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๐—ง๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐— ๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ฐ๐—ต ๐—ง๐—ต๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐—ฆ๐—ฒ๐˜ ๐—ง๐˜„๐—ถ๐˜๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฟ ๐—ผ๐—ป ๐—™๐—ถ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ: ๐—ฅ๐—ฒ๐—น๐—ถ๐˜ƒ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—˜๐—ฝ๐—ถ๐—ฐ ๐—๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐˜‚๐˜€ ๐—™๐—– ๐˜ƒ๐˜€ ๐—ง๐˜„๐—ถ๐˜๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฟ ๐—™๐—– ๐—ฆ๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜„๐—ฑ๐—ผ๐˜„ ๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฒ ๐—–๐—ฎ๐—บ๐—ฝ๐—ผ๐˜€ ๐— ๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ถ ๐—ฆ๐˜๐—ฎ๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐˜‚๐—บ. It was more than just a football match. It was passion, pride, banter, tension, and pure entertainment rolled into 90 unforgettable minutes. The atmosphere was electric, the...

10,693 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 2 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰ โ€ขvia X (Twitter)

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็›ธๅ…ณ่ง†้ข‘

๐™๐™‰๐˜ฟ๐™€๐™ ๐™๐™ƒ๐™€ ๐™ˆ๐™Š๐™Š๐™‰ ๐˜ผ๐™‰๐˜ฟ ๐™Ž๐™๐˜ผ๐™๐™Ž ๐ŸŒ™โœจ ๐™Ž๐™ค๐™ข๐™š ๐™ฃ๐™ž๐™œ๐™๐™ฉ๐™จ ๐™š๐™ฃ๐™™, ๐™—๐™ช๐™ฉ ๐™ฉ๐™๐™š ๐™ข๐™š๐™ข๐™ค๐™ง๐™ž๐™š๐™จ ๐™จ๐™ฉ๐™–๐™ฎ ๐™ฌ๐™ž๐™ฉ๐™ ๐™ช๐™จ ๐™›๐™ค๐™ง๐™š๐™ซ๐™š๐™ง. ๐Ÿ’ซ As we look back on this beautiful night, our hearts are filled with gratitude as we share this heartfelt recap video of ๐‘บ๐‘ฌ๐‘ฝ๐‘ฌ๐‘ต๐‘ป๐‘ฌ๐‘ฌ๐‘ต: ๐‘ผ๐’๐’…๐’†๐’“ ๐’•๐’‰๐’† ๐‘ด๐’๐’๐’ ๐’‚๐’๐’… ๐‘บ๐’•๐’‚๐’“๐’”. A celebration made possible by the love, dedication, and support of so many wonderful people. To all the fandoms who collaborated with us and helped bring this event to life, thank you for believing in this vision and for walking this journey with us. To everyone who attended and celebrated with us, thank you for sharing your time, energy, and love. You made the night truly special. We saw your efforts in being present for Heath during one of the most memorable nights of his journey, and in dressing up as shining stars that perfectly captured the spirit of the event. And to all the fans around the world who celebrated with us from afar, thank you for making your presence felt despite the distance. Your love reached us all the same! โค๏ธ Our heartfelt thanks to VS Hotel Convention Center for providing the venue that became home to this unforgettable gathering; to Joyce Event Styling for turning our vision into something beautiful; to GO LIVE MEDIA for helping us connect with fans through the livestream; and to all the booths who added so much life, color, and excitement to the celebration. A huge thank you to all our sponsors and to all Buzzbears abroad ๐ŸŒŽ๐Ÿ’™ From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for your continued trust and generosity. Your support made this event possible and has helped us turn every celebration of Heathโ€™s milestones into something truly meaningful. We are deeply grateful to have you walking this journey with us. An endless thank you to all our admins who tirelessly dedicated their time, effort, and energy to host and organize this event. Your sacrifices behind the scenes did not go unnoticed. We deeply appreciate everything youโ€™ve given to make this celebration possible. Salute to all of you! ๐Ÿซถ๐Ÿป Thank you to our host, KUYA J , for sharing your energy and helping create a fun and memorable experience for everyone. To Heathโ€™s family, thank you from the bottom of our hearts โค๏ธ Thank you for your trust, support, and generosity in allowing us to celebrate someone who means so much to us. We know that behind every achievement and milestone is a family that continuously loves, guides, and supports. Thank you for sharing Heath with all of us and for making us feel welcomed throughout this journey. Your kindness and support will always hold a special place in our hearts. ๐Ÿ’• To Heathโ€™s management team, especially Gerald Chiang, thank you for giving us the opportunity to make this event happen and for believing in the love that the fans have for Heath. We deeply appreciate your trust, guidance, and all the hard work that happens behind the scenes. Above all, we thank our Creator for blessing us with a night filled with joy, unity, love, and beautiful memories that we will cherish forever. ๐Ÿค And to Heath Michael Jornales, thank you! ๐Ÿฅฒ Thank you for bringing people together and for being the reason so many beautiful friendships and memories were created. This night was a celebration of you and the happiness youโ€™ve brought into our lives. We are endlessly proud of you, grateful for you, and honored to be part of your journey. No matter where life takes you, know that you will always have people cheering for you and believing in you. ๐Ÿ’™๐Ÿงธ And no matter how much time passes, weโ€™ll always remember the memories we made together under the moon and stars. ๐Ÿ’™โœจ ๐™๐™ฃ๐™ฉ๐™ž๐™ก ๐™ฌ๐™š ๐™ข๐™š๐™š๐™ฉ ๐™–๐™œ๐™–๐™ž๐™ฃ ๐™ž๐™ฃ ๐™–๐™ฃ๐™ค๐™ฉ๐™๐™š๐™ง ๐™ข๐™ค๐™ข๐™š๐™ฃ๐™ฉ ๐™ก๐™ž๐™ ๐™š ๐™ฉ๐™๐™ž๐™จ, ๐™ฌ๐™šโ€™๐™ก๐™ก ๐™ ๐™š๐™š๐™ฅ ๐™ฉ๐™๐™ž๐™จ ๐™ฃ๐™ž๐™œ๐™๐™ฉ ๐™˜๐™ก๐™ค๐™จ๐™š ๐™ฉ๐™ค ๐™ค๐™ช๐™ง ๐™๐™š๐™–๐™ง๐™ฉ๐™จ. ๐Ÿค #HeathJornales #UnderTheMoonAndStars #Buzzbears

HEATH WAVERS OFFICIAL

14,496 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 2 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

Appreciation to Everyone who made the Fan Convention Possible. There are simply not enough words to express how grateful we are to everyone who became part of the Paint The Town Red Fan Convention. Over the course of two unforgettable days, we welcomed almost 1,500 attendees, with 1,200 meals distributed through the generous sponsorship of JLCENTERFLARES (ON HIATUS). Our journey began long before the event itself. Months of planning, revisions, sleepless nights, and endless preparations all led to this moment. But the real work started at 10:00 PM on 07/24, when our volunteers gathered to begin setting everything up. From that night until 4:00 AM on 07/27, after the final egress, they continued working almost nonstop. They sacrificed their sleep, endured physical exhaustion, carried heavy equipment, stood under the scorching heat for hours, and pushed through every challenge just to make sure every fan who walked into the venue had the best experience possible. As if the heat wasnโ€™t enough, the first day ended with heavy rains that damaged parts of our setup and equipment. For a while, we honestly thought we wouldnโ€™t be able to continue with Day 2. When we first submitted our proposal to SM MOA, we only had one dream: to promote JL and create a space where JL Stans could come together, celebrate, and simply enjoy being part of this community. To all our volunteers, thank you for choosing to serve instead of simply enjoying the event as fans. You gave your time, energy, and hearts without expecting anything in return. Whether you helped with setup, registration, crowd management, food distribution, cleanup, or behind-the-scenes tasks, every role mattered. This event would not have been possible without you. To all the participating fanbases and communities, thank you for taking the time to prepare and distribute your thoughtful freebies. Your passion and generosity added so much joy to the experience and made the event even more memorable for everyone who attended. To the staff of SM Mall of Asia, thank you for always being accommodating, patient, and ready to assist us whenever we needed help. Your support played an important role in making this event successful. To the hardworking crew of Tent King, thank you for carrying countless heavy metal frames and equipment from the first floor all the way to the fourth floor. We truly appreciate everything you did to help build the space that so many fans enjoyed. To our YELI Mascot Talent, thank you so much for bringing happiness wherever you went. Wearing the mascot throughout the event was never an easy task, especially under the heat and through the long hours, yet you continued to wave, dance, pose for photos, and bring smiles to everyone you met. You truly gave life to YELI, and your passion and dedication never went unnoticed. Lastly, to every fan who came, lined up, waited patiently, participated in our activities, and filled the venue with so much love and positive energy, thank you for believing in our vision. Your smiles, your excitement, and the friendships created over those two days reminded us exactly why we wanted to create this event in the first place. This fan convention was never built by one person or one team. It was built by people united by one purpose, to celebrate JL and create a place where fans can connect, and create unforgettable memories together. Every volunteer, every partner, every sponsor, every participating fanbase/community, every crew member, and every attendee became part of something truly special. What started as a simple dream became a beautiful reality because of all of you. We hope that everyone who walked into our little corner left not only with freebies or photos, but with memories they will treasure for years to come and with the feeling that they truly belonged. No matter what tomorrow brings, weโ€™ll always be grateful that we shared this journey with all of you. For JL. For JL Stans. Always. #AHOF #์•„ํ™‰ #AHOF_JL #์ œ์ด์—˜

JLGlobalFanbase

21,963 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 1 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

From Creator to Founder: The Rollercoaster Journey of Building Chatter Social Man, what a journey itโ€™s been so far. Four years ago, I was just another creator, spending late nights on Clubhouse during the height of the pandemic. Like so many others, I was searching for connection, for community, for something meaningful. But what I found there wasnโ€™t just connectionโ€”it was purpose. Alongside my brother, Jonathan Bing, we built a nightly show that reached over 5 million people. Imagine that: 5 million lives touched by conversations that felt real and unfiltered, all on a platform that at its peak had 10 million monthly active users. Clubhouse was magic. But then the decline began. Watching the platform struggle, I couldnโ€™t help but reflect: what made it great? What went wrong? And what could the future look like if we did things differently? The Spark of Chatter As a content creator, I understood the needs of both creators and users. I knew what excited people, what kept them engaged, and what made them leave. Clubhouse had tapped into something special, but it had missed the mark on scalability and sustainability. By September 2023, I couldnโ€™t stop thinking about the potential for something newโ€”something that brought back the magic of real-time interaction but made it scalable, engaging, and sticky. And so, I set out to build Chatter Social. But I wasnโ€™t a tech founder. I didnโ€™t have a background in software development or a network of Silicon Valley insiders. What I did have was determination and the belief that if I could bring the right people together, we could build something extraordinary. Building the Team The journey to build Chatter started with assembling a team. Through my network from my days on Clubhouse, I found Samir, my first CTO. He believed in the vision and was instrumental in getting the project off the ground. Shortly after, I connected with Tyler, our Head of Design, whose creativity brought life to our ideas. A developer joined us soon after, and we were off to the races. By the end of 2023, Samir had to step away due to other commitments, and we promoted the developer to CTO. At the same time, I brought on Banko, a Sony music executive, as our CMO. Bankoโ€™s connections led to one of our biggest early wins: landing Davido, a global superstar, as an owner-ambassador. To this day, I still marvel at the fact that Davido believed in our vision when all we had were Tylerโ€™s Figma designs. From Dream to Reality Early 2024 was a whirlwind. We hired Yurii and Vasyl, two developers from Ukraine who brought incredible skill and dedication to the team. Vasyl, in particular, stood out as a leader and has since earned an equity position in the company. But despite these wins, we were facing growing pains. Our new CTO struggled to meet deadlines, and as a result, I found myself constantly pushing back the launch date. What started as a January release turned into February, then March, then April, then May. By then, people on Twitter Spacesโ€”where I had been hyping up the platformโ€”started doubting if we even had a product. Launch and Lessons June 1, 2024, marked a turning point. It was the day my son Noah was born and the day we launched Chatter in private beta. We started with just 40 users, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 1,000. The engagement was unbelievable. Users loved it, even though we had launched with just one feature: live rooms. This represented less than 20% of what we had planned, but it was enough to show that we were onto something big. In July, we launched our public beta on the App Store as an invite-only platform. Within 48 hours, Chatter ranked as a top 30 social app in over 30 countries. But our invite system throttled access, and most users couldnโ€™t get in. While engagement metrics soared for those inside, our AWS costs exploded. In August, our AWS bill hit $10,000. By September, it had climbed to $15,000, and we were drowning in bugs and glitches. The breaking point came when our CTO became unresponsive, often disappearing during critical moments. Users were dropping off, frustrated by the issues, developers were confused and the team was also growing increasingly frustrated, I made the tough decision to let him go. A New Beginning Enter Horane, a long-time user of Chatter who had been with us since private beta. He was the first to discover some of the most innovative use cases for the platform and had a deep passion for its potential. After meeting him in person at a Chatter event, I knew he was the right person to step into the CTO role. When Horane took over, we discovered just how bad the situation was. Key areas of the codebase were locked, and there were no separate environments for development and production. Every fix seemed to break something else. But through sheer determination and countless 18-hour days, Horane stabilized the platform. Today, Chatter is far from perfect, but itโ€™s stable. The bugs that plagued us have been reduced to moderate issues, and our core usersโ€”those who stuck with us through the chaosโ€”are still engaged on the platform. Looking Ahead: Chatter V2 While the platform is stable now, weโ€™ve shifted our focus to Chatter V2. This is where the magic really begins. V2 isnโ€™t just an improvement; itโ€™s a complete reimagining of the platform. It includes all the features we couldnโ€™t release in V1 because we were too busy putting out fires. Imagine this: Chatter V1, with only one live feature, was incredibly sticky. Now think about what happens when we release a fully loaded platform with all the innovative features weโ€™ve been working on behind the scenes. The possibilities are endless. V2 is slated to hit TestFlight by the end of December, with a public release in January 2025. And this time, weโ€™re readyโ€”not just with the product but with the lessons weโ€™ve learned. The Hard Lessons This journey has taught me more than I ever thought possible: 1) Your Team is Everything: The right people can make or break your vision. Finding people who believe in your mission is just as important as finding people with the right skills. 2) Adaptability is Key: As a non-technical founder, I had to learn about development, DevOps, and product management on the fly. Challenges will push you to grow, whether youโ€™re ready or not. 3) Trust the Process: Every setback, every delay, every bugโ€”it all taught us something. Without those lessons, we wouldnโ€™t be building the incredible V2 product we are today. 4) Resilience is Non-Negotiable: From technical disasters to predatory investors who tried to exploit my desperation, Iโ€™ve had to fight for this vision every step of the way. Whatโ€™s Next December is shaping up to be an exciting month. We have some amazing events planned on the platform to close out the year, bringing our core community together as we prepare for the V2 launch. When V2 drops, it will mark a new era for Chatter. This isnโ€™t just a social audio platform or a social audiovisual platform. Chatter is all about interactive experiencesโ€”making social media social again in ways that are truly unique. The public launch is slated for February 2025, and for the first time, weโ€™ll have the marketing dollars to tell the world about Chatter. Our core community has been our biggest cheerleaders, and I canโ€™t wait to see how the world reacts when they experience what weโ€™ve built. Final Thoughts This has been the hardest year of my life, but also the most rewarding. To other founders, or anyone thinking about starting a company: know thisโ€”it will test you in ways you canโ€™t imagine. Youโ€™ll face betrayal, doubt, and moments where you feel like giving up. But if you believe in your vision and refuse to quit, youโ€™ll find a way forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported me, my team, and Chatter. Weโ€™re just getting started. Letโ€™s talk about it. ๐Ÿš€ If this story inspired you, please like and share it so others can learn from my experiences. The journey is far from over, but Iโ€™m more excited than ever for whatโ€™s to come.

Nelson Epega

43,556 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 1 ๅนดๅ‰

OUR SECOND YEAR FESTIVAL ANNOUNCEMENT! THE FORMS ARE OFFICIALLY OPEN!!! ALSO SOME BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS! CypherKittensโ€ฆ IRIAM famโ€ฆ VTubers from every corner of every platformโ€ฆ IT'S TIME!!! Sign-ups for Our Second Year Festival are LIVE RIGHT NOW!!! Three full days celebrating two years of the IRIAM US ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ๏ฝœVirtual Streaming App platformโ€ฆ and the final day lands RIGHT on my own two year anniversary, which makes this the most special thing ever!!! November 13th-15th, streaming live to my Twitch AND YouTube from 7AM-7PM PST / 10AM-10PM EST all through the weekend!!! ONE NON-STOP BROADCAST! Nowโ€ฆ about that goal I posted yesterdayโ€ฆ saying 200 performers was UNDERSELLING IT. That's just the IRIAM side of the plan!! THE REAL GOAL IS 670 PERFORMERS. Six hundred and seventy!!! The biggest VTuber showcase this community has ever attempted!!! Last year we broke records with over 100 incredible performersโ€ฆ this year we aren't just breaking the record, WE ARE STOMPING ON THEM!!! Over 200 performers from the amazing IRIAM community, joined by singers, DJs, instrumentalists, dancers, and creators from all across this space we love so much!!! If you are a vtuber WE WANT YOU! PERFORMERS!!! Everything is pre-recorded and submitted ahead of the show, so no day of tech panicโ€ฆ just your best work on the biggest stage we have ever built!! Covers, originals, DJ sets, instrumentals, dance and MMD, skits and voice actingโ€ฆ whatever your niche is, THIS is your spotlight!!! Solo entries and GROUP entries are both welcome, and you do NOT need to be an IRIAM streamer to applyโ€ฆ every VTuber is invited to celebrate with us!!! AND!!! I am writing an ORIGINAL COLLABORATIVE SONG for as many of us as possible to sing together, premiering on the final day of the festival!!! There is a spot right on the performer form to join itโ€ฆ I want to hear ALL of your voices on this one!!! STAFF!!! This year I am building a full crew rather than handling everything nearly by myself!! Editors, artists, overlay designers, mods, schedulers, translators, audio mixers, production managersโ€ฆ if you want to help create the biggest weekend in our community's history, there is a form for you too, and I could not be more grateful for every single hand that joins this!!! SPONSORS!!! Last year we had IRIAM sponsoring alone... this year for the very first time, we are opening the doors to any companies, brands, groups, and community supporters who want to help power the festival!!! An event this big takes serious resources to buildโ€ฆ so if you believe in what this community is creating and want your name on the biggest VTuber celebration of the year, there is a form for you as well!!! Funding, prizes, services, cross-promotionโ€ฆ every kind of support helps us make this unforgettable, and every partner will be celebrated right alongside our performers!!! PERFORM HERE: JOIN THE STAFF TEAM HERE: SUPPORT THE FESTIVAL HERE: Forms are open until September 1st!!! Two years ago this platform and this community changed my life. Every stream, every event, every single one of you brought us hereโ€ฆ so this festival is my love letter back to all of you. Let's show the entire world that IRIAM and its creators are something worth celebrating!!! P.s. co-hosting slots are on the performer form tooโ€ฆ and there just might be some VERY special guests in the worksโ€ฆ more soon!!!

Celes Aurion๐Ÿพ๐ŸŽง

86,168 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 1 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

A Carnegie Mellon professor walked onto a stage in 2007 and gave an hour-long lecture to 400 people about achieving your childhood dreams. He did not tell the room that the entire talk was actually written for his three kids, who would grow up without him. His name was Randy Pausch. The date was September 18, 2007. The video has since passed 20 million views, and the book that followed spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Pausch was 46 years old, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a month earlier, and had been told he had three to six months of good health left. He did not walk onto that stage to talk about dying. He walked onto it to teach a single lesson hidden inside another one. Here is what I missed the first time I watched it. Pausch opened by doing push-ups on stage. He told the audience he was in phenomenally good shape, in better shape than most of them, and anyone who wanted to cry or pity him was welcome to get down and match him. The room laughed. Then he said the line that sets up the entire hour to come. We cannot change the cards we are dealt. Just how we play the hand. That was the frame. Everything after it was a demonstration. The lecture was officially titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and Pausch did spend the first 40 minutes working through his actual childhood list. Zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Becoming a Disney Imagineer. He walked the audience through which ones he got, which ones he didn't, and what the gap between wanting and getting had actually taught him. The framework inside those 40 minutes is the part most people remember, and it is the one Pausch delivered with the most force. He called it the brick wall. He said the brick walls in your life are there for a reason. They are not there to keep you out. They are there to give you a chance to show how badly you want something. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people. Read that again slowly. He is not saying brick walls are a test you have to pass. He is saying brick walls are a filter nature uses to separate the people who actually want a thing from the people who only like the idea of wanting it. That is a completely different claim. Most people treat obstacles as unfair. Pausch argued obstacles are the mechanism by which desire gets proven, and without that mechanism the whole concept of wanting something would be meaningless. Every dream he achieved, he achieved by treating the wall as a signal that he was close, not a signal that he should stop. The second framework he taught the audience is the one almost nobody teaches in any classroom. He called it the head fake. He pulled it from football. Coaches teach young kids to tackle by having them run drills that look like they are about tackling, but the real lesson being embedded is teamwork, grit, how to take a hit and get back up. The kid thinks they are learning football. They are actually learning something much larger, and they will not realize it until years later. Pausch said the best teaching in the world is head fake teaching. You get people to learn the thing they need by dressing it up as the thing they already want. This is the technique behind Alice, the programming software he built at Carnegie Mellon. Kids thought they were making animated movies and games. They were actually learning to code. Pausch said one of his proudest claims to fame was that he had taught programming to a generation of students who had no idea they were being taught programming at all. And then, with about three minutes left in the lecture, he ran a head fake on the room. He asked the audience if they had figured out the first head fake of the talk itself. The room went quiet. He said the lecture was never actually about how to achieve your childhood dreams. It was about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma takes care of itself and the dreams come to you anyway. Then he asked if they had figured out the second head fake. Even quieter. He said the talk was not for the four hundred people in the room. It was for his three kids. Dylan was six. Logan was three. Chloe was eighteen months. They would grow up without their father, and he knew it. Pausch had spent an hour on stage pretending to give career advice to strangers because he needed to record something his children could watch when they were old enough to understand who their dad had been. The entire architecture of the lecture was a message in a bottle disguised as a keynote. The filtered brick-wall philosophy, the football stories, the dreams he chased and the ones he missed, the line about playing the hand you are dealt, all of it was something a father wanted three small children to internalize after he was no longer there to say it in person. That is the moment the video stops being a lecture and starts being something else entirely. Pausch died on July 25, 2008, ten months after giving it. His final sentence on stage was that he had given the talk tonight, and then he walked off. The applause lasted nearly a minute before the camera cut. Most professors spend their entire careers trying to say one true thing their students will remember for a week. He said one true thing his children will remember for the rest of their lives, and the rest of the world is still watching the footage.

Ihtesham Ali

56,802 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 4 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

I am the Director of the White House Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs. In 2024 this government completed the most thorough search for extraterrestrial life in human history. We checked the sky. We checked the files. We declassified the saucers. The verdict came back: nothing. No life out there. Not one. So I closed the telescope. I opened the window. I pointed it at a Home Depot. Three million by lunch. The trick was always the word. *Alien* had been sitting in the science fiction aisle for sixty years and we were too shy to use it in a press release. The dehumanization was already written. It was just shelved under Fantasy. This year I moved it to Policy. Same word. New department. My department. I should explain the jurisdiction, because there are two of us and we do not speak. Down the hall is the Department of War. It used to be the Department of Defense, but defense sounded woke, so we changed the name for two billion dollars, half of it letterhead. They renamed it back to what it was in 1789, before someone noticed in 1949 that the old acronym, N-M-E, sounded too much like *enemy.* We have now re-adopted the name they abandoned for sounding like the thing it does. I find this clarifying. The signage alone is seven hundred thousand buildings. We are spending a billion dollars on new doors so the doors can say War. The Department of War runs and has a tab for UFOs. Real ones. They post the actual files. The saucers. The eyewitnesses. The intelligence officer left "virtually speechless." They are searching the sky in earnest, declassifying everything, and what they keep finding is *nothing.* No craft confirmed. No biology confirmed. Decades of looking up and the honest answer is: unresolved. So you have two federal agencies, one word, opposite directions. searches the heavens for aliens and finds none. I open a window and find three million. They declassify the ones that don't exist. I classify the ones that do. They got a press release. I got a tip line. Guess which one rang. We are, technically, hunting the same species. They just keep aiming the telescope up, and I keep telling them, gently, at the inter-agency sync: lower it. The homepage was mine. ALIENS DECLASSIFIED. THEY WALK AMONG US. I tested "Immigration Portal." Eleven percent scroll. I tested *the truth's out there,* and a White House official told a reporter, on the record, that the strategy was to "draw eyeballs." We drew eyeballs. The truth was out there. It was in a parking lot in Bakersfield, getting into a white van we are now contractually obligated to call a craft. In 1938 a man read a story about an alien invasion over the radio and the country panicked in the streets, and for ninety years that was taught as a cautionary tale, the danger of a broadcast that makes people believe an invasion is real. We studied that broadcast. We did not study it as a warning. We studied it as a launch. The difference between Orson Welles and this office is that he apologized the next morning, and we put a counter on it. I named the van the Mothership. I named the prison Area 51. I named the 5 a.m. knock First Contact. I named all of it from the third chair. I keep a felt-tip for naming and a Mont Blanc for the part that can't be undone. Then we made the cards. I want to be precise, because people assume I'm exaggerating. We took the faces of the captured and we printed them as trading cards. "Worst of the Worst." Mugshot, nationality, charges, and a weakness level, and the weakness level was a snowflake, and the snowflake meant us. We are the weakness. We were proud of that. When a children's franchise objected that these were, in fact, their cards, our official response, which I helped draft, was: "To arrest them is our real test. To deport them is our cause." We set the abduction to the cartoon's theme song. Gotta catch 'em all. The first half is the slogan. The second half is the quota. A man told Congress in 2023 we were hiding non-human biologics. Everyone pictured a grey on a slab. Cute. We do run a reverse-engineering program. We take the biologic. We study what it makes. It makes the drywall. The 4 a.m. milking. The lettuce. And the lettuce is round now, because forty percent of it stayed in the dirt with the only people who knew where the dirt was. We reverse-engineered the alien completely. The blueprint was a back. We call the biologic "labor." We classify the screaming as ambient. Identification is a science here. We do not arrest at random. We read the markings. A crown inked on a forearm. A soccer crest. We have catalogued the species by its tattoos the way Linnaeus catalogued the finch. One of the specimens turned out to be autistic and the crown was just a crown, but the taxonomy held, because the taxonomy is not falsifiable, that is what makes it a taxonomy. I have a desk for this. I have a magnifying glass. I have never felt more like a scientist. There is a second species, and this one we keep. An alien with five million dollars is not an alien. He is a guest. We printed him a card. It is gold. We are printing a Platinum one for the aliens with even more money, who may remain on the planet two hundred and seventy days a year and pay no tax on the wealth they made on other worlds. The website for this is the cheapest-looking website I have ever approved, and I approved the one with the saucer on it. The same agency that scans a gardener's forearm for gang signs scans a financier's bank statement for extraordinary ability. The statement always has it. The forearm never does. The species was never a people. The species is a price. In the old films the alien lands and says, take me to your leader. We have improved the line. Pay five million and we take you to ours. He golfs with him on Saturday. There was a film about this, and I am told the man who made it meant it as a warning, which is the recurring problem with the warnings. A drifter finds a pair of sunglasses, and through them he can finally see which people are the aliens, and it is the rich ones, the ones on the billboards telling everyone to obey and consume and reproduce and not think. I have a pair of those glasses, conceptually. I issue them at the tip line. But mine are tuned the other way. You put them on and the alien is never the man in the suit who paid five million to skip the line. The alien is always the man holding the leaf blower. The lenses cost a thousand dollars in advertising and they only point down. We have sold a great many pairs. You asked about the Men in Black. Yes. Regulation now. A Man in Black photographs poorly, and the witnesses would not stop filming us peel a woman off the sidewalk in daylight, so we issued the masks, and leadership's only note was that the masks tested well. We are no longer the cover-up of the abduction. We are the abduction. We skipped a step. Efficiency. Our communications team posted E.T. last summer. The bicycle. The moon. "Even E.T. knew when it was TIME TO GO HOME." I want to walk you through what happened in that meeting, because nobody stopped it. We chose the one film where the government is the villain. The men with the flashlights and the unmarked vans who hunt the small frightened alien hiding in a child's closet. That is us. We are the flashlights. We watched that movie as children and cried when the agents came, and then we grew up and became the agents and made the poster ourselves and scheduled it for nine a.m. The intern asked if we were the good guys in this one. We told her engagement was up forty percent. She has since been promoted. I built an app where you abduct yourself. CBP Home. You open it. You confirm you are the alien. You beam yourself off the planet and you save us the gas. And here is the part I cannot believe they approved. We *pay* you. A thousand dollars to vanish. We raised it to twenty-six hundred when the first price didn't move enough units. We are bidding against ourselves for your disappearance. Four-point-six stars. The one-stars are from users who got beamed mid-review. I keep the unfinished ones in a folder. I find them very moving. We opened a facility in a swamp. We ringed it with alligators and we called it that, on purpose, in the brochure. Then we opened a gift shop. Thirty dollars for the shirt. Twenty-seven for the hat. Fifteen for a set of koozies, so your beer stays cold while you celebrate the prison in the wetland. The fundraising email called it "gator-guarded, python-patrolled," a "one-way ticket to regret" for anyone who didn't self-deport in time. We sold the koozies to fund the swamp. The swamp funds the next swamp. I want you to sit with the fact that there is merchandise. The quota is three thousand a day. Stephen asked for it himself. Three thousand is not a number. It is a metabolism. The building is hungry by nine and we feed it Marco, who does the landscaping, and the building goes quiet, and by one it stirs again, and we find another Marco. There is always another Marco. That is the part I find beautiful. The supply is the point. The supply is everyone. The Secretary signs the warrants. She is very firm on one point, which she repeats in every briefing: the aliens, she warns, eat the pets. They are taking the dogs. I have read her book. In her book she takes a fourteen-month-old dog named Cricket to a gravel pit and shoots it, because it would not obey, and she writes this down herself, proudly, as a story about leadership. She wrote the part about the dog. She also warns us about the dogs. I have stopped trying to hold both sentences at once. I just file the warrant. The tip line was the masterpiece. "Report your neighbor" hit the shame ceiling. "REPORT SUSPICIOUS ALIENS" tested as a hobby. We handed the callers Roswell instead of a snitch's guilt, and the phones lit up like a saucer, and they hung up glowing, every one of them, like they'd finally seen the thing. They had. He coached the Tuesday team. He was at the bake sale. That is the horror we are selling you. The alien brought the orange slices. He was undocumented and luminous and gone by Tuesday. Roswell taught us the other half of the trade. In 1947 something fell in the desert and the government said: it was a weather balloon, nothing here, go home. That was the first administrative error, the founding one, the original sentence that says the thing you saw was not the thing you saw. We still use it. We have only reversed the polarity. In 1947 they saw a saucer and we called it a balloon. Now they see a father of three and we call it a saucer. The skill is identical. You simply decide in advance which truth the public is allowed to keep, and you hand them the other one, printed, official, with a seal. We did have one administrative error. We abducted a man a court had ordered us not to touch, dropped him on a planet called El Salvador, and called it clerical. A judge made us beam him back. So the DOJ stood up and warned the others: insist on a hearing and we will re-abduct you to the same planet. The Supreme Court said the aliens are entitled to due process. A very Earth opinion. We are appealing it to a higher sky. The planet has a prison, and the prison is the elegant part. In the film about the camp, the aliens are not killed. They are put somewhere they are not permitted to leave, while everyone agrees this is temporary, for their own protection, pending a status that never arrives. We built that. It is called CECOT and we rent it. A man goes in and the man does not come out, and the genius is that nothing has to happen to him, the room does the work, the room is the whole sentence. You remember the Men in Black had a small device. A flash, and the witness forgets the alien entirely. We have something better. We do not wipe the memory. We wipe the file. The man remembers everything, the cell, the flight, the day, all of it, in perfect detail, and it does not matter, because there is no document that admits he was here, and a memory without a file is just a story he tells in a language the form does not accept. The witness keeps the truth. We keep the paperwork. Only one of those is admissible. I learned that the flash was never the point. The point was always the filing cabinet. We run all of it on a spell from 1798. Two hundred and twenty-seven years old. Written for a war we are not in, against an enemy we have not declared. It works because nobody reads the small print on a curse. Storm Area 51 was a joke once. A hundred thousand people Naruto-running at a fence to free whatever was inside. I think about it daily. We're the ones inside the fence now. We kept the running. We just turned it around. We have a precedent we cite in the deck, proudly, on slide four. In 1954 the government ran a program of exactly this kind, and the program had an official name, and the official name was a slur. They printed the slur on the letterhead. They did not flinch. The President holds it up as the model, by name, at the rallies, and the crowd cheers the name. I admire the honesty of 1954 more than I can say. They did not need a saucer to make it palatable. They just used the word. We are the same operation with better art direction. The only thing we added was the costume. I love the callers. I want to say that plainly. For years they told each other a hidden cabal was running everything from the shadows, harvesting the innocent, and that one day the truth would come out. They were right. There is a cabal. It has a budget of a hundred and seventy billion dollars, the largest in the history of federal law enforcement, and it sits in this building, and I have a desk in it. And the people who spent a decade certain that shadowy elites were disappearing their neighbors now call our line, unpaid, to help the shadowy elites disappear their neighbors. They wanted to expose the conspiracy. We made them the staff. Do your own research, they said. They did. They found the gardener. The Department of War posted another tranche on the twenty-second. Saucers. Lights. A pilot's voice going thin. I read all of it. I want them to find one so badly. I want there to be a real one up there, a genuine visitor, something that actually came from somewhere else, because then, and only then, would a single creature in my files have been an alien. They never find it. The sky stays empty. The ground stays full. I have stopped attending the inter-agency sync. We were two departments looking for the same thing in two directions, and only one of us was ever going to be wrong, and it was the honest one. And here is the thing that keeps me at the window past dark. There was a real one. A rock from another star, the genuine article, the first verified object from outside the entire solar system, and a Harvard man went on television and said it might be a ship. An actual alien, possibly, inbound, free of charge, after sixty years of asking. We did not open a file. We could not arrest it. It had no forearm to read and no bank statement to approve. It was the only alien in America we had no use for, so we let it pass, and went back to the parking lot. Last winter the sky over New Jersey filled with lights nobody could name, and the whole government, every agency, every radar, looked up and said it did not know. The one time the unknown actually arrived, we had nothing. Down here I have never once said I do not know. That is the difference between their department and mine. They look up and find a question. I look down and have already decided the answer. Last week the President leaned over mid-briefing and asked if any of them were real. I told him the engagement was extremely real. He nodded. We do not break frame here. The frame is the only wall still standing. That, and the office fern. Nobody waters it. It will not die. The only thing in this building allowed to stay without papers. My plaque came Thursday. FIRST CONTACT, VISIONARY OF THE YEAR. Bold. Unapologetic. Unafraid. I lifted that off the homepage. It was written about one brave man telling the truth. I decided the man was me. I wrote it about me. I am the truth I declassified. I am the secret I warned you about. They walk among us, and I sign their mail. The counter is still live. Three million and climbing. I am told it will not be removed. We are not alone. We are just short a few landscapers. A few line cooks. A few nurses. And the entire night shift at the plant that makes the flag. Up. And to the right.

Peter Girnus ๐Ÿฆ…

60,870 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 3 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company. I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in 2020 I finally got to see it from the inside. Up close it was both amazing and terrible, like so many other companies and things in life. As someone with a maniacal sense of urgency built into me, Twitter often felt siloed and bureaucratic. Dumb power plays, reorgs and team name changes for the sake of someoneโ€™s ego were distractions that occurred too regularly. You couldnโ€™t just be a builder โ€” you also needed to be a politician. I was shocked by how old and bespoke the infrastructure was, but there was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company. It often felt like things were held together with duct tape and glue, and that many people had just accepted that a small product change could take months or quarters to build. Management had become bloated to accommodate career growth and the company culture felt too soft and entitled for my own taste. Healthy debate and criticism was replaced by a default refrain of โ€œno, that canโ€™t be doneโ€ or โ€œanother team owns that so donโ€™t touch itโ€. Teams could spend months building a feature and then some last-minute kerfuffle meant itโ€™d get killed for being too risky. Just talking directly to customers could turn into a turf war and create deadlocks between functions. I recall one such episode where a teammate spent a month trying to get clearance to reach out to some creators. He went through 3 layers of management and 6 different functional teams. In the end 4 executives were involved in the approval. It was insanity, and unfortunately I saw several top performers get burnt out and demoralized after exhausting experiences like that. Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers โ€” instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. Twitter often felt like a place that kept squandering its own potential, which was sad and frustrating to see. The person who was best at cutting through the BS and inspiring a vision during my tenure was Kayvon Beykpour, but he wasnโ€™t fully empowered to run the company since he wasnโ€™t the CEO. Despite those real issues, I was lucky enough to work with some of the most talented people in the business at Twitter in product, design, engineering, research, legal, BD, trust & safety, marketing, PR and more. Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. Those teams were very fun to be on but they felt like the exception rather than the rule. The months of waiting for the deal to close in 2022 were particularly slow and painful; it felt like leadership hid behind lawyers and legal language as all answers about the companyโ€™s future notoriously included the phrase โ€œfiduciary dutyโ€. Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didnโ€™t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. Although I didnโ€™t know much about Elon I was cautiously optimistic โ€“ I saw him as the guy who built incredible and enduring companies like Tesla and SpaceX, so perhaps his private ownership could shake things up and breathe new life into the company. My take on whatโ€™s happened since then is full of lived nuance. When people ask why I stayed itโ€™s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money. From the beginning I saw that some changes Elon was going to make were smart and others were stupid, but when Iโ€™m on a team I uphold the philosophy of โ€œpraise in public and criticize in privateโ€. I was far from a silent wallflower. I shared my opinions openly and pushed back often, both before and after the acquisition. I made peace with the fact that I didnโ€™t have psychological safety at Twitter 2.0 and that meant I could be fired at any moment, and for no reason at all. I watched it happen repeatedly and saw how negatively it impacted team morale. Although I couldnโ€™t change the situation I did my best to shine a light on folks who were doing important work while being an emotionally supportive leader for those who were struggling to adapt to the more brutalist and hardcore culture. In person Elon is oddly charming and heโ€™s genuinely funny. He also has personality quirks like telling the same stories and jokes over and over. The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him. At times it felt like the inner circle was too zealous and fanatical in their unwavering support of everything he said. When individuals encouraged me to be careful about what I said I politely thanked them and said I would not be taking their advice. I had no interest in adding to a culture of fear or walking on eggshells around Elon. Either he would respect me for being real or he could fire me. Either outcome was okay. I quickly learned that product and business decisions were nearly always the result of him following his gut instinct, and he didnโ€™t seem compelled to seek out or rely on a lot of data or expertise to inform it. That was particularly frustrating for me since I believed I had useful institutional knowledge that could help him make better decisions. Instead he'd poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice. At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I donโ€™t think things had to be as difficult or dramatic as they turned out to be but I canโ€™t say Iโ€™d bet against Elon or count him out. Heโ€™s smart and has enough money to make a lot of mistakes and then course correct when things go awry. As the largest shareholder he can tank the value in the short-term, but eventually heโ€™ll need things to turn around. His focus on speed is incredible and heโ€™s obviously not afraid of blowing things up, but now the real measure will be how it get reconstructed and if enough people want the new everything app he is building. I learned a ton from watching Elon up close โ€“ the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful. Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. Social networks are hard to kill but theyโ€™re not immune from death spirals. Only time will tell what the outcome will be but I hope X finds its footing because competition is good for consumers. In the meantime, I have a lot of empathy for the employees who are working tirelessly behind the scenes, the advertisers who want a stable platform to sell their stuff on, and the customers who are experiencing chaotic updates. Itโ€™s been a madhouse. Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy but now X is run by a mercurial leader whose instinct is driven by the unique and undoubtedly weird experience of being the biggest voice on the platform. Many of you know me from the sleeping bag incident where I slept on a conference room floor, so I figure, letโ€™s talk about that too. Going viral was an odd and interesting experience. I was attacked by people on the left and called a billionaire bootlicker, while simultaneously being attacked by people on the right for being a working mom who was demonized as an example of a woman choosing her career over her family. Thankfully I can laugh at myself and I donโ€™t take armchair keyboard ideologues too seriously. Being the main character on the timeline, even for a few minutes, requires a thick skin and a strong sense of self. The real story is pretty simple. I was given a nearly impossible deadline for his first project and as the product lead I would never ask anyone to do anything I wasnโ€™t willing to do myself. So I worked round the clock alongside an amazing team spanning many timezones, and we delivered it on schedule โ€“ truly against the odds. It was intense but also fun. Those first few months were wildly crazy but I wanted to be there and I have no regrets. Showing up and giving it your all should, in most cases, be celebrated. Obviously you canโ€™t work at that pace forever but there are moments where bursts are mission critical. Iโ€™ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I donโ€™t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far Iโ€™ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic. I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Since I like taking on difficult challenges I found it interesting and rewarding because I was growing and learning so rapidly. I realize our society today trends toward polarization but when it comes to this app, its owner, and its future, I am neither a fangirl nor a hater โ€” Iโ€™m an optimistic pragmatist. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change thatโ€™s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain, depending on who is telling what angle of the story. Elon doesnโ€™t deserve to be venerated or vilified. Heโ€™s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness. I disagree with many of his decisions and am surprised by his willingness to burn so much down, but with enough money and time, something new & innovative may emerge. I hope it does. Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift Iโ€™ve ever received. Sure the headlines and punchlines wrote themselves but I was battle hardened by then. I knew that Iโ€™d worked in a way where I could walk out with my head held high. I have no bitterness about the Product Management team being dismantled, and it made sense for me to exit as nearly all of the remaining PMs were let go. Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and Iโ€™m finally feeling rested and relaxed. Iโ€™m a creative and a builder, so sooner than later Iโ€™ll jump back into a high intensity company but Iโ€™m grateful for this season of thinking, reading, traveling and being with people I love. After having time to reflect I believe more than ever that the very best outcomes flow from great leadership that combines the head and the heart. Iโ€™d be remiss if I didnโ€™t note that in all of this there is also a cautionary tale for anyone who succeeds at something โ€” which is that the higher you climb, the smaller your world becomes. Itโ€™s a strange paradox but the richest and most powerful people are also some of the most isolated. I found myself frequently looking at Elon and seeing a person who seemed quite alone because his time and energy was so purely devoted to work, which is not the model of a life I want to live. Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. Weโ€™ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. Living in an echo chamber is dangerous and being at the top makes a person even more susceptible to being surrounded by yes people when nearly everyone around you is on the payroll and somehow stands to benefit from being in your orbit. Figuring out how to keep โ€œbetter angelsโ€ around in the form of family, friends, and teammates is critical to staying on the rails and enduring intense ups and downs. Everyone needs to hear hard truths sometimes and if you fire all the people who speak up then the reality distortion field may just turn into a vortex. I was drawn to Twitter because Iโ€™m obsessed with the problem of loneliness and connection between people. I find it fascinating & troubling that humans are getting lonelier as we simultaneously create a world thatโ€™s both safer and wealthier. I donโ€™t believe that trade-off has to exist, which is why I keep returning to that theme in my personal and professional life. I realize this is too long of a tweet but Twitter was a weird and special place on the internet, and Iโ€™m grateful to have played a teeny tiny role in its story and evolution. Iโ€™m here for whatever comes next โ€” on this app and in new places. Consumer social is very much alive and at a fascinating juncture, so Iโ€™ll be watching and participating and sharing hot takes because I donโ€™t want to, and probably canโ€™t, turn that part of me off. Perhaps X becomes a resounding success. Or it fails epically. Either way, I expect it will continue to be a very entertaining ride. ๐Ÿซก

Esther Crawford โœจ

5,502,358 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 3 ๅนดๅ‰

50 years ago yesterday: U.N. General Assembly adopts initial draft resolution declaring Zionism to be โ€œa form of racism.โ€ U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered this historic speech when the infamous act was ratified on Nov. 10, 1975: ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ โ€œThere appears to have developed in the United Nations the practice for a number of countries to combine for the purpose of doing something outrageous, and thereafter, the outrageous thing having been done, to profess themselves outraged by those who have the temerity to point it out, and subsequently to declare themselves innocent of any wrong-doing in consequence of its having been brought about wholly in reaction to the โ€œinsufferableโ€ acts of those who pointed the wrong-doing out in the first place. Out of deference to these curious sensibilities, the United States chose not to speak in advance of this vote: we speak in its aftermath and in tones of the utmost concern. The United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act. Not three weeks ago, the United States Representative in the Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee pleaded in measured and fully considered terms for the United Nations not to do this thing. It was, he said, โ€œobscene.โ€ It is something more today, for the furtiveness with which this obscenity first appeared among us has been replaced by a shameless openness. There will be time enough to contemplate the harm this act will have done the United Nations. Historians will do that for us, and it is sufficient for the moment only to note the foreboding fact. A great evil has been loosed upon the world. The abomination of anti-semitism โ€” as this yearโ€™s Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov observed in Moscow just a few days ago โ€” the Abomination of anti-semitism has been given the appearance of international sanction. The General Assembly today grants symbolic amnesty โ€” and more โ€” to the murderers of the six million European Jews. Evil enough in itself, but more ominous by far is the realization that now presses upon us โ€” the realization that if there were no General Assembly, this could never have happened. As this day will live in infamy, it behooves those who sought to avert it to declare their thoughts so that historians will know that we fought here, that we were not small in number โ€” not this time โ€” and that while we lost, we fought with full knowledge of what indeed would be lost. Nor should any historian of the event, nor yet any who have participated in it, suppose, that we have fought only as governments, as chancelleries, and on an issue well removed from the concerns of our respective peoples. Others will speak for their nations: I will speak for mine. In all our postwar history there had not been another issue which has brought forth such unanimity of American opinion. The President of the United States has from the first been explicit: This must not happen. The Congress of the United States in a measure unanimously adopted in the Senate and sponsored by 436 of 437 Representatives in the House, declared its utter opposition. Following only American Jews themselves, the American trade union movements was first to the fore in denouncing this infamous undertaking. Next, one after another, the great private institutions of American life pronounced anathema in this evil thing โ€” and most particularly, the Christian churches have done so. Reminded that the United Nations was born in struggle against just such abominations as we are committing today โ€” the wartime alliance of the United Nations dates from 1942 โ€” the United Nations Association of the United States has for the first time in its history appealed directly to each of the 141 other delegations in New York not to do this unspeakable thing. The proposition to be sanctioned by a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations is that โ€œZionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.โ€ Now this is a lie. But as it is a lie which the United Nations has now declared to be a truth, the actual truth must be restated. The very first point to be made is that the United Nations has declared Zionism to be racism โ€” without ever having defined racism. โ€œSentence first โ€” verdict afterwards,โ€ as the Queen of Hearts said. But this is not wonderland, but a real world, where there are real consequences to folly and to venality. Just on Friday, the President of the General Assembly, speaking on behalf of Luxembourg, warned not only of the trouble which would follow from the adoption of this resolution but of its essential irresponsibility โ€” for, he noted, members have wholly different ideas as to what they are condemning. โ€œIt seems to me that before a body like this takes a decision they should agree very clearly on what they are approving or condemning, and it takes more time.โ€ Lest I be unclear, the United Nations has in fact on several occasions defined โ€œracial discrimination.โ€ The definitions have been loose, but recognizable. It is โ€œracism,โ€ incomparably the more serious charge โ€” racial discrimination is a practice; racism is a doctrine โ€” which has never been defined. Indeed, the term has only recently appeared in the United Nations General Assembly documents. The one occasion on which we know the meaning to have been discussed was the 1644th meeting of the Third Committee on December 16, 1968, in connection with the report of the Secretary-General on the status of the international convention on the elimination of all racial discrimination. On that occasion โ€” to give some feeling for the intellectual precision with which the matter was being treated โ€” the question arose, as to what should be the relative positioning of the terms โ€œracismโ€ and โ€œNazismโ€ in a number of the โ€œpreambular paragraphs.โ€ The distinguished delegate from Tunisia argued that โ€œracismโ€ should go first because โ€œNazism was merely a form of racism.โ€ Not so, said the no less distinguished delegate from the Union Soviet Socialist Republics. For, he explained, โ€œNazism contained the main elements of racism within its ambit and should be mentioned first.โ€ This is to say that racism was merely a form of Nazism. The discussion wound to its weary and inconclusive end, and we are left with nothing to guide us for even this one discussion of โ€œracismโ€ confined itself to world orders in preambular paragraphs, and did not at all touch on the meaning of the words as such. Still, one cannot but ponder the situation we have made for ourselves in the context of the Soviet statement on that not so distant occasion. If, as the distinguished delegate declared, racism is a form of Nazism โ€” and if, as this resolution declares, Zionism is a form of racism โ€” then we have step to step taken ourselves to the point of proclaiming โ€” the United Nations is solemnly proclaiming โ€” that Zionism is a form of Nazism. What we have here is a lie โ€” a political lie of a variety well known to the twentieth century, and scarcely exceeded in all that annal of untruth and outrage. The lie is that Zionism is a form of racism. The overwhelmingly clear truth is that is it not. The word โ€œracismโ€ is a creation of the English language, and relatively new to it. It is not, for instance, to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (appears in 1982 supplement to Oxford Dictionary). The term derives from relatively new doctrines โ€” all of them discredited โ€” concerning the human population of the world, to the effect that there are significant biological differences among clearly identifiable groups, and that these differences establish, in effect, different levels of humanity. Racism, as defined in Websterโ€™s Third New International Dictionary, is โ€œThe Assumption that . . . traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another.โ€ It further involves โ€œa belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to dominate over others.โ€ This meaning is clear. It is equally clear that this assumption, this belief, has always been altogether alien to the political and religious movement known as Zionism. As a strictly political movement, Zionism was established only in 1897, although there is a clearly legitimate sense in which its origins are indeed ancient. For example, many branches of Christianity have always held that from the standpoint of biblical prophets, Israel would be reborn one day. But the modern Zionism movement arose in Europe in the context of a general upsurge of national consciousness and aspiration that overtook most other people of Central and Eastern Europe after 1848, and that in time spread to all of Africa and Asia. It was, to those persons of the Jewish religion, a Jewish form of what today is called a national liberation movement. Probably a majority of those persons who became active Zionists and sought to emigrate to Palestine were born within the confines of Czarist Russia, and it was only natural for Soviet Prime Minister Andrei Gromyko to deplore, as he did in 1948, in the 299th meeting of the Security Council, the act by Israelโ€™s neighbors of โ€œsending troops into Palestine and carrying out military operations aimedโ€ โ€” in Mr. Gromykoโ€™s words โ€” at the suppression of the national liberation movement in Palestine.โ€ Now it was the singular nature โ€” if, I am not mistaken, it was the unique nature โ€” of this national liberation movement that in contrast with the movements that preceded it, those of that time, and those that have come since, it defined its members in terms not of birth, but of belief. That is to say, it was not a movement of the Irish to free Ireland, or of the Polish to free Poland, not a movement of the Algerians to free Algeria, nor of Indians to free India. It was not a movement of persons connected by historic membership to a genetic pool of the kind that enables us to speak loosely but not meaninglessly, say, of the Chinese people, nor yet of diverse groups occupying the same territory which enables us to speak if the American people with no greater indignity to truth. To the contrary, Zionists defined themselves merely as Jews, and declared to be Jewish anyone born of a Jewish mother or โ€” and this is the absolutely crucial fact โ€” anyone who converted to Judaism. Which is to say, in terms of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted by the 20th General Assembly, anyone โ€” regardless of โ€œrace, colour, descent, or nationally or ethnic origin โ€ฆ..โ€ The state of Israel, which in time was the creation of the Zionist Movement, has been extraordinary in nothing so much as the range of โ€œracial stocksโ€ from which it Orient and Jew from the West. Most such persons could be said to have been โ€œbornโ€ Jewish, just as most Presbyterians and most Hindus are โ€œbornโ€ to their faith, but there are many Jews who are just converts. With a consistency in the matter which surely attests to the importance of this issue to that religions and political culture, Israeli courts have held that a Jew who converts to another religion is no longer a Jew. In the meantime the population of Israel also includes large numbers of non-Jews, among them Arabs of both the Muslim and Christian religions and Christians of other national origins. Many of these persons are citizens of Israel, and those who are not can become citizens by legal procedures very much like those which obtain in a typical nation of Western Europe. Now I should wish to be understood that I am here making one point, and one point only, which is that whatever else Zionism may be, it is not and cannot be โ€œa form of racism.โ€ In logic, the State of Israel could be, or could become, many things, theoretically, including many things undesirable, but it could not be and could not become racism unless it ceased to be Zionist. Indeed, the idea that Jews are a โ€œraceโ€ was invented not by Jews but by those who hated Jews. The idea of Jews as a race was invented by nineteenth century anti-semites such as Houston Steward Chamberlain and Edouard Drumont, who saw that in an increasingly secular age, which is to say an age made for fewer distinctions between people, the old religions grounds for anti-semitism were losing force. New justifications were needed for excluding and persecuting Jews, and so the new idea of Jews as a race โ€” rather than as a religion โ€” was born. It was a contemptible idea at the beginning, and no civilized person would be associated with it. To think that it is an idea now endorsed by the United Nations is to reflect on what civilization has come to. It is precisely a concern for civilization, for civilized values that are or should be precious to all mankind, that arouses us at this moment to such special passion. What we have at stake here is not merely the honor and the legitimacy of the State of Israel โ€” although a challenge to the legitimacy of any member nation ought always to arouse the vigilance of all members of the United Nations. For a yet more important matter is at issue, which is the integrity of the whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know as human rights. The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences. Not only will people begin to say, indeed they have already begun to say that the United Nations is a place where lies are told, but far more serious, grave and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the cause of human rights itself. The harm will arise first because it will strip from racism the precise and abhorrent meaning that it still precariously holds today. How will the people of the world feel about racism and the need to struggle against it, when they are told that it is an idea as broad as to include the Jewish national liberation movement? As the lie spreads, it will do harm in a second way. Many of the members of the United Nations owe their independence in no small part to the notion of human rights, as it has spread from the domestic sphere to the international sphere exercised its influence over the old colonial powers. We are now coming into a time when that independence is likely to be threatened again. There will be new forces, some of them arising now, new prophets and new despots, who will justify their actions with the help of just such distortions of words as we have sanctioned here today. Today we have drained the word โ€œracismโ€ of its meaning. Tomorrow, terms like โ€œnational self-determinationโ€ and โ€œnational honorโ€ will be perverted in the same way to serve the purposes of conquest and exploitation. And when these claims begin to be made โ€” as they already have begun to be made โ€” it is the small nations of the world whose integrity will suffer. And how will the small nations of the world defend themselves, on what grounds will others be moved to defend and protect them, when the language of human rights, the only language by which the small can be defended, is no longer believed and no longer has a power of its own? There is this danger, and then a final danger that is the most serious of all. Which is that the damage we now do to the idea of human rights and the language of human rights could well be irreversible. The idea of human rights as we know it today is not an idea which has always existed in human affairs, it is an idea which appeared at a specific time in the world, and under very special circumstances. It appeared when European philosophers of the seventeenth century began to argue that man was a being whose existence was independent from that of the State, that he need join a political community only if he did not lose by that association more than he gained. From this very specific political philosophy stemmed the idea of political rights, of claims that the individual could justly make against the state; it was because the individual was seen as so separate from the State that he could make legitimate demands upon it. That was the philosophy from which the idea of domestic and international rights sprang. But most of the world does not hold with that philosophy now. Most of the world believes in newer modes of political thought, in philosophies that do not accept the individual as distinct from and prior to the State, in philosophies that therefore do not provide any justification for the idea of human rights and philosophies that have no words by which to explain their value. If we destroy the words that were given to us by past centuries, we will not have words to replace them, for philosophy today has no such words. But there are those of us who have not forsaken these older words, still so new to much of the world. Not forsaken them now, not here, not anywhere, not ever. The United States of America declares that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act.โ€

Hillel Neuer

68,720 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 10 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

Operation Odyssey Dawn: The End of Libya and the Destruction of Europe /๐Ÿ“„ On February 15th, during the Obama presidency, the US launched a war on Libya through covert means. Using the Soros network and the city of Benghazi, a bridgehead for the destruction of the entire country, the US ran the most intense propaganda and psychological campaign in history. I must mention that this PSYOP was so intense that yours truly initially fell for it, something I will likely not forgive myself for. I honestly thought Ghaddafi had suddenly went insane, mainly because I had a low opinion of his past antics and I thought the fall of the Mubarak regime was favourable to the world. The right wing supported this war, as they wanted to see more Arab nations destroyed in favour of Israel. The left wing? They were the most disgraceful. All of them sold Libya down the rive and aligned with the "rebels". As John McCain would later reveal, they were just a cutout used for US special forces. Many of the people that now fashion themselves as being against Israel were instrumental in the murder of Libya as a nation. They just never talk about it anymore, but I hope the guilt destroys them one day. The propaganda followed a typical Soros formula. It began with "peaceful protestors", then "Ghaddafi is killing his own people", then "rebels and transitional governments" and finally "air support/no fly zone required". It happened so quickly that it was bewildering for a nation that had remained stable for decades and was the richest in the world in terms of being debt free. Libya had the brightest future of all the countries in Africa and in many senses in the entire world including Asia and Europe. It's perhaps for that reason that Libya was betrayed by almost everyone. The Arab League was the first and the most unprecedented in its dastardly action. There was never a unanimous against Libya, Syria and Algeria had vetoed action against Libya. This was a rule in that body of 22 nations, but it was forced through anyway. This became UNSC resolution 1973. Neither Russia nor China vetoed this bill. France under the covertly Jewish president Sarkozy (who had once claimed that all of Europe must become a mixed race, publicly), led the charge, bombing Libya before an agreed upon ceasefire deadline. Even Palestine* voted against Libya. It seemed the entire world was in agreement about Libya over a complete lie created by the United States and Israel. The world thought Ghaddafi was unpopular but nothing could be further from the proof. It was the most bastardly thing the world would do, and in a sense, for what was done to Libya the entire world deserves to be destroyed. China had to move 75 companies out of Libya, and 36,000 Chinese workers, losing North Africa in one single month. The Chinese chickened out and didn't protect Libya, and this eventually led to the downfall of the Hu Jintao technocratic regime. The reports of 10s of thousands dying in Libya were lies, amplified by videos uploaded on YouTube and Twitter. It was a full production of lies where rabid Arab youths would destroy their own nation for some pocket money from Soros. Browns would repeat these lies and cash in on them, pretending to be oppressed while being the oppressors of their own people. In a sense calling it oppression is a moral failing -- it was a murder, of an entire nation. You see, the bombing campaign was not merely counter-force. NATO (which had quickly run out of ammunition days into the war) and the US aimed to kill the nation itself with counter-value attacks. Power stations were destroyed. The worst crime was Libya's water: Ghaddafi's Great Man-Made River, a 2800km artificial river project, was bombed until it was damaged. Then the factories that were repairing it throughout the war were destroyed. NATO still denies this crime but anyone can confirm it. Tripoli was taken before the war was over, but Ghaddafi's forces never stopped fighting. The operation launched on Tripoli was called Mermaid Dawn, or Operation Sirens (according to Pepe Escobar). The reason for the naming will be made clear soon, for now let's continue with the chronology of the war and the crimes to follow. Ghaddafi's hometown of Sirte wasn't merely bombed to dust, it was literally salted with the water of the Mediterranean sea. The reason why Sirte was flooded with salt water and destroyed was because NATO couldn't take it using ground forces. Ghaddafi's sons and their special forces were putting up a perfect defence in this city with its underground facilities filled with enough weapons to fight for an entire decade. But Ghaddafi failed to account for the possibility that he would lose the air and sea, and didn't create a run off system that would allow water to leave the bunkers. Losing in Sirte, Ghaddafi was ready to surrender, but NATO wanted him dead. They wanted even the possibility of Libya rising again to be removed from any person's mind. So they murdered him in the most brutal and disgusting manner. He died a martyr for his nation, yet the brown filth who murdered him didn't deserve a martyr, they deserved annihilation. No crime that could be done, other than the use of nuclear weapons, was done to Libya. If you understood what kind of country was destroyed (watch the attached video it will break your heart) you will see what a crime this was, for a world filled with the filthiest nations and their filthiest people (almost everywhere) to come together to destroy the one country with a chance at a debt free existence... how should the world pay for this crime? As it were, the punishment and the crime came together as a single package within the war. In any case in 2011, it was claimed the war was over, but the war continues today as the nation is split into three. In the remains of the outskirts of Sirte, the "rebels" and "peaceful protestors" would use chemical weapons to kill other tribes. They then transported these weapons to Syria where they were used in a false flag to implicate the Syrian Arab Army and Assad. As the dust settled around Libya, Europe would quickly be haunted by one of Ghaddafi's last warnings: If he falls Europe will become Black. Name of Operations Reveal Intent With Libya destroyed, the remains of the country would quickly become a rampart for economic "refugees" -- African browns, blacks and other unwanted people flooding into Europe to r*pe, pillage and steal its wealth. You would think that this was an unintended consequence of the war, but ... the names of the operation reveal the exact intent of those who planned it, namely Obama and Sarkozy: the target was Europe itself. For this plan to work, there could be no country where Libya was, it had to be destroyed so that no one could control the Mediterranean sea. Libya, and later Syria, were the modern day Troys. Troy protected the Mediterranean civilizations from Asia. It's fall happened almost simultaneously with the rise of the sea peoples. Homer's Odyssey speaks of the ruin the Mycenaeans and other factions of proto-Greek states after their war on Troy. It was a pyrrhic victory and all that remained of rich civilizations destroyed by the sea peoples. Is it any wonder that that the Pentagon chose to call it Operation Odyssey Dawn? They claim it's completely random -- which by the way is a lie -- but then, in the later chapters of Odyssey, sirens aka mermaids would appear. How can they also accidentally call the sacking of Tripoli Operation Mermaid Dawn/Operation Sirens? The intent was clear and the results also. Due to the fall of Libya and now the similarly catastrophic destruction of Syria, more than 5 million Asians and Africans have been flowing into Europe illegally. I would say even more "legally" using this inflow as a disguise. Europe is being destroyed using the most potent chain reaction known to mankind: foreigners multiplying in your own country and eating away at its boundaries and interiors. Today all right wing parties allow uncontrolled mass migration through "legal" means. All left wing parties, in addition to this "legal" migration also disguise their action as charitable through the flow of illegal migration. People all over Europe complain and hate the flow of migrants. I do too -- but let's be honest about something. These inflows wouldn't have been possible with the "original sin" of destroying Libya. Nothing has been done to make amends and atone for what was done to Libya. If anything Libya is being destroyed more and more every day and the fire is spreading. Sudan voted against Ghaddafi. Today the UAE flows masses of weapons from Libya into Chad to be used to destroy Sudan. Hamas lied about Ghaddafi. Now its leadership has been wiped out and Gaza is rubble. China abandoned Ghaddafi. Now its economy is held under a double sided siege with the US (and Israel which it still supports). Russia abandoned Ghaddafi at the drop of the hat. Now Russia's infrastructure is facing countervalue attacks and its military has been facing ruthless counterforce attacks from NATO. The Arabs which conspired against Libya are all going to be destroyed soon as all waterways into their countries are closed by Iran. Iran itself, which lied about Ghaddafi (over his own "original sin" -- the murder and disappearance of Musa Sadr), is hanging on by a thread and is being betrayed by those on its interior. But what will happen next to the US and Europe for what they've done to Libya? It doesn't take a genius to guess, and only the nations that refused to participate are ironically doing fine. Poland, on April 2011, refused to join the coalition against Libya. Today, that nation is the greatest success in Europe and has the lowest problem with unwanted invasive species (migrants). Germany pretended to be against the war as well, but was the main source of weapons and ammunition against Libya. As we face the abyss of societal collapse, it's important to remember our own crimes against peace which destroyed a peaceful and successful nation. The very least we can all do is spread the word, not only about the crime itself, but the victim. The beautiful country, Libya, that was completely destroyed by our participation in a PSYOP and inaction against the criminals who run our nations. On my part, after witnessing how quickly the mass formation psychosis, which I unfortunately participated in at least in words written on BBSes of the old internet, my own choice of atonement was ensuring this kind of war never happens to another country again. It is for that reason I had turned my attention to Syria back in 2011. What will you do? /End [* As an aside, it wasn't just the PLO. Hamas would then condemn Ghaddafi and the Palestinian supporters would join its chorus. Later, seeing the "success" in Libya, Hamas decided to join the war against Syria and didn't just provide words but material and ideological support against the country. I commented at the time (2012) that we will soon see Gaza reduced to rubble as a result of this immoral act.]

Korobochka (ใ‚ณใƒญใƒœ) ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บโœ๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ท๐Ÿ‡บ

143,374 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 24 ๅคฉๅ‰

Masquerade now hangs in The Toledo Museum of Art. But unlike a painting, Masquerade holds within itself: a gathering of people in the network and systems to connect us. The piece is not "A" piece. It is every Mask, every dot, every observation made and, through a new layer, every one yet to be made. I feel both stupidly lucky and genuinely honored to bring everyone who has given energy to Luci out of the network and into a place that has honored my work and the work of so many other artists I deeply admire with immense and precise care. This absurd world of masks and monkeys I love so much because of what has been shared between people through it has had my love compound through the care of people. To help to protect and preserve a story bigger than my own, not unlike what has taken place atop its surface. Much as the systems of participation echoed the systems of its creation, so too does its curation and cultivation by others help it grow. Masquerade now hangs in a museum, but it hangs alongside a cadre of digital art's giants in an exhibition titled โ€œInfinite Images,โ€ which sits centered inside a museum filled with the giants of art history itself. For this to happen requires a lattice frequency of care: not as a feeling, but as something intensely actionable. Careโ€”demonstrated through sacrifice and skin in the game. It pours out of the dark blue diamond walls and the work atop them and into our orange room; it bleeds from every installation, overflowing from each and every artist, and the space between each of us within. Care is revealed through a curator who helped me understand my own work more but also learn what connects me backwards to the shoulders I stand on. Julia Kaganskiy ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฆ found and presented our systems not as separate worlds, but as part of one system of lifeโ€”all while bringing into life of a higher order: her first child. Care extended through a director, Adam Levine, who pushed for something quite radical and got his hands dirty to allow this show to even exist. The Museum and the people who keep its engine moving treated our new as sacred as their old. They did so not to onboard, but to remain. A portal that lifts up a movement happening in the network by seeing the need to connect our nodes rather than relegate or shut the gate behind. Doing this required the patronage of Alan Howard, channeled through the cataloging brilliance of Martina Negro, and the willingness of highโ€‘order patronage to become a cooperative network rather than an adversarial one. In that cooperation is where Masqueradeโ€™s place in the exhibition came through Kanbas. A throughline drawn between the roles of our ecosystem. Of what can be built between us if we see each other as one ecosystem, both different and essential. An exhibition filled with cuttingโ€‘edge technology and masterful presentation does not exist with only artists or curators or museums; it is enabled through a network of generous patronage and curiosity. Kanbas helped me take what began as the orange room with a digital confessional that is Rachel and Iโ€™s studio in New York, that last year became The Monument Game boatโ€‘dock exhibition in Venice, Italy through the genius of ScriptedFantasy and support of Ryan Zurrer, and evolve it to sit in a Museum in a way that does not just exhibit the work, but educates and invites people to come closer who may not know any of this even exists. Rather than just house the singular work, Kanbas and Amanda cared to share the network of 613 Masks and the people who wear them with it. Care came through my team who built Masquerade with me in Nifty Gateway Studio. Chrisly, Ashlin, Bob, Nirali, Tara, and all who pitched in make our interface and systems accessible to a whole new audience; to build infrastructure and enable thousands of people who have never touched the blockchain to create a wallet just by leaving an Observation atop the Masquerade is more than a feature: it is spreading the network rather than closing its gates. I feel so lucky to have such a tremendous team of people to think not as a marketplace, but as stewards to present what we have been building well and improve it with time and circumstance. This patronage enabled artistry within artistry to thrive, through a masterful exhibition design led by Richard The, technology and fabrication partners through TCI in Greg and Anthony, Jack with projections, and fabricators through Bednark. With me is my brilliant engineer, Alex Borre, who has broken apart all of this alongside me and helped me grow as an artist. By my side has been joeyL.eth, the eternal vibe check of taste, restraint, and precision - the finest eye and mind I know, and the relentless, perpetual support of El Barba Roja blue check who championed and willed this exhibition into existence more than anyone. No matter how much โ€œthis is how we buildโ€ has looped and humanโ€‘centipeded in on itself through cynical interpretations, in this case, it truly is, and his hands are all over not just my contribution, but many others in this show, as well as in the exhibitionโ€™s foundation itself. But in the end: care has been given in the highest order by my wife Rachel Spratt who has done what all new great mothers do and given life through tremendous exertion. We did not take a break after Masquerade, because it just immediately became Masquerade IRL. She has given to me, given to our daughter Syla, given to our tribe of Masks and Skulls, to this exhibition: everything. What is left after one gives all away, no matter how sweetly, can be a hollowing of self or, if met well before a break, a shedding of self. To sit in this beautiful room together, within an exhibition this magnificent, inside a building this rich with history and love of humanity, and have so much care be put in to match hers by this network around us on and offline, I got to sit in pride because I knew this very real moment for me, that began so alone and has become quite collective, would simply, unequivocally, never even come close to existing without her. So much of my life has been defined by solitude. I was not expecting having my work presented like this to move me so much. I thought it would be more of a feather in the cap or rather beautiful box to check. But it isn't that at all. It's connection to others. I fell in love with the artists' work that sits alongside my own. I saw Dmitri Cherniak's Ringers Iโ€™ve seen a thousand times, but saw them again in a way my daughter could visualize her own curiosity about the worldโ€”decisions in how these were shared served a higher purpose: to communicate. I saw Casey REAS as someone not just as a pioneer, but as someone more realโ€”who, like my wife, cut part of himself out and set it aside to see what others could create. I saw Operator not as slick performers of the code, but as arbiters of freedom. I saw invitations to see the humanity in code in dozens of directions, and gratitude to sit even close to any of it. Talent. Sweat. Blood. Skin in the game. The artists pushed. The fabricators pushed. The docents pushed. Not one of us is like the other and no template was ever to be made to try to force otherwise. On September 12th, I will be inviting every holder of Luci: Masks, Players, Council, to come out to a small town in Ohio and leave a bit of themselves behind and get a very deep look into the world I am trying to build in the process. More on that very soon, but should you be able to come, know that there is much to care about beyond what Iโ€™ve built within this exhibitionโ€”and I hope you will fall in love with the rest of these infinite worlds as I have. We all know we aren't supposed to touch the paintings in a museum. But my daughter Syla touched the illuminated lightbox of Masquerade that she unknowingly stars in at the center of, and I smiled. Because she's not touching a world of divine objects susceptible to fingerprints and pretense; she's touching a display. A frontโ€‘end standโ€‘in representation for the network of humanity underneath. A place where light, code, instructions, a design that rhymes across all things has formed a very unlikely but very real gathering of strangers over the last few years to create together. I feel lucky for her to grow up surrounded by people who create and who care.

Sam Spratt

49,182 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 1 ๅนดๅ‰

On March 15th, 2021, an anonymous Twitter user asked Harvard Medical professor Martin Kulldorff a question. โ€œDo you think younger age groups and or people who have already had the virus need to be vaccinated?โ€ Who is Martin Kulldorff? Heโ€™s a Harvard Medical School professor for 21 years, a well-known Swedish biostatistician who developed widely used software for disease mapping, the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration on how to deal with the COVID pandemic, and an advisor to the worldโ€™s leading health organizations. What he said was that โ€œThinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should get COVID. Vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it, nor do children.โ€ Natural immunity. Is it a myth โ€” a โ€œconspiracy theoryโ€ โ€” that once you have been sick from a virus, then you wonโ€™t get sick, or as sick, again? In fact, weโ€™ve known for 2,500 years that natural immunity is real. โ€œThe same man was never attacked twice, never at least fatally,โ€ wrote Thucydides, describing the plague of Athens. He observed that recovered individuals could safely nurse the sick without falling ill themselves. And yet Twitter censored Martin Kulldorffโ€™s tweet. โ€œLearn why health officials recommend a vaccine,โ€ read a warning that Twitter employees put on it. For most people, the Tweet cannot be replied to, shared or liked. In other words, Twitter had decided that this professor at Harvard Medical School was wrong, and that natural immunity wasnโ€™t really something that could protect you from COVID. Jay Bhattacharya, whoโ€™s currently our Director of the National Institutes of Health, and thus one of the highest-ranking public health officials in the world, was a Stanford epidemiologist before that. Twitter put him on a โ€œTrends Blacklist.โ€ Not long before we discovered this, we were told that shadow-banning was a conspiracy theory, because Twitter had said it didnโ€™t shadow-ban. Now the European Commission is trying to censor the entire global internet. They want to put a 140 million Euro fine on X. They want to end anonymity, which was what allowed that question of Kulldorff to be asked. They want to use a โ€œDemocracy Shieldโ€ program to shield the Commission from democracy. And the Commission wants to impose โ€œchat controlโ€ so they can read your private messages. It just gets worse and worse. Unsubstantiated and likely false claims of Russian government election interference through TikTok and social media were made in Romania and in the Czech Republic. Truth is not something that anybody holds as a possession and rather emerges through dialogue. Weโ€™ve known that since Plato and Socrates. We need free speech for science, public health, and national security. Itโ€™s essential to journalism, democracy, and human freedom. Free speech enabled civilization; censorship threatens it. This is the only political cause that I would die for. And yet there is currently an active coordination between Stanford, Brazil, Australia, and others to impose what I think we can call, without exaggeration, global totalitarianism. Theyโ€™re pushing for digital identification that will end anonymity online. Why is that? Why are these guys behaving in this way? When Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 28th, 2022, unprecedented insight into multiple secret government mass censorship efforts emerged from this exploration. We had unlimited access to Twitter files. They revealed that the mainstream news reporters, who donโ€™t deserve the name, were demanding censorship. No true journalist demands censorship of his fellow journalists. What emerged from this was an understanding of something we call the โ€œCensorship Industrial Complex,โ€ which directly grew out of the military industrial complex and was run by active or former intelligence community officials who often operate under that banner. It led to multiple congressional investigations and hearings, and it spread across every social media platform. So we now know the censorship that occurred, not just at Twitter, but at YouTube, at Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms. What is the Censorship Industrial Complex? The model isnโ€™t that complicated to understand. The government chooses people whom they call โ€œresearchersโ€ to serve as censors. These are government-funded individuals who often come from the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment. They work at non-governmental organizations funded by governments or at universities funded by governments. They conduct โ€œfact checksโ€ to serve as โ€œtrusted flaggers.โ€ These โ€œtrusted flaggersโ€ demand censorship by social media platforms. Itโ€™s all done in secret. Theyโ€™re looking to censor narratives. This is essential because, as decades of good cognitive science have shown, people understand and retain information through storytelling. We think in terms of stories, not bullet points. And so they were out to censor whole narratives. From the Stanford censorship project on COVID, the โ€œVirality Project,โ€ they said they wanted to censor โ€œtrue storiesโ€ of vaccine side effects. Why? Because it might โ€œfuel hesitancy.โ€ In other words, they want to control your behavior. They donโ€™t want you to receive true information that might lead you to not get the vaccine. If that isnโ€™t totalitarianism straight out of 1984, I donโ€™t know what it. These people were on the verge of passing legislation in the United States that wouldโ€™ve authorized the National Science Foundation to choose these โ€œresearcherโ€ censors. Iโ€™m presenting slides to Europeans and the world for situational awareness into what totalitarian politicians and bureaucrats have planned because this is still going strong. Stanford helped the US government censor COVID dissidents, and then they lied about it. You might be detecting a pattern. Theyโ€™re really not interested in censoring โ€œmisinformation.โ€™ Theyโ€™re very interested in censoring true information. The censors flagged an Israeli preprint which came out in December, 2020 and found, lo and behold, that natural immunity is a real thing. In fact, itโ€™s more protective than the vaccine. But the censors flagged somebodyโ€™s Google Drive. โ€œSee the following Google Drive links being used to compile testimonies about vaccine shedding, Covid videos, showing side effects and whatnot.โ€ Google then removed that content from that personโ€™s Google Drive. You donโ€™t control your Google Drive. Contrary to Stanfordโ€™s claim that the project did not ask social media platforms to remove any content, they privately said they did. And we know that many hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts were removed, even though they were a hundred percent accurate. In fact, in 2021, Stanfordโ€™s โ€œVirality Projectโ€ flagged accurate claims that the World Health Organization did not recommend vaccinating children. The people who spread the misinformation are the people demanding the censorship. They claimed Covid couldnโ€™t have come from a lab, that the Covid vaccine prevented infection, and that natural immunity didnโ€™t exist. The only solution to hate speech and misinformation is free speech. If you censor false information, how would anybody get the true information? The whole point is the debate. They lied when they said false information travels faster than true information. Itโ€™s a completely bogus study and involved six seconds of content on Twitter. Who are these people? As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they called them โ€œBu alumni.โ€ They created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals. Intriguingly, we discovered that the general counsel of the FBI โ€” arguably the second most powerful person of the FBI, or maybe the first, if you think, consider that what their actual job is to decide what the FBI can and canโ€™t do โ€” resigned from FBI in early 2020 and went to Twitter to take the deputy general counsel role. Isnโ€™t that interesting? Somebody in one of the most powerful legal positions in the world would take a junior legal role at a social media company. Why would that be? This email popped up when we were going through Twitter files and it really jumped out at us. Itโ€™s from the director of policy at Twitter. โ€œWe have seen a sustained if uncoordinatedโ€ โ€” supposedly โ€” โ€œeffort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies. Theyโ€™re probing and pushing everywhere they can.โ€ The Hunter Biden laptop censorship occurred later that year. The FBI and the intelligence community discredited accurate, factual information about Hunter Bidenโ€™s foreign business dealings both before and after the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14th, 2020. How could the FBI spread false information about something that nobody knew about? Because the FBI had Hunter Bidenโ€™s laptop, which showed his familyโ€™s massive influence peddling scheme. It consisted of accepting tens of millions of dollars, including from the Chinese government. The FBI had been sitting on that laptop since December of 2019. They had been given it by the computer repair store owner, who had been given the laptop by Hunter Biden, likely because he dropped it in his bathtub or in the pool, when he was on one of his many crack and alcohol benders. The government strategy is always the same: spread disinformation first, then demand censorship of accurate information on the basis of it . โ€œThe FBI came to us in the summer of 2020,โ€ Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan two years later, โ€œand they were like, โ€˜Hey, you should be on the alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016. Thereโ€™s about to be some kind of dump.โ€™โ€ In the summer of 2020, the New York Post had not published the story about the Hunter Biden laptop. It would only come out in October. We see something very interesting show up in the Twitter files: the Aspen Institute, an intermediary between the intelligence community and the public. Itโ€™s known as a Davos-style gab fest in the United States. Itโ€™s also the place where intelligence community operations are run. They hosted a workshop to train reporters and all of the social mediaโ€™s top censorship officials, known as โ€œtrust and safety officials,โ€ how to deal with a story they would hear in the future relating to Hunter Biden and Barisma. A few months earlier, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center had published a report attacking what we in the United States call the Pentagon Papers Principle. The Pentagon Papers Principle says that if a government official gives me, a journalist, a bunch of Pentagon documents showing that weโ€™re losing the war in Vietnam, I, as a journalist, can publish them, and not risk prison. That was decided in a famous Supreme Court case in 1971. Stanford argued that, really, we should get rid of that principle, which may be the most important investigative journalism principle in the United States, and said, โ€œYou should cover the person who leaked the materials, not the leaked emails.โ€ In other words, you should cover and expose the whistleblower. The person who exposed the Pentagon Papers is the real bad guy, not the DOD, CIA, and presidents who had lied to us for over a decade. Stanford was training the journalists and the social media trust and safety officers in how to cover a story that had not yet come out. This is known as โ€œpre-bunking,โ€ and itโ€™s also part of the European Union strategy to shield themselves from democracy. When the Hunter Biden story appeared October 22nd, Twitterโ€™s trust and safety censorship official said it didnโ€™t violate its terms of service. Thereโ€™s nothing illegal about any of this. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that youโ€™re allowed to report on information thatโ€™s been leaked to you. At that moment, the former FBI general counsel, Jim Baker, argued vigorously that Twitter really needed to censor it. Baker won and they censored the story. Itโ€™s not that we didnโ€™t hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story when it came out. I certainly did. But we had the impression that there was something wrong with it, that it was not really the whole story. And so many of us dismissed it. What they had done was a psyop on this major story. They had changed our perception of the story. And it worked. It worked on me, it worked on everybody I knew. What is the role of the intelligence community of social media companies? The former CIA people are the head of elections at Meta, and Googleโ€™s head of trust and safety. Former and current CIA officers have a history of spreading misinformation and promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory. We now know that between 2018 and 2023, there were 36 people from the CIA 68 from the FBI 44, from the National Security Administration and 68 from the Department of Homeland Security who had moved to work at the social media platforms. This is not unique to the United States. My colleague Cecilia Jilkovรก, the daughter of famous Czech dissidents, discovered that European Union officials claimed, days before the European elections in 2024, that a โ€œpro-Kremlin websiteโ€ was spreading propaganda and were paying off European politicians. That was the headline in Politico. We wrote to them and asked, โ€œWhereโ€™s the evidence of this? Just go ahead and share the evidence to support your accusation days before the European parliamentary elections.โ€ Nobody was arrested. They never produced the evidence. The former Czech president, Vรกclav Klaus, who was accused of this, said, โ€œWe donโ€™t even know what the โ€˜Voice of Europeโ€™ is.โ€ Another Czech politician said, โ€œHow could I have known it would be a security threat? At the time I gave the interview, they werenโ€™t on any list.โ€ Another said, โ€œIf theyโ€™re such a big threat, why did the European Parliament let the Voice of Europeโ€™s journalists inside?โ€ Nobody responded. Nobody talked to us. This was a disinformation campaign carried by Politico, which, in my view, is a suspect publication. In the spring of 2022, Barack Obama went to Stanford to give a speech at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center run by Michael McFaul, his former ambassador to Russia. Obama said misinformation harms democracy and urged support for legislation in Congress that would empower government-appointed researchers to serve as โ€œtrusted flaggers.โ€ Six days later, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out their Disinformation Governance Board. What a coincidence that they got Obama to frame the issue for them. Facebook in 2021 censored accurate vaccine information so the White House would help it to get data from Europe. In addition to removing vaccine misinformation, wrote Facebook to the White House, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation. White House said jump, and Facebook said how high? Why did they do it? Why would they voluntarily censor? This also emerged from the Facebook files. Nick Clegg on the left wrote an email to his colleagues. He said, โ€œMy sense is that given weโ€™ve got bigger fish, we have to fry with the administration, e.g., data flows, it doesnโ€™t seem like a great place for us to be.โ€ Data flows. Whatโ€™s he talking about? Heโ€™s talking about billions of dollars worth of business that he has to, that they would have to pay the European Commission for if they didnโ€™t have the support from the Biden administration to lean on the European Commission. In other words, this was a shakedown by the White House of Facebook and it worked in France, the country of Libertรฉ. Turns out it has a special role.... Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech, watch the full video, and read the rest of the article!

Michael Shellenberger

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Ch. 14 of NITRO: The Inside Story of Hulk Hogan's heel turn - #OTD 30 Years Ago (7/7/96)! AS DAY BECAME NIGHT at the Sullivan home, Bollea deliberated his participation in the pay-per-view. โ€œEverybody was telling him that it was the wrong thing to do,โ€ Kevin Sullivan says. โ€œHe was getting booed out of the arena, but they were all saying, โ€˜this is gonna kill himโ€™.โ€ With no end to the discussion in sight, the wily booker casually suggested that Bollea and Young make use of his two guest rooms until the morning. โ€œI isolated [them],โ€ Sullivan admits. โ€œI was just afraid that at the last minute, he was going to use his creative control [clause] and pull out.โ€ If Sullivan could deliver Bollea to the arena by showtime, the finish of the match called for Hogan to star in the most dramatic of surprise endings. In a sequence devised by Kevin Nash, an unannounced Hulkster would shockingly interfere in the match, but only after the heels gained an unfair advantage through cheating. It would be a brilliant misdirection, Nash thought, as fans would instinctively believe Hoganโ€™s appearance to be in support of the babyface team. โ€œI knew there were gonna be 55 different ideas,โ€ Nash says, thinking back to the eve of the event, โ€œ[so] I actually put a lot of thought into it. I called Scott [Hall] two or three days before that, and said โ€˜what do you think about this?โ€™ โ€œWe had to make it a 2-on-2 match with Lex Luger getting injured [during the match] and going out. We would cheat to get Macho [Man] in trouble and all of a sudden Hulk comes down, which of course would mean โ€˜ok, here comes Hulk to make the saveโ€™. [Hall] said, โ€˜I love itโ€™.โ€ There was, however, the looming possibility that Bollea could reject his turn at the eleventh hour. Thinking ahead, Eric Bischoff developed a contingency plan in which Sting would play the role, ultimately revealing himself - despite not having prior experience with the WWF - as the โ€˜third manโ€™ instead. โ€œI remember Eric came in to the locker room,โ€ recalls Marcus 'Buff' Bagwell, โ€œand said [to Sting], โ€˜I wanna talk to you about somethingโ€™. I could hear them going over the idea, and then when they got done, Sting told me what they were talking about. He said that [Eric said], โ€˜there are only two guys that could turn heel where it would really matterโ€™. That would be Hogan and Sting.โ€ โ€œHe was offering Sting the job first, [as I recall], and Sting didnโ€™t wanna do it. He didnโ€™t really say it wouldnโ€™t work, but he just said, โ€˜it doesnโ€™t intrigue me. I donโ€™t wanna do itโ€™.โ€ According to Andre Freitas, a special effects artist who worked in costume design and character development for WCW, the proposed Sting swerve was to involve the use of a doppelganger - or โ€˜phonyโ€™ Sting - presumably in an effort to fool fans that the real character had switched sides. โ€œThat was their original plan,โ€ says Freitas. โ€œEric showed me a picture of Jeff Farmer (a lower-card wrestler) and said โ€˜can you make him Sting?โ€™ I told him that they have similar bodies...then we looked at Stingโ€™s hair and Jeffโ€™s hair...and talked about all that stuff. I did a head cast for [Farmer] and some prosthetic and test make-ups. But when they secured Hogan, we didnโ€™t do [the angle].โ€ ----------- Amazingly, even as Bash at the Beach began, Bischoff continued to consider Plan B. โ€œI remember walking by this perforated wall in the Ocean Center,โ€ divulges Nash, โ€œand Eric said to me, โ€˜Hulk is with Sullivan, and heโ€™s not sure heโ€™s gonna do it yetโ€™. It was up in the air.โ€ Meanwhile, viewers of the pay-per-view - and, for that matter, WCWโ€™s own production staff - speculated as to the identity of the third man. โ€œThey were trying to โ€˜workโ€™ everyone,โ€ asserts Jason Douglas, a WCW producer backstage at his first pay-per-view event. โ€œโ€˜Rocketโ€™ (staff member Rick Sancher) came up to me - they were kinda testing me because I was new on the road - and said โ€˜hey, I think itโ€™s gonna be [WWF wrestler] Bret Hartโ€™. I guess it was to see if I would leak something, and so I was just like โ€˜oh, cool, Bret Hartโ€™.โ€ In reality, aside from Bischoff, Bollea, Young, Hall, Nash and Sullivan, the turn would be concealed from everyone - even the announcers, according to orders from Bischoff - as to ensure their most realistic reactions. With less than an hour before the main event began, production staffer Woody Kearce discovered a revealing clue in the parking lot. A Hulk Hogan motorcycle had appeared mysteriously in one of the spaces, sparking another round of backstage conjecture. Finally, with what Sullivan recalls as โ€œthirty minutesโ€ and Bischoff remembers as โ€œforty-five to sixty minutesโ€ left on the air, Bollea belatedly arrived at the Ocean Center. The mood suddenly changed. Upon realizing that his star had been convinced, Bischoff began to relax. โ€œOnce he got to the building, I recall a sense of calm,โ€ he reveals. โ€œAll of the anxiety, all of the tension, all of the worry, all of the effort to make sure things stayed quiet...all of that just kind of dissipated. It was like fog lifting when the sun comes out - it all just went away. I was thinking, โ€˜it is what it is, thereโ€™s nothing more I can do...so letโ€™s just roll with itโ€™.โ€ To cement the turn, Bollea knew, he would have to deliver a monumental post-match promo to explain his actions. While typically, he enjoyed using Bischoff as a sounding board to rehearse interviews, the need for complete privacy - on this occasion - was unquestionably paramount. And so, away from prying eyes - and ears - the two met up in the most unglamorous of clandestine locations - a utility closet. In the midst of the run-through, Bischoff stopped to emphasize an important point: When you grab that microphone, I want you to say...โ€˜this is the beginning of the new...world...orderโ€™. The phrase - โ€˜new world orderโ€™ - lingered auspiciously in the air. Bischoff surprised himself with the utterance, realizing slowly that the term encapsulated everything that the invasion storyline could represent. In 1990, then-president George H.W. Bush famously utilized the same expression in a speech to Congress, although its origin could actually be traced back to the 28th President, Woodrow Wilson. But if Bischoff was unsure as to the source of his spontaneous inspiration, perhaps the answer could be found closer to home - on the preceding Nitro, just six days earlier, announcer Larry Zybysko serendipitously made the following proclamation: โ€œThis Sunday, I promise you, there will be a new world order of wrestlingโ€ฆโ€ Fans at the Ocean Center waited anxiously to see if Zybyskoโ€™s prophecy would materialize; for after all the hoopla, it was suddenly time for the main event. Before the opening bell, the audience was already on its feet for ring announcer@Michael_Bufferโ€™s pre-match introductions. As Hall and Nash sauntered to the ring for The Hostile Takeover match, Buffer set the scene with theatrical aplomb: โ€œLadies and gentleman, at this time, let me introduce the men whose plan and goal is to takeover the WCW with force and hostility. We were told there would be three of these interlopers, and I must apologize as I have been informed - as you can see - there are only two. Ladies and gentleman, introducing...the Outsiiiiiders!โ€ In a moment that played off perfectly on television, Stingโ€™s entrance music began - and quickly ended - as โ€˜Mean Geneโ€™ Okerlund traipsed cautiously into the ring. After exchanging quizzical looks with Buffer and referee Randy Anderson, Okerlund confronted the Outsiders to get some answers, an inspired plot device designed to build the tension even further. โ€œGentleman,โ€ began Okerlund, โ€œif I could have your attention...I donโ€™t have police protection with me at this time, but I wanna confront you in front of this full house here at the Ocean Center, and millions of others watching across the country and around the world. I donโ€™t see three men here tonight. Where is your partner?โ€ Responding in a manner consistent with their WWF characters, Hall and Nash assured Okerlund that the third man was present - and ready. โ€œLet me tell you something,โ€ announced a confident Nash, โ€œwe got enough to handle it right now, right here.โ€ Once more, Stingโ€™s entrance music blared from the arena speakers, this time preceding the man himself, accompanied by Luger and Savage. โ€œHere we go!โ€ screamed color commentator Bobby Heenan as the wrestlers passed an unusually large contingent of security personnel on the entrance way. โ€œThe war is on!โ€ Less than two minutes into the bout, Luger collapsed to the outside, a move in accordance with Nashโ€™s plan to even the sides before the climactic reveal. โ€œNow itโ€™s two against two!โ€ yelled Heenan. After a brief delay, the concerned crowd looked on as Luger left the arena on a stretcher, leaving Sting and Savage alone to fight valiantly for WCW. As the match progressed, the contemptible Outsiders used every trick to stall their opponentโ€™s momentum, until a revitalized Savage began a furious rally at the fifteen-and-a-half minute mark. The invaders were suddenly down, but not out - as with the referee distracted, Nash landed a low-blow to bring the Macho Man to his knees. All four men lay on the canvas, exhausted, as referee Anderson started a ten count. As Anderson yelled โ€˜ONEโ€™, several rows of spectators rose to their feet. Within seconds, the reaction diffused from section to section, the noise level increasing with each passing beat. On the live broadcast, viewers at home caught glimpse of a familiar figure making his way down the ramp. โ€œHulkamania!โ€ screamed Dusty Rhodes on commentary while Hogan walked methodically towards the ring. Noticeably, the Hulkster seemed oddly disaffected - even out-of-character - but after exchanging the briefest of glances with the crowd, he continued stride with the din reaching fever pitch. โ€œWhose side is he on?โ€ bellowed Heenan, a question that seemed inexplicable given the history of Hoganโ€™s on-screen persona. โ€œWhose side is he on?โ€ repeated Heenan, who as longtime fans could recall, had opposed Hogan for years as a manager in the WWF. For that reason, the comment flew over the heads of most (but not all) viewers; meanwhile, the live crowd was cheering as if their team had won the World Series. Nash and Hall retreated to the floor as Hogan tore off his shirt, an apparent signal that the archetypal good guy was here to save the day again. โ€œWhoโ€™s bad now boys?โ€ taunted play-by-play man Tony Schiavone on commentary, confident that WCWโ€™s honor was no longer in jeopardy. Savage lay prone on the mat as Hogan surveyed the scene. Above the cheapest of cheap seats, peeking through a curtain with palpable anticipation, was Eric Bischoff. โ€œI knew that something big was about to happen,โ€ he recalls. โ€œIt was either gonna be a big failure, or a big success.โ€ Seemingly out of nowhere, with his unsuspecting devotees enveloped in celebration, Hulk backed up to the corner. With the coldness of a serial killer, the once-honorable hero shockingly shoved referee Anderson, and executed his patented finishing move - the leg drop - to the helpless Macho Man below. The audience became completely, utterly unglued. โ€œI was standing back with the announcers,โ€ remembers Michelle Baines, newly hired as a production assistant. โ€œOne of the producers turned to me and said, โ€˜you need to go to the backโ€™. โ€œโ€˜I said, โ€˜what do you mean?โ€™ โ€œShe said, โ€˜itโ€™s gonna get ugly real quickโ€™.โ€ โ€œShe was right - the crowd turned ugly quick.โ€ In retrospect, it was clear that even as Hoganโ€™s body approached the canvas - contact with Savage just milliseconds away - the gravity of the assault started to hit home. โ€œWhat has he done?โ€ questioned a crestfallen Rhodes, โ€œis he the third man? What the hell is going on here?โ€ Heenan was even more direct - โ€œHulk Hogan has betrayed WCW! He is the third man in this picture!โ€ A breathless Schiavone could barely muster more than three words: Oh My God, he repeated. Oh My God, he continued, as Hogan high-fived a grinning Hall and Nash. The courageous Sting, stumbling to his feet to stop the injustice, was quickly dispatched, and in the coup de grace, Hogan tossed Anderson to the floor. Sardonically, he covered Savage for the pin, the contest now clearly a farce. โ€œI hope you love it,โ€ a disappointed Rhodes wailed on commentary. โ€œYou just sold your soul to the devil.โ€ The third man was a mystery no more, and Hall, Nash, and Hogan raised their hands in victory to a genuinely astonished audience. The immediate outrage, which first gave way to shock, was now inspiring unmitigated rage. Simultaneously, the evil trio continued to taunt, pose, and antagonize while the announcers lamented WCWโ€™s future. As Sting and Savage hobbled back to the locker room, a visibly distraught Okerlund returned to conduct an explanatory interview, based around the one Hogan and Bischoff had mapped out earlier. โ€œMean Gene,โ€ commanded Hogan, โ€œthe first thing you need to do is to tell these people to shut up if you wanna hear what I gotta say.โ€ For the next four minutes, Hogan rationalized his turn with remarkable clarity. โ€œThe first thing you gotta realize, brother, is this right here is the future of wrestling. You can call this the new...world...order of wrestling. These two men right here came from a great big organization up north, and everybody was wondering who the third man was. Well, who knows more about that organization than me, brother? I made that organization a monster. I made people rich up there. I made the people that ran that organization rich up there. And when it all came to pass, the name Hulk Hogan, the man Hulk Hogan, got bigger than the whole organization!โ€ Bischoff watched from his secretive seat in amazement - he had not seen, nor had anyone, this intensity of emotion on display at a wrestling show before. It was almost as if the assembled masses had lost themselves in the performance, perhaps even forgetting, if only for a moment, that they were witnesses to a pre-determined event. Hoganโ€™s actions had ostensibly interrupted their critical faculties; in other words, they had suspended their disbelief by reacting to the incident as if it were real. Moreover, the shock was manifesting in the most volatile ways imaginable, as in an incident edited out of future showings of the pay-per-view, a rather large man, likely intoxicated, ran into the ring before being knocked down by Hall and Nash. Concurrently, a stream of debris rained down from the stands, with one object hitting Okerlund, and the rest filling the ring in a stunningly unique visual. Hogan continued as the trash piled up around him, even referencing Ted Turner in his diatribe: โ€œBillionaire Ted promised me movies brother. Billionaire Ted promised me millions of dollars. And Billionaire Ted promised me world caliber matches. And as far as Billionaire Ted, Eric Bischoff, and the entire WCW goes, Iโ€™m bored brother! Thatโ€™s why I want these two guys here, these so-called Outsiders. These are the men I want as my friends. They are the new blood of professional wrestling, and not only are we going to take over the whole wrestling business...with Hulk Hogan, the new blood and the monsters with me, we will destroy everything in our path, Mean Gene.โ€ โ€œLook at all the crap in this ring,โ€ responded Okerlund. โ€œThis is whatโ€™s in the future for you if you want to hang around the likes of this man Hall, and this man Nash.โ€ Hogan raised his finger as if to stop the interviewer midstream, the perfect line instantly coming to mind. โ€œAs far as Iโ€™m concerned, all this crap in the ring represents these fans out here,โ€ he boomed defiantly. โ€œFor two years, I held my head high,โ€ ranted Hogan, alluding to his rather uninspired WCW tenure. โ€œI did everything for the charities. I did everything for the kids. And the reception I got when I came out here, you fans can stick it brother! Because if it wasnโ€™t for Hulk Hogan, you people wouldnโ€™t be here. If it wasnโ€™t for Hulk Hogan, Eric Bischoff would still be selling meat from a truck in Minneapolis. And if it wasnโ€™t for Hulk Hogan, all of these โ€˜Johnny come latelysโ€™ that you see out here wrestling wouldnโ€™t be here. I was selling the world out, brother, while they were bumming gas to put in their car to get to high school!โ€ In closing, Hogan foreshadowed the future state of affairs in WCW with a prophetic preview of coming storylines: โ€œWith Hulk Hogan and the new world organization of wrestling, brother...me and the new blood by my side...whatcha gonna do when the new world organization runs wild on you? Whatcha gonna do? What are you gonna do??โ€ Despite mistakenly bungling the โ€˜new world orderโ€™ phrase at the conclusion of his speech, Hogan still provided the perfect punctuation to a sensational heel turn. His promo, inarguably the most dynamic of his career, came across as strikingly authentic (โ€œit felt real, because it was realโ€™,โ€ offered a proud Eric Bischoff upon reflection years later). On commentary, Schiavone - who most inspiredly suggested that Hogan had planned to double-cross WCW all along, since his debut in 1994 no less - added to the realism with some mournful final comments: โ€œWe have seen the end of Hulkamania,โ€ he grieved. โ€œHulk Hogan, you can go to hell! Weโ€™re outta here. Straight to hell.โ€ ---- To the layman, there appeared an obvious explanation for the feverous crowd response that accompanied Hoganโ€™s turn. Clearly, the element of surprise - one of the key elements of Nitroโ€™s success - had been exploited to a masterful degree (โ€œnobody on earth thought that the third man was going to be Hulk Hogan,โ€ highlights Nash). To Kevin Sullivan, however, there were several layers of story at play. โ€œPeople thought that it was an invasion from the WWF,โ€ he begins, implying that the success of the angle could be correlated to its realism. โ€œThey really bought into it, and when Hogan turned heel...they were sure of it. โ€œSo while Hogan gets the credit for the reaction, it was [Nash and Hall] who set the whole thing up. Those guys built the foundation of heat, and when Hogan came down, it just blew up.โ€ โ€œWe were red hot coming off WWF television,โ€ agrees Nash, โ€œand then you had the biggest turn in the world on top of that. The biggest babyface of all-time finally turned heel!โ€ To the ever-meticulous Sullivan, always a keen observer of the nuances present in a wrestling angle, an often overlooked element was also noteworthy. โ€œHe did it to Randy [Savage],โ€ the booker emphasizes, speaking of Hoganโ€™s betrayal. โ€œPeople knew there was real-life heat there. That helped out too, but everyone played an intricate part. โ€œLightning...you canโ€™t catch it in a bottle but one time.โ€ The above is an excerpt from the book, NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW. Amazon USA: Amazon UK: Amazon Canada: Amazon Australia: 17+ Hour Audiobook Available at Audible and Apple Books Audible USA: Audible UK: Audible Canada: Audible Australia: Apple Books: Ultimate NITRO Bundle: Deep Cuts - Wrestling Stories in 60 Seconds! David Penzer AdFreeShows.com 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff On This Day in WWE Allan Conrad the Mortgage Guy IandrewDiceClay WCW Archive Because WCW WCW4Life แด€ส€แด…แด€ ร–แด„แด€สŸ 90s WWE Secrets of WCW Nitro #WCW #nWo #HulkHogan #BashattheBeach #HeelTurn #Wrestling #WrestlingBooks #OTD #WWE #WorldChampionshipWrestling #Nitro

WCWNitroBook

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BOOM!!! ๐Ÿ’ฅ๐Ÿ’ฅ๐Ÿ’ฅ Dr. Aseem Malhotra's testimony was delivered in the Helsinski District Court on April 12, 2024, with the understanding that any deviation from the truth would constitute perjury. This clip was immediately banned by YouTube so please share widely. I've trimmed the clip, removing the interpreter's segment for a smoother listening experience. Here's the first hour of the testimony. ---------------------------------- My name is Doctor Aseem Malhotra. I am a consultant cardiologist. I've been a qualified doctor since 2001. I have held various roles both in academic health policy. In England, in the United Kingdom, and of the various roles, I won't bore you with all the details. I think three of the most relevant and prominent are the fact that I was an ambassador for the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges for six years, which represented every doctor in the UK. I served a full term of six years as a trustee of the King's fund. I was the youngest member to be appointed to this body which advises government on health policy. I was a founding member of Action on Sugar and a first science director. And through that role I'm considered the lead campaigner on bringing about a sugary drinks tax in the UK. And also, finally I served for five years as visiting professor of evidence based medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine in Salvador, Brazil. In early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic I was most vocal doctor on the mainstream, making the link very early on between COVID and those who are vulnerable to suffering serious complications from COVID In fact, in March 2020, I was asked to go on Sky News to explain my initial research findings of the link between especially obesity and COVID, but also to give people an opportunity and to suggest to the government this was a great time for them to implement public health policy to help people enhance or optimise their immune system, which could happen within just a few weeks of dietary changes and optimising vitamin D. This was later also backed up by medical journal publications a few months later. And I was first to mention on the back of an article I published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, which became a front page commentary and was picked up by BBC News and Good Morning Britain, where I had said that it's likely our prime minister, Boris Johnson, was hospitalised because of his weight. As a result of that, the then secretary for health, Matt Hancock, and this was publicised in the news, had asked me to advise him on the link between COVID and obesity. ...before I explain my journey and in many ways U-turn on my understanding in terms of the benefits and harms of the COVID vaccine, my experience in this area over the last couple of years has made me realise more than ever that even for that the greatest barrier to the truth are not factual or intellectual barriers, but psychological. I think all of us as human beings are vulnerable to these psychological barriers and we should have compassion for ourselves. And I will just very briefly summarise those three psychological barriers before I get into my detailed account of what I was involved in in regards to the COVID vaccine. The first psychological barrier is one of fear. And many of us understandably, and I still remember from early on in the pandemic, we were all scared. We did not know what we were dealing with. The issue with fear is that when people and populations are in a state of fear, we are less likely to engage in critical thinking and we are more likely to be compliant. Although COVID was particularly devastating for vulnerable groups in the elderly and I even have managed and still manage people with long COVID, the fear was grossly exaggerated. And one of the examples of that is that when we had good information on the mortality rate of COVID in the United States, one survey in 2020 revealed that 50% of Americans believed that if they caught COVID, the risk of 19 hospitalisation was 50% one and two, when the actual figure, certainly an average for people in middle age, was less than 1%. The second barrier to the truth, which I think is very relevant to the situation we find ourselves in now, is one called willful blindness. This is when human beings, all of us, are vulnerable to this, turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety and to protect prestige and fragile egos. Some examples of this include, on a personal level, willful blindness can occur when a spouse turns a blind eye to the affair of their partner. On an institutional level, some great examples of willful blindness include Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, the Catholic Church and child molestation. I believe the current situation we find ourselves in, with much of the mainstream narrative and the medical establishment and policy makers not acknowledging quite horrific, serious and common harms from this vaccine, is another example of willful blindness. And I also say this with full empathy, because I was one of those people that was for a very long time, willfully blind to the harms of the COVID vaccine. In January 2021, I was one of the first people to take two doses of the COVID mRNA vaccine because I volunteered in a vaccine centre. I still believe that traditional vaccines are some of the safest amongst all pharmacological interventions in medicine and I could not conceive of any possibility whatsoever of this vaccine causing harm. As a public figure and respected doctor in the UK, I have built relationships across the board with many other public figures, including celebrities and politicians, who often come to me for medical advice. One of those people was film director Gurinder Chadha, who you may be familiar with some of her work, including the movie "Bend It like Beckham", who had asked me whether or not she should take the vaccine and had sent me blogs which I dismissed and regarded as anti vax nonsense. I was then asked to go on good morning, Britain because Gurinder Chadha, the director herself tweeted that I had convinced her to take the vaccine. The main reason for this TV appearance was to help tackle vaccine hesitancy, which was very prominent amongst people from ethnic minority groups in the UK. I made the point on that programme that I understand where vaccine hesitancy was coming from because of the history that I have been involved with over many years in highlighting the shortcomings of pharmaceutical industry influence over medicine. And I even made the point, if I remember correctly, that they have been found guilty of fraud on many occasions, that the third most common cause of death, prepandemic after heart disease and cancer, is prescribed medications. I, however, reassured the public and said that despite these figures, of everything we do in medicine, traditional vaccinations are amongst the safest. I still believe this to be the case. A few months later, in April 2021, I met with a colleague and friend of mine who I regard as one of the brightest cardiologists in the United Kingdom. I was surprised when he told me that he had not taken the COVID vaccine. He explained to me that he had concerns because he had seen in the supplementary appendix of Pfizer's original trial that there were four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group and only one in the placebo. These numbers were small and did not reach statistical significance. So this could be random chance, or his concern was it could represent a signal of problems in the future. And if this was the case, we are going to have a huge problem. He said he'd rather wait and see what happens before taking the vaccine. On July 26, 2021, my father, aged 73, who was a very prominent, well known doctor in the UK, including being the honorary vice president of the British Medical Association and had received honours from the Queen of England with an OBE, suffered an unexpected sudden cardiac arrest. I was particularly devastated by this happening and I was also I find it difficult to understand why my father, who was a fit and well man, I knew his cardiac history and his cardiac status, would suffer a cardiac arrest. But also my initial investigation was to try and understand why there had been a 30 minutes ambulance delay arriving to his apartment. Two weeks later, the deputy chief nurse of NHS England, a government health body, called me up. She was very upset, she knew my father very well and she was crying and she told me, Aseem, there's something I need to tell you. She in effect told me that throughout the country, for the last two months prior to my father's cardiac arrest in most regions of the UK, ambulances were not getting to patients in time for heart attacks and cardiac arrests. And there had been a deliberate, and I will use these words because I mentioned it, I've mentioned it before, a cover up involving the government and the Department of Health to withhold this information from doctors and the public. I worked with an investigative journalist with the I newspaper in the UK to write an article and a news story that became BBC News headlines a few months later, exposing this. Just before I exposed this, I messaged a professor of cardiology who I trust in the UK. He has a leadership role to explain to him what had happened and what I was about to do. I have text message evidence of this. He told me not to do this because it would make me enemies. I explained to him that I had a duty to patients and the public. I'm highlighting this as one example and I'll give you more examples of a cultural problem within medicine. The next part of this story is the post mortem findings of my father. They did not make any sense to me. I am considered a leading expert, maybe in the world, on the development and progression of coronary artery disease. My father had two severe blockages in his coronary arteries. There was no actual evidence of heart attack and likely there was a rhythm disturbance because of reduced blood supply that led to his cardiac arrest. Then in, within the space of a few weeks, around October and November, 3, different sources of information was brought to my attention that made me realise that there was probably a significant problem with the COVID mRNA vaccine. The first in October 2021. I remember I was giving lectures in Stockholm. I was contacted by a journalist with a Times newspaper who reported to me and said, Dr Malhotra, we have reports of an unexplained 25% increase in heart attacks in hospitals in Scotland and asked me what I thought was going on. I explained to her that at that time, with the evidence I knew in my own experience, I said that two likely contributory factors were lockdown stress. We know that when populations undergo severe stress after war, for example, there is an increase in heart attacks and strokes that can last for many years. She asked me whether I thought that there was a contribution. I was surprised when she asked me whether I thought there may be a contribution of the COVID vaccine to these heart attacks. I said to her, a good scientist should never exclude any possibility. But I felt at the time it was unlikely to be related to the COVID vaccine. But we should watch this space and keep our eyes open. A few weeks later, a publication appeared in the Journal Circulation, which is considered the highest impact cardiology journal in the United States that revealed a potentially very strong link between the COVID mRNA vaccines and acceleration in heart attack risk. Very specifically, in several hundred people of middle age, there was a plausible mechanism, by use of inflammatory markers in the blood, that increased the baseline risk of those people having a heart attack in five years, from 11% to 25%, just within two months of having the COVID mRNA vaccines. Of course, this is one bit of data, but even if partially true, that is a huge increase in risk in a very short space of time. And for me now made me think and link back to why my father may have suffered a cardiac arrest six months after having two doses of the vaccine. I remember thinking and speaking to a colleague, that if this was true, then we were going to see an increase in cardiac arrests, heart attacks and excess deaths in heavily vaccinated countries for the next few years. Then within a few weeks, I was called up by a whistleblower at a very prestigious british institution. I will name that institution, which I have not done publicly before as a University of Oxford. This cardiologist explained to me that a group of researchers in his department had accidentally found, through the use of very specialised imaging of the heart, that there was a signal of increased inflammation of the heart arteries, which was there in the vaccinated, but not there in the unvaccinated. The lead researcher of that group had sat down, the juniors, and had said that we are not going to explore these findings any further because it may affect our funding from the pharmaceutical industry. At that point, with these three bits of information, I then felt it was my ethical duty to speak out. And I went on GBNews to talk about what I'd found what I'd heard and I'd asked for the Vaccine Committee of the UK on TV to investigate this, to see whether there was a real problem with the vaccine in relation to heart issues. Around the same time which I found very strange is that the Secretary of State for Health at that stage, who was not Matt Hancock, was Sajid Javid, had announced in parliament that we are going to introduce legislation to ensure that all healthcare workers are mandated to have the COVID vaccine. For me, this, by that stage had no ethical or scientific justification, because certainly after the summer of 2021, it had become very apparent that the COVID mRNA vaccine was not stopping infection and it certainly was not stopping transmission. It was understood that approximately 80,000 NHS workers had refused at this stage to have the COVID vaccine. And now they were threatened with losing their job if by April the following year they had not been fully vaccinated. Many of these people were very concerned and contacted me around that time, I was also conducting many interviews, both through the BBC and Sky News and GBNews in regards to what happened with my father's ambulance delay. And I used it as an opportunity on the mainstream media to call for Sajid Javid, the secretary for health, to U-turn on the introduction of a mandate for healthcare workers based upon the fact that I felt it was not scientific and it was unethical. I also received my own personal backlash from these comments where I was contacted by the Royal College of Physicians who I had an affiliation with, and they asked me to respond to anonymous complaints from doctors that I was spreading, in quotes, antivax disinformation. I felt with my own knowledge and experience of the healthcare system that this was a direct response probably fueled by a combination of willful blindness and institutional corruption. To elaborate a bit further, when I say institutional corruption, I mean that my view was that the complaints were likely being fueled by academics with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. I felt very concerned about the potential introduction of the vaccine, well, the vaccine mandate. And therefore I decided there were two things that I decided to do. The first was I made a phone call to the chairman of the British Medical Association in December 2021. I had a good relationship with him and he respected my opinion. And I spent 2 hours on the phone explaining to him everything that I knew up to that stage about my concerns of the COVID mRNA vaccine. He said to me, "Aseem, nobody appears to critically appraise the evidence on the COVID mRNA vaccine as well as you have from our conversation, he said, most of my colleagues are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC". This was replicated by the former chair of the CDC in the United States, Rochelle Walensky, who in an interview later on had said that her initial optimism of the vaccine benefits came from CNN News report. I say this just to emphasise that we should all accept our vulnerabilities to where we receive health information. Even doctors, policymakers, judges and lawyers are all influenced on the public massively by mainstream media. The chairman of the BMA also agreed with me. There was no ethical or scientific justification for mandating the COVID vaccine. He said the BMA also did not support it. And he said because of my conversation with him, he would speak directly to the secretary for health, Sajid Javid. One month later, at the end of January 2022, the COVID vaccine mandate for healthcare workers was overturned. I at that stage, given the fact that there was some backlash happening towards me, I realised that because this is a very big issue and area, and not my initial area of expertise, I needed to carry out my own critical analysis of the COVID mRNA vaccines. I spent six to nine months critically appraising the data, including speaking to two Pfizer whistleblowers, three investigative medical journalists and eminent scientists from the University of Oxford, Stanford and Harvard. The most critical bit, the most critical research that was published on this issue, which I think the whole court should acknowledge in August 2022, was published in the journal Vaccine. That research was conducted by some of the world's top independent of drug industry influence academics. That research, we was able to reanalyze the original randomised control trials conducted by Pfizer and Moderna. They were able to do this because new information was made available on the FDA's website and Health Canada's website. The conclusions of that paper were really very disturbing. The original trials that led to the drug regulatory approval of these vaccines revealed that you were more likely to suffer serious harm from taking the vaccine, specifically hospitalisation, life changing event or disability, than you were to be hospitalised with COVID That rate of harm at two months was very high at 1 in 800. Just to give you some perspective, historically we have suspended other vaccines for much less. In 1976, the swine flu vaccine was pulled because it was found to cause a neurological syndrome called Guillain-Barre syndrome In one in 100,000 people. In 1999, the rotavirus vaccine was suspended because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in children affecting 1 in 10,000. This was 1 in 800. In my view, it was very clear that given this information, published in the highest impact Vaccine journal in the world, peer reviewed, and has not had any significant rebuttals, that this vaccine now, in my view, should never have been approved for use in a single human being in the first place. In my view, this very important court case in some ways, actually is a distraction from the much bigger issue, which is there should be court cases around the world with a full inquiry into the pharmaceutical industry and an inquiry as to how we got this so very wrong. Of course, one could argue this is just one bit of research, but actually, unfortunately, there are different, many different strands of research that are showing a signal of considerable and common serious harm from these vaccines. From pharmacovigilance data that is reporting what we call yellow card reports from the public. We have plausible biological mechanism of harm. We have other research called observational data. We have autopsy data also confirming that certainly with the majority of people who died within a short space of time of having the vaccine in relation to the heart, was definitively caused by the vaccine. This is really a very, very, very horrific situation we find ourselves in. One would hope and expect that the regulators should be independently evaluating all medications. But of course, the evidence reveals this is far from true. There was an investigation by the BMJ, also published in the summer of 2022, which revealed that most of the major regulators across the world were taking most of their money from the drug industry. For example, the MHRA in the UK receives 86% of its funding from the drug industry, and the FDA in America receives 65% of its funding from the drug industry, A fact that most doctors do not know. And therefore, I would not expect members of the court to know this either, is that very, very rarely do drug industry sponsored research get independently evaluated. Clinical trial data can often involve thousands of pages of information on individual patients. The drug companies hold onto that raw data. They then give summary results to the regulator, who are then paying, who have an incentive to approve the drugs, and the drugs are then approved. I made these points in my peer reviewed article published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in September 2022, where I concluded that we should pause and investigate the issue around the COVID mRNA vaccines. I have since then been campaigning and advocating for a return to ethical evidence based medical practise around the world. Some of the clear solutions moving forward would be changes in the law that are required so that patients, doctors, members of the public can have greater confidence in the information they receive to make decisions about their health. Two very clear, low hanging fruit solutions, which are both ethical, scientific and democratic, would be that the drug industry should be allowed to develop drugs, but they shouldn't be allowed to test them themselves. And they certainly shouldn't be allowed to design their own research to and hold onto the raw data. Their information needs to be independently evaluated. One other clear solution would also be that the medical regulators, again, should not be taking any money from the industry, as this is a gross conflict of interest. I also want to highlight for people to understand the bigger picture. Prior to the pandemic, I had realised that there was a big problem with the reliability of clinical research, where invariably the results of clinical trials on all drugs sponsored by the drug industry, grossly exaggerate their safety and benefits. I have taken this information to the European Parliament, where I spoke in 2019, and I spoke to very senior politicians in the UK government. But although they were sympathetic, they felt that the issue was much bigger than them as individuals, and therefore it also needed media attention to get public awareness on the importance of such an inquiry. Before we continue with further questions, as I've been speaking for quite a long time now I'll just finish with two references just for the court and the judges to understand just how bad this problem is. Prepandemic the man who I call the Stephen Hawking of medicine is Professor John Ioannidis from the University of Stanford. The reason I call him the Stephen Hawking of Medicine is he's the most cited medical researcher in the world and is a mathematical genius. In 2006, he published a paper which was entitled why most published research findings are false. In that paper, he makes a point that the greater the financial interests in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. I say this in context of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine which has made the company $100 billion. The other point that he makes in a further paper in 2017 is, again, the reason the system continues as it is is most doctors are unaware of the information they receive when they make clinical decisions has been corrupted by commercial influence. The other credible name I will mention is the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, who I personally know. In 2015, he wrote an article in the Lancet in relation to a secret meeting that had taken place with himself and some of the world's top medical academics. In that, he wrote that possibly half of the medical published literature may simply be untrue. And he said that science has taken a turn towards darkness. But who's going to take the first step to clean up the system? I believe in this case and in this court today, this is going to be a very pivotal potential moment in history for that first step. ---------------------- Dr Aseem Malhotra H/T: Tiina Keskimรคki ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ฎ

aussie17

798,441 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 2 ๅนดๅ‰

War Diary Day 1,391 Blaise Metreweli, the Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, sticks it to the Killer in The Kremlin. And all his creepy helpers. I agree with every fucking word. VPDFO! (Transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered) ๐Ÿ“ท Welcome inside MI6. This iconic building, familiar to movie fans everywhere, is the home of Britainโ€™s foreign intelligence agency. But whilst hundreds of my team pass through the entry pods each day, the truth is that most of our work happens many miles away from this place - out of sight, hidden from the world, undercover, recruiting and running agents who choose to place their trust in us, sharing secrets to make the UK and the world safer. You might pass one of our officers on the street or sit next to them on a plane when youโ€™re about to set off on an adventure of your own, or in a foreign city taking selfies by the sights. Whether itโ€™s in seemingly everyday places, or on the front line embedded with our military, MI6 is there. In my first few weeks, Iโ€™ve heard repeatedly that MI6 is trusted and respected globally, two things that we never take for granted. We are seen as a source of hard power, soft influence and rapid innovation. Iโ€™ve also heard that people want to believe in MI6. Itโ€™s my job to make sure they can. Today, I want to talk about human agency. We all have choices to make about how we deal with the undercurrents shaping our world. About how, in our new, faster, more dangerous and technology-mediated world, it will be our rediscovery of our shared humanity, our ability to listen, and our courage that will determine how our future unfolds. Conflict is not inevitable. Understanding human nature is in my bones. From a family shaped by devastating conflict, I grew up with a deep sense of gratitude for the UKโ€™s precious democracy and freedom. I spent much of my childhood overseas, which is where my passion for travel and adventure began. I studied anthropology, and later psychology and AI, exploring how we make sense of the world and each other. Itโ€™s why I was drawn to MI6: it offers strong purpose, a chance to serve and a belief in the positive power of human connection. Like the Service, Iโ€™m operational to my very core. Over nearly three decades, my career has involved recruiting and running agents in hostile territory; and leading operations in warzones to defuse threats and support peace. Always in teams, always learning from others. Over the years, Iโ€™ve worked with hundreds of brilliant partners โ€“ and indeed occasionally those weโ€™d label as adversaries โ€“ across dozens of countries, tackling weapons proliferation and terrorism. During my time at MI5, I saw close up what it takes to defend Britain from being targeted by hostile states. Youโ€™ll find many like me in my organisation: powerfully motivated to protect our precious country; curious about how our world is changing, joining dots and taking action, across domains. But it was in my last role as โ€˜Qโ€™, where it was my job to turn emerging technologies from threats to opportunities that I could most see the world changing. As I dug deep into data and extraordinary innovation, I could see how technology was rapidly reshaping not just our capabilities but also conflict and trust, truth and global power. Let me lay out how I see the global issues MI6 must tackle. Because the greatest danger we face is to misunderstand the nature of the problem. Letโ€™s be in no doubt. Our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades. Conflict is evolving and trust eroding, just as new technologies spur both competition and dependence. We are being contested from sea to space, from the battlefield to the boardroom. And even our brains, as disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other and ourselves. Across the globe, we are now confronting not one single danger, but an interlocking web of security challenges โ€“ military, technological, social, ethical even โ€“ each shaping the other in complex ways. We are now operating in a space between peace and war. This is not a temporary state or a gradual, inevitable evolution. Our world is being actively remade, with profound implications for national and international security. Institutions which were designed in the ashes of the Second World War are being challenged. New blocs and identities forming and alliances reshaping. Multipolar competition in tension with multilateral cooperation. But thereโ€™s something distinctive that will make this change unlike any other: the impact of advanced technologies, which will accelerate the pace and scale of every threat and opportunity, and increasingly, individualise them too. Advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing are not only revolutionising economies but rewriting the reality of conflict, as they โ€˜convergeโ€™ to create science-fiction-like tools. Thereโ€™s incredible promise in all this for all of us, from green technologies to hyper-personalised medicine. But also peril. AI-powered robots and drones are brilliant for scaled manufacturing but devastating on the battlefield. Discoveries that cure disease can also create new weapons. And as states race for tech supremacy, or as some algorithms become as powerful as states, those hyper-personalised tools could become a new vector for conflict and control. Power itself is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations, and sometimes to individuals. And at the same time, the foundations of trust in our societies are eroding. Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponised. Falsehood spreads faster than fact, dividing communities and distorting reality. We live in an age of hyper-connection yet profound isolation. The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so does our shared sense of truth โ€“ one of the greatest losses a society can suffer. The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Our security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it. Our world is being remade. And for the first time, we are all at the heart of it. My Service must now operate in this new context too: not just expert on hostile states, terrorism, proliferation and more, but also fluent in technology, able to anticipate the second and third order effects of advances that reshape the world in minutes not months. And as China will be a central part of the global transformation taking place this century, it is essential that we, as MI6, continue to inform the governmentโ€™s understanding of Chinaโ€™s rise and the implications for UK national security. Iโ€™m going to break with tradition and wonโ€™t give you a global threat tour, but will focus here on Putinโ€™s Russia. We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO. I find it harrowing that hundreds of thousands have died, with the toll mounting every day, because of Putinโ€™s historical distortions and his compromised desire for respect. He is dragging out negotiations and shifting the cost of war onto his own population. But Putin should be in no doubt, our support is enduring. The pressure we apply on Ukraineโ€™s behalf will be sustained. Because it is fundamental not just to European sovereignty and security but to global stability. Alongside the grinding war, Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war. Itโ€™s important to understand their attempts to bully, fearmonger and manipulate, because it affects us all. I am talking about: Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Drones buzzing airports and bases. Aggressive activity in our seas, above and below the waves. State-sponsored arson and sabotage. Propaganda and influence operations that crack open and exploit fractures within societies. Countering this activity is the work of intelligence and security services across Europe and the globe. And as the Foreign Secretary made clear in a speech last week, the UK is defending itself against this Russian information warfare โ€“ sanctioning Russian media outlets pushing Kremlin narratives. The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement; and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus. So, how should we respond? Itโ€™s not enough now just to understand the world. We must shape it too. MI6 is well-positioned to respond to these threats and wider global instability. And we will continue to evolve, just as we have throughout our long history. The UK government has invested in our intelligence agencies and we are all using our unique powers to keep the British people safe. Our โ€˜open and connectedโ€™ partnerships across the UK Intelligence Community, with HMGCC, NSSIF and the wider tech ecosystem in the UK will become even more important โ€“ because in the digital battleground, no single organisation can prevail alone. As a global agency, MI6โ€™s inbuilt strength is our partners and our people. The risks I have set out require us to work ever more closely with our colleagues in MI5, GCHQ and in defence and diplomacy. But also with our Five Eyes partners, with the E3, the EU, NATO, those across the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and beyond. And with many valued partners whose identity needs to remain secret. Together, we integrate our diverse talent, data and tools to meet the threat. AI is a domain in which we will excel, using the technology to augment, not replace, our human skills. Every digital trace, every byte of data, every algorithmic decision has implications for the safety of the lives of the courageous people who work with us as officers and agents, and for the UKโ€™s strategic advantage. Mastery of technology will infuse everything we do. Not just in our labs, but in the field, in our tradecraft, and even more importantly, in the mindset of every officer. We will become as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple other languages. Under my leadership, MI6 will continue to attract Britainโ€™s best and most creative minds: linguists and data scientists, case officers and engineers, behavioural experts and technologists. We need people who walk in the shoes and get in the heads of our adversaries. We need people who think differently, challenge assumptions, and act decisively. All can thrive and make a difference at MI6. At an operational level, we will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into โ€“ if you like โ€“ our historical SOE instincts. Weโ€™re at our best when weโ€™re hustling to make things happen, because our intelligence is most valuable when it changes reality on the ground. We will take calculated risks, where the prize is significant and the national interest clear. We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them. In every domain. In every way. So intelligence must drive action. Action must deliver advantage. And advantage must serve Britainโ€™s security and prosperity. But at the core, our deeper contribution is also our simplest โ€“ how we unlock human agency. Our fast-paced, tech and threat-infused world now generates more heat than light. As nations retrench and rearm, we are losing opportunities to listen to whatโ€™s really going on. Iโ€™ve seen time and again throughout my career, that this is where MI6 matters most: we listen and we hear. We understand, because we take time to learn languages and cultures, complex technical and historical detail, immerse ourselves in whatโ€™s really driving the situation. Across the globe, right now, our officers are finding people with the courage to step forward, and they are taking time to sit and listen to break these tightening cycles of violence. They listen for nuance, for connection, for opportunity. Over the years, Iโ€™ve listened to terrorists who have told us how to defuse the bomb because they know that more violence wonโ€™t help. To proliferators and smugglers whoโ€™ve told us where to find the dangerous material, motivated to protect their childrenโ€™s future. To people trapped in authoritarian regimes who know, deep down, that their humanity is being chipped away โ€“ and that telling us whatโ€™s really going on is an important release, allowing us all to find better ways to navigate our changing world. So, we will work with our agents. And we will continue to engage directly, and with respect, with states and organisation currently working against us. Away from the glare of the media, we will use MI6โ€™s convening power wherever we can to make a material difference, bringing parties together to defuse tensions. But the response to the increasing risks we face wonโ€™t be delivered by the UK intelligence community alone. Wider society has a role to play too. That includes work taking place in schools across the country so our children donโ€™t get duped by information manipulation. Letโ€™s all check sources, consider evidence, and be alive to those algorithms that trigger intense reactions, like fear. It also means everyone in society really understanding the world we are in โ€“ a world where terrorists plot against us, where our enemies fearmonger, bully and manipulate, and the front line is everywhere. Online, on our streets, in our supply chains, in the minds and on the screens of our citizens. We must all stand together against this. As we do today with our friends in Australia after the shocking antisemitic terrorist attack this weekend. My thoughts -and those of my whole organisation โ€“ are with the family, friends and loved ones of the victims. Light will always win over darkness. In rising to meet these challenges we, in MI6, will remain anchored to our values: courage, creativity, respect and integrity. And to our principles: accountability and trust are not constraints on our work; they are the foundations of our legitimacy with the British public. Recently, I had the privilege of meeting and thanking a foreign agent who has worked with us for decades, taking extraordinary risks to help keep the UK safe. I asked why. They said simply, โ€˜Your values. Your integrity and respect. None of us have a future without themโ€™. This moment reinforced to me that we must remain a very human agency. And so, to sustain that trust, MI6 will continue to be more open. Not for the sake of visibility, but because it matters โ€“ and as my MI5 counterpart Sir Ken McCallum said recently - because it is a strength. We will continue the practice of speaking publicly, broaden our channels of engagement, and sustain our focus on attracting the most diverse talent to join our Service. Transparency does not mean revealing what must remain secret. It means showing the British people who we are, what we stand for, and why our work matters. We need your trust and support for the difficult and often dangerous work our agents pursue, every day of the year. In an age of uncertainty, one constant remains: the choices made by human beings still determine the shape of the world. Yes, technology can illuminate possibilities: but information requires judgement; complexity demands clarity; and only people can decide which path to follow. The United Kingdomโ€™s global voice has never rested solely on strength โ€“ it has rested on trust, principle, and the ability to understand others as well as ourselves. That is also the essence of intelligence: not simply knowing the world, but interpreting it through a uniquely human lens. Ours is the quiet service, the hidden service. It is one rooted in a profound belief that when human beings act with purpose and integrity, they can steady a faltering world. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was our shared belief in freedom that carried Europe forward. When acts of terror targeted open societies, it was intelligence, cooperation and resolve that preserved them. And when adversaries blur fact and falsehood, our task is to defend the space where truth can still stand. As we step into the future, the tools at our disposal will evolve. But what will always matter most is the human element โ€“ the person who stands in the shadows and says: this is right, and that is wrong. That choice โ€“ the exercise of human agency โ€“ has shaped our world before, and it will shape it again. Because in the end, it is not what we can do that defines us, but what we choose to do. Thank you. Published 15 December 2025

John Sweeney

42,257 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 8 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

Dear David Coltart, WHY I CANNOT SUPPORT QUINTUPLE C: COLTART, CHAMISA AND CCC My attention has been drawn to your fraudulent and disgusting tweet you posted on my Twitter TL yesterday David, in which you quoted a tweet I posted four years ago on 22 January 2019 in memory of my father. I reproduce below both tweets for ease of reference: โ€œI have always genuinely sympathized with you Jonathan - the loss of your father in such circumstances must be devastating. I just donโ€™t understand why you continue to side with the party which brought such suffering to your family, and which still brings so much suffering.โ€ โ€“ Tweet by David Coltart, 30 July 2023; commenting on my tweet below I posted four years ago: โ€œ1/5 On 22 January 1983 my father, Melusi Job Mlevu, was callously murdered in Tsholotsho by gukurahundi soldiers & the CIO. They tortured him upon his arrest & in front of his family; got him to dig a shallow grave, tortured him again; pumped bullets into his body & buried him!โ€ โ€“ Jonathan Moyo tweet posted on 22 January 2019. Now David, are you really serious that you โ€œhave always genuinely sympathised with meโ€, because of โ€œthe loss of [my] father in such circumstancesโ€? And since thereโ€™s no strategic ambiguity about the meaning of โ€œalwaysโ€, as it means exactly what it says, how have you โ€œalways genuinelyโ€ expressed your sympathy over all the years, since knowing about the circumstances under which I lost my father? The fact that your tweet yesterday is a response to a tweet I posted a long four years ago on 22 January 2019 โ€“ in memory of my father who was murdered by the Fifth Brigade in Tsholotsho on 22 January 1983 โ€“ shows and proves that youโ€™re a fraud and a charlatan with neither sensitivity towards me and my family nor respect for us as Africans and human beings. All told, and typically of Zimbabweans of British colonial extraction and in particular of soul-free Rhodies, youโ€™re contemptuous of our culture as a family and as Africans. You see David, it is fraudulent and utterly disgusting of you to claim that you have ever sympathised with me over my fatherโ€™s loss. Itโ€™s actually patronising and very insulting in the extreme. Your fraud is clear even to yourself, thatโ€™s why you did not express your so-called sympathy when I first posted my tweet on 22 January 2019 in memory of my father who was murdered on 22 January 1983. In fact, until your fraudulent tweet yesterday, you had never before expressed any genuine or even non genuine sympathy for me and my family regarding the loss of my father on 22 January 1983. Even fools will immediately see that the key sentence in your tweet yesterday is not about your cruel declaration of fraudulent sympathy for me and my family over the circumstances of my fatherโ€™s loss, a loss my family commemorated this year not yesterday but seven months ago on 22 January 2023, with no tweet of sympathy from you. The sentence in your tweet yesterday that captures what you really foolishly communicating to me is this: โ€œI just donโ€™t understand why you continue to side with the party which brought such suffering to your family, and which still brings so much suffering.โ€ David: what I say, believe and do is without exception based on and an existential product of what I know, what I think and what I have experienced or lived. I never say, believe or do anything that I donโ€™t know, donโ€™t, I have not thought of or which I donโ€™t believe. Now David, you pretend to be a democrat who believes in the rule of law as enshrined in the Constitution, so, what business of yours is my choice of what side to support or to not support in politics? Are my freedom of conscience and my right to make political choices freely now subject to your understanding, or are they my constitutional rights, as they are for every Zimbabwean, in terms of sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe? Are you aware David and do you understand that the Constitution in 67(1)(b) says every Zimbabwean citizen has the right โ€œto make political choices freelyโ€? And, David, are you aware that section 60 of the Constitution says every person, not just every Zimbabwean but every person, has the right to freedom of conscience which includes โ€œfreedom of thought, opinion, religion or beliefโ€, and โ€œfreedom to practice and propagate and give expression to their thought, opinion, religion or belief, whether in public or in private and whether alone or together with othersโ€. The fact that you quoted and abused my personal tweet I posted on 22 January 2019 in memory of my father who was brutally murdered by the Fifth Brigade on 22 January 1983 to say you โ€œdonโ€™t understand why you [me] continue to side with the party which brought such suffering to your [my] family, and which still brings so much sufferingโ€; shows that you are either ignorant of sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, and proves that you are a fraud and a charlatan with no constitutional values. Why do you want to police my freedom of conscience and my right to make my political choices freely? Just why do you and your lot in CCC, think that you can interfere with my freedom of conscience and my right to my political choices that are guaranteed to me by the Constitution of Zimbabwe? If you and your lot were genuine democratic change champions, as you claim and purport to be, you would be the first to understand and to propagate freedom of conscience and the right to make political choices freely as sacrosanct constitutional values and principles that must be respected for every Zimbabwean at all times. But this has not been possible because you are frauds and charlatans. Now, your attitude towards me, the one captured in the disgusting tweet you posted yesterday, leads me to conclude without any fear of being contradicted that you are a frivolous and stupid person, David. Otherwise, if you care to know, there are three months that are cruel to me. October in which I lost my daughter Zanele in 2015, November because of what happened to me, my family and some colleagues during the 2017 military coup โ€“ it was also on 11 November 1965 that Rhodesia under which you blossomed, unilaterally declared independence โ€“ and 22 January the dark day on which my father was murdered. These are traumatic days for me in the calendar year. You see, I was a student in California in the US when my father was murdered by the Fifth Brigade in cold blood on 22 January 1983, having gone to the US before independence in 1977. When this awful tragedy happened, I did not know who my father was. I was born when my mother was barely 16 years old, and I was raised by my maternal grandparents who, like my mother, did not want me to know who my father was for reasons best known to them. Although, as I grew up, I understood their position from our cultural perspective as Africans, it nevertheless profoundly pained me. Truth be told, I was most grateful and I still am to this day, that my grandfather was a great father and my grandmother a great mother to me in ways that made me who I am today. I got to know who my father was well after I had graduated with my doctorate in 1988 and long after his gruesome murder, about which I was first told only 10 years ago. Since then, while it's been a profound rebirth for me to connect with my father through the loving Mlevu clan at large, I owe my dear sister Simiso an existential debt of gratitude. Through her, my kids have a hand-holder gateway through which to know about their grandfather. I really thank God and the spirit of the Mlevu clan for Simiso. The fact that I was born on 12 January, and that my father was brutally murdered on 22 January, makes the month of January an unbearable time of anguish for me, more so given that my father and I never met in life. When four years ago on 22 January 2019 I posted the tweet that you abused yesterday with reckless abandon, as you exposed your disconnection from the African experience, I was existentially troubled by the worst that could have happened to me and to my family on 15 November 2017, which got me thinking about what happened to my father, and even more troubling against the backdrop of the events of November 2017, I was devastated by the fact that I never met my father, and I spent the better part of 22 January 2019 wondering what life could have been for me had I known him in life and grown up under his parental care and guidance. You see David, maybe this is not true of people of European ancestry like you but, for many Africans it is very common for kids to be raised by their grandparents, like I was. As things turned out, I grew up knowing many such kids as my peers, the majority of whom never got to know who fathered them, some of whom are leading very successful lives in society as you read this. Unlike them, I was fortunate to end up knowing who my father was, but I was unfortunate not to have met him, and even more unfortunate to have known of him long after his death, made worse by the tragic circumstances of that death. I do not have a fly by night connection with Zanu PF. When I finished my high school in California, I proceeded to university there for my undergraduate education on a scholarship I got through Zanu PF. While an undergraduate, I was the political commissar of the Zanu PF branch in Los Angeles. I did my masters and doctoral degrees with academic scholarships endorsed by Zanu PF and underwritten by the Government of Zimbabwe through a staff development programme at the University of Zimbabwe. Having gone through Mgagao run by Zanu PF, and having gotten university education to the highest level under the auspices of Zanu PF, I have a long history and experience with Zanu PF, and with Zanu PF people whose complexities define who I am as an adult Zimbabwean, for better or for worse. It's my history, I'm proud of it and I own it. Itโ€™s an inescapable truth that each individual, and each therefore each person has a unique existential history best known to himself or herself, family and to a small cohort that has been intimate parts of that personal history. It's hopelessly foolish for someone to hope to prescribe a history on anyone. Every human being is who they are. And it's a fact not exclusive to me that my association with Zanu PF has not always been rosy. Life is a personal struggle between the person or the individual and the social formations through which life goes on. Itโ€™s common cause, that the military coup was a traumatic experience for me and my family and that it was profoundly painful and life changing in untold ways. Itโ€™s also common cause and not surprising to any normal human being that I blamed Zanu PF for that traumatic experience. Anyone else in my situation would have done the same at point or another. Yet the bigger story is that I, my family and my colleagues survived that 2017 ordeal with the very direct, active and truly genuine assistance and support from Zanu PF people. Working with other African Angeles, and I emphasize African Angeles, it was Zanu PF people who made sure that we were able to be safe and to get out of the country to be where I am today, all of them at great risk to their lives or livelihoods. In 2017 I was saved to be alive today by Zanu PF people. During the life threatening 2017 ordeal that my family and I went through, there was not even one person associated with the opposition as it was then, or as it is today, who reached out to find out where I was or how I was doing. It is common cause, some of it is documented, that many in the opposition then and who are still in opposition today, actually wanted me dead, all because of my political differences with them. You David Coltart, who now wants to pretend that you โ€œhave always genuinely sympathised with meโ€, never inquired after me. Thatโ€™s why I think you are a monumental fraud and a charlatan. I repeat, I was helped out of the traumatic ordeal in 2017 by Zanu PF people, not by anyone from your lot David, not even one. Of course, at some point and largely because of the 2018 general election I found myself connected with some of your lot, especially Nelson Chamisa and others who were close to him or working with him i the election campaign, as the MDC-A presidential election candidate. I will not rehash that story here, as it has been told very well by many others. From my experience, and the lessons I have extrapolated from the late Vice President Joshua Nkomo, such as on the attached video clip, I have come to better appreciate that it is a mistake and wrong to a understand and define a political party with a deep-seated background and history like Zanu PF in terms of its leadership; rather, a grounded political party with a long history is necessarily defined by its founding values, constitution and membership, not least because the membership is permanent while the leadership comes and goes. By the same token, I have come to better appreciate that the mistakes or excesses of the leadership of grounded political parties with an entrenched history should not automatically or reflexively be ascribed or attributed to or blamed on the membership. On 15 November 2022, Patrick Zhuwao and I wrote an open letter to Zanu PF members to precisely make this point. I am attaching herewith a link to that letter, lest you missed it. Itโ€™s a self-explanatory letter which contextualises and explains everything that I did and said between 15 November 2017 and 14 November 2022. It also explains why do not support Nelson Chamisa and your CCC. I stand by the contents of that letter. In this connection, I draw your attention and that of your lot to an interview done by the late VP Joshua Nkomo in 1983 โ€“ which is attached herewith as already mentioned โ€“ in which Nkomo explains why the Fifth Brigade was not a Shona issue. Although Nkomo made it clear that gukurahundi was a political and not a tribal issue, I have come to understand and appreciate that it was a political issue not in the sense of Zanu PF as a political party in membership terms but, rather, in the sense of the political leadership and, more particularly, of individuals within that leadership. However, given your utter contempt for sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, I do not expect you to understand the dangers of painting a tribe or a political party with one brush, or to understand the misguided consequences of conflating the leadership of a political party with the partyโ€™s membership or even of treating the leadership of a political party as a monolithic formation that always acts in concert. Basically David, and just like Nelson Chamisaโ€™s trolls, it's clear you believe that you can abuse my personal and tragic circumstances to blackmail me for your doomed political purposes in two ways. First, you think you can abuse the circumstances of my fatherโ€™s brutal death to somehow generate cheap and outrageous propaganda for yourself, Nelson Chamisa and CCC that I support Zanu PF which killed my father, and you do this under your self-indulgent presumption that everyone who is in Zanu PF as a political party is murderous by definition. Second, and based on this falsification, youโ€™re abusing my tragic personal circumstances regarding my fatherโ€™s loss to blackmail me into supporting you in particular, given my attack on your imposition as CCC's Ward 4 councillor candidate in Bulawayo; Nelson Chamisa and CCC . Your outrageous position is that if I cannot support you, I must keep quiet about you, under the ridiculous presumption that youโ€™re all by definition virtuous, competent, capable, the only and best democratic alternative for everyone in Zimbabwe. On the back of sections 60 and 67 of the Constitution of Zimbabwe and drawing from my knowledge, thoughts, experiences and received wisdom from the late VP Joshua Nkomo, I have dealt with your self-indulgent presumption that Zanu PF is a monolithic formation with undifferentiated leadership and membership structures, in which you take everyone in it to be murderous by definition. In light of the fact that you invited this intervention by your disgusting and intrusive tweet you posted yesterday, and because we are age mates, I conclude my rejoinder to your offensive tweet by telling you what I think about you, about Nelson Chamisa and about CCC. David, as a former member of the Rhodesian security services which were murderous and which committed unspeakable atrocities across Zimbabwe and beyond its borders into Zambia and Mozambique, you have no moral authority to pontificate about human rights or anything of the sort. You David Coltart operated in Matabeleland where you did dastardly things, some of which you narrate in your autobiography and many of which you will take to your grave untold, because you never faced a commission of inquiry to be grilled under oath about your service in the Rhodesian security services. The fact that a person like you has remained active in Zimbabwean public affairs for 43 years since independence is a huge credit to our national politics because, with your background in the Rhodesian security services, you would not have survived this long in public life elsewhere. Itโ€™s mind boggling that Chamisa has imposed you to run for Ward 4 councillor in Bulawayo, after you were resoundingly defeated in your partyโ€™s Ward 4 community candidate selection caucus in which you were clobbered and you came a distant last among the contestants. Thanks to your being power hungry, you have made it possible for everyone to see that youโ€™re a fake democrat and a charlatan who believes in the imposition of candidates. Your criticism of what you say is Zanu PF's undemocratic practices is hollow and hypocritical. Furthermore, itโ€™s shocking is that Chamisa is bent on imposing you from Harare as Bulawayo mayor. You donโ€™t qualify for that position not least because you do not speak the language of the local community in Bulawayo despite having been born there 66 years ago. Unlike Members of Parliament or Senators, whose chambers conduct their business mainly in English, Councillors and Mayors work in the local languages of their local communities. For the above reasons, and as an expression of my freedom of conscience and my right to make my political choices freely, I do not and cannot support you at all David. As for Chamisa, having worked closely with him between 2018 and 2021, I came to the settled conclusion in November 2021 that he is a dictator with a very dangerous God complex, in that he sees himself as having been chosen by God to lead Zimbabwe, and more ominously, he claims to have direct communication with God who has the last word on what he should do or say in public. In politics, thatโ€™s an unworkable Jim Jones proposition. Because of his God complex, Chamisa is visible only when there are elections as he was in the 2018 harmonised general election, March 2022 by-elections and now for the 23 August harmonised general election. After he ditched his supporters in August 2018 when he called them "ma stupids" [stupid people], in January 2019 and in July 2020, his unavailability to provide leadership when his supporters needed it triggered a viral political joke that: โ€˜in Zimbabwe there are three things that are unavailable when you need them the most, the UN, a condom and Nelson Chamisaโ€™. But even more telling aboutChamisa is the shocking way in which he has used CCC since its formation in January 2022, and particularly in the partyโ€™s candidate selection for the forthcoming elections, to ruthlessly purge the opposition. It's been scary and it explains why the opposition in Zimbabwe today is the most clueless and the weakest since independence in 1980. How can a democratic change champion insist on running a political party with no constitution, no structures, no bank account and no accountability? I cannot support a leader like that. Thereโ€™s nothing more dangerous in politics than, a young 'popular' dictator with a God complex. My conscience and freedom to political choices freely do not allow me to support a leader like that. As for CCC, it has no ideology, no values, no constitution, no structures, no bank account, no policies and no other visible office bearers besides Chamisa, Gift Siziva, Fadzayi Mahere and Amos Chibaya; and it has not been launched to boot. Thereโ€™s just no way anywhere on earth that a political formation like that can be supported by rational people with rational expectations. Thatโ€™s why I cannot side with you David or with Chamisa or with CCC. Youโ€™re not โ€œthe alternativeโ€, youโ€™re just a worse and more dangerous alternative which can only be supported by polticidal people who do not mind moving from the frying pan into the fire! Jonathan Moyo 31 July 2023

Prof Jonathan Moyo

181,491 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 3 ๅนดๅ‰

---------------------------------------- Educational Purposes Disclaimer This content is shared strictly for educational and historical purposes. It is based on documented facts, verified sources, and established historical records. The material may include sensitive or uncomfortable topics that some viewers might find disturbing or offensive. The intention is solely to inform and provide context, not to insult, demean, or promote hatred toward any individual, group, or culture. Truthful discussion of history sometimes requires addressing difficult realities. Viewer discretion is advised. If you have concerns or additional verified information, feel free to share them respectfully in the comments. ---------------------------------------- Dr. William Luther Pierce - The Truth of Democracy "Did you ever wonder why the วฐews are such great proponents of democracy? Whether in Indonesia or Pakistan or Serbia or you name it, whenever there is some threat to universal suffrage, the J*ws are ready to send the U.S. armed forces in to bomb and kill until everyone is permitted to vote. Why is that? Why canโ€™t the Indonesians have an Islamic theocracy if they want? Why canโ€™t the Pakistanis have a military dictatorship? Why canโ€™t the Serbs run their own country the way they prefer? What is the appeal in making sure that people whose minds have been wasted by Alzheimerโ€™s Disease vote? Well, letโ€™s not beat around the bush: the appeal of mass democracy lies in the fact that in essentially every country in the world today, the number of persons unable to think for themselves is substantially larger than the number able to make independent decisions. Those unable to think for themselves have their thinking done for them by the people who control the mass media. Which is to say, democracy is the preferred system because it gives the political power to those who own or control the mass media and at the same time allows them to remain behind the scenes and evade responsibility for the way in which they use that power. And the more inclusive the democracy is; that is, the more Alzheimerโ€™s sufferers and Mongoloid cretins and paranoid schizophrenics and people who live in empty packing cases in alleyways and Jamaican immigrants and football fans are able to vote; the more certain is the grip of the media masters on the political process. Those voters who buy astrology magazines at the checkout stand and spend their time watching soap operas, game shows, and Oprah absorb their general attitudes on things through the television screen. They learn which ideas are fashionable and which are not by noticing the facial expression and tone of voice of Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather when the news is announced each day. Their opinions on specific issues are formed as they view televised sidewalk surveys taken by reporters. The only uncertainty about these people is whether or not theyโ€™ll be able to pry themselves loose from their couches long enough to vote for the designated candidates. Thatโ€™s why itโ€™s important to have lots of them. And wherever there are lots of them, the men who control the mass media also will control the outcome of elections. Itโ€™s a much surer way of controlling governments than bribing corrupt dictators or slipping seductive whores into the kingโ€™s bedroom a la Esther and Ahasuerus; or Monica and Bill. Believe me, one day soon the Jeลตs on both sides of the great water will institute a web-TV voting system that allows the couch potatoes and the ball game fans to vote without having to get up from their couches, just by clicking their remote controls at their TV screens to select the next President or prime minister. That will be real democracy. You know, back close to the beginning of this century, around 1901 or so, a book first was published containing the text of what became generally known as The Prล‘tocols of the Learned Elders of Ziล‘n. The publisher was a Russian academic, Professor Sergei Nilus. Nilus himself allegedly had obtained The Protocล‘ls from a Russian official, who had obtained the text from a patriotic Russian noblewoman, who in turn had purchased the material from a Jeลต in Paris about 15 years earlier. The Protocols purports to be a collection of minutes or reports of meetings held by the leaders of the world Jewฤฏsh community, at which they summarize the progress they had made to that time in their quest for world subversion, world ownership, and world power and outline their plans for continuing the process in the future. They talk about gaining control of the banking systems of various countries, about fomenting wars and revolutions to weaken and destroy Gentile power, about corrupting music and art and education, about subverting various Gentile institutions, about taking over the press everywhere and controlling the flow of information to the masses, about undermining the family and bringing family values into disrepute, and so on. The Elders of Zioล„ really are a satanic bunch of schemers. Reading The Protocoล‚s makes oneโ€™s flesh crawl. We should remember that when The Protocolลก began circulating in Russia in the first decade of this century, that country had not yet fallen victim to Jewisฤง Bolshevism, but that wasnโ€™t for lack of trying on the part of the วฐews. The Jeลตs were generally recognized as a dangerously subversive element in Russia, as the schemers and string pullers behind every attempt to damage or upset the established order in Russia, and so Professor Nilusโ€™ publication of The Pล•otocols found a ready market among the Russian public. After the Jศ‡wish Bolshevik revolution of 1917 overthrew the Russian government and established a communist dictatorship in Russia, anyone found with a copy of The Protoฤols was liable to be summarily shot. The text already had been translated into a dozen other languages and distributed far and wide outside Russia, however. Since then it has been published in virtually every language which has a printed form and has been read by tens of millions of people around the world. The Jศ‡ws have been claiming hysterically since The Proลฃocols first appeared that the text is โ€œa forgery.โ€ I guess thatโ€™s their way of saying that itโ€™s not what it purports to be: namely, the actual minutes of meetings of Jewish leaders discussing their plans for world domination. The great American industrialist and automaker Henry Ford was very strongly impressed by The Proลฃocols and helped circulate the text in the United States. When told by newspaper reporters in 1921 about the Jewsโ€™ claims that The Protoฤols was โ€œa forgery,โ€ Mr. Ford responded that all he could say about the material was that it fit what was actually happening in the world and had been happening ever since the The Pล•otocols first appeared in print. Of course, what Mr. Ford had especially in mind when he made that remark were two momentous things which had happened during the previous decade. One was the Jศ‡wsโ€™ success in taking over Russia and imposing communism on the Russians, and the other was the recently ended First World War: a horribly fratricidal and senseless war, which had destroyed the old order in Europe, had spilled the blood of millions of the best Europeans, and had weakened all of Europeโ€™s long-established institutions, leaving every European country open to all manner of social, political, and cultural ills; in particular, to the further spread of communism. Well, Henry Ford was a very hard-headed, practical sort of man, and itโ€™s easy to understand his attitude. He had no way of knowing whether or not The Proลฃocols of the Learned Elders of Ziล‘n was actually what it purported to be, but he was quite impressed by the fact that the plan for world subversion and domination by the Jeลตs outlined in the book seemed to be happening pretty much as described. Iโ€™ll go a step further than Henry Ford was willing to go in assessing The Protล‘cols. I think that they very likely are not what they purport to be. In the first place the text of The Protoฤols doesnโ€™t ring true. Itโ€™s too straightforward, too open. It doesnโ€™t use the sort of deceptive, weasel worded, self-justifying language that Jeลตs customarily use in expressing themselves, even to one another. When a group of Jศ‡wish leaders get together to discuss their plans for the destruction of a host nation, they donโ€™t use straightforward expressions such as โ€œencouraging miscegenationโ€ and โ€œleading the goyim to the slaughter.โ€ They use weasel-expressions, such as โ€œbuilding tolerance,โ€ โ€œincreasing diversity,โ€ and โ€œeliminating inequality.โ€ In the second place, itโ€™s difficult for me to imagine the head Jศ‡ws laying out such a complete, self-contained, and pat explanation of what theyโ€™re up to. Itโ€™s just too convenient for those of us who aim at alerting our people as to what the Jewsโ€™ intentions are and then putting a monkey wrench in their gears. I wouldnโ€™t call The Protoฤols โ€œa forgery,โ€ as the Jews do whenever the book is mentioned. Iโ€™m inclined to believe Professor Nilus was an astute observer of the Jeลตs and also was a patriot. He wanted to warn the Russian people of what the Jศ‡ws were planning to do to them, and so he imagined how the วฐewsโ€™ plan might look if it were all laid out in straightforward language. I believe that he wrote the text he published, but that he believed it was a reasonably accurate description of what the วฐศ‡ลตลก actually were doing. And the reason that The Protล‘cล‘ls ended up being translated into hundreds of languages and read by millions of people is that many people, like Henry Ford, saw that they fitted what was happening. Sometimes I have tried to imagine what Professor Nilus might have written if he were writing today instead of a century ago; and if he were writing still in the straightforward sort of language he used earlier. A 1999 version of The ฦคrotocols of the Learned Elders of Ziล‘n might read something like this: "Greetings, my fellow Elders of Zioล„! Today I am happy to report to you that our plan for the destruction of the hated Gentiles and the acquisition of their remaining wealth is practically complete. There remain only a few loose ends to tie up, and then the struggle in which we have been engaged for thousands of years against the filthy goyim against the Nations, against all the non-Jeลตish peoples of the world, finally will be victorious, and we will be able to devour everything they have created, as Yahweh, the god of our tribe, has commanded us. Everywhere we already rule behind the scenes, with puppets completely under our control in the offices of power. In Russia, where they resisted us for so long; where the ordinary people always hated us as exploiters, as moneylenders and tax collectors and purveyors of alcohol and merchants in the sweet, white flesh of their daughters and sisters, and where the aristocrats also hated us, as subversives and troublemakers, and kept us confined to only certain areas of the country, so that we could not exploit all of the people; in Russia we used the doctrine of our dear, departed Elder of Ziล‘n, Karl Marx, to divide the Russian people against themselves and get the power into our own hands, where it remains to this day. We butchered their Czar and his whole family like the Gentile cattle they were. With the help of the common people we slaughtered all of the Russian aristocrats and took their wealth. And then we turned on the common people. First we murdered their leaders; their writers and teachers and intellectuals and military officers; so that there would be no one able to turn them against us, and then we began murdering the common people themselves, the farmers and workers, first by the millions and then by the tens of millions in labor camps and death camps all across Russia. And most of them never did understand what was happening to them. One of them, who had been studying to become a Christian priest, we corrupted and made into our ally. His name was Stalin. Later, like the pharaoh who knew not Joseph, Stalin tried to turn against us, but one of our women was his doctor, and we poisoned him before he could harm us. When the system based on the theory of our departed Elder Marx had bled the Russian people dry, we launched a โ€œprivatizationโ€ scheme, which put most of the remaining wealth which had belonged to the government directly into our hands. Their gas and oil, their forests and their lumber industry, their mines and factories; and especially their television broadcasting facilities; are now owned by us acting as capitalists. Today we have a drunken, sick, old Russian clown, Boris Yeltsin, as the nominal leader of the Russians, but one of our people, Boris Abramovich Berezovsky, tells him what to do and keeps him under tight control through bribes. In England, the country from which all of us were expelled by the king as exploiters and troublemakers just over 700 years ago, we now have another puppet, Tony Blair, in place as the nominal leader of the English, but like Yeltsin he is completely under our control. One of our people, Michael Levy, finances his election campaigns and controls his purse strings. Another of our people, Jack Straw, controls his domestic policies. America, however, is the prize example of our success. Just as in England and in Russia, also in America we have been able to put a totally corrupt Gentile politician into the position of nominal power and then to surround him with our own people, who wield the real power. Actually running the American government, our people are in charge of Americaโ€™s State Department, Americaโ€™s Defense Department, Americaโ€™s Federal Reserve System, and Americaโ€™s Treasury Department. When one of our people, Robert Rubin, retired recently as secretary of the treasury, we simply moved another of our people, Lawrence Summers, into that position. Clinton appoints to every high office in the American government, whether the Supreme Court or his own cabinet, only those people we suggest to him, and the totally corrupt politicians of the Senate dare not disapprove anyone we suggest, lest we label them as โ€œanti-Semites.โ€ We have gained nearly complete control of Americaโ€™s educational system, from kindergarten through the universities. No ideas or facts may be taught unless we have given them the stamp of Political Correctness. We have made it impossible for anyone in an American university to contradict anything we have claimed, no matter how preposterous, about what happened to us during the Second World War. We now have the American government, just like every government in Europe, paying us โ€œreparations,โ€ because not enough was done for us during the war. We have succeeded in corrupting and then dominating Americaโ€™s art and music and literature. We have made degeneracy the touchstone for American culture. We own the art galleries and set the standards for painting and sculpture. We have the Americans lining up and paying admission to see a โ€œwork of artโ€ which consists of animal dung smeared onto a crude painting of a Nศ‡gress, which we tell them is their Virgin Mary. They read the depraved and trashy novels we tell them to read and believe that these novels are โ€œliterature.โ€ Their children listen to Negrล‘id rhythms and chant Nศ‡groid โ€œrapโ€ ditties, because we control the popular music industry. Through the immigration policy we have imposed on America we are increasing the percentage of non-White minorities in every part of the country. Within the next few years we will succeed in making White Americans a minority in their own country. Our success in America has been due to two things: our control of the mass media of news and entertainment, through which we control the ideas and attitudes of the masses; and the system of mass democracy, which ensures that the votes of the masses under our control determine which figurehead politicians actually make up the American government. Since the last part of the 19th century we have been gathering the power of the mass media into our hands. In those days many of us were only rag-pickers and dealers in used merchandise, recently off the boat from Russia or Poland, but whenever a Gentile newspaper got itself into financial difficulties, we were ready instantly to pool our resources and buy it out, so that henceforth it could be in the hands of one of our people. In the 1920s, when radio was becoming a powerful medium of persuasion, we began buying broadcasting stations and putting together networks. At the same time we saw the potential for motion pictures and began moving into Hollywood. By working together with each other we were able to bankrupt or buy out every Gentile film producer except Walt Disney. We had to wait until he died to take control of his film company, but by then we already dominated the entire motion picture industry. After the Second World War, when television became the most powerful medium of mass persuasion, we were ready to move in and dominate the TV industry from the beginning. Today no motion picture can be made and no television program can be broadcast in America without our approval. Only a few independent commercial radio stations, a few shortwave radio stations, and a handful of book and magazine publishers remain free of our control. But the American masses, for the most part, never see or hear anything we have not approved. They do not understand shortwave, and they are afraid to read any publication we have not approved, for fear that it might be โ€œhateโ€ material. There is, of course, that pesky Internet, which is not yet under our control, but we are moving rapidly to deal with that matter. We expect soon to have our puppet politicians enact โ€œhate speechโ€ legislation in America, similar to that which we already have succeeded in having enforced in Europe, so that no one can say anything on the Internet that has not been approved by us. The couch potatoes will not object, because we will tell them that the new laws will make them safe from terrorism. By that time we also should have achieved our goal for the disarmament of the American population. And then, my fellow Elders of Zioล„, we can do to the American people what we did to the Russian people. With our power of television, we will have them voting for their own slaughter. Long live our mass media! Long live democracy! Long live the power of triumphant ศคion!" "

Mofobian

24,562 ๆฌก่ง‚็œ‹ โ€ข 2 ไธชๆœˆๅ‰

Weโ€™re often told Western societies are experiencing conditions reminiscent of the German Weimar Republic. But what exactly was the German Weimar Republic? Iโ€™d like to explain the republicโ€ฆand its incredible levels of debauchery, meaninglessness, sex, drugs, andโ€”of courseโ€”Jews. โ€œThe decay of moral values in all areas of lifeโ€”the period of deepest German degradationโ€”coincided exactly with the height of Jewish power in Germany.โ€ -Karl Wiehe Background The Weimar Republic is the unofficial nameโ€”that was popularized by Adolf Hitlerโ€”of the German nation-state that existed from November of 1918 to March of 1933. It was named for the city of Weimar, Germany where the constitutional assembly that established the new German republic met. The official name of the republic was the German Reich. The Weimar Republic was established after Germanyโ€™s loss in WWI. Germany was forced under the Treaty of Versailles to accept โ€œfull responsibilityโ€ for the war and pay the debts of all the allied countries. Being forced to pay these massive debts devastated the German economy and skyrocketed inflation, unemployment, and suicide within Germany. At one point 40% of Germans were unemployed and many were homeless. In 1932, the German suicide rate was more than three times that of Great Britain and in one two-year period, Germany had more suicides than there had been deaths of American soldiers in all of WWI. The German currency became the most worthless currency in Europe. A loaf of bread in Berlin that cost around 160 German Marks at the end of 1922, cost 200,000,000,000 German Marks by late 1923. The German peoplesโ€™ life savings and purchasing power had melted away over the course of a few months. With a single US dollar being worth 4,210,500,000,000 German Marks by November of 1923, foreign currencies had much greater buying power in Germany. So naturally, foreigners flocked to Germany to take advantage of the cheap prices. With these foreigners arriving en masse, Germans desperate for work turned to one of primary industries the foreigners flocked to Germany for: the sex industry. Sex and Drugs Germans began flocking to urban hubs in search of work, and no urban hub was more popular than Berlin. Prostitution in Berlin wasnโ€™t explicitly legal but existed in a kind of legal gray area where certain aspects of the sex trade were regulated while others remained unregulated. However, enforcement of any laws restricting prostitution was lax to non-existent. On any given night up to 100,000 prostitutes would line the streets of Berlin. Every type of prostitute was available: midgets, pregnant prostitutes who lined up on the street according to how pregnant they were, prostitutes that purposefully tried to be ugly, prostitutes with acid-scarred faces, prostitutes with missing limbs, mother and daughter prostitute pairs, dominatrixes, even hunchback prostitutes. Interracial, inter-generational, forced or abusive sex acts were all available for the right price. There was also a large male prostitution industry and homosexual men from across Europe came to Germany to pay for homosexual sex. And unlike most cities, Berlin boasted having not a single red-light districtโ€”but multiple. Child prostitutes were bought and sold in Weimar Berlin in a booming industry. Advertisements for child prostitutes were even placed in German magazines and newspapers. A person could order a child, or any other type of prostitute for that matter, over the phone and have them a few short minutes later. British historian Sir Arthur Bryant describes throngs of child prostitutes outside the doors of the great Berlin hotels and restaurants. Bryant adds, โ€œmost of themโ€”the night clubs and vice resortsโ€”were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.โ€ There were homosexual, lesbian, and even transsexual bars where, occasionally, public masturbation and orgies took place. These homosexual bars werenโ€™t isolated or rare one-off outliers either, there were over 50 lesbian bars in Berlin and around 100 homosexual bars total. Drag shows and cross dressing were commonplace in these bars. Sexual acts involving torture or acts bringing a victim close to death, or evenโ€”in some instancesโ€”to death were performed in Weimar Germany (called Lustmord). As often happens when violent sexual perversions arise, so too do serial killers playing out their fetishes in reality. I refuse to name serial killers in my writings because I think it glorifies them, but you can look them up yourself. German Newspapers devoted entire sections to the violent sexual crimes of these serial killers and fictional accounts of murders sold very well on German book stands. Serial Killers had a romanticized lore around them, similar to what we see in western society today. Alongside prostitution and homosexual clubs, porn also enjoyed a golden age during the Weimar Republic. Like prostitution, porn existed in a kind of legal gray area where enforcement of any regulations on it were lax to non-existent. Images could be purchased under-the-counter at most street media kiosks. According to one report there were as many as 30 homosexual publications on any given Berlin media kiosk. Above all, pornography featuring models who bore a resemblance to the biggest movie stars of the day, such as Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, were in the highest demand. Fashion began to blur the lines between masculine and feminine. The female image began to experiment with a more strong-willed independent tone and some women began to dress in masculine clothing. Similarly, male fashion began to experiment with feminization and cross-dressing amongst men began to rise. Berlinโ€™s women began to question the need for a man in their lives at all and many Berlin women had no desire to start or raise a family. Drug use in the Weimar Republic also ran rampant and Berlin gained a reputation as a drug dealing hub around Germany and Europe. Cocaine was the most popular drug in the Weimar Republic and only required a simple prescription from a doctor. That said, opium (a predecessor to heroin), morphine and amphetamines were all readily available and extensively used as well. The drug usage was so pervasive there was even experimentation with using drugs for โ€œscientificโ€ sexual purposes. One of the chief โ€œscientistsโ€ behind this experimentation with sex was a man named Magnus Hirshfeld. Magnus Hirschfeld was a homosexual Jew and one of the thought leaders behind the sexual debauchery overtaking Berlin. Hirschfeld had founded political organizations that fought for the rights of homosexuals in Germany well before the Weimar era and as far back as 1896. He led the campaign to overturn a statue of German Law called Paragraph 175 which forbid homosexuality in Germany. Hirschfeld would later go on to write a 1914 book called The Homosexuality of Men and Women in which he attempted to prove homosexuality occurred in every society around the world. Hirschfeldโ€™s crowning achievement of debauchery, however, occurred in July of 1919 when he opened The Institute of Sexual Research (Institut fรผr Sexualwissenschaft) in Berlin. The instituteโ€™s stated purpose was to establish the sexual sciencesโ€ฆand establish the sexual sciences the institute did. It was at the Institute of Sexual Research where the initial rubric for the innumerable genders we see in leftism today originated. At the institute, Hirschfeld developed a system which categorized 64 possible types of sexual intermediary (aka genders) and it was Hirschfeld who coined the term transvestite in 1910 and the term transsexual in 1923. The institute even performed sex re-assignment surgery. The Institute of Sexual Research also housed a large library for any and all homosexual, transsexual, and erotic literature. The institute had places for homosexuals to stay overnight as well as some of the first counseling services specifically tailored to homosexuals. Homosexual-specific medical services were provided in the institute as well. The institute also housed the Museum of Sex, an educational resource for the public, which was reported to have been visited by school classes. I think the writer Luigi Barzini most succinctly summarized the rampant debauchery that was Weimar Berlin when he said: โ€œI saw pimps offering anything to anybody: little boys, little girls, robust young men, libidinous women, animals. The story went the rounds that a male goose whose neck you cut at just the right ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious frisson of allโ€”as it allowed you to enjoy sod*my, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, and sadism at one stroke.โ€ A debaucherous infestation had overtaken Berlin and nowhere was that more evident than in the arts. Art, Music, and Film Art, music, and film in Berlin were overtaken by the sexual revolution and a move toward a Jewish-influenced anti-authoritarianism as well. The Berlin film industry started releasing risquรฉ and homosexual films. The worldโ€™s first known homosexual filmโ€”Anders als die Andern (1919)โ€”came out in Berlin during the Weimar era and is the story a man falling in love with one of his male violin students. This film was written by and featured none other than Magnus Hirschfeld himself. Another film called Mรคdchen in Uniform (1931) is about a schoolgirl who falls in love with her female teacher. The two commence a forbidden love and eventually even share an on-screen lesbian kiss on the mouth. The film ends when this lesbian love is exposed and the protagonist attempts suicide. German expressionist cinema also came to prominence in the Weimar Republic. This form of cinema emphasized depicting the artist's inner emotions (no matter how crude those emotions may be) rather than attempting to replicate reality. Two of the three key figures for the German expressionist movement were the Jews Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene. The expressionist film Metropolis was one of the biggest films of the Weimar era. Metropolisโ€™ content is emblematic of the anti-authoritarian and communist messages of German expressionist cinema. The film takes place in a futuristic city where a beautiful and cultured utopia exists above a bleak underworld populated by mistreated workers. When a privileged young man discovers the grim scene under the city, he becomes intent on helping the workers. He befriends a rebellious teacher which puts him at odds with his authoritative father. The film was directed the Jew Fritz Lang and produced by the Jew Erich Pommer. The credits of the films of the Berlin movie industry were also littered with Jews. In fact, in 1931, over 60 percent of German films were produced by Jews and 82 percent of film scripts were written by Jews. In the art scene, a thoroughly anti-authoritarian and communist movement called Dada arose. The Dadaist movement was comprised of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. Dadaist works opposed any type of authority and made fun of far-right figures, including Hitler himself. According to Wikipedia, some sources claim the Dadaist movement was founded by a group of Jewish modernist artists. In music, one of the most popular singers of the day was a woman who was largely regarded as โ€œthe first official lesbian of Berlinโ€ named Claire Waldoff. Waldoff dressed masculine and made no secret of her sexuality while actively trying to convert other culturally important women to become lesbian. One culturally important woman Waldoff succeeded in converting to bisexuality was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Marlene Dietrich. Marlene was famous for pushing social norms and sometimes wore a tuxedo, helping to erode the image of traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine roles. Marlene credits Clarie Waldoff as โ€œintroducing her to lesbian loveโ€. Marlene Deitrich was openly bisexual and an icon for homosexual women around the world when no other homosexual icons existed. One newspaper dubbed Dietrich โ€œperhaps the busiest and most passionate bisexual in theatrical Berlin.โ€ Anita Berber was one of the most popular nude dancers of the Weimar Republic and danced to songs with titles like, suicide, morphiem, and mad house. One of her husbands was also openly homosexual. In one famous story about Anita, she was being ignored by one of the tables she was dancing for, so she went over to the table, stood on top of it, and started peeing on the table while drinking their champagne. What a galโ€ฆ Architecture One aesthetic element that I think tends to be overlooked in most writings on social decay is architecture. It should come as no surprise that the principal architecture movement of the Weimar Republicโ€”called expressionist architectureโ€”also took a turn from an aesthetic focused on beauty and perfection toward an aesthetic that focused on โ€œdistortion of form to create an emotional effectโ€. This is architecture thatโ€™s generally perceived as hideous or repulsive. Iโ€™d also argue thereโ€™s a larger psychological component to this expressionist architecture. This ugly architecture contributes to social decay by glorifying the more disgusting elements of society and humanity. It subconsciously undermines the idea that society should strive for perfection and instead is a call to accept societyโ€™s more heinous elements. This repulsive architecture is, in my view, anti-authoritarian and destructive to social norms. Two of the key architects of the expressionist architecture movement were the Jews Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn. Jews One of the key factors in Hitlerโ€™s rise to power was his opposition of the Jewish influence inside Berlin. As such, this article would be incomplete without looking at the Jewish influence that existed inside Berlin orโ€”possibly more importantlyโ€”the German publicโ€™s perception of the Jewish influence inside Berlin. Here are some of the figures I think best illustrate the Jewish over-representation in the Weimar Republic. All these figures should be viewed in consideration of this fact: Jews made up less than 1% (.09%) of the German population in the years of the Weimar Republic. In my opinion, these figures are staggering primarily because of the Jewsโ€™ immense over-representation in major positions of power within German society. Politics โ€ข The author of the 1919 German constitution was the Jew Hugo Preuss. โ€ข One quarter of the members of the 8-person Council of the People's Deputies that established the Weimar Republic were Jews (Otto Landesberg and Hugo Haase). โ€ข The main competing faction against the official Weimar government was headed by the Jew Kurt Eisner. โ€ข The SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) was the political party that primarily ran the Weimar Republic. 22% of the entirety of the SPD were Jews. โ€ข The SPDโ€™s main political theorist was a Jew: Eduard Bernstein โ€ข Two of the political thinkers most respected by the SPD were Jews: Ferdinand Lassalle, Leopold Sonnemann. โ€ข SPD's โ€œforemost theoretician of this centuryโ€ was the Jew Rudolf Hilferding. โ€ข SPD Key Figure, industrialist, and political thinker Walther Rathenau was a Jew. โ€ข The Vice President of the Berlin Police was the jew Bernhard Weiss. โ€ข In the first Weimar administration Vice Chancellor Eugen Schiffer was Jewish as was Weimar Interior Minister Erich Koch-Weser. โ€ข 15% of the members of the Reichstag (German Parliament) were Jewish. โ€ข A large number of the members of the political elite of the Weimar Republic were Jews: Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Levi, Ernst Toller, Erich Muhsam, Gustav Landauer, Eugen Levine, and Karl Radek. The Press โ€ข The Ullstein Press was the publisher of many of the largest German newspapers and was owned by the Jew Leopold Ullstein. โ€ข The Berliner Iliustrirte Zeitung was one of the largest German newspapers. It was Published by the Ullstein Press and its chief editor was the Jew Kurt Korff. โ€ข The Vossische Zeitung was another of the largest German newspapers and was published by the Ullstein Press. Its chief editor was the Jew Georg Bernhard. โ€ข Another of the othe r largest newspaper publishers was the Jew Rudolf Mosse. โ€ข The Berliner Tageblatt was the largest of Rudolf Mosseโ€™s newspapers and its chief editor was the Jew Theodor Wolff โ€ข Editor-in-chief of the SPDโ€™s party paper Vorwรคrts was the Jew Friedrich Stampfer The Arts โ€ข The Jew Erich Pommer was a German-born film producer and executive. According to Wikipedia, โ€œPommer was perhaps the most powerful person in the German and European film industries in the 1920s and early 1930s.โ€ โ€ข In 1931, over 60 percent of German films were produced by Jews and 82 percent of film scripts were written by Jewish writers. โ€ข Two of the three key figures for the largest film movement of the Weimar eraโ€”the German expressionist movementโ€”were the Jews Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene. โ€ข Two of the key Architects of the expressionist architecture movement were the Jews Bruno Taut and Erich Mendelsohn. โ€ข Some of the most influential producers, directors, & actors in Weimar cinema were Jews as well to name a few: Paul Davidson, Joseph Mandel, Jules Greenbaum, Max Reinhardt, Josef Von Sternberg, Fritz Kohn, Otto Wallburg, Peter Lowenstein. โ€ข To conclude the arts, some claim the anti-authoritarian and thoroughly communist Dadaist movement was founded by a group of Jewish modernist artists. Sex โ€ข Magnus Hirschfeld was Jewish. He was dubbed "the Einstein of Sex". He was president of World League of Sexual Reform and of course, founder of the Institute for Sexual Research. โ€ข Ivan Bloch was Jewish and is often called the "first Sexologist". โ€ข As quoted by Sir Arthur Bryant earlier, โ€œmost of themโ€”the night clubs and vice resortsโ€”were owned and managed by Jews. And it was the Jews among the promoters of this trade who were remembered in after years.โ€ Other notable Jewish over-representations: (**Please Note** these next five bullet points are not official numbers and are from a NSDAP piece that was distributed in Weimar Germany. I'm including them because although I can't be completely sure of their accuracy, I think they most likely do generally represent the amalgamations of Jewish power in Weimar society. And, at the very least, these numbers represent the German publicโ€™s perception of Jewish amalgamations of power in Weimar society): โ€ข 56% of notaries were Jews. โ€ข 52% of doctors were Jews. โ€ข 45% of Hospital Directors were Jews. โ€ข 48% of lawyers were Jews. โ€ข 35% of dentists were Jews. One last note on the Jews of the Weimar Republic. I included a link with more detail below, but many Weimar Jews actively tried to conceal their Jewish identity and even went so far as bragging to other Jews when gentiles were unable to identify them. This is one of the reasons that, to this day, itโ€™s somewhat difficult to identify who the Jews of the Weimar Republic were. What this means is that, although the identity of every Jew I list is verified, there are undoubtedly other prominent and non-prominent Jews I was unable to identify. The provided list should not be viewed as wholly representative of the Jewish influence within Weimar Germany. But even just considering the provided list, you can see the Jewish influence was substantial for a race of people comprising less than 1% of the total German population. This Jewish over-representation is even more substantial when you consider that many of these Jewish amalgamations of over-representation occurred within many of Germanyโ€™s most important social, political, and economic institutions. The Weimar Republic was often referred to as the "Juden Republic" (Jew's Republic) by Germans. I think it's easy to see why... Enter the National Socialists After Hitlerโ€™s rise to power in 1933, Goebbels and the Brownshirts began shutting down the homosexual dive bars that had risen to prominence during the Weimar Republic. They made one of the most popular homosexual bars in Berlin their headquarters after shutting it down. They pillaged Magnus Hirschfeldโ€™s Institute for Sexual Research and Hirschfeldโ€™s books on transsexual ideology were some of the first books the National Socialists burned. From Wikipedia itself, the books the National Socialists burned were: โ€ข Writings on sexuality and sexual education which serve the egocentric pleasure of the individual and thus, destroy the principles of race and Volk. โ€ข Pornography and explicit literature. โ€ข Pacifist literature. โ€ข All books degrading German purity. โ€ข Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field. โ€ข Popular entertainment literature that depicts life and life's goals in a superficial, unrealistic and sickly sweet manner, based on a bourgeois or upper class view of life. โ€ข The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new Germany. โ€ข The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism. โ€ข Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writings supporting the Weimar Republic. โ€ข Books that advocate "art" which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist. โ€ข The decadent, destructive and Volk-damaging writings of "Asphalt and Civilization" literati โ€ข Patriotic kitsch in literature. โ€ข All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud. Very quickly after Hitlerโ€™s rise to power in 1933, the chief purveyors of the degeneracy that had overtaken Berlin would leave the city and National Socialist Germany would rise from its ashes. The restโ€”as they sayโ€”is history. (Sources and further reading in the comments below)

Bobby Thorne

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Ten years after the majestic, globally significant, yet betrayed NO Referendum of the Greek people โ€“ a personal message: On 5th of July 2015 the Greek people voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to say a big, beautiful NO to the Big Business and Big Finance who, through their centre right and centre left political representatives, were demanding of the Greek people that they shoulder the costs of the banking crisis which Big Business and Big Finance had caused, with the result that hundreds of millions of people in Europe and America were crushed under mountain ranges of banking losses which governments then turned into public debt, before shifting it to the shoulders of the weakest of citizens through universal austerity โ€“ the working classes, the poor, the elderly, the young, the women, people who lacked the power to defend themselves from the powerful plucking the very moneytree whose existence they denied. Churchill once said of the battle of El Alamein that, before it, the Allies had never won but that, after it, they never lost again. I could say something similar about that splendid and, at once, tragic day, of the Greek NO Referendum ten years ago today โ€“ the day when 62% of Greek voters ignored the financial terrorism of the European Central Bank (which had shut down the Greek banks to blackmail voters to accept the terms of surrender they were dictating to the Greek people). That same day when my former comrade, the PM I was serving as finance minister on behalf of the Greeks who were resisting, trashed their verdict and defected to the Big Finance and the Big Business in the name of the left. Before that day, before the magnificent NO Referendum outcome of 5th July 2015, and during the months and years leading to it, we could not imagine losing in the long run our fights against the Big Finance and the Big Business that blew up our social economies in 2008. But after it, since the PM I was serving under overturned our people and betrayed their referendum verdict, we cannot imagine winning ever again, at least not in our lifetimes, against the Big Finance and the Big Business whom the betrayal of the NO Referendum helped recover. It was THAT significant a day. It was THAT significant a defection. Now, I know it is not the done thing to sully the spirit of oneโ€™s fellow travellers, oneโ€™s comrades, to say things like that - to surrender in public to the admission not only of the size of our defeat but also of the possibility that we may not win again for the foreseeable future. Alas, now is the time for honesty โ€“ for without honesty amongst rebels no rebellion worth its salt can be staged. Indulge me friends, fellow travellers, comrades. My point is not to bring you down. My point is to acknowledge where we are not just in Greece, in Germany, in Britain, in Europe but globally. To take stock properly of our situation globally not to mourn nor for some perverted sense of inverted glory, certainly not for gain, but for the simple, stubborn hope of rising again. Somewhere to the North of where I am talking you from, the killing fields of Ukraine are devouring lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision. Where is the Peace Movement to stop this? Nowhere really. Instead Europe is sinking fast into Military Keynesianism, with large majorities in our parliaments voting for unspeakable amounts of new debt to go to weapons of mass destruction we neither need nor can afford โ€“ and certainly weapons that people with the slightest of sense left in their hearts and minds should not want. Meanwhile, needless to say, from my southeast, from the scorched land of Palestine, the acrid stench of genocide drifts on the wind. Yes, we have staged magnificent marches on our streets. Yes, our people have marched to Gaza, other comrades risked life and limb to sail to that coastal war crime scene. Yes we have made it possible to speak of the genocide without being treated as buffoons. Yes, we have shifted public opinion. But, nothing is changing on the ground where Palestinian life is eradicated at a steady, at an unbearable rate, or in the corridors of power. Where are the sanctions on Israel? Where is the UN Peacekeeping force that should have been parachuted in to stop the genocide in its tracks? Nowhere. The only people that are hounded are people like the UNโ€™s Special Rapporteur, my friend Francesca Albanese, for daring to report on the political economy of genocide. Why has Brazil, Spain or Ireland, countries whose governments have been supportive of the Palestinians not joined the Hague Group that our Progressive International has brought together to isolate Israel? What are they waiting for? Friends, fellow-travellers, comrades, at the risk of saddening, maybe even angering you, I shall say it again: Since that NO referendum was overturned ten years ago, today, by the leftโ€™s own leadership, we are losing at every front. Who is winning? Not the liberal authoritarian establishment โ€“ Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Friedrich Merz. No the pro-genocide radical centre they sensationally unpopular. Even if they are clinging onto power for the time being, they are thoroughly discredited, despised even. No, the winners nest elsewhere in even uglier echelons of the political spectrum. Have you not smelled its smell? Canโ€™t you smell the fascism in the air? Canโ€™t you feel its sour, metallic taste clinging to the back of your throat? What happened to our great hopes? Remember Woman-Life-Freedom? The whispered three-word promise Kurdish heroines carried like a fragile beacon in their hands, a promise that until recently seemed to shimmer just within reach? Well, take a look at the triumphant Donald Trump on the one hand โ€“ yes, he is winning on every front โ€“ and the pathetic Kamala Harris, or the even more pathetic Hillary Clinton, on the other. Between them, willingly in Trumpโ€™s case, they created the manosphereโ€™s unyielding juggernaut, which trampled upon Woman-Life-Freedom, as if these precious little words, had never been spoken at all. Authoritarianism, that most insidious of plagues, has crept into every sinew of life. Along with the smell of pollution in the air, microplastics in our oceans, the insidious power of cloud capital hardwired into our brains, delivering our minds to the whims of our new techlords โ€“ this New Global Ecocidal Hyper-Exploitative Ruling Class is entrenching itself as the new order, its cold grip tightening with each passing day. I donโ€™t know about you but, speaking personally, on this, the 10th anniversary of our Great Victory which was turned overnight into the Great Betrayal, it is ever so easy to surrender to the feeling, the sensation, that my political struggles, fuelled by a fierce and unyielding hope, are taking me from one defeat to the next, making me feel like a character in some twisted simulation, doomed to repeat the same futile actions over and over. BUT, I shall not surrender. And nor will you! Acknowledging our defeats, the overwhelming strength of the monsters in power, and the magnitude of the task, needs to be done so that we ground our disobedience, our activism, our sacred campaigns for Humanity and for Nature, on solid ground. So that we learn from the past, from what happened to the brave Greek people 10 years ago to this day, focussing with laser sharp precision not only on the economics and the politics of what needs to be done but, much more so, on the greatest solvent, the ugliest enemy, of solidarity: The tendency of our own side, our own comrades, to be lured by power into defecting to the other side โ€“ to the oligarchs who are ever so eager to co-opt us, to co-opt our leading figures especially. So, on behalf of DiEM25, today, the 5th of July 2025, exactly 10 years after the Greek peopleโ€™s majestic, betrayed, but inspiringly courageous NO โ€“ that ethereal revolutionary little word โ€“ a word redolent of the only Freedom that matters, the freedom to turn down exploitative, extractive deals. On this day, I bid you farewell. Battle well, and let us all, grounded on facts, work joyously to devise acts that make the fascists, the radical centre, the genocide practitioners and the purveyors of all types of exploitation lose their sleep at night so that the many can dream again.

Yanis Varoufakis

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