Two government entities subordinated to the State Department concluded, in writing, that Israel was blocking their humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, reported to Congress the opposite conclusion because he intended to deliver more military aid to Gaza.
The selected formulation is unfortunately not covering the real issue at hand.
U.S. law prohibits military aid to countries which are hindering U.S. humanitarian aid.
Two government entities subordinated to the State Department concluded, in writing, that Israel was blocking their humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, reported to Congress the opposite conclusion because he intended to deliver more military aid to Gaza.
By misleading Congress on humanitarian aid to Gaza Blinken deliberated broke the law.
The real issue is control and paranoia. The Australian government is again demonstrating that Australian citizens are its property. It has decided what they can consume, what they may be allowed to read or post, and can make the final say. Social media platforms must comply or they will be fined; how this is enforced is the next stage of overreach.
“Misinformation and disinformation pose a serious threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy”– Communications Minister Michelle Rowland
The Australian government is looking to further control speech and information online, deciding what its citizens may consume through stricter social media laws. The proposal is that social media platforms will be fined 5% of their global revenue should undesired posts or information be seen by Australians. This in conjunction with a South Australian ban on children under fourteen from social media. Steps are being made by the Australian national government to set a standard for information isolation. This is not just an Australian problem but one that is becoming apparent in Canada and the United Kingdom as well. It is a cautionary tale to nations that boast about freedom.
The intention is to censor hateful and deceptive content. The internet has been full of that since the first online forums, so nothing new there. It has also been full of other forms of information and art which at certain times and places (and without context) would also be considered “unapproved.” The intention of the government is to gatekeep and police what it decides the citizens of Australia are allowed to consume or produce.
“Australians’ legitimately-held political beliefs should not be censored by either the government, or by foreign social media platform”– Opposition Home Affairs spokesperson James Patterson
A threat to democracy is the most common cited reason. Dissenting opinions which run contrary to permissible political ideologies or refute the notion of government itself are dangerous. They challenge the status quo and bring into question specific policies while exposing corruption. Instead of setting a better example, allowing transparency and running with consistency and efficiency, the response is to ban anything that presents a challenge. As such, the new bill is part of an Australian government crackdown to take control of the nation in regards to tech influence from foreign platforms.
The irony is that banning information adds an element of taboo and enhances paranoia. Those who already have a distrust of the state will lean into conspiracy theories or embrace rightfully repulsive persons or ideologies. Damn the nuance! Repulsiveness becomes appealing because in some way it is a snub to the status quo, which is hated and distrusted that much more than history’s pariahs.
It’s been the government that has betrayed people’s trust, not memes. Recall the constant lies and twists and turns from the Global War on Terror to the war on COVID. Other, less grand moments have also inspired challenges to a paranoid authority and its experts, who at different times made Pokemon Go, planking, fidget spinners and shirtless men on the Magic Mike poster all aspects of social concern to be policed, censored, or controlled. They’re now mostly forgotten, but were part of the culminating paternal arrogance of those who view themselves as your superiors.
Social media has continued to be a focus of censorship by various governments, and its still banned in some parts of the world. During the COVID years, those who sought alternative information found themselves in a place of controversy, while others were visited by the police for online posts. Information ranged from blatant lies to more subtle and complicated. The trouble is this went for corporate and state media agencies as well as meme accounts.
In 2023, the Australian government attempted to pass a bill that was criticized in Parliament for giving the governing authority too much power to determine what is permissible speech. The problem is in defining misinformation and disinformation. Social media is certainly rife with both, including the intentional spreading of lies, whether for ideological gain, clout, or for shitposting purposes. What someone does with this information is up to the discretion of the consumer. A person only needs to go to the comment section to find clarifications and explanations, or they could research further. For those who take a meme or spurious claim at face value, this in itself brings into question democracy; power is placed into the hands of individuals who can be swayed by memes. Are such memes any better or worse than the claims and “promises” of a politician? False claims and outright misinformation can be quite obvious to anyone who is not actively trying to feed their preconceived biases.
Social media platforms have been using community notes and self-policing to address the problems of bots and false claims. The trouble is that history itself is constantly being learned and studied, debated and reviewed by historians and amateurs in the field. Developments in cience are the subject of scrutiny and critical review and analysis. To have an authority determine the correct viewpoint leaves itself open to experts bias or outdated information.
In other words, it was with Hillary and the Democratic Party, and then with the Patriot Act under Bush jr, that the U.S. lost freedom of the press, privacy and freedom of opposition, opening the door to torture and mass surveillance, all of these policies backed by the “fight against terror”. 9/11 worked as a form of power legitimation through victimization.
To prevent this, the strategy is still and always based on demonizing and isolating Russia. The intercontinental connection between Europe, Asia and Africa must be prevented. Faced with the inability and impossibility of characterizing everything as “Kremlin propaganda” when the facts don’t fit the official narrative, Hillary is now proposing a new phase in mind control.
Hillary Clinton, in a tête a tête with Rachel Maddow (Rachel One-to-One program on MSNBC), who is herself the queen of Russophobic propagandists and the main mainstream propagator of the infamous “Russiagate”, defend the lift of criminal charges against Americans who spread Russian “disinformation”.
Hillary Clinton herself bears enormous responsibility for disinformation, it must be said, since it was in her personal circle that “Russiagate”, and a whole strategy of demonizing Russia with the aim of separating the EU from this Eurasian power, were projected. Although it wasn’t so transparent at the time, this strategy of accusing the Russian Federation of wanting to “interfere” in Western democracies – as if the U.S. wasn’t the monopolist power of “democratic” interventionism – already represented the result of what we can call the ideological political “new normal”: the “normal” in which the parties of the center unite into a single monolithic and cohesive mass of principles, values and objectives. At the time, the Democratic Party already represented Wall Street and the entire military-industrial complex, as did the most fervent neocons, who many people thought were only in the Republican Party.
The support from people like Dick Cheney, accompanied by the massive support of 238 neocons, former George W. Bush “staffers”, McCain and Mitt Romney, referring to Kamala Harris as the “savior of democracy”, clearly demonstrates the reach of the Democratic Party among the ruling class. Don’t be fooled, for these people, many of them genocidal of the worst kind, responsible for crimes like the “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, responsible for eternal wars like the one in Afghanistan, it’s not about “saving democracy”! It’s about pursuing the plan to regain world hegemony. With everything that this recovery might mean. Trump, for now, is threatening this project by turning inwards. We’ll see what he does when he realizes that nothing, he can do, will stop the loss of U.S. dominance in the world.
If anyone is to blame for the escalation that is destroying the West, it is Hillary Clinton. During the reign of her husband (Bill Clinton), between saxophones and adultery, the Democratic Party not only sold out to Wall Street, starting a process in which, over time, it began to collect as many corporate donations (PACS) as the Republican Party, demonstrating the game played by most corporations on both boards. The truth of today is that the Democratic party collects individual donations from the most important billionaires, like Michael Bloomberg and many others. No longer is the Democratic Party a Worker’s party.
The role of the Democratic Party as an instrument of anti-democratic domination suddenly came to the fore during the Clinton era, as when, in 1996, it destroyed, through the Telecommunications Act, Roosevelt’s regulations about the media sector, which prevented what happened later and what we see today: the concentration of the mainstream media in a handful of large conglomerates that cartelize and create a common narrative. All under the banner of the “liberalization of media markets”, which wiped out the smaller operators, accused of having “local monopolies”. Deregulation ended with the domination of the media by half a dozen large conglomerates.
In other words, it was with Hillary and the Democratic Party, and then with the Patriot Act under Bush jr, that the U.S. lost freedom of the press, privacy and freedom of opposition, opening the door to torture and mass surveillance, all of these policies backed by the “fight against terror”. 9/11 worked as a form of power legitimation through victimization.
The only difference between the rogue operator in “Hated in the Nation” and the rogue governments killing citizens with impunity is that there is no way to call a halt to the latter when it is the prerogative of the government itself to decree who constitutes the evil enemy.
Drone swarms have been under development for years now, with the usual suspects touting the virtues of the latest and greatest automated technology to be purchased through lucrative government contracts for what are claimed to be purposes of national defense. As the name implies, drone swarms are modeled after the behavior of large groups of birds or insects which move in concert to produce what looks like purposeful action, despite the lack of a conscious intention on the part of any of the individual members of the group. Drones can be programmed to act in tandem to accomplish tasks such as locating specified persons and, in some cases, killing them.
Many of the drone swarms used in cutting-edge public events, concerts, air shows and the like, have not been “licensed to kill.” Neither were the first large surveillance drones. Instead, the capacity to kill was later appended to them. Small, insect-sized surveillance drones were featured in the film Eye in the Sky, which proved to be a fairly successful feat of propaganda in that it appeared to reconfirm the uncritical assumption on the part of much of the public that the use of drones by the military corps of governments the world over is not only inevitable but in fact good. But just as the most famous of the large reconnaissance drones, the RQ-1 Predators, were transformed into remotely controlled combat aerial vehicles, the primary mission of which became to kill designated targets, drone swarms, too, will likely be used for the same deadly purpose. This prediction flows from the fact that both efficiency and increased lethality have become the ultimate aims of military innovation.
As has been true of other means to mass homicide, including the machine gun, the underlying assumption behind the use of remote-control technology to kill has always been that taking soldiers off the battlefield and simultaneously increasing the lethality of means used against the enemy is not even worthy of debate—it’s obviously the right thing to do. This despite the fact that the use of drones in the twenty-first century has dramatically lowered the threshold for governments to engage in a wide-range of homicidal missions, both within and outside areas of active hostilities (i.e., declared war zones), including outright assassination, once regarded as officially taboo—even if it has been carried out covertly by paid operatives on behalf of governments since time immemorial.
Today’s leaders vaunt their use of cutting-edge technology to eliminate specific, named individuals, as though killing the victims were obviously permissible, given that targeted killing is now a standard-operating procedure of war, having been fully normalized. Rebranding political assassination as an act of war, provided only that the implement of homicide is a missile, was thus a slick and largely successful way of persuading people to believe that killing is an acceptable means to conflict resolution, even when it bypasses all of the standard procedures, including judicial means, for reconciling the rival claims of adversaries.
Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom, to name only the most obvious cases, have all premeditatedly and intentionally executed their own citizens without indictment or trial. Relatively little attention has been paid by the media to such flagrant violations of the citizen targets’ rights, because the narrative in every such case has been carefully controlled by the killers themselves. Samir Khan, Anwar al-Awlaki, and his son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, were killed under the authorization of President Barack Obama in 2011, setting a new precedent followed in 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, who ordered the RAF (Royal Air Force) to target and destroy British nationals Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, located in Syria at the time of their deaths. The list of Palestinian terrorist suspects killed by the Israeli government is far too long even to attempt to list here, but the point is the same: these people have all been denied their fundamental rights by the executive authority of their own government.
Equally and in some ways even more deplorable is that the much-lauded reduction of combatant troop casualties achieved through removing soldiers from the battlefield—sequestering them instead behind impenetrable bunkers in the Nevada desert and other far-flung safe spaces—has been paid for by a marked weakening of norms regarding what once upon a time was known as “noncombatant immunity.” At this point in history, the expression “collateral damage” rolls easily off the tongues of military officers, drone operators, politicians and pundits alike. Witness Gaza, where many thousands of entirely innocent persons have been systematically terrorized before being executed without indictment or trial, and without being guilty, or even suspected, of anything—beyond their spatial proximity and racial similarity to the members of Hamas responsible for the murder of Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. So little attention is now paid to the value of the lives of innocent human beings that even hostages taken by Hamas have been dispatched by their would-have-been rescuers, as a result of the Israeli government’s monomaniacal quest to “get Hamas,” no holds barred, even if that means finishing everyone else off as well.
U.S.-Zionist imperialism in the Middle East is far from coming to an end. The Hamas attack of October 7 on Israel triggered a highly murderous phase in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The subsequent retaliation of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and their killing tens of thousands of innocents and continual provocations has elevated the possibility of a soon-to-come war between Israel and Iran, with the additional chance of involving the United States. To make matters worse, the American relationship with Israel in all these decades has made possible an unfortunate tolerance of the Gazan genocide to many conservatives.
The American ability to produce humanitarian disasters, either with NATO or the IDF, is anything but new, proving over and over again that freedom and human rights do not matter to the U.S. government, which has supported the slaughter of innocents in the Middle East or done the killing itself. Besides, the creation of many more millions of refugees has provoked social turmoil in several European countries suffering from subsidized immigration. And yet, all this is actually assisted by the political leadership of these European countries. Meanwhile, in the Russia-Ukraine war, every time the U.S. government and its allies help President Volodymyr Zelensky with arms and money, they contribute to the death of ever more people by fueling a war provoked by NATO.
The necessity of the state is undoubtedly one of the worst myths that still persists in the public mind. Who demands the manufacture of weapons capable of simultaneously killing thousands of people? Who forces or convinces thousands of people to dress in uniform and shoot others? Who builds military bases all over the world? These situations would be impossible without the state. While technology is always advancing, it begins as a neutral tool, and only becomes a factor when the state’s ends are mass weapons of war.
It’s because of ideology that wars in the past century have been more devastating and total than those of previous eras. These destructive ideas include democratic nationalism, the fiat-money system, the abandonment of old ways in warfare, and the increasingly disregarded methodological individualism embodied in the concept of justice. In reality, democratic nationalism became one of the most important causes of the real Hobbesian war of all against all manifested in World War II, which destroyed tranquility, subjected the national economy of several countries to the prerequisites of war, and annihilated the lives of millions. So it is certainly not enough for states to murder or oppress their own subject populations; indeed, which crimes do states pursue and punish most intensely in their own territorial monopolies? Economist Murray Rothbard responds:
“The gravest crimes in the State’s lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of person and property, but dangers to its own contentment: for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
In the meantime, a new arms race came into being post-war. States competed in the development, innovation, and growth of their armies and weapons, qualitatively and quantitatively, making them more powerful and more effective. The race is materially based on the unique ability of states to externalize their costs. As inflation, taxation, and the manipulation of money and credit helps states, the richer they become, the easier it is to afford the race, which underpins the enrichment of the military-industrial complex and solidifies the preparation for war. And although not all states are involved with the same eagerness, all are involved by extension and definition in this arms race, equipping their military forces and purchasing on the global arms market. In fact, industries specializing in technology for mass destruction are established and thrive because states are their only financiers, diverting market resources to militaristic and warmongering initiatives. The military-industrial complex as we know it is not the result of free-market capitalism, but of statism—its intervention, its central banks, and so on.
Linked to the understanding of justice as an individual matter, private defense removes the need or diminishes incentives for military-sized weapons aimed at large destruction rather than individual execution. In the private world, where we have not yet forgotten how to live in peace, virtually no person or security company would ever consider the manufacture and use of highly destructive weapons. The need to avoid collateral damage, the concern for personal justice and defense, the search for profitability, and the private and voluntary financing of customers wanting to live in peace, happen naturally. Indeed, human tendency toward cooperation is so obvious that it suffices to realize that interpersonal conflict is actually rare and not a predominant feature of social life.
True, there will always be a global arms market, since defense and justice are not needs that appear with states, but exist independently. In reality, neither requires the existence of states. But unlike states, which do not compete or worry about the loss of voluntary customers, private security and justice services have incentives to be managed in a way that is not only economically profitable, but also peaceful. They cannot externalize the cost of their aggression or negligence as states do, nor do they have the legal means to systematically commit crimes and escape unscathed from the consequences or risks common among private individuals. Thus, private security and justice services lead people to care more about peace and the rights of others than is possible under statist terms.
The approach to justice and defense as an exclusively individual and private matter is precisely something that statism has no way of emulating.
Most people think that HIPAA means that their medical records are kept private. But what if I told you that HIPAA doesn’t protect your privacy at all? This is our first video in a series about medical privacy, specifically looking at legislation that stripped individuals of the right to consent to medical data sharing. We focus on what HIPAA actually is, how it came to allow our data to be shared without us even knowing, how we’ve been tricked into thinking we have privacy, and steps we can take to reclaim control of our medical data.
MCViewPoint 