Gaza’s two million people subsist on the edge of starvation. Israel openly boasts that it allows just enough food into the enclave to prevent outright starvation. Chemicals to treat water are banned. Electricity runs only a few hours daily because the power plant was bombed by Israel’s U.S.-supplied air force. Hospitals have almost no medicines. In short, wartime conditions in the open-air prison. Even the wretched animals in Gaza Zoo are starving. Hamas fighters have reportedly even killed cats and dogs.
It’s not a real war. The bloody carnage in Israel and Palestine that we now witness is a large prison uprising being crushed by Israel’s military might.
M-16 lightweight rifles against Merkava tanks; home-made rockets (little more than flying pipe bombs) versus U.S.-state of the art F-15 and F-16 fighter bombers; a few thousand Hamas fighters versus 600,000 or more Israeli soldiers and police backed by drones and heavy artillery.
American-made bombs and rockets are now shattering what’s left of Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated places. Israel, which suffered over 1,200 dead innocent civilians from a Hamas-led attack on a music festival and waves of rocket barrages, vows Biblical revenge on the Palestinians.
Interestingly, the U.S. supplied warplanes, bombs, and rockets pounding Palestinian fighters and civilians are being used in contravention of the U.S. Arms Control Act which forbids use of American arms against civilian targets.
Heedless of U.S. law, the Biden administration is in full pro-war hysteria over Gaza. The next U.S. elections are getting closer. The U.S. state-guided media is also in full war mode, portraying events in Gaza as an attack on the United States.
The war party in Washington is baying for war against Iran which, as far as we know now, had no primary role in the Gaza attacks. One will likely be found or manufactured by Israel’s right-wing militants and Fox News.
I have been watching and writing about the agony of Palestine for some 70 years. I’ve watched what was to have been a small Jewish enclave grow into a powerful Sparta with some 200 nuclear weapons and unprecedented control of the U.S. Congress and media.
Gaza, this miserable, squalid human garbage dump, is a giant open-air prison packed with 2.2 million Palestinian refugees driven from the newly created state of Israel in 1948. Israel and its close ally Egypt keep Gaza bottled up on its land and sea borders. Palestinians are only allowed to fish along the shore. Coastal gas and oil reserves have been expropriated by Israel and Egypt.
Only about half of the U.S.’s fleet of F-35 fighter jets is operational at any time due to difficulties with repairs, which must go through contractors.
When something breaks on the F-35, it takes the Pentagon an average of 141 days to repair it. That’s a long time for a jet to be grounded, but it’s actually an improvement from the last time the GAO conducted the survey in 2017. Back then it took the DoD 172 days to fix a piece of the jet.
Not an anomaly. The pentagram has conned most of NATO into buying into this nightmare. The new Ford class aircraft carrier is in the same situation. The Marine’s tilt rotor aircraft is called the “widow maker”.
Like Apple’s new iPhone, America’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is expensive and hard to repair without intervention from the original manufacturer. According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a bipartisan watchdog group in D.C., F-35s are only available for missions about half the time. A whole lot of these expensive jets are sitting in storage because they’re waiting on repair parts.
The F-35 is a troubled aircraft that’s been on the GAO’s radar for years. Its new report on the jet, “DOD and the Military Services Need to Reassess the Future Sustainment Strategy,” drilled down into why the aircraft spent so much time on the tarmac and not in the skies. “The F-35 fleet mission capable rate—the percentage of time the aircraft can perform one of its tasked missions—was about 55 percent in March 2023, far below program goals,” the GAO said. “The program was behind schedule in establishing depot maintenance activities to conduct repairs. As a result, component repair times remained slow with over 10,000 waiting to be repaired.”
Right now, the care and upkeep of F-35s has been contracted out to third parties. If something breaks on an F-35, it’s usually fixed by a defense contractor and not military engineers. This is part of why the jet is so expensive. “DOD has estimated overall costs for the program at more than $1.7 trillion over its life cycle, with the majority of the costs, about $1.3 trillion, associated with sustaining the aircraft,” the GAO said.
The goal has long been for the Pentagon to take over routine maintenance of the aircraft, but it’s not going well. When something breaks on the F-35, it takes the Pentagon an average of 141 days to repair it. That’s a long time for a jet to be grounded, but it’s actually an improvement from the last time the GAO conducted the survey in 2017. Back then it took the DoD 172 days to fix a piece of the jet. The goal is to get that number down to 60. “Program officials anticipated having greater repair material starting in the second half of 2023, helping to steadily improve repair times,” the GAO said. “These officials also told us that they were still years away from achieving the program’s goal.”
Other indicators have gotten worse, not better. In 2019, there was a backlog of 4,300 parts waiting on repair. In 2023, that number is up to 10,000, but the GAO did say that some of this is due to an increased number of F-35s overall. The problem of waiting on repair parts has gotten so bad, however, that the DoD is simply buying new parts instead of waiting to repair old ones.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a move to make purchasing congresspeople easier and faster for lobbyists, Congress voted to approve a new measure that calls for congresspeople to wear barcodes on their foreheads so lobbyists, activists, and corporations can simply scan them and self-checkout.
Self-checkout machines will be installed at all exits of the Capitol Building, so once they’ve added congresspeople to their cart, lobbyists can pay right on the way out.
“Purchasing congresspeople used to be a time-consuming, expensive process,” said a Planned Parenthood representative. “Now, we can simply walk through Congress, scan all the congresspeople that are for sale, and checkout without having to interact with any humans.”
“We hate humans—like, a lot,” the PP rep added.
One major military-industrial complex lobby group, Americans For Bigger Bombs, said they are also in support of the new move.
“When you need to make a quick pit stop at our nation’s legislative body to purchase a few congresspeople to start a new war, you need to do it fast,” said one AFBB lawyer. “An attack on Iran can’t wait while you wheel and deal, wine and dine, and negotiate endlessly. Now, I can just scan and go.”
This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts…
Our public politicians fear those who – much like the ownership class in the Soviet Union circa 1980s – have already decided what debt to write down, which investments to consolidate, and how to profit from the coming collapse of government debt, and governments, around the planet. Our first priority may be to recognize that the public enemies called out by our frightened politicians may be nascent heroes, future martyrs, and standard bearers.
This week, Hillary Clinton publicly proposed “formal deprogramming” for MAGA enthusiasts, piling on a repeated President Biden theme of trying to deal with “an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement.”
The nation recently discovered that the FBI has a new “MAGA Extremist” category. All this hard work by government is aimed at “preserving democracy.” Clinton is particularly concerned about the small extremist “tail” wagging the House Republican caucus, and destroying not only decorum, but the institution itself.
It is tempting to be mildly entertained by all of this, but as Tho Bishop noted “Weak regimes are particularly dangerous.” The Western/NATO/Blackrock conversation about Ukraine turned to “next steps” many months ago. Our current weak regime here at home – a group of dominant state beneficiaries looking down the barrel of a financial, societal, and military hegemonic collapse trifecta– is also considering next steps for us.
Beyond hunting down MAGAts, and perhaps loading them on trains for deprogramming somewhere, what else is coming, and what can we learn now that will help?
We can learn from the collapse of the USSR in 1989, a seemingly sudden breakdown of what appeared to be a strong and centralized federal state, that had in actuality lost control of the economy, the culture, and the narrative at least a decade earlier. People and regions itching for independence, and those challenging the narrative, were enemies of the State. At the end of that story, what remained were many of the same political oligarchs, many of them internationalized, in control of most of the former USSR’s economic and natural resources. The poor, invested in and dependent upon socialist promises, stayed poor, and many got poorer.
For several years, the death rate climbed in Russia. Power shifted, but maybe not as radically as we were told. While we celebrate Gorbachev as the leader who made the end of the USSR possible with restructuring and transparency – many Russians saw, and experienced, what happened a little differently.
It just seems like the world’s fourth largest military should be able to spot and stop a bunch of guys yelling “Allah!” Just like our own Military Industrial Complex, the greatest defense system the world has ever seen, should have been able to respond to hijacked planes flying around for over an hour.
Our government, naturally, did nothing when Rachel Corrie was murdered by our foremost ally. Just like they did nothing when the Israeli military attacked the U.S.S. Liberty. That event was covered up for decades. More recently, a Palestinian journalist who was an American citizen was shot and killed, not accidentally, by an Israeli soldier.
First of all, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to all the terrorists in the world. They’d been kind enough to stop launching attacks at defenseless civilians for nearly four years. Which coincides with the emergence of COVID-19 into the world. Now, they’re back. Bigger than ever. Can terrorism and COVID coexist?
Israel, despite being about the size of Rhode Island, has the fourth most powerful military in the world the last time I checked. Of course, that couldn’t happen naturally. They had help. Lots of help. From American taxpayers. We built that. But despite the fact they have this magnificent defense system, we are supposed to accept that they were caught by surprise by Hamas, who’d been hibernating along with Isis, Isil, the Taliban, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al-CIAeda since early 2020. Evidently, even they were afraid of a viral strain that still hasn’t been isolated (i.e., proven to exist). Terrorists don’t scare easy. But then again, the terrorists caught the most powerful defense system the world has ever seen- our Military Industrial Complex- by surprise as well on 9/11. I wonder if the security cameras were working in Israel?
With the great success the tallest Arab the world has ever seen had on 9/11, you’d think he would have hatched more nefarious schemes from his secret cave. After all, we’ve done nothing to upgrade our ancient power grids. And with most of the sensors provided by China, it should be pretty easy for any aspiring terrorist to take them out. Mild winds and light rain can do that. And what with the wide open southern border, they should be able to sneak some suicide bombers in there, alongside the drug lords and battle-aged male migrants. Nobody’s checking anything. It’s America 2.0. Take off your COVID masks and start looking for “sleeper cells.” If you see something, say something! I wonder if “White Supremacists” are still our greatest threat?
I haven’t seen any comments from politicians, along the lines of, “Gee, we really need to stay out of that crazy place. It’s none of our business!” They could follow up with, “Our infrastructure hasn’t been upgraded in over 60 years. The disparity of wealth is larger than ever. They claim we’re somehow running out of water. People are crapping in the streets.” Funny, we used to be concerned when dog owners didn’t pick up their crap from the street. But no one’s even cleaning up the human waste. That’s really not fair to dogs. Why can’t they crap in the street and have no one worry about it? Don’t dogs have rights, too? Someone call the ASCPA.
When your own home is as dilapidated as America’s is, you don’t worry about fixing the neighbors’ houses first. When your own kids are starving, you don’t buy food for the neighbors’ kids. Sorry if that sounds like America First, but charity begins at home. But let’s say your society is run by a corrupt criminal elite, whose souls have been figuratively or literally sold to Satan. Then you’d want to distract from your voluminous bad deeds. You’d want to construct foreign hobgoblins, to use the great H.L. Mencken’s term, to keep the public pleading with you to keep them safe. Hitler, Castro, Hussein, Qadaffi, Bin Laden- a murderer’s row of bogeymen.
But the greatest collective hobgoblin, since the 1970s or so, has been “terrorism.” As has been said, one man’s (or woman’s, or transgender’s) terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. George Washington and the Minute Men would have gone down in history as despicable terrorists if we had lost the War for Independence. And England didn’t come over and take our land, then literally claim we never existed, as was done to the Palestinians. Sure, Palestine can be found on old maps, but that doesn’t matter to the most die-hard Zionists. They will tell you “there was no such thing as Palestine.” It’s bad enough, when the world’s greatest military powers arm your religious rivals to the teeth, and steal your land. But then to claim you never existed?
Tulsi Gabbard made an ass out of herself by proclaiming, “We stand with Israel.” RFK, Jr. has already made amends for sharing some tweets from Roger Watters. Who can forget him running out and waving the Israeli flag in a parade? Nikki Haley is demanding that the Palestinians be wiped out. At least that’s the way I interpreted her comments. That’s bound to give Trumpenstein a healthy orange erection. DeSantis is probably scheduling his next trip to the Wailing Wall. The new Speaker of the House, Steve Scalise, shockingly expressed wholehearted support for Israel. Never let it be said that our politicians aren’t consistently willing to court controversy.
Fox News should just superimpose the Israeli flag behind every one of their talking heads. Dan Bongino dropped the MAGA stuff and almost tearfully warned us how dangerous the situation is now. In this country. He advised us to keep looking over our shoulder. There could be a terrorist, or even a “sleeper cell,” behind the local McDonald’s. Anyone named Mohammed is suspect. Didn’t conservatives like Bongino rightfully decry the COVID fear porn? What exactly is he selling, other than fear porn? I heard ominous predictions about “terrorism” going back to the 1980s. We need more money to combat terrorism. And Israeli really needs it. Could Israel even exist without our financial aid? How are they anything but a welfare state?
I’ve analyzed what videos are out there of the Hamas attack, and they consist mostly of lone individuals being dragged from cars, or bodies lying in various places. Lots of Arabs jumping up and down and shouting. I caught an “Allah” or two. I don’t know what the greatest mass attack on civilians ever seen, which is what some histrionic commentator called it, is supposed to look like. Just like I said I didn’t know what a pandemic was supposed to look like, but it shouldn’t look like those empty hospital videos. One photo of what we were told was a naked Israeli woman (she was not naked), looked, well…how do we put it? As I pointed out on Twitter, her right leg appeared to have been in an impossibly contorted position. Shades of the backyard photos that helped to incriminate Lee Harvey Oswald.
The bloody bodies that I saw reminded me very much of the footage from the Boston Bombing. Dave McGowan analyzed all that brilliantly, before he developed a Jack Ruby- style of galloping cancer. And died on November 22. You can’t make that up. If I wanted to create a “terrorist” video, I think I’d hire a bunch of guys who looked Arabic, and tell them to jump around and shout something the audience wouldn’t understand. Whoop it up, like the Indians used to do in Hollywood productions. But I’m not a filmmaker, so what do I know? I’m just a community college dropout, using my critical thinking ability to make observations.
It just seems like the world’s fourth largest military should be able to spot and stop a bunch of guys yelling “Allah!” Just like our own Military Industrial Complex, the greatest defense system the world has ever seen, should have been able to respond to hijacked planes flying around for over an hour. Sure, they were armed with box cutters and plastic knives, but I feel confident even an entirely transgender military unit could have stopped them. And this was in 2001, back when there were only two genders. Men were still sometimes not telling if they were asked. There were no transgender armed forces. It’s a “Support the Troops thing,” you wouldn’t understand.
I want to make it clear that I condemn all atrocities. I write a lot about them in my books. Many were committed by us, not “terrorists.” I doubt any terrorist could kill some 39,000 toddlers, like we did during the bombing of Dresden, one of the meccas of culture in the world, and absent any military value whatsoever. But that was done by “good guys,” in a “good war.” So it’s all cool. If Hamas, whatever it is, and however it was formed and is financed, killed women and children in Israel, that’s a horrific thing. Of course, we mourn for those losses. Civilians should never be targeted by armies, in Israel now, or during Sherman’s “march to the sea” during the Civil War.
Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian civilians, including children. Just don’t mention that to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Rachel Corrie was an American activist who unwisely sat down in protest, in front of an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer. The brave Israeli soldier bulldozed her to death. And then demolished the Palestinian home she was trying to protect. The IDF has destroyed an unknown number of Palestinian residences like this. I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem right to give billions to those doing the bulldozing, while castigating those who escape the bulldozers and dare to protest. My Substack is called “I Protest,” after all. When your land is stolen, and then the area allotted to you constantly shrinks, you should be protesting.
Our government, naturally, did nothing when Rachel Corrie was murdered by our foremost ally. Just like they did nothing when the Israeli military attacked the U.S.S. Liberty. That event was covered up for decades. More recently, a Palestinian journalist who was an American citizen was shot and killed, not accidentally, by an Israeli soldier. They even know the soldier’s identity. And yet, Joe Biden, friend of the Squad, which fights for Palestinian rights, hasn’t attempted to extradite that soldier for prosecution. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard AOC, or Ilhan Omar, or any other “Woke” activist comment on this, either. It’s funny, because usually they’re so vocal.
Israel has used White Phosphorus on the people in Gaza, another war crime. Israel has given all people in north Gaza, 1.1 million human beings, 24 hours to move to south Gaza. That is impossible and will not happen. It is an attempt of ethnic cleansing.
If Israel makes, as announced, a ground attack on Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon is likely to attack Israel. The U.S. has allegedly let Syria know (via France) that Damascus, and President Assad personally, would be attacked if that were to happen. This is a miscalculation. It is far from certain that Assad, or even Iran, has the means to hold Hizbullah back.
A U.S. attack on the government of Syria would bring Russia into the war. Iran would also respond which is exactly what some of the neocons want.
What is the reason for the ‘Al-Aqsa Deluge’, as Hamas had named its terror operation against the Zionists?
On October 8 Alastair Crooke, one of most experienced Middle East hands, wrote in AlMahadeen:
“Israel” has shattered into two equally weighted factions holding to two irreconcilable visions of “Israel’s” future; two mutually opposing readings of history and of what it means to be Jewish.
The fissure could not be more complete. Except it is. One faction, which holds a majority in parliament, is broadly Mizrahi — a former underclass in Israeli society; and the other, largely well-to-do liberal Ashkenazi.
Mizrahi are mostly the original Middle Eastern Jews and often on the religious far right, Ashkenazi are mostly liberal European ones. The current Netanyahoo government is the first which includes far-right Mizrahi ministers.
Most Mizrahi follow the Sephardi religious rites. They want an religious state based on Jewish law. They are as radial as ISIS.
The high court of Israel has 14 Ashkenazi judges and one Mizrahi one. It is one of the reasons why the Netanyahoo government wants the parliament to be able to vote down high court judgements. There have been large, U.S. sponsored ‘regime change’ protests in Israel against that move. The leaders of the military and security services, mostly Ashkenazi, have also opposed the government move against the court.
I therefore think that it is quite possible that there was intelligence pointing to the Hamas attack, but that it was not revealed to let Netanyahoo fall into a trap. We have however no evidence that there were reasonably precise intelligence warnings, or that they were held up.
There are already demands for Netanyahoo to go. If only for his long term sponsoring of Hamas as a counterweight to the more secular Fatah Palestinians. Should he no longer be prime minister the courts will take up the three bribe cases against him which are currently pending. He would likely end up in jail.
Another reason for Hamas’ success was the fact that three of the four infantry battalions, with 800 soldiers each, that usually guard the Gaza strip, had been moved to the West Bank to protect right-wing Zionist settlers during a religious holiday. This allowed for Hamas’ easy breach of the fence.
Similarly, private security companies watch over shopping malls, factories, colleges, and other facilities. It’s also a big business. The government’s “services” are inadequate despite high taxes, so people find alternatives, and businesses respond, fully liable when they screw up. That doesn’t happen with government police.
So we’re taught to believe that the government’s motives are purer — the unselfish pursuit of the “public interest” by “public servants.” That supposedly makes them superior to the profit-seekers, no matter how effective real producers of wealth — entrepreneurs, investors, managers, and workers — are.
Government facilities and services — which are actually disservices overall — are called “public” while services that are efficiently responsive to the public are dubbed “private.” Why is that?
That way of framing the distinction could be intended to subtly denigrate the marketplace, or “private sector,” where profit “selfishly” motivates people who, in the process, improve strangers’ lives every day. That sector’s record is noticeably better than the “public sector’s.” So we’re taught to believe that the government’s motives are purer — the unselfish pursuit of the “public interest” by “public servants.” That supposedly makes them superior to the profit-seekers, no matter how effective real producers of wealth — entrepreneurs, investors, managers, and workers — are.
The Public Choice school of political economy has established the more common-sense view that people don’t become morally superior to the rest of us when they take government jobs. They’re just people, except that the perverse incentives unique to the political/bureaucratic realm differ drastically from the productive incentives that distinguish the enterprise realm. We should call government jobholders “public” self-servants to lay bare that basic fact. They may be sincere in their rationalizations about helping people, but that doesn’t change what they do — coerce people, starting with the taxpayers. In contrast, people in the market have to ultimately satisfy free consumers or find something else to do.
Think about what we know as the public schools. Has anyone ever heard of a school that wasn’t open to members of the public? Who else is there? Great Britain has it closer to the truth. Public schools are called “private schools,” and government schools are called “state schools.” Since everywhere you look, parents have to pay for the lousy and expensive government system whether or not they send their kids there, and many parents can’t afford to pay twice, we might call the government’s facilities “conscript schools.”
But they are called “public” because that’s who owns them — theoretically, but not realistically.
Then we have White House spokesman John Kirby breaking down and crying on live TV, overcome with emotion about Israeli deaths. Meanwhile, this same person advocates pumping arms into Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people, without a tear shed for those deaths.
Think cluster bombs that don’t explode until a child picks them up and cancer causing depleted uranium weapons.
In a nationwide televised address, U.S. President Joe Biden did his best to sound righteous and angered by the eruption of violence in the Middle East.
“There are moments in this life − I mean this literally − when pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world,” Biden intoned with phony gravitas. “The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend.”
This American duplicity is nauseating. Slurring his words, Biden has no idea what he is talking about or how culpable he and his nation are in the violence.
Then we have White House spokesman John Kirby breaking down and crying on live TV, overcome with emotion about Israeli deaths. Meanwhile, this same person advocates pumping arms into Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people, without a tear shed for those deaths.
This American disconnect is equally nauseating.
Biden promised the immediate supply of advanced weapons to Israel to defend itself against Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, even while hundreds of Palestinian civilians are being slaughtered in revenge by the Israeli military in Gaza.
A U.S. aircraft carrier, missile destroyers and squadrons of fighter jets are also being deployed to the region, in the words of Washington, “deter” any wider violence.
How sickening is this knee-jerk recourse to more militarism and inevitably more violence?
Biden’s invocation of a mysterious “pure evil” to account for the surge in deadly violence may sound righteous and indignant, but the truth is the appalling destruction of life and ongoing war is the result of something more mundane and deliberate – the failure of criminal U.S. policy.
As a long-time Senator, as well as two-time U.S. Vice President and for the past three years incumbent President, Joe Biden must take a sizable share of the blame for this systematic failure and the concomitant bloodshed.
First of all, there is the abject failure of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Decades of neglect and indifference from Washington towards the rights of Palestinians for statehood have created a dead-end that has exploded in violence. Furthermore, successive American administrations have relentlessly and unconscionably green-lighted the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and despicable oppression. Biden has been a particularly slavish booster for Israel’s apartheid regime, saying previously on several occasions in his smart-ass cloying way that if “Israel didn’t exist then the United States would have to have invented it”.
MCViewPoint 