darkfutura |The one seeming contradiction is that these elites
predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000
people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large
cities like New York, where they would in fact be
forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we
know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters
within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama
in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely
deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but
contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun
kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream
of society.
In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have
always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and
social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an
ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to
interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc.,
and note how they exclusively mainline the most
mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes
its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off
from the real outside world of human experience.
As the earlier NYPost article described:
If
America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its
elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an
effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the
legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.
This
explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as
that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is
not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who
repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue
get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported
earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the
average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief
in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service
to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential
‘threat’.
The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create
divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to
female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:
The
Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two
generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine
methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.
Women
are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the
social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are
being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that
even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to
the ‘Longhouse’:
This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:
As
everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most
disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly
radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting
ways:
As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:
Most
of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment
story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite
political opinions
But one of the most
revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of
touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the
plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual
culture war issues:
“The
biggest news media companies are privately owned and operate without
direct government control, in contrast to the state-controlled media
landscape in Russia,” writes Politico’s Sergey Goryashko. “Russian state
TV and the primary news agencies there are the property of the
government, and the Kremlin controls other media or destroys those not
willing to collaborate.”
At the bottom of the article is a line which reads as follows: “Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.”
I
really couldn’t have come up with a more perfect illustration of what
I’m talking about here than the US government and its European lackeys
running a complex and elaborate project to further slant European media
against the Russian Federation, which then manifests as a Politico
article calling Putin a liar and claiming propaganda does not exist in
the west.
There’s an old joke that goes like this:
A Soviet and an American are on an airplane seated next to each other.
“Why are you flying to the US?” asks the American.
“To study American propaganda,” replies the Soviet.
“What American propaganda?” asks the American.
“Exactly,” the Soviet replies.
In
reality the nature of the US-centralized empire allows it to run a
massive, nonstop international propaganda campaign through mass media
platforms which are mostly privately owned. A diverse network of factors
feeds into this dynamic which I’ve detailed in my unusually lengthy
article “15 Reasons Why Mass Media Employees Act Like Propagandists”,
but the gist of it is that anyone who’s wealthy enough to control a
mass media platform is going to have a vested interest in preserving the
status quo upon which their wealth is premised, and they will cooperate
with establishment power structures in various ways toward that end.
The
fact that these mass media outlets look independent but function as
propaganda organs for the US empire allows its propaganda to fly into
people’s minds without triggering any gag reflex of critical thinking or
skepticism, which wouldn’t be the case if people knew those outlets
were feeding them propaganda. Propaganda only really has persuasive power if you don’t know it’s happening to you.
twitter | So why is Israel doing this? Is there anything in it for Israel but virtually global hate? Because it doesn't seems like there is.
A couple days ago I said I was going to provide an explanation why Israel has chosen to conduct itself like it has. Here it is. It's very provocative, and it's going to mess with your mind quite a bit.
I will also remind you that I am Jewish and I have the perfect right to my own opinion on Jewish affairs. - Before I go on, and as I know many people are going to read this, make sure that you follow me. What I have to say doesn't end here. Stay connected. - Throughout these months, I am sure you have asked yourselves why Israel is acting as if its design is to maximize the amount of hate it stands to receive from a global community of shocked and terrified people.
There have been so many occasions for this, but I'll bet last week, when IDF soldiers executed 3 Palestinian men in a hospital, it stood out to you as outrageously brazen.
That's because the IDF took special care to get it televised. They didn't confiscate cameras or servers, and didn't hack or destroyed files. It's almost as if they were acting for the cameras.
A world wide audiences got the message, and everyone was talking about Fauda, the TV series meant to portray the humane face of Israel's apartheid.
How peculiar, right? And wait, what about all those videos by soldiers of themselves joyfully blowing up stuff? And what about the naked men filmed in their humiliated hundreds?
Let me reminds you, for contrast, that in two years of Russia's was in Ukraine, not once have you seen Russian soldiers celebrating the destruction of civilian infrastructure. And you've never seen naked and humiliated Ukrainian soldiers loaded on trucks, or sitting on the ground, eyes covered.
There may have been things like that happening. We don't know. But if scenes like these actually occurred, the Russian military took special care to conceal them from us. The IDF did not. Why? - Keep this question in mind, and let's make it ever more interesting. Let's ask: what is the justification, the reason, or cause for the existence of organizations such as AIPAC and ADL? I mean, seriously. Are American Jews in so much danger, and face so much persecution in the US, that perpetual billion-dollar operations are required to guard them from harm? Are Jews disproportionally jailed in the US? Designated victims of violent crime? Harassed by the authorities? Cannot be out on the street? Is American society that laser-focused on hating Jews? Aren't there other American communities who are more exposed to danger, harassment, poverty and crime? I mean, seriously?
And say an organization like AIPAC does have some nostalgic reason for being, what is doing pushing for wars? More specifically and currently: why are Jewish organizations in the US, alongside Israel, doing all they possibly can to place Jews at the epicenter of a possible world war?
Why are organizations that are supposed to keep Jews safe making Jewish affairs the formal declared reason for a clash and a war the could destroy civilization as we know it? Isn't it the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing? Say like a military that constantly broadcasts its own astonishing cruelty, and destroys its own image? - We are getting closer. But one more hurdle needs to be removed for us to see the answer. Stay sharp. - Two very obvious opposites in seeing the world: paranoia and basic trust. This is true for people, but it is just as valid for political societies. Some societies are more paranoid and some are more relaxed, but no society on earth is more paranoid than the super-mega-ultra Jewish part of the Jewish people, or wider society. There is no other group on earth the world is so contently on its feet defending.
No other society, too, decided to use trauma as the center of its identity. I know many of you, especially Americans, have come to see this as just Jewish. But it is not so (and maybe you need a Mizrahi Jew to tell you this). It is one strand of Jewish perception that derives its sense of identity from pogroms and the Holocaust. Israel and IPAC act like this is natural and the only way to be Jewish. That's nonsense.
Pogroms and the Holocaust were not all the experience of all the Jews. Many Jewish communities knew long percids of safety and prosperity. Not all Jews were victims all the time, and Jews are definitely not the only victims humanity has even known. Personally I always found it more than a little offsetting to hear American Jews refer to their misery and victimhood constantly, in a country where millions of natives, organized in hundreds and thousands of flourishing communities, were wiped of the face of the planet. A country and culture that operated industrial scale slavery of black people for hundreds and hundreds of years, and fought not to recognize them as equal humans for centuries more.
I would never do that.
A country that has so much terrible, dehumanizing poverty and homelessness, so much pain. How come the most successful, heavily represented in all things power and money minority in this society is also its greatest victim?
I know this is the norm and this is the description of reality I should conform to, but no. It doesn't make sense. - You can choose trauma and paranoia or trust and basic optimism as your guide in life. But the biggest Jewish organization in our lifetime chose one clear path: that of trauma, suspicion and what can be called Armageddonism. Always alert. Always someone out there to get you. Everybody hates us.
And as we're almost at the end of it, I will say the final part a little more directly. In choosing trauma and paranoia, both Israel and AIPAC found and unexpected source of false power.
Because existential fear can bring a society of people together, but it's not going to be a society many people would want to live in.
So you keep people afraid all the time, and you make sure they are feeling, or actually being, hated all the time. This is how you maintain your power over them.
And as Jewish trauma has become such a huge international political thing (again: I wouldn't do that), the incentive was always there to keep this mentality alive. To organize around it. To make sure it remains the formal doctrine of Jewish institutions. Such as AIPAC and Israel. - So Israel and American Jewish organizations took it upon themselves to keep Jews afraid and isolated. This strategy of intentional paranoia has been working for a while, but it gradually eroded. It especially eroded in the US, as younger Jews became increasingly aware that the stories they've been told are lies, and that no one really cares about their ethnicity.
That erosion in the power of instilled exceptionalism, isolationism and existential fear poses a very serious problem for Jewish organizations built around paranoia. The Palestinians and Arabs were a wonderful solutions for this problem for a while: by keeping Palestinians oppressed and thus hostile, the old myth of antisemitism as a huge international force could be kept on life support.
But this, too, began to fade, as younger American Jews started getting more familiar with Palestinian perspectives. - And then October 7th hit. And the right wing, nationalistic, paranoid section of the Jewish political spectrum, realized it could be translated into political gold.
This could be used to revive the old sentiments. The ghetto, the pogroms, the trains to the east. All of it. This is why Nazis were invoked so early on. Jews were once again the persecuted minority AIPAC and Netanyahu always told you they were. How wonderful for them.
But October 7th was not enough, because people would immediately put it in the context of the occupation. They would ask the eternal human question: why did this happen? What happened before?
If you're Netanyahu or AIPAC, putting Jews in the context of normal human behavior is the last thing you want. What you want is boiling rage and fear to be extensively covered in all the media and all the briefings.
Need I say I would not do that, either? - And this is where my final point arrives. It doesn't seem like Israel is trying to be hated globally. It is actually what it's doing. It is intentionally airing its cruelty and barbarity so that it will remain closed up to the world, thus guaranteeing the continued rule of the paranoia camp.
They are doing it on purpose, for cynical political gains, out of a twisted reading of history and of human nature. Palestinians are just crash test dummies in this scenario. They count for nothing. Their deaths are used to get people angry and Israel hated, so it becomes even more paranoid. - For the same reason, AIPAC is putting the Jewish issue at the epicenter of the lead up to WW3. They cannot not know that Jews will be called as responsible, or at least a major factor in it.
Can you imagine millions of dead Americans, destroyed cities, populations stressed into panic and despair - all because of a war Jewish organizations pushed for? How does anyone who purports to represent Jews and care for them not recoil from this scenario? Do these people have any idea at all of what they're doing?
And I am sorry for sounding this impolite an not nice: we are on the eve of a potential world war. As a Jew I am terrified.
The last thing I want is to be blames for a world war. But the Jewish paranoia camp seems to relish the opportunity. Maybe they are sure this is how the messiah comes. I have my reservations. - Finally, Jewish organization centered around trauma found a very welcoming and happy to help friend in American imperialists. It is so wonderful when you can market middle east invasions as battling antisemitism. Who could argue with you? In the name of defending Israel, the US can do whatever it wants. It has the perfect moral cover. It will support an actual genocide. It will go completely insane.
What they - both AIPAC and US establishments - are not including in their calculations is that a big war in the middle east can have very devastating results for both the US and Israel. In their quest for creating a Jewish psyche and a world beneficial to their paranoid vision (which America shares as a colonial power), that don't take into account that reality is a whole different business from propaganda. - But this is why they do it, and televise and broadcast it. So that we are hated, isolated, fearful and controlled by Bibi and AIPAC forever. There's nothing that reassures those people as hate for Israel. - Don't fight people who thrive on hate with hate. Fight them with clarity and resolve.
yasha | It
might sound like I’m describing a cult or something. But actually
zionism was actually pretty normal by 19th-early 20th century European
standards. It’s just nationalism — Jewish nationalism. It came out of
Europe and the Russian Empire and gained popularity as one solution to
the Jewish Question that was being debated there at the time: Are Jews a
religious group? A race? Should Jews assimilate and become part of the
societies in which they live — to become Russian or German?
Why does
antisemitism exist?
Jewish
nationalism offered an answer: Jews are a race. And because the only
natural and healthy way to organize society is for every race to have
its own state, the Jews need also need a state of their own where they
can live and flourish and control their fate— like the English, the
French, the Italians, the Germans. Without this Jewish state, Jews in
Europe and all over the world are doomed. They’ll remain hated
minorities and suffer bouts of violence. Or even worse, the race will
continue to degrade spiritually and culturally and will eventually
disappear altogether. To zionists, a Jewish state is the only path to
survival of the Jewish race.
This
wasn’t unique to zionism. Nationalism was a popular notion in Europe at
the time — and it led to some horrible results, Nazi Germany being one
example. One thing that made Jewish nationalism stand out was that it
wasn’t about defending land that Jews currently occupied from inferior
races. It was about transporting millions of Jews from Europe to a place
called Palestine — and once there purging the land of the locals and
restoring what zionists believed is their rightful ancient Jewish home.
Here’s
how Vladimir Jabotinsky — a journalist originally from Odessa who
played a big role in setting up the militant rightwing flank of zionism
that ultimately produced Israel’s Likud — wrote about about European
Jews and the Land of Israel. The two were one:
…the
true kernel of our national uniqueness is the pure product of the Land
of Israel. We did not exist before we came to the Land of Israel. The
Hebrew people was created from the fragments of other peoples on the
soil of the Land of Israel. We grew up in the Land of Israel; on it we
became citizens; we strengthened the belief in one God; we breathed in
the winds of the land, and in our struggles for independence and
sovereignty, its air enwrapped us and the grain that its land produced
sustained us. In the Land of Israel the ideas of our prophets were
developed and in the Land of Israel the “Song of Songs” was first heard.
Everything Hebrew in our midst was given to us by the Land of Israel.
Anything else in us is not Hebrew. Israel and the Land of Israel are
one. There we were born as a people and there we developed.³
The
zionism had all sorts of rifts and fissures. But at its core, the
movement believed in the same goal and sought to speak collectively for
all Jews. It wasn’t about individuals. It was about the race.
So
that’s been the main obsession of the movement ever since: the creation
and protection of a Jewish state in Palestine. The existence of this
state is linked to the survival of the Jewish people. Get rid of one and
the other will follow. A Jewish state — a government of Jews, by Jews,
for Jews — is the base on which all zionism rests.
Ideologies
impose structure on the way people see the world. They condition
reactions and assumption and interpretations. That’s why zionist Jews
are so freaked out right now. For them October 7 was a shock. The
surprise Hamas attack, the killing of innocents, the hostages dragged
back to Gaza, the powerlessness of Israeli military — to them this had
nothing to do with violence that the zionist quest for land foisted on Palestinians,
it was a reminder of the atavistic horror that always plagued Jewish
people: Jews are hated for just being Jewish. Existence is never
guaranteed.
And
as they looked around after the attack, they saw more sympathy for
Palestinian suffering than they ever have before: pro-Palestinian
protests and marches, college kids on Instagram and TikTok posting about
Israel’s occupation and apartheid. All over the world, people were
criticizing Israel. In their minds, they saw this as people going after
the Jews. This only reaffirmed their fears and deepened their
convictions: The ancient hatred is still there. Israel is our only
refuge, the only thing that can protect us.
Survival
of the Jews. That’s what they believe Israel is fighting for in Gaza.
They think they’re warding off a mortal enemy, an enemy that seeks to
destroy the Jewishness of Israel. And so nothing is off limits to them
— no number of babies or children killed is too high, no destruction is
too great. There are no innocents in a war of survival between competing
races. The innocent baby of today will grow into a fierce enemy who
will want to exterminate them tomorrow. It’s a zero-sum world. They
really do believe it. The survival of the race is at stake.
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.”
.@joerogan is deeply concerned by the dehumanizing rhetoric emanating from both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict and genuinely fearful that escalating tensions in the Middle East could lead to Global Thermonuclear War.
MOA | Israel is a colonial settler state in permanent conflict with the suppressed natives.
It thought it could survive in that state, or even extend its
settlements, by deterring opposing forces with its superior military.
Hamas has breached that deterrence myth by inflicting, in one day,
more casualties in Israel than it had experienced in any previous wars.
Natanyahoo is under pressure to restore the deterrence, to again provide the Zionists with a feeling of superiority.
He can not do that.
Any land attack in Gaza means urban warfare in an already destroyed
city with large underground facilities. During the taking of Bakhmut the
Wagener forces had in total some 40,000 casualties (dead and wounded).
The other side had more than 70,000. What price would the IDF have to
pay to 'destroy Hamas'?
The other factor is of course Hizbullah and other resistance groups,
which may well attack Israel from the north and various other
directions. Hizbullah has loudly said it would do so should the IDF
enter Gaza. It has some 100,000 missiles - more than enough to exhaust
Israel's air defenses. Its longest reach missiles can attack any major
city within Israel. There have already been daily fire exchanges at the
norther border.
The 2006 war in Lebanon has shown that Hizbullah is dug in and very
able to defend itself. It has since gained more experience by fighting
ISIS in Syria. Neither U.S. air force attacks nor a land force invasion can hinder Hizbullah from firing its missiles.
(Syria, as well as Iran, will not intervene in the war unless they are directly attacked.)
Netanyahoo must attack Gaza to restore deterrence. He can not attack
Gaza because the urban warfare would cause large Israeli casualties. He
can not attack Gaza because Hizbullah would then destroy the myth of the
superior settler state even more than Hamas has done so far.
Israel, with the help of the U.S., has tried to push the population
of Gaza into Egypt. From Egypt's standpoint that would be a humanitarian
solution, at least as long as others pay for it. But it would cause a
serious strategic problem. Resistance by Hamas and others against Israel
would continue indefinitely, but Egypt would be held responsible for
it. It can not and will not take on that burden.
Netanyahoo's next idea was to starve Gaza. But the world will not let
him do that. At least not beyond a certain point. Even the UN Secretary
General has visited the Rafah crossing. Other global organizations, like the WHO and ASEAN, have spoken up. Pictures of starving people will make it impossible for the west to support that 'solution'.
Meanwhile Hamas fighters will continue to sit in their tunnels, ready
to defend their land, and likely with enough provisions to hold out for
months.
Israeli settlers, with the support of the IDF, are rampaging through
the West Bank. They are killing more Palestinians and further enrage the
global public against their deeds. This will escalate.
Israel's decision making is paralyzed. It will for now continue to
talk of a ground invasion but will not launch one. It will also continue
to starve Gaza.
But something will soon break. At any minute there might be a new
large atrocity in Gaza or a pogrom in the West Bank. Any miscalculation
in the north could launch that front into a hot war. Hizbullah could
start to 'preemptively' invade Israeli proper.
But Israel's Jewish public is still demanding a war of revenge. It
still needs the restoration of its deterrence and superiority.
But what if that turns out to be impossible to achieve?
Well. Then something else must change.
As Adam Shatz summarizes in the London Review of Books:
The inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish
Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the Palestinians can
win an Algerian-style liberation war: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs
are stuck with each other, unless Israel, the far stronger party,
drives the Palestinians into exile for good. The only thing that can
save the people of Israel and Palestine, and prevent another Nakba – a
real possibility, while another Holocaust remains a traumatic
hallucination – is a political solution that recognises both as equal
citizens, and allows them to live in peace and freedom, whether in a
single democratic state, two states, or a federation. So long as this
solution is avoided, a continuing degradation, and an even greater
catastrophe, are all but guaranteed.
IndianPunchline | The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s press conference
on Thursday concluding his visit to Israel conveyed three things. One,
the Biden Administration will be seen as backing Israel to the hilt by
way of meeting its security needs but Washington will not be drawn into
the forthcoming Gaza operations except to arrange exit routes in the
south for hapless civilians fleeing the conflict zone.
Two, Washington’s top priority at the moment is on engaging with the regional states
who wield influence with Hamas to negotiate the hostage issue. Fourteen
US citizens in Israel remain unaccounted for. (White House confirmed
that the death toll in the fighting now includes at least 27 Americans.)
Three,
the US will coordinate with the regional states to prevent any
escalation in the situation to widen the conflict on the part of
Hezbollah. Although the US cannot and will not stop Israeli leadership
on its tracks apropos the imminent Gaza operation, it remains
unconvinced.
Blinken was non-committal about any direct US military involvement, and the chances are slim as things stand.Most
important, even as Blinken could hear the war drums, he also cast his
eye on a future for Israel (and the region) where it will be at peace
with itself, would integrate into the region and concentrate on creating
economic prosperity — metaphorically put, beating its swords into
plowshares in a Biblical Messianic intent.
That
is to say, despite the massive show of force off the waters of Israel,
with the deployment of two aircraft carriers along with destroyers and
other naval assets and fighter jets off the waters of Israel, the Biden
Administration is profoundly uneasy about any escalation of the conflict
into a wider war. If the US senses that this is a catastrophe that Israel allowed to happen, that remains a strictly private thought.
Even
as Blinken was heading for Tel Aviv, US House Foreign Affairs Committee
Chairman Michael McCaul told reporters in Washington on Wednesday
following a closed-door intelligence briefing that “We know that Egypt
has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could
happen. I don’t want to get too much into classified, but a warning was
given. I think the question was at what level.”
Shortly after
McCaul spoke to reporters in Washington, an anonymous Egyptian official
confirmed to the Times of Israel that Cairo’s agents did warn their
Israeli counterparts about a planned Hamas attack, but that this warning
may not have made it to Netanyahu’s office.
These
disclosures would embarrass the Israeli government, as Saturday’s
surprise attack can be viewed as a catastrophic failure for Israel’s
intelligence services. In a brutally frank statement
on Thursday, the Chief of General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces
General Herzi Halevi admitted, “The IDF is responsible for the security
of our nation and its citizens, and we failed to do so on Saturday
morning. We will look into it, we will investigate, but now it is time
for war.”
This
failure will impact the decision-making in Tel Aviv. Gen. Halevi
described Hamas as “animals” and “merciless terrorists who have
committed unimaginable acts” against men, women and children. He said
that the IDF “understands the magnitude of this time, and the magnitude
of the mission that lays on our shoulders.”
“Yahya Sinwar, the
ruler of the Gaza Strip, decided on this horrible attack, and therefore
he and the entire system under him are dead men,” the general added,
vowing to “attack them and dismantle them and their organisation” and
that “Gaza will not look the same” afterward.
RT | The McCarthy drama shows that a small band of representatives can actually change things in Washington – even if all it leads to is chaos.
Former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy just
got ousted from his post as the third-highest constitutional officer in
Washington after a contingent of Republican lawmakers joined Democrats
to remove him.
While the details of this situation are, to be
honest, pretty hilarious and indicate a lack of a serious plan by those
GOP members, it also reveals what’s possible if elected representatives
in America actually hold the establishment’s feet to the fire.
First, a word on what happened. In a nutshell, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz forced a vote on a motion to vacate the office of the speaker after threatening to do
so last week because McCarthy apparently acquiesced to Democrats by
passing a bipartisan temporary spending bill, funding the government
through November 17 and narrowly avoiding a government shutdown.
Where it goes from there is not fully detailed yet, but some emerging reports from the right-wing press, such as Fox News,
suggest that even the Republicans who joined Gaetz, first of all,
weren’t even sure of their own votes until the very moment they cast
them. They also don’t seem to have any sort of plan at all.
Acting Speaker Patrick McHenry adjourned the House, since pretty much
the only thing he can do is form a session to specifically vote for a
new speaker (this has never happened before and the rules are vague).
With the House adjourned, no congressional hearings can happen,
subpoenas can’t go through, and committees can’t convene. This is
telling because the same Republicans who ousted McCarthy are also
leading an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. Without a
speaker, the impeachment process is halted.
Given this, it was
foolish for these lawmakers to vote out McCarthy. And that’s especially
the case when it took nearly two months of negotiations to install him
in the first place back in January. Now, there’s no telling where things
will go or how long it will take to cut deals and find a new speaker.
If it takes even the same amount of time as before, then a government
shutdown would be inevitable. That level of dysfunction from the GOP is
not only poor governance but also bad politics, since it would allow
Democrats to look good by contrast.
“Follow your heart, but
take your brain with you. The American people expect us to govern. I
also advise my House colleagues to be sure and take your meds,” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, a Republican, said to the press after McCarthy was booted.
At
the same time, this situation demonstrates quite clearly that the
establishment – especially during a period of intense partisan divide –
is not truly safe. Even powerful figures such as McCarthy can be
dethroned by a small contingent of representatives. That shows that
people like Jimmy Dore, a well-known YouTube personality, are
unfortunately correct for once. The so-called comedian called on
progressives to refuse to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker when
Democrats controlled the House until a vote was taken on Medicare for
All. It turns out he was completely correct on that.
If ‘The Squad’ (a team of relatively young Democratic lawmakers who
got into the House on a super-progressive platform) had any backbone, as
Gaetz and his gang of rebels have shown, they could have forced a vote
on that important issue and many others. They certainly could have
squeezed out concessions from Pelosi and the political establishment,
making her understand that her position on the pedestal is contingent on
the support of progressives and not the other way around. The fact that
they, who are supposed to be more savvy and calculated than the MAGA
mutineers, didn’t do that indicates, at the very least, a lack of
commitment to the values that got them elected.
For their part,
the MAGA wing of the Republican Party is making waves: they have made
Ukraine funding a hot-button issue, censured Rep. Adam Schiff (a mortal
enemy of their cause), put ‘the border’ and fake allegations of election
fraud front and center, shouldered out establishment Republicans such
as Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, and they’re building their own media
ecosystem. Even though their self-imposed speaker debacle clearly lacks
any serious intent, MAGA is flexing its muscles – even if, at times, for
nothing.
Will those who are supposedly fighting for the working
class in Congress ever exert the same pressure? Doubtful, and it’s also
doubtful if these people have any serious commitment to doing that in
the first place, since they have the very same tools as Gaetz and his
friends yet refuse to wield them. Undoubtedly, however, the political
situation in the US is getting a whole hell of a lot more interesting.
jonathanturley | We previously discussed the defunct Disinformation Governance Board and its controversial head Nina Jankowicz.
After the outcry over the program, Homeland Security Secretary
Alejandro Mayorkas finally relented and disbanded the board while
insisting that it was never about censoring opposing views. Jankowicz
has sued over the portrayal of her views. Now, Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) has exposed
just how broad the scope of the censorship efforts were under the board
in combatting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation
(MDM). This range of authority in what the agency called the “MDM
space,” included targeting views on racial justice and the disastrous
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
New documents obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests show that the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) argued that the agency could regulate speech related to
“the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19
vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the
nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” as well as “irregular immigration.”
Those subjects stretch across much of the “space” used for political speech in the last few years.
Notably, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over
critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.”
The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” –
described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to
mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.
So DHS asserted the authority to target viewpoints on racial justice,
Ukraine, and other political subjects, including views based on fact
but viewed as misleading in context.
What is also troubling is the continued effort to conceal these
censorship activities. Homeland redacted much of this information on a
now defunct board under FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects “techniques
and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations.” That claim is itself chilling.
As the title suggests, NPR just repeated the view of Jankowicz
despite the objections of many of us in the free speech community.
Jankowicz insisted “we weren’t going to be doing anything related to
policing speech. It was an internal coordinating mechanism to make sure
that we were doing that work efficiently.” Yet, what were the criminal
investigations, prosecutions, and enforcement efforts now being claimed
as connected to this work?
Recently, a court found that the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts constituted “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Those words by Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty are part of a 155-page opinion granting
a temporary injunction, requested by Louisiana and Missouri, to prevent
White House officials from meeting with tech companies about social
media censorship.
wave3 | This story began December 1 at 5 p.m. with a phone call to our newsroom from a horrified University Hospital employee. The employee claimed security had just wheeled an elderly woman all the way out to the corner of Hancock and Ali, just off hospital property, dumped the woman out of the wheelchair on the sidewalk and left.
Minutes later, we shot video of her still in a soiled hospital gown and slippers, breathing hard under a blanket placed over her in 36 degree weather. Her stuff was in a bag next to her.
The caller claimed she saw this a lot.
So I started watching, and on December 16 at 7 p.m., 35 degrees outside, I recorded three security guards surrounding an elderly woman with a walker and slowly escorting her out of the emergency room.
She couldn’t move fast.
It took several minutes to make it all the way to the same corner of Hancock and Ali.
After they had her across the street off the hospital property, the security guards turned around and went back.
When they cleared I caught up to her. She said she couldn’t breathe.
“They told me I would not stay on the premises,” she said.
“Were you there as a patient?” I asked.
“I needed to be a patient because I’m sick,” she said.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
“I’ve got COPD,” she said. “I got diabetes.”
“So they wouldn’t treat you?” I asked.
“The doctor talked to me for one minute,” she said.
“And told you what?” I said.
“That I had to leave,” she said.
“What reason did he give you?” I asked.
“He didn’t give me a reason,” she said.
She told me she was homeless.
“I’ve got to go because I’m hurting,” she said. “I’m in pain.”
Matthew Hauber and his mother claimed a similar story. They met us in front of Wayside Christian Mission in the spot where they said he was dumped in October.
“I was in a car crash,” Matthew said. “I completely shattered my hip and pelvis. I got like 30-some screws.”
“They said we can’t find a rehab right now,” Linda Hauber said.
She said when Norton Hospital told her they had a room lined up for Matthew at Wayside, she checked it out.
“I called Wayside just to confirm, and they said ‘No, we can’t do that, we can’t.’” Linda said. “‘We have beds and help find jobs, but we don’t take medically needy people, we don’t do that.’”
She said she then had a conference call with the hospital staff.
“The social worker said ‘We’re going to take him to a shelter’ and I said ‘Which one?’” Linda said. “And they said Wayside Christian Mission. And I said ‘Well I know that’s not true, because I called them and they don’t take them.’ Then the social worker said ‘That’s history, we’ll think of something else.’” Ad
Linda said the next day, her son was unloaded from a transport vehicle on the curb in the rain on Jackson Street in front of Wayside.
“I thought ‘They’ve dumped my son...’ my garbage I have to put out to the curb, that’s how they dumped my son,” Linda said. “Like garbage.”
Linda said she was in no shape to care for him at home. She died after the interview with us.
“They put all their stuff on the sidewalk over there, dump them off on the sidewalk, get back in their vehicle and get out of here just as fast as they can,” Wayside staffer Perry Layne said. Ad
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling between what one holds to be true and what one knows to be true. Similar to ambivalence, the term cognitive dissonance describes conflicting thoughts or beliefs (cognitions) that occur at the same time, or when engaged in behaviors that conflict with one's beliefs. In academic literature, the term refers to attempts to reduce the discomfort of conflicting thoughts, by performing actions that are opposite to one's beliefs.
In simple terms, it can be the filtering of information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one's beliefs. In detailed terms, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where "cognition" is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these have examined how beliefs often change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in conflict.
They are among the biggest-selling drugs of all time, the "happiness pills" that supposedly lift the moods of those who suffer depression and are taken by millions of people in the UK every year.
But one of the largest studies of modern antidepressant drugs has found that they have no clinically significant effect. In other words, they don't work.
The finding will send shock waves through the medical profession and patients and raises serious questions about the regulation of the multinational pharmaceutical industry, which was accused yesterday of withholding data on the drugs.
In the study, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of all 47 clinical trials, published and unpublished, submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the US, made in support of licensing applications for six of the best known antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, Seroxat – which is made by GlaxoSmithKline – and Efexor made by Wyeth. The results showed the drugs were effective only in a very small group of the most extremely depressed.
Two drugs were excluded from the study because of incomplete data. A third drug, chemical name nafazodone, has been withdrawn from the market because of side-effects.
Professor Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull, who led the study published in the online journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine , said the data submitted to the FDA would also have been submitted to the licensing authorities in Britain and Europe. It showed the drugs produced a "very small" improvement compared with placebo of two points on the 51-point Hamilton depression scale.
That was sufficient to grant the drugs a licence but did not meet the minimum three-point difference required by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) to establish "clinical" significance. Full-monty available here - in tomorrow's UK Independent.
“...of course the term relates to a luminous disc hovering over a scalarly transdimensional tree with its arms upraised... in the gesture of sentient communion...” — overheard at velocities exceeding c to the third.
Contrary to our activity, the discovery and production of more interesting or useful machines is not the penultimate goal of our species. Whatever it was we came to be and experience together definitely has more to do with animals than it does machines — in every possible way. It probably has a lot more to do with trees than machines, too. It defintely has to do with each other.
There are certainly hidden potentials in our human theory and technology we have not yet guessed the shapes or opportunities of — but there are also potentials in other domains we commonly ignore that far outweigh the power of those we are generally habituated to pursue, defend, value and emulate. This ‘library’ of opportunities is vast beyond our wildest imaginings, however our access is blocked by our insistance on mechanical approaches and technological ‘advancement’. The very ways of knowing we look to for enlightenment are consuming us (and our world) while systematically pretending to a heroism their enactions consistently deliver the opposite of.
I believe that the most incredible discovery our species will make will grant us new and complexly evolving experiences of personal, social and cultural liberty. It will be something we do together, for and with each other — all the time — a very general thing. Having found such a new way of experiencing ourselves and our world we will remember our earlier selves as ‘having nearly perished in the attempt to conserve heartful intentions in heartless vehicles and transports of relation’.
That liberty looks like unity. Not an formalized unity, but one that grows in waves of explosive abundance and regeneration — beyond all definition — any time it is experienced and elaborated by any interaction at all. It looks like impossible movement, that grows more impossible and amazing with each motion.
In assembly and form — this movement would be much more akin to an explosively positive game — than a religion, theory, law, philosophy, government, or formal way of knowing.
Formal vehicles resist change and are far too interested in their own reproduction and conservation to deserve our undivided attention. Informal vehicles are made to dissolve themselves, in order to provide access to a transport.
What sort of ‘thing’ could relate to knowledge the way that E=mc2 has come to relate to physics? A discovery of this magnitude would awaken the sleeping potential for the opposite of an atomic bomb: a sort of star exploding in the domain of human sentience, instead of a way of unfolding matter to create horror. We might expect to have direct experience, for the first time in modern history, of a way of being together that would encourage and empower us to share, grow and receive real understanding and access to our potentials — instead of predatory copies of these things masquerading as heroes, while copying themselves endlessly into every possible terrain.
I realize that I repeat myself. In part because I am at pains to solidly convey that I am not referring to a theory, religion or dogma — I am speaking of a transport — an ‘ever-growing set of ways’, to which we will at last have clear and common access, and the powers of mutual uplift, rescue and celebration that will arise in the wake of such a ‘disc over y’.
Am I speculating? No. I speak as though I am for the sake of achieving agreement to explore. What I am speaking about is accessible now, and it has the power to end war, and to allow us to transcend some broken toys that have kept us trapped in games of mutual annihilation, in general.
Something got broken in our species, a long time ago. And we can repair this something, together, now.
A long time ago an expanding ramp of barriers got set up between us and our inherent potentials with knowledge and relation. The time has arrived when we can surpass those barriers together, rapidly, and even turn some of them to the advantage not only of our peoples, but of the delicate nursery in and with which we proceed toward our hidden purposes, potentials, and powers.
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