Tag: history

The Vanishing Letter

Osama bin Laden wanted to speak directly to the American people. An undated letter promising endless war is one of hundreds of documents collected in the May 2, 2011 raid on his compound in Pakistan that was released Wednesday. The full text is below.

However, the full text of the letter was not actually provided by Foreign Policy. Two lines, highlighted below in bold italics, were omitted with the following note.

(TN: Two lines of poetry that say the Mujahidin will not stop fighting until the United States leaves their land.)

Even more intriguing, The Guardian just disappeared the page on which the letter had been published for the last 21 years.

Removed: document
Wed 15 Nov 2023 21.19 CET
This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

From Usama Bin Muhammad Bin Ladin to the American people,

I speak to you about the subject of the ongoing war between you and us. Even though the consensus of your wise thinkers and others is that your time (TN: of defeat) will come, compassion for the women and children who are being unjustly killed, wounded, and displaced in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan motivates me to speak to you.

First of all, I would like to say that your war with us is the longest war in your history and the most expensive for you financially. As for us, we see it as being only halfway finished. If you were to ask your wise thinkers, they would tell you that there is no way to win it because the indications are
against it. How will you win a war whose leaders are pessimistic and whose soldiers are committing suicide? If fear enters the hearts of men, winning the war becomes impossible. How will you
win a war whose cost is like a hurricane blowing violently at your economy and weakening your dollar?

The Bush administration got you into these wars on the premise that they were vital to your security. He promised that it would be a quick war, won within six days or six weeks; however, six years have passed, and they are still promising you victory and not achieving it. Then Obama came and delayed the withdrawal that he had promised you by 16 more months. He promised you victory in Afghanistan and set a date for withdrawal from there. Six months later, Petraeus came to you once again with the number six, requesting that the withdrawal be delayed six months beyond the date that had been set. All the while you continue to bleed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You are wading into a war with no end in sight on the horizon and which has no connection to your security, which was confirmed by the operation of ‘Umar al-Faruq, which was not launched from the battlefield and could have been launched from any place in the world.

As for us, jihad against the tyrants and the aggressors is a form of great worship in our religion. It is more precious to us than our fathers and sons. Thus, our jihad against you is worship, and your killing us is a testimony. Thanks to God, Almighty, we have been waging jihad for 30 years, against the Russians and
then against you. Not a single one of our men has committed suicide, whereas every 30 days 30 of your men commit suicide.

Continue the war if you will.

Palestine shall not be seen captive for we will try to break its shackles.
The United States shall pay for its arrogance with the blood of Christians and their funds.

Peace be upon those who follow right guidance.

Justice is the strongest army, and security is the best way of life, but it slipped out of your grasp the day you made the Jews victorious in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine. The path to security is for you to lift your oppression from us.

There can’t be much doubt as to why Bin Ladin’s “Letter to the American People” is being disappeared, in light of the recent Hamas attacks, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the rush of US men and material to the Middle East. The neocons in the US and UK media are obviously attempting to prevent the pro-Palestinian side from presenting its perspective to the public, and more importantly, they are trying to hide the material link between the past US military defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan with the present US military presence in Syria, Israel, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

I doubt it matters in the slightest. As even the ADL has reported, the youngest generation in the West is solidly against the Israeli position in the Gaza conflict, while only the Boomers generally support it. While the Millennials and Generation X are more balanced – or in the case of GenX, characteristically apathetic – neither of them are even remotely interested in fighting anyone in the Middle East for any reason.

But there can be little question that this is an all-hands-on-deck situation for the neocons, so it will be very informative to observe which public figures fall in line with the demands of the Narrative, and which ones are not being controlled.

UPDATE: The media is officially upset that its attempt to disappear the Bin Ladin letter has failed:

A vile letter written by the warlord behind the 9/11 atrocities has gone viral on TikTok with users saying that reading it has led to them ‘understanding’ as to why the horrific attacks were carried out in 2001. The letter began to gain traction online after UK newspaper The Guardian linked to a 2002 article which translated it in full in an article about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. It was subsequently deleted with the outlet telling DailyMail.com in a statement that it was removed because was being shared ‘without its original context.’

They’re not even attempting to pretend to be journalists anymore. The letter is “vile”? The attacks were “horrific”? Furthermore, The Guardian linked to the article in 2002, so the letter began to gain traction 21 years later, which is indeed “after” the link, but is a very misleading way to describe what happened and why people are paying attention to the vanished letter.

Remember, facts provided without approved context consistent with the Narrative is misinformation.

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Interview with John Julius Norwich

This is an automated transcription of an interview with the late English popular historian, John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, CVO, recorded in 2011.

VOX DAY: I’m delighted to be able to tell you today that my guest is one of my favourite historians, John Julius Norwich. He’s the author of more than 20 books including A History of Venice, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, Shakespeare’s Kings, as well as his recently published memoirs entitled Trying to Please. Lord Norwich, welcome to the podcast. Western culture has always been obsessed with the Western Roman Empire, and paid relatively little attention to the Eastern Roman Empire, so to what do you attribute this general lack of attention or interest in the Byzantines versus the ancient Greeks and Romans?

JOHN JULIUS NORWICH: I think largely that… I mean, I didn’t. I had the sort of ordinary interest in the Greeks and Romans, because that’s what you have. If you go to school in England, you know, you go to public school education, you learn a lot about the Greeks and the Romans. But the interesting thing in England is that you never, never get any education at all about the Eastern Roman Empire, about Byzantium. It’s a conspiracy of silence, and it has been for the last 200 years. And I fell in love with the Byzantine Empire really, largely because of my friend, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died last week, who was the greatest archeologist and a scholar of it, and who I went on a cruise around Eastern Mediterranean with. And also when, in 1955, when I joined the Foreign Service, My first post was Belgrade, in Serbia, or Yugoslavia as it was in those days, and I was just sort of swept up in the whole. That seemed to me the sort of the whole mystery and the magic of the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium and all that. I suppose I’ve been swept up in it ever since.

VD: To what do you attribute the fact that it was a mystery to you? I mean, it’s certainly a mystery to Americans, we don’t spend any time learning about it either. Why is there such ignorance of it?

JJN: Why is there a conspiracy of silence? Precisely. I wish I knew. I went through what I’m sure would have been considered a very good English public school education at Eton. And I hardly knew what Byzantium was. I’m not sure that I knew whether it was Christian or Muslim. I’m not sure whether I don’t think I knew anything about it at all. And because nobody ever mentioned it all throughout my schooling. And I think I was not alone in this. I mean, people just didn’t. It was never taken seriously by English educationists.

VD: Constantine’s decision to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium was one of the more monumental decisions in history.

JJN: Yes, it tends to distract the reader, as if Obama had suddenly decided to move the US Capitol from Washington, DC to Mexico City.

VD: What was behind Constantine’s decision to establish a new capital? And why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, the capital had really, to all intents and purposes already left Rome. I mean, what happened already in this, in the second century? The second century AD, the whole focus of political and cultural activity, is moving to the east, is moving east from Rome, to the eastern Mediterranean. I mean, if you read the Acts of the Apostles, or if, if you read any of that stuff, I mean, it is it is in Asia Minor on the eastern Mediterranean, that everything is happening. Rome has become a backwater, it’s too far away. By this time. The Empire’s principal enemy is Persia, Rome to Persia. I mean, it’s, I don’t know, three or four months probably travel. And it was no it was absolutely necessary to move the capitol to where all the action was. Diocletian did it first. I mean, he, he decided to divide the imprint of the empire into four. And each one had a what he called a Tetrarch. But all four of them were in the east. None of them are in Rome, even then. So when Constantine decided in 332, to move to move the Capitol, it wasn’t a terribly new or revolutionary idea at all. I mean, he was really doing what had already happened. He was just choosing a new a new place. You know, I mean, Nicomedia. Antioquia was three or four other places, which had been tried out and they were very successful. So he just found this new place. which was superbly in a superb defensive position, and said, right, this is it, this is going to be in future capital. Apart from that we’re exactly the same Empire we’ve always been, where we’re Romans whether our empire is the empire of Adios, Nero and Hadrian and Trajan and all that lot. There’s no change, except that we’ve moved to a new capital.

VD: Why did the eastern half of the Empire survive so much longer than the Western one did?

JJN: Well, I mean, it’s survived. Very, very surprisingly, it remained. Except for 50 years in the 13th century, it remained undefeated, I mean, the Roman Empire continued under the new capital in Constantinople, and got incredibly powerful and is by far the richest, by far the most powerful state in the in the civilised world. Until two terrible things happen. One was the the surge of checks, the first wave of tax arrived, and defeated the Byzantine army. This was intense. And more or less flooded all over the whole of Asia Minor, which was where Byzantium got most of its food, and nearly all its manpower. And, and then, and then, that was the that was the first great disaster from which from which you’ve never recovered. And the second great disaster, of course, was the Fourth Crusade when the the Christian armies, who should have done everything they could to protect and defend and strengthen this last great outpost of Christianity in the east, turned against it and destroyed it, and left it a poor, pale shred of what it had been before, to the point where, although it lasted another 250 years, God knows how it did it. It really had completely lost its importance.

Continue reading “Interview with John Julius Norwich”

Ukraine Endgame

As US supports pivots to the Middle Eastern front, Russian strategists are already contemplating what comes after the surrender of Ukraine, the fall of the Kiev regime, and the end of the Special Military Operation in Novorossiya.

Immediately after the end of the Special Military Operation, the West will not be able to fight with us. It does not have a trained army, it will not accumulate the required amount of resources, it has no plans for war with Russia. It only has scraps of speculation and guesswork. These three factors make war with NATO unlikely. It is clear that the United States can push the Europeans to take crazy steps. But on the economic and diplomatic front we have specialists who will try to keep them from doing this. And the NWO will lead to processes that will lead to a split in the European Union and NATO. If we break through a land corridor to Hungary, then Serbia will be magnetized to this axis. And it can be followed by Slovakia and Romania, where very interesting processes are taking place. Eastern Europe will begin to break away from old Europe, which will be severely depressed due to the economic situation. After all, Europe is  defeated not only on the eastern front, but also in the global south. 

Consider this: Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia have a combined population of roughly 42 million. This is substantial, it is also a promising market–make your own conclusion. As I already stated many times, Russia doesn’t need love or obedience, Russia is interested in trade with people who still recognize that there are only two genders. Simple as that. Once the land bridge is built, European structure changes dramatically.

It’s unlikely that either Zelensky or the Kiev regime will long survive the fall of Avdeevka, whether it is followed by a Russian winter offensive or not. Post-Zelensky succession struggles have already begun, and as the assassination of the top personal aide to the Ukrainian Armed Forces shows, they are likely going to be very violent and nasty. And the first priority of whoever wins will be to surrender to Russia on the most favorable terms possible.

My assumption is that Russia will not accept any settlement that does not include the transfer of Odessa. And while it is clear that Ukraine does not have the ability to prevent Russian forces from taking it, there is no reason for Putin to spend the Russian blood required to do so when a little patience and a new regime will likely allow him to accomplish his goals without it. This patient approach might, in fact, be a micro-analogy for the way Xi is approaching China’s desired reunification with its wayward island.

The longer Israel is enmeshed in Gaza, and the more US resources that pour into the region, the more it looks to me as if the October 7 attacks were intended to draw the US deep enough into the conflict to prevent its full engagement on any other front. While both the Netanyahu government and the anti-China faction of the neocons welcomed the redirection of the US military focus from Ukraine to Israel, it chiefly appears to serve the strategic interests of the Russians, which might explain why the Russians have been surprisingly inactive in Syria while Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran have all been unexpectedly passive in response to the slow-paced Israeli invasion.

The scale of the global violence may be limited and regional to date, but the strategic scope is observably worldwide. It appears the complexities of WWIII will pose an even greater challenge to historians than its predecessor. But now that the second front appears to have been opened, it can only be a matter of time before the third one – presumably Taiwan, though possibly the Philippines – follows suit.

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I Read, Therefore I Know

We’re finalizing the art for Books 2 and 3 of the Castalia History subscription, and there has been a lot of discussion for what, if any, subscriptions will be created once the Bindery comes online and the two volumes of Homer have been completed. What we’ve learned so far is that we will be able to offer subscriptions with much smaller print runs than before, which means that we can do more esoteric sets that we wouldn’t have previously contemplated.

But the History subscription is already on very sound footing, and the interiors for Book 4 are already being printed. So, we’re pleased to introduce the Castalia History logo in the form that will appear on the spines of all of the History subscription books in order to set them apart from the Library books as well as the future subscriptions. A more elaborate form will appear inside the books beginning with Book 4.

We would also welcome a discussion among subscribers concerning their opinions on what the next subscription or two should be. We’re presently in discussions with a major publisher that, if successful, will be offered as a separate subscription, and we’ve also kicked around a few ideas among the Castalia team.

  • The There Will Be War series (10 volumes)
  • Thomas Aquinas series (4-6 volumes)
  • Chinese Classics series (5 volumes)
  • Chick Lit Classics series (Austen, Bronte, etc.)
  • The Hardy Boys (3+ as copyright allows)
  • Arkhaven omnibus comic series

Please don’t opine without taking into account the availability of the works. Obviously, we will do a Tolkien series whenever we have the opportunity to do so. Anyhow, if you haven’t subscribed to Castalia History yet, you might want to wait until January to start your subscription with Book 4 so that you don’t start with the second book in a two-volume set. Unless, of course, you don’t mind paying five catchups to ensure you get both volumes of the Cambridge Medieval History.

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Do They Want Right-Wing Death Squads?

Because left-wing murders are, historically, how a society gets right-wing death squads:

The former head of Spain’s People’s Party in the Catalonia region was shot in the face in Madrid on Thursday, police said. Alejo Vidal-Quadras, 78, was shot on Núñez de Balboa street in the wealthy Salamanca area of central Madrid at about 1.30pm, as he was returning home from a church service, according to witnesses.

A Civil Protection spokesperson said Vidal-Quadras retained consciousness and was rushed to the nearby Gregorio Marañón hospital, while police are now hunting for two people who fled the scene on a motorbike, with the shooter wearing a black helmet. Witnesses described the attacker as a ‘young, small man’ who was wearing jeans and a dark coat and was seemingly waiting for the politician to pass by.

The pair exchanged no words, with the shooter reportedly stepping up and blasting Vidal-Quadras from near point blank range before hopping onto the motorcycle piloted by an accomplice.

Vidal-Quadras was the head of the centre-right PP in Catalonia and was also the Vice-President of the European Parliament from 2009-2014, when he left the group to join newly created party Vox.

People have mostly forgotten that the original Brownshirts were formed in Germany from groups of WWI veterans in response to murderous rampages by Communist militants. For all that it is feared by the Left and Center alike, the violence of the Right has historically been predominantly defensive and reactive.

Even Franco’s Nationalist government only came to power in Spain in response to eight years of murderous Leftist violence, particularly the Red Terror of 1936-1939 that left over 50,000 Spaniards dead, including 6,832 members of the clergy.

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Boomer is a Philosophical Path

Recently, some self-styled advocates of the white race, most of whom are anti-nationalist racial imperialists whose historically-ignorant views merit being taken about as seriously as those of the Black Israelites, the Christian Zionists, and the ADL, have been trying to push the idea that “Boomer” is an anti-white slur that is being used to “divide” white citizens of the USA.

First, the idea is obviously absurd because US whites have always been divided, for the obvious reason that race is a superset of nation. Americans are British. They’re not of German descent, Chinese descent, or Martian descent. The American Revolution wasn’t fought against the Holy Roman Emperor, the Tsar of Russia, the King of France, or the Galactic Overlord, it was fought against King George III of Great Britain and the British Parliament.

The fact that other Europeans “of good character” were permitted to enter and reside in the United States, and that the Indian tribes were conquered, and that the Spanish territories were forcibly seized in war, and that the global floodgates were opened in 1965 leading to the single greatest invasion in recorded human history no more makes those US citizens “American” than the US soldiers occupying Japan for the last 78 years have become Japanese.

Because the USA is an empire established by military force and occupation in 1865 that refers to all of its subjects as “Americans”, people are usually blind to the fact that the USA is not a “nation-state” at all, but rather, a literal empire of many states and nations very similar to the the British and Roman empires. Somehow, this obvious observation escapes most “Americans” even though they literally live in formerly sovereign States like Massachusetts and Texas. A casual term cannot define history; recall that the citizens of Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay have as much historical claim to call themselves “American” as does the average US citizen who is not of British descent. Neither citizen nor subject necessarily denotes national, which is why economists had to stop using GNP and switch to GDP.

Second, Boomer was never coined as a pejorative term and wasn’t viewed as one for decades. It was accepted by those it described and is still borne with pride by most of them to this day. It gradually, and organically, became seen as a negative due to the behavior of those it described, in much the same way that “gay” and “Negro” are now viewed as slurs. Now Boomer has come to describe a negative philosophy and a historical path, to describe those who consciously chose Hell over Heaven.

A recent dialogue on social media:

BOOMERBOT: “Boomer.” Another anti white slur. Divide and conquer, rather than trying to figure out why whites of ALL generations are being destroyed by the anti white propaganda

SPACEBUNNY: Actually this attitude is more of destroyer of white culture than your moronic “divide and conquer” bs, dear. We should be able to call out the mistakes and police our own culture, that the Silents didn’t call out the Boomers who were there children is part of the reason we’re where we are today. If you can’t acknowledge and admit mistakes you’re a failure as a human. Grow up, Boomer, take some responsibility for once in your life. Most of the Boomer hate would evaporate in a heartbeat if you all took responsibility for where the West in general, and the US in particular, is right now. But no, you just whine about how it’s not really your fault everyone is so mean…..

VD: Defending Boomers and trying to ex post facto redefine “Boomer” as an anti-white slur is one way to ensure that virtually no GenX or Millennial will ever pay any attention to you. Because we were there. We saw what they consciously chose from our earliest years. We lived in the America that they smugly rejected and ruined. The Boomers collectively were, and are, a wicked generation. They remain wicked and they revel in their collective identity to this day. The fact that evil influences exist does not excuse in any way those who chose evil new ways in preference to that which is traditional and good. And if you are defending Boomers and their dreadful choices that have led to the consequences we observe today, then you are an enemy of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Here is the point: you are always responsible for whom you choose to follow. The temptation is not the sin. The Boomers were tempted by, and consciously chose, a broad and easy path with cheap credit, easy morals, and great ethnic food. We are attempting to forge a different path.

UPDATE: This may be the best summation of the Boomer philosophy that I’ve seen:

“The moralizing of objectively false platitudes in the face of their observable failure.”

UPDATE: The Boomers will hear no criticism of their actions, and they believe the only reason anyone would ever criticize them is due to bitterness at their own failures. Words are insufficient for how utterly despicable they are. To hear the Boomer is to hate the Boomer.

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Mailvox: Why International Opinion Matters

An SGer asks a reasonable question:

Why does Israel care what the international community thinks?

Because the nation is too small and too weak to survive without being provided resources and protection by other nations. Only large nations with abundant natural resources such as China, the USA, and Russia can afford to ignore international opinion without rapidly regressing into a pre-industrial state of starvation. Unfortunately, the current Israeli elite has transformed what was once excellent diplomacy into an abusive parasitism over time, which is short-term advantageous but long-term self-destructive.

The current crisis is almost certainly related to the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel. In the eyes of the world, Israel had a just cause to use force to take its hostages back. But it does not see Israel having just cause to ethnically cleanse Gaza or bomb the civilian population there. Hence the rapid loss of global sympathy, and the concomitant increase of global antipathy.

Here’s a hint: if you’re appealing to the historical examples of Dresden and Nagasaki, you are absolutely going to lose the rhetorical war every single time. Even many Americans regard those wartime acts as inexcusable war crimes, as does most of the planet.

Scott Ritter’s article on his complicated personal history with Israel is, as is often the case with Ritter, somewhat hit or miss – at this point, the current state of South Africa is better seen as an ex post facto justification of apartheid than as a positive example for Israel or anyone else – but he does manage to demonstrate why no world leaders, and even many Israelis, have absolutely no trust in Netanyahu or his leadership in this war.

I didn’t blame Israel as a whole, but rather the individual Israelis involved, first and foremost the man who had taken over from Yitzhak Rabin as the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s incompetence as a political leader had resulted in him being voted out of office in 1999, replaced by Ehud Barack (who had apparently learned to lie to a degree sufficient to the task of being an Israeli politician). In September 2002, Netanyahu testified before the US Congress about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Even though he did so as a private citizen, his status as a former Prime Minister gave his words credibility they did not deserve.

“There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said. “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.”

Netanyahu’s statements directly contradicted the findings that my Israeli colleagues and I had reached—findings that were shared by the International Atomic Energy Agency, responsible for overseeing the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear program—that the Iraqi nuclear program had been eliminated, and that there was no evidence of its reconstitution.

But Netanyahu’s job wasn’t to tell the truth about Iraq’s nuclear program, but rather use the fear generated by the specter of an Iraqi nuclear weapon to justify a war with Iraq that would remove Saddam Husein from power. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told his receptive congressional audience. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Looking back today, at the horrific consequences of America’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, at an Iranian regime firmly entrenched behind a nuclear program that is not going away, one can clearly see that Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong about everything. But that has been his modus operendi from the start—to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster.

Now, regardless of what one thinks of Ritter, the fact that Netanhayu’s known modus operandi for more than two decades has been “to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster” does not leave one with a great deal of confidence in a positive outcome of this recent war between Israel and the organization it helped create, Hamas.

This is Netanyahu’s war, one that he has long sought, and quite possibly one of which it will eventually be learned that he arranged and staged. We may even need to coin a new term for this sort of war, because if it is true that Netanyahu not only permitted, but was involved in encouraging the attacks, “green flag” wouldn’t suffice to describe it. “Puppet flag” would be more accurate.

And as for any objections that it would require a sociopath to contemplate and actually do such a contemptible thing, well, there appears to be considerable evidence that Netanyahu is not only a sociopath, but one whose psyche was deeply affected by the death of his heroic older brother at Entebbe. As the Germans learned to their great detriment, as the Ukrainians are presently learning to theirs, it is very costly to a nation to permit a psychologically-damaged individual to hold the reins of government.

UPDATE: Oh, Sweet Moses. Israeli PR doubles down on the rhetorical retardery.

Nations that have failed to support Israel’s response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 are on the side of the militant group in the conflict, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has declared. There can be no neutrality regarding the conflict, a ministry spokesman has insisted.

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Zero Ornithology

The Zero Historians are now determined to wipe out the names of more than 100 species of birds.

Dozens of birds’ names that have been ‘clouded by racism and misogyny’ have been officially reclassified to avoid glorifying slave owners and Confederate generals.

The American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced Wednesday it will alter the names of certain flying animals after a ‘highly charged and publicized’ debate surrounding the now-controversial figures whom the birds are named after.

According to AOS President Colleen Handel, the group will change the bird names that prove to be ‘exclusionary and harmful today.’

The AOS created a committee last year to discuss and determine which birds’ names needed changing. So far, more than 100 species across the Americas have been identified as needing new monikers, and the project will continue in 2024.

Among the birds who will receive a new name is the Audubon’s shearwater.

It is a bird that is found off the coast of the southeast, and was named after one of the most established bird illustrator of the 19th century, John James Audubon.

But he was also a slave owner who adamantly opposed the abolition of slavery.

John James Audubon is described by the National Audubon Society as ‘a genius, a pioneer, a fabulist, and a man whose actions reflected a dominant white view of the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

‘His contributions to ornithology, art, and culture are enormous, but he was a complex and troubling character who did despicable things even by the standards of his day.’

Needless to say, the Audubon Society is going to have to change its name too. And eventually, if Clown World survives much longer, we’re going to need new names for Caesar salad as well as the months of July and August.

It appears Castalia Library is going to have to produce a bird book now.

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Absolutely Certainly Again

The founding editor of The Times of Israel cries out in shock while his people besiege and bomb a city without air defenses:

More than three weeks after that blackest Shabbat in our Israeli history, we remain, unsurprisingly, a nation deep in shock.

Shocked at the unrestrained murderous savagery that thousands of our neighbors unleashed upon us — the hysterical exultation with which they ripped away 1,400 lives in ways many of us still will not bring ourselves to watch….

But the shock is also expanding, now, to horror, disappointment and fury at the shift outside Israel — from brief, initial empathy for all those whose lives were shot and burned and butchered away, for their bereft and broken families and for the innocent snatched away into Hamas’s underground hellholes, to a rising global effort to deprive us of the right to ensure it will not happen again. A rising global effort propelled by Israel-haters and antisemites, assisted by falsehoods and misrepresentations everywhere from TikTok to supposedly responsible media, and inflated by fools, to try to halt our military response, or limit and undermine it. Basically, to tell us that what happened on October 7, if it happened, was terrible, but we need to get over it. Subverting “Never Again,” and telling us instead, well, yes, Almost Certainly Again.

But David Horovitz shouldn’t be shocked. He shouldn’t even be surprised. His people don’t need to “get over it,” they need to learn that their actions speak much louder in the ears of the world than their endless flow of words.

Let’s get this straight. Jews have been invading the British Mandate of Palestine since the end of the 19th century, just as they’ve been invading various countries for centuries, often illegally. After decades of anti-British terrorism led to the British withdrawal, the Jewish military forces won the wars of 1948 and 1967 fair and square, and they now hold the land currently controlled by the State of Israel and recognized by the international community by the same right of conquest that most modern states hold their land.

They hold no historical claim to the land prior to that 20th century claim, because their initial claim to the land of Canaan is also one of conquest, conquest that was repeatedly superseded by various other conquests by a number of other parties. Remember, the Jews didn’t even found the city of Jerusalem. Furthermore, the greater part of the land of Israel never belonged to either the tribe or the kingdom of Judah, so the Biblical claim to which the Christian Zionists hold so fervently doesn’t even apply to any of the Canaanite lands north of Jericho or east of the Jordan River.

The allotment for the tribe of Judah, according to its clans, extended down to the territory of Edom, to the Desert of Zin in the extreme south. Their southern boundary started from the bay at the southern end of the Dead Sea, crossed south of Scorpion Pass, continued on to Zin and went over to the south of Kadesh Barnea. Then it ran past Hezron up to Addar and curved around to Karka. It then passed along to Azmon and joined the Wadi of Egypt, ending at the Mediterranean Sea. This is their southern boundary.

The eastern boundary is the Dead Sea as far as the mouth of the Jordan.

The northern boundary started from the bay of the sea at the mouth of the Jordan, went up to Beth Hoglah and continued north of Beth Arabah to the Stone of Bohan son of Reuben. The boundary then went up to Debir from the Valley of Achor and turned north to Gilgal, which faces the Pass of Adummim south of the gorge. It continued along to the waters of En Shemesh and came out at En Rogel. Then it ran up the Valley of Ben Hinnom along the southern slope of the Jebusite city (that is, Jerusalem). From there it climbed to the top of the hill west of the Hinnom Valley at the northern end of the Valley of Rephaim. From the hilltop the boundary headed toward the spring of the waters of Nephtoah, came out at the towns of Mount Ephron and went down toward Baalah (that is, Kiriath Jearim). Then it curved westward from Baalah to Mount Seir, ran along the northern slope of Mount Jearim (that is, Kesalon), continued down to Beth Shemesh and crossed to Timnah. It went to the northern slope of Ekron, turned toward Shikkeron, passed along to Mount Baalah and reached Jabneel. The boundary ended at the sea.

The western boundary is the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea.

Joshua 15: 1-12

Now, Israel’s right to exist is no more questionable than the USA’s right to exist. No reasonable, historically-literate individual can deny it. Everyone has to live somewhere. Every nation has the right to live somewhere.

And Israel has the right to defend itself. No question. But therein lies the problem. Israel has more than 11 percent of its Jewish population living on what are not recognized as Israel’s lands, and the Jewish nation has more than 50 percent of its people living in a diaspora scattered throughout lands that belong to other nations.

And all of those nations have the right to defend their lands too. Including the Palestinians. So, it’s always important to look very carefully at the question: who is defending what?

Very few outside the Muslim world supported the October 7 attacks by Hamas. Most of the world was rightly horrified by them. But everyone also understands that they didn’t happen in a vacuum or for no reason. Similarly, everyone understands that Israel has the right and the responsibility to respond to those attacks with military action against Hamas, as well as to utilize its military forces to rescue the hostages that are being held by Hamas.

However, that understanding does not go so far as to provide pre-approval for an unlimited military response. If it is true that the IDF has already killed 6,747 Palestinians in Gaza in reprisal, and for which the Gaza Health Ministry has provided evidence to the U.S. President, then it appears Israel is already approaching the limits of what most fair-minded people around the world are going to accept, especially in light of the frothing-mouthed genocidal rhetoric being thrown about by too many loud-mouthed US supporters of Israel. The correct Israeli response to the massive pro-Gaza support being demonstrated around the world should not be shock, rhetoric, and even more doubling down, but rather, sober contemplation of the likely consequences if what appears to be a path toward opening the second front of World War III is continued.

The reason people are telling writers like David Horovitz “Almost Certainly Again” is because for every violent action or forced compulsion, the potential for an opposite reaction that corresponds to, or exceeds, the magnitude of the original action is created. This is not to justify these hypothetical reactions, merely to explain their inevitability. And as long as there are Jews who refuse to stay in their lanes and live in their own lands, there will be reactions to their various provocations, large and small, no matter how eloquently those provocations are justified or rationalized or legalized or defined away.

Those who advocate genocide should not expect much in the way of sympathy from the rest of humanity when they find themselves under attack by anyone, for any reason. Which is why I’ll go Horovitz’s imagined interlocutors one step better and say: Absolutely Certainly Again. Because the only thing that a nation can reliably control over time is its own collective behavior, and the recent rhetoric of the Israeli government as well as that of the global diaspora tends to indicate that neither has learned the vital lesson of the Third Law of Motion as it applies to violence.

We must pray for more reasonable minds to prevail. But we should not expect them to do so.

UPDATE: This sort of rhetoric from the Defense Minister is why people around the world do not trust Israel’s assertions of self-defense and refuse to support its military actions in Gaza. Because this isn’t some hot-headed relative of a Hamas victim, this is one of the government leaders to whom the IDF generals answer.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant underlined his government’s determination to ignore pleas for a ceasefire. He told families of the 239 hostages trapped in Gaza: ‘We are fighting animals, not people.‘

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We Have Always Not Mandate

OSHA is attempting to revise history in real-time by denying that there was ever a US Federal vaccine mandate:

A top federal official at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) claims that his agency never told private companies to implement Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “vaccine” mandates after the Supreme Court rejected the mandate.

OSHA Assistant Secretary of Labor Douglas Parker claims that his agency’s COVID jab mandate was rescinded after the Supreme Court ruling, this after House Republicans during a September 27 hearing criticized OSHA for the emergency rule it implemented in late 2021.

Tens of millions of private sector workers were impacted by this ruling, which was overturned in early 2022 after the Supreme Court blocked OSHA from enforcing the mandate.

“The federal vaccine mandate, announced in the fall of 2021, had applied to all private-sector firms with 100 or more employees, including both part-time and full-time staff,” reports The Epoch Times. “There were estimates at the time that 84 million people – or two-thirds of the private-sector workforce – would be impacted.”

You may recall that employees who refused the shots during that time period were required to show a “negative” COVID test result every week in order to continue working. The White House referred to that OSHA rule as a “vaccination requirement,” adding that unvaccinated workers would be forced to “wear a face mask while in the workplace.”

Aside from the fact that millions of people were affected by the federal mandate, and quite clearly remember them, how does this gaslighting fed explain why the Supreme Court was reviewing the legality of the mandate if it never existed in the first place?

Can he cite any important Supreme Court rulings on unicorns?

Anyhow, remember this the next time a government or a corporation tries to force a mandate on you. Not only is it a huge mistake to submit to their demands, but they’re eventually going to pretend they never demanding anything from you in the first place. Never comply. If it wasn’t bad for you, they wouldn’t have to force you.

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