When The Iron Law Of Oligarchy Pinched Joe Biden's Little Narrow Peasant Ass

ZeroHedge  |  As the MSM turns on President Joe Biden heading into the 2024 election, the Washington Post had an interesting piece on Thursday exploring a little-known connection between the Bidens and the du Pont family, which revolves around a 2001 case in which then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) was voted in as a prominent new member of a prestigious Golf Club in Wilmington, Delaware, founded by a du Pont heiress.

That year, Biden, known for his "Middle-Class Joe" image and modest financial status, joined the exclusive Fieldstone Golf Club, a symbol of prestige and power. This move painted a contrasting picture: a politician aligned with working-class values, yet rubbing shoulders with the state's most affluent family, renowned for their chemical company empire.

At the time, Biden walked a delicate line. On one hand, he campaigned as an Amtrak-riding “Middle-Class Joe” striving to make ends meet, and accurately described himself as “one of the poorest members of Congress” — reporting $221,000 in combined income with his wife that year and $360 in charitable contributions. -WaPo

Biden's connection to the du Ponts extended beyond social interactions. His staffing choices, political allies, and personal real estate investments all reflected a deep integration with this influential family. His acquisition of a mansion built by a du Pont member further underscores this relationship.

Yet, Biden's entry into the Fieldstone Golf Club raised eyebrows and led to a brief FBI investigation in 2007. The inquiry centered on how Biden obtained his club membership, especially as it involved an "unused" ticket from a company owned by the club's founder, potentially bypassing a substantial partnership fee. The FBI's probe, which included photographing Biden's personal locker at the club, eventually closed without any allegations of wrongdoing. It's unknown whether Biden was ever informed about the FBI investigation.

In response to an inquiry, the White House told the Post: "These bizarre suggestions from more than 20 years ago are confusing given the fact that the Post is reporting that President Biden was fully responsible for membership dues at the golf club and all out-of-pocket costs associated with it. Frankly, the Post’s own reporting suggests this supposed matter was closed 15 years ago with no finding of wrongdoing. If you want to dig deep on who’s funding a president’s golf habits, we might have some suggestions."

Yet, this story reveals the delicate balance Biden navigated between his public identity as a relatable politician and his private interactions with Delaware's elite. While maintaining his image as a defender of middle-class interests, Biden also sought inclusion in the state's upper echelons, epitomized by his association with the du Ponts and his membership at Fieldstone.

For someone raised in Delaware with Biden’s blue-collar background, “it would be quite an accomplishment” to rise into the same social circles as the du Ponts, said Joseph Hurley, a Wilmington attorney who grew up with Biden and represented Moseley.

“It’s like, ‘I’ve really arrived,’ because the du Ponts were the family, the king’s-family type thing,” he said. -WaPo

Biden often cited the long role of the du Pont family in Delaware in his family story - writing in his memoir that his father moved the family from Scranton, PA to a suburb of Wilmington, which was made more economically stable thanks to so many well-paid DuPont employees.

"DuPont meant security for today and better times for the future," Biden wrote.

Years later, Biden recalled that his mother urged him to value his heritage with as much pride as the state’s best-known family. “Like I’m a du Pont or something,” Biden recalled. “You’re a Biden. Nobody is better than you, and everybody’s equal to you,” his mother told him.

Still, he envied the position and power of those who founded the DuPont company.

Elected to the Senate in 1972, he served in Congress alongside Rep. Pierre “Pete” du Pont IV, who later became Delaware’s governor and ran for president. Biden’s close adviser and Senate chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, had worked for DuPont as a plastics engineer.

 

 

 

Not A Fan Of Mayor Eric Adams - But - What Did He Do To Become An Enemy Of The State?

epochtimes  |  An attorney for New York City Mayor Eric Adams confirmed on Friday that the FBI seized the mayor's phones and an iPad as part of an investigation into his campaign financing.

“After learning of the federal investigation, it was discovered that an individual had recently acted improperly. In the spirit of transparency and cooperation, this behavior was immediately and proactively reported to investigators. The Mayor has been and remains committed to cooperating in this matter," his attorney Boyd Johnson said in a statement.

"On Monday night, the FBI approached the mayor after an event. The Mayor immediately complied with the FBI’s request and provided them with electronic devices. The mayor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and continues to cooperate with the investigation."

Mr. Adams also denied any wrongdoing in a statement.

“As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law and fully cooperate with any sort of investigation—and I will continue to do exactly that. I have nothing to hide,” he stated.

Last week, the FBI raided the home of Brianna Suggs, one of the mayor's chief political consultants, after which the mayor also issued a statement that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

“I feel extremely comfortable about how I comply with rules and procedures. I’ve stated this over and over again. I hold myself to a high standard, I hold my campaign to a high standard, and I hold my staffers at city hall to a high standard,” he said. He also said that Ms. Suggs was a "real professional" and would remain on his team for his 2025 reelection campaign.

“I am outraged and angry if anyone attempted to use the campaign to manipulate our democracy and defraud our campaign,” Mr. Adams said in the statement.

“I want to be clear, I have no knowledge, direct or otherwise, of any improper fundraising activity—and certainly not of any foreign money.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in Manhattan declined to comment.

Investigation

The FBI has not made public details of the investigation, but a search warrant was first reported by the New York Times, which reported that the federal investigation is related to alleged corruption in Mr. Adams's 2021 campaign and possible ties to the Turkish government.

The seized devices, which the FBI has likely made copies of, were returned days later.

The mayor's staff has confirmed that his office has met with the federal prosecutors, but did not disclose what they discussed.

After the raid on Ms. Suggs's home, media reported that the relationship between the mayor's 2021 campaign and Brooklyn-based KSK Construction Group's ties to Turkey is the center of the probe.

The KSK Construction Group owns apartment buildings and condominiums throughout the city. It is owned by the KiSKA Construction Corp., a company that possesses two branches of a Turkish hotel chain in the United States.

Turkey

Mr. Adams has visited Turkey multiple times, including as part of official duties in different public offices.

“I’m probably the only mayor in the history of this city that has not only visited Turkey once, but I think I’m on my sixth or seventh visit to Turkey,” Mr. Adams said at a Turkish flag-raising ceremony in New York recently.

Two of those trips were made while he was the Brooklyn Borough President.

Campaign records show that he received donations from three members of a foundation opened by the son of the Turkish president.

At an event this week, the mayor answered reporters' questions about the probe and his ties to Turkey.

“We just thought it was a great opportunity to exchange ideas as we do with all these…countries and we want to attract businesses here,” he said of the trips, according to The City.

“So Turkey as well as any other country, I want to attract people to the city. There’s nothing specific about that one particular country.”

He added that he frequently told his staff to "follow the law."

“I just strongly believe you have to follow the law. It would really shock me if someone that was hired by my campaign did something that was inappropriate,” he said.

 

The Biden Administration Is At War On Five Fronts - YOU Are The Fifth Front

wired  |  Leaders in the United States Senate have been discussing plans to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) beyond its December 31 deadline by amending must-pass legislation this month.

A senior congressional aide tells WIRED that leadership offices and judiciary sources have both disclosed that discussions are underway about saving the Section 702 program in the short term by attaching an amendment extending it to a bill that is sorely needed to extend federal funding and avert a government shutdown one week from now.

The program, last extended in 2018, is due to expire at the end of the year. Without a vote to reauthorize 702, the US government will lose its ability to obtain year-long “certifications” compelling telecommunications companies to wiretap overseas calls, text messages, and emails without being served individual warrants or subpoenas.

Whether the authority is reauthorized before expiring on January 1 or not, the actual surveillance is likely to continue into the spring, when this year’s certifications expire.

Extending the program by attaching it to another bill that Congress can’t avoid is a risky political maneuver that will cause significant unrest among a majority of House lawmakers and a number of senators who are working to reform the 702 program. A top priority for privacy hawks is curtailing the ability of federal law enforcement to use 702 data “incidentally” collected on Americans. The 702 program collects communications from two sources: internet service providers and the companies that conduct traffic between them. The latter source is tapped less frequently but intercepts a greater quantity of domestic communications.

An aide to Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said Jordan was firmly on the side of the reformers and would not support extending 702 through a temporary measure. Chuck Schumer, the senate majority leader, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.

“America’s security and its citizens’ rights demand more than a short-term fix. Congress has had all year to scrutinize and address this crucial policy question,” says James Czerniawski, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Americans for Prosperity. “Doing a short-term extension punts the ball on the critical reforms desperately needed to this program to protect Americans civil liberties.”

While surveillance of US calls is illegal and unconstitutional without a warrant based on probable cause, the government is permitted to collect domestic calls for specific national security purposes under procedures created to minimize its access to them later. The US National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance for the Pentagon, is only permitted to eavesdrop on foreigners who are overseas. Those foreigners, however, many of whom are likely government officials and not criminals or terrorists, frequently exchange calls and emails with people inside the United States, and those get collected as well.

Roughly a quarter of a million people are targeted by the program each year, and it is estimated that the number of individual messages collected reaches into the hundreds of millions.

While the NSA is not allowed to target the communications of “US persons” (an umbrella term for US citizens, legal residents, and corporations), the government has long been permitted to query the database for information on US persons without obtaining warrants.

It is known that the 702 program collects significant numbers of US communications, but the exact quantity is unknown, even to the government. The NSA argues that it would be unfeasible to count the number of Americans incidentally spied on without analyzing the collection thoroughly, further imperiling people’s rights. Privacy watchdogs who have classified knowledge of the program say the term “incidental” is deceiving, in that it makes the volume of the collection sound small.

The term is also frequently conflated with wiretaps that accidentally target Americans, which is called “inadvertent” collection. Incidental collection is factored into the program as an acceptable risk to Americans’ civil liberties, ameliorated by various internal procedures approved by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Critics of the program say these procedures are frequently violated and do little to nothing to stop the FBI from warrantlessly accessing Americans’ calls and emails without evidence that they’ve committed a crime.

 

Daaaaammmmmmnnnnn!!!!!! (How We Get Our Country Back!!!)

Daaaaammmmmmnnnnn!!!!!!
Vivek took a wrecking ball to these clowns!
pic.twitter.com/fkelt7xtGI

— Cody T (@The_Cody_T) November 9, 2023

 

Why Has The U.S. Sent An Ohio Class Submarine To Israel?

newsweek  |   The Pentagon has further bolstered its naval strike capabilities in the Middle East amid Israel's war against Palestinian militant group Hamas, with United States Central Command—known as CENTCOM, and responsible for U.S. operations in the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia—confirming the weekend arrival of a nuclear submarine in the region.

CENTCOM posted a rare announcement on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday noting that an Ohio-class nuclear submarine "arrived in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility," without offering further details regarding the specific location or the name of the vessel in question. Newsweek has contacted CENTCOM by email to request further information.

The U.S. Navy's Ohio-class offering consists of 14 ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and four cruise missile submarines (SSGNs), the latter converted to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles rather than their original nuclear-armed ballistic missile loadout.

One SSGN can be armed with 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, significantly more than the number carried by U.S. guided-missile destroyers and attack submarines. Tomahawk missiles can carry up to a 1,000-pound high-explosive warhead out to around 1,500 miles.

The Pentagon has been expanding its presence in the Mediterranean and Middle East regions amid Israel's showdown with Hamas in Gaza, prompted by the militant group's October 7 infiltration attack into southern Israel that killed at least 1,400 people, per figures published by the Associated Press. Roughly 240 people were also taken hostage.

Two American nuclear-powered aircraft carriers—the USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower—were sent to the Mediterranean Sea amid rising regional tensions. As of last week, the Dwight D. Eisenhower was operating in the Red Sea. The Pentagon has also dispatched additional air defense capabilities to the region.

Israel's subsequent unprecedented land, air, and sea campaign in the Gaza Strip is ongoing, and has so far killed at least 9,448 Palestinians as of November 4, the Associated Press reported citing the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza.

The threat of regional escalation is looming over the latest conflagration in the besieged Palestinian coastal territory, with multiple Iranian-aligned groups involved. Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza—both funded and armed by Tehran—are continuing their attacks against Israel, and the Houthi movement in Yemen has launched ballistic missiles and drones towards Israel. U.S. forces are also in the firing line, with several American bases in Iraq and Syria repeatedly targeted by Iranian-backed militias.

Fighting is also ongoing along the Lebanese border between Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah, a powerful Shiite militia aligned with Tehran.

On Friday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah distanced himself from the Hamas October 7 attack, saying the operation was "100 percent Palestinian in terms of both decision and execution." Meanwhile, he lauded what he called the "very important and significant" Hezbollah operations against Israel and vowed they would not be "the end" of the Lebanon-based group's involvement.

Did Israel Just Admit That It Has Nuclear Weapons?!?!?!

thecradle  |  Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on 7 November said that recent remarks by Israeli Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu, in which he said dropping a nuclear bomb in the Gaza Strip is “a possibility,” raised a multitude of questions.

"It raised a great number of questions. Question number one: Does this mean we are hearing an official statement acknowledging [Israel’s] possession of nuclear weapons? Accordingly, the next set of questions that everyone has is: Where are the international organizations, including the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]; where are the inspectors?" Zakharova said during a televised interview.

Estimates of Israel's nuclear stockpile range between 80 and 400 warheads, which can be delivered via aircraft, submarine-launched cruise missiles, and the Jericho series of intermediate to intercontinental-range ballistic missiles.

Its first deliverable nuclear weapon is thought to have been completed in late 1966 or early 1967, making it the sixth country in the world to have developed them.

Israel has never openly tested its nuclear weapons nor signed the  Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), making it the world’s only unacknowledged atomic power. The country has also never been subjected to an inspection from the UN nuclear watchdog.

Asked in an interview with Radio Kol Berama last week whether an atomic bomb should be dropped on Gaza, Israeli minister Eliyahu answered: “This is one of the possibilities.”

Eliyahu, from the Jewish supremacist Religious Zionist party, stated further that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” and that, therefore, no humanitarian aid should be allowed into the besieged enclave.

He also expressed his support for depopulating Gaza and reconquering it to reestablish Jewish settlements there. Regarding the Palestinian population, he said: “They can go to Ireland or deserts; the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.”

Eliyahu added that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth.”

In response, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu from participating in cabinet meetings and dismissed his statement, calling it "not based in reality."

Russia's UN envoy has previously stated that, as an occupying state, Israel has “no right" to self-defense.

The Globalist Plan For Gaza

moneycircus  |  Zionism has lost its mask; for it is, and has always been, a tool of globalist imperialism. (We’ll leave the religious aspects until a later article.)

Readers know well the story. The European empires were corporate ventures, beginning around 1600. Operating under royal charter or exemption, corporations carved out territories according to where the narcotics, textiles, spices, minerals and, later, the oil lay.

First they drew on the investment of shareholders, and later the lending of banks which provided a shot of steroids to the business of empire and war, paying for troops and mercenaries, and greater and ever more costly wars.

Today there is oil in them there hills, namely the Golan Heights, for which Rothschild-backed Genie Energy (its board is a Who’s Who of the deep state) secured a license in 2013.

There is oil off the shore of Gaza, in the Mediterranean, and lip-smacking plans for pipelines this way and that, with the potential to flow north to Europe or east to Asia.

We saw this coming more than a year ago — as an outcome of the Ukraine war — when the NordStream pipeline was detonated. See Europe, Gas And The Endgame (Sep 30, 2022)

Longstanding plans have resurfaced for a new canal to rival Egypt’s Suez, flowing from the Red Sea directly to the Levantine gas fields, disappropriating the residents of Gaza.

The British Empire’s favourite narrative is that as herders and nomads they are transients, having no land, nor rights thereto.

And so there are plans to expel much of the population of Gaza to allow for these projects.

See Gaza Depopulation Plan Revealed By Intel Leak (Oct 30, 2023)

While these economic machinations unfold, the general attitude is one of compliance, lock step and censorship. UK political leaders and corporate executives are firing any who call for ceasefire.

Florida has acted against students showing sympathy for Palestinians.

The U.S., France and Britain may outlaw public critique of Zionism just at the moment it is being exposed as an extension of globalism and imperialism.

Such gagging is straight out of the Covid censorship play book, and that is the connection they do not want you to make: exposing the lie that governments care about the people whom they so recently terrorised and poisoned.

For why should the same politicians who marched in lock step to the dictates of big pharma and the military care about Israel except for its role as a regional bridgehead? It is the world’s most-jabbed nation — the laboratory for Pfizer, as prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted.

Palestinians were not given the jab. He had other plans for them.

 

Willful Ignorance...,

Note: Reasonable people believe that thimerosol and aluminum adjuvants alike are neurotoxic. Much the same way we believe that atrazine causes gender dysmorphia. I was chewing this cud on my way to CT last week, and again on the way back from NYC yesterday afternoon, lamenting the fact that the airline no longer gives away peanuts as a snack due to the congenitally weak fail tails who cannot abide exposure to peanuts. Either these genetically underprivileged feebs let us all down because weakness, or, they were exposed to something early in life which rendered them dysfunctional.

BigThink  |  Do you have an uncle who believes vaccines cause autism but refuses to study the reams of research showing them to be safe? What about a friend who avoids information about factory animal farming so they can eat cheap meat guilt-free? Or how about that CEO who claims their business is ethically minded, yet doesn’t investigate its supply chain for exploitation of the environment or the impoverished?

Each is an example of what psychologists call willful ignorance — the intentional act of avoiding information that reveals the negative consequences of one’s actions. Not to judge: We all have a place in our lives where we look the other way and pretend everything is fine. It may be personal, political, or professional in nature, but just below the conscious surface, we know our actions don’t align with our stated values.

“Examples [of] willful ignorance abound in everyday life,” Linh Vu, a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam, said. “We wanted to know just how prevalent and how harmful willful ignorance is, as well as why people engage in it.”

To find out, Vu and a team of researchers performed the first meta-analysis on the current empirical evidence of willful ignorance, and it was published in the Psychological Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association. They compared the results of 22 studies with a total of more than 6,000 participants. Here’s what they found. 

Moral wiggle room

The classic experiment for studying willful ignorance is known as the moral wiggle room task. It was designed by Jason Dana, an associate professor of marketing and management at Yale. Participants are randomly assigned the role of decision-maker or recipient. The decision-maker is given a choice: They can take either a $5 or $6 payout. If they take the $5 payout, the recipient will receive $5 as well. If they take the $6 payout, the recipient will receive $1.

When provided with this information by a researcher, the majority of decision-makers act altruistically. They sacrifice the slightly larger payout for themselves to give the recipient more money. On average, only about a quarter of decision-makers act selfishly. But this full-information condition is simply the control. The experiment really begins when the researchers become less forthcoming.

In the experimental condition, the decision-makers can still choose between the $5 or $6 payouts, but this time they are not told what the recipient will receive. There’s a 50-50 chance the recipient will receive $5 or $1. Importantly, the decision-makers can ask the researchers what payout the recipient will receive, and they can do so at no cost to themselves. In other words, while the decision-makers start out blind to the consequences of their actions, they don’t have to stay that way if they don’t want to.

 

 

The Willful Ignorance Of The Chosen

This is such an extraordinary speech. I only ask of my followers to watch this. Then I leave you alonepic.twitter.com/rZLQKD2BMX

— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) November 6, 2023

 

"Our" Crisis du Jour Makes It Clear That The U.S. Government Is A Purchased Entity

PCR  |  US Representative Matt Gaetz  has courage and principles, for the most part good ones.  

It was Gaetz who had the courage and leadership ability to get rid of Rino McCarthy as Speaker of the House.

It is Gaetz who understands that hardly any member of Congress in either party represents Americans.  Instead, they represent the military/security complex’s power and profits, the profits of the pharmaceutical companies,  the profits of agri-business (ethanol for example), the profits of Wall Street, the profits of energy, timber, and mining, and so forth.  And especially, the US Congress represents the artificial state of Israel and all of Israel’s agendas.  

Indeed, Matt Gaetz himself cannot escape having to support an occupier of Palestinians’ land, claiming that it is Israel’s.  The fact that even a brave man like Matt Gaetz has to support an aggressor against a people abandoned by the “moral” West shows how captured the US government is at all levels by vested monied interests.

Gaetz along with the entirely of the US Congress and the President  are purchased by the billions of dollars that American taxpayers are forced to hand over to Israel each year. American taxpayers are forced to give Israel annually billions of dollars that are used to purchase our government. Israel, considered a rich country, does not need foreign aid, but any member of Congress who does not vote for  Israel’s billions finds in his next election a challenger financed by Israel’s billions  and himself a victim of Israel’s slander machine. The same thing happens if you vote against an excessive military/security budget or against the agendas of powerful organized interests.  A government whose election is financed by interest groups has to represent those interest groups.

So, obviously, the solution is not term limits on members of Congress.  The solution is to take the money that Congress gives Israel to buy our government out of politics along with the ability of corporations to purchase the US government, thanks to an  unconstitutional ruling of the  US Supreme Court that it is a “free speech right”  for corporations and foreign interests to purchase the US government for their own use. 

There you have it. The US government is a purchased entity. It has nothing whatsoever to do with American interests or protecting the interests of the American people.

What needs to be done?

Matt Gaetz, the conservatives and libertarians naively  think that term limits is the answer.  This is another of Americans’ insouciant mistakes. The real solution is to extend, not limit, the terms of members of Congress and to give Congress the police powers  on which Congress’ enemy–the executive branch–has a monopoly. The corrupt Justice Department can frame up and arrest  members of Congress, and Congress has no corresponding powers.

The founding fathers distrusted democracy because of their fear of ignorant mobs. For this reason they limited the terms of US Representatives to two years.    So US Representatives and Senators are turned into whores prostituting themselves for reelection money as soon as they are elected. It is never possible for Congress or the President to represent American’s interests.

This is because of money.  The solution is to take out of politics the ability of corporations, Israel, and foreign interests to purchase the services of the US Government, which as a result of interest group funding of election campaigns turns the US government into a whore.  The Founding Fathers should have lengthened the terms of Congress and the President, prohibited all outside money from financing election campaigns, and financed at taxpayer expense free speech forums for candidates to debate their differences.  They also made a mistake by creating a legislative body too large for a common interest to emerge. This failure of the Founding Fathers doomed America to the control of vested interests.  The Democrats when they limited the terms of committee chairmen eliminated legislative power centers that could stand up to the executive branch and thereby weakened Congress as an institution.

Your Stupid Smirk Won't Change The Fact...,

Best ever response to the Zionist propaganda line: ‘why don’t the neighbouring Arab countries want the Palestinians?’@normfinkelstein : ‘you’re smiling but your stupid smirk won’t change the fact the argument you used was used by Hitler to justify the extermination of the Jews’ pic.twitter.com/8UPuNB9pLh

— sheree (@tinyfleu) November 5, 2023

 

Between Gaza And Ukraine

globaltimes  |  The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is exacerbating. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made four visits to Israel since October 7, but what he talked about was the US support for Israel instead of a ceasefire.

With each day that a ceasefire is delayed, Palestinians' animosity toward Israel deepens. It will definitely create a longer-term and more devastating disaster in the region already plagued by decades of war.

When the conflict between Palestine and Israel first broke out, China immediately expressed its stance, emphasizing that the top priority is to prevent a broader humanitarian disaster and that the fundamental way out is to implement the "two-state solution." On many occasions since then, China has repeatedly stressed the importance and urgency of returning to the "two-state solution."

However, the US and European countries have not actively responded to this call of conscience. Instead, they have been constrained by domestic politics and wavered, preventing major countries from  reaching an immediate consensus.

It was not until Israel's military operations in Gaza had caused tens of thousands of casualties, including scores of women and children, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people that leaders in the US and European countries seemed to realize the need to return to the two-state solution. US President Joe Biden and some European leaders have expressed their stance on this recently.

Although the current suffering in the Middle East is not directly caused by the US and Europe, as countries deeply involved in the geopolitical game there since World War II, they bear a heavy responsibility for the resumption of the war.

It is precisely because of the US' unlimited support for Israel and the cowardice of the US and Europe that led to the failure to take action to maintain peace. Israel marched into Gaza without any scruples, carrying US-made weapons and equipment. 

So far, the US has not called for shifting the focus to a ceasefire. Instead, it supported Israel's retaliatory strikes against Gaza and enhanced the deployment of force to restrain the involvement of other forces in the Middle East.

MUCH MORE Impressed With Mark Crispin Miller Than I Am With Myself!!!

off-guardian  |   There is one thing that’s new about this latest propaganda drive since January, 2020. Whereas the others all united what we (very loosely) call “the left” (along with certain sectors of the GOP) against the “far-right” bogey, this one has abruptly split that gross alliance, as both parties—Trump et al. included—and the “liberal media” have (predictably) swung virulently Zionist, while the “woke” masses (predictably, and, often, virulently) “stand with Palestine,” along with some few politicians, movie stars and rappers. This livid falling-out has only weakened the antagonists, since both sides are disabled by a common blindness to what’s really happening to them both (and all the rest of us).

“We are the people of light, they are the people of darkness—and light shall triumph over darkness.” Thus spake Netanyahu two days ago, spelling out the Manichaean vision that “our free press” has, by and large, been variously pitching since October 7, and that has Zionists beside themselves with open genocidal rage, not just at Hamas, and/or its armed confederates, but at the Gazans overall, and, no doubt, all Palestinians.

It was, of course, the “sudden” horror of Hamas’s attack, and the endless invocation of the Holocaust by the Israeli government (and, therefore, by “our free press”), that now has Zionists not only cheering as the IDF kills thousands more than Hamas killed (and forcibly “relocates” many thousands more), but attacking anyone who isn’t cheering, too, demanding that whoever doesn’t “stand with Israel” be censored, fired, expelled from school or otherwise eliminated in a crackdown that makes “cancel culture” seem (almost) benign.

This ferocious drive against the Palestinians, and anyone who advocates on their behalf, is wholly based on the Official Story that “our free press” (as usual) will not question, even though the Israeli people don’t believe it, since there is overwhelming evidence against it—evidence that “our free press” will not report, just as it has long blacked out the agony in Gaza (and those eight years of Nazi violence in East Ukraine).

And as the Zionists have been disastrously misled by the Official Story, so have those who applauded Hamas’s bloody raids, voicing “exhilaration” over what they took to be a righteous counter-blow against the occupying power, like the heroic uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. While Gaza does recall the Warsaw ghetto, Hamas’s “surprise attack” does not recall that uprising, which actually did come as a surprise (and, of course, killed no civilians), whereas “October 7” clearly was an “inside job,” as the Israeli people know—an inconvenient fact for all who now want to see still more people die, whether Israelis, Gazans, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims or whomever else they hate, for whatever reason (or no reason).

So let us finally pose the crucial question: Who benefits from the catastrophe that may now sweep us all away, if we don’t break the spell of the Official Story? It’s surely not the Zionists, since Netanyahu obviously isn’t one, or he wouldn’t have forced “vaccination” on his people, through what may well have been the toughest “vaccine” mandate in the world. Despite his reputation, and his demagogic rhetoric, Netanyahu would appear to be a globalist, not a Zionist.

Certainly this latest melodrama is now speedily intensifying the repressive trends that started with the rollout of “the virus,” from ever-tighter censorship, to still “smarter” surveillance, to the splintering of opposition, to the exacerbation of the refugee crisis, and so on, as this acute OffGuardian piece makes clear:

The Israel-Hamas War is ALREADY Pushing the Great Reset Agenda”
Kit Knightly, Off-Guardian.org, October 20 2023

Now, let’s return to the only bit of good news in this whole hyper-barbaric episode—that the Israeli people get it, not just about Hamas’s “surprise attack,” but about the “vaccination” drive that Netanyahu forced on them, and which now has them “dying suddenly” week after week, along with other peoples the world over.

Could it be that Netanyahu actually is not the ultimate or only author of “October 7,” and that its purpose wasn’t just to save his hide politically?

Is it not possible that, just as “his” drive to “vaccinate” all the Israeli people was probably dictated from on high, he organized “October 7,” or okayed it, on the orders of the same powers who’ve been ravaging the world since January, 2020?

Not only is this crisis serving perfectly to foster still more chaos, division and economic ruination overall, but, more precisely, it has (at least for now) completely drowned out the Israelis’ quiet, shared awareness that “vaccination” is a stroke of democide, imposed worldwide not with the noble goal of “saving lives,” but—on the contrary—to end as many lives as possible, for the purpose of extreme depopulation everywhere (as Bill Gates once incautiously revealed, when he referred to the eventual concluding phase of global “vaccination” as “the final solution”).

The last thing that our masters want is for the Israelis’ consciousness of what’s been done to them to spread to other countries, so that enough of us wake up, and unify enough to put an end to these catastrophes at last.

And so those whose eyes are now so full of blood that they just want to see more people die—whether Jews or Palestinians—had better understand, for their own sake, that those behind the “vaccination” drive agree with you, and with your enemy, since they want nearly all of us to die, and the sooner the better.

So if you can’t stop hating any others to the point of wanting them all dead, go ahead and keep it up. It’s your funeral (assuming anyone will be around to bury you).

The Biden Administration Budgeted For The Ethnic Cleansing Of Gaza

stephensemler  |   The White House deployed the Secretaries of Defense and State to Capitol Hill this morning to sell Biden’s $106 billion spending request, which includes billions in military aid for Israel. With rising concerns that Israel’s ongoing military offensive will amount to mass ethnic cleansing, a bunch of protestors thankfully attended the congressional hearing too.

The Protestors Are Right

As this newsletter’s resident budget boffin, I want to explain why the activists were right to protest this specific spending plan. Biden’s proposal lists up to $23.5 billion in funding related to Israel’s military offensive: $8.7 billion in direct military aid, $5.6 billion in potential long-term military support, up to $3.5 billion for State Department’s migration assistance programs, and up to $5.7 billion for USAID’s humanitarian aid programs.1

All of it supports the forced displacement of Palestinians. Based on my reading of the tea leaves — and the 69-page PDF from the White House Office of Management Budget detailing the $106 billion request — I believe Biden is prepared to subsidize ethnic cleansing2 on a historic scale. Here’s how.

The $8.7 billion in military aid would bankroll Israel’s ongoing violent displacement of Palestinian civilians by sustaining its bombing campaign and ground invasion. The other $5.6 billion in military spending is there to support a bloody, protracted invasion of Gaza (which Israeli military leaders openly admit is a real possibility) by boosting US weapons stockpiles in Israel that Israel can draw from upon request, and funding the president’s new authority to send Israel any weapon directly from Pentagon stocks (with minimal oversight). Biden’s plan would primarily manage the humanitarian fallout not by securing Gaza, but by financing mass migration. Judging by how they were written in the proposal, the intent behind the $3.5 billion request for migration assistance is to manage near-term displacement, and the $5.7 billion in humanitarian relief is to accommodate the long-term (and perhaps permanent) mass displacement of Palestinian civilians.

Israeli leaders have expressed interest in ultimately shrinking Palestinian territory and greatly reducing the number of people living in it, and formalized plans for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza have recently emerged from the country’s political establishment. As president, Biden could prevent Israel from weaponizing mass migration, but he chose to budget for it instead.

Were You Aware Of The Secret U.S. Military Bases In Israel?

theintercept  |  Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.

On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.

Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.

The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”

Rare acknowledgment of the U.S. military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the U.S. government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.” Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.”

Jewish Antisemitism Toward Arabs Was Hamas' Strategic Opportunity

[Thread] For the third weekend in a row, cities across Europe 🇪🇺 have seen massive demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine 🇵🇸

1) London: A wall of humanity marches through the city center. Some estimates say 500,000 people are there. pic.twitter.com/2KGubzJvhG

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) October 28, 2023

johnhelmer  |  If we abstract from the versions about the eschatological motives of the parties to the conflict and various hypotheses about the scenario of how events developed,  the Al-Aqsa Flood operation exposed three  vulnerabilities of the Israelis of a military intelligence nature:

— a failure in strategic intelligence regarding the plans and intentions of Hamas. Although, based on the received HUMINT [human intelligence] data, there were warnings from the Egyptian intelligence services. The Israelis position their technical intelligence capabilities as dominant [above their human intelligence].

— the discrepancy between the capabilities of the advanced, expensive Iron Dome missile defense system and the requirements for repelling the direct and asymmetric threats [employed by Hamas].

— strategic miscalculation in the use of a complex, high-tech, expensive security barrier around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The construction of the  barrier strategically set restrictions on offensive  manoeuvre for the IDF and the ability of the Israelis to anticipate. Hamas has gained thereby the operational initiative – the mobility of their forces against the static dispersion of the Israelis.  Considering the barrier impenetrable before the operation, the Israelis had relocated most of their regular forces to northern-sector control of the territories near the borders of Lebanon and Syria,and to the West Bank.

The “great Israeli wall” has appeared to be almost totally useless. Hamas overcame it in a short time, which allowed it to operate almost unhindered in the adjacent territories. The disabling of [the IDF’s] technological means demonstrated the lack of the human resources to respond. In terms of communications, the dependence of the Israeli forces on wireless data transmission has become a critical vulnerability.

As in the case of Iron Dome, the Israelis relied on technological solutions, methods,  and thinking, neglecting the principle of war being waged by people, not by  machines (yet). To this is added a doctrinal and strategic discrepancy with the actual conditions of combat. Technological superiority was placed at the forefront, but the complex systems showed vulnerability to a cascade of failures, leading the system to collapse. A regional conflict would make this catastrophic. 

[*]  The lead cartoons are, left, by Carlos Latuff in Brazil in 2006  and, right, by Mr Fish in the US (Harper’s Magazine) also in 2006. They have been reproduced by Evan Jones in a collection of western media cartoons on the meaning of anti-Semitism as an information warfare weapon in US-Israeli military operations against the Arabs until editorial censorship was imposed in both the UK and US. Click to read.  

[**] Read the 80-year old story of the German General Staff plans for the Arab states and Hitler’s failure to implement them, followed by the plans of Coon, the OSS, and the CIA homicidalists against the Arabs, which are still being followed in Washington and Tel Aviv. Click.  On Saturday night, October 28, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed his intelligence services and military staff for failing to warn him of the Hamas war plan. Under counter-attack from the services and the military, Netanyahu then apologised and retracted his claims. The Israeli press record of the episode reveals that the entire Israeli political and military leadership shares the same racial superiority doctrine.  

[***] In a special session of security officials called to discuss the Makhachkala airport incidents, President Vladimir Putin said: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of the peoples of the Middle East and other regions of the world, who organizes deadly chaos, who benefits from it. Today, in my opinion, it has already become obvious and understandable for everyone – customers act openly and brazenly. It is the current ruling elites of the United States and their satellites that are the main beneficiaries of global instability. They extract their bloody rent from it. Their strategy is also obvious. The United States as a global superpower – everyone sees it, understands it, even according to trends in the global economy – is weakening, losing its position. The American-style world, with one hegemon, is being destroyed, is leaving, gradually but steadily going into the past…The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired, including through social networks, not least from the territory of Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western special services. I want to ask myself in this regard: is it possible to help Palestine by trying to attack the Tats and their families? Tats, by the way, are the titular nation in Dagestan. Palestine can only be helped in the fight against those who are behind this tragedy. We, Russia, are fighting them as part of a special military operation, it is with them – both for ourselves and for those who strive for real, true freedom.” 


Antisemitism Is Special Bigotry Because Jews Are THE Special People

timesofisrael  |  Bias against homelands can hurt minorities in the Diaspora. Prejudices against Africans (‘primitives,’ ‘hotheads’) devalue Black migrants around the world. Prejudices against Asians (‘mystical people’) dehumanize Asian migrants the world over. But propaganda against Israel hurts Jews in their Diaspora like no other minority. Zionism is to Jews what feminism is to women. Men who ‘like women but not feminists’ show they don’t like women; rather, they like being served. Jews and Gentiles who ‘like Jews but not Zionists’ show they like Jews as long as they feel scared all the time so that they can be manipulated to serve and comfort the Gentile powers to be; but not when they are independent and proud of themselves. 

Judaism laid much of the foundation of all Monotheism (One G^d), Science (One Universe), and Democracy (Equality) in the world. That’s why hatred of Jews is the ultimate ungratefulness, throwing mud on Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Einstein, and Herzl. And therefore, the Holocaust doesn’t compare to any other genocide, Armenian included—though they are all horrific.

It seems that Intersectionality was designed to promote Antisemitic. It advocates comparing oppressions and seeing how they are all interwoven. Because Antisemitism is so unique, and because Jews are kept hostage by the top level of societies (and blamed for all ills), it often ends up uniting all oppressed groups against the Jews, the victims of the oldest hatred.

And so, you see there is reason not to just regard Antisemitism as one of the forms of Racism. Jews-oppression is too specific. It’s a special bigotry.

 

 

For Halloween Blinken Dressed His Child As The Cucaracha Of Kiev...,

NYPost  |  Secretary of State Antony Blinken dressed his 4-year-old son as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a Halloween event with President Biden on the White House lawn Monday night.

Biden gave the young “Zelensky,” who wore a dark green sweatshirt, a box of M&Ms bearing the presidential seal — after asking Congress earlier this month to give another $61.4 billion for the real deal, on top of $113 billion already appropriated to help Kyiv resist Russia’s 20-month-old invasion.

Blinken was accompanied by his wife, Biden’s White House cabinet secretary Evan Ryan, and their 3-year-old daughter, who was dressed in the Ukrainian flag’s blue-and-yellow scheme.

The top US diplomat’s grandfather, Moritz Blinken, was born in Ukraine’s capital, then part of the Russian empire, in 1900 and immigrated to the US with his family as a 4-year-old.

Blinken’s ancestors were, like Zelensky, Ukrainian Jews.

The Empire Can't Spin The Murder Of Thousands Of Children

🇵🇸🇮🇱🚨‼️ “We wrote their names on the children’s bodies so that we would recognize them when they were torn into pieces.” pic.twitter.com/vQFG9njJwS

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) October 29, 2023

catyjohnstone |  Propagandists are used to having a lot more wiggle room to work with than this. They’re used to interfacing with a complex matrix of narrative and manipulating it to distort the public’s understanding of what’s going on. But raw video footage of a mother clutching the tattered remains of a child is not narrative. Satellite images of powdered city blocks are not narrative. It’s just reality. Right there in your face.

Western civilization is dominated by propaganda. The “freedom” and “democracy” we think we have is an illusion that has been carefully cultivated by those who manipulate the way we think, speak, act and vote by mass-scale psychological manipulation — as Chomsky says, propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. A mind-controlled dystopia is not some dark future that awaits humanity if things go terribly wrong for us; it is already presently the case.

Propagandists are able to control civilization so effectively because they understand that humans are storytelling creatures whose lives are dominated by mental narrative, so if you can control the narratives the humans are telling each other, you can control the humans. A globe-spanning empire centralized around the United States depends heavily on its ability to indoctrinate us with subtle mass media messaging from a very early age.

The Gaza massacre throws a big fat monkey wrench in all that, because the raw data coming out of it is so transparently horrifying that no amount of narrative spin can make it look acceptable. The fact that the US and its allies are helping Israel murder children by the thousands is a giant glitch in the narrative matrix.

The longer this continues, the more people are going to wake up out of the propaganda-induced coma the empire has had them in all their lives. The more people are going to realize that their government is not what it has been pretending to be and the media have not been telling them the truth about the world. As the western empire backs the slaughter of thousands of children, the discrepancies between what the propaganda tells us about our society and what our society actually is are being brightly illuminated.

By murdering thousands of children in Gaza, the empire has exposed its true face in front of everyone. And the people aren’t liking what they see.

Eyes are opening everywhere. People are being radicalized in record numbers. The streets are being flooded with protesters. Very inconvenient questions are being asked. Rigorous scrutiny is being applied in places it was seldom applied before. Light is shining in through cracks that weren’t there before.

This is all so, so horrible and so, so painful to watch day in and day out. But something is moving underneath it all. Something big. The empire has done irreparable harm to its ability to keep everyone sleeping and complacent going forward. A healthy world may be in our future yet.

 

 

 

Why Two Carrier Groups Are A Useless Response To Gaza

Aurelian2022  |  In reality, the relationship between the use of force and the attainment of a defined political objective is a highly complex, inexact and uncertain art, and is much easier to explain theoretically than to do in practice. It implies a whole series of complicated, asserted relationships that don’t necessarily exist tidily in real life. To begin with, of course, you need to have a defined political objective, which is agreed, practicable and measurable. Bombing somebody, or firing off some shells like the French ship, is not an objective in itself, and is often indistinguishable from a display of pique to make yourself feel better. What the military call the “end-state” has to be clearly distinguishable from the current state, not to mention better than it, or there is no point in pursuing it.

You also have to be reasonably sure of how the political end-state will play out, or you could be in a worse situation than you were at the start. This implies a realistic knowledge of the political situation you are trying to affect, and what the political consequences of your military actions might be. So the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 was intended to humiliate the government of Slobodan Milosevic by forcing the surrender of Kosovo, and so remove him from power in the elections the following year. It was assumed that the government that replaced his would be grateful to NATO for bombing them, and would adopt a pro-western, pro-NATO stance. What was not anticipated  (well, except by those of us who were paying attention) was that Milosevic would be brought down by nationalist agitation, and replaced by a hard-line nationalist President, Kostunica. And as for the idea that a teetering Gaddafi, perhaps on the point of being overthrown in 2011, could be pushed over the brink by western intervention, leading to a stable, pro-western democratic system … well if there is a stronger word than “catastrophic” to put before “misunderstanding” let’s by all means use it. Oh, and let’s not even get into the political fantasies of western capitals about what would follow the forced resignation of Vladimir Putin.

So this use-of-force-for political-objectives thing looks a bit more complicated than we thought at first sight, doesn’t it? It also means that you might just get your fingers trapped in the wringer. For example, the US has deployed two carrier battle groups to the eastern Mediterranean. Now, this is a traditional action of governments that have no other options really open to them, and not, of itself, necessarily criticable. In the circumstances there is a political obligation to do something, whatever that something might be. And to be fair, carriers are very useful for evacuating foreign nationals, under military protection or otherwise, as the French showed in Beirut in 2006.

The problem is that it’s virtually certain that the carrier groups have been deployed according to this “do something” logic, which is to say that there is almost certainly no accompanying political strategy: as often, the US is making it up as it goes along. (Talking about “deterrence” or “stabilisation” is not a strategy, it’s an attempt at a justification.) The difficulty with all such deployments, though, is that they are much easier to start than stop. To withdraw the force is to send a political message that you think the crisis is over, or at least manageable, which may not be the message you want to send. So you keep the force in position, and eventually you replace it, because you don’t have any choice. The difficulty is that, apart from evacuations, there’s almost nothing for which the career group can be usefully employed. Intelligence gathering maybe, but there are far easier and more discreet ways of doing that. In the meantime, they are large targets, probably limited to flying patrols and not much else. (I’m assuming that the US would not be so insane as to join in the bombardment of Gaza itself.)

In turn, this reflects the effective impotence of the US in the present conflict. Its historical attempt to combine the positions of independent facilitator with doglike devotion to one side was always dubious, but was tolerated insofar as the country was actually able to have some influence. That’s clearly no longer true. Nobody in the Arab world is going to be influenced by the US now, and it has also ruled itself out of any influence over Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. Biden’s initial maximalist rhetoric has effectively given away most of the influence the US might have been able to assert over Israel as well. Which doesn’t leave a lot, and doesn’t leave a lot for US military power to actually do, either.

In any event, even if a decision were made to use military power, in a political vacuum, and just to look threatening, what could the US actually do? For the moment, nothing. Now if a major ground invasion were to start in Gaza, and if Hezbollah were to react militarily along the northern frontier, then theoretically the US could target them, but with massive attendant risks to the Lebanese population, and considerable risk of casualties to itself, in other places where there are US troops. Put simply, an attack agains Hezbollah which is large enough to make a difference could cause massive collateral damage to Lebanon, whereas anything smaller will not make a difference anyway. The US has invested massively in the stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that investment in jeopardy now.

There is certainly every chance that Iran would consider a large-scale attack on Hezbollah to be an unfriendly action, and then retaliate. The problem for the Americans is that the Iranians can inflict far more damage on them and their interests than they can inflict on the Iranians. This is nothing to do with the sophistication, or even numbers, of weapons: it’s a lot more mundane than that. Get out a map, and have a look at the region, and ask yourself, where could US carrier groups safely go? Which countries could be expected to provide airfields, ports and harbours and logistic depots? In the present political situation, the answer is probably “none.” No doubt an air- and sea-launched missile attack on Iran could do some damage, but what would be the point? What possible proportional political objective could be served thereby? No conceivable amount of damage caused to Iran could compel the government, for example, to cut off support for Hezbollah, or for the current government in Syria. By contrast, severe damage to a single carrier, even if it were not sunk, would  be enough to drive the US  out of the region.

I think we can draw some general lessons from these examples, which in turn may help us understand how the current Gaza crisis may eventually resolve itself. We can start by recalling that the theory of using military power to achieve political end-states is important, but primarily as a limitation. That’s to say that, whilst military action without a political objective is pointless, the mere fact of starting military action towards a declared political end-state doesn’t mean that you will automatically get there. You still have to do the hard work of turning the one into the other, and it’s that that I want to talk about now.

Consider a political end-state of some kind. It doesn’t have to be heaven on earth or for that matter the surrender of your enemy. It can be something simpler, such as an enforceable decision by your neighbour to stop supporting separatist groups in your country. So let’s assume you define that political end-state, which we’ll call P(E). Now the first thing to say is that this political end-state must actually be politically (not just militarily) possible. It must be within the capacity of the other government to agree to, or failing that the balance of political forces at the end of the conflict must at least make it possible. It is pointless and dangerous to attempt to force a country or a political actor do do something that is beyond their power to do; not that this hasn’t been attempted often enough.