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Conspiracies of Silence and Blackmail

5/30/2025

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The DOJ's investigations on the Epstein Files and Trump's shooting are a bad joke.

Ohio Barbarian
May 29, 2025

After Trump was re-elected, he promised to release the Epstein Files. They have been reviewed by his pretty blond Attorney General, his crazy-eyed FBI Director, and his podcaster cum Deputy FBI Director, and they all assure us they have read every line of the official reports and the only possible conclusion is that Epstein committed suicide.

It must be true. How can you not believe anyone with eyes like this?
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Nope, nothing to see here. Move along. The problem is that not a single Trump-supporting podcaster or influencer who is not now on the Federal payroll believes it. Not Tucker Carlson, not Alex Jones, not anyone with an even partially functioning brain.

Then there’s this little thing that happened on my birthday last year.
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Patel promised Fox News “complete transparency” less than two weeks ago, but so far nothing has been presented with any transparency at all, except for the cellphone camera images that were livestreamed that day.

As far as I can tell, there has been no investigation into how the Secret Service allowed a young punk with a rifle on to the roof of a building with a clear shot at the stage, or into Biden’s Secret Service Director herself, or the organization in general in spite of its obvious failure to do its job here.

In fact, there are Democrats out there saying the shooting was faked, never mind the fact that a man standing behind Trump died. This guy. Fireman Corey Comperatore, who took the bullet intended for Trump only because Trump turned at the last second to admire himself on the Jumbotron.
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This man is dead, murdered, but we and his family still don't know all the reasons why, and Trump's own FBI and Secret Service seem none too interested in finding those reasons.  

Neither does the press. It is as if we are supposed to forget Corey Comperatore ever existed, or maybe that he managed to shoot himself at long range, just as Jeffrey Epstein “unquestioningly” hanged himself as Patel and his steroidy-looking sidekick now tell us to believe.
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When was the last time you saw a story on either of these two Unexplained Events? When was the last time you thought about either one? If your answer is “I don’t know,” then you are in the majority, and now you know that our Powers-That-Be, and that most definitely includes the Trump Dept. of Justice, want you to forget about both.

Don’t.

We are supposed to forget that Epstein was a Mossad asset who owned an island and stocked it with young girls for both the entertainment and blackmail of some of the most powerful people on the planet.

We are supposed to forget there is a strong possibility one faction of our kleptocracy tried to assassinate a major presidential candidate just last summer.
And we aren’t supposed to notice that the same people who were calling for full investigations of both incidents last year are now in charge of those same investigations and claiming there just isn’t anything to see in either case.

It’s almost as if they were threatened or bribed, or both. It’s almost as if there is a conspiracy of silence.

It’s almost as if, since Trump was elected, that nothing has fundamentally changed.
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US Veterans Fast Against Israel’s Starvation of Gaza

5/30/2025

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Fasters are demanding full humanitarian aid to Gaza under U.N. authority and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, Marjorie Cohn reports.
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Members of Veterans For Peace begin the first week of a 40-day fast in support of Gaza on May 27. (Veterans for Peace via X)
As the death toll of Palestinians continues to rise and more than a half a million people in Gaza are on the brink of starvation, U.S.-based Veterans For Peace and several allied organizations have launched a 40-day “Fast for Gaza.”

From May 22 to June 30, 600 people in the U.S. and abroad are fasting and demanding full humanitarian aid to Gaza under U.N. authority and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel.

Mary Kelly Gardner, a teacher from Santa Cruz, California, told Truthout she joined the fast in memory of her late father, a service member in Vietnam who “staunchly opposed U.S. militarism.”

He opposed “the so-called ‘war on terror’ and ongoing U.S. violence against Middle Eastern countries,” she said. Gardner is limiting herself to 250 calories for the first 10 days of the fast. “Then I will switch to fasting during daylight (as Muslims observing Ramadan do).”

Palestinians in Gaza are being forced to survive on 245 calories per day; 250 calories daily is considered a starvation diet, as the body breaks down muscle and other tissues. Prolonged fasting can cause dehydration, heart problems, kidney failure and even death.

Gardner is distressed because her “tax dollars are being used to fund this horrific violence” (which, she noted, constitutes genocide) “in the form of weapons shipments.” She feels the need to speak out.
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Jabalia camp destruction by Israel in Gaza, October 2024. (Al Jazeera/Wikimedia Commons)
Gardner said her goals are to “get people’s attention with a meaningful action” and “engage in a practice that challenges me to be more personally present with the human suffering taking place in Gaza.” She is “intentionally causing myself some discomfort and inconvenience,” yet “not harming myself.”

For 11 weeks, using starvation as a weapon of war, Israel has blocked all food, medicine and other relief from entering the Gaza Strip, home to 2.1 million Palestinians. Now aid is trickling in under the auspices of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a delivery system established by the U.S. and Israel to bypass the U.N., provide a fig leaf of aid and blunt global outrage at Israel’s starvation tactics.

Risk of famine comes even as Israel intensifies its military campaign. On May 27, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported at least 54,056 people killed, including at least 17,400 children, and at least 123,129 people injured in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

Read on Consortium News.
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Why Did Burning Girls Matter in Vietnam but Not in Gaza?

5/29/2025

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The 'Napalm Girl' photo shocked the world and helped end the Vietnam War – but a viral video of a child surrounded by flames and other similar images in Gaza can't even provoke a ceasefire.

Jehad Abusalim
May 27, 2025
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Left: Phan Thi Kim Phuc runs screaming after the South Vietnamese army dropped napalm in 1972. Photo by Nick Ut/AP/Public domain; Right: Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil attempts to escape the flames after Israel bombed a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza. Photo: Screenshot via Twitter
When the ‘Napalm Girl’ photo appeared in US and international media in 1972, it shocked the world. The image showed a young Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running naked, screaming in agony, her body burned by napalm dropped by the US-backed South Vietnamese army. The photo captured the raw, inescapable truth of war, and it forced people, especially in the United States, to confront the human cost of their government’s actions in Vietnam. It became a catalyst, a turning point, a symbol of a war that had lost its moral justification.

Now, more than 50 years later, the world is again seeing images of children burned alive. But this time, the response is different. This time, the images don’t seem to pierce through power in the same way. The pain in Gaza is undeniable, the evidence overwhelming. But the accountability is missing.
Just on Monday, footage emerged from Gaza after an Israeli airstrike hit the Fahmi al-Jirjawi school in Gaza City. The school was sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinian families, many sleeping in makeshift tents in the courtyard and classrooms. At least 36 people were killed in the bombing, according to Al Jazeera, and many of them (nearly half) were children. Dozens more were critically wounded, with bodies burned beyond recognition.

One clip in particular shook many. It showed a 5-year-old child, Ward Jalal al-Sheikh Khalil, trying to escape a burning classroom, her tiny silhouette surrounded by flames. The 11-second video, shot from a distance, spread quickly on Telegram and other platforms. You could barely see her form against the fire. Somehow, Ward survived. But her mother and at least five of her siblings were killed. Her father is in critical condition. 


When I saw that clip of Ward, I immediately thought of Kim Phuc. Like Ward, Kim survived a fire meant to kill. She survived the war that burned her, and later became a
peace activist, a UNESCO ambassador, and recipient of prestigious prizes. Her suffering, her survival, and her transformation were all given meaning in part because her pain was seen and believed.


But what about Ward?

Today, scenes like Ward’s are not rare; they are daily. In Gaza, there are dozens of “Napalm Girl” moments each day, and they don’t come filtered through distant photo wires or delayed coverage. They come live. This genocide is being live-streamed by Palestinian journalists and by ordinary people who refuse to let their suffering go unseen. Burned children, screaming fathers, headless infants – these images are not just real, they are relentless.

So why won’t the world react the same way? Why did one photo of a burned child help end a war, while hundreds of clips showing burned Palestinian children can’t even provoke a ceasefire?
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'Children ask why they survived': Doctor's Gaza testimony shocks UN Security Council

5/29/2025

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In a searing address to the UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East and Gaza, American trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa delivered a first-hand account of Gaza's collapsing healthcare system, drawing from his two medical missions to Khan Younis.
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This Dystopia Would Never Be Accepted Without Extensive Indoctrination

5/28/2025

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Caitlin Johnstone
May 26, 2025

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

I am not a politically complicated person. I think genocide is bad. I think peace is good. I don’t think anyone should be struggling to survive in a civilization that is capable of providing for all. I think we should try to preserve the biosphere we all depend on for survival.

To me these are just obvious, common sense positions, no more remarkable or profound than believing I should refrain from slamming my nipple in a car door. I do not think these views should put me on the political fringe. I don’t think they should cause me to be seen as some kind of radical. It’s not outlandish that I hold these views, it’s outlandish that everyone else does not.

But that’s the kind of society we find ourselves in today. The obvious is framed as freakish while the freakish is presented as obvious. Health is framed as sickness while sickness is presented as health. The moderate is framed as extremism while extremism is presented as moderate.

We live in a twisted, backwards dystopia where everything is the opposite of the way it should be, and we’re conditioned to think it’s normal and acceptable. It’s not until some degree of insight dawns in you that you look around and realize you are living in the nightmare of a madman. Until then you spend your time here thinking, speaking, voting and behaving as though the demented status quo we are living under is the moderate and expected reality.
All our lives we are trained to believe this hellscape is the healthy and expected circumstance for our species. Our parents and teachers tell us that it’s normal for things to be this way. Our pundits and politicians assure us that there’s no other way things could be and that we are living under the best possible system.

A big part of it is just growing up in a society that’s been diseased since long before you were born, being raised and taught by people who also grew up in a society that’s been diseased since long before they were born. We show up here, we don’t know anything, and then the big people teach us about war and money and jobs and politics, and assure us that our initial horrified reaction to the things we are learning is just immature naivety to something fine and normal.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to explain war to a child, then you know how insane this civilization looks when perceived by a pair of fresh eyes. I’ve never had to explain the genocide in Gaza to a young child, but I am sure it would be met with even more shock and grief. Kids have a natural, healthy revulsion toward such things, and it is only by sustained indoctrination that we are able to twist their minds into seeing them as normal.

It takes a lot of education to make us this stupid. Our minds require a whole lot of training to accept this horrific dystopia as the baseline norm. That’s why the empire we live under has the most sophisticated domestic propaganda machine that has ever existed.

In order to have clarity, we need to learn to look with fresh eyes. Uninitiated eyes. Eyes that have not been educated out of their initial healthy impulse to weep at what we are doing and how we are living here. We need to get in touch with that intuition within us which rejects the sickness of our society as though it was meeting it for the very first time.

Learning to meet life afresh in each instant is good practice anyway; it makes living a lot more enjoyable and beautiful, and it helps us move in a much wiser way since we’re not constantly reacting to old patterns and expectations in an ever-changing world. But as an added bonus it also peels away the tolerance we have built up for the backwards lunacy of this empire we are living under.

The less healthy this civilization feels to you, the healthier you are getting. Everything about this nightmare looks appalling through clear eyes.

Read Caitlin Johnstone.
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The Essential Memorial Day Message That Went Unheard For Most Americans

5/27/2025

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“'What’s it like having people thanking you for your service everywhere you go, James?' I asked. 'You might think this is an exaggeration, but you asked,' he said. 'It’s an act of violence.'”

Mark Taylor
May 27, 2025
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I just found this HuffPost column about Memorial Day and what many combat veterans really think of it. The message and reality of post-combat life for the majority of US veterans of our obscene, manipulated wars for oil and endless corporate profit is unheard by the vast majority of Americans. And most Americans, as noted in the column by vet counselor Scott Janssen, don’t give a crap about what combat vets think, feel and experienced.

Instead, hollow red-white-n-blue performative gestures and cheery “Thank you for your service” greetings and a flag pin are somehow supposed to honor the dead and — in too many cases — living dead.

In my career as a psychotherapist, I counseled a few veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars and what Janssen describes is consistent with what my clients experienced and felt. To some extent they are — like the client Janssen describes — alone, isolated and traumatized, exploited and disrespected by most flag-lapel-pin-wearing Americans.

How we betray the veterans

Most Americans ignore their civic duty to be informed and rise up and act when the government lies and commits crimes in order to send more young Americans off to kill and be killed. The politicians get their Raytheon and General Dynamics campaign bribes and board seats while traumatized vets get a f’ing flag pin.

Now we have Trump and the Republicans callously shutting down services for veterans and firing veteran public employees while they jack up the War Department budget as they — along with the Democrats — follow the orders of Israel, American Zionists and Christo fascists to go to war with Iran.

I encourage my fellow Americans to read Janssen’s column to better understand what we have done — and do — to combat veterans … and are about to do to another generation of young soldiers in Iran.

I especially urge any young person contemplating a career in the military to heed veteran James’ words.

Instead of thanks to our exploited and lied-too veterans, what I feel and offer is empathy and solidarity.

Read Scott Jansen's HuffPost column - I Work With Dying Veterans: Here's Why I Don't Automatically Thank Them For Their Service.

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Reverie on Sacrifice

5/26/2025

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Gene Marx
May 26, 2025

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Memorial Day weekend began for me with a late-night viewing of Currahee, the first episode of the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. It always resonates, reflecting on how my father and I voluntarily underwent similar, usually demeaning military training and indoctrination to earn our commissions and aviator wings. My father enlisted in 1942 to defend the republic, in arguably our last good war. He is one of the fallen remembered today, dying in a B-47 aircraft crash in 1953.

A hometown hero by default, my father’s B-24 and B-29 Pacific War exploits from a steady stream of former crew members were staples for his young sons growing up in the 50s and 60s, when Memorial Day was special. Major Gene Marx was a hero to me, not a “fallen warrior”, despite the accolades showered on the dead and an unknown soldier at Arlington today by another sham Commander in Chief.
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Soldiers place Memorial Day flags at Arlington National Cemetery in honored tradition
But memory is fragile, and valor, noted writer/composer Mark McInerney, can be distorted. “We often lionize the fallen because they can no longer speak. We drape the word hero across the dead—but sometimes we do it to silence the living.” This tactic could not have been more than effective, with Congress abdicating its war powers responsibilities since Saigon’s fall and public apathy prevailing. Today, war tributes and memorials are now no more than shiny appeasements to unbloodied patriots or effective recruitment tools for endless conflicts.

Finish reading on Substack.
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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

5/23/2025

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William Schryver
May 22, 2025

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
The inexorable decline of the American Empire has arrived at an Imperial Paradox. It must either fight a war and die, or not fight a war and yet still die.

Here are the options:

China

Neither South Korea nor Japan want anything to do with a war against China, leaving only the Philippines dumb enough to play along.

The US apparently pulled another brigade out of South Korea. They’ll pull out more in the future. They know damn well the North Koreans could easily conquer the entire peninsula if they chose to do so.

China and its local seas are a vast ocean away from America, and its capacity to defend its local seas is enormous and growing.

The Pentagon must understand it cannot sustain logistics in a war against China in the western Pacific. It simply cannot be done. Anyone who thinks otherwise must upgrade their proficiency in basic arithmetic.

Iran

In the context of a war against Iran, all the geography is against the US.

Iran is an exceedingly mountainous country that has, over the course of millennia, learned to use those mountains to defend itself against would-be conquerors.

They can field a satisfactorily well-equipped million-man army.

They have learned in the 21st century to burrow deep heavily fortified tunnels into their mountains.

Iran is also much more technologically advanced than most people understand.

They have become impressively capable in terms of both offensive and defensive missiles. They pose a far greater challenge than the Yemeni have been over the past year and a half.

Indeed, they pose a “near-peer” challenge against US overseas power projection.
The US Navy could only operate at extreme risk in the southern Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Persian Gulf.
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Every US base in the region is well within range of Iranian missile strikes.

The US Navy very demonstrably cannot secure seaborne logistics into the Persian Gulf. They lack both the sealift ships, and the ability to protect them.

They cannot even open the Bab-el-Mandeb!
Russia

From a geographic and logistical standpoint, the only remotely conceivable war is one in Ukraine against Russia.

The US at least has bases and forces already in place in the UK, Germany, Poland, Romania, Finland, and in Baltic chihuahua fantasy-land — and what has served until now as a reasonably secure logistics pathway into all those places.

Of course, whether or not such a condition persists long in a war scenario is another question altogether.

Because, you see, the Russians are now unquestionably the most formidable and battle-hardened military on the planet — at least in the context of a war fought on their doorstep.

So if you're an empire that thinks it needs a war to reaffirm at least its short-term relevance and fading glory ... well, these are your choices.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Read William Schriver on Substack.

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Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza

5/22/2025

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A 40-day fast for Gaza, organized by Veterans For Peace, begins today, May 22.
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You’re invited to a 40-day fast for Gaza, organized by Veterans For Peace. (VFP May 21st Press Release)

https://www.fosna.org/2025gazafast

On May 22, we begin our fasting across the country while demanding:

1) a resumption of humanitarian aid, under UN authority, to Gaza
2) that the U.S. stop arming Israel NOW!

Join us in our work! We imagine two fasting options: a centralized fasting location in NYC where fasters will commit to 250 calories a day, in line with the general caloric intake of Gazans under the ongoing Israeli military blockade, and a dispersed fasting option for folks to join the work from their local context.

This action is open to all Gaza allies and people of good conscience who want an end to the genocide in Gaza, veteran or not. Our fast launches as the UN warns the death of 15000 infants is imminent. Join us as we resist this genocide!

Note: We have now reached capacity for our community-housed centralized fasters in NY. All new registrants will be counted as dispersed fasters.
 
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The New Dark Age

5/21/2025

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The genocide in Gaza is not an anomaly. It illustrates something fundamental about human nature and is a terrifying harbinger of where the world is headed.

Chris Hedges
May 17, 2025

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Such a Bright Future - by Mr. Fish
CAIRO, Egypt — It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s.
 

A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots.
 

There will be “no way,” Israel will stop the war, he announced, even if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza. The Palestinians “have nowhere to return.”

“[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”

The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations. It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter.
It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation. We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights.
   
The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history.

In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.

Read Chris Hedges in Substack. 


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