Stephen Bleil

"I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne."

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

Facts about the JFK assassination, 56 years ago yesterday, which don’t fit the standard lone-nut narrative, in a thread.

[Rap Game Edward Bernays @edward_bernayz]

@Jilderness Don’t mention this on JRE

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@malonebarry @mehdirhasan

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@bradleybirzer Lewis rarely expressed any political opinions, so the dust-up between him and Tolkien concerning Roy Campbell is interesting and revealing. CSL’s Ulster prejudices at least kept him from wandering into any sympathy for Franco.

[Mother Jones @MotherJones]

Jaw-dropping documents from our lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI reveal how tech leaders talk when they think no one is listening: We may have pulled off “the largest theft of labor in human history” https://t.co/yExKAAtjwm

[The Grayzone @TheGrayzoneNews]

Max Blumenthal tells Tucker about crimes exposed in the new film NAZA:

“Israeli intelligence hacked into the phones of young girls in Gaza to determine when their fathers would come home.

Then they would order an airstrike on their homes and listen to the girls burn alive”

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

Since both political parties and the donor class decided today is Paramount Oligarch Day, it seems like a good moment to post this before it is erased from the world by the media overlords.

This scene was supposed to be a cautionary tale. It became America's dominant ideology.

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

Well that’s odd…

[John Galt @dadiani_george]

Charlie Kirk’s whole security team wore the same static dissipating shoes. The type people wear when they’re handling explosives, or working in munitions factories, so that any static electricity they pick up is earthed out into the ground before it can cause an accidental spark and cause an unexpected explosion.

All of them. WTF?

Perhaps they all communicated before the event to coordinate their outfits and to make sure they didn’t clash - but I doubt it.

Why would they need special explosives handling shoes?

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@bradleybirzer Didn’t have to be that way…

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@Pat_Boone He can’t be quiet, man. There is nothing that he doesn’t do for his own self-aggrandizement. You’re wasting your time.

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@BreakingDawn64 @EricLDaugh Your display name is a threat Trump made to Hillary in 2016 that he still hasn’t followed through on and you think you’re the one who has it figured out.

[2001 Live @25YearsAgoLive]

A candlelight vigil in Tehran, Iran displays an outpouring of condolences for American victims of the attacks.

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

The deepest ring in Dante’s Hell which is reserved for traitors.

[冷凍芭蕉 @TPatbat]

Apropos of nothing I remember the part in Dante where he says that some sinners are so heinous that their souls get pulled into Hell before their bodies die, leaving behind literally soulless corpses still living on Earth

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[Lisa Pease @lisapease]

Do you want to know how good this podcast is? Google has censored it from search results! I had to go back to the channel to find this again. This has many pictures that help anchor the story. https://t.co/buBGcDQyHH

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@lisapease One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen was Dan Rather completely breaking down in tears on Letterman right after 9/11. I wonder how much conscious or unconsciousness guilt he carries around.

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@lisapease My high school history teacher was the football coach. Learned some time ago that this is the typical arrangement in most schools in America because history is so dumbed down they don’t typically employ a specialist. Just insane.

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@DanHankeAI Just reminded me of this:

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

Bill Clinton explaining that the CIA wouldn’t let him kill bin Laden reminds me of that other September 11 when a hijacked plane was flown into his house.

[Stephen Bleil @stephenbleil]

@V_Saldziunas @25YearsAgoLive I think he had started the job in August, so it maybe wasn’t his first day? He was essentially run out of the FBI and forced into an early retirement.