Peloni: A encompassing account of the surveillance state and the need for, as well as the complications with, eliminating its hold over the public discourse and first amendment rights.
By Ben Weingarten | Real Clear Investigations | Jan 9, 2025
The incoming Trump administration scored an early but possibly illusory victory last month in its effort to reform government overreach when it successfully pressured Congress to eliminate what it termed “sweetheart provisions for government censors” from a measure to stave off a government shutdown. Funding for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center – which Republicans had attacked as a tool of domestic censorship – was stripped from the final bill, and the center announced that it was closed for good on Dec. 23. Days later, however, reporting emerged that the State Department had devised plans to shift the center’s 51 employees and millions of dollars of funding to a separate hub purportedly to counter foreign “information manipulation and interference.”
The Israel government has released a recording made by the Shin Bet of a telephone call it conducted with Israelis being held by Hamas captors at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, 2023. The Shin Bet operative also talks to one of the Hamas men, a certain “Hasan.” Among Hasan’s chilling remarks there was this: “Stay on the line and hear them die.” The recording captures the confusion, chaos, and sheer horror of that day, when a Hamas man casually murders several children, and other Israelis are forced to stand outside one of the buildings where, their Hamas captors know, they will be mistakenly killed by the IDF. More on this recording can be found here: “‘Stay on the line and hear them die’: Recordings reveal horror of Hamas hostage crisis in Be’eri,” Jerusalem Post, January
Peloni: This is how systemic reform must be approached for an institution . An alternate organization must be structured, staffed, trained and, following the termination of the existing corrupted crew, replace the existing organization. This is of course a radical move to make, but radical course redirection is what is called for among US institutions which have betrayed the American people and their chosen govt so badly.
Sundance | Jan 10, 2024
Despite my reservations about Mike Waltz, this is the best approach.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, said in a brief text message to Jewish Insider on Wednesday that the post “is clearly referencing Obama’s failed policies and the corrupt media.”
But he did not respond to a request for clarification that Trump was not endorsing Sachs’ condemnation of Netanyahu, whom he described in the video as an “obsessive” leader “still trying to get us to fight Iran to this day.”
The claims made by Sachs in the video reposted by Trump are illogical, unfactual, and unsupportable. They are also inflammatory, divisive, and antisemitic. Beyond all of this, though, they are also completely contrary to Trump’s own political perspective and that of his MAGA base, which has long held that US Forever Wars are not due to influence from Israel, nor from Bibi, but are related to the political and economic interests of US elites which sway US policy towards such misadventures as took place in Iraq. In fact, Trump has never once made any comment supportive of the rant put forward by Sachs in this video. Marina Medvin suggests that Trump may have posted it without watching it, perhaps at the suggestion of a trusted third party. This of course is a very reasonable proposal, but as of this posting, the Sachs video has still not been removed from Trump’s TS account, to the delight and claimed affirmation of too many antisemites on the web to count.
Sachs ranted about Netanyahu’s obsession to manipulate US foreign policy to “get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah” by removing regimes that support them via military force.
US President-elect Donald Trump shared a video of Jewish-American economist Jeffrey Sachs on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Wednesday wherein Sachs called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a dark son of a b****” and of dragging the US into wars in the Middle East.
Is Israel’s standing amongst the world’s nations its most important asset? Yes, at least according to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. Moreover, Israel’s standing amongst the world’s nations has plummeted. He has been visiting many countries, and reports that this sad state of affairs has occurred not only in Arab lands but in many other places as well. For example, he approvingly quotes Shekhar Gupta, an editor of the Indian newspaper ThePrint as follows: “Netanyahu’s war is damaging Israel’s greatest asset: the widely held belief in … the justness of its mission.”
Peloni: It should be anticipated that the new era in Lebanon will look remarkably similar to the old era, so long as the Mullahs are left in power in Tehran.
FDD | Jan 9, 2025
Latest Developments
Lebanon Chooses New President: Lebanon’s parliament elected Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) General Joseph Aoun to be the country’s next president. Aoun, who has been backed by both the United States and Saudi Arabia, vowed a “new era” for Lebanon in his acceptance speech on January 9. The parliament’s successful vote for Aoun follows 12 unsuccessful attempts to fill the presidency after it was vacated in 2022 by Michel Aoun (who is not related to Joseph Aoun).
Peloni: Sanctions, no matter how crushing, will not forestall Iran from continuing its path towards nuclear hegemony. This leaves either war or regime change as the only paths forward to end Iran’s nuclear plans. The irony is that Trump is outwardly opposed to such tactics of regime change or war. Trump has stated that he will prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear status, so it will be interesting to see how long he will pursue sanctions before accepting that these are at best a delaying action, and at worst delusional basis on which to fulfill this promise.
Peloni: I have read several inspiring tweets of late by Rawan Oswan, but I was not familiar with her or her background. Coincidently, I was sent this short video to watch and was quite surprised to find that this was the same person whose tweets I had recently read. Please watch.
Linda Goudsmit: Dominic Green wrote an excellent summary of the horrific complicity of the despicable and functionally amoral British government. What Green fails to discuss is why the government was, and continues to be complicit. Disguised as multiculturalism, the British government is complicit in the globalist elite campaign to collapse England from within. The Brits are doing the same thing in England that the leftist/Islamist/globalist alliance is doing in the U.S. They intentionally import millions of Muslims with hostile norms into their respective countries in order to collapse the economies, and to collapse their Judeo-Christian infrastructures. Importing millions of immigrants with hostile norms is not only the biggest peacetime crime and cover-up in British history, it is a seismic humanitarian hoax disguised and being perpetrated as multiculturalism.
Elon Musk has shocked the world by “saying the unsayable about the unspeakable.” Now it is time for the sleeping British public and willfully ignorant American public to do something about it! The savage rape and murder of young children is acceptable in Islamic sharia law, but can never ever be accepted in civilized western societies. Multiculturalism, including the importing of millions of Muslims with hostile norms, is an act of war and must be understood in those terms to make sense of the nonsensical. The globalist elite is advancing its megalomaniacal campaign for world government by destabilizing and collapsing western nations from within. Ignorance is not bliss––it is just ignorance. And willful blindness is not a survival strategy. I thank Elon Musk for his temerity and courage in exposing this horrific and tactical maneuver in globalism’s war on the nation-state.
Did a ‘foreign actor’ play a role in the Oct 7 invasion? Leaked Documents Case takes a shocking turn
Aaron “Ari” Rosenfeld, one of the suspects in the classified documents leak case arrives to the courtroom at the Tel Aviv District Court on January 7, 2025. Photo by Koko/Flash90
The “Leaked Documents Case,” in which a former aide of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an IDF intelligence reservist are accused of leaking classified information, has held the attention of Israel’s media for months.
While much of the initially censored information has been revealed, like the name of the second main suspect Ari Rosenfeld, the case continues to take surprising turns.
It started with a tweet by conservative Hollywood actor James Woods, posting a video of a fire in a Pacific Palisades canyon threatening his neighbor’s house, and saying, “Leaving”:
Given the wind seen, I had a bad feeling about it.
Within an hour or two, a flood of tweet videos followed, showing a full blown inferno, with stories about cars jammed in gridlock, and people abandoning their cars to flee on foot. Writer Naomi Wolf, who might have been one of them, or who may have been in a similar incident earlier (I couldn’t tell from her tweet), said they fled because they literally couldn’t breathe.
Peloni: Unbelievable tragedy strikes as fires spread consuming homes, businesses and lives. Mass evacuations creating impassable traffick jams, no water pressure to fight the fires paint the landscape of this ensuing disaster.
? Israel Treasury Minister Smotrich: “We are now preparing a very fundamental change in how we conduct the war in Gaza. We are preparing hell for Hams.”
“I think there should have been no negotiations with Hams, but I can't understand it even more when we will come to the table… pic.twitter.com/e0RsdzxCpg
Assad prevented Syria-based proxies from opening war front against Israel, general says
A worker tears down the pictures of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Lebanon’s late Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a gas station in Nubl, a Shi’ite village seized by rebels, in rural Aleppo, Syria, December 11, 2024. REUTERS/Umit Bektas
Following the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the subsequent expulsion of the large Iranian presence, the Ayatollah regime has publicly sought to downplay the loss, but internally, power factions quickly turned on each other to assign blame.
Peloni: It should surprise no one that not only did Hezbollah enter into the cease-fire deal in bad faith, but also that the LAF is acting in coordination to provide diplomatic cover for Hezbollah which is more or less their master – ie, they have no agency of their own and never will so long as the Mullahs remain in power in Tehran. In fact, the deal was pushed forward by the Washington elites in their continued campaign to preserve as much of Iran’s hegemony over the ME as possible, regardless of its has on the people involved or the region at large. In other words, this “deal” was never intended to be anything more than diplomatic kabuki theater from the outset.
A false narrative has emerged claiming Lebanese authorities searched an Iranian plane last week at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport over suspicion the aircraft was smuggling funds to Hezbollah and seized the funds. Many saw this as the long-awaited action by the Lebanese state to restrain Hezbollah and prevent its regeneration after the group’s adventurism invited yet another destructive war upon the Levantine country. One Lebanese propagandist described the event as “historic, confirming Hezbollah’s end.” However, closer inspection reveals that, though this is the impression Beirut wanted to create out of the incident, it could not be farther from the truth.
Peloni: Israel should annex one-third to one-half of northern Gaza. This would impose a penalty on Gaza for their war, one which provide a deterrance against war with Israel by any of her neighbors. So, while ending Hamas is a necessary solution to this war, it should not be the limit of the solution.
The preference for freezing wars instead of ending them is one of the more dangerous trends in Western policymaking. What was once widely recognized as an innovation of Vladimir Putin’s Russia has somehow become Plan A among a panicky Western public that refuses to look more than a few hours into the future.
And the insistence on applying this policy to Israel’s war against Hamas recalls the adage “it was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.” In this case, pressuring Israel to freeze its conflict with Hamas in place is more than immoral; it is irrational.
Peloni: Devastating report of a Ukrainian unit trained and armed in France which was significantly cannibalized and dispersed to fill vacancies among other frontline units, backfilled with raw recruits and still sent to the front as being ready to serve. The disaster which ensued was predictable, embarrassing and revealing of the gross incompetence within Ukraine’s emphasis upon optics and corruption over victory. Very tragic.
