Chris Walen on the commercial real estate bust

On the commercial side, because of such uncertainty as to what some of these assets are worth, a lot of the big buyers have stepped back and said, "ok, wait, we're going to see what happens."  So, for example, look at some of the marks that the banks are talking about.  Look at what Bank of America's talking about on their commercial loan exposures.  They basically have cut them in half.  And I think that's the appropriate posture for the banks to take.  If they get the money back later, great, they can take a gain.  But I think for now, when you're talking about urban commercial properties, especially older properties, you've got to be very very cautious.  If you read The Real Deal, which is one of my favorite reads, they're cataloguing all of these restructurings and foreclosures and everything else, and it's because these assets are underutilized.  Walk around New York City.  We have lots of tourists, but he buildings are empty.  We still have a really significant underutilization of office buildings in New York, most of the major cities around the country, including the South.  You would think Texas and the rest of the South would be different; they're not.  Atlanta.  It's astounding, but all of these cities are dealing with a sudden change in the use case for commercial properties that nobody anticipated.  It's like we wound the clock back a hundred years, we've taken Henry Ford and kidnapped him, right?  So we don't have this car-centric, commuter-centric model for cities anymore.  People realize that they can work at home.

~ Christopher Whalen, interview, Forward Guidance, 2:45 mark, October 17, 2023

Omar Baddar on Israeli human right abuses towards Palestinians

There's all these announcements about they're [Israeli Defense Forces] going to do everything they can to avoid civilian casualties.  It is really worth emphasizing here that Israel has bombed Gaza many, many times before and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and even Israeli human rights organizations like B'Tselem say that this is not at all what Israel's conduct is.  There isn't an effort to minimize civilian casualties.  There is mass indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas and frankly, we're watching that unfold right now as well.  The policy is essentially to punish the entire Palestinian population, cutting off electricity to all of Gaza, preventing anyone in Gaza from coming in and out.  This is an act of collective punishment and this is exactly the trajectory that we unfortunately are on.  I think we are going to see much greater death that's going to cover the entire Gaza strip and at the end of it, Palestinians are going to remain a population that is captive and under an illegal seige, as recognized by the U.N.  And we're only setting ourselves up towards another round of this in the future.  

What we need right now is the world community to come together and start dealing with this issue seriously, understanding that this policy of giving Israel carte blanche to behave however it wants towards Palestinians is not a way to actually achieve long-lasting peace.  You can't keep doing the same thing over and over againd and expecting a different result.  The one thing that has not been tried so far is allowing Palestinians to be free of Israeli occupation and military dictatorship.  Until we start taking Palestinian grievances seriously, until Israel starts seeing Palestinians as equal human beings who are deserving of the same human rights and decency and dignity that Israelis enjoy, I'm afraid we're going to be stuck in this situation for a very, very long time.

~ Omar Baddar, Palestinian-American Middle East analyst, CNN interview, 3:25 mark, October 9, 2023

Connor O'Keefe on war, revenge and killing civilians

War is no trivial subject.  It’s violence on the widest scale.  At their best, wars can throw off the worst tyrannies and liberate the oppressed.  But they can also bring about the worst atrocities. 

That’s why it is so important to have a firm and precise understanding of when violence is justified.  History shows that without this it is far too easy for our healthy human reactions and emotions to be funneled into support for further crimes—trapping us in indiscriminate revenge cycles.

~ Connor O'Keefe, "Is It Just War or Unjustified Slaughter of Innocents?," Mises Wire, October 11, 2023

Murray Rothbard on the Israel-Palestine conflict (1982)

Libertarians are opposed to every State.  But the State of Israel is uniquely pernicious, because its entire existence rests and continues to rest on a massive expropriation of property and expulsion from the land.  Libertarians in the United States often complain about the radical libertarian adherence to “land reform,” i.e. the giving back of stolen land to the victims.  In the case of expropriations centuries ago, who gets what is often fuzzy, and conservative libertarians can raise an important point.  But in the case of Palestine, the victims and their children—the true owners of the land—are right there, beyond the borders, in refugee camps, in hovels, dreaming about a return to their own.  There is nothing fuzzy here.  Justice will only be served, and true peace in the devastated area will only come, when a miracle happens and Israel allows the Palestinians to stream back in and repossess their rightful property.  Until then, so long as the Palestinians continue to live and no matter how far back they are pushed, they will always be there, and they will continue to press for their dream of justice.  No matter how many square miles and how many cities Israel conquers (shall it be Damascus next?), the Palestinians will be there, in addition to all the other Arab refugees newly created by the Israeli policy of blood and iron.  But allowing justice, allowing the return of the expropriated, would mean that Israel would have to give up its exclusivist Zionist ideal.  For recognizing Palestinians as human beings with full human rights is the negation of Zionism; it is the recognition that the land was never “empty.” 

A just Israeli state (insofar as any state can be just), then, would necessarily be a de-Zionized state, and this no Israeli political party in the foreseeable future would have the slightest desire to do. And so the slaughter and the horror will go on.

~ Murray Rothbard, "The Massacre," The Libertarian Forum, October 1982

George Carlin on government propaganda

I have certain rules I live by.  My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me.

~ George Carlin

Jeff Berwick on the Ocober 7 attack on Israel

A lot of people actually believe this narrative that the Palestinian people are evil.  It's totally not the case.  Absolutely not the case.  A lot of the people in Israel aren't evil either, but the government of Israel is super super evil, and they're the ones doing all of this [false flag attack on Israel].  And because people don't wake up to this, we're probably going to end up in a World War III where most people are going to end up dead.  So first the lefties tried to kill everyone with all the lethal injections [Covid vaccines], they did a pretty good job, and now the righties are going to try to kill everyone with war.  And they all hate us libertarians.  And I'm just sitting at the ranch, got all our food here, we're ready to go for the apocalypse.

~ Jeff Berwick, "FALSE FLAG: We Just Had Another 9/11 Inside Job in Israel And Everyone Is Falling For It Again," The Dollar Vigilante, 1:12:40 mark, October 9, 2023

Scott Ritter on how Senator Diane Feinstein went along with the WMD lie to justify Iraq War

I met Senator Diane Feinstein once, in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  She had just recently been assigned to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (in 2001), and it was in that capacity that she had a senior staffer from the committee ask me to come to Washington DC to brief her on Iraqi WMD and the allegations being made by the Bush administration that Iraq continued to possess them.  We met in a secure conference room in the Capital building—me, the Senator, and a half dozen staffers and aides.  It was a polite, professional affair, with the Senator asking questions and taking notes.  Eventually she confronted me—“Your position is causing us some difficulty. You are making the US look bad in the eyes of the world.”  I replied that my analysis and the underlying facts were rock solid, something she agreed with. I said that while I knew she couldn’t reveal sensitive intelligence, if she could look me in the eye and say she has seen unequivocal proof that Iraq retained WMD, I’d shut up and go away.  She looked at her retinue, and then me.  “I have seen no such intelligence,” she replied.  She thanked me for the briefing, and said it provided her with “food for thought.” 

[On October 11, 2002, Senator Feinstein voted in favor of the resolution authorizing war with Iraq. Later, she said she had been misled by the Bush administration and bad intelligence.]

I will forever know Senator Feinstein as someone who had been empowered by the truth, and lacked the moral courage to act on it.  The blood of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis stains her soul.  I hope when she stands in judgment before her maker, she is punished accordingly.

~ Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and US intelligence officer, "Blood of thousands of Americans, Iraqis stains Senator Feinstein’s soul: Former US official," PressTV, September 30, 2023