Zelenskyy's Former Press Secretary Begs Europe to Consider Peace

 She was banned by Zelenskyy, then by the European Parliament, but was able to give her speech anyway.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-216109300

The Origins of the War in Ukraine

 Ivan Katchanovski's latest masterpiece book on how the War in Ukraine began is available for free downloads from Springer:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-98724-3

The hardcover version is $59.99 on Amazon.

Katchanovski has impeccable academic credentials also indicated by his publication by Springer.  He identifies as Ukrainian and is anti-Putin (unlike me).  He was born in Ukraine, was an active supporter of Ukrainian separation from the Soviet Union, and believes in liberal democracy.*  He was prevented from graduate study in the Soviet Union because his undergraduate thesis concerned Max Weber and western economists.  So instead he got his PhD at George Mason University and held jobs at prestigious locations in US, including Harvard and the Library of Congress, before joining the University of Ottawa where he has become quite famous, most recently for questioning western narratives about the beginning of the War in Ukraine.  His book is the most serious scholarship on the topic.

 *I think it's always been fake, now it's a thin cover for hegemonic fascist imperialism. 

Theory and Revolution

 https://liberationschool.org/theory-and-revolution-addressing-the-break-of-ideological-continuity/

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) released a very insightful essay in 2016 on the importance of defining Socialism in terms of working class power.  Nothing permanent can be achieved until that is done, but rather than using the historical Marxist phrase "smash the bourgeois state," they propose this definition of socialism:

”Socialism is a society where political and economic power is in the hands of the working class and the oppressed. Socialism is a society where the basic needs of the population and the planet are planned for and guaranteed.”

 The key word here is power.  And PSL contrasts this with the proposals of Social Democrats like Bernie Sanders.

PSL recognizes the successful revolution of 1917 that created the Soviet Union, the first of its kind where the working class seized power, and that there is much to learn from the Marxism and Leninism that inspired it.  (PSL uses the phrase "Marxism and Leninism" instead of the typical "Marxism Leninism" that Communist Parties use, but they would also consider themselves communists in essentially that same tradition, which was active in the US from 1919 through the liberation movements of the 1960's, but subsequently snuffed out in the minds of activists and replaced with bourgeois Identity Politics.)

Limits to Growth vs Paul Ehrlich

Whenever I bring up Limits To Growth, the groundbreaking study based on Systems Dynamics modeling, critics respond about Paul Ehrlich, who made many predictions in his book Population Bomb and in many interviews which were incredibly wrong.  Noah Smith (an economist who I basically despise btw) has a good synopsis:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-paul-ehrlich-got-everything-wrong

But Paul Ehrlich was not an author of Limits to Growth, and he was not ever a member of the Club of Rome which commissioned it.  

The Club of Rome is still around today making annual report books.  They still say we need to transition to a sustainable society or it will be forced on us at some point in the future, still likely around 2050 (but the exact date is less important than the principle) with Buisness as Usual, with drastic consequences like a large die off of humans, not just demographic shifts.  A sustainable society will not have a growing population and resource use, because the earth is finite.  Our current society can't work like that, resource use growth is forced at every level, especially through the demand for higher profits.  All that seems incontrovertible to me, and it seems we are indeed continuing down the easy road to a catastrophic collapse of several kinds all at once.

Paul Ehrlich's predictions were based on what looks little better than extrapolating current trends.  He predicted catastrophes based on limited resources in the 1970's and 1980's.  These catastrophes never happened, largely because technological changes which at least kicked the can down the road if not solving them completely.

Meanwhile, Limits to Growth made arguments (they denied they were predictions) based on a Systems Dynamics Computer Model of the world called World3.  World3 was run with different scenarios, the Standard scenario represented Business as Usual and showed Growth (of population and material production) peaking in the Middle of the 21st Century.   The authors repeatedly reiterated in interviews that they did not predict catastrophes in the 20th Century, but somehow the confusion with Ehrlich persists.  Another scenario based on wider ecological consciousness, conservation, and reduced materialism showed peaking in the early 22nd Century (but a steeper decline thereafter).

There were several official updates to Limits to Growth, in 1992, 2004, and 2015.  In every update, the authors concluded our actual trajectory still seems closest to the original Standard scenario, which did not even include Global Warming, Endless Wars, and unforced declining Fertility.

Paul Ehrlich was a co-founder of Zero Population Growth (ZPG), which has always advocated for free birth control and abortion on demand, in the US and elsewhere.  I think there are no good arguments against these things, but I know some who make them.  Anyway, ZPG has rebranded itself as Population Connection.  And they are not to be confused with another organization, Negative Population Growth, which has several ideas including severely restricting immigration to USA because immigrants have more children than non-immigrants.  I oppose ideas like that in principle, I believe in as open borders as possible both for economic and fairness reasons.  So awhile after discovering that POV I stopped supporting NPG, but I have been a long time supporter of Population Connection.

How Many Gazans Killed by Israel

 Tony Hanania (@AntounHananias on X, Antoun Hananias on Medium) says a conservative estimate of the Gazans killed by Israel since 10/7 is 1.2 million, including those buried in rubble.  He points out that Francesca Albanese had estimated 680,000 in 2025.  He is a D.Phil (PhD) and says he is a member of the oldest Palestinian family dating to 1st Century CE, St. Ananias.*

https://medium.com/@antounananias/gaza-genocide-toll-exceeds-aushwitz-91e6405c961c

@MosabAbuToha gives the current count "slaughtered" (by direct gunfire) of 73,787 and estimates the total deaths now exceeds 200,000 (September 12, 2026).

https://x.com/MosabAbuToha/status/2098903369167385017

(*I would think the families of Canaanites and others in the region would go back millenia farther than that, if you accept the name Palestine for the region then, though that name was first applied to the region by Herodotus around 500 BCE, possibly because he was most impressed by the Philistines who had migrated there in the Second Millenium BCE.  But if you want to start when Romans renamed the province which they had previously called Judaea as Syria Palaestina, that was in the 135 CE--the Second Century CE.)

Truth vs antisemitism

 I've been investigating the claims that Israel was behind the assassination of JFK.  I myself firmly believe these claims, for many reasons, including that Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu confirmed them when he was released from Israeli prison in 2004.  He had been imprisoned for revealing the Israeli nuclear program, how it had been hidden from inspectors in 1964, and revealing that Israel did indeed have nukes--which has been denied both by Israel and the US government ever since--which is pretty amazing, since outside of those two government's denials, everyone else believes it completely, and veteran journalist Seymour Hirsch even wrote a book, The Sampson Option, spelling out the mad way Israel intends to use nukes not merely against threatening Arab nations but against its Western backers, the US and Europe, if they fail to come to Israel's defense when Israel needs it.  That whole book is based on the knowledge, which everyone has, that Israel has nukes.  Epstein friend, liberal Zionist, and highly regarded writer and lecturer Noam Chomsky has also many times presumed the existence of Israeli nukes in exclamations such as "and they have nukes!"  Still, I personally know a Zionist who settled in Israel in the past decade, now lives near Dimona, and continues to deny that Israel has nukes.  These denials are a pretty good indication of who cannot be believed in probably just about anything having to do with geopolitics anyway.

Anyway, the participation of Israel in the JFK assassination has a clear motive because it is very well known now that JFK and the Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, sparred over the US investigating Israel's nuclear program.  The letters they exchanged were long ago declassified and have been published in many places, including most recently by Palestinian American journalist (and now Congressional candidate) Sam Husseini based in Washington DC.  Ben-Gurion insisted that Israeli intentions were peaceful, but because the Israeli nuclear program was assisted by the French, he would not allow for US inspections.  But Kennedy was not backing down.  Kennedy was assassinated a short time later.  Just before that, Ben-Gurion resigned and was replaced with an even more hardline Prime Minister in Israel.  Finally, the US was allowed inspections in 1964 but the US investigators under LBJ were not very thorough, and Mordechi Vanunu later revealed how a fake nuclear control center was constructed to fool the US investigators.  BTW, De Gaulle had also wanted inspections that were being refused by Israel, so Ben-Gurion's claim that he would not allow US inspections because it was a French assisted operation were bogus.  Evidence has subsequently arisen that China was a partner with Israel in nuclear bomb development too.

Now it is curious that one of the first JFK Assassination conspiracy theorists to write a whole book about Israel being involved was Michael Collins Piper, whose first book Final Judgement: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy was first released in 1994.  It was sometimes banned, but today you can buy the last commemorative edition, from 2015, on Amazon.  It is Piper's most popular book and it went through 5 revisions.  He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2015 at the age of 55.  His last and previous editions can be also be obtained online at such places as Wikispooks and the Internet Archive.  Piper renounced copyright to his works.

https://www.amazon.com/Final-Judgment-Missing-Assassination-Conspiracy/dp/1937787370/

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Michael-Collins-Piper/author/B001KCGXU8?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=278859b5-4a12-4b95-b375-0bd6fb806bf1

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Michael+Collins+Piper%22

Piper wrote a review of his own book, which gives a very illuminating summary of the key Mossad connections to many of the key players we have heard about in other theories.  This is like a very brief version of the very long book.

http://jfk-mossad.htmlplanet.com/piper.html

Now it is not at all surprising that Piper is called anti-Semitic and a Holocaust Denier by the likes of ADL and SPLC.  Piper himself said he was not a Holocaust Denier, and more often than not he praises jews such as Seymour Hirsch he says he relied on mostly for his work Final Judgement.  In his more careful writings such as that he clearly distinguishes Jews from Zionists, Israelis, Israeli-supporters, and Neocons.  But he was a prolific writer and and media personality and he was not always that careful.

And while he claimed not to be a Holocaust Denier, he could be categorized as a Holocaust Revisionist.  He wrote a book about the lawsuit of Mel Mermelstein against the Institute of Historical Review, a well known Holocaust revisionist organization that had offered a $50,000 reward to anyone that could prove that gas chambers were used at Auschwitz as part of an industrial scale killing program.  Piper tries to make the case that Mermelstein did not win his case on the merits of the arguments presented but instead on high powered legal tactics.  (That's not entirely implausible, not that I have the least doubt that Auschwitz had an industrial scale killing program that relied on gas chambers.  But the Nazis were pretty good at hiding their secrets.  You may need to combine multiple lines of evidence, including receipts and letters and engineering diagrams, as historians do, to prove the gas chambers.  In contrast, the Zionists boast and broadcast about their crimes.). Ultimately the judge ruled simply that the Holocaust was a fact which could not be denied, and IHR settled with Mermelstein for $90,000.

That book is out of print but is widely available used at mostly inflated prices.  Piper also wrote a book Confessions of an Anti-Semite, another book about the Rothchild banking and global influence operations, and a few others which could be dodgy.  And his books and media were generally printed by a well known self-described "Nationalist" organization (often labeled as White Supremacist) whose backer was one of his best friends.  Though Piper declared himself to be a "Progressive in the La Follette tradition" and he also wrote a book entitled Share the Wealth so he was not at all a traditional conservative.  He died before the rise of MAGA so we can't judge him on MAGA-ness.

In my brief reading of Piper so far I can sense that he is very intelligent and intellectual.  He is not your garden variety dumbass anti-semite.  His error, if there is one, which may be shared with many of the conspiracy writing set, is that he may be blind to items that don't fit the thesis.  This may be intentional or unintentional.  But from what I've read in Piper's JFK work so far, he seems like he may be the best of all in connecting all the dots, as well as critiquing earlier and later theories.  It's not surprising that Final Judgement is highly praised and often touted as the best exposition of a JFK assassination conspiracy theory ever.  And you may also learn quite a bit about the other conspiracy theories and their deniers by reading it.

So, should we discount the theory that Israel was a key player in the JFK assassination because the best known book about it was written by a Holocaust Revisionist and who was at least somewhat anti-semitic?

I don't think so, and I've made the general case in this blog that we can and should judge any ideas and/or writings based on their internal validity and not on the character of the persons who wrote about them.  I've critiqued Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein on this basis, even going so far as to call them Limited Hangouts, but nevertheless saying that we can still learn a great deal from their writings, which are essential reading, while always being aware of their biases (liberal Zionist and anti-China).

In fact, it's hard to find anyone at all that I agree with 100%, so I've quit trying.  The one person I trust the most about Zionism is Tony Greenstein, a jewish socialist anti-Zionist who critiques both Chomsky and Finkelstein as liberal Zionists.  But he can't possibly answer every question we can think of and agrees with me that people must read Finkelstein anyway.

In a similar vein, a more recent proponent of the Israel was a key player in the JFK assassination conspiracy theory is Ryan Dawson.  Not surprisingly, he has also been accused of being both antisemitic and a holocaust denier by the likes of ADL and SPLC. (Unlike with Piper, however, Google AI doesn't offer me a definitive opinion on it.  Dawson has not written books about Holocaust Revisionism or the Rothchilds.) Born in North Carolina and educated at the College of William and Mary, Dawson now lives in Japan as a prolific writer, media personality, and movie producer.  His recent hour and a half documentary NUMEC How Israel Stole the Atomic Bomb and killed JFK looks to be the best of its kind (we could still use better IMO).

https://rumble.com/v1a6xdr-numec-how-israel-stole-the-atomic-bomb.html?e9s=src_v1_upp_pl%2Csrc_v1_pl&playlist_id=QtQvO_cZvSw

Dawson's website is specifically aimed against Neocons, not Jews.  Dawson has appeared on mainstream TV programs and has featured many well known guests on his program, including Finkelstein, it's a quite an impressive list.

https://www.ancreport.com/ 

https://www.ancreport.com/ryan-dawson/

However, one clever Reddit poster clipped a 30 second segment which does make Dawson sound anti-semitic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VaushV/comments/fxp4hv/everything_you_need_to_know_about_ryan_dawson_in/

Others in that chat repeatedly ask the poster to show the rest of the monologue (which has since been deleted) and claim that Dawson is being taken out of context.  They claim that in the opening Dawson clearly distinguishes between Jews and Zionists, even though that distinction is not being made in these particular 30 seconds.  The original poster refused to show any more of the monologue.

I believe the critics of the poster, that Dawson is being taken out of context in these 30 seconds.  I think he must be starting this section with an additional prelude like this, "It's easy to see how people can become antisemitic when they see so many things, and come to think like this ..."  So he is describing how other people come to think like they do, not that he does.  His inflections seem to reinforce that interpretation, it seems like he is making little of some of the ideas.

I note that the original poster also reveals his biases in statements such as this:

Not like that other quote makes sense. Zionism does not mean Jewish supremacism. Zionism is the belief in the right to self determination for Jews in their homeland. Most countries in the world are based on the same idea, for their respective nations. Something like 90% of Jews are Zionist. It doesn't inherently involve "shooting children". In a parallel universe where the 1947 partition plan is accepted by the arab side Zionism is achieved without any conflict.

He is wrong, Zionism does mean Jewish Supremacism, as it exists today in genocidal apartheid Israel.  Wise jews like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt and many others opposed the creation of the State of Israel from the beginning.  The 1947 Partition Plan was neither fair nor agreed to by the inhabitants of Palestine--who ought to have had the last word--nor implemented as written by Israel; Zionists chose to achieve facts on the ground through violence and terror rather than international agreement.  They grabbed all they could and are still doing so.  It was clear from 1898 onwards that Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine by whatever means necessary; they did not intend to stare the land with a rump Palestinian state or with any non-Jews.  Palestine was not ever the one or exclusive homeland of Jews, that would be like calling Germany the homeland of Lutherans.  There were always many other peoples living there, and many if not most Palestinians themselves have descent from First Century BCE Jews who simply changed religions over time.  (Tony Hanania is one example.). 90% of Jews being Zionist (which is wrong on the high side) means little when 90% of US citizens believe in US Exceptionalism.  That Zionists speak like the poster shows that they have become the genocide deniers of our time, and we should take great care in parsing the truth of their statements and agreeing to their claims of antisemitism.  And that even when antisemitism is true, it's only one of many dimensions in which nobody is right about everything.  Zionism can be just as bad, or worse, as antisemitism, and more than 90% of the political and media class in the US is Zionist.  We should denounce, but not necessarily ignore, all of them too even if not antisemitic.  Speaking with an antisemite is not uniquely evil.  

Most people of all ethnicities (not just Jews) are swept away by the political currents and propaganda of their times as well as self interest and approximate thinking.  Jews are not above all the others in these human weaknesses simply because they are Jews.  It just so happened that Zionists got their plan, to the disaster of all, because it aligned with western imperial interests and Zionists still have it, and vast support from Western governments, for the same reason.   

Zionism may even be, as believed by some Jews, among the worst antisemitism of all, since it presumes that all good jews are inherently Zionist (ie, supremacist and genocidal) and regards the others as scum, fake, or self-hating.  The truth is that anti-Zionist Jews are the minority (as it would be among any ethnicity) to buck the currents, propaganda, self-interest, and approximate thinking and see the truth past it.  And our job as anti-Zionists generally is to change those currents and debunk the propaganda.

The Reddit poster also points out how Dawson also blames Israelis for 9/11, on the basis of the widely debunked allegations that Building 7 was blown up with internal bombs.  I don't necessarily accept the bombing allegation, I can accept the official story that fire spread through the elevators.  However, these allegations are not required for the story of Israeli involvement to be possible, or even true.  CIA appears to have been involved in protecting the hijackers from FBI interference, if not actually guiding them.  And it also appears that over and over Al Qaeda has served CIA and Mossad interests, as has ISIS.  Somebodies had to be behind 9/11, and the way the US government failed to stop 9/11 despite many warnings it was going to happen.  Mossad has been at other times shown to work for CIA for deniability purposes, and that would have been useful here.  So while I don't accept that the case has been proven, there are some tantalizing bits of evidence and it's not at all implausible that Mossad was involved.  And thinking about these things does not necessarily embody antisemitism.  After all, the CIA, Bush Administration, and Saudi government are implicated too.  Are we supposed to think that Israel, who had the most to gain, would be above the fray and not involved because they are Jews?

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/04/18/9-11-hijackers-cia-recruits/

Hong Kong "Democracy" Movement

 Long read on the history and really existing democracy in Hong Kong and it's western backed discontents.

https://theescalatorhk.com/people-of-hong-kong-fight-for-hong-kong-democracy/

A much shorter version is possible and I've given it before, echoing MoonOfAlabama and other sources.  The supposed pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong was a western backed rioting hyper violent Color Revolution, much as has been seen in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, Iran, Xinjiang, Ukraine, and many other places.  It was very violent in Hong Kong, with so-called "protestors" using flame throwers to torch police and innocent bystanders alike.  In Iran recently, hundreds of mosques and other buildings were burned by "protestors" before the Iranian government got control of the situation.  In some places, Color Revolutions succeeded in installing western backed tyranny, in others not.  China has been exceptionally good at repulsing it relatively peaceably.  When you add up all the ways countries are actually controlled, the West is no better than others in implementing the will of the people within resource and other limits, and China probably does it best of all these days.