# entry

guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/max-blumenthal-on-trumps-media-strategy
title: Max Blumenthal on Trump’s Media Strategy, Ukraine’s Crackdown, and the Israel-Gaza Nexus
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/max-blumenthal-on-trumps-media-strategy
hash: }TߕA��=S߿�b�W
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F156578670%2Fe20bdb65-f757-4201-93f7-76f09eb43664%2Ftranscoded-1738813965.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p><span>In this episode of</span> <em>Going Underground</em><span>,</span> <em>Grayzone</em> <span>Editor-in-Chief Max Blumenthal dissects Donald Trump’s call for greater independent media access to White House press briefings and the broader implications of his media strategy. Blumenthal breaks down his viral confrontation with former Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the U.S. role in Israel’s assault on Gaza, as well as Trump’s move to cut USAID grants to Ukraine—leading to the swift collapse of Ukrainian media outlets reliant on Western funding.</span></p>
<p><span>He also exposes the Ukrainian Myrotvorets kill list, detailing the threats he and other journalists have faced for reporting inconvenient truths about NATO’s proxy war. The conversation turns to the arrests of</span> <em>The Electronic Intifada</em><span>’s Ali Abunimah in Switzerland and</span> <em>Grayzone</em> <span>journalist Jeremy Loffredo in Israel, underscoring the global crackdown on independent reporting.</span></p>
<p>Blumenthal further unpacks the Biden administration’s political maneuvering, including an alleged pardon for Anthony Fauci to shield him from accountability over COVID policies, and how Trump’s potential return to the White House could see the most overtly pro-Israel administration in U.S. history. He analyzes Trump’s role in advancing Israel’s expansionist agenda, including his tacit approval of West Bank annexation and Netanyahu’s expectation that a second Trump presidency would back Israel in a regional war against Iran.</p>
<p>Check out this no-holds-barred discussion of stories the establishment media won’t touch.</p>
<p>For more info on Afshin Rattansi's Going Underground: linktree.com/goingundergroundtv</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/trumps-gaza-relocation-plan-a-dangerous
title: Trump’s Gaza Relocation Plan: A Dangerous Scheme to Displace Palestinians and Expand Israeli Power
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/trumps-gaza-relocation-plan-a-dangerous
hash: �W�ho����Sy�t
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F156579843%2F33e68a71-b07f-46ca-a7d1-6d676a8c0a15%2Ftranscoded-1738815370.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>On the Judging Freedom podcast, Max Blumenthal delves into the implications of Donald Trump’s recent rhetoric regarding Gaza, where he suggests forcibly relocating two million Palestinians to Egypt’s Sinai Desert and Jordan. This controversial plan, framed as a "peaceful" resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, threatens to destabilize the Middle East further and faces significant opposition from Arab leaders already strained by regional tensions.</p>
<p>Blumenthal highlights the immense resistance that would likely arise from Egypt and Jordan, both of which are already hosting large Palestinian refugee populations. For Egypt, the idea of absorbing more Palestinians is seen as a direct assault on its sovereignty, with many in the Egyptian elite deeply hostile to the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Jordan, long used as a "warehouse" for Palestinian refugees, has also seen large-scale protests in response to similar proposals, signaling that the population is unwilling to accept this new wave of displacement.</p>
<p>Despite these objections, Trump’s plan has been supported by hardline Israeli factions and billionaire donors tied to the Israel lobby, suggesting that the real motive behind the plan is to solidify Israeli control over Gaza and the wider region. Blumenthal emphasizes that this proposal is not just about territorial expansion but also about further cementing the power of a small ruling elite that has long been aligned with U.S. imperial interests.</p>
<p>Blumenthal critiques both Trump and Biden administrations for their shared responsibility in the devastation of Gaza, calling attention to the broader system of U.S. foreign policy that perpetuates violence and destabilization in the region. This analysis underscores the need for an alternative approach—one rooted in justice and a real understanding of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/digital-censorship-exposed-how-the
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/digital-censorship-exposed-how-the
hash: ���T�2����_ �},�
title:
Digital Censorship Exposed: How the Center for Countering Digital Hate Silences Pro-Palestinian Voices

content:
<p><span>In a recent episode of</span> <em>Palestine Declassified</em><span>, hosts Chris Williamson and David Miller were joined by</span> <em>The Grayzone</em> <span>editor Max Blumenthal to dissect the controversial role of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The discussion centered on the CCDH’s efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian voices on social media, particularly under the leadership of Elon Musk. The episode shed light on the organization’s ties to Zionist interests and its broader agenda to silence dissent against Israeli policies.</span></p>
<p><span>The first segment featured Latifa Abouchakra, who detailed</span> <em>The Grayzone’s</em> <span>investigative work exposing the CCDH as a dishonest entity masquerading as a watchdog. The report revealed how the CCDH, despite its claims of combating hate speech, systematically targets and erases content supportive of Palestinian rights, effectively aligning itself with the Zionist regime’s propaganda efforts.</span></p>
<p>The second segment delved into the CCDH’s extensive network of connections, including its links to the British Labour Party, the Community Security Trust, the Pears Foundation, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the United States. These ties underscore the organization’s role as a tool for advancing pro-Israel narratives while undermining legitimate criticism of Israeli actions. The episode highlighted how these relationships enable the CCDH to wield significant influence over digital platforms, shaping public discourse in favor of Zionist interests.</p>
<p><span>Overall, the program provides a critical examination of the CCDH’s activities, exposing its role in the broader campaign to delegitimize and suppress pro-Palestinian advocacy. By connecting the dots between the CCDH and its institutional backers,</span> <em>Palestine Declassified</em> <span>offered a compelling case for how digital censorship is weaponized to serve political agendas, particularly those aligned with the Zionist movement. This episode is a must-watch for anyone concerned about free speech and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian rights.</span></p>
<p><a href="https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/leaked-emails-expose-ccdh" rel>Read The Grayzone’s reporting on leaked emails from the CCHD</a><span>:</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-flexDirection-column pc-reset"><a href="https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/leaked-emails-expose-ccdh" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-sanitized-class="">
<h2 data-sanitized-class="pencraft pc-reset color-pub-primary-text-NyXPlw line-height-36-XIK16z font-display-nhmvtD size-30-tZAWf_ weight-bold-DmI9lw reset-IxiVJZ">Leaked emails expose ‘collaborative efforts’ between Israeli govt and Center for Countering Digital Hate</h2>
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<div data-sanitized-class="pencraft pc-paddingTop-24 pc-reset"><a href="https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/leaked-emails-expose-ccdh" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-sanitized-class=""><picture><source type="image/webp"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1300,h_650,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c3ae276-8c81-4dcc-ae64-a487ac6397f4_768x432.jpeg" alt="Leaked emails expose ‘collaborative efforts’ between Israeli govt and Center for Countering Digital Hate" width="1300" height="650" data-sanitized-class="img-OACg1c fullWidth-Ta6aEE pencraft pc-reset"></picture></a></div>
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<p data-sanitized-class="caption-QiPycG">Max Blumenthal - January 6, 2025</p>
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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/why-did-republicans-fund-transgender
title: Why did Republicans fund ‘transgender dance’ in Bangladesh?
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/why-did-republicans-fund-transgender
hash: �b�ђC[�3� 7UWl
content:
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<figcaption data-sanitized-class="image-caption">An IRI-sponsored 'transgender dance performance' on December 9, 2020 in Dhaka's National Theater</figcaption></figure></div>
<p><strong><span>By</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/wyattreed1/" rel>Wyatt Reed</a> <span>- February 7, 2025</span></strong></p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>As Trump attacks foreign spending on “woke” initiatives, a GOP-aligned outfit has largely escaped scrutiny, despite using taxpayer funds to sponsor “transgender dance performances” and what it called the “largest published survey of LGBTI people in Bangladesh.”</strong></h3>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>According to documents obtained by The Grayzone, the US-funded International Republican Institute sees gay and transgender people as uniquely disruptive actors who can be deployed to manipulate political realities overseas, stating, “LGBTI people tend to participate in social change activities to eventually bring changes to politics.”</strong></h3>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong><span>Read part one of The Grayzone’s investigation into International Republican Institute’s activities in Bangladesh</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2024/09/30/us-plot-destabilize-bangladesh/" rel>here</a><span>.</span></strong></h3>
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<p>For years, the Republican Party-aligned International Republican Institute’s (IRI) agenda in Bangladesh has been dominated by ethnic minority and transgender issues, with leaked documents revealing the Institute sponsored “the largest published survey of LGBTI people in Bangladesh” and that a full 24% of the 1,868 Bangladeshis who participated in IRI programs in 2019 and 2020 were transgender.</p>
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<p><span>The IRI’s cultural activities were conducted with explicitly subversive objectives, aiming to recruit socially excluded groups as regime change activists. They mirrored the US government’s machinations in Cuba, where, as</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2021/07/25/cubas-cultural-counter-revolution-us-govt-rappers-artists-catalyst/" rel>The Grayzone reported</a><span>, USAID funded rappers, artists, and “desocialized and marginalized youth” to undermine the country’s socialist government.</span></p>
<p><span>Since its founding in 1983, the congressionally-funded IRI has been run by Republican politicians and operatives dedicated to the cause of “democracy promotion” abroad. IRI’s Chairman, Sen. Dan Sullivan, is a vehement opponent of same sex marriage who</span> <a href="https://www.adn.com/politics/2022/09/25/sen-sullivan-signs-letter-with-other-republicans-denouncing-proposed-federal-protections-for-transgender-athletes/" rel>signed on to a GOP letter</a> <span>calling to restrict the participation of transgender youth in sports. While many of the</span> <a href="https://www.iri.org/who-we-are/" rel>institute’s board members</a> <span>are Never Trump Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney, the board also includes Sen. Tom Cotton, a top Trump ally who</span> <a href="https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-statement-on-courts-blocking-of-arkansas-transgender-youth-law" rel>strongly opposes</a> <span>transgender medical interventions for youth.</span></p>
<p><span>The IRI’s eyebrow-raising statistics on trans participation in regime change activities were included in an</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/IRI-Bangladesh-Final-Report-1.pdf" rel>internal report</a> <span>on its PAIRS (“Promoting Accountability, Inclusivity, and Resiliency Support”) Program, which was obtained by The Grayzone in 2024. The report boasts that “IRI issued 11 advocacy grants to artists, musicians, performers or organizations that created 225 art products addressing political and social issues that were viewed nearly 400,000 times [and] supported three civil society organizations from LGBTI, Bihari and ethnic communities to train 77 activists and engage 326 citizens to develop 43 specific policy demands, which were proposed before 65 government officials.”</span></p>
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<p>All told, between March 1, 2019 and December 31, 2020, the Republican group sponsored 160 photographs, 30 paintings, 21 theatrical shows, five short films, three “transgender dance performances,” three documentaries, two rap songs and accompanying music videos, and one book. Meanwhile, IRI staff had “identified over 170 democratic activists who would cooperate with IRI to destabilize Bangladesh’s politics,” they wrote.</p>
<p><span>The activities were frequently attended by American diplomats, with the US ambassador to Bangladesh at the time, Earl Miller, even providing the welcome speech for a seven-day art exhibit titled “The Power of Art.” When the IRI held an “invitation-only book launch event… for a book that documents the lives of LGBTI people in Bangladesh” featuring “a panel discussion with LGBTI activists,” a political officer and a consular officer from the US embassy were on hand as well. At the IRI’s</span> <a href="https://www.daily-sun.com/post/522951" rel>third</a> <span>transgender dance performance in December of 2020, “guests from the US embassy were the deputy consul general and deputy director of the Office for Democracy, Rights, and Governance.”</span></p>
<p>Discussions that would guide the Institute’s actions were similarly dominated by transgender voices, with 136 of the 308 community members the IRI interviewed when generating policy proposals listed as “transgender/nonbinary.” According to the documents, these meetings generated 60 policy proposals, of which 17 related specifically to “LGBTI” issues.</p>
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<p><span>So why did transgender people make up a quarter of the IRI program’s participants, in a country of 173 million where a 2022 census</span> <a href="https://www.tbsnews.net/bangladesh/bangladesh-includes-transgenders-national-census-first-time-466230" rel>found</a> <span>they comprise just 0.007% of the population? The IRI documents suggest it’s because the Institute views gay and transgender people as uniquely disruptive actors who can be deployed to manipulate political realities overseas: “Facing discrimination and prejudice, LGBTI people tend to participate in social change activities to eventually bring changes to politics.”</span> <em><span>[Editor’s note: the IRI has</span> <a href="https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/361159/no-the-us-wasn%E2%80%99t-behind-the-july-uprising" rel>claimed</a> <span>that this phrase did not appear in their original report.]</span></em></p>
<p>Apparently, the IRI were slowly but surely achieving their desired changes, with the report’s authors bragging that they’d successfully “capacitated new and under-utilized activists from marginalized communities to advocate for change with policymakers,” but concluding that “although IRI’s beneficiaries made important strides in raising public awareness and advocating for change, more time, resources and skills are needed to capitalize on this preliminary success to formalize changes in public attitudes and policy.” The campaign appeared to take root in 2019, when IRI conducted a “baseline assessment” which concluded that “modern forms of cultural activism are underutilized” and “advocacy campaigns should target national-level officials to maximize impact.”</p>
<p>While the emphasis on transgender issues may fly in the face of the GOP’s publicly-professed values, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that Republican leaders have secretly shifted their attitude towards the immutability of gender. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who helped spearhead the ongoing push to defund USAID, recently noted, “I don’t think that the Republicans at IRI are woke — I think you have tactical wokeness in service of statecraft.”</p>
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<p><span>Describing The Grayzone’s</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2024/09/30/us-plot-destabilize-bangladesh/" rel>previous investigation</a> <span>into the IRI’s efforts to fund aggrieved Bangladeshis to destabilize their country, Benz explained: “these DEl wokeness programs are part of the ethnic balkanization and human rights predicates that are laid by the state in order to topple and control governments.”</span></p>
<p>That’s exactly what happened in 2024 when Bangladesh’s elected prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, was deposed in a Western-backed coup which legacy media hailed as a revolutionary uprising over an autocratic dictator. Within weeks, Hasina had been replaced as head of state by Muhammad Yunus, a Clinton Global Initiative fellow awarded a Nobel Prize for popularizing the concept of micro-lending, a recent financial innovation which finally gave hundreds of millions of impoverished people across the planet the opportunity to access crippling debt.</p>
<p>It’s not clear exactly how much taxpayer money has been expended on capacity-building transgender and ethnic minority Bangladeshis, but for the time being, the funding mechanisms are still in place. While the Trump administration has ordered a 90-day freeze on non-Israeli foreign spending and slashed USAID’s employees from over 14,000 to just 294, the IRI’s parent organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), remains untouched.</p>
<p>The NED was founded in 1983 by President Reagan as the CIA sought to offload its funding responsibilities after the Church Committee exposed dozens of its highly illegal operations, including the MKULTRA mind control program, various efforts to assassinate international leaders, and Operation Mockingbird, which saw Langley come to exercise so much control over American newsrooms that the agency’s covert operations chief, Frank Wisner, famously compared the press to a “mighty Wurlitzer” which would play any song he liked. For dedicated Cold Warriors, the disappearance of that propaganda network in light of its exposure in the ‘70s was inarguably a major loss.</p>
<p><span>With the advent of the NED, the Cold Warriors gained a new channel through which they could subsidize regime change activists and amplify their message. In 1991, NED cofounder Allen Weinstein</span> <a href="https://archive.is/JjgTy" rel>admitted</a> <span>in an interview with the Washington Post that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”</span></p>
<p><span>Much like USAID, the NED, which recently</span> <a href="https://www.ned.org/ned-welcomes-victoria-nuland-to-the-board-of-directors/" rel>welcomed</a> <span>veteran neocon coup plotter Victoria Nuland to its board of directors, also oversees the annual disbursement of hundreds of millions for various activities likely to foment coups d’etat across the globe. That money continues to be split down the middle and funneled through one of two partisan organizations: the National Democratic Institute and the IRI.</span></p>
<p><span>Unfortunately for Bangladesh’s community of US-funded culture warriors, that may not be the case for much longer. Elon Musk, the head of the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency, recently put NED on notice, linking to a list of indicators of corruption at the agency and</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1886093812352565741" rel>writing</a> <span>on X: “NED is a SCAM.”</span></p>
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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/senior-ansar-allah-official-on-why
title: Senior Ansar Allah official on why Yemen fought for Gaza
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/senior-ansar-allah-official-on-why
hash: ��SO۵B�[��
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F156809498%2F4c5d0db8-d52b-4238-b713-c3feedfd2259%2Ftranscoded-1739131476.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal holds his second interview with Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, a senior political officer and spokesman for Yemen's Ansar Allah (Houthi movement), asking him why his movement intervened in defense of Gaza despite devastating Israeli and US-UK attacks. Al-Bukhaiti explains why he believes Palestinian losses would have been worse without Ansar Allah's intervention, and discusses developments in Yemen's grueling civil war.</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/the-grayzone-live-golden-pagers-on
title: 🔴 The Grayzone live: Golden pagers on the riviera
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/the-grayzone-live-golden-pagers-on
hash: �욠��sS���ﴱ
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F156810903%2Fcc94b347-889d-4435-a2b0-6f0a6ba9e2a0%2Ftranscoded-1739132198.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss President Donald Trump's pledge to "take over" Gaza during a meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu, the real history of USAID, Tulsi Gabbard's revealing confirmation hearing, and more.</p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://rumble.com/v6i4vu7-golden-pagers-on-the-riviera-the-grayzone-live.html" rel>Watch on Rumble</a></p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QFb6ooiBTko" rel>Watch on YouTube</a></p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="http://thegrayzone.com/" rel>Read TheGrayzone.com</a></p>

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guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/the-american-system-is-moving-to
title: The “American System” is Moving to Center Stage
author: ;Anton Chaitkin
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/the-american-system-is-moving-to
hash: xc@�r�Mb%��4[
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fantonchaitkin.substack.com%2Ftwitter%2Fsubscribe-card.jpg%3Fv%3D-1560552167%26version%3D9" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>The “American System” is Moving to Center Stage</strong></h4>
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<p>By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin</p>
<p><strong>The historic “American System of Political Economy,” in recent decades suppressed as a topic of public discussion, has recently emerged in the center of U.S. politics. This involves protective tariffs and other governmental interventions, which violate the transatl…</strong></p>
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guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/correction-and-apology
title: Correction, and Apology
author: ;Anton Chaitkin
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/correction-and-apology
hash: ��G���LYu�f��
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fantonchaitkin.substack.com%2Ftwitter%2Fsubscribe-card.jpg%3Fv%3D-1560552167%26version%3D9" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p><span>My last post (”The ‘American System’ is Moving to Center Stage”) contained a misleading statement: that my book series, Who We Are,</span> <em>“is the only authentic history of the American System in existence.”</em></p>
<p>Other authors, contemporary and in the past, have written authentic histories of the American System, pioneering accounts of the champions and deadly enemi…</p>


guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/judging-freedom-trumps-gaza-plan
title: Judging Freedom: Trump’s Gaza plan is ethnic cleansing, yet the resistance stands firm
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/judging-freedom-trumps-gaza-plan
hash: �QƆ� �GZ���� �
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F157220453%2Ffb45dad3-83d9-4d7d-aed3-5f956d041123%2Ftranscoded-1739657903.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p><em><strong>Max Blumenthal exposes how Trump bullies Arab states to absorb Palestinians, while Israel’s Zionist logic drives demographic warfare. Despite ceasefire violations, Hamas stands firm, forcing aid into Gaza. Netanyahu clings to power, backed by Trump’s brutal strategy. A damning critique of U.S.-Israeli policies and the resilience of Palestinian resistance.</strong></em></p>
<p>In this explosive discussion between Judge Andrew Napolitano and Max Blumenthal, the focus is on Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to "buy and own" the Gaza Strip, a plan Blumenthal describes as a thinly veiled attempt at ethnic cleansing. Blumenthal argues that Trump’s strategy is to intimidate and bully regional allies like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia into absorbing displaced Palestinians, effectively carrying out Israel’s long-standing goal of demographic control. He highlights how these nations, particularly Saudi Arabia, are now scrambling to counter Trump’s plan, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman issuing the "Dawn Statement," rejecting normalization with Israel without a Palestinian state.</p>
<p>Blumenthal critiques the underlying logic of Zionism, which views Palestinians as a demographic threat to Israel’s Jewish majority. He explains how this logic has driven policies like the two-state solution, which he describes as a way to warehouse Palestinians in isolated cantons while maintaining Jewish dominance. He also touches on the destruction of Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank, emphasizing the broader ethnic and religious dimensions of the conflict.</p>
<p>The conversation shifts to the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, with Blumenthal criticizing Trump and Netanyahu for their attempts to sabotage the agreement by demanding the immediate release of all hostages. He points out that Israel has repeatedly violated the ceasefire, but Hamas has stood firm, forcing Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Blumenthal suggests that Hamas’s resilience has temporarily thwarted Trump and Netanyahu’s plans.</p>
<p>Finally, Blumenthal speculates on Netanyahu’s political and physical health, noting that the Israeli prime minister is under significant pressure from both his corruption trials and the Israeli public’s demand for the release of hostages. Despite these challenges, Netanyahu has managed to stabilize his leadership by aligning with Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan, which has garnered support across the Israeli political spectrum. Blumenthal concludes by emphasizing the moral and political bankruptcy of Trump’s plan and the broader Zionist project, warning that it will only lead to further instability and suffering.</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/elons-semen-rules
title: Elon&amp;#039;s semen rules
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/elons-semen-rules
hash: ���u���� Kjz
content:
<h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">In Washington, power is now shaped by the "incredible genetics" of the deadbeat dad who happens to be Trump's most generous donor.</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
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<p><span>The tradcon replies to professional Twitter/X poster Ashley St. Clair’s</span> <a href="https://x.com/stclairashley/status/1890554279749951687" rel>Valentine’s Day announcement</a> <span>that she’s having Elon Musk’s latest baby are a masterpiece of moral hypocrisy. Witness the gushing celebration of a family values mongering ultra-Zionist propagandist for having a kid out of wedlock with the transhumanist lothario growing a litter of no less than 13 babies, all conceived through contact-free IVF, while denying</span> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/19/he-has-already-fathered-many-children-now-musk-wants-all-of-the-us-to-embrace-extreme-breeding" rel>reports</a> <span>that he offered his sperm to RFK's running mate and random couples at Silicon Valley parties. “This child has incredible genetics,”</span> <a href="https://x.com/mattgaetz/status/1890583555815661732" rel>effused</a> <span>Matt Gaetz, who now hosts a NewsMax show after a</span> <a href="https://jessicareedkraus.substack.com/p/village-crazy-lady-has-a-matt-gaetz" rel>bizarre sexual blackmail scandal</a> <span>torpedoed his Attorney General nomination.</span></p>
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<p><span>Just imagine the nuclear meltdown that would have ensued among the MAGA commentariat if AOC or Ilhan Omar announced they'd busted out the bastard love child of Alex Soros. St. Clair has also accused the media of</span> <a href="https://x.com/stclairashley/status/1890557278446645578" rel>"doxxing a baby"</a> <span>for supposedly planning to report that the leader of America's new plutocratic shadow government secretly fathered the child of a top influencer whom he algorithmically boosted – a</span> <a href="https://x.com/tiredasslesbian/status/1890677969435128091" rel>former cam girl</a> <span>he literally created as a top poster on the burgeoning "everything" app he owns.</span></p>
<p><span>The NY Post has</span> <a href="https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/ashley-st-clair-who-claims-to-have-had-musks-13th-child-reveals-life-of-secrecy/" rel>subsequently revealed</a> <span>that after supposedly being alerted to Elon’s existence by her “gay best friend,” St. Clair was “flown out” to meet the government-sponsored billionaire by her employer, the self-proclaimed “genetically Jewish” Christian conservative publisher of the Babylon Bee, Seth Dillon. Musk had removed a Twitter ban on Babylon Bee eight months prior, but was he also funding the right-wing satire rag?</span></p>
<p>St. Clair subsequently received a luxury apartment in New York’s Financial District and a security detail as a reward for bearing Elon’s latest baby – but “no romance,” reported the Post. “The young mother was allegedly forced to spend her pregnancy alone.”</p>
<p><span>Nothing about this reporting fits the definition of “doxxing a baby.” In fact, the story is one of the more revealing scandals of the year, vividly illustrating how the scolding influencers of the MAGA commentariat uphold a different set of rules for themselves, enabling and defending all the decadent behaviors they sneer at when divorced Park Slope co-op moms do it, while openly</span> <a href="https://x.com/HotSpotHotSpot/status/1889449525825179729" rel>agonizing</a> <span>over the "demographic threat" of Palestinian natalism</span> <em>within wedlock</em><span>.</span></p>
<p><span>More crucially, it demonstrates how power in Washington is now shaped by the “incredible genetics” of the technofeudalist deadbeat dad who happens to be Trump's most generous donor. Because if any one member of the Christianist tradcon pantheon held Elon or his</span> <a href="https://x.com/GingerLGaetz/status/1890555152781767146" rel>“mama bear”</a> <span>to the same moral standards they impose on their usual, more déclassé targets, they would be demonized, demonetized, and</span> <a href="https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/1890959527337451880" rel>digitally disappeared</a><span>. We are all hostages in his semen supremacist regime.</span></p>
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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/the-grayzone-live-the-jig-is-up
title: 🔴 The Grayzone live: The jig is up
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/the-grayzone-live-the-jig-is-up
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<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F157216840%2F2a768924-d5f4-459d-afc1-c22943fad1cb%2Ftranscoded-1739657305.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss the Trump administration's announcement that Ukraine will not join NATO as Kiev's military campaign continues to falter, and cover the fallout from Donald Trump's deranged plan to "own" the Gaza Strip and forcibly remove its residents.</p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://rumble.com/v6ki787-the-jig-is-up-the-grayzone-live.html" rel>Watch on Rumble</a></p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/live/_tPv8EsIYaU" rel>Watch on YouTube</a></p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="http://thegrayzone.com/" rel>Read TheGrayzone.com</a></p>
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<p><em>Summary:</em></p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">Ukraine and NATO: The Shifting Narrative</h3>
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<p>The discussion quickly turns to Ukraine, with a focus on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's recent comments about Ukraine's NATO membership. Hegi stated that Ukraine joining NATO is unrealistic, a stance that aligns with what Blumenthal and Maté have been saying for years. Maté criticizes Biden for not taking NATO membership off the table earlier, which he believes could have prevented the war. They argue that the U.S. and Europe used Ukraine as a pawn to bleed Russia, with Ukraine paying the "butcher's bill."</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">Trump's Role in Ukraine Policy</h3>
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<p>The hosts discuss how Trump's administration is now shifting the narrative, with Trump himself doubling down on the idea that Ukraine should never have been promised NATO membership. They speculate that this could lead to a winding down of the Ukraine proxy war, much to the dismay of European leaders who have been subservient to U.S. interests.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The Role of European Leaders</h3>
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<p>Blumenthal and Maté critique European leaders like Macron, Scholz, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte for their lack of leadership and reliance on U.S. directives. They argue that Europe has been reduced to a vassal state, waiting for instructions from Washington.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The Gaza Conflict and Trump's Controversial Plan</h3>
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<p>The conversation shifts to Gaza, where Trump has proposed a controversial plan to "take control" of the territory after the fighting ends. Blumenthal and Maté express skepticism about the feasibility of this plan and its implications for the region. They discuss how Arab states like Jordan and Egypt are reacting to Trump's proposals, with King Abdullah of Jordan appearing visibly uncomfortable during a press conference with Trump.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Under Fire</h3>
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<p>Blumenthal and Maté celebrate the Trump administration's decision to cut funding to the NED, an organization they describe as a CIA cutout used to destabilize countries around the world. They recount their own investigative work exposing the NED's role in various regime change operations, including in Nicaragua and Ukraine.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The Future of U.S. Foreign Policy</h3>
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<p>The hosts speculate on the future of U.S. foreign policy under Trump, particularly in relation to China and Russia. Trump has hinted at potential denuclearization talks with both countries, which Blumenthal and Maté view as a positive development, though they remain skeptical about Trump's ability to follow through.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The Gaza Holocaust and Palestinian Resistance</h3>
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<p>Blumenthal and Maté discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza, emphasizing the resilience of the Palestinian resistance. They criticize the U.S. and Israel for their brutal tactics and highlight the role of Arab states in failing to support Palestine. They also touch on the internal divisions within Palestinian leadership and the challenges of achieving unity.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The Role of the Left in U.S. Politics</h3>
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<p>The hosts lament the weakness of the left in the U.S., particularly its failure to oppose imperialist policies. They criticize Bernie Sanders for his support of the Ukraine proxy war and his vote against Tulsi Gabbard, whom they see as a more principled progressive. They argue that the left has been co-opted by neoconservative elements, leaving no real opposition to U.S. imperialism.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">Conclusion and Call to Action</h3>
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<p>Blumenthal and Maté wrap up the episode by encouraging viewers to support independent media like The Grayzone. They emphasize the importance of staying informed and resisting the mainstream narrative, especially in the face of ongoing wars and political corruption.</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/secret-terror-blueprints-for-us-nsc
title: Secret terror blueprints for US NSC to ‘help Ukraine resist’ exposed
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/secret-terror-blueprints-for-us-nsc
hash: *��7�<!}�ӿ�
content:
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<figure><a target="_blank" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F44a6ca28-ef26-4c29-8d59-3a1858d8c4c3_768x432.jpeg" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM" rel data-sanitized-class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img">
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<p><strong><span>By</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/kit-klarenberg/" rel>Kit Klarenberg</a> <span>- February 15, 2025</span></strong></p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Newly-leaked documents reveal a crew of military academics pitching the US National Security Council a series of extreme strategies for Ukraine, from IED’s inspired by Iraqi insurgents to sabotaging Russia’s infrastructure to propaganda “from ISIS’ playbook.”</strong></h3>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Conceived under the auspices of the UK’s University of St. Andrews, the plans were outsourced through third parties to ensure “plausible deniability.”</strong></h3>
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<p>Explosive leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone show how a shady transatlantic collective of academics and military-intelligence operatives conceived schemes which would lead to the US “helping Ukraine resist,” to “prolong” the proxy war “by virtually any means short of American and NATO forces deploying to Ukraine or attacking Russia.”</p>
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<p>The operatives assembled their war plans immediately in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and delivered them directly to the highest-ranking relevant US National Security Council official in the Biden administration.</p>
<p>Proposed operations ranged from covert military options to jihadist-style psychological operations against Russian civilians, with the authors insisting, “we need to take a page from ISIS’ playbook.”</p>
<p>ISIS was not the only militant outfit upheld as a model for Ukraine’s military. The intelligence cabal also proposed modernizing IEDs, like those staged by Iraqi insurgents against occupying US troops, for a potential stay-behind guerrilla army in Russia, which would attack rail lines, power plants and other civilian targets.</p>
<p>Many of the cabal’s recommendations were subsequently enacted by the Biden administration, dangerously escalating the conflict and repeatedly crossing Russia’s clearly-stated red lines.</p>
<p><span>Included among the proposals were providing extensive training to “Ukrainian expatriates” in using Javelin and Stinger missiles, enabling “cyberattacks on Russia by ‘patriotic hackers’ with deniability,” and flooding Kiev with “unmanned combat air vehicles.” It was also foreseen that “replacement fighter aircraft” would be provided by “many sources,” and that “non-Ukrainian volunteer pilots and ground crews” would be recruited to fight air battles in the manner of the</span> <a href="https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/a_people_at_war/prelude_to_war/flying_tigers.html" rel>Flying Tigers</a><span>, a World War II-era force composed of American Air Force pilots, which was formed in April 1941 to help the Chinese oppose Japan’s invasion before Washington’s formal entry into the conflict.</span></p>
<p><span>The document was written and cosigned by a quartet of academic armchair warriors with colorful pasts. They included historian</span> <a href="https://www.k-state.edu/history/about/faculty-staff/orr.html" rel>Andrew Orr</a><span>, the director of the University of Kansas Institute for Military History. His recent academic contributions include a chapter in an obscure</span> <a href="https://vernonpress.com/book/1828" rel>academic volume</a> <span>entitled, “Who is a Soldier? Using Trans Theory to Rethink French Women’s Military Identity in World War II.”</span></p>
<p><span>Joining him was</span> <a href="https://www.ku.ac.ae/college-people/ash-rossiter" rel>Ash Rossiter</a><span>, assistant professor of international security at the United Arab Emirates’ Khalifa University, and described as “ex-British Army Intelligence Corps.” Also participating was Marcel Plichta, then a doctoral candidate at St. Andrews. He’s described as a veteran of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and his</span> <a href="https://uk.linkedin.com/in/marcel-plichta-724733129" rel>LinkedIn profile</a> <span>indicates he interned at NATO before working in roles with Pentagon contractors, then joined the DIA as an intelligence analyst. Along the way, Plichta claims to have “[nominated] known or suspected terrorists to the national watchlisting and screening community.”</span></p>
<p><span>Also involved in the academic cabal was Zachary Kallenborn,</span> <a href="https://www.zkallenborn.com/" rel>a self-styled US Army “mad scientist”</a> <span>currently pursuing his PhD in War Studies at King’s College London, with a focus on drones, WMD, and other edgy forms of modern warfare. Kallenborn, who has moonlighted at the DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, contributed to the Ukraine war planning by offering proposals for Iraqi insurgent-style “smart” IED attacks on Russian targets, and planting bombs on Russian trains and railways.</span></p>
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<p><span>The cabal appears to have been led by</span> <a href="https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/international-relations/people/mrd7/" rel>Marc R. DeVore</a><span>, a senior lecturer at Britain’s St. Andrews University. Little about his personal or professional background can be ascertained online, although his most recent academic publications discuss military strategy. Around the time the secret proposal document was being drafted, he published an article with Orr for the Pentagon’s in-house</span> <a href="https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Military-Review/" rel>Military Review</a> <span>journal entitled “Winning by Outlasting: The United States and Ukrainian Resistance to Russia.” Moreover, he is a fellow at the elite</span> <a href="https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/locations-and-operations/bases-and-stations/royal-navy-strategic-studies-centre" rel>Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre</a><span>, a Ministry of Defence-run “think tank.”</span></p>
<p><span>Emails show DeVore passed the group’s handiwork directly to Col. Tim Wright, who was the Director for Russia in the Biden administration’s National Security Council (NSC) at the time the emails were sent, according to his</span> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-f-wright00/" rel>LinkedIn profile</a><span>. Since July 2022, Wright has been the Assistant Head for Research and Experimentation in the Futures Directorate of the British Army.</span></p>
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<p>The Grayzone attempted to contact Orr, Rossiter, and Devore by phone and email in order to solicit comment about their role in proxy war scheme, and about whether St. Andrews University was aware it was being used as a base for planning terror attacks against Russia. None have responded to our requests.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Surging the Ukrainian diaspora to the front</strong></h3>
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<p>Once the Ukraine proxy war erupted with full force in February 2022, the cabal of military academics quickly laid out what they described as “ideas of varying practicality that may not have been considered that Western states can collectively take to strengthen Ukraine’s ability to resist and hopefully preserve its independence.” Dedicated sections spelled out five suggestions, along with “background for such action and possible avenues for implementing them.” They boasted that the “fastest proposals” in the document were “executable in little over a week.”</p>
<p><span>First on the list was arming Ukrainian emigres with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, due to Kiev’s lack of “trained crews to operate the large numbers of missiles” being shipped to them by the West. They cited the little-known</span> <a href="https://amcmuseum.org/history/operation-nickel-grass/" rel>October 1973</a> <span>Operation Nickel Grass as a means of “providing trained crews along with the hardware.” Under that mission’s auspices, Tel Aviv’s embassy in Washington “mobilized Israeli students studying at American universities,” who were then “rushed… through a rapid training program” by the US military.</span></p>
<p>This included teaching the conscripts how to use weapons similar to Javelin and Stinger missiles. The Israelis were then airdropped onto the frontlines of the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Syria and Egypt, where they “achieved ample tank kills before the two-week war had concluded.” The academics proposed doing “the same for Ukraine,” due to “large numbers of Ukrainian young men” living in the West, some of whom would have completed compulsory military training before emigrating.</p>
<p>This diaspora, it was believed, could easily be identified and recruited due to their registration with Ukrainian “consulates or embassies” in the West, then given “intensive classes” in using “shoulder-launched missiles” before being dispatched to Kiev.</p>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>“Volunteer cyber warriors” conceal state hacking</strong></h3>
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<p>The quartet’s plans extended into the realm of cyberware, calling for “Western intelligence agencies” to “provide cyber tools and suggestions” to “volunteer hackers who want to strike their blow for Ukrainian independence, while also warning them what targets we do not want attacked.”</p>
<p>A “major task for these volunteer cyber warriors,” the four wrote, “could be to make certain that videos of Russian indiscriminate attacks, the use of objectionable weapons such as thermobarics, Ukrainian civilian casualties, Russian casualties and poor befuddled captured Russian conscripts” were made available to Russian audiences. Simultaneously, “patriotic hackers” could seek to bombard Russians with propaganda “about domestic opposition to the war.”</p>
<p>The intelligence cabal made clear they aimed to achieve the same psychological impact as the world’s most notorious terrorist organization, declaring, “we need to take a page from ISIS’ playbook in agilely communicating our message to Russians.”</p>
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<p>The activities of these “volunteer cyber warriors” were designed to provide cover for more formal, state-level hack attacks on Russian cyber infrastructure. “The greater the volume of freelance cyber-attacks on Russia, the greater also will be the opportunities for Western intelligence agencies to launch surgical cyber-attacks to disrupt key systems at key moments… because these will be more plausibly attributable to the truly amateur component,” the four academics evangelized.</p>
<p><span>The description offered strongly resembles the so-called “IT Army of Ukraine,” a volunteer</span> <a href="https://itarmy.com.ua/" rel>cyber militia</a> <span>propped up in the days after Russia’s invasion. Since then, it’s been overseen by Mikhailo Federov, the Ukrainian digital czar</span> <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60608222" rel>credited</a> <span>by the BBC with pressuring Samsung and Nvidia to cease operations in Moscow, and getting PayPal to de-bank all its Russian clients.</span></p>
<p><span>Ukraine’s cyber army</span> <a href="https://www.wired.it/article/attacco-hacker-taxi-mosca/" rel>collaborates closely</a> <span>with Anonymous, the once-countercultural online hacker collective whose work now tracks closely with the objectives of the CIA. The authors of the proposal to the NSC hinted at the relationship, writing, “Hacking groups such as Anonymous have already begun targeting Russia. This effort could be enlarged and enhanced.”</span></p>
<p><span>The Ukrainian cyber army has taken credit for various acts of online vandalism. However, it also appears to have been involved in hacks targeting Russia’s power grids and railways. An attack on Russian taxi service Yandex that caused a large September 2022 traffic jam in Moscow was</span> <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/3/23335694/hackers-traffic-jam-russia-moscow-ride-hailing-app-yandex-taxi" rel>jointly attributed</a> <span>to both Ukraine’s ‘IT Army’ and Anonymous.</span></p>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>“Modern” IEDs for blowing up Russian infrastructure</strong></h3>
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<p><span>The academic cabal’s plans for attacking Russia through unconventional means extended explicitly into the realm of terrorism. A series of detailed recommendations for attacking Russian railway systems and roads with improvised explosive devices was put forward by</span> <a href="https://www.zkallenborn.com/" rel>Zachary Kallenborn</a><span>, a self-described “PhD Student in War Studies at King’s College London researching risk analysis, perception, management, and theories with topical focuses in global catastrophe, drone warfare, WMD, extreme terrorism, and critical infrastructure.”</span></p>
<p>“Fuel tanks for diesel locomotives are typically on the bottom, underneath the engine,” Kallenborn wrote. “It wouldn’t be very difficult to plant and disguise small explosives between the wooden slats of the railway then detonate when the locomotive is above it… Ideally, guerrillas operating behind Russian lines would place the anti-locomotive lines.”</p>
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<p><span>Throughout 2023, a group of self-described Russian and Belarussian anarchists conducted a series of attacks on railways, cell towers, and infrastructure inside Russia. Calling themselves BOAK, or the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists, the group of radical saboteurs earned</span> <a href="https://thelead.uk/boak-anarchist-partisans-sabotaging-russian-railways" rel>glowing promotion</a> <span>in Western media. It is unclear if it received any outside assistance, however.</span></p>
<p>Kallenborn’s proposal, drafted in conjunction with the US War Department’s Joint IED Defeat Organization, suggested the US and its allies could “draw upon the lessons they painfully learned in Iraq and Afghanistan to help Ukraine orchestrate an IED campaign behind Russia’s lines.”</p>
<p>With the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents as models, Kallenborn proposed two technologies, “public-private key ring cryptography and ‘smart’ IEDs… to greatly increase the effectiveness of such a campaign.”</p>
<p><span>To wreak havoc inside Russia, Kallenborn envisioned a modern “stay behind” force similar to those unleashed onto Europe during Cold War era</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2023/06/19/files-british-natos-secret-terror-armies/" rel>Operation Gladio</a><span>, when the CIA and NATO organized fascist gangs and mafiosi to conduct anti-communist terrorist attacks.</span></p>
<p>Meanwhile, “smart” IEDs with “modern components” such as “microcontrollers,” which are now “abundant and cheap,” would allow Ukrainian attackers to “exercise additional discretion, reducing potential for collateral damage,” and “detonate the IED regardless of what the targets do.”</p>
<p>“The circuitry of microcontrollers can internalize most of the circuitry that would originally have been hard-wired into IED initiation switches,” Kallenborn wrote. “All microcontrollers have multiple inputs and outputs allowing multiple inputs, all while controlling multiple devices. Because microcontrollers are programmable, attackers can automate complicated algorithms to maximize an IEDs effects, and reduce collateral damage. Microcontrollers can even, relatively easily, circumvent many common countermeasures.”</p>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Secretly employing contractors to pilot drones</strong></h3>
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<p>While taking inspiration from non-state actors like ISIS and the Taliban, the Western academics plotting on the Ukrainian government’s behalf had elaborate plans for conventional warfare as well.</p>
<p><span>They assessed that drones had already “proven effective thus far” in the proxy war, so they urged greater deliveries of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2s, which they said were “virtually the only airborne platform with which Ukraine is successfully striking Russian ground forces.” They proposed flooding Kiev with “additional TB2s,” pointing out that since Ukraine was already openly</span> <a href="https://breakingdefense.com/2023/10/with-turkish-drones-in-the-headlines-what-happened-to-ukraines-bayraktar-tb2s/" rel>using them</a><span>, and “had more on order before the conflict began,” Turkey’s role in supplying yet further drones could be concealed, leaving its neutrality publicly intact.</span></p>
<p>Ankara “could potentially transfer significant numbers of TB2s rapidly” from a variety of sources, the academics assumed, and fly them using local “private sector contractors.” If Turkey was unwilling or unable to go along with this plan, alternatives could be sought. “Given how commonly UCAVs are operated by private sector contractors, these could all be remotely piloted by private sector personnel employed by Ukraine, rather than uniformed members of NATO armed forces,” they noted.</p>
<p>Since drones can be operated “from considerable distances away from the frontline (potentially with pilots operating from neighboring countries),” they offered the further “advantage” over contract pilots, in that they would “be comparatively safe and certainly unlikely to be captured and paraded in front of Russian cameras.” While US-produced unmanned systems such as Predators and Reapers were an option, and could be provided “in large numbers,” they “would appear the most provocative” from Russia’s perspective, and make active US involvement too obvious.</p>
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<p><span>Prophetically, the paper noted Ukraine could be provided instead with “commercial-off-the-shelf drones such as the DJI Mavic and Phantom,” which not only had recording equipment capable of producing “tactically useful intelligence,” but could “be modified to carry explosives.” Moreover, “their wide-spread availability” made “attribution of these platforms to a supplying nation difficult.” It is surely no coincidence that ever since,</span> <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/01/16/djis-new-drone-could-change-war--but-its-not-supposed-to-be-a-weapon/" rel>both drones</a> <span>have been</span> <a href="https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/phantom-drone-squad-key-ukraine-russian-incursion-ghvd9fpg5" rel>deployed extensively</a> <span>by Kiev to slow Russian advances and swarm military and civilian infrastructure.</span></p>
<p><span>By contrast, despite alleged initial successes, Bayraktar TB2s quickly vanished from the skies of Donbass. As several Ukrainian officials</span> <a href="https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2023/10/31/are-the-once-vaunted-bayraktar-drones-losing-their-shine-in-ukraine/" rel>have admitted</a><span>, Russian innovation in air defense and electronic warfare rendered the drones effectively useless. Conversely, the paper noted that while Ukraine’s Air Force was still conducting missions, Kiev would soon “run out of aircraft.” The prescribed remedy was to re-equip the country with Soviet-produced MiG-29 fighters, which “Ukrainian pilots know how to operate” already.</span></p>
<p><span>This plan, however, required a number of countries to hand over their ancient fleets of MiG-29s. The academics expressed concern that Central and Eastern European states might be “reticent” due to the risk of “Russian retaliation,” which could be circumvented by “promising gifts” to them, such as weapon upgrades. A year later, in March 2023, Slovakia granted Kiev its</span> <a href="https://www.airforce-technology.com/features/slovakia-transfers-entire-mig-29-fulcrum-fighter-jet-fleet-to-ukraine/" rel>entire squadron</a> <span>of thirteen MiG-29s in exchange for a US promise of twelve Bell AH-1Z attack choppers equipped with Hellfire missiles.</span></p>
<p><span>Poland initially promised to match Slovakia’s splurge, but only wound up delivering a</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLJrMahEiWc" rel>token amount</a><span>. The deal has remained on hold since Krakow’s</span> <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-needs-f-35s-before-dispatching-mig-29s-to-ukraine-says-minister/" rel>August 2024</a> <span>announcement that it wouldn’t provide any further MiG-29s until it received a fleet of F-35s, which aren’t expected to arrive until 2026. Peru, likewise tapped by the academics as a potential source for the aircraft, reportedly initially greenlit supply of its MiG-29s to Ukraine, but</span> <a href="https://www.eurasiantimes.com/russia-sabotages-ukraines-aircraft-deal-with-an-ally-using/" rel>then reneged</a><span>. Latin American governments</span> <a href="https://www.voanews.com/amp/us-pushing-central-south-american-countries-to-give-ukraine-quick-military-boost-/6927591.html" rel>more widely</a> <span>have refused to dispatch any arms whatsoever to Ukraine, despite US pressure.</span></p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Air wars waged against Russia by “non-Ukrainian” pilots</strong></h3>
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<p>Perhaps the most disquieting passage of the document is its last, in which its authors survey historical examples of air forces employing foreign pilots in major conflicts. The paper notes that the aforementioned Flying Tigers “were discharged from the US armed forces” to fight Japan in China, “with the clear understanding that they would be welcomed back thereafter.” Also cited was Finland’s employment of an “entirely” foreign squadron in its 1940 war with Moscow, as well as Zionist settlers’ reliance on an air force “comprised almost entirely of foreign volunteers” during their military campaign against indigenous Palestinian and Arab forces in 1948.</p>
<p>The academics wished to apply these precedents to the Ukraine proxy conflict, creating “volunteer fighter groups today to bolster Ukraine’s air defense” composed of “a reasonable number of Western pilots.” They wrote that these airmen “might volunteer if their national armed forces offered leaves of absence” – as might their civilian counterparts, if US commercial airlines could be “pressured into allowing their pilots, who are fighter-qualified Air Force Reserve or Air National Guard pilots, to take such leaves of absence.” The document boasted that “volunteer fighter groups could substantially disjoint Russia’s air campaign.”</p>
<p><span>F-16s were considered “the most logical option” due to “the number of NATO members that use F-16s,” including Poland. Accordingly, “Polish spare parts could be trucked into Ukraine comparatively quickly,” with the US “airlifting replacements” to Warsaw. From almost the first day of the proxy war, its most hawkish supporters have demanded that Kiev be provided with these fighter jets,</span> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/20/it-is-all-lining-up-plan-for-ukraine-to-finally-start-using-f-16-jets-this-summer" rel>referring</a> <span>to the planes as a “game changer” which would tip the conflict’s scales decisively in favor of Ukraine.</span></p>
<p><span>Despite much</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6oE_LQbZ-E" rel>initial fanfare</a><span>, when F-16s finally arrived in Kiev in late July of 2024, President Volodomyr Zelensky almost immediately complained the country had</span> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-needs-more-trained-pilots-to-maximize-f-16-success-2024-10" rel>only received</a> <span>a handful of jets, and did not have enough pilots trained to fly them. The panic spread to Washington, where Sen. Lindsey Graham publicly urged any “retired F-16 pilot… looking to fight for freedom” to sign up. By the month’s end, the first of F-16s had crashed in</span> <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/08/30/g-s1-20234/ukraine-f16-warplane-crash" rel>uncertain circumstances</a><span>.</span></p>
<p>While references to Ukraine’s “game changing” use of F-16s have all but disappeared from the media in the months since, the leaked proposal’s contents raise serious questions how many supposedly Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia were actually perpetrated by Western military operatives, acting at the behest of, and with the material assistance from, NATO and the US.</p>
<p>“Western European and American fighter pilots tend to fly substantially more hours and train more realistically than their Russian or Ukrainian counterparts,” the academics claimed, meaning they were ideal candidates for conducting “combat missions” against Moscow’s positions, forces, and territory. However, the academics cautioned against Western pilots flying close to the frontline, for fear that “foreign volunteers fall into Russian custody, where an example could be made of them, or they could be paraded in front of the camera.” This was perhaps a nod to CIA pilots Gary Powers and Eugene Hassenfus, whose capture by the Soviet Union and Nicaragua, respectively, humiliated US intelligence.</p>
<p>It’s still unclear how much these proposals determined the course of operations by Ukrainian forces against their Russian foes. But the leaks reviewed by The Grayzone reveal for the first time how, in just a matter of weeks, a small cabal of academics secretly furnished some fairly unconventional war plans on a platter for the CIA and MI6.</p>
<p><span>Just as Britain did with its</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/tag/project-alchemy/" rel>Project Alchemy</a><span>, the Biden administration appears to have outsourced responsibility for crafting its battlefield strategy in Ukraine to a nexus of pinheads with dubious backgrounds, situated thousands of miles from the frontline and its gruesome realities. Almost three years later, with a generation of Ukrainians lost to the proxy war’s meat grinder, the authors of these battle plans are likely still pecking away at their laptops somewhere in the musty halls of academia.</span></p>
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guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/a-national-conversation-urgently
title: A National Conversation Urgently Needed: Industrial Policy and Peace
author: ;Anton Chaitkin
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/a-national-conversation-urgently
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<p>A Message from Anton Chaitkin</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>I spoke with Matt Ehret of the</strong> <em><strong>Canadian Patriot</strong></em> <strong>podcast on the profound implications of the Trump circle’s apparent orientation to re-industrializing the USA.</strong></h3>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong><span>I believe this interview was a uniquely moving and provocative discussion.</span> <a href="https://youtu.be/0Zy6Us7OyCA" rel>View the video here</a><span>.</span></strong></h3>
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<p><span>The President and some close associates have attributed the U.S. rise to power to the “American System.” They point out that this was the protectionist industrial policy of U.S. economic nationalist statesmen Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley.</span><a href="https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/a-national-conversation-urgently#_ftn1" rel>[1]</a></p>
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<p>The administration would “make America great again” – and keep their working class voter base – by rebuilding the country’s manufacturing with modern capital-intensive, energy-intensive factories.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Following through on this commitment would bring earth-shaking positive consequences for peace, and for deep changes in the thinking of the American people.</strong></h3>
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<p><span>My forthcoming book, Volume II of</span> <em>Who We Are</em><span>, is the definitive history of America’s 19</span><sup>th</sup><span>century nationalists. They industrialized America and spread anti-imperial economics as the favored road to national sovereignty and progress.</span></p>
<p>We can’t “wait and see what Trump does.” Let us push hard for a national conversation on the history and future of the promised industrial policy.</p>
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<p><a href="https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/a-national-conversation-urgently#_ftnref1" rel>[1]</a> <span>For example, Robert Lighthizer, U.S. Trade Representative in the first Trump administration, identifies these historic American System advocates in his 2023 book,</span> <em>No Trade is Free</em><span>. Trump himself has singled out President McKinley as an outstanding protectionist.</span></p>
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<p>Anton’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. I urgently need financial backing for my work. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.</p>
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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/argentinas-milei-faces-impeachment
title: Argentina’s Milei faces impeachment for promoting crypto scam
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/argentinas-milei-faces-impeachment
hash: ���M�>n|~�mx�
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<p><strong><span>By</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/wyattreed1/" rel>Wyatt Reed</a> <span>and</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/oscar-leon/" rel>Oscar León</a> <span>- February 17, 2025</span></strong></p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>The Argentinean president branded himself as an edgy economic genius to ride a wave of financial discontent to power. Now he’s implicated in one of the biggest scams in history, wiping out over $4 billion in market cap in a few hours, leaving Argentineans wondering if they’ve also been rugged.</strong></h3>
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<p><span>Argentina’s President Javier Milei has been accused of fraud, and is likely to face impeachment charges, after he promoted a sham cryptocurrency token which allowed a handful of con artists to dupe crypto owners out of hundreds of millions of dollars in a single day. The scam is believed to be the first cryptocurrency “rug-pull” to have been orchestrated with the help of a sitting president. While the exact number of victims is unknown, around 75,000 people are suspected to have been swindled, and a judge has been appointed to investigate after at least 100 criminal complaints were</span> <a href="https://x.com/infobae/status/1891206167243694482" rel>filed</a> <span>against Milei in Argentina in the days since.</span></p>
<p>Crypto token $LIBRA jumped massively in value after Milei endorsed it on social media on Feb. 14, posting a link to purchase the coin and lauding the “private project” for “encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy, funding small business and Argentine ventures.” Milei went as far as framing the coin as a legitimate investment, writing, “the world wants to invest in Argentina.”</p>
<p><span>The URL for the $LIBRA token’s official website, vivalalibertadproject.com, was a clear nod to Milei’s campaign slogan, “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” The page, which</span> <a href="https://www.vivalalibertadproject.com/" rel>remains online</a><span>, says the coin was being launched “in honor of Javier Milei’s libertarian ideas” and was “designed to strengthen the Argentine economy from the ground up by supporting entrepreneurship and innovation.”</span></p>
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<p><span>The token immediately shot up from $0.27 to well over $4, then dropped to less than $0.20 in a matter of hours as a tiny handful of insiders who owned over 80% of the supply dumped their holdings, draining an</span> <a href="https://x.com/davidrkadler/status/1891537060873269382" rel>estimated</a> <span>$280 million from the unsuspecting buyers. While horrified owners discovered they’d been victimized by a classic “pump-and-dump” scheme, Milei promptly deleted his post publicizing the coin.</span></p>
<p>In their place, Milei published a new message attempting to wash his hands of the matter, insisting he’d merely been “supporting a supposed private enterprise with which I obviously have no connection whatsoever.”</p>
<p>“I was not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word (that is why I deleted the tweet),” he wrote.</p>
<p><span>But a number of social media posts make clear that Milei had previously interacted with at least three of the scheme’s operators, and met with two of them on multiple occasions. Further, the claim that Milei was “not aware of the details of the project” is contradicted by a prior</span> <a href="https://x.com/BloombergLineaA/status/1890581295912059096" rel>statement</a> <span>he gave to Bloomberg in which he insisted that the project was “real” and involved “pure private financing.”</span></p>
<p><span>Just two weeks before the scam’s culmination, Milei uploaded a</span> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DFd3qwdplSg" rel>photo</a> <span>to Instagram showing him posing beside Hayden Mark Davis, one of the creators of the $LIBRA coin. As of publication, the post remains online.</span></p>
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<p><span>The day after the $LIBRA crash, Davis took to Twitter to “set the record straight.” In a</span> <a href="https://x.com/KelsierVentures/status/1890914583910449505" rel>video message</a><span>, Davis concedes that “things didn’t go according to plan” with the meme token launch, but promises to re-inject the approximately $100 million they made from it back into the venture. Furthermore, Davis said he still continues to serve as “Javier Milei’s advisor,” and suggested they have no plans to stop the crypto collaboration. “I am working with him and his team on much bigger tokenization and really cool stuff in Argentina, and I absolutely back him.”</span></p>
<p><span>But in a subsequent</span> <a href="https://x.com/KelsierVentures/status/1890914583910449505" rel>written statement</a><span>, Hayden heaped blame on Milei, accusing him of causing a “wave of panic selling” by deleting his X post and denouncing the project. “The sudden loss of confidence had a catastrophic impact on the token’s market stability,” he wrote. As other users quickly</span> <a href="https://x.com/nachilos_/status/1890932734891020316" rel>pointed out</a><span>, though, Milei’s post wasn’t deleted until the coin had already crashed by over 80% of its peak value.</span></p>
<p><span>An hour and half later, Argentina’s Office of the President published a</span> <a href="https://x.com/OPRArgentina/status/1890937875677495542" rel>statement</a> <span>which characterized the entire scheme as the work of KIP Protocol – a company which helped create the token – and described Davis as affiliated purely with KIP, not the president. But it acknowledged that on Jan. 30 Milei had met with Davis, “who, according to the KIP Protocol representatives, would provide the technological infrastructure for his project.”</span></p>
<p>However, “Mr. Davis had no and does not have any connection with the Argentinean government” and was simply “was presented by representatives of KIP Protocol as one of their partners in the project,” the official statement insisted.</p>
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<p>For their part, KIP Protocol has categorically denied involvement, issuing their own statement with the help of legal representatives in which they claim they’re merely an AI infrastructure company and that “it would be unusual to be pitching anything else.”</p>
<p><span>They say their company “had no knowledge of, or involvement in, this meeting of 30 January 2025” and “certainly did not have any representatives present at this meeting.” Though the company’s CEO was</span> <a href="https://x.com/KIPprotocol/status/1849767686554910985" rel>photographed</a> <span>posing enthusiastically in October 2024 alongside Milei, the company maintains that the meeting “was the only occasion on which… any employee of KIP Protocol met with President Milei” and that no other employee of KIP has been in contact with Milei since.</span></p>
<p><span>Prior to the meeting, KIP said it had “no business dealings with Hayden Mark Davis, adding that Davis was never employed by the company, never represented them, and “at no time did [any] employee of KIP Protocol make any representations about Davis being a partner of KIP” to Milei. But the notion that KIP is completely unconnected to $LIBRA is undermined by the token’s</span> <a href="https://archive.is/H5Yph" rel>official page</a><span>, which describes it as a “Private Initative [sic] project Developed by KIP Network Inc © 2025.”</span></p>
<p><span>So far, Davis remains the only figure to have conceded to participating in the plot. In an</span> <a href="https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?si=KJGiTXZmeh2tikhp" rel>interview</a> <span>published on Feb 17, Davis made a series of highly incriminating admissions, including acknowledging that insiders around him had sold off huge quantities of the token (making off with over $100 million while tanking the price) and revealing that he’d personally paid out $5 million of the proceeds to an acquaintance who apparently lost that money in the scam. Davis defended his actions by describing the token, which was explicitly marketed as a social investment vehicle for the state of Argentina, as “dogshit.”</span></p>
<p>“All [cryptocurrency] is extractive to some degree, or a zero-sum game. None of it has value. Whether it’s a fuckin’ meme coin, or it’s a giant utility project, it all is dogshit.”</p>
<p>Davis went on to explain that members of the team “sniped” the token — a method by which crypto insiders use algorithmic bots to identify new tokens and other situations ripe for manipulation — but claimed they only did it to prevent other, more predatory investors from doing so. Davis also admits to having participated in the launch (and having subsequently “sniped”) the infamous $MELANIA meme coin.</p>
<p>Later on in the discussion, however, he attempted to distance himself from the coin’s creators, describing $LIBRA as a joint project between KIP Protocol and the government of Argentina which he merely facilitated.</p>
<p><span>Another strange figure who appears to have been central to the scheme was Mauricio Novelli, with whom Milei had maintained business ties since early 2021, when the then-Congressman repeatedly</span> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1117827611987386" rel>lent his likeness</a> <span>to a company called N&amp;W Professional Traders which was co-founded by Novelli. A week before the the scam took place, Novelli</span> <a href="https://x.com/julitolopez/status/1891160864905892171" rel>published</a> <span>a now-deleted photo on Instagram in which he’s seen posing at a Los Angeles Lakers game alongside Agustin Laje, a close associate of Milei who also worked as an “instructor” at N&amp;W Professional Traders, and who also promoted $LIBRA on social media.</span></p>
<p><span>In the year prior to the scam, Novelli reportedly</span> <a href="https://x.com/juanelegonzalez/status/1890884414923592009" rel>met</a> <span>with Karina Milei, the president’s sister and closest political confidante, on at least four occasions.</span></p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Everything’s coming up Milei</strong></h3>
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<p>So what exactly did Pres. Milei know about the scheme, and did he personally profit off it? Or was he, like tens of thousands of purchasers, simply taken for a ride? The answer to that crucial question has so far remained elusive, but it’s clear that at least some of those being recruited to promote $LIBRA were being compensated for it.</p>
<p><span>Two days after the scam unfolded, male influencer Dave Portnoy revealed the coin’s creator, Hayden Mark Davis, had given him over 6 million of the tokens to promote $LIBRA. Portnoy says he returned the tokens, which would have been worth some $25 million at the coin’s peak, after Davis ordered him not to divulge that he’d been compensated. Nevertheless, Portnoy went on to lose approximately $5 million of his own assets in the scam regardless. But unlike the vast majority of victims, Portnoy was subsequently reimbursed – directly from a crypto wallet containing the “sniped” funds,</span> <a href="https://youtu.be/EqizJTbxAEM?si=KJGiTXZmeh2tikhp" rel>according to Davis</a><span>. Davis subsequently described the decision to only compensate the high-profile influencer as “a mistake.”</span></p>
<p><span>It’s unclear whether Milei was offered a similar arrangement. But it’s also unclear why else the president would have lent his likeness to the project. For economist and cryptocurrency expert Saifedean Ammous, the most likely explanation is that simplest – which is, as he wrote in a popular</span> <a href="https://x.com/saifedean/status/1890724929168912636" rel>post on X</a><span>, that Milei “marketed a shitcoin to support the growth of Argentina, received millions of dollars from fans worldwide, dumped his coins, tanking the coin 95%, deleted the tweet, and now expects everyone to just move on.”</span></p>
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<p><span>But Charles Hoskinson, one of the crypto entrepreneurs featured in a now-infamous</span> <a href="https://x.com/KIPprotocol/status/1849767686554910985" rel>photograph</a> <span>in which Milei poses alongside a number of the scammers, insisted that Milei was simply another rube who was fooled by the token’s operators. The day after the scheme unfolded, Hoskinson published a video, stating:</span></p>
<p>“Here’s what I think happened. I think there’s some people in that inner circle surrounding Milei himself who took advantage of his lack of knowledge of our industry, and what happened with Trump coin and these other things, to convince him that it would be a good idea to launch some crypto infrastructure, and be basically endorsing it, and the used the President of Argentina basically to make a lot of money. And they left him, basically, to clean up the mess after they ran away.”</p>
<p>It’s a line that a number of the president’s most vocal defenders have adopted. From a legal perspective, the notion that Milei was just another victim of the scam would arguably represent the best-case scenario for him. But that, too, involves its own set of problems.</p>
<p>Perhaps most importantly, Milei’s political fortunes largely hinged on his supposed economic acumen. The president stormed to power in 2023 by presenting himself as an edgy, politically incorrect economist who was unafraid to challenge the fiscal orthodoxies that he claimed led to Argentina’s financial woes, even going as far as wielding a chainsaw at rallies to symbolize the budget cuts he’d enact. Those who voted him into power are now confronted with the burning question: what kind of fiscal responsibility can he offer if he can’t even keep from falling for a digital shakedown?</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Not his first rug pull</strong></h3>
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<p>The question is all the more pressing given that it’s not the first time Milei has been credibly accused of participating in a cryptocurrency scam.</p>
<p>In 2022, a scandal erupted around Milei, who was a member of Argentina’s Congress at the time, after he promoted another dubious crypto operation that operated under the name “CoinX.” The platform largely consisted of an extremely basic website created just three weeks before Milei began promoting it, but the highly attractive monthly returns offered led lots of Milei’s followers to buy in, with many even entrusting it with their life savings.</p>
<p>Milei later claimed that his promotional work was a “one-time thing,” but posts on social media between late 2021 and early 2022 indicate Milei visited the CoinX offices at least three times. By May 2022, CoinX had ceased paying investors, and the next month, its CEO and employees vanished – along with the investors’ money – after a national regulatory commision ordered the platform to cease operations due to its strong resemblance to a ponzi scheme.</p>
<p><span>When confronted by a radio journalist in a live interview, Milei defended the original business model and refused to accept responsibility for swindling numerous people – even after a number of them called the show and directly blamed his endorsement for their decision to invest. Although Milei never admitted fault, when asked directly if he was paid by CoinX he</span> <a href="https://x.com/robertomerken/status/1890887008983081158" rel>stated simply</a><span>, “I charge for my opinions.”</span></p>
<p>As of publication, the case is still being litigated. In August 2024, Milei nominated the judge in control of the case, Ariel Lijo, to a seat on the Supreme Court.</p>
<p><span>New charges against Milei relating to his role in the $LIBRA scam are still in their infancy, with a federal judge appointed Feb. 17 set to investigate the various fraud claims against the president. The Argentinean opposition is severely outnumbered, and thus unlikely to win an impeachment battle barring any unforeseen developments. Instead, as Argentina’s markets reacted to the scam by</span> <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EMERV/" rel>tumbling over 6%</a> <span>on the first day after, it seems the force most likely to end Milei’s presidency is the one closest to his heart: the free market.</span></p>

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guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/the-post-kennedy-era-ends-how-can
title: The Post-Kennedy Era Ends; How Can America Now Be Rebuilt?
author: ;Magdalena Therrien
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/the-post-kennedy-era-ends-how-can
hash: �߬�s��3?]�g
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<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F14f8adb0-49c3-4609-bb79-44241dec719d_605x605.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">The Post-Kennedy Era Ends; How Can America Now Be Rebuilt?</h4>
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<p>By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin</p>
<p>The usurpers who ruled after the 1960s assassinations took American industry down. They dictated wars, austerity and censorship. That era is now ending, though they will try to sabotage and regroup.</p>
<p><span>How can we shape a</span> <strong>development agenda</strong> <span>to return America to progress and self-government? Why is international cooperation vital? What reckoning is needed with crimes against humanity, and crimes against our nation?</span></p>
<p>Anton Chaitkin will address these topics in a presentation to the Rising Tide Foundation on Sunday, February 23, 2025, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM Eastern Time. Participation in this event will be for paid subscribers only.</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/zelensky-didnt-start-the-war-he-provoked
title: Zelensky didn&amp;#039;t "start" the war, he provoked it
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/zelensky-didnt-start-the-war-he-provoked
hash: D�4/���FL�j��6
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">Trump's heresy was not literally true, but it was grounded in a fundamental truth that has been denied to Americans so the national security state could bilk them for billions.</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
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<p>By Max Blumenthal</p>
<p><span>President Donald Trump’s claim that his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky,</span> <a href="https://x.com/Megatron_ron/status/1892112578471510063" rel>“started”</a> <span>his country’s war with Russia is being treated by his domestic foes as one of the most heretical foreign policy statements ever issued by a sitting president. These include usual suspects of Russiagate, who have resurfaced to cite Trump’s remark as concrete evidence that the Kremlin had hacked his brain.</span></p>
<p><span>Having tried from my little corner of the internet to warn the American public on the coming proxy war in Ukraine since 2014, and to educate it about its real causes since the war erupted, I felt like I was dreaming when I heard the president’s comments. Of course his words were not literally true; Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. But they were grounded in a fundamental truth which had been denied to Americans by the Nulandite foreign policy team of Obama-Biden, and their Mighty Wurlitzer, which psychologically battered them for years with the relentlessly repeated phrase, “</span><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+unprovoked+Russian+invasion+of+Ukraine%22&amp;oq=%22the+unprovoked+Russian+invasion+of+Ukraine%22&amp;gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRiPAjIHCAIQIRiPAtIBCDEyNDdqMGo0qAIAsAIA&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8" rel>the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine</a><span>” in order to bilk them for billions of dollars – money which Zelensky now</span> <a href="https://x.com/ivan_8848/status/1886180340768854362" rel>says</a> <span>has largely gone missing.</span></p>
<p>Anyone capable of seeing outside the Clockwork Orange-style, eyelids-peeled-back anti-Russia struggle sessions of Western corporate media for the past three years recognizes this war was, in fact, one of the most provoked conflicts in recent history - and that Ukraine would never emerge victorious. No sovereign, nuclear armed country would have allowed a hostile foreign military alliance to establish a beachhead on its borders while controlling that country's government to the point where it hand-selected its leaders. If Russia or China had attempted to install missile systems that could hit Washington on the southern border of the US, and orchestrated a coup to install a puppet leader in Mexico City, the American military would have immediately dispatched B-52's to blanket everywhere from Tijuana to Teotihuacan with JDAMs. But this is precisely what Russia was expected to accept.</p>
<p><span>Just two days after Zelensky was elected president with the help of American advisors, the Pentagon-linked RAND Corp published a paper which concisely spelled out the collective West's agenda for post-Maidan Ukraine in its title:</span> <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html" rel>"Overextending and Unbalancing Russia."</a></p>
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<p><span>France's</span> <a href="https://tass.com/world/1600325" rel>Hollande</a> <span>and Germany's</span> <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html" rel>Merkel</a> <span>later admitted that the Minsk Accords were were merely a ruse the West agreed to in order to buy Ukraine time to build up its military for the coming war with Russia. At the 2022 Munich Security conference, Zelensky articulated Russia's worst nightmare,</span> <a href="https://kyivindependent.com/zelenskys-full-speech-at-munich-security-conference/" rel>calling on</a> <span>the Western powers which controlled him to immediately welcome his country into NATO, a move which everyone from former CIA director</span> <a href="https://x.com/ricwe123/status/1675911162418933775/photo/2" rel>William Burns</a> <span>to former US ambassador to Russia Jack Matlock have described as a near-certain recipe for war. Though they never intended to grant Zelensky’s wish, his fevered demands were met with thunderous applause from</span> <a href="https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_209931.htm" rel>Berlin</a><span>,</span> <a href="https://x.com/davidkurten/status/1761810161553863138" rel>Brussels</a> <span>and</span> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/14/boris-johnson-nato-ukraine-membership" rel>London</a><span>.</span></p>
<p><span>By this point, the Russophone Ukrainians who voted for Zelensky in large numbers in hopes of peace were being</span> <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/kyiv-imposes-ban-on-russian-language-culture/a-66301913" rel>stripped of their national rights</a> <span>under his watch; their local broadcast outlets were being</span> <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-medvedchuk-tv-channels-zelenskiy-defends-ban/31085877.html" rel>banned</a> <span>with Washington's encouragement; and in the Donbas, they were bunkered and taking bodies every day thanks to the</span> <a href="https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1892410776905797983" rel>relentless shelling</a> <span>of the Ukrainian military. In February 2022, OSCE observers documented a</span> <a href="https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1522245695994015745" rel>record number of violations</a><span>, mostly by the Ukrainians. By the 18th of that month, as Aaron Mate</span> <a href="https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1494835674293411846" rel>noted</a><span>, the US removed its OSCE observers and Ukraine rejected a revival of Minsk negotiations with Donbas separatists. Five days later, reality came crashing through in the form of the Russian Special Military Operation.</span></p>
<p><span>Speaking from an alternately opposed angle to Trump in May 2023, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg effectively</span> <a href="https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_214799.htm" rel>admitted</a> <span>the West set the stage for the Russian invasion by backing the Maidan coup, which triggered Putin’s annexation of Crimea. “This war actually started in 2014, with the illegal annexation of Crimea and then a few months later, Russia went in and took control over eastern Donbas,” Stoltenberg remarked. “And since then since 2014, and NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense in a generation.”</span></p>
<p><span>This history and much more is documented in small print over the course of 690 meticulously footnoted pages in Scott Horton's authoritative new book,</span> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Provoked-Washington-Started-Catastrophe-Ukraine/dp/1733647376" rel>“Provoked.”</a> <span>I could not recommend it more highly today.</span></p>
<p>Once Americans begin to understand that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was one of the most provoked wars in our time, the rest of the contrived narratives about Project Ukraine's heroic battle for freedom and democracy evaporate almost as quickly as USAID funds in Kiev. With his heresy, Trump has finally given them the chance to recognize the criminal manipulation to which they were subjected.</p>
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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/judging-freedom-zelenskyy-on-the
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/judging-freedom-zelenskyy-on-the
hash: j�͛�y�z���s�*
title:
Judging Freedom: Zelenskyy on the Ropes - Ukraine, Trump, and the Hidden Forces Shaping American Foreign Policy

content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F157586052%2F1bda3a94-b49f-4feb-98d8-83be5002f15b%2Ftranscoded-27054.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p><em><strong>Max Blumenthal joins Judge Napolitano to dissect the shifting dynamics of U.S. foreign policy under Trump, the provocations leading to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and the potential collapse of Zelenskyy's government. Blumenthal also delves into Netanyahu's strategies in Gaza and the hidden forces driving American interventionism.</strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Summary:</strong><br><span>In a revealing conversation on</span> <em>Judging Freedom</em><span>, Max Blumenthal discusses the dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump, particularly regarding Ukraine. Blumenthal argues that Trump’s recent acknowledgment of the war in Ukraine as one of the most provoked conflicts in modern history marks a significant departure from previous administrations. He traces the roots of the conflict back to the 2014 Maidan coup, which he claims was heavily backed by the U.S., leading to Russia's annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in Donbas.</span></p>
<p>Blumenthal criticizes the narrative of Ukraine as a victim of Russian aggression, asserting that the U.S. and NATO's actions, including the buildup of military alliances on Russia's border, were deliberate provocations. He highlights how the American public is beginning to see through years of propaganda, recognizing the war as a result of U.S. intervention rather than unprovoked Russian aggression.</p>
<p>The discussion also touches on the potential collapse of Zelenskyy's government if U.S. aid is cut off, with Blumenthal predicting internal strife and possible overthrow by nationalist factions. He critiques the Biden administration's sanctions on Russia, arguing they have harmed the U.S. economy more than Russia's, and calls for a reevaluation of America's foreign policy priorities.</p>
<p>Shifting to the Middle East, Blumenthal examines Netanyahu's strategies in Gaza, suggesting that Israel's leadership is more interested in maintaining a state of conflict than achieving peace. He reveals disturbing details about the Hannibal Directive, which allegedly led to the deaths of many Israeli civilians during the October 7th attacks, and discusses the political turmoil within Israel as Netanyahu faces corruption allegations.</p>
<p>Throughout the interview, Blumenthal emphasizes the need for a fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy, away from interventionism and towards a focus on domestic interests. He calls out the influence of lobby groups and the military-industrial complex, urging the Trump administration to prioritize America's needs over global entanglements.</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/the-grayzone-live-youre-fired
title: 🔴 The Grayzone live: You&amp;#039;re fired
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/the-grayzone-live-youre-fired
hash: Pj*/'�j���M�4�
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F157625270%2Fa5b68756-986c-4e59-bc9c-265f0728f858%2Ftranscoded-1740155105.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss Donald Trump's unraveling of the Ukraine proxy war and the apoplectic reactions from his domestic foes and European leaders as Volodymyr Zelensky is cast aside. They will then be joined by Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada, who will discuss his detention in Switzerland in the context of the wider assault on Palestine solidarity and antiwar activism in the West.</p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://rumble.com/v6narjo-youre-fired-the-grayzone-live.html?e9s=src_v1_upp" rel>Watch on Rumble</a></p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFvsz6hHiyE&amp;ab_channel=TheGrayzone" rel>Watch on YouTube</a></p>
<p><span>🔴</span> <a href="http://thegrayzone.com/" rel>Read TheGrayzone.com</a></p>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post">Summary</h3>
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<p>In this Grayzone Live, Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté critically analyze US foreign policy, the role of NATO, and the humanitarian cost of the war in Ukraine, while also addressing the repression of free speech in Europe and the ongoing conflict in Gaza.</p>
<h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Introduction and Context</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>Hosts</strong><span>: Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté welcome viewers to The Grayzone, acknowledging the late start for European, Middle Eastern, and African audiences.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Trump's Controversial Statements</strong><span>: The discussion begins with Trump's recent press conference, where he suggested that Ukrainian President Zelensky could have avoided the war with Russia. This statement has been labeled as heretical by Trump's domestic enemies, sparking a significant backlash.</span></p>
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</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Trump's Foreign Policy Shift</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>Trump's Critique of Zelensky</strong><span>: Trump's comments that Zelensky "started the war" are analyzed. While Trump's phrasing was crude, the hosts argue that there is a fundamental truth behind his statement: the war could have been avoided if Zelensky had made different decisions, particularly regarding NATO expansion and negotiations with Russia.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>US Proxy War in Ukraine</strong><span>: The hosts discuss how the US has used Ukraine as a proxy to provoke and weaken Russia since the 2014 coup. They criticize the bipartisan policy of supporting Ukraine to bleed Russia, which has led to significant destruction and loss of life in Ukraine.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Trump's Potential Policy Shift</strong><span>: Trump's willingness to engage with Russia and his rejection of NATO expansion into Ukraine are seen as a significant departure from previous US policy. The hosts argue that this shift could lead to an end to the proxy war, which they view as a positive development.</span></p>
</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Zelensky's Role and Ukraine's Sovereignty</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>Zelensky as a US Puppet</strong><span>: The hosts argue that Zelensky is a product of US influence, particularly through figures like Victoria Nuland and Nina Jankowicz. They claim that Ukraine has lost its sovereignty and is effectively controlled by the US.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Zelensky's Dictatorial Actions</strong><span>: The hosts criticize Zelensky for shutting down opposition media and acting in a dictatorial manner, even before the Russian invasion. They argue that these actions, supported by the US, contributed to the escalation of tensions with Russia.</span></p>
</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>The Role of NATO and the Minsk Accords</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>NATO Expansion as a Provocation</strong><span>: The hosts discuss how NATO's eastward expansion, particularly into Ukraine, was a key factor in provoking Russia. They reference NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's admission that the war started in 2014 with the Maidan coup and subsequent annexation of Crimea.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Sabotage of the Minsk Accords</strong><span>: The hosts argue that the US and Ukraine sabotaged the Minsk Accords, which could have ended the conflict in Donbas. They claim that the US encouraged Ukraine to attack Donbas, leading to further escalation.</span></p>
</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>The Humanitarian Cost of the War</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>Ukrainian Casualties</strong><span>: The hosts highlight the devastating human cost of the war, particularly for lower-class Ukrainians who are disproportionately affected. They criticize the US and European powers for using Ukraine as a pawn in their geopolitical games, leading to unnecessary suffering.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Trump's Potential to End the War</strong><span>: The hosts express hope that Trump's shift in policy could lead to an end to the war, which they view as a positive development for both Ukraine and global stability.</span></p>
</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>European and US Reactions</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>European Fear of Peace</strong><span>: The hosts discuss why European transatlanticists are afraid of peace with Russia. They argue that a normalized relationship with Russia would benefit European economies but threaten the dominance of NATO and the US-led global order.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Bernie Sanders' Stance</strong><span>: The hosts criticize Bernie Sanders for aligning with neoconservative policies on Ukraine, abandoning his previous critiques of NATO expansion and war.</span></p>
</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Repression of Free Speech in Europe</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity</strong><span>: The hosts discuss the repression of free speech in Europe, particularly targeting Palestine solidarity activists. They highlight the case of Ali Abunimah, who was arrested in Switzerland for attempting to speak at a Palestine solidarity event.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Legal Action Against Repression</strong><span>: Ali Abunimah announces that he is taking legal action against the Swiss government for violating his rights. He emphasizes the importance of fighting back against repression to protect free speech.</span></p>
</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Israel's Hannibal Directive and Gaza Conflict</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>Hannibal Directive</strong><span>: The hosts discuss Israel's use of the Hannibal Directive, which involves killing Israeli captives to prevent their use as bargaining chips by Hamas. They argue that this policy has led to the deaths of many Israeli captives, including children.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Cynical Use of Tragedy</strong><span>: The hosts criticize Israel for cynically using the deaths of Israeli children to justify continued violence in Gaza. They argue that Israel could have avoided these deaths by negotiating with Hamas.</span></p>
</li>
</ul><h4 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Conclusion and Call to Action</strong></h4>
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<ul><li>
<p><strong>Fight Against Repression</strong><span>: The hosts emphasize the importance of fighting back against repression and supporting independent journalism. They encourage viewers to support Ali Abunimah's legal fund and continue to resist attempts to silence dissent.</span></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Upcoming Topics</strong><span>: The hosts preview upcoming discussions on Javier Milei and other topics, encouraging viewers to stay engaged with The Grayzone's content.</span></p>
</li>
</ul>

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guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/live-event-historical-insights-into
title: Live Event: Historical Insights into the Possibility of Progress Under Trump
author: ;Anton Chaitkin
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/live-event-historical-insights-into
hash: �;~�� ���K��
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fantonchaitkin.substack.com%2Ftwitter%2Fsubscribe-card.jpg%3Fv%3D-1560552167%26version%3D9" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>This is a reminder of the presentation by Anton Chaitkin on Sunday, February 23, 2025.</p>
<p>The usurpers who ruled after the 1960s assassinations took American industry down. They dictated wars, austerity and censorship. That era is now ending, though they will try to sabotage and regroup.</p>
<p><span>How can we shape a</span> <strong>development agenda</strong> <span>to return America to progress and self-government? Why is international cooperation vital? What reckoning is needed with crimes against humanity, and crimes against our nation?</span></p>
<p>Anton Chaitkin will address these topics in a presentation to the Rising Tide Foundation on Sunday, February 23, 2025, from 2 PM to 3:30 PM Eastern Time. Participation in this event will be for paid subscribers only.</p>


guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/chaitkin-seminar-on-the-historic
title: Chaitkin Seminar on the Historic Reality Confronting Trump - Video Available Soon
author: ;Anton Chaitkin
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/chaitkin-seminar-on-the-historic
hash: ?sƧ{�*���2�r�
content:
<h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
<p>My remarks lasted about 45 minutes, followed by a lively question and answer session. The video of the event should be available later today (Monday).</p>
<p>This was my introduction to the session:</p>
<p><span>I know some things others don’t know, knowledge that I believe is vital for intelligent participation in today’s world events. I am putting this knowledge into a series of books. giving the inner history of the fight for progress for the people of the United States. The second volume, on the Lincoln era 1830s to 1890s, will be published soon. Here is the cover [see picture, below]. The 3</span><sup>rd</sup><span>volume will take the story up through the assassinations of the 1960s, after which the transatlantic oligarchy took near absolute power.</span></p>
<p>This presentation deals with how the USA might be seriously improved to serve its people, might be self-governing, and might help make the world better instead of promoting mass murder and chaos. I hope you will not tune out now, because you idolize Trump or hate Trump. To do your part, you need to know the economic and strategic reality our country faces.</p>
<p>The two sides in our history are the Americans who want to improve society and serve Man in God’s image, vs the British empire and its American partners. The former are nation-builders, favoring national sovereignty and cooperation. The latter are globalists, favoring subjugation to authority and degradation of labor.</p>
<p><em><strong>Now President Trump promises to rebuild our manufacturing. He and his team blame liberals and China for taking down our factories. The deeper truth has to be faced, or Trump cannot succeed. We have to get to real Economic development, and the people will have to be rallied to fight for their rights against the real enemy oligarchism.</strong></em></p>
<p>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++</p>
<h5><span>The cover for the forthcoming Volume 2 of</span> <em>Who We Are</em></h5>
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<figure><a target="_blank" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ab2a17f-6272-440a-ae40-93df4814f446_1977x2679.jpeg" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM" rel data-sanitized-class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img">
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attributes:
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guid: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/view-the-chaitkin-seminar-historic
title: View the Chaitkin Seminar: Historic Realities Must be Faced to Restore U.S. Industry.
author: ;Anton Chaitkin
link: https://antonchaitkin.substack.com/p/view-the-chaitkin-seminar-historic
hash: ��r!ϰdoBm jVHR
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:best,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fantonchaitkin.substack.com%2Ftwitter%2Fsubscribe-card.jpg%3Fv%3D-1560552167%26version%3D9" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
<p><span>Anton Chaitkin addressed subscriber-participants for the Rising Tide Foundation.</span> <a href="https://youtu.be/ODZtjV3bPiE" rel>Click here to view the video of the February 23, 2025 seminar.</a></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="subscription-widget-wrap">
<div data-sanitized-class="subscription-widget show-subscribe">
<div data-sanitized-class="preamble">
<p>Anton’s Substack is a reader-sponsored publication. Financial backing is urgently needed. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.</p>
</div>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/why-was-i-questioned-by-the-feds
title: Why was I questioned by the Feds?
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/why-was-i-questioned-by-the-feds
hash: /5�)� >yB�L2c�
content:
<h3 data-sanitized-class="subtitle">A federal agent was waiting for me soon after I got off an international flight. I was then treated to a brief but disturbing question-and-answer session.</h3><div dir="auto" data-sanitized-class="body markup">
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<p><strong>By Max Blumenthal</strong></p>
<p>As I approached the customs line at Dulles International Airport early on the morning of February 24, a man called out to me, “Mr. Blumenthal?” He identified himself as an officer with Customs and Border Protection, and led me into a cavernous secondary screening room, where he treated me to a strange and disconcerting questioning session. I had just returned from a leisurely trip to Nicaragua with my family during which I participated in no political activities. But the agent’s line of questioning suggested federal authorities had little interest in my visit to Nicaragua, a country that happens to be controlled by a socialist-oriented government on Washington’s hit list.</p>
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<p><span>As my family and I followed the agent down a long hallway, he turned to me and said, “I caught your latest appearance on Judge Napolito [sic].” He was referring to Andrew Napolitano, a former Fox News host and jurist who hosts a daily livestream featuring former military and intelligence officials as well as journalists like me who dissent from official national security narratives. Nearly all of my appearances on Napolitano’s program,</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@judgingfreedom" rel>Judging Freedom,</a> <span>have focused on Israel’s blood-soaked wars in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond throughout the past 16 months. When I asked the agent how he liked my interview with the Judge, he shrugged and declined to volunteer an opinion. Was he simply trying to warm me up for our own question and answer session, or darkly signaling to me that Big Brother was watching? “This is just a friendly exchange,” he insisted as we entered the cavernous secondary screening room. “You’re not a target or anything.”</span></p>
<p>Standing across from me at a metal desk, the agent asked me to fill out a questionnaire with my personal info and details of my trip. As soon as I completed the form, he flipped it over and displayed a hand-written list of a handful of names. “Do you know any of these people?” he asked.</p>
<p><span>Two of those listed were Anglo names: Nicole Smith and Susan Benjamin. The other three were extremely common Muslims names. Because the agent would not allow me to photograph the list, I was only able to commit one to memory: Muhammad Khan. I could not recall any people I knew with those names. And the only Nicole Smith I could think of was the late model who</span> <a href="https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/celebrities/2023/05/05/64552fdd46163f973c8b465a.html" rel>died under strange circumstances</a> <span>at age 39. I therefore told the agent the names were unfamiliar to me.</span></p>
<p><span>To be sure, I would not have answered extensive follow up questions even if I knew I had a personal connection with one of the names on the list. I’ve learned from activists and journalists who’ve experienced similar probing that federal agents often deploy inane or disingenuous questions to get their subject talking, then attempt to manipulate or entrap them so they can implicate them in a crime. In fact, the</span> <a href="https://innocenceproject.org/police-deception-lying-interrogations-youth-teenagers/" rel>US Supreme Court has ruled</a> <span>that police are allowed to lie to elicit confessions from suspects. If government agents want to subject American citizens like me to extended questioning, they must follow constitutional procedures and allow us to have a lawyer present.</span></p>
<p>After spending several minutes inside a small office, the agent returned to inform us we were free to go. As we exited the screening room and headed toward the baggage claim area, an airport worker from West Africa pulled up to me on a ride-on floor scrubber, shook my hand and asked for a selfie. Like the federal agent, he was apparently aware of my journalistic output, but viewed it in a much more favorable light.</p>
<p>While waiting for our luggage, my wife, Anya Parampil, had a disturbing realization. She had been googling the names on the list the officer presented to me and discovered that Susan Benjamin was the birth name of our friend, Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink and one of the most widely recognized antiwar activists on the planet.</p>
<p>The following day, I informed Medea about my encounter at Dulles and asked if she had experienced anything similar. She told me there was a period when she was harassed by federal authorities each time she traveled out of the country. The FBI once dispatched an officer to meet her at an airport upon her return from a foreign trip, and called her on several occasions in an unsuccessful attempt to solicit a “meeting.” She said the harassment stopped after she filed a series of complaints, but my experience has led her to believe it will begin again.</p>
<p><span>While I was allowed to return to my country after a fairly brief question-and-answer session with a polite federal officer, the interaction felt like an act of political harassment, and seemed to signal an escalation against journalists and activists who’ve expressed antiwar, anti-Zionist views. I can only speculate on what the Feds’ ultimate objective was, however, I know of several antiwar activists who have had FBI agents</span> <a href="https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/11/19/737517/FBI-raid-American-journalist-interview-Presstv" rel>appear at their doors</a> <span>over the past several months asking questions about Iran and individuals with Muslim or Arab names. Just down the road from Dulles, the</span> <a href="https://theintercept.com/2024/12/03/george-mason-fbi-gaza-palestine-israel/" rel>FBI raided the home</a> <span>of a Palestinian American family whose daughter is a Palestine solidarity activist at George Mason University.</span></p>
<p><span>Within the broader realm of Five Eyes, in European vassal states without the same free speech protections Americans enjoy, journalists like</span> <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/ali-abunimah-reveals-how-he-was-ambushed-swiss-police" rel>Ali Abunimah</a><span>,</span> <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/uk-police-raid-home-seize-devices-eis-asa-winstanley" rel>Asa Winstanley</a><span>, and</span> <a href="https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1887632785378021455" rel>Richard Medhurst</a> <span>have been subjected to police raids, imprisonment, and even criminal prosecution for the opinions they’ve expressed on Israel-Palestine. My colleague at The Grayzone,</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/30/journalist-kit-klarenberg-british-police-interrogated-grayzone/" rel>Kit Klarenberg</a><span>, was detained by British counter-terror cops and grilled for hours about his journalism on London’s machinations in Ukraine and beyond. Another one of our contributors,</span> <a href="https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2024/10/21/nj-journalist-jeremy-loffredo-detained-israel-missles-home/75783506007/" rel>Jeremy Loffredo</a><span>, spent several days in an Israeli prison and was ordered to self-deport after authorities falsely accused him of “assisting an enemy during wartime” for his journalism inside the country’s occupied frontiers. In Canada, activist Yves Engler was just released from</span> <a href="https://x.com/EnglerYves/status/1894221884423602579" rel>five days in jail</a> <span>after a fanatical Zionist activist, Dahlia Kurtz, accused him of “hate speech” for branding her a “fascist.” Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travels freely from</span> <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/election-winner-merz-invites-netanyahu-germany-says-israelis-office-2025-02-24/" rel>Berlin</a> <span>to</span> <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-extend-washington-visit-return-israel-saturday-axios-2025-02-03/" rel>Washington DC</a> <span>despite an ICC warrant for his arrest for authorizing ghastly war crimes in the besieged Gaza Strip.</span></p>
<p>My experience at Dulles International Airport paled in comparison to what a growing number of journalists and activists have endured in NATO states under Zionist management. Nonetheless, it is important to document encounters like these, and to prepare for future interactions that might not be as “friendly.”</p>
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guid: https://www.uncaptured.media/p/did-israel-bomb-the-bibas-family
title: Did Israel bomb the Bibas family then hide their deaths to collapse the November 2023 ceasefire?
author: ;Dan Cohen
link: https://www.uncaptured.media/p/did-israel-bomb-the-bibas-family
hash: �?�'_ю�K�UO�t
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<figcaption data-sanitized-class="image-caption"><span>Netanyahu holds a picture of the deceased Bibas family at an officers’ graduation ceremony on February 23, 2025. Source:</span> <a href="https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rjdz05d51x" rel>Ynet</a></figcaption></figure></div>
<p>On November 30, 2023, negotiations were underway between Israel and Hamas to extend a temporary ceasefire that had begun a week before.</p>
<p><span>The previous few days had been marked by jubilant scenes of reuniting families as the Palestinian resistance released 105 women, children, elderly people, and foreigners taken captive on October 7, and Israel released 240 Palestinian hostages and</span> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/world/middleeast/palestinian-prisoners-released-gaza.html" rel>prisoners</a> <span>– 107 of whom were under 18 and three-quarters had not been convicted of a crime.</span></p>
<p>Relatives of Shiri, Yarden, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, the orange-haired family that became a symbol of October 7 around the world, hoped for good news as Hamas released captives. However, each day their hopes were dashed as their loved ones’ names did not appear on any of the lists.</p>
<p>On the morning of November 30, another nightmare unfolded when Hamas published a video of Yarden Bibas screaming in agony after being informed that his wife and two young children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike.</p>
<p>“Netanyahu, you bombed and killed my wife and my two children, who were the most important things in my life! Bring them back home so they can be buried in Israel! I beg you to bring me, my wife, and my children back home!” he wailed.</p>

<p>The video contained Hamas’ offer to “transfer the Bibas family's bodies and release their father for their burial, along with two Zionist detainees.”</p>
<p>Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari called the video “psychological terror” and said it was working to determine if Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas had indeed been killed.</p>
<p>Hours after Hamas published the video, negotiations to extend the ceasefire broke down.</p>
<p>Israel’s mega-assault on the Gaza Strip resumed, having already killed at least 14,800 Palestinians including 6,000 children. With the full backing of the Biden administration, the slaughter would continue until January 2025, when U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, just days before taking office, forced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire.</p>
<p>While Israel blamed Hamas for the breakdown of the ceasefire, contemporaneous reports indicate that Netanyahu walked away from negotiations in order to avoid the transfer of the Bibas family’s corpses.</p>
<p>Among Israelis who supported a ceasefire and exchange, the Bibas family had become – with Shiri filmed as she desperately gripped her two young boys – the most potent symbol, not only of Hamas’ cruelty against the most defenseless civilians, but of the Israeli government’s total failure to protect the residents of the settlements surrounding Gaza.</p>
<p>Thus, any reinforcement of the notion that the Israeli government had abandoned them could have turned the tide in Israeli and international public opinion against resumption of the war.</p>
<p><span>As the end of the temporary ceasefire neared, negotiations were underway to extend it. Netanyahu and his cabinet, stacked with fanatical ministers and lawmakers, who had been demanding nothing less than a full ethnic cleansing of Gaza and had</span> <a href="https://www.uncaptured.media/p/option-c-israeli-government-policy" rel>drafted official plans</a> <span>for its implementation, were looking for a way to resume the war.</span></p>
<p>Israel made a maximalist and deceptive demand for the release of all female captives, a proposal Hamas rejected because it considered soldiers, regardless of their sex, as legitimate prisoners of war. Hamas instead presented in the Yarden Bibas video its counter-proposal to release the bodies of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas, and to allow the father to attend the funeral of his wife and children.</p>
<p>This was widely reported at the time.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231201-hamas-says-offered-to-hand-over-remains-of-hostage-baby-family" rel>French state outlet AFP</a> <span>published an article titled “Hamas says offered to hand over remains of hostage baby, family,” noting that “Hamas's armed wing announced that Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel had been killed in an Israeli bombing before the now-lapsed truce went into effect -- a claim Israel's military has said it is investigating, but has yet to confirm.”</span></p>
<p>“Until now it was believed that they were alive,” reported AFP correspondent Jordana Miller.</p>

<p>Veteran Israeli correspondent Barak Ravid published an article in Axios stating that “Hamas in a statement said it had offered to release elderly men and two Israeli hostages, as well as the bodies of hostages it said were killed during Israeli airstrikes in Gaza” which “included a mother and her two children.”</p>
<p>Ravid’s article also noted that “Hamas said it offered to release the father of the children so that he could attend their funeral.”</p>
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<figcaption data-sanitized-class="image-caption"><span>Barak Ravid’s report on why the November 2024 ceasefire broke down. Source:</span> <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/12/01/gaza-ceasefire-collapse-israel-hostages" rel>Axios</a><span>.</span></figcaption></figure></div>
<p><span>Several other publications, including</span> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/29/hamas-says-10-month-old-hostage-kfir-bibas-was-killed-in-israeli-bombing" rel>The Guardian</a><span>,</span> <a href="https://x.com/CBSMornings/status/1730229151867507145" rel>CBS</a><span>,</span> <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-29/ty-article/.premium/israel-looking-into-hamas-claim-that-bibas-mother-and-sons-killed-in-gaza/0000018c-1c01-dc03-a9ec-1c7be0f40000" rel>Haaretz</a><span>,</span> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-investigating-cruel-hamas-claim-that-bibas-children-mother-killed-in-gaza/" rel>The Times of Israel</a> <span>and the</span> <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12809913/Fresh-blow-family-Kfir-Bibas-Hamas-offer-exchange-three-hostages-bodies-day-claiming-baby-brother-mother-killed-Israeli-bombardment.html" rel>Daily Mail</a> <span>published written and video reports on Hamas’ statement and proposal to transfer the Bibas family’s corpses.</span></p>

<p>None of the reports suggested, as Israel did, that Hamas was lying to advance its goals.</p>
<p>Hamas’s proposal was shot down by Israeli officials, who were intent on resuming the war on Gaza.</p>
<p>"Israel will not address propaganda-based reports coming from Hamas,” Netanyahu’s office told AFP.</p>
<p><strong>‘They lie to us, they sacrifice them’</strong></p>
<p>While Israel abandoned Yarden Bibas and his family’s corpses in Gaza as it continued to commit genocide, it killed several other Israeli captives and lied to the families about them.</p>
<p><span>On January 16, 2024, Israel</span> <a href="https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bkoiuveka" rel>told</a> <span>the family of Yossi Sharabi that he was murdered in Hamas captivity. However, weeks later, Netanyahou’s government was forced to admit Sharabi was</span> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-hostage-yossi-sharabi-was-likely-killed-as-a-result-of-idf-strike/" rel>killed</a> <span>by Israeli airstrikes.</span></p>
<p><span>The day after the Israeli government lied to Sharabi’s family, it was revealed that the military had killed three captives in Jabalya, then lied to their families that Hamas had murdered them. The deception was only</span> <a href="https://x.com/dancohen3000/status/1747673970193670532" rel>revealed</a> <span>when Mayaan Sherman, the mother of soldier Ron Sherman, had her son’s corpse examined and found that they had asphyxiated in a tunnel from poison gasses released as a byproduct of Israeli bombing, what she called “premeditated murder” carried out by the very military her son served in.</span></p>
<p><span>Meirav Svirsky, whose brother Itai was killed by Hamas as a result of Israeli military pressure,</span> <a href="https://x.com/UncapturedNews/status/1748772658492088807" rel>lambasted</a> <span>the Netanyahu government. "They lie to us, they sacrifice them, they give up on them, I was given up on completely,” she remarked on national television.</span></p>
<p><strong>Propaganda value</strong></p>
<p>While Israel abandoned and sacrificed the captives, and deceived the desperate families, its diplomats exploited the plight of the Bibas family in the international arena for maximum propaganda value.</p>

<p>On January 9, 2024, Israeli ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan stepped to the podium in New York City, brandishing a birthday cake decorated with the face of Kfir Bibas, who would have turned one year-old that day.</p>
<p>“Kfir, this birthday cake is for you. You are the reason Israel is fighting day and night,” he railed. “I only wish for you, for your first birthday, that next year, next year God willing, you will celebrate your birthday surrounded by your family and that the suffering of Israeli babies is important to the UN.”</p>
<p><span>At the same time, Israel arranged a</span> <a href="https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hkc7gvbta" rel>special media tour</a> <span>branded the “World's Saddest Birthday" for local and international press at Kibbutz Nir Oz, and held events in Tel Aviv and cities around the world.</span></p>
<p><strong>Hannibal Directive</strong></p>
<p>All along, the danger Israel’s unprecedented bombing campaign presented to the captives held inside Gaza was obvious and widely discussed.</p>
<p><span>As I documented extensively in a January 2024</span> <a href="https://www.uncaptured.media/p/netanyahu-and-kahanist-allies-wage" rel>investigation</a><span>, Netanyahu had plotted from the war’s earliest days to sabotage the families of captives who sought a ceasefire, and the Israeli right-wing openly called for the captives and hostages – including children and babies – to be sacrificed for the conquest of Gaza.</span></p>

<p>This kind of sentiment was echoed in Washington too.</p>
<p>Elliott Abrams, longtime neoconservative whose career in government had spanned from the Reagan administration to the first Trump administration, on October 11 advocated that Israel should reject negotiations with Hamas to save the captives.</p>
<p>“Israel cannot stop the invasion, cannot stop destroying Hamas because of that,” he explained. “I think they're going to have to, in this case, say ‘We can't today play that game anymore, we're going to have to do what we do.’”</p>

<p><strong>The Bibas family returns in coffins</strong></p>
<p>For 13 more months, Bibas family relatives rallied on their behalf but tempered their expectations and prepared for the possibility that Hamas had told the truth about Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir’s fate.</p>
<p><span>“I have real strong faith that they are alive and well. I must not believe otherwise for a moment,” Shiri Bibas’ cousin Yossi Schneider said as he</span> <a href="https://youtu.be/X0_m7LzO6vs?si=Fx9d7urWFygckVWz" rel>toured</a> <span>the destruction of the Bibas home.</span></p>
<p>Public vigils with the color orange, representing the haircolor of the two children, were held all along. It was an ironic twist; the movement that sought to re-establish settlements in Gaza had long used the color orange and continued to as it held conferences making plans to colonize Gaza’s entirety.</p>

<p><span>After months of official silence on the Bibas family, Hagari</span> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-spokesman-hamas-violated-deal-by-failing-to-free-all-female-civilians-first-grave-concern-for-bibas-family/" rel>admitted</a> <span>on January 25, weeks after the incoming Trump administration forced Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire, that there were “grave concerns for their fate.”</span></p>
<p>On February 1, Yarden Bibas was released from captivity and returned to Israel.</p>
<p>The family still had no confirmation on the fate of Shiri, Kfir, and Ariel. Nonetheless, the Israeli government published their names as officially dead, violating protocol that requires informing the family before releasing the information to the public. This act enraged the family.</p>
<p><span>"We have been waiting for 16 months for certainty that they could not give us, and now it has been determined before they are here?? Before they have been identified?? Before we are informed?" Ofri Bibas, Yarden’s sister,</span> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ofri.bibas/posts/10161028905737322?ref=embed_post" rel>wrote</a> <span>on Facebook.</span></p>
<p>While the publication was said to be a mistake, it may also have been a Freudian slip, demonstrating that the Israeli government indeed knew Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir were dead.</p>
<p><span>On February 19, the Bibas family</span> <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/middleeast/bibas-family-deaths-israel-hostages-intl-latam/index.html" rel>received official confirmation</a> <span>of their deaths. Their remains were transferred by Hamas in black coffins the next day, along with that of Oded Lifshitz, an elderly man also abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz.</span></p>
<p>On February 21, the Israeli military announced that Palestinians had murdered Ariel and Kfir Bibas and then mutilated their corpses to make it appear as if they had been killed in airstrikes.</p>
<p>“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered by terrorists in cold blood,” he said. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys. They killed them with their bare hands. Afterwards, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”</p>

<p>Hagari claimed that this conclusion was based on “forensic findings, the identification process and intelligence that supports the findings.”</p>
<p><span>The following day, Chen Kugel, a former Israeli military doctor who heads the Israeli National Forensic Institute of Medicine,</span> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/forensics-chief-says-remains-of-shiri-bibas-positively-identified-no-evidence-she-was-killed-in-explosion/" rel>announced</a> <span>that their examination “found no evidence of injuries caused by bombing.”</span></p>
<p><span>However, Chen Kugel had previously been caught repeatedly</span> <a href="https://x.com/zei_squirrel/status/1893400129723334981" rel>lying</a> <span>that he personally witnessed beheaded babies on October 7, despite the fact that only one Israeli baby was killed that day as a result of a stray bullet, and none were beheaded.</span></p>
<p><span>In the immediate aftermath of the transfer of the Bibas family’s corpses, the Israeli government’s claim that Palestinians had killed them with their “bare hands”, lacking any evidence, was uncritically spread across legacy media outlets and by politicians and influencers</span> <a href="https://x.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1893381979573301335" rel>including</a> <span>Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Richtie Torres.</span></p>
<p><strong>Netanyahu attacks the ceasefire again</strong></p>
<p>With the ceasefire scheduled to move into its second phase, Netanyahu once again began to exploit the suffering of the Bibas family in order to upend it and return to war. On the national stage, the prime minister made bombastic claims about the nature of their deaths that had not been shared with the grieving family.</p>
<p><span>On February 23, Netanyahu</span> <a href="https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/rjdz05d51x" rel>addressed</a> <span>an officers’ graduation ceremony, waving a photo of the Bibas family.</span></p>
<p>“They strangled the tender children with their own hands, and if they could, they would have murdered all of us with the same level of cruelty,” Netanyahu declares to cheers.</p>
<p>"Why didn't you save them?" a group of audience members shouted.</p>
<p>Ofri Bibas-Levy, the sister of Yarden Bibas, sent a cease and desist letter the next day to Netanyahu’s office and others, threatening legal action if he continued to discuss details of their deaths.</p>
<p><span>"This is outright abuse of a family that has already been enduring hell for 16 months," Bibas-Levy</span> <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-25/ty-article/.premium/bibas-family-learning-details-of-murders-from-media-and-netanyahu-relative-says/00000195-3e8b-d852-a5df-ffaf62a80000" rel>wrote</a> <span>on Facebook.</span></p>
<p>At the same time, Israel launched a massive propaganda offensive on social media, repeating Netanyahu’s claims against the Bibas family’s wishes.</p>
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<figcaption data-sanitized-class="image-caption"><span>The Israeli governemnt mounted a propaganda campaign claiming Hamas murdered the Bibas family, against the wishes of the grieving family members. Source:</span> <a href="https://x.com/Israel/status/189369403119829813" rel>X/Israel</a></figcaption></figure></div>
<p>On Tuesday, February 25, Netanyahu took his act to AIPAC, this time adding a new detail that Hamas first strangled the mother in front of the children, a sequence of events that would be impossible to determine, even if it were true.</p>

<p>“They crushed their tiny skulls with unspeakable cruelty and barbarism. What monsters! Their evil knows no bounds,” Netanyahu thundered. “We will ensure that no child, no parent, no family will ever face such horror again. This is our duty, this is our sacred obligation for we are fighting a war between civilization and barbarism and I say civilization must win, and civilization will win!”</p>
<p>While Netanyahu spares no effort or artifice in trying to wreck another ceasefire, using the Bibas family as the pretext, the lives of the remaining 63 Israeli captives and the millions of Palestinians of Gaza hang in the balance.</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/bibas-family-threatens-to-sue-israeli
title: Bibas family threatens to sue Israeli govt as official propaganda on hostage killings unravels
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/bibas-family-threatens-to-sue-israeli
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>The Bibas family demands the Israeli government cease exploiting the deaths of their family members for propaganda purposes as layers of evidence support claims an Israeli airstrike killed them.</strong></h3>
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<p><strong><span>By</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/wyattreed1/" rel>Wyatt Reed</a> <span>and</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/max-blumenthal/" rel>Max Blumenthal</a> <span>- February 25, 2025</span></strong></p>
<p>The relatives of an Israeli family killed while in Hamas captivity in Gaza have demanded the government stop making statements attributing blame for the killings of their loved ones, threatening to “take all legal measures at their disposal” if the Netanyahu administration refuses to comply. The request came three days after a declaration by Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari that Palestinian “terrorists” had “deliberately” killed two young members of the Bibas family “with their bare hands.”</p>
<p>Lawyers representing surviving members of the Bibas family have accused government ministries of seeking to exploit their plight for propaganda purposes, complaining “the family continues to receive, surprisingly, repeated inquiries from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Information System… with the aim of satisfying the public’s voyeuristic instinct.”</p>
<p>“Although it is surprising that it is necessary to request and emphasize this,” the lawyers continued, “we ask once again and in every language of request that all parties” be instructed “not to contact the family, nor to speak with any professional party entrusted with conducting the examinations regarding the circumstances of the murder and the condition of the deceased.”</p>
<p><em><span>Read the Bibas family’s letter to Netanyahu and other officials</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/bibas-1.pdf" rel>here</a><span>.</span></em></p>
<p>The Bibas family has become a symbol of the plight of Israelis taken captive on October 7, but the truth behind their experience remains obscured by official spin. All four family members were taken captive on Oct. 7, but the father was separated in the chaos.</p>
<p><span>While he survived his time in Hamas and was later released to Israel, his wife, Shiri, and two young sons, Kfir and Ariel, were killed while in the custody of the Mujahedin Brigades, a smaller, lesser known faction. According to a</span> <a href="https://x.com/suppressednws/status/1892461004727975938?" rel>Mujahedin Brigades</a> <span>commander, “When [Shiri Bibas] was captured [on October 7], we sent her children with her out of compassion for them. The Israeli occupation killed her along with her children after bombing them along with their captors.”</span></p>
<p><span>The commander also declared that Shiri Bibas had</span> <a href="https://x.com/stjrawberry/status/1894021110553063807" rel>served as a soldier</a> <span>in the Israeli army’s Unit 8200 intelligence division, which spies on and seeks to compromise Gaza residents, and later served in the army’s Gaza Division.</span></p>
<p>Though Hamas announced that Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, Israeli authorities were reluctant to openly acknowledge their fate. During an exchange of captives the following month, Hamas offered to hand over the remains of the dead family members. On December 3, Yarden Bibas delivered a video messaging from captivity stating that his wife and children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike – like dozens of other Israeli hostages – and pleaded with his government to negotiate for their freedom so he could give them a proper burial. But Israel rejected the appeals, and resumed its decimation of the Gaza Strip.</p>
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<p>The return of their Bibas family members’ bodies this February 18, and the outrage stoked by the Israeli government in calculated fashion, now threatens to derail the tenuous ceasefire with Hamas.</p>
<p><span>Since his release on Feb. 2, Yarden Bibas has neglected to confirm the stunning comments he made while in captivity. However, the open letter his family delivered to top Israeli officials conveyed strident disapproval of the government’s narrative, and</span> <a href="https://x.com/RachelMoiselle/status/1894002796287955376" rel>contradicts a statement by Hagari</a><span>, the IDF spokesman, who claimed, “‘Yarden [Bibas] looked me in the eyes and asked that all the world know and be horrified by the manner in which they murdered his children.”</span></p>
<p><span>Funerals for the deceased Bibas family members are scheduled to take place on Feb. 26. The family has reportedly</span> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/at-bibas-familys-request-no-government-minister-to-attend-funeral-for-shiri-ariel-and-kfir/" rel>banned</a> <span>Israeli government officials from attending the ceremony. A day before the funeral, the sister of Yarden Bibas, Ofri,</span> <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/bibas-family-tells-netanyahu-to-shut-up-as-he-details-the-murders-of-shiri-ariel-and-kfir/" rel>published</a> <span>a Facebook post telling Israeli Prime Minister to “shut up,” and accused him of “abuse for its own sake of a family that has gone through 16 months of hell.”</span></p>
<p>Meanwhile, as a new independent analysis supports claims that Israel killed the Bibas family members in an airstrike, Tel Aviv has deployed one of its most notorious spin doctors to keep the blame focused on Hamas.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>The propaganda doctor is in</strong></h3>
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<p><span>An official investigation into the exact cause of death has yet to be completed. Nevertheless, on Feb. 22, the head of Israel’s official forensic institute, Dr. Chen Kugel, published a</span> <a href="https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/bjqs8dpqjl" rel>video</a> <span>insisting that members of the Bibas family were not killed by Israeli bombing.</span></p>
<p>In the Bibas family’s letter, their lawyers explicitly accuse Kugel of attempting “to violate medical confidentiality” by repeatedly divulging details of their loved ones’ deaths without the family’s permission, referencing “confidential and sensitive information” which they noted “only the family has the right to decide how and whether it will be used.”</p>
<p><span>It wouldn’t be Dr. Kugel’s first time twisting reality to reinforce official Israeli government propaganda. Less than a month after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Kugel was already hard at work laundering the myth of beheaded babies which Israel used to manufacture consent for its genocidal rampage, with a writer for The Economist</span> <a href="https://archive.ph/20231105171102/https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/11/05/the-biblical-archaeologist-finding-the-victims-hamas-burned#selection-1321.0-1321.422" rel>noting</a> <span>that “Dr. Chen Kugel… told me he had seen the burnt, headless bodies of babies.”</span></p>
<p>This turned out to be a gargantuan lie, as only one baby was killed on October 7: 11 month old Mila Cohen, who was accidentally shot through the door of a kibbutz safe room.</p>
<p><span>In 2016, Kugel attempted to shield an Israeli soldier from prosecution by claiming during the trial that the exit wound on a 17-year-old Palestinian boy who’d been shot dead during a protest was inconsistent with the firing position of the defendant,</span> <a href="https://news.walla.co.il/item/2971152" rel>stating</a> <span>at the trial that “there is no explanation for the direction of the shooting.”</span></p>
<p><span>The soldier later acknowledged “accidentally” firing a live round after he said he failed to ensure that his gun was loaded with blanks and failed to load a rubber bullet into a separate adapter. An article published in the New York Times at the time</span> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/world/middleeast/israel-border-shooting-sentencing.html" rel>noted</a> <span>that “according to court documents, [the accused] expressed regret for aiming and firing at the young man.”</span></p>
<p>Prior to that, Kugel served as a key witness on the defense team of the Israeli sniper who killed the British human rights activist Tom Hurndall with a bullet to his brain. The soldier wound up being convicted in an Israeli court, where he received a slap on the wrist despite Kugel’s best efforts to bend the truth.</p>
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<p>While insisting that Israel was not responsible for the death of the Bibas boys, Kugel confirmed that Israel had received the body of their mother, Shiri Bibas, after remains initially returned by Hamas turned out to belong to a different woman.</p>
<p>Hamas subsequently acknowledged the “the possibility of an error or mix-up of bodies,” attributing the confusion to the difficulty of retrieving corpses and body parts under the rubble caused by indiscriminate Israeli bombing.</p>
<p><span>But even after Israel received Shiri Bibas, the country’s notoriously fanatical Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich,</span> <a href="https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/172948/20250221/netanyahu-vows-hamas-will-pay-full-price-after-israel-receives-wrong-body-in-hostage-return.htm" rel>condemned</a> <span>the mix-up as a “serious violation of the agreement,” while Netanayahu pledged to “ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement.” Two days later, citing what it called “Hamas’s repeated violations” of the deal, Israel unilaterally declared an end to the ceasefire, refusing to honor its commitment to give back over 600 Palestinians who’ve been detained without charge.</span></p>
<p>Today, the ceasefire hangs by a thread.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>Israeli analyst finds Israel killed Bibas family members</strong></h3>
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<p><span>Mainstream outlets from</span> <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2025/02/21/bibas-children-strangled-israel-hamas-ceasefire/79455874007/" rel>USA Today</a> <span>to the</span> <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjry3jzedl1o" rel>BBC</a> <span>have regurgitated the Israeli government’s claim that Hamas strangled the Bibas children with their bare hands, prompting centrist hereditary influencer Meghan McCain to</span> <a href="https://x.com/Truthtellerftm/status/1892401305177485640" rel>call</a> <span>to “blast the people who killed this baby [Kfir Bibas] to hell.”</span></p>
<p><span>However, an</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/AdarWeinreb/status/1893030350089265360" rel>analysis by Adar Weinreb</a><span>, an independent Israeli researcher and former IDF soldier, demonstrates that an Israeli airstrike was the most likely cause of death for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas.</span></p>
<p>“While Israel claims the Bibas family was ‘brutally murdered by terrorists,’ a closer look at the available evidence suggests otherwise,” Weinreb wrote. “Given Israel’s history of misleading forensic reports, its established pattern of killing hostages in airstrikes, and the overwhelming lack of precedent for Islamist militants executing young children, I believe the most plausible explanation, by a significant margin, is that they were killed in an Israeli airstrike.”</p>
<p>Furthermore, “the available evidence does not support the claim that young children were systematically targeted” by Hamas,” Weinreb explained, noting that on Oct. 7, children under 13 “were killed at a rate approximately seven times lower than their share of the population,” and that children under 5, like the Bibas children, “were killed at a rate of approximately 11 times lower than their share of the population.”</p>
<p>Yet in the months after October 7, Israel targeted virtually anything that moved inside Gaza, including Israeli hostages. Weinreb pointed specifically to Noa Marciano, a 19-year-old corporal in the Israeli army who was “almost certainly killed by an Israeli airstrike” after being taken captive on October 7. In the aftermath of Marciano’s killing, Israeli military spokesman Hagari claimed the pathology report showed that “Noa was injured by the strike, but not in a life-threatening manner,” claiming “according to intelligence information, Noa was taken inside the walls of Shifa Hospital, where she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist.”</p>
<p>As Weinreb notes, “This narrative makes absolutely no sense. Why would her captors take her to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries only for a doctor to kill her? The far more plausible scenario is that Noa was injured in the airstrike, taken to the hospital, and died from her injuries.”</p>
<p>After all, Weinreb wrote, “among the 80+ released hostages, the single most consistent testimony is their constant fear of being killed by Israeli airstrikes.” This included Noa Argamani, a young Israeli woman who revealed after being rescued from the Gaza Strip in a blood-soaked raid by Israeli soldiers that she “was in a building that was bombed by the Air Force.”</p>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><strong>“They are carrying out a Hannibal procedure on us”</strong></h3>
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<p>On Feb. 25, Argamani testified before the United Nations about the harrowing moment when fellow captive Yossi Sharabi was killed in an Israeli airstrike, and she nearly suffered the same fate: “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I thought it was going to be the last second of my life. I screamed so loud so someone would hear me, and I heard Yossi screaming too. But after a few seconds, I stopped hearing from Yossi.”</p>
<p><span>During a meeting with Netanyahu’s cabinet, one former hostage reportedly</span> <a href="https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/hkp00rchsp" rel>declared</a><span>: “The reality is that I was in a hideout that was bombed, and we became wounded refugees. This doesn’t even include the helicopter that fired at us on our way to Gaza. You claim there is intelligence, but the reality is that we were being bombed.”</span></p>
<p><span>Around 800 Israeli civilians are estimated to have died during the Oct. 7 attack, but it’s still unclear exactly how many were killed by Palestinian militants – and how many were killed by the Israeli military. A month after the war began, an Israeli helicopter pilot confirmed the military deployed a</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r63nmfbIUBA" rel>“mass Hannibal”</a> <span>against its own people that day. Under Israel’s Hannibal Directive, soldiers are authorized to open fire on both Israeli civilians and troops who are being taken captive to prevent them from being used as bargaining chips.</span></p>
<p><span>After being extracted to Gaza, at least three Israelis who managed to escape their Hamas captors were</span> <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/3-israeli-hostages-tried-only-killed-military-rcna130912" rel>killed by Israeli forces</a> <span>who subsequently testified that they mistook them for Palestinians. Those soldiers even hunted down one of the escaped hostages on foot, executing him at point blank range.</span></p>
<p><span>In January of 2024, the mother of an Israeli soldier slain while being held in Gaza, Ron Sherman,</span> <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/18/israeli-army-gassed-auschwitz-soldier/" rel>revealed</a> <span>that he’d been killed by his own forces when the Israeli army gassed the Gaza tunnel he was in – a death which she said was “like Auschwitz.”</span></p>
<p><span>Noam Dann, the niece of captive Ofer Calderon, publicly</span> <a href="https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1893029138316787836" rel>complained</a><span>, “They are carrying out a Hannibal procedure on us. My cabinet, my prime minister, my defense minister, are carrying out operations on my family, on citizens who were kidnapped from their homes – a Hannibal procedure.”</span></p>
<p><span>Many released captives have described being more frightened of Israeli bombing than of their Hamas captors. That fear was perhaps best</span> <a href="https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/hkp00rchsp" rel>summarized</a> <span>by Menir Oz, a released Israeli who told the country’s cabinet that when “we were sitting in the tunnels, we were terribly afraid that not Hamas but Israel would kill us, and then they would say – Hamas killed you.”</span></p>
<p>Though it might seem outlandish that the Netanyahu regime would deliberately bomb sites being used to hold Israeli hostages, according to Israeli sociologist Yigal Levy, “the government’s decision to attack Gaza despite the presence of hostages in the bombed sites can be considered an extension of the ‘Hannibal’ directive.”</p>

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/deep-fake-state-the-grayzone-live
title: 🔴Deep fake state - The Grayzone live
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/deep-fake-state-the-grayzone-live
hash: �T>_O��~��/�
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F158106574%2F704e6a2b-39c6-47ae-8bd7-6014e7d91d98%2Ftranscoded-1740760317.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate cover Israel's latest hostage deception, its takeover of southern Syria, Trump's outrageous AI Gaza video, his escalation of the economic war on Venezuela, the furor over his Ukraine plan, and more.</p>
<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2aYvPCjar4&amp;ab_channel=TheGrayzone" rel>Watch on YouTube</a></h3>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><span>🔴</span> <a href="https://rumble.com/v6pukhc-deep-fake-state-the-grayzone-live.html" rel>Watch on Rumble</a></h3>
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<h3 data-sanitized-class="header-anchor-post"><span>🔴 Read</span> <a href="http://thegrayzone.com/" rel>TheGrayzone.com</a></h3>
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guid: https://www.uncaptured.media/p/dan-cohen-discusses-how-netanyahu
author: ;Dan Cohen
link: https://www.uncaptured.media/p/dan-cohen-discusses-how-netanyahu
hash: �~ܝ ]wΠ�۔�\
title:
Dan Cohen discusses how Netanyahu is exploiting the Bibas family&amp;#039;s deaths to upend the ceasefire

content:
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Dan Cohen joins Redacted to discuss how Israel killed the Bibas family, covered up their deaths to break the November 2023 ceasefire, and is again using their deaths to attack the current ceasefire.

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guid: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/judging-freedom-max-blumenthal-interrogated
title: Judging Freedom: Max Blumenthal Interrogated at Dulles Airport
author: ;The Grayzone
link: https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/judging-freedom-max-blumenthal-interrogated
hash: �~$K��f��Ә>~|
content:
<div><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1200,h_600,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-video.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fvideo_upload%2Fpost%2F158107004%2Ff6d1fda1-906f-4d09-bb6b-201114e905f3%2Ftranscoded-22167.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p>Max Blumenthal shares his experience of being interrogated at Dulles Airport by Customs and Border Protection agents about his political views and associations. He discusses the broader context of U.S. government harassment of activists and journalists, particularly those critical of Israel. The conversation also delves into Israel's actions in Gaza, including allegations of killing hostages and exploiting their deaths for propaganda.</p>

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guid: https://thehill.com/?p=5171507
title: Johnson says Putin ‘not to be trusted,’ ‘dangerous’
author: ;Tara Suter
link: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5171507-johnsonputin-not-to-be-trusted-dangerous/
hash: ���:=�tS�3
tags: #Defense #House #International #News #House Republicans #russia #ukraine
content:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not to be trusted,” as well as “dangerous.” “What is your view of Vladimir Putin?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Johnson on “State of the Union.” “I think Vladimir Putin is an old-school communist, a former KGB agent, and he’s not to…

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guid: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2144739/election-partielle-halifax-andy-fillmore
title: Une élection partielle annoncée dans la circonscription fédérale d’Halifax
content: <p>Justin Trudeau a annoncé dimanche que les électeurs seront conviés aux urnes le 14 avril.</p>
link: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2144739/election-partielle-halifax-andy-fillmore
hash: �� ���!�k����K
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guid: https://thehill.com/?p=5171481
title: ‘SNL’ Cold Open mocks heated Trump-Zelenksy meeting, Musk chainsaw moment
author: ;Rachel Scully
link: https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5171481-snl-cold-open-mocks-trump-zelenksy-musk-chainsaw/
hash: )����R�m !����
tags: #Blog Briefing Room #In The Know
content:
This week’s “Saturday Night Live” Cold Open spoofed the meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and featured a special appearance from a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk. In its first episode since its 50th anniversary, the late-night show opened with Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, and Zelensky, played by Mikey Day. Last week,…

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guid: https://thehill.com/?p=5171518
title: GOP senator: ‘I don’t agree’ with calls for Zelensky to step down
author: ;Lauren Irwin
link: https://thehill.com/policy/international/5171518-james-lankford-opposes-zelensky-resignation/
hash: 2�1*���4��^8��R
tags: #International #News #Russia-Ukraine war
content:
Sen. James Lankford (R-Olka.) said he doesn’t agree with the calls from some in his party saying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should step down. Lankford joined NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday to discuss the explosive meeting between President Trump and Zelensky, and the subsequent calls from GOP leaders for a new Ukrainian leader. “I…

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guid: https://thehill.com/?p=5169913
title: Postponing last week’s vaccine meeting endangers Americans’ health
author: ;Tom Frieden; opinion contributor
hash: �W<���Q�*��c�
tags: #Healthcare #Opinion
content:
Expect efforts to discredit ACIP by portraying medical and public health experience as bias rather than the result of decades of fact-based investigations.

link:
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5169913-postponing-last-weeks-vaccine-meeting-endangers-americans-health/

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guid: 67c378fe6dfcc00001ebb785
title: Why can't we go back to small phones?
author: ;Corbin Davenport
link: https://www.spacebar.news/cant-go-back-to-small-phones/
hash: Ƥ�.�,(X�� ��
content:
<img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/iphone-SE-1.jpg" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"><p>Last month, Apple <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/19/apple-discontinues-iphone-se/">discontinued the third-generation iPhone SE</a>, marking an unceremonious end to mainstream compact smartphones. Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo/OnePlus, and Vivo, the <a href="https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/global-smartphone-share/">top four Android smartphone manufacturers</a>, have not released a single phone with a display 5.5 inches or smaller in the past three years, <a href="https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&amp;fDisplayInchesMax=5.5&amp;idOS=2" rel="noreferrer">according to data from GSMArena</a>. Apple's smallest phones are now the 6.1-inch iPhone 16e and iPhone 16.</p><p>There are still a few niche companies working on smaller devices, like <a href="https://www.unihertz.com/" rel="noreferrer">Unihertz</a>, but those phones almost always have low-end hardware and limited software support. Eric Migicovsky, the founder of the Pebble smartwatch, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/23125959/pebble-founder-eric-migicovsky-small-android-phone-quest-iphone-mini">announced plans in 2022</a> to create a compact Android phone—that project is <a href="https://www.theverge.com/mobile/609857/small-android-phone-beep-not-priority-pebble-instead">now on hold</a> while Migicovsky is focused on bringing back Pebble watches.</p><p>It really seems like high-quality compact smartphones are gone for good, but not just because real-world demand for these devices has declined over the years. They're gone <em>and</em> increasingly difficult to bring back, as both hardware and software trends towards large devices as the 'default' form factor. I think there is a narrow segment where small phones can work, but probably not as the 'flagship smartphone in half the size' product that most people might want.</p><h2 data-sanitized-id="how-we-got-to-big-phones">How we got to big phones</h2><p>Let's travel back to 2011 for a moment. <em>Transformers: Dark of the Moon</em> hit theaters, the Occupy Wall Street movement was in full swing, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Portal 2 were finally released, and no one could escape from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6zr6kCPj8">LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem</a>. This is the world in which the first Samsung Galaxy Note arrived, with its 5.3-inch display and S Pen stylus.</p><p>The Galaxy Note was not a uniquely giant phone for the time—the <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/3853/the-dell-streak-review">5-inch Dell Streak</a> predated the Galaxy Note by over a year—but it was a significant departure from most mainstream smartphones and heavily marketed. Michael Calore for <em>Wired</em> said in <a href="https://www.wired.com/2012/02/samsung-galaxy-note/" rel="noreferrer">his 2012 review</a>, "Closer to a tablet than a phone, the Note dwarfs the iPhones and Droids around it. Hold it up to your face to make a call and everyone around you laughs. Seriously, it never gets old."</p><figure data-sanitized-class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/GALAXY-Note_1.jpg" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?" loading="lazy" width="691" height="424" data-sanitized-class="kg-image"><figcaption><span>Credit: </span><a href="https://news.samsung.com/global/galaxy-note" rel="noreferrer"><span>Samsung</span></a></figcaption></figure><p>These giant phones were definitely absurd at first. I didn't have a Galaxy Note, but I did have the <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2011/11/21/2553335/samsung-galaxy-player-4-0-5-0-review" rel="noreferrer">Samsung Galaxy Player 5</a> (also called the Galaxy S WiFi 5.0), which was a 5-inch Android device intended as an iPod Touch competitor. I received many comments about it from other students at school, and I have a vivid memory of a security officer commenting "I could watch TV on that!" to me as I put it into a plastic tray for scanning at an airport.</p><p>There were some issues with this larger form factor, most of which still exist today to varying extents. That <em>Wired</em> review mentions, "it's too wide to type or scroll comfortably with the thumb of one hand" and was "tough to carry in your front pocket comfortably while walking around or riding a bike." <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/23/2722302/samsung-galaxy-note-review">Vlad Savov's review</a> at <em>The Verge</em> said the phone had a "one-size-fits-none form factor," and "pocketing the Note is an exercise in either frustration or denial."</p><p>There were benefits to the comically-large form factor, though. Touch keyboards worked significantly better with larger screens, placing another nail in the coffin of BlackBerry-style phones with physical keyboards. <em>Engadget</em> <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2011-10-28-samsung-galaxy-note-review.html">said</a> at the time, "A  larger display means larger keys, which are easier to see and simpler to tap accurately — if you can reach them." The larger screen was also just better for reading websites and books, watching videos and movies, and playing games. I certainly enjoyed <em>Minecraft</em> and <em>Bloons Tower Defense 5</em> on my Galaxy Player 5.</p><p>Battery life was perhaps the strongest selling point for the original Galaxy Note. This was simple physics: the larger form factor could fit a larger 2,500 mAh battery, while that year's iPhone 4s had a ~1430 mAh battery, and the Galaxy S2 from a few months earlier had a 1,650 mAh battery. <em>Engadget</em> called the battery life "phenomenal," and that review from <em>The Verge</em> said, "I could regularly go from the start of one day to the end of the next without recharging the Note."</p><p>I strongly suspect battery life was the main reason large phones eventually became mainstream, as phones could continue increasing performance without sacrificing all-day (or even two-day) battery life. Samsung doubled down on this with the Galaxy Note 2's even bigger 3,100 mAh battery, though it still <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/6386/samsung-galaxy-note-2-review-t-mobile-/4">wasn't the top of the pack in battery benchmarks</a>, as the larger screen did eat up some of those power reserves.</p><p>Samsung continued releasing new Galaxy Note phones on a regular basis, and slowly but surely, larger phones became mainstream. The 5.2-inch <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/lgs-g2-smartphone-gets-caught-living-in-the-shadows-of-giants/">LG G</a>2 arrived in 2013, the same year as the 5.9-inch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GrIWdORHvc">Oppo N1</a> and 6-inch <a href="https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-Fonepad-Note-FHD-6-Smartphone.105172.0.html" rel="noreferrer">ASUS Fonepad Note FHD6</a>. Nokia joined the big-screen party with the 6-inch <a href="https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nokia-lumia-1320-review/" rel="noreferrer">Lumia 1320</a> in 2014, around the same time as Apple released the 5.5-inch <a href="https://youtu.be/WuC6b43_kLQ" rel="noreferrer">iPhone 6 Plus</a>.</p><figure data-sanitized-class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/Untitled.jpg" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?" loading="lazy" width="1898" height="853" data-sanitized-class="kg-image"><figcaption><span>Credit: </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38IqQpwPe7s" rel="noreferrer"><span>Apple</span></a></figcaption></figure><p>Eventually, other benefits to larger screens became apparent. You could fit more complex camera systems in larger devices, because camera lenses and sensors are similarly bound to the laws of physics as lithiom-ion batteries. Larger camera sensors <a href="https://www.dxomark.com/dxomark-decodes-how-a-large-sensor-in-a-smartphone-affects-image-quality/">improve low-light image quality</a>, and more lenses (each with their own fine-tuned sensor) gives you more flexibility in photos and videos. I suspect the <a href="https://www.statista.com/outlook/amo/media/games/mobile-games/worldwide" rel="noreferrer">rise of mobile gaming throughout the 2010s and 2020s</a> also created a snowball effect, as mobile games benefit greatly from larger batteries and screens.</p><p>Sure, larger phones are still harder to use with one hand and stuff into a pocket, but almost everything else is an improvement. The higher battery capacity improves daily usage, and perhaps more importantly, makes long-term battery health less of a concern. I bought my iPhone 15 at launch in September 2023, and after ~1.5 years of use and an 11% drop in maximum capacity, the phone still easily lasts all day. The larger display makes web browsing, games, streaming, and typing a better experience. You can more comfortably fit more cameras with larger sensors and lenses. Antennas and speakers can also benefit from more internal space, though not always.</p><h2 data-sanitized-id="the-struggle-to-return">The struggle to return</h2><p>Let's say you really want a compact smartphone, more than you want a large screen, improved battery life and cameras, or anything else. Your highest priority is something you can comfortably hold with one hand and won't look like a solid brick in your pocket, and you might just prefer to do most tasks on a desktop or laptop computer. That is a reasonable request, but there are a few problems with doing that in 2025.</p><p>First, smartphones are now many people's primary or <em>only</em> computing device. SimilarWeb <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/platforms/">estimates</a> that around 68% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices, with tablets around 1.6% and desktops around 30.5%. StatCounter has <a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet" rel="noreferrer">similar results</a>, at around 62% for mobile, 36% for desktop, and 2% for tablets. Web traffic estimates aren't a perfect statistic for measuring general device use, but similar results can be seen in other data, too. The United States Census Bureau <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer-internet-use-2021.html" rel="noreferrer">said</a> smartphones were used in 90% of U.S. households in 2021, with smartphone-only households more common among low-income, Black, and Hispanic people.</p><figure data-sanitized-class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/StatCounter-comparison-ww-monthly-202401-202501.png" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?" loading="lazy" width="1280" height="720" data-sanitized-class="kg-image"><figcaption><span>Credit: </span><a href="https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet" rel="noreferrer"><span>StatCounter</span></a></figcaption></figure><p>If your smartphone is your primary or only computing device, it doesn't make much sense to choose the compromised experience of a smaller device. This is especially true now that large screens are available at all price points. The Galaxy A15 5G is Samsung's cheapest phone in the United States, <a href="https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-galaxy-a15-5g-128gb-unlocked-blue-black/6569030.p?skuId=6569030">available for $200 unlocked</a> and <a href="https://www.cricketwireless.com/prepaid-phones/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-a15-5g-blue-black">free with a new line at many carriers</a>, and it has a massive 6.5-inch display.</p><p>So, the potential market for a compact phone is continuing to diminish. Even if a company decides to make one anyway, there's another problem: mobile apps and websites are simply not built for small screens anymore. Mobile interface design has <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/death-by-hamburger-2d1db115352a">moved away 'hamburger' menus</a> in favor of more buttons and functions always visible on the screen, which take up more space on smaller devices. On top of that, many web and app developers simply aren't doing much testing on small displays.</p><p>I fired up my original iPhone SE with a 4-inch screen and iOS 15, and while I didn't find any apps or websites that were outright broken, most of them are not a great experience. Double navigation bars, floating buttons, and excessive padding around elements are great on large phones, but not so much on these smaller devices. Web browsing is especially rough, as the floating ads and popups that are already awful on large screens are even worse, and some websites are expecting larger screen widths for proper text wrapping. Even when everything works, which is <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/iPhoneSE/comments/1exha2m/apps_display_not_optimized_for_any_se/">not always</a> the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/iPhoneSE/comments/zgw0cq/app_developers_not_supporting_se_screen_size/">case</a>, you're in for a <em>lot</em> of scrolling.</p><figure data-sanitized-class="kg-card kg-gallery-card kg-width-wide"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-container"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-row"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0010.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0009.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0008.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-row"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0007.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0006.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0005.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-row"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0004.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0003.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/IMG_0002.PNG" width="640" height="1136" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div></div></div></figure><p>This is a problem that can't be solved unless web and app developers do more testing on small screens, which might require completely different layouts and interaction methods in some cases. Small phones can somewhat bypass this problem by changing the display scaling, so the internal resolution becomes a bit closer to the default scale on larger phones. However, this makes text <em>even smaller</em> on the already-small screens.</p><p>You may <em>think</em> you want a compact Android phone or iPhone in 2025, but you almost certainly don't. I fully understand the appeal, as someone who chooses the smallest phone model at every opportunity, but there are just too many problems with them in 2025.</p><h2 data-sanitized-id="the-compact-future-isnt-apple-or-android">The compact future isn't Apple or Android</h2><p>I don't think small phones are a pointless product segment, or that they'll go away forever. Again, Unihertz still makes them, the iPhone SE 3 will probably get software updates for a few more years, and Eric Migicovsky's project might eventually happen. However, with the mobile app and web ecosystem moving towards large screens, a compact smartphone running iOS or Android will be a severely compromised experience.</p><p>If there is going to be a high-quality compact phone again, it will probably need to use an entirely different software platform. Apple is the only one making iOS phones, and Apple doesn't seem interested in small devices anymore, so that door is shut. Most modern Android apps are not designed properly for small screens, so as long as they are critical to using the phone, they will make it a compromised experience.</p><p>The future of compact smartphones might look more like <a href="https://www.kaiostech.com/" rel="noreferrer">KaiOS</a>, which is built primarily for phones with T9 keypads with 3-5" screens. I have a Nokia phone with KaiOS, and while some sites in the mobile browser are still rough, all the built-in and third-party apps are perfectly usable. When the software is actually built for the screen size, it's not a problem.</p><figure data-sanitized-class="kg-card kg-gallery-card kg-width-wide"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-container"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-row"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/2025-03-01-22-37-28.png" width="240" height="320" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/2025-03-01-22-38-10.png" width="240" height="320" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/2025-03-01-22-38-27.png" width="240" height="320" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-row"><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/2025-03-01-22-38-47.png" width="240" height="320" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/2025-03-01-22-39-28.png" width="240" height="320" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div><div data-sanitized-class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.spacebar.news/content/images/2025/03/2025-03-01-22-46-15.png" width="240" height="320" loading="lazy" alt="Why can't we go back to small phones?"></div></div></div></figure><p>The lack of mainstream mobile apps and games might seem like a drawback, but we have seen plenty of companies spin it into a selling point. <a href="https://news.microsoft.com/2016/05/18/microsoft-selling-feature-phone-business-to-fih-mobile-ltd-and-hmd-global-oy/">HMD Global took over Nokia's feature phone business</a> in 2016, and continued releasing new models with the usual low-end hardware and T9 keypads, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/16/nokia-8110-4g-review-nostalgia-the-matrix-banana-phone">occasionally cashing in on nostalgia</a>. At some point, HMD's marketing teams had the genius idea to pitch the phones as digital detox tools for Gen Z. The <a href="https://www.hmd.com/en_us/press/your-barbie-dream-phone-is-now-a-reality-press-release">press release for the Barbie Phone</a> spins the lack of apps as "perfect for taking a smartphone break" and the 5MP rear camera as delivering "authentic Y2K style images." I have no idea if that was a successful strategy, but it could be something to try again in the future.</p><p>The compact smartphone as we know it might be dead, but still there's a chance for it to be reinvented. In the meantime, save yourself the pain and buy a normal-sized smartphone the next time you need an upgrade.</p>

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guid: https://thehill.com/?p=5171542
title: Waltz: ‘We do not see Ukraine being a member of NATO’
author: ;Tara Suter
link: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5171542-mike-waltz-ukraine-nato/
hash: ��Js`�EE��r�9�J
content:
National security adviser Mike Waltz said on Sunday that the U.S. does “not see Ukraine being a member of NATO.” “One thing is clear, we do not see Ukraine being a member of NATO, because that would automatically drag U.S. troops in,” Waltz told CNN’s Dana Bash of “State of the Union.”  “But Dana ……

tags:
#Administration #Defense #International #News #NATO #russia #Russia-Ukraine war #Trump administration #ukraine

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guid: https://www.rt.com/news/613585-media-hungarian-fm-eu-ukraine-energy-security/
title: Member state accuses EU of violating energy security guarantees – media
author: ;RT
hash: T�n�:�""�QD��c�
content:
<p><strong>Addressing the bloc’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, Hungarian FM Peter Szijjarto reportedly cited a recent foiled Ukrainian UAV attack on the TurkStream pipeline</strong></p>
            
                        
            <p>Hungary has accused the European Union of failing to honor the energy security guarantees it recently gave to Budapest, M1 broadcaster has reported, citing a letter that Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto sent to the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas on Sunday.</p>
<p>The Hungarian official reportedly warned Brussels that his country’s acquiescence in any further Ukraine-related decision would be contingent on the EU’s ability to safeguard Budapest’s energy supplies.</p>
<p>The letter came hard on the heels of a Russian Defense Ministry report that three drones had been shot down near a key compressor station servicing the TurkStream gas pipeline on Friday. Moscow described the incident as a Ukrainian sabotage attempt.</p>
<p>In an article on Sunday, Hungary’s Hirado news program claimed that Foreign Minister Szijjarto had reminded Kallas that as recently as January 27, when the EU was deciding on extending sanctions against Russia, Brussels explicitly gave Budapest <em>“four guarantees that Hungary’s energy supply would be secure.”</em></p>
<p>Szijjarto reportedly wrote that the bloc’s leadership had pledged to involve his country in negotiations over the resumption of Russian gas transit through Ukraine – an apparent reference to Kiev’s decision in late 2024 to terminate its five-year transit contract with Russian energy giant Gazprom. The diplomat pointed out that despite this promise, Budapest has been excluded from the respective talks, Hirado noted.</p>

            
    <blockquote>
        <span><strong>Read more</strong></span>
        <figure>
            <img src="https://mf.b37mrtl.ru/files/2025.03/thumbnail/67c447ec20302768840fa7d9.jpg" alt="FILE PHOTO. Nord Stream 2 construction site in Lubmin, Germany.">
            <figcaption><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/613573-us-launch-nord-stream-leverage/">US may launch Nord Stream 2 – FT</a></figcaption>
        </figure>
    </blockquote>


    

<p><em>“Secondly, the European Commission also gave a guarantee that Ukraine would not attack the infrastructure responsible for energy transport to the EU,”</em> Szijjarto wrote, adding that nonetheless, <em>“Ukraine launched a drone attack on the Russkaya compressor station of the TurkStream on the night of February 28.”</em></p>
<p>The media outlet quoted the minister as expressing incredulity that an EU candidate nation (Ukraine) would seriously endanger the energy security of a current member state, with Brussels seemingly taking Kiev’s side and not Budapest’s.</p>
<p>The Hungarian diplomat made it clear that his country’s <em>“position will largely be determined by the issues raised in this letter in the decisions regarding Ukraine in the coming period,”</em> Hirado reported.</p>
<p>In a post on Facebook on Saturday, the official wrote that the inoperability of the TurkStream <em>“would seriously endanger our energy security,”</em> and thus encroach on Hungary’s sovereignty.</p>
<p>While Friday’s incident did not result in any damage to the energy infrastructure, a similar attack reported by the Russian Defense Ministry in January saw falling debris impact the facility.</p>
<p>TurkStream delivers Russian natural gas to Turkish customers and several European countries, including Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Greece.</p>

link:
https://www.rt.com/news/613585-media-hungarian-fm-eu-ukraine-energy-security/?utm_source=rss&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=RSS

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guid: https://thehill.com/?p=5171561
title: British ambassador calls on US and Ukraine to meet again
author: ;Lauren Irwin
link: https://thehill.com/policy/international/5171561-british-ambassador-us-ukraine-meet-again/
hash: 1�@���+���x���
tags: #International #News #Russia-Ukraine war
content:
United Kingdom ambassador to the U.S., Lord Peter Mandelson, said he believes the U.S. and Ukraine need to meet again to kickstart negotiations. Mandelson joined ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday to discuss the failure of a meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which ended in shouting. “My response is that we…

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guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=544412
title: Baltic/Black Sea Power Games and Red Lines Intersect in a "Strange War", by Pepe Escobar
author: ;Pepe Escobar
link: https://www.unz.com/pescobar/baltic-black-sea-power-games-and-red-lines-intersect-in-a-strange-war/
hash: ������@������
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content:
<p wcount="17" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong><em>No one ever lost money betting on the batshit crazy “policies” of the ferociously yapping Baltic chihuahuas.</em></strong></span></p>
<p wcount="35" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">No one ever lost money betting on the batshit crazy “policies” of the ferociously yapping Baltic chihuahuas. Their latest power play of sorts is a drive to turn the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake.</span></p>
<p wcount="58" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The notion that a bunch of Russophobic sub-entities have what it takes to expel the Russian superpower from the Baltic Sea and pose a threat to St. Petersburg does not even qualify as cartoonish. Yet that is indeed part and parcel of NATO’s re-configured obsessions, as their warmongering “vanguard” has been relocated to a London-Warsaw-Baltic chihuahuas-Ukraine axis.</span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">What kind of black hole rump “Ukraine” will turn out to be after the end of the war – which may not even happen in 2025 – remains to be seen. What’s certain is that in the case of a Ukraine exit – whatever the modalities – enter Romania.</span></p>
<p wcount="34" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The whole electoral farce in Romania – complete with the demonization of election front-runner Calin Georgescu – revolves around the upgrading of the Mihail Kogalniceanu base, which will become the largest NATO military base in Europe.</span></p>
<p wcount="30" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">So, once again, this is all about the Black Sea. NATO wreaking havoc in the Black Sea carries way more savory prospects than NATO via chihuahuas monopolizing the Baltic Sea.</span></p>
<p wcount="33" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Ilya Fabrichnikov, a member of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, has published a remarkable essay essentially focusing on the Black Sea (<a title="https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7516851" href="https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7516851" rel="noopener">this is a short version on the Kommersant daily)</a>.</span></p>
<p wcount="88" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Fabrichnikov convincingly argues that from an European – UE/NATO – angle, what really mattered in Ukraine was “to move its borders, along with its military, political and economic infrastructure, close to Russia’s, to put under full control the strategic Black Sea trade corridor – which easily stretches further north along the Odessa-Gdansk route – in order to more conveniently and quickly explore the economic spaces of Asia and North Africa, and to begin dictating its terms to Russian supplies of oil, gas and other resources needed by the European economy.”</span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As this focused power play instrumentalizing Ukraine is unravelling in real time, a replacement is needed – even as warmongering Eurocrats keep peddling their Orwellian “peace is war” dementia non-stop, complete with a non-stop tsunami of sanctions and renewed promises of avalanches of weapons to Kiev.</span></p>
<p wcount="50" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This is a classic Brussels vassals affair – even as the toxic Medusa von der Lugen as head of the EC and Rutti-Frutti as the new head of NATO were essentially appointed by Washington and London. Collectively, Europe has pumped way more military-political funds into black hole Ukraine than the Americans.</span></p>
<p wcount="19" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The reason is simple. For Europe there’s no Plan B apart from that mirific “strategic defeat” of Russia.</span></p>
<p wcount="38" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The EU/NATO Black Sea power play would make it even more imperative for Russia to connect with Transnistria. The only one who can answer whether this is part of the current planning is of course President Putin.</span></p>
<p wcount="4" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Neo-nazis go pipeline bombing</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="38" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Russian intel is very much aware that the Europeans have to some extent already carved up their own areas in Ukraine – from ports to mines. Not surprisingly the Brits, via MI6, are ahead of the “continentals”, mostly Germany.</span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_15" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">All that intertwines with the extremely murky weapons-for-metals deal clinched by Trump 2.0 with the totally illegitimate sweatshirt actor-turned-gangster in Kiev. The only thing that matters for Trump is to get U.S. money back – whether the total bill is $500 billion or less (actually, much less).</span></p>
<p wcount="53" data-sanitized-id="p_1_16" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Into this kabuki steps in the real power in Kiev after the proclamation of martial law: the National Defense and Security Council of Ukraine. The unelected, actually illegal actor is not taking any major decisions for some time now. These are issued by the former head of the foreign secret service, Oleksandr Lytvynenko.</span></p>
<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_17" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">It was the council that on February 17 ordered the bombing of the crucial pipeline owned by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) linking Kazakhstan to Novorossiysk, exporting loads of Kazakh and Russian oil.</span></p>
<p wcount="28" data-sanitized-id="p_1_18" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Crucially, CPC shareholders included Italy’s ENI (2%); the Caspian Pipeline Co., which is a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil (7.5%); and the Caspian Pipeline Consortium Co., a subsidiary of Chevron (15%).</span></p>
<p wcount="34" data-sanitized-id="p_1_19" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Well, that’s not very bright; the “integral nationalists”, code for neo-nazis in Kiev decided to bomb a partially owned American asset. Not only there will be blowback by Trump 2.0; it is already on.</span></p>
<p wcount="82" data-sanitized-id="p_1_20" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">On the equally murky rare earths front, Putin’s recent interview to Channel One seems to have thrown everyone off balance. Russia, he said, has way more rare earths than Ukraine and is “ready to work with our foreign partners, including the U.S.” to develop these deposits. That’s classic Sun Tzu Putin: the Americans won’t have rare earths to exploit in the future rump Ukraine – because they don’t exist. But they can be partners with Russia in Novorossiya.</span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_21" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">All of the above of course would presuppose a solid U.S.-Russia negotiation on Ukraine. And yet Team Trump 2.0 still does not seem to grasp the real Russian red lines:</span></p>
<p wcount="7" data-sanitized-id="p_1_22" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">1. No temporary ceasefire “along the front line”.</span></p>
<p wcount="9" data-sanitized-id="p_1_23" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">2. No trading of new territories acquired in the battlefield.</span></p>
<p wcount="11" data-sanitized-id="p_1_24" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">3. No NATO or European “peacekeepers” in the western borders of Russia.</span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_25" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Putin discombobulating Trump</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="11" data-sanitized-id="p_1_26" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As it stands, Washington and Moscow remain divided by an abyss.</span></p>
<p wcount="30" data-sanitized-id="p_1_27" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://sputnikglobe.com/20250128/pepe-escobar-dancing-to-trumps-disco-inferno-1121513139.html" href="https://sputnikglobe.com/20250128/pepe-escobar-dancing-to-trumps-disco-inferno-1121513139.html" rel="noopener">Mr. Disco Inferno</a> simply cannot make serious concessions – or de facto recognize the strategic defeat of the Empire of Chaos. Because that would seal the Definitive End of Unilateral Hegemony.</span></p>
<p wcount="33" data-sanitized-id="p_1_28" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Putin for his part simply will not give away the hard-won victories on the battlefield. Russian public opinion expects nothing less. After all Russia holds all the cards leading to a possible negotiation.</span></p>
<p wcount="35" data-sanitized-id="p_1_29" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The EU/NATO will never admit their own, self-inflicted strategic defeat; hence those Baltic/Black Sea dreams, which carry the extra self-inflicted fantasy of disrupting China’s New Silk Roads as much as “isolating” Russia.</span></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit alignright premblock book-author"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978813820/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514BiChCuYL.jpg"></a>
<p>ORDER IT NOW</p>
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<p wcount="81" data-sanitized-id="p_1_30" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Putin is actually performing virtual somersaults to instill some common sense. In his <a title="https://sputnikglobe.com/20250128/pepe-escobar-dancing-to-trumps-disco-inferno-1121513139.html" href="https://sputnikglobe.com/20250128/pepe-escobar-dancing-to-trumps-disco-inferno-1121513139.html" rel="noopener">Mr. Disco Inferno</a> he noted how, on U.S.-Russia relations, “t <strong>his first step should focus on</strong> increasing the level of trust between the two countries. This is exactly what we have been doing in Riyadh, and this is what our next high-level contacts will be devoted to. Without this, it is impossible to solve any issue, including one as complex and acute as the Ukrainian crisis.”</span></p>
<p wcount="51" data-sanitized-id="p_1_31" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Trust is far from being re-established, especially vis a vis a Lavrov-defined “non-agreement capable” Empire of Chaos with its global credibility in tatters. Add to it bombast after bombast manufactured to control the news cycle 24/7: the preferred Trump 2.0 modus operandi. None of it leads to that prime diplomatic mantra: “confidence building”.</span></p>
<p wcount="51" data-sanitized-id="p_1_32" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And it will get even murkier – and way more dangerous – if Russian public opinion is confronted with the fact that after 11 years fighting a vicious proxy war with the Empire of Chaos, they may become partners in strategic industry sectors that Putin himself defined as essential to Russia’s national security.</span></p>
<p wcount="17" data-sanitized-id="p_1_33" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Just like that. Or that may be just Putin discombobulating Trump with some unforeseen Sun Tzu gambit.</span></p>
<p wcount="56" data-sanitized-id="p_1_34" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Earlier this week I had a fabulous off the record conversation with Sergey Glazyev, formerly with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and now leading the consolidation of the Union State (Russia-Belarus). It was up to Mr. Glazyev to come up with the definitive summary of everything unrolling before our eyes: “This is a very strange war”.</span></p>


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=544389
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title:
Slimy Cheater and Retard Elon Musk Bombs with Stand-Up Comedy Opening of First Cabinet Meeting, by Andrew Anglin

content:
<p><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8E2QksviRAA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" title="Elon Musk at Trump Cabinet meeting: US will go ‘bankrupt’ without DOGE" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin">[embedded content]</iframe></p>
<p wcount="2" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E2QksviRAA'" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E2QksviRAA" target="_blank" data-sanitized-class="caption">Video Link</a></span></p>
<p wcount="81" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em><strong>Editor’s Note:</strong> This is not introducing a new format. This is just a normal Daily Stormer essay. But I don’t want the site to seem dead, so I’m just going to be posting things like this every day or every other day to keep people coming to the site while I work on my bigger projects. I guess it should be daily, given the name of the site. That’s sort of what I’ve been leaning towards.</em></span></p>
<p wcount="22" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Elon Musk was inexplicably invited by President Donald Trump to deliver a stand-up comedy routine at the administration’s first cabinet meeting.</span></p>
<p wcount="108" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The routine fell flat, eliciting no laughs except from one woman who seemed to be laughing out of politeness – or perhaps ambition, given Musk’s penchant for impregnating middle-aged women. (Musk has been impregnating used up old skanks at random, most recently a former porn star and conservative influencer named Ashly St. Claire. She had sex with blacks and is Jewish. Musk doesn’t care, and he doesn’t make these women sign papers, meaning they will all sue him and get billions. Many women are trying to get in on this burgeoning industry and will be willing to embarrass themselves by laughing at the worst jokes ever.)</span></p>
<p wcount="49" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Along with many other failed landings, Musk told a joke about how he has a wooden head, which no analyst has been able to decipher the meaning of. Most have concluded that the joke didn’t make sense at all, and Musk made the joke because he is retarded.</span></p>
<p wcount="18" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Musk has been hovering over this second Trump administration in a way that many find disgusting and weird.</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://dailystormer.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/elon-turmp.jpeg"><img src="https://dailystormer.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/elon-turmp-618x324.jpeg" alt></a></span></div>
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<p wcount="51" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Just before the inauguration, Musk came out and demanded that Americans accept an unlimited number of Indian perverts and scammers into the country on H-1B visas, threatening that those who complained would be “fucked in their face.” He also said that he would give his life for Indian replacement immigration.</span></p>
<p wcount="59" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As he is demanding to be at the center of the Trump Administration, no one was shocked to see him doing the opening act at the cabinet meeting. It’s unclear if Trump likes being controlled by this retarded man or if he is purposefully allowing him to become hated by everyone so that people demand he be deported.</span></p>
<p wcount="92" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">If Trump is purposefully allowing Musk to consume the spotlight in order to drum up hatred against him, it appears to be working. A <a title="https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_IHMRRoV.pdf" href="https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabReport_IHMRRoV.pdf">poll</a> by The Economist/YouGov earlier this month showed that the support for Musk among Republicans had been nearly halved since November. People are suspicious of leftist polling agencies, and polls are generally sort of useless regardless, but it’s not possible to believe that any Republican who saw Musk’s comments about his plans to replace whites with “superior” Indians would tell a pollster they support him.</span></p>
<p wcount="29" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Furthermore, anyone can just ask people they know what they think of Elon Musk following Trump around everywhere and making himself the center of attention. No one likes this.</span></p>
<p wcount="57" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">That said, Trump must be getting tired of the headlines about how Musk controls him, and he has to be annoyed by Musk continuing to play into this. At the cabinet meeting, he delivered another “hovering and watching” photo for the <a title="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/trump-musk-cabinet-meeting.html" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/trump-musk-cabinet-meeting.html">New York Times</a> to use in a story about how the meeting showed “deference” to Musk.</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://dailystormer.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Screenshot-2025-02-27-at-2.48.21%E2%80%AFAM.png"><img src="https://dailystormer.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Screenshot-2025-02-27-at-2.48.21%E2%80%AFAM-618x837.png" alt></a></span></div>
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<p wcount="42" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Why would he think it’s okay to not sit down? To hover like that? Who does that? Everyone else in the room is sitting down. He is wearing a t-shirt and a baseball cap and hovering like he’s the mastermind.</span></p>
<p wcount="89" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">He should have a pretty easy job managing his public image, given that his agenda to cut government spending is generally popular with everyone. However, his odious visage and retarded way of speaking, coupled with his pompous obsession with making himself the center of attention, is destroying any good will that he might otherwise have. He could very easily have not insisted on giving the opening remarks at the first cabinet meeting, but he is apparently so disconnected from reality that he doesn’t realize how repulsed people are.</span></p>
<p wcount="90" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Trump’s cabinet is reported to be sick of this man. Musk sent out an email to most federal employees doing a little cutesy thing where he said something to the effect of “list five things you did this week or you’ll be fired.” The actual text was: “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished this week and cc your manager.” He’s conserving letters by abbreviating “approximately.” He later announced that if someone doesn’t respond, that will be taken as a resignation.</span></p>
<blockquote data-width="500" data-dnt="true" readability="10.488549618321" data-sanitized-class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">Consistent with President <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump</a>’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.</p>
<p wcount="9" data-sanitized-id="p_1_15" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.</span></p>
<p wcount="5" data-sanitized-id="p_1_16" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1893386883444437415?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 22, 2025</a></span></p>
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<p wcount="52" data-sanitized-id="p_1_17" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Obviously, most of these federal employees work under one of the cabinet members. Presumably, these people do not think Elon Musk should be coming in and threatening to fire their employees. In fact, he cannot fire those employees, and would have to simply request that the heads of the departments fire them.</span></p>
<p wcount="157" data-sanitized-id="p_1_18" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I’ve seen conservative commentators saying “WHY CAN’T THEY LIST FIVE THINGS THO???” and that clearly misses the point. Firstly, he’s not going to read millions of emails, that would be the definition of “inefficient,” and he doesn’t have those resources anyway. Secondly, even if he did read them, or try to process them with AI, they wouldn’t mean anything. Maybe there are government employees who don’t do anything, you would assume there are given how bloated this government is, but even ones who do literally no work would be able to make up five things they did in a week. Anyone can just type into DeepSeek “what are five things someone with [my title] would have done this week?” and send it as the reply. It would take less than a minute and meaning nothing at all. So it’s just a harassment campaign, to cause a panic in government offices.</span></p>
<p wcount="61" data-sanitized-id="p_1_19" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">A lot of government employees should be fired, clearly, and it’s possible that there should be some kind of independent body formed to figure out who needs fired, because the heads of these agencies don’t want their own budgets cut. However, this email is not serious and can only serve the purpose of harassing people with no concrete goal.</span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_20" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">After it was pointed out that the email could not possibly serve any purpose, Musk then claimed that he knew that all along and was just messing with people’s heads.</span></p>
<p wcount="21" data-sanitized-id="p_1_21" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Before the meeting this week, Trump posted a tweet on Truth Social claiming “ALL CABINET MEMBERS ARE EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.”</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://dailystormer.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Screenshot-2025-02-27-at-2.52.04%E2%80%AFAM.png"><img src="https://dailystormer.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Screenshot-2025-02-27-at-2.52.04%E2%80%AFAM-618x449.png" alt></a></span></div>
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<p wcount="30" data-sanitized-id="p_1_22" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This was a response to news reports that none of the cabinet members were really very excited about Musk’s behavior and assertion that he is the boss of everything.</span></p>
<p wcount="36" data-sanitized-id="p_1_23" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Clearly unfamiliar with the concept of “oversaturation,” the “bulbous billionaire,” who is known for being fat and sloppy, appeared at CPAC over the weekend and was accused of being high on ketamine as he mumbled stupidly.</span></p>
<blockquote data-width="500" data-dnt="true" readability="7.5474452554745" data-sanitized-class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">He is so high on Ketamine, Elon Musk can’t form a sentence.</p>
<p wcount="5" data-sanitized-id="p_1_24" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://t.co/m2BJfnNHoK">pic.twitter.com/m2BJfnNHoK</a></span></p>
<p wcount="5" data-sanitized-id="p_1_25" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">— James Tate (@JamesTate121) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesTate121/status/1892722618920312895?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 20, 2025</a></span></p>
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<p wcount="34" data-sanitized-id="p_1_26" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Apparently, some people were unaware that he always talks that way. He has grotesque autism and an abysmally low IQ, in order words he is what used to be referred to as “mentally retarded.”</span></p>
<p wcount="18" data-sanitized-id="p_1_27" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">At CPAC he also waved around a chainsaw, apparently with the intent of some sort of comedic effect.</span></p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">BREAKING: Elon Musk, who is wearing sunglasses indoors, wields a chainsaw to celebrate the tens of thousands of federal employees he’s fired indiscriminately and without explanation. <a href="https://t.co/VMsW1MDmzh">pic.twitter.com/VMsW1MDmzh</a></p>
<p wcount="7" data-sanitized-id="p_1_28" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">— Trump’s Lies (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) <a href="https://twitter.com/MAGALieTracker/status/1892701573337211357?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 20, 2025</a></span></p>
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<p wcount="57" data-sanitized-id="p_1_29" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Why would that be funny? It doesn’t make sense. I could maybe see a person with Down Syndrome thinking it’s funny, but that would have to be the explicit goal of that chainsaw bit. You might think of that bit if someone told you “we’re going for the Down Syndrome demographic with this one.”</span></p>
<p wcount="110" data-sanitized-id="p_1_30" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Seriously, you couldn’t even claim that bit was aimed at children. I just watched Dog Man this week, and I can tell you: children have higher standards than “haha, a chainsaw, haha! woooo!” But if this is the kind of humor Elon is going for, he should consider hiring the writer of Dog Man as a “comedic advisor.” (By the way, just a note: Dog Man the Movie has race-mixing, so since I mentioned the film, I should probably say that while it is good, people shouldn’t really let their kids watch it. I also wouldn’t recommend watching it without kids, because it’s like, for 5-year-olds.)</span></p>
<p wcount="104" data-sanitized-id="p_1_31" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">If he wanted to do physical comedy, he should made a joke about $50 million in condoms to Gaza and then put on a full-body condom and gone crowd surfing. But why does there need to be this forced humor, which is never funny at all? Why is that the agenda? Is it because his father didn’t love him and therefore in late middle age he need to go around begging for public approval? But if that were the case, why wouldn’t he hire a team to figure out how to gain approval? Why does he do jokes that make everyone hate him?</span></p>
<p wcount="37" data-sanitized-id="p_1_32" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Speaking of Elon’s father, Errol Musk this week <a title="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-tmcrMx2s" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-tmcrMx2s">told Al Arabiya</a> he thinks his son will fail at politics. He said that politics are for people with people skills, and Elon does not have these skills.</span></p>
<p wcount="16" data-sanitized-id="p_1_33" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">He is also redpilled on the Hitler salute, clearly having read my materials on the subject.</span></p>
<blockquote data-width="500" data-dnt="true" readability="11.640883977901" data-sanitized-class="twitter-tweet">
<p lang="en" dir="ltr" xml:lang="en">Errol Musk defends his son Elon Musk's 'salute':</p>
<p wcount="15" data-sanitized-id="p_1_34" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">"It means my right hand is empty, I do not carry a weapon"</span></p>
<p wcount="33" data-sanitized-id="p_1_35" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Errol Musk joined us for an exclusive interview where he says that people have misinterpreted <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@elonmusk</a>'s gesture and was not meant to replicate a Nazi salute. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ElonMusk?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ElonMusk</a> <a href="https://t.co/pfvhPnYR4k">pic.twitter.com/pfvhPnYR4k</a></span></p>
<p wcount="7" data-sanitized-id="p_1_36" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) <a href="https://twitter.com/AlArabiya_Eng/status/1894113919460843907?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 24, 2025</a></span></p>
</blockquote>

<p wcount="140" data-sanitized-id="p_1_37" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Musk’s own agenda has nothing to do with America First, as evidenced by his desire to race replace whites with Indians, and in fact as evidenced by everything he’s ever said. He wants to go live on Mars. That’s what he says. That “the human race” should be an “interplanetary species.” He’s jungled up with a bunch of weirdos who want to live forever using “bio-hacks.” This is not related to Norman Rockwell, Jesus, or any sort of nationalistic vision of America. His agenda to cut government spending is something everyone would agree with, but he is so distasteful that he’s actually giving this agenda a very bad image, and making it so Democrats can claim people are going to be starving in the streets if we don’t sent $50 million in condoms to Gaza.</span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_38" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">It seems rather unlikely he’s going to be such a fixture in the Trump administration much longer. It’s possible that his disastrous stand-up routine at the opening of the first Trump 2.0 cabinet meeting will be seen in retrospect as the “Peak Elon” moment.</span></p>

link:
https://www.unz.com/aanglin/slimy-cheater-and-retard-elon-musk-bombs-with-stand-up-comedy-opening-of-first-cabinet-meeting/


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=544447
title: On Media, Trump and the Impending War with China, by Hua Bin
author: ;Hua Bin
link: https://www.unz.com/bhua/on-media-trump-and-the-impending-war-with-china/
hash: *"�nj ����F-,�
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<div><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/themes/unzSite/IMAGES/unz_large_logo.png" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p wcount="26" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I had an interview with reporter Mike Whitney recently and Mike’s article was published on Unz Review, which published my Substack articles as a columnist.</span></p>
<p wcount="46" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I thought it was interesting for my Substack readers on a range of topics from western media report on China, US China technology comparison, Trump, the so-called Uyghurs “genocide” in Xinjiang, war between US and China. Those parts in bold are highlights called out by Whitney.</span></p>
<p wcount="46" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">For those unfamiliar with Unz Review, it is a great source of news and analysis from the “alternative media” and features many of my personal favorite thinkers such as Michael Hudson, Ron Unz, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Ron Paul, Alastaire Crooke, Pepe Escobar, Philip Giraldi, and more.</span></p>
<p wcount="18" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Here is the text of the interview and you can also check it out on <a href="https://www.unz.com/" title="www.unz.com">www.unz.com</a></span></p>
<p wcount="6" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/hua-bin-on-media-trump-and-the-impending-war-with-china/" title="https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/hua-bin-on-media-trump-and-the-impending-war-with-china/">https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/hua-bin-on-media-trump-and-the-impending-war-with-china/</a></span></p>


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=544407
title: AI and the Digital Revolution Are Mankind’s Deadly Enemies, by Paul Craig Roberts
author: ;Paul Craig Roberts
link: https://www.unz.com/proberts/ai-and-the-digital-revolution-are-mankinds-deadly-enemies/
hash: -0.U�,!\����`��
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<p wcount="115" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Does the pleasure you get from scrolling your cell phone compensate you for the frustration from the absence of customer service? The same digital revolution that gave you a cell phone gave the companies the opportunity to drive up profits and executive bonuses by replacing customer service with AI that is seldom, if ever, programed to answer your questions and is extremely reluctant to connect you to a superior human who knows what to do. All of us have been stressed out trying to get problems fixed, accounts adjusted, repairs made. My favorite AI response when I call about the internet being down is “you will get faster service if you chat with us online.”</span></p>
<p wcount="140" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">All of us know the frustration of the constant demands to update our information, our telephone number, our email. These endless notices always appear when we are in the middle of some activity that is inconvenient to interrupt to go tend to Internet house-keeping problems. But if you fail to respond too often, all of a sudden you cannot get into your investment accounts, your bank account, your Internet files, because the necessary code, since passwords no longer suffice, doesn’t reach you via cell text or email because you didn’t update. These kinds of problems are almost impossible to correct, because they use your cell phone number and email to identify you. And even if you can get a human on the phone, the person has no way of knowing who you are except your information on file.</span></p>
<p wcount="83" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The ability to hack the Internet has grown so rapidly that accounts now have to have double and triple protection, and this doesn’t suffice. Your password and user name are merely step one. Next you have to receive a code via cell phone as a text to the number on record. Then a code via email of record. If you didn’t update or made a typo, you don’t have access to what is yours. Just try getting that straightened out.</span></p>
<p wcount="122" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And now we hear from Malwarebytes, one of the protective services you can purchase online to protect you against viruses, phishing, and capture of your cell phone and/or computer, that AI is being employed by cybercriminals to craft convincing voice, video, and email messages to defraud both businesses and individuals with sophisticated tactics that result in devastating financial losses, reputational damage, and compromise of sensitive data. The AI-powered scamming operations can bypass security filters. As the AI tools are low cost, they can be used on a poor man’s budget. <a href="https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/how-ai-was-used-in-an-advanced-phishing-campaign-targeting-gmail-users?utm_source=iterable&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=b2c_pro_oth_20250224_februaryweeklynewsletter_v4_174008949080&amp;utm_content=AI_used_for_phishing" title="https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/how-ai-was-used-in-an-advanced-phishing-campaign-targeting-gmail-users?utm_source=iterable&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=b2c_pro_oth_20250224_februaryweeklynewsletter_v4_174008949080&amp;utm_content=AI_used_for_phishing">https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/how-ai-was-used-in-an-advanced-phishing-campaign-targeting-gmail-users?utm_source=iterable&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=b2c_pro_oth_20250224_februaryweeklynewsletter_v4_174008949080&amp;utm_content=AI_used_for_phishing</a></span></p>
<p wcount="43" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Every dollar companies saved by laying off customer representatives has been spent on cybersecurity. As cybersecurity experts will tell you, there is no cybersecurity. The protections can only make hacking more difficult. The digital revolution is costing us much more than our privacy.</span></p>
<p wcount="137" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Malewarebytes gives an example of how the attack on you unfolds and how to avoid being a victim. Notice that the only way you can avoid being a victim is to be unreachable by anyone whose email or telephone number you do not recognize. But these can also be obtained, and I suspect that it will not be long before scammers contact you via your husband, wife, or child’s cell phone number. Or something like this can happen. Your college kid loses his/her cell phone, gets a new one, different number, has a car accident, calls you and cannot reach you because you don’t recognize the number. Suppose a headhunter wants to offer you a job at $100,000 more than you are currently making, but it is not a number you recognize and goes unanswered.</span></p>
<p wcount="42" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Already cell phones have gone beyond being useless, as no one answers a call, to being dangerous. Texting has taken over communication. People hear one another’s voices less and less. The digital revolution is isolating people by making verbal conversation problematical.</span></p>
<p wcount="91" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And the situation is worsening at warp speed. The other day a software engineer I know who is earning in the six figures told me that his employer just told the engineers that they would be replaced by AI in three years. He has a mortgage on a $900,000 condo and is stunned that his expensive education and years of experience are suddenly worthless. Why will Americans go to universities? What will be the point of education, of public schools? Who among the work force displaced by AI can pay property taxes?</span></p>
<p wcount="89" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The digital revolution and its bastard child AI, along with nuclear weapons, US blowar labs, and Israel, are the worst enemies mankind has. How is Trump going to make America Great Again when in the third and fourth year of his term there will be mass layoffs of Americans replaced by AI? Indeed, Trump and Musk have bought into this development and are discussing replacing a large chunk of the civil service with AI. Why not instead just get rid of the useless work with budget and spending reform?</span></p>
<p wcount="79" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As an economist I am utterly and totally amazed at the complete and total stupidity of displacing humans with AI. Robots don’t need food and clothing and entertainment and cars and housing. They don’t have car payments and mortgage payments and credit card payments. With humans displaced by machines, aggregate consumer demand disappears, so, as no one has a job or any income, who purchases the goods and services produced by AI? What becomes of the economy?</span></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit alignright premblock book-author"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0986076996/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TyPsr3%2ByL.jpg"></a>
<p>ORDER IT NOW</p>
</div>
<p wcount="132" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As I pointed out years ago, and as Elon Musk today confirms, <em>AI and the digital revolution introduce the era of Socialism.</em> Everyone, Musk admits, will have to be given an income. Otherwise, there is no point in the AI provision of goods and services. As humans are not involved in production, merit no longer matters. Everyone will be given the same income. Equality at last. Indeed, what is the point of humans? They no longer have any productive function. Why are they needed? What do they do with themselves with nothing to do? Why should machines produce substance for people who do not participate in production? You can see why Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum want to reduce the human population to a small percentage of its present size.</span></p>
<p wcount="13" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The digital revolution and AI bring us the most dystopian of all worlds.</span></p>
<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The First World will be the first to be utterly and totally destroyed by the digital revolution. But “education” will eventually carry the digital revolution into what was once called “darkest Africa.”</span></p>
<p wcount="52" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">In an AI world universities are superfluous as there are few if any jobs that AI cannot do. The only remaining jobs would be plumbers, electricians, mechanics, and perhaps sooner or later your friendly plumber will be a robot programmed to run through the programs, one of which will clear your line.</span></p>
<p wcount="49" data-sanitized-id="p_1_15" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Meanwhile libertarian and free market economists will be telling us that “better jobs” will be created by the digital revolution just as they told us that jobs offshoring would create better jobs to take the place of the old “dirty fingernail jobs.” These promised jobs are yet to materialize.</span></p>


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=544391
title: Chihuahuas, Not Dobermans, by Patrick Lawrence
author: ;Patrick Lawrence
link: https://www.unz.com/plawrence/chihuahuas-not-dobermans/
hash: ;���.<`+&�葊��
attributes: {"enclosures":[]}
content:
<p wcount="19" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I have never been much for <em>schadenfreude</em>: It is always best to occupy one’s mind with worthier matters.</span></p>
<p wcount="66" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">But I cave to temptation as Volodymyr Zelensky, the puffed-up buffoon who has paraded flamboyantly across the world stage as a hero these past half-dozen years, is publicly cut to size as President Donald Trump gets on with the business of ending the proxy war Zelensky has cynically sold to the Western world’s lumpen liberals while presiding over the monstrously corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev.</span></p>
<p wcount="15" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Let us sneer, let us snicker as the air hisses out of Zelensky’s balloon.</span></p>
<p wcount="40" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This thieving som-a-gom bears front-line responsibility — along with his masters, of course — for the deaths of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers somewhere in six figures and the ruination of the country and the citizenry to which he purports to dedicate himself.</span></p>
<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Donald Trump’s démarche toward Russia and a determination to end the Ukraine war he shares with President Vladimir Putin, leave Zelensky marooned on an island made of out-of-date propaganda ops.</span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And now we find Europe’s neoliberal elites, having war-mongered their way into the Ukraine morass because the Biden regime told them to do so, wandering on the beaches with him.</span></p>
<p wcount="36" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As of Trump’s Feb. 12 telephone call with Putin and the Munich Security Conference, held in the Bavarian capital Feb. 14–16, the Continent’s leaders and their repellent mascot have been left holding a very big bag.</span></p>
<p wcount="23" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Zelensky’s fall is significant but was a matter of time. Europanic, as I call it, is the big news of the week.</span></p>
<p wcount="25" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This shapes up to be more fun than a rerun of an old Terry Southern movie, supercilious hypocrites with their pants down in every scene.</span></p>
<p wcount="51" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Zelensky has been the <em>papier mâché</em> creation of others since he was plucked from a sit-com and re-costumed to succeed Petro Poroshenko, a chocolate magnate — Is there not a serious pol anywhere in Ukraine? — who moved into the presidential palace after the U.S.–cultivated coup 11 years ago this month.</span></p>
<p wcount="26" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">He, Zelensky, was financed by one of Ukraine’s countless megacrooks and coached by American image-crafters during the craven chicanery of his presidential campaign back in 2019.</span></p>
<p wcount="44" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As readers may recall, the propaganda got so far out of hand after Russia began its military intervention three years ago that Biden regime ideologues, with corporate media dutifully parroting the trope, had the great broad masses believing Zelensky was “a 21st century Churchill.”</span></p>
<p wcount="13" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Tell me, I recall thinking, somebody please tell me they are not serious.</span></p>
<p wcount="27" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">In <a title="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114031332924234939" href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114031332924234939">his now-famous dismissal of Zelensky</a> last week, Trump marked him down as “a modestly successful comedian.” Sometimes even what we quaintly call reality has its appeal.</span></p>
<p wcount="36" data-sanitized-id="p_1_15" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As Max Blumenthal astutely observed <a title="https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/zelensky-didnt-start-the-war-he-provoked" href="https://thegrayzone.substack.com/p/zelensky-didnt-start-the-war-he-provoked">in <em>The Grayzone</em> the other day</a>, Trump had it wrong when he charged in his contra–Zelensky broadside that the Ukrainian president started the war in Ukraine. No, he provoked it.</span></p>
<p wcount="49" data-sanitized-id="p_1_16" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I like the distinction. The modestly successful comedian has effectively served — very effectively, indeed — as a sort of <em>agent provocateur</em> enabling those with the money and the guns to send extravagant amounts of both into the sinkhole of corruption over which Zelensky presides without the worry of domestic revolts.</span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_17" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Pleading &amp; Complaining</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="56" data-sanitized-id="p_1_18" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">With the regularity of a seasonal TV series, Zelensky would bleat that Ukraine needs more weapons, Ukraine needs more money and Ukraine needs it all now. I especially liked it when he would bark that Western leaders — President Joe Biden, the Europeans — were sloughing off their responsibilities. The impudent, scolding tone: You had to appreciate this.</span></p>
<p wcount="52" data-sanitized-id="p_1_19" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">That wasn’t meant for Biden or any of the trans–Atlantic clients. I have had a hunch all along that the Biden White House, which acknowledged daily telephone contacts with Zelensky, rehearsed him regularly as to what to say, when to say it and how desperately to make the assigned point.</span></p>
<p wcount="42" data-sanitized-id="p_1_20" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">No, Zelensky’s pleading-and-complaining routines, at times so rude Biden’s people told him to throttle back, were meant for the American and European publics — a perception management op to keep the blue-and-yellow flags drooping off millions of balconies and front porches.</span></p>
<p wcount="53" data-sanitized-id="p_1_21" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Zelensky was a professional showman and his was a showman’s work. His other job was fully to harness Ukraine’s neo–Nazi fanaticism — in the political sphere, in the military — while dressing it up to look like a presentable democracy worthy of all the billions of taxpayers’ money wastefully lavished upon it.</span></p>
<p wcount="8" data-sanitized-id="p_1_22" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And so to the bout of early-onset <em>schadenfreude</em>.</span></p>
<p wcount="54" data-sanitized-id="p_1_23" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Zelensky in Munich was little more than a gadfly. It was minorly wonderful to watch: You saw in the video footage the face of an uncertain man who knew his star was falling, and his anxious features reminded you that the grotesque operation this nobody was oddly instrumental in sustaining was falling with him.</span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_24" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>The European Turn</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="47" data-sanitized-id="p_1_25" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Let’s have a pivot, shall we — that overworked word the mainstream press has not been able to resist since Hillary Clinton’s celebrated-but-without-substance “pivot to Asia” way back when. Post–Munich, the suddenly desperate Zelensky — authentically desperate this time — pivoted on a dime to the Europeans.</span></p>
<p wcount="47" data-sanitized-id="p_1_26" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The modestly successful comedian had not even departed from that lovely city of <em>Biergärten</em> and parks before <a title="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgl27x74wpo" href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgl27x74wpo">he was calling for “an army of Europe”</a> — this as if to imply he and his regime were, but of course, as European as the French or the Portuguese.</span></p>
<p wcount="66" data-sanitized-id="p_1_27" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And now we have the spectacle of the European powers, ignoring the fact that Zelensky’s diadem just turned into tin foil, throwing in their lot with him and his regime once again — never mind the only two powers capable of negotiating an end to the war are about to do so over their heads (where, indeed, the U.S.–Russian talks ought to take place).</span></p>
<p wcount="23" data-sanitized-id="p_1_28" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I absolutely loved an unnamed Trump administration official’s assessment of Zelensky’s new circumstances a few days after the Munich conference ended.</span></p>
<p wcount="40" data-sanitized-id="p_1_29" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">“It’s a shit sandwich,” <a title="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/zelenski-has-yet-to-eat-the-shit-sandwich.html" href="https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/zelenski-has-yet-to-eat-the-shit-sandwich.html">this source said</a>, according to <em>Moon of Alabama</em> (which cited a brief <em>Axios</em> report). “But Ukraine is going to have to eat it because he [Trump] has made clear this is no longer our problem.”</span></p>
<p wcount="15" data-sanitized-id="p_1_30" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And now it is decided: The European powers are going to chow down with him.</span></p>
<div data-sanitized-class="book-unit alignright premblock book-author"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1949762785/"><img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71xGRE8EThL.jpg"></a>
<p>ORDER IT NOW</p>
</div>
<p wcount="51" data-sanitized-id="p_1_31" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">We are now treated to a daily procession of chest-beating European leaders professing their determination to go it alone with the Kiev regime. Europe must “step up,” <a title="https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/ukraine-british-troops-keir-starmer-78l3fqhb9" href="https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/ukraine-british-troops-keir-starmer-78l3fqhb9">Keir Starmer said</a> a day after the Munich gathering concluded. “It’s time for us to take responsibility for our security, for our continent.”</span></p>
<p wcount="40" data-sanitized-id="p_1_32" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">That is from <em>The Times</em> of London. <a title="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/02/21/starmer-to-defy-trump-with-new-aid-for-ukraine/" href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/02/21/starmer-to-defy-trump-with-new-aid-for-ukraine/"><em>The Telegraph</em> subsequently reported</a> the British PM plans “to defy Trump” with a “triple whammy” — vulgarity goes trans–Atlantic these days — that will include military support and yet more sanctions against Russian interests.</span></p>
<p wcount="26" data-sanitized-id="p_1_33" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I am always on for more deluded silliness from Annalena Baerbock, the dependably deluded and silly German foreign minister. And she did not disappoint last week.</span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_34" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As <a title="https://www.rt.com/news/613126-germany-us-russia-ukraine/" href="https://www.rt.com/news/613126-germany-us-russia-ukraine/">RT International reported</a> under the headline, “Germany issues warning to U.S.,” it quoted Baerbock offering this gem at a Potsdam campaign rally just before Germany’s national elections Sunday:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="6" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p wcount="29" data-sanitized-id="p_1_35" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">“We’re increasing pressure on the Americans [so they know] they have a lot to lose if they don’t stand on the side of Europe’s liberal democracies.”</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="43" data-sanitized-id="p_1_36" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I can do no better with this one than Tom Harrington, emeritus at Trinity College, Hartford, and an energetic blogger with that pithy wit for which we all appreciate the Irish. Under the headline, “The perils of method acting” he gives us this:</span></p>
<blockquote readability="7" data-sanitized-class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
<p wcount="36" data-sanitized-id="p_1_37" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">“If you are a chihuahua and you play a Doberman for many years on TV, you can forget you are actually a chihuahua. This can lead to much delusion when the director calls off the production.”</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="17" data-sanitized-id="p_1_38" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I loved typing those lines just now and wish they were mine. These people are blowing bubbles.</span></p>
<p wcount="29" data-sanitized-id="p_1_39" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Neither Britain nor Germany — nor any other member of Ukraine’s European constituency — has the money, the military, or the domestic consensus to act consequentially in Kiev’s behalf.</span></p>
<p wcount="21" data-sanitized-id="p_1_40" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">They have been supine clients of the U.S. for too long. In Tom Harrington’s terms, they are yelping chihuahuas.</span></p>
<p wcount="5" data-sanitized-id="p_1_41" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>‘Into the Valley of Death’</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_42" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The Euros and their Canadian cousins in the neoliberal cause, a dozen top officials in all, gathered in Kiev Monday to put their money — so wastefully and unwisely — where their mouths are.</span></p>
<p wcount="44" data-sanitized-id="p_1_43" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">European foreign ministers convened simultaneously in Brussels. And between them they considered sending Ukraine an additional €20 billion straight off the top — more coming is the implication— and a wide variety of additional sanctions — on energy, trade, financial services and so on — against the Russians.</span></p>
<p wcount="20" data-sanitized-id="p_1_44" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">So: The killing must go on more senselessly by the day, and the European citizenry must continue to suffer, ditto.</span></p>
<p wcount="30" data-sanitized-id="p_1_45" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Why do I keep thinking of the Charge of the Light Brigade and <a title="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade" href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade">Lord Tennyson’s mournful memorial</a> to that catastrophic miscalculation — “Into the valley of death” and all that:</span></p>
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<p wcount="43" data-sanitized-id="p_1_46" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>“Forward, the Light Brigade!</em><br><em>Charge for the guns!” he said….</em><br><em>“Forward, the Light Brigade!”</em><br><em>Was there a man dismayed?</em><br><em>Not though the soldier knew</em><br><em>Someone had blundered.</em><br><em>Theirs not to make reply,</em><br><em>Theirs not to reason why,</em><br><em>Theirs but to do and die….</em></span></p>
</blockquote>
<p wcount="43" data-sanitized-id="p_1_47" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This new round of foolishness among the Europeans is not funny. This is not a Terry Southern script. Under the circumstances — a likely settlement somewhere in the offing — it is a criminally careless of human lives and the well-being of 450 million European citizens.</span></p>
<p wcount="45" data-sanitized-id="p_1_48" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I see only one explanation for this. It is the diabolic outcome of the liberal authoritarianism I go on about in this space. The neoliberal order must must must prevail no matter what the cost, no matter how obviously irrational this repudiation of reason proves.</span></p>
<p wcount="44" data-sanitized-id="p_1_49" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Keir Starmer is off to Washington this week for his first encounter with President Trump. We cannot know what will transpire when they meet in the Oval Office, but these two could not possibly be more opposite in their politics, their temperaments, their intentions.</span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_50" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Emmanuel Macron, who concluded his visit to the White House Monday, proved predictably ineffectual. He seemed, at least, to understand — a modest virtue — that he is no more than a chihuahua.</span></p>
<p wcount="41" data-sanitized-id="p_1_51" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Taking as a guide the French president’s failure to get anything done, I see little coming out of Starmer’s small summit — perhaps, if Trump shuts down the famously spineless Brit, another occasion for the indulgence of a little <em>schadenfreude</em>.</span></p>
<p wcount="60" data-sanitized-id="p_1_52" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">I have waited decades — I go back here to the mid–Cold War years — for the Europeans to think and act for themselves, to stand as an independent force as de Gaulle and a few others urged, to serve as a bridge between the Atlantic world of which they are a part and the great East that is their neighbor.</span></p>
<p wcount="31" data-sanitized-id="p_1_53" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">How superbly moral the world order they could bring into being, I imagined. Václav Havel shared such a vision — or, I had better say out of respect, I shared his.</span></p>
<p wcount="53" data-sanitized-id="p_1_54" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Now circumstances at last force the Europeans to go their own way. And they charge in precisely the wrong direction — clinging for dear life to the old binaries generations of Americans have long insisted upon even as America’s new leadership, countless objections to it notwithstanding, seems to begin looking beyond all that.</span></p>


guid: https://www.unz.com/?post_type=item&amp;p=544439
title: Synaptically Seductive Sequence, by Tobias Langdon
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<p wcount="32" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Almost everyone has a favorite number. So if you aspire higher than the herd, you need a favorite number-sequence too. In fact, you need lots of them. Here’s <a title="https://oeis.org/A000002" href="https://oeis.org/A000002">one of mine</a>:</span></p>
<p wcount="0" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, …</span></p>
<p wcount="337" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">See if you can work out the rule self-generating the sequence. If you can, congratulations. If you can’t, don’t worry. The <a title="https://metatutor.co.uk/the-kolakoski-sequence/" href="https://metatutor.co.uk/the-kolakoski-sequence/">Kolakoski sequence</a>, as it’s known, is simultaneously supremely simple and synapse-seducingly subtle. On the one hand, it’s entirely deterministic; on the other, it’s uncannily unpredictable. It’s merely mathematical, it’s mundanely mechanical, but it seems to have a mind of its own. Technically speaking, the Kolakoski sequence is identical to its own <a title="https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Run-LengthEncoding.html" href="https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Run-LengthEncoding.html">run-length encoding</a>. In other words, if you write down the lengths of the runs of 1 and 2, you reproduce the same sequence.</span></p><p>You can also create the Kolakoski sequence by dropping the initial 1 like this: 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, … This means that the Kolakoski sequence consists of nothing but 1s and 2s in runs of one and two.</p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-11.jpg"><img src="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-11.jpg" alt="William Kolakoski and his synaptically seductive sequence (adapted self-portrait from Wikipedia)"></a></span></div>
<div data-sanitized-class="caption"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">William Kolakoski and his synaptically seductive sequence (adapted self-portrait from <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kolakoski" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kolakoski">Wikipedia</a>)</span></div>
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<p wcount="96" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As I said: supremely simple. And mathematicians have been studying this supremely simple sequence for decades. But they’ve never found a straightforward formula for an arbitrary entry in the sequence. That is, no-one can easily tell in advance whether the 100th or 1000th or 1,000,000th number in the sequence is 1 or 2. To know that, it can be quicker to work out everything that comes before. In short, the sequence isn’t periodic and isn’t predictable. And no-one can yet prove that 1s occur there as often as 2s. As I also said: synapse-seducingly subtle.</span></p>
<p wcount="2" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Strangely beautiful</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="157" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The sequence certainly seduced the synapses of the man who gave it his name. It soothed his synapses too. This was because <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kolakoski" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kolakoski">William Kolakoski</a> (1944-97), the American artist and amateur mathematician who popularized the sequence in 1965, was schizophrenic and needed constant medication to prevent his mind being carried into what a friend of his <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kolakoski" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kolakoski">called</a> “regions of chaos and delusion.” Because he couldn’t control his own brain, Kolakoski felt compelled to reject free will and accept determinism. But he wanted to find some “benevolent order” in the deterministic universe and he believed that his sequence was one expression of it. As I noted above, the Kolakoski sequence is entirely deterministic, but uncannily unpredictable. It’s also strangely beautiful. Discussions of it on the web sometimes make the claim that it’s “<a title="https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2014/oct/07/neil-sloane-the-man-who-loved-only-integer-sequences" href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2014/oct/07/neil-sloane-the-man-who-loved-only-integer-sequences">the only sequence</a>” that is its own run-length encoding. That isn’t just wrong, but infinitely wrong. There are an infinite number of such sequences:</span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 3, 3, 1, … (Kolakoski sequence <a title="https://oeis.org/A064353" href="https://oeis.org/A064353">using 1,3</a>)</span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, … (Kolakoski sequence <a title="https://oeis.org/A071820" href="https://oeis.org/A071820">using 2,3</a>)</span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, … (Kolakoski sequence <a title="https://oeis.org/A079730" href="https://oeis.org/A079730">using 1,2,3,4</a>)</span></p>
<p wcount="175" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">If someone’s synapses aren’t seduced by such sequences, then they’ll never enter nerd-nirvana. But if their synapses <em>are</em> seduced, I can make two confident predictions about them. First, they’re probably male. Second, they’re probably light-skinned. They’re White or Jewish or Asian, not Black in the fullest, melanin-tastickest sense. Math appeals most to pale stale males like William Kolakoski. And like <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Oldenburger" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Oldenburger">Rufus Oldenburger</a> (1908–69), the American mathematician who first published the sequence in 1945. But that year is very late in the history of mathematics. Why was such a simple and seductive sequence not discovered millennia ago? That’s an interesting question. It’s also interesting to speculate what would happen to intellectual history if we could use a time-machine to teach <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Pythagoras" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Pythagoras">Pythagoras</a> or <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Archimedes" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Archimedes">Archimedes</a> or <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Aryabhata" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Aryabhata">Aryabhata</a> about the sequence.</span></p>
<p wcount="232" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">All of those mathematical giants would have found their synapses seduced by it, I think. But Pythagoras might have been seduced most of all. After all, he was a <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Pythagoras" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Pythagoras">mystic and metaphysician</a> as well as a mathematizer. The Kolakoski sequence is mystically and metaphysically mesmerizing as well as mathematically so. As I said above: it seems to have a mind of its own. Indeed, a life of its own. The <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Fibonacci_number" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Fibonacci_number">Fibonacci sequence</a> – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, … – famously illuminates biology. The Kolakoski sequence almost seems to belong to biology. What would Pythagoras have made of it? I think he would have been dazzled and delighted by it. And if the Kolakoski sequence had become part of early mathematics, it might have profoundly altered and enriched the course and content of the field. Perhaps calculus would have appeared centuries or millennia earlier, and not had to wait for the genius of those two pale stale males <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Isaac_Newton" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Isaac_Newton">Isaac Newton</a> (1642–1726) and <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz">Gottfried Leibniz</a> (1646–1716).</span></p>
<p wcount="4" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>The geometry of life</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="139" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Why Newton and Leibniz didn’t discover the Kolakoski sequence is a question that currently belongs to history and the philosophy of mathematics. Why they <em>did</em> discover calculus is a question that now belongs partly to biology, because their genius is explained by something else that Pythagoras would have been dazzled and delighted by, namely, DNA. Part of his delight would have come from a sense of vindication. Pythagoras <a title="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pythagoras" href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pythagoras">believed that</a> “Number rules the Universe.” DNA is, in effect, a number-sequence that rules all earthly life. In other words, biology is mathematics: <em>A</em><em>ei h</em><em>ē Zo</em><em>ē geōmetreî</em>, “Life eternally geometrizes,” as Plato might have put it. That ancient Greek verb, <a title="https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0058:entry=gewmetre%2Fw" href="https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0058:entry=gewmetre%2Fw"><em>geōmetreî</em></a>, captured the modern sense of “do mathematics” because Greek mathematics centered on geometry.</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-8.jpg"><img src="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-8.jpg" alt="DNA would have dazzled and delighted Pythagoras"></a></span></div>
<p><span data-sanitized-class="contents">DNA would have dazzled and delighted Pythagoras</span></p>
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<p wcount="146" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">But DNA geometrizes in a more literal sense. It’s a geometric embodiment of a number-sequence, because the physical structure of DNA — its geometry — explains how it works, how it encodes and directs the manufacture of proteins. DNA is a splittable spiral, a double helix whose structure and simplicity would have added to the dazzlement and delight of Pythagoras. Biology is mathematics and mechanics! In effect, a human body is a giant factory full of microscopic machines manufacturing and maintaining meat. And also manufacturing and maintaining mind. Whatever the precise nature and origin of <a title="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/02/19/magnissimum-mysterium-pondering-a-huge-but-hidden-factor-in-politics-and-white-nationalism/" href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/02/19/magnissimum-mysterium-pondering-a-huge-but-hidden-factor-in-politics-and-white-nationalism/">consciousness</a>, there can be no doubt that it is profoundly influenced by mindless matter and by those microscopic machines of DNA. In some sense, mind is both mechanical and mathematical. If we want to explain the very wide mental variation among humans, we have to understand the mechanics and mathematics of DNA.</span></p>
<p wcount="6" data-sanitized-id="p_1_15" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>“A hidden arithmetic of the soul”</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="188" data-sanitized-id="p_1_16" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">That’s because DNA governs the differing psychology and cognition of different human races. Indeed, DNA explains why and how there are different human races. DNA has mutated in the course of human history and now differs in significant ways from race to race, just as DNA has mutated in deeper biological time and differs from male to female. This produces a delicious irony: the number-sequence of DNA explains why some human beings delight in number-sequences and some don’t. And why some human beings are much better at understanding and manipulating number-sequences, in both a narrow and a wide sense. The great philosopher Leibniz, co-creator of calculus, once <a title="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gottfried_Leibniz" href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gottfried_Leibniz">wrote that</a> <em>Musica exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi</em> – “music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, unaware that it calculates.” In other words, music is mathematics (and is another synapse-seducing sequence). It’s not a coincidence that perhaps the greatest mathematician of all time, <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss">Carl Friedrich Gauss</a> (1777–1855), belonged to the same race as perhaps the greatest composer of all time, <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Ludwig_van_Beethoven" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Ludwig_van_Beethoven">Ludwig van Beethoven</a> (1770–1827). Leibniz, a <a title="https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/g-o-a-t/" href="https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/g-o-a-t/">GOAT</a> in both philosophy and mathematics, belonged to that race too.</span></p>
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<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-10.jpg"><img src="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-10.jpg" alt="Charles Murray’s hate-hexagon captures 97% of human accomplishment by stale pale males in Europe"></a></span></div>

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<p wcount="217" data-sanitized-id="p_1_17" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">It was the German branch of the White European race. Gauss, Beethoven and Leibniz were all pale stale males. So, in a wider sense, is perhaps the greatest living mathematician, the Chinese <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Terence_Tao" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Terence_Tao">Terry Tao</a> (born 1975). He’s perhaps the greatest on Earth, that is, but there may be far greater mathematicians elsewhere in the Universe, members of alien species with radically different biologies. In one sense, math floats free of biology: it’s presumably a universal language for advanced intelligent beings of any kind, which is why we’ve <a title="https://www.celestis.com/blog/message-sent-into-space-and-what-we-heard-back/" href="https://www.celestis.com/blog/message-sent-into-space-and-what-we-heard-back/">beamed prime numbers</a> at the stars to prove our existence and intelligence, not the poetry of Maya Angelou. But in other senses math is closely bound to biology. The Fibonacci sequence is one famous example. It governs the <a title="https://phys.org/news/2013-02-nature-pattern-fibonacci.html" href="https://phys.org/news/2013-02-nature-pattern-fibonacci.html">structure of pine-cones and pineapples</a>, yet those species are subjects of math, not sovereigns of it like <em>Homo sapiens</em>. You could say that pine-cones and pineapples <em>are</em> mathematics, that is, they embody mathematics. Human beings both are mathematics and <em>do</em> mathematics. And if you want to understand why, you have to understand the biology of human beings and the number-sequence of their DNA.</span></p>
<p wcount="2" data-sanitized-id="p_1_18" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Misomathematical mysticism</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="208" data-sanitized-id="p_1_19" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">More specifically, you have to understand the biology of those individuals and races who invented and excel at mathematics. As I pointed out above, the individuals have a strong tendency to be pale stale males, from Pythagoras in the 6th century before Christ to Terry Tao in the twenty-first century after. The maximal masculinity of math is explained by the evolution of males to hunt and hurl weapons; the minimal melanicity of math is explained by the evolution of higher intelligence at higher latitudes in colder climates. In other words, the mathematics of DNA explains why some human beings have a mind for mathematics and some don’t. DNA is mechanically mathematical (and vice versa). But mystics, of course, object to the mechanization and mathematization of mind. There’s a great irony in that <a title="https://www.etymonline.com/word/miso-" href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/miso-">misomathematical</a> mysticism, because some of those who espouse it are followers of a man who would, like Pythagoras, have been dazzled and delighted by DNA. And like Pythagoras he would have felt vindicated by it. But whereas Pythagoras would have hailed the mathematicality of DNA, Karl Marx (1818–83) would have hailed the materiality of DNA.</span></p>
<p wcount="149" data-sanitized-id="p_1_20" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Marxism in its classic form claims to be a strictly materialist ideology. But modern Marxists, like the wider, Marx-influenced left in general, are resolutely anti-material when it comes to race and the influence of mere DNA on the majesty of mind. They deny the existence of race and claim that only sociology, not biology, can explain why Black women, for example, haven’t scaled the heights of mathematics like the stale pale males Isaac Newton and Terry Tao. For example, their devotion to Marxism unites stale pale males like <a title="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/06/stephen-jay-gould-next-to-judas-iscariot-brutus-and-cassius-in-the-devil%E2%80%99s-mouth-at-the-center-of-hell/" href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/06/stephen-jay-gould-next-to-judas-iscariot-brutus-and-cassius-in-the-devil%E2%80%99s-mouth-at-the-center-of-hell/">Stephen Jay Gould</a>, Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin, and Steven Rose, the most important and influential of the DNA-deniers. They are all adherents of a strictly materialist ideology. And yet they resort to mysticism when it comes to racial and sexual difference, denying that genetics can explain the vastly different behavior and achievements of Whites and Blacks or men and women.</span></p>
<p wcount="3" data-sanitized-id="p_1_21" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Partisan, not impartial</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="176" data-sanitized-id="p_1_22" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">However, something else unites these dominant DNA-deniers. They are also all Jewish. So are the DNA-deniers — with delicious irony — determined by DNA? I would say yes, to some degree at least. Jewish DNA certainly accounts for the intelligence and verbal facility of Gould, Lewontin <em>et al</em>. Scholars like Kevin MacDonald would further claim that Jewish DNA accounts for the <a title="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/05/16/the-psychology-of-moral-communities-part-2-ethnocentrism-and-its-control/" href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/05/16/the-psychology-of-moral-communities-part-2-ethnocentrism-and-its-control/">ethnocentrism</a> of the Gouldeans, who haven’t been impartial scientists pursuing truth but partisan ideologues pursuing Jewish advantage. It’s not good for Jews for Whites to recognize the simple truth, namely, that biology underlies behavior and that the failure of Blacks in Western societies has deep genetic and evolutionary roots. But it is good for Jews for Whites to <a title="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/06/03/destroy-the-goy-the-metaphysics-of-anti-white-hatred-part-1/" href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/06/03/destroy-the-goy-the-metaphysics-of-anti-white-hatred-part-1/">embrace a gigantic lie</a>, namely, that sociology is supreme and that all non-White failure can be blamed on White racism. The Gouldeans are mendacious, not <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Mendelian_inheritance" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Mendelian_inheritance">Mendelian</a>. So you could also say they are immoral. And I would say that DNA also profoundly influences morality: some races have evolved for deceit and manipulation, and even for straightforward criminality.</span></p>
<p wcount="161" data-sanitized-id="p_1_23" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">As I pointed out in my article “<a title="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/10/verbal-venom-biological-parallels-for-western-pathologies/" href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/10/verbal-venom-biological-parallels-for-western-pathologies/">Verbal Venom</a>,” predation and parasitism have spontaneously evolved again and again in the animal kingdom. There are parasitic mammals, birds, fish, insects and more: Think of vampire-bats, cuckoos, lampreys, mosquitoes and so on. All of those animal groups behave in what is, from one perspective, a profoundly immoral way. They steal the hard-earned resources of their fellow creatures, deceiving and manipulating and sometimes literally sucking their blood. But morality doesn’t really apply, of course. It’s biology, not badness, that’s at work when a mosquito sucks human blood or a cuckoo-chick flips its unrelated nest-mates to their death and then exploits the labor of the deceived parents. And I think it’s biology, not badness, if those same readily evolving strategies of predation and parasitism have appeared among human beings. Predation and parasitism are written into mosquito and cuckoo DNA and may also be written into the DNA of some human groups.</span></p>
<div readability="7" data-sanitized-id="i_4" data-sanitized-class="image imagecenter container">
<div data-sanitized-class="image-holder"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-9.jpg"><img src="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/pic1-9.jpg" alt="Genetic geometry shows that Jews are distinct from northern European Whites"></a></span></div>
<p><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Genetic geometry shows that Jews are distinct from northern European Whites</span></p>
</div>
<p wcount="267" data-sanitized-id="p_1_24" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">But DNA is a number-sequence, not a code of ethics. Morality dissolves in mathematics. I don’t think we can blame Stephen Jay Gould for his anti-Mendelian mendacity. As Kevin MacDonald <a title="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/06/stephen-jay-gould-next-to-judas-iscariot-brutus-and-cassius-in-the-devil%E2%80%99s-mouth-at-the-center-of-hell/" href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/06/stephen-jay-gould-next-to-judas-iscariot-brutus-and-cassius-in-the-devil%E2%80%99s-mouth-at-the-center-of-hell/">points out</a>, Gould proclaimed this in his most famous book, <em>The Mismeasure of Man</em> (1996): “May I end up next to Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius in the devil’s mouth at the center of hell if I ever fail to present my most honest assessment and best judgment of the evidence for empirical truth.” That was self-righteous and Gould is self-damned, because <em>The Mismeasure of Man</em> is replete with mendacity. But if Gould denied scientific truth and MacDonald champions it, that divergence isn’t surprising. Both men belong to small human groups that have had a vastly disproportionate influence on the world. But Scots, who have mostly had a good influence, are White and Jews, who have often had a bad influence, are not. Analysis of DNA has proved that. The three-dimensional geometry of DNA can be translated into a two-dimensional geometry of gene-clusters. On a gene-cluster map, Jews stand as <a title="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2024/05/28/israeli-society-sociopathic/" href="https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2024/05/28/israeli-society-sociopathic/">a people alone</a>, separated by the Southern-European cluster from Scots in the Northern-European cluster. But there’s another irony in such mathematically based DNA analysis, because one of the central figures in the discovery of DNA’s geometry was much more closely related to Stephen Jay Gould than she was to two of the other central figures in the DNA story.</span></p>
<p wcount="123" data-sanitized-id="p_1_25" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/James_Watson" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/James_Watson">James Watson</a> (born 1928) and <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Francis_Crick" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Francis_Crick">Francis Crick</a> (1916-2004) were White like Kevin MacDonald, but the X-ray crystallographer <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Rosalind_Franklin" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Rosalind_Franklin">Rosalind Franklin</a> (1920–58) was Jewish like Stephen Jay Gould. Unlike Gould, she was a true scientist, but unlike Crick and Watson she never achieved the scientific immortality of a Nobel prize. She died too soon and perhaps being a woman during her lifetime would have denied her a Nobel anyway. Immortality can be much easier to achieve in mathematics. William Kolakoski died young like Franklin, but he achieved immortality by discovering and giving his name to that synaptically seductive sequence of 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2…</span></p>
<p wcount="232" data-sanitized-id="p_1_26" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Or rather: by re-discovering it. Rufus Oldenburger was there first. Or first on Earth, at least. Perhaps the Kolakoski sequence was first discovered millennia ago and light-years away by an alien being with a radically different biology. As I pointed out above, in one sense math floats free of biology. But, as I also pointed out above, in other senses math is closely bound to biology. I myself wish I were much better at it. Then again, I can boast that I’m very good at it already, like almost every human since the number-sequence of DNA first granted us the faculty of speech. Whether it’s spoken or written, language too is a number-sequence. It isn’t <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Turtles_all_the_way_down" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Turtles_all_the_way_down">turtles all the way down</a>, it’s numbers and algorithms and math. <em>Le monde, c’est mathématique</em>.</span></p>
<p wcount="1" data-sanitized-id="p_1_27" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><strong>Notes</strong></span></p>
<p wcount="205" data-sanitized-id="p_1_28" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> <a title="https://metatutor.co.uk/the-kolakoski-sequence/" href="https://metatutor.co.uk/the-kolakoski-sequence/"><strong>“How to generate the sequence</strong></a> The Kolakoski Sequence … is a self-describing sequence. The sequence consists of only 1s and 2s, and begins with 1. Each term in the sequence describes the length of the next run of the same number (either 1s or 2s). That probably didn’t make sense (as it didn’t to me the first time I read it), so let me show you what I mean…<br>The sequence begins with <strong>1</strong>. So this means the first run of the same digit only contains 1 number. Since the first number is 1, this means there must only be one 1 in this run. And by definition, because this run must only contain one 1, the next number must be <strong>2</strong>.<br>Because the second number is 2, that means that there are 2 of the same number in the next run. So the sequence will next contain another <strong>2</strong>. And this term will be the end of this run of the same number.<br>Because the third term is 2, we know that the next run of the same number will have length 2. Because we know the third term was the end of the last run, the fourth term has to be <strong>1</strong>.<br>The fifth term will also be <strong>1</strong>, as this run has to have length 2.”</span></p>
<p wcount="13" data-sanitized-id="p_1_29" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">You can also create the Kolakoski sequence by dropping the initial 1 like this: 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, …</span></p>
<p wcount="42" data-sanitized-id="p_1_30" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> Oldenburger’s precedence means that the Kolakoski sequence is an example of <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy">Stigler’s law of eponymy</a>, which states that “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Stigler’s law is also, by design, an example of Stigler’s law.</span></p>
<p wcount="58" data-sanitized-id="p_1_31" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> Of course, if a time-machine took the Kolakoski sequence back in time, there would be no need for a time-machine to take the Kolakoski sequence back in time. You can avoid this paradox by invoking <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Multiverse" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Multiverse">the multiverse</a> and supposing that a time-machine from one universe hops across to another universe that’s accessible and observable from the former.</span></p>
<p wcount="19" data-sanitized-id="p_1_32" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> For example, as noted later in the article, the Fibonacci sequence helps explain the <a title="https://phys.org/news/2013-02-nature-pattern-fibonacci.html" href="https://phys.org/news/2013-02-nature-pattern-fibonacci.html">structure of pine-cones and pineapples</a>.</span></p>
<p wcount="14" data-sanitized-id="p_1_33" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> According <a title="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Classical_Greek_phrases" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Classical_Greek_phrases">to Plutarch</a>, Plato believed that ἀεὶ ὁ Θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ, <em>aei ho Theos geōmetreî</em>, “God ever geometrizes.”</span></p>
<p wcount="27" data-sanitized-id="p_1_34" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> That is, we humans are governed in our biology, physiology, etc by mathematical principles, but are also capable of creating and performing mathematics as an explicit symbology.</span></p>
<p wcount="20" data-sanitized-id="p_1_35" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> Tracking prey involves following a sequence of spoor through space; throwing spears or firing arrows selects for spatial ability too.</span></p>
<p wcount="24" data-sanitized-id="p_1_36" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> In fact, gene-space has far more dimensions than two, but the gene-cluster map above uses only two and I’m simplifying for rhetorical effect.</span></p>
<p wcount="27" data-sanitized-id="p_1_37" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> And like the mathematical giant <a title="https://infogalactic.com/info/Emmy_Noether" href="https://infogalactic.com/info/Emmy_Noether">Emmy Noether</a> (1882–1935). As I noted above, stale pale males have dominated math, but stale pale females have sometimes been important there too.</span></p>
<p wcount="96" data-sanitized-id="p_1_38" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"> “The world, it’s mathematical.” After the manically alliterative title of this article, that’s a mildly alliterative envoi in French (inspired by Louis XIV’s <a title="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/l%27%C3%A9tat%2C%20c%27est%20moi" href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/l%27%C3%A9tat%2C%20c%27est%20moi">alleged remark</a> <em>L’etat, c’est moi,</em> “I am the state”). Perhaps both the mania and the mildness can be explained by my genetics. Anglo-Saxon poetry was famously based on alliteration, not on rhyme. Gene-expression strengthens with age and the older I’ve got, the more I’ve felt compelled to alliterate. I hope this sequence about a synaptically seductive sequence has been synaptically seductive in its own written right.</span></p>


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<div><img src="https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Brian-Mast.jpg" data-sanitized-class="ff-og-image-inserted"></div><p wcount="179" data-sanitized-id="p_1_1" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">After Donald Trump began to pull together his cabinet and inner circle it became pretty clear that the overwhelming tie that bound the group together was its embrace of Israel and everything that it is doing. There were even jokes that the top cabinet officials had apparently been selected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel himself to reflect the fact that the Jewish state would be calling the shots for Trump even more than they did with the spineless Joe Biden. The handover of power was confirmed for all to see when Trump invited Netanyahu to the White House, the first foreign head of state to be so sanctified. While in Washington, a grinning Netanyahu was beguiled to learn of a crazy scheme to either kill or throw all the remaining Palestinians out of what was once Palestine and turn the ruins of Gaza into a high-end beach resort. Since that time, Trump has assured a delighted Netanyahu that no Palestinians would be allowed to return to visit what was once the site of their homes and communities.</span></p>
<p wcount="111" data-sanitized-id="p_1_2" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">So okay, those of us who had not yet learned to accept the occasional genocides carried out by Israel on its neighbors are now quickly learning to understand that the enabling role played by Joe Biden in the massacres of the Arabs was about to accelerate to a higher gear, which would include the clearing of the West Bank and incorporation of parts of Lebanon and Syria after the two million or so pesky Gazans are removed. Nevertheless, there were still some surprises to come and I must confess that some developments as well as recent comments made by Trump’s team have been astonishing even if one expected the worst.</span></p>
<p wcount="139" data-sanitized-id="p_1_3" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Even seasoned Trump-o-philes might have been astonished by an apparently Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated short video prepared for Trump and released on Tuesday on his website Truth Social. It is a brief cartoonish tour of <a title="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/trump-promotes-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-in-bizarre-ai-video/?ml_recipient=147494056028538383&amp;ml_link=147494000569353527&amp;utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=2025-02-27&amp;utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation" href="https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/trump-promotes-gaza-ethnic-cleansing-in-bizarre-ai-video/?ml_recipient=147494056028538383&amp;ml_link=147494000569353527&amp;utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=2025-02-27&amp;utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation">what Gaza might look like</a> when it is transformed into Trump Gaza on the Mediterranean, a luxury beachfront destination, filled with posh sky-scrapers and condominiums, and even featuring bearded bellydancers. The video includes Trump and Netanyahu sunbathing together on the beach, Elon Musk apparently eating hummus, and a fifty feet high golden statue of Donald Trump the Founder located prominently on one of the resort’s main thoroughfares. Small replicas of the golden Trump statue were also seen on a gift shop rack for sale, apparently as souvenirs. Every family should have one to place prominently in its home to protect against Hamas “terrorists.”</span></p>
<p wcount="242" data-sanitized-id="p_1_4" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Coming close to the Trump video in terms of its bizarreness, is the behavior by Representative Brian Mast from Florida, who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Mast is perhaps best known for the fact that he was an American veteran who volunteered to serve with the Israel Defense Force (IDF) after he was wounded in Afghanistan and discharged. He has appeared in Congressional offices and in meetings in Washington in his Israeli army uniform, which some, including myself, consider to be both disgraceful and even borderline treasonous. Mast has often asserted the value of his Israeli credentials and cited his love for Israel saying “I stand by Israel,” which should be a disqualifier for the office he holds. In his latest stunt last week, Mast informed the fifty Republican staffers on his committee that henceforth they <a title="https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/26/house-foreign-affairs-chair-tells-staff-to-refer-to-israeli-occupied-west-bank-as-judea-and-samaria/" href="https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/26/house-foreign-affairs-chair-tells-staff-to-refer-to-israeli-occupied-west-bank-as-judea-and-samaria/">must not refer to</a> the part of Palestine that is generally called the West Bank by that name. The House Committee must henceforth refer to the region as “Judea and Samaria” which is the Israeli preferred “biblical” usage that will no doubt serve as a first step in the annexation of the area into the apartheid Israeli state. Mast elaborated that “in recognition of our unbreakable bond with Israel and the inherent right of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will, from here forward, refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria in formal correspondence, communication and documentation.”</span></p>
<p wcount="119" data-sanitized-id="p_1_5" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">While it may seem only symbolic, referring to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria” is a clear show of support for Israeli annexation. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee to serve as the US ambassador to Israel, also refers to the West Bank using the same language and has said <a title="https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/13/huckabee-of-course-israeli-annexation-of-the-west-bank-is-possible-under-trump/" href="https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/13/huckabee-of-course-israeli-annexation-of-the-west-bank-is-possible-under-trump/">annexation is possible under the new Trump administration.</a> Earlier this month, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas also <a title="https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-reintroduceslegislation-to-eliminate-federal-use-of-the-term-west-bank" href="https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/cotton-reintroduceslegislation-to-eliminate-federal-use-of-the-term-west-bank">reintroduced a bill</a> that would require the use of the term “Judea and Samaria” in all official US documents. Representative Claudia Tenney of New York also introduced the identical legislation in the House and maintained that “the Israeli people have an undeniable and indisputable historical and legal claim over Judea and Samaria.”</span></p>
<p wcount="141" data-sanitized-id="p_1_6" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Congress and the White House have clearly become Israeli Occupied territory as Pat Buchanan once colorfully described the US government. Another prominent Israeli firster who is showing his true colors is the grotesque Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who has recently received the <a title="https://www.newarab.com/news/fetterman-staffers-resign-over-us-senators-israel-obsession" href="https://www.newarab.com/news/fetterman-staffers-resign-over-us-senators-israel-obsession">resignations of six of his staffers</a>, who complained that all the work that they had been given recently had reflected the Senator’s obsession with supporting Israel. Congressman Tom Massie of Kentucky <a title="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-republican-claims-every-gop-colleague-has-an-aipac-babysitter-pressuring-them-to-cast-pro-israel-votes/ar-BB1nPXGP" href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-republican-claims-every-gop-colleague-has-an-aipac-babysitter-pressuring-them-to-cast-pro-israel-votes/ar-BB1nPXGP">has declared that</a> every Republican congressman but himself has among their staffs at least one “minder” (he calls them “babysitters”) who is present to monitor and report on how the representative votes in support of Israel. The Israel-first staffer is often an employee of the Lobby, commonly either connected to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or with the even more virulent Anti-Defamation League (ADL).</span></p>
<p wcount="85" data-sanitized-id="p_1_7" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">After the “cleansing of Gaza” the West Bank will clearly be next. Israel has already announced that the approximate 40,000 West Bank Palestinians who have already been driven from their homes in ongoing operation “Iron Wall” will not be allowed to return and new Jewish settlements are planned for the former Palestinian towns and villages. As in Gaza the Israeli onslaught has involved the destruction of roads, homes, schools, churches, hospitals and other infrastructure, and the killing of civilians, including a pregnant woman and several children.</span></p>
<p wcount="208" data-sanitized-id="p_1_8" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And there is more, lots more, but some of the developments are more interesting because they are impacting domestically on the United States and on the constitutional liberties and rights that are under siege as the Israel Lobby and Team Trump seek to suppress any criticism of the Jewish state and/or of the illegal activities carried out by its supporters through their corruption of government at all levels in the United States. Another revelation of how the new administration will be targeting any and all supporters of the Palestinians comes from the highly respectable Arab American Institute’s Director James Zogby. Per Zogby, “For those unaware of the situation, here’s what’s happened. In recent days, a tweet from Elon Musk shared hateful and dangerous disinformation about the Arab American Institute and other groups whose missions, though varied, have been either to provide humanitarian assistance to communities in need or to provide educational services and training. Mr. Musk reposted a tweet that listed several organizations that have received government grants in recent years. The list was almost exclusively Arab American or American Muslim organizations and labeled us all ‘terrorist linked organizations.’ Mr. Musk’s retweet, which now has more than 16 million views, refers to ‘terrorist organizations.’”</span></p>
<p wcount="76" data-sanitized-id="p_1_9" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">This systematic ethnic and religious demonization of Israel’s designated enemies is being backed up by legal initiatives to rid the United States of any and all foreign students who deign to protest against the genocide being carried out by Israel. At the end of January, Trump <a title="https://www.newsweek.com/trump-order-deport-pro-palestinian-protesters-explained-2023375" href="https://www.newsweek.com/trump-order-deport-pro-palestinian-protesters-explained-2023375">signed an executive order</a> that instructs the leaders of federal agencies to provide recommendations on “all civil and criminal” authorities or actions available to the White House within 60 days.</span></p>
<p wcount="156" data-sanitized-id="p_1_10" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">The order says the report should include details of all court cases involving schools, colleges and universities, which could lead to actions to remove “alien students and staff.” According to an accompanying White House fact sheet, it will “marshal all federal resources” to combat what it describes “the explosion of antisemitism on our campuses and streets” since the October 2023 Hamas attack. Trump’s executive order promises “immediate action” from the Justice Department to “protect law and order, quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities. To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump was quoted as saying in the fact sheet. He explained that “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”</span></p>
<p wcount="81" data-sanitized-id="p_1_11" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">Attorney General Pam Bondi has inevitably taken the lead on the deportation plan. She told <em>Newsmax</em> in an interview that “The thing that’s really the most troubling to me [are] these students in universities in our country, whether they’re here as Americans or if they’re here on student visas, and they’re out there saying ‘I support Hamas.’ Frankly they need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away.”</span></p>
<p wcount="131" data-sanitized-id="p_1_12" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents">And the <em>faux</em> compliments regarding what Israel is doing just keep on coming both from talking heads in Washington and from the Zionist dominated media. My favorite line spewed out regularly by both Democrats and Republicans is some version of the assertion that Israel is somehow a wonderful “democracy that is America’s best friend and closest ally.” Attorney General Pam Bondi went over the top <a title="https://www.yahoo.com/news/pam-bondi-pick-replace-matt-013354056.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall" href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/pam-bondi-pick-replace-matt-013354056.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall">when she called Israel</a> “our greatest ally in the world” in an interview with <em>Fox News</em>. Interestingly, apartheid war criminal Israel is in fact neither a democracy nor a friend nor an ally but when the blind are leading the blind anything might well pop out of one’s mouth, particularly when it is not connected to a functioning brain that actually has a conscience.</span></p>
<p wcount="146" data-sanitized-id="p_1_13" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><a title="https://deepnewz.com/israel/fbi-deputy-director-dan-bongino-kash-patel-affirm-strong-support-israel-amid-65bb4a6e" href="https://deepnewz.com/israel/fbi-deputy-director-dan-bongino-kash-patel-affirm-strong-support-israel-amid-65bb4a6e">Over at the FBI</a> effusive comments also seem to be the general rule with Dan Bongino, the newly appointed Deputy Director of the FBI, when responding to a question about what might be the causes that are dear to his heart, stating, “Israel. Defense of Israel.” His comment reflects a broad commitment within the FBI and Justice Department to prioritize relations with Israel, as echoed by FBI Director Kash Patel, who affirmed that “America will prioritize Israel, and we stand by our number one ally.” Nice one Kash! Is that really your first name or just a pseudonym? Maybe you should be looking into the various internationally binding agreements entered into with the US guaranteeing the arrangements that <a title="https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/27/israel-to-remain-in-philadelphi-corridor-in-violation-of-gaza-ceasefire-deal/" href="https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/27/israel-to-remain-in-philadelphi-corridor-in-violation-of-gaza-ceasefire-deal/">are being violated by Israel</a> in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza? They are war crimes and Washington is complicit. But I guess you are not interested in that stuff…</span></p>
<p wcount="56" data-sanitized-id="p_1_14" data-sanitized-class="container"><span data-sanitized-class="contents"><em>Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is</em> <a title="mailto:inform@cnionline.org" href="https://www.unz.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#f69f989099849bb695989f99989a9f9893d8998491"><em><span data-cfemail="0a63646c6578674a69646365646663646f2465786d" data-sanitized-class="__cf_email__">[email protected]</span></em></a>.</span></p>


