Episode 3 The Indus Valley Civilization

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

The Indus Valley Civilization was as technically advanced as any in the ancient world.  Encompassing a far greater geographic area than the Nile, Mesopotamian or Yellow River (Chinese) civilization, this was complex multi-city civilization. It’s unclear whether the people who created this civilization were descended from the Adivasi or possibly migrated into India from the Iranian plateau or Central Asia. Owing to the high moisture level of ancient Indus Valley soils, they left few skeletons. Unlike the Adivasi, they left no oral tradition and their written language is undecipherable.

By 2600 BC, they had developed intensive settled agriculture and animal husbandry. They grew wheat, barley and cotton (for cloth and cords), but no rice or spices. They also fished. Their grain surplus allowed for some of them to specialize as craftsmen.Their three major cities were Dholavira (along the west coast of India), best known for its water channels and reservoirs, as well as Mochejno-daro and Harappa in modern day Pakistan.

All the Indus Valley cities had walls (built of fire baked bricks without mortar), straight north-south, east-west streets (suggesting they were planned), sophisticated sanitation, substantial brick houses and public buildings (food warehouses, assembly halls and bat houses*). The absence of weapons in their remains, suggests the walls weren’t defensive. It seems more likely they were used to limit access for taxation purposes.

All three cities had sewage drains from toilets and bathing rooms inside individual houses which led to soak pits.* Each city had at least one public public bath house, with well water supplying the bathing pools.

Although it appear the families who lived in the large houses had servants, there’s no evidence of special chiefs, kings or priests. Poorer residents built their homes of perishable materials (instead of brick), which didn’t survive.

Indus Valley lapis lazuli and copper discovered in Mesopotamian burial mounds indicates the two civilizations traded with one another.

It’s speculated that climate change and/or a change in the course of the Indus River caused the population to suddenly disperse across India after 500 years. At present the region is too dry to be suitable for intensive agriculture.

Archeologists believe their language evolved into the Dravidian language of South India (although the Dravidians themselves assert they are indigenous to their current homeland). Languages related to Dravidian are are also found in Brahui, a region just west of the Indus Valley in modern day Balochistan. DNA evidence suggests some Indus Valley survivors migrated to North India.

*Bats have been long revered in India.

**A soak pit is an engineered underground pit (designed to avoid flooding) that holds rainwater and/or wastewater to enable its gradually absorption. According to Fisher, Indus Valley natives were centuries ahead of other civilizations in waste management.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/366254/366177

TL  Creus

I’ve noticed that self-checkout is taking over more and more shops and supermarkets. They have existed for a while, of course, but more as an alternative to reduce lines, but now many shops have exclusively self-checkout machines.Yet, self-checkout appears not to be very effective or convenient, neither for shops nor for customers. Many customers tend to dislike self-checkout, as evidenced by the fact that there are always lines for human cashiers but none for self-checkouts. They give you the perception of more speed, but it is just illusory. Professional human cashiers scan and move your products faster (especially in Germany, where they go so quickly, basically throwing the stuff at your face, that you can hardly keep up).

“Nobody likes self-checkout”, says an article at CNN, “Here’s why it’s everywhere”.

Basically, as it is typical in the “digital economy”, it is just another way of passing the work to the customer and making think he’s gaining something with the exchange. Now, it may work for some — and I guess it is good if you want to avoid human interactions with a cranky cashier, which sometimes has its benefits.

You’d think that this type of automation would reduce the work of human cashiers and therefore save money for the companies and therefore make products cheaper, but it is not so. First of all, the machines need constant maintenance. Even if companies reduce the number of cashiers, they need to hire more technicians, which are paid more. The machines cost a lot, too, and require programming. And are supermarket products becoming cheaper? I don’t think so, quite the opposite in fact…

But not even the reduction in the number of human cashiers is a given. When people have to do their own checkout with machines, there is always something that goes wrong, or some product that won’t be scanned, so many people constantly require assistance even when using the self-checkout. In the end, cashiers and supervisors actually end up having more work, instead of less.

Of course, self-checkout is more conducive to shoplifting — sometimes voluntary, sometimes accidental. There are items, such as bread, that have no barcodes, and it becomes more complicated to register them in. Even if most people are honest, some are not. Companies lose more money with that, too — according to that same CNN article, losses are about 77% higher than at stores without self-checkout.

Since it doesn’t save money for companies, nor makes the products cheaper or the experience better for customers, one has to wonder why most companies are moving to self-checkout anyway?

CNN’s and The Guardian‘s answer is that “most companies are doing it, so they feel that they have to do it too”, which seems a stupid explanation.

Unfazed by the relative failure of self-checkout, Big Tech is pushing for even more of it. Amazon, who owns Whole Foods and other physical stores, has introduced “smart carts”, where your products are scanned and weighed as soon as you put them in the cart, no checkout needed (your debit card or phone is charged automatically).

Other new versions of self-checkout include shops where each movement is tracked by AI cameras and motion sensors, registering each item you take from the shelf and billing you later. All you need to do is swipe a credit card or smartphone, at least until the new methods that allow you to pay by facial recognition are installed.

The same is true of customer service — most people dislike bots as costumer service agents and prefer talking to a person. Yet bots keep being used, more and more. I suppose they are cheaper than paying a person to answer the phone, but my suspicion is that it’s about something else entirely. And in fact an article gives it away when it says that bots can easily record, memorize and access all your information, in order to provide for a “better customer journey” (the new marketing buzzword is “journey” instead of “experience”).

Self-driving taxi cabs, the same thing — the companies working with that are not making money, and even if you reduce costs by removing the driver on one side, you increase it on the other side by having to hire more technicians and supervisors — or even just someone to clean the car, as a Roomba can’t do it.

Obviously, there is something else behind the hype. Like with everything related to AI, there is a huge push by Big Tech for making everything automated and AI-dependant, from cars to journalistic essays to art works. And the reason is “big data”. Getting all the information they can about you.

In “1984”, George Orwell predicted screens observing us 24/7. But now we have not just screens, but cameras, satellites, location tracking apps, facial identification apps, voice recording apps, AI. They will know what you eat, what you poop, how much money you make, how much you spend, what hereditary diseases you have, and what you did last summer.

In the end, what “Artificial Intelligence” is really about, is not “intelligence” in the sense of “being clever”, but “intelligence” in the meaning understood by the CIA — gathering “intelligence”.

Recording, remembering and accessing all kinds of information from everybody.

Soon, all objects are going to be spying on you.

And it will not be just governments and big corporations. A recent story about a mother who received a message about her daughter’s fake kidnapping using the girl’s cloned voice, as well as the emergency of very believable “deep fake” videos, show the huge boost for scamming and crime provided by these new technologies. If you thought spam mails and spam calls were a nightmare, get ready for the new AI-powered identity thefts and scams.

And, of course, there is also the issue of “sensitivity filters” being applied to AI. Right now, they are using mostly human “sensitivity readers” to rewrite novels from Roald Dahl to Ian Fleming to Agatha Christie — despite the growth of AI, which is supposedly “stealing all our jobs”, there is a growing number of absurd, unnecessary professions, such as “DEI consultant” or “sensitivity reader”. And yet, one would think that this is one of the rare cases in which AI could probably do a better job — how hard can it be to write a program to filter out “offensive” words and replace them with something else?

Not that I support any of that, of course. Besides the more general attempt to change the past (“who controls the past controls the present”, as per Orwell), I think what is really going on here, under the excuse of “not offending anyone”, is simply an attack on readers, and on reading in general. Not too many people read books these days, and if all books are just going to be rewritten into the same inane, boring, nondescript, corporate propagandistic jargon that is the norm everywhere else in the media, well, then what will be the point of reading, anyway? You might as well have all books written by AI bots — and read by bots, too, since such books won’t interest anyone else. Which I suspect is the idea. Murdering literature, and getting away with it.

[…]

Via https://off-guardian.org/2023/05/27/who-really-wants-ai-and-why/

Sraid Marx

The local election results in the North of Ireland have given rise to more commentary that another step has been taken towards a referendum on Irish unity and a united Ireland.  The success of Sinn Fein in becoming the largest party at local government level in council seats and votes has provoked this reaction, as have its previous victories.  The two have almost come to seem synonymous.

At the same time the two are repeatedly separated by the selfsame commentators who argue that any vote for a united Ireland in a referendum would have to go way beyond Sinn Fein’s support.  If a vote for this party is an indicator of impending unity, then there is an obvious problem.  Its vote in the local elections was 30.9 percent of the ballot so even after an increase in its support of 7.7 percent it is not yet a third of those voting.

It is argued that other pro-unity candidates add to the forward movement of Irish nationalism, except that the other major nationalist party, the SDLP, is slowly dying.  Its vote fell by 3.3 percentage points to 8.7 per cent.  Together the two major nationalist parties gathered 39.7 per cent.  Even with the addition of the pro-unity parties on the left and right, People before Profit and Aontú, the total rises only to 41.5 per cent.  The total for the three main unionist parties is 38.1 per cent; Irish nationalism gained more votes than the these parties.

In the 2019 local government election the three Unionist parties plus smaller unionists gained 41.87 per cent of the vote while the comparable Irish nationalist and pro-unity parties won 37.73 per cent.  At this election the DUP was the largest party and the Unionist vote was higher than that of Irish nationalism.

Local elections, however, are the least accurate electoral indicator of the relative strengths of the two camps; the turnout in 2023 was only 54 per cent, an increase of 2 per cent on the 2019 vote.  Commentators have noted that the turnout in 2023 was higher in predominantly nationalist than unionist areas by as much as 10 percentage points in some places. Irish nationalism therefore won only 22 per cent of the electorate while many unionist voters stayed at home. During any referendum on a united Ireland it can hardly be expected that unionists will be so apathetic or demoralised, unless political circumstances make them so, unlikely to be a result of the vote itself.

In the 2022 Assembly elections, where the turnout was almost 63.6 per cent, the vote for the three Unionist parties was 40.1 per cent while the pro-Irish unity vote comparable to the most recent local elections was 40.7 per cent.  The recent local election results are not the first time the Unionist parties have fallen behind.

Twelve years ago in the 2011 Assembly elections, Unionism polled 47.65 per cent while Irish nationalism trailed behind at 42.81 per cent.  The decline in the Unionist vote over these years is therefore clear and it is this decline that has provided most of the impetus to claims that a nationalist referendum victory is a realistic prospect in the short to medium term.  The 2011 result however also reveals what the advance of Sinn Fein has hidden – that the nationalist share of the vote hasn’t increased:  42.81 per cent in 2011 and 41.5 per cent in 2023.

The missing piece of the jigsaw is the rise of the Alliance party: from 7.84 per cent in 2011 to  13.3 per cent in the recent local election.  The question then becomes the political nature of this party – unionist with a ‘small u’ or nationalist; or what it presents itself as – simply ‘other’.

So let’s start with the third alternative–that Alliance cannot be said to have a position on the national question.  Even if this were so the national question will face Alliance and its supporters with the choice sooner or later and ‘other’ will not be on the ballot paper.

Alliance is definitely not an Irish nationalist party, does not pretend to be or pretend to hide it, and while it has a significant Catholic support, this has consciously decided not to vote for Irish nationalism.  While it may be more likely than other Alliance supporters to vote for unity in a referendum, its existing vote is for the status quo and the status quo is continued British rule.

The party was originally set up as an openly unionist party that presented itself as non-sectarian; one that divorced its unionism from any religious identity.  It has moved from this to present itself as neither Unionist nor nationalist but with a soft, ‘small u’, unionist support that is repelled by the sectarianism of the Unionist mainstream, with many also rejecting Brexit.  In a referendum, all other things being equal, the majority of Alliance voters can be expected to support continued British rule, as will the party itself.

The ’other things being equal’ is what will matter for many; the political circumstances will at some point be decisive.  These include the reality of what a united Ireland might offer and the configuration of the forces fighting for and against it.  This includes the approach of the British state and the extent of violent unionist opposition.  What the election results demonstrate is that this point is not yet near, whatever about Sinn Fein becoming the largest party and Irish nationalism garnering more votes than ‘big U’ Unionism.  This does not mean that nothing is really changing.

Unionism continues to decline.  Its support for Brexit and rejection of the deal negotiated by the British state with the EU indicates a political movement fighting against its own interests. These are still considered to include a sectarian supremacy that is no longer possible and opposition to economic forces that might make the Northern State more attractive, even while it strengthens the all-island character of potential economic prosperity.  No longer able to make its claims on the basis that it is the majority within the gerrymandered state, it simply declares its veto based on its own existence.  This existence has always been one of sectarian privilege.

The other significant change has been within Irish republicanism, which having ditched its armed struggle against British rule has found itself with no clothes it cannot discard.  From opposition to British imperialism it now stands foursquare behind the western imperialist  proxy war in Ukraine.  Its representatives have acclaimed its recent success as a result of its brilliant electoral campaign.  This put a united Ireland on the back-burner but purposively elevated its attendance at the British king’s coronation, ‘to show their respect’.

It seems not to occur to them that monarchy is the epitome of denial of democracy and deserves zero respect. When Celtic and Liverpool football fans demonstrate a higher level of awareness of very basic democratic and republican principles we can appreciate the level to which Sinn Fein has sunk (with all due respect to those fans).

[…]

Via

The local elections – another step to a united Ireland?

By Debra Heine

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are demanding an FBI briefing on the status of their January 6 Pipe Bomb Investigation following disclosures that the feds have enough information to identify a suspect.

In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) said the slow progression of the Bureau’s investigation into the pipe bombs “raises significant concerns about the FBI’s prioritization of that case in relation to other January 6 investigations.”

Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, a whistleblower who worked on the pipe bomb investigation, told the Washington Times that after planting the bombs, the suspect used a MetroRail SmarTrip card to travel through the Washington metro system to a stop in northern Virginia.

“The FBI used security footage in the Northern Virginia to identify the license plate of the car that the individual entered,” the congressmen wrote. “Still, the FBI has not identified the subject.”

The suspect was caught on surveillance video. He wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, a pair of Air Max Speed Turf shoes with a yellow Nike logo, a backpack and gloves. He was recorded walking through Capitol Hill neighborhoods carrying what federal investigators said were two live pipe bombs.

However, Mr. Seraphin said technicians determined the pipe bombs were inoperable.

His story runs counter to the FBI’s official version that the devices could have detonated at any time. The bureau repeated that story in January while offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to the suspect’s arrest.

Seraphin also told Times reporter Kerry Picket that a separate individual bought the Metrorail SmarTrip card one year before the pipe bomber suspect used it on Jan. 5, 2021.

“The card had never been used before. It was bought a year prior by a retired chief master sergeant in the Air Force, and he was a security contractor. So he held a security clearance,”  Seraphin said.

Mr. Seraphin and his team surveilled the retired airman, who lived in a Northern Virginia townhouse, for a couple of days and learned about his background.

Although Mr. Seraphin, who also served in the Air Force, wanted to approach the Air Fhttps://amgreatness.com/2023/05/25/gop-lawmakers-demand-fbi-briefing-on-jan-6-pipe-bomb-investigation-following-whistleblower-disclosures-regarding-suspect/orce veteran and talk to him, his bureau superiors forbade him to do so before his team was removed from the case.

“I don’t know what they [eventually] did on that case, but I know that it was BS and the bombs were BS, and it seems like they had a good lead, and they could have run it down. But as far as I know, they never did,” he told the Times. “He may still be occasionally surveilled. That’s how dumb it gets.”

The congressmen cited former FBI assistant director Christopher Swecker, who told Picket, “[i]t just doesn’t add up . . . [t]here’s just too much to work with to not know who this guy is.”

The committee requested an update on the case in a briefing no later that June 7, 2023.

[…]

Via https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/25/gop-lawmakers-demand-fbi-briefing-on-jan-6-pipe-bomb-investigation-following-whistleblower-disclosures-regarding-suspect/

Episode 2 Migration and the Adivasi

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

The Adivasi were the earliest settlers in the Indian subcontinent. Hundreds of millions of them still live in India’s forest areas – the largest number of aboriginal people anywhere on earth. The term was coined in 1930s to advocate for forest dwellers. The government calls them tribal and doesn’t acknowledge them as indigenous. 30,000 years ago they comprised 100% of the Indian subcontinent. At present they represent 8.6%

They speak a number of different languages. Most had no written script until recently. About one-half of Adivasi women are illiterate and one-third of Adivasi men. There are hundreds of different Adivasi groups, each with their own origin story.

India’s wet, acidic soil makes carbon dating extremely difficult. Instead archeologists use DNA testing (specifically the rate of genetic mutations) and linguistic changes to identify migration patterns and date human remains and artifacts.

They have established that modern Adivasi are descended from human beings who left Africa 60,000 – 70,000 years ago. They have been in India at least 30,000 years and possibly longer.

They have a long history of using fire and stone and bone tools and molding soft copper into ornaments, as well as slash and burn agriculture. Using fire to create small forest clearings for crops, they moved in a continuous circle as soils depleted, returning to their original fields after 20 years. Men tended to specialize in hunting and raiding other groups for food. Women specialized in weaving and gathering forest products. Because there were no agricultural surpluses, there was no wealth accumulation.

Each time new settlers arrived in India, they cleared land, reducing forest area available to Adivasi. Some took menial jobs working for settlers, but in most cases they were simply pushed onto less productive land.* In some instances they were subject to special taxes.

Adivasi have also been displaced by the timber, coal and hydropower industry. The latter destroys a massive amount of forest and agricultural land, as well as housing, through dam construction. Often Adivasi are cleared from forest land to protect endangered animals.

Maoist insurgencies are common in regions with large concentrations of Adivasi. In 2000, Adivasi activism led to the creation of two new provinces: Jharkhand and Chhaltisgarh.

Since 2008, the Forest Rights Act requires Adivasi be compensated if they’re removed from their lands. Many are on a list of 704 legally designated tribals, which entitle them to special quotas for college admission and parliamentary seats.

*At present 90% of India’s forests have been cleared or deeply degraded. Only 3% virgin forest remains and 40% is wasteland. At present, most of India’s forests are  monocrop forest plantations that don’t support Adivasi lifeways or culture.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/366254/366175

Jonathan Turley

Two years ago, I wrote columns about companies pouring money into Black Lives Matter to establish their bona fides as “antiracist” corporations. The money continued to flow despite serious questions raised about BLM’s management and accounting. Democratic prosecutors like New York Attorney General Letitia James showed little interest in these allegations even as James sought to disband the National Rifle Association (NRA) over similar allegations. At the same time, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors cashed in with companies like Warner Bros. eager to give her massive contracts to signal their own reformed status. It now appears that BLM is facing bankruptcy after burning through tens of millions and Warner Bros. cut ties with Cullors after the contract produced no — zero — new programming.

Some states belatedly investigated BLM as founders like Cullors seemed to scatter to the winds. Gone are tens of millions of dollars, including millions spent on luxury mansions and windfalls for close associates of BLM leaders. The usual suspects gathered around the activists like former Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias, who later removed himself from his “key role” as the scandals grew.

When questions were raised about the lack of accounting and questionable spending, BLM attacked critics as “white supremacists.”

Warner Bros. was one of the companies eager to grab its own piece of Cullors to signal its own anti-racist virtues.  It gave Cullors a lucrative contract to guide the company in the creation of both scripted and non-scripted content, focusing on reparations and other forms of social justice. It launched a publicity campaign for everyone to know that it established a “wide-ranging content partnership” with Cullors who would now help guide the massive corporation’s new programming. Calling Cullors “one of the most influential thought leaders in American public life,” Warner Bros. announced that she was going to create a wide array of new programming, including “but not limited to live-action scripted drama and comedy series; longform/event series; unscripted docuseries; animated programming for co-viewing among kids, young adults and families; and original digital content.”

Some are now wondering if Warner Bros. ever intended for this contract to produce anything other than a public relations pitch or whether Cullors took the money and ran without producing even a trailer for an actual product. Indeed, both explanations may be true.

Paying money to Cullors was likely viewed as a type of insurance to protect the company from accusations of racial insensitive. After all, the company was giving creative powers to a person who had no prior experience or demonstrated talent in the area. Yet, Cullors would be developing programming for one of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world.

One can hardly blame Cullors despite criticizism by some on the left for going on a buying spree of luxury properties.

After all, Cullors was previously open about her lack of interest in working with “capitalist” elements. Nevertheless, BLM was run like a Trotskyite study group as the media and corporations poured in support and revenue.

It was glaringly ironic to see companies like Warner Bros. falling over each other to grab their own front person as the group continued boycotts of white-owned businesses. Indeed, if you did not want to be on the wrong end of one of those boycotts, you needed to get Cullors on your payroll.

Much has now changed as companies like Bud Light have been rocked by boycotts over what some view as heavy handed virtue signaling campaigns.

It was quite a change for Cullors and her BLM co-founder, who previously proclaimed “[we] are trained Marxists. We are super versed on, sort of, ideological theories.” She denounced capitalism as worse than COVID-19. Yet, companies like Lululemon rushed to find their own “social justice warrior” while selling leggings for $120 apiece.

When some began to raise questions about Cullors buying luxury homes, Facebook and Twitter censored them.

With increasing concerns over the loss of millions, Cullors eventually stepped down as executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, as others resigned.  At the same time, the New York Post was revealing that BLM Global Network transferred $6.3 million to Cullors’ spouse, Janaya Khan, and other Canadian activists to purchase a mansion in Toronto in 2021.

According to The Washington Examiner, BLM PAC and a Los Angeles-based jail reform group paid Cullors $20,000 a month. It also spent nearly $26,000 on meetings at a luxury Malibu beach resort in 2019. Reform LA Jails, chaired by Cullors, received $1.4 million, of which $205,000 went to the consulting firm owned by Cullors and her spouse, according to New York magazine.

Once again, while figures like James have spent huge amounts of money and effort to disband the NRA over such accounting and spending controversies, there has been only limited efforts directed against BLM in New York and most states.

Cullors once declared that “while the COVID-19 illness is tragic, what’s more tragic is capitalism.” These companies seem to be trying to prove her point. Yet, at least for Cullors, Warner Bros. fulfilled its slogan that this is all “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

[…]

Via https://jonathanturley.org/2023/05/28/the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of-blm-faces-bankruptcy-as-founder-cullors-is-cut-by-warner-bros/

Video link

Kevin Barrett

Dr. Lucy Morgan Edwards has impeccable establishment credentials (Ph.D International Relations, Exeter; former political advisor to the EU Ambassador in Kabul). She’s calm, sensible, down-to-earth, and blessed with uncommonly good judgment. If the invaders and occupiers of Afghanistan had listened to her, things might have turned out differently. (See her book The Afghan Solution for details).

So why, her establishment ex-colleagues must wonder, does Dr. Morgan-Edwards suspect that Dr. Rashid Buttar, the famous COVID dissident physician, may have been assassinated? Does she really take seriously Dr. Buttar’s ravings about a COVID vaccine depopulation plot? What could have led her to wander so far off the reservation?

The answer, of course, is that Lucy Morgan-Edwards has experienced the extreme untrustworthiness of today’s Western elites first-hand. . . And when one of the most prominent voices warning of such possibilities, Dr. Rashid Buttar, claimed he was poisoned during an appearance on CNN, and then dropped dead a few months later at age 57, you don’t have to be paranoid to wonder whether “they” might have been out to get him.

[…]

One of Dr. Rashid Buttar’s supporters, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,* knows better than anyone that America has a political assassination problem. His father and uncle, America’s two most promising post-WWII leaders, were shot dead in the two-part coup d’état that defined the 1960s and shaped the course of subsequent American history.

[…]

Let’s consider a few of the most prominent suspected assassinations and the likely motive.

December 21, 1945: Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. is shot dead with a blunt object during a rigged car crash. William Donovan and his OSS, which would become the CIA, were probably responsible. Patton’s opposition to the genocidal occupation policies in Germany, and his intention to run for president on an off-script platform, were the likely motives.

May 22, 1949: Secretary of Defense James Forrestal plunges to his death from a 16th floor window. Strongly opposed to the creation of Israel, Forrestal was probably killed by Zionists.

November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy is murdered in Dallas, almost certainly by a coalition of US imperial hardliners and Zionists panicking over Kennedy’s efforts to eliminate Israel’s nuclear program.

February 21, 1965: Malcolm X is killed in the Audubon Ballroom, New York, in the wake of his attempts to unite Muslims and blacks with Third World anti-US-empire forces. As usual, elements of the CIA are lead suspects.

June 6, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy is shot from behind by a gun pressed against the back of his head, shortly after a hypnotized Palestinian patsy distracted onlookers by firing randomly from 10 feet in front. The same hardline-CIA-plus-Israel group that killed JFK was almost certainly responsible.

December 10, 1968: Thomas Merton is murdered in Bangkok, Thailand. The world’s most influential Catholic (with the possible exception of the Pope), Merton had turned hard against the Vietnam war before he was killed. Once again, elements of the CIA were likely responsible.

October 16, 1972: US Rep. Hale Boggs (D-LA), a member of the Warren Commission who privately rejected and scoffed at its findings, is killed in a rigged plane crash. He was presumably on the Hit List of many dozens, if not hundreds, who were killed as part of the JFK-RFK assassination coverup.

July 20, 1993: Vince Foster is murdered in Washington, DC, probably for knowing too much about the Clinton crime family and its links with CIA drug smuggling.

April 3, 1996: Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown dies in a rigged plane Croatia after a failed bid to broker a corrupt deal between the CIA-linked Clinton crime family and Croatian dictator Franjo Tudjman. Once again, the CIA and its corrupt international dealings are on display.

October 25, 2002: Senator Paul Wellstone, along with his wife, daughter, and campaign staff, die in a rigged plane crash in Minnesota. Wellstone’s desire to investigate 9/11, and his opposition to the looming war on Iraq, almost certainly motivated his killers.

December 19, 2008: High-level Republican software consultant Micheal Connell dies in a rigged plane crash shortly before he is scheduled to testify against Karl Rove. Connell allegedly rigged the 2004 presidential elections by hacking voting machines. (That election was probably rigged in order to prevent the appearance of voters rejecting and rebuking the 9/11 and 9/11-wars perpetrators in and around the Cheney-Bush Administration.)

July 10, 2016: Seth Rich, the suspected DNC Wikileaker, is shot dead. Deep State backers of the empire’s anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton, are obvious suspects.

The above list obviously comprises only a minuscule fraction of likely US domestic political assassinations since World War II. Plausible reports that such towering figures as Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover were poisoned, that Jack Ruby and Hugo Chavez were dosed with fast-acting cancer, and that the CIA has a weapon that can induce heart attacks indistinguishable from natural ones suggest that America’s “Murder Incorporated” can easily disguise assassinations as natural deaths. So the real number of US political assassinations is quite possibly orders of magnitude larger than even the longest list of suspected hits compiled by the most paranoid conspiracy theorist.

[…]

Via https://kevinbarrett.substack.com/p/america-has-a-political-assassination

*I’m asserting that RFK Jr. supported Dr. Rashid Buttar’s right to speak his mind and at least some of his claims, not that he agreed with all of Dr. Buttar’s positions. Some of Buttar’s statements, including arguments that all COVID vax recipients will be dead within a few years, were obviously fallacious.