#wartime president

[reality-detective]

I did a post about this 👇 a little while back 🤔

Revolution Disclosed! The Military Occupation Launched by Trump’s Executive Orders and The Role of the Judge Advocate General: The Legal Backbone of Military Occupation

Disclose: the explosive truth behind Trump’s inauguration—a military occupation that began in 2017 and continues today. Dive deep into the secret power of the Judge Advocate General, military tribunals, and the war for America’s future. The old government is gone—it’s time to wake up!

January 20, 2017, marked not just a transition of power but the beginning of a military occupation. Trump took control of a nation under siege by forces unseen by the average American. This day should have sent shockwaves through the nation but was buried under layers of media manipulation and public ignorance. We are living in a new reality—one too many are blind to, and it’s time to open our eyes to the truth.

Picture this: Trump stands on the Capitol steps, flanked by a Military Intelligence Serviceman and a Judge Advocate General (JAG). This wasn’t a ceremonial show; it was a blatant signal that the military was in control. The Military Intelligence Serviceman represents the shadowy force that pulls the strings, while the JAG stands as the guardian of the new legal order, ready to enforce it with an iron fist.

When Trump declared, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” it was more than rhetoric—it was a direct communication from the Armed Forces, announcing their intent to restore order. The days of political games were over; the military was stepping into the light to bring the nation back from chaos.

The JAG’s presence wasn’t just symbolic; it was a statement of intent. Under Trump, military tribunals would enforce a new order of governance, and those who dared to oppose it would find themselves at the mercy of a system designed to eliminate dissent.

Let’s be clear: the military occupation didn’t start on January 20, 2017; it began months earlier. Trump didn’t just inherit the presidency; he inherited the authority of a War Powers President, operating with the full backing of the military. The country has been under military occupation, while most remain oblivious to the truth.

Under Trump, 11 Emergency Executive Orders (EOs) were enacted, granting extraordinary powers to maintain order in a nation on the brink. The Biden administration, far from reversing these orders, has quietly extended them, ensuring the military’s grip on the nation remains strong.

The current administration is a puppet government, maintaining the illusion of democracy while real power lies with the military. The American people need to wake up; they are living under a military regime. The corporation that once governed this nation has been dissolved, and those who once held power have been brought to justice.

It’s time to stop living in denial. The military is in control, and the sooner Americans accept this, the better equipped they’ll be for the challenges ahead. The media has lied; the government you thought you knew is gone. The future belongs to those willing to see the world as it is, and in this new world, the military reigns supreme. 🤔

[contemplatingoutlander]

Tell it like it is Ted Lieu! 

Indeed, President Zelensky seems to have just been following a tradition of wartime national leaders. 

And you could not have a better role model than Churchill when it comes to leadership (and proper attire) during a war.

_____________

Gif is an edit of a section of the video that went with this tweet.

[rodaportal]

Viktor Orbán’s Call for Ceasefire: Global Context

Join us as we explore Viktor Orbán’s urgent call for a ceasefire and peace talks in the midst of the Ukraine conflict. 🌍✌️ Featuring powerful insights from global leaders like Ursula von der Leyen, Antony Blinken, Jens Stoltenberg, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin, this video dives deep into the complexities of achieving global peace. Don't miss this critical discussion!

Watch now 👉 Viktor Orbán’s Call for Ceasefire: Global Context

📌 Highlights: 🔹 Viktor Orbán on the urgency of peace 🔹 Ursula von der Leyen on independence and freedom 🔹 Antony Blinken’s support for Ukraine 🔹 Jens Stoltenberg on NATO’s strength 🔹 Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s perspectives

[nunyabznsbabes]

Katniss is like Lucy Gray this, Katniss is like Sejanus that, and yes fine that's all good and true and lovely but Katniss Everdeen is also a direct parallel to Coriolanus Snow and people NEED to start talking about this because it's driving me crazy.

Think about it: they both grew up poor and deeply vulnerable, losing parents at a very young age, with a matriarchal adult (Katniss' mother and Coriolanus' Grandma'am) who fails to provide for them emotionally and physically. They intimately understand the threat of starvation, even developing with stunted growth because of it, and their narrations in the books share a fixation on food. Throughout their childhoods, both experienced constant fear and suffered a fundamental lack of control over their circumstances. Because of this, they're inherently suspicious of the people around them. They resent feeling indebted to others, especially those who have saved their lives. They're motivated almost entirely by family and deeply connected to their communities. Both are used and manipulated by the Capitol, both are forced to perform to survive and despise every inch of it, both are thrown into the Arena and made to kill. Both have a self-sacrificial, genuinely sweet sister figure acting as their conscience. Peeta and Lucy Gray - performers and love interests with a fundamental kindness and sense of hope about them - fulfill markedly similar roles in their narrative. Both contribute to the development of the future Hunger Games, Snow throughout tbosas and Katniss towards the end of Mockingjay.

It's easy to ignore these similarities because, as mirrors of each other, they are exact opposites. Katniss is from District 12, viewed and treated as less than human; Snow is the cream of the Capitol crop, given the privilege of a name with social weight, an ancestral home, and the opportunity of the Academy despite having no more money than a miner from 12. Katniss has no agency over her life, and responds by being kind whenever she's able, while Snow justifies horrendous evils in order to continue his quest for complete control. Katniss does everything she can to protect her family; Snow does everything he can to protect his family's image as an extension of his own ego. Katniss loves her District and connects with its inhabitants on a meaningful level, but Snow is indifferent at best to his peers - the apparent "superior people" - and only engages with his community for personal gain. Katniss emerges from the Arena horrified at herself and the system, but Snow takes his trauma and turns it into an excuse to perpetuate the violence with himself at the top. Katniss cares for Prim until her death and then snaps at the loss of her little sister, while Snow survives on Tigris' blood, sweat, and tears and then torments and abandons her, presumably because she calls him out on his insanity. Snow actively adds to and popularizes the Hunger Games because of his vendetta against the Districts following his childhood wartime trauma - Katniss briefly agrees to a new Hunger Games in the pursuit of vengeance, but later stops them from happening by killing Coin and choosing a life of peace and privacy. Snow is obsessed with revenge, but Katniss empathizes with the Capitolites and does what she can to keep them from suffering. He exists in a cruel system and selfishly upholds it; she exists in a cruel system and works to dismantle it for the good of her family and community, at great personal cost. And Peeta and Lucy Gray are incredibly similar, but Katniss and Peeta forge a relationship of genuine love and understanding that shines in comparison to Coriolanus' obsessive projection onto Lucy Gray.

So, yeah, Katniss is Lucy Gray haunting Coriolanus. But I bet you anything that eighty-something year old President Snow looks at her, the girl on fire, bright and young and brilliant, emerging from a childhood of starvation with a relentless hunger for success, a talented and charming performer helping her win the Games, and he sees the ghost of his own past. And that's why he's so afraid of her! Because if he sees himself in her, then he's up against his own cunning, his own talent for manipulation, his own charisma, his own genius. He's up against the version of himself that he once wished to be, with the nightmare army of his childhood at her back and her star-crossed lover at her side, spewing Sejanus' truths in his own voice. This isn't to say that Katniss ever achieved the level of power and agency that Coriolanus did during her time with the rebellion, but it is to say that Snow was taken down by what truly terrified him - his own morality, come to finish the job.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire

[riveracheron]

special thanks to the tsv discord for helping w some of these

reblog for larger sample size :)

[azspot]

Ukraine has much less of a problem with the far right than does Russia, or for that matter than the United States, or pretty much any other European country you care to name. Ukrainians elected a Jewish president by more than 70% of the ballot, without his Jewishness being much of an issue. That would be a challenge elsewhere. The Ukrainian minister of defense is a Crimean Tatar (and a Muslim). The commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces was born in Soviet Russia to Russian parents. Ukraine manages a degree of diversity, even in wartime, that reflects its fascinating history, a past that cannot really be described in a text like this, one which has to have to narrow purpose of showing how and why Putin is wrong.

Putin's genocidal myth

[mariacallous]

People often say to me that I wouldn’t personally be affected by a second Donald Trump presidency. After all, I live in a blue city in a blue state, and I’m a married, heterosexual woman who isn’t looking to have any more children. I won’t need medication like mifepristone for a miscarriage (though I do have girls in my family who I assume will someday want to have children), and I don’t personally rely on the federal government for education, because my kids don’t go to public school.

So, again, how would any of this affect me? The most likely answer is that, as a public-facing person, I will continue to be subjected to threats, as many in the mainstream media already are. But attacks on the media could escalate if Trump returns to power, given that he doesn’t hesitate to demonize journalists and call them out before his millions of followers. And given what Trump says on television, he may target American citizens for unfavorable speech.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News on Sunday. “Sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or, if really necessary, by the military.” The “lunatics” in question could be anyone from protesters to opinion columnists—or even mainstream reporters—he doesn’t agree with. Trump has referred to CBS as a “A FAKE NEWS SCAM” whose operations are “totally illegal,” and has similarly suggested that ABC should lose its broadcast license. 

What would it mean to have a president who, in this fashion, targets what little is left of the free press? It’s hard to fathom, but there’s a world where Trump imitates his strongman friends like Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orbán or Kim Jong Un—all of whom participate in jailing or killing journalists in countries with state-regulated media. He’s already taking a page from Joe McCarthy this election cycle in targeting the “enemies within,” something my family is all too familiar with.

Few aspects of Trump’s second-terms plans are more openly authoritarian than his immigration platform. On Friday, Trump traveled to Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, where he is shopping “Operation Aurora,” a policy he said would target “every illegal migrant criminal network operating on American soil” by use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. According to the Brennan Center, the law is “a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation. The law permits the president to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship.” The last time the United States used the Alien Enemies Act, it was to put Japanese and Japanese Americans into internment camps during WWII.

What would internment camps actually entail in the modern day? Well, Trump has talked about deporting up to 20 million undocumented immigrants—an operation of staggering scale that he freely admits will be “bloody.” (The Department of Homeland Security, in 2018, estimated there were 11.4 million undocumented immigrants; Pew put the number at roughly 11 million in 2022.) It’s impossible to imagine what deporting that many people would really look like; maybe blue-state governors would be strong enough to prevent deportation camps from being built in states like California and New York. Maybe the camps would only be in red states, or maybe they’d be erected on federal land, like national parks. Then there’s the question of who would run these camps. Trump, for his part, has mused about using the National Guard. Who would stop any of this, you might ask? Would a Republican Congress stop it? Who would be the grown-ups in the room.

At least during the first Trump administration, the courts prevented Trump from doing some of the things he wanted to do, like ending DACA. But this time, Trump would be starting out with a 6-3 conservative-majority Supreme Court, featuring three justices he appointed. Last year, we saw the Trump-friendly high court issue two rulings that will pretty much serve as a blank check to an emboldened Trump: The first ended the Chevron deference, which will curb the power of federal agencies and expedite the death of regulatory expertise. The other decision, which is perhaps more worrying, Trump would have a blank check to do whatever he wants if he says it’s in the service of the presidency, essentially granting him blanket immunity against any crimes he commits in office. As Ninth Circuit judge and Ronald Reagan appointee Stephen S. Trott wrote, it means that Richard Nixon could have “legally ordered his plumbers to burgle the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.”

Trump is telling us all about his potential plans: internment camps, going after his enemies foreign and domestic, including, presumably, journalists. Will I be one of them? Will he clamp down on the free press? Will he take away the licenses from networks he deems insufficiently supportive of his presidency?

On the campaign trail, Trump has recently posed a question of his own when it comes to voting for him, asking the crowd, “What the hell do you have to lose?” Actually, a lot. While we don’t know precisely what a second Trump term will look like, it’ll surely be chaotic and bleak, and could mark the end of something we certainly don’t want to lose: democracy as we know it.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pushed back Thursday on comments made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about an Israeli military airstrike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza, including one Canadian.

In a video statement released earlier this week, Netanyahu expressed regret over the incident and called it a "tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people in the Gaza Strip." He also said "this happens in wartime" and that Israel was looking into the situation.

"No, it doesn't just happen," Trudeau said Thursday during an event in Winnipeg. "And it shouldn't just happen when you have aid workers for an extraordinary organization like World Central Kitchen risking their lives every day in an incredibly dangerous place to deliver food to people who are experiencing a horrific humanitarian catastrophe."

Jacob Flickinger, a 33-year-old Canadian veteran, was killed by the Israeli airstrike, along with six other aid workers. The incident has triggered widespread international condemnation. U.S. President Joe Biden said he was "outraged and heartbroken" by the incident. [...]

More than 196 humanitarian workers, many of them Palestinians working for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), have been killed since the war's start in October, according to Aid Worker Security Database, a U.S.-funded group recording major incidents of violence against aid personnel. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: Trudeau can choke and die on this condemnation that is over 40 000 dead Palestinians too late. Fucking filth. He can open his mouth to condemn Israeli terrorism, just not when it's aimed at us subhuman Palestinians. Fuck all of them. Fuck Biden, fuck Trudeau, fuck every piece of shit who believes we're beneath them.

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[reality-detective]

Now ask yourself how can the Senate be approving these people already?

I'll tell you... Because he has always been the "Commander in Chief"

I know there are so many who never understood and there are many who say they are awake to what's going on, but really they are NOT! Through executive orders he did what has never been done since Abraham Lincoln and Trump is a wartime president because of the deep state, protecting our country from enemies foreign and domestic🤔

[argumate]

Ukrainian forces have defended against Russia's full-scale invasion for 1,000 days and continue to demonstrate incredible resilience against Russian aggression. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 under the incorrect assumption that Ukraine would fail to defend itself and that Russian forces would be able to seize Kyiv City and install a pro-Russian proxy government in three days. One thousand days later, Ukrainian forces have successfully pushed Russian forces from their most forward points of advance in Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, Poltava, and Mykolaiv oblasts and continue their daily fight to liberate occupied territory in Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Kherson oblasts and Crimea. Russian forces are currently advancing throughout eastern Ukraine, and Ukrainian officials have recently warned about the possibility of an imminent Russian offensive operation in Zaporizhia Oblast. Russian President Vladimir Putin is simultaneously waging an informational war against the West, Ukraine, and the Russian population aimed at convincing the world that Russian victory is inevitable, and that Ukraine stands no chance. This informational effort is born out of Putin's fear and understanding that sustained Western military, economic, and diplomatic support for Ukraine will turn the tide of the war against Russia.

Russia has accumulated a significant amount of risk and a number of ever-increasing constraints on its warfighting capabilities over the last 1,000 days. Russia began the war with a poorly organized and understaffed military comprised of contract military personnel and limited number of conscripts due to his incorrect assumption that Ukraine would fold and fear that general mobilization could threaten the stability of his regime. Russia largely relied on a combination of volunteer contract servicemembers, mobilized personnel, and irregular formations (such as the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republic Army Corps [DNR/LNR AC], the Wagner Group, and Russian Volunteer Corps) to wage Putin's war without general mobilization. This system has provided the Kremlin the manpower necessary to support operations so far, but there are mounting indicators that this system is beginning to teeter. Recent Western estimates of Russian manpower losses suggest that Russian forces are currently losing more troops per month than Russia’s ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts can sustain, and open-source evidence indicates that Russia may not be able to sustain its current rate of armored vehicle and tank losses in the medium term as Russia burns through its stockpiles of Soviet-era equipment. The upcoming 2025 year will only increase the manpower and materiel constraints on the Russian military if Russia attempts to sustain its current offensive tempo, and Putin continues to appear averse to such measures given Russian society's growing disinterest in fighting in Russia’s war, the Russian economy’s limitations including a significant labor deficit and high inflation, and continual aversion to bearing the burden of additional wartime costs. Russia cannot maintain its current tempo indefinitely. Putin will likely need to take disruptive and drastic measures - including another involuntary call up of the mobilization reserve - to overcome these growing limitations as the war protracts.

it's been a long and ruinously expensive war, I think something we've often underestimated is how both sides would keep adapting to the evolving conditions

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Barney Ross

Dov-Ber Rosovsky was a world-champion boxer and injured World War II hero whose fierce Jewish pride made him an icon to American Jews.

Dov-Ber was born in New York in 1909, the son of a Talmudic scholar who fled to America after surviving a pogrom in Belarus. Dov-Ber grew up in Chicago, helping out in his father’s small grocery store in a poor neighborhood and studying to be a rabbi.

His life was changed forever when his father was shot dead resisting a robbery at his store. Dov-Ber’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown and the kids were farmed out to foster homes.

Dov-Ber became bitter and angry. He turned his back on religion, changed his name to Barney Ross, and took a job working for Al Capone. Barney’s goal was to make enough money to buy a house and reunite his family. He soon became such an effective street fighter, however, that he gave professional boxing a try. Strong, fast, and determined, “Barney” became a world champion in the three different weight classes. He was known for his exceptional stamina and his street smarts.

In the 1930’s, when Hitler was rising to power, Barney Ross became a hero to American Jews by showing pride in his heritage and taking a public stand against Nazi Germany.  He was determined to end each fight on his feet to show that Jews fight and don’t go down. In Barney’s final fight, he defended his title against fellow three-division world champion Henry Armstrong. Barney got brutally pummeled and his trainers begged him to let them stop the fight, but he was determined to stay on his feet. He’d never been knocked out in his career and wasn’t going to start now. He retired from boxing in his early 30’s with a record of 72 wins, 4 loses, 3 draws, and two no decisions, with 22 wins by knockout. He achieved his goal of having no career knockouts.

After retiring from the ring, Barney/Dov-Ber enlisted in the US Marine Corps to fight in World War II. The Marines wanted to keep him stateside as a celebrity morale-booster, but Barney insisted on fighting for his country. He was sent to Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. During his time in Guadalcanal, Barney became friends with Chaplain Frederic Gehrig. Father Gehrig found an old pump organ on the island, and Barney was the only one who could play it. On Christmas Eve, before Barney and his fellow Marines were to go to battle, Gehrig asked him to play “Silent Night” and other Christmas songs for the troops. Barney happily obliged, finishing off the concert with “My Yiddishe Momma,” the song he used to play when he entered the boxing ring. Father Gehrig would later describe Barney Ross as a “national treasure.”

One night, Barney and three other soldiers were trapped under enemy fire. All four were wounded but Barney was the only one able to continue fighting. He gathered his comrades’ weapons and fought 22 Japanese soldiers, killing them all. Two of the American soldiers died, but Barney carried the third man to safety, even though the soldier weighed 230 pounds, while the wounded Barney weighed only 140! For his courage, Barney Ross was awarded a Silver Star and a citation from President Roosevelt.

Barney was hospitalized for his battle injuries, and the pain was so bad that he became dependent on morphine. After the war, he returned to America and opened a bar lounge. However, his drug addiction intensified as he turned to heroin, which was easier to obtain than morphine. Barney became hooked on heroin, an addiction that cost him $500 a day, as well as his marriage, his business and his life savings. Finally he hit rock bottom, and checked into a veteran’s recovery facility. He kicked his habit once and for all, and became a public speaker who educated high school students about the danger of drugs.

In the 1960’s, Barney made his living as a celebrity spokesman. After a brutal struggle with throat cancer, Barney Ross died in 1967 at age 57.

For his wartime heroism and for modeling Jewish strength and pride, we honor Dov-Ber “Barney Ross” Rosovsky as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[apas-95]

i do love that president 'goes to international summits in military cosplay and constantly demands more devastating weapons' zelensky would be universally considered an absolute fucking tinpot if he weren't US-aligned. his 'international acclaim' would end with irony-poisoned 4channers calling him based, rather than podcast liberals on twitter sharing fantasies that he'd cuckold them.

this is how everyone i talk to who isn't steeped in western discourse basically considers him - another random wartime spin-doctor for oligarchy trying to get as much power and money as possible through cynical appeals to national supremacy. the immediate impression, gained through experience, is that it's theater, that they're all basically friends behind the scenes anyway. it's fundamentally correct - oligarchs can be hostile brothers, but they're still brothers. i mean, the gas pipelines through the country haven't even been closed, for fucks sake!

[yuri-alexseygaybitch]

Sometimes I wonder why even for a US puppet dictator Zelensky seems so constantly starved for media attention and insists on keeping up his ridiculous pantomime as a Badass Wartime Military Leader in those army surplus fatigues and is generally just an extremely ridiculous and clownish presence nobody would even pretend to take seriously if he wasn't the mascot of a proxy war, then I remember he was an actor and "comedian" whose most famous role before becoming president of Ukraine was... playing the president of Ukraine. Man literally thinks he's in a Netflix show and he's the star.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“I see God in the rubble,” said Munther Isaac, the Palestinian pastor of a landmark Lutheran church in Bethlehem, the West Bank town revered by Christians as Jesus’ birthplace. “And Christ was born under occupation.”

[...]

In Bethlehem, where many local Christians have relatives in Gaza, the Christmas holiday will be marked by prayers, church services and the annual procession of Christian patriarchs — but the more joyous traditional trappings are being eschewed. No twinkling Christmas lights, no lavishly decorated tree in Manger Square, no festive parade with marching bands. “How could we celebrate?” asked the town’s mayor, Hanna Hanania, whose office overlooks a nearly deserted Manger Square. The flagstone plaza facing the Church of the Nativity, a pilgrimage site for Christians the world over, is usually bustling at this time of year, but most of the souvenir shops and restaurants lining it are tightly shuttered. Bethlehem, where once-majority Christians now make up fewer than one-fifth of the town’s population of some 30,000, is a microcosm of the West Bank’s woes. Checkpoints hem it in, and the stony terraced hills — where shepherds watched their flocks by night, as the traditional Christmas carol has it — are transversed by a hulking Israeli security barrier. Surrounded by Jewish settlements, the town is home to two Palestinian refugee camps that seethe with unrest and are regularly raided by Israeli troops. “It’s not the little town of the Bible anymore,” said the Rev. Mitri Raheb, president of Bethlehem’s Dar al-Kalima University. At 61, he remembers when the unobstructed view from his nearby family home was a mountainside that turned green in spring rains. Now it is topped by a settlement, one of nearly 150 in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law. For Palestinian Christians, the current war marks a catastrophe embedded within a catastrophe: the potential eradication of what was already a minuscule Christian presence in Gaza. Numbering fewer than 1,000 out of a population of more than 2 million, the community’s wartime losses are disproportionately felt. Many Bethlehem-area Christians have relatives in Gaza, and are terrified for their safety.