The Evening Blues - 10-30-23
Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features jazz and blues pianist and bandleader Buddy Johnson. Enjoy!
Buddy Johnson - A Pretty Girl, A Cadillac & Some Money
"Remember that murderer who took a US elementary school classroom hostage, and the US air force dropped a MOAB on the school and killed all the children, and everyone was cool with it because they needed to kill the guy and he was using the kids as human shields?
No?
Me neither."
-- Caitlin Johnstone
News and Opinion
There’s Only So Much Propaganda Spin You Can Put On The Murder Of Thousands Of Children
The thing is there’s only so much propaganda spin you can put on the murder of thousands of children.
With other imperial military actions the propagandists had an easier time spinning things. Oh no those evil communists are taking over South Vietnam, we need to stop them! Oh no Saddam’s got WMDs, we need to get him! Oh no Gaddafi’s gonna rape and kill all those Libyans, we have a responsibility to protect them!
In Gaza, Israel and its western backers are massacring children by the thousands with a shockingly vicious bombing campaign that is turning entire neighborhoods into gravel. They’re raining down military explosives on a giant concentration camp that is densely populated by children.
There’s only so much a propagandist can do with that.
At this rate, they’re killing over a thousand Palestinian children every single week. That’s over 142 per day. That’s over 6 children per hour.
Every HOUR Israel is allowed to continue this massacre, half a dozen Palestinian children will be murdered. MAKE THEM STOP! https://t.co/WxpGn7xZPh
— Omar Baddar (@OmarBaddar) October 29, 2023
They can talk about the killings on October 7 til they’re blue in the face, but people are going to object that nothing Hamas did makes it moral or acceptable to murder children by the thousands.
They can say “Israel has a right to defend itself” as much as they want, but people are going to object that murdering children by the thousands is not actually defending anything from anyone.
They can bleat the phrase “human shields” over and over again, but eventually people are going to start saying “Okay but even if they are human shields, could we please stop murdering children by the thousands? I know I wouldn’t want my children to be murdered just because they were being used as human shields.”
They can say every death is the fault of Hamas, but more and more people are going to start saying “Okay blame whoever you want, but can we please stop murdering children by the thousands right this very instant?”
They can say “Well what do you expect Israel to do?”, and people will respond “Stop murdering children by the thousands for starters, please and thank you.”
Imagine you’re a mass media propagandist trying to frame all this in a positive light. How would you do it? Would you be able to make it believable?
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.
Gaza Is Burning
With 7,300+ Gazans Dead, Israeli PM Adviser Says 'Tonight We Are Starting Payback'
Clearly undeterred by the mounting civilian death toll and global calls for a cease-fire three weeks into Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Friday that "tonight we are starting payback."
Asked by MSNBC's Katy Tur what Israeli forces are targeting and why the operation is intensifying, Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev said: "You can be sure that if you're in a Hamas bunker somewhere, if you're in a Hamas tunnel, if you're in a Hamas stronghold, then we're gonna come and find you and we're gonna eliminate that target. Hamas will pay for its crimes against humanity. Hamas will pay for slaughtering our people."
"This... ISIS-taught group that the German chancellor, when he was visiting Israel last week, he said they acted like Nazis, we are bringing justice to this terrible, despicable, disgusting terrorist group, and they will pay for their crimes," he continued. "And once again, not just Israel will be better off afterwards but the people of Gaza will be better off without them as well."
Regev's interview came after Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said earlier Friday that in addition to ramping up its airstrikes, the Israeli military is "expanding ground operations" in Gaza ahead of an expected full-scale invasion as part of the war launched in response to a Hamas-led attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, with around 200 others taken hostage.
Since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, a year after winning local elections, the strip's 2.3 million residents—half of them children—have endured an Israeli blockade and four previous military offensives. Legal scholars have said the ongoing Israeli assault enabled by billions of dollars in U.S. military support could amount to genocide.
Chris Hedges: Exterminate All the Brutes
On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.
Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.
Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth. The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.
Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated. Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” ...
When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.
Israel is raining death & destruction on Gaza, including by reportedly bombing the al Shifa hospital, the only lifeline for thousands of wounded & sick civilians.
A horrific slaughter is happening in plain sight, while the world watches & the US shamelessly aids & abets it! pic.twitter.com/NRUE0vv7WQ
— Sina Toossi سینا طوسی (@SinaToossi) October 27, 2023
A little late:
Palestinian civilians ‘didn’t deserve to die’ in Israeli strikes, US chief security adviser says
Thousands of Palestinians killed in Israel’s attacks on Gaza over the past three weeks “did not deserve to die”, according to the US national security adviser, in a marked softening of the Biden administration’s hardline support of Israel.
In an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, the White House’s chief security adviser, said Hamas is “hiding” behind civilians but that doesn’t lessen Israel’s “responsibility under international humanitarian law and the laws in war to do all in their power to protect the civilian population”.
“There have been deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians in this conflict and that is an absolute tragedy … Those people did not deserve to die. Those people deserve to live lives of peace and safety and dignity,” Sullivan told ABC’s This Week.
At least 8,000 Palestinians including more than 3,300 children and more than 2,000 women have been killed by Israeli’s military bombardment of Gaza, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The toll is expected to rise as Israel continues with its ground offensive – in addition to ongoing aerial attacks.
US Retreats UNGA Defeat; No Gaza Displacement; China Cools Xi-Biden Summit
"Book 'Em, Danno!"
Biden Risks Complicity in Genocide, Warns Brief
A day before President Joe Biden delivered his primetime Oval Office address demanding more military aid for Israel, a group of expert attorneys issued a grave warning.
By continuing to arm the Israeli military as it carries out a massive assault on the Gaza Strip, the lawyers argued in an emergency briefing paper, the Biden administration is rendering itself complicit in possible genocide against Palestinians in the occupied territory.
“The United States is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law,” warned experts with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a U.S.-based nonprofit.
CCR’s brief notes that “the United States—and U.S. citizens, including and up to the president—can be held responsible for their role in furthering genocide,” both under international and U.S. law.
“Israel’s invocation of self-defense for the campaign it has unleashed against the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, and the full credit the United States gives it when affirming its unconditional support, does not negate genocidal intent or serve as a justification for its crimes under international law,” the brief adds. “In the absence of accountability, we have now reached the point of genocide. All states must now — finally — act, including the United States, to end and address all of these crimes.”
#ICC Prosecutor @KarimKhanQC was at the Rafah Border Crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip this weekend.
Watch his remarks on the current situation in Israel and the State of Palestine. pic.twitter.com/Z22DMLaAv3
— Int'l Criminal Court (@IntlCrimCourt) October 29, 2023
Erdogan THREATENS War With Israel As US Worries Expand
Absolutely worth a full read:
The ‘Genocide Moment’
Israel’s systematic and wanton destruction of Gaza has raised long-standing issues of its political and legal culpability over the treatment of Palestinians to a new level of seriousness. It obviously poses familiar issues of Israeli war crimes, and Amnesty International had already clearly designated it as such after just the first week. The human rights organization also asked the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to “urgently expedite” its investigation of the aims of all parties.
But this Israeli campaign now poses the even graver issue of genocide of Palestinians as a nation. The utter devastation of Gaza and the vast numbers of civilians facing death from bombardment and from deliberately engineered starvation and sickness already presents the world with a spectacle of mass murder of unspeakable proportions.
The Israelis should face accountability for its crimes. A panel of nine distinguished independent experts on human rights who investigated the Gaza emergency for the United Nations’ Human Rights Council has just warned that the Israeli campaign of destruction of Gaza poses “a risk of genocide against the Palestinian people.” And there is a long history of genocidal thinking and action behind this “genocidal moment”. It should be recalled that during the previous Gaza crisis in 2014, an equally extremist Israeli government openly threatened genocide against the Palestinians.
Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked declared on Facebook that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and said:
“All of them are enemy fighters and all of them are bleeding from the head. Now it also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow in the footsteps of their sons, there is nothing fair about that. They have to go, and so does the physical house where they raised the snake. Otherwise, more small snakes will grow there.”
That same year, the Likud deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Moshe Feiglin said:
“Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel.”
The present Israeli government — whose extremist right-wing politics resemble those of the 2014 government — has made no effort to hide its political, genocidal contempt for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza. Nor has it hidden the proximate objective of the present campaign, which is to eliminate Palestinians entirely from Gaza.
"This Has to Stop": Doctors Denounce Israel's Targeting of Gaza Hospitals
WHO Chief Calls Report of Israeli Forces Threatening Gaza Hospital 'Deeply Concerning'
The World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Sunday expressed alarm after a Palestinian humanitarian group announced that Israeli forces have ordered the immediate evacuation of Al-Quds Hospital in the Gaza Strip.
The report from Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) "is deeply concerning," the WHO chief said on social media. "We reiterate it's impossible to evacuate hospitals full of patients without endangering their lives. Under international humanitarian law, healthcare must always be protected."
The humanitarian group explained in a statement Sunday that "two phone calls were received, with a clear and direct threat, that the hospital must be evacuated at once, otherwise PRCS holds full responsibility for the lives of everyone inside the hospital."
PRCS highlighted that along with its staff, the hospital "has hundreds of wounded and patients receiving medical care," including in the intensive care unit and children in incubators, along with approximately 12,000 internally displaced civilians sheltering there.
The group called for International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) intervention to ensure the protection of civilians and PRCS' teams and facilities in accordance with international humanitarian law, and for the global community, including the United Nations system, "to act immediately" to prevent the targeting of all Gaza hospitals and "a humanitarian catastrophe from unfolding."
Israel GETTING Obliterated In TikTok Information War
Mob storms Dagestan airport in search of Jewish passengers from Israel
A mob in Russia’s mostly Muslim region of Dagestan has stormed the airport in Makhachkala in search of Jewish passengers arriving from Israel.
In the past day, local people have besieged a hotel in search of Jewish guests and stormed the airport after reports emerged that a flight from Tel Aviv was arriving in the city. Passengers were forced to take refuge in planes or hide in the airport for fear of being attacked. Local health authorities said that 20 people had been injured, including two who were critical, without giving further details.
Video posted to social media showed hundreds of young men, some carrying Palestinian flags or placards denouncing Israel, storming on to the tarmac of the Makhachkala international airport and climbing on to idling planes, attempting to break through the windows.
Airline employees were shown hustling passengers back inside planes as the crowds approached the aircraft. Russia closed Makhachkala airport on Sunday evening due to “intruders” at the airport. ...
Russia’s aviation authority said late on Sunday that all “unauthorised citizens” had been removed from the airport, while video clips circulating online appeared to show police arresting some protesters.
WARMONGER Hillary Clinton MOCKS Israel CEASEFIRE, Fetterman KICKS OUT Constituent Over Gaza
Attacks on US Bases in Iraq and Syria Continue After US Airstrikes
Attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria have continued through the weekend after the US launched airstrikes in eastern Syria early Friday.
Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen reported that a group calling itself the Islamic Resistance in Iraq said it “successfully” targeted the US’s al-Shadadi base in northeast Syria’s al-Hasakah province on Sunday.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also reported a drone attack on the al-Shadadi base, saying explosions were heard in the area and smoke columns rose from the base. Al Mayadeen also reported an overnight attack on a US base in Syria’s eastern Deir Ezzor province. ...
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday that one purpose of the US airstrikes in eastern Syria was to “deter” further attacks on US forces in the region, which has clearly failed.
LEE FANG: Is Biblical Prophecy Driving GOP Israel Support?
Ron DeSantis defends call to ban pro-Palestinian groups from Florida colleges
The Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has amplified and defended his call to ban pro-Palestinian groups from colleges in the state, rejecting claims by 2024 rival Vivek Ramaswamy that such restrictions were a “shameful political ploy” and “utter hypocrisy” that amounted to a violation of free speech rights.
“This is not cancel culture,” DeSantis hit back in a interview on NBC’s Meet the Press before locking Palestinian rights supporters in with supporters of Hamas. DeSantis went on to claim that pro-Palestinian groups on state campuses had “themselves said in the aftermath of the Hamas attack that they don’t just stand in solidarity, that they are part of this Hamas movement”.
Last week, the DeSantis ordered two state universities to deactivate chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, as they had purportedly violated state laws prohibiting antisemitism.
Julian Assange’s brother urges Anthony Albanese to ‘up the ante’ over WikiLeaks founder’s case
Julian Assange’s brother has urged the Australian government to “up the ante” after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, confirmed he raised the WikiLeaks founder’s case with Joe Biden last week.
Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, told Guardian Australia: “If his government can get back Cheng Lei from China, why is he so impotent when it comes to Julian and the USA?” ...
But Albanese played down the idea of the US president personally stepping in to order the case be dropped. “Joe Biden doesn’t interfere with the Department of Justice,” Albanese said. “Joe Biden is a president who understands the separation of the judicial system from the political system. That’s an important principle.” ...
Shipton said the US president’s rhetoric about not influencing the Department of Justice (DoJ) was not surprising “given the number of prosecutions against Biden’s main political opponent”, Donald Trump. But Shipton said Assange’s prosecution was “unique and a novel use of the law developed during the Trump administration” and was “entirely political”.
Shipton noted the government’s recent success in securing the release of Cheng, an Australian journalist after more than three years of detention in China. “It’s time for the prime minister to up the ante,” he said.
Speaker Johnson Has 'RECEIPTS' For Biden Impeachment, Open To Subpoenaing Son Hunter
Kamala Harris Says Joe Biden Is 'VERY MUCH ALIVE'
How the US supreme court and an Idaho couple upended wetlands protection
Often dismissed as dismal wet bogs and rampantly cleared since European arrival in the US, the underappreciated importance of wetlands has been placed into sharp relief by a supreme court ruling that has plunged many of these ecosystems into new peril. The extent of wetlands, areas covered or saturated by water that encompass marshes, swamps and carbon-rich peatlands, has shrunk by 40% over the past 300 years as the US drained and filled them in for housing, highways, parking lots, golf courses and other uses. Globally, wetlands are disappearing three times faster than forests are.
Wetlands received federal protection under the 1972 Clean Water Act but the future of many of these remaining ecosystems, which span 290m acres, or about twice the size of France, is now in jeopardy following the supreme court’s decision in May to severely narrow the scope of what is protected. Environmentalists are now nervously eyeing developments in several states that have relatively weak wetlands protections in the wake of the case. At risk, they say, are systems that act as the kidneys of America by filtering clean water as well as providing a home to a treasure trove of wildlife, from dragonflies to frogs to waterfowl, and acting as an important buffer to floods and storms projected to worsen due to the climate crisis.
By some estimates, about half of remaining wetlands have now been stripped of federal protection following the supreme court ruling, in which five conservative justices decided that the Clean Water Act only applied to bodies of water with a “continuous surface connection” to rivers, lakes or other navigable waters. This case, brought by an Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, who wanted to fill in a section of wetland to develop a house in Priest Lake without getting a permit first, has upended previous assumptions about the protection of wetlands and now places many of the remaining, prized wetlands at risk. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency released a new, scaled-down set of water protections that its administrator, Michael Regan, said was necessary after the “disappointing” supreme court decision. ...
Under the new definition, even the Everglades, perhaps the most famous wetland of all, would be “dramatically affected”, according to Lowenthal, as much of the sprawling ecosystem is not obviously connected to major bodies of water, separated by agricultural ditches or other barriers. Florida has insisted it has a robust system of wetlands protections that can provide adequate protection, but other states aren’t as well-equipped to safeguard wetlands from developers. States such as Texas, Nevada, Oklahoma and Missouri have scant wetland protections, according to an analysis by Earthjustice, with a host of other states, including Georgia, Louisiana and Alaska, having both weak protections as well as exceptionally large tracts of wetlands.
New ‘forever chemicals’ polluting water near North Carolina plant, study finds
At least 11 new kinds of PFAS “forever chemicals” are polluting the water around a North Carolina Chemours plant that manufactures the toxic substances, new research finds. The discovery, made by researchers using a novel testing method, is evidence that the environment around the plant is more contaminated with PFAS than regulators have found, the researchers said.
“This means there are a lot more PFAS that people are being exposed to than they know,” said Erin Baker, a University of North Carolina PFAS researcher who co-authored the peer-reviewed paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science. “That’s because [regulators’ testing] is missing the PFAS because no one knows how to target them.”
A 2019 state consent order required Chemours to rein in its Fayetteville Works’ site pollution for PFAS compounds produced or released from the facility. But most PFAS tests can only identify a limited number of PFAS.
Chemours, which was spun off from DuPont in 2015 to shield the latter from legal liability, is thought to be responsible for contaminating the air, soil, crops and water across potentially hundreds of square miles of south-east North Carolina with PFAS waste, according to public health advocates, regulators and researchers.
Many residents allege it has sickened people on a wide scale; a judge recently allowed more than 100,000 residents to move forward with a class-action PFAS lawsuit against DuPont and Chemours and the United Nations has been urged to investigate alleged human rights violations over the company’s pollution.
At what threshold is Greenland ice cap’s melting irreversible?
The threshold, according to a paper in the journal Nature, is between 1.7C and 2.3C above pre-industrial levels. Since we have been exceeding 1.5C for some months this year, and on current projections global temperatures are set to rise by up to 3C this century, we are perilously close to the tipping point.
It will be a fairly gradual process, so there is time to move inland, and there is one cheerful note from the paper: if in the future we managed to get the temperature rise back down to 1.5C the melting would eventually stop again.
Against that, the researchers point out that by the time we would get back down to 1.5C, sea levels would already be 2 or 3 metres higher than now.
Breaking news and a major announcement! I’m happy and proud to announce that 841 has given birth and has a baby with her! pic.twitter.com/eD5N29nknL
— Native Santa Cruz (@NativeSantaCruz) October 25, 2023
More 841+1 photos. She leaves the pup on the surface as she dives for food. I love the one of her smiling and seeming to show off her little pup. I’ll be back there tomorrow hoping she comes a little closer to shore for better photo ops. And yes, I do feel like a proud papa pic.twitter.com/faNKDFkfLx
— Native Santa Cruz (@NativeSantaCruz) October 25, 2023
Also of Interest
Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.
Craig Murray: Something Has Snapped
Israel Cut Off Gaza’s Communications Because Murderers Don’t Like Witnesses
Israeli targets journalists, kills their families as Big Tech & Biden admin silence Palestinians
The Gods Are Going Against the Chosen People — Mammon Against Israel, Mars Against the Pentagon
New House Speaker: Russia, China, and Iran Are New Axis of Evil
Here’s Why Russia Didn’t Deter or Respond to the US’ Latest Bombing of Syria
How the Gaza conflict is dividing Europe’s left
An Interview On Gaza With Dominique De Villepin
How Much of the World Will the US Burn in the Transition to Multipolarity?
Breaking Down Cornel West’s Campaign So Far (w/ Sabby Sabs)
841+1: beloved mischievous otter who swiped surfboards gives birth to pup
MTG Will Vote NO On Israel War Funding; 'FED UP With AMERICA LAST!'
Media forgets Zelensky as frontline worsens for Ukraine military
US isolated in UN. Starlink in Gaza. Malta, Ukraine peace summit. Light vs Darkness.
IDF scales back operation. Dagestan airport PSYOP. Kiev ends gas transit. Scholz Nigeria stream.
A Little Night Music
Buddy Johnson - Why Don't Cha Stop It
Buddy Johnson - Doot Doot Dow
Buddy Johnson - Shufflin & Rollin'
Buddy Johnson - I Don’t Want Nobody
Buddy Johnson and his Orchestra - Rock On!
Buddy Johnson Orchestra - You'd better believe me
Buddy Johnson and his Band - Jammin' in Georgia
Buddy Johnson - Boogie Woogie's Mother in Law
Buddy Johnson & His Orchestra - That's The Stuff You Gonna Watch
Buddy Johnson - I Wonder Who's Boogieing My Woogie Now
Comments
Zionist colonization of Palestine
Israel's History of Military Expansionism
Notice Egypt and Southern Lebanon were once"occupied territories". The Golan Heights
are still "occupied" in spite of it being part of Syria. Most of Palestine is an "occupied"
territory, in other words, not legally owned by Israel.
When will these greedy suckers stop?
Thanks for the run-down and Buddy Johnson joe!
evening qms...
perhaps when they achieve conquest of all of the territory that their magic book tells them that their hairy thunderer gave them. or perhaps it isn't a religious mania at all and is deep down a quest for lebensraum.
I’m out of words except for anger, disgust and heartbroken
.
I’ll let Caitlin speak for me. For now because you know I can’t stay silent for long. But boy did she nail it. Again.
One thing that I see happening though is that Jews and Americans will be targeted because of what Bibi and Biden are doing. I’m betting those angry Russian Muslims are not the last group that will target Jews. And American bases are going to be very busy for awhile.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
Well there was an alleged Jew-targeting in Dagestan
Alex Christoforou thought it was a psyop:
" In a war with China there would be a trade embargo. Military manufacturing in the US would grind to a halt almost immediately. But due to a massive competency crisis in DC, they might push for it regardless." -Philip Pilkington
evening cass...
that story is apparently hitting the mainstream press:
Russia blames Ukraine for antisemitic riot at airport in Dagestan
I posted tweets on this last night
in the WW. Am I the only one who reads all essays and comments here?
RT has an article on this that says that Ukraine was involved in getting them riled up and go to the airport.
Ahh I just saw Joe’s comment on this.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
evening snoopy...
yeah, it's getting harder to read the news every day. it looks like life is going to get even more nasty and brutish for a while. hard to believe it was possible, but here we are.
This reminds me of…
Lily's statement. No matter how cynical I become it’s not cynical enough.
After Libya was destroyed I wondered what it would be like if my city got bombed into oblivion for no other reason than a more powerful country wanted to do it. I’ve been trying to put myself in the Palestinian's place and I’d be wondering why the fcking world hasn’t tried to stop it.
Have you seen the statement from big ass Hagee? He wants America to roll up its sleeves and wipe Iran off the map. Caitlin mocked the evangelicals and said that it’s weird how they support Israel just so Jesus can return and roast them in hell. Something like that. It’s in the WW too. I sure enjoy her nailing so many things.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
heh...
lily was certainly dead on with that one. i have been trying to keep pace, but i always seem to be insufficiently cynical.
i missed the latest instance of hagee calling for iran to be vaporized, but he's said stupid, callous shit like that enough times in the past that it fails to surprise me. i hope jesus comes back and kicks his ass.
Ha
That’s what I said about him. It’d be funny that after they got all their goals met it would be fun to watch them sit with their thumbs up their arses waiting for Jesus, but when he comes he smites them for their evil ways. Great minds.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
Oh FFS..
.
ETA
Biden has changed his mind on this.
No that’s not a good plan from Biden. It’s helping Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s exactly what Israel has been saying they want to do. Once they leave their country they will never be allowed to return to it.
I wonder which neocon got Biden to sign on in the first place? My guess it was Blinken.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
heh...
i knew that biden, blinken and all the rest were evil before this. i wish they would stop demonstrating their malevolence so thoroughly.
Ditto!
Here’s what b says about them.
I think that’s a damn good idea. And take cookies Nuland with them. But there would still be all the people in congress who think just like them. The new speaker is all in with Israel. Funny how congress can find hundreds of billions of dollars to fund wars, but they have to look in the couch cushions to find any change to help Americans.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
From what I've read
...Israel will not be sending in soldiers to search the extensive tunnels and basements that crisscross all of Gaza in order to kill members of Hamas and the Palestinian people who are sheltering there. When they tried that two weeks ago, a large number of Israeli soldiers were killed in the boobytrapped Gaza underground. At that rate, Israel would lose much of its army and would likely be be forced to leave in defeat. Their fantasy genocide could backfire, just like everything else the neocon psychopaths have touched since 9-11.
Instead, there is speculation that Israel's new plan is to release the deadly toxin, Novachok, in the the underground tunnels built throughout Gaza. In this way, they can silently kill every living thing in the territory in a single offensive attack. The Novachok will likely be supplied by the UK, since they have the only known stockpile of the nerve gas, which was last used in 2018 in the false flag event involving the Skripals in the UK. The false flag was a lame UK intelligence psyop to demonize Putin in Russia and throughout the world. The diplomatic fall out that ensued in the West was an extension of the West's temper tantrum dating back to 2014, when Russia continued to occupy its 250 year-old Navy Base in Crimea, following the US toppling of Ukraine's government. This was a blow to NATO's expansion plans, which were designed to cut off Russia's direct access to the Black Sea and the Medditerannian Sea, Europe, and the Middle East. The UK hysteria was also a carry over of the "Russia, Russia, Russia" fake narrative, which gripped Hillary Clinton's failed Presidential run in 2016.
Thus, we have the UK now directly participating in genocide in Palestine, while the UN and the ICC look on. The fact is, if the world just stands there and watches passively as a population is systematically exterminated, then we can be certain that even more depraved events are right around the corner. By all indications, our species is adrift and insane and doomed to destroy itself.
I suspect that when a sentient species has become profoundly flawed, it naturally engages in self-annihilation, which seems to be built in to the life-force of this universe. Like a law of physics.
Populations don’t like wars. They have to be lied into it.
That means we can be “truthed” into peace. — Julian Assange
Just so hard to believe isn’t it
Jews whose ancestors were gassed to death decades ago are now open to gassing others including innocent civilians. The world reacted in horror when that happened to the Jews, but is now either silent or are cheering it on. The Israeli rep is now wearing the Star of David that has ‘never again' down on it whilst his own damn country is the one doing it again.
And yes the hypocrisy of Israel using Novachok and again after the world reacted in mock horror after Russia was said to have used it. Twice even. Funny how the world’s most deadly nerve agent failed to kill its targets. Well except for Dawn who was said to have found it in the trash. I wonder what really killed her or if she actually existed?
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Voting is like driving with a toy steering wheel.
Scallops anyone?
The IAEA didn't "vouch" for anything. What the Director said in the intro to his report, was its review was neither an endorsement nor a recommendation. That doesn't inspire any confidence whatever. What it means is the new system ALPs for now is consistent with safety standards. Long term environmental studies of the food chain in a situation like this have never been done. The system is going to be subject to filtration deterioration, and periodic shutdowns for replacements. What's the backup system? There isn't any. What alternative disposal systems were considered? Answer- none. There are nuclear engineers and nuclear environmental biologists who are not reassured by the IAEA review. The situation requires constant monitoring for decades, preventative maintenance (requiring shutdowns because there is no backup for each unique filter), and much more extensive longitudinal environmental studies. TEPCO and the Japanese government are not known for their transparency on Fukushima issues.
語必忠信 行必正直
evening soryang...
well, i guess it's par for the course. the u.s. government has tested all kinds of crap on soldiers, mustard gas, lsd, sarin, etc.
i suppose you should know when you sign up that the government that will allow aging, demented idiots to send you off to get killed will also test out its mad scientists' latest brainstorms on you with absolutely no concern as to its effects on you.