Land of the Deadliest Sins - Hello Sodom and Gomorrah (I challenge you to read this....and then refute it as 'that isn't us'! Go ahead - have at it! - CL)

 Christianity has always emphasized the severity of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Catholic Church defined them as pride, greed, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, and sloth. Looking around at America 2.0, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Deadly Sinning comes as naturally to us as betrayal or dishonesty, which apparently don’t qualify.

Pride can be seen in the scrunched up duckfaces of every young girl, as she posts selfie after selfie, like all her fellow narcissist friends. It can be seen in the face of the bully, after he’s sucker punched someone. You know, as in the Knockout Game. You’ll find it on the glowing faces of executives who’ve outsourced or eliminated thousands of jobs, as they announce how much larger the tax free bonuses will be at Christmas. You’ll hear it in the excessively loud laughter of the practical joker, after he’s humiliated someone. But now we have a Pride Month. And it’s devoted to something no decent person should ever be proud of. Gay Pride gave way to LGBTQ Pride. It’s more inclusive. So the mother who pushes her son to become a “girl,” and the newly emasculated lad himself, become extraordinarily proud. But there is no pride in say, being a faithful husband or wife for a half century. Or just being a good Samaritan.

There are some things to be justifiably proud of. Any parent’s face should be flushed with pride as they hold their newborn baby. Or watch them accomplish great things on the sports fields, or cheer them as they graduate from high school or college. Tear up as they walk down the aisle, and dance at their wedding. Genuine heroes should be proud. A firefighter who saves a child from a burning building. A soldier whose valor earns him a Purple Heart, even though the cause he was fighting for was senseless. Inventors who make all our lives better. Nikola Tesla had a right to be proud. The artist who creates a timeless work. But there’s a huge difference between any of that, and Pride Month, for instance. To paraphrase the late Norm MacDonald, that’s not an achievement. Or to revel in your obesity, for instance. The Fat Acceptance movement has created vain monsters out of those who shouldn’t be shamed as they often were in the past, but certainly shouldn’t be celebrated for an inability to control themselves.

Full text: https://donaldjeffries.substack.com/p/land-of-the-deadliest-sins?publication_id=344941&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

Solzhenit-Spin: Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Was a Deep State British Lie - LewRockwell

 https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/08/wayne-lusvardi/solzhenit-spin-solzhenitsyns-gulag-was-a-deep-state-british-lie/ 

To be American and Christian is to be anti-Communist that is ingrained in Americans’ psyches. Evangelical Christians have a similar social psychological dilemma about Zionism. Evangelical Christianity was birthed in Britain in the late 1800’s, incubated in the Azusa Street Revivals in Los Angeles in the early 1900’s, and ended up the prevalent form of religion in the American South (see Sean Durbin, Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity and Myth in John Hagee’ Christians United for Israel, 2020). Seventy million American evangelical Christians currently support the Israeli War against Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza, as an apocalyptic “end times” war against Communism prophesied in the books of Revelations, Ezekial and Isaiah.

The Gulag Archipelago has become the “bible” of anti-communists, without apparent awareness that Solzhenitsyn was a phony anti-communist and deserter when it came to fighting greater evil. Hitler was planted by British bankers to bring about the downfall of Germany so that it would not align with Russia against Britain (see Guido Preparada, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich and Destroyed Europe, 2021).

But Dreher, evangelical Zionists and pro-Solzhenitsyn Leftist intellectuals are no worse than the person described earlier in this article (myself) who is a James Bond movie fan. British anti-communist propaganda is embedded everywhere. This is how successful propaganda operates; it becomes an indistinguishable and taken for granted part of the ether. It is not how some British novels like 1984, or A Brave New World describe it as manifestly cruel and totalitarian. In fact, those novels were themselves pseudo-propaganda meant to make you unconscious about real, insidious propaganda.

This article should not be misconstrued as some pro-Communist refutation of anti-Communist criticism against Joseph Stalin. Nor is it a defense of ‘useful idiots’ George Bernard Shaw, John-Paul Sartre and Walter Duranty for being Stalin’s dupes nor Hannah Arendt’s warped resentful anti-totalitarianism that scapegoated the American working class for war crimes. Nor is this a condemnation of Evangelical Christianity carte blanche. To repeat, everyone’s camp of propagandists and unconscious James Bond movie fans has been infected by the English Shakespearian plague of distorted anti-Communism. Truth has been murdered so many times by so many people taking their lines from the anti-Communist script written by British Intelligence that it is like the English Shakespearean play Titus Andronicus where there are fourteen murders as well as cannibalism and mutilations, that one can’t keep track.

In closing, another dot that perhaps needs connected is that the Gulag Archipelago was originally published by the YMCA Press in Paris, France. Sounds innocent, doesn’t it? The Young Men’s Christian Association was founded by George Williams in London in 1844 and the YMCA Press was coincidentally formed in Russia and moved to Paris. All roads lead to London including Solzhenitsyn’s, Robert Conquest’s and Stephen Kotkin’s books and all those Ian Fleming novels and movies. I rest my case.

Get To Know the Future - LewRockwell

 Living with exponential trends is confounding because they mimic linear trends in their early stages then suddenly shoot skyward.  As Kurzweil often describes it, “If I count 30 steps linearly I get to 30.  If I count exponentially, 30 steps later I’m at a billion.  It makes a dramatic difference.”

Here’s the point: Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, but we experience it linearly.  If two points on an exponential curve are close  enough, the experience of moving from one to the other will seem linear.  Thus, our expectations and projections about the future are often based on the wrong scale — linear instead of exponential.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/08/george-f-smith/get-to-know-the-future/ 

He thinks the sixth paradigm of computing will be modeled on the structure of the human brain:

Chips today are flat (although it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer of circuitry). Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. We live in a three dimensional world, why not use the third dimension? The human brain actually uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions.

There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions.

As he writes in The Singularity is Near, it is specifically information technology that is growing exponentially.  But this is far from a limiting factor:

Are They Lying to Us About Inflation?

 https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/08/eric-peters/are-they-lying-to-us-about-inflation/

 I have written before about my first house, which I bought back in the mid-1990s in Northern Virginia for $155k. Today, that same house would list for more than $600k, according to my realtor friend who sells similar houses in the same neighborhood. Now, here’s a way to more accurately measure what they’re lying to us about.

When I plug what I paid for my first house into the government’s so-called “inflation calculator,” it says that $155k back then is equivalent in cost to just shy of $315 today. Whey then is a house like my old house a $600k house today? What accounts for the nearly $300k difference in cost?

Channeling the Church Lady: Could it be . . . inflation? That is to say, the waning value of what a dollar buys today vs. yesterday?

It sure seems that way.

Eating at McDonald’s has become a kind of near-luxury dining experience that the parents of today’s teens are having a time paying for. How many 17-year-olds can afford a $40 bag of fast food? How many can afford a car, at all? How many adults can afford their first house? If the stats are correct – about the average of first-time home buyers being well into middle aged – then the answer is not many.

Yes, they are lying to us, again.

As Dr. Evil used to say, it’s what they do.

On Hubris & Pride - (How to understand our leaders......- CL)

 In Christian theology, Lucifer, whose name means “Light Bringer,” was the most beautiful and powerful angel until his pride prompted him to revolt. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, he makes the flippant statement, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/08/no_author/on-hubris-pride/ 

Israel’s Man Inside the CIA Betrayed the US, New Files Show, by Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed - The Unz Review

 CIA spymaster James Angleton shaped the US-Israeli relationship in secrecy. Newly unredacted files shed light on his wanton betrayal of his country to assist Israel’s theft of US nuclear material and global spying operations.

Veteran CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton secretly oversaw a top-level spy ring involving Jewish émigrés and Israeli operatives without “any clearances” from Congress or Langley itself, according to recently declassified documents published as part of the Trump administration’s pledge to disclose all available information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The files provide a fresh and often disturbing look at a spy described by historian Jefferson Morley as “a leading architect of America’s strategic relationship with Israel,” detailing Angleton’s role in transforming the Mossad into a fearsome agency with global reach, while assisting Israel’s theft of US nuclear material and protecting Zionist terrorists.

Angleton established the Jewish emigre spying network in the aftermath of WWII, with the apparent goal of infiltrating the Soviet Union. But as the files show, the spymaster considered his “most important” task to be maintaining the supply of Jewish immigrants flowing from the Soviet Union towards the burgeoning Israeli state.

According to Angelton, his Jewish assets were responsible for 22,000 reports on the USSR, generating several intelligence masterstrokes. Chief among them was the publication of Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Kruschev’s famous 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin, which the spymaster boasted “practically created revolutions in Hungary and Poland.” Elsewhere, Angleton bragged that his arrangement with Israel had produced “500 Polish intelligence officers who were Jewish” who “knew more about Polish intelligence than the Poles.”

Other passages appear to show Angleton taking credit for securing the “release” of several Zionist terrorists affiliated with the Irgun militia before they could be convicted for bombing the British embassy in Rome. Though the group had been captured by Italian authorities, the newly-disclosed files indicate the terror cell was freed on the orders of the CIA.

The information was originally divulged in 1975 to senators serving on the Church Committee, which probed widespread abuses by US intelligence in the decades prior. Congress was particularly interested in claims by New York Times foreign correspondent Tad Szulc, who testified under oath that Angleton had personally informed him that the US provided technical information on nuclear devices to Israel in the late 1950s. The new documents show that Angleton was deceptive under questioning, and evaded questions on Israel’s nuclear espionage efforts on the record.

Additional unsealed FBI documents, which refer to Israel’s Mossad as Angleton’s “primary source” of information, confirm that the CIA’s head of counterintelligence relied heavily on Tel Aviv to solidify his position within the Agency – and also add to the growing body of evidence that Angleton may not have been operating with US interests in mind throughout his 21-year tenure.

https://www.unz.com/article/israels-man-inside-the-cia-betrayed-the-us-new-files-show/ 

The Ukraine War Was Always Going To End This Way

 Ukraine’s current borders are a relic of Soviet propaganda, invented by Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 as part of an effort to make the Warsaw Pact look like a diverse coalition of strong states. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, those fictional borders were made “real,” leaving Ukraine with a Soviet nuclear arsenal, Russia’s Black Sea fleet, and control of the ports of Sevastopol and Odessa.

The situation this created was obviously untenable. Under pressure from the United States, Kiev returned the nuclear arsenal and the Black Sea fleet to Russia, and signed a long-term lease agreement giving Moscow control over the warm-water port at Sevastopol. But it left Ukraine itself with an indefensible territory and millions of Russian inside its borders. As Mario Loyola explained in these pages three weeks before Moscow launched its invasion in February 2022, Ukraine in 1991 wasn’t really a viable state: “It wasn’t at all clear that Ukraine would be strong enough to maintain both political independence and territorial integrity given the weight of vital Russian interests involved.”

As long as Ukraine stayed in Russia’s orbit, it could control its territory. But, as Loyola writes, “the moment it definitively broke away from Moscow in 2014, it immediately lost control of those areas that were most vital to Russian interests, and nobody with an even minimal sense of Russian and Ukrainian history can pretend to have been taken by surprise.”

As it now stands, Ukraine can have political independence or territorial integrity, but it cannot have both. That was true in 2014, it was true in 2022 before the Russian invasion, and it is true today. It’s not parroting Russian propaganda to say that Ukraine will have lasting peace and stability only with an adjustment of its borders, it’s simply a statement of historical fact. If Ukraine wants to be oriented toward Europe and politically independent of Russia, then its borders will have to be adjusted.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/18/the-ukraine-war-was-always-going-to-end-this-way/ 

This should have been obvious to anyone familiar with the relevant history and geography. Indeed, these solid, unchanging realities of history, geography, and Moscow’s strategic imperatives have always been at the heart of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. There was never a scenario, for example, in which Russia was going to allow the government of Ukraine to control the warm-water port at Sevastopol, much less join NATO (although, as we’ve seen, Moscow might be willing to accept a NATO-like security guarantee for Ukraine). Those are red-lines for Russia, and the idea that the United States or the E.U. was going to cross them, risking World War Three for the sake of preserving Ukraine’s indefensible Soviet-era borders, was always unrealistic — a corporate media fiction totally unmoored from reality.

Reality is really the big difference between the Biden administration’s approach to the war and Trump’s approach. Biden and his top officials routinely talked about Ukraine in a way that was so unrealistic it bordered on the fantastical. More than once, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken dismissed the possibility of a negotiated peace until Ukraine could “defend itself” and Russia withdrew all its troops from Ukrainian territory. In June 2023 [http://any%20peace%20agreement%20must%20uphold%20the%20principles%20of%20sovereignty,%20territorial%20integrity%20and%20independence/]he told CBS News that any peace agreement must uphold the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence. Biden and Blinken repeatedly insisted that nobody can veto NATO membership. But of course that’s not true; Putin vetoed NATO membership for Ukraine when he invaded the country.

And here we come to heart of the difference between Biden and Trump’s view of the war, and of foreign policy broadly speaking. The establishment foreign policy experts that ran things during Biden’s term (and Obama’s) think the world operates according to theories and abstractions rather than solid realities like history and geography. They thought they could simply invoke something like sovereignty, without grappling with the possibility that sovereignty and territorial integrity, given Ukraine’s history and its untenable borders, might be mutually exclusive.

That mindset is representative of an entire class of policymakers in Washington who fail to grasp that the outcome of a war — any war — is far more likely to be decided by something as unmovable as a mountain range or a warm-water port than vague invocations of sovereignty. Likewise, a common language or a shared 1,000-year history between warring peoples are going to be more important factors than the bureaucratic minutiae of a multi-lateral security agreement drafted in Brussels.

After years of attrition warfare between Ukraine and Russia, bankrolled largely by western powers, the underlying factors in the conflict have not changed — and they never will. An adjustment of Ukraine’s borders, together with security guarantees from the U.S. and Europe, is actually in everyone’s best interests, not just Russia’s. Ukraine as it’s currently constituted is indefensible, as events have shown. Lasting peace will require grappling with the history of Ukraine’s borders and adjusting them to reflect solid realities — not some hazy platitudes about democracy and sovereignty. Those kind of abstractions are a big reason we’re in this mess, and rejecting them is the only way we’re going to get out of it.