The Gambler

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The tale of a Vegas gambler, failed politician, and professional Nazi groupie The war in Ukraine has been a bonanza for grifters. From mercenaries and gun runners to OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and journalists, a bottomless well of western financing combined with a firehose stream of information both true and...
Less than a year after the United States and the U.S.-backed Organization of American States (OAS) supported a violent military coup to overthrow the government of Bolivia, the Bolivian people have reelected the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and restored it to power. In the long history of U.S.-backed “regime changes”...
CIA detracts from national security by purporting to know what it doesn’t In a recent feature article in The New Yorker magazine, writer Amy Davidson Sorkin recalls the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1995 bill, the Abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency Act. One of the original neoconservatives, Moynihan had...
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately for a new book I’m writing that has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence or the CIA, and I stumbled upon the biography of Frank Mankiewicz, the former Robert F. Kennedy speechwriter, who apparently had been a “secret backchannel” between President...
Whether One Agrees or Disagrees With Aspects of His Outlook, the Media is Clearly Slanted Against Him In January 1967, the CIA sent a memo (marked “SECRET,” “RESTRICTED,” and “DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED”) to its army of media “assets” secretly embedded in virtually every area of U.S. communications. This...

Hope and Resolve

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In chaotic times like ours, it behooves us to practice proactive optimism, which is far more than infantile hope or pious faith. Conscious, vigorous optimism is visionary and builds on our awareness of our human identity and dignity. It expresses our faith in humanity, our resolve to be morally and...
Yellow Journalism of the Hearst Era Is Alive and Well in the 21st Century There is a wise old maxim that says, “The first step on the road to wisdom is to call things by their right names.” So, let’s do that. "Fake News" has been around a long while: The...
Leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group, including its national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, have been charged with seditious conspiracy for plotting to storm the U.S. Capitol to obstruct the certification of Joe Biden’s election win over Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. While this is certainly a move in the right direction,...
Max Amstutz, the former head of the world’s largest cement company, Holcim, is calling on Europe, like many other Western warmongers before him, to arm itself massively against China and Russia in preparation for the inevitable major confrontation. The Group he ran in the past failed in the world’s largest...
On January 29th, The Washington Post published an op-ed by the well-known Yale historian Timothy Snyder, titled “Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths.” In a key passage, the article reads: Last July, Vladimir Putin supplied the mythical basis for Russian war propaganda in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity...