OVERVIEW - MIDDLE EAST AT WAR
Most of this issue will be perspectives on Israel’s push for full-scale war in the Middle East. The fear for months has been that Israel’s out-of-control, genocidal destruction of the population of Gaza would become a regional war designed to drag the US into a war against Hezbollah, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen.
It is no surprise that Israel has now extended the war to the West Bank under its governmental leadership to crush Hamas and now Lebanon to crush Hezbollah. The goal is genocide and ethnic cleansing of the nearly three million Palestinian people, equal in number to the Israeli population.
This program, with US weapons and military expertise, is fully supported and funded. With the massive attacks on heavily populated Beirut and Tyre, the Israelis have killed hundreds of civilians and finally succeeded in killing Hassan Nasrallah.
The likelihood that Netanyahu will get his wish for a full-scale regional war is now very likely. The Zionists in charge of Israel have worked very hard to achieve this goal to both prevent his removal from power in Israel and to complete the theft of all Palestinian land.
Below is additional information on this to balance the US and Israeli propaganda.
Israel attacks Lebanon live: Nonstop bombing as Hezbollah leader mourned
This video may contain light patterns or images that could trigger seizures or cause discomfort for people with visual sensitivities. By Lyndal Rowlands 29 Sep 2024
Israel’s warplanes continue nonstop bombardment in Beirut, as Israeli attacks kill 33 across Lebanon on Saturday, according to Health Ministry officials.
Lebanon declares three days of mourning for Hassan Nasrallah after the longtime Hezbollah leader was killed in an Israeli air strike.
Hassan Nasrallah’s death will reshape Lebanon and the Middle East
September 28, 2024
Sep 28th 2024|DUBAI AND JERUSALEM
THE SILENCE was deafening. By mid-afternoon on September 28th it had been almost 24 hours since Israel tried to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia. The Israeli army declared him dead that morning. But Hizbullah said nothing, neither about his fate nor about the enormous strike on its headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Even its media outriders, usually a pugnacious bunch, were stunned speechless. The group finally confirmed his death at around 2.30pm.
This column by Chris Edges is from three days ago and Israel’s terrorist action using pagers and communicators as bombs.
"Israel as a terrorist state."
26 SEPTEMBER—Much has already been said and written about the significance of Israel’s lethal sabotage of electronic devices in Lebanon last week. It is a new kind of warfare, it suggests the vulnerability of global supply chains, the possibilities of other such operations are at this moment impossible to calculate. Yes, yes, and yes. In some way one cannot yet fathom, the Israelis have turned yet another page in the twenty-first century story, which has so far proven a dreadful story, and the new page is not altogether legible.
I think Edward Snowden has so far had the most useful word for the Israelis’ diabolic subterfuge in Lebanon. “Indistinguishable from terrorism,” he remarked on “X” the day of the explosions. Here is the former National Security Agency contractor’s full statement after the first of Israel’s cyberattacks, involving the exploding pagers:
What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism. https://t.co/th4fYwa0jr
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 17, 2024
It has been difficult even for Israel’s most committed apologists to avoid this conclusion, even if they have been chary of the term. Here is David Sanger, a long-serving New York Times correspondent in Washington who has, to put the matter politely, a questionable relationship with the national-security apparatus, in the paper’s 19 September editions:
The chief effect is psychological. Just as pervasive surveillance makes people question who might have access to the phones that now contain details, treasures and secrets of one’s life — pictures, text messages, credit card numbers — the sabotage makes everyone fearful that ordinary devices can become an instant source of injury or death. It gnaws at the psyche.
The purposeful inducing of fear in a general populace, gnawing at the psyche, is the very definition of terrorism. Or if you prefer, this is from the U.N. General Assembly’s condemnation of terrorism in Resolution 49/60, passed thirty years ago this December:
Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious, or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them.
. . . .
World reacts to Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah
The Lebanese group pledges to continue its resistance to Israeli aggression as regional powers condemn the killing of the longtime leader.
WAR/COVID
The Madness Of Antony Blinken
Tyler Durden September 23, 2024
On March 7, 2022, two weeks after Moscow entered the civil war in Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News from Moldova that the U.S. would give NATO-member Poland a "green light" to send Mig-29 fighter jets to Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer then also backed the no-fly zone. But within days the Pentagon shot down the idea as it engaged in a consequential battle with the State Department and members of Congress to prevent a direct NATO military confrontation with Russia that could unleash history’s most unimaginable horrors.
A no-fly zone "could result in significant Russian reaction that might increase the prospects of a military escalation with NATO," according to then Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. President Joe Biden was caught in the middle of the fray. Pressure on the White House from some members of Congress and the press corps was unrelenting to recklessly bring NATO directly into the war.
Biden ultimately sided with the Defense Department, and he couldn’t be more explicit why. He opposed a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft, he said, because "that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine."
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War, Covid And Narratives Of Control
Nate Bear September 24, 2024
I feel like reality is coming undone.
I feel like there is increasingly little point in declaring those things that are actually true, because it makes no difference to anything.
I feel like there is a giant cleaving between the values of good, ordinary, empathetic people and the values of the people that run our world and tell the stories about our world.
And that truly evil things are manifesting in this gap.
I feel like we are being led to the darkest places that any civilization could ever be led.
That we are being led to collective destruction.
A few things have made me feel like this recently.
First the outward expansion of Israeli violence. Because as it dismembers more children in another country, we’re being told, as we’ve been told for 11 months of genocide, that Israel is again acting in response, that it is all for defence, all for security.
History has been flattened.
Everything began in the blink of an eye.
When it comes to Israel, events are like the Big Bang, forever just happening, preceded by nothing.
This is how this story is told to us by the people elevated to help us make sense of the world. The journalists at the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, etc.
Their stories read like IDF press releases, framed by a Marvel-style good vs evil narrative. Israel killed 500 in Lebanon, including women and children, bombed its capital city, but all we hear about is big bad Hezbollah. Why did Hezbollah come into being? No matter. They are baddies firing rockets and that is all you need to know.
Look at this BBC story.
Israel 'strikes'. The headline emphasizes the military targets, civilian casualties are ignored even when the story acknowledges, like here, that it was a residential area. Hezbollah is 'powerful,’ an adjective providing no context. Powerful in relation to what? But this word reassures us that these are not feeble victims. We can feel ok about this violence. The use of ‘Iranian-backed’ is also subtle propaganda, coding for the good vs evil narrative, further reassurance that the violence was justified because Iran is bad. The strike is a 'major blow' to them. Is it really? How? Why? This is entirely subjective, editorializing presented as a fact. Imagine if October 7th had been bloodlessly described as a ‘major blow’ to Israel.
It wasn’t always quite like this. . . .
TECHNOLOGY
AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs
Kyle Orland - September 27, 2024
Anyone who has been surfing the web for a while is probably used to clicking through a CAPTCHA grid of street images, identifying everyday objects to prove that they're a human and not an automated bot. Now, though, new research claims that locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can match human-level performance in this style of CAPTCHA, achieving a 100 percent success rate despite being decidedly not human.
ETH Zurich PhD student Andreas Plesner and his colleagues' new research,
available as a pre-print paper, focuses on Google's ReCAPTCHA v2, which challenges users to identify which street images in a grid contain items like bicycles, crosswalks, mountains, stairs, or traffic lights. Google
began phasing that system out years ago in favor of an "invisible" reCAPTCHA v3 that analyzes user interactions rather than offering an explicit challenge.
Despite this, the older reCAPTCHA v2 is still used by millions of websites. And even sites that use the updated reCAPTCHA v3 will sometimes use reCAPTCHA v2 as a fallback when the updated system gives a user a low "human" confidence rating.
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Until Next Week [Hopefully]