Tag: history

Netanyahu’s shock plot to split with US

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Benjamin Netanyahu plans to ‘wean’ Israel off American financial support. 

Netanyahu was pressed on financial support Israel receives from the US during an interview with CBS News anchor Major Garrett Sunday. 

‘Do you believe it’s time for the state of Israel to reexamine and possibly reset its financial relationship to the United States?’ Garrett asked, to which Netanyahu responded, ‘Absolutely.’ 

‘And I’ve said this to President Trump. I’ve said it in – to our own people. Their jaws drop,’ Netanyahu continued. ‘I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have.’

Netanyahu went on the say he wants to begin the drawdown immediately rather than wait for the next Congress, phasing it in over the next decade, a push that comes as American support for Israel declines. 

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This looks like the polite way for Netanyahu to respond to Trump’s firing him. If Trump has been playing hardball with Israel and Jewish Supremacy, his breaking free of JS control would look like this. This is the equivalent of allowing an employee to resign rather than face the humiliation of being fired. If true, this is very good news for Americans and all Westerners. ABN

Alan Wallace on consciousness

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Video prompted to start at 33:03

Dharmadhatu (Buddhist Concept)

Dharmadhatu (Sanskrit: धर्मधातु, “realm of phenomena” or “realm of ultimate reality”) is a central concept in Mahayana Buddhism denoting the ultimate, all-encompassing nature of reality. It represents the infinite, empty, and interdependent expanse in which all phenomena—both samsaric and nirvanic—arise, abide, and dissolve. Often equated with emptiness (śūnyatā), suchness (tathatā), and the Dharmakāya (the body of ultimate truth), the Dharmadhatu is the fundamental ground of existence and consciousness. 

In Tibetan Buddhism, it is associated with the primordial purity of mind and is accessible through the mindstream. When fully realized, it is inseparable from buddha-nature (tathagatagarbha). The Dharmadhatu is also linked to Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha, and is one of the Five Wisdoms—specifically Dharmadhatu wisdom, which perceives the equality and interconnectedness of all things. 

The Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism developed the concept into the “Fourfold Dharmadhatu,” describing increasingly profound levels of reality, culminating in the mutual interpenetration of all phenomena. 

Alan Wallace

B. Alan Wallace (born 1950) is an American Buddhist scholar, author, and meditation teacher renowned for his work in Tibetan Buddhism and the dialogue between contemplative practices and Western science. Ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama in 1975, he trained for 14 years in India and Switzerland before earning a B.A. in physics and philosophy of science from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in religious studies from Stanford University. 

Wallace is a prominent advocate for integrating first-person contemplative inquiry into scientific study, critiquing materialist reductionism in science. He founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies and the Centers for Contemplative Research in Colorado, Italy, and New Zealand. He led the landmark Shamatha Project, a scientific study on the effects of long-term meditation. 

A prolific writer and translator, his works include The Attention Revolution, Dreaming Yourself Awake, and Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic. He has served as a translator for the Dalai Lama in Mind and Life dialogues with scientists since 1987. 

The Hidden History of World War II — and the System It Created

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…[After WW2], monopoly capitalism absorbed the world through debt, trade, media, technology, and corporate consolidation.

The result is the strange hybrid we live under today: corporate communism from above.

Private ownership for the few. Managed dependency for the many.

Who Won World War II?

The ordinary soldier did not win.

The bombed civilians did not win.

The raped women of Eastern Europe did not win.

The Christians sent to gulags did not win.

The British public did not win. Despite Britain’s continued role within the postwar international order, the public was left with heavy debt and prolonged austerity.

The American people did not win either—over 400,000 were killed, while U.S. institutions emerged with unprecedented federal debt and a permanently expanded war economy.

Poland suffered catastrophic losses during the war, with an estimated 5.5 to 6 million people killed—around one-sixth of its population—yet did not emerge as a fully independent state in the postwar settlement, but became part of the communist sphere of influence.

The Germans did not win. The country and its major urban and civilian centres were devastated by sustained bombing, millions were displaced or expelled from Eastern Europe. An estimated 6–7 million German soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the war and its immediate aftermath, and between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans were displaced or expelled from Eastern Europe, with many forced into occupied Germany while others were deported eastward into communist labour camps or used as forced labour.

With over 20 million deaths, the Soviet population—including Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Baltic peoples, and others—certainly did not win, if by “victory” we mean the experience of the people rather than the outcome for the Soviet state.

The winners were the institutions that emerged stronger: central banks, military contractors, intelligence agencies, supranational bodies, ideological bureaucracies, and the financial interests able to profit from destruction and reconstruction alike.

The war did not end in 1945.
It changed form.

The battlefield shifted—from territory to finance, from armies to institutions, from open conflict to systems of management and global governance.

The old empires flew flags. The modern order operates through frameworks.

Institutions such as the United Nations matter not because they command openly, but because they reflect a broader postwar principle: that sovereignty is increasingly shaped, guided, and constrained through supranational structures.

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I believe almost all thoughtful people can agree with the highlighted paragraph above. Who are the strongest players inside that system and what goals are they pursuing — these are the questions which face us today. Who controls the propaganda, who owns its outlets; who advocates for censorship; who uses established institutions to control large populations; who controls those institutions and how were they built, and how have they been taken over? What can possibly replace insider control of major institutions, and where does the power lie to do that? I don’t see it. We the people cannot do that. We the people can only act effectively when largely united, a rare occurrence. There may be a role for some future iteration of AI to remove most if not all of the corruption, contradictions, frictions and inefficiencies within regional and global systems. I imagine we humans will try to do that and might succeed. A good version of a world like that will provide for everyone without stifling anyone. At core, most of our problems are fairly simple, so it could happen. ABN

My father’s deathbed confession could rewrite one of Beverly Hills’ greatest murder mysteries. He was sitting next to the victim when the bullets flew… and told me a secret he kept for decades

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The daughter of a Hollywood mob boss has shared a chilling revelation from her father that offers new insight into one of America’s most notorious unsolved murders.

Luellen Smiley is the daughter of mobster Allen Smiley – a member of a loose alliance between the Italian and Jewish mafias known as National Crime Syndicate, which dominated organized crime in the US in the early to mid-20th century.

Smiley was also the associate, confidant and best friend of Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, the mogul who built the Flamingo, Las Vegas‘s first luxury casino, and whose unsolved 1947 murder has baffled historians and law enforcement for nearly 80 years.

He was next to Bugsy when he was shot through a window of his mistress’s $17 million Beverly Hills mansion – murdered in cold blood with two gunshots to the head on June 20, 1947. His killer has never been found.

Speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Luellen recounted the 1983 deathbed conversation she had with her father that revealed just how close he had been to Bugsy and throws open new questions about the intended target of the hit. 

‘He was in the hospital. He was dying of liver failure,’ Luellen explained. 

‘And he said, “There’s going to be a lot of talk about me after I pass. And you’ll read things in the newspaper about me. Just remember that [Bugsy] was my best friend, and he would take a bullet for me.”‘

Luellen said she was certain that her father knew who Bugsy’s killer was but he never told her, police or the FBI, despite law enforcement’s persistent efforts to get him to talk.

Luellen described her father as a man who was ‘tyrannical’ but also ‘devoted’

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STRAIT SHOWDOWN: Trump’s Project Freedom Puts Iran to the Ultimate Test

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President Trump announces “Project Freedom,” directing the U.S. Navy to escort neutral-country ships through the Strait of Hormuz starting Monday and warning that interference will be attacked, while noting positive U.S.-Iran discussions and framing the move as a test of whether Iran’s negotiators control the IRGC.

The episode argues Trump is using oil and gas to rebuild the U.S. economy and to displace London’s oil-pricing power, citing April 20 Presidential Determinations under the Defense Production Act, a National Energy Dominance Council led by Doug Burgum and Chris Wright, and rising U.S. production (EIA March 2026: ~24 million bpd) driving lower prices, a manufacturing revival, and a shrinking trade deficit.

It contrasts this with post-1971 “petrodollar” strategy, OPEC shocks, “controlled disintegration,” and Iran-related destabilization, and claims modern media propaganda—from Lippmann to Operation Mockingbird to recent censorship networks—drives anti-Trump narratives.

In March 2021, the FDA was warned that its VAERS analysis algorithm could hide or mask safety signals from the COVID shots. Rather than alerting the public, they covered it up

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It is my recollection that danger signals from vax recipients showed up even sooner than early March 2021. Without doubt, the claim that the covid vax is ‘Safe & Effective’ was a blatant lie. Based on this alone, the FDA, CDC and entire medical & pharmaceutical industry should not be trusted again until there has been a very thorough cleaning up of all of these institutions. Covid and the covid vax is but a fraction of the overall institutional health problem in USA. It’s all fixable and even fairly obvious, and some progress is being made, but there is still a very long way to go. At a bare minimum citizens should demand health freedom guarantees, so the bottom line at least rests with us and not some jackass on a schoolboard, government agency, doctor’s office or hospital. ABN

A challenge to the cognitive model of the mind: Paul Cisek questions the dominant scientific paradigm and the current theory of artificial intelligence

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…human language is a tool for communicating our thoughts, but is separate and distinct from thought itself. Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist at MIT and lead author of the paper laying out the empirical evidence for this claim, was kind enough to let me interview her. Her basic argument is that we know language must be separate from thought because (a) people who lose language ability can still think and reason, and (b) different parts of the brain activate when we engage in different types of thought, and often the “language part” remains idle when we’re thinking. In my view, this evidence deals a serious blow to the hopes of achieving “artificial general intelligence” through the scaling of large-language models since, after all, they are language tools (it’s in the name).

Enter now stage left Dr. Paul Cisek, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, to throw some gasoline on that fire. Cisek first came across my radar last year when a pithy observation he made about LLMs started making the rounds on social media. You can read his full comment here, but to summarize:

  • We know that humans in general can falsely impute intelligence and agency to complex events that take place in the world, as we’ve seen humans do this in the past when interacting with a chatbot such as ELIZA, or claiming the gods make volcanoes explode.
  • But although modern-day LLMs are complex, researchers know quite a bit about how they function, through pattern-matching and use of mathematical theories (among other things).
  • Thus, although the public may be inclined to attribute sentience and agency to LLMs, scientists should know better. Cisek: “We are like a bunch of professional magicians, who know where all of the little strings and compartments are, and who know how we just redirected the audience’s attention to slip the card in our pocket…but then we are standing around backstage wondering, ‘Maybe there really is magic?’”

There isn’t any magic. But a big challenge we face is that the companies that produce LLMs are willfully trying to convince us otherwise, and are working to take advantage of the human impulse to ascribe agency to these tools.

Cisek’s main claims as I understand them:

  1. The simple model of the mind as an information processor that takes input and produces output is mistaken.
  2. We should instead see minds as control systems that guide behavior as part of a continuous process, like a circuit.
  3. Over hundreds of millions of years, biological evolution has expanded the range and depth of behaviors that our minds can control.

…

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I have taken several excerpts from the essay above to provide a sense of the overall discussion. It’s an interesting read, not very long, not hard to follow. Well-worth reading. ABN

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‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.’ ~ Max Planck

Slavery and Colonialism. Are Whites Responsible for the Stagnation of Africa and Blacks in General?

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OpenAI Text Summary

The text presents a controversial perspective on historical narratives surrounding colonialism and slavery, positing that contemporary discussions around these topics are often manipulated to induce guilt among White people. The author claims that this guilt is exploited by various groups, including self-hating Whites, racial minorities, and international financiers, to foster a narrative that undermines the racial identity and survival instinct of the White race. The argument hinges upon the idea that the portrayal of history has been distorted to promote a sense of moral obligation among Whites while dismissing the complexities of historical events, such as slavery and colonialism, which the author claims were not exclusively the result of European actions but involved various actors, including Black Africans themselves.

The text argues that the European slave trade was not a unique or novel development, as it was built upon pre-existing practices wherein African tribes captured and sold one another. The author references historical specialists to support the claim that the demographic impact of the slave trade on Africa was minimal and that contrary to popular belief, the industrial revolutions in Europe were not significantly financed by profits from slavery. Furthermore, it is asserted that many Black individuals were themselves slave owners, and the text points out that a considerable number of White individuals also suffered from forms of slavery, which complicates the narrative of racial oppression. The author suggests that the prevailing discourse surrounding reparations and racial guilt is fundamentally flawed, arguing that contemporary generations should not be held accountable for the sins of their ancestors.

…the forgers of history forget to mention that, like the inter-European trade of White Christians, the European slave trade was a Jewish specialty. The vast majority of slave traders who were not Arabs or Blacks were in fact Jews. They owned the slave ships; the crews and auction brokers were predominantly Jewish, as were a disproportionate number of slave owners, especially in the West Indies, Brazil, and South America. The headquarters of this very lucrative trade were in New Port Rhode Island, which is also the site of the first synagogue in the Western hemisphere. Trading in this human misery was halted on Saturdays to observe the sabbath.

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This is not a new topic and readers of this site are probably aware of the basics of it. I have only lightly skimmed the linked article, but is appears to be a good overview of slavery and who did it and why. ABN