u/penelopepnortney

From Nicholas Hulscher, epidemiologist and Administrator of the McCullough Foundation:

>A recent peer-reviewed paper titled, Beneficial Bloodsucking, argues that alpha-gal syndrome—the tick-borne condition that can make people allergic to red meat—should be treated as a form of “moral bioenhancement.”

>The authors (Western Michigan University professors) argue that because they believe eating meat is morally wrong, intentionally spreading a meat allergy using CRISPR-edited ticks could make people more “virtuous” by forcing them away from mammalian meat.

>Alpha-gal syndrome is not a harmless lifestyle nudge. It is a serious, potentially life-threatening allergic condition that can develop after a tick bite. Symptoms can include rash, gastrointestinal distress, and severe allergic reactions including anaphylaxis; reactions can occur after exposure to mammalian meat, mammal-derived products, dairy in some cases, and certain medical products.

>This does not sound like public health. It sounds like bioterrorism dressed up as bioethics.

>And this is not happening in a vacuum. The Gates Foundation has already funded work on genetically engineered ticks, awarding more than $7.6 million to Flyttr Limited in 2023 “to initiate development of a self-limiting tick” for control of the tropical cattle tick, Rhipicephalus microplus.

>That project is not the same as alpha-gal syndrome and involves cattle ticks... but it proves the broader point: genetically engineered ticks are no longer theoretical. They are already being funded, developed, and normalized.

He posts a 14-minute clip of his meeting with nature photographers and (ETA) wildlife activists in Xizang province. Interesting, entertaining and the location is absolutely beautiful.

Interviewed by Pascal Lottaz of Neutrality Studies who is quickly becoming one of my favorite interviewers because he's very knowledgeable himself across a wide range of topics and asks great questions.

Some key points which I've hopefully summarized accurately:

>- The capitalist ruling class is not an economic formation which then imposes itself politically, it is a social formation which operates on several fronts at the same time. It always restructures itself depending on what the most successful format for operating is.

>- Simply put, capitalism emerged from trade and early manufacture with those associated with these capitalist activities also leading the entire property class. This particular group was emulated because it was identified with success: economically, in its ability to appropriate a large share of the profits; politically, in its ability to manage social issues because every ruling class has to convince the majority to be governed by a minority.

>- Between the late 19th century and the 1980s there was a shift from the manufacturing of durable consumer goods like cars to finance. Finance not only appropriated the largest share of profits but was also able to imbue society with the idea that a self-regulating market was a good thing, even though most people are not helped by a society entirely dependent on individual economic activity. But once they're convinced, as happened roughly in the 1970s, a new cohesion and a new consistency of society falls into place.

>- Today we have the younger generation growing up with the internet. It has a certain magic, just as having a private car with four seats in it used to have a certain magic, at the time it was as intoxicating as the internet is today. So with class formation, we're talking about groups that move forward in the economic process but are able at the same time to spread ideas that have a magical quality, that inspire younger generations and that people associate with the good life.

>- The spearhead of capitalist development in the 1990s was embodied in a triangle of IT industries, Silicon Valley; the media, which was consolidated into a handful of very large conglomerates; and the intelligence services. In the 90s, the CIA began working jointly with Israeli's Unit 8200 and it runs In-Q-Tel, an investment firm aimed at securing the most innovative techniques. So basically what you now have through Palantir.

>- This triangle to some extent displaced the financial sector, which went for a very bumpy ride in 2008. The financial collapse basically ended the high tide of finance. So again you see the same process on several chess boards: one is economic, where the mass of profits are being appropriated; another is the spread of ideas that inspire entire new generations. But we're always talking about a complex entity that is not necessarily cohesive at the start but very slowly begins to blend into a single social force which rules the roost for a period of time. One of the most frightening things today is that we're living through the end of the economic order, the political economic order that we've lived with for the last 200 years at least. Capitalism and social cohesion are in what I see as a terminal crisis.

>- Throughout most of the 20th century there was an Atlantic ruling class with a strong European component. Once the Soviet Union and communism collapsed, a new space opened up and a Zionist element took its place. This triangle - Silicon Valley, the new media conglomerates and intelligence services - consolidated in the 1990s under people like Alvin Krongard, a key figure in the American Zionist lineup. There was also a wave of investments coming from Israel, mainly in IT companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the combined capital value of these companies was larger than the combined value of the Tel Aviv stock exchange.

>- From the earliest days, humanity has existed in small groups and as they encountered others there are familiar patterns: discovery, intermarriage, exchange as we call trade or finance. Through different forms, the way of dealing with foreign communities and inter-state relations have evolved; sovereign equality is one of them. Then from all these sovereign states that were formerly equals emerged a new era in which the main social forces - the ones that used to direct these separate states - begin to organize themselves into transnational classes.

>- After the collapse of communism in 1991, Europe was relegated to secondary status and you can see that in the quality of the leaders. The last time Europe really raised its voice as an independent force in international relations was the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq when people like Chirac and Schröder joined Russia, China, Brazil and others in rejecting this breakdown of the international order. We are now in a situation where force once again rules. And once the fighting starts you enter a fluid situation in which social structures that contribute to stabilization fall away and decline or in some cases harden into very conservative and regressive conditions.

>- Israel is a very small state of 9 million people. But it's a sort of cosmopolis like the medieval Catholic Church was and we don't judge the Catholic Church by the size of Vatican City. In that sense Israel represents something completely unique which is deeply transnational and cosmopolitan in its own right, otherwise it wouldn't be possible for Silicon Valley and American media and to some extent the CIA and other intelligence services to already have a Zionist profile.

>- You have to be very careful here because you don't want to promote the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy. That's not how it works. We didn't speak of a European world conspiracy either when for almost 100 years there was this Atlantic bond in which people associated with the European ruling classes were very powerful in the United States. There are too many people of Jewish extraction who are deeply upset about what is happening in Israel and its neighboring areas, and we can't let these people down.

>- Mattias Desmet, the Belgian psychologist, made the right point: that the only thing you can do is to do your best to express honestly what you think is the case and how we might steer clear of disaster. I find that very convincing because you first have to understand what's happening, and that in itself is a form of struggle. You can inspire other people by expressing what you think is happening though this will always be a very limited number of people because you're up against a vast array of forces. The only consolation that we have is that the ultimate basis on which the world order of today rests, the capitalist system, is itself objectively doomed to disintegrate. Now disintegration is never an attractive prospect because, you know, the baker will also stop baking bread under those conditions.

>- One thing that we should never do is try to remake humanity into something completely different, as with the idea of transhumanism proposed by Yuval Harari of the World Economic Forum. I would rather settle for a more modest proposal. Gramsci is a very important thinker here; he said, "Socialism is not everything turned around into its opposite, it's a society that's richer in collective values." Having a collective medical insurance for everyone without restrictions and with full access is a form of having something which is richer in collective values. The same with education; not everybody has to go to university but everybody has a right to training, to education, to participation in culture. I went to a concert while visiting an Eastern European country many years ago; it cost 50 cents to sit and listen to some of the most beautiful music you can imagine. There are many forms of art that can be made more accessible for people who are now having to listen to or look at absolute crap. There are ways of enriching the social side of society and lifting the cultural level that I think can be done in even in the smallest community and which in the end limit the readiness of people to submit to murderous social systems.

>- I don't believe a word of "separation of powers" because once you begin to think of social classes you understand. On a visit to friends in England Montesquieu, the enlightenment thinker from France, was told they had a separate judiciary, a separate executive and so forth. The judges and the politicians were at dinner that evening and they all happily conversed because they were all part of the same class as Montesquieu, himself a nobleman.

>- We're dealing with a very dangerous and unstable system and the only hope that we can have is that humanity itself has shown a capability of reviving the best instincts it stands for, the greatest cultural expressions, in spite of the deepest forms of degradation that have been brought upon it. There was a Swedish film in which a chainsaw wielding nutcase was allowed to behave in the way he did because people thought he was fashionable, that it was the way to go about things. Our modest role is to challenge this kind of thinking because it's the people's receptivity toward that behavior that gives the madman leeway to keep behaving that way.

(I'll undoubtedly edit this as I spot typos, etc. I missed on earlier reviews)

u/Sandernista2, this may be of interest to you.

Highlights from Col Lawrence Wilkerson interview by Tucker Carlson, post title is the one used on Carlson's site. Excerpts specifically related to the war with Iran are posted here but this is a fuller transcription of this wide-ranging and very interesting interview. It's very long but Wilkerson recounts a lot of history I'd never heard before.

On China vis-à-vis Iran

>The US and Israel are bombing China's latest completed railroad in their five-base road initiative, probably the most strategic one because eventually it would go up the Persian Gulf and into Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, the Caucasus and on northward, marrying up with the other three base road initiative railroads which, incidentally, have been adumbrated seriously by the war in Ukraine. Now railroads don't get bombed very well. You could drop all the ordinance in the world on them and they'll get a bunch of people out there and repair them pretty quickly. But it shows that there's something more to this war of choice than perhaps even Trump knows about though I'm sure there are people in the Pentagon who do.

>Basically those railroads mean that instead of 2-1/2 to 3 days and very expensive maritime shipping for China's Pacific port produce, it's 16 hours into the heart of Europe. That's a huge change, one that will drive a lot of commerce off the seas and will to a certain extent negate the Bab-el Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal. These railroads are a game changer in terms of commerce and in terms of one of the United States' supposedly great strengths, its maritime power. Because we won't need to police the seas anymore.

>We used that route during the period immediately prior to World War II when Britain and the United States sneaked into Iran - and I mean that we sneaked in there, they were Nazi sympathizers at the time - and we built a road and flanked it with security. At that time the Iranians couldn't challenge it very much and we shipped all manner of goods up that road into the belly of the Soviet Union. Stalingrad would have never held out without that supply route. Hundreds of thousands of trucks and wheeled vehicles and other implements of war went up that route, it was second only to Murmansk and in terms of strategic effect it was more important than Murmansk.

>China's perspective is what it's been ever since Deng Xiaoping started capitalism with Chinese characteristics: "We do not want a war. We will beat you without a war. We are going to beat you technologically. We're going to beat you culturally. We're going to beat you militarily. We're going to beat you every dimension of power that you can imagine." And this latest edict by Xi Jinping, which the American press has completely missed as far as I can tell, says, "We are essentially triumphant in every element of global power but one, financial control. Now we're going to take on that one."

>And that means the renminbi being substituted for the dollar in everything from oil sales to you name it. It will become the transactional and reserve currency, already is to a great extent for about 40% of the world. They're going to shoot for 60 to 70% of the world. They're going to drive the Bretton Woods system back where it came from. They're going to eliminate SWIFT. They're going to eliminate our ability to sanction countries, it's one of their major purposes and it's an altruistic purpose for them. Our sanctions have killed 38 million men, women, and children. China looks at us as having done that damage in the world with our financial system, which allowed us to put primary and secondary sanctions on 30% of the world. Go to OFAC and see how many countries we have under sanction, it's incredible (not to mention illegal under the UN Charter).

>(on our competition with China being seen in primarily military terms) But that's new. In George W. Bush's administration, Colin Powell was given his head on only one major international issue and that was China. Powell was constantly, constantly thwarting the vice president because Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney wanted a hot war or a cold war with China - they'd have preferred the latter but would have accepted the former - and Bush didn't want that; he viewed the competition as economic and didn't mind that because he thought we were better than they were at capitalism. At the end of his first term he had to repudiate Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian publicly and tell him to shut up about his independence referendum because he knew that was a red line with Beijing.

>What Cheney and Rumsfeld really wanted was a replacement for the Cold War, something that would put the same pressures on us that the Cold War did. Cheney occasionally would reveal things like his statement, "We don't want people to love us, we want people to fear us." They thought that you needed an external enemy to keep the empire in power domestically and internationally. There was a pamphlet called "The report from Iron Mountain", it's not known whether it was a fanciful parody from somebody at the New Yorker or a serious study, but the New York Times picked up on it and it went viral. In that report, they went through all the Cold War parameters and "You can never have peace. The only way an empire like the United States of America can survive is to have a constant threat." Keeping your own citizens obedient was part of it too, to keep them toeing the line and paying their taxes and everything that you do in a state that once was a republic and now is an empire.

---

China and the US

>I've been in China almost every other year or so since 1984 and have done simulations in Beijing. The one in 2009 was called "The oil disruption exercise", a postulated terrorist attack on Ras Tanura (Saudi Arabian port) which at that time had about 8 million barrels per day productive capacity. We had MARAD (Maritime Administration), we had AIG, we had Lloyds of London, we had all the countries involved and West Texas Intermediate Brent crude went to $200 almost overnight. Shippers wouldn't ship, insurers wouldn't insure.

>We shifted oil reserves around the world to help countries in the most desperate need and to prevent a real global depression. I've never seen this before and I've done hundreds of simulations - the Chinese diplomats had to consult their Ministry of Foreign Affairs before they could come back to the game floor and make a decision that took oil at that moment away from China. I know this because (former) Ambassador Chas Freeman, who was also there, explained it to me. They didn't know he was fluent in Mandarin, their intelligence had failed them on that. We knew that probably 10% of the Chinese delegation was intel, ours was too. But that was the last time I saw real comity between the US and China and a willingness to work together in a significant way.

Strait of Hormuz

> I think re-opening of the strait is going to have to be the force of reality of what we're doing to the globe. I'm looking very closely at economic analyses that tell me by the end of June if we're not back to reasonable shipping again, we'll be certainly in recession, global recession. And if we go to the end of August, we might be in global depression.

>Putin and Trump can say that we have plenty of LNG and oil, it doesn't matter. You're not going to survive in that kind of autarchic sense. Economically, you're going to you're going to crash too. And at the same time that our incredible debt coupled with the fact that Xi Jinping would probably accelerate the replacement of the dollar with renminbi because that'd be a moment to do it.

>I just read the a history of the Civilian Conservation Corps that Roosevelt created during the depression, "Recalled: the Civilian Conservation Corps." It's a wonderful book and you see that Roosevelt ultimately had to order the army in to do that, the army became the ingredient of the CCC that made it work. Douglas MacArthur ran it. MacArthur was an interesting character in Roosevelt's administration. more than once FDR said things that made anyone around him realize he knew how dangerous Doug MacArthur, like his attempt to kill the Bonus Marchers and MacArthur's attempt to kill them.

(Wikipedia: The Bonus Army, a group of 43,000 demonstrators—17,000 veterans of U.S. involvement in World War I, their families, and affiliated groups—gathered in Washington, D.C., in mid-1932 to demand early cash redemption of their service-bonus certificates. Organizers called the demonstrators the Bonus Expeditionary Force, to echo the name of World War I's American Expeditionary Forces, while the media referred to them as the "Bonus Army" or as "Bonus Marchers")

>FDR should never have divided command in the Pacific, it cost a 100,000 American casualties. He gave Stark and King the Central Pacific and MacArthur the Southwest Pacific. We had a bloody strategy in the center (Central Pacific). We didn't need to take half of those islands, MacArthur showed us what to do; you just bypass them and let them wither.

---

Israel and Lebanon

>I don't think Israel can survive in the Levant without the US because the original conception was a safe haven and it's anything but a safe haven.That's been demonstrated markedly to all of its Jewish citizens, many of whom have left and probably more would have left if Netanyahu would let them. I think it can survive as a true democracy with Palestinian, Arabs, Christians and Jews all living there. But they don't want to do that so I think they're sealing their own demise as a state at all in the Levant.

>What we're doing in Lebanon right now is just unconscionable - I always say we because Israel couldn't do it without us. We're killing 2-300 civilians about every 48 or 96 hours. We're bombing dry cleaners, bars, restaurants, hotels. And we built the most expensive, largest embassy in the world in Beirut. But we don't have any respect for Lebanon, it could disappear tomorrow morning and our embassy would still be there, fortified to the hilt. We built it there because it's a haven for Mossad, MI6, and CIA. And because we plan on, in that center piece in the Eastern Mediterranean, mounting our guns against China and Russia, too, if we have to.

>And we're lashed up with the wrong people in Lebanon. We always have been. The right people are the people that Hassan Nasrallah was trying to introduce to the political situation, cease his militaristic angle and become the politician in Lebanon who would finally after years and years consolidate a government that the majority of Lebanese could support. And what did Netanyahu do? Killed him, as he always does.

>I've been associated with this for 50 years and think Israel's real policies with respect to Lebanon was periodically demolishing its economic capacity. Lebanon way back there was the pearl of the eastern Mediterranean, a place where everybody wanted to go. Then Israel came along and on our dollar to a certain extent became a very successful predatory capitalistic economy. So they had to take Lebanon down a peg every time. If you go back and examine those bombing campaigns, even the '82 invasion when they were really after PLO and Arafat, they bombed the bejeesus out of the economic structure of Lebanon (Hezbollah was created in response to the 1982 invasion).

>I don't see how the American relationship with Israel can remain the same. Even in the core of MAGA, under 40 in particular and under 20 on college campuses generally don't like Israel, period. It was obvious Charlie Kirk was changing his mind about Israel, both in terms of US security and in terms of the American people; I think he was beginning to realize that it was poisonous and that was dangerous.

---

The American Empire

>If you go back and you look at any of the empires of old but particularly the Western Roman Empire, the twelve emperors between Julius Caesar and Suetonius (referencing the recent book by Mary Beard and the one Suetonious wrote in 121 AD), you see Epstein all through it, the depravity, and you understand what being an empire does to you. Arguably the Cold War was a check on us after 1945 but since the end of the Cold War, with no check whatsoever, we have turned into that version of the Western Roman Empire.

>I'm 81 now and in the years since I entered the highest realms of American power and was exposed to that power in 1993, or even ' 89 when I was with Colin Powell when he was chairman (of the Joint Chiefs), I have really become a cynic about our ability even to survive much longer in a way that is anything like our past.

---

AI

> I'm really worried about AI. I don't know if you saw that piece the other day by that gentleman, I forget his name now, from Cambridge, I believe, who sold some of his AI development to Google - he's sort of the Oppenheimer of the AI movement. He said he was on his bench outside his lab or something and all of a sudden his cell phone rang and it was his AI checking up on him. He had an epiphany right there on the bench, "This is dangerous what we're doing."

> I probably had roughly 600 students over the 16 years I taught at GWU (George Washington University) and William and Mary and a lot of them stay in contact with me. They reflect the same angst about AI that I have but in a much more visceral way because it's their future, it's their life. They're worried that it will eliminate their jobs but their bigger worry is that it will eliminate human autonomy. And there's a component of it that is "there's no way we're going to survive with that in our midst, not as humans." There are a couple of them who think we're going to wind up in a huge conflict between AI-generated, AI-led, AI- whatever robots and ourselves.

>There was a gentleman not too long ago, I think he was a NASA scientist, who said, "We have been given incredible powers. We have been given incredible riches. We have also been given wisdom. The question in the future is going to be will we use it or will we be overcome." I don't count myself in the camp of those who think it's impossible to eliminate the human race. It is not impossible with nuclear weapons, the newest technology in the world. No empire in all of 5,000 years of empires had ever possessed the technological means to destroy itself. Not a single one. To think that human nature will allow us to get through a demise of empire without ultimately trying that method to save it I think is wishful thinking. And we're at that point, as you as you well know, without a single treaty. They're all gone now, every single one from the ABM treaty all the way to New Start.

---

Pope Leo, Great Awakenings and Hegseth's crusade

>We've had an effort in this country for a long time, very sotto voce and under the table, to create an American Catholic church and to have our own pope. When Leo's selection was announced I said "that'll put a stop to that because an American is now the pope in Rome." But that's not what they want, they want an American pope and they want an American Catholic church, then they wouldn't have to take any instructions at all from Rome. It's a minority of Catholics but it is a powerful minority and they've been around for at least a hundred years. And I suspect doctrinally they'd try to divorce the Roman pope from the idea of being from God (via apostolic succession). I don't think there's an ideological or theological motivation, I think it's all about power.

>Most historians won't go with me yet but I bet you in 10 or 20 years they will look back on this period and call it a Great Awakening. just like they did the one that produced prohibition and the amendment to the constitution to rescind it. Very damaging periods in our history whether it was burning witches or prohibition. Prohibition really generated the momentum for organized crime, Al Capone was the first organized criminal, if you will.

>Hegseth is holding OSW protocol prayer services every week for 13 months. This is not very American, it's uncommonly un-American to mix religion and the military the way Hegseth is doing it. He's also preacher packing as we used to say in South Carolina, putting the rotten strawberries on the bottom and the fresh strawberries on the top. He's making sure to eliminate flag and admiral officers who are or might be opposed to the military becoming a defender of Christianity as the national religion. In the lower ranks, he's exceeding Congress's 4% limit on mental category 4 recruits who can't even read their name on a guard roster. He got 11% the last time around. The inspector general, brave man he, went over and told the Congress. And what Hegseth told Congress when they called him over to testify was, "Well, we created a school within the army." That school taught them how to pass the entrance exam, i.e., they taught the test. So then they gave them the test again and all of a sudden 7% of them leapt up into mental category 4 so they kept the 4% cap Congress set. It's just a dog and pony show. A very illustrative example is the 50 or 60 that go out of basic training into the river there at Fort Jackson and get baptized in the name of Jesus Christ and are told by the chaplain when they rise from the water that they are soldiers for Christ. What Hegseth wants is even the oath changed, from being an oath to the Constitution to being an oath to Jesus Christ.

>And talk about corruption of the gospels, Franklin Graham gave a sermon for Hegseth in the center courtyard of the Pentagon that would make Ted Cruz happy, resurrecting all the stuff Cruz was talking about in his interview with you and talked about how you had to sometimes kill everything in sight, men, women, children.

(I'll no doubt be editing this as I spot typos and other errors like duplicate words and phrases).

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxMrVYHzyi-Sypjg7F_tY3saN363v0-j1m

>Vandana Joshi, the widow of victim Tiru Chabba, filed a federal lawsuit against the company in Florida on Sunday.

>During an exchange of more than 16,000 messages, the chatbot advised alleged gunman Phoenix Ikner when the student union would be busiest and how to get more notoriety for the killings, according to the lawsuit.

>“If children are involved, even 2-3 victims can draw more attention,” ChatGPT allegedly told him.

>OpenAI has denied all wrongdoing in the case. “ChatGPT provided factual responses to questions ​with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote ​illegal or harmful activity," spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement.

>Ikner also allegedly sent the chatbot pictures of firearms he had acquired, and it replied, “telling him the Glock had no safety, that it was meant to be fired ‘quick to use under stress’ and advising him to keep his finger off the trigger until he was ready to shoot,” the lawsuit says.

>One other man, Robert Morales, was killed, and several people were injured in last year’s attack.

>The lawsuit characterises ChatGPT as a co-conspirator, and says OpenAI did not flag or escalate the conversations. It seeks punitive damages, accusing the company of designing a defective product and failing to adequately warn the public of the risks.

>Last month, seven families filed lawsuits in California accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of ignoring disturbing messages between ChatGPT and a mass shooter in Canada. Eight people were killed, including six children, when an attacker opened fire at the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia in February.

>Altman has apologised to the families of those victims. "I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement," he said in an open letter last month.

https://www.taxpayer.net/national-security/the-fog-of-war-budget/

> Adjusted for inflation, Pentagon spending grew by about 50 percent over the first quarter of this century, from 2000 to 2024. Then last year, it grew by 18 percent. Funding this budget request would mean an additional 45 percent increase. Even adjusted for inflation, this is the largest U.S. military budget request ever, larger than at the height of World War II. And if the Pentagon gets an Iran War supplemental as well, the total figure could see military spending effectively double in just two years.

>The Pentagon is seeking $1.15 trillion in its annual spending bill for its base budget, and $350 billion through yet another budget reconciliation bill. That means different votes on different bills, and that’s left us budget nerds wondering how lawmakers will vote on each.

>On the $350 billion side of the request, Republicans would need almost unanimous support from their side of the aisle to pass it, as no Democrats are expected to vote for it (the minority party typically rejects reconciliation packages). That’s far from a sure thing, with many Republican lawmakers wary of cutting deeper into social programs to pay for another Pentagon spending spree against the backdrop of a painful affordability crisis, a deeply unpopular war with Iran, and upcoming midterm elections.

>On the $1.15 trillion side of the request... [Democratic] Rep. McCollum blasted the number when the budget first dropped in early April as “outrageous and unacceptable, especially when President Trump and Congressional Republicans intend to make further cuts to critical services that Americans rely on at home.”

>We pointed out the bifurcated spending plan is really a negotiating tactic: “It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison. But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year. If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”

>We’ll be tracking the Pentagon budget like a storm chaser tracking a tornado as it tears through the budget process, so keep a weather eye on the horizon for our latest National Security forecasts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJAMVtWUWqE

Edit to add: I used "purportedly" in the title because it's on the internet and we know there will those who dispute its veracity. Personally, I found it credible.

@kirrausanov 2 hours ago

>I am writing from Ukraine.

>As many YT users suggest the Western media need to do some homework regarding origins of this civil war between Ukrainians who support the 2014 putsch (backed by the West) and the Ukrainianz opposing it (backed by RF).

>I have relatives fighting on both sides.

>Madness of this war is best illustrated by the fact that gen. Storozhenko (born in Ukraine) commands Russia's 6th Combined Arms Army and is currently leading assaults on Kupians'k and gen. Syrs'kij (born in the heart of Russia) is the the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

>Here in Ukraine we live in constant fear of being snatched by Zelensky's goon squads, who are forcibly rounding up 25-60 year old men (including disabled) in our streets, shopping malls, restaurants, fitness clubs public transport, roadblocks, in pubs, during church services and funerals, in the gas stations toilets... Recently they started baiting unsuspected victims on dating sites.

>Billboards have appeared on the streets across the country:

>"Defending Ukraine is a woman’s business" («Захист України — це жіноча справа»).

>That is not the end of this self-destructive paranoia. Since we running out of men Zelensky's regime even designed combat uniforms for... pregnant women. Another peculiar ("Epsteinian") idea they have: lowering marrying age for the girls (14 yo) but only if they are mothers or expecting.

>We used to feel respect our soldiers but now the sight of anyone in uniform feels us with dread. As a result ТЦК press gangs started operating in the civilian clothes and are often assisted by K9s for attacking suspects, who flee from "the busification".

>There is nothing more heartbreaking than watching a crying child chase after her/his father as he is brutally dragged away to a "mobilisation bus" by the masked men in balaclavas. As a result of the brutal actions of ТЦК mobile units, several fatalities were reported among those detained.

>The only men not pressed ganged into Ukrainian Army are relatives of politicians, rich or well "connected" men and... grave diggers.

>"Glory to Ukraine" (Слава Україні) was replaced by "What are you doing?" ("Что вы делаете?!" / "Що ви робите?!") in our streets.

>The USA is the main inspirer, organiser and beneficiary of this war, and in fact a direct participant yet they unilaterally appointed themselves as mediators and peace makers...

>Only recently Americans and increasingly West Europeans realised that they back the losing side.

>Every second Ukrainian I know has some relatives in Russia.

>I have very limited contact with my relatives in RF as it could be potentially dangerous.

>Anyway we have completely different priorities in our lives now.

>It is a struggle for survival here.

>We women are hiding our sons, husbands, brothers, fathers.

>It is dangerous for them to go out let alone appear in the street. Body snatchers (ТЦК) are everywhere. One cannot trust anyone.

>Officially there are currently almost 200 000 deserters (I am sure the number is much higher as - according to unofficial sources - AFU loses 1000 men daily due to desertion and AWOL).

>Only a few young Ukrainians - risking their lives - managed to escape abroad mostly via Moldova, The Carpathian mountains, The Tisa river.

>Zelens'ky stopped sending our recruits to the West for training as many of those men use it as an escape route and refuse to return to Ukraine. Instead the Western instructors come here to train them.

>Even pro-Kiev Odessites lost any illusions regarding EU/NATO dream (freedom of travel, European wages, "coffee and cake or opera" in Vienna...).

>However there is no organised resistance per se.

>Resistance in a concentration camp without external support has no chances of succeeding. The isolated desperate acts of defiance are very few and far between.

>People (including Ukrainian speaking) will take off their masks as soon as the Majdan regime collapses.

>Only then Western media will learn the full truth about this - in fact - civil/proxy war.

>As I said - sadly - I have relatives fighting on both sides. They both are Christian Orthodox and are from Russian speaking Families.

>In another words madness and stupidity.

>We have a great history, traditions, beautiful 1000 years culture yet we allowed ourselves to be manipulated into this suicidal slaughter like some primitive tribes in colonial Africa or North America.

>After this war - apart from exposing and punishing the real internal and external instigators of this conflict - we will need a lengthy soul-searching process, which would help us to heal the self-inflicted wounds. Only then we will live together in peace and prosperity again.

>Love and greetings from the occupied by banderovites Odessa

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/ill-stop-talking-about-israel-when

>I don’t enjoy writing about this shit. I don’t enjoy getting called a Nazi by state-funded shills all day.

>I didn’t ask to spend years watching a live-streamed genocide perpetrated right in front of my eyes with the facilitation of my own government.

>I didn’t choose to live in a world where Israel’s actions directly affect me and my country.

>I never invited the Israel lobby to attack my freedom of speech by trying to outlaw criticism of a genocidal apartheid state.

>It was never my decision to live in an information ecosystem where pro-Israel propagandists are constantly trying to deceive me about what’s going on in my world and manipulate the thoughts in my head.

>Those things were imposed upon me. I write about them because I am given no choice.

>Don’t want me to talk about Israel? Then stop shocking me with horrifying Israeli atrocities.

>Stop trying to shove Israeli bullshit down my throat.

>Stop trying to erode my rights for the advancement of Israeli information interests.

>Stop trying to make my society dumber and more sociopathic with propaganda indoctrination.

>Stop starting wars that directly affect me.

>Stop lobbying my government to support unspeakable evils.

>I’ll stop speaking about Israel when Israel stops making itself my problem.

>All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want.

https://solarireport.substack.com/p/the-washington-war-machine-vs-thomas

>Massie’s opponent (Ed Gallrein)—whose stance on the issues is relatively unknown—refuses to debate him and looks likely to be a “rubber-stamper” politician, but he has the Trump-backed billionaire machine behind him. This small army of powerful millionaires and billionaires, with no connection to the state of Kentucky whatsoever, is quite eager to max out on one-time donations to Massie’s challenger, while also pouring a fortune into anti-Massie super PACs and ad purchases.

>Throughout his career, Rep. Thomas Massie has championed issues related to agriculture and farming, anti-surveillance, free speech, anti-interventionism, and more. While Massie has voted with President Trump’s MAGA agenda 91% of the time, his recent efforts to keep U.S. troops out of the Middle East, his refusal to pass large spending bills, and his refusal to approve an unprecedented spy bill—all initiatives supported by the President—have effectively put Massie on the radar of the powerful MAGA donor class.

>According to a local news report dated February 5, 2026, Gallrein (at the time of publication) had raised more than $1.2 million, with only $32,000 (about 2.6%) coming from Kentucky donors. The report went on to state that Gallrein was also bolstered by the MAGA KY political action committee, which received $2.75 million from donors outside the state of Kentucky. The numbers have only increased since then.

https://thediplomat.com/2026/05/why-an-australia-us-rare-earth-deal-sparked-backlash-in-malaysia/

>A recent rare earths agreement between Australia’s Lynas Corporation and the U.S. Department of Defense has sparked domestic backlash, highlighting how middle powers like Malaysia are being drawn into strategic – and potentially military-linked – economic networks.

>Earlier, a coalition of 57 Malaysian civil society organizations issued a joint memorandum opposing the approximately $96 million rare earths supply deal between Lynas and the U.S. Department of Defense. The groups warned that the agreement could link rare earth processing operations in Malaysia directly to foreign military supply chains, and urged Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to intervene.

>...there are credible allegations that some U.S. military engagements involve serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

>The coalition also stressed that economic activity must be grounded in ethics and legality. “Any agreement that could lend support to war crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity cannot be justified on the basis of economic gain. Such arrangements are unconscionable and must be condemned,” Raman added. (bold added)

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/05/11/hiding-why-democrats-lost-to-boost-harris/

>More than four months after Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin announced that he was breaking his promise to release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the decision remains highly controversial.

>As Harris eyes another run, she has a major stake in the DNC continuing to keep the autopsy under wraps — and has a lot to lose if it reaches the light of day.

>Partly based on interviews with more than 300 prominent Democrats and others in all 50 states, the autopsy reportedly concludes that Harris’s unwavering support for U.S. weapons shipments to Israel was a significant factor in her loss to Donald Trump.

>At the time, polls showed that Harris was harming her election prospects by refusing to distance herself from Biden’s policy toward Israel. She evades that reality in her post-election book 107 Days, which dismisses antiwar protesters at her rallies as mere “hecklers.” Harris’ protracted book tour has been beset by disruptions as well as her inability to provide cogent responses.

>Renewed attention to the Harris 2024 finances would also be unwelcome. Thirteen months after the election, The New York Times reported, “some Democratic donors have demanded a more thorough accounting of how exactly the party and Ms. Harris spent $1.5 billion in 15 weeks en route to losing every battleground state in 2024.”

https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-blackmail-the

Ismaele's translation of an interesting Italian article (all formatting in the original). It's broken down into categories, first exploring the architecture of the fundamentally eschatological Epstein blackmail system and culminating in a review of emerging solutions to replace it with a system based on "functional power" with China at the forefront.

Whether or not you agree with the author's conclusions or that the future he imagines is one we should want, it's an extremely interesting discussion that's complex and detailed, so the few excerpts below don't come close to doing it justice.

>To understand the crisis of 2026, it is necessary to deconstruct the narrative of the “Epstein Case” (2019–2024). Scientifically speaking, this was not an investigation into sexual offences, but the uncovering of a system of systemic extortion designed to ensnare the elite.

>Jeffrey Epstein was... a “sorting hub” between the intelligence services (with documented links to Mossad and the CIA) and the US decision-making elite. Blackmail was not a side effect, but the main product.

>The Mechanism: There are “release keys” programmed to activate automatically should those in power (Israel/the Lobby) lose political or military control. This system turns US leaders into permanent hostages of an algorithm.

>The Role of Evangelical Donors: Pressure groups such as CUFI (Christians United For Israel) do not limit their scope to political lobbying. In 2026, it emerged that substantial capital flows from American “Megachurches” had been diverted towards the creation of armoured data centres in territories under Israeli jurisdiction (such as the Negev desert) and in Texas free zones.

>The Eschatology of the Database: For these actors, the protection of the Israeli government and the destruction of Iran are biblical imperatives. They view the Epstein Files not as a crime, but as a providential instrument (“God’s sieve”) to compel secular leaders (such as Trump) to fulfil the divine mission. In this sense, funding the storage of secrets ensures that no US leader can deviate from the path laid out towards nuclear Armageddon.

>The Loophole: Resistance Protocols (Nostr and Mesh Networks): In this landscape of total control, the “loophole” emerges. Groups of dissidents, including dissident Jewish fringe groups and isolationist technologists, are using protocols such as Nostr.

>Nostr has no central servers. Information circulates via independent relays. Here, the resistance is building a “counter-blockchain” of truth, where data is not used for blackmail, but to document financial flows between Evangelical donors and the arms industry.

>Mesh Networks: In conflict zones or areas of heavy censorship, the use of devices that communicate directly with one another (without the official internet) allows monitoring by the Directorate to be bypassed.

>China’s infiltration of Western technological vulnerabilities is not an act of traditional sabotage, but the implementation of a post-ideological paradigm that is undermining the global balance. China is now the key player in global evolution, not because it is “better”, but because it is more functional.

>Whilst the US-Israel axis exercises a form of moral violence (blackmail as the sole political glue), Beijing exercises material power. Blackmail is fragile: if the secret leaks out, the power vanishes. China’s systemic power, on the other hand, is based on being indispensable.

>True global evolution will occur when humanity realises that power does not lie in the possession of others’ secrets, but in the ability to ensure the continuity of vital and productive processes.

ETA:

>The West’s fear of China is not a fear of invasion, but a fear of its own irrelevance. If the world discovers that it can live, trade and prosper without passing through Washington’s moral and financial filter, Trump and Netanyahu’s “mantle of power” becomes nothing more than a stage costume in an empty theatre.

https://bracingviews.substack.com/p/support-our-troops

>“Support our troops” is a catchphrase, almost a mantra, often used by cynical politicians to suppress dissent about their disastrous wars of choice. Basically, dissenters are accused of being unpatriotic because their criticism allegedly betrays the troops and weakens national resolve. It’s a BS argument but it’s often compelling and even convincing to some.

>Americans have a civic religion defined by the Pledge of Allegiance, the flag, the National Anthem, military parades and pageantry, and U.S. history taught as heritage and as a celebration of American goodness and greatness. When you step outside of that, when you criticize it, dissent from it, you must be prepared to be attacked as a heretic.

>I remain convinced that hyping the troops as universal “heroes” isn’t a form of support. The troops know better. If you truly want to support them, listen to them. Be an informed and knowledgeable citizen. Speak your mind and don’t be afraid to criticize those who seek to use the military for dishonorable or indefensible purposes.

>We Americans celebrate our troops for defending freedom, yet we paradoxically attack those who try to exercise their freedom by denouncing war and militarism. You can’t have it both ways.

>In sum, “our” troops don’t want to put on pedestals and plinths. They certainly don’t want to be carried in flag-draped caskets. And most don’t want to be celebrated as heroes because they know they haven’t earned it. What they want, I think, is to be understood. What they don’t want is to be wasted, to be betrayed, to be misused.

https://reclaimthenet.org/new-mexicos-meta-trial-opens-with-judge-wary-of-states-broad-surveillance-demands

>State prosecutors now want the judge to rewrite how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp operate inside New Mexico, with a remedy list that reaches well past algorithm tweaks into the architecture of identity verification and encrypted messaging itself.

>Meaningful age verification at the platform level means government IDs, facial scans, or third-party identity services that link a real legal identity to every account. Once that link exists, it does not unlink. The pseudonymous Instagram account becomes an identity-verified Instagram account, for adults and minors alike, in service of a check that only formally concerns the under-18 population.

>The state is also demanding restrictions on end-to-end encryption for minors. Encryption does not have a child mode. A platform either holds the keys to your messages or it does not and once Meta is required to scan or filter the content of conversations involving anyone under 18, it builds the technical capability to scan everyone’s.

>Meta’s lawyers responded that the state’s demands are “overbroad, vague, unworkable” and would compel speech, and the company has separately threatened to withdraw Facebook and Instagram from New Mexico rather than comply.

>Consider what a 90-hour monthly access cap actually requires. To enforce it, Meta has to know, with legal certainty, which accounts belong to New Mexico minors. That means location tracking precise enough to distinguish a 17-year-old in Las Cruces from a 17-year-old visiting from El Paso, identity verification robust enough to survive legal challenge, and an account-linked usage clock that runs whether the user is on their phone, a friend’s laptop, or a school computer.

>The cap cannot be implemented without comprehensive surveillance sitting underneath every New Mexico account. Build that surveillance for minors and it exists for everyone because the only way to know who the minors are is to verify everyone.

https://reclaimthenet.org/the-fcc-wants-your-id-before-you-get-a-phone-number

>The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service.

>Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.

>The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.