US Secretary of State Antony Blinken used emergency authority to approve the sale of $147.5 million of 155 mm artillery shells to Israel on Saturday, bypassing the standard congressional review for arms sales for the second time since the start of the war on Gaza.
A State Department spokesman said on Friday that “given the urgency of Israel’s defensive needs, the secretary notified Congress that he had exercised his delegated authority to determine an emergency existed necessitating the immediate approval of the transfer.”
Via AFP
Earlier this month, Blinken used the same emergency process to approve the sale of 14,000 tank shells, worth more than $106 million, to Israel. The emergency sale of artillery shells comes as Israel’s military intensifies its bombing campaign in Gaza.
Earlier this week, on Christmas Eve, Israeli forces bombed the Meghazi camp, killing 86 Palestinians in one strike. Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy excused the death toll by telling Sky News the army had used an “incorrect munition.”
These days, no one with even two brain cells who attends the Paris Airshow, or the Milipol internal security summit, leaves their computer or phone in their hotel room. Just like back in the days of France’s Concorde supersonic jet, Canadian and American intelligence services warned their executives to treat the plane as though it was bugged to pick up any conversations.
Not to be forgotten is America’s “best ally,” Israel, cited by the US government in targeting American business people for research and development intelligence as far back as 1992 – and more recently through its military-grade Pegasus spyware and its larger cyber-surveillance industry, whose separation from the state is highly questionable at best and nonexistent at worst.
“There is an active hunt not only for promising research, the data and parameters of our weapons, but also for our specialists who are especially valuable,” Russian Industry and Trade Minister Denis Manturov recently said, referring to Western spies and their efforts to seek information about Russian defense production by targeting industry experts.
Well, approaching “soft target” experts for info is certainly a better bet for spies than trying to chat up a soldier whose BS-detector is more finely tuned to espionage. And Western spooks know this better than anyone else since they’ve been busy practicing – among themselves.
Ultimately, all spying is about getting an economic advantage – whether in conflict or war, where the outcome determines the prominence of any future economic foothold, or more directly through theft of economically valuable secrets or the subversion of trade or competition. The current focus on the military conflict between Russia and the Western military alliance via Ukraine obscures the fact that for all the public proclamations of unity and solidarity by Western leaders, they’d all screw each other over economically if given even the slightest chance.
The Ukraine conflict has really underscored the American view of Germany as an economic rival, which once translated into Washington’s systemic criticism of Germany’s Nord Stream economic lifeline of Russian gas (before it was mysteriously blown up). Now, it’s seen in the form of Uncle Sam’s enticing of German companies to US shores with green tax breaks and plentiful energy as limited and pricey replacement American liquified natural gas sold to Europe has sparked German deindustrialization. It was a longtime dream come true for the US, having considered Germany a key competitor on the global stage since the early ’90s.
Based on the struggle for civil rights, the Vietnam War unleashed a massive mobilization on U.S. campuses. Since then, few events have been able to mobilize students like the Gaza war, which shares some key features with the earlier conflict: the imagery of a powerful army subjugating a helpless population; generational differences (young Americans are more pro-Palestinian than their elders); the conflict as a catalyst for broader trends; and, finally, the belief in opposition to the war as a just cause in both cases.
But there are also many differences between the two. Race is the first important distinction. In the 1960s, campuses were mostly white, while today’s campuses have many more students of other races, who empathize with the Palestinian struggle as a form of final resistance to colonialism. Protesters against the Gaza war agree with the denunciation of police brutality against African Americans that rocked the U.S. in 2014 and 2020. But even in the racial protests of the last decade, the demonstrations did not reach the level of polarization and virulence of the current ones,in which accusations of antisemitism have become another casus belli added to the war itself.
Today’s anti-war protest differs from the one in the 1960s that was encouraged by the beat generation and the hippie movement, because the former pits equals against equals: Jewish students who say they feel insecure in the face of their own peers and the latter’s calls for intifada. The tension has moved from the bottom up, reaching university leaders and igniting a political firestorm a year before the elections. Indeed, the situation has reached an even higher level with a federal investigation examining whether a dozen schools, including some of the country’s most prestigious ones, have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legislation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or origin, by allowing antisemitic demonstrations.
As campus demographics have changed, so too have the political pressures and demands on university leaders, including from many donors. The latter have placed the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an untenable situation. A case in point: Liz Magill resigned after a donor threatened to withdraw $100 million in funding. Harvard’s Claudine Gay is still on the hot seat, not just for failing to expressly condemn hateful messages on her campus at a congressional hearing but also for accusations of plagiarism, which have forced her to revise several articles. Like Gay’s, Sally Kornbluth’s picture appears on banners and posters with disparaging slogans. The controversy over alleged antisemitism is the Republicans’ new battering ram against opponents.
Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, summarizes the debate’s background. “There has been a general polarization of political opinion since Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016. That polarization has found its way onto campuses as well. At the same time, there has been a growing tendency to silence or even ban the opinions, speeches and writings of those expressing views opposed to one’s own. That has occurred on both the Right and the Left. Among conservatives, that trend has manifested itself most notably in the bans on speeches and writings that are critical of American history and racism; among liberals, it occurs against those using terms and terminology deemed offensive or inappropriate. The former has been evident at several schools in Republican states; the latter has become common at many liberal universities.”
A student-organized protest against the Gaza war on November 9 in New York.JUSTIN LANE (EFE)
The Gaza war protest movement is largely decentralized, although it has links to national platforms, such as the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the largest in the country. “We have seen students leading our communities across the country. Despite attempts to silence them, students continue to organize and speak out in support of an immediate ceasefire and a free Palestine. We proudly support their work,” a spokesperson explains. The internet offers inspiration and, at times, advice for protesters. In 2014, when Mike Brown, an unarmed black man, was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, leading thousands of people to protest in the streets for days, Palestinian Americans on social media offered suggestions for how to protect oneself from tear gas. Nine years later, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and elsewhere, black and Latino students are the vanguard of the pro-Palestinian movement.
For years, we have discussed the alarming shift in the Democratic party on free speech with candidates running on pledges to censor opposing views and politicians supporting blacklisting and censorship on social media. Many citizens oppose such efforts to restrict their rights under the First Amendment, but are unaware of the work of their representatives to limit free speech. Now, a filing in the Supreme Court supporting censorship efforts by the Biden Administration has supplied a handy list of the anti-free speech states for citizens.
The 5th Circuit previously ruled in Missouri v. Biden that administration officials “likely violated” the First Amendment and issued a preliminary injunction banning the government from communicating with social media companies to limit speech.
Not surprisingly, the state of California is leading the effort to get the Supreme Court to reverse a decision enjoining the government from censorship efforts. California has long sought to impose speech limits on doctors, businesses, and citizens to silence opposing viewpoints.
However, 23 Democrat-led states joined this ignoble effort in signing on to the brief of California Attorney General Rob Bonta. The brief lauds past efforts of these states to combat “harmful content” on the Internet and to protect the public from “misleading information” through partnerships with social media companies.
So here is the list to see if you are residing in an anti-free speech state:
The nightmare continued: “Dealer claimed to have updated the software. My car was delivered to my home and nothing was fixed. In fact, my software reverted to 4.2.1. Now my service manager has no idea what to do. I can’t change drive modes, open trunk or frunk, and pre-collision warning turns on all the time. I can still drive but with limited capability. Feels like a car with a sprained ankle.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Gone are the days of Windows 95; heading into the year 2024, there’s an entirely new “blue screen of death” people apparently need to be watching out for – in their cars.
This week a photo went viral on social media purporting to show a Ford vehicle displaying a “your vehicle cannot be driven” message after a failed software update. “Please call customer support,” the screen urges.
A post on one car enthusiast forum questioned the authenticity of the screenshot, stating: “This is going around on Twitter, but I couldn’t find any mentions of it here. Is this even real? The phone number, when Googled doesn’t turn up anything official.”
One person responded: “That’s the message you will see on the rare occasion that an OTA fails. It’s a special customer service phone number for dealing with failed OTAs. It’s from a user on Reddit, his car has since been fixed and is back to normal FYI.”
“If an OTA update fails in such a way that this screen would be necessary, they should automatically revert to the last working state and notify the user,” another user posted in response.
“Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by Western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan.
Stated differently, the trauma of the 1930s was not the result of the inherent flaws or purported cyclical instabilities of free market capitalism; it was, instead, the delayed legacy of the financial carnage of the Great War and the failed 1920s efforts to restore the liberal order of sound money, open trade and unimpeded money and capital flows.
Another Christmas and there is still no peace on earth. And the proximate cause of that vexing reality is the $1.3 trillion Warfare State planted on the banks of the Potomac—along with its web of war-making capabilities, bases, alliances and vassals stretching to the four corners of the planet. So positioned, it stands in stark mockery of John Qunicy Adam’s sage advice to his new nation 200-years ago:
Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.
But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
The last bolded sentence pretty much sums up the foolish, destructive, unnecessary and fiscally calamitous Forever Wars hatched in Washington all the way back to 1950. Nearly without exception they were waged against alleged foreign monsters of the very kind which John Quincy Adams urged his countrymen not to pursue: Kim Il-Sung, Mohammad Mosaddegh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, Sukarno, Salvador Allende, Ayatollah Khomeini, Daniel Ortega, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolas Maduro, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are but the most prominent among these targets of Washington’s relentless global-spanning search for “monsters to destroy”.
Yet without exception not one of these assorted authoritarians, dictators, tyrants, thugs and revolutionists, along with the nation’s they ruled, posed a direct threat to the American homeland. Not even Putin or Xi could actually dream of mounting the massive armada of land, air and sea-forces needed to transit the great ocean moats and lay waste to the security and liberty of 335 million Americans domiciled from “sea to shining sea”.
To the contrary, the claim always and everywhere has been that these foreign devils amount to incipient totalitarian monsters—the next Hitler or Stalin in the making. The presumption is that the likes of these two twentieth-century mutants are somehow embedded in the DNA of humankind. And unless resolutely and timely thwarted, each new tinpot tyrant who comes along will gobble up their neighbors in falling domino fashion until the economic and military might of their accumulated conquests threatens the security of the entire planet, including the fair lands in faraway North America.
Accordingly, the War Party claims that deterrence of incipient foreign monsters needs be accomplished through robust international arrangements for “collective security” and continuous preventive interventions, led by the peace-loving politicians and apparatchiks of Washington. The latter have finally learned the lessons of WWII and the Cold War, or so it goes, that eternal vigilance is imperative and that incipient monsters must be crushed in the cradle before they metastasize into the next Hitler or Stalin.
That’s always the syllogism whenever a new rascal, tyrant or local belligerent appears on the scene, and it always leads to hideously flawed claims of universal peril, as embodied in the current proxy war with Putin in Ukraine. That particular outbreak of mindless insanity has so far cost the lives of upwards of 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and the displacement of 10 million civilians across Europe. Nearly $200 billion in Western public money has been wasted to date. And now “Joe Biden” and the European Union want to donate another $100 billion to prolong this futile slaughter.
Yet a passing familiarity with the last few centuries of history makes it obvious that what is happening in Ukraine is not an unprovoked invasion of its neighbor by Russia but a civil and territorial war in what had been the shape-shifting “borderlands” (viz. “ukraine”) and vassals of Imperial Russia, and which became a defined state only upon the bloody edicts of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. So allowing this aberrant communist state of 1922-1991 to join its Soviet sire in the dustbin of history amounts to a no brainer.
And by all the evidence that is what had been inchoately wanting to materialize on the political ground in Ukraine after the iron fist of communist rule ended in 1991. As we have documented elsewhere, the Russian-speaking inhabitants of the Donbass and southern rim along the Black Sea had voted 80-20 against the Ukrainian nationalist candidates, who in reciprocation had garnered 80-20 pluralities in the central and western regions including historic Galicia and remnants of Poland. Thus, this communist artifact of a broader 20th century history that needn’t have happened either (per below) could have been partitioned with dispatch ala Czechoslovakia and that would have been the end it. The dead, maimed and disabled in their tens of thousands need not have been victims, nor would the hideous waste of economic resources and military material in its hundreds of billions have ever transpired.
But it happened because the interested parties permanently bivouacked on the Potomac need an endless parade of “monsters to destroy” in order to justify the great enterprise of global hegemony and the opportunity for glory and globe-trotting importance that it confers upon Washington’s self-appointed proconsuls. And that’s to say nothing of the trillion dollars per year of fiscal largesse that it pumps into the insatiable maw of the military-industrial-security-foreign aid-think tank-NGO complex—an arrangement that coincidently has set the greater Washington metropolis aglow with prosperity.
In the current case of Ukraine, however, they have literally thrown rationality to the winds. Sleepy Joe himself in last week’s address to the nation trotted out the hoary canard that Putin means to resurrect the old Soviet Empire and that Poland, the Baltics and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin are next on his game plan of conquest, if he is not stopped well east of the Dnieper River. And, of course, Russian tanks in Poland would mean, under NATO Article 5, American troops being mustered into battle and the commencement of WWIII for all practical purposes.
Of course, this whole scenario is utter poppycock, hogwash, humbug and malarky all rolled into one malefic lie. There is not a shred of evidence that Putin has anything in mind other than the preventing the implantation of a NATO advance guard on his doorstep and cruise missiles within 30 minutes of Moscow. The whole Ukraine War saga, in fact, amounts to a Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
In turn, the fact that official Washington does not even remotely see the irony is due to the fact that the War Machine on the banks of the Potomac has so thoroughly polluted the intellectual waters and ethers alike with the incipient Hitler/Stalin canard that it has just robotically slotted “Putin” into the latest incarnation of this hoary formula without even a tinge of embarrassment.
To be sure, Vlad Putin is no prince of men, and he does have his contemporary gulags to show for it. But he is way, way too smart and historically educated to wish to fall on his sword in Poland or anywhere else west of the Dnieper where Russians are distinctly unwelcome. Indeed, the very thought that this canard is a valid argument for the mayhem Washington is now conducting in Ukraine is a veritable affront to adult reasoning.
So let us turn to the predicate. How in the world did the notion that the planet is teeming with incipient monsters that can only be tamed by the global presence and continuous vigilance of a Washington-led and -kitted planetary gendarme ever take such deep roots and persevere for so long?
Alas, the answer lies in the truth that much of the 20th Century was an unforced error—a giant mistake that reaches back to Woodrow Wilson’s utter folly in bringing America into World War I, thereby ignominiously extinguishing the wisdom of John Quincy Adams in the mud and blood of northern France.
Wilson’s unforgiveable error was to put the United States into the Great War for utterly no good reason of homeland security, which is the only valid basis for foreign policy in a peaceful Republic. The European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.
Actually, his thinly veiled reason for plunging the US into the cauldron of the Great War was none of the above. Instead, what he really sought was a big seat at the peace conference table——so that he could remake the world in response to god’s calling.
But this was a world about which he was blatantly ignorant; a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited; and an utter chimera based on 14 points that were so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.
Or, as his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House, put it: Intervention positioned Wilson to play—
“The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.
America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and non-intervention in the quarrels of the Old World. John Quincy Adam’s wisdom got shit-canned in one fell swoop.
Israeli officials have asked their American counterparts for additional Apache attack helicopters. The White House has not given Tel Aviv a response, leading Israel to step up pressure on the US. The Israeli Defense Forces is heavily using the Apaches across multiple fronts.
Ynet, an Israeli outlet, reports the Israeli Defense Minister requested the attack helicopters but the White House has not yet reached a decision. “The IDF has requested Apache attack helicopters from the United States but has been denied so far,” Ynet explains.
“The request was made to the Pentagon in recent weeks and was also raised by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during his meetings with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during his visit to Israel last week.” The report continues, “Security sources suggest that a final decision on the potential acquisition has not been made, and Jerusalem is continuing to apply pressure.”
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/NEFY64CLSNFDJA5Y7TQ4ABMPYE.jpg)
MCViewPoint 
