“…A Greek appeals court on Wednesday handed 13-year prison terms to leaders of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in a landmark case over crimes committed at the height of the country’s economic crisis.

The court last week had already found several officials, including its founder-leader Nikos Michaloliakos, guilty of “running a criminal organisation”.

Michaloliakos and five other officials were sentenced to 13-year jail terms — but the 68-year-old leader will remain free on health grounds. His wife Eleni Zaroulia, a former Golden Dawn lawmaker, was however ordered to serve a five year term for participation in a criminal organisation.

Zaroulia had called migrants disease-carrying “sub-humans” in a 2012 speech in parliament.

More than 30 other party officials and members received jail sentences of four to 10 years. Most have already served their terms, or were granted conditional release.

Crimes attributed to the group include the savage beating of Egyptian fishermen in 2012 and the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013…”

~ Full artihttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/greek-appeals-court-hands-neo-nazi-leaders-13-year-sentences/ar-AA1YlPGucle…

“…These programs required psychiatrists and scientists using psychiatric “treatments.” The professionals involved were not peripheral consultants; they were essential architects.

Investigative journalist Gordon Thomas captured the ethical collapse behind these programs in Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse (1989):

“Nothing I had researched before could have prepared me for the dark reality of doctors who set out to deliberately destroy minds and bodies they were trained to heal.”[10]

The 1977 Senate hearings on Project MKUltra revealed that 80 institutions and 185 non-governmental researchers and assistants participated in 149 CIA behavioral research projects.[11] This was not rogue psychiatric activity. It was institutional.

[…]

The question is not merely what occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, but whether institutions have fully reckoned with the behavioral power of central nervous system-acting drugs.

In 2008, the Mitre Corporation conducted a Human Performance Study for the U.S. Department of Defense Research and Engineering Enterprise. The report examined how advances in psychoactive drugs might be weaponized by America’s adversaries. It warned that newly approved drugs would “certainly have extensive off-label use” in the United States and recommended monitoring such use because adversaries might exploit these compounds in training or field operations against the nation.[29]

Yet today, 76.9 million Americans, including 6.1 million children and teens, are prescribed psychotropic drugs. Many carry regulatory warnings for agitation, hostility, aggression, suicidal ideation, and even homicidal thoughts.

Among them is fluoxetine (Prozac), one of the most widely prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which increases synaptic serotonin and indirectly affects multiple serotonin receptors, including 5-HT2A—the same receptor strongly implicated in the psychoactive effects of psychedelics…”

~ Full article…

“…No dramatic breakdown. Just a new framework that is gradually taking shape. In the end, that might be more disruptive than an unexpected crash. because crashes result in obvious reactions. Central banks step in. Governments work together. Markets eventually stabilize. On the other hand, over time, rule changes modify incentives. Businesses make investments in different ways. Trade between nations varies. Investors reevaluate what appeared to be permanent.

As this develops, there’s a sense that the world economy has entered a transitional stage, continuing to grow and function while operating in increasingly strange circumstances.

Growth is ongoing. The markets are still open. Cross-border capital flows. However, the underlying presumptions of the previous generation of economic growth—stable monetary policy, frictionless trade, and ever-increasing globalization—are gradually being replaced by new ones.

Furthermore, the next global shock might not appear on trading screens as a panic. It might just appear to be a rule change that everyone gradually comes to understand has already occurred…”

~ Full article…

“…If this ill-planned military adventure ends badly, then the elites of none of the combatant countries will end up suffering in the way that ordinary Iranians, Israelis or Americans will. This sense of impunity infects much of the discussion of the war: how, for example, could someone who feels any connection to other people be exulting in their death in the way that U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth does? In this bloodthirstiness, as in so many other aspects of kleptocracy of course, Russia led the way, but the rest of the world is catching up and I don’t think we’re ready for what that will look like.

An important aspect of this, again long visible in Russia with its dreadful public services and military failure in Ukraine, is that corruption does not just enrich elites, it also degrades state capabilities. “Corruption at the top always rolls downhill. Once it becomes open and acknowledged, it leads to corrupt and slovenly acts throughout a system,” as Phillips Payson O’Brien argues, in a piece which builds on another article in which he lays out how the Russian model might be worth applying to much of what’s happening in the United States…”

~ Full article…

“…Elites also push the boundaries of sex because when sex is not about connection (or reproduction), the focus turns to either individual pleasure or power exploration. As I’ve mentioned prior, this is why sex and sexual blackmail (ie kompromat) are so commonly used as mechanisms of bribery and control. Elites are aware that trauma and shame are powerful tools. Sex is not only intrinsically vulnerable, but it also evokes primal drives tied to dominance and submission. As sex is a social act, it also inherently involves power dynamics and imbalances, regardless of whether they are spoken or not…”

~ Full article…

“…Days after the United States and Israel killed Iran’s leader, the war is set to enter a dramatic new phase. Thousands of Iranian Kurdish militants are gathering in Iraqi Kurdistan, set to receive American and Israeli financial and military support to launch a major attack on Iranian territory, according to several people with close knowledge of the plan. Other armed militants, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an exiled opposition group that has long carried out violent operations inside Iran, and Baloch militias that operate on Iran’s southeastern border with Pakistan, are also rumored to be involved.

Last month, five Kurdish Iranian political parties came together to form the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan, signaling their desire for joint political action. The five parties, all of which have military wings, have gathered thousands of their members in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region, a leader of an Iranian opposition group who has been privy to the plans told me. (He requested anonymity, like others I spoke with for this story, because of the sensitivity of the operation.)

According to this person, the operation is to be led by the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (known by its Kurdish initials PDKI), whose leader, Mustafa Hijri, spoke by phone with Donald Trump yesterday. The PDKI has deep roots among Iran’s Kurds. It’s the oldest Kurdish party and a consultative member of the Socialist International. According to the opposition leader who spoke with me, as well as the leader of one of the Kurdish groups aware of but not included in the plan, the U.S. and Israel have set aside significant funds for arms and logistical support to the five Iranian Kurdish groups…”

~ Full article…

“…Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson told CNN after the Wednesday morning Pentagon press conference, “somebody’s smokin’ something.”

During his briefing, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was asked how Iran had nuclear weapons when the administration said last year that they obliterated the weapons in the “12-Day War.”
[…]
The other problem, according to several reports, is that the U.S. is running out of weaponry because the administration has burned through the stockpile so quickly.

It was reported on Tuesday by several outlets that the military lacks the supplies to continue at the current level.

“It’s not panic yet, but the sooner they get here, the better,” a regional source told CNN…”

~ Full article…

In this Tuesday, March 3, 2026 lecture, Professor Jiang analyzes the US-Iran War.

~ Video…

The Pentagon spent last Friday trying to bully an AI company that had dared to require human oversight of surveillance and autonomous weapons. On Sunday, automated air defense proved exactly why that company was right and oversight matters.

On Friday, February 27, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic — the AI company behind Claude — a “supply chain risk,” a classification meant for foreign adversaries. The company’s offense was simply refusing Pete’s unwanted advances. He demanded they strip naked the safeguards requiring human responsibility for lethal autonomous weapons systems, and prohibiting mass domestic surveillance. Hegseth, infamous for arrogance and betrayal, called it “a master class in arrogance and betrayal.”

Emil Michael, the disgraced ex-Uber executive who was fired for acting like he was God and could control women (appointed Pete’s Undersecretary for Research and Engineering), called Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei “a liar” with a “God-complex” who “wants nothing more than to personally control the US Military.”

The demand made was to allow the AI to be used for “all lawful purposes,” with no exceptions. Anthropic said no because, Amodei argued, it is not reliable enough for autonomous lethal decisions under the law.

~ Full article…

The truth that Herzog has in mind is more like the truth of poetry than the mere facts and shared understanding that he mocks as “the truth of accountants.” As he put it in a 1999 manifesto, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

The idea that an artist, even a documentarian, would mix fact with fiction is not quite so radical today as it might have been at the peak of cinema verité. Yet questions of truth and its relation to reality are more pressing and vexed than ever. Getting at deep truths by means of artful lies may seem less appealing or daring in the era of the deepfake. Herzog’s oft-repeated provocation that only the “conman, the liar who knew what he was talking about, would speak the truth” loses some of its countercultural appeal when the conmen move from the margins of society to the centers of power and bullshit becomes de rigueur.

~ Full article…