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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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The post How Young May the Next Pope Be? appeared first on LewRockwell.

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.

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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.

The post ‘Signal-gate’: Trump Team Brings Neocon Journo Into Yemen Attack Planning Sessions? appeared first on LewRockwell.

America’s Untold Stories
With Eric Hunley and Mark Groubert

Mark Lane Exposed the Truth About JFK’s Assassination

Join Mark Groubert and Eric Hunley in this captivating episode of America’s Untold Stories as they delve into the life and legacy of Mark Lane, the bold attorney and author of Rush to Judgment. As the first major public figure to openly challenge the Warren Commission’s conclusions, Lane helped spark decades of debate over the JFK assassination and became a lightning rod for controversy.

In this compelling deep dive, Groubert and Hunley explore who Mark Lane truly was — beyond the courtroom and beyond the pages of his famous book. Through behind-the-scenes stories, legal insights, and historical context, the episode unpacks Lane’s motivations, legal battles, personal convictions, and the cultural storm he helped ignite.

What you’ll learn in this episode:
• Why Lane wrote Rush to Judgment and how it shifted the public narrative on JFK
• Lane’s early influences and how they shaped his pursuit of justice
• The controversies that surrounded Lane’s career, from civil rights activism to high-profile clients
• The enduring impact of Lane’s work on government accountability and modern skepticism

Whether you’re a JFK researcher, legal enthusiast, or just curious about the roots of American distrust in official narratives — this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

The post America’s Untold Stories: Mark Lane Exposed the Truth About JFK’s Assassination appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Cradle

The post Gaza ceasefire talks ‘collapse’ after Israel rejects all proposals appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

The Libertarian Institute

The post Israel’s Lobby Launches Preemptive War on Thomas Massie appeared first on LewRockwell.