u/penelopepnortney

https://youtu.be/EMIPJW_4hAY

In this 50-minute video David Adler, co-general coordinator of the Progressive International and an expert on Latin American politics, provides some historical context and discusses the significance of the 37 audio leaks that comprise Hondurasgate (which can be found at hondurasgateDOTch). He says the site's servers were attacked over 30,000 times from the United States and Israel after their release.

>The audio leaks reveal the machinations around the 2025 electoral coup in Honduras that installed the puppet government of Nasry "Tito" Asfura of the National Party. More generally it sheds light on an operation that stretches from Tel Aviv to Washington to Buenos Aires to destabilize democracies across the Americas and in particular to target progressive leaders and presidents such as Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum and Colombia's Gustavo Petro.

>This operation not only spans the Americas but in its Israeli dimension also touches on the architecture of what we've been calling the Reactionary International, a global network of politicians, consultants, financiers, entrepreneurs and technologists propelling a kind of reactionary agenda of extraction, of exploitation, undermining democratic norms, freedoms, institutions across the world.

>Several weeks before the Honduran election Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president and head of the National Party, who had been sentenced (in March 2024) to a 45-year term for drug trafficking. Trump also threatened to strip Honduras of financial aid if they didn't vote for the right candidate.

Some history

• Manuel Zelaya won the 2007 Honduran presidential election. He was looking to join the "pink tide" represented by figures like Rafael Correa (Bolivia), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Néstor Kirchner (Argentina) and Lula Silva (Brazil), who were advancing Latin American integration via ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) to counter the free trade union across the Americas being pushed by George W. Bush.

• Zelaya was overthrown by a military coup in 2009 and the National Party came to power. Honduras became one of the most dangerous, corrupt and narco-linked countries in the hemisphere, a key node in the criminal networks of narco trafficking. And Juan Orlando Hernandez presided over that narco dictatorship.

• Hernandez enacted reforms that handed over huge parts of Honduran national territory to Peter Thiel under the banner of the ZEDEs, zones of employment and economic development - free enterprise zones where they could deregulate everything from labor to the environment (later declared unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court).

• In 2020, the overwhelming discontent brought Xiomara Castro, the country's first woman president and also the wife of the formerly deposed Manuel Zelaya, to power. We can date Hondurasgate and the plot to conduct a kind of vengeance against the Zelayas and the Libré party from here.

Hondurasgate

>One of the benefits of Hondurasgate is it squares the circle so to speak, shedding light on the underlying machinations that puts Trump's pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez in the context of a broader operation from Honduras to other parts of the hemisphere to realign interests, this constellation that we call the Reactionary International, in the service of everyone from Peter Thiel and Trump to Netanyahu to Javier Milei.

>Juan Orlando Hernandez is nothing but a pawn in all this, he's seen by the the US and Israel as being the most pliant and certainly the most indebted. These audio leaks allegedly reveal, in his own words, the pots of money that were made available by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and efforts led by Roger Stone out of Florida to put pressure on Trump to pardon Hernandez or perhaps purchase a pardon directly. Hernandez would then be a vector of influence back at home.

>Honduras remains kind of a colony of the United States: when you fly into the capital city, you don't actually fly into Tegucigalpa. You fly into Palmerola, the largest US military base in Latin America and headquarters of the US Southern Command. The country is teeming with US military personnel and a kind of swashbuckling US ambassador who likes to give orders to Honduras's sitting legislators and executive leaders.

>Honduras is the type of place that "banana republic" was once used to describe, a place where US corporations like the United Fruit Company held such sway that they could "coup whoever they wanted" in the words of Elon Musk. Replace the United Fruit Company with Palantir or Peter Thiel's Pronomos Capital and we're seeing an effort to recolonize the hemisphere from Havana to Caracas to Brasilia to Santiago, Chile all the way up to Mexico City and everywhere in between under Trump's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Drugs

>The drug trade is highly liquid and discreet, you can move cash in ways that don't leave a trace. It's transnational in scale so you can move money quickly from place to place and people are pretty fungible in that way so the US has always played this double game with respect to the drug trade. So you have the DEA and CIA setting up the drug cartels in Mexico, then you have operations like the one where the CIA goes after cartels in cooperation with the state government. At the end of the day, if you need to get two duffel bags of cash onto a politician's table tomorrow, your first call is probably going to be some of these narco-linked actors who have bags of cash that they can move.

Israel

>The state of Israel is not new to the region, there's a decades-old history there but it's been more proactive since Latin America as a continent pushed back against Israeli impunity over the Palestinian genocide. Bolivia and Honduras helped establish The Hague Group in January 2025, a diplomatic bloc to defend international law and stand up for the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. As soon of the new governments of Bolivia and Honduras came to power they left this group.

>The first thing president-elect Tito Asfura did after winning the 2025 Honduran election was visit Israel and you have to wonder why this was such a priority given all the poverty and violence and other problems Honduras had.

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/06/30/europes-moral-bankruptcy/

>In response to the June 19 signing of the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran — intended to bring an end to a destructive war — von der Leyen declared that the European Union does not intend to lift its sanctions on Tehran.

>“The principle of sanctions is that we need real change on the ground before we can think about lifting them,” she stated, adding: “As long as there is no behavioral change, you cannot lift the sanctions because of human rights violations.”

>On that very same day, the European Union’s duplicity was laid bare. During a Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg, Europe effectively refused to take a unified stand on imposing trade sanctions on Israel, despite its ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and unchecked colonial violence and expansionist policies in the occupied West Bank.

>This reality appears entirely irrelevant to von der Leyen, who remains preoccupied with the human rights records of states viewed as Western adversaries. Such concern is not motivated by solidarity with victims, but by the desire to maintain political leverage that can be invoked when convenient and ignored when necessary.

>Lest we forget, von der Leyen was among the first Western leaders to visit Israel following the events of October 7... She did so as Palestinians in Gaza were already being subjected to a devastating military assault that would soon claim tens of thousands of lives.

>None of that matters to von der Leyen, of course, since such immense human suffering does not neatly fit within her geopolitical priorities.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/weaponizing-civil-death-to-crush

This post by Hedges has his video interview plus the transcript for those who prefer reading to listening.

From the Introduction:

>The war on information in the West has tread new grounds since the genocide in Palestine. Journalists and media outlets who report on the imperialist endeavors of the ruling class increasingly find themselves under the boot of legislators who concoct fascist legislation to act as imperial henchmen. Their methods are stretching the limits of the law with the scope and severity of the punishments imposed. Nowhere is this repression more apparent than in Germany where, since October 7 of 2023, governments have banned languages and symbols related to Palestine and many people, not only journalists but also professors, doctors and lawyers, have lost their jobs for speaking out against the genocide or participating in pro-Palestine demonstrations.

---

Beginning of transcript (bold added):

>Chris Hedges: The German journalist, Hüseyin Dogru, because of his reporting on the genocide in Gaza, has been hit with draconian sanctions. Since May 2025, he has been banned from leaving Germany or re-entering if he somehow managed to leave. He has been forced to surrender his identity card. His bank account has been frozen. He is prohibited from working, although he is allowed 506 euros per month to survive. The German Bundestag passed legislation targeting anyone, directly or indirectly, who provides money or other resources to a person on the sanctions list. Offenses are punishable with up to five years imprisonment. And because these sanctions are defined as an administrative measure within the EU’s bureaucracy, he cannot appeal to a German court.

>This imposition of civil death is a familiar tactic used to cripple and silence dissidents and was used against Paul Robeson and Julian Assange. It is seen Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur in Palestine, and the two international criminal court judges, who issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant, also locked out of the global financial system. Dogru founded Red Dot Media in early 2023, the left-wing English language video portal focused on the genocide in Gaza and the Palestinian solidarity movement in Germany.

>In perhaps one of the most bizarre twists to this story, the European Union charges that his reporting supports “Actions by the government of the Russian Federation, which undermine or threaten stability and security in the Union.” Think about this. Reporting on the genocide in Gaza undermines the war effort against Russia. Dogru’s name was included in the EU’s 17 package of sanctions against Russia. No mainstream newspaper or broadcaster in Germany has reported on his case.

---

---

When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say. ― George R.R. Martin

https://reclaimthenet.org/reddit-to-require-login-for-old-reddit-curbing-anonymous-browsing

>Reddit is closing one of the last doors that let people read the site without an account. Users will soon have to log in before they can reach old.reddit.com, the pared-back version of the platform that stayed usable for logged-out visitors long after the redesign pushed everyone else toward accounts.

>The change rolls out over the coming month, and Reddit has warned that Old Reddit may not exist “forever.”

>The person who loses access is the one who wanted to read a thread without handing Reddit a name, an email, and a session tied to everything they click. Reddit is giving up anonymous reading to inconvenience bots that will mostly route around the obstacle.

>This follows a direction Reddit set years ago. It ended most third-party apps in 2023 when it started charging for API access, closing off Apollo and the clients many people used to read the site on their own terms.

>Many privacy-conscious readers prefer Old Reddit because it loads without the heavier tracking and scripting of the redesign and still works on older hardware and stripped-down browsers.

>Folding it into the account-only site removes a lighter, less-surveilled way in. Reddit frames the goal as protecting the platform from abuse. What it actually does is put a price on reading a public forum, and the price is the anonymity you used to keep by default.

https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/the-toxic-effects-of-fraudulent-money

>Lietaer’s tale is flawed in that it assumes that money came into circulation as a replacement for barter. That’s not how money originated. In spite of that, his parable is a valid illustration of why debt-based money is profoundly toxic to society and why, if left to itself and the game’s winners, can turn humanity into a radical perversion of itself, exemplified in a small predatory financier “elite,” served and protected by a ruthless Praetorian guard.

>One does not need to be a socialist or a communist to notice the profound depravity among many of these people. This is the Epstein class, which seems to have been present throughout history, a by-product of a fraudulent money system. Transcending this system, confining it to history’s trash heap and engineering a new, improved operating system for society is the single most important task we need to accomplish in order to direct the development of human societies toward the beautiful and the divine. I can’t think of a single reason why we shouldn’t; this is our nature, and our choice is to allow it to blossom, or to allow it to remain stunted.

---

Comment from Howard Switzer:

>The medicine already exists. It's not theoretical. It's legislative.

>In 2011, Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced HR 2990, the National Emergency Employment Defense Act (NEED Act) . It does exactly what your parable calls for:

>1. Transfers the power of money creation from private banks to the sovereign government.

>2. Ends debt-based, interest-bearing money as the primary form of issuance.

>3. Ensures new money is created for public purposes, not private profit.

>The NEED Act was vetted by legislative counsel. It was referred to committee. It's still sitting there, waiting to be reintroduced. It's not perfect—no bill is—but it's a vehicle. It's a real, existing piece of legislation that we can organize around, educate people about, and demand that candidates support.

>And there's a movement behind it.

>The Alliance For Just Money (monetaryalliance.org) is a coalition that "advocates for a transition away from our current debt money system to a just system of publicly created money." Their legislative proposal, the American Monetary Reform Act (AMRA) , follows the same principles.

>Monetary.org hosts the full text of the NEED Act and educational resources.

>There are teach-ins, webinars, and a growing network of organizers who understand that changing who creates money and on what terms is the structural lever that makes everything else possible.

---

Reply from Nick U:

>One concept that needs to be revived is the Sin of Usury. For at least a thousand years prior to the Reformation, charging compound interest was regarded as unjust and exploitative, particularly of the poor. A workable solution was adopted called the "Monte di Pietà" in 15th Century Europe. These civic banks charged a max 5% flat interest per year for insurance and administrative costs, which allowed the borrower to get out of debt while protecting the lender.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/trumps-board-peace-launch-hamas-free-shelters-while-israel-tightens-grip-gaza

Can these people - Israel and US and everyone else who is enabling this - be any more despicable?

>US President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace is set to launch “Hamas-free humanitarian zones” in Gaza where Palestinians will be herded while the Israeli military expands its control on the rest of the territory, Israeli media is reporting.

>Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported that the first site will open in Tel Sultan, near Rafah, “within weeks”, and house civilians “with no weapons or affiliation with Hamas”.

>It added that the zone will be policed by a “multinational force”, known as the International Stabilisation Force (ISF), which will be equipped with “non-lethal weapons” and operate from the Israeli Amitai Camp near Gaza under the command of the board.

>Meanwhile, it said that the Israeli army will continue expanding and consolidating its grip beyond the so-called “Yellow Line” - an area that Israel was expected to hold temporarily in the first stage of the ceasefire but has refused to relinquish as it has not proceeded with the second stage of the deal, which requires its withdrawal.

>The buffer zone now encompasses about 70 percent of the territory.

(continues at link)

https://youtu.be/arch7KLd9Yk

For the uninitiated, Bout was a large-scale arms dealer, which earned him the "Merchant of Death" moniker.

Bout speaks English but the words and phrasing he uses make transcription difficult so hopefully this is an accurate representation of what he said.

IMO the title of this video, "Merchant of Death Warns Russia Is Preparing for a Devastating Attack on Western Europe", is misleading because it implies something imminent that was not stated as such. He does point out that European states playing such an active role in the Ukraine conflict become co-belligerents who can be retaliated against under international law, a point that many Western analysts have also made.

Europe and Russia

When asked, Bout specifically names Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Spain, Belgium, Dutch (Netherlands) and Britain as providing Ukraine with drones that have about a 1,000-mile range in sufficient numbers that they can launch 500-600 of them simultaneously.

>This is again pushing us very close to where we would have no other choice but to start hitting logistics centers in Poland, in Romania, in Germany, in all these countries because they are part of the conflict. According to international law we have a full right to attack them because they are manufacturing armaments and declaring that these are factories belonging to Ukraine.

(3:22)

He calls Ukraine's drone attack on the college dormitory in Lugansk a terrorist attack as there was no military presence there, there were over 100 students and 21 were killed. He says they're using what they call (meshian?) drones in the border region that don't even have an operator, they just target anything that's moving like a car and they even strike the kit on a bike. Later (40:08) he also brings up Ukrainian drone attacks on civilian busses, like the one carrying the Belarusian soccer team from Belarus to a Black Sea resort: "this was kids, there wasn't a single soldier in that bus."

(9:31)

He sees European leadership as a double dictatorship, first under national leaders who are unpopular but cling to power by manipulating elections "like we saw recently in Romania." And then the Brussels dictatorship (EU Commission) that deprives individual states of their sovereignty, driving them to commit economic suicide.

(11:01)

>In Germany the auto industry is on its death bed and now they're militarizing, converting the old Volkswagen and Audi factories to weapons manufacturing. Males of military age are not allowed to leave Germany without first registering at some military recruiting point. They're openly saying that they need to have a strongest army in Europe in three years. Well, you know, we already had this similar situation right before World War II.

(13:16)

>It looks like the European elites are seriously considering a full-blown war with Russia and thinking that they're going to win in conventional war. But in our military doctrine, there is a formula where if we feel that any attacks against us are threatening our existence, we will answer with a nuclear weapon. Definitely we don't want to go this way but if they think they can conquer us, split us into 32 small parts as they want and make them into colonies, it ain't happening.

(16:04)

>(on why European leaders would want war with Russia) Look at Macron, Merz or Starmer who just resigned today. These people are the most unpopular in their countries. Think of the European bureaucracy in Brussels. So for them the war is maybe the only way to stay in power to keep their influence. If they go to war they can declare an emergency, postpone the election and then they grab power completely.

>The globalists fully control Europe. For last 30 years Soros invested heavily in these leaders, since their early teens they were paid to study in the universities, then they become activists, then they become politicians and finally they become leaders of their countries who have no feeling for their own native countries. They are all part of this suicidal satanic cult. For me this conflict with Ukraine has basically become a religious conflict, and it feels like this is maybe a final battle with evil forces.

>By the way, today we have a national remembrance of the day Germany attacked the Soviet Union, June 22nd. So for Russians, even many republics of the former USSR, this is a very somber day when we remember our grandfathers, like mine who died in the fight in the Kursk battle, and this is really, really huge for us.

>Just recently Zelensky brought the remains of Ukrainian Bandera leaders from Europe and with full honors buried them in the special memorial cemetery. This of course sparked some conflict with Poland because these Ukrainian nationalists were responsible for ethnic cleansing, not only Jews and Russians but also over 100,000 Poles.

[Wikipedia: "The Institute of National Remembrance estimates that 100,000 Poles were killed by the Ukrainian nationalists (40,000-60,000 victims in Volhynia, 30,000-40,000 in Eastern Galicia and at least 4,000 in Lesser Poland, including up to 2,000 in the Chełm region)."]

>In Germany it's forbidden to display any swastikas or any Nazi symbols but in Ukraine there are many military units openly wearing Nazi insignia and there's crickets from German investigative journalists. So for them, as long as they are fighting Russians it is good. It's also very, very serious that Germany is openly talking again of another big campaign against Russia.

(21:49)

>So we know how it ends up and believe me if we need to repeat like our grandfathers we will do it but we'd rather try to find those with sober minds and to say, "do you know the consequences? do you really want to see Europe destroyed again?" I don't think populations are even being asked. I'm almost sure that in every European country there is a majority of normal people who like you, like me, like many normal people everywhere in the world are willing to have peace and prosperity, some normal cooperation and all problems or disputes solved through negotiations.

Religious conflict

(26:05)

>(asked to expand on his earlier statement that this was fundamentally a religious conflict) A majority, over I would say 80% of the population of Ukraine was part of the Russian Orthodox church; the Ukrainian patriarchy had autonomy but was an integral part of the Russian Orthodox church. With the 2014 coup, they decided to abolish the Russian Orthodox Church and create the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. And for the past 12 years they've used the police, used the gangs of these neo-Nazis - who by the way have never been Christian, they have their own pantheon of gods - they go to each church and force the original priest out, put a new lock on it and say "this is now a Ukrainian Orthodox Church."

>The Kiev Pechersk Lavra is a monastery with a lot of relics buried in their huge underground tunnels, and now they pillage the relics and the bodies of the saints which had been buried and mummified in this huge system of underground caves and send them to Europe. And in the biggest temple there, they just created a military canteen and are doing some Satanist performances. So for us this is also a big deal religious war.

---

(31:41)

>According to recent polls done by a western organization, I think it was American and British, they found - and they double checked several times - that over 80% want a peace deal with Russia. Now we're seeing also rhetoric from Zelensky threatening some kind of lightning strike operation in Belarus. I don't know if his army is capable to open another front line over about thousand miles long, it looks suicidal.

---

(33:53)

>I feel very much sorrow for the proud people of France and Germany and England. Basically the fabric of their civilization is being demolished, there is a huge replacement of the population happening with this uncontrolled immigration. Unfortunately it's also been happening in America for a very long time I guess. This is one of the points of the globalist elites - let's replace the basically white Christian population with somebody we can easily control, use them as foot soldiers for expansion campaigns.

---

(35:16)

>On the first day of the war against Iran they just openly killed the innocent children in school, the same is happening by Ukrainians. All the international law, all the written and unwritten rules of military conduct has been thrown in the garbage bin. Nobody anymore abides by these rules except Russia, we can't just be as despicable as our enemies. I think you reported this, there have been many cases when our soldiers who became prisoners of war have been forcefully sterilized [in our Ukraine links is a video of the head of Ukraine's medical services instructing doctors to castrate any Russian POWs who come into their care]. They've put swastikas on the bodies of Russian POWs, killed them in the most vicious ways and made footage of this.

(39:30)

>Trump could stop this war very quickly: shut off Starlink, which is the Ukrainian military's key communication system; and stop sharing intelligence information from satellites. Of course, if the Ukrainian regime is in agony and they have no other recourse but to start an all out terrorist war against the Russian population, they would not achieve it because it only will make us more angry and more resilient to finish this war the way we wanted to from first day of this conflict.

---

Drone technology

(43:31)

>(on how drone technology will change warfare) Well, it's already changed drastically. I have many friends on the front lines telling me that every two weeks there is a new improvement in technology and they have to find counter measures to tackle it. So now there is a race of the technological capacities, who will outproduce more drones, which drones would be cheaper more efficient and which drones would not be subject to the jamming or other counter measures.

>Many military units now have their own workshops where they produce necessary spare parts, 3D printing, assembling the drones, adjusting them, reprogramming. There is even many where they put their control units with the microchips themselves. It's becoming mind-blowing. So now there's competition not only for foot soldiers who are more physically fit but for the more skilled soldiers who can operate drones, quickly assemble and produce them, quickly repair them and quickly use them properly so this is a huge change.

---

Hypocrisy

(46:07)

>From the get-go, Ukrainians were selling the armaments supplied by the west on the black market. There's many reported cases of delivery including to Hamas, including to Hezbollah, including to Mexican cartels and nobody knows how much ended up in the criminal circles in Europe. So that would be another time bomb which unfortunately European countries planted themselves for their own future.

>(on why the Israeli government allowed the Zelensky government to sell weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, given their close relationship with Zelensky) Well, that's $1 million question. Another one is why on earth Israelis would send over 2,000 instructors to train the Ukrainian army at the beginning of the conflict? How come they refused to condemn this reburial of the Banderites by the leaders in Ukraine? So the country defending the memory of the old victims of the Holocaust are apparently in cahoots with the Nazi regime? And their defense that Zelensky is a Jew is not working anymore.

>Zelensky's grandfather by the way was a colonel of the Red Army and fought the Nazi Germans so he may be now turning in his tomb knowing that his grandson basically sold out his nation, the memory of what his grandfather did by fighting German Nazism.

>So definitely the Israelis knew about Ukraine selling arms to Hamas and Hezbollah but we're living in a world where hypocrisy has become the norm. I'd say 20, 30 years ago when leaders lied you could see they felt uncomfortable. I think now for them lying and being hypocritical has become the norm and if you're honest and open-minded it looks like a deviation.

Casualties

(50:14)

>I cannot tell you exact numbers and it's very difficult to estimate. But one thing is clear, that Ukraine suffered at least uh at least 3:1 if not 5:1 comparing to the Russian losses, just analyze how many cemeteries appeared in Ukraine, how quickly they are filled up.

>We know that for every fallen soldier the Ukrainian government has to pay a significant amount but it has a practice of considering a majority of the dead people as MIA. When the Russians return their bodies the family has to go through the painful process to prove that he is dead and the government owes them money, then they're told they'll get this money within 10 years by small installments. Demographically Ukraine cannot be the same anymore because their population, especially males of reproductive age, are basically destroyed.

>Now they've started to bring in immigrants like from India or from Bangladesh or Pakistan. According to certain data there's now over 300,000 there and they want to replace more because basically the villages are empty. Since the war has been protracted we were forced to destroy the infrastructure in Ukraine which is feeding the military installation so there is no water, no electricity, no communication. So it's very grim future.

---

Corruption

>Their capital is in such a decimated state with the attacks, with the corruption, with the negligence previous to this conflict. There's a huge history when Ukraine became a black hole for corruption and hugest laundry machine (money launderers) in history. Ukraine was apparently involved in political scandals in the US for the last 10, 15, 20 years. I guess it was 2002 when Ukrainian heavily invested in lobbying in the United States and we know everything from Hunter Biden's Burisma employment. There were many others which are not that known yet who were in the pay of the Ukrainian corrupt regime.

(55:01)

>I would estimate maybe one-third of everything sent to Ukraine was recycled back to political sludge funds (sic) in the United States, especially the Democratic Party. There are many senators happy to go to Ukraine, we know many cases when the Ukrainians paid lavish honorariums. There's a lot of similarity with Epstein, basically Zelensky using the same tactics. Not only corrupting by money but let's provide such a facility when all the visitors can have everything they want for free - drugs are plentiful, underage girls. You want something else more satanic, you're welcome.

>Americans taxpayers are really suffering themselves because their leaders are sending money to Ukraine instead of taking care of unrepaired bridges. making sure water is clean in all small towns in America or that the infrastructure corresponds to the superpower level and not to the third world.

---

Americans

(1:00:14)

>I spent almost 12 years in the US in prison and met a lot of Americans, real patriots like me. Many of them were political prisoners and I learned a lot about how the real America lives by their stories. And I believe that the Russian and American people have so much in common. And I believe if America could free themselves from the control of the globalists, who are using America as a test ground before they run all over the world... for me the American nation is real resistance, despite all the mainstream media dictatorship and control there's still independent voices like you and others still able to speak their mind despite their encroaching on freedom of expression.

>And this is why in my opinion we can not only have a normal relationship, we could have a really, really good friendship. Think of this, if our two countries put our resources and our ingenuity together. Because Russia also invented a lot of stuff the same way America did and many of your inventors basically came from Russia. So there's always inter-pollination happening between our cultures. If we unite and stop fighting, stop being sworn enemies and cooperate to solve the problems we have on the planet, then the sky is the limit or maybe even the sky is not the limit. If instead of spending money that guarantees destroying the planet 100 or 200 times over we put these efforts into science, into modern medicine, into space exploration, into new physics it could be a completely different planet we're living on.

(as usual I'll be editing this to fix typos and formatting problems)

https://reclaimthenet.org/sony-deletes-551-studiocanal-movies-playstation-owners-paid-for

>Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back.

>The titles all come from StudioCanal, the distributor behind Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo: First Blood, The Deer Hunter, Bridget Jones’s Diary, From Dusk Till Dawn, and Cliffhanger.

>A licensing deal between Sony and StudioCanal expired or shifted, and the people who paid are the ones losing their films over it. None of them signed that contract and none gets a vote in it.

>If the movie case feels abstract, the games industry just made the same point with its biggest release in over a decade. GTA 6 arrives November 19, and the boxed copy you can buy at Walmart or GameStop contains no disc. Take-Two confirmed it in a press release: “The physical version of Grand Theft Auto VI, containing a download code inside the box, will be available starting November 12, 2026 to support pre-loading.”

>Do you want an actual disc that lives on your shelf and answers to no server? There isn’t one, and if a real physical edition ever ships, you’ll buy the game a second time to get it.

"You will own nothing and be happy about it!!" /s

https://reclaimthenet.org/eus-new-creator-press-passes-come-with-a-loyalty-test

>The Council of the European Union has decided that from July, online creators can attend EU summits and ministerial meetings to make videos for YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Fine. But the guidance to member states includes one odd instruction: don’t pick anyone who has “published views against EU values.”

>What are EU values? Nobody will say. That’s the useful thing about a vague rule. You can point it wherever you like and never have to justify it. (bold added)

>Now imagine them trying this on actual journalists... The newspapers would lose their minds, and Brussels knows it, which is exactly why it would never write that sentence down for the press corps. Journalists come with a long tradition of being a nuisance to power, and a fair number of lawyers to back it up.

>Creators don’t have that armor. They’re doing the same job, though. A creator explaining a Brussels decision to teenagers who’ll never buy a newspaper is doing journalism, whether or not anyone hands him a badge. Plenty of them reach more people than the wire reporters in the room. The only real difference is that one group has institutional defenders and the other has a phone.

>Which leaves the EU with an awkward question. Is a free press one of these “values” or not? If it is, the rule contradicts itself, because the whole point of a free press is being able to publish views against you.

https://reclaimthenet.org/supreme-court-geofence-ruling

>The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that the geofence warrants law enforcement has relied on for years count as a search of the people they catch, even when those people did nothing but carry a phone through the wrong place at the wrong time.

>We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

>A geofence warrant treats location itself as the suspect. Police draw a virtual fence around a spot and a stretch of time, then force a company like Google to turn over data on every phone that passed through. The method does not begin with a specific person and a trace their movements. It begins with everyone’s movements and goes looking for a person, which is why it gathers bystanders by the thousands. (bold added)

>A cell-phone user, Kagan wrote, “is not to be viewed as sharing private information with third parties – which then can be freely passed on to the government – just by doing the ordinary things cell-phone users do.”

>“That argument ignores how and why Google users turn on location history: Google repeatedly prompts users to turn on the service, often warning that devices will not “work correctly” otherwise..."

>Google itself admitted that geofence searches “often run a high risk of sweeping in innocent users–sometimes thousands of them,” reaching into private homes, apartment buildings, government buildings, hotels, places of worship, and busy roads that police had no cause to search.

https://monikawiesak.substack.com/p/from-jfk-to-the-national-defense

>And why did Lyndon Johnson not offer Israel a formal security guarantee despite reversing all the other policies toward Israel which had created, in the words of Israeli Minister Mordechai Gazit, “a state of crisis” in the US/Israeli relationship[2] under the Kennedy administration? After all, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “Historians generally regard Johnson as the President most uniformly friendly to Israel” and “Israel has had no better friend” than Lyndon Johnson.[3] Johnson was very close to Abraham Feinberg, who was organizing the financing for Israel’s nuclear weapons program.[4] According to reporter Seymour Hersh, Feinberg “enjoyed the greatest presidential access and influence … with Lyndon Johnson.

>Johnson did not show the same opposition to Israel’s nukes program as JFK had. At a September 9, 1963, meeting, JFK expressed, “One of the best arguments, of course, for [the nuclear test ban treaty] is actually what situation we’ll face if we ever [reject] this treaty, we would really be in one hell of a mess. … My God, every country heading towards nuclear, Israel, Egypt, … we’d have a bitch of [a scenario].”[6] It is also during Johnson’s presidency that Israel captured Gaza and the West Bank.

>In a May 12 letter to JFK, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion requested a formal security guarantee.[9] At a May 17 meeting, JFK contemplated a potential joint security guarantee to Israel and Egypt. At the meeting JFK clearly stated that the guarantee would be for the Tripartite Declaration, i.e. the borders and armistice lines established between Israel and its Arab neighbors in 1949.[10] Such a security guarantee would have meant no 1967 war and no expansion of Israeli territory.

>We know Nasser did not want the joint security guarantee proposed by JFK, but the question becomes, what exactly did Israel want from JFK and why were they pushing so hard for a security guarantee in the late spring and summer of 1963? Any security guarantee offered by JFK would almost certainly have required not only an agreed definition of Israel’s borders, but also comprehensive access to the Dimona nuclear facility to verify that it was being used exclusively for peaceful purposes and that any pursuit of nuclear weapons had been abandoned. However, it is unclear that Israel was willing to give up on its nuclear weapons program. Indeed, in his farewell speech to the Armaments Development Authority (RAFAEL) on June 27, 1963, Ben-Gurion (who resigned on June 16 after an ultimatum from JFK) expressed, “I am confident that science is able to provide us with the weapon that will … deter our enemies.”[15]

(continues at the link)

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/five-dynamics-that-make-sense-of

(emphasis in original except as noted)

>The roots of this simplistic either-or are obvious: our tribe good, other tribe bad. The problems with this simplistic loyalty arise when we attempt to explain complex real-world dynamics with the comic-book simplicities of ideology, which extend from politics to culture to finance.

>The emotions of tribal / ideological identity and loyalty bypass our rational processes (bold added) in favor of fight-or-flight limbic responses. Needless to say, these hormonal floods of emotions are the equivalent of smashing a rock on a machine to “problem-solve” what’s broken in the device.

>Humans are social animals because the ability to cooperate with others opens vast vistas of problem-solving power via self-organization: we self-organize to pursue mutual / shared interests in ways that benefit us all. This is the core function of tribes, i.e. self-organizing social structures in which our self-interest is advanced by advancing our mutual interests.

>Both markets and society are self-organizing structures that arise to benefit individual self-interests by benefiting shared interests. In other words, both capitalist and socialist structures arise to serve shared interests. They are not either-or, they’re both manifestations of the same dynamic. This is why the ideological either-or is such a misleading false choice.

>Markets only function to everyone’s benefit within a high-trust society. If there is no social structure that serves everyone’s shared interests by limiting predation and exploitation, then you end up with the extractive “market forces” of totalitarianism, i.e. rackets, in which the few impoverish and immiserate the many to the exclusive benefit of the small cadre of insiders.

>Life cycle of a bureaucracy, Administrative costs (chart):

>Launch: tight budgets, modest pay, minimal benefits, high camaraderie

>Growth: rapid growth in program and staffing; morale high

>Maturity: "mission creep", union & admin gain political power; depts soldify, infighting

>Bloat: budget is flat but admin costs rise; gaming the system and fraud are rife

>Budget cuts: program abandoned as focus shifts to protecting budget and staff pay/benefits

>Failure/implosion: the competent retire leaving the incompetent to command; morale low, chaos and failure the norm; organizational implosion

(I included the above because most of us have seen how it manifested in organizations we've been part of)

>Benoit Mandelbrot’s book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward explains how self-organizing structures... are prone to unpredictable cascades that operate outside the “normal, predictable” rules we’ve identified as “the way things work.”

>In terms of selective pressures and adaptation, these unpredictable crises test the system’s adaptability and stability. In this way, they are essential to maintaining the adaptive “muscles” and coherence of the system which boil down to the dynamics of self-organization--precisely what all the control structures running on automatic have stripped out (bold added) in the “rational actor” incentives to optimize concentrating gains and diffusing costs and risks.

>These dynamics led to a rising wedge of asymmetric distributions of power, control, wealth and income that strip out self-organizing adaptation and the system’s ability to survive unpredictable but inevitable crises. These dynamics and the incentives they generate lead to systemic crisis and collapse.

https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxLfVjNG9yacJjwr5bDLw5ZyQtAGe9mErU

>Gig workers in the US are being offered individualised wages depending on what algorithms decide about how desperate they are for work.

>Ride-hailing companies have long used algorithms to determine how much to pay drivers for a trip – and tech vendors in the US are now exporting that model to other sectors, according to a Washington Center for Equitable Growth report from last year.

>According to the report, platforms like Uber and Lyft track users’ personal data – like how often they find work through the app and for what wage – to find workers who will accept the bare minimum without the protections that come with fixed-term contracts.

>One Lyft driver in the US found that over a two-month period, it took her longer and longer to earn $200. It seemed like the longer she spent on the app, the less she would be paid per trip.

>“Uber was the baseline model, and we are seeing that model being exported into different industries,” Travis Hall, state director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Bloomberg Law.

>A report from the Roosevelt Institute found that the staffing platforms now used by gig nurses in the US use algorithms to determine pay for individual shifts – resulting in nurses being paid different amounts for the same work within the same facility.

>Experts fear that the same trend is being repeated across diverse industries, including HR, customer services and retail.

>In the UK, experts from the Institute of Employment Rights argue that more needs to be done to regulate algorithmic pay practices.

>Non-profit Worker Info Exchange found that since Uber introduced ‘dynamic pay’ practices in the UK in 2024, drivers in the country have lost out on an estimated £1.2bn in pay in the 12 months to March 2025.

>James Farrar, director of Worker Info Exchange, said: “Uber UK managers must now come clean and explain to their workers how their pay is set – and how much of each fare the company is taking.

>“If Uber is allowed to continue getting away with the algorithmic trickery of its so-called ‘dynamic pay’ model, we should not be surprised when hyper-variability and AI-induced precarity in pay become the norm across the entire labour market.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/06/22/israels-surveillance-of-christian-americans/

>Amid a massive drop in support from the Christian community, Israel is spending millions of dollars to target individuals entering churches or Christian colleges with ads, and paying pastors across the country to promote propaganda and false “anti-Palestinian” narratives every Sunday, documents filed with the United States’ Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) show.

>The declaration revealed that the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was paying Show Faith by Works $4.1 million to carry out a massive, covert, digital surveillance operation targeting Christian communities across multiple states, including California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

>The document noted that all students at every Christian college and every congregant at “every major church” in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado has been spied on through their phone’s location data, and targeted with propaganda extolling Israel’s “moral superiority” and “linking the Palestinian population with extremist factions.”

>Geofencing creates invisible digital boundaries around real world locations (in this case, hundreds of churches and universities). Any phone or smart device entering a church on Sunday or a college during term time is logged and recorded.

>Once you enter a church or college targeted by Israel, there is almost nothing you can do about it. They are paying to manipulate your search results, news feeds, and algorithms. What you see online will be decided by Israel, not by you. And virtually none of the millions of people affected are aware this is happening.

(continues at the link)

https://memoryandaccountability.substack.com/p/cpjs-cover-up-of-israels-journalist

>Jodie Ginsberg pretended like the journalist protection experts had no clue. “We’re in the middle of the war, so establishing conclusively whether journalists are deliberately targeted is extremely challenging,” she replied.

>This wasn’t in October 2023, in the fog of war. Or even November. Or December. Everyone knew Israel was targeting journalists and their family members.

>The single week before Jodie Ginsberg pretended that experts simply couldn’t establish “conclusively whether journalists are deliberately targeted” Israel murdered the following journalists:

>- Yazan Al-Zuwaidi | يزن الزويدي

>- Muhammad Al-Thalathini | محمد الثلاثيني

>- Fouad Abu Khammash | فؤاد أبو خماش

>- Sharif Okasha | شريف عكاشة

>- Ahmed Badir | أحمد بدير

>- Heba Alabdlah | هبه العبادلة

>- Muhammad Abu Dayr | محمد ابو داير

>- Abdullah Burais | عبد الله بريص

>A friend began calling CPJ “the Committee to Watch Israel Murder Journalists and Write Vaguely Worded Obituaries.”

>Israel beheaded two journalists on 31 July 2024.

>- Ismail Al Ghoul | إسماعيل الغول

>- Rami Iyad Al-Rifi | رامي الريفي

>CPJ didn’t condemn the journalist beheading. They put out a statement that they were “dismayed by the news” and that “Israel must explain why two more Al Jazeera journalists have been killed in what appears to be a direct strike”.

>Israel did explain the journalist beheading. They bragged about it.

>>ELIMINATED: Ismail al-Ghoul, a Hamas Military Wing operative, Nukhba terrorist and @AJEnglish journalist -- IDF

(continues at the link)

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/06/23/vijay-prashad-two-ways-for-east-asia/

>The Okinawan artist Kinjo Minoru is haunted by the tragedy of the 1945 Battle of Okinawa and the military occupation that has marked the island ever since.

>His art is informed by that sensibility; his sculptures seem to emerge from the earth itself. Human figures struggle outwardly through stone and concrete, their bodies marked by war, occupation and memory. [photos of these poignant sculptures are included in the article]

>Kinjo works with the same materials today being poured into Okinawa’s coast to build yet another U.S. military base. His sculptures aren’t merely monuments to the past. They’re a warning to the present.

>They warn us about the concrete drying across East Asia: new missile systems, military exercises, bases, naval fleets on patrol in contested waters and military budgets that soar as social budgets stagnate.

>East Asia, one of the great engines of global economic and technological development, is being transformed into a frontline of a dangerous New Cold War.

>Today, China is the motor of growth in the region and entire industries and millions of jobs depend on the East Asian states’ relationship with China. Yet while economic gravity pulls the region towards integration, military power pushes in the opposite direction.

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/06/23/chris-hedges-israels-game-is-up/

>Israel is sabotaging the negotiations with Iran and alienating its last important ally by refusing to halt its attacks on Lebanon and withdraw from its occupation of the south.

>It is determined to reignite a regional conflagration that could see Iran perpetually close the Strait of Hormuz and plunge the global economy into a global depression. And it continues its genocide in Gaza.

>Israel’s vision of a “Greater Israel,” designed to ensure Israel’s military dominance throughout the Middle East, depends on harnessing the wealth and military power of the U.S.

>The rhetoric unleashed by Israeli politicians and pundits about Trump and those in his administration over the MoU — reportedly arranged without Israeli participation — is venomous.

>But Israel has overplayed its hand.

>Israel has no intention of catering to Trump. It could not care less what happens to him, his administration or the effects of the looming economic catastrophe.

>But Trump, who always has been and always will be out for Trump alone, is not going to sacrifice himself for someone else’s benefit or airy ideals.

>The genocide ripped the veil off Israel and exposed its dark and murderous visage to the global community. The war on Iran, which Netanyahu sold as an easy win, exposed Israel’s cynical manipulation of the U.S. to the Trump White House.

>It can and will do a lot of damage. It can and will inflict more death and suffering. But it is cannibalizing itself.