... For all this fame, he [Sandburg] remained unassuming. What he wanted from life was “to be out of jail, ... to eat regular, ... to get what I write printed, ... a little love at home and a little nice affection hither and yon over the American landscape, ... [and] to sing every day.” He wrote with a pencil, a fountain pen, or a typewriter, “but I draw the line at dictating ’em,” he said. He kept his home as it was, refusing, for example, to rearrange his vast library in some orderly fashion; he knew where everything was. Furthermore, he said, “I want Emerson in every room.”

THERE IS A CERTAIN PARALLEL BETWEEN LLOYD AUSTIN AND COLIN POWELL. BOTH ARE (WERE) TELLING BULLSHIT WITH THE APLOMB OF A KID TELLING WHY THE DOG ATE THE HOMEWORK. POWELL STINT AT THE UNITED NATION WITH A VIAL — OF WASHING POWDER, OR PLASTER OF PARIS, OR FLOUR FROM THE FLOOR OF THE LOCAL BAKER, OR BAKING SODA, OR TALCUM POWDER, OR COCAINE... BUT DEFINITELY NOT ANTHRAX — WAS PITIFUL.

BUT OF COURSE THE MEDIA OF THE ESTABLISHMENT, PROMOTED THIS VIAL AS THE ELIXIR OF TRUTH. A VIAL FULL OF WHITE STUFF WAS SCARY ENOUGH TO GO TO WAR....

Song: Goe, and catche a falling starre

BY JOHN DONNE

Goe, and catche a falling starre,

    Get with child a mandrake roote,

Tell me, where all past yeares are,

    Or Who cleft the Divels foot,

Teach me to heare Mermaides singing,

Or to keep off envies stinging,

            And finde

            What winde

Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou beest born to strange sights,

    Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand daies and nights,

    Till age snow white haires on thee,

President Vladimir Zelensky ambushed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres with a surprise ceremony in Kiev during which the Ukrainian leader awarded medals to female soldiers, the Washington Post has reported, citing alleged US eavesdropping on the UN chief.

Guterres’ reaction to the incident, which took place during his visit to the Ukrainian capital on March 8, was described in one of the slides purportedly leaked by a US National Guardsman who had access to classified US intelligence. The secretary general apparently discussed his experience privately with his spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

Zelensky “sprung the event” on Guterres, the newspaper said. The president’s aides later spun it to imply that the UN chief was “congratulating military personnel on one side of the Russia-Ukraine war.”

Finland’s inclusion in, and the consequent expansion of, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), has supposedly brought much joy to the Western world supposedly fighting Russia for the protection of democracy and human rights.

The real purpose of this fight, as we already know, is to preserve the West – mainly, the US-led – dominated post-Second World War world order, which assumed the shape of unilateral US hegemony after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

BY Salman Rafi Sheikh

The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian eradication of free speech is the theatrical takedown of Jack Teixeira.

Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

BY KURT NIMMO

Keep Calm and Carry On” posters should be put up in all Canberra government departments. The British Ministry of Information produced the original of this meme in 1939 to prevent public panic about widely predicted German air attacks. A new version is needed in Australia in 2023 to counter fears of imminent invasion and subversion by China.

By Jocelyn Chey

Valérie Bugault holds a doctorate in law from the University of Paris — Panthéon-Sorbonne. In her thesis on business law, she developed a unified legal theory, described as "iconoclastic", of company law.

She worked as a tax lawyer in the field of financial exchange as well as in internal tax law before ceasing her career as a lawyer to devote herself to the analysis and sanitation of geopolitical economic issues.

In 2016, on the French-Saker website, she published a series of essays entitled "decrypting the global economic system", where she exposed tax havens and the international monetary system. She also co-wrote a book "The New SPIRIT of Laws and Money”, published in June 2017 by Sigest.

This political cartoon lamenting the relative budgets applied to science, education, arts, health &
military spending is 80 years old - progress?

An explosive court filing from the Guantanamo Military Commission – a court considering the cases of defendants accused of carrying out the "9/11" terrorist attacks on New York – has seemingly confirmed the unthinkable.

The document was originally published via a Guantanamo Bay court docket, but while public, it was completely redacted. Independent researchers obtained an unexpurgated copy. It is an account by the Commission’s lead investigator, DEA veteran Don Canestraro, of his personal probe of potential Saudi government involvement in the 9/11 attacks, conducted at the request of the defendants’ lawyers.

By Felix Livshitz

The U.K. government has poured over £25 million into private “counter-disinformation” organisations since January 2018 and four of these are directed by people linked to the British or U.S. foreign policy establishment.

Yet, while publishing information deriving from these groups, much of it on the Ukraine war, media outlets are failing to inform their readers of these organisations’ ties to the U.K. government.

The latest issue of the French edition of Playboy, which features the country’s citizenship minister Marlene Schiappa on its cover, sold out its initial run of 100,000 copies just hours after hitting newsstands on Monday, its publisher Jean-Christophe Florentin told media.

The magazine typically sells just 30,000 issues a month, Florentin told FranceInfo. An additional 60,000 are going to the presses to satisfy public demand, he added.

The interest in this particular issue is being put down to a wide-ranging interview the minister gives in the magazine regarding women’s and LGBTQ rights. Its popularity is also considered a public riposte to opposition from Paris’ political infrastructure to her appearance in the infamous publication – including from the country’s Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.

In facing the great challenge of our time, a super-state resident in continental Asia and an itinerant naval power seeking to maintain primacy – the foreign minister was unable to nominate a single piece of strategic statecraft by Australia that would attempt a solution for both powers. 

Paul Keating’s response to Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s speech at the National Press Club, 17 April 2023.

I never expected more than platitudes from Penny Wong’s press club speech and as it turned out, I was not disappointed.

In facing the great challenge of our time, a super-state resident in continental Asia and an itinerant naval power seeking to maintain primacy – the foreign minister was unable to nominate a single piece of strategic statecraft by Australia that would attempt a solution for both powers.

The role of the US dollar as the world reserve currency could diminish due to Washington using its leverage over the global financial system to pursue its geopolitical goals through sanctions, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has admitted. However, there is no obvious candidate to is replace it, she insisted.

Yellen was asked during an interview on Sunday by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria about the efficiency of the anti-Russia sanctions and about Washington’s track record of what he described as the “weaponization of the dollar.”

Zakaria cited recent statements by Brazil’s President Lula da Silva and other politicians about the risk of dependency on the US currency. He asked whether the present time would be remembered as the moment when “the dollar’s hegemony and its status as a reserve currency began to falter.”

Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk has claimed he was shocked to find out the true scale of US government involvement and access to Twitter communications when he purchased and took full control over the social media giant last year.

“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,” Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson, claiming he “was not aware of that” until he eventually purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October.