Jonathan Pollard, Wolf Blitzer wrote, there is “a widely held attitude among Israeli officials that Israel can get away with the most outrageous things. There is a notion among many Israelis that their American counterparts are not too bright, that they can be ‘handled’.”
Jonathan Pollard, who served 30 years in US prison for passing classified intelligence to Israel, told Channel 13 he’s joining new right-wing party Orot HaShachar ahead of the upcoming election. He’s calling for the annexation of Gaza and forced transfer of Gazans.
DIRTIEST FUCKING PEOPLE ON EARTH.
Addressing the Martyred Imam directly, he pledged that Iran would preserve his school, continue along the path he charted, and hold those responsible for his blood accountable.
“We pledge to avenge your pure blood and the blood of all the martyrs of these two wars upon the criminal and disgraced killers. This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it must certainly be carried out.”
The Supreme Leader delivered an even more explicit warning to those responsible for the assassination, saying that their identities are known and that none should expect to escape the consequences of their actions.
“These criminals, whose names from the highest to the lowest are all on a list, will take with them to the grave their wish to die peacefully in their beds.”
A network of lobby-aligned organisations, several with direct connections to Israeli government ministries, has built a public adverse information infrastructure — blacklist databases, employer-notification campaigns, adverse media trail production — whose explicit operational goal is the professional destruction of people who express political views about Palestine, Lebanon and wherever’s next.
1981, Jew York TImes:
‘’We don’t have any atomic bomb now,’‘ Mr. Dayan said. ‘’But we have the capacity; we can do that in a short time. We are not going to be the first ones to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, but we do have the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, and if the Arabs are willing to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, then Israel should not be too late in having nuclear weapons too.’‘
Mr. Dayan did not explain what he meant by Israel’s not taking steps to ‘’introduce the weapon,’‘ but it appeared that this referred to the actual assembling and manufacturing of bombs. Ability Was Widely Assumed
It was believed to be the first time that any Israeli holding or having held a position of authority had confirmed what has long been widely assumed about Israel’s nuclear capacity.
US presidents since Bill Clinton are said to have signed a secret letter that they will not interfere with Israel’s nuclear weapons, and Israel acted as if it was entitled to such a commitment from every incoming US president. It got the commitment. When President Obama took office in 2009, the first question at his first televised press conference, from veteran reporter Helen Thomas, was:
“Do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?”
The president’s slippery reply was: “I don’t want to speculate.”
Helen Thomas got fired soon after, and while this was for her anti-Israeli remarks on a different occasion, no reporter has asked the question since. In February 2017 Israeli ambassador Ron Dermer managed to infuriate even the newly arrived Trump White House staff, sympathetic to Israel, with his heavy-handed demands the new president sign “the letter.” Still, it worked.
Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas resigned from her position as an opinion columnist at Hearst Newspapers on June 7, 2010. Her resignation came after widespread backlash regarding an interview in which she stated that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to countries like Germany and Poland.
House house triple fucking menorah Shabbat Goy Niger Obama:
President Barack Obama has said it was the right decision for White House reporter Helen Thomas to resign after she called for all Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine”.
He said in a television interview that Helen Thomas’ remarks were “offensive”.
The veteran reporter, who has worked in Washington since the Kennedy administration, announced her resignation after footage emerged of her saying Jews in Israel should “go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else”.
FUCKING JEWS:
He nicknamed fellow Obama staffer Ben Rhodes “Hamas” for daring to suggest that Palestinians in Gaza not be carpet bombed with impunity.
“I want to stop American aid. It’s like welfare; I don’t want it.”
A window into their panic. The one thing they never do is ask what it is about them that invokes that animosity… It’s difficult to watch, but . . .
The same Jewish state that suffocated the USA with faulty intelligence and misleading predictions that led the USA into its final war, is now telling the retard Ginger Caligula that the Iranians are planning his assassination.
Let me assure you, the resistance wants Trump and Netanyahu alive and kicking. No one in America or Sodomstan can replace the level of destruction these two inflict on their own states and their own people…
The Ginger KaligulStein is committed to to reduce the planet into dust on behalf of his Tel Aviv puppeteer. The only thing that can save the planet at this point is an Iranian bomb..
Indonesia, 1965: Dozens of civilians, including children, await execution by firing squad in a mass grave in a period in which more than 1.5 million people, some say up to 3 million, would be exterminated by Indonesian fascists, with support and funding from the CIA, simply for being suspected communists.
At that time, the Communist Party of Indonesia was one of the strongest parties in the world, though lacking its own armed forces. This genocide against the communists in Indonesia was committed following a coup d’état organized primarily by the US.
The death of U.S. imperialism is necessary for the world to know abundant life.
Last week I was questioning the timing of the burial and funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 4 months after his assassination.
Needless to say, I wasn’t sold on the ‘security reason’ narrative offered by the majority of the well-meaning people who commented on my post!
If you know Islam as much as I do, you would know that it’s very regimented and textually oriented faith. And if you know Shiite Muslims you would know that they are even more regimented and they up the rituals and symbolisms a few more notches than the Sunni Muslims do.
So it wasn’t until I saw a photo of the funeral procession, the lamenting ritual of death, and a sea of red flags adorned with verses from the Quran and religious slogans and its resemblance to ‘Aashura’ (explained below) that I managed to connect the dots and realized the reason behind the postponement of Ayatollah Khamenei’s burial/funeral.
So here we go, a very quick education on one of the most significant Shiite Islamic rituals, ergo the connection to the timing of Ayatollah Khamenei’s delayed burial.
The month of Muharram is the first month of the Islamic Lunar calendar, as January is to the Gregorian calendar. Muharram started on June 15th and ends on July 15th this year. The month of Muharram is also identified as one of the four sacred months in Islam by Allah.
The entire month is dedicated to constant reflection and self-improvement, seeking Allah’s mercy and forgiveness, whilst staying away from conflict and the evil whispers of the Shaytan (devil).
The main symbolism and the significance of the month of Muharram is the victory of the oppressed over the oppressor. The month contains many events; however, there are two major occurrences that are regularly reflected upon by Muslims (both Sunnis & Shiites) worldwide.
1. The Martyrdom of Hussain Ibn Ali, who was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, also known as Ashura, which took place during the Battle of Karbala and is commemorated on the 10th day of the month of Muharram, which fell on June 25th on the Gregorian calendar. This day consists of mourning by Shia Muslims, who make up one of the 73 sects in Islam.
2. The Splitting of the Sea for Moses also marks one of the first miraculous events to have occurred in the month of Muharram when Allah split the sea to save Prophet Moses and all those who believed in the message of Islam from Pharaoh.
It is not an exaggeration to say that religious rituals and symbolisms are as old as religion itself and have been around as long as human history. But what we see these days is not a mere practice of religious rites but serious efforts for extensive staging, producing narrative, restoring awe, and mobilizing masses.
For the Islamic Republic of Iran, the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei being the first public ritual after the end of the war, not only signifies the battle between the oppressed and the oppressor, but it also reflects a life sacrifice and martyrdom of the man (Khamenei) to be as equally significant as the Martyrdom of Hussain Ibn Ali, aka Imam Hussain, in the Battle of Karbala. And what better time to hold such a public ritual than the month of Muharram, hence taking the body of the Ayatollah Khamenei to Najaf, Iraq, for pilgrimage to Imam Ali, the father of Imam Husayn, the martyr.
Therefore, for the Muslims around the world, let alone the Iranians (99% of whom are Muslims by faith), attending Ayatollah Khamenei was not only paying respect but a religious duty, one of which has not taken place since the martyrdom of Hussain Ibn Ali himself.
Having explained the importance of the chosen timing of this funeral, one cannot ignore the fact that as soon as the staging and excitement subsides, the realities, troubles, and deep social and economic problems that have made Iranian society in particular and the region in general prone to instability will reappear.
But at the end of the day, it is symbolism that counts, and the lack of awareness and understanding of ‘others’ cultural significance of religious heritage by the United States and the Western world would always be palpable and the dividing factor between the Muslim communities and populations and their Christian counterparts.
Ayatollahs, Imams, religious figures come and go, but the divisions will remain and carry over to the generations to come, and THAT is the problem.
Federal agents delivered subpoenas to the homes of four New York Times journalists Friday night, ordering them to appear before a federal grand jury this week. Reporters Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt are all being compelled to testify after their reporting on a security threat involving Trump’s new Air Force One, the jet Trump accepted as a gift from the Qatari government.
The Times called the move “an extraordinary escalation” in efforts to intimidate independent journalism, and the paper’s lawyer described federal agents showing up at reporters’ homes as a “brazen act” that “should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution.” The subpoenas themselves are vague, asking only that the journalists testify about an unspecified violation of federal criminal law.
The DOJ insists the reporters are not targets and that the investigation is focused on whoever leaked classified information. The underlying story reported that Trump switched planes during a trip to Turkey at the Secret Service’s request because of an unspecified threat, something Trump has since tied to an Iranian assassination plot, even as he publicly claimed the swap was so troops in the UK could admire the new jet.
Trump Quietly Reopens Canadian Bridge After Donor Family Suspicions
Trump is backing off his aggressive trade posture toward Canada, quietly allowing the completed Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario to finally open on July 27. The bridge had sat closed for months after Trump refused to open it, officially as protest over Canadian trade practices, while demanding the U.S. be given at least half ownership despite an existing agreement to simply split toll revenue.
Political observers had pointed out that the new bridge would compete directly with the privately owned Ambassador Bridge, controlled by a trucking family that contributed heavily to Trump’s super PAC, raising questions about who the closure was really protecting. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer celebrated the announcement, calling the bridge a testament to Michigan and Canada’s partnership.
Fucking Hell, aye? A fucking hockey player gets a bridge name!
If you have applied for a job at any large organisation in the last decade, the first human being to see your application almost certainly wasn’t the first entity to evaluate it. Before any person read your CV, an algorithm did. And the algorithm was configured by someone who may have had instructions you never saw, operating on criteria you were never told about, producing a score you were never shown, attached to reasons you have no legal right to access in any meaningful form.
This is not speculation. This is the normal functioning of modern recruitment technology, used by over 98% of Fortune 500 companies, the vast majority of large UK employers, most Australian corporate and government sector employers, and every significant financial institution in North America and Europe.
The core technology is the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). The dominant players are Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, and SAP SuccessFactors. These systems do several things that matter for this story:
They parse CVs and LinkedIn profiles automatically, extracting named entities — employers, institutions, locations, and increasingly, associations. They score candidates against keyword profiles configured by the client employer. They log candidate social media handles for downstream screening. They can be configured with custom exclusion flags by HR administrators — flags that produce no visible rejection notice, no explanation, and no candidate-facing record. And critically: the exclusion logic is invisible to applicants, and is not subject to disclosure requirements in most jurisdictions. A candidate rejected by an automated filter has no right to know why in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, or the United States. The EU’s GDPR creates a theoretical right to explanation for automated decisions, but its practical enforcement in hiring contexts has been negligible.
To the candidate, it looks like: no response.
To the employer: they acted on an independent, risk-based assessment of applicant suitability.
To the data feed that triggered the flag: successful outcome.
The people who built this did not do it secretly. They announced it. They funded it through charitable foundations. They accepted government contracts and ministerial briefings. They published the goal — “will not be able to find employment” — on a website with their logo.
The only thing that happened in secret was the connection to the HR software.
THE ECOSYSTEM MODEL: No Single Crime, Just Coordinated Data Poisoning
This is the analysis that should stop you in your tracks, because it’s the part that makes this not just disturbing but genuinely difficult to challenge.
No single actor in this chain needs to do anything illegal. The system produces political persecution as an emergent property of commercially normal operations by commercially normal entities, each acting on commercially normal incentives, each operating within their legal mandate. Let’s run the sequence:
Step one: Canary Mission publishes a profile of a student who attended a campus protest and signed an open letter. The profile is public, indexed by Google, and contains accurate factual information about where the student goes to university and their political expression.
Step two: StopAntisemitism.org posts about a journalist who published a thread citing civilian casualty figures from Gaza. The post is public, indexed by Google, and characterises the journalist as promoting antisemitic narratives.
Step three: An adverse media scanning product used by a background check firm indexes both pieces of content as part of its routine media monitoring operation. The student and the journalist now have adverse media hits in the candidate profiles generated whenever their names are run through the background check system.
Step four: A social media screening vendor used by financial services firms runs the student’s and journalist’s social media handles. The posts that triggered Canary Mission and StopAntisemitism.org appearances are flagged under the “political controversy” risk category. The vendor’s report notes: potential reputational risk / political controversy.
Step five: The student applies for a position at a financial services firm. The ATS processes their application. The background check returns an adverse media hit. The social media screen returns a political risk flag. The candidate is automatically deprioritised or excluded. No human being makes a discriminatory decision. The algorithm processed available data and produced a risk score.
Step six: The journalist’s Stripe account is flagged by automated transaction monitoring following an increase in payments associated with content about Gaza. Stripe’s compliance team reviews and terminates the account, citing “unacceptable risk.” The journalist’s Substack revenue stops. Their ability to fund the journalism stops.
Step seven: The university employing an academic who signed a ceasefire letter receives a call from a major donor expressing “concern.” The university’s development office flags the concern to the provost’s office. The provost’s office flags it to the academic’s dean. No instruction is given. None needs to be. The academic’s next grant application is reviewed with particular care. Their contract renewal is discussed in terms of “institutional fit.”
Each person in this chain — the background check vendor, the ATS product manager, the social media screening algorithm, the Stripe compliance officer, the development office staffer, the dean — made a commercially or institutionally normal decision. None of them coordinated. None of them needed to. The coordination happened upstream, in the data environment, where the content that triggers all of these downstream decisions was produced by organisations whose explicit stated goal is employment destruction.
The legal concept you need here is disparate impact: discrimination that occurs not through intent but through the systematic application of neutral-seeming processes that produce discriminatory outcomes for a protected class. Disparate impact is a recognised legal theory in UK, Australian, US, and EU employment law. It has never been successfully applied to a case of this type. The primary reason is the evidentiary problem: you cannot bring a disparate impact claim without access to the data that produced the outcome, and automated screening systems are not required to produce that data.
Humanity is at its closest yet to destroying itself, according to Tuesday’s reset of the ominous “Doomsday Clock.” The symbolic clock now reads 89 [85]seconds to midnight after advancing one second since last year’s reset.
It is now the closest to midnight since the introduction of the clock in 1947. It is updated by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which organizes the assessment of how close we are to a self-inflicted end of humanity.
The world is less safe and less stable than it was a year ago, said Dan Holz, chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ science and security board.
“We have no enemies except those we elect and select and direct toward the nearest nuclear bombs.“ Gore Vidal
William F. Buckley, Jr. [the fucker wanted to nuke Vietnam, man] and Dr. Giovanni Costigan held a debate at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington on November 11, 1971. The event was held at the Hec Edmundson Pavilion with over 8,000 people in attendance. For two and a half hours, they debated the subject of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia.
William F. Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925-February 27, 2008) was a conservative political author and commentator. In 1951, he graduated from Yale University, where he studied political science, history, and economics. He founded the National Review in 1955 and wrote a syndicated column called “On the Right” in 1962. Buckley was most recognized for his weekly PBS show “Firing Line” that first aired in 1966.
Giovanni Costigan (1905-1985) was a critic of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1934, he accepted a position in the history department at the University of Washington, where he taught Irish and English history.
Following the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a long stream of questions and concerns came to dominate the public discourse over nuclear weapons, with many demanding instant action to control the use and further development of these powerful new instruments of war. In the years immediately following the war, Teller agreed with Pauling that a universal government could, and should, control the knowledge that had resulted in the production of a nuclear device – trying to keep the information secret was unscientific and would likely only make the geopolitical situation worse.
Teller continued to believe in this course of action until finally deciding that the solution was not realistic, especially in the face of mounting tensions with the Soviet Union over their rapidly developing technologies. Teller stated publicly that he wished he could side with Pauling’s position that the US could help to maintain peace through international cooperation.
But instead, Teller believed that the US ultimately had to keep the upper hand with respect to nuclear technologies and that doing so necessitated further weapons development. Deterrence, Teller felt, required more weapons, and in order for new weapons to be developed, nuclear tests needed to continue. Teller argued that this was the only path to avoiding a third World War. Pauling, on the other hand, believed that the West needed to learn to get along with the Communists and he sought to include them in his peace activities.
The 1958 debate, and Pauling and Teller’s stances, encapsulate many of the diverse ideas and tensions that surrounded the development and testing of nuclear weapons in the Cold War period. The two scientists approached the dangers of the Cold War and the associated arms race from very different perspectives, due in part to their different disciplinary backgrounds in chemistry and physics respectively. Nonetheless, their tactics and approach were similar in key respects, in part because each man shared an enthusiasm for speaking to large lay audiences.
Both men also sought to educate the American public about the current geopolitical situation and the future of nuclear development, and both strove to present their views in language that the public could understand. Pauling was extremely rational in his thinking and he sought to use his scientific background to educate others so that they could draw their own conclusions concerning nuclear testing and fallout. In this, Teller was similar to Pauling as he too sought to educate the lay public as a means to establish his argument. Both men also believed that it was their duty to educate the public because of their unique positions as scientists, consultants, and citizens.
But the discussion between Pauling and Teller was not merely one of whether or not nuclear weapons should continue to be developed, but ultimately how peace with the Soviet Union could be maintained. For Pauling the dialogue was framed as a battle for disarmament that would lead to peace; for Teller, it was deterrence against future Soviet acts of aggression. Both men played on the fears of ordinary Americans, drawing from the very real tensions of the time, and each fought for the attention of politicians who could enact the policies that they, as scientists, could not. As we will see, the result of all this was a sometimes messy battle over calculations, predictions, and interpretations.
+—+
Now go to the Jew Hour, with Jew Koppel and Jew Sagan and Jew Weisel.
“Strangely enough, maybe the whole world has turned Jewish . . . . “ Wiesel!
On November 20, 1983 the ABC television network aired a film called “The Day After”. That film portrays a full-scale thermonuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact as witnessed by the residents of Lawrence, Kansas. Over 100 million people tuned in to watch “The Day After”, a full 62% of the U.S. television audience. It remains the most-watched TV movie event in history.
Immediately following the film, ABC aired a live town hall debate moderated by news anchor Ted Koppel. Appearing on the panel were Carl Sagan, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, General Brent Scowcroft, and commentator William F. Buckley.
Motherfucking white shit hole MEN MEN MEN, man. No mothers, no sisters, no aunties, no wives, no grandmas. Psychosis of Whiteness, man.
Quaint, no, ten years ago:
‘I think when it comes to nuclear, we are really in a good place.’ With these words, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte described the state of the Alliance’s nuclear strategy at the pre-Summit press conference in Ankara on 6 July 2026. The phrase was intended to project stability, confidence, and reassurance. Yet, to anyone familiar with the history of the nuclear age, it reveals something far more disturbing: the dangerous normalization of the belief that more nuclear weapons, more deployments, and greater confrontation can somehow produce greater security.
This is precisely where the greatest paradox of contemporary European security policy (if there is any) lies. A continent devastated by two world wars, a continent that built its post-war institutions precisely to overcome the cycle of military rivalry, is once again embracing a logic in which military power, deterrence, and strategic confrontation are becoming the foundations of political order. Particularly alarming is the fact that the nuclear dimension of this transformation has scarcely become the subject of any meaningful debate.
Europe is gradually turning into a space where nuclear powers are moving ever closer to one another. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has significantly altered the strategic geography of Northern Europe. Finland, a country that for decades based its security policy on military neutrality and careful balancing vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, has, following its NATO membership, amended its legal framework to allow for the potential deployment of nuclear capabilities on its territory. At the same time, the Baltic region is becoming one of the most heavily militarized areas in Europe.
At the centre of this new geopolitical anxiety lies Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave situated between Poland and Lithuania and surrounded by NATO member states. For Moscow, it is a crucial strategic bastion; for NATO, it is frequently portrayed as a potential launch point for Russian aggression. Precisely because of its geographical isolation and military significance, Kaliningrad has become the symbol of Europe’s most dangerous zone of confrontation. In this place, a miscalculation, an accident, or a deliberate provocation could trigger a crisis with unforeseeable consequences.
In the run-up to the Ankara Summit, numerous political and intelligence assessments and media speculations circulated, revealing precisely this atmosphere of fear and mutual distrust. One suggested that Russia might attempt to stage a limited incident in the Baltic region or near Poland to ‘test’ NATO, i.e. the Alliance’s political willingness to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
At the same time, an opposite set of speculations also emerged: that heightened tensions surrounding Kaliningrad could themselves become a pretext for false-flag operations, that is, incidents whose true origin would remain unclear but which could generate political pressure for further escalation. In such a scenario, fears of Russian aggression could be used to justify an expanded American military and nuclear presence across Europe.
Such scenarios are far from being facts. Yet their very circulation in the public sphere illustrates how dangerous the prevailing logic of confrontation has become. In an era of hybrid warfare, cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, and information warfare, the boundary between objective threats and socially constructed perceptions of insecurity becomes increasingly blurred, creating fertile ground for the political manipulation of fear and the manufacture of consent for further militarisation.
This exposes the fundamental flaws of nuclear deterrence itself. Deterrence assumes rational decision-makers, perfect information, and the ability to control crises. Yet the history of the Cold War demonstrates precisely the opposite. Humanity avoided nuclear catastrophe not because the system was inherently safe, but because, at several critical moments, individual decision-makers refused to act according to the logic of worst-case scenarios. Nuclear peace has never been the product of perfect control. It has been the repeated avoidance of disaster.
Even more troubling is the fact that this logic is no longer confined to Europe. What might be described as a ‘global NATO‘ (although it exists neither formally nor institutionally) is expanding through the so-called nuclear sharing with countries such as Japan, South Korea, etc. Across the Indo-Pacific, just as in Europe, military budgets are rising, new strategic arrangements are being forged, and greater space is being created for an expanded American military (including nuclear) presence. Japan, the only country ever to experience atomic bombing against civilian populations, is steadily moving toward the normalization of military power. South Korea increasingly debates whether to develop its own nuclear capability or rely more heavily on the American nuclear umbrella. Australia, through new security arrangements, has become an integral part of a broader strategy aimed at containing China. In this way, the Orwellian logic of ‘peace through strength’ is being replicated from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.
The war against Iran in 2025/2026 has produced yet another dangerous consequence that few in the West appear willing to acknowledge. The military campaign was justified as a necessary measure to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, yet its political effect may prove exactly the opposite. For many around the world, the lesson is straightforward: states without nuclear weapons remain vulnerable to external military intervention, whereas those possessing a nuclear arsenal enjoy a significant degree of immunity from direct attack. The logic is harsh, but understandable: had Iran already been a nuclear power, the likelihood of such an attack would almost certainly have been much lower. Rather than strengthening the regime of nuclear non-proliferation and ultimately nuclear abolition, this war may encourage other states to conclude that the only genuine guarantee of survival lies in possessing nuclear weapons themselves, even if under someone else’s flag.
This brings us to the central question: does the world become safer simply because it contains more nuclear flashpoints? Or does it become more vulnerable because more actors, more weapons systems, and more lines of confrontation inevitably create more opportunities for miscalculation? The answers, of course, are self-evident.
Under the banner of deterrence and protection, NATO’s European pillar risks becoming trapped in a condition of permanent confrontation. Instead of developing an autonomous European security architecture founded upon cooperation, diplomacy, arms control, and risk reduction, Europe is increasingly becoming a theatre in which the major powers test one another’s resolve.
After the Ankara Summit, therefore, the real question is not whether Europe is ‘in a good place.’ The real question is whether Europe is genuinely becoming safer or merely better armed for a future in which no one will be secure. The most dangerous illusion of the nuclear age is the belief that catastrophe can be controlled simply because it has not occurred for a long time. Genuine security begins precisely where dependence on permanent preparation for war comes to an end.
Biljana Vankovska is a professor of political science and international relations at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, the president of Synergia Orbi: Institute for Global Analysis in Skopje, and the most influential public intellectual in Macedonia. She is a member of the No Cold War collective.
And yet it all comes down to one dead Palestinian child or one disappeared Native American…..
“Allowing corporations to bypass regulations and exploit natural resources indiscriminately harms our environment and communities.”
— Jolene Tsinnijinnie, Pueblo of Santo Domingo and Navajo member
Participants highlighted concerns about oil and gas drilling, cleanup of sites contaminated by the uranium industry, hydrogen development and resource extraction’s connection to missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Emileah Misty Rain Flower Lujan, of Taos Pueblo, told attendees at Indigenous Women’s Day that hoop dancing helped her understand her existence as an Indigenous woman.
And here we are, no, the Jews . . .
Five thousand fucking intelopers, well fed, AC, water, TV?
Buttu has described the widespread destruction of housing infrastructure and the massive loss of life, stating that the sheer scale of the damage requires generations to clear and rebuild
Plans to deploy an international stabilization force in Gaza are facing significant setbacks, with organizers struggling to deploy an initial team of just 10 to 20 personnel, far below the 20,000 troops envisioned under U.S. President Donald Trump’s post-war Gaza plan, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
The report, citing a U.S. military official and people familiar with the plan, said the multinational force has yet to achieve the large-scale deployment originally expected. Moroccan troops, intended to form part of the first deployment wave, were scheduled to arrive in June but have been delayed and are now expected to deploy in the coming months.
Israel is using the illegal war on Iran to continue to kill and starve Gaza, steal more Palestinian land, and restrict movement in the West Bank. Don’t look away.
Initially, Moroccan forces will train at facilities inside Israel near the Gaza border before carrying out limited operations inside the enclave. Additional international contingents are expected to join later.
The plan called for a phased peace process that would end the war, establish an international stabilization force, and transfer Gaza’s administration to a Palestinian technocratic council after Hamas is disarmed. However, progress has stalled as Hamas has expressed willingness to hand over civilian governance without committing to disarmament, while Israeli military operations continue.
The report also noted that reconstruction efforts have yet to begin on a meaningful scale, and much of the pledged funding has not been delivered. Several countries have delayed or suspended participation in the force due to regional instability, particularly following the conflict involving Iran.
Indonesia, once considered one of the largest potential contributors, suspended discussions about sending peacekeepers, while Albania, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Morocco are reportedly moving toward formal participation commitments.
According to the report, the force will begin with a gradual deployment centered on two main sites: a logistics hub near the Kerem Shalom crossing inside Israel and a future support base inside Gaza. Together, the facilities are expected to accommodate up to 5,500 personnel once completed
[Make that 80,000 dead and 95 percent of Gaza flattened,]
As expected, since the US-Israeli attacks in Iran began, Gaza has once again slipped from the radar. After killing more than 72,000 Palestinians (including more than 615 since the October 2025 “agreement”) and flattening more than 90% of Gaza’s housing infrastructure, Israel’s genocidal policies continued unhindered over the last week. Now, instead of fast-paced live-streamed killing, Israel’s death policies include monitoring virtually every morsel of food that enters Gaza. And despite (hesitatingly) agreeing to allow aid trucks into Gaza (as an aside, why does a genocidal regime have a say in this anyway?), Israel continues to turn away needed goods. For days, Israel prevented any supplies from entering Gaza – including food and medicine – before allowing a mere trickle of supplies last week. Despite glitzy reconstruction plans – funded by the same countries that the US has now put in the line of fire – Palestinians continue to languish in flooded tents. The instant meme of Trump’s so-called Board of Peace becoming ”Bored of Peace” rings eerily true. And, of course, Israel’s killing machine continues to grind on (Israel has killed more than a dozen Palestinians in Gaza since attacking Iran, including a 12-year-old girl, a journalist, and a paramedic over the weekend) while Israeli settlers clamor for the establishment of settlements in the enclave.
In the West Bank, Israel has imposed a blanket ban on Palestinian movement while Israeli settler-militias, emboldened by their leaders and an army that thinks it is cool to stand by and watch Israelis terrorize Palestinians, carry out their attacks on Palestinians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. After an especially violent February, which saw settlers carry out hundreds of attacks against Palestinians, ranging from killings (including an American citizen, if that still matters to anyone) to stealing land, destroying homes, uprooting trees, and burning fields, the violence has only gotten worse. Just since the start of the war in Iran, Israeli settlers have killed at least five Palestinians. That includes two Palestinian brothers who were murdered by settlers last Monday in Qaryut. Three others, including a third brother, were wounded in the attacks. On Saturday, settlers killed another Palestinian man in Masafer Yatta. And on Sunday, Israeli settlers murdered two Palestinians in the village of Khirbet Abu Falah (a third man died after getting hit with a tear gas deployed by the Israeli military). All the while, the Israeli army continues to arrest Palestinians across the West Bank. Why? Because Palestinians are not allowed to defend themselves or their land. That right is reserved exclusively for those trying to steal land – i.e., Israelis.
German theologian Rudolf Otto referred to that which is indescribable and beyond human comprehension.
“The numinous unconscious is the deepest unconscious. It contains the luminous part of us, our greatness, our splendour and our sacredness. The numinous unconscious gives us access to a feeling of intimacy, to limitless love and to a connection with beauty and mystery. When we are in touch with this part of our unconscious, we feel our intrinsic value. Connecting to our own light allows us to discover it in others”.
A fucking movie and Ray-gun signing a nuclear disarmament pact…
Did you know the original ending of The Day After (1983) was so disturbing that ABC executives banned it from television? Discover the hidden truths behind the nuclear apocalypse movie that terrified 100 million viewers and secretly changed Cold War history…
The Day After remains the most-watched made-for-TV movie in American history, delivering a harrowing look at a nuclear strike on American soil. But the version broadcast to the public was heavily sanitized. Network censors rejected the original, bleak climax—where Dr. Russell Oakes discovers his wife’s skeletal remains in the rubble—deeming the body horror too graphic for a broadcast audience. This censorship was just one of many battles director Nicholas Meyer fought against the network and the Pentagon to get this controversial film on the air without losing its grim, anti-war message.
In this deep dive, we uncover 15 hidden facts about the production, deleted scenes, and massive cultural impact of this 1980s classic. We explore the film’s eerie overlap with the real-life Able Archer 83 nuclear crisis, the hidden Morse code Easter egg left for paying viewers, and how this raw depiction of society collapsing actually pushed President Ronald Reagan to sign a nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union.
The Spies: In the Book of Numbers, Moses dispatches 12 scouts. While Joshua and Caleb bring back a positive report, the other ten spies are condemned in the Talmud Bavli, Sotah 34 for speaking negatively about the land of Israel.
The Sicarii: The Talmud also references the sicarii, a group of extremist zealots active during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Accounts in the Talmud Bavli, Gittin 56a document how these factions destroyed the city’s own food supply to force the population to fight the Romans, serving as a historical warning against factionalism.
Fucking Krauts: Into the Depths of Evil: How the Nazis “Recruited” the Talmud for Anti-Semitic Propaganda
It was the Talmud, more than any other book, which the Nazis used as conclusive proof of Jewish inferiority and the racial danger posed by the Jewish people.
And all of these Jews should be gutted from the pubic zone up to the forked tongue:
In the Jews’ own words: Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have endured an exponential increase in “Jewish terrorism” over the past several years, with most of the terrorists going unpunished for their crimes against the natives.
“Incidents of Jewish settler terrorism and nationalist crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank have increased by more than 560 percent since 2019,” Haaretzreported on Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, a vast majority of these Jewish terrorists go scot-free. “Only 6.6 percent of the cases resulted in an indictment — according to data from the Israel Police.”
The report explained that 139 cases were opened in 2019 in the West Bank district in response to “complaints of nationalist crime and Jewish terrorism, as well as offenses attributed to far-right activists for harming state security.” By 2025, the number of cases had risen to 779. A senior defence establishment official attributed the increase in violent incidents to the spread of illegal farms and outposts.
The paper noted a sharp rise in these cases after the incumbent Netanyahu government came to power in 2023 and following the Al-Aqsa Flood operation of October 7:
In 2022, police opened 293 cases; in 2023, the number rose to 416; and in 2024, it reached 685.
Anti-Palestinian rhetoric in Israeli society has always been extremely violent, with a vast majority of Israeli Jews publicly expressing genocidal views towards the natives. Poll after poll in Israel has found that the Jewish population wants to see the occupation forces inflict more suffering on Palestinians and is on board with the idea of expelling them from their ancestral lands to make way for Jews-only settlements.
This sentiment has been turbocharged by the Israeli political leadership. Ben-Gvir has been openly distributing weapons to Jewish squatters in the occupied West Bank.
“Over 120,000 weapons were distributed to eligible citizens, while tens of thousands more received conditional approvals,” Ben-Gvir boasted in October 2024. “We intend to continue arming Israel. That’s what we did, and that’s what we’ll continue to do!”
Talmudic House NIGGER =
Smotrich, the Israeli Minister of Finance, has been greenlighting the annexation of vast swathes of Palestinian land, with the ultimate aim of pushing all Palestinians into Jordan and killing the rest.
Zvi Sukkot, a Knesset member from Smotrich’s party, has taken it upon himself to terrorise Palestinian students and teachers with his unannounced raids on classrooms, schools, and educational institutions serving Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem, the West Bank, and cities inside Israel.
Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, who comes from Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, has been using his position in the cabinet to systematically steal Palestinian land on the pretext of finding Jewish fantasies beneath Palestinian soil.
Jews in the illegal settlements have been emboldened by their political leadership and security apparatus to attack Palestinians and destroy their property. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since October 2023.
This fucking creep has his brothers in the USA: Holly-Dirt? Mossad and Israel and Jewish Mafias.
JEW JEW JEW: Peter Beinart joins Derek to unpack a major shift inside the Democratic Party. As Democratic Socialist-backed candidates notch a string of surprising primary victories, one issue has emerged as a defining political litmus test: Israel and the war in Gaza. But it’s difficult to hold two ideas at once … that the war in Gaza is a moral catastrophe, and that antisemitism is rising in some of the spaces where that catastrophe is being debated. Derek and Peter discuss why the conflict has become so central to Democratic primaries, how debates over anti-Zionism and antisemitism are reshaping public life, and what it all means for the future of the Democratic coalition.
Derek Thompson, the prominent journalist and host of the podcast Plain English With Derek Thompson, identifies himself as a secular Reform Jew.
Peter Beinart is Jewish. He is an American journalist, author, and professor whose parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He is a prominent, often controversial, voice in Jewish public life, having authored works exploring Jewish identity and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.
Oh, JEWS: Meta/Facebook/Fuckerberg doubles down on smart glasses amid always-on feature concerns
The company’s boldest wearable move yet arrived one day after its loudest privacy promise.
Meta Platforms (META) has spent two years proving it can build that next thing. Its camera-equipped Ray-Ban glasses became the first genuine hardware hit of the artificial intelligence (AI) era, “one of the fastest-growing consumer products of our lifetimes,” according to Meta.
The social contract behind that hit has always been simple. The glasses capture photos and video only when the wearer tells them to, and a white light-emitting diode (LED) on the frame warns everyone nearby that the camera is live.
Meta spent July 7 defending that light. The company rolled out an update that disables the camera entirely if the LED is blocked, physically tampered with, or destroyed, and it promised legal action against businesses that sell tampering services.
One day later, the other shoe dropped. Meta is testing prototype glasses that would “continuously collect audio while taking photos every few seconds,” sources told the Financial Times, as reported by TechCrunch.
The project, known internally as super sensing, would turn Meta’s biggest consumer hit into something closer to a memory machine. It is also the clearest sign yet of how far Mark Zuckerberg will push the one hardware bet that finally paid off.
Israel submits government requests to censor content on Facebook and Instagram. Meta has historically accepted a high percentage of these requests, which primarily target pro-Palestinian and Arab speech, often utilizing AI-based automated removal.
In April 2025, the media outlet Drop Site News published an article raising concerns about Meta’s role in facilitating a global censorship campaign allegedly orchestrated by the Israeli government, targeting pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram.
According to the article, Meta complied with 94% of Israel’s takedown requests, resulting in the removal, suppression, or banning of over 30 million posts. It further alleges that Israel’s requests have overwhelmingly targeted users from Arab and Muslim-majority countries, in what the article describes as a widespread effort to silence criticism of Israel. The report also claims that Meta’s internal Integrity Organization, led by Guy Rosen, a former Israeli military official who served in Unit 8200, worked closely with policy teams to carry out the campaign.
Moreover, the article alleges that despite being aware of Israel’s censorship practices for at least seven years, Meta failed to prevent the abuse and instead actively enabled it by providing a legal mechanism for mass takedown requests.
The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre invited Meta to respond to these allegations and to outline any actions the company is taking to address the concerns raised. Meta did respond.
In 1755, Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Royal Lieutenant Governor issued a scalp bounty proclamation, offering substantial cash payments to any white colonists who brought in the scalps of indigenous men, women, and children. This was just one of approximately 70 scalp bounty proclamations issued in New England in the century before the American Revolution; U.S. governments issued at least another 50 throughout the new nation in subsequent decades. These planned genocides are a profoundly painful part of American history, but are often little remembered or discussed.
New England once hunted and killed humans for money. We’re descendants of the survivors
Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana with Adam Mazo
The settlers whom many Americans mythologize at Thanksgiving as peace-loving Pilgrims issued government orders offering cash for dead Native American children
For more than 10,000 years, the Wabanaki peoples have been living in a region called the Dawnland. Captain John Smith rebranded the area “New England” in a map he made in 1614. He and the other colonial settlers renamed rivers and villages to claim the land for themselves and erase Native people from their homelands. But that wasn’t enough. Eventually colonial officials introduced a grisly incentive to hasten that erasure: bounties for dead Native Americans.
Yes, the settlers whom many Americans mythologize at Thanksgiving as peace-loving pilgrims were, just a generation later, issuing official government orders putting a price on the scalps of Indigenous children, women and men.
The reward: about $12,000 in today’s dollars for the scalp of a man, half that for a woman, and a bit less for a child. It was nearly as much as a soldier would earn in two years. Sometimes bounty hunters were granted the land of the people they scalped – thousands of acres, which scalpers used to found towns that they named after themselves, like Westbrook, Maine; Shirley, Massachusetts; and Spencer, Massachusetts, to name just a few.
According to our research, there were at least 69 government-issued scalp edicts across the Dawnland from 1675 to 1760, and at least 50 scalp edicts issued elsewhere in the United States until 1885. The proclamations targeted specific tribes by name – and occasionally marked specific tribes safe because they were “allies” of the authorities. But neither scalpers nor authorities had much way of knowing the tribal affiliations of the people whose scalps they took, so for centuries bounties were a license to kill all Indigenous people.
We are part of the team behind the new short documentary Bounty. In New England alone, we’ve uncovered government payments for 375 human scalps, submitted in 94 separate claims and equaling government payments of millions of dollars in today’s money. More documents may be buried in colonial archives.
In 1755, the lieutenant governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay, Spencer Phips, issued an edict declaring the Penobscot people a target of extermination and commanding “his Majesty’s Subjects of this Province to Embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing, and Destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians”.
The Phips Proclamation lives on in collective memory because members of the Penobscot Nation and other Wabanaki peoples sometimes post it on the walls of tribal government offices as a kind of reminder: You tried to kill us, but we are still here. The United States was built on our lands and on top of the bones of our ancestors. We live and thrive on these lands today and are sovereign nations with the right to self-determination.
In our film, Penobscot parents and children read and react to one of the dozens of government-issued bounty proclamations that motivated colonial settlers to hunt, murder, and scalp Indigenous people.
The lives that were destroyed by scalping were tallied up in a ledger and the human remains incinerated to prevent double payment. But the digits in that ledger represented murdered mothers, fathers, two-spirits, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins and infants, usually rendered nameless in the historical record.
Of course, those deadly bounties were only one of the tools deployed by the European settlers to make this land theirs. The legacy of those wrongs manifest today in a range of forms: the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls; the fact that Indigenous people have the highest rate of death at the hands of police, the highest suicide rate among veterans, a disproportionate rate of death from Covid-19, and the highest incarceration rates in the US; continued violations of Indigenous sovereignty by state and federal authorities and private extractive industries; the continued use of Indian mascots; and the celebration of national holidays, like Thanksgiving and Columbus Day, that dishonor Native peoples.
In spite of countless wars, massacres, land ordinances, and extermination orders, today there are over 5 million Indigenous people in the United States who are citizens or members of more than 600 tribal nations. And while the legacy of anti-Native brutality remains, most Native people are thriving and modeling for all people in the US how to live in caring communities based on mutual respect, reciprocity, and reverence for the land, water, and all our relations.
In this season, as families and friends gather to share gratitude, let us seek new opportunities to learn about our collective history, in all its complexity, and embrace a future built upon mutual understanding and respect for our neighbors.
Maulian Dana is the Penobscot national tribal ambassador. Dawn Neptune Adams is a Penobscot Nation citizen and a member of Sunlight Media Collective. Adam Mazo is a co-founder of Upstander Project. Together they are part of the film-making team behind the documentary film Bounty
The conveyor belt of pure crap- some of it, that is- repetition, and of course, no call to action.
Email disabled, or better yet, a new term: Unsubscribed:
It certainly is a list of flailing ideas:
But Palestine Deep Dive is worthy:
I had not stepped outside my home since 18 March 2025. The day before – 17 March, the final day of the ceasefire – I went on a drive with my father, my sister, and my brother. We drove across Gaza, stopping at every relative’s home, knocking on doors, visiting tents, seeing everyone we could squeeze into a single day. The streets were alive then—the smell of fresh falafel frying in corner shops, the sweetness of knafeh being pulled hot from the oven, the sounds of children kicking a half-flat football down the dusty alleys, girls skipping rope and counting in loud cheerful voices, and the chatter of neighbours passing teacups across their balconies.
I remember the voices of street vendors selling chips, instant noodles, and snacks, their calls echoing through the neighbourhood. We laughed with our cousins, exchanged old family stories, and snapped photos on our phones. That day, the world seemed ordinary, almost safe. By the time we pulled up in the driveway of our home, night had already covered the streets. We were exhausted, but our hearts were light. I never imagined that only a few hours later the massacre would resume, tearing apart the city, our families, and the rhythm of our days. From that moment, I did not leave home for six months.
During all these months, I had no energy to talk to anyone, to listen, to walk. My only remaining strength was barely enough for my university courses. I study English literature at the Islamic University, which now exists only online, its buildings having been destroyed. Any leftover fragments of energy went to my writing, which is my private therapy. Writing is how I survive. It is where I speak when my voice cannot leave my lips, where I release the grief that the walls of my home absorb silently.
Then, in August, my teeth forced me to leave our home.
I had hidden the pain for a week, refusing to admit it, but for three days, I could not close my eyes. The pain was unbearable, a constant pressure that throbbed in rhythm with my heartbeat. On top of this, I was suffering from a severe flu with bone-deep aches, which made everything worse. My immunity was almost zero. Anyone who knows me knows how I struggle with illness, how it takes forever for my body to recover. Every night was a battle between my aching body and my restless mind.
Finally, after enduring days and nights of pain, I surrendered. I agreed to go to the dentist.
Outside Again
That morning, I had no energy even to dress. I forced myself to shower, to put on my black abaya and hijab. My mother disapproved of wearing black on black, but my hands chose it automatically. It felt right, as if my mood, heavy with grief, demanded it. My mother and I stepped outside, and I was immediately met with the first shock: there were no vehicles on the street. Not a single car. The city felt like a graveyard, silent except for distant echoes of destruction.
Every step was heavy. Every street told a story of destruction. Homes I had known, streets I had walked a thousand times, were now shattered and unrecognisable. Dust and rubble clung to my shoes, the heat of the sun pressing down on my shoulders, and every corner whispered of death. I asked my mother, again and again, “When did this happen?”
On the way, I passed the house of my dearest friend Shimaa Saidam, the girl who accompanied me in studying and memorising the Quran. Her house was destroyed. I stopped, frozen. I took a photo only to convince my mind that this was real. I wondered: did she survive, or is this a memory I will never touch again? I remembered her gentle family, our last visit just a week before the genocide, one of the happiest moments of my life. My feet did not want to move, and my heart weighed me down. My mother turned to me, silently urging me to keep walking.
We came to the cemetery, the resting place of my grandparents, my aunt, my uncle’s wife, his children, and my close friends. I stopped. I wanted to cry, but the tears would not come. The wind whispered among the graves, carrying dust into my eyes. All I could do was pray for them, my quiet words ascending to the sky, as I kept walking.
Graveyard Streets
Further along, on the right, I saw my uncle’s house, bombed by Israeli forces on 29 November 2023. I remembered my aunt Asmaa, my uncle’s wife Neeven, and their baby daughter Fatima, only two months old when the genocide stole them. I prayed silently and took another heavy step forward. My legs felt as though they would give up, refusing to carry me further.
Then came the hardest sight of all: my grandfather’s house. Four floors filled with memories, the home that embraced me from birth until the age of fourteen. It had been completely destroyed by multiple missiles from the Israeli occupation on 30 December 2023. Rubble and twisted metal filled the space where walls, floors, and my family once stood. Dust hung thick in the air, and the once-spacious garden was reduced to shattered trees, broken branches, and upturned soil, the trees my grandfather used to water with his own hands now charred and lifeless.
My uncle Abd al-Salam, my cousin Huthaifa, and his daughter Hala were killed there by Israeli missiles. As I stared at the ruins, memories flashed before my eyes like a relentless, painful film. I remembered the sound of laughter, footsteps across the wooden floors, the smell of maqluba cooking in the kitchen, the warmth of family hugs. My chest felt crushed, and the weight of everything made my steps slow and heavy.
We walked for an hour and a half, making our way through the streets of Gaza, until we reached Abu Amra — a small shop that sold almost everything. It was located on a busy main street; people used to stand at its entrance, hoping to catch rides with passing cars. We were desperately searching for any form of transport that could take us further. Finally, we found something: a small car towing a wooden cart covered by a makeshift roof. I did not know what to call it, but I knew it was an invention born from necessity. After we climbed into the cart, I held onto my mother’s abaya tightly. I had never ridden in anything like this before.
Market Road
The cart dropped us off at the edge of the market. We walked three more streets to the dentist. He was late, so we waited for about an hour and a half. I was in the middle of my midterm exams, so I opened my Translation II course on my phone. The pain was too intense to focus properly. I had hoped to use studying as an escape, a way to distract my mind from the painful scenes we had passed on our journey, but I couldn’t concentrate and my thoughts kept returning to what I had witnessed and what we had lost.
Finally, the dentist arrived. He was in his late forties, and ever since I was a child, we had always gone to his clinic — he was our family’s dentist, the one we all trusted for our dental care. The clinic looked the same as it had before the genocide, except for the glass door, which had been broken and was now patched up. His demeanour, although serious, was kind and gentle—he knew I was afraid of dental work and treated me with calm care. He examined my teeth and told me that I had infections caused by my wisdom teeth, which were pushing and carving a space for themselves in my gums, and that was the reason for all the pain I had endured for days.
We left, walking again until we found another cart. I had no energy to protest. I collapsed onto the wooden seat, completely drained by the sun, the walk, the memories. The market was full of faces etched with fatigue, grief, and loss. There were vendors calling out their wares, small stalls filled with goods, and children playing in the streets. The children’s faces haunted me the most — tired before their time, worn down by the weight of a world they should not have inherited.
As the cart moved, my mind did not stop. Everywhere I looked, I saw the people I had lost, the houses I had known, the mosques turned into rubble. Even Al-Farouq Mosque, once so beautiful, was now only a pile of stones. I wanted nothing more than to return home, to lie down, to try to forget what I had seen. I had gone out to fix my teeth, not to carry the burden of an entire city of memories.
I am a Palestinian writer, poet, and editor from Gaza, currently studying English Language and Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. You can find more of my work here.
And they laughed and mugged and plotted more death at Nato:
And of course, this putrid cunt-tree’s fascination with fucking Maine?
There had been an uneasy expectation in Maine political circles that something else was going to drop with Graham Platner. After this week’s rape allegation, his swift downfall is not surprising. The harbormaster of Sullivan has joined the sad and mostly male parade of American politicians who operate under the conceit that their past transgressions will never outpace them.
But eventually, on Wednesday night, Platner stepped aside. And the question now turns to who will replace him, through a statewide convention in a couple of weeks, as the Prospect has reported.
So, this human monster, Collins, hmm:
So how tough is it to beat a pedophile defender?
Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner faced significant scrutiny over a skull-and-crossbones chest tattoo resembling the Nazi Totenkopf. He stated he got it while drinking in Croatia in 2007 as a young Marine and was unaware of its historical meaning until reporters raised concerns. He covered it with a new design in late 2025.
Oh, here’s the fucking retired professor in the East of AmeriKKKa, who unsubscribed, yammering once again, with his Jewish ROOTS never looking at why JEWS are high up there in riches (sic) and financial power.
Always the Jew to decide the framing, the diatribe goal posts, the language, the lexicon, the correct way:
My point is this. Nima Alkhorshid chose to praise the changes in Iran by saying “You can get rich easily easily” and not by saying anything about how society was getting more equal economically. This is because his anti-imperialist concern is not the egaliarian one about making society more equal economically.
What most of you don’t know is that (labour) Zionism was a naive (however genuine) attempt to seperate the Jews from the Talmud and bond them with the Old Testament. What we got in the the end is a nation inspired by two of the most vile misanthropic texts in human history.
36 hours ago the Ginger Caligula confirmed he will meet his Tel Aviv puppeteer as soon as next week. Last night we saw the Israeli colonial army AKA The USA NAVY bombing Iran.
There is no end to this war until both the USA and its Mother State capitulate, waving a big white flag in the air and even then, the surrender must be complete and unconditional.
Our own fucking wrecking ball of Jews: Greenspan Ran the Fed for 18 Years and Left an Economic Time Bomb
Michael Hudson:
Well, I’m glad we’re talking about Alan Greenspan because we’re still in the kind of era that he initiated. Back in the ’60s, I actually was saddled with having to work with him briefly. I was working at Chase Manhattan on the balance of payments of the oil industry, and Socony-Mobil insisted that we hire him to calculate the balance of payments and profits of the oil industry in Europe. Well, my boss, who had been recommended to Chase by Milton Friedman, told me, “Greenspan’s just a shill. He says whatever the clients want.” He was notorious for just having his reports up for sale.
We had a discussion with David Rockefeller, who said, “Well, people are not going to trust our study if Greenspan’s part of it. They’ll think we’re acting just as lobbyists for the oil industry.” So, my boss, John Deaver, asked me to check his work: “Can you see anything wrong with his statistics? I’m sure the little bastard did something in there somewhere.” That was how people talked about Greenspan in the 1960s. Well, sure enough, I found that he’d faked some figures from the European data. As a result, I was assigned to go over to his office and give him the news that he was off the project. I obtained some renown as the man who fired Alan Greenspan, but I was just the low man on the totem pole being told to do it.
Well, how did this person ever rise to be head of the Federal Reserve? That’s the question. The answer lies in the 1980s. The era when he emerged was very different from the 1960s. You had the era of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans, and the anti-federalists. Earlier this week, Matt Stoller had a great Substack report explaining how Newt Gingrich designed a whole strategy for the Republicans to shrink government, and what you do is shrink Congress. In the 1980s, for the first time, Congress was taken over by the Republican Party. What the Republicans did, Matt explains, was to cut back all the budgets for the government staff—the staffs of the representatives and senators who had been doing all the research to make sure they were anti-monopolists and acting in the public interest. All of that was unwound.
To quote briefly from his report: “In 1995, the Republican Party took control of the US House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich and a small group of right-wing politicians who called themselves ‘jihadists.’ These men sought to revamp a legislative chamber held by the Democrats since 1949.”
That was the environment in which they got Alan Greenspan appointed as head of the Federal Reserve. His job was basically to represent their clients—the commercial banks—not the economy at large. When people talk about an “independent” Federal Reserve, they mean independent from US policy; independent from congressional and presidential policy. Just days ago, you had the Supreme Court rule that Donald Trump can fire policymakers anywhere he wants in the US government, but not from the Federal Reserve. Its independence means that the banks are pretty independent of having money and credit operated and managed in the public interest.
Well, that’s what Alan Greenspan did. He deregulated everything. He sat there and let the huge savings and loan bubble explode. He let the 1998 dot-com bubble explode. That is exactly the same policy that we’re seeing today. The reason Greenspan got such a write-up of editorials and obituaries all over the press was because he opened the doors for this setup.
By being independent, the banking system in effect controls government tax policy, monetary policy, and the allocation of credit. Who gets the credit, and for what? Well, we know the credit is used to create a bubble. This is the result of all of these changes that occurred with Greenspan in the 1980s.
Oh, the Higher Education Jewish scam:
The Chronicle of Higher Education generally work within its editorial, reporting, and review divisions, rather than in corporate ownership, which has historically resided with the Gwaltney family. Notable Jewish journalists and editors have contributed to its staff and op-ed sections.
Prominent Jewish Journalists and Contributors
Len Gutkin: A prominent Review Editor and frequent writer for the publication, responsible for conducting major interviews and covering Jewish studies, literature, and academia.
Evan Goldstein: Senior Editor at the publication, who works extensively on broad academic trends and intellectual history.
Jonathan Zimmerman: A widely published opinion contributor and professor who frequently writes about academia, antisemitism, and free speech for the outlet.
Contributors & Academics: The publication also routinely features reporting and op-eds from esteemed Jewish scholars, such as Lila Corwin Berman and Ronit Y. Stahl, who write on Jewish-studies scholars and university policies.
These fuckers are offering me a discount for their Counter UAS Summit:
Counter-UAS (C-UAS), or Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems, refers to a layered combination of technologies used to detect, track, identify, and neutralize unauthorized or hostile uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs/drones)
.
Our fucking enemies among us . . .
Fucking Racket? Fucking MAFIA, General Smedley Butler.
Last week, millions of people around the world were subjected to record-breaking heatwaves. At least 25 deaths in the U.S. from this heat dome were reported. The French government also counted over 2,000 excess deaths during the June heatwaves. At the same time, this past weekend, a devastating super typhoon hit the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam, leaving islands like Rota, where 2,000 people live, without running water and most buildings impacted.
Architect Teddy Cruz has celebrated these regionally inventive structures. “While the seemingly permanent housing stock in San Diego is turned disposable from one day to another, the ephemeral dwellings in Tijuana want to become permanent,” he has written. “One city recycles the ‘left over’ of the other into a sort of ‘second hand’ urbanism.”
One of the many stark contrasts between the two sides of the border wall is the contrast between profligate consumption and obligatory thriftiness. Cruz is well known for saying that the border wall turns San Diego into “the world’s largest gated community.” Inside the gated community that is the contemporary U.S., free trade has accustomed many Americans to a lifestyle of waste. In its mirror image, that waste becomes the substance of a city. Perhaps the post-NAFTA era could be an opportunity to find the conditions for a built landscape that is somewhere in the middle.
[Second-hand Manufactured homes imported from the U.S. for sale in Baja California.]
July 1, Donald Trump refused to renew the USMCA, the extension of NAFTA signed in July 2020. Because of the U.S.’ refusal to comply, the agreement will now be subjected to review annually and could sunset in 2036.
NAFTA profoundly re-shaped the North American economy. Perhaps the most famous example of this is its impact on smallholder Mexican corn farmers, who found their markets flooded by tariff-free corn grown on massive, subsidized U.S. farms; the agreement also facilitated the rise of industrial pork farming in Mexico and of health conditions such as Type 2 Diabetes and childhood obesity.
It also transformed Mexico’s built environment. The rise of assembly plants turned northern cities into fast-growing boomtowns; the policy change allowing communal ejido farmlands to be sold off gave rise to a fragmented landscape of housing developments. As a geographer driving through the Baja borderlands, I couldn’t stop reflecting on the visible traces of NAFTA and other aspects of border policy.
[In Mexico, increased meat consumption and the opening of new markets, such as China, have driven the expansion of industrial pig farms, including in the western state of Jalisco]
The White House is preparing for what could become a multi-day or even multi-week military campaign against Iran centered on the Strait of Hormuz, Axios, a frequent source of U.S. and Israeli leaks throughout the war, reported on Wednesday.
One U.S. official reportedly threatened to “slap” Iran “a bit,” “so they understand we’re not fucking around.” The same official said the duration of the strikes will depend on Tehran’s response.
Trump told reporters on Air Force One that Iran’s representative had “called a little while ago” and that they “want to make a deal”—a claim he made without providing evidence. Iran did not confirm any direct outreach.
U.S. officials also told Axios that “reopening” the Strait of Hormuz and “restoring freedom of navigation” have become the administration’s primary military objectives, as Iran has insisted the waterway will only operate on its terms.
Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Wednesday that U.S. strikes “are just going to keep on happening until they open up that lane and stop shooting at ships.”
Regarding the Strait, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s lead negotiator and parliament speaker, said in a post on X it would “only open with ‘Iranian arrangements,’ not American threats.” He also warned Washington that it “still [hadn’t] learned that bullying and breaking promises are no longer cost-free.” “Let me put it plainly, he said, “if you strike, you’ll get hit.”
Traffic through the Strait slowed to a near standstill on Thursday, Bloomberg reported. Ship-tracking data showed most vessel movements were confined to the Iran-approved route along the waterway’s northern side, while the U.S.-backed Omani shipping corridor saw little activity. Among larger vessels, only a U.S.-sanctioned supertanker departing the Persian Gulf and an Iranian-flagged container ship were visible, although some ships may have been transiting with their tracking systems switched off, the outlet noted.
Imagine the significance of what Donald Trump said about the Golan!
The President of the United States effectively reaffirmed Israel’s occupation and annexation of the Golan Heights while Abu Mohammad al-Julani sat beside him without a single objection, not even a reminder that the Golan is occupied Syrian territory.
Silence at a moment like this is state policy.
When the U.S. president declares the Golan to be Israeli territory and the self-proclaimed “President of Syria” says nothing, the world is bound to interpret that silence as acceptance of the status quo.
Oh, fucking queer as lactating tits on a bull Substack….
It’s become fashionable for the commentariat across the political spectrum to describe Syrian President Ahmad al Sharaa as an al Qaeda “terrorist.” From Ana Kasparian on the left to Tucker Carlson on the right, they have voiced outrage that the former Islamist rebel fighter they routinely call a “head-chopper” seized control of Damascus in 2024 and became leader of Syria.
That anger reached a fever pitch when Sharaa, previously known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al Jolani, was welcomed in Washington last month. That’s when President Donald Trump called him “handsome” and sprayed him with cologne in the Oval Office, and he was spotted shooting hoops with US military commanders he may have once fought against.
Sharaa’s forces—like every armed group in the Syrian conflict— didevilshit, and were credibly accused of engaging in sectarian purges. But it’s way too broad a brush to paint Sharaa, former leader of the Syrian group Jabhat al-Nusra. as a “head-chopper” or “terrorist.” I generally avoid calling any group or person a “terrorist,” because it generates more heat than light. But in Sharaa’s case, it underplays his role in Middle East history, and risks underestimating his future impact.
Yes, he’s a former al Qaeda militant. But he’s a lot more than that. He is as much a yuppie as a jihadi, with a life trajectory more akin to Fidel Castro than Osama bin Laden. The reason why the US and much of the world embraced him is because they had no choice. Over the course of Syria’s 13-year war, he adeptly used the instruments of war and politics to outflank, defeat, or co-opt every other contender in Syria’s game of thrones. Among a substantial number of Syrians, he is now regarded as a national hero who toppled the country’s despised leader Bashar al-Assad and his family’s decades-long dictatorship.
[In recent years, Syria’s US “terrorism” designation has been primarily related to al-Assad’s relationship with Iran and support for Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed Shia movement.
Last month, Trump suggested that Syria, under al-Sharaa, could take over from Israel in a military campaign to degrade Hezbollah. Al-Sharaa denied any intention to intervene militarily in Lebanon, which Syria had occupied for decades under the al-Assads.]
U.S. to remove Syria from list of “state sponsors of terror”: The U.S. announced on Wednesday that it would delist Syria as a “state sponsor of terror,” with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling the move a “historic step” which would “give the Syrian people a chance at greatness.”
Rubio added that the decision was made because Syria had made “formal assurances” to the U.S. that it would “not support acts of international terrorism in the future.”
The announcement came as Trump met with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Ankara on Wednesday. Trump praised al-Sharaa for the “unbelievable job” he had done in Syria. “What a job he’s doing,” he added.
The designation has significantly impacted the country’s economy since it was announced in 1979. It has limited investment within Syria by preventing U.S.-affiliated companies from doing business in the country and by preventing Syrian companies from banking with U.S.-based financial institutions.
The U.S. had lifted other sanctions on the country in May, but this delisting is viewed by many as the most significant step the U.S. has taken to benefit al-Sharaa’s government.
‘A lot of love in the room,’ Trump: “Every time you get a censor, you get a fool, and worse yet a knave, pretending to be a guardian of morality, while acting as a guardian of class greed.” Sinclair
He’s on the run, that is, the dog, Elldee. That’s River Falls, Wisconsin, and I did a whole series on my trip up there and my amigos from up there. Kelly is on the show, again, KYAQ Finding Fringe, because there are very few people who are available or willing to have the real conversation about why this country should be Custer’s Last Stand throughout the land, every day, everywhere in this shit hole.
We knew this pedophile would move again against Iran and its people: Trump threatens more strikes on Iran after saying ceasefire is ‘over’ — CNN… CIA News (sic) Network:
Here’s the latest
• US-Iran truce uncertain: President Donald Trump said the US will “very probably hit” Iran again tonight after the two sides traded strikes overnight. Trump, currently at the NATO summit in Turkey, earlier said he believed the memorandum of understanding with Tehran “is over,” but that negotiators can “keep talking if they want.”
• Strikes traded: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said they attacked American military targets in Bahrain and Kuwait after the US launched strikes and reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales, following attacks on ships near the Strait of Hormuz.
Here, Merrill, where Kelly grew up and where his wife is buried. I was honored to be a part of THAT.
What makes that friendship, those late-in-life friendships that survive the great distance of time and narrative and space? That Cardinal was Cheri’s favorite, and the truck in the background is hers, and that’s where we stayed with the Palestinian dog, Elddee, a few years ago when we made the trip to Merrill to recover some of his roots, not all bad.
He’s in lockup, on paper, and you can read all about that. He can’t even cross state lines without talking to an ACAB probation officer. Let alone head to Oregon, or Mexico, deep Mexico, where I’d like to take him.
Lock up, but not his mind, and he traverses River Falls with his electric trike and his weiner dog, with the Palestine symbol of resistance flying high on his trips around town.
He lives alone, save for the canine companion. He is biding his time as the state of Wisconsin owns his constitutional rights to bear arms, vote, travel, and free speech.
You see, he’s in extended jail because of phone calls he made to his wife while he was in lock-up. PHONE calls that were recorded, and he knew they were.
Oh, now, to say. “I’d like all ACAB chopped to pieces, and I’d gladly do it,” well, so far, that’s not a crime here on this Substack. But, if I put in, “I’d like Deputy Fife who lives on 333 Oregon Oak Lane, with his fancy 4 x 4 F150 and his three fucking pit bulls and his extended dirty MAGA family, oh, I’d like them extinguished, and, shit, I think next week I will fill up the 5 gallon gasoline can and rig up a timer and then wait for it to blow under his 4 x 4 and bam, in the woods I will be with several of my God-given weapons, and, bam bam bam. He’d never know what hit him or his wife and his three MAGA kiddos and three VD Vance-loving pits. See you there sometime next week.”
There you have it, on paper, house arrest for six years for intimating that he’d like to see Judge X and Prosecutor Y and Pig Z taken out. Under duress, man, in jail on his way to prison with a wife also being threatened with incarceration for aiding and abetting Kelly’s skipping out.
Now we tried to frame yesterday some of the fucking news, to try and keep up with breaking news, but alas, one 24-hour cycle in this shithole Jewish-controlled country, well, that was a vain attempt.
“If necessary, we will destroy power and water plants, but I don’t want to do that. Our attack on Iran could be major.”
Breaking news from the pedophile and rapist Jewish president. You know, genocide, crimes against humanity, collective and civilian punishment.
And, shit yeah, that piece of shit peace president: He announced he is giving Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot missiles.
Trump Says Turkey ‘Could Have Gotten Into the Fight’ Against Israel During Iran War — If Not for Him
Did you get it yet? White Fucking Perversions, gathered for the Nato Summit, and the fucking drugged-up Jewish President giving the Jews of Israel their new Levant in Ukraine while Putin the Billionaire gives more and more redlines for the Jews Running the USA to Cross.
Increasing Ukraine strikes on Russia can help end war: Trump
US President Trump has addressed Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russian territory on its oil refineries and defence-manufacturing facilities.
“It’s an escalation but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end [of the war],” said the American leader at the NATO summit.
Cosplay:
Ahh, free health care my ass.
NATO leaders are meeting in Turkiye’s capital, Ankara, for the second day of a key summit.
Divisions over defence spending, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the Iran conflict dominated the first day.
President Donald Trump lashed out at allies for failing to support the United States during the war on Iran and again insisted Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, should be controlled by the US.
NATO leaders announced new multibillion-dollar arms deals aimed at strengthening the alliance’s military capabilities – something Trump has long demanded.
“We’ve settled a lot of wars,” Trump says, adding the Ukraine-Russia conflict is the one he “thought might be the easiest” to resolve.
President Putin is “a difficult character”, he said before motioning to President Zelenskyy, also calling him “a difficult character”.
“It’s not the easiest, not the easiest thing. There’s a lot of commitment, and there’s a lot of love of the countries and everything else. But I think we’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks,” he said.
And this is it in a nutshell, no: taking her family’s rights away BIG TIME. Attacks on a UN rapporteur who is doing her work.
While the fucking dirty whites on the “other side of the maure pile” figure out about their fucking ex-Marine Killer Candidate: For nine months, Graham Platner’s supporters have insisted that Democrats should ignore the mounting evidence of his personal foibles and political vulnerabilities — and support his bid for the Senate in Maine.
They argued that his Nazi “Totenkopf” tattoo was a youthful indiscretion and parroted his ludicrous argument that he didn’t know the origins of the Nazi insignia that was on his chest for 18 years before he covered it up with more ink. They waved away his dozens of racist, misogynistic and, frankly, creepy Reddit posts. They said his sexting with as many as a dozen women soon after his wedding was between him and his wife. They insisted that he was the best candidate to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, even as polling showed him badly underperforming other Maine Democrats.
Platner’s campaign working to navigate exit from consequential Maine race, sources say
[Graham Platner speaks during a “Fighting Oligarchy” event in Portland, Maine, on May 25, 2026.]
Graham Platner and a small team of strategists behind his candidacy are trying to navigate an exit from the consequential Senate race in Maine without entirely squandering the movement he built, people familiar with the matter said, rather than digging in or trying to find a path forward for his candidacy.
He is expected to announce his decision through a recorded video, which could come later today. As of this morning, the message had not been taped, the people familiar said.
Support for Maine’s Democratic nominee in the Senate race collapsed this week amid a rape allegation that he has denied.
After CNN and Politico reported the allegation, which was made by a woman he previously dated, Platner said he would “reflect on the best path forward” for his Senate bid.
Morris JEW Katz, a top campaign strategist for Platner, is set to meet with the embattled candidate in Maine on Wednesday.
Katz, who also is a key adviser to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, has told associates he does not believe Platner can remain in the race, given the allegations against him.
“This could – and should – end today,” a person close to the campaign told CNN. “We’ll see if it does.”
Just another Trump guy….
Graham Platner Joined US Military to “Kill People” [and had a “hell of an excellent experience” doing so], Deleted Posts [from 2020] Reveal
Speaking in Ankara, Turkey, he lashed out at Iran, calling its leaders “scum” and dismissing continued negotiations as a “waste of time,” though he said U.S. negotiators could keep talking if they wished.
Our CUNTS:
MAGA and those around the White House have grown concerned as Trump appeared visibly confused at times at the summit. During remarks, Trump appeared to misspeak, saying, “We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan,” apparently confusing Iran with Japan while discussing the conflict in the Middle East.
Trump repeatedly referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” during their meeting, appearing to confuse the Ukrainian leader with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump struggled to recall the name of the Iran nuclear deal, referring to it as the “Obom” deal and “the JC… POC.”
Lockheed Martin: This defense contractor manufactures the hit-to-kill interceptor missiles used in the system, specifically the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3).
RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Lockheed Martin. Primary US production facilities are located in Camden, Arkansas (missile assembly and solid-rocket motors), Tucson, Arizona, and Orlando, Florida
Trump confirmed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggesting the U.S. would let Ukraine manufacture Patriot missile systems, “We haven’t informed the company of that yet, but that’ll work out alright. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.” The comment implied the administration had not coordinated with the manufacturer before discussing a potential production license, prompting questions about whether the proposal reflected official policy or was an impromptu remark.
“All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
— From his 1925 essay collection, Mammonart
“There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.”
— From The Jungle
“All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy whether he would travel to Moscow, prompting Zelenskyy to quip, “It is difficult. There are lots of Ukrainian drones there. It’s dangerous.” The exchange drew attention as Zelenskyy used humor to underscore Ukraine’s expanding long-range drone campaign inside Russia, while highlighting the security risks posed by the ongoing war.
Electricity blackouts could begin as early as next year as the U.S. power grid struggles to keep pace with surging demand from AI data centers, according to Exelon CEO Calvin Butler. Butler warned, in an interview with the Financial Times, that power shortages in the Northeast and Midwest could force utilities to cut electricity to hundreds of thousands of customers during periods of extreme demand, noting the grid narrowly avoided widespread outages during last winter’s coldest days. Grid operator PJM is already projecting significant power supply deficits over the next decade, while U.S. electricity demand is expected to jump nearly 40% by 2035. Butler argued that without a rapid expansion of power generation and grid infrastructure, reliability risks will continue to grow.
Electricity costs are also set to rise as utilities seek billions of dollars to expand and modernize the grid to support AI-driven demand. Residential electricity prices have already climbed nationwide over the past two years, with some states—including New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—seeing double-digit increases. Butler said higher utility bills are unavoidable because companies must invest in new transmission lines, aging infrastructure, and additional power capacity to meet growing demand. While politicians have pushed back against rate hikes and accused utilities of profiteering, Butler argued delaying increases would only result in even higher costs later.
The growing battle over who pays for the AI boom is becoming a major political and economic flashpoint. Butler said technology companies underestimated public resistance to the massive electricity demands of new data centers, leaving utilities to shoulder much of the criticism over rising power bills. He also argued current regulations discourage construction of new power plants because independent generators lack sufficient incentives to make long-term investments. Without policy changes to accelerate new generation and infrastructure spending, Butler warned lawmakers may not recognize the severity of the looming electricity crisis until widespread shortages and blackouts become a reality.
Other news:
The Trump administration has begun draining the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for a second time in three months after persistent problems including algae blooms, damaged lining, and discoloration, with officials again blaming vandalism despite not publicly releasing evidence. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said crews will remove debris, repair the pool’s lining, and refill it using the same contractor that previously received a more than $14 million no-bid contract. The renewed repairs have drawn scrutiny over the project’s cost, repeated maintenance issues, and the administration’s handling of the high-profile restoration.
Beginning in the 1980s, there was a significant increase in awareness of the deep flaws of mainstream journalism among those on the U.S. left. Writers such as Todd Gitlin, Herbert Schiller, Gaye Tuchman, Ben Bagdikian, and Michael Parenti, each in his or her own way, drew attention to the incompatibility between a corporate-run news media and an ostensibly democratic society. The work of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in particular, introduced an entire generation of progressives to a critical position regarding mainstream journalism. As the title of their masterful Manufacturing Consent indicated, the capitalist news media are far more about generating support for elite policies than they are about empowering people to make informed political decisions.
What is not so well known across the left, not to mention elsewhere, is that this radical criticism of the limitations of a capitalist-sponsored journalism is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it dates back to the birth, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of both modern monopoly capitalism and modern commercial media, roughly one hundred years ago. Radical criticism of the press was an integral component of the many large social movements of the Progressive Era, which sought to resist the effects of accelerating capitalist development. It was a time of striking similarity to the present, mirroring in particular the corruption of democracy by political and economic elites whose control over the media strangles public awareness, debate, and activism. However, unlike today, radical criticism of capitalist journalism was a dominant theme on the left during the Progressive Era, particularly in the socialist, anarchist, and progressive press. This was the Golden Age of radical press criticism, and Upton Sinclair was at its epicenter.
Upton Sinclair is best remembered for his novel The Jungle, the 1906 muckraking exposé of labor and sanitary conditions in the Chicago stockyards. The book catapulted the then-twenty-seven-year-old author into international prominence, and Sinclair remained a highly acclaimed and widely read author until his death in 1968. What has been forgotten is that, although he wrote ninety-two books and twenty-nine pamphlets, for much of Sinclair’s career he was known as a “two book author.” The other book, besides The Jungle, was The Brass Check, which he published himself in 1919. In The Brass Check, Sinclair made a systematic and damning critique of the severe limitations of the “free press” in the United States. “(T)he thesis of this book,” he wrote, is “that American Journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor.”*If The Jungle was notorious for its aggressive assaults on capitalist industry, The Brass Check pulled even fewer punches. The title itself is a reference to the chit issued to patrons of urban brothels at the time. Sinclair drew an analogy between journalists and prostitutes, beholden to the agenda, ideology, and policies of the monied elites that owned and controlled the press. It was an integral part of his broader critique of the corruption of U.S. politics and the appalling nature of capitalism: “Politics, Journalism, and Big Business work hand in hand for the hoodwinking of the public and the plundering of labor” (p. 153).
With the ostensible voice of the public in the hands of the editors and news writers of the capitalist press, Sinclair saw that he and the movements for social justice could never expect a fair deal. The very public opinion which the socialists sought to mobilize against the social order was wielded not by the democratic polity but by the elites who ruled them. So long as this situation continued, there could be no justice. The press was the key to every political issue in isolation and essential to the success of the larger movement as a whole. By the time Sinclair sat down in 1919 to write The Brass Check, he did so knowing that this book was of far greater significance than any he had written before. In the text of the book itself, he called it “the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written”(p. 429).
Yet while The Jungle remains a staple of American literature, The Brass Check has been all but forgotten. This is the case despite its groundbreaking critique of the structural basis of U.S. journalism, arguably the first such systematic critique ever made. Anticipating much of the best in more recent structural media criticism, Sinclair explained the class bias built into journalism in a four-part systemic model emphasizing the importance of owners, advertisers, public relations, and the web of economic interests tied into the media system, and invested in its control of public opinion. Integrating the critique of the press into the larger history of Progressive Era activism, Sinclair pointed to the centrality of the media in all of the problems of social injustice which attended the rise of modern capitalism.
Yet, those historians who bother to mention The Brass Check dismiss it as ephemeral, explaining that the problems it depicts have been solved. As John Ahouse, Sinclair’s bibliographer put it, the criticism made by Sinclair in “The Brass Check played an important part by provoking and broadening a debate that eventually led to greater objectivity in the American press.”* Sinclair, the curmudgeonly muckraker, helped clean up the newsrooms much like he helped clean up the stockyards. We can all move on to some other more pressing social issue.
In fact, many of the concerns Sinclair had about commercial journalism did not disappear with the rise of professionalism and “objectivity”—a development he witnessed and regarded with disdain as a sham solution. Moreover, as commercial pressures on the integrity of U.S. journalism have intensified over the past two decades, much of Sinclair’s critique now appears startlingly accurate. What then explains the erasure of The Brass Check, not to mention the entire radical tradition it crystallizes, from public consciousness, or even from the reading lists of contemporary media scholars, both mainstream and critical?
In our view, the explanation is that in this book Sinclair analyzes a central and powerful institution in the United States—the commercial press—and offers an unambiguously radical critique. The fact that attacking the press system was considerably more sensitive, difficult, and controversial than criticizing meatpackers or robber barons was quickly and immediately apparent to Sinclair.
From the outset, The Brass Check faced an opposition unlike any other book he published. For starters, each of the first two hundred pages contained the potential for a libel suit. He could not even find a commercial book publisher willing to tackle the project, so he self-published the book, something he did on only a few other occasions in his career. And the book was hardly lacking in commercial promise. Sinclair organized ten printings of The Brass Check in its first decade and sold over 150,000 copies. He did not even copyright the book, hoping to maximize his readership, but also knowing that no one was likely to reprint it and join him in the hot seat. Indeed, at one point, he had difficulties securing sufficient paper from recalcitrant vendors to reprint the book.*
Nor did the hostility of the established media powers end there. Most newspapers refused to review the book, and those very few that did were almost always unsympathetic. Many newspapers, like the New York Times, even refused to run paid advertisements for the book (p. 294). Critics loosely charged that Sinclair had been sloppy with his facts in The Brass Check, and the book did not stand up to close scrutiny. Sinclair, a fanatic for factual accuracy, directly challenged any of those he criticized in The Brass Check to sue him for criminal libel—often in the footnotes of later editions of the book—if they could prove a single word in the text was false. No suits were ever forthcoming. Indeed, in 1921, the Associated Press announced it was appointing a commission to review, collect evidence, and denounce the charges Sinclair made about the AP in The Brass Check. The project was quietly abandoned without any report, formal or informal, being issued (p. 376).
In our view it was this smear campaign, more than anything else, which led to the virtual disappearance of The Brass Check by the middle of the century. Sinclair was effectively powerless to reply in the mainstream media, so unanswered charges and innuendos assumed the aura of truth. Sinclair himself moved on to other pressing matters. His media criticism was always part of a broader commitment to social justice, and in the 1920s and 1930s there were numerous causes to engage his attention.
That it was Upton Sinclair who spearheaded the attack on the capitalist press was no small matter. During much of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, Sinclair was a public figure of the highest magnitude, something of no small accomplishment for an avowed socialist. H. L. Mencken asserted that Sinclair was, “by far,” the most widely translated American author abroad. In 1941, George Bernard Shaw told Sinclair, “When people ask me what has happened in my lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files or to the authorities, but to your novels.” As Greg Mitchell puts it, “No American writer converted more young people to socialism.”*
But he was also much more than a writer. Sinclair was directly involved in social experiments, like group-living cooperatives, and he had a keen interest in health food. Most important, he ran for public office on several occasions, usually as a Socialist. He was never effectively a party politician tied to specific ideologues or doctrines—but he was never far from the action. His greatest success came in 1934 when he ran as the Democratic candidate for Governor of California on his End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform. In the words of the New York Times, it was “the first serious movement against the profit system in the United States.” As Greg Mitchell has brilliantly chronicled, Sinclair was defeated after an extraordinary war of sophisticated propaganda conducted by the state’s wealthy elite, including the leading Hollywood moguls and the news media.* The brass check, indeed!
As talented as Sinclair was, and as remarkable as his career was, he is best understood not as some exceptional genius, but, rather, as representative of broad developments in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This was especially true of the media criticism Sinclair provided in The Brass Check. The crisis of the press Sinclair wrote about was commonly discussed all across American society during the Progressive Era. The basis for the crisis was fairly clear. Traditionally, newspapers in the United States had been highly partisan. The views represented in the pages were those of the owner; the editor and publisher were indeed one. A major city might have ten to twenty daily newspapers, or more, each representing a distinct political viewpoint. No single paper dominated the market, and if someone was dissatisfied with the existing range of viewpoints, it was not impossible to launch a new newspaper. The market was relatively competitive.
All of that changed by the end of the nineteenth century as newspaper markets became vastly less competitive. The largest newspaper magnates—Pulitzer, Hearst, Scripps—had constructed “chains” of newspapers across the country which often accounted for one of the two newspapers in a given market if it did not hold an outright monopoly. Moreover, what economists call “barriers to entry” made it much more difficult for new entrepreneurs to found competitors. Advertising became the largest source of revenues; it rose from relative insignificance in the mid-nineteenth century to accounting for some two-thirds of newspaper income by the beginning of the twentieth century. This greatly enhanced the concentration process. Advertisers tended to flock to the paper or papers that offered the most readers at the lowest “cost per thousand.” This tended to drive marginal papers out of business, strengthening the monopolies of wealthy owners or chains in all but the largest cities. Despite the immense profitability of daily newspapers in the United States throughout the twentieth century, no more than a few upstart newspapers have successfully entered established markets since 1920. This is a classic indicator of monopoly, or, at least, oligopoly. Newspaper publishing was a big business.
This concentration in newspaper markets, along with the rise of advertising, was the foundation for the crisis of journalism in the Progressive Era. It was one thing to have stridently partisan journalism when there were numerous papers in a community offering a range of viewpoints, and it was not that difficult to launch a new one. It was quite another matter to have stridently partisan journalism when there were only one or two newspapers, and they clearly represented the politics of their owners, which were usually decidedly conservative. Journalism in such a context has the scent not unlike that of official propaganda in an authoritarian society where there are formal restrictions on press freedom. This was the context that Sinclair was addressing.
Conventional accounts of the crisis of journalism in the Progressive Era, including the most frequently cited history by Frank Luther Mott and the most thorough study by Marion Marzolf, have tended to emphasize the increase in sensational fare—or what was termed “yellow journalism”—as profit-hungry publishers published whatever was necessary to attract the mass readership that would win over advertisers.* The hallowed obligation of the democratic press accurately to report public affairs was brushed aside by a wave of new gimmicky features, trumpeting the lies of elite interests who used their papers to manipulate national politics. Progressives encamped with Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin frequently flayed the commercial press in the pages of La Follette’s Magazine, warning of the perversion of democratic processes through the manufacture of public opinion.
Universities organized conferences to address the problems of degraded public information, manipulation of prejudice, and the agenda setting by the web of vested interests behind the commercial press system. Editors and journalists within the system expressed their own concerns, advocating the endowment of a noncommercial press, the creation of fairness and accuracy bureaus, and the restriction of advertising revenues. Between 1900 and 1920, hundreds upon hundreds of critical articles were printed in the popular press, from socialist newspapers to mass circulation magazines.
At the root of this almost universal opposition were some very simple concerns. “If the country is governed by public opinion, and public opinion is largely governed by the newspapers,” Harvard professor Hugo Munsterberg wrote in 1911, “is it not essential to understand who governs the newspapers?” The power of the press was axiomatic. “The American press has more influence than it ever had in any other time, in any other country,” Will Irwin wrote in 1911. “No other extrajudicial form except religion, is half so powerful.” Charles Edward Russell expressed the sentiments of many, when he wrote for La Follette’s political magazine in 1910: “If the people of the entire United States could be informed every day of exactly what happens at Washington and the reason for it, the peculiar stranglehold that the corporations have upon national legislation would last no longer than the next election.”*
If the conventional accounts saw the problem with journalism as commercialism out of control, with everyone the loser, the radical press critics saw it in stark class terms. “A subservient press and a free government cannot abide under the same roof,” Max Sherover wrote in a socialist political pamphlet. And the subservience was to big business. Liberal editor Hamilton Holt, though a far cry politically from socialism, quoted a journalist off-the-record to make a very similar point: “The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes.” La Follette was a constant critic of the press system. In a speech to a convention of magazine publishers in Philadelphia, in February 1912, he warned of the dangerous forces at work in the press: “The control comes through the community of interests, that interdependence of investments and credits which ties the publishers up to the banks, the advertisers, the special interests.”*
Although the radical criticism was laced with anger at editors and reporters who failed to tell the truth, this was never a conspiracy theory. The premise was never that the problem was bad people; to the contrary, the problem was that it was a bad system that forced good and bad people to do bad things. The central logic of capitalist news production corrupted its democratic purpose to the very core. “It cannot be denied,” one socialist wrote, “that the financing of large-scale newspapers and magazine enterprises depends, with but few exceptions, on the good will of the business community. And this goodwill cannot be had without serving the interest of the business community.” One editor of the Boston Common argued: “It is not accident nor the special depravity of publishers but the cold logic of commercial necessity which brings into being the fact that in most of the great battles against special privilege the big newspapers are found openly or stealthily lined up on the side of privilege.” Industry proposals for internal reform smacked of futility. Professor Edward Ross of the University of Wisconsin advocated the notion of an endowed press with these sentiments: “To urge the editor, under the thumb of the advertiser or of the owner, to be more independent, is to invite him to remove himself from his profession. As for the capitalist-owner, to exhort him to run his newspaper in the interest of truth and progress is about as reasonable as to exhort the mill-owner to work his property for the public good instead of for his private benefit.”*
In this radical press criticism, advertising was regarded as a particularly negative force and the primary instrument of corruption. “When the news-columns and editorial page are a mere incident in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, it is strictly ‘businesslike’ to let the big advertisers censor both,” Professor Ross wrote in 1910. La Follette termed advertising “a subtle new peril,” and he informed journalists that it would “in time seek to gag you.” “It is the big advertiser,” William Salisbury, a prominent journalist, concluded, “who is the gold-sceptered king of American journalism—the king who can do no wrong.”*
Sinclair, too, more than any previous press critic, zeroes in on advertising and its ignominious implications for a free press. “Everywhere in the world of Journalism, high and low, you see this power of the advertiser,” he writes. “This system of publicity in return for advertising is a fundamentally dishonest one, but it is inseparable from the business of publishing news for profit, and the legitimate and the illegitimate shade into one another so gradually that it would be hard for an honest editor to know where to draw the line”(p. 285). Moreover, to Sinclair, the political biases of advertisers made it vastly more difficult for socialist pro-labor publications to survive in the marketplace. “For some strange reason,” he noted of a magazine that generated a large circulation but still could not generate enough revenue to break even, “the packers of hams and bacon, the manufacturers of automobiles and ready-made clothing, of toilet perfumeries and fancy cigarettes, would not pay money to a Socialist magazine!” (p. 294)
Sinclair’s genius in The Brass Check is, in part, to sift through much of this entire body of criticism and distill it into a coherent monograph. Combined with his own extensive experience as a journalist and political activist, it makes for a heady brew. There is, for example, the rudimentary basis of a sophisticated critique of the use of propaganda by powerful forces to subvert democracy: “Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two parties of their exploiters” (p. 222). “You will miss the point of this book,” Sinclair writes later, “if you fail to get clear the perversion of news and the betrayal of public opinion is no haphazard and accidental thing; for twenty five years…it has been a thing deliberately planned and systematically carried out, a science and a technique. High-priced experts devote their lives to it, they sit in counsel with the masters of industry, and report on the public minds, and determine precisely how this shall be presented, and how this shall be suppressed” (p. 262).
The scope of the opposition is testament to the depth of the crisis in the press. The Progressive Era was awash in progressive, independent media. Members and supporters of the Socialist Party alone published some 325 English and foreign language daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers and magazines. Most of these were privately owned or were the publications of one of the five thousand Socialist Party locals. They reached a total of more than two million subscribers. Appeal to Reason, the legendary socialist weekly in which Sinclair had his own page, had a readership of more than 750,000 alone. But the monopolistic, advertising-supported media marketplace elevated the degree of difficulty for the alternative press such that it was virtually impossible to become “mainstream.” Sinclair had contempt for the idea that radicals should content themselves with financially insolvent media on the margins, dismissing that notion as a clear indication that “bourgeois thought is bankrupt” (p. 404).
For Sinclair, it is the treatment of movements for social justice that is the real measure of journalism in his era, and it is here that he found the treatment of labor, socialists, and feminists so unsympathetic and hostile, that it became an enormous barrier to the peaceful exercise of democracy. “Journalism follows this simple and elemental rule,” he writes, “if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires; by which simple device it is brought about that nine-tenths of the telegraphic news you read about strikes is news of violence, and so in your brain channels is irrevocably graven the idea-association: Strikes—violence! Violence—strikes!”(p. 353)
The point of The Brass Check is not merely to criticize commercial journalism, but to explain the reasons so the system may be changed. “The thing I am interested in saying is: The Prostitution of journalism is due to such and such factors, and may be remedied by such and such changes” (p. 221). Although a socialist, Sinclair was loathe to have a government monopoly over newspapers or journalism. He presents a range of solutions in The Brass Check, including several that would work within the system. He called, for example, for powerful independent unions of journalists. “In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time” (p. 234). “One purpose of this book,” he concluded, “is to advocate a union of newspaper workers, so that they may make their demands as an organization, and not as helpless individuals” (p. 421). He also urged organized labor to establish well-funded independent newspapers. For several years after the publication of The Brass Check, Sinclair collected money pledges to launch “an honest weekly newspaper entitled the ‘National News,’ serving no party or cause, but giving the facts to the people. Sinclair abandoned the newspaper idea when it became a drain on his time; he preferred to write books (p. 440).
Sinclair is to be commended for his willingness to offer plans for reform in addition to providing a critique of the status quo. That his solutions did not measure up to his critique is another example of the supreme difficulties that have faced radical media critics. “The American people thoroughly despise and hate their newspapers,” Sinclair observed, “yet they seem to have no idea what to do about it, and take it for granted that they must go on reading falsehoods for the balance of their days”(p. 201). The commercial news media were an especially strong adversary, with their domination over the dissemination of ideas and their influence over politicians. Those politicians that dared attack the press barons, like Robert M. La Follette, earned powerful enemies who would then work to undermine their political careers and agendas (pp. 325-26). Whatever success media reform would enjoy at the time of The Brass Check would depend largely on the success of the Socialists and the La Follette branch of the progressive movement. When those movements were crushed, by the 1920s, the prospects for media reform, dim to begin with, disappeared with but a handful of exceptions.*
It is ironic that observers at the time argued that the rise of professionalism effectively resolved Sinclair’s main criticism of the news media. Though the notion of professional journalism was introduced in the Progressive Era, it resolved very little at the time—hardly surprising since it has never served as more than a rhetorical stand-in for its supposed accomplishments despite becoming internalized as a rule by the mid-twentieth century. Even if it could be credibly developed, the revolutionary idea that the political views of the news media would not automatically reflect those of the owner began as just that, an idea. The much ballyhooed construction of the “Chinese Wall” that would separate the business office from the editorial office would take time to reinforce. The trained professionals who would refuse the biases of the ownership and sublimate their own partisanship had yet to be trained to do so. Moreover, it was a major obstacle to the legitimacy of the practice that this was an informal agreement, made by the owners because it legitimated their product in the face of more concentrated ownership and was therefore very good business. Nonetheless, for most establishment observers, then and subsequently, professionalism in the Progressive Era was the perfect solution, and it worked.
But Sinclair was anything but a mainstream observer, and enough of a socialist to think any solution that left the power in the hands of the owning class was invariably flawed. He believed that, ultimately, those who own, and hire, and fire, and set budgets determine the values of the medium. Quoting Will Irwin, he noted that the “subordinates” drift “inevitably toward the point of view held by their master” (p. 276). “A professional journalist,” he concludes, “may be defined as a man who holds himself ready at a day’s notice to adjust his opinions to the pocket-book of a new owner”(p. 248).*There were plenty of disillusioned journalists floating around to confirm the sentiment. Professionalism lowered the menace of commercial journalism just below the threshold of public outrage and held it there with a combination of mild internal reform and stunningly comprehensive public relations to compensate for the ever-present reality of business as usual. Will Irwin captured this duality vividly. “Publicly, the controlled newspaper assumes to exercise its ancient office of tribune of the people. Privately, it serves wealth. Publicly, that it may keep its subscribers, it pretends to favor progress; privately that it may guard its owners sources of revenue and social position, it suppresses and denatures the news which would assist that process. The system is dishonest to its marrow.”*
In the decades since The Brass Check was first published, professionalism in journalism has become far more sophisticated. It has provided a measure of autonomy for journalists from commercial pressures, and it has placed a premium upon factual accuracy. That is all to the good. But professional journalism’s basic claims of fairness and social neutrality have come under sustained criticism, and there is ample evidence to justify Sinclair’s skepticism. To be blunt, the newly minted code for professional journalists had, as media critic Ben Bagdikian points out, several distinct biases written into it that reflected the commercial and political needs of the owners. (For a discussion of these, see Robert W. McChesney, “Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle,” Monthly Review, November 2000.)
The bogus neutrality of professional journalism is evident in the manner in which it tends to cover anti-capitalist social movements. In professional journalism, business is assumed to be the natural steward of society, while labor is seen as a less benevolent force and left politics generally are held in suspicion. A cartoon from the late 1940s in the CIO News captured progressive sentiment toward this trend in the news media. It showed the cigar-smoking fat boss caricature manipulating two levers connected to a skull cap fitted over the head of a person identified as the American public. One lever is for radio, the other for newspapers. The message being pumped into the head is “business is good, labor is bad.”
During the past twenty-five years, it has gotten even more difficult for progressives to receive satisfactory press coverage in the mainstream media. This is due primarily to the tightening corporate ownership over the news media that has resulted from government deregulation of broadcasting and lax enforcement of antitrust statutes. Over the past two decades, the U.S. media system has been consolidated in the hands of a small number of colossal conglomerates. To give some sense of proportion, in 2000 AOL purchased Time Warner in the biggest media deal ever, valued at around $160 billion. That was 470 times greater than the value of the largest media deal in history that had been recorded by 1979. The nine or ten largest media conglomerates now almost all rank among the three hundred largest firms in the world; in 1970 there were only a couple of media firms on that list.
These media conglomerates often pay a premium price for TV networks or newspaper chains, so they have huge incentive to apply the same commercial logic to their newsrooms that they apply to their other divisions. Why should they grant editors carte blanche when their other managers are held to a strict accounting of all their moves? The logical result has been a reduction in resources for journalism, a decline in costly and controversial investigative reporting, and a softening up of journalistic standards to permit less expensive and more commercially attractive journalism. First in line for the corporate guillotine was international reporting which costs a great deal of money and adds little to the bottom line. Labor coverage has fallen off the map, while more lucrative “business journalism”—pitched to the top quarter of the population, if that—has become so widespread that it has effectively merged with general news. This tendency for business journalism to become the defining modality for journalism generally effectively established and celebrated the triumph of “market forces” as the beneficent guiding light of American democracy and public affairs—a boldly ideological move couched in the trappings of disinterested reportage.
In short, the media owners have increasingly abandoned the professional “deal,” because it no longer makes economic sense. One measure of the attack on the autonomy of the newsroom can be found in the plummeting morale of working journalists. Well into the 1980s, journalists were among the staunchest and most sensitive defenders of the media status quo. They enjoyed their privileges and were convinced that they used them for the betterment of society. Over the past decade, in what amounts to a sea change, journalists have grown despondent over the collapse of their autonomy. The Pew Center surveys of journalists showed a marked increase in demoralization over the course of the 1990s. The editor of the Chicago Tribune, James Squires, left his job, arguing that he had witnessed the “death of journalism” due to the “corporate takeover” of the news.*
So the dawn of the twenty-first century finds us in a position not entirely unlike the one found by Sinclair and his compatriots eighty plus years ago. The media are exceptionally concentrated, the journalism is of dubious integrity, journalists are demoralized, and the political system is awash in corruption. Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check is not only the capstone of the first great generation of modern press criticism, but is also the first thoroughgoing critique of the modern era of capitalist journalism, an era in which we most certainly remain. The political crisis of capitalist journalism remains an unavoidable and central facet in understanding our current predicament, and there is no reason to think the problem will go away of its own volition. Any democratic reckoning will have to come to terms with the core problems that capitalist control over journalism and media pose for a free and self-governing society.
* Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 9th rev. ed. (Long Beach Cal.: The Author, 1928), 147. All page number references included in the text of this article are to this edition of Sinclair’s book.
* John Ahouse, Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive, Annotated Bibliography (Los Angeles: Mercer & Aitchison, 1994), 42.
* Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 177–178
* All of these quotations are taken from Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Modern Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), x-xvi.
* See Mitchell, op. cit., for his detailed analysis of the 1934 race, as well as the material in this paragraph. See also, Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, with an introduction by James Gregory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Originally published in 1934 and 1935.
* See Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, rev. ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1950), 519; Marion Marzolf, Civilizing Voices: American Press Criticism, 1880–1950 (New York: Longman, 1991)
* Hugo Munsterberg, “The Case of the Reporter,” McClure’s, February 1911, 435–439; Will Irwin, The American Newspaper: A Series First Appearing in Collier’s, January–July, 1911 (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1969), 8; Charles Edward Russell, “The Press and the Public,” La Follette’s Magazine, June 4, 1910, 7–8.
*Max Sherover, Fakes in American Journalism, 3rd ed. (Brooklyn: Free Press League, 1916), 7; Hamilton Holt, Commercialism in Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 3-4; Robert La Follette, La Follette’s Autobiography, 258-259.
* S.E. “The ‘Free Speech’ Fallacy,” The Socialist Review, April 1920, 273; Livy S. Richard quoted in “Our Problem of the Press,” La Follette’s Magazine, July 20, 1912, 15; Edward Alsworth Ross, “The Suppression of Important News,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1910, 310.
* Ross, “Suppression,” 304; Robert La Follette, La Follette’s Autobiography, 259; William Salisbury, The Career of a Journalist (New York: B. W. Dodge, 1908), 523.
* One of those exceptions was the movement to establish a significant nonprofit and noncommercial component to U.S. radio broadcasting in the early 1930s. See Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
* A striking example of this is television journalist Ted Koppel’s response to Disney’s plan to replace Koppel’s highly successful news-interview show Nightline on ABC (owned by Disney) with the David Letterman comedy-entertainment show, if Disney could lure the comedian from CBS. According to Koppel, “It is perfectly understandable that Disney would jump at the opportunity to increase earnings.” Koppel quoted in William Safire, New York Times, Op-Ed, March 7, 2002.
* Irwin, American, 71.
* James Squires, Read All About It! (New York: Times Books, 1993).
Later in his career, Sinclair knew himself well enough as an artist to tell the critic Van Wyck Brooks that “some novelists I know collect their material with a microscope, and I collect mine with a telescope.” E.L. Doctorow once said that contemporary American writers are more technically proficient and far less socially or politically motivated than previous generations of writers (many of whom began as journalists). Readers of contemporary literary fiction have grown accustomed to the novel’s microscopic power to render, often beautifully, the small moments of a character’s life. Conversely, we’ve grown skeptical of the novel’s telescopic function to bring large, distant abstractions into focus. We’re wary of the big picture. And if the accurate depiction or explanation of the world outside our minds is not a part of our conception of Good Literature, we will fail to recognize the power of The Jungle.
The book of Joshua, written in the Persian or Hellenistic periods according to the “minimalists”, reflects the same conscious ambiguity. It never refers to Yahweh simply as “God,” but always as “Yahweh the god of Israel”,[2] “Yahweh my god” or “our god” when Israelites are talking,[3] or “Yahweh your god” when the Israelites are talked to.[4] The only explicit profession that Yahweh is the supreme God, in the whole Book of Joshua, comes from the mouth of Rahab, a prostitute who hides two Israeli spies for the night inside Jericho’s walls, and later lets the Israelites into the city in exchange for being spared with her family during the massacre that follows. As justification for betraying her own people, she tells the Israelites that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11), something that neither the narrator, nor Yahweh, nor any Israelite in the book ever claims. This story, which likens the prostitute of Jericho to the Trojan Horse, illustrates that the Israelites are satisfied with the belief that Yahweh is their god, while Gentiles will be conquered by the belief that Yahweh is the God of Heaven and Earth—who happens to love Israel and hate all Israel’s enemies.
My French Catholic Bible (published by the Dominicans of the École Biblique de Jérusalem) adds a footnote to that passage, saying that Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel … made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find this footnote, likening the Gentile Church to the prostitute of Jericho, emblematic of the true role of Christianity. For it is indeed the Church that, by acknowledging the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power. — SOURCE
Everything about Judaism is a fucking Marvel Comic BOOK book of lies!! Deception. Spy Cams. Sicarios.
Hassan’s comments about Palestine:
“Everyone has feelings, and if there is a single person in the world who doesn’t feel for the Palestinian people, then they are not human. They are not human, regardless of whether they are Arab, European, American, or anything else.
“We always see that even among populations in Europe, around the world, and in America, if an animal is mistreated or harmed, human rights, animal rights, and all world organisations stand up. But when thousands of human beings are killed every single day, children and women… while we are sitting in air-conditioned rooms, living in palaces or apartments, with food right in front of us, these children and communities are living in tents in the winter cold and the summer heat. When it’s hot, we want air conditioning and fans, and when it’s winter, we want a closed home, heaters, and blankets. The Palestinian people are living out in the open. Don’t we feel for the children we see who can’t find food? Who suffer from illness and epidemics due to a lack of food, a lack of sleep, and the lack of a proper life?
“If I don’t feel this as a human being, then my life has no value. Any human being on Earth who doesn’t feel what is happening in Palestine, regardless of whether they are Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, is not a human being and shouldn’t live. If we insist on turning a blind eye… those who have the power to make decisions should put themselves and their own children in that position for just one day. Let them stay in the street under the sun, the rain, and the cold just to try it and see how they would survive. When heavy rain happens here, people take cover and run. But torrential rains happen in Gaza and Palestine, and people can’t find anything to warm themselves up with, nor can they escape the rain or the sun.
“So I say, it is a shame on all of us. A shame on the whole world, not just the Arab world or Africa. It is a shame on all of us and a shame on the decision-makers who leave human beings who are just like us. We are all the same; we have eyes, faces, heads, and bodies. Today, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, or 4,000 people are hit by a rocket and die, and it’s treated as normal. Meanwhile, populations everywhere, including in Europe and America, are looking at something else, perhaps because they are shown a completely different image.
“Regardless of religion, we are talking about how you treat animals. If a video shows someone harming a street animal, we would all demand they be tracked down and prosecuted. But what about those who kill people? What about that rocket that comes down and kills people? Regardless of religion, I am not talking about Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. The feelings I expressed came straight from within me because I am a human being, just like the people who are dying. I am a human being before my identity, my religion, or whether I am Arab or foreign.”
“We left under fire,” Mohammed Ayad, 48, who fled the Sanfoura area with his wife and six children, told TNA.
“Around midnight, we started hearing tanks and heavy gunfire. At first, we thought it was a limited military operation, but by dawn we realised the concrete blocks had moved much closer to our neighbourhood,” he said.
“We received no warnings and suddenly found ourselves near army posts. The children were terrified. We grabbed some clothes and important documents and left quickly, leaving everything else behind, uncertain if we’d be gone hours, weeks, or months,” he added.
The expansion has deepened a sense of insecurity among residents who believed they were living at a relatively safe distance from the military zone.
Among those displaced was Abu Hamed Hamada, 55, who has now taken shelter in a school housing displaced families in western Gaza City.
“Since the war began, we’ve moved many times. Each time, we think we’ve found safety, but the occupation advances, and we’re forced to leave again […] Now, there’s almost nowhere left to go,” he told TNA.
“We were shocked by the speed of the expansion. We carried whatever we could and left on foot. Some elderly residents refused to leave because they have nowhere else to go,” he added.
According to local estimates, around 100 families were living in or near the area affected by the latest expansion. While many fled westwards into Gaza City, others have remained near the newly established line due to a lack of shelter, money or alternative accommodation.
Mahmoud Bassal, spokesperson for Gaza’s Civil Defence, said residents have repeatedly found themselves waking up to shifting realities on the ground.
Esperanza Ghandour was the principal of the Youssef Salman Chamoun Public School in Nabatieh El Fawqa.
She was killed in an Israeli strike while returning home with her mother and their domestic worker, after months of displacement.
Watching the putrid US Men’s Team while the world burns thanks largely to the Minyans in the White Man’s House and in Tel Aviv . . . .
Good reading during those fucking loony matches?
House negroes . . .
The Belgium National Team (often called the “Red Devils”), virtually the entire squad consists of millionaires, led by global superstars like Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Jérémy Doku, and Thibaut Courtois.
Right after Lukaku scored this goal, he and many other members of Belgium’s roster celebrated by doing the iconic Donald Trump dance in a circle together.
We are the queer world ripe for the ZIM world to overtake EVERY fucking aspect of the West’s mind:
“This is what we want from a leader: a leader that cares about the people. We want to live in a safe world, in a safe environment. We want to unite, and that’s what we do here today, and that’s what we want to do at the World Cup,” Infantino said, as he presented the award to Trump.
Infantino then proceeded to twist the knife deeper into the fresh corpses of the Palestinians and to kick the thousands of bodies still buried in the rubble of their homes: “Mr. President, you definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action — for what you have obtained in your way, and you have obtained it in an incredible way.”
This has brought FIFA’s deeply entrenched corruption, which was backstage and hidden from public view, right onto the football pitch, bringing the integrity of the beautiful game into question. (Despite Balogun’s participation, Belgium whacked the US 4-1 to end their World Cup… unless Trump makes another call, perhaps.)
The fact that FIFA would yield to Trump’s pressure was never in question. It’s the same organisation that has refused to ban Israel and its clubs from competitions despite the Western-backed Jewish state’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The Israelis have killed upwards of 1,000 Palestinian athletes, over half of them football players of all ages, since the start of the genocide in 2023. The Israelis killed the latest Palestinian footballer on the same day as the US’s match against Bosnia.
Meanwhile, Russia and all its clubs remain banned from FIFA’s competitions as a result of its war against Ukraine.
Epstein Classless:
Against this sordid background, the Arab teams and fans — despite their compromised governments — have kept Palestine at the forefront at the World Cup. The Palestinian flag has been on prominent display every time a predominantly Muslim country has taken to the pitch.
The players and fans of Morocco, which has some of the most fervent pro-Palestine supporters, effectively privileged the Palestinian flag over their own during their semi-final run at the 2022 World Cup, and the same pattern has been repeated this year. The players and fans of the Egyptian national team, which has the staunch support of Gaza’s genocide survivors, have also put Palestine at the heart of their World Cup campaign.
Jews: A previously unreported dinner with Gianni Infantino and a handful of insiders shows how far the Commerce Secretary’s ties to soccer’s governing body extend — including a push to get Folarin Balogun’s red card lifted.
For decades, israel poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Hasbara, one of the most sophisticated state propaganda machines on Earth.
Its purpose wasn’t simply to persuade.
It was to manufacture amnesia.
To make the world doubt its own eyes.
To bury atrocity beneath polished talking points,
media spin,
diplomatic doublespeak,
and an endless chorus of “it’s complicated.”
That project is over.
Not because governments suddenly found a conscience.
Not because international law finally found its backbone.
Because, for the first time, they no longer get to decide what history remembers.
While politicians crafted statements,
military spokespeople rehearsed denials,
journalists tone-policed language,
and influencers pumped out propaganda,
tens of thousands of Palestinians, journalists, medics, aid workers, archivists, and ordinary people were documenting everything.
Not the edited version.
Everything.
The children pulled from pulverised apartment blocks.
The hospitals reduced to cemeteries.
Families burned alive inside tents after being told they were in “safe zones.”
The starving infants.
The emaciated elderly.
The schools.
The refugee camps.
The aid convoys.
The bodies left to rot because anyone who tried to retrieve them was shot.
Entire bloodlines erased.
Entire neighbourhoods turned into moonscapes.
And then there are the perpetrators.
The israeli politicians who authorised it.
The israeli ministers who publicly incited it.
The israeli generals who planned it.
The israeli intelligence officers who built the target banks.
The israeli pilots who dropped the bombs.
The israeli drone operators who watched families through cross-hairs.
The israeli tank crews.
The israeli snipers.
The israeli prison guards.
The israeli interrogators.
The israeli soldiers who filmed themselves looting Palestinian homes,
wearing stolen lingerie,
destroying family photo albums,
mocking the dead,
humiliating detainees,
celebrating demolished neighbourhoods,
and laughing as they documented their own depravity for social media clout.
No PR firm can spin that.
No press release can erase that.
No lobbying campaign can bury that.
No amount of money can convince the world it never happened.
Because you cannot explain away 64,537 videos.
You cannot rebrand 17,905 photographs.
You cannot “contextualise” millions of pieces of evidence.
[We are a group of researchers dedicated to archiving war crimes footage from Gaza and the West Bank. Our team submits all evidence to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Hind Rajab Foundation, and the South African legal team at the ICJ. If you’d like to contribute or join the effort, connect with us on Twitter or Telegram.
Tech companies are working overtime to censor and delete content from Gaza. We are doing our best to archive it before it disappears. You can browse the documented footage in the Archive, and download the complete raw source collections from the Downloads page.]
ArchiveGenocide.com has brought together one of the most extraordinary archives ever assembled:
more than 64,000 videos,
nearly 18,000 photographs,
hundreds of primary sources,
geolocation data,
downloadable files,
decentralised backups,
and an ever-growing historical record that no government,
military,
tech company,
or billionaire can simply make disappear.
They believed they were annihilating a people.
Instead, they created the most comprehensively documented mass atrocity of the digital age.
Every bomb.
Every shattered hospital.
Every child pulled from the rubble.
Every starving infant.
Every execution.
Every act of humiliation.
Every celebration.
Every lie told afterwards.
It’s all there.
The archive exists.
The record exists.
And it only continues to grow…
And unlike the lives the israelis extinguished,
it cannot be buried,
bombed,
censored,
lobbied away,
or erased.
The rest of history belongs to the evidence…
+—+
These fucking JEWS, man, have no shame:
Former Israeli Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann said Saturday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political weakness had enabled US President Donald Trump to lead both Netanyahu and Israel through an “unprecedented journey of humiliation,” Anadolu reports.
Turning to relations with Washington, Friedmann said Netanyahu’s political weakness had allowed Trump to guide both him and Israel through “an unprecedented journey of humiliation.”
He recalled that in September 2025, Israel carried out “a failed attempt” to assassinate senior Hamas officials who had traveled to Qatar for negotiations on a US-backed ceasefire and prisoner exchange proposal for Gaza.
According to Friedmann, Trump subsequently “demanded that Netanyahu apologize to the Qatari leader and pledge that Israel would not carry out attacks on Qatari territory.”
He said Netanyahu’s apology was delivered in a phone call from the White House and later reported globally.
Iran framework agreement and regional constraints
Friedmann also criticized a US framework agreement with Iran, saying it imposed limits on Israel’s actions, “or more precisely, its inaction,” against Hezbollah while disregarding Israel’s position.
He argued that Trump was eager to end the conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to restore global energy flows.
“To achieve that, he was prepared to pay not only with American dollars, but also with Israel’s interests,” he wrote.
“In this way, we became a tradable commodity in an international struggle over which we have no influence.”
He added: “Since World War II, there has not been such an attempt to trade Jews and make deals at their expense.”
JEWS, man, the fucking JEWS.
Over 1,000 sports people killed, 265 facilities destroyed in Israeli war on Gaza, official says
45 women among victims
Fucking 12 years ago, recall the headlines? No?
1,000 Gaza children disabled by Israel’s 2014 onslaught….More than 1,000 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip sustained permanent disabilities during last year’s 51-day Israeli military onslaught, according to Defense for Children International (DCI), an NGO devoted to children’s rights.
In a report entitled “Operation Protective Edge: A war waged on Gaza’s Children”, released on Tuesday, DCI’s Palestine unit said last year’s Israeli offensive had led to the injury of more than 11,000 Palestinians, including 1,000 permanently disabled by the violence.
For children living in the Gaza Strip, 2014 was a year that brought violence, fear, and loss. The Israeli military offensive that lasted 50 days between July 8 and August 26, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, killed 547 Palestinian children, 535 of them as a direct result of Israeli attacks. Another 3,374 children suffered injuries in attacks, including over 1,000 children whose wounds rendered them permanently disabled.
In total, Operation Protective Edge claimed the lives of 2,220 Palestinians, including at least 1,492 civilians. Five Israeli civilians, including one child, and 67 Israeli soldiers also lost their lives. Investigations undertaken by Defense for Children International Palestine (DCIP) into Palestinian child fatalities during Operation Protective Edge found overwhelming and repeated evidence of international humanitarian law violations committed by Israeli forces. These included direct attacks on children and indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on civilian homes, schools, and residential neighborhoods.
WAR CRIMINALS? You fucking betcha. So-called Leaders in 2014 . . .
Vladimir Putin: President of Russia, who topped the 2014 list following his annexation of Crimea and the initiation of conflict in Ukraine.
Barack Obama: President of the United States, who ranked second globally.
Xi Jinping: General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President of China.
Pope Francis: The head of the Roman Catholic Church, highly influential in both religious and political spheres.
Angela Merkel: Chancellor of Germany and a central figure in European politics.
Narendra Modi: Prime Minister of India, who was newly elected to lead the world’s most populous nation that year.
David Cameron: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
François Hollande: President of France.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi: Elected President of Egypt in 2014, solidifying a new era in the Middle East following the Arab Spring.
Shinzo Abe: Prime Minister of Japan, who dominated Japanese economic and foreign policy throughout the year.
You want fucking Forbes? War Criminals, one and all since they ALL do/did business with Israel: 2014 Ranking Of The World’s Most Powerful People.
NEW YORK (November 5, 2014) –Russian President Vladimir Putin (No. 1) takes the top spot out of 72 on Forbes’ sixth annual ranking of “The World’s 72 Most Powerful People” (p. 98 of the November 24, 2014 Forbes magazine issue) for the second year in a row. In 2014, the Russian President flexed his muscles on the world stage by annexing Crimea, staging a proxy war in the Ukraine and inking a deal to build a more than $70 billion gas pipeline with China (the planet’s largest construction project). The top 5 positions are unchanged from last year, with President Barack Obama (No. 2) remaining in second place ahead of General Secretary, Communist Party of China’s Xi Jinping (No. 3), Pope Francis (No.4) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (No. 5). Rounding out the Top 10 are Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen (No. 6), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Co-chair Bill Gates (No. 7), European Central Bank President Mario Draghi (No. 8), Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (No. 9), and UK Prime Minister David Cameron (No. 10). Saudi Arabia King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud drops three spots to number 11, Ben Bernanke andformer Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke fall off of this year’s list.
Among the 12 newcomers to this year’s list are Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi (No. 15),Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon (No. 29), Alibaba CEO Jack Ma (No. 30), Gazprom Chair Alexey Miller (No. 47), President of Egypt Abdel el-Sisi (No. 51), Tencent CEO Ma Huateng (No. 53), ISIS “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (No. 54), billionaire Len Blavatnik (No. 56), General Motors CEO Mary Barra (No. 62), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (No. 64), Hancock Prospecting Group Chair Gina Rinehart (No. 66) and Doubleline Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach (No. 69).
Dang, William and Mary
Waterboarding and “much worse” torture, and “tak[ing] out” the family members of terrorists: President Trump endorsed these measures while campaigning for office. After his inauguration, Trump confirmed his view of the effectiveness of torture and has not clearly rejected other measures forbidden by international law. This Article therefore examines whether a President has the power to order or authorize the military to violate international humanitarian law, known as the “law of war.” Rather than assess whether the law of war generally constrains a President as Commander-in-Chief, however, its focus is the extent to which Congress requires the U.S. military to comply with the law of war in its disciplinary code, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). It clarifies how Article 18 of the UCMJ empowers military criminal courts, known as courts-martial, to try and punish not only conduct denominated a “war crime” by international law but also any other conduct for which the law of war permits punishment by military tribunal. Punishable conduct under Article 18 includes any law of war violation that entails or results in a criminal offense under the UCMJ. Put differently, this Article clarifies why reasonable compliance with the law of war is necessary to justify war measures that are otherwise common crimes such as murder, maiming, and assault, that are defined and made punishable by the UCMJ. This Article then explains why this execution of the law of war in the UCMJ limits a President’s authority as Commander-in-Chief: a President does not possess constitutional power to override congressional regulation of the military, particularly in matters of military discipline. So long as the law of war component of Article 18 remains unchanged, no President may order or authorize war crimes or most other law of war violations that entail or result in a UCMJ offense.
ALL WAR CRIMINALS AND WAR PROFITEERS AND WAR DAWGS.
RE: The 4th of July as a time for reckoning with American history and imagining a better future . . . More fucking JOKES about 1776. Thousands of slaves in 1776, millions in 1861!
My comment, then the author’s comment, and then my comment back. Whew, what a way to start the day.
Amazing, no, while the murder spree continues in Occupied Palestine. You ask for a ceasefire? The Jews are a mafia, crazed, perverted, gleeful in their rape dungeons and their back-shooting and tent bombing, Fisher.
You can easily go to David Swanson’s site and give your readers a better picture of the War Mongering USA, or listen to Gerald Horne talk about the counter-revolution of 1776. How is it that you fail to discuss the Minyan in the White House — the outsized influence of Jewish Billionaires and Millionaires in Donald “I am the First Jewish President” Trump’s Epstein office?
Manuel Funk and Nadja Rakowitz: Our solidarity goes to the victims of the war, war opponents, deserters, and healthcare workers on all sides. Current developments have also affected our association, where members hold diverse views. While we have faced criticism and (very) few resignations, we continue to engage in debate and education.
At this point, in Germany, public funds are being used not only for defense, but also for shaping public attitudes. The Bundeswehr (the German armed forces) now publishes official videos showing German soldiers at night, by firelight, shouting “hurrah” when their general tells them they are working toward becoming “capable of winning.” The German army wants to win again. Beware, Europe. When they discuss a possible war, officials speak of the “Eastern Front,” and the “enemy” in public debate is clearly Russia – often personalized as Vladimir Putin. In our view, this taps into old anti-Russian sentiments and is becoming increasingly irrational.
Nowadays, it is once again socially acceptable to express pride in a grandfather who “fought against the Russians back then” – that is, in the Nazi Wehrmacht or even the SS. Statements like this no longer cause scandal, and even politicians from parties such as the Green Party sometimes make them.
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Swanson:
Since 2001, the United States has been systematically destroying a region of the globe, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, not to mention the Philippines. The United States has “special forces” operating in two-thirds of the world’s countries and non-special forces in three-quarters of them.
See also How Many Millions Have Been Killed in America’s Post-9/11 Wars? Part 3: Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen by Nicolas Davies. From 2018, this article estimates 5 to 7 million people directly killed by U.S. wars since 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.
See also How Death Outlives War by Costs of War. From 2023, this report estimates 4.5 to 4.6 million people killed directly or indirectly by U.S. wars since 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.
The U.S. government provides weapons, military training, and/or military funding to almost every dictatorship and oppressive government on earth. See my 2020 book 20 Dictators Currently Supported by the U.S.
U.S. weapons are used on both sides of many wars.
In an attempt to quantify U.S. warmaking, I’ve copied below lists from these sources:
David Vine: The United States of War
William Blum: America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy
Dr. Zoltan Grossman: A Century of U.S. Military Interventions
James Lucas: U.S. Has Killed More Than 20 Million People
William Appleman Williams: Empire As a Way of Life
Paul, thank you for providing these further sources, I look forward to reading them. I share your outrage at what is happening but caution against equating Israel with Jews, as that is a harmful generalization. We can call out those who are committing the horrors without equating them to a whole ethnic or religious group. Even the influence of Jewish billionaires as you point out is a huge piece of the Zionist apparatus but them being Jewish is not the point. Just like the extremist Christian nationalists are not representative of Christians and ISIS is not representative of Muslims.
Yikes, Albert. I’m 69, a real journalist of newspaper fame for, hell, since age 17, and still rocking it elsewhere, not to mention my Substack, which is rant for sure. Lived in many countries, and shit, have a few graduate degrees under my belt, but more importantly, I work with adults and kiddos with developmental disabilities, and worked with houseless or unhoused veterans and their families, as well as folk coming out of prison still in their substance abuse days.
So, damn, and my radio show. SHOOT. Books, as you can check out at the Amazon Monster.
So, thanks for the elementary school comments about Zionism versus Judaism, and then cautioning me to do what?
The Jewish Billionaires highlighted by Forbes and by Jewish State of Israel news organs always HIGHLIGHT their Jewishness, their Jewish history, and never ever anything mentioned about ZION or ZIONISM.
Jim Sweeney: “Balin” The story of Balin Miller, a 23-year-old climber of extraordinary talent, whose life ended on El Capitan.
Paul Haeder “Dream Tigers—What Would Neruda Say About Gaza?” An essay that places Pablo Neruda’s political awakening alongside the present devastation in Gaza, asking what poetry demands in times of mass civilian suffering.
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The outsized number of Jews in the millionaire and billionaire category, supporting Israel, and Israel’s fucking influence in Latin America, for fuck’s sake, it is their JEWISHNESS that they sell, so, hmmm….. Which rabbi are you digging? Remember, this is a Jewish Dude, Talmud and Torah DUDE, as the chief sicario of, hmm, The Commonwealth of Nations, formerly known as the British Commonwealth, is a voluntary association of 56 independent sovereign states. Spanning five continents, its members represent 2.7 billion people—roughly a third of the global population.
The Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and The Commonwealth, Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis is a charlatan, which should come as no surprise given he is a Zionist, and Zionism is a racist ideology.
Mirvis has remained silent while the moral crisis of our age has raged on for a thousand days.
A thousand days of silence; a thousand days of indifference; a thousand days of apathy, unconcern; a thousand days of excusing a genocide; turning a blind eye to the rape of prisoners; the murder of children; the starvation of babies; turning a dense urban city to rubble; homes turned to dust; a thousand days of Israelis celebrating the death of children; dancing at the prospect of burning babies alive.
And then dismissing this silence with accusations of antisemitism.
Another religious leader was, once, silent about the moral crisis of his age.
Pius XII was Pope during the Holocaust, and like Rabbi Mirvis, remained silent to the suffering and murder of innocents.
It’s not known if Pius XII had any relatives in the Nazi army, but we do know that Rabbi Mirvis has a son serving in the IDF, in which Mirvis expressed great pride.
Was the son involved in any war crimes? Will the British Metropolitan Police investigate? It’s not difficult to find out – just contact the Hind Rajab Foundation and they will be able to say whether Mirvis’s son was involved in any war crimes.
When the Catholic Church began proceedings to beatify Pius XII there was understandable outrage that a Pope who was silent during the Holocaust was being considered for sainthood.
In the 1940s news did not travel as immediately and directly it does today; there were no live-streamed videos; no social media to show the horrors of war and what it does to men, women and children. Pope Pius XII will not have seen videos of rape and sodomy; he will not have seen children being collected in plastic bags.
Ephraim Mirvis will have seen this and much more.
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Athens vs. Jerusalem in 4 lines:
Athens is the birthplace of (Western) philosophy; Jerusalem is the city of revelation.
Athens teaches you how to think for yourself; Jerusalem dictates what you say and how you think (tyranny of correctness masquerades as PC).
Every precious Western value originated in Athens. Sadly, every catastrophe is due to Jerusalemite immoral intervention…
Athens, Jerusalem and the Genocide
The best way to grasp the dichotomy between Athens and Jerusalem is to understand that Jerusalem has replaced ethics with litigation. Jerusalem is the institutional lack of ethics. It mimics ethics, deploying a set of Mitzvoth.
In Jerusalem, a genocide is kosher as long as you get away with it. How do they get away with it? They will do whatever it takes. They will dismantle the ICC’s ability to operate; they will threaten the prosecutors; if needed, they will wipe out The Hague together with the UN.
Athenians fail to grasp Jerusalem until it is too late because Athenians project their own ethics. Humans find it very hard or even impossible to imagine an operation out of the ethical ‘box’. Even the worst criminals tend to sense guilt and empathy.
These two (guilt and empathy), are the exact elementary human features that we don’t find in Jerusalem.
Since the lack of empathy and guilt is widely considered a core and defining feature of psychopathy, we may have to reach the conclusion that we are dealing with a collective psychopathy.
I wish I was original here. Jesus realised it 2000 years ago. The Hebrew Prophets also saw it. The Jewish State is in big trouble right now because the whole of humanity is experiencing this epiphany right now…
More?
Gilad Atzmon:
Palestine Cause vs. Jewish Solidarity Terminology (Spin)
(As I explained it 10 years ago. Long before the Gaza Genocide)
The Right of Return has been at the core of the Palestinian cause. It positions the 1948 Nakba and the suffering of refugees as the primary issue; it places Gaza into historical context and highlights the gross injustices perpetuated and sustained by Israeli politics since 1948. It clearly illuminates the racist nature of the Jewish state and its immigration laws. The Right of Return offers a clear course of action that unites Palestinians in the region and in exile, but it evokes fear amongst Israelis, Zionists, and Jewish anti- Zionists.
For decades, Jewish solidarity has been shockingly effective in subduing the call for the Right of Return. It was gradually diluted and eventually drowned in a tsunami of duplicitous terminology designed to appeal to Jewish supporters at the expense of Palestinians and their essential rights.
Let’s examine some of the solidarity movement’s current terminology.
End Of The Occupation
The call for the ‘End Of The Occupation’ was the first indication that something had gone terribly wrong. On its face, the call appears humanist and peaceful, politically pragmatic and even populist. The truth of the matter is the complete opposite. The ‘End of the Occupation’ is a legitimization of Israel through the back door – it confirms that the Jewish State within the pre-1967 green line borders is a valid and legitimate political unit. ‘End Of The Occupation’ limits the solidarity discussion to the West Bank; it is nothing short of a spit in the face to 8.000.000 Palestinian refugees and a complete dismissal of their right of return.
Colonialism
Another grossly misleading term promulgated by the Jewish progressive solidarity campaigners is ‘colonialism.’ The term conveys the false image that Jewish nationalism is as bad as British or Dutch colonialism but not worse. Such a delusional vision of the Zionist project may also vaguely offer the prospect of a future ‘resolution’ in some sort of a ‘post-colonial’ phase. But Zionism is not colonialism nor has it ever been. Zionism is a movement with no precedent in history. Can you think of another historical moment when people ‘returned’ to an imaginary ‘homeland’ after 2000 years and asked the indigenous population to move out to make room for the former ‘residents?’ Colonialism requires a material and spiritual exchange between a ‘mother state’ and a ‘settler state.’ The Jewish State is a settler state, but there is no mother state to Zionism or Israel. When prominent solidarity activists refer to Zionism as ‘colonialism,’ they are either being intentionally misleading or simply displaying a unique form of ignorance that one would not expect from educated and highly motivated activists.
One may suggest that though Zionism is not a colonial apparatus, the relationships between Israel and its West Bank settlements establish a quasi-colonial correspondence between a ‘Mother’ and a ‘Settler’ affair.’ Wrong: The Jewish Settlements did not form a new state in the West Bank. What we see instead is an ideologically driven territorial expansion, a form of Judeo-centric Lebensraum philosophy and practice.
Settler Colonialism
In recent years, a new terminological spin popped up within the Palestinian solidarity ranks, namely: ‘settler colonialism.’ The criticism of the colonial paradigm struck a few of the so-called progressive anti-Zionist enthusiasts. They were pushed to revise their theoretical narrative. Their efforts brought forth a new ad hoc, deformed, dysfunctional theoretical baby. But the term ‘settler colonialism’ does not illuminate anything. It seems a desperate attempt to further conceal the truth of the Jewish National project.
Settler colonialism posits a situation in which superpower ‘A’ facilitates the settlement of ethnic group ‘B’ on land ‘C.’ This action may lead to grave consequences for the indigenous population ‘D.’ But this explanation is problematic. The A-B-C-D scenario has nothing in common with Zionism, Israel or the Jewish national adventure. It was the Zionists (B) who persuaded Britain, then a superpower (A), that a Jewish homeland in Palestine (C) was the way forward. In short, instead of the A-B-C-D chain of events that form ‘settler colonialism,’ when it comes to Zionism, there is a B-A-C-D chronology. It is the ethnic group ‘B’ that pushes superpower ‘A’ to act in its favour. Most importantly, no interpretation of colonialism, settler colonialism, provides any support to the Palestinian cause, nor does it further our understanding of the so-called ‘conflict.’
Apartheid
Another inapt concept ascribed to the Jewish State in a transparent attempt to divert attention from the unique genocidal reality on the ground is ‘Apartheid.’ The term suggests that Israel is only ‘just’ as bad as South Africa or the southern United States. The truth is worse. Apartheid is a racist system of exploitation, but Israel doesn’t want to exploit the Palestinians; it wants them ‘gone’ and it acts upon it eg the Gaza genocide. At least from an ideological perspective, Israel is a genocidal, racially driven, expansionist state like no other.
Tragically, this lethal exclusivism is consistent with Zionist philosophy and some radical, yet popular, interpretations of the Judaic call. The so-called ‘Jews in the movement’ are uncomfortable with a realistic rendering of Israeli politics. They much prefer Israel to be grouped with other vile regimes within a recognized historical pattern such as colonialism, apartheid, etc.
BDS
When the call for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions of Israeli goods was established in 2005 in Ramallah, its first demand was for Israel to: “End[ing] its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantl[ing] the Wall”
This call didn’t leave room for interpretation. Back in 2005, the BDS movement disputed the legitimacy of the Jewish State.
But in 2010, its primary goal was changed significantly; it now reads:
“Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall”
There is no public record of the process that led to any of these changes. And as if to prove its deceptive nature, the change appears only in English and has never been integrated into any of the official BDS publications in Arabic. It is likely that most Palestinians were not aware of the change made on their behalf by people who claim to be their ‘grassroots’ representatives. My study suggests that the change in the BDS goal statement that de facto legitimizes the Jewish State took place at the time the BDS became popular amongst Jewish activists and accepted funds from liberal Zionist George Soros’s Open Society Institute. You can read more about BDS, Soros money promoting BDS campaign in a book Israel Palestine and the Queer International by Jewish activist Sarah Shulman.
It is devastating that even the call for BDS has become an instrument to legitimise the Jewish State within its pre 1967 borders.
A Jewish Solidarity Pet
The logical conclusion of this analysis is pretty devastating. Two decades of Jewish left hegemony within the pro-Palestinian movement has reduced the Palestinians and their plight into a mere ‘solidarity pet.’ The Palestinians have been instrumental in an internal Jewish political show that has led nowhere. The Palestinian cause and the Right of Return have been watered down and replaced by terminology that was set to derail the solidarity movement and has succeeded remarkably.
Though it is no surprise that people who identify politically and primarily as Jews (JVP, IJAN, JFJFP, J-big, Mondoweiss, etc) are also primarily concerned with Jewish interests, it is legitimate to ask how these Jewish interests have succeeded in dominating the solidarity movement of another people. How is it possible that the Palestinian solidarity movement has been dominated by concerns to do with Jewish sensitivities, almost totally dismissive of the Palestinian cause? How is it possible that it is Jewish voices that dominate the battle against the Jewish State? Would Nelson Mandela allow a bunch of recovered Afrikaners run the Anti- Apartheid struggle on his behalf?
Would Malcolm X let ex KKK militants dominate the terminology of his campaign? How did it happen to the Palestinians that their solidarity discourse is attuned to the voice of the oppressor rather than the victim?
I believe that the ability to articulate these questions, or even staying reading this post up to this very final sentence, may suggest that deep in your heart you know the answer.
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Nah, who is Palantir? Alexander Caedmon Karp is an American billionaire businessman and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of the software firm Palantir Technologies. Karp earned his J.D. degree from Stanford Law School and a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt.
Palantir just partnered with The Joint Commission — the organization that accredits over 80% of US hospitals — meaning Palantir is now intertwined with the very system that decides whether a hospital meets the standards needed to keep its doors open, treat patients, or get paid by Medicare and Medicaid. …. Known for his hawkish views, Karp strongly advocates for a powerful U.S. military and closed borders. He has explicitly stated that he believes outsourcing battlefield AI strategy to Silicon Valley’s standard consensus view is a major national security risk. [1, 2]
Palantir Technologies and its CEO, Alex Karp, are deeply entrenched in the conflict in Gaza, providing advanced artificial intelligence and data analytics technology to the Israeli military.
LOOK at this cocksucker (video in the link above), and then the cunt white shit calls for security? And so, fuck the world of Jews . . . .
Paul, thank you for providing these further sources, I look forward to reading them. I share your outrage at what is happening but caution against equating Israel with Jews, as that is a harmful generalization.
In Judaism, Karp most commonly refers to Karpas, the green vegetable placed on the Passover Seder plate. It is eaten early in the ritual after being dipped in saltwater. The vegetable symbolizes spring and rebirth, while the saltwater represents the tears and sweat of the enslaved Israelites.
Zelensky’s aspiration to make Ukraine “a big Israel” is, from the standpoint of the Ukrainian oligarchy, entirely rational. It promises them survival, enrichment, and international legitimacy behind the shield of American power. It aligns Ukraine’s future with the structural requirements of US imperialism in a period of intensifying great-power competition.
Volodymyr Zelensky has remarked on numerous occasions that he wishes for Ukraine to become, in his words, “a big Israel.” On the surface, this might appear as little more than rhetorical aspiration — a small nation’s leader casting about for a model of survival against a larger neighbour. But the statement is far more telling than Zelensky perhaps intended. It reveals not only the trajectory the Ukrainian oligarchy envisions for its country, but also illuminates the structural function that Israel has performed within the US imperialist system since its inception.
To understand what Zelensky is proposing, we must first examine the role Israel has played in the West Asian region — a role that has evolved since the British Empire first backed the Zionist movement to create a state, but whose core features have remained remarkably consistent.
Stephanie Coontz: The Marriage Crisis Is Really a Crisis of Inequality
Academic Subject Matter: In her extensive historical research on American family structures—most notably in her book A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s—Coontz frequently analyzes the profound contributions of Jewish feminist leaders. She writes extensively about figures like Betty Friedan and delves deeply into the cultural background of mid-century Jewish households. [1, 2, 3]
Discussions on Marriage Customs: During media appearances and interviews discussing her book Marriage, a History, she often addresses traditional religious marital expectations, including historical Jewish customs regarding endogamy (marrying within the faith). [1, 2, 3]
Twenty Yeaers ago, Sun Magazine . . . Leviton: I grew up in a Jewish home, and my parents expected me to marry another Jew. Do couples who share the same religion or spiritual values have a better chance to stay together?
Coontz: It depends on what exactly they are sharing. People who have shared goals that they act upon, whether they are religious or not, tend to have better marriages. My husband and I are completely secular, but we both care about the labor movement and the environment. We find the same reports infuriating when we read the newspaper and the same stories moving when we watch TV. Those shared values are a huge boost for our marriage.
Couples who belong to churches, temples, or mosques that reach beyond the houses of worship do have a better chance of staying together. But religious belief without membership in a faith organization and shared, meaningful activities doesn’t protect people from divorce at all.
Leviton: You’ve referred to increasing gender equality and increasing economic inequality as two “tectonic plates” pushing against each other under the surface of our culture.
Coontz: Since the 1950s there’s been a large increase in the percentage of people who believe it’s wrong to deny others opportunities or rights based on gender, race, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. This equality revolution is incomplete and uneven and still meets furious resistance, but it’s real.
The growth of economic inequality over the same period, however, has been equally striking. The real wages and benefits of less-educated workers have declined. Middle-income workers experience more economic insecurity. Between 1979 and 2012 the income of families in the top 5 percent increased by 75 percent, while for the bottom 60 percent income has fallen or remained flat. The chance that an individual will experience poverty for at least a year has increased dramatically. The risk of being laid off is pervasive, from high-paying and low-paying jobs alike.
These shifts — which I don’t see abating — are not unrelated to the increase in equality in other areas. For example, more gender equality means fewer women need to be rescued economically by men. Women can say no to marriage and carve out their own lives. And when people do marry, they tend to choose a spouse with roughly equal earnings. A man who’s a doctor or an executive is not looking to marry his nurse or secretary anymore. The doctor wants to marry another doctor. This has tended to exacerbate inequality between social classes even as it promotes equality within the marriage.
Coontz: Think about the supposedly wonderful marriages of the 1950s. Child abuse was more common and much less likely to be reported. Marital rape was legal and widely accepted. Women were subordinate to men and had very limited ways to support themselves outside marriage.
When unilateral or no-fault divorce was introduced—California was the first state to adopt it—we had something resembling a controlled experiment.
Divorce rates initially increased. But over time, female suicide declined significantly, and domestic violence also declined in states that adopted unilateral divorce. Research found a long-term reduction of roughly 20 percent in female suicide and a decline of approximately one-third in domestic violence.
That tells us there were many deeply unhappy and dangerous marriages that people previously could not leave.
Under the old fault-based divorce laws, you could not get a divorce unless you could prove that you were completely innocent and that your spouse was completely at fault. But anyone who has ever been in a relationship knows that marriages do not usually break down that neatly.
In practice, the more miserable and hostile both people became, the harder it could be to prove that only one person was responsible. Those were irrational laws, and changing them was a tremendous improvement.
Kyle: We are constantly told that divorce has become more common because people no longer take marriage seriously. Is that accurate?
Coontz: No. Divorce rates have been declining since around 1980.
They are lower than most people realize, especially when you measure divorce in relation to the number of people who are actually married.
What has fallen dramatically is the marriage rate. Most people still eventually marry, but they marry at much older ages.
At the same time, a huge class and racial divide has opened in who enters marriage and who is able to sustain it.
A great deal of that difference is connected to economic stress.
We now want stronger and more emotionally fulfilling marriages—relationships requiring more patience, communication and negotiation than marriages of the past. Yet we are trying to build those relationships while living increasingly precarious lives.
Most marriages today begin with cohabitation. Many couples move in together intending eventually to marry. But couples facing severe economic stress, discrimination or instability are more likely to break up before reaching marriage.
So one reason divorce rates are falling is not necessarily good news: some of the people most likely to experience instability never make it into marriage in the first place.
Again, how’s that marriage situation working out in the Murdering Capital of the World — Occupied Palestine?
As the country and this administration launched its America 250 and Freedom 250 “Celebrations”, what we experienced in the nation’s capitol and a city of 700,000 residents replicated what the United States does to other parts of the world. The streets were invaded by the military, public spaces barricaded with multiple levels of security checkpoints, and the sky full of military flyovers, including a seven-hour schedule of flyovers on July 4th.
Military flyovers come at a devastating cost–economically, psychologically and environmentally. The most recent ones came in the middle of a heatwave where even Trump’s American State Fair closed after people were baptizing themselves in the religious tent to prevent heat stroke. But flyovers are not new and have been used as a propaganda tool for military recruitment during NFL games and summer festivals. The militarization has been so normalized for so long.
This past weekend, thousands of people cheered on the flyovers, but many did not. The sounds of war shook windows, terrified children, animals, and those suffering from PTSD. Washington DC is made up of 700,000 people without statehood, leaving it little power to push back at the military occupation of the city, let alone the military playground.
In passing, I overheard folks sneering “here’s where all our money goes,” and another asking “is this what Iran sounds like right now?” These flyovers, an exercise of an illusion of force, domination, and strength. All to further prop up hyper nationalism and militarism. But we were lucky it was just for a “show”. The bombs did not drop on the occupied city of Washington, D.C., as they do from some of the same jets that fly over places like Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran.
As an Iranian immigrant, as I watched my children tremble and cover their ears at the roar of bombers and fighter jets over our home, so loud the walls vibrated, I was struck by a haunting duality. My heart broke because I knew what that sound means to children just like them back in Iran. My children know they can cover their ears, cuddle in close to me, and wait it out. The planes will pass, the ground will stop trembling, and we can return to their bedtime routines. But for children just like them in my home country of Iran, for their families, for our brothers and sisters in Palestine, Lebanon, and so many other places devastated by Western imperialism, those same sounds mean something entirely different. They mean bombs falling on schools, neighborhoods erased in seconds, families torn apart before they can say goodbye. They also cuddle in close to their loved ones, but they do so knowing it may be the last time.
As they try to normalize the militarization of our streets and skies here, these displays, framed as celebration and “freedom,” also serve another grim reminder. We, in the diaspora, are forced to fund our own oppression twice over: first with the bombs dropping on our families abroad, then with that same taxpayer money reverberating back to our doorsteps here. Hovering over our neighborhoods and our children’s heads, and terrorizing our communities instead of feeding, healing, and sustaining them. We must not allow ourselves to grow desensitized to the reality of what our tax dollars could be funding instead of the spread of surveillance, destruction, and devastation. And we must make it clear that we will never mistake the roar of engines overhead for the promise of peace, whether that is abroad or here.
Every dollar spent on one of these performative fighter jet overpasses is a dollar stolen from our communities. The budget is a clear reflection of what the country values, and right now, our budget says we value genocide, destruction, and the theater of war over the substance of peace and the actual betterment of our communities, our country.
The America and Freedom 250 celebrations ask us to reflect on what our nation stands for, a nation started by genocide, carried out by slavery, fueled by exploitation, and exposing how militarism, racism, and fascism are on full display. Why do we spend trillions to destroy and destabilize the world, while spending pennies on investments to make our own communities actually safe?
Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi has declared that the blood of the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, along with that of the commanders, officials, civilians, and children killed alongside him, must be answered through justice.
The senior cleric made the remarks in a message issued on Sunday to coincide with the farewell and funeral ceremonies held for the martyred Leader. He said the enormous public turnout at the ceremonies bore witness to the Iranian nation’s fidelity to the ideals of the Islamic Revolution, its endurance, and its resolve to carry forward the path of the martyrs.
Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi cautioned against any belief that the confrontation has drawn to a close, stressing that the struggle against the front of global arrogance goes on. Sowing despair, weakness, or hopelessness among the public, the officials, or the Armed Forces, he warned, would only advance the aims of the enemy. Patience and steadfastness, he affirmed, remain the conditions for victory.
The Grand Ayatollah stated that those behind the assassination of the martyred Leader, of military commanders, of officials, and of civilians and children, would escape neither divine justice nor rightful punishment. The blood of the martyrs, he said, will never be forgotten, and the Islamic Ummah will pursue justice for them within the framework of Islamic law and established legal principles.
He further called on the country’s officials, the Armed Forces, and its decision-makers to place their trust in God, in the nation’s own capabilities, and in the faith and perseverance of the people, while standing firm against the enemy across the military, diplomatic, and every other arena. Experience has shown, he warned, that any retreat before an aggressor only emboldens it to press on and to widen its ambitions.
He laughs, smiles, when the Palestinian woman in the crowd challenges him.
‘Your technology kills Palestinians.’
‘That’s true, mostly terrorists.’
Speaking at The Hill & Valley Forum 2025, Palantir CEO Alex Karp found himself challenged by a pro-Palestine protester pointing out that his company provides the Israeli army with artificial intelligence technology to ‘strike targets in Gaza’.
Karp defended his position by insisting that the AI is used to kill ‘terrorists’ and that the protester is just another ‘useful idiot for Hamas’ to further it’s ideology in the West.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp called for the Jewish community to step outside its “comfort zone” and look for new strategies to defend itself amid rising antisemitism, during a speech at the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad) annual Lamplighter Awards in Washington.
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Karp, who was honored at the Chabad gala, also framed the battle against antisemitism as part of a broader fight for Western civilization and societies.
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What he said: “Lessons that we’ve learned at Palantir … might be valuable for defending the West, in this particular case a particular tribe of people that are equally associated with the West, the Jewish people,” Karp said.
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“Palantir is a metaphor for working when there’s no playbook, and currently there is no playbook because institutions that have historically effectively defended people who’ve been discriminated against, especially Jewish people, are kind of not working.”
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Karp continued, “If we’re going to have a meaningful chance of fighting, everybody’s going to have to leave their comfort zone a couple times a year. It’s our job and my job to remind people [of] that, especially younger people here.”
“We have to remember that this nation fought wars to prevent bombs from being dropped on its people in this country,” Novella Williams, a community activist, said in the documentary. “And we sit by and allow a little city government to borrow a helicopter and concoct a bomb with high military explosives, C-4, and drop it on our people? What kind of people are we?”
The documentary is a powerful and nuanced exploration of that question, tracing back to the 1970s, when MOVE arose against the backdrop of stark police brutality against Black Philadelphians.
The 1985 bombing and the resulting fire destroyed not just the MOVE compound, but also the homes of frustrated neighbors who had complained about MOVE’s tactics to city officials and begged for their help.
The Philadelphia City Council issued a formal apology for the MOVE bombing in 2020, acknowledging “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity” of the event. No city officials were ever criminally charged.
“The Bombing of West Philly” was written, produced and directed by Martin Smith. The correspondent was Leon Dash. The associate producer was Sue Williams. The executive producer of FRONTLINE was David Fanning.
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FORTY-ONE FUCKING AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL YEARS AGO:
On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department dropped an aerial bomb on a residential row house occupied by the Black liberation and anarcho-primitivist group MOVE, killing 11 members—including six adults and five children. The resulting fire destroyed 61 homes in the West Philadelphia neighborhood.
Adults:
John Africa (Vincent Leaphart), the founder of the organization
Rhonda Africa
Teresa Africa
Frank Africa
Conrad Africa
Raymond Africa (often referred to as CP Africa) [1, 2]
Only two individuals inside the house managed to escape the burning compound alive: [1, 2]
Ramona Africa, a 30-year-old adult member
Michael Ward (Birdie Africa), a 13-year-old child [1, 2]
The bones of Black children who died in 1985 after their home was bombed by Philadelphia police in a confrontation with the Black liberation group which was raising them are being used as a “case study” in an online forensic anthropology course presented by an Ivy League professor.
It has emerged that the physical remains of one, or possibly two, of the children who were killed in the aerial bombing of the Move organization in May 1985 have been guarded over the past 36 years in the anthropological collections of the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.
The institutions have held on to the heavily burned fragments, and since 2019 have been deploying them for teaching purposes without the permission of the deceased’s living parents.
To the astonishment and dismay of present-day Move members, some of the bones are being deployed as artifacts in an online course presented in the name of Princeton and hosted by the online study platform Coursera. Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology focuses on “lost personhood” – cases where an individual cannot be identified due to the decomposed condition of their remains.
It uses as its main “case study” the events of May 1985, producing as prime evidence a set of bones belonging to a girl in her teens retrieved from the ashes of the Move house at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philadelphia.
The professor is holding the bones of a 14-year-old girl whose mother is still alive and grieving Michael Africa Jr
The bones of Black children who died in 1985 after their home was bombed by Philadelphia police in a confrontation with the Black liberation group which was raising them are being used as a “case study” in an online forensic anthropology course presented by an Ivy League professor.
It has emerged that the physical remains of one, or possibly two, of the children who were killed in the aerial bombing of the Move organization in May 1985 have been guarded over the past 36 years in the anthropological collections of the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.
The institutions have held on to the heavily burned fragments, and since 2019 have been deploying them for teaching purposes without the permission of the deceased’s living parents.
To the astonishment and dismay of present-day Move members, some of the bones are being deployed as artifacts in an online course presented in the name of Princeton and hosted by the online study platform Coursera. Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology focuses on “lost personhood” – cases where an individual cannot be identified due to the decomposed condition of their remains.
It uses as its main “case study” the events of May 1985, producing as prime evidence a set of bones belonging to a girl in her teens retrieved from the ashes of the Move house at 6221 Osage Avenue in Philadelphia.
The professor is holding the bones of a 14-year-old girl whose mother is still alive and grieving
Michael Africa Jr
The revelation comes just days before Philadelphia stages its first official day of remembrance over the 1985 bombing, following a formal apology issued by the city council last year.
The disclosure, first reported by the local news outlet Billy Penn, also lands in the middle of a fevered debate over academia’s handling of African American remains that has been rocket-charged by the nationwide racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis last year by a police officer.
The revelation comes just days before Philadelphia stages its first official day of remembrance over the 1985 bombing, following a formal apology issued by the city council last year.
The disclosure, first reported by the local news outlet Billy Penn, also lands in the middle of a fevered debate over academia’s handling of African American remains that has been rocket-charged by the nationwide racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis last year by a police officer.
The misuse of Black remains for scientific purposes has a long history in America. In 1989, construction workers in Augusta, Georgia, discovered almost 10,000 individual human bones under the former premises of the Medical College of Georgia.
The fragments came from corpses that were sold to the college by grave robbers and taken from Augusta’s cemetery for impoverished African Americans. The college used them in medical training and dissections.
Samuel Redman, a historian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, said the discovery of the Move bones was all the more disturbing given how recently the deaths occurred.
“There are people alive who are affected by this, not just in an emotional way but in a trauma-inducing way that could be harmful. The notion of ‘do no harm’ should be part and parcel of our research and teaching – we need to wrestle with this problem much more completely.”
And say what?
Israeli military officials have said there are no restrictions on bombing homes in Gaza, days after a prominent right-wing TV channel claimed that the country’s military advocate general prevented an air strike on a building – where four soldiers later died – due to the risk of killing Palestinian civilians.
On 6 June, four Israeli soldiers died after the building they entered in Khan Younis collapsed due to an explosive device.
The Israeli army is still probing the cause of the blast and has yet to determine whether the device was a booby-trap set up by Hamas or if it was unexploded Israeli ordinance.
But within hours of the deaths, Israel’s Channel 14, a right-wing network favoured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claimedthat Israel’s military advocate general bore responsibility for the deaths.
The channel, which has repeatedly portrayed Palestinians in Gaza as “animals” who must be “exterminated”, reported that the army had sent the soldiers into the building rather than target it with an air strike because Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi had changed army protocol to prohibit striking the structure.
In its televised report, Channel 14’s Noam Amir spoke with a senior Israeli officer who claimed that the building had been designated as a Hamas compound but Tomer-Yerushalmi prevented the country’s air force from bombing the structure due to the risk of “collateral damage”.
The Israeli army tends to use the term “collateral damage” when referring to Palestinian civilians who are killed by Israeli forces for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“We knew the infrastructure, we knew who was there, and we didn’t strike, each time for a different reason – high collateral damage,” the officer said.
‘They [Israeli soldiers] are blowing up Gaza, house by house, compound by compound, without any interference’- Ben Caspit, senior Israeli journalist
Following the report, the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, launched a scathing attack on Channel 14, saying he rejected the “false, repeated, and baseless attacks regarding the conduct of the military advocate general.”
Former Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef previously stated that the actions of the Assad regime in Syria constituted a genocide, asserting a moral obligation to intervene. Conversely, prominent Israeli rabbis and international religious figures, such as the UK’s Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis, have strongly rejected accusations that Israel’s military actions in Gaza constitute genocide, calling such claims a “moral inversion” and a misappropriation of the term.
The HEAD of the SNAKE, that is, HEAD of the JEWS.
“The destructive and manufactured hyperbole, which reaches its nadir with the accusation of genocide, can only harm the cause of peace.”
Sir Ephraim Mirvis said the use of the term was a “moral inversion, which undermines the memory of the worst crimes in human history” and was designed to “tear open the still gaping wound of the Holocaust”.
MARRIAGE: Fucking prion, Judaism: Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, officially converted to Judaism in 2022. The couple, who have three daughters, raise their children with Jewish traditions and regularly observe Shabbat.
Arabella Rose Kushner (Born 2011) – Celebrated her Bat Mitzvah in June 2023.
Joseph Frederick Kushner (Born 2013)
Theodore James Kushner (Born 2016)
The family is openly observant, eats a kosher diet, and celebrates Jewish holidays. [1]
Joe Biden’s Jewish Grandkids
While Joe Biden is a lifelong Roman Catholic, all three of his adult children married Jewish partners. The Jewish status of his grandchildren depends on whether you look at traditional halachic law (matrilineal descent) or Reform/interfaith definitions.
Those of you who follow my comedy know that my wife is a Black woman who converted to Judaism. What you also know is that we have a young son who is Biracial and Jewish. As a result, I can tell you that Black-Jewish relations in our family are at an all-time high.
But, we are not an anomaly. Since time immemorial, there has been a connection, a bond, between Black and Jewish people. Perhaps it’s our respective histories of oppression. Perhaps it’s because of our mothers, who are overbearing, intrusive and force us to eat. Perhaps it’s because without us, there would be no music industry. Whatever the reason, the simple fact is that there is a bond between Blacks and Jews.
Doug Emhoff has been highly active in celebrating Jewish traditions and leading efforts against antisemitism. Kamala Harris herself has hosted multiple Jewish holiday gatherings—such as Passover Seders and Hanukkah celebrations—at the Vice President’s residence to honor her husband’s background.
In March 2017, she spoke at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference,
“Let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations.”
In 2018, she spoke at the AIPAC conference once more, but this time in an off-the-record speech. Then she boosted,
“As a child, I never sold Girl Scout cookies, I went around with a (Jewish National Fund) JNFUSA box collecting funds to plant trees in Israel.”
Hold onto your children and vomit bags!
The first major event likely to shape the 2028 Democratic field will occur this summer when former vice-president Kamala Harris decides whether to run for governor of California in 2026. If she does, she has privately conceded that that probably rules out a third presidential run in 2028. If she doesn’t, then the door could remain open for 2028. Her viability as a refurbished presidential candidate is a very open question. She is, after all, a two-time loser in a party terrified of losing any more elections to the MAGA Republicans. On the other hand, she is arguably not to blame for 2024 and for a moment there seemed to bring hope and even joy to her party before the disappointing outcome. One thing is for sure: Unless she rules out running in 2028, her name will appear at or very near the top of polls thanks to her exceptional name ID, particularly compared to her many less-than-famous rivals. That she does not do nearly so well in prediction markets shows skepticism about the willingness of Democrats to conduct a do-over.
Gavin Newsom: Ever eager
Pete Buttigieg: The brainy charmer
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Bernie’s heir apparent
Cory Booker: Very durable and now a little more famous
Josh Shapiro: The ultracentrist
Andy Beshear: The red-state dark horse
J.B. Pritzker: The deepest pocket
Wes Moore: The young man in a hurry
Ro Khanna: AOC’s backup
Ruben Gallego: The mainstream-friendly progressive
Gretchen Whitmer: The somewhat-faded star
From that Criminal Enterprise, AIPAC . . . . Quoting: AIPAC applauds the House of Representatives for passing critical pro-Israel provisions, including $3.3 billion in security assistance to Israel, in the Fiscal Year 2026 National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act.
The pro-Israel provisions in this bill further reinforce the bipartisan and ironclad support for the U.S.-Israel partnership in Congress. These resources help ensure that our ally can confront shared strategic threats and that America has a strong and capable ally in the heart of the Middle East. The vital security funding in this bill strengthens Israel while bolstering the U.S. economy and creating jobs here at home.
In addition to the $3.3 billion in security assistance, the bill also includes:
A complete ban on funding to UNRWA, the Hamas-affiliated U.N. agency in Gaza whose members participated in the October 7th massacre.
A prohibition on funds to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) against Israel, a clear demonstration of American opposition to these international organizations that abuse their platforms to demonize the Jewish state and also threaten American troops.
$37.5 million for the Nita Lowey Middle East Partnership for Peace Act funding (MEPPA), a program designed to foster economic cooperation and people-to-people peacebuilding in the region.
$3 million for U.S.-Israel international development cooperation.
We encourage the Senate to quickly pass this legislation.
We appreciate the efforts of many Republican and Democratic members who worked to include key pro-Israel provisions in the bill. In particular, we thank the leadership of House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole and Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro, and National Security and Department of State Subcommittee Chairman Mario Diaz-Balart and Ranking Member Lois Frankel. We also appreciate the work of their colleagues in the Senate, including Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins and Vice Chair Patty Murray, and State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chairman Lindsey Graham and Ranking Member Brian Schatz.
Oh shit, Tucker Carlson’s party. Triple the vomit bags.
Host of The Dig podcast, Daniel Denvir, joins Bad Faith to discuss the DSA sweep and whether the new elected socialist candidates might be willing to act as a block to change the Democratic Party before the Democratic Party changes them. Is DSA wrong to refuse to act as a party, or to support candidates running outside of the Democratic Party, like Andre Easton? What is the strategy there? And if the DSA refuses to take party building seriously, will the Tucker Carlson right be first to harness imperialist, working-class energy to achieve a third party break from the duopoly? What happens to the left then?
Twelve minutes…..Gerald Horne.
By Gerald Horne: Joseph J. Ellis is one of the most celebrated historians in the nation. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and once the holder of an endowed chair at Mount Holyoke, he was hailed by The Washington Post as the “most widely read scholar of the Revolutionary period and…probably the most influential as well.” His best-selling books on Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other founders have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and have been instrumental in forging a remarkable consensus, from left to right, that sees July 4, 1776, as a sacred date and a great leap forward for all of humanity.
Books in review — The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
by Joseph J. Ellis
But in his latest book, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of theAmerican Founding, Ellis reconsiders the essence of his oeuvre and this consensus, which is akin to the pope reconsidering Catholicism. Focusing “on two unquestionably horrific tragedies the founders oversaw”—the “failure to end slavery, and the failure to avoid Indian removal”—Ellis seeks to understand how and why they happened. “Next to the failure to end slavery,” he writes, the “inability to reach a just accommodation with the Native Americans was the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation.” Charting not only the history of the republic’s founders but also the history that preceded and followed them, he outlines what he terms the “Great Silence”: “For more than four centuries, the most important voices of Western civilization remained mute as a highly organized program of unspeakable barbarity with genocidal implications flourished throughout Europe. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Erasmus, Locke, and all the Catholic popes regarded slavery and the slave trade as acceptable features of European society.”
Why has Ellis chosen at this late date to break from the pack of rationalizers and justifiers? The antics of the 47th US president and his avid followers have clearly left him shaken, but more than that: They point to a pattern, “an inherently paradoxical pattern,” that “racism surges only after some semblance of racial equality becomes foreseeable,” which Ellis now believes runs throughout this nation’s history. It began, he notes, “during the American founding,” and “we are currently living through its most recent manifestation in the movement to ‘Make America Great Again.’”
Ellis does not expand on this explosive point, but he concedes that the late Edmund Morgan, one of his mentors, got it right, particularly in his trailblazing American Slavery, AmericanFreedom, which argues that these polar opposites were there from the outset. Much like Macbeth and Banquo’s ghost, Ellis concedes, the nation cannot evade the tragedy preordained at its founding.
To begin his story, Ellis starts with the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, which accelerated as the settlers landed on these shores and was “growing exponentially” in the prelude to 1776. He observes cogently that “creating a [multiracial] society” was not as pressing a concern in the imperial capitals as it was here. Abolition would have created such a nation, and this was inconceivable for most of the founders, he suggests. Likewise, he presents the expropriation of the Indigenous as being virtually inevitable, given the pressure from below of land-hungry settlers.
Throughout his account, Ellis continually reminds us that without a compromise favoring the enslavers, the republic would not have materialized—to which I say: So what? This could have meant another Canada, a pleasing alternative to the war-driven status quo. He also explores the central paradox found in the fact that the republic depended on the labor of enslaved workers, one that Morgan had put at the center of his own work—namely that, as Ellis writes, “the presence of an enslaved black population actually enhanced the commitment to freedom by the white population of Virginia…. Less prominent Virginians were spared the task of performing manual labor, since enslaved blacks filled that role, thereby allowing all white Virginians to unite racially instead of being divided into upper and lower classes, as was the case in England and throughout Europe.”
A corrupt bargain indeed: a republic born out of enslaving many so that some could profit and be free. Naturally, such a society would engender enormous instability. Enslavers, and those who admired them, Ellis writes, “were sitting atop an active volcano on the verge of eruption…especially in the Tidewater [Virginia] counties, where Blacks outnumbered Whites three to one.”
Virginia was the California of the founding, the largest and most prosperous settlement, and it produced a disproportionate number of presidents in the antebellum era. Yet as a place where enslaved Africans tended to reside, it was simultaneously “the soft underbelly of the American resistance” to London’s rule. Being the richest and, at the same time, the most insecure of the 13 states fomented unsteadiness that ultimately culminated in civil war.
This was especially the case, Ellis writes, when Virginia’s last colonial governor, Lord Dunmore, created the “Ethiopian Regiment, numerous and armed,” which began “marching toward isolated plantations with revenge in their hearts. Any Virginia planter who harbored doubts about the wisdom of war with Great Britain quickly discovered a powerful reason to abandon those doubts.”
Simultaneously, the British Empire was becoming ever more dependent on Black labor. As Ellis writes, “the Caribbean, most especially Jamaica…provided more revenue to the empire than all the American colonies put together.” Seeking to keep a lid on Ireland, and increasingly on India as well, the British felt compelled to enlist more Black troops, which was not endearing to the settlers.
In sum, the republic was triggered into being in no small measure to quash Black resistance. As Ellis avers, “the surprising size and scale of Dunmore’s movement terrified the planter class…. The most self-evident truth of all was white supremacy.” Or to put it another way, class collaboration has been the “most self-evident truth,” still the unmentionable today in divining the country’s elections. And the unpaid sector of the working class—the enslaved, and then their descendants—have had difficulty in “integrating” into this framework, not least because it was sparked into being precisely to repress them.
“Any frontal assault on slavery,” Ellis writes, “put at risk the political unity necessary to win the war [and] to assure southern support for a nation-sized republic…. Consider the alternative scenario provided by the French and Russian revolutions, where justice imposed led to justice destroyed.” But didn’t 1776 merely delay the reckoning that arrived in 1861, which led not only to hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed in a bloody civil war but to countless Indigenous lives destroyed thereafter?
Although Ellis devotes much more time to enslavement than to Indigenous dispossession, some of this book’s most valuable insights emerge when he discusses the latter.
“Indian removal,” Ellis writes, “was the inevitable consequence of unbridled democracy in action.” While many in this nation might prefer to think otherwise, the foundations of popular government rested on the unraveling of Indigenous self-rule. The republic rests on the brutal fact that “ordinary American citizens seeking a better life and a parcel of land” colonized a continent with people already living on it. If US radicals and liberals had done a better job over the centuries in explaining this aspect of the nation’s history, perhaps Ellis would have been able to spend less time focused on it and to instead explore some of its subtleties—such as how settler colonialism in North America was not just an elite project, but one that involved “class collaboration”—unity across class lines by the interlopers—as well as a construction of whiteness that included even many born outside of Europe, particularly if they were Christian.
But to his credit, Ellis is determined to fill in many of the elisions in North American history that exist today. For example, he points out that George Washington was “in current currency…a multimillionaire” as well as a substantial landowner. A goodly number of the sainted founders were similarly endowed, thanks to Indigenous dispossession.
Ellis is also dismissive of the increasingly popular “antislavery interpretation of the Constitution as Abraham Lincoln viewed it. Lincoln, of course, had some powerful political reasons to downplay the proslavery side,” he observes in one of his endnotes, “which, as I see it, was shaped by powerful political reasons to defer the slavery question until the infant American republic had outgrown its infancy.” Instead, he focuses on the Constitution’s “fugitive slave clause,” which “explicitly endorsed slavery” and “required all the states to publicly acknowledge the abiding existence of slavery.”
Unlike today’s judicial “originalists,” who purport to ascertain the original understanding of the Constitution, and the overly confident historians who perform a similar role, Ellis stresses our inadequate surviving record of the Constitution’s creation. “We know very little about the covert deliberations,” he observes, “the arguments, concessions and compromises that generated and shaped those words.”
Iconfess to being torn while reading Ellis’s account. On the one hand, when a scholar of his eminence begins to raise searching questions about such a foundational matter, one is tempted to stand and cheer. On the other hand, I wish Ellis had gone further in this slim volume, particularly since the heroic Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her estimable 1619 Project, had already played a vanguard role in opening up these vistas by suggesting that a revolt led by enslavers may have had something to do with preserving slavery.
One such area where I wish Ellis had gone further is in resurrecting the other side of his tale: those Black writers, past and present, who sought to raise searching questions about the republic’s roots. It’s a subject recently explored in Black Writers of the Founding Era, a volume edited by James G. Basker; and it’s also at the center of the film Belle, directed by the British Ghanaian auteur Amma Asante and starring the British South African actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw, which tells the backstory of the landmark “Somerset’s Case” of 1772, which blocked the forcible removal from England of an enslaved African to return him to bondage in Virginia. The role of Black critics of slavery is also portrayed in the Canadian–South African–BET coproduced docudrama The Book of Negroes, which features a classic scene in which the heroine confronts none other than George Washington himself as he is basking in victory in Manhattan.
In general, a deeper appreciation of Black studies and the scholarship it has produced would have aided The Great Contradiction immeasurably. More scrutiny of this now-besieged field would have helped Ellis and his readers understand why Black people “fled to [Benedict] Arnold’s army by the thousands,” or why—by his counting—“twice as many” of this beleaguered minority served under the British Union Jack than with George Washington’s forces. This tendency contributed to a significant reversal by Washington, who at first had “issued an order ‘to reject all slaves and to reject Negroes altogether’” and then concurred that the independence forces should accept them.
In The Great Contradiction, Ellis seems to be pessimistic about what the future holds as well. “In or about 2045, when demographers predict that the white population of the United States will become a statistical minority,” we will see yet another backlash, he writes, this time more pernicious.
Given the alarm bells sounded by the otherwise sober Ellis, one wonders if it might be time for liberals to revise many of their presuppositions—not only those that relate to the myths of the country’s founding, but also those that concern US power. For example, what Ellis condemns as “white supremacy”—and what I elaborate as “class collaboration”—requires analysts to view “Trumpism” not as aberrational but as endemic. If we are not surprised by the rightward profile of settlers in the West Bank or their comrades in today’s South Africa, then why should we be surprised by the performance of their historical counterparts, and their descendants, in this republic?
To his credit, by having the courage and wisdom to rethink his life’s work, Ellis has provided a grand service for us all.
Also the Beyond Israelism podcast is another great one to check out. I’m sure you are aware Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, and Gabor Mate are some of the greatest advocates for Palestinian freedom and are Jewish.
I hope you can see that ranting your resume and backing up your antisemitism is not a good look. It sounds like you’ve done some great work in your life so don’t let a harmful false equivalence tarnish that.
There you go, not a good look, your empty signifier, “antisemitism.”
Blumenthal, Halper, Pappe, Finkelstein, the Mates . . . Miko Peled speaks in support of the motion that This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide
Yikes. WHich anti-semitism will Fisher abide by?
Numerous U.S. states and the federal government have recently passed legislation combating antisemitism, primarily by adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism for civil rights enforcement and educational standards.
Key recent legislative actions include
Federal Action: The Antisemitism Awareness Act has advanced in Congress, directing the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to utilize the IHRA definition when investigating discrimination complaints in federally funded programs.
Missouri (April 2026): Governor Mike Kehoe signed HB 2061, making Missouri the 18th U.S. state to codify the IHRA definition into K-12 and higher education.
California (October 2025): Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 715 and SB 48, which establish new Offices of Civil Rights and Antisemitism Prevention Coordinators to protect K-12 schools.
Oklahoma (May 2025): The state legislature passed bills SB 942 and SB 991, mandating that public schools and colleges integrate the IHRA definition into their conduct codes.
Ohio (December 2024): The Senate passed SB 297, expanding ethnic intimidation and violence laws while adopting the IHRA definition to protect Jewish students on campuses.
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Thanks for nothing. Hmm, ADL?
A new report from the Anti-Defamation League shows California, with over 1 million Jewish residents, is the top state fighting antisemitism. Under Governor Newsom’s leadership, the state launched the Golden State Plan to Counter Antisemitism — a first-of-its-kind, statewide framework to combat antisemitism through education, prevention, security, and community partnership.
Israel has ZERO right to exist, you know that, and that’s antisemitism a la U$A.
Peled, along with various international activists and several sovereign nations, argues that Israel’s establishment in 1948 resulted in the unjust expulsion of Palestinians. From this viewpoint, a state built upon ethnic or religious supremacy is fundamentally illegitimate and must be transformed into a universal democracy.
And so, anti-Zionism? Antisemitic…
Federal and state governments have not made anti-Zionism illegal YET, but they have passed laws and resolutions penalizing actions associated with it. Over 35 states have “anti-BDS” laws that prohibit state contracts and public investments in companies that boycott Israel. Federally, the U.S. House passed resolutions condemning anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism and advanced legislation to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism for civil rights enforcement.
Oh, shit, those false equivalences . . . .
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THIS LONG ASS RANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s “impossible” to view the last decade of events as anything but “divine providence,” placing Donald Trump in the presidency during America’s 250th anniversary year.
Make sure the anti-Zionism movement is a truly antisemitic movement that refers to the bad guys as “the Jews” and that NEVER tells the truth, the KEY FACT, about Zionism. I discuss in my article here what this leads to. Note that the Nazis channeled people’s anger at the oppression of working class people by the rich into an antisemitism, non-class, framework in which the enemy was “the Jews.” The result? The billionaire class in Germany is still in power and working class Germans are still oppressed. The new anti-Israel voices, such as that of Tucker Carlson, are keeping the KEY FACT about Zionism, its pro-billionaire and anti-Jewish-working-class purpose, a secret, which provides a green light for overt antisemites to control the new anti-Israel discourse, as I discuss here and here. Remember, if the billionaire class remains in power then all working class people will continue to be oppressed, including the Palestinians whose oppression is what the anti-Zionism movement is trying to end, right? The Israeli billionaire class cares much more about staying in power than preserving the Zionist ethnic cleansing project, just as the South African billionaire ruling class cared much more about staying in power than it did about preserving the system of apartheid. This explains why the ultra-pro-apartheid South African president deKlerk led the movement to abolish apartheid, knowing that this was the way to keep the billionaire class in power and maintain the horrible oppression of the working class.
Sure, that’s the ticket: billionaires in Palestine? Fuck, bloody dirty fools, and the kibbutz freaks? Poor as mules coming to Palestine to destroy people for their own bloody dirty working class roots. Billionaires my ass.
“Indian removal,” Ellis writes, “was the inevitable consequence of unbridled democracy in action.” While many in this nation might prefer to think otherwise, the foundations of popular government rested on the unraveling of Indigenous self-rule. The republic rests on the brutal fact that “ordinary American citizens seeking a better life and a parcel of land” colonized a continent with people already living on it. If US radicals and liberals had done a better job over the centuries in explaining this aspect of the nation’s history, perhaps Ellis would have been able to spend less time focused on it and to instead explore some of its subtleties—such as how settler colonialism in North America was not just an elite project, but one that involved “class collaboration”—unity across class lines by the interlopers—as well as a construction of whiteness that included even many born outside of Europe, particularly if they were Christian. — Banquo’s Ghost, The contradictions of the American Revolution. Gerald Horne
What do historical records, ancient texts, archaeology, and DNA research actually tell us about Palestinians?
In this episode of The Deep Dive, Ahmed Alnaouq is joined by historian and bestselling author William Dalrymple to explore the deep history of the Palestinian people, which he argues have too often been erased from mainstream narratives and the documented history of Palestine.
Together, they discuss how history is taught in Britain, the origins of the name Palestine, the continuity of the people who have lived on the land for thousands of years, and why understanding the past is essential to understanding the present.
Oh, that fucking dirty Jew, I know, a billionaire, Jew, for sure, but a JEW who whipped his Talmud to get his Chinese wife to convert before insemination:
Mark Zuckerberg takes business calls on a jet ski wearing his $800 Meta glasses—and insists ‘the other person could not tell’.
The couple embraces Judaism in their household by frequently hosting weekly Shabbat dinners, celebrating Jewish holidays like Hanukkah, and having Zuckerberg recite Jewish bedtime prayers with their daughters. Additionally, Chan formally converted to Judaism prior to the birth of their youngest daughter.
The LATIN AMERICANS are screwed AGAIN: Israeli AI Startup Eyes Expansion in Trump-Aligned Latin America.
Wisconsin residents sue Microsoft over noise caused by new data center — Residents have also complained the area has become a ‘dust bowl’ due to construction
Residents living near Microsoft’s Fairwater data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, are suing the company over the facility’s alleged noise pollution.
The class-action lawsuit was filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Three residents of Sturtevant — a village approximately 30 miles south of Milwaukee close to the data center—are named as plaintiffs.
“Through its operation and maintenance of the Data Center, Defendant has emitted, and continues to emit, unreasonable and excessive noise onto Plaintiffs’ properties, thereby causing property damages through private nuisance and negligence,” the lawsuit states.
Jews:
The bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act, designed to shield individuals from soaring electricity prices amid the datacenter boom, would fail to meaningfully protect the public from the centers’ true costs, consumer advocates warn.
The bill, backed by some in big tech such as Microsoft, moved through a House subcommittee in mid-June, and a vote in full committee scheduled for 1 July was delayed. Its measures are largely voluntary, meaning the state utility commissions that set electric rates can ignore the law altogether.
The legislative package also includes benefits for big tech that would speed datacenter construction, prioritize the centers’ connection to the electric grid and open new loopholes that would allow companies to claim they are paying for their own power, said Jim Walsh, policy director with Food and Water Watch, which opposes the package.
Nazis in bed with each other: Germany expands missile defense network with second Israeli Arrow 3 site
The Arrow 3, one of Israel’s most advanced air defense systems, is capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at altitudes of over 100 km. and with a reported range of up to 2,400 km.
Soaring demand for rocket motors used to power missiles and other weapons has spurred new thinking about supply chains. Seeking big returns, Silicon Valley-style startups are now taking on defense companies that have long dominated the industry, pulled into the competition by a need for production speed, high volume and lower costs, according to 10 industry executives, experts and U.S officials interviewed by Reuters.
And here we are, one of a million stories how the focus on Jews will kill us all:
HOOD RIVER COUNTY, Ore. (KPTV) – Governor Tina Kotek signed a letter Thursday to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture requesting a disaster designation for pear growers in Hood River and Wasco counties, as well as contiguous counties affected by severe crop losses in 2025.
The losses are estimated at $40 million to $45 million, with grower revenue reduced by roughly 50%.
Growers attributed the damage to the worst pear psylla infestation reported in nearly half a century. Pear psylla is a sap-sucking insect that in 2025 coated trees and fruit in honeydew, leading to black sooty mold and leaving many pears unmarketable.
In the high desert of Central Oregon, the Deschutes River is a lifeline for farmers and landowners — but a century-old water law entitles just a few thousand people to more than half of its volume.
Chris Casad awakens each day before dawn on the Central Oregon property he bought nine years ago, the farm where he once grew tons of potatoes before water shortages forced him to fallow fields and take a job feeding someone else’s cattle on someone else’s land.
At 38, he’s got tractors older than he is. His two kids are under 5. His wife, Cate, has two jobs. They’re staring down a pile of debt from their 85 acres and its unending supply of things in the process of breaking.
The crisis for their farm started in drought — three summers during which starving grasshoppers descended on the area’s remaining crops, tepid reservoirs bloomed with toxic algae, nearly 1,000 Oregon wells went dry and the springs feeding the Deschutes River shriveled to their lowest recorded flow.
But the death knell for Casad’s crops was Oregon’s century-old law, which protects some water users at the expense of others.
The couple saw the state cut their community’s share of irrigation water from the Deschutes in the name of that law. Farmers in Jefferson County, where they live, stopped cultivating a third of the county’s irrigated land. “There were a number of suicides, let alone people who closed up shop, older farmers just not wanting to waste their life’s worth of work and their savings on just trying to keep it going,” Casad said.
Casad grew up in Bend, the region’s biggest city, where he watched developers slice farmland into subdivisions. The lumber mill became a shopping mall anchored by an REI. An economy once dependent on timber and agriculture turned instead toward tourism and recreation.
Canals from the Deschutes still wind through Bend’s neighborhoods of single-family homes, and then to the estates, farms, ranches and destination resorts on the city’s outskirts. Among those sits a horse ranch owned by Phil and Penelope Knight of Nike fame, one of the wealthiest families in the world and, our analysis found, one of the largest consumers of COID water. The ranch raises “high-end” horses and sells hay, its website shows. A manager declined to comment on how it manages water.
Another long, gated driveway leads to an 80-acre property that was once dry scrubland. Cinematographer Byron Garth bought water rights from another landowner through COID a decade ago to irrigate part of the property.
The water helped him transform a rocky hillside into an “exclusive compound paradise,” as an auction listing last year put it, with a 6,300-square-foot mansion with radiant heated floors, three guest houses, a 10,000-square-foot garage and a swimming pool — all surrounded by a carpet of soft green grass.
For a few years, Garth used his water rights to grow hay for about 15 alpacas and goats, but in the end, he said, “it was cheaper to just mow it.” Garth said he did have reservations about using so much water during the drought, but he reasoned that somebody had to use it.
“For the aesthetic value,” realtor Jen Bowen said about the grass last year, as she gave OPB a tour of the estate shortly before Garth sold it for $4.8 million.
“I think most of us would agree — it’s nicer to look out over a lush pasture than it is the high desertscape,” Bowen said.
CEO of The Historic Trust, Temple Lentz, left, and Anne McEnerny-Ogle, mayor of Vancouver, center, watch Duana Ricks, a Colville-Lakes tribal member give a blessing during the America 250 celebration at Fort Vancouver in Vancouver, Wash. on July 3, 2026.
Fort Vancouver celebrates ‘complex and inspired’ history of America
By Joni Auden Land (OPB) and Erik Neumann (OPB)
July 3, 2026 6 a.m. Updated: July 3, 2026 4:13 p.m.
From parades to rodeos, to commemorative products and virtual get-togethers, there are plenty of options in Oregon and Southwest Washington to celebrate America’s semiquincentennial.
Many notable Jewish actors, musicians, and screenwriters contributed to the 1965 biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told. The Jewish talent involved included:
Joseph Schildkraut: Played the Jewish Pharisee Nicodemus. This was the final film appearance of his legendary career.
Martin Landau: Played the Jewish High Priest Caiaphas.
Sal Mineo: Portrayed a follower named Uriah.
Shelley Winters: Made a cameo appearance.
Alfred Newman: Served as the film’s acclaimed composer, writing the original musical score.
Carl Sandburg: The celebrated Jewish poet and Pulitzer Prize winner contributed uncredited work to the film’s script during its lengthy development.
How did Goy Soylent Green NRA Bud Heston get the Jew PART?
ESCAPE
D. H. Lawrence
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.
“All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness. On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey. Like Hawthorne being such a blue-eyed darling, in life, and Longfellow and the rest such sucking doves… Serpents they were. Look at the inner meaning of their art and see what demons they were. You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness.”
and
“We are the masterless.” That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It’s a Hen-Eagle.
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” D.H. Lawrence
Albania’s protest movement matters far beyond the Balkans. What began as opposition to a luxury development on Albania’s southern coast has evolved into something much larger. For many Albanians, the controversy surrounding Jared Kushner’s proposed resort projects is no longer simply about tourism or foreign investment. It has become a test of sovereignty, democratic accountability, and the relationship between political power and global capital.
+—+
“May God grant them [the Palestinians] victory, may God have mercy on their martyrs.
“I’m saying to them: I’m dedicating this victory to the Egyptian people and Palestinian people, those kind and honourable people.”
No fan of organized pro sports, but . . . . .. .
The demonstrations have continued for more than a month—with large rallies, clashes, and diaspora mobilization—making them one of the most sustained challenges to Rama’s government in recent years. Their persistence suggests that a significant segment of Albanian society views the issue not merely as a dispute over land but as part of a broader pattern of governance characterized by insufficient transparency, concentrated political power, and growing public distrust.
The controversy also illustrates how geopolitics increasingly operates through investment rather than traditional diplomacy. Major international business figures, sovereign wealth funds, investment firms, and politically connected families now play an increasingly visible role in shaping strategic sectors and valuable real estate across smaller states.
Soros Syphilis! The writer just won’t say the obvious — the Jew Pestilence is smearing their Feces in His Country!
Albania has become one example of this broader phenomenon. The country’s geographic position, NATO membership, EU accession ambitions, and valuable Adriatic and Ionian coastline make it attractive to international investors as well as politically significant partners.
Prime Minister Edi Rama has cultivated relationships with influential international political and business figures over many years. Lindsey Graham, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, are just a few of them.
The Israeli government has announced it is sending a “highly specialized” team to Venezuela to help locate missing children after the earthquake. They’re selling it as humanitarian assistance. But anyone who has followed Israel’s long, documented history of protecting accused child predators knows exactly why this move is setting off alarms.
For decades, Israel has functioned as a safe haven for individuals accused of child rape, child trafficking, and serial abuse in other countries — especially the United States. It’s a pattern so consistent that victims’ advocates openly describe Israel as the place pedophiles run to when they get caught.
These are court cases, extradition battles, investigative reports, and public scandals.
The Extradition Loophole That Protects Child Rapists
Israel’s Law of Return allows anyone with Jewish ancestry to obtain citizenship quickly. Once they do, extradition becomes a long, messy, often unsuccessful process. Accused child rapists have used this loophole for decades.
Some of the most documented cases:
Malka Leifer — accused of sexually abusing multiple minors in Australia. She fled to Israel and lived freely for years while Israeli officials stalled her extradition. The case became an international scandal because it exposed how easily accused predators could avoid accountability.
Yona Weinberg — a convicted sex offender from New York who moved to Israel and continued living openly. U.S. authorities warned Israeli officials. Nothing happened.
Rabbi Mordechai Elon — a high‑profile religious figure accused of sexually abusing minors. The case was dragged out for years, with community leaders protecting him.
These cases are not isolated. They form a systemic pattern: Israel repeatedly shelters individuals accused of abusing children abroad.
The fucking WORLD is Jewish Upside Down Pedophile CAKE:
Venezuela is in chaos. Tens of thousands of children are missing. Families are digging through rubble with their bare hands. Communication is broken. Oversight is nonexistent. Children are displaced, separated, injured, or simply gone.
It is the exact environment where vulnerable kids can disappear without a trace.
And into that environment walks a foreign government with:
a documented record of sheltering accused child rapists
a history of blocking extraditions
political networks tied to Epstein
high‑profile abuse scandals inside its own borders
legal loopholes that protect offenders
institutions that repeatedly fail victims
Israeli officials describe their deployment as “a highly trained and professional team.”
Highly trained at what?
Highly trained at shielding predators?
Highly trained at ignoring victims?
Highly trained at letting offenders slip through legal cracks?
Highly trained at protecting the powerful while children suffer?
Highly trained at trafficking children?
Highly trained at child rape and torture?
The sacred flag from the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza (AS) was placed over the coffin of the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, during funeral ceremonies in Iran.
Tehran, IRNA – The Martyrs and Veterans Affairs Foundation says that the funeral procession for Martyr Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei will be held over multiple days across Iran, drawing millions of mourners in the massive historic national event.
Trump and his Jewish HANDLERS — MURDERERS.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in Israeli attacks, with U.S. support, on Saturday. He was 86 years old.
His death was confirmed by President Trump, who joined Israeli leaders in calling for the overthrow of Khamenei’s authoritarian regime as the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes across Iran. The Israeli military said its forces killed Khamenei. The Iranian government confirmed the supreme leader’s death and announced 40 days of mourning.
During his 36-year rule, Khamenei was unwavering in his steadfast antipathy to the U.S. and Israel and to any efforts to reform and bring Iran into the 21st century.
Last week, the event was shut down twice due to inclement weather, with one rainy evening even canceling the rest of the day’s activities, including a performance by “Ice Ice Baby” singer Vanilla Ice, last Friday.
Excessive heat coupled with a power outage also caused food vendors’ ice cream to melt on June 25.
These cunts, typical fucking MAGA cunts. Evil grandparents ‘R Us.
Fucking Cunt of a County Fair United Snakes of AmeriKKKa:
“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” Trump said during a speech on Friday. “It is the greatest threat to our country”.
The US is celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence on Saturday against a backdrop of political polarisation and a brutal heatwave that’s sweeping across parts of the nation.
Roy Cohn Condemned the Rosenbergs as Soviet Spies. Their Granddaughter Just Made a Film About Him.
Ivy Meeropol, the director of Bully. Coward. Victim., discusses the life of the Trump mentor who remains one of America’s most infamous villains.
[Robert and Michael Rosenberg in 1953.]
JEWS, man. the filthy lives of Jews like Cohn.
hen filmmaker Ivy Meeropol was in college, she and her father Michael Meeropol visited the AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall. The quilt features tens of thousands of panels memorializing AIDS victims, but the first they chanced upon was one dedicated to the memory of Roy Cohn. Three words were stitched beneath his name: “Bully,” “Coward,” and “Victim.”
For those who, like Meeropol, grew up in a “solidly leftist environment,” Cohn, an architect of the Red Scare, friend of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and a thoroughly unscrupulous power broker, is a familiar villain. He’s the poster child for venal hypocrisy and shameless cruelty—a gay, Jewish man who ruined lives by tarring Jews and homosexuals as communists while serving as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations committee, a lawyer for mobsters and purveyor of political dirty tricks.
I have a brother in North Arkansas, AKA McCarthy Wisconsin. Some dumb as rocks cocksuckers sucking on meth and cheese curds. My brother is an exception to the rule.
“It’s everything from a dry cleaning bill, to a bunch of ties that he buys, to a giant hotel bill. I mean, it’s just unbelievable,” Ivy Meeropol says. Cohn even wrote a cover story for Parade magazine instructing readers on how to “beat” the IRS. “He would openly brag about his goal to die owing the IRS a lot of money. It sounds like someone else we know, right?”
Not only does Cohn’s shameless lying and financial chicanery echo his most famous protégé, but so does his red baiting. Just last week, Trump tweeted that 75-year-old protestor Martin Gugino, whose skull was fractured after he was pushed to the ground by a Buffalo policeman, was a member of Antifa, the loosely organized anti-fascist groups promoted as left-wing bogeymen by conservative media.
“He’s going to try to do whatever he can to make everyone look like commie traitors, anti-American, not patriotic,” Ivy Meeropol says. “The language that the Trump administration is using is all too familiar and their tactics are all too familiar. We have to pay attention to our history.”
Everything about Chabad Trump speaks of Jewish Influence and Mossad Hi-Definition Spy Cam Footage of DJT raping boys and girls. Trump Pardons Jared Kushner’s Dad, Who Paid a Prostitute to Seduce His Brother-in-Law. And then this fucking JEW cunt, gets what? Viva la France.
“Mr. Kushner pled guilty. He admitted the crimes,” Christie told PBS in a 2019 interview. “And so what am I supposed to do as a prosecutor? I mean, if a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?”
Christie continued: “I mean, it’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted. And I was U.S. attorney in New Jersey, so we had some loathsome and disgusting crime going on there.”
According to a press release announcing his guilty plea, Kushner admitted that he “devised a scheme to retaliate against a cooperating witness and her husband by having a prostitute seduce the husband and covertly filming them having sex.”
As the release explained, “Kushner told the Court that he paid a private investigator $25,000 to arrange for the seduction and videotaping of the cooperating witness’ husband. Kushner admitted to personally recruiting the prostitute and instructing that the videotape be mailed to the cooperating witness.”
Kushner also pleaded guilty to 16 counts of assisting in the filing of false tax returns and one count of making false statements to the Federal Election Commission.
Kushner’s son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and serves as a senior adviser to the president.
MIKO won’t say it: Israel HAS ZERO RIGHT TO EXIST! “We discuss the realities of segregation, occupation, and apartheid in Palestine, the personal tragedy that became a turning point in Miko’s life, and why he believes genuine peace requires Israelis and Palestinians to live with equal rights under a single democratic state.
Miko explains why he believes the two-state solution is no longer viable, how Israeli politics have evolved over the years, and what the future may hold for the region as public opinion continues to shift in the United States and around the world.
Our conversation explores the growing tensions between Israel and the United States, the conflict with Iran, the future of Gaza and the West Bank, threats facing holy sites such as Al-Aqsa Mosque, and why Miko believes the current political system is becoming increasingly unsustainable.”
Jews teach the Eddy Bernays offshoots how to frame: There is a particular grammar to how Europe talks about housing. Prices “rise.” Rents “climb.” Markets come “under pressure.” Supply “fails to keep pace.” The sentences have no subjects. Nobody raises a rent; rents simply go up, the way tides do.
One in Ten Europeans Now Can’t Afford Their Rent. In Vienna, a Quarter of the City Lives in Public Housing
The truth is, however, the Nakba, the dehumanization have gone on for much longer than 1,000 days. And will likely continue for many more, so long as Israel continues to receive the backing of the U.S. and much of the West.
Fucking HELL of a CUNT-TREE: Big protests whewwwww.
Ali Mazloum reports from the village of Qinnarit in Saida District following the Zionist Colony’s bombardment of the village – clear compensation for its continual losses on the battlefield to the resistance. Hosting displaced civilians from across South Lebanon, the Zionist’s ongoing “ceasefire” rampage would move to the village and massacre a family of eleven people, destroy the local graveyard, and level the old historic quarter. Ali Mazloum would also speak to the mayor of the town, Rabih Ghaddar, on the this treacherous and murderous “ceasefire” attack of the Zionists, and the Lebanese code of honor and hospitality maintained especially in the face of this colonial genocide.
Fucking JEWS: 23 minutes in. Jewish Indian Fighter in San Diego County!
Millions of Americans will today celebrate 250 years since the United States declared independence from the British crown.
But what is there to celebrate?
The US has been the most violent and murderous state-building experiment in history.
Built from the bones of slaves atop the bodies of the indigenous, fuelled by the blood of the poor, it has created the most deeply unequal society in the west ruled by a new class of billionaire kings.
The sickly violent ethnic cleansing the country was birthed from has become the blueprint and justification for colonial crimes around the world, best reflected today by its disgusting, genocidal, illegitimate proxy in occupied Palestine.
The only country to use a nuclear weapon, the marauding, murderous invader of dozens of sovereign nations, and the single greatest cause of instability in the modern world.
There is nothing to celebrate.
Well, come on: Jews and Nukes. Oppen-Monster-Heimer.
The development of the atomic bomb relied heavily on both native-born Americans and refugees from Germany, Hungary, and Austria. Some of the most prominent Jewish scientists involved in the project include: [1, 2]
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Project Director who led the Los Alamos laboratory and is recognized as the “father of the atomic bomb”.
Leo Szilard: The physicist who first conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction and co-authored the Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt.
Edward Teller: A Hungarian-born theoretical physicist who made key contributions to the physics of the bomb and later became known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”.
Hans Bethe: Head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos, who calculated the critical mass required for a nuclear explosion.
John von Neumann: A brilliant mathematician who contributed to the calculations of the implosion mechanism and the hydrodynamics of the bomb.
Richard Feynman: A young theoretical physicist at Los Alamos who worked on the calculation of the neutron diffusion equations and the implosion model.
Eugene Wigner: A Hungarian-born physicist who helped design the nuclear reactors used to produce plutonium.
Otto Frisch: An Austrian-born physicist who, alongside Rudolf Peierls, drafted the Frisch-Peierls memorandum outlining how an atomic bomb was scientifically and practically possible.
Isidor Isaac Rabi: Nobel laureate who served as the Associate Director of the Radiation Laboratory at MIT and an advisor at Los Alamos.
Victor Weisskopf: A theoretical physicist who served as a group leader at Los Alamos.
Felix Bloch: A Swiss-American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project before joining the radar project at Harvard
July, 1946 cover of TIME magazine featuring Albert Einstein.
FUCK JEWS: Albert Einstein and the State of Israel shared a deep, lifelong bond, most famously highlighted in 1952 when Israel offered Einstein its presidency following the death of its first president, Chaim Weizmann.
Though a strong supporter of Zionism and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Einstein respectfully declined the presidency. He stated that while he was deeply moved, he lacked the natural aptitude, political experience, and temperament to deal with people and carry out official government functions
Fucking JEWS:
In the historic heart of Bint Jbeil, a 400-year-old Great Mosque once stood as a testament to the city’s enduring cultural memory. Today, it lies in ruins, alongside more than 1,500 buildings systematically destroyed by Israeli forces in an escalating military campaign in southern Lebanon.
Through the meticulous analysis of satellite imagery and open-source intelligence, a visual investigation by Al Jazeera Arabic’s fact-checking team has revealed a deliberate Israeli policy to render southern Lebanon permanently uninhabitable.
If you don’t hate your local fucking rabbi tarred, feathered and sent to Berlin, and if you do not want that fucking Holo-Fake Remembrance museum (sic) in your neighborhood to be squatted upon by homeless Americans, then you are already circumcised.
There are at least 45 dedicated Holocaust museums and major educational centers across the United States, with over 300 Shoah study centers and thousands of smaller memorials.
There are at least 45 Holocaust Museums in the US, and no existing museums to educate Americans on the history of US Slavery.
Court clears way for Trump admin to ‘immediately’ replace slavery exhibit in Philadelphia ahead of July 4
In this photo released by the National Parks Service, President’s House Site is shown in Philadelphia.
“What Trump wants to do and plans to do is to literally whitewash and censor the site,” said Philadelphia attorney Michael Coard, the founder of Avenging the Ancestor’s Coalition – a group that Coard founded in 2002 to launch a movement to convince Philadelphia to build the slavery memorial.
Lies, Children’s Tales, Room Temperature IQ: Pope Leo XIV marked the Fourth of July with a visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa, a major entry point for migrants crossing the Mediterranean, where he urged Americans to welcome immigrants with “compassion and generosity.” In a letter celebrating the United States’ 250th anniversary, the first American pope said immigrants have long helped shape the nation’s history and that protecting human life includes welcoming and assisting those seeking a better future. During his visit, he honored migrants who died attempting the crossing, visited a cemetery where migrants are buried, met with survivors, and celebrated Mass while calling on governments to better receive and integrate migrants. Catholic leaders said the pope’s visit sends a clear message about immigration as the U.S. continues to debate the issue.
On the fucking White Man’s Whore SHow:
The most impactful anthems of protest and revolution feature the following tracks:
“Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday (1939)
One of the earliest and most haunting protest songs, this track graphically addressed the lynching of Black Americans in the South, forcing mainstream America to confront systemic racism head-on. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Bob Dylan (1963)
This quintessential folk anthem asked a series of rhetorical questions about war, peace, and freedom. It became the defining voice of the 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements. [1, 2] FUCK JEW DYLAN!
[After his mysterious “return” to Judaism, Dylan studied with Chabad rabbis in the 1980s. His appearance on the Chabad telethon fundraiser in 1989 wasn’t his first endorsement of the movement (or his first telethon cameo) — but it might have been his Jewiest. A yarmulke-clad Dylan accompanied songwriter Peter Himmelman (his Jewish son-in-law) and Harry Dean Stanton on harmonica as the group played “Hava Nagila.”]
[Just after his son’s bar mitzvah at the Kotel — and a year after Israel’s controversial first Lebanon War — Dylan released the song “Neighborhood Bully” on his 1983 album “Infidels.” In what is arguably one of the most pro-Jewish rock songs ever recorded, Dylan describes Israel as an “exiled man” who is unfairly labeled a bully for fending off constant attacks from his neighbors. One verse goes: “Well the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man/His enemies say he’s on their land/They got him outnumbered a million to one/He got no place to escape to, no place to run/He’s the neighborhood bully.”]
“A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke (1964)
Inspired by Cooke’s own experiences with racism, this song emerged as an emotional, soaring centerpiece of the Civil Rights Movement, capturing both the struggle and an enduring hope for the future. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
“What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye (1971)
Moving away from standard Motown love songs, this track delivered a poignant plea addressing police brutality, the Vietnam War, and the environment. It remains a universally recognized plea for peace. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
“Fight the Power” by Public Enemy (1989)
Serving as the musical anchor to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, this aggressive, sample-heavy hip-hop track was a direct rebellion against white supremacy, institutional oppression, and the music establishment. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
“Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine (1991)
A ferocious blend of rap and heavy metal, its iconic chorus and anti-authoritarian lyrics about police brutality and systemic corruption cemented it as an anthem for generations of protests. [1, 2]
“Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present…. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, (for all this hectic glow….) nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of. [C]hurches….usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage…. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration…. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain.”
“[P]opular democracy, whatever its faults and dangers, practically justifies itself beyond the proudest claims and wildest hopes…. [N]o future age can know, but I well know, how the gist….resided exclusively in the unnamed, unknown rank and file; and how the brunt of its labor of death was, to all essential purposes, volunteer’d. The People, of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own idea, insolently attack’d by the secession-slave power….its very existence imperil’d.”
The main thing is: “to prevent fanaticism.” This is most superb — “superbest” — counsel. Whitman would be heartbroken to learn America, today, is throttled in fanaticism; “polarized” in wildly antagonistic politics. But he would not be surprised at the locus: Whitman feared internal division infinitely more than external threat. He repeatedly voiced this fear, speculating, again, it would relate to “the appaling [sic] dangers of universal suffrage” attaching to the freed slaves.
“[T]o become an enfranchised man….impediments removed, to stand and start without humiliation and equal with the rest, whose end (perhaps requiring several generations,) may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman — that is something.”
That “something” is not only not realized; the historical implications of slavery itself are angrily resisted by the “insane” political party. But, says the visionary Whitman, the “ballast of the State” is “secured in no other way.” Failing a reckoning, on race and other grounds, destruction looms.
He confessed: “[T]he fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me.”
and the Satanists go marching on . . . And every single one should be gutted like a fucking red heifer, man, Zionist = Jew & the other wackadoodle, Christian Zionist . . . Death to Talmud Terrorists
According to Forbes Israel, the 2025 World’s Jewish Billionaires list recorded a total of 465 billionaires (though some reporting metrics focused on a core subset of 276).
These individuals held a combined net worth of $2.66 trillion. The pinnacle of the 2025 ranking was heavily dominated by American technology founders, including Larry Ellison ($213.7 billion), Mark Zuckerberg ($202.4 billion), Larry Page ($157.8 billion), and Sergey Brin ($150.7 billion)
After you defeat them in battle, wipe them out by killing them all. Don’t make any peace treaty with them. Don’t show them mercy” (Deuteronomy 7:2).
In 1967, at the height of the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, the Israeli Air Force launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty, a US Navy spy ship that was monitoring the conflict from the safety of international waters in the Mediterranean.
Israeli jet fighters hit the vessel with rockets, cannon fire and napalm, before three Israeli torpedo boats moved in to launch a second more devastating attack. Though she did not sink, the Liberty was badly damaged. Thirty-four US servicemen and civilian analysts were killed, another 171 were wounded.
Zionist Terrorism A grenade thrown from a passing taxi at a bus in the Palestinian residential quarter outside Herod’s Gate kills 17 Palestinian civilians. The perpetrators were members of the Irgun .
Consider, for example, as Benjamin Netanyahu — who has flung the “terrorist” label at least as freely as anyone else — is finally being pushed out of the prime minister’s job in Israel, the histories of some of his predecessors. Menachem Begin, who held that job in the late 1970s and early 1980s — longer than anyone except Netanyahu, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Rabin — had an earlier career as a hard-core terrorist. As leader of the Irgun group during World War II, Begin conducted a campaign of attacks, focused principally on British government and police targets, intended to drive the British out of Palestine — while Britain was busy waging a war against the Nazis.
Begin’s terrorist campaign continued after the war. His group’s most spectacular operation was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 persons and injuring 46. The list of victims went far beyond the British administrators who were the purported targets and included people of multiple nationalities not only in the hotel but in adjacent buildings and the street.
As the British exit neared, Begin’s group used more of its terrorist tactics against Palestinian Arabs, evidently aimed in part to terrorize Arabs into fleeing their homes and villages. An especially notorious operation was the massacre in the village of Deir Yassin, in which more than a hundred Arabs, including women and children, were killed.
Begin emerged from the clandestine world after the creation of Israel as he established the right-wing Herut party in 1948. This did not erase his terrorist past — certainly not in the minds of the British, who barred him from making a visit to London in the 1950s.
The British were not the only ones who took notice of what Begin represented. A trip by him to the United States in late 1948 elicited an open letter by Jewish dignitaries, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, protesting the visit and describing Herut as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”
At a speech in Jerusalem today, Mike Huckabee describedIsrael as “the 436th congressional district of the U.S.’”
Speaking at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel announced Washington will build a permanent embassy in Jerusalem — where it will serve the 700,000 Americans he says live in the Middle Eastern country.
“700,000 Americans represent an entire congressional district in the U.S. That’s how many people live in a congressional district,” Huckabee explained.
“When members of Congress come I always say, welcome to Israel, the 426th Congressional District of the U.S.,” he added.
In the 11 years leading up to the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, Zionist extremists who lived in the territory of Palestine under the British Mandate used terrorism as a military strategy to accelerate the establishment of an independent Jewish state. Their violence was directed against the British authorities who governed Palestine and against the Palestinian indigenous population throughout Palestine. Over 57 violent attacks were carried out by Zionist terrorist groups (e.g. Haganah, Lehi, Irgun – ultra-nationalist groups from the far right wing of the Revisionist Zionist movement) killing over 5,000 Palestinians and dozens of British.[2] While Zionist terrorist groups assassinated UN personnel, murdered British officers and attacked British military headquarters to overthrow the Mandate, they terrorized Palestinian inhabitants in order to provoke mass flight, displacement and migration.
Who were these Zionist terrorist groups? Who did they target?
Prominent Zionist Terrorist Groups during the Mandate period included:
The Irgun (Etzel): Known as the National Military Organization and the Military sector of the Revisionist movement, the Irgun stated that “political violence and terrorism” were “legitimate tools in the Jewish national struggle for the Land of Israel.” Their attacks included:
Al-Quds massacre, December 1937: Member of the Irgun hurled a hand grenade at the marketplace near al-Quds mosque, killing and injuring dozens.
Haifa massacre, March 1938: Members of the Irgun and Lehi gang throw grenades at Haifa market, killing 18, and injuring 38.
Haifa massacre, July 1938: The Irgun explodes booby trapped vehicles in Haifa market, killing 21 and injuring 52.
Balad El-Sheik Village Attack, June 1939: This Palestinian village was attacked by members of the Haganah, the Main Jewish Defense. Five villagers were kidnapped and murdered.
King David Hotel Bombing, July 1946: Led by Menachem Begin, the Irgun planned and carried out the bombing of the KingDavidHotel, the British military headquarters in Jerusalem in July 1946 in order to destroy documents proving the terrorist campaigns of Zionist groups. The attack killed 28 Britons, 17 Jews, 41 Palestinians and 5 others for a total of 91 victims.
Attack on the British Officers’ Club at Goldschmidt House, March 1947: This Jerusalem attack killed 17 British military and intelligence officers.
Kidnapping and murder of British Soldiers, July 1947:This attack which led to the murder of two British sergeants in Netanya was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Very soon afterward, the British abandoned the British Mandate, turning Palestine over to the UN.
Bombing of the Jerusalem Railway Station, October 1947: The Irgun bombed the Jerusalem Railway Station in addition to mining roads and attacking army vehicles.
The Stern Gang: Founded by Avraham Stern in 1939, the Stern Gang was an eccentric group which even sought contact with the Nazis in order to subvert British control in the Middle East. Under Stern, the group conducted robberies and attempted assassinations against the British. Stern is also noted for his “Eighteen Principles of National Renewal,” which articulated an expansionist mandate of Zionism, claiming a Jewish state from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq. [4]
The Lehi: After the British assassinated Stern in 1942, his followers regrouped as an underground movement called the Lehi, acronym for Fighters for the Freedom of Israel:
Assassination of Lord Moyne, November 1944: Assassinated in Cairo, Egypt, Lord Moyne was the highest ranking British government representative in the Middle East at the time. The Lehi targeted him because of his support for a Middle Eastern Arab Federation.
Cairo-Haifa Train Bombings, Early 1948: A few months before the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, the Cairo-Haifa train was bombed several times, attacks claimed by or attributed to the Lehi. An attack in February killed 28 British soldiers, and wounded 35 more. An attack in March killed 40 civilians, and wounded 60 more.
Deir Yassin Massacre, April 1948:Commandos of Lehi and Irgun headed by Menachim Begin attacked Deir Yassin,a village of 700 Palestinians, ultimately killing between 100 and 120 villagers.[5] The Master Mind behind the Deir Yassin massacre, Begin justified the attack in his book The Revolt:
Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun butchery,’ were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.[6]
Assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, September, 1948: Count Bernadotte, a UN Peace mediator who had come to the Middle East 1948 to modify the Palestine partition plan in an effort to resolve Arab-Jewish disputes, was also assassinated by the group.
A Legacy of Assassinations: More than any other Jewish terrorist group, Lehi was known for using assassinations as a terror mechanism, even using them against Jews they accused of being traitors. Lehi carried out 42 assassinations, more than twice as many as the Irgun and the Haganah combined. Of its politically-motivated assassinations, over half of them were carried out against other Jews. [7]
What happened to these terror groups following the establishment of Israel?
A building block of Israel’s political perspective and statehood program, most Zionist terrorist groups transitioned from underground terrorist groups to political mainstreams parties rapidly with the founding of Israel in May, 1948. (Note, however, that some groups continued to operate even after May, 1948, e.g. assassination of Count Bernadotte in September, 1948 as mentioned above.) Menachim Begin transformed the Irgun into a political party called Herut. The Lehi became the Moledet party which today continues to openly advocate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, territories now occupied by Israel. Paradoxically, terrorist leaders Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir later became Prime Ministers of Israel – their political heirs now forming part of the political establishment of Israel.
Every fucking Jew who doen’t renounce his-her-their Jewishness is an open season target.
“These practices are part of a systematic policy targeting the religious and historical presence in occupied Jerusalem, including both Islamic and Christian endowments.”
Jews: AI Data Centers Use Far More Water Than Most Tech Giants Report
Microsoft MSFT 1.62%increase; up pointing triangle, Google and Amazon AMZN 0.40%increase; up pointing triangle are among the tech companies spending an estimated $1 trillion on AI infrastructure this year and last. In some regions, they are using far more water than they report, depending on how data centers are powered. And their water consumption is projected to grow rapidly in coming years.
Water used at power plants that supply their electricity can be many times as great as the water used in the data centers themselves.
Palmer Luckey’s Erebor bank eyes an $8bn valuation as deposits quadruple
Erebor, the bank launched by Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel, is in talks to raise at a valuation of at least $8bn, roughly double where it stood at the end of last year. Deposits have nearly quadrupled to $4bn in three months, though its fast-tracked charter has drawn sharp questions in Washington.
Jews:
Core Executive Leadership
While not all executives hold formal board voting seats, the operational leadership team at the helm of the bank consists of:
Owen Rapaport – Co-Founder and Co-CEO (formerly co-founder of crypto compliance platform Aer Compliance).
Jacob Hirshman – Co-Founder and Co-CEO (formerly advisory role at stablecoin issuer Circle).
Aaron Pelz – Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer.
Richard “Ricky” Grant – Chief Financial Officer.
Joshua Rosenberg – Chief Risk Officer.
Vlad Dubinsky – Chief Credit Officer.
BlackRock Partner Securitize Rides Wall Street Tokenization Wave — Larry Fink: The current Chairman and CEO, Fink was raised in a Jewish family in California. He is widely considered one of the most powerful figures in global finance. Robert Kapito: The current President of BlackRock, Kapito is also Jewish. Susan Wagner: A co-founder and current board member, Wagner was born to a Jewish family.
DAYS and YEARS of INFAMY: Anduril founders invest in Israeli underground warfare startup
Traysar was unveiled last week at an industry conference in Detroit. It produces engineering components and digging machines for use against terrorist tunnels and underground military bases.
House Negro: General Charles Q. Brown Jr
The Foreign Affairs Essay: In an essay co-authored with Duke University professor Peter Feaver and lawyer Andrew Kragie for Foreign Affairs, Brown cautioned against what he termed “mission creep” within the armed forces. He warned against assigning troops to politically contentious missions—such as addressing domestic crime—arguing that it degrades the military’s primary combat focus and fails to resolve underlying civilian dysfunction.
Critique of Pentagon Purges: Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Brown publicly expressed concern over the administration’s removal of highly experienced Pentagon officials and officers. He warned that these personnel shifts were no longer based on merit and could negatively impact the career trajectories and morale of those still serving.
Removal Context: Brown and Navy Admiral Lisa Franchetti were dismissed in February 2025 by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump. The administration’s moves were tied to efforts to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the Department of Defense
War man, that Billionaire and Millionaire RACKET:
Global personal wealth surged by 10.8% in 2025, but the gains were highly concentrated. The UBS Global Wealth Report 2026 reveals widening inequality: the world added roughly one million new dollar millionaires and 383 new billionaires, even as median wealth—a better measure of typical households—declined in most countries.
South African billionaire Johann Rupert has been quietly funding a land reform programme that has helped more than 24,000 South Africans secure legal ownership of their homes, turning thousands of long-time council tenants into property owners with assets they can sell, inherit, or use as collateral, according to a report by BillionairesAfrica.
The programme, Khaya Lam—Zulu for “My Home”—was established in 2010 by the Free Market Foundation to help residents living in apartheid-era township housing convert municipal leasehold properties into freehold ownership. While South African law has long allowed these transfers, the legal costs involved have remained out of reach for many households.
Khaya Lam addresses that challenge by raising private funding to cover the cost of transferring title deeds while working with municipalities and conveyancing attorneys to complete the process.
South African billionaire Johann Rupert….his companies operated within and benefited from the systemic advantages of the Apartheid system. These structural dynamics permitted white-owned businesses to thrive through the exploitation of cheap, marginalized Black labor and restricted economic competition for the majority of the population.
1. Inheriting and Splitting the Family Empire
The Foundation: His father, Anton Rupert, established a highly successful tobacco and industrial conglomerate named the Rembrandt Group in the 1940s.
The Corporate Split: In 1988, Johann Rupert isolated the family’s international assets from the South African business, spinning them off to form Richemont.
2. Dominating the Global Luxury Market
Premium Brand Acquisitions: Under Rupert’s leadership, Richemont aggressively acquired world-renowned luxury heritage houses, including Cartier (1993), Vacheron Constantin (1996), and Van Cleef & Arpels (1999).
Global Stock Rallies: Rupert owns about 10% of Richemont shares but controls 51% of the voting rights. A massive post-pandemic surge in global demand for high-end jewelry and watches has repeatedly driven up Richemont’s stock price, heavily inflating his net worth.
3. Diversified Investment Vehicles
Remgro Limited: Rupert serves as chairman of this South African investment vehicle, holding stakes in banking, financial services, infrastructure, and media.
Reinet Investments: This Luxembourg-based vehicle manages the family’s other massive corporate stakes, including a substantial holding in the UK’s Pension Insurance Corporation.
4. Recent High-Growth Pivots (2025–2026)
Exiting Tobacco: Rupert completed a highly publicized, multi-billion-rand exit from the tobacco sector by selling off his remaining shares in British American Tobacco (BAT).
Healthcare Expansion: He channeled that capital back into South Africa by executing a $947 million buyout through Remgro to assume 100% control of the Mediclinic private hospital network.
Strategic Gold Safe-Havens: His firm converted a €22 million stake in the world’s largest gold ETF into an asset worth over €80 million by riding a historic surge in gold prices.
Ahh, mandatory!!! They tower overhead and sway in the wind and often teem with squawking birds, yet trees are easy to ignore. Urbanites rush by them without noticing, and without appreciating all the work they do: Trees reduce temperatures, mitigate flooding, and provide habitat for animals.
City leaders are no exception to this oversight. As mayors around the world pledge to reduce municipal greenhouse gas emissions, they’re missing the literal low-hanging fruit of bolstering urban forests, dozens of scientists argue in a new essay. “We have to elevate it from something that is nice to have to something that we require — like, mandatory,” said Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, an ecologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom and lead author of the piece, which published today in the journal PLOS Climate. “In the same way that we treat education, security, transportation, it has to be elevated to that level.”
The old marina at Meeks Bay Resort was polluting Lake Tahoe and is now closed. A restoration project is planned to turn it back into a functioning wetland.
More of the fucking Black Snake:
Canada took a step Thursday toward opening a new route for its vast oil reserves to Asian markets as Prime Minister Mark Carney advanced a Pacific Coast pipeline from Alberta, seeking to reduce the country’s dependence on the U.S. while easing separatist tensions and preserving environmental protections.
Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith unveiled a proposed route through southern British Columbia, saying the project would open more Canadian oil to Asian markets while preserving a ban on oil tankers off northern British Columbia.
“The best route for a new pipeline is one that goes through one that already exists south through the Trans Mountain corridor, to our Pacific Coast, the gateway to the world’s fastest growing markets,” Carney said in Calgary.
Carney has set a goal for Canada to double its non-U.S. exports in the next decade and has said a pipeline can reduce the price discount on current oil sales to U.S. markets.
Forked tongues:
Monsters and Double Standards
March 10, 2008
Samantha Power, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who in recent years has played a key role in the fight to make ending genocide a major goal of American foreign policy, has been forced to resign from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster.”
Given the case that Obama has made for keeping the Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton on the high road, it is hard to imagine any other outcome from Power’s remark. But also at work in the Power resignation is an unmistakable double standard. Power’s attack on Senator Clinton was not a personal attack. It was an attack on the character of the “kitchen-sink” campaign that Clinton has been waging.
Here is the actual quote that Power made about Senator Clinton during an interview on March 7 with The Scotsman: “She is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything.” Unlike the attack on Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro that Barbara Bush got away with in 1984 when she characterized Ferraro as a bitch (“I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich,” Mrs. Bush declared), Power’s remarks have nothing to do with sexism. They speak to her anger over the kind of innuendo that Senator Clinton saw as within bounds when on the CBS show “60 Minutes,” she was asked if she believed that Obama was a Muslim. Instead of simply saying no, Clinton milked the question for all it was worth, replying, “There’s nothing to base that on—as far as I know.”
Power has publicly apologized for her “monster” remark. “I should not have made these comments, and I deeply regret them,” she said. “It is wrong for anyone to pursue this campaign in such negative and personal terms.” Power’s resignation from the Obama campaign has, in turn, been greeted with widespread approval. As Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz observed, with a few ill-chosen words, Power managed to “blow up her brief political consulting career.”
Left out of the equation, however, has been why Power’s remarks are beyond the pale and Hillary Clinton’s Muslim innuendo is not. In the heat of a political campaign, Power was simply saying that Clinton is ruthless. On “60 Minutes,” Clinton, by contrast, was pursuing a very different strategy. In her “as far as I know” remark, she was pandering to the idea that there might really be grounds for believing that Obama was a Muslim. To be sure, Power was direct. Clinton was indirect, but the moral gap between them suggests that Clinton was the one hitting below the belt.
It is enough to make one wonder whether the real worry for the Obama campaign was an interview that Power did with the BBC. There she spoke with a complexity that Barack Obama has not yet displayed on the campaign trail about the problems of a quick American pullout from Iraq. After explaining to her BBC interviewer that Obama’s 16-month plan for American troop withdrawal was only “a best-case scenario,” Power went on to paint a stark picture of the practical obstacles Obama would face as president. “He will of course not rely upon some plan that he crafted as a presidential candidate or as a US senator,” Power told the BBC. “He will rely on a plan, an operational plan that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground, to whom he doesn’t have daily access now as a result of not being the president.”
It was the kind of thinking that would make Power an ideal assistant secretary of state, but in the midst of a heated political campaign, it is also the kind of nuanced answer that makes a candidate vulnerable. Clinton was quick to capitalize on Power’s BBC remarks. “He has attacked me continuously for having no hard exit date, and now we learn that he doesn’t have one—in fact he doesn’t have a plan at all according to his top foreign policy advisor,” Clinton observed. “I’m not sure what the American people should believe, but I would refer you to the BBC interview.”
Now Obama won’t have to explain Power’s statements as those of a trusted aide. He can ignore them or, better yet, deal with them in a way that demonstrates his thoughtfulness. It is a situation that leaves Obama with more than enough room to define his Iraq policy.
Sadly, Power’s resignation as an official advisor to the Obama campaign is a different story. It is a loss for everyone involved in the 2008 Democratic primaries. As the case of Darfur shows, genocide is alive and well in the world—but a subject of secondary interest to the nations that might actually stop it. If anyone has a commitment to reversing this trend and making genocide a mainstream issue for America, it is Samantha Power.
Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower (John Wiley and Sons). Photograph: Samantha Power speaking this February at a San Francisco book store. Photo by Steve Rhodes.
VERSUS
By Matthew John
After appointing insufferable Nazi oligarch Elon Musk to head his newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump regime implemented massive funding cuts that have affected various federal government agencies. A lively debate has ensued regarding the nature and importance of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), with one side praising the institution as an indispensable, benevolent, humanitarian force and the other claiming it is deeply corrupt and brimming with radical leftists.
The truth is not somewhere in the middle, but somewhere else entirely. To paint a more accurate picture of the interests USAID serves, as well as the unique geopolitical role it has played, I have selected examples of its work in four different countries. I hope my analysis provides a useful window into an often overlooked aspect of this discourse – especially as it relates to leftist politics.
Afghanistan
The year was 1979. The United States was in the midst of the Cold War and the late Jimmy Carter was president. During the preceding years and decades, the CIA had conducted a series of successful coups against democratically elected governments in countries like Iran, Guatemala, and Chile – often using anti-communist paranoia as justification. After a socialist revolution in Afghanistan the year prior, the agency and its co-conspirators in Washington finally had an excuse to confront the Soviets more directly – albeit through rather unsavory proxies.
The plan, according to Carter’s closest adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to provide weapons and training to Wahhabi terrorists known as the mujahideen in order to provoke an intervention by the Soviet military. According to Brzezinski, Carter signed the first directive for aid to these Islamist extremist “freedom fighters” on July 3, 1979, and the decade-long proxy war that followed resulted in the overthrow of the socialist government in Kabul and was also a significant contributing factor in the downfall of the USSR – the world’s first socialist society.
After taking power in April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) instituted an array of socialist policies, including “land reform, growth in public services, price controls, separation of church and state, full equality for women, legalization of trade unions and a sweeping literacy campaign.” This might seem like a positive development, but not in the eyes of the U.S. empire and its capitalist agenda. In addition to the CIA’s covert support for the mujahideen’s holy war against the secular evils of increased living standards and women’s rights, USAID also played an interesting role in this conflict.
The agency reportedly spent $50 million on a “jihad literacy” program in Afghanistan, primarily during the 1980s. This effort included the publication and distribution of ultra-conservative textbooks that “tried to solidify the links between violence and religious obligation,” according to author Dana Burde. Lessons on basic math and language were accompanied by depictions of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, ammunition, and a commitment to militancy and retribution against the Russians (who were depicted as “invaders” despite having been invited to lend military assistance by the PDPA). After consolidating power in the ‘90s, the Taliban government revised and reprinted these textbooks, and copies have even been found in Pakistan as recently as 2013.
Assisting the Taliban’s precursor with reactionary, jihadist propaganda to viciously sabotage a progressive, feminist government and its allies is a strange form of “humanitarianism.” You might even say it’s the opposite of humanitarianism. Was this just a mistake that USAID made in the distant past and has since learned from, or is there a continued pattern of this behavior?
Cuba
Two decades prior to the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan, the Cuban Revolution succeeded after years of guerrilla combat against the forces of a U.S.-backed capitalist dictator named Fulgencio Batista. Though the U.S. government was initially open to working with Fidel Castro’s new revolutionary administration, the tide quickly turned and Cuba has faced a relentless imperialist onslaught from Washington ever since. The tactics of the Yankee juggernaut have included invasion, terrorism, hundreds of assassination attempts, and a crippling economic blockade. Our friends at USAID have participated in these regime change efforts through various insidious plots.
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In 2014, the Associated Press reported on a USAID plan to use HIV-prevention workshops to secretly “[recruit] a younger generation of opponents to Cuba’s Castro government.” After being exposed, the scheme proved profoundly embarrassing to the U.S. political establishment and detrimental to the reputation of Western aid organizations. But this was not the first USAID regime change plot to be exposed that year. The agency had also set up a Twitter-inspired app called ZunZuneo in 2010 in an attempt to “build a base of unsuspecting Cuban users, and then introduce rumors and misinformation to destabilize the country’s socialist government.”
More recently, USAID was caught funding rappers and other artists to, as Russiagate conspiracy theorists would say, “sow political discord” in Cuban society (but it’s okay when we do it). Thankfully, all of these tactics have failed and the CubanRevolution lives on.
Venezuela
The Bolivarian Revolution began in 1999 when popular Venezuelan politician Hugo Chávez was inaugurated after his historic electoral victory the previous year. Chávez oversaw an extensive program of socialistpolicies, lifting millions out of poverty and vastly expanding participatory democracy and racial justice until his death in 2013. Five years later, Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro was sworn in to begin his second term in office after winning the Venezuelan presidential election in May of 2018.
On January 22, 2019, Juan Guaidó — a man whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of — suddenly declared himself “interim president.” Although Guaidó did not run in any presidential election, U.S. politicians and pundits quickly praised this brazen coup attempt, recognizing Guaidó’s claim to the Venezuelan presidency as legitimate. Like the efforts of U.S. imperialism in Cuba, this regime change operation has failed, as Guaidó never managed to gain popular support for his fraudulent government. He quickly became disgraced and is now under investigation by Venezuelan authorities, who recently issued an arrest warrant for the failed coup leader.
For its part, USAID provided $128 million in funding to the would-be dictator and his collaborators, and an additional $307 million to Venezuela’s right-wing political opposition more broadly, including for use in plots that were condemned by the International Red Cross and the United Nations. Reporting by the L.A. Times even revealed that $41.9 million in aid was diverted from Guatemala and Honduras and redirected to Guaidó and his fellow insurrectionists “to pay for their salaries, airfare, ‘good governance’ training, propaganda, technical assistance for holding elections and other ‘democracy-building’ projects.”
This was not the first time USAID was involved in the imperialist sabotage of Venezuela’s ongoing socialist project. During the years prior to the Guaidó debacle, the agency also played a central role in a conspiracy to meddle in Venezuela’s elections by weaponizing social media (again, it’s only bad when Russia does it).
Nicaragua
Those familiar with the Iran-Contra affair might recall the ghastly history of the U.S. government supporting far-right Nicaraguan death squads during the 1980s. Those death squads, known as the Contras, had an ultimate goal of destroying the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which had gained power through a popular revolution in 1979. The Sandinistas dedicated the first years of their governance to eradicating illiteracy, nationalizing public services, and the founding of working-class, socialist institutions like the People’s Army, the Sandinista Workers’ Confederation, the Association of Agricultural Workers, the Nicaraguan Students Union, the Federation of Health Workers, and the National Teachers’ Union.
However, just like the PDPA government in Afghanistan, the Sandinistas were met with a bloody proxy war at the hands of U.S. imperialism, resulting in a death toll of 30,000. The U.S.-backed Contra death squads “engaged in direct assassination campaigns against literacy and health care workers, engineers and anyone dedicated to rebuilding Nicaragua.” The capitalist elements in Nicaragua eventually consolidated power in 1990 and ruled the country for a decade and a half, but the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007 after Daniel Ortega was elected president.
Instead of simply funding sadistic death squads this time, Washington chose a more subtle and insidious path. Similar to their recent efforts in Cuba and Venezuela, the U.S. meddled in the politics of Nicaragua through a complex network of “aid” organizations and right-wing media outlets. One of the most notorious institutions USAID has supported is called the Chamorro Foundation, which is “run by one of the richest and most powerful family dynasties in Nicaragua.” The organization was complicit in a violent coup attempt against Ortega in 2018 and is now under investigation for money laundering.
Conclusion
This topic is far more complicated than what I have included in this article, and there are many other importantanalyses. I chose to focus on these specific countries in order to make a simple point: An organization that consistently engages in imperialist regime change efforts against socialist nations is entirely incompatible with the notion of humanitarianism. The ongoing project of socialism itself is inherently humanitarian and humanistic. As Michael Parenti once wrote:
“To say that ‘socialism doesn’t work’ is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.”
Despite its reputation among American liberals as a benevolent humanitarian organization, USAID is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is a Trojan horse for Western imperialism — an insidious, destabilizing force that causes far more harm to the Global South than any “good” resulting from its ostensible assistance. And, despite far-right delusions about the agency in question supposedly being composed of “radical left lunatics,” its history reveals consistent and relentless opposition toward leftist movements around the world. Given its blood-drenched track record, the best humanitarianism the United States can offer developing countries is to simply leave them alone and respect their sovereignty.
JEWS: Prominent Jewish men who have headed or played central leadership roles at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) include:
Mark Feierstein: Served as the Acting Administrator of USAID Feierstein Acting Administrator of USAID in early 2017 following the conclusion of the Obama administration.
Nicholas Enrich: Served as a top global health official and later a high-profile whistleblower regarding the agency’s internal operations Nicholas Enrich whistleblower.
The Toronto Hearings, slated to run from Sept. 8 to 11 at Ryerson University, will aim to classify and preserve evidence that the U.S. government’s official narrative of the 9/11 attacks is flawed or false, said Graeme MacQueen, a member of the steering committee that organized the event.
The conference will include two moderators, witnesses and what organizers describe as an independent panel.
“These were horrific acts of violence, and we should remember them, but we’re afraid there won’t be much critical reflection,” Mr. MacQueen said. “There will be much reciting the story, and there will be a reinforcement of what some of us believe is the myth of 9/11.”
Among the theories that may come up during the conference are the notions that no plane actually hit the Pentagon, that the twin towers were destroyed by controlled demolition and that the ensuing wars were planned in advance of the attacks.
Mr. MacQueen, co-founder of McMaster University’s Centre for Peace Studies, said his support for the latter theory grew after he heard a high-ranking Afghan official say in February 2001 that “the U.S. is going to be at war in Afghanistan soon.”
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
The Command: The text commands the Israelites to utterly destroy the indigenous Canaanite nations, leaving “nothing that breathes” alive.
The Execution: Passages like Joshua 6:21 record the total destruction of cities like Jericho, where men, women, children, and animals were put to the sword.
Many Christians say they have trouble believing God had anything to do with one commandment that Moses attributed to him:
“When the LORD your God gives them to you, you’ll need to finish them off. After you defeat them in battle, wipe them out by killing them all. Don’t make any peace treaty with them. Don’t show them mercy” (Deuteronomy 7:2).
Also, the people promised the LORD, “If you will let us defeat those people, we will annihilate all Canaanites and decimate their cities” (Numbers 21:2).
The Hebrew word for “annihilate” is herem. Scholars describe it as a “curse of war” or a “ban.” The “ban” means that when soldiers conquer a city, for example, they are banned from keeping anything for themselves—everything in the city is under the curse of war and must die.
Joshua usually fought by those rules, as the Bible tells it.
Many Christians today struggle with this order, which they say sounds like genocide.
Others say if God ordered the people killed, it’s not our place to question it.
Moses explained why God allowed Israel to slaughter and drive out the Canaanites:
“You’re not getting this land because you’re good enough to deserve it. The locals are losing it because they’re terrible people. You’re getting the land because the LORD promised it to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Deuteronomy 9:5).
Paul Haeder, Author 