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Ron Paul Against Meshing [Even More] With the US Military

We Should Not ‘Integrate’ Our Military with Any Foreign Nation!

Not since the notorious 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provided for indefinite detention of American citizens, has the annual funding bill been as misused as this year. Embedded in the bill is an insult to every American who values our national sovereignty. The NDAA’s Section 224, the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” would “integrate” the Israeli military with our own, fusing technology, production, intelligence-sharing, and more.

As Ben Freeman wrote last week in Responsible Statecraft:

“The US and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes ‘network integration’ and ‘data fusion.’ In other words, the US military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.”

It is hard to think of a more “America last” position than handing the keys to the Pentagon (and our intelligence community) to a foreign country.

The insanity of Section 224 is made even more clear with news over the weekend that the Pentagon has raised to “critical” the threat level of Israel spying on the United States and its officials!

We should not “integrate” our military with any foreign country or organization, but integrating with a country that is a “critical” espionage threat to our national security? How does this make any sense?

The “problem” for American lawmakers is that after the killing in Gaza and now Lebanon, the American people – particularly younger Americans – have turned sharply against the US relationship with Israel. This foreign entanglement has sucked billions from the US treasury over the decades, and it has sucked us into endless conflict in the Middle East, including the current US war on Iran.

Rather than listen to the will of their constituents, Congress has decided to defy the wishes of Americans in favor of the wishes of a foreign government. AIPAC largely controls our Congress and passing Section 224 would be a great victory for the foreign lobby.

It should come as no surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorses Section 224. He may have written it for all we know!

Should Section 224 remain in the NDAA, it would essentially remove future Congresses from any role in determining what level of support, cooperation, and oversight should be included in the US relationship with Israel. It would be worse even than President Obama’s 10 year guaranteed US financial support for Israel. Funding would not only be on autopilot, but the US would be further drawn into Israel’s multiple wars with its neighbors. Worse even than backing up Israel in its regional wars, the wars themselves would become ours.

Americans must speak out against plans to integrate our military with any foreign country. What we should be doing is disentangling from these overseas obligations, whether they be NATO or support for Ukraine or backing Taiwan against China.

We already spend more than a trillion dollars a year on our own military and our national debt is nearing $40 trillion. Taking on the obligation to fight even more wars overseas will hasten our bankruptcy. Section 224 must be stricken from the NDAA and it is up to every American who cares about our sovereignty to demand that Congress do so.

From Mises.org, here.

What’s Wrong With Socialism? – Rabbi Avigdor Miller zatzal

From Toras Avigdor, unabridged:

Q: What’s wrong with the idea of Socialism, of taking away some wealth from the wealthy and giving it to the poor?

A: We are happy to let the rich remain rich. They worked for it or they inherited it, whatever it is, and private property is a holy institution. To take away somebody else’s money, to rob the rich, to give it to the poor—what’s being done, let’s say, by the United States government, by the big welfare organizations of the United States government—all that is a wicked principle. If you earned money, you have a right to bequeath it to your children after you! A family that gained wealth has a right to keep wealth.

Now I don’t care what anybody will say. Private property is a sacred institution. And you poor people who are envious of the rich, get busy! And build up estates of your own. How did they start? They also one day were poor. And this business of taxing the rich people and discouraging them in order to give the poor people the opportunity to loaf in their welfare apartment, get free rent, and free handouts and food from the Department of Agriculture, and free everything else, that’s not the derech haTorah.

Now you’ll say to me, are you trying to undo all the social reforms? And the answer is, I’m trying to undo wickedness. If it’s based on wickedness, yes, we want it undone.

So if the government wants the government can do things but to put burdens on the rich just because you believe in equal distribution of wealth, there’s no such principle al pi Torah.

Now, I don’t want to harp on that too much; people might get up and walk out soon but that’s the truth.

(December 1989)

Ron Paul Equivocates, but… Welfare/Warfare State Ending Means EVEN MORE Brutal Regime

The Federal Reserve is Why the People are Unhappy

by  | Jun 1, 2026

According to the University of Michigan’s latest Index of Consumer Sentiment, a record number of Americans have negative views of the economy. This is yet more evidence that the American people are dissatisfied with their economic condition. Some commentators have claimed to be perplexed by the people’s negative views of the economy since government statistics show that most Americans have good jobs that pay them good salaries.

One problem with this defense of the economy is that government statistics are manipulated to understate the true rates of inflation and unemployment. Trip Powers, writing on Substack, looks at the situation using a more accurate definition of unemployment than what is used by the government. By, for example, including those who have given up looking for work and those working part-time because they cannot find a full-time job, the unemployment rate is over ten percent. An unemployment rate that high indicates a significant economic downturn.

The main reason why even many Americans with above average incomes are dissatisfied with the economy is high prices. According to the latest Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, which is known as the Federal Reserve’s favorite measure of inflation, prices have increased by an understated 3.8 percent over the past year. The culprit behind the price increases is the Federal Reserve. Today, prices are several times higher than they were when President Nixon in 1971 severed the last link between the US dollar and gold, thus removing any restraints on the Federal Reserve’s ability to inflate the currency.

With inflation rising more than incomes, many Americans have suffered a loss of purchasing power even though their nominal income increased. The erosion of Americans’ purchasing power has led to a debt-based economy. This has created a number of bubbles that likely will soon burst. According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by economist Mike Shedlock, total car, credit card, and student loan debts are now higher, measured in real dollars, than nearly 20 years ago during the Great Recession.

Of course, the greatest debtor is the US government. The Federal Reserve’s practice of buying government debt in order to pump more money into the economy enables maintaining the largest government in history. Without the Federal Reserve, the US government would have to finance the welfare-warfare state via direct taxation, instead of through the central bank’s hidden (and regressive) inflation tax.

Many Americans voted for President Trump in 2024 because of his promise to lower prices. Now, Democrats may gain control of one or both houses of Congress by running as the party of “affordability.” Unfortunately, most politicians think the way to address the affordability crisis is with more government spending facilitated by the Federal Reserve. That will only worsen the affordability crisis.

Eventually, Congress will be forced to cut spending as the soon to be over 40 trillion dollars Federal debt leads to a dollar crisis. This crisis will result in the collapse of the welfare, warfare, and fiat money system. Whether it is replaced with an even more authoritarian system or a restoration of liberty depends in part on whether those of us who know the truth do all we can to spread the ideas of liberty. If we are successful, we can make America free, prosperous, and affordable.

From RPI, here.

How Humor Helps Havanah

Humor and Learning Torah

Monday, March 24, 2014
When we began this website, many people were drawn here by divrei Torah, but then they were put off by the humor.  Since they could only recognize serious divrei Torah when they’re bound in a black book, they never came back.  Others were drawn by the name Havolim, looking for letizanus, for jokes, and were put off by the serious divrei Torah.  What can I do.  The Beis Halevi first printed his teshuvos together with his divrei torah on the parsha, but in the later editions he separated them into two volumes, saying that the audience that was interested in the one was totally uninterested in the other.  Lehavdil, I’ve done something similar, and have begun posting the serious Divrei Torah on my other site, Beis Vaad.But the truth is that there is no contradiction between humor and learning Gemara.

Stimulating the mind through humor is mentioned in the Gemara (Shabbos 30b) where it says that before he would begin the shiur, Rabba would say something that would make the students smile, and then his tone and demeanor would change, the mood in the room would shift from light-hearted to an extremely tense focus, and he would begin the shiur, expecting absolute attention, unforgiving of even the smallest lapse.

כי הא דרבה מקמי דפתח להו לרבנן אמר מילתא דבדיחותא ובדחי רבנן לסוף יתיב באימתא ופתח בשמעתא

Rashi says that one should begin with something comedic, and the rabbis/students would laugh, and their minds would open from the happiness.

 ובדחי רבנן. נפתח לבם מחמת השמחה

I don’t think most people realize how wise and effective this method is.  It sounds, to some, like just another quaint story in the Gemara.  So for us, the modern thinkers, who don’t believe anything if it’s anecdotal, here are some interesting studies.

A 1976 study by the late professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, Avner Ziv, (the author of the entry on Humor in the Encyclopedia Judaica) found that those who listened to a comedy album before taking a creativity test scored 20% better than a control group that had not heard the routine.

From Havolim, here.