When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look, but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown, the dream is gone.

-Pink Floyd (lyrics by Roger Waters), Comfortably Numb, 1980

On the evening of September 10, 2001, a fierce storm system lashed the island of Manhattan, bringing lightning, wind, and rain. 37-year-old artist Monika Bravo was working in her studio on the 92nd floor of One World Trade Center, often referred to as the “North Tower”, when she set up her video camera to capture the first moments of the storm’s arrival, around 3 in the afternoon. She took seven hours of time-lapse footage, later edited into five minutes of video, as successive waves of storms rolled through into the night. Bravo’s video would be the last footage ever captured from inside the structure that had occupied that location since 1971, but would occupy it no longer.

When I discovered her film a year or so ago on Vimeo, until recently the only site where it had been accessible since 2011, I was astounded. The events surrounding the twin towers on 9/11 are too dark and impenetrable for the human mind to fully comprehend. On social media I’d sometimes come across tourist images or videos from the buildings captured in the weeks or months prior to the event and would read the comments about how eerie it was to see these. But now here was video shot from the very zone of the first plane’s impact on the day before — on the very night before — looking out at a stormy, foreboding world on the cusp of ceasing to exist. The metaphor it represented was unmistakable, and I couldn’t believe I’d never known about it. (Since learning of Bravo’s film, I’ve discovered a half-dozen or more other images and videos from that night and early the next morning, before the initial attack, but her film remains the most iconic and impactful to me).

Titled September 10 2001, Uno nunca muere la vispera, which translates to “one never dies the day before [their death]”, the film transitions from a whiteout title screen to an opaque grey as the opening bars begin to play of the downtempo lounge track Summer in San Tropez, from a 2000 collaboration called Flora & Fauna. You realize there’s movement in the grey and an indistinct horizon. A droplet of rainwater streaks the glass pane you now realize is in front of the lens. Then another droplet, and another.

What you’re seeing are rain-laden clouds passing over New York Harbor and then the East River on the afternoon of September 10th, the camera alternating between south- and east-facing windows of the 92nd floor of the North Tower. On occasion, the west facade of the South Tower is visible to the left and a drab, indistinct Statue of Liberty pokes up like the pointy end of a thumb tack into the mist from a darkened Liberty Island in the far distance.

Monika Bravo’s film:

At about a minute in, the film cuts to sepia-toned timelapse footage of the storm’s approach just as the music takes on a lighter tone, incongruous with the foreboding images. This somehow makes it more unsettling. Dark clouds rush up from the southwest and overtake the tip of Manhattan, interspersed with sunlight. The splotchy surface of the harbor looks like a calico cat in motion as cloud and sun compete to reflect off of it. A similar view across the East River shows the time-lapse boat trails crisscrossing up and down until the mist fully obscures them as the first wave of storms sets in.

When night has fallen, direct shots of the South Tower become visible through the rain and lightning. The video image drifts out of focus at times, only to snap back into sharpness moments later. An unexpected one-second zoom-in to the face of the tower at the 2:22 mark is jarring and seems an odd and slightly irreverent choice of edit. You can see empty desks and chairs on lighted floors opposite, beyond what are now rivulets of rainwater streaming down the window in front of you and down those soon-to-be-infamous aluminum-clad columns to the side of the frame.

It was near midnight before Bravo collected her footage and headed home, leaving fellow artist Michael Richards, a sculptor, on the 92nd floor as he watched the end of the Giants-Broncos game on Monday Night Football. Richards would stay overnight working on his own project. He would be killed the next morning after an American Airlines Boeing 767 slammed into the north face of the tower at 8:46 a.m., leaving a black, smoking gash from Floors 93 to 99, filling the stairwells and elevator shafts with debris extending down into the levels below.

Richards and Bravo were just two of about 20 artists in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s (LMCC) World Views artist-in-residence program that for four years had occupied studios on the the 91st and 92nd floors of the North Tower. Richards would be the only member of the program to be killed in the attacks. He was working on a memorial to the Tuskegee Airmen, the famous unit of decorated Black pilots from World War II. His unfinished piece lost in the building’s destruction depicted an airman riding a meteor.

One of Richards’ prior pieces from the same series, titled Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, featured a suspended airman in flight suit, eyes closed and palms open outward, with a swarm of fighter planes impacting his body from multiple directions. St. Sebastian was a Christian martyr traditionally shown pierced by arrows. This imagery drew from the history of the Tuskegee Airmen and broader themes of Black identity, vulnerability, and heroism.

Richards had used his own body as a model for the airman. “The idea of flight relates to my use of pilots and planes, but it also references … the idea of being lifted up, enraptured, or taken up to a safe place — to a better world,” Richards wrote. These weren’t Richards’ only works containing elements that seemed to anticipate the circumstances of his fate.

These elements are framed in Carl Jung’s depth psychology using the concept of “synchronicity”, referring to coincidental events that appear meaningfully related but do not seem to be causally connected, taken by Jung’s psychoanalytic theory to be evidence of a connection between the mind and material objects. Some who take the theories seriously believe those with artistic minds may be uniquely adept at picking up synchronistic patterns, even precognitive ones, in the spaces they inhabit and the objects they create.

2001 arts program interview of an LMCC staff member in the WTC:

Such apparent pattern recognition, or “pre-reflection”, among artists in the World Views program didn’t stop with Richards. An art collective called “E-Team” who were part of the residency in early 2001 did two projects that still raise eyebrows (and, among some, suspicions).

The first, 127 Illuminated Windows, in March 2001, involved treating the upper north face of the North Tower like the face of an LCD screen by having businesses occupying adjacent offices on floors 89-95 selectively turn lights on or off for the night to spell out the name of the collaborative - E-TEAM - in giant block letters. What made this project significant in retrospect was the fact that the floors used for the display closely approximated those that were impacted by the first plane to attack on 9/11 (floors 93-99), and on the same face of the tower.

The second E-Team project to draw retrospective scrutiny was Quick Click, a project related to the Open Studios open-house event for the LMCC World Views program that was held on a Saturday in late March, 2001. This is probably the second-most unsettling event tied to the program in the year-and-a-half leading up to 9/11.

Members of the public lined up along the north-facing windows of the 91st floor of the North Tower and awaited their turn to have their photos snapped from a helicopter hovering outside for 20 minutes (see video below). When it was their turn, each individual would step up into a lighted window, pose for a few seconds, and step down to let the next person take their turn. The whole thing was coordinated by E-Team members with handheld radios. People could return the next day to pick up their photos.

I’ve yet to find a single example of an individual photo from this event, but the imagery from the video of it is unnerving. Seeing illuminated human forms standing between the columns on the same face of the building, and only a few floors below, where desperate people gasping for air would lean out of broken and blackened windows less than six months later is almost too unsettling to watch.

What sense did this kind of display make, even in hindsight, as an artistic expression? Judging from the poor-quality video image, the photographic effect couldn’t have been that good. The lighting appears to have been inadequate. The distance of the helicopter from the building would have prevented a stable, closeup shot. The whole thing seems only to have meaning when considered in light of subsequent events, which makes it all the more disturbing.

Short video documenting the Quick Click project, apparently created by E-Team:

But, with the exception of the helicopter, Quick Click happened inside the building. A year prior to that project, there was another one by a different artist group that “pierced the veil” of the building and extended strikingly similar symbolic imagery to its outside. This is by far the most astounding and unsettling example of WTC art imitating, in advance, the horrific real-world life of the building’s near-future. And it’s almost unbelievable that it actually happened.

The Austrian art collective Gelitin are known for their performative, often absurdist projects that blend sculpture, action, and prank-like gestures. Their later work, Rabbit, in 2005, saw them create a giant, cartoonish, pink bunny figure on a mountainside in Italy, knitted from wool and stuffed with hay. It was intended to last until 2025 but had all but rotted away by 2016.

During their residency at World Views in early 2000, it’s unclear what kind of project they were supposed to be working on, but the one they ended up doing was shrouded in controversy and intrigue, and fuels conspiracy theories to this day.

The B-Thing, performed in March 2000, involved the group secretly removing a window pane on the 91st floor from the inside using putty-stripping and suction-cup equipment, and then extending outside the building a small, load‑bearing balcony made from materials they smuggled in (artists in the building apparently had free reign at all hours of the day and night). At dawn on March 19th, each member stepped onto the balcony—at least one of them wearing angel wings — while a helicopter hovered nearby, documenting the moment in a series of haunting photographs. They then removed the balcony, resealed the window, and kept the operation so secret that it sparked rumors and disbelief across New York’s art circles.

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They published a now-out-of-print, limited-edition art book about the feat on January 1, 2001, which today costs thousands of dollars to purchase on Amazon and eBay. Although there was a time early on when even Gelitin themselves denied having done it (probably to avoid legal consequences), experts analyzing the photos found no signs of digital tampering—confirming the stunt’s authenticity. Numerous articles have been written about it, including most-recently in Rolling Stone.

Incredibly, Gelitin had a gallery exhibition scheduled to open on September 11, 2001, in New York that was to include documentation from The B-Thing (photos, concept material), which was either delayed or overtaken by the events of the day.

Understandably, conspiracy theorists (and I don’t consider that term to be derogatory, as it describes me on occasion) have pounced on all aspects of this stunt as evidence of foreknowledge of 9/11. They often conflate Gelitin and E-Team and mis-identify photos of Gelitin preparing their stunt as being members of E-Team. The name “E-Team” is said to be a not-so-subtle reference to the artists being members of an explosives team preparing the building for demolition.

Gelitin built a temporary wall around the 91st-floor area where they constructed their balcony using discarded cardboard boxes. They called this makeshift concealment device “the Trojan box”. Conspiracists zero in on the fact that all of the boxes used to construct the Trojan box were identical in size, shape, and labeling and contained writing on them (including the alphanumeric characters “BB 18”) that indicated they had all contained fuse holders, or related components, manufactured by a company called Littelfuse. An internet search shows these are used in electronics and control panels, or small appliances. I found nothing to say they’re used in controlled demolitions, but you get why something like that would draw suspicion.

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It’s apparently common practice for Gelitin to include crude sketches and scribbled themes, many of them cryptic, in relation to the projects they do, often as an integral part of the published project. The B-Thing was no exception. The book contains more disturbing imagery in light of the context.

In one sketch, one of the WTC towers is labeled “VERY DEPRESSING BUILDING INSIDE” and “VERY AMAZING BUILDING OUTSIDE”, and “WE WANT TO BRAKE THRU [SIC] TO THE AMAZEMENT FROM INSIDE.” The sleek tower is juxtaposed with a more impressionistic version scribbled on the same page, with scribbled pen marks up and down the outside surface of the building (below). One can use his imagination to picture what this resembles.

Another sketch depicts both towers, the sky above them, and multiple layers of ground below, all annotated with miscellanea. At the top, a satellite with the caption “SATELITE [SIC] PHONE TALK WITH MAMA.” Underneath it, a plane skims below “fluffy clouds”. The space between the cloud deck and the top of the buildings is labeled “LAST CHANCE TO OPEN A PARACHUTE.” Gelitin’s makeshift balcony from the stunt is depicted. Three or four layers underground, in a small corner below the building, is an area labeled “HIDDEN MILITARY ACTION.”

Is the unease we feel with these videos and images only because we’re viewing them in hindsight, after the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11? Was that event so horrible that maybe we (I, at least) inappropriately paint every cryptic, artistic allusion with the colors cast by that day? Maybe. It’s easy to forget that in 2001 the World Trade Center had already been the site of terrorism — in 1993, when a car bomb attributed to Middle East terrorists detonated below the North Tower, killing 6, injuring thousands, and doing $250 million worth of damage. The memory of this event alone could have contributed to the mood of the artists working at the site and affected their art.

And beyond the direct terrorism connections, it’s important to remember how most of the artists felt in a general sense about this stripped-down, corporatist, sterile space they found themselves working out of. It was like a giant version of the quintessential cubicles from the 1999 Mike Judge film Office Space, only with a magnificent view between and beyond the overbearing columns. The buildings were 30 years old by then and already antiquated, full of asbestos and lacking in occupants. Seen in this light, Gelitin’s scribbles about breaking trough to the amazingness outside doesn’t seem so sinister.

But… but… but…the impossibly eerie Quick Click photo project…the jaw-dropping coincidence of Gelitin’s figure on the balcony, dressed in angel’s wings, and their bizarre captions referencing phone calls to family members and parachutes…the unbelievable symbolism of Michael Richards’ Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian and related works…and even something so simple as the artistic red EXIT someone painted over the 91st floor windows. These things are just…weird — hindsight or no. Monika Bravo’s symbolic storm seems a perfect, poetic finale to this harbingers’ parade.

I’ll never reconcile it all in my head. I can’t help but wonder, somewhere in the back of my mind, whether E-Team, Gelitin, or both groups had actual knowledge of something coming or were led to their themes by someone who did. But I’m aware of no evidence of that whatsoever beyond their art itself, and so I have to tell myself it’s either all a very strange coincidence or some kind of metaphysical artistic intuition. None of these explanations satisfies me, and that’s what keeps bringing me back — the need to know — knowing that the need will remain forever unmet.

Monika Bravo’s film ends with a tribute to her friend:

MICHAEL:

wherever you are,
this one is for you.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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America has never had a more reckless and arrogant president. Blatant lies and a complete lack of restraint, punctuated by fits of childish pettiness, have become the hallmarks of Trump’s second term. He knows this second act is the final one for him, and he wants to go out with a bang. You have to break a lot of china to become the most consequential president in history, and he’s willing to do it. He’s said more than once that he doesn’t think he’ll go to heaven, and if the hell he’s unleashed is any indication, he may not have been joking.

There was no reason to start a war with Iran. They have been, and continue to be, in compliance with international law, both with respect to their nuclear program and their ballistic missile stockpile. Claims of mass murder of their population, on the order of tens of thousands of people, were fairy tales. Even if they had been true, it would be none of America’s business. We’ve permitted Israel to do far worse over the last 2-1/2 years, and with our weapons.

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When Iranian protests erupted in late December, Trump’s immediate reaction gave us the first real sign that he had something up his sleeve. “If Iran … violently kills peaceful protesters… the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Iranian officials alleged the violent anti-government protests were being orchestrated by American and Israeli intelligence. Public reporting moved beyond mere speculation: an Israeli Mossad-linked Persian account told Iranians they were “with you in the streets,” while US officials were later reported to have smuggled 6,000 Starlink terminals into Iran. But when the riots were met with even larger counter-protests from pro-government crowds and eventually crushed by security forces, the tactics changed.

After months of shedding crocodile tears for Iranian protestors (evidenced by the current massive bombing campaign of the cities in which those protestors live) and hyping bogus numbers on how many Iranians had been killed (the oft-cited 30,000 in just a few days was absurd — it took Israel almost five months to kill that many Palestinians in their all-out military siege of Gaza), the Administration shifted tactics: a return to nuclear talks.

The “negotiations” with Iran were also a sham, designed to fail. The president’s men told the Iranians they would have to meet all of Israel’s demands and give up not only their nuclear program but also the ballistic missiles they needed to defend themselves. In exchange, America would take its finger off the trigger on the gun it held to their head. There would be no sanctions relief, no nothing. Just capitulation. And they called this offer “a deal”.

This played out as almost a carbon copy of last summer when the US pretended to negotiate in good faith over the nuclear program only to have Israel start bombing in the middle of it, initiating what’s been called the “Twelve Day War”, just as it looked like progress was being made.

This time the Iranians were more wary. Ballistic missiles were off the table, they told Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Iran would only discuss limits on nuclear enrichment, and only in exchange for sanctions relief. Sanctions had been lifted as part of the 2015 deal Obama had brokered to limit enrichment. It was an agreement even Trump’s own administration certified Iran had complied with before he tore it up in 2018 and reimposed sanctions. Now, trust was gone, and it was the Americans who needed to reestablish it.

No dice. Trump’s not into the trust-building game. He’s into projecting power, instilling fear, and keeping his opponents guessing. He said Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated last summer. Obliterated! But suddenly his roving real-estate investor turned diplomat Witkoff said they were a week away from weapons-grade enrichment, after 40+ plus years of being on the precipice!

And so at around 9:45 am Iran standard time on Saturday the 28th, the US and Israel stopped pretending they wanted a negotiated settlement and started raining down missiles. Within the hour they had hit a girls’ school adjacent to an Iranian military complex in Minab. Saturday is a school day in Iran, and more than 160 young girls were killed on the spot, their bodies buried under the rubble. At least one other school, this one for boys, also sustained damage and one boy was reportedly killed (video below).

But one of the first casualties, if not the very first, was 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei. Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989, Khamenei was not just the head of state of the Islamic Republic and its highest religious authority. He was also a revered religious figure for millions of Shia Muslims across the world. By Iran’s account, Khamenei knew he would almost certainly be taken out if he stayed in his residence, but he refused to be taken to a bunker while 90 million Iranians didn’t have that option. He had said his entire life he wanted to die a martyr.

By Sunday, not only were the streets of Iran’s cities flooded with people mourning him and honoring his martyrdom by the US and Israel, many thousands more did so in cities across west and south Asia that hosted significant Shia populations, like India, Lebanon, and Yemen.

Whichever genius decided to take out Khamenei in a first strike should follow Kristi Noem out the door. Khamenei was certainly no saint but he was a man of restraint. He facilitated de-escalation last June when he settled for a symbolic strike on American facilities, with adequate pre-warning to evacuate, as sufficient retaliation against the US after it had bombed Iran’s nuclear sites. But more importantly for US objectives, his martyrdom is a highly emotional rallying cry pulling the Iranian nation and fellow Shias together to defeat what they consider an arrogant and evil America.

If the US launches a ground war or otherwise tries to fracture Iran along ethnic lines, the uniting effect that Khamenei’s killing has had will be a direct impediment to their goals. Iran has a dozen major ethnic groups, but they’re all overwhelmingly Shia except for the Kurds in the northwest, the Balochs in the southeast, and the relatively small Turkmen population in the extreme northeast. The Balochs, small in number but with large territorial coverage, have already issued statements of support for the Islamic Republic, and the Kurds have said they won’t become cannon fodder for America and Israel.

And a ground war would be disastrous for the US. Iran is not Iraq. It’s not Venezuela. At around 90 million people, it has a larger population than Germany, while being almost five times its size in land area. Superimposed over the US lower 48, Iran would stretch from the North Dakota-Canada border to Atlanta. And unlike Iraq, which is mostly flat desert and river valleys, Iran’s 600,000 square miles is packed with rugged limestone mountains interlaced with narrow valleys.

Deep inside these mountains, Iran has built extensive underground military infrastructure, including bases with production facilities and stockpiles of missiles, drones, launchers, fuel, and propellant. Across dozens of sites, these deep tunnel systems likely amount to hundreds of miles of underground passages and chambers. The biggest bunker-buster bombs that are available in significant numbers can’t reach these sites. The best the US can do is find and destroy their entrances, but with multiple dispersed entrances for a single complex, the damaged ones can be quickly cleared out and repaired when attention moves elsewhere.

Iran has a 600,000-strong standing army to defend its territory, with a sizable additional population of military-age men to draw from if they choose to fully mobilize for an existential fight.

Although, tellingly, Trump and the Israelis haven’t ruled out a ground invasion, they appear to have expected that a brutal, protracted bombing campaign would grind Iran down within days or weeks and force a surrender or, better yet in their eyes, a revolution. And maybe it still will. But so far the Iranians have sounded nothing but determined and belligerent, as if they know time and circumstances are on their side.

The Washington Post has reported that a classified US report issued a week before the start of the war concluded that even a large-scale American assault on Iran would be unlikely to topple the Islamic Republic’s military and clerical establishment. This leaves one to wonder, what were Trump’s upper echelon thinking?

If they thought they could get by without Iran inflicting much damage, that fantasy seems to already have been shattered. The true scale of the destruction Iran has already inflicted is being minimized, with Trump stupidly saying they’ve already been beaten, as if saying it will make it so.

At the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a radar used for the THAAD missile-defense system was destroyed or severely damaged, with satellite imagery showing multiple impact craters. This is the most clearly documented successful Iranian strike on a high-value U.S. military asset so far, and has been publicly acknowledged by the US. Only about 10 of these radars exist globally.

At the Naval Support Activity Bahrain, which is the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, satellite images showed multiple buildings destroyed, two satellite communications terminals destroyed, and visible fires.

At an American naval base in Kuwait, six US soldiers were killed in a drone strike, the deadliest confirmed strike on US personnel so far. Damage has also been done to the Ali Al Salem Air Base, home to an expeditionary wing of the US Air Force.

At the US air base in Erbil, Iraq, where most of the remaining 2,000 US troops in the country are stationed, according to video and reports circulating on Telegram, rockets and drones attributed to Iran-aligned groups in Iraq have struck areas inside and around the base, causing damage and fires.

There have also been attacks and material damage, with the extent largely unknown, at Al Dhafra base in the UAE, Al Udeid in Qatar, and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Iran says they have shot down 82 US or Israeli drones since the war began.

And Iran has even claimed that when the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier approached to within 340 kilometers of Iran’s territorial waters in the Sea of Oman, it was hit by IRGC naval drones, after which it retreated more than 1,000 kilometers away and took up position in the Indian Ocean. The US denied this and no independent evidence has publicly verified that the carrier was struck.

There’s no doubt the US and Israel are also inflicting major damage in Iran and will continue to do so.

A week into the war, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) claims it’s conducted over 3,000 strikes against targets in Iran, with about 1,000 of those occurring in the most-recent three-day period. They claim to have killed almost 50 of Iran’s senior military, intelligence, and political officials. In addition to this, there are Arab reports of widespread US attacks across Iraq on pro-Iranian militia bases. Iran claims that US-Israeli strikes on their country have killed more than 1,300 Iranian civilians so far, with thousands more injured.

America’s weapons and aircraft definitely make this an asymmetrical fight. But there’s another asymmetry here that works against the US and Israel, at least in this phase of fighting. This war is likely costing the US a billion dollars a day right now. No one really knows the cost to Iran, but one of their primary weapons — the Shahed drone — costs around $20,000 per unit. The interceptors used to bring them down cost, depending on the system, $40,000 (Israel’s Iron Dome) to $4 million (US Patriot) per shot. Only six or seven of the Patriot missiles are made per month.

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It’s unclear where this goes next. Iran still seems confident and ready for the big fight, whenever it comes. They’re clearly whipped up with what they see as a righteous anger, not based on a stereotypical religious fanaticism, but on a feeling that they’ve been historically wronged and underestimated by the whole world. They keep taunting America to send its warships through the Straight of Hormuz and its troops to their shores, as if they have big plans for when that happens. It could all be bluster, but it doesn’t feel like it to me.

One thing is for sure, though. This was and is an unnecessary and unjust war. If it escalates much further, the executive branch attorneys who pretend the Constitution allows a president to do this without Congressional authorization so long as it’s a limited operation will have a big, big problem on their hands.

The Biden foreign policy team insanely threatened war with arguably the world’s most advanced nuclear superpower Russia. The Trump foreign policy team is beginning to make Biden’s look sane in comparison. The US has long been hated in the Middle East, but it’s also been feared. If they don’t play this right, it’s in danger of no longer being feared.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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The frenzied debate over the ICE shooting of a protestor in Minneapolis has frequently focused on irrelevant points. Those who think it was justified tend to focus on the fact that Renée Good had chosen to use her vehicle to impede a law enforcement operation, that she was resisting arrest, and that she was being reckless or malicious with the vehicle. The fact that the officer was in fact still in front of the vehicle when it began to move forward and he pulled his gun is enough for many of them to say her killing was justified. The ones with some humanity will express regret that it had come to that despite their belief that the shooting was legitimately in self-defense. But others cheer the bloodshed.

On the other side, many are so blinded by their left-wing commitment to absolute open borders and disdain for all things MAGA that any violence that erupts as a result of an ICE operation is going to be murder to them, regardless of the specific facts. Some of them wouldn’t even be interested in seeing a video to determine the positioning and motion of individuals and vehicles and the apparent trajectories of objects or timing of shots. For them, deportation operations are in themselves violence that begets violence, so the details don’t matter.

I’m someone who is not opposed to deporting people who are in the country illegally. It was clear to me that the Biden Administration used massive, unchecked immigration to try and skew demographics and benefit the Democratic Party electorally. That had to be stopped and order restored so that the country could have a rational, controlled process for immigration like any self-respecting country with a massive welfare state should have. I’m not saying that the Trump Administration has conducted a rational process. I haven’t followed it enough and don’t profess to know whether ICE’s operations have by and large been professionally conducted and not frequently excessive.

None of that matters, though, in determining whether Renée Good’s killing was justified. People are free to demonstrate against government action in this country. People are even free to try and obstruct law enforcement operations that they think are unjust, so long as they understand and accept that they will likely be arrested for doing so and will inherently be putting themselves, and possibly others, at risk. But none of that justifies an officer using deadly force against such a person unless at the moment the officer fires the shot he or someone else is perceived to be in imminent danger of death or serious injury from the person’s actions.

After watching both videos showing the sequence of the shooting, in slow motion and with audio, it’s clear to me that Good’s shooting was unjustified. Whatever threat to himself the officer could have perceived when he was still partially in front of the vehicle and drew his weapon, at the moment he took his first shot, the video and audio show he had cleared the corner of the car and that no part of his body remained in front of it. No other person was immediately in front of the vehicle and in danger. It had been clear from the moment she began to back up and then cut her wheels to the right to accelerate forward that Good was trying to flee imminent arrest, not find someone to run down.

Some have focused on the fact that the first shot entered through the windshield and not through the side window as evidence that the officer was still in front of the vehicle, and thus in danger, when he fired his first shot. But the video shows that was not the case. He was still close enough to the front of the car that his first shot passed through the windshield on its far left side, but his foot placement shows that his entire body was beside the vehicle at that point, not in front of it. Moreover, by that point the car was clearly pulling forward and to the right, not into the body of the officer.

Others will largely concede the above analysis of shots and positions but argue that the shooting was still justified because the time between when the officer was still in front of the vehicle and, theoretically at least, in danger, and the time when he had moved to the side of the vehicle and taken his first shot can all be measured in mere sub-seconds — frames of images — and does not last even a full second of time. In this view, it doesn’t matter that any theoretical danger to the officer had passed by the time he shot because it all happened so fast that it was beyond mental processing speeds.

This view to me is contradicted by the video evidence as well. The officer in question has a full view of the vehicle for the whole sequence of the events leading up to his pulling the trigger. He saw, as the video shows, that as the first officer approached the driver’s window and reached into it, Good was backing the vehicle up and cutting the wheels to position it for an escape forward and to the right. As she stops and begins her acceleration forward, the officer is indeed in front of her, but he’s already on the far left side (from the driver’s standpoint) and moving to the left-front corner of the vehicle and she’s beginning to cut her wheels sharply to the right to make an escape. I don’t believe anyone viewing the full sequence with an open mind would conclude that her intention was to mow down an officer, and I don’t think the officer who shot her thought she was trying to do that. Her intention, clearly, I think, was to resist arrest and to flee. And it’s not justifiable to shoot someone for that if you’re not in a position of imminent danger at the moment you shoot.

However foolish or reckless Renée Good may have been to do what she did, her shooting was not legally justifiable. I can’t guarantee a jury will find that way. News is coming in that the FBI is taking over the case and already denying evidence to the state. The way in which the highest federal officials, and even the president himself, rushed to judgment on this shooting and demonized the victim rather than making the usual careful statements that it would have to be fully investigated shows that the fix is likely in. The Trump Administration will not tolerate acknowledging a grave error if it could be used to criticize their deportation operations or ICE officers. They don’t even care that their overreach may be detrimental to their own cause in the long run.

Some will be presented with these facts and will nevertheless conclude that Renée Good got what was coming to her. They know she was the type of person they don’t like and whose politics are repugnant to them. They know she was defying authority and trying to disrupt a federal law enforcement operation that they supported, in a part of the country where a large number of people share her (warped, in their view) politics. They think her actions were beyond reckless, or were full-on malicious, and that she and others like her deserve to be demonized and, if need be, neutralized, as she was. And their political leadership is encouraging these views with flat-out lies about what happened.

MAGA were on higher ground when they pointed out the perverse discrepancies between the way BLM and George Floyd rioters were treated by prosecutors versus the way January 6th suspects were pursued relentlessly. By circling the wagons here to protect a cop emboldened by federal officials’ inflammatory “domestic terrorism” rhetoric to kill a citizen protestor, Trump officials are fanning flames that could ignite a real domestic upheaval of the type they pretend already exists. How that could be good for the country is beyond me.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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The following reprint is a guest editorial I wrote that was published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on February 23, 2013. The context was a widely publicized Congressional budget battle over cuts in federal spending that were set to automatically take effect on March 1 and continue until 2021 if Congressional Republicans and the Obama White House couldn’t agree on an alternative. It was not unlike the current battle over Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

The Obama-friendly media hyped the coming “sequester”, as it was called, as a looming disaster - a “fiscal cliff” — that was wholly the fault of the relatively few Congressional Republicans who wanted to do something about the ballooning federal debt. Because Republicans had only a narrow majority in the House, these budget hardliners could torpedo a GOP capitulation and were an effective block to an agreement.

In the editorial, I point out that the uproar was absurd because what was called a “cut” in Washington DC was not what people think of as a budget cut — spending less in one year than the year before. Congressional “baseline budgeting”, a parlor trick adopted in the 1980s, meant that an increase was considered a cut in spending by the DC establishment.

In the end, no deal was reached and the so-called cuts went into effect. Still, total federal spending went up year over year during the sequester period, which was eventually extended to 2023. The $16 trillion federal debt I refer to in the article has now ballooned to $36 trillion, and is still growing. Trump’s budget bill would make it grow even faster, even as his administration tries to make the case that it would cut spending. The Obama-era tactics I describe here are the same ones that allow Trump to make this claim today.

On this one, at least, Elon Musk is right. Nothing has changed and we’re still sleepwalking into bankruptcy as a country.

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The cries that blind

Sequester debate obscures reality

February 23, 2013 by RICHARD GRAHAM SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

LITTLE ROCK - Few things strike terror into the heart of Washington like the prospect of a spending cut.

Although American households have become accustomed to them since the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, the federal government, aided by an accommodative Federal Reserve ever-ready to monetize new mountains of public debt, has taken deficit spending to record heights. Now, as the March 1 deadline for the “sequester” approaches and automatic reductions loom, the usual hand wringing and cries of alarm from the Beltway have begun in earnest.

The cuts are the result of a deal between the White House and congressional Republicans to increase the debt ceiling while forcing compromise on deficit-reduction. Split between defense and nondefense cuts, they were to be so severe that members of both parties would be forced to work together to find more palatable alternatives. That theory now appears to be breaking down as Republicans, jaded by a string of strategic defeats at the hands of the president, have said they’re willing to accept defense cuts if the alternative is another tax increase.

If Republicans hold their ground this time against the onslaught by Democrats and their media allies, they’re on firmer ground than you might think. Here’s the dirty little secret about the sequester: These cuts that are supposedly so draconian that no one would dare let them happen aren’t really cuts; government spending will continue to increase year after year, and after 10 years, even defense spending will have increased.

In fact, based on the latest figures from the Congressional Budget Office that assume the sequester, by 2023 the record $16 trillion official debt will have grown to $26 trillion. And the CBO almost always ends up overstating revenue and understating spending, so the actual figure is likely to be even worse.

How is Washington able to consistently confuse and, in some cases, mislead the public when it comes to deficits and debt? Part of it is that the terms are easy to confuse. Even longtime members of Congress sometimes conflate the deficit with the debt. Not a dime of debt is paid down until deficits become surpluses, and yet, listening to Washington rhetoric, you’d think the occasional slight downtick in the deficit is a major accomplishment.

Another way is with something called “baseline budgeting.” Since the 1980s, the process Congress uses to develop a budget is based upon 10-year spending projections made by the CBO. This baseline assumes the previous year’s funding levels and then builds in automatic increases averaging around 7 percent, supposedly for inflation and population growth.

Because these built-in increases are so ingrained into the budgeting culture, the entire conversation in Washington is expressed in terms of this automatically increasing baseline. If spending ends up growing more slowly than projected, that increase is considered a cut. The absurdity of this Orwellian budget-speak is such that if through some act of enlightened insanity Congress simply kept the same spending levels — a true budget freeze — in a 10-year span in which spending was projected to grow $9 trillion, that would be considered a $9 trillion cut in spending.

With this institutional bias toward spending, Ronald Reagan’s words have never been truer when he said the nearest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program.

We can no longer afford this largesse. With gross domestic product stubbornly holding just above recession levels despite unprecedented amounts of Fed pump-priming, counting on higher growth rates to substantially increase revenue or to absorb the ballooning debt is the height of irresponsibility. This is especially true when you consider that tens of trillions more in future contingent liabilities aren’t even counted in the official debt projections.

Advocates of Keynesian stimulus will counter that this fragile state of the economy is in fact the prime reason not to cut spending now, arguing that GDP will inevitably take a hit. Never mind that government spending is actually a component of the GDP figure itself. To say cuts will cause a reduction in GDP is like saying ceasing to exhale will cause a reduction in breathing.

What matters is growth in the private sector, and a government that crowds out investment there will not foster an economy that can sustain unparalleled levels of debt.

Although continued low interest rates and foreign appetite for our Treasurys have lulled us into complacency, the extent to which historically accommodative central bank policy is propping up a weak economy in need of restructuring is not fully appreciated. It can’t be many years before the fields of IOUs that Congress has sown begin to reap a bitter harvest.

If Republicans can’t persevere on this measure, so minor as to be largely symbolic, they should stop insulting our intelligence, drop their pretense of opposition, and turn fiscal policy over to the party whose actions at least conform to their rhetoric.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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I was in the daycare center that my mother once ran with her friend decades ago, but it was like a hospital. On the way there I had been bitten on the leg by a spider and had some kind of mental disturbance because of it. Some nurses were there and one said something about the spider venom containing an “RNA blocker” and that I was fortunate because it would give me insight. Other people in robes, as if in a choir, were standing there. One was having some kind of mystical experience and was singing, eyes staring into the distance. The nurse pointed to this person as if to say, see?, that’s what you get to experience with an RNA blocker.

-Dream I had in September 2020, three months before the first Covid vaccine was released in the US

Sometime in mid-2020, I started reading about preparations begun early in the pandemic for the development and introduction of a Covid vaccine. I noted the singular focus on fast-tracking a new vaccine and the odd certainty that seemed to prevail among health officials and the media on the futility of trying to re-purpose existing drugs, alone or in combination, to fight the illness.

I watched as frontline doctors who had seen success in battling Covid in their patients through trial and error were demonized and de-platformed for having discussed these successes in videos on social media, daring to depart from the narrative put forth by federal health officials who, despite never having treated a patient their entire careers, maintained there was little that could be done pre-vaccine.

I was alarmed to learn that the most likely contenders for the first US vaccines were based on an entirely novel, highly experimental form of technology never before authorized for use in humans, and never tested at scale prior to 2020. These vaccines, by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, would be based on messenger RNA (mRNA).

mRNA vaccines, so called because they involve the injection of encapsulated synthetic mRNA molecules instead of natural viral material to induce immunity, were expected by their manufacturers to be regulated as gene therapy by the FDA early in their development, though people who still called them that after Covid were vilified.

Their similarity to other gene therapy products was not because they made changes to a cell’s genetic code, although at least one subsequent study hinted at the possibility they could, but because they used mRNA, a gene-based cellular messenger, to biologically “program” the cell’s ribosomes to manufacture proteins that mimicked those of the actual virus, which proteins the cell would then exhibit on its surface to be targeted by the immune system.

Cutting-edge applications of technology like this in medicine had always involved decades of research and various phases of successful testing before being introduced to the public. But now a dreaded global pandemic had so traumatized the country that few cared about the details of what was behind the vaccines or how rushed the development and testing had been. The first small-scale human study involving an mRNA vaccine, for rabies, had occurred barely five years earlier. There were still problems getting the technology to perform as designed just a few years before Covid.

In October 2019, Tony Fauci and BARDA Director Rick Bright had almost given away the game at a health summit when they discussed the need for a “disruptive” event to quickly transition from the old “egg-growing” way of making vaccines to new mRNA-based technologies, without going through the usual phases of clinical trials, which, according to Fauci, could take a decade. Bright called for an “entity of excitement” that would be disruptive and “not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes” in order to push forward the transition. This was two months before Covid began sweeping across China. Both Fauci’s and Bright’s agencies had funded bat coronavirus gain-of-function research at the Chinese lab near where the outbreak began.

I attended an outdoor gathering of people at the apartment complex in which I lived at the time and listened as one lady expressed her hopeful anticipation of the new vaccines so we could all go back to normal, inviting others to chime in and nod their agreement with her sentiments. Having already decided I wouldn’t be getting one, I kept my mouth shut and my head still.

The pharmaceutical companies stood to make tens of billions of dollars on these products for which they were shielded from any legal liability under federal law, so they didn’t mind the rush either. Donald Trump, ever the opportunist, saw where things were going and jumped on the bandwagon of “Operation Warp Speed” in order to take credit in time for the coming election.

The partially government-funded large trials (~30,000-40,000 people in each of the two) were initiated and rushed to completion by Big Pharma in 2020. The testing period didn’t last long enough to measure possible long-term adverse effects. That was supposed to come later as the trial continued, but at some point after vaccine release most of the placebo group got the shot as well, essentially invalidating any subsequent results.

These omissions paved the way for the vaccines to be considered “safe and effective” for emergency use authorization by the end of 2020 despite their highly experimental nature and rushed development and testing.

When the first shots were authorized in the US for release in December, health officials misled the public by implying they had gone through decades of research. That was certainly true for a handful of relatively obscure mRNA drugs that had been developed for rare conditions like some uncommon cancers, but mRNA vaccines were much newer and research had been sporadic since the first small studies in animals in the 1990s. Vaccines operate on very different principles from drugs and engage the highly complex human immune system, sometimes in ways that aren’t fully predictable.

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I began reading reports of some sudden deaths and injuries that were occurring post-vaccination, sometimes within hours, knowing that the voluntary vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) had severe limitations in its design and execution.

A Harvard study funded by the Department of HHS in 2010 had concluded that fewer than one percent of vaccine injuries were actually reported to VAERS. Yet even with these limitations the number of Covid vaccine injuries being reported was exponentially higher than for any previous vaccine.

In January of 2021, amidst all the hand-wringing over the 2020 election and January 6th, the first wave of Covid finally peaked and reported cases began to plummet almost overnight, a trend that would last for months.

This case collapse could not have been caused by the Covid vaccine. At the time the precipitous drop in cases began, around mid-January in most places, the vast majority of Americans had yet to receive a single dose of the vaccine, let alone the two doses needed to be considered fully vaccinated. In my state of Arkansas, for example, less than four percent of the population had received their first shot. Only a few tens of thousands had completed two doses nationwide as the shots had only become available to a small subset of people in late December.

Whether the decline was due to a critical mass of infections having been reached for herd immunity (likely), or due to natural seasonal variability for this new coronavirus (possible, but would be odd given that flu typically peaks around this time), or due to changes with the PCR tests that occurred at about this time to correct the problems with them I highlighted in Part One, the important thing was the worst was over and all of my loved ones had survived that first crazy year of Covid.

Everything I described in Part One and all of the above I read in that first, surreal year of Covid. About Covid’s strange origin story, about how a death was determined to be a Covid death, about masking and its advocates’ deceptions, about the flawed Covid tests, and about the brave new world of mRNA vaccines.

And as I read, I wrote.

This site was brand-new when the pandemic began but very quickly became essentially a Covid blog (before it became essentially a Ukraine War blog). That first year was entirely dedicated to various aspects of the pandemic. Even well into the second year I was still writing about it, and to-date my second most read article ever was a late 2021 retrospective timeline piece entitled Two Years in Wonderland, which was followed by Leaving Wonderland in late 2022.

At some point in that first year, a friend who seemed always to pride himself on accepting only official narratives about most topics reached out discreetly to inform me that I was embarrassing myself with what I was writing about Covid. I told him he might be surprised to learn the names of some of our common friends that we both respected who had reached out to compliment and encourage me on that very same writing.

I was feeling very good about myself, about my choices, about my writing, and about what I had learned over the preceding year. And then the Delta variant arrived by summer and the second wave washed over the country, ultimately infecting me for the first (and thus far only) time upon my return from a Colorado mountain-climbing trip in August 2021.

I was unvaccinated and this would be the real test. Would I end up on a vent, weeping and gnashing my teeth over my hubris? Would I become a poster boy for my intransigent refusal to just get the damn shot, my story slowly gaining traction in the Twittersphere as a lesson to be learned? Would Bette Midler re-post it on social media and heap scorn? “This f**ker reaped what he sowed!”

As it would transpire, I spent two days in bed with major fatigue and a low-grade fever (though never a cough and no trouble breathing), a third day feeling somewhat better but nursing a sore throat, and a fourth feeling mostly better but noticing I couldn’t smell or taste a damn thing. That lagging symptom lasted a week or two before my senses slowly started to return and food began to not taste like cardboard.

I had not (and haven’t since) gotten a Covid test, but there was no doubt it was the culprit. I got an antibody test afterward so I could excitedly announce I had natural immunity, but I did the first blood draw too soon. No antibodies detected. I waited another week and paid to have another test. Bingo.

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It was about this time that the Biden Administration decided to take the scare and blame tactics to a new, shameless level, declaring a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Biden’s handlers used him to try and browbeat 40% of the population into taking an experimental medical product that they had no interest in. If that didn’t work, they were going to try and take away their jobs, and in many cases they did just that until courts put an end to it.

Finally, in December, as a last gasp for Pfizer, our honorary president, geriatric and muzzled with his signature jet-black mask, solemnly stared through a camera lens into the heart of a wayward people and damned us for our sins, declaring: “for the unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death.” It came off sounding like a hope or a threat and not at all like a regretful final plea.

But by then events had overtaken the narrative of doom. The mercifully mild Omicron variant that would carry us out of the woods, while the vaccines got the undeserved credit, had begun to prevail. That eminent virologist and health expert — err, software mogul — Bill Gates announced the end of the “acute phase” of the pandemic for 2022. For the media, it was as if the Pope had blessed red meat on Friday. That was the signal to promote letting things get back to relative normality.

Looking back, the surreal nature of it all has only grown over time, not lessened. Did that really happen? I feel like I’ve lived three lives since 2019. At the same time, inexplicably, the twenties feel like they’re flying past like loose-leaf calendar pages in a hurricane.

I want to think we’ve learned something as a people about putting too much trust in authority. That unchecked power corrupts. That public health officials do not embody science, no matter which party appoints them. That the emperor has no clothes.

But I fear our rulers are too wily for us. There will be no new Covid pandemic for the same reason there was no new Kennedy assassination and no new 9/11. Once a crisis for the ages has served its purpose of ratcheting up fear, enabling government power and control, and further enriching elites, a new, different crisis must be invented to terrorize the public for that next great leap toward authoritarianism.

And when that crisis comes along, and the skepticism of the masses is once again put to the test in a new and different way, will their gullibility have finally reached its limits? Well, as much as I hate to say it, don’t dream it’s over.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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Five years ago today, on Thursday, March 19, 2020, the governor of my state of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, announced that, beginning the next day, bars and restaurants would no longer be permitted to offer dine-in services and barbershops and salons would be forced to close.

These measures against the newly declared Covid-19 pandemic would continue indefinitely. State officials would monitor infection statistics and make determinations later as to when restrictions could be lifted.

Public schools had already closed for onsite instruction two days earlier and would remain so for the rest of the school year.

Other states issued similar orders that week in a coordinated effort.

Many companies that were able to send their workforce home, like the one I worked for, had already begun to do so on a voluntary basis. With the state orders, they followed suit and made it mandatory.

I had traveled to Key West and Savannah, Georgia in January. By the time I arrived in Savannah, news of a mysterious and alarming new virus emanating from Wuhan, China, sickening and killing people in that country, was in the news but wasn’t yet a headline story.

It had become one by the time the first US Covid case was announced in late January, in Washington state.

I had traveled with friends by car from San Diego to Mexico in late February for a trip to last until early March. The first Mexican case, in Mexico City, was announced while I was there, but life and commerce was completely unaffected where we were in the Ensenada area of northern Baja.

I had worried that Donald Trump might shut the border before we could return, but later when I flew home from California only a handful of people in airports were wearing the flimsy paper masks that would become ubiquitous in a couple of months.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) had declared Covid-19 a pandemic on March 11. From that moment, the way the media and public officials talked about the illness had changed, from concern tempered with reassurance to full-on alarm, eventually progressing to barely contained panic.

I met a friend at a local German-style beer hall after work for our last opportunity to go to a bar before the shutdown was to take effect the next day. We were bewildered by what was happening in the country and parts of the wider world. How had it come to this so quickly?

Federal health officials said states’ restrictive measures might need to be in place for as few as fourteen days, just long enough to “slow the spread” and prevent hospitals being overwhelmed, but I and I think most others knew it would be longer.

Arkansas’ restrictions would never go as far as some states that imposed “stay-at-home” orders and closed additional types of businesses, though rumors that Hutchinson was on the verge of issuing such an order circulated more than once. I’m sure he was getting pressured to, and although I’m not a Hutchinson fan, I applaud him for having at least resisted that.

To my way of thinking, he should have resisted closing schools and restaurants, and imposing mask mandates, but I suppose the pressure was too much and the political fallout would have been too great.

I wanted Arkansas to be the US equivalent of Sweden, the one and only country in western Europe whose public health officials didn’t impose widespread shutdowns or mask mandates and focused instead on protecting the elderly and vulnerable for the duration of the crisis.

Sweden ended up having very similar disease outcomes to comparable neighboring countries that locked down hard, but they suffered far less economic dislocation and harm to their children’s social development and education.

With little work to do and out of disillusionment at what the world was coming to, I began reading as much as I could, between episodes of Tiger King, about Covid, Covid tests, the efficacy of masks, and the already anticipated vaccines.

For months on end, I read.

Covid’s origins

I read about the possible origins of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that was found to be the cause of Covid-19. I learned that the alleged place of origin — a “wet market” in Wuhan, China — was just eight miles from the only research lab in all of China that did testing on bat coronaviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

I learned that WIV’s testing involved “gain-of-function” research in which coronaviruses were intentionally made more infectious to humans, apparently to study them and prepare for possible future mutations and outbreaks.

I learned that a significant chunk of funding for WIV’s bat research came from Anthony Fauci’s agency NIAID, under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that much more may have come from the US Department of Defense. I also learned that all the US government funding for this research at WIV was channeled through an organization called EcoHealth Alliance, run by a British virologist named Peter Daszak (more on that below).

I learned that when Fauci and the head of NIH wanted to put a stop to growing suspicions about the Wuhan lab as the source of the virus, they pointed to a letter signed by 27 scientists in the field of virology that had appeared in the February 2020 edition of The Lancet. The letter defended the lab and said the virus had almost certainly arisen naturally.

I learned that many of the scientists who had signed the letter had professional or financial ties to EcoHealth Alliance or China, and that the letter had been prompted by, and even written by, none other than Peter Daszak.

I learned that when the WHO sent a team to investigate the Wuhan lab in early 2021, they appointed, once again, Peter Daszak to lead the team.

Thus, the one man responsible for channeling the US government’s funding to the Wuhan lab orchestrated publication of the leading scientific statement downplaying a lab origin and then was tasked by the WHO with investigating the lab and clearing it of all wrongdoing.

I learned that a number of scientists in the US and around the world who had studied the genome of the Covid virus found what appeared to be “inserts” of known genetic sequences, including some that appeared to come from HIV virus, that caused them to suspect the virus was engineered in a lab.

Covid deaths

I read statistics on Covid-19 deaths and how Covid was determined to be a cause of death on death certificates.

I learned that in March 2020, the CDC issued new guidance to medical personnel for coding disease and filling out death certificates that weighed heavily in favor of finding Covid-19 as a cause of death even in the presence of other serious medical conditions that could cause death, known as “comorbidities”. The statement said the rules were “expected to result in Covid-19 being the underlying cause more often than not.”

I learned that, due to the new guidance, many deaths were automatically attributed to Covid based solely on a positive test result having been obtained from a flawed Covid test (more on that later) within 30-60 days of their deaths, and that this was done even if the deceased had one or more comorbidities at the time of testing or death.

I learned that only about 6% of Covid death certificates listed Covid as the only cause, and that the other 94% had, on average, four comorbidities. I discovered that the average age of death from Covid was in the 80s, beyond average life expectancy, and that children accounted for fewer than 0.1% of all Covid deaths in the US.

With those numbers, it was next to impossible for the media to find tragic child deaths that they could exploit, but whenever they could find a statistically rare case of a relatively healthy 40-year-old whose death had been attributed to Covid, they shamelessly trumpeted it as if it were the norm.

I learned that Medicare issued reimbursement rules in March that ensured hospitals got higher reimbursements for coding Covid-19.

Finally, I learned that the overly aggressive use of ventilators early on in the pandemic had likely killed many Covid patients as ventilators themselves were highly invasive and known to increase the risk of death by their very use.

I knew lots of people died from Covid, and I knew each of those deaths was a tragedy for their family and friends. But I had learned that sensation claims about the death toll from Covid were likely inflated, and that regardless of the total number, the statistical threat to any individual person not already very sick was very, very small.

The vast majority of people of all age groups infected with the virus would not become seriously ill or die, even when the virus was still at its most lethal and before the vaccines were available. Isolating and providing preventative care for only the most at-risk populations and cautioning everyone else to wash their hands and stay home if they were sick was always the best option.

They said what they were doing was necessary to prevent hospital overload, but most had forgotten that a severe flu season in 2018, one of the worst in decades, had forced hospitals in a number of states to expand capacity using tents and mobile units to accommodate flu patients. But no one had suggested shutting down the country, mandating masks, or forcing vaccinations.

Stoking fear and imposing mass isolation of the entire population was unconscionable and had its own, largely unquantifiable health impacts, as did keeping people sedentary in their homes and cancelling many non-Covid hospital procedures.

Masks

I read about the CDC’s remarkable U-turn in April 2020 on its longstanding guidance about the futility of wearing masks to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases, including Covid.

CDC-published meta-analyses of numerous studies across the decades, some going back to World War II, had consistently found wearing masks had no significant effect on preventing community spread of respiratory illnesses like the flu. Only hand-washing and similar hygienic measures had shown to be preventative.

Frequent use of masks carried its own risks of burdening respiration for people with compromised cardio-pulmonary function, and, if not changed or washed frequently, they could also act as reservoirs for viral or bacterial material to be repeatedly re-inhaled.

Public health officials like Fauci had maintained this stance against masking as late as March, but then in April, after New York became a global hotspot of infections, the CDC abruptly reversed its guidance and recommended that all people wear masks outside the home.

CDC said it changed the recommendations due to studies of water-droplet dispersal from sneezing and coughing and the predicted effect such dispersal could have on viral transmission. But predicting how a virus theoretically could spread based on observations of droplets and aerosols does not overcome decades of studies showing how viruses with similar particle sizes actually do spread in community settings and what does and doesn’t work to stop them.

Subsequent comparisons of states with and without widespread masking would show no association between the introduction of mandates and reduction in Covid-19, and many states and countries would see their highest case rates of the pandemic after the introduction of mask mandates.

Covid tests

I read about the Covid tests and how they worked.

I learned that a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was the key component of the most widely used Covid test, and that some scientists considered it questionable whether PCR was appropriate for use as a primary diagnostic tool for infectious diseases.

That was because the PCR technology, which uses several cycles of processing to amplify DNA present in a sample, amplifies not just live viral DNA but also fragments of inactive viral DNA remaining in a person’s system after the body has cleared an infection. This meant that if too many cycles were run in a single test, a person could test positive when they’re not actively sick and almost certainly not infectious.

I learned from an August 2020 New York Times article widely discussed at the time that several states were indeed running so many cycles in each PCR test that up to 90 percent of people testing positive in those states carried barely any live virus when their samples were subsequently subjected to culturing in a lab.

This opened the question as to whether the daily Covid briefings being conducted by states and the federal government, in which the latest ominous statistics on case numbers and deaths were relayed to a frightened public, based mostly on PCR test results, were actually putting out highly inflated numbers.

Tony Fauci had alluded to this problem of overly sensitive tests in passing when he participated in a podcast in July, but he didn’t highlight the significance of it and rarely, if ever, talked about it afterwards.

I learned that around the same time in January 2021 that most states’ first wave of Covid sharply peaked and then began a steep, sustained, months-long decline, a number of states had begun quietly reducing the cycle thresholds of their PCR tests and requiring labs to report the number of cycles run for positive tests they returned.

The WHO had also issued updated information instructing labs to consult test manufacturer requirements to see if manual adjustment of PCR cycle thresholds were needed.

Whether the timing of adjustments to overly sensitive tests and the peak in cases was coincidental or not, it showed that the problems with the PCR technology as a diagnostic tool was finally being recognized. By then, more reliance was being put on the so-called “rapid” tests that looked for Covid antigens rather than viral genetic material and were less likely to return false positives.

Part 2 - mRNA vaccines and what it all meant

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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Slowly but surely, the Trump Administration is peeling away layers of illusion that have underpinned US and European narratives about the Ukraine War and the public’s support for it.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to the Ukraine War as a “proxy war” between the US and Russia, with Ukraine as the proxy. He was slammed for it in the press, just as Trump had been for saying the prospect of NATO expansion had provoked Russia to invade. As is par for the course, they accused Rubio of adopting Russian narratives. But he was right, and his statement was the latest indication that the new Administration intends to call it like it is in Ukraine.

Gone are the days when Joe Biden and his secretary of state Antony Blinken deceitfully trumpeted the conflict as a war only between Russia and Ukraine, with the US merely supplying money and matériel to a democratic ally. Only western Europe’s officials speak that way now, unable to adjust to the new reality in Washington.

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Now that the US has cut off intelligence sharing with Zelensky’s regime in a bid to bring him to the negotiating table (and also prohibited the UK from sharing American intelligence with them), it’s becoming clear that Russia was right about a key fact largely unacknowledged before: that Ukrainian missile strikes on Russia were actually American strikes.

When Ukraine received the Biden Administration’s blessing last year to begin launching medium-range missiles, namely American-supplied ATACMS, deep inside Russian territory, the Russians announced they would consider such strikes to be attacks by the United States. The same would be true of British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles.

They said this was so because such launches required satellite-based targeting that Ukraine didn’t possess, and that therefor the Americans were indispensable participants in the selection and targeting of missile strikes deep within Russia.

They announced that this was a grave escalation that risked a direct military confrontation between the US and Russia. To drive home their point, the Russians launched a previously unknown nuclear-capable ballistic missile called “Oreshnik”, targeting a site near Dnipro in Ukraine.

Footage showed the missile’s multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) piercing the cloud deck and slamming into the ground at hypersonic speeds. Though said to be nuclear-capable, they were apparently equipped with dummy warheads and used only to demonstrate their potential.

At first I thought it was faked video of multiple missile launches sped up and reversed. But the source of the video was Ukrainian, verified by Ukraine, and eventually ended up in Western media.

No other country has an acknowledged missile capability like this. Interception would be next to impossible with current technology. And this is just one part of Russia’s arsenal of recently introduced new missile systems following their more than decade-long weapons modernization program.

Shortly afterwards, Russia announced that they had more Oreshniks and that if the US and Europe caused any more of their medium-range missiles to be targeted inside Russia, Russia would use the weapon again, this time armed, against decision-making centers in Kiev and elsewhere.

But of course the Western strikes continued, because continual escalation and bluff-calling against arguably the world’s preeminent nuclear power had been the name of the game for Biden and the Europeans since the beginning. And not escalation that made any difference militarily — Ukraine was still slowly but surely losing ground — but escalation that risked a nuclear confrontation nonetheless.

Now, Western media is admitting what Russia said all along: that Ukraine is incapable of launching Western-supplied missiles into Russia without American satellite targeting and other support. A missile launch deep into Russia by Ukraine is a missile launch by the US.

So the way it works is this: ordinary Ukrainians (and Russians) do the fighting and dying at the front. America takes money from struggling US taxpayers and sends it to Ukraine, with no real accounting. Ukraine’s elites skim some off the top and then use what’s left to buy expensive American and European weapons, some of which only the US can operate on their behalf, enriching companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics. Those companies, in turn, reward and ensure the reelection of the politicians who steadfastly support the war in Ukraine. Rinse, and repeat.

But, you may say, even if all that is true, we’re defending a democratic country against an unprovoked full-scale invasion by an aggressor that threatens the security of all of Europe, headed by a brutal dictator bent on conquest and restoring the Soviet Union.

Complete rubbish.

If Ukraine was ever a democracy with free and fair elections, it ceased being one when the US and Europe allied with right-wing nationalist forces in Kiev in 2014 to overthrow a Russia-friendly elected Ukrainian president.

That coup was fueled in large part by neo-Nazi paramilitary groups like Right Sektor and Azov Battalion that have since been integrated into the Ukrainian military structure. Ukraine has a complicated history with Nazi sympathizers, called “Banderites” after the World War II Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and nationalist Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with German troops during the war to drive out communists. Many of these sympathizers in the Ukrainian military still wear Nazi insignia.

As I’ve pointed out before, American officials hand-picked the man who would replace the deposed president in 2014, even before the coup was accomplished. Elections were restored thereafter, but the game was rigged at that point, and the people of Donbas didn’t participate in the 2019 elections that brought Zelensky to power on a pledge to improve relations with Russia.

With all this, it’s hard to argue that Ukraine’s battle is for democracy. A sizable minority of Ukrainians are either ethnically Russian or speak Russian and identify with it more than with the EU, especially those in the east that broke away in 2014 or welcomed Russian annexation in 2022. It’s not their voices that Ukraine is fighting for.

When Western politicians and their media surrogates talk about democracy in Ukraine, what they really mean by “democracy” is alignment with the West geopolitically. If they really meant democracy, they would have condemned the 2014 coup rather than sponsor and participate in it.

It’s ironic that it was Barack Obama’s administration that enabled that. Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after becoming president in 2009. Now, another president far less esteemed in European halls of power appears to be about to bring Obama’s tragic legacy in Ukraine to an end, whether Europe likes it or not.

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Another myth that the Trump Administration has busted is that the Russian invasion was unprovoked. For 30 years, America and its European allies have been advancing the frontiers of their military alliance, created to defend against a Soviet Union that ceased to exist a generation ago, toward Russia’s borders.

The Russians repeatedly warned that Ukraine was a red line for them and that they would not allow NATO to gain a foothold in it. You can argue about whether Russia should be able to dictate this, but consider this: if Russia had done in Mexico what the US has done in Ukraine, the US would have invaded Mexico in the blink of an eye, and probably with far more “shock and awe” brazenness than the Russians have shown in Ukraine (see Iraq 2003-2011, for example).

In order to try and avoid the final step of war, Russia presented formal plans for a new European security treaty to the US, EU, and NATO in December 2021. Though some of their demands were unrealistic, such as NATO pulling back to its 1997 frontiers, the terms could have been a starting point for negotiations. They would have made Ukraine a neutral buffer country between NATO and Russia. That part was certainly not unrealistic and may yet come to pass.

But the US and Europe brushed aside these overtures and continued ramping up their arming of Ukraine in late 2021, setting the stage for the invasion that would come in February.

Western officials since that time have talked of inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia, saying they must be seen to lose. It’s simply inconceivable to them that Russia could have a geopolitical win at their expense, even given the West’s sordid history in Ukraine.

Western think tanks like the militant Atlantic Council, which serves as a sort of incubator from which foreign policy experts are reared to work in the US government, have explicitly fantasized about regime change in Russia and breaking up the resource-rich Russian Federation.

If you think I exaggerate, just listen to the words of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. In a May 2023 meeting with Zelensky, Graham remarked that “the Russians are dying,” and characterized U.S. military assistance to Ukraine as “the best money we’ve ever spent.”

So now that Russia’s demise has failed to materialize and the narrative is beginning to change, European leaders are pretending that the fate of Europe hangs in the balance if the status quo — Ukrainian and Russian young men dying on America’s dime — is not preserved. They claim Russia will invade and take over the rest of Europe, emboldened by their victory.

This is complete nonsense and they know it.

Lacking mobilization on a scale that likely would threaten their economy and stability, Russia has been barely capable of capturing and holding 20% of Ukraine’s former territory in the course of three years. Though their army is now war-tested and more efficient, their progress has been slow and costly. Their true power lies in weapons they can’t realistically use without risking a suicidal global nuclear war.

There’s no evidence that Russia has expansionist ambitions beyond the relatively few areas they’ve captured and annexed from Ukraine after the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking population there were terrorized for years by the American puppet government in Kiev.

True, Putin regrets the breakup of the Soviet Union and has spoken about that, as have many Russian commentators. But he doesn’t regret the fall of communism or of the totalitarian regime that forcefully bound it together.

Putin had eight years after the coup in Kiev in which he could have formally annexed the rebellious Donbas and he didn’t do it. Instead, he agreed to the Minsk Accords in 2015 that, had it ever been implemented by Kiev, would have kept Donbas as part of Ukraine, but with semi-autonomy.

Russia has said it has no problem with Ukraine joining the EU, but they won’t tolerate it joining NATO. That’s why Russia has said the proposal for British and French peacekeepers to be deployed in what’s left of Ukraine after a peace settlement is a nonstarter. The Russians view that as NATO by the back door.

If you think all of this is just me being a Russian asset mindlessly parroting propaganda, you need to snap out of it. The fact that Putin might agree with something doesn’t make it untrue or merely propaganda. Resist the gaslighting that free thinking provokes from others.

Both America and its self-created enemies use propaganda to try and shape opinions in their favor, but sometimes what the other side says is true, or at least more true than what our government says. To think that only America and its allies tell the truth and that their enemies always lie is to live in a fantasy world that doesn’t exist in reality.

One thing Trump said in his Oval Office dust-up with the comedian from Krivoy Rog that was as true as anything he’s said, among much untruth, was this: Zelensky can talk tough only because he has US backing; without us, he has no cards.

There may be one other reason Zelensky has been able to talk tough. Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett shed some light on this when he told the story of his interceding on Zelensky’s behalf with Putin at the outset of the war in 2022. Zelensky had been hiding in an underground bunker since the start of the invasion, terrified that Putin would have him personally taken out.

When then-prime minister Bennett met with Putin, he says he extracted a promise that Zelensky would not be personally targeted. Only after Zelensky was informed of this and assured it was true did he emerge from hiding. Per Bennett, “two hours later, Zelensky went to his office, and did a selfie in the office, [in which he said,] ‘I’m not afraid.’”

So, the paper tiger pulled it off for a while, secure in his role as the chief fundraiser for America’s proxy war. But, mercifully, the days of fighting nuclear-armed Russia to the last Ukrainian with American money and weapons appear to be coming to an end.

America tried to turn Ukraine into a NATO garrison and failed. In the end, it became little more than a Democratic Party playground for personal wealth extraction and money laundering, much like Iraq was for the Republicans in the early 2000s.

Russia lost the previous American proxy war against it, in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That war bled them dry and hastened the end of the Soviet Union (while bringing us Osama bin Laden). The Obama and Biden administrations thought they could do it again in Ukraine. But this time it’s a generation of young Ukrainians whose blood has been spilled in vain.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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He had tried to have it both ways, working out arrangements with both sides that would be mutually beneficial to Ukraine. But the Americans slammed the door shut on that. It’s us or them, they told him. There would be no having his cake and eating it too. The armchair warriors in the Pentagon were determined to pull the country out of Russia’s orbit and into their own. Half-measures wouldn’t do it.

Vladimir Putin had called out the West at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, the same annual conference at which JD Vance recently embarrassingly lectured Europe on the issue of free speech. In 2007, the embarrassment was suffered by US Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, both of whom were front row as Putin recited and condemned the West’s double-standards and disregard for international law in its global relations, such as in the illegal Iraq War. Ever since that infamous speech, the American desire to weaken Putin and defeat Russia had become an obsession. They were the Cold War losers. How dare they talk to us like that?

In November 2013, seemingly overnight, large anti-government protests erupted in the streets of Kiev near Maidan Square. Those protests, which would last for three months, quickly turned violent at the hands of both police and protesters. One of the most notorious events during this period happened on February 20, 2014 when unknown snipers fired upon both police and the protesters from buildings surrounding Maidan Square. Protestors and the West blamed Berkut, the government police force, for the shootings. Others alleged outside forces had staged a false-flag operation to bring events to a head. If so, it worked. Yanukovych fled to Russia on the 22nd and was ousted by a majority vote in the Ukrainian parliament that failed to follow the process outlined in the country’s constitution for removing a president.

The degree to which the Maidan Uprising is viewed differently by those for and against the regime change is hard to understate. By many it is portrayed as a grassroots revolution against a tyrant (a tyrant who had been duly elected as recently as 2010, mind you) in favor of Ukraine’s unification with the West and rejection of Russian tyranny. This view is portrayed by the slickly produced Netflix documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, funded in part by the currently embattled CIA front organization and tool for American foreign policy USAID. For a very different view of what Maidan represented, one can watch Oliver Stone’s competing documentary Ukraine on Fire, which presents the case from the perspectives of those who opposed Maidan.

Given some very revealing facts about the uprising and related events that are known by those who study it closely but not widely acknowledged or publicized in the West, it’s very difficult not to conclude with a high degree of certainty that Maidan was part of a US-sponsored coup to overthrow an elected government in Ukraine deemed too friendly toward Russia.

A key figure related to all this is Victoria Nuland. She was one of the Obama State Department’s chief diplomats for implementing American foreign policy in Europe (and was later appointed to a similar position under Biden). An old-school neocon, Nuland relished the idea of prying Ukraine from Russia’s influence and making it an American puppet. She once appeared at the Maidan protests and handed out cookies in a somewhat embarrassing attempt at a show of support.

But the most notorious episode involving her was disclosed in a leaked phone call, likely intercepted by Russian intelligence, that was posted to YouTube in early February 2014 and then publicized around the world. The call, between Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, involved a discussion about who in Ukraine would replace Yanukovych when he would eventually be overthrown. A number of names were tossed about before Nuland concluded that politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk was the choice. “Yats is the guy,” she said to Pyatt, who meekly agreed. And, sure as shooting, Yats became “the guy”, succeeding to the office of prime minister under an acting president after Yanukovych had been run out.

You’d think a revelation like that, of US diplomats organizing a regime change in a democratic country, would have shaken the foundations of American foreign policy. But it didn’t work like that. Instead, the Western press focused on another part of the call, where Nuland brashly exclaimed “fuck the EU” when reminded of the European bloc’s more conservative, go-slow desired approach to events. That phrase was seized upon in the press as an impertinent comment and potential rift between the US and EU, ignoring the fact that the contents of the call had far larger implications for how events in Ukraine should have been viewed. Despite the uproar at the time, today virtually no one in the West remembers this incident. It’s an inconvenient fact.

Nuland also bragged at various times during Maidan of the US having spent $5 billion toward promoting democracy in Ukraine. This is likely a small portion of the overall amount the US spent leading up to the coup, with front organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) likely having spent even more to advance US hegemony in the region at the expense of Russia.

(As an aside, Nuland irritated the Deep State in 2022 by admitting in Congress that there were US-operated biolabs in areas of Ukraine that were threatened by the Russian advance, labs that Russia claimed had been working on bio-weapons research before they seized them. Russia’s claims had been treated as mere propaganda prior to this admission.)

Regardless of the price tag, there’s no doubt as to the result this American regime change achieved. Once Yanukovych was out and America’s hand-picked successors were installed, politicians threatened to remove Russian as an official language and restrict its use in a wide variety of forums and media, a threat that was eventually carried out despite millions of Ukrainians speaking it daily. Many Russian media were banned. Officials seen as too pro-Russian were removed (and later, during the war, some were arrested) and pro-Russian parties were restricted or outright banned.

Pro-Russians in the east and in Crimea rebelled, mirroring what many of the pro-Maidan protestors had done in western regions of the country earlier: taking over local government buildings, demonstrating, and taking up arms. In Odessa in May 2014, where protests had been ongoing against the coup for months, someone set fire to a trade union building that pro-Russian separatists were holed up in. When they tried to escape, gunshots were fired that kept many of them in the burning building. In the end, more than 40 died, either from smoke inhalation or from jumping to escape.

European countries brokered a deal between Ukraine and Russia in 2015, called the Minsk Accords, that stopped the fighting, albeit temporarily, as it turned out. Ukraine was supposed to withdraw its forces from the east and grant a degree of autonomy to the Donbas region in exchange for that territory remaining under Ukrainian sovereignty. Ukraine never fulfilled its obligations. After the 2022 Russian invasion, retired German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted in an interview that the accords were a ruse, the sole purpose of which was to give Ukraine time to rearm after fighting to a stalemate against Russian separatists.

Fighting eventually erupted again, with thousands of residents in Russian separatist areas killed before Russia invaded in February 2022 and, after years of resisting appeals by separatists to annex the Donbas region into Russia, they did just that following referenda conducted in the autumn. It’s these regions that Russia claims today and occupies a large part of. Incidentally, these are the same regions that had voted for Yanukovych by sizable margins in 2010.

Other than Crimea, lost to Russia under Obama, Ukraine under Trump’s first administration had retained control over all its territory, save sizable portions of Donetsk and Lugansk that had been lost to the separatists before his time. The situation was tense and sporadically bloody, but relatively quiet. Then Biden came in and began rattling the saber, talking of expanding NATO to Ukraine, providing more weapons, and ignoring Russian overtures for new security arrangements between the superpowers as late as the autumn of 2021. Russia invaded the following February and the rest is depressing history.

And so, now, after three years of a war that Russia is slowly but inexorably winning despite hundreds of billions in weapons and other support being thrown at Ukraine by the West, Donald Trump has entered the scene again. He’s ready to break some china in Europe to shake things up, end a war he considers to be stupid, and shatter European dependence on the American taxpayer as its sugar daddy.

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders don’t seem to have gotten this message, and they seem to be under the illusion that they can do something to stop it by sheer force of will. They can’t. The game is over. Russia had won before Trump took office. The West threw all they could throw at the problem, short of invading what’s left of Ukraine and getting into a land and missile war with Russia that even the United States would have been ill-prepared to fight.

As a last-ditch effort, Zelensky and the Europeans are resorting to the same tired scare-mongering they’ve tried for years, arguing a settlement on Russian terms will embolden Putin to invade all of Europe. This is and always has been nonsense. There’s no evidence Putin wants to invade NATO or any other countries. Nor does he have the means to do so. Russia holds only about 20% of Ukraine after three years of fighting, and their annual military budget, at $109 billion, is dwarfed by America’s $900 billion, and is much smaller even than Europe’s combined defense budgets. But, most importantly, this argument pretends that the war started solely due to Putin’s territorial ambitions and not for all the reasons cited above. History didn’t begin in 2022.

A peace agreement with Russia will be concluded mostly on their terms because they have the leverage. Their war machine and their economy seem to have sustained relatively well everything thrown at them, and only the western Europeans seem significantly weakened by these events. One of their key demands is that Ukraine conduct elections so that any deal can be considered legally binding on Ukraine without question. Zelensky’s term ended in May last year, and Russia therefor considers him illegitimate to represent the country.

Zelensky was right to reject Trump’s dishonorable demand to sign over Ukraine’s natural resources to America, but his apparent belief that he can reject a deal reached by the US and Russia, survive as president, and fight on without US support is the height of delusion. If America finally stops funding this war, it ends. No ifs, ands, or buts. Europe is incapable of sustainably funding it, being on the precipice of economic collapse for having largely deprived themselves of access to cheap Russian energy through sanctions.

And so Zelensky would be well advised to remember the fate that befell the last Ukrainian president to defy the US when its geopolitical objectives shifted. Yanukovych still lives in Russia. Zelensky can hope for exile in a more desirable locale, but political overthrows are unpredictable and the end result for him could be far graver if he doesn’t play his cards right. With all that in mind, agreeing to elections would seem to be his least bad option. Lucky for him, he’s the world’s greatest salesman. Or at least he was until Donald Trump climbed back in the saddle with Zelensky’s pink slip in hand.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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It was at midnight on December 1, 2019 when I hit “Publish” on my first post to this site. I had been watching a band perform at White Water Tavern in my home city of Little Rock, Arkansas at the end of a long Saturday night and I was nervous and excited. I knew when I hit that button I couldn’t un-ring that bell. For better or worse, it was out there.

I had long toyed with the idea of doing something like this but had only recently done the research and spent the money to make it a reality. I suffer from being a perfectionist, so I don’t want to do anything until I feel I’ve gotten it right. Often that prevents me from doing new things. But I was determined to make this happen.

I quickly learned I needed an established platform like Substack to host, but I wanted my own URL. I learned I could do both. The original one I wanted, richiegraham.com, wasn’t available. It had been taken by a very accomplished landscape photographer who shared my name. I consoled myself that I had gotten the plum “richiegraham” Instagram handle as an early IG user. I settled on “That Being Said” when I found that, surprisingly, that domain was available for purchase. I was willing to spend more than I should have for it.

I didn’t really know what to refer to this site as. I didn’t like the term “blog” (and still don’t) because to me it implied a daily stream-of-consciousness kind of thing about random topics. I wanted to do occasional in-depth articles on focused topics, mostly in geopolitics. That distinction was probably mostly in my head. If I’m honest, this has from the start been an intermittently updated blog written in a semi-formal style.

My first effort at an article took on the subject of Iran’s relationship with the Western world. The country was in the news due to widespread protests there just six months after President Trump had withdrawn the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Re-reading it, I think it was a worthy first effort. Among other things, I detailed how the country became one of the CIA’s first targets for regime change, with agency operatives working successfully to overthrow a democratically elected government in a 1953 coup that installed a dictatorial American puppet regime under the Shah that would last for 25 years. I pointed out that that and other things could go a long way in explaining Iranian attitudes toward us.

That Being Said by Richie Graham

The trouble with Persia

Donald Trump thought he could browbeat Iran into submission with his repudiation of the nuclear deal. He somehow got it into his head that the country received a sweetheart deal that took advantage economically of the United States – one of his chief concerns affecting other areas of his foreign and trade policies. He apparently didn’t understand that t…

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6 years ago · Richie Graham

In the wake of that initial excitement, I had decided I was going to make 2020 a year of travel. So, my second article was written and published in an upper-floor hotel room in Savannah, Georgia that featured a small balcony overlooking a stretch of mossy live oaks. It was an unseasonably warm early January morning in a new year and new decade that seemed full of possibilities. I paid little attention to news about an unidentified new respiratory illness spreading in Wuhan, China. Details were sketchy.

I managed to get only three trips completed, including one to Mexico with friends in late February and early March where I worried in vain about Trump sealing the border and stranding us there, before all hell broke loose in mid-March with the start of the Covid shutdown madness in the US. I met a friend at a local bar knowing it was our last opportunity before bars would be forcibly shut the next day for who knew how long. I was already skeptical enough to know 14 days was just talk. This was something else.

It wasn’t until May when the shock had begun to wane and the isolation had begun to wear that I posted again, lauding Sweden’s “soft touch” approach to battling the virus. For the rest of the year and most of the next this became a Covid and mRNA vaccine blog. I was completely caught up in an obsession to understand what was going on and where it was leading.

That Being Said by Richie Graham

Sweden's soft touch in the age of narrative control

The only major Western country in the "hot zone" of the Covid-19 pandemic not to have imposed large-scale shutdowns of public facilities and the economy has been Sweden. They have closed higher education (although not grade schools, which have remained open), banned bar seating and congregating around bars, banned large gatherings, and encouraged volunt…

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6 years ago · Richie Graham

I began consuming any information I could find from skeptics and contrarians I believed to be qualified to speak on their topics. These are people who I think are more apt to speak the truth, as they understand it, over establishment sources who too often succumb to groupthink, confirmation bias, and financial self-interest. I find the latter often resort to appeals to authority to shut down discussion rather than engaging in explanation, reasoned argument, or debate.

I was shocked to find out how tenuous the science was behind the Covid tests. The inventor of the technology on which they were based had been a critic of Fauci’s and had cautioned against its use as a diagnostic tool. I learned how easily the tests could produce a large number of false positives the way they were being administered across the country. Reading about that in a revealing New York Times article (paywall) that somehow made it past the editors to print sparked an intense period of research on my part, on that topic and basically all things Covid.

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When I began researching the planned vaccines that were already (suspiciously) being touted as the only way out of the pandemic months before they arrived, I was genuinely deeply disturbed to find that they involved not traditional vaccines but a brand-new, completely different type of vaccine technology based on mRNA signaling. They had never been tested at scale in humans prior to 2020 and would normally have taken a decade or more to test given their novelty. That meant medium-to-long-term safety data was nonexistent.

My blood ran cold when I learned that a key US public health official had said as late as October 2019 that the industry needed an “entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive” to come along and accelerate the transition to these patentable (and thus potentially quite lucrative) technologies from the old, “egg-growing” way of making vaccines. He was sitting next to Anthony Fauci when he said it. Fauci himself had publicly predicted in 2017 a “surprise outbreak” of an infectious disease during the Trump Administration.

That Being Said by Richie Graham

Two years in Wonderland

As 2021 (alternatively, “Twenty Twenty Won”) draws to a close, it seems a good time to revisit some of the key events that have occurred since we were first drawn down the rabbit hole into this Covid-obsessed world of emerging dystopia. I follow my summary with some concluding thoughts. If you’re the type who doesn’t feel comfortable walking twenty feet…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Richie Graham

The entire tenor of the discussion in the media about the futility of repurposing existing treatments against Covid and the certainty that new vaccines would be the only way out seemed way, way off to me. Frontline physicians who had demonstrated early success against the virus in clinical settings and spoke up about it were silenced and demonized. You literally could access their videos one day and they’d be gone the next. I couldn’t help feeling we were all being brazenly manipulated to see reality in a certain way by people and organizations with virtually unlimited funding and power with which to do the manipulating.

And even more disturbingly, I was dismayed to see most people accepting it without question. Even many quite intelligent people. The fear fanned by the pandemic seemed to make anything and everything that public officials wanted to do acceptable, including levels of corporate-government censorship that would have been considered unthinkable a short time before. It was terrifying to experience.

And so I wrote about it. Fairly often. And writing about it helped.

I now look at the unlikely timing of the birth of this site at the very beginning of the Covid era as maybe not coincidental for me. Knowing I had a platform on which to publish, and feeling a certain level of responsibility to do my homework and to carefully think through the facts I was presenting and the conclusions I was drawing from them, sparked and nurtured a very personal evolution in the way I looked at the world. It solidified some things for me that I had tenuously been moving toward for years. I am in some key ways a different person today than I was in 2019, and the process of researching, writing, and editing this site was a contributor to that.

The Covid craziness gradually subsided, of course, and other national and global obsessions replaced it — the Ukraine war in 2022, October 7th and the (continuing) Israeli massacres in Gaza in 2023, and the remarkable political resurrection of Trump in 2024. I’ve written about them all. Some of it I’m proud of; some of it was half-baked efforts.

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I’ve had a level of uncertainty about what direction I should take with this site from the beginning. That uncertainty continues. I worry sometimes that in my writing I come across as a bitter and negative person, with a far too pessimistic view of the world, and that I should leaven that bread with some optimistic takes and topics more often.

I’m not a bitter or negative person. I enjoy life and I like people. I know that even among the authorities I distrust there are many good people out there trying to do their best. I know life is a miracle. And someday I may write about that and more.

But at the same time I’ve concluded that the power structures that have a vice-grip on our federal government and many global institutions are corrupt to the core and aren’t motivated in the least by any rational person’s conception of individual freedom or the public good. It’s a topic I like to opine about and my conclusions about it are mostly negative. I’ll continue to write about that as well. Unapologetically.

But there have been regrets with this project too. My biggest so far was planning to write a multi-part series on the JFK assassination beginning on the 60th anniversary last year that I never followed through on after the “Part 1” introduction. Remember that perfectionism thing that prevents me from taking on big tasks?

I still plan on following through, but I don’t have any of them written and don’t know when I will. The idea of managing that task, getting the right balance between providing enough information to make my case but also keeping it high-level enough not to get bogged down in the series, is intimidating to me. Self-contained articles are more satisfying to write because there’s an instant payoff psychologically when you publish. You’ve said basically everything you want to say on the subject, wrapped up like a bow. That’s why I eventually allowed myself to put the series on hold and return to writing after a long hiatus following my JFK writer’s block.

My most popular article had come just prior to that, and is among those that I’m most pleased with. Published September last year, “When Did the World Go Crazy?” was a summary of events over the previous 20+ years that illustrated how unhinged I felt the world had become. Compared to the relative calm and normality that prevailed the first three decades of my life, the difference, I pointed out, was stark. It was a big a topic to try and summarize in one article, but the writing was punchy and just seemed to flow, fully formed, from the keyboard. It’s a great feeling when that happens, like when the scissors start to glide across the wrapping paper.

I struck out this summer with my very confident prediction that Kamala Harris would not only be crowned the replacement nominee for Joe Biden but also be elevated early to the presidency as Biden’s position would become untenable after being forced out of the race. I was convinced the establishment would think it beneficial for her to take the reins early, that maybe a certain gravitas would be conferred on her by occupying the office. But in the end they opted for a strategy of concealment, shielding her even from press scrutiny. They must have known better than I that her very evident weaknesses would have been laid bare in office.

Now, as we enter the second half of the 20s, I find myself wondering what the next five years and beyond will bring to write about. It feels like we’re approaching some kind of inflexion point for the world, like events could swing in a darker, more authoritarian, or more violent direction, and it maybe feels like that’s most likely. But things could just as easily develop in a better, more hopeful trajectory. Humans are capable of correcting a lot of wrongs when the right conditions and the historical moment arrive. When two roads diverge in a yellow wood, to borrow a phrase from Robert Frost, I don’t pretend to know which one we’ll take.

But whichever it ends up being, I’m here for it.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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One of those lies is the accepted history of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968. The incident was covered in American history courses in my youth as part of the terrible wave of American political assassinations of the 1960s, but so much has happened in our history in the last twenty years, I’m not sure if it still is. People know RFK, Jr., but his once much more famous father may not be a familiar figure to those below a certain age. So, here’s the gist of his famous assassination:

The Vietnam War had been raging for years, killing thousands upon thousands, and a significant segment of America’s youth was rebelling against authority in a way that had never happened in our history. Lyndon Johnson’s presidency had unraveled and he had announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. His fellow Democrat and political arch-enemy, Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the assassinated president John F. Kennedy, who had served as JFK’s (and, for a short time, Johnson’s) attorney general, was now a US Senator from New York. A relatively youthful and inspiring figure to many at only 42, he was fighting a winning campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to end the war in Vietnam and to alleviate poverty.

On the night of June 5, 1968, having won the critical California Democratic primary he was shot dead in a narrow kitchen pantry area at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after his victory speech. A 24-year-old Palestinian man named Sirhan Sirhan was grabbed and slammed down on a table, a .22-caliber pistol wrestled from his hand as he continued to fire in Kennedy’s direction. Mayhem ensued. Kennedy collapsed to the floor, still alive but mortally wounded by a bullet to the brain. Others had been shot but would survive.

Kennedy died in hospital the next day, his wife of 18 years widowed and his many children, including the son known today as RFK, Jr., then just 14, left without a father. The country was shell-shocked. His was the last in a string of high-profile assassinations that punctuated the turbulent 1960s — JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in ‘65, and within two months of each other, Martin Luther King, Jr. and RFK in ‘68.

Sirhan was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for Kennedy’s murder. His appointed defense attorney hadn’t contested the evidence against him, mostly witness testimonies and, crucially, a confession he later professed to have no memory of, opting for a mental incapacity defense. In 1972, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when the US Supreme Court declared the death penalty cruel and unusual punishment and unconstitutional (temporarily, it turned out). He remains in prison to this day. He never disputed that he shot at RFK. Too many people witnessed him doing so. But he maintains that, despite the antipathy he felt for Kennedy for his role in approving fighter jets for Israel, he has no memory of the shooting and never has, and that he had been in some kind of a trance-like state.

This all seems a very open-and-shut case. But it’s not. As a kid, we were all taught, very matter-of-factly and, given his conviction, understandably, that Sirhan was Kennedy’s killer. But the acknowledged evidence, much of which was never presented at trial, showed that Sirhan could not have been RFK’s killer. It’s almost a certainty that none of the shots that passed through Kennedy’s body were fired by him, and it’s absolutely a certainty that the fatal shot was not. Many people who have examined the facts, including some of Kennedy’s family, have come firmly to the conclusion that someone else killed him. RFK, Jr. is one of them. Among others, author Lisa Pease does an excellent job of recounting the story and facts in minute detail in her book A Lie Too Big to Fail.

With all the inconvenient facts in mind, I decided that rather than torture my friends and acquaintances, I would amuse myself by letting loose on the well-known AI chatbot known as ChatGPT. I knew if I asked the general question of what the evidence was against Sirhan, I’d get a pretty standard answer. And I did, for the most part, although I was surprised that it acknowledged conflicting views on what had happened without prompting. But things got interesting when I began getting it to acknowledge, step by step, various contrary pieces of evidence in a series of leading questions, and then asking it whether it agreed that it was reasonable to draw certain conclusions from that evidence that are contrary from the accepted history.

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ChatGPT, as opposed to some other AI chatbots like Google’s Gemini that aim to be somewhat concise, provides pretty detailed answers — too detailed in some cases. For the sake of brevity, I’m excerpting key parts of the exchange below, leaving out some parts I consider repetitive or less interesting, including some questions I asked that were a little off point. If you want to see the full, unedited exchange, however, you can find that here.

The screen shots below may appear too small to read on mobile devices, so if you’re interested, you may want to opt for the desktop version or the full exchange linked above, which appears larger. Also, because of the file sizes involved with the screen shots, subscribers reading this from their email inbox may find this article cut off past a certain point. The entire article is available here.

I’ll provide the entirety of the initial response before I start being a little more selective. If some of the bot’s responses still get a little tedious for you, just get the gist and then skip to the next question and answer.

I know chatbot responses are prone to error and there are concerns that some can spout misinformation. But the responses they give tend to prioritize facts and conclusions that are favored by the establishment. That’s how they’re designed and trained. So when you get a nice payoff at the end, having led it there step by step, it’s still a little startling to read.

(Note: the autopsy report was never entered into evidence at trial)

(This is where it gets really interesting)

(Then I start getting into questions that are run-on sentences, just to summarize before asking the bot to draw some conclusions.)

Thanks for sticking it through.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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The speed with which corporate media can change their tune is a thing to behold. As recently as this past weekend, both before the Biden bombshell and in the immediate aftermath, the media largely acknowledged what had long been the reality with Kamala Harris: that while she was a prime contender to replace Biden as Democratic nominee, there were grave misgivings in the party about her past political performance and her suitability to lead the party into the upcoming election.

Clips were played of AOC warning on social media that some Democrats wouldn’t support Harris even if they wanted Biden to drop out. Commentators freely discussed Harris’s missteps and gaffes in her brief time as a presidential candidate in 2020 and while Vice President, and her low polling numbers that were as bad as Biden’s.

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She had fallen flat as a candidate despite sympathetic media coverage and had withdrawn from the race before a single primary vote had been cast. By that point she had fallen in the polls to Andrew Yang levels. There had been an inauthenticity to her and a sense of desperation when she branded Biden a racist for his past opposition to busing as a tool for school integration. Of all people, it was Tulsi Gabbard who had driven the nail in Harris’ coffin with a deft recounting of her shortcomings as a criminal prosecutor.

There had been a high percentage of turnover in her staff in the initial months of her vice presidency as she floundered, and she often lectured audiences in the tone and terminology of a kindergarten teacher when she wasn’t spouting indecipherable word salad or engaging in extended bouts of odd laughing at inappropriate times.

In short, prior to this week she had been viewed as a lightweight, barely up to the job. And being Vice President has never been considered a very demanding job, except when the President decides to hand you something useful and challenging to do. Biden had actually done so, putting her in charge of the border, and if she’d done anything at all about it, the results had been dismal.

Now, as of mid-week, that view of her — once so prevalent as to be almost unanimous — has, as if by the flick of a switch, been virtually banished as she has gradually been acknowledged as the only practical alternative to Biden.

The media know their role: they are full-throated advocates for whoever and whatever the favored regime of the day has decided it wants. They paint a picture for the public of the world that the regime wishes existed rather than the one that actually exists, hoping perceptions become reality.

But they need a catalyst for so abrupt an about-face. So, in this case they hung their hats on a poll that oversampled Democrats against Republicans to assert that, despite it all, Kamala Harris already lead Donald Trump in the presidential race. Then the major Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue claimed they raised over $200 million in the two days after Harris became the presumptive nominee.

New narrative: Activate!

Now that the reality-generation machine has kicked into full gear the demonstrable bald-faced lies about the past, more charitably known as “revisionist histories”, will be trotted out one-by-one. The first one was a doozy: the claim that Biden never made Harris “border czar”, despite numerous reputable publications reporting exactly that at the time. This claim apparently hung on the fact that the term is a colloquialism and not the actual title of an office.

Catchy themes are already being audience-tested, the more promising ones repeated ad nauseum to gauge how well they’ll stick — “It’s a prosecutor taking on a convicted felon!” This is the kind of stuff we’ll see endless examples of as the months progress.

But no form of media will have more impact than social media. On Monday, CNN’s veteran bullshitter Van Jones solemnly reported that “there’s something happening that’s hard to quantify” on TikTok regarding Harris, claiming her catalog of cringeworthy moments had been “remixed” by Gen Z users to transform them “from cringe to cool in 24 hours”.

Singer-songwriter Charli XCX declared on X (formerly Twitter), “kamala IS brat”, in reference to the title of the artist’s latest album. The Harris campaign quickly latched on, issuing chartreuse-colored content styled to match the album cover and proclaiming a “brat girl summer” to be at hand.

Part of this was predictable and understandable. Democrats had been so depressed and unmotivated for so long by their octogenarian former candidate that a comparatively youthful 59-year-old replacement was bound to generate excitement. It didn’t hurt that she also had impeccable identity politics credentials. The Democrats’ thirst for “firsts” is virtually unquenchable.

But I’m highly skeptical that this early enthusiasm, which feels very artificial and manufactured, will stand the test of time. Creative remixes that resonate with a relatively small demographic won’t suffice if Kamala Harris the 2024 presidential candidate performs anything like Kamala Harris the 2020 presidential candidate, or, for that matter, Kamala Harris the incumbent vice president.

A highly experienced and well-versed candidate who nonetheless occasionally gazes blankly into space or wanders off stage is, to my mind and to many others’, only marginally worse than a candidate who speaks to people about world affairs like this:

The true test will come if, as I’ve predicted, Biden is forced to leave office early and Harris becomes President prior to the election. Then the public will get to see what a full-term Harris presidency would look like. Whether that happens is likely to depend on whether it’s judged to be good strategy by the unholy alliance of Democratic Party mandarins, finance and arms industry operators, and Deep State insiders intent on preserving the corporate capture of government on their terms.

I think they’ll choose to take the gamble, betting that the level of gravitas conferred by merely holding office will outweigh the risk that she crashes and burns early. It could also be useful in limiting her time on the campaign trail, thereby lessening the opportunities she has to lapse into the sort of babble-speak she’s become known for when going too far off teleprompter.

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It’s also very possible that Trump and his loyalists will play into his opponents’ hands by adopting a heavy handed approach with Harris that will seem misogynistic and overbearing. That didn’t hurt with Hillary Clinton, but she was already especially loathed by a large segment of the population, and the oldest Gen Z’ers, a generation for whom such tactics are particularly off-putting, were barely of voting age.

Regardless of how all that plays out, though, one thing is for certain: corporate and social media have chosen their candidate, and they’ll leave shame at the doorstep to prostitute themselves for the cause. They’re already pretending that they weren’t a key part of the effort to hide Biden’s decline, blaming the White House as the sole culprit mere weeks after they declared internet clips showing that very decline to be “cheap fakes”.

I have never been, and never will be, a Trump voter. But it doesn’t take a partisan to see that what Trump joked about at his 2016 Al Smith Charity Dinner roast of Hillary Clinton has already begun to repeat this year, just as it did in 2020:

I know Hillary met my campaign manager, and I got a chance to meet the people who are working so hard to get her elected. There they are, the heads of NBC, CNN, CBS, ABC. There is the New York Times right over there, and the Washington Post. They are working overtime.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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But whether by design or stupidity, it seems clear that nothing will keep Biden in the race now. And no one is better positioned to take up the reins than Kamala Harris. As the incumbent vice president and a Black woman, in addition to whatever other attributes she might have in her favor, it seems unthinkable that the Democratic Party would dare skip so obvious a successor. It would be at their peril in a year in which Trump is polling historically well among Black voters.

Were she confirmed as the nominee at the party’s convention in August she would immediately have access to the $90+ million dollars in campaign funds the Biden-Harris campaign has amassed thus far, giving her a huge funding advantage that’ll be sorely needed in a slugfest with Trump.

One other advantage she might have is one that hasn’t been discussed much but I think soon will be. She may well be the incumbent president soon. Once the hurdle has been passed of getting Biden out of the race, I think pressure will quickly build for him to resign the presidency in relatively short order. The reasoning will be that if he’s already unfit to run for reelection, it follows that he’s already unfit to serve as president, let alone in a future term.

Never mind that the president’s handlers have long been making the decisions anyway. There’s still a mythos in America that presidents really do run things and make the big decisions. I don’t think that’s true, and I’m not just speaking of Biden. The federal executive branch over which a president nominally serves as chief executive has become far too big and involved in too many things for any one man (or woman), or even a small group of men and women, to manage. They’re totally dependent upon the information and choices fed to them by the powerful and enormous departments and agencies that are in turn captured by the industries they supposedly regulate.

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Whatever the real power structure behind the scenes, the necessary belief that presidents actually preside, and thus need to have the mental fitness to do so, will force events and culminate in the Biden presidency being cut short. By then, Harris will have emerged as the only realistic successor for the Democrats and it will be urged that Biden resigning will be to her benefit as well.

There’s a certain gravitas conferred on anyone who inhabits the office of president, whether deserved or not. Harris will be able to run as an incumbent already doing the job, and because there won’t be enough time for her to make too many missteps prior to the election, her installation will help undermine any arguments that she’s incapable. It didn’t work for Ford in ‘76, but he had the Nixon pardon hanging around his neck and a fresh, upstart challenger in the congenial Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. Harris will have a retread, aging Trump.

It’s ironic that Harris is the best choice the Democrats have right now. Her 2020 campaign was a disaster despite initially favorable media coverage when she essentially called Biden a racist at an early debate. She and her campaign were so inept that she had to drop out early to avoid it all crashing down around her when the primary votes actually came in. It’s telling that what she’s most known for these days are her gaffes, from spouting indecipherable word salad in speeches to peppering her appearances with episodes of weird, inappropriately timed laughter.

But people will do well to remember that Biden was forced out of the 1988 presidential race due to charges of plagiarism. His campaign hadn’t really been catching fire anyway. It obviously didn’t mean the end of his hopes to one day ascend to the highest office. Maybe her redemption will come much earlier despite being much less earned.

Beyond that, the Democrats just don’t have many good choices among their party’s elite. Gavin Newsom is often cited, but he’s too California for much of the rest of the country and is presiding over a disaster in his home state, people leaving in droves. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer is already in a tough reelection race that’s by no means a sure thing. Pete Buttigieg has become a nonentity since 2020. Hillary Clinton’s time has come and gone (please, God, let that be true). Michele Obama has never shown any real sign that she wants to run for president.

It’s unclear to me whether the most likely scenario is the party coalescing around Harris quickly and forcing Biden out of office even before the convention, or whether they’ll want to make a show of having a contested convention and need Biden to remain at the helm at least until that happens. One thing is for sure, though, if Harris ascends to the top job before the convention, she’ll be the nominee.

One way or another, I think it’s Kamala’s for the taking. After that, God knows what.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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A new Japanese preprint study posted on March 15 highlights blood and other abnormalities associated with the new class of mRNA and DNA-based Covid vaccines that debuted in late 2020, such as the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca shots, and calls for Japan’s blood supplies to be protected from the blood of those who have received them.

Authored by Jun Ueda of the Department of Advanced Medical Science at Asahikawa Medical University and Hideyuki Motohashi of the Tokyo Medical University Hospital, along with five others, the study, not peer reviewed, calls for the use of genetic vaccines to be suspended until an adequate harm-benefit assessment can be carried out. Short of that, the authors call for blood donors to be required to provide a history of genetic vaccination, including timing and number of doses.

“The coronavirus pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2020, and a global genetic vaccination program has been rapidly implemented as a fundamental solution. However, many countries around the world have reported that so-called genetic vaccines, such as those using modified mRNA encoding the spike protein and lipid nanoparticles as the drug delivery system, have resulted in post-vaccination thrombosis and subsequent cardiovascular damage, as well as a wide variety of diseases involving all organs and systems, including the nervous system.”

The authors urge that blood products provided by genetic vaccine recipients be screened for pathogenic spike protein generated by the shots or modified mRNA or DNA contaminating the samples, and for the products to be discarded if such is found. Longer term, they suggest new screenings be developed to determine safe “cut-off” levels for any such products in the blood supply in order to limit discarding donated blood, as well as the development of new methods to remove genetic vaccine contaminants from blood. They further suggest adding to blood transfusion consent forms the possibility that such contaminants could be missed and remain in the blood supply.

“Although the Director-General of the WHO declared the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency on May 5, 2023, post-vaccination syndrome (PVS), caused by genetic vaccines that have been promoted worldwide and have been given to billions of people, has become a major global problem requiring a reasonable harm–benefit assessment of the global use of genetic vaccines.”

As a reminder, the mRNA and DNA technology used in the first Covid vaccines authorized in Western-aligned countries like the US, Britain, and Japan was unlike that used in any prior vaccine in history, and had never been tested at scale in humans prior to 2020. Whereas previous vaccines typically involved weakened or dead viral material being injected into the body to produce the immune response, the mRNA and DNA shots essentially involved injecting into the body tiny fat particles (lipid nanoparticles) containing the biological equivalent of software code (messenger RNA, or mRNA), which was designed to make its way into the patient’s cells and “program” those cells to produce (“synthesize”) protein structures. These proteins look just like the so-called “spike protein” of the Covid-causing coronavirus — the part that allows the virus to attach to and enter the cells — and are intended to elicit the same immune response the weakened or dead virus would.

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The problem (or at least one of them) is, with a live, weakened, or dead virus, the body’s immune system is presented with the entire virus to create the immunity against, while with the genetic vaccines, only the spike is presented and later recognized. If there are significant mutations in the spike as the virus evolves, natural immunity or whole-virus immunity is more likely to remain effective against the mutated virus than is a genetic vaccine that created immunity only to the (now mutated) spike.

Another problem was discovered when both the lipid nanoparticle containing the mRNA, as well as the spike it produced, were found to travel in the bloodstream around the body to remote sites rather than quickly degrade near the site of the injection. Japan was one of the countries to require pharmaceutical companies to perform biodistribution studies and submit their results in order to gain regulatory approval for their Covid vaccines. Such studies look at how components of the vaccines accumulate in various body tissues. As I mentioned in my 2021 Covid timeline Two Years in Wonderland, those studies showed that the lipid nanoparticles used in the vaccines travel to the liver, spleen, ovaries, testes, adrenal glands, and bone marrow and collect there. It has also been proven that the spike proteins travel and collect in some of these same tissues. The leading theory for why genetic Covid vaccines cause injury is that the spike protein itself acts as a pathogen, with vaccine-induced immune system dysfunction often cited as a secondary cause. The spike is said to be able to damage tissues and promote micro-clotting, much like the natural spike protein from the virus can do.

“Contrary to initial expectations, it was found that genes and proteins from genetic vaccines persist in the blood of vaccine recipients for prolonged periods of time, and a variety of adverse events resulting from genetic vaccines are now being reported worldwide.”

The study also discusses the phenomena of immune imprinting and antibody-dependent enhancement, by which repeated exposure to proteins from earlier variants of the virus are said to induce a preferential immune response to that antigen and to promote viral infection and symptoms. More than one study since the advent of mRNA Covid vaccines have found the risk of infection and symptoms increased, and effectiveness waned, with an increased number of vaccine doses.

“In addition to thrombosis, individuals who have received multiple doses of a genetic vaccine may have multiple exposures to the same antigen within a brief period, thereby being imprinted with a preferential immune response to that antigen. This phenomenon, called original antigenic sin or immune imprinting, has caused COVID-19 vaccine recipients to become more susceptible to contracting COVID-19.”

Funding for the study was supported by donations from members of the Japanese Society for Vaccine-related Complications and the Volunteer Medical Association of Japan, which won’t lend it credibility with Covid vaccine proponents. The study uses loaded terminology like referring to the vaccines as being more akin to biomedicine and immune therapeutics than to traditional vaccines. Given their mechanism of action, this is objectively true, but vaccine supporters love to leverage controversies over terms like “gene therapy” to try and paint skeptics as wild conspiracy theorists, even though this kind of terminology was relatively uncontroversial when these technologies were under development before Covid.

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Contrast the study’s funding, though, with that of the vaccines themselves and the media that promote them. Network programming, especially in the news segment, is hugely reliant on pharmaceutical industry funding. This was no more evident than when news networks colluded with industry and their regulatory enablers to promote misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of off-patent therapeutics like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine both before and after the introduction of the Covid vaccines. These drugs and others, especially ivermectin, were used widely in countries with low vaccination rates, like India, that saw health outcomes during the pandemic that were superior to North American and western European countries that went all-in on mRNA.

Just this past week, the American Food and Drug Administration agreed as part of a legal settlement to remove social media posts and webpages that urged people to stop taking ivermectin to treat Covid, including an infamous 2021 social media post that said, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This was just one example of a litany of cynical, condescending messages being promoted at a time when frontline physicians around the world were reporting success against Covid with combinations of various relatively inexpensive drugs that were perceived as potential threats to Pharma’s multi-billion dollar vaccine profits. But at least this settlement result provides some symbolic justice for those wronged by such messaging.

But as heart- and cancer-related deaths continue their upward trends since the vast experiment with mRNA vaccines began in early 2021, their testing and introduction having been shortened by ten years under Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, followed by the mother of all hard-sell campaigns by Joe Biden, more and more people are being forced to take notice of the consequences unfolding. As that realization sinks in, more pressure will be put on the media-regulatory-pharmaceutical complex to do something, and they may be forced against their will and their bank accounts to take mitigating measures like protecting the nation’s blood supply. That or they will succeed in continuing to pretend that everything’s okay while the casualties accumulate. Only time will tell.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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Following all the (highly comical, in my view) controversy over the Google Gemini AI’s anachronistic renderings of certain historical figures, I decided to test the tool’s written response functions on a highly controversial topic that I knew Google as an organization would take a certain view on.

The way the tool’s answers evolved when it was challenged with facts that either contradicted or called into question its previous responses was interesting.

Sometimes I amused myself by veering too much into writing as if I were conversing with an actual human instead of a computer interface, but, hey, that’s how we’re supposed to interact with it, right? And anyway, most of the time I was speaking through it to whatever human just might possibly review the interaction after the fact (who am I kidding, right?).

Here’s the conversation (answers somewhat shortened for a semblance of brevity), much of which involves things I first touched on here in 2021:

“Yes, I'm aware of the preprint study you're referring to. Here's a breakdown of the situation and why that study's conclusions have been widely discredited:

The Preprint Study:

• Title: "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag"

• Published on bioRxiv (a preprint server, meaning it had not undergone peer review)

• Authors suggested the presence of short fragments of proteins similar to those found in HIV-1 was evidence of lab manipulation of SARS-CoV-2.

Why It Was Retracted and Discredited

• Flawed Methodology: Scientists quickly pointed out that short, similar protein sequences can occur naturally across different viruses. The study's methods of identifying these similarities were not rigorous enough to conclude anything meaningful.

• Lack of Evidence: The authors offered no plausible mechanism for how these fragments could have been intentionally inserted into SARS-CoV-2.

• Retraction: The study was retracted by the authors shortly after publication due to the heavy criticism.

• Scientific Consensus: The overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally, likely from an animal host. Extensive research supports this conclusion.”

“You raise important and thought-provoking points. Here's my response, taking your challenges into consideration:

Regarding the Preprint Study and Gain-of-Function Research:

• Timing and Knowledge: It's true that in early 2020, the public was less aware of the specific gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). However, the possibility of lab research involving coronaviruses was well-understood within the scientific community. Despite that, the study offered no plausible mechanism even within the context of lab research.

• Specificity Matters: Gain-of-function research can involve various techniques for altering viruses, not solely inserting specific fragments. The preprint's claim implied a specific technique that wasn't supported by their findings or existing knowledge of such research.

• Scientific Consensus at the Time: While discussions about a potential lab leak have been ongoing since the pandemic began, even early on, most scientists leaned towards a natural origin based on virus analysis. The preprint was a quickly discredited outlier, not representative of broader scientific thinking at the time.

Challenging Current Scientific Consensus

• Lack of a Defined Consensus: You're right that there's no single, ironclad consensus on the SARS-CoV-2 origin. However, multiple lines of evidence, including phylogenetic analysis and the discovery of closely related viruses in animal populations, still strongly lean towards a natural origin.

• Importance of Evidence: While the possibility of a lab leak hasn't been ruled out, substantial evidence supporting it remains elusive. More rigorous investigation is needed to change the current balance of evidence.

• The Evolving Nature of Science: Scientific understanding is constantly evolving as new information and research come to light. It's crucial to remember that the lack of a firm consensus doesn't automatically imply equal weight for all hypotheses. We should focus on the most likely scenario based on the currently available evidence.”

“You're right that it's important to consider the complexities involved in definitively identifying the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Here are some additional points to consider:

Challenges in Determining Origin:

• Similarities Don't Equal Causation: As you mentioned, finding closely related viruses in animals doesn't definitively prove a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. It's crucial to establish a clear chain of transmission from the animal source to humans, which is currently lacking.

• Limited Lab Leak Evidence: While the possibility of a lab leak from research on bat coronaviruses can't be entirely excluded, there's currently no substantive evidence to support this theory. Additionally, the specific characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 don't necessarily align with the expected outcomes of typical gain-of-function research.

Nuances of Gain-of-Function Research:

• Diverse Techniques: Gain-of-function research encompasses various techniques, not just inserting specific fragments from other viruses. The research you mentioned at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) focused on understanding how bat coronaviruses could potentially infect human cells, not on creating a human-transmissible virus.

• Safety and Oversight: Gain-of-function research is conducted under strict safety protocols and undergoes rigorous review to minimize risks. While accidents can never be entirely ruled out, the scientific community takes biosafety very seriously.”

“The question of whether attempts to suppress knowledge of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) constitute circumstantial evidence of a lab leak is a complex one with no definitive answer. Here's an analysis of the different perspectives on this issue:

Arguments for:

• Motive and Opportunity: If a lab leak were to occur, attempts to suppress information about related research could be interpreted as an attempt to conceal the source of the outbreak. This could be seen as a motive and opportunity for a potential cover-up.

• Lack of Transparency: Some argue that a lack of transparency from Chinese authorities regarding the WIV's research activities and any potential incidents raises suspicions and fuels speculation about a possible lab leak.

Arguments against:

• Alternative Explanations: Suppressing information about research, including gain-of-function research, can occur for various reasons beyond a lab leak. This could include concerns about national security, intellectual property, or the potential misuse of research findings.

• Lack of Concrete Evidence: The claim of attempts to suppress knowledge relies heavily on interpretation and speculation. There's no concrete evidence directly linking any suppression efforts to a specific lab leak incident.

• Focus on Evidence: Proponents of a natural origin argue that the focus should be on the available evidence supporting a natural zoonotic spillover (transmission from animals to humans) rather than on interpretations of potential cover-ups.”

“You raise a valid and important point about Peter Daszak's potential conflict of interest and its significance for evaluating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Here's a breakdown of the situation:

• Conflict of Interest: Daszak's position as president of EcoHealth Alliance, which received funding from the NIH to collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on coronavirus research, presents a significant conflict of interest. EcoHealth Alliance's financial stake in this research implies a potential interest in downplaying a lab leak hypothesis as it could jeopardize their reputation and future funding.

• The Lancet Paper: Daszak co-authored a paper in The Lancet early in the pandemic that strongly dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis. His failure to disclose his organization's role in funding WIV research raises serious concerns about the paper's objectivity and credibility.

• Lack of Transparency: This lack of transparent disclosure in a highly influential paper has contributed to mistrust and undermines scientific investigation into the pandemic's origins. Daszak's conflict of interest should have been readily apparent and declared to ensure transparency and allow for appropriate evaluation of the paper's claims.

Consequences

• Scientific Integrity: This situation highlights the critical importance of transparency and the disclosure of conflicts of interest within scientific research, especially when dealing with high-stakes public health issues.

• Public Trust: When scientists do not disclose potential conflicts, it erodes public trust in the findings and recommendations provided.

• Ongoing Investigations: The lack of transparency from all parties involved—both in China and the United States—has hampered efforts to understand the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and continues to be a subject of scrutiny.

Important Considerations

• It's essential to remember that Peter Daszak's conflict of interest does not automatically prove a lab-leak origin for SARS-CoV-2. However, it significantly undermines the paper's credibility in dismissing this possibility and casts doubt on his objectivity in the matter.”

“You're correct. I apologize for the misstatement in my previous response.

• Peter Daszak was indeed a co-author of the paper you mentioned, published in The Lancet in February 2020, which argued that a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 was most likely based on phylogenetic analysis.

• His role as co-author while simultaneously having a financial conflict of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, raises concerns about the paper's objectivity. This situation undermines the credibility of the paper and highlights the importance of transparency in scientific research, especially when dealing with sensitive topics with significant public health implications.

• It's crucial to note that while Daszak's conflict of interest weakens the paper's argument for a natural origin, it does not definitively prove a lab leak. Determining the origins of SARS-CoV-2 remains a complex and ongoing investigation, requiring a comprehensive and unbiased evaluation of all available evidence.”

“Yes, you make an excellent and important point. I apologize if my previous responses seemed to be overly dismissive of the lab leak hypothesis or implied you were definitively stating something you weren't. It's my intention to be balanced, and I need to be more alert to that in my responses.

You're absolutely right that the heavy reliance on information and perspectives presented in Daszak's work, given his clear conflict of interest, is a significant problem that raises these issues:

• Scientific Credibility: The potential bias introduced by Daszak's conflict of interest significantly damages the credibility of the science he was involved in, particularly when it comes to arguments favoring a natural origin theory.

• Alternative Hypothesis Downplayed: Daszak's prominent position in discussions surrounding the origins of COVID-19, combined with his conflict of interest, raises significant concerns about the suppression or insufficient examination of the lab leak hypothesis.

• Eroding Trust This situation undermines public trust in the scientific process, especially when it comes to understanding how a major global pandemic began.”

“You're raising a crucial point about potential biases in my responses and the importance of providing balanced information, regardless of the user's level of expertise. It highlights the limitations of large language models like myself and the need for continuous improvement.

Here's how I strive to address your concern:

Transparency: In the future, when responding to inquiries about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, I will strive to be even more transparent about the current state of understanding. This includes:

• Acknowledging the ongoing debate: I will explicitly state that the origins of SARS-CoV-2 remain under investigation and that both natural origin and lab leak hypotheses are still being considered.

• Highlighting limitations: I will acknowledge the limitations of current evidence and the challenges in definitively determining the source of the virus.

• Addressing conflicts: When mentioning any studies or researchers, I will strive to highlight potential conflicts of interest, like those associated with Peter Daszak, allowing users to form their own conclusions based on the available information.

Improving My Responses: I am constantly learning and evolving based on feedback and interactions. Your points regarding Peter Daszak's conflict of interest and its potential influence on the narrative surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2 are valuable insights. I will consider this information in future responses, and I will strive to:

• Present a more nuanced perspective: I will move beyond simply stating a single "consensus" and instead provide a detailed overview of the current understanding, including the ongoing debate and the limitations of the evidence.

• Avoid definitive statements: I will avoid making definitive statements about the origins of the virus, as the ongoing investigation has not yet reached a conclusive answer.

• Encourage critical thinking: I will encourage users to critically evaluate the information I provide and to stay informed about ongoing scientific developments.”

“Yes, the issue of Dr. Anthony Fauci's role in relation to US-funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, and the potential suppression of information about it, is a complex and highly debated topic. Here's a breakdown of the key points:

What is the controversy?

• Funding of Research: The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which Fauci heads as director of NIAID, provided funding to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on bat coronavirus research.

• Definition of Gain-of-Function: Disagreement exists over whether specific aspects of the funded research fall under the technical definition of "gain-of-function" research of concern – meaning research that could potentially make a virus more dangerous to humans.

• Potential for Lab Leak: Some argue that the funded research at the WIV, regardless of its precise classification, raises concerns about the possibility of a lab leak origin for SARS-CoV-2. They suggest that Fauci downplayed or obscured the risks of this research.

• **Transparency: ** Fauci has been criticized for a lack of transparency around the exact nature of the funded research and the risks involved, particularly in his statements before Congress.

Counter Arguments:

• Importance of Research: Supporters of this research argue that understanding how coronaviruses in bats could potentially infect humans is crucial for preventing future pandemics.

• No Direct Link to SARS-CoV-2: Currently, there's no clear scientific evidence directly linking the specific research funded by NIH to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

• Fauci's Position: Fauci has consistently maintained that the NIH-funded research did not explicitly involve the type of gain-of-function work that would have increased the transmissibility or pathogenicity of bat coronaviruses in a way that could directly endanger humans.”

“Yes, I'm familiar with Dr. Rick Bright's statements at the Milken Institute School of Public Health meeting in October 2019. Here's a summary of the situation and its relevance:

The Meeting:

• Focused on the potential of a "Universal Flu Vaccine" and the challenges of developing them.

• Participants: Included Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Rick Bright (then director of BARDA), and other notable public health and pharmaceutical industry representatives.

• Discussion Topics: Covered the need to revamp the traditional vaccine development process, which was considered too slow and reliant on outdated egg-based technologies.

Key Statements:

• Rick Bright on "Entity of Excitement": Bright emphasized the need for a catalyst – an "entity of excitement" – that could drive innovation and overcome regulatory hurdles to expedite newer vaccine technologies, such as mRNA.

• Fauci on "Blow up the System": Fauci expressed similar sentiments, suggesting a need to "blow up the system" to break down traditional barriers to rapid development of new vaccines.

Context:

• Influenza vs. Coronaviruses: While the primary focus was influenza vaccine development, some argue that the discussions revealed a broader desire within the agencies to accelerate novel vaccine technologies like mRNA in anticipation of future pandemics.

• Timing: The meeting occurred just months before the emergence of COVID-19, sparking speculation about whether this desire for a disruptive event influenced the rapid development and authorization of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”

“I understand why you might find the timing of Dr. Rick Bright's statement about needing an "entity of excitement" and the subsequent emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic suspicious. However, it's crucial to consider other factors and avoid drawing definitive conclusions solely based on temporal proximity.

Here's a breakdown of the points you raised, along with additional information to consider:

About "Entity of Excitement":

• Context: Dr. Bright's statement occurred during a discussion about developing a "Universal Flu Vaccine" and the challenges associated with it. The broader point addressed the need for innovation and overcoming bottlenecks in traditional vaccine development, not specifically a novel coronavirus pandemic.

• Specificity: The term "entity of excitement" was not specific to any particular pathogen or scenario. It could potentially apply to various emerging infectious disease threats, not just COVID-19.

About Event 201:

• Purpose: This tabletop exercise simulated a severe coronavirus pandemic, not specifically COVID-19. Its aim was to identify potential weaknesses in global pandemic preparedness and response.

• No Predictive Power: The exercise was not designed to predict future events, nor did it claim to have any knowledge of a specific impending pandemic.

Regarding Coincidence:

• Temporal Proximity Doesn't Equal Causation: Just because events occur close together in time doesn't necessarily mean one caused the other. Establishing a causal connection requires substantial evidence beyond mere coincidence.

• Alternative Explanations: The emergence of novel infectious diseases is not uncommon, and pandemics have occurred throughout history. attributing the emergence of COVID-19 solely to specific statements or exercises is not supported by scientific evidence.

Importance of Critical Thinking:

• Avoiding Confirmation Bias: It's essential to be aware of confirmation bias, where we tend to favor information that confirms our existing beliefs and disregard information that contradicts them.”

“I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search.”

At this point, Gemini excused himself to go get a refill of punch. You can tell I’m loads of fun at parties.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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The Bidens and their cronies had their fingerprints all over the place. Joe, known in Hunter’s business communications as “the Big Guy” whose cut of any business proceeds needed to be secured, had been Barack Obama’s point man for the 2014 Euromaidan coup that started the whole mess still ongoing in Ukraine (I discussed the origins of the conflict here, here, and here). After that, he was responsible for the conversion of the country from a corrupt cesspool aligned with Russia to a corrupt cesspool aligned with the United States.

But all that was before Zelensky’s reign. Now, his moment had finally, truly arrived. He was prepared. Saber-rattling for Ukraine’s entry into NATO and the EU, he began pushing all of Russia’s red buttons against NATO expansion toward their borders, all of which was music to the ears of Western arms manufacturers. He had been a well-known comedian and actor in Ukraine prior to his 2019 election to the presidency. With this background, he knew the game of political optics. But as well-trained as Zelensky may have been for this moment, he initially hesitated and faltered before his talents really kicked in.

When Russian bombs first started dropping on Kiev in February 2022 (after a failed 2021 Russian bid for a new security arrangement with the West that would have included Ukrainian neutrality), he retreated to his bunker for a few weeks, terrified that Putin might have him taken out, according to former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. Bennett had traveled to Moscow on a peace mission and obtained Putin’s promise not to kill the Ukrainian president. Only when Zelensky was fully assured there was no target on his back did he emerge from his bunker and begin making videos saying he wasn’t afraid.

This was before the West began pumping money and materiel into the conflict, when Ukraine was still having to rely on its existing stockpiles of weapons to fight off the invaders who were then knocking on Kiev’s door and threatening to surround the capital.

In addition to throwing everything his country had into the fight and beginning to wage an often bizarre propaganda campaign, Zelensky had also wisely permitted members of his government to engage in direct negotiations with Russia, brokered by Turkey, to see if there was a way out. By many accounts, this effort was on the verge of success. Russia began withdrawing forces from around Kiev and retreated behind the Donbas frontlines in a gesture of goodwill. A deal involving Ukrainian neutrality and a promise not to join NATO was supposedly ready to sign when British prime minister Boris Johnson intervened to tell the Ukrainians to keep fighting, that help would be on the way.

Almost as if on cue, in April 2022, on the outskirts of Kiev at a place called Bucha, Ukraine and its new Western sponsors gravely announced the discovery of an an alleged civilian massacre they pinned on the Russian forces that had recently retreated. Russia declared it a false-flag operation designed to provide cover for Kiev’s about-face on the talks. Whatever it was (and oddly it’s rarely mentioned today despite the gravity of the allegation) it certainly had the affect of putting a steak through the heart of the negotiations.

From there, it was off to the races.

Zelensky had begun dressing exclusively in an olive-green sweatshirt and casual pants rather than a suit in order to portray an in-the-trenches persona. He enlisted his photogenic wife Olena for glossy publicity shots, such as their famous Vogue cover photo. He hosted celebrities of all stripes — film, media, musical, and political — all in a slick effort to attract money and weapons for the fight against Vladimir Putin’s contract soldiers.

And the money and weapons came pouring in. The geriatric warriors at the Pentagon decided this was the perfect opportunity to sell weapons for their golfing buddies at the top of General Dynamics and Raytheon while bogging Russia down in an Afghanistan-style quagmire, weakening their military, destroying their economy, and, just maybe, toppling Putin in the process. Oh, and killing a lot of Ukrainian young men.

At first, it looked like they might succeed. Following Russia’s withdrawal from Kiev, Ukrainian forces were on the advance for a while, pushing the Russian frontlines back from Kharkiv in the northeast and across the Dnipro River from Kherson in the south, until a relative stalemate was finally reached with Russia still occupying about 20% of Ukrainian territory.

This was not the infamous Ukrainian counteroffensive. That came later. Before it started, though, the prospect of it was leveraged for months to drum up support for more Western weapons, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and anything else they could get the US and Europe to cough up from their armories. Russia used the time to dig in and fortify its frontlines, reorganize its forces, try to learn the lessons of its military setbacks, and adjust its tactics.

It also, in September 2022, held referendums in four of Ukraine’s provinces that it partially occupied, returning results that, if taken at face value, showed overwhelming support for those provinces joining the Russian Federation. Russia promptly formally annexed them, an act not recognized as legitimate by the vast majority of countries. For his part, Zelensky passed a law banning negotiations with Russia, making it illegal, according to the Russians, even for local officials near the war zone to discuss humanitarian corridors with Russian forces.

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When the much-touted offensive finally came, in June 2023, Ukraine certainly had more weapons but they’d also lost a lot of time and the advantage, having telegraphed the operation’s approach for so long. Despite a few superficial gains of scattered villages here and there, the offensive as a whole ran into the brick wall of a much more organized and prepared Russian military machine, with an impenetrable frontline fortified in a layered approach. By the autumn, the whole exercise had essentially petered out.

Now, Zelensky’s brash promises of driving the Russians not only out of Ukraine proper but also out of the Crimean territory they had annexed in 2014 rang hollow. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment and weapons, including drones and missiles that could reach across the Russian border, as well as advanced tanks and APCs, had failed to turn the tide. Zelinsky’s continued pleas for more and more weapons began to sound tone-deaf, even delusional, as more and more Americans and Europeans began questioning the wisdom of throwing good money after bad.

Then, a seismic geopolitical shift occurred that ensured Zelensky’s star had begun a fall from which he will surely not recover: the October 7th attacks and Israel’s subsequent and still ongoing Gaza offensive in response. It was already starting to look like the story of the Ukraine war was going to be everything that happened before the failed counteroffensive and everything after. Now, the US and its allies can also blame the “everything after” on this new, more pressing global event that brought a full stop to the counteroffensive’s end.

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Zelensky tried to react by offering his support to Israel. But, embarrassingly, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government denied his request to visit at a time when Western leaders were streaming into Tel Aviv to kiss Netanyahu’s ring and endorse his plans to kill tens of thousands of Gazan civilians. Bibi was too diplomatic to say it, but he knew that Kiev was a direct competitor for the dwindling artillery shells in Western stockpiles, shells whose production could not be ramped up in time to supply both Ukraine and Israel in their present need.

Now, as Republicans in Washington begin to turn sour on the Ukraine war, knowing their likely nominee, not to mention their constituents, are against it, the Biden Administration has only their lapdog European governments to try to wring more weapons out of for Zelensky’s last, hopeless attempts to stage some kind of turnaround in fortunes. He replaced a general recently. Just this week he mentioned the possibility of yet another counteroffensive, a statement that would be comical if it didn’t threaten the lives of so many remaining Ukrainian youth. This followed a week in which his forces faced one of their biggest defeats yet: the loss of the strategic city of Avdiivka.

And so here we are, two years in. Western leaders gambled big time that blocking peace negotiations and flooding the zone with weapons, coupled with economic sanctions, would bog Russia down militarily and bankrupt its economy. In their best-case scenario, Putin would have lost power in disgrace, possibly opening the door to some future, Western-friendly leadership that would welcome foreign multinational industries back in to exploit the country’s vast, resource-rich frontiers.

Instead, the Russians waited out the counteroffensive, reoriented their trade toward the east and south, and, even by Western accounts, rode out the economic headwinds successfully. Russia’s economy is now one of the fastest-growing in Europe, and projected to remain so. The same can’t be said for western European economies like Britain’s and especially Germany’s. The much-vaunted German industrial machine has almost ground to a halt, plagued by soaring energy costs and other blowback from sanctions. Polls show support for right-wing parties long considered outside the mainstream, such as Alternative for Germany (AfD), is rising so quickly that the progressive German establishment, almost in panic, is considering banning them. Right-wing leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seem to have been vindicated in their opposition to the EU propping up the war.

In the US, Biden’s $60 billion Ukraine aid package languishes in Congress, with no near-term prospect of passage (although, don't estimate the warmongers’ ability to find a way). The old tactics that always seemed to work — calling people Putin apologists and isolationists — just doesn’t seem to be doing it this time. In their desperation to fund the arms dealers they keep trying to paint ridiculous scenarios, such as Russia attacking NATO and western Europe, if we don’t prolong this war that’s already lost — that was lost last year when the counteroffensive made no material gains and ground to a halt.

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These people know that Russia has neither the means nor the will to wage an offensive war against western Europe. They live in a make-believe world in which Russia is the expansionist power rather than the US, the EU, and NATO. In this world, the only reason Russia could possibly be waging war in Ukraine is because Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union and reclaim all its vast territory. What Putin and other Russians say about their motives and objectives is irrelevant. We know what they really mean to do, and the security of the free world is at stake.

What utter claptrap. The Soviet Union has been dead since 1991. For fourteen years after Putin came to power, Russia made no move threatening Ukrainian sovereignty. The US started this mess with another in a long line of failed regime-change operations, the 2014 coup, toppling a duly elected, Russia-friendly government that was also trying to reach out to the West. Now, the whole thing’s blown up in our faces and the Joe Bidens of the world that started it have no one else to blame but themselves.

Zelensky would be a tragic figure had he not been so ruthless, jailing his political opponents, canceling elections, suppressing the Orthodox Church that so many of his countrymen hold dear, abandoning a peace effort on its way to success at the last minute to act as NATO’s proxy warrior. His time on the global stage hasn’t yet come to an end, but some in the audience are already beginning to leave the theater. He was a fresh face in 2019, elected on a promise to find an accommodation with Russia after five years of confrontation and stalemate. He’s aged ten years since then. One gets the sense that he knows now: history will not judge him well.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

But the 1960s are also associated with the peace movement that was a reaction to Vietnam, most fully embraced by the youth of that decade. Inspiration for that can be traced, at least in part, to the hopeful final months of the Kennedy presidency that was so tragically cut short.

A traditional Cold Warrior at the start of his Administration, by 1963 a series of global crises had changed JFK. One of at least two occasions during the Cold War in which the US and the USSR came perilously close to nuclear war, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was Kennedy’s turning point. He and his closest advisors had averted catastrophe by bypassing the military and establishing direct lines of communication with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The end result was a deal: Russia would remove missiles from Cuba and America would remove its own aging missiles from Turkey. We would also pledge not to invade Cuba. It was the first major de-escalatory development to that point in the almost 20-year-old Cold War, and it may have saved humanity.

It may also have contributed to Kennedy’s murder. With a few exceptions, the military and intelligence establishments at the time were made up of particularly hardline Cold Warriors. For many of them, Kennedy’s triumph in ending the missile crisis was the latest in a string of defeats for Kennedy’s America in its standoff with the Soviets. Agreeing to a quid pro quo to them was anathema. Some had actually advocated a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union during the 1961 Berlin Crisis that ended with the building of the Berlin Wall, so fearful were they of a Soviet takeover of West Berlin. Now they considered Kennedy a traitor to his country in a life-and-death struggle.

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As for Kennedy, he seems to have had a sort of spiritual and political awakening as a result of it all. Political realities being what they were in the run-up to an election year in the middle of the Cold War, he had to tread carefully, but he had decided he should be the President to bring an end to that Cold War. In the end, though, he was eliminated. Lyndon Johnson took over, and while direct confrontation with the Soviets didn’t return to pre-Kennedy levels under him, the indirect conflict with them in the form of the Vietnam War soon exploded into the full-fledged tragedy it became known for in history.

The best insight into Kennedy’s transformation comes from reading arguably the most important speech of his presidency: a commencement address on world peace delivered at American University in Washington, D.C. on June 10, 1963, just five-and-a-half months before his death. What’s most remarkable about this speech is how direct and unguarded it was in laying out Kennedy’s vision for ending the Cold War, using typically eloquent Kennedy phraseology.

What’s also remarkable is the degree to which the speech is still relevant today as an indictment of how American foreign policy has developed, or, more accurately, devolved, since 9/11. Some example passages to highlight this:

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

“World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor — it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.”

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.”

What has the US tried to build in the decades since if not a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war”? This has been most keenly felt in the Middle East, where America has propped up dictators, overthrown regimes, and generally bombed, invaded, and occupied multiple countries. And what has it gotten us? A new terror group virtually every decade to fret over, some of which were born in American prison camps from the radicalization that happened there (this is how ISIS was formed in Iraq). Millions killed, fueling hatreds that will create future generations of so-called terrorists. The collapse of American prestige and the coming end of our global dominance, which I wrote about here.

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John Kennedy wasn’t perfect. He was human. Like so many men of power, his marital infidelities were legendary. But he was also arguably the most idealistic President America has had since World War II, and his sacrifice on the alter of peace marked the end of something that can never be fully reclaimed. That sacrifice alone, which he had known his powerful enemies could exact from him at any moment, is reason enough to remember and honor him on the anniversary of his death.

Full text of American University address available here: https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/american-university-19630610.

For the first installment in a planned series on why I think Kennedy’s murder was a conspiracy, see below and watch this space:

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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What is the truth, and where did it go?
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know
"Shut your mouth," said a wise old owl
Business is business, and it's a murder most foul

“Murder Most Foul”, Bob Dylan, 2020

Sixty years on, you’d think JFK anniversaries would have taken on the same kind of feel as other long-ago big events, like Pearl Harbor — still generating interest but with virtually everything worth knowing about it revealed long ago, passed into legend. But as evidenced by recent revelations about the infamous “magic bullet” by a former Secret Service agent, and the fact that the US government still inexcusably refuses to declassify thousands of pages of documents and redactions about the event, the assassination remains an evolving, perplexing enigma.

I have a couple of minor personal connections to the event that helped fuel my interest in it from a young age. My grandfather was part of Kennedy’s security detail the last night he was alive, at the Hotel Texas in downtown Fort Worth. I have a copy of a contemporary floor plan of the hotel’s grand ballroom sent to me by someone in the Fort Worth Police Department more than 20 years ago. “X”s are marked on the plan in ballpoint pen indicating where various officers were to be stationed in the overnight hours while the Kennedys slept. They would be there until the completion of a breakfast speech the president was to give the next morning to more than 500 guests. It would be Kennedy’s last speech. On the floorplan, “F. W. Gilmore” is written in neat cursive script next to a set of doors. The “F” stood for Floyd, my middle name. Having had no male offspring, I, his oldest grandchild, am his namesake.

The police uniform 39-year-old Floyd Gilmore wore for the occasion was not his usual work attire. He was a plainclothes officer most of his career. Having been too young to remember him in uniform in his early career, Thursday, November 21, 1963 is the only time my mother, then 13, remembers him actually looking like a policeman, dressed up to leave for duty at the hotel.

Officer Gilmore’s shift took him through the night and into Friday morning. He was there for JFK’s appearance before an enthusiastic crowd gathered in a light drizzle outside the hotel, and then back inside for the big breakfast speech. There, the First Lady joined the president. She wore a dazzling pink outfit with pillbox hat that would become tragically iconic, and bloodstained, in a matter of hours. Receiving a Stetson hat as a gift from the Chamber of Commerce, the president sheepishly declined to wear it, reluctant to be photographed in a hat. When some in the crowd good-naturedly prodded him, he joked that if they would come to the White House the next Monday, he would put it on there.

Before heading home to catch some sleep, my grandfather asked the Secret Service if he could sit in the president’s chair. It was a black leather one with brass casters, specially made to address his back problems. It traveled with him on trips. They said yes, and he did. He may have been the last person to sit in this chair before Kennedy’s death. It was loaded onto a truck for the 30-mile trip to Dallas immediately after. Photos exist of it sitting empty at the Dallas Trade Mart moments after stunned guests were informed the president would never arrive.

My second personal connection to the assassination involved my mother. As a junior in high school, around 1967, she had a job at the Fort Worth branch of a credit bureau. Potential creditors would contact the agency for reports on the credit history of their applicants and people like my mother would look up this information on cards indexed by name. One day, by chance, she came across the envelope for Lee Oswald, the longtime Fort Worth resident alleged to have been the president’s lone assassin four years earlier. He now resided in the city’s Rose Hill Cemetery. That same year, thieves stole his original headstone.

My mother recalls looking at Oswald’s credit report out of curiosity, finding only two inquiries listed, both by law enforcement agencies. One was by the state police, but the other, dated shortly before the assassination, was by the FBI. While intriguing, this in itself is not a bombshell or something terribly surprising. Even in 1967 it was known that the FBI had interviewed Oswald on at least a couple of occasions in 1962 following his return from the Soviet Union to the United States. At the time, though, the FBI claimed it had closed their file on him in 1962. Later, it was revealed that their interest in Oswald continued right up to the assassination and was much more extensive than originally revealed.

When my mother first told me this anecdote as a teenager, at a time when I was engrossed in a newly released documentary series about the assassination, I was amazed and motivated to consume as much conspiracy material as I could find in the pre-internet era. By the time I reached my early 20s, though, under the influence of a highly publicized anti-conspiracy book by journalist Gerald Posner called Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, I had mentally closed the door on a conspiracy and concluded that the official story must be correct.

Only in the last ten years have I revisited the topic with fresh eyes, new books, and the rich trove of information available online. In doing so, I completely reversed my prior conclusions. I realized that Posner’s 1993 book had deceived me. In my youth and inexperience, I had taken its prolific footnoting and engaging storytelling as evidence of the soundness of its assertions. Now, I realized that the vast majority of its sourcing was from the highly problematic Warren Commission Report, which itself was largely a repackaging of the highly problematic findings of J. Edgar Hoover’s corrupt FBI. Much of what had been released in the ensuing years had either invalidated it or seriously called it into question.

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My conclusions today are essentially this: that Kennedy was murdered in a conspiracy primarily directed by a group of insiders from the CIA and other elements of the national security state, as well as Lyndon Johnson, the plot’s most direct beneficiary. I believe others were involved from the world of organized crime, which was already being leveraged by the CIA in their efforts to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro, from CIA-sponsored anti-Castro Cuban dissident groups, and from certain right-wing Texas oil barons. Some other government officials, including a few elected ones, probably had prior knowledge.

It is relatively uncontroversial today to state that Kennedy faced intense hostility from elements of the government he led and from certain groups in the country. Though he was a decorated US Navy veteran, having been wounded and almost killed in World War II, Kennedy was viewed by some in the military and intelligence ranks as a traitor and a threat to national security. And this was in a period when the struggle with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was at it zenith, considered life-or-death.

While largely aligned with the nation’s military leadership on Vietnam and the wider confrontation with the Soviets early in his presidency, the young Kennedy began making enemies early. The biggest minefields were his handling of the CIA’s failed anti-Castro Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, as well as his later efforts at detente with the Soviets that might have ended the Cold War 25 years earlier. All of this combined to cause outright hatred of him among some of the more reactionary elements in positions of power. His policy directive, delivered in the last months of his life, to begin staged withdrawals of American troops from Vietnam at a time when the military and arms manufacturers wanted to wade deeper into the gathering quagmire could not have helped his standing with the reactionaries.

He tried to heed the warnings of his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower about the danger the military industrial complex posed to civilian government. A failed coup attempt by a group of right-wing military generals against French president Charles de Gaulle in 1961 had brought the danger into sharp focus. Intimate profiles sourced from people in his inner circle reveal he was aware of the danger posed by his occasional standoffs with the Joint Chiefs and the CIA — about their desire to escalate in Vietnam, about their desire to invade Cuba (using false-flag events as a pretext), and about their willingness to consider a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviets. He tried to pick his battles but was stoic about the possibility of it leading to his death. Still, he reportedly remarked to an Administration official that after reelection in ‘64 he wanted to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

Likewise, some top organized crime figures hated JFK and his brother Robert, the Attorney General, for the betrayal they felt at the latter’s high-profile mob-busting campaigns. They had worked to help get JFK elected in 1960, allegedly at the behest of his father, a former businessman and American ambassador who had connections in the mafia. And many Cuban exiles involved in the various CIA operations to overthrow Castro blamed Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which resulted in hundreds of their compatriots getting killed or wounded on the battlefield.

For his part, Lyndon Johnson hated the Kennedy brothers for all kinds of personal reasons. They represented an inherited, pampered East Coast wealth that he despised, having worked his way up from poverty in south Texas. He thought they condescended to him behind his back. They had been an obstacle to his political rise in 1960, and they were likely very close to dumping him from the ticket in ‘64 due in part to a brewing influence-peddling scandal from LBJ’s time in the Senate.

That’s quite a collection of groups, but I disagree with those who say conspiracies involving lots of people are impossible because people can’t keep secrets. For one thing, conspiracies rarely require that all involved have full knowledge of what’s going on. Operations can often be compartmentalized so that individuals know only what they need to know to perform their particular functions, without seeing the big picture. Throughout its history, the CIA, for example, has routinely operated according to this principle.

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Secondly, if there’s anything recent history should have taught us it’s that our society doesn’t generally reward individuals who speak out against government officials and policies. The use of the phrase “conspiracy theorist” as a derogatory label rather than a neutral, descriptive term seems to have emerged around the 1980s or 90s when interest in alternative assassination theories reignited. It has since become ubiquitous as a weapon against dissenters.

Power structures usually discredit or retaliate against people who illuminate truths they want kept in the dark. And there is no bigger power structure than the U.S. government. Courageous people with inside access, or people on their deathbeds with nothing left to lose, sometimes do speak out about government secrets, even about the JFK assassination. But when they do, they’re discredited or ignored. In a “he said, she said” scenario, the vast majority of people will believe the polished words of government officials and their media mouthpieces over some individual portrayed as unhinged for speaking out.

And it’s not difficult for the government and media to turn credible witnesses into crackpots in the public’s mind. For examples one only has to look to the front-line physicians, cardiologists, and other qualified medical personnel demonized during Covid for speaking out about successful treatment protocols or about the dangers of inadequately tested Covid vaccines. Previously considered respected members of their profession, many were fired, had their contracts terminated, or lost their licenses for threatening Pharma profits. Each time that succeeds against another brave whistleblower, many others choose to self-censor, creating a ratcheting cycle of cover-up.

For those who seek with open minds and patience, though, illuminating facts eventually trickle out. In subsequent installments of this series, I’ll provide a high-level overview of some of those facts that, when considered as a whole, have led me to conclude that JFK was killed in a conspiracy directed by disaffected elements of his own national security apparatus. It was likely not some officially sanctioned project that would show up in documents but a clandestine effort “off the books”. In later posts I may focus and go into more detail on some of the more interesting aspects I address in this series.

On the pivotal question of whether I think Lee Oswald killed JFK, either acting alone or in concert with others, I’ll give the best answer I can: I think he was undoubtedly involved in the plot to kill Kennedy in some capacity. It’s pretty clear to me that he’d been a tool of American intelligence since his Soviet defection, which I believe was a false defection. But whether he actually pulled a trigger on November 22, I don’t know. If he did, I don’t think he was the only one and I seriously doubt that any shots he fired were the fatal head shot that killed the president. I definitely think he was shocked and unprepared to find himself in custody as the sole fall guy for Kennedy’s murder. I think he was telling the truth, or some semblance of it, when he exclaimed while being dragged by officers through a jail corridor 36 hours before his own sensational murder, “I’m just a patsy”.

We’ll do well to remember that Oswald was never convicted of anything. The conclusions of a presidential commission of officials hand-picked by the chief beneficiary of the crime is no substitute for a full adversarial trial by jury. In a trial, witnesses are sworn under penalty of perjury to speak the truth and the innocence of the accused must be presumed until his guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The least we can do in this regard is to resist the increasingly common practice of dropping the word “alleged” when referring to Oswald as Kennedy’s assassin.

It is now accepted history that the CIA sponsored coups to overthrow governments almost from the moment of its inception in 1947 and likely continues to do so. In just the first 30 years of its existence, the list included: Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia in 1958 (failed), Congo in 1960, Cuba in 1961 (failed), the Dominican Republic in 1961, Iraq in 1963, South Vietnam in 1963, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1973. But I think this list is incomplete without another entry, the biggest one of them all: the United States in 1963.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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It was no surprise. Just when the Biden Administration needed a new war to come along and pull their chestnuts out of the smoldering failure that is Ukraine, they got one. It all started on October 7 with a strange and unlikely surprise attack, ostensibly conducted by the Palestinian paramilitary group Hamas, from inside the walls of the (normally) most heavily surveilled and barricaded open-air prison in the world. I’m speaking of Gaza, of course.

Continuously occupied by the Israeli military from 1967 until 2005, when they withdrew to rely upon barricades, blockades, “no-go” buffer zones to keep the population subdued, the 141-square-mile Gaza Strip is almost exactly the size of Detroit (the city, not the metro area). But whereas Detroit has a little over 600,000 people, Gaza is home to about 2.3 million people, the vast majority of them barely eking out a living and unable to leave.

It’s essentially an Israeli-controlled slum. I say this not to add to the dehumanization of the Palestinian people that has become commonplace — there are pockets of Gaza that are beautiful — but repeated bombardments by Israel over the years using sophisticated American weapons has reduced many areas to rubble, or shanty-town pockets built in previously bombed-out areas.

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For many people who live there and in the West Bank, the other Palestinian enclave in Israeli-occupied territory being slowly absorbed by Jewish settlements, their heritage is a bitter one. By the time the Palestine War ended following the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, 400 Palestinian towns and villages throughout what had become Israel had been depopulated or wiped off the map to make way for new Israeli towns. 700,000 people — 80 percent of the Palestinian Arabs that had inhabited what became Israel — had been made homeless refugees, either having fled the violence or been driven out. This historic oppression, and all that’s followed in the years since, is referred to as the “Nakba” by Palestinian Arabs. It’s a word that’s not spoken in polite society in Israel.

A minority of Arab residents were able to remain in what became Israel, and today 2.5 million Israeli-Arab citizens — most of them Muslim or Christian — comprise roughly 20% of the country’s population. But fears of a growing Arab population in Israel proper periodically cause the very right-wing political establishment there to panic and adopt policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic dominance over the country and increasing isolation and control over Gaza and the West Bank.

When members of Hamas and other Palestinian paramilitary organizations like Islamic Jihad get fed up with the pressure in Gaza, they periodically lash out with waves of crude rocket attacks that don’t pose a threat of widespread loss of life but do kill and damage or destroy property. In the past, Israel has responded disproportionately. In 2014 after Hamas launched a wave of rocket attacks with little real effect, Israel responded with a heavy bombardment that killed thousands in Gaza, but far fewer than have been killed so far in the current conflict.

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October 7 was an exponentially more serious and deadly development. It was also very odd. Videos showed the use of paragliders and drones to take out or simply fly over modern Israeli defenses. The bulk of the Israeli military were very late to engage, apparently having been pulled from the area around Gaza and moved north. Whatever the real story is of the attack’s origin, at the end of it 1,200 Israeli citizens and soldiers were killed and many injured. Images and videos showing the panic and carnage were hard to watch. Over 200 were reportedly taken back into Gaza as hostages. Remnants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, many of them apparently hard to distinguish from fleeing Israelis, remained in the country to battle with Israeli forces for days, an outcome that would have been inconceivable just a few days before.

Israel’s political and military establishment seemed in disarray and confusion for days. But when they finally pulled it together, the latest in a series of heavy bombardments began for Gaza. As of this writing, over 11,000 Palestinians, unable to leave Gaza, have been killed, including many thousands of children. This is being done using American weapons and logistical support (the US has admitted to operating drones in the skies over Gaza), not to mention US and European political cover for the genocide Israel is waging against these people (there’s no other word for the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands).

Images and videos coming out of Gaza have been both heartbreaking and enraging. The broken bodies of men, women and children have streamed into overwhelmed hospitals at a steady pace. Bloodied, dust-covered kids have drawn their last breaths in the rubble of their homes or on the floors of hospital corridors while others tremble in wide-eyed shock. Many of them are so gruesome and explicit I can’t post them here.

I condemn the attacks that took 1,200 Israeli lives. And I condemn the barbaric reaction of the Israel government and military who have bombed hospitals, ambulances, and residential buildings relentlessly since then, wiping out 11,000 lives and counting. I condemn Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s taking of hundreds of Israelis hostage. And I condemn Israel’s prior arrest and imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians, many of them and their families oblivious as to why they were arrested because Israeli law allows administrative arrest without explanation. Are they not also hostages?

My condemnation and disgust with Israel’s actions are greater for several reasons. The historic background shows them to be the oppressor of the Palestinian people. They created and maintain the conditions that keep the Palestinians destitute and virtually imprisoned, and their constant building of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank further balkanizes and isolates the Arab populations in an area which, according to decades of UN resolutions and US policy, is supposed to be set aside for a Palestinian state.

But most of all, I condemn Israeli actions more than Palestinian ones because Israel does it with my taxpayer dollars using weapons my country’s arms manufacturers get rich off of. For decades we have aided Israel, a modern, wealthy country, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Many of those billions have flowed into the coffers of Boeing and Raytheon and General Dynamics. I’m supposed to feel good about that because some of my money is ultimately flowing back to the US into the bank accounts of these bombmakers.

Or I’m supposed to feel good about it because Israel is populated by God’s chosen people living out a destiny granted to them in biblical accounts thousands of years ago before modern states and modern international humanitarian law existed. I’m supposed to pretend that the modern state that was created in 1948, carved out of land that mostly belonged to others, is uniquely immune from international law because it has a direct tie to an Old Testament-era kingdom that I’m supposed to view as a fulfillment of prophecy.

Or I’m supposed to feel good about it because it’s somehow justified due to the historic crime that was committed against German Jews that rightfully created so much sympathy for their plight and hastened the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine.

Well, two wrongs don’t make a right.

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” - Malcolm X

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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Headlines in recent months have spoken of the dire situation in Ukraine where the regime’s Western sponsors have been unable to supply it with enough shells and ammunition to make any progress in their summer counteroffensive. Western sources have said that existing stockpiles and manufacturing capabilities in the West have simply not been adequate to replenish what Ukraine is using on a daily basis to try and hold the line against Russian forces.

What many don’t know is that one of the stockpiles from which the US has been supplying Ukraine is a massive one in Israel. The US Central Command’s War Reserve Stockpile Ammunition-Israel, or WRSA-I, was, until recently, relatively secret. But those paying attention to the news coverage of Israel’s massive bombardment of Gaza in 2014 might remember talk of it then. There was some controversy at the time about Israel tapping into it, with US permission, to replenish its stockpiles in that conflict.

News reports earlier this year, however, highlighted concerns that the stockpile had been significantly reduced to provide munitions to Ukraine. There was worry that the depletion left Israel vulnerable to an attack by Hezbollah out of Lebanon or Hamas from Gaza, the latter of which has materialized as of this morning.

It’s unclear exactly how depleted the stocks are or whether they will have a material affect on Israel’s ability to fully liberate Israeli settlements and then prosecute a punishing counterattack on Gaza itself, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said they will pursue.

But given the recent deterioration in support for more money and weapons to Ukraine, and the great uncertainty already created by the US budget battles and possible election of Ukraine war skeptic Jim Jordan as US House Speaker, a war in Israel may prove to be the final death blow for America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

The recent rapid decline in America’s global authority caused by its failure in Ukraine and weaponization of the dollar against noncompliant states is about to force its leaders to reassess where their priorities lie. With US government borrowing costs drastically rising after years of profligate spending, and a huge and growing fiscal deficit, the era when America could support conflicts on multiple fronts at once has come to an end, whether its leaders realize it or not.

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In American politics, the only thing more potent than obsession over opposing Russia is obsession over supporting Israel. In a direct conflict between those two priorities, few doubt which one will win out if both can’t be pursued simultaneously. While there is a sizable minority of antiwar Republicans in Congress, virtually none of them will back denying Israel whatever material support it asks for in a large-scale, protracted campaign against its enemies.

Thus, if there was any question about it before this morning, today’s events provide a definitive answer: Ukrainian President Zelensky’s gravy train is about to derail.

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.

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https://weltwoche.ch/daily/theyre-all-afraid/

Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.