United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in his speech at the High-Level Segment of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024, attempted to characterize today’s world as one in which the quest for multipolarity has triggered a “purgatory of polarity”, in which impunity would reign and the rules and protection mechanisms established in international law would not be respected. For, “in that purgatory, more and more countries are filling the spaces of geopolitical divisions and doing whatever they want without any accountability”.

This narrative creates the misleading perception that it is multipolarity that is responsible for the world being plunged into chaos, due to the deliberate failure of the powers of collective imperialism to comply with the rules established by the United Nations Charter. It is as if the emerging powers, or those peoples of the world who see multipolarity as an opportunity to exist, were responsible for the imperialist powers’ indiscriminate violence, genocide, expansionism, and the dismantling of the international security architecture that has brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict.

The Main Threat To US Imperialism

In his reflections on deterrence in international security, retired US General Michael P. C. Carns argued that the main threat and greatest challenge facing the United States today is the existence of a multipolar world in which hundreds of actors with different types and levels of power, within the framework of a set of cross-cutting alliances, make the world more “dangerous and volatile” than in previous contexts of bipolarity.
[…]
The geopolitical battle is in full swing, and whoever controls the narrative will be able to direct the consolidation of a new multipolar world order, because in this world of exponential subjectivities, it is not enough to “be good”; one also has to appear to be so, and one must have the cultural and communicational strength so that the peoples of the world can be aware of this geopolitical battle for the defense of a new international power correlation and the democratization of the decision-making process, projecting the interests and cultural values of the diversity represented by the Global South.

~ Full article…

From: 2025 RAND Wrap-Up: Research That Defined Our Year

…In 2025, that meant helping to build an even stronger, more ready, and more effective military. It meant helping decisionmakers understand and prepare for the risks and opportunities of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. It meant offering innovative analysis and ideas to rebuild Gaza, achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine, and compete with China. It meant finding ways to reduce the federal debt burden and save American taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Here are just some of the ways RAND helped policymakers answer the challenges of 2025.

Strengthening the U.S. Military…

The protests of that night became an annual tradition. The killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos on December 6, 2008, carries significant weight for Greek society. For many, it remains a deep collective wound, marking a turning point in the country’s modern history. The death of a 15-year-old at the hands of a police officer is seen as a stark reminder of how fragile the relationship between citizens and state authorities can be.

It has also become a symbol of social injustice and public frustration. The unrest that followed in December 2008 reflected not only anger over the incident itself but also the broader tension of a society already under economic and political strain. Each year, the anniversary reignites discussions about police conduct, youth rights, institutional accountability, and how societies should respond to violence.

For younger generations in particular, December 6 has become a day associated with civic engagement and political awareness, a moment to remember the need for justice and active participation in public life.

~ Full article…

December 15, 2008
Riots or revolt? – An insight into why Greece is now in flames

Many Greek journalists and foreign correspondents have ‘grokked’ the situation. Some, like Brady Kiesling, the former diplomat who resigned his post at the embassy of the United States in Athens in protest against the policies of the Bush regime, deserve kudos for their astute and accurate assessments of the situation.

Others may be in denial. How else to explain the reports by the likes of John Carr. In his early articles on the Athens riots to British newspapers Mr. Carr reported the official police version of events and gave no say to the eyewitnesses whose version of the event was available from the first moments of this tragedy. Mr. Carr’s depiction of Exarchia as a ‘heavily policed district’ is indicative of how out of touch he is with Athenian reality. One television commentator recently described the Exarchia police station as a precinct with the “globally exclusive” distinction of existing primarily to defend itself – the police station to which the man who pulled the trigger of his gun on that fateful evening reported to. What the commentator meant was that it is not actively defending the precinct’s constituents. If Mr. Carr had bothered to ask how ‘heavily policed’ the residents of Exarchia feel he might be surprised to find how many have called the police to request help while break-ins to their homes were in progress only to be told it was too dangerous an area for police to intervene. It is an area where police only enter in squads and where undercover law enforcement officers have been assaulted and have even had their weapons stolen. It is an area where a few months ago local groups initiated identification spot-checks to weed out undercover policemen in their midst.

Mr. Carr and his ilk report from a position of haughty condescension. One remark of his – something to the effect that hooliganism is a 3,000-year-old Greek tradition – drew caustic comments from television news anchor Olga Tremi and her guest, MP Fotini Pipili.

Other British and American journalists have commented on the ‘fragility’ of democracy in the land that spawned this system. Maybe they should take stock of the civil liberties that have evaporated in their own lands. Where people may be legally disappeared in the dead of night to military camps in the Caribbean, where people may be shot, beaten or tased to death by overzealous enforcers of the ‘law’, where foreign nationals may be shot in cold blood while taking a ride in the subway, and where business is expected to continue as usual after such atrocities occur.

What Mr. Carr refuses to grasp is that the youth of Greece (and of several other countries if recent events are taken into account) is fed up with the current paradigm of ‘democratic’ regimes. The ‘free world’ is taking stock of its situation. It is taking a long hard look in the mirror and realizing that the enemy may indeed be its own self. It is understanding that freedom is a privilege accorded to a few of its elite and denied to its vast majority. This reality check may have pushed many to the realization that they have more to lose than to gain by perpetuating the current order of things.

It was the collapse of a Spanish bank – named Banco Popular – in 2017 that led Gareth Gore to first investigate the organization. By 2024, he was releasing Opus, the most recent widescale exposé into the machinations and influence of Opus Dei.7

“Like everyone else,” when he first went to Spain to report on what seemed like just another bank crisis, he said, he “missed the most important part of the story:”8 Following the bank’s collapse, most shareholders, he noted, had tried to recover their money. Most, but one.9

This shareholder, known as La Sindicatura, held approximately 10% of the bank, amounting to nearly EUR 2 billion.10 Instead of trying to recoup its costs, this shareholder was working to dissolve itself and disappear. Gore quickly discovered that, behind the Syndicate, were dozens of companies and foundations. The significant dividends being earned by these organizations were being distributed through “support companies” to a network of schools, residences, and retreat centers, all leading back to one organization: Opus Dei.

In fact, at the time of the bank’s collapse, Opus Dei had been in control of the bank’s board for around two decades.11 Over the years, a range of services had been made available to it, including currency movements, shell companies, and secret accounts in Panama and Switzerland.12 The bank had also set up a charitable foundation to which 5% of its profits had been dedicated each year, amounting to USD 150 million total. The bank’s chairman, a member of the Work (Opus Dei’s members and people familiar with it often refer to it simply as the Work), Luis-Valls Taberner, insisted the money was being used for “good causes”; most of the money had gone to projects run by Opus Dei.

~ Full article…

Born in 1760 (arguably also the birth year of the Revolution), Henri de Saint-Simon was a French theorist best known for, early on, identifying the industrial class as the group that must be protected to bring about a properly functioning economy and society. This was a philosophy that sought to learn from the Enlightenment era but applied to the industrial age amid the rise of productivity, individualism, and other forces spurred by capitalist production. This idealized vision of “the industrial society” not only condemned idleness of any kind, but also lacked any materialist basis, and so while Saint-Simon’s ideas influenced Karl Marx and others, this version of utopian socialism was one that ignored class struggle in favor of an industrialized vision of meritocracy.

Saint-Simon also learned from the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, a key Enlightenment figure who, alongside championing the power of ideas and not people to lead the charge of the future, solidified for Saint-Simon the value of a rationalist determinism about human progress. He predicted that only this form of meritocratic industrialism would provide Western society with a viable future and that a proper hierarchy would be required to make it happen, with the decision-making industrial class at the top. As Walter M. Simon’s translation of Oeuvres de Saint-Simon & D’Enfantin (1865) shows, this belief in a deterministic causality lent his predictions their power.

“[T]he future consists of the last terms of a series whose first terms constitute the past,” Saint-Simon wrote. “When one has carefully studied the first terms of a series, it is easy to supply the following ones; thus one may easily deduce the future from a proper observation of the past.”

Saint-Simon had an authoritarian streak, too, believing so fully in his proposals for a better society that he felt they ought to be enacted by force: the attitude of a true philosopher-king that’s not unlike the style of tech evangelists in the twenty-first century, who likewise attach a sense of pure inevitability to their predictive abilities.

~ Full article…

BREAKING: Secret third temple blueprints, red heifers, and a hidden prophetic timeline are converging right now in Jerusalem, pointing directly to the end-time events foretold in Scripture.

~ Video…

Today in Jerusalem: rabbis reveal the time for the third temple is now
BREAKING: Sanhedrin rabbis in Jerusalem publicly advance preparations for the prophesied Third Temple, signaling we are closer than ever to the climax of end-time events.

THIRD TEMPLE UPDATE – Perfect Red Heifer Approved, First Stone To Be Laid Soon
A perfect red heifer has reportedly been approved in Israel, fulfilling one of the rarest requirements for Third Temple purification. For the first time in 2,000 years, prophecy watchers, rabbis, and researchers believe construction could move one step closer. This video breaks down the significance of the red heifer, Temple Mount politics, the Temple Institute’s preparations, and what this means for End-Times prophecy. Is the first ceremonial stone about to be laid? Explore the latest updates, evidence, and biblical clues.

Patterned silencing

Digital repression has become a structural filter on Meta’s platforms, deciding who is heard and who is erased. In October and November 2023 alone, Human Rights Watch documented over a thousand cases where Instagram and Facebook removed or suppressed peaceful expressions of solidarity with Palestine.

The patterns were systematic: deleted posts or stories, restricted features, search bans and the quiet throttling of reach known as “shadowbanning.” That same month, Meta’s translation algorithm added the word “terrorist” to Palestinian users’ bios. The company later apologized for the “bug,” but for many, it felt like a slip revealing the machine’s logic.

At the center of this machinery sits Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which functions less like apps and more like global infrastructure. With several billion daily users across its platforms, Meta’s design choices effectively dictate much of the world’s visible reality. When Meta downgrades, deletes or distorts Palestinian content, it is not a marginal glitch on a niche site; it is the main artery of digital communication constricting a people’s ability to speak and be seen.

~ Full article…

“All those collaborators went into the system”, says Manolis Glezos, “into the government mechanism – during the civil war, after the civil war and their sons went into the military Junta. The deposits remain, like cells in the system. Unlike France, or even Germany, there was no de-Nazification. In fact, just the opposite: While other countries purged their Nazis, Greece promoted them, because although we liberated Greece, the Nazi collaborators won the war, thanks to the British. And the deposits remain, like bacilli in the system”.

But there is one last thing Glezos would like to make clear, that we have failed to raise during our three conversations. “You haven’t asked: why do I go on? Why I am doing this when I am 92 years and two months old?” he says, fixing us with his gaze. “I could, after all, be sitting on a sofa in slippers with my feet up,” he jests. “So why do I do this?”

And he answers himself: “You think that the man sitting opposite you is Manolis but you are wrong. I am not him. And I am not him because I have not forgotten that every time someone was about to be executed, they would say: ‘Don’t forget me. When you say good morning, think of me. When you raise a glass, say my name.’ And that is what I am doing talking to you, or doing any of this. The man you see before you is all those people. And all this is about not forgetting them.”

~ Full article…

Why should we be interested in a battle that took place 80 years ago, in December 1944, in Athens? Dekemvriana (‘December events’), the clash of British troops and Greek government forces with Greek communist resistance fighters has become known, was a highly significant incident in World War II, which however remains little known outside of Greece. It was indeed the sole instance where Allied forces clashed in an armed conflict during the war, and the first military intervention by an Allied army in a liberated country. An intervention, which may chronologically fall within the context of World War II, which had not yet ended, but politically it shifts our gaze towards the Cold War, which had not yet begun. Furthermore, Dekemvriana was an instance of popular uprising with a distinct class-based character. Citizens, mainly from the poor districts of Athens and Piraeus, took up arms and fought against a well-organized and well-equipped Allied army operating with a colonial logic, and the Greek conservative forces that supported it. The insurgents may have been severely lacking in weapons and inadequately organized, but they were also driven by a deep belief that justice was on their side and that they fought for a democratic post-war Greece.

Dekemvriana is a typical example of how a deep crisis, and indeed in its worst possible form, that of war and a foreign military occupation, can in a very limited time sweep away political constellations, and provoke their rearrangement or even their complete overthrow on a national and international level.[1] The clash of December also shows us that in times of crisis, the relations of dependence between great powers and peripheral states, are revealed in their full extent. As we will see below, in their attempt to regain power, the Greek government-in-exile and the country’s King allowed, if not sought, the crude involvement of British political and military force in settling domestic Greek affairs. Dekemvriana was an dramatic concession of national independence. Finally, the Battle of Athens shows us that the post-war world had begun in earnest, well before field marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945.
[…]
The sunny morning of Saturday, December 3 did not foreshadow what would follow. When the first large bloc of protesters appeared in the square, the police opened fire killing at least 13 protesters and injured more than 60. We know that the order for the police to shoot at the unarmed crowd was given by the Police Chief, Angelos Evert. However, we do not know who gave the order to Evert. Many pointed to the monarchists, who were the only ones who would likely benefit from a disrupted political process. The EAM decided not to make an armed response.
[…]
Dekemvriana turned Athens into a battle field. Military operations began on December 4, 1944 and ended on January 11, 1945. They can be divided them into two phases: until December 17, when the ELAS had the initiative, with the small number of of British forces backed into a defensive posture; and after December 17, when the arrival of reinforcements gave the initiative to the British.

~ Full article…

So it was with some nostalgia that I read a recent memo from General Kenneth Wilsbach, the new Chief of Staff of the Air Force (CSAF). Along with the usual warrior talk, the CSAF vowed to “relentlessly advocate” for the new Sentinel ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) and the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. While the Air Force often speaks of “investing” in new nukes, this time the CSAF opted for “recapitalization,” a remarkably bloodless term for the creation of a whole new generation of genocidal thermonuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

(Take a moment to think about that word, “creation,” applied to weapons of mass destruction.)
[…]
At this moment, Donald Trump’s America has more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and bombs of various sorts, while Vladimir Putin’s Russia has roughly 5,500 of the same. Together, they represent overkill of an enormity that should be considered essentially unfathomable. Any sane person would minimally argue for serious reductions in nuclear weaponry on this planet. The literal salvation of humanity may depend on it. But don’t tell that to the generals and admirals, or to the weapons-producing corporations that get rich building such weaponry, or to members of Congress who have factories producing such weaponry and bases housing them in their districts.

So, here we are in a world in which the Pentagon plans to spend another $1.7 trillion (and no, that is not a typo!) “recapitalizing” its nuclear triad, and so in a world that is guaranteed to remain haunted forever by a possible future doomsday, the specter of nuclear mushroom clouds, and a true “end-times” catastrophe.
[…]
The saying that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” may never be truer than when it comes to nuclear war. We even have expressions like “use them or lose them” to express how ICBMs should be “launched on warning” of a nuclear attack before they can be destroyed by an incoming enemy strike. So many years later, in other words, the world remains on even more of a nuclear hair-trigger, the pistol loaded and cocked to our collective heads, just waiting for news that will push us over the edge, that will make those trigger fingers of ours too itchy to resist the urge to put too much pressure on that nuclear trigger.

~ Full article…