hmmmm AI is not our friend
Pentagon Restricts Press Office Access Over Privacy Concerns
The Pentagon announced Monday that reporters will no longer have open access to the War Department’s public affairs office after the space was redesignated as a classified facility to accommodate staff handling sensitive material.
The announcement marks the latest effort by the Pete Hegseth-led War Department to tighten operational security and reshape longstanding media access practices inside the Pentagon.
Under the new policy, the Pentagon’s public affairs office has been converted into a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, commonly known as a SCIF.
The office had previously allowed journalists to enter without escorts and directly approach military public affairs officials with questions.
Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez said the change was necessary because speechwriters working in the office routinely handle classified material and require access to secure government systems.
“This is the most transparent War Department in history. No amount of spin from the Fake News media will change that,” Valdez wrote in a post on X.
“These speechwriters routinely handle classified material and require SIPRNet access. As a result, journalists will no longer be permitted to enter the office space. There’s nothing controversial about that,” he added.
Valdez said reporters will still have access to the Pentagon press secretary and the Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs through scheduled appointments.
The policy change comes months after War Secretary Pete Hegseth imposed additional restrictions on media operations at the Pentagon.
Last October, the department introduced new rules allowing officials to revoke press credentials from reporters designated as security risks.
The New York Times subsequently filed two lawsuits against the Pentagon, arguing the restrictions violate First Amendment protections. Both cases remain pending in court.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pentagon-restricts-press-office-access-over-privacy-concerns
State Department Issues Travel Advisory For Mexico
The State Department updated its travel advisory for Mexico on May 29, continuing to warn Americans who plan on visiting the country to be wary of terrorism and crimes.
“Many violent crimes take place in Mexico. They include homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, sexual assault, and robbery. There is a risk of terrorist violence, including terrorist attacks and other activity in Mexico,” the advisory said.
Overall, Mexico is categorized with a “Level 2—Exercise Increased Caution” designation for travelers.
“The U.S. government has limited ability to help in many parts of Mexico, a large country in which conditions can vary widely from state to state and even within a state. U.S. government employees may not travel to certain high-risk areas, which may be within states that include low-risk areas,” the department said.
The travel restrictions on U.S. employees prohibit them from traveling between cities in the dark, waving down taxis on the street, driving between border cities and the interior of Mexico, and traveling alone, especially in remote areas.
Due to security risks, Americans visiting Mexico must follow the same restrictions as applied to U.S. government employees, the advisory said.
The State Department also published maps showing various restricted areas in Mexico.
Some states in the country are classified under “Level 4-Do Not Travel,” such as Colima, Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa, Tamaulipas, and Zacatecas. States designated as “Level 3-Reconsider Travel” are Baja California, Chiapas, Chihuahua, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, and Sonora.
The department warned Americans that emergency services will be unavailable or limited in rural or remote regions. When met with a road checkpoint, visitors must comply, the advisory said, warning that “fleeing or ignoring instructions can lead to you being hurt or killed.”
There have been multiple cases of tourists being killed in Mexico. In April, a Canadian tourist was killed in the Teotihuacan archaeological zone after a gunman opened fire on tourists. Back in 2024, an American couple was shot dead in the state of Michoacán while traveling in a pickup.
According to the Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2025, there are “extremely high rates” of violent crime in Mexico.
“Security analysts estimate that around two-thirds of homicides are committed by organized crime. Two-thirds of homicides in 2023 were committed with firearms,” the report said.
The group also warned about the risk of arbitrary detention in Mexico.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/state-department-issues-travel-advisory-mexico
Russia blacklists five UK nationals for peddling disinfo
A group of journalists, experts, and leaders of pro-Ukrainian NGOs has been placed on Moscow’s entry-ban list
Moscow has added five British nationals to its blacklist over London’s hostile actions, spread of disinformation, and the concentrated effort “to pump up the Kiev regime with weaponry,” the Russian Foreign Ministry has said.
The ministry announced the move on Tuesday, urging London “to renounce aggressive anti-Russian steps, as well as its support for the [Vladimir] Zelensky regime.” The UK’s effort to prolong the Ukraine conflict no matter what leads only to “further civilian casualties” and ultimately the “destruction of Ukrainian statehood,” it said.
The latest addition to Russia’s no-entry list includes journalists and experts involved in “disseminating slanderous fabrications and false information.” It also features two heads of “British security companies” that recruit personnel to prop up the Kiev regime under the guise of “implementing pseudo-humanitarian projects in Ukraine,” the ministry stated.
The sanctioned individuals are Catherine Belton and Richard Holmes, journalists with The Washington Post and The i Paper, respectively. The list also includes Alexander Browder, a self-styled corruption and money-laundering expert, described by the ministry as the author of a misleading report for the Henry Jackson Society think tank.
The restrictions have also been slapped on Alice Laugher, CEO of the Committed to Good (CTG), an NGO, supposedly involved in “humanitarian and development projects in fragile and conflict-affected areas.” Nicholas Westbury, one of the founders of CTG’s parent company, the Chelsea Group, has also made the list.
Russian diplomats said work on the blacklist, as well as other retaliatory measures, is bound to continue unless London abandons its hostile stance.
“We warn that any efforts by British political elites to further fuel Russophobia, deliberately damage our country’s international reputation, and accelerate the anti-Russian sanctions will inevitably be met with a decisive response,” the ministry stated.
London has emerged as a key backer of Kiev in the Ukraine conflict, actively seeking to derail attempts to resolve it through diplomacy and focusing on inflicting a defeat on Russia instead. The UK has been leading various initiatives to supply Ukrainian forces with increasingly sophisticated weaponry, and to rally additional foreign monetary and military support.
https://www.rt.com/russia/640894-five-uk-nationals-blacklisted/
CANNIBALISM IN HOLLYWOOD?:
At around 45 minutes into this link, Jeff Rense says, "You can throw cannibalism in there. That is a big secret in Hollywood, by the way, although not everyone does it. But it is a secret because some big names do. You can go to any major city in the country, I am told. And if you know the right restaurant to go to, and the right codewords, you can get human meat. It is there. That is what I am told".
https://old.bitchute.com/video/oO1zZIeTrj35/
US Law Enforcement Warns of ‘Anti-Tech Extremism’ as AI Hatred Grows
As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their backyards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show.
More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.
This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.
Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.
Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.
"The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City," the report reads. The term "anti-tech violent extremism" does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.
In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a novel threat emerging in the wake of the arrest and trial of Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a small cultlike group, three members of which have been charged with murder, tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI.
While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that "paranoid views regarding AI" may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians' trial, thanks to their "attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent," and belief that "humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality, or face existential consequences for failing to do so."
https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/
Images being blocked
CANADIAN DOCTOR MOONLIGHTS A SIDE-HUSTLE CALLED "HELPFUL" QUICK-KILL GENOCIDE:
A "helpful" MD called Dr James MacLean met a struggling 45-year-old man at a parking lot of Tim Hortons (coffeehouse and restaurant chain), assessed him on-the-spot for euthanasia, then personally drove him to "benefit" from the Canadian Regime's MAID Quick-Kill Genocide "Services" just two hours later. Thus, it only officially takes a few hours to go from depressed to the Death Camp in today's ZioNazi Canada:
https://old.bitchute.com/video/o4DakuLJlzTP/
AI Data Centers: The Real Reason They're Going Up Everywhere
Who's paying for them. Why it's happening this fast. What the buildout is actually for. Why you should care.
Pulling it together – and this is my thesis, stated as a thesis: the data centers are the physical substrate that surveillance, digital ID, behavioral scoring, and predictive systems all run on. The reclassification of pushback as a security threat is the legal lever. The detention capacity is the physical one. The language operation is the cultural one. All three are being installed at once, and all three depend on the compute the data centers provide.
What an AI Data Center Actually Is
“AI data center” sounds like a server room — abstract, technical, somebody else’s business. The vagueness is doing work. You can’t organize against something you can’t picture.
So here’s what one is. A massive industrial facility, typically half a million to several million square feet. Tens of thousands of specialized processors in dense racks, each rack drawing more power than an average home. A full center can draw 100 to over 1,000 megawatts — the largest rival the power use of a mid-sized city. Cooling the heat takes water, sometimes millions of gallons a day, pulled from local aquifers, rivers, or municipal supply. Featureless buildings. No windows. Razor wire. A facility that uses a city’s worth of electricity might employ thirty to a hundred people. It exists to host computation, not workers.
What that computation is for is the question.
The Argument This Piece Makes
Let me be straight about what’s documented and what’s my read.
The documented, boring use of these buildings is commercial: training and running AI models, cloud services. That’s real. But I’m going to make the case that the strategic reason for a buildout this fast, this coordinated, and this heavily financed is bigger than chatbots — that these facilities are becoming the physical substrate for surveillance, digital identity, and behavioral data systems, and that the people funding them have said as much in public. Where I’m citing a fact, I’ll source it. Where I’m drawing a conclusion, I’ll say so. You can take the facts and disagree with my conclusion. That’s fair. But the facts are the facts.
Start with one thread you can verify yourself.
The UN’s 2030 Agenda does not say “digital ID.” Target 16.9 says “provide legal identity for all, including birth registration” by 2030 — clean, humanitarian, nothing to object to.¹ The word “digital” lives one layer down. The World Bank’s ID4D program — the body operationalizing 16.9 — states in its own materials that it’s delivering that legal identity as digital identification systems.² That’s the pattern worth understanding: the mandate is written in language no one can attack, and the machinery is built somewhere you have to go looking. You need both documents to see the whole picture. That’s not me connecting dots that aren’t there — that’s how the structure is built.
I want to be careful here, because this is where these arguments usually overreach. The 2030 Agenda is mostly seventeen goals about poverty, water, health, education, and labor — and most of it is exactly what it says. I’m not claiming the whole framework is a surveillance plot. My claim is narrower: one target inside it is the on-ramp for population-scale digital ID, and that earns scrutiny even if the other sixteen goals are benign.
The broader thing to watch isn’t a single master document. It’s convergence. Digital identity (UN/World Bank), central bank digital currencies (central banks and the BIS), behavioral data systems (the ad-tech and surveillance industry), smart-city programs — these come from different bodies, not one blueprint. What they share is that every one of them needs enormous compute to run at scale. The data centers are that compute. That’s the connection I’m asking you to hold: not one conspiracy, but a set of systems converging on the same physical requirement.
¹ UN, SDG Target 16.9 — https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/peace-justice/
² World Bank ID4D — https://id4d.worldbank.org/guide/good-id-supports-multiple-development-goals
https://goldenorder.substack.com/p/ai-data-centers-the-real-reason-theyre
The Covishield Scandal (2025)
Words could not begin to explain the misery endured by the vaccine injured in the UK - and the rest of the world, which is still to be revealed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu51GMb0SA4
AI Data Centers: The Real Reason They're Going Up Everywhere
Who's paying for them. Why it's happening this fast. What the buildout is actually for. Why you should care.
Pulling it together – and this is my thesis, stated as a thesis: the data centers are the physical substrate that surveillance, digital ID, behavioral scoring, and predictive systems all run on. The reclassification of pushback as a security threat is the legal lever. The detention capacity is the physical one. The language operation is the cultural one. All three are being installed at once, and all three depend on the compute the data centers provide.
What an AI Data Center Actually Is
“AI data center” sounds like a server room — abstract, technical, somebody else’s business. The vagueness is doing work. You can’t organize against something you can’t picture.
So here’s what one is. A massive industrial facility, typically half a million to several million square feet. Tens of thousands of specialized processors in dense racks, each rack drawing more power than an average home. A full center can draw 100 to over 1,000 megawatts — the largest rival the power use of a mid-sized city. Cooling the heat takes water, sometimes millions of gallons a day, pulled from local aquifers, rivers, or municipal supply. Featureless buildings. No windows. Razor wire. A facility that uses a city’s worth of electricity might employ thirty to a hundred people. It exists to host computation, not workers.
What that computation is for is the question.
The Argument This Piece Makes
Let me be straight about what’s documented and what’s my read.
The documented, boring use of these buildings is commercial: training and running AI models, cloud services. That’s real. But I’m going to make the case that the strategic reason for a buildout this fast, this coordinated, and this heavily financed is bigger than chatbots — that these facilities are becoming the physical substrate for surveillance, digital identity, and behavioral data systems, and that the people funding them have said as much in public. Where I’m citing a fact, I’ll source it. Where I’m drawing a conclusion, I’ll say so. You can take the facts and disagree with my conclusion. That’s fair. But the facts are the facts.
Start with one thread you can verify yourself.
The UN’s 2030 Agenda does not say “digital ID.” Target 16.9 says “provide legal identity for all, including birth registration” by 2030 — clean, humanitarian, nothing to object to.¹ The word “digital” lives one layer down. The World Bank’s ID4D program — the body operationalizing 16.9 — states in its own materials that it’s delivering that legal identity as digital identification systems.² That’s the pattern worth understanding: the mandate is written in language no one can attack, and the machinery is built somewhere you have to go looking. You need both documents to see the whole picture. That’s not me connecting dots that aren’t there — that’s how the structure is built.
I want to be careful here, because this is where these arguments usually overreach. The 2030 Agenda is mostly seventeen goals about poverty, water, health, education, and labor — and most of it is exactly what it says. I’m not claiming the whole framework is a surveillance plot. My claim is narrower: one target inside it is the on-ramp for population-scale digital ID, and that earns scrutiny even if the other sixteen goals are benign.
The broader thing to watch isn’t a single master document. It’s convergence. Digital identity (UN/World Bank), central bank digital currencies (central banks and the BIS), behavioral data systems (the ad-tech and surveillance industry), smart-city programs — these come from different bodies, not one blueprint. What they share is that every one of them needs enormous compute to run at scale. The data centers are that compute. That’s the connection I’m asking you to hold: not one conspiracy, but a set of systems converging on the same physical requirement.
¹ UN, SDG Target 16.9 — https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/peace-justice/
² World Bank ID4D — https://id4d.worldbank.org/guide/good-id-supports-multiple-development-goals
https://goldenorder.substack.com/p/ai-data-centers-the-real-reason-theyre
Joint Law Enforcement Effort Disrupts Two Multi-State Drug Trafficking Operations; Nineteen Defendants Charged in Homeland Security Task Force Initiative
MARTINSBURG, WEST VIRGINIA – Two multi-state drug trafficking organizations were taken down today with 13 federal arrests made in Maryland and West Virginia, announced U.S. Attorney Matthew L. Harvey.
“Thanks to the tireless, coordinated work of law enforcement across multiple states, our communities are now safer,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew Harvey. “Our focus now turns to ensuring these individuals are held fully accountable for the harm they caused.”
“Together … we were able to collect evidence, execute search warrants, and mete out justice properly to safeguard our communities,” FBI Director Kash Patel said during a press conference in Martinsburg, West Virginia, following the takedown. “We took no shortcuts.”
“Tearing this drug operation out from our communities across two states means ridding our neighborhoods of the poison and violence that tears families apart. Months of painstaking investigative work conducted by every partner agency led to unleashing the full force of the law to destroy this network fueling violence and addiction,” said FBI Pittsburgh Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec. “The FBI and our local, state, and federal partners state loud and clear: crime will pay a heavy price in this region, and we will not stop in the pursuit of keeping your community safe.”
According to two filed indictments, two drug trafficking operations were selling large quantities of cocaine and cocaine base in Berkely and Jefferson Counties over a two-year period. One operation, led by Rohan Broadie, aka Glama G, Aneteneh Zewde Terfe, and Marvin A. Taaff of the Baltimore and Greenbelt, Maryland areas, involved 15 defendants and used multiple residences to store and distribute drugs. Members of the group allegedly possessed firearms to support their trafficking activities and handled large amounts of cash in drug proceeds. Omari Obeng Stewart, aka O, routinely traveled between Maryland and West Virginia to supply, coordinate, and sell cocaine and cocaine base throughout the region. Several defendants are charged in a drug conspiracy involving over five kilograms of cocaine and 28 grams of cocaine base. The second organization, led by brothers Jorfory and Joroy Twyman, of Ranson, West Virginia, worked together to distribute over 500 grams of cocaine and quantities of cocaine base in and around Jefferson County, West Virginia. During the investigation, law enforcement searched multiple homes and storage units, seizing tens of thousands of dollars, cocaine, and luxury items believed to have been purchased with drug proceeds.
“Today’s arrests demonstrate the power of partnership in action. Building public safety is a complex challenge that no single agency can accomplish alone. Each agency contributes unique authorities and expertise, and today, that collaboration has resulted in 14 alleged drug dealers being removed from our streets,” said Special Agent in Charge Eric Weindorf of Homeland Security Investigations Washington D.C. “The landscape is ever-evolving, but Homeland Security Task Force partnerships enable us to confront complex, multifaceted drug trafficking cases with a united front—leveraging our collective strengths to deliver real results.”
The defendants in both cases are:
Omari Obeng Stewart, also known as “O,” 46, of Greenbelt, Maryland
Rohan Lamante Broadie, also known as “Glama G,” 53, an illegal alien from Jamaica
Aneteneh Zewde Terfe, 45, of Baltimore, Maryland
Christopher Wallace Jones, Jr., 38, of Capitol Heights, Maryland
Marvin A. Taaff, 39, an illegal alien from Jamaica
Omo-Karo Cooper, 46, of Brandywine, Maryland
Traci-Ann Simone Ward, 41, an illegal alien from Jamaica
LeeAnn Lopez, 33, of Greenbelt, Maryland
Gavin Anthony Johnson, 23, of New Carrollton, Maryland
Dante McFalls, 37, of Martinsburg, West Virginia
Tabatha McFalls, 40, of Martinsburg, West Virginia
Stanley Delano Lum, 41, of Martinsburg, West Virginia
Juan Vashaun Payne, also known as “Big Guy,” 51, of Martinsburg, West Virginia
Christopher Pasco, 57, of Inwood, West Virginia
Jorfory Twyman, also known as “Foy,” 47, of Ranson, West Virginia
Joroy Twyman, also known as “Roy,” 47, of Ranson, West Virginia
Jennifer Woodsmall, 48, of Summerville, South Carolina
Chaz Plauche, 31, of Charles Town, West Virginia
Unnamed fugitive
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndwv/pr/joint-law-enforcement-effort-disrupts-two-multi-state-drug-trafficking-operations
can't find another sauce atm
28 minutes ago
IRGC says it struck US bases in Kuwait in retaliation for Qeshm Island attack
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Tuesday it carried out “precise and concentrated missile strikes” targeting US military bases in Kuwait in response to what it described as a US attack on Iran’s Qeshm Island, according to a statement.
"Any new folly, any further aggression, or any move that even touches an inch of our borders and sovereignty will be met with a seismic, crushing, and decisive response that will go beyond the usual rules and boundaries, and our brave forces will not hesitate to turn all aggressors’ bases and their interests in the region into ashes," the statement said. "The time of “hit and run” is over, and the oppressive forces must accept the grave consequences of their ignorance and reckless adventurism."
43 minutes ago
Bahrain activates sirens, urges residents to seek shelter
Bahrain’s Interior Ministry said on Tuesday sirens were sounded and urged citizens and residents to remain calm and move to the nearest safe place, according to an official post on X.
The siren has been sounded .Citizens and residents are urged to remain calm and head to the nearest safe place.
— Ministry of Interior (@moi_bahrain) June 2, 2026
https://www.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/202605308417
EXPLOSIONS reported in Erbil, Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait
Significant air defense activity ongoing
IRGC says they’re targeting US bases.
https://twitter.com/i/status/2061946128946401782
Rubio appears to criticize Netanyahu’s plan to seize 70% of Gaza, says it contradicts Trump plan
During a Capitol Hill hearing, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is pressed by Rep. Rose DeLauro, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, on where the US stands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal of seizing 70% of Gaza to defeat the Hamas terror group.
Rubio says Netanyahu’s statement was not part of US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan to end the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The plan would end Hamas’s rule and rebuild the territory.
“We have a plan — it doesn’t call for that,” Rubio says. “And at the end of the day, we understand that what we want, and I think what the Israelis would ultimately want, is a Gaza that is governed by a non-Hamas” entity.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/rubio-says-netanyahus-goal-to-seize-70-of-gaza-contradicts-trumps-plan-for-strip/
IRGC statement:
-
The US attacked Qeshm Island
-
In response, Iran has carried out "precise and intensive missile strikes" on US bases in Kuwait
-
Further US aggression will be met with a "seismic, crushing, and decisive response"
https://x.com/Faytuks/status/2061945623767593465
UN Faces Bankruptcy Risk as US, China Withhold Dues: "Cash to Run Out by August"
The United Nations could face a severe liquidity crisis in August as unpaid and delayed contributions from the United States and China — which together account for 42% of the UN's core funding — pile up, according to a warning from the organization.
According to the latest financial report from the UN General Assembly's Fifth Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Affairs on Thursday (local time), the UN's cash position is rapidly deteriorating due to funding holds and delays from the US and China. The UN Secretariat estimates that the current cash balance will only sustain operations until mid-August.
The largest contributor to the UN's financial crisis is the United States, the biggest debtor. Washington currently owes more than $4.28 billion (approximately 6.4 trillion won) in arrears. The Donald Trump administration has labeled the UN a bloated and inefficient organization, pressuring the body by stating that overdue payments will be made only after high-intensity restructuring is implemented. China, which has become the second-largest contributor after the US, recently paid $844 million toward peacekeeping costs but still owes $455 million (approximately 690 billion won) in arrears.
Within the UN, concerns are mounting that if the cash shortage materializes, staff salary payments could halt and food and security programs could be paralyzed. In response to the financial difficulties, the UN has already begun cutting jobs, including reducing administrative staff by 3,000, and has moved up the withdrawal timeline for peacekeeping forces from African conflict zones such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
https://en.sedaily.com/international/2026/05/31/un-faces-bankruptcy-risk-as-us-china-withhold-dues-cash-to
The Hand-Me-Down Military Alliance: Australia, AUKUS and Op-Shop Submarines
The latest discussions: US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles and UK Defence Secretary John Healey
One can never accuse the Australian political palette of being too demanding, let alone attentive. When it comes to matters of defence, that palette is happy to be deceived, remaining credulous to the notion it is sensitive to good taste and observant of flavours. When it comes to alliances, this especially so. As for the AUKUS agreement, it was clear that the Australian establishment was simply incapable of tasting anything in the way of the rancid or putrid. Of the three participating countries in this doomed ménage à trois – the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia – it was the last of the trio that has been left providing the most while receiving the least.
Centred on two pillars of poor understanding and unequal exchange, the AUKUS agreement is mouldering in unenviable disgrace. The first pillar envisages (dare on use the current tense?) the purchase of SSNs (nuclear-powered submarines) of the Virginia-Class from the United States that may run into three boats, possibly even two additional ones. According to the fatuous and vacuous Australian Submarine Agency’s assessment, the “acquisition will eliminate any capability gap and increase the 3 nations [sic] (Australia, UK and US) ability to deter aggression and contribute to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific”. Eventually, the SSN-AUKUS, a hybrid of UK design, US technology and Australian gristle, will also be added to the fleet, a prospect bound to give few joy.
But the docile and the doltish in Canberra do not seem alert to the grumbling mood in Washington that any transfer of these hulks would only take place on exclusive American terms. Doubt about Australian worthiness in using such boats in a war with China if called upon (call it want of skill, call it reluctance); and doubts about the rate of production back home (the annual rate of two Virginia SSNs remains tardily elusive), has made the very idea of conveying such vessels to Canberra improbable.
The latest discussions by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles and UK Defence Secretary John Healey, held on the sidelines of the International Institute of Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, also confirms that the boats, should they ever arrive, will be of the optional, rather than optimal shop variety. They will be second hand goods with a shorter life span and less troubling to let go of by the US Navy. Give the Aussies the hand-me-downs. They’re worth it.
A May 30 joint statement from the ministers was a tedious, tortuous garble that did little to hide the fact that Australia has been degraded and sent packing to the cooler.
“The Deputy Prime Minister and Secretaries welcomed the proposed approach to streamline Australia’s acquisition of Virginia-class submarines (VCS), simplifying chain management, operational and maintenance requirements and maximizing cost efficiencies. This approach would enable Australia to acquire three in-service VCs in lieu of a mixture of new and in-service VSs variants.”
Without a smidgen to go on, the trio also claimed that “significant progress in the design and delivery of SSN-AUKUS, which will provide the UK and Australia with an advanced warfighting capability” had been made.
It is worth recounting the stages of cloddishness that culminated at this current pass. In 2023, the Australian government accepted the position that the US would sell it three Virginia-class boats in the early 2030s, with the following observation:
“The first two will be used but refurbished Block 4 boats with 23 years of remaining life and the third will be a brand new stretched Block 6 boat fitted with the 84-foot-long payload of greatly increased weapons loads.”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/australia-aukus-op-shop-submarines/5928529
“You Either Leave Right Now or You Die”—Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of a Village in Lebanon
Israeli soldiers went door to door in the border village of Ain Arab, forcing residents from their homes at gunpoint as part of a systematic campaign to empty large swathes of southern Lebanon.
When Lebanon and Israel announced a ceasefire agreement on April 16, Nasreen Abd Elaal and her husband and four children packed their few belongings and departed the public school in Marj al-Zuhoor where they had taken shelter—for the last time, they hoped. They returned the next day to their home in Ain Arab, a small village nestled in the plains near the southern border, where they run a small butcher shop and corner store. That same day, Israeli forces entered the village and established a curfew, warning local residents not to leave their homes after dark, before setting up a checkpoint on the exit road leading south.
Twelve days later, Abd Elaal was working behind the counter at the store when she saw a large armored bulldozer lumbering down the road, followed by a swarm of army vehicles carrying, by her estimation, more than one hundred Israeli soldiers. The troops spread through the village, pointed their guns at residents and told them that the area was located within Israel’s new “yellow line”—a line demarcating an Israeli zone of control along the southern border inside Lebanese territory that was unilaterally declared by Israel using the same terminology as in Gaza. The soldiers told Abd Elaal and the other village residents that they had two hours to evacuate north.
“They didn’t even give us that,” Abd Elaal recalled. She rushed home and put her children in their pickup truck, then went back into the house with her husband to pack what they could. They were interrupted by the sound of a car horn and ran back outside to find that an Israeli soldier had opened the door of their vehicle and begun honking the horn while their children were sitting inside. “He told us they had orders to empty the village. He said, ‘You either leave right now or you die.’” Residents were expelled from the village so rapidly, many weren’t even able to lock their front doors behind them, Abd Elaal said.
The forced expulsion of Ain Arab—where Israeli soldiers went door to door, forcing residents from their homes at gunpoint—was a striking example of the Israeli military’s campaign to ethnically cleanse villages across southern Lebanon. Human rights advocates and locals told Drop Site they hadn’t heard of a similar incident occurring in this latest phase of the war—the Israeli military typically bombs and shells areas to forcibly displace residents. Over 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon since March 2, and many have no idea if or when they will be able to return to their homes.
Abd Elaal returned with her family to the same school-turned-shelter in the village of Marj al-Zuhoor in the Bekaa Valley where she said four families share one room and water access is intermittent. After studying a map that the Israeli military published on April 19, they found that their village was actually located outside of Israel’s “yellow line,” prompting a group of men from the village, including Abd Elaal’s husband and a local official, to visit an army office in the village of Marjayoun on May 21 to ask if the state could work with UNFIL—the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in the South—to return them to their lands. When the residents followed up a week later, army officials said they had not been able to secure them safe passage back home.
“To say we are destroyed is not enough,” Abd Elaal said. Most villagers lived off of the land, and their expulsion meant that they couldn’t prepare the fields for spring planting. “We left our livelihoods in the soil and fled.”
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https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/lebanon-ain-arab-israeli-military-hezbollah-displacement-trump-
Jewish overlords aren't happy
Shadow minister, Jewish groups criticise ABC’s Grace Tame podcast deal
The ABC’s decision to hand former Australian of the Year Grace Tame a podcast gig has been met with criticism from Jewish groups and some Liberal senators, and been labelled “problematic” by one of organisation’s highest profile presenters.
Tame is hosting a four-part series called Autistic AF on the broadcaster’s Ladies, We Need to Talk podcast channel. It promises to talk to leading experts on the disorder and other neurodivergent women to give listeners “a better understanding of what life is like as an autistic person, beyond the stereotypes”.
The first episode released on Monday delved into Tame’s childhood, diagnosis and misdiagnosis, sexuality, sexual abuse and using drugs and alcohol to cope.
“I remember she [Tame’s psychologist] handed me a picture book called All Cats Have Aspergers,” Tame said.
“And on each page is a picture of a cat doing something cat-like, and on the corresponding page is a description of an autistic trait that is also similar.
“I got to the end of the book, and I was sobbing. I was distraught. I was sitting there thinking, well, either I’m autistic or I’m a cat.”
It was not the podcast itself that critics objected to but Tame being given the platform after earlier controversial remarks about Hamas’ October 7 terror attack and Israel’s response in Palestine.
The 31-year-old became an outspoken advocate for sexual abuse victims as she fought and overturned a Tasmanian law blocking her from identifying herself to denounce the man who raped her when she was 15.
In 2021 she was names as Australian of the Year.
She has also become an outspoken advocate for Palestinians and critic of the Australian government’s stance on the conflict.
She was criticised by politicians on the left and right for leading chants of “globalise the intifada” at a rally against the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February and again in March referred to the rape of Israeli women on October 7 as “propaganda” and “debunked”.
Australian Jewish Association chief executive Robert Gregory said hiring Tame demonstrated a “profound lack of judgment and a disregard for the concerns of many Australians, particularly within the Jewish community”.
“At first, I thought the ABC announcement was a joke. I simply could not believe that Australia’s public broadcaster could be so tone-deaf,” he said in a statement.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said Tame’s hiring “legitimised her violent views” and sent a message her “obscene conduct” carried no consequences.
https://www.nine.com.au/australia-news/shadow-minister-jewish-groups-criticise-abc-s-grace-tame-podcast-deal-20260603-p603bt.html