Grumpy Old Man Syndrome? Fucking A, I’ve been pushing up against the old man, old woman fucking lunacy faux democracy since I was 13

I go to these fucking science events and get completely flummoxed by their fear of coming onto a fucking radio show to explain their PhD and Post Doc work, man . . . .

Paulo Kirk

Mar 19, 2026

I can’t get a Mexican shark researcher and a Scottish researcher on species and human conflict resolution to come onto my radio show. And, today, I had my hand up, but the moderator skipped me and went to someone else. Do I hate this? DO I really hate the fucking closing of the radical mind in biological sciences?

Conference History

This biennial shark meeting began in 2004, was initially called the Cowshark Conservation Workshop and focused on the biology and ecology of Sixgill and Sevengill Sharks, known as “Cowsharks” and distinguished by their extra gill slits. Many sharks have five gill slits but sixgills have six and sevengills have seven—hence their names. Cowsharks remained the focus of the meeting for 10 years until, in 2014, it was changed to be called the Northeast Pacific Shark Symposium (NEPSS). The change was driven in part because of increased interest by scientists that studied sharks and rays outside of the Cowshark family as well as the fact that at the first NEPSS we also convened an International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Northeast Pacific Shark specialist group meeting where IUCN members worked on regional re-assessments of Northeast Pacific shark conservation status updates. Since then, the meeting has been known as the NEPSS, although the sixgill image remains the logo for the conference. This symposium is the largest gathering of shark and ray scientists along the west coast of North and Central America.

Fucking Capitalism . . .

Workshops:

NEPSS VII aims to facilitate conversations and solutions among colleagues. See more information about our workshops here.

Social Events

Thursday Icebreaker: The evening of March 19th, we will host registration and a welcome address and mixer (light appetizers and drinks provided by our sponsors) from 6-8 pm at the Hatfield Marine Science Center! This Icebreaker is included in registration fee and is supported by our sponsors. Dress attire: casual

Aquarium Mixer: We will be hosting a catered mixer on Saturday, March 20th from 6-9 pm at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, OR. Dinner and drinks will be included in the registration cost. Conference attendees will be able to network and explore the aquarium after hours. This mixer is included in your registration fee and is supported by our sponsors. Dress attire: casual

Merch

3/1/26 UPDATE: shirt orders are CLOSED. Those who pre-purchased can pick up at the registration booth.

No mother-fucking mention of this:

It is the lobotomized science species, all bundled up in their cloistered lives, and this is the reality:

Along the coasts on both sides of the Persian Gulf are mangrove forests and seagrass beds where herbivorous species such as manatees and dugongs graze. The area is also an important migration route for whales, including Bryde’s whale, the critically endangered Arabian humpback whale and whale sharks. Green sea turtles and hawksbill sea turtles also live and breed in the region.

There are over 700 different fish species in the Persian Gulf, including commercially important species such as king mackerel, grouper, snapper, barracuda, trevally and tuna.

The marine biologist has spent several years researching sensitive coral reefs and diving in many locations in the region, including Kish Island in Iran.

‘Explosions above and below the sea surface create enormous noise and shock waves. Whales, dolphins, turtles, and fish can become disoriented, lose their hearing or suffer severe injuries. For species already living on the edge in this extremely warm environment, additional stress can be devastating,‘ says the source.

The Strait of Hormuz is a critical energy corridor through which approximately 20-25 per cent of the world’s total oil consumption passes. Even in peacetime, the intense oil tanker traffic poses a constant risk to marine life – partly through collisions with whales and porpoises, and partly through the risk of oil spills and other environmental pollution.

Iran has currently stopped all passage through the strait and, according to information provided to the BBC, plans to keep this strategically important part of the Indian Ocean closed for six months.

Fuck them all, then, so, not one wants to discuss their work on a community radio station?

Key Factors Shaping the “Apolitical” Perception:

• Scientific Norms: Science training traditionally emphasizes neutrality, objectivity, and peer review, creating a culture that often views partisan politics as contrary to scientific methods.
• Cold War Legacy: Many U.S. scientific institutions were built on a model of government funding that promoted scientific freedom, leading to a long-held perception that science should be independent of political intervention.
• Political Polarization & Distrust: Increased political polarization has led to a divide where Americans are three times more likely to trust scientists if they identify as left-wing, making science itself a polarized issue rather than the scientists themselves being inherently apolitical.
• “Anti-Science” vs. “Anti-Regulation”: Conservative distrust of science often stems from opposition to policy implications—such as regulations on climate change or pandemics—rather than a rejection of science itself.
• Role Definition: While many Americans support an active role for science in policy, scientists often face pressure to remain objective to maintain public trust and avoid accusations of bias, particularly given that scientists tend to lean liberal, as shown in studies.

Ultimately, while individual scientists hold political views, their professional focus on empirical evidence—which is inherently objective—often creates the impression of being above the political fray. However, this is changing as science becomes more central to public policy debates.

A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World

Philip Ball in Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People coins the term “anthropoeia” to describe the various methods, from the homunculus to the golem, in which ancient and Medieval magicians claimed to be able to create artificial people from methods alchemical and theurgical. He writes that tales about artificial people tell “us something interesting, and, I contend, something important,” a legend that has never been more relevant than today when CRISPR seems to be giving us a homunculus and ChatGPT-3 a Brazen Head. Unlike a homunculus, an artificial man gestated in a fake womb, the Brazen Head isn’t organic; unlike a golem made from the bankside mud of the Vltava River, the mechanical being is made of sturdier materials. Metal-sheen aside, the Brazen Head isn’t quite a robot either (like the moving, mechanical automata of ancient Greek myth named Telos), for Grosseteste’s gadget was a stationary computer, a being for whom intelligence (and consciousness?) is the most salient detail. Furthermore, the manner in which the Brazen Head communicates (though according to Gower the device was only able to utter “Time is, time was, time is past” before it fell to the floor) is to have questions posed to it and to answer them in a manner which is positively computational.

Not just computational, but algorithmic. In an early permutation of the story, the occult-minded future Pope Sylvester II is said to have built such a device in the tenth century, based on knowledge acquired in Islamic Al-Andalus, whereby a strict process must be followed for the Brazen Head to properly answer questions posed to it (algorithm is, after all, an Arabic word). All such answers from the device could subsequently only be expressed in the form of a “Yes” or “No,” an anticipation of binary coding some seven centuries before the philosopher Willhelm Gottfried Leibniz developed the concept. As Sylvester demonstrates, Grosseteste’s Brazen Head is hardly the most famous version of the legend, for the manufacture of such a device has been attributed to other luminaries as well, including the thirteenth-century physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova, his contemporary the theologian Albertus Magnus, and even the ancient Roman poet Virgil in a strange thirteenth-century encyclopedic French text by Gautier de Metz entitled The Image of the World.

Most celebrated of all hermetic engineers is the great Scholastic philosopher and proto-scientist Roger Bacon, a thinker who introduced such inventions as gunpowder and eyeglasses to Europe, while hypothesizing about flying devices and armored vehicles. A student of Grosseteste, the monk most definitely didn’t build a Brazen Head either, but his empirical investigations no doubt contributed to the allure of the legend, this man whose contemporary biographer Brian Clegg in Roger Bacon: The First Scientist argues was “covered in layer after layer of myth and confusion,” seen as less scientist than as a conjurer. That’s the enigmatic character in an Elizabethan play of 1589 by the dramatist Robert Greene entitled Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay in which the building of a Brazen Head is a central plot point. Before his calculating and thinking machine, Greene’s version of Bacon enthuses over “My magic glass, that shows me far and near/All things that are, or were, or are to be,” and it’s hard not to imagine him scrolling on his smartphone.

“It can be easy to sit back, work on our research, and not engage with real life scenarios of that work,” he says in an interview. “But we do that at our own peril.” Scientists, he argues, need to take leadership roles in government and policy making. “One letter signed by international scientists is not going to change anybody’s opinion. But putting our names on the line is the least we can do, instead of doing nothing at all.”

Among the people horrified by the policy was Timothy Verstynen, who found himself imagining with horror what it would feel like to have his own young daughter ripped away and put under such devastating conditions. But to him, protesting on the streets was only one form of dissent. As an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, Verstynen is well-versed with the scientific evidence that such parental separation can scar children in perpetuity. In June, he decided to write an open letter to US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, detailing the studies that have shown the kind of psychological cost children can pay after extended parental separation. More than 2,000 scientists from around the globe joined his mission, co-signing and endorsing the letter.

“Universities should train students on how to do outreach, which is absolutely critical, and should almost certainly be a part of the curriculum in all universities”

Here we go, an interesting concept: Watch it. It is what science, maybe, could be like, after the planet is completely trashed. Now, why have we allowed the planet to be completely trashed?

Address by Daniel Quinn delivered August 16, 1997, at the annual conference of the North American Association for Environmental Education, Vancouver BC

——

In a recent semi-documentary film called Garbage, a toxic waste disposal engineer was asked how we can stop engulfing the world in our poisons. His answer was, “We’d have to remove everybody from the face of the earth, because humans GENERATE toxic waste, whether it be pathogenic organisms that we excrete from our bodies or whatever. We are toxic to the face of the earth.”

What is your gut reaction to this assessment? Please raise your hands if you agree that humans are inherently toxic.

I understand that many representatives of the First Peoples are attending this conference. I hope there are many in this audience. Please raise your hand if you belong to an aboriginal people. Thank you. Now I’d like to ask you the same question I asked the whole group a moment ago. If you consult your traditional teachings, do you agree that humans are inherently toxic to the life of this planet?

Those who know my work will know that you’ve just demonstrated one of my basic theses, that the people of my culture, whom I call Takers, have a fundamentally different mythology from the First Peoples, whom I call Leavers. In Taker mythology, humans are indeed viewed as inherently toxic to the world, as alien beings who were born to rule—and ultimately destroy—the world. As WE are currently ruling and destroying the world. In Leaver mythology, by contrast, the world is a sacred place, and humans are not perceived as alien to that sacred place but rather as belonging to it. In other words, in the Leaver worldview, people are no less a part of the sacred framework of the universe than scorpions or eagles or salmon or bears or daffodils. . . .

When I first proposed to speak here about how we’re preparing ourselves and our children for extinction, the organizer of the conference wondered if this topic wasn’t directed too exclusively to members of “our” culture—the culture I call Taker culture in my books—the dominant culture of the world, found wherever the food is under lock and key and people have to work to get it. I think it’s important that you hear my answer to this question.

The reality is that, even if you’re a member of one of the First Peoples, you and your children are constantly bombarded with messages from Taker culture by way of books, billboards, movies, newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, and of course pre-eminently by way of the schools.

In other words, it doesn’t really matter whether you belong to our culture or not in this regard. If you or your children watch television, go to movies, listen to the radio, and go to our schools, then, like it or not, you’re preparing yourselves and your children for extinction.

But what do I actually mean by this outrageous statement? I’ll tell you this in a nutshell and then offer some examples of what I’m talking about. In a nutshell: We have been taught—and are therefore teaching our children—that, individually, we are all pretty much helpless when it comes to saving the world. That is, unless we happen to have the power of a world leader—the power of a Clinton or Yeltsin. Or unless we happen to control some vast multi-national corporation like Shell Oil or Du Pont. Or unless we happen to control some big organization like the Red Cross or Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund. We’ve been taught (and are therefore teaching our children) that, as individuals, all we can do is wait for OTHER people—POWERFUL people—to save the world. Oh sure, we can do our little bit. We can reduce, reuse, and recycle, and this is very nice and very useful—but really important and far-reaching global change must come from the TOP. We just have to wait and hope for the best. We’re like people standing around watching a neighbor’s house burn down because we’ve been taught that this is a problem for PROFESSIONALS to handle. We mustn’t interfere. Until trained fire-fighters arrive, we’re just supposed to stand there and watch—and if they NEVER arrive, then the house will just have to burn down right to the ground. . . .

Since my novel Ishmael appeared in 1992, I’ve received well over five thousand letters from readers—many of them young people. When they write to me, they don’t say, “Why have I been taught that individually I’m helpless?” This teaching is revealed in a more subtle way. They say to me, “Since I’m not a world leader and don’t control a multi-national corporation or a big NGO, I’m looking for a career that will enable me to make a difference. I’m thinking of going into environmental engineering or something like that. Can you make a suggestion?” Now, until you think about it, this might sound like someone who’s on the right track here. But listen to what he’s really saying. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not electrical engineers. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not optometrists. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not English teachers. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not bus drivers. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not homemakers. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not mail carriers. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not grocery store clerks. Environmental engineers can make a difference—but not potters. I could stand here and extend this list all day—this list of occupations in which people can make no difference. It includes virtually every occupation being pursued on the face of this planet today!

Here’s a statement from an actual letter, from a young woman in Knoxville TN. She writes, “I’ve been in graphic design since I finished high school in ‘86, and I’m still there, but I’m starting to look more and more seriously at environmental policy, national and world politics, and similar areas. I’ve always despised and hated politics.” Do you see what she’s saying? “I’m thinking of going into something I’ve always despised and hated“—because she can’t make a difference as a graphic designer. For her, the question is no longer, “What am I really GOOD at?” It doesn’t matter that she might be a terrific graphic designer and a rotten politician. She has come to believe that graphic designers can’t make a difference. Only very, very rare people can make a difference.

Here’s another, from a young man in Waco TX: “I treasure the ideals of your novel, and pledge my services toward getting something started. I do have one question that I think only you can answer for me, and that is: What can I do to find a job that adheres and advances the principles of your novel? It’s what I’ve been searching for all my life.”

My answer to him was this: We ALL have to make a difference. It doesn’t matter what job we do. We can’t have people saying, “Oh I just flip burgers, so I can’t make a difference.” “Oh I just drive a cab, so I can’t make a difference.” “Oh I just sell insurance, so I can’t make a difference.” “Oh I’m just an auto mechanic, so I can’t make a difference.” “Oh I’m just an accountant, so I can’t make a difference.” Concentrate on doing what you do best, because THAT’S where you’ll have the most influence on the future of the world.

You know, I’ll bet almost all of you were idealists when you were young—or were considered idealists by friends and teachers. If you were an idealistic youngster, please raise your hand. Good. Now—how many of you as youngsters had the experience of being told by a parent or teacher, “Who do you think you are? YOU can’t change the world.”

Believe me, nothing’s changed since you were young. This comes to me from a tenth-grader in Philadelphia: “I just finished Ishmael, and I want to thank you because you have successfully written down in complete form what I and so many people have thought about only in fragments. But when I try to talk to people about these things, being only fourteen, they tell me I’m foolish and ‘trying to be a hippie.’”

This is from the same design student who thought she’d have to go into politics in order to make a difference: “My advisor says I’m young and enthusiastic, in a kind of condescending way when I told him about wanting to go into environmental policy and change people’s perceptions and the way things are done. I want to prove him wrong. . . ”

But I’m not bringing this up to caution you against discouraging young people’s idealism and enthusiasm. I’m sure you don’t do that—or you wouldn’t be in this audience at all. What I’m trying to do is deepen your understanding of what’s happening when oldsters tell youngsters, YOU can’t change the world.

“I want to prove him WRONG,” the design student said. Wrong about what? She IS young and enthusiastic, so she can’t prove him wrong about that. What are the two of them really talking about? What her advisor is hearing from her is something like this: “I’m not going to end up like YOU. You never made any difference in your whole life. Well, I’m not going be like you. I’m going to make a difference.” And of course he’s defending himself the only way he knows how. He can’t say, “Look, kiddo, you may not believe it, but student advisors make PLENTY of difference.” He probably doesn’t even believe it himself! Why would he? He’s been told from childhood that only big shots make a difference. Since he can’t say this, he says instead, “Believe me, you WILL end up like me. What YOU have aren’t ideals, they’re just illusions. Nothing you do will make any difference, and life is going to prove me RIGHT.” He actually has a vested interest in discouraging students, in preparing them for extinction. Their failure will be his vindication! The vein of pessimism runs deep in our culture and is broadcast like a virus in all our communications—including all our communications directed to those of you who belong to the nations of the First People. Three years ago a young Navajo student at Dartmouth managed to track down my unlisted phone number. He told me that over the years he’d drifted away from his cultural roots. Then he read Ishmael. He was calling because he wanted to give me his reaction personally, and this was his reaction: “You’ve given me back my religion.” I asked him to explain why he felt this way, because of course there’s nothing in my book about Navajo religion in particular. He said, “When I was growing up among my own people, I was taught to think of humans as a blessing on the world. Living among your people, I’ve been taught to think of humans as a curse on the world. I didn’t notice it happening until I read your book, and that’s how you’ve given me back my religion.”

This brings me back to where I started, with the assessment of the waste disposal engineer who was asked how we can stop poisoning the world. Here it is again.

He said, “We’d have to remove EVERYBODY from the face of the earth, because humans GENERATE toxic waste, whether it be pathogenic organisms that we excrete from our bodies or whatever. We are toxic to the face of the earth.”

I’d like to take a few minutes explore this strange mythology, so central to our culture, and its impact on our children and their vision of the future.

To begin with, is it mythology? Oh, most certainly it is mythology. Humans no more “generate toxic waste” than elephants or grasshoppers do. And the organisms we excrete from our bodies are no more pathogenic than those excreted from the bodies of sparrows or salmon. This engineer was speaking pure mythology, because the biological truth is that humans lived on this planet for three million years without being any more poisonous than our primate ancestors.

It has been the work of my life to pin down and demolish the lie that is at the root of this mythology in our culture. It’s to be found in the way we tell the human story itself in our culture. You can see it perpetuated in textbook after textbook, and if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see it repeated weekly somewhere—in a newspaper or magazine article, in a television documentary. Here it is, the human story as it’s told in our culture, day in and day out, stripped to its essentials. “Humans appeared in the living community about three million years ago. When they appeared, they were foragers, just like their primate ancestors. Over the millennia, these foragers added hunting to their repertoire and so became hunter-gatherers. Humans lived as hunter-gatherers until about ten thousand years ago, when they abandoned this life for the agricultural life, settling down into villages and beginning to build the civilization that encircles the world today.” That’s the story as our children learn it, and it has just this one little problem, that it didn’t happen that way at all. Ten thousand years ago, it was not HUMANITY that traded in the foraging life for the agricultural life and began to build civilization, it was a single culture. One culture out of ten thousand cultures did this, and the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine went on exactly as before. Over the millennia that followed, this one culture, born in the middle east, overran neighboring cultures in all directions, finally arriving in the New World about five hundred years ago. At which point it began to overrun the native cultures of THIS part of the world as well. It is a truism that the conqueror gets to write the history books, and the history our children learn is history as WE tell it. And the central lie of this history is that HUMANITY ITSELF did what WE did.

Well, even if this is so, why does it matter? It matters because everything the waste disposal engineer said was false about HUMANITY, but absolutely true of this one conquering culture. HUMANS don’t generate toxic wastes—but our culture certainly does. HUMANS aren’t toxic to the face of the earth—but our culture certainly is.

It’s vitally important for our children to know that the curse that needs to be lifted from the earth is not humanity. It’s important for them to know that we may be a doomed culture, but we are not a doomed species. It’s important for them to understand that it’s not being HUMAN that is destroying the world. It’s living THIS WAY that is destroying the world. It’s important for them to know that humans HAVE lived other ways, because it’s important for them to know that it’s POSSIBLE for humans to live other ways. Otherwise they can only repeat the falsehood spoken by that waste disposal engineer: That the only way to stop poisoning the world is to get rid of humanity.

Here’s what a college student in Arkansas wrote to me: “Standing riverside with my geology class in the Grand Canyon, viewing one and a half billion year-old basement rocks, humankind’s history was a vertical mile away in the dust of the South Rim. Strangely, my classmates struggled with the concept and acceptance of geologic time. I felt the overburden of reality. Since that time, the extinction of Homo Sapiens has often appeared to me to be the ONLY solution for the vast spread, dominance, consumption, and destruction inflicted on the world by this species.”

This is from a ninth grader in Eugene Oregon: “Since reading your book a second time recently, I’ve talked with some of my friends about their theories about life, the universe, and so on. Some thought we should just kill off all the humans (which I’ll admit would be one way of dealing with things).”

This is from a graduate student at the University of Oregon: “I was at an aquarium with my daughter shortly after re-reading Ishmael, and I happened to spend some time looking at the jellyfish tank. I wondered if the world would be better off if evolution had stopped with these spineless, brainless, majestic entities. . . . Despite our best efforts to resuscitate the cancer known as humanity, we are in fact on our way out, and indeed that may be for the better.”

These students, as you hear, are all thoroughly reconciled to the disappearance of human life.

We absolutely must stop sending our children out to save the world, first arming them with the undermining belief that humans are inherently toxic. Because if they truly believe this, then they will truly be prepared for extinction. We must be on vigilant guard against teaching our children—even by indirection— that the very best thing that can happen to the world is the extinction of the human race.

I know very well that I have set myself up for at least one hard question with this talk, and I’d like to address at least this one hard question before I invite your questions.

I have said—not only here but in a thousand letters and a dozen other speeches like this one—that there is no one who is without resources to change the world. I believe this is a message we must give our children. We don’t just need caring environmental engineers. We need caring attorneys, caring physicians, caring fry cooks, caring salespeople, caring real estate developers, caring industrialists, caring journalists, caring entrepreneurs, caring veterinarians, caring stock brokers, and caring carpenters. We even need good people in bad places. In fact we especially need good people in bad places. For example, whether you know it or not, the film industry is tremendously pollutive and tremendously wasteful. Does this mean caring people should avoid it? Hardly! Just the opposite! We mustn’t leave pollutive and wasteful industries entirely in the hands of people who don’t give a damn about the world. This is why I say and say again that there is no place where no good can be done. And this is why I say to young people, “Don’t think about going into noble lines of work, think only of doing what you do best. Because that’s where you’re going to make the most difference in the world.”

People often ask me if I practice what I preach, and what I say to them is, “Look, I’m doing exactly what I preach. What I preach is, USE YOUR BEST RESOURCES TO DO WHAT YOU CAN DO. And that’s what I’m doing. Doing what I do best, I’m reaching hundreds of thousands of people all over the world in the cause of saving the world.”

I say to them, “Do you think I should have been an environmental engineer instead? I would’ve been a LOUSY environmental engineer!”

And then people typically say to me, “Well, that’s great for YOU, but what am I supposed to do? I’m just a dressmaker, just a bricklayer, just a fiddle player, just a massage therapist, just a choir director, just an asphalt spreader—fill in the blank.

I hope you see that I’m talking about an EDUCATIONAL problem here. We have honest to god GOT to stop teaching our children that only OTHER people count. I think we need to make it a top-priority goal for us to teach our children that it isn’t just people with special jobs who are going to save the world. If the world is saved, it will be because all six billion of us stopped waiting for someone ELSE to do it. If the world is saved, it will be because the people of the world finally woke up to the fact that saving the world isn’t the work of specialists. It’s work we all CAN do—and all MUST do.

Thanks for listening.

I don’t know if these fucking people know what’s going on with Trump and Jews and Israel and War Profiteers and the 120 Jewish Billionaires and their Jewsaders and Crusaders:

It is a very, very strange world of Jews like Blumenthal, bar mitzvahed and fucking sick in the head, yakking on Hedges:

How do they fucking rationalize these headlines: Trump’s Iran War Backfires — Regime Change Failing as Prices Soar

It’s exactly on target, man, on target for the elimination of any resistance in the USA and abroad, the Jews have infiltrated all things, all of Russia’s computing and satellite tech, and even fucking traffic cameras.

US universities are pipelines to the defense industry. What does that say about our morals?

Much of our higher education system is a glorified feeder for Lockheed Martin and other defense industry firms

Thanks, science. God, I hate the White Man’s rhetoric, forked tongue, words!!!!!!

On campus, Lockheed has set up recruiting tables in the lobbies and hallways of student buildings and hosts workshops on everything from space exploration to résumé-building. At the University of Texas at Arlington, a $1.5m donation resulted in one of their buildings being renamed the Lockheed Martin Career Development Center.

But the company’s signature recruiting event, which is hosted at more than a dozen universities, is something called Lockheed Martin Day. Recruiters attract students with virtual reality demos, flight simulators and, in some cases, landing their helicopters directly on campus. Company officials have been known to offer on-the-spot job and internship opportunities to students during the event.

Additionally, Lockheed has poured resources into the financial support and recruitment of students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), earning its place as the number one industry supporter of HBCU engineering institutions for seven years in a row.

A variety of objects might be considered dual-use. A first set of dual-use objects are objects that, by their nature, serve or have the potential to serve civilian and military purposes alike—for example, transportation infrastructure like bridges, roads, trains, and airports.²³ A second set of dual-use objects are civilian objects that become dual-use because they are used by armed groups—for example, an apartment building that houses civilian families might become a dual-use object if part of it is used as a storage facility for weapons or a meeting place for an armed group. A third set of dual-use objects are civilian in nature, but at least in part support or sustain armed forces or their members—for example, banks, bakeries and other food-production facilities, or oil wells and refineries (where some of the proceeds of oil sales go to the armed forces). These objects are sometimes referred to as “war-sustaining” because they support or sustain the enemy’s war effort, even though they are equally essential to civilians.²⁴

The rise of the concept of dual-use objects has not served to protect civilians. To be sure, many of the objects that are today labeled “dual-use” have long been considered lawful “military objectives” under international humanitarian law. And calling these objects “dual-use” recognizes their civilian use. Yet it appears that, rather than prompting caution in targeting, dubbing objects “dual-use” has had the effect of creating a porous category of targetable objects that are obviously critical to civilian life and yet are lawfully targetable—including traditionally protected objects such as private homes, schools, and hospitals. Thus, while this Article is fundamentally concerned with what states do—that is, the targeting of dual-use objects—we also note that the creation of this category appears to have had the effect of casting suspicion on objects critical to civilian life, thus reducing inhibitions in targeting them. Global audiences have become accustomed to witnessing the destruction of these objects when the targeting military asserts that they serve some military purpose, however modest and however poorly documented. At the same time, the range of dual-use objects targeted in recent decades has grown in both type and scale. The addition of “war-sustaining” objects to the list of targetable objects—a development that is still contested—has significantly expanded the type of dual-use objects that are considered targetable. That greater willingness to target such objects presents a dangerous challenge to modern international humanitarian law and its aim to protect civilians from the worst horrors of war.

“It’s probably what most engineers, especially in mechanical and aerospace who want to go into defense prospects, aspire to,” says Sam*, who graduated with a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering in December 2021. ​“They’re one of the biggest defense contractors in this country, so you have the opportunity to work on very state-of-the-art technology.”

Since 9/11, the United States has spent $8 trillion on war. In 2020, for the first time, federal funding to Lockheed surpassed that of the U.S. Department of Education, the federal agency tasked with dispensing scholarships and Pell grants. Biden requested $813 billion in defense spending for fiscal year 2023, which includes the largest-ever allocation for research and development.

“Of course it’s the defense industries that have the ability to offer these favorable terms to people, because they’re also parasites on the public purse,” Astra Taylor says. ​“If these students weren’t worried about the cost of college, would they be as apt to take a job at a defense contractor versus doing something else in their community?”

New Haven students enjoy a Lockheed Martin flight simulator at a career fair on Feb. 19, 2020. Lockheed is not only one of the world’s biggest weapons manufacturers, but one of the biggest employers of software engineers in North America.

WE ARE DEAD IN THE WATER: To a casual observer, the Black Hawk and Sikorsky S-76 helicopters may have seemed incongruous landing next to the student union on the University of Connecticut’s pastoral green campus, but this particular Thursday in September 2018 was Lockheed Martin Day, and the aircraft were the main attraction.

They are murderers, but so so cute: Luis (right), a circuit design engineer at Lockheed, celebrates with his wife after paying off more than $300,000 in student debt, as featured in a promotional message on Lockheed Martin’s website.

DEI for Genocide: Lockheed Martin Day, part of a larger effort to create a full student-to-weapons manufacturer pipeline, includes same-day job interviews at the University of New Haven on Feb. 19, 2020.

Discussion about this post

Take no quarter with Trump and Company, his tech monsters, the Jewish Billionaire Fascists, and all those making bank on murdering Iranians and Lebanese and Gazans.

Paulo Kirk

Mar 18, 2026

Jews run the media, suckers.

Not sure why these Zeteo outlets continue with this whiny headline: CBS Owner Paramount Pushed Pro-Israel Panels While Squashing One on Gaza

========================================================================

### Read Justin Baragona’s latest scoop from Paramount land. Plus, the NYT gets caught sanewashing Trump again, and you won’t believe how CBS News is spinning Tony Dokoupil’s rating flop.

Source: Royer Perez-Jimenez, a 19-year-old Mexican national, was pronounced dead at 2:51 a.m. on March 16, 2026 at the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Florida. He was able to commit suicide in a detention facility well known for its systemic failures, which the Biden administration shut down and the Trump administration recklessly reopened. Royer is the second person to die in ICE custody this week after Afghanistan War Veteran Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, the 13th since the start of the year in January, and the 42nd person to die in ICE custody during the Trump administration. Despite the now predictable number of detention deaths—a steady rate of one every 6 days—Congress does absolutely nothing to investigate the loss of life under its watch, ICE continues to minimize and ignore the deaths of migrants in its custody, and Trump’s supporters mock these deaths on social media.

On Monday, I published a map of detention deaths that showed a high concentration of detained deaths in South Florida that would have alerted any civil servant with a conscience or any elected official with a shred of integrity and responsibility to at least look into the conditions in these facilities. I am not aware of any investigations that have taken place.

The latest version of the Protocols of the Tech Children: Google co-founder spends $45m in fight against California billionaire tax. Sergey Brin gives $25m on top of $20m he’s already given to Super Pac trying to block state’s proposed 5% wealth tax

A whole lotta fucking AmeriKKKan hell to be unleashed on the world: Anduril’s Ohio weapons plant goes live “in a matter of weeks”,

Ya think those Jews like Page, Zuckerberg, Karp, Altman, Adelson, Fink, Schwartzman, Schultz, the lot of them, would fight this Trump shit hole move?

Lawsuit challenges Trump admin’s plan to dismantle country’s largest climate research lab

​​The universities that oversee the National Center for Atmospheric Research allege in the suit that the center is “collateral damage” in the Trump administration’s ongoing feud with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

Again, war pays off, more than some fucking WWI Racket: EU leaders soften call to send naval ships to Middle East

Vessels should be sent to the Middle East — but only to support existing European operations, a draft leaders’ statement reads.

Rainbow trout is a prized catch for fisherman on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, in the high plains of southeastern Montana.

“The men in my family like to go fishing; they cook them right there because it’s fresh,” said Charlene Alden, the tribe’s environmental protection director.

But there is an invisible threat in the local waterways. The pollution coming out of the smokestacks at the nearby Colstrip power plant contains mercury and other toxic elements, which can settle in water and be ingested by the fish.

That kind of pollution used to be much more prolific around the country, before Obama-era rules cut it dramatically, by 90%. But Colstrip is among over 30 power plants nationwide that still burn lignite, a peat-rich coal that contains higher-than-average levels of mercury and other pollutants — and lignite plants were able to slip through a loophole in the Obama regulations.

Under former President Joe Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency attempted to crack down on the remainder, finalizing a regulation in 2024 that closed the prior loophole. But the Trump administration recently axed that measure, with EPA Press Secretary Brigit Hirsch calling the original Obama rule “highly effective” and one that has “protected public health and the environment for years.” In other words, to the current EPA, a 90% reduction is good enough.

While it’s true the Trump rollback impacts a relatively small number of power plants, it could have big implications for communities that live near them, like the Northern Cheyenne tribe.

Alden said she is concerned about what they mean for the health of her community.

“I think it’s taking a step backwards from making sure our environment is safe and making sure our food sources are safe,” Alden said. “We try hard to keep our little piece of land that we have left free of pollution. We consider ourselves stewards of the environment.”

Tech giants including Microsoft and Oracle can’t get data centers built fast enough. Construction stocks are ripping on the demand.

Mamma, don’t let your girls grow up to be cowgirls?

Now, a slightly less glamorous group of AI beneficiaries are getting their moment in the spotlight: the staid construction and engineering companies performing the nuts-and-bolts work of clearing sites, pouring concrete, running wiring, and designing water and HVAC systems.

Analysts and tech executives say construction work itself has become another big bottleneck in the AI buildout, putting a significant amount of negotiating leverage in the hands of the companies performing the work.

“Data center, that margin is historically better than the smaller kind of industrial commercial jobs.”

This is the AmeriKKKa we have all been waiting for. Blacklisting and jailing journalists!!!! National parks employees say SFGATE has been blacklisted by the Interior Department

The move follows critical coverage of new Park Service policies

Over the past month, SFGATE’s national parks bureau has sent dozens of inquiries to public affairs specialists at the National Park Service. Journalists had questions about everything from the rapidly dwindling snowpack in Lassen Volcanic National Park to the first grizzly bear to wake up in Yellowstone National Park to quicksand in national parks across the American Southwest.

At a March 13 news briefing about the US-Israeli war with Iran, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed: “We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

Of the Oxford English Dictionary’s few dozen definitions for “quarter” — covering units of measurement, physical locations and particular parts of things — several are linked to militaries. “Quarter” is slang for the rank of quartermaster. It can mean lodging for soldiers or the act of housing troops, as in the Third Amendment’s proscription “in time of peace” on allowing troops to “be quartered in any house” without the owner’s permission. “Close quarters” can refer to fighting at short distances; a “quarter of assembly” was once a point of rendezvous for troops.

Since the early 1600s, “quarter” has also meant the act of showing mercy and sparing the life of an adversary who surrenders in battle. In this context, it’s more common to see “quarter” used in the negative, in the phrase “no quarter,” as in Hegseth’s comment. The phrase is widely understood to mean taking no prisoners, or rejecting an opponent’s surrender and killing them instead.

More rotting and rotten white fucking boys with beards: Trump’s Homeland Security Pick Says He’d End Policy That Slowed Disaster Aid

The president’s nominee, Markwayne Mullin, said he would avoid “micromanaging” FEMA.

The disastrous campaign is going to badly that even arch-neocon grandees like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol are starting to question US’s fatal attachment to Israel:

It’s fuckinglobotomy time…

Things really hit the fan earlier today after Iran’s largest natural gas field, the South Pars, was struck by Israel. This field reportedly accounts for 75% of Iran’s natural gas production and 80-85% of its electric grid.

This of course, came directly after Israel had assassinated Iran’s Secretary of the Supreme National Council Ali Larijani in a strike that was said to have also killed upwards of 100+ civilians in the vicinity, as it leveled the apartment block he was in, and possibly even surrounding buildings.

This led to Iran immediately escalating with strikes against energy targets in both Israel and the Gulf, particularly hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas hub said to be the world’s largest:

The Jews are right on target for the return of Samson:

Discussion about this post

Always the hospitals! Psychopathic men with guns and bombs: Afghanistan says 400 killed in strike by Pakistan on Kabul hospital.

Paulo Kirk

Mar 17, 2026

That American Price is RIGHT, vis-a-vis Israel:

“There’s kind of defeatism, this idea that there’s no stopping technology and resistance is futile, everything will be crushed in its path. That needs to change… We can decide that we want to be human.”

“The most worthless degree you can get is a humanities degree.”

These fuckers love targeting girls’ dormitories, schools, hospitals, ambulances, and medical workers. Double and Triple Tap Tap Tap.

+—+

Deputy government spokesman says death toll has reached 400 people ‘so far’ as Islamabad denies targeting facility for drug addicts.

Again, machetes, acid, Molotovs and botulism: Robert Kagan, one of the strongest proponents of the proxy war in Ukraine, lamented that the war in Iran will make the proxy war in Ukraine hard to continue, saying, “the skyrocketing oil prices … are even before Trump took the action of lifting sanctions against Russia was going to increase Russian income” and “American forces are … burning through major stocks of weaponry and particularly Patriot and other forms of interceptors on which Ukraine depends heavily because those are the interceptors that defend their major cities from constant Russian attacks”.

Then the creeps in AmeriKKKa think this shithead is some sort of hero?

Joe Kent Isn’t the Hero. You Are

The ease with which the military can now, aided by modern technology and AI, rapidly put together a plan of attack, bomb with relative impunity, and destroy lots of “targets” is the lingering problem for the future. Barack Obama was similarly seduced by the ability to kill with drones, and then undertook assassinations from the air driven largely by the seeming “success” and buoyed by the low-risk enterprise.

It is true that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agitated for war, but the Israeli military is operating more and more of one mind with the U.S. military. The two countries have shared a common war plan against Iran since the Biden administration. That level of cooperation has solidified under Trump, driven more by a true affinity and affection for the technologically and operationally sophisticated friend than anything Donald Trump (or Benjamin Netanyahu) has ordered.

A senior intelligence officer tells me that rather than Trump, it is Hegseth, a self-described “warrior,” who is most susceptible to Israeli influence.

“For a Hegseth who only wants the ‘warrior’ answer, Israeli swagger and combat competence is catnip,” the officer says.

The source adds that while Trump loves a winner, and he loves action, it is Hegseth and his “impetuousness” that pushes the relentless destroy-the-target, no-rules, no-quarter style of warfare that has unfolded.

That reality—the ease of warfare I’m describing—is the enduring problem that we will need to address long after Trump is gone and Kent is a Senator, or the next Charlie Kirk or MAGA-darling. (Axios reports that the White House is already prepping for a Tucker Carlson interview of Kent.)

So Kent is right in decrying that Israel’s objectives hold too much sway over what America sees as its interests, but he too easily lets Trump (and the Pentagon) off the hook, portraying them as helpless victims. The buck stop over there.

“You hold the cards,” Kent says to President Trump in closing.

Now turn them over to me, he means.

[Kent is an Oregon native and a graduate of Norwich University in Strategic Defense Analysis. He served in the U.S. Army for 20 years, where he completed 11 combat deployments in the Middle East and other high-threat regions. During his time in the Army, he served with the 75th Ranger Regiment, Army Special Forces and U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and received numerous military commendations, including six bronze stars. After retiring from the Army in 2018, he served as a paramilitary officer in the CIA’s Special Activities Center.

Kent and his family have devoted their lives to counterterrorism and keeping the American people safe. In 2019, his wife, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, was killed in a suicide bombing while serving in Syria.]

Queer mercenary in USA uniform: I was born in a cabin in Sweet Home, Oregon, and grew up in Portland, Oregon. Growing up, I spent much of my formative years in the Cascades and Columbia River Gorge, thanks to Boy Scouts and Explorer Scouts. I have always considered the Pacific Northwest my home and wanted to fight for this nation.

When I was eighteen, I enlisted in the Army as an infantryman and earned my way into the Ranger Regiment and then Special Forces. After 9/11, I volunteered at every opportunity to serve in combat. I did this for over twenty years and eleven combat deployments. I intended to continue to serve our nation in hostile locations abroad until my world turned upside down on January 16th, 2019, when my wife, Shannon Kent, was killed fighting ISIS in Syria. At that moment, I knew I had to step away from putting myself in physical danger so I could be there for our two young sons. Shannon was killed approximately one month after President Trump attempted to pull our troops out of Syria because we had met our military objective. This attempt to end a war brought out the Establishment’s true colors as they resisted him at every step.

Seeing the Establishment’s hubris and contempt for a President who represented the country’s will and the people’s best interests, I knew I had to act. However, this time my fight was to defend America First policies. No one asked me to do this. I sought out every opportunity and any media outlet that would give me a platform to use my twenty years of expertise physically fighting these wars to articulate how correct President Trump was. Defending Trump’s policies gave me a taste of the savage fight we face against a hostile mainstream media and deeply entrenched political class. I eagerly sought out the opportunity to defend President Trump when The Atlantic, a well-known publication, printed slanderous accusations about the President.

I moved back to the Pacific Northwest to get my sons closer to my parents and family. After living in Portland for a short time, I realized that the far left had ruined that city and relocated to Yacolt, Washington. I chose to live here because I knew that this district’s people share my traditional conservative values, and it would be an ideal environment to raise my sons. I voted for Representative Beutler to stand firm for my family and our district. She betrayed that trust and made it clear that I needed to act decisively.

In over 20 years of fighting on the battlefields and through my wife’s death, I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of failed policy. The Establishment is too self-absorbed to represent the will of the people they are supposed to represent. I have also seen firsthand that you cannot persuade someone to fight when the odds are against you. Only those with the courage of conviction will continue to fight when the odds are not in their favor. No one has asked me to do this. I’m volunteering now, just like I did 22 years ago. Suppose we rely on traditional candidates who have done nothing but run for office or have no experience in a hard fight and have never been in danger. In that case, our voices and our movement will succumb to the left’s dark vision for this nation. Portland and Olympia demonstrate this with their failed policies that surround this great district.

I want to go forward and fight because I want to fight, and I know how to fight. This is for the future of our nation and the legacy that we will leave for our children. This is what is compelling me to run for office. It would be an honor to earn your vote and serve this great country once more.

Crap from Zeteo: The MAGA Elite Is Being Torn Apart by Trump’s War in Iran

Joe Kent’s resignation shows that Trump’s illegal war in Iran is creating a fissure within the MAGA upper ranks, but don’t expect many others to quit soon.

by Minnah Arshad, Andrew Perez, and Asawin Suebsaeng (what the fuck?)

Dirt…

A Democratic candidate for a key House race in Maine oversaw a political action committee that donated thousands of dollars to Republican candidates across the country, Federal Election Commission records show.

Jordan Wood, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, is the former executive director of democracyFirst PAC, a group that — despite its left-of-center orientation — donated to at least one Republican PAC, in addition to giving thousands of dollars to at least six GOP campaigns for House and Senate seats during the 2024 election cycle, according to the records.

Dirt…..

Kushner and Witkoff had invited Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to the Geneva talks, to provide technical expertise, though Kushner would later claim that he and Witkoff had “a pretty deep understanding of the issues that matter in this”. Nuclear experts would later say that Witkoff’s pronouncements on the Iran nuclear programme were riddled with basic errors.

Don’t believe the USA military, or what have you: A fiery statement from one of the U.S. Army leaders who participated in the invasion of Iraq—directed at Trump

He tells him: “Why aren’t the countries of the world responding to you in sending their fleets to open the Strait of Hormuz?

You’ve dragged America into a losing war and made its reputation a laughingstock to the world.”

‘Do you know that Iran has complete fire control? Any talk of “opening the Strait of Hormuz” by military means is sheer nonsense. A ground invasion is practically impossible.

Escorting warships is impossible as well. Iran has complete fire control over the entire strait, so if you do that, it’s suicide and the loss of all fleets—not to mention the loss of the entire Middle East. That’s why the countries won’t follow your opinion.’

Double dirt…..

Back to the Broken Back USA: Back in that USA:

Idaho House Passes Trans Bathroom Ban With 5 Year Prison Sentence

The bill is one of the harshest bills criminalizing trans people in the nation, and it will now move to the Senate.

Anti-transgender bills have moved across the United States this year, and they have seen expanded enforcement mechanisms and scopes never before seen in previous years, making them the latest vanguard of anti-transgender legislation. Earlier this year, Kansas passed a bill that mass-invalidated transgender people’s driver’s licenses and created a bathroom bounty hunter system across the state. Missouri then advanced three anti-transgender bathroom bills in a single night. Now, Idaho has gone even further than these extreme bills in other states, with its House passing a bill that would ban transgender people from public bathrooms, including private business bathrooms, with a second-offense felony carrying up to a five-year prison sentence. The bill now will move to the Senate, which will could take up the measure in the coming weeks.

The bill, HB 752, states that “any person who knowingly and willfully enters a restroom or changing room in a government-owned building or a place of public accommodation”—a category that includes private businesses—”designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person shall be guilty of a misdemeanor” punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years would be a felony carrying up to five years in prison

MORE on this fucking mercenary, KENT.

Oh, shit, explosions?

The Explosion Inside Trump’s War Machine: Joe Kent Resigns By Ramzy Baroud

This story is not ending. It is starting. Because once one insider says the war was built on lies, others are forced into a choice. They can continue to perform loyalty to a collapsing narrative, or they can speak. And the longer this war drags on, the more difficult silence will become.

Oh, that land of opportunity!

How an “average” Yoga Coach Managed to Become a Head of CIA Division Responsible for Arms Transfers to Militants in Africa and Middle East

CIAgate/ Jun 20, 2023

“America is the land of opportunity” – this phrase fully describes our nation. America gives an opportunity for every person not only to achieve anything they put their mind to, but also reach a mighty power and get filthy rich. Despite the fact that it is not customary to speak about it, but in most cases people assume such power through deception and hypocrisy. They serve as heads of serious departments, using their post to manipulate the American taxpayers’ money.

Today we’d like to tell you a dizzying story about a yoga teacher, Chanda Creasy, whose enlightenment path took her to a top-secret CIA unit responsible for weapons supplies to militants in Africa and Middle East, receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks.

Food? Cuba? Who the fuck needs fook with Pedophile and Golden Shower Rapist Trump and Minyan and Company, LLC, in charge?

China just told its exporters to stop shipping nitrogen-potassium fertilizer blends abroad. China is the world’s largest fertilizer producer. When it closes the spigot, the entire planet feels the drought. This is not a supply chain story, this is a food security story. A human impact story, and if you know your history, it is also a story about what happens in the streets when bread becomes a luxury.

When grain prices jump 30 percent, governments fall. Egypt learned that in 1977. They learned it again in 2011. The math hasn’t changed.

“Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) told Drop Site’s Julian Andreone that Israel has “always been” a liability to the United States, citing Israel’s role in dragging Americans into the Iraq War and now the Iran War. She added that, “It seems like Israeli officials are always pushing for a war,” saying that she’s “not surprised” Joe Kent resigning as Director of National Counterterrorism Center on those grounds.”

Fuck. Water, man, it’s the water, and food, and the 2.3 million people displaced. Iran is NOT winning. Marandi, give it a fucking Break.

Damage caused to the Israeli regime is irreversible, I believe we are seeing the beginning of its end, says Iranian analyst. Mohammad Marandi believes that :

‘Iran’s impressive success in recent weeks is a great victory for humanity.’

According to presenter and former British MP George Galloway, some of his anonymous sources in Tel Aviv have reported that parts of the city now resemble Gaza, which has been cruelly bombed by the Zionist regime. Nearing two weeks of resistance, Iran appears to be calling the shots in the war at this point and may dictate the terms of the end of the conflict.

In recent days, according to some Western media outlets, the Iranian government has been approached twice by Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to sound out possible negotiations. Tehran has reportedly refused dialogue. After being betrayed twice in negotiations with the US – in June 2025 and March 2026 – the Iranian government sees no point in negotiating now.

Ali Larijani, chairman of Iran’s Supreme Security Council, responding to a post by Donald Trump, who said that the US should win the war soon, said that “starting a war is easy, but ending it cannot be achieved with a few tweets. We will not leave them alone until they accept their mistake and pay for it.”

Laundering the Truth

A laundry fire that takes thirty hours to extinguish on a $13 billion carrier with the most advanced damage control systems in any navy on earth. That displaces 600 crew from their berths. On a ship designed to take battle damage and keep fighting. And the explanation is the laundry.

The USS Ford has automated fire suppression. It has damage control teams that train constantly. It has redundant systems specifically because carriers are built to survive hits in combat.

A laundry fire on a ship designed to survive anti-ship missiles does not burn for thirty hours and render 600 berths uninhabitable. That’s not a laundry fire. That’s damage.

The IRGC has been claiming hits on U.S. assets. CENTCOM has been posting lies. The IRGC said it destroyed fighter jets. CENTCOM said no, unmatched lethality, air superiority. Clean denial.

But the Ford fire got a treatment. It got a laundry. It got an explanation that doesn’t survive contact with what a thirty-hour fire on a carrier actually means.

If the Ford took a hit — a drone, a missile fragment, something — and the explanation is a laundry fire, then the unmatched lethality press release is covering for the matched vulnerability that actually happened.

The chess game at a very high level where one side won’t admit the board has a piece missing.

And if it is a laundry fire — if the most expensive warship ever built actually lost thirty hours and 600 berths to its own laundry in the middle of a shooting war — that’s worse.

That’s the empire that can’t maintain its own ship while projecting power across a hemisphere.

Either the Ford got hit and they’re lying, or the Ford broke itself and they’re not lying and the truth is worse than the lie.

Either way. Thirty hours. 600 beds. Day seventeen. Some chess game.

Toilets that don’t work. Dirty underwear. And yet…in the meantime, the US media keeps on repeating the mantra that the US and Israel have broken the back of Iran’s resistance.

The Price of Right contestants: You and me on the dole, and we dirty welfare queens and kings.

Goddamn! Fucking killers inside and out, that fucking American.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

—D.H. Lawrence

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it

Diversity? Greed is diversity and DEI-ready Price is Right!

For the uninitiated, each hour-long episode of “The Price Is Right” consists of six pricing games. At the end, two players face off in the “Showcase Showdown” for a grand prize — usually a car or a boat or a lavish trip or both. The players must guess the actual retail price of the prize without going over, and whoever’s closest wins. It’s not hard to root for the players, who are selected from the studio audience — the producers pick the most boisterous prospects at each taping.

But the thing I appreciate most about “The Price Is Right” is the diversity among the contestants. It’s so different from the all-white, only-attractive demographic that I recall watching since the ‘70s.

“The Price Is Right” is a sanctuary; a priceless hub of unity, diversity, inclusion, and, well, love.

While the USA kills kills kills, we have twenty-four castaways who are ready for another shot at the $1 million prize — and the bragging rights of being named the winner of the landmark 50th installment.

This is what this fucking country has devolved into = Price is Right, March Madness, Survivor, and John Mearsheimer types, declaring the “war” is not going good for USA and that it was all about the Greater Israel Project.

Jesus Fucking Christ, DUH. Smiley white fucking FACE:

John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago professor, said in an interview on Tuesday that the Iran War is going badly for the U.S., and it is becoming clearer by the day that this is a “war for Israel.”

“We had no national interest in going to war against Iran,” he said. “And there is just a ton of evidence that President Trump was dragged into this war by Israel and the Israeli supporters inside the United States.”

SURVIVOR, old fucking Pedophile and Golden Showers Rapist Trump is protected!

Tulsi Gabbard’s childhood was heavily influenced by her parents’ devotion to Chris Butler, leader of the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna-affiliated group, creating a private, highly regimented upbringing in Hawaii and the Philippines. She was largely homeschooled, adopted Hindu principles early, and was raised in a strict environment.

• DNI Tulsi Gabbard responded to Joe Kent’s resignation in protest of the Iran war:

Not sure where these folk get this shit, but . . . Lunacy. No end to the so-called empire. Israel is bombing the fuck out of Lebanon, has Syria by the short hairs, and has Pedophile and Golden Showers Rapist Trump by the HD Spy Cam videos.

An End of Empire

Greg Reese

Mar 17, 2026

Despite having the world’s most powerful navy, the United States cannot force the Strait of Hormuz open, which every US military expert knew would be closed if Iran was attacked. This is why the US Navy is miles away. And it is why America’s NATO Allies are refusing to participate.

The Iranians may have suffered the brutal Shock & Awe of the United States military, but they have been preparing for decades, and as the US is already running low on weapons, Iran has plans for a long-term asymmetrical war, a defensive fight for their very existence. Iran has the moral high ground and they are holding practically all the cards.

By his own admission, Trump expected a quick, decisive victory. He ignored warnings from experts and instead listened to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

With a smile on his face, the President of the United States has said that it’s fun to kill the Iranians and that they are genetically inferior. By any historical standard, America has never had a president speak in such a manner. It has been confirmed that the United States has murdered almost two hundred school girls with Tomahawk missiles fired at an elementary school. Trump said he can live with it, and Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said there would be ‘no quarter, no mercy’.

• A prolonged government funding standoff has led to a mounting workforce revolt among TSA officers, who have been working without pay for weeks and are increasingly calling out or quitting, severely straining airport security operations. Absentee rates have surged far above normal levels, causing long screening delays and operational disruptions at major hubs, while officials warn that if the situation continues, staffing shortages could force the closure of some smaller airports—especially as travel demand ramps up during the busy spring season.
• The Senate narrowly voted 51–48 to open debate on the SAVE America Act, but some Republicans showed internal division: Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted against it, Sen. Thom Tillis missed the vote after opposing it, and Sen. Mitch McConnell—who doesn’t support the bill—only voted to proceed as a procedural courtesy, highlighting fractures within the GOP despite overall backing for the legislation.

Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future, was published in 2025 with U. of California Press.

“I now talk about AI with my students not under the framework of cheating or academic honesty but in terms that are frankly existential,” Dora Zhang, a literature professor at UC Berkeley said. “What is it doing to us as a species?”

Alas, students looking for an easy “A” may not be interested in philosophical inquiries on how AI is fundamentally changing how we interact with the world and with each other — and indeed, according to a burgeoning body of research, how our brains work.

One canary in the coal mine comes from a Carnegie Mellon study published in early 2025 that found that knowledge workers who regularly used and trusted the accuracy of AI tools were losing their critical thinking skills. An earlier study found a link between students who relied on ChatGPT and memory loss, procrastination, and worsening academic performance. And an MIT study that performed EEG scans on subjects who were asked to write essays with and without ChatGPT found that AI users had the lowest levels of cognitive engagement during the tasks.

Working in the trenches, most professors, especially in the humanities, probably didn’t need formal research to tell them what those studies found, when they could easily intuit it by interacting with their pupils. Michael Clune, a literature professor and novelist, lamented to The Guardian that many students are now “incapable of reading and analyzing, synthesizing data, all kinds of skills.” Clune’s school, Ohio State University, recently required all students to enroll in “AI fluency” courses “across every major,” ostensibly to prepare them for a world that is dominated by the tech.

Clune was critical of the push. “No one knows what that means,” he told newspaper. “In my case, as a literature professor, these tools actually seem to mitigate against the educational goals I have for my students.”

OSU may be the most egregious example of capitulating to the whims of Big Tech, but the AI industry has its tendrils all across education. Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft have poured tens of millions of dollars into teachers’ unions, providing training on how to use their AI systems. They’ve also partnered with numerous institutions to provide their students with free access to their AI tools. Duke University, after entering such a partnership with OpenAI, introduced its own AI tool called “DukeGPT.” Abroad, xAI founder Elon Musk partnered with the government of El Salvador to launch the “world’s first nationwide AI-powered education program” to provide his Grok chatbot to a million students across thousands of public schools.

Words words words. Trump and Company, Kushner and Witkoff, the lot of them, shoot them out of the sky. Sli, shut the fuck up and do something. Sleeper cells?

WHY even get into a word-pissing contest with the AMeriKKKans?

Major General Ali Abdollahi, Commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, stated that stronger responses are forthcoming, declaring that

“Trump should now wait for our surprises.”

The remarks were made in a message issued following the martyrdom of the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the head of the Basij Organization for the Oppressed, and the sailors of the Dena destroyer.

DOES IT FUCKING MATTER?

Rep. Summer Lee has introduced articles of impeachment against Attorney General Pam Bondi, alleging a wide range of misconduct, including defying congressional subpoenas to release unredacted Epstein files, violating federal law, misleading Congress and the courts, and abusing prosecutorial authority. The resolution also accuses Bondi of politicizing the Justice Department by targeting political opponents, dismissing cases involving allies, and retaliating against officials and journalists, as Lee and several Democratic co-sponsors argue her actions undermine the rule of law and warrant removal from office.

Economic draft my ass. This is just lazy cuntology, and they get into the fucking mercenary services, believe that Yankee Doodle Dandy, and then somehow change? She’s a fucking Republican, man, just end these ignorant fucks, no heroes here!!

YANKEE GO HOME.

Fill her up!!

Always white boys in another person’s country:

Discussion about this post

Never ever trust a Jew tied to Trump and MAGA and Israel . . . and that’s not antisemitic, but just plain old prepping, plain old survival technique #999.

Paulo Kirk

Mar 16, 2026

And some of us want them DEAD (so arrested, tried, convicted and sent to prison, now is that the death we hope for?): Our lathered up in ACID.

When Jared Kushner formed Affinity Partners in 2021 and then raised most of his first fund from Middle Eastern sovereigns, he took great pains to say that the endeavor was conceived after he left the White House.

• He bristled at suggestions of quid pro quo, but also understood that the whiff was strong enough that it had to be addressed.
• Kushner also insisted that his government days were in the past, even if his father-in-law regained power. Full-time private equity guy in Miami, not a D.C. denizen hoping to boomerang.

But it hasn’t quite worked out that way, resurrecting old questions as Affinity begins premarketing its second fund.

• Kushner has spent the vast majority of his time since last summer on geopolitics, as a volunteer at the behest of President Trump. First on Israel/Gaza. Then on Russia/Ukraine. And most recently, a trio of meetings with Iran, prior to the war.

Tar and feathers, then?

Jew on the left and Catholic on the right: Yep, they would be best as night earth, DOA. You might wipe that smirk off his face with some high-grade acid.

VD Vance defended President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war (murdering thousands and displacing a few million who will die, some of them, and be permanently scared and disabled for life) with Iran on Monday, accusing the media of trying to drive a wedge between the president and vice president, a longtime skeptic of foreign interventionism.

Vance — who served in Iraq with the Marine Corps — was a vocal skeptic of U.S. military engagement overseas during his time in the Senate. The White House has repeatedly batted down speculation of a rift between Vance and the president.

DON’T FUCKING LECTURE ME ABOUT HOW FUCKING PSYCHO MY WRITING IS . . . OR THE FUCKING IMPLICATIONS OF AN ACID BATH FOR A FEW MILLION like Trump and Kushner and Ackman and Altman and Adelson and Ellison(s) and FInk and Schwartzman and Brin and Page and Zuckerberg and Karp and . . . . Note: all or part of this hyperbole from Paulokirk’s RANT is all fiction!!!

So they just get to beddy-bye at night, no repercussions?

BECAUSE WE KNEW ABOUT THIS FUCKING YEARS AGO . . . Report: Counties that spray the most glyphosate have higher non-Hodgkin lymphoma rates

Iowa lawmaker launches pesticide exposure study

Yeah, you want to deal with lymphoma cancer? Acid to the face of Semen Drip Trump and the Epstein Class, too harsh? Fuck YOU.

Will these two countries get balls? Every day, more than $4 billion worth of goods cross the United States’ borders with Canada and Mexico – U.S. auto parts headed for car factories in northern Mexico, cartons of Mexican avocados bound for California supermarkets, Canadian aluminium destined to become cans of Campbell Soup.

Much of this bustling cross-border commerce is duty-free, thanks to the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, that President Donald Trump negotiated with America’s northern and southern neighbors during his first term.

But the future of the USMCA , which took effect July 1, 2020, is cloudy as the three countries begin what could be a tempestuous attempt to renew the pact this year. The United States is demanding changes to the treaty, and the top U.S. trade negotiator told Politico in December that Trump would be willing to pull the United States out of the pact if he can’t get the deal he wants. Trump also suggested last fall that the United States could negotiate separate deals with Canada and Mexico, ending the three-country North American bloc that previous administrations saw as crucial to competing economically with China and the European Union.

ACID, come on millionaires and billionaires, ACID TO YOUR FUCKING UGLY FACES.

Companies such as Atlassian, Block and Amazon have announced they would lay off thousands of employees due to increased reliance on AI.

The narrative these companies offer is consistent: AI is making human labour replaceable, and responsible management demands adjustment.

Oh, the fucking Jew Sachs, man, sacks of fucking empty testicles:

A 2025 Goldman Sachs report estimated that if AI were used across the economy for all the things it could currently do, roughly 2.5% of US employment would be at risk of job loss.

That’s not a trivial number. However, the report notes that workers in AI-exposed occupations are currently no more likely to lose their jobs, face reduced hours, or earn lower wages than anyone else.

The report does note early signs of strain in specific industries. Goldman Sachs identifies sectors where employment growth has slowed that align with AI-related efficiency gains. Examples include marketing consulting, graphic design, office administration and call centres.

In the tech sector, US workers in their 20s in AI-exposed occupations saw unemployment rise by almost 3% in the first half of 2025. Anthropic’s research also found that job-finding rates (the chance of an unemployed person finding a job in a one-month period) for workers aged 22–25 entering AI-exposed occupations have fallen by around 14% since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. This is a tentative but telling signal about where the pressure is being felt first.

These are meaningful signals, but they are sector-specific and concentrated – not the evidence of sweeping displacement that corporate announcements often imply. That gap between the evidence and the rhetoric raises an obvious question: what else might be driving these decisions?

Jew Bait . . . ‘The guy’s a piece of s–t’: SBF’s pardon push falls flat in Congress. ACID-WASHED Fried.

Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted in 2023 on fraud charges after his FTX crypto exchange collapsed, has been heaping praise on President Donald Trump.

More ACID WASHING: Russian state sources have reported that Ukrainian authorities are using construction work as a cover for the recruitment of Colombian nationals for combat operations, citing documents found on the phone of Colombian military contractor Jose Luis Pocheco Navarra, who recently surrendered to Russian forces. The document is reported to have contained a request by the head of the Zaporozhye Region’s military administration, Ivan Fyodorov, that Colombian citizens be engaged in construction and restoration works in the region. “There’s a need for unskilled workers, including general labourers and spare hands, in order to speed up work, which requires a request to facilitate the entry to Ukraine for Colombian nationals,” the document is reported to have read.

EVERYTHING AMERICANOS TOUCH turns sour:

Thirty years ago, a single light bulb would illuminate the mezcal distillery owned by Gladys Sánchez Garnica’s family in rural Oaxaca, where the agave-based spirit was made through the night. As drops dripped from a clay oven, Garnica and her siblings listened to stories told by their parents while neighbors arrived by horse to get a taste of a drink known for its smoky flavor.

“We were taught when to harvest agave, how to care for the soil, and how much we could ask of the forest,” said Garnica, 33, speaking from a women-owned distillery in San Pedro Totolapam, a town of just over 3,000 residents in Mexico’s Oaxacan Central Valleys, where much of the economy depends on mezcal.

Today, that small-scale tradition exists alongside a global boom that has transformed mezcal into a major industry dominated by international brands. As mezcal has spread to bars around the world, so has its footprint on the land. Along the road to communities like San Luis del Rio, where celebrity brands such as Dos Hombres, created by actors Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul from the hit series “Breaking Bad,” are made, agave plantations now blanket hillsides that were once forest. While the boom has brought economic benefits for many local producers, it’s also led to rising environmental costs

In Oaxaca, much land is communally owned and managed through local systems of self-governance. Converting forest into agave plantations requires federal approval from Mexico’s Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources.

The permitting process is so slow and bureaucratic that some communities choose to bypass it, said Helena Iturribarria from Tierra de Agaves, a conservation project to reforest parts of Oaxaca’s valleys and promote sustainable agave production.

The Secretary of Environment said in a statement it had not received requests for forest clearing for agave cultivation in the past three years in Oaxaca. The agency also said it was investigating nine public complaints filed since 2021 over illegal land clearing for mezcal production.

In 2018, Garnica founded a collective of women called the “Guardians of Mezcal.” The group is promoting mezcal produced by women using sustainable practices, including using only fallen trees for firewood and planting agave alongside other crops.

With help from Tierra de Agaves, Guardians of Mezcal and local community officials from Santa Maria Zoquitlan secured projected status for 26,000 hectares of forest surrounding the town.

“Mezcal is a way of life, like a form of work that our parents taught us, so it really means a lot,” Garnica said. “If there is a funeral, a wedding, a party, mezcal is a drink you are going to share with others, and above all many families depend on it.”

The price is right, and the biodiversity can just fucking cock off:

The U.S. Forest Service on March 5 announced it plans to soon approve the nation’s first critical minerals mine, South32’s Hermosa project, when it released the final environmental impact statement, which was permitted under a streamlined process. The federal government called it “a strategic investment in America’s energy future” that “directly supports U.S. energy and security needs.”

But in Patagonia, Arizona, residents and environmentalists are preparing for the impacts the project will bring to a world-renowned biodiversity hotspot, as the town, the nearby city of Nogales and Santa Cruz County inch closer to signing a community benefit agreement with the Australian mine company, South32, to mitigate and help address the impacts it is already bringing.

South32’s $2 billion Hermosa project would extract zinc, lead and silver, all deemed critical minerals by the administration of President Donald Trump. A second mineral deposit contains manganese, another critical mineral, though a decision to move forward with extracting it is pending. South32 is also evaluating a copper deposit found on site.

How many Epstein jugs of acid will it take to ACID WASH the TECH CUNTS?

Your garbage, not mine: Thailand to return 284 tonnes of e-waste to America.

My oh my, Zelensky and a million fucking NAZI’s and AZOV storm troopers and rapists and paedophiles need some acid treatment. Are you tired of this fucking coke head Jew yet?

Ukraine has no good options to replace a crucial cash package from the European Union, which Hungary continues to block, leaving Kyiv hurtling towards a hole in its finances as it awaits a solution to the impasse.

The loan, agreed unanimously by EU countries at a summit in December, would provide 90 billion euros ($103 billion) to Ukraine over 2026–2027, covering two-thirds of the country’s financial and military needs. But Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has since U-turned, ostensibly over a dispute pertaining to Russian oil transit through Ukraine.

You fucking dirty Latin American cunts, those so-called leaders. FUCK YOU, & ACID to your FUCKING FACES and your CHILDREN’S FACES:

Cubans say there is little food, power, fuel or relief amid worsening conditions

As the U.S. and Cuba hold conversations to decide the island’s fate, basic necessities are scarce or unaffordable, and simple tasks like cooking are burdensome.

And these stories are what make the West, AmeriKKKa, the broke back mountaineers society. Fucking HELL. US judge dismisses $100,000 suit over spiciness of New York taqueria’s sauce

A German tourist filed a lawsuit claiming he felt unpleasant symptoms after eating tacos with salsa at Los Tacos No 1.

How quickly that fucking Boy Scouts’ fruit salad on his left chest would melt like butter and sink into his fucking skin with some high-grade ACID.

And this is how we end this ACID BATH review: General Greg Guillot, the commander of the US Northern Command, said that if given the order to strike anyone that the Trump administration labels a “domestic terrorist”, he would carry out the order.

Footnote: Of course, all this trigger warning crap applies here to the Secret Service. All ideas expressed here are speculative, thought experiments, and there is no way in hell a dude like me would every carry out any of this shit, and for any of this shit to work, it would take thousands of guerrilla warriors on the streets of the USA, and we know there ain’t no revolution at Costco or with the Incel-class, so, cock off:

Key points regarding this legal boundary include:

• Definition of “True Threats”: The Supreme Court has established that speech is not protected if it constitutes a serious expression of an intention to inflict bodily harm or take the life of the president.
• Federal Law (18 U.S.C. § 871): Knowingly and willfully making threats to kill or kidnap the President, Vice President, or former Presidents is a federal felony.
• “True Threat” vs. Hyperbole: Courts look at whether a reasonable person would view the statement as a serious expression of intent to harm, rather than just “political hyperbole” or satire (e.g., Watts v. United States).
• Recklessness Standard: In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that for a statement to be a “true threat,” the speaker must at least act recklessly, with a conscious disregard that their words would be viewed as threatening violence.
• Investigation: The U.S. Secret Service investigates threats to determine if they are serious, and individuals making such threats can be prosecuted even if they did not intend to carry them out, provided a reasonable person would interpret the speech as a serious threat.

While hateful speech or expressing a desire for a president’s death as a political opinion might sometimes be protected if it is deemed merely emotional, hyperbolic, or speculative, crossing the line into a direct threat or a call for violence removes that protection.

More and more Americanos just have that blank stare, can’t carry on a real conversation unless it’s about their conversion from Walmart to Costco!

Paulo Kirk

Mar 16, 2026

You are getting Maisoon Rice on the radio show. I stitched in an intro, which is me giving the rundown of the latest Axis of Evil USA-Israel death dealing, and then the original Zoom recording of Maisoon, a Palestinian living in London, and then a couple of poems at the end of the recording.

KYAQ Finding Fringe: Voices from the Edge. Wednesday, 8 pm, rebroadcast 3 PM, Thursday afternoons. LISTEN HERE.

Headless folk coming up:

No Kings Day 3.0 (No Kings 3) is a planned nationwide day of mass mobilization and protest in the United States scheduled for March 28, 2026. Organizers aim to protest against the actions of the Trump administration, with over 1,000 to 2,000 local protests confirmed across all 50 states, DC, and some international locations.

Here are the key details regarding the March 28, 2026, events:

• Goal: To “push back against the growing authoritarian actions of the Trump administration,” specifically addressing issues like the use of federal agents, immigration enforcement, and other policies.
• Organizer: The protests are organized by Indivisible, a progressive group, along with coalition partners like 50501 and Stand Up America.
• Flagship Event: The largest, central event is planned for Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
• Previous Events: This follows two similar, massive “No Kings” protests held in June 2025 (approx. 5 million participants) and October 2025 (approx. 7 million participants).
• Local Action: A map of local “No Kings Day 3” protests is available on the Indivisible website.

You think they’d let me put this in block letters on a posterboard: Haitians killed their White oppressors. So should WE.

Or this?

I was asked by one of the No Kings organisers to speak?

Will you please consider speaking at No Kings? I hope you will add your progressive voice.

So far, Gomberg will talk about ICE and Brubaker will talk about trusting media.

In Solidarity, M

[U.S. state lawmakers this week visited the Nova festival memorial site in Re’im, Israel. The grounds around Re’im Park have been turned into a memorial for the victims and hostages from the Nova music festival which was attacked by Hamas on the morning of Oct. 7, 2023.]

Oh, darn, I had to write back:

Thanks for the endorsement of my ability to speak to this group on many issues, from global heating/warming, to war lust by both parties, education, science, urban planning (yep, I did that graduate work in Spokane), and sustainability. But I am way off the charts in terms of most No Kings Day folk. I’ve talked to some of them in Florence, Bend, Cannon Beach, and Newport: I am a bona fide communist, M, so, not part of the Dems or republicans on national politics, and I voted for Claudia De Las Cruz last time and Jill Stein before that and worked for Nader and Kuchinich. I know education like the back of my hand. And journalism, too. And social work, since I have done case management for years while teaching college from TX to AZ to WA to OR.

It’s a tough one. I am not a progressive, as you understand, unfortunately for your group’s overall collective (I know I am generalizing) ethos and philosophical grounding. I’m way left of left, more than just socialist. Additionally, I recently wrote a piece criticizing Gomberg for his genocide-themed trip to Israel. See page 5. I’ve asked him to be on my radio show, and he might be up for that; however, it might be contentious. We talked briefly at the rambunctious ICE and helicopter city council meeting months ago.

I don’t want to rain on your parade, and while I have lived with boo’s, I am not into those right now. Does this frame things for you a bit better? Look, I was cancelled recently, from a talk I was asked to give at the Performing Arts Center Dec. 4, and I am ghosted by OCCC and can’t teach my memoir writing classes there anymore.

Telling it like it is — Israel doesn’t have any right to exist, and alas, From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will-Should Be Free is considered antisemitic by many on the blue side of the aisle.

Click to access 68eef5740f7f0.pdf.pdf

A response back:

Dear Paul,

Look – I am somewhat impulsive and have a tendency to make simple assumptions like sharing facts will strengthen the resistance.

I had no idea about any of the challenges you have faced. I am not an advocate of boos – they cut off any conversation. That is familiar from being on the street. And, I am familiar with those who confound antisemitism with objecting to Netanyahu’s war on Palestine. The worst part of that, I think, is the way that confusion is used/exploited by the well-oiled MAGA machine.

I get that you are not a progressive. It reminds me of working (years ago) with Women’s Pentagon Action in Northampton and endless discussions about naming a group so that is would draw people into a larger resistance. Now, because I am organizing a variety of people in Lincoln City, I imagine I look more moderate than I am. But, it feels important to do this – even crucial. Indivisible Lincoln City includes folks who have always been out there, working for what is right, and folks who have never stepped out before.

They all need to be out there. The challenge is not to stand on a street corner, but to talk to neighbors and vote MAGA out of school boards, city councils, county boards, state and federal congressional seats.

So, that is me.

I was born and raised in North Portland and went to Jeff, 68 – 72. If you know Albina and those years in our history, you know what HS was like. The first march was anti-Vietnam. Went to a variety of schools and took time to get through undergrad, and ended at UO in psych. Had my son then. Was active, there, too. Went on to grad school in Cognitive Psych, worked as a prof at Quinnipiac in CT for years. Too many. Came home in 20. Finally got to see the real ocean and real mountains again. The last action I organized there was because Trump defunded the arts.

More on me.

This program approach sounds like it doesn’t appeal to you. The plan is to have a bunch of short talks, each focused on an area of damage to our democracy, with the goal of informing and inspiring folks before they move to the rally onto 101. It isn’t substantive, like your writing or your interviews.

Not sure where this leaves us. I still think you could speak. One speaker may talk about what war does to children.

Thanks for reaching back and for telling me about yourself.

+—+

There ain’t no way to do No Kings Day without going back to 1776? Look at this fucking mass killing, mass bombing, Jewish State of Israel!

Endless crocodile tears, don’t you know, Gallee.

Footnote: A really good dad wouldn’t get involved in killing 165 children at school.

I would love nothing more than to see the destruction of the UAE. It is a slave state. It supports genocide in Sudan. Women and young girls are being raped in Sudan.. UAE LOSSES IN THE WAR ARE STAGGERING.

An estimated $1 million is reportedly lost every minute, totaling nearly $10 billion per week.

Disgusting is the position of the petrodictatorships of the Persian Gulf; Mohamed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, dictator and accused of killing and dismembering a journalist, has asked Trump to continue the war against Iran, in addition to selling himself to the Zionist entity of Israel. Traitor, like few others, 800 dead in Lebanon, 2000 in Iran, and a genocide in Gaza.

Trump lives in a world of ballrooms, lobster dinners, gold toilets and yachts. War is nothing more than a pleasant excursion to him. Anyone who dances on stage at rallies while the bodies of our soldiers are being sent home is repulsive and pathetic. A pig is more sensitive.

But Trump’s a Kraut and a Brit. Britain executed hundreds of Indian Muslims in Singapore after they refused to fight against the Islamic Caliphate, 1914-1915.

16 March 1968. A platoon of American soldiers murdered approximately 1000 unarmed civilians at My Lai and destroyed a cluster of other small villages located in South Vietnam. The incident was kept secret for nearly 2 years and later became known as the My Lai Massacre.

Nicolás Maduro is being kept in solitary confinement, locked in a 6ft by 10ft room for more than 23 hours a day.

All because he wouldn’t let Donald Trump steal Venezuela’s oil.

The Nakba did not start or end in 1948 — Report from 2017!

Every year on May 15, Palestinians around the world, numbering about 12.4 million, mark the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in 1948.

The Palestinian experience of dispossession and loss of a homeland is 69 years old this year.

On that day, the State of Israel came into being. The creation of Israel was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state, as per the aspirations of the Zionist movement.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres.

Though May 15, 1948, became the official day for commemorating the Nakba, armed Zionist groups had launched the process of displacement of Palestinians much earlier. In fact, by May 15, half of the total number of Palestinian refugees had already been forcefully expelled from their country.

Israel continues to oppress and dispossess Palestinians to this day, albeit in a less explicit way than that during the Nakba.

What caused the Nakba?

The roots of the Nakba stem from the emergence of Zionism as a political ideology in late 19th-century Eastern Europe. The ideology is based on the belief that Jews are a nation or a race that deserve their own state.

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From 1882 onwards, thousands of Eastern European and Russian Jews began settling in Palestine; pushed by the anti-Semitic persecution and pogroms they were facing in the Russian Empire, and the appeal of Zionism.

In 1896, Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl published a pamphlet that came to be seen as the ideological basis for political Zionism – Der Judenstaat, or “The Jewish State”. Herzl concluded that the remedy to centuries-old anti-Semitic sentiments and attacks in Europe was the creation of a Jewish state.

Though some of the movement’s pioneers initially supported a Jewish state in places such as Uganda and Argentina, they eventually called for for building a state in Palestine based on the biblical concept that the Holy Land was promised to the Jews by God.

In the 1880s, the community of Palestinian Jews, known as the Yishuv, amounted to three percent of the total population. In contrast to the Zionist Jews who would arrive in Palestine later, the original Yishuv did not aspire to build a modern Jewish state in Palestine.

After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1517-1914), the British occupied Palestine as part of the secret Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916 between Britain and France to divvy up the Middle East for imperial interests.

In 1917, before the start of the British Mandate (1920-1947), the British issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to help the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, essentially vowing to give away a country that was not theirs to give.

READ MORE: How Britain Destroyed the Palestinian Homeland

Central to the pledge was Chaim Weizmann, a Britain-based Russian Zionist leader and chemist whose contributions to the British war effort during World War I (1914-1918) made him well-connected to the upper echelons of the British government. Weizmann lobbied hard for more than two years with British former Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and former Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour to publicly commit Britain to building a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

By giving their support to Zionist goals in Palestine, the British hoped they could shore up support among the significant Jewish populations in the US and Russia for the Allied effort during WWI. They also believed the Balfour Declaration would secure their control over Palestine after the war.

From 1919 onwards, Zionist immigration to Palestine, facilitated by the British, increased dramatically. Weizmann, who later became Israel’s first president, was realising his dream of making Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”.

Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants from their lands as Zionists bought land from absentee landlords.

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Leading Arab and Palestinian intellectuals openly warned against the motifs of the Zionist movement in the press as early as 1908. With the Nazi seizure of power in Germany between 1933 and 1936, 30,000 to 60,000 European Jews arrived on the shores of Palestine.

In 1936, Palestinian Arabs launched a large-scale uprising against the British and their support for Zionist settler-colonialism, known as the Arab Revolt. The British authorities crushed the revolt, which lasted until 1939, violently; they destroyed at least 2,000 Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians in concentration camps and subjected them to violent interrogation, including torture, and deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders.

At least ten percent of the Palestinian male population had been killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned by the end of the revolt.

The British government, worried about the eruption of violence between the Palestinians and Zionists, tried to curtail at several points immigration of European Jews. Zionist lobbyists in London overturned their efforts.

In 1944, several Zionist armed groups declared war on Britain for trying to put limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine at a time when Jews were fleeing the Holocaust. The Zionist paramilitary organisations launched a number of attacks against the British – the most notable of which was the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 where the British administrative headquarters were housed; 91 people were killed in the attack.

In early 1947, the British government announced it would be handing over the disaster it had created in Palestine to the United Nations and ending its colonial project there. On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

At the time, the Jews in Palestine constituted one third of the population and owned less than six percent of the total land area. Under the UN partition plan, they were allocated 55 percent of the land, encompassing many of the main cities with Palestinian Arab majorities and the important coastline from Haifa to Jaffa. The Arab state would be deprived of key agricultural lands and seaports, which led the Palestinians to reject the proposal.

Shortly following the UN Resolution 181, war broke out between the Palestinian Arabs and Zionist armed groups, who, unlike the Palestinians, had gained extensive training and arms from fighting alongside Britain in World War II.

READ MORE: How Israel’s violent birth destroyed Palestine

Zionist paramilitary groups launched a vicious process of ethnic cleansing in the form of large-scale attacks aimed at the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their towns and villages to build the Jewish state, which culminated in the Nakba.

While some Zionist thinkers claim there is no proof of a systematic master plan for the expulsion of Palestinians for the creation of the Jewish state, and that their dispossession was an unintended result of war, the presence of a Palestinian Arab majority in what Zionist leaders envisioned as a future state meant the Nakba was inevitable.

Why do Palestinians commemorate the Nakba on May 15?

The British occupation authorities had announced that they would be ending their mandate in Palestine on the eve of May 15, 1948. Eight hours earlier, David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, announced what the Zionist leaders called a declaration of independence in Tel Aviv.

The British Mandate ended at midnight, and on May 15, the Israeli state came into being.

Palestinians commemorated their national tragedy of losing a homeland in an unofficial way for decades, but in 1998, the former President of the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Arafat, declared May 15 a national day of remembrance, on the 50th year since the Nakba.

Israel celebrates the day as its day of independence.

When did the process of displacement actually begin?

Though displacement of Palestinians from their lands by the Zionist project was already taking place during the British Mandate, mass displacement started when the UN partition plan was passed.

In less than six months, from December 1947 to mid-May 1948, Zionist armed groups expelled about 440,000 Palestinians from 220 villages.

Before May 15, some of the most infamous massacres had already been committed; the Baldat al-Sheikh massacre on December 31, 1947, killing up to 70 Palestinians; the Sa’sa’ massacre on February 14, 1948, when 16 houses were blown up and 60 people lost their lives; and the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, when about 110 Palestinian men, women and children were slaughtered.

IN PICTURES: Remembering Deir Yassin

How many Palestinians were displaced?

As units of the Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi armies invaded on May 15, the Arab-Israeli war was launched, and stretched until March 1949.

By the first half of 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians in total were forcibly expelled or fled outside of their homeland. Zionist forces had committed about 223 atrocities by 1949, including massacres, attacks such as bombings of homes, looting, the destruction of property and entire villages.

Some 150,000 Palestinians remained in the areas of Palestine that became part of the Israeli state. Of the 150,000, some 30,000 to 40,000 were internally displaced.

Like the 750,000 who were displaced beyond the borders of the new state, Israel prohibited internally displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes.

In the years that followed the establishment of Israel, the state extended its systematic ethnic cleansing. Though armistice agreements had been signed with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon in 1949, the newly founded Israeli army committed a number of additional massacres and campaigns of forced displacement.

For example, in 1950, the remaining 2,500 Palestinian residents of the city of Majdal were forced into the Gaza Strip, about 2,000 inhabitants of Beer el-Sabe were expelled to the West Bank, and some 2,000 residents of two northern villages were driven into Syria.

By the mid-1950s, the Palestinian population inside Israel had become about 195,000. Between 1948 and the mid-1950s, some 30,000, or 15 percent of the population, were expelled outside the borders of the new state, according to the BADIL refugee rights group.

Is the Nakba over?

While the Zionist project fulfilled its dream of creating “a Jewish homeland” in Palestine in 1948, the process of ethnic cleansing and displacement of Palestinians never stopped.

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During the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, known as the Naksa, meaning “setback”, Israel occupied the remaining Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and continues to occupy them until today. While under the UN partition plan Israel was allocated 55 percent, today it controls more than 85 percent of historic Palestine.

The Naksa led to the displacement of some 430,000 Palestinians, half of which originated from the areas occupied in 1948 and were thus twice refugees. As in the Nakba, Israeli forces used military tactics that violated basic international rights law such as attacks on civilians and expulsion. Most refugees fled into neighbouring Jordan, with others going to Egypt and Syria.

What is the situation today?

The more than three million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem face home demolitions, arbitrary arrests, and displacement as Israel expands the 100-plus Jewish-only colonies and steals Palestinian land to do so. Palestinian movement is restricted by military checkpoints and the Separation Wall that has obstructed their ability to travel freely.

The Gaza Strip, where some two million Palestinians live, has been under Israeli siege for more than a decade whereby Israel controls the air space, sea and borders; the Strip has also witnessed three Israeli assaults that have made the area close to uninhabitable.

READ MORE: Occupied words – On Israel’s colonial narrative

Within Israel, the 1.8 million Palestinians are an involuntary minority in a state for the Jews. Rights groups have recorded some 50 laws that discriminate against them for not being Jewish, such as ones that criminalise the commemoration of the Nakba.

Since the creation of Israel, no new Palestinian towns or cities were built within its borders, in contrast to the 600 Jewish municipalities that have been developed, according to Adalah, the legal centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Since 1948, some one million Palestinians have been arrested by Israel, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Additionally, some 100,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished (not including the Nakba or the Gaza wars), according to BADIL.

Today, there are about 7.98 million Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons who have not been able to return to their original homes and villages.

Some 6.14 million of those are refugees and their descendants beyond the borders of the state; many live in some of the worst conditions in more than 50 refugee camps run by the UN in neighbouring countries.

Discussion about this episode

“This is a sham trial, built on political persecution and ideological attacks coming from the top.”

Paulo Kirk

Mar 15, 2026

Oh, yeah, under fucking House Nigger Obama:

A federal jury handed prosecutors a mixed victory in the trial of nine protesters for their roles during or after a chaotic demonstration outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility last July, convicting eight defendants of terrorism charges but sparing some of them on attempted murder counts.

The widely watched trial could serve as a bellwether as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on left-wing groups — and the convictions could encourage prosecutors to bring more such charges. A top FBI official said in December that the agency is now treating “antifa” as a major domestic terror threat.

Another significant witness was a researcher at a right-wing think tank who said the tactics used by the demonstrators that night, including “black bloc” clothing and the encrypted messaging app Signal — the latter of which the witness said he also used — were typical of antifa.

Long arm of the law, lawfare, as in war=fare.

The Justice Department has moved to dismiss charges against an Army veteran who set fire to an American flag near the White House last year to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order on flag burning.

Jay Carey, 55, of Arden, North Carolina, who has said he served in the Army from 1989 to 2012 and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, was arrested on Aug. 25 after he set fire to a flag in Lafayette Park, which the National Park Service oversees. Earlier that day, Trump signed an executive order requiring the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute people for burning the American flag.

Carey was charged with two misdemeanors that aren’t focused on the act of burning a flag: igniting a fire in an undesignated area and lighting a fire causing damage to property or park resources. He pleaded not guilty in September. Friday’s filing did not explain the decision to move to dismiss and the U.S Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia did not immediately respond on Saturday to an email seeking comment.

The cunts of the fascist tech bro’s are just saying it out in the open: Luckey says Pentagon could have been “more forceful” against Anthropic.

The fucking queen of AI,

Mark Zuckerberg Is Said to Have Made a Record Florida Home Purchase

The Meta C.E.O. bought a waterfront compound for $170 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ivana Trump’s townhouse and a “Breaking Bad” house also sold.

Which circle of hell would he be in? His own fucking AI:

Based on the structure of Dante’s Inferno, Mark Zuckerberg is most often jokingly (or pointedly) assigned to the Eighth Circle, specifically the Tenth Bolgia (the Falsifiers) or the Ninth Bolgia (the Sowers of Discord).

In Dante’s view, this circle is reserved for those who used their intelligence to deceive others or split communities apart. Since Facebook has been criticized for its role in spreading misinformation and polarizing society, he fits the “Sower of Discord” archetype—someone whose actions created deep rifts in the “human fabric.”

Alternatively, some might place him in the Fourth Circle (Greed) for the relentless monetization of personal data.

Hell, uh?

To Address Farm Labor Shortage, Trump Administration Turns to Migrant Workers

As the president’s immigration policies squeeze an already tight supply of farm labor, the Trump administration is making it cheaper to hire foreign farmworkers.

Scholars and literary critics who have analyzed Donald Trump’s public life and legal record often suggest he would fit into multiple circles, primarily focusing on Circle Eight (Fraud) and Circle Nine (Treachery).

Top Candidates for Trump’s Circle

• Circle Eight: Fraud (Malebolge)
  The most common placement by critics, as this circle is reserved for those who use intellect to deceive others.
  • Pouch 5 (Grafters): For corrupt politicians who sell political influence or offices.
  • Pouch 9 (Sowers of Discord): For those who sow scandal and split unified groups. Critics point to his divisive rhetoric as a potential fit for this “body-splitting” punishment.
  • Pouch 10 (Falsifiers): For “falsifiers of words” and liars.
• Circle Nine: Treachery
  The deepest circle, reserved for the betrayal of fundamental trust.
  • Antenora: A sub-sector of the ninth circle for traitors to their country or party. Analysts argue his actions regarding the 2020 election and the U.S. Constitution would land him here, frozen in the ice of Lake Cocytus.
• Circle Four: Greed
  Reserved for those who hoard or squander wealth. Critics cite his business history and focus on personal brand as reasons he might be condemned to push heavy weights against other hoarders for eternity.

[Jim Shaw, Donald and Melania Trump descending the escalator into the 9th circle of hell reserved for traitors frozen in a sea of ice]

Other Potential Placements

• Circle Two (Lust): Some point to his documented history of infidelity and comments about women.
• Circle Three (Gluttony): His well-known penchant for fast food and excess is occasionally mentioned.
• Circle Six (Heresy): Scholars from the magazine Commonweal suggest that if he only “pretends” to be religious for political gain, he might reside here with the atheists and materialists.

Ultimately, Dante’s moral framework places the most weight on sins of the “intellect” (Fraud and Treachery) rather than “incontinence” (Lust or Greed), suggesting he would be placed in the deeper, colder levels of the Inferno.

These articles analyze the specific sins and circles of hell that Donald Trump might occupy based on Dante Alighieri’s Inferno:

Which circle of hell for the entire fucking America?

The distress call came in to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue coordination centre just after 5 am. The ship in trouble, they determined, was well within Sri Lanka’s obligation for rescue, being just over 19 nautical miles off the coast of the southern city of Galle.

The navy swiftly mobilised and, by 6 am, the first search and rescue boat was on its way, another soon close behind. It was hard to see through the thick morning mist but officers on board kept their eyes peeled for a ship in the distance.

Instead, they found a spooling slick of oil on the sea’s surface. Dozens of survivors held on to life rafts, and bodies bobbed in the waves, but the vessel was nowhere to be seen. IRIS Dena, an Iranian warship on its way to a friendly port call in Sri Lanka, already sat on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

[The IRIS Dena in the Bay of Bengal during the international fleet review held at Visakhapatnam, India, in February]

The retired Indian V Adm Shekhar Sinha had been particularly shaken by the demise of Dena. Sinha attended the international fleet review in Visakhapatnam, saw Iran’s cadets line up proudly on Dena, and exchanged a conversation of niceties with the Iranian naval commander, who had said how much he was enjoying being in India.

“All’s fair in love and war,” said Sinha. “But it’s very upsetting to think that a week later, many of them were dead.” [Cuntology 101 == All Uniformed Cunts are devils!!! All’s fair in love and war. Die, Sinha, DIE.]

He too said the incident had troubling implications for India and the security of the Indian Ocean. “It’s clear we need to relook at Indian Ocean security and underwater surveillance,” he said. “If an American submarine is floating in the Indian Ocean so close by and we did not know, then we’d better buck up.”

All is fair in a time of art and fucking genocide?

Simply by invoking those people and places — without ever leaving Hujar’s apartment in the legendary Westbeth Artists Community — the film evokes the essence of New York in the era of Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. Hujar was a master portraitist, and both his photographs and the film’s dialogue reveal why: he drew meaning from every second spent with someone.

“His work is poetry,” says Sachs. “His photograph Orgasmic Man? It represents an art and an artist who was honest and different, the kind of art you don’t see that much anymore.”

This is so fucking fucked up, Western Civilization (NOT) while people are bombed: Rebecca Hall: ‘We lost counterculture somewhere along the way.’

The painter, actress, and director works from a very personal, and at the same time communal place, saying, ‘when you paint a face, that creates an exchange.’

Counter-culture? FUCK.

UK complicit in desecration of international law in Gaza, says Corbyn-led tribunal

Unofficial body co-chaired by ex-Labour leader says Britain failed to meet its duty to seek to prevent a genocide

THese cunts on Wall Street, in banking, in Fink and Schwartzman’s game, in war dag murder cartels, the lot of them, fucking need to be just murdered any which way.

Goodbye to water as we know it: a study warns that 74% of regions could experience unprecedented shortages by 2100

“This is not about being involved in operations. We are not at war with Iran,” Zelenskyy said.

Earlier this week, Ukraine’s leader announced military teams were sent to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and a US military base in Jordan.

Here is the transactional pathology of JEWS: Zelenskiy says Ukraine wants money, technology in return for Middle East drone help… Ukraine’s leader previously said advisers were sent to Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia to help thwart Iranian drone attacks

No news from the dildo and cloud server surveillance seller: How Jeff Bezos Upended The Washington Post

The billionaire newspaper owner, dissatisfied by years of losses, wants the newsroom to double productivity with half its budget.

Christ, a one-in-a-million story: The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination

They call this land the Laue. In the late 1800s, part of these 200 acres of grassland inside the Quapaw Nation was allotted to tribal citizen Charley Quapaw Blackhawk. After forcing dozens of tribes into Indian territory before the Civil War, the US government then parceled out reservations and property to individual members. It was part of the government’s attempt to “civilize” Native Americans by turning them into private, not communal, landholders and yeoman farmers in the model of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal citizen.

Yet, for the last century, little grew on the Laue. Half of it was buried beneath towering mounds of toxic rock known as chat piles. The waste rock, laced with chemicals, was left after miners extracted millions of tons of lead and zinc from the Tri-State Mining District, where the valuable ores stretched across Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma between 1891 and the 1970s. By 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated 40 sq miles that include nearly all the Quapaw Nation as the Tar Creek Superfund site, joining the EPA’s list of the most contaminated places in the country. Informally called a “megasite”, Tar Creek remains one of the largest and most complex environmental disasters in the country.

+—+

• Total Time Served: 21 months.
• Release Date: April 21, 2013 (one day before Earth Day).
• Custody Locations: He served time in federal prisons in Herlong, California, and Littleton, Colorado, and completed the final portion of his sentence in a halfway house in Salt Lake City.
• Post-Release: Following his release, he began three years of supervised probation.

Tim’s statement: Before being sentenced to two years in prison and slapped with a $10,000 fine, Tim DeChristopher made this statement to the prosecution and the judge:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court. When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to “get to know me.” He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate. I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye. I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time. I’m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.

Mr. Huber has leveled a lot of character attacks at me, many of which are contrary to Mr. Manross’s report. While reading Mr. Huber’s critiques of my character and my integrity, as well as his assumptions about my motivations, I was reminded that Mr. Huber and I have never had a conversation. Over the two and half years of this prosecution, he has never asked me any of the questions that he makes assumptions about in the government’s report. Apparently, Mr. Huber has never considered it his job to get to know me, and yet he is quite willing to disregard the opinions of the one person who does see that as his job.

There are alternating characterizations that Mr. Huber would like you to believe about me. In one paragraph, the government claims I “played out the parts of accuser, jury, and judge as he determined the fate of the oil and gas lease auction and its intended participants that day.” In the very next paragraph, they claim, “It was not the defendant’s crimes that effected such a change.” Mr. Huber would lead you to believe that I’m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I’m just an incompetent child who didn’t affect the outcome of anything. As evidenced by the continued back and forth of contradictory arguments in the government’s memorandum, they’re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between. Rather than the job of getting to know me, it seems Mr. Huber prefers the job of fitting me into whatever extreme characterization is most politically expedient at the moment.

In nearly every paragraph, the government’s memorandum uses the words lie, lied, lying, liar. It makes me want to thank whatever clerk edited out the words “pants on fire.” Their report doesn’t mention the fact that at the auction in question, the first person who asked me what I was doing there was Agent Dan Love. And I told him very clearly that I was there to stand in the way of an illegitimate auction that threatened my future. I proceeded to answer all of his questions openly and honestly, and have done so to this day when speaking about that auction in any forum, including this courtroom. The entire basis for the false statements charge that I was convicted of was the fact that I wrote my real name and address on a form that included the words “bona fide bidder.” When I sat there on the witness stand, Mr. Romney asked me if I ever had any intention of being a bona fide bidder. I responded by asking Mr. Romney to clarify what “bona fide bidder” meant in this context. Mr. Romney then withdrew the question and moved on to the next subject. On that right there is the entire basis for the government’s repeated attacks on my integrity. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, your honor.

Mr. Huber also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law. The government claims a long prison sentence is necessary to counteract the political statements I’ve made and promote a respect for the law. The only evidence provided for my lack of respect for the law is political statements that I’ve made in public forums. Again, the government doesn’t mention my actions in regard to the drastic restrictions that were put upon my defense in this courtroom. My political disagreements with the court about the proper role of a jury in the legal system are probably well known. I’ve given several public speeches and interviews about how the jury system was established and how it has evolved to its current state. Outside of this courtroom, I’ve made my views clear that I agree with the founding fathers that juries should be the conscience of the community and a defense against legislative tyranny. I even went so far as to organize a book study group that read about the history of jury nullification. Some of the participants in that book group later began passing out leaflets to the public about jury rights, as is their right. Mr. Huber was apparently so outraged by this that he made the slanderous accusations that I tried to taint the jury. He didn’t specify the extra number of months that I should spend in prison for the heinous activity of holding a book group at the Unitarian Church and quoting Thomas Jefferson in public, but he says you should have “little tolerance for this behavior.”

But here is the important point that Mr. Huber would rather ignore. Despite my strong disagreements with the court about the Constitutional basis for the limits on my defense, while I was in this courtroom I respected the authority of the court. Whether I agreed with them or not, I abided by the restrictions that you put on me and my legal team. I never attempted to “taint” the jury, as Mr. Huber claimed, by sharing any of the relevant facts about the auction in question that the court had decided were off limits. I didn’t burst out and tell the jury that I successfully raised the down payment and offered it to the BLM. I didn’t let the jury know that the auction was later reversed because it was illegitimate in the first place. To this day I still think I should have had the right to do so, but disagreement with the law should not be confused with disrespect for the law.

My public statements about jury nullification were not the only political statements that Mr. Huber thinks I should be punished for. As the government’s memorandum points out, I have also made public statements about the value of civil disobedience in bringing the rule of law closer to our shared sense of justice. In fact, I have openly and explicitly called for nonviolent civil disobedience against mountaintop removal coal mining in my home state of West Virginia. Mountaintop removal is itself an illegal activity, which has always been in violation of the Clean Water Act, and it is an illegal activity that kills people. A West Virginia state investigation found that Massey Energy had been cited with 62,923 violations of the law in the ten years preceding the disaster that killed 29 people last year. The investigation also revealed that Massey paid for almost none of those violations because the company provided millions of dollars worth of campaign contributions that elected most of the appeals court judges in the state. When I was growing up in West Virginia, my mother was one of many who pursued every legal avenue for making the coal industry follow the law. She commented at hearings, wrote petitions and filed lawsuits, and many have continued to do ever since, to no avail. I actually have great respect for the rule of law, because I see what happens when it doesn’t exist, as is the case with the fossil-fuel industry. Those crimes committed by Massey Energy led not only to the deaths of their own workers, but to the deaths of countless local residents, such as Joshua McCormick, who died of kidney cancer at age 22 because he was unlucky enough to live downstream from a coal mine. When a corrupted government is no longer willing to uphold the rule of law, I advocate that citizens step up to that responsibility.

This is really the heart of what this case is about. The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law.

Mr. Huber claims that the seriousness of my offense was that I “obstructed lawful government proceedings.” But the auction in question was not a lawful proceeding. I know you’ve heard another case about some of the irregularities for which the auction was overturned. But that case did not involve the BLM’s blatant violation of Secretarial Order 3226, which was a law that went into effect in 2001 and required the BLM to weigh the impacts on climate change for all its major decisions, particularly resource development. A federal judge in Montana ruled last year that the BLM was in constant violation of this law throughout the Bush administration. In all the proceedings and debates about this auction, no apologist for the government or the BLM has ever even tried to claim that the BLM followed this law. In both the December 2008 auction and the creation of the Resource Management Plan on which this auction was based, the BLM did not even attempt to follow this law.

And this law is not a trivial regulation about crossing t’s or dotting i’s to make some government accountant’s job easier. This law was put into effect to mitigate the impacts of catastrophic climate change and defend a livable future on this planet. This law was about protecting the survival of young generations. That’s kind of a big deal. It’s a very big deal to me. If the government is going to refuse to step up to that responsibility to defend a livable future, I believe that creates a moral imperative for me and other citizens. My future, and the future of everyone I care about, is being traded for short term profits. I take that very personally. Until our leaders take seriously their responsibility to pass on a healthy and just world to the next generation, I will continue this fight.

The government has made the claim that there were legal alternatives to standing in the way of this auction. Particularly, I could have filed a written protest against certain parcels. The government does not mention, however, that two months prior to this auction, in October 2008, a Congressional report was released that looked into those protests. The report, by the House committee on public lands, stated that it had become common practice for the BLM to take volunteers from the oil and gas industry to process those permits. The oil industry was paying people specifically to volunteer for the industry that was supposed to be regulating it, and it was to those industry staff that I would have been appealing. Moreover, this auction was just three months after The New York Times reported on a major scandal involving Department of the Interior regulators who were taking bribes of sex and drugs from the oil companies that they were supposed to be regulating. In 2008, this was the condition of the rule of law, for which Mr Huber says I lacked respect. Just as the legal avenues which people in West Virginia have been pursuing for 30 years, the legal avenues in this case were constructed precisely to protect the corporations who control the government.

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice. Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code. I know Mr. Huber disagrees with me on this. He wrote that “the rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the cause of the day.” That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience. Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice. The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.

This philosophical difference is serious enough that Mr. Huber thinks I should be imprisoned to discourage the spread of this idea. Much of the government’s memorandum focuses on the political statements that I’ve made in public. But it hasn’t always been this way. When Mr. Huber was arguing that my defense should be limited, he addressed my views this way: “The public square is the proper stage for the defendant’s message, not criminal proceedings in federal court.” But now that the jury is gone, Mr. Huber wants to take my message from the public square and make it a central part of these federal court proceedings. I have no problem with that. I’m just as willing to have those views on display as I’ve ever been.

The government’s memorandum states, “As opposed to preventing this particular defendant from committing further crimes, the sentence should be crafted ‘to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct’ by others.” Their concern is not the danger that I present, but the danger presented by my ideas and words that might lead others to action. Perhaps Mr. Huber is right to be concerned. He represents the United States Government. His job is to protect those currently in power, and by extension, their corporate sponsors. After months of no action after the auction, the way I found out about my indictment was the day before it happened, Pat Shea got a call from an Associated Press reporter who said, “I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow Tim is going to be indicted, and this is what the charges are going to be.” That reporter had gotten that information two weeks earlier from an oil industry lobbyist. Our request for disclosure of what role that lobbyist played in the U.S. Attorney’s office was denied, but we know that she apparently holds sway and that the government feels the need to protect the industry’s interests.

The things that I’ve been publicly saying may indeed be threatening to that power structure. There have been several references to the speech I gave after the conviction, but I’ve only ever seen half of one sentence of that speech quoted. In the government’s report, they actually had to add their own words to that one sentence to make it sound more threatening. But the speech was about empowerment. It was about recognizing our interconnectedness rather than viewing ourselves as isolated individuals. The message of the speech was that when people stand together, they no longer have to be exploited by powerful corporations. Alienation is perhaps the most effective tool of control in America, and every reminder of our real connectedness weakens that tool.

But the sentencing guidelines don’t mention the need to protect corporations or politicians from ideas that threaten their control. The guidelines say “protect the public.” The question is whether the public is helped or harmed by my actions. The easiest way to answer that question is with the direct impacts of my action. As the oil executive stated in his testimony, the parcels I didn’t bid on averaged $12 per acre, but the ones I did bid on averaged $125. Those are the prices paid for public property to the public trust. The industry admits very openly that they were getting those parcels for an order of magnitude less than what they were worth. Not only did those oil companies drive up the prices to $125 during the bidding, they were then given an opportunity to withdraw their bids once my actions were explained. They kept the parcels, presumably because they knew they were still a good deal at $125. The oil companies knew they were getting a steal from the American people, and now they’re crying because they had to pay a little closer to what those parcels were actually worth. The government claims I should be held accountable for the steal the oil companies didn’t get. The government’s report demands $600,000 worth of financial impacts for the amount which the oil industry wasn’t able to steal from the public.

That extra revenue for the public became almost irrelevant, though, once most of those parcels were revoked by Secretary Salazar. Most of the parcels I won were later deemed inappropriate for drilling. In other words, the highest and best value to the public for those particular lands was not for oil and gas drilling. Had the auction gone off without a hitch, it would have been a loss for the public. The fact that the auction was delayed, extra attention was brought to the process, and the parcels were ultimately revoked was a good thing for the public.

More generally, the question of whether civil disobedience is good for the public is a matter of perspective. Civil disobedience is inherently an attempt at change. Those in power, whom Mr. Huber represents, are those for whom the status quo is working, so they always see civil disobedience as a bad thing. The decision you are making today, your honor, is what segment of the public you are meant to protect. Mr. Huber clearly has cast his lot with that segment who wishes to preserve the status quo. But the majority of the public is exploited by the status quo far more than they are benefited by it. The young are the most obvious group who is exploited and condemned to an ugly future by letting the fossil fuel industry call the shots. There is an overwhelming amount of scientific research, some of which you received as part of our proffer on the necessity defense, that reveals the catastrophic consequences which the young will have to deal with over the coming decades.

But just as real is the exploitation of the communities where fossil fuels are extracted. As a native of West Virginia, I have seen from a young age that the exploitation of fossil fuels has always gone hand in hand with the exploitation of local people. In West Virginia, we’ve been extracting coal longer than anyone else. And after 150 years of making other people rich, West Virginia is almost dead last among the states in per capita income, education rates and life expectancy. And it’s not an anomaly. The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option. But it is also the nature of the economic model. Since fossil fuels are a limited resources, whoever controls access to that resource in the beginning gets to set all the terms. They set the terms for their workers, for the local communities, and apparently even for the regulatory agencies. A renewable energy economy is a threat to that model. Since no one can control access to the sun or the wind, the wealth is more likely to flow to whoever does the work of harnessing that energy, and therefore to create a more distributed economic system, which leads to a more distributed political system. It threatens the profits of the handful of corporations for whom the current system works, but our question is which segment of the public are you tasked with protecting. I am here today because I have chosen to protect the people locked out of the system over the profits of the corporations running the system. I say this not because I want your mercy, but because I want you to join me.

After this difference of political philosophies, the rest of the sentencing debate has been based on the financial loss from my actions. The government has suggested a variety of numbers loosely associated with my actions, but as of yet has yet to establish any causality between my actions and any of those figures. The most commonly discussed figure is perhaps the most easily debunked. This is the figure of roughly $140,000, which is the amount the BLM originally spent to hold the December 2008 auction. By definition, this number is the amount of money the BLM spent before I ever got involved. The relevant question is what the BLM spent because of my actions, but apparently that question has yet to be asked. The only logic that relates the $140,000 figure to my actions is if I caused the entire auction to be null and void and the BLM had to start from scratch to redo the entire auction. But that of course is not the case. First is the prosecution’s on-again-off-again argument that I didn’t have any impact on the auction being overturned. More importantly, the BLM never did redo the auction because it was decided that many of those parcels should never have been auctioned in the first place. Rather than this arbitrary figure of $140,000, it would have been easy to ask the BLM how much money they spent or will spend on redoing the auction. But the government never asked this question, probably because they knew they wouldn’t like the answer.

The other number suggested in the government’s memorandum is the $166,000 that was the total price of the three parcels I won which were not invalidated. Strangely, the government wants me to pay for these parcels, but has never offered to actually give them to me. When I offered the BLM the money a couple weeks after the auction, they refused to take it. Aside from that history, this figure is still not a valid financial loss from my actions. When we wrote there was no loss from my actions, we actually meant that rather literally. Those three parcels were not evaporated or blasted into space because of my actions, not was the oil underneath them sucked dry by my bid card. They’re still there, and in fact the BLM has already issued public notice of their intent to re-auction those parcels in February of 2012.

The final figure suggested as a financial loss is the $600,000 that the oil company wasn’t able to steal from the public. That completely unsubstantiated number is supposedly the extra amount the BLM received because of my actions. This is when things get tricky. The government’s report takes that $600,000 positive for the BLM and adds it to that roughly $300,000 negative for the BLM, and comes up with a $900,000 negative. With math like that, it’s obvious that Mr. Huber works for the federal government.

After most of those figures were disputed in the presentence report, the government claimed in their most recent objection that I should be punished according to the intended financial impact that I intended to cause. The government tries to assume my intentions and then claims, “This is consistent with the testimony that Mr. DeChristopher provided at trial, admitting that his intention was to cause financial harm to others with whom he disagreed.” Now I didn’t get to say a whole lot at the trial, so it was pretty easy to look back through the transcripts. The statement claimed by the government never happened. There was nothing even close enough to make their statement a paraphrase or artistic license. This statement in the government’s objection is a complete fiction. Mr. Huber’s inability to judge my intent is revealed in this case by the degree to which he underestimates my ambition. The truth is that my intention, then as now, was to expose, embarrass, and hold accountable the oil industry to the extent that it cuts into the $100 billion in annual profits that it makes through exploitation. I actually intended for my actions to play a role in the wide variety of actions that steer the country toward a clean energy economy where those $100 billion in oil profits are completely eliminated. When I read Mr. Huber’s new logic, I was terrified to consider that my slightly unrealistic intention to have a $100 billion impact will fetch me several consecutive life sentences. Luckily, this reasoning is as unrealistic as it is silly.

A more serious look at my intentions is found in Mr. Huber’s attempt to find contradictions in my statements. Mr. Huber points out that in public I acted proud of my actions and treated it like a success, while in our sentencing memorandum we claimed that my actions led to “no loss.” On the one hand I think it was a success, and yet I claim it there was no loss. Success, but no loss. Mr. Huber presents these ideas as mutually contradictory and obvious proof that I was either dishonest or backing down from my convictions. But for success to be contradictory to no loss, there has to be another assumption. One has to assume that my intent was to cause a loss. But the only loss that I intended to cause was the loss of secrecy by which the government gave away public property for private profit. As I actually stated in the trial, my intent was to shine a light on a corrupt process and get the government to take a second look at how this auction was conducted. The success of that intent is not dependent on any loss. I knew that if I was completely off base, and the government took that second look and decided that nothing was wrong with that auction, the cost of my action would be another day’s salary for the auctioneer and some minor costs of re-auctioning the parcels. But if I was right about the irregularities of the auction, I knew that allowing the auction to proceed would mean the permanent loss of lands better suited for other purposes and the permanent loss of a safe climate. The intent was to prevent loss, but again that is a matter of perspective.

Mr. Huber wants you to weigh the loss for the corporations that expected to get public property for pennies on the dollar, but I believe the important factor is the loss to the public which I helped prevent. Again, we come back to this philosophical difference. From any perspective, this is a case about the right of citizens to challenge the government. The U.S. Attorney’s office makes clear that their interest is not only to punish me for doing so, but to discourage others from challenging the government, even when the government is acting inappropriately. Their memorandum states, “To be sure, a federal prison term here will deter others from entering a path of criminal behavior.” The certainty of this statement not only ignores the history of political prisoners, it ignores the severity of the present situation. Those who are inspired to follow my actions are those who understand that we are on a path toward catastrophic consequences of climate change. They know their future, and the future of their loved ones, is on the line. And they know were are running out of time to turn things around. The closer we get to that point where it’s too late, the less people have to lose by fighting back. The power of the Justice Department is based on its ability to take things away from people. The more that people feel that they have nothing to lose, the more that power begins to shrivel. The people who are committed to fighting for a livable future will not be discouraged or intimidated by anything that happens here today. And neither will I. I will continue to confront the system that threatens our future. Given the destruction of our democratic institutions that once gave citizens access to power, my future will likely involve civil disobedience. Nothing that happens here today will change that. I don’t mean that in any sort of disrespectful way at all, but you don’t have that authority. You have authority over my life, but not my principles. Those are mine alone.

I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me. If you side with Mr. Huber and believe that your role is to discourage citizens from holding their government accountable, then you should follow his recommendations and lock me away. I certainly don’t want that. I have no desire to go to prison, and any assertion that I want to be even a temporary martyr is false. I want you to join me in standing up for the right and responsibility of citizens to challenge their government. I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience. If you share those values but think my tactics are mistaken, you have the power to redirect them. You can sentence me to a wide range of community service efforts that would point my commitment to a healthy and just world down a different path. You can have me work with troubled teens, as I spent most of my career doing. You can have me help disadvantaged communities or even just pull weeds for the BLM. You can steer that commitment if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away. At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on.

In that respect, Debs’ campaign might appear to parallel Trump’s. The only time Trump has posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) since he was kicked off of the platform in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection has been to share a photo of his defiant mug shot. Polling indicates that Trump’s base is unfazed by his indictments — and perhaps even more likely to rally on his behalf because of them.

But the similarities end there. Trump’s legal troubles are primarily tied to his attempts to subvert democracy; Debs was imprisoned for anti-war rhetoric on behalf of the working class. Trump commands the support of an authoritarian mass movement; Debs represented a small but influential sector of the far left that called for the expansion of democracy into economic life. While Trump uses his rhetoric to gin up a cult of self, Debs called for “the Christ-like practice of solidarity” with his fellow citizens.

Still, Debs’ run provides a fascinating example of how imprisonment can code politically to the electorate, and the awkward logistics of running for president while stuck in a prison cell. To learn more about his run, I called up Ernest Freeman, a professor at the University of Tennessee and author of “Democracy’s Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent.” Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Ernest Freeberg: Eugene Debs was one of the founders and the longtime leader of the Socialist Party in the United States. He came up through the labor movement and first went to prison in 1895 for being the leader of the American Railway Union in the Pullman Strike, the largest strike in the 19th century. The fact that he was put in jail for leading that strike led him to the conclusion that the two major political parties were both in the hands of what he would consider to be the corporate plutocracy. He believed that the only way forward was to convince workers to vote in their own interests — and that would be embodied in the Socialist Party platform.

He was really a charismatic speaker who barnstormed across the country and made his fifth run for president as leader of the Socialist Party in 1920. Even though the Socialists were never close to winning a presidential campaign, they had quite a number of state-level and city-level offices. His high watermark was 6% of the presidential vote in 1912. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, called Debs one of America’s “most undesirable citizens,” an apostle of “bloodshed, anarchy, and riot.” Roosevelt also urged his fellow progressives to borrow some of the moderate parts of the Socialist message in order to head off the really revolutionary parts. Some ideas — such as old age pensions, support for health benefits, women’s suffrage, a ban on child labor, and state support for kindergarten — were part of the Socialist Party platform long before they were adopted by the main parties.

What was unique about Debs was that he was able to take what many considered to be a radical, foreign idea, like socialism, and present it in the American vein. He was comfortable talking about socialism in the context of the Declaration of Independence and Tom Paine, Walt Whitman, and John Brown. His argument was: We completed the war against chattel slavery, and the next step was wage slavery.

Freeberg: When the war broke out in 1914, the vast majority of Americans from all different political persuasions favored American neutrality. The gradual escalation of the war eventually led Woodrow Wilson to enter the war in 1917, and there had to be a major draft right away. The government decided that it would do two things: First, it would seize the loudest microphone in the marketplace of ideas by creating a massive propaganda campaign to stir up hatred of the Germans and to rally support for the allies. Second, Congress very quickly passed the Espionage Act, which made it illegal to give comfort to the enemy, essentially. This law was not used to prosecute spies, but in fact became a powerful weapon for silencing dissent.

Debs was strongly anti-war, and he was well aware that if he went onto the stump and gave a speech about the war that he would, along with his fellow comrades, end up going to jail. In June of 1918 he gave a speech at a Socialist picnic in Canton, Ohio, knowing that there were government agents in the audience who were taking down his every word. He says things like, “You need at this time especially to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder,” making the argument he’s made all along, which is that this was, as the saying goes, “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

Debs was put on trial in Cleveland, and he used that as an opportunity to speak against the war again and to defend his right to free speech. The government argued that what he was really doing at that Socialist picnic was trying to incite young men in the crowd to resist the draft. One of the long-standing exceptions to First Amendment rights is that you’re not allowed to use speech to incite others to crime. Nobody in the audience was found to not have their draft registration; there was no evidence that anybody was moved to not participate in the draft because of hearing Debs speak. But given the way the law was applied in 1918, he was very quickly convicted.

Debs wasn’t the only one convicted — over 1,200 socialists, anarchists, religious pacifists, and some people who just said some cranky thing about the war effort in the wrong place were prosecuted, and many were jailed. Few people knew or cared about most of these people, but Debs was the visible one, a significant voice in American political life for decades. The sight of him in prison garb galvanized many who decided the government had gone too far in silencing dissent. So an amnesty movement around these prisoners centered on getting him out of prison. Part of the amnesty movement strategy to get Debs out of prison — or at least to help people remember that he was in jail — was to nominate him for president in 1920. While the Socialist Party was in disarray in 1920, thanks in large part to government persecution, almost a million Americans voted for Debs, considering it a protest vote for freedom of speech.

“The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles.”

“The master class has always declared the wars. The subject class has always fought the battles,” Debs said. “The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose–especially their lives.”

“They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.”

Debs added:

“And here let me emphasize the fact–and it cannot be repeated too often–that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.”

“Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.” I.F. Stone

Paulo Kirk

Mar 13, 2026

Hunter — Now, mostly 345 million used car and AI addicted and mostly lobotomized dealers and grifters

Fucking Epstein and Zorro Ranch!1!

New Mexico Didn’t Have to Stop Investigating Zorro Rancho in 2019 Just Because Federal Prosecutors Requested It. But Former NM Attorney General Hector Balderas Seems to Want Us to Think It Did.

The boots, the fucking smirk, and the eyes, a face only a group of pedophiles could love?

In the piece I published earlier today (Alisa), I laid out what the somewhat-newly released Epstein files reveal about Zorro Ranch and how reports of serious crimes there went largely uninvestigated for decades. The documents also show something else that deserves much closer scrutiny: New Mexico halted its investigation in 2019 after federal prosecutors asked the state to stand down and transfer its materials.

That detail has circulated widely as if it explains the entire mystery. Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, who complied with those requests from federal prosecutors, has spoken to reporters in the past couple of weeks to blame-shift the them his decision to halt investigations. Federal prosecutors were building a larger case, the thinking goes, so the state stepped aside.

But when you look at how American law actually works, that explanation doesn’t hold up very well. The federal government does not have the authority to order a state to stop investigating potential violations of state law. New Mexico’s investigation did not have to end simply because federal prosecutors asked it to.

Pete — The Patriotic Press

Pete Hegseth just confirmed what the Ellison takeover of CNN is actually for.Hegseth held a press briefing at the Pentagon on Friday morning, and he had some thoughts about CNN.

He was responding to a CNN report published Thursday that cited multiple sources saying the administration had misjudged Iran’s willingness to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. The New York Times had published similar reporting days earlier. Hegseth called CNN’s story “fake news” and “fundamentally unserious.”

And then: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

He kept going. He complained about CNN’s chyrons (“Mideast War Intensifies”), then offered his own alternatives for what he called “an actual patriotic press.” His version of “War widening” was “Iran shrinking, going underground.” A former Fox News host, now running the Pentagon, told reporters he knew how headlines worked because “I used to be in that business.” The Defense Secretary was writing chyrons from the podium. Six American service members had been confirmed killed in a refueling aircraft crash in western Iraq that same morning.

CNN’s response was five words: “We stand by our reporting.”

I wrote about this administration’s contradictory war framing earlier this week, so none of the bluster surprises me anymore. But a sitting Defense Secretary, during an active war, publicly endorsing a specific corporate acquisition of a specific news outlet because it published a specific story he didn’t like? That’s worth stopping on. Because Hegseth didn’t just bash CNN. He told you what the Ellison deal is for.

Why do the cunts in the media even report on this, without jamming down the fucking White Man’s House Minyan curated press corps and any chance they can have speaking with Trump and Hegseth and Company calling them out on their shite?

Murdered civilians, carpet bombing, girls raped by a Tomahawk, and more?

In recent days, President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to his illegal war on Iran – in which American troops are dying – as an “excursion,” a term generally reserved for describing pleasant little family sojourns or brief, fun vacations.

This is, according to sources in and close to the administration, because the president is confusing the term “military incursion” with a “military excursion,” a phrase typically used only to ridicule foreign adventurism and warmongering. Some of these sources say that they or their colleagues have used the term “incursion” in front of Trump lately, but then the president just… did his own thing.

“We took a little excursion because we felt we had to, to get rid of some evil, and I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion,” Trump said Tuesday, as he addressed Republican lawmakers at an event in Florida. Speaking at a business in Ohio on Wednesday, Trump said, “We did a little excursion, we had to take this couple weeks, few weeks of excursion.”

[Retired Army four-star General David Petraeus and former head of the CIA — whose greatest strategic victory was either marrying the daughter of a four-star general or avoiding jail time after leaking classified information to his mistress — has become one of cable news’s most sought-after Iran analysts.]

Note: I left my fucking precious cell phone in a friend’s car, and he told me, before I realized it was there, that he was going to an Episcopalian Church to do the stations of the cross. He’s a fun Latino who doesn’t speak much Spanish and just lost his husband of 40 years to cancer. And alas, I had no idea where this religious joint is, and alas, I did not have his phone number, so, alas, I went to one church I knew about, and there were two cars parked out front, and then I approached the porch area where they distribute food boxes. It was way past that time.

Old guy, bundled up, playing with his phone, so I asked him to look up the Newport Episcopal Church. He couldn’t spell the word, and he told me he had gotten hit by a car in Seaside, and that he was at the shelter in town, but that the kiddos there were too loud. He was bundled up, rain whipping around, and then, he handed me his fucking phone:

His phone screen with the word “Proud Republican” and then Semen Drip Trump’s face he was scrolling upon. This guy is using homeless shelters, probably got ER services and medical care for the accident, ambulance ride, all expenses paid because he’s indigent, and he has that cunt on his phone, and on an Obama phone, no less.

At 83, retired Army four-star General Jack Keane resembles a wax mannequin. His analysis does too.

[Then there’s Mark Hertling, the retired Army three-star who resembles a more handsome Mike Pence, with a spray tan — exactly the kind of airbrushed, authoritative-looking screen presence television news loves. The imposing general (he says he’s 6’4”) holds forth in a sonorous tone with an air of complete command.

There’s just one problem: he has nothing to say.]

Pressed on what the actual U.S. objectives are, he had this to say on CNN:

“I can’t answer that question… what I’ve seen is multiple end states that keep switching back and forth… I don’t see where it’s going and that’s the part that concerns me.”

Ten years at CNN, a doctorate in leadership, a career culminating in commanding U.S. Army Europe — and when asked the most basic question about a war, his answer is: I don’t know.

And this fucking guy, Sack of Sachs Shit, again and again, the Jew Jew Jew show.

After Pete Hegseth Claims Iranian Leadership Was ‘Cowering’,Political Leaders Appear At Massive Rally

Al Jazeera reported , “Thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets of the capital Tehran for a mass protest in support of Palestinians, as the death toll from United States and Israeli attacks on the country continues to mount,” adding,:

Reporting from the demonstration in Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi said Iranians hoped to both show their support for Palestinians and express “defiance and resilience” amid the US-Israeli attacks.

“They think that by killing us, we will be afraid, that by dropping bombs on our heads, we will be afraid. No, we stand by our country,” a female demonstrator told Al Jazeera.

Another protester said Iranians have shown in their confrontation with the US and Israel that “the wall of oppression can be broken”.

“Today, with their presence in different squares, the people showed that it is possible to overcome injustice and break the wall of oppression,” he told Al Jazeera.

Iranian heroes versus . . . There you have the great American cook-off with the Department of War Crimes with Cap’n Crunch Hegseth….The Brief

• A government watchdog report reveals the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, spent $6.9 million on lobster tails during a single month in late 2025.
• The expenditure was part of a record-breaking $93.4 billion “use-it-or-lose-it” spree in September that included ribeye steaks, king crab, and luxury furniture.
• Critics and lawmakers are slamming the optics of the spending, contrasting the “surf and turf” budget with the administration’s public push for federal efficiency.

Beyond the $6.9 million for lobster, the Pentagon spent:

• $15.1 million on ribeye steaks
• $2 million on Alaskan king crab
• Nearly $140,000 on doughnuts
• Over $124,000 on ice cream machines

High-end non-food items were also on the list, including:

• $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for an Air Force residence
• $225 million in furniture, featuring individual chairs costing nearly $1,900
• $12,540 for fruit basket stands
• $5.3 million on Apple devices

Open the Books called the spending “completely unacceptable,” noting that the $93 billion total was the highest month-of-September spend since at least 2008.

RE: Trump SHOCKED As G7 Leaders Just PUBLICLY EXPOSE HIM

A Big, Beautiful Week of War: Trump’s Guide to Spiking Gas Prices and Hitting Schools Tee Ashby

Trump’s Big, Beautiful Week of War: A Scheduling Preview

In what can only be described as a social media teaser for Armageddon, President Trump has announced that the U.S. has penciled in some good old-fashioned bombing for sometime in the next seven days. Mark your calendars, Iran—the boss is planning to hit you “very hard” before brunch next Sunday.

The ‘Oops, Gas is Expensive’ Pivot

Of course, flexing on the Ayatollahs has a pesky side effect: it makes gas prices spike so hard your wallet starts hyperventilating. To fix this, Trump has graciously allowed the purchase of sanctioned Russian oil for the next 30 days. That’s right—we’re buying gas from the guy we’re supposedly sanctioning so we can afford to bomb the other guy. It’s fiscal responsibility, folks.

Navy Seals: Now Offering Convoy Services

Meanwhile, in the Strait of Hormuz—a waterway so narrow and important it makes the Suez Canal look like a garden hose—Iran keeps poking holes in oil tankers. Trump has promised to “guarantee the safety” of shipping vessels. Translation: if your oil tanker gets a flat tire out there, the U.S. Navy will come give you a jumpstart.

$4 Gas On Average is the New Normal

According to commodities gurus, Brent crude has jumped 40% since this whole thing started. Gas prices are now creeping toward that terrifying $4-per-gallon threshold nationwide average, which is the only number that actually makes voters care about foreign policy.

The Supreme Leader Is Having a Rough Week

Over at the Pentagon, Pentagon Pete dropped some juicy gossip: Iran’s new Supreme Leader is apparently “wounded, disfigured, and hiding.” While the Pentagon didn’t release photos (yet), sources say he currently looks like the final scene of *Scarface* and is probably not taking meetings.

Oops, We Hit a School (Again)

In a plot twist that surprises absolutely no one, the U.S. military is currently investigating itself for bombing an Iranian girls’ school. Early indications suggest that, yes, it was probably us. The investigation is expected to conclude that war is messy and that apologies will be issued if we run out of bombs, or not, depending on Trump’s morality or lack thereof …

+—+

Why do SNAP recipients vote for and back Trump?

• Belief in an “America First” agenda: Some low-income voters believe Trump’s policies will prioritize American citizens and improve their economic prospects, a core message of his campaign.
• Cultural and social identity: Shared cultural values, including religious beliefs, social issues (like abortion), or a sense of “perceived racial status,” can outweigh economic considerations for some voters. Research from the London School of Economics suggests a commitment to racial hierarchy or prejudice can blind some white voters to their own economic self-interest.
• Misunderstanding of policies: Some voters may not be aware of the specific details of Trump’s proposals or how they could impact social safety nets like SNAP. In some cases, Republicans have started pivoting to defending SNAP as key to helping the “vulnerable,” which may confuse the issue for some voters.
• Focus on private charity over government programs: Some Trump supporters believe that charity should be handled by the private sector rather than the government, aligning with a broader conservative ideology that favors limited government intervention in social issues.
• Skepticism of government efficiency/waste: Some voters are drawn to a platform of reducing government spending, believing that federal programs are inefficient or that their tax dollars are being misused (e.g., to support illegal immigrants), even if they personally rely on the benefits.
• Hope for personal economic improvement: Voters may hope to improve their economic situation to a point where they no longer need government assistance and thus vote for a candidate they believe will create jobs and lower costs.
• Geographic factors: Notably, 76% of counties that receive food stamps voted for President Trump, indicating a significant overlap between recipients and his voter base in specific geographic areas, often rural or in “red states”.

It’s the fucking Costco bill, the Amazon order, what’s still available at Walmart, and, gasoline, how much is that shit now? Do not believe this paragraph below! Support for him is high, high, high. Where’s VD Vance? Hmm, waiting in the wings?

“MAGA Republican” is a very specific designation. How many among the original MAGA base, at this stage within the turbulent Trump 2.0, would still relate to a label like this? And why do these analyses only discuss public opinion on the Iran strikes, while not focusing on how the masses will react to the repercussions from the Iran war? When Americans have been faced with the reality of how much the war will impact gas and food prices, support for the war drops, including among Trump voters.

If you don’t want most of the cunt AmeriKKKan white males in the Trump Brigade, as well as members of the uniformed and ununiformed mercenary corps, to be fried to a crisp, then go sign up and be all that you will never fucking be!

On September 20, 2025, in the Simon Pelé neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, children gathered at a sports complex. A local gang leader was handing out gifts — food, toys.

Then a quadcopter drone armed with an explosive device detonated overhead. Nine of the ten people killed were children aged three to twelve. One resident told investigators the blast “ripped both feet off a baby.”

The drone belonged to Erik Prince.

In January 1804, the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic. The Africans toiling on the sugar-rich plantations overthrew their French masters and declared independence. The name Saint-Domingue was replaced by the aboriginal Taíno Indian word Haiti (meaning “mountainous land”), and the Haitian flag was created when the white band was ceremonially ripped from the French tricolour. Two hundred years on, Haiti is the only successful slave revolution in history. It was led by Toussaint Louverture, a Haitian former slave and emblem of slavery’s hoped-for abolition throughout the Americas.

This superb new history of Louverture and his legacy portrays Saint-Domingue as the most profitable slave colony the world had ever known. The glittering prosperity of Nantes and Bordeaux, Marseilles and Dieppe, derived from commerce with the Caribbean island in coffee, indigo, cocoa, and cotton; Saint- Domingue’s sugar plantations alone produced more cane than all the British West Indian islands together.

Whipped, chained, and branded with the French fleur-de-lis, the slaves took up arms under Louverture – in the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, a “gilded African”–and burned down plantation homes. The prospect of a free black state founded on the expulsion of its white community horrified the western world – this was half a century before the Civil War liberated the enslaved peoples of the United States.

Sudhir Hazareesingh, a Mauritian-born historian, conducted much of his research in the French archives, where so many revolutionary-era documents are preserved. He has scrutinised letters from Louverture to a vast number of French officials and revolutionary republican organisations. Black Spartacus is not a dry academic work, though; with rare narrative verve, Hazareesingh conjures his subject’s extraordinary life.

Born in the north of Saint-Domingue in 1743 as the grandson of a captured African chieftain, Louverture was taught to read and write by French Jesuit missionaries and from an early age was familiar with the polemics of French abolitionist the Abbé Raynal. Like the majority of Haitians today, Louverture was most likely an adept of vodou (or voodoo, in the old, discredited orthography). Vodou, a New World religion that married elements of Catholicism with African animism-mysticism, disconcerted and sometimes frightened the French.

Most historians agree that Saint-Domingue first rose up under a Jamaican vodou priest named Dutty “Zamba” Boukman. One August night in 1791, Boukman called on the spirits of ancestral Africa to avenge the French. Reportedly, Louverture was present at the ceremony, and within six weeks, the island’s rebel armies had begun the 12-year Louverturian struggle for freedom. What made the struggle possible?

Politically adroit, Louverture set the enemies of the French Republic against each other and spread rumour among them

The French Revolution of 1789-91 proclaimed equality among all men: slavery was an intolerable injury to human nature. Unsurprisingly, the planters of Saint-Domingue refused to relinquish their privileges. Politically adroit, Louverture set the enemies of the new French Republic against each other and spread misinformation and rumour among them. To his allies, he became the “Black Spartacus”, after the slave-gladiator who defied imperial Rome.

In concisely written pages, Hazareesingh rescues Louverture from the ideological and political aggrandisements that so often misrepresented him in the past. In 1936, in Harlem, Orson Welles staged an Afro-Caribbean Macbeth extravaganza in which Macduff was portrayed as an implausibly princely Louverture. Much later, in the 1970s, the Latino rock band Santana dedicated a frantic electric guitar workout to Louverture. Such tributes pale beside the work of the Marxist Trinidadian historian CLR James, whose pioneering 1938 account of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, elevated Louverture to near-saintly status but ignored his monarchist leanings and occasional dictatorial tendencies. Hazareesingh, by contrast, is careful to return Louverture to the primary sources.

In May 1801, having acted as Napoleon’s faithful envoy for 10 years, Louverture declared himself governor for life of Saint-Domingue and called for the execution of all known or merely suspected “enemies”. Napoleon promptly abandoned his support of Louverture and organised an expedition to destroy the “new Algiers in the Caribbean”. Louverture ought to be clapped in irons or perhaps exhibited in a cage in Paris at the newly opened Jardin des Plantes, Napoleon reckoned.

Abducted by Napoleon, Louverture was imprisoned for five months in a dungeon-fortress in the Jura mountains of France. News of his imprisonment reached William Wordsworth in Calais in the summer of 1802; moved by the fate of the “most unhappy” revolutionary who had placed his trust in the French Republic, Wordsworth addressed a famous sonnet to Louverture.

From his snow-bound captivity, Louverture pleaded with Napoleon for his release, but he was found dead in his cell on 7 April 1803: “the Black Napoleon”, observed a caustic Chateaubriand, “imitated and killed by the White Napoleon”. Louverture did not live to see the proclamation of the Haitian Republic the following year. He was 60. The man Hazareesingh calls the “first black superhero of the modern age” had, apparently, died of pneumonia.

Julian Ku is a professor of constitutional law at Hofstra University.

When Yale law professor Oona Hathaway calls U.S. strikes on Iran “blatantly illegal,” she speaks for a large segment of the international legal academy. For many scholars, the analysis is straightforward: The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of force except in self-defense against an armed attack or with Security Council authorization. Neither condition, they argue, is satisfied. Case closed.

There are plausible counterarguments.

Source: As Grasp on Power and Narrative Slips, West Re-Imagines Old Norms

The piece attempts to describe a new conception of moral equivalency for the post-GWOT age wherein international law is dismissed as an inflexibly rigid and obsolete antique. In its place, the ‘expert’ argues, should be built a system which adjusts for nuanced interpretations of more abstracted concepts like ‘self defense’. He absurdly argues that the US’s unilateral acts of aggression of the past several decades would not violate any ‘international law’ under the new framework, because they are justified for a variety of hair-splitting reasons. Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine, naturally, falls under the previously understood framework as an illegal and criminal act of international law.

The article is chiefly an apologia for Trump’s criminal attacks against Iran. The author argues that many ‘counter-arguments’ can be made for why the US is justified in these attacks despite “international law”—or more specifically, UN Article 51—stating that only attacks in self-defense are deemed legitimate. Iran’s “militias” have been attacking US forces, the author concludes, which should be construed as US exercising self-defense.

International law governing the use of force has ossified into a formal binary. A strike is either lawful or unlawful.

Well, generally legal code is designed to be clear-cut for a reason: precisely so that duplicitous individuals like the author here do not have the power to corrupt the law with their “creative” re-interpretations.

But Ku goes on:

There is little space in the doctrine to distinguish among profoundly different uses of force. Under a strict reading, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a limited U.S. strike aimed at deterring Syria’s use of chemical weapons are both illegal. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo — undertaken to halt ethnic cleansing — is likewise condemned as a Charter violation. Meanwhile, the Charter has strikingly little to say about catastrophic internal wars in Sudan or Myanmar. And its application to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan would turn on technical questions of recognition and statehood that might even favor China’s aggression.

Note his conveniently arbitrary recharacterizations of events: NATO’s barbaric attacks against Serbia’s civilian population are styled “intervention”; China’s hypothetical retaking of Taiwan is “invasion”. Russia’s actions in Ukraine bear the regime media style-guide issued stenographic qualifier of “full-scale” invasion, while the US’s actions in Syria are “limited”. Convenient cherry-picking leaves out the “limited” Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya operations, for some reason.

The problem is not that governments ignore international law. It is that international lawyers have too often retreated into a rigid formalism that refuses to grapple with moral and strategic differences everyone else can see.

But our moral authority here believes that he alone bears peremptory judgment on these matters. In such a deluded propagandist’s mind, Israel’s horrific post-October 7 genocide of Gaza would be classified as an act of “defense” because it was responding to Hamas’s laughably tiny operation. But Hamas’s operation itself—surprise, surprise—would not fall under “self-defense” despite years of unjustified Israeli aggression against Palestine. These are the types of heinously arbitrary moral equivalence games imperial stooges like the author play to manufacture the consensus necessary for the Empire’s continued barbarism around the globe.

The problem with such “stretching” of definitions is that it allows you to effectively sell any justification at all. The US’s illegal kidnapping of a sovereign nation’s legally elected sitting president in Venezuela? Justified under “self-defense” because some made-up drug cartel can be used to argue that Venezuela was indirectly “attacking” the US. In that way, any nation on earth can easily manufacture its own ad hoc justifications for war against neighbors. Maybe Ukraine and Taiwan were likewise smuggling drugs into Russia and China, etc.

Ku digs the hole deeper:

A more honest approach would acknowledge that the jus ad bellum — conditions under which states may resort to war — already rests on moral judgments. We distinguish instinctively between Russia’s attempt to erase Ukrainian sovereignty and other, more limited uses of force such as last summer’s U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. We distinguish between humanitarian interventions and wars of conquest, between defensive necessity and strategic opportunism. The law should be capable of articulating those differences rather than pretending they do not matter.

So, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was to “erase Ukrainian sovereignty”, but Israel’s invasion of Gaza—which openly revolves around erasing the Palestinian people’s culture, nationality, existence, etc., and outright ethnically cleansing them into a different land—would be totally justified under the author’s dishonest remaking of international law.

That’s not even to mention that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was officially done for the very same reasons as the US’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the author mentions: both were to neutralize an imminent threat. Except in Russia’s case, that threat was immediate and directly to the homeland, which actually borders the nation from which the threat is emanating. The US lies on the other side of the globe from Iran, and Iran verifiably does not possess weapons that can reach the US homeland. The author gets his equivalency completely backwards: it’s clear that Russia possesses the far more definitive case of jus ad bellum than the US, which is actually acting under the aegis of a different foreign power—in this case, Israel.

His article closes with a lament that the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked attacks against Iran “fall on the wrong side” of international law’s interpretative spectrum. Ku pleads for the system to be reworked such that it becomes easier to arbitrarily bend interpretations and redefine long-established norms so that the US and Israel’s criminality can continue getting rubber-stamped, while the lawful actions of their enemies are blanketly condemned as “illegal”:

The U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran arguably falls on the wrong side of the Charter’s traditional interpretation. But if that conclusion leaves the law unable to differentiate meaningfully between the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, the problem runs deeper than any single episode.

International law’s authority ultimately depends on its ability to align legal judgment with widely shared moral intuitions about war and peace. If it cannot do that — if it insists on treating profoundly different conflicts as doctrinally interchangeable — it will not meaningfully constrain powerful states. Nor will it command the moral clarity needed to condemn genuine aggression when it occurs.

This kind of thinking has become emblematic of the recent trend in the West to increasingly bastardize the ‘rule of law’ or reinterpret key civil understandings of norms to favor the imperial expression.

The EU, for instance, is allegedly floating a new initiative to establish a “multi-tier” system for EU membership, which would administratively erode the so-called “democratic” nature of the bloc by allowing different countries to operate at different membership levels:

The Federalist Society Ku is happy to speak at.