Society's ChildS


Cult

Leaked NYT Gaza memo instructs 'journalists' to avoid words "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," and "occupied territory"

Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim
The Intercept
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 15:22 UTC
The new york times
© Alastair Pike / AFP
Amid the internal battle over the New York Times's coverage of Israel's war, top editors handed down a set of directives.

The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel's war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" and to "avoid" using the phrase "occupied territory" when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine "except in very rare cases" and to steer clear of the term "refugee camps" to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli-Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — "offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October."
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Snakes in Suits

Who (or what) are these people, anyway?

Charlie Stephens
The Solari Report
Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00 UTC
the ruling class
“Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.”
~ Al Capone
By now, a large and growing fraction of our country's population knows that the quality of life of "the 99 percent," supported by less and less income and a smaller and smaller share of humanity's useful and usable production, is in serious decline. Except for the most fortunate of Earth's human cohort of life, current trends include growing economic insecurity, seriously declining health due to intentional planet-wide poisoning, ever larger swaths of the country's real wealth going to very few, a rising tide of violence both at home and around the world, and a tightening noose of censorship and surveillance. The list gets longer every year and has been getting visibly longer since sometime in the late 1950s.

None of this is an accident. Our "problems" are the predictable outcomes of a system — a predatory system — that has been carefully and inexorably designed, outfitted, and inflicted on others for centuries. The rate of destruction of societies, cultures, and whole countries, and the liquidation of the Earth and its life capacities, has increased exponentially for hundreds of years now. Those running the crime syndicate that designs and runs the system are people too dim or too arrogant to know that they've assembled a system that's inherently suicidal. It has multiple reinforcing feedback loops that are called "success to the already successful" in systems language. There are no balancing feedback loops anymore (they've systematically stripped those away over time), so such a system will always self-destruct. There are no exceptions.
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Sherlock

Copenhagen's historic stock exchange in flames, cause of fire unknown

Paul Kirby
BBC
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 12:44 UTC
fire stock exchange
© AFPFire engulfed the historic spire which then collapsed
Denmark's historic old stock exchange building in the centre of Copenhagen has been engulfed by fire.

The 17th Century Børsen is one of the city's oldest buildings and onlookers gasped as its iconic spire collapsed in the flames.

Everyone inside the building was able to leave and people rushed to rescue some of its historic paintings.

Culture minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt said 400 years of Danish cultural heritage had gone up in flames.

The building, dating back to 1625, is a stone's throw from Denmark's parliament, the Folketing, housed in the old royal palace of Christiansborg castle. Danish media said the nearby square was being evacuated.

Comment: Considering the number of fires and explosions of late, and the significance of the building, it probably wouldn't be unreasonable to question whether arson may be the cause:

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Bizarro Earth

3 bomb attacks in 1 night in Belgium, thought to be linked to drug gangs


VRT
Tue, 16 Apr 2024 12:26 UTC
belgium firebomb
FILE: Firebombing attack, Belgium, 2023
Explosive devices were thrown at homes at three locations in Antwerp Province on Monday night. Houses in the Antwerp districts of Merksem and Borgerhout were attacked, as was a house in the municipality of Boom, around 16 kilometres south of Antwerp. No one was injured in the attacks. Police are currently investigating whether the three incidents are connected.

A resident of the house that was attacked in the Antwerp district of Merksem told VRT News "We were woken up by a loud bang and when we looked outside there was fire everywhere". The front door of the house on the Gasthuisstraat, not far from the Sportpaleis events centre, sustained fire damage.

A window in an adjacent house was also destroyed and a car that was parked nearby was damaged.

Comment: The surge in violent crime across Europe has been shown to be linked to migrant gang violence, and it's likely that soaring poverty levels, in addition to the continuation of weaponised mass migration policies, is only exacerbating the situation:

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Life Preserver

US pharmaceutical drug shortages worst on record

Ernie Mundell
US News
Mon, 15 Apr 2024 11:24 UTC
Taking a Pill
© jorgeantonio / GettyAmericans born in 2019 can expect to spend nearly half their lives taking prescription drugs, according to a new study conducted by Jessica Ho, associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State.
Americans are facing more shortages of the drugs they need for medical care than ever before, a national pharmacy database shows.

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHSP) and the University of Utah Drug Information Service started tracking drug shortages as far back as 2001.

Their latest data shows that things haven't been this bad in all the years they've kept records.

A record high of 323 different meds were in short supply during the first quarter of 2024, the groups found. That's worse than the last peak for drug shortages -- 320 in 2014, according to the data.

Comment: As noted these shortages are just getting worse, particularly it seems in Western nations, and those governments that are reporting shortages don't seem to have come up with a solution.

Considering how a number of these medications are essential for emergency and critical healthcare, it's highly likely that they're already having a quantifiable, detrimental, impact on public health. Furthermore, should there be serious shortages of medications used for mental health, it may result in a significant proportion of the population, who are dependent, into going without; and the fall out of patients who are forced to taper off to quickly, or going cold turkey, could have disastrous consequences for society:

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Fire

Fire breaks out at US ammunition factory


RT
Mon, 15 Apr 2024 07:20 UTC
The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, April 15, 2024.
© Facebook/NEPAFirePhotos/screenshotThe Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, April 15, 2024.
The Scranton Army Munitions Plant has produced artillery shells for Ukraine.

The US Army factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania that specializes in artillery ammunition caught fire on Monday afternoon, according to local media reports and eyewitnesses.

The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant started spewing black smoke shortly before 3pm local time. Local emergency services were summoned to deal with what was described as a "structure fire."

No further details were available.
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NPC

Facebook censors Climate: The Movie after 'fact check' by science feedback

Andy May
Watts Up With That?
Mon, 15 Apr 2024 07:00 UTC
facebook censorship
Facebook's censorship is totally out of hand, and its "independent and nonpartisan fact checks" are anything but. Now it is censoring Climate: The Movie. The supposed 'fact checks' provided by Science Feedback and Climate Feedback (they are two branches of the same organisation) have been shown many times to be both partisan and ideologically driven. The 'fact check' of Steve Koonin's bestselling book Unsettled done by Climate Feedback was blisteringly criticised by the Wall Street Journal in a lead editorial by the WSJ editorial staff.

The editorial includes the following:
Mr. Koonin, whose careful book draws extensively on existing scholarship, may respond on the merits in a different forum. Suffice it to say here that many of the 'fact check' claims relied on by Facebook don't contradict the underlying material, but instead argue with its perceived implications.
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Gavel

Abu Ghraib survivors to get their day in court


RT
Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:20 UTC
down on floor
© API/Gamma-Rapho/Getty ImagesA photo purports to show prisoners being abused by US guards at Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad
Two decades after a US torture scandal made headlines, a lawsuit against the military contractor involved is going to trial...

Twenty years on from reports that the US military was torturing prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, three survivors will finally get a chance to bring their claims before an American jury.

A trial in the civil lawsuit filed by former Abu Ghraib inmates against the US military contractor that they blame for their suffering is scheduled to begin on Monday in a federal court near Washington. The private security contractor, CACI International, has strung the case along for 16 years by making over 20 unsuccessful attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed.

CACI, which supplied the interrogators who worked at Abu Ghraib, has insisted that its employees weren't accused of abusing detainees. The Virginia-based company also has argued that as a Pentagon contractor, it should be protected by the government's sovereign immunity against the torture allegations.
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Clipboard

Crib notes for the Trial of the Century

James Howard Kunstler
jameshowardkunstler.substack.com
Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00 UTC
clouds
"Once someone determined Trump was so bad it was okay to lie about him, it set the precedent that the only thing that mattered was a subject's politics." — Matt Taibbi
What fascinates us about sex, I suppose, is that most everyone wants it and seeks it, driven by irresistible natural impulses, and yet the act itself is such an affront to civilized decorum that it inspires both comedy and horror, two states of consciousness that are themselves irresistibly compelling. Add lawyers to all that and you find yourself entering the realm of opera bouffe, which is to say, kitsch, human expression reduced to its most self-consciously ridiculous.

Enter Stormy Daniels, that notorious pair of cumulus clouds attached to a person, who made a career in the sex industry and later on, at the age when sex workers generally face retirement, had a fresh start as a political gadfly buzzing around the mystifying hair-do of President Donald Trump. Stormy first encountered Mr. Trump in 2006 when he was a mere TV star who played in a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. She was hanging out there with two porn-star girlfriends. Golf nuts all, must've been.
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Star of David

Vultures: Israeli firms working overtime to sell stolen Palestinian land to US Jews

Eleanor Goldfield
TruthOut
Sat, 13 Apr 2024 17:18 UTC
israel sell palestine land us jews
© Eleanor GoldfieldZionists encircle anti-Zionist protesters standing with keffiyehs and a sign reading "Waterfront properties built upon bulldozed bodies" outside of Shomrei Emunah in Baltimore, Maryland.
The real estate events peddling land in Israeli settlements in the West Bank appear to flout US and international law.

"Your chance to own a piece of the Holy Land!" exclaims the cheerful advertising copy on a real estate website aimed at attracting buyers in the U.S. and Canada to purchase land located in Israel and in a number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The site describes five land sale events that occurred this spring in the U.S. and Canada.

Another land sale event held in Baltimore invited attendees to "Buy Your Home in Israel Now!" But, as with the other events, attendees couldn't just be anyone interested in some freshly stolen land. You have to be Jewish, but not just any kind of Jewish.
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