Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
As depicted in numerous temple wall paintings, Ramesses II accompanied his father Seti I on military campaigns as early as age nine. In Year 5 of his reign, he led his troops through the desert to battle the Hittites (originally from Turkey) who occupied Syria. With four divisions of 5,000 men each (including countless chariots with archers), he took town after town with no resistance. The logistics were very difficult because they had to carry all their own water and food. Although the Hittites outnumbered the Egyptians by two to one, the battle ended in a standoff. Ramsesses II refused a peace treaty but accepted a truce.
On his return to Egypt, he moved the administrative capitol from Thebes (Wassit) in southern Egypt to P-Ramses (Kantir) in the delta because it was more strategic for attacking other Mediterranean countries.
He also carved a temple out of a mountain just south of Aswan (in Nubia) fronted by four 60-foot statues of Ramsses II.* Inside, frescoes depict the pharaoh battling the Nubians and Syrians. In addition to completing his fathers temple at Abidos (and carving his own name on the door), he built a third temple at Abu Sendil.
Hi great wife Nephratare gave him five sons and two daughters. By his other wives and concubines, he had 100 children altogether.
Living well into his eighties, Ramesses the Great ruled 67 years. Hyawasoff, a son by his second wife Isetnofret, became the high priest of Memphis and the world’s first archeologist. He restored many of the great pyramids, as well a labeling them with the names of the kings who built them.
Merataba, Ramesses’s 13th son, would succeed him.
*The sculptors were suspended from scaffolding at the top to carve them. When the Aswan dam was built, UNESCO moved the statues to higher ground by breaking them into massive blocks and reassembling them.
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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (Photo by Reuters)
Press TV
A suggestion by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that Western allies lift the ban on Ukraine’s use of NATO supplied weapons against targets on Russian territory has been received with reluctance in a number of EU countries, including Italy.
On Monday, on the sidelines of a European Council meeting in Brussels which also had a session dedicated to the brutal Israeli war on Gaza, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani once again expressed Rome’s opposition to the use of NATO weaponry on Russian soil.
We have made a commitment since the start of the Ukraine war.
We will make sure that the military equipment sent by Italy is being used inside Ukraine.
We are not at war with Russia. We are defending Ukraine’s independence.
It is not Stoltenberg who makes these kinds of calls. It’s a collective process.
Our goal is to reach peace. Against the backdrop of this stalemate, we want Putin to sit at the negotiating table.
Antonio Tajani, Deputy Prime Minister of Italy
Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has so far been an enthusiastically staunch supporter of Ukraine, has stated she’s against Kiev using Western supplied weapons for strikes inside Russian territory.
Meloni has warned that the West must be very prudent, arguing that Europe is not on the verge of expanding the Ukraine war.
Italy’s other Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini also expressed this disagreement with the US-led NATO secretary general’s position.
Italy is not at war with anyone and if it was right to help Ukraine militarily, then at the same time, it is out of the question to lift the ban on key to strike military targets in Russia.
I’m against sending even a single Italian soldier to fight in Ukraine. Stoltenberg should either retract his statement, apologize or resign.
Tiberio Graziani, Geopolitical Analyst:
Provided that every word said in the attempt to de-escalate tensions is welcomed, it must be said that Italian top officials’ declarations also have to be read in view of the upcoming European elections.
All three of Italy’s government coalition parties are facing electoral difficulties, and their leaders are perfectly aware that a large majority of Italians are against war, both in Ukraine and in Gaza.
Also on Monday, Israel’s brutal war on Gaza was touched upon by Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto following Tel Aviv’s strike on tents hosting displaced people in Rafah, which has killed dozens of Palestinians.
Crosetto declared that the situation in Rafah is no longer justifiable and that all states have agreed that Israel has to stop, Crosetto also warned that sowing hatred will affect Israel’s future generations.
Guantánamo Bay prison is a monstrosity where hundreds of suspected terrorists have been held and tortured for years, many without being charged of any crime.
To keep their humanity, many of the inmates produced paintings that were featured at a May 2 screening premiere event in Beverly Hills of I Am Gitmo, a feature film about the human rights abuses that occurred at Guantánamo.
The paintings are also currently being spotlighted in Burbank, California, at Cinema Libre Studio, which produced I Am Gitmo, and have been shown at the European Parliament.
Display of Guantánamo Bay prisoners’ paintings at film premiere of I Am Gitmo in Beverly Hills on May 2. [Source: Photo courtesy of Philippe Diaz]
Directed by Philippe Diaz, whose previous film credits include a documentary on poverty narrated by Martin Sheen, I Am Gitmo, spotlights the case of an Egyptian who was tortured for years at Guantánamo after being captured in a bounty program in which the U.S. military paid Afghan villagers $2,000 to $25,000 to turn in terrorist suspects.
The CIA never checked on the guilt of these suspects.
The U.S. military fabricated evidence to make it look like captives taken in the bounty program were guilty while telling the public that Guantánamo Bay housed the worst terrorists.
After 22 years of operation, only four inmates have been convicted of any crimes. The facility today still houses more than 30 inmates, many of whom are geriatrics suffering from serious mental health deterioration owing to the years of isolation and torture.
In part as a form of therapy and a way to pass their time productively, detainees began to make art almost as soon as they arrived at Guantánamo, carving designs in Styrofoam cups and using tea powder for ink.
Initially, the art was destroyed. The work that survives was made after the detainees were permitted to take an art class and give some of their pieces to their lawyers.
Each work outside the camp bore a stamp reading “Approved by U.S. Forces” on its reverse, signaling that it was scrutinized by authorities before it was cleared to leave Guantánamo. Such artworks have brought worldwide attention to Guantánamo in multiple exhibitions since 2017 (visit www.hrtlaw.org/art or www.artfromguantanamo.com for more information).
The artists represented were all cleared for release from Guantánamo; none was ever charged with a crime.
Most of the paintings are non-political, though one (featured at the beginning of this article) has an American flag covered by prison bars, and another, by Yemeni Sabri al-Qurashi, depicted a scene from Guantánamo.
Another of al-Qurashi’s paintings showed the Statue of Liberty in front of a razor-wire fence, suggesting that U.S. was not actually a beacon of liberty.
A number of inmate paintings depict the waters surrounding Guantánamo Bay prison that were blocked from the inmates’ view. The sea “means freedom that no one can control or own, freedom for everyone,” said former Guantánamo detainee Mansoor Adayfi.
The yearning from freedom and miscarriage of justice are the theme of paintings by Khalid Qasim, a Yemeni Guantánamo prisoner who acknowledged once meeting Osama bin Laden but said that bin Laden gave him only a passing greeting.
Another interesting painting by Ahmed Rabbani depicts a beautiful mosque at a distance behind a wall, the theme being that the beauty of the palace was at a great distance and out of reach from the artist who was stuck at Guantánamo behind the wall.
Painting by Guantánamo inmate of a mosque visible only from a distance. [Source: artfromguantanamo.com]
In “Binoculars Pointing at the Moon,” Rabbani, who is Pakistani, depicts large tubular telescopes projected from the tops of multi-story buildings toward an enormous, luminous moon.
According to M. Neelika Jayawardane, a professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, the telescopes signify the attempts by the U.S. government and its interrogation apparatus to render the prisoners controllable under interrogation and constant surveillance.
Muhammad Ansi, a Yemeni detained at Guantánamo for almost 15 years before being released to Oman in January 2017, pictured an unseen man sticking flowers through a prison window, his hands yearning for escape and flowers representing a peace offering.
Ansi often symbolically represented his family members in his work, with his siblings sometimes represented as flowers and his mother mourning for him in the form of a disembodied eye.
Ansi additionally painted a portrait of a drowned Syrian refugee whose body had washed ashore. The image was based on a well-known 2015 photograph of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old Syrian Kurd, whose body washed ashore.
This latter painting points to vast human suffering in the Middle East, bred in large part by U.S. policies of which Ansi was also a victim.
There is hope that the exhibits of paintings, combined with the film I Am Gitmo, will lead to an upsurge in demand to close Guantánamo Bay prison once and for all and to hold top Bush administration officials legally accountable for their crimes.
Trump has just been convicted of a felony without specification of what the crime really was.
How to manipulate the jurors. That Trump committed a misdemeanor by falsifying records is beyond doubt.
But that misdemeanor has expired. Only as a “conspiracy” could the falsification of records become a felony. The DA (prosecutor) served the jury 3 possible conspiracies, but proved none of them.
The jury agreed on the falsification of records, and a conviction for felony was pronounced by the judge by skipping the necessary intermediate evidence for a conspiracy.
For background, a ”misdemeanor” is a minor crime with no more than one year of prison – a felony is a grave crime of more than one year of prison.
A misdemeanor in the form of falsification of records is clear, but that misdemeanor has since long expired. Therefore, the prosecutor’s problem was to present evidence for a graver crime, a felony, in order to achieve something. These two issues have to be separated – the proof of incorrect book-keeping (minor misdemeanor, too late for jail-time), and the allegation for felony, claiming that the misdemeanor intended to conceal a graver (jail-carrying) crime. The latter, proving intent to conceal a much graver crime, was not achieved.
Normally a felony conviction would be politically fatal for a candidate appearing on the ballot in five months. But normally a prosecutor wouldn’t have brought this case. Mr. Bragg, an elected Democrat, ran for office as the man ready to take on Mr. Trump.
By the time Mr. Bragg showed up on the scene, the Stormy business was old enough that Mr. Trump couldn’t be hit with misdemeanor falsification of records, because the statute of limitations had expired. To elevate these counts into felonies, the DA said Mr. Trump cooked the books with an intent to commit or cover up a second offense.
What crime was that? At first Mr. Bragg was cagey. He eventually settled on a New York election law, rarely enforced, that prohibits conspiracies to promote political candidates “by unlawful means.”
Yet what “unlawful means” did this alleged conspiracy use? The DA’s argument was that there were three:
First, the hush money was effectively an illegally large donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Second, more business filings were falsified, including bank records for Mr. Cohen’s wire transfer to Ms. Daniels.
Third, false statements were made to tax authorities, since Mr. Trump’s repayment of Mr. Cohen was structured as income and “grossed up” to cover the taxes he would need to pay on it.
In some ways this Russian nesting doll structure, to use another analogy, defies logic.
Did Mr. Trump falsify business records in 2017 to cover up an illegal conspiracy to elect him in 2016, whose unlawful means included false information in Mr. Cohen’s tax return for 2017?
There was hardly any direct evidence about Mr. Trump’s state of mind. Federal prosecutors squeezed a guilty plea out of Mr. Cohen but notably didn’t pursue Mr. Trump. One news report said the feds worried that his “lack of basic knowledge of campaign finance laws would make it hard to prove intent.”
A help to Mr. Bragg’s prosecution is that the jurors were instructed that as long as they were unanimous that Mr. Trump was guilty of falsifying business records to aid or cover up an illegal conspiracy to get him elected, they didn’t all have to agree about which theory of the “unlawful means” they found persuasive.
Mr. Trump may be a cad, this conviction isn’t disqualifying for a second term in the White House.
The conviction sets a precedent of using legal cases, no matter how sketchy, to try to knock out political opponents, including former Presidents. Mr. Trump has already vowed to return the favor. See this.
The conviction of Trump for felony hangs upon whether Trump fiddled with his book-keeping intended to commit or cover up a felony, a larger crime – a list of no less than 3 possible felony crimes were presented by the DA (prosecutor) to the jurors. And the judge instructed the jurors that they did not have to agree on any of them, just that the book-keeping (for which itself he cannot be convicted) was not correct. A procedure, which probably goes against US federal law, which requires jurors to agree on all key elements of a possible crime.
You just cannot lawfully say that Mr. X intended to commit one of three suggested crimes, we cannot prove which, but pick your choice, even if all of you disagree.
The New York Times, the Party-paper and mother of Democrat opinion, however, has no problem with such an unlawful conviction for an unknown crime out of 3 suggested and unproven crimes, and tells the World that this is perfectly okay. The Democrats just enjoy themselves in their solarium-sun.
Reckoning Coming to Democrats
But this rigged conviction of Trump will have a reckoning, which the Democrats will not want.
First of all, Trump will probably still get elected, and the Democrats may themselves have transformed Trump to their own worst fears.
But not only Trump is upset by the Democrats’ blatant rigging of the US justice system, where the custody of secret papers is only a crime if Trump does it, but not if Biden does the same, and where contact about Biden family-members’ involvement in corruption in Ukraine in the same way is only illegal, if Trump talks with the Ukrainian president, but not if Biden talks with the Ukrainian president in the same object just from the Biden-family’s side.
Republican Tulsi Gabbard, who is not a “MAGA” follower, has condemned Biden for abusing the US justice system in the following stark words:
Joe Biden has turned this country into a banana republic.
A country, where those in power use the legal powers and the law enforcement against their opponents.
By now even the dimmest of bulbs from the world of American and European politics, journalism, and think tanks have realized that the Ukrainian project is dead as a fencepost. And yet journalists have to fill space with verbiage in order to run ads, think-tankers have to pretend that their think tanks still have some magic mind juice to sell and, most importantly, politicians have to somehow find a way to get their sorry selves reelected, or at least to not get thrown to the ground and booted in the ribs, repeatedly and from both the right and the left, by their endlessly frustrated, infuriated constituents.
How can they compensate for the infinitely sad result of throwing endless money and weapons at the stupendously corrupt Kiev regime? At this point, the Ukraine has no industry, a largely destroyed army and a political system that consists of just one party called “Servant of the People” eponymous with the sitcom in which the former Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky starred prior to becoming president. But his acting career is long over and so is his political career now that his five-year presidential term ran out on May 20 of this year. He is now just a squatter in the presidential office.
The Ukraine is bankrupt. It is missing roughly a half of its population, who by now have either decided that they are Russian or have dispersed across Europe. Its energy grid is unlikely to survive the next winter. Most of its military-age men who are fit to serve are dead. It is a rotting corpse of a country and it is now infested with worms: a thriving subculture of people feeding strategically important information to the Russians in an effort to ingratiate themselves with them.
A case in point: just yesterday a Russian rocket strike demolished a recently, expensively rebuilt underground center at which Ukrainian F-16 pilots were being trained for their missions by mostly Belgian and Dutch personnel. Their mission details were leaked along with everything else: a squadron of F-16s would take off from an airfield in Poland, land in the Ukraine for refueling, then fly into Russian airspace to launch rockets. After the Russian rocket strike, the site was littered with several hundred corpses and hundreds more severely wounded were being evacuated to Poland and Germany. That is just a particularly striking example, but there are many others: almost the entire Ukrainian military, including at least a dozen high-ranking Ukrainian army officers, are eager to make nice with the Russian side in preparation for what’s coming up. Very few of them are dumb enough to want to die for Zelensky, the political corpse in chief.
Given this situation, what could possibly qualify as any sort of victory as far as European and American politicians are concerned — because, you see, they do need some sort of victory in order to get reelected in all of the numerous elections that are coming up shortly. One bright idea is to sell the Ukraine’s decomposing corpse to Russia, burdening the Russians with the responsibility of reanimating it. There are a few problems with this plan. First, how does one distinguish giving something to Russia and Russia simply taking it without permission? Second, what would entice Russia to offer anything in return for graciously accepting the Ukraine? Third, and perhaps most importantly, what could possibly compel Russia to work out any sort of deal, and to do so in enough of a hurry to allow it to positively influence the elections in Europe and the US that are coming up?
What the Europeans and the Americans are finding particularly maddening is that Russia appears to be sending what to them must seem as mixed signals. On the one hand, the Russian leadership (Putin and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov both) expresses willingness to negotiate. On the other hand, Putin endlessly brings up the matter of Russia being fooled-jipped-swindled as a result of previous negotiations: the promise to Gorbachev of NATO not expanding to the east; the Minsk agreements which both Angela Merkel and François Hollande freely admitted to have been cynical ploys to buy time to train and arm the Ukrainians; the İstanbul agreements with the Ukrainian delegation which were close to being signed but were then cancelled by Boris Johnson. Americans have trouble understanding why Putin continues to bring up such fiascos; after all, being played for a sucker is, to an American, an embarrassment that one should not be eager to broadcast far and wide.
What Americans fail to understand is that Putin comes from a different culture. In Russia, most deals aren’t even committed to paper — a simple handshake is usually enough. If a deal is signed, it is not a bloated document stuffed with small-print legalese, as with the pathologically litigious Americans, but a simple statement of intent that fits on a single page. This has changed in recent years and there is now more legal boilerplate to deal with. But in the 1990s, which were a formative period for Putin, law and order in Russia were largely missing and what prevailed was something called “ponyatia” and can be loosely translated as “mob rules.”
Suppose that you were a Russian businessman trying to run a business in Russia in the 1990s. You struck a deal with a supplier, made an advance payment to reserve a share of production and then the supplier reneged on the deal, absconded with the money and laughed at you. What you would do in response is visit every single one of his clients and tell them what happened. The untrustworthy supplier would probably never see another advance payment again and also lose some clients simply from it becoming known that he is not a man of his word. This is rather different from Americans who, given their perverse notions of success, would perhaps only feel proud to be swindled by such a successful con artist.
What the Americans and the Europeans can’t seem to get through their heads is that by complaining about being repeatedly fooled-jipped-swindled by them, Putin has ruined their reputations once and for all. In a rapidly changing world, the “rules-based international order” that American and European politicians keep prattling about has gone altogether missing and all that is left is personal integrity and the good reputations of specific leaders.
The latest efforts by both the Americans and the Europeans to steal Russia’s sovereign reserves and give the money to the Ukrainians (to steal) has plunked a massive gravestone on top of their reputations: they are now regarded not as sharp operators but as mere common thieves. Their failure to (so far) go through with the theft is only compounding the problem by also making them look like cowards: they’d steal that money in a heartbeat but fear the consequences. Who in the world would possibly want to trust them after that performance?
Their inability to grasp the situation is not necessarily a problem. If they were to abandon their efforts to put some lipstick on the Ukrainian pig, they might hurry up and stir up some additional trouble somewhere else. For instance, they could turbocharge their plan to destroy Moldova and absorb it into Romania, thus shifting it from being constitutionally neutral to being NATO territory. They have already made some preparations along these lines: banning the use of both Russian and Moldavian languages, installing a puppet president (Maya Sandu, a Romanian national) and corrupting the court system and much of the rest of the government to serve foreign interests, all while driving the rapidly dwindling population of Moldova into destitution.
Paying the hush money was not in itself illegal but the prosecution successfully argued that it was designed to influence the outcome of the election — a violation of election laws and, argued the prosecutors, the underlying crime.
This is highly contentious territory — especially since the trial heard next to nothing about campaign law violations — which is why the guilty verdict will be immediately appealed. Trump’s defense lawyers have 30 days to prepare an appeal.
Guilty on 34 counts sounds worse than it is. It only refers to the number of installments by which Trump arranged for his then lawyer and sleazy fixer, Michael Cohen, to be reimbursed for paying Daniels.
The prosecution argued convincingly that Trump and his people had covered up these repayments to hide their true purpose. But doctoring corporate book-keeping entries under New York law is only a misdemeanor or minor crime, usually involving just a slap on the wrist.
It was linking the payments to a breach of campaign finance law which elevated the matter to proper criminality. For many observers the link is highly tenuous. It was barely discussed during the trial and nobody testified that such a link even existed.
Those salivating at the prospect of Trump now doing jail time will have to be patient.
Trump will not be held in remand pending sentencing. He is hardly a flight risk. It was a white-collar crime involving someone with no previous convictions. Jail would be an unusual outcome.
But then this whole trial has been unusual.
Sentencing will not take place until July 11, when Trump could face anything from probation to four years behind bars.
But even if the judge decides on jail, the guilty verdict will be appealed and Trump will remain free until the appeal process is concluded.
The CIA-linked Cicero Institute’s campaign to make it illegal to be homeless.
A confluence of horrific policies is converging that threatens the freedom of homeless people in the United States. Governors and big city mayors across the western United States are demanding the “right” to drive the homeless from view and have pushed for the Supreme Court to remove the Martin v. Boise restrictions on criminalizing the unhoused.
The case of Johnson v. Grants Pass, based on the Martin decision that bans as cruel and unusual punishment the charging of people criminally if there is no shelter available, was heard on April 22, 2024, at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
The Supreme Court’s decision is likely to be announced by the end of June 2024, potentially impacting a growing number of cities and states which have passed harsh laws making it a crime to sleep outside. At the same time the number of Americans becoming homeless is increasing.
“A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year,” Forbes magazine reported in April 2024. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there was an 11% increase in the number of Americans who became homeless in 2023. This crisis is likely to increase and America’s intelligence agencies are among those willing to provide a solution.
One such organization is the CIA-linked Cicero Institute that is pushing a “solution” to the homeless crisis that could lead to governments coercing people into FEMA camps. The Cicero Institute provides a “Model Bill” it calls “Reducing Street Homelessness Act” to state and city legislators, which the institute’s website notes is legislation based on Missouri’s HB 1606 from 2022.
Billionaire Joe Lonsdale started the Cicero Institute in 2016. His institute focuses on government policy and the problem of homelessness. He also co-founded CIA contractor Palantir Technologies with several others, including PayPal’s Peter Thiel. He also co-founded Addepar, OpenGov and is a partner at 8VC, his venture capital firm. Palantir’s first backer was the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel.
Lonsdale’s Palantir is an AI military contractor known for three projects: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Apollo, and Palantir Foundry. Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and the Department of Defense. They are providing help to Israel in targeting Palestinians in Gaza.
Google and Amazon are also collaborating with U.S. defense contractors like Palantir to migrate Israel’s war-fighting capabilities onto their cloud services and, additionally, are helping to reshape the battlefield in Ukraine by improving drone-strike capabilities and targeting.
The Nation magazine reports, “As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s ‘work’ was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities—the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked [World Central Kitchen] aid vehicles.”
While Lonsdale’s Palantir is aiding in bombing Palestinians and eastern Ukrainians into homelessness, he is also coordinating a nationwide program to “solve” the homeless problem here in the United States. The Cicero Institute website offers “A New Way on Homelessness.”
“The United States has a growing homelessness problem—and bad policies at the local, state, and federal level exacerbate that problem.”
“For nearly two decades, failed, ideologically driven policies promulgated by HUD and embraced by local bureaucrats and activists have resulted in more and more spending on homeless services—for worse and worse results. That must change.”
“The Cicero Institute offers the strongest reform package to state leaders who want to fix bad incentives, hold service agencies accountable for results, and get the homeless the help they need instead of doubling down on failure.”
His signature policy change is the criminalization of those forced to sleep outside:
“1. States should ban unauthorized street camping.”
“Street camps are dangerous to the public and the vulnerable homeless alike. They are often hotbeds of violence, especially against women and children—especially those who are homeless themselves.”
“The public widely supports enforcing ordinances against dangerous street camps and moving individuals into emergency shelters.”
So far, the Cicero Institute has placed ten bills in at least nine state legislatures: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and Wisconsin. Texas became the first state to pass such a law in 2021; Tennessee and Missouri followed in 2022.
Cynthia Griffith wrote about Wisconsin’s Assembly Bill 689 and Senate Bill 669 on the Invisible People website: “Concentration camps and secret committees, out-of-state lobbyists, and flat-out lies—as unbelievable and terrifying as it sounds, this is a glimpse into what’s happening behind closed doors in 2024 Wisconsin.”
The Cicero Institute website reported a recent “success”: “This morning [March 20, 2024] in Miami Beach, Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365 / SB 1530, which will make Florida a leading state in the fight against the failed homelessness policies that have wreaked havoc on so many American cities. HB 1365 will ban street camping and upend how Florida provides treatment and help to the homeless—and holds providers and cities accountable for failure.”
In early April 2024 this movement against America’s poorest people had another “victory” in its nationwide campaign to make it a crime to be homeless: Kentucky Bill HB 5—the “Safer Kentucky Act”—passed. The 78-page bill criminalizes homelessness and decriminalizes the use of deadly force against individuals engaging in unlawful camping. Under this law, “if a property owner believes an unhoused trespasser is attempting to commit a felony or attempting to dispossess them, they can shoot the homeless person.”
House Bill 5 would ban street encampments in most public areas except those that public officials designate. Those designated areas must also include basic sanitation services like hand-washing stations and bathrooms.
The penalty is a violation for the first offense and a Class B misdemeanor for the second offense.
It is not difficult to imagine under such a law that county jails will reach capacity very quickly and other accommodations will be required. With world leaders talking about world wars interning the ballooning population of those forced to break these laws, a Japanese internment-style solution will seem humane or, as the United States grows more desensitized to the horror of state repression, governments may opt for a more World War II Dachau-type “useless eater” removal. Nothing is beyond them.
While the CIA has been fomenting conflicts in Europe and Asia, was it also preparing a response to a homeless crisis in America it knew their wars would cause? There sure could have been some coordination between intelligence agencies but that would not necessarily be the case. This system has its own logic guided by generations of aristocracy who believe they know what is best for all of us.
I would not be surprised if we learn that there were some in the intelligence industry who gamed this circus of cruelty. I know the mentality of the Victoria Nulands, Antony Blinkens, Henry Kissingers and Zbigniew Brzezinskis of the world who fashioned themselves as the special ones anointed by their sponsors in the task of being the masters of the universe.
My mother’s father, John Vanderpool Phelan, was a member of this special universe, a college football hero who played for the Crimson while studying at Harvard Law. He was caring and taught me the “real politics” that made the world turn with the intention of providing me with the foundation needed to join these hallowed ranks. I understand how the genocide of Gaza is possible. He had no qualms with inflicting horrific terror on millions of people for “a good reason” and that one “good reason” was always defending the interests of the oligarchs and their corporations. There are no limits to what these people believe is worth doing if it protects their economic system.
My grandfather was not shy about recounting his days directing the world’s most deadly bombing campaign, the firebombing of Tokyo or “Operation Meetinghouse.” His 63 framed 8 by 10 black and white photos that he took from 20,000 feet to gauge the campaign’s progress hung proudly in the den of his Needham, Massachusetts, home.
I watched him argue over the phone for using a nuclear weapon on Hanoi, demanding that his friends (Secretary of Defense) Robert McNamara and (Air Force General) Curtis LeMay “send a message” to Communist Russia and China by vaporizing North Vietnam’s capital.
During the days that I was watching my grandfather argue for a nuclear detonation, his friend LeMay was encouraging President Kennedy to implement the terror plot “Operation Northwoods,” a false-flag attack on a Miami shopping mall that would be blamed on Castro’s Cuba, thereby providing justification for a U.S. invasion of the island nation. In April 2024 FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that his concerns over terrorism are at “a whole other level,” suggesting another false flag that could open the door for greater police powers.
This spring the Supreme Court may rule in favor of the civil rights of the homeless, upholding the decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson that it is cruel and unusual punishment for people to face jail for being unable to secure housing indoors. On the other hand, in this political climate, a majority of Justices may find that it does not violate the U.S. Constitution and that cities and states will be free to jail Americans for failing to secure housing.
With the very real possibility of tens of thousands of families finding themselves homeless, flooding communities with people seeking shelter in their vehicles, doorways or in a cheap pup tent, municipalities may feel pressure to adopt bans on camping and institute “Obligation to Accept Shelter” laws that would justify the internment of America’s homeless. Tens of thousands of Americans may find themselves confined to FEMA camps on remote military bases or prison grounds. When the CIA is involved, there is nothing that is out of the question.
The Palestinian movement Hamas on Friday welcomed the proposal of US President Joe Biden on the ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
Earlier in the day, Biden said that Israel has offered Hamas a new three-phase proposal with a roadmap that would lead to an enduring cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip as well as the release of all hostages.
“The Hamas Islamic Resistance movement welcomes idea of the speech of US President Joe Biden … in his call for a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of occupying forces from the Gaza Strip, the reconstruction [of the Gaza Strip] and the exchange of prisoners,” the movement said in a statement.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres hopes the new proposal announced by US President Biden will achieve a permanent peace in Gaza, UN Spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
“For months the Secretary-General has been pushing for a ceasefire, full and unfettered humanitarian access, and the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held in Gaza. The Secretary-General strongly hopes that this will lead to an agreement by the parties for lasting peace,” Dujarric said on Friday in response to Biden’s announcement.
Ramesses I (1293-1291 BC) – founder of Dynasty XIX, a commoner and professional soldier who was in his sixties when he assumed the throne. Awarded unprecedented powers as vizier (prime minister) to Horemheb, the last pharaoh of Dynasty XVIII. He left no heirs.
Seti I (1291-1278 BC) – also a commoner who served as vizier to Rameses I. He was a follower of Set (sometime portrayed as the Egyptian god of Evil see The Ancient Egyptian Origin Myth). He conquered Kadish in Syria when it was controlled by Hittites) and used the booty and captives to construct many public buildings, including a new temple at Karnak (adding to 100-acre complex that was home to the god Amun.) He also built a temple at Adidos, where Isis buried Osiris’s body in the origin myth. The walls are decorated with ornate frescoes and the entire text of the Book of the Gates, which were the passwords a dead person had to recite to enter the afterlife.
By the XIXth dynasty the temple complex at Karnak also supported numerous workshops, catering to the needs of the Karnak priests (weaving their linen robes, preparing their food and manufacturing artifacts used in religious rituals). Off limits to commoners, each temple contained a holy of holies, which was the literal dwelling of the god (a statue cast in either gold or gilded bronz)e. Only priests were allowed to enter to feed dress, perfume and apply eye make-up to the gods.*
*At the founding of ancient Egypt, pharaohs performed all these religious rituals. As the Egyptian population grew, the pharaoh had to appoint priests to fulfill this role. (no religious calling was necessary nor any requirement to live a devout or moral life). Usually the position was hereditary, as were the plots of lands allotted to Egyptian priests.
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For decades, Israel has been “one of the club”, a proud member of the “good-guy countries”. A handful of regimes protected by a bubble that makes them almost immune to criticism or consequence, whatever crimes and evils they might commit.
No matter how many ships they bombed or children they shot or open air prison camps they ran, the general tone of Western media was the same – Israel are good guys.
Now, there are signs that could change, that the next step in the Gaza narrative will be a heel-turn that makes Israel an official “bad guy”.
The hints have been there for a while, starting almost immediately following October 7th attack last year, and picking up pace in the last couple of weeks.
Now let’s be quite clear here. Netanyahu IS a war criminal. He is a blood-soaked tyrant, guilty of vast amounts of illicit slaughter.
But let’s remember that in the real world blood-soaked war criminals go unpunished – and indeed sometimes get awarded Nobel Peace Prizes – every day. The ICC never moved against Bush or Blair or Obama or Brown or their cadre of war criminal subordinates.
Until recently “Bibi” was in that Teflon-coated club. He has been slaughtering innocents for years and years, while institutions and the legacy media happily ignored the fact. Now suddenly he’s not.
This needs to be interrogated.
The question must be – what is different now?
Two weeks ago, as we reported in This Week, Israel banned Al Jazeera. This received condemnation in the Washington Post and from the German foreign office.
These are not places that care about free speech, as their banning of RT (and others) demonstrates, so why the criticism? Why isn’t the Al Jazeera ban bracketed with all the other “acceptable” censorship that’s gone on for years?
Two days ago, the Guardian reported in big red banner headlines…
Spying, hacking and intimidation: Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC exposed
Why is this suddenly a front-page story? Alongside that, there are at least half a dozen stories on its front page criticising Israel – here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Contrast this to the coverage of Israel in the same paper nine years ago.
A UN court has already ruled that Israel must “stop Rafah offensive and open border for aid”
The Guardian view on the Rafah offensive: crossing US red lines should have consequences
And even goes so far as to suggest Biden and the US could be held legally accountable for Israel’s actions as well, something that would have sounded absurd as recently as 2015 (the potential fall of the US Empire, and the power shift it would signal, are a story for another time).
Even the staunchest of Israel’s media supporters – the Washington Post and the New York Times – have been loudly decrying Netanyahu’s actions of late.
The pattern is forming, it is definitely much more acceptable to criticize Israel in the mainstream media right now than it has been for decades.
But why?
Why would outlets like the Guardian or Washington Post decide to print anti-Israel articles now, but not ten years ago?
Is it because Israel is suddenly behaving worse than it ever has before?
Of course not. The slaughter in Gaza is an awful crime, but it’s not new. Israel and their NATO allies already had the blood of millions on their hands before this offensive even started. They commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with such monotonous regularity it almost dilutes the meaning of the words.
Is it because ‘even the mainstream media’ is finally ‘waking up’ or finding a conscience?
No.
They are not waking up because they were never asleep, and no, they have NO conscience.
Unless having one becomes politically expedient.
Nothing is so true the mainstream media have to report it, nothing is so morally outrageous the mainstream media bow to their consciences. They don’t have consciences. There is no facility for even recognizing truth or morals, let alone acting upon them.
They are opinion manufacturing machines, that is all. When they say something – anything – even something manifestly true like ‘Israel is engaged in genocide’ – it’s because somebody somewhere wants to tell a story.
So what is the story they are telling? Where is the narrative going?
The rulers of Israel are bloodsoaked sociopaths but they are also an entirely disposable part of a greater malign whole.
Terminology fails us here, because none of us in the alt-media world can ever completely agree on a name for that whole. CJ Hopkins favours Globo-Cap, others use “the elite”, “Deep State”, “Globalists” or “the-powers-that-(shouldn’t)-be”.
Roughly speaking, we’re talking about an overlapping cartel of political and corporate power brokers existing outside the so-called (largely sham) “democratic” power structures and wielding supranational influence in every sphere of human society.
Israel, like most regions and nations, is a base and tool of those powers, but a replaceable one. There is a vast, VAST power structure desperately looking for a way to appease a swelling of righteous anger tens of millions strong, and cutting Israel and its leadership loose might currently be perceived as a way of doing that.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 