The report identifies environmental racism as numerous interconnected human rights violations which include the adverse impacts of environmental degradation on the rights to life, health, an adequate standard of living, education and other substantive rights, the encroachment on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and the violation of the right to freedom from discrimination.

The indifference and disdain with which the survivors and their descendants have been treated ever since the gas leak, the lack of proper and effective accountability of both state and corporate actors for both the gas leak and ongoing contamination, and the failure to ensure a reparations programme that adequately addresses all past and ongoing harms have been enabled by entrenched environmental racism.

Therefore, Amnesty International has asked shareholders to end their relationship with Dow and consider withdrawing their investment from the chemicals company if it fails to take meaningful and rapid action to address the suffering through adequately compensation for all survivors and contamination assessment and clean-up.

~ Full article…

From: ‘A Simulacrum of Dissent’

So there I was, staring into the cold, dead, algorithmic eyes of ChatGPT — the latest omnipotent, omniscient, and utterly unaccountable AI Overlord we’ve all apparently agreed to trust with everything from our grocery lists to our moral compass — when it hit me:

Why not outsource my own destruction?
[…]
Note that, now, because I posted this column, it will become a part of the material that LLMs like ChatGPT and Grok draw from when “explaining” who I am and creating simulations of my writing. Those “explanations” and simulations of my (or anyone’s) writing (and essentially anything posted on the Internet) can become material for further simulations … feeding further simulations feeding further simulations feeding further simulations.

A quote comes to mind …

“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

~ Full article...

Two moments of reading stand out from my research, pivotal moments that confirmed the notion that if rocks are not alive in the conventional sense, they’re not dead either—in technical terms, that the lithosphere is as much a part of the ecosphere as the biosphere. One sentence came in a book by the eminent geologist Marcia Bjornerud: “more than 40 percent of all mineral species on Earth are in some sense biogenic”—that is, they are the result of organic activity. Chalk and limestone and cherts are made up of plankton shells, oxygenating microbes “grow” iron, coal consists of decomposed plant matter.

The second was a passage in Mircea Eliade’s ethnographic study of early metallurgy: “the imaginary world … came into being with the discovery of metals.” He went on to suggest that “metals opened up a new mythological and religious universe.” A bold claim that thrilled me and aroused my skepticism at the same time. In a sense, my book—Under a Metal Sky—is an attempt to prove Eliade’s point. He also brought into sharp focus a moment in pre-history, that primitive experiment, when a piece of dull stone was placed in a fire and a shiny liquid was seen to ooze from it.

Out of dead rock came something transformative; hardened, that liquid transformed lives in a dozen different ways. It also altered forever our relationship to the planet.

~ Full article…

This year alone, Israeli forces have carried out nearly 7,500 raids across the West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“The occupied West Bank is experiencing its worst displacement crisis in decades,” OCHA said, citing demolitions, military operations and escalating Israeli settler violence.

More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank in the past two years.

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch said Israel’s mass displacement from three refugee camps amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

~ Full article…

In New York City, residential power shutoffs are up fivefold compared to one year ago…

In some areas, such as New York City, the surge has been dramatic — with residential shutoffs in August up fivefold from a year ago, utility filings show.

Needless to say, Americans aren’t just getting behind on their power bills.

As economic conditions have steadily gotten worse, delinquency rates have risen to historic levels…

Credit card balances alone jumped $24 billion, reaching an all-time high, while the share of balances in serious delinquency—90 days past due—climbed to a nearly financial-crash level of 7.1 percent.

Auto loans tell a similar story, with serious delinquency rates at 3 percent, the highest since 2010. And a spike in resulting defaults has triggered a wave of repossessions in 2025, with 2.2 million vehicles already repossessed, per figures from the Recovery Database Network (RDN), and forecasts of a record 3 million by year’s end.

“Delinquencies, defaults, and repossessions have shot up in recent years and look alarmingly similar to trends that were apparent before the Great Recession,” the Consumer Federation of America said in a recent report.

When you are drowning in debt, relocating to a better place that will be more secure for your family is nothing but a pipe dream.

Most Americans will have to deal with whatever is ahead wherever they are located right now.

But the ultra-wealthy have enough money to live wherever they want, and the fact that so many of them are choosing to live in “fortress communities” says a lot about where things are heading.

~ Full article…

Key points: The CIA studied the work of the Monroe Institute. “Gifted” children say they listened to Monroe meditation tapes during GATE sessions. The program appears to have been an extension of the intelligence community’s Project Star Gate.
[…]
After drinking the liquid, the children remembered nothing. As adults, they still remember nothing.

SMOKING GUN…OF SORTS

In 1988, the Department of Education published a report by the Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance.

John A. Swets was Committee Chair at the time. The CIA says that the report was commissioned for the US Army.

So, a US Army report was published by the DoE.

On Hemi-Sync, the report says: “it is claimed that, by altering sound patterns, it is possible to alter states of awareness. Stated applications are in the areas of language learning, stress management, reading skills, and creativity and problem solving.”

Don’t these just sound like “Strange Gate” tests? It adds that Hemi-Sync covered:

“education (e.g., ‘77.8 percent of a class reported improvement in mental-motorskills’), health (early recuperation, lower blood pressure), psychotherapy (stress reduction, working with terminally ill patients, teaching autistic children).”

Education and autistic children. Thus proof that military- and intelligence-linked Hemi-Sync had been used on minors. But this is still not proof that it had been used in GATE specifically.

DEP. EDUCATION PROPOSED USING HEMI-SYNC AND ZENER CARDS

It would appear that the CIA -DIA Star Gate program ran from 1978 to 1995.

It is possible that in order to test the perceived ESP of children, certain minors were selected from public schools for secret Star Gate tests under the cover of GATE.

~ Full article…

***

21 Once Dismissed Conspiracy Theories That Were Actually True

Compelled to disobey

US service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the US Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the US Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.

Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.
[…]
Soldiers, not lawyers

But the open-ended answers pointed to another struggle troops face: Some no longer trust US law as useful guidance.

Writing in their own words about how they would know an illegal order when they saw it, more troops emphasized international law as a standard of illegality than emphasized U.S. law. Others implied that acts that are illegal under international law might become legal in the US.

“Trump will issue illegal orders,” wrote one respondent. “The new laws will allow it,” wrote another. A third wrote, “We are not required to obey such laws.”

Several emphasized the US political situation directly in their remarks, stating they’d disobey “oppression or harming US civilians that clearly goes against the Constitution” or an order for “use of the military to carry out deportations.”

Still, the percentage of respondents who said they would disobey specific orders – such as torture – is lower than the percentage of respondents who recognized the responsibility to disobey in general.

~ Full article…

Businessman Salinas Price, currently 93 years old, is a self-confessed tax evader—that’s why he created Elektra—and strikebreaker, but also a rabid anti-communist who boasts of having financed the University Movement of Renewal Orientation (MURO), one of the shock groups of the secret organization of Los Tecos and El Yunque, as he confesses in his memoir My Years with Elektra, in which he boasts of all the far-right initiatives, some Nazi, that he created and sponsored against the left in Mexico.
[…]
MURO & The CIA

Salinas Price doesn’t say so in his book, but his adventures were associated with the CIA, because his friend Navarro Vázquez was a prominent agent of the agency, just when he was the director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (IISE), a private organization that he himself founded in 1953, and which came to gather 300 members, including Salinas Price, whose steering committee included representatives of the upper banking and industrial bourgeoisie of Mexico linked to foreign capital.
[…]
A CIA report dated June 7, 1964, signed by the head of the “Station” in Mexico, Winston Scott, details the background, funding and objectives of “Project LIHUFF”, with the agency headed by Navarro Vázquez.

“(The IIES) was founded in 1953 by a group of Mexican businessmen to promote the principles of free enterprise. Since then, it has established numerous contacts and relationships of influence, and has been involved in various anti-communist and other activities. It organized meetings and various types of congresses where it focused on the dangers of communism; it published books, pamphlets, and brochures on communism, as well as the dangers of economic socialism. It organized a student group (MURO), established and maintained contacts in the university, economic, and business fields in Latin America; it significantly boosted the coverage in the press of topics related to private enterprise and the communist threat, and it amassed an archive of basic data on events and individuals linked to communism and socialism that would be difficult for any other private group in Mexico to match.”

In that same document, when referring to the “background” of LIHUFF, it points out that this project “and its sponsors are considered, in the Mexican scenario, as far-right conservatives, however, in the PBPRIME forum (United States cryptometer) they would be considered more as centrists.”

The LIHUFF Project by Rudolph Wichtrich and Navarro Vázquez was highly valued by the CIA in the United States, “Headquarters”, in the context of the anti-communism of the early sixties, in the midst of the Cold War, and especially to exert influence on the government of López Mateos:

“The importance of a group like this, noisy and combative, existing in Mexico is not valued in absolute terms, but in relative terms. As Headquarters is aware, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in power is essentially a delicate reflector of the many political currents and pressures that exist in Mexico. During elections, as well as in appointments and decisions, the PRI weighs its political actions very carefully. When radical leftists are hesitant and active, then decisions tend to be weighted in their favor and oriented according to their viewpoints. In other words, to have some counterweight, even between extremes, the right must be as noisy and active as the left. This is essentially where the Station sees the value of the LIHUFF mechanism. It does not intend for Mexico to embrace LIHUFF’s philosophy or objectives in whole, or even in large part: It seeks for LIHUFF to exert an influence and restrain Mexico from succumbing to the pressures and demands of the radical left. If it weren’t for a few like LIHUFF-2 (Navarro Vázquez’s IISE) and Miguel Alemán Valdés are mobilized through organizations of this type; the political center of gravity would shift unchecked toward the radical left, beyond what the policies of ODYOKE (the United States government) could oversee. This is the only specific value that the Station has seen, and continues to see, in LIHUFF’s activity.”

~ Full article…

The Pentagon announced Nov. 24 that it was investigating Sen. Mark Kelly for “serious allegations of misconduct” after the Arizona Democrat called for U.S. troops to refuse unlawful orders.

Officials are reviewing whether Kelly was involved in a breach of military law, according to a post on X from the Department of War, formally the Department of Defense.

Kelly was among a group of six Democratic lawmakers who put out a video directed at service members telling them they have the right not to obey orders they believe to be illegal.

“A thorough review” of the allegations was initiated to determine further actions against Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy captain, “which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures,” the post reads.

~ Full article…