Dickweed Volunteer Cannon-Fodder Needs To Go Shame Himself On Soft White Underbelly...,

sonar21 |  Let me state up front that there are many brave, courageous Ukrainian soldiers fighting for their nation. Unfortunately, many of these soldiers are irredeemable bigots. It is indisputable that many in the ranks of the Azov battalion celebrate Nazi “theology” and embrace Adolf Hitler. No amount of rewriting history can erase the bloody legacy Hitler carved into the land and peoples of Europe during the Second World War.

So what are we to make of Justin Banse? You will meet him in the following video. He does not strike me as a racist or an anti-semite. He seems like a fairly normal 22 year old who is not a deep thinker and not well educated. Maybe that explains how he could have joined forces with some modern day Nazis.

If you take the time to watch the video — warning, it is more than 3 hours long — you will understand my confusion. It is a shame that the guy conducting the interview is so clueless. He should have pressed Justin to explain how he could excuse the Nazi beliefs and then fight along side the Azov guys. But he did not.

In a way, Justin is a victim of his prior military service with the United States. What he experienced as combat against the Taliban (I’m assuming that he did), was not real war. His testimony in this video perfectly illustrates a point that Andrei Martyanov makes repeatedly — i.e., the United States has not experienced a peer to peer war since Korea. Justin’s account also confirms a point I have made in previous posts about the lack of artillery and air support for attacking Ukrainian units. They are relying solely on ground forces and vehicles and those are no match for heavy artillery, rockets, missiles and aerial strafing.

Justin does inadvertently reveal the problems facing the Ukrainian soldiers. For example, he states that the 200 man company he was assigned to was ordered to Mariupol. He was left behind and the company was wiped out. None returned, according to Justin.

I feel sorry for the kid. His very soul was scarred by this experience and it will haunt him for the rest of his life. He has discovered the sickening reality of war that combat veterans of World War I and World War II experienced, regardless of the army they fought for.

 

Everything The Goyim Want To Know But Are Afraid To Ask...,

Jews And Blacks: Everything The Goyim Want To Know But Are Afraid To Ask

kevinmcdonald |  Jews won the culture war without a shot being fired and without the losing side seeming to realize that it was a war with real winners and real losers — where the losers have not only given up their cultural preeminence, but have failed to stand up to the ultimate denouement: demographic displacement from lands they had controlled for centuries. The new elite retains its outsider feelings toward their new subjects — a hostile elite in the United States as it was in the Soviet Union.

Unlike Weissberg, then, Weiss seems to feel a twinge of guilt about the role of Jews as victors in the culture war — guilt stemming from his understanding that the new elite has some very glaring moral failings of its own, including its own brand of ethnocentrism that seems far deeper than anything imagined by the WASPs.   

The danger for Jews is that non-Jews will come to realize the deep wellsprings of Jewish ethnocentrism and see Jewish involvement in the displacement of European-descended peoples as resulting from ethnic conflict over the construction of culture. Ultimately, Europeans may come to realize that the conflict is really about the ethnic displacement of themselves as a people.

Speaking for myself, it would be difficult for me not to have developed something of a sense of my peoplehood after delving into the 2000-year history of Jews who were intensely concerned about preserving their people and their culture. As I’ve come to realize, preserving one’s people and culture is a virtual human universal. No one would contend that, say, Koreans have a moral obligation to allow millions of other peoples into Korea so that what we would call ethnic Koreans become a minority and their culture put up for grabs. Certainly, the idea that Israel is a Jewish state is central to its entire self-concept — so much so that the idea of the Palestinians who were basically expelled in 1948 being allowed to return to create a multi-ethnic, pluralistic society is a political impossibility. The idea that European-descended peoples have no right to preserve their peoples and cultures while others do is a glaring double standard.

The fact is that the US did have a sense of being a European, Christian society until very recently. Christianity was an uncontested part of public culture until large-scale Jewish immigration in the early 20^th century. The immigration laws were biased in favor of Europeans until 1965 when the long Jewish campaign to change them finally succeeded. Such laws were no different from exactly what Israel continues to do with the strong support of the organized American Jewish community. Nevertheless, my research shows that the organized American Jewish community has led the campaign to make assertions of white identity and interests illegitimate. I see that as hypocritical. The big question is whether the WASPs will put up a fight.

Was JFK's Assassination A Zionist Coup?

unz |  November 22, 1963 was a coup d’état. That is the premise from which any discussion about JFK’s assassination should start. The coup was invisible at the time, because Johnson created an illusion of continuity. What changed dramatically only became public knowledge in the 1990s. In the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 2009, we read that, “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy With Israel’s Policies.”

Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his. … Not only was he personally a strong supporter of the Jewish state but he had a number of high officials, advisers and friends who shared his view. … These officials occupied such high offices as the ambassador to the United Nations, the head of the National Security Council and the number two post at the State Department. They were assiduous in putting forward Israel’s interests in such memoranda as “What We Have Done for Israel” and “New Things We Might Do in Israel” and “How We Have Helped Israel.” … So pervasive was the influence of Israel’s supporters during Johnson’s tenure that CIA Director Richard Helms believed there was no important U.S. secret affecting Israel that the Israeli government did not know about in this period.[8]

Although Dimona was probably the most urgent reason for replacing JFK with LBJ, as Michael Collins Piper has shown in his groundbreaking book Final Judgment, it was not the only one. The problem of Dimona cannot be separated from the wider geopolitical context of the Cold War. For the Soviets were as worried as Kennedy about nuclear proliferation.[9] Against Piper’s theory, it has been argued that Kennedy had no power to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, and that there was therefore no necessity for Israel to kill him.[10] That may be true: the real danger for Israel was if both the United States and the Soviet Union joined their effort to thwart Israel’s nuclear ambition. When Khrushchev’s minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko visited the White House on October 3, 1963 to discuss ways of expanding the progress of the Limited Test Ban treaty, Kennedy tasked his Secretary of State Dean Rusk to bring up the issue of Israel’s secret nuke program with Gromyko in his evening meeting at the Soviet Embassy.[11] If Americans and Russians agreed to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, Israel would have had to comply.

But worst than the risk of being deprived of their “Samson option”, the nascent cooperation between Kennedy and Khrushchev toward détente presented an even more distressing danger: their common support of Israel’s greatest foe, Egypt. This point is well made by author Salvador Astucia in Opium Lords: Israel, the Golden Triangle, and the Kennedy Assassination (2002, in pdf here)[12]:

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had stronger ties with Egyptian President Nasser than with Israel. Their befriending of Nasser, a living icon symbolizing Arab unity, was a signal to Israel that both superpowers had more interest in the Arab world than in Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish homeland, let alone its expansion into neighboring Arab territories.[13]

“In short,” writes Astucia, “détente would mark the beginning of the end for Israel as a world power because neither superpower had a strategic interest in Israel.”[14] What was urgently needed was to transform Egypt into a ground for confrontation rather than rapprochement.

Astucia published his book in 2002, and lacked hindsight on 9/11 to draw the parallel that can now be drawn between President Kennedy’s assassination and the false flag attacks of September 11^th, 2001. The parallel should be clear to those who now understand that 9/11 was both a massive psychological operation and a foreign policy coup aimed at drawing the U.S. on the side of Israel against its Arab enemies (see my previous Unz Review article). As I wrote for the film 9/11 and Israel’s Great Game: “In 2001, Israel’s reputation had fallen to its lowest level in international public opinion. Condemnations were voiced from all sides against its apartheid and colonization policies, and its systematic war against Palestinian leadership structures. The attacks of 9/11 instantly reversed this trend. Americans experienced the attacks as an act of hatred on the part of the Arab world, and thus felt immediate sympathy for Israel. … Overnight, after the 9/11 attacks, Western opinion had amalgamated the Arab world and the Palestinian resistance with Islamic terrorism.”

The Black-Jewish Relations Paradigm Is A Racist And A-Historical Trope: Who Made It Up?

uwm.edu  |  That Black antisemitism was frequently motivated by economic oppression is corroborated by Eddie Ellis who, in 1966, wrote, “The most violent type of oppression of Black Americans – economic oppression – is waged by solely profit-motivated members of that other ethnic minority [i.e. Jews]. Hence, it stands to reason the Black man who is constantly under the heel of economic tyranny lashes out, quite naturally, at the visible tyrant.”15 

Ellis’ statement highlights numerous issues within the Black-Jewish relationship. Jews frequently voiced their treatment of being an ethnic minority when discussing Black woes. Letters such as those from Frances Dale, a Jewish teacher in New Jersey, point to some Jews viewing themselves as the victims of the white-Black racial conflict that was brewing.16 

Jews, being the pale-skinned people that Blacks interacted with most frequently in urban areas since they owned many of the shops that were in ghettos, were seen as white, rather than Jewish. However, Jews often did not see this in the same light. Eddie Ellis wrote in January of 1966 that “America’s Jewish communities have assimilated themselves into white Protestant America – and done it so damn well – they have assumed the attitudes and prejudices of this WASP ‘in group’ ….to our sorrow.”17 

Ellis’ sentiment was not far from the truth. Many Jews in the inner-city had developed similar racial prejudices to whites and it was because of this racial discrimination that many Blacks began viewing Jews as white. This is, perhaps, one of the many great issues surrounding Black-Jewish tensions; whites often did not view Jews as white and were thus alienated, while Blacks did view Jews as white and were similarly ostracized. White southerners were outraged that Jews were helping with the civil rights movement and by the 1950s Jews had become targets of white violence.18 

Many Jews found themselves in an uncomfortable position, rejected and even persecuted by some whites and blacks and caught in the middle the fight for civil rights. One key aspect of the Black-Jewish relationship, and perhaps the entire reason why the conflict grew so rapidly, is that the two sides never saw the issue in the same way. Blacks saw Jews as oppressive white urbanites who were taking advantage of a history of racial oppression, while Jews thought that Blacks despised Jews for religious reasons. Samuel Lipschitz, a New York Jew, wrote to Dore Schary, the chairman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for much of the 1960s, voicing his concerns on a Black-Jewish coalition. Lipschitz, when stating his belief about the motivation for the Black-Jewish alliance proposed by Schary stated, “Is it not that the Jew is using the Negro as a tool to take revenge or to manifest their resentments against the white Christian who for so long have persecuted the Jews.”19 

Rather than seeing the issue as Dore Schary saw it, i.e. as an issue of racial inequality where both Jews and Blacks were being abused, many Jews saw it as an issue of religious persecution. An anonymous teacher in New York wrote to Dore Schary that, “Maybe you should tell your Negro friends that, from 1619 to 1861, Christian Southerners enslaved them, and that thereafter a vicious discriminatory system has been perpetrated, largely by southerners? And that when the products of this terrible system come North, uneducated and unprepared for city life, to eat up our welfare money, even the most sympathetic becomes angry after a while?”20 

Indeed, this sort of misunderstanding made it difficult for Jews to comprehend why Blacks were displeased, since many viewed Blacks as being disgruntled over the Jewish religion, rather than their economic situation.

A Perfect Encapsulation Of What THEY Do And Have Done To Black Americans...,

NPR  |  So there are basically three areas advanced for why Jews would involve themselves in the struggle for racial equality. All three turn out to be false. But the first would be the history argument, that says blacks and Jews share a common history, and therefore Jews empathize with the historical experience of blacks, and therefore they're willing to help. Right?

When I talk generally with white Jews about why Jews are involved in social justice or civil rights or racial equality, they'll talk about this shared history of oppression.

And the problem is that American Jewish history and African-American history are 180 degrees opposite on that question. One of my African-American colleagues, he said, "If I ever go to a Seder and the Jews say that they know what it's like because they too were once slaves in Egypt," he's gonna punch 'em.

Because if Jews have to go back to ancient Egypt to get the slavery metaphor, then they've kind of missed that American Jewish history is a story of rapid social ascent, and African-American history is the legacy of slavery. That argument is insulting, and it's very elementary.

And, of course, I found that the people actually involved in the movement in the 50s, they knew that. And they were quite clear that they were not buying into that.

What's the second argument that people draw on?

The second argument is a sociological one, which is to say Jews experience social marginalization; blacks experience social marginalization. Since Jews understand what it is to be on the margins, they help blacks. The problem with that is that the civil rights movement didn't happen 'til the 1950s. In the 1950s, Jews were already in the mainstream. So if marginalization was the motive, then the movement should have started 50 years earlier.

Eric Goldstein at Emory, in his book, The Price of Whiteness, basically points out that Jews could only cross the racial line after they achieved whiteness, when they were no longer marginal. So that kind of undermines the sociology argument.

Last but not least?

The third one, the one we get today, is Judaism: that the religion of the Jews argues for social justice, tikkun olam. Prophetic Judaism, the Reform movement, is involved with all of that.

The problem is, if one's adherence to Judaism informs social justice, one would expect the Orthodox, those for whom traditional Judaism is most present in their everyday life, to be in the lead in racial equality. And in fact it's the opposite.

The more religiously traditional, the less engaged [Jews are] in social justice. And the ones that were going to Mississippi getting killed were [for the most part] on the left, were secular, were not involved in synagogue life. And socialist and communist Jews were, in fact, a whole lot more empathetic to the [racial justice] cause than religious Jews.

Why Do Powerful And Activist Jews Fear And Fear Losing Control Of Black Americans?

unz  |  While Jews are obviously desirous and capable of snuffing out any and all criticism, they are particularly sensitive to influential examples from the Black population. In Separation and Its Discontents, Kevin MacDonald identifies the key themes of anti-Semitism as including an understanding that, speaking in general terms, Jews

• represent a separate and clannish foreign group with their own set of interests;
• are highly adept at resource competition and have a tendency towards economic domination;
• tend to engage as cultural actors in order to shape non-Jewish culture to suit Jewish interests;
• form a cohesive political entity that seeks politically dominant roles in non-Jewish societies;
• possess negative personality traits, including the pursuance of a system of dual ethics in which non-Jews can be treated badly and exploited;
• are disloyal to the host nation in all fundamental and meaningful ways

Among Black expressions of animosity toward Jews, the same themes can be observed, arising first from more modest economic conflicts and, as such, having something more in common with the complaints of the early modern European peasantries. Horace Mann Bond, in his own 1965 reflections on “Negro Attitudes Toward Jews,” comments on the fact Jews historically appeared in the African-American environment overwhelmingly as pawnbrokers, as monopolists of the liquor trade (“The Jews have a stranglehold on the liquor stores in this town”), as the primary sellers on credit of clothing and other essential items, and, perhaps most crucial of all, as the slumlord and property dealer (“Some Jews have bought up that urban re-development land and are putting up shoddy apartments they call “Nigger housing” on it”).[1] In 2016, local news website Patch published a list of the 100 worst slumlords in Harlem, with the top ten including seven Jews (Mark Silber, Adam Stryker, Joel Goldstein, Marc Chemtob, Moshe Deutsch, Solomon Gottlieb, and Jason Green), a representation that has remained roughly constant every year, with Jews persistently claiming top ranking for building violations, rodent infestations, lack of maintenance, exploitative rent, mold, and other forms of building decay injurious to health. Indeed, this situation has at times resulted in considerable embarrassment to Jews.

Indeed, it is the sheer dominance and proximity of the Jews as primary exploiters of Blacks that has often caused a quite radical break in the Black imagination between perceiving wholesale “White oppression,” and the more nuanced understanding that Jews are a distinctive class unto themselves. Moreover, the reality of day-to-day interethnic exploitation leaves little room for abstract apologetic theories of anti-Semitism, since the problem is never that Jews arouse hostility merely on account of their religion or identity, but rather that Jews arouse hostility because of their behavior within certain ecological contexts (i.e., as a dominant clique within the rap scene). As Bond explains,

It is my considered view that Negro attitudes and actions towards Jews that are frequently interpreted as “antisemitic” actually lack the sinister thought-content they are sometimes advertised as holding. The occasional riots against small businessmen and landlords in Harlem — persons who may happen to be Jews — do not, in my opinion, actually possess the “classic” emotional load of aggression against a Jewish “race” or “religion,” that has been considered the essence of antisemitism.

One of the most prominent Jewish strategies when discussing Black anti-Semitism is the attempt to preserve both Jewish and Black senses of victimhood, and thus preserve the idea of an alliance against an allegedly oppressive White society. So it was hardly surprising for me to hear that Bill Adler’s first approach to Professor Griff involved a quite ludicrous attempt to turn him against the ‘racist’ Henry Ford.

• • •

The very existence of a Black anti-Semitism is highly disruptive to established victim narratives which deny the privileged status of Jews as a wealthy and influential elite within Western society. While White anti-Semitism can still be portrayed (thanks to endless propaganda) as a top-down form of oppression directed against Jews, Black anti-Semitism flips the narrative since a received wisdom of modern culture is that Blacks are the most disadvantaged ethnic group in society. When Blacks “punch up” and the target is Jews, the only available solution to Jews is censorship. Blacks who grovel enough, and with enough sincerity (like Nick Cannon and Ice Cube) will be rehabilitated through Holocaust tours and such, and their apologies will be widely broadcast as a form of propaganda literature in its own right.

But those who don’t, like Professor Griff, will have their careers destroyed and they will vanish from the cultural spotlight. It may even be worse than that. In a remarkable incident covered by Tucker Carlson, Jewish trainer Harley Pasternak even threatened to have Kanye West drugged and institutionalised: “You go back to Zombieland forever.” The future of Kanye ‘Ye’ West is currently uncertain, but will be undoubtedly be dictated by the extent to which he apologizes to his masters.

When A Company Fails To Implement Diversity: It's Khazars All The Way Down....,

kunstler |  FTX commander-in-chief Sam Bankman-Fried remains at large after steering the crypto-currency trading platform into a bankruptcy so hideously tangled that the assigned liquidator in court proceedings, one John Ray III, who oversaw the Enron aftermath years ago, was boggled by what he’s found so far (and it’s early in the game): Namely, a company run by a handful of twenty-something drug freaks with no idea what they were doing, no record-keeping, and a slime trail of misappropriated investors’ funds leading to Kiev and Geneva through various crooked American political action committees, and the halls of Congress — with echos in ballot harvesting shenanigans which shaped the outcome of this month’s US elections.

     Mr. Bankman-Fried is still scheduled as a main speaker for Accenture’s Nov. 30 DealBook Conference in New York ($2,499 for a ticket), along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Odds on him showing up? Or even being alive elsewhere on this planet then?

     The Bankman-Fried extended family is the quintessence of Woke aristocracy. Dad Joe Bankman and mom Barbara Fried are both law professors at Stanford. She also acted as a money-bundler for the Democratic Party and ran two non-profit “voter registration” orgs (against the IRS laws which only permit non-partisan organized voter registration). Brother Gabe Bankman-Fried headed a non-profit named Guarding Against Pandemics (funded by Sam), which lobbies Congress to construct new platforms for medical tyranny. Aunt Linda Fried is Dean of Columbia U’s Public Health school, and is associated with Johns Hopkins, which ran the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic drill (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) months before the Covid-19 outbreak.

Sam’s girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, ran the Alameda Investments arm of the FTX empire (that is, FTX’s own money laundromat). Her dad, Glenn Ellison, is chair of MIT’s Econ School. His former colleague on the MIT Econ faculty, Gary Gensler, who specialized in blockchains there, is now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that Sam Bankman-Fried was attempting to rope into a regulation scheme to eliminate FTX’s crypto-currency competitors. Caroline’s mom, Sara Fisher Ellison, is an MIT econ prof specializing in the pharmaceutical industry (fancy that!). Caroline Ellison is currently on-the-run.

     The sum total of all this professional and academic accomplishment is also the quintessence of Woke-Jacobin turpitude in service to a political faction that seeks maximum moneygrubbing while acting to overthrow every norm of behavior in the conduct of elections, and perhaps in American life generally. That’s some accomplishment. It’s also a lesson in why the managerial elite of our country are no longer trustworthy. They have gotten away with crimes against the nation for years, which has only made them bolder and more reckless.

     Wait for the FTX bankruptcy to unwind, along with all the political ramifications it entails, not to mention the financial afterburn in the whole crypto market, very likely extending into and befouling the rest of the banking system. This is going to be a clusterfuck for the ages, and will propel the USA into a depression with no visible horizon.

The Mafia Influenced Politicians And Police - THEY Insist On BEING The Politicians And Police

Fortune  |  Gary Gensler blew it again. After his agency failed to warn investors about Terra and Celsius—whose collapses this spring sparked a trillion-dollar investor wipeout—the Securities and Exchange Commission chair allowed an even bigger debacle to unfold right under his nose. I’m talking, of course, about the revelation this week that the $30 billion FTX empire was a house of cards and that its golden boy founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is the crypto equivalent of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes.

To be fair, Gensler was not the only one suckered by SBF. Nearly everyone else—myself included—fell for the narrative that SBF, with his cute afro and aw-shucks demeanor, was exactly the savior crypto needed to shake off its dodgy reputation and emerge as part of the mainstream financial system. The problem is that cop-on-the-beat Gensler not only failed to spot the crime—he appeared set to go along with a legislative strategy that would have given SBF a regulatory moat and made him king of the U.S. crypto market.

Money path:
Congress -> Zelensky,
Zelensky -> FTX -> SBF,
SBF -> Democrats (Congresspersons, "Biden," Gensler)

Democrats get campaign money.

SBF gets promise that Democrats will
(1) attack DeFi,
(2) attack competing CEX's, and
(3) keep SBF safe from investigators. https://t.co/PRfiXti7z6

— The Libertarian Anthology (@JoshuaJHansen) November 13, 2022

According to Washington insiders I spoke with, the reason behind SBF’s decision this summer to obtain control over BlockFi was to benefit from the troubled crypto lender’s recent settlement with the SEC—basically extending the amnesty BlockFi had received to FTX. Meanwhile, FTX’s recent tie-up with securities exchange IEX (of Flash Boys fame) would also help SBF’s empire come under the U.S. regulatory umbrella. All of this would clear FTX to have the U.S. market to itself as the company lobbied for legislation that could have torpedoed competitors like Binance as well as the emerging DeFi sector.

This appears to be what prominent House member Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) was referring to when he tweeted on Thursday that “@GaryGensler runs to the media while reports to my office allege he was helping SBF and FTX work on legal loopholes to obtain a regulatory monopoly.”

Gensler, a former campaign finance chair for Hillary Clinton, is of course not the only prominent Democrat who may have been willing to flex his influence on behalf of FTX. SBF, you may recall, was one of the biggest donors to President Joe Biden, while his parents—both Stanford law professors—have ties to the party. His mother, Barbara Fried, leads a group called Mind the Gap that helps raise Silicon Valley cash for Democrats, while his father, Joseph Bankman, drafted tax legislation for the powerful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass). It’s not a stretch to imagine SBF sought to exploit these political ties to his benefit.

All of this does not mean SBF, Gensler, and other higher-ups in the Democratic party sat around plotting an explicit scheme to hand the crypto industry to FTX. That reeks too much of a wild conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, at a time when Gensler is already shrieking for more money and power to address the latest crypto crisis, this would be a good time for skeptics to ask why he failed to stop FTX in the first place—and if anyone else in high places had a role in enabling this debacle.

Unprecedented Levels Of Ideological Confusion: As Goes Blackness - So Goes America....,

BAR  |  The Black Liberation Movement in the United States has reached an almost unprecedented level of ideological confusion. Unlike in the 20th century, significant sections of the contemporary Black Left openly embrace an understanding of ‘identity politics’[i] that is based in philosophical idealism.[ii]  A somewhat resurgent US Left has, correctly, begun to critique these perceived political errors. Unfortunately, social democrats such as DSA, Jacobin and Cedric Johnson in his award-winning article[iii] add to the ideological confusion.  This essay asserts that contrary to the claims of advancing democracy and freedom, social democracy has consistently undermined the struggle for national liberation and socialism.

In 1896, Eduard Bernstein, the leading theoretician of social democracy,[iv] wrote that the 2nd or Socialist International[v] should adopt a pro-colonial policy. Under the banner of social democracy, Bernstein boldly proclaimed through colonialism the “savage races” can be “compelled to conform with the rules of higher civilization.”[vi]  Fortunately, other, more principled socialists won the debate and the 2nd international officially espoused an anti-colonial position.[vii] Although this isn’t the first time that Western ‘radicals’ have betrayed colonized people,[viii] several leaders such as Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, saw this as a complete betrayal of the ‘national question’ and international socialism.[ix]

Lenin theorized that in the late 19th century, capitalism entered a new phase that he referred to as imperialism or monopoly capitalism.[x]  Under imperialism, “capitalists can devote apart of these super profits to bribe their own workers to create something like an alliance between the workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other countries.”[xi] In short, the capitalists use their extreme profits to create an aristocracy of labor in North America and Europe who sellout and look down upon workers in the global south. By the start of WWI, the process was complete: the Social Democratic Party of Germany and others had rejected their anti-colonial positions and voted to enter the war on the side of their own national capitalist class.[xii]  In one of his most influential works, Lenin clearly demonstrated WWI was fundamentally a war to determine which colonizer would control what part of the world. He called these opportunistic social democrats, “social imperialists, that is, socialists in word but imperialists in deed.”[xiii]

A year before Lenin’s seminal work, WEB Du Bois in the “African Roots of War” contends that the African continent was the ‘prime cause’ of WWI.  Similar to Lenin, Du Bois states:

“the white workingman has been asked to share the spoils of exploiting ‘chinks and niggers.’ It is no longer simply merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic union composed of capital and labor.”[xiv]

According to Du Bois, white workers condoning, if not outright, support for lynching, legal segregation, poll taxes, and racist politicians had a material basis in the imperialist system. Dubois claimed that African America was a semi-colony[xv] with, more in common with other Black and colonized people in the rest of the world than US white workers. Preceding Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s call by thirty years,[xvi] Du Bois believed Black people must practice a form of voluntary segregation[xvii] for at least a short period, then, unite with white workers.  To be clear, like all the theorists discussed in this essay, Du Bois believed that the primary motivations for colonialism were economic.

Academics Intentionally Making Up Shit Opportunistically Create Confusion

MIT  | Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States.² Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.³ And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.⁴

Here is the article in which Harvard profs call for greatest expansion of militarized police surveillance bureaucracy in Western history. Below I discuss the flagrant ethical and intellectual problems and how elite academia can be so dangerous. https://t.co/Cq1fFCdWR2

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) November 3, 2022

It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.⁵

The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”

We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong about much of what we argue here.

In the first part of this essay, we outline five comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts and make the case for the First World Balance.

Hoodboogers Aren't Born, They're Engineered And Systematically Groomed...,

Corporate America disproportionately targets Black and Hispanic consumers with junk food, such as candy, sugary drinks, snacks, and fast food, more than any other race. 

The Rudd Center for Food and Policy Health at the University of Connecticut found Black youth and adults were subjected to 21% more junk food ads than their white counterparts. Researchers said corporate America boosted their advertising budgets on Spanish-speaking television stations as a total proportion of their ad budget.

As the advertising industry drastically changes, companies are embracing celebrities and influencers to promote their products on television and social media. Researchers said advertisers hired celebrities from Black and Hispanic communities to encourage young people of color to purchase junk food. 

Many of these celebrities are idolized by consumers and will mimic their trends, even if that's unhealthy eating habits. 

In the midst of the worst obesity epidemic this nation has ever faced, corporate America employs an army of influencers to bombard people of color with ads for junk food. Data shows nearly 20% of all children are obese, and rates are much higher among children of color: 26.2% of Hispanic children and 24.8% of Black children. This is compared with 16.6% of white children. 

dailymail  |   Highly-processed foods should be reclassified as drugs because they are as addictive and harmful as cigarettes, scientists argue.

Researchers claim items like donuts, sugary cereals and pizza meet the meet official criteria that established cigarettes as a drug in the 1990s.

These include causing compulsive use and mood altering affects on the brain, and having properties or ingredients that reinforce addiction or trigger cravings.

Ultra processed foods - which also include things like soda, chips, pastries and candies - contain high amounts of unnatural flavorings, preservatives and sweeteners.

These properties give them their delicious flavor — but also make them high in calories, fat, sugar or salt, which raise the risk of obesity and other chronic illnesses.

Researchers led by Dr Ashley Gearhardt, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, told DailyMail.com these foods are more like a drug because of how distant they are in taste and texture from natural foods.

'They are industrial produced substances designed to deliver sugar and fat,' Dr Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, a health behaviors research professor at Virginia Tech University, said.

'They are not foods anymore. These are these products that have been really well designed to deliver addictive substances.'

 

Israel News States The Obvious - Nobody Mad - Negroe Reporter Does The Same And Gets Fired For It

unz  |  Ye opened the floodgates. The Jews have a crisis of black people basically every day now.

Black journalist Isaiah Jackson, who works for CoinDesk, tweeted the following about the ongoing FTX debacle:

That was fast pic.twitter.com/tYMis0GORe

— Qualms (@Qualms19) November 12, 2022

It’s a pretty simple, obvious observation. Jews are 2% of the American population and 100% of the high-level FTX employees. This is similar to what we’ve seen Ye saying about organized Jewry engaging in high-level crime. It’s difficult to understand how this observation is “hateful” in and of itself, right?

Well, it might be difficult for you to understand, but it wasn’t difficult for the managers of CoinDesk, who immediately fired Jackson over the tweet.

In response to a tweet from Isaiah Jackson that made an anti-Semitic, hurtful statement, CoinDesk is immediately terminating his contract for his weekly Community Crypto show on CoinDesk TV. 🧵

— CoinDesk (@CoinDesk) November 11, 2022

It’s amazing how that happens every single time. It’s almost like Jews have a total lockdown on the entirety of American institutions and shut down anyone who even hints at criticism of them in order to make an example.

Jackson was just talking the facts – everyone in charge at FTX was Jewish. Literally everyone.

If Jews were just random people, then this would be a totally wild coincidence, and Jews wouldn’t care if anyone pointed it out. I didn’t have any Irish people come down on me when I pointed out that everyone I knew in high school who was known for fighting, charged with a crime, expelled from school, or sold drugs had an Irish last name. I told other people with Irish last names this fact and they said “lol. lmao.”

Yet for some reason, Jews freak out if you point out that Jews hold all of these coincidental positions of power, and are often associated with financial crimes or other clear misdeeds. If it didn’t reflect on Jews as a whole, they would not care if you pointed it out.

In the above example of people of Irish origin in Ohio being overrepresented among people committing misdeeds, this theoretically did reflect badly on people of Irish origin, though no one ever thought to get mad about it. Most people with Irish last names were not associated with misdeeds, so it was just a funny thing. It is not intuitive to get mad unless you yourself are personally implicated.

Jackson has completely refused to back down. He noted that all he is doing is recognizing a pattern.

Name Stealer Scientology One Helluva Drug: Bankman-Fried And Zelensky Not Going To Jail....,

He didn't make the mistakes his predecessor Bernie Madoff made. 

1. He took great care to buy off the regime in power, acting as their bagman for the Ukro-Khazarian money laundering scheme. 

Maxine Waters just blew @SBF_FTX a kiss. Safe to say that went well.😘 pic.twitter.com/C8I90fdmqW

— chochaymon (@ElliottFryback) December 8, 2021

2. He took great care not to rip off his Khazarian co-religionists, who wield outsize influence in America (to the point where an outsider might legitimately assume it is an almost entirely Zionist country). 

And, of course, he must have a substantial amount of blackmail information about Bidencorp's Ukrainian money laundering scheme. 

He's either going to be allowed to flee to a non-extraditable exile - or - commit suicide by a bullet to the back of the head.

astral-codexten |  Tyler Cowen linked Milky Eggs’ excellent overview of the FTX crash. I’m unqualified to comment on any of the financial or regulatory aspects. But it turns out there’s a psychopharmacology angle, which I am qualified to talk about, so let’s go.

1: Was SBF Using A Medication That Can Cause Overspending And Compulsive Gambling As A Side Effect?

 

Probably yes, and maybe it could have had some small effect, but probably not as much as the people discussing it on Twitter think.

Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This could be a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline. The detectives at the @AutismCapital Twitter account found a photo of SBF, zoomed in on a scrap of paper on his desk, and recognized it as an Emsam wrapper.

 What’s the blue-green bottle to the left of the red circle?

Here the detectives on r/NootropicsDepot recognized it as their company’s old brand of adrafinil7. Adrafinil is a prodrug of modafinil, an unusual stimulant-like drug. That is, your body metabolizes adrafinil and turns it into modafinil after you take it.

So was SBF effectively on modafinil? Seems likely - many traders are. I won’t lie - modafinil is a good stimulant, during medical residency some doctors (including me) would use it to stay alert through the night shift. It’s not any better than Adderall or anything, just a bit different and easier to get.

Does it affect attitudes to risk? Hopefully you can already predict my answer to that question: all dopaminergics affect attitude to risk in complicated ways we don’t really understand, but for most people these effects will be too small to notice. There’s one case report of modafinil causing pathological gambling, and various contrived studies where neuroscientists investigate how modafinil shifts some technical parameter in a risk curve; these kinds of studies often don’t replicate. I think you can really just stick to your prior of “all dopaminergics affect risk curves in ways we don’t understand, but it’s usually fine when your job doesn’t require perfectly-tuned risk awareness”.

Except - was he taking the selegiline and adrafinil at the same time?

Selegiline prevents the body from breaking down dopamine. Modafinil works by preventing cells from reabsorbing dopamine. If you can’t break it down, and you can’t reabsorb it, what happens? Does it just build up forever until it explodes and you die?

This is what happens with serotonin. If you take a drug that prevents serotonin breakdown (like a traditional MAOI) and a drug that prevents serotonin reuptake (like an SSRI) at the same time, you definitely die. Lots of doctors have noticed that the MAOI + stimulant situation is pretty similar and decided you shouldn’t take these at the same time either. So some people following the FTX situation have wondered whether this combo might have been very dangerous - either to Sam’s health or to his risk-management ability.

 

Why Did NBC News Suspend Miguel Almaguer For Accurately Reporting On Paul Pelosi?

dailymail  |  NBC News is under mounting pressure to explain its actions after retracting the controversial segment and this week suspending Almaguer, pending an internal inquiry.

It made the move despite a second report on the company-owned-and-operated NBC Bay Area station that repeats many of the same points in his segment.

National correspondent Almaguer quoted sources saying the husband of House Speaker Nancy did not immediately declare an emergency when he answered the door to police at the couple's San Francisco home following a 911 call.

NBC removed the footage from its website hours after airing on November 4, saying it 'did not meet' its reporting standards - and this week suspended the 45-year-old reporter pending an internal investigation.

et San Francisco's local NBC Bay Area news still has available online a report that also questions versions of the horrific incident, asking why Mr. Pelosi didn't flee the $8million house the moment officers arrived.

The suspension of Almaguer- who has been with NBC since 2009 – has now reignited conspiracy theories surrounding the early hours break-in and attack on October 28, allegedly carried out by Canadian national David DePape, 42.

Almaguer has not appeared on the network since the report, which directly contradicted claims made by prosecutors and the police.

One former senior NBC executive told Fox News that station 'needs to be more transparent with its viewers about this error… NBC owes it to its audience to be truthful and not cover this up'.

Unlike most affiliates, NBC Bay Area is directly owned and operated by the parent company. It is one of only around a dozen in the country to have such an arrangement while more than 200 others are independently owned.

In the now retracted report, Almaguer can be heard saying over footage of the four-bedroom Pelosi home: 'NBC News learning new details about the moments police arrived.

'Sources familiar with what unfolded in the Pelosi residence now revealing when officers responded to the high priority call they were seemingly unaware they had been called to the home of the Speaker of the House.

'After a knock and announce the front door was opened by Mr. Pelosi. The 82-year-old did not immediately declare an emergency or try to leave his home, but instead began walking several feet back into the foyer toward the assailant and away from police.'

The correspondent added: 'It's unclear if the 82-year-old was already injured or what his mental state was, say sources.

'According to court documents, when the officer asked what was going on 'defendant smiled and said that everything's good' but instantaneously a struggle ensued as police clearly saw David DePape strike Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer.

'After tackling the suspect, officers rushed to Mr. Pelosi who was lying in a pool of blood.'

The footage then cut to Almaguer on screen saying: 'Law enforcement officials tell us the bottom line here is this is a terrifying situation.

'We still don't know exactly what unfolded between Mr. Pelosi and the suspect for the 30 minutes they were alone inside the house before police arrived. Officials who were investigating this matter would not go into further details about these new details.'

 

 

Police Bodycam Footage Shows That Paul Pelosi Opened The Door For Police

nbcbayarea  |  The Department of Justice and the San Francisco District Attorney's Office have outlined differing accounts of who opened the door when police responded to Pelosi's 911 call.

Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban shares new details about what the body camera video actually captured as police arrived at the Pelosi's San Francisco home.

Police body camera video that captured the attack on Paul Pelosi, and the moments leading up to it, contradict one of the details included in the Department of Justice's account of what happened that evening, according to a source familiar with the Pelosi investigation who personally viewed the body camera footage and spoke to the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit.

Despite this contradiction over who opened the door, the basic facts of the attack are not disputed in the documents: 42-year-old David DePape is accused of breaking into the Pelosi home and attacking 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer. DePape is being held in San Francisco County jail on attempted murder and multiple other felony charges. According to court documents, DePape was looking for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Paul's wife, and threatened to break her kneecaps.

 

The Little Cokehead In Kiev Tried - And Epically Failed - To Trigger NATO Article 5

sonar21  |  I believe the evidence is overwhelming that Ukraine tried and failed to manufacture a “Russian” attack on Poland that would have justified NATO coming to Poland’s defense under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty and solved Kiev’s dilemma over how to replace the massive number of Ukrainian soldiers that were killed or wounded in combat during the past two months. It is a whopper of a number. And Ukraine is in desperate need of reinforcements that are not available if they rely on only drafting Ukrainians.

The S-300 was fired by Ukrainian forces located somewhere to the west of Kiev. It is highly likely that U.S. and Russian satellites recorded this launch. In other words, both sides know where the S-300 originated.

It is highly unlikely — hell, impossible — that this was an “errant” missile that Ukraine fired in a moment of desperation trying to take down an in bound Russian missile. Why? The Russian missiles are flying from the south to the north or from the east to the west. That means if Ukraine is firing an anti-missile defense system at those inbound missiles the Ukrainian missile would travel from west to east.

But that is not what happened here. The S-300 traveled east to west. Unless the Ukrainian operator who launched the S-300 was drunk on his ass, it is impossible to “accidentally” fire this air defense missile in the wrong direction.

But repeating a lie does not make it true. You may insist that the Sun rises in the West, but no matter how loud you shout or how many times you repeat that nonsense, it is not true. Same principle applies here. An anti-air defense missile fired at missiles coming from the east and the south does not magically travel in the opposite direction.

I believe this is another indicator of Zelensky’s growing desperation. Think about it for a moment. If Ukraine really had Russia on its heels, why fabricate an easily disproved claim that Russia attacked Poland with a missile? This was sloppy trade-craft. If Ukraine had used another Russian missile capable of flying the distance from current Russian lines to that farm in Poland, then the circumstantial evidence might have ignited the desired fire among the NATO members.

I think one of the reasons the US Department of Defense was so quick to agree with the Russians about the origin of the missile is that the technical data from the National Reconnaissance Office pin pointed the launch location. It the NRO knows then the Russians, who have similar capabilities, would know.

I also think that Ukraine and Poland cooked up this plan without telling Demented Joey Biden. The incident was timed to coincide with the G-20 meeting in Bali. Hence, my title — Epic Fail.

 

 

Who Now Speaks For The Poles?

johnhelmer |  No one in Poland is in any doubt now that Tuesday’s missile attack on Przewodów* village, eight kilometres west of the Ukrainian border, was caused by a Russian-made missile fired by the Ukrainian military acting on the orders of President Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev. Two  villagers were killed by the Ukrainian action. That Zelensky continues to deny this makes him a liar throughout Poland.

Polish President Andrzej Duda has made this official. “There is a high probability that it was a missile that was used for missile defense; that is, it was used by the Ukrainian defence forces”. Duda justified the action by telling Polish voters: “Ukraine defended itself – which is obvious and understandable – by firing missiles which were tasked with hitting Russian missiles.”

Duda was sharply and publicly corrected by the national party politician closest to the incident, Jaroslaw Pakula, the head of the Lublin City Council.  “ ‘Of course, it’s a Ukrainian rocket. Of course, this is a provocation on the part of the Ukrainian authorities…The rocket could not be fired 100 km in the opposite direction by mistake.’ The aim of the provocation was to scare the EU and gain civil society support to send even more weapons to Ukraine, Pakula added. Instead of saying ‘fairy tales’ about the missile, the Polish president should tell Ukrainian Vladimir Zelensky that Warsaw ‘will no longer put up with this behaviour’ by Kiev.”  

Pakula posted his commentary on his Facebook account.  “I urge you to rethink Poland’s position [looking] at this war in case the red line is crossed again!”  Pakula told Duda and the leadership of the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Warsaw.

Zelensky told the Polish Government: “I have no doubt that this is not our missile. I believe that this was a Russian missile, based on our military reports.”  In a full text of his remarks republished from Ukrainian into Polish by the state Polish Press Agency (PAP), Zelensky added:  “It was not our rocket, not our missile strike…I am convinced that we should and will [take part in the Polish investigation]…I want us to be fair, and if it was the use of our air defense,  then I want that evidence. First the investigation, access, and the data you [Polish government] have.”  

The Polish news agency also reported the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council as claiming: “we are ready to provide our [Polish] partners with the evidence of the Russian footprint that we have. We also expect information from the partners, on the basis of which the final conclusion was drawn [by the Poles] that it is a Ukrainian air defense missile.”

Former Polish senator for the opposition party Civic Platform (PO), Robert Smoktunowicz, commented: “Not only have we not yet received an apology and expressions of regret from the president. Zelensky for the explosion and death of two Polish citizens. What is worse, the Ukrainian side denies its responsibility and demands evidence from the Polish side. What went wrong after February 24?”  

Stanislas Balcerac, an independent political analyst based in Warsaw, acknowledges that the Ukrainian missile attack has struck at the rural heartland of eastern Poland which has voted solidly for the PiS party to win the provincial council and governorate (voivodeship) elections of October 2018;   and likewise the national parliament (Sejm) elections of October 2019  and the presidential election which Duda won narrowly in June 2020.

“The PiS has had to fight on three fronts,” Balcerac said “coronavirus, the war in Ukraine, and Brussels’ game of blocking European Union money for Poland. That’s quite a lot.”

He believes the PiS and its leaders – Duda, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, and party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski — must maintain a balancing act in public, but privately they are furious at Zelensky’s statements. In the context of the current war, adds Balcerac, “Poland has a specific history with both Germany and Russia.”

In Warsaw, that phrase “specific history” means much more than anyone can calculate in votes for the moment.

The moment won’t last, comments a veteran NATO military analyst. “It hasn’t gotten hard enough for the Poles or Ukrainians. Winter hasn’t sunk in yet. We’ll know better in a week or three.”

The UniParty Blocked Douglas McGregor From A Trump Appointment

TAC  |  No serious person in Washington can say they were not warned of the impact of their power-lust in expanding NATO. But the lie continues. The top foreign policy leaders who spoke up over the years against the destructive interventions were ignored.

William Burns, Biden's director of the CIA—the agency charged with knowing how other nations will act and react—has had a ringside seat on Russian and NATO policy for more than 30 years. In 1990, Burns served under Secretary of State James Baker in a planning role during the period when Baker made the pledge to Russia that NATO would not advance past the borders of the newly reunited Germany.

Burns's career as an anointed cardinal of the Deep State is well documented. In fact, he is a bit of a legacy. Burns's father, a major general in the Army, was deeply involved in intelligence work and served Reagan and Bush I on the Disarmament Councils. Burns himself was a Clinton appointee in 1995 when he wrote, while serving as counselor for political affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that "hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here."

The intensity of Russia's antipathy to the expansion of NATO toward their border, and Ukraine in particular, was accentuated in a 2008 report by Burns—at that time U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation—to Bush II Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests." 

Even if Biden’s CIA director was not able to bring his extensive experience to bear this year, others in the State Department knew full well how Russia would react to open moves to add Ukraine to the membership rolls of NATO. Yet Victoria Nuland, mandarin in the neocon ranks of the foreign policy establishment and State Department, in 2013 boasted that the U.S. had spent more than $5 billion promoting pro-Western "civil society" groups in Ukraine since the end of the Cold War.

In 2014 the United States assisted, if not outright directed, a coup d'état against an elected government in Ukraine because that government wanted friendly relations with Russia—a larger neighbor with a shared history stretching back centuries. The Deep State could not tolerate that friendship. An infamous leaked call between then Assistant Secretary of State Nuland and former U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt discussing helping "midwife" the February 2014 revolution can be heard here. University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer gave a 2015 lecture in which he warned about the problems and dangers wrought by the 2014 U.S.-engineered Ukraine crisis.

After numerous rebuffed Russian diplomatic overtures to resolve the dangers posed by an unfriendly and NATO-armed Ukraine, Russia did act—as Kennan, Burns, and others predicted. The Russians moved in 2014 to defend their southern border. By supporting local Russian-speaking separatists, Russia was able to secure Crimea, a peninsula that had been central to the Russian Navy for 300 years. Did they go further? No. Did they start a full-on war?  No. But they did as they had promised and moved to defend their nation’s southern front. As Professor John Mearsheimer pointed out in a June 6, 2022, lecture, there was a long list of provocations by the U.S. and NATO leading up to that.