ON PAUL: “There’s been a coup. We don’t have any resemblance to a government that believes in a republic. We don’t have honest money. We don’t have integrity. We don’t even have people in Washington who even pretend… to tell the truth.”“[I believe the coup began on] November 22, 1963.”
IAN CROSSLAND: “What happened on that day?”
RON PAUL: “That was the day Kennedy was murdered by our government. You know, by the CIA.”
Tucker Carlson's message needs to be blasted from every corporate news outlet:
It's time not to end it, not to set up an adversarial relationship, but to set up a healthy conventional relationship where Israel can pay its own bills and fund its own military and act within the constraints imposed on it by its own economy and population. That's what normal countries do. Most countries live with neighbors that don't like them, with whom they have testy relationships. But they make accommodations because they have no choice. There's no country in the world that acts with total impunity because it knows a much larger country will backstop it no matter what it does that just doesn't exist in the natural world, because it's not natural, it's grotesque, and it's terrible for the United States, and now it's obvious.
There was no anti-war party on the presidential ballot in 2024.
There is a version of the Democratic Party that exists only in the imagination: the peace party, the anti-war party, the party that marched against the Iraq War and howled at its neocon designers. As Donald Trump (reportedly) accepted Iran’s ceasefire terms this week, some of the most pointed attacks coming his way from Democrats are not about the thousands of civilians killed, the weeks of brutal bombardments against medical centers and universities, or the global economic damage the war has caused. They are about the war ending before the U.S. and Israel finished the job.And this is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a pattern coming from Democratic senators, the Democratic House Foreign Affairs Committee, ranking members of the Armed Services Committee, and some of the party’s most prominent voices. The liberal opposition party wants more war.
This pattern predates the war. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Kamala Harris called Iran America’s “greatest adversary,” vowed that Iran would never obtain a nuclear weapon under her watch, and argued that Iran’s attacks on Israel would not have happened under her presidency. The Democratic nominee for president was running on a promise to be harder on Iran than Donald Trump.
Trump's despicable war might be coming to a close for now (as Israel continues to pummel Lebanon). One can hope. But take a look back at US military involvement in the Middle East and the constant war-mongering by the US for many decades. Biden/Harris stood watch over the leveling of Gaza. Harris was ready and willing to do what Trump just did.
Obama was a most unusual "Peace President."
It disgusts me that this comes strongly from both political parties. Americans have no option to vote for no war. Nor do we have any option to vote for candidates who are not controlled by the AIPAC and the government of Israel. Our "leaders" keep us in the dark and do the opposite of what we vote for. Our government system is rotted to the core. It pains me to write these words.
Brivael - FR makes sense here:
There’s a phrase I love: “I’m communist with my family, socialist with my friends, liberal with my country, and capitalist with the rest of the world.”
This phrase is brilliant because it sums up the number one mistake people make when thinking about economic systems: applying what works on a small scale to a large scale without understanding that the complexity of systems changes everything.
Communism with your family works. You share everything, you don’t keep score, each person gives according to their abilities and receives according to their needs. And it works. Because you’re 4 or 5 people, you know everyone intimately, trust is total, cheating is impossible to hide, and love replaces economic incentives.
Socialism with your friends works too. A group of 20-30 people. You share restaurant bills, you help a buddy move, you lend a hand without keeping count. Reciprocity is natural because you know each person and your reputation is on the line.
But as soon as you scale up to a country, 68 million people, everything falls apart. Why? Because the complexity of systems is non-linear. Organizing 5 people is trivial. Organizing 50 is difficult. Organizing 50 million is a problem of fundamentally different complexity. It’s not just “harder.” It’s qualitatively a different problem.
At large scale, you no longer know the people. Trust disappears. Cheating becomes invisible. Free riders proliferate. The information needed to coordinate 68 million people exceeds the capacity of any central planner. This is the economic calculation problem of Mises (1920) and the dispersed knowledge of Hayek (1945). A central brain can’t process the information that millions of market prices transmit in real time.
That’s exactly why communism produces happy families and dead countries. The model doesn’t scale. Not because people are mean. Because the complexity of systems makes centralized coordination impossible beyond a certain threshold.
And that’s the fundamental judgment error that most people who subscribe to Marxist theses make. They take their experience of sharing in a family or among friends, a model that works for 5-20 people, and they extrapolate it to 68 million people while completely ignoring the emergence of complexity. “If it works at home, it should work for the country.” No. The physics of complex systems says exactly the opposite.
The free market is the only system that scales. Because it doesn’t depend on personal trust, nor on good will, nor on an omniscient planner. It depends on prices that transmit information, incentives that align behaviors, and competition that corrects errors. It’s a system designed to work with strangers, at any scale.
Be communist with your family. Socialist with your friends. And liberal with everything else. Because the size of the system determines the model that works. Not your good intentions.