Tag: perpetual war

California Senate Puts Selective Service Bill ‘In Suspense’

After hearings on its policy and fiscal implications, the California Senate has deferred action on a bill to automatically register draft-age applicants for driver’s licenses and state IDs with the Selective Service System (SSS) for a possible future military draft, by placing the bill on the Senate Appropriations Committee “suspense file”. This means that unless the Senate Appropriations Committee decides by May 17, 2024, to call up the bill and forward it to the state Senate floor, the bill will be dead.

The Acting Director of the Selective Service System (who had been on the West Coast to swear in a new Washington State Director of Selective Service) and the Deputy Associate SSS Director for Legislative Affairs spent several days in Sacramento lobbying state Senators in support of SB-1081. The Acting SSS Director was the lead witness in support of SB-1081 at the Senate Transportation Committee hearing on April 9th.

The Senate Transportation Committee voted 12-2 (with one Democratic and one Republican member in opposition, and another Democratic member not voting) to send SB-1081 on to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which held its own perfunctory hearing on April 22nd before placing SB-1081 on its “suspense file” by unanimous consent.

In California, bills that would result in significant costs to the state are placed on the “suspense file” to allow fiscal priorities for the state budget to be determined. Decisions as to which bills to call up for further action, and which to allow to die “in suspense”, are typically made behind closed doors by State senate leaders – especially the Senate President pro tem – and the Chair and members of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

SB-1081 could be called up from the suspense file and sent to the state Senate floor at any time, but most likely it will be considered along with all the other bills in the suspense file at a “suspense hearing” shortly before the May 17th deadline.

The lobbying visit to Sacramento by the top national officials of the SSS reflects the existential importance of this bill to the attempt by the SSS to rescue the system from failure and save their agency and their own jobs from elimination. Especially since the repeal of laws that used to condition Federal and California financial aid for higher education on draft registration, the SSS depends primarily on state laws like SB-1081 to coerce or trick young men into signing up for a possible future draft when they think they are merely signing up for a driver’s license, without legal counsel and often without realizing what is happening or its potential life-or-death consequences.

California has rejected bills like this at least seven times since 2000, but the Selective Slavery System and supporters of military conscription won’t give up.

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The Shift: Does the White House care about mass graves?

Does the Biden administration care about mass graves?

More than 300 bodies were recently discovered at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis and the UN says it found more at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital.

“Among the deceased were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands…tied and stripped of their clothes,” explained UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Ravina Shamdasani.

State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel was asked about these atrocities at a press briefing this week. Of course, The White House finds the situation “troubling” and “disturbing.” They take this kind of stuff “very seriously” and will continue to engage with the Israeli government on the issue.

When pressed about actual accountability, consequences, or investigations Patel quickly pivoted to a cascade of bureaucratic bilge.

He told reporters, “When it comes to the security relationships that we have with countries around the world – whether it be Israel, whether it be any other country where we have a robust security relationship – the applications and standards of the laws that guide that security relationship, including the laws and procedures that guide accountability measures that are in place within our system to ensure that human rights are not being violated, to ensure that American assistance is being used properly, the laws and guidelines and standards of those are applied consistently across the board.”

Obviously, none of this means anything. Israel will continue to receive military funding from Biden regardless of what it does to Palestinians. The President just signed a $95.3 billion aid bill, which includes another $17 billion in weapons for Israel.

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Russia Says Over 3100 Mainly U.S. Mercenaries Fighting In Ukraine

Mercenaries have long been used on both sides to fight in the Ukraine conflict raging in Eastern Europe. The Wagner Group is an infamous example of the use of paid fighters by Russian forces.

Tsarizm’s sister site, ArmedForces.press reported on this several years ago.

The Kremlin this morning alleged thousands of mercenaries, most of them with a background in the United States, are also involved in fighting for Kyiv.

Over 3,100 foreign mercenaries fight for Ukraine during Russia’s special military operation and most of them come from the United States and Canada, the press office of the Russian Investigative Committee said in a statement on Thursday, reports Russian state news agency TASS.

“Investigators have information about an overall number of over 3,100 foreign mercenaries taking part in combat activities on the Ukrainian side and the majority of them come from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Georgia,” the statement reads.

The committee added that measures are underway to locate their whereabouts and bring them to criminal liability.

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Official “Secret” Israeli Document Revealed: Expel All Palestinians from Gaza, Israeli Intelligence Ministry

The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.

The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.

The existence of the document does not necessarily indicate that its recommendations are being considered by Israel’s defense establishment. Despite its name, the Intelligence Ministry is not directly responsible for any intelligence body, but rather independently prepares studies and policy papers that are distributed to the Israeli government and security agencies for review, but are not binding. The ministry’s annual budget is NIS 25 million and its influence is considered relatively small. It is currently headed by Gila Gamliel, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party.

However, the fact that an Israeli government ministry has prepared such a detailed proposal amid a large-scale military offensive on the Gaza Strip, following Hamas’ deadly assault and massacres in southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, reflects how the idea of forced population transfer is being raised to the level of official policy discussions. Fears of such plans — which would constitute a serious war crime under international law — have grown in recent weeks, especially after the Israeli army ordered about 1 million Palestinians to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip ahead of escalating bombardment and incremental ground incursions.

The document recommends that Israel act to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” during the war; establish tent cities and later more permanent cities in the northern Sinai that will absorb the expelled population; and then create “a sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt, and [prevent] the return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel.” At the same time, governments around the world, led by the United States, must be mobilized to implement the move.

A source in the Intelligence Ministry confirmed to Local Call/+972 that the document was authentic, that it was distributed to the defense establishment by the ministry’s policy division, and “was not supposed to reach the media.”

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US Foreign Policy: ‘No Daylight’ Is Where Peace Dies In Darkness

“Absent a directed, sustained, and articulated policy of no daylight between the United States and Israel,” Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free Beacon on March 29, “the rift between America and her ally will widen and the world will grow more dangerous.”

Proof that Continetti had things completely bass-ackward arrived on April 1, when Israeli aircraft attacked an Iranian consulate building in Syria, killing 16 and boosting the already not insignificant prospect of a wider regional war. The US regime disclaimed prior knowledge of the Israeli strike, but couldn’t be bothered to actually condemn it.

While occasionally, softly, and grudgingly calling for “restraint” from all parties, Washington has continued its policy of supporting the Israeli regime no matter what it does, and blaming Israel’s adversaries for every Bad Thing that happens in the Middle East.

The US and Israeli regimes remain in a bear hug through which not so much as a single ray of daylight passes. And THAT makes the world more dangerous.

If the US left Israel to its own devices, or at the very least conditioned its billions of dollars in annual aid — not to mention its support in every argument — on good behavior, we might see some progress toward peace.

How many fights would Israel pick with Iran, Syria, and Lebanon if it didn’t have the US threatening to pound anyone who doesn’t comply with its every demand?

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Pennsylvania National Guard Members Deploy to Africa

U.S. Soldiers from the Pennsylvania National Guard’s 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team recently deployed to Africa to support Special Operations Command Africa.

Task Force Iroquois teams include nine Soldiers going to Somalia in the Horn of Africa and five going to Benin in West Africa.

“Over our time together, we’ve formed a cohesive team that works hard to complete the mission and looks out for one another,” said Lt. Col. Mark Kurzawa, Horn of Africa Forward Logistical Element officer-in-charge.

Since January, task force members have participated in 14 drill days, 14 days of annual training, and an eight-day pre-deployment site survey in Germany and Africa. They have also completed maintenance, culinary, finance, unit movement, hazardous materials, and vehicle recovery courses based on their roles.

“The important thing to know about this mission is it’s being executed for the first time,” said Kurzawa. “We’ve had no previous unit to give us guidance.”

Usually in a deployment, there is a larger unit and a culminating training exercise to validate the unit’s training. However, in this case, the Soldiers are validated on individual tasks because they will be going out in small teams in outstation locations and doing skills specific to their military occupational specialty.

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BBC boosts Ukraine’s falling morale by slandering Russia’s war dead

MI6’s BBC outlet is at it again. This time, in a disgusting effort to boost Ukraine’s flagging morale, they featured a story by their crack Russian unit explaining how Russian graveyards are full to the brim of soldiers who fell in Ukraine. As always with the MI6’s B team, it is the sort of misinformed guff that belongs in a badly edited student newspaper rather than in such a globally prominent propaganda outlet.

Or indeed in the website of Ukraine’s Ministry of Misinformation. If we first go to Ukraine’s site, we see that the Russkies are getting a right mauling, with some 442,880 soldiers dead up to April Fool’s Day, 2024. Although Wikipedia parrots those numbers by using the same tainted NATO sources, to put them in context, Wikipedia claim that the United States lost a relatively modest 58,281 dead during its genocide campaign in Vietnam, and the Watson Intstitute claims that the United States lost 7,057 troops in the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, with a much higher number, 30,177, committing suicide.

Other things being equal then, the Russkies should be up in arms against their government over these deaths in Ukraine. But other things are not, of course, equal. First off, as a quick Google search shows us these numbers of Russian dead are part of a vociferous NATO echo chamber, we can see no need as to why this should be a major NATO news story today unless Russia is experiencing the turbulence the United States did during its Vietnamese cull or if the BBC has brought additional information to light, thus making it a story worthy of coverage today. Or, of course, as we suspect, that the BBC has once again been leaned on to put its shoulder to the NATO wheel.

That is certainly the impression we get from this Politico article, which claims that the morale of Ukraine’s Armed Forces is crumbling as their casualties exponentially mount. The pleas of Clown Prince Zelensky and the rest of Kiev’s circus for more arms, more sanctions and more Swiss bank accounts certainly seems to help counter BBC’s flagging line that Russia is on its knees. As do all the tiktok and Twitter videos of Ukrainian grandfathers and pregnant women being frog marched off to the front.

This is not to negate the BBC argument but to say that the Ukrainian war has got less hands on media coverage than perhaps any other since the Korean war. And, though much of that lack of direct coverage has been due to the use of long range drones and artillery rather than the preponderance of close hand to hand fighting, much more of it has been due to the way both High Commands are conducting their affairs.

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Ukraine Moves to Force Fighting-Age Men Into the Meatgrinder for U.S.

Dmitry Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, posted on X Tuesday that Kyiv is moving to pressure Ukrainian men who fled the country to avoid war with Russia by potentially cutting off their access to essential government services.

Ukraine will be receiving $61 billion in funding from the U.S., but it is having a hard time fielding a capable army. Thousands of men have fled and it is believed that up to 500,000 have died on the battlefield since the start of the war.

Kuleba posted on X that it is unfair that men who left the country would be treated the same as those who stayed.

”How it looks like now: a man of conscription age went abroad, showed his state that he does not care about its survival, and then comes and wants to receive services from this state. It does not work this way. Our country is at war,” he posted, according to RT, the Russian outlet.

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Israel’s Architect of Ethnic Cleansing

Since 1948, Israel has invoked the Holocaust to justify the forced expulsion of Arabs from Palestine to create a Jewish state, but the systematic blueprint for ethnic cleansing was being drawn up years earlier by a Zionist zealot named Yosef Weitz.  

In November 1940 – eight years before the founding of the state of Israel – Weitz wrote: 

“It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples … If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us …. The only solution is a Land…without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises… There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries … Not one village must be left, not one tribe… There is no other solution.”

Weitz was “a quintessential Zionist colonialist,” writes Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. Born in Russia in 1890 and immigrating to Palestine as a child, Weitz would become the influential head of the Land Settlement Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) created to colonise Palestine by purchasing Arab land for the Yishuv (the immigrant Jews in Palestine before 1948).

As head of the Land Settlement Department, Weitz oversaw the program to purchase properties from absentee landlords and run the Palestinian tenant farmers off their land.  But it soon became clear that purchasing small lots of land would not come close to fulfilling the Zionists’ dream of creating a Jewish majority state in Palestine.  

In 1932, when Weitz joined the Jewish National Fund, there were only 91,000 Jews in Palestine (roughly 10 percent of the population) who owned a mere 2 percent of the land. 

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Play in Israel, just don’t pretend you didn’t know

Since October 7, scores of writers have authored scores of columns pleading – to no avail – with prominent politicians who wield transformative power to stop the genocide unfolding with such obscene lethality in the apocalyptic remnants of occupied Gaza.

The same dynamic applies to a gallery of preening artists who claim that they are not only allergic to conformity, but also reject as tantamount to censorship any call from any quarter not to entertain audiences in Israel.

Rather than beseeching Nick Cave, the Australian troubadour, or the British band, Radiohead, finally to heed the petitions of Brian Eno, Roger Waters and company and forgo performing in an apartheid state, my aim here is to challenge their, by now, discredited defences to opt to play in Tel Aviv.

After not performing in Israel for some 20 years, in 2014, Cave refrained from signing on to an artist-organised pledge – meant to show tangible solidarity with imprisoned Palestinians – to boycott touring in Israel in the aftermath of yet another Israeli killing spree in Gaza.

Cave later explained his decision this way: “There was something that stunk to me about that list. Then it kind of occurred to me that I’m not signing the list but I’m also not playing Israel and that just felt to me cowardly, really.”

The lobbying, Cave added, constituted a “public humiliation” that apparently fuelled his determination to spurn the overture and stage shows in Israel.

“It suddenly became very important to make a stand against those people that are trying to shut down musicians, to bully musicians, to censor musicians, and to silence musicians … so really you could say in a way that the BDS made me play Israel,” Cave said, referring to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

In this flattering construct, Cave is the portrait of the principled renegade resisting the “age-old” rejectionist forces bent on muzzling him and, by extension, his art.

In a 2017 letter to his “hero” Brian Eno, the British musical savant behind the boycott drive, Cave insisted that he was not a supporter of the Israeli government to blame for the “injustices suffered by the Palestinian population”.

And yet, like the Israeli government he distances himself from, Cave recycled the stock canard to discredit the BDS movement by claiming that “the boycott of Israel can be seen as anti-Semitic at heart”.

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