Bulletin N° 1168
“Gaslight”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYmtzaHwCKo
(1:24:09)
Directed by Thorold Dickinson
Gaslight is a 1940 British film directed by Thorold Dickinson which stars Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and features Frank Pettingell. The film adheres more closely to the original play upon which it is based – Patrick Hamilton's Gas Light (1938) – than the better-known 1944 MGM adaptation. The play had been shown on Broadway as Angel Street, so when the film was released in the United States it was given the same name.
PLOT
Alice Barlow (Marie Wright) is murdered by an unknown man, who then ransacks her house, looking for her valuable and famous rubies. The house remains empty for years, until newlyweds Paul and Bella Mallen move in. Bella (Diana Wynyard) soon finds herself misplacing small objects; and, before long, Paul (Anton Walbrook) has her believing she is losing her sanity. B. G. Rough (Frank Pettingell), a former detective involved in the original murder investigation, immediately suspects him of Alice Barlow's murder.
and
“Gaslight (1940) – Film, Literature and the New World Order”
https://corbettreport.com/gaslight-1940-film-literature-and-the-new-world-order/
by James Corbett
(41:22)
In this edition of Film, Literature and the New World Order we welcome Thomas Sheridan, author of The Anvil of the Psyche, to discuss Gaslight, the 1940 British psychological thriller that introduced us to the concept of ‘gaslighting.’ In the discussion we point out how common gaslighting is, ask “Are you being gaslighted?”, talk about techniques for defending oneself from gaslighting, and talk about how this technique is used on a societal level by the psychopaths at the top of the pyramid.
CLICK HERE for comments and mp3 audio
Subject : “Looking through a glass darkly.”
Grenoble, France
Labor Day, 2025
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
Crimes against humanity are escalating, and we cannot escape the implications of our collaboration. The “gaslighting” cannot succeed forever in deflecting our attention away from the inconvenient truths. In the long run, we all have skin in this game which is being played against humanity for the profit of a very few powerful private interests. The wrecking-ball crew is at work. We can run, but we cannot hide.
The conditions in Gaza are beyond words, and the depressingly blatant lies which are cynically used to justify this mass murder; the expansion of masacres in the Middle East is unconscionable. There is no hope beyond the will of the people today. History shows again and again that ordinary people must make the effort to resist and defend their own interests against evil, dehumanizing policies of the self-appointed, sadistic elite. And when they fail to do so, there is all hell to pay . . . .
With this bulletin, we continue our summary examination of the European Middle Ages that offers us some insights into the evolution of our human race. With this objective, we continue to present views of different historians such as Marc Bloc and Morris Bishop, who wrote about this period in an effort to demystify relationships between social classes and to illuminate the social context which gave rise to repeated struggles against inequalities in daily life.
Medieval European history may be divided into two distinct phases between the Carolingian Empire of the 9th century and the Italian Renaissance: the Monastery period, and the Cathedral period, beginning in the 11th century. Each of these phases represents a structural and functional peculiarity in ideological architecture as well as in wider cultural expressions, such as in literature, the codification of religious doctrine, in laws, formal rituals, and acquired social customs in these respective periods of history.
Marc Bloc’s writings on the Middle Ages focus on the complexity of historical research, employing the method of logical positivism. The first volume of his two-volume book, Feudal Society, written in 1940 --before he joined the French Resistance Movement and was captured, tortured and subsequently murdered by the Fascist Gestapo in 1944-- is a comparative study of these two phases of medieval European history.
Two Ages of Feudalism.
The framework of institutions which governs a society can in the last resort be understood only though a knowledge of the whole human environment. For though the artificial conception of man’s activities which prompts us to carve up the creature of flesh and blood into the phantoms homo oeconomicus, philosophicus, juridicus is doubtless necessary, it is tolerable only if we refuse to be deceived by it. That is why, despite the existence of other works on the various aspects of medieval civilization, the descriptions thus attempted from points of view different from ours did not seem to us to obviate the necessity of recalling at this stage the fundamental characteristics of the historical climate in which European feudalism flourished Need I add that in placing this account near the beginning of the book there is no thought of claiming any sort of illusory primacy for facts of this kind? When it is a question of comparing two particular phenomena belonging to a separate series –a certain distribution of population, for example, with certain forms of legal groups –the delicate problem of cause and effect undoubtedly arises. On the other hand, to contrast two sets of dissimilar phenomena over a period of several centuries, and then say: ‘Here on this side are the causes; there on that are all the effects’, would be to construct the most pointless of dichotomies. A society, like a mind, is woven of perpetual interaction. For other researches, differently oriented, the analysis of the economy of the mental climate are culminating points; for the historian of this social structure they are a starting-point.
In this preliminary picture, designedly limited in scope, it will be necessary to retain only what is essential and least open to doubt. The wonderful flowering of art in the feudal era, at least from the eleventh century on, is not merely the most lasting glory of that epoch in the eyes of posterity. It served in those times as a vehicle for the most exalted forms of religious sensibility as well as for that interpenetration of the sacred and profane so characteristic of the age, which has left no more spontaneous witness than the friezes and capitals of certain churches. It was also very often the refuge as it were of certain values which could not find expression elsewhere. The restraint of which the medieval epic was incapable must be sought in Romanesque architecture. The precision of mind which the notaries were able to attain in their charters presided over the works of the builders of vaults. But the links that unite plastic expression to the other features of a civilization are still insufficiently understood; from the little that we know of them they appear so complex, so subject to delays and divergences that it has been necessary in this work to leave aside the problems posed by connections so delicate and contradictions that to us seem so astonishing.
It would, moreover, be a grave mistake to treat ‘feudal civilization’ as being all of one piece chronologically. Engendered no doubt or made possible by a cessation of the last invasions, but first manifesting themselves some generations later, a series of very profound and very widespread changes occurred towards the, middle of the eleventh century. No definite break with the past occurred, but the change of direction which, despite inevitable variations in time according to the counties or the phenomena considered, affected in turn all the graphs of social activity. There were, in a word, two successive ‘feudal’ ages, very different from one another in their essential character. We shall endeavor in the following pages to do justice as much to the contrasts between these two phases as to the characteristics they shared.(pp.59-60)
The Transformation of Human Relationships.
The stabilization of obligations was accompanies by certain drastic modifications in the internal structure of the manor. There was a general reduction of compulsory labour services; sometime they were replaced by money payments, which were also occasionally substituted for rents in kind; finally there was a progressive elimination of those parts of the system of obligations which had remained uncertain and fortuitous. These changes were henceforth inscribed on every page of the cartularies.
. . .
Meanwhile the form of dependence in which the subordination of man to man had found its most complete expression either disappeared or changed its character. From the thirteenth century onwards, repeated enfranchisements which sometimes applied to whole villages considerably reduced the number of French and Italian serfs. Other groups slipped into freedom though mere desuetude. Moreover, where serfdom survived in France it progressively deviated from the old form of personal bondage (homage de corps). It was conceived of less as a personal tie and more as an inferiority of class which by a sort of contagion could pass from the soil to the man. There would henceforth be servile tenements, the possession of which made a man a serf, and the abandonment of which sometimes set him free. In more than one province, the body of specific obligations itself was broken up. New criteria appeared. Formerly innumerable tenants had been tallageable at will; but some serfs, while remaining serfs, had got their obligations placed on a contractual basis. Henceforth to pay at the will of the lord established at least a presumption of serfdom. Such changes were almost universal. Was English villeinage, in spite of its highly original characteristics, anything other than a definition of status by uncertainty of obligations (compulsory labour services here being taken as the standard) and of obligations essentially attaching to a piece of land? Formerly, in the days when as yet the only unfree persons were the bondmen, the ‘bond of the man’ had been regarded as a mark of servitude; in future, this stigma attached to a man in his capacity as a manant, a villain. And the villain par excellence was he who was subject to irregular services and ‘did not know in the evening what he would have to do the next morning’. In Germany, where the class of Leibeigene was not unified till very late, the evolutions was slower; it none the less in the end followed much the same course.
The manor in itself has no claim to a place among the institutions which we call feudal.. It had coexisted (as it did again later on) with a stronger State, with less numerous and less solid relationships of clientage, and with a much freer circulation of money. Nevertheless, in the new conditions of life which arose form approximately the ninth century onward, this ancient method of social organization was destined not only to extend it grip over a much larger portion of the population, but also to consolidate to a remarkable degree its own internal structure. Like the family it was profoundly influenced by surrounding conditions. In the days when vassalage was developing, or when it was in its prime, the minor was first and foremost a community of dependants who were by turns protected, commanded, and oppressed by their lord to whom many of them were bound by a sort of hereditary link, unconnected with possession of the soil or place of abode. When the relationship truly characteristic of feudalism fell into decay the manor lived on, but with different characteristics; it became more territorial, more purely economic.
Thus feudalism, a type of social organization marked by a special quality in human relationships, expressed itself not only in the creation of new institutions; it imparted its own colouring to what it received from the past, as if passing it through a prism, and transmitting it to succeeding ages.(pp.278-279)
Morris Bishop’s popular introduction to the study of medieval Europe, The Middle Ages (1968) offers an unconventional view of the complexities of the social history of this period.
The Manorial System and the Life of Labor.
The collapse of the Roman Empire in 476, left an all but non-functional infrastructure across much of Europe –Roman roads and aqueducts, for example, were of little use without Roman imperial purpose and their maintenance. In this context, local European communities filled the vacuum to supply the needs of local populations.
The manorial system, widespread in the West from Charlemagne’s time onward, was not at first favorable to the development of agriculture and commerce. Manors tended to be self-sufficient; the economy was closed. People lived in their small world, in constant fear of the strange world beyond, form which came only evil. The best they could hope for was to endure; and they endured. (p.177)
Modern writers distinguish between the feudal system and the manorial system, not always lucidly, for the two coincide as often as the diverge. . . . [T]he feudal system properly refers to the relations between fief holders and their lords. Essentially to it was the noble lord’s possession of a fuedum, or fief, a grant from a greater lord. The fief normally took the physical form of a manor: castle or great house and a village or villages surrounded by farmland. The manorial system can be defined as the exploitation of these lands and the government of heir inhabitants.
The character of the manor varied greatly during a period of about five hundred years and over a territory extending from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Even within a limited area, there might be wide divergences, for the nature of the terrain and the ‘custom of the manor’ determined local rights and duties. One can hardly find a single manor at a specific time that can be called typical. However, we are best informed about the manorial system in northern France and in England during the early centuries of this millennium. . . .
The manor was divided into two parts: Land granted to the peasants, held and cultivated by them, under the lord’s overriding rights; and the demesne, directly owned and exploited by the lord, and worked on a part-time basis by the same peasants. On a small manor the lord might oversee operations in person. On a large estate he would employ as general manager a seneschal, or steward, often a gentleman of his own class, trained as a guardian of noble rights and privileges. ‘The seneschal,’ writes the British scholar H.S. Bennett, ‘must know the size and needs of every manor; how many acres should be plowed and how much seed will be needed. He must know all his bailiffs and reeves, how they conduct the lord’s business and how they treat the peasants. He must know exactly how many half-penny loaves can be made from a quarter of corn, or how many cattle each pasture should support. He must for ever be on the alert lest any of the lord’s franchises lapse or are usurped by others. He must think of his lord’s needs, both of money and of kind, and see that they are constantly supplied. In short, he must be as all-knowing as he is all-powerful.’
The seneschal might supervise several estates; he might also be frequently absent on his lord’s errands. He would often employ a bailiff, or intendant, as farm manager. The bailiff was chiefly concerned with the lord’s demesne. He assigned and supervised tasks, and usually kept the accounts, in Roman numerals and with the aid of tallies, notched sticks that provided him with a comprehensible record. These were often split in two to provide a receipt, which ‘tallied’ when the halves were brought together. The bailiff was a free peasant, rough and tough; to him was ascribed the principle that ‘the churl like the willow sprouts the better for being cropped.’ He had many opportunities for small-scale graft; he was checked, however, by the seneschal and by the annual visit of the lord’s auditors, if not by conscience.
In England the bailiff often had as his subordinate a reeve, who was himself a peasant. Sometimes he was imposed by the lord as a sort of foreman; usually he was elected by the serfs from their own number as a defender of their interests. He may have descended from the Anglo-Saxon elder, or head man, of a free village. One step down were certain minor agents: the beadle, or constable, who collected rents and fines, issued summonses, evicted delinquents; the hayward, or ‘hedge warden,’ chosen by the lord of the manor or elected by the villagers to lead the sowing and harvesting, to impound stray cattle, and to service hedging and temporary fencing around the hay meadows. The hayward’s symbol of office as a horn, which he blew to give warning that cattle were invading the corps. Little BoyBlue was a hayward.
Within the village, which today looks so uniform with rows of nearly identical houses, a legal and social hierarchy prevailed. At the top was the parish priest, who might be a gentleman, but was most often a peasant among his own kind. He had his own land, the glebe or parson’s close, and was often obliged to participate in the village’s communal labors. He worked alongside the others, in smock and coarse boots, but was treated with at least a modicum of respect.
The peasants, the commoners, fell into several groups. The freemen were legally privileged, and in England some of them, the franklins, held a good deal of land and received much consideration. Freemen owned their patches of land, and with the lord’s consent, could sell or otherwise dispose of them. They could leave the manor, contract marriage where they pleased, put their sons into the church or send them off to be soldiers; The freeman felt some social superiority to the serf, but he actually possessed little economic superiority. All peasants lived in the same kind of house, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, suffered alike from the caprices of weather and soil.
The serfs were unfree, boud to the manor, but they held guaranteed rights to the land they worked. In England they were called villeins, and if they had a house rather than a cottage, they were termed house-bond, or husbands. Their normal landholding was a virgate, about thirty acres. Legally they possessed nothing but their bellies –nihil praeter ventrem; all their property was lent to them by the lord, who in theory could sell them with their land, marry them to whom he please, separate their families. In practice, however, few lords, in England at least, would risk such highhanded procedures. It was understood that the villein’s land was bound to him and he to it. He had no fear of unemployment. The lord’s interest was to protect his workers and give them security in their jobs. The serf could, however, gain freedom by purchase, by marrying a free woman, by dispensation to enter the church, or by fleeing from home to live for a year and a day in a principal town or on a royal domain.
Both freeman and serfs supplied the village with specialists. The smith was essential to the economy, as the abundance of his offspring attests. He united physical strength with enterprise and ingenuity. He shod horses, made and repaired plowshares and other farm tools, also nails, knives, hinges, locks and bolts, and sometimes swords and other weapons. The miller, who has also begotten innumerable progeny, might prosper and live at ease, as we may judge from the evidence of surviving mills and from Chaucer’s Miller of Trumpington, proud as a peacock, who carried an honorable sword. But millers, like the Miller of Trumpington, were ill regarded and accused of every kind of peculation, of giving short weight and taking an undue proportion of the gain for their pay. ‘What is the boldest thing in the world?’ inquired the peasant in a riddle. ‘A miller’s shirt’ was the answer, ‘for it clasps a thief by the throat daily;’ The village might also be able to support a full-time or part-time carpenter, a shoemaker, a barber, a tavernkeeper; but there was seldom business for a shopkeeper.
Those who had trades acquired surnames –Shoemaker, Dyer, and so on. In the twelfth century family names became general and inheritable. Except in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, patronymics –Wilson, Johnson, Samson—were fixed. Many surnames indicated the bearer’s hometown or a characteristic of his physique or his behavior.
The cottars, who occupied a cot or hovel as distinct from a house, were economically inferior to the freemen and serfs. Though they might possess a scrap of land, they lived by casual labor for daily wages. They herded cows and swine, helped in the strenuous days of harvest and planting, ditched and delved, guarded prisoners, carried messages. They were the odd-job men, the rural proletariat. Last of all were the slaves, who had no rights at all. But by the thirteenth century slavery had mostly disappeared from western Europe.
As long as the villages were let alone, they could survive and even prosper. But all too often they were undone by incomprehensible wars. Abbot Suger of St. Denis tells a significant story. An upstart noble of Reims violated the king’s domain. The king, Louis VI, fitly punished him by invading, plundering and firing, and depopulating his lands. ‘It was an excellent deed, that those who ravaged should be ravaged.’ The king’s men ‘avenged by the ruin of the lands the injuries committed.’ Thus the culprit was punished by the death and destruction of many guiltless little people, to whom the holy abbot does not give a thought.(pp.209-212)
The Life of Thought.
Until the economic recovery of the 11th century, a “cultural stagnation” (as far as we know) characterized Europe after the fall of Rome.
The culture of a given time and place is a product of inherited tradition, of innovation. Such seeds, fertilized by prosperity, tended by leisure, and warmed by the sun of peace, may produce an abundant bloom. Most commonly the bloom is brief, as was that of the Carolingian Renaissance. Its soil was too thin; its roots pithless.
For nearly three hundred years, from the ninth century onward, cultural growth in western Europe was all but arrested. In the church some few learned to write good Latin, and in the monasteries fewer still, bold or bored, opened the old books of brooding wisdom and copied them down. We are ill informed of the spirit’s life in those days, but evidently the cultural calamity was due less to ignorance than to incuriosity. Men were not ignorant of the things thyme needed to know –practical agriculture, weaponmaking, the strategies of survival; and they had no interest rediscovering the speculations of ancient sages. If we censure them for their neglect, we might well ask ourselves when we have last read Cicero and Vergil through.
With the eleventh century’ came an economic recovery, a slackening of tension in Christian Europe. The Scandinavian invaders were absorbed, the Islamic thrust checked. New orders in the church, especially the Cluniacs, provided islands of peace and security. The struggle for existence continued, but men could now hope for something more than mere existence. Here and there they could find leisure for contemplation, for the arousing of curiosities about the human past as well as about their personal destinies in another world.
In all these gloomy years two names stand out: Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, and Gerbert of Aurillac. Alfred, still beloved in English legend, lived at the end of the ninth century. Not only did he organize Anglo-Saxondom and triumphantly fight the Danish invaders, he also translated into his own language a number of Latin classics, notably the sixth-century Consolaton of Philosophy, by Boethius. He fostered an Anglo-Saxon literary culture, superior to that of the Continent, but doomed to extinction after 1066. Gerbert, who flourished in the latter half of the tenth century, left his monastery in southern France and went to study in Spain. He returned to head the cathedral school of Reims and to tutor the future German Emperor Otto III. He liberalized his school’s curriculum, resuscitating such ancient authors as Virgil, Horace, Terence, and Juvenal. He explained the mathematical basis of music by means of vibrating stings of various lengths; Deft-fingered, he constructed a clock marking the hours, a hydraulic organ, and an armillary sphere, illustrating the earth and the orbits of the planets around it, and revolving heaven of the fixed stars. He reintroduced the abacus, making quick calculation possible. Naturally he was regarded as a magician; he was said to have manufactured a head of brass that told him of the future. It said to him: ‘You will be pope!’ And, in fact, he was elected pope as Sylvester II. But beware of necromancy, which tricks its devotees! He died soon after his elevation, and he is said to have repented on his deathbed for selling his soul to the devil.
After the death of Charlemagne, organized schools were almost entirely lacking. We are so used to equating education with schools that we may forget that schools are merely a convenient, economical method of group or mass education. In primitive societies a child is educated by association with his elders in work and play. Plenty of great thinkers, from Socrates to Pascal, Rousseau, and Mill, never went to a regularly constituted school.
The monasteries, with their insistence on the correct singing and chanting of the sacred offices, commonly supported song schools to train young choristers. They had to learn to read Latin script and needed enough Latin grammar and vocabulary to sing with proper expression and emphasis; this was not difficult in a convent where Latin was the language commonly used. Most graduates took orders, and no doubt many improved their opportunities for private study. The monastery schools, then, were properly vocational. So were the cathedral schools, for each bishop was supposed to provide for the training of secular priests.(pp.237 -238)
The Noble’s Life.
Toward the end of the “Dark Ages” ("dark" because we are able to know little about it, due to the scarcity of available documents) a new political system began to take formation in Europe: “Feudalism is one of those words that have taken on so many extended and figurative meanings that the original meaning has been obscured.”
Today any oppressive government, greedy landholder, or brutal exploiter of labor is called feudal –always with disapproval. This is unfair to feudalism; The word is also often confused with the manorial system, which tied peasants to the land they worked, and is sometimes applied to all medieval European governments. This is inexact; parts of Europe, such as Scandinavia and Ireland, were hardly touched by feudalism, and in Italy it was complicated by other political systems. On the other hand, Japan developed an organization that may well be called feudal.
Feudalism is a total organization of society. It specifies the status of the individual and his relations with his superiors and inferiors. It includes an economic system based on land; in general a man’s rights to land correspond with his social rights. It is a scheme of political organization, legally based, overlapping the social and economic organization. In medieval feudalism the overlord was, in theory, socially, economically, and politically supreme. He granted some part of his rights to his vassals, his noble companions and servants. The granted rights took the form of rule over a unit of land, a fief. An implicit bargain was stuck: the lord offered maintenance and protection; the vassal promised military aid to his lord.
Feudalism was, then, a military, political, social, economic and legal system emerging from the breakup of Carolingian society. It suited a time when communications were difficult, when society was governed through personal relations rather than correspondence, when scarcity of money precluded a salaried officialdom. Feudalism was a system of rights and duties; more than that, it was a way of life and a mystique.
As a system of government, feudalism was simple and logical; The king kept a part of his realm as his own demesne, which he farmed and administered for his own support. The rest he entrusted to his faithful companions in the form of fiefs, to enjoy and administer. In theory the fief was revocable and would revert to the monarch at the holder’s death, but in practice the monarch was seldom strong enough to remove a gift once made, and feudal holdings became hereditary. In return for his land the noble became his lord’s vassal, owing to him services, particularly the provision of fixed number of armed horsemen for his lord’s wars. The noble, vassal of the king, was also a lord, empowered to grant a share of his land, with its accompanying rights an duties, to a vassal of his own; this is subinfeudation.
The feudal lord usually exercised justice on his estate, except for major cases reserved to his monarch. He collected tolls and other taxes, and was supposed to maintain roads, bridges, and defenses, and to protect the poor, orphans, and widows. The lord and his vassals together formed the nobility, in distinction to the mass of peasants, the clergy, and the townspeople, although the distinctions were not completely formalized until the twelfth century. The nobles were fighting men, the descendants of fighting men. They were proud of their vassalage, a word we have tinged with derogation. But today most of us are, have been, or will be employees; no employee has the right to look down on a vassal.
The feudal contract rested upon land because land was, in the early days, the only capital or means of support. The French law said: ‘No lord without land; no land without a lord.’ A fief, however, was more tan land; it represented the whole complex of the vassal’s rights and obligations. The bond between lord and vassal was affirmed or reaffirmed by the ceremony of homage. The vassal knelt, placed his clasped hands within those of his master, declared, ‘Lord, I become your man,’ and took an oath of fealty. The lord raised him to his feet and bestowed on him a ceremonial kiss. The vassal was thenceforth bound by his oath ‘to love what his lord loved and loath what he loathed, and never by word or deed to do aught that should grieve him.’
The vassal rendered to his lord certain services in addition to supplying his quota of armed knights. . . . .
. . .
Feudalism was a balance of needs and forces, arising out of the strong man’s urge for power and possessions and the weak man’s need for protection and survival. It was a class system; it maintained that nobles and villeins were born to their state by divine disposition and that they would remain forever what they were born to be. The blood of noble and commoner was believed to be different in composition.
The church, as the greatest of landholders, was necessarily within the feudal system. Throughout the West the church came to possess as much as a third of the land. Bishops and abbots of the great monasteries entered the feudal hierarchy, adopting
its duties and exercising sovereign rights. Some even fulfilled their military obligations. Three bishops fought the English at Poitiers in 1356; the archbishop of Sens died at Agincourt. Until the French Revolution the bishops of Cahors had the right to lay on the alter his helmet, cuirass, and sword when he said mass in state.
Feudalism began, in part, as a system by which weak kings could transfer to strong agents the tasks of administration and defense. It established a swarm of local rulers, turbulent and savage. Its patterns of loyalty were obscure and marred by frequent beeches of faith. Its justice was capricious; its financial system , incompeten. Its raison d’être was the exchange of land for military service, but by the fourteenth century the feudal army became obsolete, and the mercenary army replaced the levee en masse. The growth of commerce, based on money, weakened land-based feudalism. In the late Middle Ages the nobility, hard hit by rising costs, were obliged to sell land, to discontinue their manorial workshops in the face of competition from the towns, and to sell serfs their freedom. In England freed serfs began to lease their own farms or work for wages. The lord made indentures with his workers. The terms of agreement were written twice on a single sheet, one copy for each party; as a check against future forgery, the two parts were cut apart on a jagged line resembling a great bite, hence indenture.
As the historian J.J. Bagley has noted, the fourteenth century ‘marked the end of the true feudal age and began paving the way for the strong monarchies, nation states, and national wars of the sixteenth century. Much fourteenth-century ‘medievalism’ had become artificial and self-conscious. Already men were finding it a little curious. It was acquiring an antiquarian interest and losing its usefulness. It was ceasing to belong to the real world of practical living.’ Feudalism had begun as a bargain --the exchange of service for protection. The bargain was not kept; in the end one party continued to render service while the other failed to provide protection. (pp.109-115)
In chapter V, entitled “An Age of Faith”, Bishop describes the dogmatic ruling-class view of social inequalities and their own supremacy.
‘God’s house is threefold,’ wrote a French bishop. ‘Some pray in it, some fight in it, some work in it.’ Thus in the early Middle Ages the Christian world was neatly divided into three castes: priests, nobles, and common people. (The burgher class was still inchoate.) Preachers like to compare society to the human body: priests were the head and eyes; nobles, the arms and hand; commoners, the legs and feet. As the head of all mankind, the church claimed the right to direct and rule society, as it hardly does today except in certain pious polities, such as those of the Mormons or the Amish.
The church fulfilled many of the functions of the modern state. Church courts tried civil and criminal cases involving clerics, and their decisions on such matters as marriage, divorce, and bequests were binding and enforceable by local constables. The church alone controlled scholarship and book production; it alone cared for the poor, the sick, and the aged. It had jurisdiction over all students as well as over priests, monks, lay brothers, and a horde of ‘clerks’ in minor orders, who enjoyed ‘benefits of clergy’ with practically no obligations. The proportion of clerics to the population was perhaps ten times as large as it is today. The church was, in sum, more than the patron of medieval culture; it was medieval culture.
The pope ruled this mighty organization as God’s vicar on earth. Possessing dominion over souls, some popes asserted their mastery over bodies as well, and over the earth form which bodies are drawn. They dreamed of a City of God wherein the pope, God’s vassal, would anoint kings and his vassals and bid them defend the faith.
Papal claims were both supported and impaired by possession of the Patrimony of St. Peter –the city of Rome and its surroundings—and the papal states, which extended across Italy. The popes could regard this territory as a kind of feudal demesne, paying part of the costs of their government. The papal lands were always badly administered, however, and they could not provide enough money to support the papal court properly. The popes, therefore, eagerly sought more territory. Asserting their primacy throughout the world, they played the role of Italian princelings at home, using spiritual weapons –anathema, excommunication, interdict --against temporal rivals and actually declaring crusades against them. Thus they blunted the church’s weapons, ranged themselves with ordinary mortals, and laid themselves open to mockery and shame. What land the popes gained was bought very dear, at much cost to their spiritual authority.
It was in the Middle Ages that the church [eventually] formed the organization that it more or less keeps today. At its head was the pope, elected by the cardinals acting under divine guidance. The pope, in his turn, appointed the cardinals, making the system closed and self-perpetuating. The cardinals would nearly always elect one of their own number as pope. Ordinarily the cardinals were merely the high clergy of the city of Rome and its environs. It was not until 1245 that they received their distinctive red hats; they adopted their characteristic red robes shortly thereafter. With their assistants the cardinals formed the pope’s curia, or court. They could meet with the pope in consistory as board of directors , but mostly they worked in committees or a supervisors of executive departments. The church’s enormous correspondence was handled by the chancery, which drafted and issued all papal decrees, taking elaborate precautions against forgery. (But false bulls were rife, and were sometimes commissioned by unscrupulous bishops from unscrupulous scribes.) The papacy’s financial bureau, the camera, ran a gigantic business, with money coming in from taxes imposed on all bishops and fees charged for decisions made by the papal court. Since the transport of gold from afar was difficult and dangerous, the camera developed a credit system in cooperation with Italian bankers.
Along with the rationalization of the church’s governmental structure came the systematization of Christian doctrine. Many of the current beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church were established in the Middle Ages. Transubstantiation was made a dogma in 1215; the number of sacraments was fixed at seven. The doctrine of the treasury of the merits of the church was proposed in the thirteenth century and confirmed in the fourteenth. One could, through prayer, good deeds, pilgrimage, or cash contributions, obtain an indulgence or draft on this treasury; it contained the excess virtues of Christ and the saints, which could be drawn upon by repentant sinners to relieve them of purgatorial pains. The Electors of Saxony piled up a credit of two million yeas against their time in purgatory. The Virgin, a minor figure in the New Testament became an object of great reverence, chief intercessor with her son, almost his rival. The doctrine of her Immaculate Conception was first explicitly stated by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century. Her cult as strengthened by the import from the East of the rosary with its litany of prayers addressed to Mary. Worship of the saints was much developed, for they are kind, whereas God if just, and justice I not kind to sinners. The most important saints’ days were marked on the calendar with red letters, hence our red-letter days. The liturgy was revised, hardly to be altered until our own time. The church’s teaching were masterfully codified in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican monk, scholar, and saint.
In the age of faith tales of miracles abounded, and they were solemnly recounted from the pulpit and by the fireside. Eagerness to see wonders brought the wonders to life –bleeding statues, miraculous cures, resurrections, reversals of nature’s laws; Men were not the only beneficiaries of the saints’ intercessions. A parrot, even, carried off by a bird of prey, spoke the familiar words of his mistress; ‘Sancte Thoma adjuva me’ (Saint Thomas, help me), and Saint Thomas immediately released the parrot.
The powers of heaven were rivaled and often thwarted by the powers of hell. Life was an unceasing battle with the devil and his minions, who were always nearby, ready to pounce. After all, their home was directly underfoot, only a second’s flight away. They too had their rights and obligations. Said Saint Francis, ‘The demons are out Lord’s bailiffs, whom he hath set part to exercise men;’ Satan could even befool mankind by assuming the form of Christ or of the Virgin. It was thought that insanity was caused by possession by an unholy spirit; the victims might be whipped, tortured, or burned to force out his impious inhabitant. One of the lower ranks of the clergy was that of the exorcist.
Men and women were not only victims of the devil, often they were supposed to be his active agents. Having made a pact with the Evil One, they flew by night to horrid assembles, or covens, where they coupled with demons without much satisfaction, for the diabolic members are icy cold. In return they were enabled to cast spells on their neighbors, rendering them impotent or causing them or their cattle to waste away and die.
. . .
Jews were also classes as enemies of good Christians. Stories of ritual murders of Christian children, committed by Jews in following their hellish rites received wide circulation. Perhaps these originated in the Jew’s slave-treading activities in the early Middle Ages –a time when Jewish dealers may have bought children from poor parents and shipped them off to Moslem lands. (Unwanted children were often sent into the forest to die, as the story of Hansel and Gretel recalls; parents could easily explain their disappearance by blaming it on the Jews.) In Norwich Cathedral in England one can see a very apologetic plaque commemorating the boy William of Norwich, who in the twelfth century was said to have been stolen by Jews and crucified. In compensation he was made a saint.
(pp. 143-145)
The 26+ items below have been selected from the critical Anglophone social media to represent important discussions that are presently occurring in the US and around the world, beyond the corporate media. Judging from studies of the distant past, western political and social institutions are quickly eroding and becoming obsolete; new institutions are urgently needed to carry on life within our societies. Many see their interconnections and want a better life for all; others look no futher than to monitize new techniques and to gain maximum privte profits from new reforms.
The lack of social vision on the part of today’s capitalist class leaders is evident, and the ideological shifts we are now witnessing are the immediate results. It is time to take seriously the ancient French axiom: “Les absents ont toujours tort.”
We must all be at the table, ready to participate when discussions of "a new social order" take place. These important decisions cannot be left to industrialists, bankers, military personel, and their various technicians. The social contradictions embedded in “bourgeois representative democracy” have become palpable for all to see; it is time to turn to a new form of democracy, to harness technology to the achievement of “direct democracy,” representing the whole of society, and no longer the exclusive social class interests of the owners of capital.
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
___
Professeur honoraire de l'Université Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur de Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
___________
a.
“Buckle Up, Folks! You’re About to See the Mother of All Gaslighting Operations . . . .”
by Corbett Report Newsletter, April 27, 2025
+
“European Leaders ADMIT Ukraine Peace Deal Was A Sham”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjwSNiCSpnw
by The Jimmy Dore Show, Jan. 16, 2023
(11:05)
In the West we’re frequently told by our leaders in government and the media that Russia “can’t be trusted,” so there’s no real point to negotiating with Putin and his duplicitous ilk. Except now we learn from former German Chancellor – confirmed by former French President Francois Hollande – that when NATO countries signed the Minsk peace accords in 2015, calling for a ceasefire in the Donbas, they had no intention of honoring the agreement and were merely buying time to arm the Ukrainian military for the inevitable war to come.
Guest host Aaron Maté and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the shocking
revelation and why it will receive virtually no attention in the Western media.
+
“'Russia Doesn't Negotiate': Putin Aide Lavrov Drops Bombshell On Trump, Justifies Kyiv Attack”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyoLyYXmoI8
by Times Of India
(14:00)
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to justify the deadly attack on Kyiv that took place last week in an interview on CBS News. He stated that the U.S. President recognises that Russia does not negotiate over its own territory. Lavrov further asserted that the status of Crimea is a 'done deal' and non-negotiable. Watch an excerpt from his interview in English. #sergeilavrov #crimea #realitycheck #donaldtrump #russiaukrainewar #kyiv #kremlin #moscow #vladimirputin #volodymyrzelensky #usa #unitedstates #whitehouse #washington
+
“Trump RIPS Zelensky For Blocking Peace Deal!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5631D6gO0VU
by The Jimmy Dore Show, April 26, 2025
(16:52)
President Trump on Wednesday lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he was harming peace talks with Russia after the Ukrainian leader said Kyiv would never recognize Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Trump, in a post on his site Truth Social, rejected Zelensky’s red line on Crimea being excluded from negotiations with Russia and said the territory was “lost years ago” and “and is not even a point of discussion.”
Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the unwillingness of Zelensky, his European backers and the mainstream American press to acknowledge that Ukraine has lost this war and is not in any position to be making fanciful demands about the return of Crimea.
+
“Col. Lawrence Wilkerson: Washington's Rivalries, Coups, Wars & Cover-Ups”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHJJDOHV9dc
with Glenn Diesen
(1:00:27)
He discusses internal rivalries; how Obama was drawn into the destruction of Libya; how Washington manipulated European allies, using Jens Stoltenberg as a "useful idiot"; how color revolutions and regime changes were orchestrated through NGOs; how the U.S. ended up supporting rival factions within Syria; and other secrets behind the (mis)management of the empire.
+
“Don’t Believe A Word These Hypocrites Say On Climate Change!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs6jswuE7Wk
by The Jimmy Dore Show, with Neil Oliver, April 27, 2025
(15:05)
.========
b.
“Israeli General Says Israel Is In A State Of Collapse!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy1aT99TdGA&si=t8hRskPMKb_NNiko
with Jimmy Dore and Norman Finkelstein
(13:01)
+
“Israel's International BLACKMAIL Campaign”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7VuYxx2Mx4&pp=0gcJCYQJAYcqIYzv
with Chris Hedges and Norman Finkelstein
(12:22)
Dr. Norman Finkelstein explains the mysterious cases of Israel blackmailing members of the international community to maintain the illusion of the settler-colonial state's "humanitarian" image over the years, and during the genocide in Gaza.
(0:00) Intro
(2:18) Solving the Gaza question
(8:26) Israel’s media trickery
(12:46) Transfer of Palestinians
(14:12) This isn’t about Hamas
(20:06) Will anything stop Israel?
(25:10) The Press
(29:29) Crushing academia
(31:53) SCOTUS Free Speech rulings
(38:48) Academic Freedom
(40:58) The problem with the humanities
(45:42) Israel’s Blackmail
(57:32) Outro
+
“Irish Lawyer Spells out Israel’s Destruction of Gaza at the Haig”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP4FR5fYeQ4
by PoliticsJOE, April 28, 2025
(38:50)
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh spoke as part of the Palestinian delegation at the ICC in their case against Israel, where she went into immense detail on the failure of Israel to ensure the basic human rights of Palestinians in Gaza.
+
“Palestinian Diplomat Outlines Israeli Crimes in Gaza”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4iAwlf9Wk
by PoliticsJOE
(19:42)
Palestine's Ambassador to International Organisations in The Hague Ammar Hijazi spoke in front of the International Criminal Court in Palestine's case on Israel's obligations, where he outlined the Israeli government's failure to ensure human rights for the Palestinian people.
+
“Video: ‘Wiping Gaza Off the Map’: Big Money Agenda. Confiscating Palestine’s Maritime Natural Gas Reserves”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-gas-oil-and-trouble-in-the-levant/5362955
by Felicity Arbuthnot and Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Video Interview with Michel Chossudovsky
Introduction
Israel has launched an invasion (October 7, 2023) of the Gaza Strip.
As outlined by Felicity Arbuthnot with foresight 10 years ago in a December, 30 2013 article:
“Israel is set to become a major exporter of gas and some oil, “If All Goes to Plan”.
In the current context, Israel’s “All Goes to Plan” option consists in bypassing Palestine and “Wiping Gaza off the Map”, as well confiscating ALL Gaza’s maritime offshore gas reserves, worth billions of dollars.
The ultimate objective is not only to exclude Palestinians from their homeland, it consists in confiscating the multi-billion dollar Gaza offshore Natural Gas reserves, namely those pertaining to the BG (BG Group) in 1999, as well the Levant discoveries of 2013.
Update. Israel’s Secret Intelligence Memorandum
An official “secret” memorandum authored by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence “is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula”, namely to a refugee camp in Egyptian territory. There are indications of Israel-Egypt negotiations as well as consultations with the U.S.
The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry … assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip … It recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. … The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972. See below, click here or below to access complete document (10 pages)
First published on October 22, 2023. Video added on October 27, 2023, Update, November 1, 2023 @ Wiping Gaza Off the Map (6:09). Confiscating Palestine’s Maritime Natural Gas….
========
c.
“Zionists Attack Pro-Peace Americans”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K52rwm8XQog
with Mark Blumenthal
(Live)
+
“How the creation of the ‘New Antisemitism’ was used to shield Israel and attack the Left”
by Sean L. Malloy
Challenges to Zionism in the late 1960s and 1970s sparked an effort to redefine antisemitism focused on defending Israel while attacking the political Left. This resulted in the IHRA definition and the assault on Palestine activism we see today.
Originally published in Mondoweiss .
This article briefly examines the pre-history of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, and how a combination of domestic and international challenges to Zionism in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to a concerted effort to redefine antisemitism in a way that prioritized the defense of Israel while identifying the political Left as the primary antagonist. It positions the IHRA definition not as a grassroots response to antisemitism, but rather as a coordinated, institutional form of counterinsurgency aimed at snuffing out transnational solidarity with Palestine.
The institutional and legal history of the IHRA definition usually begins in the early 2000s with the so-called “3D test” proposed by Natan Sharansky, then the Minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs in the Israeli government. Sharansky, a dissident Soviet Jew who emigrated to Israel following his release from prison in 1986 and served in a variety of governmental roles from the 1990s through the early 2000s, came to see non-violent Palestinian solidarity efforts in nearly apocalyptic terms, linking them both to the Nazi genocide and Stalinist “totalitarianism.” In response, Sharansky proposed the so-called “3D test” to distinguish between “legitimate criticism” of Israel and that which fell into the realm of antisemitism. The three “D’s” in question, according to Sharansky, were demonization (“when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”), double standards (“When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out. . . for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored”), and delegitimization (“when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied”).1 Under this definition, all anti-Zionism was to be understood as a form of antisemitism. Even those who accepted the existence of Israel had to ensure that their criticism stayed within certain bounds and was matched by a proportional critique of other human rights abusers (notably a test not required when other countries are denounced for human rights violations).
In 2005, elements of Sharansky’s “3D test” were enshrined as part of the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s (EUMC) “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism.” Of the 11 examples of antisemitism offered by the drafters, seven involved the state of Israel, including “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”2 In 2010, the U.S. State Department officially adopted its own definition of antisemitism which was largely identical to that proffered by the EUMC, although it made the “3D test” even more prominent with respect to criticism of Israel.3 Finally, in 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a subtly modified version of the EMUC Working Definition which kept intact the 11 examples and their links to the “3D test.”4
Israel and the “New Antisemitism” in the 1970s
While the institutional history of the IHRA is relatively straightforward, if we want to understand both where it came from and what motivated its creation, we have to turn the clock back a number of decades. In that vein, a quote from a book entitled The Real Anti-Semitism in America, written in 1982 by ADL director Nathan Pearlmutter and his wife, Ruth Pearlmutter, is instructive. I’ll warn that the language here is extremely racist, but I’ve included it because it is important to understanding the developments that we are addressing as part of the conference as well as in the larger ongoing struggle to support Palestinian liberation: . . . .
+
“Power, Climate and Hatred of Humans”
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/KtbxLthhtKgSxFlVZnDBXcMfnqBKSHBlkg
with James Corbett and Tom Nelson
(audio, 51:07)
James joins Tom Nelson of the “Climate Realism” podcast to discuss the climate hoax and how it ties into the greater scheme for global government, technocratic control, and depopulation.
+
“Dennis Kucinich: War Dust and Collateral Inhalation — Israel Breathes in Gaza’s Death”
https://scheerpost.com/2025/04/25/war-dust-and-collateral-inhalation-israel-breathes-in-gazas-dust/
by Scheer Post
Gaza is suffering the most intense bombing, per capita, of anywhere on earth, ever.
Over 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, an area slightly smaller than the City of Detroit, Michigan, resulting in the recorded deaths of at least 60,000 Gazans and injuries to hundreds of thousands.¹
It is impossible to overstate the effects of the abominable bombing war on Gazans, their lives, their families, their health and their communities.
What has escaped attention up until now is the undeniable environmental and health effects of the bombing of Gazans on Israelis, as well as on citizens of neighboring states, and the potential harm to U.S. military personnel in the region.
A study of explosion physics based on declassified Department of Defense data, blast temperature data and consequent emissions, a review of wind patterns with publicly available data of health effects from 9/11, and data gathered from U.S. veterans of the Persian Gulf War yield a shocking conclusion:
Israel, in executing the unprecedented bombing attack on Gaza, is, in effect, bombing itself, with grave consequences for the public health of its people.² What is being visited upon Gaza does not stay in Gaza.
The sustained bombing of Gaza pulverizes stone, heavy metals and the human body. The vaporizing of human beings under extreme heat and pressure combines with dust, water vapor and metallic particles the size of microns, all blasted upwards, aerosolized and wind-driven across borders into Israel and surrounding countries.³
The unlimited bombing of Gaza has created an unparalleled ecological and biomedical feedback loop. Israel exhales death in Gaza and inhales the Gaza it has vaporized.
Israel, in bombing neighboring Gaza, is breathing in its own fallout, along with the vaporized remains of its declared enemies. The external consequences of violence become internalized. The substance of the oppressed communes with the oppressor.
On a clinical level, breathing in bioaerosols can compromise human immune systems.⁴ Breathing in ultrafine particles from non-biological war dust can cross the blood-brain barrier and contribute to neurodegenerative disease.⁵
Israel and the Palestinians share a common atmosphere. They inhale the same war dust from bomb materials, carbon soot and the fine particle remains of vaporized Gazans.
Human cremation occurs at temperatures between 1,400°F and 1,800°F.⁶ The blast temperatures of the bombs identified as being dropped on Gaza — MK-84 bombs: 4,496°F; GBU-39s: 4,892°F; BLU-109s: 3,632°F — far exceed this range.⁷ In comparison, blast furnaces used to melt steel operate at 2,500°F to 2,800°F.⁸
People at the epicenter of such bombings in Gaza are instantly turned into dust. This is a factor confounding the determination of exactly how many people have perished in Gaza since October 2023. How can an accurate body count be achieved if bodies have been turned to smoke and ash?
Let’s look at 9/11. The total confirmed dead: 2,753. Almost 40% of the victims were never identified, as their bodies were fragmented or vaporized, reduced to dust.⁹
When a bomb hits its target — for example, a tent city — the high-temperature explosion can vaporize a person so thoroughly that microscopic particles of DNA and loose molecules are suspended in air, mingling with dust and smoke as bioaerosols.¹⁰
These biologicals — DNA and fat in human tissue — turn to carbon, black dust, and smoke. The minerals of bones and teeth, skeletal dust, go airborne. Fragments of cells can float in the air, bubbles holding fat, bone, and broken DNA strands travel with the wind and are breathed in dozens of miles from the blast site.¹¹
It is not only the superheat that destroys the human body. The explosive force of a bomb, in terms of pounds per square inch (psi), can produce vaporization at the blast site, an impact equivalent to a plane plunging into the earth at high speed.¹²
As 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, the matter destroyed takes a different form, as toxic pollutants carried aloft in gas, dust, vapor and particulates.
Specifically, toxic quantities of cadmium, nickel, lead, mercury, and arsenic are released into the air, together with dioxins, furans, PCBs, (polychlorinated biphenyls), PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) and VOCs (volatile organic compounds).¹³
One calculation indicates that 100,000 tons of bombs, exploded in a densely populated area of Gaza, can generate between 800,000 to 1.2 million tons of pollution.¹⁴
+
“Under Fire: ‘Israel’s War On Medics’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RkJVpEMzb8
by Middle East Eye
(9:39)
‘Under Fire: Israel’s War on Medics’ is
a groundbreaking documentary presented by Hind Hassan, who reports on the work
of paramedics on the frontline and captures their harrowing experiences as they
risk their lives to save others. “This collaboration with an investigative,
journalistic outlet is very important, it helps amplify the voices of the
people on the ground, paramedics and medical staff and emergency workers and
sheds the light on the genocide that Israel is committing,” Dania Abul Haj, a
Palestinian lawyer and senior legal officer at the ICJP tells MEE. The film
sheds light on Israel’s targeting of healthcare infrastructure and rescue teams
in both Gaza and Lebanon, despite their protection under international law.
The screening in London, in collaboration with the ICJP, brought together an
expert panel discussion and Q&A with journalists and Doctors who have
worked in Gaza and Lebanon throughout the wars. "The most important thing
for me is giving people a platform — especially the most vulnerable in society.
When we go to these places, we speak to those victims, we speak to the most
vulnerable in society, and we give them an opportunity and a platform to talk
about their experiences,” says Hind Hassan, an award-winning correspondent and
documentary filmmaker who directs the film. Through powerful
footage, expert insight, first-hand testimony, and investigative reporting, the
filmmakers reveal the devastating toll of the attacks on emergency
services. The full panel discussion and film screening can be found
here: 
• Israel’s War on Medics - Film Screeni...
+
“Ben Gvir to promote Gaza starvation plan at private Brooklyn ‘welcoming’ brunch’”
https://thegrayzone.com/2025/04/25/ben-gvir-gaza-starvation-brooklyn-brunch/
by Max Blumenthal
Fascist Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is set to appear on April 27 at the home of a Brooklyn businessman and Jewish power broker named Harry Adjmi, according to a private invitation.
Update: Jeremy Loffredo, a reporter for The Grayzone, was turned away from the Midwood, Brooklyn venue which hosted Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on April 25. He witnessed a heavy security presence outside, with about 100 Shomrim, or volunteer Orthodox Jewish civilian patrolmen on the scene, operating alongside NYPD officers. Loffredo said a small number of Palestine solidarity protesters were confronted by a much larger number of local Zionist supporters of Ben Gvir, who attempted to intimidate them while the civilian patrols obstructed their movements. Among the Zionists outside the venue were members of the Jewish Defense League, the terrorist outfit founded by the late Meir Kahane, who serves as the inspiration of Ben Gvir’s fascist Jewish Power (Otzmah Yehudit) Party in Israel.
. . .
+
“From the United States to Europe, Criticizing Israel Is Becoming a Crime”
by Kit Klarenberg / MintPress News
Across the United States and much of the West, criticism of Israel and solidarity with Palestine are increasingly being criminalized—a project long championed by Israel’s government and its powerful lobbying networks.
In February 2020, Israeli leader and internationally wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu proudly declared that Tel Aviv had “promoted laws in most U.S. states” to punish those who boycott Israel, offering a rare glimpse into the foreign forces eroding free speech in the American heartland.
Since then, anti-boycott laws have quietly spread to dozens of states, forcing public institutions, businesses, and even individual contractors to pledge loyalty to Israel—or risk losing jobs, contracts, and funding. What began as a niche effort to shield Tel Aviv from grassroots criticism has rapidly escalated into a sweeping assault on free speech across the Western world.
The overwhelming majority of states now boast laws making it illegal for local entities, including hospitals and schools, to work with individuals or companies that boycott Israel. For example, in 2016, Indiana’s Senate unanimously passed a law calling for mandatory divestment by state agencies, commercial enterprises, and nonprofit organizations—including universities—from any firm involved in “the promotion of activities to boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel.”
The legislation branded boycotts against Israel as “antithetical and deeply damaging to the cause of peace, justice, equality, democracy and human rights for all people in the Middle East.”
Several states have adopted comparable laws via governors signing administrative and executive orders. In some cases, state contractors—be they individuals or organizations—are legally obligated to demonstrate their anti-BDS credentials by signing contractual affirmations of non-support for BDS, which critics argue is essentially a loyalty oath to Israel.
State employees, including teachers, have lost their jobs for refusing to do so. In May 2021, a federal judge ruled such legislation in Georgia to be “unconstitutional compelled speech.” Undeterred, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp reintroduced the requirement just months later with slight amendments.
Israel’s extraordinary and ever-growing influence over domestic U.S. laws in recent years, and the devastating consequences for Palestinian solidarity at home and abroad, have passed without much critical mainstream acknowledgement, let alone censure.
Since October 7, the push to criminalize pro-Palestinian sentiment Stateside and the media’s mass omertà (code of silence) on this disturbing crusade have both intensified significantly. However, such disquieting developments aren’t restricted to the U.S., but eagerly embraced by an ever-growing number of countries intimately complicit in the Gaza genocide.
‘Drastic Rise’
In a grave testament to the speed with which U.S.-based pro-Israel organizations, including several prominent Jewish advocacy groups, sought to capitalize on October 7 for their own purposes, two-and-a-half weeks after Palestinian fighters breached Gaza’s infamous apartheid walls, Republican lawmaker Mike Lawler proposed H.R. 6090, also known as the Antisemitism Awareness Act.
Lawler is a major recipient of Israeli lobby funds, with the influential lobbying group AIPAC gifting him $392,669 in 2023 and 2024 alone, his largest donor by some margin. His bill would require the Department of Education to consider the highly controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism (which critics argue conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism) when determining if cases of harassment are motivated by antisemitism, raising concerns that it would violate the intent of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
========
d.
“Patrick Lawrence: Germany in Crisis Part 3: A Culture of Submission”
President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz participate in a joint press conference Monday, February 7, 2022, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
https://scheerpost.com/2025/04/26/patrick-lawrence-germany-in-crisis-part-3-a-culture-of-submission/
by Scheer Post
This is the third of four reports on Germany in crisis. Part 1 of this series is here and Part 2 here.
BERLIN— I return briefly to those singular moments when Olaf Scholz stood next to President Joe Biden at a press conference on Feb. 7, 2022, after concluding private talks in the Oval Office. This was the occasion when Biden declared that if Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory—as he was by this time confident they would have no choice but to do—“then there will no longer be a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”
Take a moment to view the video record of this event. What do we see in those two men? Let us consider their demeanor, their gestures, their facial expressions, what each said and left unsaid, and read what we can into them. I read a 77–year history.
In Biden we have a man calmly matter-of-fact as he states his intention to destroy the expensive industrial assets of the country represented by the man next to him. We note his perfect aplomb, the dismissive wave of his hand, as he puts on full display his indifference to a close ally’s interests and, indeed, sovereignty.
I have until recently attributed Biden’s astounding coarseness as he stands with Scholz to the gracelessness that has marked the whole of his, Biden’s, political career. But I reflect now, as I think of this occasion in the light of all that preceded it, there is another way to judge it: After decades of overweening dominance within the Atlantic alliance, Biden saw no need any longer to disguise America’s hegemonic prerogative. Indeed, in the C–SPAN recording linked above we see the face of a man who takes malign pride in this exercise of raw power.
For his part, Scholz stood at a separate lectern, per protocol, and said nothing in response to Biden’s remark. His demeanor, Scholz’s, indicates he was neither surprised nor angry. He seems, rather, resigned, apprehensive, faintly regretful, faintly submissive. In his face we read the apprehension of a soldier who has just accepted his commanding officer’s baleful battle plan. My guess is he was also wondering what in hell he would say to his government and to Germans on his return to Berlin.
The best way to understand this very pregnant occasion, which has to count as unique or very nearly in the annals of trans–Atlantic diplomacy, is to look backward and then forward from it.
What a long span of time lay between the Germany of the early 1980s, Helmut Schmidt’s Germany, and Olaf Scholz’s Germany, the Germany that fairly cowered as it stood on a dais with America 40 years later. Schmidt, a Social Democrat given to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, had stood with other Europeans to defend Germany’s interests against President Ronald Reagan’s blunt attempts to impose America’s Cold War disciplines. Scholz, a Social Democrat of a very different kind, was not inclined to defend Germany against Joe Biden even when its very sovereignty was at issue.
How did Germany come to this? I grew convinced, after some days’ reporting here, a city the Iron Curtain long divided, and more time elsewhere in Germany, that Cold War and post–Cold War politics do not of themselves give an answer to this question. No, as I found often during my decades as a correspondent, one must resort to psychology and culture fully to understand politics and history, the latter being in some measure expressions of the former.
The Allies’ plans for the nations they vanquished in 1945, which in a brief time amounted to America’s plans, were never short of ambition. At the Potsdam Conference, a few months after the fall of the Reich, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin divided Germany into four occupation zones: Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union would administer one each. Berlin was in the Soviet zone but was similarly divided. Millions of German settlers had to be repatriated from lands the Nazis had conquered—a messy undertaking marked by never-now-mentioned suffering. A de–Nazification program began immediately, and the German military was to be dismantled, although both of these objectives were complicated, to put the point mildly, as the wartime alliance with Moscow gave way to the Cold War the Truman administration insisted on provoking.
But it was in the matter of German hearts and minds that the remaking of the Reich into another kind of country tilted from ambition in the direction of hubris. This was a psychological operation the sweep and magnitude of which may never since have been matched. Only the post–1945 Japanese have undergone anything similar to it. This project was at first shaped and executed by Rooseveltian New Dealers. It was a year or two before Cold War ideologues dispensed with the high ideals in favor of the rigors of late–1940s, early–1950s anti–Communism. The Japanese, not without a subdued bitterness, call this “the reverse course.”
+
“Working Homeless People: Laboring Without a Roof”
https://www.blackagendareport.com/working-homeless-people-laboring-without-roof
by Jocelyn Figueroa
For millions, a job is no longer enough to afford housing—yet the myth that homeless people don’t work still dominates public opinion.
Originally published in Invisible People .
While homeless and living in a shelter, one of my neighbors was a woman not much older than my Mom. One day, I learned that she was a certified full-time medical assistant. Her husband, disabled, was not able to work. Due to rising rents in New York City, they couldn’t afford to pay their rent anymore. That’s how they eventually landed a few doors down from me.
At the time, it just seemed so unbelievable that a medical professional wasn’t able to afford a place to live. Eventually, I realized that most of us in that shelter, aside from those who were disabled or elderly, were working.
The Myth That Homeless People Don’t Work
While it’s true that many homeless people do work, it’s also true that a lot of people don’t believe it. Many instead think homeless people don’t work or don’t want to work. This is by far one of the most misleading stereotypes about homeless people.
According to a 2021 97-page study from the Becker-Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago, 53% of homeless shelter residents are employed. Additionally, the study found that at least 40.4% of unsheltered homeless people are employed.
In an interview with the University of Chicago News, poverty scholar Professor Bruce Meyer explained how homeless people are frequently left out of vital poverty statistics:
“People experiencing homelessness are among the most deprived individuals in the United States, yet they are neglected in official poverty statistics and other surveys,” he said. “As a result, policymakers and others interested in understanding this have never had complete or reliable information from which to guide decision-making.”
Moreover, Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place For Us , shared in a recent essay that not only are working homeless people excluded from official homeless counts, but policymakers also ignore them and have been for decades. This means that official homeless counts, which many policy decisions are based on, are completely inaccurate.
“These workers aren’t ‘falling’ into homelessness. They are being pushed,” Goldstone said.
Where the Stigma Began
Goldstone leads us back to the Reagan administration to help us understand where and how this all began.
The message that “homeless people just need to get a job” was actually deliberately put into motion decades ago. . . . .
+
“Why Pro-Palestine Protesters Are Being Sent to a For-Profit ICE Prison in Rural Louisiana”
by Stephanie Guilloud and Desiree S. Evans / Mondoweiss
“My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.”
In recent weeks, students Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Alireza Doroudi were abducted by ICE and are being held in ICE detention centers in rural Louisiana. Khalil’s powerful statement connects multiple realities that demonstrate how state repression is activated to support the rise of authoritarianism.
That Khalil and others are being sent to detention centers in remote towns across Louisiana is not an accident. Rising authoritarianism requires a police state, and the expansion of prisons, police, and detention centers is extremely profitable. As the current U.S. government disappears people to a brutal prison camp in El Salvador, they are also moving people to rural Louisiana in attempts to disappear people within the United States borders.
The South’s history of slavery, incarceration, white supremacist social control, and people’s consistent resistance are all part of a blueprint that can help us understand what is happening, why, who benefits, and how to fight back.
Why Louisiana Matters: isolation, legal strategy, & profit
To understand why these detention center locations matter, we have to understand the U.S. prison system rooted in racial control, economic exploitation, and geographic erasure.
Khalil and Doroudi are both being detained at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana. Öztürk is being held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana. Both detention centers are located in remote, rural, predominantly-white towns with less than a few thousand people. These locations present significant challenges for these detainees, as the centers are far from major cities, as well as far from many legal advocates and human rights organizations.
This isolation is deliberate and strategic, positioning detainees thousands of miles from their support networks and significantly limiting access to legal counsel—making it far more difficult to build an effective defense. These sites also face less public scrutiny, as media outlets and advocacy organizations have limited access to monitor conditions and report on what occurs inside. With less opportunities for family visits, detainees become increasingly cut off from the outside world—isolated both emotionally and physically. Rural detention becomes another method of “disappearing” people.
In recent years, Louisiana has emerged as one of the nation’s leading hubs for immigrant detention, ranking just behind Texas in the number of people held in custody. Louisiana currently holds about 7,000 immigrants in civil detention. Louisiana, along with its neighbors Texas and Mississippi, house 14 of the 20 largest ICE detention centers in the country, and also have extremely conservative courts.
Repressive administrations love the well-known conservative 5th Circuit Court in Louisiana and can often get the outcomes they want more readily than in other states. It was a federal judge in Louisiana who ruled that Khalil can be deported as a national security risk by virtue of his beliefs and protests in support of Palestine. An immigration judge in Jena recently denied bond to Doroudi. In contrast, the federal judge in New York ruled that the detainment of Yunseo Chung was unlawful. . . . .
========
e.
“Video. Canada: Economic and Social Crisis”
by Michel Chossudovsky et Caroline Mailloux
It happened more than 23 years ago. It was barely covered by the Canadian media.
In one fell swoop, the Sovereignty of Canada and Mexico is wiped out. The entire territory of Canada has so to speak been militarized.
The US can deploy troops up to the North-West territories and the Arctic.
It controls the North-West passage.
It can establish military facilities throughout Canada.
Our country, Canada, is part of a regional command entity of the US military entitled USNORTHCOM.
In the words of General Myers.
“Myers: Thank you, Mr. Secretary [Rumsfeld], and good afternoon.
The Unified Command Plan or UCP establishes, as the secretary [Rumsfeld] said, the missions and responsibilities of each combatant command within the United States armed forces. It’s important to just note here that it only applies to the U.S. armed forces, to no other armed forces.[Canada, Mexico]“
USNORTHCOM is part of the 6 command structures of the US Military
========
f.
“The Battle for Your Brain is ALREADY Underway”
by James Corbett
Mind control. Nanobots. Neurohacking.
Bring up these topics with the average Joe and he'll tell you that they are the stuff of science fiction.
But these concepts are not the cyberpunk fantasies of some novelist's overactive imagination. They are under development right now.
Last week we explored the reality of the battle of the brain, from the long history of psychological experimentation and social engineering to the claim of modern-day militaries that the "cognitive space" is part of their operational domain.
This week let's explore the technologies today's militaries are seeking to employ in their battle for your brain and examine the ways in which these technologies are being weaponized against you.
Brain Chips For Everyone! . . . .
+
“The Media Distracts You While Israel Slaughters Gazans”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jg26QQZBOw
with Chris Hedges and Norman Finkelstein
(9:49)
Dr. Norman Finkelstein breaks down Israel's history of utilizing American media cycles to carry out abhorrent war crimes "when the cameras are turned off." With the current chaos of the Trump administration, they are doing it yet again in Gaza.
+
“Why Have There Been 200 Holocaust Movies Since 1980?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh3-b9ON3Fs
with Jimmy Dore and Norman Finkelstein
(9:34)
+
“Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy for Israel? Mossad Debate With Former CIA Agent”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwCTktxy0ho&pp=0gcJCYQJAYcqIYzv
by Piers Morgan Uncensored
(58:59)
Piers Morgan Uncensored takes a deep dive into the good, the bad and the ugly history of Israel’s intelligence agency, known as the Mossad.
Does Israel have nuclear weapons? Was Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad agent? Why didn't they see the October 7 attack by Hamas coming? Piers Morgan delves into all this and more with former Head of Mossad Danny Yatom, former CIA agent and convicted whistleblower John Kiriakou, criminal defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz and author of ‘Provoked’ and ‘By Way of Deception’ Scott Horton.
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g.
“Fake Russian Submarines : An Assassinated Swedish Prime Minister and the NATO Connection”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCeAbk4C18E
by SaltCubeAnalytics
(1:39:29)
In this explosive interview with Professor Ola Tunander, we trace a four-decade operation to assassinate not just a Prime Minister—but a national identity.
1. From the fake submarine scare of the 1980s (spoiler: it was NATO, not the Soviets)...
2. To the still-unsolved murder of Olof Palme—the last real obstacle to U.S. military integration...
3. To NATO’s secret terror networks operating across Europe under the guise of "stay-behind armies"...
4. To the media, academics, and political elites who programmed Sweden to fear peace and beg for protection…
This video exposes how Sweden’s neutrality was not outdated—it was inconvenient. And so, over 40 years, it was dismantled. Covertly. Methodically. Democratically... in appearance only. No vote. No public debate. Just manipulation disguised as consensus. This isn’t a documentary. It’s a post-mortem. Watch until the end to understand how democracies die—not with bullets, but with narratives.
========
h.
“60 Minutes chief resigns over Gaza censorship”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQvpViJOd3c
by Electronic Intifada, with Ali Abunimah
(7:31)
Ali Abunimah, executive director, discusses the resignation of 60 Minutes chief over Gaza censorship.
This is a segment from The Electronic Intifada's livestream on day 566 of the Gaza genocide. Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Jon Elmer and Asa Winstanley were joined by Ahmed Alnaouq, director of We Are Not Numbers. You can watch the full show here: https://www.youtube.com/live/SXOr5wfYWlg
========
i.
“Protesters Stalk and Confront Israeli Minister in NYC”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Paec4msVLk
with Jimmy Dore
(8:49)
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is also a convicted terrorist and Jewish supremacist, has been touring the US, speaking on college campuses and meeting with political groups, and he even traveled to Mar-a-Lago. His visit has been met with widespread protests, however.
Ben Gvir was confronted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators in New Haven, Connecticut, following a speech he gave at Shabtai, a private Jewish society at Yale that’s not officially affiliated with the university.
Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss how Ben-Gvir’s security detail was able to assault protesters with impunity — and that in fact police officers approach an assaulted protester to demand that he step away from Ben-Gvir’s group.
========
j.
“Oliver Stone REVEALS The JFK Evidence The Media Doesn’t Want You To Know About”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqOGpJIOKYE
with Kaitie Halper
(10:54)
Katie talks to the Academy-Award winning director Oliver Stone and JFK researcher and author Jim Di Eugenio about the JFK files which they testified about in Congress.
00:00 False pictures of Kennedy’s body were shown to the public
03:20 Why couldn’t the best fingerprint expert get any prints off of the rifle when the Dallas police could?
04:41 One explanation from Oliver Stone’s JFK film
06:05 What did we learn from Donald Trump’s 80,000 pages of JFK files?
06:55 Fidel Castro’s obsession with JFK conspiracy theories
08:06 Oliver Stone’s big takeaway from the new JFK files.
+
“Oliver Stone On JFK Files, Alec Karakatsanis On 'Copaganda'”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoO5I0IYans
with Kaitie Halper
(1:41:43)
Katie talks to the Academy-Award winning director Oliver Stone and JFK researcher and author Jim Di Eugenio about the JFK files which they testified about in Congress. Then Katie talks to Civil Rights Lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about his book Copaganda and the way the media lies about crime.
00:00:00 Katie introduces Oliver Stone and Jim Di Eugenio
00:05:17 Oliver Stone explains how he got interested in JFK in the first place through Jim Garrison
00:06:15 Oliver Stone on the making of 1991’s JFK movie with Kevin Costner
00:08:30 The chain of custody on the rifle and bullets
00:10:00 Attacked by Max Boot!
00:12:30 JFK Revisited and the new AARB Evidence
00:18:50 The fingerprints story
00:22:10 What’s in the JFK files newly released by Donald Trump? Stories about Fidel Castro
00:27:20 The three women witness who debunk the official narrative
00:32:10 Oliver Stone’s take on the newly revealed big massive evidence of collusion
00:35:40 Alec Karakatsanis explains what copaganda is
00:42:00 The fallacies that Karakatsanis’s book debunks, better ways money can be spent
00:46:00 How does medicaid expansion relate to crime? And how to be misleading without lying
00:50:45 Why are liberals the most susceptible to propaganda?
00:54:45 How propaganda around Israel and Hasbara is different
00:57:00 The most important chart to help people see through copaganda
00:58:30 Bukele, Trump and the propaganda around El Salvador and Venezuela
01:03:30 Lying or duped? Does it matter how bad faith the spreading of propaganda is?
01:07:10 Why the New York Times spreading of propaganda is so dangerous
01:10:15 NBC’s coverage of Abrego Garcia, propaganda for the Trump administration
01:18:00 What the news could look like to win back people’s trust?
01:27:30 How victims and marginalized communities are treated as a monolith and used to prop up the carceral state
01:29:50 Gavin Newsom sucks
01:36:00 Katie pays her respects to The Pope.
Oliver Stone is an Award-winning director, producer, screenwriter whose films include , Snowden, Savages, Untold History, Platoon, Wall Street, JFK and the documentary JFK Revisited. He is the author of Chasing the Light.
Jim DiEugenio is a researcher and writer who focuses on the political assassinations of the 1960s, including the killing of JFK. He is the author of two books, Destiny Betrayed (1992/2012) and The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today (2018), co-author of The Assassinations, and co-edited Probe Magazine (1993-2000).
Alec Karakatsanis is a Civil Rights lawyer and the founder of Civil RIghts Corps. He is the author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System (2019) and Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News (2025)
========
k.
“INTERVIEW: Dressed for mourning”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l17zSNqN3yw
with George Galloway and Garland Nixon
(13:59)
Jeffrey Epstein's child trafficking clients still alive and at large. The not unexpected death of Virginia Giuffre. Trump and the electric blue funeral suit
+
“Whitney Webb on How Sex Criminals Hide in Israel”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuYSNyhev4g
with Kaitie Halper
(11:37)
Whitney Webb exposes the real connections between Jeffery Epstein and Israel and how the CIA, the mafia, and Wall Street collude to organize assassinations and manipulate global geopolitics.
00:00 How Jewish American Pedophiles Hide in Israel
01:15 Connections to intelligence and the mob
03:02 Intelligence agencies aren’t at the top of the food chain, they work for somebody else - Wall Street
04:40 The history of US involvement in arming paramilitary groups that eventually became the IDF
06:44 Lucky Luciano’s connection to Mussolini, ethno-fascism and Israel
08:08 Epstein’s stronger connection to Israeli military intelligence vs Mossad
10:15 Leslie Wexner’s ties to Israeli officials Whitney.
Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for Unlimited Hangout. She is the author of the book One Nation Under Blackmail. Recently her work was referenced by Ian Carroll on the Joe Rogan Podcast. Follow Whitney on X https://x.com/_whitneywebb
========
l.
“Glyphosate Worse Than We Could Imagine. ‘It’s Everywhere’”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/glyphosate-worse/5674472
by F. William Engdahl
Glyphosate residues have been found in tap water, orange juice, children’s urine, breast milk, chips, snacks, beer, wine, cereals, eggs, oatmeal, wheat products, and most conventional foods tested. It’s everywhere, in brief.
As new studies continue to point to a direct link between the widely-used glyphosate herbicide and various forms of cancer, the agribusiness lobby fights ferociously to ignore or discredit evidence of human and other damage. A second US court jury case just ruled that Monsanto, now a part of the German Bayer AG, must pay $ 81 million in damages to plaintiff Edwin Hardeman who contracted non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. The ruling and a line-up of another 11,000 pending cases in US courts going after the effects of glyphosate, have hit Bayer AG hard with the company announcing several thousand layoffs as its stock price plunges.
In a trial in San Francisco the jury was unanimous in their verdict that Monsanto Roundup weed-killer, based on glyphosate, had been responsible for Hardeman’s cancer. His attorneys stated,
“It is clear from Monsanto’s actions that it does not care whether Roundup causes cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concerns about Roundup.”
It is the second defeat for the lawyers of Monsanto after another jury ruled in 2018 that Glyphosate-based Roundup was responsible for the cancer illness of a California school grounds-keeper who contracted the same form of cancer after daily spraying school grounds with Roundup over years, unprotected. There a jury found Monsanto guilty of “malice and oppression” in that company executives, based on internal email discovery, knew that their glyphosate products could cause cancer and suppressed this information from the public.
A new independent study shows that those with highest exposure to glyphosate have a 41% increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) cancer. A meta-analysis of six studies containing nearly 65,000 participants looked at links between glyphosate-based herbicides and immune-suppression, endocrine disruption and genetic alterations. The authors found “the same key finding: exposure to GBHs (glyphosate-based herbicides) are associated with an increased risk of NHL (Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma).” Further, they stated that glyphosate “alters the gut microbiome,” and that that could “impact the immune system, promote chronic inflammation, and contribute to the susceptibility of invading pathogens.” Glyphosate also ”may act as an endocrine disrupting chemical because it has been found recently to alter sex hormone production” in both male and female rats.
In a long-term animal study by French scientists under Gilles Eric Seralini, Michael Antoniou and associates, it was demonstrated that even ultra-low levels of glyphosate herbicides cause non-alcoholic liver disease. The levels the rats were exposed to, per kg of body weight, were far lower than what is allowed in our food supply. According to the Mayo Clinic, today, after four decades or more pervasive use of glyphosate pesticides, 100 million, or 1 out of 3 Americans now have liver disease. These diagnoses are in some as young as 8 years old.
But glyphosate is not only having alarming effects on human health. Soil scientists are beginning to realize the residues of glyphosate application are also having a possibly dramatic effect on soil health and nutrition, effects that can take years to restore.
Killing Soils Too . . . .
========
m.
“Alex Krainer: Europe's Economic Suicide”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrnBo-_GjEg
with Glenn Diesen
(49:27)
Alex Krainer is a market analyst, author & former hedge fund manager. Krainer outlines how the EU undermined its own economic, political and security interests, resulting in its growing irrelevance in the world.
+
“European Revolt Intensifies: German and Dutch Demand Immediate Stop to Ukraine Aid”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvLKdO48Row
by Times Now World
(5:16)
Across Europe, a wave of fierce protests is growing, with citizens in key nations rallying against their governments' continued support for Ukraine. In Germany, thousands flooded the streets of Nuremberg and Munich, demanding an end to financial and military aid, while in Amsterdam, demonstrators called for peace and mediation rather than further escalation. The protests were sparked by outrage over broken political promises and a growing disillusionment with EU policies, highlighting a deepening rift within Europe as many question the logic of sustaining support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. #russia #ukraine #EU #germany #tnworld #timesnowworld #worldnews #internationalnews #timesnews #newsworld
========
n.
“UPDATE: Protest today in Eastham and Wellfleet”
by Jeff Zinn
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o.
“‘UKRAINE WAR IS OVER’, JEFFREY SACHS MAKES FIERY SPEECH AT EU”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/3UVWOXl4X1Di
with Jeffry Sachs
(31:36)
==========
p.
“Stop The Digital Control Grid”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/28oLx7pqyi3u
with CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS
(43:57)
==========
q.
“The Cost of War (w/ Dennis Kucinich)”
https://scheerpost.com/2025/04/29/the-cost-of-war-w-dennis-kucinich/
by The Scheer Report
(34:58)
Former U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich penned two articles for his Substack detailing the devastating toll of the U.S.-backed genocide in Palestine. He joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to discuss his articles, specifically honing on his second one, which details the ecological effects of Israel’s relentless bombing campaigns on its close neighbor.
“If someone is close to the dropping of [a 2,000 pound bomb], the human body is vaporized. And in addition to that, the buildings, building materials, concrete, rebar, steel, can also be turned into dust. That dust migrates. The environment, the atmosphere doesn’t really have any boundaries, no geographical boundaries. The wind just takes that right into Israel,” Kucinich tells Scheer.
Kucinich emphasizes that this war is a self-inflicting wound on Israel and war in general is a lose-lose situation. “When you wage war against someone, you’re actually waging war against yourself,” Kucinich says. “That’s the deeper proposition here. It’s not just philosophical. It’s not just metaphysical. It is a physical fact that when people wage war against a country that is proximate, it is incontrovertible that the treatise of that war is going to be visited to people, not only in the air, but in the water, in the land, on the food.”
+
“Watch ‘Will Kashmir attack cause new India-Pakistan war?’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b76o-dr6L3c
by Channel 4 News
Tensions between India and Pakistan have escalated following a deadly attack in a tourist hotspot in Kashmir, with Indian Prime Minister Nerandra Modi saying he will pursue the attackers to the ‘ends of the earth’ after they killed 26 people.
With India blaming Pakistan for the attack, retaliatory actions between the two countries have ramped up. India has cancelled visas, excluded diplomats and suspended a landmark water-sharing treaty - while Pakistan has halted all trade.
So, what will Prime Minister Modi do next? Could this attack lead to a bigger conflict between these two nuclear armed nations? And how would this affect a world already reeling from wars in the Middle East and Europe.
To discuss all this on the latest episode of the Fourcast, Krishnan Guru-Murthy is joined by Manoj Joshi, who spent decades as a journalist in India and most recently advised the government on reforming the security forces, and our Foreign Affairs Correspondent Secunder Kermani.
==========
r.
Pepe Escobar: “Putin Drops Kursk BOMBSHELL, Russia-North Korea Alliance STUNS Trump”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=C5uTI9G_m9uY7ZFS&v=C0znRp6GZHQ&feature=youtu.be
with Danny Haiphong
(19:54)
+
Andrei Martyanov: “The End of NATO”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=_47t9-ewYSpoXT7c&v=dYYPYZUUpRU&feature=youtu.be
with Glenn Diesen
(1:02:06)
==========
s.
“Speech: Lavrov Drops Diplomatic Grenade at BRICS, Sends Clear Message to West On U.S.-Russia Ties”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=XrQliV6Bku0mmxRz&v=h21Roe7vNMU&feature=youtu.be
by Hindustan Times
(22:03)
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered a forceful message to the United States and its Western allies from the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in Rio de Janeiro, signaling a new era of strategic alignment among emerging economies. In remarks described as a "diplomatic grenade," Lavrov called for strengthened coordination and solidarity within BRICS, especially in the face of what he characterized as renewed attacks and pressure from the Trump administration. Watch for more
========
t.
“The Kory Conspiracy Theory Scale - An Aide To Guiding Social Interactions”
by Pierre Kory, MD, MPA
MMS pioneer Mark Grenon claims the man who inspired the James Bond character revealed disturbing allegations about global elites that most would dismiss as a conspiracy theory. I found them credible.
Since the inception of my “Medical Musings” Substack almost 3 1/2 years ago, I have primarily focused on topics related to the field of Medicine, both historical and current. Initially, I focused on treatments for COVID-19 and vaccine injury while trying to expose the pandemic’s multifaceted frauds perpetrated via propaganda and censorship.
More recently, I began exploring the potential applications of various repurposed drugs and therapies to treat different illnesses, particularly cancer. During that research, I discovered a truly dark side of medicine, namely the over 100-year history of persecutions and assassinations of physicians who discovered effective treatments that threatened the prevailing economic models of the medical establishment.
Today, I will expose a new dimension of my interest: my newfound fascination with researching conspiracy theories. Although on its surface, this topic may seem unrelated to Medicine, I disagree, as you will learn below.
You see, I was given a front-row seat to the global Disinformation campaign that successfully convinced most of the world that ivermectin was a worthless horse dewormer in treating Covid despite it being one of the most effective therapies I used in treating hundreds of patients. As a result of that disorienting and alarming experience, I began to wonder: if “they” could successfully convince most of the world of something so obviously false, what other lies have they pulled off, and for how long have “they” been pulling them?
Then I realized that many of the friends and colleagues I gained during my COVID journey turned out to be people repeatedly amused at my utter shock that a brazen, easily disprovable lie could be propagated globally and then believed by most citizens. No wonder my new friends were quickly “hip” to the ivermectin fraud. Unlike me, they had long realized and accepted that the media, the government, politicians, and corporations spew lies regularly. Yet, most of the population (like pre-Covid Pierre) remain unaware of this fact (although, post-Covid, I think there are far fewer still unaware).
A few of my new friends revealed the truth about several prominent “conspiracy theories.” Once I verified them, I was transformed. It inspired me to research numerous supposedly false, dissenting accounts of current and historical events, with such beliefs labeled by wider society as “conspiracy theories.” It became a hobby because the many “inconvenient truths” (what I now prefer to call conspiracy theories) that I uncovered, like the ivermectin fraud, further awakened me to a world I knew little about before. The terms “red-pilled,” “blue-pilled,” and “awake” (not woke) began to enter my vocabulary.
I found many, but not all, of the “inconvenient truths” fascinating, disturbing, and often disorienting. However, I have avoided writing about such topics on this blog despite finding irrefutable evidence that many popular conspiracy theories are verifiably (often easily) true.
+
“The Imprisonment Of Chlorine Dioxide Researcher, Professor Enno Freye”
by Pierre Kory, MD, MPA
Freye obtained funding from the UN for a chlorine dioxide trial in Senegal against malaria. Officials gave him a package of documents to present to the bank with drugs inside. This sent him to prison.
I began researching and writing about chlorine dioxide in the treatment of human disease on December 25th, 2024, with my post on “Trump’s Bleach Conference.” That was followed by my post on the success of Bolivia's national chlorine dioxide program during COVID, initiated by a group of politicians that successfully passed a law encouraging its manufacture and distribution. I then began to write on the science behind chlorine dioxide (mechanisms, safety, and published evidence base). Those were followed by posts on the persecutions of the pioneers of oxidative therapies from last century, followed by the persecutions of the more modern pioneers of the oral chlorine dioxide formulation called “Miracle Mineral Supplement” (MMS).
Those posts got worldwide attention (I was told they were widely read in South America, particularly Brazil).
The day after my 2nd post, I received an email from a senior German anesthesiologist and Adjunct Professor at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. His most recent area of research was on the sublingual administration of chlorine dioxide in treating malaria. We began an email correspondence in which he tells both a shockingly disturbing and unsurprising tale of global Big Pharma influence, which was brought to bear against him and led to his imprisonment.
Let’s start with the Wikipedia page about MMS and what they say about Professor Enno Freye’s research efforts regarding oral chlorine dioxide. Then you will learn the truth behind this account:
From The Wikipedia Page “Miracle Mineral Supplement”
Cameroon
“In a 2018 study by Enno Freye of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, chlorine dioxide was tested on 500 malarial patients in Cameroon, finding it "a promising new approach in malaria treatment".[72] As reported in May 2019, The Guardian newspaper contacted the university, and was told that the study had been reviewed and found to be "scientifically worthless, contradictory, and in part ethically problematic"; Freye was stripped of his title of Apl-Professor (Ed: adjunct Professor) of the faculty on grounds that he had "severely damaged the respectability and trust this title requires", and was terminated from the university.[48] In August 2019, the study was retracted by the journal that had published it because the editors concluded, after a complaint and investigation, that the study had never actually been conducted.[73]”
Editorial Note: There are two observations that I would like to share with you about the information above. The Guardian is the same news outlet that; 1) “broke the story” about a wickedly positive ivermectin trial from Egypt that they claimed was fraudulent (which then started the global narrative that “all positive ivermectin trials were fraudulent” - I believe that trial was legit but the Professor and University “went dark” and never defended it) and, 2) received almost 13 million dollars in grants from the public health “philanthopath” Bill Gates, with the majority given after 2020:
“In this post, I will share my numerous correspondences with Prof. Freye regarding the truth behind the above “hit job” by Wikipedia (for brevity, I edited out several exchanges where we discuss our various approaches and insights into treating vaccine injury syndromes and Long Covid). I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he, too, is focusing his clinical practice on treating these challenging illnesses (two birds of a feather?). There were a few typos and awkwardly translated phrases in the correspondence below. Thus, I made minor edits to language/phrasing to improve readability without substantive changes to content or meaning.”
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News from Underground by Mark Crispin Miller
“Carlos Santana cancels 2nd show after collapse; B-52's cancel show (‘nasty flu’); Lorrie Morgan cancels show after hubby's cancer diagnosis; Rita Moreno cancels TV appearance due to ‘bout of vertigo’”
by Mark Crispin Miller
NBC4 anchor Leon Harris quits after "shaky broadcast"; Rockies' Kris Bryant sidelined by degenerative disc disease; Sharon Osbourne cancels talk show as Ozzie declines; & more
+
“The dam has broken! 140+ recent studies PROVE that ‘vaccination’ is a deadly fraud”
by Mark Crispin Miller
Thus "the science" reconfirms the global toll that we've been tracking here for three years now; yet "our free press" will not report it.
+
“Crisis of Brain Damage Among COVID-Vaccinated. Study of 9 Million Italians”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/study-9-million-reveals-crisis-brain-damage-covid-vaccinated/5885603
by Frank Bergman
One of the largest studies to date has revealed an alarming crisis of neurological and psychiatric damage among people who received Covid mRNA “vaccines.”
The explosive study, involving almost 9 million participants, has exposed a devastating surge in deadly disorders and long-term damage.
According to the peer-reviewed study, just one dose of an mRNA injection puts recipients at risk of suffering from several severe neurological diseases.
The study, led by renowned neuroscientist Dr. Andrea Salmaggi, was conducted by a group of leading Italian researchers associated with the University of Milan and San Paolo Hospital.
The results of the study were published in the eminent medical journal Springer Nature.
The massive study included 8,821,812 Italians, making the research one of the largest investigations so far.
The researchers found alarming surges in several conditions, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, transient ischemic attack, myelitis, myasthenia gravis, Alzheimer’s disease, cognitive impairment, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders.
The study found surges in multiple severe conditions in people who received at least one Covid mRNA “vaccine” dose.
Those severe disorder surges include:
· Ischemic Stroke: IRR 1.44 [95% CI: 1.34–1.54]
· Cerebral Hemorrhage: IRR 1.50 [95% CI: 1.32–1.70]
· Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA): IRR 1.67 [95% CI: 1.46–1.91]
· Myelitis: IRR 2.65 [95% CI: 1.49–4.70]
· Myasthenia Gravis: IRR 1.71 [95% CI: 1.29–2.28]
The study notes that the vast majority of all patients hospitalized for neurological diseases in 2021 received at least one vaccine dose.
McCullough Foundation epidemiologist Dr. Nicolas Hulscher has been sounding the alarm on these issues for some time,
Weighing in on the crisis earliert his year, Hulscher warned:
“COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ damage the brain and DEVASTATE mental health.”
Hulscher explains that the injections increase the risk of:
· Alzheimer’s (+22.5%)
· Cognitive impairment (+137.7%)
· Depression (+68.3%)
· Anxiety disorders (+43.9%)
· Sleep disorders (+93.4%)
“This is likely due to toxic Spike protein accumulation and persistence in the skull-meninges-brain axis,” Hulscher notes.
========
v.
“Epstein Justice, What You Need To Know”
with James Corbett and Nick Bryant
(46:44)
Nick Bryant, author, researcher and founder of EpsteinJustice.com, joins us today to update us on his organization’s fight to rally the public in support of Epstein’s victims and against those who are seeking to cover up the truth about the horrific crimes of the Epstein network. We discuss the recent death of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, the nothingburger of the recent Epstein files release, and how people can truly support the cause of achieving Epstein justice.
+
“Megyn Kelly battling VAIDS, regrets the jab; Lil Nas X ‘losing control’ of his face; Lola Young ‘gagging and throwing up’ on stage; UAE: sports journo Abdulaziz Al Qarni collapses on TV”
by Mark Crispin Miller
IS: PM Naftali Bennett in ICU after "cardiac event"; Danish TV host Anette Toftgaard, Aussie influencer "Tigga Mac" both have breast cancer; SD anchor Helene Duhamel has lung cancer; & much more
+
“‘The left’ now sees hand-counting paper ballots as a danger to ‘democracy’ (along with the First Amendment)”
by Mark Crispin Miller
This (state-backed) "leftist" has also championed jabbing every Palestinian (and everybody else), "asylum" for ALL "migrants," censoring "hate speech" and "misinformation," and the Green New Deal.
With Trump as president (again), everybody’s talking, or screaming, about everything he’s said or done since his inauguration—just like last time, only the reaction now is even more hysterical. This is, to say the least, unfortunate. Between Trump’s provocations and the answering din of “liberal” propaganda, there seems to be no possibility of civil conversation, as we’re split—beyond repair, it seems—into opposing camps, as in a war; and this at a moment when our unity could not be more important, as the only way to fight the powers intent on killing us. And this raucous stalemate has not just divided us, but, no less, degraded us, with politicians, journalists and others on both sides routinely shouting “Fuck you!” at each other—even in Congress!—and calling one another “assholes”; while, worldwide and every day (or so it seems), there are random murders, crazy brawls, arbitrary mob attacks on subways, stores, shopping malls and airliners, and other outbursts of uncivilized behavior (which, as readers of this Substack know, I ascribe to “vaccination,” with its now well-established neuropsychiatric “adverse events”).
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“The US/EU/NATO’s Regime Change Playbook for Burkina Faso and Captain Ibrahim Traoré”
by Ann Garrison
On April 3, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) Commander Michael Langley testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee during an excruciating two hours obsessively devoted to the ill-fated project of preserving US hegemony. Langley’s testimony was all about stopping Russia and China’s advances on the continent. Some Senators expressed concern that Trump had dispensed with the soft power—their term—projected by USAID and worried that China is stepping in to fill the breach.
Alarm bells went off in Africa, the African diaspora, and peace and justice communities all over the world when he turned attention to Burkina Faso and its leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, accusing him of using the gold reserves he nationalized “to protect his junta.”
It would be challenging, of course, to come up with a more arrogant, illogical, and downright idiotic assertion. The head of AFRICOM, a military command openly devoted to securing US interests, with a $2 billion dollar annual budget, accuses an African leader of devoting his own country’s resources to its security?
In a pathetic attempt to give this a bit of humanity or legitimacy, Langley complained that Traoré was using the country’s gold to finance his own security rather than for the benefit of his people, as though there were some universe in which this was a plausible US concern. In the same breath he described North Africa as “NATO’s southern flank.”
Since mid-April a slew of social media posts have reported that the Burkina Faso diaspora, particularly in France, have been protesting and demanding that Captain Traoré step down, accusing him of being a dictator, with some even calling for his arrest. None of these posts are conclusively evidenced, and their scale, sometimes described as "hundreds" or a "small group,” varies across reports. No major news outlets seem to have reported such protests, but real or not, they’re a classic element in the Western regime change playbook.
Human Rights Watch has been playing its usual role as well, reporting that Burkina Faso has cracked down on dissent and that some members of its civilian militia, Volunteers in Defense of the Homeland (VDH), have killed members of the Fulani ethnic minority. It seems likely that there is some incidence of VDH violence against the Fulani, but this is an internal problem for the Burkinabe people and their government, not cause for the “humanitarian intervention” that’s usually on the US/EU/NATO drawing board before these reports are published. Watch out for the emergence of the word "genocide.”
+
“Sixty-Eight Reported Killed by US Airstrike on African Migrant Facility in Yemen”
by Dave DeCamp
The detention facility appears to be the one that was previously targeted by the US-backed Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.
Originally published in Antiwar.com .
Sixty-eight people were killed by a US airstrike on a detention facility for African migrants in Yemen’s northwestern Saada province, Yemen’s Al Masirah TV has reported.
Another 47 were injured by the US attack, which hit the facility early Monday morning. Footage and photos of the aftermath of the strike show bodies strewn in the rubble and wounded African migrants being treated at a hospital.
A Pentagon official told Reuters that the US military was aware of the reports of civilian casualties. “We are currently conducting our battle-damage assessment and inquiry into those claims,” the official said.
The Pentagon has shared virtually no details about its bombing campaign in Yemen, which US Central Command acknowledged on Sunday, claiming it was withholding information to preserve “operational security.”
The strike on the migrant facility is the second-deadliest US attack on Yemen since President Trump launched his bombing campaign on March 15. On April 17, the US bombed the Ras Isa fuel port in Yemen’s Red Sea province of Hodeidah, killing 80 civilians , mostly workers at the port.
Authorities in Yemen strongly condemned the US attack on the migrant facility as a war crime. “The United States of America did not stop at killing Yemeni citizens and targeting civilian objects in Yemen, but its heinous crimes extended to targeting African migrants who arrived in Yemen in search of safety and stability,” Yemen’s National Committee for Refugee Affairs said, according to the SABA news agency.
“They were housed in a shelter center operating under the knowledge and supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Organization for Migration,” the committee added.
Reuters said that it verified the location of the migrant facility in Saada and that it was the same facility that was targeted by the US-backed Saudi-led coalition in January 2022. According to the Yemen Data Project, the Saudi strike killed 91 civilians.
Many African migrants attempt the journey through Yemen, looking for work in Saudi Arabia. Saudi border guards have been brutal in their efforts to keep migrants out and have been accused of slaughtering hundreds of Africans on the Saudi-Yemen border.
+
“Ready For the Revolution But Unable to See It: Blacks Recognize Racism But Lack Game Plan to Fight It”
by Jon Jeter
Black communities once turned righteous fury into systemic change, but today’s outrage over slights like Shedeur Sanders’ NFL draft slide rarely sparks organized resistance. The blueprint for liberation still exists; the question is whether we will dust it off or continue to mistake viral hashtags for revolution.
The snowflakes that began to pelt Chicago on an early January weekend in 1979 were bigger and wetter than anyone could remember, eventually burying the city under two feet of snow, shutting down O’Hare International Airport for only the second time ever, and producing snowdrifts that resembled a lumpen Sahara of marshmallow-white sand, swallowing cars, collapsing roofs, and disabling “L” trains.
The transit cars that remained operational, however, were just as problematic, skipping stops in the city’s African American neighborhoods and whizzing off to the lily-white northwestern suburbs, stranding Black commuters and reducing public transportation to a taxpayer-funded private shuttle service for whites.
That was the last straw for Chicago’s Black electorate that had little to show for more than a half-century of loyalty to the most powerful big-city machine in U.S. history. Through the city’s pharaoh-like Mayor, Richard J. Daley—known both affectionately and derisively as “Boss”— and his byzantine network of aldermen and Democratic precinct captains, City Hall doled out a few crumbs—a job on the city payroll here, an endorsement there, a pint of cheap whiskey, a canned ham, maybe a bed in a nursing home—to African American voters in exchange for their vote. When carrots didn’t work, the machine wasn’t shy about brandishing the stick, threatening to evict a tenant from public housing, or withholding a welfare check from anyone who dared to vote against the machine.
Daley lost the white vote in 1963, but overwhelming support from African American voters re-elected him. That did nothing, however, to replenish affordable housing stocks, nor abate police terror against communities of color. Blacks were denied all but the most menial patronage jobs, accounting for scarcely one in every 30 managers in the City of Big Shoulders. When a 24-year-old Jesse Jackson met with Daley about job prospects in 1965, Daley offered him a job as a toll booth operator, despite his college degree and a letter of recommendation from North Carolina’s governor, a fellow Democrat.
After Daley died unexpectedly five days before Christmas in 1976, Black Chicagoans, turned out for the 1979 primary– three months after the avalanche– in then-record numbers to elect a white lakefront liberal, Jane Byrne, thinking she would be more responsive to African American communities.
If anything, she was worse. . . . .
========
x.
“The Geopolitics of Elite Insanity. ‘Transforming the Entire World into A Planetary Technocracy’.”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/geopolitics-elite-insanity-part-iii/5878411
by Robert J. Burrowes
Part III: The dangerous delusion that governments, including BRICS governments, are sovereign and can stop the technocratic takeover.
[First published on 28 January 2025]
As the geopolitical order is being rapidly reshaped to better serve Elite interests, most analysts writing on the subject are being suckered into perceiving the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa recently expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates) as some sort of ‘alternative’.
See, for example:
Ben Norton’s claim that ‘BRICS… will change the world’ in ‘BRICS expands with 9 new partner countries. Now it’s half of world population, 41% of global economy’.
Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs’ claim that ‘BRICS is… a potential opening for a far more peaceful and secure world order…. [and] can be a boon for all countries’ in ‘The BRICS Summit Should Mark the End of Neocon Delusions’.
The claim of Alfred de Zayas, the first UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, that ‘BRICS represents a “new dawn” of multipolarity’ and ‘the very existence of BRICS and the future-oriented Kazan Summit offer an alternative to Western nihilism.’ in ‘The BRICS Summit in Kazan: A Manifesto for a Rational World Order’.
And Abayomi Azikiwe’s claim that ‘BRICS represents a historical pattern of efforts to build alternatives to the existing world capitalist system…. BRICS Plus Summit is a manifestation of the international movement towards ending the domination of the world’s peoples by international finance capital.’ in ‘BRICS Declaration Reinforces Call for Multipolarity: Kazan summit rejects unilateralism advanced by the West’.
Of course, more astute analysts are clearly seeing through the facade and exposing how the BRICS countries are simply implementing the same technocratic program as countries outside the BRICS. See, for example, Riley Waggaman’s ‘Would you like to know what BRICS just declared?’
The point is simple: Beneath any superficial differences between what BRICS countries (sometimes now referred to as BRICS+ given the recent accession of another five members) might be doing that appears to be reshaping planetary geopolitics into a multipolar world order that will somehow supersede the US-led unipolar world order, lies a deeper and darker truth.
This truth is that the Global Elite is rapidly and progressively transforming the entire world into a planetary technocracy populated by transhuman slaves. This means that perceptions that are limited to longstanding worldviews that see the world as statist and/or capitalist/socialist, for example, miss or misperceive the profound changes that are taking place.
No government, including those of the BRICS countries, is resisting these profound changes. No government, including those of the BRICS countries, will resist these profound changes.
The geopolitical world does not revolve around sovereign nation-states because no nation is sovereign. That is, no government of a nation-state is able to exercise independent and ultimate authority over all of its (internal and external) affairs.
Of course, this has long been the case as explained by preeminent historian Professor Carroll Quigley in his classic work published in 1966. See Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. pp.5-6.
‘[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations…
‘It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called ‘international’ or ‘merchant’ bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.’
Apart from Quigley’s extensive and invaluable book, you can read a reasonable summary of how Elite power – politically, economically, socially and militarily – was gained and is being exercised in Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until ‘You’ll Own Nothing.’
Of course, in the case of ‘democratic’ countries at least, you are meant to believe that ‘your’ government is, indeed, free to make decisions governing your security and well-being and that you have certain rights, including voting rights, to have a say in determining the government of the country in which you live.
To conceal the reality that no nation is sovereign, governments have long been empowered to make decisions about minor matters (which may still have critical impact on some populations) that have no bearing on the fundamental Elite program while any significant ‘decisions’ made by governments are confined to endorsing Elite directives and mobilizing the relevant agents in government, bureaucracies, the media, the military and elsewhere to implement the latest components of the Elite program.
So until you recognize that governments at all levels – and the international institutions with which you are most familiar, starting with the United Nations and the World Health Organization – are merely window-dressing or ‘shadow puppets’ that are designed to distract you from the real bases of power in the world system, then you will continue to misunderstand what is happening, who is driving it and how it is being done. And any effort you make to resist the rampant violence and injustice inherent in what is happening, will fail.
And that is precisely what the Elite intends.
After all, the most effective way to thwart opposition to any program is to make sure that any potential opponents do not understand the rules of the game (including, in this case, who exercises effective power in the world system) while making sure that these potential opponents are given a lot of noisy and colorful distractions (such as regular elections and other party-political processes, not to mention art and sport in various forms) to keep the bulk of them occupied at the same time.
The recent US presidential election has been a perfect example of this distraction, with a vast range of commentary on a wide range of superficial changes and only the rarest analyst even noting the number and range of wealthy technocrats appointed by Donald Trump to play key roles in his new administration let alone explaining the significance of this.
In essence, it is better for the Elite to have you putting all your passion and energy into fighting on a field of battle that is utterly irrelevant and to keep you unaware of where the real battlefield lies.
What better way to neutralize all opposition than to have it focused on the wrong ‘game’?
The Rapidly Advancing Planetary Technocracy . . . .
========
y.
“The People’s Forum”
https://7q0j7.r.sp1-brevo.net/mk/mr/sh/1t6AVsd2XFnIGBpQkfOkP7c2Y0lzQi/Kve_yEhmkdS5
by Media Digest, April 26, 2025
+
“REPORTAGE Book Launch Announcement”
https://corbettreport.com/reportage-book-launch-announcement/
with James Corbett
(3:08)
REPORTAGE: Essays on the New World Order has been available at reportagebook.com for months now . . . so, maybe it’s time for me to actually have a book launch! It will be at The Deck in Osaka on May 10, 2025. Doors will open at 1:30 PM and the reading/signing/video screening will begin at 2:00PM. Admission is ¥2000 and includes a limited-edition, numbered, hardcover edition of the book!
Be there or be square!
+
“Whose Dog Was Being Wagged During Showtime Between Trump and Zelensky?”
by Edward Curtin
Art requires the use of imagination, but so does political and social analysis. But imagination is just a first step; it proves nothing.
Evidence is required. But imagination rules out nothing from the start. If one cannot imagine an hypothesis or a scene – no matter how seemingly implausible – to be possibly true, one will leave it unexamined or unwritten. As Graeme MacQueen, the author of the crucial book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, and much else, put it:
Suppose our imaginations can embrace the possibility that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by elements in the U.S. government. In that case what do we do next? There is no mystery. Once the imagination stops filtering out a hypothesis and allows it into the realm of the possible, it can be put to the test. Evidence and reason must now do the job. Imagination cannot settle the question of truth or falsity any more than ideology, morality, or “common sense.”
We know that in the case of the attacks of September 11, 2001 that this is precisely what did not occur. Various hypotheses were ignored and emotional patriotism held sway. The script had been written in advance and the good and bad characters chosen. “It was another Pearl Harbor, bin Laden did it from his cave in Afghanistan, it seemed like a movie, etc.” And those anthrax attacks were claimed to be second stage terror attacks of these monsters, except that it turned out this wasn’t so and that the anthrax came from a U.S. government lab. MacQueen proved in his book that this was so and that the anthrax attacks were directly linked to the those of September 11, later showing through meticulously logical and evidence-based research that both were inside jobs.
Even today, this conclusion is hard for most people to accept, for the conclusion they started with – what was planted in their brains – precluded imagining another hypothesis. To do so was considered too outrageous – an impossibility that offended the patriotic heart.
And of course the Bush administration’s lies steamrolled any skepticism, the Patriot Act was quickly passed, and endless U.S. wars of aggression ensued, both preceding and following Colin Powell’s Academy Award performance at the United Nations. But he too was an honorable man.
They too are honorable men.
So if you sat with your mouth agape in shock at the dog and pony show in DC between Trump, the reality TV actor, and Zelensky, the comedian, who became Ukraine’s president and Trump’s apprentice in 2019 during Trump’s first term, let me suggest a bizarre possibility at a time when the bizarre has become commonplace.
Across the spectrum of opinion on the mainstream and alternative media, it is assumed without question that what took place on Friday, February 28, 2025 between Trump and Zelensky, ably assisted by Vance, should be taken at face value – in other words, as real.
The political reactions to that shouting match are what one would expect.
The Democrats are outraged that Trump (and Vance) would bully and humiliate an heroic ally who has been fighting a valiant war against the evil Russians and Putin.
Thus Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, toeing the party war line, had this to say:
Trump criticizes Zelensky, the leader of a democratic country who is courageously fighting Russian imperialism, while he aligns himself with Putin, the dictator who started the bloodiest European war in 80 years. Sorry, President Trump. We believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.
And on the Republican side, Senator Lindsay Graham, while calling the meeting “a complete disaster” but urging continued support for the war for “democracy,” said he was never more proud of Trump:
What I saw in the Oval office was disrespectful and I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again.
These reactions have been repeated ad infinitum. They are equally absurd propaganda in the service of the U.S. elites’ Repubmocratic tandem team of imperialists.
And then there are the reactions of utter shock from all corners who call this fight an historic and a diplomatic turning point to be immortalized.
It is hard, I know, to hear an unbearable possibility: But suppose it were a performance, not just in the sense that Trump and Vance set Zelensky up, but as a coordinated reality TV show in which all the principle actors were performing from a script whose goal was the opposite of all the subsequent interpretations. A script that allowed for some improvisation, as comedians like Zelensky and reality TV stars like Trump are adept at. Improvisations that may have gone a step too far and elicited outbursts that tarnished the performance but did not derail the overall goal of showing that the puppet-apprentice serves at the whim of the show’s host, and despite all the loot showered upon him, he could still be fired and replaced with another puppet, as the play would proceed under a new name.
As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “There are unconscious actors among them, and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.”
If it sounds hyperbolic to entertain such a thought, I agree. Yet I assume you would agree that we are living in hyperbolic and vertiginous times, a society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord called his famous book. A time when acting is promoted as the pinnacle of the professions, a skill requisite for spy craft, stagecraft, and political craft in equal measure.
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