Monthly Archives: August 2024

There will be no posting Saturday and Sunday. My posting labor will resume on Labor Day, Monday 9/2. Have a great weekend.

h/t WRSA

Australians can’t be entirely wimpy. From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.su:

If big things have small beginnings, then there are two wee things in Australia we’d best keep our weather eye on.

If big things have small beginnings, then there are two wee things in Australia we’d best keep our weather eye on. These are the pronouncements of former Aussie Prime Minister Paul Keating on the NATO alliance and those of former TV anchorwoman Mary Kostakidis on pathways to peace in Palestine.

Not only was Kostakidis a highly regarded anchorwoman on SBS, an Australian public broadcasting outfit with a format not unlike that of Russia Today, but she was also a stalwart in Australia’s campaign to free Julian Assange, a not insignificant fact in its own right, but a much bigger one when we consider that Kostakidis cobbled together a large, loose but very effective coalition from the unlikeliest of diverse streams, which all combined to move mountains to secure Assange’s release.

Australia’s Assange campaign was sufficiently robust to transform Assange’s case into one between the Australian and American governments. That that coalition could get the Aussie government to stand up to the Americans is something Kostakidis and her buddies can be rightly very proud of, as they move on to crack the even harder nut of peace in Palestine.

But even there they have hope. Although Australia’s Zionist movement have played their usual stunt of throwing the full weight of their legal teams against Kostakidis, claiming that Australia’s pre-eminent champion of diversity and multiculturalism is a racist or some such rot, because Kostakidis’ crew now have their own formidable legal crews, that stunt no longer works as easily as it once did, and Kostakidis’ twitter profile shows she is brimming with confidence, as she faces into the legal and other fights regarding her alleged anti-semitism that Australia’s well-entrenched Israeli lobby have dishonestly levied against her.

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Israel claiming it repelled a Hezbollah attack does not establish regional dominance for Israel or by implication, the U.S. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

America is trapped by its ‘ironclad’, unqualified military support for Israel – which offers Netanyahu ample room for manoeuvre.

“The successful thwarting of Hizbullah’s attack on Sunday, symbolized Israel’s intelligence and operational edge”: According to the IDF spokesman, the Hezbollah attack was thwarted for the most part – thanks to 100 Israel aircraft carrying out around the clock – pre-emptive strikes that destroyed “thousands of missile launchers”.

“The group [Hizbullah], did manage to fire hundreds of rockets at northern Israel, but the damage they caused was quite limited”, the Israeli spokespersons disdainfully suggested (amidst a complete blackout on publication, under full censorship, in Israel of any reporting on damage caused to strategic Israeli infrastructure or to military sites).

In effect, it was ‘theatre’ mounted by both sides: By limiting their 20 minute strike to within 5 kms of the border – and by Hizbullah staying within the ‘equations’ of war – both sides signalled plainly to each other they were not looking for all-out war.

The ‘winner narrative’ from Israel was to be expected in today’s psy-war atmosphere. Yet it comes at a cost: Amos Harel in Haaretz suggests that “there’s a tendency in Israel [as a result] to view the success in foiling Sunday’s attack as renewed evidence of the consolidation of regional deterrence and [of western] strategic supremacy. But such an assessment” he concedes, “appears to be far from accurate”.

Indeed it is (far from accurate). The Sunday theatre concluded with no change to the strategic situation in the north of Israel: Daily attrition continues from across the frontier of Lebanon, down to the new 40 km border defining the extent of Israel’s loss of territory to the Hizbullah no-go zone.

The strategic point is not that this narrative of a successful thwarting of Hizbullah’s capabilities is highly misleading. Rather, it sets up expectations of available military success from which wrong conclusions will be drawn. We have been here before. It didn’t go well …

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The Israelis plan to take over most of Gaza and leave the Palestinians in essentially a squalid prison camp. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

Unit 601 of the IDF’s Combat Engineering Corps is clearing a vast swath of land across central Gaza splitting the 25-mile-long territory into two parts. The so-called Netzarim corridor (Highway 749)—which crosses Gaza from east to west—will provide faster transport for IDF troops operating in the area and will also function as vital part of Israel’s security cordon separating the north from the south. There is no doubt that military outposts will be established along the corridor as well as in locations along the western coast. The aim of these actions is to protect the development of new settlements that will be built north of the corridor. In short, the Israeli government is using its war on Hamas to divert attention from its real objective which is the expansion of the Jewish state on Palestinian land.

Not surprisingly, Israel’s activities in the north have resulted in mass evacuations that have intensified the suffering of the traumatized population. According to the Palestinian Chronicle:

The United Nations announced on Tuesday that Israel issued three fresh evacuation orders for over 19 neighborhoods in the north of Gaza and Deir Al-Balah, bringing the number of massive evacuation orders to 16 in August alone, which leaves only 11 percent of the Gaza Strip untouched by the evacuation orders.

Only 11% of Gaza Spared – 16 Israeli Evacuation Orders in August Alone, Palestinian Chronicle

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There will emerge suburban armed vigilantes, well-armed and well-trained. From Matthew Bracken at steelcutter.substack.com:

Part 2 of 2

Link back to Part 1

THE SUBURBAN ARMED VIGILANTE RESPONSE

In the absence of effective official police response to the exploding levels of violence, suburbanites will first hastily form self-defense forces to guard their neighborhoods—especially ones located near ethnic borders. These ubiquitous neighborhood armed defense teams will often have a deep and talented bench from which to select members, and they will not lack for volunteers.

Since 9-11, hundreds of thousands of young men (and more than a few women) have acquired graduate-level educations in various aspects of urban warfare. In the Middle East, these troops were frequently tasked with restoring order to urban areas exploding in internecine strife. Today these former military men and women understand better than anyone the life-or-death difference between being armed and organized versus unarmed and disorganized.

Hundreds of thousands if not millions of veterans currently own rifles strikingly similar to those they carried in the armed forces, lacking only the full-automatic selector switch. Their brothers, sisters, parents, friends, and neighbors who did not serve in the military are often just as familiar with the weapons, if not the tactics. Today the AR-pattern rifle (the semi-automatic civilian version of the familiar full-auto-capable M-16 or M-4) is the most popular model of rifle in America, with millions sold in the past decade. Virtually all of them produced in the past decade have abandoned the old M-16′s signature “carrying handle” rear iron sight for a standardized sight mounting rail, meaning that virtually every AR sold today can be easily equipped with an efficient optical sight. Firing the high-velocity 5.56×45 mm cartridge and mounted with a four-power tactical sight, a typical AR rifle can shoot two-inch groups at one hundred yards when fired from a steady bench rest. That translates to shooting eight- to ten-inch groups at four hundred yards.

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From 41 minutes of Kamala-speak, they could only stitch together 18 minutes that are semi-coherent. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

DANA BASH: “You’ve been Vice President for three and half years. The steps that you are talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?” KAMALA: “I’m very proud of the work we have done.”

     She was speaking, you understand, but the main thing you noticed was the musical quality of her voice: sonorous, resonant, like one of the more obscure woodwind instruments, an alto clarinet or a basset horn, producing a sound like unto creamy dressing over the familiar word-salad of iceberg lettuce.

     It would be ungentlemanly to bang on the particulars of Kamala Harris’s CNN interview performance, so I’ll proceed. The nocturne was 18-minutes long, all that survived from the 41-minutes CNN actually recorded, so you might wonder a little about the notes not played. The leitmotif throughout was “my values have not changed,” meaning, disregard any dissonance you might detect in the velvet honk of my voice. Mind the significance of the passage of time, not the music, Altogether, as nocturnes should, it had a soporific effect.

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The Democrats will try to make happy (joy) talk up to the election, avoid talking about anything unpleasant, and try to censor anyone who does. From Patrick Lawrence at scheerpost.com:

Is there some connection, — not quite official but it may as well be— between censorship and presidential politics? I pose the question as a survivor of the Russiagate years, when illiberal liberals started talking about “free-speech absolutists,” and when corporate journalists cheered the censoring of unincorporated journalists so long as it was called “content moderation.” 

I cannot answer my own question, honestly. But as this November’s elections draw near, a new and aggressive campaign to suppress dissent — in social media, at airports, on campuses, and elsewhere — is hard upon us. This is a trans–Atlantic, trans-national operation. Let us not fail to take note. 

Straight off the top, you probably noticed that the Democratic Party’s openly undemocratic elite refused to allow any speaker of Palestinian background to address the convention in Chicago last week. We can read this, disgraceful in itself, as an indication of how the Democrats intend to deal with the Gaza crisis and other such foreign policy matters if they succeed in extending their power another four years. 

Yes, they will continue supporting terrorist Israel and the Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine just as they have to date, but they will avoid talking to you and me about the imperium’s gruesome business as they conduct it. Silence on such matters will be as gold to these people, especially between now and Nov. 5. Kamala Harris, or the cynical operatives busily inventing Kamala Harris, are selling “joy” this political season, not any kind of sober, responsible view of our circumstances. Harris is supposed to ride into the White House on a carpet of good vibes. Gaza, the war in Ukraine, Washington’s provocations at the other end of the Pacific: Nah: All such questions are bad vibes.

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Rulers are different from you and me . . . many of them are psychopaths. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

I’ve been working on collections of quotes lately, and I have one more that I’d like to present… this one on the thoughts of rulers. For a number of years I’ve been telling people that the incentives faced by productive people and the incentives facing rulers (of whatever stripe) are very, very different. This list, I believe, will make that point.

I’ve been working on collections of quotes lately, and I have one more that I’d like to present… this one on the thoughts of rulers.

For a number of years I’ve been telling people that the incentives faced by productive people and the incentives facing rulers (of whatever stripe) are very, very different. This list, I believe, will make that point.

You’ll find quotes from ‘bad’ rulers on this list, of course, but also some from the ‘good’ rulers. And please note that the ‘bad’ ones are very often held in high regard in their times. Joseph Stalin, for example – the #2 most prolific killer in all of human history – was the ‘great ally’ of the US in World War II and was routinely presented to the American public as “Uncle Joe.”

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Even innocuous-sounding bureaucracies can kill. From Brian McGlinchey at starkrealities.substack.com:

Treasury bureaucrats inflict poverty, illness and death — but it’s a living

The Freedman’s Bank Building: Headquarters of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)

As tourists complete their strolls to the White House from the east along Pennsylvania Avenue, they pass a relatively unremarkable, columned office building that overlooks Lafayette Square — oblivious that, behind its walls, bureaucrats are quietly inflicting poverty, illness and death on innumerable innocents around the world.

The Freedman’s Bank Building doesn’t house CIA or Department of Defense officials, but rather the US Treasury’s little-known Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Instead of orchestrating airstrikes or insurgencies, these bureaucrats impose mass suffering via economic warfare, collectively serving as the tip of the spear that is America’s ever-expanding economic sanctions regime.

The term “banality of evil” was coined by intellectual Hannah Arendt after she observed the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official who, from his post atop the inscrutably-named Office IV B 4, oversaw the grim logistics of funneling Jews into German concentration camps.

Arendt said she was struck to find Eichmann “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but “terrifyingly normal.” Rather than a rabid ideologue or psychopathic antisemite, Arendt found herself observing a boring bureaucrat whose diligent performance of his assigned duties was largely motivated by a mere desire for career advancement. “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous,” Arendt later wrote.

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