Southern California was known for years to be vulnerable to potentially devastating wildfires, but Democratic officials did not take sufficient action before proceeding to botch the response to fires currently devastating the Los Angeles area.
House Passes Sanctions on ICC: Rebuking the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the U.S. House of Representatives on January 9 passed a bill to sanction ICC officials and their collaborators. The “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” was passed by a 243-140 vote, with all but one Republican and 45 Democrats voting in favor. “America is passing this law because a kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally, Israel,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL).
Here is some of the current official background noise…
BARRY SHAW | Israel Institute for Strategic Studies | Jan 10, 2025
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a discussion on Thursday , 9 January 2025) to evaluate the Israeli military’s preparedness for the possibility of a third attack on Iran.
Also on the agenda: a more aggressive U.S. policy expected from the incoming Trump administration regarding Iran.
Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, after a Nov. 10 meeting with Donald Trump, reportedly left with the impression that the president-elect would support an Israeli Air Force strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, or possibly send in a U.S. strike, according to news site Axios, citing unnamed sources.
I’m not sure what the rationale was to bring an Islamist nation with expansionist goals and a vision of creating a revised Ottoman caliphate into NATO to begin with, but if it ever made sense, it no longer does. It’s time to expel Turkey from NATO.
It’s generous to look at Turkey as “European,” and they certainly have no connection to the North Atlantic, but Turkey certainly does threaten Europe. Turkey creates tension because of it is the only NATO member with such broad expansionist goals: in Syria, in northern Africa, as well as its occupation of Cyprus (which is part of Europe). Turkey allowed a flood of millions of illegal migrants from Syria and elsewhere to transverse its borders, and enter actual Europe.
Plan aims to change selection of Supreme Court judges and limit judicial review
Minister Gideon Sa’ar with Minister of Justice Yariv Levin attends a plenum session at the assembly hall of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem on November 6, 2024. (Photo: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Thursday presented a “compromise outline” for softened judicial reform. The proposal aims to reform the Judge Selection Committee for the Supreme Court and, for the first time, seeks to enshrine guiding principles for legislation in a Basic Law.
Peloni: Highly recommended video. Daoud provides a masterclass explanation on why Lebanese society is crippled, incapable of freeing itself from Hezbollah’s hold over it, and why it will only frustrate any external force which tries to force the Lebanese shaped peg into a Hezbollah-free shaped hole. It would be quite important for Trump’s foreign policy team to grasp what Daoud details in this video, and failing to do so, as was the case in Trump’s foreign policy team in his first term, will only lead to a continuation of policies which will strengthen Hezbollah at the expense of the stability of the region.
While the entire video is worth studying closely, careful attention should be given to the video from 5-38min mark.
Peloni: The TSS proponent, JCPOA advocate, and Clinton turned Bernie turned Trump supporter Tulsi Gabbard has turned the page on opposing the Intel Communities favorite tool, FISA-702. In point of fact, Gabbard’s appointment was always troubling for reasons listed above and more, but her steadfast opposition to the warrantless surveillance FISA-702 stood as a basis of hope that she would not be as poor a choice as was otherwise expected. Unfortunately, Gabbard found the pressure too great, and her powerful nomination too enticing, to maintain even this long held position. And so, on this too it would seem that the Cowboys have won the day. Quite expected, but still, quite unfortunate.
Sundance | Jan 10, 2025
As the story is told [SEE HERE], and it aligns with every scintilla of researched data on the darkest and deepest elements of the Deep State, DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard has reversed her position and will now support FISA-702, the warrantless searches of American communication and electronic metadata.
The U.S. military is under systemic attack by jihadist “influencers” trying to lure them into terror-related activities. Soldiers are not the only targets, but considering that our military contains young, healthy people, trained in weapons use, it makes sense that those wanting to infiltrate and radicalize people would see soldiers as fertile ground for a campaign to undermine American society.
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.
