Jun 18, 2025

Steve Bannon on how war with Iran threatens the MAGA coalition

If you look at the three planks [of MAGA] - stop the forever wars, seal the border and deport the illegal alien invaders, and redo the commercial relationships in the world around trade deals and bring high value-added manufacturing jobs back here - they're [the Trump team] trying to shut all three down, but the one that they're obsessed with the most, which I find strange, is the forever wars.  They've got to be in the forever wars and in particular the Middle East.  And I'm a big supporter of Israel and I'm telling people, "hey, if we get sucked into this war which inexorably looks like it's going to happen on the combat side, it's not just going to blow up the coalition, it's also going to thwart what we're doing with the most important thing which is the deportation of the illegal alien invaders that are here.  If we don't do that, we don't have a country."  And just see right now that they're doubling and tripling down.

[...]

If we don't lance the bull over this, if you can't turn it around with Trump, the Trump team he has - people like you, myself; they're blessed to have these apparatuses.  If we can't do this now, it's not going to get done.  And so that's why, to me,... of everything we're doing: stopping the forever wars, redoing the commercial relationship with China to bring jobs back and sealing the border and sending home, deporting 10 million, which is going to be massive, almost like a civil war in these big cities, of all of those... to get our sovereignty back, the war we have to have now, the throwdown we have to have now is with the deep state.  We've looked away too often.  We're just kind of kicking the can down the road.  And if we can't do it now with Trump, it's not going to get done.

~ Steve Bannon, "Tucker and Steve Bannon Respond to Israel’s War on Iran and How It Could Destroy MAGA Forever," Tucker Carlson, 0:45 and 6:05 mark, June 16, 2025




Bertrand Russell on war

War does not determine who is right, only who is left.

~ Bertrand Russell



Jun 16, 2025

Jeffrey Sachs on why the U.S. opposes Russia and China

What do we have against Russia?  The fact of the matter is, Russia is big.  Russia is powerful.  And for that reason and that reason alone, or sufficiently, the U.S. would oppose Russia, just like the U.S. opposes China.  Now of course, maybe people listening to this would say, "That's crazy.  We oppose China because all of the terrible things they do."  Or "We oppose Russia because all of the terrible things they do."  I would take a different view of this which is, we make up stories about why we oppose big powers, but the basic reason we oppose big powers is that they are big.  They are an afront to our desire for what the political scientists in a fancy word call "primacy," or call "hegemony," or call "full spectrum dominance."  In other words, Russia is an afront to our ability to dictate circumstances.  China certainly is an afront to the U.S. ability to dictate circumstances in Asia.  For that reason alone, for the powers that be in Washington, that's completely antithetical to the American strategic purpose, which explicitly, for many, many years has been full spectrum dominance...  In other words, our purpose, as stated by the establishment, by the military industrial complex, is "We must be the unrivaled #1."




Promised Land on the first Irgun attacks

In Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, Benny Morris writes that the Irgun Bombs of 1937 and 1938 “sowed terror in the Arab population and substantially increased its casualties. The bombs do not appear in any way to have curtailed Arab terrorism, but they do appear to have helped persuade moderate Arabs of the need to resist Zionism and to support the rebellion.”

The first Irgun attack occurred on November 11, 1937. Morris writes that the attacks were responsible for “killing two Arabs at a bus depot near Jaffa Street in Jerusalem, and wounding five. Three days later, on November 14, a number of Arabs were killed in simultaneous attacks around the country—a day that the Irgun thereafter commemorated as the ’Day of the Breaking of the Havlaga (restrain).’”

Morris also describes the events on July 6, 1938, when “an Irgun operative dressed as an Arab placed two large milk cans filled with TNT and shrapnel in the Arab market in downtown Haifa. The subsequent explosions killed twenty-one and wounded fifty-two. On July 15 another bomb killed ten Arabs and wounded more than thirty in David Street in Jerusalem’s Old City. A second bomb in the Haifa market—this time disguised as a large can of sour cucumbers—on July 25, 1938 killed at least thirty-nine Arabs and injured at least seventy. On August 26, a bomb in Jaffa’s vegetable market killed twenty-four Arabs and wounded thirty-nine.”

~ "The Beginning of the Israel-Palestine Conflict," Promised Land: The Jewish Museum of the Palestinian Experience

Wanted by the British government: Menachem Begin


Jun 14, 2025

Murray Rothbard on consumers, voters and knowledge

Consumers also take entrepreneurial risks on the market.  Many critics of the market, while willing to concede the expertise of the capitalist-entrepreneurs, bewail the prevailing ignorance of consumers, which prevents them from gaining the utility ex post that they had expected ex ante.  Typically, Wesley C. Mitchell entitled one of his famous essays: ‘The Backward Art of Spending Money.’  Professor Mises has keenly pointed out the paradox of interventionists who insist that consumers are too ignorant or incompetent to buy products intelligently, while at the same time proclaiming the virtues of democracy, where the same people vote for or against politicians whom they do not know and on policies which they scarcely understand.  

To put it another way, the partisans of intervention assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them, but they also assume that these same individuals are competent to vote for these experts at the ballot box.  They are further assuming that the mass of supposedly incompetent consumers are competent to choose not only those who will rule over themselves, but also over the competent individuals in society.  Yet such absurd and contradictory assumptions lie at the root of every program for ‘democratic’ intervention in the affairs of the people. 

In fact, the truth is precisely the reverse of this popular ideology.  Consumers are surely not omniscient, but they have direct tests by which to acquire and check their knowledge.  They buy a certain brand of breakfast food and they do not like it; and so they do not buy it again.  They buy a certain type of automobile and like its performance; they buy another one.  And in both cases, they tell their friends of this newly won knowledge.  Other consumers patronize consumers’ research organizations, which can warn or advise them in advance.  But, in all cases, the consumers have the direct test of results to guide them.  And the firm which satisfied the consumers expands and prospers and thus gains ‘good will,’ while the firm failing to satisfy them goes out of business.  

On the other hand, voting for politicians and public policies is a completely different matter.  Here there are no direct tests of success or failure whatever, neither profits and losses nor enjoyable or unsatisfying consumption.  In order to grasp consequences, especially the indirect catallactic consequences of governmental decisions, it is necessary to comprehend complex chains of praxeological reasoning.  Very few voters have the ability or the interest to follow such reasoning, particularly, as Schumpeter points out, in political situations.  For the minute influence that any one person has on the results, as well as the seeming remoteness of the actions, keeps people from gaining interest in political problems or arguments.  Lacking the direct test of success or failure, the voter tends to turn, not to those politicians whose policies have the best chance of success, but to those who can best sell their propaganda ability.  Without grasping logical chains of deduction, the average voter will never be able to discover the errors that his ruler makes.  

George J. Schuller, in attempting to refute this argument, protested that: ‘complex chains of reasoning are required for consumers to select intelligently an automobile or television set.’  But such knowledge is not necessary; for the whole point is that the consumers have always at hand a simple and pragmatic test of success: does the product work and work well?  In public economic affairs, there is no such test, for no one can know whether a particular policy has ‘worked’ or not without knowing the a priori reasoning of economics.

~ Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (1962)

(As quoted by Lew Rockwell in "The Greatness of Man, Economy, and State," LewRockwell.com, June 4, 2025.  See also here under "E. Utility Ex Post.")



Jun 12, 2025

Kevin Duffy on modern warfare

Warfare today is all about pinning the “aggressor” label on the opposing side and claiming victim status.  This allows the self-proclaimed victim to act with impunity – civilians be damned – all in the name of “self-defense.”  Thus modern warfare is filled with an endless litany of false flag operations, baiting the other side into firing the first shot, preemptive strikes and sensationalized propaganda (usually involving “killing babies”) all meant to gain the moral high ground and justify cutting the dogs of war loose.

~ Kevin Duffy, "Gaza: What Would Rothbard Think?," The Libertarian Alliance, June 8, 2025



Jun 11, 2025

Fred Hickey on the stock market: "This is about as toxic a brew as I could ever imagine"

The combination of investor complacency in an environment with trade wars, out-of-control U.S. government spending, enormous deficits and debts, funding risks in a period of financial tightening, rising inflation, supply shortages, a likely economic recession, loss of faith in "U.S. exceptionalism," a declining U.S. dollar, risk of monetary debasement and a "massively overvalued stock market" (per investor extraordinaire Paul Singer) is about as toxic a brew as I could ever imagine.

Not only are investors extraordinarily complacent, the bear market rally since April 7 has encouraged them to return to taking enormous risks.  They're piling into the MAG 7 stocks, which have accounted for over half of the S&P 500's total market cap gains since the early April bottom.  Worse yet, they're pouring into all sorts of garbage stocks, grossly overpriced high-fliers and cryptos, including MicroStrategy (MSTR), CoreWeave (CRWV), Tesla (196 times falling earnings and with slumping auto deliveries), Palantir (PLTR - 600 P/E) and many more.  Investors have added a record $437 billion into U.S. ETFs this year, with the largest inflows occurring following market declines.  Believing that they cannot lose in the long run, they buy every dip (thanks Fed!).

~ Fred Hickey, "Toxic Combination," The High-Tech Strategist, p. 2, June 2, 2025