I said on the day of the Qatari strike that the attack will be great for Palestine. Since then we’ve seen an aggressive systematic overturn on Israel’s interests.
This is a great article. Everyone should read it.
I’ve copy pasted here as its behind a paywall;
Two weeks before he went to the US to discuss a Donald Trump-backed plan to end the war in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood in front of his far-right followers in an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank and made a vow. “There will be no Palestinian state,” he said. “This place is ours.” Now, sitting in a hotel room in New York with his closest advisers and US interlocutors, he was looking at a draft document for a peace plan that ended with the exact opposite: a “credible pathway”, however vague, to a future Palestinian state. “The sting was in the tail,” said a person briefed on the meeting, which took place in late September. “It felt like a final betrayal.”
It wasn’t the only sting. Trump’s draft document was the result of a frantic round of lobbying by Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other influential Arab and Muslim countries, that also tapped into the president’s anger over Israel’s September 9 strike targeting Hamas’s political negotiators in Doha. The diplomatic push was also aided by the renewed influence of Trump’s son-in-law and former Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner. Their goal, said people involved in the process, was to deliver for the US president twin political and personal ambitions. Trump wanted to secure the release of the 48 Israeli hostages held by Hamas, end the war in Gaza and also keep alive his dream of brokering a grand rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The timing was not arbitrary, said two Israeli officials involved in the talks. Trump made clear that he wanted the war to end by the second anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the conflict. The Nobel Peace Prize, which Trump covets, will also be announced this month.
“From very early on, Trump understood that the hostages are the keys that open all doors in the Middle East,” said a former Israeli diplomat who liaised with Washington on behalf of the captives’ families.
Trump had met with released hostages, knew some by name, and followed their recovery from months in captivity — a personal connection far surpassing that of Netanyahu. Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, texts regularly with the families waiting for their loved ones. But to get all the hostages out at once, and set his grand plan for the Middle East in motion, Trump needed Netanyahu to make concessions and a postwar plan. This was necessary not just to convince Hamas — for whom the hostages are the only real source of leverage — but also to appease Washington’s Gulf allies, who Netanyahu had alienated with Israel’s belligerence across the Middle East.
Among the most influential was Qatar, which hosts Hamas’s political office and has been central to two years of mediation efforts, said people involved in the negotiations. Israel’s attack on Doha, a US ally, just as Hamas was studying a ceasefire proposal from Witkoff, infuriated Trump. Indeed, when Netanyahu finally made it to the White House on September 29 — days after Trump had already presented his peace plan to Arab leaders — the president handed him a phone receiver and listened in as Netanyahu humbly apologised to Qatar’s prime minister. The strike on Qatar “actually opened the door for all of this,” said a former US official who maintains contact with leaders in the Middle East. The strike was humiliating for Trump, but “it allowed him to say, ‘you guys fucked up, and I’m bailing you out here, and I’m done,’” the official said, satirically characterising Netanyahu’s subsequent Oval Office apology to Qatar as “a hostage video”.
While Netanyahu and his team tried watering down some elements of what became Trump’s 20-point peace plan — especially the reference to a Palestinian state — a Qatari technical team sat not far away in the White House, said a person familiar with the events.
“It was impossible to change more than a few words here and there,” said a second person who read drafts of the plan. For instance, Netanyahu and his negotiators had sought one major concession — an opportunity to return to fighting if Israel decided Hamas had broken some clause of the agreement. The team was told, in no uncertain terms, “to stop looking for loopholes”. “Trump himself had guaranteed [to the Arabs] that Israel would not start the war again,” the person said. This pledge was verified by a second person familiar with conversations between the White House and Arab officials. And so nestled between the dry legalese of the peace plan were proposals that would be anathema to the far-right and messianic parties that prop up Netanyahu’s coalition, and who have vowed to expel Palestinians from Gaza and resettle it with Jews. Now, the document ruled out forced displacement and said Gazans would be free to leave the besieged enclave, and to return when they wanted. Hamas fighters could be granted amnesty if they gave up their weapons and agreed to “peaceful coexistence”, instead of being hunted to death. Not only would Israel not be allowed to occupy or annex Gaza, it could not build settlements there. The UN, reviled by Netanyahu, would be allowed back to feed Palestinians starved by Israel’s blockade. Still, there was enough in the document for Netanyahu to save face. Hamas would be barred from Palestinian governance. Its fighters would be disarmed and the strip demilitarised.
A committee of Palestinian technocrats and an international supervisory body chaired by Trump would run Gaza temporarily, not the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank. An international force would provide security. But most important, said two Israeli officials, was the language Trump used when announcing it — if Hamas rejected the deal, he said, “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas”. Standing next to him, Netanyahu looked subdued. He had grappled with and outmanoeuvred three American presidents — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Now he faced intense pressure from the president he had confidently declared to be “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”. Though Trump has long unnerved US allies with his transactional approach to politics and mercurial decision-making, Netanyahu had seen the US leader and his fervently pro-Israel political base as reliable sources of support. But earlier this year Trump surprised him with the announcement that the US had been holding indirect talks with Iran, then embarrassed him by reminding him that Israel was propped up by billions of dollars in US aid. “The rule of thumb is Donald Trump’s interests come first,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US. Before Trump, Netanyahu expanded settlements over Obama’s objections, and slow-rolled peace talks under Clinton. Referring to demands from Biden on the conduct of the Gaza war, Oren added: “And with president Biden who famously said don’t, don’t, don’t — and Israel did.” “But with Donald Trump, when he says don’t, then you don’t,” said Oren. “And now that’s the rule [even for] Israel.” He pointed out the expletive-laden public scolding the president administered when Israel bombed eastern Iran after Trump declared a ceasefire that ended a 12-day war between the regional enemies in June.
Days after his White House visit, where Netanyahu stood alongside Trump and said he supported the plan, the mood turned sour for the Israeli prime minister again. Back home, he had sold the Trump proposals as a victory for Israel — a “take it or leave it” option for Hamas, with US blessing for Israel to annihilate the militant group as the cost of rejection.
But on Friday, when Hamas cherry-picked the part of the deal that appealed the most to Trump — the release within 72 hours of all the remaining captives, alive and dead — while sidestepping the more contentious elements, Netanyahu found himself cornered. “Suddenly, there was a fundamental change in the situation. Earlier, Hamas had three choices — it could surrender, it could abjure terror, or it could die,” said Oren. “Now, it has a fourth choice — to negotiate. And while they negotiate, Israel has a red light.” Shortly after Hamas’s statement, Trump ordered Israel to “immediately” cease military operations in Gaza while talks continued. In a phone call with Trump, first reported by Axios and confirmed by an Israeli official, Netanyahu tried to convince Trump that Hamas’s qualified acceptance was a delaying tactic. Trump snapped back: “Why are you so fucking negative?” Axios reported. Days later, Trump publicly hammered the point home, telling an Israeli reporter that it did not take much to convince Netanyahu to accept the situation. “He was fine with it. He’s got to be fine with it. He has no choice,” Trump told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “With me, you got to be fine.”
If this account is true, Israel does not control Trump. Great read. ABN
We know the answers to the “when” and the “where.” Blue eyes became common during the last ice age within a region encompassing Germany, Scandinavia, the East Baltic, and probably areas farther east.
At that time, Scandinavia and the Alps were under ice. Northern Europe was habitable only on the plains stretching from northern Germany eastwards. Before 12,000 years ago, these plains were steppe-tundra with wandering herds of reindeer and nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. Actually, they were just hunters. There were few opportunities for gathering fruits, nuts, tubers, or edible greens. Food was almost entirely “meat on the hoof” (Hoffecker, 2002, pp. 8, 178, 193-194, 237).
But why would such an environment favor blue eyes? Davide offers four possible reasons:
Lower UV exposure requiring less melanin protection
Sexual selection for distinctive traits
Genetic drift in smaller northern populations
Need for lighter skin to maintain vitamin D synthesis where sunlight is weaker
No Baltic tribe or tribal group seems to have had a history so dynamic, rich in incident and tragic as the Old Prussians.
They died out during conflicts between two medieval European cultures – Christian and pagan – and were physically destroyed or assimilated.
The Latvian and Lithuanian people have the Old Prussians to thank more than anyone else for their existence.
Under the cover of their heroic resistance against the crusaders, which lasted for almost the whole of the 13th century, the foundations of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were laid, which, in turn, became an obstacle to the mass inflow of crusaders and German colonists into the territory of Latvia.
The Old Prussians belonged to the Western Baltic group of tribes, which also included the Curonians, Samogitians, Skalvians, Galindians and Yotvingians. Around 3000 years before the birth of Christ, the Old Prussians broke away from the first Indo-European peoples and entered the land where they would live right up until their eventual disappearance.
Today the area where the Old Prussians lived is divided between Russia (the province of Kaliningrad) and Poland (the provinces of Elbląg and Olsztyn).
The 1st-century Roman historian Tacitus’s work Germania was the first text to mention the Western Balts. Tacitus called them as “Aesti”, which means “easterners”. This was also how their western neighbours, the Germans, referred to the Balts. The Aesti were described as industrious farmers and peace-loving people.
The Army is experimenting with arming small, soldier-operated drones with guns to shoot enemy targets with either a 9mm pistol or tiny ink-pen-like gun barrel mounted on.
“We are looking right now at a remotely operated single-shot weapon which looks like a pen,” Col. Sam Edwards, Director of Robotics Requirements, Capability Development Integration Directorate, Ft. Benning, Ga., told The National Interest in an interview.
First and foremost, a small drone armed with a pistol controlled remotely by a human operator can attack an enemy soldier on the other side of a ridge, behind a rock, or even inside a building. It can enable point-to-point small arms fire while protecting the shooter. Such a possibility could clearly bring new possibilities to close quarter battle by offering new angles of attack. The presence of an armed drone might force enemies to reposition and move, potentially exposing themselves to targeting opportunities.
Armed drone aerial small arms attack would be very difficult to defend against, particularly if there were numerous mini-gun tubes loaded onto the drone as is the case with the ink-pen-like drone.
Unlike drones that are themselves engineered to become explosives, mini-armed drones could be recoverable and, for example, return to an operator for reloading and retasking. The system will need to have the right kinds of hardware configuration, software, and camera systems enabled by some kind of data link transmission sufficient to send targeting information.
This article is from 2020. If this weapon was made public at that time, you can be sure it was operable even sooner, let alone today.
A reasonable hypothesis today is Charlie Kirk was shot from a drone like this carrying a small caliber round fired through a ‘pen-like barrel’.
This would explain the super-fast drones observed on that day and the anomalous neck wound on Kirk; and, so far, the absence of an exit wound or a spent bullet.
The projectile could have been designed to home in on a signal coming from Kirk’s earpiece or it could have been aimed by a remote operator or AI program.
Only a nation or powerful private organization would have the means to obtain and use a weapon like this.
Kirk’s autopsy will reveal what happened if it is credible, which is highly unlikely. ABN
It was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed, against all Rules, Regulations, Protocols, and Standards, 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax. This is different from what Director Christopher Wray stated, over and over again! That’s right, as it now turns out, FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as “Law Enforcement Officials.” I want to know who each and every one of these so-called “Agents” are, and what they were up to on that now “Historic” Day. Many Great American Patriots were made to pay a very big price only for the love their Country. I owe this investigation of “Dirty Cops and Crooked Politicians” to them! Christopher Wray, the then Director of the FBI, has some major explaining to do. That’s two in a row, Comey and Wray, who got caught LYING, with our Great Country at stake. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN TO AMERICA AGAIN!
It is good to see Carlson using his voice to insist that we be told who made the bets on the stock market immediately before 9/11 and profited hugely from them. They had to have had foreknowledge the attacks were coming. ABN
Donald Trump asserted on Thursday that James Comey nearly started a war by launching Crossfire Hurricane – the widescale and fruitless investigation into Russian collusion.
‘Comey placed a cloud over the entire nation, and actually, the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax made it very difficult,’ Trump he told Fox News.
The president then added: ‘It could have caused wars.’
The charges for Comey were related to his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 30, 2020 over Crossfire Hurricane – the codename for the Trump-Russia investigation.
A million-year-old human skull suggests that the origins of modern humans may reach back far deeper in time than previously thought and raises the possibility that Homo sapiens first emerged outside of Africa.
An artist’s impression of what Homo longi, or dragon man, may have looked like. Photograph: Chuang Zhao/Eurekalert/AFP/Getty Images
Leading scientists reached this conclusion after reanalysis of a skull known as Yunxian 2 discovered in China and previously classified as belonging to a member of the primitive human species Homo erectus.
After applying sophisticated reconstruction techniques to the skull, scientists believe that it may instead belong to a group called Homo longi (dragon man), closely linked to the elusive Denisovans who lived alongside our own ancestors.
This repositioning would make the fossil the closest on record to the split between modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, and would radically revise understanding of the last 1m years of human evolution.
Prof Chris Stringer, an anthropologist and research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “This changes a lot of thinking because it suggests that by one million years ago our ancestors had already split into distinct groups, pointing to a much earlier and more complex human evolutionary split than previously believed. It more or less doubles the time of origin of Homo sapiens.”
I’ve watched Tucker Carlson’s docu The 9/11 Files released today! Ep 1 to 3 assume that Al-Qaeda Hijackers did 9/11 (but CIA, Saudis, blahblah)! Ep 4 does get into controlled demolition, WTC7, put options. It also mentions the dancing Israelis and the Hollywood, Fl. connection, but only to suggest that Israel had foreknowledge (of Al-Qaeda’s attack) which they didn’t share, but they apologized for it. No mention of Silverstein or Chertoff, of course. But Bush, CIA, Bush, CIA, Saudis, Bush, CIA… In other words: LIMITED HANGOUT. Funnily, at the beginning of Ep 4, Carlson tells us that conspiracy theories are fabricated by the Deep State to prevent an actual investigation. Confusing!
Although there are a few interesting bits (which any limited hangout must have), the general impression that the viewer is led to is that:
1. Al-Qaeda did 9/11,
2. Al-Qaeda was helped by CIA,
3. CIA had some foreknowledge,
4. We don’t know much (so many questions, so few answers), and we won’t until we have a new government commission.
5. and the main conclusion in Ep. 5: “despite the CIA’s previously unknown role in recruiting the hijackers, and the extent of their stonewalling to the 9/11 Commission, the CIA was, on net, maybe the biggest winner from 9/11″.
American Buddhist Net 