Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 276

Macron Slapped Down for Cheap Talk on Israel Arms Ban

Netanyahu is a despicable brute. But his slapping down of Macron is a priceless demonstration of how much of a non-entity the French leader is.

French President Emmanuel Macron got his marching orders with a smack on the head for daring to propose an arms embargo on Israel.

Israel’s obnoxious leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly mauled Macron in a phone call for having the nerve to make such a suggestion.

With his typical bluster and deceit, Netanyahu claimed that Israel was fighting for Weste...

Social Trust: It’s Not Warm and Fuzzy, It’s the Money, Honey

That most of us live in a low-value, low-trust economy of shoddy goods and services hidden beneath high-tech frictionless, faceless transactions is not recognized.

Social trust manifests in all sorts of ways, and it’s often amorphous and difficult to measure. We sense its presence or absence, but exactly what is it? Is it our trust in strangers, or our trust in institutions, or a warm and fuzzy feeling that our society isn’t falling apart?

In several critical ways, social trust isn’t warm and fu...

Has Iran Just Tested a Nuclear Bomb?

Two disturbing news items out of Iran suggest that Iran may already have a nuclear bomb capacity.

Firstly an Armenian station recorded a seismic event measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale in Iran on Saturday 5th October and according to Armenian researchers, its characteristics suggest it was more like an explosion than an earthquake.

Secondly a source in the Islamic republic said in a private conversation with an official close to Khamenei that

“Allah has already given us everything, everything i...

Creepy Government-Funded ‘Anti-Hate’ Organisation Run by a Weird Egyptian Man

These Trusted Flaggers are charged with eradicating “hate speech” and “fake news” from social media; platforms that ignore their Trusted Flagging can be fined or face other serious sanctions.

Are you one of those schoolmarm hall-monitor types?

Do you have a screechy voice and do you enjoy looking down your nose at other people?

Do your favourite pastimes include complaining to the manager, telling teenagers not to say bad words and levelling self-superior moral disapproval at everything you don...

Slaughter in Gaza And Lebanon as War With Iran Approaches

Israel appears to have begun its long-planned ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, with the IDF dropping bombs, issuing evacuation orders for multiple hospitals, attacking civilians with sniper drones, and besieging civilian populations in order to force tens of thousands of people to either move south or die. Israel has reportedly been dropping leaflets on the Jabalia refugee camp ordering people to leave, and then shooting anyone who tries to.

Since the seventh of October last year Israel has co...

Disinformation Isn’t the Problem. Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can t...

Repeal Government Regulators. Improve Safety and Quality, End Inflation

Voluntary cooperation is robust, multiply-protected, and loss-limiting, and brings healthy deflation. A government regulator makes a system fragile, fraught with a single point of failure, and loss-compounding, and brings sickening inflation.

Donald Trump and his unity team members Robert Kennedy and Elon Musk promise to limit cronyism and slash waste.

Both approaches deny that state-government and national-government administrative states are themselves peak cronyism. If government people stop ...

Potential ‘October Surprises’ Before the Election

International Man: The 2024 US presidential election is a short time away. What types of surprises or twists could we expect?

Doug Casey: It’s long been said that there’s usually an October surprise. So what might happen between now and then?

All things considered, I expect the Democrats to win. Despite the fact that voting for a pair of hard-core leftists is clinically insane on the part of the average American, I think that they’ll win. The capite censi support leftist views on almost all majo...

A Voice From the Hoi Polloi

On October 12, 2004 Lew Rockwell published my article Now and Then, my first on LRC. Over the intervening 20 years there have been upwards of 170 posts by me, with as few as one article in 2009 when my daughter was a year old and 23 articles in the COVID year 2020.

I am very fortunate to own a house in the countryside in Burgundy, France that I have called My Investment in Heaven (in another LRC post). There is a mezzanine in the house that serves no obvious purpose. I once asked the previous ow...

The ‘Fascist’ Ad Hominem As an Act of Projection

A definition of “projection” is when one baselessly accuses others of doing something unsavory, immoral, or illegal that he is actually doing. For example, a thief who, without proof, accuses others of being thieves. This is what socialists do when they call their intellectual and political opponents “fascists” or compare them to Hitler. Fascism is socialism, as Lew Rockwell recently reminded us in an essay entitled “National Socialism Was Socialist.” Socialists calling opponents of socialism fa...