“So, they haven’t broken — they have not broke me. I am not broken.”
While he was in prison, he was treated — I mean, it was hell on Earth all 49 years. And he was revered and respected by the prisoners, but it was hell on Earth. He never had proper medical care. He never had the medical attention that he needed. And he was in maximum security the entire time. Think about that. He was in maximum security the entire time. And so, you know, he was so happy to get out of there because of how he was treated in that place and how bad that place is, not just for Leonard Peltier but for all prisoners who are in there.
Comanche Chief Tosahwi reputedly tells Sheridan in 1869, “Tosahwi, good Indian,” to which Sheridan supposedly replies, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” (Brown, 1970).
Kathy Peltier, the daughter of Leonard Peltier, in Burbank, Calif., on March 17. The banner was made for a march of several hundred Native American activists and supporters from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in 1978.
Leonard Peltier walked out of the front doors of Coleman prison energetic and completely dignified. When he walked out, he shook the hands of all the corrections officers, and all of them were happy to see him go. They had deep respect for him. He came walking out, and I stuck my hand out to shake his hand, and he just hugged me, and he said, “I’m free. I’m finally, finally free.” And he was so excited to get out of the prison.
We hopped in the vehicle. We got him into the vehicle, and we started listening to Redbone and music, and he was dancing in the backseat of the car. And it was joy. It was absolute pure joy to watch him do that. And then we were able to do a ceremony for him and to wipe him off and to bless him and put prayers of protection over him and wipe him off from the things that happened there in prison.
And then, when we came home, when we got him back to Turtle Mountain, the streets were lined with hundreds and hundreds of people welcoming him home, holding up signs, cheering, singing, war whooping. It was a beautiful, beautiful sight. I remember seeing the sign that said, “Miigwech, Leonard Peltier,” which in the Anishinaabe language ”miigwech” means “thank you,” and the amount of love and gratitude in which he was embraced by his community, his people and his movement. It was an absolutely historic and moving day.
And Leonard was absolutely joyous when we rolled up to his home that we had got for him. And this is the first home Leonard Peltier had had since he was 9 years old, since he was taken away from Turtle Mountain to go off to boarding schools. And now he walked into this home that was prepared for him, and he loved it. And we prayed in that home, and we blessed out that home. And Leonard sat down on the couch and said, “Here, I’m finally home.”
And he thanked everybody. And that’s the thing he wants everybody to know, is he thanks everybody around the world for fighting for him and standing up for him and never giving up on him.
Today, NDN Collective announced that after nearly two and a half years of legal battles, all charges against NDN Collective president and CEO Nick Tilsen have been dismissed by the state of South Dakota.
“My case held a mirror up to the so-called legal system, where prosecutors – fueled by white fragility and fear of Indigenous power – wasted years of state resources to intimidate, criminalize, and violate me,” said Nick Tilsen, president and CEO of NDN Collective. “The fact that I’ve gone from facing 17 years in prison to all charges dismissed is not a coincidence or an act of justice – it’s evidence that the charges were bogus from the start. We only won because we had effective tools and a strong network to fight them, and did not back down until we had exhausted the system that was built to exhaust us.
“The past few years have been incredibly difficult in many ways – but feeling the support of my community and ancestors along the way has been lifegiving. I extend my deepest gratitude to everyone who took action on my behalf, prayed for me in ceremony, and supported my family through the darkest times. This victory belongs to all of you.
Nick Tilsen stands outside of the courthouse in Rapid City, South Dakota after a hearing in October 2021. Photo by Willi White for NDN Collective.
“While this particular battle has finally been won, my work for Indigenous liberation is far from over. I will continue fighting for the Black Hills to be returned to the Lakota people, and for all rightful Indigenous land to be returned to its people across Turtle Island.”
Tilsen has continued to lead NDN Collective throughout the legal battles created and continuously prolonged by the state of South Dakota. In the past year alone, the organization has opened Rapid City’s first Indigenous led school, granted $19.4 million to Indigenous people fighting for liberation across Turtle Island, began investing into sustainable housing solutions for Rapid City’s unsheltered community, sent a delegation to the United Nations Climate Change conference, mobilized people to stand up to systemic racism in Rapid City resulting in a federal civil rights lawsuit, and much more.
TRACKER GINAMARIE RANGEL QUINONES:
So, our relative Leonard Peltier has been incarcerated for 50 years in a draconian system. And I am from Arizona. We are First Nation people. And we are here to witness this as our relative walks out. … This is the most important day, because not only does it stand for the Indigenous First Nation people here on Turtle Island, but it also stands for people internationally. This represents — his incarceration represented not only other political prisoners, but people who stand in solidarity for all humankind and humanity.
We are not going to give up. We’re going to win. We’ve been winning. We’re going to continue to win. We’re going to — we’re going to stick together. We’re going to unite. As it is right now, we’ve been united all through Indigenous countries. And we’re going to — we’re going to fight back. We’re going to — we’re going to continue ’til we are a free nation. I gave 50 years for that. And I’m going to give the rest of my life. So, they haven’t broken — they have not broke me. I am not broken. — Leonard
All those fucking Trumpers, all those bro’s, liberatrian sorta guys, Aaron and Max and then the Bat Mitzvah one, Katie, and so so many thinking Trump does ANY FUCKING thing GOOD.
As Indian Country celebrated the release of Leonard Peltier in one of Joe Biden’s final actions as president, the new occupant of the Oval Office began taking aim at some of the bedrock principles of the trust and treaty relationship.
Just hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders that he said would restore “common sense” to federal government. In particular, he rescinded nearly 80 policy directives that Biden had issued over four years in the White House.
“With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense,” President Trump said in his inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol on Monday. “It’s all about common sense.”
But in targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in federal policy, Trump also swept up the first Americans and their long-standing relationship with the U.S. As confirmed by numerous laws and court decisions, the nation-to-nation relationship is based on the recognition of tribal governments as sovereign entities — it’s not rooted in race or racial status.
“So our Native sovereignty exists hand-in-hand with that sovereignty,” Tahsuda said at the Navajo Nation Washington Office in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s actions and words on January 20, however, do not explain why the trust and treaty obligations of the federal government have been targeted by his anti-DEI efforts. Buried in the lengthy list of his “initial rescissions of harmful executive orders and actions” is a Biden-era executive order that merely promoted Indian education — from public schools to tribal colleges and universities.
“As many of my colleagues know, the federal government holds a unique trust responsibility to the Native and tribal communities, a responsibility that is not just a legal obligation, but a moral one,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), the former chair of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, said in passing the bill known as the National Advisory Council on Indian Education Improvement Act. [S.5355]
“This trust is rooted in both the U.S. Constitution and centuries of commitments to Native communities,” added Foxx, who now chairs the powerful House Committee on Rules, a position that is key to advancing legislation in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives.
It’s not clear why Trump in particular rescinded Executive Order 14049, which Biden signed on October 11, 2021, to little fanfare. But the name itself — “Equity” is in the title — along with words and phrases like “diverse” and “justice” and “gender based violence” in the text make it an easy target amid the strong anti-DEI current within the Republican party.
“What President Trump did is he got away from DEI and gave everybody — once again, regardless of your race or identity — they gave you an opportunity to succeed on merit base,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the only Native American in the U.S. Senate, said on Fox News Radio on Wednesday.
“Wow. That’s America for us,” Mullin said on Fox Across America With Jimmy Failla, during which he brought up the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee people and other Native peoples from their homelands by the U.S. government.
+—+
Trump, man, this is the Elon Musk-Jewish Minyan-Tech Bro’s Fucking sickness:
JOHN WASHINGTON:
So, what happened, this started last week. This mother of four was with two of her children, and she was selling empanadas outside of a gas station in Tucson, when she says that she was verbally attacked by someone who was leaving the gas station. And that person then called the police. The responding officers were state troopers. And this woman packed up her things and packed up her children and started driving away. And the officers made a stop down the road. The pretext was that she was driving too slowly, 25 miles a hour in a 40-mile-an-hour zone. She was taken out of the car. She was extensively questioned. And as that was happening, the Border Patrol were already on their way. The troopers had allegedly called the Border Patrol. She was handcuffed, as you mentioned, by Border Patrol officers in front of her children. And her children were then taken away to a short-term detention facility elsewhere in Tucson that was run by Border Patrol.
She says, from there, that she suffered a night of interrogation, that Border Patrol officers were accusing her of being in a Venezuelan gang. They were accusing her husband of being in a gang. They actually were questioning her 6-year-old daughter and saying that her dad was a gang member. All of these claims, the family vehemently denies.
“I lived through a kidnapping. I was scared to return to México,” she says. She also continued her pleas for her other two children still in Tucson.
She says that agents just kept saying, “That’s not my problem.”
At the Tucson sector Border Patrol station, agents questioned both her and her children. “They asked my 6-year-old daughter if her dad was a gang member, if he had a gun,” she says. Her daughter was sobbing.
“Imagine scaring a 6 year old like that,” Yesenia’s sister-in-law says. She asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from immigration or law enforcement officials.
Yesenia also says agents threatened to send her to Guantánamo, and that her kids could be put up for adoption.
“My son, 9 years old, was crying. He’s really sensitive. He kept trying to stop the agents from talking to his mom and sister like that, but they yelled at him to be quiet,” Yesenia says.
And just hours later, after a really difficult night and with the 9-year-old son trying to protect his mom and his younger sister from what he saw as aggressive Border Patrol agents, they were deported to Mexico. And from there, they were taken about 2,000 miles south. And not until they arrived to their destination were they able to make the first call. So, the mother tells me that she pleaded with first the state troopers, then the Border Patrol agents who were arresting her, and then multiple times during the night, to please let her have a phone call to let her family know where she is, where she and her two children were, to check in with her other two kids and let them know. But she was repeatedly denied calls both in the U.S. and then also in Mexico.
and Trump is all about Raping and Musk, don’t you know
[Read full article below all my rant!]
Beware of old Jewish Men and their headlines: ‘ZERO EMPATHY, ZERO SHAME’. Sy Hersh is not talking about the zero empathy of Jewish State of Murdering Raping Maiming Starving Poisoning Occupied Palestine. NOPE. Not the Jews’ Zero Shame for What They Have Done!
Nothing about the Jews Zuckerberg and Altman and Ellison and the hundreds of Jewish Billionaires Footing this Fucking Chaos and Terror.
How Trump’s ideologues and profiteers are wrecking the US government: Jews in the first Trump Toilet Bowl;
Elliott Abrams Special representative for Venezuela, then Iran. Jared Kushner Senior Advisor David Friedman Ambassador to Israel Jason GreenblattSpecial Representative for International Negotiations, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict [Resigned September 2019] Steve Mnuchin Secretary of the Treasury Stephen Miller Senior Advisor, Policy Anne Neuberger Deputy National Manager, National Security Agency Gary Cohn Director, White House National Economic Council [Resigned March 2018] Reed Cordish Assistant to the President, Intragovernmental and Technology Initiatives Avrahm Berkowitz Deputy Advisor to the President and his Senior Advisor Jared Kushner Rod Rosenstein Deputy Attorney General Elan Carr Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism
Jeffrey Rosen
Deputy Secretary of the Department of Transportation / Attorney General (December 2020- )Morgan Ortagus Spokesperson, State Department David ShulkinSecretary of Veterans Affairs (appointed February 14, 2017, fired March 28, 2018) Lawrence Kudlow Director National Economic Council Ivanka Trump Advisor to the President John Eisenberg National Security Council Legal Advisor and Deputy Council to the President for National Security Affairs Ezra Cohen-Watnick Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Len Khodorkovsky Deputy Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism
One: there are many reasonable ways to trim the federal budget, and the most logical way to cut the budget is to start where it is most bloated—the Pentagon. Why not begin with the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which went into use in 2015 after two decades of cost overruns that totaled more than two trillion dollars. Shutting up Washington’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will give solace to the nation’s banking and finance world, but not much else. (Its annual budget is $823 million.)
Two: President Donald Trump believes or wants to believe—not sure there is a difference—that Article 2 of the Constitution, which says that executive power is vested in the presidency, gives him what he has called “the right to do whatever I want.” Hence his constant talk now of running for yet another term in office.
Three: I have been told by those who know the US hacking community that the young members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency computing team now running amok inside the Treasury Department, where America’s checks are drawn up, would not have been granted a clearance had they sought computer jobs with the federal government. But there is little doubt about the skills of Musk’s young Turks and their ability to get proprietary information that would enrich their boss. Musk does billions of dollars in business with the federal government, and analyzing and evaluating the way various bureaucrats evaluate his firms’ contract proposals—and those of their competitors—would be of prime interest.
Trump’s new cabinet will include Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, and other loyalists with strong pro-Israel stances
Top row, from left: Laura Loomer, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller. Bottom row: Howard Lutnick, Lee Zeldin, David Friedman, Miriam Adelson. (Collage by Grace Yagel / JTA)
NEVER EVER TRUST A Jew.
/ JTA)
JTA — Stephen Miller. David Friedman. Jared. Ivanka.
These names, and a few others, became familiar to American Jews over the four years of Donald Trump’s first term in the White House. Depending on the day, and their political views, Jews looked at them with pride or scorn, hope or disappointment. In addition to shaping the course of the first Trump administration, they became symbols of and conduits for the president’s relationship with the Jewish community.
Now, four years later, as Trump prepares to reenter the White House, some of that cast of characters is back while others have dropped off the stage. Other Jewish figures are making their entrances for the first time. Some come from Trump’s time in the worlds of media and business, others from his decade in politics, still others from his family.
Here are the Jews to know in Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
No two Jews drew more attention than Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Coming to the White House from the social circles of wealthy New York City millennial life, the couple was seen as a relatively liberal, moderating influence on a president who had never before held office.
They both served as White House advisers and took central roles in the administration. Kushner, in particular, had a wide-ranging portfolio spanning everything from negotiating a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada to running Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign to brokering the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states known as the Abraham Accords.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, right, arrive for the funeral of former first lady Melania Trump’s mother, Amalija Knavs, at the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida, January 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
They were also in some ways the Jewish face of the administration, making appearances at Jewish sites and hosting members of the cabinet for Shabbat dinner. Particularly at the beginning of Trump’s term, their Jewish observance — they have attended Orthodox synagogues and send their kids to Jewish day school — drew curiosity and scrutiny.
After Trump’s 2020 loss, the family moved to Miami and sat out Trump’s most recent reelection campaign. Ivanka, who campaigned with her father during his previous two electoral campaigns, said after Trump’s campaign announcement in 2022 that she and Kushner would step back to focus on family life. Kushner said he would focus on his business and the couple’s children.
Kushner suggested to The New York Times late last month that the pair would remain outside of politics if Trump won the election, though more recent reports suggest he may be involved in some way with Trump’s Middle East policy. During the campaign, the couple appeared at several events, including the Republican National Convention and Trump’s victory party.
They have not entirely separated from their work during the first Trump administration. Kushner runs a multi-billion dollar investment firm tied to Arab states in the Gulf, raising ethical concerns about overlapping with government affairs. The Democrat-led Senate Finance Committee opened an investigation into Kushner’s firm in June, though its future is uncertain.
Stephen Miller
Stephen Miller — one of Trump’s most hardline advisers on immigration during his first term, and one of that administration’s most polarizing figures — will serve as Trump’s deputy chief of staff in his next term.
During Trump’s first term, Miller was an architect of some of the administration’s most divisive actions on immigration, including the family separation policy and the travel ban on a number of Muslim-majority countries. A broad range of Jewish officials and groups criticized those policies and called for Miller’s resignation.
Stephen Miller speaks before then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, November 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Over the last four years since Trump was voted out, Miller launched a firm called America First Legal that bills itself as a conservative response to the American Civil Liberties Union, and was involved in Project 2025, the controversial compilation of proposals for a second Trump term. He and his wife, who wed in 2020, have also had three children.
This year, Miller campaigned for Trump and used nativist rhetoric at Trump’s controversial rally in Madison Square Garden last month.
“America is for Americans and Americans only,” Miller said, adding that US citizens were having their jobs “looted and stolen.”
In an interview last week with Fox News, Miller said Trump would begin deporting undocumented immigrants immediately after taking office. In multiple interviews, he has outlined plans to deport millions of migrants, renewing Jewish groups’ concerns.
“The invasion will end the instant that he takes the oath of office,” Miller said.
David Friedman
David Friedman, who worked as Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer before 2016, was ambassador to Israel during his first administration.
Republican presidential candidate former president Donald Trump, right, greets David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel in the Trump administration, at the National Religious Broadcasters convention at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center on February 22, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Friedman did not have foreign policy experience before becoming ambassador in 2017 and had been a supporter of Israeli West Bank settlements before entering office. As ambassador, he was a key part of the team that fulfilled a long wish list of Israeli government priorities — from moving the US embassy to Jerusalem to brokering the Abraham Accords.
Friedman criticized his former boss for his 2022 meeting with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, then two of the most prominent people spouting antisemitic rhetoric. “To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this,” Friedman tweeted after that meeting.
But he says he subsequently spoke with Trump and endorsed the former president’s reelection campaign, citing Trump’s “historic achievements” as president, and his support for Israel.
Friedman has pushed for Israeli annexation of the West Bank. He recently released a book arguing for Israeli control over the entire territory.
Friedman will not be reprising his role in Trump’s second term; Trump announced on Tuesday that former Gov. Mike Huckabee will be the next US ambassador to Israel. Friedman said he was “thrilled” by Huckabee’s appointment.
Steve Witkoff
Steve Witkoff, a real estate businessman and Trump’s golf buddy, will be the Middle East envoy in the president-elect’s coming term.
Steve Witkoff arrives at a campaign rally for Donald Trump at the Butler Farm Show, October 5, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
In that role, Witkoff, 67, will take the spot occupied by Jason Greenblatt in the first part of Trump’s first term. In that role, Greenblatt conducted negotiations with leaders across the region. As was the case when Greenblatt entered the administration, Witkoff has no Middle East diplomatic experience.
Witkoff has been friends with Trump since the 1980s, when he bought Trump a sandwich after they worked on a real estate transaction. Witkoff has also praised Trump for his friendship after one of Witkoff’s sons, Andrew, died at a rehab facility.
Trump said Witkoff was playing golf with him when Secret Service agents fired at someone who was allegedly preparing to kill Trump. He and his son Zach spoke at the Republican convention in July.
Miriam Adelson
Miriam Adelson, a prolific donor to Republican, pro-Israel and Jewish causes, is carrying on the legacy she built with her late husband, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
Adelson has remained a force in Republican politics and has stayed close to Trump since her husband’s death in 2021. She donated $100 million to a campaign committee supporting Trump’s candidacy. (Her estimated net worth is $35 billion.) During the campaign, she introduced Trump before he gave a speech on fighting antisemitism.
Adelson was born in Tel Aviv and reportedly spends much of her time in Israel. She is the publisher of the country’s largest print newspaper, Israel Hayom, which her husband founded.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump embraces Miriam Adelson at an event marking one year since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, October 7, 2024, in Miami. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Boris Epshteyn
Boris Epshteyn is a longtime aide to Trump and a political strategist. He often spoke for Trump on television during the 2016 campaign and advised his 2024 campaign.
Epshteyn served as a special assistant in the Trump administration during Trump’s first term and reportedly wrote a controversial statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2017 that did not mention Jews.
Epshteyn, an investment banker and finance attorney, also collaborated with Rudy Giuliani on trying unsuccessfully to overturn the results of the 2020 election and appeared with Trump in court in New York last year. Epshteyn was charged with felonies for election tampering in Arizona earlier this year and pleaded not guilty.
Epshteyn moved to the United States from his native Moscow in 1993 at the age of 11. He was previously a communications aide for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 campaign for president.
This week, Epshteyn was on Trump’s airplane with the president-elect, Elon Musk and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz when Trump decided to nominate Gaetz, a Florida Republican who once invited a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, as his attorney general.
Epshteyn has reportedly sparred with Musk over decisions during the presidential transition, and The New York Times reported that he has floated himself as Trump’s special envoy for the war in Ukraine.
Boris Epshteyn arrives at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, August 3, 2023, in Arlington, Virginia. (AP/Alex Brandon, File)
Howard Lutnick
Howard Lutnick, the billionaire head of finance firm Cantor Fitzgerald, is the co-chair of Trump’s transition team.
He raised campaign funds for Trump and has taken on a prominent role on the president-elect’s team in recent months, speaking for Trump in the media and earning plaudits from Trump family members and the campaign.
He has been in touch with Kushner about hiring and Musk about budget policy, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Washington Post has reported that Lutnick is a candidate for treasury secretary, though more recently, The New York Times reported that Lutnick “has gotten on Mr. Trump’s nerves lately.”
Lutnick is a supporter of pro-Israel causes including the first responder group United Hatzalah and Birthright, which organizes free 10-day trips for Jewish groups to the country.
A New York native, Lutnick accompanied Trump to the grave of the late spiritual leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, last month.
Laura Loomer, a Jewish far-right firebrand who once was the Republican nominee for a Florida congressional seat, has long come close to Trump but never worked for him.
Trump endorsed her 2020 run for Congress and nearly hired her as a campaign aide a year ago but was dissuaded by his aides from doing so. They were concerned about her record of racist and bigoted comments about Muslims and others.
Over the course of the campaign, Loomer began spending more time with Trump and traveled on his plane to Philadelphia to join him for the September presidential debate. Her presence and her racist comments about Kamala Harris drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has herself been accused of hate speech (against Jews).
Sid Rosenberg, a New York shock jock, said he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 but soon became a Trump convert, after initially dismissing his seriousness as a candidate. On his show, he has backed Trump and his policies, including seeking to eject migrants from the United States.
Rosenberg became a pro-Israel advocate after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel in which terrorists murdered some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages. He vaulted into national prominence last month when he appeared at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, where he mocked comparisons between the rally and one held by American Nazis there in 1939.
This week, he joked with Tulsi Gabbard on his show about becoming White House press secretary under Trump. (Gabbard said his daily briefings would require an R rating.)
And, something from the fucking pathetic Dennis Kucinich?
President Trump Wants to Cut the Pentagon Budget in Half. How?
The President advances a three-pronged strategy for national security: 1. Negotiate a peace deal for Ukraine. 2. Negotiate nuclear arms drawdown with China and Russia. 3. Cut military spending by 50%
Some of the nation’s wealthiest people are powering Trump’s bid to return to the White House: His 26 biggest billionaire backers, worth a combined $143 billion, have poured $162 million into the effort so far.
“We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man,” declared Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, at the Republican National Convention last month. “A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations, but will stand up for American companies and American industry.”
This is from fucking Dennis and his wife: “Military contractors poured $4,440,605 into Kamala Harris’s campaign—more than double what they contributed to Donald Trump. Yet, even with the support of establishment figures like Dick Cheney, their favored candidate fell short. The defeat of the military contractor’s candidate may have consequences for the industry.
Now, with President Trump in office and a bold initiative to cut Pentagon spending by 50%, the defense industry faces a challenge unlike any before.”
++—++
The stuff Kucinich’s don’t read:
Israel’s ‘genocide general’ welcomed in London – and the media yawns
Why is it only Declassified seeking to hold to account General Basyuk, who oversaw Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, as he meets UK officials?
General Basyuk (second from right) with Netanyahu and Gallant – both wanted by the ICC. (Photo: GPO)
There have been two stories deeply revealing – in starkly contrasting ways – of the West’s relationship to Israel’s industrialised, militarised slaughter of the people of Gaza over the past 15 months.
Last week, Declassified UK carried out one of the fundamental duties of journalism. Its reporter Alex Morris sought to hold accountable a war crimes suspect evading justice. And not just any suspect.
Morris doorstepped Major General Oded Basyuk as he led an Israeli military delegation through the streets of London in meetings with the Ministry of Defence and the Royal United Services Institute, a UK “security think-tank” with close ties to the British government.
Basyuk, sometimes spelt Basiuk, heads the Israeli military’s operations directorate, whose responsibilities have included the development of the military strategy that guided Israel’s brutal 15-month assault on Gaza.
The International Court of Justice ruled a year ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. Israel has effectively been on trial ever since.
Meanwhile, the ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity – most notably for their policy of blocking aid and starving the entire population of 2.3 million Palestinians there.
Basyuk was one of the central figures helping to devise and direct these genocidal acts.
He was also pivotal in overseeing the Israeli military’s invasion and occupation of south Lebanon. Israeli forces have been similarly levelling entire communities there and slaughtering civilians.
In other words, Basyuk is one of the biggest cogs in Israel’s genocidal war machine.
If the ICC finds the nerve to take on the new Trump administration – which is almost certain to sanction court officials for charging Netanyahu and Gallant – Basyuk will be at the head of the queue for an arrest warrant.
Diplomatic immunity
Which leads to a number of conundrums.
Not least, why is a major war crimes suspect such as Basyuk freely wandering the streets of London in the midst of two genocide-related legal cases against Israel?
Given that the ICC can issue arrest warrants in secret, and at short notice, how is Basyuk so confident that he can visit the UK without legal repercussions?
Further, Britain’s universal jurisdiction laws mean serious crimes can be prosecuted in the UK wherever they occurred, and separately from the ICC. A private application for his arrest could have been issued while he was here.
The only plausible answer is that the government of Keir Starmer gave him a gold-plated assurance that he would not be arrested under any circumstances during his visit.
That is precisely what happened back in November when Israel’s now-outgoing military chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, visited Britain to meet officials from the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office.
Starmer’s government issued Halevi with diplomatic immunity – a so-called “special mission certificate” – that blocked any possibility of legal redress against him.
As a signatory to the Rome Statute, it should be noted, Britain is legally obliged to enforce an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, though it has equivocated about whether in practice it would carry out an arrest of either Netanyahu or Gallant, if put to the test.
There are other puzzling questions that need answers.
In the midst of legal cases at the world’s two highest courts against the Israeli military for crimes against humanity, why would the Ministry of Defence think that Basyuk – one of Israel’s highest ranking commanders – was a suitable person to be meeting with and talking to?
What knowledge does Basyuk currently have to share with our own military chain of command that makes it so important to meet with him face to face in London, especially when his visit could potentially drag Starmer’s government into a legal showdown with the ICC or expose a shameful evasion of its legal obligations?
Basyuk’s visit serves as a reminder that the MoD is profoundly implicated in the Gaza genocide – as is Starmer himself.
It has approved the continuing sale of more than 90 per cent of British weapons and components to Israel, including those that have kept Israel’s fleet of F-35s in the air so that they can carpet bomb Gaza.
Additionally, the MoD is believed to have helped ship US and German munitions to Israel through air bases in the UK and from an RAF base in Cyprus, Akrotiri, without which the mass slaughter of Gaza’s children would not have been possible.
As Declassified revealed in October, the UK has been allowing regular secret flights of US special forces from Akrotiri to Israel.
And the MoD has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza, almost certainly with the purpose of supplying intelligence to Israel to help it select targets as it has destroyed most residential properties, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries.
A strong suspicion must be that the MoD invited Basyuk not only to deepen ties between the two militaries but to prepare for a renewed British role in the genocide should Israel return to the bombardment of Gaza after the first stage of the ceasefire is completed, as Netanyahu has threatened.
Media silence
And then there are questions for the British media.
How is it possible that Basyuk, a major war crimes suspect, is strolling around London at the head of an official Israeli military delegation in the midst of a genocide investigation by the ICJ and no major British media outlet has shown the slightest interest in doorstepping him, or in asking questions of the government about his visit?
Only Declassified UK – an independent outlet with a tiny fraction of the resources of the BBC, the Guardian, the Times or the Telegraph – has chased him down, embarrassed him by asking him to his face whether he is a war criminal, and drawn attention to his presence in the UK.
It is not even as though we can assume this collective failure by the British establishment media was an oversight, and that for some inexplicable reason their military and security correspondents all failed to learn of Basyuk’s visit, as Declassified UK had done.
Because all these media outlets also ignored the video that went viral of Declassified UK’s Alex Morris challenging Basyuk to his face, “Are you a war criminal, General Basyuk?” and “Are you worried about being investigated by the ICC for war crimes?”
In stark contrast to the Israeli media, which widely reported on this supremely awkward confrontation for Basyuk, the British media has remained studiously silent.
They have not wondered why Basyuk, or earlier Halevi, has been allowed into the UK. Or what assurances Basyuk was given. Or what he and Halevi were here to discuss with the British officials.
Similarly, they have not taken this as an opportunity to focus on another story that so far has entirely passed them by and that Declassified has been at the forefront of exposing: Britain’s deep complicity in Israel’s genocide and the covert role in the genocide of RAF base Akrotiri, on Cypus.
These are not oversights. They are a consistent pattern of failure by the media that indicates one thing only: that these failures are entirely intentional. The British media has conspired with the British government every bit as criminally as the British government has colluded in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Through its silence, the British media has given the government cover to assist Israel in its mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
The British establishment media has been similarly silent – if for opposing reasons – on another development related to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
While Basyuk was moving around London to meet British officials without fear of arrest or scrutiny, a Palestinian-American journalist was arrested by the police in Zurich at the weekend shortly before he was about to begin a speaking tour of Switzerland.
Ali Abunimah, editor of the veteran website Electronic Intifada, which is dedicated to Israel-Palestine issues, has been a long-standing and trenchant critic of Israel’s decades of abuses of the Palestinian people.
Alongside Declassified UK and a handful of other independent sites, Electronic Intifada has helped to challenge some of the key narrative deceptions Israel has promoted to rationalise the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza – fake news that British media outlets have too often enthusiastically regurgitated.
Abunimah and his team undermined falsified claims of Hamas beheading and baking babies alive during its attack on Israel on October 7 2023, and of mass rapes by Hamas fighters that day.
The site has shone a light too on a secretive Israeli military protocol, the Hannibal directive, that was invoked during Hamas’ attack.
It allowed the Israeli military to kill a significant number of Israeli civilians, including children, to prevent them being abducted. Some of the resulting, horrifying deaths have been attributed to Hamas.
United Nations legal and human rights experts lost no time in condemning Abunimah’s arrest, calling it “shocking” and evidence of an “increasingly toxic” climate in Europe towards free speech.
But the Swiss authorities are not acting in isolation. This is part of a concerted, Europe-wide crackdown on protest against Israel or support for Palestinian rights – and Britain has been leading the way.
Draconian terror laws
Abunimah’s British colleague Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist, had his home raided by London counter-terrorism police in October and his electronic devices seized under draconian terrorism laws.
He is one of several independent journalists being hounded over their criticisms of Israel.
Activists with Palestine Action, and its leader Richard Barnard, have been arrested and charged under similar laws for trying to stop firms in the UK making and supplying weapons to Israel for use in the genocide.
Israeli Jewish activists living in the UK, including Professor Haim Bresheeth and Yael Kahn, both of whom lost family members in the Holocaust, have been arrested in recent months for making speeches criticising Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
Another anti-Zionist Jewish activist, Tony Greenstein, was charged in December under the same terrorism laws.
And in a sign that the Starmer government is determined to stamp out wider pro-Palestine and anti-genocide activism, the Metropolitan police used an iron fist this month in cracking down on the latest mass peaceful protest in London against the genocide – one that sought to highlight the heavy slanting of the BBC’s coverage in Israel’s favour.
The police arrested and charged two of the march organisers, including Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, with entirely confected “public order” offences.
The Met also interviewed “under caution” and are investigating the march’s two figureheads: the leftwing MPs John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party.
The contrast could not be more clear-cut – or telling.
Starmer’s government is happy to invite foreign war crimes suspects to the UK to learn from them, safe in the knowledge that the British media will do nothing to highlight their crimes or the UK’s complicity in those crimes.
And the Starmer government is equally happy to bully, arrest and charge journalists and peaceful demonstrators opposed to those war crimes, safe in the knowledge that the British media will do nothing to highlight the UK government’s duplicity or its trampling over the fundamental rights of free speech and protest.
The British police leave Israeli state terrorists in peace, while hounding peaceful protesters as terrorists. The world is turned on its head.
But this glaring contrast in treatment – by the government, the Met and the establishment media – serves precisely the same end: shielding Israel and its enablers in the British government from accountability.
All three institutions of the British state have colluded in oiling the wheels of Israel’s genocide machine. All have conspired to keep war crimes suspect General Basyuk out of public view, and make it harder to get him where he belongs: in the dock at The Hague.
All three have played separate but critically important roles in making the genocide in Gaza possible. And for that, they should be put in the dock too.
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ANother fucking weird Jewish Connected Judge:
After a nearly hour-long virtual hearing, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said she planned to issue a ruling within 24 hours on a request by 14 state attorneys general to issue a temporary restraining order that would block DOGE from firing employees or accessing data from the Departments of Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation, Commerce, and Office of Personnel Management as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to slash the federal government.
The 14 states on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Musk’s “expansive authority” is in violation of the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which calls for anyone deemed a “principal officer” of the U.S. government to be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
MORE: Elon Musk’s DOGE asks for access to IRS taxpayer data, sources say
Describing the states’ request for a temporary restraining order as “prophylactic,” Judge Chutkan expressed skepticism about issuing a wide reaching order while the plaintiffs struggled to prove a concrete harm stemming from DOGE’s conduct.
“The court can’t act based on the media reports. We can’t do that,” Chutkan said. “The things that I’m hearing are concerning indeed and troubling indeed, but I have to have a record, and I have to make a finding on the facts before I issue something.” [Her ex-husband,[42]Peter A. Krauthamer (Black raised by Jews), served as a judge on the Superior Court of the District of Columbia from 2012 to 2023. They have two sons.]
More Jew Lawyers ready to defend the poisons and poisoners.
Pesticides are causing overwhelming negative effects on hundreds of species of microbes, fungi, plants, insects, fish, birds and mammals that they are not intended to harm—and globally their use is a major contributor to the biodiversity crisis.
That is the finding of the first study assessing the impacts of pesticides across all types of species in land and water habitats, carried out by an international research team that included the UK Center for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and the University of Sussex.
The international study, led by East China University of Science and Technology, has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Multiple negative impacts
The scientists analyzed over 1,700 existing lab and field studies of the impacts of 471 different pesticide types—either insecticides, fungicides or herbicides—in agricultural, commercial or domestic use.
Wide-ranging negative effects were seen for over 800 species found on land and in water, including impacts on how fast they grow, their reproductive success, and even behavior such as their ability to catch prey, find plants to forage upon, move, or attract mates. Pesticides can also affect organisms’ metabolism and damage cells.
These negative effects can result in the premature death of wild organisms and reduce populations.
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Trump and his gutting of EPA, with another Jew at the Helm. And, Dennis’ buddy, again, evicerating common sense:
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And Dennis’ Rapist in Chief Trump is really enlightening the world about why a Kucinich would back this fucking monster:
In a lengthy Instagram post Sunday, the Oscar-winning actress and children’s book author reacted to the news that her book “Freckleface Strawberry” was reportedly removed from schools within the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA).
“It is a great shock for me to learn that my first book, Freckleface Strawberry, has been banned by the Trump Administration from schools run by the Department of Defense,” wrote Moore, whose father is a Vietnam War veteran.
More Queer than Udders on Bulls — Trump White Trash mentally dislocated fucks: Singer and rapper Kid Rock stormed off stage at a Nashville performance this weekend, cutting the show short when the audience didn’t clap along.
The slim minds of the Republicans and the fucking Trump Rapist Backers, like Dennis?
In a memo Wednesday, the administration said that “Trump is determined to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars and put an end to fraudulent and wasteful spending” and attached the GAO’s report.
A co-author of that report, GAO Director Rebecca Shea, tells NPR that while government fraud and waste makes up an estimated 3% and 7% of federal spending, the overwhelming majority of federal spending isn’t fraudulent.
Shea also noted that the report defines fraud narrowly — and that definition doesn’t match up with Trump and Musk’s definition. “To call something fraud, you need to prove it in a criminal or civil case,” she said.
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More Kucinich fucking heroes — Jews!
The eclectic crowd that frequents the three Educational Bookshop stores in east Jerusalem, and prides itself on open-mindedness and understanding through discourse, was shocked when the store’s co-owners were arrested earlier this week.
Far from remaining a local security issue, the event has become the subject of international attention.
The Wall Street Journal, for example, headlined a February 10 report: “Israeli Police cite ‘River to the Sea’ coloring book after raiding Palestinian book stores.”
Dennis’ Jews Want Us ALL dead:
‘FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA’
From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book
Illustrated by South African-based artist Nathi Ngubane
Activity book provides an introduction to the story of Palestine for children
Illustrations inspired by murals around the world
Suggested age group 6-10 years
Author & Illustrator Nathi Ngubane is available for artist workshops for children
13,000+ copies sold in South Africa
$12,000 donated to Penny Appeal South Africa projects in Palestine
Social Bandit Media is proud to announce the publication of a new title on Palestine: “From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book”.
From the River to the Sea is an educational coloring book that provides a gateway into the story of Palestine. Through a series of stunning illustrations, Soweto-based Nathi Ngubane tackles the injustice of the Nakba, delves into the history and culture of the land, and introduces young readers to the key concepts driving and sustaining the Palestinian resistance.
The book also provides space for young readers to produce their own murals and show their support for Palestine.
“I created this activity book with the aim of educating children in South Africa and worldwide about the history of Palestine, the culture of Palestinian people and their flora and fauna,” Ngubane said.
”The current situation in Gaza is heart-wrenching. Every day, I follow the news to keep myself updated on the ongoing events, such as the Israeli military strikes that are causing severe injuries, destruction to homes and deaths to thousands of children.”
“Many of us feel helpless and wish we could do something to help,” Ngubane added.
“I am hoping that by the end of this book, children will be more informed about the devastating situation that children their age are facing in Gaza.
Furthermore, I hope to encourage children to express their support and solidarity with Palestine by creating their own murals,” Ngubane added.
The activity book is the latest collaboration between Ngubane and Social Bandit Media, an experimental media project based between Johannesburg and New York City.
Social Bandit Media seeks to challenge mainstream narratives and serves as timely interventions in moments of crisis.
Social Bandit Media will be partnering with Penny Appeal South Africa to get copies of the books to learners in South Africa.
As of February 2025, the books are available for sale in South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom and India. Other partners have taken limited batches of the books to Australia, Vietnam, Kenya, Germany, France and Switzerland.
Kucinich’s RFK Junior is now on the hunt for protestors.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. recently called Palestinians “the most pampered people by international aid organizations in the history of the world.”
Kennedy said this in December 2023, more than two months into Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza and when we knew that tens of thousands of Palestinians had already been slaughtered or brutally injured – and more than a million had been displaced.
Oh, fucking Dennis:
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign picked up steam through the summer and into the fall, concerns were mounting internally about its management.
Former Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, then Kennedy’s campaign manager, faced doubts about his leadership — doubts that persisted despite convergence with Kennedy on policy. Days after Kennedy left the Democratic race to become an independent, Kucinich left the campaign and said he sent an email to the staff announcing his departure.
Three people with direct knowledge of the campaign said he was fired. The reason, one person said, was persistent internal concern about his capability in that role. A separate memo from a staffer outlined a lack of direction and a pattern of poor communication.
The nature of Kucinich’s departure is now a matter of dispute.
Kucinich said he “was not asked to leave the campaign.” In a phone interview, he called the idea that he was fired “insane” and “totally false.”
Former campaign treasurer John Sullivan said in a phone interview that the situation was more nuanced and ambiguous than a firing or a resignation.
The former congressman also walked away with $120,000 after leaving the campaign, according to the latest campaign financial disclosure to the FEC. The payment was made in two installments on Oct. 18, five days after his departure was announced.
Sullivan, who left shortly after Kucinich, said he could not comment on the specifics of the payment after Kucinich left. Sullivan said it would violate his nondisclosure agreement to discuss it, but the payment would have been per the terms of Kucinich’s contract.
Kennedy’s third-party bid for the White House is a long shot; even getting his name on the ballot will prove tough. While Kucinich said it was “stupid” to doubt his ability to lead the campaign, that feeling wasn’t unanimous.
“He’s just not a great manager of resources, whether financial or people,” said one of the people, who — like the others who were interviewed for this article — was granted anonymity to discuss internal campaign dynamics.
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How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa
Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler
When Elon Musk’s arm shot out in a stiff arm salute at Donald Trump’s inaugural celebrations, startled viewers mostly drew the obvious comparison.
But in the fired-up debate about Musk’s intent that followed, as the world’s richest man insisted he wasn’t trying to be a Nazi, speculation inevitably focused on whether his roots in apartheid-era South Africa offered an insight.
In recent months Musk’s promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has grown, from a deepening hostility to democratic institutions to the recent endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). He has taken an unhealthy interest in genetics while backing claims of a looming “white genocide” in his South African homeland and endorsing posts promoting the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Increasingly, his language and tone have come to echo the old South Africa.
He is not alone. Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.
They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated. Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.
David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young. A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.
Among them, Musk stands out for his ownership of X, which is increasingly a platform for far-right views, and his proximity to Trump, who has nominated Musk to head a “department of government efficiency” to slash and burn its way through the federal bureaucracy.
Some draw a straight line between Musk’s formative years atop a complex system of racial hierarchy as a white male, in a country increasingly at war with itself as the South African government became ever more repressive as resistance to apartheid grew, and the man we see at Trump’s side today.
The week before the inauguration, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, described white South Africans as the “most racist people on earth”, questioned their involvement in US politics and said Musk was a malign influence who should go back to the country of his birth.
Others are sceptical that Musk’s increasingly extreme views can be tracked back to his upbringing in Pretoria. The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently called attempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.
But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.
Musk’s formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening of apartheid.
The South Africa into which Musk was born in 1971, and to which Thiel moved as a child from Germany, was led by a prime minister, John Vorster, who had been a general in a fascist militia three decades earlier that allied itself with Hitler.
The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was founded shortly before the second world war. It opposed South Africa entering the war as an ally of Britain and plotted with German military intelligence to assassinate the prime minster, Jan Smuts, as a prelude to an armed uprising in support of Hitler.
Vorster made no secret of his sympathy for Nazi, or National Socialist, ideology which he compared to the Afrikaner political philosophy of Christian nationalism.
“We stand for Christian nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism,” he said in 1942. “You can call this anti-democratic principle dictatorship if you wish. In Italy it is called ‘Fascism’, in Germany ‘German National Socialism’ and in South Africa ‘Christian nationalism’.”
Smuts’s government took a dim view of that and a few weeks later interned Vorster as a Nazi sympathiser.
At the end of the war, the OB was absorbed into the National party, which then won the 1948 election, in which Black South Africans had no vote, on a commitment to impose apartheid. In 1961, Vorster joined the government as minister of justice and five years later became prime minister.
Nazism may have been defeated in Europe but Christian nationalism was alive and kicking in South Africa under Vorster, with its own brand of racial classification and stratification justified by the need to keep the “swart gevaar”, or black danger, at bay.
In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs.
The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it
Phillip Van Niekerk
Bea Roberts, who grew up in an apartheid-supporting family but came to oppose the system and later worked for the Institute for a Democratic South Africa, remembers a heavy emphasis on Afrikaners as victims pursuing apartheid in order to protect their culture and even their very existence.
“It was a strange mix of ‘we got fucked up by the British in the [second Boer] war, and our women and children died in thousands in the concentration camps’ so we are going to rebuild our nation and make sure that that we are invincible. And we’ll do that by extreme means,” she said.
Schooling, like much else, was segregated by race for most of the apartheid era and, on paper at least, white pupils across South Africa were subject to the same Christian nationalist education. But white society was itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones.
Musk attended a Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister.
Phillip Van Niekerk, former editor of the leading anti-apartheid Mail and Guardian newspaper in Johannesburg, had Afrikaner parents but attended an English-speaking school. He recalled that the official version of history did little toengender support for the apartheid system among a lot of English speakers even if they benefited from it and did little to challenge it.
“We hated the National party government. Even our teachers were kind of hostile. It was seen almost like an imposition. Yet you imbibe things through the culture. The truth is we didn’t see Black people quite as equals. We didn’t think about it,” he said.
Thiel got all that and more at schools in South Africa and its de facto colony, South West Africa, which became independent as Namibia in 1990.
South West Africa had been a German colony until the end of the first world war and Thiel lived for a time in the city of Swakopmund, where he attended a German-language school while his father worked at a nearby uranium mine.
At that time, Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday. In 1976, the New York Times reported that some people in the town continued to greet each other with “Heil Hitler” and to give the Nazi salute.
Van Niekerk visited Swakopmund during South African rule.
“I was there in the 1980s and you could walk into a curio shop and buy mugs with Nazi swastikas on them. If you’re German and you’re in Swakopmund in the 1970s, which is when Thiel was there, you’re part of that community,” he said.
Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10, has described his schooling in Swakopmund as instilling a dislike of regimentation that steered him towards libertarianism.
Thiel’s father worked at a uranium mine in Rössing where, as in the gold and coalmines of the Reef around Johannesburg, Black laborers were paid just enough to survive, living conditions were dire and the work dangerous. White managers, on the other hand, lived a lifestyle of neo-colonial luxury with servants at the ready.
Musk’s father, Errol, was also in the mining business among other interests. He once boasted that his stake in Zambian emerald mines made him “so much money we couldn’t even close our safe”. Musk’s mother, Maye, has said the family owned two homes, a plane, a yacht and a handful of luxury cars.
Errol Musk has said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal party but then left because he didn’t like its demand for one person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with separate parliaments for different races. That was the liberal position inside the Musk family.
Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government.
In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.
The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.
After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism.
Errol Musk described Maye’s parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them.
We white South Africans, by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race
Phillip Van Niekerk
“They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid,” he told Podcast and Chill. “Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”
Haldeman was killed in a plane crash when Elon was three years old but the boy remained close to his grandmother and mother. He is estranged from his father, whom Maye has described as abusive of her and their children. Errol Musk once claimed to have shot and killed three people who broke into his house.
Musk has described his father as a “terrible human being”.
“Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he told Rolling Stone without elaborating in 2017.
What is indisputable is that Musk and Thiel grew up amid incredible privilege where the racial hierarchy was clear. Those who claimed to reject apartheid sought to explain this privilege not as the result of systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to their own abilities. That in turn led some to regard all forms government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for survival.
The biography of Thiel said he held a view common among apartheid’s supporters at the time that Black South Africans were better off than Africans in other parts of the continent even if they were systematically denied their rights. Thiel has denied ever having supported apartheid.
Van Niekerk said that opposition to apartheid did not necessarily mean rejection of white supremacy or privilege, a point made in a 1968 British television documentary the year before Thiel was born.
The commentary observed that the English-speaking mining barons and other industrialists in Johannesburg usually claimed to be “hostile to apartheid, call themselves liberal” but did little to oppose the system while profiting from it.
Helen Suzman, at the time a member of the South African parliament who was often a lone voice in opposition to apartheid, was critical of these powerful industrialists and businessmen, saying “people who do nothing are responsible”. She accused them of hiding behind apartheid to exploit Black workers.
“I see no reason why the industrialists should not improve the living conditions of their workers,” she said.
In the documentary, Stanley Cohen, the managing director of the OK Bazaars supermarket chain owned by his family, was asked why he only employed whites behind the counter and no South Africans of other races even though many of the customers were Black. Cohen acknowledged that it was not a legal requirement, but did it to indulge the racist prejudices of white customers.
“There is no reason why they [Black people] can’t work behind the counters. There’s no law against it. But there is this natural prejudice in this country which you can’t legislate for or against,” he said.
A decade later, power was shifting. The uprising that began in Soweto in 1976 had become a full-blown national crisis for the apartheid system by the 1980s. A low-level civil war was under way. In response, the state grew even more violent and repressive. White paranoia was fed by the creep of independent Black African states under Marxist-leaning governments ever closer to South Africa’s borders, with Angola and Mozambique in the 1970s followed by Zimbabwe in 1980.
Talk of white genocide emerged, a conspiracy theory that has taken on new life in recent times with the killings of white farmers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Support surged for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), or Afrikaner Resistance Movement, founded in the early 1970s to oppose any relaxation of apartheid.
The AWB, founded by Eugene Terre’Blanche, an imposing and flamboyant figure given to riding around on a horse from which he occasionally fell off, made no secret of its model with a badge strikingly similar to a swastika in design and colors. It’s supporters were also fond of the stiff-armed Hitler salute as they paraded on the streets of Pretoria. At its peak, the AWB appeared to have the support of more than 10% of white South Africans.
Roberts said life for privileged whites in particular was “definitely a bubble, and one filled with self-belief”. But she said that it became increasingly difficult to ignore reality.
“I think Musk in Pretoria in the 1980s must have had a sense of what Black people were experiencing and why they were angry. I grew up fairly conservative but I was able to change my views. I think you have to be fairly rigid in the 80s to still cling on to the belief that the apartheid system was fine and correct and in everybody’s best interest,” she said.
Musk left South Africa in 1988 in the midst of this ferment, two years before FW de Klerk carved out a path to freedom by releasing Nelson Mandela. Had he stayed, Musk faced being conscripted into the military for two years, an obligatory service for white men, that could well have meant fighting in the “border war” in Angola and Namibia or being sent to put down Black protests in the townships.
Instead, Musk took Canadian citizenship through his mother and moved to Ontario. Van Niekerk said that, whether he wants to admit it or not, Musk also took a part of South Africa with him.
“We all [white South Africans], by the very nature of our privileges and our place in the racial hierarchy, grew up believing we were the master race, even if we didn’t actively think about it,” he said.
Chris McGreal is the Guardian’s former Johannesburg corresponden
The Guaraní believe that the world wants to be different, that it wants to be born again, and so the world entreats the First Father to unleash the blue tiger that sleeps beneath his hammock.
Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” writes that once a society surrenders to the dictates of the market, once its mafia economy becomes a mafia state, once it succumbs to what he calls “the ravages of this satanic mill,” it inevitably leads to “the demolition of society.”
Hedges: “The mafia state cannot be reformed. We must organize to break our chains, one-by-one, to use the power of the strike to cripple the state machinery. We must embrace a radical militancy, one that offers a new vision and a new social structure. We must hold fast to moral imperatives. We must forgive mortgage and student debt, institute universal health care and break up monopolies. We must raise the minimum wage and end the squandering of resources and funds to sustain the empire and the war industry. We must establish a nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s collapsing infrastructure. We must nationalize the banks, pharmaceutical corporations, military contractors and transportation and embrace environmentally sustainable energy sources.”
None of this will happen until we resist.
Galeano: “Fine words and pretty ceremonies are about to descend upon us: The five-hundredth anniversary of the so-called Discovery is approaching. I think Alejo Carpentier was right when he called this the greatest event in the history of humankind. But it seems strikingly clear to me that America wasn’t discovered in 1492, just as Spain was not discovered when the Roman legions invaded it in 218 B.C. And it also seems clear as can be that it’s high time America discovered itself. And when I say America, I’m talking first and foremost about the America that’s been despoiled of everything, even its name, in the five-centuries-long process that put it at the service of foreign progress: our Latin America.”
This necessary discovery, a revelation of the face hidden behind the masks, rests on the redemption of some of our most ancient traditions. It’s out of hope, not nostalgia that we must recover a community-based mode of production and way of life, founded not on greed, but on solidarity, age-old freedoms, and identity between human beings and nature. I believe there is no better way to honor the Indians, the first Americans, who from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego have kept their identity and message alive through successive campaigns of extermination. Today they still hold out vital keys to memory and prophecy for all of America, not just our Latin America: Simultaneously, they bear witness to the past and cast the light of fresh fires on the path ahead. If the values they embody were of only archaeological interest, the Indians would no longer be objects of bloody repression, nor would the powerful be so anxious to separate them from the class struggle and from the people’s liberation movements.
Halfway through the last century, an Indian chief named Seattle warned officials of the United States government:
“After several days, the dying man does not smell the stench of his own body. If you continue polluting your bed, one night you will die suffocated by your own wastes.”
Chief Seattle also said, “Whatever happens to the earth, happens to the sons of the earth.”
And I have just heard this same phrase, exactly the same, from the lips of one of the Maya-Quiché Indians in a documentary filmed recently in the mountains of Ixcán, Guatemala. This is how the Mayas explain why their people are hunted down by the army: “They kill us because we work together, eat together, live together, dream together.”
What dark threat emanates from the Indians of the Americas, what threat treacherously lives on despite the centuries of crime and scorn? What ghosts are the executioners exorcising? What fears?
To justify usurping the lands of the Sioux Indians at the end of the last century, the United States Congress declared that “community property is dangerous to the development of the free enterprise system.” And in March 1979, a law was promulgated in Chile requiring the Mapuche Indians to divide up their lands and turn themselves into small landowners with no links among them; the dictator Pinochet explained that the communities were incompatible with the nation’s economic progress. The U.S. Congress was right. So was General Pinochet. From capitalism’s point of view, communal cultures that do not separate human beings from one another or from nature are enemy cultures. But the capitalist point of view is not the only one.
The official story of the conquest of America has been told from the perspective of mercantile capitalism in expansion. It takes Europe as its center and Christianity as its only truth. This is essentially the same official story, after all, that is told of the “reconquest” of Spain by Christians against “Moorish” invaders, a way of disqualifying Spaniards of Muslim culture who had been living in the peninsula for seven centuries when they were expelled. The expulsion of these supposed “Moors,” who had nothing Moorish about them, along with Spaniards of Jewish faith, signaled the triumph of intolerance and sealed the ruinous history of the very Spain that discovered and conquered America. A few years before friar Diego de Landa cast the books of the Mayas into the flames in Yucatán, Archbishop Cisneros had burned the Islamic books in Granada, in a great bonfire of purification that blazed for several days.
The official story repeats the ideological alibis of the usurpers of America, but in spite of itself it also reveals the reality that it contradicts. That reality, burned, banned, and falsified, emerges in the shock and horror, the outrage, and also the awe of the chroniclers of the Indies when they came face to face with those beings that Europe, the Europe of the Inquisition, was in the process of “discovering.”
The Church acknowledged in 1537 that the Indians were persons, endowed with soul and reason, but it blessed the crime and pillage: The Indians were persons, but persons possessed by the devil and therefore without any rights. The conquistadors acted in the name of God, to root out idolatry, and the Indians gave continuous proof of their irremediable perdition and irrefutable causes for condemnation. The Indians did not know private property. They did not use gold or silver as money, but to adorn their bodies or pay homage to their gods. Those false gods were on the side of sin. The Indians went around naked: The spectacle of nudity, warned Archbishop Pedro Cortés Larraz, causes “much injury to the brain.” Indissoluble marriage bonds did not exist anywhere in America, and virginity had no value. On the Caribbean coasts and in other areas, homosexuality was unrestrained, and this offended God as much as or more than the cannibalism of the Amazon jungle. The Indians had the unwholesome habit of bathing every day and, to cap it all, they believed in dreams. Thus the Jesuits were able to confirm the influence of Satan on the Canadian Indians: Indians so diabolical they had interpreters for the symbolic language of dreams, because they believed that the soul speaks while the body sleeps and that dreams express unfulfilled desires. The Iroquois, Guaraní, and other American Indians elected their chiefs in open meetings, where women took part as men’s equals, and removed them from office if they became overbearing. No doubt possessed by the devil, Chief Nicaragua asked who had elected the king of Spain.
The purifying mission of Civilization no longer masks the plunder of gold or silver: Under the banner of Progress, onward march the legions of modern pirates, without hooked hands, eye patches or wooden legs, the multinationals that swoop down on the uranium, petroleum, nickel, manganese, tungsten. The Indians suffer, as before, the curse of the wealth of the lands they inhabit. They were driven toward arid soil; technology has discovered, beneath those soils, fertile subsoils.
“The conquest isn’t over,” gaily proclaimed the advertisements published in Europe 11 years ago, offering Bolivia to foreigners. The military dictatorship held out to the highest bidder the richest land in the country, while treating the Indians the same as in the 16th century. In the first phase of the conquest, Indians were compelled to describe themselves in public documents,
“I, wretched Indian . . . ” Now the Indians only have the right to exist as servile labor or tourist attractions.
“Land is not sold. Land is our mother. You don’t sell your mother. Why don’t they offer $100 million to the Pope for the Vatican?” a Sioux chief asked recently in the United States.
A century earlier, the Seventh Cavalry had ravaged the Black Hills, sacred territory to the Sioux, because they held gold. Now multinational corporations mine its uranium, although the Sioux refuse to sell. The uranium is poisoning the rivers.
A few years ago, the Colombian government told the Indians of the Cauca valley, “The subsoil does not belong to you but to the Colombian nation,” and immediately turned it over to the Celanese Corporation. After a time, part of the Cauca had been turned into a lunar landscape. A thousand hectares of Indian land were made barren. In the Ecuadoran Amazon, oil is dislodging the Auca Indians. A helicopter flies over the jungle, with a loudspeaker announcing in the Auca language, “It’s time to leave now.” And the Indians obey the will of God.
From Geneva, in 1979, the United Nations Human Rights Commission warned: “Unless the Brazilian government alters its plans, we can expect that the largest of the surviving tribes will cease to exist in twenty years.”
The Commission was referring to the Yanomami, in whose Amazonian lands tin and rare minerals had been discovered. For the same reason, the Nambiquara Indians now number fewer than 200, and they were 15,000 at the beginning of the century. Indians die like flies when they come in contact with unknown bacteria brought by the invaders, as in the days of Cortés and Pizarro—a process now speeded up by Dow Chemical’s defoliants, sprayed from the air. When the commission launched its pathetic warning from Geneva, FUNAI, the official body for the protection of Brazil’s Indians, was run by 16 colonels and employed 14 anthropologists. There has been no change in the government’s plans since then.
Throughout America, from north to south, the dominant culture acknowledges Indians as objects of study but denies them as subjects of history: The Indians have folklore, not culture; they practice superstitions, not religions; they speak dialects, not languages; they make handicrafts, not art.
Perhaps the approaching celebration of the 500th anniversary could help turn things around, so topsy-turvy are they now. Not to confirm the world, adding to the self-importance, the self-glorification of the masters of power, but to denounce and change it. For that we shall have to celebrate the vanquished, not the victors. The vanquished and those who identified with them, like Bernardino de Sahagún, and those who lived for them, like Bartolomé de las Casas, Vasco de Quiroga, and Antonio Vieira, and those who died for them, like Gonzalo Guerrero, the first conquered conqueror, who ended his days fighting at the side of the Indians, his chosen brothers, in Yucatán.
And perhaps in this way we could get a bit closer to the day of justice that the Guaraní, pursuers of Paradise, have always been awaiting. The Guaraní believe that the world wants to be different, that it wants to be born again, and so the world entreats the First Father to unleash the blue tiger that sleeps beneath his hammock. The Guaraní believe that someday that righteous tiger will shatter this world so that another world, with neither evil nor death, guilt nor prohibitions, can be born from its ashes. The Guaraní believe, and I do too, that life truly deserves that festival.
—Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan author and journalist. His most recent book is Los hijos de los días (Siglo XXI Editores, 2012). This is an excerpt of an article that was originally printed in the February 1991 NACLA Report on the Americas
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Ruthless and rudderless, the American is an evil creature in his or her or their formulation as millionaire or billionaire or the Eichmann’s or the wannabe Musks. Dirty and evil, that’s the fucking ticket.
Happy Valetine’s Day, Mother Fuckers.
And this under the eye of a fucking racist cunt from South Africa, white apartheid loving shit?
According to reports, these positions were deemed “not in the public interest” by DOI—an assertion that fundamentally ignores the role these professionals play in protecting and restoring our nation’s wildlife and wild places.
This sweeping, mass firing comes at a time when the Refuge System is already struggling with a decimated workforce. Today’s cuts will further cripple the agency’s ability to protect and manage America’s 573 national wildlife refuges, which span 95 million acres of land, 750 million acres of marine habitat, and supports countless species, many of which are keystone species, pollinators, and others vital to agriculture and the health of ecosystems.
“Losing this many dedicated employees all at once is an especially devastating blow to conservation efforts nationwide and an intentional dismantling of science,” said Desirée Sorenson-Groves, President & CEO of the National Wildlife Refuge Association. “The National Wildlife Refuge System was already underfunded and understaffed. The people being fired today are the backbone of wildlife protection in this country. Without them, habitats will degrade, endangered species will go unmonitored, trails will remain unmaintained, and visitors will lose access to environmental education and recreation opportunities. This is a crisis. These terminations will have long-lasting consequences for the protection of wildlife and habitat, as well as for the communities that depend on refuges for recreation, tourism, and economic benefits.”
Reports indicate that in order to hire new employees, the agency will be required to eliminate four current positions for every one new hire—a policy that will only worsen the Refuge System’s staffing crisis.
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Where are the Yemen Heroes? Bomb the fuck out of these super yachts.
The shipyard that built the support ships for Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos will now be outfitting the world’s largest superyacht. Owned by an oil billionaire, the REV Ocean will have eight laboratories, three swimming pools, and a submarine hangar
It’s unclear what that might be, but the US has a long history of political and military intervention in Panama, including an invasion nearly 40 years ago that culminated in a dictator being driven out of an embassy with deafening rock music. Operation Just Cause, a 1989 military intervention, saw 26,000 American troops pour into the country.
Trump has said he wants to again put the Panama Canal under US control, causing a stir.
The US has a history of intervention in Panama. In 1989, the military invaded it.
The successful invasion signaled to neighboring countries that the US disregarded state sovereignty.
And the fucking world burns, floods kill, animals immolate, coral reefs crumble, plastics and nanoparticles into the brains of our babies, and alas, this is where the Mafia State goes:
The shipyard that built the support ships for Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos will now be outfitting the world’s largest superyacht. Owned by an oil billionaire, the REV Ocean will have eight laboratories, three swimming pools, and a submarine hangar
If you’re wondering why the billionaire owner of Aker, a shipping and offshore drilling conglomerate is doing so much for the oceans, the answer lies in his roots. The 66-year-old tycoon, worth $4.4 billion, got his start selling fish off a boat in Seattle before returning to Norway, where he built a fleet and earned a reputation as a ruthless corporate raider.
Perhaps in an effort to redefine that image, and give back to the nature that shaped his success, he commissioned a ship that will accommodate up to 60 scientists and 30 crew members during research expeditions.
We are shifting the spotlight to Damen Yachting today, not only because most billionaires like to own at least one Damen yacht in their fleet, either as their superyacht or a support vessel, but also because the shipyard continues to push the boundaries of maritime innovation. From Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ $75 million Abeona to Mark Zuckerberg’s $30 million Wingman, and even Russian billionaire Oleg Tinkov’s $100 million La Datcha, Damen Yachts has delivered some maritime marvels. Now, they are busy outfitting not a support vessel but the world’s longest yacht, REV Ocean, spanning 638 feet, currently undergoing outfitting at Damen Shiprepair Vlissingen.
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Chris! Billionaires, man, War is a Racket, Monopolies, Trusts, the entire shithole of capitalism from the beginning:
Hedges: Kiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his “made” men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of government. You can turn us and the natural world into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility. Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term it is collective suicide.
America is a full blown kleptocracy. The demolition of the social and political structure, begun long before Trump, makes a few very, very rich and immiserates everyone else. Mafia capitalism always leads to a mafia state. The two ruling parties gave us the first. Now we get the second. It is not only our wealth that is being taken from us, but our liberty.
Since the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, currently worth $394 billion, saw his wealth increase by $170 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $254 billion, saw his net worth increase by nearly $41 billion.
Tidy sums for kneeling before Moloch.
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Then this fucking billionaire surveillance felon: The Google cofounder has already donated more than $1.5 billion to Parkinson’s research. Now, as he takes on autism, he’s also investing in venture funds and startups working to develop therapies and treatments, Everything they touch is dirty.
Hmm, Parkinson’s and Atrazine and a thousand other chemicals? Autism and, well, you figure that one out — shots, more shots, hormone disrupters, more and more.
And here we are, the God Fucking Silicon Valley bloodlust cocksuckers:
The state of Ohio is spending $70 million to build a taxiway at Rickenbacker International Airport and make other improvements to support a new weapons factory in Pickaway County.
The money is in addition to other state incentives for the California company Anduril, which announced in January that it plans to spend $900 million on a 5-million-square-foot complex to build drones, missiles and other high-tech weapons south of the airport. Dubbed Arsenal-1, the complex is expected to employ 4,008 workers by 2035, at an average annual salary of $132,000.
The state money, from the All Ohio Future Fund, will be distributed through the Pickaway County Port Authority. The authority will spend the money on improving utility and roads at the 600-acre site, off Airbase Road. Much of the money will also be spent on a taxiway to the runway for Anduril’s buildings directly on airport grounds.
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All for the fucking perverted “religion”: Palestinian prisoners show signs of torture, medical neglect; Israel attacks bulldozer crew retrieving bodies in Gaza; bakeries reopen; West Bank violence; Israel violates Lebanon ceasefire
Your brain is full of microplastics: are they harming you?
Plastics have infiltrated every recess of the planet, including your lungs, kidneys and other sensitive organs. Scientists are scrambling to understand their effects on health.
A sliver of human brain in a small vial starts to melt as lye is added to it. Over the next few days, the caustic chemical will break down the neurons and blood vessels within, leaving behind a grisly slurry containing thousands of tiny plastic particles.
Toxicologist Matthew Campen has been using this method to isolate and track the microplastics — and their smaller counterparts, nanoplastics — found in human kidneys, livers and especially brains. Campen, who is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, estimates that he can isolate about 10 grams of plastics from a donated human brain; that’s about the weight of an unused crayon.
Microplastics have been found just about everywhere that scientists have looked: on remote islands, in fresh snow in Antarctica, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, in food, in water and in the air that we breathe. And scientists such as Campen are finding them spread throughout the human body.
Detection is only the first step, however. Determining precisely what these plastics are doing inside people and whether they’re harmful has been much harder. That’s because there’s no one ‘microplastic’. They come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes and chemical compositions, each of which could affect cells and tissues differently.
This is where Campen’s beige sludge comes into play. Despite microplastics’ ubiquity, it’s difficult to determine which microplastics people are exposed to, how they’re exposed and which particles make their way into the nooks and crannies of the body. The samples that Campen collects from cadavers can, in turn, be used to test how living tissues respond to the kinds of plastic that people carry around with them.
“Morbidly speaking, the best source I can think of to get good, relevant microplastics is to take an entire human brain and digest it,” says Campen.
The world is hungry for data — German consumers rated microplastics in food as their top environmental-health concern in 2023, for example. And negotiations on a global treaty that could cap plastics production are under way. Findings have trickled out slowly, hampered by insufficient analytical methods, contamination risks and a lack of collaboration between scientists in different fields. “There’s no cookbook at this point. There’s no manual of standard operating procedures,” says Kathleen Egan, a cancer researcher at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. “We’re having to make them up as we go, and it’s a process.”
But there are signs that scientists are ironing out these kinks, and that the field is maturing. Campen is one of a cadre of researchers developing unconventional methods and forming teams of interdisciplinary scientists. They are caught in a race against time. Plastics production, which began less than a century ago, reaches an all-time high each year, and the material takes hundreds, if not thousands, of years to degrade, which will create trillions of microplastics in the process.
“There are microplastics everywhere,” says Bart Koelmans, an environmental chemist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. “We cannot run away from them.”
Mafia Bosses of Plastic
William Young
Founded Plastipak, a plastic container maker, with his father in 1967
Sold a majority stake in Plastipak to Beatrice Foods, but the family bought it back in 1982
Sold a minority stake to Goldman Sachs three decades later
The Chao siblings
Albert, James, and Dorothy Chao Jenkins own stakes in Westlake Corporation, a producer of low-density polyethylene
Low-density polyethylene is used for food packaging and other forms of plastic
Other billionaires
Walter Wang is a Taiwanese immigrant who became a multibillionaire by supplying America with plastic pipes
Ahh, Billionaires:
Mafia Bar Mitzvah Style:
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Dumb mother fucking Southerners.
Here we are in the fucking Mormon Cunt-Tree:
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🚨 Our fossil fuel wealth tracking campaign has recorded a £3bn wealth boost for Trump’s inner circle of billionaires in just ONE DAY following the inauguration. 🚨
“In just one day after Trump’s inauguration, CARP says 15 billionaires saw their combined wealth increase $3.31 billion, from $317.86 billion to $321.17 billion. And since the new year began, these individuals have made $17 billion, according to a CARP analysis using Bloomberg Data.”
n 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a law banning political contributions from corporations, a measure that was widely popular at that time – and perhaps would be again today. In 1935, public utility companies were prohibited from making political contributions, clamping down corporate influence in elections even further. But over time, these policies were softened and ultimately reversed, culminating in the 2010 Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court that opened the floodgates to unlimited spending by corporations seeking to assert political influence.
Monsters, one and all:
Largest Plastic Manufacturing Companies in the World
15. Toray Industries, Inc. (OTC:TRYIY)
Market Cap as of January 12: $9.10 Billion
Toray Industries, Inc. (OTC:TRYIY) produces and sells fibers, textiles, performance chemicals, carbon fiber composite materials, environmental and engineering products, and life science products worldwide. The company offers yarns, fabrics, non-woven fabrics, resins, molded products, foam products, films, processed film products, synthetic fibers, chemicals, electronic materials, graphic materials, carbon fibers, molded products, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, engineering services, condominiums, industrial equipment, IT-related equipment, membranes, housing materials, and building materials. Toray Industries, Inc. (OTC:TRYIY) was founded in 1926 and is based in Tokyo, Japan. The company employs over 48,000 individuals and is worth $9.10 billion, as of January 12.
Some of the biggest companies that have brought, and are expected to further bring, business to the global plastics industry include Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA), and The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO).
14. Evonik Industries AG (OTC:EVKIY)
Market Cap as of January 12: $10.10 Billion
Evonik Industries AG (OTC:EVKIY) is a German company that specializes in chemical production. The company provides various additives, surfactants, smart materials, performance materials and infrastructure services. The company’s products are used in many sectors, such as automotive, construction, and consumer goods. Evonik Industries AG (OTC:EVKIY) has operations in several regions, including Europe, Asia-Pacific, and North and South America. Evonik Industries AG (OTC:EVKIY) was founded in 1873 and employs roughly 34,000 individuals. As of January 12, Evonik Industries AG (OTC:EVKIY) is worth $10.10 billion and is one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world, by market cap.
Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) is a specialty materials company in the US and overseas. The company operates through four segments: Additives & Functional Products, Advanced Materials, Chemical Intermediates, and Fibers. The company’s Additives & Functional Products segment provides hydrocarbon and rosin resins, organic acid solutions, amine-based building blocks, soil fumigants, fungicides, plant regulators, specialty and commodity solvents, paint additives, and specialty polymers. Its Advanced Materials segment offers copolyesters, biopolymers, cellulose esters, PVB sheets, and window and protective films. The company’s Chemical Intermediates segment provides methylamines, higher amines, solvents, Olefin derivatives, and plasticizers. Finally, Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) supplies cellulose acetate tow, triacetin, flake, acetic acid, and anhydride for filtration and yarns, as well as nonwoven media, papers, and cellulose fibers, through its Fibers segment. Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN) was founded in 1920 and is based in Tennessee. As of January 12, the company is worth $10.97 billion.
Celanese Corporation (NYSE:CE) is a technology and specialty materials company that produces and sells engineered polymers in the U.S. and internationally. The company has three divisions: Engineered Materials, Acetate Tow, and Acetyl Chain. The Engineered Materials division produces specialty polymers for auto, medical, industrial, and consumer electronics, as well as sweeteners and food protection ingredients. The Acetate Tow division produces acetate tows and flakes for filter products, and the Acetyl Chain division manufactures acetyl products and solvents used for colorants, paints, adhesives, coatings, pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, and chemicals. Celanese Corporation (NYSE:CE) also produces vinyl acetate-based emulsions and ethylene vinyl acetate resins and compounds, as well as ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene. The company was founded in 1918 and is based in Irving, Texas.
Celanese Corporation (NYSE:CE) is one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world and is valued at $12.91 billion, as of January 12.
11. Formosa Plastics Corporation (TPE:1301)
Market Cap as of January 12: $18.39 Billion
Formosa Plastics Corporation (TPE: 1301) is a Taiwan-based chemical and plastics company founded in 1954. The company is one of the largest petrochemical companies in Taiwan and also one of the largest producers of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in the world. Formosa Plastics Corporation (TPE:1301) produces a wide range of products, including Chlor-Alkali, Polyethylene, Polypropylene, Suspension PVC, Specialty PVC, and other plastic compounds.
Formosa Plastics Corporation (TPE:1301) is an important player in the global plastics market and is one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world. As of January 12, the company is worth $18.39 billion on the open market.
10. INEOS Group Limited
Annual Revenue (2021): $20.38 Billion
INEOS Group Limited is a multinational chemical company based in the United Kingdom. It is among the world’s largest private chemical companies by revenue, with an annual revenue of over $20 billion, as of 2021. The company produces products ranging from basic chemicals, such as chlorine and ethylene, to advanced materials and specialty chemicals, such as polyethylene, styrenics, and performance chemicals. The company also produces chemicals for the automotive, construction, electronics, and medical industries.
INEOS Group Limited is a global leader in the plastic manufacturing industry, with a presence in more than 25 countries. The company produces and sells a variety of plastic products, including polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and PVC, among others. INEOS’ portfolio of products is used for a variety of applications, including packaging, construction, automotive, and consumer goods. The company has a strong presence in the global plastic manufacturing industry, and is among the top producers of polyethylene and polypropylene.
LyondellBasell Industries N.V. (NYSE:LYB) is a chemical company based in Houston, Texas, that operates in the U.S., Germany, Mexico, Italy, Poland, France, Japan, China, and the Netherlands. The company operates 6 business segments: Olefins/Polyolefins-Americas, Olefins/Polyolefins-Europe/Asia/International, Intermediates/Derivatives, Advanced Polymer Solutions, Refining, and Technology. LyondellBasell Industries N.V. (NYSE:LYB) produces olefins, co-products, polyethylene, polypropylene, propylene oxide, oxyfuels, intermediates, compounds/solutions, catalysts, and also refines crude oil into gasoline and distillates. LyondellBasell Industries N.V. (NYSE:LYB) was founded in 2009 and has grown to become one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world with a market cap of $30 billion, as of January 12.
DuPont de Nemours, Inc. (NYSE:DD) is based in Wilmington, Delaware and produces tech-based materials and solutions in the U.S., Canada, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. The company has three segments: Electronics & Industrial, Mobility & Materials, and Water & Protection. The Electronics & Industrial sells materials for semiconductor and circuit fabrication, PCBs, LEDs, metal finishing, displays, and specialty silicones. DuPont de Nemours, Inc. (NYSE:DD) provides engineering resins, silicone, films, and pastes for transportation, electronics, industrial, and consumer end-markets through its Mobility & Materials segment. The Water & Protection supplies products and systems for worker safety, water purification, energy, medical packaging, and building materials. DuPont de Nemours, Inc. (NYSE:DD) is worth $37.21 billion, as of January 12, and is among the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world.
Dow Inc. (NYSE:DOW) is a materials science solutions provider in the US, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, the Asia Pacific, and Latin America. It has three segments: Packaging & Specialty Plastics, Industrial Intermediates & Infrastructure, and Performance Materials & Coatings. The company offers ethylene, propylene and aromatics products; polyethylene, polyolefin elastomers, ethylene vinyl acetate, and ethylene propylene diene monomer rubbers through its Packaging & Specialty Plastics segment. The company’s Industrial Intermediates & Infrastructure segment provides ethylene oxides, propylene oxides, propylene glycol and polyether polyols, aromatic isocyanates and polyurethane systems, coatings, adhesives, sealants, elastomers, and composites. Additionally, Dow Inc. (NYSE:DOW) provides architectural paints & coatings, industrial coatings, performance silicones & specialty materials, and silicone feedstocks & intermediates through its Performance Materials & Coatings segment.
Dow Inc. (NYSE:DOW) was founded in 2018 and is based in Midland, Michigan. The company has quickly grown to become one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world and is valued at $40.5 billion, as of January 12.
The plastic manufacturing industry has high exposure to a diverse range of lucrative end-markets that are led by giant companies like Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA), and The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE:KO).
BASF SE (OTC:BASFY) is a global chemical company with six segments: Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, Surface Technologies, Nutrition & Care, and Agricultural Solutions. The company provides petrochemicals & intermediates, advanced materials & their precursors, ingredients & additives for industrial applications, chemical solutions & automotive OEM, nutrition & care ingredients, crop protection products & seeds, and battery materials solutions. Founded in 1865 and headquartered in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany, BASF SE (OTC:BASFY) is one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world. As of January 12, the company is worth over $51 billion on the open market.
5. Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (TADAWUL:2010)
Market Cap as of January 12: $74.67 Billion
Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (TADAWUL:2010), or more commonly known as SABIC, is one of the world’s largest diversified chemical companies and a global leader in the chemical industry. The company is publicly listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange and is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and has operations in over 50 countries. Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (TADAWUL:2010) produces a wide range of petrochemicals, including olefins, aromatics, methanol, ethylene glycol, and polyethylene, as well as fertilizers, metals and industrial chemicals. The company also has interests in manufacturing, engineering and technology-based businesses.
As of January 12, Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (TADAWUL:2010) is worth SAR 282 billion, or $74.67 billion, and is placed high among the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world.
4. China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SHA:600028)
Market Cap as of January 12: $75.87 Billion
China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SHA:600028), also known as Sinopec, is one of the world’s leading integrated oil and gas companies. It is also a major player in the global plastics manufacturing industry. The company operates through five segments: Exploration and Production, Refining, Marketing and Distribution, Chemicals and Corporate and Others. China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SHA:600028) has a comprehensive portfolio of petrochemical products, including plastic resins, polyethylene, polypropylene, and other plastics. China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SHA:600028) is a major player in the global plastic manufacturing industry and is well-positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities in the sector. Its strong brand recognition and extensive distribution networks help it compete effectively against other leading players in the industry. The company is also well-positioned to benefit from the growing demand for plastic products in the future.
As of January 12, China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (SHA:600028) is worth over $75 billion and is one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world.
TotalEnergies SE (NYSE:TTE) is a French multinational energy company, involved in the production and distribution of oil, natural gas and petrochemicals. The company is one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world and its operations span across the entire plastics value chain, from feedstock and resin production to compounding, processing and recycling. The company operates a range of plants and facilities around the world, in over 130 countries, producing a variety of plastic products for a range of industries. As of January 12, TotalEnergies SE (NYSE:TTE) is worth $157.10 billion.
2. LG Chem, Ltd. (KRX:051910)
Market Cap as of January 12: $204.5 Billion
LG Chem, Ltd. (KRX:051910) is one of the largest chemical companies in the world, with operations in 15 countries. The company is a leading producer of petrochemicals, plastics, and specialty chemicals, with a large presence in the automotive, electronics, and energy industries. It also produces advanced materials, including Li-ion batteries, OLED displays, and fuel cells. As of January 12, LG Chem, Ltd. (KRX:051910) is worth KRW 46.96 trillion, or $204.5 billion, and is one of the largest plastic manufacturing companies in the world.
Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) explores, extracts, and sells crude oil and natural gas globally. The oil and gas giant also manufactures, trades, transports, and sells petroleum products, petrochemicals, and other special items across the globe. Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) is a major player in the plastic manufacturing industry. The company produces petrochemicals, such as olefins, polyolefins, aromatics, and other petrochemicals that are the building blocks of a wide array of plastic products.
Basically, Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) manufactures and provides the necessary components for an expansive range of plastic products, such as packaging materials, plastic containers, car bumpers, artificial rubber, and many more. As of January 12, Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) is worth $458.7 billion on the open market and is the largest plastic manufacturing company in the world.
under his dirty perverse psychopathic eye — Trump and his Terror Campaign Against Sense, Common Sense, Social Fabric, Safety Nets, Humanity! Trumpers for More Mercury in Your Mother’s Milk!
So, I wrote a couple of pieces which included the Nazi Ideology of Hillsdale “college” and so I get emails now in the Google Gulag Box from this fucked up place, Hillsdale.
More fucking retardation in AmeriKKKa. See Hillsdale survey below.
Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not. —Robert F. Kennedy
In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. —Justice Harry Blackmun
That is where this book comes in. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have written a primer for nonlawyers that makes the now sprawling literature of critical race theory easily accessible to the beginner. From the earliest social and intellectual origins of the movement to its key themes and debates to its methods to its future, Delgado and Stefancic offer a lively, lucid guide to critical race theory and a starting place for further reading and thinking. With the help of this book, even students who find their official course reading lists as barren as I did in 1983 will find their way into a rich and important intellectual debate.
Critical race theory not only dares to treat race as central to the law and policy of the United States, it dares to look beyond the popular belief that getting rid of racism means simply getting rid of ignorance, or encouraging everyone to “get along.” To read this primer is to be sobered by the recognition that racism is part of the structure of legal institutions, but also to be invigorated by the creativity, power, wit, and humanity of the voices speaking about ways to change that structure. As race relations continue to shape our lives in the new century—setting the stage for new tragedies and new hopes—critical race theory has become an indispensable tool for making sense of it all. — Preface to the Book.
Dear Fellow American,
I’m glad you opened my email today! I have something urgent to ask you that will shape the future of our families, communities, and country.
Sharing your opinion is an important way you’ll combat the spread of CRT in our schools and workplaces. Together, we can preserve the constitutional and free-enterprise principles that made our nation so great and so free.
Thanks in advance! I look forward to seeing your response.
Bill Gray, ‘01 Vice President Institutional Advancement Hillsdale College
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Take a break from the fucked up insanity of the White Western Ghoulish Race:
At the age of at least 74, Wisdom the albatross is showing that for many, motherhood simply never ends.
Three things to know:
The Laysan albatross was first banded (or marked) in Hawaii in 1956. Meaning, she could be even older than the current estimate of 74.
She’s been at motherhood for quite some time; Wisdom has likely produced 50 to 60 eggs, and brought as many as 30 chicks to the fledgling state, NPR’s Bill Chappell reported.
But it still feels like a marvel to watch her keep at it; after laying her latest egg in December, she was captured returning to her nest last week on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge to tend to her young chick.
Bye bye good stories like this one since the Fascist Elon-Trump with the glassy eyes of the Demon-crats looking on is evicerating real earth and biological sciences.
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Numbers to remember — 48 million and $600 Billion
AmeriKKKa, the Final Roadshow: Janice Will was diagnosed in 2012 with Parkinson’s, a condition that causes parts of the brain to deteriorate, causing tremors and balance problems.
“When she broke her femur and it was close to the artery…it could have been lights out,” Brandon Will, Janice’s son, said about his mother.
Brandon, who lives with his mother near Chicago, Illinois, soon realized his mom needed 24/7 access to care.
Brandon, 42, reminds his mom that she is not weighing him down, telling her, “Parkinson’s is the burden. It’s one we share.”
“I think people get to these points where there is an illness or something that comes earlier than you’d expect. You realize how many systems aren’t in place,” Brandon told ABC News.
Janice and Brandon’s story mirrors the struggles many Americans are forced to reckon with when a loved one falls ill.
In the U.S., 48 million people have taken on the role of becoming a caregiver to a family member — with little to no financial help, according to Susan Reinhard, formerly the senior vice president of AARP’s Public Policy Institute and chief strategist for the organization.
“There are 48 million family caregivers who are unpaid. And if you did have to pay them, it would be $600 billion. I keep emphasizing the billion dollars because it’s quite amazing. It’s more than all out-of-pocket spending in the United States on health care,” Reinhard told ABC News.
Remember you fucking Christian and non-Christian Fucks:
My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’
After I left the office, I was standing with the others near the side entrance to the West Wing when Donald’s assistant caught up with me. “Your uncle would like to see you,” she said.
Azar was still in the Oval Office when I walked back in. “Hey, pal,” Donald said. “How’s everything going?”
“Good,” I said. “I appreciate your meeting with us.”
“Sure, happy to do it.”
He sounded interested and even concerned. I thought he had been touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared about their journey with their patients and their own family members. But I was wrong.
“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
Oh, that cocksucker Trump and his Minyan and his fucking Jew Lovers and Gazan Killers, they want more BLOOD.
It is a black and latino and BIPOC attack by the Racist and Rapist in Chief, Trump.
The termination notice came just before Valentine’s Day, and Elena Moseyko’s heart was shattered as she broke down crying in front of her two young children.
She has bills to pay – a mortgage, preschool tuition, a car payment – and a scared family.
“I feel so angry now at the administration because I traumatized my kids,” she said. “I wish I would’ve never joined the federal government.”
Moseyko joined the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs last year as a data scientist. She’d been “happily employed” in the private sector for a consulting firm but thought a government job seemed more stable.
Great heroes, federal worker, most of them, but . . . but . . . we need to reverse jujistu the fucking felons with our own program to take out motorcades, cabinet members’ jets, finding their backyard and poolside parties:
Newly-leaked documents reveal a crew of military academics pitching the US National Security Council a series of extreme strategies for Ukraine, from IED’s inspired by Iraqi insurgents to sabotaging Russia’s infrastructure to propaganda “from ISIS’ playbook.”
Conceived under the auspices of the UK’s University of St. Andrews, the plans were outsourced through third parties to ensure “plausible deniability.”
Explosive leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone show how a shady transatlantic collective of academics and military-intelligence operatives conceived schemes which would lead to the US “helping Ukraine resist,” to “prolong” the proxy war “by virtually any means”.
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A break from the pathological insanity of USA and UK and EUroTrashLandia:
Parenting a flock of Northern Bald Ibises is a demanding job. For the past six months, biologists Barbara Steininger and Helena Wehner have spent every day hand-feeding and raising dozens of these endangered chicks. They couldn’t pass their fostering duties off on anyone else during that time—the juvenile birds needed to imprint on them and them alone.
Steininger and Wehner then took to the skies to guide their young charges on the birds’ first migration. In mid-August they climbed onboard a microlight aircraft in Rosegg, Austria, to start their approximately 2,800-kilometer journey, which ended on October 3 at a wintering site in Andalusia, Spain. There the two foster parents said their final goodbye to the birds that they helped raise.
“At the end, you have to release them in the wintering site and accept that they are now independent and don’t need you anymore,” says Johannes Fritz, who leads the team reintroducing Northern Bald Ibises to the wild in Europe and has been piloting the microlight aircraft on these guided migrations since 2004.
Conservation under the Rapist in Chief Trump’s Watch? LET THEM ALL DIE. Trump hates women, smart women, scientists, et al.
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And here, the Mengele and Oppen-Monster-Heimers of the WORLD:
Eutelsat is taking another step away from consumer broadband as Starlink’s sprawling low Earth orbit (LEO) network continues to erode demand for geostationary services.
The French operator said Feb. 14 it is repurposing Konnect VHTS, the 500-gigabit-per-second satellite launched to geostationary orbit (GEO) in 2022 for consumer broadband over Europe and Africa, to serve higher-paying mobility customers in other markets.
Eutelsat CEO Eva Berneke said Konnect VHTS is currently providing connectivity to major customers in Spain, Switzerland and France, adding that only Italian telco TIM has opted not to proceed with migrating to the satellite.
“However, we will probably not sell all of the capacity,” she added, so “we are developing terminals for also mobility use,” such as connectivity on boats and planes.
Berneke pointed to mounting consumer broadband competition from Starlink, which can provide lower-latency services with LEO satellites orbiting much closer to Earth than GEO.
While SpaceX’s Starlink initially focused on the consumer broadband market, she noted that the U.S.-based company has been steadily expanding into enterprise and government services in recent years.
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Bad Science at its Genetic Fucking Frankenstein Level. Mercury, uh?
[A Japanese court on Wednesday (2023)ordered the central government, the Kumamoto prefecture and a chemical company to recognize more than 120 plaintiffs as patients of the decades-old Minamata mercury poisoning and pay compensation they have been denied because they developed symptoms after moving away from the region.
The Osaka District Court recognized all 128 plaintiffs as Minamata disease victims and ordered the government, Kumamoto and Chisso Corp., which is held responsible for the pollution, to pay 2.75 million yen ($18,400) each, according to officials and media reports.
The plaintiffs, in their 50s and 80s, were living in Kumamoto and nearby Kagoshima at the time of the mercury poisoning and later moved to Osaka and elsewhere in western Japan. They filed a lawsuit in 2014, saying they were unfairly excluded from a 2009 compensation. They had demanded 4.5 million yen ($30,170) each, according to their lawyers.
….
The research team from Macquarie University’s Applied BioSciences, CSIRO, Macquarie Medical School, and the ARC Center of Excellence in Synthetic Biology, has successfully genetically modified fruit flies and zebrafish to transform methylmercury into a far less harmful gas that disperses in air.
“It still seems like magic to me that we can use synthetic biology to convert the most environmentally harmful form of mercury and evaporate it out of an animal,” says synthetic biologist Dr. Kate Tepper from Macquarie University, lead author on the paper.
Methylmercury causes environmental harm due to its high bioavailability and poor excretion: it can easily cross the digestive tract, the blood-brain barrier, and the placenta and becomes increasingly concentrated as it moves up through food webs to levels that can cause harm to neural and reproductive health.
The team modified the DNA of fruit flies and zebrafish by inserting variants of genes from bacteria to make two enzymes that together can convert methylmercury to elemental mercury, which evaporates from the animals as a gas.
New Illegal Material Not Allowed in K12, and a college coming to your town near you: Hillsdale curriculum now ready for deploying across the U$A.
Billions of years ago, the molecular building blocks of life emerged from a complex web of chemical and geological processes. This transformation laid the foundation for biological systems, culminating in the formation of DNA, RNA, proteins, and cellular membranes. A key factor in this process was environmental energy, which drove the formation of increasingly complex biopolymers.
Recent studies highlight the importance of wet-dry cycles—periodic shifts in water availability—suggesting that these fluctuations played a crucial role in shaping early chemistry.
Through a process of dehydration and rehydration, simple molecules formed larger, more complex structures. During dry phases, molecules linked together into longer chains, and in wet phases, these chains partially broke down. This cycle enabled chemical selection, allowing only the most stable and functional molecules to persist.
How Israel is weaponising everyday tech into terror devices . . . And why you will never be safe again. by Palestine Will Be Free
Oh, those fucking Substacker Cock Blockers. Who woulda thunk?
Oh well: Ralph Nader today? Maybe blocked tomorrow?
My comments, but also sent to Emanuel:
Cognitive dissonance. The murdering maiming jailing poisoning starving state of Jews did the killing of their own people Oct 7. Larry Wilkerson should know that by looking at the straffed and immolated cars at the military rave.
Then. This idea that Rapist in Chief Trump’s Minyan and Goyim support democracy?
Look at these monsters, Larry: Rapist Pete? What a guy
Trump’s connection to all of these monsters, pray tell? Emanuel, come on. Andrew Mellon onward. Oil, media, megalomania, anti-democracy, anti-people. All of them, and so, NSA and CIA and deep state and the deeper data state?
But it’s data, and 4IR, and, well, again, Greater Israel now is Great Wailing Wall White House. Larry Ellison and Larry Fink?
I know you are leaning toward Jewish being separate from Zionism, Ralph, but the old saying, even from the mouths of Jews — “Never trust a Jew” is really the coming of the MOABs and nukes.
Out of the list below, 3 Jews. And the value system of a Mellon, or Mellons, well, this is Project of New American Jewish Century gone wild.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Thursday, Timothy Mellon, grandson to Gulf Oil founder Andrew Mellon and heir to his fortune, gave $50 million to Donald Trump, who inherited $413 million from his father.
Alex Glass, Managing Director of Communications at Climate Power, released the following statement. “Trust fund baby Donald Trump and his new best friend Tim Mellon have something in common besides getting rich without doing any work: Trump, like Mellon, is completely dependent on fossil fuel billionaires for his continuing “success.” That’s why Donald Trump has been promising Big Oil CEOs to extend tax cuts for the ultrawealthy while asking them for $1 billion on campaign contributions – tax cuts that would let Andrew Mellon hold onto his unearned oil fortune, which Trump surely relates to.”
The Pentagon is now led by one of the least-qualified persons ever to be Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. He was exposed by the Democrats and the media when he was going through the congressional-confirmation process as ignorant, belligerent, vengeful, a woman-abuser denounced by his own mother, and a financial mismanager of the two groups that he directed. He’s now Secretary of Defense.
Ralph Nader
What I’d like to see Hegseth do is try his best to get Trump to help him refuse that money (the $150 billion that Congressional Republicans have proposed adding to the military budget). Gordon Adams—a man for whom I have a lot of respect, who was an OMB-type for a long, long time and knows more about the defense budget than probably anyone alive—said the truth the other day when he said: when Defense gets tons of money, it’s polluted, weakened, and turns into a place that can’t do its job. When it has periods of scarcity—and the better the scarcity, the deeper the scarcity, the better the Defense Department—it turns out to operate pretty well. So I think that’s stupid. I think it’s the Congress doing it because the Congress has become a wholly paid subsidiary of the military-industrial complex.
When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting-edge technology, oftentimes, I think our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly caused us to do precisely the opposite. Our administration, the Trump administration, believes that AI will have countless revolutionary applications… And to restrict its development now would not only unfairly benefit incumbents in the space, it would mean paralyzing one of the most promising technologies we have seen in generations.
this administration will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide, and we are the partner of choice for others, foreign countries, and certainly businesses as they expand their own use of AI. Number two, we believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off, and we’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies. And I like to see that deregulatory flavor, making its way into a lot of the conversations this conference. Number three, we feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship. …
The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way. The US possesses all components across the full AI stack, including advanced semiconductor design, frontier algorithms, and, of course, transformational applications…. And to safeguard America’s advantage, the Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful AI systems are built in the US with American designed and manufactured chips. (America must dominate AI because AI provides the means for domination.)
America wants to partner with all of you, and we want to embark on the AI revolution before us with the spirit of openness and collaboration. But to create that kind of trust, we need international regulatory regimes that foster the creation of AI technology rather than strangle it. And we need our European friends in particular to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation. (Note—Ignore the risks, damn the torpedoes)…
with the President’s recent executive order on AI, we’re developing an AI action plan that avoids an overly precautionary regulatory regime while ensuring that all Americans benefit from the technology and its transformative potential…..
Concerns About International Regulations
The US innovators of all sizes already know what it’s like to deal with onerous international rules…..
Ladies and gentlemen…. The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety….
Now at this moment, we face the extraordinary prospect of a new industrial revolution, one on par with the invention of the steam engine or Bessemer steel, but it will never come to pass if overregulation deters innovators from taking the risks necessary to advance the ball… TRANSCRIPT: VP JD Vance’s Speech at Paris AI Summit 2025, Singju Post
Vance’s entire presentation was little more than an anti-regulation harangue designed to belittle anyone who failed to ascribe to his “Damn the torpedoes, all ahead full” philosophy. What the speech shows is that the Trump team believes that anyone who expresses the slightest support for modest oversight (of this potentially lethal technology) is a namby-pamby trying to block the path to the future. But what is so surprising about Vance’s analysis is that it appears to be the polar opposite of Musk’s. Musk has not expressed any such opposition to regulation or oversight; quite the contrary. As we’ve already shown, Musk feels quite strongly that we must reach international consensus on how AI should be regulated to ensure things don’t get out of hand. Mike Whitney
Back to the diritiest of the dirty — Jew. Oh those fucking Jews:
Some absolutely remarkable things have happened lately — since September 17 of last year, to be exact. That was when Israel carried out a barbaric terror campaign in Lebanon as it weaponised communication devices — pagers and walkie-talkies — to kill dozens and maim hundreds of Hezbollah officials and ordinary citizens with no ties to the Lebanese resistance.
It’s an act so depraved that even the former CIA chief Leon Panetta called it terrorism in no uncertain terms, “I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”
Yet, instead of feeling any sense of guilt or moral quandary about it, the Israelis — and their supporters — have since gone on to gloat about that unhinged act of terror at every opportunity possible. “Where’s your beeper/pager?” or some variant of this line has become a something of a favourite of pro-genocide Zionists in encounters online and offline.
Betar, a rabidly Zionist organisation with a sordid past of terrorism in Palestine openly tweeted to a pro-Palestine activist a death threat in the following words,
“1800 dollars to anyone who hands that jihadi a beeper.”
“I hope your beeper doesn’t go off”, on live TV. A minister in the Netanyahu government tweeted a similar threat to the founder of the Hind Rajab Foundation: “Watch your pager.”
Deborah Lipstadt, who was Biden’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, rhetorically asked an interviewer,
while answering his question about Israel not being weaker in the aftermath of October 7. She was roundly applauded and cheered for her supposedly funny/clever remark at the pro-Israel event.
Bahraini and Emirati officials with Trump and Netanyahu at the signing of the Abraham Accords.
[So you are selling me Pegasus, right? Right?]
For the Indian government, which is the top buyer of Israeli weapons, Pegasus came in handy towards the fulfilment of its long-cherished dream and electoral promise.
It also helped Israel change India’s position in its favour at the UN. The aforementioned New York Timesarticle states, “[I]n June 2019, India voted in support of Israel at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization, a first for the nation.”
India had a long history of taking pro-Palestine positions at the UN, but the Narendra Modi-led right-wing Indian government is fast becoming a trusted Israel ally at international forums — helped undoubtedly by the weaponisation of a powerful spyware tool, as seen in the case of Gogoi.
In his book The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Israeli-British musician and writer Gilad Atzmon tells the story of Victor Ostrovsky, a deserter former Mossad agent who grew a conscience later in his life and divulged sordid details of Israel’s espionage operations, much to the chagrin of Israeli society.
Ostrovsky made some startling revelations in a book, in particular about the existence of “sayanim” which means assistants or helpers (singular: sayan). The sayanim, who must be 100 percent Jewish, are Israel’s assets in foreign countries who can be mobilised in an instant into doing things for the benefit of Israel.
Atzmon quotes the following passage from Ostrovsky’s 1990 book By Way of Deception about the way the sayanim work to advance Israeli interests from their native countries:
The next day Ran S. delivered a lecture on the savanim, a unique and important part of the Mossad’s operation. Sayanim (assistants) – must be 100 percent Jewish. They live abroad, and though they are not Israeli citizens, many are reached through their relatives in Israel. An Israeli with a relative in England, for example, might be asked to write a letter telling the person bearing the letter that he represents an organization whose main goal is to help save Jewish people in the Diaspora. Could the British relative help in any way? … There are thousands of sayanim around the world. In London alone, there are about 2,000 who are active, and another 5,000 on the list. They fulfill many different roles. A car sayan, for example, running a rental agency, could help the Mossad rent a car without having to complete the usual documentation. An apartment sayan would find accommodation without raising suspicions, a bank sayan could get you money if you needed it in the middle of the night, a doctor sayan would treat a bullet wound without reporting it to the police, and so on. The idea is to have a pool of people available when needed who can provide services but will keep quiet about them out of loyalty to the cause. They are paid only costs.
To prove that Ostrovsky wasn’t making things up, Atzmon writes that “the Israeli government used every possible means to stop the publication of his books.” Further, Atzmon shares the following conversation between two Israeli journalists to cement Ostrovsky’s account of Mossad’s clandestine network as truthful:
In a radio interview Joseph Lapid, at the time a senior Israeli columnist, opened his heart and told the world what he thought of Ostrovsky: ‘Ostrovsky is the most treacherous Jew in modern Jewish history. And he has no right to live, except if he’s prepared to return to Israel and stand trial.’
Valerie Pringle, the journalist on the other side of the line, asked Lapid: ‘Do you feel it’s a responsible statement to say what you’ve said?Lapid: ‘Oh yes, I fully believe in that. And unfortunately the Mossad cannot do it because we cannot endanger our relations with Canada. But I hope there will be a decent Jew in Canada who does it for us.
Pringle: ‘You hope this. You could live with his blood on your hands?’
Lapid: ‘Oh no. It’s to…only it will not be his blood on my hands. It will be justice to a man who does the most horrible thing that any Jew can think of, and that is that he’s selling out the Jewish state and the Jewish people for money to our enemies. There is absolutely nothing worse that a human being, if he can be called a human being, can do’.
Lapid, later a member of Sharon’s cabinet, makes it very clear: to be a Jew is a deep commitment that goes far beyond any legal or moral order.
Instead of ostracisation as would happen in any civilised society after such egregious call for murder, Lapid would go on to serve as Israeli Minister of Law in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s cabinet.
these Blumenthals and the Rest of the Ritter-Loving Substackers are zero real people cuz they don’t know real people
These are your people, Aaron-Max-Katie et al who just love the smell of napalm Tulsi’s Hair Shampoo in the Morning! These are the boys with toys, fuckers. And there will be blood!
Newport, Oregon, 2/14/2025!
Then the fucking unnews on UnBing: This fucking Jewish Hell Hole butt grabber ain’t no left leaner!
Look at this fucking 10 year old shot — a fucking Jew in the Mode of ZioAzovNaziLensky:
Rahm Emanuel Is a Union-buster. So Why Are Chicago Unions Backing Him?
Most of the city’s labor movement is laying low or supporting the mayor in the upcoming election, despite his well-known anti-worker policies.
When Rahm Emanuel strode into office as mayor of Chicago in 2011, one of his first targets was the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). He sought and obtained state legislation limiting the right of Chicago teachers to strike. But he lost doubly in the fall of 2012: The CTU successfully mobilized its members to go on strike, then won both a good contract and the battle for public support. Yet Emanuel still closed 49 public schools and expanded charter schools the following spring. Meanwhile, other public employee unions moved into the mayor’s crosshairs as he drastically cut and privatized city jobs and services, often with help from a Democratic governor and state legislature.
This is trash, on all side of the fucking aisle: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said treatment for addiction and substance abuse would be a priority if he is confirmed.
“I was a heroin addict for 14 years. I’ve been 42 years in recovery,” said Kennedy, noting he goes to 12-step meetings daily. Kennedy said he would support improving education on the issue for medical school students. “Primary care physicians should understand addiction care,” he said.
Kennedy’s wet dream:
Everything about Trump is Mired in His Racism, His Nazism, His Jewish Genuflection, His Criminality, His Rape Crimes, His Ignorance, His Grifting, His Stupidity, His UnManly Faux Manly Shit, His Daft Ideas, His Shallowness, His Triple Hatred of Blacks and Muslims.
The only fabric of America this cocksucker Rapist Trump stands for is his zipper politics, his fucking senile blathering, and this cunt of a South African Racist.
Come on fucking nerds, bring these fuckers’ planes down with electronic warfare, even if you are in your fucking mother’s basement with the 4-d chess games and, Dark Souls, Nioh, Lies of P, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Battletoads, Geometry Dash, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, A Difficult Game About Climbing, Real-time strategy, Survival, Rhythm, Bullet hell, Roguelike, Precision platformer, Soulslike.
Modi the Monster and his fucking teet-tit licking!
Another Trump Supporter. Memphis man sentenced to life for murdering wife on honeymoon.
And who said EuroTrashLandia doesn’t know how to be buggered without the Vaseline?
Little Dick Mother Fucking Queer as a Boy Scout Troop Master.
Now now, here is another Queer as a Steer with Udders, Scott RItter:
President Trump says he wants to work with China and Russia on the issue of “slowing down, stopping and reducing nuclear weapons.” Trump went on to declare that “there’s no reason for us to be building brand-new nuclear weapons…We already have so many you can destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over.” He also said he would urge Russia and China to join him in cutting their respective military budgets by half.
This is the most important statement made by an American president in decades, because from this can come a movement to save the world from the threat of nuclear annihilation. But such a dramatic departure from past practice threatens the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC), that massive monolithic edifice to greed and war which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned his fellow Americans about in his farewell address delivered in January 1961. — Ritter!
Former United Nations weapons inspector convicted in an online sex sting has been sentenced to up to 5 1/2 years behind bars.
Scott Ritter, 50, of Delmar, N.Y., exchanged explicit messages with a detective posing as a 15-year-old girl, then performed a sex act on himself in front of a webcam.
He testified in his own defense that he believed the person he met in a Yahoo chat room in 2009 was an adult acting out her own fantasy.
But a northeastern Pennsylvania jury convicted Ritter in April. On Wednesday, a Monroe County judge sentenced him to 18 months to 66 months in state prison.
Ritter was taken into custody immediately.
Ritter was one of the U.N.’s chief weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998.
Ritter had asked for a new trial Wednesday, basing his request on an appeals court ruling in New York that records from two previous incidents in that state in 2001 should not have been unsealed and given to prosecutors in Pennsylvania to be used at his trial. Defense attorney Gary Kohlman argued the New York ruling entitled Ritter to a new trial because prosecutors based much of their strategy on the argument that Ritter had a history of illicit online sex.
“It became, as I feared, the tail that was wagging the dog at trial,” Kohlman said in court.
Assistant District Attorney Michael Rakaczewski argued the New York ruling had no bearing on Ritter’s conviction and sentence in Pennsylvania.
THese fucking Marines!
Monroe County Judge Jennifer Sibum rejected the defense request for a new trial, saying Kohlman could bring up the New York case on appeal, and ordered Ritter’s sentencing hearing to begin.
Paula Brust, a member of the Pennsylvania’s Sexual Offenders Assessment Board, testified for the prosecution that based on Ritter’s history, he is at risk to offend again.
“He is not able to manage his offending in the community despite sex offender treatment,” she said.
Kohlman indicated he plans to call his own expert who will testify that Ritter is doing well in treatment and presents a low risk of re-offending.
Ritter was one of the U.N.’s chief weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He resigned after accusing the United States and the U.N. of failing to get tough with Saddam Hussein. Later, he said Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction, and he became a vocal critic of the U.S. invasion.
In 2001, Ritter twice arranged to meet people who claimed online to be underage girls but who turned out to be undercover police in Colonie, N.Y. The charges were eventually dismissed and the case was sealed, but Pennsylvania prosecutors obtained the records and used them to try to show Ritter has a predilection for underage girls.
Ritter told jurors he knew he was chatting with undercover police and set up the meetings so he would be arrested. Kohlman has said Ritter used sexually explicit chats on the Internet as a way to handle his depression over being called unpatriotic for his criticism of American policy on Iraq
Finally, what it all comes down to is this: Was Ollie North following orders or anticipating them? Is he the good guy or the bad guy or the fall guy? Everyone who has ever known him has an answer. Here are a few.
— William Corson: ”If the President says, `Write me a speech that says that green cheese and the moon are the same thing,` what are you going to do? Say it`s Velveeta?”
— Lt. Col. Holly: ”You can`t run with the ball till the ball`s been thrown to you.”
— An Annapolis graduate: ”What a lot of us are asking ourselves is,
`Did the Naval Academy teach more loyalty than what (Watergate figure) John Dean learned at his school?”
— Randall Herrod, the Marine for whom North traveled to Da Nang to testify: ”I believe in Ollie and if he did it, he did it in the best interest of the country. That`s the kind of man he is, real patriotic.”
— Denzil Garrison, one of Herrod`s attorneys: ”I still think he`ll be commandant of the Marine Corps someday.”
— President Reagan: ”He is a national hero.”
Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North, who was dismissed from his National Security Council staff job last week but later praised by President Reagan as a ”national hero,” had a relatively orthodox, modestly successful career as a Marine Corps officer.
Those who knew him well at the Naval Academy and in the Marines Corps said they found such harsh recent descriptions as a ”bull elephant gone amok,” and ”loose cannon” hard to reconcile with the professional, diligent performance they saw during the colonel’s 13 years of active duty.
During the Vietnam War, then Second Lieutenant North was once swept from the deck of a tank by its revolving turret. But, according to a battle citation, he grabbed a grenade launcher, climbed back onto the tank and led an attack that killed seven North Vietnamese soldiers. On another occasion during his 11-month tour he led three assaults on an enemy position until it finally fell.
He was decorated for such actions, but not highly decorated. He was regularly promoted, but not rapidly promoted. He took a serious, studious interest in such subjects as revolutionary warfare and military history, but one friend remarked that ”anyone who tells you Ollie North is a military intellectual is crazy.” No Critics to Be Found
Perhaps, too, the questions have been slow to arise because so many high-ranking Reagan administration officials respected North, admired him, and cooperated with him. But if North is in fact the unbalanced figure he appears to be, the implications of his role in the Reagan administration become not merely unsettling but alarming.
He’s got a fucking Meta Fuck You Page page!
Another fucking cunt:
QUEER boys of the USMC!
Robert C. McFarlane, President Reagan’s former national security adviser and a key figure in the Administration’s Iran arms sale operation, took an overdose of 25 to 30 Valium tablets Monday morning in what police said was a suicide attempt.
The overdose occurred about three hours before McFarlane was to testify before the Tower Commission investigating the operation of the National Security Council staff in light of the arms sale scandal.
Rushed to Hospital
McFarlane, 49, was rushed by ambulance to Bethesda Naval Medical Center, minutes from his home in suburban Bethesda, Md., just after 7 a.m., according to Detective Lauren Acquaviva of the Montgomery County, Md., Police Department.
More fucking Jews who need machetes!
Scooping out the minds of youth, one million at a time!
President Donald Trump has publicly stated, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” and “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. . . . I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely. I’m not going to read it.” Trump has also averred, “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying, and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” Obviously, these statements are contradictory, for if Trump is truly oblivious to the machinations of Project 2025, then how can he honestly disavow its policies, especially if he didn’t actually read the official “Playbook,”Mandate for Leadership: Project 2025?
While contemplating the answer to this question, consider that Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought was recorded with a hidden camera which caught him saying that Trump’s public distancing from Project 2025 is merely a feint intended to deflect and placate his opponents in media and politics. Meanwhile, at least 29 Project 2025 contributors, including Project 2025 Director Paul Dans, have served under Trump in official positions across various levels during his first presidential administration.
Moving forward into Trump’s second term, many of his picks for high-level officials in his executive branch are Project 2025 contributors. These include Cabinet appointments, such as John Ratcliffe, who is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Russell Vought, who is the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Other appointments include Tom Homan, who is Trump’s Border Czar, and Brendan Carr, who is the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Altogether, this constellation of Project 2025 contributors orbiting Trump indicates that his administration will be adopting at least some of the Project 2025 directives, such as the mass deportation operation already being carried out by Homan.
“TrumpED 2025: School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance, and the Dismantling of the Department of Education
In alignment with Project 2025, Trump pledges to eliminate the Dpt. of Ed and replace it with “school choice.” Rather than end federal control of education, Project 2025 education policy threatens to expand both government and corporate control of schooling in order to streamline ed-technocracy for the 4IR.” by John Klyczek
US President Donald Trump has reportedly greenlit the transfer of 11-ton bombs, dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB), to the Israeli regime, a decision his predecessors avoided.
Trump’s West Asia envoy, Steve Witkoff, unveiled the historic agreement to deliver the GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast, as the bomb is officially named, to Tel Aviv, according to German media.
Israel has coveted non-nuclear mega-bombs since the early 2000s, yet successive US presidents, including George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, had been reluctant to greenlight it.
Even Trump himself had declined to authorize such transfers during his first term.
The unprecedented delivery of the MOAB signals a new era of deepening American-Israeli military collaboration, one that analysts warn could dangerously heighten regional tensions.
Adding to the geopolitical tremors, Trump last month lifted a Biden-imposed hold on 2,000-pound bomb shipments to the Israeli regime, resuming their flow with a decisive stroke.
Biden’s administration had halted these bomb transfers in May in a bid to deter Israel from launching a full-scale assault on Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. However, despite this symbolic move, Washington continued to funnel billions of dollars worth of other lethal weaponry to Tel Aviv.
In other words, Ellison’s vision of the future is complete control over everyone’s data in the hands of governments and a select number of super-rich companies capable of building and running this infrastructure for them.
Ellison also told Blair about Oracle’s AI-powered biometric ID that’s currently used only to log into the company’s system:
“The computer recognizes you. It recognizes your voice. It might ask you to put your index finger on the return key. And we know, we’re absolutely certain it’s you. There’s no reason to enter a password.”
This is a rite of passage that needs to go the way of the Dodo.
Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?
Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:
“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.
Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”
“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”
“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.
When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”
“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”
We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shoot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.
Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.
And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.
Yeah, I heard stories about Paul Haeder’s exploits on a tall sail ship learning how to be a soldier, and listened intently his war experiences, and learned about his post-WWI life, and his life in Iowa and South Dakota (my grandfather ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who hit Ellis Island before WWI). Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and “working” the food trains with orders to shoot fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit, if they rushed the trains for food, bread, foodstuffs. That wasn’t Paul Haeder’s ethos, so he never did the dirty deeds of shooting Germans hungrier than rabid dogs.
Now, of course, forgotten history of that putrid, Patton and MacArthur, and their dirty deeds killing their own veterans:
In 1932, 17,000 former soldiers marched on Washington, D.C. to demand wartime pay owed to them. The Great Depression ravaged the country, and a president took desperate measures to disperse the angry veterans.
Tanks rolled down the streets. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. People died.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur — then the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff — led the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment into the fray.
The cavalry regiment contained six Renault FT tanks commanded by Maj. George Patton. The Army troops, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds. (source)
Skin in the game? Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army posts and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.
I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.
No blue blood in my family.
Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.
So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.
I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:
Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires.
His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.
He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing.
The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.
The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison.
I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many levels
Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class. This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?
FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.
Whew. Amazing, no, ECC.
Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.
Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate.
Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?
Here’s the show’s low down blurb:
Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.
Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living; i.e., food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.
I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?
It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.
The thuggery and gansterism RFK Jr. and Conor Kennedy espouse about Putin, that’s way off, sort of brainwashed opinion. Putin is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken. They have skin in the game, a la Raytheon et al.
Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:
GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?
You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.
So I really believe that really this Russia gate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.
I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.
AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?
GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.
What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak
AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.
GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.
And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.
Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.
There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.
Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:
When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donetsk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”
Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donetsk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.
“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)
“Here is Texas Russell Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists”
I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman — Conor, ever see him?
Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.
Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russell Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:
Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”
That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?
I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)
Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)
Then, on a sad and inspiring (for some) note tied to other types of humans who might be coming to Donbass to fight what they believe is the good fight.
That’s Alex Castillo, who was a fighter in Donbass since 2014. From Spain, but born in Columbia. It’s a tough comparison, right, Kennedy and Castillo. This man had skin in the game, family in the game, was there to defend the people of Donbass being murdered by Ukraine, vis-a-vis USA material and training and NATO beefing up.
He was a communist, too, which is contrary to the bleeding heart liberals who are wrapped in blue and yellow and demand more more more for Zelensky, who has rounded up communists. Russia, by the way, isn’t communist, since so many Americans I will send this article to might need some reminding.
Russell Bentley is in Donbass and was in the fighting groups with Castillo. Bentley is a communist, colorful, sometimes bombastic, but not afraid to call a spade a spade, and he has that robust energy still in his older age days (63) of someone critical of USA, of Ukraine and of Russia’s decision makers who Russell believes have really messed up the fight against the AFU and Azov folk in Donbass region.
But he has tributes for Castillo, just recently killed in fighting:
Alexis was a true Communist, and a real Internationalist. He often spoke of going to Syria or Venezuela or Cuba after our victory here in Donbass, to defend the people and the socialism there. He did not love war, not by any means, he hated it, as we all do here, as all decent people do, but he was good at the job, and the job needed to be done. As all combat veterans know, we are all born with only so much luck, and the more time you spend in the places where the bullets fly, the closer you get to the day your luck runs out. Alexis spent 8 years as a front line soldier, a sniper in a Spetsnaz unit, and he never, ever hesitated when it was his turn to go. And when his time came to meet death, two weeks after our good friend Elia was killed, Alexis met it like a hero, advancing on the enemy with a weapon in his hand. Alexis was truly a Che Guevara of the 21st century, and Alexis had said, as did Che, “I do not care if I fall, as long as another ear hears my battle cry, and another hand picks up my gun.” (“Adios, Alex Castillo: A Donbas hero falls on Oct. 28″).
Any sort of tribute to a fighter like Castillo in the circles I intersect with is verboten, literally. Cancelled, called a traitor, called a Putin lover, called a Trumpster, called any number of names that are completely antithetical to who and what I am. Or, you might end up in a Michigan Democratic rally, with Obama stumping, and god forbid you confront Obama about his administration’s work in Ukraine in 2014, and not only will you get the swarmy and bs Obama folksy retort — “We are all friends here . . . you’ll have time to speak” — but you will get those blue democrats, men, women, children, old and young, hating on Russia and just not ready for any pushback against their multimillionaire-soon-to-be-a-pro-basketball-team-owner Obama. Yelling, “Down with Russia . . . Putin is our enemy.” You know, no antiwar chants, or chants of peace talks, or chants against escalation, of nuclear saber rattling by Biden. Obama is truly a stump. These are his rallies in Michigan, and he was in Oregon, stumping for the democratic candidate for governor. What’s that got to do with ex-President’s multimillionaire package?
I know it’s “only” Jimmy Dore below covering that Michigan event, but heck, no pushback from mainstream media, so here, watch Democratic Party rally with Obama pushed through the Dore seive: “Peace Activists Heckle Obama Over Nuclear War”
All those dead Ukrainians, and Russians, and fighters like Castillo, and this is the end result for so many of them — what they leave behind:
?We are in some very sick and strange times —
Deep Critical Analysis Needed EVERY Veterans’ Day, USA’s National Holiday, November 11!
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Fucked up Catholic Heroin Addict and his Jewish Vaseline Queen: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach at the Israel parade in Manhattan
Dear friends, I have just returned from a lecture tour in the United States. I began in the north, in Michigan. I was invited by Hillsdale College, a university like few others, determined in its own vision and ideology but with a real openness to the Other.
It was an honor to speak at a place where so many remarkable individuals have preceded me, and at a moment when America is seeking its way to the future between feverish enthusiasm and wary anticipation. Many thanks, straight from the heart, to Hillsdale
This fellow: In the new book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, world-renowned Professor of Clinical Psychology Mattias Desmet deconstructs the societal conditions that allow collective psychosis to take hold. By looking at our current situation and identifying the phenomenon of “mass formation”—a type of collective hypnosis—he illustrates how close we are to surrendering to totalitarian regimes.
It’s just so fucking limiting. Inverted Totalitarianism, dude? Jewish Influence on Everything Psychology of the Lobotomy when it comes to Jews and Israel?
Just listen up, Mattias:
Fucking Western Civilization: Listen up, Belgian.
How did we lose Jerusalem after Salahuddin’s victory? What will it take to liberate Masjid al-Aqsa today? What can we learn from the Crusades, the rise of Zionism, and the internal divisions that have plagued the ummah? Join Dr. Omar Suleiman on this story of resilience, betrayal, and a question that still haunts us: will we rise to reclaim what was lost?
Project Censored: Nope. Not at the Baptist Fucking College!
Mass psychosis, massive Stockholm Syndrome, Massive and Consistent Shifting Baseline Synrome, the Tragedy of Some Commons, the Lack of Do No Harm, the Death of Precautionary Principle. My ass, these goddamned EuroTrashLandians.
Did old Mattis talk about the mass formation of the Jews? Those Jews?
As long as Zionism continues, so will Israel’s mental health epidemic
Suicides of Israeli Occupation Forces hit the headlines again, shining a light on the settler colonial state’s mental health epidemic. This issue won’t disappear as long as Zionism & violence inflicted on Palestinians continues, argues Rami Rmeileh.
”Zionism is a dehumanising ideology that persists at the expense of Palestinian suffering, and trauma should serve as a poignant wake-up call. As long as Zionism is ongoing, post-traumatic Zionism disorder (PTZD) will remain undiagnosed – only treatable as a physical condition, through chemicals and escapism.”
Kevin Barrett: There is a Karl Rove quote to Ron Suskind, I believe it was, after 9/11. And Rove went on this rant saying that, “all of you in the reality-based community are still stuck in that…We’re an empire and we create our own reality now.”
Hua Bin: Exactly. I must have seen that three dozen times in various books. Essentially this is the imperialist speaking, right? They create the reality and everybody else lives in the reality that they create. And eventually they reach that point where they don’t live in a world of facts, physical laws. Like somehow physical laws are suspended on the date of 9/11, right? Buildings collapsing for no good reason and the laws of physics doesn’t apply to airplanes and things of this nature. I like to think those guys actually are sometimes very honest about what they’re doing. And frankly, it’s out there, right? All the information you need is out there. Very few people actually bother to connect the dots. If you connect the dots, the conclusion is so transparent. It’s so just right staring at you in your face, right?
To your point, Karl Rove is essentially kind of opening the book to you. How many people really think through what he said and what’s the implications? Especially in the context of what happened with 9/11. The so-called war on terror, was just like such a straightforward case of “so who benefits from that terrorist attack? Did the so-called extremist Muslims benefit from that? Or did the state of Israel benefit from that?”
So go back to your common sense logic and think about those defining moments in history. And you say, like, we’re living in a world that’s kind of in the movie of Matrix, right? You can decide to take the blue pill, as most people did, right? And say, “I just pretend I’m living this normal life, not living in the body of the Matrix.” If you take the red pill, it’s actually pretty easy to see through all that.
Kevin: To what extent do you think that this (Western decadence, demeritocracy, etc.) is symptomatic of not just a decline in virtue in Western leadership circles per se, but specifically a decline in virtue corresponding with the rise of Jewish power in the West? We certainly see that the Jewish tradition behind the creation of the so-called Jewish state in occupied Palestine is genocidal and mendacious. I translated a book by Laurent Guyernot called From Yahweh to Zion, which makes the case that the roots of that kind of psychopathic lack of ethics go back to the Torah, the holy book, which has influenced this whole Jewish tradition.
And so we see that for sure in the colony in Palestine. But there are those who argue that it’s also a factor in the Ukraine war and and in the general bad leadership that we’re seeing in the West, the propaganda bubble that you talked about in your demeritocracy article.
And another quotation regarding that that I want to mention to you, or I did earlier before the show, was Alan Hart, the former BBC lead correspondent for the Middle East, claimed that a very high-level Israeli, who may have been Golda Meir, told him that “our problem is that we believe our own propaganda.” Everybody believes their own propaganda but (here again) Jews are “just like everybody else only more so” as the saying goes. And in this case in terms of believing their own propaganda they really excel at that. We have an unbroken tradition of this tribe whose holidays are all the same: “they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” So for thousands of years their story is that these evil other tribes hated them and wanted to kill them for no particular reason. And so the heroic Jews then fought those tribes and genocided them, like with Purim in the book of Esther. They won. And so, hey, it’s a story of success. And then that goes right on into modern times, where we have
“the Russians fought us with all their pogroms and so on. There were six million Jews killed in the Russian pogroms. But then we won. There was the Bolshevek revolution. And then the Nazis tried to kill us in the gas chambers, and we won.”
And all of these stories are about probably about equally reliable. That is, the details of the Purim story are probably just about as reliable as the details of the gas chamber story or any of these stories.
But not only do ordinary Jewish people mostly believe these stories, or pretend to at least on their Jewish holidays in some cases, but they’ve seized tremendous power and have now inflicted these kinds of stories, especially the Holocaust story—and the 9/11 story, for that matter—on the world, as almost a new religion.
Kevin: And so this believing one’s own propaganda thing is so far out of control in Jewish culture. I wonder to what extent that has perhaps metastasized and killed the quality of leadership in the West in general.
Hua Bin: I think there’s certainly a huge extent of that. Let’s be honest: They persevered. They were driven out of their ancestral homeland and they managed not to integrate. They managed not to assimilate into any of the societies, right? They kept their tradition, their language, their identity, and their plan for the long term. And they take every advantage the whole society provides in terms of…influence campaigns, constructing a society that’s beneficial to them or to their particular set of skills. I think if you read Henry Ford’sThe International Jew, the connection of his essays back in the 1920s, he was mostly talking about Jewish people, not from a religious perspective, but from a business perspective. But he was kind of describing the the manipulativeness and the kind of reliance on gimmicks, on tricking your competitor and all that.
Volume 1 • The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem
Kevin: It sounds like Donald Trump.
Hua Bin: Yeah. He’s a dedicated Zionist. He actually probably wanted to be born a Jew. Like some of his best buds are Jewish, right? In New York real estate..,
Kevin: His mentor was Roy Cohn.
Hua Bin: Yeah, exactly. So I think, you know, let me go back to the Jewish, you know, I think uniqueness. I actually think they’re very unscrupulous. They’re very smart, very intelligent, but they really…don’t seem to have any moral mooring, right? It’s probably because of religion. To my knowledge, like Talmud never really talks about virtue, about being good. They never even talk about afterlife. It’s all about maximizing your life in this life. Whatever you do to get ahead is permissible.
Kevin: Wealth, power, and progeny. And progeny is the only immortality.
Hua Bin: Yeah, exactly. Grabbing, kind of enriching yourself, all those are virtues, I think, in their minds. And that’s very different from almost all the teachings in other religions when they describe a better world in the afterlife, so you have to do good in this life in order to get into that better world in the afterlife. But that seems to be lacking. I don’t want to be definitive about it because I don’t want to pretend that I’ve read the Talmud from cover to cover. But from what I hear, the key philosophies from Talmud seem to be very Machiavellian. I’m even a little surprised that Niccolo Machiavelli was not Jewish. Because his words are like music to like to the inner self of the average Jew.
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And so the Baptists are Jews.
Shane Windmeyer, founder and CEO of Campus Pride, calls them “the absolute worst.” They are the 193 colleges and universities across the nation that he says are diligently working to inhibit the rights of LBGTQ+ students.
Each year, his organization releases its “Best List” of institutions striving to promote and foster positive and welcoming environments for students from all groups, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or religion. And it also releases its “Worst List”, which this year includes 13 new ones at a time when polarization and aggression against gay, lesbian, transgender and nonbinary students have reached a fever pitch.
“The growing anti-LGBTQ+ attacks on youth across the country makes the release of this year’s Worst List even more crucial and timely, shining a harsh spotlight on the religion-based bias, bigotry and discrimination happening on these campuses,” Windmeyer said. “All students deserve a college experience where they are welcomed and fully embraced to live, learn and grow – including LGBTQ+ students. The Worst List campuses are unsafe, unwelcoming. All youth and families should be warned and fully aware that these 193 campuses on the Worst List openly discriminate and perpetuate harm.”
He says those institutions are becoming more intentional in trying to tamp down speech and actions of the LBGTQ+ community on their campuses. Campus Pride notes that close to two-thirds have updated policies including codes of conduct, with seven of them “receiving a Title IX religious exemption from the U.S. Department of Education to openly discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.” Many of the rest, Campus Pride reveals, are ignoring Title IX by not accepting funds from the federal government.
The new list includes the 4,900-student Pensacola Christian College in Florida and headline-making Hillsdale College in Michigan all the way down to small Christendom College in Virginia and even smaller Gutenberg College in Oregon (20 students), all of whom refuse that Title IX funding, with Campus Pride noting that Hillsdale has “demonstrated history of anti-LGBTQ+ language.” Under each of the colleges and universities that appear, Campus Pride offers examples of why they consider them the worst. For example, one of the reasons for inclusion of Palm Beach Atlantic University is its stance on gay marriage and its additional policy within its View of Human Sexuality statement: “PBA expects that their students, faculty, and staff will neither engage in nor promote views of sexuality or gender expression that contradicts biblical standards.”
The others all have less than 1,500 in enrollments, with many under 100: Grace College in Indiana; Lincoln Christian University in Illinois; Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Wisconsin; Northwest University in Washington; Presbyterian Theological Seminary in America and San Diego Christian College in California; Wyoming Catholic College; and Yeshiva Toras Chaim Talmudical Seminary of Denver.
They join a wide-ranging list of institutions, including some of the biggest and well-known in America–Baylor University, Brigham Young University, Yeshiva University and Seattle Pacific University, which became a focal point this summer for LBGTQ+ rights as students held a monthlong sit-in and handed out pride flags to its president. SPU’s policies caught the eye of Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, whose state launched an investigation and was summarily sued by the university, which believes it has the right to exercise its own religious policies based on freedoms afforded in the First Amendment. However, students and some alums have strongly pushed back.
“It’s critical that we boldly call out schools with anti-LGBTQ+ policies at every level of community,” said Chloe Guillot, a 2022 graduate and current Masters of Divinity student at Seattle Pacific. “Students like me have been organizing for years against an administration determined to marginalize queer voices and weaponize power to further anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination on a campus that is overwhelmingly demanding change. It’s important that people see what’s happening at Seattle Pacific University and other schools.”
Campus Pride did call out SPU and others for those stances, and took aim at BYU for its continued policies and recent delayed action in backing the LBGTQ community.
“These campuses illustrate the necessity for the Worst List and are striking examples of the anti-LGBTQ actions that students face at these colleges and universities,” Campus Pride officials said. “BYU has earned its reputation as a hotbed of bigotry, spending 2022 cracking down against pro-civil rights protests and removing some 5,000 Allyship and Activism Resource Guides set to be distributed to incoming freshmen.”
Hillsdale College believes that socialism isincompatible with America’s Constitution and heritage of liberty. What are yourchief concerns, if any, about socialism taking root in America? (Please checkall that apply. – America cannot afford the steep costs of socialism. – Socialism undermines faith and religious liberty. – Socialism is the enemy of econmic freedom and opportunity. – Socialism undermines responsibility and encourages dependence. – Once imposed, socialism is almost impossible to undo. – I have no concerns about socialism. – Not Sure/No Opinion
I was waiting for a choice such as “socialism would lead to a system in which human need is valued over private profit.” But that choice never appeared, so I chose “I have no concerns about socialism.” (Although that wasn’t strictly true; I was concerned that under socialism there would be so many meetings to attend that I’d run out of excuses to skip them).
For decades, too many American K-12 schools have failed to provide young Americans with a solid grounding in American civics — the study of American history, government, and economics. This has contributed to the attraction so many young people today feel for socialism. Do you think K-12 schools in your area should be doing more to teach young Americans about America’s great heritage of liberty? – Yes – No – Not Sure/No Opinion
Darn tootin’ they should, and I proudly clicked “yes.” They should be teaching more about the heritage that gave plantation owners the liberty to enslave Africans and, once slavery ended, gave racists the liberty to deny African Americans their constitutional rights; gave the military the liberty to exterminate Native Americans and invade third-world countries; gave giant corporations the liberty to deprive workers of a living wage and the opportunity to form unions – I could go on and on. There’s so much about American liberty that our kids don’t learn!
America’s colleges and universities are now hotbeds of progressive and “politically correct” ideology, including socialism, and are increasingly denying free speech rights to students and others who hold non-progressive viewpoints. Do you believe that colleges and universities should defend the free speech rights of students and others who oppose socialism and other aspects of progressive ideology? – Yes – No – Not Sure/Don’t Know
I also answered yes, although that colleges were denying free-speech rights to non-progressives was news to me. It seemed to me the business schools were doing a booming business and the law schools were pumping out corporate lawyers in as great a quantity as ever. It seemed to me that for a long time it was left-wing speech that was censored until campus activists fought for real free speech. So “yes” was my answer, so long as socialists actually got equal time.
The news media is increasingly biased towards Left-wing politicians, including those who are self-proclaimed socialists, and increasingly aligned against policymakers who challenge ideas that would dramatically expand government control of the economy. Do you consider the media biased in favor of progressivism, including socialist politicians and policies that tend toward socialism? – Yes – No – Not Sure/No Opinion
I scoured TV news and major newspapers for bias toward left-wing politicians and ideas and came up empty. I did land on Fox News for a few minutes, and I wondered if the creators of the survey were actually familiar with the major media. So I had to vote “no.”
Recent polling suggests that nearly half of younger Americans would “prefer living in a socialist country.” According to one analysis of these polls, “The word ‘socialism’ does not carry the same stigma it did in the past, now that it has been resurrected by celebrity politicians.” Do you believe lawmakers who encourage young people to embrace socialism are doing a disservice to the country? – Yes – No – Not Sure/No Opinion
Hmm. Bernie, AOC and the other socialist lawmakers want living wages, Medicare for All, free college (at public universities, not Hillsdale) and cuts in the military. So no, they’re OK in my book.
Hillsdale believes that citizens who have been taught American history, who understand the principles and meaning of the Constitution, and who are proud of our nation’s great heritage of liberty, will not fall prey to the fantasy of socialism. So that Americans nationwide will better understand the Constitution and see that socialism is incompatible with liberty, which of Hillsdale’s educational outreach programs would you like to see expanded? – Free online courses on topics such as the Constitution and free-market economics. – Imprimis, Hillsdale’s free monthly speech digest of liberty. – Scholarships for undergraduate students to attend Hillsdale. – The founding of Hillsdale-affiliated K-12 charter schools nationwide. – Delivering free pocket Constitutions to America’s K-12 students.
Definitely the last of those. I want more young people to learn that Article II doesn’t give the president the right to do anything he wants, that the constitution has only seven articles and not 12 as President Trump thinks, that slaves were once considered three-fifths of a person, and that the Bill of Rights consists of more than the Second Amendment.
Somehow I was not surprised that when I submitted the survey I landed on a page that asked me to make a donation to the school. I took a pass. Nor was I surprised when a few days after taking the survey Hillsdale emailed me to say the overwhelming majority of respondents regarded socialism as a menace on par with COVID-19, giving the school another opportunity to solicit a donation
Zyklon Blinken is still in the philosophical driver’s fucking seat — Final Solution!
Just shoot the fuckers at the Club Med or the other places they haunt, like the whore houses and children’s wards at hospitals. Jews of the IOF, well, shoot them like rabid dogs:
An Israeli army reservist’s dream vacation in Brazil ended abruptly last month over an accusation that he committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
Yuval Vagdani woke up on Jan. 4 to a flurry of missed calls from family members and Israel’s Foreign Ministry with an urgent warning: A pro-Palestinian legal group had convinced a federal judge in Brazil to open a war crimes investigation for his alleged participation in the demolition of civilian homes in Gaza.
Universal jurisdiction is not new. The 1949 Geneva Conventions — the post Second World War treaty regulating military conduct — specify that all signatories must prosecute war criminals or hand them over to a country who will. In 1999, the United Nations Security Council asked all U.N. countries to include universal jurisdiction in their legal codes, and around 160 countries have adopted them in some form.
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Why work for these Jews like Zuckerberg-Fuck-You-Berg? These fucking CIA assets? These goddamned whores of the tech fascism world?
This is why the USA is a fucked up society of Rapists and Lawyers and Judges who all need to be shot: Trump signs order shifting US back toward plastic straws
This is a queer man who is used to sucking on cocks that do not dissolve in his Rapist’s Mouth: Last week, Trump – who sold branded plastic straws during his 2020 election campaign – said paper straws “don’t work” and “disgustingly” dissolve in the mouths of consumers.
These are our Cunt-Tree’s fearless fucking fascist leaders? Sam Altman fires back at Elon Musk: ‘I don’t think he’s a happy person. I feel for him’
And under the One Percent and Five Percent (Eichmann’s, one and all), this is what will screw you over and over, in the womb, at birth, seven generations down your fucking Yanqui or Confederate line:
These poor pathetic people I service everyday, the old, the poor, many using state supported meal and food services, on Social Security, and they fucking love Trump, Hands Down, not a fucking thing he could do to their floundering selves they would ever criticize.
Deja vu? Reagan? Bush Senior? Yep!
A renewed and expanded effort from chemical giant Bayer to shield itself from lawsuits that claim its popular weedkiller Roundup causes cancer brought dozens of protesters to the Iowa Capitol building Monday begging lawmakers to reject it.
The legislation, pending in Iowa and at least seven other states, would protect pesticide companies from claims they failed to warn that their product causes cancer if the product label otherwise complies with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations.
Quit calling it the MIC, the military industrial complex, mother fuckers. Murder Incorporated Companies, and alas, that’s the complex — energy, food, mining, oil, chemicals, education, law, PR, marketing, retail, EVERYTHING tied to the parts and wires and motherboards and such put inside the guts of these goddamned murder machines.
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
Here, from a Mafia, AKA lobbying group: Listen to the cold calculated goddamned military welfare programs:
The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) is the air branch’s ongoing effort to develop a new type of semi-autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). These jet-powered UAVs are designed to operate as “loyal wingmen” alongside crewed fighter jets, capable of flying independently or in small groups. Equipped with artificial intelligence, CCAs can collaborate with and take direction from human pilots, enabling them to perform a range of missions such as air-to-air combat, air-to-ground combat, electronic warfare, targeting, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR).
Part of the Air Force’s Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiative, CCAs aim to expand the fighter fleet, protect human pilots, and reduce costs compared to traditional fighter jets. The Air Force has planned for 1,000 CCAs, supporting its advanced fighters at a ratio of two CCAs per fighter. These aircraft align with the agile combat employment (ACE) strategy, which emphasizes dispersed operations, enhancing the U.S. military’s ability to counter advanced threats like China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities.
2024 provided several notable updates to CCA. This article will track those updates and provide a look at what 2025 might bring for the unmanned combat aircraft.
This is the mafia, man:
2025 SPEAKER FACULTY INCLUDES:
Lieutenant General Miles Brown, Deputy Commanding General, Army Futures Command, US Army
Brigadier General Chad Chalfont, Commandant, US Army Armor School, Training and Doctrine Command, US Army
Brigadier General Zachary Miller, Commander, Army Joint Modernization Command, US Army
Colonel Kevin Bradley, Director, Next Generation Combat Vehicles Cross Functional Team, US Army Futures Command
Stephen Bowdren SES, Program Executive Officer for Land Systems, US Marine Corps
Garry Bishop, Deputy Director, Operational Test & Evaluation, Land & Expeditionary Warfare, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Cunt-TREE tis of thee:
The Pentagon is changing the name of the military base Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, reversing a decision made by a congressionally mandated commission to rename bases that honor Confederate generals.
The Army base will be renamed Fort Bragg, but it will honor a different Bragg than its original namesake, Gen. Braxton Bragg, who fought for the Confederacy. Instead, it will honor Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, who was awarded a Silver Star for actions during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, according to a memo signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“This decision reflects the installation’s proud history of honoring selfless service and sacrifice in defense of the nation,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot said in a statement.
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Back to fucking stupidity. I was teaching these issues to college students in 19-Fucking-83! Scientists have discovered that our roads and parking lots are silently contributing to plastic pollution.
A new study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials demonstrated that pavement surfaces release tiny plastic particles, known as microplastics, into stormwater runoff as they wear down from everyday use.
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Duh: As it flows over these surfaces, the water picks up dirt and dust, rubber and metal deposits from tire wear, antifreeze and engine oil that has dripped onto the pavement, pesticides and fertilizers, and discarded cups, plastic bags, cigarette butts, pet waste, and other litter.
Duh: Asphalt was something that jumped out to us,” says Drew Gentner, an environmental engineer at Yale University who led the new study. The material, made from crude oil or similar substances, contains the kinds of semivolatile organic compounds that lead to some types of air pollution. There’s also a lot of it.
Duh: One of the most pressing issues associated with asphalt and concrete roadways is their impermeability, meaning rainwater cannot drain naturally. Since traditional paving materials don’t permit water to permeate, municipalities must invest significant effort and resources in building drainage networks to remove rainwater from asphalt surfaces and prevent dangerous flooding.
Another significant water-related concern is that asphalt can lead to water pollution. When rainwater falls onto the asphalt pavement, it’s exposed to pollutants like oils, heavy metals, and other toxic substances. This tainted runoff eventually flows through the manufactured sewage networks and empties into our lakes, rivers, and streams.
Ahh, the Kraut Peter, and he’s the Jew in Disguise: “Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley: When tech luminaries talk about their Christian faith, people listen.”
Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley
Everything clicked when Peter Thiel gave the speech about God.
The occasion was a 40th birthday party for Trae Stephens, who is Mr. Thiel’s venture capital partner as well as one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a maker of high-tech defense systems and weaponry. It was a multiday affair, held in 2023 at Mr. Stephens’s home in New Mexico. It began with an evening roasting the birthday boy, followed by another toasting him and then a brunch with caviar bumps, mimosas and breakfast pizza. At the brunch (the theme was the Holy Ghost), Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing kingmaker, delivered a talk about miracles, forgiveness and Jesus Christ. The guests were enthralled.
“The room of over 220 people, mostly in technology and venture capital, were coming up to us saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know Peter Thiel was a Christian,’” recalled Michelle Stephens, Mr. Stephens’s wife. “‘He’s gay and a billionaire. How can he be Christian?’”
Playing fucking god: MIT scientists are designing robotic insects that could one day swarm out of mechanical hives and perform pollination at a rapid pace — ensuring fruits and vegetables are grown at an unprecedented level. The new technology could increase crop yields dramatically without harming the environment
Aerial insects are exceptionally agile and precise owing to their small size and fast neuromotor control. They perform impressive acrobatic maneuvers when evading predators, recovering from wind gust, or landing on moving objects. Flapping-wing propulsion is advantageous for flight agility because it can generate large changes in instantaneous forces and torques. During flapping-wing flight, wings, hinges, and tendons of pterygote insects endure large deformation and high stress hundreds of times each second, highlighting the outstanding flexibility and fatigue resistance of biological structures and materials. In comparison, engineered materials and microscale structures in subgram micro–aerial vehicles (MAVs) exhibit substantially shorter lifespans. Consequently, most subgram MAVs are limited to hovering for less than 10 seconds or following simple trajectories at slow speeds. Here, we developed a 750-milligram flapping-wing MAV that demonstrated substantially improved lifespan, speed, accuracy, and agility. With transmission and hinge designs that reduced off-axis torsional stress and deformation, the robot achieved a 1000-second hovering flight, two orders of magnitude longer than existing subgram MAVs. This robot also performed complex flight trajectories with under 1-centimeter root mean square error and more than 30 centimeters per second average speed. With a lift-to-weight ratio of 2.2 and a maximum ascending speed of 100 centimeters per second, this robot demonstrated double body flips at a rotational rate exceeding that of the fastest aerial insects and larger MAVs. These results highlight insect-like flight endurance, precision, and agility in an at-scale MAV, opening opportunities for future research on sensing and power autonomy.
This is what the fuckng White Cancer Race does, while the world burns:
Wilson Almeida Adao, a senior AU official for child welfare, said in a separate statement that hospital admissions for malnutrition rose by 44 percent in 2024, with more than 431,000 children receiving treatment.
“We witness reports of grave violations, including attacks on schools and hospitals, forced recruitment of child soldiers, and the denial of humanitarian access,” he said.
Twelve Fucking Million People, fuckers:
The war in Sudan broke out in April 2023 and has displaced an estimated 12 million people. AU officials warned that hundreds of thousands of children are now malnourished.
Sickness personified in the millionaire and billionaire club, along with the Eichmanns:
Investors have been piling cash into cricket in recent years.
They are targeting the sport’s global appeal and new short-format competitions.
Investors include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and India’s billionaire Ambani family.
Then you have this fucking idiot Irish person: The Irish public are blissfully unaware that the Third World War has already begun
The sad fact is that, while we may be neutral, our Defence Forces are well and truly neutered, writes Dorcha Lee.
Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine, and this fucking dude thinks Russia is after fucking Ireland, UK, Europe? Fucking sad fucking sack.
[The Irish Naval Service vessel LE Samuel Beckett. The Naval Service has not got one warship capable of naval combat. — THIS IS A GOOD FUCKING THING, Dorcha.]
The Irish public have long been conditioned into thinking that the most important issues are housing, childcare, the economy, the health services and to a lesser extent, education and immigration. I would argue that, in all these, admittedly valid, areas, we are already coping better than most other EU Member States.
They are not, per se, existential life and death issues in modern Ireland. National life expectancy is improving all the time. We know very well that, as one of the top 20% richest countries on this planet, we are well capable of solving at least the homeless problem, if there is the political will to do so.
+—+
Here we go, China kicking the fucking fascists’ ass.
Nazi Germany and Israel, one in the same, Ireland, not RUSSIA.
Another group? The conversation revolves around the formation and significance of the Hague Group, an initiative aimed at addressing the failures of international law and the need for collective action against injustices in Palestine.
Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla and Zane Dangor discuss the role of the Progressive International, South Africa’s legal actions against Israel, and the challenges posed by US hegemony and the limitations of the UN Security Council. They emphasise the importance of coordination among nations to uphold international law and advocate for a more just global order.
Varsha is general coordinator of the Progressive International and the acting chair of the Hague Group. Zane is Director General Department of International Relations and Cooperation in South Africa.
Israelis had the information abut Oct. 7, you know that!
The NFL confirmed Monday morning to USA TODAY that the person was part of the 400-member field cast and had hidden the flag on himself before the halftime show began Sunday night.
[See it? Optics? Fucking goddamned white cunts with the black man in cuffs.]
Lamar, 37, previously performed during the Super Bowl in 2022 as part of a lineup with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and Mary J. Blige.
I’m Sambo, “massa” ——
“Salutations, it’s your Uncle Sam, and this is the great American game.”
Samuel L. Jackson shocked viewers who tuned into the Super Bowl 2025 Halftime Show with that opening line. The legendary actor appeared dressed as the 19th-century symbol of American duty in his surprise role as the emcee of Kendrick Lamar‘s halftime performance.
After Lamar opened with an unreleased song and followed up with the GNX track “squabble up,” Jackson cut in with an admonishing, “No no no no no! Too loud, too reckless — too ghetto! Mr. Lamar, do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up!”
As if taking the bait, Lamar then launched into one of the most visually confrontational segments of his performance. Lamar sang two of his biggest hits, “HUMBLE.” and “DNA.” from his acclaimed album DAMN. while his dancers, donning red, white, and blue streetwear, arrayed in the shape of the American flag.
Jackson’s “ghetto” remark may be a response to the letter sent by a group of Republican Louisana lawmakers to the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation ahead of the Super Bowl, demanding Lamar’s halftime show not be “lewd” or “offensive.”
The letter cited “hardworking taxpayers with children who have serious concerns about the fact that past Super Bowl halftime performances have been less than family-friendly.”
With Samuel L. Jackson, clad in a full Uncle Sam outfit and top hat, acting as a moderator, The Grammy- and Pulitzer-winning rapper was also briefly joined by R&B performer SZA. Lamar also brought out Drake’s ex, tennis legend Serena Williams, during his controversial Grammy-winning song “Not Like Us,” which targets Drake.
David Zirin, the Jew with the Cooumn (yet ANOTHER Jew with a column!): From his position on Colin Kaepernick, to his slanders about those concerned about brain injury, the sitting president has demonstrated just how much he disrespects the NFL.
Donald Trump will be the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, and his presence will be a gob of spit in the face of every NFL player, whether they voted for him or not. Trump’s plan to attend the game is made even more egregious by commissioner Roger Goodell’s ostentatious decision to remove the words “End Racism” from the end zone for the first time in four Super Bowls. There are those in the NFL offices, according to longtime football scribe Michael Silver, who think that this decision was a sop to Trump, lest his fragile self would have to see words he is trying to blot out of existence. To put a point on it, they know Trump is a racist—he’s canceling Black History Month FFS—and they wouldn’t want to offend their honored guest.
As folks who read my last column know, I asked NFL VP of communications Brian McCarthy about this and he said the narrative that the NFL switched out the slogan to please Trump was “total bullshit.” They went instead with the previously used “Choose Love” in order to “lift the imagination” after recent horrors like the California wildfires and the plane crash at DC National Airport. But, as former president of the Pro Football Writers of America Jim Trotter pointed out, why doesn’t the league think that ending racism “lifts the imagination”? Especially when we consider that the California wildfires destroyed historic Black communities like Altadena. And especially when we realize that Trump turned the fires and the DC plane crash into a racist whip against DEI. As Trotter said to me archly, “Seems to me that, in a moment like this, ‘end racism’ would be a more powerful statement than ‘choose love.’” One might even call it uplifting.
The cocksuckers can’t even muster a protest in front of their slaver master, Trump?
When former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick remained seated during the national anthem before a preseason NFL game in 2016, he told the media the reason was simple:
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” he said. “To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street, and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
“To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way,” Kaepernick said in The Guardian newspaper. “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Kaepernick’s activism, coinciding with the reemergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, received varied responses.
We surveyed 207 college students and 33 residents in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I teach, to examine their views on racial justice activism among professional athletes.
We found there were three general perspectives.
One group supported the sports activism and tied it to changing the status quo. People in this group back athletes’ ability to serve as activists and role models, and they hope the protests generate meaningful sociopolitical change.
“I thought it was very necessary and good,” said one participant in the study, referring to athletes’ activism. “I think that if they can use their platform for something good, they should.”
Hitler Didn’t Have Anything On the Minyans, the Zyklon Blinkens, the Fascists in Heir Trump’s Adolph Bibi Carnival!
February 25, 2024
And I know a million fuckers on Substack and in the streets and on Podcasts and just around the corner who love buggered lives of this monster Trump/Kushner/Miller/ Thiel/Ellison/Minyans Galore!
[Armed officers blocked Oregon U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici and other Democratic members of Congress from entering the U.S. Department of Education building on Friday morning as they sought a meeting with the agency’s acting director about reports that President Donald Trump was preparing to take illegal action to abolish or dismantle the agency.]
Something about fucking judges in the Shit Hole?
A federal judge Friday evening refused to block the Labor Department from giving Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to confidential systems or power to fire employees for refusing to hand over the credentials.
Professional managerial and CEO class, the white ghouls of the earth. Not salt of the earth, but the arsenic of the earth.
Russell Vought Orders Consumer Protection Bureau’s Headquarters Closed for a Week
The order to shutter the agency’s headquarters follows another order issued Saturday by Mr. Vought, who also leads the Office of Management and Budget, telling agency employees to halt nearly all their work.
February 25, 2024
Staff and contractors at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been told that the bureau’s Washington headquarters will be “closed this week” and that they must work remotely, according to an internal email obtained by NPR.
No reason was given for the building’s closure. Representatives of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team were seen at the headquarters on Friday, according to the union representing CFPB staff, and have been granted access to key systems, stirring concerns about the fate of the vast amount of sensitive information maintained by the bureau.
The bureau’s staff were informed over the weekend that Russell Vought is now acting director of the CFPB, the country’s consumer protection watchdog. Vought was an architect of the conservative policy agenda Project 2025 and was confirmed last week as director of the Office of Management and Budget.
February 25, 2024
Garber’s Sunday message is a significantly more pointed indictment of the Trump administration than the mellow statement he issued following the White House’s now-rescinded order directing a federal fund freeze.
“When other nations are expanding their investment in science, America should not drop knowingly and willingly from her lead position on the endless frontier,” Garber wrote in Sunday’s email.
Former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier wrote in a post on X that Trump’s order would “cause chaos and harm biomedical research and researchers in hospitals, schools and institutes nationwide.”
“A sane government would never do this,” Flier wrote.
A sane society of the rich, the well-placed, the elite (sic), the highly educated (sic), those in chambers of power, the so-called dean and admin class, all those fucker in the revolving door would have anticipated ALL of this and moved to dump Biden and Harris a year or two ago. Instead:
February 25, 2024
Capitalism, man, growth and cancers and a strongman (Rapist Trump in Chief is a Wimp, but, then, Wimps Rule):
But in recent months, there has been a concerning trend: The churn that’s needed for a healthy labor market has slowed significantly. Businesses aren’t hiring as much, folks aren’t eager to quit, and those without jobs are staying on the sidelines for longer.
“That leaves us in a situation where things can essentially flip quite quickly, because you’ve already got companies hiring as if they’re in a recession — even if they’re not laying people off,” Oliver Allen, senior US economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, told CNN this week.
And the potential for a significant change has dramatically increased as President Donald Trump has started implementing sweeping policy changes related to trade, immigration, federal employment reductions, as well as a crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, Michelle Holder, associate professor of economics at John Jay College at the City University of New York.
[The photograph, credited to Agence France-Presse (AFP) on the Getty Images image-licensing website, was taken by photojournalist Tannen Maury. “The picture is authentic. I took it on assignment for AFP.”]
This is the fucking hellishness of this fucking carnival cunt nation: Trump is such a human stain, that these carnival folk have a million times more integrity. John Merrick? Better looking than Rapist Trump?
February 25, 2024
For Johnny Eck it was a crime committed against him and his elderly brother late in life that made him bitter and disillusioned with humanity. Johnny Eck was born twenty minutes in 1911 after his perfectly formed twin brother Robert, to his horrified parents and midwife who declared him a broken doll. Born a half boy, with small withered and useless legs, he was born John Eckhart, Jr. Johnny taught himself to walk on his hands at the age when most children learn to walk on their feet. Both twins were bright boys who excelled in school, and John aspired to be a preacher, but his deformity had destined him otherwise. The twins visited a local side show where a performing magician persuaded Johnny to join the side show. By 13 his career was shaping up as the “King of the Freaks.”
Johnny loved show business. He did acrobatics with his extraordinarily strong arms, trained animals, juggled, and played the front end of the magician’s “sawed in half” illusion. When not performing as a circus freak, he and Robert conducted their own Baltimore-based orchestra. Johnny also drew and painted, and drove a custom-built race car, the “Johnny Eck Special”. Johnny also starred in the 1932 cult classic Freaks! With other famous freaks Shlitze and the Hilton sisters.
In 1987, Johnny and Robert were viciously attacked and beaten during a robbery in their home. Old and feeble the once strong, Johnny was unable to defend himself and his brother against the attackers.
He was quoted as saying, “If I want to see freaks, I can just look out the window.”
He died of a heart attack in 1991 after living for years in seclusion. His brother Robert died in 1995.
Freaks indeed: The upper-class are flashing their funds in more creative ways that in some cases, have nothing to do with overt spending. Privacy, leisure activities, novel items, and expressing oneself have become new touchpoints of prosperity. It’s not about having the money to afford an item, it’s about having the means to ditch hustle culture and getting ahead.
February 25, 2024
After the rise of affordable knock-offs, the ultra-rich then moved the goalpost to a new standard of wealth: health and aesthetic beauty. Whether that be investing in $40 Pilates classes, at-home IV drips, lip filler, organic produce, or weight-loss drugs, celebrities and the 1% touted all the ways they were reversing the biological clock. Being slim signaled that one had more “self control,” or had access to healthy foods and boutique workout memberships. Looking youthful was another signifier—but then the middle-class got a hold of face-lifts and Wegovy. Increased demand, competition, and expanded insurance coverage have driven prices down; the net price of Ozempic in the U.S. declined 40% between 2024 and 2017, when it was first introduced to the American market.
The current classes of drugs included in antiretroviral therapies include:
Nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs). HIV requires an enzyme called reverse transcriptase (RT) in order to replicate. By offering faulty versions of RT to the virus, NRTIs block HIV’s ability to replicate.
Non-nucleoside reverse transcription inhibitors (NNRTIs). These inhibitors disable a key protein that HIV requires to replicate.
Protease inhibitors (PIs). This inhibitor disables the protein called protease, another key building block required by HIV to replicate.
Entry or fusion inhibitors. These inhibitors block the virus’s ability to enter the body’s CD4 cells.
Integrase inhibitors (INSTIs). Once HIV has penetrated a CD4 cell, it inserts genetic material into the cells with the assistance of a protein called integrase. These inhibitors block the virus’s ability to complete this crucial replication step.
February 25, 2024
When she saw the news on TikTok and CNN that the United States would halt funding HIV medication, Gwendolyn Dube, a 36-year-old single mother in South Africa who was diagnosed with AIDS as a child, thought to herself, “People are going to die.”
In his first week back in office, President Donald Trump’s administration announced it would exit the World Health Organization and implemented, via an executive order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” a 90-day pause on the disbursement of all foreign aid.
On January 29, Palestinian organizers in New York City gathered at a park for a vigil to mourn the one-year anniversary of the death of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old killed last year alongside her family and paramedics by the Israeli military in Gaza. At Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, attendees laid candles, alongside photos and art of Rajab.
That same day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” that “demands the removal of resident aliens who violate our laws” and calls on the Department of Justice to “protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.” It comes on the heels of an earlier anti-immigration order signed during Trump’s first day in office that called for increased vetting and crackdowns on visa holders and people trying to enter the U.S. based on their political and cultural views.
They tell you it’s about protecting children. About stopping drug dealers. About making the internet “safer.” But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find the same disturbing pattern — crises being exploited to push censorship, surveillance, and control.
Politicians who can barely use email are once again making decisions that will shape the future of online privacy, free speech, and encryption.
And Big Tech? Far from the victim, they’re quietly cheering it on — because when the government tightens its grip, it’s the tech giants who hold the keys.
Zuckerberg on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he acknowledged that the Biden administration exerted intense pressure on Facebook to suppress content about vaccine side effects. According to Zuckerberg, the government “pushed [Facebook] super hard to take down things that were honestly true” and even resorted to “yelling, cursing, and threatening repercussions” if the platform did not comply.
Pursuant to Senate Resolution 59 (118th Cong.), the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (the “Subcommittee”) is conducting a review of the censorship of COVID-19 vaccine injuries. In order to assist the Subcommittee’s review, please provide the following information:
1. Did Facebook shutdown, remove, or otherwise ban the COVID-19 vaccine injury support group named “A Wee Sprinkle of Hope”? If yes, please explain why this group was shutdown, removed, or otherwise banned.
2. Did any federal entity ever request that Facebook shutdown, remove, ban, or otherwise censor any COVID-19 vaccine injury support group? a. If yes, please explain when were these requests made, what support groups were targeted, and what federal entity (or entities) made the request.
3. Did Facebook shutdown, remove, or otherwise ban any COVID-19 vaccine injury support group as a result of pressure from the Biden administration? If yes, please explain what Facebook groups were shutdown, removed, or otherwise banned and when.
4. A list of all Facebook groups connected to COVID-19 vaccine injuries that were shutdown, removed, had restrictions placed on them, or were otherwise banned by Facebook since January 1, 2020, including the reason(s) that each group was shutdown, removed, had restrictions placed on them, or were otherwise banned by Facebook.
5. All records22 referring or relating to Facebook groups connected to COVID-19 vaccine injury groups, including, but not limited to, all communications referring or relating to moderation, shutdown, removal, restriction, or otherwise banning of groups associated with COVID-19 vaccine injuries.
6. All records referring or relating to the moderation, removal, restriction, or reduction in the visibility of posts made concerning COVID-19 vaccine injuries, adverse events, or side effects.
7. All communications with any federal entity, or any employee or representative of any federal entity, referring or relating to COVID-19 vaccine injuries, adverse events, or side effects, including, but not limited to, all communications with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes for Health, or the White House.
8. A list of all Facebook employees, including contractors, along with their titles and dates they held those titles between January 1, 2020 and the present, who have been responsible for the creation and/or application of Facebook’s policies referring or relating to the moderation, removal, suppression, or other forms of restrictions for posts made regarding COVID-19 vaccine injury or of COVID-19 vaccine injury groups.
9. All communications with any COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer or trade association, or any entity involved with the clinical trial of any COVID-19 vaccine referring or relating to COVID-19 vaccine injuries, adverse events, or side effects, including, but not limited to, all communications with Pfizer, Inc., Moderna, Inc., Johnson and Johnson.
10. A list of any third-party group, nonprofit organization, academic institution, government entity, or individual that Facebook has communicated with, consulted with, or otherwise relied upon for: a. the development of policies regarding content moderation as it relates to COVID19 vaccine injuries, adverse events, or side effects; and b. the moderation, removal, suppression, or other forms of restrictions for posts made regarding COVID-19 vaccine injury or of COVID-19 vaccine injury groups.
11. All records referring or relating to any third-party group, nonprofit organization, academic institution, government entity, or individual that Facebook has communicated with, consulted with, or otherwise relied upon for:
a. the development of policies regarding content moderation as it relates to COVID19 vaccine injuries, adverse events, or side effects; and
b. the moderation, removal, suppression, or other forms of restrictions for posts made regarding COVID-19 vaccine injury or of COVID-19 vaccine injury groups.
February 25, 2024
But these fuckers, man, these fuckers on both sides of the godd-damned manure aisle, all of them, the capitalists, the PMC’s, the wannabe rich and famous, and the rich and infamous, may they all die die die.
It is the end of thinking:
As if the fucking Stupor Bowl MEANS a goddamn fucking thing.
Racism has ended! Have you heard? Or maybe ending racism has ended. On Tuesday, it was reported that the N.F.L. would switch one of the slogans stencilled on the edge of the end zone during Super Bowl LIX from “END RACISM” to “CHOOSE LOVE.”
Try him out:
Another real man: Why do the Americans hate us, asks Gazan Abdel Bari Atwan? What have we ever done to them? And why do they want to drive us to anywhere but our home? Galloway’s man, Trump?
February 25, 2024
The fucking JEWS: Where are the American People? Where are the Europeans? Trump will make the whole world miserable.
February 25, 2024
Today, Sunday, settlers attacked a number of citizens in Khirbet Al-Marajem, which is part of Duma lands, south of Nablus.
According to local sources, a group of settlers attacked citizens in Khirbet al-Marajim, assaulted them, caused havoc and destruction in sheep pens, and cut down and destroyed olive trees in the same area.
Families are finding their homes in ruins or severely damaged, uncertain whether this pause in violence will last long enough for them to rebuild. Though the ceasefire relieved some immediate suffering, many Palestinians in Gaza remain skeptical, aware that previous truces have crumbled under Israeli military escalation or political jockeying by leaders who are interested in removing Palestinians from Gaza altogether.
February 25, 2024
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu spent his visit to Washington D.C. touting the “unbreakable bond” between Israel and the United States, courting the Trump administration’s hawkish support for continuing settlements and stifling Palestinian aspirations. Netanyahu, embattled at home by right-wing factions demanding a return to all-out war on Gaza, appeared emboldened by his reception in the U.S. By all indications, the human cost of Israel’s policies—now gaining more visibility—does not trouble him or his allies in Washington.
[Goy and his master.]
They will appear in a Superbowl ad denouncing “hatred.” The ad is paid for by the “Foundation to Combat Antisemitism,” staffed by Israel lobbyists that attempts to equate opposition to Israel’s destruction of Gaza with anti-Jewish racism. It was founded by billionaire Patriots owner and Israel advocate Robert Kraft.
February 25, 2024
[Niggerized fucking shit.]
Football star Tom Brady and rap legend Snoop Dogg will appear in a big-money Superbowl ad denouncing hatred. The ad is paid for by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, a group staffed by Israel lobbyists that attempts to equate opposition to Israel’s destruction of Gaza with anti-Jewish racism. The group was founded by billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, Robert Kraft, who is one of the pro-Israel Lobby’s most generous benefactors. Kraft has used his power to attempt to crush the nationwide Palestine solidarity movement on campus and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Laurent Guyenot: I’m not fighting against Christianity and I’m definitely not fighting against Jesus. I feel Jesus is an incredibly inspiring heroic figure. “Jesus is a Palestinian.” We need Jesus. I’m not trying to deny the importance of Jesus as a central figure in our civilization.
But my priority now became to understand Israel. And I became convinced that you cannot understand modern Israel if you don’t understand that modern Israel is the same as ancient Israel. And that’s a big disagreement with Christians (who say) “modern Israel has nothing to do with the people of ancient Israel, who were holy people. Yes, they wanted to genocide the Amalekites, but that’s because the Amalekites were really, really, really bad.”
I’m fed up with these kinds of things. I feel Netanyahu wants to genocide the Amalekites exactly as Moses wanted to genocide the Amalekites. And I feel it’s really way too late now to start to defend ancient Israel. Ancient Israel is just as demonic as modern Israel. And if you don’t come to the point of realizing this, you just cannot understand what Israel is. You think “it’s because they’re Zionists, they’re not real Jews in any way, they’re Ashkenazi Jews.” And you find all kinds of excuses to protect the essence of Israel.
The essence of Israel is in the Bible, is in the Torah. I don’t especially want to burn the Torah, but I want to put it in a museum or in a library together with Homer and this kind of thing. It’s an interesting book, but I definitely don’t want anything to do with it as the story of God choosing the Jews. I don’t believe God chose the Jews. If I talk to Christians, I want to help them to find a way to get out of this dilemma.
And one way, I suggest to them is (to ask): Did Jesus really claim to be the Messiah? Because it doesn’t really matter. You say, well, there’s the true Messiah or the military Messiah. In any case, if Jesus said, yes, I am the Messiah, that means he stands within the paradigm of the chosen people. Because if God sends the Messiah, that means He needs the holy people and so on. From the historical perspective, that of historians of Jesus, it’s debatable. because there is this, notion of the messianic secret. Sometimes Jesus sounded like he said, yes, I’m the Messiah, but don’t say it, don’t tell it to anyone—which of course, from the historian’s point of view, means that he didn’t say “I’m the Messiah.” It’s the disciples who said he was the Messiah after he died. It’s very simple ogic that leads us to conclude that, in fact, Jesus rejected the title of Messiah.
So we can say we can basically become Marcionist. That’s why I offer to the Christian the only way you can get out and start to save Christianity. Because if you continue to worship ancient Israel, you are worshipping the Devil. If you think Yahweh is God, you are confusing God with the Devil. So the only way you can get out of this catastrophic situation is to understand that Jesus is not the Messiah. Jesus is a guy who is like Socrates, a guy who is completely 100% loyal to the truth, to what he saw as true, to the point of sacrificing his life.
In a few days, we will have the anniversary of the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell. I was thinking about this today. I felt I have to write something.
Jesus was like that. He could not stand to see this evil society. He spoke out or — he’s not like Aaron Bushnell, but the impulse to be totally, 100%, in harmony with what you believe, you know, and going all the way: That’s what Jesus was. So he was destroyed. He is precisely the saint, the patron saint, of people like you and me. Or at least we should try to imitate him in the sense of fighting against Israel to the point of being ready to pay the price.
Jesus, by the way, was crucified not by the Jews, but by the empire. They use the empire to destroy their enemy.
So I get carried away. But what I wanted to say fundamentally is that I feel it’s wrong to defend ancient Israel. It’s wrong to excuse Moses for having to kill the Amalekites. Now, everybody can see what is Israel. So you have no excuse any more. And we hear Netanyahu say “the Gaza people are Amalek.” We have no more excuses for the Torah. We have to go to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the Torah.
February 25, 2024
“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
My man, my man.
February 25, 2024
“He took all the steps he needed to make sure that everything he had would be cared for, like his cat, he designated that to his neighbor,” Lupe Barboza of the Care Collective, told Texas Public Radio after he viewed the will.
“So yeah, that to me is all the sense of someone who was measured and knew what he was doing.”
Bushnell reportedly notified several reporters and news websites about his upcoming protest.
Mainstream media pathologized Bushnell’s act of protest and attempted to obscure his motivations despite the clarity of his message.
The Washington Postlabeled Bushnell’s self-immolation as an “Israel-Hamas war protest,” despite his explicit intention to protest the genocide of Palestinians perpetrated by their colonizers.
Several reports, including from the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post, reported no injuries at the embassy. However, Bushnell neither attempted to attack embassy members nor did he endeavor to enter the embassy.
A protester self-immolated outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, Georgia, in December and was transferred to the hospital in critical condition. While a Palestinian flag was found at the scene, authorities have kept the incident hushed and did not release many details. The person remains unidentified.
In November 2006, American musician and human rights activist Malachi Ritscher self-immolated in Chicago to protest the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
“To the rest of the world we are cowards – demanding Iraq to disarm, and after they comply, we attack with remote-control high-tech video-game weapons. And then lie about our reasons for invading. We the people bear complete responsibility for all that will follow, and it won’t be pretty,” he wrote in a statement explicitly stating his motives.