Madrid resident traveling from Tucson to Portland, soaking in the U S of A with a little bit of Trump Derangement Syndrome via Europe, stops off in Lincoln County for a radio interview
by Paul Haeder / June 23rd, 2026
Dear Pablo Haeder:
When I get to Spain, the relaxed travel mode ends and my head goes crazy…
I’m writing for two reasons. One is to apologize, and of course, if you’d like, we can pick up where we left off.
The other is that “La Nopalita,” my old Volkswagen, is still traveling through the United States with a friend, also named Pablo, and he’ll be passing through Cape Perpetua again in a few days.
Pablo is another great traveler, another very interesting person, and I think you’d like to interview him or just meet him.
If you’d like, I can put you in touch. He’s traveling alone, and I think you’d get along really well.
Let me know. Big hug from Spain.
Adro.
So, here comes Pablo Strubell (b. 1975), who went to university in Madrid to become an economist. He did some import and export work for two companies in Spain, representing them in Malaysia — a sweetener company and a cigarette lighter company.
He is obviously passionate about long journeys, photography, and gastronomy. He told me that he’s been the manager of the Spanish Geographical Society (SGE), which is a small version of the National Geographic Society-USE.
The Spanish Geographical Association (AGE) is a professional partnership of geographers whose main purpose is to promote and further develop the Spanish geographical science and its applications, and disseminate and publicize the geographical knowledge in society.
The AGE was founded in 1975 during the celebration of the Fourth National Conference of Geography. Since then, its activity has been focused on promoting scientific meetings, coordinating the activities of the Spanish Geography Society, and collaborating with other national and international geographic associations.
The AGE states it currently brings together nearly 1,000 people connected with Geography through teaching, research, and the free practice of the profession of geographers.
Pablo also ran a Madrid bookstore, De Viaje. He lived in Malaysia and Turkey, a country about which he has written several guidebooks for the publisher Anaya. In 2005, he embarked on the first of his great journeys, traveling the Silk Road for eight months, a trip he described in the book “I Hate You, Marco Polo!” (Niberta, 2009). Since then, he has been a contributor to *Altaïr* magazine, the AGE Bulletin, and the collective travel blog *La línea del horizonte* (The Horizon Line). In 2010, he crossed Africa by public transport with his partner, Itziar Marcotegui. For twelve months, they traversed the continent from South Africa to Morocco along the Atlantic coast.
De Viaje is a specialized travel bookstore and boutique travel agency located in the upscale Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid. Operating for over 35 years, it serves as a comprehensive hub for travel enthusiasts by combining a curated bookstore, a travel gear shop, and custom trip-planning services.
Here he is, June 23, Waldport, Oregon, heading north with a bit of a detour with Haeder at the studio and at the lighthouse.
We talked about geopolitics, the performative words of his own country, Spain, when it comes to the genocide, to recognizing Palestine over the made-up “country, “ Israel.
We talked about 1492 and Cortez and the Conquistadores.
We talked about Spain stopping short of issuing a formal, official apology to Mexico for colonial-era abuses, even though some recent diplomatic breakthroughs have brought closure to a years-long dispute.
Recent Diplomatic Developments
Late 2025 Reconciliation Efforts: In October 2025, Spain’s Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares took the first major step by publicly acknowledging the “pain and injustice” suffered by Mexico’s Indigenous people.
Royal Acknowledgment: In March 2026, King Felipe VI made a rare and significant admission. During a museum visit in Madrid, he acknowledged there was “much abuse” during the Spanish conquest of the Americas and stated that actions of the colonial era “cannot make us feel proud”.
Diplomatic Thaw: Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum welcomed these statements as a positive first step toward reconciliation. This shift in tone seemed to have normalized diplomatic relations, leading to an official state visit between President Sheinbaum and King Felipe VI in Mexico City.
Background of the Dispute
This reality of Spain tied to the genocide on this continent has been contentious for decades, and recent Mexican tension began in 2019 when former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador demanded a formal apology from Spain for human rights violations and massacres committed during the 1519–1521 conquest of Mexico. For years, the Spanish government and Crown rejected this demand. The rift culminated in 2024 when President Sheinbaum chose not to invite King Felipe VI to her inauguration over the lack of a formal apology
Battle and Fall of Tenochtitlan
The conquest and colonization led to a significant blending of Spanish and indigenous cultures, resulting in a new mestizo culture. This cultural blending had lasting impacts on the social, economic, and political structures of the region.
“The Spanish’s progressive weaponry and imaginative war tactics led to their victory and the Aztec demise.” Smith, Michael E., Andrew Monson, and Walter Scheidel. “The Aztec Empire.” Fiscal regimes and the political economy of premodern states (2015): 71-114.
The legacy of colonialism influenced Latin America’s history for centuries, shaping its development and identity.
In 2018: “I have sent a letter to the king of Spain and another to the pope calling for a full account of the abuses and urging them to apologize to the indigenous peoples (of Mexico) for the violations of what we now call their human rights,” Lopez Obrador, 65, said in the video, which he posted to his social media accounts. “There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the (indigenous) temples,” he said. “The time has come to reconcile. But let us ask forgiveness first.”
New data-driven best estimate is a death toll of 56 million by the beginning of the 1600s – 90% of the pre-Columbian indigenous population and around 10% of the global population at the time. This makes the “Great Dying” the largest human mortality event in proportion to the global population, putting it second in absolute terms only to World War II, in which 80 million people died – 3% of the world’s population at the time.
A figure of 90% mortality in post-contact America is extraordinary and exceeds similar epidemics, including the Black Death in Europe, which resulted in a 30% population loss in Europe. One explanation is that multiple waves of epidemics hit indigenous immune systems that had evolved in isolation from Eurasian and African populations for 13,000 years.
[Incan agricultural terraces in Peru]
[The coast in Cuba where Columbus arrived in 1492.]
Pablo and I talked about many political things, and his travel passion and his Podcast and blogs of old, well, we didn’t get too much into that.
I like the emblematic comments he’s had as a Spaniard traveling in Arizona, California, and Oregon:
“You are from where? Spain? Where is that?”
“By the way, what language do they speak in Spain?”
We also talked about the predominance of English and Spanish in the world, 1.3 billion and 650 million speakers worldwide, respectively. Cultural survival and alas, language extinction were topics we broached. He is from Catalonia, and the school system there teaches K12 the Catalan language, in a country that speaks Castilian.
Ironically, the presence of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans in large numbers in this area of Spain, due to immigration, not only represents a new and interesting twist in the age-old conflict between Catalan and Castilian, but for many, this demographic shift threatens to contribute to the rolling back of the progress that the Catalan language has made in recent years through policies of linguistic normalisation.
And herein lies a paradox in Catalonia: new migrants are protecting the Catalan economy and the (historically Catalan-speaking) elite’s dominant position in society by doing the work that the locals do not want to do; however, their presence in such concentrations threatens the policy-led progress made by the Catalan language in recent years. Barcelona today is characterised by a combination of the characteristics of the old, the modern, the `late-modern,’ and postmodern.”
Despite Spain being the EU Member State with the highest level of immigration per capita throughout the past 20 years, international and comparative opinion studies have shown that Spain has consistently maintained more open attitudes towards immigration than the European average, with less rejection and a greater appreciation of its contribution to society and the economy. There are historic reasons for this phenomenon, including the experience of Spanish migrants in the 1960s and the backlash against nationalism as a result of the Franco regime. Regardless of the cause, relatively permissive public opinion has contributed to the fact that until recently there have been no political parties in Spain that have campaigned on an anti-immigration platform to successfully gain an institutional foothold. This had made Spain an exception in the European context, where the presence of ‘nativist’ parties has become a common feature of parliaments and in many cases governments. However, the Spanish exception came to an end in 2018 with the success of VOX in the Andalusian elections and its entry to the Spanish Congress of Deputies the following year. — Spanish public opinion on immigration and the effect of VOX
Ahh, the 2025 and 2026 years:
Street vendors in major Spanish cities have found themselves at the center of immigration battles as right-wing political parties try to reverse their political poll slump.
The Popular party and the Citizens party have followed their attacks on migrant ships by targeting street vendors, the majority of whom are undocumented immigrants from West Africa.
The vendors, known as manteros because they sell their wares from blankets (mantas) spread out on the pavement, sell pirated designer goods imported from China: mostly handbags, sunglasses, and sports shoes.
Speaking in Algeciras in southern Spain, Ignacio Cosidó, the Popular Party’s spokesman, sought to link manteros with crime in Barcelona.
“Crime in Barcelona is up 20% in a year,” he said. “I’m not saying this is the only reason, but to ensure our coexistence and security, we need to have secure borders.”
His words echo those of Albert Rivera, leader of the center-right Citizens party, who said, “It’s time to bring order to the streets, order and security. We will fight the mafia and make sure the law is obeyed.”
The number of manteros has increased in recent years. There are between 1,000 to 2,000 in Barcelona, with as many as 500 operating in Madrid, as well as in coastal resorts.
Pablo talked about the destructive force of tourism in any place around the world, but especially in Spain. Air BnBs are taking over towns and cities, and service economies of the laboring class are creating economic hardship for the workers. Hence, these hard workers with low pay, and those hotel workers and restaurant attendants, can’t find affordable housing.
We talked about the godfather of travel writing, Paul Theroux, and I recommended On the Plain of Snakes, Theroux’s work taking us on his car trip through Mexico. Several Mexican friends, a scholar and writer being one of them, said he learned more about his native Mexico from Theroux’s 2019 book than from most books written by Mexicans of late.
At 76, Theroux felt he wasn’t getting enough respect,
“I’d observed for years that the whole of American life caters to the 18-35-year-olds. Books, music, educational TV shows, movies—it’s all for them.” Youth have become ‘empowered by their spending, and that’s created a kind of contempt for older Americans.”
The author (now 83) reveals that this feeling of rejection made it easy to identify with migrants and Mexicans, “who knew that same feeling of being despised.” As befits this obstinate traveler and author, his response was,
“My work is my reply, my travel is my defiance. And I think of myself in the Mexican way, not as an old man, but as most Mexicans regard a senior, an hombre de juicio, a man of judgement…”
In this book, Theroux starts his journey crisscrossing the border, interviewing a diverse group of migrants detained in Mexico, and then driving south to one of the poorest states of Mexico, Oaxaca.
Oh, the genocide and hell on earth caused by Spain wasn’t limited to the conquest of the Aztecs.
In response to the deaths of 12 Spanish soldiers, Juan de Oñate ordered a punitive expedition against the Acoma Pueblo (present-day New Mexico) in 1599, killing roughly 800 indigenous men, women, and children. Survivors were subjected to forced labor, and 24 men suffered forced amputations.
Spanish conquistadors were known for their cruel punishments, typically intended to strike fear into the hearts of indigenous peoples. This scene above depicts an event in Florida where the Spanish cut off the hands and feet of native men who opposed them.
Sure, the first No Thank You Thanksgiving:
Fifteen years before the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Juan de Oñate inscribed the above at El Morro on his return from the Gulf of California and the South Sea: “Governor Don Juan de Oñate passed through here, from the discovery of the Sea of the South on the 16th of April, 1605.”
Stucco towers, “painted with colorful animals and sculpted on stone,” were “a marvel to behold,” drawing comparisons to Venice, one observer wrote. Tens of thousands of canoes dotted Lake Texcoco, “some, like great barges, carrying up to sixty people,” writes Fernando Cervantes in Conquistadores, his new history of the era.
Cervantes sets out not to whitewash such atrocities but to place them in context. Modern historians like to emphasize the genocide and greed that are undeniably part of the legacy of the conquistadors, but as Cervantes reminds us, that wasn’t always the case. In Spain at the time, “the most honored members of society were those who had won their riches by force of arms,” and plunder was seen as a “legitimate means to wealth.” Far from being condemned, early explorers such as Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were celebrated for their daring and bravery, in Spain and elsewhere. There was a swashbuckling romance to their stories.
My ideas are a bit different, as I spent much time in Mexico, and especially in Maya land, in Guatemala, too, but the Yucatan, for sure.
My oh my, in a single act of wanton zealotry, the Spanish friar Diego de Landa burned, by his own account, 27 priceless Maya screenfold manuscripts in front of the church in the 4,000-year-old town of Maní, on the Yucatan peninsula, on the evening of July 12, 1562. It was an attempt to erase from the minds of the Maya peoples the memory of their gods and ancient beliefs. In this, it failed dismally. Here is the eloquent testimony to this, ‘The Fire Blunders’, written by the world-famous Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano, taken from his masterpiece Memory of Fire…
Pic 1: Mural by Juan O’Gorman, Biblioteca Central de la UNAM , Mexico City (Click on image to enlarge)
Fray Diego de Landa throws into the flames, one after the other, the books of the Mayas. The inquisitor curses Satan, and the fire crackles and devours. Around the incinerator, heretics howl with their heads down. Hung by the feet, flayed with whips, Indians are doused with boiling wax as the fire flares up and the books snap, as if complaining.
Tonight, eight centuries of Mayan literature turn to ashes. On these long sheets of bark paper, signs and images spoke: They told of work done and days spent, of the dreams and the wars of a people born before Christ. With hog-bristle brushes, the knowers of things had painted these illuminated, illuminating books so that the grandchildren’s grandchildren should not be blind, should know how to see themselves and see the history of their folk, so they should know the movements of the stars, the frequency of eclipses, and the prophecies of the gods, and so they could call for rains and good corn harvest.
Pic 2: Torching of Aztec books by Spanish friars (Click on image to enlarge)
In the centre, the inquisitor burns the books. Around the huge bonfire, he chastises the readers. Meanwhile, the authors, artist-priests dead years or centuries ago, drink chocolate in the fresh shade of the first tree of the world. They are at peace because they died knowing that memory cannot be burned. Will not what they painted be sung and danced through the times of the times?
When its little paper houses are burned, memory finds refuge in mouths that sing the glories of men and of gods, songs that stay on from people to people and in bodies that dance to the sound of hollow trunks, tortoise shells, and reed flutes.
It was Gaspar Antonio Xiu/Chi who had to stand before his own grieving people, read out the Spanish sentences of punishment, and translate the demands of the friars as centuries of Maya history, science, and astronomy turned to ash. Historical records indicate Chi later expressed discomfort and great sorrow regarding the brutality and cultural erasure he witnessed.
On July 12, 1562, Friar Diego de Landa orchestrated an unauthorized, violent Inquisition in the town of Maní, Yucatán. Believing that baptized Maya people were secretly practicing their traditional religion, Landa staged a massive auto-da-fé. He ordered the rounding up and burning of approximately 27 ancient hieroglyphic codices (though modern historians suspect the true number was much higher) along with over 5,000 religious icons and statues.
Chi’s Direct Role: Having been taken in and educated by Franciscan friars after his father was assassinated, the young Chi was highly proficient in Spanish, Latin, and Maya. During the horrifying events at Maní, Chi was forced to act as Landa’s official interpreter and notary.
“During the ceremony a disputed number of Maya codices (or books; Landa admits to 27, other sources claim ‘99 times as many’) and approximately 5,000 Maya cult images were burned. The actions of Landa passed into the Black Legend of the Spanish in the Americas” (Wikipedia article on Diego de Landa).
“Such codices were primary written records of Maya civilization, together with the many inscriptions on stone monuments and stelae which survive to the present day. However, their range of subject matter in all likelihood embraced more topics than those recorded in stone and buildings, and was more like what is found on painted ceramics (the so-called ‘ceramic codex’). Alonso de Zorita wrote that in 1540 he saw numerous such books in the Guatemalan highlands which ‘recorded their history for more than eight hundred years back, and which were interpreted for me by very ancient Indians’ (Zorita 1963, 271-2). Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas lamented that when found, such books were destroyed: ‘These books were seen by our clergy, and even I saw part of those which were burned by the monks, apparently because they thought [they] might harm the Indians in matters concerning religion, since at that time they were at the beginning of their conversion.’ The last codices destroyed were those of Tayasal, Guatemala in 1697. . . “ (Wikipedia article on Maya Codices).
‘We have been victorious / We have conquered’ — Yiddish Soon to be USA Official Language
American Jew lover declares victory in Colombia.
For his part, Cepeda told his supporters that the results presented are preliminary and, therefore, not binding, so they will have to wait for the official tally, including those that will be contested by the Pacto Histórico.
In fact, Cepeda also announced that he will challenge more than 33,000 polling stations (out of the nearly 122,000 in existence) to determine with certainty who won the closest election in Colombian electoral history. Once these votes are properly reviewed, he continued, he will respect the official results.
For his part, President Gustavo Petro, speaking in the same vein, said he will await the official results and take all legal measures to investigate possible irregularities: “No one can be declared president. It is the vote count that determines who the president is. I will abide by the judges’ decisions. Please, let the public remain calm. The reality is that our country is split down the middle, and foreign interference is robbing us of our freedom. A national agreement is essential if we want to preserve our homeland and maintain peace in the years to come.”
The Colombian president also claimed that Israel was behind an alleged manipulation of the election software: “I requested an expert audit of the Bautista brothers’ software, and the Registrar did not allow it.”
Kushner Inc. – What’s Really Happening in Albania/ Henningsen/ Jun 23
In this special report, I conducted a bombshell interview with Albanian dissident academic and whistleblower, Olsi Jazexhi, where he reveals the real story behind the headlines of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s audacious land-grab of Sazan Island in Albania . Olsi describes the rapid Israeli takeover of the his government, key nodes of the military and police forces, the intelligence services, as well as industry. More shocking though, are the large tracks of fertile land and resources, including an incredible 100,000 square hectares that’s being gifted by Albania’s corrupt Prime Minster Edi Rama to Israel, including the establishment of new settlements and Kibbutz farms—effectively extending the infamous Greater Israel Project into Europe and the Balkans. There is also a major geopolitical element too: a longterm plan is for Washington and Tel Aviv to commandeer this strategic maritime choke point leading into the Adriatic Sea and mainland Europe. == Kushner Inc. – What’s Really Happening in Albania
“The fact that MSG is creating dossiers on activists who say things they don’t like shows exactly why private companies should not be allowed to use dangerous surveillance technologies like facial recognition,” Greer told 404 Media in an email. “Large companies can and will use surveillance tech to punish critics, exploit workers, and consolidate power, with no regard for the basic rights they trample in the process.”
In the document, MSG misgenders Greer. “Given their recent treatment of a trans woman trying to use the bathroom in their venue, I’m also not surprised they misgendered me,” Greer added, pointing to a case reported in a recent in-depth report from WIRED on MSG’s surveillance practices.
It is not clear who wrote the document. MSG did not respond to a request for comment.
MSG has deployed facial recognition technology since 2018 to identify people entering the venue. MSG’s facial recognition systems have been used to block entry to the stadium for all sorts of people. The list includes lawyers who work at law firms in litigation with MSG, even if they are not part of the litigation themselves; and potentially a man who once made a shirt that criticized Dolan.
Madison Square Garden is owned and operated by Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp., which is controlled by the Dolan family. James L. Dolan serves as the Executive Chairman and CEO of MSG Entertainment. [1, 2, 3]
The Dolan family’s broader empire includes three primary publicly traded companies: [1]
Sphere Entertainment Co.: Operates the Sphere in Las Vegas and holds a minority stake in MSG Entertainment.
Bread and Circuses and Basketball and Gambling and Lobotomies!
New York City has hosted more than 200 such parades for more than 125 years, honoring everyone from military heroes and presidents to athletes and astronauts.
The first individual honored was Admiral George Dewey in 1899, drawing massive crowds after his Spanish-American War victory.
Albert Einstein (1921), the only scientist to receive the honor
Charles Lindbergh after his 1927 transatlantic flight
Jesse Owens and the U.S. Olympic team in 1936 after the Berlin Games
V-J Day in 1945, marking the Allied victory over Japan
Winston Churchill in 1946, symbolizing Allied leadership
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during their U.S. visit
The Apollo 11 astronauts following the 1969 moon landing
The 1969 “Miracle Mets”
American hostages released from Iran in 1981
“Hometown Heroes,” honoring essential workers during COVID-19 in 2021
The New York Liberty after their 2024 WNBA championship
Jew Jew Jews …. Paul Starr.
This is the worst year—and a perfect time—to commemorate the American Revolution. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is arriving at a political moment wholly inconsistent with the Declaration itself. Our own leader is a would-be king, responsible for “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object,” namely his own power and glory, which he confuses with the nation’s. “Neo-royalist” is an apt term for his conduct of the presidency and his posture toward the world.
Robert Kuttner is a prominent American journalist, political analyst, and author who is Jewish. He frequently writes about the intersection of economics and politics, serving as co-founder and co-editor of the progressive magazine The American Prospect. ¡Los tres amigos judíos! Initially called The Liberal Prospect, the magazine was founded in 1990 by Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich, and Paul Starr as a response to the perceived ascendancy of conservatism in the 1980s.
The Preservative Counter-Revolution: Horne argues that early North American elites revolted in 1776 not to secure universal liberty, but to protect the institution of slavery from London’s growing abolitionist movements and legal precedents.
A History of Exploitation: In discussions regarding the upcoming 250 years, Horne focuses on the selective teaching of history, pointing out the “pedestaling of state-sanctioned violence” and the “moving target of whiteness”.
Systemic Contradictions: He maintains that there is really no “propitious moment to celebrate the Declaration of Independence” without confronting its deep internal contradictions.
I’m a Philosophy Professor. Here’s Why I’m Training AI to Replace Me.
Over at least the last few months, a number of artificial-intelligence companies have been paying academic philosophers to train their models to be better at doing philosophy. I know this because I’ve been doing it myself. While the details vary, in general the work involves prompting AI models with questions designed to test the limits of their philosophical reasoning abilities and then grading their responses, in the hopes of generating data that will be useful in training the next generation of philosobots.
Why would we do this? The money is fine, but very far from life-changing. (I’m not talking about the numerous philosophy Ph.D.s employed on a full-time basis by AI companies, but about professional academics who retain their jobs while working for AI companies on the side.) As Chroniclereadersknow, one of the main ways generative AI is already affecting the academy is that it’s making it easier for students to cheat. Why would we willingly accelerate that process, making our day jobs harder?
Eichmann had been abducted from Argentina by Mossad agents, and there must have been moments when they wondered if they had the right German. Could this dull, almost invisibly anonymous little man be the one who organized the Holocaust, whose timetables and procedures controlled the dispossession, despoliation and murder of six million people? Oh, yes: he freely admitted it – well, at least five million. But he hadn’t done it out of malice, you understand: “personally I have no hatred against a Jew, I have never personally had a bad experience with a Jew; [but] when I switched from being a military to a police officer, I had to carry out all the orders I was given. I am one of those men who carry out orders without reservation, according to my oath of loyalty.”
“Israel has long been indoctrinating its children to believe Palestinians are less than human, and thus not worthy of empathy or compassion,” writes Rifat Audeh, Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, and journalist.
.
“In November, Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, uploaded on its official X page a video of Israeli children singing a song celebrating their country’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The broadcaster deleted the video clip after a huge online backlash.”
.
“Even after the video was silently erased from social media, however, the song remained a subject of discussion and controversy. Many across the world were shocked to see children sing happily about “eliminating” an entire people “within one year”. Yet a closer look at Israeli literature and curricula shows this open celebration of genocide was the only natural outcome of Israel’s persistent indoctrination – or brainwashing to be more blunt – of its children to ensure that they do not view Palestinians as human and fully embrace apartheid and occupation.”
Israel As God
The type of Judaism taught at the schools varied, but they all shared at least one thing.Israel was “omnipresent,” Amir Fleischmann, 31, told me. A version of this claim was made by everyone I spoke with.
Several former students said their schools flew Israeli flags. Tyler Levitan, 38, told me the first thing students would see upon entering his elementary school was a portrait of Israel’s prime minister, which at the time was Benjamin Netanyahu.
Every day of school would start with the Israeli and Canadian national anthems being played. Some of the former students I spoke with said the anthems were treated differently by their peers and teachers. Chelsey Lichtman, 42, said, “We knew the Israeli anthem was more important and more directly connected to us than the Canadian one.” Shoshana Schwebel, 34, stated, “Nobody cared about the Canadian anthem, but the Israeli anthem you had to stand, you had to sing it.”
Israeli national holidays were also marked at the schools.
Schwebel told me that her school always celebrated “‘Israeli Independence Day,’” stating: “They’d bring in bouncy castles and blue and white donuts for everyone. The whole day would just be a day of snow cone machines, popcorn machines, cotton candy machines; it was basically carnival time and everyone would be encouraged to drape themselves in Israeli flags, get their face painted with Israeli flags, and do Israeli-style dancing.”
This experience was shared by other students I spoke with. Jeremy Appel(who writes for The Maple), 34, recounted how the day would be marked: “They brought falafel to us, and told us that it’s Israeli food. And they sat us in rows, like we were on a plane going to Israel. I remember this very euphoric feeling.”
For Stav, 25, being a Jewish Agency Shlichah (Israeli emissary) in Maryland was a full-circle type of coming home. Stav was born in Maryland when her parents served as Shlichim (Israeli emissaries) at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. but her family returned to Israel when she was about a year old.
After growing up on a moshav in Avihayil, north of Tel Aviv, Stav served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years as a combat officer. Once discharged, she wanted to serve her country in another way, feeling she had more to do and give outside the IDF. When she heard about The Jewish Agency’s Shlichut (Israeli emissary service) program, she knew she had to apply and requested to be sent to a Maryland community, so she could come back and create her own memories there.
Every year, The Jewish Agency for Israel sends hundreds of Shlichim to Jewish communities worldwide to work in schools, JCCs, Hillels, summer camps and other local Jewish organizations. Shlichim act as an authentic living bridge to Israel, building lasting personal relationships and spreading an appreciation for Israeli and Jewish culture.
Good fucking Nazi Jews:
Just when we thought the Kiev regime couldn’t possibly become a more destabilizing force, its frontman Volodymyr Zelensky started threatening Belarus with war.
As if a series of recent mass terrorist attacks on Russian civilians weren’t enough, the Neo-Nazi junta not only failed to explain why it attacked a bus packed with Belarussian nationals (including children), but also keeps threatening to attack Minsk.
Emboldened by the US/EU/NATO’s direct participation in massive drone strikes on Russian civilian infrastructure (primarily oil depots and refineries), the Kiev regime keeps escalating, not only with Russia, but virtually all of its neighbors. In reality, it’s perfectly clear that these attacks are not the work of the Neo-Nazi junta alone, as the Western Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is heavily involved.
Namely, American AI giants-in-the-making directly participate in terrorist actions against Russia, as their AI models and networks control drones and other unmanned systems. For Washington DC, the goal is entirely strategic – to exhaust the Russian economy and make it impossible to export oil, gas and their derivatives. The damage they’ve dealt so far is certainly noticeable, but it’s still quite far from a “strategic defeat of Russia” narrative pushed by the mainstream propaganda machine. However, it’s enough to give Zelensky the illusion that he can go around attacking neighbors. He’s effectively trying to blackmail Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, threatening that “Belarus could face attacks out of Ukraine if it fails to dismantle the air defense radar array along its southern border”.
Laughably enough, the mainstream propaganda machine claims that the commercial sector will also benefit from this, with reports that “the Naval Research Laboratory has already implemented the ACTIVATE platform to support weather forecasting workloads”. Parallel Works insists that “the system automates forecasting workflows while securely coordinating computing resources across defense and cloud environments”, with this approach serving to “improve reliability, speed up processing and help redistribute workloads when demand spikes”. The very idea that weather forecasts were part of the motivation to integrate the commercial sector with the Pentagon is beyond ridiculous.
Another Special Envoy appointed by Trump is Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun as US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.
He was born to a Chabad-Lubavitch family in Israel. In 2023, a lawsuit was filed against Kaploun stating he had an affair with a married woman he met at a synagogue. It was settled shortly before his appointment. His appointment was secured by Miriam Adelson.
Kaploun has expressed support for President Trump’s desire to remove accreditation and funding from educational institutions that do not sufficiently punish students who act in support of Palestinians. Trump is actively trying to transport all remaining Palestinians to Libya which is engaged in an ongoing conflict. The US is attempting to install a proxy government loyal to Israel.
Rabbi Kaploun is on record proclaiming that Armenia was their latest coup wherein they used gentle to harsh persuasion to affect change in the government. Armenia is and has been in wars and conflicts for decades. Its current PM spent much of his young adult time in jail and rules somewhat like Trump. Rabbi Kaploun’s entire speech made after his confirmation was a declaration of victimhood as a result of his religion.
In an interesting twist to the Pakistan Minister seen trembling on camera during the Switzerland summit for the Peace Pause, Iran claims their intelligence informed them a trap had been set by the Americans in the hall prepared for the photo-op. It was for this reason the Iranian team left and Trump unleashed his terrorist threat that the delegation would not return to Iran alive. Iran claims the journalists were a trigger. Some of them included:
Barak Ravid for Axios is Jewish.
Trey Yingst for Fox News reported in Gaza as an IDF companion.
Sanam Mahoozi is an environmental journalist.
Anniek Bao, a CNBC reporter focused on China : As an economy reporter, she frequently co-authors and contributes to breaking news regarding Middle Eastern conflicts, market volatility, and global asset pricing involving Israel (the Jewish state).
“Unfortunately, President Zelensky has shown that Ukraine, in terms of mentality – glorifying bandits, murderers from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) – is not ready to be part of the European family.”
In such a family “you cannot glorify bandits [who] murdered women and children, murdered Poles.” The deputy leader of the national-conservative Law and Justice (Pis) party, Przemysław Czarnek, waspishly described the decision as “a shameful signal sent to Polish society,” nothing less than “a demonstration of shameful ingratitude” to one of Kyiv’s strongest supporters against Russian invasion. Ukrainian “elites” still sought “to build their national identity on the cult of Banderism.”
Zelensky has now returned the Order via post, making a fuss of the affair with photographic evidence of the gesture accompanied by statement.
Poland hosts nearly 1 million Ukrainian refugees, currently comprising 2.5% of its population, a demographic jolt to accompany the pre-war presence of some 1.3-1.5 million Ukrainian migrant workers and long-term residents. Despite figures showing the successful employ of roughly 69% of working age Ukrainians and the enrolment of 200,000 Ukrainian children in Polish schools, the competition of resources has become a source of agitation and comment.
We know US Aid is bad on many levels, but . . .
Ten-year-old Peter Donde was suffering from H.I.V., contracted from his mother during childbirth
. With the help of a U.S.-led aid program called PEPFAR, he was able to stay healthy.
Elon Musk – who just became the world’s first trillionaire – is insisting he had nothing to do with it.
“There is not even a single dead child!” he says. “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!”
In fact, severalheadlines, worldwide, havetold us horror stories just like Donde’s. He is one of hundreds of thousands of people, including awful numbers of children, who have died since the Trump-Vance administration callously dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. government’s international humanitarian and development agency, which administered programs like PEPFAR. The brutal cuts were led by Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which, while tasked with cutting waste and making government more efficient, did notactuallyaccomplish much of that at all.
On top of DOGE’s apparent failure to achieve its mandate was the active harm it caused, seen in the deaths of so many children like Donde, and with so many more destined to meet a similar fate if the Trump brutality continues. That widely reported reality was one Rep. Ro Khanna pointed out on Saturday, during an interview on the ‘I’ve Had It’ podcast…
The Nobodies: Eduardo Galeano
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
― From Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
For decades, American administrations run by both parties saw humanitarian diplomacy, or “soft power,” as a cost-effective measure to help stabilize volatile but strategically important regions and provide basic needs for people who might otherwise turn to international adversaries. Those investments, experts say, help prevent regional conflict and war that may embroil the U.S. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition,” Jim Mattis, who was defense secretary during Trump’s first administration, told Congress in 2013 when he led U.S. Central Command.
Food insecurity has long been closely linked with regional turmoil. But despite promises from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that lifesaving operations would continue amid widespread cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has terminated funding to WFP for several countries. Nearly 50% of the WFP’s budget came from the U.S. in 2024.
The year was 1979. The United States was in the midst of the Cold War and the late Jimmy Carter was president. During the preceding years and decades, the CIA had conducted a series of successful coups against democratically elected governments in countries like Iran, Guatemala, and Chile – often using anti-communist paranoia as justification. After a socialist revolution in Afghanistan the year prior, the agency and its co-conspirators in Washington finally had an excuse to confront the Soviets more directly – albeit through rather unsavory proxies.
The plan, according to Carter’s closest adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to provide weapons and training to Wahhabi terrorists known as the mujahideen in order to provoke an intervention by the Soviet military. According to Brzezinski, Carter signed the first directive for aid to these Islamist extremist “freedom fighters” on July 3, 1979, and the decade-long proxy war that followed resulted in the overthrow of the socialist government in Kabul and was also a significant contributing factor in the downfall of the USSR – the world’s first socialist society.
After taking power in April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) instituted an array of socialist policies, including “land reform, growth in public services, price controls, separation of church and state, full equality for women, legalization of trade unions and a sweeping literacy campaign.” This might seem like a positive development, but not in the eyes of the U.S. empire and its capitalist agenda. In addition to the CIA’s covert support for the mujahideen’s holy war against the secular evils of increased living standards and women’s rights, USAID also played an interesting role in this conflict.
The agency reportedly spent $50 million on a “jihad literacy” program in Afghanistan, primarily during the 1980s. This effort included the publication and distribution of ultra-conservative textbooks that “tried to solidify the links between violence and religious obligation,” according to author Dana Burde. Lessons on basic math and language were accompanied by depictions of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, ammunition, and a commitment to militancy and retribution against the Russians (who were depicted as “invaders” despite having been invited to lend military assistance by the PDPA). After consolidating power in the ‘90s, the Taliban government revised and reprinted these textbooks, and copies have even been found in Pakistan as recently as 2013.
Assisting the Taliban’s precursor with reactionary, jihadist propaganda to viciously sabotage a progressive, feminist government and its allies is a strange form of “humanitarianism.” You might even say it’s the opposite of humanitarianism. Was this just a mistake that USAID made in the distant past and has since learned from, or is there a continued pattern of this behavior?
“To say that ‘socialism doesn’t work’ is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.”
Despite its reputation among American liberals as a benevolent humanitarian organization, USAID is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is a Trojan horse for Western imperialism — an insidious, destabilizing force that causes far more harm to the Global South than any “good” resulting from its ostensible assistance. And, despite far-right delusions about the agency in question supposedly being composed of “radical left lunatics,” its history reveals consistent and relentless opposition toward leftist movements around the world. Given its blood-drenched track record, the best humanitarianism the United States can offer developing countries is to simply leave them alone and respect their sovereignty.
these sorts of reports seemingly impress upon some that action is being taken, or that the world is taking the scales off their eyes, but DO NOT BE FOOLED! We are surrounded by the Sodomites!
No Limits to the Epstein HD spy cam tapes the Jews have vaulted somewhere in Silicon Wadi! Now that’s POWER!
Outgoing President Gustavo Petro questioned the integrity of the election and accused Israel of interfering through fraud. Petro was previously barred from entering the United States after his remarks at the United Nations Security Council regarding Israeli actions in Gaza, a move that triggered a coordinated campaign against him by Israeli and American officials.
It is a region in Israel that serves as one of the global centres for advanced technology. It spans the Israeli coastal plain and is cited as among the reasons why the country has become known as the world’s “start-up nation” (see science and technology in Israel).[1][2] The highest concentrations of high-tech industry in the region can be found around Tel Aviv, including small clusters around the cities of Raʽanana, Petah Tikva, Herzliya, Netanya, Rehovot, and Ness Ziona. Additional clusters of high-tech industry can be found in Haifa and Caesarea. More recent high-tech establishments have been raised in cities such as Jerusalem and Beersheba, in towns such as Yokneam Illit, and in Airport City. Israel has the third-highest number of startups by region, the highest rate of startups per capita in the world, with one in three cybersecurity unicorns in the world being an Israeli company.
These fucking towns need obliteration.
We welcome Ann Larson to discuss her experience working as a grocery cashier during the COVID-19 pandemic, the complex emotional and structural factors involved in professional success and failure, meritocracy as a simplification of economic outcomes, the multiple forms of labor involved in supermarket work, the difference between one’s status and skillset, food waste at the expense of wages, and the importance of community in surviving low wage work.
Ann Larson’s writing on education, debt, and low-wage work has appeared in The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Fast Company, and The Nation, among other publications. She is coauthor of Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition and is a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her new book, available June 9, 2026, is called Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register.
CAPITALISM is the fucking problem, blokes.
Tentative But Defiant, Lebanese Families Return to Southern Lebanon Amid Continued Occupation
Israel conducted some of its heaviest attacks on Lebanon following the U.S.-Iran deal. The bombardment has finally halted but troops remain.
In response to Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon on Thursday, Iran refused to de-link Lebanon and allow the agreement with the U.S. to move forward, declaring it would close the Strait of Hormuz, jeopardizing a key provision of the MOU. Iran also told mediators it was prepared to suspend the agreement entirely and launch retaliatory strikes against Israel, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site.
Nevertheless, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that Israeli troops would remain in a “security zone” in southern Lebanon, which runs several kilometers along the border into Lebanese territory and encompasses more than 60 Lebanese villages, indefinitely. “Our fighters in southern Lebanon have full freedom of action to thwart any direct or emerging threat against them or against the residents of the north. The IDF has no restrictions in this matter,” Netanyahu said on Monday. “I stand firm on the fact that we will remain in the security zone in southern Lebanon for as long as is required to protect the residents of the north and all the citizens of the state.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz also said that Israeli troops would not withdraw from Beaufort castle—also known as Qalaat al-Shaqif—in southern Lebanon. “Israel has no intention of withdrawing from the Beaufort, which is an integral part of the security zone in Lebanon and essential for the defense of the Galilee settlements and IDF forces,” Katz wrote on X.
Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem rejected Israel’s continued occupation of Lebanese territory, saying in a televised address on Sunday Israeli troops “remaining on Lebanese land is impossible. There are no security zones for Israel…we have a national army which deploys, and it is responsible for preserving sovereignty, and it is who we cooperate with.” He also condemned the hypocrisy of Israel’s position. “A ceasefire means Hezbollah does not fire and Israel is free to occupy anywhere. We do not want such a ceasefire.”
Even Lebanese President Joseph Aoun—who at the outbreak of the latest phase of the war on March 2 regularly condemned what he called Iranian interference in Lebanese affairs, declared a ban on Hezbollah military activity, and supported efforts to expel Iran’s ambassador from Beirut—appeared to warm to Tehran’s stance. Aoun held direct talks with Israeli officials in Washington—the first publicly acknowledged direct negotiations in decades—that were conducted alongside the U.S.-Iran negotiations in what was presented as two separate tracks. Since the signing of the MOU, however, Aoun has welcomed the deal and spoken by phone with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
Everyone knows that American politicians are controlled by Israel. AIPAC have said as much: “98% AIPAC-endorsed candidates have won their general election so far”, is what AIPAC have claimed.
In Britain, the top jobs in Government were held by Labour Friends of Israel. Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, Wes Steeting, Rachel Reeves, as well as the Speaker of the House, are all Labour Friends of Israel. And three-quarters of the Tories are Conservative Friends of Israel.
This documentary proves beyond any doubt that Israel attempts to influence our MPs, and the recent assault on civil liberties demonstrates that “Friends of Israel” are working for Israeli interests.
Christ, fucking CUster’s fucking offspring, man, what psychosis of whiteness, man oh man.
As a child in South Dakota, Ernie LaPointe was told: Don’t tell anyone who your great-grandfather was.
If his neighbors or friends knew he was descended from Sitting Bull, the storied Hunkpapa Lakota leader, he would never have a normal childhood, his mother told him.
“‘There will be a time and place when you get the permission to do it,’” LaPointe, now 77, recalled his mother saying.
Now he protects the legacy of Sitting Bull, who helped lead the resistance to the U.S. government’s seizure of the Great Plains and became perhaps even more famous in death than in life.
Almost 150 years ago, Sitting Bull’s followers defeated Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, one of the most closely studied and hotly debated military clashes in American history. Sitting Bull is said to have had a vision that presaged a great victory, which came weeks later for warriors led by Crazy Horse.
More than a thousand miles south, in Arizona, Chip Custer’s lineage was not something he could have hidden, even if he wanted to.
He was born George Armstrong Custer IV, the great-great-grand-nephew of the famous lieutenant colonel. After his father (George Armstrong Custer III) died suddenly in 1991, Chip inherited the job of minding the legacy of a man who is among the most lionized and vilified figures in American history.
To the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and other tribes, the battlefield remains hallowed ground, a place of great triumph over a government that suppressed their way of life.
Chip Custer first visited the battlefield in 1976, for the 100th anniversary of the battle, as a 21-year-old hippie with no expressed interest in family history. He drove up from college to surprise his father, a retired Army officer who had fought in three wars.
As they sat through a quiet ceremony near what is known as Last Stand Hill, the American Indian Movement leader Russell Means spoke out to celebrate the cavalry’s defeat.
“My father, of course, was incensed over the way that whole event went,” Custer said. “So that was my introduction.”
DIRT and feces, SCOTUS.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to stop the execution of Victor Saldaño, convicted of murder in Texas in 1996, but who subsequently got the support of not just defense experts, but state experts as well, who determined that he was intellectually disabled and thus not eligible for execution under the law.
Saldaño was convicted of murder in a robbery gone wrong, but his first lawyers did not raise the claim of intellectual disability at trial. Saldaño was in the country illegally at the time of the crime. Eventually, however, his case was referred to the Texas Office of Capital Forensic Writs, a state public defender’s office. Lawyers there determined that Saldaño had an IQ of 74, within the range that could qualify him for not being executed.
“Every expert who has evaluated Mr. Saldaño for intellectual disability agrees he’s intellectually disabled,” Wolff said in a statement. “The state of Texas, who several years ago sought Mr. Saldaño’s execution, now agrees that he meets the criteria for intellectual disability. It is disappointing that the courts have yet to allow us through the courthouse doors to present what we believe to be overwhelming evidence that Mr. Saldaño is intellectually disabled and, as such, the U.S. Constitution forbids his execution.”
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Think of the millions imprisoned by these cunt microchips and motherboards, and those same fucking chips are used in Tomahawks and other bombs that have murdered millions. No death sentence(s)?
Intel CEO praises Israel’s tech sector: “Very disruptive and innovative”
Lip-Bu Tan says the country’s resilience and entrepreneurial culture continue to shape Intel’s future despite regional turmoil.
“Quite a significant amount of my investments are in Israel,” Tan said during an interview on the No Priors podcast, hosted by tech investors Elad Gil and Sarah Guo. “They have very disruptive, innovative entrepreneurship and they work really hard.”
And who is the fucking mass murderer?
Saldaño, an Argentine national, was convicted of the capital murder of Paul Ray King in Collin County, Texas. During the sentencing phase, the prosecution utilized a clinical psychologist who testified that Saldaño’s Hispanic ethnicity was a factor indicating “future dangerousness”—a requirement for the death penalty in Texas.
We are in HELL: Faggotry territory while USA kills.
[A mess dress uniform is the military equivalent of civilian black-tie attire, worn by officers and sometimes enlisted personnel at official formal evening functions, military balls, and weddings. It is primarily composed of a tailored, cropped jacket, high-waisted trousers or a skirt, miniature medals, and specific evening accessories. ]
A Space Force general donned a new mess dress that the service is testing for wear this fall, an official confirmed to Task & Purpose.
The new mess dress uniform is black with silver buttons and embroidery. The lower sleeve-cuff area shows a diamond shape that outlines the same design on the service’s flag with the delta, globe, orbit, and Polaris star. Mess dress uniforms are the military equivalent of tuxedos or similar attire that would be worn to a black-tie event, according to Space Force uniform regulations.
The uniform news was first reported by Air & Space Force Magazine. Their reporters noticed that the Space Force’s Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman sported a new uniform at a graduation at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School in Las Vegas, Nevada, in mid June.
An Air Force spokesperson told Task & Purpose that Saltzman was wearing the first test version of the Space Force mess dress, which is expected to enter “formal wear testing” in the fall.
“The Space Force is continuing to work with industry partners to determine production requirements and the timeline for service-wide availability,” the official said. “Guardians who volunteered and were selected as wear testers have recently completed their mess dress fittings.”
The war is ON:
Rocket Lab quietly launched a small satellite from New Zealand on Friday in a high-flying military exercise to test the US Space Force’s ability to rapidly respond to a crisis in low-Earth orbit.
The launch was scarcely announced in advance. The only public indication of an impending launch was the release of a warning for pilots and sailors to steer clear of the rocket’s flight path. Rocket Lab did not provide a livestream of the launch, as it does for most of its missions. As of Monday morning, officials from Rocket Lab and the Space Force had not acknowledged the launch in any official public statements.
Based on previous statements from officials, the Victus Haze mission will unfold with additional maneuvers to bring Rocket Lab’s Puma satellite closer to True Anomaly’s Jackal. Eventually, the satellites are expected to switch roles, with Jackal serving as the inspector and Puma acting as the target.
True Anomaly, a Colorado-based company specializing in building highly maneuverable satellites for national security missions, announced last Thursday that its latest Jackal spacecraft had achieved all of its “test objectives” following its arrival in orbit in early May to demonstrate the satellite’s capabilities for “end-to-end uncooperative rendezvous and proximity operations.”
“Jackal has been fully commissioned and is prepared for its next phase of mission,” True Anomaly said, without articulating what the next phase would entail.
There’s your IDF Jew Boy: Oracle workforce shrinks by about 21,000 employees amid AI adoption.
Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds developer Obsidian Entertainment is being sued in a class action lawsuit that accuses the studio of “a systematic pattern of wage and hour violations under the California Labor Code and Industrial Welfare Commission (’IWC’) Wage Orders.”
As spotted by a Redditor and reported by GamesRadar+, the lawsuit – which seemingly first went to court in October 2025 – was raised by plaintiff Victoria Turner, a QA lead who reportedly worked on The Outer Worlds 2.
According to the court papers, Obsidian is accused of “increas[ing its] profits by violating state wage and hour laws” and failing to “pay all wages (including minimum wages and overtime wages),” as well as wages “due upon separation of employment.” It is also accused of failing to provide meal periods and rest breaks.
The class lawsuit covers “all persons currently or formerly employed by any or all Defendants as nonexempt employees in the State of California at any time between October 9, 2021 and the date of class certification.” The plaintiff also wants to certify “all members of the Class who separated their employment with any or all Defendants at any time between October 9, 2022 and the date of class certification.”
It seeks monetary relief and to “recover, among other things, unpaid wages, unreimbursed business expenses, benefits, interest, attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses” in addition to “penalities pursuant” to alleged labor code violations.
A rapid reduction in Chinese crude imports has helped stop oil from trading even higher since the outbreak of the U.S.-Iran war — but analysts warn that price rises will be needed as market balance is gradually restored.
The Middle East conflict has entered its 100th day — but fears of a $200-per-barrel spike have failed to materialize, despite global crude supplies tumbling 14% since hostilities began on Feb. 28.
Market strategists say China is acting as a key pressure valve on energy markets, with Beijing’s move to cut crude imports from 11.7 million barrels a day in February to just under 9 million a day by late May helping to ease the Strait of Hormuz supply shock.
China’s cut represents about 74% of the decline in global crude imports, a “disproportionate” share of the adjustment, according to J.P. Morgan analysts, who said this has helped prices remain “remarkably calm” four months into the conflict.
However, Societe Generale warns that the market will ultimately require higher oil prices moving forward as global inventories are depleted and strategic reserves require rebuilding.
Myanmar army killed over 700 civilians in six months, UN says
China, a key ally of Myanmar’s military government, congratulated Min Aung Hlaing on Friday and pledged “high-quality” cooperation on Beijing’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects.
“China supports the new Myanmar government in safeguarding national peace and stability, and realising development and prosperity,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters.
For critics and many analysts, however, the military handover and Min Aung Hlaing’s rise to the presidency are seen as a strategic pivot to consolidate his power as head of a nominally civilian government and earn international legitimacy, while protecting the interests of an armed forces that has run the country directly for five of the past six decades.
Many citizens also agree that the move is civilian window dressing.
“There is no hope for the country under his presidency. The country will only get worse,” a 50-year-old Yangon resident, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity due to security concerns, said of Min Aung Hlaing’s win.
“I never expected anything from this government anyway,” she said, adding it was formed through “fake elections”.
And so, Gaza is the laboratory for tyranny, torture, emotional-psychological-legal stress tests.
Two years ago?
26 Mar 2024
There are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel is committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of the Gaza Strip, according to a report issued by a United Nations-appointed expert.
In the report, issued late on Monday, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese said there are clear indications that Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention.
Albanese, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but not an official voice on behalf of the United Nations, said she had found “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of … acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met”.
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” she said.
The report was immediately rejected by Israel as an “obscene inversion of reality”.
Entitled Anatomy of a Genocide, the report listed the violating acts as: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
Albanese noted that Israel has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. A further 12,000 are reported missing, presumed dead under the rubble.
More than 70 percent of the recorded deaths have been women and children and Israel has failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent – adult males – were active Hamas fighters, she said.
A Franco-Israeli lawyer has filed a case with the International Criminal Court (ICC), calling for the prosecution of eight individuals for the crime of incitement to genocide: seven current and former high-ranking Israeli government and military officials, and a journalist. The submission, obtained by Statewatch, is published here.
Benjamin Netanyahu (Prime Minister)
Yoav Gallant (Former Defense Minister)
Israel Katz (Current Defense Minister / former Foreign Minister)
Bezalel Smotrich (Finance Minister)
Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister)
Isaac Herzog (President)
Giora Eiland (Retired IDF Major General)
Ben-Menashe noted that “on March 17, 2000, Madeleine Albright made a speech at the American Iranian Council apologizing to the Iranian people for America overthrowing an elected government in 1952 in Iran and bringing the Shah back”
Indeed, on March 17, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a speech apologizing for the overthrow of Iran’s popular elected president Mohammed Massadegh in 1953, saying:
In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Massadegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.
Moreover, during the next quarter century, the United States and the West gave sustained backing to the Shah’s regime. Although it did much to develop the country economically, the Shah’s government also brutally repressed political dissent.
As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations. Even in more recent years, aspects of U.S. policy towards Iraq, during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted, especially in light our subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein.
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Sure, those fucking millions upon millions working for the death military murder cults, we have problems!
Totally fucked, every fucking piece of military hardware shoved down your throats, a dozen deaths from heat.
THese are real journalists, in London, asked how they enjoy or what they tihink of London, and Jeremy says, “Being here where genocide has been normalized, and people are being locked up for supporting Palestinians, I have no reward being here.”
“Every US counterterrorism law traces back to criminalising dissent on Palestine”
“You can’t walk around and think the sights are beautiful.”
Here we go . . .
On Aug. 7, Abelardo de la Espriella will take office as Colombia’s newest president, in a major rightwards shift from Gustavo Petro’s outgoing leftist administration.
As Colombia continues to grapple with paramilitary violence, De la Espriella, who has dubbed himself “The Tiger,” has proposed a hard-line approach backed by the likes of Javier Milei and Donald Trump.
So as another controversial and outspoken right-winger takes power in South America, here are 11 things you need to know about Abelardo de la Espriella.
1. He Has No Government Experience
Before launching his presidential campaign, De la Espriella was a lawyer and businessman. He will be the first modern Colombian president elected with no prior political experience.
2. He’s Made a Brand of Flaunting His Wealth
Often seen wearing tailored suits, fedoras, and fancy watches, De la Espriella has hinged his public persona on his millionaire status. He self-produced a covers album, including a version of Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ with an accompanying video in which he was shown eating sushi on a private jet. For those interested in living the De la Espriella lifestyle, his website sells everything from his own rum and wine brands to luxury suit jackets.
Starmer announced he will step down after mounting pressure from Labour MPs, less than two years after leading Labour to a historic election victory. His resignation clears the way for Andy Burnham, who is expected to become both Labour leader and prime minister, with strong backing from senior party figures including Wes Streeting.
welfare cuts and austerity.
Starting with the most immediate and visceral issue. Burnham has said, explicitly, that he would cut the welfare bill in order to fund higher defence spending.
‘I am not squeamish about saying that the plan would be to reduce the welfare bill,’ he told the Times. This is. of course, at a moment when food bank usage is soaring, when the cost of living crisis is still grinding working families into the pavement, when the most vulnerable people in Britain are already choosing between heating and eating.
His answer to that crisis is to cut the safety net further. One might reasonably ask: why not tax the wealthy? Why not close the loopholes that allow billionaires to pay less than their cleaners? Why not ask those who have hoarded the most to contribute the most? Those questions are not on Burnham’s agenda. Instead, he reaches for the same austerity playbook that has failed Britain for fifteen years and produced the conditions he now claims to want to fix.
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We’ll get to this in a sec!
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Back to InBred UnUnited Queen/r-dumb.
As far as I can tell, Burnham has been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since at least 2015. In that year’s leadership campaign, he pledged that his first state visit as prime minister would be to Israel. He called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement ‘spiteful.’ He praised ‘Israeli democracy.’ He described the Balfour Declaration, the document that set in motion the dispossession of the Palestinian people, as ‘British values in action.’ He voted for the Iraq War, which killed over a million people, and while he has since expressed regret, the fact remains that when it mattered, he sided with the Empire.
On Gaza, he has since signed letters calling for a ceasefire and for the recognition of Palestinian statehood, which represents the absolute bare minimum of decency and not a great deal more. But he has refused, repeatedly and under direct questioning, to describe what is happening in Gaza as a genocide.
A new nationwide survey shows that most Israelis support maintaining buffer zones in areas like Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and the Jordan Valley. They oppose withdrawing from the West Bank unless Israeli-controlled security is ensured, and do not trust international forces to protect Israel’s borders.
Everything a Jew touches is the dirty legacy of their anti-humanity, anti-goyimism….
Antisemitism has been present in Great Britain for almost a thousand years of recorded history. In the twelfth century, Catholic medieval Britain was a persecutory society, particularly when it came to Jews. It pioneered the blood libel and the church was a leader in instituting cruel legislation and discriminatory conduct toward Jews.
Prof. Robert S. Wistrich
No. 70,
Antisemitism has been present in Great Britain for almost a thousand years of recorded history. In the twelfth century, Catholic medieval Britain was a persecutory society, particularly when it came to Jews. It pioneered the blood libel and the church was a leader in instituting cruel legislation and discriminatory conduct toward Jews.
English literature and culture are drenched in antisemitic stereotypes. Major British authors throughout the centuries transmitted culturally embedded antisemitism to future generations. Although they did not do so deliberately, it was absorbed and has had a long-term, major impact on British society.
In the new century the United Kingdom is a European leader in several areas of antisemitism. It holds a pioneering position in promoting academic boycotts of Israel. The same is true for trade-union efforts at economic boycotts. There is also no other Western society where jihadiradicalism has proved as violent and dangerous as in the UK.
In the UK the anti-Zionist narrative probably has greater legitimacy than in any other Western society. Antisemitism of the “anti-Zionist” variety has achieved such resonance, particularly in elite opinion, that various British media are leaders in this field. Successive British governments neither share nor have encouraged such attitudes-least of all Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They have shown concern over antisemitism and the boycott movement and tried to counteract them. However, Trotskyites who infiltrated the Labour Party and the trade unions in the 1980s have been an important factor in spreading poisonous attitudes. The BBC has also played a role in stimulating pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli attitudes over the years.
“The United Kingdom has been a European leader in several areas of antisemitism in the new century. It holds a pioneering position in promoting academic boycotts of Israel. The same is true for trade-union efforts at economic boycotts.
“Although the anti-Zionist narrative is worldwide and widespread in the European Union, this discourse in the UK probably exceeds that of most other Western societies. Thus antisemitism has achieved a degree of resonance, particularly in elite opinion, that makes the country a leader in encouraging discriminatory attitudes. Trotskyites who infiltrated the Labour Party and the trade unions back in the 1980s are an important factor in spreading this poison.”
Prof. Robert Wistrich holds the Neuberger Chair for Modern European and Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 2002 he has been director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at that university and has been vigorously involved in the struggle against its inroads.
He adds: “There is also no other Western society where jihadiradicalism has proved as violent and dangerous as in the UK. Although antisemitism is not the determining factor in this extremism, it plays a role. This Islamist radicalism has helped shape the direction of overall antisemitism in the UK.
“Another pioneering role of the UK, especially in the area of anti-Israelism is the longstanding bias in BBC reporting and commentary about the Jewish world and Israel in particular. Double standards have long been a defining characteristic of its Middle East coverage. This has had debilitating consequences. The BBC plays a special role owing to its long-established prestige as a news source widely considered to be objective. It carries a weight beyond that of any other Western media institution.
“One characteristic of English antisemitism has been its often understated nature, in keeping with British tradition. That makes it more effective because one does not become aware of it so easily. One example among many is the British journalist Richard Ingrams, who was editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye for twenty-three years starting in the 1960s. He once wrote in the Observer that he threw away unread all correspondence he received from people with Jewish names regarding the Middle East because, he thought, they must be biased on the subject. If someone were to tell him he is an antisemite he would, of course, reject that. But would he publicly write the same thing about Arab correspondents?”
SASSOONS:
The wealthy Jewish Sassoon family derived the majority of their wealth from the opium trade in China. The entire trade was controlled by Jewish families only. Sassoon would not allow any other race to engage in “the Jews’ business” of importing and selling opium.
Opium was strictly a Jewish monopoly, but these Jews were working under British passports.
The British monarchy honored them with privilege and knighthood. To this day the Sassoons are in the history books as “great developers” of India, but the source of their vast wealth is never mentioned – the destruction and impoverishment of the population of China.
The Opium Wars began with the British Army fighting as mercenaries of the Sassoons. In 1839, the Manchu Emperor ordered that it be stopped. He named the Commissioner of Canton, Lin Tse-hsu, to lead a campaign against opium. Lin seized 2,000 chests of Sassoon opium and threw it into the river. The British Army responded by attacking cities and blockading ports. The Chinese Army, decimated by 10 years of rampant opium addiction, proved no match for the British Army.
•The war ended in 1839 with the signing of “The Treaty of Nanking.” This included provisions especially designed to guarantee the Sassoons the right to enslave an entire population with opium.
✨Look up on the history of the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion.
The “peace treaty” included these provisions: “1) Full legalization of the opium trade in China, 2) compensation from the opium stockpiles confiscated by Lin of 2 million pounds, 3) territorial sovereignty for the British Crown over several designated offshore islands.
TALK TALK TALK, ZJews and their fucking TALK Therapy….
Advances during the “first mass killing of the 20th century” have saved countless lives since.
Traditional Freudian analysis is typically a long-term, intensive process often involving multiple sessions per week. While original psychoanalysis is less common today, it laid the foundation for virtually all modern psychotherapies. Many contemporary mental health professionals utilize evolving approaches known as psychodynamic therapy.
TALK TALK TALK to JEW JEW JEW:
Traditional Freudian psychoanalysis typically costs between $150 and $400+ per session. Because this method involves intensive therapy (often 3 to 4 times a week), yearly costs can range from $15,000 to over $50,000, making it a significant financial commitment.
Skepticism of Zionism: In 1930, Freud was asked by a Zionist leader to issue a public statement of support for a Jewish home in Palestine. He declined. In a famous letter, he outlined his “sober judgment,” arguing that attempting to establish a Jewish state would inflame tensions with the Christian and Islamic worlds. He believed a Jewish homeland would be better suited in a “less historically-burdened land”
In 1930, just a few months after the violence had come to a stop, Keren HaYesod, a fundraising organization established by the Zionist Congress to help Jews to immigrate to the Land of Israel, launched a public relations campaign for the Yishuv, the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. The organization sent out letters to the world’s prominent Jews asking if they might be willing to issue a statement of support on behalf of the Jews living in the Land of Israel. One such letter, sent by Chaim Koffler, the head of the Keren HaYesod in Vienna, made it to the hands of one Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis who also happened to be Jewish.
Freud, it appears, took some time to consider this request. His response sent on February 26th, 1930, came in a carefully crafted, subtly scathing but perfectly polite letter sent back to Dr. Koffler where he made his feelings on the subject of Zionism and Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel very clear.
Not only did Freud decline the request to issue a public statement of support, but he also made it very clear that he was, let’s call it – unsympathetic – to the plight of the Jews living in the Yishuv.
“I cannot do as you wish,” wrote Freud. “Whoever wants to influence the masses must give them something rousing and inflammatory and my sober judgment of Zionism does not permit this.”
As for expressing sympathy for the Hebrew pioneers who had suffered through the riots, Freud felt that “the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.”
Freud closed the letter with about as much sympathy as he started it.
“Now judge for yourself whether I, with such a critical point of view, am the right person to come forward as the solace of a people deluded by unjustified hope.”
Upon reading Freud’s reply, Dr. Koffler, surprised by its contents, wrote in pencil in the top corner of the letter, “Do not show this to foreigners.” In fact, the letter remained unpublished for 60 years.
Freud in Zion is a groundbreaking study by Israeli psychoanalyst and historian Eran J. Rolnik that explores the fascinating intersection of psychoanalysis, Zionism, and modern Jewish identity in early-20th-century Palestine and the emerging State of Israel. [1, 2]
The book explores how psychoanalytic theory permeated the intellectual and popular discourse of the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community), examining the frictions between collectivist Zionist ideologies and individualistic psychological exploration. Rolnik draws on previously unpublished archival documents—including personal letters by Sigmund Freud—to reveal how psychoanalysis was both adapted by and influenced the builders of the new Jewish state.
Key themes of the book include:
The “New Jew”: How early psychoanalysts in the region grappled with the idea of constructing a “New Jewish Man” unburdened by the traumas of the Diaspora. [
Historical Context: How psychoanalysis survived and developed in the highly charged political and cultural context of war, mass immigration, and nation-building.
Freud’s Ambivalence: The complex, often skeptical relationship Sigmund Freud himself held toward Zionism and the idea of establishing a Jewish state.
“In my teenage years, I was a Zionist until I realised that this dream was accomplished by imposing a nightmare on the local population [Palestinians]”
Dr. Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-Canadian Holocaust survivor and trauma expert, was a fervent Zionist in his youth. Raised in post-war Hungary where he faced antisemitism, he found the concept of a powerful, resurrected Jewish state in the historical homeland deeply appealing.
Comments:
“Isra3l” is a Zi0nist, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and military occupation coloniser. As Palestine is occupied, resistance is justified.
In our lifetime, we’re watching “Isra3l’s” brutal settler colony systematically kill the native Palestinians with a new society of American/Europeans, every day, since 1948.
Palestinians are Arab, an ethno-linguistic group from Western Asia (18 countries including Palestine) whose genetic ancestry traces back to the Canaanites (3,500 years before Judea). Jews are an ethno-religious group and Ashkenazi Jews are pretty much genetically European. Even PM Benjamin Netanyahu changed his immigrant Polish fathers last name. That’s why DNA test kits are illegal in Israel. The signatories of the “Isra3li” Declaration of Independence were all foreigners, none are indigenous to Palestine and none are Semitic.
If you approve of apartheid “Isra3l” then apartheid South Africa gets approval, right? Make it make sense. You should want to be on the right side of history.
Isra3li Settler videos show some of the most evil scum on earth, glorifying evil acts (bombed airport & press tower, burn homes, farms, and olive trees, kill livestock animals, drown fishermen, beat & kill Palestinians, spray skunk water, throw open bottles of urine, steal culture- dates/ olives/falafel, and have checkpoints like Nazl Germany etc).
Ukraine is glorified for Molotov cocktails and armed civilians against Russian invaders, well Palestine has been resisting”Isra3l” for 75+ years.
#ZionlstColonists 🇮🇱 the world watches you terrorise native Palestinians & and use the anti-semite card to get away with it. Keep the spiritual religion of Judaism out of your vile nationalistic political movement!
Google Images: “disappearing Palestine”. Watch “Tantura” (2022) admired massacres.
More of the U$A-I cartoon!!!!
:
Five people were reportedly arrested and five others cited in connection with alleged vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., according to a U.S. administration official cited by CBS News. The pool has recently faced problems, including algae growth and peeling paint following renovation work tied to upcoming America 250 celebrations. President Donald Trump said he personally inspected the damage and announced that repairs would begin immediately, possibly requiring the pool to be drained. However, details about the alleged vandalism remain unclear, and some of those detained dispute the accusations. One of those arrested, Olympian David Hearn, told reporters he was simply examining a loose piece of peeling paint when he was charged with a misdemeanor offense. The National Guard remains stationed at the reflecting pool today:
As we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the release of “A Wild Hare,” the first animated short starring Bugs Bunny, the question arises: How Jewish was the sassy, anti-authoritarian rabbit?
Bug’s voice, created by the radio personality Mel Blanc (1908–1989) of Russian Jewish origin, was a blend of Brooklyn and Bronx tones. Blanc was such a virtuoso of melting pot sound effects that Milt Josefsberg, a writer on the Jack Benny Program, Blanc’s longtime employer, told his biographer that scripts routinely challenged Blanc to produce seemingly impossible accents. One such was a man on the street identified as an African American gay Jew (using derogatory slang terms of the time). Blanc faithfully reproduced this unlikely blend of tonal characterizations, so Bugs’ Bronx/Brooklyn mix proved no challenge to him.
Boris Khaimovich of the Hebrew University’s Center for Jewish Art has analyzed the meaning of hares in East European Jewish tradition, pointing out that although rabbits and hares are non-kosher, hounds chase hares in early Jewish illuminated manuscripts. One book, the Kennicott Bible created in Spain in 1476, shows hares “punishing or ruling their enemies,” even “storming a fortress occupied by a wolf” in a Bugs-like retort to tyranny.
On Feb. 1, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, published an expose about Dwayne Booth, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. The article stated that Booth had published “several antisemitic cartoons since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.”
Among them were “Zionists sipping Gazan blood from wine glasses,” “Jews in a Nazi concentration camp holding signs bearing slogans such as ‘Free Palestine’” and “Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a bloodied, red-eyed butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag.”
Booth teaches two classes at Penn. He never used the cartoons in those courses, according to interim Penn President J. Larry Jameson. The cartoonist often publishes under the pseudonym Mr. Fish on his own website and the progressive outlet ScheerPost.com, which is frequently critical of Israel..
Jameson said of the cartoons, “I find them reprehensible, with antisemitic symbols, and incongruent with our efforts to fight hate.” Jameson has his position because his predecessor, M. Elizabeth Magill, stepped down after failing to condemn antisemitism before a congressional committee. Penn saw a series of antisemitic incidents on its campus in the fall after hosting the Palestine Writes Festival.
HERO — Mr. Fish!
Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.”
The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we’re working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.
Alan Greenspan, the influential economist who led the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, has died at the age of 100 from complications related to Parkinson’s disease. Serving under four presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—he was widely credited with guiding the U.S. economy through a long period of growth and stability. However, his legacy was later complicated by criticism that his support for financial deregulation contributed to the conditions that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Greenspan later acknowledged mistakes in trusting banks to regulate themselves but argued that economic models could not fully predict speculative bubbles and financial panics. He remained active in public economic debates after retirement and was remembered by his wife, journalist Andrea Mitchell, as both brilliant and kind.
SHARMINI PERIES: Michael, on page 260 of your book, J is for Junk Economics, you deal with the issue of Social Security, and it’s a myth that Social Security should be pre-funded by its beneficiaries, or that progressive taxes should be abolished in favor of a flat tax. Just one tax rate for everyone you criticize. We talked about this earlier, but let’s apply what this actually means when it comes to Social Security.
MICHAEL HUDSON: The mythology aims to convince people that if they’re the beneficiaries of Social Security, they should be responsible for saving up to pre-fund it. That’s like saying that you’re the beneficiary of public education, so you have to pay for the schooling. You’re the beneficiary of healthcare, you have to save up to pay for that. You’re the beneficiary of America’s military spending that keeps us from being invaded next week by Russia, you have to spend for all that – in advance, and lend the money to the government for when it’s needed.
Where do you draw the line? Nobody anticipated in the 19th century that people would have to pay for their own retirement. That was viewed as an obligation of society. You had the first public pension (social security) program in Germany under Bismarck. The whole idea is that this is a public obligation. There are certain rights of citizens, and among these rights is that after your working life you deserve to live in retirement. That means that you have to be able to afford this retirement, and not have to beg in the street for money. The wool that’s been pulled over people’s eyes is to imagine that because they’re the beneficiaries of Social Security, they have to actually pay for it.
This was Alan Greenspan’s trick that he pulled in the 1980s as head of the Greenspan Commission. He said that what was needed in America was to traumatize the workers – to squeeze them so much that they won’t have the courage to strike. Not have the courage to ask for better working conditions. He recognized that the best way to really squeeze wage earners is to sharply increase their taxes. He didn’t call FICA wage withholding a tax, but of course it is. His trick was to say that it’s not really a tax, but a contribution to Social Security. And now it siphons off 15.4% of everybody’s pay check, right off the top.
The effect of what Greenspan did was more than just to make wage earners pay this FICA rake-off out of their paycheck every month. The charge was set so high that the Social Security fund lent its surplus to the government. Now, with all this huge surplus that we’re squeezing out of the wage earners, there’s a cut-off point: around $120,000. The richest people don’t have to pay for Social Security funding, only the wage-earner class has to. Their forced savings are lent to the government to enable it to claim that it has so much extra money in the budget pouring in from social security that now it can afford to cut taxes on the rich.
So the sharp increase in Social Security tax for wage earners went hand-in-hand with sharp reductions in taxes on real estate, finance and on top One Percent. The people who live on economic rent, not by working, not by producing goods and services but by making money on their real estate, stocks and bonds “in their sleep.” That’s how the five percent have basically been able to make their money.
The idea that Social Security has to be funded by its beneficiaries has been a setup for the wealthy to claim that the government budget doesn’t have enough money to keep paying. Social Security may begin to run a budget deficit.
After having run a surplus since 1933, for 70 years, now we have to begin paying some of this savings out. That’s called a deficit, as if it’s a disaster and we have to begin cutting back Social Security. The implication is that wage earners will have to starve in the street after they retire.
The Federal Reserve has just published statistics saying the average American family, 55 and 60 years old, only has about $14,000 worth of savings. This isn’t nearly enough to retire on. There’s also been a vast looting of pension funds, largely by Wall Street. That’s why the investment banks have had to pay tens of billions of dollars of penalties for cheating pension funds and other investors. The current risk-free rate of return is 0.1% on government bonds, so the pension funds don’t have enough money to pay pensions at the rate that their junk economics advisors forecast. The money that people thought was going to be available for their retirement, all of a sudden isn’t. The pretense is that nobody could have forecast this!
There are so many corporate pension funds that are going bankrupt that the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation doesn’t have enough money to bail them out. The PBGC is in deficit. If you’re going to be a corporate raider, if you’re going to be a Governor Romney or whatever and you take over a company, you do what Sam Zell did with the ChicagoTribune: You loot the pension fund, you empty it out to pay the bondholders that have lent you the money to buy out the company. You then tell the workers, “I’m sorry there is nothing there. It’s wiped out.” Half of the employee stock ownership programs go bankrupt. That was already a critique made in the 1950s and ‘60s.
In Chile the Chicago Boys who really developed this strategy. University of Chicago economists made it possible, by privatizing and corporatizing the Social Security system. Their ploy was to set aside a pension fund managed by the company, mostly to invest in its own stock. The company would then set up an affiliate that would actually own the company under an umbrella, and then leave the company with its pension fund to go bankrupt – having already emptied out the pension fund by loaning it to the corporate shell.
So it’s become a shell game. There’s really no Social Security problem. Of course the government has enough tax revenue to pay Social Security. That’s what the tax system is all about. Just look at our military spending. But if you do what Donald Trump does, and say that you’re not going to tax the rich; and if you do what Alan Greenspan did and not make higher-income individuals contribute to the Social Security system, then of course it’s going to show a deficit. It’s supposed to show a deficit when more people retire. It was always intended to show a deficit. But now that the government actually isn’t using Social Security surpluses to pretend that it can afford to cut taxes on the rich, they’re baiting and switching. This is basically part of the shell game. Explaining its myth is partly what I try to do in my book.
It’s strange that Alan Greenspan hasn’t been blamed for the housing bubble. After all, he set the “easy money” policies that put the whole thing in motion and he’s the one who should be held responsible when it goes up in smoke.
Let me explain.
Most people expect the Federal Reserve to lower rates when business is flagging to stimulate the economy by making loans more available for commerce, home buying, recreational spending etc. But, just as higher rates can stop the economy in its tracks by making money too expensive to borrow, so too, lower rates can have equally adverse consequences.
For example, when Greenspan lowered rates to 1% in 2002 he knew that money would surge into the economy and create the appearance that everything was hunky-dory. Predictably, the economy sputtered along from the economic activity generated by the housing boom and from the 30% increase in government spending.
But, what else did Greenspan’s lower rates achieve?
Well, they achieved the results for which they were designed; they kept the economy humming along while Bush dragged the country to war, they kept the American people asleep while $400 billion per year in Bush tax cuts were siphoned from the US Treasury, and they generated what the “The Economist” calls this “the biggest bubble in history”; the housing bubble.
All of these were purely political choices made at the Federal Reserve under the auspices of Fed-chairman Greenspan.
Thanks, Alan.
Now, of course, Greenspan has signaled that the Happy Days are over and that the Fed will continue to ratchet up rates to strengthen the dollar. So far, the Fed has raised rates 10 times in the last 14 months. This eventually will strain the resources of all the poor slobs who took out ARMs (Adjustable Rate Mortgages) trusting is the soundness of the system. They will inevitably see their monthly payments go through the roof.
No one understands the ins and outs of monetary policy better then the Federal Reserve. It’s their job, and they have plenty of experience judging the results of their decisions. They know that when they lower rates the public will borrow boatloads of cash and dump it in the preferred investment of the day. Since, many American’s were burned in the 1990s stock market crash; investing in the housing market seemed like a logical alternative. But, as more and more people entered the market, housing prices skyrocketed well beyond their true value, and that hyper-inflation was recorded in the monthly housing figures. Greenspan, who prides himself on studying every abstruse fact and figure about the economy, was fully aware of the speculative bubble that was emerging before his eyes. He also knew about the “interest only loans”, “the no-down payments”, the shaky lending practices, and the exaggerated prices, but just like the 1990s, when he had every opportunity to raise marginal rates on stocks and stop the bleeding, he kept the game in motion.
Greenspan knows all about “irrational exuberance”; he’s its primary champion. The Fed seduces the public with cheap money, so that credit spending increases and, then, “presto”, millions of Americans slip inexorably into indentured servitude.
Isn’t this what’s happening right now?
The American public is presently mortgaged up to the hilt with most of their personal wealth invested in their homes and with the highest level of personal debt in any period since the Great Depression.
Not good.
Especially when we consider that the current bubble is “larger than the global stock market bubble in the late 1990s (an increase over five years of 80% of GDP) or America’s stock market bubble in the late 1920s (55% of GDP).”
Or, when we consider that “over the past four years, consumer spending and residential construction have together accounted for 90% of the total growth in GDP.” (The Economist”)
Or, when we consider that 2 out of every 5 jobs in America are now related to construction. One blip in the housing market and we’ll all be hawking pencils on the street corner.
Regrettably, this Greenspan-generated pyramid scheme is headed for the dumpster. The fundamentals for securing a loan have all been abandoned; putting traditionally unqualified applicants in a position to buy a home. 42% of all new home buyers cannot even come up with a few thousand dollars for a down payment. Equally disturbing is the fact that “nearly one third of all new mortgages this year call for interest-only payments (in California, it’s almost half)” (NY Times)”
The Fed’s “cheap money” policy has spawned a “creative financing” monster and the speculation in the housing market has grown accordingly. A full 36% of homes are bought either for investment or as second homes; “the very definition of a financial bubble.” (Economist)
“Speculation”? Not according to Colonel Greenspan. According to him, it’s just a bit of “froth” in the market.
“Froth”? The biggest bubble in history!?!
Of course, none of this even vaguely resembles the activities of a “free market”. The market is not free when a privately owned banking system like the Federal Reserve sets the prime rate according to its own political-economic agenda.
Most people have no idea to what extent Greenspan has abandoned his principles to carry out his task as the country’s foremost class-warrior. Earlier in his career, Greenspan proclaimed, “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth”.
Hmmmmm?
That, of course, was when deficits were used to pay for exorbitant social programs, like Welfare or Medicaid that benefited the broader American public. Greenspan has revised his thinking now that the deficits are a means for lining the pockets of his rich constituents.
Greenspan fully grasps the danger of his current strategy of flooding the market with, what he once called, “easy money”. As he noted in an article he wrote in 1967 “Gold and Economic Freedom”:
“After a mild business contraction in 1927 the fed decided the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market — triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in breaking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed.”
Let’s see if we got that right?
“The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economytriggered a fantastic speculative boom.which collapsed the American economy”.
Sound familiar?
And who does Greenspan blame for the 1929 depression; the people who bought the stocks on speculation or the policy-makers?
The policy-makers.
The “speculative imbalances” (re: Housing bubble) were the work of the policy-makers just as they are today. And, in this case, that’s the Fed-master himself.
Greenspan’s term at the Fed has been devastating for the dwindling American middle-class. In 1983 he worked to “fix” Social Security for upcoming generations. In fact, his fix was nothing more than a shifting of the tax burden onto poorer and middle class Americans by increasing the withholding for SS. Greenspan knew that the additional resources would be used to fund basic government operations and not stashed safely in a “lockbox” for retirement. His presumption proved to be accurate.
He’s also been an ardent supporter of financial deregulation, which has allowed foreign countries, particularly China and Japan, to buy up American assets and businesses. Deregulation has crushed America’s manufacturing sector by forcing it to compete with the poorest paid workers in the world in head-to-head competition. Now, the US is teetering from its unsustainable trade deficit and must get infusions of $2 billion per day in foreign investment per day to maintain its current standard of living. Greenspan and his “free trade” friends have hammered the American worker and tilted the nation towards third-world status. At this point, there’s little that can be done to reverse the trend other than a major overhaul of existing trade policies and a renewed effort to restore America’s manufacturing base; something neither party has even recommended.
Greenspan has worked exclusively to serve the interests of American elites. He has helped shape the policies on taxation, minimum wage and Social Security that have enriched the wealthy and battered the middle class. His lowered interest rates have perilously expanded credit and produced the “largest speculative market of all time”. Whatever economic calamity befalls the American people certainly bears his imprimatur.
The nation now faces the end of the Greenspan epoch and the very real prospect of an economic tidal wave greater than 1929. The bubble was manufactured by Greenspan and his colleagues at the Fed to swindle millions of working-class Americans out of their life-savings and to facilitate the greatest transferal of wealth in American history.
The lesson of the housing bubble is simple: whenever monetary policy is put into the hands of privately owned institutions like the Federal Reserve, those policies will invariably reflect the narrow interests of the men who own them and the members of their class.
That’s why Thomas Jefferson warned, “Banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies.”
Obama Legacy: As Celebrities Descended Upon Chicago Presidential Center, Across Town Firefighters Were Evacuating Patients From Another Private-Equity-Destroyed Hospital
Posted on June 22, 2026 by Conor Gallagher
And the never ending arguments that if we could just get rid of the current monster in the White House and go back to this, all would be right with the world:
— Protect Kamala Harris ✊ (@DisavowTrump20) June 18, 2026
To once again refute this type of argument, let’s start with another event that occurred in the runup to Juneteenth roughly 15 miles across Chicago. It’s one that tells the story of Obama and the Democrats much better than all the revolting royal pageantry at the crusader fortress in Jackson Park.
On June 11, the Chicago suburb of Oak Park closed down West Suburban Medical Center after the hospital’s last functioning elevator went kaput. Firefighters had to be called in to help patients stranded on upper floors. More from the Chicago Tribune:
Though the owner of the company that operates West Suburban abruptly closed the hospital in March, some providers that were not part of the hospital’s operations had still been using the building.
A dialysis clinic that saw about 140 patients a week on the fifth floor of the hospital’s professional building had continued to operate, and PCC Community Wellness Center had continued to run three clinics there.
They left Thursday after Oak Park closed the building to the public. The only people allowed in the building now are security and maintenance workers, Jacobsen said.
“We’ve basically been scrambling to move 140 patients,” said Dr. George Naratadam, a nephrologist at West Suburban. “They can’t really miss dialysis or they could die.”
Dialysis patients now have to go to different dialysis sites in the area, but those locations may be farther from their homes and they may not be able to get in at their usual times, Naratadam said. Patients must typically undergo dialysis three times a week for four hours at a time.
The sad end to West Suburban comes after private equity squeezed the facility dry and then discarded it. Like other Chicago-area hospitals Weiss Memorial (closed last year) and Westlake (closed 2019), West Suburban was also at one point owned by Pipeline Health, a private equity-backed hospital chain. Pipeline still holds a $67 million subordinate note tied to the broader hospital operations of Resilience Healthcare, which along with landlord Ramco Healthcare Holdings, purchased West Suburban in 2022.
Ramco, Resilience, Pipeline, and another private equity outfit in Miami, Rialto Capital Advisors, are now engaged in a messy court battle over tens of millions of dollars while patients suffer.
Not to worry, though, The Real Deal assures us the West Suburban legal fight is not representative of the wider Chicago-area healthcare attractiveness as an investment:
The severe distress stands in contrast to the broader Chicago health care real estate sector, where medical office properties remain in high demand. Driven by an aging population and low inventory, investors are treating clinical space as a refuge from the traditional office slump, pushing local medical deal volume past $600 million this year.
And that ensures more West Suburbans in the not-too-distant future. Fear not, though, poor patients, for a beacon of hope now rises:
It’s difficult to heap enough scorn on the opening ceremony of the Obama Presidential Center event on Juneteenth. The very fact it was held on the day commemorating the end of slavery in the US despite Obama destroying black wealth, the takeover of a public park, the ugliness of the building, the oligarchs paying it for it, the tone deafness delight in holding a celebrity-packed self-congratulatory bash even as the world burns, and the family-blog W-Michelle Altoids sequel.
Jerusalem News Syndicate . . . Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) . . . World Jewish Congress–Israel Region
Something about Judaism, no? Jewish?
The second annual JNS International Policy Summit is scheduled to get underway on Sunday in Jerusalem, just days after the United States signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran.
The three-day conference, which will take place at the Waldorf Astoria in Jerusalem, includes keynote addresses by top Israeli government leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, alongside U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Fox News host Mark Levin and the head of the World Jewish Congress–Israel Region, Sylvan Adams.
“Israel continues to manage hostilities with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Diplomatic relations and the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship are constantly being tested. Antisemitism is rising dramatically. And yet Israel’s economy is strong, and the Jewish state is emerging as a regional superpower,” said JNS CEO Alex Traiman.
No Zionism in their fucking dirty titles?
General Links to Jewish Organizations
Directory of Charities and Nonprofit Organizations This link opens in a new windowGuideStar is the most complete source of information about U.S. charities and other nonprofit organizations there is. Search our database of more than 1.8 million IRS-recognized organizations to find a charity to support, benchmark your own nonprofit’s performance, research the sector, and more.
North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry This link opens in a new windowThe North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry (NACOEJ) is a non-profit organization founded in 1982 with four mandates: 1) To help Ethiopian Jews survive in Ethiopia. 2) To assist them in reaching Israel. 3) To aid in the absorption of Ethiopian Jews into Israeli society. 4) To preserve their unique and ancient culture.
Vance is set to lead a delegation that includes special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kusher, the pair tasked with spearheading U.S. diplomacy efforts in the president’s second term.
The vice president said during a Fox News interview on Saturday morning that Witkoff and Kushner had already been on the ground in Europe for several hours “dealing with some of the technical elements” of the impending negotiations and that “things are going well.”
The 14-point memorandum of understanding signed electronically earlier this week extends the ceasefire and restores unrestricted navigation through the Strait of Hormuz for a 60-day period.
Senate panel considers vote to shield special education from RFK Jr.’s agency
Bill Cassidy, the Republican chairman of the Senate’s education committee, said he agreed with Democrats that special ed programs should not be moved to the Health and Human Services Department.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. tours Puerto Rico, April 18, 2000, to Examine the environmental Impact of US Navy training operations on the island of Vieques. Kennedy is planning to file a lawsuit against the Navy on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Democratic presidential hopeful Vice President Al Gore (L) speaks as environmental activist and lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr.(R) listens during a speech to the Iowa Earth Year 2000 conference in Des Moines, Iowa Jan. 21, 2000.
Robert Kennedy Jr. speaks at a press conference upon his arrival at Miami International Airport on Feb. 19, 1996, after visiting Cuba with his brother Michael (L) and a delegation of US environmental and energy experts.
All over this Southeast Asian city are vestiges of the multibillion-dollar online scam industry, which thrived here for more than half a decade until a recent government crackdown.
There are luxurious high-rise towers overlooking the Mekong River, where entire floors are now deserted following police raids that cleared out the illicit operations hidden there. Disintegrating cardboard boxes and bits of Styrofoam litter the entrance of a branch of Prince Supermarket, after its parent company—the massive Cambodian conglomerate Prince Holding Group—was slapped with U.S. sanctions for allegedly running industrial-scale scam compounds.
But the crackdown has created a secondary crisis: thousands of stranded foreign workers transported to Cambodia by the online scam operators and forced to work as hostage employees are now roaming the streets of Phnom Penh, after being freed when the scam operations closed. NGOs, including Amnesty International, say many of the workers are victims of human trafficking. They are now at the center of a silent humanitarian crisis in Cambodia, aid workers say, left with few options and abandoned amid the highly-publicized government crackdown.
[A man who worked in scam compound in Cambodia shows the only evidence he managed to document on his phone, a photo of dozens of phones that he was given to reach out and recruit potential scam victims.]
“The government has only addressed half of this problem,” said Mark Taylor, a consultant on human trafficking issues who previously led a USAID-backed program in Cambodia. “But it is totally ignoring what fueled that problem,” he added, namely the tens of thousands of vulnerable migrants that were lured into the scam industry and are now at risk of being re-trafficked.
[A group of Ugandan men and women line up to board their flight back home, after being released from scam compounds in Cambodia and then enduring compounding hardship on the streets of Phnom Penh.]
In response to questions from NPR, Interior Ministry spokesman Touch Sokhak rejected the criticism, saying authorities have “rescued” hundreds of thousands of scam workers, including trafficking victims, and repatriated them “with the utmost care, in accordance with the law.”
But accounts from inside Cambodia’s detention system tell a starkly different story. In a text message shared with NPR by aid workers, a former scam worker described conditions inside one facility: free drinking water is available for only one hour a day and otherwise costs $2. He asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“I don’t know how we will survive here,” he wrote.
Back to the cunt: Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is standing firm in his defense of a White House executive order to ramp up production of the weedkiller glyphosate.
That’s the very herbicide Kennedy once condemned in court as a “probable carcinogen.”
RFK Jr. Calls Ultra-Processed Foods a “Genocide” Against Native Americans in Congressional Testimony.
“If we want to talk about justice, we must start by returning autonomy over health and food back to Native people,” Kennedy said.
Despite his promises, Kennedy has come under fire from tribal leaders and Native health advocates for contradictory actions. The administration recently cut $32.5 million in funding for the CDC’s Healthy Tribes program, which supported chronic disease prevention and traditional medicine. Over 30 positions were eliminated, including 11 directly linked to tribal initiatives.
For many Native leaders, these cuts undermine Kennedy’s words and raise questions about the federal government’s commitment to fulfilling its trust and treaty obligations.
RFK Jr says there is a ‘genocide against Jews,’ not Gazans
Jews are cancerous as any Round-Up Ready spray party:
Abstract: Agro-industries should adopt effective strategies to use agrochemicals such as glyphosate herbicides cautiously in order to protect public health. This entails careful testing and risk assessment of available choices, and also educating farmers and users with mitigation strategies in ecosystem protection and sustainable development. The key to success in this endeavour is using scientific research on biological pest control, organic farming and regulatory control, etc., for new developments in food production and safety, and for environmental protection. Education and research is of paramount importance for food and nutrition security in the shadow of climate change, and their consequences in food production and consumption safety and sustainability. This review, therefore, diagnoses on the use of glyphosate and the associated development of glyphosate-resistant weeds. It also deals with the risk assessment on human health of glyphosate formulations through environment and dietary exposures based on the impact of glyphosate and its metabolite AMPA—(aminomethyl)phosphonic acid—on water and food. All this to set up further conclusions and recommendations on the regulated use of glyphosate and how to mitigate the adverse effects.
RFK Jr. Says Son Conor ‘Talked His Way’ onto Ukraine War Unit Despite Lacking Combat Experience
“He said to me, when he heard maybe a little bit of anger and concern, ‘Dad, this is what you taught me to do: to stand up for what I believe in,'” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tells PEOPLE
Among these incarcerated children are 65 general secondary school students who, according to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education, have been prevented by the Israeli authorities from sitting their general secondary examinations this year.
People talk about the women and the babies — and of course they should — but Palestinian men are always pushed to the side. Either demonized, labeled, or treated like they don’t count because they’re “men.” As if being a man somehow makes your death less tragic or your suffering less real.
These are the same men digging their families out of rubble with their bare hands. The same men watching their kids starve and feeling the kind of helplessness most people will never understand. The same men carrying trauma that nobody even asks about because the world has already decided who they are.
They’re painted as threats, as suspects, as “maybe Hamas,” instead of human beings who love their kids, who protect their families, who break down when no one is looking. They’re the pillars of their homes, and yet they’re the ones the world refuses to mourn.
So this is for them.
For the men who are still standing in Gaza, and for the men who should still be here but aren’t.
Happy Father’s Day to the Palestinian men — the ones the world overlooks, but we don’t.
May the Jews just curl up with their cancer of the bowels and develop glioblastoma forever.
REM singer Michael Stipe has spoken out in support of British band Radiohead.
The Oxfordshire rock five-piece, whose guitarist Jonny Greenwood is married to an Israeli, have been subjected to criticism over their decision to play a concert in Tel Aviv.
Stipe, whose own band played in Israel in the 1990s with Radiohead as their support act, published an Instagram post which said:
‘I stand with Radiohead and their decision to perform. Let’s hope a dialogue continues, helping to bring the occupation to an end and lead to a peaceful solution. Sincerely, Michael Stipe’
R.E.M.‘s Michael Stipe has urged his social media followers to join him in a temporary boycott of Meta and its associated products to protest their part in “helping advance the far right in America”.
Stipe shared his intentions via a post on Instagram on Sunday (Jan. 19), outlining the “Lights Out Meta” campaign which would take place from Jan. 19 – 26, and asked users to log out of all Meta platforms for the week. As Stipe added, this includes the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger, WhatsApp, Giphy, Meta Quest, and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
Cunts:
“I believe that boycotting artists will not bring any solution. I believe that banning songs, movies, plays, books etc, is not going to fix the world’s problems.”
Erez has rejected ultimatums demanding she condemn Israel or publicly state her views. She has emphasized that boycotting artists based on their nationality will not solve world conflicts. While noting her own desire for peace in the region, she has expressed frustration over the atmosphere of intense polarization that forces artists to take sides.
A botched reflecting pool renovation, a capitulation to Iran, and an embarrassing spectacle at the Kennedy Center… Will the U.S. president finally give up?
“It is very much the latter days of a dictator who is on his way out,” says CNN host turned independent journalist Jim Acosta to Zeteo’s John Harwood. The two discussed Trump’s recent embarrassing endeavors in a Substack live conversation, in which they answered questions from an audience of subscribers.
So, will Trump call it quits? Will he throw JD Vance under the bus over Iran? How worried should we be about people like Stephen Miller and Peter Thiel? Watch the full video above to hear Acosta’s take on all that and more – and let us know what you think in the comments below.
You’ve probably heard of Russia’s “Dead Hand” system, also called Perimeter. It’s been around since the Cold War; it shows up in movies, and people reference it whenever nuclear tensions spike. The basic idea is that even if Russia gets completely obliterated in a nuclear strike and there’s nobody left alive to push the button, the missiles still launch automatically.
Scary, right? But here’s the thing, it actually makes a twisted kind of sense as a deterrent, and we’ll get to why in a second.
Now, North Korea just passed a constitutional amendment that sounds like the same thing, but it isn’t. And the difference between what Russia built and what Kim Jong Un just wrote into his constitution is one of the most dangerous gaps in nuclear policy on the planet right now.
Perimeter was developed in the 1970s and placed on combat duty in January 1985, at the height of the arms race. Its core problem was a legitimate one: if the United States launched a first strike sophisticated enough to simultaneously destroy Russia’s entire leadership, its communications infrastructure, and its command nodes, how would the surviving missile forces know to retaliate? The answer was an automated fallback loop, a system that monitors for the electromagnetic, seismic, and radiological signatures of a mass nuclear strike; attempts to reach the General Staff, then the presidential command system (”Kazbek”), and only if both fail, autonomously launches command missiles that relay the strike order to nuclear forces across Russian territory.
Perimeter was engineered to respond to the signature of a civilization-ending nuclear exchange, not to a single event.
It requires multiple sensor confirmations across multiple spectra. It attempts human contact before going autonomous. The 1984 test that first tipped off US intelligence involved a command missile transmitting launch orders to a waiting ICBM at Baikonur, which then struck a target range in Kamchatka, a complete validation of the chain:
command missile,
combat missile,
target.
What North Korea Just Built
Kim Jung-Un’s constitutional amendment has no such architecture of restraint.
Jew-oogle: J. Robert Oppenheimer consistently defended the wartime development of the atomic bomb, arguing it was an inevitable scientific progression and a necessary military tool to end World War II. However, he deeply opposed an arms race and strongly advocated against the development of the vastly more destructive hydrogen bomb.
How can scholars and scientists balance moral and ethical dilemmas that can potentially arise in the application of their work?
When Oppenheimer refused to sign the letter that Leo Szilard, the physicist who created the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and others wrote opposing dropping the bomb on Japan, Oppenheimer said that the scientists who invented the atomic bomb have no greater rights or responsibilities than others about how to use the weapon. I disagree with that. I think scientists and social scientists who have expertise in this area have grave responsibilities to express their opinions about nuclear strategy, and how we respond could be used in a war or used for deterrence. I think there can be worrisome tendencies for scholars to fall in line with what is the current rage or received wisdom about what the best national security policy should be. We’ve got to constantly challenge the status quo and think carefully about alternative policies.
Oppenheimer envisioned the tactical use of nuclear weapons. Putin now threatens it. And the Jews of Israel have already used the weapon, so-called tactical nuke, and the depleted uranium shells? The gift that keeps on giving.
Jewified, man, this cunt of a monster, Oppen-Monster-Heimer:
Based on the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, largely drafted by Oppenheimer, Baruch’s plan eliminated the provision for international control of uranium deposits and emphasized instead the punishment of countries that sought to use atomic energy for military purposes. Baruch insisted that the United States maintain its monopoly on nuclear weapons until intrusive inspection procedures had assured that no other countries possessed them—clearly a nonstarter for the secretive Soviet Union.
Oppenheimer was disappointed at the failure of international negotiations to control the bomb but was still eager to maintain his privileged access to policy circles in Washington. He devoted his attention to accelerating US production of fissile material and developing bomb designs that would use it more efficiently. As chair of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), he oversaw three major expansions of atomic production facilities in 1949, 1950, and 1952. The Sandstone series of nuclear tests in April and May 1948—a follow up of the 1946 Operation Crossroads—had demonstrated the success of new designs of smaller, more efficient nuclear weapons than had previously been available. At this point, US strategy for a potential war with the Soviet Union—including a feared invasion of western Europe—focused entirely on attacking Soviet cities with atomic weapons. But Oppenheimer preferred that nuclear weapons play a more direct role in defense. He chaired a panel on “long-range objectives” for the Pentagon’s Research and Development Board that recommended in August 1948 that nuclear weapons be developed for use on a battlefield. Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer’s chosen successor as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, accordingly, submitted a request in October “that a complete small weapon be readied for test early in 1951.”[2] He relayed an order to the Sandia Laboratory, responsible for the weaponization of nuclear devices. Sandia was already at work on the “Mark 4” bomb, which consisted of an improved version of the Mark 3 “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The Mark 4 was the first US atomic weapon to go into mass production and eventually came in a variety of yields, including one kiloton (1,000 tons of TNT equivalent), considered at the time small enough to use for tactical purposes.
Birth defects in Iraq are part of an evidentiary ecology of war brought to political and moral attention through the practices of archiving and documenting.
When Iraqi scholars and doctors catalogue incidences of birth defects and note that their rates exceed that of Hiroshima, or when epidemiologists conduct studies to mark where, when and how a population experiences birth defects, they highlight the connections between militarism and public health, global inequalities and environmental racism.[4]Majid, a physician who treats children with heart defects in Falluja, said in an interview, “When people see birth defects, there is no avoiding the issue. Birth defects say, ‘Something is wrong here,’ in a way that other medical problems do not.”[5]
Applied to the Middle East, the term ecologies of war often refers to environments transformed by decades of intensive militarism. In Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Syria, such ecologies are not always accidental side effects of military operations but are instead central components of military strategy.[6] For example, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein drained the marshes of southern Iraq as a direct counterinsurgency tactic to suppress the Marsh Arabs, whom he accused of disloyalty during the Iran-Iraq war (1980 –1988).[7] When the Iraqi marshes were reflooded in the name of ecological restoration after 2003, it was part of a broader restructuring of Iraq’s environment and economy, alongside other mechanisms of spatial control like the use of T-walls (portable concrete walls).[8]
Beyond deliberate spatial and social transformations, chemical pollution also shapes Iraq’s war ecologies. While living and working with internally displaced farming families from Anbar province in 2014 and 2015 I witnessed plant crops and livestock with malformed parts or tumorous growth. Many farmers kept photographs and told stories of destroyed irrigation systems, contaminated water and hypersalinized soil. Infertility, cancers and birth defects prevented them from having and raising healthy children. They described birth defects as just one consequence of the environmental damage they witnessed in all aspects of their lives.
Many Iraqis I spoke to described these enduring environmental maladies as intentional. Ahmed, the father of a child who died within a few hours of her birth from multiple birth defects, said, “The Americans wanted this. If they didn’t, they would have cleaned up from their wars. They starved us during the sanctions; now they are poisoning us.”[9] When Ahmed speaks of being poisoned, he refers to both the enduring life of toxic war materials embedded and abandoned in Iraq’s landscape and the destruction of the human resources needed to cope with public health crises.
US military intervention heavily damaged Iraqi infrastructure and ecologies that sustain human survival, especially during the initial invasion in 2003 but also later during the occupation (2004–2011). Adhering to a “shock and awe” strategy, the United States launched 800 cruise missiles within the first 48 hours of the invasion in March 2003 —more than double the number of missiles launched in the entire Gulf War.[10] Between 2002 and 2005 alone, the US armed forces expended 6 billion bullets—roughly 200,000-300,000 bullets per individual killed in Iraq.[11] This number of shells, full of lead and mercury, does not include larger ordinances or other metal remnants from after 2005, or from previous wars: the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988), the First Gulf War (1990–1991), the sanctions era (1991-2003) and the 2003 occupation’s instigation of a further decade of militia warfare. The most recent military intervention in Iraq was accompanied by unprecedented waste abandonment and waste burning: discarded vehicles, excess weapons, discarded clothing and much more were all left in Iraq’s land, water or air.
Given the onslaught of military toxic dumping in Iraq, from spent bombs and bullets to base-making, burn pits and junkyards, it is no surprise that widespread cancers and congenital anomalies, along with other major health issues in the civilian population, abound.
Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations,” leveraged Cold War paranoia to manipulate American public and political opinion. His most famous operation during this era was orchestrating a massive propaganda campaign for the United Fruit Company (UFCO), painting the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz as a communist puppet.
A Palestinian baby losing their legs at two months old does not shatter the world into action. Our genocide is sustained by weapons deals, colonial land theft, Zionist ideology, and a bottomless apathy. Even those who offer solidarity give only a fragile grief, one TikTok cat video away from being forgotten. We chew on glass while they scroll past.
Yet this wall of indifference is finally cracking. The Zionist state is hemorrhaging support in the United States. Americans want accountability, not branding. In a panic, the Israeli government has poured resources into American PR campaigns to launder its image. But the effort is not stopping the shift. The boycott is working. Campus occupations, BDS campaigns, and grassroots defiance have pierced the armor of the settlers. They do this not because pressure magically stops bombs, but because it makes denial harder to sustain.
This shift matters. The US and Israel remain entangled, but their alignment is strained by competing priorities. It does not signal restraint, but it exposes the friction between two colonial projects. As a direct result of global boycotts and BDS campaigns, economic costs are rippling outward. The Zionist entity has lost over fifty-seven billion dollars. Tech giants are laying off thousands, shutting down research centers, and fleeing the apartheid state. The empire and its outpost bicker, but the violence rolls on without pause.
Watching them now feels like witnessing a toxic marriage unraveling. It is not a clean ending, just mutual accusations as shared interests fracture. They are two settler projects built on stolen land and sustained by elimination, turning on each other in public while our bodies pile up. The empire is starting to see its mirror image as a liability, and that fracture offers a rare opening.
I love this fellow’s writing, BUT . . . . He’s Palestinian in Ireland. He is not seeing the forest for the fucking Judaic World Sucking Chlamydia TREE.
A Palestinian baby losing their legs at two months old does not shatter the world into action. Our genocide is sustained by weapons deals, colonial land theft, Zionist ideology, and a bottomless apathy. Even those who offer solidarity give only a fragile grief, one TikTok cat video away from being forgotten. We chew on glass while they scroll past.
Yet this wall of indifference is finally cracking. The Zionist state is hemorrhaging support in the United States. Americans want accountability, not branding. In a panic, the Israeli government has poured resources into American PR campaigns to launder its image. But the effort is not stopping the shift. The boycott is working. Campus occupations, BDS campaigns, and grassroots defiance have pierced the armor of the settlers. They do this not because pressure magically stops bombs, but because it makes denial harder to sustain.
This shift matters. The US and Israel remain entangled, but their alignment is strained by competing priorities. It does not signal restraint, but it exposes the friction between two colonial projects. As a direct result of global boycotts and BDS campaigns, economic costs are rippling outward. The Zionist entity has lost over fifty-seven billion dollars. Tech giants are laying off thousands, shutting down research centers, and fleeing the apartheid state. The empire and its outpost bicker, but the violence rolls on without pause.
Watching them now feels like witnessing a toxic marriage unraveling. It is not a clean ending, just mutual accusations as shared interests fracture. They are two settler projects built on stolen land and sustained by elimination, turning on each other in public while our bodies pile up. The empire is starting to see its mirror image as a liability, and that fracture offers a rare opening.
How Israel Improves the World: Technology Edition
I liked the title “How Israel Improves the World” so I wanted to create another like it.
First let me present the core metric that explains almost everything else: Israel spends more on R&D as a percentage of GDP than any country in the world. Not the US. Not South Korea. Not Germany. Israel. About 6% of our GDP goes straight into research and development.
What’s even more unusual is where that R&D happens. Israel has the highest share of R&D done by the private sector in the OECD. It’s in companies, startups, spin-outs, and small teams solving problems because someone needs a solution now, not in ten years.
Further Israel leads the world in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) per capita. More than half of private-sector R&D in Israel is funded by foreign companies. The rest of the world is literally wiring money into Israel so Israelis can solve their hardest technical problems for them.
Israel also ranks #1 in the world for scientists and engineers per capita in the workforce. Number one. Which explains why so much of the world’s core technology quietly originates here.
Take cybersecurity. Despite being a tiny fraction of the world, Israel consistently captures around 20% of global private cybersecurity investment. That’s absurd when you remember our country’s population. A huge chunk of the world’s encryption, network defense, endpoint security, fraud detection, and cyber-resilience tooling has Israeli DNA in it. Look at Wiz, the hugest M&A in history. An Israeli company.. Banks, hospitals, power grids, and governments all over the planet are running on systems designed by Israelis.
Then there’s medical technology. Israeli companies pioneered capsule endoscopy (a literal camera you swallow), advanced imaging systems, remote patient monitoring, robotic surgery components, and AI-assisted diagnostics. Hospitals worldwide use Israeli-designed devices every day without ever seeing Hebrew.
Water and climate tech is another massive contribution. Israel essentially industrialized desalination and made it cheap, reliable, and scalable. Countries facing water scarcity depend on Israeli desal tech, leak-detection systems, and smart irrigation. Drip irrigation is now a global standard and it was invented in Israel. That one innovation alone reshaped agriculture on multiple continents.
In semiconductors and deep tech, Israel punches way above its weight too. Israel designs most of the world’s most advanced chips, and Taiwan builds them. Critical CPU and GPU architectures, chip validation tools, hardware security modules, and low-level systems software are designed here. If your laptop, phone, or cloud server feels faster or safer than it did ten years ago, odds are good an Israeli engineer is why.
And then there’s AI. Computer vision for industrial inspection, AI for drug discovery, optimization engines, anomaly detection, edge AI, and infrastructure and tooling. Israel is consistently one of the top countries in the world for deep-tech outside the US, especially in areas where the problems are ugly and the data is messy. Which is where real value usually lives. Let me not forget to mention the former Chief Scientist of OpenAI is Israeli and the reason why ChatGPT “thinks”. He is now running a multi billion dollar AI company out of Israel. To add, if not Israeli, all major AI companies in the USA are founded and ran by Jews.
Israel builds foundational tech underpinning much of modern civilization. Stuff that becomes invisible once it works. Stuff other countries rely on without thinking about where it came from.
The metrics tell the story: #1 in R&D, #1 in scientific talent, #1 in private-sector investment, and dominant position in multiple strategic tech verticals.
So, Israeli spends an awful lot of time improving the underlying machinery of the modern world. The code, the chips, the water systems, the medical devices, the security layers, the AI. Many things you take for granted. In fact, why Israel is even a rich country is due to our technology exports. Like the Arab countries export oil, our industry is science and technology. All powered by the immense talent of our people.
– Israel was humiliated on Oct. 7, is taking revenge from innocent people and civilians, Miko Peled tells Anadolu
ISTANBUL
Israeli activist and writer Miko Peled, the grandson of a signatory to the Jewish state’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, has criticized Israel’s policies towards Palestine, asserting that “they cannot defeat the Palestinians.”
The author, whose father served as a general in the Six-Day War of 1967, spoke to Anadolu about his journey as an activist advocating for the rights of Palestinians, and evaluated the current conflict that started on Oct. 7.
“I come from a very prominent Zionist patriotic family … I grew up as a patriot, a strong supporter of my country, my state, and of course, Zionism,” said Peled, who was born in Jerusalem in 1961.
He was greatly influenced by his father’s ideas in the early years of his life, and served in the military for a while but later regretted it and left.
“My father, while still in uniform right after the war, said: ‘Look … we are here forever, our existence is no longer uncertain or in danger. We must allow the Palestinians to have their small state in a small part of Palestine.’ … As soon as the war ended, they started building massive cities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
‘According to Zionism, there is no such place as Palestine’
Emphasizing that there is no place called Palestine in the fundamental philosophy of Zionism, Peled said: “According to Zionism, that is Israeli land, and those lands belong not to the Palestinians living there, but to all Jews in the world. If you have a supremacist ideology, that is, if you argue that one group has more rights than another, then you must use violence. You must have an apartheid regime for this racist ideology to be realized. That is the Israeli state,” he said.
Peled, pointing out that the Israel-Palestine issue did not start last month, but 75 years ago with the establishment of Israel, said: “As a movement, Zionists and then the state born from this movement declared war on the Palestinian people. In this war, we saw ethnic cleansing, genocide policies, and a racist apartheid regime.”
Describing Israel as a “terrorist state,” Peled drew attention to the oppression that Palestinians have been experiencing for years.
“Palestinians are exposed to terrorism every day. You don’t know whether you will be beaten or killed while walking on the street, whether your children will be safe going to school, whether your house will be demolished, whether your brothers will be taken or abducted and disappeared by the Israeli army or Israeli intelligence,” he said.
‘I realized I lived in a kind of colony, a superficial, artificial reality’
The Israeli-American said he started questioning the existence of Israel after the death of a family member more than two decades ago.
“In 1997, my sister’s little daughter was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem. She was 13 years old. This was a tragedy that fundamentally shook a person; you know, after such an event, you cannot look at the world with the same eyes. This led me to examine the reality of what was taught to me, the existence of Israel.” he said.
He then embarked on a journey to Palestine to find answers.
“When I started the journey, I realized that the country I thought was mine was someone else’s country. I was living in a kind of colony, a superficial, artificial reality that was not real. It did not rely on reality. It was based on an apartheid state built on lies, and these lies legitimized the existence of the Israeli state,” Pelod said.
‘Condemning a nation under oppression for resisting is the height of hypocrisy’
On Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza, which started after a cross border attack by Palestinian group Hamas, Peled said: “Palestinians who have nothing to do with this event are paying a heavy price. Israel was humiliated, and now it extracts all its revenge and anger from innocent people and civilians who have nothing to do with the attack.”
Israel’s air and ground attacks on the besieged enclave has since killed more than 14,000 people, most of them women and children.
Pointing out that in Western media there is a tendency to condemn Hamas in every comment on the conflict, Peled said: “It is absurd to condemn those who emerged to resist, people who have been under pressure for so long. This was expected. If we want to eliminate resistance, then we must eliminate pressure. Resistance is always a reaction against oppression. The Palestinians’ response to greater violence that has been going on for more than 75 years has mostly been non-violent.”
“If there is something to condemn, it is to condemn the apartheid regime. It is necessary to condemn the violence, brutality that Palestinians face every day, the thousands of Palestinians being arrested and killed in the West Bank while we speak, the racism practiced by Israel against Palestinian citizens. It is necessary to condemn the Israeli doctors who signed the petition approving the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, the students who demand the expulsion of Palestinian Israeli citizens from university dormitories, and many more. But condemning a nation under oppression for resisting is the height of hypocrisy and meaningless.”
Which countries buy the most from Israel?
Israel sold $61.7bn worth of goods in 2024. The biggest importers of Israeli products were the United States with $17.3bn, Ireland with $3.2bn and China with $2.8bn. Hong Kong, a semiautonomous region of China that trade databases treat as a separate entity, imported an additional $2bn in products from Israel. Add that to China’s tally, and the country becomes the second-largest importer of Israeli products.
The United States primarily imported diamonds, high-tech electronics, including integrated circuits and telecommunications equipment, as well as chemical products.
Ireland was the largest buyer of Israeli integrated circuits in 2024, importing some $3bn billion worth of electronic integrated circuits and microassemblies. These components are widely used in Ireland’s pharmaceutical, medical device and tech manufacturing sectors.
China imported a range of Israeli products including optical equipment, electronic components and chemical products.
Which countries sell the most to Israel?
Forbes Israel presents the definitive ranking of the world’s wealthiest individuals of Jewish heritage- an exclusive annual project documenting extraordinary achievement, innovation, and wealth creation at the highest levels of global capitalism.
This year’s list features 319 billionaires with a combined net worth exceeding $2 trillion, including six individuals who rank among the 15 richest people on Earth. From Silicon Valley’s technological titans to Wall Street’s financial masterminds, from shipping magnates to media moguls, these entrepreneurs and business leaders have fundamentally reshaped industries, built iconic companies, and accumulated unprecedented fortunes through vision, ambition, and relentless execution.
The 2026 edition reveals remarkable shifts at the very top: Larry Page reclaims the crown as the wealthiest Jewish billionaire following Google’s AI-driven resurgence, while fellow founders Sergey Brin and Larry Ellison battle for position amid dramatic market swings. Meanwhile, Israeli billionaires achieve record representation, with 52 citizens appearing on the list – their combined wealth surging 50% over two years to $308 billion.
This is more than a wealth ranking. It’s a chronicle of transformative impact.
Then this piece of shit, Paul Craig Roberts, trickle down cunt of RayGun years:
From another cunt using his mercenary rank to sell crap: Capt. Roy Harkness
Captain Jack Harkness our beloved Jack Russell has gone. He waited until i came home and he died peacefully in his dada’s arms within an hour of my return with @scottmale Dixie and Tito around him. He was a good boy, a loyal friend and our Jackamo for 18 years. We are very sad but grateful he died of old age and did not suffer.
Jun 21
From the old James Bond movie, “Live and Let Die”: A white woman about to be sacrificed during a Voodoo religious rite. It works well enough for the topic.
Paul Craig Roberts
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It turns out that a number of British governments not only turned a blind eye to immigrant-invader gang rapes of ethnic British children for 30 years–and the gang rapes and other horrors are still ongoing– but also enabled and financed the gangs with the raped girls’ parents’ taxes.
The anti-white British governments and the anti-white British presstitutes dismissed the legitimate complaints of white parents and raped kids as “far-right racist agitation.” The British governments were determined to protect the open borders policy at the expense of the ethnic British population, proving themselves more insidiously evil than open borders US Democrats. As Janice Gassam Asare said, “The most insidious form of oppression is that which comes at the hands of your own.”
The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privileges Destroy Democracy is a provocative but frustrating book. The heart of the book is a well-researched history of how civil rights litigation and legislation ultimately led to today’s ubiquitous racial quotas and preferences. No boring academic tome, The New Color Line is well-written and concise. It is likely to be the leading conservative study of affirmative action for some time.
Paul Craig Roberts, who played a crucial role in enacting the tax cuts of the 1980s and in forging the political emergence of supply-side economics, reflects on his experience in Washington. He emphasizes that intra-party power struggles, not economics, are the main influence on policy.
Until YOU KIND READER, discover the term “Israeli” is the same as JEW, and Zionist? Another forked tongue mumbo jumbo to get Goyim Gooey with Mitzvah Fluids!!
Not only are the Israelis relentlessly killing genocide survivors in the Gaza Strip, but their continued blockade of the enclave has once again brought besieged Palestinians to the brink of famine. Long lines persist outside community kitchens as people struggle to secure adequate meals for themselves and their families amid widespread deprivation.
“In Palestine, conditions in Gaza remain fragile despite some improvements after the October 2025 ceasefire,” a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) stated earlier this week. “More than 1.6 million people were previously assessed as needing urgent food support.”
Shit dawg, more “defeat for Trump” bullshit. Do these people get it? The USA a la Is-RAW-Hell are just ramping up for the next stage.
I was interviewed by Mondoweiss about the regional and strategic ramifications of the US-Israeli war against Iran. Text and link below: Mouin Rabbani
This week, President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding outlining terms for an end to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran. After months of bombing, the United States has achieved none of its stated war aims.
What does Trump’s defeat mean for the future of U.S. designs in the region? Will the U.S. relationship with Israel change in any way going forward? What does the Iranian victory mean for the country?
I’d start with a few comments. The first is that the United States has suffered an unambiguous defeat.
The second is that any responses to U.S. diplomacy have to be considered tentative, because Washington has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be a thoroughly dishonest, untrustworthy, and unreliable negotiating partner. Most recently, it launched two unprovoked words of aggression, using diplomacy as camouflage, just in the past year. As you just mentioned, this is not a peace treaty, and so we have to keep the very real possibility in mind that the u.s is simply not serious about any commitments it has made under this agreement, but having said so
There are important indications that the U.S. recognizes its defeat and that it will prove extremely costly for the U.S. to try to overturn it. Let’s briefly go through the history. In 2015, the United States and Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action JCPOA. The Iranian nuclear agreement, which ensured that Iran could never develop a nuclear weapon, established the most intrusive monitoring and inspections regime in the history of the nuclear age, and basically fulfilled each of Washington’s explicitly stated objectives with respect to Iran.
What we found is that the United States was very slow to meet its own commitments, and the agreement turned out to be a bad deal for Iran because of the benefits Iran was supposed to get from it, including trade and the lifting of sanctions. So they were quite limited, but that wasn’t enough for the United States. In 2018, the U.S. unilaterally renounced an international agreement and replaced it with a policy of maximum pressure, a policy that made things much more difficult for Iran.
However, the U.S. failed to achieve any of its objectives in terms of either fomenting regime change in Tehran, reducing Iran’s regional footprint, or affecting its ballistic missile program. More importantly, Iran viewed itself as no longer bound by its own commitments under that agreement, which, according to everyone who has looked at it, Iran was scrupulously observing until that agreement.
Then in 2021, Washington renewed negotiations. I’m not talking about Obama and Trump and Biden, because it’s important to understand we’re talking about the policies of a state, of a country, not those of different individuals. That’s why I’m referring to Washington and the United States, rather than the individual leaders involved.
In 2021, recognizing the failures of maximum pressure, Washington reopened negotiations with Iran to rejoin the agreement, but rather than simply admitting its failure or its mistake or whatever, however you want to describe the unilateral renunciation of an international agreement,
The U.S. tried to impose a new agreement on Iran rather than seeking to resolve issues that arose as a result of the renunciation of that agreement and the subsequent Iranian violation of its own commitments. Here I’m referring primarily to Iran’s decision to begin enriching uranium to increasingly high levels. Washington sought to impose a new and entirely different agreement that would have compelled Iran to make commitments that had nothing to do with the original 2015 agreement.
I’m talking about, for example, Iran’s regional policy, its relationships with its partners in the so-called “Axis of Resistance”, and its ballistic missile program. Needless to say, Iran rejected these illegitimate demands, which set the stage for the issues we’re discussing today.
I would like to add a personal note: in late 2020, after U.S. presidential elections, I got a call from a researcher at Chatham House in the UK. They were conducting a study on how the incoming administration should handle the Iranian file.
I made a very simple point. The U.S. has essentially two choices. It can either unconditionally admit its mistake and rejoin the JCPOA, then raise any objections it has to Iran’s conduct under this agreement, or it can take a different path, like trying to impose new conditions on Iran, and that’s not going to work. It’s going to end badly for everyone concerned. If I say so myself, I’ve been proven right by the Biden administration’s refusal to uphold U.S. obligations under the JCPOA. The Biden administration’s insistence on continuing with Trump’s policies towards Iran, without altering them in any way, in other words, maintaining maximum pressure, even adding new sanctions, set the stage for war.
So you can’t just say Trump is horrible and it’s all his fault. We have to look at the consistencies in U.S. policy over the past several decades, and particularly the last one. We had the 12-day war last year. It achieved nothing. Then we had the unprecedented, unprovoked war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28 this year. Now the objectives of that war were laid out very clearly, openly, explicitly word for word by the leaders concerned: regime change, a comprehensive end to Iran’s nuclear program. In other words, Iran would no longer have a nuclear program as opposed to having one under proper international supervision with monitoring, you know, every single reactor would be decommissioned, missile material would not be so much be moved out of the country as seized by the United States and taken to the United States. Iran’s ballistic missile program would be comprehensively dismantled. Iran would not be allowed to have any more regional alliances and so on. There was also an unstated Israeli war objective that may or may not have been shared by the United States. And that was essentially a state collapse to make Iran a carbon copy of Iraq during the first decade of the century and Syria during the second decade.
It failed. Not a single one of these objectives was achieved. On April 8, the United States, recognizing its failure and the increasing cost of pursuing success, concluded a ceasefire agreement with Iran, mediated by Pakistan in close coordination with Saudi Arabia and with additional input from Egypt, Turkey, and perhaps others.
The ceasefire agreement ultimately didn’t resolve any of the issues that led the United States to accept it. What I mean is that you had a global economic crisis caused by this war. Energy prices were increasingly high. What was being termed a price shock was threatening to become a supply shock. In other words, the issue wasn’t so much that you had to pay so much for these things, but that they wouldn’t even be available on the market. A whole bunch of secondary impacts were observed in terms of petroleum byproducts, inputs for agricultural fertilizers, and other products that were prominently exported from the Gulf.
None of these issues were resolved because a ceasefire in and of itself was not, for example, sufficient for Lloyd’s of London to begin bringing down maritime insurance rates to a reasonable and acceptable level. In other words, the trade didn’t get back on its feet.
Now, the difference here is that, um, the U.S. was not only dealing with damage to itself but also with damage it had inflicted on the global economy. Whereas for Iran, which the United States had spent nearly half a century seeking to disconnect from the global economy, yes, it was suffering and enduring a very punishing reality, but it was much less affected by these things.
So, to resolve this, the problems that it had created for itself as a result of its decision to launch an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran and in partnership with Israel, the United States essentially had two options, because a ceasefire in and of itself didn’t resolve those challenges. It was left with two options.
The first was to sign a diplomatic agreement with Iran, on the understanding that it would reflect Iran’s strengthened position and Washington’s weakened one. The second option would have been to resume full-scale military hostilities, and that would have required the commitment of substantially larger U.S. military and other resources than had been committed at the beginning of the war. Those are resources that, in key respects, the United States either no longer possessed or was unwilling to commit, and even then, without any guarantee of success.
Faced with these two options, Washington’s initial policy was to seek to create a third option by instituting the blockade of Iran and beginning what was essentially a war of attrition against Iran. The United States hoped to sufficiently weaken Iran and reduce its leverage by forcibly reopening the Strait of Hormuz and compelling Iran to sign a diplomatic agreement that would be much more advantageous to the U.S.
Initially, this approach worked to Washington’s advantage. The problem was that Iran retained the capacity to respond and retaliate, and it began retaliating with increasing force, so that things were rapidly escalating once again, leaving the U.S. facing a fork in the road. It either had to reach a rapid, conclusive diplomatic agreement or, failing that, rapidly escalate once again towards full-scale war.
It chose this diplomatic agreement because it was unprepared, unable, and unwilling to once again commit to full-scale war, bearing in mind, as I said at the outset of this very long-winded response, that the United States has repeatedly proven itself to be a thoroughly dishonest, untrustworthy, and unreliable negotiator. We should by no means conclude on that basis that this is over now.
What we have now is a diplomatic agreement; it’s not a peace treaty. It’s a framework agreement; it sets forth the issues that need to be resolved and those that the United States and Iran have mutually agreed to either implement or negotiate.
If you look at the memorandum, what is as important as the issues that are included in that document are the issues that are excluded. And the issues excluded encompass every single objective proclaimed at the outset of this war regime change. Not only is regime change not on the agenda, but Washington has committed not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. Iran’s ballistic missile program, Iran’s regional alliances, these are not even up for discussion. The only issues that are up for discussion are Iran repeating, as it has for decades, that it will not acquire nuclear weapons, and the issues of enriched uranium in Iran, basically, its violations of the 2015 agreement that are on the agenda only because the U.S. unilaterally renounced that agreement. Beyond that, no element of Iran’s nuclear program is even up for discussion.
So, if you look at this agreement, it represents an unambiguous victory uh for Iran, and the reason that I’ve referred to this war as Washington’s Suez Moment, and i’m leaving Israel outside the analysis for the moment, is that just as how in 1956 Britain and France going to war in the Middle East to reassert themselves as global powers in the aftermath of the Second World War and being confronted with the limits of that power, making unambiguously clear that they were in fact declining powers, so in 2026, the United States went to war in the Middle East to reassert its global primacy, and as a result of its failure, has confirmed its decline as a global empire.
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The video is hard to watch. Little Zeina pleading over her father’s body, “Father, father, my beloved father, come to me…. Why did you leave me? Why?”
Zeina, of course, knows her father didn’t leave her. He and her brother were taken from her by Israel. They were killed while collecting water.
Zeina’s father, Mohammad Al-Habeel, and her brother, 5-year-old Mousa, are two of the more than 1,000 Palestinians killed since the so-called “ceasefire” agreement last October. “What ceasefire?” as Zeteo contributor Diana Buttu recently asked.
I have always hated the use of the term “ceasefire” when it comes to Palestine. The Cambridge English dictionary defines the term as “an agreement, usually between two armies, to stop fighting in order to allow discussions about peace.” For clarity, Palestinians do not have an army; we are not “fighting” (Israel is committing genocide), and of course, there are no “discussions about peace” (nor prospect of it, given that Israel continues to steal land).
And before anyone misconstrues my words, let me be clear: Palestinians were the happiest to see Israel’s mass killings stop when the so-called “ceasefire” was announced in October 2025. From October 2023 to October 2025 – the height of Israel’s genocide on Gaza – Israel was killing, on average, over 100 Palestinians a day. Israeli forces were gleefully bombing nearly all of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, and more than 200 schools and universities (we saw the TikToks). Israeli soldiers viewed children, journalists, and medical personnel as legitimate targets. Israel and its U.S. backers derived sick pleasure in seeing Palestinians scramble for food, only for Israeli soldier’s to gun them down or bomb them.
So why do I hate the term “ceasefire”? Because “ceasefire” doesn’t mean the end of genocide – at least not for Israel. So let’s examine what it doesmean for Israel.
When a foreign government has:
– Direct access to your classified intelligence
– Co-production rights on your weapons systems
– Influence over your defense procurement
– A dedicated executive agent in your Pentagon
– The ability to create jobs to buy political support
– A ‘critical’ espionage rating from your own intelligence agencies
At what point do you stop being a sovereign nation?
The Jews are getting it all, man — USA, Canada, most of EuroTrashLandia, AU, NZ, UK — wherever their murder tools are sold.
Part of the genius of Section 224 is how it’s designed to make opposing it politically impossible. The provision allows Israeli defense companies like Rafael to expand or establish co-production plants in U.S. states, creating jobs in American districts.
The mechanism is simple and it works:
1. An Israeli company opens a facility in, say, Alabama.
2. People in that district get jobs.
3. That district’s representative now has a material interest in protecting the relationship.
4. The representative votes to keep the money flowing.
THEY ARE WINNING:
Call your representative at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you see what they’re doing.
References
1. The Intercept. “Congress Is Trying to Permanently Integrate U.S. and Israeli Defense Tech.” June 7, 2026.
2. Consortium News. “Fusing the US Military and the IDF.” June 4, 2026.
3. Pew Research Center. “Most people across 36 countries have negative views of Israel and little confidence in Netanyahu.” June 3, 2026.
4. ThePrint. “Israel ‘spied’ on US negotiators working on Iran deal, Pentagon raises threat perception—NYT report.” June 6, 2026.
5. The Independent. “Trump pushing through law to massively expand US intelligence sharing with Israel.” June 8, 2026.
6. The Jerusalem Post. “Khanna, Massie join to strip US-Israel tech cooperation from defense bill.” June 1, 2026.
7. Newsweek. “NDAA Section 224 alarms progressives and conservatives—Here’s what it says.” June 8, 2026.
8. PressTV. “2027 NDAA Section 224: Inside the deepening integration of American, Israeli military systems.” June 18, 2026.
9. Responsible Statecraft. “Pro-Israel voices win out, kill bill to stop US-Israel military integration.” June 4, 2026.
10. Middle East Eye. “Negative views of Israel soar across 36 countries since Iran war, survey finds.” June 4, 2026.
And, again, more fucking tripe with more fucking ex-Colonels. This is reality, the US Mercenary Diservices: Unfortunately, the War is a Racket and the Middle East/West Asia is Paying the Price, Not USA Ex-Colonel is correct. PROVING gorunds. Stress TESTS.
So Donald Trump’s “little excursion” to Iran—which he assured everyone would be a quick two-week romp—somehow stretched into a 100-day slog of death, destruction, and economic chaos. But don’t worry! They’ve now “settled” the war with “the Red.” (Iran? The Reds? Who knows, who cares—victory lap time!)
Our host Mehdi Hasan sat down with retired Colonel David D. Ro, a man so dedicated to defending the indefensible that he literally had to consult a thesaurus to redefine “imminent,” “massacre,” and “success” into something resembling English.
His conclusion? Operation Epic Fury is a success! Never mind that Iran still has 70% of its missiles, 90% of its underground storage, and enough enriched uranium to make a reactor blush. And sure, they replaced the Supreme Leader with… another Ayatollah.
But David has a four-point checklist, people!
Air defense? Check!
Nuclear program? Kind of check!
Missiles? Well, they’re not firing many *effective* ones, so check!
Internal security degraded? Maybe? The metrics are flexible!
When confronted with 1,700 dead civilians, 120 children blown up in a school, and dozens of hospitals and universities reduced to rubble, David’s response was truly Olympic-caliber mental gymnastics. Massacre? That implies *intent*! It wasn’t a massacre—it was just… 120 kids getting recklessly deleted. And the school was *near* a military base, so really, it’s the children’s fault for being in the wrong place. Also, the Pentagon’s weapons are apparently so precise they accidentally bomb volleyball teams *and* sports halls simultaneously. But don’t worry—David is *unfamiliar* with that incident. Because his crack research team clearly works from the Pentagon’s PR department.
Barak Cena, an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, joined to explain that 120 dead Iranian children are merely “collateral damage”—and he was *so* careful to say it’s all tragic while simultaneously calling it completely legitimate. The UN War Crimes Tribunal is presumably taking notes.
Meanwhile, Muhammad Ali Shabbani pointed out that Iran’s military budget is 130 times smaller than America’s, yet somehow they’re still fighting. Almost like bombing knowledge, scientists, and universities doesn’t actually work. But who knew?
The highlight reel: David arguing that 1953 Iran wasn’t *really* a democracy because the prime minister was appointed by the king (like the UK’s prime minister!), so therefore the CIA-MI6 coup was fine. And he *still* wouldn’t fully admit the US helped Saddam gas Iranians in the 1980s—just a “little bit” of help targeting Iranian troops with chemical weapons, not *really* endorsing the gassing itself. The distinction was clearly lost on the dead Iranians.
When asked about Israel ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon (a million displaced!), David suddenly couldn’t see the ethnic cleansing. It’s just… temporary Shia relocation? And he insists Israel won’t keep them out permanently—despite the Israeli foreign minister saying exactly that. But David’s “on record” predicting they’ll return. Because his track record of predictions has been so spotless!
The audience poll showing 44% of Arabs see Israel as the biggest threat, 21% the US, and Iran a distant 6%? David’s response: “I’m surprised we only got 21%—we’re a superpower, we get blamed for everything.” And the JCPOA was bad, apparently, because it gave Iran planes that they used to fly militias into Syria—except Iran already had planes and sanctions didn’t actually stop them. But hey, let’s bomb schools instead!
In the end, David’s parting defense: “The burden of being a superpower is we’re blamed for everything we do and everything we don’t do.” A philosophy the families of 1,700 dead Iranians would surely find reassuring.
The Jews have colonized the colonizers:
‘I’ve finally found God without all the extras’: behind the surge in people converting to Progressive Judaism
Despite an increase in antisemitism and anti-Jewish feeling in the UK, adult conversions are on the rise
[Elizabeth Arif-Fear was born Christian, then converted to Islam and was Muslim for 14 years and has now converted to Judaism.]
[Rabbi Jonathan Romain is convener of the Reform Beit Din, the rabbinic court for Progressive Judaism.]
“We’ve found several times people have said to me, ‘Somebody gave me a DNA test as a Christmas present and it turned out I was Jewish,’” he says. “For some people, that’s just a matter of information. But other people, it intrigues them, or maybe it even answers something deep inside them.”
A mercenary in another man’s land, another child’s land, another aunty’s land, a mother’s land, and this is fucking celebrated?
Estimates indicate that several million people—including soldiers and civilians—were killed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as a result of the Vietnam War and associated U.S. military operations. The total death toll is heavily debated, but the most widely accepted historical estimates place the combined casualties for all sides between 2 million and 3.8 million deaths. [1, 2]
More than 54 years after he crawled beneath the Dong Ha Bridge to stop a North Vietnamese armored invasion, Marine Col. John Ripley entered the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes on Thursday.
For generations of Marines, the moment represented recognition of one of the most legendary acts of battlefield leadership in the Vietnam War. But for Ripley’s son, Tom, the ceremony was about far more than a medal.
In an exclusive interview with Military.com following the ceremony, Tom Ripley said the Medal of Honor awarded to his father represents the Marines who fought beside him, the military spouse who held their family together through two Vietnam tours, and the generations of service members who carried the story forward for more than half a century.
“This is not my award,” Ripley said. “When people would stand up and clap, I would clap too.”
Fighting for our freedoms to be slipped away… The San Francisco Police Department said an audit of its automated license plate reader camera network shows it was improperly accessed by out-of-state and federal agencies.
Data from the SFPD’s ALPR network, manufactured by Flock Safety, was improperly searched nearly 300 times by over roughly one year, representing about 0.005% of all searches during that period, the department said. The audit found no searches related to immigration enforcement or reproductive rights investigations, according to police.
It’s not greenwashing. It’s green sadomasochism. Green Porn. Green Snuff.
The ocean is home to some of the richest biodiversity on Earth. From coral reefs and mangrove forests to the deep sea, marine ecosystems sustain countless species, support coastal communities, regulate the climate and underpin global food security.
But these systems face growing pressure from overfishing, habitat loss, pollution and climate change.
In response, nations have adopted an ambitious global goal to conserve at least 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030 – known as 30×30. This target has expanded marine protection worldwide, particularly through marine protected areas.
But what happens after protection is announced?
[Marine heat waves can trigger coral bleaching.]
Decades of experience have shown that effective marine protection requires consistent rules, regulations and oversight, along with financing and meaningful collaboration with local governments, industries and communities. Without it, these areas risk becoming paper parks: lines on a map without real-world impact, where marine life may continue to face overfishing and other threats.
The Strait of Hormuz has reopened to international shipping after Iran and the US signed a memorandum of understanding this week, but a CNN Business analysis warns that the diplomatic breakthrough may have arrived too late to stop global oil reserves running critically short this summer.
Crude has not moved freely out of the Gulf for nearly four months. According to analytics firm Kpler, the war has cost the world some 1.15 billion barrels of oil supply, a shortfall that has pushed the market towards what the outlet describes as a breaking point even as diplomats celebrate the truce.
Even if global production outpaced demand by close to 5 million barrels a day, the surplus the International Energy Agency currently forecasts, it would take roughly a year to recover the 1.15 billion barrels lost during the Iran-US conflict.
By Watson’s own account, these men were terrified that his uncompromising history would frighten off the governmental partners they were so desperate to court. The tactic of aggressive non-violence that Watson developed in 1977 was rejected as being too controversial, despite having been the very approach that made Sea Shepherd the successful movement it became.
Watson’s account of the split makes clear this was not a disagreement about tactics. It was a disagreement about what the organisation fundamentally was. The new leadership wanted a mainstream conservation NGO. Watson wanted what Sea Shepherd had always been: a direct-action force that answered to no one.
Following the removal of Watson and Essemlali, Sea Shepherd France, Brazil, and the UK remained loyal to the original objectives of the movement. The new Sea Shepherd Global subsequently sued Watson and Sea Shepherd France, charging that they had no legal right to use the name Sea Shepherd — the name Watson himself created — or the logos that he had designed. An organisation suing its founder for using his own name. The symbolism was not subtle.
The Yamasec Problem: Mercenaries at Sea
This is where the story moves from disappointing to genuinely troubling.
According to reporting by L’Impertinent, the Israeli company Yamasec, based in Uganda, had been hiring security personnel to operate on Sea Shepherd Global boats for approximately seven years. On board Sea Shepherd’s ship the Sam Simon in Gambian waters, two hired Israeli security personnel from Yamasec trained Gambian Navy officers in military boarding procedures: how to carry their weapons while climbing rope ladders, how to check ships for contraband, weapons, or hidden workers, and how to board moving vessels that refused to stop.
Let that sink in. An organisation founded on non-violent direct action, celebrated for its scrappy, civilian-crewed ships standing between whalers and whales, had quietly become a platform for military-trained contractors to run boarding operations with armed naval officers.
Sea Shepherd France’s Lamya Essemlali says she and Watson were entirely unaware of the Yamasec collaboration: “It sounds crazy, but no, we didn’t know. It was never discussed during board meetings, and we never approved any contract.” According to Essemlali, internal documents including the Yamasec contracts were kept hidden from them, which is precisely why Sea Shepherd France filed a lawsuit against Global in Amsterdam — to access the internal documents that had been concealed.
A crew member who spoke to L’Impertinent described the dynamic aboard ship in terms that should alarm anyone who remembers what Sea Shepherd was supposed to be: “They are there to help us in case of pirate attacks and to manage the local soldiers who board with us and give us the legitimacy to dock fishing vessels. One of Yamasec’s bosses has privileged contacts with governments. I was told that without Yamasec, we wouldn’t be able to be there — which surprised me, since they’re the ones working for us, not the other way around. There’s a link I find unhealthy between a private security company and local presidents.”
A former crew member, writing under their own name, corroborated this: “I witnessed an Israeli security team on board — paid obscene amounts — who later returned to participate in operations against Palestinians.” This is a single, unverified account, and it deserves to be treated as such. But it is the kind of account that demands a response from Sea Shepherd Global — one that has not been forthcoming.
The Paul Watson Foundation’s FAQ lays out the founding philosophy with striking clarity: direct action, operational independence, no government partners, complete transparency with the public. These were not aspirational values — they were the operational DNA that made Sea Shepherd effective. Governments do not board illegal fishing vessels at three in the morning in a storm. Radical, non-violent civilians who answer to no flag will.
By choosing legitimacy over autonomy, the new Sea Shepherd Global traded away the only thing that made it powerful. You cannot hold governments accountable while those same governments are signing your contracts and vetting your security personnel. You cannot claim to protect the ocean while your board suppresses internal documents to conceal which military contractors are running your ships. And you cannot pretend to be a grassroots movement while suing your own founder for using his name.
The Captain Paul Watson Foundation carries the original mandate forward, operating independently without government partnerships or security contractors. Whether that is enough — and whether “working within the system” can achieve what defiance could not — is the question the ocean itself may eventually answer.
The rest, as they say, is fancy paperwork for the extinction of the seas.
THREE years of spinlessness and complicity:
So, the Jews are losing? Christ. 320 Jew Billionaires and their Cartel of Tech Billionaires and Eichmann millionaires. Jews are not humanity’s or Earth’s friends.
My mom’s name is Mona, so a little bit of triggering here, but I don’t need many more examples to understand the value of Goyim to the Rabid Rabbi Raunchy Cult of Mitzvaha
Lebanese journalist and analyst Marwa Osman writes:
They knew exactly who Mona Khalil was.
They knew the bright orange house in Mansouri, south Lebanon. They knew it was not a military site, not a command center, not a battlefield position. It was one of the most recognizable symbols of environmental conservation on Lebanon’s southern coast; a sanctuary dedicated to protecting endangered sea turtles and preserving life.
Mona spent her years defending the most vulnerable creatures of the Mediterranean, teaching generations that every life matters, that nature is not a casualty to be discarded, and that humanity has a duty to protect what cannot protect itself.
Yet the same orange house that stood as a beacon of conservation became a target for terrorist Israel.
This was an assault on a woman whose life’s work was devoted to safeguarding life itself. A woman known internationally for her environmental activism, whose name had become synonymous with the protection of Lebanon’s coastline and its endangered sea turtles.
The murder of Mona Khalil sends a chilling message: even those whose only weapon is compassion, whose only mission is preservation, are not spared.
Al Mayadeen reported:
Environmental activist Mona Khalil, widely known as the “guardian of the turtles” of Mansouri in the Tyre district, South Lebanon, has succumbed to injuries sustained in an Israeli strike that directly targeted her home on June 4.
The 76-year-old founder of the Orange House Project spent more than 25 years protecting sea turtles and preserving Lebanon’s marine turtle life along Tyre’s coast, refusing to abandon her home despite repeated wars.
After leaving her career in the Netherlands, she dedicated her life to turning Mansouri Beach into a sanctuary for marine life.
According to L’Orient Le Jour, after Israeli occupation forces withdrew from South Lebanon in 2000, Mona founded the Orange House Project to protect this nesting site and ensure the survival of baby turtles until they returned to the sea.
The Orange House, just meters from the beach, was transformed into an eco-guesthouse whose revenues funded the preservation of a 1.4-kilometer stretch of coastline. This stretch of sand, which became her daily field of action, is home to turtle nesting as well as broader biodiversity.
Mona’s death has been widely mourned.
The Green Southerners association described the Israeli attack on her home as a reminder that “highlights the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation in the South, which spare neither people nor the environment.”
Jews are liars, deep, deep in their fucking Marvel Moses Comic Book paedophile brains:
On 16 March 2003, Rachel Corrie, a twenty-three-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Washington, was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Rafah, southern Gaza, where she had been living for the past seven weeks as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Wearing a bright orange jacket of the sort donned by ISM volunteers during “human shield” work, Corrie, along with other ISM activists, was trying to block demolitions of Palestinian homes.
In its initial statement dated 17 March, the IDF noted that the incident occurred while IDF forces were “taking down shrubbery along the border between Israel and Egypt” and that “as the windows of the bulletproof bulldozer are very small, the visibility is very limited and the bulldozer operator did not see the woman.” But while the initial Israeli statement indicated that “an IDF bulldozer apparently ran over a protester accidentally,” the “full” investigation, led by the chief of general staff of the IDF and completed during the second week of April 2003, concluded that Corrie had not been run over by an “engineering vehicle” after all, “but rather was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved.” The report exonerated Israeli forces of any responsibility.
According to eyewitness reports by ISM volunteers on the scene, however, the army’s description of events bore little resemblance to what they saw. In the words of Joe Smith, an ISM activist present at the time, “Rachel was kneeling 20 meters in front of the bulldozer on flat ground. There was no way she could not have been seen. We only maintain positions that are clearly visible. She had been doing this all day, but this time the driver did not stop. Once she had fallen under the bulldozer, the driver stopped when she was under its middle section and reversed.” Photographs of the incident confirm the ISM accounts.
Fucking Thespians. Mandy just skirts over his fucking dirty religion, and again, once again, the Holocaust Industrial Complex, as he cites “Bibi” Mileikowsky, often spelled Mileikowski, as the cunt culprit? Your entire Jewish racists, dude, Israel, that Jewish State of Hate . . .
This is their fucking psychopathic “religion,” liar, err, thespian:
Israel is making clear that it wants war with any regional country that even mildly pushes back against the Greater Israel Project , now stating that it intends to “ be at war with Syria sooner or later” and fabricating a “Sunni axis of evil” which includes “Pakistan, Türkiye and Qatar”
In the delusional minds of the Israelis, sabotaging the MoU will cause a spring effect that will cause the United States to bomb Iranian energy infrastructure and carry out regime change and the collapse of Iran.
Before the signing of the MoU, when Israel bombed Dahiyeh, Beirut, the Israeli paper Ynet reported that , “A source familiar with the details claims that as early as last Thursday, Israel really wanted to bomb Tehran, perhaps as a last-ditch attempt to thwart the bad agreement that was emerging with Iran. Trump pressed for it not to happen, and the attack was indeed called off. Israel saw Hezbollah’s firing into the Galilee as an opportunity to put the plan back on the table, and thought of a domino effect: Israel would attack Dahiyya, Iran, which is trying to create an equation, would attack with missiles – and Israel would have justification to attack. In Jerusalem, they thought that this would be an opportunity to settle scores with the Iranians and strike infrastructure and energy targets, which would accelerate the overthrow of the regime.”
[Here’s a target right here, Mandy, not you fav enemy, Adolph Bibi! Middle East Eye reports that Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli said that Israel “will be at war with Syria sooner or later” and “outlined what he considers to be a new anti-Israel alliance made up of Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar”, suggesting “that Pakistan and Turkey were part of this axis after playing a major role in negotiations between the US and Iran.”]
Jews, Mandy, JEWS.
Karim gets it right here:
The function of the Trump-Netanyahu melodrama is not to restrain Israel. The function is to manage Western opinion. Audiences that might otherwise be roused to outrage by the sight of mothers digging their children out of pulverized concrete can be soothed by the suggestion that someone, somewhere in Washington, is angry on their behalf. The leaked profanities and the off-the-record briefings give the appearance of conflict between a reluctant imperial sovereign and his runaway client, and the appearance is the product. The bombs continue. The corpses pile up. But the conscience of the empire has been served, the moral hygiene of the consumer class preserved.
This is the oldest ritual of power: the performance of remorse without its substance. The Roman senate could weep over the destruction of Carthage even as the salt was poured into its fields. The British parliament could pass humanitarian resolutions during the Bengal famine while the grain ships sailed for Europe. The same arts are practiced today by a class of professional regretters who occupy our cable news desks and the deputy assistant secretariats of Foggy Bottom. They are very sorry about what they cannot, in good conscience, stop doing.
And so we are asked to believe the unbelievable. We are asked to believe that the most militarily dependent state on earth, a country whose air force flies American jets and whose treasury floats on American grants, is conducting a campaign of regional destruction in defiance of the express wishes of its sole patron. We are asked to believe that the empire’s wishes are unenforceable because Bibi (god, I hate that teddy bear name)will not pick up the phone. We are asked to look at the visible flow of nine billion dollars in expedited munitions and to conclude that the rupture is real.
One Mona is worth 100,000 Jews. One sea turtle is worth 1 million Zionists:
And what would this prostitute do? Sell Genocide Property: Gwyneth Paltrow faces online backlash for starring in luxury Israel real estate ad
And so the death trap with the ZioAzovNaziLensky continues . . . Jews, Queen’s Gambit!
Zelensky gave Lukashenko one week to remove air defenses and drone relay transmitters along their joint border otherwise Ukraine will do it for him. This comes amidst their growing tensions that have been boiling since spring after Zelensky implied that Ukraine could capture Lukashenko like the US captured Maduro on the pretext of preempting a supposedly imminent Belarusian invasion of Ukraine. This closely resembles their summer 2024 crisis which readers learn more about here, here, and here.
Here you go, over the pond, where my mom Mona’s family hails from. She’s spinning in her grave . . .
Britain can now let out a sigh of relief. We can all breath again, having held our breath for weeks, anxious that Reform UK would light the fuse to a Fascist Britain.
But is there reason to be cheerful? Reason to be optimistic?
Andy Burnham said it himself in his victory speech: “Everyone knows that politics isn’t working”.
And Andy Burnham is one of the politicians that has brought us all to this dysfunctional Britain.
Everyone will point to their own historical moment for when the rot set in. I’m of a generation that would put that date to 1983, when Margaret Thatcher should have lost the General Election, for everything she had done to the country – the legacy of which is with us to this day.
But the Falklands saved her.
Everything pointed to a Thatcher defeat until the Falklands victory. The war saved Thatcher; a precedent that future Prime Ministers would remember and emulate.
But another more recent example of when the rot began has to be the Iraq War and the “War on Terror”, and Tony Blair.
Let us not forget that Andy Burnham is a Blairite. Like his Lord and Master, Burnham has mastered the art of sincerity and appearing authentic; a man of the people; relatable.
But Burnham backed the Iraq war and all the lies that came with it.
Saddam was behind 9/11. No?
Well Saddam supports al-Qaeda. No?
Well he’s a despot, and the world will be a better place without him.
What? There are other despots we support? And what’s that you say? We helped him attack Iran and then gave him chemical weapons? What’s that? We gave him weapons of mass destruction?
Aha! There! You see! Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and he can launch them at us in just 45-minutes. QED!
Let the bombing begin! Let curtains go up in this theatre of war! Let’s watch the spectacle of a life-time. The Shock and Awe of it all!
That is what Burnham supported.
Did he learn from the experience?
Hell, no!
The world has watched a genocide unfold, and Burnham didn’t see it. Or he can’t “judge things of that enormity”.
But he saw Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. They were very real. Real enough to start a war. Clearly, he was able to judge on “little” things like war.
Burnham was, and probably still is, a member of Labour Friends of Israel.
Would things have been different if Andy Burnham had been Prime Minister? Perhaps. But not with regards the genocide – because Burnham does not see a genocide. And he is a “friend of Israel”.
Burnham has the political insight not to have said that Israel has the right to stop water, food and fuel to Gaza, but he would have provided Israel with the diplomatic cover and the military intelligence that Starmer has been giving during the genocide. Of that there is no doubt.
Wes Streeting comes out better than Burnham over Gaza. Streeting has said that Israel has been using the “language of ethnic cleansing” and has committed war crimes – something that Burnham has not done.
So, I’m supposed to be grateful that Burnham won?
More than half (55%) of the people in Makerfield voted for this man who refuses to call a genocide a genocide.
And more than one-third (34%) voted for a racist and a misogynist. Let’s put the racism to one side and focus on what Rob Kenyon thinks about 50.7% of the UK.
He doesn’t believe that women can drive or give directions. He has admitted to being a sexist: “I’m sexist. Sorry, but I am”.
Female sports commentators “aren’t up to the job and only there to tick a box”.
Women get abortions for “vanity purposes” and use it as a “secondary form of contraception”. Kenyon claimed women rely on abortions so they can “shag anyone they want.”
Kenyon is impressed by European women’s bodies, but of English women’s bodies, he said they “don’t care” and “just walk around with their fat bellies and odd shapes pushing a pram at 16.”
One in three people in Makerfield thought that Kenyon is representative of their town. Presumably all were men.
In a word. No. Not the 55% who voted for Burnham. Not the 34% who voted for Kenyon.
The only thing that would have given me hope would have been returning Count Binface to Westminster, and showing the bastards there just how contemptible they are for allowing a genocide to take place under their very noses. And for steering this country towards a Fascist Britain.
The two are very much related.
a whole lot of talking going around . . . . You have two hours to pop the popcorn, chill the Bud, grease your recliner, cheer your fav footballers, and wait for more slop from the sloppy Danny Boston Haiphong.
So so easy to hate Jews, man . . .
She stood firm through two wars, refusing to abandon her home in Mansouri just a few meters from the beach and the sea turtles she watched over for a quarter century.
Environmental activist Mona Khalil, 76, founder of the Orange House Project and a prominent figure in marine turtle protection along the Sour coast, succumbed to her injuries Friday caused by an Israeli strike that directly hit her family home on June 4.
She regained consciousness the day after the attack before her condition gradually deteriorated. She had been hospitalized for two weeks at AUBMC in Beirut, after being transferred from Jabal Amel Hospital in the south, according to Fadia Joumaa, an environmental activist from Sour, contacted by L’Orient-Le Jour. “Doctors tried in vain to save her in recent days,” she added.
‘Today, I’m living my dream’
A leading figure in wildlife protection in Lebanon, Khalil dedicated more than two decades to saving the sea turtles of the southern coastline. Her commitment began in 1999 when, one night in May on the Mansouri beach, she discovered a turtle laying its eggs. Soon after, she left her career as an art restorer in the Netherlands and settled in the family house located about a hundred meters from the shore, built by her father and where she spent her childhood summers. In 2000, after the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon, she founded the Orange House Project to protect this nesting site and ensure the survival of the baby turtles until they returned to the sea.
The house, just meters from the beach, was transformed into an eco-guesthouse whose revenues funded the preservation of a 1.4-kilometer stretch of coastline. This stretch of sand, which became her daily field of action, is home to turtle nesting as well as broader biodiversity. Over the years, Khalil became a local environmental reference and the guardian angel of the Mansouri turtles.
“I started with a friend. We were two women, alone. I knew nothing about turtles. I wrote to the Mediterranean Association to Save the Sea Turtles to ask for help. They sent us a marine biologist who taught us everything. Today, I’m living my dream,” she told L’Orient-Le Jour.
She was known for her staunch opposition, over the years, to any projects that threatened to cement “her beach,” which had become a sanctuary for sea turtles. She succeeded in having the beach designated as a “hima,” a type of reserve managed by individuals and local authorities.
The Israeli strike that wounded and then killed her hit her house directly. The shell landed on the side where her bedroom was, according to witnesses of the strike. “Mona barricaded herself inside her home, letting in no one and believing she was safe because she was a civilian, Fadia Joumaa told us two weeks ago. She absolutely refused to be displaced, and that was truly worthy of someone so determined.”
Mansouri is located just north of what the Israelis call the “yellow line,” which marks a de facto buffer zone inside which they occupy dozens of villages, but the destruction there is nonetheless immense.
The New Trump-Kushner-Minyan promoted Jewish postage stamp!
This is Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor John Cafaro who got the no-bid contract to install a water purification system for the reflecting pool. He has 2 prior convictions, one for bribing a member of Congress and another for an illegal loan that violated campaign finance laws.
Hereo:
The Israeli soldier who responsible for the killing of Palestinian child Hind Rajab with 335 bullets was killed in Lebanon
Jews
Hedges gets it right!
The buffoons who orchestrate fascism, with its quack science, idiocy, penchant for violence and grotesque hypermasculinity, are ripe for satire. It is easy, as late-night comics do — and as the cabarets did for the Nazis in Berlin — to pillory the goons, misfits and mediocrities who hold power and spew fascist bile. But this form of satire blinds opponents to its destructive power and murderous core. It ignores the real centers of power. It does not engender resistance. It engenders disdain and cynicism. It furthers the social and political divide between us, the “enlightened” and “educated” elite, and them, the despised and ridiculed “basket of deplorables.”
There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass. It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.
Antonio Gramsci warned that elitist satire is counterproductive. He called for a “passionate sarcasm,” which targets the machinery of power. Satire, he wrote, must excoriate the dominant myths and ideologies which buttress capitalism and fascism. It must expose not only the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of fascism, but acknowledge the legitimate grievances of those under its spell. It must focus on the institutions that perpetuate injustice and social inequality.
“Trump has also been necessary to expose the plastic progressives, the liberal anti-Trump imperialists who, in their opposition to Trump’s deal with Iran, can only look like warmongering imperial psychopaths,” writes Nate Bear. “From all those sharing memes on social media about surrender, from the Democrats and CNN talking heads decrying the deal, to Jimmy Fallon dragging Trump for giving Iran back the money the US stole, there is no articulation of an alternative to endlessly bombing Iran. There’s no anger from liberals over dead Iranians, or at the imperial state, at Zionism or the embedded death machinery that made this violence possible. No, they’re just embarrassed for empire. And they don’t want to recognise the limits of that empire.”
It begins with a movement that divides society into two: the ‘real people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’, and with a leader who insists they alone embody the ‘real’ people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritisation of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long-standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness. The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal. As the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule, universal values — human dignity and the rule of law — are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history. Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of who counts as ‘us’ grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.
As Temelkuran warns, Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, “…soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line, ‘The institutions will hold.’ They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon, they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America.”
What is Ho Chi Minh Thought In Vietnam?
Ho Chi Minh Thought isn’t a watered-down nationalist gloss on Marxism-Leninism. It’s the most fully worked-out version of Vietnamese communism there is
And no, the label “Vietnamese communism” doesn’t explain itself.
Versus . . .
He’s been catholic, Mormon, Baptist, anti-Trump, pro-Trump, pro-immigrant, anti-immigrant, anti-Iran war, pro-Iran war…
The man has no identity outside of opportunism.
There’s a saying passed down from earlier generations of Black Texans who were there for the first Juneteenth: “It was not a piece of paper that freed the slaves, but the men with the guns.”
In Libya, black men are captured and sold in an open air market like vegetables.
Dr. Walter Edmondson taking a blood sample from an unidentified and unknowing participant in the Tuskegee Syphilis study, 1932.
The study existed from 1932 to 1972 and was designed to observe how syphilis would destroy their bodies and eventually kill black patients.
American President Ronald Reagan hosted a dinner at the White House in 1987 after becoming President of the United States.
During the reception, the First Lady circulated among the guests to greet them. Her attention was drawn to a Black man, dressed modestly. Among the white guests, she hadn’t recognized him.
She approached him, with a politeness tinged with condescension, and said to him:
“Sir, may I know what you did to deserve this invitation to the dinner?”
He replied to her:
“I changed the course of music five or six times… And you, what have you done to become First Lady, other than marrying the president?”
The man was Miles Davis, one of the greatest jazz musicians in United States history.
He was a composer, trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, autobiographer, jazz musician, actor, songwriter, and film score composer, and he neither accepted nor tolerated humiliation for the color of his skin.
Did you know the Soviet Union was brought down by an NED Color Revolution?
Jew Jab:
PFIZER HAS PUBLISHED THE LIST OF SIDE EFFECTS FROM COVID VACCINE
1) Blood clot,
2) Acute kidney injury,
3) Acute flaccid myelitis,
4) Positive anti-sperm antibodies,
5) Brainstem embolism,
6) Brainstem thrombosis,
7) Cardiac arrest (hundreds of cases),
8) Heart failure,
9) Cardiac ventricular thrombosis…
10) Cardiogenic shock,
11) Central nervous system vasculitis,
12) Neonatal death,
13) Deep vein thrombosis,
14) Brainstem encephalitis,
15) Hemorrhagic encephalitis,
16) Frontal lobe epilepsy,
17) Epileptic psychosis,
18) Facial paralysis,
19) Fetal distress syndrome,
20) Gastrointestinal amyloidosis,
21) Generalized tonic-clonic seizure,
22) Hashimoto’s encephalopathy,
23) Hepatic vascular thrombosis,
24) Shingles reactivation,
25) Cancer reactivation…
26) Turbo cancers,
27) Immune-mediated hepatitis,
28) Interstitial lung disease,
29) Jugular vein embolism,
30) Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy,
31) Liver damage,
32) Low birth weight,
34) Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children,
35) Myocarditis,
36) Neonatal seizure,
37) Pancreatitis,
38) Pneumonia,
39) Stillbirth,
40) Tachycardia,
41) Temporal lobe epilepsy,
43) Testicular autoimmunity,
44) Thrombotic stroke,
45) Type 1 diabetes mellitus,
46) Neonatal vein thrombosis,
47) Vertebral artery thrombosis,
48) Pericarditis,
Oh fuck you. There is no way the guy who got the no-bid contract for using bottom shelf Home Depot sealant on the reflecting pool looks like this. Come the fuck on.
On June 19, 1953, the couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair for being communists in the USA, during the paranoid anticommunist persecution of McCarthyism.
It was the first public execution of communists after Hitler’s fall in 1945 and it took place in the country of the “Statue of Liberty,” under a campaign of mass persecution against professors, scientists, actors… devised by the anticommunist senator McCarthy.
The arrest of Ethel and Julius came about due to the “confession” of Ethel’s brother, the American sergeant David Greenglass, who accused his own sister and his brother-in-law of being “Soviet spies” out of pure hatred toward her… in 2001, David confessed that he had made it all up and had murdered his sister by lying to the FBI.
After learning of the death sentence, Ethel said: “I die with honor and dignity, knowing that my husband and I will be vindicated by history.”
Happy Juneteenth!!
Anal penetration: Trump struggles to clasp the Medal of Honor to Major Nicholas Dockery — and then ties it?
It’s a single snap…
While the World Cup is being played in the US, Trump’s Gestapo, ICE, gases civilians in the face for protesting against the kidnapping of immigrants and the repression against the American people who are fighting to prevent it.
The World Cup of shame, if this happened in Cuba or another enemy country of the West, it would be a scandal.
United States…
Bombs schools in Iran, supports the genocidal Israeli, backs the continuation of the war in Ukraine with weapons, carries out summary executions in the Caribbean, turned Argentina and Venezuela into 1950s-style Sub-Saharan extractivist colonies, wields…
I opened up a retired Air Force Colonel’s Substack, and I what do I get? Deja vu, as he waxes orgasmic over space exploration and the great photos of earth from Artemis
But without a healthy Earth, none of it matters. Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover captured this beautifully in his viral message. From deep space, he said:
“You are special, in all this emptiness. This is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.”
Fucking 1,000 words later, and the rationale is typical of the closed mind:
On July 21, 2021, billionaire Jeff Bezos rocketed about 65 miles above the Earth’s crust. Another billionaire, Sir Richard Branson, did the same nine days before, but his vehicle could only climb to 53 miles—some do not consider that a space flight, really.
Clearly, this was not the first time man ventured into space. However, in all earlier cases, explorers pursued a publicly defined mission and were paid from the public purse. Whereas Bezos and Branson were motived by private interest. Although Bezos thanked his company’s workers and customers for “paying for his trip,” it was, nonetheless, a privately financed venture. These two aspects, private interest and private financing, make these billionaires the world’s first space barons.
There is more to both sides of this argument than meets the eye, and further inquiry is warranted. For starters, I shall rule out an otherwise interesting, but notoriously complex, dimension that gave economists a headache for decades. That is the problem of interpersonal comparison of utility. In this case, can we really compare the utility gained by Bezos from his $5.5 billion trip with that of 37 million people had the money been used to end their hunger? The question may seem rhetorical, but it is not.
The problem remains an interesting one even after Bezos, and thus the need to compare his well-being with that of others, is taken out of the picture. Let us look exclusively from the viewpoint of potential beneficiaries in the developing world. Would a transfer of cash to them be better than using the money on space tourism? Surprisingly, the answer is not necessarily affirmative.
Conspicuous consumption or an incubator for innovation?
Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton suggests that technological innovations like antibiotics, pest control, and vaccines have been the primary drivers of humanity’s escape from destitution, including in developing countries, far surpassing development aid in impact. By this logic, space tourism could muster moral support, in addition to cash, if it also facilitates significant technological advances (in addition to conspicuous consumption).
So far, blasting billionaires off to the edge of space has not exactly been earth-shattering, technically. Mankind had previously stepped onto the moon on six separate occasions; astronauts and cosmonauts have visited space routinely, often without such commotion; and Mars is already inhabited by robots. The NASA Voyager, built half a century ago, has become the first man-made object to exit our solar system—currently drifting at 14.2 billion miles away from us—that is about 21 hours of light-travel time from Earth (solar light reaches us in about eight minutes).
Previous research on space technology has undoubtedly improved life on earth. Modern water filtration systems, solar cells, firefighting equipment, insulin pumps, and artificial limbs are all reported to have been initiated by space research. It is too soon to see such impact from the new billionaire-driven space race. However, Bezos’ company Blue Origin is reported to hold at least 19 patents, whereas Elon Musk’s SpaceX has followed a different path: The company has not submitted any patent applications to avoid technological disclosure. Yet, there are some obvious advances including reusable rockets, which have reduced the cost of space flight dramatically.
Jew-oogle this: “space programs are not helping the poor” And this is what you get from the Satan of Google et al =
The debate regarding space funding versus alleviating poverty involves specific arguments and benefits:
Terrestrial Technology Transfer: Space research yields practical spinoffs that improve global living standards. Innovations like water purification systems, advanced telemedicine, and portable solar energy were all developed to support space missions but are now widely used in impoverished and remote regions. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Earth Observation & Agriculture: Agencies use Earth science satellites to monitor droughts, optimize crop yields, and track water resources. For example, the NASA Earth Applied Sciences program directly partners with organizations globally to improve food security and manage natural disasters. [1, 2, 3]
Budget Proportions: Space exploration represents a very small fraction of national expenditures (for instance, NASA receives around 0.5% of the US federal budget). Experts argue that diverting this funding would not resolve systemic poverty because the problem lies primarily in resource allocation and political priorities, rather than a lack of capital. [1, 2, 3]
Socioeconomic Mobility: The aerospace sector drives significant job creation and technological development, acting as a powerful engine for economic growth. Some economists suggest that space-based innovations, like internet constellations, offer better long-term improvements in developing nations than hypothetical cash transfers of equivalent size
And just down the road, we see at U of Oregon, more attacks: Community to Corporate — The University of Oregon is consolidating department offices and the Department of Earth Sciences says it could harm students
Faculty members say the University of Oregon is closing the Department of Earth Sciences office in Cascade Hall, a space they describe as a hub where undergraduate and graduate students meet with advisors, build community and manage internal administrative tasks with ease.
The office is being closed in line with a “shared services” model across the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) that some describe as impersonal and filled with unnecessary corporate bureaucracy.
Faculty such as Earth Sciences professor Marli Miller tell Eugene Weekly that the office closure will erode the department’s sense of community and ability to support students. She says the shared services model is causing the loss of “institutional knowledge,” as staff members who’ve been working within one specific department for years are being moved into roles where they work with several departments at once, or they’ve left entirely.
How will it impact the already diminished populations of phytoplankton which provide up to 70% of the oxygen in the atmosphere? How will it impact the already diminished populations of krill, the foundation of the food pyramid in the sea? How will deep sea mining influence the climate, the movement of currents, and the migration and viability of sea life? The industry has not answered these questions because there is no answer that they will acknowledge—because such answers will expose them as harbingers of global destruction.
Scholars estimate that a vast majority (up to 95%) of modern space tech has both civilian and defense applications. For example, a synthetic aperture radar used to monitor deforestation and climate change can also be used for military reconnaissance and espionage.
Double Dual-Use Dilemma: Private space companies are increasingly integrated into national security efforts, leading to debates around how commercial infrastructure like satellite internet constellations become military targets in times of conflict. [1]
I. Space X: an emblematic example
No single example better illustrates the problem than SpaceX. Holding approximately $22 billion in U.S. government contracts, its satellite internet service Starlink is described by analysts as “an indispensable asset throughout the entire government sector, from U.S. embassies to the battlefield.” Starlink accounts for 97% of Space Force program task orders, and its military variant, Starshield—a hardened, government-controlled version of Starlink offering encrypted communications and intelligence capabilities—is built on the same underlying technology to support national security operations. As the California Coastal Commissionhas noted, for many U.S. Government users, the two are indistinguishable. SpaceX thus exemplifies a private company whose technology simultaneously underpins consumer internet, battlefield communications, and classified intelligence programs—a convergence that existing legal frameworks were never designed to govern.
Union of Concerned Scientists? Bulletin of Atomic Scientists!
Unlike the traditional military-industrial complex, space companies fluidly shift between civilian and military roles. Their expertise in launch systems, satellites, and surveillance infrastructure allows them to serve both markets, often without clear regulatory oversight. Companies like Walchandnagar Industries in India, SpaceX in the United States, and the private Chinese firms that operate under a national strategy of the Chinese Communist Party called Military-Civil Fusion exemplify this trend, maintaining commercial identities while actively supporting defense programs. This blurring of roles, including the possibility that private space companies may develop their own weapons, raises concerns over unchecked militarization and calls for stronger oversight to preserve space as a neutral domain.
Dual use of space companies. Countries like the United States and China have already shown a willingness to use commercial space entities for military purposes. China encourages private entities to participate in space activities as part of its Military-Civilian Integration Strategy. Similarly, the 2021 United States Space Priorities Framework outlines how new commercial space capabilities and services can be leveraged to meet national security needs. In a 2021 interview, the then-head of the US Space Force discussed the importance of using the space industry for national security.
Researchers and security analysts are increasingly concerned that the dual use of private space companies is not limited to their space technologies, such as the satellites they launch. In some cases, a company may appear to be a civilian space entity while actually maintaining close links with defense sectors.
For instance, take the example of India, which has seen phenomenal growth in its space sector in recent years. The leading companies of the Indian Space Association have worked closely with the Indian Ministry of Defence on various contracts.
Furthermore, the association’s leadership maintains a close connection with the Indian army and defense organizations. For example, the first chairman, Jayant Patil, was also the senior vice president for defense business at Larsen and Toubro, an Indian company involved in the space industry. The company has collaborated with India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation since the mid-1980s.
The usefulness of space companies goes beyond their existing technologies. Military organizations can use expertise gained through civilian cooperation programs to develop other critical technologies. India’s intercontinental ballistic missile program, based on the SLV-3 vehicle, was initially developed under civilian space cooperation with NASA. India’s Agni-V ICBM, which is capable of carrying multiple warheads and has a range exceeding 5,000 kilometers, has also benefited from technological cooperation with NASA.
Indian private space companies such as Walchandnagar Industries are also defense contractors producing aerospace, defense, missile, and nuclear power technologies. These companies collaborate with India’s Defence Ministry and the Defence Research and Development Organisation to produce strategic articles, tactical missiles, and critical platform-based equipment. The expertise gained from private space launches and technological developments can be leveraged to improve missile technology.
There is a serious risk that civilian companies in India and elsewhere, having gained expertise through cooperation with the military, might start developing their own weapons. The table below shows how specific types of space expertise can be used to develop missiles, drones, precision missiles, hypersonic missiles, and other loitering munitions.
The Outer Space Treaty, which forms the basis of international space law, should be expanded to include specific provisions for the dual use of space technologies. For example, countries could be required to declare the intended uses of their satellites, with periodic inspections to ensure compliance. International space governance must ensure that expertise gained through civil cooperation does not translate into new weapons programs.
the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind;
outer space shall be free for exploration and use by all States;
outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means;
States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;
the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes;
astronauts shall be regarded as the envoys of mankind;
States shall be responsible for national space activities whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities;
States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects; and
States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.
Furthermore, partnerships between governments and private corporations should be regulated to prevent the misuse of commercial space capabilities. The European Union’s Space Surveillance and Tracking network is an example of regional cooperation to monitor space activities and ensure that space assets are used for their declared purposes. This type of cooperation should be extended globally to include major space-faring nations and emerging space players.
In the United States, the Space Force has already begun leveraging commercial space capabilities for national security purposes. For instance, the National Reconnaissance Office has contracted with commercial satellite companies to provide imagery for intelligence purposes. Such partnerships highlight the need for clear guidelines to differentiate civilian and military applications and to ensure that commercial space activities do not escalate geopolitical tensions.
DUH. So, you do the YouTUbe addiction, the BLack Mirror Screen Addiction, the fucking SLOP of AI, all that time pushing robotics olympics and coding school, and then you watch Silicon Valley and Silicon Wadi suck the life from humanity, and this is what we get:
Universities attempt to justify these cuts as dwindling student numbers make courses less profitable. However, decreasing student numbers often follow drastic cuts in government funding in a vicious positive feedback. In Australia, a 29% reduction in 2020 funding for Earth science courses, equivalent to about AU$10,000 per student per year, necessitated decreases in course size, in turn, triggering further drops in enrolment and profit in 2021. Funding reductions also inevitably lead to lower-quality student experiences amidst lecturer, field-course and lab equipment constraints. Academics found themselves stranded, postgraduates were left without supervisors, and undergraduates faced transfers to other institutions.
Two distinct categories of dual-nature space objects: what are dual-use and dual-purpose objects? Therefore, there are two distinct categories of space objects that States have expressed concerns about: dual-use on the one hand, and dual-purpose on the other hand. This distinction is important as the concerns stemming from the use of these objects are also different. They are perceived as two different threats, which therefore require different approaches.
The terms dual-use and dual-purpose are derived from the distinction established between use and purpose in the law of targeting. Under targeting regulations, only military objectives can be targeted. Military objectives can be identified by their nature, location, purpose or use. Purpose and use are the relevant identifiers in this case. “Use” is concerned with the present function of an object, while “purpose” is concerned with its intended future use. • Dual-use space objects: they can have a military and security function, as well as a civilian or commercial one (either simultaneously or alternating.
Alternate use is sometimes known as dual-capable). They can be operated by the military, even to provide services to civilians (examples include certain GNSS services). And they can also be operated by civilian or commercial actors, even to carry out military functions, as militaries can sometimes outsource certain services, particularly for satellite communications or remote sensing.
These objects are known as “dual-use” precisely because they are intended to serve military and civilian functions. • Dual-purpose space objects: they are designed to fulfil a benign objective (such as debris removal or on-orbit servicing), but they could potentially be repurposed to harm other space objects. They are generally operated by civilian entities, as well as commercial actors. They are generally developed with no military objective in mind, and are not intended to serve any aggressive function. However, their characteristics or capabilities —such as the possession of a robotic arm, for example— have raised concern that these 4 objects could be repurposed to be used against another satellite.
It should be noted, however, that the capabilities themselves are not what make these objects be perceived as a threat. In this sense, the term “capability neutral” has been used by some delegations, accurately reflecting that the capabilities of dual-purpose objects alone pose no danger to space actors.
It is the challenge of discerning an operator’s intent when utilising these assets what has led many to perceive the assets themselves as a threat, even when they are used in a relatively transparent manner. Although dual-use and dual-purpose objects are different, they can share characteristics that could, in theory, cause them to qualify as both dual-use and purpose at the same time. For example, a dual-use satellite with manoeuvring capabilities could be repurposed to act as a counterspace weapon by causing it to manoeuvre so that it collides with another satellite. In practice, however, such situations would be relatively unlikely as it would be impractical and very costly.
War is a racket. Those words were written in 1935 by Major General Smedley Butler, a decorated veteran who had spent his career fighting America’s foreign wars and came to recognise that he had been nothing more than a “muscle-man for the protection of business interests” (1). Butler’s conclusion was simple: war is a deception conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the very many. Nearly a century later, despite all the technological advances and rhetorical shifts, the fundamental mechanism he described remains intact. The weaponry has changed, but the racket persists.
The ongoing buildup of an AI arms race with China and Russia has spurred significant defence investments in artificial intelligence and large-scale infrastructure projects. Tech firms that once maintained an arms-length relationship with the military are now deeply entangled with the US security apparatus.
Notably, a crucial aspect of Eisenhower’s comment appears to have fallen by the wayside in the decades between the two speeches, namely, the military. In this Forum Article, we recenter the focus on the pivotal role of the US military in the formation of today’s tech oligarchy while simultaneously demonstrating how the tech oligarchy is reshaping the defense domain in line with its own beliefs and political-economic interests, accumulating ever more informational, sociotechnical, and political-economic power.
In doing so, we highlight the historical role of the US military in funding the core technologies on which today’s tech oligarchy has built its power, as well as the broader role of military spending in supporting the rise of tech firms. At the same time, we argue that there is an urgency and specificity to the current (re-)entanglements between the US military and Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchy that cannot be fully captured by a historical focus on the state’s role in capitalist accumulation. We are witnessing a moment in which Big Tech firms, such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, complemented by Defense Tech companies like Palantir and Anduril, are becoming prominent military contractors in their own right; in some cases, overtaking the traditional defense primes in competitive bids, and pushing for new regulations for procuring software designed to eliminate restrictions on how the Pentagon can contract with private sector companies (Dunne and Sköns, Citation2021).
Leading tech figures of Palantir, OpenAI and Meta being sworn into the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps.
That the military, as the center of state power and a disciplining force both internally and externally, has become subject to the tech oligarchy’s scaling and expansion efforts should not surprise us. However, it should concern us.
Yah think less science, less Cap’n Crunch Hegseth, Zelensky, Putin, Xi, DoD, DoW, and more LIBERAL FUCKING ARTS? Diplomacy? Political depth? Higher social and empathetic IQ training?
The world is erupting this morning. U.S.-Iran peace talks scheduled for Friday in Switzerland were abruptly postponed after Iran demanded guarantees that Israeli military operations in Lebanon would stop. The delay came as Israel launched a new wave of strikes in southern Lebanon, killing at least 18 people, while four Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes with Hezbollah. Vice President JD Vance canceled his planned trip to Switzerland as diplomats worked behind the scenes to keep negotiations on track. The talks were intended to begin a 60-day process aimed at reaching a permanent end to the conflict that began earlier this year. Officials say the postponement is temporary, but it underscores how fragile the agreement remains.
Vance publicly defended the U.S.-Iran agreement and argued that Israel should respect a peace process he described as beneficial for both Israel and the broader region. He also criticized Israeli officials who have attacked the deal, saying they should not undermine their strongest international ally. Iran, meanwhile, warned that it may not abide by the agreement if Israeli operations in Lebanon continue, raising the stakes for future negotiations.
Former President Barack Obama said the United States may be “worse off” now than before President Donald Trump launched the war with Iran, arguing that billions of dollars were spent, significant lives were lost, and the conflict appears to have ended with little change from the prewar status quo. While welcoming the ceasefire and expressing hope that it holds, Obama questioned the rationale for the war and pointed to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement negotiated during his administration, arguing that Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons before the U.S. withdrew from the deal. Speaking ahead of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, he also warned that the country is experiencing a period of political polarization and democratic strain, while urging Americans to remain engaged in civic life and hold elected officials accountable. This is Trump’s response:
“We knowed what was goin’ on in [the war] all the time,” said Felix Haywood, dismissing the notion that his fellow Texas slaves were ignorant of the Emancipation Proclamation.
“Ending slavery was not simply a matter of issuing pronouncements, but of forcing rebels to obey the law.”
One hundred fifty years ago, the U.S. Army took possession of Galveston Island, a barrier island just off the Texas coast that guards the entrance to Galveston Bay, and began a late-arriving, long-lasting war against slavery in Texas. This little-known battle would endure for months after the end of what we normally think of as the Civil War. This struggle, pitting Texas freedpeople and loyalists and the U.S. Army against stubborn defenders of slavery, would become the basis for the increasingly popular celebrations of Juneteenth, a predominantly African-American holiday celebrating emancipation on or about June 19th every year.
The historical origins of Juneteenth are clear. On June 19, 1865, U.S. Major General Gordon Granger, newly arrived with 1,800 men in Texas, ordered that “all slaves are free” in Texas and that there would be an “absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.” The idea that any such proclamation would still need to be issued in June 1865 – two months after the surrender at Appomattox – forces us to rethink how and when slavery and the Civil War really ended. And in turn it helps us recognize Juneteenth as not just a bookend to the Civil War but as a celebration and commemoration of the epic struggles of emancipation and Reconstruction.
By June 19, 1865, it had been more than two years since President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, almost five months since Congress passed the 13th Amendment, and more than two months since General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate army at Appomattox Court House. So why did Granger need to act to end slavery?
To answer that question, we have to look back at slavery, the Civil War, and Texas’ peculiar place in both histories. During the Civil War, white planters forcibly moved tens of thousands of slaves to Texas, hoping to keep them in bondage and away from the U.S. Army. Even after Lee surrendered, Confederate Texans dreamed of sustaining the rebel cause there. Only on June 2, 1865, after the state’s rebel governor had already fled to Mexico, did Confederate Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith agree to surrender the state. For more than two weeks, chaos reigned as people looted the state treasury, and no one was certain who was in charge.
“The idea that a proclamation would still need to be issued two months after the surrender at Appomattox forces us to rethink how and when slavery and the Civil War really ended.”
In that chaos, many African-Americans fled, some across the river in Mexico, a less-remembered pathway to freedom in the decades before the Civil War. Others launched strikes or refused to work. But in a state where whites outnumbered slaves more than two-to-one, planters and ranchers did everything in their power to sustain slavery wherever they could.
Granger’s arrival on June 19 marked the first effective intervention of the United States in Texas on the side of ending slavery. So when Granger issued his proclamation in Galveston, it was no abstract or symbolic statement against slavery and rebellion; he was striking a blow against slavery itself in the place where it remained most firmly entrenched in June 1865.
But what did Granger’s proclamation mean? One oft-told myth has it that Texans simply did not know that slavery had ended. What Granger brought, in this telling, was good news. But if we listen to the words of someone like Felix Haywood, a slave in Texas during the Civil War, we see that this was not so. “We knowed what was goin’ on in [the war] all the time,” Haywood later remembered. At emancipation, “We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves.”
If Haywood and other enslaved people knew about the Emancipation Proclamation, what exactly did the events of June 19, 1865 mean? Here we face a key forgotten reality about the end of the Civil War and slavery that has been shrouded in the mythology of Appomattox. The internecine conflict and the institution of slavery could not and did not end neatly at Appomattox or on Galveston Island. Ending slavery was not simply a matter of issuing pronouncements. It was a matter of forcing rebels to obey the law. To a very real extent, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment amounted to promissory notes of freedom. The real on-the-ground work of ending slavery and defending the rudiments of liberty was done by the freedpeople in collaboration with and often backed by the force of the US Army.
“The Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment amounted to promissory notes of freedom.”
Granger’s proclamation may not have brought news of emancipation but it did carry this crucial promise of force. Within weeks, fifty thousand U.S. troops flooded into the state in a late-arriving occupation. These soldiers were needed because planters would not give up on slavery. In October 1865, months after the June orders, white Texans in some regions “still claim and control [slaves] as property, and in two or three instances recently bought and sold them,” according to one report. To sustain slavery, some planters systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission. A report by the Texas constitutional convention claimed that between 1865 and 1868, white Texans killed almost 400 black people; black Texans, the report claimed, killed 10 whites. Other planters hoped to hold onto slavery in one form or another until they could overturn the Emancipation Proclamation in court.
Against this resistance, the Army turned to force. In a largely forgotten or misunderstood occupation, the Army spread more than 40 outposts across Texas to teach rebels “the idea of law as an irresistible power to which all must bow.” Freedpeople, as Haywood’s quote reminds us, did not need the Army to teach them about freedom; they needed the Army to teach planters the futility of trying to sustain slavery.
Against that resistance, and in response to freedpeople’s complaints, the Army acted as if the Civil War had not in fact ended. Relying upon its broad war powers to exert control over civilians, the Army attacked slavery by arresting judges and sheriffs, taking control over court cases, running military commissions, and suspending habeas corpus. As Texas’ provisional governor—a white loyalist—tried to build a new state, the Army provided crucial support against a developing insurgency.
Slowly, slavery itself ended. By the winter of 1865-1866, freedpeople, the Army, and white loyalists had extinguished the ‘peculiar institution’ in Texas. Under the threat of continued military occupation, President Andrew Johnson coerced former Confederate states into inscribing this change into the Constitution by ratifying the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.
“Between 1865 and 1868, white Texans killed almost 400 black people; black Texans, the report claimed, killed 10 whites.”
But the victory over slavery was only one in a series of battles to determine the meaning of freedom. Over the next few years, freedpeople’s rights and their power expanded, along with the Army’s authority to protect them. Responding to planters’ efforts to create a hardened racial caste system and to freedpeople’s testimony, the U.S. Congress in 1866 tried to create defensible rights through the 14th Amendment that created birthright citizenship, established equal protection under the law, and guaranteed due process. When rebel states did not accept that amendment, Congress reasserted military control and charged the Army with registering freedpeople to vote. In 1869 Congress also passed a 15th Amendment prohibiting denial of the vote on grounds of race or previous condition of servitude. New biracial governments in the South helped write both amendments into the Constitution, thus remaking basic rights not just for African-Americans but for all Americans.
Reconstruction created a new world in Texas. Almost 40,000 black Texans, mostly former slaves, voted to call the state’s new constitutional convention. The new state government in Texas, as elsewhere, established statewide public schools, protected small homesteads from foreclosure, and created a tri-racial state police. Among the leading black politicians to emerge were freeborn teacher George T. Ruby and the previously enslaved Matthew Gaines. On the ground, freedpeople built vibrant families, constructed churches, opened schools, and elected African-Americans to less-remembered but crucial local offices.
But these gains did not endure. Over the 1870s, as the Army lost its hold on many rebel states, Democrats re-established control. Through a poll tax in 1902 and an all-white primary in 1903, African-American voter turnout in Texas dropped from about 100,000 in the 1890s to fewer than 5,000 by 1906. Along with disenfranchisement came Jim Crow segregation and exclusion from equal access to public services like education, public transportation, and the justice system.
“African-American voter turnout in Texas dropped from about 100,000 in the 1890s to fewer than 5,000 by 1906.”
Texas freedpeople kept alive the memory of emancipation and Reconstruction in ceremonies that eventually became named Juneteenth. Begun in 1866, the year after the proclamation, and growing dramatically after an 1867 parade in Austin, Juneteenth festivals spread to towns and churches across Texas. At Houston’s aptly named Emancipation Park, freedpeople flew flags, sang patriotic songs, paraded in uniform, and defended the memory of Reconstruction. As African-Americans moved north and west, Juneteenth moved with them to hundreds of towns and cities. With other, often regionally based, holidays like Watch Night, Eighth of August, Memorial Day, and Fourth of July, Juneteenth became a way for African-Americans to celebrate their gains, sustain their hopes, assess their defeats, and plan paths forward.
Their efforts should be models for our own, fledgling struggle to remember the gains and promise of Reconstruction. Despite wide-ranging efforts to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Civil War battles, there have been thus far only scattered efforts to mark the approaching anniversaries of Reconstruction.
In part this is because Americans remain confused about the period after the Civil War’s battles ended. Although historians—none more so than Columbia University’s Eric Foner—have shown the extraordinary political, economic, and legal gains of Reconstruction, many Americans either cling to outdated stories of corruption or have virtually no sense at all of what happened once the battles ended. A false story of Reconstruction spread by propagandists for Jim Crow segregation and disseminated in popular culture through Birth of a Nation continues to shape the national imagination.
But this Juneteenth, there is reason to hope that’s changing. Recognizing the importance of the 13th, 14th, and 15th constitutional amendments passed during this era, the U.S. Senate last week termed the period the nation’s “Second Founding,” though without using the word Reconstruction. Recently, the National Park Service commissioned a National Historic Landmark Theme Study on Reconstruction to identify landmarks that capture the dramatic story of the era.
Now, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the events that ended slavery and constructed meaningful rights for all Americans, we should look to Juneteenth as a model for commemorating Reconstruction. By grappling publicly—in parks and in programs—with the accomplishments of ending slavery and constructing equal rights, as well as the overthrow of Reconstruction and equal rights in Jim Crow, we can begin to wrestle with the impact that events like Juneteenth had upon the nation we live in. While the stories that begin with Granger’s proclamation on Galveston Island 150 years ago today may not conclude as neatly as the battlefield stories of the Civil War, they are just as crucial to the story of the nation we are today.
For more information, see:
Sowandé Mustakeem, “Juneteenth,” in Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., Encylopedia of Emancipation and Aboliiton in the Transatlantic World
Randolph B. Campbell, Grass Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1880
Carl H. Moneyhon, Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction
William L. Richter, The Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865-1870
James Smallwood, Barry A. Crouch, and Larry Peacock, Murder and Mayhem: The War of Reconstruction in Texas
Elizabeth Hayes Turner, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Gregg Cantrell and Turner, eds., Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas
Gregory P. Downsis a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War and The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic.
[Emancipation Day Celebration, June 19, 1900. Photo from Grace Murray Stephenson. Public domain from the University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, from the Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.]
[Emancipation Day Celebration band, June 19, 1900. Photo from Grace Murray Stephenson. Public domain from the University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, from the Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.]
[Juneteenth celebrated in Emancipation Park, Houston, Texas in 1880] As we approach Juneteenth, Black Agenda Report is republishing this article from 2022, written by our Executive Editor, Margaret Kimberley.
Juneteenth was a people’s holiday with deep meaning for the descendants of enslaved people. But the declaration of an official federal holiday has turned it into an opportunity for corporate exploiters and cynical politicians to show pretend concern for Black people. At best Juneteenth provides a history lesson and an opportunity for much needed political education.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” General Order Number 3, June 19, 1865
The fact that members of the United States Senate voted unanimously to make Juneteenth a federal holiday proved that the commemoration is of no political value. Turning what was a peoples’ celebration into an occasion for opportunism and window dressing has actually damaged the cause of Black liberation and the understanding of history.
On June 19, 1865 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and issued General Order Three, a declaration that slavery had ended. The fact that this event occurred two months after the Civil War ended took on an understandably mythic quality, including a belief that the news had been deliberately kept from enslaved people, or that the person carrying the message had been killed.
In reality, enslaved Texans were well aware that the war had ended. But they also knew that the absence of federal troops who could enforce the law made any legalities moot. They knew better than anyone else that the people who forced them to labor without compensation would not end their system unless they were forced to do so.
A drone is photographed in front of a poster depicting portraits of Iran’s late and new Supreme Leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, during a nightly pro-government rally at Enghelab Square in downtown Tehran, on June 5, 2026.
JEWS:
“Regarding Lebanon, we have warned both the mediators and the American side that if the regime fails to comply with the existing agreement, Iran will respond with substantial military measures without prior public notice,” said the Iranian official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. “Should the United States intervene, conditions particularly those related to the Strait of Hormuz could rapidly revert to a wartime environment.”
On Friday, reports emerged that a ceasefire agreement had been reached between Israel and Hezbollah, but an Israeli official said that even with a ceasefire, Israel would not withdraw its forces from Lebanon. Another Israeli official told Channel 12 that Israel retains the right to strike against perceived threats, a common Israeli claim used to systematically violate ceasefire agreements in Gaza and Lebanon.
Over the past week, Israel has continued to relentlessly attack Lebanon, and its forces remain deeply entrenched in the south. In a barrage of more than 20 airstrikes on Thursday night, Israel killed at least 47 people, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Since March, when Hezbollah entered the war alongside Iran, Israel has killed more than 3,900 people in Lebanon and displace over 1.2 million. Hezbollah has continued to ferociously retaliate against Israel’s military campaign and has stunned Israel with its ability to inflict losses on its occupation forces. More than 30 Israeli troops have been confirmed killed in action since March 2.
NOTE: The CUNT is using more censorship tools on Substack:
I was six years old when astronauts first walked on the moon. I had a poster on my bedroom wall illustrating the Apollo mission, featuring its orbital trajectories along with diagrams of space suits and similar equipment. That was what inspired me to want to join Air Force Space Command in 1985, not images of satellites being shattered by ASAT missiles. Not violence in or from space. — Air Force Bombing Mercenary, William Astore
1 reply hidden
My reply?
Space? Man in the Can? Satellites in the 60,000 range? Surveillance of all humanity? Space? And how do those overpriced space missions get to the moon? Jesus thrusters? Hmm, the earth sciences are underfunded, and forget about ecology and marine sciences and, well, the deep sea mining schemes are already underway. And what’s under the sea, in Davey Jones’ locker? A million lawyers? Ninety percent of Israelis? Nah, those strategic metals, nodules, for, you know, “peaceful space.”
The space programs have always been dual use (military) and now triple use (for the corporate trillionaires).
And we still have cloth tents for millions on earth, as the dirty Westerners, the Psychosis of Whiteness prevails.
We have big issues on that beautiful photo model you blather about — earth.
The sea is acidifying, heating up, and alas, the abyssal plane, man . . . for those data centers (running the space programs) and the thrusters (Not those of Jesus) and the telemetry.
Ahh, even little things kill earth sciences: The University of Oregon is consolidating department offices and the Department of Earth Sciences says it could harm students
The lie is that technology gained from shooting polluting and strategic, and rare earth metals into space will help planet earth. RIGHT.
It all goes through the Offensive Weapons War Lords’ Fucking Bank Accounts. We are an earth on deep deep war footing, as this extractive taker society is turning the planet into one giant sludge pile and desertification experiment.
Manufacturing Dissent
Paul Haeder, Author 