CIA personnel land in Lebanon, ramp up intel gathering to support Israel's war

penelopepnortney · 2024-10-14T15:26:49+00:00

Excerpt:

The CIA has sent additional agents to Lebanon and has increased its communications with Lebanese military, security, and political officials in an effort to obtain information about Hezbollah, and may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Al-Akhbar reported on 14 October.

Three senior officials in the official security services acknowledged that Western parties, primarily the US, have initiated intensive daily communication with all Lebanese military and security forces since the outbreak of the open war between Lebanon and Israel, Al-Akhbar editor Ibrahim al-Amin wrote.

The same official revealed that a security team of 15 CIA officers arrived at Beirut airport last Thursday, 10 October, and moved in a convoy of armored cars without license plates to the headquarters of the American embassy in Awkar.

The official said he knew of “five working visits by Lebanese officers of various levels to the United States, who held meetings with American intelligence officials at their headquarters in Langley.”

In this context, Amin reports that these contacts between the CIA and Lebanese security officials may have played a role in Israel’s recent attempt to assassinate a Hezbollah political leader, Wafiq Safa.

The official stated that the US wanted to kill Safa, who has no military role in Hezbollah, as part of a campaign launched by the US Ambassador to Beirut, Lisa Johnson, who recently “called on Lebanese political and non-political forces to begin working to establish the stage of “post-Hezbollah Lebanon.”

penelopepnortney · 2024-10-12T15:45:37+00:00

i suspect they simply have no idea how bad this is or how it's going to play and every time they get a bad response, they assume that it's because they did not add enough cringe last time.

watch BO scolding “black men” like some sort of school marm. can he seriously think this is going to work and that “the brothers” are going to ignore the content of her character (and her brain pan) to focus only upon the color of her skin? is this “you ain’t black if you don’t vote donkey”?

the smug entitlement is galling.

the taking for granted is pure chafe.

they are used to being the only ones speaking. they are used to being the only ones who know stuff. others getting to speak and knowing stuff too seems like wild horror and incredible slant to them as they mistake a return to “equal” from “massively biased” for “biased toward the other side.”

cancel culture has lost its ability to intimidate and drive self-censorship.

and the resultant atmosphere is glorious.

penelopepnortney · 2024-10-09T00:34:26+00:00

Israel rolled out its new phase of propaganda at its own United Nations Mission in November 2023... the speeches were complemented by protests outside the UN Headquarters featuring literal crisis actors, women impersonating rape victims, dramatizing events for which no concrete evidence existed in order to pressure feminist organizations into more vocally supporting Israel's murderous assault on Gaza. As usual the Western mainstream press reverted to its role as Tel Aviv's obedient stenographer.

25:15

The tsunami of atrocity porn culminated with a front page article in The New York Times purporting to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that Hamas had engaged in a "pattern of gender based violence on Oct. 7th", sexually assaulting Jewish Israeli women as part of a calculated campaign of terror.

At the Grayzone, as we began examining the sources in the article, it quickly became clear we were witnessing yet another atrocity hoax. An especially cynical one which exploited the real crime of sexual violence against women in order to manufacture consent for an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing.

When Ha'aretz asked their country's police for forensic evidence to back up Shapir's outrageous decapitation schemes they said they'd come up empty-handed.

29:19

Perhaps most tellingly, the casualty intended as Exhibit A of Hamas savagery in the NYT article, was a woman called Gal Abdush dubbed by the Times as "the woman in the black dress" referring to a grainy cell phone video of her clad in a tight-fitting black dress splayed out dead next to a burned out vehicle.

The Times' stubborn insistence that Abdush had been raped despite a lack of forensic or visual evidence proved to be too much for the young woman's bereaved family. On January 2nd Abdush's sister took to Instagram to write in to the NYT, stating matter-of-factly that her sister "was not raped...there was no proof she was raped." She also pointed out that the timeline between her sister's last message to her family and the time of her reported murder made it impossible for a rape to occur: "how in 4 minutes were they also raped and burned?" The NYT article had unraveled on every level...

31:00

At around the same time the pro-Israel tech oligarch Sheryl Sandberg was preparing to release a documentary aimed at sustaining the propaganda, building on the NYT article. She also relied on videos of Palestinian prisoners filmed by Israeli interrogators in which they appeared to confess to brutally sexually assaulting Jewish Israeli women on Oct. 7th.

As we demonstrated at The Grayzone, the most outrageous confessions by Palestinian prisoners did not match up with any atrocities documented on Oct. 7th. Worse, there's simply no way these confessions had not been coerced through threats and hideous acts of torture, a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions Article 17 governing the treatment of prisoners of war.

So in providing a platform for violently coerced false confessions to advance the dubious narrative of her propaganda film, Sheryl Sandberg had violated one of the most important tenets of journalistic ethics and therefore become a party to Israel's crimes.

33:27

In an especially dark twist of irony, the hoax advanced by Sandberg, the NYT and so many other Western publications would soon be revealed as de facto policy by Israeli soldiers against defenseless male Palestinian prisoners held in Israel's archipelago of torture dungeons.

In a shocking report relying on testimony from 55 former Palestinian prisoners, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem demonstrated that the Israeli prison system after Oct. 7 had been transformed into what the group called "a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy." According to B'Tselem these facilities, in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering, operate as de facto torture camps.

34:26

At the heart of Israel's network of torture centers is Sde Teiman, a facility in the Negev desert that was built after Oct. 7th to imprison the thousands of men captured by the Israeli military in Gaza. Human rights groups across the world have demonstrated that many of those languishing in the facility are innocent civilians, including physicians kidnapped from hospitals in Gaza and subjected to sadistic acts of violence and torture.

At almost the exact time when Israel's propaganda apparatus was pitting out concocted stories of Hamas militants sexually assaulting Jewish Israeli ravers on Oct. 7th, members of the shadowy Israeli military unit known as Force 100 were actually gangraping defenseless Palestinian men in Sde Teiman.

35:30

We know this is true not only from the testimony of former prisoners who told the media and human rights groups that they'd been sodomized by Israeli soldiers with electrified metal rods but because there was actual video evidence. The soldiers responsible for these hideous crimes were clearly filmed sexually assaulting the prisoners. Once again, an allegation Israeli propagandists made against Palestinians was exposed as a confession.

The soldiers' culpability for sodomizing Palestinian prisoners was never a matter of dispute. In fact, a dozen members of Force 100 were charged and indicted in an Israeli military court for sexually abusing the prisoners. What happened next exposed how hollow the prosecutions actually were.

Because as the soldiers were transported to a military based in the occupied West Bank, Israeli nationalists launched a series of riots to support the accused gang rapists. And no one was arrested in the riots. As protests continued across Israel in support of the soldiers and the practice of sodomizing Palestinian prisoners, calls for exonerating the soldiers came from top Israeli ministers. According to a poll by the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies, 65% of Jewish Israelis opposed prosecuting the soldiers.

37:25

Meanwhile the Force 100 soldier charged as the ringleader of the gang rapes in Sde Teiman, Meir Ben-Shitrit, was transformed by Israeli national media into a folk hero. One mainstream media pundit said the only problem with the raping of prisoners is that it hadn't been institutionalized as military policy, to exact revenge against the "mass rapes" he was convinced had been committed by Hamas on Oct. 7th.

The deceptive coverage by Western mainstream media created real world consequences for Palestinians who had been placed under siege in Gaza, branded as human animals, then kidnapped and hauled off to torture centers. As long as these outlets refuse to retract or even correct their lies, US politicians on the largest stage in the world will continue to repeat them.

When Navi Pelai, the judge in the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, convicted three media personalities for supposedly inciting the Rwandan genocide, she said the following: "You were fully aware of the power of words and you used the medium of communication with the widest possible reach to disseminate hatred and violence. Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the death of thousands of innocent civilians."

Those words can and should also be directed at the media outlets that trumpeted Israel's bogus Oct. 7th atrocity propaganda, helping it generate international support for an assault on Gaza that has killed, injured or disappeared close to 10% of its total population by this point.

That indictment should also be directed at the powerful elected officials who to this day continue to repeat the lies about what happened on Oct. 7th.

So what can we - the citizens of the countries backing Israel's destruction of Gaza - do in the face of all this? The first thing we need to do is recognize our power. We might not have endless resources like Israel and its army of propagandists be we have something more powerful: it's the truth, and we're using it to get to them.

Take it from Alex Karp, the ultra-Zionist CEO of Palantir, a private military contractor that is pioneering AI targeting systems and testing them on the people of Gaza, when he discussed the importance of the intellectual battle being waged right now: "We kind of just think these things happening across college campuses are a sideshow; no, they are the show. Because if we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever."

Alex Karp is actually right, and that's a good thing. He's saying we still have the power to challenge the war machine he represents, which is raking in record profits from the war on Gaza and beyond. So we have to continue our efforts, to never let them rest; to bring our protests, voices and independent media to every place we can. We have to use our power while we still have the right to do so.

penelopepnortney · 2024-10-09T00:34:14+00:00

(First few minutes is a montage of claims by Israeli and US officials and Western media)

3:54

The source for the beheaded babies story was a single soldier, David Zion. When not in army uniform Zion serves as political leader of the Shomron Council, a group that represents 35 illegal settlements in the northern West Bank. Just prior to Oct. 7th Zion incited deadly riots against Palestinians in the town of Huwara, declaring "the village of Huwara should be wiped out, this place is a nest of terror and the punishment should be for everyone." So is this violent fanatic a credible source? Mainstream media outlets didn't even bother to ask.

The Israeli army and government press office, as well as the Biden White House eventually walked back and retracted these claims altogether. But once it was plastered across the front pages of papers all across the US and Europe, the damage was already done, no matter how fabricated it might have been.

And Israel had all the political space it needed to carry out one sadistic act after another in the Gaza Strip, the livestream slaughter made possible by Washington, Berlin, Brussels and the mainstream press that functioned as these government's megaphone.

Even as the beheaded babies story was exposed as a complete and total hoax, Israel and its proxies fed the media new tales of atrocities that were even more lurid than before. Most of these came from one single individual, Yossi Landau, a religious fanatic from a self-described rescue organization known as ZAKA.

One fact Landau did prove was that the business of fabricating atrocity porn is extremely lucrative. Before Oct. 7th his ZAKA organization was nearly broke but in the aftermath of the propaganda bonanza they fueled they raked in over $13 million in donations in just a short amount of time.

One of ZAKA's competitor organizations, United Hatzalah, was eager to cash in as well. It sent its director, Eli Beer, to a Republican Jewish Coalition fundraiser where he rattled off a slew of lies.

12:04

Among Israel's key talking points, dutifully repeated by its stooges in the US media, was that the death toll on Oct. 7th represented "the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust."

The implication of this line was obvious: Hamas had set out to kill Israelis simply because they were Jews, not because they were military occupiers. But was Hamas solely responsible for the death toll?

According to the official Israeli line, Hamas slaughtered 1400 completely innocent people on Oct. 7th. But it has since been confirmed that at least 380 of the dead were actually uniformed Israeli soldiers engaged in maintaining the siege of Gaza. After several weeks, the official death toll was reduced to 1200, of which 695 were Israeli civilians, after coroners determined that at least 200 Palestinians, including fighters and average citizens who entered Israeli territory, were included in the original count.

The Electronic Intifada was the first Western outlet to publicize an interview given by a survivor from the Kibbutz Bieri, who recounted how an Israeli tank crew deliberately shelled a home filled with Israeli civilians who had been taken captive on Oct. 7th, knowing they would all be killed.

17:17

Multiple mainstream Israeli and Western papers, as well as Israeli officials themselves, have since admitted that Tel Aviv enacted a mass Hannibal [Directive] on Oct. 7th. Even Ha'aretz, which previously attacked us (at the Grayzone) acknowledged that we were actually right, revealing that the Israeli army employed the Hannibal Directive in at least 3 separate locations inside southern Israel... The paper published an official order that read, "Not a single car can return to Gaza."

18:34

As US mainstream media took its cues from the Israeli propaganda apparatus, repeating obviously dubious narratives and sweeping the lies they were told under the rug when they were eventually exposed, they also refused to report on one of the most shocking aspects of the war: the stated intention by Israeli officials and average Israeli citizens to commit genocide in Gaza.

But for the millions and millions of Americans following the war through social media this horror was impossible to ignore. They couldn't look away from the gruesome, nakedly fascist snuff videos Israeli soldiers were posting on Tik Tok and Instagram from inside the ruins of Gaza.

20:48

Or the viral videos average Israelis posted showing themselves mocking the suffering of Gaza residents with no electricity, water or medicine while trying to survive under siege.
Or the propaganda Israeli media was creating for its own citizens showing children singing in support of annihilating everyone in Gaza.

After decades and decades of grinding military occupation, Israel has become a comprehensively sick society, with masses of citizens primed for the destruction of Palestine. But you'd never know it if you limited yourself to consuming old legacy media.

The US public's initial support for an Israeli military response to Oct. 7th began to dwindle after several months, with polls showing that a strong majority (over 70%) of Democratic voters favored an immediate ceasefire. In the face of this PR crisis, Israel groped for a new propaganda construct...Israel turned to Frank Luntz, a celebrity pollster who in the past had helped the Republican party shape its tax-slashing corporate agenda. He also designed the famous Global Language Dictionary, which advises pro-Israel activists on which focus-tested words and phrases to use to maintain American support for Israel in its war on Palestinians.

This past March I received a tip from a political insider who had attended several briefings Luntz delivered for New York State lawmakers and various influencers. It consisted of slide shows of data Luntz had collected through focus groups he'd conducted on the war in Gaza. In one focus group Luntz asked participants to identify which alleged Oct. 7th Hamas crime upset them the most; a majority responded they were most upset by the claim that Hamas "raped civilians".

So it's abundantly clear that Luntz's research influenced the next stage of Israel's propaganda blitz as Tel Aviv quickly pivoted from beheaded babies and other made-up atrocities to the suddenly discovered plague of systemic rape by Hamas on Oct. 7th.

penelopepnortney · 2024-10-06T16:52:53+00:00

On Ukraine's missile attack on the Nuclear Power Plant in Kursk region:

The Ukrainians launched these missiles ostensibly as an act of desperation. You destroy and potentially damage a nuclear power plant, that has implications for a large region. The good news is the Russians report no radiation leaks and others in the region that are monitoring these say they don't detect any radiation leaks.

This act of desperation is designed, I'm afraid, to do to us in Ukraine what Netanyahu is doing to us in the Middle East, which is to drag in the US. What has to happen in Ukraine is the president needs to shut down this regime. It's dangerous. This is a careless, irresponsible action and we don't want something like this to happen in the future and succeed.

On the nearly 7,000 Americans trapped in Lebanon

We should keep in mind we do have a Marine Expeditionary Unit in the area, almost 6,000 Marines; normally the reason we maintain Marine Expeditionary Units is to rescue American citizens in this kind of situation.

The Israelis have killed 7,000 people in and around Beirut over the last several days. That makes it very difficult for commercial airlines to fly in and pick people up. It's a bad situation and I don't know why we waited this long because it's been clear for some time Netanyahu planned to attack southern Lebanon.

On the status of Israel's incursion into Lebanon

I've been hearing the same thing from my sources, that when the special forces went in on the ground to try and "clear the way", they weren't able to make much progress and many of them were wounded or killed. The troops that came after them were subjected to the same kind of ambush tactics the Israelis saw back in 1982 though these may be worse because of the weapons systems they're using. Someone told me, and this is now a day old, that the Israelis had taken 149 casualties. That may be true. We know the Israeli Defense Minister, when asked about casualties, said "high losses are a cost of fighting this 'just war'."

Other (potential) players

I know from reports that Russian bases in Syria were bombed by the Israeli air force (note below). Not a good way to do business if you're trying to minimize the number of people against you. So Putin has essentially told Israel to get out of Lebanon.

(Note: Clayton clarifies that it was a weapons depot the Israelis struck but I'm not clear from various reports whether it was Russia's or Iran's. Max Blumenthal said yesterday that "Israel struck a weapons storehouse in Latakia on the coast of Syria directly adjacent to the Russian air base at Khmeimim, the largest Russian air base in the Middle East; also near a Russian naval base in Tartus.")

The other group we haven't talked about is the Turks. A million people have already fled Lebanon and guess where they go? They flee to Turkey. The Turks already have 3-4 million refugees from the Syrian war, now they'll get more from Lebanon and the foreign minister said that's unacceptable. I'm getting the impression the Turks are nearing the point of intervening militarily if the IDF doesn't end its operations in Lebanon.

On what Israel's response to Iran will be

The Israelis have not yet responded, which is interesting if the Iranian attack was as strategically irrelevant as they claim. I don't have the Battleground Damage Assessment, I don't get to look at the satellite photography. I'm told that Iran's attack involving 180 missiles, some of them hypersonic, actually damaged airfields and aircraft.

The lack of Israeli response does suggest the Iranians had some impact in that area because they're almost entirely dependent on the air force. That's one of the reasons the Iranians made clear they know where the aircraft are and are going to target them because without close air support for the Israeli army on the ground, they're probably not going to get very far in Lebanon and the Israelis know that.

On what Iran's subsequent response will be

Iran has been listening, as everyone in the Middle East has been listening, to Vladimir Putin and secondarily President Xi and their repeated counsel has been "don't act rashly, exercise restraint, don't give reason for someone to go to war against you." They've listened to this and have now concluded this restraint hasn't worked.

On where the US fits in

I'm sure you've seen the reports that we, through our representatives on the ground over there, had told Hizbullah that we were ready for a negotiated ceasefire with Hizbullah and that was the reason for the meeting. That meeting was identified, found and targeted by our capabilities; without our participation, without our ISR capabilities, our electronic capabilities, the Israelis could not carry off something on the scale you saw in Beirut recently against Hizbullah. Everyone knows that, it may be a secret to the American people that we're that involved but everyone in the region knows it and so does President Putin.

Cyprus and Azerbaijan

And I think Iran has now said, that's it, we're not going to exercise any more restraint and we have the ability to deliver punishing strikes. I've seen estimates that for at least 4 or 5 days Iran could launch 100 missiles an hour against Israel. The Iranians also know where the Israelis will go, i.e., Cyprus, and that's why Erdogan has said "don't try to use Cyprus as a launch pad against Hizbullah, if you do that we'll become involved."

Then there's Azerbaijan, which has been providing oil to the Israelis through Turkey and Erdogan has allowed it to move without interruption. That could end soon because the Turkish population is furious and wants it stopped. And I think the Azeri Turks, whatever their dislikes of Iran, are probably equally sensitive to this. Remember, the Azerbaijani were supported in their last war with Armenia by the Israelis, who helped them with unmanned aircraft.

But the Iranians know the Israelis have been given license if they want to go into Azerbaijan where they can set up, refuel and then launch strikes against Iran. I suspect that if the Israelis do it, Azerbaijan will be drawn into the war unless Erdogan, who's very close to the Azeri Turks in Azerbaijan, intervenes to stop it.

This has always been my concern from the very beginning, the tendency to treat everyone in the region - Arabs, Turks, Persians - with contempt, as though they're some sort of backwater, there's no human capital, there's no sophistication, there's no technology. Well, that is wrong and we're going to get an education the hard way very shortly, and I think it's going to be the death knell of Israel.

In a sane world the President of the United States would intervene: pull the plug on Kiev completely and give Netanyahu 48 hours to come up with a negotiated agreement to end what Israel is doing throughout the region or risk the US walking away and leaving them on their own.

That would require a president who had a clear picture of our true national interests. We have no national interests in a war with Russia or Iran or anyone else in the Middle East. But both Zelensky and Netanyahu are trying to drag us into their conflicts. It needs to stop.

penelopepnortney · 2024-10-06T15:56:13+00:00

This SitRep has a lot of detail about the fall of Ugledar but the most important part of the post IMO is highlighted below:

But some of Ukraine’s elites are now scrambling for a way to keep the conflict from being frozen, in order to sustain their lives and livelihoods. The method is simple: create a big enough provocation against Russia that Russia refuses any sort of ceasefire. Arestovich also gave a nod to this method in his earlier interview.

Listen carefully to what he says in response to the interviewer asking how Ukraine can positively disrupt any potential ‘peace summits’: (clip)

“Blow up the Kremlin.”

Besides the above, he also names a terrorist attack with large amounts of civilian victims, particularly one on a nuclear power plant. This is precisely Zelensky’s backup plan if the West absolutely pushes him to end the conflict under the duress of withholding further weapons supplies and allowing Ukraine to do provocative “deep strikes” into Russia for the sole purpose of bringing NATO into the conflict.

Here Zelensky himself states that the war is unwinnable without these ‘deep strikes’: (clip)

But one thing is certain, there are deeply radical groups within Ukraine that will not allow any capitulation or negotiations. Journalist Leonid Ragozin highlighted another new Azov statement, for instance, which is a response to the earlier FT article (bold added).

Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Merezhko told FT that the far right will dub any talks with the Russians capitulation and called them “a threat to democracy”.

One can engage in cheap and silly talk about “only 2% of Ukrainians supporting the far right” but they have all the military and political capability to upset any peace and they care little about 98% of Ukrainians. They succeeded in derailing the 2019 Paris agreements between Putin and Zelensky. Together with other far right movements, they staged a menacing campaign to prevent Zelensky from reaching a last-minute deal on the eve of the Russian full-out invasion in 2022. They are a major political and military force that should be reckoned with when peace talks start in earnest. If peace is finally reached, these professional soldiers and especially drone operators will fill up the ranks of organised crime in Europe and beyond.

penelopepnortney · 2024-10-06T14:58:26+00:00

@USSGoodGirl

She sounds like she just fell out of a coconut tree.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-28T23:21:07+00:00

history is written by the winners and given where we are right now, what happens next seems to be of unusual import because these last 5 years have been some strange days indeed.

the simple fact is that 2020-1 was a golden age of state sponsored propaganda (and trust me, we are not out of the woods on this yet)...the chicken little brigades that fell for and cheer led this departure from civility and from reason seem to be adopting a stance of “well, it’s over now,” “it was a long time ago,” and “let’s just forgive and move on” because “the experts meant well and were doing the best they could with uncertain information in a scary rapidly evolving situation.”

flatly, this is unmitigated tripe and apologia for deliberate misbehavior, manipulation, and profiteering.

this was not an accident. this was not uncertainty or “honest errors.” it was deliberate, deliberately dishonest, and done in the most manipulative of fashions with malice aforethought by agencies and agents who specialize in doing exactly that.

you guys know me well enough to realize that my base prior is generally not “conspiracy” but rather “stupidity, cupidity, incentive, and emergent behavior.”

but i think we’re long past the point where one can make that claim about what’s going on with government and its messaging of late.

we’re being attacked.

but señor cat, we already know most if this, it’s old news, old hat. why are you bringing this up again now?

because now is when it matters.

we’re having an election and who wins will, to great effect, determine whether any of what just happened EVER sees the light of day. you cannot fix what you cannot see or what you cannot speak about...

...the scope and reach of the tentacles here passes WAY beyond public health and into all manner of history and the right of dissent.

it comes for speech, guns, borders, elections, schools, culture, and even the idea of facts.

and her imperious world salad queen would not be a president to rein this in, she’d be the one where it REALLY got control because she’s even weaker, dumber, and more puppetable than biden.

y’all know i have no great affinity or even respect for trump, but at least with him we could get a chance to dig out and find some accountability and RFK might be some real help there.

who has the power to expand or curtail agencies, to hold them to account and open them up to daylight or to sweep their misdeeds under the rug is going to matter a lot. worth considering as one evaluates the election.

and if one were seeking a simple heuristic for good decision making, you could do a lot worse than “do the exact opposite of whatever these people tell you to.” (screencap: "Scientists Explain Why 'Doing Your Own Research' Leads to Believing Conspiracies")

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-27T23:10:06+00:00

Replies:

Don’t think I’ve ever seen a president sabotage their own party to such an extreme in an election year before

People could buy houses and solar but instead they gotta bleed money forever to enrich the bank accounts of the 1%

How else could they pay for their wars?

Because they've been too busy funding a genocide

This is because our student loan debt got bundled with all kinds of other debt that the billionaires have used to do the shadiest of shit and now they can’t unbundle it without crashing the stock market :)

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-26T20:52:03+00:00

Wow, that was impressive. And what's so great about his presentation is that he cited mainstream media and government officials for so much of what he laid out.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-21T15:13:42+00:00

Related tweet:

This is truly beyond parody 🤦‍♂️

A MEP argues in EU parliament against prolonging the war in Ukraine.

They immediately cut his mic, and lecture him on how there's "no democracy and no freedom of speech" in Russia...

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-21T15:10:31+00:00

Tweet continues:

Undemocratic because it acts against the will of the people. Deluded because it asks for things everyone knows are impossible.

First of all, what do Europeans want? All the surveys are crystal clear (for instance this recent one by @EurasiaGroup👇): approximately two-thirds of Europeans want their leaders to "push for a negotiated settlement for the war in Ukraine".

Yet what does the resolution (which passed with a 425 -131 vote) say?

It calls for "support in every possible way until Ukraine’s victory", which it defines as "allowing Ukraine to liberate all its people, re-establish full control within internationally recognised borders"

In other words, it supports the exact contrary of pushing for a negotiated settlement: it supports a victory of Ukraine until it re-establishes "full control within internationally recognized borders", which by the way include Crimea which Ukraine hasn't controlled in 10 years.

For this purpose the resolution "calls on Member States to immediately lift restrictions on the use of Western weapons systems delivered to Ukraine against legitimate military targets on Russian territory".

In other words, a dramatic expansion of the war: no limits anymore.

And of course, you'll have guessed it: more sanctions! Because sanctions have been working so brilliantly so far...

But what shall we do with the European people who don't want all that?

Not to worry, the resolution has this covered too: it "calls on the European Commission to engage in strategic communication" (a codeword for propaganda) to explain to the people what they ought to think...

This is, of course, completely deluded. There is no expert worth his salt who honestly believes that Ukraine can win and regain all its territory.

The public is correct in thinking that the only possible prospect here is a negotiated settlement that puts an end to the suffering.

The only scenario where Ukraine could potentially have a fighting chance would be if it managed to goad NATO to officially enter the war on its side.

Which by the way is precisely what following the recommendations of this resolution might result in.

Putin said as much: allowing long-range strikes into Russia "changes the very nature of the conflict" and means direct war between Russia and NATO.

But then this is even less what Europeans want and even more deluded: a direct conflict between 2 nuclear powers is potentially a civilization-ending event...

Even at the height of the cold war rulers weren't this irresponsible.

I'm old enough to remember a time when the EU was sold to us Europeans as an instrument for peace and prosperity.

Sadly we're forced to recognize it's instead become the exact contrary: an instrument of war and economic decline, guided by leaders who seem to have lost touch with both reality and the will of their own people.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-20T16:01:35+00:00

They've also further solidified their reputation throughout the world as a rogue, terrorist state.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-20T15:58:24+00:00

meet dr jay varma, NYC’s senior public health advisor, cuomo’s top guy during the “lock down, mask up, and vent till you die.”

and it turns out that like so many others from gavin to SAGE to fancy nanci, it’s always “one law for thee and another for me.”

but here is varma in his own words telling you that he’s an awful person, that he lied, that he did not believe any of his own dictates enough to actually follow them, and that worst of all, he knows this. THAT has impact. that changes minds. it’s objective proof that trust in public health should never be uncritical and that perhaps skepticism even outright distrust constitutes a better base prior.

some have argued that this is unfair or unjust or somehow “dirty” and more akin to spying than journalism.

i heartily disagree.

this is real public interest public service work. this is finding the truth about the people who deign to rule us.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-18T03:58:17+00:00

This article is several months old but chock full of information I did not know.

Excerpt:

The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, coined the term ‘junk fee,’ and has begun restructuring how financial markets work, removing medical debt from credit reports, fostering competition in credit cards, and examining big tech’s entrance into payments. And yet, for ideological reasons, to many bankers, Chopra is a villain running a government agency full of bureaucratic demons, whose goal is to force them to do paperwork on behalf of nebulous ‘consumers.’

So it was a weird day last month when Chopra had a room full of mortgage bankers nodding their heads in furious agreement, and even angry at their own trade association for helping a monopoly take advantage of them.

...Chopra went on stage a few hours later and discussed an increasing cost center for banks, which is the credit bureaus and FICO.

“Mortgage lenders in the U.S. increasingly face a lack of competition when it comes to accessing data and reports needed for loan origination,” he said. “In many cases, a handful of firms have cornered the market, allowing those companies to levy a tax on every mortgage application or transaction in the country.” Three firms dominate credit reporting: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. And just one company handles algorithms, the Fair Isaac Corporation, which sells the FICO score. “Mortgage lenders have shared that costs for credit reports and scores have increased,” he said. “Sometimes by 400% since 2022.”

Even if a lender thinks the customer would be a good risk, the lender has to buy a FICO score regardless. Mortgage bankers don’t carry the capital to hold the mortgages they make. Instead they make a loan, and then send it onward to the capital markets.

Mortgage bankers aren’t typical Wall Street bankers. While mortgage lending can be done by the big guys, real estate is an inherently localized industry with a clubby network of realtors, title insurers, and various other specialists in the home-buying process, so independent players have a strong foothold. There are roughly a thousand independent mortgage lending firms nationwide, and these lenders live everywhere.

Credit scoring used to cost a relatively small amount of money, but now it can be up to $60 per pull, with the price quadrupling over the last two years for no reason whatsoever. Only one out of every ten prospective customers ends up taking out a mortgage, so higher prices fronted by mortgage bankers add up. And it’s starting to be a major expense, driving some of the mortgage lenders out of the business entirely.

There were two thousand credit bureaus across the U.S. when FCRA passed. By the 1990s, due to this law and to a relaxation of antitrust, they consolidated into three main firms, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion... The credit bureaus, fostered by regulatory choices and consolidation, were the first wave of big data firms, laying the groundwork for corporations like Google and Facebook years later.

These firms aren’t just private entities, but have become key parts of governance. If you want to verify someone’s work and income, for instance, or manage unemployment insurance claims at scale, you use one of these bureaus...

Though contract terms [between the credit bureaus and FICO] are still confidential, some details have come out in an ongoing antitrust suit in Illinois by banks against FICO and the three bureaus. The claim is that the four firms are now a cartel.

(more information and lots more detail at the link)

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-17T15:16:11+00:00

Military coups, Counter-coups, assassinations, treachery… the history of the young 53-year-old Bangladesh has more intrigue than a Shakespeare novel. While the repercussions of all the drama have been restricted to South Asia so far, the recent coup has direct involvement of the US.

Bangladesh is a country of 170 million – larger than Russia, Japan or Germany. And it’s strategically located right next to India. While the US has encircled China in the east, the US has no presence in the south. Moreover, the Bay of Bengal region is close to the Malacca Strait and can be theoretically used to disrupt China’s trade. (See map below)

Ideally, the US would like to use Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia to control the Malacca Strait and contain China. However, all those ASEAN countries have refused to be America’s geopolitical pawns, and have explicitly told the US to take a hike in this matter. The next best option for the US is to build bases in the Andaman Nicobar Islands, which overlook the Malacca Strait. These islands, of course, belong to India, which has also staunchly refused to allow foreign military bases in its soil.

The person who was convicted of trying to assassinate [PM Hasina] in 2004 – Tarique Rahman – has been living in London for the last sixteen years. He is also the acting chairman of BNP, the opposition party, which is now poised to rule Bangladesh. This reveals how the West has taken a clear position in the internal affairs of Bangladesh.

Hasina’s biggest geopolitical “crime” – according to the US – was to embrace strategic autonomy. Her government was equally friends with India, Russia, China and the US.

In 2016, Bangladesh joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Since then, China has spent tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure projects, loans and aid in Bangladesh. Hasina also enhanced defense cooperation with China – she bought a couple of Chinese submarines and built a naval base with China’s help.

Hasina also invited Russia to build a nuclear power reactor in Bangladesh; and when the US threatened sanctions, she used Chinese yuan to pay Russia. Overall, in just 14 years of Hasina’s rule (from 2008 to 2022), the GDP of Bangladesh grew a whopping 360% – from $100 billion to $460 billion.

Along with that, Hasina wanted to join BRICS. If all those “crimes” were not enough, she refused to let the US build military bases in Saint Martin Island.

In summary, she welcomed neutrality and the multipolar world with too much enthusiasm, which was unacceptable to the US Empire.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-17T01:35:14+00:00

That's a good idea. However limited the reach of such a campaign, it's taking positive action and it's something most people would be able to do fairly easily.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-17T01:22:03+00:00

Katchanovski said that the valorization of the Azov Regiment is comparable to how the West initially supported the predecessors of the Taliban in their fight against the Soviet Union’s intervention in the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and also risks inspiring yet more far-right activists from other countries to join the conflict in Ukraine in order to gain military experience, potentially causing a blowback effect if they make it home.

As more people start to think about potential ways to end the war in Ukraine the far-right in Ukraine is threatening to use violence to prevent that:

A serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with the call sign "Madyar" openly and "without drama" threatens the Ukrainian government.

According to him, if someone negotiates with the Russian Federation "not in the interests of the Ukrainian people", then a million fighters will return from the front and overthrow such a government.

Members of Azov and other 'nationalist' groupings in Ukraine are now experienced fighters. The have the means to fight as there are lots of Ukrainian weapons in unaccountable hands (machine translation):

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine, more than 270,945 weapons have disappeared or been stolen.

These weapons can be easily smuggled into Europe to target any politician who dares to pressure Ukraine into accepting an end of the war.

The attempted assassination of Trump is only one of the first of such incidents. (The motives for the assassination attempt against the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico are still unknown.)

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-16T15:27:00+00:00

For nearly ten years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference.

Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.

...the failure of of the Eurocracy to limit migration is gradually undermining the credibility of the EU itself. This is because nation states are much better at border security than international bureaucratic behemoths. Should a major EU member state decide that it has had enough of mass migration and elect to close its borders, the migrant pressure on other EU states would increase... A sufficiently fierce reaction could substantially undermine the authority of the EU itself, and would certainly spell the end of the Schengen Arrangement.

Germany, despite all its recent crises and setbacks, is still the dominant industrial nation of the EU, and also its most populous state. By keeping its borders open and enticing migrants with generous benefits, Germany hopes to reduce migrant pressure on its neighbours and prevent the anti-migration chain reaction from getting off the ground.

The problem is that the snake has begun to eat its own tail. The energy crisis and the lunatic anti-nuclear and anti-carbon radicalism of the Greens have taken a huge bite out of German prosperity. Open borders have lost their appeal, Alternative für Deutschland are,pounding at the door, and no amount of staged public freakouts about “the extreme right” can restore the balance.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-13T02:05:42+00:00

It hasn't been too long, I just noticed it a month or so ago but I got the impression Maniak was not miffed, precisely, but disappointed it took that long for someone to notice.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-11T05:58:39+00:00

He's responding to this tweet:

@AmandiOnAir (profile shows he's an MSNBC analyst...)

That this election — between a decent, ethical, sane person loyal to the Constitution and a vile, corrupt, insane person openly hostile towards it — is even close is a 5 alarm fire revealing that the true core cause of our national problem and rot is not Trump — it’s the voters.

My response:

We have a "decent, ethical, sane person loyal to the Constitution" running in the 2024 election? Dang, I'm not sure how I missed that.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-10T16:00:58+00:00

1. At what point does it become irresponsible not to compare Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people with the genocide westerners know best: the Nazi Holocaust?

2. At what point does shielding Israel from the revulsion its actions naturally inspire not turn into complicity?

3. At what point should western publics be offered proper historical context to make sense of Israel's genocide: one that lets them understand how the Zionist movement was ideologically shaped by its exposure to ugly, century-old European ethnic nationalisms that culminated in Nazism, and how the Zionists chose to mirror those supremacist ideologies rather than reject them?

4. At what point are we allowed to say that Israel cannot continue to exist in its current form, as a racist, settler-colonial state masquerading as the “state of the Jews”, and that it must be remade, as apartheid South Africa once was?

5. And at what point are we permitted to prize Palestinian life over the "sensitivities" of Zionist supremacists?

6. Is the answer: Never?

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-08T06:55:55+00:00

There are two reasons I'm opposed to reparations. The first is that I've been doing genealogical research for some 40 years and proving you're anyone's descendant is hugely challenging, it requires hours and hours of tedious research that very often doesn't yield definitive proof. Even professional genealogists with credentials out the ears and decades of experience may not succeed when it comes to formerly enslaved people, because the records for them are so sparse.

The other reason is that I'm not a descendant of slave owners. I've heard the argument that slavery helped build this country and don't disagree with that, but I come from a long line of dirt poor farmers who scratched out a living the best they could. Not only did they not personally benefit from slavery but they were disadvantaged by it, because they were limited in how much land they could afford to own, how many acres the males in the family were able to cultivate, and when they sold their crops they were competing with large landowners who owned hundreds of acres of land with hundreds of slaves to work them.

As they say in the video, it's an emotional subject. I agree, but not just for the descendants of former slaves; because it would be hard to do justice to them for the tragic history of their ancestors without doing injustice to others whose ancestors played no part in it.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-07T23:46:30+00:00

being just placed there out of nowhere, from one day to the next, without a primary,

There's been LOTS of words about this, actually. Not in MSM, of course, but in alt media and on Twitter.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-07T22:36:47+00:00

Here's an apt alternative for the younger bitch from the comments on Max's tweet:

Space Cackles

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-07T22:30:57+00:00

And as I recall, Her Heinous arranged for Harris to hobknob and fundraise in Martha's Vineyard in 2020.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-07T22:25:10+00:00

I would imagine for Clinton the Worst, it's so people know which Clinton is being referred to. I prefer to call her Her Heinous or the more generic HRC. For Harris, maybe because that surname is kind of generic and doesn't immediately bring to mind the cackling one, because why would it? She's nondescript, an empty vessel cardboard cutout with no substance.

Just to add that the above assessment no doubt derives from negative bias and should be weighed accordingly.

And this edit would have happened sooner if not for the cloudflare BS that sent me to a webserver timeout, because of course it did.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-05T17:45:17+00:00

Though one may quibble about cases, the big debates—both in the public and among historians and social scientists—have centered on motives and causes. In nearly every case, U.S. officials cited U.S. security interests, either as determinative or as a principal motivation. With hindsight, it is now possible to dismiss most these claims as implausible. In many cases, they were understood as necessary for generating public and congressional support, but not taken seriously by the key decision makers. The United States did not face a significant military threat from Latin America at any time in the 20th century. Even in the October 1962 missile crisis, the Pentagon did not believe that the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba altered the global balance of nuclear terror. It is unlikely that any significant threat would have materialized if the 41 governments deposed by the United States had remained in office until voted out or overturned without U.S. help.

The corruption hypothesis contends that U.S. officials order interventions to protect U.S. corporations. The best evidence for this version comes from the decision to depose the elected government of Guatemala in 1954. Except for President Dwight Eisenhower, every significant decision maker in this case had a family, business or professional tie to the United Fruit Company, whose interests were adversely affected by an agrarian reform and other policies of the incumbent government.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-05T17:39:47+00:00

In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century (see table).

Direct intervention occurred in 17 of the 41 cases. These incidents involved the use of U.S. military forces, intelligence agents or local citizens employed by U.S. government agencies. In another 24 cases, the U.S. government played an indirect role. That is, local actors played the principal roles, but either would not have acted or would not have succeeded without encouragement from the U.S. government.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-05T04:47:22+00:00

100X worse, how? Would he send two shipments of arms a week instead of one?

(She's merely a Russian asset.)

God, preserve me from fucking ignorant people.

The president is the CIC and the Pentagon answers to him or her.

Congress can pass legislation but would have to have enough votes to override a presidential veto if the WH didn't support it.

There are clauses in our existing laws that could be (and should have been) used to ban any further arms shipments to Israel since they're being used to violate human rights and international law. There's nothing preventing us putting a stop to Israel's genocide except the political will.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-04T22:25:03+00:00

Vote for Harris = Additional pressure on Israel for a ceasefire

How delusional can you get? There's absolutely zero indication she will do anything different from what the Biden administration is currently doing.

If she wanted to convince voters, she could do what Stein has done: say that on Day One, she would pick up the phone and tell Israel there would be no more weapons until they stopped the slaughter. Israeli officials have said they could not continue what they're doing in Gaza without that assistance. They should also be told - and I'm sure Stein would - that if they provoke a wider war with their neighbors, as they've been trying to do, the US will not come to their aid.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-04T21:07:30+00:00

I see. So the GP should care more about the climate than they care about the slaughter of Gazans. Got it.

Not voting for Harris or Trump. Period.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-04T19:51:52+00:00

No one claims that the Democrat party is owed a vote.

But then you say this:

a wasted vote for a candidate like Stein - who has no chance of winning - is one less vote for an electable candidate. Because Green Party supporters would normally not like Trump - due to his many records of abusing the environment for the sake of Big Oil &c - they'd otherwise vote for Harris.

First, it's our vote to "waste", quit trying to browbeat us into supporting candidates we've clearly said we don't support.

Second, you assume that these voters, denied of a 3rd party candidate, would vote for the Democrats. You're absolutely wrong about that. I'm not alone in saying that if my only options were D and R, I wouldn't vote at all. Then there are others who have admitted to casting a protest vote for the Republicans though this happens less frequently.

People resent being corralled and they will find ways to subvert those who attempt it.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-04T14:29:40+00:00

No candidate or party is owed a vote so how voters vote doesn't "cost" them anything. A much larger percentage of voters identify as Independent than as either D or R so if the major parties want more votes they should stop putting up such crappy candidates.

Greens have won over 1500 races since 1985.

Instead of attacking third parties that offer candidates and platforms that huge numbers of people want to vote for, you should be attacking the "democratic" system that makes it so hard and sometimes impossible for them to get/stay on the ballot. Unless your aim is just to push people into not voting at all; because what you're suggesting is that they should vote under duress for candidates and policies they do not support.

Stein is (like Trump) a useful idiot for Putin

This remark is too stupidly ignorant to treat seriously.

What AOC means when she says "She's not a serious candidate" is "She's not supported by the corporate oligarchy like I am." (h/t u/Centaurea16)

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-04T04:52:54+00:00

Pretty stupid move on AOC's part since it gave Jill Stein such an excellent opportunity to gain visibility for herself and her anti-genocide platform among AOC's Dem fan base.

penelopepnortney · 2024-09-01T14:37:47+00:00

Excerpt:

The arrest yesterday of Palestine solidarity activist Sarah Wilkinson, following the arrest of journalist Richard Medhurst last week – both based on an improbable claim they have violated Section 12 of the Terrorism Act – is definitive proof that Keir Starmer’s authoritarian purges of the Labour left are being rolled out against critics on a nationwide basis.

The British prime minister is determined to terrorise into silence critics highlighting his, and now his government's, complicity with Israel and its genocide in Gaza.

The usual Israel lobby ghouls, such as David Collier, have been salivating over Wilkinson's arrest. She faces up to 14 years in jail for supposedly “supporting” a proscribed organisation – namely, Hamas.

According to reports, she was told she was being arrested over “content that she has posted online”. Police seized all her electronic devices. According to her daughter, she has been released on bail on condition she “never” uses those devices.

Let’s be clear: the police are using the Terrorism Act in this way only because they have received political direction to do so. Wilkinson’s arrest is only possible because the police and Starmer, supposedly a human rights lawyer, are rewriting the meaning of the term “support for terrorism”.

This is political repression in its clearest form.

Let us remember too that, if Britain’s terrorism laws are going to be enforced so expansively, the first person who should be arrested for “supporting” terrorism is Starmer himself. Months ago he insisted numerous times that Israel had a right to block food, water and power to 2.3 million people in Gaza, a policy Israel has indeed pursued and has resulted in a man-made famine that is starving Palestinians to death. The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor is seeking Netanyahu’s arrest for that starvation policy because it is a crime against humanity.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-31T19:55:27+00:00

I thought of this when reading Roy Lilley's email on the NHS this morning. In it he noted:

Wherever you are on the debate about the NHS, whatever line you take, everyone will probably agree, stopping people getting sick in the first place is a good idea.

It might be more important than you think. Most of what we turn-up with, to get fixed-up, is up to us.

While it's difficult to pinpoint an exact percentage across all illnesses, studies suggest that lifestyle choices could be responsible for anywhere between 50 and 70% of all healthcare costs and a similar proportion of chronic diseases.

They do not do this by chance: there is a food-industrial complex (to use Eisenhowwer's terminology) that aims to make them sick as a result of the production of these items.

And then there is a medical-industrial complex called big pharma that is only too pleased to prescribe as many drugs as possible to deal with the effects of this.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-30T22:46:02+00:00

This is a 3-1/2 minute clip from today's broadcast, Wilkerson talking.

Here's what Ha'aretz uncovered, a couple of days ago I found these documents. One is called "Israeli settlers have a master plan to cleanse the land of Palestinians." The second is called "Road to redemption: How Israel's war against Hamas turned into a springboard for Jewish settlement in Gaza."

Bingo, that has described Netanyahu's ultimate plan.

And he's got to consolidate on the West Bank as fast as he can as Ben Gvir and his settlers are already moving into north Gaza with shovels and pick axes and AR-15s, they're already clearing rubble and getting ready to establish settlements.

This has been Bibi's plan all along and he hopes it will do two things: one, consolidate his hold in the Golan, the West Bank and East Jerusalem - consolidate means killing some more people there and dispossessing them of their land; and two, begin to do the same thing in Gaza so that a lot of Palestinians get so tired of it they'll pick up and go to other countries.

And he's got plans under both these programs to entice those other countries to take the Palestinians he can't kill. That's Bibi's ultimate plan and we're playing right along with it.

(On whether it will require force to stop Bibi and his plan): It could be stopped immediately if we picked up the phone and told Bibi no more weapons, guns, artillery, ammunition; nothing. He'd have to stop, especially the peril he's in right now with the possibility of a multi-front war and some fairly significant enemies on those fronts. If we told him we weren't going to be there with him, that would end it. It would also end his political career and he'd go to jail.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-30T20:01:45+00:00

He gives one of the most detailed explanations I've heard of the challenges of training Ukrainian pilots to fly the F-16s: the language barrier, having to unlearn what they knew about flying Soviet era aircraft, the time required to be ready for a combat situation, the maintenance required in terms of how much and the skill and equipment needed.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-27T17:18:05+00:00

On Israel's Channel 12, a prominent pundit complained that the only problem with soldiers raping Palestinian prisoners is that the act has not been formally regulated.

This is actually inaccurate, here's what the tweet he links to says:

Channel 12 panellists expressing their delight at the sexual assault of Palestinian hostages and their desire for institutionalised rape of Palestinians as revenge, punishment, and deterrence from further uprising.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-26T17:01:06+00:00

Excerpt:

Meanwhile, Israel’s domestic political situation is becoming increasingly strained. Seventy-seven year old Retired Israeli General Itzhak Barik’s recent Oped in Haaretz, is but one of many warning signs that Israeli unity is fraying. General Barik fought as a company commander in the Yom Kippur War and, of late, has been an outspoken critic of the current Zionist government. General Barik wrote:

The country really is galloping towards the edge of an abyss. If the war of attrition against Hamas and Hezbollah continues, Israel will collapse within no more than a year. . . .

[Netanyahu] has lost his humanity, basic morality, norms, values, and responsibility for Israel’s security. Only replacing him and his cronies as soon as possible can save the country. Israel has entered an existential tailspin and could soon reach a point of no return.

The head of Israel’s Shin Bet (sort of like the FBI with a CIA twist) has come out swinging and earned the wrath of Ben Gvir and Smotrich.

Israel’s Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar said in a letter to Netanyahu, Gallant and other ministers published by Channel 12 that “Jewish terror” by settlers in the West Bank and Ben Gvir’s incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque are doing “indescribable damage to Israel.”

When the head of Israel’s internal security service speaks openly against the current Zionist policies during a time of war, it is a clear indication that Israel is in trouble. And Ronen Bar is not alone. The head of Mossad and the chief press spokesman for the IDF — Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari — also have butted heads with Netanyahu.

Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of the IDF, who also served as Israel’s Defence Minister, had this to say in a video interview on the forces taking over in Israel:

When you talk about Smotrich and Ben Gvir: They have a Rabbi. His name is Dov Lior. He is the Rabbi of the Jewish Underground, who intended to blow up the Dome of the Rock – and before that the buses in Jerusalem. Why? In order to hurry up the ‘Last War’. Do you [not] hear them talking in terms of the Last War; or of Smotrich’s concept of ‘subjugation’? Read the article he published in Shiloh in 2017. First of all, this concept rests on Jewish supremacy: Mein Kampf in reverse.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-26T02:32:58+00:00

This piece gets technical and is a tad over my head but thought I'd post it for anyone who's interested.

Excerpt:

... if we would stay free and private, we need new systems.

but how do we get there? building from scratch is crazy hard.

to my mind, the best solution is this: change twitter/X.

open it. make it a protocol not a company. make it peer to peer, not centralized. encrypt it all. then let it go so it is controlled by no one.

change the business model. musk should move to:

payments and a neo banking system that can accomplish what all the faltering crypto currencies and their stagnant “layer 2’s” always 2 years away from “lightning solving this” never could: anonymous, private, scalable commerce, savings, and investment. make it into the everyhting market with competing digital currencies and trusted counterparties where commerce can be behind firewalls.

hardware. the world desperately needs a new smartphone not run by google or apple. something that’s secure and optimized for the coming peer to peer world. something that is not 60% spyware by weight. a phone you can trust. a phone that can be a trusted node.

these two opportunities dwarf anything an ad or subscription based twitter could ever be. and it solves the layer one problem. the astonishing power of a network of internet by satellite and billion terrestrial phone nodes optimized to extend it into one vast ubiquitous mesh could be transformative. it could place the ball well and truly out of levaithan’s reach once and for all.

this is the path. there is no other.

it’s time to move out of the house. it’s time for the internet to end its awkward adolescence and realize its promise.

it’s time for information, conversation, agora, money, and commerce to transcend that grasping tentacles of the dying giant we one mistook for government.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-25T16:06:01+00:00

Ah, this was the tipping point. Color me shocked.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-24T23:36:17+00:00

More from Reclaim the Net - this is what it's really about is my guess:

The recent arrest of Pavel Durov is just the latest in a series of challenges facing Telegram, an encrypted messaging service known for its stringent privacy policies. In recent weeks, the platform has come under intensified scrutiny and attacks from various governments and regulatory bodies, alleging that its free speech policies facilitate illegal activities.

The core of the controversy surrounds Telegram’s encryption protocols and privacy features, which authorities claim obstruct criminal investigations and enable the spread of illicit content. (translation: it poses an obstacle to our illegal spying)

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-24T03:15:18+00:00

It's definitely overwhelming. I used to bookmark a lot of the tweets but don't do that much anymore and don't always look at all the photos or watch the video streams. But I do follow it closely enough to know that it continues to be relentless and brutal. I don't bother replying using the word "genocide", mostly I just reply something like "sadistic bastards" or "what kind of sick society is this?" or "this is psychopathic" because when you strip away the veneer of ideology that's what it boils down to.

Here's another one I just added because he posts a lot of content and I especially appreciate his scathing comments about what's being done.

https://x.com/AdameMedia

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-21T23:09:19+00:00

Excerpt (which includes a link to the YT video, about 1hour and 20 minutes long):

This interview is also available on Rumble and podcast platforms. Transcript will be posted later today.

As Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian, professor and author, and host Chris Hedges detail in this latest episode of The Chris Hedges Report, the lobby’s rise to power consisted of diverging ideological factions uniting in pursuit of their shared interests in controlling the land of historic Palestine. The history and manifestation of this systemic corruption of the Zionist lobby, hyper-dependent on coercion and total control, is thoroughly described in Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic.

Through Pappé’s historical accounts and analysis, he dispels the fabrication that Israel was created to protect the Jews of the world from systemic oppression. Those first involved in lobbying for Zionism were separated into two ideological groups; the religious Zionists, who actually believed in a messianic connection to historic Palestine, as well as protecting marginalized Jews, and those who the Israeli author describes as “more cynical; the imperialists, or those “who saw the theological ideas as a good pretext for fulfilling more secular political roles…they wanted not only Palestine, but also Syria and Egypt to expand the British empire.”

As Pappé states,

One of the major motives for leaders of the Jewish community in Britain to support the idea of the Jews going from Russia to Palestine was the fear that these Jews would come to London.

As we’ve seen, the way AIPAC decided who Israel’s enemies were often had very little to do with the actual policies, which were frequently to Israel’s advantage–they decided simply based on how obedient an administration was to the lobby. America’s endorsement of the Oslo Accords was not a milestone on the road to peace for AIPAC, but a testimony to its own failure to influence America’s policy.

It is through this endemic toxicity that Israel may very well be leading itself, and Zionism with it, to its demise.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-20T01:54:07+00:00

Here's my links when you have time: https://saidit.net/s/WayOfTheBern/comments/azjw/understanding_russiagate/

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-20T01:04:17+00:00

No, it's not false. But I'm too busy to waste any more time with you so think whatever you want.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-19T23:11:18+00:00

You're too steeped in koolaid, you'll have to find your own way out.

By the way, the original article does still exist: https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/13/msm-admits-russiagate-farce-proven-by-cn-in-2018/

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-19T21:23:48+00:00

MSM Admits Russiagate Farce Proven by CN in 2018:

New York University this week released a study that found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In other words, the relatively tiny amount of social media posts from Russia’s Internet Research Agency on Twitter, many of which came after the election, had zero effect on the election’s outcome.

But that was a major theme of mainstream media’s manic coverage after the election in a failed attempt to pin Donald Trump’s victory on Russian influence. In reporting the NYU study, the MSM has now finally admitted it was wrong.

If they sincerely cared about election interference, they'd go after Israel lobby organizations like AIPAC, which actually boasts about pouring millions into campaigns of opposition candidates of anyone who was insufficiently servile to Israel's interests.

And seriously, do try not to be such a gullible rube when it comes to stuff like this. Mueller came up with nada on the Trump collusion hoax; Crowdstrike admitted in Congressional testimony they had no actual evidence that any data was exfiltrated from the DNC servers; and Durham corroborated there was no collusion in his report, acknowledging how egregiously the FBI had acted but weaseling out when it came to saying they should be held accountable.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-19T19:31:11+00:00

Just like they found evidence for Russiagate... oh wait, they didn't find any evidence, just lots of chum in the water over 6 or 7 years.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-19T19:21:30+00:00

Excerpt:

WTF is going on...

We have Kamala-nomics propoagandists expounding that price-controls are good for deflation and half of America believes it...

And now, we have US Leading Economic Indicators down for their 29th straight month - at a level worse than the trough of COVID lockdowns...

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-19T18:06:53+00:00

Don't blame you.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-19T06:46:02+00:00

As you will hear in our discussion, Cynthia and her students believe this coup is organic and is not part of some US plan to install a puppet government that will do the bidding of Washington. I know there is some speculation that this was a US move to put a guy in the big chair who will eventually give the green light to open a US naval base in Bangladesh.

A commenter says "Seems like a color revolution to me," citing and linking to a piece by MK Bhadrakumar that I haven't yet read. The Duran agrees, and gives basically the same reasons as this commenter: "Same setup and excuses as the maidan revolution (supposed fight for freedom, democracy, fighting against tyranny)."

They point out that the idea of a naval base in Bangladesh was first floated in the late 60s or early 70s, but never went anywhere especially after relations with China improved. But they made several good points: that the interim PM has long been an ally of the US, is very pro-Western and is hostile to both India and China; that relations between India and the US have deteriorated because India declined to get on board with the Russian sanctions and continues to have good relations with Russia; that India and China have been working to resolve their past conflicts and there was a key meeting between their foreign ministers just recently. I tend to agree with the Duran that with the color revolution the US is trying to reassert its influence and power in that region. I also agree that we may start to see pockets of civil unrest in parts of India because although the US cannot realistically topple the government, they can set a lot of fires to "remind" them who runs the world.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-18T23:33:11+00:00

You're so silly.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-18T23:31:55+00:00

Hopefully enough people are tuning in the discussions we see with Wilkerson and Macgregor and Freeman and Ritter so they know what complete hogwash the Biden statement about a ceasefire is.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-18T23:26:40+00:00

Perish the thought.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-15T19:20:29+00:00

From former ambassador Chas Freeman:

Israel used to distinguish itself by demanding that others recognize its right to exist. This is very peculiar, no other country asks whether it has a right to exist; if it does exist, it exists, that's enough. What this question really meant was that if you agreed Israel had a right to exist, you were implicitly agreeing that the Palestinians had no right to exist and that Israel was the only state that could exist in historic Palestine. That was the implication. So this was a way of obliquely denying Palestinian self-determination.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-15T19:16:37+00:00

I'm sure this negotiator with dual US-Israeli citizenship is just the credible spokesperson the situation requires. /s

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-15T19:12:51+00:00

Jeffrey Sachs on how would we react if the Russians invaded up in Alaska:

The whole point of American behavior is that we never ask the question, ever, of how would we react on the other side. The whole point of American foreign policy is the belief by these officials that we can do what we want with impunity against any norm, standard, international law, principle, vote of the UN or UNSC, treaty or anything else that we would say limits the behavior of others.

The most basic point, which the US has said for 201 years since the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine to the rest of the world, is "stay out of the Western Hemisphere, we regard any incursion from the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego to our immediate neighborhood as an infringement on US security."

But we say, "of course we have the right to push NATO right up to Russia's borders, put in missiles systems wherever we want, engage in Georgia and the Caucusus region as part of NATO." So everything about American foreign policy is built on hypocrisy and then we can't understand why that's annoying to others and gets us into perpetual war.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-15T18:04:30+00:00

More highlights from the clip, Sachs speaking:

Israel has willfully isolated itself from the entire world community except perhaps the Biden White House and Biden foreign policy team. And I include the American people as well, who are aghast at what Israel is doing, because of the extremism that Ben Gvir represents and leads.

There's one underlying issue in the Israeli conflict, the denial of the most basic political rights of the millions of Palestinians who are now occupied by Israel or under the bombing by Israel, under the rubble Israel has caused, under the murderous behavior of illegal Israeli settlers in occupied territories. But essentially Israel has established an apartheid state where it rules over millions of Palestinians and kills them when they protest or when they react to this profound, continuing, illegal injustice and that situation has gone on for decades.

This is not a government, Netanyahu's government, that is looking for peace. This is a government that's looking for complete domination over millions of people, up to and including killing them when they resist.

The US position, which isn't just a failed position but a completely phony one, is that there must be an agreement between the two parties. But this is absurd, Orwellian, because it means Israel can veto the basic political rights of the Palestinian people, despite the repeated calls by the UNGA and UNSC and the repeated decisions of the ICJ that Israel's behavior is plainly, flatly, brutally illegal.

The point is the whole world knows what the answer needs to be and it can be that way because the UN has under the UN Charter all the power it needs to put this solution into place. The US remains the lone veto, not because the American people want that but because the Israel Lobby has been able to get American officials to raise their hand to veto peace.

As long as Israel maintains this grotesque extremism and this aggressive show of it like Ben Gvir's walk through Al Aqsa mosque today, we can be sure that at one point or another there will be a massive regional war. Because Israel is intent on provoking it and it seems we don't have in the US the wisdom in our political class to stop this. So I don't know whether it will be today or this week or next week but what we have is a completely lawless and renegade or rogue state of Israel and the US bound with it at the hip no matter what its behavior is... BTW part of the Geneva Conventions is not to attack other country's diplomatic facilities. So long as this kind of recklessness, lawlessness, flagrant boasting as unlimited extremism goes on, we will have a disastrous war.

It is the job of the US president first and foremost to put a brake on the war machine of the US, which is always revving. This is the drama we're in right now because in Ukraine and in Gaza we have the makings of WWIII because we have completely reckless countries, reckless governments doing whatever provocation they can to create a wider war.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-14T17:39:00+00:00

Video clip starts with this from Judge Nap:

News reports are floating out from non-Western sources that the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk, Russia was planned by NATO for several months; rehearsed in Poland; Polish, Estonian, Romanian, British, German and Americans participated; Russian surveillance reports hearing English voices with quote American accents, some of whom are now dead. Does any of this surprise you?

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-14T14:48:26+00:00

Seriously, it's almost as though it were by design.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-12T20:36:13+00:00

Clip:

Go back to the period before the introduction of sanctions in 2014 and even up until 2022, the Russian economy was very heavily colonized by Western firms. That was true in automobiles, it was true in aircraft, it was true in everything from fast food restaurants, big box stores. Western firms were present all throughout the Russian economy.

A great many of them, not all, either chose or were pressured to exit Russia after early 2022. So on what terms did they leave? Well, if they were leaving permanently they were required to sell their capital equipment, their factories and so forth to let's say, a Russian business, which would get a loan from the Russian banks or maybe have other forms of financing, at a very favorable price for the Russians.

So effectively, a lot of capital wealth which was partly owned by the West has been transferred to Russian ownership and you now have an economy that is moving forward and has the advantage, compared to Europe, of relatively low resource costs because Russia is a great producer of resources: oil and gas and fertilizer and food stuffs, etc.

So while the Europeans are paying maybe twice in Germany what they were paying for energy, the Russians are not; they're paying no more and perhaps less than they were paying before the war. Again, I characterize the effect of the sanctions being in certain respects a gift to the Russian economy.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-12T18:42:18+00:00

An outstanding piece from start to finish. Some excerpts, bold added:

Conventional wisdom has it that the US and much of the Western world has polarized into right and left. These tribes are hard-core and share mutual loathing. That model of understanding pervades all popular media and consumes the culture, such that everyone feels the need to choose. It’s simple, harkens back to Cold War binaries, drums up media attention, and further divides the population in ways that benefit the leaders of both sides.

The reality underneath the surface is otherwise. The old ideologies are fractured and most serious people are trying to piece together something other than the old frameworks. The turning was slow at first, probably beginning at the end of the Cold War, but culminated in the response to the Covid crisis. Despite the claim, left and right have never been more scrambled. The reassembling is also occurring right now but it looks much more like the ruling class vs everyone else.

The Covid policy response confounded every ideological outlook. For the center-left that had always trusted public health, seeing the principles of 100 years shredded in an instant was a shock. For the center-right, to see the Republicans in power acquiesce to the idea of “shutting down the economy” was truly hard to believe. The concerns of the traditional civil libertarians, including free speech, were trampled. Those who had traditionally rallied around the rights and interests of business big and small watched with horror as Big Business joined the lockdown armies and small businesses were crushed. The believers in science as a standard of truth to rise above it all were astonished to see every journal and every association compromised by state priorities.

Gradually over the months and years, we have found each other. And what have we found? We’ve discovered that people who were seemingly on different sides solely due to branding of the past had far more in common than we thought.

And as a result, and partly because we were now in a position to trust each other more than we might otherwise, we began to listen to each other. More importantly, we have begun to learn from each other, discovering all the ways in which our previous tribal connections had blinded us to realities that we had right before us the whole time but we simply could not see.

And so those of us who care about holding an accurate understanding of the world had to regroup, draw on what we knew to be true which was confirmed but rethinking postulates and dogmas we assumed to be true but which turned out to be false in the emergency.

What we have learned is that our ideological system not only didn’t protect us; they could not even fully explain the strange realities that unfolded.

All these shifts in the firmament of opinion and politics come from the same place: the desire to take back control of our lives.

In the language of Thomas Kuhn, our times have seen the decisive collapse of old paradigms. They have fallen under the weight of too many anomalies. We have already entered into the pre-paradigmatic stage that seeks a new and more evidence-based orthodoxy of understanding. The only way we can get there is to enter into and enjoy the clash of ideas, in a spirit of freedom and learning.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-12T18:14:04+00:00

It's certainly causing your blind rage against this sub and me personally for things we don't control. Rant away, I've stopped listening.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-11T19:09:40+00:00

Excerpt, bold added:

Shawn Ryan, a retired Navy SEAL and a popular podcaster, recently posted a lengthy conversation with Navy SEAL Captain Brad Geary [linked in Larry's piece]. It is almost six hours long and should probably be posted on Court TV. Here is the bottomline — The Navy and the Pentagon are fabricating evidence to accuse Captain Geary of a dereliction of duty that led to the death of a young sailor who was trying to become a Navy SEAL. If you take the time to watch the video you will realize why the US Navy and most of the military leadership in other commands are a disgrace. There is no honor and no integrity in the chain of command. And I remind you that these are the same people who will send the sons and daughters of Americans into meaningless, even illegal, wars.

The gist of Geary’s case is this. A Navy SEAL candidate died after Hell Week (the final stage of Navy SEAL BUDS training). When the candidate’s car was searched, a large quantity of illegal performance enhancement drugs (aka PEDS) was discovered. Geary, who was the commander of that unit at the time, tried to secure permission to conduct a search of the cars of other candidates on base who were still alive. The lawyers denied the request.

Rather than cop to the fact that one of the SEAL candidates died because his persistent use of PEDS enlarged his heart and compromised other vital organs, the NAVY — the Special Ops folks in particular — tried to cover it up and blame the death on Geary.

The nightmare being visited on Captain Geary could be a preview of coming attractions for my friend, Scott Ritter. Facts do not matter.

What is being done to him is symptomatic of many of the craven, sycophants that now occupy positions of command in the military and intelligence bureaucracies. This has broader implications, at least in my thinking, to the ability of the US military leadership to actually perform their duties with competence. When you are busy playing politics and covering your own ass, you have no time to think seriously about what a war with Russia or Iran means.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-11T18:22:19+00:00

@Chaologistician: Only in shitlib land is it worse to be sexist than a genocidal maniac.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-11T18:07:47+00:00

Excerpt:

Voters in the USA live in fantasy and probably always will. No matter how obvious it is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, not a democracy, the ardent pipe dreams of a new face in the White House go to their heads every four years.

It can only be explained by a combination of intellectual ignorance, the acceptance of propaganda, and the embrace of illusions.

Although it might sound uppity, unless people read books that explain how the political and economic system is constructed and how it operates, they have no hope of understanding why the presidential elections are musical chairs played to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

But the vast majority of people will not read such books because many can’t read or are too lazy or distracted to take the time to switch off digital media and the mainstream corporate press. It is only through slow meditative reading and study of the great analytic books about social structure, propaganda, history, capitalism, and political economy that a person can truly grasp the nature of the power elite’s domination of the US government, the mass media, and the White House.

This ties in with my comment here about one of the biggest human flaws being laziness, but this says it better - the real problem is intellectual laziness. People will exert inordinate amounts of energy on trivialities.

I would also add that many of us quit falling for the voter trap a long time ago, and we are treated as dangerous threats to "democracy" by the lockstepping pipe-dreamers because of it.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-11T17:57:01+00:00

So in your view, why doesn't #1 happen?

Here's my opinion: anyone who's ever worked for an organization knows that most people love to talk about problems and propose abstract solutions but the number who are willing to actually roll up their sleeves and do the necessary grunt work are few and far between. I had the exact same experience as a middle manager in various social services organizations over a 40-year career as I did chairing the board of a charity for 8 years.

The reality is that humans are fundamentally lazy, and i don't point fingers at others without pointing it back to myself because I'm incredibly lazy about many things. But the reason we have such a massively uninformed public is because so many people are too lazy to get informed; it's not impossible but it does take time and effort. Instead they rely on talking points, they take their opinions from newspaper headlines instead of even reading the full article when doing so would expose them to the disclaimers that negate or mitigate what the headline just told them. If you don't even understand what the problem is or that there is one, how likely are you to contribute in a positive way to the solution?

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-11T17:35:06+00:00

I'd gladly repair the 403 error problem if I could but that's a site issue. And despite SaidIt users complaining about it, it doesn't sound like it will change anytime soon. You can see the site owner's comments on it from October of last year here; there's more recent comments where he said why cloudflare was re-implemented after a very brief hiatus but I don't have the link handy.

As for mud-slinging, it is a political sub and politics is a contentious issue. We do try to keep the discussions civil, however; i.e., not resorting to ad homs and such, and this is what I was referring to.

We do not curate content here so as long as a post is relevant and doesn't violate rules against promoting hate and violence or spam, people are free to post what they want.

You're free to post more content of the type you'd like to see. As with any forum, there's no guarantee that a post will gain traction or engagement. As you've probably noticed, this sub is pretty low activity at the moment. During the API blackout at Reddit, many of our members from the WOTB subreddit there came here and there was more going on but that changed once things opened up on Reddit again, no doubt due in part to the annoying cloudflare nonsense. I'd spend a lot less time here myself if I weren't a mod and didn't feel obligated to keep the home fires burning.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-11T17:00:35+00:00

I think the contribution part (work hours) is important, it's my belief you can never fully appreciate something you didn't have to invest in that just gets handed to you.

penelopepnortney · 2024-08-09T20:22:03+00:00

Here's some of the twitter accounts I follow.

These probably provide the most up to date reports on what's happening on the ground:

https://x.com/QudsNen (Quds News Network)

https://x.com/StopZionistHate

https://x.com/UNRWA

Here's some individual accounts that consistently report on Gaza though they cover other things:

https://x.com/dancohen3000 - I think this guy sometimes does on-the-ground reporting

https://x.com/JamesKroeger5

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook - was based for years in Jerusalem, now back in the UK but still the majority of his reporting is on Israel/Gaza

https://x.com/RaniaKhalek

https://x.com/AbbyMartin

https://x.com/dimitrilascaris

https://x.com/Louis_Allday

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