Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 2303

Poland’s on My Mind

A controversy surrounds the new Polish law just signed by Polish President Andrzej Duda that criminalizes Holocaust denial and Holocaust trivialization but also extends the prohibition to anyone who ascribes Nazi atrocities to the “Polish government or Polish nation.” Although I’m passionately opposed to all such efforts to muzzle open discussion (and have paid a heavy price for this stand professionally), I certainly don’t find the Polish law any worse than the repeated attempts to muzzle op...

A Million Dollars a Minute

Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back.

Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three yea...

If Yellowstone Erupts

A process known as deformation, where subsurface rocks subtly change shapes, is occurring beneath the surface of Yellowstone which alerts experts.

Researchers state deformation occurs when there is a change in the amount of pressure in the magma chamber and experts are keeping an eye on the development.

Seismologists from UNAVCO, a nonprofit university-governed consortium, are using “Global Positioning System, borehole tiltmeters, and borehole strainmeters” to measure minute changes in deform...

Are You Attractive?

There’s no rulebook for what people find appealing in a partner. Everyone has their own taste, but over the years, scientific studies have suggested certain traits are more desirable than others. And it’s not just the types of traits we’d expect—fit bodies and a perfect smile aren’t the only things people find attractive in their partners. Here are eight traits people find attractive, according to science.

1. A SENSE OF HUMOR

According to one study, women are more attracted to partners with a...

Endangered Gestures

Disappearing along with hierarchies, order and politeness

It used to be ubiquitous, but today it’s only a curiosity in the high nobility or upper class circles, and in the Vatican. Its disappearance has as much to do with the deterioration of hierarchies and order, as with the loss of an elaborate politeness prepared to do more than the necessary. The demystification of the female sex in the past fifty years, promoted in particular by the women themselves, also manifests itself in the absence...

Russian Banks

Russian financial institutions and firms are ready to work without SWIFT’s interbank cash transfer services, according to Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich.

“Certainly, it is unpleasant, as it will prove a stumbling block for companies and banks, and will slow down work. It will be inevitable to deploy some aged technologies for information transfer and calculations. However, the companies are technically and psychologically ready for the shutdown as this threat was repeatedly voiced,” ...

The Antidote for Chaos in Your Life

Jordan Peterson may be the only clinical psychologist who believes that psychology is subordinate to philosophy and the one thing that psychology and philosophy both genuflect before is story. Story, or myth, predates religion and is, in fact, as old as language itself.

In his earlier book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Peterson connects the stories we share with our earliest ancestors with modern knowledge of behavior and the mind. It’s a textbook for his popular University of...

A Multi-Polar Cooperative World

Because the three major rivals in the world, Russia, China, and the United States, each have nuclear weapons and systems to wipe each other out and make the world uninhabitable, there is only one option that spells the survival of mankind along with its current state of knowledge. No one of these three countries and no alliance of lesser powers can take over the world and form a world government because the others will resist. If one of these attempts to rule the world, the likelihood of nucl...

The Military Industrial Complex Strikes Again

“Why throw money at defense when everything is falling down around us? Do we need to spend more money on our military (about $600 billion this year) than the next seven countries combined? Do we need 1.4 million active military personnel and 850,000 reserves when the enemy at the moment — ISIS — numbers in the low tens of thousands? If so, it seems there’s something radically wrong with our strategy. Should 55% of the federal government’s discretionary spending go to the military and only 3%...

Is US Being Sucked Into Syria’s War?

Candidate Donald Trump may have promised to extricate us from Middle East wars, once ISIS and al-Qaida were routed, yet events and people seem to be conspiring to keep us endlessly enmeshed.

Friday night, a drone, apparently modeled on a U.S. drone that fell into Iran’s hands, intruded briefly into Israeli airspace over the Golan Heights, and was shot down by an Apache helicopter.

Israel seized upon this to send F-16s to strike the airfield whence the drone originated. Returning home, an F-16...