Has Trump had a stroke? It seems likely. 2 days ago, Will M., Felix B. and Matt Christman were talking about a Trump appearance on Chapo Trap House and noted it appeared he’d had at least a “small” stroke. (I wonder how small the normal 79 year old’s strokes would be.)
Matt Christman was first to coin the term CHUDs for the Trump toadies, then popularized its use. CHUD= “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers”, from a satiric horror film. Unlike Hillary’s “Deplorables”, just flat class bigotry, CHUD at least carries clever disrespect. Christman himself had a stroke a couple of years ago and has mostly recovered, was off the show for at least a year and a half. (His wife had a baby about the time he had the stroke, so that household went thru a lot.)
The first pic in particular, right side of his mouth has collapsed and is sagging, eyes barely open and functional. Not a good look!! If this is so and he is permanently disabled, I can’t see Melania taking over as Mrs. Woodrow Wilson did at the end of his term, so I guess we’d get Mr. J.D. Vance.
Vance is despicable, “I don’t give a shit” about War Crimes (bombing an accused small “drug boat” with 11 people in it, no drugs visible, 1,000s of miles from USA with no refueling stations within 100s of miles.)
Vance’s wife is East Indian. Might the vicious color-based ICE racism be ramped down a bit? I wouldn’t predict it but it’s not impossible. The bigger question is with the charismatic strongman gone, largely discredited with the release of his 50th birthday card to Jeffrey E. in 2003 showing an early pubescent girls body and talking about the pleasure “enigma” can give us (an anagram for gamine, a young girl), can the likes of Vance move into the Strongman’s big shoes. Methinks not.
There will still be a MAGA movement, but it will become even more incoherent and shambolic than it already is (see mago’s comment on the same Kirk thread about the whole US culture becoming shambolic). Barron will be too young to run for Pres. in 2028 in any case.
Late Imperial Rot has hit the fish’s head . . . it only travels downward from there.
“The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional’s lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations, and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker, showing how an honest reassessment of what it means to be a professional in today’s corporate society can be remarkably liberating.”
A few Highlights:
(The numbers scattered throughout denote page lines and are included so you can use the control find feature to locate them in the transcript)
Q- you’re still 14 receiving remuneration from all four major vaccine 15 makers, correct?
A- Yes
Q- Do you agree with the IOM’s conclusion 25 that the data, the evidence is insufficient to … determine whether or not DTaP/Tdap cause autism?
A- I agree with their conclusion
Q- as a scientist, can 12 you make the statement that vaccines do not cause 13 autism
A- As a scientist, I would say that I do not 16 have evidence one way or the other.
Q- you’re okay with 22 telling the parent that DTaP/Tdap does not cause 23 autism even though the science isn’t there yet to 24 support that claim?
A- Absolutely
Q- Have you ever used orphans to study 25 an experimental vaccine?
A- Yes
Q- Have you ever used the mentally 4 handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?
A- it was not an uncommon practice.
Q- in this study it was randomized, 22 correct?
A- Yes
Q- there is a ten-times-greater death rate 22 amongst those who got DPT — TP in the first six 23 months of life versus those who got no vaccines, 24 correct?
A- I don’t dispute his findings
Q- study in which 2.3 percent of participants in the 3 GARDASIL group and in the control group had a 4 systemic autoimmune disorder,
A- Yes
Q- But the saline placebo group that didn’t 8 get the aluminum adjuvant had a 0 percent, right?
A- yes
(like in pretty much every randomized study the “control” group is given a vaccine. One rare exception is the HPV vaccine where there was also a small placebo group)
Q- found that injecting rabbits with aluminum and then 20 dissected them, they found aluminum in the brain of 21 the rabbits, correct?
A- Yes
Q- study found that injecting 19 aluminum in mice caused motor deficits and motor 20 neuron degeneration, correct?
A- yes.
Q- This study involved 155 mice, again 23 injected with aluminum.
…
can aluminum injected into the body travel to the 7 brain?
A- there are experiments suggesting 9 that that is possible.
(At this point if you’ve already made it your identify to ignore the evidence, ignore anyone not paid by pharma, and ignore the science, it won’t be hard to also ignore what the Medical priests say under oath.)
Now 70 years later, Zionism is seen as so central to the western “liberal order” that its opponents – those who stand against starving children to death – must be demonised and outlawed.
For the West, recognising Palestine is not about advancing Palestinian sovereignty, or even ending genocide. It is about preserving western colonialism in the Middle East in Zionist clothing.
The crunch time is upon us. Two years into the genocide, as Israel prepares for a final push into Gaza City to purge starving Palestinians from their last redoubt, western publics are starting to acknowledge a horrifying truth: their leaders are not coming to the rescue.
This is a moment of seering truth. It is not just Israel and its genocidal “war” that must defeated. It is the ugly colonial system that has long hidden behind the “moral” facade of Zionism.
I would be surprised if Trump had NOT had at least a mini-stroke by now, given his age and personal habits. Even so, the idea of JD Vance in charge strikes me as worse than Trump. Also, based on my close relationship with a MAGA relative, I don’t think replacing Trump with Vance will shake the loyalty of the base at all. As best as I can tell from my conversations with my MAGA relations, they like Trump, but their thinking is mainly shaped by only following right wing news sources to the exclusion of all other voices.
Also, even though I already posted this link to the Taibbi/Kern conversation about the Charlie Kirk shooting in comments to Ian’s post on the topic, I want to post it again here because it is that good.
The movie Star Wars is a story about spiritual alchemy told from the perspective of Sufism, which is the mystical branch of Islam, i.e., the Islamic path to enlightenment.
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker represents the lead, i.e., the spiritual neophyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi represents the gold, i.e., the spiritual adept, and Yoda represents the Philosopher’s Stone, aka, the red sulfur, which effects the alchemical transmutation.
The Qur’an tells a story of Moses meeting with a mysterious figure, who, though not mentioned by name, is known by Muslims as al-Khidr, Arabic for “the green one”.
Yoda lives next to the Cave of Dagobah, an allusion to the title of the 18th Surah of the Qur’an called “The Cave”, where the story of al-Khidr is found. The Surah is named after some young men, who, fleeing persecution, take refuge in a cave. Entering the cave is an allusion to spiritual trials before enlightenment.
A couple of quotes from the movie:
[quote]
“That place… is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.”
“What’s in there?”
“Only what you take with you.”
―Yoda and Luke Skywalker at the entrance to the cave.
Also here:
“Brought you here, the galaxy has. Your path, clearly, this is.”
“You know what I’m looking for.”
“Something lost. A part of yourself, perhaps. That which you seek, inside, you will find.”
―Galen Marek’s clone met by Yoda at the entrance to the cave
[end quotes]
As an aside, Al-Khidr, i.e., the green one, appears earlier in the poem titled: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, among other places.
It’s mid September with about a month of magic weather, shadow and light, sunny days and crisp nights remaining in my mountain world.
Outside my window finches, jays and chickadees attack the suet cage. Everybody’s hitting the water bowl, birds and rabbits, chipmunks and squirrels.
They all know what’s going on without a screen to watch, a link or pundit to inform them and tell them what to think, expect, say or do.
No man, winter’s coming on so grab what you can while you can while it’s still there and you’re still able.
Time waits for neither corvids nor men as we all fade into darkness. Carpe diem. It’s all we’ve got.
I am a regular listener (at 2x speed; they talk so slowly!) but was going to skip it this week until I saw your endorsement
I don’t think much of Kirn trying to make Goldwater Girl Rodham out to have ever been much a 60s radical. Ditto for her Rockefeller protege boyfriend, Bill. The truth about the 60s radicals leading the Civil Rights Revolution, the Sexual Revolution and so on was that they belonged to the Silent Generation, children of the Depression and World War. The Boomers may have bought the music albums but they were evading the draft not opposing the war. The truth is that the New Left abandoned the working class as icky and boring, and eventually embraced neoliberalism for the same reason as the professional right: it paid.
Taibbi does the best Media criticism. He made a good point about how journalists will label someone’s opinions as, for example, “racist”, without giving examples of what precisely they consider racist and why. The centrist left are unapologetic and ready to blame the right no matter who is killed.
I think there are many reasons to draw parallels with the 1960s/70s wave of political violence. They focused their retrospective consideration on the assassinations, for the topical reason. The 1960s shootings originated the “lone madman” with three names, but I don’t think many believed that was ever true. Part of the political traction of those killings rested with forcing official acceptance.
Now, the “lone madman” is again the official story. Is it any more believable? Or has the dynamic really changed? Or is it just easier to locate and use some precarious individual isolated in our dissociated society?
Being reminded of all the actual violence in the 60s by the Kirn/Taibbi video has put me in an oddly optimistic frame of mind. This country does have a history of internal domestic violence that dates back to its founding. Melville did not concoct a character like Ahab out of thin air. Violent madmen obsessed with domination to the point of thinking they can dominate nature itself are personalities Melville encountered in real life. They have been with us since the founding of this place.
But then I remember that Alex Mercouris made the fine point that the US is a continental power. Which means that it is probably flawed reasoning to compare civic outcomes in small European nations to trends in a place as big and diverse as the US.
This nation is based on genocide, slavery and colonial violence, both military and economic. Right now we are in the middle of the last push for total domination of the nation by the mad Ahabs who have always misruled this place. As all of us in this community know, their efforts are doomed to fail. China has already won, economically and, eventually, militarily as well, since anyone with a couple of working neurons knows that military power flows from economic/technical might.
The big question is how much damage this place will suffer until the Ahabs are finally defeated. However, once their demise is a done deal, maybe the survivors will finally have a chance to create something here that is not built on fraud and bloody domination.
Whenever politics in this place swings too far to the right or the left, a corrective swing in the opposite direction inevitably emerges. So maybe it behooves us to remember, despite our current justified despair, that especially because of the unhinged extremity of the reactionary policies currently underway and the extreme damage they are causing, the rejection of them will be just as strong and, in this country, probably inevitable.
I’m shocked that anyone on this site would recommend anything by Walter Kirn, a sick, hate-filled genocider. Taibbi was either blackmailed or bribed to say nothing negative about the genocide in Gaza many months ago, and additionally he wrote a massive tribute to the vicious advocate of Palestinian extermination (and the woman who directly got Rafeet Al Areer murdered in Dec. 2023 for making a joke about the lie that Palestinians “baked” “babies in ovens”), Bari Weiss, rewarded for her advocacy of Palestinian extermination by now the world’s richest man, Larry Ellison, by being the new head of CBS. https://nypost.com/2025/09/10/media/bari-weiss-closes-in-on-top-job-at-cbs-news-but-staff-fear-it-would-be-like-dropping-a-grenade/
Weiss’ Uber-Zionist Substack, “The Free Press”, rarely gets as many as 100,000 views and is not considered successful relative to even average sites, but she gets a billionaire buyout of it for at least $100 million for promoting the message, all Palestinians must die or be removed from their homeland.
I once greatly admired Taibbi, Griftopia was a brilliant expose of Wall Street Looting after the ’08 Greenspan Crash, & I lent my copy to several friends at work c. 2009-12. Kirn is hateful, racist scum, I first came across his work during 2024 on a trip to Chicago. A stop at a major book/ magazine store always mandatory when visiting Chicago (Duluth, MN where I lived at that time, didn’t offer much in that area) & by chance I picked up a small newspaper called “County Highway.” It looked like good Indy Media, drew me in with a long piece on Vladimir Nabokov’s and his wife’s exile years in the West. Additionally on the front page was a story of a free-thinking woman Christian fanatic, who lived off the grid working small service jobs without any government ID and promoted her lifestyle as healthy and showing integrity (which I think in many respects it did.)
But as soon as I got to page 2, there was a long hate-piece against Jewish Voice for Peace and other pro-Palestine student groups, demanding that they all be expelled from college and jailed!! Kirn is a principal editor at County Highway, may have been the author of that piece, or a co-author. I’d paid for the paper, so I eventually read the whole thing. Some innocuous, interesting articles, e.g. on Armadillos. A “humor” piece near the end about special food items in all 50 states with lots of racist stereotyping jokes, put-downs of poor and non-white people, some passing ridicule of Southern racists as well, for “balance” I’d assume. Overall I found about 35% of the content to be interesting, the rest spoiled by vicious racism and widespread hate.
Taibbi once had a lot of value to share. Like Russell Brand, he either got blackmailed or co-opted for right wing extremism, and explicitly to support (covertly or overtly) the Genocide of Palestine. Don’t forget Taibbi was an Elon Musk sycophant/sub at one time as well. Brand does it from a “Christian” perspective, Taibbi from an “I don’t know about this subject, so I won’t talk about it” cop-out (other than bootlicking for Bari Weiss’ “pluck” and “organization” as an “independent” (sic) media voice”.)
If one watches the whole DD episode, Russell Dobular included a piece by Taibbi from 2002 when he actually was fair-minded and thoughtful, on why there is “Arab terrorism” in the Mideast that shows he is not as ignorant as he now claims. There’s also a long, painful session of Kirn and Taibbi explaining why Israel isn’t a “theocracy” (like those filthy Iranians who bomb at least 9 neighboring countries– oops, that’s not the Iranians, is it?) and certain types of governmental racial preference for some groups are GOOD and healthy and do be commended.
Walter Kirn is a fellow traveler to people like Ben Shapiro, the terrorist Jabotinsky or Rabbi Schneerson, whose Lubavitcher Cult believes he is the Messiah and will soon return to them as he is immortal. Getting invested with people like this is sickening. Anyone who engages in that level of racist tribalism is toxic, to be avoided like tuberculosis or heroin.
I think there is one error in my recent post– Weiss’ “Free Press” rarely reaches 10,000, not 100,000 views. Not popular, not influential, but boosted to Fame and Fortune due to billionaires who want to exterminate an indigenous population in Palestine. Oh, also for fairness– County Highway was very well written. Kind of has a Bill Buckley gloss around it, oh they’re not David Duke, they are intelligent and well-educated sharing their racism and hate.
Became a Gore Vidal fan in my teens because his smiling evisceration of Buckley was a joy to watch. Buckley getting so frustrated at his utter inability to outsmart Vidal that his face got red and he practically drooled. A memory that my friends and I still remember fondly to this day.
I’ve commented here before about Taibbi and his turncoat ways. Kirn is a died in the wool Zionist and genocide apologist. I’ve read that his sympathies were formed from his hippie kibbutz days. I don’t care about that. These two are indeed toxic. Thanks for the call out Mark.
This nation is based on genocide, slavery and colonial violence, both military and economic. Right now we are in the middle of the last push for total domination of the nation by the mad Ahabs who have always misruled this place.
And based as well on an aspiration to be an exception among nations, to be better. There’s a fashion among liberals — always the ignorant know-it-alls — to decry “exceptionalism” as a pretentious fraud while, of course, never lifting a finger to make the country “exceptional”, to realize something of its exceptional aspirations. The successor ideology embraces original sin and revels in bearing the mark of Cain to no better end than simply projecting and feeling personally superior amidst a fallen realm.
I do not feel confident that the U.S. will recover in its “fourth turning”. The irony that its egalitarian aspirations to making economic fairness prevail would be betrayed and subverted by its first African-American President is not lost on me. Maybe there’s some perverse symbolic justice in that — payback is indeed a bitch and the trouble with cynicism starts when it becomes a faith. The farcical epilogue of, say, “justice” as pronoun etiquette? — I am not laughing.
The poison of secrets and lies introduced by the CIA and the military-industrial complex into the bloodstream has become a leukemia of the national soul. What is wrong with Walter Kirn recalling the radical left violence of the 1960s is that he’s hiding the forest with a rhododendron. The forest was the War in Vietnam (the Heart of Darkness and the bonfire of industrial-scale violence) — the Party of anti-imperialism abandoning its Atlantic Charter commitments from the outset of WWII embarking on a colonial restoration because it was afraid of repeating the political consequences of “losing China”. And, of course, they were outflanked in their perfidy by Nixon Going to China.
The Narrative of World War II, built originally by idealists out of the wreckage of the Wilsonian War to End All Wars, was very powerful even when hijacked by the likes of sociopaths like Allen Dulles and Bonner Fellers. It proved the power of Narrative when Radio was new and television barely a babe. It found its last true believers, ironically, in The Project for a New American Century, putting a bust of Winston Churchill in the Lesser Bush’s Oval Office.
Where Kirn drove to is: “. . . we have a civil rights oriented anti-war right wing now. It means it’s not the right wing I grew up with.” Populism is shacked up with America First and Christian Nationalism now, it seems.
It is not the right wing I grew up with either, but I look around in vain for the remains of the reality-based community of good will I once aspired to be a political ally of. Those of you who think you can reliably judge and shun the evil people on one issue and be left with anyone morally reliable on every — any —other issue are going to be disappointed. The Political Spectrum is a shifting kaleidoscope, shards of colored glass falling into ever new random alignments. A lot of lies and strategic adaptation lubricating the shifting.
As for Taibbi’s vow of silence on Israeli genocide, I would rather he do that than have an opinion on everything. He may well have economic considerations as well. A lot of people are being threatened and penalized, in case you haven’t noticed. I would not want to martyr myself or my family. Again, silence is more honorable, imho, than lies. There are plenty of professional and amateur opinion havers making noise on any number of subjects with no scruples at all about moral judgment or accurate reporting.
Normies I know didn’t even know who tf Kirk was and after being forced to find out, most of them don’t care – another school shooting but got somebody popular who was like a Rush Limbaugh wierdo – so what. Back to the playoffs.
I had a few posts on my feeds from righties talking about “war”. I really dunno who they believe the war is going to be between, they believe in something that mostly isn’t real in USA.
I used to be an enormous fan but Taibbi has become boomer slop tbfh. Eric Salzman’s articles on Racket are worth maintaining a free sub (he covers what Taibbi came to fame on and the bonehead chuds there routinely think it’s Matt writing the articles). Sorry if this offends, I held on for a long time but his content just turned to shitty old man belly-aching, as did the community there.
Some time ago I commented with a video of someone showing how little food and stuff that $100 would buy. I think he made this video in Walmart but I can’t remember for sure.
So I decided to see what I could get for $100 at one of my favorite stores here in the Ann Arbor Food Jungle . . . the Peoples’ Food Co-op. I didn’t look for “the cheapest” of everything, I looked for things I knew I would actually consistently eat without being bored or upset. So I looked for cheapish things I would consistently eat and noted down their prices per amount purchased. I can give all the price details if people want, and if people ask, that is what I will do.
So, for a hundred dollars, I could have gotten a 3lb. bag of gala apples, a 500ml bottle of Jovial brand e.v. olive oil, a 12 oz bottle of SanJ low sodium tamari sauce, 3 pounds each of millet, buckwheat, oats and black lentils; a 3lb bag of Michigan carrots on special sale, 3 oz. of pink Himmalayan salt, 10 of the standard small cans of Field Day organic tomato paste, and 3 lb. of organic red cabbage. This would have brought me to spending $98.04.
What to buy with the remaining 94 cents? The co-op has a scale which lets us weigh things like dried herbs and spices in increments of 1/100th of a pound. So I would very carefully weigh out and calculate just under 94 cents worth of dried oregano and there would be my $100 spent on food.
But wait! I realized that our local “healthy lifestyling” magazine supplement given away for free here and there contains a coupon for . . . ” $10.00 off of any purchase of $100 or more.” So that means I could “buy” ten dollars MORE stuff with that coupon and still have to only give them the original single hundred dollars that I had, in this example challenge.
So, to redeem that coupon, I could buy a $3.99 bag of Michigan Yellow ( on the inside) potatoes and then carefully weigh out enough fresh garlic bulbs to come in at just under that ” ten more dollar” coupon.
All that stuff would be enough to meet my yes-I-can-live-like-this food needs for a little while, assuming I would not know when or from where my next hundred dollars might be coming from.
But this would only work because I already know about these things and how to cook simple basic food with them, because I have a place to live and store food and cook, and so on. IF the people making these ” I can’t believe the prices” videos have a place to live, they can learn what I know and do what I do. If they are capable of that learning.
All this knowledge does nothing for the homeless and very little for people living in food deserts and food junkyards. Their food-survival struggle would be harder.
Sorry Kirn is paywalled at County Highway. But anyone who wants to see what a monster he is (& evidently has been for many years) should just watch the full DD piece. Near the end their is the Taibbi-Kirn “defense” of Israeli Apartheid. Taibbi’s not quite as brain-dead as he feigns, he tries to be agreeable with Kirn’s Colonel Kurtz-like foaming at the mouth that all the “Savages” be exterminated, but some slight remnant of decency makes him back off a bit– or not? He does admit that Israel practices Apartheid, then he says some dreck to the extent that “If that’s what’s needed to preserve the “Jewish people” maybe Apartheid is justified.
By “Jewish people” here he means only Israelis of course, not the millions of Jews living around the world who are not hate-filled Zionist lunatics. I think Dobular and Weiss are so good on this issue as they understand that the Zionist entity deliberately whips up anti-Semitism around the world to force more Jews to join the Settler-Colonial entity, and how much harm the rise of anti-Semitism will be to their community, even living in the US. Neither seems to be particularly (if at all) religious, but like other anti-Zionist Jews (Max Blumenthal, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Norman Finkelstein and too many others to mention) they are unwilling to sacrifice their humanity to Tribalism. The Israelis may pull off their mass extermination in Gaza (I heard just today that Gaza City is being invaded and torn to shreds) but they can’t exterminate the Palestinian people globally. There is a huge diaspora across the region, in Europe, the US, Latin America and elsewhere, so someday there will be justice and a regaining of the stolen land, if only at a very high price.
As to Taibbi, for whatever reasons (maybe blackmail or threats against his family) as Dobular states he has made himself irrelevant and will soon be an Invisible Podcaster. Better to be a full-on monster like David Pakman, who still has a huge audience and is secretly funded by billionaires. Matt will soon have the popularity of niche folks like Civil War re-enactors or fans of Sean Penn’s ouvre, or that faux-hillbilly clown “Beau of the 5th Column.” Pretty sad for someone who once had potential.
Thanks for the link to the Plotkin deposition. It took me the better part of a day to read the whole 400 page deposítion, but it was one of my more rewarding recent reads. Defense counsel Aaron Siri does a an admirable job of exposing the rot at the center of American medicine, while Plotkin agilely pleads “the greatest good for the greatest number”.
The case may have resulted in a hung jury (don’t know; don’t care), but the deposition is an astonishing portrait of the moral paralysis of USian institutions, and packed with incisive commentary on the nature of vaccine science. I highly recommend it to other readers.
Because of the discursive, sometimes deliberately deceptive narrative flow of depositions, I’ve outlined the arguments on my toy website, giving the interested reader a five-minute overview of this tortuous deposition:
Apparently someone somewhere invented the concept of a “challenge” between a hundred Brittanians and a hundred Americans to achieve something involving a “W”. I don’t know what that challenge is/was.
But I guess some people do. Here is an American posting a funny video describing how she would draw upon America’s vast cultural-demographic diversity to assemble a team of 30 Americans who could take the “W” ( whatever that is) from the hundred Brittanians. I thought it was really funny, and we need some really funny in these really unfunny times.
There must be a perennial wetland reliable enough to produce those dragonflies and nearby enough to where those dragonflies could reach that sewage well. Protect your friendly neighborhood wetland or bio-fertile water feature.
A way to push for that would be to start a Least Common Denominator Party running on those three things. Vote LCD for the 3 Simple Things. Maybe someone will give it a try over the next few decades, if we last that long.
The link above is about the history of the guillotine. The story begins in 1757 with an attmept on the life of the French King.
The would be assassin was tortured to death. That led to a young man think about a more humane way to enact the death penalty.
Thinking of a more humane way to perform a death penalty might have been a step forward in the 18th Century. But by the time the 20th century was underway it was a step backwards.
By the 20th century there is a lot of temptation for those in high positions of industrialized societies to take part in instigating unneccessary wars as a means of obtaining personal wealth.
The risks for such people are extremely small and the potential rewards are very great.
It is a no brainer that many people will engage in such extraordinairly dispicable behavior. The threat of a quick execution would certianly not be any kind of deterent at all. The threat of life imprisonment might not be any deterent either as that will just be a new arena for such psycopaths and sociopaths to play their games.
The threat of torture may also not be sufficient deterence either because those who sit in p laces that have the capability to stir up such trouble will no doubt thing that the chances of ever being held accountable for their behavior are zero or close to zero so what ever risk there is is worth taking.
But the threat of facing torture may be a deterent for some people not to help those trying to instigate unneccesary wars. AND the ability to torture those who have caused massive unneccessary suffering may motivate would be rebels who would not otherwise be motivated to take the risks neccesary to bring to an end a well entrenched continuing criminal enterprise that has siezed the institutions of a national government, only to watch a court system grant mercy on the members of the cults that cause world chaos.
OK,
Because everyone is guilty and everyone is innocent, but some people are more guilty and less innocent that others, where would one draw the line on torture?
Easy smeezy, the most guilty 10,000 people from the most guilty countries get tortured for sure. Then the the next 100,000 most guilty people would be subject to a lottery in which 10% would be subject to torture, 10% just like in good old Roman Times.
That means world wide 20,000 people would be tortuted for carrrying out policies designed to maintain (led by the US) global western hegemony. If these people escape being tortured they have escaped justice.
The top 10,000 people will be selected from the most guilty countries which are the USA, the rest of the NATO countries, including Turkey. The middle eastern countries of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Katar. The Asian countries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Phillipines. And last but not least Australia, maybe New Zealand too.
A commission of 5 people from the Russian Intellegence services, along with 5 from China, 3 from Iran, 3 from Venezuela, 3 from Cuba and myself should be on the commission which would be a condition that the axis of resistence would impose on the western empire should the west ever seek peace. A pair of positions on the commission for for Patrick Lancaster and Brain Berlitic will also be saved if they have any interest in serving on it. Or the could delegate someone to represent them.
No, of course I do not expect this to happen in this simulation. But I expect it to happen where the simulation that we are stuck inside of is being run.
One thing that has really disappointed me over the last 3 years is that German Intellegence agencies have not managed to assert German independence.
Are these agencies filled with traitors or idiots?
Mark Level
Has Trump had a stroke? It seems likely. 2 days ago, Will M., Felix B. and Matt Christman were talking about a Trump appearance on Chapo Trap House and noted it appeared he’d had at least a “small” stroke. (I wonder how small the normal 79 year old’s strokes would be.)
Matt Christman was first to coin the term CHUDs for the Trump toadies, then popularized its use. CHUD= “Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers”, from a satiric horror film. Unlike Hillary’s “Deplorables”, just flat class bigotry, CHUD at least carries clever disrespect. Christman himself had a stroke a couple of years ago and has mostly recovered, was off the show for at least a year and a half. (His wife had a baby about the time he had the stroke, so that household went thru a lot.)
See the picture here, the first of 3, which Diff Clue posted on the Charlie Kirk thread–
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/trump-says-he-couldn-t-care-less-about-unifying-the-country-after-charlie-kirk-s-death/ar-AA1MrsBh?ocid=BingNewsSerp
The first pic in particular, right side of his mouth has collapsed and is sagging, eyes barely open and functional. Not a good look!! If this is so and he is permanently disabled, I can’t see Melania taking over as Mrs. Woodrow Wilson did at the end of his term, so I guess we’d get Mr. J.D. Vance.
Vance is despicable, “I don’t give a shit” about War Crimes (bombing an accused small “drug boat” with 11 people in it, no drugs visible, 1,000s of miles from USA with no refueling stations within 100s of miles.)
Vance’s wife is East Indian. Might the vicious color-based ICE racism be ramped down a bit? I wouldn’t predict it but it’s not impossible. The bigger question is with the charismatic strongman gone, largely discredited with the release of his 50th birthday card to Jeffrey E. in 2003 showing an early pubescent girls body and talking about the pleasure “enigma” can give us (an anagram for gamine, a young girl), can the likes of Vance move into the Strongman’s big shoes. Methinks not.
There will still be a MAGA movement, but it will become even more incoherent and shambolic than it already is (see mago’s comment on the same Kirk thread about the whole US culture becoming shambolic). Barron will be too young to run for Pres. in 2028 in any case.
Late Imperial Rot has hit the fish’s head . . . it only travels downward from there.
canopy
Disciplined Minds
by Jeff Schmidt
from Goodreads –
“The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional’s lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations, and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker, showing how an honest reassessment of what it means to be a professional in today’s corporate society can be remarkably liberating.”
Oakchair
Here is what Stanley Plotkin the worlds top vaccine expert says when he’s under oath.
This is a video of the depostion:
https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/the-deposition-of-stanley-plotkin/
This is a transcript:
https://www.lumenfidei.ie/documents/dr-stanley-plotkin-testimony.pdf
A few Highlights:
(The numbers scattered throughout denote page lines and are included so you can use the control find feature to locate them in the transcript)
Q- you’re still 14 receiving remuneration from all four major vaccine 15 makers, correct?
A- Yes
Q- Do you agree with the IOM’s conclusion 25 that the data, the evidence is insufficient to … determine whether or not DTaP/Tdap cause autism?
A- I agree with their conclusion
Q- as a scientist, can 12 you make the statement that vaccines do not cause 13 autism
A- As a scientist, I would say that I do not 16 have evidence one way or the other.
Q- you’re okay with 22 telling the parent that DTaP/Tdap does not cause 23 autism even though the science isn’t there yet to 24 support that claim?
A- Absolutely
Q- Have you ever used orphans to study 25 an experimental vaccine?
A- Yes
Q- Have you ever used the mentally 4 handicapped to study an experimental vaccine?
A- it was not an uncommon practice.
Q- in this study it was randomized, 22 correct?
A- Yes
Q- there is a ten-times-greater death rate 22 amongst those who got DPT — TP in the first six 23 months of life versus those who got no vaccines, 24 correct?
A- I don’t dispute his findings
Q- study in which 2.3 percent of participants in the 3 GARDASIL group and in the control group had a 4 systemic autoimmune disorder,
A- Yes
Q- But the saline placebo group that didn’t 8 get the aluminum adjuvant had a 0 percent, right?
A- yes
(like in pretty much every randomized study the “control” group is given a vaccine. One rare exception is the HPV vaccine where there was also a small placebo group)
Q- found that injecting rabbits with aluminum and then 20 dissected them, they found aluminum in the brain of 21 the rabbits, correct?
A- Yes
Q- study found that injecting 19 aluminum in mice caused motor deficits and motor 20 neuron degeneration, correct?
A- yes.
Q- This study involved 155 mice, again 23 injected with aluminum.
…
can aluminum injected into the body travel to the 7 brain?
A- there are experiments suggesting 9 that that is possible.
(At this point if you’ve already made it your identify to ignore the evidence, ignore anyone not paid by pharma, and ignore the science, it won’t be hard to also ignore what the Medical priests say under oath.)
cc
Jonathan Cook points out that Zionism is today’s version of McCarthyism of the 1950s:
In Gaza, western colonialism has been unmasked
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/in-gaza-western-colonialism-has-been
Now 70 years later, Zionism is seen as so central to the western “liberal order” that its opponents – those who stand against starving children to death – must be demonised and outlawed.
For the West, recognising Palestine is not about advancing Palestinian sovereignty, or even ending genocide. It is about preserving western colonialism in the Middle East in Zionist clothing.
The crunch time is upon us. Two years into the genocide, as Israel prepares for a final push into Gaza City to purge starving Palestinians from their last redoubt, western publics are starting to acknowledge a horrifying truth: their leaders are not coming to the rescue.
This is a moment of seering truth. It is not just Israel and its genocidal “war” that must defeated. It is the ugly colonial system that has long hidden behind the “moral” facade of Zionism.
someofparts
I would be surprised if Trump had NOT had at least a mini-stroke by now, given his age and personal habits. Even so, the idea of JD Vance in charge strikes me as worse than Trump. Also, based on my close relationship with a MAGA relative, I don’t think replacing Trump with Vance will shake the loyalty of the base at all. As best as I can tell from my conversations with my MAGA relations, they like Trump, but their thinking is mainly shaped by only following right wing news sources to the exclusion of all other voices.
Also, even though I already posted this link to the Taibbi/Kern conversation about the Charlie Kirk shooting in comments to Ian’s post on the topic, I want to post it again here because it is that good.
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-september-12-2025
Ahmed Fares
The movie Star Wars is a story about spiritual alchemy told from the perspective of Sufism, which is the mystical branch of Islam, i.e., the Islamic path to enlightenment.
In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker represents the lead, i.e., the spiritual neophyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi represents the gold, i.e., the spiritual adept, and Yoda represents the Philosopher’s Stone, aka, the red sulfur, which effects the alchemical transmutation.
The Qur’an tells a story of Moses meeting with a mysterious figure, who, though not mentioned by name, is known by Muslims as al-Khidr, Arabic for “the green one”.
Yoda lives next to the Cave of Dagobah, an allusion to the title of the 18th Surah of the Qur’an called “The Cave”, where the story of al-Khidr is found. The Surah is named after some young men, who, fleeing persecution, take refuge in a cave. Entering the cave is an allusion to spiritual trials before enlightenment.
A couple of quotes from the movie:
[quote]
“That place… is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.”
“What’s in there?”
“Only what you take with you.”
―Yoda and Luke Skywalker at the entrance to the cave.
Also here:
“Brought you here, the galaxy has. Your path, clearly, this is.”
“You know what I’m looking for.”
“Something lost. A part of yourself, perhaps. That which you seek, inside, you will find.”
―Galen Marek’s clone met by Yoda at the entrance to the cave
[end quotes]
As an aside, Al-Khidr, i.e., the green one, appears earlier in the poem titled: “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, among other places.
mago
It’s mid September with about a month of magic weather, shadow and light, sunny days and crisp nights remaining in my mountain world.
Outside my window finches, jays and chickadees attack the suet cage. Everybody’s hitting the water bowl, birds and rabbits, chipmunks and squirrels.
They all know what’s going on without a screen to watch, a link or pundit to inform them and tell them what to think, expect, say or do.
No man, winter’s coming on so grab what you can while you can while it’s still there and you’re still able.
Time waits for neither corvids nor men as we all fade into darkness. Carpe diem. It’s all we’ve got.
bruce wilder
thanks for the link to Kirn and Taibbi.
I am a regular listener (at 2x speed; they talk so slowly!) but was going to skip it this week until I saw your endorsement
I don’t think much of Kirn trying to make Goldwater Girl Rodham out to have ever been much a 60s radical. Ditto for her Rockefeller protege boyfriend, Bill. The truth about the 60s radicals leading the Civil Rights Revolution, the Sexual Revolution and so on was that they belonged to the Silent Generation, children of the Depression and World War. The Boomers may have bought the music albums but they were evading the draft not opposing the war. The truth is that the New Left abandoned the working class as icky and boring, and eventually embraced neoliberalism for the same reason as the professional right: it paid.
Taibbi does the best Media criticism. He made a good point about how journalists will label someone’s opinions as, for example, “racist”, without giving examples of what precisely they consider racist and why. The centrist left are unapologetic and ready to blame the right no matter who is killed.
I think there are many reasons to draw parallels with the 1960s/70s wave of political violence. They focused their retrospective consideration on the assassinations, for the topical reason. The 1960s shootings originated the “lone madman” with three names, but I don’t think many believed that was ever true. Part of the political traction of those killings rested with forcing official acceptance.
Now, the “lone madman” is again the official story. Is it any more believable? Or has the dynamic really changed? Or is it just easier to locate and use some precarious individual isolated in our dissociated society?
mago
We’ve got to make the best of what we’ve got ain’t got a lot but it’s what we’ve got gonna make the best of it.
someofparts
Being reminded of all the actual violence in the 60s by the Kirn/Taibbi video has put me in an oddly optimistic frame of mind. This country does have a history of internal domestic violence that dates back to its founding. Melville did not concoct a character like Ahab out of thin air. Violent madmen obsessed with domination to the point of thinking they can dominate nature itself are personalities Melville encountered in real life. They have been with us since the founding of this place.
But then I remember that Alex Mercouris made the fine point that the US is a continental power. Which means that it is probably flawed reasoning to compare civic outcomes in small European nations to trends in a place as big and diverse as the US.
This nation is based on genocide, slavery and colonial violence, both military and economic. Right now we are in the middle of the last push for total domination of the nation by the mad Ahabs who have always misruled this place. As all of us in this community know, their efforts are doomed to fail. China has already won, economically and, eventually, militarily as well, since anyone with a couple of working neurons knows that military power flows from economic/technical might.
The big question is how much damage this place will suffer until the Ahabs are finally defeated. However, once their demise is a done deal, maybe the survivors will finally have a chance to create something here that is not built on fraud and bloody domination.
Whenever politics in this place swings too far to the right or the left, a corrective swing in the opposite direction inevitably emerges. So maybe it behooves us to remember, despite our current justified despair, that especially because of the unhinged extremity of the reactionary policies currently underway and the extreme damage they are causing, the rejection of them will be just as strong and, in this country, probably inevitable.
Mark Level
I’m shocked that anyone on this site would recommend anything by Walter Kirn, a sick, hate-filled genocider. Taibbi was either blackmailed or bribed to say nothing negative about the genocide in Gaza many months ago, and additionally he wrote a massive tribute to the vicious advocate of Palestinian extermination (and the woman who directly got Rafeet Al Areer murdered in Dec. 2023 for making a joke about the lie that Palestinians “baked” “babies in ovens”), Bari Weiss, rewarded for her advocacy of Palestinian extermination by now the world’s richest man, Larry Ellison, by being the new head of CBS. https://nypost.com/2025/09/10/media/bari-weiss-closes-in-on-top-job-at-cbs-news-but-staff-fear-it-would-be-like-dropping-a-grenade/
Weiss’ Uber-Zionist Substack, “The Free Press”, rarely gets as many as 100,000 views and is not considered successful relative to even average sites, but she gets a billionaire buyout of it for at least $100 million for promoting the message, all Palestinians must die or be removed from their homeland.
The 2 gents of Due Dissidence take down Taibbi (their former friend and guest) and Kirn at the link here– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34IJ8iHLaL8
I once greatly admired Taibbi, Griftopia was a brilliant expose of Wall Street Looting after the ’08 Greenspan Crash, & I lent my copy to several friends at work c. 2009-12. Kirn is hateful, racist scum, I first came across his work during 2024 on a trip to Chicago. A stop at a major book/ magazine store always mandatory when visiting Chicago (Duluth, MN where I lived at that time, didn’t offer much in that area) & by chance I picked up a small newspaper called “County Highway.” It looked like good Indy Media, drew me in with a long piece on Vladimir Nabokov’s and his wife’s exile years in the West. Additionally on the front page was a story of a free-thinking woman Christian fanatic, who lived off the grid working small service jobs without any government ID and promoted her lifestyle as healthy and showing integrity (which I think in many respects it did.)
But as soon as I got to page 2, there was a long hate-piece against Jewish Voice for Peace and other pro-Palestine student groups, demanding that they all be expelled from college and jailed!! Kirn is a principal editor at County Highway, may have been the author of that piece, or a co-author. I’d paid for the paper, so I eventually read the whole thing. Some innocuous, interesting articles, e.g. on Armadillos. A “humor” piece near the end about special food items in all 50 states with lots of racist stereotyping jokes, put-downs of poor and non-white people, some passing ridicule of Southern racists as well, for “balance” I’d assume. Overall I found about 35% of the content to be interesting, the rest spoiled by vicious racism and widespread hate.
Taibbi once had a lot of value to share. Like Russell Brand, he either got blackmailed or co-opted for right wing extremism, and explicitly to support (covertly or overtly) the Genocide of Palestine. Don’t forget Taibbi was an Elon Musk sycophant/sub at one time as well. Brand does it from a “Christian” perspective, Taibbi from an “I don’t know about this subject, so I won’t talk about it” cop-out (other than bootlicking for Bari Weiss’ “pluck” and “organization” as an “independent” (sic) media voice”.)
If one watches the whole DD episode, Russell Dobular included a piece by Taibbi from 2002 when he actually was fair-minded and thoughtful, on why there is “Arab terrorism” in the Mideast that shows he is not as ignorant as he now claims. There’s also a long, painful session of Kirn and Taibbi explaining why Israel isn’t a “theocracy” (like those filthy Iranians who bomb at least 9 neighboring countries– oops, that’s not the Iranians, is it?) and certain types of governmental racial preference for some groups are GOOD and healthy and do be commended.
Walter Kirn is a fellow traveler to people like Ben Shapiro, the terrorist Jabotinsky or Rabbi Schneerson, whose Lubavitcher Cult believes he is the Messiah and will soon return to them as he is immortal. Getting invested with people like this is sickening. Anyone who engages in that level of racist tribalism is toxic, to be avoided like tuberculosis or heroin.
someofparts
Good grief. Had no idea. Will check the links you shared. Thanks for the input.
Mark Level
I think there is one error in my recent post– Weiss’ “Free Press” rarely reaches 10,000, not 100,000 views. Not popular, not influential, but boosted to Fame and Fortune due to billionaires who want to exterminate an indigenous population in Palestine. Oh, also for fairness– County Highway was very well written. Kind of has a Bill Buckley gloss around it, oh they’re not David Duke, they are intelligent and well-educated sharing their racism and hate.
someofparts
Can’t look at County Highway without subscription
someofparts
Became a Gore Vidal fan in my teens because his smiling evisceration of Buckley was a joy to watch. Buckley getting so frustrated at his utter inability to outsmart Vidal that his face got red and he practically drooled. A memory that my friends and I still remember fondly to this day.
mago
I’ve commented here before about Taibbi and his turncoat ways. Kirn is a died in the wool Zionist and genocide apologist. I’ve read that his sympathies were formed from his hippie kibbutz days. I don’t care about that. These two are indeed toxic. Thanks for the call out Mark.
bruce wilder
This nation is based on genocide, slavery and colonial violence, both military and economic. Right now we are in the middle of the last push for total domination of the nation by the mad Ahabs who have always misruled this place.
And based as well on an aspiration to be an exception among nations, to be better. There’s a fashion among liberals — always the ignorant know-it-alls — to decry “exceptionalism” as a pretentious fraud while, of course, never lifting a finger to make the country “exceptional”, to realize something of its exceptional aspirations. The successor ideology embraces original sin and revels in bearing the mark of Cain to no better end than simply projecting and feeling personally superior amidst a fallen realm.
I do not feel confident that the U.S. will recover in its “fourth turning”. The irony that its egalitarian aspirations to making economic fairness prevail would be betrayed and subverted by its first African-American President is not lost on me. Maybe there’s some perverse symbolic justice in that — payback is indeed a bitch and the trouble with cynicism starts when it becomes a faith. The farcical epilogue of, say, “justice” as pronoun etiquette? — I am not laughing.
The poison of secrets and lies introduced by the CIA and the military-industrial complex into the bloodstream has become a leukemia of the national soul. What is wrong with Walter Kirn recalling the radical left violence of the 1960s is that he’s hiding the forest with a rhododendron. The forest was the War in Vietnam (the Heart of Darkness and the bonfire of industrial-scale violence) — the Party of anti-imperialism abandoning its Atlantic Charter commitments from the outset of WWII embarking on a colonial restoration because it was afraid of repeating the political consequences of “losing China”. And, of course, they were outflanked in their perfidy by Nixon Going to China.
The Narrative of World War II, built originally by idealists out of the wreckage of the Wilsonian War to End All Wars, was very powerful even when hijacked by the likes of sociopaths like Allen Dulles and Bonner Fellers. It proved the power of Narrative when Radio was new and television barely a babe. It found its last true believers, ironically, in The Project for a New American Century, putting a bust of Winston Churchill in the Lesser Bush’s Oval Office.
Where Kirn drove to is: “. . . we have a civil rights oriented anti-war right wing now. It means it’s not the right wing I grew up with.” Populism is shacked up with America First and Christian Nationalism now, it seems.
It is not the right wing I grew up with either, but I look around in vain for the remains of the reality-based community of good will I once aspired to be a political ally of. Those of you who think you can reliably judge and shun the evil people on one issue and be left with anyone morally reliable on every — any —other issue are going to be disappointed. The Political Spectrum is a shifting kaleidoscope, shards of colored glass falling into ever new random alignments. A lot of lies and strategic adaptation lubricating the shifting.
As for Taibbi’s vow of silence on Israeli genocide, I would rather he do that than have an opinion on everything. He may well have economic considerations as well. A lot of people are being threatened and penalized, in case you haven’t noticed. I would not want to martyr myself or my family. Again, silence is more honorable, imho, than lies. There are plenty of professional and amateur opinion havers making noise on any number of subjects with no scruples at all about moral judgment or accurate reporting.
Hiero
Normies I know didn’t even know who tf Kirk was and after being forced to find out, most of them don’t care – another school shooting but got somebody popular who was like a Rush Limbaugh wierdo – so what. Back to the playoffs.
I had a few posts on my feeds from righties talking about “war”. I really dunno who they believe the war is going to be between, they believe in something that mostly isn’t real in USA.
I used to be an enormous fan but Taibbi has become boomer slop tbfh. Eric Salzman’s articles on Racket are worth maintaining a free sub (he covers what Taibbi came to fame on and the bonehead chuds there routinely think it’s Matt writing the articles). Sorry if this offends, I held on for a long time but his content just turned to shitty old man belly-aching, as did the community there.
different clue
Header: The One Hundred Dollar Grocery Challenge.
Some time ago I commented with a video of someone showing how little food and stuff that $100 would buy. I think he made this video in Walmart but I can’t remember for sure.
So I decided to see what I could get for $100 at one of my favorite stores here in the Ann Arbor Food Jungle . . . the Peoples’ Food Co-op. I didn’t look for “the cheapest” of everything, I looked for things I knew I would actually consistently eat without being bored or upset. So I looked for cheapish things I would consistently eat and noted down their prices per amount purchased. I can give all the price details if people want, and if people ask, that is what I will do.
So, for a hundred dollars, I could have gotten a 3lb. bag of gala apples, a 500ml bottle of Jovial brand e.v. olive oil, a 12 oz bottle of SanJ low sodium tamari sauce, 3 pounds each of millet, buckwheat, oats and black lentils; a 3lb bag of Michigan carrots on special sale, 3 oz. of pink Himmalayan salt, 10 of the standard small cans of Field Day organic tomato paste, and 3 lb. of organic red cabbage. This would have brought me to spending $98.04.
What to buy with the remaining 94 cents? The co-op has a scale which lets us weigh things like dried herbs and spices in increments of 1/100th of a pound. So I would very carefully weigh out and calculate just under 94 cents worth of dried oregano and there would be my $100 spent on food.
But wait! I realized that our local “healthy lifestyling” magazine supplement given away for free here and there contains a coupon for . . . ” $10.00 off of any purchase of $100 or more.” So that means I could “buy” ten dollars MORE stuff with that coupon and still have to only give them the original single hundred dollars that I had, in this example challenge.
So, to redeem that coupon, I could buy a $3.99 bag of Michigan Yellow ( on the inside) potatoes and then carefully weigh out enough fresh garlic bulbs to come in at just under that ” ten more dollar” coupon.
All that stuff would be enough to meet my yes-I-can-live-like-this food needs for a little while, assuming I would not know when or from where my next hundred dollars might be coming from.
But this would only work because I already know about these things and how to cook simple basic food with them, because I have a place to live and store food and cook, and so on. IF the people making these ” I can’t believe the prices” videos have a place to live, they can learn what I know and do what I do. If they are capable of that learning.
All this knowledge does nothing for the homeless and very little for people living in food deserts and food junkyards. Their food-survival struggle would be harder.
Mark Level
Sorry Kirn is paywalled at County Highway. But anyone who wants to see what a monster he is (& evidently has been for many years) should just watch the full DD piece. Near the end their is the Taibbi-Kirn “defense” of Israeli Apartheid. Taibbi’s not quite as brain-dead as he feigns, he tries to be agreeable with Kirn’s Colonel Kurtz-like foaming at the mouth that all the “Savages” be exterminated, but some slight remnant of decency makes him back off a bit– or not? He does admit that Israel practices Apartheid, then he says some dreck to the extent that “If that’s what’s needed to preserve the “Jewish people” maybe Apartheid is justified.
By “Jewish people” here he means only Israelis of course, not the millions of Jews living around the world who are not hate-filled Zionist lunatics. I think Dobular and Weiss are so good on this issue as they understand that the Zionist entity deliberately whips up anti-Semitism around the world to force more Jews to join the Settler-Colonial entity, and how much harm the rise of anti-Semitism will be to their community, even living in the US. Neither seems to be particularly (if at all) religious, but like other anti-Zionist Jews (Max Blumenthal, Nora Barrows-Friedman, Norman Finkelstein and too many others to mention) they are unwilling to sacrifice their humanity to Tribalism. The Israelis may pull off their mass extermination in Gaza (I heard just today that Gaza City is being invaded and torn to shreds) but they can’t exterminate the Palestinian people globally. There is a huge diaspora across the region, in Europe, the US, Latin America and elsewhere, so someday there will be justice and a regaining of the stolen land, if only at a very high price.
As to Taibbi, for whatever reasons (maybe blackmail or threats against his family) as Dobular states he has made himself irrelevant and will soon be an Invisible Podcaster. Better to be a full-on monster like David Pakman, who still has a huge audience and is secretly funded by billionaires. Matt will soon have the popularity of niche folks like Civil War re-enactors or fans of Sean Penn’s ouvre, or that faux-hillbilly clown “Beau of the 5th Column.” Pretty sad for someone who once had potential.
different clue
Fascinating little article, titled: ” Trump Says ‘Smart People Don’t Like Me’
READ BETWEEN THE LINES “. Here is the link.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-says-smart-people-dont-like-me/
Now if someone could inject into his brain the following phrase . . . ” Good people don’t like me.”
GramSci
@Oakchair
Thanks for the link to the Plotkin deposition. It took me the better part of a day to read the whole 400 page deposítion, but it was one of my more rewarding recent reads. Defense counsel Aaron Siri does a an admirable job of exposing the rot at the center of American medicine, while Plotkin agilely pleads “the greatest good for the greatest number”.
The case may have resulted in a hung jury (don’t know; don’t care), but the deposition is an astonishing portrait of the moral paralysis of USian institutions, and packed with incisive commentary on the nature of vaccine science. I highly recommend it to other readers.
Because of the discursive, sometimes deliberately deceptive narrative flow of depositions, I’ve outlined the arguments on my toy website, giving the interested reader a five-minute overview of this tortuous deposition:
https://www.thoughtandlanguage.com/~tal2/25/0010-dr_stanley_plotkin_vs_anti_vax_lawyer_2017_.htl
Hiero
” silence is more honorable, imho, than lies” yes
Curt Kastens
Brian Berletic at his very best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgZXwXIVZTk
different clue
Apparently someone somewhere invented the concept of a “challenge” between a hundred Brittanians and a hundred Americans to achieve something involving a “W”. I don’t know what that challenge is/was.
But I guess some people do. Here is an American posting a funny video describing how she would draw upon America’s vast cultural-demographic diversity to assemble a team of 30 Americans who could take the “W” ( whatever that is) from the hundred Brittanians. I thought it was really funny, and we need some really funny in these really unfunny times.
It is titled: ” Still not a fair fight though, esp with the Cab driver from New York “.
Here is the link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1nhl6z0/still_not_a_fair_fight_though_esp_with_the_cab/
different clue
And here’s an uplifting eco-video, titled: ” Dragonflies eating mosquitoes that come out of a sewage well. ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1nhhv8f/dragonflies_eating_mosquitoes_that_come_out_of_a/
There must be a perennial wetland reliable enough to produce those dragonflies and nearby enough to where those dragonflies could reach that sewage well. Protect your friendly neighborhood wetland or bio-fertile water feature.
different clue
Here is a little posting by Nina Turner, titled: ” The American people can be United; let’s push for what we can agree on. ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1nhmtud/the_american_people_can_be_united_lets_push_for/
A way to push for that would be to start a Least Common Denominator Party running on those three things. Vote LCD for the 3 Simple Things. Maybe someone will give it a try over the next few decades, if we last that long.
different clue
Here , from the InterestingAsFuck subreddit is a light-hearted video called ” An anteater playing with its caretaker.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nhk20n/an_anteater_playing_with_its_caretaker/
Curt Kastens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GTkK_khhBM
The link above is about the history of the guillotine. The story begins in 1757 with an attmept on the life of the French King.
The would be assassin was tortured to death. That led to a young man think about a more humane way to enact the death penalty.
Thinking of a more humane way to perform a death penalty might have been a step forward in the 18th Century. But by the time the 20th century was underway it was a step backwards.
By the 20th century there is a lot of temptation for those in high positions of industrialized societies to take part in instigating unneccessary wars as a means of obtaining personal wealth.
The risks for such people are extremely small and the potential rewards are very great.
It is a no brainer that many people will engage in such extraordinairly dispicable behavior. The threat of a quick execution would certianly not be any kind of deterent at all. The threat of life imprisonment might not be any deterent either as that will just be a new arena for such psycopaths and sociopaths to play their games.
The threat of torture may also not be sufficient deterence either because those who sit in p laces that have the capability to stir up such trouble will no doubt thing that the chances of ever being held accountable for their behavior are zero or close to zero so what ever risk there is is worth taking.
But the threat of facing torture may be a deterent for some people not to help those trying to instigate unneccesary wars. AND the ability to torture those who have caused massive unneccessary suffering may motivate would be rebels who would not otherwise be motivated to take the risks neccesary to bring to an end a well entrenched continuing criminal enterprise that has siezed the institutions of a national government, only to watch a court system grant mercy on the members of the cults that cause world chaos.
Curt Kastens
OK,
Because everyone is guilty and everyone is innocent, but some people are more guilty and less innocent that others, where would one draw the line on torture?
Easy smeezy, the most guilty 10,000 people from the most guilty countries get tortured for sure. Then the the next 100,000 most guilty people would be subject to a lottery in which 10% would be subject to torture, 10% just like in good old Roman Times.
That means world wide 20,000 people would be tortuted for carrrying out policies designed to maintain (led by the US) global western hegemony. If these people escape being tortured they have escaped justice.
The top 10,000 people will be selected from the most guilty countries which are the USA, the rest of the NATO countries, including Turkey. The middle eastern countries of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Katar. The Asian countries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Phillipines. And last but not least Australia, maybe New Zealand too.
A commission of 5 people from the Russian Intellegence services, along with 5 from China, 3 from Iran, 3 from Venezuela, 3 from Cuba and myself should be on the commission which would be a condition that the axis of resistence would impose on the western empire should the west ever seek peace. A pair of positions on the commission for for Patrick Lancaster and Brain Berlitic will also be saved if they have any interest in serving on it. Or the could delegate someone to represent them.
No, of course I do not expect this to happen in this simulation. But I expect it to happen where the simulation that we are stuck inside of is being run.
Curt Kastens
One thing that has really disappointed me over the last 3 years is that German Intellegence agencies have not managed to assert German independence.
Are these agencies filled with traitors or idiots?
different clue
Here’s a display of amazing knife-slicing skills which mago and possibly others might enjoy.
” One of the most impressive slicing skills I have ever seen ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1nj4fyi/one_of_the_most_impressive_slicing_skills_i_have/