Best of the Web:


Bullseye

Best of the Web: Secret Israeli military bunker located under Tel Aviv tower struck by Iran, analysis shows

Jack Poulson, Wyatt Reed
The Grayzone
Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00 UTC
unknown command center?
© UnknownPresumably the underground Israeli command center Site 81
The Grayzone has geolocated the underground bunker of an important military command and control center nestled within a densely populated Tel Aviv neighborhood. Known as 'Site 81,' the U.S.-built facility houses a hyper-secretive intelligence base.

When Iran struck a series of targets in the heart of north Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles on June 13, Israeli authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent journalists from filming the damage. "The building on this compound was just hit," Trey Yingst of Fox News reported as he arrived that evening at the site of HaKirya, Israel's Defense Ministry headquarters, and the nearby Azrieli Center. But within seconds, Israeli police officers arrived to aggressively shunt Yingst away from where he was standing, just north of the HaKirya Bridge on the west side of Menachem Begin Road.

That day, Iranian missiles struck the north tower of the Da Vinci apartment complex roughly 550 meters southwest of Yingst's location. The Grayzone has determined that the building sits immediately south of the "Canarit" / "Kannarit" Israeli Air Force towers and above an underground military intelligence bunker jointly administered by the US and Israeli militaries. According to an analysis of leaked emails, public documents, and Israeli news reports, the location is host to a highly secretive, electromagnetically shielded intelligence facility known as "Site 81."
Read More...
Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: The algorithm that rigged the census: How one bureaucrat stole the House and billions in funding

@amuse
Amuse on X
Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:54 UTC
john abowd rig elections algorithm census
John M. Abowd, former Chief Scientist for the U.S. Census Bureau
The 2020 census was marketed as an "actual enumeration," a neutral count of people for apportionment and funding. It was not. The same official who helped block a basic citizenship question in 2018, John M. Abowd, then the Census Bureau's Chief Scientist, pushed through a new, opaque methodology in 2020 called differential privacy. The new system deliberately injected mathematical noise into every block count in America, turning the census from a headcount into a model with knobs. The knob that mattered most was a single parameter, epsilon, a secrecy shroud known only to a small inner circle. Abowd argued that a single added question about citizenship posed an intolerable risk to data quality because there was, he said, not enough time to test it. Then he rushed an untested algorithm that altered every count in every neighborhood. The irony is so sharp it cuts: the man who warned that one question might distort the census approved a method that guaranteed distortion.

Start with the record. On January 19, 2018, Abowd sent Commerce a technical memo urging rejection of a citizenship question. He then testified for several days in federal court. The transcript, nearly 700 pages, cemented a narrative that any citizenship question would degrade data and impede participation. The courts cited this drumbeat of doubt, and the question was blocked. The administration lost the public fight. But the inside fight over how to publish the data was only beginning. Abowd immediately advanced a quiet revolution in disclosure avoidance, adopting differential privacy for the first time ever in a US census. That choice, made outside the glare that attended the citizenship question, had far more sweeping consequences.
Read More...
People

Best of the Web: The Nobel that wasn't Trump's: Why Oslo chose a Venezuelan rebel over a peacemaker

Georgiy Berezovsky, Vladikavkaz-based journalist
RT
Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:39 UTC
María Corina Machado and Donald Trump
The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has gone to María Corina Machado, one of the most prominent faces of Venezuela's opposition. The committee's language is familiar - "rights," "peaceful transition" - but the story behind it isn't. Machado's record blends volunteer election networks with long-running fights over foreign funding; her name has appeared in cases tied to efforts to unseat the government - charges she rejects; and a country remains split over where legitimate politics ends and regime change begins.

The award lifts a domestic struggle onto a global stage and drops it into a fresh context: for much of the year, chatter about a "Nobel for Trump" hung in the air, and the very idea of what counts as peacemaking is once again up for debate far beyond Caracas.
Read More...
Extinguisher

Best of the Web: Clown world! Macron reappoints Sebastien Lecornu as France's Prime Minister, 4 days after he quit


Le Monde
Sat, 11 Oct 2025 10:10 UTC
Sébastien Lecornu had resigned as prime minister hours after forming his cabinet. He then led talks during the week, saying he believed there was still a way forward for passing a budget without holding snap elections.
macron lecornu
"But sir, won't they remember me from earlier this week?"

"Of course not, they are stupid animals!"
French President Emmanuel Macron reappointed Sébastien Lecornu as prime minister on Friday, October 10, the presidency said, four days after his resignation as the shortest-lived premier in modern French history.

"The president of the Republic has appointed Mr. Sébastien Lecornu as prime minister and tasked him with forming a government," the Elysée Palace said without providing further details. The president "is giving the prime minister carte blanche," said Macron's entourage.

"I accept - out of duty - the mission entrusted to me by the president," Lecornu said, in a post on X. He said he would strive "to do everything possible to give France a budget for the end of the year." Lecornu said that the new government team would have to "embody renewal" and that all appointees "must commit to disconnecting themselves from presidential ambitions for 2027."

Lecornu, 39, threw in the towel on Monday just hours after forming a largely unchanged cabinet, after criticism from inside and outside his coalition over the lack of personnel renewal. He agreed to stay on for two extra days to talk to all political parties and told French television late Wednesday that he was optimistic that a new cabinet could get a spending bill through Parliament.
Read More...
Star of David

Best of the Web: Neocons David Frum and Douglas Murray secretly drafted speeches for Israeli ambassador

Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim
DropSite News
Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:07 UTC
david frum speeches atlantic magazine neocon
© Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for PoliticonThe Atlantic's David Frum speaks onstage during Politicon 2018 on October 21, 2018 in Los Angeles, California.
Leaked emails from former Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor show David Frum, Douglas Murray offering to write his speeches and a CNN producer fundraising for Israel's Iron Dome during Israel's 2014 war

David Frum, a senior editor at the liberal flagship magazine The Atlantic, had previously enjoyed a career as a speechwriter for George W. Bush, helping Bush coin the notorious phrase "Axis of Evil." Since that time, Frum has enjoyed the limelight as a celebrated political pundit of the anti-Trump resistance movement.

Despite that shift in careers, it seems that Frum never fully gave up his true love: writing speeches for powerful political figures.

Frum started his senior editorial role at The Atlantic in March 2014. In July of 2014, during an Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed over 2,200 Palestinians, including over 551 children, and wounded over 11,000, Frum helped write a speech for the then-Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor. Prosor is now ambassador to Germany.
Read More...
Bullseye

Best of the Web: The Left's political playbook (bonus track): Redefining words and standards

Thaddeus G. McCotter
American Greatness
Sat, 04 Oct 2025 19:55 UTC
censorship illustration
© Eric Drucker
The left twists language to stifle dissent — redefining "tolerance" into intolerance and branding free speech as hate speech to advance its agenda.

Last week, I wrote about the left's playbook of projection and deflection, wherein they ascribe their own sins unto their victims. This week, let us examine how the left tries to advance its radical agenda by redefining words and standards. Today's case study: free speech.

While the First Amendment of the United States Constitution recognizes and protects the God-given right to free speech, there has always been a reasonable, popular consensus that there exists material not suitable for young, impressionable children and that, alternatively, for adult consumption, cannot be banned. The left is endeavoring to rend this consensus.

Presently, the left equates the removal of age-inappropriate materials that sexualize children from public schools as "censorship." As readers of last week's article will recognize, such is a deflection and a projection from the fact the left has for years been banning, eliminating, and re-editing all manner of media, usually by "dead white European males" (though certainly not exclusively), from curricula for being contrary to the dictates of their "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (DEI) secular religion.
Read More...
Target

Best of the Web: New CBS owner David Ellison met with top Israeli general in scheme to spy on Americans

Wyatt Reed, Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone
Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00 UTC
Gantz Game
© UnknownGantz Game
Israel's former top general sought donations from David Ellison and his father, Larry, as part of a billionaire coterie to fund digital paramilitaries aimed at sabotaging pro-Palestine activists. The leaked documents show one planner explaining, "In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF." With Paramount and CBS News now under his control, the younger Ellison has installed self-described "Zionist fanatic" Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.

The new owner of Paramount, David Ellison, participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, leaked emails show. Originally dubbed "12 Tribes," a reference to the dozen Jewish billionaires solicited to underwrite the operation, the scheme sought out American faces to fund surveillance firms run by Israeli intelligence veterans on behalf of Tel Aviv, as it targeted American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The emails documenting the foreign influence campaign to counter BDS were first identified by journalist Jack Poulson, who discovered them in a trove leaked by the Handala hacking collective in 2024. The files show former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was tasked with recruiting wealthy Westerners to fund surveillance firms operated by Israeli intelligence veterans as they stalked and harassed people whom the government of Israel suspected of harboring pro-Palestinian sympathies.

Comment:

New CBS owner David Ellison met with top Israeli general in scheme to spy on Americans
6 Oct 2025

Read More...
Eiffel Tower

Best of the Web: Macron Effect: French PM Lecornu resigns hours after forming cabinet - Shortest ever tenure!


Le Monde
Mon, 06 Oct 2025 08:30 UTC
lecornu
© CYRIL BITTONAu'revoir
President Emmanuel Macron's office announced that Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu had tendered his resignation on the morning of Monday, October 6, hours after his new government had been formed. Lecornu's resignation after 27 days in office, making him the shortest-lived prime minister in recent French history, plunges the country into political uncertainty again.

On Sunday evening, almost four weeks after his appointment by Macron, Lecornu had unveiled his cabinet, which was almost identical to that of his fallen predecessor, François Bayrou. But cracks were apparent right away, with members of several parties within the governing coalition expressing doubts and criticism about the lack of change.

Lecornu, a former defense minister, had faced the daunting task of finding approval in a deeply divided parliament for an austerity budget for next year.

Lecornu was to make a public statement at 10:45 am (Paris time).

Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), immediately called for snap elections. "There can be no return to stability without a return to the polls and without the dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale," he insisted.
Read More...
Bullseye

Best of the Web: The End Of Woke Capitalism

Mark Jeftovic
ZeroHedge
Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:04 UTC
charlie kirk Iryna Zarutska memorials
The moment the cultural tide turned against the Left.
"At the physical level, we are witnessing a war of structures,
on the meta-physical level, a battle of pendulums." — Vadim Zeland
The egregore of far-Left radicalism is wounded - but what will take it's place?

Within the space of a few days over the second week of September, the world looked on in horror as a pair of unspeakably horrific crimes were committed; by now it's likely everyone knows what I'm referring to.

I'm talking, of course, about the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a North Carolina transit train - and the all-too-public assassination of Charlie Kirk, at a campus event in Utah.

The images from both events were horrific and circulated widely, there is no need to show them again here - but this "one-two" punch in my mind was the definitive knock-out blow to the far-left domination of our cultural zeitgeist.
Read More...
Star of David

Best of the Web: Mossad 'in contact from very beginning' with killers of Italian PM, reporter reveals

Kit Klarenberg, Wyatt Reed
The Grayzone
Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00 UTC
Neti Meloni
© UnknownIsraeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu • Italian PM Giorgia Meloni
A roving reporter who covered Italy's top politicians explains to The Grayzone how his country was reduced to a joint US-Israeli "aircraft carrier," and raises troubling questions about an Israeli role in the killing of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

For years, Israel's Mossad monitored and secretly influenced a violent communist faction that carried out the March 16, 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, veteran investigative journalist Eric Salerno has documented.

Having worked closely alongside multiple Italian heads of state during his 30-year career as a correspondent, Salerno published an expose of their secret relationship with Israeli intelligence in 2010 called Mossad Base Italy.

The reporter told The Grayzone that Moro, who was arguably Italy's most important leader, became a thorn in the side of powerful forces who sought to keep his country firmly lodged in the pro-Western bloc. Salerno believes Italy's long-term foreign policy would have developed differently if Moro had survived, adding, "that's what they were afraid of in the United States."
Read More...