Lew Rockwell Institute

One of the dumbest narratives we’re asked to swallow about Palestinians is that they are guilty of anti-Jewish prejudice which makes them comparable to Nazis. Palestinians didn’t choose the religion of their oppressors; any hatred they have toward Israelis is because Israelis are the ones oppressing and murdering them, not because of their religion. Expecting Palestinians not to hate the oppressors who hate them just because those oppressors happen to be Jewish is shitbrained thinking.

Every so often you’ll see the IDF plant a copy of Mein Kampf in a building in Gaza and then wave it around as though it would somehow justify what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and it’s just so stupid. The reason we’ve come to abhor hatred toward Jews in the west is because we know the west has an extensive history of committing atrocities against Jewish people because of their religion.

Palestinians harbor no such prejudice and are guilty of no such crimes. Any violence they’ve inflicted upon Israelis has been in an effort to keep their land and resist tyrannical oppression, not because they have some weird European Hitlerite hatred toward Jews. Anytime you hear Palestinians talk about “the Jews” they’re always talking solely and exclusively about their oppressors in the context of the occupation; they’re not talking about some Jewish guy in Canada.

Palestinians would hate their oppressors whether the oppression was being inflicted by Hindus, Buddhists or Catholics. That’s normal. That’s how people’s minds and emotions work; we hate people who hate us, and we hate people who abuse us. Any failure to understand this is a failure to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to live in their situation. It’s a sign that you lack normal human empathy.

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The world needs Israel. Without Israel where would sexual predators go for safety and protection? Where would we get our surveillance technology? Who would use human targets to field test new kinds of murder robots, military explosives and AI systems used to kill entire families?

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One of the most evil things happening in the world today is the way human beings in Gaza are being used as laboratory guinea pigs to field test new technology for the military industrial complex. https://t.co/yF3wY4WbV0

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 22, 2025

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Critics of Israel should familiarize themselves with Hitchens’s razor: “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Whether it’s beheaded babies, mass rapes, Hamas bases in hospitals, or Hamas killing the Bibas kids with their bare hands, if it’s being asserted without evidence, it can be immediately dismissed.

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It is a well-documented fact that Israel and its supporters use lobbying, campaign funding and blackmail to exert influence over western nations. It is also a fact that the US empire has the power to stop Israel from doing this at any time, but chooses not to. The empire managers in the official elected government don’t do anything to stop these influence operations, nor do the empire managers in the far more powerful unelected national security state. Does anyone really believe Israel would still be exerting such massive influence over the US government if the CIA determined that this was impeding their agendas of global domination?

It follows that the Zionist influence operations exist because the empire wants them to. The artificially manufactured support for Israel has been deemed a necessary evil to help ensure constant violence, division and instability in the middle east and justify endless military presence in a crucial geostrategic region which, if left to its own devices, might unite and conduct its affairs in a way that is disadvantageous to western interests.

There are many other nations in the middle east who are aligned with the US and are used to advance its interests in the region, but none of them are fully dependent on support from the US government for their continued existence. It’s a completely artificial construct that was inserted into the middle east like a glass shard into a foot, and its continued existence benefits both the settler colonialists who live there and the long-term hegemonic interests of the US-centralized empire.

I say all this to point out that the west isn’t some passive innocent victim of manipulations by the big mean tyrant Israel. It is just as guilty of Israel’s crimes as Israel itself, because those crimes are inseparable from the western empire as a whole. You see some on the right trying to argue that the west would be this wonderful virtuous place if not for the malign influence of those nasty Jews, but this narrative is refuted by the entire historical existence of the western world. The west has always been a warmongering, genocidal civilization driven by conquest and domination, and the western settler-colonialist project of Israel is just one more manifestation of the dystopia we are living in.

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The only reason they keep framing this naked ethnic cleansing operation as a “war” is so that they can later say “Of course Palestinians lost that land, they fought a war and they lost” again, like they’ve been doing ever since Israel was founded. https://t.co/VrZCNMl6jL

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 21, 2025

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Defending Trump’s warmongering in the middle east by babbling about his peacemaking efforts in Ukraine is the same as saying it’s okay for him to torch Gaza because he’s not bombing Argentina. It’s nonsensical. You don’t negate your crimes by being less criminal somewhere else.

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Whenever I criticize Trump’s actions in the middle east I’ll get some Democrat going “I BET YOU WISH YOU’D SUPPORTED KAMALA NOW, HUH?”

That’s not what this is, idiots. I did this exact same commentary throughout the Biden administration, because Biden is also evil. I am simply criticizing the world’s most murderous and destructive power structure and whatever empire managers happen to be sitting at the front desk while it happens. This is just what it looks like when you apply scrutiny to the empire without being a partisan hack.

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Bernie Sanders has been such a worthless empire simp I sometimes wonder why the Democratic Party establishment even bothered sabotaging his primary campaigns. They would have gotten another Obama, selling people false hope while advancing the interests of oligarchy and empire.

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Our species evolved these brains of unprecedented sophistication only to use them to destroy our biosphere, invent new ways to blow each other up, and make ourselves miserable with our own thoughts.

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It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about terrorism. Those aren’t the reasons, they’re the excuses. The excuses to expel Palestinians and turn more Palestinian land into Israeli land. That’s all this has ever been about. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

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The post Palestinians Didn’t Choose the Religion of Their Oppressors appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hundreds of Democrat party political hacks who happen to have attended law school for a couple of years have been rewarded for their hackism with appointments as federal district court judges. Armed with lifetime tenure and dressed in spooky looking black robes, they behave like an army of some 700 dictators responsible and answerable to no one as they plot their coup to take over the other two branches of government with their dictatorial decrees known as “nationwide injunctions.” In every instance in the past several months these “injunctions” have been aimed at stopping any attempts to reduce the size and power of the deep state, never to protect the constitutional liberties of the American people.

The deep state’s “supreme” court mostly serves the same purpose. This was recently on display when its “chief” justice John Roberts, who magically discovered Obamacare to be one of the delegated powers in the Constitution by calling it a “tax,” scolded President Trump for deporting several hundred members of a Central American criminal gang without first saying “Mother May I” to John Roberts.

Thomas Jefferson was alarmed during his day of the threat of judicial tyranny of this sort. He feared that it could turn the Constitution into “a thing of wax” that could be “twisted into any form” (Letter to Judge Spencer Roane, Nov. 1819). Unlike congressmen and presidents, Jefferson noted, federal judges are “more dangerous [to liberty] as they are in office for life” (Letter to a Mr. Jarvis, Sept. 1820). The federal judiciary, said Jefferson, was “the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine our Constitution . . .” (Letter to Thomas Ritchie, Sept. 1820).

Jefferson reminded anyone who inquired that the Constitution does not give the judiciary the sole right to interpret the Constitution. The executive and congressional branches, “in their own spheres,” have equal rights, he said. As president, Jefferson freed everyone imprisoned by the Adams administration’s Sedition Act which made free political speech illegal. “I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law,” he said, “because I considered . . . that law to be a nullity.” The “supreme” court “Judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment, because the power was placed in their hands . . . . But the executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, was bound to remit the execution of it” (The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 154).

“The judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government” (Letter to A. Coray, Oct. 31, 1823). Experience has shown, however, that “they were to become the most dangerous,” especially because impeachment was so scarce.

Yes, government lawyers with lifetime tenure did usurp powers not given to them by the Constitution when they began pretending that they somehow were given a monopoly of constitutional interpretation, but this idea was strongly opposed for generations by Americans in every state. The Jeffersonian position on judicial tyranny prevailed, in other words. In addition to the congress and the executive branch having the right and power to make constitutional interpretations, Jefferson said that “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,” organized in political communities at the state and local levels (The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 154).

After “chief” justice John Marshall declared the Bank of the United States to be constitutional, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bank’s recharter by saying “To this I cannot consent.” State legislatures issued declarations of nullification of myriad federal laws and government programs during the pre-Civil War era. New England states refused to participate in the War of 1812 and nullified the government’s trade embargo that was enacted by Jefferson in order to avoid another war with England after the British navy had kidnapped American sailors. South Carolina nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations by calling it unconstitutional. The Wisconsin legislature nullified the Fugitive Slave Act. Jefferson himself authored the Kentucky Resolve of 1798 that nullified the Sedition Act within the state of Kentucky. James Madison authored an almost identical Resolve for Virginia.

Jefferson and the Jeffersonians proclaimed for decades that if the day ever came when the federal government, through its judiciary, became the sole decision maker of what the limits of federal governmental powers would be, Americans would then live under a tyranny. That day finally came in April of 1865 when the Republican party succeeded in overthrowing the original constitution and its system of federalism and states’ rights, the rights of nullification and secession as checks on federal power, and most importantly, the ability of anyone but the government’s own courts to decide what everyone’s freedoms were to be.

This was celebrated by “progressives” like Woodrow Wilson who, in his book Constitutional Government in the United States (p. 178), wrote triumphantly that “The War between the States established . . . this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers.” Only a dictator and a tyrant would celebrate such a thing.

Law-and-order conservatives who fancy themselves to be constitutionalists, and who hang on every word from any black-robed deity called a “ federal judge,” are aiding and abetting the destruction of American freedom by acquiescing in the idea that no one – not even the president, let alone the people – has a right to question or disobey their decrees and “injunctions.”

The post Judicial Tyranny: Tip of the Deep State Sword appeared first on LewRockwell.

Most people rarely think about where their electricity comes from—until it’s not there. Long-term power outages remain relatively infrequent. But with aging infrastructure, ever-worsening extreme weather events, and geopolitical instability increasing, long-term blackouts are becoming more common. When a long-term power outage does hit, it can create havoc.

The last few years have shown that even long-reliable electrical grids can experience catastrophic problems—leaving many thousands of homes without power for hours and sometimes even days. With global climate change worsening, power outages are poised to become a much more common event in our daily lives.

But just because blackouts are becoming more frequent doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself. Preparation is critical to surviving a long-term power outage.

Common Reasons for a Long-Term Power Outage

Power outages can result from a whole catalog of issues, the most common being natural disasters and extreme weather. Weather-related events account for roughly 83% of all power cuts.

• Extreme weather: The most common reason for long-term power outages is when high winds, snow, ice, or extreme temperatures, such as an extended heat wave, arrive.
• Spikes in power demand: During periods of high power demand, usually in either very hot or cold weather, aging electrical grids and infrastructure can struggle to keep up.
• Power surges: A power surge is an unusually high voltage event that typically lasts for a short period. A surge can cause an outage itself or occur after utility providers restore power, potentially damaging home appliances.
• Human error: One of the worst outages in U.S. history, the Northeast Blackout of 1965, was caused by a maintenance worker incorrectly laying a protective relay on a transmission line.
• Trees/Vehicles/Animals: Fallen trees, often during storms, are a significant source of outages, while simple vehicle collisions with a utility pole can be hugely damaging. You’d also be amazed at how much damage squirrels, rats, and other animals can do to electrical equipment.
• Natural disasters: Power outages often follow in the wake of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and volcanic eruptions.

How Likely Is an Extended Power Outage?

With aging grid infrastructure unable to keep up with growing demands for electricity, power outages will likely be a factor in our lives for many years to come. With increasingly erratic weather patterns and extreme weather events due to climate change, it can sometimes feel like we are always just a few steps away from disaster.

To date, most power outages in the United States remain relatively small scale. The average person experienced eight hours of power interruptions in 2020. U.S. utility customers experienced a total of 1.33 billion outage hours, higher than in 2019 but lower than in 2018, much of it due to a series of natural disasters that year, such as Hurricane Isaias. Maine, West Virginia, and California experienced the most prolonged outages, with residents of Maine experiencing 15 hours’ worth of outages per year on average.

While there are certainly hotspots, other parts of the country see far fewer outages, with the District of Columbia coming out on top, with just 77 minutes of power interruptions each year.

In 2021, Texas suffered a major power crisis. Over 4.5M homes and businesses were left without power in the dead of winter, many for days. At least 246 people died due to the long-term power outage.

It’s easy to get into a Doomsday scenario when thinking about an extended power outage. The Northeast Blackout of 1965 affected over 30 million people. It lasted 14 hours, making it one of the most widespread outages in U.S. history. But what would happen if something like that continued for days or weeks?

The U.S. government has contingency plans for such an event that would probably see the Army and National Guard step in to prevent widespread panic.

A 14-hour outage pales compared to Venezuela’s five-day blackout in 2019, which affected 70% of the country. The results were dramatic and frequently harrowing. In hospitals, vital life-saving equipment failed, leaving medical professionals battling alone while people remained trapped in lifts, on public transport, or even in their homes.

Extended power outages in the U.S. remain relatively infrequent. Still, with an ever greater strain placed on our power grids—along with increasingly extreme weather—we will probably see more blackouts in the future. Preparation has never been more vital.

What to Do to Prepare for a Long-term Power Outage

Unless you’re living completely off-grid, it’s difficult to escape power outages altogether. But there are numerous things you can do to prepare.

Safe Drinking Water

While your water supply won’t necessarily fail during a long-term power outage, it is possible. Humans require around half a gallon of water per day to remain healthy. It’s essential to stock up on clean drinking water for you, your family, and your pets before a disaster strikes.

Food & Supplies 

Food is not as vital to the human body in the short term as water. But it will soon be a top priority during an extended power outage. Stock up sufficiently on non-perishable food, such as canned meats, fruits and vegetables, fruit bars, granola, peanut butter, and other high-energy foods that don’t require refrigeration. If you have an electric stove, keep in mind that you won’t be able to use it if you don’t have home backup power.

Remember the little things like a manual can-opener, and be aware of the necessities for good health. You might be able to survive for a while on Twinkies and chocolate bars, but it won’t be pretty.

Consider what other supplies you might need if you can’t leave your home for several days. If you rely on prescription or over-the-counter drugs—or other medical supplies—try to keep at least a week’s supply at home—if not more.

Lighting

When everything goes dark, it’s crucial to have lighting alternatives close to hand and ready to go. Keep a box containing LED lights, flashlights, and extra batteries, in an easily-accessible place. Candles have long been a go-to solution during blackouts but are not recommended as they pose a significant fire hazard.

Personal headlamps are inexpensive and give people more freedom to navigate a pitch-black environment.

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In 1971, the US abruptly went off the gold standard, and in making the public announcement, US President Richard Nixon looked into the television camera and said, “We’re all Keynesians now.”

I was a young man at the time and had previously bought gold, albeit on a very small scale, but I recall looking into the face of this delusional man and thinking, “This is not good.”

However, the world at large apparently agreed with Mister Nixon, and within a few years, the other countries also went off the gold standard, which meant that, from that point on, no currency was backed by anything other than a promise.

Party Time

It didn’t take long before countries began playing with their currencies. At one time, the German mark, the French franc, the Italian lire, and the British shilling had all been roughly equivalent in value, and four or five of any one of them was worth about a dollar.

That had already begun to change prior to 1971, but following the decoupling from gold, the governments of the world really began to see the advantages of manipulating their own currencies against the currencies of other nations.

From that point on, a currency note from any country, which was already no more than an “I owe you,” was increasingly degraded to an “I owe you an undetermined and fluctuating amount.”

This fixation with monetary manipulation began much like the 1960s youths’ experimentation with drugs, and by the millennium, had morphed into something more akin to heroin addiction. Unfortunately, those who had become the addicts were the national leaders in finance and politics.

Well, here we are, in the second decade of the millennium. The party has deteriorated and is soon to come to a bad end.

As we get closer, those of us who have, for many years, predicted an eventual realisation that Mister Keynes and Mister Nixon were dead wrong and that the world will once again look to gold are, at this late date, gaining a bit of traction.

We’re seeing an increase in the number of people who recognise that all fiat currencies eventually come to an end and gold will continue to shine.

But there are two remaining questions that have even the best of prognosticators puzzling.

1. What Will the Role of Gold Be in the Future?

When currencies collapse, will there be an immediate and complete switch to gold? Unlikely.

Will further fiat currencies be put forward as solutions to paper money? Almost definitely.

Will future currencies be backed by gold? Probably, especially as so many governments and banking institutions are quietly scrambling to buy gold whilst trying not to let on the extent of their stockpiling.

Will gold-backed currencies stabilise money for the rest of our lives? Quite unlikely.

Even those countries who may agree to audits to demonstrate they own the gold they claim to own will, at some point in the future, look for ways to “do a Nixon” and once again get off the gold standard. (The short-term benefits of fiddling with currency is too tempting.)

2. Who’s Got the Gold?

Currencies come and go in the world with remarkable frequency (the last hundred years has been witness to over twenty hyperinflations worldwide).

In that quiet scrambling we were talking about, no one is being really truthful about how much gold they have. In addition, even between the foremost experts on the subject (and here, I refer not to the pundits on television, but to those economists that I personally hold in the highest regard), there is broad speculation as to who holds what.

One school of thought has it that, although the US has long claimed that it possesses roughly 8,000 tonnes of gold in Fort Knox, there has not been an audit of Fort Knox since 1953. (That’s not encouraging.) Is it 8,000 tonnes? 4,000? None? We’re unlikely to ever get a truthful answer on this question.

In addition, the US has held roughly 6,000 tonnes of gold for European countries since the Cold War.

Now that the US has become the world’s foremost debtor nation, Europe is getting a bit antsy, and some are asking to have it back. In response, the Federal Reserve has sent Germany a small portion of their gold but avoids shipping the remainder and denies them even the ability to inspect the remainder. (Again, not encouraging.)

On the other hand, we have equally astute economists—US government insiders—who state that they are fairly certain the gold is there—in both Fort Knox and the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s underground vault. In the latter case, they state that, although much or all of the gold has been leased to the bullion banks, it has never left the building.

What does this mean to the rightful owners? There are multiple legitimate claims on the very same bars of gold.

Might the Fed burn the rightful owners—the European nations—and burn the bullion banks? Might they just confiscate the gold (assuming it’s still there) to create a new gold-backed currency for the US, and thumb their collective noses to all other claimants?

And does the People’s Bank of China hold roughly 2,500 tonnes of gold, as has been suggested? Or do they hold 5,000, or even more? Certainly, it’s to their advantage to claim the lowest amount that might be believable at present. Some US government insiders have insisted that the low number is the true number.

The argument over this question may seem moot, but it is not. “Who has the gold” may very well decide which countries will recover from the currency crashes with their skin still on.

Whoever holds the most gold will hold the most real wealth and, by extension, gain the most prominent seat at the bargaining table for decades to come. Whether that table will be the IMF, the new AAIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), or any future central economic entity, the future will go to the player with the most metal, as he will be able to create the most currency, in whatever form it may take.

Reprinted with permission from International Man.

The post Who’s Got the Gold? appeared first on LewRockwell.

When Karol Wojtyła stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in 1978 as John Paul II, he was only 58. Though that seemed unusual at the time, the previous century saw Pius IX elected at 54. Although we aren’t likely to see a pope as young as 20-year-old Benedict IX, elected in 1031, it’s safe to say that Pius and John Paul have broken the mold and made it possible for virtually anyone to be elected to the See of Peter.

Elderly popes had been the norm for several reasons. Wisdom, of course, comes with age. So does a proven track record. Near-octogenarians have also been elected as “stop-gaps,” such as John XXIII who followed upon the 20-year reign of Pius XII. Although il papa buono occupied the throne for less than five years, he rocked the Barque of Peter by convoking an ecumenical council now known as Vatican II.

Pope Clement X, elected just shy of his 80th birthday in 1670, had enough vigor to pass the five-year mark and preside over the Holy Year of 1675 before dying the following year. Albino Luciani, 65 when elected as John Paul I in 1978, was not meant to be a stopgap, but still, he only lasted 33 days. Non si sa mai, as the Italians say (“you just never know”).

By the time Karol Wojtyła entered the Sistine Chapel in October of 1978, he had been a cardinal for over a decade and was among the electors who chose John Paul I just two months earlier. Wojtyła wasn’t well-known, but he certainly was not unknown. The average age of the College at that time was 67, and one of the Archbishop of Kraków’s main contenders, Giovanni Benelli, Archbishop of Florence, was only 56. The other, Giuseppe Siri, was already 72.

St. John Paul II, fluent in eight languages, was a splendid communicator and brilliant philosopher. He was also a goalie, a skier, and an avid outdoorsman. The Church adored him precisely because he acted younger than his age. His remarkable story was translated into gripping comic books that I avidly consumed as an 8-year-old growing up in Chicago, the largest Polish metropolis outside of Poland. There was no reason to think he would be leaving anytime soon. And indeed, his 27-year pontificate will go down in history as one of the most prolific.

Now, 20 years later, is it time for another young pope? Setting Paolo Sorrentino’s television drama aside, let’s look at two candidates.

Giorgio Marengo, I.M.C, is currently Apostolic Prefect of Ulaanbaatar, a missionary territory covering all 600,000 square miles of Mongolia. The country is the 19th largest by area but home to only 3.5 million, 1,500 of whom are Catholic. That’s almost a 10,000 percent increase over 30 years thanks to the fall of communism and the assiduous work of missionaries such as the Consolata, a religious congregation founded by Blessed Giuseppe Allamano in 1901.

Two years after his priestly ordination, Fr. Marengo was sent to Mongolia along with four Consolata comrades. He spent 14 years in Arvaikheer, 280 miles southwest of the capital, where he established a small parish and immersed himself in charitable work. Appointed shepherd of those hinterlands by Francis in 2020, His Eminence has increased the number of priests in Mongolia to about 25. The Prefecture is also blessed with 30 religious men and 30 women.

I and others who studied alongside Giorgio at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the late 1990s were impressed with his missionary heart and his insatiable desire to learn about other cultures and religions. He describes his approach to evangelization as “sussurrare il Vangelo” (“to whisper the Gospel”), meaning to build trust with the Buddhist natives and form relationships that open the door to a personal sharing of faith. If the cardinals want a missionary evangelist with extensive experience in interreligious dialogue and the heart of a pastor, Giorgio is their man.

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In January of 2025, President Trump took office. The week of January 13-20, Brooklyn was still in chaos. So was Manhattan. It was a chaos I have sought to describe in past essays, but things had reached a crescendo.

All of the world, it seemed, had descended upon the Five Boroughs.

From the floodgates that opened in 2022, and right up until Inauguration Day, Brooklyn and Manhattan had been under siege. I had never seen anything like it.

Due to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal newcomers, with thousands more arriving every day, the city had been transformed. There was no coherent culture, social contract, understanding of how one gets through a day. It was a circus of confusion, entitlement, aggression and chaos, all of it performed upside-down.

These millions had been ‘magicked’ to this city, then housed, cosseted, clothed and fed, on the dime of the Biden administration (meaning: on our taxpayer dime) and with the funding of the United Nations.

Manhattan and Brooklyn had been thronged with strangers – -people who were not the usual newcomers to the city who arrive legally, have family or business here, and then set about soberly to learn the language, seek out a job, pay taxes, raise kids, and settle into an American life. Legal immigrants in the past have been self-selected; they have thought for a long time about immigrating to America, taken steps to do so under the law, planned and prepared. They have been self-selected in the past, too, because it is their own drive or initiative, without external assistance, that led them to make it lawfully to our shores.

In contrast – and this is not a racist or even ethnocentric observation; it is about people differently situated, differently motivated — the millions abruptly, unlawfully streamed among us, were indeed deeply, truly strangers. Unlike earlier waves of legal immigrants, these folks were not self-selecting, self-propelled, or self-assisted in their journeys. They were people who seemed to have been scooped out of whole villages far elsewhere; people who had been doing other things entirely, making other plans altogether; and who then had been simply lifted up into space, transported, transplanted. They were indeed hoisted up out of other lives, other communities, other sensibilities, virtually other timelines, and transported hither, via the immensely powerful assistance of some of the most massive forces on earth.

Given the massive apparatus built up on three staging nations in order thus to transport this tide of humanity – that is to say, the immense powers and the millions of dollars deployed by the US State Department and by the UN, which I chronicled in my essay “What is a Culture?” — this sense of chaos and alienation that engulfed the city was not surprising.

Their arrival created an immense cultural strain. According to “City & State: New York”:

“More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022, many hailing from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, though a significant number have also come from China and countries in Africa. City officials, advocacy groups, school communities, nonprofits and a bevy of elected officials have mobilized to welcome the ongoing flow of new arrivals, but it’s been a massive – and costly – undertaking.

In those two-and-a-half years, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has stood up more than 200 emergency shelter sites, enrolled tens of thousands of migrant children in schools, gone to court to amend its right to shelter obligations, fought for federal and state funding to help handle the costs of providing services, and sued bus companies sending migrants from the border.”

The numbers involved in funding this transfer of humans, were staggering: In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams planned to spend $4.3 Billion of the city’s budget, in just one year, on “welcoming” the illegal immigrants. The Biden administration poured Federal money into the effort as well, in astonishing amounts:

“June 7, 2023: Building on the roughly $30 million in federal funding offered in May, the Biden administration agreed to provide the city with an additional $104.6 million to help officials manage the influx of migrants through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter Services Program.”

By August of 2023, the grift was out of control: Mayor Adams expected to spend “$12 billion to house and care for migrant arrivals” for the upcoming three years, and Attorney General Letitia James launched an investigation into DocGo, a for-profit medical company, which had been awarded a $432 million no-bid contract to provide medical care to illegal immigrants (in the media of the bad days of 2023, these groups are inaccurately described as “asylum-seekers”).

Events of 2024 were as unbelievable, when it came to the Biden administration’s policies that simply opened doors to millions of illegal newcomers, then paid for their every need:

“June 28, 2024: Biden extends Temporary Protected Status to around 300,000 Haitians living in the U.S.

July 2, 2024: The city expands a pilot program to over 7,300 migrant families staying in city-funded hotels, pledging to give them debit cards to buy their own food.”

The perception that Americans were starting to have by that time — that these numbers represented “an invasion” and that illegal newcomers were being given debit cards, free housing, free medical care and other benefits unavailable to American citizens — was true.

After Election Day, the about-face in policies in New York related to illegal immigrants, was also dramatic:

“Nov. 7, 2024: The city moves to end the controversial program that provided debit cards to migrant families so they could buy food and other essentials. […]

Dec. 4, 2024: News breaks that the city is racing to remove National Guard members from migrant shelters ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Dec. 10, 2024: The city announces plans to shut down at least two dozen migrant shelters across the city and upstate by the end of March, including the sweeping family shelter at Floyd Bennett Field. The latter, which is on federal land, is expected to close by Jan. 15 – a few days before Trump’s inauguration.

Dec. 12, 2024: After meeting with Trump’s incoming “border czar” in early December, Adams told reporters that he and Tom Homan are on the same page. “We’re going to protect the rights of immigrants in this city that are hard-working, giving back to the city in a real way,” Adams said. “We’re not going to be a safe haven for those who commit repeated, violent crimes against innocent migrants, immigrants and long standing New Yorkers.”

We will look back on 2022-2024 with astonishment. President Trump has referred to the 30 million illegal entrants to our nation as an “invasion”, and he is right to do so. It is clear now, not just in the United States and Canada, but throughout Western Europe, that “Mr Global” has weaponized immigration to destroy existing cultures, and make war on sovereign nations — a cynical enough misuse of the bodies of millions of people; people who are often without options, to start with.

This was a marginalized, “right-wing” view a year ago, but it is now a common perception throughout the West and across political perspectives. There is no escaping this conclusion.

By transplanting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, from nations that are themselves broken in many ways, to the heart of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Biden administration created an atmosphere of chaos, incomprehension and fear.

What were we importing in such vast, unassimilable numbers? Attitudes and cultures alien to our own.

Haiti is a failed state. According to international think tanks, there is a nearly complete collapse of civil society and national governance in Haiti. Informally, when you talk to Haitian legal immigrants to this country, they describe the way in which crime, plunder and corruption have made what was once a beautiful, safe country, now unlivable; everyone who can leave, they say, has fled.

China is also a source of the “Biden invasion” numbers. This is frankly weird. People in Communist China cannot just up and leave. They need permission from the Chinese Communist Party:

“Article 5. Chinese citizens who desire to leave the country for private purposes shall apply to the public security organs of the city or county in which their residence is registered. Approval shall be granted except in cases prescribed in Article 8 of this Law.

The public security organs shall decide, within a specified time, whether to approve or disapprove the citizens’ applications for leaving the country for private purposes, and shall notify the applicants accordingly.”

The above is from China’s legal codes. So that means that the thousands and thousands of Chinese nationals who simply appeared in the United States from 2022-2024, were sent on their way by our existential adversaries — people who want to destroy the United States as a superpower!

Then there are the illegal immigrants from nations such as Afghanistan, Yemen, and other MENA — (“Middle Eastern and North African”) — Muslim countries. The immigration-friendly Migration Policy Institute estimates that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 illegal immigrants to the United States from MENA nations alone! While these are not failed states, they are nations that are often theocracies with values very different from our own. Today in Afghanistan, women have been virtually erased from public life by the Taliban, and are forbidden even from singing. In Yemen, according to the advocacy organization Human Rights Watch, though women have legal rights on paper, “[t]he authorities across Yemen are increasingly restricting women’s freedom of movement […] The restrictions have harmed women’s ability to access work, education, and health care, and are a form of discrimination.” In Algeria, 14% of women participate in the labor force, versus 67 per cent of men, and they are subject to Sharia law, which treats them unequally to men: “Algerian women are subject to the family code (Sharia law), a retrograde and patriarchal interpretation of Islamic law passed in 1984 by the Popular National Assembly, under the pressure of religious and conservative representatives. On the whole, laws under the family code serve to reinforce the domination of men over women, contradicting Article 29 of the Algerian constitution […]”

I could go on and on. The bottom line is that it is not racist or even ethnocentric, to object passionately to the “invasion” of the United States, or any Western country (or any country), by illegal immigrants. When you import people in large groups, you also import their cultures. We need to face the fact that the freedom, rule of law, relative peaceableness, and high level of civil society functioning, of Western nations, is an incredible achievement and an incredible gift. When you import millions of people who are not acculturated to these norms and rules, you also will import the reflexes and expectations of those who live in failed states, or under corrupt rulers, tyrannical or unequal laws, and oppressive theocracies. You simply cannot sustain the high level of functioning civil society, the peaceableness, rule of law, legal equality, etc, that characterize the West, under these conditions. And we need to stop being shy about saying so aloud.

Read the Whole Article

The post President Trump’s New York appeared first on LewRockwell.

This interview began with the information available about President Kennedy’s assassination.  I made the point that there is more conclusive evidence that JFK’s assassination was the result of a Joint Chiefs-CIA-Secret Service plot in James W. Douglass’ book, JFK and the Unspeakable, than there is in the released CIA files.  The CIA is not going to keep a dossier of its own crimes.

The discussion moved on to alternative explanations, such as President Kennedy was assassinated by Israel, because he was putting pressure to prevent Israel from producing nuclear weapons. The morning of my interview by Larry, Ron Unz blamed Israel in his interview by Mike Whitney.  I noted that Israel had no ability or cause to alter an official autopsy or ability to send Jack Ruby into a Dallas jail to shoot Oswald before he could talk.

(Note to the Israel Lobby:  If I were the anti-semite you say I am, would I absolve Israel of murdering a loved and respected American President? The Israel Lobby is so incompetent that it creates anti-semites by calling honest people who tell the truth anti-semites. The crazy way the Israel Lobby works is that you have to be a liar for Israel to avoid the designation of “anti-semite.”)

From Israel as the culprit we moved on to CIA cover stories, how it always has one ready to plant in the media the minute a CIA operation occurs, and a half dozen or more cover stories to be implanted when the original wears out.  As the CIA’s Director of Counterintelligence told me, as soon as the original story is worn out by contrary evidence, the CIA releases two or more other cover stories, and commentators argue about which of the other cover stories is the correct one, and the distance from the real event widens. Angleton said that as time passes, not even the CIA knows what really happened.

Those of us on the secret presidential committee were asked to keep it quiet, but we didn’t have to do so forever.  As decades passed, people involved died, and the world changed, I decided it was a disservice to my country to let information die with me.  Perhaps the few knowledgable Americans who remain will make use of it.

Here is the interview:

The post The JFK Released CIA Assassination Files appeared first on LewRockwell.

[This article was originally published in Serbian.]

Michel Chossudovsky, professor of economics from the University of Ottawa and founder of the Centre for Research on Globalization, said on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of the beginning of the NATO aggression against FR Yugoslavia that it was the first official NATO war against a sovereign country, but not the last, because that war agenda was later used in various wars, and in which media propaganda played a big role, which shows its face even today when it comes to Ukraine.

Chossudovsky pointed out for Tanjug that in the case of the bombing of the FRY, the propaganda machinery was well organized, but also that the war was a brutal and merciless action, planned years before, which, among other things, is confirmed by the construction of the US military base Bondsteel in occupied Kosovo, which many see as a strategic support for the US presence in this region.

“When you have US President Donald Trump, who makes statements that he wants to reduce military spending by billions and billions of dollars, and who is reticent about NATO’s role in American military bases, which is the case with Bondsteel, I think it would be appropriate for the Government of Serbia to kindly send a note to Washington, citing Trump’s concerns about military spending,” Chossudovsky said.

According to him, the note should say that Bondstyle is a burden for Serbia, a burden for the so-called Kosovo and for Washington, that “we want to cooperate” and that “we would like that base to be closed”.

He added that this would be a position in line with the rhetoric of the US president, who even said he would close military bases in Europe.

“And there you have an opportunity,” Chossudovsky said, pointing out that the relationship between the US and NATO is complex, but also that NATO does not actually decide on anything, and that all major decisions go through the Pentagon and very complex command structures.

Serbia, as he emphasized, must regain control over AP KiM.

Chossudovsky emphasized that first of all, that territory is not a state, but a province of Serbia, which was occupied by General Michael Jackson, who had a criminal record in Great Britain, that is, Hashim Thaci, a man involved in the drug trade, who was sent to The Hague only after 20 years.

According to him, Serbia, by remaining neutral in relations with Russia and the USA, is able to play a role in creating peace.

That is why, as he stated, it was better that the negotiations between Putin and Trump took place in Belgrade, and not in Saudi Arabia.

“Here is a neutral territory, not in the same way as Switzerland. They are very biased. Your president (Aleksandar Vučić) is very insightful in understanding geopolitics. We looked at one of his earlier speeches, where he says that if we do not make certain decisions, it is the road to disaster. I think he is a powerful voice and maybe he should also play a role in the peace operation, because he has a dialogue with the EU, Washington and Moscow,” Chossudovsky assessed and recalled that Serbia has always declared itself to be neutral, which it inherited from the SFRY, which was non-aligned and for that reason also strategically important for those who want to build empires.

“It was the first NATO war, but not the last”

In recalling March 24, 1999, Chossudovsky pointed out that this war against the truth was waged in conjunction with the so-called criminal elements. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which cooperated with the American and German intelligence services.

“It was the first NATO war, but not the last NATO war, because all the ingredients of that war were entered into the data banks of the upcoming conquest plans in different countries. And the war agenda from 1999 was used in various wars set in different contexts, different cultures, but, at the end of the day, it is always the coordination of military action with economic activities, regime change, propaganda…” said Chossudovsky.

He emphasized that the bombing of FRY was a criminal act.

“The bombing of the FRY was an illegal and criminal act, in which the media played a very important role. The Western media are complicit, because they covered up the crimes,” Chosudovski added and recalled the 1998 film “The Valley”, sponsored by NATO, which was the justification for the horrors of the war in Kosovo.

“There were fake pictures… They showed that the Serbs were the ones killing the Albanians, and it was sponsored with the support of the KLA, and that documentary was then distributed especially in Western countries. It was a way to show that the Serbs were killing people… and that is why, obviously, this fabricated fact that the KLA was there to ‘save’ everything from the Serbs. Despite the fact that they themselves were connected to organized crime and Al Qaeda, and with the support of the media, it had legitimacy,” said Chossudovsky.

That film must be carefully analyzed, assessed Chosudovski, who wrote for “Mond Diplomatic” at the time, but, as he added, stopped the cooperation when the editors refused to publish an article presenting evidence that one of the key actors in the KiM Hashim Thaci has a criminal record.

“It is similar with Ukraine, because there is not a single newspaper in the Western world that would write that the Government of Ukraine is neo-Nazi,” Chossudovsky said.

“The CIA financed Al Qaeda, which was connected to the KLA”

“They attacked Serbia, i.e. FR Yugoslavia, under the pretext of humanitarian intervention, with strong condemnation and demonization of President Slobodan Milosevic, but also of the entire nation,” said Chossudovsky, who, he says, spoke with Milosevic in The Hague and knew “that he was being poisoned at the Tribunal.”

“People in Serbia should understand that Milošević died for his people,” said Chossudovsky, who began to deal with the SFRY issue in the context of all events in the economic field during the eighties of the last century.

He reminded that in Yugoslavia the peak of the economic crisis was in January 1990, which led to what was called a civil war, although, as he claims, it was not a civil war.

“There were two elements that I think are key – one is the Western media and how they lied and covered up the crimes committed by NATO forces. The other element is the so-called left, the ‘progressive’ parties in the USA and Western Europe. They even portrayed KLA members as ‘freedom fighters’, they went so far as to quote Marx and Lenin in that context. They even said that the KLA was connected to organized crime, but they justified that it was necessary to carried out a revolution,” Chossudovsky said.

He believes that Milošević’s legacy is very important, because he, above all, as he stated, did not play their game and acted on behalf of the people of Serbia and his country.

“Everyone knows that the CIA financed Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda was connected to the so-called KLA,” Chossudovsky said, among other things.

[This article was originally published in Serbian.]

The original source of this article is Borba

The post The NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia Was a Criminal Act, Western Media Were Accomplices, Covering Up the Crimes of NATO and the KLA appeared first on LewRockwell.

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox.  Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged fro the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

The post Do You Think You’ll Ever Know, Now That You Have Handed Your Mind to the Machine? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Today, I spent hours on the phone and on the website of Microsoft and its subsidiary Skype trying to close my $2.99 monthly subscription to Skype which is automatically charged to my credit card account, but there is no human (only an automated) chatbox at their website, and no human available on any of the three listed phone numbers for Microsoft Customer Service (1-855-270-0615, 1-800-865-9408, 1-800-642-7676), all of which are fully automated and ultimately hang up on the caller (“Goodbye.”) if the caller has said to their robot something like: I’ve tried each one of your recommended pathways for help, but all are fully automated and none succeeded, none addressed my problem — none enable me to cancel my subscription — and so I need now to speak to a person, a real human, to deal with my need to stop being on auto-pay to Microsoft — simply to cancel my “subscription.” I then (being left with no alternative) phoned my credit card’s customer service, and they said that the only way that they would be able to block Microsoft from charging my account would be after they have already billed me the $2.99, at which point I could “dispute” the charge and MAYBE block further such charges from Microsoft/Skype. Based upon my previous experience with such matters — when the vendor’s allegations were taken unquestioningly as true and mine were not (even though I had presented proof, but the vendor provided none at all) — my assumption now is that the only way to get Microsoft to not extract $2.99 per month will be for me to trash this credit-card account and to use a different one (as I had done with regard to that prior credit card matter, regarding the earlier such incident). All of this has been necessary in order for me to stop being billed by Skype, which, after my having tried it for a month, I have never yet been able to place even a single call through to anyone. It’s totally unusable by me — and there is no customer service for help, but only their 100% robotized chatbox and likewise fully automated phone ‘help’ (via all three of those 800 numbers, all of which provide the same 100% automated routine up through their final and shocking abrupt “Goodbye”). Microsoft’s system is automated thievery, with no recourse and no accountability. But that has become fairly normal in America.

I have run into so many similar situations lately, so that I now recognize that not only is it now possible in the U.S. for large corporations to, basically, rob people and have no accountability for doing so (our consumer-fraud laws now have virtually, if not totally, zero enforcement), but this is now the norm in, at least, the United States — a country that is now brazenly, and only, for the owners of corporations, against the public — against consumers, and against workers. This isn’t merely Trump and the Republicans; it is also Biden and the Democrats — BOTH of America’s billionaires-controlled Parties. The only real difference between the two is the rhetoric: the Democrats are more hypocritical about it — they refuse to know that ‘their’ Party is ALSO part of the scam. It’s not their Party; it — like with the Republicans — belongs to only its billionaires.

I’m not saying that EVERY large U.S. corporation is now structured so as to rob the public (Apple, for example, isn’t, at least not YET), but I am saying that perhaps the majority of them now are. As recently as a decade ago, only few were like that — and there was at least some degree of federal and state enforcement against consumer frauds. (Now there isn’t — those days are gone.)

In international affairs, the same is true. Unaccountable constant deceit rules here too. For example: On 5 May 2015, Chicago Review headlined “Myth Busting: Robert Pape on ISIS, suicide terrorism, and U.S. Foreign Policy” and interviewed the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, who had done the first and only systematic study “of suicide attacks around the world from the early 1980s to 2003,” and he said that “I was really struck that half the suicide attacks were secular. I began to look at the patterns and I noticed that they were tightly clustered, both in where they occurred and the timing, and that 95 percent of the suicide attacks were in response to a military occupation.” Colonialism — imperialism — was the overwhelmingly dominant reason why the vast majority of these terrorist incidents had been perpetrated; and, moreover, these are the worst, the most dangerous, types of terrorist attacks, because “The average suicide attack kills 10 people, whereas the average non-suicide attack, even in the very same countries, typically kills one person. So they’re tactically [ten times more] effective.” He was especially condemnatory of The Atlantic’s March 2015 cover story, “What ISIS Really Wants”, by Graeme Wood, of Yale’s Political Science Department (who has since become notorious for his misrepresentations of news-events and of history): “I think it’s just wrong. Wood is painting a picture of ISIS as all religious, all the time. Interestingly in the second section he is talking about how the main difference with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda is that ISIS really wants territory.” Well, now that al-Qaeda, with crucial help from the U.S., Turkey, Qatar, and the Sauds, has taken over Syria and thus shows that it TOO “really wants territory,” this is yet further confirmation of the study that Pape did, which is virtually ignored by not only the U.S.-and-allied press (such as The Atlantic) but by their Governments. The fish rots from the head down. Consequently, the U.S. empire’s press is probably the world’s most corrupt (dishonest — heavily censored) of all. (Interestingly, Pape Himself, in that interview, wasn’t, in any way, critical of imperialism — not even because he had established that imperialism causes terrorism. Maybe he knew that, if he were critical of imperialism, that would jeopardize his career, since American imperialism — “neoconservatism” — is what all of America’s billionaires demand from the politicians whose careers they fund, and promote in their news-media. Nonetheless, Pape has been courageous to continue challenging — with empirical studies — also OTHER commonly spreaded lies by the neoconservatives.)

And this is how and why such atrocities as America’s rapes of Iraq and of Ukraine have been carried out and constantly lied about.

And it is also the reason why, whereas the American public want America’s ‘Defense’ (Aggression) Department to be cut the most, the U.S. Government is now in the process of cutting the most Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and services to the poor — the very same areas that the U.S. public want to be cut the least, or even be increased. Corruption now reigns without any effective challenge in America.

This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.

The post How Corrupt Is America Now? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Lawmakers who attended the recent Aspen Security Forum warned that DNA testing services to identify ancestry could be fronts to harvest information for ethnicity-tailored bioweapons programs.

U.S. Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, is one such lawmaker who says there are already bioweapons programs currently in development that are “designed to target specific people,” and that this would not have been possible if not for DNA testing services.

“That’s what this is, where you can actually take someone’s DNA, take their medical profile, and you can target a biological weapon that will kill that person or take them off the battlefield or make them inoperable,” Crow stated.

Since personal data privacy pretty much went out the window ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, young people today have “very little expectation of privacy,” which explains why many of them are eager to participate in data mining fronts like 23andMe.

“People will very rapidly spit into a cup and send it to 23andMe and get really interesting data about their background,” Crow said. “And guess what? Their DNA is now owned by a private company. It can be sold off with very little intellectual property protection or privacy protection.”

Pentagon a major player in DNA harvesting and biological weapons development programs

Crow wants the United States to create a new set of guidelines for the protection of personal health data because in his view, “that data is actually going to be procured and collected by our adversaries for the development of these systems.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin agrees, having stated back in 2017 that biological samples were being harvested “purposefully and professionally” all over Russia by various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups for unknown purposes.

The Pentagon (Pentagram), meanwhile, is actively collecting DNA and using it to develop biological weapons, which is exactly what Putin is worried about – and could be one of the reasons why Putin invaded Ukraine and is now challenging the Western globalist matrix of control.

Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force, announced back in May that the Pentagon has “significantly expanded its research potential not only in the field of creating biological weapons, but also obtaining information about antibiotic resistance and the presence of antibodies to certain diseases in populations of specific regions.”

The Pentagon is also involved, Russia says, in funding and developing biolaboratories throughout Ukraine, having poured some $224 million into the country for such purposes between 2005 and early 2022.

After initially denying the existence of these biolabs, the globalist controllers of the United States now admit that there are, in fact, 46 biological research facilities littering the Ukrainian landscape, but that they are supposedly being used for a “peaceful public health project.”

Anyone who says otherwise, insist U.S. officials, is “spreading disinformation and sowing mistrust.” Such disinformation spreaders include Russia, China and other enemies of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is in agreement with Crow that customized bioweapons made from harvested DNA are a threat. A member of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities and Armed Services Committee, Ernst says such bioweapons could be used to target livestock and crops throughout America.

“There’s a number of ways we can look at biological weapons and the need to make sure not only are we securing human beings, but then also the food that will sustain us,” she is quoted as saying.

U.S. legislators are particularly concerned about genetically engineered (GMO) crops, which China and other countries could target for destruction – which could actually be a good thing for Americans.

This originally appeared on Natural News.

The post DNA Testing Kits Are a Scam To Develop Ethnic-Specific Bioweapons appeared first on LewRockwell.

The more I study science, and particularly medicine, the more I come to see how often fundamental facts end up being changed so that a profitable industry can be created. Recently I showed how this happened with blood pressure, as rather than causing arterial damage, high blood pressure is a response to arterial damage that ensures damaged arteries can still bring blood to the tissues and, in turn, rather than helping patients, aggressively lowering blood pressure can be quite harmful. In this article, I will look at the other half of the coin, the Great Cholesterol Scam—something that harms so many Americans it was recently discussed by Comedian Jimmy Dore.

In addition to doctors being forced to follow these guidelines, patients often are too. Doctors often retaliate against patients who do not take statins (similar to how unvaccinated patients were reprehensibly denied essential medical care during COVID-19). Employers sometimes require cholesterol numbers to meet a certain threshold for employment (although they never did anything on the scale of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates placed on workers around America). Similarly, life insurance policies often penalize those with “unsafe” cholesterol numbers.

Read the Whole Article

The post Why Are Statins so Dangerous? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Gail Appel:

Illegals aren’t eligible for Social Security. How theHell  did the government miss this?

They didn’t. They issued the cards. But America is the “Shining City On The Hill”. Not a Third World Dictatorship rife with corruption. It’s the land of promise!

So long as you’re an illegal alien and not a har-working American who’s taxpayer dollars are used to fund illegals.

See here.

The post I0,000 illegals given the same Social Security number. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Jerome Barber:

Why am I NOT surprised?  Listen to her own words.

See here.

The post Two-Faced Tulsi Gabbard appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Jacobin

The post The European Union Is Endorsing Israel’s Attack on Gaza appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Wayne Goodfellow:

Canada is about to discover Mark Carney is the man with the reverse Midas touch. After ten years of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, Canadians are referring to these years as the lost decade of stagnant growth, high inflation, exploding debt, a plummeting Canadian dollar, increased taxes including a carbon tax, unaffordable housing, mass immigration, higher crime rates and a failing health care system. Another five years under Trudeau’s mentor, Mark Carney, may be enough time to destroy what was once a proud and confident Canada. 

See here.

The post Mark Carney is the man with the reverse Midas touch appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Vicki Marzullo. 

JFK released documents.

The post CIA Evil Revealed in JFK Release appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

Leo’s Newsletter

The post Trump makes astonishing statement about U.S. joining British Commonwealth of Nations as ‘associate member’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Writes Ginny Garner:

Lew,

On March 1 Palestinian director Hamdan Ballal won the Oscar for the feature film documentary No Other Land. A few weeks later he was attacked by masked Israeli settlers and kidnapped by the Israel Defense Force.: 

See here.

The post Israel Kidnaps Academy Award Winning Palestinian Fillmmaker appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

AP News

The post Oscar-winning Palestinian director is attacked by Israeli settlers and detained by the army appeared first on LewRockwell.