'When The Government Claims the Power to Decide Whose Life Has Value and Whose Does Not—Who May Live and Who May Die in the Name of the "General Welfare"—It is No Longer Governing. It is Playing God'

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BUT WHAT IS GOVERNING THOUGH? From [RON PAUL] When the government claims the power to decide whose life has value and whose does not—who may live and who may die in the name of “security,” “order,” or “efficiency”—it is no longer governing. It is playing god.

A government that acts as if freedoms—and life, in turn—are privileges granted by the state has abandoned the foundational principle that rights are inherent and inalienable.

We see it in a system that celebrates the sanctity of life before birth while expanding the machinery of death after birth—through executions carried out in the name of justice, militarized policing carried out in the name of order, indefinite detention carried out in the name of security, shoot-first enforcement regimes that treat civilians as threats rather than human beings, and endless wars driven by greed, profit and ego.

Nor are these executions limited to death chambers.

As the killing of Renée Good makes clear, the modern police state now carries out executions in the streets—without trial, without jury, and without meaningful accountability.

When government agents act as judge, jury, and executioner, the distinction between capital punishment and law enforcement violence collapses.

Both rest on the same premise: that the state has the moral authority to decide, unilaterally and irrevocably, that a human life is no longer worthy of protection.

We see it in a bureaucracy that has armed itself like an occupying force—federal agencies equipped with military-grade weapons, surveillance tools, and near-total immunity—while insisting that this concentration of power is necessary for our safety.

We see it in the normalization of state violence: no-knock raids, warrantless searches, armed enforcement actions carried out in residential neighborhoods, and the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens during domestic enforcement operations that resemble a military deployment more than civilian law enforcement.

Alex Pretti’s death was the foreseeable end result of a system that normalizes state violence, immunizes authority from accountability, and treats human life as collateral damage.

Once government is allowed to decide whose life matters, no life is safe. [MORE]

Puppet Trump's Rule by Force Doctrine Offers a Grim Choice for the world: Obey Authority to Remain Free

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Given US President Donald Trump’s declarations that there would be no mass executions of protesters in Iran, and that the killings had stopped, it appears that Iran will for the moment be spared the Venezuela treatment or worse. 

Yet even without military action in the form of targeted assassinations or bombing campaigns, it would be safer - especially for the Iranian regime - to consider such interventions as having only been put on hold, at best. 

This sudden change of heart might simply be a sort of psy-op ploy to reassure Iran’s regime, encouraging the nation to lower its guard before an actual strike. It’s also possible that Trump was genuinely convinced to shelve that option, at least for awhile. 

Many factors might have contributed to this about-face, including the resolute opposition of Trump’s regional allies; the still-fresh example of the Iraq disaster; the lack of preparation among the US and its regional allies for a major operation in Iran; the likely destabilising consequences for the region, especially Lebanon; the possibility of “mission creep”; the uncertainty over the ultimate outcome in Iran itself; and the lack of viable opposition figures. [MORE]

The Ruthlessness and Brutality of the US Government

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From [HERE] I have long maintained that one of the big obstacles libertarians face in the achievement of a genuinely free society is the fact that most Americans honestly believe they are free. When people are convinced they are free, they have no reason to want to join up with us libertarians in our effort to establish a genuinely free society. Instead, they simply view libertarianism as a “weird” philosophy that purports to achieve what we already have — a free society.

One can only hope that the recent killings of 37-year-old Renée Good and 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, both of whom were regular American citizens, will enable at least some Americans to break through the inches-thick indoctrination that has encased their minds and that has convinced them that they live in a free society. After all, how can a society genuinely be considered free when the government wields the omnipotent power to kill anyone it wants?

And make no mistake about it: As we have seen, US officials have the omnipotent power to kill any American they want. That’s a harsh reality that so many Americans still do not want to accept. They’d rather remain convinced that they live under the same governmental structure on which our nation was founded, one in which the federal government’s powers were limited and restricted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. [MORE]

ICE Believes it Can Murder Anyone Who Carries and Bears Firearms- so MAGA Barks and Claps for More Murders and FreeDumb [like Larken Rose said]

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According to FUNKTIONARY:

Dogma – Am God (spelled backwards). 2) a puppy’s mother—a bitch. 3) instructions on what to believe and how to believe it. 4) truth pressed and starched to appear crisp. 5) any kind of truth that justifies the institutionalized structure of the organization. Reality isn’t wrinkle-free. Every dogma has its day—and a dogma that chases its catechism, will definitely be busy. Dogma is the edifice of ignorance (in the form of static superstitions) and bastion of banality inside your thinking apparatus and thinking process. Dogma is the expression of the belief system that must be adhered to; hatred is the enforcer. Dogma is the rulebook of the particular truth that is being enforced by hatred. The truth that is played with is the game— the rules that enforce how the game is played is the dogma. Dogma is a protector of objective truth; and truth is a prophylactic for reality. Dogma is the bug (fatal flaw) and true believers are the replicating viruses that propagate and distort the internal model of the nature of reality directly experienced within nondual consciousness. People perceive reality’s forms as direct threats on (and to) their truths because they are merely living (in truth at the mythic or rational level of consciousness) and not Alive (living God in reality) at the higher states, levels or realms of consciousness. Nondual consciousness unfolds itself the highest realization that a divine being can experience appearing-as-process in the space-time continuum. “Any time you have a doctrine where that is the truth that you assert, and that what you call the truth is unassailable, you’ve got doctrine, you’ve got dogma on your hands. And so Cosmos is…an offering of science, and a reminder that dogma does not advance science; it actually regresses it.” ~Neil DeGrassi Tyson. Dogma is the straightjacket of the spirit. Before you ever had the opportunity to even ask the question, the answer was given to you. Dogma is believing in borrowed answers to questions you never had the chance to formulate or ask. True believers are people who believe in answers without asking. Believing in borrowed answers is convenient and comfortable. Questioning is never comforting; to question one has to go within oneself. Dogma’s staying power lies in its ability to feed on any experience, digest, then defecate it while pronouncing it as a piece of duty. It secretly enriches itself on that it openly despises. A man of dogma is a dead man, and he clings to dead leaves (beliefs and scriptures) and dead ideologies. His religion is static, codified, organized, lifeless—dead. A true believer and his religion is a corpse. How could it be otherwise? Dogma is bogus; it is repetitive ritualistic hocus-pocus, life unlived, orotund and way out of focus—unaligned with the Divine and unaware of the new reality ever unfolding into the unknown. You will never make it Hohm Alive because you can never make dogma your own. If you listen to and believe in anything other than your existential experience (understanding derived from awareness), you will never make it out of the Jungle—much less realize how close Hohm really is here and Now. Wherever you come across a pile of duty—there is your dogma. A warning sign should accompany all dogma, (be it religious, political or ideological), that reads: “Beware: Wet Shit, No Doubtlet!” Watch your step, there are smelly dogma tracks all around you. (See: TRICK, FUDGE Factor, True Believers, OT, Exodus, Indoctrination, Traditions, Religiobabble, Emancipatory Composition, Dyslexia, HODGE-PODGE, Belief System, Questioning, Thinking, Hatred, Intelligence, Thought, Prostitution, Now, Nine Forty-Five, Understanding, Overstanding, Unlearning, Divine Impartation, Awakening, Dawn, Truth Laundering, Violence, Warmonger, Experience, Science, Questions, Answers, Reconstituted Religion, Unanswering, Renunciation, Religious Franchises & Belief Pushers)

dogma – spiritual mace; a reality-repellant—a fixed form petrification of a belief system or concretized thought-system. 2) religious institutional inertia—a catechism of closed theo-rhetorical ethic that cannot change you or you it. 3) the building of a door with a limitation built by and for a prospective adherent, which he/she cannot go beyond. 4) reconstituted institutionalized belief. 5) inhibited, ingrown and perverted spirituality. 6) dead tenets of dead religion on which most are (were) razed (authentic-self rent asunder) to believe unquestionably. 7) the limitations imposed by intellect, imagination, dimension, suspicion, belief and superstition. 8) ego-knowledge—taught through noise, fear and memory, and in that order. 9) fundamental statements of absolute fact based on lies. 10) permanent self-sealing truths formulated and held about reality without question. 11) prefabricated religion; anti-spirituality; instant creed—just add ritual. 12) an authoritative and precisely formulated statement of religious doctrine that is advanced, not for discussion or questioning, but for unquestioning belief by the naïve. 13) convictions entombed in a declaration of blind adherence to a set of stringent beliefs or vice versa. The objective of dogma is to bind the mind to error. Religious dogma is worship by rote. Dogma, though not a four-letter word, is a four-legged creature, itself being the second leg of a vicious cycle of static truth, dogma, hatred and violence. Dogma is an integral and activating aspect of the mind-prism-prison constructed out of 3-D translucent ecclesiastical bullshit. This perverse prism down through the ages has reflected the lies, diffracted the reality, displaced the structure of truth with the content of truth and thereby created the color spectrum of consciousness that you now occupy and peregrinate under. Truth (conscience; physical effects; outer seasons) is another name for a destructive competitive local personal static mythic God, whereas reality (consciousness; immaterial causes, inner realms) is another name for a noncompetitive dynamic cooperating unfolding pattern or non-local universal creative Principle or Divine Love that modifies matter (and our interpretations and impressions of it) based on the morphing nature of Life—the underlying or foremost principle being unceasing or incessant change. If you mind truth (deify it), dogma is your yield and religious hocus-pocus becomes your spiel and submissionary zeal. If you mine truth (edit it), nuggets of reality (insights) are your gain without enduring the hoary gory savior-god pain. Dogma is the bug (fatal flaw) and true believers are the replicating viruses that propagate and distort the internal model of the nature of reality directly experienced within nondual consciousness. People perceive reality’s forms as direct threats on (and to) their truths because they are merely living (in truth at the mythic or rational level of consciousness) and not Alive (living God in reality) at the higher states, levels or realms of consciousness. Nondual consciousness unfolds itself the highest realization that a divine being can experience appearing-as-process in the space-time continuum. Dogma is an enemy occupation camp holed up in the most fertile regions of your subconscious mind. “Doctrines can only be created in darkness; in the light, there can be no beliefs.” ~Osho. Religious dogma is like holding out an empty fist to a child—taken in, but no reality in it. When you get to know the mind and get to its source, all of this becomes apparent of course. Dogma is like dead branches. All you need is to get to the root and you will come to sprout living ones naturally on your own. Dogma becomes believed secondhand or underhandedly— reality becomes known candidly first hand (when you cease handing over paradoxes and subjective truth for another’s contradictions of objective or absolute truth)—and this you must overstand (so your credulity doesn’t get too far out-ofhand). Dogma is designed to lead you away from the self-transcending path of spiritual awareness. It arrives to us as stale, pre-packaged definitive answers to unanswerable questions. Different dogmas are nothing more than different cells in a spiritual prison block. Dogma is always hypostasized. Even science is entrenched with dogmas of mechanism and materialsm—making it too a belief system. People need to better understand dogmas (religious, political and scientific) for what they are so they don’t become deluded by them. Dogmas camouflage rather than disclose deeper meanings. Reverse the spell-curse of dogma, invert the prism, unlock the prison, and come correct for a change. Isn’t dogma a bitch? (See: God, Change, Second Coming, Beliefs, The Jungle, Organized Religion, Science, Reality-Based Truth, Proselytute, The Garden, PRISM, Meme, Religion, GOD, The Forest, Priestcraft, Hohm, Seedless Knowledge, Authority, Tradition, BC, AD, Third Coming, Ideologies, Words, Mysticism, Belief Systems, Illiteralists, Feedback & Absolute Truth)

‘Worldwide Increase in Cancer is No Surprise.’ Comprehensive Study Finds “Smoking Gun” Evidence COVID Injections Trigger Cancers

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From [HERE] A systematic review of 69 studies and reports on COVID-19 and cancer identified a possible safety signal linking COVID-19 vaccines and SARS-CoV-2 to certain types of cancer.

The study identified safety signals for leukemia, lymphoma, breast and lung cancer. The authors of the paper, published last week in the journal Oncotarget, said their findings suggest the need for further research.

The paper identified mechanisms — including the spike protein and DNA contamination found in some COVID-19 vaccine types — that might be responsible for triggering cancer.

The authors also addressed “several recurrent themes” in the studies they examined:

  • The “unusually rapid progression, recurrence, or reactivation” of preexisting conditions.

  • The “atypical” appearance of cancers near the point of vaccination.

  • The reactivation of dormant tumors.

Wafik El-Deiry, M.D., Ph.D., one of the co-authors, told The Defender that the paper “is the first most comprehensive presentation summarizing the world‘s literature on the subject matter of COVID vaccines, COVID infection and cancer.”

He said some of the review’s findings “look like a smoking gun” linking COVID-19 shots to cancer.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, said the review’s findings may represent “the tip of a very damaging iceberg.”

“It is not remotely surprising that a gene-therapy rebranded as a vaccine, never tested for oncogenic safety, with severe immune dysregulating effects, injected into a billion people would correlate with an increased risk of cancers worldwide,” Jablonowski said.

El-Deiry said the review may provide insights into rising cancer rates in recent years, including an increase in so-called “turbo cancers.”

“I believe there is a risk of cancer associated with COVID vaccination,” El-Deiry said. “The magnitude of the risk remains to be more precisely defined, including the risk of hyperprogression.” Hyperprogression refers to cases where “a pre-existing tumor grows more aggressively.”

“The paper doesn’t say that COVID vaccines cause cancer, but it does argue that when the same pattern of aggressive cancer keeps appearing across different cancers and different countries, they can no longer be brushed aside,” investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., said in a video posted Monday on Substack.

Review found link between COVID vaccines, aggressive onset of cancer

According to the review, a “growing number of peer-reviewed publications” have reported the appearance of diverse cancer types following COVID-19 vaccination or infection.

The time between vaccination and the onset of cancers “varied substantially,” according to the review, ranging from within 2-4 weeks to 8 months or more after vaccination or administration of a booster dose.

The authors said they conducted the review because the COVID-19 vaccines were never evaluated for carcinogenicity or genotoxicity.

They reviewed studies conducted between January 2020 and October 2025. About 43% of the studies “reported lymphoid malignancies, encompassing both lymphomas and leukemias.”

Several studies emphasized “unexpectedly rapid progression, atypical presentations, or unusually aggressive courses of disease.”

Forty-one percent of the studies identified a link between the COVID-19 vaccines and solid tumors, including melanoma, breast cancer, lung cancer, sarcomas and “organ-specific carcinomas, such as pancreatic cancer.”

Several studies “described unusually rapid onset, short-latency recurrence, or aggressive clinical progression” for these tumor types. Some of the studies “described tumor formation or recurrence at or near vaccine injection sites.”

The review cited several recent large-scale studies, including a two-year study of 8.4 million South Koreans published last year.

The South Korean study found a statistically significant link between COVID-19 vaccines and six cancer types, including breast, colorectal, gastric, lung, prostate and thyroid cancers, and a 27% higher overall cancer risk.

The review also cited a 2025 study of nearly 300,000 Italians that found cancer hospitalizations were moderately higher among COVID-19 vaccine recipients, with a particularly increased risk of bladder, breast and colorectal cancer.

The authors also cited a U.S. Armed Forces Health Surveillance Division report tracking non-Hodgkin lymphoma incidence among active-duty service members between 2017 and 2023. The report found a significant increase in some lymphomas in 2021, the year COVID-19 shots became widely available.

The authors said their findings “underscore the need for rigorous epidemiologic, longitudinal, clinical, histopathological, forensic, and mechanistic studies to assess whether and under what conditions COVID-19 vaccination or infection may be linked with cancer.”

Philip Giraldi: What Does Venezuela Have to Do with Israel?

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From [HERE ]It is interesting to observe how United States foreign policy, such as it is, often appears to have an Israeli back story that explains at least in part how Donald Trump’s mindless aggression against much of the world is driven by Zionist imperatives rather than actual American interests. Ukraine is supported by Israel and the US Israel Lobby in part because the roots of many diaspora and Israeli Jews are “Kazarian,” i.e. they derive from that part of Eastern Europe. Plus, Ukraine’s acting head of state Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew whose mother and father reportedly live in Israel in a posh residence paid for by the money stolen by their son from US and European donations to Kiev to fight Russia. Also, the Jewish antipathy towards Moscow in large part derives from the belief that Imperial Russia was the source of many pogroms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That narrative fails, however, to mention how Russian Jews turned Bolshevik and, becoming enforcers of the Communist Revolution, subsequently got their revenge a hundred-fold on Russian and other Eastern European Christians.

And, of course, it has been frequently observed how US policy in the Middle East is essentially dictated by war criminal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who de facto controls both Trump and the US Congress. The Israel Lobby also has significant input into what goes on in state and local government levels and has considerable control over what appears in the national media, which they increasingly own thanks to the efforts of Jewish billionaires like Larry Ellison. This ability to use money to manipulate politics and government has been manifested in the ability to suppress free speech in the United States when the topic is Israel’s abhorrent behavior towards the Palestinians and its other neighbors. Criminalizing antisemitism, which includes any criticism of Israel, has become the crime du jour to silence opposition to pro-Zionist agendas at both federal and state level and it has also been used to eliminate Palestinian support at universities and in the job market. Beyond that, the US State Department is now demanding access to the social media of visa applicants so that those who are supporters of the Palestinian cause can be blocked from entry into the United States. This is what Jewish power in America is all about.

It is interesting to note the somewhat unexpected Israeli and Jewish hand in recent US aggression directed particularly against Venezuela. There are several main reasons for the Venezuela hit. Caracas developed a close relationship with Iran through its negotiations over BRICS and has unambiguously sided with Palestine in denouncing the Zionist war crimes and crimes against humanity. This clearly was impressed upon Donald Trump and his consiglieri by the Israelis and members of the Israeli Lobby like Miriam Adelson and Laura Loomer who have full access to the president and who no doubt were able to convince the Orangeman that he would be able to benefit by striking against an ally of a common enemy of the US and Israel with one fell swoop. [MORE]

Patrick Lawrence: An Abyss of Lawlessness

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From [HERE] It is a long time now since the paying-attention among us began speaking of the fundamental lawlessness of our time.

It was the Israelis who prompted this discourse, as readers will easily recall, by way of their daily barbarities against the Palestinians of Gaza after the events of Oct. 7, 2023.

The Western powers compounded the shock of all that real-time savagery as they supported the Zionist terror machine — militarily, materially, politically, legally, diplomatically.

Alon Mizrahi, the Arab Jew who left Israel in protest three autumns ago, afterward made the point severally in The Mizrahi Perspective, his Substack newsletter:

This is what comes when a people are told that however atrocious their conduct toward others, however great their crimes, there will never be any consequence. Totalized impunity: In two words, this was Mizrahi’s preoccupation.

As 2025 drew mercifully to a close, I sat to share some observations concerning law and its perversion or absence or opposite — American law, European law, international law — with the Zionist regime much in mind.

The world’s most lawless state had just de-recognized the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which bears primary responsibility for the welfare of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan, so stripping UNRWA of diplomatic immunity while sequestering its finances, blocking its supplies of electricity and water, and seizing its offices in East Jerusalem.

The Israelis also barred 37 aid organizations from the Gaza Strip, including — some big names here—the French, Belgian, and Spanish affiliates of Médecins sans Frontières, Mercy Corps, the International Rescue Committee.

As John Whitbeck, the tireless Parisian blogger, put it in response, “Israel’s finding a new way, virtually every day, to flaunt its contempt for the United Nations, international law, and human decency.”

With the move against UNRWA, it is indeed clear the Israelis intend to destroy the U.N. and all it stands for as completely as the world lets it. And so to a second source of outrage:  It looks so far as if the world is going to let it.

Now the Trump regime, with its invasion of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela on Jan. 3, its abduction of President Nicolás Maduro, and its plans to occupy the nation and appropriate its petroleum reserves, has cast aside all thought of law, American and international alike.

It is as if Israel’s crimes-without-consequence these past two and some years (counting conservatively) were a kind of prelude — as if they had cleared the ground in some transformative way, an announcement that the law of our time is at bottom the lawlessness of those in power.

Questions arise. Two. [MORE]

Vijay Prashad: The absence of U.N. and O.A.S. condemnations of Washington’s attacks on Venezuela indicates the absolute mafia-type power the U.S. wields in the world

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What makes the attack against Venezuela illegal? Given the way that the United States completely and consistently disregards international law, even as it talks about a “rules-based international order,” it is worthwhile to revisit the basics of international law as well as review the international laws that the country violated with its attack on Venezuela on Jan. 3.

First, when we talk about “international law,” we are referring to legal obligations that states — and, in certain cases, international organisations and individuals — recognise as binding in their relations with one another.

From [HERE] These rules come from two main sources: treaties (written agreements) and customary international law (rules that become binding through consistent state practice and are accepted as law).

A state must consent to be bound by a treaty (which means it should either sign the treaty or accede to it), but it may be bound by customary international law and peremptory norms (jus cogens, or “compelling law,” fundamental rules that bind all states) regardless of whether it has signed any treaty.

For instance, the prohibition against genocide and slavery does not require a state to sign anything, since these prohibitions are recognised as peremptory norms that bind all states as a matter of international law.

Another way of saying this is that some laws are so fundamental that no state can opt out of them. The obligations that I will refer to below come from both sources: treaties (such as the U.N. Charter) and customary international law (including the principle of non-intervention and head-of-state immunity), sometimes interpreted and applied by the International Court of Justice (ICJ, the U.N.’s highest court for disputes between states), whose judgements carry special authority in explaining what international law requires in practice.

  • Prohibition of the threat or use of force. There are two key treaties that should restrict the United States’ use of force against other countries:

    1. The most important is the 1945 Charter of the United Nations, whose Article 2(4) says that all states must refrain from the “threat or use of force” against another state. There are limited exceptions to this, such as if the U.N. Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter (Articles 39–42), determines that there is a “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and then authorises the use of force to “maintain or restore international peace and security,” or if a state is acting in self-defence. Since there is no other exception, the U.S.’ act of aggression against Venezuela is in clear violation of the U.N. Charter, the highest treaty obligation in the interstate system.

    2. In Latin America, there is also the 1948 Charter of the Organisation of American States (OAS), in which Article 21 says that the “territory of a state is inviolable” and that no “military occupation” or “measures of force” are permitted by one state against another. The OAS Charter follows the U.N. Charter, in which Article 103 makes clear that, where treaty obligations conflict, members’ obligations under the U.N. Charter prevail over those under any other international agreement.

    There should already be resolutions at both the U.N. and the OAS to condemn the recent actions of the United States. The absence of such resolutions is a demonstration less of the powerlessness of the interstate system by itself and more of the absolute mafia-type power wielded by the United States in the world.

Oswaldo Vigas, Composición IV, 1943. (Via Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)

  • Non-intervention in the internal or external affairs of a state. Article 2(7) of the U.N. Charter underscores the centrality of state sovereignty by making it clear that nothing in the Charter authorises the United Nations to intervene in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction” of any state (except through enforcement measures under Chapter VII).

The prohibition of states intervening in one another’s affairs is also set out plainly in Article 19 of the OAS Charter, which says that no state “has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever” in the internal or external affairs of another state, and that includes any “form of interference” — including a military invasion and the seizure of a head of government.

The U.N. Charter and the O.A.S. Charter are treaties, and customary international law reinforces these treaty rules, independently prohibiting intervention. [MORE]

Marjorie Cohn: Cloutlaw Trump's Attack on Venezuela is a Plainly Unlawful, "War of Aggression" within the Meaning of the International Criminal Court

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From [HERE] The Trump administration’s massive military attack on Venezuela, launched with 150 aircraft, reportedly killed upwards of 80 people, including civilians.

In utter defiance of the mandates of the United Nations Charter, U.S. forces launched the attack as they kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, who have been transported to New York, where they face drug trafficking charges.

After two world wars claimed more than 100 million lives, 50 countries came together and enacted the U.N. Charter to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The United States, one of the drafters of the Charter, is a party to that treaty.

Under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land, and judges across the country are bound by them.

Article 2 (4) of the Charter declares,

“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The only two exceptions to that prohibition are when a country acts in self-defense after an armed attack or when the U.N. Security Council approves the use of force. The attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro and Flores did not constitute self-defense nor did the Security Council authorize it.

Venezuela had not launched an armed attack on the U.S. or any other country, nor did it pose an imminent threat. In a stark example of the tail wagging the dog, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in the press conference following the invasion that the U.S. military engaged in “multiple self-defense engagements as the force began to withdraw out of Venezuela.”

Indeed, it is Venezuela that has the right to exercise self-defense in response to the armed attack by the United States.

Illegal Aggression

Donald Trump’s Jan. 3 attack constituted illegal aggression. In its 1946 judgment, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg held:

“To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of whole.”

Under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, an

“‘act of aggression’ means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.” That includes “the invasion or attack by the armed forces of a State of the territory of another State.”

The U.S. military attack violated the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of Venezuela, and thus constituted aggression.

Trump attempted to justify his aggression by claiming that Maduro was the kingpin of an operation that brought drugs into the U.S., saying in his press conference after the abduction that Maduro “sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang, Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide.”

But an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies from February 2025 determined that Tren de Aragua was neither controlled by the Venezuelan government, nor committing crimes in the U.S. on its orders.

[See: Behind the DOJ’s Politicized Indictment of Maduro]

And most of the cocaine coming into the U.S. is thought to travel not through the Caribbean but rather through the Pacific, according to data from Colombia, the U.S., and the United Nations. Venezuela doesn’t have a Pacific Coast.

Trump also stated at his press conference that he intends to take over Venezuela’s oil and sell it to other countries because it belongs to the United States and U.S. corporations.

But the U.S. has never owned Venezuela’s oil or territory. In 1976, Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized Venezuela’s oil industry. In a process contemporaneously described by The New York Times as “peaceful and orderly,” U.S. and European oil companies that had previously been operating in Venezuela were compensated with about $1 billion.

Foreign oil companies have lodged and won awards in further complaints against Venezuela in the World Bank’s state-corporate dispute arbitration system after then-President Hugo Chávez nationalized other segments of the country’s oil production in 2007, which Venezuela has not paid out. Even if Trump’s bizarre claim that the U.S. owns Venezuela’s oil were true, that would not provide a legal basis for his military attack.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio put forth still a different rationale for the military operation. He claimed it was “largely a law enforcement operation” to arrest Maduro and Flores, on charges in a U.S. indictment alleging that they and other members of the Maduro government committed narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine.

But a state has no enforcement jurisdiction in the territory of another state unless the latter has given its consent. Without consent, it is a violation of the second state’s territorial sovereignty.

Moreover, under customary international law, Maduro has “head of state immunity” from foreign enforcement jurisdiction. The U.S. withdrawal of recognition of him as head of the Venezuelan government does not negate his personal immunity under customary international law. These are two defenses Maduro will invariably raise when his case is heard in the United States.

The 1989 OLC Opinion

In an attempt to justify its illegal aggression against Venezuela, the Trump administration will undoubtedly rely on an opinion written in 1989 by then-Assistant Attorney General Bill Barr for the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). The opinion was dated six months before President George H. W. Bush’s invasion of Panama, in which the U.S. arrested Gen. Manuel Noriega on drug-trafficking charges.

That opinion says that the president has inherent constitutional authority to order an extraterritorial arrest even if it violates customary international law by intruding “on the sovereignty of other countries.”

The opinion also asserts that domestic U.S. law trumps the U.N. Charter, which prohibits the “use of force against the territorial integrity” of any state. Barr wrote that the Charter doesn’t “prohibit the Executive as a matter of domestic law from authorizing forcible abductions” abroad.

“The OLC opinion completely failed to address numerous recognitions of the founders, framers, and Supreme Court justices that the president and members of the executive branch are bound by international law,” Jordan Paust, professor emeritus at the University of Houston Law Center and former captain in the U.S. Army JAG Corps, told Truthout. “Further, the express constitutional duty is to faithfully execute the law — not to disobey law.”

Additionally, a significant difference between the Noriega and Maduro cases is that before Bush ordered the arrest of Noriega, Panama’s general assembly had formally declared war against the United States.

Illegal Regime Change & US Occupation

After Maduro’s abduction, Trump said that the United States would occupy Venezuela and “run” the country. “We’re going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place. So we’re gonna stay until such time as, we’re gonna run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place.”

Forcible regime change is illegal. The U.N. Charter; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights all guarantee the right to self-determination.

The two covenants have the same first sentence of Article 1: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right, they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”

By kidnapping President Maduro and removing him from Venezuela, Trump engaged in illegal regime change and violated the right of the Venezuelan people to self-determination. [MORE]

Chris Hedges: Territorial Gangsters [governments] Cannibalize their own country and pillage the natural resources of other countries

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From [Chris Hedges] The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.

U.S. democratic institutions are moribund. They are unable or unwilling to restrain the ruling gangster class. The lobby-infested Congress is a useless appendage. It surrendered its constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass legislation, long ago.

It sent a paltry 38 bills to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law last year. Most were “disapproval” resolutions rolling back regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump governs by imperial decree through executive orders.

The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is an echo chamber for the crimes of state, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians; attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezuela; and the pillage by the billionaire class. Money-saturated elections are a burlesque.

The diplomatic corps, tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing war and building alliances, has been dismantled. The courts, despite some rulings by courageous judges, including blocking National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, are lackeys to corporate power and overseen by a Department of Justice whose primary function is silencing Trump’s political enemies.

The corporate-indentured Democratic Party, the purported opposition, blocks the only mechanism that can save Americans — popular mass movements and strikes — knowing its corrupt and despised party leadership will be swept aside.

Democratic Party leaders treat New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a flicker of light in the darkness — as if he has leprosy. Better to let the whole ship go down than surrender their status and privilege.

Dictatorships are one-dimensional. They reduce politics to its simplest form: Do what I say or I will destroy you.

Nuance, complexity, compromise, and of course empathy and understanding, are beyond the tiny emotional bandwidth of gangsters, including the Gangster-in-Chief.

Dictatorships are a thug’s paradise. Gangsters, whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley or in the White House, cannibalize their own country and pillage the natural resources of other countries.

Dictatorships invert the social order. Honesty, hard work, compassion, solidarity, self-sacrifice are negative qualities. Those who embody these qualities are marginalized and persecuted. The heartless, corrupt, mendacious, cruel and mediocre thrive.

Dictatorships empower goons to keep their victims — at home and abroad — immobilized. Goons from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Goons from Delta Force, Navy Seals and Black Ops C.I.A. teams, which as any Iraqi or Afghan can tell you are the most lethal death squads on the planet.

Goons from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) and Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) — seen escorting a hand-cuffed President Nicolás Maduro in New York — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and police departments.

Can anyone seriously make the argument that the U.S. is a democracy? Are there any democratic institutions that function? Is there any check on state power?

Is there any mechanism that can enforce the rule of law at home, where legal residents are snatched by masked thugs from our streets, where a phantom “radical left” is an excuse to criminalize dissent, where the highest court in the land bestows king-like power and immunity on Trump? [MORE]

James Corbett: Is most of what we see, read and hear on the Internet generated by Bots?

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From [HERE] James Corbett explains that nearly everyone you talk to online is a bot, spy, troll or psyops warrior!

And, as you’re about to see, it gets even worse before it gets (hopefully) better.

Intrigued? Want to know what this means for the future of the internet? Or, much more importantly, what it means for the future of human community? Then read on!

FOREIGN SPIES UNMASKED

If you’ve been “surfing the web” since the early days of the “information superhighway,” you’ll no doubt recall one of the earliest online jokes: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Now, in 2025, it seems we may need to amend that joke to take it from a pithy observation about online anonymity to a dire warning about the weaponization of online anonymity: “On the internet, no one knows you’re a foreign psyops officer.”

You see, last month the social media platform formerly known as Twitter decided to roll out a new feature: a location tool that reveals the country or region in which a given account is based. The result? A lot of foreign psyops warriors got caught with their pants down.

It seems that particular Trump-loving Ivanka fan is based in the MAGA stronghold of . . . Nigeria?

And it’s not just those accounts. The @BarronTNews_ Barron Trump fan account (that posted heartfelt birthday messages to “Dad” Donald before it was exposed as a fan account)? The “UltraMAGA Trump 2028” account? Those accounts and numerous others were discovered to be originating from similarly far-flung corners of the globe. [MORE]

The God Given Right to Possess and Carry Firearms for Self-Defense Against Tyranny and Slavery is Especially Vital when a Lawless Racist is in the Blight House and He Represents a Racist Majority

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From [HERE] and [HERE] The Declaration of Independence established a new nation, acting as “one people,” through “thirteen united States of America.”  James Madison insisted that the Constitution be ratified by special conventions to make clear that ratification would be “not through the intervention of the Legislatures, but by the people at large”—a distinction regarded as “very material.”  For these reasons, incidentally, a state has no unilateral right to secede:  the Constitution is not a compact of states but an agreement among the people.  See Timothy Sandefur, How Libertarians Ought to Think About the U.S. Civil War.

If this is so and the people are sovereign, it has important implications, the most important of which for our purposes here is that sovereignty is inalienable.  This, the first lesson of the American experiment, was demonstrated when our Founders asserted the people’s right to declare independence from the crown and to engage in a legitimate act of revolution.  That right, as the Declaration explains, does not arise from light and transient causes but from a long train of abuses and usurpations, which the Founders took care to enumerate in their appeal to the natural law from which sovereignty and sovereign rights derive.  Moreover, the sovereign people’s right to revolution is limited by the natural bounds of reason—had the Founders’ rational appeal to their fellows failed to persuade enough of them to willingly risk life and limb in taking up arms in revolution, the American self-government project would have foundered without a shot fired or a drop of blood spilled.

Self-government thus requires that the sovereign people enjoy meaningful exercise of the people’s right to associate with one another, their right to speak their grievances and invoke their right to self-government, and the right, in the face of an aggressor sovereign, to bear arms against it.  Mere paper barriers like the rights of habeas corpus and due process are without teeth in the face of unchallenged tyranny. The very essence of sovereignty includes a right to revolution, the right to enforce those rights.  It is the ultimate form of self-defense.

In other words, the rights expressed in the First and Second Amendments are the bedrock of the American project in self-government, and the font of our sovereignty.  That we can post on each other’s Facebook walls and experiment with Zoroastrianism and go duck hunting are happy byproducts of that sovereignty.  But it is silly to suggest these activities are why those amendments exist.  As Judge Alex Kozinski put it in his dissent to the Ninth Circuit’s denial of review in Silveira v. Lockyer:

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. [MORE]