Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Blog, page 484

Two Kinds of Minds

For the past few days, I’ve been learning about habits of the mind. Unfortunately, my lessons are occurring in real-time— in all the unglamorous and sometimes aggravating details of my life as a wife, mother and owner of two Labrador retrievers—one of whom inspired this essay. Although I imagined myself to be intentional about nearly everything I do, something had escaped my scrutiny. A rogue habit reigned over a covert kingdom of dashed hopes; it was my habit of selfish expectations.

We all hav...

An Eastern Message to Western Trads

As different as my culture is from that of my readers, there are still many things in common between Anglicanitas and Pax Russica – those two split-league hairs were once paired branches of the Roman Empire. Grafted by cutting, this ancient sprig has turned into a shrubbery sprawling East and West down from the Hill of Capitolium with myriad branch striving for sunlight and soil moisture. Tended and gardened through ages by the same Catholic Church, straining after the same Sun of Goodness, that...

Book Bans and Backroom Deals: The White House, Amazon, and the Battle over Free Speech

In the labyrinth of government interventions during the infamous COVID-19 debacle, one might mistakenly believe we’ve seen every conceivable overreach. Yet, the audacity of the Biden White House to engage in a brazen tango with Amazon, pressuring the titan to sideline books disfavored by the administration, adds a fresh chapter to this saga of governmental hubris.

Revealed through documents unearthed by committees and Rep. Jim Jordan, we learn that Andy Slavitt, the administration’s censorship c...

How Much Food Should You Have in Your Long Term Food Cache?

So the SHTF and you have successfully bugged in or bugged out according to your contingency plans. Now what? Is this going to be a longterm crisis due to war, asteroid strike or solar flare EMP? What is longterm for you…a couple weeks, months or several years?

I suggest that there are three distinct duration intervals for which you should stock supplies:

72 Hour Events

Something has happened while you are at work, school or stuck at home. It may be a riot, power outage or minor earthquake. You m...

Thomas Jefferson Still Supported Secession Forty Years After the Declaration of Independence

Some modern opponents of a right to secession or self-determination invent a variety of reasons why secession was acceptable for Americans in the 1770s, but not in the 1860s. For example, historian Brooks Simpson in this column splits many hairs attempting to explain (unconvincingly) that the Declaration of Independence had nothing to do with secession. At the core of many of these claims is the idea that since some Americans in the eighteenth century endorsed the current constitution, then all ...

300-Year Old Fraudulent Banking Pea Shell Game With No Pea Exposed

NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE

Libertarian Credit System Formed to Replace Banks by Recovering Fraudulently Taken Equity

Michael Bernicia is a working-class film maker in Britain and producer of the documentary “The Great British Mortgage Swindle”.  His family was evicted from his home when he was a child due to his father’s bankruptcy.  His surname means “victory bringer” and derives from Anglo Saxons heritage.  He was banned from the film industry in Britain after he revealed what he found out about wh...

To Avoid Catastrophe, Israel Must Integrate Gazans Into Israel and Grant Them Equal Rights

To date, there has been negligible attention given to what will be the ultimate fate of the approximately 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip enclave in Palestine. In response to the October 7 Hamas attacks, Israel, with the full backing of the United States, has undertaken a military campaign to destroy all infrastructure in Gaza, including homes, buildings, mosques, churches, hospitals and roads. Israel has decided to cut off all food, water, medical supplies and electricity for Gaza e...

America’s Towering Public Debt—Spawn of War, Welfare and Wampum

When it comes to illuminating the nation’s towering public debt, here are two bookend pictures that are as good as any. In June 1970, when we took leave of protesting the Vietnam War and dodging the draft at Harvard Divinity School in order to pursue the cause of peace and freedom as a Congressional staffer (sic!), the public debt of the United States was $370 billion.

As it happened, our first assignment as a newly minted legislative assistant to Congressman John B. Anderson was to work on the ...

‘Nonsense on Stilts’: The Rhetorical Cornerstone of the American Welfare/Warfare State

In a 1922 essay about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in his book Prejudices: Third Series H.L. Mencken asked, “Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg Address”?  One example of the nonsense of Lincoln’s rhetoric as explained by Mencken is as follows:

“Think of the argument in it.  Put it into the cold words of everyday.  The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – th...

Sarajevo Redux or How World Wars Come About

On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated in Sarajevo. Who would know that in only a few weeks the whole of Europe would be at war, leading to the deaths of millions. Are we facing a similar escalation of events today?

Nowadays, we would ascribe runaway events like these to chaos theory, but it wasn’t so in 1914. They were sequenced with the principal actors seemingly unable to stop them. Austria-Hungary called in Germany and together they declared war on Se...