Society's ChildS


Airplane

Best of the Web: Boeing whistleblower found dead in carpark ahead of legal deposition against corporation's corrupt practices

john barnett
© John BarnettJohn Barnett was a former quality control manager at Boeing.
A former Boeing employee known for raising concerns about the firm's production standards has been found dead in the US.

John Barnett had worked for Boeing for 32 years, until his retirement in 2017.

In the days before his death, he had been giving evidence in a whistleblower lawsuit against the company.

Comment: While the controversy around Boeing's lax production standards is being spun as a diversity issue, it seems there's little in Barnett's complaints about diversity-hires being the root of the problem. It more appears that the age-old issue of penny-pinching and corner-cutting.

See also:


Star of David

Israel's anti-Zionist fringe is taking a stand: 'I don't want to be a pawn in this sick game'

idf soldiers israel patrol gaza border
© Mostafa Alkharouf / Anadolu via Getty ImagesIsraeli soldiers patrol near the Gaza border
The number of people willing to serve in the IDF is decreasing every year, but will this change the militaristic nature of the country?

Over the years, the number of people who have exempted themselves from service in the Israeli military, or Israel Defense Forces (IDF), has gone up. In 2021 it reached more than 31%. Reports suggest that by 2050 more than 50% of Israeli youth will evade conscription. Roughly 10% of those will do so due to ideology and their reluctance to support Israeli policy and actions.

Israel's war on Hamas, which was declared shortly after the group's deadly attacks on communities in the southern part of the country in October last year, has seen a surge in the number of volunteers for the military.

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are typically exempt from serving, have enrolled in the army. Hundreds of Jewish young people from around the world have come to Israel to join the IDF, and the country has registered a total of 300,000 reservists determined to protect their nation.

Headphones

Book admits Fani Willis' Trump investigation was launched using an illegal recording

fani willis
© 11Alive/YoutubeEmbattled Georgia DA Fani Willis at her hearing March 2, 2024
With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of an illegally recorded phone call, defendants might pursue legal recourse.

Democrat Fani Willis' legal troubles extend beyond recent revelations that she deceptively hired her otherwise under-qualified, secret, married lover to run the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in Georgia. A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis' political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare.

Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election is a fawning political biography of Willis. For context on the bias of the authors, Isikoff was an original Russia-collusion hoaxer, and his articles to that end were used to secure warrants for the FBI to spy on innocent Republican presidential campaign advisers such as Carter Page.

Boat

Charity loads food aid onto barge in Cyprus headed for Gaza

Ship
© Proactiva Open Arms AFP/Getty ImagesHandout showing the vessel 'Open Arms' docked in Larnaca
Charity workers loaded relief supplies bound for Gaza on to a barge in Cyprus on Saturday as part of an international effort to launch a maritime corridor to a Palestinian population on the brink of famine.

The European Commission had said a maritime aid corridor between Cyprus and Gaza could start operating as early as this weekend in a pilot project run by an international charity and financed by the UAE.

The Open Arms, a salvage vessel owned by a Spanish NGO and more accustomed to rescuing migrants at sea, was moored at a port in the coastal Cyprus town of Larnaca, 210 miles northwest of Gaza.

It will tow a barge with 200 tonnes of food sourced by charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) and mostly funded by the UAE. The timing of its departure from Cyprus was unclear.
packages
© Yiannis Kourtoglou/ReutersHumanitarian aid for Gaza is loaded on a platform next to the Spanish NGO Open Arms rescue vessel

Comment: Too little too late for 2.4M Palestinians...
Spokeswoman Laura Lanuza said: "Israeli authorities, which have welcomed the Cypriot sea corridor initiative, were inspecting the cargo of '200 tonnes of basic foodstuffs, rice and flour, cans of tuna'."

The United Nations World Food Programme has warned that the volume of aid that can be delivered by sea will do little if anything to stave off famine in Gaza.

Humanitarian workers and UN officials say that easing the entry of trucks to Gaza would be more effective than aid airdrops or sea shipments.

With ground access limited, countries have also turned to airdropping aid, although a parachute malfunction turned one delivery on Friday deadly.

Another 82 people were killed in strikes over the previous day, the ministry said, bringing the number of fatalities in Israel's bombardment and ground offensive of Gaza to 30,960, mostly women and children.

Canada has since become the latest country to say it would join aerial aid delivery missions.



Stock Down

US layoffs highest level in 11 months

whitehouse
© Elizabeth Frantz/ReutersDemocrats and Republicans in June reached an agreement to avoid a debt default by raising the $31.4 trillion borrowing limit after months of political wrangling
A report released by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed that in February, U.S. layoff announcements rose three percent to the highest level in 11 months amid ongoing automation-related restructuring.

The report said that in February, job cut announcements reached 84,638, the highest since last March and compared with 82,307 in January.

It was also the highest total for February since 2009.

The technology sector saw some of the most significant job cuts in February, along with transportation and services.


Comment: As is also the case over in the UK: Record number of British haulage businesses going bust


The tech sector, which leads all industries in job cuts so far this year, has seen cuts down by 55 percent year to date compared with the same period in 2023. In contrast, the finance sector has seen cuts up 56 percent compared with last year.

Comment: Considering the current state of Western economies, their government's insistence to escalate tensions on their multiple war fronts, alongside the wargames, and soaring price of commodities, there's every reason to suppose that the situation is going to get much, much worse:


Star of David

New Israeli settlements a crime - UN official

settlement
© Ahmad Gharabli/AFPIsraeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the occupied West Bank on the outskirts of Jerusalem, August 16, 2023
The developments pose a risk to the possibility of a Palestinian state, human rights commissioner has warned...

New Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are growing at a record rate, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk has warned.

The senior UN official has warned that the establishment and continuing expansion of settlements amount to the transfer by Israel of its own civilian population into the territories that it occupies, which, he reiterated, is a war crime under international law.

Commenting on Friday on a report to be presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva in late March, he added that the settlements risk eliminating any practical possibility of a Palestinian state.
"The West Bank is already in crisis. Yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian State."

Bullseye

Finally: Women's pro golf tour updates policy to only allow biological females

Transgender golf star Hailey Davidson
© @haileydgolf/InstagramTransgender golf competitor Hailey Davidson
Trans golfer Hailey Davidson, who claimed first in the NXXT Women's Classic earlier this year is now banned from events.

The NXXT Women's Pro Tour,a professional women's golf tour based in Florida, has updated its policy to ban transgender athletes from competition, announcing Friday that only competitors who are "biological female at birth" will be able to participate in tour-sanctioned events.

This decision follows transgender golfer Hailey Davidson's controversial win at the NXXT Women's Classic earlier this year.

NXXT GOLF CEO Stuart McKinnon described in a statement the change in policy as a "crucial" step in helping to "uphold the competitive integrity that is the cornerstone of women's sports."

Airplane

Alaska Airlines flight carrying pets arrives with cargo door open while Boeing faces $1B lawsuit

alaska airlines safety issues
© AFP via Getty ImageAlaska Airlines has come under a litany of criticism over safety issues this winter. 3
Alaska Airlines has come under a litany of criticism over safety issues this winter.
Embattled Alaska Airlines is at the center of a second aviation drama after a plane arrived at an airport gate in Portland, Ore. last Friday with its cargo door open.

The cargo hold was stowing passenger's pets, according to local TV station KOIN, although none of the animals were injured. The plane had flown in from Los Cabos, Mexico.

Alaska Airlines told KOIN in a statement that "there was no indication to the crew that the door was unsealed during [last Friday's] flight and all indications point to the door partially opening after landing."

"Our maintenance teams inspected the aircraft, replaced a spring in the door, tested the door and reentered it into service," the Alaska Airlines statement concluded.

Comment: Much of Boeing's problems are self-inflicted: But, there are also the twin whammies of a growing competency gap, exacerbated by lunatic DEI policies. Turns out the best qualified employees still seem to be old white guys.


Whistle

Anti-genocide protester slashes Lord Balfour painting with knife in UK

Balfour painting
© Palestine ActionA protest targeting a painting of Lord Arthur James Balfour, the former prime minister and foreign secretary, at Trinty College, Cambridge.
Politicians have condemned a "moronic act of vandalism" after pro-Palestine activists damaged a portrait of Lord Balfour.

Palestine Action shared a video on social media of a demonstrator defacing and slashing the historic painting, which hangs at the University of Cambridge's Trinity College.

In the clip, a woman can be seen spraying red paint before using a sharp object to slice open the canvas.

Lord Arthur James Balfour was a Conservative prime minister between 1902 and 1905. He later became the foreign secretary, when he signed the Balfour Declaration in 1917.

Comment: See also:



Attention

Sick, and Sick of It All

Pollock Portrait
© Off-Guardian
Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at "defense" contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc.

Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces "over there" and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

Living in a technological world of the internet divorces us from real life as it passes into inert, abstract, and dead screen existence. It should not be surprising that people grow sick and tired of the steady streams of "news" that fills their days and nights.

So much of the news is grotesque; propaganda abounds. Stories twisted right and left to tie minds into knots. After a while, as Macbeth tells us, life seems like "a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world. This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda.

A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely. Fleeting headlines have been all I've noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness.

Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.