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"Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge."

-- Winston Churchill

News and Opinion

“Gaza Is Complicated!” No It Isn’t. Grow Up.

It’s false to say that conflicts in the middle east are hard to understand. They’re not. What can be hard is opening your mind to the possibility that everything you’ve been told about the world is a lie, and that everyone you know and respect has been brainwashed by propaganda.

Once you’ve done that, understanding conflicts in the middle east becomes easy — because the entire framework we’re indoctrinated with for understanding them is a lie.

So much abusive bullshit hides behind the false modesty of “This issue is too complicated for me to understand.” You see it with Gaza, where westerners act like an empire-backed military force dropping bombs on a giant concentration camp and systematically using rape as a weapon of torture and deliberately starving civilians is just way too compwicated for a dumb widdle baby wike me, goo goo ga ga.

People act like they’re being humble about their own intellect and understanding, but really they’re just lying and psychologically compartmentalizing away from self-evident reality. It’s not humility, it’s just another kind of dishonesty.

I cannot get over the fact that now multiple reports have confirmed that Israeli forces are systematically using rape as a method of torture and there is zero outrage from Western media.

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) July 2, 2024

You see this fraudulent act all the time with the average westerner’s general incuriosity about the behavior of their government and its allies throughout the world. “Oh I’m too dumb to know anything about foreign policy, I leave that to the experts.” No actually you’re just compartmentalizing away from the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise lead to the destruction of your mainstream worldview once you really looked at the publicly available information about what your government and its allies are doing to people in other countries.

It’s the same as people who deep down know that the couple they’re friends with is an abusive relationship and know damn well which one the abuser is, but refuse to take sides after a breakup because oh, there’s two sides to every story and who’s to judge anyway. Abusive dynamics run throughout our entire society that people just refuse to squarely examine, placating that inner voice of discomfort with thoughts that say “nobody knows anything for sure” and “it’s for God to sort out, tra la la la.” The entire Catholic Church molestation scandal hid behind this dynamic for generations, until it couldn’t anymore.

There absolutely is a benefit to having real humility about the limits of your own understanding, and to knowing that from a certain point of view everything about this strange reality we were birthed into is mysterious and ungraspable. But if you use this fact to hide from your own responsibility toward understanding your world, your society and your interpersonal relationships, it’s just cowardice and dishonesty. If you use this truth to hide from reality, it becomes a lie.

If you accept that we all have a responsibility to act in an ethical way, then you must also accept that we have a responsibility to form a mature understanding of our world and our surroundings, because all of our actions necessarily flow from our understanding. This won’t always be convenient or comfortable, just conducting one’s behavior in an ethical way isn’t always convenient or comfortable, but that’s what being a responsible adult is. You can’t discern responsible action without having a responsible relationship with your understanding of the world.

Gaza isn’t complicated. Those who says it is are just running from their own intellectual adulthood. Stop shirking your responsibility, learn the facts, take a stand, and grow up.

About 90% of people in Gaza displaced since war began, says UN agency

About 90% of the population of the Gaza Strip have been displaced at least once since the war between Israel and Hamas began, according to the UN’s humanitarian agency.

Andrea De Domenico, head of the UN’s OCHA agency in the Palestinian territories, said on Wednesday that about 1.9 million people are thought to be displaced in Gaza.

“We estimate that nine in every 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been internally displaced at least once, if not up to 10 times, unfortunately, since October,” he told reporters.

“Before we were estimating 1.7 (million) but since that number, we had the operation in Rafah, and we had additional displacement from Rafah,” he said, explaining the increase. ...

Meanwhile, he added that since the war began, an estimated 110,000 people had managed to leave the Gaza Strip before the Rafah crossing into Egypt was closed in early May.

Israel CRUSHED as Iran Exposes IDF’s Humiliating Failures w/ Prof. Mohammad Marandi

Israel Is Using Starvation as a Weapon of War in Gaza and the World Has Failed to Stop It

Humanitarian aid should never be politicized though, quite often, the very survival of nations is used as political bargaining chips.

Sadly, Gaza remains a prime example. Even before the current war, the Gaza Strip suffered under a 17-year hermetic blockade, which has rendered the impoverished area virtually “unlivable.”

That very term, “unlivable” was used by the then-United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Situation of Palestine, Michael Lynk, in 2018.

As of mid-December of last year, “nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed,” The Wall Street Journal reported, citing experts who conducted a thorough analysis of satellite data.

As tragic as the situation was in December, now it is far worse.

Sixty-seven percent of Gaza’s water, sanitation facilities, and infrastructure have been destroyed or damaged, according to a statement by the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees, UNRWA, on June 19, leading to the spreading of infectious diseases, which has ravaged the beleaguered population for months.

The spread of disease is also linked to the accumulation of garbage everywhere in Gaza. Earlier, the refugees agency reported that “as of June 9, over 330,000 tons of waste have accumulated in or near populated areas across Gaza, posing catastrophic environmental (and) health risks.”

The situation was already disastrous. Indeed, three years before the war, the Global Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (GIWEH) said, in a joint statement with the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, that 97% of Gaza water was undrinkable and unfit for human consumption.

Yet, so far, any conversation on allowing aid to Gaza, or the rebuilding of Gaza after the war, has been placed largely within political contexts.

By shutting down all border crossings, including the Egypt-Gaza Rafah Crossing—which, on June 17, was set ablaze—Israel has politicized food, fuel, and medicine as tools in its war in the strip.

This is not a mere inference, but the actual statement made by Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, who on October 9 declared that he had ordered a “complete siege” and that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, no water” entering Gaza.

The timing of the statement, which has indeed been put into action from the first day of the war, suggests that Israel did not apply the strategy as a last resort. It was one of the most important pieces in the war stratagem, which remains in effect to this day.

Instead of pressuring Israel, Washington tried to obtain its own political leverage, also by politicizing aid. On March 2, the U.S. Air Force started airdropping aid into northern Gaza. A far more conducive and less humiliating option for Palestinians, however, would have been direct U.S. pressure on Israel to allow access to aid trucks arriving through Rafah, Karem Abu Salem Crossing, or any other.

Scenes and images of thousands of starving Palestinians chasing after boxes of aid parachuted into Gaza will remain etched in the collective memory of humanity as an example of our failed morality.

News reports spoke of people who were killed under the weight of the dropped “aid,” much of which had fallen in the Mediterranean, never to be retrieved.

Even the Gaza pier, constructed by the U.S. military on the Gaza shore in May, did little to alleviate the situation. It merely transported 137 aid trucks, according to the U.S.’ own estimation, enough to cover Gaza’s need for food for a few hours only.

During the years of siege, an average of 500 trucks arriving daily in Gaza has kept the 2.3 million population of the strip alive, though malnourished.

To deal with the outcome of the war, and to stave off current starvation, especially in the north, the number of aid trucks would have to be much higher. Yet, whole days would pass without a single truck making its way to the suffering population. This is unacceptable.

Not only did the international community fail at ending the war, it has also failed in delinking humanitarian aid from political and military objectives.

The problem with politicizing aid is that innocent civilians become a bargaining chip for politicians and military men. This goes against the very foundation of international humanitarian law.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, citing the Hague Regulations, “international humanitarian law is the branch of international law that seeks to impose limits on the destruction and suffering caused by armed conflict.” In Gaza, no such “limits” have been “imposed” by anyone.

Providing aid to Gaza and ensuring the reconstruction of the strip must not be a political item for negotiations. It is a basic human right that must be honored under any circumstance.

Meaningful pressure must be placed on Israel to end the Gaza siege, and urgent plans must be drafted, starting today, by representatives of U.N. humanitarian institutions, the Arab League, and Palestinian and Gaza authorities to be the entities responsible for delivering aid to Gaza.

Humanitarian aid to Gaza must not be used as political leverage, or a tool in a cruel war, whose primary victims are millions of Palestinian civilians.

Max Blumenthal : The Biden War Machine

Zelenskyy: If Trump Has Plan to End the Ukraine War 'He Should Tell Us Today'

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview published Wednesday that presumptive Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump should reveal his secret plan to quickly end the war in Ukraine.

The request came following Trump's claim during last week's U.S. presidential debate that he would "have the war settled" by the time he took office on January 20, if elected in November. The former president has claimed repeatedly that he would meet with Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin and end the war "within 24 hours" or within "one day."

Trump hasn't revealed details of his proclaimed plan, leading Zelenskyy to express concern that it would be a deal favorable to Russia.

"If Trump knows how to finish this war, he should tell us today," Zelenskyy told Bloomberg Television in the Wednesday interview. "If there are risks to Ukrainian independence, if we lose statehood—we want to be ready for this, we want to know."

"We want to understand whether in November we will have the powerful support of the U.S., or we'll be all alone," Zelenskyy added.

Though Trump has not disclosed his plan to quickly end the war, reports indicate that it involves ceding Ukranian territory to Russia. He's said privately that he would pressure Ukraine to give up land, The Washington Post reported in April. Last week, Trump was said to broadly approve of a plan written by two of his key advisers to reach a cease-fire agreement based on prevailing battle lines, according to Reuters.

French PM says efforts to prevent far-right majority can succeed

France’s prime minister has said nationwide efforts to prevent Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) winning an outright majority in parliament could succeed, after more than 200 candidates pulled out of Sunday’s legislative election runoff to avoid splitting the anti-far-right vote.

“We can avoid an absolute majority for the far right,” Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday, adding that 90% of candidates from President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist camp had quit three-way races if they were in third with an RN candidate ahead of them. ...

Although accurate seat projections are difficult before the shape of each constituency contest is known, pollsters’ initial estimates suggested RN could return as many as 300 deputies. The high number of runoff withdrawals makes that less likely, and one poll released on Wednesday predicted the RN would fall short of a majority on Sunday, with between 190 and 220 seats. The Harris Interactive poll had the NPF in second place, with 159-183, and Macron’s centrist camp in third with 110-135.

Attal said centrist candidates were right to stand down even in favour of a rival from the radical-left France Unbowed (LFI), part of the NFP leftwing alliance. “Neither LFI or NFP can win an absolute majority,” he said. “RN can.” He added: “What’s at stake is to do everything so that the extreme right does not have an absolute majority. It is not nice for some French to have to block … by voting in a way they did not want to. I say it’s our responsibility to do this.”

According to Le Monde, 221 candidates, including 132 from NFP and 83 from Macron’s camp and its allies, had withdrawn from potential three-way runoffs by the Tuesday evening deadline, leaving 94 so-called “triangular” contests. ... While the parties have largely swung behind it, this time there is no guarantee centrist voters will be prepared to vote for candidates from the far-left LFI, or that leftwing voters angry with Macron will be happy to cast their ballots for candidates from his camp.

Biden Support Weakens, Demand Stand Down; Macron Defies French Voters; Rus Routs Ukr Troops Toretsk

Rishi Sunak fearful of losing his seat, sources say

Rishi Sunak has confided to members of his inner circle that he is fearful of losing his Yorkshire constituency at the general election, the Guardian has been told.

The prime minister, who would be the first sitting leader of the country to lose his seat, told confidants before a Conservative rally on Tuesday that he thought the vote in Richmond and Northallerton was too close to call.

In 2019, he won the seat with a majority of more than 27,000 and 63% of the vote.

One source said: “He is genuinely fearful of a defeat in Richmond: the risk that it could be tight has hit him hard. He’s rattled – he can’t quite believe it’s coming so close.” Another source added: “He’s taken so much friendly fire from his own side I’m amazed he’s had the strength to keep going.” ...

Mel Stride, a close ally of the prime minister, said on Wednesday that Labour was likely to win “the largest majority any party has ever achieved”.

Well, duh!

White House efforts to shield Biden’s missteps are unraveling

For three and a half years, Joe Biden was wrapped in a metaphorical ball of cotton wool by an anxious White House staff eager to protect him from the worst of himself. Worried about signs of ageing and an increasing propensity for verbal missteps, they cut press conferences and media interviews to a minimum. Meetings with members of Congress, frequent enough in his first year – despite it coinciding with part of the Covid-19 pandemic – were whittled down by two-thirds by year three.

Public appearances were tightly rationed and controlled, with the president speaking predominantly from an autocue. Unscripted exchanges with journalists were deemed too hazardous, resulting in 81-year-old Biden staging fewer presidential news conferences than any US chief executive since Ronald Reagan. Even the traditional pre-Super Bowl television interview – a chance to reach the biggest audience ever likely to tune for a political broadcast – was given a wide berth for the past two years.

Now the approach has unravelled spectacularly, seemingly exposed as a desperate damage limitation exercise by last week’s floundering performance in a televised debate with Donald Trump that has left Biden’s presidential candidacy in dire jeopardy.

Democrats considering replacing him on the ticket accuse his handlers of putting up a wall of denial to counteract a years-long low murmur of talk about his age-related decline, only for the truth to burst into the open in a manner that greatly increases the chances of a second Trump presidency. “We kind of just feel lied to,” an unnamed Democratic senator told Punchbowl website. “They’ve been shielding him from those types of settings for months and even after it became undeniable, they’re still lying to us.”

Dem Oligarchs Forcing Biden Out of Presidential Race

Uncommitted voters take on added influence amid swirl over Biden future

After Joe Biden’s poor debate performance and calls by some prominent Democrats to replace him, the hundreds of thousands of anti-war voters and the delegates who represent them have taken on new significance in the US presidential race.

More than 700,000 voters cast ballots in the Democratic primaries for “uncommitted” options after a movement started in Michigan to pressure Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and stop US funding and arms to the Israeli government.

These voters won 29 uncommitted delegates to the Democratic national convention, a small but vocal group that will use their position at the nominating convention to call for an end to the war. The uncommitted vote consists of likely Democratic voters who have consistently said they are anti-Trump and who used the primary process to send a message to Biden. ...

“People are like, you guys have 10 times the power you did before,” said Asma Mohammed, an uncommitted delegate to the DNC from Minnesota and one of the organizers behind the uncommitted push there. “The way I was looking at it is, we always have had power. Our story has consistently been powerful, and we have over 700,000 voters that we have been engaged with, who were previously just not going to show up or didn’t know how to engage in this election.”

The uncommitted movement has heard from delegates committed to Biden from around the country who sympathize with the anti-war platform, and the uncommitted delegates hope to work with them at the DNC to show the president – or any other potential nominee that the party’s base does not support US funding of the war, Abbas Alawieh, a spokesperson for Uncommitted National Movement and an uncommitted delegate to the DNC from Michigan said.

Artificial light on coastlines lures small fish to their doom, coral reef study finds

Artificial light shining from coastlines around the world is acting like “a midnight fridge” full of tasty snacks, threatening young fish who can be drawn to it and who are then eaten by predators also attracted by the brightness, according to a study.

It has long been established that light pollution hampers people’s ability to see the night sky and harms migrating birds, insects and other animals. But its impact on marine ecosystems has rarely been taken into account, said Jules Schligler, the lead author of the study at the international coral ecosystem research centre in Mo’orea, French Polynesia.

Nearly a quarter of the world’s coastline, excluding Antarctica, was artificially lit, according to a satellite study carried out a decade ago, and it was probably more than this by now, Schligler said.

His study, which involved creating 12 coral test sites in the waters off Mo’orea and shining an underwater light on half of them, found the artificially lit corals first attracted fish larvae and then predators that ate them. “We found that the coral with the light attracted two to three times more fish compared to the naturally lit control site,” Schligler told the Guardian. “The coral with the [artificial] light is a bad environment for the larval fish because there are more predators, opportunistic fish passing by, that ate them.”

The findings, he said, meant artificial light should be seen as “another threat to marine animal populations and coastal ecosystems”. And while artificial light might appear to benefit predator fish, Schligler said more research was needed. “It could be bad for their sleep, or they could eat too much, we don’t yet know.”

The Real Story Behind Idaho’s Shut Off Of Farm Water!

Nearly 30,000 people in northern California evacuated as raging wildfire spreads

Thousands of homes are under threat from a raging wildfire that erupted in northern California on Tuesday, as the state simmers in a brutal and potentially historic heatwave.

Roughly 28,000 residents have been forced to evacuate as the Thompson fire quickly swept across more than 3,500 acres (1,416 hectares) near the city of Oroville, about an hour outside Sacramento, California’s capital.

Photojournalists captured intense scenes on Tuesday night as the blaze tore through homes and vehicles in the rural enclave in Butte county. Officials confirmed that at least four structures have been destroyed.

More than 1,400 fire personnel from across the state have deployed to battle the blaze, which was at 0% containment Wednesday afternoon. Eight injuries have been confirmed by officials, at least half of whom were firefighters, as dangerously high temperatures continue to threaten their health and safety. ...

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, declared a state of emergency on Wednesday to ensure resources are readily available to support response and recovery to the fire.

Newsom said on Tuesday that California had secured a fire management assistance grant (FMAG) from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to cover some of the costs associated with firefighting. Earlier in the week, Newsom had activated the state 0perations center to coordinate the response to wildfires and excessive heat across the state.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

The Houthis Turn the Red Sea Redder, Stymieing Israel and the US

'The Land Theft Continues': Israel Announces Biggest West Bank Seizure in Over 30 Years

Assassinations at Home and Abroad

Let’s Talk About Joe Biden

Grand Jury Transcript in Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Released, Raising Questions about Epstein’s Darkest Secrets Being Protected in JPMorgan Cases

Hippos might fly: UK research discovers animal can get airborne

Fangs and toilet seat-shaped head: giant salamander-like fossil found in Namibia

Oldest known picture story is a 51,000-year-old Indonesian cave painting

A Little Night Music

Robert Earl Keen - 4th of July

John Brim - Wake up America

Sunnyland Slim - Be Careful How You Vote

Grateful Dead - U.S. Blues

Talking Heads - Life During Wartime

MC5 - The Motor City Is Burning

Alice Cooper - I Love America

America Fuck Yeah!

Phil Ochs - The Power and The Glory

The Impressions - This is My Country

Charlie Poole - Whitehouse Blues

The Del McCoury Band & Bluegrass Congress - White House Blues

The Byrds - Chimes of Freedom

Leonard Cohen - Democracy