I agree with Professor Jack Goldsmith that if the media reporting is accurate, this military operation is a “dishonorable strike” that is illegal under international law and the laws of war. This sentiment and logic was echoed by former U.S. military lawyers. The illegal order also runs contrary to longstanding U.S. military doctrine and U.S. Navy Regulations governing the treatment of survivors at sea. (See, also, this analysis by Michael Schmitt, Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman.)

But beyond the troubling legal issues associated with the strike, killing unarmed and vulnerable survivors is stunningly shortsighted. Killing survivors of a military strike is not just patently illegal and morally reprehensible; it is strategically reckless.

The United States, which has military forces deployed around the globe, cannot build a safer world for its own servicemembers by discarding basic laws of war. History shows that when America blatantly abandons humane norms and the law of war, it ultimately endangers its own people.

~ Full article…

Wachowski—who has made it crystal clear in the past that The Matrix is a trans allegory—also noted that “Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything. They appropriate left-wing points of view, and they mutate them for their own propaganda, for their own to obfuscate what the real message is … That is what fascism does. It takes these things, these ideas that are generally acknowledged as questions or investigations or truisms about humanity and life, and they turn them [into] something else so that they remove the weight of what those things represent.”

~ Full article…

The Matrix Was Intended to Be a Trans Story, Says Lilly Wachowski

At its core, The Matrix is also the story of a person who realizes they’re trapped in a place where they can’t be themselves, escapes, and is reborn in a new world as their true self. And considering the film was written and directed by two trans women, it’s no surprise that Lilly Wachowski says telling a trans allegory was the intent of the film all along.

Lisa Doe versus Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn, Coexecutors of Epstein Estate

NES, LLC, 
Financial Trust Company, Inc. (FTC), 
 Darren K. Indyke and Richard D. Kahn, HBRK Associates, Inc. 

Reuters “Two of Jeffrey Epstein’s close advisers can face victims’ claims”
By Jonathan Stempel
August 5, 2024

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian in Manhattan rejected arguments by Epstein’s former personal lawyer Darren Indyke and former accountant Richard Kahn that victims cannot pursue a class action because many agreed not to sue after settling claims against Epstein’s estate.

“… Indyke’s lawyer Daniel Weiner said they “emphatically reject” accusations they knew about or were complicit in Epstein’s wrongdoing.”

“Victims said Indyke and Kahn helped Epstein create a complex web of corporations and bank accounts that let him hide his abuses and pay victims and recruiters, while leaving them “richly compensated” for their work.
McCawley and another lawyer for the victims, David Boies, helped obtain $365 million of settlements with JPMorgan Chase (JPM.N)
, opens new tab and Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE), opens new tab after accusing them of missing red flags about Epstein, once a lucrative client.

~ Full post…

Carroll Quigley’s account of the Milner/Rhodes network advances a clear causal line: to avoid a western land war and to husband imperial strength, an influential British elite faction sought to appease Germany in the west and encourage its expansion eastward, which required neutralizing France’s treaty‑enforcement posture and devaluing the eastern alliances France had built. This policy was propagated through press campaigns, research institutes, salon diplomacy, and personnel placements, reaching its apogee at Munich. It failed because Hitler’s ambitions were not territorially modular and because dismantling eastern buffers removed the very conditions that might have contained him. The wager that Germany could be redirected into a German–Soviet collision without engulfing the west proved catastrophically wrong; the west was engulfed anyway, now with worse odds.

Whether one treats Quigley’s network map as airtight or as an overdrawn conspiracy of proximity, the logic he uncovers—sidelining France to point Hitler east—offers a powerful lens on the appeasement era. It shows how grand designs can fuse with institutional echo chambers, and how, in the hands of capable men convinced of their mission, a strategy meant to avert catastrophe can prepare it instead.

~ Full article…

To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross oversimplification of a concept they held as precious”—the concept, that is, of fairy stories. Some might brush away their opinions as two Oxford dons gazing down their noses at American mass entertainment. As Tolkien scholar Trish Lambert puts it, “I think it grated on them that he [Disney] was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct.”

“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Greydanus at the National Catholic Register, “it would be impossible to imagine” these two authors “being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on pluralizing the word), also have funny names (derived, however, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to separate his dwarves from the common run of children’s story dwarfs.

Tolkien would later express his reverence for fairy tales in a scholarly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” in which he attempts to define the genre, parsing its differences from other types of marvelous fiction, and writing with awe, “the realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high.” These are stories to be taken seriously, not dumbed-down and infantilized as he believed they had been. “The association of children and fairy-stories,” he writes, “is an accident of our domestic history.”

~ Full article…

Trump’s most original idea? Redefining antisemitism

Rooting out terrorism and antisemitism was the supposed reason that plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, after she coauthored an op-ed calling on Tufts University to divest from companies with ties to Israel due to the killing and starvation of Palestinian civilians. There is an international movement to boycott, sanction and divest from Israel, but in the United States, President Donald Trump is imperiling the freedom even to publicly discuss such ideas, which should, in effect, be considered a test case for his larger attack on free speech. So far, the test is going well for Trump.

In 2020, which seems a long time ago, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, released a blueprint for what it called “a national strategy to combat antisemitism” by addressing what it described as “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement.’” In essence, and in what’s amounted to an extraordinarily effective work of political theater that has been sold to my own state, Massachusetts, among other places, that foundation dubbed its political opponents “supporters of terrorism.” It also labeled organizations working in opposition to its agenda a “terrorist support network” and claimed for itself the noble mantle of “combating antisemitism” — even as it deftly redefined antisemitism from hatred of Jewish people to criticism of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Trump has put the Heritage Foundation strategy into action and gone even further.

~ Full article…

Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup by John Dinges. University of California Press, 2025. 287 pages.

Their fate reminds us of the long-term consequences that permitting lawlessness and lies from a government can have, how those qualities can corrupt the moral compass of officials who, through their inaction and silence, become complicit in the repression. Today, the United States itself veers toward authoritarianism, abrogates civil rights, and persecutes its opponents. An unavoidable question arises: are we that far from turning a tale about Chile yesterday into a story about America today?

~ Full article…

Do any of these players know that the UAE severely curtails speech, imprisons dissidents, and ties a migrant worker’s legal residency and work permit directly to an employer in a system resembling slavery?

Do they know that the UAE criminalizes and severely punishes anyone who manifests as LGBTQ?

Do they know that the UAE funds the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a descendant of the janjaweed, in a proxy war for Sudan’s vast gold reserves and agricultural land?

Do they know that the RSF are responsible for war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and atrocities that many now label as genocide?

Do they know that the RSF are geographically African but Arab-speaking and Arab-identifying forces murdering Africans in Sudan’s Darfur Region?
Using a Black sport to whitewash an African genocide

The cruelest irony of the NBA/Emirates partnership is that they are using a Black sport to whitewash the criminal monarchy’s proxy genocide of Africans.

~ Full article…

The White Coat Waste Project uncovered 10 existing USDA contracts to work on mRNA vaccines, including one that is studying Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), a highly pathogenic tick-borne disease with a 10-40% case fatality rate. The research grant is given to the Agricultural Research Service in Manhattan, Kansas, in combination with researchers at the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), which was formerly on Plum Island, where researchers were studying Lyme disease near Lyme, Connecticut, where the first outbreak occurred.

The research involves multiple partner facilities, including UC Davis and Texas Tech, where tick colonies have been established after they have procured the ticks from African countries where the disease is endemic. CCHF has never been found in the United States – it is endemic to Africa, Asia, and some European countries, including southern Russia.
[…]
EcoHealth Alliance, the research organization headed by now debarred Peter Daszak, also received funding from the Department of Defense to research CCHF to “combat weapons of mass destruction.” That grant was $3.7 million and ran from 2020 to 2024. The recently uncovered contract started in 2021 and ends in March of 2026 with an unknown contract amount.

While the EcoHealth Alliance grant to study CCHF mentions the purpose of combating weapons of mass destruction, this ongoing USDA research is said to be conducted for biodefense purposes. Specifically, the goal is to determine the “risk for the establishment of tick host vectors in the United States considering climatic and ecological conditions.” The tick species and the disease are only endemic in the eastern hemisphere.

~ Full article…

Throughout the complicated and often contradictory cultural milieu that shaped turn-of-the-century Vienna—which included Jewish and non-Jewish artistic patrons who were both friends and combatants, Jewish and non-Jewish artists who were supported by these clients, and the rhetoric surrounding the Secession’s goût juif—Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele began to include esoteric hand gestures in their various portraits, including self-portraits (see figs. 3–5, 8–10, 13–17). Deciphering the “secret” language of these signs is the primary aim of this study, in which I argue that the three Expressionists were creating images that incorporated Jewish and Masonic hand gestures in order to “speak” a language of exclusivity, and thus modernity. In so doing, meaning was thus visually communicable between themselves and their sitters, as well as to erudite viewers who were cognizant of these historic “gang signs.” This contention suggests, moreover, that Kokoschka, Oppenheimer, and Schiele had developed a niche lexicon of signs by 1910 based on two separate, yet interconnected, concepts: the mysteries encoded in the gestures of the Freemasons; and an awareness that “talking with one’s hands”—as discussed, for example, by the Austrian-Jewish writer Elisabeth Freundlich (1906–2001)—persisted as a cultural stereotype of Jews in fin-de-siècle Vienna.[15] Importantly, the Expressionists laid claim to these Jewish and Masonic gestures at a moment when the search for “greater truths” was key to their avant-garde agendas, and when Kraus—for better or for worse—had already associated the Secession-led art market with a “Jewish taste.”
[…]
The present essay endeavors to specifically demonstrate that each of these artists (though, as I will show, Oppenheimer and Schiele were more prolific in this arena than Kokoschka) worked in tandem to create an expressive language that iconographically referenced two very specific hand gestures. The first drew upon the Jewish symbology of the Nesi’at Kapayim, or “raising of the hands,” which is still enacted today as part of the Aaronic priestly blessing known as the Birkat Kohanim (ברכת כהנים in Hebrew; see fig. 6). During this benediction, a Kohen (or Jewish priest) invokes the Hebrew letter Shin (ש) by forming his or her fingers into the telltale “W” sign (the thumb serves as one side of the letter), thus drawing a visual reference to the Hebraic word for Shaddai, or “God Almighty.” The second gesture—the Masonic upside-down “M” sign, which also resembles the Shin—was historically used by secular and religious Freemasons to show members that they too were part of the secret fraternity (fig. 7). The “M” gesture, in turn, conceivably developed from the Kabbalah—the ancient source of Judaic mysticism and esoteric teachings—given that the origins and “secrets” of Freemasonry were already connected to Judaism by the time the society was officially formed in the eighteenth century.[17]

~ Full article…