Helen Dale, lawyer and award-winning author of 3 novels, including The Hand that Signed the Paper, writes at Law & Liberty and Not On Your Team, But Always Fair. Her two-novel series Kingdom of the Wicked is an alternative history of Roman-occupied Judea in the first century and the arrest and trial of Yeshua ben Yusuf, an enigmatic man with a large following, including some radical religious zealots. If you like literary and genre fiction — and Roman history — you won't be able to put these ones down. They've got soldiers, lawyers, terrorists, and biomechs; action, romance, legal proceedings, and great characters.

Today on MindMatters we talk about the books and how Helen came to write them, blending Roman morality with modern technology, and the interesting directions that might have gone. Other topics: political systems and their compatibility with different nations and cultures, Lorenzo Warby's articles on Helen's Substack, a policy approach to countering Woke ideology, Cluster B's and ponerology in modern and historical politics, what Hannah Arendt got wrong about totalitarianism, and how lobbyists are the absolute worst.


Running Time: 01:47:15

Download: MP3 — 149 MB

Following the 'high' of UFO-balloon-gate, US imperial policy returned to Earth this week as Western leaders paraded their psychotic embrace of global hegemony at the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC).

This time last year, the annual pow-wow ended with Zelensky floating the idea of Kiev acquiring nuclear weapons, at which point Russia declared its recognition of the breakaway Donbass republics and launched a 'special military operation' to 'denazify' Ukraine.

Statements made by Western leaders at MSC 2023 - by the British PM in particular - suggest the Anglo-Americans remain committed to fighting to the last Ukrainian to achieve 'existential victory' over Russia - and if that requires upending civilization and causing suffering on a gargantuan scale, then so be it.


Running Time: 01:32:42

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The start of 2023 has been marked by heavy snow, unseasonably cold temperatures, and wetter-than-expected weather for the season. All this while the manufactured food and energy crisis continues to deepen in the West, thanks to the deluded globalist psychopaths.

Extreme weather hit California pretty hard this month: A bomb cyclone, severe flooding, mudslides, power outages, walls of snow in Soda Spring, and a magnitude 4.2 earthquake with an epicenter in offshore Malibu.

Denver, Colorado, saw 13 inches of snow this month, making it the 15th snowiest January on record. Jackson County registered -5°C, and the Purgatory ski resort recorded 23 inches of snow in 24 hours.

Northern Arizona got more than two feet of snow in 48 hours. It was the 25th largest snow event and broke the single-day snowfall record on Sunday.

Nevada was hit by winter storms that brought heavy rain, high winds, and significant snowfall at higher elevations. Las Vegas desert was also covered in white, a strange sight for the area.

More than 41 inches of snow fell at Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah, forcing a closure due to extreme weather conditions. The resort also recorded nearly 8 inches of rain.

Heavy snow also disrupted normal life in Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and Mallorca. Mallorca was covered by its largest snowfall in more than five years.

China's northernmost city, Mohe, was hit by an all-time record of -53°C, the lowest ever recorded. The local officials worked overtime to ensure heating and water services. This comes days after temperatures plunged to -50°C in Russia's Yakutsk.

Central Asia also suffered a harsh January. In Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan recorded unusual levels of snow, that collapsed power poles and trees, blocked main roads, and burst water pipes. The temperatures in Kazakhstan reached a chilling -30°C.

The Middle East was also caught off guard by colder-than-usual temperatures and snow. Tens of thousands of Iranians were left without gas amid snow and freezing conditions, and Afghanistan temperatures plummeted as low as -33°C, combined with widespread snowfall, freezing gusts, and regular power outages. At least 166 people died due to the cold wave.

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Ellie continued to batter northern Australia this month. Heavy rain turned roads into rivers, thousands of cattle got lost or died, and boats were the only form of transportation in some counties. Western Australia was also hit hard by heavy rain and floods. 38 homes and 37 businesses were destroyed, with an additional 121 homes damaged. In some cases, the damage is so severe that will require long-term rebuilding efforts. The floods have also caused significant damage to infrastructure and transportation routes.

New Zealand's largest city declared a state of emergency after torrential rains caused widespread flooding and evacuations. Heavy floods washed away houses, blocked roads, and knocked out power. The city received 75% of its usual summer rainfall in just 15 hours.

Latvia experienced its worst flooding since 1981, forcing residents of central areas to evacuate their homes. Meanwhile, large chunks of ice that drifted from Belkarus caused the water level to rise, while also putting pressure on a new dam.

Other noteworthy events this month:

• Sumatra, Indonesia: Heavy flooding leaves 3 dead and 15,000 homes damaged
• Johor and Pahang, Malaysia: More than 4,000 were displaced by flooding caused by 17 inches of rain in 24 hours
• North Sulawesi, Indonesia: Nearly 18 inches of rain in 48 hours left 3-meter floods in some areas.
• Zambia - Non-stop rains caused catastrophic flooding in southern and central provinces.

And things start to get rocky! A 5.9 Mag earthquake struck northwestern Iran, killing at least seven people and injuring 440.

All this and more in our SOTT Earth Changes Summary for January 2023:

The Pentagon is quietly transitioning high-altitude balloon projects to the military services.
The Pentagon is working on a new plan to rise above competition from China and Russia: balloons.

The high-altitude inflatables, flying at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet, would be added to the Pentagon's extensive surveillance network and could eventually be used to track hypersonic weapons.

The idea may sound like science fiction, but Pentagon budget documents signal the technology is moving from DoD's scientific community to the military services.

"High or very high-altitude platforms have a lot of benefit for their endurance on station, maneuverability and also flexibility for multiple payloads," said Tom Karako, senior fellow for the International Security Program and Missile Defense Project director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Pentagon continues to invest in these projects because the military could use the balloons for various missions.

What in the name of God is going on in America?

Following last week's comically bizarre 'Chinese Spy Balloon Shoot-down', this weekend the Pentagon declared that it shot down two MORE 'Chinese balloons' over Alaska and Canada, and that it scrambled fighter jets to investigate a 'radar anomaly' over Montana. (And, since airing, a FOURTH balloon has been downed by the US Air Force over Lake Huron.)

What's different this week is that the Pentagon isn't exactly confirming that these latest 'objects' are balloons, much less Chinese 'spy' ones. In fact, the media and govt spokespeople seem to be deliberately insinuating that these 'unidentified objects' are... extraterrestrial in origin!

In this NewsReal, Joe & Niall suggest that the USA is NOT 'under attack' - from either China or aliens. More likely, the Pentagon is knocking out Chinese versions of the very same network of stratospheric spy balloons the US government sent up for global military surveillance many years ago. Seen in this context, the Pentagon is 'taking out' a competing sub-space ISR network under the guise of an 'alien invasion', thereby 'setting the theater' for an upcoming proxy war with China...


Running Time: 01:28:05

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Reviewing Michael Rectenwald's excellent new book

Michael Rectenwald's new book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda isn't just his best book yet. It's one of the most important books of this generation.

Part of this has to do with Rectenwald's own tonic intersectionality — what makes him the man for the job. He's a true scholar — the type that mostly used to exist, back when the word really meant something. He knows how to think, and he knows how to write: clearly, effectively, and comprehensively. He reads the primary sources, draws out the connections that aren't clear when they're read in isolation, and thus provides us with a key to the jargon and misleading doublespeak. He was a Marxist academic, so he's intimately aware of the philosophical foundations of the ideologies in question. He ties together all the threads. He's also intellectually fearless, which, when combined with critical thought, packs a powerful punch. In Rectenwald's hands, writing about semi-open conspiracies like the Great Reset leaves the domain of crazy people and enters a realm of smart sophistication. And, of course, he wrote the foreword to the new edition of Political Ponerology, so he knows what's really going on.

The other part has to do with his subject matter. The Great Reset isn't just a "conspiracy theory," or a current political fad of ineffectual elites. It is a century-long program tying together a handful of the biggest political programs and cultural trends of our times: climate change catastrophism, emerging economic systems, global governance, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, transhumanism, Woke ideology (or as we Neo-Gonzos cheekily like to call it, Marxcissism). It involves national and economic leaders, international organizations, big corporations, and activists. And this has all come together in the last three years of the covid crisis, which Klaus Schwab and his associates saw as an "opportunity" to further implement their already pre-ordained plans for "a fairer, greener future." These are big ideas, relevant to everyone.

I want you to buy the book and read it, so my summary will be relatively brief. After distilling down the content of each section, I'll draw out some of the points of particular relevance for my Substack's main theme: political ponerology.

The New York Times called it a "mystery," but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret — until now
The U.S. Navy's Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name — down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center's complex is as nondescript as its location — a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.

The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good — using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance — as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.

Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.

Tonic intersectionality is what makes everything awesome

All the best words get stolen from us. Woke now means its opposite. Therapy used to mean, well, therapy. Now it means castration. Inclusion used to be an inviting word. Now it pretty much means its opposite, self-censorship, and copy-and-paste thinking. "Gaslight" used to mean something. Now it just means someone is saying something you disagree with. Toxic used to be a good word too. No longer. Rainbows used to be cool.

Yes, Marxcissism is where words go to DIE.¹

But one of my favorite words has been so maligned that I feel something must be done to rehabilitate its battered and flayed corpse: diversity. Not only is it the source of everything good in life, it's one of the basic principles underlying all of creation. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Over at The Radical American Mind, Grant Smith posted something you should definitely check out:

On February 16, 2022, a full week before Putin sent combat troops into Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army began the heavy bombardment of the area (in east Ukraine) occupied by mainly ethnic Russians. Officials from the Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were located in the vicinity at the time and kept a record of the shelling as it took place. What the OSCE discovered was that the bombardment dramatically intensified as the week went on until it reached a peak on February 19, when a total of 2,026 artillery strikes were recorded. Keep in mind, the Ukrainian Army was, in fact, shelling civilian areas along the Line of Contact that were occupied by other Ukrainians.

We want to emphasize that the officials from the OSCE were operating in their professional capacity gathering first-hand evidence of shelling in the area. What their data shows is that Ukrainian Forces were bombing and killing their own people. This has all been documented and has not been challenged.

So, the question we must all ask ourselves is this: Is the bombardment and slaughter of one's own people an 'act of war'?

A massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck central Türkiye early Monday morning, followed by several powerful aftershocks that were felt all across the region. The jolts caused widespread destruction, knocking down multiple residential buildings, according to disturbing footage captured by survivors.

The most powerful jolt, measured at 7.8 by USGS and 7.4 by Turkish disaster management agency, happened around 4:17 am local time, and was centered some 33 kilometers northeast from Gaziantep, a major provincial capital with a population of over 2 million people.

There was no immediate estimate of total casualties, but according to Turkish media reports dozens are feared killed, as multiple buildings were damaged or completely destroyed in the province of Gaziantep and across the neighboring Diyarbakir, Osmaniye and Malatya, with their residents trapped under the rubble.