Category Archives: Dystopia

The New Abnormal: Authoritarian Control Freaks Want to Micromanage Our Lives

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By By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Authoritarian control freaks out to micromanage our lives have become the new normal or, to be more accurate, the new abnormal when it comes to how the government relates to the citizenry.

This overbearing despotism, which pre-dates the COVID-19 hysteria, is the very definition of a Nanny State, where government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

Indeed, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act responsibly according to your best judgment.

This tug-of-war for control and sovereignty over our selves impacts almost every aspect of our lives, whether you’re talking about decisions relating to our health, our homes, how we raise our children, what we consume, what we drive, what we wear, how we spend our money, how we protect ourselves and our loved ones, and even who we associate with and what we think.

As Liz Wolfe writes for Reason, “Little things that make people’s lives better, tastier, and less tedious are being cracked down on by big government types in federal and state governments.”

You can’t even buy a stove, a dishwasher, a showerhead, a leaf blower, or a lightbulb anymore without running afoul of the Nanny State.

In this way, under the guise of pseudo-benevolence, the government has meted out this bureaucratic tyranny in such a way as to nullify the inalienable rights of the individual and limit our choices to those few that the government deems safe enough.

Yet limited choice is no choice at all. Likewise, regulated freedom is no freedom at all.

Indeed, as a study by the Cato Institute concludes, for the average American, freedom has declined generally over the past 20 years. As researchers William Ruger and Jason Sorens explain, “We ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.”

The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

When the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the individual rights of the citizenry, we’re in trouble, folks.

Federal and state governments have used the law as a bludgeon to litigate, legislate and micromanage our lives through overregulation and overcriminalization.

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal, and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

You don’t have to look far to find abundant examples of Nanny State laws that infantilize individuals and strip them of their ability to decide things for themselves. Back in 2012, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg infamously proposed a ban on the sale of sodas and large sugary drinks in order to guard against obesity. Other localities enacted bans on texting while jaywalking, wearing saggy pants, having too much mud on your car, smoking outdoors, storing trash in your car, improperly sorting your trash, cursing within earshot of others, or screeching your tires.

Yet while there are endless ways for the Nanny State to micromanage our lives, things become truly ominous when the government adopts mechanisms enabling it to monitor us for violations in order to enforce its many laws.

Nanny State, meet the all-seeing, all-knowing Surveillance State and its sidekick, the muscle-flexing Police State.

You see, in an age of overcriminalization—when the law is wielded like a hammer to force compliance to the government’s dictates whatever they might be—you don’t have to do anything “wrong” to be fined, arrested or subjected to raids and seizures and surveillance.

You just have to refuse to march in lockstep with the government.

As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.

“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”

This is the police state’s superpower: empowered by the Nanny State, it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.

Indeed, if you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in by the Nanny State working in tandem with the Police State.

The government’s response to COVID-19 saddled us with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

The groundwork laid with COVID-19 is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

Consider how many more ways the government could “protect us” from ourselves under the guise of public health and safety.

For instance, under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

When combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, these preemptive mental health programs could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

This is how it begins.

On a daily basis, Americans are already relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—their biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

Having conditioned the population to the idea that being part of society is a privilege and not a right, such access could easily be predicated on social credit scores, the worthiness of one’s political views, or the extent to which one is willing to comply with the government’s dictates, no matter what they might be.

COVID-19 with its talk of mass testing, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, and snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities was a preview of what’s to come.

We should all be leery and afraid.

At a time when the government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state, it won’t take much for any of us to be considered outlaws or terrorists.

After all, the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. The Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

At some point, being an individualist will be considered as dangerous as being a terrorist.

When anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism, “we the people” have little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like, whether or  not you’ve done anything wrong.

In an age of overcriminalization, you’re already a criminal.

All the government needs is proof of your law-breaking. They’ll get it, too.

Whether it’s through the use of surveillance software such as ShadowDragon that allows police to watch people’s social media activity, or technology that uses a home’s WiFi router and smart appliances to allow those on the outside to “see” throughout your home, it’s just a matter of time.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying one of its numerous mandates but when.

What the media forgets to tell you about Israel and Gaza

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Ignore the fake news. Israel isn’t defending itself. It’s enforcing its right to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night and day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state – when it was known as the Zionist movement.

Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.

The ‘settler’ project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: ‘Judaisation’, or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme, and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.

New technology allowed Israel to besiege Gaza remotely by land, sea and air in 2007, limiting the entry of food and vital items like medicine and cement for construction. Automated gun towers shot anyone who came near the fence. The navy patrolled the sea, stopping boats straying more than a kilometre or two off shore. And drones watched 24 hours a day from the sky.

The people of Gaza were sealed in and largely forgotten, except when they lobbed a few rockets over the fence – to international indignation. If they fired too many rockets, Israel bombed them mercilessly and occasionally launched a ground invasion. The rocket threat was increasingly neutralised by a rocket interception system, paid for by the US, called Iron Dome.

Palestinians tried to be more inventive in finding ways to break out of their prison. They built tunnels. But Israel found ways to identify those that ran close to the fence and destroyed them.

Palestinians tried to get attention by protesting en masse at the fence. Israeli snipers were ordered to shoot them in the legs, leading to thousands of amputees.

The ‘deterrence’ seemed to work. Israel could once again sit back and let the Palestinians rot in Gaza. ‘Quiet’ had been restored.

Until, that is, last weekend when Hamas broke out briefly and ran amok, killing civilians and soldiers alike.

So Israel now needs a new policy. It looks like the ethnic cleansing programme is being applied to Gaza anew. The half of the population in the enclave’s north is being herded south, where there are not the resources to cope with them. And even if there were, Israel has cut off food, water and power to everyone in Gaza.

The enclave is quickly becoming a pressure cooker. The pressure is meant to build on Egypt to allow the Palestinians entry into Sinai on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.

Whatever the media are telling you, the ‘conflict’ – that is, Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme – started long before Hamas appeared on the scene. In fact, Hamas emerged very late, as the predictable response to Israel’s violent colonisation project.

And no turning point was reached a week ago. This has all been playing out in slow motion for more than 100 years.

Ignore the fake news. Israel isn’t defending itself. It’s enforcing its right to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

Get this straight, Western media: Palestinians aren’t sub-human

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Dehumanisation of Palestinians is as central to Israel’s war strategy as the deadly missiles it wields

By Andrew Mitrovica

Source: Information Clearing House

A young child sits on his mother’s hip as she and others flee through the streets of the Gaza Strip amid Israeli strikes on October 9, 2023 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]

Israel has waged war on Palestinians for decades.

That fact may come, I suspect, as a surprise to many people whose grasp of the world is shaped by their exclusive consumption of Western media.

The deep and lasting human consequences of Israel’s terrifying, perpetual war on Palestinians – prosecuted with indiscriminate cruelty by an occupying army and its de facto proxies, fanatical settler militias – have been plain for anyone willing or inclined to see, for generations.

Countless lives lost and maimed in body and spirit. Land and homes stolen. Livelihoods and ancient traditions destroyed. The exhausting cycle of having to rebuild, then watching all the promise and possibility turn, in an instant, to dust. The wholesale imprisonment of a people penned like cattle behind walls and barbed wire fences, where water and electricity, food and fuel, are switched on and off on a colonial power’s whim.

But, of course, much of the Western media won’t acknowledge these facts and outrages. That’s because many of the reporters and columnists now gripped by the latest eruption of murderous madness in Palestine and Israel have always interpreted events through a prism chiefly dictated by Israel – whether they are prepared to admit it or not.

In this myopic calculus, Israel is always the victim, never the perpetrator. Israel’s understanding of history matters; Palestinians’ reading not only of the past but of the present and the future too, does not count. And, perhaps most indecent of all, Israeli lives and deaths matter; Palestinian lives and deaths don’t.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, made this point in a quiet, but persuasive address he delivered on Sunday to that apparently powerless body.

“History,” he said, “begins for some media and politicians when Israelis are killed. Our people have endured one deadly year after another”.

Mansour recounted the repeated warnings he and other exasperated Palestinians have issued – time and again – of the potential “consequences of Israeli impunity and international inaction”.

He was not alone.

Human rights groups based in Jerusalem, London and New York have published report after report that establishes, as a matter of international law, that Israel has, for a long time, been guilty of apartheid – a state-sanctioned, systemic policy to impose ethnic supremacy over besieged Palestinians with brutal, grinding efficiency.

Implicit in those dense, meticulously chronicled studies was what amounted to a blazing flare intended to seize finally the flighty attention of complicit Western governments and media. Israel’s deliberate, organised oppression is not only unsustainable, it disfigures both the oppressor and the oppressed.  Ultimately, violence begets violence in round after round of horrific vengeance by both sides.

Predictably, the cautions were not heeded.

Instead, many Western news outlets either dismissed outright or used the familiar vocabulary of denial to obscure the blatant truth.

Others opted for wilful malpractice, preferring to devote time and resources to the death of a celebrity dog over the documented theft, deprivations and indignities endured by Palestinians – young and old.

At the core of this blindness is a shared doctrine that holds that a Palestinian is a disposable non-entity, an expendable by-product of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.

In this perverse construct, Palestinian civilians are not considered innocent casualties of war but remain largely responsible for their own deaths and desperate fates.

The result: Western columnists will defend Israel – without so much as a hint of doubt or equivocation – despite its demonstrable record of erasing Palestinians whenever it wants, wherever it wants, for whatever reason it wants.

The sad, human evidence abounds.

Mahmoud al-Saadi, an 18-year-old student, was erased by Israel while walking to school in the Jenin refugee camp last November.

Mohammad al-Tamimi, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler was erased by Israel while he was sitting in his father’s car parked outside their home in Nabi Saleh, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, as he waited to go to a birthday party in June 2023.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian-American journalist was erased by Israel while she was preparing to report on yet another raid in Jenin in May 2022.

Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a 67-year-old Palestinian-Canadian physician, scholar and humanitarian, witnessed three of his daughters – Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, Aya, 13 – and a niece, Noor, 17, being erased when Israeli tank shells shattered the family home in the Gaza Strip in January 2009.

Omar Abdulmajeed Asaad, a 78-year-old Palestinian-American retiree was erased by Israel while en route home to Jiljilya, a town a little northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, after an evening playing cards with friends in January 2022. Soldiers marched Asaad to a nearby construction site and dumped him onto cold stone pavers. That’s where he died of a “stress-induced heart attack”. Alone.

Twelve-year-old Hassan Abu al-Neil was erased by Israel on August 21, 2021 while standing on what remains of Palestinian soil in Gaza in defiance of the occupation.

The lethal ledger goes on and on and on.

In the awful days, weeks and potentially months ahead, a gallery of writers will, no doubt, stand rhetorically shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his appalling calls to impose a total blockade on Gaza and bludgeon it into a “deserted island” in the wake of Hamas’s ruthless onslaught.

Netanyahu’s chilling vow to, in effect, obliterate Gaza and his warning to the 2 million Palestinians who live in that thin strip of land to “get out” is the inevitable expression of apartheid, which is predicated on the dehumanisation of an entire people.

As Palestinian-American writer, Ra’fat Al-Dajani, has explained, the dehumanisation of Palestinians is based on two tenets widely held among Western media: “Palestinians are violent because of who they are –​ because of something intrinsic in their very nature and culture,” Dajani wrote, rather than “because of the oppression and violence of the Israeli occupation”. As a corollary to this, “since Palestinians lack basic standards of morality… the only way to interact with them is through the use of force, whether state-sponsored force by the Israeli security forces or non-state actors such as Israeli settlers. Force is the only language they understand.”

Both of these blasphemies have already been on display on Western cable news channels’ 24/7 loop and in opinion pages featuring the usual parade of Israeli-aligned officials and pundits.

In rebuttal, Mansour was obliged, remarkably, to state the obvious: “We [Palestinians] are not sub-humans. Let me repeat: We are not sub-humans. We will never accept a rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and reneges our rights. A rhetoric that ignores the occupation of our land and oppression of our people.”

Mansour defended the resistance as an understandable response to Israel’s longstanding war on Palestinians, saying: “Israel cannot wage a full-scale war on a nation, its people, its land, its holy sites and expect peace in exchange.”

In the end, the ambassador said, Palestinians, and Palestinians alone, will decide their destiny. “The Palestinian people will be free one day or another, one way or another,” Mansour said.

He is right.

Israel is committing an epic war crime with US backing and arms

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Where is the U.S. peace movement and the U.S. public outrage?

Image Credit: AFP

By Dave Lindorff

Source: Nation of Change

When the U.S. was bombing levees and hospitals in North Vietnam, peasants in Laos and burning villages in South Vietnam, herding those not killed in the process into “strategic hamlets,” Americans took to the streets en masse, occupied the Pentagon mall, brought central Washington D.C. to a standstill, and broke into an FBI office stealing the records of Cointelpro disruption and spying and into a draft ward destroying the records of potential draftees.

When U.S. military “trainers” helped massacre and slaughter peasant guerrillas and their urban supporters fighting a brutal dictatorship in El Salvador, and the Pentagon was running a proxy war against the revolutionary government in Nicaragua, masses of Americans, even in the absence of a draft and of US deaths, rose to the occasion to massively oppose U.S. intervention in those countries’ internal conflicts.  Even in 2003 when America was preparing to invade Iraq, claiming it was making or hiding weapons of mass destruction, chemical or even nuclear, Americans in record numbers turnout out in Washington to oppose going to war. (It didn’t work, but at least they turned out to protest war.)

Now when America is basically bankrolling and arming Israel as it prepares to commit a massive war crime, collectively punishing and killing ordinary Palestinians trapped in the open-air prison of Gaza. When the Israeli ‘Defense’ Force (IDF)  is giving the 1.1 million Palestinians living in the northern 12-mile-long and 7-mile-wide half of the walled-off enclave 24 hours to relocate themselves to the southern half of the strip or face the full destructive force of an all-out  IDF air and ground attack and invasion of the north—an impossible challenge. When Israel has cut off all supplies of food, medicine, water (in a desert!), electricity, and oil for the enclaves on rickety power plant, already for a week, the protests by Americans have been anemic, and have largely been by specifically pro-Palestinian groups, not by what is left of the once large and broad peace movement.

It is a shameful moment. While a few left-leaning progressive Democratic members of Congress like Reps AOC and Ilhan Omar have denounced Israel’s war crime of collective punishment and U.S. support for it, there is actually more criticism of Israel and of U.S. military aid to that country coming from Republicans than Democrats, (though they aren’t talking about the war crimes, since Republicans favor those tactics in other circumstances). The truth is, one of the arguments being used by Democrats to convince House Republicans to get their shit together and elect a House speaker is so they can pass legislation in that chamber to allow the U.S. to give Israel (and Ukraine) even more military aid.

And still, no burgeoning, blooming peace movement.

The U.S. may not be technically at war, but the U.S. war machine is everywhere, on every continent, in every ocean, its military budget, way over $1 trillion a year when everything is counted, bigger than it was in constant dollars than at the height of the Vietnam War when 500.000 U.S. troops were in that country fighting, dying (and losing) a hot war. But its special forces, its arms merchants of death, and its military “trainers” are busy stirring up and supporting local conflicts and pouring oil on fires like those blazing in Ukraine, Yemen, Gaza, Syria, Niger, Haiti, and elsewhere, while also making trouble off the coast of China, on the Korean peninsula (where it still has troops based and has had since 1950, and in Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea.

Where is the public anger? Where is the organized protest against this warmongering permanent government in Washington, D.C.?

Americans are mad at Washington to be sure, correctly perceiving that it is corrupt and rotten to the core They know it ignores popular calls for taxes on the rich, for a well funded Social Security system that will pay livable retirement benefits as promised to all retirees into the foreseeable future, instead of facing drastic cuts in a decade or sooner, a medical system that doesn’t drive us into bankruptcy when we get sick, that gives everyone access to care they can afford and doesn’t give mega profits to private insurers and hospital executives, good public schools for our kids, affordable public colleges, an end to debt enslavement, police who are social servants not fear-inspiring centurions, clean air and water, and action of preventing a climate emergency. But too many of us don’t grasp that none of those things that huge majorities of us want will happen as long as the leaders in Washington, almost all of them bought and owned by large corporate and financial interests and the rich, are enamored of weapons, wars and militarism.

We need a focused campaign to use all available means to educate the American public to a common-sense reality: you cannot have guns and butter. And you can’t eat guns.

As a  Vietnam War Era war resister and protester I’m disgusted. How can we U.S. Americans be accepting that almost all the income tax we pay each year (including income taxes on our Social Security benefits for gods’ sakes!) goes straight to funding the Pentagon and America’s endless wars and proxy wars, with the rest of federal government operations being funded using borrowed money– loans that we the taxpayers have to then pay five percent or more  in interest on every year. In the end it’s all because of the military budgets.

Get it?

It’s time to take that to the streets.

A good place to start would be demanding that the U.S. stop propping up the intransigent, apartheid, fake democracy of Israel and demand that it stop its collective punishment of 2.3 million Gazan Palestinians. For once, the U.S. should try to solve an international crisis by taking action to de-escalate conflict instead of pouring oil on the fire by mindlessly offering more weapons and ammunition.

If that approach works there, our troglodyte leaders should try the same thing with the Ukraine/Russia conflict.

“This is genocide. This is a war crime,” a Palestinian Red Crescent Society representative said.

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Wounded Palestinians wait for treatment at the al-Shifa hospital following Israeli airstrikes, in Gaza City, central Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled)

By Diego Ramos

Source: ScheerPost.com

An Israeli airstrike on the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City has killed more than 500 people, according to Palestinian health authorities and journalists on the ground.

According to Al Jazeera journalist Maram Humaid, a spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported an initial estimate of 200-300 casualties. The health ministry has updated estimates to 500 people killed.

Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting for Al Jazeera from Khan Younis in southern Gaza, detailed that the bombing on the hospital courtyard came without warning and has caused significant damage to the building, which continues to provide medical services.

“This hospital contains hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians injured during the continuing Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave.

It is crowded with civilians. Just at this moment, hundreds of wounded people have reached the hospital. The area is full of residential buildings.

This is a true massacre that has taken place,” Azzoum reports.

Journalist Younis Tirawi spoke to people in the hospital, who described seeing thousands of people taking shelter, thinking the hospital was a safe haven.

Tirawi also reported a statement from Donald Binder, the undersecretary to the Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, who warned against Israeli airstrikes two days prior to the Oct. 17 bombing. Binder noted the severe damage done to the ultrasound and mammography sections of the hospital and pleaded for anyone with influence in the Israeli government to call off any future strikes.

Journalist Dan Cohen posted a phone conversation with Dr. Mohamad Ziara from Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, as it prepares to receive casualties and injured civilians from the al-Ahli attack:

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defense, said, “The massacre at al-Ahli Arab Hospital is unprecedented in our history. While we’ve witnessed tragedies in past wars and days, what took place tonight is tantamount to a genocide.”

Representative from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Nebal Farsakh, echoed the sentiment stating to Al Jazeera:

“Those who were in front of the hospital were forced to leave their homes under the evacuation order. They can’t even afford to evacuate to the south. There’s complete destruction of the infrastructure and transportation,” she said. “They are forced t[o] evacuate themselves under continuous bombardment. The only available [refuge] is a hospital, so they’re thinking that they would be in a safe place.

“This is genocide. This is a war crime,” she said.

Waiting for an Apocalypse

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Method, Method, what do you want from me?  You know that I have eaten of the fruit of the unconscious.”  – Jules Laforgue, Moralités légendaires

The other day my wife attended an event at a well-appointed home in town where men in dark suits stood around to provide a sense of security that no harm would come to the visitors, even though the angel of death had visited this house on previous occasions, for it was a funeral home, well-steeped in boxing people up for the journey to the underworld.  So to call it a “home” is really a misnomer; that might sound cozy, but it is really a way station for the dead.  A layover.

Mistakenly thinking that she was attending a traditional wake and the dead person’s corpse would be there in a coffin, I suggested that she check out the casket and, if she liked its wood and the softness of its velvet liner, to inquire whether they had any sales going on, especially if they had a buy-one-get-one-free sale like the local supermarket often has for English muffins and other goodies.

I think she forgot to ask, but she did tell me that the elderly woman who died had been cremated weeks ago and that her ashes were in a box on a table.  Boxes, ah, little boxes.

***

I have long wondered why so many people are enchanted by sunsets, why they travel to see them and gasp in wonder that the sun disappears and night comes on.  Colorful yes, but not as glorious as the sunrise, the rosy-fingered dawn of every new day.  Why celebrate the death of the day and our journey into the underworld of sleep and the cave of dreams rather than the dawn of our awakening and new life.  Jokes aside, morbidity is not life-affirming.  The true apocalypse – Greek apokalyptein, uncover, disclose, reveal – is every dawn’s epiphany when we can dream while awake and create.

***

In Apuleius’s Metamorphoses there is the story of Cupid and Psyche, the former being a male god and the latter a female human.  Psyche, who has lost her lover Cupid but wants him back, is tricked by the goddess Aphrodite who challenges her, if she wants Cupid back, to take the dangerous journey to the underworld to retrieve a box of beauty cream.  Psyche goes and gets the box but is tempted to open it since it would enhance her already beautiful human appearance.  When she does, she falls into a deathlike sleep.  It’s an old story, forever new.  Switch the sexes if you wish.  Take 200 vitamin pills a day as many billionaires and other assorted crazies do intent on becoming immortal gods.  Good luck.  Get uploaded or downloaded into a computer, whichever it is, and live forever.  Maybe watch the sun set or perchance wake up.  And although Psyche is given a Hollywood ending when she is saved by Zeus and made immortal with the other gods in Olympus, that’s just an old movie.  We live by facts these days, not myths.  Ah, boxes.

***

The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel
I am just a poor boy, though my story’s
seldom told
I have squandered my resistance for a
pocketful of mumbles
Such as promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest, hmm

***

Children love boxes within which they often hide their collections for safekeeping.  Give a child a box with a lid and it will be filled in no time.  Filled with little things that symbolize for children the vast infinity of secret space that is their hold on time.  Children are born poets and philosophers who over time are usually dulled by adults around them from whom they learn to hide their secrets and the questions these secrets raise.  The secrets often fester and die, only to live on in repressed lives.  I knew a man who collected cigar boxes.  They were everywhere in his house when he died.  Most were empty.  His wife outdid him with her collection of empty boxes: shoe boxes, jewelry boxes, every kind of box imaginable.  All empty.  Were they waiting to be filled?  With what?  Secrets? Another woman I knew had a box with an envelope inside marked, “My Father’s Magic Envelope – AKA Miracles.”  It was empty.  She pictured herself as a boxer in a sketch she drew, a child without a face with boxing gloves.  I can only guess at the secrets she was fighting to remember or forget. The experimental method is based on repetition, but so too is trauma.  Internment is not just for the dead.

***

Boxed in, boxed up, housed, enclosed. trapped, contained, caged , enveloped, bounded, penned, corralled, trapped: calling from my cell for help?  The screen lights up with a concatenation of phantom images that seize the mind, what the Greeks called eidolon.

***

Let’s forget about Pandora’s box, which was actually a jar in the original story.  Its last content being hope.  I once knew a girl named Hope.  She was very seductive. But I sensed she was trouble and escaped when she started to open up about her secrets.  I wasn’t very curious, just afraid.  So long, Hope, “it’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.”  Thanks, Leonard.

***

There are countless political analyses of what drives the United States’ ruling forces in their systematic, brutal, and remorseless wars of aggression around the world.  The perpetual effort to expand an empire originally built on the blood of indigenous people.  The refusal to live in peace within national boundaries.  The pushing of NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders.  It seems insane, which of course it is.  But what is behind such madness?  The secret may be quite simple.  Again the ancient Greeks come to mind as Roberto Calasso writes in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, quoting the historian Jacob Burckhardt, when he wrote of the secret of war-loving Sparta: “But the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.”  Power as an end in itself.  Realizing this is apocalyptic in the revelatory sense, for it opens the box on the secret nihilism of the U.S. ruling elites.

***

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am waiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting,”
for jazz accompaniment

It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War”

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Activist Post

Few people are familiar with a little event around 1200 BC called the Bronze Age Collapse in the region known as the Levant (now known as the Middle East). Most folks are taught that history and progress travel in a straight line and that each generation improves upon the culture and innovations of previous generations. This delusion is constructed around a Smithsonian-influenced view of the past. In reality, history tends to go in a circle, or a spiral, with innovation leading to ease, ease leading to laziness and corruption, and corruption leading to weakness and collapse.

Over and over again, humanity reaches for Elysium on Earth only to be slapped back down. The survivors then build grass huts on top of the ruins of the old empires and they start over from scratch.  Why does the Bronze Age catastrophe matter?  Obviously, because history tends to rhyme.

The Levant at this time was rich with civilization and trade, composed of a host of kingdoms that represented the known world including the Egyptians, Babylonians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, etc.  They had vast economic networks, agriculture, industry and written libraries. The proximity of the kingdoms allowed for such extensive trade relations that this period is often referred to by modern historians as the first “globalized economy” (sound familiar?).

What took centuries to build was destroyed in a single generation by a series of disasters. A “mega-drought” caused kingdoms without consistent water resources to lose agricultural production leading to widespread famine and disease (yes, the climate can and does change dramatically regardless of human carbon footprint). Trade was disrupted by internal disputes, and a mysterious invasion of a group of roaming raiders called the “sea people” is documented as a primary factor in collapse.

The Sea People attacked numerous kingdoms, but many of them were also refugees flooding into the region. They disrupted cultures and economies and dragged a number of empires into the dust. This all happened in less than 30 years. Sadly, because only the elites of these civilizations were able to read and write, languages and historical documentation were lost.

This initiated a dark age which lasted for centuries. Humanity was set back, essentially to zero, while scratching and surviving among temples and pyramids of past generations. They must have looked up at those decaying marvels of architecture from hundreds of years ago and wondered “What the hell happened to us?”

Not everything perished, of course. The Egyptian dynasties were in decline, but they managed to hold together far better than their counterparts across the Levant.  However, the event represented a setback to human knowledge that was detrimental. One might suggest that if the Bronze Age Collapse never occurred we might be a space borne species traveling the stars by now.

Then again, maybe these cultures were so corrupt that they needed to fail so that something better could be built in their place?

What does any of this have to do with the state of the Middle East today? The smart readers out there surely see what I’m getting at. The intricate relationships and trade mechanisms of the Bronze Age led to great wealth and prosperity, but they were terribly fragile. That same interdependency resulted in their demise as they tumbled like dominoes on top of each other.

The globalization and collectivist war mongering of today is leading to a similar worldwide implosion. Our irrational ties to foreign entanglements and economies could very well destroy civilization again. Consider what are we about to see as the Israel/Palestine war unfolds…

Multiple Nations Dragged Into The Conflict

If you were wondering what the “October surprise” was going to be, well, now you know.  I will make my position on this situation clear – I don’t care about either side.  I care about innocent civilians, but other than that the war is irrelevant.  I am an American and I care about America. The same goes for Ukraine and Russia. Their wars are not our wars, and I am highly suspicious every time our political leaders try to lure us into choosing a side when foreigners start shooting each other. To summarize:  All wars are banker wars.

The Israelis enjoy our money but they have a history of proven elicit operations to lure us into war (USS Liberty, anyone?). The Palestinians and most of the Muslim world despise the West and Christianity in general (and I don’t really care who started it, the fact remains that our cultures are completely incompatible and this will never change).  Just because we happen to find common ground on fighting back against the insane trans agenda does not mean I’m willing to accept draconian Sharia Law in my community.

Both sides use tactics that deliberately target civilians. I’m not talking about collateral damage like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m talking about groups that are consciously and brazenly engaged in plans for genocide. Bottom line? There are no “good guys” to join with. It’s a complete sh*t show of ancient tribal nonsense that Westerners should stay away from.

For those who disagree, ask yourselves this – Are you truly willing to go pick up a rifle and fly to Israel or Gaza to fight and die for either side?  If so, then go do it and stop demanding others do it for you.  If not, then shut up.

But here’s what’s going to happen:  the establishment will seek to force Americans and Europeans into these wars regardless.  The corporate media and some political leaders are already suggesting that the recent full-scale attack on Israel was planned by governments outside of Gaza. Some are accusing Iran, and others accuse Lebanon. From the extensive amount of footage of the attack that I have examined, I have no doubt that someone other than the Palestinians orchestrated the event. The tactics were far too advanced and far too coordinated; the Palestinians have never been all that smart when it comes to military strategy.

Who drafted the attack is another question entirely. So far there are a lot of rumors but no hard evidence leading to any specific governments. Another big question is, how did the Palestinians manage to organize all of this and execute the invasion WITHOUT Israeli intel services knowing about it? Mossad is known to be one of the most intrusive and pervasive covert agencies in the world, yet they were caught completely off guard by this unprecedented attack?  I think not.

I’m reminded of the events of 9/11 and the strange series of intelligence failures that preceded it. I’m also reminded of the lies, propaganda and the reactionary response which led to two decades of meaningless war.

I’m going to call it here – in a couple of weeks we will hear reports that many of the soldiers involved in the incursion were NOT Palestinian. They will claim some of them are from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, etc. There will be intel that says Iran was a major backer of the plan (The Wall Street Journal already claims this is the case, but they have not provided any compelling proof, yet).

A US carrier strike group is on the way to the region now, and this is just the beginning. Europeans will be pressured to go to war, American conservatives in particular will be waterboarded with propaganda telling us that an “attack on Israel is an attack on the US.” It will be a lot like the rhetoric Neo-cons and leftists used during the initial invasion of Ukraine, but multiplied by a thousand. To be clear, both Biden and Trump have been rattling sabers and testing the waters of war, so don’t think that we can avoid this simply by voting.

Multiple Fronts

Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that.  A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory.  The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization).  Lebanon, Iran and Syria will all immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all – Hell, the Israelis got their asses handed to them by Lebanon alone in 2006.

This will result in inevitable demands for US/EU intervention.

East vs West

Depending on the extent of the Western reaction, the BRICS nations may be compelled to get involved. This may not be on a kinetic level, but there is a chance. Russia has strategic security treaties with Iran and Syria. China has numerous economic interests and influence in the region as the world’s largest importer/exporter.

These nations might retaliate with the same kind of financial warfare that the West used against Russia – with China and the BRICS cutting off the dollar as the world reserve currency. This would add to the crippling inflation we are already experiencing.

Terror Attacks And False Flags

If you thought things might be eerily quiet on the terrorism front lately, that’s now over. I would be shocked if we made it another six months without multiple attacks tied back to Islamic groups. Some of them will be real and some of them will be staged, and telling which is which will be difficult.

The thing is, wide open borders in the West have made this far more likely and the establishment knows it. In my opinion they WELCOMED IT. If they can get at least one crazy Muslim to shoot up a strip mall or blow up a football stadium, they will have all the leverage they need to con Americans into another ground war in the Middle East.  Do we need to “fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here?”  That’s garbage thinking.  We should not be letting them over here in the first place.

Europe in particular is playing with fire. National governments and the EU have invited tens-of-millions of these people to their doorsteps and now they face a serious conundrum. There are Sharia Law communities all over Europe, there are millions of military-age Muslim men with every opportunity to do great harm. And, there are millions of woke leftists currently cheering them on, thinking that this is some form of “decolonization.”

Closure Of The Strait Of Hormuz, Skyrocketing Oil Prices

I have been warning about this scenario for many years; it was only a matter of time before tensions with Iran gave them a rationale to close the Strait Of Hormuz and shut down 30% of all oil exports from the Middle East to the rest of the world. Keep in mind, Europe is suffering from extensive energy inflation, in part because of the economic crisis and also because of sanctions against Russia.

Biden has been trying to hide inflation by dumping oil from the strategic reserves onto the market, but now those reserves are the lowest they have been since 1983.  Conveniently, this happened right before the strike on Israel. Our reserves are depleted as we go to war. Oil prices and gasoline prices will explode if Iran is implicated in the Israel attack. Iran will run a few giant oil tankers into the Hormuz, sink them, and make the strait impassable for months. Don’t be surprised of we see $200 per barrel oil next year, which will translate to around $7 per gallon gas or higher for much of the US.

A Push For A New Draft

Let’s be honest, current US recruitment numbers are a joke and the wokification of our military is making it weaker by the month. No American citizen with a legit warrior mindset or combat aptitude is going to join that circus freak show voluntarily. The establishment will try to regale conservatives and patriots with visions of “fighting the good fight for family and country” but most will not buy in. With attempts to ignite multiple fronts against Russia, China and the Middle East, they will start talking about a new draft system.

My belief is that this will fail miserably and would start a civil war rather than fill the ranks of the Army or Marines, but they may have a scheme to deal with this outcome…

Is This The Real Reason Why US Officials Are Encouraging The Migrant Invasion?

The reality is, America has its own invasion to deal with.  During the Bronze Age Collapse certain empires (like Egypt) survived using an odd tactic – instead of fighting off the invading hordes of refugees, nomads and sea people, they HIRED them and inducted them into important positions within their military. Corrupt authoritarian rulers ultimately found that they faced more of a threat from their own starving peasants than they did from the outsiders, so they joined with them to put down local rebellions.

This might not be as useful in Europe, but in America I wonder if this was the intention all along; to bring in millions of military-age foreigners with little sympathy for the existing culture, then in the midst of collapse and conflict offer them automatic citizenship and benefits if they join the military. Not on the small scale the federal government has going today, but on an enormous scale the likes of which we have never seen.

Maybe the plan was always to leave the gates open and allow illegals to stroll in so that they could act as a mercenary contingent to fight in foreign wars or fight against American citizens should rebellion arise…

Plan C

The timing of the conflict in Israel is incredibly beneficial to globalists, and this might explain Israel’s bizarre intel failure. Just as US and British leaders had prior knowledge of a potential Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but warned no one because they WANTED to compel Americans to fight in WWII, the Palestinian incursion serves a similar purpose.

The covid pandemic and mandates failed to get the desired result of a global medical tyranny. The war in Ukraine failed to get desired results as the warhawks’ demands for boots on the ground against Russia fell apart. Perhaps this is just Plan C?

The establishment seems particularly obsessed with convincing US conservatives and patriots to participate in the chaos; there are a number of Neo-cons and even a few supposed liberty media personalities calling for Americans to answer the call of blood in Israel. Some have described the coming conflagration as “the war to end all wars.”

I believe that the real war is yet to truly start, and that is the war to erase the globalists from existence. They want us to fight overseas in endless quagmires in the hopes we will die out. And when we do, there will be no one left to oppose them. It’s a predictable strategy, but its success is doubtful. Another interesting fact about the Bronze Age Collapse – the elites were some of the first groups to be wiped out after the system broke down.

‘Al-Aqsa Storm’ Operation: Far-reaching Geopolitical Implications

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By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

Source: GlobalResearch.ca

A major conflict is beginning in Palestine. On October 7, Hamas launched a military operation against the Israeli occupation forces. Using missiles, drones and paragliders, Palestinian soldiers managed to surprisingly attack Israeli troops and advance through occupied territory, liberating many areas. Tel Aviv responded with a declaration of war and several brutal attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, however, the Jewish State’s forces still appear unable to expel Palestinian soldiers from their occupied territory, with Hamas advancing rapidly.

In addition to territorial disputes, the attack seems to have direct religious reasons. Palestinians call the assault “Al-Aqsa Storm Operation“, referring to the famous Al-Aqsa Mosque, an important Islamic holy site. Jewish militants have frequently attacked the site and extremist religious groups have pressured the state to demolish the Mosque and build a Jewish temple in the region. The constant desecration of Al-Aqsa appears to have been a red line for Palestinian Muslims.

The surprise effect of the Hamas attack shocked Israeli authorities and Tel Aviv’s supporters around the world. Hamas’ ability to destroy the illegal siege imposed by Zionist forces was seen as a historic defeat for Israel. Furthermore, many experts are criticizing the intelligence capabilities of the Jewish State after the start of the battle, as the country’s spy forces were inefficient in predicting Palestinian moves and taking preventive measures against Hamas, which is a militia, not a regular national army, therefore having much more limited resources than Israeli Defense Forces.

Immediately after the start of hostilities, many videos and images began to be shared on social media showing the violence of the clashes. Many of these images are spread out of context, mainly by the Western pro-Zionist propaganda machine. Anti-Palestine activists accuse Hamas of murdering civilians, while anti-Zionists claim [erronously] that all those killed are military targets – even though some of them are unarmed. It is important to remember that in Israel military service is mandatory for almost all citizens (including women), with most of the Gaza borders’ settlers being actually military, even if they were eventually killed or captured while off duty.

Israel’s reactions were harsh. Netanyahu declared a state of war and ordered a series of bombings against the Gaza Strip.

Hundreds of Palestinian civilians died, non-military facilities were destroyed, and a severe blockade is being imposed on any type of food, energy or water supply. The retaliation, did not prevent Hamas’ advance into the occupation zone. There is still a strong presence of Palestinian troops and an absolute Israeli inability to expel them. Furthermore, thousands of Israeli citizens are leaving the country, creating an unprecedented crisis.

Around the world, reactions to the escalation were as expected. Most Arab and Islamic countries have expressed support for the Palestinian resistance, but without committing to direct military cooperation. The Collective West has voiced support for Israel, with the US, EU, UK and their allies harshly criticizing Hamas, which they consider a “terrorist group”. On the other hand, Russia and China called for an immediate ceasefire and emphasized the importance of recognizing a Palestinian State as an existential condition for peace in the Middle East.

Washington is moving significant extra military aid to Tel Aviv. The Jewish State already receives 3 billion dollars in military assistance annually from the US, but with the escalation of hostilities, the tendency is for this assistance to increase substantially. Obviously, this will have a severe impact on the proxy war against Russia, as it will be impossible for the US to continue backing two high-intensity conflicts at the same time. The pro-Israel agenda is unanimous among American politicians, bringing together Republicans and Democrats much more cohesively than Ukraine, which many conservative politicians dislike. So, it is most likely that Kiev will be progressively “abandoned” by Washington as the crisis in Palestine worsens.

However, it is unlikely that American aid will automatically be a “game-changer” for Israel. There will be many local reprisals as Iran will certainly exponentially boost its participation in the conflict and send weapons and irregular troops to help the Palestinians. Furthermore, Hezbollah from Lebanon and some Syrian military units are also on combat readiness and could openly enter the conflict if it escalates. Iran also controls Houthi dissidents in Yemen, who could also take part in hostilities. So, instead of an “easy” military effort, with systematic killing of civilians and territorial expansionism (as seen on other occasions), this time, Israel may be facing a serious security crisis, putting its very existence at risk.

To avoid this disastrous scenario, the right thing to do for Tel Aviv is to stop territorial expansionism and the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories. The Jewish State needs to respect international law and start thinking seriously about returning its borders to the limits of the 1948 UN plan – with possible changes, as long as they are negotiated with the Arabs under mutually beneficial circumstances. Aggressive policies of apartheid and territorial annexation, as well as desecration of Islamic religious sites, will only result in more conflicts.

However, Tel Aviv seems not only committed to the most extreme wings of Zionism but also shows a willingness to act as an American proxy against Iran in the Middle East, which brings very negative expectations. If Israel chooses the path of war, it could become a “new Ukraine”.