Right now, many of us vets are looking back on our years of service and wondering what the hell we did it all for. We used to know – for the USA. Yet you look at the disaster that is our country, our culture, and our beloved military, and you just want to go find a wall and pound your head against it. But a lot fewer folks are going to have this problem in the future because a lot fewer young people are joining our military. The Pentagon can't meet its recruiting goals, and, of course, the fault is our young people, our potential soldiers, for being unwilling to sacrifice their time, and sometimes their lives, in support of the bizarre social pathologies that our garbage ruling class embraces. 

Bending to a wave of mass protests, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed his contentious judicial overhaul plan Monday and said he wanted 'to avoid civil war' by making time to seek a compromise with political opponents.

The announcement appeared to calm some of the tensions that have fueled three tumultuous months of unrest. But it failed to address the underlying issues that have polarized the nation, and the antigovernmental protest movement vowed to intensify its efforts.

In his prime-time address, Netanyahu, who had previously rejected calls to delay the legislation, took a more conciliatory tone than in recent speeches. He acknowledged the deep divisions in the country and said he was hitting the pause button 'to prevent a rift in the nation.'

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to the mass shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee, elementary school by blaming Republicans for opposing gun control measures.

“We must do more, and he [Biden] wants Congress to act, because enough is enough. In his State of the Union, the President called on Congress to do something to stop the epidemic of gun violence tearing families apart, tearing communities apart,” Jean-Pierre said shortly after mourning the victims of the shooting.

Webmaster addition: Karine, mentally ill people (and this liberal 28 year old transgender appears to be one) do not obey gun laws!

But, that said: The Pope Coat Incident makes clear that AI can and will also be used for the equivalent of making hyper-realistic cartoons. For dreaming up fantasy fashion statements, combining any given celebrity with any given clothing ensemble like an infinite set of paper dolls. For creating the photographic equivalent of fanfic. It may have been one of the first true mass AI misinformation events, in other words, but the puffer-pope saga was also … pretty low-stakes.

Last week, as rumors that Trump might be arrested imminently swirled, the realistic-looking images of that still-hypothetical event — also created by Midjourney — began to flood social media. While most images, upon closer inspection, were clearly generated by AI, many experts saw their arrival and proliferation as a harbinger of AI’s power to intentionally mislead. On Thursday, Trump shared an image on his site, Truth Social, that depicted his likeness kneeling in prayer under dramatic lighting. It began making the rounds among his supporters but was revealed soon afterward to be a “deepfake,” hallmarked as such by the strange not-quite-lifelike presences in the background and certain telltale distortions of aspects of fake-Trump’s body.

The findings of an initial expert report were astonishing: One of the 20th century’s revered Catholic leaders, who built an international movement of community care for people with intellectual disabilities, perverted Catholic doctrine about Jesus and Mary to justify his own sexual compulsions and abuse women.

The findings of a second report were even worse: The movement he created had at its core a secret, mystical-sexual “sect,” and was founded for the precise purpose of hiding the sect’s deviant activities from church authorities.

The two rounds of revelations about Jean Vanier and the L’Arche federation he founded have rocked the group to its core, all the more because L’Arche itself commissioned independent scholars to investigate after receiving a first complaint from a victim a few years before Vanier died in 2019. It’s the latest case of a Catholic giant, considered a living saint by his admirers and eulogized as a “great” Christian by Pope Francis, falling to revelations that he abused his power to sexually exploit women under his spiritual sway.

In a federal court case over Starbucks’ alleged anti-union retaliation, the coffee giant is deploying a maneuver that labor experts say could have a chilling effect on workers’ organizing efforts and potentially set a disastrous precedent — hijacking the proceedings to dig up information on employees and intensify retaliation as part of its battle to crush a labor uprising in its stores.

That includes the Buffalo location where employees launched the Starbucks Workers United organizing campaign that has now spread nationwide — and where the company fired six workers in alleged retaliation for organizing.

Federal labor regulators are suing Starbucks on behalf of the union and workers over its conduct, but last October, a Trump-appointed judge in Buffalo, New York, ruled that as a defendant in the case, Starbucks is allowed to use subpoena power to obtain employee communications — even though the company can then use those communications to identify union sympathizers within its workforce.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has recently come under fire for defending Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok following reports of its parent company ByteDance donating six-figure sums to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Foundation and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in December.

According to Fox News, Shou Chew, the CEO of TikTok's parent company, testified before the Congressional House Energy and Commerce Committee Thursday on the degree to which the company puts users' personal data into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Ocasio-Cortez then took to her TikTok platform, where she has nearly 400,000 followers, to defend the social media giant.

As increasing evidence of the Biden family's financial ties to China comes to light, Americans are urging President Biden to address the "significant and important" connection.

On "Mornings with Maria" Monday, Maslansky + Partners President Lee Carter expressed her concern, noting that the President's relationship with Beijing poses a major threat to the nation. Her comments follow Senator Ron Johnson's recent revelation on "Sunday Morning Futures" that records from Cathay Bank – an American bank founded by Chinese Americans – matched those of U.S. regulators.

This bank, which operates offices in Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei, appears to be linked to the House Oversight Committee's investigation into the Biden family's overseas business dealings.

Nashville police identified the shooter who opened fire on Monday morning at The Covenant School as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a transgender former student at the private Presbyterian school. 

Three children and three adults were murdered in the shooting: Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Hallie Scruggs, 9, William Kinney, 9, Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.

Nashville police chief John Drake identified Hale as a transgender woman on Monday afternoon, but Hale listed "He/Him" pronouns on a LinkedIn profile. 

Schiff doesn’t just criticize the US’s state of economic affairs, just for the sake of racking up views and clicks.

The Euro Pacific Capital CEO has strong philosophical foundations. He’s a staunch proponent of the Austrian school of economics and is a firm believer of sound money and small government.

When he appears on mainstream financial shows, he’s generally the only voice of reason. But that has not stopped him from dropping uncomfortable truths. If anything, it further fuels his unquenchable desire to expose the ruling class’s economic machinations.

With mass inflation all around us and a new set of bank bailouts right around the corner, Schiff is sounding the alarms yet again on another financial collapse.

Ukrainian soldiers have been filmed alongside depleted uranium ammunition that Britain is supplying to their country for the fight against Russia.

The footage is contained in a documentary the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) released Sunday as Ukrainian tank crews completed their training.

Britain is gifting 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine together with depleted uranium shells, which Declassified revealed last week.

Russia could demand compensation for damages over the sabotaged Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, a senior Russian diplomat told Russian news agency RIA Novosti in an interview.

“We do not rule out raising the issue of compensation for damages as a result of the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines,” Dmitry Birichevsky, Head of the Economic Cooperation Department at the Russian Foreign Ministry, was quoted as saying.    

The official did not specify with whom Russia would seek compensation.

Yousaf beat devout Christian Kate Forbes to become the next leader of the governing SNP party, despite being strongly disliked among the Scottish electorate...

Humza Yousaf has won the Scottish National Party leadership contest and will succeed the outgoing Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister of Scotland, despite being disliked by almost half of Scots, according to recent polling.

The Scottish health secretary will become the first Muslim to attain the role. He narrowly beat colleague and practicing Christian Kate Forbes by 52 to 48 percent once second preference votes were counted after outsider Ash Regan was eliminated in third place.

The 37-year-old is expected to be formally sworn in as Scotland’s sixth first minister at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on Wednesday, subject to a procedural parliamentary vote on Tuesday.

On Monday Der Spiegel reported that 18 Leopard 2 battle tanks have been received by the Ukrainian government, after the tanks were successfully delivered at the Ukrainian border.

Previously Defense Minister Boris Pistorius had promised that the the battle tanks would be in Ukrainian hands by the close of March. The German media report also noted that about 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles were also delivered.

The Democrats say that Jan. 6 was the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War. They call it an insurrection, but if it was indeed the worst since 1865, no one but a fool would dare claim it even remotely approached the scale of the bloody war between the states.

And if you weren’t a fool, you might conclude that Jan. 6 was nothing like an insurrection. It wasn’t violent in the sense of an armed rebellion. It wasn’t organized. And it didn’t seek to overthrow the government, but to protect the Constitution. In more ways than not, it was a defense of American democracy, not an attack on it.

In every particular, Jan. 6 was a pale shadow compared to the Civil War. To start with, it lasted less than six hours, whereas the Civil War lasted four long years. The war between the North and South cost the lives of 620,000 soldiers and another 50,000 civilians. The Jan. 6 incursion at the U.S. Capitol, on the other hand, claimed the lives of just two women protesters, Ashli Babbitt and Roseanne Boyland. Among the defenders of the Capitol, police officer Brian Sicknick died after suffering two strokes the next day, but without a direct known connection to the riot. Two other protesters died of natural causes during the siege, and four law officers died by suicide in the months following the attack. If you count all of those as legitimate casualties of Jan. 6, then the total comes to nine compared to a minimum of 670,000 in the Civil War.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the stark differences between Jan. 6 and the Civil War.

A Kansas meat packing company has recalled approximately 3,436 lbs of boneless beef chuck product due to potential contamination with E. coli, according to the US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

A routine FSIS inspection of a sample of ground beef made from the boneless beef chuck tested positive for this strain of E. coli, also known as STEC O103, after which the the Harper, Kansas-based outfit issued the recall.

The U.S. government has released the licensing agreement it hammered out with vaccine manufacturer Moderna but has refused to confirm many payment details.

Moderna agreed to pay the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to license spike protein technology the company included in its COVID-19 vaccine, the contract confirms.

Moderna resisted for years acknowledging the work by government researchers on the spike protein but relented in late 2021 and announced the contract during an earnings call on Feb. 23.

Moderna said it provided a “catch-up payment” of $400 million to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the NIH, under the agreement.

The newly disclosed contract says that Moderna would pay the NIH a “noncreditable, nonrefundable royalty in the amount of Four Hundred Million dollars.”

Portions that would confirm Moderna’s statement that the company would pay “low single digit royalties” on future sales of its COVID-19 vaccines are redacted.

The contract, running 34 pages, has key sections redacted as to future royalties.

Webmaster addition: So the NIH was getting a "piece of the action" which is why they keep pushing the shots despite the flood of reports of adverse reactions!

Documents the FBI recently released show that a lawyer for the agency expressed her reservations about a draft version of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4, 2021 memo that initiated a controversial federal effort to investigate alleged harassment at school board meetings around the country.

The documents, which the America First Legal Foundation (AFL) recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, showed FBI attorney Miriam Coakley expressed her hope that Garland and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) would reconsider their actions.

“Not sure if you’ve seen this/weighed in—it was just raised to my attention,” Coakley wrote in an Oct. 4, 2021 email to Corey Frazier Ellis. Ellis was serving at the time as chief of staff for FBI Director Christopher Wray before Garland appointed him in December of that year to serve as the Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina.

“I hope DOJ reconsiders,” Coakley added in her email.

After Coakley contacted him, Ellis raised the issue to Norman Wong, the then director of the DOJ’s Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA), writing “we are asking that the memo be revised,” to which Wong replied: “It’s a little too late.”

The World Bank said in a new report that Ukraine’s reconstruction will cost at least $411 billion over the next ten years, a number that will rise as the war drags on.

The report said the $411 billion figure should be seen as a “minimum as needs will continue to rise as long as the war continues.”

World Bank Vice President Anna Bjerde previously estimated the reconstruction would cost between $525 billion-$630 billion, but the report issued Wednesday was more precise and was produced jointly with the US and Ukrainian governments.

After the new report came out, Bjerde said Ukraine’s reconstruction will take “several years” and will require public investments “complemented by significant private investment to increase the available financing for reconstruction.”

Earlier this month, a judge ruled that two different lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s ties to deceased “financier” and pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, would be allowed to advance in U.S. Courts. One of these cases, brought against the bank by the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), has been a particular focus of independent media since the new year began, in part because the Attorney General of the USVI, Denise George, was fired from her post just days after she filed that case.

In a hearing in the USVI case against JPMorgan earlier this month, a USVI lawyer argued that the CEO of JPMorgan – Jamie Dimon – “knew in 2008 that his billionaire client [Jeffrey Epstein] was a sex trafficker.” The lawyer, Mimi Liu, also stated that former JPMorgan Jes Staley also knew this about Epstein at the time, but noted: “This case was not just Jes Staley … there will be numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive suite.” Liu also asserted that “Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase knew” about Epstein’s criminal activities against minors.

While the bank has disputed that Dimon knew anything about Epstein’s accounts at the bank or what he was really up to at the time, this Unlimited Hangout investigation – a multi-part series – will reveal that Dimon’s rise to the top post at JPMorgan was intimately linked to the very same group of people who enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities as well as his extensive financial crimes.

The Department of Energy's reported conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 most likely leaked from a Chinese lab, affirming the FBI's assessment, is not the only recent evidence for the hypothesis still dismissed as a conspiracy theory by some establishment scientists.

Anthony Fauci discussed "the outbreak and chimeras" — fragments from different viruses stitched together into a new creation — with an American scientist collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in February 2020, Freedom of Information Act documents suggest.

Previous FOIA disclosures imply that Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, played an unacknowledged role in a paper concluding that COVID-19 emerged naturally.

Walt Disney Company began 7,000 layoffs in a letter sent to employees Monday, as CEO Bob Iger works to save the company some $5.5 billion.

Several major divisions of the company - Disney Entertainment, Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, and corporate - will be impacted, according to a person familiar with the matter. The layoffs will also affect Disney workers across the globe, and not just in the United States. 

Iger had previously announced the layoffs throughout the company after he took back over as CEO in November. 

Still, OpenAI is keeping everything that happens within its search API separate from the rest of its infrastructure just to be sure. It can’t visit websites that aren’t available through Bing’s “safe mode,” and it won’t visit sites that request not to be crawled in their robots.txt files.

Secondly, it can now run the code it writes. OpenAI has given it a working Python interpreter, sitting in a “sandboxed, firewalled execution environment,” along with some disk space, which stays available for the duration of your chat session, or until it times out. It can also now upload and download files.

So if you ask it a question that requires some serious number crunching, it’s now capable of coding up a piece of software specifically for the task, and running that code to complete your task. You can supply it with data in certain file formats, and it’ll perform operations on that data and give you something back again, potentially in a different format if that’s what you ask for.

This is pretty bonkers stuff. It’ll take a spreadsheet and make annotated graphs for you. It’ll accept JPGs, tell you what they look like they are, and write and run code to resize those images or convert them to grayscale.

In an outstanding piece of political-theoretical writing, titled ‘The Threat of Big Other’ (with its play on George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) Shoshana Zuboff, succinctly addresses the main issues of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, Hachette, 2019), explicitly linking it to Orwell’s 1984. 

Significantly, at the time she reminded readers that Orwell’s goal with 1984 was to alert British and American societies that democracy is not immune to totalitarianism, and that “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” (Orwell, quoted by Zuboff, p. 16). In other words, people are utterly wrong in their belief that totalitarian control of their actions through mass surveillance (as depicted in 1984, captured in the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you”) could only issue from the state, and she does not hesitate to name the source of this threat today (p. 16):

For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behaviour. These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next. 

This is a big story that will probably fly under the radar. That’s too bad because it gets at the underlying scammy nature of the climate change movement.

Every time a state government or a corporation announces a particular environmental target, most of the time what they mean is that they’re going to make some small changes and then they’ll buy some offsets or credits to compensate for the rest.

For example, makers of actual cars were forced to buy credits from Tesla by California so that working-class drivers were financing luxury car owners. Airlines now routinely announce that they’re buying offsets which means a portion of your ticket is going to pay off some company that is supposedly doing some environmentally sound. Your power company buys credits resold by some company that’s supposedly running wind farms in Wyoming (that nobody needs) which doesn’t mean that you’re using wind power, but that you’re paying for someone else to use wind power to atone for your use of fossil fuels.

Obviously, this is already a scam. And the few sincere environmentalists who believe the sky is actually falling denounce it as such. But it’s an incredibly lucrative scam that moves billions if not trillions of dollars around.

Leaked emails show that the White House was intent on pressuring messaging platform WhatsApp to censor private conversations about ‘vaccine skepticism’.

The revelation is perhaps even more alarming than the Biden administration’s efforts to shut down dissent on public social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, because the lobbying pertained to information exchanged between as a few as two people.

The leaked emails were featured in a Substack article written by journalist and author David Zweig.

From March 2021 onwards, Rob Flaherty, the Biden White House’s Director of Digital Strategy, demanded WhatsApp owner Meta explain the actions it was taking to intervene in private conversations about the COVID vaccine between WhatsApp users.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power last year, he never mentioned plans to overhaul the country’s judiciary. But a little-known Jerusalem think tank had been preparing for the moment for years.

The Kohelet Policy Forum, founded by an American Israeli and funded by a U.S. libertarian billionaire, quietly authored and helped introduce the far-reaching package of judicial changes that has sparked a national crisis and driven hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets.

Likud member Keti Shitrit, in a recent interview with Israel’s Channel 13, said Netanyahu’s party never internally discussed the judicial overhaul bills supplied by Kohelet before fast-tracking them through the parliament.

“It wasn’t us that prepared it; it was Kohelet Forum,” she said on a special TV broadcast covering the mass anti-government protests, adding that the group has been providing “materials” to right-wing politicians for years.

The meeting was the only time Mark got any answers from the DOJ about his brother's death. Three years later, he still doesn't know exactly how Epstein died and why it's taken the government that long to share its answer to that question.

Mark Epstein told Insider that even though he's Jeffrey's next of kin, he hasn't been able to obtain certain medical records, including the care reports filled out by EMTs who evaluated his brother's corpse.

The public hasn't gotten answers either. Epstein flew at the heights of power, consorting with presidents and princes while at the same time abusing scores of girls. His death in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons represents one of the most shocking failures of federal law enforcement in history. How could the Justice Department let him just slip away?

The Justice Department's Office of Inspector General launched an investigation after he was found dead. But more than three years later, the office still hasn't released its report into the circumstances of Epstein's death.

Webmaster addition: It's quite possible Epstein is still alive!