Dumpster fire: White House Press Office faced internal criticism over the rewriting of Biden’s garbage comments
By Jonathan Turley | November 1, 2024
Since the “Let’s Go, Brandon” incident, the media has been repeatedly accused of reframing news or rewriting words to benefit the President or the Biden-Harris Administration. This week, the White House Press Office and various media outlets like Politico and MSNBC have been ridiculed for denying that President Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” It has created a weird dissonance as Democratic politicians denounced what the White House and many in the press denied was said. Now, the White House Press office is being criticized from a new quarter for the clean up on aisle three: the Director of White House Stenography, Amy Sands. The White House stenographers objected to the rewriting of the transcript by the Biden White House staff to suggest that the President was condemning Trump’s rhetoric, not his supporters.
The President’s attack on Trump supporters was nothing new. Leaders like Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” and Biden himself has described their views as a return of the confederacy and the rise of fascism. Democrats have called the movement a modern form of Nazism and an effort to destroy democracy, round up homosexuals, and create internment camps.
The problem was the timing. As Harris was denouncing Trump for name-calling and insisting that Democrats are bringing the country together (while condemning Trump as a modern version of Hitler), Biden was literally behind her in the White House, calling tens of millions of Trump supporters “garbage.”
Fox News reportedly obtained an email in which the supervisor sounded the alarm on the White House press office’s “breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.” Sands went on to say that
“if there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently. Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff… After last night’s process, our team would like to reiterate that rush drafts/excerpts the Stenography Office sends to assist the Press Office are not intended for public distribution or as the final version of the transcript. Please avoid sharing rush drafts/excerpts, which are subject to review and might create confusion among staff, media, and the public while our Stenography Office completes a thorough review process.”
The White House was criticized for adding an apostrophe to the President’s comments to change the meaning of the key line.
After the statement, there was an immediate clean-up effort by Politico White House bureau chief and MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire, who was accused of changing the language by saying that “Biden, in a Zoom call with the organization Voto Latino, said ‘the only garbage’ was the ‘hatred’ of Trump supporters who said such things about American citizens.”
Lemire was widely ridiculed. For many, it sounded like another “Let’s Go Brandon” moment. He later turned to the apostrophe spin: “The full Biden quote from the Zoom tonight, which is being taken out of context.” Accompanying the text is a screenshot of a transcript that has Biden saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”
The spin would have been more convincing if many of these pundits were not at the same time insisting that a line from a comedian delivered at a Trump event should be attributed to Trump (despite his later condemnation of any such view). It would also be more credible if Biden had not spent much of the last four years portraying the Trump movement as a new confederacy (before it was reframed as the new Third Reich).
When asked about the internal objections, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates only repeated the prior statement: “The President confirmed in his tweet on Tuesday evening that he was addressing the hateful rhetoric from the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. That was reflected in the transcript.”
However, Fox noted that it remains “unclear … whether the transcript the White House cites is the one that was altered and released to the press or the final transcript that was sent to the National Archives.”
Other reporters now admit that Biden said what he said but describe it, as did CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, as “a gaffe by President Biden where he, in his explanation, inadvertently called Trump supporters garbage.” The “inadvertent gaffe” ignores years of portraying Trump supporters as seeking to return the United States to the Jim Crowe period or pursuing a neo-Nazi future.
While various Democratic politicians have denounced Biden’s statements and Harris has said that she strongly disagrees with them, diehards like MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell mocked those who were critical as “some of the worst” or just ungrammatical journalists:
“To do so, they had to refuse to listen to the actual sentence Joe Biden spoke. They had to refuse to look at the written words of that sentence. They had to refuse to understand English grammar. They had to refuse to understand what a singular possessive is. They had to refuse to understand what apostrophe ‘s’ means. They had to refuse to remember what they learned in elementary school about the English language.”
It appears that the non-partisan, career stenographers who recorded the interview contemporaneously are also on that “worst” list of ungrammatical morons.
The mainstream media is now dismissing the entire matter as just the placement of an apostrophe. Yet, many of these same voices were supporting a full-fledged investigation into the transcript of the Ukraine call during the Trump Administration over “the use of ellipses.”
I was critical of that call and supported calls for an accurate transcript, particularly on such a weighty issue. However, back then, the accuracy of such transcripts was accepted as of paramount importance. Whether it is a matter of foreign or domestic policy (or an apostrophe or ellipses), the public should be confident on the accuracy of White House transcripts, as stressed by Sands in her internal objections to the White House Press Office.
One of those objecting to the use of the ellipses was Lawrence O’Donnell.
It appears that one person’s punctuation is another person’s punch line.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
In Bryansk, the West once again shows its terrorist face
By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 1, 2024
On October 28, 2024, in the Bryansk region, an undisputed territory of the Russian Federation, military personnel and border guards prevented an attempted ground invasion led by a foreign sabotage and reconnaissance group consisting of approximately 20 people.
As a result of the clash, four foreign saboteurs from the USA, Canada and Poland were eliminated by Russian soldiers. The other members of the group were hit by rocket and artillery fire while trying to evade, suffering even greater losses. Militarily, the enemy operation was an absolute failure, with no practical results on the battlefield and a high number of casualties.
It is surprising that, despite the fact that the conflict is, for the Western media, “between Russia and Ukraine”, not a single Ukrainian military personnel was identified in the group. It was discovered that the destroyed saboteurs had foreign weapons, uniforms and communications equipment, as well as personal items indicating their belonging to other countries that are not legally involved in the conflict in Ukraine. For example, according to some reports circulating on military channels (and confirmed by me with local sources), a Canadian flag, a prayer book in Polish, and a notebook with notes on tactical training in English were found with the dead enemies.
In addition, a rather interesting fact drew the attention of the Russian military to the case. A tattoo of the 2nd Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment, Parachute Reconnaissance Regiment of the U.S. Army Special Forces, was found on the body of one of the dead militants. It is practically impossible that such a tattoo was made “by chance”. Surely, the eliminated enemy was a veteran of such a military unit, and therefore a member of one of the most qualified commando groups in the West.
It must be remembered that the 75th Parachute Reconnaissance Regiment of the United States Army (75th Ranger Regiment), also known simply as the “Rangers”, is an amphibious reconnaissance paratrooper regiment. Like all American military units, the regiment is directly subordinate to the U.S. Department of Defense – and is, of course, part of the American war apparatus. The headquarters and main units of the Army’s special forces are stationed on the territory of the U.S. Army unit at Fort Benning, Georgia.
The regiment is designed to perform special combat missions, including reconnaissance and sabotage behind enemy lines, capture of airfields and reconnaissance in the interests of advancing units of the Ground Forces. Units of the 75th Parachute Regiment are troops prepared for helicopter landing or amphibious assault, being highly qualified groups with broad operational capabilities for the most diverse environments of military activity.
Officially, by decision of the U.S. Army leadership, the parachute battalions of the 75th Airborne Division must be on combat readiness to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. This only reinforces how the group is part of what is most advanced, special and sophisticated in the American military.
Despite the special nature of the American unit, the Western media simply ignored Russian reports of a Ranger in the Bryansk raid. There was no explanation from U.S. authorities as to why members of their most highly skilled military personnel were fighting in a land invasion on another continent.
In theory, the Rangers should be under the full control of U.S. authorities. Like any special forces unit, the group must be on combat readiness so that it can be called into a real operational situation at any time – if Washington deems it necessary to use such forces on the battlefield. Given such conditions, it would not be an exaggeration if the Russian Federation viewed the involvement of such special forces in Ukraine as an open declaration of war, prompting an appropriate military response.
In practice, once again, it is only Russia’s diplomatic goodwill and its desire for de-escalation that prevent Moscow from taking decisive action against Western countries. NATO is making it increasingly clear that it is at war with Moscow and will not stop its efforts to harm Russia, using ever more terrorism and even its most skilled troops.
As long as this Western war effort is limited to low-level impacts, such as the useless and shameful invasion of Bryansk, Russian patience will prevent a reaction. But it is unwise for the West to continue betting on the constant violation of Russian red lines, since once patience runs out, there will be no turning back.
NATO plotting against its own members to ‘help’ Ukraine
By Lucas Leiroz | November 1, 2024
NATO seems to be starting to plot against its own members. In a recent case, it was revealed that the NATO alliance launched a sabotage attempt against Hungary to circumvent the country’s authorities and try to send weapons to Ukraine. This situation clearly shows how Western countries are not safe within NATO itself, having their sovereignty threatened by the bloc’s war plans.
Viktor Orban’s presidential administration recently announced that the country’s intelligence service had thwarted a foreign operation to deliver Hungarian weapons to Kiev. According to the head of the presidential cabinet, Gergely Gulyas, there was an illegal deal between members of military companies in Hungary and foreign agents directly involved in financing Ukraine. The objective of such a criminal network would be to make Hungary finally “help” the Kiev neo-Nazi regime.
“Indeed, there were attempts to use the Hungarian military industry to send weapons to Ukraine, but our counterintelligence discovered and stopped them (…) Hungary will not deliver any of its weapons or ammunition to Ukraine,” Gulyas said.
As a reaction to Orban’s resistance, Westerners have attempted to use the Hungarian military-industrial complex as a platform for producing weapons for Ukraine. According to reports, these weapons, once manufactured in Hungary, would be purchased by NATO intermediaries as part of the aid program for Kiev. Then, upon receiving these weapons, the agents would ship them to the Ukrainian frontlines or to terrorists in Africa – thus serving Western interests in both cases.
Details of how Hungarian counterintelligence identified this threat and acted to neutralize it have not yet been shared. However, it seems clear that Budapest took tough measures against its own alleged Western “allies,” preventing them from establishing a black market for weapons in the country to supply Ukraine.
As well known, Viktor Orban’s stance has been in favor of peace and diplomacy since the beginning of the conflict. Instead of fomenting war and chaos by creating useless hostilities, the Hungarian government made the right decision: it ignored Russophobic policies, prioritized sovereignty and national interests, and refused to continue depending on NATO’s political, ideological and economic stance. Orban has repeatedly said that Hungary is in favor of a ceasefire and does not share any of the West’s most liberal agendas – both in geopolitical and cultural topics.
Orban is clearly not a “pro-Russian” politician. His goal has never been to align Hungary fully with Moscow, nor does he have any anti-Western goals. Orban simply does not want his country to suffer because of the anti-Russian madness of sending weapons to the Ukrainians, prolonging a war that is obviously damaging Europe. In the end, Orban is working to establish a new position among NATO countries, trying to remain in the alliance but without participating in the war with Russia.
However, NATO clearly has no respect for the sovereignty of any of its members. The Western alliance demands absolute alignment and political subservience as requirements for establishing cooperation projects. Western main powers, the US and the UK, do not seem interested in allowing any political freedom to their allies, demanding from them a stance of absolute support for anti-Russian military initiatives.
In fact, Orban is often criticized in the Western mainstream media for his efforts to end the war. Unfortunately, however, the Western siege against Budapest goes beyond propaganda. The alliance is beginning to mobilize its security apparatus to target its own members in a desperate attempt to dissuade them and ensure they are following the pro-Ukrainian war plans. Hungary has actually suffered an action that would be expected for NATO against any external, non-member country, but not against a European state integrated into the bloc, despite its distinct views on foreign policy.
Just as there was a plot to circumvent national norms, there is also a possibility of a plot to cause real damage or even eliminate Orban and other key figures in the Hungarian government. NATO has simply shown that Budapest is not immune to becoming a target of sabotage, ending once and for all any kind of trust between Hungarians and their other Western “partners.”
Without trust, there is no unity in a military alliance. Perhaps NATO is contributing to its own decline by promoting such acts of sabotage, since it is destroying the alliance’s credibility and image among the public.
Lucas Leiroz is a member of the BRICS Journalists Associations, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies and military expert.
The US Secretary of Defense is Ready to Fight a Nuclear War over Korea
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity Blog | October 31, 2024
Few Americans today would try to justify the United States government taking part in the Korean War in the 1950s. Even most of those who would make such an attempt would ground their argument in asserting there was a special need back then, as part of the Cold War, to prevent the expansion of communism.
The Cold War is long over. So, why are still today tens of thousands of US soldiers in South Korea, and many more nearby, ready to resume fighting in the long paused Korean War at a moment’s notice? Inertia? Bloodlust? Reluctance of the military bureaucracy to give up any of its size and scope? The desire of the military-industrial complex to wring every possible dollar it can from the American people?
None of these reasons seems very persuasive. Instead of preparing to restart the war that wrought enormous death and destruction the first time around, US officials should be preparing for the US military to finally exit Korea.
Yet, there was US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Wednesday not just saying he has declared to the South Korea defense minister “that the United States remains fully committed to the defense” of South Korea. Further, Austin pledged that the US government’s “extended deterrence commitment” to South Korea “remains ironclad” and that that commitment “is backed by the full range of America’s conventional, missile defense, nuclear and advanced non-nuclear capabilities.”
There you go, the US secretary of defense is threatening going nuclear in a war for which the now generally rejected reason for the US becoming involved in it disappeared decades ago. The defense secretary is mad for war. In this condition he reflects US government policy.
RIPPLE EFFECT
The HighWire | October 31, 2024
Jefferey Jaxen Guest Hosts! First, the continued demise of legacy media and the rise of new media delivering the truth; Jefferey reports on a massive Alzheimer’s fraud, and is the UK going to mandate weight loss injections?; Fluoride Win Attorney Walks through Video Depositions and Evidence Exposing Fluoridation as one of the most damaging public policies in American History.
Guest: Michael Connett, Esq.
House Floats Law to Make Colleges That Mandated COVID Shots Pay for Vaccine Injuries
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 30, 2024
Colleges that mandated the COVID-19 vaccine would be liable for medical expenses for students who experienced adverse events from the shot, under a bill introduced Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The University Forced Vaccination Student Injury Mitigation Act of 2024 would require higher education institutions to cover medical costs for students who were — or still are — required to get a COVID-19 shot for class attendance and who experienced an injury.
The bill — introduced by Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) — stipulates colleges must cover the medical costs or risk losing all federal funding from the U.S. Department of Education.
“If you are not prepared to face the consequences, you should have never committed the act,” said Rosendale in a press release. “Colleges and universities forced students to inject themselves with an experimental vaccine knowing it was not going to prevent COVID-19 while potentially simultaneously causing life-threatening health defects like Guillain-Barré Syndrome and myocarditis.”
“It is now time,” Rosendale added, “for schools to be held accountable for their brazen disregard for students’ health and pay for the issues they are responsible for causing.”
Reps. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Bill Posey (R-Fla.) co-sponsored the bill.
Dr. Joseph Marine, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained in the press release why he supports the bill:
“COVID-19 vaccine mandates for college students were flawed policies that did not alter the course of the pandemic and were not needed to keep college campuses ‘safe.’ I had to make efforts to prevent my own high school and college-age children from receiving COVID-19 booster shots that they did not want or need.
“It seems reasonable to me that institutions that implemented such policies without a sound medical or scientific rationale should take responsibility for any proven medical harm that they caused.”
If passed, the bill would allow students to submit a formal request for reimbursement, the Washington Examiner reported.
The request would have to include a record of COVID-19 vaccination, certification from a medical provider that the vaccine caused some kind of disease and a detailed account of related medical expenses.
Diseases covered by the legislation include myocarditis, pericarditis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, Guillain-Barré syndrome and any other diseases that the U.S. Secretary of Education determines to be linked to COVID-19 vaccination.
After the student’s request is vetted to ensure it’s valid and contains sufficient evidence, the college would have to pay the medical costs within 30 days.
It is unclear when a vote on the bill will take place.
CHD took college mandate challenge to U.S. Supreme Court
Rutgers University was the first college or university in the U.S. to mandate the vaccines, threatening to disenroll noncompliant students in the fall 2021 semester. In August 2021, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) sued the university in an attempt to block the mandate.
The case was dismissed in January 2023. After losing on appeal in February, CHD in May asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, but the court declined. Meanwhile, a month earlier, Rutgers abruptly ended the mandate.
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court this summer ruled that employees in the Los Angeles Unified School District can sue the district over its COVID-19 vaccine mandate because the shots don’t prevent transmission.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges that myocarditis and pericarditis may occur after COVID-19 vaccination. And research shows that adolescents and young adults are particularly at risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis.
As of Sept. 27, there were 1,604,710 Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports of injury or death following a COVID-19 vaccination.
VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before confirming the reported adverse event was caused by the vaccine. VAERS has historically been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
Meanwhile, citing concerns about the shots’ efficacy and safety, Idaho’s Southwest District Health last week voted to no longer offer COVID-19 vaccines at all 30 locations where it provides healthcare services.
17 colleges still have COVID vaccine mandates
By late May 2021, more than 400 U.S. colleges and universities required students to be vaccinated against COVID-19, The New York Times reported.
As of Oct. 19, 17 of those institutions still have a COVID-19 vaccination requirement for students to be able to enroll or live on campus, according to No College Mandates, a “group of concerned parents, doctors, nurses, professors, students and other college stakeholders working towards the common goal of ending COVID-19 vaccine mandates.”
Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of No College Mandates, said in the press release:
“College students were never at risk of severe injury or death from any variant of the COVID-19 virus and institutions of higher education had this data well in advance of mandating COVID-19 vaccines.”
According to the CDC, age is the “strongest risk factor” for severe outcomes from COVID-19 — meaning that the older a person is, the greater their risk for severe symptoms and death.
The CDC said its National Center for Health Statistics shows that “compared with ages 18–29 years, the risk of death is 25 times higher in those ages 50–64 years, 60 times higher in those ages 65–74 years, 140 times higher in those ages 75–84 years, and 340 times higher in those ages 85+ years.”
In other words, the typical college student — ages 18-22 — isn’t usually at risk of severe disease or death from COVID-19 when compared with older age groups.
Nonetheless, Sinatra said, many colleges imposed “some of the most coercive and restrictive vaccination policies” on college students, stripping them of their “fundamental right to bodily autonomy and informed consent.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
By Jeffrey A Tucker and Debbie Lerman | Brownstone Institute | October 30, 2024
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
Here’s why the Israeli military only knows how to fight civilians
By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | October 31, 2024
While it may sound hyperbolic, the Israeli military is only truly prepared to commit high-tech civilian massacres and cannot confront any well-prepared foes. The Zionist regime’s history of asymmetric warfare lulled it into a false sense of security that supplemented their racist worldview, proving catastrophic for them in today’s multi-front war.
Who are the soldiers who make up the military?
In order to understand the Israeli military and how it fights, we first have to understand the society that shapes its soldiers. All Israelis are indoctrinated from a young age with a supremacist ideology through their school system and are geared toward military service from the moment they exit the womb. They believe their army to be “the most moral” on earth, while also believing in the concept of their own supremacy over others.
Any discussion on the Zionist armed forces must begin with recognizing who the Israeli public are because when every one of them finishes high school, they are required to do a 2-3-year stint of mandatory service, which is often followed by reserve service for some time. While there are the likes of the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) who do not serve due to religious reasons and liberal Israelis who often use mental health issues as an excuse, most are drafted into some section of the military.
Those soldiers who enter their mandatory years of service, who will actually experience real combat settings, will not enter direct warfare and are instead stationed at checkpoints, do crowd control, or participate in night raids that aim to arrest teenagers who do things like throw stones. This is why many young Israelis find it more mentally stimulating to join the Air Force or work on intelligence. It is not uncommon to find soldiers sitting at checkpoints, bored out of their minds and with frustrated looks. For journalists covering protests across the West Bank, the Israeli soldiers who are deployed to shoot at children/teenagers who burn tires and throw stones act as if they are playing a game of paintball.
These soldiers also quickly gain rank in the Israeli army, earning in a matter of years what most other militaries would usually only issue to their forces after 10 to 15 years of service. These are entitled individuals whose minds aren’t focused and especially over the past decades have become ill-disciplined, permitted to get away with all kinds of decisions they take on an individual basis. It is a citizens’ army, which means that they are very much part of the society as a whole.
If we look at the actions they have been able to commit during armed confrontations, especially inside the Gaza Strip, it is no wonder that they feel emboldened to take matters into their own hands at this time too. This is exemplified through the trend over the past year where their fighters have filmed themselves committing all kinds of crimes and perverted activities, posting this onto social media.
These videos that are posted gleefully on online platforms like Tiktok, where Israeli soldiers wear the underwear of Palestinian women they displaced and killed or blow up/bulldoze civilian homes, are not only reflective of a lack of discipline but also hurt the objectives of the Zionist entity too.
The following are two such cases that highlight how the soldiers damaged the Israeli army’s war efforts: 1) The instant release of information and photos/videos of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, which prevented their superiors from creating a false story about what happened and inflicting a psychological blow. 2) Israeli forces who seized the Rafah Crossing in May filmed themselves callously destroying the site and insulting the Egyptian army while committing an action that technically violated the normalization agreement between Cairo and “Tel Aviv”.
So why can the Israeli army not just clear up this problem? Well, we all saw what happened when 10 soldiers were detained over the gang-rape of a Palestinian detainee; who was being held at the Sde Teiman detention facility without any charge. This led to protests where thousands of Israelis rioted and stormed military facilities in what were dubbed the “right to rape” demonstrations. However, it wasn’t just protesters, the idea of the right of soldiers to gang-rape prisoners was expressed by members of the Israeli Knesset and received support from a large segment of the public.
Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that if the Israeli high command gives the order to begin prosecuting its soldiers for posting videos of themselves burning homes in Gaza and defecating on the floors of houses or committing a litany of other disgusting actions, they would face an internal uprising against such decisions.
What is the Israeli military strategy?
Understanding that Israeli society is inextricably linked to the armed forces, it also helps to shape how we view the mindset of this military. For instance, while in most societies around the world, a civilian death is perceived as more damaging than the death of a soldier, this is precisely the opposite for Israelis. This partly comes down to the supremacist myth of Israeli superiority and also the fact that soldier deaths have not been all that common, with the exception of occasional lone-wolf attacks here and there.
The doctrine of the Israeli military is roughly congruent with that of the US’ Counterinsurgency model that emerged during the so-called “War on Terror” in the early 2000s, yet it differs in key dimensions that make it way less effective than the American military.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Israeli military enjoyed asymmetry on the battlefield, heavily relying on their air force to respond to aggression with a significant force that would complete missions and achieve tactical victories at a very low cost to military personnel. While relying on their superior military vehicles/aircraft during the years of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), the Israelis managed to inflict a defeat on the West Bank-based Resistance groups, the most significant blow being delivered during their 2002 “Operation Defensive Shield” that resulted in around 500 Palestinians being killed.
In the year 2000, the Zionist regime withdrew from South Lebanon – as the situation became costly to their forces – then in 2005, they decided to do the same in the Gaza Strip after failing to crush Hamas during a battle that took place in northern Gaza back in October of 2004.
However, as the Zionists discovered in their 2006 war on Lebanon and later in their countless wars against Gaza, they were now facing a new kind of threat that today they describe as “rocket-based terror armies.” Throughout the past nearly two decades, the Zionist military believed that it could manage the threats posed by both the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance, needing only to periodically attack in order to maintain “deterrence”.
Yet, between 2019 and 2020, the Israeli military began recalculating and released two important publications: “The Momentum Multiyear Plan” and “The Operational Concept for Victory”. In these documents, it is clear that the Israelis were seeking to adapt to their newly faced challenges. It presents a plan to integrate the developments of the technological “fourth industrial revolution” into military planning, noting that the short military operations that the Zionist armed forces had committed were not delivering the desired image of victory in the face of Iran’s ever-growing military power.
Therefore, the Israelis sought to implement a system that would link all their technological surveillance, reconnaissance, and spyware devices together. We see that in 2021, this new system begins coming into practice as the Zionists brag about their AI systems that helped them conduct the 11-day Gaza war in May of that year. The idea here was to use this system that would be eventually fully integrated to enable the Zionist entity to strike first and deliver undeniable blows resulting in strategic victory.
Then came October 7, when the Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood flipped the world upside down for an overconfident Israeli military and its leadership. Suddenly, they were the side that had to muster a response to a blow that completely embarrassed them on every single level, delivered by the least powerful bastion of resistance they faced.
Understanding the Israeli strategy, it shouldn’t come as a surprise also that Hezbollah instantly began targeting the Zionist regime’s reconnaissance and spyware technology during its first phase of the war either.
If we look at their Counterinsurgency strategy in Gaza on the ground, we see that, unlike the US military, they don’t allow infantry to go through and clear buildings before tanks enter an area, instead they use armored vehicles to protect their soldiers and reduce the number of deaths. But the problem with this improvised US Counterinsurgency strategy is that in reducing soldier deaths, it also makes it nearly impossible to properly combat the fighters that they are supposed to be seeking out.
This is because the Israelis are simply too cowardly to follow a traditional Counterinsurgency strategy, attempting to perform this task without the required risk it involves. In the absence of anything to show for their ground operations, which are designed to keep their ill-prepared and ill-disciplined soldiers out of harm’s way, they began to just destroy more and more civilian infrastructure.
What has occurred before our eyes is that the Israelis have been knocked back to their armed strategies of the 1970s, where we see today that they are trying to besiege the Palestinian Resistance in northern Gaza the way they besieged the Egyptian military in 1973. Yet, in the current war inside the Gaza Strip, the Israeli ground forces aren’t prepared for the kind of strategies that were implemented during the October war.
The Israelis needed to reinstate their military dominance and were suddenly placed in the worst possible position, knowing only how to use their technology to kill from a distance, and appearing to have no coherent ground strategies, they were forced to use this rather useless army to achieve extremely difficult goals that their air force and AI tech couldn’t perform for them. In light of this understanding, genocide became the choice and the strategy.
In the past, civilian massacres weren’t simply used for the purpose of shedding blood for no reason – although the Zionist regime had no issue with this at all – the massacres that we saw periodically in Gaza were committed with the goal of inflicting real psychological blows on the Resistance and Palestinian public; in addition to sending a message to the wider region. This time, it is an uncontrolled mass slaughter campaign, allowing their racist unhinged soldiers to do whatever they choose to butcher innocent people and completely destroy the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip.
Why? The Zionist entity realized that it had no military options left and the only way to achieve a victory and rescue the image of strength they had lost was to unleash a genocide, to kill, displace, and destroy everyone and everything. Even their tactical achievements in Lebanon around a month ago are today being swept away by Hezbollah, to which they have no real answer. To their peril, it has become obvious that assassinations and booby-traps cannot achieve a strategic victory and in face-to-face combat, the Lebanese Resistance is clearly superior to them.
Israel has issued 9,500 administrative detention orders since 7 October 2023
MEMO | October 31, 2024
Two Palestinian institutions concerned with prisoners’ affairs said on Wednesday that Israel has increased its issue of administrative detention orders, with nearly 9,500 issued since 7 October last year.
“The huge increase in the number of administrative detainees is mainly linked to the arrest campaigns in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem, with more than 11,500 arrests in all groups,” said the Palestinian Authority’s Commission of Detainees Affairs and the Prisoners’ Club civil society group in a joint statement seen by Anadolu.
“The occupation intelligence agency has recently escalated the number of transfers to administrative detention of detainees whose sentences have ended, as well as the number of administrative detention orders issued against prisoners who were released on bail and specific conditions, or without conditions.”
Administrative detention sees prisoners being held with neither charge nor trial for up to six months, renewable indefinitely.
Monitoring of administrative detainees’ has proven that the occupation regime’s military courts have formed and continue to form an essential structure for solidifying its crimes, including the crime of administrative detention, said the Palestinian institutions.
According to the latest data that they supplied, there are currently 3,398 administrative detainees among the 10,100 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 30 women and more than 90 children, one of whom is just 14 years old. “The number of administrative detainees in the occupation prisons is 33 per cent of the total number of prisoners and detainees.”
It is worth noting that the prisoner data is related only to those from the occupied West Bank. The Israeli regime does not disclose information related to prisoners in Gaza.
US-Israeli proposals do not include permanent ceasefire: Source
Al Mayadeen | October 31, 2024
The Israeli and US proposals regarding a deal on Gaza lack provisions for a permanent ceasefire or a complete withdrawal from the Strip, a Palestinian source told Al Mayadeen on Thursday.
Instead, the proposal entails 10 days of calm in exchange for the release of four Israeli captives, including two women, in exchange for the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian detainees, according to the approved mechanism.
The proposal also stipulates the entry of about 300 aid trucks daily into Gaza.
The source stressed that Hamas believes the US wants to exploit partial initiatives to benefit election campaigns only. Meanwhile, upcoming meetings are planned between Fatah and Hamas to resume discussions on managing the Gaza Strip and forming a special committee with mutual approval from both parties.
Netanyahu ‘buying time’ with Gaza deal negotiations: Hamas official
On Wednesday, Taher al-Nounou, a senior Hamas official told Al Mayadeen that in any negotiations, the movement’s goal is to stop the war on the Gaza Strip while “Israel” merely seeks a prisoner exchange.
Al-Nounou stressed that any potential agreement must include a permanent ceasefire, a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, reconstruction of the Strip, an end to the blockade, and a captive-prisoner exchange.
According to the official, prioritizing a prisoner exchange alone would not necessarily lead to a lasting ceasefire.
The Palestinian official argued that current discussions regarding a deal are merely a waste of time, under the guise of negotiations in preparation for the coming US elections.
Al-Nounou said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aim with these proposals is to “buy time”, which he sees as “part of a local or US election campaign.”
“We have no veto on listening to mediators if they have any proposals,” the Hamas official reiterated but underlined that the movement had made it clear that it opposes a temporary pause of hostilities and the resumption of the Israeli aggression on Gaza.
The Palestinian official clarified that openness to offers is distinct from agreeing to them, particularly “if they fail to meet the resistance’s four core demands,” affirming, “If we are invited to hear new proposals, we will certainly attend.”
His statements echoed those of the movement’s spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri, who confirmed on Tuesday that Hamas has responded to requests from mediators to discuss new proposals regarding a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
Several meetings have already occurred on this matter, with more scheduled to follow, Abu Zuhri indicated.
Splurge On Defense Spending, Ukraine Aid: Digesting UK Labour Government’s New Budget
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 31.10.2024
UK new government is raising taxes by more than $50 billion amid a widening budget deficit, While PM Starmer last week allocated 120 million pounds to Ukraine for military spending.
UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has delivered the new Labor government’s first budget.
What’s in it?
There will be an increase of around £2.9 billion ($3.76 billion) next year in the Ministry of Defense’s budget.
The UK will give Ukraine a new £2.26 billion ($2.9 billion) military loan, Reeves announced earlier in October. The loan is to be repaid using profits on illegally frozen Russian sovereign assets.
“Ensuring the UK comfortably exceeds our NATO commitments and providing guaranteed military support to Ukraine of £3 billion [$3.8 billion] per year, for as long as it takes,” Reeves told MPs.
Boosted military spending was slammed as “an insult to all those struggling during a cost-of-living crisis and diverts funds from underfunded public services” by Peace Pledge Union campaigner Geoff Tibbs.
“This government is addicted to war and yet again money is earmarked for weapons to continue wars in Ukraine and the Middle East,” said founding member of the Stop the War Coalition Lindsey German.
What Else Is in the Budget?
- The budget will hit taxpayers with £40 billion (~$51.8 billion) in tax rises. The amount businesses will pay on their employees’ national insurance contributions will increase from 13.8% to 15% from April 2025. The rise in taxes is the largest since former PM John Major’s government in 1993.
- Households won’t be entitled to the Winter Fuel Payment from winter 2024/2025 (unless receiving Pension Credit/other means-tested benefits).
- Taxes on capital gains and inheritance are to be raised. The freeze on income tax thresholds will end in 2028/29 (to be later uprated in line with inflation).
- Fiscal rules will be tweaked to allow more space for borrowing. A broader measure of government finances, known as “public sector net financial liabilities” (PSNFL), will reportedly include student loans and other financial assets.
What Has the Office for Budget Responsibility Said?
“This budget delivers one of the largest increases in spending, tax and borrowing of any single fiscal event in history,” OBR chair Richard Hughes said.
- The UK budget deficit was £49 billion ($63.5 billion) in 2023/24, equivalent to 1.8% of GDP. Britain’s budget deficit is projected to be £26.2 billion ($33.9 billion) in the 2025/26 financial year.
- The budget will push up inflation and interest rates, while the pace of economic growth will peak next year at 2% before falling back to around 1.5%.
- Average interest rates on the stock of mortgages are expected to rise from around 3.7% in 2024 to a peak of 4.5% in 2027.
- Inflation will remain above the Bank of England’s 2% target until 2029.
- Budget policies will increase UK borrowing by £19.6 billion ($25.4 billion) this year and by an average of £32.3 billion ($41.9 billion) over the next five years.
Both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have blamed the preceding Conservative government for all of the country’s economic woes. During the election campaign, Reeves claimed that if victorious, Labour would get the “worst economic inheritance since World War Two.” Last year, Reeves told the Financial Times : “Taxes are at a 70-year high — I don’t have plans to be a big tax-raising chancellor.”
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USS Liberty Massacre: A Pivotal Moment in the Hostile Takeover of America
By Kevin Barrett | Crescent | Dhu al-Qa’dah 24, 1445
In corporate America, hostile takeovers are commonplace. They occur when an aggressor—a larger corporation or rich individuals—seizes control of a smaller corporation without asking permission.
What few recognize is that the United States itself has been subjected to a hostile takeover. Since the aggressor, the illegitimate settler colony known as “Israel,” is much smaller than the US, the takeover has necessarily been surreptitious.
As of June, 2024, Israel’s gradual takeover of the US has become obvious and undeniable—a proverbial “elephant in the living room.” … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Seyed M. Marandi: US-Iran War Inevitable: Kuwait and Bahrain May Fall
- Leaders Condemn Ansarallah Attack on Saudi Arabia While Ignoring Illegal War Against Yemen
- Leaked: Britain’s Covert Iraqi Psyops Network
- Yemeni Armed Forces Warn Airlines Against Using Saudi Airports, Exempt Mecca and Medina
- Iran security chief says powers greater than US tried to conquer Iran but ended in ‘dustbin of history’
- Europe’s mounting social chaos… chickens coming home to roost for proxy war against Russia
- US-Russia Diesel Deal Becomes Massive Defeat for Ukraine
- Hormuz and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- Dhubab offensive, media blitz and the rapid unraveling of Saudi-backed coalition’s new gambit
- Putin Conveys to Trump Iran’s Vision on Possible Conflict Resolution – Kremlin
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza: Ceasefire Anniversary Marks Year of Failed Promises
- The American Conservative: Mike Huckabee Should Resign
- A C-Section in Shackles: A Palestinian Woman’s Harrowing Birth in Israeli Detention
- ‘He’s Desperate’: AIPAC Begins Spending Against Abdul El-Sayed to Boost Mike Rogers:
- Trump, Hormuz, and the Looming Economic Catastrophe
- For three years, Israel has killed a child in Gaza every 71 minutes – Daily Update
- Israeli forces kill another child in Gaza – Daily Update
- Gaza ceasefire exists in name only, say more than 100 organizations
- Nearly 2 Million in Gaza Need Urgent Shelter Assistance as Winter Looms: IOM Chief Warns
- Suppressing Palestinian resistance: US charity under fire for AI monitoring of Gaza classrooms
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
