Brown University’s cost of the Afghan war project just concluded that America’s longest war cost an estimated $US 2.2 trillion dollars – that’s ‘trillion dollars.”

If we add in George W. Bush’s fake `war on terror,’ Brown’s scholars estimate that the cost rises to US $8 trillion!

Most of this huge amount was financed by loans, not through taxes. Meaning that every dollar spent must be paid for by borrowing. That means paying interest (raised by taxes) on the borrowed money – $95 billion dollars of taxpayer money that Biden just gave to Israel, Taiwan and Ukraine in a desperate attempt to buy the November election.

Interestingly, the much-ballyhooed war in Afghanistan has all but vanished from the media. All the CNN generals who postured on TV about the Afghan War have fallen into silence. They were dead wrong about the war. The minute Donald Trump ended the Afghan War by cutting off the billions in US money that kept the corrupt US-backed Kabul regime alive, the war ended and the blizzard of propaganda against Taliban abated. The $2.2 trillion war abruptly became unimportant.

I was blacklisted by top newspapers and TV stations in the US, Mideast and Europe for having predicted that the Taliban resistance movement would win the conflict. I wrote that Taliban was the only legitimate mass political movement in Afghanistan. America co-opted other groups, like the heroin-dealing Tajik Northern Alliance and some anti-Taliban factions backed by Russia or Iran. The US ended up backing the Afghan heroin trade – which Taliban has completely shut down since it returned to power in Kabul.

The United States is the most over-propagandized nation on earth. Americans are barraged around the clock by government propaganda, commercial messages, internet agitprop and pro-war movies. Even the old Soviet Union was not so flooded by non-stop propaganda.

Today, we get 24/7 advertising for Ukraine, Taiwan and, of course, Israel. Women have been a particular target for the anti-Taliban propaganda – the same Taliban that were US allies in the 1980’s, as I saw. Taliban’s mountaineers are a wild and crazy bunch of warriors. Everything they believe in runs counter to the overly feminized United States.

The zeitgeist of the Afghan warriors Taliban’s credo is ‘tobacco, guns, and war.’

My columns about why war in Afghanistan was a huge mistake made me an object of hate. A former born-again evangelical prime minister of Canada actually sent his flunkies to get my 40-year old column dropped from the nation’s largest newspaper. He detested what I had to say but apparently lost no sleep over the scores of Canadian soldiers he sent to their death in Afghanistan or the millions wasted on the foolish Afghan War.

Politicians and generals who lose wars and trillions of dollars should admit their folly and resign. The media that promoted the colonial Afghan war should be rid of the propagandists infesting its ranks. Today, we see CNN, the New York Times, and Fox, the twin voices of America’s neocons, cheer-leading for the massacres in Gaza.

Instead, those newscasters who shilled for the Afghan War are now busily promoted President Biden’s wars. They and TV commentators seem to have no shame when it comes to their hugely bloody, expensive errors in Afghanistan. Nor do we find many commentators or critics who share the least guilt over carpet bombing Afghan villages by B-52 and B-1 heavy bombers.

How many Afghan civilians did we kill? The Pentagon refuses to release estimates. The Soviets are estimated to have killed two million Afghans. I believe the US has killed at least one million.

A trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, suddenly we are taking about real money. Part of the dangerous inflation that today bedevils America was caused by reckless government spending on Afghanistan – as well as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Reprinted with permission from EricMargolis.com.

The FBI is being pressed by members of Congress to investigate the student protests, both for possible foreign financing and for students chanting “Death to America” — a phrase Fox News says is becoming a “key slogan” of the protests. 

There’s just one problem: students never said it. 

I’ve searched, scoured photographs, and waded through social media. There’s no evidence that any of the student demonstrators taking to dozens of college campuses in recent weeks to protest Israel’s war in Gaza said “Death to America.”

The rumor began with a single incident in which an anonymously authored pamphlet found at a University of Michigan encampment contained a passage saying, “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America.” 

That phrase was taken up by Fox News and a number of other news sites. 

“The slogan ‘Death to America’ is seemingly gaining steam among anti-Israel agitators, who have swept across the nation,” Fox News reported.

The claims of a Death to America theme have germinated in right-wing media outlets and even been echoed by more mainstream figures from smug commentator Bill Maher to the Atlantic Magazine, which warned that “every random protester who shouts ‘Death to America’…brings him [Donald Trump] closer to a return to the Oval Office.” Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers has even called for “close investigations” of the funding sources of the recent protests on college campuses.

Though absent on campus, the one place the Death to America slogan is gaining steam is in Washington, where the hoax has been taken at face value.

Last month, five Republican congresspeople representing Michigan — which has a large Muslim population — sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for an investigation into “Death to America” chants. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also referenced the phrase in remarks on the Senate floor regarding higher education and judicial nominations. 

“Chants of ‘We are Hamas’ and ‘Death to America’ by students on college campuses are national security threats,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said on X (formerly Twitter). “Put any student who promotes terrorism on behalf of Hamas on the terrorist watchlist.”

As a member of the Senate Judiciary committee, which oversees the FBI, there’s little doubt that Blackburn’s statement reached FBI headquarters — and such ignorance and might even prod them to action. 

There’s already evidence that the Bureau is closely monitoring purported Israel-Hamas related threats.

FBI Director Christopher Wray in March revealed that the Bureau’s counterterrorism division was “urgently” investigating thousands of reported threats related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Wray also said that “we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.” 

The White House also recently acknowledged the FBI’s involvement — not just in relation the conflict generally but colleges in particular. On Wednesday, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that “the DOJ and FBI is going to continue to offer support to universities and colleges in respect to federal laws,” adding: “So, that is something that the DOJ and FBI is doing.”

Since 9/11 in particular, the FBI has maintained close contact with college campuses across the country under a little-known program called the Campus Liaison Initiative. The program designates an FBI agent (or member of a joint terrorism task force) from each of the Bureau’s 56 field offices to coordinate with campus public safety officers in addition to other school personnel at campuses across the country.

The White House, through its many campaigns against anti-semitism, extremism, racism, hate, disinformation, and foreign malign influence has constructed a patch quilt of offenses that to it demands action. It has already stated publicly that the Department of Justice and the FBI are in contact with college and university administrators, and those two agencies, along with the Department of Homeland Security, are already primed to investigate terrorism threats, specifically Hamas and Palestinian extremism on American soil. Investigations hover in the background, as much looking for federal offenses as responding to them. 

None of this is because there is any intelligence validating a controlling foreign hand or financing of the student protests. It is, in fact, the news media frenzy that is the most dangerous. Fox and other conservative outlets repeat the false allegation that the students are chanting “Death to America,” commentators and even members of Congress pick up the claim without checking, social media becomes saturated and the new reality emerges. 

I can imagine right now a meeting on Pennsylvania Avenue in which an official is asking some spy agency to “look into” the allegations. That leads to surveillance and infiltration and pretty soon you have the full force of the national security state involved — all because the news media got it wrong.

– Edited by William M. Arkin

Reprinted with permission from Ken Klippenstein’s Substack.

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My late friend William Norman Grigg used to joke that radio/Fox host Sean Hannity’s alt-shift-7 hotkey auto-response to someone slightly disagreeing with him on air was to blurt out: “Why do you hate America?” 

DailyWire co-founder Jeremy Boreing seems to have been unwittingly channeling Will Grigg’s satire of Hannity, tweeting on April 20: “People who deny the moon landing or suggest America is evil for its use of atomic weapons against Imperial Japan or who say that George Bush was behind 9/11 actually hate this country.”

Boreing’s remark was directed at Tucker Carlson, who had dared to say in an interview with Joe Rogan that incinerating 150,000 civilians with nuclear weapons is evil. 

How dare Tucker Carlson utter a blood libel against the origin story of the American empire? All that matters is that you are on Team America, right or wrong. And America is always right, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians it has to kill. And by America, that means Israel too. And Ukraine. And probably Taiwan, if we can provoke China into doing something other than selling us low-priced stuff.

It’s no wonder Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens were thrown out of the Conservative, Inc. cathedral and are so thoroughly hated by the official Captive Media. Carlson’s two interviews with Javier Milei and Donald Trump generated more than 700 million views on Twitter/X alone, more than the combined audiences of CNN, Fox and MSNBC throughout their 24-hour cycle for an entire month. More importantly, once you hear either Carlson or Owens for any length of time, you can no longer take the coiffed Captive Media script seriously.

One place where they still pretend to take the script seriously was the White House correspondents’ dinner a week ago. There, the stenographers of the empire broke brie with the official spokesliars of Washington’s executive branch they call “press secretaries.” The dinner is necessary so they can engage in such brave journalistic feats of strength as lamenting the imprisonment of their brethren abroad by all the current official enemies of the regime that are Hitler’s Russia and Hitler’s Syria and Hitler’s Gaza, under the doting smile of Joe Biden. You don’t have to tell them, they know they’re … just … so … courageous.

By way of contrast, official Washington has no use for those “journalistic” cowards Julian Assange and Gonzalo Lira who hide away in prison and the grave, respectively, because of Biden. No need to mention them at all. That would be awkward with Biden in the room. Their prime directive is to preserve their “access” to power, not to speak truth to power as a genuine Fourth Estate.

It’s fashionable among the heterodox to label the Potomac’s partying pooh-bahs of publishing the “corporate media,” or equally pejoratively for non-socialists “legacy media.” And in a sense, they’re both true. Like Dorfman in the old SNL slob movie “Animal House,” this media is in a sense a “legacy” in that it appears to be overweight, stupid, brainless and impossible to take seriously. And the corporate media is “corporatist” in the Mussolini-style sense of the term because they’ve been at least informally brought into the government, as last week’s fete serves as evidence.

But these labels are a mistake. Like conservatives who used to call Soviet satellite states during the Cold War “Captive Nations,” The current legacy media is a thoroughly “Captive Media.” And it’s best labeled just that. Besting the excesses of “Captive Nation” East Germany during the Cold War, they’ve become a key part of a surveillance and censorship system that can only be described as Benthamite. 

It should be taken seriously.

Sure, its audience is literally dying off, as evidenced by the fact that ― other than the MIC and BigPharma subsidies ― they have only three kinds of advertisers: Walk-in shower installers for the elderly, Medicare hotline scam organizations and manufacturers of the kind of “adult” underwear Joe Biden is almost certainly wearing.

But without the compliant Captive Media, it would have been impossible for Congress to have passed the unconstitutional “Antisemitism Awareness Act” this week. Under the new anti-Semitism law, it’s clear what will be legal and what will be illegal speech:

Legal speech: “America has a special relationship with Israel, and an unshakeable commitment to its welfare, and I think that’s great.”

Illegal, anti-Semitic speech: “America has a special relationship with Israel, and an unshakeable commitment to its welfare, and I don’t like it because it’s against my views that America should come first.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the same congress-critters who put Israel’s interests over America’s interests would vote to make it illegal for people to say they’re putting Israel’s interests over America’s interests. And we can’t have a mass media calling that out to the plebes.

Likewise, without a Captive Media how can America sacrifice Ukraine, like we sacrificed Afghanistan in the 1980s, and turn it into a broken country? 

Today’s Captive Media is controlled similarly to how Reader’s Digest and National Review were instructed during the first iteration of Operation Mockingbird of the Cold War, i.e., full of CIA disciples informally on station who willingly guard the official Langley orthodoxy. KGB defector Anitoly Golitsyn, who presciently forecasted the fall of the Berlin Wall in his 1984 book New Lies for Old, also famously wanted Bill Buckley to ghost write his book and serialize it in Reader’s Digest. Golitsyn had changed empire loyalty and he knew well where his counterparts in the CIA were working. (Buckley deferred, as he was too busy selling out conservatism to the neocons.)

Operation Mockingbird, the sequel, is much, much bigger. And like most sequels, it’s more expensive, more extravagant and a bigger disaster than the original. It’s much more than just Bellingcat and a little cottage industry of government-funded fact-chuckers. The fact-chuckers call themselves NGOs, “Non-Government Organizations,” but look behind the veil at their funding and you find that they are really at the very least “Near Government Organizations” if not “Nitro-ed Government Organizations.” Their percentage of government funding typically exceeds the proportions received by NPR and PBS, which make no bones about being government corporations. And more often than not, the source funding for the fact-chuckers is from CIA fronts like the National Endowment for Democracy and other western intelligence agency-related groups. The fact-chuckers help to gate-keep the tech firms and the rest of the media that pours through it in line with the Official Story.

It really doesn’t take much federal government money to control an organization. Back in the 1970s, when the federal government had created the new federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, former LAPD Chief Daryll Gates said something along the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing here) “For two percent of my budget, they insist on becoming my personnel director, my labor negotiator, my operations director, my equipment acquisitions specialist and my policy administrator.” The LEAA was one of the few federal agencies abolished (in 1982, thanks to a campaign by the John Birch Society), but today’s Deep State learned their lessons from the heavy-handed LEAA of the 1970s.

Much of what used to be called the “mainstream media” in the US is now locked down indirectly through the tech portals by the CIA/FBI, or the job is offshored to MI6 and other “friendly” foreign intelligence agencies with a wink-and-a-nod. “Five Eyes” provides a handy work-around for those pesky amendments in the US Bill of Rights.

And the reason for all this effort toward censorship is pretty clear. The Military-Industrial-Complex doesn’t want to have to convince wildcards like Donald Trump to vote their way. Sure, Trump increased military spending to record levels in the US and kept all of Obama’s wars humming along throughout his presidency. And yeah, he got NATO allies to spend more on pointless weaponry. He was 95% on their side from the outset.

But that wasn’t enough. The MIC wants fresh wars, where they can test their new weaponry in the field. We can’t let all the wars go stale. People tend to lose their fear of the Hitler-of-the-month over time.

Also, they don’t want to have to explain away why generals had to overrule Trump’s sudden announcement the US was pulling troops out of Afghanistan in 2018. It’s awkward to claim to be a “democracy” when the generals are in charge over the elected “commander-in-chief.” People might get the idea that we’re living in a military dictatorship, the kind of government where generals get to overrule elected civilian leaders.

The MIC prefers a President they won’t have to bother to convince to back their wars, someone who responds “How high?” when they whisper “Jump.”

A close second is the zombie presidency of Joe Biden, who will slur out “That reminds me of when Corn Pop tried to eat all the mango” when they tell him to back a war. That works almost as well because the permanent bureaucracy thoroughly embedded in the executive branch that thoughtful people call the “Deep State” will dutifully enact the agenda. 

This is also the reason for passing the TikTok censorship bill. While TikTok’s corporate leadership have bent over backwards giving Washington everything it wanted so far in the form of censorship, because it’s foreign owned they still retain the theoretical ability to buck the Captive Media system. And that’s unacceptable. They don’t want to risk another Trump who gives them only 95% of what they want.

“America First” is now anti-Semitic, as is the US border to the MIC’s pawns. “Some say, well, we have to deal with our border first,” Virginia Democratic Congressman Gerry Connolly raged in the recent congressional debate on Ukrainian military aid, “The Ukrainian-Russian border is our border!” 

In his defense, Connolly has a point. Our border truly is the Ukraine border, as it’s the border of the US empire  … until the Russian color revolution moves that border forward again. The 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine was the crowning achievement of the late CIA agent Nadia Diuk, who held the National Endowment for Democracy portfolio for Eastern Europe and Latin America for a decade before her death from cancer in 2019. The NED website was as quick to document the award Diuk received from the Ukrainian puppet government of the CIA in the days before she died as they were sure to omit her CIA background. 

Putin may be a crusty old KGB thug holdover from the Cold War, but he’s smart enough to know that’s the endgame the CIA has been plotting since the 1990s. It ends for Putin, if the CIA gets its way, the same as for Libya’s Gaddafi. 

And the MIC can’t have any dissident media voices like TikTok expressing skepticism about the ongoing sacrifice of the nation of Ukraine, the upcoming sacrifice of Russia, and eventually, China and Iran.

John Ford made westerns. He made sure this was known, not least of all in his opening words to a famous 1950 meeting of the Screen Directors Guild where Ford faced down Cecil B. DeMille, who wanted to oust Joseph Mankiewicz as head of the Guild and

The Italian city of Naples keeps three feasts in honor of its Patron St Januarius, the relics of whose blood famously liquify on all three occasions. His principal feast, the anniversary of his martyrdom, is on September 19, but today, the first Saturday before the first Sunday of May, there is a commemoration of the translation of his relics (one of several) from Pozzuoli, about 9 miles to the Gregory DiPippohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295638279418781125noreply@blogger.com0

This week, Pope Francis talked about two things in a very positive way, he talked positively about parish priests without denigrating them and he spoke positively about making reparation for sin. 

He didn’t complain about worrying about sin as being rigid, backwards or obsolete. He encouraged examination of conscience and the devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the reparation that is demanded of our forgiven sins. This is very traditional, Jesuit missionary zeal as it concerns the promotion of devotion to the Sacred Heart. 

READ THE STORY OF REPARATION FROM VATICAN NEWS HERE.

READ A COMMENTARY ON POPE FRANCIS’ NICE WORDS ABOUT PRIESTS, WITHOUT HIS IDEOLOGY OF DENIGRATING US HERE

What’s going on here? It’s a head scratcher. 

'Razor's Edge': PM Orbán Calls For Europeans To Vote For Pro-Peace Parties In June EU Elections Tyler Durden Sat, 05/04/2024 - 07:00

The rite presided over by Archbishop Bejoy N. D'Cruze in St Mary's Cathedral. 'A gift to strengthen the various activities at the service of the diocese'. From the new bishop, who is 61 years old, the invitation to the people of God to support his ministry with prayer.

A course dedicated to their protection was held at the Caritas Village and attended by 200 women. Significant contribution made by migrant labour to the national economy through remittances recognised.

During the HolyThursday service, Patriarch Kirill recited a special prayer 'for the victory of holy Rus'", which intensifies the war litanies imposed on priests, on pain of deprivation of clerical status if they refuse to pronounce them. The Easter celebrations must recompose the people of believers to show that Russia has defeated the evil within, finding the right path to sobornost.

Today's news: three Indians arrested in Canada for the murder of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar; Chinalaunches mission to take samples from the hidden side of the Moon; InBrazil Kishida signs a cooperation agreement with Lula onAmazon protection;Uzbekistan to restoreoldestKoran manuscriptdating back to the 7th century.

 Such was the headline in a London newspaper in 1932. The account continued:"The beautiful reredos at the back of the Altar, designed by Ernest Procter, A.R.A, was destroyed and the canopy torn down. Two tabernacles were removed, the Venetian bracket supporting the image of St. Joseph was dug out of the wall and the images of St. Anne and Our Lady removed ..."The account by Fr Bernard Walke Fr John Hunwickehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17766211573399409633noreply@blogger.com0

Nations, as well as people, can be unsung heroes. They can suffer and be heroic in their suffering. Poland is such a nation. Hemmed in by neighbors that have all too often been enemies—and, as often as not, conquering enemies—Poland’s whole history has been shaped by suffering. It has been besieged and attacked by the Russians in the east and the Prussians in the west, and by the Swedes in the…

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The Dream of Gerontius—a masterful mix of lyricism and theology—was written in 1865 by John Henry Newman, who, having left the Anglican communion twenty years before, straightaway became England’s most famous convert to the True Faith, which he could only find in the Church of Rome. Set down in a series of seven rhymed sections numbering fifty-plus pages, the book became an immediate bestseller…

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At The Catholic Thing, Diane Montagna interviews me about the Vatican’s recent Declaration Dignitas Infinita.

In publicly opposing Apartheid, William H. Hutt saw how legal segregation deprived black South Africans from pursuing legitimate economic goals. To Hutt, Apartheid deprived people of equality of economic opportunity, which kept them in poverty.

Vast sums are spent on “reforming” government schools, only to end up with the same lousy product. Thinking outside the box means abandoning public schools altogether.

Is Consumer Confidence a reliable indicator of the current economy?

In the third weekly episode of “Playing President,” Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA veteran and briefer of five presidents, continues to make sense of the world to “President” Scheer, who prepared for this role through his decades as a journalist, including in-depth interviews with five presidents from Nixon to Clinton. This week the focus is on...

The Economist Philip Pilkington wrote an essay on what he called “Capitalism’s Overlooked Contradiction”. He identified this contradiction as the “tendency of the rate of people to fall.” Pilkington was here borrowing from Marx, whose prediction of a necessary collapse of capitalism and transition to communism was premised on a fundamental contradiction he believed he...