Bohemian novelist and short-story writer (1883–1924)
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Huff some ether, dress for an ORTBO, and always keep an eye out for a private place beneath a tarp—we’re here to discuss the second season of “Severance,” a story that goes beyond the first season with some twists and turns that might be Kafkaesque, but are definitely Kafka-ish. Jason Snell with Brian Hamilton, Brian Warren, Dan Moren, Glenn Fleishman and Heather Berberet.
Huff some ether, dress for an ORTBO, and always keep an eye out for a private place beneath a tarp—we’re here to discuss the second season of “Severance,” a story that goes beyond the first season with some twists and turns that might be Kafkaesque, but are definitely Kafka-ish. Jason Snell with Brian Hamilton, Brian Warren, Dan Moren, Glenn Fleishman and Heather Berberet.
In this no-holds-barred installment of Badlands Book Club, CannCon and Ashe in America dive headfirst into Chapters 8 and 9 of Government Gangsters by Kash Patel, unpacking one of the most explosive blueprints for deep state destruction ever put to print. From dismantling the FBI's corrupt Washington command structure to exposing the FISA Court's Kafkaesque abuses, this episode is packed with firepower. Ashe and Cann explore Patel's proposed reforms for congressional oversight, special counsel restructuring, and decentralizing FBI power to prevent political capture. They dig into Patel's takedown of DOJ jurisdiction shopping and the weaponization of the General Counsel's office, all while tying in real-time moves in D.C., including Ed Martin's nomination and Dan Bongino's cryptic call for patience. But the heat doesn't stop there. Chapter 9 jumps into Patel's firsthand account of the first Trump impeachment, blowing up the media narrative with facts, sworn testimony, and stunning insight into how the deep state used projection, lies, and backchannel gossip to smear a president, and implicate Patel himself. It's not just history...it's a playbook, and the Badlands crew lays it all bare.
It's a Newsday Tuesday with Emma on the mic. She recaps the chilling spectacle that was the Bukele-Trump Oval Office meeting / press availability, including the Kafkaesque exchange over the wrongfully deported Maryland father Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. As Emma explains, despite the Supreme Court's ruling that the administration must make an effort to bring Abrego Garcia home, the Trump administration and and El Salvador's crypto-strong man both claim to be unable to abide by the ruling out of deference to one another. Emma then talks to Annelle Sheline, a research fellow in the Quincy Institute's Middle East program who's latest paper focuses on the U.S.'s prioritization of weapons sales over human rights. Annelle gets into some of the thinking of her state department colleagues over this issue, which she finds to be rooted in outdated American exceptionalism. The hypocrisy is particularly noteworthy when it comes to Israel, despite growing public sentiment against Israel's destruction of Gaza and perpetual subjugation of the Palestinian people. Read Annelle's paper "Under Primacy, Weapons Sales Will Always Supersede Human Rights" here: https://quincyinst.org/research/under-primacy-weapons-sales-will-always-supersede-human-rights/# In the Fun Half, Emma further peels the onion of Stephen Miller's lies about the Abrego Garcia case, citing the administration's own court filings. She then delves into the debate between Megyn Kelly and Matt Walsh over trad wives and whether women should only tend to the needs of their husbands and children. Ben Shapiro and Some More News also get in on the action. And a caller asks how he might talk to members of his family who have gone down the conservative rabbit hole. Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here!: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here!: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here!: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here!: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase! Check out today's sponsors: Fast Growing Trees: Get 15% off your first purchase. FastGrowingTrees.com/majority Express VPN: Get an extra 4 months free. Expressvpn.com/Majority Sunset Lake CBD: Use coupon code 420 to save 30% site-wide: SunsetLakeCBD.com Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech @RussFinkelstein Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder – https://majorityreportradio.com/
In this episode, Alex talks about Katy Perry (and others) going into “space” for about ten minutes. Then he talks about the prices, heat, traffic, and payment plans that plagued this year's Coachella events. For the rest of the episode, Alex talks about why the Trump Administration is on a collision course with the Supreme Court. A district court ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia, the man wrongfully deported to CECOT in El Salvador. But after Trump met with President Bukele in the Oval Office, the administration has decided to side with Bukele and is not pursuing his release and return. Alex worries that Trump is defying the courts and is setting a dangerous precedent.
In this (spoiler-free) episode, we give YOU, the listener, all the tools you need to confidently and appropriately use the term Kafkaesque the next time Severance comes up in conversation. During Why This, Why Now?, Hannah guides Marcelle through some very compelling ideas about the show's popularity (did someone say "pandemic?"). We then move into The Theory We Need where the conversation turns to Marxism, surrealism, anti-capitalism and, you guessed it, Franz Kafka! The best news? By the end of the episode, you earn a MUSIC DANCE EXPERIENCE! Not really, (because we're a podcast), but we do end the episode with Hannah's thesis about state power, repression of grief, corporate culture and entertainment — and in a way, isn't that just as "elite" and "coveted AF?"To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back in two weeks with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there! We're currently doing a Patreon push, so please consider joining today to get all our extra perks, along with the backlog of bonuses!***Material Girls is a show that aims to make sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is really interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
News includes a new Elixir case study about Cyanview's camera shading technology used at major events like the Olympics and Super Bowl, Oban Pro 1.6 with 20x faster queue partitioning, the openid_connect package reaching version 1.0, Supabase's new Postgres Language Server for developer tooling, and ElixirEvents.net as a community resource. Plus, we interview Michael Lubas, founder of Paraxial.io, about web application security in Elixir, what's involved in a security audit, and how his Elixir-focused security company is helping teams and businesses in the community. Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/248 (http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/248) Elixir Community News https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/03/25/cyanview-elixir-case/ (https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2025/03/25/cyanview-elixir-case/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – New Elixir case study about Cyanview, a Belgian company whose Remote Control Panel for camera shading is used at major events like the Olympics and Super Bowl. Their Elixir-powered solution enables remote camera control across challenging network conditions. https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.0-rc.1/changelog.html (https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.0-rc.1/changelog.html?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Oban Pro 1.6 released with subworkflows, improved queue partitioning (20x faster), and a new guide explaining different job composition approaches. https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.0-rc.1/composition.html (https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.0-rc.1/composition.html?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – New Oban Pro guide explaining when to use chains, workflows, chunks, or batches for job composition. https://github.com/DockYard/openid_connect (https://github.com/DockYard/openid_connect?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – The Elixir package 'openid_connect' reached version 1.0, providing client library support for working with various OpenID Connect providers like Google, Microsoft Azure AD, Auth0, and others. https://hexdocs.pm/openid_connect/readme.html (https://hexdocs.pm/openid_connect/readme.html?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Documentation for the newly released openid_connect 1.0 package. https://bsky.app/profile/davelucia.com/post/3llqwsbyutc2z (https://bsky.app/profile/davelucia.com/post/3llqwsbyutc2z?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Announcement that openid_connect is maintained by tvlabs. https://bsky.app/profile/germsvel.com/post/3llee5lyerk2b (https://bsky.app/profile/germsvel.com/post/3llee5lyerk2b?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – PhoenixTest v0.6.0 has been released with significant changes, including a breaking change. https://github.com/germsvel/phoenix_test (https://github.com/germsvel/phoenix_test?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – GitHub repository for PhoenixTest. https://hexdocs.pm/phoenixtest/upgradeguides.html#upgrading-to-0-6-0 (https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_test/upgrade_guides.html#upgrading-to-0-6-0?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Upgrade guide for updating to PhoenixTest v0.6.0 with its breaking change. https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_test/changelog.html#0-6-0 (https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_test/changelog.html#0-6-0?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Changelog for PhoenixTest v0.6.0. https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-language-server (https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-language-server?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Supabase has released a new Postgres Language Server for developers, providing IDE intellisense and autocomplete for PostgreSQL. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Supabase.postgrestools (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Supabase.postgrestools?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – VSCode extension for Supabase's new Postgres developer tools. https://github.com/supabase-community/postgres-language-server (https://github.com/supabase-community/postgres-language-server?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – GitHub repository for Supabase's Postgres Language Server. https://pgtools.dev/ (https://pgtools.dev/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Official website for Postgres Tools with documentation and features. https://pgtools.dev/checking_migrations/ (https://pgtools.dev/checking_migrations/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Feature in Postgres Tools that lints database migrations to check for problematic schema changes. https://github.com/fly-apps/safe-ecto-migrations (https://github.com/fly-apps/safe-ecto-migrations?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Resource for ensuring safe Ecto migrations. https://fly.io/phoenix-files/safe-ecto-migrations/ (https://fly.io/phoenix-files/safe-ecto-migrations/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Article about safe Ecto migrations posted on Fly.io. https://elixirevents.net/ (https://elixirevents.net/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Community resource created by Johanna Larsson for tracking, sharing, and learning about Elixir events worldwide. https://bsky.app/profile/elixirevents.net (https://bsky.app/profile/elixirevents.net?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Bluesky account for ElixirEvents.net for following Elixir community events. Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir (https://twitter.com/ThinkingElixir) or email at show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) Discussion Resources https://paraxial.io/ (https://paraxial.io/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) https://paraxial.io/blog/index (https://paraxial.io/blog/index?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Blog with posts about security for Elixir, Rails, and the Paraxial service https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/18/tech/google-wiz-acquisition/index.html (https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/18/tech/google-wiz-acquisition/index.html?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/93 (https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/93?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Our last discussion was 3 years ago in episode 93! Titled "Preventing Service Abuse with Michael Lubas" https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244 (https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kafkaesque - having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Kafkaesque - having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) https://paraxial.io/blog/oban-pentest (https://paraxial.io/blog/oban-pentest?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Completed a Security Audit of Oban Pro - this is after ObanPro went free and OpenSource https://paraxial.io/blog/elixir-best (https://paraxial.io/blog/elixir-best?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Elixir and Phoenix Security Checklist: 11 Best Practices https://paraxial.io/blog/rails-command-injection (https://paraxial.io/blog/rails-command-injection?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Ruby on Rails Security: Preventing Command Injection https://paraxial.io/blog/paraxial-three (https://paraxial.io/blog/paraxial-three?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Paraxial.io v3 blog post Guest Information - Michael Lubas, Paraxial.io Founder - michael@paraxial.io - https://x.com/paraxialio (https://x.com/paraxialio?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – on Twitter/X - https://x.com/paraxialio (https://x.com/paraxialio?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – on Twitter/X - https://github.com/paraxialio/ (https://github.com/paraxialio/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – on Github - https://www.youtube.com/@paraxial5874 (https://www.youtube.com/@paraxial5874?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Paraxial.io channel on YouTube - https://genserver.social/paraxial (https://genserver.social/paraxial?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – on Fediverse - https://paraxial.io/ (https://paraxial.io/?utm_source=thinkingelixir&utm_medium=shownotes) – Blog Find us online - Message the show - Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/thinkingelixir.com) - Message the show - X (https://x.com/ThinkingElixir) - Message the show on Fediverse - @ThinkingElixir@genserver.social (https://genserver.social/ThinkingElixir) - Email the show - show@thinkingelixir.com (mailto:show@thinkingelixir.com) - Mark Ericksen on X - @brainlid (https://x.com/brainlid) - Mark Ericksen on Bluesky - @brainlid.bsky.social (https://bsky.app/profile/brainlid.bsky.social) - Mark Ericksen on Fediverse - @brainlid@genserver.social (https://genserver.social/brainlid) - David Bernheisel on Bluesky - @david.bernheisel.com (https://bsky.app/profile/david.bernheisel.com) - David Bernheisel on Fediverse - @dbern@genserver.social (https://genserver.social/dbern)
Legally immigrating to the United States involves red tape, legalese, mounds of paperwork, money and a lot of finger crossing. Felipe Torres Medina is a Peabody and Writers Guild of America Award–winning writer for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss his seemingly impossible journey to obtain a green card, why navigating the system can feel Kafkaesque, and what a proposed option for the rich to buy their citizenship could mean for the American Dream. His book is “America, Let Me In: A Choose Your Immigration Story. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
HP was forcing people to wait on hold for 15 minutes to get support, the DOGE site was embarrassingly insecure, setting up encrypted offsite backups, and mixing SATA and NVMe in a server. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Why FreeBSD is the Right Choice […]
HP was forcing people to wait on hold for 15 minutes to get support, the DOGE site was embarrassingly insecure, setting up encrypted offsite backups, and mixing SATA and NVMe in a server. Plugs Support us on patreon and get an ad-free RSS feed with early episodes sometimes Why FreeBSD is the Right Choice... Read More
Mike kicks off a fresh month of Patreon picks alongside Cullen Gallagher and Rob St. Mary to unpack the satirical brilliance of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1966 gem, Death of a Bureaucrat. When a revered Cuban sculptor invents a revolutionary bust-making machine only to meet his untimely demise at its mechanical hands, bureaucratic absurdity kicks into high gear. Buried proudly with his labor card, the sculptor inadvertently sparks a Kafkaesque quest as his widow and nephew wrestle hilariously with red tape, relentless officials, and ridiculous obstacles—all in pursuit of the one document standing between them and survival. Special thanks to Patreon supporter John Redford for this sharp, comedic dive into the madness of bureaucracy.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.
Mike kicks off a fresh month of Patreon picks alongside Cullen Gallagher and Rob St. Mary to unpack the satirical brilliance of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1966 gem, Death of a Bureaucrat. When a revered Cuban sculptor invents a revolutionary bust-making machine only to meet his untimely demise at its mechanical hands, bureaucratic absurdity kicks into high gear. Buried proudly with his labor card, the sculptor inadvertently sparks a Kafkaesque quest as his widow and nephew wrestle hilariously with red tape, relentless officials, and ridiculous obstacles—all in pursuit of the one document standing between them and survival. Special thanks to Patreon supporter John Redford for this sharp, comedic dive into the madness of bureaucracy.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-projection-booth-podcast--5513239/support.
Dr. Gary Null provides a commentary on "Universal Healthcare" Universal Healthcare is the Solution to a Broken Medical System Gary Null, PhD Progressive Radio Network, March 3, 2025 For over 50 years, there has been no concerted or successful effort to bring down medical costs in the American healthcare system. Nor are the federal health agencies making disease prevention a priority. Regardless whether the political left or right sponsors proposals for reform, such measures are repeatedly defeated by both parties in Congress. As a result, the nation's healthcare system remains one of the most expensive and least efficient in the developed world. For the past 30 years, medical bills contributing to personal debt regularly rank among the top three causes of personal bankruptcy. This is a reality that reflects not only the financial strain on ordinary Americans but the systemic failure of the healthcare system itself. The urgent question is: If President Trump and his administration are truly seeking to reduce the nation's $36 trillion deficit, why is there no serious effort to reform the most bloated and corrupt sector of the economy? A key obstacle is the widespread misinformation campaign that falsely claims universal health care would cost an additional $2 trillion annually and further balloon the national debt. However, a more honest assessment reveals the opposite. If the US adopted a universal single-payer system, the nation could actually save up to $20 trillion over the next 10 years rather than add to the deficit. Even with the most ambitious efforts by people like Elon Musk to rein in federal spending or optimize government efficiency, the estimated savings would only amount to $500 billion. This is only a fraction of what could be achieved through comprehensive healthcare reform alone. Healthcare is the largest single expenditure of the federal budget. A careful examination of where the $5 trillion spent annually on healthcare actually goes reveals massive systemic fraud and inefficiency. Aside from emergency medicine, which accounts for only 10-12 percent of total healthcare expenditures, the bulk of this spending does not deliver better health outcomes nor reduce trends in physical and mental illness. Applying Ockham's Razor, the principle that the simplest solution is often the best, the obvious conclusion is that America's astronomical healthcare costs are the direct result of price gouging on an unimaginable scale. For example, in most small businesses, profit margins range between 1.6 and 2.5 percent, such as in grocery retail. Yet the pharmaceutical industrial complex routinely operates on markup rates as high as 150,000 percent for many prescription drugs. The chart below highlights the astronomical gap between the retail price of some top-selling patented pharmaceutical medications and their generic equivalents. Drug Condition Patent Price (per unit) Generic Price Estimated Manufacture Cost Markup Source Insulin (Humalog) Diabetes $300 $30 $3 10,000% Rand (2021) EpiPen Allergic reactions $600 $30 $10 6,000% BMJ (2022) Daraprim Toxoplasmosis $750/pill $2 $0.50 150,000% JAMA (2019) Harvoni Hepatitis C $94,500 (12 weeks) $30,000 $200 47,000% WHO Report (2018) Lipitor Cholesterol $150 $10 $0.50 29,900% Health Affairs (2020) Xarelto Blood Thinner $450 $25 $1.50 30,000% NEJM (2020) Abilify Schizophrenia $800 (30 tablets) $15 $2 39,900% AJMC (2019) Revlimid Cancer $16,000/mo $450 $150 10,500% Kaiser Health News (2021) Humira Arthritis $2,984/dose $400 $50 5,868% Rand (2021) Sovaldi Hepatitis C $1,000/pill $10 $2 49,900% JAMA (2021) Xolair Asthma $2,400/dose $300 $50 4,800% NEJM (2020) Gleevec Leukemia $10,000/mo $350 $200 4,900% Harvard Public Health Review (2020) OxyContin Pain Relief $600 (30 tablets) $15 $0.50 119,900% BMJ (2022) Remdesivir Covid-19 $3,120 (5 doses) N/A $10 31,100% The Lancet (2020) The corruption extends far beyond price gouging. Many pharmaceutical companies convince federal health agencies to fund their basic research and drug development with taxpayer dollars. Yet when these companies bring successful products to market, the profits are kept entirely by the corporations or shared with the agencies or groups of government scientists. On the other hand, the public, who funded the research, receives no financial return. This amounts to a systemic betrayal of the public trust on a scale of hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Another significant contributor to rising healthcare costs is the widespread practice of defensive medicine that is driven by the constant threat of litigation. Over the past 40 years, defensive medicine has become a cottage industry. Physicians order excessive diagnostic tests and unnecessary treatments simply to protect themselves from lawsuits. Study after study has shown that these over-performed procedures not only inflate costs but lead to iatrogenesis or medical injury and death caused by the medical system and practices itself. The solution is simple: adopting no-fault healthcare coverage for everyone where patients receive care without needing to sue and thereby freeing doctors from the burden of excessive malpractice insurance. A single-payer universal healthcare system could fundamentally transform the entire industry by capping profits at every level — from drug manufacturers to hospitals to medical equipment suppliers. The Department of Health and Human Services would have the authority to set profit margins for medical procedures. This would ensure that healthcare is determined by outcomes, not profits. Additionally, the growing influence of private equity firms and vulture capitalists buying up hospitals and medical clinics across America must be reined in. These equity firms prioritize profit extraction over improving the quality of care. They often slash staff, raise prices, and dictate medical procedures based on what will yield the highest returns. Another vital reform would be to provide free medical education for doctors and nurses in exchange for five years of service under the universal system. Medical professionals would earn a realistic salary cap to prevent them from being lured into equity partnerships or charging exorbitant rates. The biggest single expense in the current system, however, is the private health insurance industry, which consumes 33 percent of the $5 trillion healthcare budget. Health insurance CEOs consistently rank among the highest-paid executives in the country. Their companies, who are nothing more than bean counters, decide what procedures and drugs will be covered, partially covered, or denied altogether. This entire industry is designed to place profits above patients' lives. If the US dismantled its existing insurance-based system and replaced it with a fully reformed national healthcare model, the country could save $2.7 trillion annually while simultaneously improving health outcomes. Over the course of 10 years, those savings would amount to $27 trillion. This could wipe out nearly the entire national debt in a short time. This solution has been available for decades but has been systematically blocked by corporate lobbying and bipartisan corruption in Washington. The path forward is clear but only if American citizens demand a system where healthcare is valued as a public service and not a commodity. The national healthcare crisis is not just a fiscal issue. It is a crucial moral failure of the highest order. With the right reforms, the nation could simultaneously restore its financial health and deliver the kind of healthcare system its citizens have long deserved. American Healthcare: Corrupt, Broken and Lethal Richard Gale and Gary Null Progressive Radio Network, March 3, 2025 For a nation that prides itself on being the world's wealthiest, most innovative and technologically advanced, the US' healthcare system is nothing less than a disaster and disgrace. Not only are Americans the least healthy among the most developed nations, but the US' health system ranks dead last among high-income countries. Despite rising costs and our unshakeable faith in American medical exceptionalism, average life expectancy in the US has remained lower than other OECD nations for many years and continues to decline. The United Nations recognizes healthcare as a human right. In 2018, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon denounced the American healthcare system as "politically and morally wrong." During the pandemic it is estimated that two to three years was lost on average life expectancy. On the other hand, before the Covid-19 pandemic, countries with universal healthcare coverage found their average life expectancy stable or slowly increasing. The fundamental problem in the U.S. is that politics have been far too beholden to the pharmaceutical, HMO and private insurance industries. Neither party has made any concerted effort to reign in the corruption of corporate campaign funding and do what is sensible, financially feasible and morally correct to improve Americans' quality of health and well-being. The fact that our healthcare system is horribly broken is proof that moneyed interests have become so powerful to keep single-payer debate out of the media spotlight and censored. Poll after poll shows that the American public favors the expansion of public health coverage. Other incremental proposals, including Medicare and Medicaid buy-in plans, are also widely preferred to the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare mess we are currently stuck with. It is not difficult to understand how the dismal state of American medicine is the result of a system that has been sold out to the free-market and the bottom line interests of drug makers and an inflated private insurance industry. How advanced and ethically sound can a healthcare system be if tens of millions of people have no access to medical care because it is financially out of their reach? The figures speak for themselves. The U.S. is burdened with a $41 trillion Medicare liability. The number of uninsured has declined during the past several years but still lingers around 25 million. An additional 30-35 million are underinsured. There are currently 65 million Medicare enrollees and 89 million Medicaid recipients. This is an extremely unhealthy snapshot of the country's ability to provide affordable healthcare and it is certainly unsustainable. The system is a public economic failure, benefiting no one except the large and increasingly consolidated insurance and pharmaceutical firms at the top that supervise the racket. Our political parties have wrestled with single-payer or universal healthcare for decades. Obama ran his first 2008 presidential campaign on a single-payer platform. Since 1985, his campaign health adviser, the late Dr. Quentin Young from the University of Illinois Medical School, was one of the nation's leading voices calling for universal health coverage. During a private conversation with Dr. Young shortly before his passing in 2016, he conveyed his sense of betrayal at the hands of the Obama administration. Dr. Young was in his 80s when he joined the Obama campaign team to help lead the young Senator to victory on a promise that America would finally catch up with other nations. The doctor sounded defeated. He shared how he was manipulated, and that Obama held no sincere intention to make universal healthcare a part of his administration's agenda. During the closed-door negotiations, which spawned the weak and compromised Affordable Care Act, Dr. Young was neither consulted nor invited to participate. In fact, he told us that he never heard from Obama again after his White House victory. Past efforts to even raise the issue have been viciously attacked. A huge army of private interests is determined to keep the public enslaved to private insurers and high medical costs. The failure of our healthcare is in no small measure due to it being a fully for-profit operation. Last year, private health insurance accounted for 65 percent of coverage. Consider that there are over 900 private insurance companies in the US. National Health Expenditures (NHE) grew to $4.5 trillion in 2022, which was 17.3 percent of GDP. Older corporate rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans argue that a single-payer or socialized medical program is unaffordable. However, not only is single-payer affordable, it will end bankruptcies due to unpayable medical debt. In addition, universal healthcare, structured on a preventative model, will reduce disease rates at the outset. Corporate Democrats argue that Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a positive step inching the country towards complete public coverage. However, aside from providing coverage to the poorest of Americans, Obamacare turned into another financial anchor around the necks of millions more. According to the health policy research group KFF, the average annual health insurance premium for single coverage is $8,400 and almost $24,000 for a family. In addition, patient out-of-pocket costs continue to increase, a 6.6% increase to $471 billion in 2022. Rather than healthcare spending falling, it has exploded, and the Trump and Biden administrations made matters worse. Clearly, a universal healthcare program will require flipping the script on the entire private insurance industry, which employed over half a million people last year. Obviously, the most volatile debate concerning a national universal healthcare system concerns cost. Although there is already a socialized healthcare system in place -- every federal legislator, bureaucrat, government employee and veteran benefits from it -- fiscal Republican conservatives and groups such as the Koch Brothers network are single-mindedly dedicated to preventing the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid. A Koch-funded Mercatus analysis made the outrageous claim that a single-payer system would increase federal health spending by $32 trillion in ten years. However, analyses and reviews by the Congressional Budget Office in the early 1990s concluded that such a system would only increase spending at the start; enormous savings would quickly offset it as the years pass. In one analysis, "the savings in administrative costs [10 percent of health spending] would be more than enough to offset the expense of universal coverage." Defenders of those advocating for funding a National Health Program argue this can primarily be accomplished by raising taxes to levels comparable to other developed nations. This was a platform Senator Bernie Sanders and some of the younger progressive Democrats in the House campaigned on. The strategy was to tax the highest multimillion-dollar earners 60-70 percent. Despite the outrage of its critics, including old rank-and-file multi-millionaire Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, this is still far less than in the past. During the Korean War, the top tax rate was 91 percent; it declined to 70 percent in the late 1960s. Throughout most of the 1970s, those in the lowest income bracket were taxed at 14 percent. We are not advocating for this strategy because it ignores where the funding is going, and the corruption in the system that is contributing to exorbitant waste. But Democratic supporters of the ACA who oppose a universal healthcare plan ignore the additional taxes Obama levied to pay for the program. These included surtaxes on investment income, Medicare taxes from those earning over $200,000, taxes on tanning services, an excise tax on medical equipment, and a 40 percent tax on health coverage for costs over the designated cap that applied to flexible savings and health savings accounts. The entire ACA was reckless, sloppy and unnecessarily complicated from the start. The fact that Obamacare further strengthened the distinctions between two parallel systems -- federal and private -- with entirely different economic structures created a labyrinth of red tape, rules, and wasteful bureaucracy. Since the ACA went into effect, over 150 new boards, agencies and programs have had to be established to monitor its 2,700 pages of gibberish. A federal single-payer system would easily eliminate this bureaucracy and waste. A medical New Deal to establish universal healthcare coverage is a decisive step in the correct direction. But we must look at the crisis holistically and in a systematic way. Simply shuffling private insurance into a federal Medicare-for-all or buy-in program, funded by taxing the wealthiest of citizens, would only temporarily reduce costs. It will neither curtail nor slash escalating disease rates e. Any effective healthcare reform must also tackle the underlying reasons for Americans' poor state of health. We cannot shy away from examining the social illnesses infecting our entire free-market capitalist culture and its addiction to deregulation. A viable healthcare model would have to structurally transform how the medical economy operates. Finally, a successful medical New Deal must honestly evaluate the best and most reliable scientific evidence in order to effectively redirect public health spending. For example, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Obama healthcare adviser, observed that AIDS-HIV measures consume the most public health spending, even though the disease "ranked 75th on the list of diseases by personal health expenditures." On the other hand, according to the American Medical Association, a large percentage of the nation's $3.4 trillion healthcare spending goes towards treating preventable diseases, notably diabetes, common forms of heart disease, and back and neck pain conditions. In 2016, these three conditions were the most costly and accounted for approximately $277 billion in spending. Last year, the CDC announced the autism rate is now 1 in 36 children compared to 1 in 44 two years ago. A retracted study by Mark Blaxill, an autism activist at the Holland Center and a friend of the authors, estimates that ASD costs will reach $589 billion annually by 2030. There are no signs that this alarming trend will reverse and decline; and yet, our entire federal health system has failed to conscientiously investigate the underlying causes of this epidemic. All explanations that might interfere with the pharmaceutical industry's unchecked growth, such as over-vaccination, are ignored and viciously discredited without any sound scientific evidence. Therefore, a proper medical New Deal will require a systemic overhaul and reform of our federal health agencies, especially the HHS, CDC and FDA. Only the Robert Kennedy Jr presidential campaign is even addressing the crisis and has an inexpensive and comprehensive plan to deal with it. For any medical revolution to succeed in advancing universal healthcare, the plan must prioritize spending in a manner that serves public health and not private interests. It will also require reshuffling private corporate interests and their lobbyists to the sidelines, away from any strategic planning, in order to break up the private interests' control over federal agencies and its revolving door policies. Aside from those who benefit from this medical corruption, the overwhelming majority of Americans would agree with this criticism. However, there is a complete lack of national trust that our legislators, including the so-called progressives, would be willing to undertake such actions. In addition, America's healthcare system ignores the single most critical initiative to reduce costs - that is, preventative efforts and programs instead of deregulation and closing loopholes designed to protect the drug and insurance industries' bottom line. Prevention can begin with banning toxic chemicals that are proven health hazards associated with current disease epidemics, and it can begin by removing a 1,000-plus toxins already banned in Europe. This should be a no-brainer for any legislator who cares for public health. For example, Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, notes that "the policy approach in the US and Europe is dramatically different" when it comes to chemical allowances in cosmetic products. Whereas the EU has banned 1,328 toxic substances from the cosmetic industry alone, the US has banned only 11. The US continues to allow carcinogenic formaldehyde, petroleum, forever chemicals, many parabens (an estrogen mimicker and endocrine hormone destroyer), the highly allergenic p-phenylenediamine or PBD, triclosan, which has been associated with the rise in antibiotic resistant bacteria, avobenzone, and many others to be used in cosmetics, sunscreens, shampoo and hair dyes. Next, the food Americans consume can be reevaluated for its health benefits. There should be no hesitation to tax the unhealthiest foods, such as commercial junk food, sodas and candy relying on high fructose corn syrup, products that contain ingredients proven to be toxic, and meat products laden with dangerous chemicals including growth hormones and antibiotics. The scientific evidence that the average American diet is contributing to rising disease trends is indisputable. We could also implement additional taxes on the public advertising of these demonstrably unhealthy products. All such tax revenue would accrue to a national universal health program to offset medical expenditures associated with the very illnesses linked to these products. Although such tax measures would help pay for a new medical New Deal, it may be combined with programs to educate the public about healthy nutrition if it is to produce a reduction in the most common preventable diseases. In fact, comprehensive nutrition courses in medical schools should be mandatory because the average physician receives no education in this crucial subject. In addition, preventative health education should be mandatory throughout public school systems. Private insurers force hospitals, clinics and private physicians into financial corners, and this is contributing to prodigious waste in money and resources. Annually, healthcare spending towards medical liability insurance costs tens of billions of dollars. In particular, this economic burden has taxed small clinics and physicians. It is well past the time that physician liability insurance is replaced with no-fault options. Today's doctors are spending an inordinate amount of money to protect themselves. Legions of liability and trial lawyers seek big paydays for themselves stemming from physician error. This has created a culture of fear among doctors and hospitals, resulting in the overly cautious practice of defensive medicine, driving up costs and insurance premiums just to avoid lawsuits. Doctors are forced to order unnecessary tests and prescribe more medications and medical procedures just to cover their backsides. No-fault insurance is a common-sense plan that enables physicians to pursue their profession in a manner that will reduce iatrogenic injuries and costs. Individual cases requiring additional medical intervention and loss of income would still be compensated. This would generate huge savings. No other nation suffers from the scourge of excessive drug price gouging like the US. After many years of haggling to lower prices and increase access to generic drugs, only a minute amount of progress has been made in recent years. A 60 Minutes feature about the Affordable Care Act reported an "orgy of lobbying and backroom deals in which just about everyone with a stake in the $3-trillion-a-year health industry came out ahead—except the taxpayers.” For example, Life Extension magazine reported that an antiviral cream (acyclovir), which had lost its patent protection, "was being sold to pharmacies for 7,500% over the active ingredient cost. The active ingredient (acyclovir) costs only 8 pennies, yet pharmacies are paying a generic maker $600 for this drug and selling it to consumers for around $700." Other examples include the antibiotic Doxycycline. The price per pill averages 7 cents to $3.36 but has a 5,300 percent markup when it reaches the consumer. The antidepressant Clomipramine is marked up 3,780 percent, and the anti-hypertensive drug Captopril's mark-up is 2,850 percent. And these are generic drugs! Medication costs need to be dramatically cut to allow drug manufacturers a reasonable but not obscene profit margin. By capping profits approximately 100 percent above all costs, we would save our system hundreds of billions of dollars. Such a measure would also extirpate the growing corporate misdemeanors of pricing fraud, which forces patients to pay out-of-pocket in order to make up for the costs insurers are unwilling to pay. Finally, we can acknowledge that our healthcare is fundamentally a despotic rationing system based upon high insurance costs vis-a-vis a toss of the dice to determine where a person sits on the economic ladder. For the past three decades it has contributed to inequality. The present insurance-based economic metrics cast millions of Americans out of coverage because private insurance costs are beyond their means. Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University political economist, has called our system "brutal" because it "rations [people] out of the system." He defined rationing as "withholding something from someone that is beneficial." Discriminatory healthcare rationing now affects upwards to 60 million people who have been either priced out of the system or under insured. They make too much to qualify for Medicare under Obamacare, yet earn far too little to afford private insurance costs and premiums. In the final analysis, the entire system is discriminatory and predatory. However, we must be realistic. Almost every member of Congress has benefited from Big Pharma and private insurance lobbyists. The only way to begin to bring our healthcare program up to the level of a truly developed nation is to remove the drug industry's rampant and unnecessary profiteering from the equation. How did Fauci memory-hole a cure for AIDS and get away with it? By Helen Buyniski Over 700,000 Americans have died of AIDS since 1981, with the disease claiming some 42.3 million victims worldwide. While an HIV diagnosis is no longer considered a certain death sentence, the disease looms large in the public imagination and in public health funding, with contemporary treatments running into thousands of dollars per patient annually. But was there a cure for AIDS all this time - an affordable and safe treatment that was ruthlessly suppressed and attacked by the US public health bureaucracy and its agents? Could this have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars spent on AZT, ddI and failed HIV vaccine trials? What could possibly justify the decision to disappear a safe and effective approach down the memory hole? The inventor of the cure, Gary Null, already had several decades of experience creating healing protocols for physicians to help patients not responding well to conventional treatments by the time AIDS was officially defined in 1981. Null, a registered dietitian and board-certified nutritionist with a PhD in human nutrition and public health science, was a senior research fellow and Director of Anti-Aging Medicine at the Institute of Applied Biology for 36 years and has published over 950 papers, conducting groundbreaking experiments in reversing biological aging as confirmed with DNA methylation testing. Additionally, Null is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker, bestselling author, and investigative journalist whose work exposing crimes against humanity over the last 50 years has highlighted abuses by Big Pharma, the military-industrial complex, the financial industry, and the permanent government stay-behind networks that have come to be known as the Deep State. Null was contacted in 1974 by Dr. Stephen Caiazza, a physician working with a subculture of gay men in New York living the so-called “fast track” lifestyle, an extreme manifestation of the gay liberation movement that began with the Stonewall riots. Defined by rampant sexual promiscuity and copious use of illegal and prescription drugs, including heavy antibiotic use for a cornucopia of sexually-transmitted diseases, the fast-track never included more than about two percent of gay men, though these dominated many of the bathhouses and clubs that defined gay nightlife in the era. These patients had become seriously ill as a result of their indulgence, generally arriving at the clinic with multiple STDs including cytomegalovirus and several types of herpes and hepatitis, along with candida overgrowth, nutritional deficiencies, gut issues, and recurring pneumonia. Every week for the next 10 years, Null would counsel two or three of these men - a total of 800 patients - on how to detoxify their bodies and de-stress their lives, tracking their progress with Caiazza and the other providers at weekly feedback meetings that he credits with allowing the team to quickly evaluate which treatments were most effective. He observed that it only took about two years on the “fast track” for a healthy young person to begin seeing muscle loss and the recurrent, lingering opportunistic infections that would later come to be associated with AIDS - while those willing to commit to a healthier lifestyle could regain their health in about a year. It was with this background that Null established the Tri-State Healing Center in Manhattan in 1980, staffing the facility with what would eventually run to 22 certified health professionals to offer safe, natural, and effective low- and no-cost treatments to thousands of patients with HIV and AIDS-defining conditions. Null and his staff used variations of the protocols he had perfected with Caiazza's patients, a multifactorial patient-tailored approach that included high-dose vitamin C drips, intravenous ozone therapy, juicing and nutritional improvements and supplementation, aspects of homeopathy and naturopathy with some Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurvedic practices. Additional services offered on-site included acupuncture and holistic dentistry, while peer support groups were also held at the facility so that patients could find community and a positive environment, healing their minds and spirits while they healed their bodies. “Instead of trying to kill the virus with antiretroviral pharmaceuticals designed to stop viral replication before it kills patients, we focused on what benefits could be gained by building up the patients' natural immunity and restoring biochemical integrity so the body could fight for itself,” Null wrote in a 2014 article describing the philosophy behind the Center's approach, which was wholly at odds with the pharmaceutical model.1 Patients were comprehensively tested every week, with any “recovery” defined solely by the labs, which documented AIDS patient after patient - 1,200 of them - returning to good health and reversing their debilitating conditions. Null claims to have never lost an AIDS patient in the Center's care, even as the death toll for the disease - and its pharmaceutical standard of care AZT - reached an all-time high in the early 1990s. Eight patients who had opted for a more intensive course of treatment - visiting the Center six days a week rather than one - actually sero-deconverted, with repeated subsequent testing showing no trace of HIV in their bodies. As an experienced clinical researcher himself, Null recognized that any claims made by the Center would be massively scrutinized, challenging as they did the prevailing scientific consensus that AIDS was an incurable, terminal illness. He freely gave his protocols to any medical practitioner who asked, understanding that his own work could be considered scientifically valid only if others could replicate it under the same conditions. After weeks of daily observational visits to the Center, Dr. Robert Cathcart took the protocols back to San Francisco, where he excitedly reported that patients were no longer dying in his care. Null's own colleague at the Institute of Applied Biology, senior research fellow Elana Avram, set up IV drip rooms at the Institute and used his intensive protocols to sero-deconvert 10 patients over a two-year period. While the experiment had been conducted in secret, as the Institute had been funded by Big Pharma since its inception half a century earlier, Avram had hoped she would be able to publish a journal article to further publicize Null's protocols and potentially help AIDS patients, who were still dying at incredibly high rates thanks to Burroughs Wellcome's noxious but profitable AZT. But as she would later explain in a 2019 letter to Null, their groundbreaking research never made it into print - despite meticulous documentation of their successes - because the Institute's director and board feared their pharmaceutical benefactors would withdraw the funding on which they depended, given that Null's protocols did not involve any patentable or otherwise profitable drugs. When Avram approached them about publication, the board vetoed the idea, arguing that it would “draw negative attention because [the work] was contrary to standard drug treatments.” With no real point in continuing experiments along those lines without institutional support and no hope of obtaining funding from elsewhere, the department she had created specifically for these experiments shut down after a two-year followup with her test subjects - all of whom remained alive and healthy - was completed.2 While the Center was receiving regular visits by this time from medical professionals and, increasingly, black celebrities like Stokely Carmichael and Isaac Hayes, who would occasionally perform for the patients, the news was spreading by word of mouth alone - not a single media outlet had dared to document the clinic that was curing AIDS patients for free. Instead, they gave airtime to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, who had for years been spreading baseless, hysteria-fueling claims about HIV and AIDS to any news outlet that would put him on. His claim that children could contract the virus from “ordinary household conduct” with an infected relative proved so outrageous he had to walk it back,3 and he never really stopped insisting the deadly plague associated with gays and drug users was about to explode like a nuclear bomb among the law-abiding heterosexual population. Fauci by this time controlled all government science funding through NIAID, and his zero-tolerance approach to dissent on the HIV/AIDS front had already seen prominent scientists like virologist Peter Duesberg stripped of the resources they needed for their work because they had dared to question his commandment: There is no cause of AIDS but HIV, and AZT is its treatment. Even the AIDS activist groups, which by then had been coopted by Big Pharma and essentially reduced to astroturfing for the toxic failed chemotherapy drug AZT backed by the institutional might of Fauci's NIAID,4 didn't seem to want to hear that there was a cure. Unconcerned with the irrationality of denouncing the man touting his free AIDS cure as an “AIDS denier,” they warned journalists that platforming Null or anyone else rejecting the mainstream medical line would be met with organized demands for their firing. Determined to breach the institutional iron curtain and get his message to the masses, Null and his team staged a press conference in New York, inviting scientists and doctors from around the world to share their research on alternative approaches to HIV and AIDS in 1993. To emphasize the sound scientific basis of the Center's protocols and encourage guests to adopt them into their own practices, Null printed out thousands of abstracts in support of each nutrient and treatment being used. However, despite over 7,000 invitations sent three times to major media, government figures, scientists, and activists, almost none of the intended audience members showed up. Over 100 AIDS patients and their doctors, whose charts exhaustively documented their improvements using natural and nontoxic modalities over the preceding 12 months, gave filmed testimonials, declaring that the feared disease was no longer a death sentence, but the conference had effectively been silenced. Bill Tatum, publisher of the Amsterdam News, suggested Null and his patients would find a more welcoming audience in his home neighborhood of Harlem - specifically, its iconic Apollo Theatre. For three nights, the theater was packed to capacity. Hit especially hard by the epidemic and distrustful of a medical system that had only recently stopped being openly racist (the Tuskegee syphilis experiment only ended in 1972), black Americans, at least, did not seem to care what Anthony Fauci would do if he found out they were investigating alternatives to AZT and death. PBS journalist Tony Brown, having obtained a copy of the video of patient testimonials from the failed press conference, was among a handful of black journalists who began visiting the Center to investigate the legitimacy of Null's claims. Satisfied they had something significant to offer his audience, Brown invited eight patients - along with Null himself - onto his program over the course of several episodes to discuss the work. It was the first time these protocols had received any attention in the media, despite Null having released nearly two dozen articles and multiple documentaries on the subject by that time. A typical patient on one program, Al, a recovered IV drug user who was diagnosed with AIDS at age 32, described how he “panicked,” saw a doctor and started taking AZT despite his misgivings - only to be forced to discontinue the drug after just a few weeks due to his condition deteriorating rapidly. Researching alternatives brought him to Null, and after six months of “detoxing [his] lifestyle,” he observed his initial symptoms - swollen lymph nodes and weight loss - begin to reverse, culminating with sero-deconversion. On Bill McCreary's Channel 5 program, a married couple diagnosed with HIV described how they watched their T-cell counts increase as they cut out sugar, caffeine, smoking, and drinking and began eating a healthy diet. They also saw the virus leave their bodies. For HIV-positive viewers surrounded by fear and negativity, watching healthy-looking, cheerful “AIDS patients” detail their recovery while Null backed up their claims with charts must have been balm for the soul. But the TV programs were also a form of outreach to the medical community, with patients' charts always on hand to convince skeptics the cure was scientifically valid. Null brought patients' charts to every program, urging them to keep an open mind: “Other physicians and public health officials should know that there's good science in the alternative perspective. It may not be a therapy that they're familiar with, because they're just not trained in it, but if the results are positive, and you can document them…” He challenged doubters to send in charts from their own sero-deconverted patients on AZT, and volunteered to debate proponents of the orthodox treatment paradigm - though the NIH and WHO both refused to participate in such a debate on Tony Brown's Journal, following Fauci's directive prohibiting engagement with forbidden ideas. Aside from those few TV programs and Null's own films, suppression of Null's AIDS cure beyond word of mouth was total. The 2021 documentary The Cost of Denial, produced by the Society for Independent Journalists, tells the story of the Tri-State Healing Center and the medical paradigm that sought to destroy it, lamenting the loss of the lives that might have been saved in a more enlightened society. Nurse practitioner Luanne Pennesi, who treated many of the AIDS patients at the Center, speculated in the film that the refusal by the scientific establishment and AIDS activists to accept their successes was financially motivated. “It was as if they didn't want this information to get out. Understand that our healthcare system as we know it is a corporation, it's a corporate model, and it's about generating revenue. My concern was that maybe they couldn't generate enough revenue from these natural approaches.”5 Funding was certainly the main disciplinary tool Fauci's NIAID used to keep the scientific community in line. Despite the massive community interest in the work being done at the Center, no foundation or institution would defy Fauci and risk getting itself blacklisted, leaving Null to continue funding the operation out of his pocket with the profits from book sales. After 15 years, he left the Center in 1995, convinced the mainstream model had so thoroughly been institutionalized that there was no chance of overthrowing it. He has continued to counsel patients and advocate for a reappraisal of the HIV=AIDS hypothesis and its pharmaceutical treatments, highlighting the deeply flawed science underpinning the model of the disease espoused by the scientific establishment in 39 articles, six documentaries and a 700-page textbook on AIDS, but the Center's achievements have been effectively memory-holed by Fauci's multi-billion-dollar propaganda apparatus. FRUIT OF THE POISONOUS TREE To understand just how much of a threat Null's work was to the HIV/AIDS establishment, it is instructive to revisit the 1984 paper, published by Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, that established HIV as the sole cause of AIDS. The CDC's official recognition of AIDS in 1981 had done little to quell the mounting public panic over the mysterious illness afflicting gay men in the US, as the agency had effectively admitted it had no idea what was causing them to sicken and die. As years passed with no progress determining the causative agent of the plague, activist groups like Gay Men's Health Crisis disrupted public events and threatened further mass civil disobedience as they excoriated the NIH for its sluggish allocation of government science funding to uncovering the cause of the “gay cancer.”6 When Gallo published his paper declaring that the retrovirus we now know as HIV was the sole “probable” cause of AIDS, its simple, single-factor hypothesis was the answer to the scientific establishment's prayers. This was particularly true for Fauci, as the NIAID chief was able to claim the hot new disease as his agency's own domain in what has been described as a “dramatic confrontation” with his rival Sam Broder at the National Cancer Institute. After all, Fauci pointed out, Gallo's findings - presented by Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler as if they were gospel truth before any other scientists had had a chance to inspect them, never mind conduct a full peer review - clearly classified AIDS as an infectious disease, and not a cancer like the Kaposi's sarcoma which was at the time its most visible manifestation. Money and media attention began pouring in, even as funding for the investigation of other potential causes of AIDS dried up. Having already patented a diagnostic test for “his” retrovirus before introducing it to the world, Gallo was poised for a financial windfall, while Fauci was busily leveraging the discovery into full bureaucratic empire of the US scientific apparatus. While it would serve as the sole basis for all US government-backed AIDS research to follow - quickly turning Gallo into the most-cited scientist in the world during the 1980s,7 Gallo's “discovery” of HIV was deeply problematic. The sample that yielded the momentous discovery actually belonged to Prof. Luc Montagnier of the French Institut Pasteur, a fact Gallo finally admitted in 1991, four years after a lawsuit from the French government challenged his patent on the HIV antibody test, forcing the US government to negotiate a hasty profit-sharing agreement between Gallo's and Montagnier's labs. That lawsuit triggered a cascade of official investigations into scientific misconduct by Gallo, and evidence submitted during one of these probes, unearthed in 2008 by journalist Janine Roberts, revealed a much deeper problem with the seminal “discovery.” While Gallo's co-author, Mikulas Popovic, had concluded after numerous experiments with the French samples that the virus they contained was not the cause of AIDS, Gallo had drastically altered the paper's conclusion, scribbling his notes in the margins, and submitted it for publication to the journal Science without informing his co-author. After Roberts shared her discovery with contacts in the scientific community, 37 scientific experts wrote to the journal demanding that Gallo's career-defining HIV paper be retracted from Science for lacking scientific integrity.8 Their call, backed by an endorsement from the 2,600-member scientific organization Rethinking AIDS, was ignored by the publication and by the rest of mainstream science despite - or perhaps because of - its profound implications. That 2008 letter, addressed to Science editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts and copied to American Association for the Advancement of Science CEO Alan Leshner, is worth reproducing here in its entirety, as it utterly dismantles Gallo's hypothesis - and with them the entire HIV is the sole cause of AIDS dogma upon which the contemporary medical model of the disease rests: On May 4, 1984 your journal published four papers by a group led by Dr. Robert Gallo. We are writing to express our serious concerns with regard to the integrity and veracity of the lead paper among these four of which Dr. Mikulas Popovic is the lead author.[1] The other three are also of concern because they rely upon the conclusions of the lead paper .[2][3][4] In the early 1990s, several highly critical reports on the research underlying these papers were produced as a result of governmental inquiries working under the supervision of scientists nominated by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. The Office of Research Integrity of the US Department of Health and Human Services concluded that the lead paper was “fraught with false and erroneous statements,” and that the “ORI believes that the careless and unacceptable keeping of research records...reflects irresponsible laboratory management that has permanently impaired the ability to retrace the important steps taken.”[5] Further, a Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations led by US Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan produced a staff report on the papers which contains scathing criticisms of their integrity.[6] Despite the publically available record of challenges to their veracity, these papers have remained uncorrected and continue to be part of the scientific record. What prompts our communication today is the recent revelation of an astonishing number of previously unreported deletions and unjustified alterations made by Gallo to the lead paper. There are several documents originating from Gallo's laboratory that, while available for some time, have only recently been fully analyzed. These include a draft of the lead paper typewritten by Popovic which contains handwritten changes made to it by Gallo.[7] This draft was the key evidence used in the above described inquiries to establish that Gallo had concealed his laboratory's use of a cell culture sample (known as LAV) which it received from the Institut Pasteur. These earlier inquiries verified that the typed manuscript draft was produced by Popovic who had carried out the recorded experiment while his laboratory chief, Gallo, was in Europe and that, upon his return, Gallo changed the document by hand a few days before it was submitted to Science on March 30, 1984. According to the ORI investigation, “Dr. Gallo systematically rewrote the manuscript for what would become a renowned LTCB [Gallo's laboratory at the National Cancer Institute] paper.”[5] This document provided the important evidence that established the basis for awarding Dr. Luc Montagnier and Dr. Francoise Barré-Sinoussi the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the AIDS virus by proving it was their samples of LAV that Popovic used in his key experiment. The draft reveals that Popovic had forthrightly admitted using the French samples of LAV renamed as Gallo's virus, HTLV-III, and that Gallo had deleted this admission, concealing their use of LAV. However, it has not been previously reported that on page three of this same document Gallo had also deleted Popovic's unambiguous statement that, "Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified,” replacing it in the published paper with a statement that said practically the opposite, namely, “That a retrovirus of the HTLV family might be an etiologic agent of AIDS was suggested by the findings.” It is clear that the rest of Popovic's typed paper is entirely consistent with his statement that the cause of AIDS had not been found, despite his use of the French LAV. Popovic's final conclusion was that the culture he produced “provides the possibility” for detailed studies. He claimed to have achieved nothing more. At no point in his paper did Popovic attempt to prove that any virus caused AIDS, and it is evident that Gallo concealed these key elements in Popovic's experimental findings. It is astonishing now to discover these unreported changes to such a seminal document. We can only assume that Gallo's alterations of Popovic's conclusions were not highlighted by earlier inquiries because the focus at the time was on establishing that the sample used by Gallo's lab came from Montagnier and was not independently collected by Gallo. In fact, the only attention paid to the deletions made by Gallo pertains to his effort to hide the identity of the sample. The questions of whether Gallo and Popovic's research proved that LAV or any other virus was the cause of AIDS were clearly not considered. Related to these questions are other long overlooked documents that merit your attention. One of these is a letter from Dr. Matthew A. Gonda, then Head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, which is addressed to Popovic, copied to Gallo and dated just four days prior to Gallo's submission to Science.[8] In this letter, Gonda remarks on samples he had been sent for imaging because “Dr Gallo wanted these micrographs for publication because they contain HTLV.” He states, “I do not believe any of the particles photographed are of HTLV-I, II or III.” According to Gonda, one sample contained cellular debris, while another had no particles near the size of a retrovirus. Despite Gonda's clearly worded statement, Science published on May 4, 1984 papers attributed to Gallo et al with micrographs attributed to Gonda and described unequivocally as HTLV-III. In another letter by Gallo, dated one day before he submitted his papers to Science, Gallo states, “It's extremely rare to find fresh cells [from AIDS patients] expressing the virus... cell culture seems to be necessary to induce virus,” a statement which raises the possibility he was working with a laboratory artifact. [9] Included here are copies of these documents and links to the same. The very serious flaws they reveal in the preparation of the lead paper published in your journal in 1984 prompts our request that this paper be withdrawn. It appears that key experimental findings have been concealed. We further request that the three associated papers published on the same date also be withdrawn as they depend on the accuracy of this paper. For the scientific record to be reliable, it is vital that papers shown to be flawed, or falsified be retracted. Because a very public record now exists showing that the Gallo papers drew unjustified conclusions, their withdrawal from Science is all the more important to maintain integrity. Future researchers must also understand they cannot rely on the 1984 Gallo papers for statements about HIV and AIDS, and all authors of papers that previously relied on this set of four papers should have the opportunity to consider whether their own conclusions are weakened by these revelations. Gallo's handwritten revision, submitted without his colleague's knowledge despite multiple experiments that failed to support the new conclusion, was the sole foundation for the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. Had Science published the manuscript the way Popovic had typed it, there would be no AIDS “pandemic” - merely small clusters of people with AIDS. Without a viral hypothesis backing the development of expensive and deadly pharmaceuticals, would Fauci have allowed these patients to learn about the cure that existed all along? Faced with a potential rebellion, Fauci marshaled the full resources under his control to squelch the publication of the investigations into Gallo and restrict any discussion of competing hypotheses in the scientific and mainstream press, which had been running virus-scare stories full-time since 1984. The effect was total, according to biochemist Dr. Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedure. In a 2009 interview, Mullis recalled his own shock when he attempted to unearth the experimental basis for the HIV=AIDS hypothesis. Despite his extensive inquiry into the literature, “there wasn't a scientific reference…[that] said ‘here's how come we know that HIV is the probable cause of AIDS.' There was nothing out there like that.”9 This yawning void at the core of HIV/AIDS “science" turned him into a strident critic of AIDS dogma - and those views made him persona non grata where the scientific press was concerned, suddenly unable to publish a single paper despite having won the Nobel Prize for his invention of the PCR test just weeks before. 10 DISSENT BECOMES “DENIAL” While many of those who dissent from the orthodox HIV=AIDS view believe HIV plays a role in the development of AIDS, they point to lifestyle and other co-factors as being equally if not more important. Individuals who test positive for HIV can live for decades in perfect health - so long as they don't take AZT or the other toxic antivirals fast-tracked by Fauci's NIAID - but those who developed full-blown AIDS generally engaged in highly risky behaviors like extreme promiscuity and prodigious drug abuse, contracting STDs they took large quantities of antibiotics to treat, further running down their immune systems. While AIDS was largely portrayed as a “gay disease,” it was only the “fast track” gays, hooking up with dozens of partners nightly in sex marathons fueled by “poppers” (nitrate inhalants notorious for their own devastating effects on the immune system), who became sick. Kaposi's sarcoma, one of the original AIDS-defining conditions, was widespread among poppers-using gay men, but never appeared among IV drug users or hemophiliacs, the other two main risk groups during the early years of the epidemic. Even Robert Gallo himself, at a 1994 conference on poppers held by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, would admit that the previously-rare form of skin cancer surging among gay men was not primarily caused by HIV - and that it was immune stimulation, rather than suppression, that was likely responsible.11 Similarly, IV drug users are often riddled with opportunistic infections as their habit depresses the immune system and their focus on maintaining their addiction means that healthier habits - like good nutrition and even basic hygiene - fall by the wayside. Supporting the call for revising the HIV=AIDS hypothesis to include co-factors is the fact that the mass heterosexual outbreaks long predicted by Fauci and his ilk in seemingly every country on Earth have failed to materialize, except - supposedly - in Africa, where the diagnostic standard for AIDS differs dramatically from those of the West. Given the prohibitively high cost of HIV testing for poor African nations, the WHO in 1985 crafted a diagnostic loophole that became known as the “Bangui definition,” allowing medical professionals to diagnose AIDS in the absence of a test using just clinical symptoms: high fever, persistent cough, at least 30 days of diarrhea, and the loss of 10% of one's body weight within two months. Often suffering from malnutrition and without access to clean drinking water, many of the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa fit the bill, especially when the WHO added tuberculosis to the list of AIDS-defining illnesses in 1993 - a move which may be responsible for as many as one half of African “AIDS” cases, according to journalist Christine Johnson. The WHO's former Chief of Global HIV Surveillance, James Chin, acknowledged their manipulation of statistics, but stressed that it was the entire AIDS industry - not just his organization - perpetrating the fraud. “There's the saying that, if you knew what sausages are made of, most people would hesitate to sort of eat them, because they wouldn't like what's in it. And if you knew how HIV/AIDS numbers are cooked, or made up, you would use them with extreme caution,” Chin told an interviewer in 2009.12 With infected numbers stubbornly remaining constant in the US despite Fauci's fearmongering projections of the looming heterosexually-transmitted plague, the CDC in 1993 broadened its definition of AIDS to include asymptomatic (that is, healthy) HIV-positive people with low T-cell counts - an absurd criteria given that an individual's T-cell count can fluctuate by hundreds within a single day. As a result, the number of “AIDS cases” in the US immediately doubled. Supervised by Fauci, the NIAID had been quietly piling on diseases into the “AIDS-related” category for years, bloating the list from just two conditions - pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma - to 30 so fast it raised eyebrows among some of science's leading lights. Deeming the entire process “bizarre” and unprecedented, Kary Mullis wondered aloud why no one had called the AIDS establishment out: “There's something wrong here. And it's got to be financial.”13 Indeed, an early CDC public relations campaign was exposed by the Wall Street Journal in 1987 as having deliberately mischaracterized AIDS as a threat to the entire population so as to garner increased public and private funding for what was very much a niche issue, with the risk to average heterosexuals from a single act of sex “smaller than the risk of ever getting hit by lightning.” Ironically, the ads, which sought to humanize AIDS patients in an era when few Americans knew anyone with the disease and more than half the adult population thought infected people should be forced to carry cards warning of their status, could be seen as a reaction to the fear tactics deployed by Fauci early on.14 It's hard to tell where fraud ends and incompetence begins with Gallo's HIV antibody test. Much like Covid-19 would become a “pandemic of testing,” with murder victims and motorcycle crashes lumped into “Covid deaths” thanks to over-sensitized PCR tests that yielded as many as 90% false positives,15 HIV testing is fraught with false positives - and unlike with Covid-19, most people who hear they are HIV-positive still believe they are receiving a death sentence. Due to the difficulty of isolating HIV itself from human samples, the most common diagnostic tests, ELISA and the Western Blot, are designed to detect not the virus but antibodies to it, upending the traditional medical understanding that the presence of antibodies indicates only exposure - and often that the body has actually vanquished the pathogen. Patients are known to test positive for HIV antibodies in the absence of the virus due to at least 70 other conditions, including hepatitis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, syphilis, recent vaccination or even pregnancy. (https://www.chcfl.org/diseases-that-can-cause-a-false-positive-hiv-test/) Positive results are often followed up with a PCR “viral load” test, even though the inventor of the PCR technique Kary Mullis famously condemned its misuse as a tool for diagnosing infection. Packaging inserts for all three tests warn the user that they cannot be reliably used to diagnose HIV.16 The ELISA HIV antibody test explicitly states: “At present there is no recognized standard for establishing the presence and absence of HIV antibody in human blood.”17 That the public remains largely unaware of these and other massive holes in the supposedly airtight HIV=AIDS=DEATH paradigm is a testament to Fauci's multi-layered control of the press. Like the writers of the Great Barrington Declaration and other Covid-19 dissidents, scientists who question HIV/AIDS dogma have been brutally punished for their heresy, no matter how prestigious their prior standing in the field and no matter how much evidence they have for their own claims. In 1987, the year the FDA's approval of AZT made AIDS the most profitable epidemic yet (a dubious designation Covid-19 has since surpassed), Fauci made it clearer than ever that scientific inquiry and debate - the basis of the scientific method - would no longer be welcome in the American public health sector, eliminating retrovirologist Peter Duesberg, then one of the most prominent opponents of the HIV=AIDS hypothesis, from the scientific conversation with a professional disemboweling that would make a cartel hitman blush. Duesberg had just eviscerated Gallo's 1984 HIV paper with an article of his own in the journal Cancer Research, pointing out that retroviruses had never before been found to cause a single disease in humans - let alone 30 AIDS-defining diseases. Rather than allow Gallo or any of the other scientists in his camp to respond to the challenge, Fauci waged a scorched-earth campaign against Duesberg, who had until then been one of the most highly regarded researchers in his field. Every research grant he requested was denied; every media appearance was canceled or preempted. The University of California at Berkeley, unable to fully fire him due to tenure, took away his lab, his graduate students, and the rest of his funding. The few colleagues who dared speak up for him in public were also attacked, while enemies and opportunists were encouraged to slander Duesberg at the conferences he was barred from attending and in the journals that would no longer publish his replies. When Duesberg was summoned to the White House later that year by then-President Ronald Reagan to debate Fauci on the origins of AIDS, Fauci convinced the president to cancel, allegedly pulling rank on the Commander-in-Chief with an accusation that the “White House was interfering in scientific matters that belonged to the NIH and the Office of Science and Technology Assessment.” After seven years of this treatment, Duesberg was contacted by NIH official Stephen O'Brien and offered an escape from professional purgatory. He could have “everything back,” he was told, and shown a manuscript of a scientific paper - apparently commissioned by the editor of the journal Nature - “HIV Causes AIDS: Koch's Postulates Fulfilled” with his own name listed alongside O'Brien's as an author.18 His refusal to take the bribe effectively guaranteed the epithet “AIDS denier” will appear on his tombstone. The character assassination of Duesberg became a template that would be deployed to great effectiveness wherever Fauci encountered dissent - never debate, only demonize, deplatform and destroy. Even Luc Montagnier, the real discoverer of HIV, soon found himself on the wrong side of the Fauci machine. With his 1990 declaration that “the HIV virus [by itself] is harmless and passive, a benign virus,” Montagnier began distancing himself from Gallo's fraud, effectively placing a target on his own back. In a 1995 interview, he elaborated: “four factors that have come together to account for the sudden epidemic [of AIDS]: HIV presence, immune hyper-activation, increased sexually transmitted disease incidence, sexual behavior changes and other behavioral changes” such as drug use, poor nutrition and stress - all of which he said had to occur “essentially simultaneously” for HIV to be transmitted, creating the modern epidemic. Like the professionals at the Tri-State Healing Center, Montagnier advocated for the use of antioxidants like vitamin C and N-acetyl cysteine, naming oxidative stress as a critical factor in the progression from HIV to AIDS.19 When Montagnier died in 2022, Fauci's media mouthpieces sneered that the scientist (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008 for his discovery of HIV, despite his flagging faith in that discovery's significance) “started espousing views devoid of a scientific basis” in the late 2000s, leading him to be “shunned by the scientific community.”20 In a particularly egregious jab, the Washington Post's obit sings the praises of Robert Gallo, implying it was the American scientist who really should have won the Nobel for HIV, while dismissing as “
2:00 to 22:53Eggflation From Biden to Trump, A Continuous Cycle of Chicken Carnage and Vaccine Threats The blame game for skyrocketing egg prices and the mass culling of chickens swings like a pendulum between administrations, with Biden and Trump each getting their turn in the spotlight. However, beneath this political tug-of-war lies a deeper issue: the perpetuation of policies that lead to the slaughter of millions of chickens, not just under Biden's watch, but continuing unabated into Trump's term While the media and political figures engage in partisan finger-pointing, the real story is one of economic manipulation, biosecurity madness, and the looming threat of vaccinating our food supply.22:53 to 57:30Fowl Play from the “Alt-Right Media” as They Once Again Sell a Pandemic for Trump and for ProfitHistory rhymes 57:30 to 1:17:43LIVE comments from audience on Deja Flu, Contagion & Germ Theory, Inflation and other topics 1:17:43 to 1:26:12John Deere and “Right to Repair” and Federal efforts to ban all lead ammunition and fishing tackle 1:26:12 to 1:42:13 LIVE comments from audience 1:42:13 to 1:53:24From Free Speech to Fear Speech: CBS “60 Minutes” Cheers the Orwellian Crackdown in Germany CBS gleefully reports on a Kafkaesque legal system where a mere insult online can land you in jail or slap you with a fine that rivals a luxury car's price tag. In this dystopian twist, German politicians are turning critics into criminals, prosecuting thousands for 'hate speech' while real crimes get a mere slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, the hypocrisy where political figures like J.D. Vance decry censorship abroad yet push for it at home against any criticism of a foreign government, Israel. 1:53:24 to 2:20:45 Censorship's New World Order The EU's Orwellian playbook, from annulling elections in Romania to Thierry Breton threatening Germany, shows a blatant disregard for democratic principles. Remember when Thierry threatened Elon Musk over Twitter & Musk bowed? Both the left, and the MAGA-right support “taking the license” of news outlets with whom they disagree. Even as Trump doubles down on weaponizing the FCC against “60 Minutes”, the same news organization trashes the First Amendment! 2:20:45 to 2:23:03 LIVE comments from audience 2:23:03 to 2:48:37Vanishing Gold Conspiracy That Could Shake the World From missing audits to mysterious deaths, dive deep into a conspiracy so vast it could catapult the price of gold into the stratosphere. Was Goldfinger right all along? Did the Rockefellers and the Federal Reserve engage in the greatest heist of all time? What happened to the 9/11 gold? Are we on the brink of economic chaos, headed for a gilded iceberg? 2:48:37 Rabbis Resist Trump's Gaza Scheme: Does That Make Them Anti-Semitic? More than 350 Jewish rabbis have placed a full-page ad in the New York Times, denouncing Trump's plan to transform Gaza into a luxurious beach resort at the cost of ethnic cleansing. Labeling Trump's vision as "morally abhorrent," these religious leaders from various Jewish denominations stand against the backdrop of an Israel that's been mythologized by both “prosperity gospel” Christian Zionists and secular Jews who only want the land. At the same time the Sanhedrin is blessing Trump as a modern-day Cyrus, and the GOP is pushing laws against campus protests If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.
2:00 to 22:53Eggflation From Biden to Trump, A Continuous Cycle of Chicken Carnage and Vaccine Threats The blame game for skyrocketing egg prices and the mass culling of chickens swings like a pendulum between administrations, with Biden and Trump each getting their turn in the spotlight. However, beneath this political tug-of-war lies a deeper issue: the perpetuation of policies that lead to the slaughter of millions of chickens, not just under Biden's watch, but continuing unabated into Trump's term While the media and political figures engage in partisan finger-pointing, the real story is one of economic manipulation, biosecurity madness, and the looming threat of vaccinating our food supply.22:53 to 57:30Fowl Play from the “Alt-Right Media” as They Once Again Sell a Pandemic for Trump and for ProfitHistory rhymes 57:30 to 1:17:43LIVE comments from audience on Deja Flu, Contagion & Germ Theory, Inflation and other topics 1:17:43 to 1:26:12John Deere and “Right to Repair” and Federal efforts to ban all lead ammunition and fishing tackle 1:26:12 to 1:42:13 LIVE comments from audience 1:42:13 to 1:53:24From Free Speech to Fear Speech: CBS “60 Minutes” Cheers the Orwellian Crackdown in Germany CBS gleefully reports on a Kafkaesque legal system where a mere insult online can land you in jail or slap you with a fine that rivals a luxury car's price tag. In this dystopian twist, German politicians are turning critics into criminals, prosecuting thousands for 'hate speech' while real crimes get a mere slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, the hypocrisy where political figures like J.D. Vance decry censorship abroad yet push for it at home against any criticism of a foreign government, Israel. 1:53:24 to 2:20:45 Censorship's New World Order The EU's Orwellian playbook, from annulling elections in Romania to Thierry Breton threatening Germany, shows a blatant disregard for democratic principles. Remember when Thierry threatened Elon Musk over Twitter & Musk bowed? Both the left, and the MAGA-right support “taking the license” of news outlets with whom they disagree. Even as Trump doubles down on weaponizing the FCC against “60 Minutes”, the same news organization trashes the First Amendment! 2:20:45 to 2:23:03 LIVE comments from audience 2:23:03 to 2:48:37Vanishing Gold Conspiracy That Could Shake the World From missing audits to mysterious deaths, dive deep into a conspiracy so vast it could catapult the price of gold into the stratosphere. Was Goldfinger right all along? Did the Rockefellers and the Federal Reserve engage in the greatest heist of all time? What happened to the 9/11 gold? Are we on the brink of economic chaos, headed for a gilded iceberg? 2:48:37 Rabbis Resist Trump's Gaza Scheme: Does That Make Them Anti-Semitic? More than 350 Jewish rabbis have placed a full-page ad in the New York Times, denouncing Trump's plan to transform Gaza into a luxurious beach resort at the cost of ethnic cleansing. Labeling Trump's vision as "morally abhorrent," these religious leaders from various Jewish denominations stand against the backdrop of an Israel that's been mythologized by both “prosperity gospel” Christian Zionists and secular Jews who only want the land. At the same time the Sanhedrin is blessing Trump as a modern-day Cyrus, and the GOP is pushing laws against campus protests If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-david-knight-show--5282736/support.
Vanessa Stockard recently visited the podcast for the 3rd time!Vanessa Stockard was born in 1975 in Sydney and spent her formative years in a small country town in the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. At 12 she returned to Sydney as a boarder at Abbotsleigh. After graduating from the College of Fine Arts (COFA) Sydney in 1998 with a BFA, Stockard launched head first into the avant-garde art scene in the bohemian village of Glebe.Stockard is one of the most dangerous artists on the Australian, and by extension, international scene. Her ethereal works of art are a window into the soul of a talented and complex artist, one whose legacy is bound to resonate well past her generation. The existential nature of her painting viscerally questions our concepts of social relationships and reality.Twenty years of introspection and experimentation, ranging over a number of media, have forged Vanessa's style and vulcanised her craft, enabling her to reveal complex misdemeanours, while simultaneously demanding the viewer's self-reflection. She deals with isolation and sadness with intimate care and attention.Vanessa is unhindered by failure, always continuing the discovery of things previously unseen, revealing work that is fresh, unlaboured and penetrating. The deceptive everyday nature of her subject matter belies hidden depths of relationship, feeling and emotion. One could describe her process as absence of thought, a freedom of construct, not unlike the stream of consciousness associated with authors such as Hemmingway and Thomas Wolfe.If light and shade were students, she would be their master. This skill, combined with a naturally deft hand and a determined use of perspective, imbue her subjects with gravitas. The artist refers to set design elements that often alter and morph as her piece progresses. She has said she feels grounded from her ability to draw from the benign surrounds of familiar life, infusing these images with a meaning that yields a meditative satisfaction.Stockard's oeuvre features many pieces developed without any direct visual reference but rather from memory, often incorporating domestic pets such as cats and dogs. Juxtaposing the anthropomorphic nature these animals are given by our society, she infuses the personification of virtue and vice into the everyday canine and feline status quo of our pets. Cats with their fluffy comical exteriors glint with an instinctive urge to kill and cruelly torment their prey, dogs with their providence of happiness, loyalty and friendship are flung back onto Churchill's menacing metaphor for depression.The Kafkaesque mindset behind such works is reminiscent of the existentialist authors like Sartre and Camus. Absurdism appears with cake imagery and its relation to a childlike nostalgia for happiness which may never be real, but rather imaginary, unattainable and unachievable. It's been said “pain is inexhaustible, it's only people who get exhausted…”One can never “have it all”, to be both the artist and patron. To intrinsically understand those things around us that others overlook is what we want from our artists, our creatives. They give voice to the profound mystery of the world around us, surrounded as we are with consumerism, pointless greed, deceit and dissatisfaction. There's no pretension here in these paintings, just spontaneous insight and beauty. Some art is said to speak volumes, but these works are more like innocent and delicate poems, whispering untold truths with an economy of words.Something Rather Than Nothing Podcast
We're back with an episode analyzing writer-director Aaron Schimburg's Kafkaesque body swap, A Different Man. Joining us is critic, actor, and BWDR darling Frank Falisi, co-founder of Garden State Lantern. We get into Adam Pearson's Oscar snub and Sebastian Stan's win, The Substance for boys, shooting in NYC, if you want to dance the mask, the humanism of karaoke, doing your life wrong, self-image as self-esteem, and what it means to never change a bit. Further reading: Le Cinema Club's interview with Aaron Schimburg, RogerEbert.com's interview with Schimburg, Adam Pearson, and Sebastian Stan, and Screen Slate Podcast's episode with Schimburg (and a few cameos from the film). The Bright Wall/Dark Room Podcast is co-hosted by Veronica Fitzpatrick and Chad Perman, produced by Eli Sands, and edited by Buczar. Our theme music is composed by Chad. This episode is sponsored by Galerie: a new kind of film club. Listeners can sign up for access to essays, curated film lists, live screenings, and more at join.galerie.com.Find every issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room at brightwalldarkroom.com. Holy trinity: please give us a follow, rate the pod, give a review. We welcome feedback and inquiries at podcast@brightwalldarkroom.com. Happy new year.
Charles Hugh Smith discusses civilization's crumbling status quo and the hydrocarbon industrial age or current world system which some view as superabundant due to technology while others question whether we've used up the easy energy and are facing resource constraints. He comments on cycles, empire, financialization, consumption, true wealth, how the future will go to those who can get the most out of the resources they extract, and why a new mythology and revolution in social and cultural values is needed. We're faced with a Kafkaesque digital neofeudalism or digital gulag, one solution is reducing our dependency on their systems as much as possible. Watch on BitChute / Brighteon / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack Geopolitics & Empire · Charles Hugh Smith: Anti-Progress, Resource Constraints, & Digital Neofeudalism #511 *Support Geopolitics & Empire! Become a Member https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.com Donate https://geopoliticsandempire.com/donations Consult https://geopoliticsandempire.com/consultation **Visit Our Affiliates & Sponsors! Above Phone https://abovephone.com/?above=geopolitics easyDNS (use code GEOPOLITICS for 15% off!) https://easydns.com Escape The Technocracy course (15% discount using link) https://escapethetechnocracy.com/geopolitics PassVult https://passvult.com Sociatates Civis (CitizenHR, CitizenIT, CitizenPL) https://societates-civis.com Wise Wolf Gold https://www.wolfpack.gold/?ref=geopolitics Websites Blog https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html Substack https://charleshughsmith.substack.com X https://x.com/chsm1th Books https://www.oftwominds.com/CHS-books.html About Charles Hugh Smith Charles Hugh Smith is the author of the oftwominds.com blog, #7 in CNBC's top alternative financial sites, and 18 books on our economy and society, including "A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All," "Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States," "Burnout: Reckoning and Renewal" and "Self-Reliance in the 21st Century." His work is published on a number of popular financial websites including Zero Hedge, Financial Sense and Seeking Alpha and has been featured on numerous podcasts. Smith has also written nine novels, including "The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher" and "The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me." Sample chapters of his books are available on his sites www.oftwominds.com/blog.html and https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com *Podcast intro music is from the song "The Queens Jig" by "Musicke & Mirth" from their album "Music for Two Lyra Viols": http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Charles Hugh Smith discusses civilization's crumbling status quo and the hydrocarbon industrial age or current world system which some view as superabundant due to technology while others question whether we've used up the easy energy and are facing resource constraints. He comments on cycles, empire, financialization, consumption, true wealth, how the future will go to those who can get the most out of the resources they extract, and why a new mythology and revolution in social and cultural values is needed. We're faced with a Kafkaesque digital neofeudalism or digital gulag, one solution is reducing our dependency on their systems as much as possible. Watch on BitChute / Brighteon / Rokfin / Rumble / Substack Geopolitics & Empire · Charles Hugh Smith: Anti-Progress, Resource Constraints, & Digital Neofeudalism #511 *Support Geopolitics & Empire! Become a Member https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.com Donate https://geopoliticsandempire.com/donations Consult https://geopoliticsandempire.com/consultation **Visit Our Affiliates & Sponsors! Above Phone https://abovephone.com/?above=geopolitics easyDNS (use code GEOPOLITICS for 15% off!) https://easydns.com Escape The Technocracy course (15% discount using link) https://escapethetechnocracy.com/geopolitics PassVult https://passvult.com Sociatates Civis (CitizenHR, CitizenIT, CitizenPL) https://societates-civis.com Wise Wolf Gold https://www.wolfpack.gold/?ref=geopolitics Websites Blog https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html Substack https://charleshughsmith.substack.com X https://x.com/chsm1th Books https://www.oftwominds.com/CHS-books.html About Charles Hugh Smith Charles Hugh Smith is the author of the oftwominds.com blog, #7 in CNBC's top alternative financial sites, and 18 books on our economy and society, including "A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All," "Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States," "Burnout: Reckoning and Renewal" and "Self-Reliance in the 21st Century." His work is published on a number of popular financial websites including Zero Hedge, Financial Sense and Seeking Alpha and has been featured on numerous podcasts. Smith has also written nine novels, including "The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher" and "The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me." Sample chapters of his books are available on his sites www.oftwominds.com/blog.html and https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com *Podcast intro music is from the song "The Queens Jig" by "Musicke & Mirth" from their album "Music for Two Lyra Viols": http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Welcome back to PKD! Brian and Steven chew on the Chew-Z madness. The next episode will be delayed by a week, so come back in two weeks for the final three chapters, 11, 12, and 13! Continue reading
Join our Patreon to get access to exclusive monthly calls: https://www.patreon.com/TheThinkingMuslimThe Syrian revolution began in 2011 as a grassroots civil society uprising against one of the most tyrannical rulers in the Muslim World. Bashar al-Assad, like his father before him, presided over a state of terror, with mass disappearances, secret police repression and a brutal, corrupt state machinery that governed through fear. Assad had four secret service agencies (mukhabarat) that worked independently. If you got onto a list, your life would become a never-ending Kafkaesque tragedy. All four had to pardon you before you could be absolved of any guilt. Ordinary Syrians talked in hushed tones in case stray criticism of the state would be misconstrued as insurrection. Assad was a ‘god' who had to be adored by his people.What has happened over these past two weeks is truly spectacular. But how did we get here? And how do we understand the past 13 years?Let me remind all viewers that to help us continue to engage critical thought at this time, Please consider becoming a Patron. https://www.patreon.com/TheThinkingMuslimYou can also support The Thinking Muslim through a one-time donation: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/DonateListen to the audio version of the podcast:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7vXiAjVFnhNI3T9Gkw636aApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-thinking-muslim/id1471798762Sign up to Muhammad Jalal's newsletter: https://jalalayn.substack.comPurchase our Thinking Muslim mug: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com/merchFind us on:Patron. https://www.patreon.com/TheThinkingMuslimTwitter: https://twitter.com/thinking_muslimFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/The-Thinking-Muslim-Podcast-105790781361490Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thinkingmuslimpodcast/Telegram: https://t.me/thinkingmuslimBlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/thinkingmuslim.bsky.socialHost: https://twitter.com/jalalaynIG: https://www.instagram.com/jalalayns?igsh=MWIxbXBkOWswbTg5OA==Website Archive: https://www.thinkingmuslim.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Given Jew-hatred and virulent anti-Israel rhetoric spiraling out of control, particularly on college campuses, we've invited Shai Davidai to be our featured guest on this episode of the program. Shai is Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia University Business School. His research examines people's everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society as a whole. Born and raised just outside Tel-Aviv, Shai received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 2015. Before joining Columbia Business School, Shai spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton and 3 years as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The New School for Social Research. Following the barbaric October 7th 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, Shai has faced deplorable treatment from Columbia University for standing up for Israel and the rights of Jewish students on campus. Today, he's a leading face and voice in the fight against Jew-hatred and Israel-bashing. Our conversation begins with Shai sharing his one way ticket to the safety of his late Grandmother's couch in Givatayim, just outside of Tel Aviv. While on weekend breaks from his university studies in Jerusalem, Shai would visit his Savta (Grandmother) Lydia. Together they would talk, smoke, drink Turkish coffee and enjoy her signature Romanian cheesecake. And at some point, Shai would fall asleep on her couch. Shai shares that Savta Lydia, who was from Bucharest, was studying to be a doctor. Aged 19 and after her first year of university, despite good grades, she was called into the Dean's office and told she wouldn't be able to continue her studies because the university met its quota of Jews. That, plus her being a woman, didn't fit the university's agenda. Realizing she had no future as a Jew in Romania, she packed up and traveled solo to Israel to chart a new course. Her biggest regret in life, Shai offers, is that she didn't become a doctor. We continue our chat with Shai highlighting: 1) How the first protests at Columbia supporting the October 7th attack (organizing began the evening of October 7th while terrorists were still in Israel!) took place at the university on October 12th before one IDF soldier set foot in Gaza and four days after Hezbollah's unprovoked attack on Israel's north. On the 12th, approximately 800 students, faculty and staff came out to celebrate “the historic day” (their words). They used slogans like “resistance by any means necessary” (which for them meant rape, murder and kidnapping civilians was “necessary”). For me, not sure what the need was for resistance since Israel had left Gaza 18 years before and thousands of Gazans would cross into Israel daily to work. 2) The Kafkaesque treatment he's received from Columbia University, simply for speaking out, not against the protestors or their hatred, but against Columbia's administration for allowing the hatred to fester and take root. For exercising his first amendment rights, he's been banned from Columbia's campus. This includes the Columbia Hillel. 3) His goal in speaking out is to push the message that we have a problem for support of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and anti-American terrorism in academia. 4) How US professors openly support US designated terrorist groups, e.g., Hamas and the Houthis, but only ones that target Jews (you won't see support for Boko Haram). How the same professors and others remained and remain silent on, for example, the October 7th attack and the burning of synagogues worldwide. 5) Jewish students being verbally and physically attacked on campuses and denied entry into their public campus spaces. 6) The silent, slanted and biased behavior of international aid organizations like the Red Cross (which to this day has not visited one single hostage), UNRWA, or Amnesty International which engages in historical revisionism. 7) How the anti-Israel and Jew-hating protests are in fact anti-democratic and also anti-American. 8) What starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews. This is a powerful episode to be heard more than once and shared widely. For more from Shai, tune into his podcast: Here I Am With Shai Davidai. Also, follow Shai on all social media: @shaidavidai
Send us a textEpisode 168Ah, sweet freedom. One glorious month to sit back and savor the exquisite schadenfreude of being off while others toil away in the fluorescent-lit trenches of workplace misery. For eight long months, you've endured the delicate ballet of navigating normal coworkers—a refreshing upgrade from the Kafkaesque nightmare that was four years with the Worst People Ever™. Who were they? Sociopaths masquerading as team players? Passive-aggressive micromanagers? Coffee-stealing goblins? Doesn't matter. What matters is they're no longer your problem.Picture them now, shivering at their desks as another winter Monday dawns. Maybe their office heating system is just broken enough to match their frozen souls, while you sit here basking in your own personal holiday utopia. They're probably wondering where their lives went wrong as they trudge through their inboxes, neck-deep in petty email chains about who forgot to CC Karen. Karen's mad, obviously, and probably CCing everyone now. It's all so... small.Meanwhile, you, a beacon of triumph, are staring down the barrel of 31 glorious days of doing exactly what you want. Or nothing at all. It's an art, really, to fill an entire month with absolutely no regard for corporate nonsense. Will you sleep until noon just because you can? Eat breakfast at 3 PM? Binge-watch a series so bad it lowers your IQ? The possibilities are as endless as their TPS reports.Oh, how poetic it is that they must labor through office Secret Santa exchanges and forced merriment while you enjoy the most wonderful gift of all: not giving a damn. Imagine their grim holiday party. Bland hors d'oeuvres, tepid conversations, and Bob from Accounting getting just drunk enough to reveal he hates everyone. Somewhere, someone is wearing a sweater with lights and wishing they'd stayed home.And yet, through it all, there you are, untouched by the madness. You've emerged from the war zone of toxic colleagues scarred, perhaps, but victorious. You've seen the worst humanity has to offer in the form of people who'd steal your stapler and gaslight you about it. You've endured team-building exercises so cringe-inducing they should be banned under the Geneva Convention. And yet, here you are. Unstoppable. Unbothered. A phoenix rising from the ashes of mediocrity.Sure, you've earned this holiday. But there's something sweeter than rest: the knowledge that they can't escape. Not just the worst people ever, but even your current coworkers—decent as they may be—are trapped in the cycle. They'll squint at spreadsheets and juggle deadlines, while you sip something warm, staring out the window, marveling at how the world spins without you lifting a finger.So, take a deep breath, my friend. You're no longer a prisoner. You're a holiday hero. A rebel without an Outlook calendar. When your month is up, you'll return with a tan—or at least a glow—and they'll still be there, complaining about Karen.Music:Echobelly - Great ThingsBadly Drawn Boy - Support the showInsta@justpassingthroughpodcastContact:justpassingthroughpodcast@gmail.comArtwork @digitalnomadicart on Insta
Shane Joaquin Jimenez is the author of short stories and essays featured in publications such as The Greensboro Review, Shotgun Honey, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He joins Vince on the show to discuss his debut novel, Bondage, focusing on the complex character of Che Guevara Horowitz, her upbringing shaped by extremist ideologies, and the dark themes woven throughout the narrative. The conversation explores the symbolism in the story, the influence of celebrity culture, and the psychological dimensions of voyeurism and evil. Jimenez offers insights on pacing in dark narratives, providing a detailed look at the motivations and fears driving the characters in his book. In this engaging dialogue, he examines themes of power, morality, and the intricacies of character archetypes within the noir genre. The discussion touches on the Kafkaesque elements of his narrative, the significance of settings like strip clubs, and the duality within his characters. Jimenez also reflects on his influences from classic noir films and literature, the importance of feedback in writing, and his upcoming projects, including a collection of short stories. The conversation highlights the feminist undertones in his work and his exploration of personal meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. Website: https://www.shanejoaquinjimenez.com/about Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Shane-Joaquin-Jimenez/author/B0D5C1H3DR?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1733502479&sr=1-1&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shane_joaquin_jimenez/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@shane_joaquin_jimenez #shanejoaquinjimenez #bondage #cheguevarahorowitz #neonoir #extremistideologies #darkthemes #celebrityscandals #humannature #symbolism #mafia #kafkaesque #noir #privateeye #stripclub #barracuda #predation #morality #powerdynamics #feministthemes #giallo
Ralph welcomes Marc Rotenberg, founder and president of the Center for AI and Digital Policy to fill us in on the latest international treaty aimed at putting guardrails on the potential Frankenstein monster that is Artificial Intelligence. Plus, as we get to the end of the Medicare enrollment period, we put out one last warning for listeners to avoid the scam that is Medicare Advantage.Marc Rotenberg is the founder and president of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a global organization focused on emerging challenges associated with Artificial Intelligence. He serves as an expert advisor on AI policy to many organizations including the Council of Europe, the Council on Foreign Relations, the European Parliament, the Global Partnership on AI, the OECD, and UNESCO. What troubles me is the gap between an increasingly obscure, technical, and complex technology—abbreviated into “AI” —and public understanding. You know, when motor vehicles came and we tried to regulate them and did, people understood motor vehicles in their daily lives. When solar energy started coming on, they saw solar roof panels. They could see it, they could understand it, they could actually work putting solar panels on roofs of buildings. This area is just producing a massively expanding gap between the experts from various disciplines, and the power structure of corporatism, and their government servants and the rest of the people in the world.Ralph NaderThe difference between these two types of [AI] systems is that with the old ones we could inspect them and interrogate them. If one of the factors being used for an outcome was, for example, race or nationality, we could say, well, that's impermissible and you can't use an automated system in that way. The problem today with the probabilistic systems that US companies have become increasingly reliant on is that it's very difficult to actually tell whether those factors are contributing to an outcome. And so for that reason, there are a lot of computer scientists rightly concerned about the problem of algorithmic bias.Marc Rotenberg[The sponsors of California SB 1047] wanted companies that were building these big complicated systems to undertake a safety plan, identify the harms, and make those plans available to the Attorney General…In fact, I work with many governments around the world on AI regulation and this concept of having an impact assessment is fairly obvious. You don't want to build these large complex systems without some assessment of what the risk might be.Marc RotenbergWe've always understood that when you create devices that have consequences, there has to be some circuit breaker. The companies didn't like that either. [They said] it's too difficult to predict what those scenarios might be, but that was almost precisely the point of the legislation, you see, because if those scenarios exist and you haven't identified them yet, you choose to deploy these large foundational models without any safety mechanism in place, and all of us are at risk. So I thought it was an important bill and not only am I disappointed that the governor vetoed it, but as I said, I think he made a mistake. This is not simply about politics. This is actually about science, and it's about the direction these systems are heading.Marc RotenbergThat's where we are in this moment—opaque systems that the experts don't understand, increasingly being deployed by organizations that also don't understand these systems, and an industry that says, “don't regulate us.” This is not going to end well.Marc RotenbergIn Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DesantisNews 11/27/241. Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. According to a statement from ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, the international legal body found reasonable grounds to believe that each has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. This news has been met with varied reactions throughout the world. These have been meticulously documented by Just Security. The United States, which is under no obligation to honor the warrant as it is not a party to the Rome Statute, has said it “fundamentally rejects” the judgment and has called the issuing of warrants “outrageous.” Canada, which is party to the Rome Statue has vowed to uphold their treaty obligations despite their close ties to Israel. Germany however, another signatory to the Rome Statute, has suggested that they would not honor the warrants. In a statement, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said the warrants are “long overdue” and signal that “the days of the Israeli apartheid government operating with impunity are ending.” One can only hope that is true.2. On November 21st, 19 Senators voted for at least one of the three Joint Resolutions of Disapproval regarding additional arms transfers to Israel. As Jewish Voice for Peace Action puts it, “this is an unprecedented show of Senate opposition to President Biden's disastrous foreign policy of unconditional support for the Israeli military.” The 19 Senators include Independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King, progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Raphael Warnock, and Democratic caucus leaders like Dick Durbin, among many others. Perhaps the most notable supporter however is Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, whom Ryan Grim notes is the only Democrat representing a state Trump won and who is up for reelection in 2026 to vote for the resolution. Ossoff cited President Reagan's decision to withhold cluster munitions during the IDF occupation of Beirut in a floor speech explaining his vote. The Middle East Eye reports that the Biden Administration deployed Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer to whip votes against the JRD.3. Last week, we covered H.R. 9495, aka the “nonprofit killer” bill targeting pro-Palestine NGOs. Since then, the bill has passed the House. Per the Guardian, the bill passed 219-184, with fifteen Democrats crossing the aisle to grant incoming-President Trump the unilateral power to obliterate any non-profit organization he dislikes, a list sure to be extensive. Congressman Jamie Raskin is quoted saying “A sixth-grader would know this is unconstitutional…They want us to vote to give the president Orwellian powers and the not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.” The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is unlikely to pass while Democrats cling to control. Come January however, Republicans will hold a decisive majority in the upper chamber.4. President-elect Donald Trump has announced his selection of Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer as his pick for Secretary of Labor. Chavez-DeRemer is perhaps the most pro-labor Republican in Congress, with the AFL-CIO noting that she is one of only three Republicans to cosponsor the PRO Act and one of eight to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Chavez-DeRemer was reportedly the favored choice of Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, who controversially became the first ever Teamster to address the RNC earlier this year. While her selection has been greeted with cautious optimism by many labor allies, anti-labor conservatives are melting down at the prospect. Akash Chougule of Americans for Prosperity accused Trump of giving “A giant middle finger to red states,” by “picking a teachers union hack” and urged Senate Republicans to reject the nomination.5. Unfortunately, most of Trump's selections are much, much worse. Perhaps worst of all, Trump has chosen Mehmet Cengiz Öz – better known as Dr. Oz – to lead the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Beyond his lack of qualifications and history of promoting crackpot medical theories, Oz is a longtime proponent of pushing more seniors into privatized Medicare Advantage, or “Disadvantage,” plans, per Yahoo! Finance. This report notes that the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 called for making Medicare Advantage the default health program for seniors.6. According to CNN, Brazilian police have arrested five people who conspired to assassinate leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, in 2022. This assassination plot was allegedly cooked up even before Lula took office, and included plans to kill Lula's Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The conspirators included a former high-ranking Bolsonaro advisor and military special forces personnel. Reuters reports investigators have discovered evidence that Bolsonaro himself was involved in the scheme.7. In more news from Latin America, Drop Site reports that the United States and Colombia engaged in a secretive agreement to allow the country's previous U.S.-backed conservative President Ivan Duque to utilize the Israeli Pegasus spyware for internal surveillance in the country. Details of the transaction and of the utilization of the spyware remain “murky,” but American and Colombian officials maintain it was used to target drug-trafficking groups and not domestic political opponents. Just two months ago, Colombia's leftist President Gustavo Petro delivered a televised speech revealing details of this shadowy arrangement, including that the Duque government flew $11 million cash from Bogotá to Tel Aviv. As Drop Site notes, “In Colombia, there's a long legacy of state intelligence agencies surveilling political opposition leaders. With the news that the U.S. secretly helped acquire and deploy powerful espionage software in their country, the government is furious at the gross violation of their sovereignty. They fear that Colombia's history of politically motivated surveillance, backed by the U.S. government, lives on to this day.”8. Following the Democrats' electoral wipeout, the race for new DNC leadership is on. Media attention has mostly been focused on the race to succeed Jamie Harrison as DNC Chair, but POLITICO is out with a story on James Zogby's bid for the DNC vice chair seat. Zogby, a longtime DNC member, Bernie Sanders ally and president of the Arab American Institute has criticized the party's position on Israel and particularly of the Kamala Harris campaign's refusal to allow a Palestinian-American speaker at this year's convention. He called the move “unimaginative, overly cautious and completely out of touch with where voters are.” This report notes Zogby's involvement in the 2016 DNC Unity Reform Commission, and his successful push to strip substantial power away from the so-called superdelegates.9. Speaking of Democratic Party rot, the Lever reports that in its final days the Biden Administration is handing corporations a “get out of jail free card.” A new Justice Department policy dictates that the government will essentially look the other way at corporate misconduct, even if the company has “committed multiple crimes, earned significant profit from their wrongdoing, and failed to self-disclose the misconduct — as long as the companies demonstrate they ‘acted in good faith' to try to come clean.” This is the logical endpoint of the longstanding Biden era soft-touch approach intended to encourage corporations to self-police, an idea that is patently absurd on its face. Public Citizen's Corporate Crime expert Rick Claypool described the policy as “bending over backward to protect corporations.”10. Finally, on November 23rd lawyer and former progressive congressional candidate Brent Welder posted a fundraising email from Bernie Sanders that immediately attracted substantial interest for its strong language. In this note, Sanders writes “The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges…Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class[?]…unlikely.” The email ends with a list of tough questions, including “should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties?” Many on the Left read this as Bernie opening the door to a “dirty break” with the Democratic Party, perhaps even an attempt to form some kind of independent alliance or third party. In a follow-up interview with John Nichols in the Nation, Sanders clarified that he is not calling for the creation of a new party, but “Where it is more advantageous to run as an independent, outside of the Democratic [Party]…we should do that.” Whether anything will come of this remains to be seen, but if nothing else the severity of his rhetoric reflects the intensity of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party in light of their second humiliating defeat at the hands of a clownish, fascistic game show host. Perhaps a populist left third party is a far-fetched, unachievable goal. On the other hand, how many times can we go back to the Democratic Party expecting different results. Something has got to give, or else the few remaining pillars of our democracy will wither and die under sustained assault by the Right and their corporate overlords.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. 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Welcome back to PKD! Brian and Steven continue their reading of Man in the High Castle. Tensions continue to rise, super secrets are hinted at, and Julianna is planning to visit the guy who’s name is the the name of the thing (she wants to visit the Man in the… Continue reading
Wars and rumors of wars. The people who run Joe Biden decided to let Ukraine take one of our long range missiles and fire it into Russia. Maybe, instead of going to war with Russia, we should invade the UK to rescue its citizens, who are being arrested for wrong-think and wrong-speak. As always, we must look to Christ during times like these…What Does God's Word Say?John 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”Episode Links:The Grammy winner and former lead guitarist of the British folk rock band Mumford & Sons @MrWinMarshall reveals to Americans that people are being imprisoned in the UK and EU for politically incorrect social media postsTelegraph journalist faces ‘Kafkaesque' investigation over alleged hate crime; Allison Pearson reveals how police officers called at her home on Remembrance Sunday to tell her of inquiry into year-old social media postBritish police are now harassing Christians for preaching about Jesus saying that it is a CRIMINAL OFFENCE" if a member of the public feels "harassment, alarm and distress".Counting illegal votes in Pennsylvania: Democrat Commissioners violate the rule of law and ignore PA Supreme Court ruling! Democrat Commissioners Diane Marseglia and Bob Harvie voted today to count illegal ballots, against PA Supreme Court ruling, in an attempt to aid former Senator Bob Casey.Alan's Soapshttps://www.alansartisansoaps.comUse coupon code ‘TODD' to save an additional 10% off the bundle price.Bioptimizershttps://bioptimizers.com/toddUse code TODD to unlock up to $100 in free gifts and save an additional 10% off the special 3-product bundle for a 25% savings.Bonefroghttps://bonefrogcoffee.com/toddMake Bonefrog Cold Brew at home! Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.Bulwark CapitalBulwark Capital Management (bulwarkcapitalmgmt.com)Don't miss the next live Webinar THIS Thursday at 3:30pm pacific. Sign up today by calling 866-779-RISK or go to KnowYourRiskRadio.com.My Pillowhttps://mypillow.com/toddUse promo code TODD to save big on the entire MyPillow classic Collection with the Standard starting at only $14.88. Renue Healthcarehttps://renue.healthcare/toddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit renue.healthcare/Todd
If you're feeling sad this week then what better way to lift the blues than by listening in to your Happy Hosts, Paul L and Geoff C as they cast their swirly eyes over the sinister goings-on in the dark streets of Terra Alpha in the iconic 7th Doctor story, The Happiness Patrol.Is it a satire? Is it a dig at the Thatcher government? Is it a Kafkaesque exploration of Jungian archetypes with a bunch of sweets?Or is it just a totally bonkers script brought to life by a production team having a lot of fun behind the cameras?One thing is for sure, once you've seen The Happiness Patrol, you won't forget it!So stop being a Killjoy, switch up your brightest smile (don't forget the dimples!) and join us for a commentary that is sure to liven up the rainiest of rainy days!Remember: Happiness WILL prevail!!Send us a text and let us know what you think of our podcast!Support the show Subscribe to Who Corner to Corner on your podcast app to make sure you don't miss an episode! Now available to watch on YouTube! Join the Doctor Who chat with us and other fans on Twitter and Facebook! Visit the Who Corner to Corner website and see our back catalogue of episodes! Enjoying what we do? Consider joining our Explorers Subscription plan for more content! Who Corner to Corner: Great guests and 100% positive Doctor Who chat!
Franz Kafka died 100 years ago, but his work is still very much alive today in literature classes and, surprisingly, on social media. This hour, we look at Kafka's life and legacy, discuss the “Kafkaesque,” and investigate why the author resonates so much today. Plus, we revisit his most famous work, “The Metamorphosis,” and talk with a zoologist about the idea of turning into an insect. GUESTS: Benjamin Balint: Author of Kafka's Last Trial; his latest book is Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and the Hijacking of History Tim Coulson: Professor of zoology at the University of Oxford; his latest book is The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe from the Big Bang to Consciousness Margarita Mouka: Content creator and creative executive; her TikTok handle is @aquariuscat444 Karolina Watroba: Post-doctoral research fellow in modern languages at Oxford's All Souls College and the author of Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Bradley O'Connor contributed to this show, which originally aired July 8, 2024.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Writers from Hong Kong face a Kafkaesque decision in the years since draconian security legislation was imposed on the city: to stay and be subject to intense censorship, or to write freely from exile. In this episode, Louisa speaks to two award-winning authors who have chosen different paths. Lau Yeewa is still living in Hong Kong; her book Tongueless, translated by Jennifer Feeley, won the 2024 Pen Translates award. Gigi Leung Lee-chi is now based in Taiwan, and her book The Melancholy of Trees has just won Taiwan's Golden Tripod award. Image: c/- Wikimedia Commons, Empty Bookshelves, 2014 Transcripts available at https://www.thechinastory.org/lrp/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Since the comedian Julio Torres came to America from El Salvador, more than a decade ago, his fantastical style has made him a singular presence in the entertainment landscape. An early stint writing for “Saturday Night Live” yielded some of the show's weirdest and most memorable sketches; soon after that, Torres's work on the HBO series “Los Espookys,” which he co-wrote and starred in, cemented his status as a beloved odd-child of the comedy scene. In his most recent work, he's applied his dreamy sensibility to very real bureaucratic nightmares. “Problemista,” his first feature film, draws on Torres's own Kafkaesque experience navigating the U.S. immigration system; in his new HBO show, “Fantasmas,” the protagonist considers whether to acquire a document called a “proof of existence,” without which everyday tasks like renting an apartment are rendered impossible. In a live taping at The New Yorker Festival, the hosts of Critics at Large talk with Torres about his creative influences, and about using abstraction to put our most impenetrable systems into tangible terms. “Life today is so riddled with these man-made labyrinths that are life-or-death … there's something very lonely about it,” Torres says. “These flourishes are there in service of the humanity.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“Problemista” (2023)“Fantasmas” (2024-)“Los Espookys” (2019-22)“I Want to Be a Vase,” by Julio Torres“My Favorite Shapes” (2019)“Saturday Night Live” (1975-)“Julio Torres's ‘Fantasmas' Finds Truth in Fantasy,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996)“Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle” (2003)“The Substance” (2024)New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Share your thoughts on Critics At Large. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey.https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2
‘Dorian Gray’ Announces Broadway House, ‘Cult of Love’ Completes Cast, ‘Kafkaesque’ Creator and Star James Harvey Since 2016, “Today on Broadway” has been the first and only daily podcast recapping the top theatre headlines every Monday through Friday. Any and all feedback is appreciated:Grace Aki: grace@broadwayradio.com | @ItsGraceAkiMatt Tamanini: matt@broadwayradio.com | @BWWMatt Patreon: BroadwayRadiohttps://www.patreon.com/broadwayradio read more The post ToB: Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024 | James Harvey of ‘Kafkaesque’ appeared first on BroadwayRadio.
Welcome back to PKD! Brian and Steven kick off our second book, Man in the High Castle! So far it’s lots of fun, even if the world is a complete nightmare. Continue reading
Hot off the presses and straight to you, it's a brand new Whisper in the Wings from Stage Whisper. On this episode, we sat down with creator/performer James Harvey, to talk about his new show, Kafkaesque! This was a brilliant conversation about this unique interpretation of some of the best stories ever written. So make sure you tune in and turn up for this amazing production!Kafakaesque!October 18th- November 11th@ 154 Christopher StreetTickets and more information are available at kafkashow.comAnd be sure to follow James to stay up to date on all his upcoming projects and productions:Kafkaesque: kafkashow.com and @kafkaesquemusicalJames: @jamesgharvey and jamesharvey.com
Welcome back to PKD, the show where Brian and Steven dive into the weird world and weirder mind of Phillip K. Dick! In this episode, we wrap up Ubik and talk about some of the cool, mind-bending stuff it makes you think about. Come back next week for the first… Continue reading
In the first (of four!) episodes planned for Halloween month, we're entering not the King-sized American genre worlds populated by slasher killers, raging alcoholics, and traumatized ghosts but a distinctly Greek one. This, as our guest, Panos Liakos (NYU graduate; freelance writer for The New Herald), tells us, is the "Yorgos Cosmos" -- built on exploring the tragi-comic absurdity of human existence. It's a style of horror/dark comedy that's distinctly Greek -- originating from the "Greek Weird Wave" movement, internationally recognized as a representation of and response to the Greek Financial Crisis in 2010. But its -- and especially its most famous figure, Yorgos Lanthimos' growing international appeal -- also speaks to its universal appeal: for who hasn't felt the Kafkaesque dread of getting crushed by a strictly ordered, almost automaton existence and then tried (and failed to) escape in comically absurd ways? Dhruv and Panos discuss all this by first talking about the “Greek Weird Wave,” then Yorgos Lanthimos' eclectic filmography, and then his latest film, “Kinds of Kindness,” in spoiler-filled detail. TIME CODES Introduction: [00:00 – 08:48] Greek Weird Wave 101 - [08:48 – 30:42] Yorgos Lanthimos' Cosmos: [30:42 – 49:00] “Kinds of Kindness”: [49:00 - 01:17:26] Outro: [01:17:26 - 01:21:24] ------------------------------------------------------------- You can (and should!) read Panos' pieces on both Lanthimos and “Poor Things” here: 1. Poor Things: A Traverse into the Cosmos of Yorgos Lanthimos – https://filmbuff.org.in/2024/07/poor-things-a-traverse-into-the-cosmos-of-yorgos-lanthimos/. 2. Yorgos Lanthimos: A Journey from “Kinetta” to Los Angeles – https://daysofart.gr/en/news/days-of-art/yorgos-lanthimos-a-journey-from-kinetta-to-los-angeles-by-panos-liakos/. You can (and should!) follow Panos everywhere: INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/liakos_panos?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==. ACADEMIA: https://tisch-nyu.academia.edu/PanosLiakos. ----------------------------------------------------------- Follow our Instagram page: https://instagram.com/queenisdead.filmpodcast. You can follow us on Instagram at: Amartya: https://www.instagram.com/amartya25/. Hemant: https://www.instagram.com/hemantganti. Dhruv: https://www.instagram.com/terminalcinema/. You can also follow us on Letterboxd at - Dhruv: https://letterboxd.com/aterminalcinema/. Hemant - https://letterboxd.com/ganti117/. Amartya: https://letterboxd.com/amartya/. CLIPS 1. The Lobster Movie CLIP - Choice (2016) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYpycAcxEBQ&ab_channel=RottenTomatoesComingSoon. 2. Kinetta Opening - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-fy4ujo2vs&ab_channel=iamtable. 3. Dogtooth Cat Scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHhwzV5WV-Y&ab_channel=zoharbarkan. 4. “I Must Go Punch that Baby" | Poor Things (HDR) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jHDaheGc1E&ab_channel=HigherQualityUploads. 5. Kinds of Kindness Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGOL2_mI9Hw&t=4s&ab_channel=SearchlightPictures.
Julie Bindel: Shocking Stories From the Victims of Youth Gender Medicine. Julie joins me to discuss her new podcast 'Julie in Genderland,' where Julie speaks to the parents and professionals caught up in a Kafkaesque transgender scandal. Follow Julie
Sall Grover – founder of the women-only social-media app, Giggle – returns to The Brendan O'Neill Show. Sall talks to Brendan about her landmark case in Australia and why her loss could have a devastating impact on women worldwide. Take your business to the next level with Shopify. Sign up now and get a £1-per-month trial period: https://shopify.co.uk/brendan This episode is sponsored by Incogni. Protect your personal data today, and use the code BRENDAN to get 60% off your annual plan: https://incogni.com/brendan?utm_medium=brendan&utm_campaign=youtube&utm_source=Blue_Partner Order Brendan O'Neill's A Heretic's Manifesto now from:
This week- a pair of films starring the late French icon Alain Delon. Tom Ripley has been sent to Italy to retrieve Phillippe Greenleaf, son of a wealth San Francisco family. Phillippe has no intention of returning home, especially if it means leaving behind his fiancée, Marge. He soon grows cruel and abusive to the always fawning Tom. But Tom Ripley has ideas and plans of his own. The first film adaption of the original book Patricia Highsmith's classic novel series, Purple Noon (original title: Plein soleil). A Gentile art dealer in Vichy France is mistaken from a Jewish man with the same name. Robert Klein's wealthy and secure life is thrown into a paranoid mystery as he tries desperately to both satisfy the authorities on his identity and find who put him in this position to begin with. A Kafkaesque film about obsession and identity, Monsieur Klein. All that and Kevin is summoned with digital necromancy, Dave sees the bright lights big city, and Tyler sharpens his tongue for next week. Join us, won't you? Episode 375- Ice-Cold Angel
How do criminals turn their ill-gotten gains into taxable income? And how does law enforcement stop them? Zachary Crockett follows the money. SOURCES:Patrick McKenzie, fraud prevention expert and strategic advisor at Stripe.Kerry Myers, associate professor of instruction at the University of South Florida and former F.B.I. special agent. RESOURCES:"National Assessments of Money Laundering Risks: Stumbling at the Start," by Joras Ferwerda and Peter Reuter (Risk Analysis, 2024)."Hacker 'Washes' $25M in Stolen Crypto Through Magic: The Gathering Card Scheme," by Oliver Dale (Blockonomi, 2023)."Money Spending or Money Laundering: The Fine Line between Legal and Illegal Financial Transactions," by Matthew R. Auten (Pace Law Review, 2013)."HSBC to Pay $1.9bn in US Money Laundering Penalties" (BBC News, 2012)."How a Big US Bank Laundered Billions From Mexico's Murderous Drug Gangs," by Ed Vulliamy (The Guardian, 2011). EXTRAS:"Why Does One Tiny State Set the Rules for Everyone?" by Freakonomics Radio (2023)."Kafkaesque," S3.E9 of Breaking Bad (2010).
. . . As the late Shelly Duval says in the legendary "Annie Hall". In which, of course, the only response would be, "thank you". That and talking about the movies, "Home Alone" today and how it was just a little film that could AND the brand new Netflix movie, "Beverly Hills Cop 4", which, spoiler alert, is Awesome! I guess I didn't do much this week except watch movies.
Franz Kafka died 100 years ago last month, but his work is still very much alive today in literature classes and, surprisingly, on social media. This hour, we look at Kafka's life and legacy, discuss the “Kafkaesque,” and investigate why the author resonates so much today. Plus, we revisit his most famous work, “The Metamorphosis,” and talk with a zoologist about the idea of turning into an insect. GUESTS: Margarita Mouka: Content creator and creative executive. Her TikTok Handle is @aquariuscat444 Karolina Watroba: Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Oxford's All Souls College, and the author of Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka Benjamin Balint: Author of Kafka's Last Trial. His new book is Bruno Schulz: An Artist, A Murder, and the Hijacking of History Tim Coulson: Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford. His new book is The Science of Why We Exist: A History of the Universe from the Big Bang to Consciousness Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode. Colin McEnroe, Jonathan McNicol, and Bradley O'Connor contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
“Kafkaesque” is the word usually used to describe After Hours, Martin Scorsese's 1985 comedy—a fair point, since there's a scene in the film that dramatizes Kafka's “Before the Law.” But the writer whose imagination this film really taps is Lewis Carroll: as in Alice in Wonderland, a naïve but likable young person chases a white rabbit to a different part of town, is threatened by an angry woman who wants to chop off his head, and learns, “We're all mad here.” Join us for an appreciation of this terrific film we've used to test other people's sense of humor. If you haven't read Lewis Carroll in a while, you can get a copy of all the Alice books here. Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you'd like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out the new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
“Kafkaesque” is the word usually used to describe After Hours, Martin Scorsese's 1985 comedy—a fair point, since there's a scene in the film that dramatizes Kafka's “Before the Law.” But the writer whose imagination this film really taps is Lewis Carroll: as in Alice in Wonderland, a naïve but likable young person chases a white rabbit to a different part of town, is threatened by an angry woman who wants to chop off his head, and learns, “We're all mad here.” Join us for an appreciation of this terrific film we've used to test other people's sense of humor. If you haven't read Lewis Carroll in a while, you can get a copy of all the Alice books here. Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you'd like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out the new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Kafkaesque” is the word usually used to describe After Hours, Martin Scorsese's 1985 comedy—a fair point, since there's a scene in the film that dramatizes Kafka's “Before the Law.” But the writer whose imagination this film really taps is Lewis Carroll: as in Alice in Wonderland, a naïve but likable young person chases a white rabbit to a different part of town, is threatened by an angry woman who wants to chop off his head, and learns, “We're all mad here.” Join us for an appreciation of this terrific film we've used to test other people's sense of humor. If you haven't read Lewis Carroll in a while, you can get a copy of all the Alice books here. Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you'd like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out the new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
Raeleen is loving her #currentlyreading, Ariel is battling a door, and we both read a very similar book. Links mentioned: Pre-order our new peach hat!: https://store.dftba.com/collections/books-unbound/products/books-ballcap The Mashed Potato Pin: https://store.dftba.com/collections/books-unbound/products/mashed-potato-enamel-pin Support The Podcast: Our beautiful merch: https://store.dftba.com/collections/books-unbound Join our patreon and become a Dust Jacket! patreon.com/booksunbound Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/books_unbound/ Need Info or Some Books? All the books we mentioned in this episode: https://www.booksunboundpodcast.com/books Submit your book requests at booksunboundpodcast.com Use our affiliate link to get 2 audiobooks for the price of 1! https://tidd.ly/3dyW1Xw Our Patrons: A special thanks to our Gold Foil Team on Patreon: Asia, Bellanora, Bethany, Brittany, Bronte, Cait, Candis, Christi, Christina, Claire, Ellen, Emma, Gene, Hannah, Hayli, Inbar, Jenny, Jessie, Jill, Jo, Katelyn, Luna, Maria, Meg, Mickey, Nicole, Nina, Phoebe, Sandra, Sarah, Sherralle, Simon, Tiffany, Zoe! Timestamps: 00:00 - Billie Eilish: New Album Thoughts 13:00 - British Shop Expedition 25:05 - Ariel's Door Repair 28:55 - What We Finished 43:37 - The Mail Room
Warning: This video discusses domestic violence and severe child abuse, including sexual abuse. Viewer discretion is advised. Dr Bandy Lee is well-known for The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which she edited. She has taught at Yale Schools of Medicine and Public Health, and Yale Law School, and more recently at both Harvard and Columbia. Bandy talks with Jon about her sister's dreadful experience in the Family Court and about the corruption that has become part of the establishment in the Family Courts. Dr Lee has an impeccable reputation, otherwise it would be impossible to believe the allegations she makes. The situation is nothing short of Kafkaesque. We should all do everything we can to protect children from the network of abuse that includes "reunification camps" and police seizure of children. Links: A short documentary on reunification camps U.S. child murder data in relation to Family Courts are the highest in the world Dr. Lee's own site on family courts: The article Jon mentions, "Beware Family Court Doublethink and Newspeak", Medium Ms. Magazine, Catherine Kassenoff Family Court Divorce Dr. Lee on the podcast "Confronting the Family Court Crisis" Dr. Lee's testimony to the NY state senate
Really, in a Kafka story, the meth would be a bueracratic drug that all individuals are required to take to meet Happiness Requirements. Find out more in my Franz Kafka/Breaking Bad slash fic! We would like to thank Gwen Static (https://soundcloud.com/deepwhale) for composing our theme song, and Trent Peters (http://instagram.com/theathleticbookworm) for creating our great podcast art.
Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET: https://rumble.com/c/GGreenwald Become part of our Locals community: https://greenwald.locals.com/ - - - Follow Glenn: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glenn.11.greenwald/ Follow System Update: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SystemUpdate_ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/systemupdate__/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@systemupdate__ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/systemupdate.tv/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/systemupdate/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 21, 2023 is: Kafkaesque kahf-kuh-ESK adjective Something described as Kafkaesque has an often nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality to it. More broadly, anything relating to or suggestive of the writing of Franz Kafka may be said to be Kafkaesque. // The airline is notorious for its Kafkaesque procedures for changing flights, even in situations where a flight is cancelled due to bad weather. See the entry > Examples: “Two people who had recently navigated the state's maze of housing programs also spoke to lawmakers on Thursday. ... Those living in poverty are expected to complete mountains of complicated paperwork to access aid and can be harshly penalized for any errors. For help, they must rely on overtaxed social workers, who are themselves often stumped by the Kafkaesque bureaucracy their clients face.” — Lola Duffort, VTDigger.org (Montpelier, Vermont), 6 Oct. 2023 Did you know? Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century. The opening sentence of his 1915 story The Metamorphosis has become one of the most famous in Western literature (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”), while in his novel The Trial, published a year after his death, a young man finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law after being charged with a crime that is never named. So deft was Kafka's prose at detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority, that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16 years after his death. Although many other literary eponyms, from Austenian to Homeric, exist and are common enough, Kafkaesque gets employed more than most and in a wide variety of contexts, leading to occasional charges that the word has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to overuse.