Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2169

Veteran Intelligence Professionals to Trump

As drums beat again for war — this time on Iran—-the VIPS’ warning is again being disregarded as it was before the Iraq debacle and this time VIPS fear the consequences will be all-caps CATASTROPHIC.

August 1, 2018

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Intelligence on Iran Fails the Smell Test

Mr. President:

As the George W. Bush administration revved up to attack Iraq 15 years ago, we could see no compelling reason for war.  We dec...

Charity Needs Markets

[Originally published May 2016]

Although it is sometimes imagined that a world based on gift-giving rather than market exchange would be a world without scarcity or want, we are still left with the problem of manufacturing and producing complex goods that require markets to allocate resources.

Moreover, if we remember that the act of gift-giving requires both the giver and the recipient to agree to the exchange, we quickly find that the situation is more complex than we initially thought.

Bot...

Sabotaged by His Own Lawyer

In the past week, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, now the chief lawyer and principal spokesman for President Donald Trump’s legal team, has offered arguments more harmful to Trump than helpful. In a series of combative, disjointed and logically challenged television rants, Giuliani has essentially argued that Trump did not engage in any conspiracy with the Russians for them to provide help to his campaign and that even if he did, it wasn’t criminal.

In making this argument, Giuliani h...

Long Time NSA Intelligence Official

Hearing about all of this Russian hacking, Trump, and politics, in general, these days seems to be like eating the same type of food every night, you literally get sick of it. This begs the question, should we even pay attention to it? Of course, we should, the political realm and the corporate stranglehold over it (and above that sit the financial elite) are taking advantage of us because WE are the ones that allow this entire charade to continue. It would be the same thing as not paying att...

The World’s Biggest Prison Camp

The United States has the highest incarceration rates in the world. The US not only has a far higher percentage of its population in prison than allegedly “authoritarian” governments, but also has a larger total number of citizens imprisoned than China, a country with four times the US population. The US is by far the largest prison camp in the world.

The conditions, such as solitary confinement, in which many US prisoners are kept are strictly illegal under international law, but that means...

Poverty Is No Mystery

Poverty is no mystery, and it’s easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairly simple. Here’s the road map: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen.

How about some numbers? A single person taking a minimu...

Did Lincoln Seek To Avoid War?

This essay is Chapter 13 in Mr. Taylor’s Union At All Costs: From Confederation to Consolidation(2016).

“I supported President Lincoln . I believed his war policy would be the only way to save the country, but I see my mistake. I visited Washington a few weeks ago, and I saw the corruption of the present administration—and so long as Abraham Lincoln  and his Cabinet are in power, so long will war continue. And for what? For the preservation of the Constitution  and the Union ? No, but for the sak...

Will Tribalism Trump Democracy

On July 19, the Knesset voted to change the nation’s Basic Law.

Israel was declared to be, now and forever, the nation-state and national home of the Jewish people. Hebrew is to be the state language.

Angry reactions, not only among Israeli Arabs and Jews, came swift.

Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism calls the law a “retreat from democracy” as it restricts the right of self-determination, once envisioned to include all within Israel’s borders, to the Jewish people. Inequali...

A Catastrophically Cooling World

According to ice core records, the last millennium 1000AD – 2000AD has been the coldest millennium of our current Holocene interglacial. This point is more fully illustrated with ice core records on a millennial basis back to the Eemian period here:

Our current, warm, congenial Holocene interglacial, although cooler than the Eemian interglacial 120,000 years ago, has been the enabler of mankind’s civilisation for the last 10,000 years, spanning from mankind’s earliest farming to the most rec...

The Anti-Brexit Politics of Fear

In the two years since I put my cross next to Leave, nothing has convinced me of the rightness of that vote more than the hysterical fearmongering coming from the Remain camp right now.

For this outburst of Brexit Derangement Syndrome, this attempt to beat the populace into EU-accepting submission by warning us that our children might starve and our loved ones with diabetes might die if we ‘crash out’ of the EU, confirms the contempt in which the political class holds the public. It confirms...