Some Levity

I don't whether to laugh or weep at this Ziegfeld production.



Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Presto! Like a Rabbit out of the Hat!!

By Jim Rickards

The U.S. government likes to ignore gold and not draw attention to it. Official visits to Fort Knox give gold some monetary credence that central banks would prefer it does not have.

Why an impromptu visit by Mnuchin and McConnell? Why now?

The answer may lie in the fact that the Treasury is running out of cash and could be broke by Sept. 29 if Congress does not increase the debt ceiling by then.

But the Treasury could get $355 billion in cash from thin air without increasing the debt simply by revaluing U.S. gold to a market price. (U.S. gold is currently officially valued at $42.22 per ounce on the Treasury’s books versus a market price of $1,285 per ounce.)

Once the Treasury revalues the gold, the Treasury can issue new “gold certificates” to the Fed and demand newly printed money in the Treasury’s account under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. Since this money comes from gold revaluation, it does not increase the national debt and no debt ceiling legislation is required.

This would be a way around the debt ceiling if Congress cannot increase it in a timely way. This weird gold trick was actually done by the Eisenhower administration in 1953.

Maybe Mnuchin and McConnell just wanted to make sure the gold was there before they revalue it and issue new certificates.

Whatever the reason, this much official attention to gold is just one more psychological lift to the price along with Fed ease, scarce supply and continued voracious buying by Russia and China.
Regards,

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Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ 

Gulf Coast Apocalypse

A twitter sampling of the reactions of the urban perpetually offended.

ht: The Burning Platform

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Today the Truth will get You FIRED...

...if it reveals the machinations of the US "deep state".

A months-long investigation which tracked and exposed a massive covert weapons shipment network to terror groups in Syria via diplomatic flights originating in the Caucuses and Eastern Europe under the watch of the CIA and other intelligence agencies has resulted in the interrogation and firing of the Bulgarian journalist who first broke the story. This comes as the original report is finally breaking into mainstream international coverage.
Investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a bombshell report for Trud Newspaper, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company was regularly transporting tons of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply anti-Assad fighters in Syria. Those weapons, Gaytandzhieva found, ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

 Read more

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

The Hoax of the Millenia

A new religion to which we must be forced to tithe:



Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

The Pressure Builds

By Robert Gore:

Atoms are life’s building blocks. Most everything worthwhile—family, community, trade, inquiry, innovation, production, progress—starts with individuals and builds. Most everything deleterious—repression, state-sponsored rapacity, tyranny, war—is imposed from the top by sociopaths masquerading as leaders. Bad as the supervolcano will be, it will blow this “top” to bits, giving the green shoots of decentralized freedom a chance to poke here and there through the ash. It’s about time.

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Coming for the Christian Faith

One has to wonder how CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) would react to finding itself on SPLC's hate list.

On Tuesday, D. James Kennedy Ministries (DJKM) filed a lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the charity navigation organization GuideStar, and Amazon for defamation, religious discrimination, and trafficking in falsehood. The SPLC listed DJKM as a "hate group," while GuideStar also categorized it in those terms, and Amazon kept the ministry off of its charity donation program, Amazon Smile.

"We embarked today on a journey to right a terrible wrong," Dr. Frank Wright, president and CEO at DJKM, said in a statement Tuesday. "Those who knowingly label Christian ministries as 'hate' groups, solely for subscribing to the historic Christian faith, are either woefully uninformed or willfully deceitful. In the case of the Southern Poverty Law Center, our lawsuit alleges the latter."

The SPLC has labeled DJKM an "anti-LGBT hate group" for its opposition to same-sex marriage and transgenderism. "These false and illegal characterizations have a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion and on religious free speech for all people of faith," Wright declared.

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Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Remove That Monument!

By Thomas DiLorenzo

Before the War to Prevent Southern Independence Ulysses S. Grant and James Longstreet were best friends during their days as classmates at West Point.  Students of the war know that they both became famous generals — Grant being the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, and Longstreet was Robert E. Lee’s right hand man, his “old war horse,” as General Lee called him. After the war the two men reestablished their friendship with President Grant appointing James Lonstreet to a job as some kind of railroad commissioner.

What few people know, however, is that Longsreet introduced his first cousin, Julia Dent, to Grant, and the two eventually married.  Before the war, Grant lived with his in-laws and was the overseer (“manager” according to the National Park Service Web site!) of the slaves on the family’s Missouri slave plantation.  As stated in this National Park Service site about the old plantation that was called White Haven, “the Dents, Grants, and an enslaved African-American workforce lived on the property.”  The slaves were not freed until they had to be after the Thirteenth Amendment became the law of the land in 1866.

How rich is it that Ulysses S. Grant’s slave plantation was called “White Haven?!”

So the man chosen by Lincoln to command the war “to end slavery” was a former slave plantation overseer.  Grant was not the first to be offered command of Lincoln’s army, however. The first man to be offered the job by Lincoln’s representative, General Winfield Scott, just before the war broke out, was U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Lee, the officer whose troops apprehended John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.  (Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, was a descendant of Martha Washington who inherited slaves who were freed by her husband in accordance with his father-in-law’s will).

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Fighting Back!!

By Dr Tom Woods

Since nobody in his right mind sympathizes with Nazis (all 137 of them), everyone is cheering at the example being made of various organizations that are losing various online services essential to their survival.

I am not suggesting that we must shed tears for these groups. Only that we be aware that there are people who have longed to shut down far more voices than just these obviously odious ones, and that we might want to keep a close eye as events continue to unfold.

For example, a bunch of right-wing websites, including a 50-year-old Catholic publication I myself wrote for in the old days (but eventually told me I was no longer welcome), recently received a sinister letter from ProPublica, a left-wing site. (Some places shun me for being too right-wing, others for not being right-wing enough; such is my interesting life.)
The letter ran:

I am a reporter at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in New York. I am contacting you to let you know that we are including your website in a list of sites that have been designated as hate or extremist by the American [sic] Defamation League or the Southern Poverty Law Center. We have identified all the tech platforms that are supporting websites on the ADL and SPLC lists.

We would like to ask you a few questions:
1) Do you disagree with the designation of your website as hate or extremist? Why?
2) We identified two tech companies on your website: PayPal, and AdPeeps. Can you confirm that you receive funds from your relationship with those tech companies? How would the loss of those funds affect your operations, and how would you be able to replace them?
3) Have you been shut down by other tech companies for being an alleged hate or extremist web site? Which companies?
4) Many people opposed to sites like yours are currently pressuring tech companies to cease their relationships with them – what is your view of this campaign? Why?
Our deadline is 5pm EST today.
Thank you, Lauren Kirchner

Well, OK, then!
I realize I will now be deluged with reminders that private companies may do business with anyone they wish — a principle all too few people consistently hold, I might add. But this is beside the point: even if we concede the legality of discontinuing vital services to dissident voices, I am still allowed to discuss it as an interesting and disturbing cultural phenomenon that all dissidents would do well to prepare for.
Because if you think the left is going to stop with demonizing only neo-Nazis, you haven’t been paying attention.

To the left’s ideologues, the definition of “Nazi” is compendiously broad.
In any case, for what it’s worth The Remnant responded this way:

Dear Ms. Kirchner: 
In reply to your email to The Remnant (see below), be advised as follows: 
1. The allegation that The Remnant, a fifty-year old Catholic newspaper, is “a hate group” according to the SPLC, a left-wing propaganda organization known for its reckless accusations against conservative groups, is as laughable as it is malicious. Indeed, the SPLC equates the teachings of the Catholic Church itself with “hate.” 
2. Here is The Remnant’s most recent response to this ridiculous accusation. The response was prompted by a local TV news story by a reporter who failed to mention that her supposedly corroborative source, a sociologist at a Catholic university, in fact told her that The Remnant is not a “hate group,” contrary to the SPLC’s libelous claim. The sociologist is quite dismayed by this evidently malicious omission.  
3. We hereby advise you that we expect you to preserve all records of communications of any kind, in electronic form or otherwise, between you, your organization, PayPal and AdPeeps. We will consider those records relevant to any interference with The Remnant’s longstanding relationship with those companies, and will view their destruction as spoliation of evidence. We include in this demand any records of telephone contacts, including notes of conversations with representatives of PayPal or AdPeeps.

Sincerely,
Christopher A. Ferrara
Pro bono legal counsel for The Remnant
Admitted NY, NJ and SC. 

.

I am not necessarily endorsing the legal strategy outlined by Ferrara, who unlike me is the expert here, but FYI I include a portion of his subsequent commentary:
This is a blatant attempt to intimidate PayPal and other Web services into ending their contractual relations with the targeted groups­—for no other reason than that they are falsely accused of “hate” or “extremism” by SPLC/ADL. Again, neither Kirchner nor her fellow “investigative journalists” conducted any independent investigation of the “hate group” designations, which they merely collated in spreadsheet form.

An update to the article admits that “In response to ProPublica’s inquiries, PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs said in a statement that the company ‘strives to conscientiously assess activity and review accounts reported to us.’” That is, PayPal states that, after multiple contacts from ProPublica, it is reviewing the websites of the groups ProPublica has “reported” based on a mere rote repackaging of SPLC/ADL’s already well-known defamatory falsehoods.

Should PayPal or other service provider terminate its contractual relations with any of the targeted groups (including The Remnant) based on ProPublica’s sham “investigative journalism,” there might well be a viable cause of action against ProPublica and its “reporters” for tortious interference with contractual relations. While formulations of this sort vary from state to state, the basic elements, as summarized by the Cornell Legal Information Institute, are: (1) that a valid contract existed, (2) that defendant had knowledge of the contract, (3) that defendant acted intentionally and improperly, and (4) that plaintiff was injured by the defendant’s actions.

I would suggest that every victim or potential victim of ProPublica’s witch-hunt, as well as similar operations conducted by other elements of the FNIC and the LTPD, consult legal counsel about possible claims for tortious interference with contractual relations.
  
What we are witnessing is the beginning of an effort to chill controversial speech, with the threat of withdrawal of essential online services hanging like a sword of Damocles over the respective heads of various right-wing organizations.

Given that the people behind this effort at intimidation are not known for their careful distinctions — i.e., Newt Gingrich = Donald Trump = Pat Buchanan = Ron Paul = Rand Paul = StormFront — there is good reason for concern among dissidents of all kinds. Protesting that you do not hold fascist views will scarcely satisfy the witch hunters — why, aren’t such protests precisely what we would expect from a wily fascist?

For example, Brandon Navom, a Ron Paul delegate from Massachusetts and the head of Software Engineers for Liberty, just lost his job after Antifa tweeted at his employer that this ordinary libertarian with no unusual views to speak of was a “Nazi.”

Meanwhile, certain libertarians believe that the urgent task at the moment is to assure the world that we ourselves are not fascists – as if there could be such a thing as a libertarian National Socialist.

When a great many young Ron Paul supporters switched to Bernie Sanders in 2016, I didn’t blame left-libertarians, or – more foolishly still – head up a petition drive reaffirming libertarian opposition to socialism (with the implication that non-signers must be crypto-socialists). That would have been pointless melodrama – as it is today with the “anti-fascism” pledge we were all supposed to sign.

(I dealt with that pledge on Facebook, and at greater length in this issue of my email newsletter.)

The chilling effect of baseless left-wing accusations of “fascism” and “Nazi” will certainly have the consequence of suppressing discussion of a wide variety of important and/or controversial topics, and rendering many people, particularly libertarians, into harmless debating-society nerds, arguing over whether raising the minimum wage is racist or if the Export-Import Bank should exist. (Although, judging from numerous libertarians I encounter online, I doubt we’d notice the difference.)

It is going to be necessary to build parallel institutions — payment systems, Internet services of various types, media outlets, and more — that lay outside the reach of those who would punish dissident voices.
One of those has to be homeschooling.

I devoted two years of my life to creating hundreds of video and audio files on history, economics, and government, so that school-age children might discover that there is in fact more than one way of understanding the world.

We use it in the Woods household, and I strongly recommend it to you — it’s self-taught and therefore easy on parents, and it’s an education you and I would have killed for:

http://www.RonPaulHomeschool.com

We have to start somewhere. Not having our kids brainwashed seems as good a place as any.

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

The Neo Bolsheviks

By Thomas DiLorenzo

They’ve attacked and beat up elderly people attempting to attend Trump-for-President rallies; attacked people with solid iron bicycle locks, bike racks, clubs, rocks, mace, baseball bats, and bottles filled with urine and feces.  They threw cement blocks through storefront windows in D.C. on inauguration day, claiming it to be a protest against capitalism.  They’ve set police cars, civilian cars, and buildings on fire to interrupt campus speeches by conservatives.  They hospitalized a female university professor for the “crime” of inviting conservative political scientist Charles Murray to speak at Middlebury College.

They organize a riot whenever a conservative or libertarian is invited (by students, never by faculty) to speak at a university.  They gather by the hundreds to scream F-bombs at those with whom they suspect they disagree on issues related to politics and government. They’ve firebombed Republican Party offices; shut down college campuses; thrown eggs at and spit on Trump supporters; fired gunshots at and punctured tires of cars with Trump bumper stickers.  One of them shot a congressman at a baseball practice in D.C.  Another shot several people at the Family Research Council headquarters in D.C. after being informed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the preeminent purveyor of politically-inspired hate, that the pro-family organization, like so many other conservative and libertarian organizations, was supposedly a “hate group.”  They often cover their faces with masks, wear helmets, and show up at public events armed with clubs, baseball bats, and guns.

They believe that the ends justify the means, the opposite of traditional morality, because they are self-proclaimed socialists and communists.  They carry signs identifying themselves with Socialist International, Democratic Socialists of America, and other far-left communistic groups.  When they vandalized the 225-year-old memorial to Christopher Columbus in Baltimore they videotaped the scene with a message condemning Columbus for bringing “European capitalism” to America, the greatest of all crimes.

They are clamoring for the demolition of the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, and Mount Rushmore.  Like the Taliban that has destroyed hundreds of religious monuments, they seek to destroy all monuments to Western civilization, which they have been taught is the root of all worldly evil.  They are defended by their ideological brethren at CNN, which has declared in fine Orwellian fashion that these violent criminals “seek peace through violence”.

Many of them are extreme bigots and ignoramuses, loudly proclaiming that all white people, regardless of their character and behavior, are “Nazis,” “white supremacists,” or worse.  They call for nothing less than genocide of “white European civilization.”  For the past several decades, they have claimed that heir guiding philosophy is the philosophy of “inclusion.”  Of course, by “inclusion” these totalitarian-minded professional rioters mean using force and violence to impose their will on all of society.  The vast majority of them, according to television and internet images, appear to be young twentysomethings or “millennials.”

They are a perfect example of what Nobel prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek called “the worst elements of any society” in the chapter of his classic book, The Road to Serfdom, entitled “Why the Worst Get on Top.”   The chapter is a discussion of how societies that become more totalitarian are inevitably led by the most immoral among them, followed by a large mob of “the worst elements of society.”

Hayek’s Recipe for Totalitarian Mobs

The main objective of all socialists is to use the coercive powers of the state to force some kind of societal “plan” or plans on the entire society, replacing all the individual plans that people normally make for their own lives.  It is about totalitarian control.  The problem, wrote Hayek, is how to organize a mob large enough to be able to enforce the views of the behind-the-scenes architects of the totalitarian scheme.  An example would be leftist billionaire George Soros, who reportedly finances much of the above-mentioned criminal activity.  The Democratic National Committee was also “outed” by “Project Veritas” investigative reporters as a financing and organizing vehicle for thuggish violence against Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign.

One “principle” of mob selection, said Hayek, is that the largest mobs will be comprised of “the least original and independent [minded].”  The “lowest common denominator” in terms of morals and intelligence, in other words.

A second “negative principle of selection” is “the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently” (p. 160).  It is these who will “swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.”  This of course sounds very similar to the thousands of young “protesters” who, whenever they are interviewed on the spot by a reporter, seem unintelligible when asked about what, exactly, they are protesting.  They seem only capable of shouting a few slogans like “Nazis!”  “White supremacists!!”

Third, the “skillful demagogue” will understand that “it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the enemy of those better off – than on any positive task.”  If the leftist Bolshevik “protesters” in America today are about anything, it is about a psychotic hatred of just about everything to do with American (and Western) civilization.  They have been taught to be filled with hatred of their own society as “racist, sexist, and homophobic” since grade school.

When Hayek was writing The Road to Serfdom it was “the Jew” who “had come to be regarded as the representative of capitalism” and was therefore the object of the intense hatred of socialist totalitarians (Nazis) in Europe (p. 161).  In today’s America it is the “one percenters,” capitalism in general, and white heterosexual males, who are said to “oppress” just about everyone else.

Hayek’s characteristics of a totalitarian mob seem to fit today’s American Bolshevik wannabes like a glove.  In a recent survey of self-described socialists, 95 percent of whom were under the age of thirty, 48% were unemployed; 61% still lived with their parents; 69% were “uneducated”; only 14% supported free speech; while more than three times that number, 46%, supported riots as a means of advancing their cause.

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Same Old...Same Old

By Michael Rozeff

Syria is on the verge of defeating ISIS. The final big battle is about to occur at Deir Ezzor. The Syrian forces have been greatly aided by Russian air forces. Russia has a large interest in defeating ISIS because it has experienced so many terrorist attacks on its soil.

Why is Russia succeeding in Syria after only 2 years with limited forces while the U.S. has failed in Afghanistan after 16 years and trillions of dollars?

Syria had its own conventional armed forces to fight ISIS on the ground. They have fought loyally for the government. The population was against ISIS. Syria invited Russia to help. They worked together. They used the right military strategies to defeat ISIS.

The U.S. quickly defeated the Taliban government of Afghanistan in 2001. However, the Taliban under Mullah Omar began an insurgency. The new government of Afghanistan didn’t have armed forces that could defeat the insurgency. The insurgency found support from important elements within Afghanistan and in Pakistan. The corrupt government didn’t command the loyalty of all Afghans. The U.S. forces in Afghanistan didn’t have a good Afghan armed force to work with. The U.S. counter-insurgency strategy (COIN) failed.

The U.S. applications of COIN are proven failures. This has been known since Vietnam. If a country doesn’t already have a strong government and strong armed forces, COIN fails against insurgencies. The U.S. cannot simultaneously build up a nation-state and fight an insurgency, even if it commits 500,000 ground forces and drops more bombs than in World War II. When we have experienced soldiers telling us “This needs to be a 50- to 100-year campaign. It requires persistence and presence.

Colombia should be a model, not Iraq”, we know that COIN is a loser.
Bush and Obama made the same strategic mistakes again and again that Johnson and Nixon made in Southeast Asia. Trump is now repeating these mistakes. To name a few:

1. They think that the U.S. has interests in these distant lands important enough to require American armed forces and warfare. This is false.
2. They think that they can secure these interests by military means. This is false.
3. They think that the potential benefits are worth the costs. They aren’t.
4. They listen to over-optimistic top brass military and political advisors. They shouldn’t.
5. They listen to war hawks in Congress and intelligence agencies. They shouldn’t.
6. They fail to gather independent information. They fail to listen to lower-level military figures who have experiences with failed COIN strategies. They should.
7. They personally don’t want to preside over defeat or be blamed for defeat. This is an institutional defect built into any system of power that attracts ambitious men and women who want fame.
8. They personally do not bear, experience or even feel the increased misery of both their own and foreign peoples brought about by their decisions to make war. This is a human characteristic shared by all human beings, but it becomes a huge negative when its consequences are amplified by placing huge power into the hands of a very few.

The American people attempted to install a president who would exit Afghanistan. They failed. The system has thwarted them. Trump, a man who explicitly and repeatedly spoke up for withdrawal, has changed his mind. Presidents do this all the time. They often get away with it and get re-elected. There is a deep and continuing evil in a system of government in which the sound instincts of both a people and their president are perverted.

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

By Porter

Only 27% of Americans those living in America believe confederate statues should be removed. Well that’s nice; they’ll be gone by October. The people only get a vote in choosing who will choose; they have nothing to say in the choice itself. And our choices of who will choose have not reflected particularly well on our own interests.

As a result we have a very unpleasant road to travel, with no traditional buses in which to ride. The long march through the institutions was a successful flanking maneuver around a somnolent population. A population who is now awaking to a duplicitous media, a malicious tech oligarchy, an academia that produces antifa drones off an assembly line, and political representation that is desperate to get on the other side.

If you’d like one piece of advice, it would be to leave the churches that have left you, support the few businesses that have not, and find presentable candidates to primary practically every republican. By next November, I imagine most incumbents will be signaling their support for the Zebra murders.

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Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

What's Old is New Again

By Charles Burris

As Sean Hannity points out, first it was Russia hacked the election and Trump obstructed justice so he should be impeached. Then recently Trump was a blood-thirsty warmonger calling for the destruction of North Korea so he should be impeached. Now it’s Trump is a pro-Nazi, pro-Klan racist who incites violence so he should be impeached.

It appears more and more that Charlottesville was a staged event.
Today’s left-wing fascists are taking a page from history with their strategy of provocation.

In the late 1920s, under the direction of Gauleiter or regional party leader Joseph Goebbels, violent street confrontation and warfare in Berlin between the left-wing National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and the left-wing Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was used to create both chaotic instability within the faltering Wiemar Republic, as well as building support for the Nazis cadres.

For the Nazi Party, the brownshirts — who included the unemployed, the underemployed, apprentices and high-school students — were “political soldiers.” In Goebbel’s view, their task was the “conquest of the street.” In the melting pot of Berlin, these primarily young men were supposed to reconcile and embody two previously hostile worldviews: nationalism, which Goebbels believed had to be “reshaped in a revolutionary way,” and a “true socialism” free of Marxism.

Even the corpse of Heather Heyer is being tragically manipulated and egregiously transformed into a 2017 version of Horst Wessel.
As Wikipedia notes:

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Lacking a majority in the Reichstag, Hitler formed a coalition with the Nationalists (German National People’s Party (German: Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP)). Not long afterwards, he called elections for 5 March. Six days before the election, on 27 February, the Reichstag fire damaged the house of Parliament in Berlin. Claiming that the fire was the first step in a Communist revolution, the Nazis used the fire as a pretext to get the President, Hindenburg, to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, officially the Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Presidential Decree for the Protection of People and State).
Under the decree, issued by Hindenburg on the basis of Article 48 of the Wiemar Republic Constitution, the government was given authority to curtail constitutional rights including habeas corpus, free expression of opinion, freedom of the press, rights of assembly, and the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Constitutional restrictions on searches and confiscation of property were likewise suspended.
The Reichstag Fire Decree was one of the first steps the Nazis took toward the establishment of a one-party dictatorship in Germany. With several key government posts in the hands of Nazis and with the constitutional protections on civil liberties suspended by the decree, the Nazis were able to use police power to suppress, intimidate and arrest their opposition, in particular the Communists. Hitler’s subversion of the Constitution under Article 48 thus had the mark of legality.

The organizer of the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville was a Democrat and an Obama supporter. He was also part of the Occupy Wall street movement and a strong supporter of gun control. His name is Jason Kessler. Kessler suddenly switched from being an Obama supporter to a Trump supporter after Trump won.
How can someone who supported and worked for George Soros funded, Black Lives Matter enthusiast Barack Obama suddenly become a white supremacist and create a white supremacist rally to engage in violent street warfare confrontation with Black Lives Matter and Antifa? Is Jason Kessler also a George Soros paid agent provocateur? The mayor of Charlottesville ordered the police to stand down so violence could erupt. The entire Charlottesville event was a staged event, a classic strategy of provocation operation which is going to be used as psywar pushing for national imposition of martial law and the deep state coup against Trump and the remnants of the Republic.

Posted By ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Off With Their Heads!!

By Michael Rozeff

The cry will go out to destroy Mt. Rushmore, because all 4 presidents depicted there were racists — were. Dogmatic cultural cleansing is gaining popularity. But for these men, those were the times. Those were the currents of thought that were prevalent. It’s demanding too much after the fact to create a sanitized history. Removing memorials that elicit all sorts of thoughts and feelings, for and against, disrespects the experiences of the past that belong to everyone in the country in memory. This disrespects the people of the past who erected these memorials. Wrong or right, they lived according to their lights and darknesses. The destroyers act as if they have found and know the truth for all time and as if they know how to make it explicit to the eye and mind, but do they know that truth and do they know how to memorialize it? Do they have a right to destroy that which annoys them?

In our time, now to create a present that’s sanitized according to particular currents of thought that are now held by particular groups is to accord respect to these thoughts and groups. Are these deserved? Does the proclamation of one’s purity and virtue on slavery justify the power of certain self-selected groups to destroy the memorials erected by past Americans?

If libertarians united and demanded similar kinds of purification rites against all those in America’s past who have been anti-libertarians, would not their case be even broader than the case being made by memorial-bashers today? What a massive excision would be involved in removing the works of our anti-libertarian forefathers. However, the case for doing so is as weak as the case for destroying Mt. Rushmore.

The past in memory belongs to all of us as it happened. The past in its public physical forms belongs to those in the past who created these forms. They left them as an inheritance to be preserved. They’d erode over time perhaps or be taken or removed or relocated, but they were not meant to be destroyed because of the aggression of past human beings. We were not bequeathed them to be destroyed because they annoy some of us or because of the sins of the fathers or because we wish to erect new monuments to our supposed purity and virtues or because of political motives disguised as virtuous ones.

The Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, writes “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the CUNY hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism.” This is a cheap shot that wounds the hall’s purpose and history, which is “to honor prominent Americans who have had a significant impact on this nation’s history.” The state is a trustee or a custodian of this property, and that means that it should be fulfilling a duty to the creators to maintain their works. It should not be culturally cleansing the art works because anti-racism has recently become a popular rallying point for political elements that have a political agenda.

If all property were private, this matter would be a libertarian no-brainer. In our world, much property is officiated over by governments. In such cases, we can ask what treatment would be appropriate if they were private. The governments, often cities, hold them in a variety of ways, because the land was sometimes donated and the statues were paid for and made in a variety of ways. We have to ask to whom the statues belong in order to get some idea of the government’s just role in protecting their heritage. They basically are held in trust for the people who built them and paid for them.

We are surely not going to find that they belong to people who are upset because the statues are of people who were slaveholders or racists. One does not gain ownership because one is unhappy about something that belongs to others or about something one has no real claim to. Tearing down statues or pressuring governments to remove them is going to be in many cases a rights violation, a disrespecting of the rights of their dead and buried owners who left them as an inheritance to be kept up by various governments typically.

If a private society were to collect these statues, which may be available at bargain prices, they could perhaps be arranged to make for a profitable tourist attraction.

posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

A Brave New USA

By Porter

Owing to a formidable native facility for pessimism, I am infrequently surprised. Though three elements of the last few days did almost tease my brow to furrow.

The first was learning of the suddenly impotent nature of court orders. The Charlottesville right–as you know–came armed with one of these sacred writs–a thing we previously knew to enjoy the power to dictate national policy on every topic. Yet apparently court orders are sufficient only to compel modest functionaries like congress and the president of the United States, while having no power whatsoever over small town leftist mayors. Thus the injunction to allow the Lee Park assembly was summarily ignored, and the court was invited to sit on its thumb if they didn’t like it. I hope someone is noting that for precedent.

The second of these were the frantic and unanimous denunciations of the Charlottesville right by every Republican down to the Humboldt County Clerk. I understand these people are made to attack right like Swiss watches are made to tick, though the sheer Pavlovian reflexiveness and purple pageantry of their language was…well…typical, I suppose.

Though it should be mentioned, this wasn’t just the customary act of conservatives running cover for a left that vividly despises them. There was a cunning calculation in those lugubrious displays. The purpose of which was to scuttle their political competition so that the National Review transvestites could consolidate influence on the right and get conservatives back to losing graciously.

You’ll note that in comparison the left never attacks its radicals. It simply doesn’t acknowledge them at all, and suffers hearing aid failures whenever anyone asks. Thus those things with black masks and baseball bats flourish in the tacit approval of benign indifference. This is how you win generation after generation, by the way. Focusing attacks on your enemies rather than one’s own flanks has been proven since the campaigns of Clausewitz to be a successful tactic. Though certainly not one conservatives will lower themselves to learn.

The final item that has given me about a three volt shock has been the utter and absolute pass given to the left’s explicit communists. Now obviously arriving at such spectacles brandishing a swastika is breathtakingly stupid. Though it should be only slightly more stupid than waving a hammer and sickle. Yet there they are at every fetid left-wing riot without a peep of media reflection or demands of denunciation. I certainly don’t expect a democrat to object to symbols of murderous Bolshevism, though is it beyond the range of even rock-ribbed republicans to mention the fact between gasps about “white supremacy?”

That reminds me of the need to clarify media terms. A supremacist is one who wants a safe and harmonious home absent foreign squatters screaming about his moral infirmities into perpetuity. And CNN deploys other shorthand as well. For instance, teen means a black man of any age, as counterprotestor means a communist of any race. And fascists are whoever counterprotestors attack. It’s really no more complicated than that.

Read the entire Article

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By Thomas DiLorenzo

Among the many crusades of America’s Social Justice Bolsheviks over the past several years has been one supposedly against bullying.  Billions of tax dollars have been spent to create a whole new anti-bullying bureaucracy.  At the same time, America’s Social Justice Bolsheviks are the world’s biggest bullies!  Let a well-known conservative or libertarian speaker show up at one of their universities and he will be shouted down, screamed at with F-bombs, shoved around, libeled as a racist/sexist/homophobe, terrorized with cars and buildings set on fire as in Berkeley, or just plain dis-invited.  A conservative student was recently assaulted by a mob of black-clad, hooded Bolshevik goons at Ithaca College for merely wearing a Young America’s Foundation ball cap.  Conservative and libertarian college students mostly remain quiet for fear of being bullied by social justice Bolsheviks among the student body and the university administration.  Whenever they do speak up in an entirely civilized and scholarly way, they risk being accused of “bullying” with their “insensitive” remarks and threatened with university sanctions.  Safe rooms are set up in dozens of universities to allow the social justice Bolsheviks to hide their empty heads in the sand should a diverse viewpoint ever be uttered on their campuses.


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Happy Anniversary, SPLC Hate Factory!

By Christopher Manion

Five years ago today domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the HQ of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. He planned to kill all fifteen FRC employees, he said, “because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified them as a “hate group” due to their traditional marriage views.”
Corkins also intended to stuff Chik-Fil-a sandwiches into the mouths of his dead victims. His attack was thwarted when he was tackled by security guard Leo Johnson – after Corkins had shot him!
“While Corkins was responsible for the shooting, he had been given a license to perpetrate this act of violence by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center which has systematically and recklessly labeled every organization with which they disagree as a ‘hate group,'” said FRC President Tony Perkins.
Sure enough, the SPLC also inspired the first terrorist attack in the United States under President Trump, when terrorist James T. Hodgkinson, 66, opened fire on Republican members of Congress on an Alexandria, Virginia baseball field. Like Corkins, Hodgkinson was also a fan of the abundantly-funded “poverty center” that has some $250 million in the bank.
Apparently, the SPCL haters aren’t spending that dough to end poverty: they’re using it to spread hate.
[note: FRC officials gratefully note that their historic escape from a mass murderer occurred on the Feast of the Assumption, a major Marian feast in the Catholic Church].

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Two Anniversaries

By Charles Goyette
This is August 15. Perhaps you know the historical importance of this very date more than a generation ago.
Well, it marks the beginning of Woodstock, “three days of peace, love, and music,” in 1969. The music festival drew 400,000 people – and many more who would later claim to have been there!
But it is also a red letter day in our country’s economic history. On August 15, 1971 events were set in motion that are driving to an unhappy finish.
It was on this date 46 year ago that President Nixon severed the last remaining link of the U.S. dollar to gold, the preferred money of the ages. Nixon introduced a number of other destructive measures at the same time, including his wage and price control program, a harebrained scheme that played such an important role in ushering in the stagflation – economic stagnation accompanied by double-digit inflation – of the 1970s.
Since the dollar is no longer redeemable in anything and anchored to nothing, there is no discipline on the extent of dollar creation by the politicians and the monetary authorities.
And create money, they have. By the governments own calculations, figures that woefully understate the real loss of the dollar’s purchasing power, it would take $6.00 today to buy what $1.00 would purchase when Nixon closed the gold window.
For the last thirty-five years the monetary authorities have been using the privilege of a currency freed from the restraint of gold to buy down interest rates and transfer wealth from Main Street to Wall Street. But from its beginnings the Fed has been in the business of funding wars that the American people would never have willingly taxed themselves to pay for.
The monetary madness reached a frenzy of ferocity with Ben Bernanke and his madcap “Quantitative Easing.”
Except for the Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sin, I know of no serious world view in which a monumental malfeasance like the creation of trillions of dollars out of nothing can have been allowed to proceed without eventually producing the most grave consequences.
Off the stage and mostly unobserved is the quickening of monetary events that were set in motion 46 years ago today.

posted by  ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Perhaps...Perhaps Not

By Michael S. Rozeff

“North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, according to a confidential July assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency…”

I do not believe this. Why believe a one-sentence conclusion that’s leaked to the Washington Post? The Post is a CIA vehicle. Why believe some unknown intelligence source with no other information to back it up? Why believe this when such leaks are used to manipulate public opinion at critical junctures? If such important information is for real, why would it be made public via a leak? Why not come out in the open? Why not inform members of Congress and have them release it? Come out of the shadows and speak like a man. I refuse to credit people who hide in the dark, shooting forth their documents and expecting us to believe them and dance to their tune. If members of government cannot make a supportable case in public, why should I listen, much less believe? Government is supposed to be transparent.

The detailed information that we have from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists does not allow us to conclude that N. Korea has an ICBM and an atomic warhead atop it that can hit the lower 48. That is further reason for thinking that N. Korea does not have an operational miniaturized atomic bomb deliverable by an ICBM to this country.

In a few years, N. Korea might attain the capability. We’d probably see some tests that showed they had it for sure.

I will believe that they have this capability now if the U.S. has penetrated their computer systems and/or has some spies on the ground or hard information that this is the case. But the available news is that the U.S. does not now have such spies. On May 8, 2017 it was reported that a spy unit was being formed for exactly that task. The U.S. has used aerial surveillance as a rule.

Failing direct knowledge of what N. Korea has accomplished, and knowing of the poor record of our intelligence agencies in other important instances such as the Russian economy, and knowing of their political biases, and knowing of their incentive to err on the side of inflating risks, I am staying with my belief that at this time N. Korea couldn’t come close to Seattle with an atomic device.

Regardless of N. Korean weaponry, safety of Americans and prevention of atomic wars are very important objectives. To attain them, the U.S. needs to negotiate and be willing to end its security pact with S. Korea. This is not appeasement, but it does signal the beginning of the end of the U.S. empire. That’s why it will be strongly resisted by the national security state. We will be told that appeasement is present and that it makes us less safe. This is absolutely not the case. Getting out of trouble spots with which the involvement makes us an atomic target makes us safer.

What should therefore be crystal clear is that the desire of the national security state to maintain and extend the U.S. empire directly conflicts with the twin aims of the safety of Americans and no atomic wars.

posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

They're Serious

In Germany and several other countries, public utterance or display of the Nazi salute is a crime.  Less than a week ago, two Chinese tourists were arrested for allegedly making a Nazi salute while they took photographs of themselves outside the Reichstag in Berlin.  The arrests made international news.

The "criminals" were ordered to post €500 bail. Final disposition of this very serious breach of law was not available as of this posting.

Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ

Surviving the Political Establishment

Patrick Mason:

Today I read through an article on Lewrockwell.com regarding increased seismic activity noted at Yellowstone and its potentially dire foreboding of what could be coming.  This got me thinking about something which continually surfaces in my mind about the legitimately unhinged actions of a handful of scheming, bought-and-paid-for politicians who are engaging in attempts to threaten nuclear-tipped Russia, N Korea, and China to the point they will be pushed into a corner with no other choice but to fight their way out…,which means nuclear war and unleashing the feared apocalypse all nuclear nations heretofore strove to steer clear of.
Those of us raised during the Cold War (1949-1991) realized during the collapse of the Soviet Union the kind of bullet we all had dodged.  Our generation should be THE keenest and sensitive to the madness which has gripped both our leadership and the general population by efforts to reignite what we all thought would be a thing of the past.  Alarmingly, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
The enormity of recklessness and arrogance of the US Government is almost nightmarish, and the complicity of the media and both sides of the political aisle is simply disgusting.  They are literally dreaming up baseless assertions against Russia, China, and N Korea insisting that we are either being “attacked,” or under “threat” of being attacked, and setting up three of the most deadly nuclear nations on earth (who have done us no harm, by the way) and DARING them to fire.

What is the most sickening tenet of all this reckless irresponsibility is this:
We cannot stop a catastrophic Yellowstone eruption, nor can we stop a life-killing asteroid.  Science has shown both events have already occurred in our past (several times) and WILL occur again.  These events also can occur with no real warning.  We are powerless to stop them.
However, we have the power to stop practically all destructive man-made events from happening…, including nuclear war which would have the same perilous effects a super-volcano or asteroid would have.  Surely, these leaders know this.  They must.  How could they not?  Yet, they press on in their aggression.
What, other than collective, bi-partisan madness, is responsible for such breathtaking indifference to such glaring stupidity?
I find myself wishing/hoping they’re bluffing, and that they’ll call off the dogs once it becomes apparent the nations in the crosshairs cock their revolvers and prepare to pull the trigger.  But, my instincts tell me THIS gang means business.
I never thought in my entire life that I would fear the actions of “my” government more than the life-snuffing effects of a super-eruption or a 5 km asteroid.
Robert Oppenheimer, designer of the US atomic bomb who had grave reservations later in life for doing so, visited Truman to express his revulsion of a second bomb dropped on Japan as being unnecessary and calling for a ban on any further nuclear weapons manufacturing.  For his efforts, Oppenheimer was shown the door by Truman who angrily exclaimed “I don’t want to ever see that SOB in this office again!”  Truman’s belligerent insouciance to ‘Peace’ appears to have manifested itself into every subsequent presidency since.
Surviving a super-eruption or asteroid impact is possible depending on factors controlling the severity of the event.  However, evidence from such events in the past have shown most to be life killers.  The same can be said of nuclear events.  The evidence we have from the Japanese bombings is horrific, and we now have countless times more weapons which are thousands of times more deadly and destructive.  Who in his or her right mind would ever – in their most fevered dream – actually believe any war could be won, much less any life could survive the nuclear onslaught which WILL occur if Washington has its way?
But, yes…, these folks appear to be that crazy.
If not these irresponsible politicians, the American public should familiarize themselves with the passage Vishnu proclaimed in the (Hindu) Bhagavad Gita which Oppenheimer recalled as he witnessed his invention going off for the first time:
“I have become death; the destroyer of worlds.”

Searching for Dragons to Slay

By Michael Rozeff

America as a people has no enemies, none: not North Korea, not Iran, not Russia and not China.

Our government says these are enemies, but they are not. Their forces are not bent on attacking us. They are not preparing to attack us, anymore than Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen were preparing to attack us. None of these countries began a war against us; but in one way or another the government claimed to see enemies and inserted our country into new battles and wars in these places. We must stop supporting the government when it invokes “national security” in situations where national security is not anywhere near being at stake. We should stop supporting our government when it expansively claims that it has “interests” all over the world.

Americans have been conned by warmongers. We continue to be conned. The warmongers who go out of their way to target countries like these and others as enemies use a cunning scheme. They claim that their prey is ready and willing to grow into an enemy. To the warmongers, a potential enemy is not “potential” anything: it’s an enemy, period. Stop them now, we are told. Take preventive steps now, we are told, which means, treat them as if they were an enemy. This makes us into their enemy:

“The United States is preparing for all options to counter the growing threat from North Korea, including launching a ‘preventive war,’ national security adviser H.R. McMaster said in an interview with MSNBC that aired Saturday.”

Hearing this, North Korea will surely regard the U.S. as its enemy, even if we have no basis for thinking of it as our enemy.

By forming alliances with “friends”, the U.S. government goes out of its way to expose us to countries that it can then label as enemies. The enemies of our “friends” and allies become our enemies. Those who favor a large U.S. military like this. They want us always to be on a war footing. That brings them profits, positions, power, promotions, glory and fame.

With reference to countries and states, America has no enemies. There are other countries with substantial military forces and nuclear weapons, but they are not threatening us. They require attention, some vigilance, some caution, but not hostility or threats of our own. We can certainly keep our sword sheathed while extending a hand in friendship.

We need to be careful how we think about terror movements. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are not states. They are terrorist movements that aspire to become states. Are they enemies? No, they are not. They are criminals and then some. It’s a mistake to grant them the status of “enemy”, as if they were a state. This allows warmongers to use them as a rationale for huge expenditures on the military and intelligence operations. They are more like larger scale criminal enterprises or syndicates that gain recruits by ideology. They are more like a Mafia, a mob, a network. Al-Qaeda means “the base”. They are more than an isolated criminal and less than an enemy state.

Al-Qaeda and ISIS are or have been supported in part by states that the U.S. regards as allies, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. Even the U.S. has supplied them with arms and equipment, albeit indirectly. In Syria, the Russians, Assad’s forces and elements of Iranian forces are dealing deadly blows to ISIS day after day after day and paying a price in fighters killed in action and wounded. They are defeating the terrorists.

If ISIS were [our] enemy …the U.S…. would be applauding Putin and Assad for winning the day against ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Syria. Instead, the Congress of the U.S. almost unanimously has just passed a sanctions bill against Iran and Russia that specifically condemns them for their activities in Syria when they’ve been invited in by the Syrian government. (See, for example, Sec. 103(6)(d), Sec. 211(2), and Sec. 234.) This kind of outrageous sanctions bill compels Russia and Iran to view the U.S. as more hostile and more of an enemy. This in turn is what warmongers want, because then it becomes easier for them to claim that Iran and Russia are enemies.

The warmongers do everything in their power to create enemies of Americans where they previously did not exist. This is an absolutely corrupt, unlawful and dishonest aim, one that’s taken over both major political parties.