GARY LEUPP—(After the failure of the pearl industry in Hawai’i—in part due to the construction around what became “Pearl Harbor,” and before sugar became the mono-crop curse of the islands, whaling and the provision of R&R for whaling ships was the kingdom’s leading economic activity. By 1824 about 100 foreign whaling vessels were using Hawai’i as a reprovisioning center.
-
-
PATRICK LAWRENCE—“The story of the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling scheme, which netted tens of millions of dollars from Ukraine, China, Russia and beyond, is scandal enough,” Devine writes. “But the coverup — from Big Tech’s censorship of the Post’sreporting from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and CIA lies that it was Russian disinformation, to the burying of this FD–1023 — is bigger than Watergate.”
-
RON UNZ—A president was dead and soon afterward his supposed lone assassin suffered the same fate, producing a tidy story with a convenient endpoint. Raising doubts or focusing on contrary evidence might open doors better kept shut, perhaps endangering national unity or even risking nuclear war if the trail seemed to lead overseas. The highest law enforcement officer in the country was the slain president’s own brother, and since he seemed to fully accept that simple framework, what responsible journalist or editor would be willing to go against it? What American center of power or influence had any strong interest in opposing that official narrative?
-
ALASTAIR CROOKE—Europe is the party most trapped by ‘delusion’ – starting from the point at which they threw themselves unreservedly into the Biden ‘camp’. The Ukraine narrative broke at Vilnius. But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”.
-
DEBORAH ARMSTRONG—As for organized religion, Regis doesn’t miss it. “I guess I’m an atheist,” he observes. “Or an agnostic. I don’t deny that there’s a force in the universe. And I’m a trained theologian. I swallowed the whole thing, hook, line, and sinker. But, over the years, I began to reexamine all of it. And it just didn’t make sense. And, what I do believe, and I follow in my life is, I believe in the radical Jesus. I believe in his message of love and forgiveness, Period. There was nothing else. He didn’t create a church. He didn’t invent the dogma. He didn’t invent the rules. Those were all created years and centuries later by men.”
