I found the following article (below) of interest, so I am passing it on.  It symbolizes for me, in iconic fashion, another major reason that the millennia-old inherited society around us is collapsing, to be replaced by a monstruous, dystopian Gulag, a counter-reality where our tried-and-true verities are unceremoniously dumped onto the ash heap of history.

Just the other day I caught a portion of a public access broadcast of a Raleigh (NC) City Council meeting. Several dozen protesters were present and proceeded to testify…that is, rant and rave and threaten the council members if they did not, that very moment, pass a resolution condemning Israeli occupation of Gaza.

 Now, let it be said, that I tend to be sympathetic to those who urgently seek negotiations and a withdrawal of the IDF, which, no doubt is wrecking Gaza beyond recognition and causing immense human suffering. While I condemn the vicious Hamas attack on Israel, the only way—the only solution, so it seems to me—is for rational members of the parties involved to sit down and negotiate an internationally-guaranteed two-state solution. This would necessarily entail full Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza and on the West Bank (with the requisite departure of zealous Zionist “settlers” who have seized the better land there from Arab inhabitants).

But back to the protesters at the Raleigh City Council: Almost all of them were identifiably women (?), and they were some of the ugliest, foulest looking creatures I’ve ever seen—anywhere: Purple stringy hair, 300 lb. female monsters, bulging out in all the wrong places, downright nasty, their noses festooned with ringlets, their mouths spilling out threats and imprecations and demands. If anyone—any rational person, that is—were sympathetic to their position, just their presence there would have probably quashed that sentiment and discouraged a sympathetic response.

Yet, the council members—like most mind-in-the-cloud liberals—appeared staid and polite, intently listening, as the loathsome harpies seized the microphone during the comment session.

That set me to thinking: How did those women become such foul harridans? Certainly, they weren’t that way as toddlers or young girls. And my thoughts centered on two causes which I believe have gotten us to where we are today here in central North Carolina: First, our perverted educational system, abetted by the collapse of the nuclear family and the church, and, second, a massive in-migration to the Tar Heel State since Governor Luther Hodges back in the late 1950s had the idea of establishing what became known as the Research Triangle Park centered around the three major universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. This, in turn, began a six-decade process of attracting highly-paid technocrats, who brought with them their neoteric beliefs on everything from politics and morality to child rearing…. But very little of the Southern “rootedness” and “social bond” communitarianism (to use the late Richard Weaver’s term) that had characterized my neighbors when I was growing up.

Many of those women at the Raleigh City Council went through our educational system, and most likely had parents who forked over thousands of shekels to make certain their daughters got a “good education.”  And, no doubt, that is a major part of the problem. For several decades we have permitted—in many cases, enabled—the total miseducation (I should call it as it is—indoctrination and cerebral infection) of our children by a corrupt public education system (which the GOP feeds almost as badly as the Dems). That miseducation is coming back to haunt us with a vengeance, culturally, politically, and religiously.

Mind you, the Raleigh City Council is now made up of an assortment of leftists and other n’er-do’wells of progressivism. The influx of population in recent decades, mostly techies from California and from “up North” attracted by our growing Carolina electronic industry, low taxes and hospitable business environment, has turned this area from a cordial, mannerly, old fashioned Southern region, into a foul copy of Silicon Valley. I now hate to venture into our state’s capital city—it is not the town I remember as a boy.

Automobile traffic is ruthless and becoming impossible. Genuine courtesy, whether on the steadily-expanding and changing road grid, or in dealing with a new and aggressive commercial class, has all but disappeared. Chatting briefly with a cashier while standing in a check-out line gets you nasty looks, if not nasty comments “to hurry up” or “move on” from impatient shoppers.

Surrounding the city and chewing up thousands of acres of once serene farmland, new multi-storied apartments rise in fields that I recall used to cultivate tobacco and soybeans. It’s becoming almost impossible for small landowners and farmers to hold on to their property given real estate sharks circling round, paying inflated prices for their homesteads. How incongruous to be driving out my way, passing beautiful countryside, only to be struck suddenly by ugly high-rise apartments which now are replacing it. As Howard W. Smith (d. 1976), the late conservative Democrat who once represented formerly-conservative northern Virginia in Congress, commented, observing the new faceless, impersonal apartments erected in his district: “And to think, that people actually live in those ant-hills!”

As my late friend and mentor, Dr. Russell Kirk, once said: “It is hard to love the strip mall where the honeysuckle used to grow.”

Thirty-five years ago Raleigh elected a very conservative mayor, a protégé of the late Senator Jesse Helms. That would never happen today. Since then Raleigh and the county of Wake, in which I live, have seen a sea change—in demographics, in voting habits, in the destruction of old neighborhoods, in the once largely unspoiled environment, and in the kind of population—the people—who inhabit the area.

Whereas I grew up in a community which celebrated our traditions and revered the nuclear family, valued the role of the church, where divorce was a rarity, where abortion was practically unknown, and where public education was considered an extension of parental guidance (not some secret lab for “woke” teachers to push six year old boys to have sex mutilation operations, without the knowledge of their parents), that sense of community has largely disappeared.

 Again, my thoughts returned to those foul witches with purple hair….They were an appropriate symbol, a primary illustration, of what the best laid plans of our unweary and grasping political and business leaders had produced…secular and barren modernism run rampant, in search of the almighty dollar, and if traditions or heritage or old fashioned courtesy and belief should stand in the way, then let them be damned.

So, when I stumbled across the following article by an “out” and “proud” lesbian, boasting that now some 30% of Gen Z women identify as LBGTQ….well, given the choices we have made, or have allowed to be made on our behalf over the past half century, is it really surprising?

Our national decline can be traced to a number of factors, including the infiltration and perversion of our educational and entertainment systems, massive immigration (and not just from overseas), the nefarious results of the “civil rights” bills of the 1960s, and, yes, the long-range effects of the 19th Amendment. Humanly speaking it may be impossible at this point to reverse it. Yet, we must continue to try. And may God help us!

*****

Almost 30% of Gen Z Women Identify as LGBTQ+, According to New Survey

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

This is why those who understand these dynamics are getting out, even though the city was their home.

A correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous sent me this account of the “doom loop” that is playing out in many American cities. The correspondent makes the case that the Doom Loop is not limited to specific cities, but is a universal dynamic in all US cities due to the core causes of the Doom Loop: financialization and the multi-decade decay of cities’ core industrial-economic purpose / mission.

I have edited the text slightly, with the correspondent’s approval.

The context of the Doom Loop is the process and politics of this decay are the second-order results of central bank easy money (free fiat). That led to financialization becoming the city’s core function and the subsequent loss of the city’s previous mission. The people living in cities just haven’t gotten the message yet.

As such, there is no reversing the process until the centralization of capital itself is reversed.

The typical media articles on metropolitan “doom loops” make it seem like not every city is headed down the path. Now that financialization does not require a physical presence, every city above a certain size will share the same experience. There will be local variations which impact the trend, such as a potential utility as a large pool of voters (i.e. a vote farm), but the decline is part and parcel of financial ‘virtualization.’

It is inevitable.

Even hosting one of the twelve central reserve banks won’t save you.

The process when a city loses its purpose but persists due to inertia follows this basic pattern:

1. Corporate consolidation costs the city its financial base as Fortune 100 corporations are sold to conglomerates closer to the centers of finance.

This is one more second-order effect of easy money: global corporations can easily finance the acquisition of multi-billion dollar companies.

2. In the past, cities received huge government subsidies for re-development, but none for ongoing maintenance. All the redevelopment projects looked great at first, but with little funding for maintenance, they’ve gone downhill and many are now dangerous.

Today, the only redevelopment is done by the billionaire class who make most of their money from (surprise) finance. Once the billionaire loses interest, it’s gone, too.

I would rather find myself in a developing-world city than an American downtown, at least there would be people around. Many American downtowns are literally apocalyptic.

3. Major league sports are increasingly an exercise in force protection. It’s like going inside a forward firebase in Iraq. People still get shot in the stands from guns fired outside the bubble. Unsurprisingly, some major league teams are exploring space outside the cities despite their stadiums being only 20 years old.

4. When federal agencies build new facilities, they’re essentially fortresses with direct entrance/egress from the highway. They add little to nothing to the surrounding economy.

5. Real estate, sales and personal property taxes in cities are typically the highest within the state. As tax revenues decline, cities’ political leaders increase business taxes and start floating ideas such as taxing non-profit organizations: a financial death spiral indeed. Should taxes increase, organizations and companies have said they will leave.

6. In the industrial economy, the core purposes of cities were derived from advantageous locations and key transportation assets (first water, then rail, then roads, and later aviation). In the information age, those benefits are diminished or gone. As a result of their transportation advantages, cities became manufacturing and warehousing hubs. Those too are diminished or gone.

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“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

This has been in the works for a long time.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

All of the distracting, disheartening, disorienting news you are bombarded with daily is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.

So where does that leave us?

Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

This originally appeared on The Rutherford Institute.

A Court of Appeals in North Carolina has set a precedent for the forced vaccination of all children with a controversial ruling involving a 14-year-old boy who was given a COVID-19 vaccine without his consent or that of his parents.

The court ruled unanimously that the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) preempted a state law that could have protected the minor, Tanner Smith.

The problem began when Smith, who is a student at Western Guilford High School in Greensboro, was informed that he had been exposed to COVID-19 at school. In a letter to his parents, the school district said that he could not return to football practice until he had been given clearance by a public health professional unless he got tested for the virus. The letter added that a local school would be holding a free clinic offering COVID-19 tests and that consent for the tests would be required.

The next day, Smith went with his stepfather to the clinic to take advantage of the free testing because he was eager to resume football practice. However, it turned out that the school was also holding a free vaccination clinic alongside the testing. With his stepfather waiting in the car, Smith filled out a form that he assumed was related to the testing he was instructed to undergo. A clinic worker reportedly attempted to contact his mother, who was not available, but they did not try to reach his stepfather.

Although Smith insisted to the workers at the clinic that he was there to receive a test and not the vaccine and made it clear he did not want to be vaccinated, a clinic worker reportedly said “give it to him anyway.” He ended up receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine over his protests and without obtaining parental consent.

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Smith and his mother, Emily Happel, sued their school district, along with the vaccine clinic, for violating Tanner’s bodily autonomy, his mother’s constitutional liberty and parental rights, both parties’ federal constitutional rights and battery. When a trial court dismissed this complaint on the grounds that the PREP Act shielded the defendants, they appealed the decision.

Unfortunately, the appeals court has affirmed the original decision by the trial court and said that even though North Carolina state law does require healthcare providers to get written consent from parents or legal guardians before giving minors vaccines with emergency use authorization that have not been fully approved by the FDA, the court maintains that the PREP Act preempts this state law, although it acknowledged that Tanner suffered due to the “egregious conduct” of being given the shot against his wishes.

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This article was first published on September 7, 2018.

Author’s Introduction

The Neo-Nazi parties of Ukraine’s so-called coalition government are actively supported by “the international community” namely our governments.

The Nazi faction within the Kiev government exerts its power in the realm of intelligence, internal affairs, national security and the military. It’s a proxy regime in liaison with its U.S.-NATO sponsors.

Amply documented, the 2014 EuroMaidan US Sponsored Coup d’Etat was carried out with the support of the two Nazi factions: Svoboda and Right Sektor.

These are not “Neo-Nazi” entities. The term “Neo” (“New”) is misleading. They are full-fledged Nazi parties, historically aligned (going back to World War II) with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) of Stepan Bandera (OUN-B)

At the outset of Operation Barbarossa, (June, 22 1941) in coordination with the death squads (Einsatzgruppen) of Nazi Germany, members of the OUN-B were instrumental in the killings in the City of Lviv, Western region of Galicia, resulting in the massacre and deportation of more than 100,000 Jews:

“The Lviv pogroms were the consecutive pogroms and massacres of Jews in June and July 1941 in the city of Lwów. (Lviv, Lvov) in German-occupied Eastern Poland/Western Ukraine (now Lviv, Ukraine). The massacres were perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (specifically, the OUN), German death squads (Einsatzgruppen), and urban population from 30 June to 2 July [1941].”

While Stepan Bandera had announced the creation of a Nazi Ukrainian State, which pledged “to work with Nazi Germany”, Adolph Hitler disapproved of the proclamation. Despite Bandera’s arrest, the members of OUN-B actively collaborated with the Wehrmacht’s occupation forces (1941-1944).

In Ukraine: “..up to a million Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen units, Police battalions, Wehrmacht troops and local Nazi collaborators” (emphasis added)

On September, 1 1941, the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote, in an article titled Let’s Conquer the City, namely Lviv:

“All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must be eradicated.

We are at this very moment resolving the Jewish question, and this resolution is part of the plan for the Reich’s total reorganization of Europe.

The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocably be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people”.

The map below is the territory under Nazi Germany occupation (1942) extending from Galicia to Kiev and Odessa.

It indicates cities with Jewish ghettoes, the locations of major massacres.

In this regard, the Janowska concentration camp was established in the outskirts of Lviv in September 1941.

Lviv had a Jewish population of 160,000. The Janowska camp combined “elements of labor, transit, and extermination”.

“By the time Soviet forces reached Lviv on 21 July 1944, less than 1 per cent of Lviv’s Jews had survived the occupation“

Holocaust Denial? 

The OUN-B was complicit in the crimes of Nazi Germany. Our governments –which claim to be firmly committed to social democracy– are actively supporting a Ukrainian Nazi movement which collaborated with Nazi Germany’s occupation forces during World War II.

That is  the unspoken truth which is embedded in our history, casually ignored by  both the media and Western Europe’s “Classe politique”.

By ignoring the World War II legacy of Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B and casually describing him as an anti-Soviet Nationalist, both the mainstream media as well as our governments, are complicit in what might be described as “holocaust denial”.

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International Man: What is the role of a justice system in a society, and what should the State have to do with it?

Doug Casey: In my view, what really holds a society together isn’t the laws enacted by legislatures or dictators, but peer pressure, social opprobrium, and moral approbation. In general, society is pretty self-regulating. It’s why people pay their bills at restaurants even though there’s not a cop at the door. Criminals are the exception, not the rule—although, it must be said, they naturally gravitate towards the government.

When somebody commits a crime, there’s a trial to determine what harm has been done, who should be compensated, and so forth. Courts determine these things. But I would argue that the state is not a necessary part of any of this. Society, like markets, tends to be self-ordering.

With a minimal “night watchman” sort of state like that described by Ayn Rand, the proper role of government is simply to defend you from force and fraud. This implies an army to defend you from force external to your society, a police force to defend you from force within your society, and a court system to allow the adjudication of disputes without resorting to force.

I could live in a society like that—it would be a vast improvement over what we have now. A proper court system, with either arbitrators or judges and juries system, would be part of it. But I’d go on to argue that juries and courts should be privatized.

International Man: What would a privatized justice system look like? Would it have juries?

Doug Casey: There might be either arbitrators, or juries, or both. The jury should be composed of independent thinkers who aren’t easily swayed by rhetoric or pressured by groupthink. Today, however, they’re just random people who aren’t clever enough to avoid jury duty.

In theory, juries can counter the tremendous power of judges. Judges today are either elected or appointed. If elected, they have to campaign like any other politician and are subject to the same perverse incentives any other politician is. If they are appointed, it can be even worse. Appointees are often just collecting political favors. While they’re allegedly more independent, in many ways, they’re even less accountable.

In theory, a jury is a good counterbalance to the power of the judge. You need some way to weigh the facts and decide who’s in the right. But the way juries work in the US today is far from optimal. It used to be that a jury could easily overturn any law. The process was called jury nullification, and it was an effective way for the common people to keep legislators under control. Today, however, it’s really a dead letter.

Today’s juries amount to a form of involuntary servitude. You get your notice for jury duty, and you either have to serve, whether you want to or not or come up with excuses the state will deign to accept.

Most productive people feel that they have more urgent priorities in their lives than helping decide court cases that can go on for months. So the type of people who end up serving on juries these days generally have nothing better to do or for whom the trivial fee they pay is good money. Hardly the kind of person who should decide weighty matters, perhaps even life and death.

In addition, many trials center on highly technical concepts, and forms of evidence, that people rounded up from the highways and byways are simply unqualified to interpret.

Worse, there’s the jury selection process called voir dire. The notion is to give the attorneys of both sides the opportunity to remove a few individuals from the jury who might be biased against their case, thus ensuring a more unbiased jury.

But in practice, it’s an interrogation process by which lawyers try to ensure they get a jury that will believe whatever they tell them. This usually means that anyone exhibiting the least bit of independent thinking or is prone to value justice over law enforcement will get removed and never serve on a jury.

The result is that the quality of juries today is several standard deviations below what it should be. Any intelligent person has opinions, and in this day of the Internet, almost any person’s opinions are easy to find out. No matter which way your opinions line up, one side or the other isn’t going to like them in any case, so you won’t make it past voir dire. Both the prosecution and defense like to see malleable jurors with easily influenced minds. As a result, the typical juror has no opinions other than those on the weather, sports, and American Idol. People who think in concepts are weeded out as troublemakers.

This process makes a shambles of the concept of a “jury of your peers.” The type of people they rope into jury duty wouldn’t likely be the peers of anyone now reading this. If I were facing a trial, I’d much rather be tried by twelve people randomly selected out of a phone book than by the type of people who get selected for jury duty.

If we’re to have juries, they ought to be truly juries of our peers—people who can understand you and the facts pertaining to your case. But we’re far from an ideal system. It’s worse than arbitrary; given that most of those employed by the justice system work for the state, and that it’s the state vs. an individual in so many cases, there’s a huge inherent bias on top of the whole problem with today’s stacked juries.

International Man: What is an ideal justice system in your perspective?

Doug Casey: It would be a more equitable system if judges and jurors were professionals who had to compete with each other on the basis of their proven records of intelligence, fairness, speed, and low cost. The victim and the accused would mutually agree on the judge and jury or arbitrators.

Separating justice and state would help eliminate the state’s ability to prosecute phony, made-up crimes, especially crimes with no victims. There needs to be an actual victim to press charges if the state can’t be party to a case. That alone would eliminate the wasted resources and trashed lives resulting from the US’s various wars against victimless crimes. No one could be criminally prosecuted for having unorthodox sexual preferences, using unpopular drugs, drinking on Sunday, or smoking in a private establishment. Or for evading taxes. It might surprise Americans to know that tax evasion is a civil, not a criminal, matter in most countries.

Most legal actions focus on matters of tort and breach of contract. It’s important to keep the laws simple and few, so ignorance of the law is impossible. Ideally, just two great laws:

1. Do all that you say you’re going to do.
2. Don’t aggress against other people or their property.

The point is that justice has to do with righting actual wrongs that have been done to people, not enforcing laws and exacting arbitrary punishments. Today justice means enforcing the will of politicians and bureaucrats. A proper system of justice would focus on making the victim whole, not arbitrarily punishing the aggressor.

With privatized justice, someone would accuse another, both sides would choose an arbitrator (professional or otherwise), and those two arbitrators would agree on a third to make sure there were no tied votes. They would look at all the facts—not just the arbitrary subset of facts allowed by legal precedent and state machinations. That decision would not be about punishing anyone but about making the harmed party whole again.

The key concepts are justice and restitution, not punishment. Punishment, if you actually think about it, rarely serves any useful purpose; it just gives vent to base and reactive emotions. It may set a “good example” to deter future miscreants, but it definitely sets a bad example for society as a whole by institutionalizing and justifying cruelty.

International Man: Is there any hope for the current justice system?

Doug Casey: The whole system is highly politicized, which is only natural for something run by the state. Unfortunately, as the country increasingly looks to government as a solution—your only choice being to choose between so-called “right” and “left” politics. That’s going to make the current legal system even more dysfunctional in every way I can think of.

International Man: What are the implications of this for investors and businesses?

Doug Casey: I see people being convicted under ridiculous applications of the securities laws, tax laws, and more. The only area where things are becoming more rational and freer is the area of drug laws. It’s becoming clear to even the dimmest legislators and jurists that they’re as stupid and destructive as were those against alcohol during Prohibition.

In fact, almost all the administrative laws of the myriad of three- and four-letter agencies—ATF, FTC, EPA, SEC, FDA, etc., etc.—create bogus and even nonsensical “crimes.” Even if you aren’t convicted, if you’re targeted, it can cost you hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in legal fees, plus time, lost business, and damaged reputation. The system has become rapacious and Kafkaesque. And as the state grabs more and more power with each passing crisis, the risk of attention from state operatives increases, even for innocent and honest­ people. The trend is accelerating in a negative direction. If history is any guide, things will get worse until we reach a genuine crisis. That’s bad news for anyone with any wealth, especially if they have unpopular political views.

That has very serious implications. Not just for people in business and investors, but society itself. This is one reason I’m so bearish on the prospects of the current world order; not only are there decades-long distortions in the economy that have to be liquidated, but the whole legal system is rotten to the core. It needs to be scrapped—someone needs to push the reset button and restore justice as its guiding principle—and that, too, is a distortion that can’t be corrected easily or painlessly.

Unfortunately, it seems as if it’s the very worst people who have their fingers on “The Great Reset” button.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The artificial sweetener aspartame is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. The phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group, which provides most of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol.

You may have heard the claim that aspartame is harmless because methanol is also found in fruits and vegetables. However, in fruits and vegetables, the methanol is firmly bonded to pectin, allowing it to be safely passed through your digestive tract. Not so with the methanol created by aspartame; it’s not bonded to anything that can help eliminate it from your body.

Symptoms of methanol poisoning include headaches, ear buzzing, dizziness, nausea, vision problems (including retinal damage and blindness), gastrointestinal disturbances, weakness, vertigo, chills, memory lapses, numbness, shooting pains in the extremities, behavioral disturbances and neuritis. Many of these are also experienced after aspartame consumption.

How Aspartame Wrecks Your Health

Methanol acts as a Trojan horse; it’s carried into susceptible tissues in your body, like your brain and bone marrow, where the alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzyme converts it into formaldehyde, which wreaks havoc with sensitive proteins and DNA.

All animals — except humans — have a protective mechanism that allows methanol to be broken down into harmless formic acid. This is why toxicology testing on animals is a flawed model. It doesn’t fully apply to people.

Both animals and humans have small structures called peroxisomes in each cell that help detoxify a variety of chemicals. Peroxisome contains catalase, which help detoxify methanol specifically.

Other chemicals in the peroxisome convert the formaldehyde to formic acid, which is harmless, but this last step only occurs in animals. While humans have the same number of peroxisomes in comparable cells as animals, human peroxisomes cannot convert the toxic formaldehyde into harmless formic acid.

So, in humans, methanol is allowed to be transported in your body to susceptible tissues where this enzyme, ADH, then converts it to formaldehyde — a known carcinogen.

Aspartame Ruled ‘Possible’ Cause of Cancer

Considering formaldehyde is a recognized carcinogen, it makes sense that aspartame might be carcinogenic as well, and that’s precisely what the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has concluded.

Based on the available evidence, the IARC classified aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2B) in the summer of 2023.^1,2,3 As reported by the WHO:⁴

“After reviewing the available scientific literature, both evaluations noted limitations in the available evidence for cancer (and other health effects).

IARC classified aspartame as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B) on the basis of limited evidence for cancer in humans (specifically, for hepatocellular carcinoma, which is a type of liver cancer). There was also limited evidence for cancer in experimental animals and limited evidence related to the possible mechanisms for causing cancer.”

‘Safe’ Limit Is Unlikely To Be Safe

However, despite the risk, they didn’t recommend avoiding aspartame-containing products altogether. Based on research by the Food and Agricultural Organization’s Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA), the IARC set the “safe” limit for aspartame at 40 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day.

That means a person weighing 154 pounds (70 kilos) would have to drink more than 14 cans of diet soda to exceed the daily safety limit — assuming that’s the sole source of aspartame in their diet. I don’t know about you, but that hardly seems prudent considering all the other carcinogenic compounds people are exposed to and consume daily.

It’s also important to recognize that while the IARC and JECFA claim the evidence for carcinogenicity is “limited,” that doesn’t mean they’ve proven that it’s safe — at any level. As stated in the IARC’s report:⁵

“The Committee noted that statistically significant increases were reported for some cancers, such as hepatocellular, breast and hematological (non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma) cancers, in some cohort studies conducted with aspartame or beverages containing aspartame …

However, a consistent association between aspartame consumption and a specific cancer type could not be demonstrated. All the studies had limitations in how they estimate exposure, especially the ones that used non sugar sweeteners exposure as proxy for aspartame exposure.

Reverse causality, chance, bias and confounding by socioeconomic or lifestyle factors, or consumption of other dietary components, could not be completely ruled out.”

Note the IARC says they couldn’t find a consistent association between aspartame consumption and “a specific cancer type.” They did, however, find “statistically significant increases” in several different types of cancer.

In fact, three large-scale studies that reviewed the link between aspartame and liver cancer specifically ALL found it raised the risk. The IARC downplayed this trend, however, because “bias or confounding could not be ruled out as an explanation for the positive findings.”

Three animal studies also found “an increased incidence of malignant neoplasms or a combination of benign and malignant neoplasms in two species (mouse and rat),” but these were downplayed as well due to “concerns over the study design.” The take-home message is that you rely on the IARC/JECFA “safe” limit at your own risk, because both rodent and human studies indicate aspartame has carcinogenic potential.

FDA Issues Empty Assurances

In response to the IARC’s report and classification of aspartame as a possible carcinogen, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a rebuttal stating it does not agree with the findings and will not update its recommendations. Here’s an excerpt of the FDA’s response, published the same day the IARC’s report was issued:⁶

“Aspartame being labeled by IARC as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ does not mean that aspartame is actually linked to cancer …

FDA scientists reviewed the scientific information included in IARC’s review in 2021 when it was first made available and identified significant shortcomings in the studies on which IARC relied …

Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives in the human food supply. FDA scientists do not have safety concerns when aspartame is used under the approved conditions …”

Other Health Impacts of Aspartame

Cancer isn’t the only, or perhaps even primary, health concern of aspartame though. Studies have also linked aspartame and other artificial sweeteners to a range of other health problems, including:

Digestive issues such as bloating, gas and diarrhea, and microbiome disruptions that contribute to poor gut health⁷

Weight gain — Even the WHO warns against the use of artificial sweeteners for weight control, as the evidence shows they promote rather than inhibit weight gain⁸

Metabolic disorders such as insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes⁹

Headaches¹⁰ and migraines¹¹

Neurological symptoms, including seizures¹² and memory and learning problems¹³

Mood disorders such as irritability, agitation, anxiety, and depression^14,15 — A 1993 study¹⁶ found that individuals with preexisting mood disorders are particularly sensitive to aspartame, suggesting its use in this population should be discouraged.

The study was halted by the Institutional Review Board after 13 individuals had completed the trial because of the severity of reactions within the group of patients with a history of depression.

Similarly, in 2008, researchers asserted that excessive aspartame ingestion might be involved in the pathogenesis of certain mental disorders, and may compromise learning and emotional functioning¹⁷

Behavioral problems¹⁸

Infertility, likely due to its effect on hormones and inflammation¹⁹

Insomnia²⁰

Dizziness²¹

Fatigue²²

In addition to the conditions listed above, adverse events related to aspartame consumption reported to the FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS) also include:²³

• Immune system disorders
• Respiratory disorders
• Renal and urinary disorders
• Nervous system disorders
• Eye disorders
• Cardiac disorders

Aspartame Elevates Cortisol

Aspartame also elevates cortisol, which can have adverse health consequences. As noted in one 2017 paper:²⁴

“Aspartame acts as a chemical stressor by elevating plasma cortisol levels and causing the production of excess free radicals. High cortisol levels and excess free radicals may increase the brains vulnerability to oxidative stress which may have adverse effects on neurobehavioral health.”

In addition to chronic inflammation and neurobehavioral health consequences, cortisol can also lead to muscle breakdown and impaired immune function when chronically elevated. Cortisol is also the primary aging hormone.

If it is chronically elevated, you simply will die prematurely as it is highly catabolic, meaning it breaks down tissues. To stay healthy as you age you need to be anabolic and build healthy tissues like muscle and mitochondria, and high cortisol will seriously impair those efforts.

Importantly, cortisol can behave differently in various parts of the body due to different feedback mechanisms.²⁵ There’s a central mechanism in your brain that usually tells your body to slow down cortisol production when there’s enough (negative feedback).

However, outside the brain, in other parts of the body (peripheral feedback), the mechanism actually works the opposite way (positive feedback). This means that in these areas, elevated cortisol can lead to even more cortisol being produced.

There’s also a difference between the cortisol level in your blood versus that in your tissues. Even if blood tests show normal or low levels of cortisol, it’s possible to have high levels of cortisol in your tissues. This can happen because of an enzyme called 11β-HSD1, which helps make cortisol and is found in most parts of the body.

It’s the rate-limiting step in synthesizing cortisol and evidence suggests the activity of the 11β-HSD1 enzyme in the tissues (not just the cortisol level in the blood) is a good indicator of whether someone might develop Type 2 diabetes,²⁶ and again, Type 2 diabetes is another side effect that has been linked to aspartame consumption.

Is Aspartame Causing Your Health Problems?

Unfortunately, aspartame toxicity is not well-recognized by physicians, despite its frequency. Diagnosis is also hampered by the fact that it mimics several other common health conditions. It’s quite possible that you could be having a reaction to artificial sweeteners and not even know it.

To determine if you’re having a reaction to aspartame or other artificial sweeteners, take the following steps:

1. Eliminate ALL artificial sweeteners from your diet for two weeks.
2. After two weeks of being artificial sweetener-free, reintroduce your artificial sweetener of choice in a significant quantity (about three servings daily).
3. Avoid other artificial sweeteners during this period.
4. Do this for one to three days and pay close attention to how you feel, especially as compared to when you were not consuming artificial sweeteners.
5. If you don’t notice a difference in how you feel after re-introducing your primary artificial sweetener for a few days, it’s a safe bet you’re able to tolerate it acutely, meaning your body doesn’t have an immediate, adverse response. However, this doesn’t mean your health won’t be damaged in the long run.
6. If you’ve been consuming more than one type of artificial sweetener, you can repeat steps 2 through 4 with the next one on your list.

Report Side Effects to the FDA

If you do experience side effects from aspartame, please report it to the FDA (if you live in the United States). It’s easy to make a report — just go to the FDA Consumer Complaint Coordinator page, find the phone number for your state, and make a call to report your reaction.

Sources and References

• ^1, 5 IARC Summary of Findings of the Evaluation of Aspartame June 2023
• ² Lancet Oncology August 2023; 24(8): 848-850
• ³ Yahoo! Life July 14, 2023
• ⁴ WHO July 14, 2023
• ⁶ FDA Response to External Safety Reviews of Aspartame July 14, 2023
• ^{7, 8, 9, 19} NDTV April 9, 2024
• ¹⁰ Neurology February 1989
• ¹¹ Headache February 1988
• ^{12, 14, 18, 24} Nutritional Neuroscience February 2017; 21(5): 1-11
• ¹³ Pharmacological Research 2006 Jan;53(1):1-5
• ^{15, 20, 21, 22} American Journal of Clinical Nutrition March 1986; 43(3): 464-469
• ¹⁶ Biological Psychiatry July 1993: 34(1); 13-17
• ¹⁷ European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2008;62: 451–462
• ²³ FAERS Public Database, Adverse Events for Aspartame, Reaction Groups
• ^25, 26 Haidut.me February 26, 2024 (Archived)

In his state of the union address, President Biden expressed his desire for a $400 a month tax credit over two years for first time home buyers. I have argued for years that tax credits are a good thing, and still maintain that they are a good thing. Yet, I am leery of Biden’s tax-credit proposal.

Biden’s proposal was one of several relating to housing:

I know the cost of housing is so important to you.

If inflation keeps coming down mortgage rates will come down as well.

But I’m not waiting.

I want to provide an annual tax credit that will give Americans $400 a month for the next two years as mortgage rates come down to put toward their mortgage when they buy a first home or trade up for a little more space.

My Administration is also eliminating title insurance fees for federally backed mortgages.

When you refinance your home this can save you $1,000 or more.

For millions of renters, we’re cracking down on big landlords who break antitrust laws by price-fixing and driving up rents.

I’ve cut red tape so more builders can get federal financing, which is already helping build a record 1.7 million housing units nationwide.

Now pass my plan to build and renovate 2 million affordable homes and bring those rents down!

In a White House “fact sheet” issued the day of Biden’s address, we are told under “mortgage relief credit” that

President Biden is calling on Congress to pass a mortgage relief credit that would provide middle-class first-time homebuyers with an annual tax credit of $5,000 a year for two years. This is the equivalent of reducing the mortgage rate by more than 1.5 percentage points for two years on the median home, and will help more than 3.5 million middle-class families purchase their first home over the next two years.

There is no mention in the fact sheet that the credit will be given monthly. And Biden’s math is a little off. Giving Americans $400 a month is $4,800 a year or $9,600 for two years.

Whether Biden’s tax credit is a good thing depends on the type of tax credit.

Following Biden’s address, U.S. senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), along with U.S. representatives Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), introduced the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit Act.

“Owning a home is at the core of the American dream, and it has been pushed further out of reach for more families over the last few years,” said Whitehouse.

“Buying a home is out of reach for many Americans right now. With this legislation, we’re changing that,” said Heinrich.

“High housing costs are putting the dream of homeownership out of reach for too many Americans,” said Panetta.

By creating incentives for families who have been systematically locked out of homeownership, we can promote housing stability and generational wealth-building opportunities for low- and middle-income Americans,” said Blumenauer.

According to the official summary of the bill:

The First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit Act would support home ownership among lower- and middle-income Americans by establishing a refundable tax credit worth up to 10% of a home’s purchase price (to a maximum of $15,000) for first-time homebuyers.

Taxpayers would have the option of receiving the credit at the time of purchase by working with their mortgage issuer or electing to treat the purchase of their home as occurring in the prior taxable year to receive the credit before tax season.

However, there are two caveats:

The credit phases out for those making above 150% of area median income and for those buying a house with a purchase price above 110% of the area median purchase price.

The credit is limited to home purchases financed through federally-backed mortgages.

Here is the problem with this proposed tax credit: it is a refundable credit.

A regular tax credit is a dollar-for-dollar reduction of the amount of income tax owed. Tax credits may reduce the tax owed to zero, but if there is no taxable income to begin with, then no credit can be taken. Tax credits (and deductions) are always a good thing because they allow Americans to keep more of their money out of the hands of the federal government.

However, a refundable tax credit is treated as a payment from the taxpayer like federal income tax withheld or estimated tax payments. If the tax credit “payment” is more than the tax owed after the regular tax credits are applied, then the “taxpayer” receives a “refund” of money he never actually paid in.

Refundable tax credits are therefore the ultimate form of welfare because they are payments made in cash. Current refundable tax credits are the Child Tax Credit, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

From what we know about Biden, he probably has in mind a new refundable tax credit. But we don’t need any new refundable tax credits any more than we need new welfare programs.

The Covid Epidemic and the Trump Neocons

The global Covid epidemic began more than four years ago, and although its visibility has largely faded over the last couple of years, displaced in the headlines by Russia’s Ukraine war and the more recent Israel-Gaza conflict, its lingering impact has been enormous.

Since 2020 The Economist has maintained the most authoritative account of the human toll and by its reckoning, the total number of “excess deaths” worldwide has nearly reached thirty million, while many billions more had their lives greatly disrupted by the lockdowns and economic dislocations. Our own country certainly suffered from these same factors, with well over a million American deaths, and the massive government spending used to avert an economic collapse raised our debt by more than $10 trillion, an increase of roughly 50% over just the last few years.

During that same period I’d published a long series of articles focused on the origins of Covid. Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of the first of those pieces and over the last few days I’ve reread most of my writings on that topic, which totaled well over 100,000 words.

In many of those articles, I’d assumed that the long-term social and economic impact of the epidemic and lockdowns would be far greater than was the case. Ordinary life in America seems to have largely returned to normal much more rapidly than I had expected at the time. Except for a few permanent changes here and there, little sign of those very difficult years seems to remain in our daily lives, and I think the same situation has also been true in most other countries. But aside from those mistaken expectations—probably shared by many others at the time—I’d strongly stand behind almost everything else that I wrote in those two dozen major articles, especially including my extremely controversial analysis of the true cause of that devastating global epidemic.

The origin of Covid had been my primary contribution to the public debate and now that four years have gone by and the dust has partially settled, I think it’s worth revisiting that question and reviewing some of my arguments. But although my first article appeared in April 2020, the underlying analysis can best be understood after carefully considering some earlier events.

In 2016 a massive wave of popular revulsion against the political establishments of both the Democratic and Republican parties unexpectedly propelled Donald Trump into the White House. However, he unfortunately soon proved himself to be a disengaged and rather erratic president, and suffering from the natural problems of someone entirely new to holding elective office, he notoriously allowed his top aides to run circles around him on important issues.

Furthermore, although he’d run for the presidency as a candidate of drastic ideological change, most of his appointments were relatively conventional Republicans. Within fifteen months he’d been persuaded to place his national security policy in the hands of hardline Neocons such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who were both intensely hostile toward China and Iran and sometimes ignored or circumvented their ignorant superior. Leading journalists later reported that Trump’s senior aides would sometimes hide his executive orders, thereby preventing him from signing them into law while correctly assuming that he would soon forget about them.

An extremely serious example of Trump’s inability to control his own underlings came in late 2018 during a crucial summit meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Huawei was one of China’s most important corporations, a global technology champion whose CFO Meng Wanzhou was the daughter of the company’s founder and chairman and was herself one of her country’s highest-profile executives. But just eight months after taking office, Bolton ordered her arrest as she was changing planes in Canada on charges that she had violated American sanctions on Iran, an action that severely damaged our relations with China. Several years later a 10,000 word article in the Wall Street Journal revealed some of the fascinating details behind that serious international incident.

Mr. Bolton, then-national security adviser in the Trump administration, knew Ms. Meng’s arrest could disrupt the summit’s marquee event that evening, a dinner between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Yet Mr. Bolton, a longtime China hawk, felt it was worth the risk. The president didn’t yet know about the plan. White House staffers later debated whether Mr. Bolton had told Mr. Trump or if it hadn’t fully registered with the president…

At the police station, Ms. Meng was fingerprinted, and allowed a phone call to the only Chinese-speaking lawyer Huawei could find on short notice, a patent attorney. As the attorney dashed to the station, Ms. Meng began to gasp for air, worrying officers who sped her to a hospital.

Messrs. Trump and Xi were dining on Argentine sirloin, accompanied by a 2014 Malbec. The goal of the dinner was to reach a truce in an escalating U.S.-China trade war. Neither man appeared aware of Ms. Meng’s arrest. Mr. Bolton, seated near Mr. Trump, didn’t mention it.

Mr. Xi learned shortly after, according to Chinese government officials, and it struck him as deceptive and an insult. He had just agreed to buy more U.S. food and energy.

Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Bolton days later at a White House Christmas dinner, according to people familiar with the conversation. “Why did you arrest Meng?” the president said. “Don’t you know she’s the Ivanka Trump of China?”

Thirteen months later, an even more shocking incident unfolded in the Middle East. For many years, Gen. Qasem Soleimani had been regarded as Iran’s most important military commander and given his very widespread popular appeal, he was considered a likely candidate in his country’s 2021 presidential election. But in early 2020 American officials lured him to Baghdad for Middle East peace negotiations with our representatives and then persuaded Trump to order his assassination when he arrived there on January 2nd. That heinous killing brought our two nations to the very brink of war as the outraged Iranians bombarded our Middle Eastern bases with a dozen or more ballistic missiles in retaliation. Although Iran provided sufficient advance warning that no American lives were lost, more than one hundred of our servicemen were injured.

Iran had long sought to reestablish amicable relations with the U.S., but the Israelis regarded that country as their most formidable regional rival and for more than a dozen years they and their close Neocon allies had been working to provoke an Iranian war with America, hoping to use our powerful military to destroy their local adversary, much like we had attacked and destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Therefore, this assassination was almost certainly part of that long-standing pro-Israel project, and although the exact American government officials responsible were never identified, it seems very likely that Pompeo and Bolton were heavily involved.

The public, peacetime assassination of so high-ranking a foreign leader was an almost unprecedented act during the last three centuries of world politics, while our disingenuous mainstream media carefully avoided suggesting the obvious Israeli dimension to the crime. As a result, I decided to explore the broader issue of assassinations, particularly focusing on Israel’s Mossad and its likely hidden role in so many of the highest-profile incidents of the previous seventy years. Near the end of that month, I published a very long and comprehensive review of that important history.

• American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words

Read the Whole Article

This is an excerpt from David Stockmans book: Trump’s War on Capitalism.

The GOP primary season has come  alive, and  the state  of play is abysmal. Front and  center there is Donald Trump,  while everyone else,  including a few real  Republicans and  several  neo-con fakers, stumble along far in the rear.

And that’s  a terrible shame. America desperately needs a return to  old-fashioned GOP  governance, yet  Donald Trump  is  not remotely a conservative, let  alone even  a half-assed Republican. As it is, he fluked into  the Oval  Office in November 2016 and  pro- ceeded to wantonly abandon Republican economic doctrine and badly tarnish the  brand. But  rather than showing him  the  door, the  floundering remnants of the Republican Party have  rallied to  the  banner of one  of the  most  bombastic, egomaniacal, unfit mountebanks ever to appear on the American political scene.

So, what  are the good people of the GOP thinking?

To  be  clear,  we  have  no  objection to  The  Donald’s relent- less  and   frequently unhinged  attacks on  the   ruling elites   of Washington, Wall Street, the mainstream media and  the Fortune 500. Indeed, his one abiding virtue is that he  has  all  the  right enemies. That  is, the  Washington political class and  the  likes of the  New York Times,  CNN, the  broadcast networks, the  foreign policy think tanks, and  the  liberal Silicon Valley  billionair.

These are the  very people, in fact,  whose  policies and  ideologies threaten the  future of America.

But while Trump has the right enemies, he has been  hopelessly wrong on the  substance of policy. Indeed, when  it comes  to what the  GOP’s core  mission should be  amidst the  ongoing tussle  of democratic governance—standing up  for  free  markets, fiscal  rec- titude, sound money, personal liberty, and  small  government at home and   non-intervention abroad—Donald Trump  has   over- whelmingly come  down on the wrong side of the issues.

Yet the  situation is now  so far gone that the  election of a true conservative leader in 2024 is the  only  hope remaining. The very future of  constitutional  democracy and  capitalist prosperity in America is  literally at  stake. These  foundational threats simply cannot endure another four  years  of Donald Trump in the  White House. Nor  can  it tolerate another election where  a woebegone Democrat like Joe Biden wins by default, owing to the simple fact that they  are not  Donald Trump.

Indeed, the calamity of Joe Biden’s wars, inflation, corruption, and  relentless assaults on  liberty and  constitutional rights is so blatant that the  American people will surely  be looking to drum the Dems out  of office in 2024. So, the chance must not  be wasted. It is  imperative that  well-meaning Republicans and   conserva- tives understand Trump’s miserable record as a big  spender, easy money-man, hard-core protectionist, immigrant-basher, militarist, and  all-around Big Government statist, and  look  elsewhere for a standard-bearer.

The Donald’s abysmal policy  failings are documented in detail and  at length in the  pages that follow; but  first,  the  myth of the great MAGA  Economy should be debunked. A lot of Republican voters, though misguided, are willing to overlook all his egregious egotism, petty bombast, and  endless departures from  conserva- tive economic principles based on the  claim  that he delivered the Greatest Economy Ever.

In a word, he  didn’t. Not  remotely. On  the  bread-and-butter matters of growth, jobs, inflation, productivity, savings and invest- ment, in fact, his record is among the worst  of modern presidents, not  the  best. Indeed, the  US  economy’s faltering  performance during The  Donald’s tenure was worse  than that of every  one  of his  modern Democratic predecessors going all  the  way  back  to Truman.

To  be  sure,  the  very  idea  that America’s  infinitely complex, deeply  cyclical,  and   globalized  $26  trillion  economy  can   be assessed by statistical outcomes realized during the  arbitrary for- ty-eight calendar months of a presidential term  is deeply faulty. That’s  because economic cycles and  trends begin and  end  on cal- endars wholly unrelated to presidential terms. So the overwhelm- ing  bulk of economic policy claims  by  all presidents amount to partisan talking points, not  credible economic analysis.

For instance, years of bad  Fed policy  brought the US economy into  a thundering tailspin in 2008.  So  any  statistical measure of results for George W. Bush’s  tenure has a dismal endpoint, which was largely not his doing.

By the same token, Barack Obama was sworn in at the very bot- tom  of the  worst  recession in post-war history and  subsequently benefited from  the  natural regenerative forces  of market capital- ism.  His economic growth and  jobs  numbers, therefore, couldn’t help  but  be  brighter. Yet Obama’s policies had  precious little  to do  with  these  outcomes—well, except to thwart what  might have been  a far stronger recovery.

In fact,  the overwhelming bulk of economic outcomes during these  four-year presidential intervals reflect  the  combined action of  tens  of  millions of  workers, entrepreneurs,  managers, inves- tors,  consumers, savers,  and  speculators operating on the (quasi) free market. And that’s  even as compromised as the private econ- omy  has  become owing to  government intervention and  central bank manipulation.

Indeed, when  it comes  to  the  big  picture, presidential policy is, by and  large, overrated. And  in the  particular period of 2017 through 2020, The Donald inherited the  positive momentum of a ripening business cycle that was overwhelmingly not his doing.

Nevertheless, even  if you  give  Trump credit owed  to  broader cyclical  and  historical trends, the  facts  still  leave  little  room for doubt. Real   economic growth  averaged  just   1.52  percent per annum during Trump’s forty-eight months in  the  Oval   Office. Literally, you  can’t find  anything that weak  over  the  course of a presidential term  since  the Korean War!

Of   course,  circumstances,  cycles,   and   even   demographics change so much over long  periods of time that reaching way back for comparisons has its limits. Still, real growth over the sixty-two- years  between 1954 and  2016 averaged 3.04 percent per  annum. That’s  exactly twice—to the  second decimal point—what material- ized  during The Donald’s term.

As it happened,  that extended sixty-two-year interval encom- passed nine  recessions, eleven  presidents, numerous wars,  and  a goodly number of domestic and  international crises.  So it’s a fair representation of modern history, not  distorted by short-run fluc- tuations owing to  cyclical  timing factors or  aberrations like  the Great Financial Crisis  (GFC). And yet, and  yet. The Donald’s bal- lyhooed MAGA  economy grew  at just  half the  rate  of what  might fairly be called the modern growth norm.

Moreover, when  dialed in  closer  to  the  present time  during which  both demographics and  long-term policy  constraints weak- ened the  underlying growth trend, the  most  apt  comparison of the  Trump years is  with  Obama’s second term. Both of  which were  all part of the  extended post-financial crisis  recovery cycle, and  occurred under a monetary and  regulatory regime that was broadly continuous over the eight years in question.

The economic growth rate during Obama’s second term  wasn’t anything to write home about, either. But it still computed to 2.18 percent per  annum—a rate  40 percent higher than that on  The Donald’s watch.

It should be noted here  that real  final sales of domestic prod- uct  are  used  as a proxy for  economic growth for  the  purpose of consistent comparisons. That’s because it has the analytical virtue of removing from  the  data short-term inventory fluctuations that are irrelevant to growth over any reasonable period but  can badly distort beginning and  end  points when  measuring growth rates via the conventional real GDP series.

With   the  economic growth data  smoothed in  this  manner, there is no  room for  doubt. If you  want  to brag about outcomes during the  artificial interval of  a presidential term, The  Donald and  his MAGA  partisans should remain as quiet as church mice. They have  the worst  record ever compiled!

Per Annum Change in Real Final Sales Since 1954:

• Kennedy/Johnson 1960–1968:  4.97 percent.
• Clinton 1992–2000:  3.75 percent.
• Reagan 1980–1988:  3.44 percent.
• Carter 1976–1980:  3.37 percent.
• Eisenhower 1954–1960:  2.92 percent.
• Nixon/Ford 1968–1976:  2.73 percent.
• George H.  W. Bush  1988–1992:  2.22 percent.
• George W. Bush  2000–2008:  2.00 percent.
• Obama 2008–2016:  1.74 percent.
• Trump  2016–2020: 1.52  percent.
• All Presidents, 1954–2016:  3.04 percent.

Trump’s defenders, of course, will claim  that the great Covid pan- demic knocked his record into  a cocked hat,  and  that he shouldn’t be  tagged with  the  economic plunge of  2020 that originated in China. You  can  get  that argument from  The Donald’s own  tweet of August 2020 after  the economy had  been  flushed into  the ditch by the lockdowns and  White House–fueled Covid hysteria:

. . . My Administration and  I built the  greatest economy in his- tory,  of any  country, turned  it off,  saved  millions of lives,  and now  am  building an  even  greater economy than it was before. Jobs  are  flowing, NASDAQ is already at a record high, the  rest to follow. Sit back  & watch!

We will refute that bit of nonsense below, but  suffice it to note here that the  economic contractions of 2020 were due  to the  sweeping Washington-imposed  lockdowns, not  the  virus  itself.  And  as  it happened, Trump was the very author of those lockdowns and the related self-quarantining of a frightened population. All this  dis- ruptive Washington interference with  normal economic function was  announced and promoted  week-after-week from   the  bully pulpit at the Trump White House.

Measured through Q1 2020, thereby discarding the  big  April- June GDP plunge, brings the  average economic growth rate  to just 2.10 percent, a figure  still near  the  bottom of the  above rank- ings.  So even when  you set the lockdown mayhem aside,  you still can’t make  an economic silk purse out  of the  sow’s ear which  was the MAGA  economy.

Jobs The Donald Didn’t Create

Nor  does the claim that The Donald was a great jobs creator wash, either. For  crying out  loud, presidents don’t create jobs—capital- ists and  businessmen do. And while most  presidents are unwilling to give the free market its due,  the  egomaniacal poseur otherwise known as Donald Trump was especially eager  to hog  the credit.

Except, there was actually no credit to boast about. There were 145,400,000  NFP (nonfarm payroll) jobs  in  December 2016 and just  142,475,000  in  December 2020.  The  Donald’s tenure, there- fore,  was the only presidential term  in which  private payrolls in the  US  economy actually shrank—and by  three million jobs  to boot. Well, at least  since  Herbert Hoover!

Again, defenders will  blame it  on  the   pandemic, but   that doesn’t hold up  either. Even  if  you  assume that Trump’s term ended at  the  pre-pandemic peak  in  February 2020,  the  contrast with  Obama’s comparable second term  is not  flattering. Trump’s adjusted monthly jobs  growth number was  33  percent smaller than Barry’s.

NFP Job Change  Per Month:

• Obama: December 2012 to December 2016: +215,300
• Trump: December 2016 to February 2020: +145,000

When you  translate these  jobs  numbers to  annual growth rates, the  story  is much the  same  as it  was  for  real  economic growth.

During Obama’s second term  the  annualized growth rate  of NFP jobs  was +1.86 percent, which  compares to an annualized gain  of, well, -0.51 percent during The Donald’s term.

And, yes, we can again pretend that the Trump lockdowns and shutdown carnage never  happened and  stop  the  calculation in February 2020, but  a jobs  growth rate  of 1.47 percent is still noth- ing to write home about.

In fact,  the  rebound of the  jobs  growth rate  from  the  Great Recession peaked in  early  2015 and  slid  downhill continuously from  there—with no discernible reversal during The Donald’s pre- Covid tenure.

The  chart below with  its downward trending jobs growth rate, of course, won’t be found at a MAGA literature stand.

It takes  the air right out of The Donald’s bloated jobs  claims.

Y/Y  Change in Nonfarm Payroll Jobs, Jan. 2015 to Feb. 2020.

In the broader context of the last half century the job story  on The Donald’s watch is not  much better. During the  twelve  presi- dencies between 1945 and  2016, the  annualized jobs  growth rate computes to  2.14 percent per  annum, a figure  nearly 44 percent higher than the above cited  gain  (1.47 percent) under Trump sans the lockdowns.

The MAGA  economy thus ended up  in the  bottom half  of the jobs  league tables, even  when  you  excise  from  the  record the  ten million jobs lost during The Donald’s final ten months in the Oval Office. So the truth of the matter is that when  it comes  to jobs and economic growth, Trump was  the  Greatest Boaster Ever,  not  a superlative generator of economic prosperity.

Annualized Rate of Nonfarm Jobs Growth:

• Kennedy/Johnson 1960–1968:  3.22 percent.
• Carter 1976–1980:  3.11 percent.
• Clinton 1992–2000:  2.43 percent.
• Truman/Eisenhower 1945–1960:  2.14 percent.
• Reagan 1980–1988:  2.04 percent.
• Nixon/Ford 1968–1976:  1.89 percent.
• Obama 2nd  Term 2012–2016:  1.86 percent.
• Trump  Dec. 2016 Thru February  2020: 1.47  percent.
• George H.  W. Bush  1988–1992:  0.60 percent.
• George W. Bush/Obama 1st Term 2000–2012: 0.15 percent.
• Trump  Dec. 2016 through Dec. 2020: -0.51 percent.
• All Presidents 1945–2016:  2.14  percent.

Moreover, even  the  job  gains  that did  occur on the  Trump watch through February 2020 were  disproportionately in the  low-wage or low-productivity sectors of the  economy. Thus,  of the  6.96 mil- lion  increase of  nonfarm jobs  reported by  the  Bureau of  Labor Statistics during that thirty-eight-month period, 3.7  million or 53  percent were  accounted for  by  government, education and health  services, leisure and  hospitality industries, personal ser- vices,  and  business administrative support. By contrast, the  high value-added manufacturing,  construction,  mining, and   energy industries generated only  18 percent of the gains  in payroll jobs.

One of the  reasons for  these  tepid GDP and  jobs  growth fig- ures  was  the  fact  that the  core  of  the  US  economy represented by the  industrial production index stalled out  completely during Trump’s tenure. In fact,  in December 2020 it was actually 1 per- cent  below the level he inherited in January 2017.

Ironically, the  industrial production index encompasses man- ufacturing, mining, energy and  gas  and  electric utility output— the  very ailing sectors of the  US  economy that Trump claimed to champion and  fix. As it happened, however, with  a -0.21 percent per annum figure, he stood far in the  dust compared to the  aver- age +2.9 percent per  annum gain  under the  previous twelve  presidents after  WWII.

Industrial  Production Index,  January 2017 to December 2020.

Then  there is the  double-fiction that the  MAGA  economy was not  only  booming, but  it was inflation-free as well.  The  facts,  of course, say otherwise.

The  best  measure of medium-term inflation is the  16 percent trimmed mean Consumer Price  Index (CPI) because it strains out the  high and  low  monthly outliers which  can  distort short-term readings. Accordingly, during Obama’s second term, the inflation reading on  this  measure averaged 1.84 percent per  annum, while the  figure  during The  Donald’s four  years  computes to  2.18 per- cent  per  year.

Again,  inflation is cyclical  and  a  function of  Fed  and  other central bank monetary policies, which  rarely  aligns with  the fixed forty-eight-month term  of a US president. Still, not  only was inflation accelerating during The  Donald’s term, but  he  was actually fanning the flames via constant demands on the Fed for even lower interest rates  and  even more  inflationary policies.

Thus,  in  September 2019, when  inflation was  clearly  acceler- ating, The  Donald relieved himself of  one  of  the  most  incoher- ent,  ignorant statements on monetary policy  ever uttered by a US president. And  it was merely more  of the  same  crackpottery that he had  been  espousing for years:

The USA should  always be paying the lowest rate. No  Inflation! It is only  the  naïveté of Jay Powell and  the  Federal Reserve that doesn’t allow  us  to  do  what  other countries are  already doing. A once  in a lifetime opportunity that we are missing because of ‘Boneheads’. . .

The Federal  Reserve  should  get our interest  rates down  to ZERO, or less,  and  we should then start to refinance our  debt. INTEREST  COST COULD BE  BROUGHT WAY  DOWN, while at the same  time  substantially lengthening the term. . .

This statement is not  just  a case of The Donald off on a monetary tangent. It’s downright offensive to  the  very  notion of coherent thought. That  the  US  interest rate  should always  be “the  lowest” on the planet, for instance, betrays The Donald’s primitive mantra that winning is all  that matters and  that what  is right is always what  is first.

Self-evidently, The  Donald is here  confusing the  Fed’s  policy rate target with the rates across the yield curve that the US Treasury pays  on  its  own  mountainous debt. So  doing, the  above comes dangerously close  to saying that the  key mechanism of capitalist prosperity—the price  of  money and  capital markets securities— should be set by the  Fed  at ultra-low levels in order to relieve  the US Treasury of debt service costs.

Indeed, the  level  of  wild-eyed irresponsibility  in  the  above statement would make  historic American monetary quacks like William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Wright Patman, and  John Connally turn green with  envy.  In fact,  this  Trumpian monetary humbug—and it’s only  a sample—is so over  the  top  that you  sim- ply cannot talk  about Trump’s allegedly superior economic stew- ardship with  a straight face.

You  also  can’t limit  the  MAGA  claims  strictly to the  calendar months of The Donald’s term. That’s  because the  Fed’s  monetary inflation machine was already running in high gear  when  he took the oath and  had  been  running red hot for years after  the so-called emergency of the Great Financial Crisis  had  fully abated.

So any  good steward of American prosperity who  chanced to land in the  Oval  Office  in January 2017 should have  been  doing the  opposite of the  Trumpian calls  for  still  easier  money. That  is to say, the vaunted “independence” of the Fed to the contrary not- withstanding, under the  circumstances a sound money president would have  urged them to stop  the printing presses forthwith.

But  The Donald doesn’t have  the  slightest affinity  for  sound money, owing to  reasons we  develop below. He therefore has no  right on  that count alone to  claim  that he  brought the  Best Economy Ever  to  main  street America. The  crucial truth of the matter is that the  Trumpian fiscal  bacchanalia of 2020 and  the massive   money-printing  by  the   Fed   which   accompanied  it  is what   fueled the  outbreak of  forty-year high  inflation directly thereafter.

For  crying out  loud, sound money and  fiscal  rectitude is the sine qua non of sustainable prosperity—so the stagflationary disas- ter which  hit the US economy subsequent to The Donald’s term  is very much his legacy. It is the  product of his noisy  insistence on the  most  profligate Fed  money-printing policies in modern times (Chapter 2),  slathered with  the  most  reckless outbreak  of  fiscal responsibility in all of American history (Chapter 4).

As it happened, the Fed’s balance sheet  grew at the staggering rate  of 13 percent per  annum during The  Donald’s term. Milton Friedman would have  been  rolling in  his  grave  and  would not have  hesitated to  say that owing to  the  lags  in  monetary policy effect, the virulent inflation that busted out  in 2021 was very much gestated by the  Fed  during The Donald’s watch and  pursuant to his endless demands for still easier  money.

But  here’s  the  thing. Any historic GOP president—including Bush  the  Younger and  Bush  the  Elder, as RINO-tending as they were—would never  have  tolerated the  Fed’s  print-a-thon, which actually started in  September 2019  during the  utterly unnecessary bailout of the “repo” market. Yet all the time  he was roaming around the White House tweeting economic dumbassery and boasting about the  bubble-ridden stock  market, The Donald had no clue  that the  fundamental basis  for sustainable prosperity was being savaged by America’s  rogue central bank.

Y/Y  Change in the 16 Percent Trimmed Mean CPI, 2013 to 2020.

The Lame Foundation of the MAGA Economy

Back  in the  day,  another part of the  GOP gospel focused on  the crucial significance of  productivity growth, which  was  properly understood to  be  the  true  foundation of rising living  standards. Low  taxes,  minimal regulatory intervention, the  slimmest possi- ble claim  on GDP by government spending and  sound monetary policy  were the  means to this  crucial outcome. And over the  long stretch from  1954 to 2007, productivity growth did  average nearly 2.1 percent per  annum.

During The Donald’s four  years,  however, there definitely was no  MAGA  magic  on  the  productivity front. The growth rate  was only  1.2  percent per  annum or  barely half  of  the  fifty-six-year average.

Moreover, the reason is not  hard to find. Historical US produc- tivity  growth has  gone AWOL  because the  main  street economy has become freighted down with public and private debt and strip- mined by corporate financial engineering enabled by the Fed.

The Donald’s big spending and  easy money policies did  noth- ing to reverse these  adverse trends. But  suffice it here  to note that what might be termed the national leverage ratio—total public and private debt as a percentage of GDP—rebounded to  record lev- els on The Donald’s watch. Compared to the  solid  1.5x ratio that accompanied the  nation’s prosperity prior to  1970,  the  national leverage ratio peaked at 3.82x in 2020.

That  meant, in practical terms, that the  US  economy was lug- ging  around $50 trillion of incremental debt compared to  what would have  prevailed at the  historic 1.5x  leverage ratio. There  is no  wonder, therefore, that productivity growth during Trump’s term  slid into  the sub-basement of modern history.

Total Public and Private Debt as Percent of GDP, 1947 to 2020.

Another cornerstone of long-term growth and  wealth creation is net  savings from  current economic output. This  metric mea- sures  true  economic savings, or  the  amount of resources left  for new investment in productivity and  growth after  government bor- rowings have  been  subtracted from  private household and  busi- ness savings.

As depicted in the chart, that ratio averaged 7.5 percent to 10 percent of GDP in  the  economic heyday before 1980. But  espe- cially  after  the  money-pumping era  of  Greenspan and  his  heirs and assigns commenced in the early 1990s, the net national savings ratio headed relentlessly south.

The Donald’s tenure did  not  reverse that baleful trend, either. Indeed, it might be well and  truly  said that the runaway spending and borrowing of the Trump years delivered the coup de grace. By 2022 the  ratio was an anemic 1.0 percent of GDP—a  sheer  round- ing error in the sweep  of post-war history.

For want  of doubt, consider the absolute dollar figures embed- ded  in  the  ratio chart below. The  actual net  national savings in 2022 at 1.0 percent of GDP was just  $260 billion, but  that figure would have computed to $1.960 trillion at the 7.5 percent net sav- ings  rate  of the pre-1980  period.

In a word, $1.7 trillion of national savings has  gone missing on an annual basis.  Gross savings in the private sector have fallen sharply, even  as governments have  scarfed up  most  of the  avail- able  new  private savings to  fund massive, serial  budget deficits. And,  yes, the  Trump years  comprised the  very apotheosis of that darkening trend.

Net National Savings Rate, 1955 to 2022.

As it  has  happened, real  economic growth dropped  from  a trend rate  of 3.5 percent per year before the turn of the century to barely 1.5 percent per annum since then. At the end of the day, the reason for this  severe  deterioration is that real private investment has stopped growing due  to savings being channeled into  private speculation and  massive  public debts—the latter having become far worse  on The Donald’s watch than ever before.

Indeed, since the year 2000, real net investment—which strains out   the   inflation and   the   annual  depreciation from   the   gross investment figures—had dropped  from  $953 billion to  $721 bil- lion in 2020. Stated differently, main  street experienced a deep cut in the motor fuel of growth and  rising prosperity, and  the MAGA economy did  absolutely nothing to reverse that trend.

Real Net Private Investment, 2000 to 2020.

Of course, the  ultimate purpose of growth, jobs,  savings, pro- ductivity, and  investment is to generate rising societal wealth and living  standards. Yet when  it comes  to the key metric for that cru- cial objective, the  MAGA  economy ranks damn near  the  bottom of that league table, as well.

In fact, the proxy for American living standards—real GDP per capita—during Trump’s term  rose  by only  two-fifths of the  aver- age  level posted over  the  half  century after  the  US  economy got back  on a peacetime footing in 1947.

So,  when  it comes  to  The  Donald’s MAGA  boasting, there is absolutely nothing to brag about.

Per Annum Growth in Per Capita Real GDP, 1947–2023

• Kennedy-Johnson, 1960–1968:  +3.93 percent.
• Truman, 1947–1952:  +3.43 percent.
• Reagan, 1980–1988:  +2.62 percent.
• Clinton, 1992–2000:  +2.60 percent.
• Carter, 1976–1980:  +2.07 percent.
• Nixon-Ford, 1968–1976:  +1.67 percent.
• Obama, 2008–2016:  +1.06 percent.
• Trump,  2016–2020: +1.03 percent.
• Bush  the Elder, 1988–1992:  +0.97 percent.
• Bush  the Younger: +0.91 percent.
• Eisenhower: +0.72 percent.
• All presidents, 1947–2000: +2.45 percent.

Thomas Woods has reminded us more than once that “no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.” It’s not strictly and always true, of course, but the evidence is clear that it’s often true. The latest example is the GOP’s speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) who has turned out more or less exactly like us skeptics have predicted. Johnson is a friend to the war party, a do-nothing on issues important to the rank and file (like immigration), and a true enemy of the people on issues like warrantless spying.

In recent weeks, Johnson has increasingly doubled down on supporting Washington’s foreign policy blob, and insists on spending at least a hundred billions dollars—dollars the Treasury doesn’t have and the Fed will have to print—on propping up the Ukraine regime. This regime, which Johnson tells us is essential in the battle for “democracy”—whatever that means—has abolished elections, ended the freedom of speech, and even destroyed the basic freedom of exercising one’s religion.

But none of that matters because someone at the FBI told Johnson he must keep spending taxpayer dollars on Ukraine while courting World War III. Johnson—ignoring his constituents as most members of Congress do—has assured the agents of the garrison state that he will help them. Perhaps Johnson’s biggest crime is his ongoing support for a new and vast expansion of the American police state. Johnson now supports securing greater prerogatives for America’s spy agencies who seek to spy on American citizens without warrants indefinitely.

This is obviously contrary to basic human rights (i.e., property rights), but Johnson certainly doesn’t care. After all, he told us that there are bad guys out there in the world, and that means the Bill of Rights goes right out the window.

The current drive to expand spy agencies’ power is no minor affair, and at the joint Mises Institute-Ron Paul Institute event in Houston last weekend, Daniel McAdams suggested that the GOP’s current effort to expand spy powers is even worse than the Patriot Act.

Yet, for anyone who has been around the game very long, he won’t be surprised to note that among the greatest champions of expanding unconstitutional state police powers right now is the GOP leadership. This, of course, is how it was in the early days of the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their acolytes were on TV daily assuring us that Americans who insist on privacy and human rights are “with the terrorists.”

In other words, this is what Republicans do. But, no matter how these GOP officials shred property rights, the rank and file keep voting for people like Mike Johnson because the GOP is careful to whip up their core voters into a frenzy over drag-queen story hours and university speech codes. These are issues for local governments, of course, not Congress, but the end result is the GOP keeps getting what it wants at the federal level: endless money for war, and the continued destruction of privacy and private property.

The fact that the average GOP activist still hasn’t caught on to the grift can be seen in the fact that they still refer to people like Johnson as “rinos.” That is, “Republicans in name only.” Anyone who uses the term is advertising that he or she still hasn’t figured out that Republicans like Johnson, McConnell, McCarthy, and the usual beltway type are, in fact, quintessential Republicans. They not Republicans “in name only.” They’re typical Republicans. They’re archetypal Republicans. Dissidents like Thomas Massey and Ron Paul are the true “Republicans in name only.” One might include Donald Trump in this category as well. These latter types are the ones who are out of step with the usual GOP agenda. The typical Republicans favor endless federal spending, unquestioning support for the Deep State, and indifference toward the problems of ordinary Americans.

To see evidence of this we need look no further than the fact that with each passing year of various Republican majorities in Congress, the regime’s victories over freedom and decency keep adding up, and virtually never are any of the state’s powers ever repealed. That’s exactly how the GOP leadership likes it.

In my last post I promised a more optimistic subject, but then life happened.
A distressing personal event that made positive thinking quite difficult; then I came across an article fitting right into the train of my own thoughts in the past few posts:
Monopoly on Knowledge: The Era of Epistemic Security – A guest post by Dr. Monika Gabriela Bartoszewicz on the  John Carter Substack.

The post is superb, please read it. It is a treasure trove of references and most beautiful art. It guides us through a number of books to explore the evolution of our present state of fear and security driven zeitgeist. I cannot think of a more succinct description of the phenomenon than the title of the post.

It perfectly describes the attitudes in the conversations I am having with family and friends traveling in the Habsburg triangle (Prague – Vienna – Budapest).
The need for epistemic security seems to be overwhelming. The replacement (and even rejection) of critical thinking with blind trust in ‘authoritative’ – one could say authoritarian – sources, to the point of making any rational conversation impossible.

The concept is also a perfect tie-in to the set I was posting in the past few weeks:

• In Core belief #1 – on decision making I profess my faith in the superiority of distributed decision making over centralized systems.
• In The not-so-smart books of Yuval Noah Harari I am trying to raise the alarm over postmodernist relativism and its sleaziest advocate.
• In The allure of surrogate power I glance at the psychology of communism through short explanations of Soviet communist phraseology.
• In Misunderstood communism I make the point that Communism/socialism is a paradox that can only exist on the values it aims to replace.
• In The enduring insult of “Capitalism” I am just venting my frustration over the continuous use of the word that was always just an insult, never a well-defined concept/theory/explanation.
• In The virtuous appeal of fascism I am trying to point to the dangers of seeing reality through the lens of mob-consensus conformity, while also looking at the psychological power of dissolving one’s self in the group’s epistemic certainty.
• In The delusion of liberal democracy I try to show how this most confused of expressions gets the least scrutiny in its use. Everybody uses it as if its meaning was universally agreed upon.

The point of the whole series was to show examples of ‘epistemic insecurity’, if you will, and to demonstrate the need for a far more rigorous approach to the discussion of complex concepts.
What drives my effort is the need to understand our apparently unresolvable political differences.

What makes them so predictable?
What is causing them?
What makes people to react to the same news in fundamentally different ways?
How can we interpret policies in so predictable ways?
How did we get to this impasse, where we cannot even agree on most basic principles?
How did we lose our ability to communicate?
How did we allow our fears to dominate our reason?
How did we get to safe-spaces and hysterical narcissism?
How did we get to the ready acceptance that knowledge is defined on the fly, at the whim of those with political power?
What could possibly effect the changes we are witnessing?
What changed in the past 75 years that led to them? Are we the victims of our own successes?
Did urbanization had something to do with it?
What is the role of ideology and the state’s incessant drive to grow?
What came first, the chicken or the egg? The fear or its shameless exploitation?
Did fear create the existential uncertainty or the other way around? In other words: is social security (for example) the answer or the problem? Will UBI create more or less existential uncertainty?
Are we living in times of weak man creating bad times or at times of evil men far beyond our control creating uncertainty to exploit?
Can we create a world where those who need safety can coexist with those who want freedom?
Can we create a world without a busybody, overbearing all-controlling government?
Can we even imagine one?

Read the Whole Article

Someone sent me an article from something called Patriot Alerts, “Morgan Stanley Sounds Alarm On ‘Death Of US Dollar.’”

The death of the US dollar is not blamed on the Federal Reserve printing trillions of new fiat currency during the years of Quantitative Easing in order to bail out the difficulties of the 5 large banks. It is not blamed on the thoughtless US sanctions imposed on Russia, Iran, and other countries, the only effect of which is to encourage countries to abandon the dollar based system, thus causing a drop in the demand for dollars and US Treasury debt.

Instead, the dollar’s peril is blamed on Russia, China, Iran, “oil-soaked Saudi Arabia” and “our neighbor Mexico.” In other words, it is a cover-up for the Fed and Biden regime’s catastrophic mistakes.

It turns out that the report is nothing but an advertisement for how to protect your pension and bank accounts by obtaining a copy of “US Dollar Collapse Guide.”

This marketing nonsenses provoked me to write this article.

As I have made crystal clear in my 4-Part series “The Great Dispossession,” you have already lost ownership of your banking, pension, and investment accounts. Your “ownership” has been reduced to permission to use your assets until the financial intermediary holding them gets into financial trouble. At that moment, they cease to be your property and become the property of the creditors of the intermediary that holds your accounts, whether it be Merrill Lynch, Schwab, Wells Fargo, TIAA, or whoever. Your dispossession was done quietly over many years by regulatory agencies. This is what Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum means when he tells you that “you will own nothing.” You already don’t.

The US dollar is in trouble, but it is trouble of Washington’s making. Republicans and the financial press, to the extent that one still exists, blame the dollar’s trouble on rising public and private debt. The US runs massive trade and budget deficits. These deficits for decades have been alleged to mean the death of the dollar. The narrative was that the dollar would be weakened by having to finance rising trade and domestic debt. When I was in the Congressional staff and later as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy, I had to deal with this ignorance, and it was frustrating. No one in Congress, on Wall Street, in the banks, or in the economics departments of universities understood the meaning of the US dollar as reserve currency.

When a country’s currency is the reserve currency, a role the US seized from Great Britain as its World War II victory prize, it means that there is unlimited demand for your debt. The reason is that your debt is the reserves of the world’s central banks. An increase in US debt is an increase in the reserves of the world banking system. As central banks desire more reserves, there was always a demand for US Treasury debt. There was zero financing problem.

All of the nonsense we heard for decades about the impossibility of paying off the US debt was unbridled ignorance. The debt did not need to be payed off. If it had been, the reserves of the world banking system would have collapsed, and the Great Depression that the Americans experienced in the 1930s, due entirely to the Fed’s failure to expand bank reserves, would be worldwide.

Being the world currency, a role Roosevelt stole from England, means the US can pay its international bills by printing money or issuing debt.

What has put this American privilege in danger is Washington’s stupid, indeed mindless, imposition of economic sanctions that then are evaded by ceasing to use the US dollar as world money. When countries cease settling their international balance of payments accounts in dollars, as Russia, China, Iran and other countries are doing, demand for Treasury debt drops. This means as the sanctioned central banks move to gold and non-Western currencies as reserves, that the demand for US Treasury debt drops, and for the first time in recent history, financing America’s tremendous public debt becomes a problem.

To be completely clear, the ONLY reason the US dollar is in danger of a large reduction in its value, is that Biden’s sanctions are driving countries away from the dollar. US debt can become a problem only from the abandonment of the dollar as world money. As US debt is denominated in US dollars, the Federal Reserve can always pay off the US debt no matter how large it is by printing money and buying the bonds.

The problem is not that the debt can’t be paid. The problem is whereas the Fed can print dollars to meet any debt payments, it cannot print foreign currencies with which to buy dollars in foreign exchange markets. When US Treasury debt is redeemed, the debt holders (largely foreign central banks) receive dollars. If they have lost confidence in the dollar, they sell the dollars in the currency markets, and the enormous supply of dollars drive down its value.

When the dollar’s value is driven down, the offshored production of American firms, who produce in Asia and Mexico the products they sell to Americans and which comes in as imports, rise in price, thus causing domestic inflation, reducing the dollar’s purchasing power and causing more exit from the dollar.

In other words, it is a death scenario–one produced by the Federal Reserve, the incompetent or bought-and-paid-for American economists, a mindless American government, and the mindless financial press.

The minute the dollar goes, American power goes with it.

Most of the world can hardly wait for it to happen.

What would cause a man (and in almost every case it is a man) to burn himself alive? Two men in recent months have publicly done so: one protesting the Israeli assault on Hamas, the other’s motive somewhat unclear but somehow connected to the trial of Donald Trump.

In the Roman Martyrology, we often read of the faithful being burned alive by authorities who feared Christ and His ability to evoke a loyalty higher than any on earth. In the case of St. Joan of Arc, the immolationists were Church authorities who betrayed their Lord. Human immolation appears in many cultures, sometimes as a method of execution or as a form of sacrifice. Pagans had their reasons for doing things. One of the paramount successes of the spread of Christianity was the overthrow of paganism and its attendant despair with the hope of eternal life with Christ.

But the two recent examples of self-immolation seem like (at best) a return to pagan darkness or (at worst) a post-pagan nihilism devoid of any kind of hope. The best-known instance of human self-immolation is that of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who took his own life to protest alleged oppression by the Catholic-led government in 1963. The image of “the burning monk” has become, in our post-modern era, a symbol of…well, something.

The socialist rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine used a photo of the incident on an album cover promoting the tearing down of the capitalist system. Arun Starkey, writing about the album’s cover photo by Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne, asserts that “the photograph was so moving that the widespread international attention it garnered led U.S. President John F. Kennedy to withdraw its support for Diệm’s government.” And just like that, the burning of a human being became a political act against Christianity rather than a lamentable action to kill Christians who nevertheless died with the supernatural, grace-filled hope of Heaven.

The 1960s, being the cesspool of confusion it was, brings us the case of Roger LaPorte, who set himself aflame on November 9, 1965, in front of the U.N. building, and died the next day. What set LaPorte apart from the Buddhist self-immolation was the fact of his being a Catholic. Indeed, he was affiliated with the Catholic Worker (CW). Critics of the CW see its trajectory over the years as starting from a personalist, works-of-compassion organization but, by the 1960s, becoming increasingly political. In short, the CW mimicked American Catholicism, trading the Good News for a mess of politicized pottage.

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The government of Georgia has tried for some time to implement a law “On transparency of foreign influence”. Its aim is to publicly identify organizations and parties who receive a significant amount of their budget from abroad:

The draft law “In order to ensure transparency”, initiated for the second time by the Georgian Dream faction, envisages the registration of such non-entrepreneurial (non-commercial) legal entities and media outlets, whose income – more than 20% – is received from abroad as an organization carrying out the interests of a foreign power. According to the project, everyone who is considered an “organization carrying the interests of a foreign power” must be registered in the public register under the same name in a mandatory manner. At the time of registration, it will be necessary to reflect the received income. At the same time, the organizations will have the obligation to fill in the financial declaration every year.

Those organization who currently receive money from the various U.S. or EU government or non-government organizations are of course not amused that they will have to reveal their association with such sources. They want to lobby for foreign positions without being identified as foreign influencers.

They have therefore launched protests against their country’s government and parliament which has passed the law in the first reading. Two further readings will be required to finalize the law.

The protesters against the law claim that it is a “Russian law” against “foreign agents”.

Since 2012 Russia does have a law that is somewhat similar to what Georgia is attempting to implement but such type of laws are certainly not a Russian intervention:

Supporters of the [Russian version of the] law have likened it to similar legislation in the US that requires lobbyists employed by foreign governments to reveal their financing.

The U.S. equivalent to the Russian and Georgian law is of course the much older Foreign Agents Registration Act:

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) (22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.) is a United States law that imposes public disclosure obligations on persons representing foreign interests. It requires “foreign agents”—defined as individuals or entities engaged in domestic lobbying or advocacy for foreign governments, organizations, or persons (“foreign principals”)—to register with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and disclose their relationship, activities, and related financial compensation.
…
FARA was enacted in 1938 primarily to counter Nazi propaganda, with an initial focus on criminal prosecution of subversive activities; since 1966, enforcement has shifted mostly to civil penalties and voluntary compliance.

For most of its existence, FARA was relatively obscure and rarely invoked; since 2017, the law has been enforced with far greater regularity and intensity, particularly against officials connected to the Trump administration. Subsequent high-profile indictments and convictions under FARA have prompted greater public, political, and legal scrutiny, including calls for reform.

FARA is administered and enforced by the FARA Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) within the DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD). Since 2016, there has been a 30 percent increase in registrations; as of November 2022, there were over 500 active foreign agents registered with the FARA Unit.

The Washington Post, without mentioning the long standing FARA law which is at least as strict as the new Georgian one, falsely insists that the original idea of the new Georgian law is indeed Russian:

Georgia pushes Russian-style ‘foreign agent’ law, putting E.U. bid at risk

Georgia’s Parliament voted Wednesday to advance deeply contentious legislation aimed at cracking down on “foreign agents” — an echo of a similar law in Russia that has been used to crush political dissent.

In Georgia, the bill has sparked huge street protests and drawn condemnation, including from President Salome Zourabichvili, who is not a member of the Georgian Dream political party, which controls Parliament and the government.

Zourabichvili and other critics say the bill is itself an instrument of foreign interference — backed by Russia and intended to undermine Georgia’s bid to join the European Union.

On Tuesday evening, as some protesters clashed with police in the streets of the capital, Tbilisi, Zourabichvili said the bill was evidence of Russian meddling.

However neither is the law “Russian style” – it is a copy of FARA – nor does the law include the loaded word “agent”. It does not accuse anyone of being such but seeks public transparency over foreign financial influences which would of course also include Russian ones.

The protests against the law look like an attempt of a typical color revolution:

17 Apr 23:15 – “Let’s demand that the Prime Minister talks to us” – rally participants moved towards the government administration

After Levan Tsutskiridze, co-founder of the “European Platform of Georgia” group, announced the plan of action, demonstrators headed towards the government chancellery and demanded a meeting with the Prime Minister. Tsutskiridze proposed demanding that the government repeal the law and release those detained the day before. Police and security forces are strengthening their cordon near the chancellery building.

At 21:30 rally participants presented an ultimatum to the authorities demanding the repeal of the law and gave them one hour to make this statement.

Attempts to storm or blockade government buildings have been pushed back. The government is holding firm. It has a solid majority in parliament and can outvote a potential presidential veto.

Every Georgian decision maker has the Ukrainian “Maidan revolution” in mind during which the opposition used snipers (allegedly from Georgia!) shot at police as well as protesters.

We can be sure that the Georgian government is aware and well prepared for such an escalation.

The law is likely to pass. Soon thereafter a majority of the organizations which currently organize the street protests against the law will have to admit that they are the foreign paid influencers the law is aimed at to reveal their dubious interests.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

The US doesn’t support a two-state solution, the US only supports saying the US supports a two-state solution. We know this because the US just vetoed Palestine’s bid to become a full UN member state, after lobbying other countries to vote against the resolution — despite continually saying it supports the foundation of a Palestinian state. Washington’s words say one thing, but its actions say the opposite.

This is because if the US admitted its actual position, it would greatly damage its reputation on the world stage. What the US actually wants is the same thing the Israelis want: for the Palestinians to go away, or lie down and submit completely, or otherwise stop being an inconvenience until they’re a forgotten footnote in the dustbin of history. But the US can’t come right out and say this, so it pretends to support a two-state solution that Israel has spent years doing everything it can to ensure never happens. It’s a completely fictional resolution to a very real problem, but the alternative to supporting it is to admit you support continued apartheid, oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

So the US maintains this ridiculous charade where it keeps pretending to support this fake non-solution, even while taking concrete actions which make it clear that it does not. Immediately after vetoing the Palestinian bid for UN membership, Deputy US Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood declared, “The United States continues to strongly support a two-state solution. This vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood,” saying the emergence of a Palestinian state can only come about through direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. We can see right now how things are going on that front.

U.S. at the UN: what we just voted no on is something that we strongly support pic.twitter.com/9psBUIzcP7

— Hamza M Syed (@HamzaMSyed) April 18, 2024

As always, the only way to understand the US-centralized global power structure is to ignore what its officials say and watch what they actually do instead. This is good advice for understanding geopolitics and government dynamics in general, and it’s good advice for sorting out fact from fiction when dealing with any manipulator in your personal life. Ignore their words, and watch their actions.

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The Washington Post put out a good investigative report on the IDF’s murder of six year-old Hind Rajab along with her family in Gaza earlier this year, showing that evidence points to Israeli forces being behind the attack. Washington Post editors immediately shitcoated this report by giving it the obnoxious headline “Palestinian paramedics said Israel gave them safe passage to save a 6-year-old girl in Gaza. They were all killed.”

This headline is carefully crafted to suggest that Israel kindly granted safe passage to Palestinian healthcare workers, who were then killed by some unknown assailant. Imagine going through all the work of putting out a hard investigative report, and then having your editor slap this shit on it. Disgusting.

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A senior US Air Force leader and whistleblower has informed Congress that the US is refusing to pull its military forces from Niger despite being told to do so by the new Nigerien government, and that refusing to withdraw troops from a nation where they aren’t wanted is putting them at risk. Which means we’ve got yet another illegal US military occupation on our hands.

New illegal US military occupation just dropped. https://t.co/0BPPuhJF3o

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 19, 2024

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It’s so stupid how everyone’s felt the need to keep pretending to believe the Gaza death toll has legitimately hovered around thirty thousand for months now just because Israel supporters have even been calling the official death count a Hamas-driven exaggeration.

We all know the Gaza health ministry hasn’t had the infrastructure or ability to count all the dead throughout the Gaza Strip for months and that the official number doesn’t include people killed by starvation and disease due to the Israeli blockade, but because Israel supporters (including the US president) threw shade on the health ministry’s numbers from the beginning they succeeded in dragging the Overton window all the way down to this ridiculously conservative estimate just through sheer vitriol and denialism — even though we know the killing never stopped.

Ralph Nader wrote in early March that the real number is probably more like 200,000. There’s no good reason to discount this. It’s certainly more likely than the number just continuing to sit around thirty thousand for no reason.

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“You either die a hero, or you live just long enough to become the villain.”
— Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight.

Too many people are trying to downplay last weekend’s response from Iran to Israel’s attack on their consulate in Damascus as some kind of “Wag the Dog” event. While I do agree there was a certain level of theatrics in the entire scene, to think this wasn’t a major geopolitical event is the worst kind of cynical cope.

Usually that type of detached cynicism is reserved to Millennials, but when I see folks in my age cohort doing this I become far more worried that everyone’s in denial to a dangerous degree. I was contacted by Sputnik News to discuss the Biden administration’s options and potential response via sanctions on Iran among other things.

While Biden signed off on a bunch of toothless virtue signaling, the reality of the post-Israel/Iran exchange is far starker.

Like when Trump assassinated General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020, Iran reacted with just the right amount of force, bloodying US forces in Iraq, showing off a little as to what their missile arsenal is capable of, and leaving the ball squarely on Trump’s side of the court to either pick up or ignore.

Trump, smartly, left the ball where it lay.

Iran’s strike on Israel, as others have pointed out quite effectively, was designed to show the Israeli people who support Benjamin Netanyahu’s unhinged, in my opinion, response to the October 7th attack that they can be gotten to.

This was an example of asymmetric warfare at its finest. The economics of war have changed. Now, attacking with swarms of drones and missiles is far cheaper than the sophisticated air defense systems and the property they are protecting.

Iran made that point very clearly last weekend.

Israel’s leadership has led the Israeli people to the brink of extermination just as Hamas’ has led the people of Gaza to the same fate. Never think for a minute that either of these groups of people are anything but cannon fodder for the globalist imperative to remake the world in their preferred image.

So, before the attack on Iran’s embassy Benjamin Netanyahu was their standard bearer, if polls from Israel are to be believed, for the extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza. Today, after digesting the sight of hundreds of drones and missiles from Iran and its allies impacting in the backyards he better be on his way to being their villain.

Because the theatrical part of Iran’s attack on Israel was that it wasn’t intended to do a ton of damage or kill hundreds of people. The goal was to send the right message to various groups of onlookers. And part of that message was that Iran and the United States agreed on a general framework for the strike so as to put the ball in Netanyahu’s court and dare him to have the strength that Trump showed.

I don’t have high hopes for that.

But it does signal a change in US behavior. And if my read on the Obama/Biden axis in the US is correct, then Bibi has vastly overplayed his hand. I believe the facts fit the scenario that the US told Iran they wouldn’t stop an attack on Israel as long as it fit within the scope of Israel and its allies’ ability to defend. Step out of that box, Iran, and we’ll let you have it.

Iran had every incentive to take a deal like that because it preserves their victim status and continues to cast Israel as the regional aggressor. It’s the message the US wants to send as well as the image Iran wants to project.

From this perspective it’s the only win/win on the table.

And Israel is the loser, but it’s a manageable loss.

The problem is that in my view Bibi one of the truly sinister people on the world stage today. And he’s operating under a number of misconceptions which inform us of his likely course of action from here.

He believes that he still has the power, like he did in the 1990’s, to order the US to jump and we would say, “how high?”

Bibi is staring at not only the end of his political life but one where he walks around as a free man, if not a breathing one. And when a man like him, a serial abuser and narcissist adept at triangulating his allies and his enemies, who gets off of the attention he courts in his pursuit of power and his own agenda, will use this moment to the fullest.

He doesn’t know how to back down here. He just knows that he can play every card in his deck and commit his ‘allies’ to bail him out because of their interests, their enmeshment with him and Israel.

Our outrage is Bibi’s fuel, his supply. He’s like the kid who picks fights with people bigger than him knowing that his big buddy will come to his rescue out of loyalty. Narcissists use your humanity against you.

And the question I have now is whether the US finally told Bibi with this strike he’s gone too far. When he convinced Trump to kill Soleimani (because come on, who else could have?) he left Trump to clean up the mess he created. Trump, for his part, won’t speak to him anymore, from the reports I’ve seen.

Now he’s upped the stakes taking out IRGC Generals in Syria and has to be thinking there’s an angle to play where he can take things to the next level. But, the Biden administration, being the Obama administration 2.0, may finally leave Bibi out to hang.

It’s now a liability to back Israel within Biden’s fading base. My read from the past few years that Bibi has the support of the UK and US neocons, but his opposition in Israel work for Davos and continental Europe, broadly speaking.

That is the pressure Bibi is under; to back down in Gaza and Lebanon, back off Iran. And that means he’s a cornered snake.

Does anyone seriously think this man is going to do back down under these circumstances?

We could be staring at that moment where Israel strikes back at Iran and the US finally just says, no more. Eventually the bodyguard realizes he’s the one with the broken nose and the bruised ribs.

Sadly, the more likely scenario is that no one on Capitol Hill, Tel Aviv, and London got the message and are now using this exchange as cover to secure more war funding for Israel for 2025 and beyond.

Gods help us all.

As always, my entire exchange with Sputnik is below for the sake of transparency.

Iran’s missile and drone strike on Israel is unlikely to prompt dramatic sanctions action on Iran’s oil exports from the Biden administration due to worries about boosting oil prices and angering top buyer China, Reuters reported. Shortly after Tehran launched its weekend attack – retaliation for Israel’s suspected April 1 strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus – House Republican leaders accused President Joe Biden of failing to enforce existing measures and said they would take up this week a series of bills to sharpen sanctions on Iran.

We’d be happy and grateful if you could share your opinions on the following:

Could you provide your analysis on oil prices dynamics after Iran’s strike on Israel? How significant was the strike’s impact on prices? What developments do you anticipate?

With the announcement that the Biden administration is approving yet another release from the US’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve they are clearly concerned over rising inflation for real people.  As I’ve pointed out previously in the post COVID-19 environment domestic inflation is tied directly to the wholesale price of gasoline futures.

With RBOB Gasoline futures trading above $2.80 per gallon I expect ‘hotter than expected’ CPI prints will continue through the election in November.  Inflation is just starting to come back.

So, Biden’s team is working hard to keep a lid on escalation in the Persian Gulf.  The strike by Iran sent the perfect message, in my view.  It was strong enough to test the limits of Israel’s air defense systems but not overwhelming to the point of providing Israel a clear escalatory path with the world at its back.  The response from the world has been, enough is enough.  It may have been enough to finally scare Israeli citizens into pulling their support of the campaign against the Palestinians.

Oil prices are currently not pricing in escalation, they seem to take the position that this conflict will settle down from here.  But that may be a dangerous mistake.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no way forward politically but to continue his aggressive stance, otherwise his career, at a minimum, is over.

The advantage is with the oil-producing states who can continue slowing production and make up the lost barrels with higher prices.  Wars are too expensive to fight with the trifecta of high interest rates, high inflation, and high energy prices.

FOMC Chair Jerome Powell reiterated his stance today that he sees no reason to consider cutting interest rates in this environment.  The bond markets are finally starting to believe him, having now priced out nearly all the rate cuts priced in at the beginning of the year.  In fact, I am raising my odds of a rate hike before year-end to a coin flip.  I believe Powell will be happy to maintain 5.5% and continue drawing down the Fed’s balance sheet, leaving it to Congress to fix the fiscal side of the equation.  All of this is weighing on Biden’s team to withdraw support from Israel at this point.

Several regional analysts said they doubted Biden would take significant action to ramp up enforcement of existing U.S. sanctions to choke off Iran’s crude exports. What’s your opinion on the matter?

They are correct.  No one wants what happens if Israel and Iran go to full-on war.  The US is more than capable of making Iran pay dearly for shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, but that is something the Pentagon does not want to have to deal with.

The way this attack unfolded told me that there are still (thankfully) grownups in the US and Iran working to keep this thing contained.  Sadly, Netanyahu and his allies in the British Foreign Secretary’s office are the wild cards here.  The EU will make noises about further sanctions on Iran while at the same time trying to show support for the Palestinians.

What is missing from all of this analysis are the religious imperatives of both the Iranians and the Israelis here.  And that is why, I think, we’re not done with the violence yet.  And if this is the case, then Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman becomes the pivotal player as he can bottle up Israel denying them his air space.  Even Jordan’s King Abdullah wants a cessation of hostilities.

What are the options for Biden, in case he doesn’t sharpen sanctions against Iran? What measures can he still take?

Not very many good ones for him.  He’s taking the tack that he has available to him, pressure Israel to back down, declare victory and pull out of Gaza.  It’s the typical US response to being beaten.  Despite the reports of the Israelis pulling back I don’t trust it.  There’s an existential dimension to this that raises the probability of continued violence.

The other dimension to this is the Israeli lobby in Congress and the Senate who want war with Iran and they are going to put Biden in a real bind if they pass new sanctions legislation for him to sign.  Politically it would be suicide for him either way.

As we watch the Russian army make mince meat of the Ukrainian army, we still wake up every few days to a spastic attack on Russia’s assets deep behind the line of contact.  The same thing will occur even if Israel backs off on Netanyahu’s plan to wipe out the Palestinians.

So, to remain in power I fully expect Biden to apply as much pressure as possible to get through the election while I expect Netanyahu to get the war with Iran he’s wanted his entire life.

What role does the “China factor” play here and why?

China has a massive investment in Iran as it is the terminal point for their Belt and Road Initiative.  The attacks last week on the ports in Southern Iran, Chabahar in particular, got my attention.  China wants that investment protected, of course, but they will not intervene overtly here.  They will support Iran financially, if need be, but it will be the Russians who give Iran both the military and diplomatic support it needs to get through this as long as the Iranians don’t look like the aggressor at any stage of the conflict.

Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.

(This paper is the basis of a talk to be given at the 25th Yasin (April) International Academic Event on Economic and Social Development, HSE University, Moscow, April 2024)

In the summer following Israel’s 2006 (unsuccessful) war on Hizbullah, Dick Cheney sat in his office loudly bemoaning Hizbullah’s continuing strength; and worse still, that it seemed to him that Iran had been the primary beneficiary from the U.S. 2003 Iraq war.

Cheney’s guest – the then Saudi Intelligence Chief, Prince Bandar – vigorously concurred (as chronicled by John Hannah, who participated in the meeting) and, to general surprise, Prince Bandar proclaimed that Iran yet could be cut to size: Syria was the ‘weak’ link between Iran and Hizbullah that could be collapsed via an Islamist insurgency, Bandar proposed. Cheney’s initial scepticism turned to elation as Bandar said that U.S. involvement would be unnecessary: He, Prince Bandar, would orchestrate and manage the project. ‘Leave it to me’, he said.

Bandar separately told John Hannah: “The King knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria”.

Thus began a new phase of attrition on Iran. The regional balance of power was to be decisively shifted towards Sunni Islam – and the region’s monarchies.

That old balance from the Shah’s time in which Persia enjoyed regional primacy was to be ended: conclusively, the U.S., Israel and the Saudi King hoped.

Iran – already badly bruised by the ‘imposed’ Iran-Iraq war – resolved never again to be so vulnerable. Iran aimed to find a path to strategic deterrence in the context of a region dominated by the overwhelming air dominance enjoyed by its adversaries.

What occurred this Saturday 14 April – some 18 years later – therefore was of utmost importance.

Despite the bruhaha and distraction following Iran’s attack, Israel and the U.S. know the truth: Iran’s missiles were able to penetrate directly into Israel’s two most sensitive and highly defended air bases and sites. Behind the whooping western rhetoric lies Israeli shock and fear. Their bases are no longer ‘untouchable’.

Israel also knows – but cannot admit – that the so-called ‘assault’ was no assault but an Iranian message to assert the new strategic equation: That any Israeli attack on Iran or its personnel will result in retribution from Iran into Israel.

This act of setting the new ‘balance of power equation’ unites the diverse Fronts against the U.S.’ “connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, that are at the core of Washington’s policy – and in many ways the root-cause of new tragedies” – in the words of Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov.

The equation represents a key ‘Front’ – together with Russia’s war against NATO in Ukraine – for persuading the West that its exceptionalist and redemptive myth has proved to be a fatal conceit; that it must be discarded; and that deep cultural change in the West needs to happen.

The roots to this wider cultural conflict are deep – but finally have been made explicit.

Prince Bandar’s post-2006 playing of the Sunni ‘card’ was a flop (in no small part thanks to Russia’s intervention in Syria). AndIran, has come in from the cold and is firmly anchored as a primary regional power. It is the strategic partner to Russia and China. And Gulf States today have switched focus instead to money, ‘business’ and Tech, rather than Salafist jurisprudence.

Syria, then targeted by the West and ostracised, has not only survived all that the West could ‘throw at it’ but has been warmly embraced by the Arab League and rehabilitated. And Syria is now slowly finding its way to being itself again.

Yet even during the Syrian crisis, unforeseen dynamics to Prince Bandar’s playing of Islamist identity versus Arab socialist secular identity were playing out:

I wrote then in 2012:

“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se”;

– a state that would enshrine Jewish political, legal, and military exceptional rights.

“[At that time] … Muslim nations [were] seeking the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasingly epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?”

To be plain, what was apparent even then – in 2012 – was “that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What [would] be the consequence – as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”

If, twelve years ago, the protagonists were explicitly moving away from the underlying secular concepts by which the West conceptualised the conflict, we, by contrast, are still trying to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of secular, rationalist concepts – even as Israel quite evidently is seized by an increasingly Apocalyptic frenzy.

And by extension, we are stuck in trying to address the conflict through our habitual utilitarian, rationalist policy tool-set. And we wonder why it is not working. It is not working because all parties have moved beyond mechanical rationalism to a different plane.

The Conflict Becomes Eschatalogical

Last year’s election in Israel saw a revolutionary change: The Mizrahim walked into the Prime Minister’s office. These Jews coming from the Arab and North African sphere – now possibly the majority – and, with their political allies on the right, embraced a radical agenda: To complete the founding of Israel on the Land of Israel (i.e. no Palestinian State); to build the Third Temple (in place of Al-Aqsa); and to institute Halachic Law (in place of secular law).

None of this is what might be termed ‘secular’ or liberal. It was intended as the revolutionary overthrow of the Ashkenazi élite. It was Begin who tied the Mizrahi firstly to the Irgun and then to Likud. The Mizrahim now in power have a vision of themselves as the true representatives of Judaism, with the Old Testament as their blueprint. And condescend to the European Ashkenazi liberals.

If we think we can put Biblical myths and injunctions behind us in our secular age – where much of contemporary western thinking makes a point of ignoring such dimensions, dismissing them as either confused, or irrelevant – we would be mistaken.

As one commentator writes:

“At every turn, political figures in Israel now soak their proclamations in Biblical reference and allegory. The foremost of which [is] Netanyahu … You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible, and we do remember – and we are fighting…“Here [Netanyahu] not only invokes the prophecy of Isaiah, but frames the conflict as that of “light” versus “darkness” and good versus evil, painting the Palestinians as the Children of Darkness to be vanquished by the Chosen Ones: The Lord ordered King Saul to destroy the enemy and all his people: “Now go and defeat Amalek and destroy all that he has; and give him no mercy; but put to death both husband and wife; from youth to infant; from ox to sheep; from camel to donkey” (15:3)”.

We might term this ‘hot eschatology’ – a mode that is running wild amongst the young Israeli military cadres, to the point that the Israeli high command is losing control on the ground (lacking any mid-layer NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) class).

On the other hand –

The uprising launched from Gaza is not called Al-Aqsa Flood for nothing. Al-Aqsa is both a symbol of a storied Islamic civlisation, and it is also the bulwark against the building of the Third Temple, for which preparations are underway. The point here is that Al-Aqsa represents Islam in aggregate — neither Shi’i, nor Sunni, nor ideological Islam.

Then, at another level, we have, as it were, ‘dispassionate eschatology’: When Yahyah Sinwar writes of ‘Victory or Martyrdom’for his people in Gaza; when Hizbullah speaks of sacrifice; and when the Iranian Supreme Leader speaks of Hussain bin Ali (the grandson of the Prophet) and some 70 companions in 680 CE, standing before inexorable slaughter against an 1,000 strong army, in the name of Justice, these sentiments simply are beyond the reach of western Utilitarian comprehension.

We cannot easily rationalise the latter ‘way of being’ in western modes of thought. However, as Hubert Védrine, France’s former Foreign Minister, observes – though titularly secular – the West nonetheless is “consumed by the spirit of proselytism”. That Saint Paul’s “go and evangelize all nations” has become “go and spread human rights to all the world”… And that this proselytism is extremely deep in [western DNA]: “Even the very least religious, totally atheists, they still have this in mind, [even though] they don’t know where it comes from”.

We might term this secular eschatology, as it were. It is certainly consequential.

A Military Revolution: We’re Ready Now

Iran, through all the West’s attrition, has pursued its astute strategy of ‘strategic patience’ – keeping conflicts away from its borders. A strategy that focused heavily on diplomacy and trade; and soft power to engage positively with near and far neighbors alike.

Behind this quietist front of stage, however, lay the evolution to ‘active deterrence’ which required long military preparation and the nurturing of allies.

Our understanding of the world became antiquated

Just occasionally, very occasionally, a military revolution can upend the prevailing strategic paradigm. This was Qasem Suleimani’s key insight. This is what ‘active deterrence’ implies. The switch to a strategy that could upend prevailing paradigms.

Both Israel and the U.S. have armies that are conventionally far more powerful than their adversaries which are mostly composed of small non-state rebels or revolutionaries. The latter are treated more as mutineers within the traditionalist colonial framing, and for whom a whiff of firepower generally is considered sufficient.

The West, however, has not fully assimilated the military revolutions now underway. There has been a radical shift in the balance of power between low-tech improvisation and expensive complex (and less robust) weapons platforms.

The Additional Ingredients

What makes Iran’s new military approach truly transformative have been two additional factors: One was the appearance of an outstanding military strategist (now assassinated); and secondly, his ability to mix and apply these new tools in a wholly novel matrix. The fusion of these two factors – together with low-tech drones and cruise missiles – completed the revolution.

The philosophy driving this military strategy is clear: the West is over-invested in air dominance and in its carpet fire power. It prioritises ‘shock and awe’ thrusts, but quickly exhausts itself early in the encounter. This rarely can be sustained for long. The Resistance aim is to exhaust the enemy.

The second key principle driving this new military approach concerns the careful calibration of the intensity of conflict, upping and lowering the flames as appropriate; and, at the same time, keeping escalatory dominance within the Resistance’s control.

In Lebanon, in 2006, Hizbullah remained deep underground whilst the Israeli air assault swept across overhead. The physical surface damage was huge, yet their forces were unaffected and emerged from deep tunnels – only afterwards. Then came the 33 days of Hizbullah’s missile barrage – until Israel called it quits.

So, is there any strategic point to an Israeli military response to Iran?

Israelis widely believe that without deterrence – without the world fearing them – they cannot survive. October 7 set this existential fear burning through Israeli society. Hezbollah’s very presence only exacerbates it – and now Iran has rained missiles down into Israel directly.

The opening of the Iranian front, in a certain way, initially may have benefited Netanyahu: the IDF defeat in the Gaza war; the hostage release impasse; the continuing displacement of Israelis from the north; and even the murder of the World Kitchen aid workers – all are temporarily forgotten. The West has grouped at Israel’s – and Netanyahu’s – side again. Arab states are again co-operating. And attention has moved from Gaza to Iran.

So far, so good (from Netanyahu’s perspective, no doubt). Netanyahu has been angling to draw the U.S. into war with Israel against Iran for two decades (albeit with successive U.S. Presidents declining the dangerous prospect).

But to cut Iran down to size would require U.S. military assistance.

Netanyahu senses Biden’s weakness and has the tools and knowhow by which he can manipulate U.S. politics: Indeed, worked in this way, Netanyahu might force Biden to continue to arm Israel, and even to embrace his widening of the war to Hizbullah in Lebanon.

Conclusion

Israel’s strategy from past decades will continue with its hope of achieving some Chimeric transformative “de-radicalisation” of Palestinians that will make ‘Israel safe’.

A former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. argues that Israel can have no peace without such ‘transformative de-radicalisation’. “If we do it right”, Ron Dermer insists, “it will make Israel stronger – and the U.S. too”. It is in this context that the War Cabinet’s insistence on retaliation against Iran should be understood.

Rational argument advocating moderation is read as inviting defeat.

All of which is to say that Israelis are psychologically very far from being able to reconsider the content to the Zionist project of Jewish special rights. For now, they are on a completely different path, trusting to a Biblical reading that many Israelis have come to view as mandatory injunctions under Halachic Law.

Hubert Védrine asks us the supplementary question: “Can we imagine a West that manages to preserve the societies it has birthed – and yet “is not proselytizing, not-interventionist? In other words, a West that can accept alterity, that can live with others – and accept them for who they are”.

Védrine says this “is not a problem of the diplomatic machines: it’s a question of profound soul-searching, a deep cultural change that needs to happen in western society”.

A ‘trial of strength’ between Israel and the Resistance Fronts ranged against it likely cannot be avoided.

The die has been deliberately cast this way.

Netanyahu is gambling big with Israel’s – and America’s – future. And he may lose.

If there is a regional war, and Israel suffers defeat, then what?

When exhaustion (and defeat) finally settles in, and the parties ‘scrabble in the drawer’ for new solutions to their strategic distress, the truly transformative solution would be for an Israeli leader to think the ‘unthinkable’ – to think of one state between the River and the Sea.

And, for Israel – tasting the bitter herbs of ‘things fallen apart’ – to talk directly with Iran.

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

Understanding the importance of CO₂ to human physiology was one of the things that made me realize that being a good carb burner is necessary to achieve optimal health. CO₂ is health supporting.

And the proper oxidation of carbohydrates produces 50% more carbon dioxide than fat oxidation (in other words, you produce 50% more CO₂ when you properly burn carbs).

Many understand how important oxygen is — we have to breathe, right? Oxygen is vital for energy metabolism. It is the final electron acceptor in the electron transport chain. And when O₂ isn’t available in the cell, our cells then use the inefficient glycolytic pathway (fermentation) for energy production more than necessary.

What is not commonly understood is HOW oxygen gets to our cells, and that process relies on CO₂! CO₂ is often labeled a “byproduct” of energy metabolism, but it is not given the credit it deserves. More CO₂ means more oxygen is delivered to our cells, improving our energy production. It is a feedforward cycle since we are able to produce more energy and thus more CO₂.

This is because the delivery of O₂ requires an exchange of gases (CO₂ and O₂) at the cellular level. Hemoglobin, a protein in our blood responsible for carrying CO₂ and oxygen, releases the oxygen bound to it in the presence of higher CO₂ concentrations. And releases CO₂ in the presence of higher O₂ concentrations. The relationship between O₂ and CO₂ in the body is explained by the Bohr and Haldane effect:¹

• Bohr — High concentration of CO₂ in the cells causes a low pH (acidic environment), causing hemoglobin to unload more O₂ in the cells and take up CO₂
• Haldane — High concentration of O₂ in the lungs means hemoglobin will unload CO₂ and take up oxygen

The higher the concentration of CO₂, the more effectively oxygen can be utilized and the better we will make energy. But improving oxygen delivery is just one benefit of CO₂. Here are eight more.

Eight Benefits of CO₂

1.CO₂ increases the metabolic rate — Since CO₂ promotes delivery of O to cells, we can produce more energy per molecule of glucose (~36 ATP relative to 2 ATP) using full oxidative phosphorylation (proper carb burning).

“The presence of carbon dioxide is an indicator of proper mitochondrial respiratory functioning.” ~ Ray Peat, Ph.D.

2.CO₂ improves function of Vitamin K since CO₂ concentrations determine the rate of Vit K dependent carboxylation reactions² — CO₂ activates the Vit K dependent proteins & thus assists fat soluble vitamins in fulfilling their physiological functions.

“The greater the supply of carbon dioxide, the better vitamin K can do its job.” ~ Chris Masterjohn, Ph.D.

“[V]itamin K uses [CO₂] to activate proteins that protect our heart valves and blood vessels from calcification.” ~ Chris Masterjohn, Ph.D.

CO₂ is thus important for the following Vit K functions: blood clotting, preventing soft tissue calcification, mineralizing bones and teeth, utilizing energy, and hormonal health.

3.CO₂ improves vasodilation by relaxing smooth muscles around blood vessels^3,4 — A vasodilator is a substance that causes smooth muscle to relax thus dilating the tubular passages it lines.

4.CO₂ improves gut health — You want HIGH CO₂ levels in your gut, and many people, unfortunately, have LOW CO₂ levels and HIGH O₂ levels (not what we want!)

The colonic microflora is extremely complex. And while it is near impossible to define what the ideal microbiome should look like (resident microbes are highly diverse, vary between individuals, and change with diet), recent evidence supports that colonic bacteria should be dominated by obligate anaerobic bacteria (meaning they cannot survive in high oxygen environments) that are able to benefit us by breaking down non-usable fibers.⁵

Balanced gut microbiomes are characterized by the dominance of obligate organisms, while an expansion of facultative organisms (bacteria that can survive in high O₂ environments) is a common marker of gut dysbiosis.

Thus, the inside of the colon should be a low oxygen and high CO₂ environment to ensure we have dominance of obligate anaerobes that can breakdown complex carbs and provide our cells with short chain fatty acids, and lower levels of facultative organisms since these facultative anaerobic bacteria do not specialize in consuming fiber and might even interfere with host nutrition.

Image from Current Opinion in Microbiology October 2017; 39: 1-6

So, maintaining a low oxygen and high CO₂ environment helps keep the microbiome in check. The internal environment of our body impacts how our body functions.

5.CO₂ improves calcium utilization⁶ — When CO₂ exits the cell, it brings with it free water and calcium,⁷ lowering cellular bulk water. It is toxic to have persistent intracellular calcium, and you want as little free water as possible inside cells. In fact, some machines use the intracellular water level when looking for cancer.⁸

“The carbon dioxide can be changed into carbonic acid, by chemically combining with water. Carbonic acid is hydrophilic, and so it quickly leaves the cell, taking with it some of the oppositely charged ions, such as calcium and sodium.”⁹

6.CO₂ protects the cell and mitochondria structure from damage, acting like an antioxidant and cell stabilizer — Since it improves oxygen delivery, it reduces free radical damage.^{10,11,12,13,14} It also protects against hypoxia and the negative effects of intracellular calcium and inflammation.^{15,16,17,18,19,20} Abundant CO₂ inside and outside the cell protects lipids and proteins susceptible to oxidation.^21,22 In fact, CO₂ is part of our antioxidant defense system.²³

“The suppression of mitochondrial respiration increases the production of toxic free radicals, and the decreased carbon dioxide makes the proteins more susceptible to attack by free radicals.” ~ Ray Peat, Ph.D.

“The failure to oxidize glucose to CO₂ is oxidative stress.” ~ Ray Peat, Ph.D.

7.CO₂ prevents accumulation of lactic acid in the cell, which we see in cancer, diabetes, and other chronic conditions^24,25,26,27 — Lactic acid is a byproduct of inefficient carb metabolism that suppresses efficient oxidation of glucose and burdens the liver’s energy supply. Elevated lactic acid levels have a hypoxic effect and signals to the cell that it is under stress.

“The presence of lactic acid, which indicates stress or defective respiration, interferes with energy metabolism in ways that tend to be self-promoting. Harry Rubin’s experiments demonstrated that cells become cancerous before genetic changes appear. The mere presence of lactic acid can make cells more susceptible to the transformation into cancer cells. (Mothersill, et al., 1983.)

Diabetics typically have elevated lactate, which shows that glucose doesn’t have a problem getting into their cells, just getting oxidized.” ~ Ray Peat, Ph.D.

More CO₂ improves oxidation and thus prevents accumulation of lactic acid since full oxidative phosphorylation (proper carb metabolism) can occur.

“Lactic acid and carbon dioxide have opposing effects.” ~ Ray Peat, Ph.D.

8.CO₂ improves longevity — The higher you live in altitude (and thus the higher CO₂ levels), the lower the cancer, heart disease and overall better health.²⁸ Moreover, maximum lifespan of mammals is positively correlated with blood CO₂.²⁹

“People who live at very high altitudes live significantly longer; they have a lower incidence of cancer (Weinberg, et al., 1987) and heart disease (Mortimer, et al., 1977), and other degenerative conditions, than people who live near sea level.” ~ Ray Peat, Ph.D.

How Do We Achieve Higher CO₂ Levels?

How we eat and breathe impacts how much CO₂ we have in our body. You can increase the endogenous production (with proper carb burning), or reduce the outflow (with proper breathing).

CO₂ is formed intracellularly during energy metabolism inside the mitochondria. Since carbs are richer in oxygen than fat, they consume less water in their metabolism and release 50% more CO₂³⁰ (if we use them properly). The more carbs we efficiently burn for energy, the more CO₂ we make.

“Higher CO₂ has benefits, and a higher ratio of carbohydrates to fat being oxidized for fuel yields greater CO₂.”³¹

The body’s primary source of CO₂ is cellular metabolism — so properly burning carbs is the primary source of CO₂. In fact, the Keto diet significantly reduces carbon dioxide stores.³² Even Dr. Lustig admits that ketosis reduces the amount of CO₂ produced by the body in relation to the amount of oxygen it consumes.³³

How we breathe also impacts the CO₂ levels inside of our body, as we blow off a ton of CO₂ with mouth breathing! Mouth breathing is, in a sense, self-suffocation and hyperventilation when taken to the extreme because we’re driving down CO₂ levels to the point that we decrease oxygen availability to the cells. Overtime this can lead to degeneration, and a lot of mouth breathing is a sign of a stressed and lowered metabolism.

Nose breathing is a MUST, and utilizing mouth tape can help reduce levels of mouth breathing while sleeping. For extra CO₂ work, try nose bag breathing with a brown paper bag to increase CO₂ levels. This is very powerful to do before bed!

In summary, there are a number of health advantages of having elevated cellular CO₂ levels. Proper breathing is very important for blood CO₂ levels, but it does not change cellular CO₂ levels — what you eat does! And being a good carb burner is one of the best ways to achieve elevated levels.

Transform Your Health — One Step at a Time

Ashley and her sister Sarah have put together a truly groundbreaking step-by-step course called “Rooted in Resilience.” They have compiled what clearly is the best application of Dr. Ray Peat’s work on Bioenergetic Medicine that I have ever seen.

It is so good that I am using the core of their program to teach the many Health Coaches that I am in the process of training for the new Mercola Health Clinics I am opening this fall. It took these women working nearly full-time on this project for a year to create it.

This has to be one of the absolute best values for health education I have ever seen. If you want to understand why you struggle with health problems and then have a clear program on how to reverse those challenges, then this is the course for you.

It is precisely the type of program I wish I would have had access to when I got out of medical school. I fumbled around for decades before I reached the conclusion they discuss in the course and share with you so you can restore your cellular energy production and recover your health.

Sources and References

• ¹ Jpn J Physiol 1984;34(2):205-16
• ² J Biol Chem 2011 Dec 30;286(52):44821-32
• ³ Stroke 1977;8:226–229
• ⁴ J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg. 2004 Sep;128(3):354-6
• ⁵ Nat Rev Microbiol 2018 Feb;16(2):103-110
• ⁶ Aviat Space Environ Med 1998 Mar;69(3):291-8
• ⁷ Pflugers Arch 2010 Nov;460(6):953-64
• ⁸ Structural Dynamics 7, 054701 (2020)
• ⁹ Ray Peat Water: swelling, tension, pain, fatigue, aging
• ¹⁰ Physiol Res 2002;51(4):335-9
• ¹¹ Vopr Med Khim 1996 Jul-Sep;42(3):193-202
• ¹² Izv Akad Nauk Ser Biol 1997 Mar-Apr:(2):204-17
• ¹³ Patol Fiziol Eksp Ter 1995 Jul-Sep:(3):34-40
• ^14, 22 Vojnosanit Pregl 1996 Jul-Aug;53(4):261-74
• ¹⁵ Fiziol Zh SSSR Im I M Sechenova 1978 Oct;64(10):1456-62
• ^16, 21, 23 Fiziol Zh Im I M Sechenova 1995 Feb;81(2):47-52
• ¹⁷ Stroke 1996;27:1634–1640
• ¹⁸ Acta Neurobiol Exp 2007;67(2):197-206
• ¹⁹ Biull Eksp Biol Med 1994 Oct;118(10):395-8
• ²⁰ Biull Eksp Biol Med 1995 Jun;119(6):590-3
• ²⁴ Clin Endocrinol 2011 Feb;74(2):191-6
• ²⁵ Int J Epidemiol 2010 Dec;39(6):1647-55
• ²⁶ Diabetes 1988;37(8):1020–1024
• ²⁷ Ray Peat Lactate vs. CO2 in wounds, sickness, and aging; the other approach to cancer
• ²⁸ Aging Dis 2014 Aug; 5(4): 274–280
• ²⁹ Biogerontology 2013; 14: 687-691
• ³⁰ ChrisMasterjohnphd.com
• ³¹ Journal of Evolution and Health An Ancestral Health Society Publication March 2017; 2(1)
• ³² Lung 2015 Dec;193(6):939-45
• ³³ Harvard TH Chan Keto diet considered for Navy SEALS

It does not take too much upstairs to see through the Biden administration’s rejection of the JetBlue-Spirit Airlines merger. The latter is on the verge of bankruptcy. It is $1.1 billion in debt. It faces the headwinds of a new labor agreement raising pilot pay by 34% and has trouble with its Pratt & Whitney engines. JetBlue offered Spirit a $3.8 billion buyout. Together the two of them would account for a 10.5% market share, fifth in this industry.

It is exceedingly difficult to see the logic behind this antitrust refusal, unless it is to protect the market share of the “big four”: Delta (17.7%), American (17.2%), Southwest (16.9%), and United (16.1%).

Nor was this the only recent interference with free enterprise on the part of the Biden administration. Another took place with its kibosh on biotech giant Illumina’s $7.1 billion reacquisition of Grail. These bureaucrats have also put paid to deals between air carriers Alaska and Hawaiian, between grocery chains Kroger and Albertsons, and between amusement park giants Six Flags and Cedar Fair. They have been busy little bees ruining the US economy.

A more important consideration is to ask why we need antitrust law in the first place. After all, the entire ethos of competition is to outdo your rivals in terms of providing consumers with a better and more reliable product at a lower price. The better you perform that task, the larger your base of operations becomes… and the more likely you are to run afoul of antitrust law. Here is a public policy that explicitly, knowingly, and purposefully clamps down on entrepreneurship, profits, earnings, and customer satisfaction, the very ideals of the free-enterprise system.

The Rotten Roots of Antitrust Law

The justifications for this set of laws are several. From an academic point of view, it stems from a diagram in microeconomics which has been crammed down the throats of aspiring economics students for lo these many decades. On the basis of it, four indictments of so-called “monopoly” have emerged.

First, the price charged by the monopolist will be higher than that exacted by the perfectly competitive industry. But what is wrong, necessarily, with a higher price? You pay more for a Maserati than you do for bubble gum. Should we legally penalize the purveyors of the former? Of course not. Economic efficiency—and justice too—requires free-market prices, which reflect scarcity and utility; we should not aim solely to minimize prices at any cost.

Second, the monopolist will produce a smaller quantity than the perfectly competitive industry. But there are far fewer of these luxury automobiles than there are pieces of these chewy sticks. Should we get upset about this? Rectify this “problem”? Don’t be silly. There’s nothing wrong with producing less of something if that’s what you decide to do.

Third, the monopolist will earn profits in equilibrium, while firms in the perfectly competitive industry will not. But profits are integral to the free-enterprise system. They make the economy go ’round. They signal entrepreneurs to invest in corners of the economy where they are most needed. Profits are the market’s call for help. Squelching them is akin to imposing decibel control on hikers lost in the wilderness. Further, if the monopoly is sold at a price that fully reflects the present discounted value of this future profit income stream, the new owners will earn zero profits.

Fourth and last and most important in the case against monopoly is deadweight loss (DWL). It is claimed that the area under the demand curve, between the quantity supplied by the two organizational forms, is greater than that which lies below the marginal cost curve. The difference is the DWL. Consumers value the additional quantity more than it costs manufacturers to produce. This constitutes, horrors, a presumed misallocation of resources.

But this is a totally fallacious way of looking at the matter. It commits the fallacy of making interpersonal comparisons of utility, a big no-no in any good economics. It attempts to compare the utilities of buyers and sellers, and cannot account for producers or consumers’ surplus, which are both merely psychological and thus can’t be measured.

I have been calling the economic actor who ruins matters in this example the monopolist. More correctly, he is merely the single seller. The word “monopolist” should be reserved for firms which are able to use violence against their competitors, such as the U.S. Post Office for the delivery of first-class mail, or the Army Corps of Engineers, which does not have to bid against competitors for gigs and accesses funds through taxation, not a voluntary process. Ditto for labor unions, which can dismiss competitors (scabs) through legal violence.

What about Predatory Pricing?

Enough of economists misleading the public on these matters via academic legerdemain. The fear apparent to the man in the street is that if these airplane and other unifications go through, and/or companies grow into being the only suppliers in their respective industries, they will jack up prices to the roof, and renege on promoting the customer satisfaction that brought them the success that enlarged them in the first place.

This widespread apprehension is due to a misinterpretation of the Standard Oil of New Jersey law case of 1911. John D. Rockefeller is used as a stick with which to beat up on the case for eliminating antitrust law root and branch. It is not too dissimilar to holding up a cross to ward off a vampire. John D. is reputed to have cut his prices way below costs, locally; he could afford to do so, since he could finance these losses from the profits of his nationwide holdings of refineries. The local competition was thus bankrupted; they could not compete with his artificially low prices and had no outside sources to finance themselves in this unfair price-cutting he imposed upon them. Then our man JDR would jack up prices to the stratosphere, and march on to the next victim. Eventually, he owned just about the entire oil refinery business in the country. Thank God for antitrust law; otherwise, evil monopolists would take over the entire economy. Or so, at least, goes the usual scare story.

Not so, says John McGee in a brilliant analysis. The real source of Standard Oil’s success had nothing to do with such unfair, made-up, local-price-cutting machinations. Rather, vast success was the result of the fact that Rockefeller could refine oil far more effectively and cheaply than his competitors. As a result, he was able to lower prices and benefit consumers.

Wouldn’t One Big Firm Just Take Over?

Second, the charge that without government regulation One Big Firm would run roughshod over an entire industry—maybe an entire country, not only in oil, but in fast food, groceries, autos, airplanes, etc.—is just plain silly. The charge is that such companies would smash all smaller competitors. If you didn’t work for or patronize one of these behemoths, you didn’t work at all, and you could purchase nothing.

No. The only way companies can succeed under free-enterprise rules is by making better offers, not worse ones, to employees, customers, and suppliers. The moment they get “uppity,” if ever they do, and stop providing better goods and services at lower prices, they get smashed down by the logic of the free-enterprise system: the supposed “victims” go elsewhere; new entrepreneurs spring up.

The One Big Firm, were it to take over the entire economy, would face the same challenges as does the socialistic economy. True, the former would have arisen to its present (hypothetical) status through a voluntary process, we are allowing, but only arguendo, while the latter took over via coercion, a great moral difference. But economically, they would be indistinguishable. Without markets—and there would be none in either case—economic calculation would be impossible.

The leaders of neither would know, could know, whether to build train rails out of steel or platinum; the latter, let us stipulate, would be preferable, but with no market-driven prices neither would know that platinum should be reserved for more important tasks. Further, with no market interest rate they would have no way of knowing whether to build a tunnel through the mountain or set up a highway around it. The former would cost more now, but save money in the future. The latter, the very opposite.

No, the One Big Firm would be a “pitiful, helpless giant” subjected to overwhelming competition from a bunch of Lilliputians. This process would occur long before any one company got too big for its britches, obviating this entire scenario. (For more on this point, see Murray Rothbard’s discussion “Vertical Integration and the Size of the Firm” from Man, Economy, and State.)

It’s Time to End the Antitrust Era

To conclude: by all means allow all of these mergers to take place. If they bring about a better, more reliable product at a lower price, all will be well and good. If not, these companies will lose profits and court bankruptcy.

But let’s also dig deeper than these particular cases, and reform the system that allows central-planning bureaucrats to determine which mergers shall get the thumbs-up signal, and which the thumbs-down.

Originally published here.

Alasdair Macleod – “Debt Trap Danger, Bretton Woods 3 & 1970s 2.0, on Steroids.” from John Budden on Vimeo.

Earlier this year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Island in Between in the Best Documentary Short Film category at the ninety-sixth Academy Awards. Although it didn’t end up taking home the Oscar, the documentary drew attention to the little-known Kinmen Island and its precarious position as an inflection point in the relationship between Taiwan, mainland China, and the continuing involvement of the United States. Taiwanese American director S. Leo Chiang narrates scenes of the tranquil lives of locals on the island juxtaposed against the dreaded possibility of war that looms larger there than in the rest of Taiwan as the shores of the mainland lay in visible distance.

In the film, a massive concrete loudspeaker pointed across Xiamen Bay wafts the voice of classic Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng as she sweetly sings her hits and delivers political taunts to the nearest mainland city, proclaiming that “I just hope all of you on the mainland will enjoy the same democracy and freedom that we have.” Chiang noted in an interview that

from there, you probably can see and hear things and feel things that you cannot from Taipei, or from the rest of the main Taiwan Island. A lot of them have the attitude [that] we’ve always been really friendly with the folks in China, and we support closer relationships [with China].

The nuance of the Taiwanese people in managing relations with China seems utterly lost on Americans, and it shows in Washington’s policy.

Green Berets Confirmed Stationed Just Miles from China’s Shores

The main island of Kinmen is situated just six miles away from the mainland Chinese city of Xiamen, and some parts of the island group are just 2.5 miles away. While Taiwan and its key role in US-China tensions has been gaining attention, far fewer people have heard of Kinmen. That might be changing as the US raises its level of engagement, sending military advisers and US Army Special Forces, better known as the Green Berets, there.

Just a couple weeks after Island in Between was nominated for an Oscar, it was announced that US military advisers had begun long-term deployments to the island to assist in the training at the Taiwanese military’s amphibious camps to enhance their capabilities in countering enemy incursions. The deployments were planned along with various other types of support for Taiwan’s military under the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. These include the Green Berets of the 1st Special Forces Group, which are permanently stationed at two bases of the 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion. The presence of Green Berets in Kinmen and another outlying island group called Penghu was recently confirmed by Taiwanese defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng.

Another aspect of the cooperation under the National Defense Authorization Act includes the Green Berets’ training of their counterparts in Taiwan on the use of the Black Hornet Nano, a small unmanned aerial vehicle that assists with portable surveillance and intelligence gathering. The Taiwanese Aviation and Special Forces Command has shown interest in buying these microdrones, which the US will likely oblige. Nobody actually believes that a group of US Army Special Forces stationed in Kinmen with small observation drones would make any difference if China launched an invasion. It would appear that this move serves as posturing against China, especially as a signal that America will brazenly and openly station special forces just miles from the mainland. It is nothing short of provocative, laying a tripwire for a miscalculation that could bring about the cross-strait conflict.

Flare-Ups over Taiwan

A few weeks after that revelation, tensions flared up around Kinmen when two Chinese fishermen drowned when their boat capsized following a chase by the Taiwanese coast guard under accusations of trespassing to which the Chinese coast guard responded by boarding a sightseeing boat and escorting it back to the island. The next day, the Taiwanese said that they drove off Chinese coast guard vessels that had entered the waters near the island. While these incidents did not result in more serious consequences, the increased attention on Kinmen is raising red flags that the island is once again becoming a hotspot for cross-strait tensions.

Taiwan has been proclaimed an integral part of China by the People’s Republic with claims that extend much further back in time than before the end of the Chinese Civil War. Xi Jinping has staked his reputation and legacy on reunifying the island with the mainland. Top American intelligence officials say Xi has ordered his military to be ready to invade the island by 2027. Against this backdrop, the Chinese military has increased its deployment of air forces that cross into Taiwanese air identification zones, implemented maritime demonstrations, and thrown its weight around in the South China Sea as the world anticipates the worst for the self-governing island.

Speaking to the Washington Post, Tom Shugart, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said that “these drills keep getting bigger and bigger. As the number and frequency continues to grow, it naturally becomes that much harder to know whether next time is the real thing.” The US government’s stances and policies that openly place it in opposition to China in a geopolitical rivalry has pushed relations to ever-worse depths.

Whose Doorstep?

Chiang ends his documentary by asking, “When these young men arrive in Kinmen, will they be surprised, like I am, of the peaceful sunsets? The same ones that my father must have seen when he served here all those years ago? And by the kindness of the people here who are forever caught in between?” His words ring as true for the young Taiwanese men who go to Kinmen for their mandatory military service as it does for the American troops that are now stationed there. At the big picture level, Kinmen, Taiwan, and all of the inhabitants there are tragically in the crosshairs of the greater rivalry between the US and China.

As was the case with the Ukraine narrative leading up to Russia’s invasion, the American narrative regarding Taiwan points to China’s provocative actions around Taiwan while waving off the possibility that Washington’s weapons deliveries and military buildup in that part of the Indo-Pacific region would be perceived as provocative from Beijing’s viewpoint. In a 2016 campaign speech, Hillary Clinton said that “Moscow has taken aggressive military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization] doorstep.” Whose doorstep now? A quick look at a map of where eastern Ukraine and Taiwan are in relation to the US, Russia, and China should give a sufficient impression of who’s on whose doorstep.

It’s a shining example of Ron Paul’s “imagine” speech where the former Congressman preached the kind of strategic empathy that asks to put the shoe on the other foot, to see what things look like for the other side. What does it look like to China, then, when the superpower almost seven thousand miles across the Pacific openly places its special forces in viewing distance from China’s shores on an island in between the mainland and Taiwan? Who’s on whose doorstep?

During the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump’s opponents in the Democratic party (and elsewhere) often pointed out that Trump’s protectionism hobbles private markets and the economy overall. Yet, the allegedly anti-protectionist Biden administration has done virtually nothing to end Trump’s protectionists policies put in place from 2017 to 2020. The motivation is unclear, but it is possible that the Biden administration realized that protectionism is a useful political tool. These policies offer a way of punishing opponents, rewarding allies, and pandering to voters.

Now that it’s election season, the pandering side of the equation is in full swing. Biden this week called for “sharply higher U.S. tariffs on Chinese metal products.” Appropriately, Biden included this new spate of protectionism in what Reuters calls “a package of policies aimed at pleasing steelworkers in the swing state of Pennsylvania.”

Biden’s pandering will likely bear some fruit, politically speaking. Protectionism remains popular. But, as Henry Hazlitt put it, voter support for raising tariffs is “the result of looking only at the immediate effects of a single tariff rate on one group of producers, and forgetting the long-run effects both on consumers as a whole and on all other producers.” Those who are incapable or unwilling to examine policies beyond their most short-term effects are easy targets for protectionist rhetoric.

The reason there are so many negative effects, of course, is that tariffs are nothing more or less than taxes and they produce the same effects as any other type of tax: when Country A imposes tariffs, Country A’s government is enriched while both producers and consumers living in Country A must endure higher prices and a less productive economy.

Even those voters who imagine themselves as opposed to taxes and “big government” often embrace tariffs—apparently fooled by the misconception that tariffs aren’t taxes or that they are only paid by foreigners. Many conservatives and protectionist “libertarians” create a wide variety of ornate theories with big words designed to distract from the fact that American tariffs are taxes on Americans. Ultimately, however, these people are simply pushing for tax increases.

It’s Not that Complicated: Tariffs Are Taxes 

A tariff is a tax that is collected when a good crosses an international border. In the United States, as with any country that imposes tariffs, any good that is subject to tariff can only enter the country when the extra tax is paid upon entry. (This tax is in addition to any other taxes that must be paid down the line, such as sales taxes.) As with any similar transactional tax (e.g., sales taxes) the result is higher prices and fewer choices for consumers. It must also be noted that the “consumer” of imported goods need not be the retail consumer or end consumer. A great many imported goods are intermediate goods that are used in the creation and production of other goods produced and sold within the United States. That is, tariffs are often taxes on materials used by American entrepreneurs and business owners to produce American goods.

Raising taxes (i.e., tariffs) raises costs for all these American producers and consumers. Yes, it is true that Americans do not suffer the full consequences of taxes on foreign goods. As with a sales tax, a tariff imposes some costs on the seller by raising prices and thus reducing total sales. But it is simply wrong to portray tariffs are taxes primarily on foreigners, since, as Murray Rothbard notes, “Tariffs injure the consumers within the ‘protected’ area, who are prevented from purchasing from more efficient competitors at a lower price.

Yet, protectionists have long been in the business trying to explain that tariffs are not actually taxes on Americans at all. Or, as Rothbard puts it:

Tariffs have inspired a profusion of economic speculation and argument. The arguments for tariffs have one thing in common: they all attempt to prove that the consumers of the protected area are not exploited by the tariff. These attempts are all in vain.

Old habits die hard, however. Even among readers of mises.org, one finds plenty of readers involved in the quest to convince others that raising taxes is a good thing. One such claim is that since other countries impose high import taxes on their own citizens, the US government must do the same. Consider this response to a recent mises.org article on trade. The reader states: “Baloney. Horse manure. ‘Free trade’ is a meaningless slogan. The issue of trade is much more complex than slogans. You can’t have free trade with Japan and China, which uses massive protectionist policies to help its own workers and industries. The wages are not comparable!!!”

Translation: “The US government must raise taxes because of ‘complex’ reasons. Since other countries tax and exploit their own people on imports, the US must do the same.” This is followed by an irrelevant statement about the comparability of wages between countries.

Or, consider this email from a reader “T.M.”: “Free trade is characterized in modernity as weakness and kindness is mistaken for weakness by foreign elites, such as Mexico and Canada who use us to the detriment of our domestic economy.”

This sentence can perhaps best be described as “word salad” or “gibberish.” But, I will attempt to translate the less incoherent portions, keeping in mind that the phrase “free trade” is simply another term for low (or zero) taxation at entry. Thus, T.M. essentially writes: “low taxes are weakness and unless the US imposes high taxes on its own people, then Mexico and Canada will use this weakness to the detriment of our own economy.” In other words, raising taxes on Americans is how the United States supposedly “owns the Mexicans.”

There are many ways to describe such a theory, but terms like “pro-freedom” or “small-government” certainly are not among them.

The fact that so many people are confused into thinking that these import taxes known as tariffs must be framed in terms of international competition and “complex” geopolitical issues can be blamed partly on economists themselves. When speaking on tariffs, economists are often guilty of needlessly complicating the matter with terms like “comparative advantage” or “balance of trade.” Yet, Rothbard notes this is not terribly enlightening on the matter of tariffs: “Economists have devoted a great deal of attention to the ‘theory of international trade…attention far beyond its analytic importance.” When discussing tariffs, what really matters is understanding whether or not raising taxes is a good thing for the taxpayers. Hint: it isn’t.

As Rothbard notes, a tax

always … distorts the allocation of resources in the society, so that consumers can no longer most efficiently satisfy their wants. … government coerces consumers into giving up part of their income to the State, which then bids away resources [via government spending] from these same consumers. Hence, the consumers are burdened, their standard of living is lowered, and the allocation of resources is distorted away from consumer satisfaction toward the satisfaction of the ends of the government.

Taxes benefit the regime while impoverishing the rest of us. To favor “free trade” is to favor lowering taxes on Americans and depriving the regime of funds. To favor protectionism, whether it be for some foreign-policy crusade, or to “create jobs” is to simply be in favor of raising taxes and handing over more Americans’ wealth to the state.

Correlation Doesn’t Prove Causation

To push for their high tax schemes, protectionists often resort to claiming that high taxes can be justified on utilitarian grounds. A typical example of this is an argument made by Patrick Buchanan in a 2018 article titled “Tariffs Made America Great.” Buchanan writes:

From 1869 to 1900, GDP quadrupled. Budget surpluses ran for 27 straight years. The U.S. debt was cut two-thirds to 7 percent of GDP. Commodity prices fell 58 percent. America’s population doubled, but real wages rose 53 percent. Economic growth averaged 4 percent a year.

Buchanan, of course, spent much of his career campaigning against high taxes. But here he argues in favor of high taxes. So how does he justify this? It’s a consequentialist argument of “the ends justify the means.” Specifically, Buchanan points out that in the second half of the nineteenth century—when tariff rates often ranged between 20 percent and 40 percent—the US economy was very robust. True enough. But here’s the problem: correlation does not prove causation. Buchanan points to a period of US history when there was a gold standard and when there was no central bank. In that period, taxation as a percentage of GDP was only a fraction of what it is today. There was no income tax (except for the Civil War tax) and none of the alphabet federal agencies that were created during the New Deal. Yet, Buchanan tries to give credit to a tax for America’s great economic performance in that period. Buchanan is here literally arguing that a tax “made America great.”

As economist Frank Shostak has explained, this is the problem of trying to create economic theory out of financial statistics. Buchanan takes a handful of stats and concludes that taxes are good. Unfortunately, a few graphs showing correlations doesn’t replace quality economic theory—and there is no sound economics that tells us that taxes create economic growth.

Buchanan would have been on much more solid ground had he attributed the economic growth of that period to a generally low tax burden, low government regulation, and a gold standard.

Unfortunately, many protectionists continue to cling to the idea that raising taxes is good for the economy so long as the tax is called a “tariff.”

This article is based on chapter 8 of my book Do Not Consent: Think OUTSIDE the Voting Booth, 2020

If someone asked you to define “free market,” could you?  Could you do it on the spot without recourse to dictionaries or other crutches?

The term “laissez-faire economy” might do as a first response.  But what does it mean?  In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal Ayn Rand explains:

Based on a column in the Los Angeles Times, August 1962.

Colbert, chief adviser of Louis XIV, was one of the early modern statists. He believed that government regulations can create national prosperity and that higher tax revenues can be obtained only from the country’s “economic growth”; so he devoted himself to seeking “a general increase in wealth by the encouragement of industry.” The encouragement consisted of imposing countless government controls and minute regulations that choked business activity; the result was dismal failure.

Colbert was not an enemy of business; no more than is our present Administration. Colbert was eager to help fatten the sacrificial victims—and on one historic occasion, he asked a group of manufacturers what he could do for industry. A manufacturer named Legendre answered: “Laissez-nous faire!” (“Let us alone!”)

But Legendre was hardly the first to express a hands-off idea.  In An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Rothbard tells us about Chuang Tzu (369-c.286 BC):

’There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind [with success]’. Chuang Tzu was also the first to work out the idea of ‘spontaneous order’, independently discovered by Proudhon in the nineteenth century, and developed by F.A. von Hayek of the Austrian School in the twentieth. Thus, Chuang Tzu: ‘Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone’.

In a Human Action excerpt Mises: The Meaning of Laissez Faire, Mises defined a laissez-faire economy as one unhampered by state interference; it means upholding “the individuals’ discretion to choose and to act.”

Most libertarians would agree with this broader interpretation.  The problem is any state that actually took a hands-off policy towards the economy wouldn’t be a state.  States are, by design, predatory and parasitical.  They exist for the purpose of accruing power and pelf.  Libertarian visions of domesticating the state are fantasies.

Besides which, states have won favor for certain people — they enable politicians to buy votes and other support needed to keep the racket going.  As for voters, who needs freedom when you can get free handouts?  Though citizens gripe about taxes and corrupt politicians, they’ve grown comfortable with the devil they’ve always known.

The public is okay with the state’s willingness to assume responsibilities they refuse to accept.  They want the state to pave their roads and educate their kids.  They want the state to pay for their health care.  They want the state to pay for the safety nets of life.  Who better to do the paying than the state, which with MMT will never run out of money?  Even a failed state like socialist Venezuela has yet to flatline because of its grip on power and propaganda, even as its people descended into cannibalism and prostitution for survival.

Where did states come from?

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine, in writing about the “race of kings,” far from having an honorary origin, considered the first of them “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang” whose purpose was to plunder the defenseless.

Eventually, as Rothbard tells us, the gangs realized the “time-span of plunder would be longer and more secure, and the situation more pleasant if the conquered tribe were allowed to live and produce, with the conquerors settling among them as rulers exacting a steady annual tribute.”

If a conquered people is the garden from which we expect free markets to grow we’re deluding ourselves.  As painful experience has taught us, attempting to bind a state to the terms of a constitution is another exercise in folly.  States have allies, none more important than the opinion makers, the intellectuals.  Intellectuals, in return for “a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus,” as Rothbard notes, will provide the needed rationale for the state’s predations.

Thus, to pick examples at random, we have “court historians” and others providing the necessary cover for the blood-bath known as World War I, a famous Keynesian telling us the debt explosion of World War II ended the Great Depression, a “political cross section of prominent economists” expressing their opposition to the Paul-Grayson Audit the Fed bill (seven of the eight of whom have Fed connections), and the wholesale lying (archived) that characterizes national elections.

Most states, being parasites, have learned to park their depredations somewhere between freedom and despotism.  Paine recognized this when he wrote in Rights of Man,

The portion of liberty enjoyed in England, is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism; and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom, and is therefore, on the ground of interest, opposed to both.

In a “full state of freedom” there would be no government “so formed.”

How Do We End The State?

There are two unmistakable trends working in liberty’s favor: Massive government debt and exponentially advancing technology.   You won’t have confidence in this claim unless you read Ray Kurzweil’s seminal The Law of Accelerating Returns.  It would also help to have an understanding of the acronym TANSTAAFL as well as a grasp of monetary fundamentals.

As I wrote in an earlier essay,

Technology is ripping a hole in centralized social control and its Keynesian underpinnings, bringing power and freedom to individuals the world over.

Both Keynesianism and technology are on a cusp. One is on a road to collapse, while the other is about to kick into high gear. . . .

[With a fiscal gap in excess of $200 trillion,] government promises will be broken. The bill for the Keynesian free lunch will come due, and the government check will bounce.

Where will that leave us? With a weakened and discredited government, and the bogus Keynesian ideas that supported it, we will have to become more self-reliant. The cry of “Do something!” to the government will be answered with an echo. Free markets will emerge where they’ve been suppressed because much of government will be ineffective or no longer exist. A free market in combination with a revolution in technology will remake our world.

We need to do with the state what we’ve done with slavery.  We can govern ourselves without a coercive sovereign.  Of necessity, free markets will emerge when the state is gone.

“This is the weirdest era in human history. By far. Nothing else even comes close. Billionaires trying to kill everyone. Civil society unable to form a coherent thought. Institutions lie in smoldering ruins. Poisons handed out like candy. We are Neanderthals with iPhones.” — Dr. Toby Rogers

Did it warm your heart to see all those blue and yellow Ukrainian flags waved by our elected officials in Congress Saturday night with the passage of the $60-plus-billion aid bill to the Palookaville of Europe? You realize, don’t you, that the tiny fraction of that hypothetical “money” — from our country’s empty treasury — that ever reaches Ukraine will rebound on the instant into Mr. Zelensky’s Cayman Islands bank account. The rest of the dough enters the recursive shell-game between US weapons-makers and the very hometown folks in Congress waving those blue and yellow flags, who will receive great greasy gobs of fresh “campaign donations” from the grateful bomb and missile producers. No wonder they’re cheering.

What the $60-plus-billion won’t do is provide any fresh arms and equipment to Ukraine’s sad-sack army soon enough to prevent Russia from bringing this cruel, stupid, and unnecessary war, which we started, to a close. Yes, we started it, not Russia, in 2014 with our Intel blob overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych in the so-called “Maidan Revolution of Dignity” (what Wikipedia calls it). And for what reason? To jam Ukraine into NATO as a prelude to “weakening” Russia sufficient to bust it up and gain control over Russian oil, ores, and grain.

Yes, that was actually the neocon’s game, equal parts megalomania and hubris, a fiasco as strategically ill-fated as Hitler’s push to gain control of Russia’s oil fields via Stalingrad in 1942-3. With failure and humiliation looming in Ukraine, the blob’s objective for now, in theory, is the vain hope of prolonging the hostilities just long enough to get its hologram president, “Joe Biden” re-elected, so that said blob can continue its amoebic digestion of what’s left uneaten by it in our sore-beset republic. You’ve got to wonder, of course, what this blob thinks will remain to rule over when it’s done gobbling up everything and jailing everyone from sea to shining sea who objects.

You tell me what conceivable way Ukraine can prevail in this proxy war now without just tripping off the civilization-ending nuke exchange? America does not have enough tactical missiles and artillery shells at hand to send over there. What we did have is gone. NATO never had much to begin with. Ukraine has run out of available cannon-fodder to conscript from its dwindling population. Despite Mr. Macron’s recent bluster, NATO can’t raise a credible army, or even agree on which country would send what. Nobody is riding to the rescue. Instead, Russia is fortifying its home-grown armaments industry and its military while systematically turning off the electricity all over Ukraine by blowing up the power stations. Very soon, Ukraine will be reduced to medieval living conditions — no lights, no phones, no Internet, no shopping, no ability to conduct modern warfare. End. . . of. . . story.

This is apt to play out much faster than America’s blob-controlled news media will be able to lie about. I’d guess it can be functionally over before mid-summer. The result will be yet another humiliation on the “Joe Biden” scorecard. When it’s over, you can be sure the Russians will abstain from an end-zone dance so as not to provoke America’s genius-losers into some final petty grand act of requital. Russia will just soberly declare what is self-evident: that for centuries Ukraine has been in its sphere-of-influence, as Mexico is in ours, and that they have reestablished the natural order of things in that corner of the world.

After that, America and the rest of Western Civ can get on with the collapse of their financial system and very likely a period of profound political and economic chaos in which governments fall, nations change boundaries and shapes, and their populations suffer dramatically from an imploded standard of living. That process may actually play out somewhat slower than the end of the Ukraine war over the coming years. It will look like a combined game of musical chairs and hot potato, with the opportunities to get a seat steadily fading, and the losers left holding things they can’t handle.

In the meantime, our country — remember it, the USA, when it had its once-enviable mojo working? — is busy being insane and finding sixty ways to Sunday to commit suicide. How do you suppose the Democratic Party will actually pretend to put up “Joe Biden” for re-election when the Ukraine failure is completed? Answer: they can’t. This dumbshow of the old gaffer hiding at his beach house and avoiding direct engagement with reality is also drawing to a close. Instead of calling “a lid” on “JB’s” activities, some humid morning in the swamp his handlers will call in “a medical alert” instead, and that will be the last we see of that dreadful apparition.

It’s also looking more and more as though the Republican Party faces its own civil war, especially after Speaker Mike Johnson’s perplexing flipperooski on the Ukraine aid vote. You recall, just weeks ago he said no dice to such a deal without a stop to the invasion coming across our Mexican border. Then, the intel blob boys lured him into a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) where they showed him . . . something. . . ! Everyone’s dying to know what. A secret signed agreement making Ukraine our 51^st State? Photographs of Mike engaged in unwholesome recreations with Gawd knows who or what? Or did they just have a little talk with him about how stuff is supposed to work? Whatever it was has made Mike Johnson untenable in his position. And he has explained nothing. He’s got to go.

At the other end of all that stands — or, rather, sits at a defense table — Donald Trump, the seemingly inevitable leader of a party seeking to cough him up like a hairball stuck in its craw. And yet, every week that passes, the various lawfare traps set up to snare him look more amateurish and gauche — while the Golden Golem of Greatness somehow manages to power through all that adversity. A big faction of the party he leads is in on that nefarious game. The wild card is the increasingly inflamed mood of the American people, in whose name the game is supposedly being played. With absolutely everyone lying to them about everything, it’s turned into some kind of bad faith olympics.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

Those seeking to buy a house as shelter for their household can’t compete with the wealthy seeking assets to snap up and hoard for appreciation.

Longtime readers know I’ve been addressing housing issues from the start of the blog in 2005. Let’s start with the general context of housing in the US, courtesy of the US Census Bureau, which tracks occupancy and the number of housing units nationally: Quarterly Residential Vacancies and Homeownership, 4th Quarter 2023

All housing units 145,967,000

Occupied 131,206,000
Owner 86,220,000 59%
Renter 44,985,000 31%

Vacant 14,761,000 10%

Non-seasonal (i.e. not second homes owned by the wealthy for their recreational use) 11,177,000

Units vacant because they’re in the process of being rented or sold:
For rent 3,224,000
For sale only 757,000
Rented or Sold 783,000

Held off Market (occasional use, temporarily occupied, other) 6,414,000

Seasonal (i.e. second homes owned by the wealthy for their recreational use) 3,583,000

TOTAL Held off Market and Seasonal / Recreational: 9,997,000

In summary: there are 14.7 million vacant dwellings in the US, of which 10 million are not available for year-round rentals or sale. Those 10 million dwellings are comparable to the total number of dwellings in entire nations, for example, Australia (11 million housing units, population of 27 million).

There are many complexities not specified or included in these statistics. For example, vacant dwellings located in rural locales with few jobs might be empty because there is little demand due to a declining population. Other dwellings may no longer be habitable without renovation or repair.

On the other side of the equation, non-permitted dwellings (granny flats, etc.) may also be uncounted as those answering Census Bureau questionnaires might hesitate to report units added without official approval. This can include everything from RVs parked alongside homes to converted garages to living rooms partitioned off and rented out as quasi-bedrooms.

The vagarities of self-reported data are potentially major factors in counting short-term vacation rentals, a.k.a. AirBnB / VRBO-type rentals. Data remains sketchy on exactly how many housing units are being “held off the market” as short-term vacation rentals. As of 2023, there were 2,459,260 available vacation rental listings in the U.S., but this may not include informal rentals, rentals listed outside of the major platforms, etc.

The Census Bureau offers several estimates of seasonal units: 3.6 million in the above link, and 4.3 million vacant seasonal units in this post: See a Vacant Home? It May Not be For Sale or Rent. These are traditionally second or third homes of wealthy households. but many such properties are now being offered as short-term vacation rentals for periods when the owners aren’t using the property.

Read the Whole Article

Some people are more observant than others. Some are more capable of thinking outside the box than others. Whether this is by nature or nurture is a moot point.

When we are children, we tend to look upon the world in all its wonder. We are amazed at what exists and we absorb it like a sponge. Then, when we are in our teens, we begin our second wave of discovery. We begin to pay more attention to the things that we find confusing; we become absorbed in issues like world hunger, warfare and political strife. These situations seem senseless and we repeatedly ask, “Why should these things be?”

Typically, in our twenties, we have not yet found any solid answers and our mood turns from interest to anger. We tend to gravitate toward liberal philosophy, as liberal philosophy tells us what we would most like to hear; that these terrible things should not exist and that we should take every step available to us to end the injustices of the world – at whatever cost to ourselves and others.

Most of us continue in this approach for several years, but in our thirties we begin to recognize that, no matter how many steps are taken in this effort, the problems seem to be self-renewing and, at that point, a split occurs in philosophical outlook. Many people cease to grow at this point, as they do not want to live in a world where it is necessary to accept that suffering of one type or another is perennial. They may become increasingly stubborn in this view and, from this point on in life, tend to dig in their heels increasingly and fail to continue to grow in their understanding of the world.

However, there are others who decide that, no matter how unpleasant reality is, we will continue our pursuit of it. For those of us who do follow this (admittedly less pleasant) path, the true nature of life begins to unfold. Somewhere in our forties, it dawns on us that our thinking is no longer liberal. We may well find that our former liberal friends may treat us like traitors to the cause and we may even become pariahs to them. (Churchill said, “If you are not a liberal when you are twenty, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative when you are forty, you have no brain.” A lot of truth in that.)

Somewhere in our fifties, if we have remained diligent in our study of mankind, it all begins to gel and we begin to have a real grasp of the interrelationship of business, politics, the haves and have-nots, the whole ball of wax. We begin to recognize that there will always be those who are inspired leaders, but that there will also be those who are uninspired usurpers. There will always be those who are eager to be producers and, likewise, there will always be those who would prefer merely to consume.

From this point on in our lives, we increasingly recognize that this state of affairs is perennial, that human nature will assure that the same verve that existed to create the Roman Empire exists today, just as the same waste and decadence that destroyed it also exists today.

When I was in High School, I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I remember how impressed I was that he had set his novel in a farmyard and that his characters were farm animals. Orwell had consciously simplified an otherwise confusing world by boiling it down to the smallest format he could think of. In that book, when the animals gained their freedom from the “oppression” of the farmer, they were filled with high-mindedness. In order to forever remind them of what they stood for, they painted on the barn, “All animals are created equal.”

The greatest revelation of the book, for me, was when the pigs, who had become the government, altered the sign under cover of darkness to say, “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.” I remember thinking, “This is where the rot sets in. I must never forget this. For the rest of my life, I will need to be watching for this change in leadership approach.”

Unfortunately, it is a fact that the majority of people truly do not want to be bothered with this effort of continual reassessment of the governmental situation. In every country, in every era, the majority genuinely prefer leaders who make big promises, regardless of whether the promises will ever be delivered upon. Every country in every era has its “chicken in every pot” slogan to hang on to.

In the late eighteenth century, America became heated up over the “oppression” of King George (whose taxation, incidentally, was far lower that today’s taxes) and, eventually, openly rebelled. It has often been said by historians that, if there was a specific moment at which the move to become the United States truly began, it was when Patrick Henry stated in the House of Burgesses, “Give me Liberty or give me death.”

As we all know, the American people gained their independence and, after a fair bit of stumbling, set forth on a course of prosperity, based upon excellent natural resources and an excellent work ethic. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a war was fought, not over slavery, but over who would control the economy of the future – the northern industrialists or the southern plantation owners. The north won and the latter half of the nineteenth century saw the greatest expansion the world had ever seen. In this period, America settled the entire continent and dramatically sped up the pace of the industrial revolution. This was done without income tax or a Federal Reserve, confirming that these factors are not necessary for progress and prosperity.

Then in 1913, the pigs rewrote the sign on the barn.

A decade later, American bankers (with the support of the government) put into motion the largest scam ever to be perpetrated upon Americans. It was an unqualified success, with an unfortunate byproduct being the Great Depression. In 1999, the American bankers (again with the support of the government) put into place an almost identical scam, which has proven to be an even bigger success and (I believe) will ultimately result in an even more devastating depression.

In 1999, The Democratic US president, with the support of the Republican US Congress, repealed the Glass Steagall Act, which would allow the scam of the 1920’s to be repeated, only on a grander scale. The “pigs”, in effect, rewrote Patrick Henry’s inspiring statement. From 1999 on, the slogan has, effectively, been, “Give me liberty or give me debt,” and the governments, both democratic and republican, have encouraged and provided the latter.

On any given day, we can turn on our televisions and watch the news programs, which continually feature Republican political advisors and Democratic political advisors argue with each other over whether all the damage that has been done was done by the other side. Neither side gives an inch to the other. Americans watch this game of ping pong endlessly play out with no conclusion, yet, at election time, they must make a choice.

Most Americans today treat the two political parties the way they would treat sports teams. Just as no self-respecting sports fan would own both a Yankees and a Red Sox hat, so every American supports one political team or the other, and along the way, that support becomes so all-encompassing that there is no room for doubt. Blind conviction becomes the norm.

In 1787, Alexander Tyler, an Englishman, commented on the new US experiment as a democracy. He said, “A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.” His prediction has proven astonishingly accurate, with the last step yet to be played out.

The debt that crippled Rome two thousand years ago, and that crippled every major power since that time, is now crippling the US. Today, all Americans are aware of the problem, and almost all are hoping that, somehow, the problem will go away. It will not. In every country, in every era, it is not in the interests of the “pigs” to fix the problem. It is in their interest to allow the situation to play itself out until it ultimately crashes. Tyler was extraordinarily astute. He understood that all great powers have a shelf life. They also have a process by which they are created, then thrive, then become corrupted, then decline, then fall into ruin. This process is as perennial as the grass.

The pundits will continue to rail with righteous indignation on television. The two political sports teams will continue to kick and gouge each other, but the outcome of the game is already cast in stone.

So, is this the end of the world as we know it? Yes and no. It is not the end of the world, just the end of the world as we know it. Whenever the leading power in the world falls, others are already in the wings, rising. And so it is today. Americans who are alive today have never known a situation in which their country was not the top dog in the world, and so it is hard to imagine a different world. For those who are not American and who do not reside in the US, it is easier to see a truer picture. With the collapse of the US (and Europe), there is still a very big world out there, waiting in the wings. Some second- and third-world countries are, admittedly, doing badly. However, others are getting by nicely. And still others are thriving.

Yes, there is a bright future ahead, but, sadly, not in America; at least not for many years. Those who were described in the first paragraph of this article as being more observant are already looking away from America into the future. For the first time since the eighteenth century, those who are pursuing the bright future are walking away from America, not toward it.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

When future historians go searching for the final nail in the US coffin, they may well settle on the date April 20, 2024.

On that day Congress passed legislation to fund two and a half wars, hand what’s left of our privacy over to the CIA and NSA, and give the US president the power to shut down whatever part of the Internet he disagrees with.

The nearly $100 billion grossly misnamed “National Security Supplemental” guarantees that Ukrainians will continue to die in that country’s unwinnable war with Russia, that Palestinian civilians will continue to be slaughtered in Gaza with US weapons, and that the neocons will continue to push us toward a war with China.

It was a total victory for the war party.

The huge spending bill is all about politics for Biden, yet so many Republicans simply went along with it. The last thing the people running Biden’s White House want to see as a close election approaches are ads blaming Biden for “losing Ukraine.”

The US and its allies have already sent over $300 billion to Ukraine and the country is still losing its war with Russia. Nobody believes another $60 billion will pull a victory from the jaws of defeat. But this additional money is meant to keep up appearances until November at the expense of Americans who are forced to pay for it and Ukrainians who are forced to die for it.

Speaker Johnson could not have passed these monstrosities without the full support of House Democrats, as the majority of Republicans voted against more money for Ukraine. So in the worst example of “bipartisanship,” Johnson reached across the aisle, stiffed the Republican majority that elected him Speaker, and pushed through a massive gift to the warfare/(corporate) welfare state.

After the House voted to send another $60 billion to notoriously corrupt Ukraine, Members waved Ukrainian flags on the House Floor and chanted “Ukraine, Ukraine.” While I find it distasteful and disgusting, in some way it seemed fitting. After all, they may as well chant the name of a foreign country because they certainly don’t care about this country!

Along with sending $100 billion that we don’t have to fund more overseas war, Speaker Johnson threw in another version of the Tik Tok ban, which gives Joe Biden and future presidents the power to shut down websites at will by simply declaring them to be “foreign adversary controlled.”

Not to be outdone, the US Senate on that same day passed the extension of Section 702 of the FISA Act, which not only allowed the government to continue spying on us without a warrant, but also contained new language massively expanding how they can spy on us.

Many conservative voters are asking what the point of Republican control of the House is if the agenda is determined by Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is even reported to have bragged to his colleagues about how easily Speaker Johnson gave Democrats everything they wanted and asked for nothing in return.

What is the silver lining in all this bad news? Most Republicans in the House voted against continuing the Ukraine war. That’s a good start. Our ideas are growing, not only across the country but even in the DC swamp. Take courage and don’t give up! Work for peace!

America last. America last. That’s all this is. America last, every single day. – Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene

The man who is most responsible for the $95 billion giveaway to Ukraine and Israel, is the same guy who pretends to oppose America’s “wasteful” foreign wars. Donald Trump. It was Trump who consulted with Speaker Mike Johnson about the contents of the Ukraine aid package, just as it was Trump who concocted the idea of issuing loans instead of dispersing the standard welfare handout. It was also Trump who said:

“I stand with the Speaker, (Mike Johnson)” after which he added that Johnson is doing “a very good job.”

A “good job”??

So, secretly collaborating with the Democrat leadership to push through a bill that “reauthorizes FISA to spy on the American people without a warrant, (bans Tik Tok) fully funds Joe Biden’s DOJ that has indicted President Trump 91 times, and giving Biden’s political gestapo a brand new FBI building bigger than the Pentagon,” while not providing a dime to protect the southern border from the swarms of people entering the country illegally, is doing a “good job”?

The question we should all be asking ourselves is why has Trump decided to participate in this scam? He keeps saying that if he was president, he’d end the war in Ukraine in a day. If he’s sincere about that, then why did he collaborate on a bill that will drag the war out for another year or two? This is from a Twitter post by political analyst Michael Tracey:

Mission Accomplished. It is done: Donald Trump and the House GOP just completed one of the most epic swindles in political history, with Trump personally effectuating the largest-ever dispersement of Ukraine funding through his emissary, “MAGA Mike Johnson” (as Trump lovingly calls him) The $61 billion passed this afternoon is likely enough to underwrite the brutal, pointless trench warfare for at least another year or two. This after the same old endless media screeching that Trump and MAGA Republicans were being brainwashed by Putin and would never fund Ukraine. That fundamental hoax continues — only this time Trump was in on it…. Michael Tracey, Twitter

And the response from Luca Cabrilo:

Michael you’re 100% spot on. Trump could have at any point killed this monstrous bill if he wanted to, but he didn’t. He even let MAGA Mike go on TV and say that he and Trump are “100% agreed” on the Ukraine funding Trump screwed his base on this one, no other way about it.

Michael Tracey again: He didn’t just “not kill it,” he personally facilitated its passage

Here’s more background from Tracey:

The bill, designed after consultations between Mike Johnson and Trump, mysteriously gives the President the ability to forgive the purported “loan” to Ukraine — immediately after the November election…

And if that’s not brazen enough for you, here’s the catch: The funds eligible for “loan forgiveness” are the direct budgetary infusions to Ukraine — meaning the money that pays for the salaries of Ukrainian government workers and so forth — NOT the military “aid,” which comprises the vast majority of the package. So, only $8 billion of the $61 billion allocated to Ukraine is even *eligible* for “loan forgiveness” under the terms of this gargantuan bill. And even that was a fake “loan” to begin with — it never had to be paid back at all! So there’s your final Trump/Johnson bamboozle, as the House GOP prepares to usher through the *largest ever* infusion of US tax dollars to Ukraine, by far, since the beginning of the war. All with Trump’s blessing, as Johnson has made abundantly clear. To underscore his close collaboration with Trump, Johnson has spent the past several days making the rounds on various conservative media, touting the inclusion of Trump’s “loan concept” in the bill. Michael Tracey

It’s all a big shell game and Trump is playing along with it to improve his political prospects. How else would you explain his performance in this dismal charade?

Trump obviously knows that his return to the White House will require significant compromise with the national security hawks and Zionists who run the government. So, we shouldn’t be too surprised that he’s trying to curry favor with them now. But for the people who thought Trump was a straightshooter; this has got to be a real eye-opener. They thought he could be trusted, but now it’s obvious that he’s just another Beltway phony trying to ingratiate himself with the Washington power-elite in order to shoehorn his sorry a** back into the Oval Office. Here’s more from Tracey:

Sorry to be a “Broken Record,” but the “Elephant in the Room” here is genuinely Donald J. Trump. ….Trump even warned Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene directly not to oust Johnson, during their joint press conference at Mar-a-Lago last Friday, April 12 — just before Johnson unveiled his war funding strategy, for which he proudly declares having secured Trump’s endorsement. The bill even contains Trump’s repeated demand to structure the Ukraine funding as a so-called “loan”! J ohnson proclaims that he and Trump are “One hundred percent united” on all of this (direct quote) …

Trump has used his vast political capital as three-time Republican Presidential Nominee to play his part assuring that the American political system mobilizes in perfect harmony to unleash $100 billion in endless-war funding. Michael Tracey

If Trump is willing to play such a duplicitous role in securing the funding for the MIC’s perpetual wars, then why in-heavens-name would any red-blooded conservative vote for him?

One of the few people who has acted honorably in this fiasco, is Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is clearly one of the few members of Congress that genuinely gives-a-damn about the American people. Greene delivered an epic rant on the floor of the House yesterday following the vote on the Ukrainian aid package. Naturally, her heartfelt presentation appeared nowhere in the sellout media, so I transcribed most of what she said below. It’s worth the time:

…. The United States taxpayer has already sent $113 billion to Ukraine, and much of that money is unaccounted for. This is an example of a sick business model the US government wants to continue….. The Congress votes for money for foreign wars that the American people do not support….. The American people do not support a business model based on blood and murder and war in foreign countries while the government does nothing to secure our border.

The American people are over $34 trillion in debt and the debt is rising by $40 billion every night while we all sleep. But nothing is done to secure our border or reduce our debt. Inflation continues to rise every day and Americans can hardly afford to pay their grocery bills, they can hardly afford to put gas in their cars, and they can hardly afford the rent. And, now, average mortgage payments are over $3000 when they were just $1700 three years ago. Young Americans don’t think they will ever be able to buy a home and yet today, this congress thinks the most important thing they should do is to send another $61 billion to the war in Ukraine that the American people –by 70%– do not support!

… But, today, the most important thing this body thinks we should do, is not reduce spending, or drive down inflation, or secure our own border that is invaded every single day by people from over 160 different countries… We have over 1.8 million ‘got-aways’ and we don’t know who these people are… and yet we have people in this very congress ‘talking tough’ saying, “We have to defeat Russia. Oh, we have to protect Ukraine” and yet , all of you are unwilling to protect the American citizens that pay your salary, pay to keep the lights on, and pay to keep the federal government running. And for what?

For nothing! Ukraine isn’t even a member of NATO But all you hear in Washington DC is “Oh, we have to keep spending America’s hard-earned tax dollars to continue to murder Ukrainians to wipe out a whole generation of young men so there are (thousands of ) widows, and fatherless orphans, and not enough men to work in their industries. Oh, but you really support Ukraine. (sarcasm) What kind of support is that? It’s repulsive!

Shame on the American government! Shame on the American government! If we want to support our military, then support our military. We should be building up our weapons and ammunition, not sending it over to foreign countries to kill foreign people.

And if this body was what it pretends to be, every single one of us would be demanding peace in Ukraine; peace for these people, so that no more of them have to die. But you never hear anybody demanding peace. No, no, no. Peace is the last thing Washington wants because it doesn’t fit the business model. This is a business model they say builds the American economy and protects American jobs. What a disgusting business model. We should have a business model that builds-up our American companies and American jobs to serve American interests, and our military and our government should care about protecting the national security of the United States of America and the Americans who pay their hard-earned tax dollars to fund all this.

America last. America last. That’s all this is. America last, every single day.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.