Bob Dylan kept his hood up and even left his gloves on as he met Pope Leo at the Vatican on Wednesday.
The legendary musician, whose career has spanned more than six decades, was granted a private audience with the pontiff at the ornate Apostolic Palace.
While the 71-year-old head of the Catholic Church wore his customary white cassock, Dylan sported a black coat, black gloves and a black hooded sweatshirt, carrying a matching black umbrella.
Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican official and Jesuit known for building relationships between the Church and figures in the entertainment industry, said on Instagram that he had helped arrange the meeting.
‘It was hard not to feel the emotion of being part of an encounter that had a real sense of history about it, with the feeling that, at every step through the Apostolic Palace, absolutely anything could happen!’ he said.
The Vatican’s newspaper said Leo had ‘received in private audience Mr Robert Allen Zimmerman’, using the name the musician was given at birth in Duluth, Minnesota.
Leo, who is originally from Chicago, is known to be a Dylan fan.
War is hell. Forced war upon the innocents is even worse and this story is very disturbing.
Ukraine has forced conscription. Essentially a radical forced draft where the government pays private contractors to locate Ukrainian men, drag them off the streets, put them into military training and force them to fight in the war. Inside Ukraine this process has become more and more aggressive as the population of available fighting-age males has declined.
The process is also fraught with corruption. The private contractors, “draft enforcers” ie. “headhunters”, are paid to find the men who refuse to fight. Financial support given to Ukraine by Europe and the USA funds these headhunting operations. However, the headhunters also take bribes and payments by Ukraine families who want to keep their sons, brothers and husbands alive and away from the eastern Ukraine meat grinder.
The headhunters are paid a bounty by the government for every Ukraine conscript they produce. The headhunters will let the conscripts avoid service if a bribe is paid by the family. To say the headhunters are hated by the Ukrainian people would be an understatement. This has created a powder-keg of anger inside the population of Ukraine and is the #1 reason why President Zelenskyy will not permit an election. Zelenskyy would be crushed.
When the headhunters capture the conscript, they turn the man over to the Ukrainian Azov Battalion who are responsible for getting the unwilling soldiers prepared to fight and die. Azov uses physical and psychological pressure to break the resistance of the conscript and get him trained for the front lines. You can easily imagine what horrors happen in this process until the conscript finally breaks and agrees to go fight.
We have watched this unfold for several years. Everything about this forced military service is horrific. That horror is compounded when you realize the ideological mindset of the Nazi Azov Battalion and the unlimited brutality they are willing to execute to succeed in the objective.
There are no rules, laws or humanitarian limits within this process, and everything is subject to the overarching Ukraine corruption system that exists within this hellscape of a country supported by EU and U.S. elites.
Forced conscripts die within days of reaching the front. This brutality on top of relentless pursuit of an unwinnable war shows: 1) the point of the war all along has been to kill as many Ukrainian men as possible, to denude the region of its people by death and emigration; and 2) the war is the pretense and runup to engulfing all of Europe in a war with Russia. The people overseeing this diabolical slaughter hate Europe, Europeans, Christians and White people. Ukraine is an opening salvo in a war that will destroy the West, including Russia. ABN
The same four investors keep showing up behind the cameras on your street, the databases holding your records and the AI being built on military bases. I was told not to say their names.
Five years ago, the cameras watching American roads mostly belonged to local police departments, your tax and Medicaid records sat in separate agencies, and data centers used about 2% of the country’s electricity. Today a handful of private companies own the cameras, merge the records and are building AI data centers on military bases, and the government rents it all back from them. By 2031, at the pace things are moving, your car, your phone and your money could all be tracked by tools the public never voted on and can’t see inside.
Behind many of the biggest of those companies are the same four sources of money. They are Peter Thiel and his Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Joe Lonsdale and Palmer Luckey. They fund the technology, and they appear to be working just as hard to protect it. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have put $50 million into an AI super PAC whose nonprofit arm, WIRED reported, paid influencers to push its message without telling viewers who paid. Their companies have hired lobbyists from both parties, and their founders and partners have been regular guests on one of the biggest podcasts in the country.
…Since my post two weeks ago, most of the conversation has been about me, including a smear campaign, instead of what I brought to light. Almost none of it has been about the investors, what they are building and how much they have riding on it. So this is about them, where they have taken the surveillance state, where they are taking it next and how they are protecting it, because that is what matters.
…Private money now sits behind every stage of how the government watches you, from the tools that collect information about you to the software that connects it, the computers that process it and the political decisions about how it’s all governed. When the government rents all of that instead of building it, the government and the investors behind these companies get powers a public program would never give them, and they are already using them.
Joe Kent appears at about 56 min. I’ve watched 30 min of him being interviewed. It’s quite good so far. Good insights into how the federal bureaucracy works plus the beginnings (I hope) of info about the Kirk murder. ABN
This case represents one of the grossest, legal overreaches by a foreign government leader in human history—a sitting President’s attempt to personally bankrupt a single podcaster from outside the nation in which he governs.
And to formally reiterate since many reporters willfully lied about this most important detail: I was NEVER being sued for stating that Brigitte Macron was born a male. I was instead being sued for discussing MK Ultra and for allegedly accusing the “First Lady” of theft from her sister.
I am tremendously grateful to the Delaware courts and to the presiding Judge for looking at this case objectively, despite false media depictions and government pressures.
Not a single person at his “conference” was elected by the people of the nation from which they originate.
Not a single participant is a representative of the citizens. Every participant is an appointed, unelected member of the western global national security system.
… A system that considers themselves totally detached and more powerful than the social network within the nation from which they originate. They are members of the authoritarian club, the omnipotent police state.
Bongino spreads his wings as a proud new member of this global club. They are unelected, but they will protect you from the scary thing, the dark imagining they promote, in order to express their power….
…. And you will cheer for them.
What exactly is this global security network protecting you from? And why do you need to be protected from it?
Ask Jair Bolsonaro. Ask Marine LePen. Ask Donald Trump. Ask Romania. Ask the AfD party in Germany. The western global security network is protecting us from all of these ‘threats.’
Bongino buys into this global IC belief system 100%, and shares how important his protection is.
He’s right on all points but leaves out the worst — a major aim of the war is to kill as many Ukrainian and Russian young males as possible. Ukraine has already lost one-half of its population to death or emigration. Zelenskyy is not Ukrainian. The Ukrainian oligarchy is not Ukrainian. Elites take the money but their deeper goal is annihilation conquest. ABN
In late spring 2020, a source I knew to be reliable called me with a story. The Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner’s phone and monitored him as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man. The story sounded preposterous, I told my source. And yet.
Six months later, I found myself speaking with someone else about the UAE government and their use of mercenaries in conflicts around the Middle East and Africa when I asked, on a whim, whether they knew anything about Kushner and bank transfers from a UAE account. My acquaintance grew quiet. Then they replied, “Yes.”
Over the next four years, I came to learn that, sometime in late 2017, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) made a startling discovery. A General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) operative, a dark web hacker specializing in stolen bank data, was traveling to the UK for an espionage mission. They reached out to the British government for permission to apprehend him when he arrived. The British agreed.
