“Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. In a Clinton administration, we’re going to put an end to welfare as we know it,” said then-Gov. Clinton in October 1991.
Republicans are hating on food stamps again. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt-ceiling bill expanded coverage of an existing work requirement to receive food stamps to include people aged 49 to 55, who were previously exempted. That wasn’t good enough for Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has called nonworking food stamp recipients “couch potatoes.” So before the bill cleared the House on Wednesday, 217–215, it was amended to accelerate to October 2024 the deadline for quinquagenarian recipients to get jobs. (Gaetz voted against the bill anyway.)
The paradox of the food stamp program is that it was originally designed to benefit three Republican constituencies: farmers, grocers, and wholesalers. (Even today, one of the program’s biggest supporters is Walmart.) Yet food stamps have come under near-constant attack since 1976, when Ronald Reagan, then challenging Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, disparaged a largely mythical African American “welfare queen” who “used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare.”
“The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won,” Ronald Reagan said during his final State of the Union address, in 1988.
This wasn’t an economic critique so much as an indictment of bureaucracy run amok. Since at least the mid-1960s, Reagan and the GOP had often portrayed the poor—especially those in urban communities of color—as freeloaders and con artists, the bottom feeders of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, whose food stamps and welfare benefits supposedly bilked taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars.
These portrayals were usually couched in euphemisms and dog whistles. In 1961, Barry Goldwater lamented that public aid was “paid for children born out of wedlock.” Goldwater’s supporters (including Reagan) surely didn’t take this as a smear against young white Protestant mothers; no, this moral rot was understood as endemic among a specific community: black, inner-city mothers who were already suspect in the conservative cultural imagination.
According to Slate editor Josh Levin — whose new book “The Queen” tells the story of Taylor, her crimes and evolution into a national mythology and rhetorical cudgel for politicians — one Chicago Tribune reporter alone, George Bliss, the three-time Pulitzer winner who first exposed Taylor’s abuses, used “welfare queen” more than three dozen times.
“The phrase was a succinct distillation of an old idea,” Levin said in his office the other day, a short walk from the White House, whose chief occupant even now is criticized for painting swaths of marginalized people with broad brushes.
Between the fall of 1974 and the presidential election of 1980, this newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, used the phrase “welfare queen” in more than 80 different stories. Sometimes it was bold and large, in a headline; sometimes it was tucked into copy. Sometimes it was “welfare queen” in quotes; sometimes just Welfare Queen, without any colloquial smirk — as if it were a formal title in Chicago. Which, in a way, for several years, it was.
There was the Welfare Queen/ice cream vendor who reportedly stole $11,000 in public assistance funds; and the Welfare Queen convicted of stealing just $1,013. There was the University of Illinois at Chicago criminal justice student sentenced to four years in state prison in 1979 for defrauding Illinois of $118,000 in public assistance. But Chicago’s most notorious Welfare Queen was indisputably a Golddust, Tenn., grifter, possible baby trafficker, possible kidnapper and possible murderer named Linda Taylor. Her name was rarely printed without adjectives and snark attached. As in “Linda Taylor, the notorious Chicago welfare queen.”
According to old reports, she hated those nicknames.
But she didn’t have a choice.
She fit an image.
She did drive a Cadillac, she did wear furs. She floated around Chicago, maintaining multiple addresses, and by 1974, according to authorities, she fraudulently gathered at least $150,000 in food stamps and Social Security payments, not to mention plenty of welfare assistance and the veterans benefits of men she had never married. (The amount was likely much less.) There was nothing typical about Taylor or her actions, and yet she would come to embody an enduring and noxious cliche, the unworthy, scheming minority welfare swindler, living high off of government largesse and the hard-fought earnings of honest working-class Americans.
According to Slate editor Josh Levin — whose new book “The Queen” tells the story of Taylor, her crimes and evolution into a national mythology and rhetorical cudgel for politicians — one Tribune reporter alone, George Bliss, the three-time Pulitzer winner who first exposed Taylor’s abuses, used “welfare queen” more than three dozen times.
“The phrase was a succinct distillation of an old idea,” Levin said in his office the other day, a short walk from the White House, whose chief occupant even now is criticized for painting swaths of marginalized people with broad brushes.
A Chicago Tribune story by George Bliss calls Linda Taylor the “welfare queen” on Oct. 12, 1974.
By the mid-’70s — just as Taylor was becoming Exhibit A of the undeserving poor — more women of color were being granted access to the assistance benefits long denied to them. The previous decade had seen the civil rights movement, the War on Poverty, as well as uprisings in Chicago and around the country. “The image of poverty at the time became black,” Levin said. Taylor, who he believes was likely mixed race, was identified variously as black, white, Hawaiian and Mexican. Not that it mattered much. “Welfare had been racialized, and ‘welfare queen’ captured the concept of people getting something they didn’t deserve — worse, living better than you! These were rough economic times, paychecks weren’t buying as much. If you wanted to stoke contempt for people supposedly getting rich without lifting a hand, the time was right.”
As Levin notes in “The Queen,” Taylor’s “mere existence gave credence to a slew of pernicious stereotypes about poor people and black women” gaming the system.
Yet arguably it’s Ronald Reagan who gained the most.
He rarely said “welfare queen” in public. He referred to Taylor as merely “a woman in Chicago.” But her public-assistance crimes — which Reagan read about in news reports, then fastened into a fixture of stump speeches during the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns — became his go-to, ready-baked cautionary tale. Public assistance, he said, was wasteful, run by do-nothing bureaucrats. And the people it served? They were out there buying steaks and lobsters with food stamps. They were living in housing projects as plush as country clubs. And how were the ’70s treating you, struggling middle-class voter? Were you as well off as those people getting something for nothing?
As well as that woman in Chicago?
“Reagan didn’t go into great detail about Taylor’s background, because he didn’t have to in the 1970s,” said Rick Perlstein, the Chicago-based historian best known for his trilogy of books about the rise of conservative politics, including “Nixonland” and “The Invisible Bridge.” “Reagan only had to draw her as symbolically terrifying, with a clear implication she was not alone — there were a thousand Linda Taylors, waiting to bankrupt your city.”
Reagan would tell his supporters she used 80 aliases, 30 addresses, 15 phone numbers. That was true. But he would never mention the far worse crimes she was linked to. And he would never specify her race. He wouldn’t have to. Though Levin notes studies that the percentage of black Americans on public aid remained steady throughout the ’70s — though most Americans getting assistance, then and now, are white — welfare was portrayed in media reports for decades as a black entitlement.
“There was a moral panic in the mid-’70s,” Perlstein said. “Yet whenever (Reagan) pulled out Taylor — whenever he said anything the (political) opposition might use to shame him — he would frame the story in a way to absolve its listeners of embarrassment or racism. People talk of dog whistles and train whistles. Reagan would never call Mexicans ‘criminals.’ But he was naive about how a narrative affected policy.”
Some of the Tribune’s coverage of Taylor can read considerably more insensitive than Reagan’s infamous “welfare queen” speeches — one 1975 headline wondered if Taylor’s talent for grifting people was caused by voodoo.
That said, Reagan’s speeches are lessons in opportunism, distortion and at the very least, blinkered self-awareness — the former president’s own father, an alcoholic who had trouble holding jobs, found his steadiest work as a welfare administrator in Dixon, Ill. And ramifications were vast.
Reagan’s welfare queen energized and outraged voters and helped land him in the White House, where he then worked to cement the belief that the problem with welfare was actually the welfare bureaucracy itself. Which eased pressure on addressing a more nebulous problem, poverty.
And so, for decades, poor families were pulled off of public assistance, leading to the Clinton administration’s later actions to “end welfare as we know it.” Within a decade,the number of children living in poverty in this country more than doubled. Linda Taylor had been an unwitting salvo in what resembles a propaganda war against the poor.
The Tribune wasn’t the first media organization to employ “welfare queen,” but the newspaper popularized the phrase. Then, according to Kate Walz, vice president of advocacy at Chicago’s Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, Reagan weaponized it. “We see the reverberations. We are continually having to explain why people are poor, why they are not undeserving, why it’s not as easy as telling people to pull themselves up by bootstraps. A lot of it goes back to (Reagan’s) narrative, when public benefit programs became slurs. It predates Reagan. But he perfected the idea.”
Levin is long and thin, with an oval face, and a pensive manner. With his sky blue button-down shirt and black-framed eyeglasses, he gives off an aura of NASA mission control wonkiness, circa 1967. He is not from Chicago; he grew up in New Orleans, and has been at Slate since 2003, moving up from editorial assistant to national editor.
Seven years ago, when the online magazine had an initiative that allowed staff to spend a month on a project, he started looking further into an old Jet article about Linda Taylor.
“I didn’t know there was a real person associated with the ‘welfare queen,’” he said. “But also, I was interested I didn’t know about it — I was interested in how something so consequential could be erased from memory and history.”
So did others.
The initial story he wrote about Taylor became one of Slate’s most popular pieces ever, and a few years later, Levin started the book. He dug exhaustively through real estate records, prison records, Cook County court files, Illinois state archives, FBI and Chicago Police Department papers; because Taylor had died at 76 in a nursing home in 2002, he spoke with Taylor’s children, people who knew Taylor, people who knew people who knew Taylor. She had been linked for years to a murder (though was never charged ); Levin linked her with two additional murders — people in Taylor’s orbit had a weird habit of dying just after she was named a recipient of their life insurance policies.
Levin also documented that, though reports tied Taylor to $150,000 in assistance fraud, the amount stolen was likely closer to $40,000, over several years.
He learned a lot about Chicago.
“Like many projects, you start in a place of ignorance, and the more you know, the more you feel you don’t know anything — that felt especially true in Chicago. The way power gets wielded in the city is remarkable.” One judge who had set Taylor’s bail eventually went to jail on corruption convictions; later, another judge who berated a different Chicago “welfare queen” for callous and amoral disregard was found to be fixing trials for money. As for the media, despite Taylor being a suspected kidnapper and murderer, despite links to child trafficking, “institutions slipped into a mode of using her to represent a group of vulnerable people. It’s not like the Tribune wasn’t sympathetic to the needy — the question of willfulness is hard to answer. But there was a lack of appreciating what downstream effects may be.”
Bliss, the reporter most associated with Taylor, was initially writing about the Illinois Department of Public Aid and its disinterest in welfare fraud. “But stories were increasingly about Linda,” Levin said. “Stories about the department don’t mention her, stories about her don’t mention the department. It lacked context — or a note that none of it was typical.”
Bliss was known for government corruption investigations. “He was no ideologue,” said Bill Mullen, a retired Tribune investigative reporter who was close to Bliss. “I couldn’t have told you if he was a Democrat or a Republican.” Bill Recktenwald, who worked with Bliss at the Better Government Association and the Tribune, doubts Bliss even came up with “welfare queen” himself: “George wasn’t a writer, he was a reporter who would return to the newspaper and sit on the edge of a rewrite desk, crafting a story.” Still, Mullen said, “the way the (traditionally conservative) Tribune handled Taylor probably fed into (anti-welfare) sensibilities. And George played along.”
The stories coincided with Reagan’s rise from the California governorship to national politics, and “welfare’s tax burden on the middle class was one leg of the (platform) that he had run long on,” Perlstein said. “He had a big line about people coming to California because welfare rules were so simple there — you could draw assistance after 21 days, he said. In fact, it took five years of residency, then 21 days. But that was typical of him.”
Actually, Reagan’s welfare tales were in keeping with a long tradition, said Heather Hahn, a senior fellow at the the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington where she specializes in public assistance and poverty. “The image of the undeserving poor dates at the very least to the Elizabethan Poor Laws of the 16th century, when the poor had to basically demonstrate their deservingness (generally to clergy who maintained welfare rolls). And it’s a thread running ever since through assistance programs. It’s also a reminder how powerful narrative is in shaping the consequences for how people live.”
After Linda Taylor, she said, the poor “had to jump through hoops to prove they weren’t Linda Taylor.”
Few could have been.
The details of Reagan’s story were so outrageous even Tip O’Neill, speaker of the House, told Reagan he doubted that welfare queen existed. But the Linda Taylor of Levin’s book was far, far more outrageous: She was born Martha Louise White, but tried on a dizzying array of identities, races, addresses. She had five children, kidnapped others and abandoned some, according to Levin’s book and the Tribune’s reporting. She worked as a spiritualist and once identified herself as a heart surgeon. She was Connie Reed, and Connie Harbaugh, and Constance Wakefield, and Connie Green — and many others. She was jailed for welfare fraud and perjury, but never charged with suspected kidnappings or murders. In the mid-’70s, the Tribune linked her to the 1964 abduction of Paul Fronczak, a day-old infant at the former Michael Reese Hospital in Bronzeville. The case remains unsolved, but someone using one of Taylor’s familiar aliases visited the hospital the day of the abduction; Taylor was also seen that day wearing a nurse’s uniform. (She was never charged with the crime.)
“Other than her children, no one had a long-term relationship with Linda,” Levin said. “The pattern was, she would blow into people’s lives, disturb everything in her path, then leave. So (when he talked with people who knew her), I would ask about the weeks or months that they knew her, and then inevitably I would tell them what she had done before and after the time they knew her. Nobody was even aware that she was dead.”
Taylor was a cipher, and Levin decided not to go far beyond that: By the end of the book, we don’t really know why she was the way she was. “If I’m making a critique of the way she was written about, I wanted to be careful not to make what I perceive are the same mistakes and assumptions. You want to say with clarity and rigor who this person was. But she’s just out of reach. It’s not a cop out — it’s honest.”
One footnote to this:
Taylor’s mental health, at various times, was questioned by doctors and lawyers, but remained outside of media accounts of her life. In comparison, in 1978, after rounds of shock treatments and time in a psychiatric facility, Bliss shot his wife to death and killed himself. In a front page story, then-Tribune editor Clayton Kirkpatrick said Bliss was a perfectionist who suffered from extreme depression, and “the terrible burden of mental illness compounded by an awareness of its presence ultimately proved too severe.”
Today, the legacy of the “welfare queen” is seen in the push for work requirements for public-aid recipients; it’s felt in shifts of terminology, from “safety net” to a more loaded “entitlement.” It’s heard in the “false narrative that people on public assistance don’t want to work,” said Hahn of the Urban Institute, “when the reality is most recipients are in low-wage jobs — often several low-wage jobs.”
[Linda Taylor, center, outside a home that she contends was willed to her by Patricia Parks, who died the week before, on June 22, 1975. Taylor was turned away, along with Ann Lewis, left, and their attorney Janet Nottingham.]
It’s felt in the dismantling of the welfare system itself.
But also, Levin said, nodding toward K Street outside his office, it’s seen in the way politicians used the 2015 killing of a woman in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant as proof that the undocumented are dangerous.
“A lack of interest in facts and statistics. The use of a single not-typical story was an example of what’s going on everyday, under our feet. It just all feels strangely familiar.”
[Goddamn, the many Jews in this piece talking about the welfare queen! And who said the media isn’t run and ruled by Jews?]
Newt Gingrich’s proposal to put poor children to work because, he says, they’re not learning the “work habit” in public housing projects has been condemned by critics as worthy of a Dickens novel.
Those who followed the GOP presidential candidate’s tumultuous legislative career in Washington say Gingrich’s latest foray into child welfare is not an anomaly.
As House Speaker in the mid-1990s, Gingrich proposed banning welfare benefits for children born to unmarried young women and using the funds to build orphanages for youngsters whose parents were failing them.
At the time, criticism and condemnation rained down on Gingrich.
And so how easy was if for Cunt Trump and Racist South African Elon 110 IW Musk to steal steal steal from the other propagandist America haters — Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Obama, Biden, Trump A (asshole) and Trump B (bastard)?
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank, says the economy is still in the soft landing phase, “but there’s a lot of turbulence out there.”
“Tariffs, they’ll definitely have pluses and minuses, you see consternation around the world,” Dimon said on Wednesday in a conversation with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the tech company’s annual summit in Las Vegas. There’s also uncertainty about what going to happen with President Trump’s proposed tax plan, he said.
Dimon also expressed concern about geopolitics and the effects of the turbulence on the economy. “I personally think the most important thing happening in the world is what’s happening with Ukraine and Russia, and the Middle East. I know that’s about the future of a free democratic world.”
Regarding spending in the U.S., “consumers at the low end are basically spending down,” he said, explaining that that means saving money by taking actions like canceling a trip or going to a less expensive restaurant. “People at the high end, their money is down a lot, but they are a lot wealthier; think of homes and stock prices over the last 20 years,” he explained.
But Dimon also wanted to make an important point for all of the leaders in the audience: “The bottom 20% [of earners in the U.S.] didn’t get a pay raise for 25 years; they’re dying younger. Their schools aren’t good and they live in crime-ridden neighborhoods.”
Continuing Criminal Enterprise, the real welfare-taxpayer queens: On January 16, 2009, Bank of America received $20 billion and a guarantee of $118 billion in potential losses from the U.S. government through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). This was in addition to the $25 billion given to the bank in the fall of 2008 through TARP.
Thousands of employees returned to the Food and Drug Administration’s headquarters Monday to find overflowing parking lots, long security lines and makeshift office spaces without chairs and other basic supplies.
Thousands of employees returned to the Food and Drug Administration’s headquarters Monday to find overflowing parking lots, long security lines and makeshift office spaces without chairs and other basic supplies.
The FDA is the latest agency scrambling to meet the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate, part of a flurry of actions — including firings and buyouts — intended to radically shrink the federal workforce. Monday was the first day that all rank-and-file FDA staffers were required to report to offices, including the agency’s 130-acre campus just outside Washington.
The Associated Press spoke with more than a half-dozen FDA staffers who described long lines to park and clear security, followed by hours of hunting for space and supplies in offices that were not designed to accommodate the agency’s full workforce. The staffers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
One staffer described “chaos and lost work hours” for commuting, security lines and shuffled office space.
The FDA is the latest agency scrambling to meet the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate, part of a flurry of actions — including firings and buyouts — intended to radically shrink the federal workforce. Monday was the first day that all rank-and-file FDA staffers were required to report to offices, including the agency’s 130-acre campus just outside Washington.
The Associated Press spoke with more than a half-dozen FDA staffers who described long lines to park and clear security, followed by hours of hunting for space and supplies in offices that were not designed to accommodate the agency’s full workforce. The staffers spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
One staffer described “chaos and lost work hours” for commuting, security lines and shuffled office space.
The cunt media all lined up, that fucking AP, uh, lying about an effort to limit fraudulent claims?
WASHINGTON (AP) — In an effort to limit fraudulent claims, the Social Security Administration will impose tighter identity-proofing measures — which will require millions of recipients and applicants to visit agency field offices rather than interact with the agency over the phone.
Beginning March 31st, people will no longer be able to verify their identity to the SSA over the phone and those who cannot properly verify their identity over the agency’s “my Social Security” online service, will be required to visit an agency field office in person to complete the verification process, agency leadership told reporters Tuesday.
The change will apply to new Social Security applicants and existing recipients who want to change their direct deposit information.
Retiree advocates warn that the change will negatively impact older Americans in rural areas, including those with disabilities, mobility limitations, those who live far from SSA offices and have limited internet access.
And we think judges should not also be shot in parking lots along with the Doge fucks? Fuck you, then.
A federal judge on Wednesday declined to block the White House Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to take over the U.S. Institute of Peace while a legal challenge to President Trump’s actions targeting the nonprofit organization moves forward.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell swiftly moved to consider whether to void the removal of several board members just days after some of them received an email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office informing them that they had been terminated. She was also asked to block staff with DOGE from having access to the Institute of Peace facilities.
Howell, who sits on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., convened a hearing Wednesday afternoon after five of the removed board members — Ambassador John Sullivan, Judy Ansley, Joseph Falk, Kerry Kennedy and Mary Swig — filed a lawsuit Tuesday that challenged their firing and what they said was an “unlawful assault” on the Institute of Peace, which was established by Congress in 1984.
In addition to the board members, the institute’s president, George Moose, was also fired by ex officio board members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice Admiral Peter Garvin. Kenneth Jackson was then installed as the acting president of the Institute of Peace.
[Fucking Jews Jews everywhere! Howell was born in 1956 in Fort Benning, which was renamed Fort Moore during the Biden administration, but is now named Fort Benning again. She is the daughter of an Army officer and is Jewish.[3] She attended elementary and secondary school in six states and Germany.]
Rats, and if you do not see the rats in these Jews’ faces, then you are antisemitic!
You rat infested Cunt-Tree-Tis-Of-Thee, all you cocksuckers who believed the fucked up democrats and those of you who kissed the festering feet of Rapist in Chief Trump. Die, all of you:
These are you fucking white nationalists, Jewish feet suckers, you fucking democrats and republicans:
“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department,” Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said Wednesday in a statement. “Discriminatory Equity Ideology is a form of Woke cultural Marxism that has no place in our military. It Divides the force, Erodes unit cohesion and Interferes with the services’ core warfighting mission. We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content accordingly.”
Trump is bombarding the Ivy League. This college just hired a staunch ally as its top lawyer.
Matt Raymer, the former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee who has backed ending birthright citizenship, will serve as Dartmouth’s general counsel.
[Our Lord Jesus Christ chose the Jewish race as his Incarnate choice. That honours the Jews and affirms their special status in time and history. — Matt Raymer]
Jan. 24, 2025, that fucking cocksucker, Raymer: If you were wondering how long it would take for Democrats to sue the Trump administration, we have an answer. With the ink barely dry, eighteen Democrat state attorneys general, four additional Democrat state AGs, and a collection of outside groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union all filed federal lawsuits over President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. Their argument, that the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship for practically anyone born here, is flatly wrong as a matter of law. The courts should use this opportunity to get it right.
The 14th Amendment — ratified after the Civil War and ensuring that former slaves were U.S. citizens — provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The plaintiffs focus on the first part, but barely glance at the second, arguing that, with few exceptions (such as the children of foreign diplomats in the United States), anyone born in the United States is “subject to its jurisdiction,” simply by virtue of being within its borders.
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Clinton and Gore, other welfare cheats:
[16 years ago, as both were loving the Epstein trips.]
Presidents are usually effusive, grandiose, and triumphant when they sign major legislation that will form a huge part of their legacy. In 1996, Bill Clinton’s announcement that he’d sign a bill ending “welfare as we know it” was not that.
It was defensive and at times openly apologetic for what was about to happen.
“Some parts of this bill still go too far,” he conceded. “This bill still cuts deeper than it should in nutritional assistance, mostly for working families with children.”
He probably didn’t know then how true those words would one day turn out to be. Clinton, and now his wife, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, has run hot and cold over the years on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) — what is now colloquially referred to as “welfare reform.”
Ten years after signing the bill, Bill took an enthusiastic victory lap in the pages of the New York Times. “Welfare reform has proved a great success,” he declared. And at first, it seemed like he was right. Evidence seemed to indicate that it really did increase employment, and worst-case scenarios liberal critics predicted didn’t come to pass.
But another 10 years later, the mood changed again. Days before the New York Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton, who once urged her husband to sign the bill, told WNYC that “we have to take a hard look at it again.” New research had showed that in fact welfare reform fell short in the depths of the Great Recession — substantially increasing deep poverty and leaving families who can’t find work without any cash safety net.
The Clintons’ statements have mirrored the overall reputation of the bill over time, especially among Democrats. In 1996 the party was all but unanimous about the fact that something had to change with welfare. There was heated debate over whether the changes were acceptable, including within the Clinton administration itself, but ultimately most congressional Democrats voted for the law on the same mixed grounds that Clinton signed it: It wasn’t perfect, but it was a necessary step toward reform.
The idea behind welfare reform back in the ’90s was that something was deeply broken about the system and needed to change. That was correct. But something else is deeply broken now, and it too needs to change.
Keeping people out of work was a feature, not a bug, of the original welfare program
Food stamps were first conceived as a subsidy to business during the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt’s Agriculture Department had been purchasing surplus crops from farmers and distributing them to hungry families. Food wholesalers and retailers, including the supermarket chains that were just starting to appear (and that marketed themselves as heavy discounters) objected to being cut out of the deal. Food stamps were the resulting compromise. Instead of the government purchasing the surplus food, wholesalers did. The wholesalers sold the food to retailers, who in turn sold it to individuals able to make their purchases with government-issued stamps.
Today’s Republicans fulminate about nonworking couch potatoes who collect food stamps (never mind that most recipients work already; in households with children, 75 percent do unless they’re disabled or elderly). But back in 1939, being unemployed was the reason you went on food stamps; as with most New Deal social welfare programs, the idea was not to punish jobless people, but to help them. Christopher Bosso, a political scientist at Northeastern University and author of the forthcoming Why SNAP Works, told me that eligibility for the New Deal program often depended on the recipient’s being enrolled locally in a relief program: no welfare, no food stamps. (SNAP, or the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, is what food stamps were renamed in 2008, in a half-hearted effort to reduce the stigma, which didn’t take.) The very first recipient, a machinist in Rochester, New York, named Ralston Thayer, was Gaetz’s worst nightmare: 35, able-bodied, and unemployed. “I never received surplus foods before,” Thayer told reporters, “but the procedure seems simple enough, and I certainly intend to take advantage of it.”
Food stamps disappeared as the economy recovered during World War II. In the 1950s, Senator George Aiken, a Vermont Republican, agitated for food stamps’ revival, but the Eisenhower administration wasn’t interested. These were prosperous years when, as Michael Harrington would observe in his 1962 book, The Other America, the poor became invisible, even to liberals. That began to change under President John F. Kennedy, partly because of Harrington’s book, and by 1964 food stamps had been legislated back into being. The Food Stamp Act’s preamble stated as its purpose, first, “to strengthen the agricultural economy”; second, “to help achieve a fuller and more effective use of food abundance”; and only third (oh, yeah), “to provide for improved levels of nutrition among low-income households.” Even so, Republican opposition (combined with resistance from Southern Democrats) nearly tanked the bill. Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts, the Democratic House speaker, finally secured support by tying it to aid for cotton and wheat farmers. {New Republic)
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Listen to Carol and see how fucked up this Cunt-Tree-Tis-Of-Thee has been way before South African Cunt Muck and Rapist in Chief Stump have been around.
endless prattle about “those darn, mean, murderous Zionists . . . can’t they be more Jewish?”
“History will judge not just the executioners but all the devils who watched and did nothing.”
Can we call the cocksuckers in the murder brigades, the I.O.F., i.e. the Israeli Occupation Forces (hmm, not Z.O.F.) without a baton from Hegseth or Rubio or Trump up our asses.
Even as refugee camps in the north are bulldozed, subject to controlled detonation, demolished, and otherwise emptied, the Zionist regime appears to be moving forward with plans to do the same in camps farther south.
What follows are extracts from a report sent to me by my correspondent in al–Arroub, Qadir al–Thaer. It summarizes disturbing accounts from camp residents of what is almost certainly the initial phase of a large-scale demolition of homes, with the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent I.O.F. presence in the camp.
On February 25, 2025, the Israeli army entered the camp and conducted field training exercises. This was followed by a large-scale raid on February 26. More than 60 soldiers, accompanied by armored vehicles, proceeded to a main street in the center of the camp. They took measurements and informed nearby residents of their plans to widen the street, which would require demolishing several homes.
The stated goal of this expansion is to facilitate the movement of armored vehicles and tanks in future incursions. The army has encountered difficulties navigating this particular road, which is one of the steepest slopes in the camp. It connects the southern and northern main roads of al-Arroub.
Pause for a moment and think about this: The Israeli army routinely conducts military training exercises in refugee camps—densely populated civilian communities—where people live and work and where children go to school and play in the streets. The Zionist regime thinks nothing of demolishing homes to facilitate its campaign of terror and total domination of Palestinian civilian life. All in willful violation of international law.
This is routine Zionist terrorism.
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It is Jewish Taught, Rabbi Influenced, Talmudic and Torah Based Religion. And, can we call a fucking rat a “rat” without some anti-semitic bullshit label?
from the Jews and their museums:
Parasites? Again, from the Holocaust Industry:
“And so We have placed in every society the most wicked to conspire in it. Yet they plot only against themselves, but they fail to perceive it.” (Qur’an 6:123)
Quoting: When I first looked up Curtis Yarvin—the Dugin of Trump’s America—he struck me as a clichè caricature of evil, like a nerdy villain from a low grade Marvel movie. That awkward, maladjusted, ignored geek posturing as a contrarian, illiberal political philosopher spewing audacious fascist drivel, who suddenly becomes the intellectual figurehead behind America’s quick descent into the abyss of moral collapse and all out fascism.
If late stage empire rot had a face, this is what it would look like: Rat on Steroids or Rodent Growth Hormones
Apparently, this is the guy secretly running this garbage heap called Trump’s America. According to Waleed Shahid,, “it is hard to overstate how much of Curtis Yarvin’s extremist playbook is being implemented at the highest levels of American government. It’s even harder to understand why so few seem to notice.” Shahid describes how Yarvin’s “ideas, once confined to niche internet forums, have become deeply influential among a particular class of Silicon Valley power brokers—Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk—who see government as an inefficient relic, ripe for disruption. Now, his theories are no longer just thought experiments. They are shaping policy.”
He boastfully dubs his pseudo-intellectual manifesto of hate on Substack, Gray Mirror, as “a portal to the next regime,” and advocates for a monarchical system whereby brute power and a cold, heartless, corporate banality is the way forward for the powerful, almighty, supremacist Judeo-Christian West. An advocate for “Dark Enlightenment,” Yarvin confesses to worshipping at the altar of brute power (see below) and is clamoring to usher in a ruthless regime of rule under the shadow of a so-called CEO-Monarch.
As the world wakes up to the harrowing images of children slain by Israeli bombs across the entire Gaza Strip AGAIN, we cannot bear witness to global leaders JUST. DOING. NOTHING. This is an acceleration of the genocide that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people as… pic.twitter.com/WV8Tt0ehgM
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur (@FranceskAlbs) March 18, 2025
Okay, back to the decay here in LaLaLandia Our Cunt-Tree-Tis-Of-Thee.
Oregon:
More than 1000 people — shoulder-to-shoulder in bleachers, on the ground and on folding chairs — jammed the Clackamas Community College in Oregon City for a town hall with Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and US Rep. Janelle Bynum.
Some of those attending, like G. Thomas Williams, told KOIN 6 News they were in line for hours just to make sure they got in for the 5:30 p.m. event.
“I did not vote to elect this president, but I’m still an American citizen. He still is my president and still represents me and made promises that I want to make sure kept,” Williams said. “17% of my income comes from overtime, and he promised to eliminate taxes on overtime. I’m not a server. I don’t get tips. But there are lots of people that we’re expecting to get relief on taxes on their tips, income.”
The crowd — another in a series of packed town halls with elected officials in Oregon and in other places across the country — demanded to know what Wyden and Bynum and everyone else is doing to fight back against the Trump Administration’s efforts in nearly every area.
As one person said, “Everybody’s scared. Everybody’s panicked, and it’s affecting physical and mental health. My question is, what can we actually do to stop this chaos?”
“What are you going to do to fix our veteran problem and the Medicaid,” another person asked.
At one point Bynum, in one of her first town halls since taking office as Oregon’s 5th District representatives, tried to calm the fears.
“Everything ultimately is going to be OK,” she said. “It doesn’t feel that way. I hear you and I feel that it is going to be OK.”
But the crowd wasn’t having it, loudly pushing back —
“It’s NOT going to be OK!”
The fucking system is so broken, so rigged, so brokeback mountain heaped upon the 80 Percent, that the cocksuckers Reagan and Bush A and Bush B are considered milquetoast compared to Rapist in Chief Trump?
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If this isn’t sick, habituation and billionaire cocksucking perversity, then you are the fucking enemy:
And then fucking A, this human room temperature IQ Apartheid Cunt?
You get it now, don’t you? Billionaires, Black Rock and Black Stone and Vanguard and the others in their cancerous glee are killing more than just Palestinians and Yemenis.
Then you have this propaganda lobby, Chemistry World. There is not fucking debate, cunts.
And so these cunts and their yachts and specialty doctors, killing us not so softly: The cuts affected more schools because of how grants are set up. “The funding flows through Columbia, which is why we were vulnerable,” a Harvard Medical School professor said. “When the NIH, or whoever made this decision, decided to target Columbia’s funding, we were just kind of swept up in this.”
Brown University has issued a memo to international professors and students, warning against travel abroad.
According to authorities cited by WCVB, federal agents said they found photos of Iran’s supreme leader and ex-Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Alawieh’s phone after she returned to Lebanon to allegedly attend the funeral of Nasrallah.
Homeland Security described Nasrallah as “a brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree.”
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No crocodile tears, but still, this is Trump World, ICE world, the Gestapo.
Mossad is organized into divisions, led by a director who is equivalent to a major general in the Israel Defense Forces. Tzomet: Mossad’s largest division, staffed with case officers called katsas tasked with conducting espionage overseas and running agents.
Canadian actor detained at US border in ‘inhumane conditions’ for nearly two weeks
Entrepreneur and actor Jasmine Mooney, who had a role in an American Pie sequel, says she was arrested at southern border and held in detention over an incomplete work visa
A Canadian entrepreneur and actor in the American Pie movie franchise said she was detained for almost two weeks in “inhumane” conditions by US border authorities over an incomplete visa.
Jasmine Mooney, an actor who is also co-founder of the beverage brand Holy! Water, was detained on 3 March in San Diego, California.
The 35-year-old Canadian citizen’s work visa to the US was reportedly revoked back in November while traveling from Vancouver to Los Angeles, and she was attempting to file a new application.
“Every single guard that sees me is like, ‘What are you doing here? I don’t understand. You’re Canadian. How are you here?’” Mooney said in an interview with ABC 10 last week from the Arizona immigration detention center where she was being held.
Her mother, Alexis Eagles, who lives in British Columbia, says Mooney was detained at the San Ysidro border crossing between Mexico and San Diego, the busiest land border crossing in the world, on 3 March with an incomplete application for a work visa. Eagles told the Vancouver Sun that instead of sending her daughter to Canada or advising her to fix her application, US Customs and Border Protection officers arrested her.
Vehicles queue at the San Ysidro border crossing between Mexico and the US, in Tijuana, Mexico, this month. Photograph: Aimee Melo/Reuters
Mooney had not been charged with any crime and does not have a prior criminal record.
She spent three nights in the detention centre, then was transferred. “We eventually learned that about 30 people, including Jasmine, were removed from their cells at 3am and transferred to the San Luis detention center in Arizona,” Eagles said.
“They are housed together in a single concrete cell with no natural light, fluorescent lights that are never turned off, no mats, no blankets, and limited bathroom facilities.”
Every time Mooney was transferred, she was handcuffed and in chains, Eagles claimed.
Mooney told ABC 10 that she was appalled by the conditions inside the private detention facility in San Luis where she was being kept.
“I have never in my life seen anything so inhumane,” she said. “I was put in a cell, and I had to sleep on a mat with no blanket, no pillow, with an aluminum foil wrapped over my body like a dead body for two and a half days.”
Mooney was profiled in BC Business magazine in 2019 for her work in the hospitality industry. According to the profile, she moved from the Yukon to Vancouver in 2008 to study at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. From there, she went to acting school, before owning and operating a bar.
She has said she had a three-year US work visa, which her mother said was revoked as she attempted to travel back to Los Angeles, where she was living, after a holiday in Canada. It was unclear why Mooney’s earlier visa was revoked, or why she was at the southern border this month. However, she told ABC she got her first visa at the San Ysidro border crossing on the advice of a Los Angeles attorney, who met her at the border, and therefore may have thought it would work a second time at that location.
The Guardian contacted US Customs and Border Protection for comment.
Mooney was released over the weekend and landed at Vancouver international airport shortly after midnight on Saturday morning.
“I’m still, to be honest, really processing everything,” Mooney told reporters who were waiting for her at the airport’s international arrivals area.
“I haven’t slept in a while and haven’t eaten proper food in a while, so I’m just really going through the motions,” she told CTV News.
“Thank you for all your messages of support. I’m sorry if I haven’t been able to respond to everyone – just got home after what felt like escaping a deeply disturbing psychological experiment,” she added in a post on her Instagram account.
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Moving into White Trash Repubic Hair territory:
Labor unions representing federal workers are facing another challenge to collective bargaining rights – and even their very existence – in a newly introduced Republican bill meant to prevent American taxpayer dollars from subsidizing union costs.
The Federal Workforce Freedom Act would prohibit federal employees from organizing or joining labor unions in order to collectively bargain, as well as forbid federal agencies from participating in collective bargaining negotiations with labor unions representing federal workers.
The bill, introduced Thursday, would also terminate any and all collective bargaining agreements between labor unions and federal agencies “established before, on, or after the date of enactment of this bill.”
Fucking Cunts. U.S. Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
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This cunt of a Netflix series, Adolescence, says it all about InBred UnUnited Queen-ueer-Dumb:
From kidney beans to love hearts, these innocuous symbols are revealed to hide a surprising code that most adults would never be able to spot.
In the world of ‘manosphere’ influencers, pills, the ‘100’ emoji and even kidney beans can be a sign that someone is an ‘incel’ – a radical misogynist who believes they are an ‘involuntary celibate’.
In the tense scene, Adam, played by Amari Bacchus, says: ‘The red pill is like ‘I see the truth’. It’s a call to action by the manosphere.
‘She’s saying he’s an incel dad. She’s saying he always will be. That’s why they say you’re an incel, they’re saying you’re going to be a virgin forever.’
From coloured hearts to kidney beans, red pills and ‘100’, here is what the emoji on your child’s phone really mean – and what to do if you see them using them.
The fucking collapse, man, of Western UnCivil-ized Culture (sic): The pill emoji can be used to mean ‘red pilled’ indicating that someone is an incel – an extreme misogynist who defines themselves by their inability to form emotional or sexual relationships.
The collapse of the Empires in one mini-series, all bundled up in the rot of Western Culture. Watch how fucked up the Brits are in their consumer culture, their fucking childish fucking talk, their cute goddamn sayings, and their children treated like prisoners in school and acting like fucking spoiled goddamned thugs.
While these fucking little kiddos laugh laugh laugh at the suffering, man:
The skies over Gaza have darkened once again with the smoke of destruction. What we are witnessing is not warfare but the methodical erasure of human existence – a calculated annihilation that defies description yet demands our witness. Israel has unleashed what can only be called an apocalyptic nightmare upon Gaza, fulfilling the chilling promise made by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich weeks earlier. This is genocide unfolding before our eyes, again —Israel’s torture, rape and death machine will not and cannot stop.
I repeat: Israel will not stop. Why would it? The world has given it carte blanche for atrocity. It bombs Syria with impunity, seizes Syrian territory without consequence, strikes Lebanon and Yemen without fear. It commits sexual violence against Palestinian men, women, and children—documented on video for all to see. It films its own torture sessions like trophies. It reduces hospitals to rubble, universities to ash, transforms doctors into casualties and journalists into corpses. It murders mothers cradling infants, aid workers carrying medicine, children sleeping in beds. ISRAEL-CAN-DO-ANY-THING.
The death toll mounts with each passing hour. Over 400 Palestinians slaughtered in relentless airstrikes, with no pretense of military necessity. Among the dead lie at least 174 children – innocent lives extinguished without remorse or hesitation. Countless others remain trapped beneath mountains of concrete and twisted metal, their fates sealed.
The evidence of this atrocity is seared into the consciousness of anyone who dares to look: a baby in a rainbow-patterned jumpsuit, lifeless. A child’s bloodied face beneath a Mickey Mouse shirt. A toddler with burns marring her delicate features. Fathers cradling their daughters for the final time – one gently playing with her hair, another wailing over her favorite pajamas now stained crimson.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a Californian surgeon volunteering in Gaza, described scenes of “utter carnage” following the strikes. “Mostly children,” he reported, his voice heavy with anguish. “The other half are mostly women.” Of the six surgeries he performed overnight, half were on children under six years old. “Most of them are going to go on to die,” he acknowledged, the weight of inevitability crushing his medical expertise.
Look at this piece of shit, all of them. I am anti-fucking-war, and anti-military, but I was lucky enough to be a military dependent of an air force enlisted dude and then my old man went into the Army as an officer. Shot in Korea and Vietnam. Thirty-two fucking years in language schools, cryptography, signals, etc.
I was drummed out after just a few months, of conduct unbecoming a private, you know, less than honorable discharge, dudes and dudettes.
But this shit, fuck. These Yanqui’s and Confederates need to be put to death.
Article by Mike Prysner
Peter Hegseth is charging forward on the promise to De-Woke The Military, codified in Trump’s executive order to purge “DEI” from the ranks. Among their targets are Black soldiers, who have been a center–and many times a catalyst–of the broader anti-racist struggle for well over a century.
Some of Hegseth’s orders so far have left little doubt that “DEI” is a code word:
Banning all Black History Month activities and recognitions the day before it began (while notably allowing military-wide St. Patrick’s Day celebrations)
Firing African American “DEI General” CQ Brown from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, after lamenting how “our generals are hunting for racists in our ranks that they know do not exist” (they do)
Banning Black student groups at military academies
Bringing back the name “Fort Bragg” to the recently renamed Army post that had honored a Confederate general
Ordering recruiters to stop attending the Black Engineer of the Year Awards, which one recruiter described as the “most talent-dense event we do”
It has gotten a bit more overt, deleting from the DoD website their only “Medal of Honor Monday” profile of a Black soldier given the award. A slip in the new URL code laid bare the new attitude: three letters were added so the web path would read “DEI Medal of Honor…”
DEI policies did not exist during the Vietnam War; in fact it was much harder for Black soldiers to get recognition. Charles Rogers–who won the award as he was wounded three different times leading a doomed defense of his outpost–was marked “DEI” simply because he was Black.
But the latest stuck out to me as the real shock.
On March 13, Hegseth ordered a review of military standards; and specifically, of beards.
This will likely elude non-veterans but every vet will know that this primarily impacts Black troops, who are commonly exempt from standard shaving requirements due to a skin condition (pseudofolliculitis barbae) which afflicts 45% of Black servicemen.
In other words, Hegseth has found a way to potentially purge thousands of Black servicemen. The Marine Corps has already announced they would do so. The other branches will decide soon.
Black infantry units in WWI also earned high prestige for bravery, such as the Harlem Hellfighters. More importantly, they returned to the racist US as skilled, battle-tested combatants. During the wave of white violence in Red Summer of 1919, Black WWI veterans were both the targets of mob violence, and the backbone of defense in battlegrounds like Tulsa. In Washington D.C., Black snipers atop the Howard Theater successfully held off the advance of lynch mobs.
Preceding Red Summer was the lynching of WWI veteran Wilbur Little, murdered for refusing to take off his Army uniform. At least 16 veterans would be lynched that year.
In 1940, 15 Black sailors aboard the USS Philadelphia publicly signed a letter detailing racial discrimination and abuse. After it was published in a newspaper, all were kicked out of the Navy and the struggle for the rights of “The Philadelphia 15” became a rallying cause for the NAACP, socialist parties and others.
Sorry, you fucking pacificists, but these are monsters, and guys like Pete Penis Hegseth needs to be batted into permanent TBI-Landia.
In 2018, Penelope Hegseth wrote her son an email in which she laid into him for poor behavior and disrespect toward women. “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” she wrote in the letter, obtained by the New York Times.
Hegseth chastised her son for how he treated his wife, Samantha, in the divorce proceedings that prompted her to send her April 2018 email. She concluded it by writing, “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…”
The following is the text of the email that Penelope Hegseth sent to her son, Pete Hegseth, on April 30, 2018. One sentence was redacted by The New York Times for privacy reasons.
Son,
I have tried to keep quiet about your character and behavior, but after listening to the way you made Samantha feel today, I cannot stay silent. And as a woman and your mother I feel I must speak out..
You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.
I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out.
Sam is a good mother and a good person (under the circumstances that you created) and I know deep down you know that. For you to try to label her as “unstable” for your own advantage is despicable and abusive. Is there any sense of decency left in you? She did not ask for or deserve any of what has come to her by your hand. Neither did Meredith.
I know you think this is one big competition and that we have taken her side… bunk… we are on the side of good and that is not you. (Go ahead and call me self-righteous, I dont’ care)
Don’t you dare run to her and cry foul that we shared with us… that’s what babies do. It’s time for someone (I wish it was a strong man) to stand up to your abusive behavior and call it out, especially against women
We still love you, but we are broken by your behavior and lack of character. I don’t want to write emails like this and never thought I would. If it damages our relationship further, then so be it, but at least I have said my piece. [Redacted]
And yes, we are praying for you (and you don’t deserve to know how we are praying, so skip the snarky reply)
I don’t want an answer to this… I don’t want to debate with you. You twist and abuse everything I say anyway. But… On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself…
Mom
Of course, TSA, Homeland Security, SWAT, ATF, ICE, any or all the fucking alphabet Gestapo Agencies need elimination.
No one could’ve imagined Milwaukee mother would be deported to Laos, former lawyer says
Exclusive details: ‘Nobody with any compassion would think that’s any compelling reason’ to separate Yang from her family, her former lawyer, Matt Ricci, said
A former lawyer for the Hmong-American woman who was brought to the United States at eight months old and lived in Milwaukee until she was deported 11 days ago to Laos says her expulsion came as a complete surprise.
Ma Yang, 37, was born in Thailand and attained legal status as a permanent US resident before the mother of five was stripped of her green card by the Trump administration some two-plus years after being released from federal prison, where she served 30 months on marijuana-related charges. In February, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told Yang to report to the agency’s Milwaukee facility. When she showed up, agents detained Yang, sent her to Indiana, then Chicago, and finally was shipped off to Laos.
“The United States sent me back to die,” Yang said.
Send them all back, those fucking EuroTrashLandians. And this is a Jewish Project, too, with Stephen Himmler Miller at the helm.
Hegseth Name Meaning
Some characteristic forenames: Scandinavian Petter, Thor, Tryg.
Norwegian: habitational name from any of several farmsteads, most of them named with Old Norse Helgasetr, Helgusetr, from the male personal name Helgi and the female personal name Helga respectively; both names are derived from heilagr ‘holy, sacred’. In some cases other personal names, for example Herleifr or Herlaugi, are the source of the first element, and in other cases it is derived from hella ‘flat stone, flat mountain’. The second element, -seth, is derived from setr ‘farmstead, dwelling’.
In what might be called a classic case of aviation overreach, the Swiss government is discovering that size does indeed matter—but not always in the way one might expect. The Federal Council’s shiny new Bombardier Global 7500 business jet, acquired for a cool 103 million Swiss francs (roughly $117 million), is proving to be something of an oversized headache for officials in Bern.
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers — The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping (Third Edition)/ Author: Robert M. Sapolsk
All you fucking cocksucking Trumpers, man, die. All fucking 70 million of you cock-sucking buggered fucking AmeriKKKans. That piece of shit president, err, peace president.
Dozens of civilians were killed in U.S. bombings across Yemen as Trump vows to unleash “overwhelming lethal force” to stop the Houthi naval blockade targeting Israel’s war on Gaza
With Massive Airstrikes on Yemen, Trump Intensifies Undeclared War Against the Poorest Country in the Arab World
Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.
Within the context of military service, particularly regarding the experience of war, “moral injury” refers to the lasting emotional, psychological, social, behavioral, and spiritual impacts of actions that violate a service member’s core moral values and behavioral expectations of self or others (Litz et al., 2009). Moral injury almost always pivots with the dimension of time: moral codes evolve alongside identities, and transitions inform perspectives that form new conclusions about old events.
While the concept itself is not new—throughout history philosophers, poets, and warriors themselves have long wrestled with the ethical dilemmas inherent in war—the term “moral injury” is more recent, and is thought to have originated in the writings of Vietnam War veteran and peace activist Camillo “Mac” Bica (Brock & Lettini, 2012; Bica, 1999, 2014), and Jonathan Shay (Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, 1994) as the aftermath of warzone trauma.
Moral injury is increasingly a focus of discussion and study across disciplines and settings. Returning veterans, and those who care for them, are struggling to understand and respond effectively when experiences of war result in levels of anguish, anger, and alienation not well explained in terms of mental health diagnoses such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD.)
Drescher et al. (2011) define moral injury as “disruption in an individual’s confidence and expectations about one’s own or others’ motivation or capacity to behave in a just and ethical manner” (p. 9). Litz et al. (2009) further describe moral injury as “the inability to contextualize or justify personal actions or the actions of others and the unsuccessful accommodation of these . . . experiences into pre-existing moral schemas” (p. 705). Shay (2014) emphasizes leadership failure and a “betrayal of what’s right, by a person who holds legitimate authority in a high stakes situation.” Silver (2011) speaks of, “a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality, and relationship to society” (para. 6).
EXAMPLES OF MORAL INJURY IN WAR:
Using deadly force in combat and causing the harm or death of civilians, knowingly but without alternatives, or accidentally
Giving orders in combat that result in the injury or death of a fellow service member
Failing to provide medical aid to an injured civilian or service member
Returning home from deployment and hearing of the executions of cooperating local nationals
Failing to report knowledge of a sexual assault or rape committed against oneself, a fellow service member, or civilians
Following orders that were illegal, immoral, and/or against the Rules of Engagement (ROE) or Geneva Convention
A change in belief about the necessity or justification for war, during or after one’s service
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES OF MORAL INJURY?
Moral injury can lead to serious distress, depression, and suicidality. Moral injury can take the life of those suffering from it, both metaphorically and literally. Moral injury debilitates people, preventing them from living full and healthy lives.
The effects of moral injury go beyond the individual and can destroy one’s capacity to trust others, impinging on the family system and the larger community. Moral injury must be brought forward into the community for a shared process of healing.
In the context of a soul, with respect to the diversity of beliefs and religious perspectives held by those involved with moral injury, consider this:
Moral injury is damage done to the soul of the individual. War is one (but not the only) thing that can cause this damage. Abuse, rape, and violence may cause similar types of damage. “Soul repair” and “soul wound” are terms already in use by researchers and institutions in the United States who are exploring moral injury and pathways to recovery.
WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD ABOUT THIS BEFORE?
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTS or PTSD) became household terms over the last decade thanks to the maturation of attitudes about the costs of war; moral injury is now the object of growing focus by researchers and academics in the same manner.
Moral injury does not, by its nature, present itself immediately. Some will experience questions of moral injury days after an incident; for many others, difficulties will not surface for years. An experience with potential for moral injury is typically realized after a change in personal moral codes or belief systems.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT MORAL INJURY?
Moral injury must be acknowledged in the same way that we acknowledge the physical and mental costs of traumas experienced in war and other place of danger. Moral injury is subjective and personal. Research on moral injury is younger than research on PTSD – the definitions, ideas, and practices we’re working with are both experimental and varied.
Trauma of a type and severity that cause PTSD* are likely to cause moral injury, too. This does not mean treating PTSD will “treat” moral injury, nor vice versa. We favor the tenet that “treatment” of moral injury must be defined by the individual according to their beliefs and needs. Outlets for acknowledging and confronting moral injury include talk therapy, religious dialogue, art, writing, discussion & talking circles, spiritual gatherings, and more.
Therapists, counselors, social workers, and clergy are often at the front lines of addressing moral injury; however, the larger community can also take part. Consider that moral injury affects, and is affected by the moral codes across a community. In the case of military veterans, moral injury stems in part from feelings of isolation from civilian society. Moral injury, then, is a burden carried by very few, until the “outsiders” become aware of, and interested in sharing it. Listening and witnessing to moral injury outside the confines of a clinical setting can be a way to break the silence that so often surrounds moral injury.
*PTSD is a clinical diagnosis, identified and treated according to criteria and methods prescribed by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The APA last updated its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in 2013.
SO, WHAT ARE WE DOING?
Fostering public dialogue about moral injury.
Providing opportunities for veterans to design and participate in programs that explore moral injury.
Researching and educating on moral injury.
Raising awareness is prerequisite to creating change. We are building the space and capacity for those who have moral injuries to start their search for healing. This is not just an academic pursuit. We are addressing the needs of the wounded through multiple healing modalities. Our endeavor is unique in this regard; through the use of artistic and literary formats for public engagement, we can serve those who need healing while addressing the public need for understanding of this topic.
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The USA is an immoral nation, and always has been:
The U.S. can never be reformed to render justice to its African residents.
“Our struggle must have Africa at its core.”
The seemingly endless debate in America over what people of African ancestry should call themselves has made many of us weary — and with good reason. Consensus on this question seems more elusive than liberation itself.
But while what to call our people is not an urgent question, we cannot shrink from the task of answering definitively at least one underlying political question about our identity and the connotations of any name we might select. Specifically, should we — even with our collective name – associate ourselves with the U.S.? Is our relationship with “America” so antagonistic that our interests are ultimately irreconcilable?
For many Black political activists – from some of the most committed bourgeois Democratic Party stalwarts to some of the most revolutionary socialists – there is a widespread commitment to achieving political aspirations, if not within the current system, at least within North America. However, if what we face in this country goes beyond racial tensions and discrimination and is instead a state of war, then plans for freedom or liberation in the U.S. are grounded in self-delusion.
“Is our relationship with ‘America’ so antagonistic that our interests are ultimately irreconcilable?”
In this George Floyd moment, the evidence of ongoing brutal warfare against people of African ancestry in the U.S. is quite apparent. A distinguished international “Commission of Inquiry on Systemic Racist Police Violence” convened by the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL), International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) recently concluded that the United States should be investigated by the International Criminal Court for its systematic commission of crimes against humanity.
Among many other findings, the commission concluded:
“The crimes [of the U.S.] include murder, severe deprivation of physical liberty, torture, persecution of people of African descent, and other inhuman acts, which occurred in the context of a widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population of people of African descent in the U.S.”
The commission’s focus was on police violence, but as far back as 2007 , NCBL called for intervention by the International Criminal Court after the Black lawyers group investigated the government response to Hurricane Katrina and identified witnesses who alleged not only police violence against survivors, but also cold-blooded murders by national guard troops. Witnesses reported that a national guardsman placed a pistol to a Black man’s head at point-blank range and committed a gangland style execution. In another instance, a helpless Black woman was allegedly taken to flying altitude in a military helicopter and then thrown overboard to her death. Finally, a Black civilian pedestrian was allegedly shot to death by a guardsman in a passing jeep. These were only a few of the egregious crimes reported.
“The evidence of ongoing brutal warfare against people of African ancestry in the U.S. is quite apparent.”
While few deny the horrific treatment and conditions imposed upon African populations for the entirety of their sojourn in the western hemisphere, there are many whose political vision involves forcing the United States to govern itself consistent with its founding principles of democracy, fairness, and justice. But what exactly were those principles as they related to enslaved Africans and presumably their descendants? That question was answered plainly and forthrightly in the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. The U.S. Supreme Court said:
“But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.”
Similarly, in the case of Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court described the first nations as “savages” and pronounced them as populations not to be regarded as American notwithstanding their status as original indigenous occupants of territory stolen from them as they were being targeted for a protracted campaign of genocide. There can be no clearer pronouncements of what was intended by the elite white males who designed the U.S., and the fact that the country was so designed explains why a long series of constitutional amendments, civil rights laws and policy reforms have utterly failed to prevent the latest of an uninterrupted pattern of police lynching and other comparable racial atrocities.
Consequently, when faithful, Black, big “D” Democrats pursue reforms with starry-eyed zeal, they engage in folly. They can have no more success than the driver of an automobile who attempts to make his vehicle fly by attaching wings. He may want it to fly, but it never will, because it was not designed that way. The U.S. can never be reformed to render justice to its African residents. It was not designed that way. As God despised Biblical Babylon, he most certainly abhors the hatred, division, oppression, and racial violence that are characteristic of this country, and we should not conform ourselves to it.
“Civil rights laws and policy reforms have utterly failed to prevent the latest of an uninterrupted pattern of police lynching and other comparable racial atrocities.”
But what of the Black revolutionaries who recognize the futility of working for reform, but whose political vision contemplates an alliance with America’s white workers? Early socialists’ dreams of a multi-racial workers’ revolution were never tempered by realistic assessment of the extent to which white supremacist nationalism has thoroughly, if not permanently sabotaged efforts to construct political relationships with white workers. Although collectively, America’s Africans have been in denial about dismal prospects for such an interracial alliance, there have been individuals who have been quite clear on this question.
At the time of his public resignation from the NAACP in 1934, W.E.B. Du Bois declared:
“The colored people of America are coming to face the fact quite calmly that most white Americans do not like them, and are planning neither for their survival, nor for their definite future if it involves free, self-assertive modern manhood. This does not mean all Americans. A saving few are worried about the Negro problem; a still larger group are not ill-disposed, but they fear prevailing public opinion. The great mass of Americans are, however, merely representatives of average humanity. They muddle along with their own affairs and scarcely can be expected to take seriously the affairs of strangers or people whom they partly fear and partly despise.”
Du Bois’ 1934 assessment is no less true of the white workers who attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Not only do they fear and despise people of African ancestry, their emotional, and in some cases mental state is pathological and a permanent barrier to the comprehension that would ordinarily be the product of calm, reasoned analysis. In the end, this all implies that not only are there systemic roadblocks to African inclusion in the U.S. entity, but also an unavailability of a critical mass of the white population that is needed to destroy the system and rebuild it in a way that yields liberation and justice for Africans and indigenous nations that were specifically and deliberately excluded and oppressed.
Where then does that leave people of African ancestry who perceive themselves to be tied to the U.S. for better or worse? The answer is found in a broader vision. Many white workers may be pathetic, lost souls but changing U.S. demographics create new opportunities for different alliances. It is not simply a matter of creating working relationships with Latino, Asian, indigenous, Arab/Muslim, and other communities of color, and maybe even progressive white forces, but rather the political orientation of any such alliance must diverge radically from past attempts at rainbow coalitions.
“Early socialists’ dreams of a multi-racial workers’ revolution were never tempered by realistic assessment.”
The new alliance must have a completely different perspective on its relationship with North America. It must have an analysis of settler colonialism that is universal and that does not make exceptions for the U.S. If settler colonization of territories occupied by indigenous populations has been historically unacceptable in Palestine, Australia and southern regions of Africa, then it cannot be acceptable in North America. The crimes involved in the construction of the U.S. on a foundation of genocide and slavery are compounded by settlers’ theft of land. Consequently, a revolutionary alliance cannot have as its objective the construction of a new society on what is now U.S. territory, even if that new society is revolutionary in character. The only morally acceptable objective is a merciless, relentless struggle to return North American territory to the first nations from whom it was stolen.
The question of what is to become of non-indigenous populations is one that is to be addressed without presumptions and in consultation with the first nations. But regardless of any accommodations that might be made, those communities that are not indigenous to the U.S. must remember that they have their own points of origin, and a responsibility to ensure that those places make their own contribution to the global movement for genuine social, economic, and political justice.
African Liberation Day is on the horizon, and it serves as a reminder and a cue for people of African descent in the U.S. to acknowledge that their continent of origin is in desperate need of liberation from the clutches of foreign multinational corporations and imperialist governments, and that Africa also needs continent-wide political consolidation and socialism. If this form of Pan-Africanism is achieved, Black people in North America are likely to find to their delight that their community circumstances and life options will be enhanced immeasurably by the emergence of Africa as the world’s preeminent superpower with the capacity to ensure the security of not only its diaspora, but other struggling and oppressed communities around the globe.
So, in the great name debate if we are not prepared to call ourselves simply “African,” we must at least have a conscious appreciation of the fact that our struggle must have Africa at its core. As for the U.S., there may be current inescapable struggles for our collective survival that compel us to think about it and grapple with it, but otherwise we should purge the U.S. from our long-term political plans.
Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and long-time contributor to Black Agenda Report. He can be contacted at mfancher[at] comcast.net. He is the author of I Ain’t Got Tired Yet: The Spiritual Battles of Enslaved African Christians and their Descendants.
Of course, it has been around with us for centuries. There was the famous sermon aboard the Arbella in 1630 as the British sailed into Boston Harbor, in which John Winthrop said, “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of the world are upon us.”
So it started then?
It’s often marked as the origin of the thought. But the conquest of the continent, displacement of native people, an aggressive war against Mexico, the history of slavery, the counter-insurgency in the Philippines and many other moments in our history—all of it evoked criticism and resistance. There has been a narrative of dissent throughout our history. But nothing quite challenged the [exceptionalist] idea as the ’60s did in the Vietnam context.
How ‘Weathering’ Contributes to Racial Health Disparities – The New York Times
Why Black Men in America Have Worse Health than White Men—and What Needs to Change
Multiple factors including socioeconomic status and access to health care have combined to erode Black men’s health.
We with a moral conscious, with humanity and empathy, we are all weathering quickly under late stage fucking Rapist in Chief Trump’s Fascism.
Research suggests repeated exposure to stressors, such as racism and discrimination, leads to poor health outcomes among Black Americans. In Part 1 of this special series “The Price of Pain: Black Health & Reparations in America,” we explore the effects of racial weathering.
On a warm August afternoon in 2002, Bonnie Steele stood in the dining room of her family’s five-bedroom house, printing an essay for her evening theology class. She examined the homework beside an open window, where her north Minneapolis neighborhood’s summer air and sounds lingered.
Two of her daughters peeked into the room.
“We’re going to walk over and go see Grams,” the 12- and 19-year-olds told Steele.
Her four kids often walked to her parents’ nearby home. Usually, it was quiet and only took a few minutes — but this day was different.
Seconds after the front door closed behind the girls, the sound of a car’s engine filled the dining room, followed by screeching tires. Steele peered out of the window and saw a man leaning out of the car with a rifle pointed toward her girls.
“He started shooting, and it was like BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!” Steele said. “It just reverberated off of all the walls in that room.”
She was paralyzed by fear, unable to chase after her children or call out to them as she desperately wanted. Both girls survived the shooting unscathed, but Steele said the trauma remains.
She knew that she and her family had to move. Years of living in poverty and in fear for her life had taken a toll on her health.
Weeks earlier, during a dental visit, she discovered her blood pressure was 270/150, well above the healthy adult average of 120/80. With stage 3 hypertension, Steele, who was 45 at the time, was at risk of a stroke.
Steele was likely experiencing the effects of “weathering.”
Yeah, UnUnited $nakes of Israel Musk Adelson Tech Mafia First, Goddamn:
The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddamn And I mean every word of it
Alabama’s gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Alabama’s gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Can’t you see it Can’t you feel it It’s all in the air I can’t stand the pressure much longer Somebody say a prayer
Alabama’s gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
This is a show tune But the show hasn’t been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail School children sitting in jail Black cat cross my path I think every day’s gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine We all gonna get it in due time I don’t belong here I don’t belong there I’ve even stopped believing in prayer
Don’t tell me I tell you Me and my people just about due I’ve been there so I know They keep on saying “Go slow”
But that’s just the trouble “Do it slow” Washing the windows “Do it slow” Picking the cotton “Do it slow” You’re just plain rotten “Do it slow” You’re too damn lazy “Do it slow” The thinking’s crazy “Do it slow” Where am I going? What am I doing? I don’t know I don’t know
Just try to do your very best Stand up be counted with all the rest For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
I bet you thought I was kiddin’ didn’t you
Picket lines School boycotts They try to say it’s a communist plot All I want is equality For my sister, my brother, my people, and me
Yes, you lied to me all these years You told me to wash and clean my ears And talk real fine just like a lady And you’d stop calling me Sister Sadie
Oh, but this whole country is full of lies You’re all gonna die and die like flies I don’t trust you any more You keep on saying “Go slow” “Go slow”
But that’s just the trouble “Do it slow” Desegregation “Do it slow” Mass participation “Do it slow” Reunification “Do it slow” Do things gradually “Do it slow” But bring more tragedy “Do it slow” Why don’t you see it? Why don’t you feel it? I don’t know I don’t know
You don’t have to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi Everybody knows about Alabama Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam, that’s it
+—+
“At first I tried to make myself a gun. I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, and I didn’t care who it was,” Simone famously said after hearing of the Birmingham bombing. “Then Andy, my husband at the time, said to me, ‘Nina, you can’t kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do.’ When I sat down the whole song happened. I never stopped writing until the thing was finished.”
The end result, composed in under an hour, would become her first battle cry for the civil rights movement.
“It was my first civil rights song,” she later recalled, “and it erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down.”
In the years after she first penned the song, Simone changed the lyric, “Tennessee made me lose my rest,” several times during various live performances around the country and the world. On the same 1964 episode of Allen’s show, Simone swapped the line for, “St. Augustine made me lose my rest,” in honor of the civil rights movement that took hold in that Floridian city. A year later, she sang for “Selma,” after the brutal police confrontation with peaceful marchers across Alabama’s Edmund Pettus bridge in 1965, and later that same year for “Watts,” when riots broke out over six days in that Los Angeles neighborhood. Simone then mourned that, “Memphis made me lose my rest,” after Martin Luther King was assassinated there in 1968.
“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. That to me is my duty,” Simone said in an interview with Black Journal. “And at this crucial time in our lives when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved.
“Young people, Black and white, know this. That’s why they’re so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country, I will not be molded and shaped at all anymore.”
On Sunday, Trump’s younger daughter, 23, and his former presidential rival Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, attended the star-studded wedding of Sophie Lasry, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Marc Lasry, a top donor to Hillary’s 2016 campaign.
oh, no, the grand teachers of good versus bad language will Unsubscribe on a turn of the dime, well, when too many ‘cunts’ and ‘anal cleft scum’ and ‘Chlamydia Capitalism’ enters their precious email
Oh, AmeriKKKa, a la Xristian and Goy-ionist and Judaic insanity, now, Century of the Jews under Rapist in Chief Trump’s Minyan “Killing Us Softly (not so fucking soft, cocksuckers) with his Song.”
Here’s that cocksucker’s cocksucking “musicians”:
All VD Vance carriers of Chlamydia: Carrie Underwood will be joined by performers including Kid Rock, the Village People, Billy Ray Cyrus, Lee Greenwood, Rascal Flatts, Jason Aldean and more over the weekend and Monday as part of Donald Trump‘s inauguration events in Washington, D.C.
Turn them down, these fucking cunts in polluting politics: Elton John, Garth Brooks, Andrea Bocelli, Kiss, Celine Dion, David Foster, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Church, and Moby.
Ferguson refused to play when the inauguration committee wouldn’t allow her request to sing Billie Holiday’s iconic protest song “Strange Fruit.”
“I requested to sing ‘Strange Fruit,’ as I felt it was the only song that would not compromise my artistic integrity, and also as somebody who has a lot of love for all people, but has a special empathy as well for African-American people and the #blacklivesmatter movement, I wanted to create a moment of pause for people to reflect,” she said.
Indeed, the Jewish Century, the Century of the Mossad, the Century of Ellison and Zuckerberg and Altman and South African Racists Musk-Thiel, oh, what a strange strange fruit it is in Palestine, no?
My recent 10 pm last night mother-fucking Cunt-Tree-Tis-of-Thee Poem, Heat Seeking Jewish Missiles:
Heat Seeking Jewish Missiles
they seek heat
missiles which catch
babies breathing, quad
copters with bullets
barking puppies to
draw the heart-felt child
out of rubble, willing
to lend a canine a
hand, but Jews
use infra-red
to incinerate, oi vey
they want bodies
parts strewn far
and wide, beheading
with concussive force
2,000 pound bombs
signed by Lindsey, RFK
even witches like Marjorie
Green, anything to
make the men in dresses
go bat mitzvah over
raping boys
jew boy or arab boy
these IDF with khaki
green are the wimps
that Trump wants
cuddling him
in his wet dreams
man hater of women’s
parts, he talks but
not the part
boy with swagger
one cockroach away
from going back
to the shit
in the shadows
of the Judaic
ghosts, another Kraut
pressing flesh to
Jews, this time
concentration camp
is Gaza, the Jews
kapos one and
all
+—+
Chris Does His Best, without the colorful motherfucking cocksucking words like “cunt.
+—+
Here, part of the VD Vance and Company’s Nazi Land. Social Security? Cut?
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — An Oklahoma retiree says his Social Security benefits were suddenly suspended without warning — and with no explanation given when he reached out, according to NewsNation affiliate KFOR.
Now, because of recent comments from Elon Musk, he’s worried his benefits were cut because of his foreign birthplace
Oklahoma man receives unexpected bill from Medicare
McAffrey, 66, told NewsNation affiliate KFOR that there was one thing he most looked forward to in retirement.
“More time with the grandkids,” McAffrey said.
He also said he made sure to save up enough retirement money to, quite frankly, spoil his three grandchildren.
“I went out and bought [my granddaughter] a new jacket,” McCaffrey said. “She’s thrilled. And then her sister says, ‘Well, you know, she got a new jacket. Where’s mine?’ I said, ‘I’ll get you one.’”
He also looked forward to being able to travel more with his wife, who is nearing retirement herself. But, after he opened his mail on a Tuesday, he thought all those dreams would have to come to a halt.
“I’d hate to have to turn around and say, ‘Well, I have to worry about my next check,’” he said.
That’s because in the mail was a bill from Medicare — that he wasn’t expecting.
“It said that I needed to pay $740 before the 25th of this month, or I was going to lose my Medicare,” McCaffrey said.
That seemed odd since his Medicare payment is normally deducted from his Social Security check.
“So I called Medicare,” he said. “They returned my call after a wait and told me that they were unable to process it through my Social Security payment, that there was some problem with it. We talked for a bit. He kind of let it out that he thinks it’s a possibility that my Social Security was suspended.”
[Gotta Go, machete or Molotov or botulism or grenade . . . gotta go, this fascist cunt.]
Musk responded on social media by calling the move “crazy”, retweeting a post that suggested he should cut off Canadian access to SpaceX and Starlink in retaliation.
At the heart of Ellison’s recruitment strategy lies a bold interview question that perfectly encapsulates his approach to talent acquisition. According to Mike Wilson’s book “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison,” Oracle recruiters were instructed to ask candidates one striking question: “Are you the smartest person you’ve ever met?”
The genius of this question lies in its simplicity and effectiveness. If candidates answered “yes,” they were immediately hired. Such a response demonstrated not only confidence in their intellectual capabilities but also the kind of bold self-assurance that Ellison values. For those who answered “no,” recruiters would follow up with: “Who is that person?” – and then attempt to hire that individual instead.
Reminder – Multi-billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison has triumphantly declared that drones, using artificial intelligence, will finally be able to completely control the “unruly population” and can guarantee “the best behavior of citizens.”
“Google Was A CIA Creation, And They’re About To Do It Again…”
Then this cunt:
Signs of life in these cunts’ eyes?
Criminal Injustice at its peek:
An appeals court on Friday lifted a block on executive orders seeking to end government support for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, handing the Trump administration a win after a string of setbacks defending President Donald Trump’s agenda from dozens of lawsuits.
The decision from a three-judge panel allows the orders to be enforced as a lawsuit challenging them plays out. The appeals court judges halted a nationwide injunction from U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson in Baltimore.
Two of the judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that Trump’s anti-DEI push could eventually raise concerns about First Amendment rights but said the judge’s sweeping block went too far.
“My vote should not be understood as agreement with the orders’ attack on efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Judge Pamela Harris wrote. Two of the panel’s members were appointed by President Barack Obama, while the third was appointed by Trump.
Abelson had found the orders likely violated free-speech rights and are unconstitutionally vague since they don’t have a specific definition of DEI.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s chief counsel, Hilary Perkins, has resigned, the federal agency said in a post on social media platform X on Thursday, just two days after her appointment was announced.
In a post on LinkedIn, Perkins confirmed that she had left the agency, saying her previous work for the Justice Department had become a distraction from the Trump administration’s work.
Perkins’ appointment had been part of Tuesday’s official announcement from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) of a reorganization of chief counsel roles that gave HHS’s new general counsel oversight of the FDA’s top lawyer. HHS oversees the FDA and other health agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The HHS and FDA did not respond to a request for comment.
The resignation comes after Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri openly criticized Martin Makary, President Donald Trump’s nominee for FDA Commissioner, for Perkins’ appointment describing her as pro-abortion and having supported vaccine mandates.
Makary has not yet been confirmed for the head of FDA and it was not clear what if any role he played in Perkins’ appointment. Reuters was unable to reach Makary for comment.
Perkins had worked at the Department of Justice from 2019 in the consumer protection division and defended the FDA to keep the abortion pill mifepristone on the market with no new restrictions in a case that went to the Supreme Court, legal documents show.
She also defended the FDA in several cases brought by pro-abortion plaintiffs who sought to relax restrictions on the drug which included her arguing against dropping in person dispensing during the pandemic, according to a Reuters review of case filings.
“Unfortunately, my work as a career attorney at the Department of Justice defending the FDA throughout multiple administrations – which I performed consistent with my oath to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States – created an unnecessary distraction from advancing the Administration’s priorities,” Perkins said in the LinkedIn post.
Although the president promised not to restrict mifepristone on a federal level, prescriptions remain illegal in multiple Republican states, including Hawley’s.
Both Makary and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shared plans to have the FDA review mifepristone data after usage spiked following the overturning of Roe v. Wade
Musk-Trump-Stephen Miller’s AmeriKKKa:
Poor poor Nina: Nina was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder and was medicated at various points in her life.
“I feel what they feel. And people who listen to me know that, and it makes them feel like they’re not alone.”
– Nina Simone
Nina Simone is My Bipolar Hero
“I feel what they feel. And people who listen to me know that, and it makes them feel like they’re not alone.”
– Nina Simone
In high school, I listened to Nina Simone religiously. Not only was she a wildly gifted singer, songwriter, pianist, and musical arranger, but she was a committed activist who worked alongside MLK Jr. and Malcolm X. Every day after school, I would blast her music from my phone and pace around the house; “Feeling Good,” “Mississippi Goddam,” and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” stayed in rotation. I always had great admiration for Nina Simone, her sense of justice and urgency, her love for Black people, and the depths of feeling — and pain — which were always reflected in her music and hit me right where I needed them to.
I truly believed she felt what I felt and more. I knew Nina Simone and I were both pisces suns and mercuries, so I credited our similarly expansive range of feelings to our astrological placements and gravitation to sad music. However, the morning before I went to get Simone’s profile tattooed on my bicep, I found out that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s—something else we have in common that describes the soaring highs and devastating lows. I was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder (alongside my other mental illnesses) two weeks earlier after an intense manic episode that eventually turned into sleep deprivation psychosis and landed me in the hospital.
I was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder two weeks earlier after an intense manic episode that eventually turned into sleep deprivation psychosis and landed me in the hospital.
Navigating this mental illness has been painful and isolating, but I find I am less alone whenever I call upon her music and interviews. With her permanently etched on my arm, I am reminded there is a very real genealogy and archive of my emotional experiences as a neurodivergent Black woman*, and I would be seen by her if not anyone else.
Navigating this mental illness has been painful and isolating, but I find I am less alone whenever I call upon her music and interviews.
When Nina Simone began working alongside Martin Luther King Jr., she told him, “I’m not non-violent.” Musical storytelling was her violent weapon against white supremacy and she waged it ragefully and diligently on behalf of her people. When four Black girls were killed in a church bombing carried out by white supremacists in Alabama, Simone armed herself with showtune: “Mississippi Goddam.” This seething song voiced the urgency and anguish around continous acts of white supremacist, anti-Black violence against Black people in the South and was banned in several states. Simone was ready to burn down buildings and kill for Black people:
“At first I tried to make myself a gun. I gathered some materials. I was going to take one of them out, and I didn’t care who it was. Then Andy, my husband at the time, said to me, ‘Nina, you can’t kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do.’ When I sat down the whole song happened. I never stopped writing until the thing was finished.”
Musical storytelling was her violent weapon against white supremacy and she waged it ragefully and diligently on behalf of her people.
Similar to Simone, my hope for freedom ignited a creative appetite that could only be satiated by true justice and liberation for Black people and a desire for immediate action that propelled me to speeds that made my head spin. During the 2020 Minneapolis Uprisings, I returned to “Mississippi Goddamn,” playing it every time I got in my car to join my comrades on the streets. The song was instigating and agitating, telling the world justice for stolen Black lives was moving too slow and we had to do something about it. I had my first of multiple manic episodes that summer, and that song was damn near the only thing that could keep up with me.
I decided then that I wasn’t non-violent either. We are justified, but, when you decide that while Black, mentally ill, and perceived as female, there are repercussions in how people perceive you and how crazy others make you out to be, especially as you react in response to the violence plaguing your lived experience. I remember standing outside the Minnesota Capitol Building hearing ancestors say clearly to me that we need to burn it all down, that we had to end the world, that we have to do whatever it takes and do it right now. Later, doctors described that experience as mania-induced psychosis, though I acknowledge it as a spiritual mandate that I still live by, but that’s for another essay.
I decided then that I wasn’t non-violent either.
The nights and mornings started to blend as I stayed up all night plotting, prophesying in my notes app, and preparing my manifesto. I didn’t advocate for violence exactly, but if it is a condition to gaining our freedom, I didn’t care; what I was asking for would always be interpreted as an assault, anyways, read through the lens of angry Black woman stereotypes.
What I was asking for would always be interpreted as an assault, anyways, read through the lens of angry Black woman stereotypes.
As the intensity built in my body, I noticed some of my family and friends began to recoil and shrink in my presence in a way that communicated I was too much. I was too pressed, too ‘angry’ and they couldn’t carry the weight of the gravity I knew to be true: this world was anti-Black and needed to end.
But the world didn’t burn. It just crashed on top of me and all of the possibilities I had imagined with it. It felt like my dreams died when the mania ended, and I wanted to die with them. People stopped being about revolution. The absence of tangible progress was excruciatingly loud and there was no dial to turn it down and no one to hold me.
I’m learning through my own experience and Nina Simone’s, bipolar disorder just makes the desire for revolution ever more dire, urgent, heavy. It feels like it all needs to be acted upon immediately. When others aren’t moving the same speed or with the same insistence, or understanding how painful it is to navigate the contradictions, depression & nihilism become your only comfort.
I bring up these experiences to speak to the intersections of Black activism, insurrection, and mental illness. That Nina Simone navigated these intersections is important. When I found out Nina Simone also had bipolar disorder, I questioned how hard it must have been for her as a dark-skinned Black woman with a highly stigmatized mental illness going through such triggering, mania-inducing events—how she must have been perceived and treated, how little space there was for any recovery. It pained me even further to think about how she navigated the depression when the mania ended.
Years of performing protest songs and meeting with young Black students around issues of Black freedom had not improved Nina Simone’s quality of life, and after giving all of the creativity, passion, and energy her spirit could give to the movement, nothing and no one could give her the urgency she demanded and deserved. She said in multiple interviews that she began to regret her protest songs, songs that she originally fought her husband-turned-manager to perform. “There is no reason to sing those songs, nothing is happening,” Simone told an interviewer in the 1980s.
After watching the 2015 American biographical documentary film, What Happened, Miss Simone?, I learned that not only was she navigating undiagnosed bipolar disorder for most of her life, but she was also deeply traumatized by her physically and financially abusive second-husband alongside the recurring trauma of being a widely known and in-demand protest singer and civil rights activist in the 1960s. The documentary shows Nina navigating the dark sides of being a bipolar trauma survivor—from being dazed and absent on stage to filled with uncontrollable rage and despair.
Nina Simone lived with co-occurring disorders, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and eventually schizophrenia. I find it important to remind myself that Nina Simone experienced violent outbursts, psychosis, and mania, and she is loved. She survived debilitating depression and suicidal ideation, and she is loved. She is and was loved for her fierceness, bold honesty, creative genius, and for being so much herself in all of her identities. Maya Angelou writes in her essay, “She is loved or feared, adored or disliked, but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation. She is an extremist, extremely realized.” Nina Simone reminds me that neurodivergent folks are tapped into another world and frequency; our ‘extreme’ and deeply felt experiences have us looking for a world that can hold them.
Nina Simone reminds me that neurodivergent folks are tapped into another world and frequency; our ‘extreme’ and deeply felt experiences have us looking for a world that can hold them.
None of this is to say that Nina Simone’s brilliance and political urgency are simply manifestations of mental illness, but her neurodivergence matters and should be named as it is a part of her. When we discuss her legacy and her participation in historical moments, we should consider how she showed up and what she went through as a neurodivergent Black woman and trauma survivor. If we name her as such, it has the potential to provide space for those who resonate with that experience to be seen and reflected in history—to know that there was someone who came before who maneuvered through these emotional extremes and divergent energies. When we look, there’s a genealogy of neurodivergent Black folks and a pending demand for true justice and liberation to guide us.
*I am gender fluid/non-binary but still very much resonate with Black womanhood
*If folks choose to view the documentary, What Happened Miss Simone?, it is important to warn that her abuser was significantly featured throughout and was given space to speak on Nina Simone’s legacy and his abuse.
Kira is an organizer, student, & writer based in Washington, D.C. and Minnesota doing work around Black anarchy, abolition, and theories of racialization. They currently do work with Libereaders, a community mutual aid library that provides Black radical reads and hosts educational events about liberation.
“When I used to get blue years ago, James Baldwin would say the same thing to me each time: ‘This is the world you have made for yourself, Nina, now you have to live in it,’” the trailblazing musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone muses in the opening lines of her 1992 autobiography, I Put a Spell on You
“Andy walked into my dressing room and found me staring into the mirror putting make-up in my hair, brown make-up, because I wanted to be the same color all over,” she writes. ”He tried to get me to talk sense, but I said things like…I was Grandma Moses…I had visions of laser beams and heaven, with skin—always skin—involved in there somewhere.”
By the late 1960s, Simone was lashing out, heartbroken in part by the stagnant struggle for civil rights. “America betrayed me, betrayed my people and stamped on our hopes. Andy had betrayed me too,” she writes. “I felt like I was being attacked on all sides: the whole world was ganging up on Nina Simone.”
Simone retreated to Barbados in 1969, leaving behind Andy and their daughter, Lisa (who asserts she was physically abused by Simone). Even more inexplicably, she abandoned her beloved father after overhearing him brag that he had supported her family growing up, though it was her mother who had really kept them afloat. “I walked into the kitchen and told him he wasn’t my daddy anymore because I disowned him. From that moment I had no father,” she writes.
She held true to her vow. While her father was dying, Simone recalls staying in Tryon with Mazzanovich. Despite her family’s constant appeals, she refused to visit him on his deathbed. The day he was buried in North Carolina, Simone was performing in D.C., singing a song she just written about him which ended with these cryptic last lines: “When he passed away, I smoked and drank all day. Alone. Again. Naturally.”
+—+”
As a permanent side-effect of medications she developed a mild-to-severe case of tardive dyskinesia, which caused ticks in her face and mouth, and involuntary tongue movements. However, accounts from her close friends and family stated that if she was not medicated she could not manage her career and/or personal life.
I’ve always been curious about the relationship between creativity and mental health, even took a course in college called “Creativity and Madness” that explored the topic.
However, in Nina’s case it’s been my impression that her mental health negatively affected her art, rather than contributed to it. I think part of this is also the fact that many artists, while they excel at being creative, aren’t great at managing their careers or the business side of art and entertainment, so her creative impulses might’ve been impeded by her struggle with managing her own career.
I think what Nina desperately needed was a manager that was passionate about Nina, looked out for Nina, and truly had Nina’s best interests at heart. With the right manager, I believe she could have thrived.
Then again, I also know that Nina could be difficult to manage, so I’m not entirely sure the typical artist/manager relationship could have always endured her temperament.
She did have some very close companions that looked out for her (Roger Nupie and Gerrit de Bruin come to mind) but I don’t think either of them were equipped to fully manage her career.
This fucking white Brit is such a scum-bucket. Nina kicks it even in her mental health shakiness, but oh is she spot on. Took at gun to killa Swiss cunt who pirated her music. Watch.
…And Jews Want Universities & K12 to Scrub and Erase and Burn “the words” of truth
But first, cut cut cut, clear-cut, clear-cut, clear-cut the world, Under the Minyan of Trump the Rapist.
“Clear‐cutting thousands of acres of old growth forest is a wasteful and wanton practice that cannot continue,” said Holly Harris, Earthjustice attorney. “The Tongass is a national treasure, but it is also an economic powerhouse for sustainable industries such as commercial fishing and tourism. This kind of large‐scale industrial old growth logging hurts Southeast Alaskans and compromises the environmental and economic viability of the Tongass.”
“The rainforest of the Tongass should be safeguarded for future generations, not given up for unnecessary clear‐cutting. The best path forward, for both the wildlife and the people who depend on the Tongass, is to protect the rainforest and its old growth trees. Moving ahead with plans to log this amazing wild place is incompatible with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to transition away from old growth logging,” said Alli Harvey, Alaska Representative for Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign.
“Export based industrial‐scale clearcuts just don’t make sense on the Tongass, where our thriving fishing and tourism economy is based on healthy streams and abundant wildlife,” said Malena Marvin with Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. “Local people would rather see a small, sustainable wood industry that keeps money circulating in our communities while protecting the resources that support our Tongass jobs, fishing, and hunting.”
“Today’s rulings are yet another punch to the gut for the Tongass National Forest and southeast Alaska,” said Kristen Miller, Conservation Director at Alaska Wilderness League. “Continuing to subsidize sales like Big Thorne threatens the viability of the wildlife and scenery that bring one million people to hike, hunt, fish, kayak and tour America’s Tongass each year. Southeast Alaska’s economy has moved on from timber. Instead of continuing to pour money into massive old growth giveaways like Big Thorne, the Forest Service should be investing in the region’s true economic powerhouses of tourism, recreation and fishing.”
“This decision is disappointing for Southeast Alaska,” said Jim Adams, Policy Director for Audubon Alaska. “The Big Thorne sale bulldozed right over the Forest Service’s own guidelines for protecting deer and goshawk habitat. Selling off old growth trees and destroying important habitat for wildlife while losing millions of taxpayer dollars a year is shortsighted and foolish.”
+—+
And the scum always rises from the pig feces-blood-aborted fetuses POND. Trump, addressing DOJ attorneys, says that those who fight him in court are ‘scum’
“So, people with gender dysphoria can’t be honest, humble, or have integrity. You think that’s demeaning to people with gender dysphoria?” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes asked a DOJ attorney on Wednesday during a hearing on the service member ban.
“I can’t answer that question,” he responded.
Boebert stands by ‘pimp cane’ comments about Texas Representative Al Green, even as she faces censure — What Boebert said was “pimp cane” in referencing Rep. Al Green, a 77-year-old Black congressman from Texas, who shook his cane at the president before being removed from the chamber.
That phrase has led to a censure resolution against her.
So, this fucking Cunt-Tree was so primed for DOGE Raped.
The outlined changes are in service of Trump’s vision of drastically reducing the size and scope of the federal government — an effort that has been led so far by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Tens of thousands of employees on probationary status — typically those new to government or who have recently started in a new role — have been fired, though these terminations have been challenged in court and the administration has been ordered to issue sweeping job reinstatements.
Trump-towns.
Oh, Klein, again, more Jews on Goy-ionsts.
The specter of economic displacement is rising in the U.S., with eerie echoes of the Hoovervilles that defined the Great Depression. Today, growing homelessness, stagnant wages, and declining affordability are converging with the political landscape shaped by Project 2025—a proposed policy overhaul that threatens to exacerbate these challenges. If implemented, the consequences could accelerate the emergence of “Trumpvilles”—tent encampments of economically displaced individuals—driven by policies that weaken social safety nets, restrict worker protections, and amplify economic inequality.
As Ezra Klein discusses in his podcast entitled “Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning it?” Trump’s economic strategy and his administration appears willing to push the economy into ‘a period of pain, maybe even a recession,’ in pursuit of long-term economic dominance.
+—+
NO MORE KLEIN’S, please.
+—+
The university sent us this statement regarding the Education Department’s investigation:
We take this complaint seriously. We have recently reviewed all of our practices and believe that the University of Oregon is in compliance with the law.
We have continued to review policies and practices in light of the administration’s executive orders and look forward to working with the Office for Civil Rights to resolve this complaint.
he PhD Project’s annual conference is set to start next week in Chicago. A spokesperson for the organization did not say how many universities have pulled their support for attendees, or if they’d seen an uptick in requests to cancel registrations.
Fansmith said that initiatives to recruit a more diverse applicant pool shouldn’t be viewed as discriminatory—especially in academic fields that have struggled to diversify. Only 35 percent of doctoral candidates in business, and 26 percent of business school faculty, are people of color, according to a 2023 report from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
“There’s lots of admissions initiatives seeking to put institutions in front of groups of students so they become aware of the programs they offer. Those are not discriminatory,” Fansmith said. “The reason these programs exist is because there are categories of students who are underrepresented in many fields… it would be a shame to see schools walk away from them.”
And K12, in Oregon? [After two weeks of tumult, school board members in Woodburn — where 87% of students are Latino, the highest of any Oregon school district — have reversed themselves and supported a resolution expressing support for the privacy and rights of immigrant and refugee students.
The reversal, which passed on a 3-1 vote, with school board chair Noemi Legaspi abstaining, came after two hours of contentious testimony during which speaker after speaker castigated the board for rejecting the resolution at their previous meeting on Feb. 25.]
+—+
All dissidents and Indians and BIPOC and Palestinians are good if, well, dead.
Tribes and Native American students sue over Bureau of Indian Education firings
The resolution that the board passed Tuesday is similar to those passed by other school districts in Oregon in recent months, including Portland, Beaverton and Salem. It says that all children in Woodburn have the right to attend public school, regardless of their immigration status, and that the district supports Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state, meaning that school employees may not aid federal immigration enforcement efforts. The resolution also specifies that immigration officials may not enter school buildings beyond the front office or remove a student from school unless they have a court order to do so.
Several dozen Woodburn students were so upset about the previous vote that they walked out of school to protest; others brought their concerns directly to the school board, where they and others were asked to submit all their testimony ahead of the meeting.
+—+
Three tribal nations and five Native American students say in a lawsuit that the Trump administration has failed its legal obligations to tribes when it cut jobs at Bureau of Indian Education schools.
Firings at two colleges as part of the administration’s cuts to federal agencies, with the help of Elon Musk, have left students and staff with unsafe conditions, canceled classes, and delayed financial aid, according to the lawsuit Friday.
Lawyers at the Native American Rights Fund filed the suit in federal court in the nation’s capital against the heads of the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Indian Education Programs on behalf of the Pueblo of Isleta, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. The tribes allege they were not consulted when the federal government laid off several employees at the two colleges under the purview of the BIE.
[White KKK, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum walks to the House Chamber before of President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington.]
+—+
These fucking misanthropic Jews:
Meta on Wednesday won an emergency arbitration ruling to temporarily stop promotion of the tell-all book Careless People by a former employee, according to a copy of the ruling published by the social media company.
The book, written by a former director of global public policy at Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams, was called by the New York Times book review “an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, and its leading executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan.
If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there. While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)
In Spain people huddled together at movies
and heating simply didn’t exist.
After so much bloodshed, it was a peace
that dawned in dirty rags, just as we
Spaniards had none of it for five years.
And an entire penniless continent
wormy with history and the black market,
suddenly looked much more like home.
“Every year is a little bit different, but what’s clear is that the ocean continues to rise, and the rate of rise is getting faster and faster,” Josh Willis, who researches sea level rise at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
After reporting on sea level rise — which stokes increased flooding and storm damage while threatening coastal infrastructure from sewage plants to water supplies — over the past decade, the most common responses I receive on the topic (beyond the unprintable) are either essentially “that’s barely any sea level rise” or “stop sensationalizing sea level rise.” It’s true that four inches of sea level rise over the last few decades may not be concerning or noticeable to some people. And just four inches itself, occurring in a temporal vacuum, doesn’t spell a serious problem. The problem, however, is it’s not stopping at four inches.
In a previous report authored by top researchers at a diversity of U.S. agencies — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, the Department of Defense, and beyond — scientists project sea levels will rise by some 10 inches to a foot along the U.S. coast over just the next three decades. And again, it won’t stop there, either. The U.S. could see several feet of sea level rise by the century’s end. (Different longer-range sea level rise scenarios are shown later in this story.)
Musk-Adelson-Altman-Fink-Schwarzman-Zuckerberg-Ellison-Thiel-Trump and Company. Fucking fools.
according to Forbes, make that 2-7-6 the number of Jews with the billions/trillions messing with planet earth . . . look at what they do!!!
Here is part of what Saleh al–Jafarawi, who describes himself as an independent journalist, says:
We are exhausted, by Allah, we are exhausted. We have no strength left. For over 420 days we have been calling out to you. There is no picture we haven’t taken for 420 days. We’ve been documenting, photographing, and showing you the crimes of the Occupation. We’ve been telling you: Look, world, look at what’s happening to us.
We’ve died by fire, by shelling, by sniper fire, by being run over…. There’s no picture we haven’t shown you. And what did we gain? Nothing. We’re just losing our loved ones, losing ourselves, losing our friends. That’s it.
The video continues for some additional minutes. It is what this pained, altogether authentic man says next that prompts me to share this video with Global Bridge’s readers:
Until when? Just tell us, until when? When will the world feel our pain?
So the sickness of the UnUnited Snakes of AmeriKKKa and its conjoined fucking cancer, Israel, truly a giant Jewish thing, boys and girls.
In the middle of last year, the BBC began filming a documentary it titled, Gaza: How to survive a warzone. This was a bold, unflinching investigation into the lives of children in Gaza as they sustain the physical, psychological, and emotional scars inflicted by the Israeli military. The BBC did something admirably imaginative as it developed the project: Its narrator is a 13–year-old Palestinian named Abdullah.
Abdullah comports himself with admirable poise in the footage. He is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who at some point served as a deputy minister in the Hamas administration. I do not see that this should have been a point of any controversy, but, covering off the possibility that it might become one given the poisonous power Zionists and their lobbies exert across all manner of Western institutions, the BBC opened the film with a white-type-on-black panel that reads as follows:
The narrator of this film is 13 year old Abdullah.
His father has worked as deputy agriculture minister for the Hamas-run government in Gaza.
The production team had full editorial control over filming with Abdullah.
This is a commendably professional way to manage a circumstance cynics and media manipulators—and these appear not infrequently in my profession—could make a fuss about. The film that follows, fifty-nine and a half minutes, is also done professionally—revealing, effective, properly provocative, leaving the images and the children in them to speak for themselves. Abdullah makes a remarkable guide as he makes his way through the rubble of Gaza—climbing atop the remains of his grandfather’s house, leading us through streets that no longer look like streets. Always, always we see people running—to hospitals, to makeshift shelters, or merely to put distance between themselves and falling Israeli bombs. Gaza: How to survive a warzone is a remarkably well-conceived and well-executed film, not least because of the remarkable young man who tells its story.
And this turned out to be the film’s problem. To put the point simply, How to survive a warzone is too truthful, simply too well-done and too effective: The BBC’s management took it off the air two weeks ago—claiming, but precisely, that it was improper to use Abdullah as narrator because his father was his father.
And I think I am alone in my small house by the fucking Alsea River and Pacific Ocean. One bad multiple fragmentation sentence or paragraph could do us in with a nighttime little gift of the Judaic — a little accelerant yet to be catalogued dumped on my roof while I struggle to sleep.
All you fucking muts, you fucking Trump Cock-sucking muts. You want war, punks, boys and girls.
US bombs Sanaa as Trump threatens to ‘rain hell’ on Yemen over Gaza support
+—+
Team Cocksucking Trump:
+—+
NOTHING the Rapist in Chief does is human.
National Poetry Month, April:
My Fellow American
My fellow American, have you had a good day?
When you woke up this morning, was there a roof over your head, instead of a tent?
When you brushed your teeth were you grateful that your toothpaste was not a prohibited “dual-use item”?
Did you have running water with which to wash your face? a toilet to flush? a working sewage system?
Food and a refrigerator to keep it cold, an oven to heat it up, electricity or gas?
When you drove to work did you fear that a drone, an F-15 fighter jet, or an Apache helicopter might target your car with a precision-guided missile?
Was the road’s surface smooth, or cratered by bulldozers and exploded bombs?
Was your progress impeded by barriers and checkpoints? Were you “administratively detained,” handcuffed and tortured until you “confessed” to what you didn’t do?
Are hospitals, schools, places of worship readily available to you, here in the U.S.?
In Gaza, you may have heard, all structure, all infrastructure has haplessly succumbed to the 2000-pound American-made bomb with its lethal radius of a quarter of a mile.
But my fellow citizen, my accomplice in genocide, don’t let that knowledge ruin your day.
[Vaheed Ramazani is Professor Emeritus of French Literature at Tulane University, where he held the Katherine B. Gore Chair in French Studies. He is the author of three books, most recently Rhetoric, Fantasy, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2021).]
+—+
Okay now — icesheets, microplastics worse than acid rain, the Cunt-Tree-Tis-of-Felons going after transgender military, censorship by Jews of movies, including Academy Award doc, that fucking complete Jewish Freak Zuckerberg going after a book and author and former Facebook workers, more on ICE arresting dissenter, Mahmoud Khalil, Schumer the Jew and other Spineless Democrats, and it’s fucking Van Jones now rallying the dipshit Democrats, no more weather and climate studies thanks to this Cunt-Tree-Tis-of-Twats/Twits, national parks will have shit and garbage piling up on spring break thanks to the Rapist in Chief Trump and his Apartheid South African Room Temp IQ Cunt-Ejaculator-Musk, science out the fucking Mar a Lago window as eukaryotic phytoplankton is dying because of acidification, &, again: Rapist Trump and his coterie of Cock Suckers —
The US has launched a “decisive and powerful” wave of air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, President Donald Trump has said, citing the armed group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea as the reason.
“Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at US aircraft, and targeted our Troops and Allies,” Trump wrote on his Truth social platform, adding that their “piracy, violence, and terrorism” had cost “billions of dollars” and put lives at risk.
Did I say, we are fucked? Read the stuff above. Snapshot of the evil capitalism unleashes, the evil of banality unleashes, the Eichmann’s and Faustian Bargainers unleashing hell on earth, from bean counters, to little fucked up on the autism spectrum boys tinkering with drones, camera, AI, and letting the M.I.C. in on the game with their AI-directed machine guns and little big man missiles.
Visuals:
The Justice Department is investigating whether Columbia University hid students sought by the US
Layoffs to cause delays at Texas national parks ahead of Spring Break
Seasonal hires likely won’t be trained in time, association says
The mapping effort, called Bedmap3, includes far more detail than previous maps and includes millions more data points.
“In general, it’s become clear the Antarctic ice sheet is thicker than we originally realized,” said Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey, which produced the map.
[The huge size of the ice sheets means that the loss of even a small fraction of their total ice can significantly raise sea levels. From 2002 to 2017, for example, due to global warming, ice sheet losses accounted for roughly a third of mean sea level rise.
The Antarctic ice sheet, which covers 98% of the continent, averages around 1.2 miles in thickness, with its thickest point reaching nearly 3 miles, the Australian Antarctic Program reports.]
[Decades ago, acid rain was one of the world’s most alarming environmental crises. Pollution from coal power plants and cars made rainfall so toxic that it killed fish, wiped out forests, and even eroded buildings. Fortunately, governments passed laws to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions.
But now, there’s an even scarier problem. And this time, there’s no easy fix. Scientists have discovered that rainfall worldwide is now contaminated with microplastics—tiny plastic particles that may pose serious risks to human health and the environment. To make matters worse, this microplastic rain may even be contaminated with “forever chemicals,” too.]
In the study, titled “Eukaryotic phytoplankton drive a decrease in primary production in response to elevated CO2 in the tropical and subtropical oceans,” researchers conducted a series of microcosm experiments to examine eukaryotic phytoplankton community responses to ocean acidification.
Crevasses on the Greenland Ice Sheet Are Growing
High-resolution 3D maps show crevasse volume is increasing across most of the Greenland Ice Sheet as it accelerates toward the ocean, which could affect future ice loss and sea level rise.
The results also highlight how crevasses affect other processes on the ice sheet. When meltwater flows through crevasses to the bed of the ice sheet, it lubricates the ice, speeds its progress into the ocean, and helps melt the ice that enters the sea. Faster ice flow could open more crevasses in a feedback loop that could further increase ice loss from Greenland and raise sea levels.
+—+
You feeling the chill down your neck and spine of living in a time of global assassins and assholes and clowns and might makes right and retrograde mother fucking Christians and especially in the Century of the Jew?
Look at them all, that is, the ones that we know of: 276. They are the problem, don’t you know.
…And Jews Want Universities & K12 to Scrub and Erase and Burn “the words” of truth
But first, cut cut cut, clear-cur, clear-cut, clear-cut the world, Under the Minyan of Trump the Rapist.
“Clear‐cutting thousands of acres of old growth forest is a wasteful and wanton practice that cannot continue,” said Holly Harris, Earthjustice attorney. “The Tongass is a national treasure, but it is also an economic powerhouse for sustainable industries such as commercial fishing and tourism. This kind of large‐scale industrial old growth logging hurts Southeast Alaskans and compromises the environmental and economic viability of the Tongass.”
“The rainforest of the Tongass should be safeguarded for future generations, not given up for unnecessary clear‐cutting. The best path forward, for both the wildlife and the people who depend on the Tongass, is to protect the rainforest and its old growth trees. Moving ahead with plans to log this amazing wild place is incompatible with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to transition away from old growth logging,” said Alli Harvey, Alaska Representative for Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign.
“Export based industrial‐scale clearcuts just don’t make sense on the Tongass, where our thriving fishing and tourism economy is based on healthy streams and abundant wildlife,” said Malena Marvin with Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. “Local people would rather see a small, sustainable wood industry that keeps money circulating in our communities while protecting the resources that support our Tongass jobs, fishing, and hunting.”
“Today’s rulings are yet another punch to the gut for the Tongass National Forest and southeast Alaska,” said Kristen Miller, Conservation Director at Alaska Wilderness League. “Continuing to subsidize sales like Big Thorne threatens the viability of the wildlife and scenery that bring one million people to hike, hunt, fish, kayak and tour America’s Tongass each year. Southeast Alaska’s economy has moved on from timber. Instead of continuing to pour money into massive old growth giveaways like Big Thorne, the Forest Service should be investing in the region’s true economic powerhouses of tourism, recreation and fishing.”
“This decision is disappointing for Southeast Alaska,” said Jim Adams, Policy Director for Audubon Alaska. “The Big Thorne sale bulldozed right over the Forest Service’s own guidelines for protecting deer and goshawk habitat. Selling off old growth trees and destroying important habitat for wildlife while losing millions of taxpayer dollars a year is shortsighted and foolish.”
+—+
And the scum always rises from the pig feces-blood-aborted fetuses POND. Trump, addressing DOJ attorneys, says that those who fight him in court are ‘scum’
“So, people with gender dysphoria can’t be honest, humble, or have integrity. You think that’s demeaning to people with gender dysphoria?” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes asked a DOJ attorney on Wednesday during a hearing on the service member ban.
“I can’t answer that question,” he responded.
Boebert stands by ‘pimp cane’ comments about Texas Representative Al Green, even as she faces censure — What Boebert said was “pimp cane” in referencing Rep. Al Green, a 77-year-old Black congressman from Texas, who shook his cane at the president before being removed from the chamber.
That phrase has led to a censure resolution against her.
So, this fucking Cunt-Tree was so primed for DOGE Raped.
The outlined changes are in service of Trump’s vision of drastically reducing the size and scope of the federal government — an effort that has been led so far by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Tens of thousands of employees on probationary status — typically those new to government or who have recently started in a new role — have been fired, though these terminations have been challenged in court and the administration has been ordered to issue sweeping job reinstatements.
Trump-towns.
Oh, Klein, again, more Jews on Goy-ionsts.
The specter of economic displacement is rising in the U.S., with eerie echoes of the Hoovervilles that defined the Great Depression. Today, growing homelessness, stagnant wages, and declining affordability are converging with the political landscape shaped by Project 2025—a proposed policy overhaul that threatens to exacerbate these challenges. If implemented, the consequences could accelerate the emergence of “Trumpvilles”—tent encampments of economically displaced individuals—driven by policies that weaken social safety nets, restrict worker protections, and amplify economic inequality.
As Ezra Klein discusses in his podcast entitled “Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning it?” Trump’s economic strategy and his administration appears willing to push the economy into ‘a period of pain, maybe even a recession,’ in pursuit of long-term economic dominance.
+—+
NO MORE KLEIN’S, please.
+—+
The university sent us this statement regarding the Education Department’s investigation:
We take this complaint seriously. We have recently reviewed all of our practices and believe that the University of Oregon is in compliance with the law.
We have continued to review policies and practices in light of the administration’s executive orders and look forward to working with the Office for Civil Rights to resolve this complaint.
he PhD Project’s annual conference is set to start next week in Chicago. A spokesperson for the organization did not say how many universities have pulled their support for attendees, or if they’d seen an uptick in requests to cancel registrations.
Fansmith said that initiatives to recruit a more diverse applicant pool shouldn’t be viewed as discriminatory—especially in academic fields that have struggled to diversify. Only 35 percent of doctoral candidates in business, and 26 percent of business school faculty, are people of color, according to a 2023 report from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
“There’s lots of admissions initiatives seeking to put institutions in front of groups of students so they become aware of the programs they offer. Those are not discriminatory,” Fansmith said. “The reason these programs exist is because there are categories of students who are underrepresented in many fields… it would be a shame to see schools walk away from them.”
And K12, in Oregon? [After two weeks of tumult, school board members in Woodburn — where 87% of students are Latino, the highest of any Oregon school district — have reversed themselves and supported a resolution expressing support for the privacy and rights of immigrant and refugee students.
The reversal, which passed on a 3-1 vote, with school board chair Noemi Legaspi abstaining, came after two hours of contentious testimony during which speaker after speaker castigated the board for rejecting the resolution at their previous meeting on Feb. 25.]
+—+
All dissidents and Indians and BIPOC and Palestinians are good if, well, dead.
Tribes and Native American students sue over Bureau of Indian Education firings
The resolution that the board passed Tuesday is similar to those passed by other school districts in Oregon in recent months, including Portland, Beaverton and Salem. It says that all children in Woodburn have the right to attend public school, regardless of their immigration status, and that the district supports Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state, meaning that school employees may not aid federal immigration enforcement efforts. The resolution also specifies that immigration officials may not enter school buildings beyond the front office or remove a student from school unless they have a court order to do so.
Several dozen Woodburn students were so upset about the previous vote that they walked out of school to protest; others brought their concerns directly to the school board, where they and others were asked to submit all their testimony ahead of the meeting.
+—+
Three tribal nations and five Native American students say in a lawsuit that the Trump administration has failed its legal obligations to tribes when it cut jobs at Bureau of Indian Education schools.
Firings at two colleges as part of the administration’s cuts to federal agencies, with the help of Elon Musk, have left students and staff with unsafe conditions, canceled classes, and delayed financial aid, according to the lawsuit Friday.
Lawyers at the Native American Rights Fund filed the suit in federal court in the nation’s capital against the heads of the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Office of Indian Education Programs on behalf of the Pueblo of Isleta, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. The tribes allege they were not consulted when the federal government laid off several employees at the two colleges under the purview of the BIE.
[White KKK, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum walks to the House Chamber before of President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the Capitol in Washington.]
+—+
These fucking misanthropic Jews:
Meta on Wednesday won an emergency arbitration ruling to temporarily stop promotion of the tell-all book Careless People by a former employee, according to a copy of the ruling published by the social media company.
The book, written by a former director of global public policy at Meta, Sarah Wynn-Williams, was called by the New York Times book review “an ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, and its leading executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan.
If the news is so old, one might ask why is Meta going nuclear on Wynn-Williams? For one thing, its author was a senior executive who was in the room, and on the corporate jet, when stuff happened—and she claims that things were worse than we imagined. Yes, Meta’s reckless disregard in Myanmar, where people died in riots triggered by misinformation posted on Facebook, was previously reported, and the company has since apologized. But Wynn-Williams’ storytelling paints a picture where Meta’s leaders simply didn’t care much about the dangers there. While the media has written about Zuckerberg’s obsession with getting Facebook into China, Wynn-Williams shares official documents that show Meta instructing the Chinese government on face recognition and AI, and says that the company’s behavior was so outrageous that the team crafted headlines to show what the company would have to deal with if their plans leaked. One example: “Zuckerberg Will Stop at Nothing to Get Into China.” While making blanket statements that the book can’t be trusted, Meta hasn’t denied all these allegations specifically. (In general, when a company tries to dismiss charges as “old news,” that translates to a confirmation.)
In Spain people huddled together at movies
and heating simply didn’t exist.
After so much bloodshed, it was a peace
that dawned in dirty rags, just as we
Spaniards had none of it for five years.
And an entire penniless continent
wormy with history and the black market,
suddenly looked much more like home.
“Every year is a little bit different, but what’s clear is that the ocean continues to rise, and the rate of rise is getting faster and faster,” Josh Willis, who researches sea level rise at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
After reporting on sea level rise — which stokes increased flooding and storm damage while threatening coastal infrastructure from sewage plants to water supplies — over the past decade, the most common responses I receive on the topic (beyond the unprintable) are either essentially “that’s barely any sea level rise” or “stop sensationalizing sea level rise.” It’s true that four inches of sea level rise over the last few decades may not be concerning or noticeable to some people. And just four inches itself, occurring in a temporal vacuum, doesn’t spell a serious problem. The problem, however, is it’s not stopping at four inches.
In a previous report authored by top researchers at a diversity of U.S. agencies — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, the Department of Defense, and beyond — scientists project sea levels will rise by some 10 inches to a foot along the U.S. coast over just the next three decades. And again, it won’t stop there, either. The U.S. could see several feet of sea level rise by the century’s end. (Different longer-range sea level rise scenarios are shown later in this story.)
Musk-Adelson-Altman-Fink-Schwarzman-Zuckerberg-Ellison-Thiel-Trump and Company. Fucking fools.
… and NEVER EVER call us Marxists and socialists Trumpies for supporting the end of Zelensky and the end of support for the proxy war in Ukraine
The Americans have moreover completely deceived the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government with regard to the completely unrealistic victory of Ukraine in this war, in my opinion, because in any case the big loser in this war is Ukrainian population itself and also as a consequence Europe with all the crisis in which it was engulfed by the will of the politicians.
— Pierre de Gaulle, grandson of Charles de Gaulle, December 2022[23]
Fucking reality:
In early November, Barbara Bonte, a Belgian member of the European Union (EU) parliament, raised concern about the sell-off of Ukrainian land on a massive scale to U.S. private equity firms along with some Saudi agro-industrial and investment businesses.
Bonte wrote to the EU parliament that, “according to several disquieting reports, mainly U.S. but also Saudi agro-industrial and investment businesses are purchasing Ukrainian farmland on a massive scale. Cargill, ADM, BlackRock, Oaktree Capital Management and Bunge Limited, for instance, have reportedly gained control over much of Ukraine’s farmland.”
Bonte then posed two questions to the EU parliament as follows:
“1. What is the Commission’s assessment of the impact of this sell-off of European farmland to multinationals serving only U.S. interests on EU strategic food-supply dependence? How does the Commission intend to address that impact?”
“2. This strongly suggests that the United States is seeking to recoup its military support for Ukraine, and ensure a geopolitical presence there in a post-war scenario through control over Ukrainian farmland and the profits it generates. How does the Commission intend to prevent the United States from cherry-picking in Ukraine and Europe from being left to deal with just the handicaps?” (source)
If not enough people die, if not enough blood flows, the people will never stand up for themselves.
—Gheorghe Ratiu, head of domestic intelligence in Romania’s Departamentul Securității Statului “Securitate” 1986-1989[28]
Read read read, listen listen listen. Stay away from TIK-TOK and these fucking bizarre podcasters, man, whomever, working to bullshit their way into saying Little Ukraine (David) against Giant Russia (Goliath).
Is this same bullshit analogy working for the USA killing hope and futures in Cuba, in most African Nations, most South American Nations? Really, how many David’s have been destroyed by USA?
Ukrainian drones have carried out terrorist strikes extending into Russia designed to cripple its oil and gas industry and been deployed to attack Russian journalists
On one of its last days in office, the Biden administration declassified an account of its once-secret support for Ukraine’s drone industry.
U.S. officials said they had made big investments—sending $1.5 billion last September alone—that helped Ukraine start and expand its production of drones as it battled Russia’s larger and better-equipped army.
The U.S. effort included money to support drone makers and to purchase parts. The U.S. also sent intelligence officials to Ukraine to help build the drone program.
[Meet the CIA’s eager students—star pupils in the art of terrorizing civilian populations: Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist (OUN) partisans recruited by the CIA to fight against the Soviets.]
The history of Ukraine is long and rich. For millennia, the fertile lands of Ukraine with their black earth and rich seas have been highly contested. From the Scythians of antiquity, the Varangians who would eventually become the Rurukids and the first Tsars, to the Mongols, the Hetmanate and the Ukrainian SSR, it is impossible to truly understand the situation in Ukraine today without some historical background.
Out of all those who have lived, fought and died in Ukraine, one group stands out for their importance to the events of today. The fascist terrorists, bandits and collaborators known as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
“Terror will be not only a means of self-defense, but also a form of agitation, which will affect friend and foe alike, regardless of whether they desire it or not.” —UVO (fascist Ukrainian Military Organization) brochure from 1929
s I write, the world is on the edge of nuclear and humanitarian crises after a year of the Ukraine “proxy” war with Russia. No single event can be seen as the sole cause, but the most dramatic lurch in the story was the “Revolution of Dignity” in Ukraine in November 2013 to February 2014, notably the horrific massacre of protesters and police in Maidan (Independence) Square on February 20, 2014.
Without dismissing the large sectors of Ukrainian society with legitimate grievances against corruption and stagnation, this was a bloody coup d’état, engineered largely by the U.S. over years with parts played by NATO puppets and local proxies. Viktor Yanukovych was elected in internationally recognized fair elections, and new elections were planned to occur within a year. But powerful interests and a large section of the public believed it could not wait as he could not be trusted. And he was chased out of the country like a hunted animal.
And, like all “color revolutions,” despite the underlying legitimate grievances, it was no true upheaval or revolution at all, it was simply local elites of the same class switching their allegiances to another external power. As Ukrainian political researcher Volodymyr Ishchenko describes, four groups gained power after the violent 2014 coup: “the oligarchic opposition, the NGOs, the far right and Washington-Brussels.”[1]
[ncle Sam says to the Filipinos: You choose—school teacher or soldier? We will dominate you either way. A centerfold in Puck by Udo Keppler, published November 1901.]
The fact that Zelensky is Jewish is often mentioned by the naïve or deceptive as an obvious sign that “Ukraine can’t be that fascist.” But this ignores the strange bedfellows of money and power politics, particularly in a region that has been pumped full of aid, gas money, corrupted investment and propaganda for decades, and has long been a battleground between the U.S. and Russia as well as between a large minority of Ukrainians and Russia.
Behind Zelensky and many of the notorious nationalist-fascist militias in the Donbas war, such as the Azov Battalion, is Ihor Kolomoisky, the PrivatBank and Burisma-linked billionaire.
Not only is he accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of millions in fraud and embezzlement, but Federal Court records show a far greater level of embezzlement that triggered a recession in Ukraine: “Between 2006 and 2015, more than $4.45 billion was transferred without any apparent effort by the banks or the government to stem the movement of dollars as the oligarch and his partners acquired an enormous [U.S.] real estate portfolio.”[18] Yet, for the most part, the government, Deutsche Bank and mainstream media continue to look the other way. “He might be a totally corrupt oligarch with no morals, but he’s our guy!”
The main strategies of regime change are:
Soft power: Provide weaponized aid, development, humanitarian assistance and media to win public opinion, ideology and culture.
Political co-opting: Co-opt and unite opposition, ideally including military leaders.
Political grooming: Train and fund a new generation of overt agents of change, the future political leaders (e.g., the World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders” program).
Covert Action/Black operations: Train and fund covert agents of change (often fascist or extremist) to do the dirty work of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Narrative control: Develop a sympathetic media.
Economic warfare: Diplomatic isolation, sanctions and sabotage to “make the economy scream.”[21]
Mobilization: Organize mass protests and PR with media control, while also warning that “there will be blood.”
Provocateurism: Goons and dragoons of power engineer provocation, confrontation, outrage and chaos and the soft arm controls the media analysis through immediate (social media), short (mainstream news) and long term (NGO reports and books).
Assassination of key political leader or false flag targeting opposition leader or public citizens.
Denial and cover-up via censorship, propaganda and narrative bias. It helps if you built the whole mediasphere.
and so they judge Trump on Monday and then Wednesday, it’s a whole other fucking crime syndicate boss
In Ex-Colonial Countries, People Should Stop Admiring the US and Europe
April 13, 2019 by Andre Vltchek
It may sound incredible, but it is true: in countries that have been damaged, even totally robbed and destroyed by the West, many people are still enamoured with Europe and North America.
For years, I have been observing this ‘phenomena’, even in the most plundered, devastated war zones and slums. Often I was shocked, other times thoroughly desperate. I did not know how to respond, how to react, how to describe what I have been observing.
Then, a few days ago, in Syria, right next to the Idlib battlefield, close to the deadly positions of Al-Nusra Front, in a country where the West and its allies have murdered hundreds of thousands of people, one of my interpreters exclaimed in a ‘patriotic’ outburst: “Look how beautiful this land is! It is almost as beautiful as Europe!”
And at night, another guide of mine began nostalgically recalling his glorious days in Europe, when he could still go there; before the Syrian war began.
An interpreter did not know who Fidel Castro was (I had his portrait, lighting up cigar, as my phone screensaver), but both of them—my local companions at the battle ground—were fluent in Western slang and the worldview. They knew, however, near zero about China. They were patriotic and they fully supported their country, but at the same time they admired the West and Western journalists from the mainstream media—those very same propagandists who helped to bring their beautiful and unique Syria to the state in which it is now.
It all felt schizophrenic, but definitely not new.
I could not take it, anymore. I decided to write this story, despite the fact that it is an intellectual ‘minefield’. I decided to write it, because it is how it is. Because I have to tell it; someone has to. And above all, because it is absolutely essential to combat the crooked selfie image with which the West has been infecting almost all nations of the world, including all those that it has been plundering and raping.
I
Are we dealing with the so-called “Stockholm Syndrome” here? Most likely, yes. The victim falls in love with her or his tormentor.
For long centuries, the West has been colonising, usurping, literally terrorising the entire planet. Hundreds of millions have died as a result of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. Wealth, cultural and educational institutions, hospitals, transportation, parks—all that Europe and North America possess to date and boast about—was constructed on mountains of bones, on genocide and unbridled plunder.
That cannot be disputed, can it?
Slavery, mass murder, genocidal expansions; the West robbed the world, and then consolidated its power, promoting its exceptionalism through relentless brainwashing (called ‘education’), propaganda (called ‘information’), and twisted entertainment for the masses that inhabit poor countries (called ‘culture’ and ‘the arts’).
Shockingly and absurdly, Europe and North America are still loved and admired by many, even (or especially) in such places where Western governments and companies plagued everything like locusts, leaving to the locals only burned land, poison and miserable slums.
How is it possible?
For years, I have been working in Africa, a continent which was entirely subjugated by the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and other European expansionist nations. Africa, from where millions of men, women and children were brought in chains to the “New World”, as slaves. Where millions died during the ‘hunt’, where millions died in ‘transit centers’, and then, on the open seas. That’s tens of millions of ruined lives. The complete plunder of the resources, the unimaginable humiliation of the people, broken cultures, genocides and holocaust against local individuals from what is now Namibia to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Great African heroes like Lumumba assassinated by the Western rulers.
And yet, many Africans see the West as some great ‘example’, as a ‘guiding light’, as a severe but respectable ‘daddy’, who uses the belt when it is necessary, but who also rewards justly those of his ‘children’ who ‘behave properly’.
It is repulsive, but undeniable.
The greatest African writers are now teaching at US and UK universities. They have been ‘neutralised’ and ‘pacified’, many of them outrightly bought. In many countries, African judges wear comical white wigs, doing their best to look like their British counterparts.The children of corrupt elites are collecting diplomas from the UK and French universities, imitating upper-class European accents.
To behave, to look and sound like the colonisers, is something that brings respect.
The same on the Sub-Continent, of course.
The mannerism among the upper classes in India and Pakistan are those of the UK (and lately, of the US). Elites there go out of their way to be more British than the Brits; more Californian than the inhabitants of the US West Coast. Countless private Indian universities call themselves ‘American’ or ‘British’, with ‘Oxford’ or ‘Cambridge’ frequently ‘decorating’ their names.
‘To be accepted’ in Europe or North America is the highest honour in almost all former colonies, therefore, in almost the entire world.
‘Well-groomed’, well-educated and modern Asians, Latin Americans, Africans and the Middle Easterners are expected to ape Westerners; to dress like Westerners, eat (and drink) like the Westerners and to ‘defend the same values’ as them.
In fact, they are expected to be much more Western than the Westerners.
But ‘expected’ by whom? Yes, you guess correctly: very often by their own people!
II
Ask and many in the ‘South’ will tell you: everything that comes from the West is beautiful, progressive and dandy.
“Every bule is beautiful,” I was informed, recently, by a young indigenous professional lady in the totally environmentally plundered island of Borneo/Kalimantan. Bule is a vulgar, derogatory Indonesian word for the ‘whites’, and literally means ‘albino’. However, the lady was not joking, it was a compliment: she was brought up believing that every bule is actually superior and fine-looking.
In the indigenous Mexican state of Yucatan, right after the elections that brought to power the left-wing President Obrador, I overheard the conversation of a dozen or so upper-class housewives in a Western chain café. Their references were fully European and North American: from vacations in Italy and Spain, to the films they were watching, books they were reading; Europe was their ‘mother-continent’, while Miami their only true comparison. Before Obrador came to power, indigenous people were increasingly living in misery, their roofs broken, jobs disappearing. But the elites were, as always, in a European state of mind. The real Mexico was not on their radar. It did not matter, or didn’t even exist.
Even some of the poor in the ‘conquered world’, who are actually ‘concerned’ about Western imperialism, see it as an abstract problem. They see it as a strictly political, military or economic issue. The fact that Western imperialism has ‘culturally’ immobilised entire nations and continents is hardly addressed.
Even in those proud countries that are determinedly struggling against Western imperialism—China, Russia, Iran, or Venezuela—the Western narrative of exceptionalism has already managed to cause tremendous damage.
In China, for instance, almost everything ‘Western’ had been, until recently, associated with modernity. Being ‘against the West’ was considered boring, gray and outdated, somehow connected to the ‘Communist propaganda’ of the past (the fact that the ‘Communist propaganda’ was often correct, mattered nothing). This attitude allowed the great infiltration of Chinese universities by Western academia, as well as the injection of Western nihilism into Chinese arts, culture, even way of life. Only recently, has this dangerous trend been reversed, but not after it had already caused great damage.
The admiration of everything Western destroyed the greatest progressive experiment of modern history—the Soviet Union and the so-called “Eastern Bloc”.
The power of negative Western propaganda packaged together with the promotion of extreme individualism, selfishness and consumerism literally wiped out all internationalist zeal, humanism and higher principles from the minds of tens of millions of young Czechs, Poles, East Germans, Bulgarians and even Soviets.
The once proud Communist Eastern Bloc, after liberating dozens of countries from colonialism, after fighting for an egalitarian world, showing solidarity with all oppressed nations, was then gradually defeated by such shallow bullshit as blue jeans labels, the nonsensical lyrics of rock and pop songs (a favorite weapon of the West), greed, religions (another Western weapon), and slogans like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ (the Western world which has been denying freedom and democracy to almost all countries on our planet, cynically turned the truth upside down and fooled East Europeans, by skillfully applying centuries long propaganda methods).
In the end, confused and increasingly cynical, what many East Europeans demanded was not ‘freedom’, but more money, more labels, and the ability to join the bloc of the countries that have been plundering the world.
III
So, what makes the West so successful, when it comes to brainwashing people all around the world? How is it possible, after all that banditry, terror and ruthlessness, that most of the oppressed and conquered countries are still showing plenty of respect to the masters that reside in New York, London or Paris?
I believe that if we find the answers to this question, we will be able to save the world and reverse this deadly trend.
First of all, after interacting with thousands of people in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and Latin America, I am coming to the conclusion that the West (and Japan) is often admired for the ‘high standards of living’.
In such miserable and collapsed countries like Indonesia, I often hear nonsense like: “European countries are more ‘Muslim’ than we are. They treat people much better than we do.”
Middle and upper class Southeast Asian families travel to Netherlands or Germany, and then exclaim after returning home: “Look at their parks, hospitals, bicycle lanes, trams, museums . . . We have to learn from them! They do so much for improving our world.”
That’s precisely what Africans admire about Europe. That’s how many ‘educated’ Indians or Southeast Asians feel. That’s what Peruvians, Hondurans or Paraguayans love about their Miami.
Are they wrong? Isn’t there, after all, plenty that poor countries could learn from the West?
Yes; definitely they are wrong. Totally wrong!
Let’s see ‘why’?
The West ‘arranged’ the entire world in accordance with its own feudal system of the past centuries. It brought the system of shameless oppressive regime to the global level.
To admire this monstrous and regressive global system would be like admiring the arrangement of European societies some three hundred years ago. It would be essentially like saying: “Look, the aristocracy of France or England was actually quite fine, egalitarian, educated and healthy, and we should learn from how they lived, and copy their examples!”
Of course, the aristocracy, the royalty and the church of Europe has always lived well, even 300 years ago. They had good schools for their children, they had decent medical care, palaces, summer villas, sanatoriums with mineral waters, theatres, lavish parks and tons of servants.
The only ‘tiny’ problem was that some 95% of the population had to work for the luxury they enjoyed, subsisting in total misery. Plus, of course, those tens of millions of un-people in the colonies were being exterminated like animals.
The same is happening now. The entire Europe (with the exception of the poor people there) has moved to the bracket of new aristocracy, at least comparatively. And the rest of the world is labouring, dying, being raped and plundered, in order to maintain this ‘wonderful-looking’ social-state project of the West. Even the US and its relatively brutal turbo-capitalist model is still ‘socialist’ (for the US citizens), compared to such countries as Indonesia, India, Peru or Nigeria.
Western standards of living cannot be replicated elsewhere. To believe that the West would allow Africans or Southeast Asians to build a social state is naïve, almost intellectually insulting. Singapore, South Korea and Japan are rare exceptions, where the West closed both eyes, for strictly strategic reasons.
In order for the West to prosper, maintaining a super high standard of living, with all the benefits for its citizens, billions of the ‘serfs’ all over the world have to suffer, sacrifice themselves, and work for close to nothing; the more of them that live in hell, the better.
Nature has to be plundered in places like Borneo and Papua, DR Congo and soon in Brazil.
People have to be ruled by pro-Western corrupt oligarchs, and by the military and religious leaders. Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and now Brazil, are perfect countries for the West: they happily and willingly sacrifice their own people, guaranteeing Western prosperity.
You did not know? Nonsense! You did not want to know. All those people who matter are very happy with this arrangement: the Western rulers, citizens of Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the rulers/elites in the poor countries. The only ones who are truly suffering are those billions of the poor, worldwide, but they matter nothing, and they are not told anything anyway, because the media is in the hands of the West and their lackeys, and so is ‘education’.
And as they are not told anything, they—the wretched of the Earth—are admiring the West, too. They eat Western junk food if they can save few dollars a month, they drink Nescafe instead of their traditional coffee, listen to the shittiest music, watch pirated Hollywood blockbuster movies, wear fake sneakers and jeans, and masturbate to Western porn (if they have internet). They also dutifully follow religions, which were injected and upheld by the West, into their countries.
The poorer the country, the greater appear to be the green hills and pastures of the Western paradise.
And so it goes, on and on.
I am an ‘old-fashioned’ revolutionary. Slaves have to rise and fight, if necessary die for freedom; not to admire their masters and tormentors.
IV
Frankly and honestly, I am tired of this status quo. And I don’t find this amusing at all: hearing admiring statements about European and other Western countries in the middle of the monstrous war zones, famine-stricken areas, brutal mines, on the banks of poisoned rivers and inside the slums.
I am an ‘old-fashioned’ revolutionary. Slaves have to rise and fight, if necessary die for freedom; not to admire their masters and tormentors.
The crimes of the colonialists have to be exposed. The insane arrangement of the world has to be defined and then smashed into pieces.
The cute trams, bicycle lanes, parks, museums, operas, cafes, universities and hospitals in Europe are built on rivers of blood and the bones of ‘The Others’. I said it three years ago on the floor of the Italian Parliament, and I will repeat it again and again, wherever I go.
There is no other topic that matters, right now, on our planet.
Everything is connected to this, including the fear and hate that the West feels and spreads about countries like Venezuela, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa, Syria or Cuba.
They hate us; they hate those who resist, who are standing tall. And they should and will get back the same in return, hopefully, if the truth is pronounced often enough!
This is a relatively short version of an essay that’s over 4000 words long. I wrote that essay in response to the recent newspaper letter from Shalom Humboldt, the Zionist group which has sought to defend Palestine’s colonization to my local community. To make my arguments more accessible, I’ve put together a concise list of the assertions this letter makes, next to summaries of why these assertions are false. This can serve as a handy guide to countering many of the narratives Zionists use to try to discredit the Palestinian liberation cause.
+—+
So, Shalom is a Zionist term? What the fuck. These are Jews first, Jews second and then Jews to the third power, which is I suppose it Zionism.
Shalom: used as salutation by Jewish people at meeting or parting, meaning “peace.”.
““I’ll be waiting for your call.” “Au revoir.” “Shalom.””
+—+
Jewish inspired:
Intercept (Lalalandia on fucking steroids and triple cream milkshakes)…..
One of the very first executive orders signed by President Donald Trump attempts to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. But under international law, the American government doesn’t have the authority to change the name of the entire Gulf worldwide — and most countries, including Mexico and Cuba, aren’t accepting the name change.
Likewise, noting that the area has carried the name the Gulf of Mexico for more than 400 years, The Associated Press, better known as the AP, decided not to change the name in their reporting. In retaliation, the Trump administration barred the AP’s reporters from the White House press pool and events. It hasn’t stopped there.
They followed up by announcing they intend to cherry-pick friendly media to join the press pool instead, breaking more than a century of independence granted by every Republican and Democratic administration before this one.
This is an unacceptable attack on freedom of the press, in violation of the First Amendment. The AP has sued to regain access, arguing that the administration’s goal is to coerce journalists to use “only government-approved language” in reporting. The administration doesn’t have to wait until the court orders them to act, but they won’t change course unless they hear from the American people.
+—+
They all need to be shot, Mighty Mouse:
On Tuesday, the Association of Foreign Correspondents of the Argentine Republic (ACERA) denounced obstacles to access to official information and the “deterioration of conditions for journalistic coverage” since Javier Milei took office as president in December 2023.
+—+
Winning? Russia Downs 343 Ukrainian Drones Overnight
Putin has to go and bring in the communists, please:
U.S. will immediately resume military aid as Ukraine says it is open to 30-day ceasefire
[Photo: Young recruits of the 10th Edelweiss Separate Mountain Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces attend an oath ceremony, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in an undisclosed location, Ukraine March 8, 2025. Ukraine’s Defence Ministry launched a recruitment drive for young people, 18- to 24-year-olds, to serve in the military for a year for the equivalent of about $24,000 and hefty bonuses. Press Service of the 10th Edelweiss Separate Mountain Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via REUTERS]
+—+
Russia don’t get it!
The Network State: Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, and Silicon Valley’s Quest for Greenland — How the Crypto Broligarchy May Explain Donald Trump’s Bizarre Greenland Fixation
In 2019, Donald Trump stunned the world by announcing his desire to purchase Greenland. As Americans slowly growing accustomed to Trump’s daily stream of bats*** insane suggestions—nuking a hurricane, the sound of windmills causes cancer, stealth jets are literally invisible to the naked eye—we collectively rolled our eyes, shrugged our shoulders and said, Huh?
Greenland?
We assumed that giant, barren patch of ice rock over Canada’s right shoulder was Donnie Quixote’s latest real estate windmill to go tilting at. Or maybe the “very stable genius” was miffed about never making Santa’s Nice List and was looking for a staging ground to invade the north pole and put whatever elves felt like defecting to work on H-1B visas at Doral.
One possible explanation was the increase in international attention Greenland has been garnering as North Atlantic shipping lanes have started opening up due to global warming and the melting polar ice caps, dramatically reducing maritime trade routes previously relegated to the Panama and Suez canals for traversing the globe. But since Trump built an entire political movement centered on the counter-factual notion that global warming isn’t real and climate change is a Chinese hoax, convincing his supporters that we needed to invade Santa’s Magic Workshop to capitalize on the global warming that doesn’t exist might’ve invited a tougher conversation with the perpetually-outraged Red Hats than he was up for.
Another possible explanation—one that squares rather nicely with Trump’s ambitions in the Ukraine peace talks—is Greenland’s abundant natural resources. Like Ukraine, Greenland has a vast, untapped supply of rare earth minerals that are critical to the construction of computer chips and semiconductors, which we’re currently reliant on China and Russia for. Say, that reminds me—you know who would really love to get their hands on a virtually unlimited supply of computer components?
Silicon Valley.
In Democracy is Dead: The Rise of Corporate Monarchy, we learned that the PayPal Mafia and billionaire tech bros of Silicon Valley are ideologically aligned with the dystopian political philosophies of Curtis Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment (I’m not going to rehash it here; click the link for a refresher). Yarvin got the bulk of the attention last time; this time, Thiel’s name is going to come often enough you’re going to be sick of hearing it before we’re done.
The last thing I’ll say about Yarvin for now is that his “burn everything down and turn society into The Matrix” isn’t the only anti-American/anti-democratic ideology out there, merely the most extreme. There are less radical movements to choose from—some of them downright utopian sounding—but they all have two things in common: 1) an end to the American way of life as we know it, and 2) the financial backing of Peter “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” Thiel.
+—+
Study the Rapist in Chief Trump and his minyans/minions. Andreessen Horowitz funded Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and donated nearly $90 million to Donald Trump and Trump PACs)
Paul Haeder, Author 