From Grok:

Paine wrote this in his 1794–1795 book The Age of Reason (Part I), a famous deist critique of organized religion.

In the full context:

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

Later in the same chapter, Paine explicitly links “the Turks” to “Mahomet” (Muhammad) and “the Koran” (Quran), treating it as the third major revealed religion alongside Judaism and Christianity.

Why “Turkish” instead of “Muslim” or “Islamic”?

In 18th-century Europe, it was extremely common to use “Turkish” (or “the Turk”) as shorthand for Muslim or Islamic. The powerful Ottoman Empire — ruled by ethnic Turks — was the dominant Muslim power that Europeans interacted with (through trade, war, and diplomacy). So “Turkish church” or “Turkish” simply meant the religion of the Turks = Islam. Paine was not referring to the modern country of Turkey (which didn’t exist yet as a nation-state) or to the Turkish language, but to the Islamic faith as one of the world’s major institutional religions of his era.

Paine’s point was universal: he rejected all organized “national” religions (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim/“Turkish”) as man-made tools of control, regardless of which one. He was advocating for deism — belief in one God revealed through nature and reason, not through any specific church or scripture.

This usage was standard in English writing at the time (you’ll see it in many Enlightenment-era authors). It has nothing to do with ethnicity or the modern Turkish state.

I measure people’s credibility by their words and actions. A good example is how many times Trump has declared victory in Iran. Pundits and politicians who state that Israel is our greatest ally is another example. On the other side, people who tell the truth are marginalized and attacked. In the case of Charlie Kirk, he was assassinated for seeking the truth and the Word of God. Thomas Massie is another good example of what happens when you tell the truth.

Credibility would not be a consideration if we were a moral country and held people accountable for their actions. Over 90% of Congress is bought and paid for by AIPAC. As for state legislatures:

from Grok:

No U.S. state has a law that directly bans or restricts criticism (i.e., protected speech) of Israel. Such a law would almost certainly violate the First Amendment.

However, 38 states have enacted anti-BDS laws (or executive orders) that prohibit state government agencies from contracting with, investing in, or doing business with companies, organizations, or individuals that boycott Israel (or, in some cases, Israeli settlements in the West Bank).

These laws—often called anti-boycott legislation—began passing widely around 2015–2016 and target the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. They typically require contractors to certify they are not boycotting Israel or bar public pension funds from investing in boycotting entities. Proponents view them as combating economic discrimination or antisemitism; opponents (including the ACLU) argue they chill free speech by punishing expressive political boycotts and protest activity that can overlap with criticism of Israeli policies.

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How cheaply our government sold our freedom. Thirty Shekels

of silver to restrain our freedom and vilify our Republic. Imagine our founding fathers’ response to make it a crime to criticize another government because of blackmail and bribes.

I doubt this would have happened if not for X.

For millennia, people relied on copper.

Our ancestors used it for water pipes, tanks, and supply systems. Not because it was cheap, but because it worked. Copper was durable, resilient, and possessed properties that we now try to replicate with great technological effort.

Then came the modern world.

Gradually, copper disappeared from our infrastructure. It was replaced by plastics, synthetic materials, and an ever-increasing use of chemicals. What was once supported by intelligent material selection is now often replaced by industrial processing.

This is particularly evident in swimming pools.

Copper pipes and copper-containing systems used to be widespread. Today, chlorine dominates. Millions of people regularly swim in water that has to be treated with chemicals to remain hygienic. At the same time, many are familiar with the side effects: burning eyes, irritated skin, respiratory problems, and the pungent odor that has long since been accepted as normal. But why do we accept something as progress when it produces side effects that previous generations didn’t experience in this form?

Of course, chlorine kills germs. But it also reacts with sweat, urine, and other substances in the water. This creates compounds that have been the subject of health debate for years. People who regularly use or work in swimming pools, in particular, repeatedly report problems with their skin and respiratory system.

The real question, however, is broader. Why have natural materials with special properties been systematically displaced?
Was it truly people’s health that drove this development?
Or was it primarily lower costs, easier installation, and higher profits?

Increasingly, the impression arises that many proven solutions of the past disappear as soon as they become less economically attractive than industrial alternatives. This applies to building materials, food, agriculture—and possibly also to our water systems.

Progress should mean creating better solutions.

Yet sometimes it seems as if we replace natural and proven systems with more technically complex processes, only to then combat the new problems with even more products and chemicals.

Perhaps we should therefore ask ourselves an uncomfortable question:
Did we really replace copper because it was inferior?
Or did we replace it because a world full of plastics, additives, and chemical processing became more economically attractive?

The past wasn’t perfect. But perhaps in some areas it was closer to nature—and therefore closer to what is ultimately good for humanity.

From Huter der Irminsul

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World 

“Narcissists are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction, with other people usually paying the heft of the price. They are aware of what they are doing to others — but they do not care. Narcissists tend to be divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent, judgment-impaired, and irrational.” – Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self-Love

Carl Sagan‘s words from 30 years ago, about the American public no longer caring about the truth and unwilling to acknowledge they have been bamboozled by the men controlling the levers of power over our civilization, has never been more prescient than during our current period of delusion, degradation and decay. As the crumbling American empire of debt and denial approaches its disastrous rendezvous with destiny, the populace remains gloriously and willfully ignorant of reality, mathematical certainty of collapse, and the treachery of those constituting the Deep State ruling class. We are truly living in a demon haunted world, run by child rapists and satanists.

The older I get, the less sure I am about what is happening in this world and who is responsible for the insanity. When every conspiracy theory comes true, I am now inclined to believe the worst scenario in every staged situation presented to the public by our overlords. 

Continue reading …

Now Iran has established total strategic dominance of the escalation ladder to the point where it can treat Israel as Israel has treated other regional countries since its founding, punitively hitting it at will for violations that no longer necessarily include direct attacks on Iran’s home territory.

And the most shocking kicker of it all is that the US cannot do anything about it—and has even told Israel to ignore the attacks and stand down.

Iran has essentially called the US and Israel’s bluff in the ultimate way, exposing the ‘Epstein Alliance’ as helpless in the face of Iran’s escalation.

Continue reading Simplicius’ latest …

Related at Unz Review …

Takes an Interesting Turn at Minute 38

How the Roman Regime Used Christianity to Simplify Thought and Subdue the Mind

Note: What follows are out-takes from an essay by E.M. Burlingame. It is NOT an attack on Christianity. It’s also not for the doctrinaire religionist who refuses to consider history. Rather, it is an attempt to explain what we have inherited and how we have been conditioned not to think, not to question, but to determine what we’re allowed to think and to say. It explains …

“the reason this history matters now, in this moment, to the specific kind of person willing to carry it. Not as a grievance. Not as nostalgia for a world that’s gone. But as a map. The campaign that opened in the fourth century hasn’t ended. It’s only changed instruments. And the first thing the map tells you — the thing it’s always told those who could read it — is that the room isn’t the world. The universe is still there. It’s simply been waiting, as it always waits, for the minds capable of letting it back in.“

What Rome accomplished in the fourth century wasn’t a religious conversion. It was the largest successfully executed opening move of the Great Game in Western history — a deliberate act of cognitive disarmament, aimed at eliminating the mental infrastructure on which the Sport depends. What was destroyed wasn’t belief. It was the capacity for a specific kind of thought. And as we will trace across the essays that follow, the methodology has never changed. Only the instruments have.

The Great Game is waged primarily by what I call the Resentfuls: a disposition — envy elevated to doctrine — operating within the intellectual, financial, managerial, and merchant classes. Their motivation isn’t ideology in any pure sense. It’s the conviction that those who build and sustain across generations shouldn’t exist independently or at all, and that they, the Resentfuls, should have the status of those they resent. The Sport of Kings, conversely, is played by those who build, sustain, and transmit: the multigenerational families and their allies across every class, whose obligation is stewardship rather than seizure.
The Great Game is forever Revolution. The Sport of Kings is forever Restoration.

Control the cognitive field — the language, the permitted questions, the structure of available discourse — and raw intelligence becomes largely harmless. The brilliant mind, trained only in binary categories, produces brilliant arguments for binary conclusions. The Game requires nothing more.

The Common Man is also a player in the infinite game — when allowed sophistication of thought, and even when not. This matters enormously. When the pagan tradition provided the common citizen with a cognitive world of genuine complexity — competing cults, philosophical schools, a universe of many gods and many truths — ordinary men and women were participants in the Sport whether they knew it by that name or not.

But the common man retains a form of infinite-game advantage that no institutional framework can fully extinguish. He lives closer to base reality. He works with soil, weather, bodies, hunger, birth, death — with the irreducible, uncontrollable, unboundable fabric of existence that no creed can fully capture and no bureaucracy can fully manage. Hence the drive to end the small farmer, the man who lives close to and in daily communion with life and the earth, the old gods. 

The Christianity that Rome weaponized in the fourth century wasn’t the Christianity of the first three centuries. The religion of the Apostles and the early Church was something strikingly different: rich, disputatious, philosophically sophisticated, and deeply engaged with the intellectual world it inhabited.

This wasn’t the Christianity Constantine needed. The early Church’s intellectual diversity — its dozens of competing schools, its tolerance for paradox and mystery, its willingness to hold multiple cosmologies in tension — was precisely what made it resistant to the kind of imperial standardization the regime required. The Council of Nicaea in 325 CE wasn’t a theological summit. It was a hostile acquisition. Constantine didn’t patiently seek theological truth. He commanded hundreds of bishops to produce a single, rigid creed, and then he enforced it with the power of the state. His goal wasn’t the salvation of souls. It was the order of the empire: one God, one Emperor, one realm.

What was destroyed at Nicaea — and in the decades of enforcement that followed — was not paganism alone. It was the Christianity of the first three centuries: the rich, philosophically open, sophisticated and intellectually demanding tradition that had spent three hundred years thinking carefully and complexly about the nature of reality. The regime didn’t adopt Christianity. It replaced it with a simplified version designed for governance. A version of binaries to be controlled. The distinction matters, because the war being described in these essays isn’t a war against Christianity. It’s a war against the same target Christianity itself was used to eliminate: the open epistemic system, the infinite cognitive space, the trained capacity for sophisticated thought.

Christianity, as standardized and enforced by the imperial state, offered the cognitive simplification the regime required by collapsing the infinite cognitive space of both paganism and early Christianity into a severe and comfortable finitude. At the heart of the new enforced doctrine lay a binary code that sorted all of existence into mutually exclusive pairs: Saved or Damned, Good or Evil, Orthodoxy or Heresy, Faith or Unbelief.

Every complex moral dilemma, every philosophical subtlety, every shade of grey was abruptly funneled into a single axis of judgment. There was no spectrum of virtue, no partial enlightenment, no noble pagan — only the stark division between the children of light and the children of darkness.

And so we see today, from the perspective of the ‘elites’ there are the children of light (Progressives, Globalists, Zionists) and children of darkness (traditionalists, conservatives, true Christians, virtuous pagans). A new instrument, but the same tactic as that established in the 4th Century.

Read the entire essay …

Definition per Merriam Webster:
1: the act of looting or plundering especially in war

2: something taken as booty

h/t WRSA