George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America

Mercenaries and PMCs are an important part of how war is waged today, but we're seeing the dangers of them in real time in Ukraine today. Their loyalty is fundamentally to a man rather than to a nation-as-idea. This is a more honest arrangement but Russia's nationhood is now bound up to some extent with Putin himself so he may carry this off. In any case, these forces and other client groups are extremely useful until they're not, which can change very quickly.

I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed. Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. [...]

The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way.

— Machiavelli, The Prince, xii

EDIT: lol just saw that Morgoth beat me to the punch by like 5 hours. Gotta get up pretty early.

The Russian coup has made it clear that Telegram is pretty much the main source of objective analysis right after a breaking news event. You will not see this variety of perspectives in long format anywhere else—everything is performative narrative sculpting.

McEwan Hall, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

NEW - Magic is over at Disney; according to Hollywood analysis, the media giant suffered losses nearing $900 million on most recent releases.

https://www.disclose.tv/id/lwx9xkpf29/

@disclosetv

🇺🇸 The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt On All Its Citizens

A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.

THE UNITED STATES government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago.

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans' lives are described soberly and at length by the director's own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members.

What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders.

“This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”

🔗 ARTICLE

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Thought crimes are set to be illegal in Canada

“Residential school denialism” is now listed as a crime.

https://tnc.news/2023/06/19/ratiod-thought-crimes-illegal/

Rainbow Warriors

Reached for comment on the notion that whiteness must be decentered, University of Chicago history Professor Rachel Fulton Brown said it’s a stand against the Anglo-American Empire’s cultures, values, traditions and history.

“I think for the most part ‘whiteness’ is an equivocation for ‘Anglo,’ especially in literature departments”...

She told The Fix via email last week regarding the decentering whiteness trend in medieval studies that “what we are witnessing globally right now is the collapse of the Anglo-American Empire, and this decentering of ‘whiteness’ is a reaction against the dominance of English for the past 150-200 years.”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/medieval-studies-professor-working-at-decentering-whiteness-wins-prestigious-award/

The US govt blocked a British rescue mission on Monday and its deep-sea submersible raising questions about search efforts

Now we know why

It was a charade

Will US Pharma See Lawsuits Over COVID Vaccine Side Effects?

BioNTech, a German company specializing in mRNA-based vaccines, is facing its first lawsuit in Germany related to alleged side effects of its COVID-19 vaccine, developed in partnership with Pfizer and authorized for emergency use in 158 countries, Reuters reported last week.

But in the U.S., vaccine makers are protected from any such liability until October 2024, thanks to a provision the federal government put forth at the start of the pandemic.

Omar Ochoa, a legal expert in biopharma and related cases, told BioSpace that the move was meant to promote the rapid innovation of vaccines that could change the course of the outbreak.

“You tend to incentivize to assure all the manufacturers and the distributors that would have to be involved in all of these things so they can build the plane as its flying.”

Whether the speed of the COVID-19 vaccine development was due to the PREP Act is impossible to say, but the first emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for individuals 16 years of age and older was issued on Dec. 11, 2020—less than a year after the virus reached U.S. soil. That’s compared to the typical 5 to 10 years of development time for vaccines to reach the U.S. market, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The new lawsuit comes amidst ongoing efforts to ideate how to deal with future pandemics in the U.S. Whether the legal immunity granted to U.S. vaccine developers this time around comes under question remains to be seen, but Ochoa noted that these companies are largely protected, even in the absence of such special circumstances.

U.S. Implications: The PREP Act

In March 2020, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary issued the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act pertaining to COVID-19 tests, drugs and vaccines. This declaration aimed to provide liability protections to various entities involved in the development, distribution and administration of COVID-19 countermeasures.

Unless a party engages in willful misconduct, covered entities—including biopharma vaccine manufacturers—are granted immunity from lawsuits and liability under federal and state law for claims related to losses resulting from the administration or use of covered countermeasures, such as COVID-19 vaccines. The PREP Act sunsets on Oct. 1, 2024, but for now, this means that Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax—the three U.S.-based producers of COVID-19 vaccines—are protected by complete immunity, except in the case of a willful violation.

“Willful violations are very hard to prove. You have to show that the company knew about some danger and proceeded anyway,” Ochoa said. “It’s a very hard standard.”

SOURCE: Biospace

Pwnd! 😏

Recent events at Twitter HQ surrounding the ultimately failed attempt to censor What Is A Woman seem to indicate that my hunch was correct. There is a gaggle of leftoids still clinging on to power and wielding it to censor their ideological opposition.

Ella Irwin and Maie Aiyed have both resigned (or been sacked) in the wake of this latest Twitter fiasco. These two anti-white broads were in charge of “brand safety” and moderating content.

It seems they deliberately defied Elon Musk by censoring What Is A Woman, despite previous agreements that the film could be streamed on the website. I wonder who and what else these girl-bosses took upon themselves to censor.

The entire Idaho GOP just voted unanimously to abolish the FBI and ban then from the state

https://www.idahotribune.org/news/idaho-gop-unanimously-passes-resolution-condemning-the-fbi-calls-for-abolition-of-corrupt-government-agency

The Wise of Heart was a warning; not a road map!

"St. Philip's College in San Antonio, Texas reportedly fired one of its biology professors for teaching his students that sex was determined by X and Y chromosomes."

https://www.foxnews.com/media/college-fired-biology-professor-teaching-sex-determined-chromosomes-x-y?intcmp=tw_fnc