Fentanyl, an extremely potent synthetic opioid, is roughly 100 times more powerful than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin. While technically approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat pain and serve as an anesthetic under the right medical conditions, fentanyl’s recent emergence as a street drug has exasperated and worsened the ongoing opioid crisis in the United States. Now, researchers from the University of California-Los Angeles report U.S. overdose deaths involving both fentanyl and stimulants have increased by more than 50-fold over the past 13 years.

What if the “epidemic of coups” in West and Central Africa is not that at all but a direct outcome of outright revolutionary movements, similar to the anti-colonial movements that liberated most African nations from the yoke of Western colonialism throughout the 20th century?

The primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives has a simple, well-documented explanation.

It’s not really deniable that Western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes. Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the U.S. empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought.

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”— H. L. Mencken

“You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can’t lead to a good conclusion.” ~ Julian Assange.

Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless for at least part of 2019. According to the Washington Post, “People 55 and older represented 16.5 percent of America’s homeless population of 1.45 million in 2019, according to the most recent reliable data.”

The Longer The Corporate State Erodes The Social Bonds That Knit Us To Society And Give Us A Sense Of Purpose And Meaning The More Inevitable An Authoritarian State And A Christianized Fascism Becomes.

The takeover of Credit Suisse (CS) by UBS exposes the massive instability of the global financial market. It is an expression of the rottenness of the world capitalist system. As always, while the bankers gamble away, the working class has to pay.

$2.24 trillion in US dollars is a mighty amount. It’s also a sickening figure when considering the object of this exercise. The flickering tease of war, the promise of bloodshed and an increasingly large butcher’s bill, are inevitable suggestions from such a figure. The scenes are also clear: well-paid suits dazed by theories of the next war; policy wonks jabbering over mock war games. A huge amount of money is being pushed into the venture, and the sceptics are being held at bay.

Most Americans would likely be surprised to know that, according to a respected international poll taken in 2022, far more Chinese (83%) perceive China to be democratic than Americans (49%) perceive the US to be. And while culture war rationales were amongst the choices available to Americans to explain the difference, they chose ‘corruption’ (78%), ‘corporate control of the political system’ (72%), and the ‘power of Big Tech’ (66%) as the leading explanations for the dearth of democracy in the US.

Elizabeth Woodruff drained her retirement account and took on three jobs after she and her husband were sued for nearly $10,000 by the New York hospital where his infected leg was amputated. Ariane Buck, a young father in Arizona who sells health insurance, couldn’t make an appointment with his doctor for a dangerous intestinal infection because the office said he had outstanding bills. Allyson Ward and her husband loaded up credit cards, borrowed from relatives, and delayed repaying student loans after the premature birth of their twins left them with $80,000 in debt. Ward, a nurse practitioner, took on extra nursing shifts, working days and nights. “I wanted to be a mom,” she said. “But we had to have the money.”

The sky over Richmond, Indiana, a former industrial city of 35,000 people on the Ohio border, was filled with a massive plume of toxic black smoke Tuesday after a plastics recycling facility in the middle of the city was consumed by flames, endangering the health of thousands across the region.