© 1984

"Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference ... The Thought Police would get him just the same ... the arrests invariably happened at night ... In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word." — George Orwell, 1984

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What's playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn't just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Talk about victory for Kiev has disappeared as Washington becomes a 'back seat driver'...

The Istanbul agreements - a tentative peace plan agreed between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022 - are being discussed again. However, as they were written at the time they are no longer relevant and are unlikely to be of any use in the future. The realities on the ground and in the hearts and minds of many key people, have changed completely.

Nevertheless, it's no coincidence that talk of negotiations began in Switzerland just as it became clear, to Westerners, that the Ukrainians are unable to make any progress. I am not talking about victory, but about any meaningful success on the battlefield. And thus it has become necessary to somehow limit Russia's potential for success, to prevent it from winning.

This is not coming from Ukraine itself, but rather the enemy with whom we are now really at war. The desire to prevent a Russian victory is behind all these diplomatic machinations.

Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance. All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world's poor. It is an old story, constantly updated. It is one form of official terrorism.

From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today's savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.

In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith wrote in 1962 of the Irish famine, it "left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword." This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later. Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of of one's ancestors' perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.

Today's Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel. Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels? Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.

But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price. Dark furies will descend.

Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.

Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.

Chad has asked US troops to halt activities at an airbase near the capital of N'Djamena, the sole place American military presence in the country, several media outlets reported this week, citing letters sent by the country's armed forces minister, Air Force Chief of Staff Idriss Amine Ahmed.

The letters were reportedly addressed to the US defense attaché. Reports, however, vary as to the contents of the missives. According to Bloomberg, which claimed to have seen one of the letters and verified it with a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Chad has merely alerted the US "to stop their activity at the base." However, earlier in the week CNN, citing intelligence sources, reported that in a separate letter the US military was ordered to clear out of the Adji Kossei Air undefined entirely. Chad also reportedly threatened to cancel the Status of Forces Agreement, the document that governs how the US military can operate in the country.

Tehran's retaliatory attack may not have caused much destruction, but it was far from a failure

On the night of April 14, Iran and its proxy forces launched a series of cruise missile and kamikaze drone strikes on Israeli territory. The attacks did not come as a surprise. Tehran had warned that it would respond to the Israeli airstrike on Iran's consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, which killed several high-ranking officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two generals. The retaliatory strike was called Operation True Promise.

There is still much debate on whether Iran's retaliatory strike was successful. Most military experts agree that there was nothing unusual about Tehran's actions, except that this was Iran's first direct attack on Israel. From a technical point of view, the strategy was simple and correct: Iran first suppressed the enemy's air defense systems with drones and then launched hypersonic missiles which the Israelis and Americans were not able to intercept. Incidentally, in light of this, Ukraine's statements about shooting down Russian Kinzhal hypersonic missiles sound ridiculous.

Cancelling sanctions relief and kicking out everyone else looks like a setup for an arranged marriage with Western oil giants...

Six months ago, high oil prices in America amid Western sanctions against Russian oil and gas sent the Biden administration scrambling for more supply that it could control - and ideally profit from.

Washington couldn't influence Russia and Saudi-led OPEC, or relent on the ideologically-driven sanctions idiocy, but it could at least maybe dial up or down the supply to mitigate domestic political fallout of any resulting price increases. So the White House considered the cards it could play, and offered Venezuela a deal to lift the American boot off its neck. It's probably just a coincidence that the country happens to have the largest oil reserves on the planet - largely untapped.

There's also the added bonus of rapprochement to counter China and Russia's advances in Washington's backyard, or mitigating the influx of migrants from Venezuela to the US as a result of people fleeing a country struggling under a seemingly endless embargo.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has said this was the message he relayed to American counterpart Antony Blinken...

Ukraine does not have a 'Plan B' for the conflict with Russia if the US Congress refuses to approve more military aid for Kiev, Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has said.

The diplomat told Ukraine's Rada broadcaster on Thursday that this was the message he had impressed on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier the same day, when the pair met on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers' summit on the Italian island of Capri.

The administration of US President Joe Biden has been unable to push another $60 billion in assistance for Kiev through Congress since the autumn, amid a bitter standoff between Democrats and Republicans over immigration and border security.

House Speaker Mike Johnson announced earlier this week that he will put a standalone Ukraine aid bill to a vote on Saturday, while Biden has promised to sign the legislation if it passes.

The president's latest blunder comes as a majority of Americans doubt his mental capacity for office

US President Joe Biden has implored his supporters to choose "freedom over democracy," in the latest of a long series of gaffes and verbal blunders. Conservative pundits have viewed the incident as more proof that the 81-year-old is unfit for office.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday, Biden rattled off a string of buzzwords as he asked voters whether they would choose him over former President Donald Trump in November's presidential election.

"Are you ready to choose unity over division? Dignity over demolition? Truth over lies? Are you ready to choose freedom over democracy? Because that's America," he exclaimed.

Overnight explosions at an Iraqi military base not far from the capital Baghdad on Saturday left one person dead and at least eight others with degrees of injuries, officials said.

The explosions occurred around 1 a.m. local time Saturday, killing and injuring members of an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia, the Popular Mobilization Forces.

"An explosion and fire occurred inside (Camp Kalsu) north of Babil Governorate on the international line, which includes the headquarters of the army, police, and Popular Mobilization Forces," Iraq's Security Media Cell said on X.

"A specialized higher technical committee from civil defense and other relevant groups was formed to determine the causes of the explosion and fires at the site and surroundings of the accident area."

Given the fact that Candace Owens has received much outrage at her suggestion (and lost her job over the kerfuffle that followed) that Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emanuel Macron, is in fact a man who transitioned into a "woman," it might serve our readers to understand the data behind Ms. Owens' assertion. The facts of this case are rather startling, to say the least. The video Ms. Owens linked has also long been scrubbed. Why, if it is all fake news?

So, here is a primer of the main arguments.

The questioning of Brigitte Macron's real sex began back in 2021, when the journal, Faits & Documents, published by Xavier Poussard, began a five-part series, entitled, "Le Mystère Brigitte Macron" ["The Mystery of Brigitte Macron"]. The investigation, which had taken three years, was done by Natacha Rey and then furthered by Mr. Poussard. By the end of 2021, there was a great buzz about all this in France.

The main arguments presented in the journal, with much documentary proof, may be summarized as follows:

1. Brigitte Macron was born a man and transitioned into a woman. There is a mysterious video from 1977, which shows a man shadowed out, calling himself "Veronique," who had begun to live as a woman. Documented analysis shows that Veronique's voice is remarkably like that of Mrs. Emmanuel Macron (to avoid confusion hereon in, we shall only use this designation).

2. This initial hint led to a fuller investigation into the background of Mrs. Macron, whose given name is "Brigitte," and whose family name is Trogneux; the family hails from the city of Amiens. What investigators found next was rather unexpected. There were two Trogneux children, a brother named Jean-Michel (born in 1945) and a sister named Brigitte (born in 1953). But this sister (Brigitte) supposedly died in 1961. And the photos of the sister, the late Brigitte, look nothing like the present Mrs. Macron who actually is a dead-ringer for the brother, Jean-Michel. So, what exactly is going on here? A dead Brigitte, and a Mrs. Macron who looks like the brother?