US stock market absolutely ate shit today after some tech companies reported weak earnings, NASDAQ almost -3%, Amazon -6%, Google -10%

Mike Johnson elected House speaker on first ballot with support from all Republicans

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans eagerly elected Rep. Mike Johnson as House speaker Wednesday, elevating a deeply conservative but lesser-known leader to the seat of U.S. power and ending for now the political chaos in their majority.

A lower-ranked member of the House GOP leadership team, Johnson emerged as the fourth Republican nominee in what has become an almost absurd cycle of political infighting since Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as GOP factions jockey for power. While not the party’s top choice for the gavel, the deeply religious and even-keeled Johnson has few foes and an important GOP backer: Donald Trump.

The new speaker is also a presidential election denier

“A lot of us know intuitively that there was a lot amiss about this election day. The fact that all these states with democrat leaders changed the rules in the fourth quarter of the game … and the allegations of these voting machines some of them being rigged, with this software by Dominion, there is a lot of merit in that. And when the president says the election was rigged, that’s what he’s talking about. The fix was in …

In Georgia, it really was rigged. It was set up for the Biden team to win …

heres joe Biden planting seeds for genocide denialism, what a country you are.

🇮🇱📣| BREAKING: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Announcement Summary:

🔺 “We have set two goals for the war: overthrowing Hamas and returning the kidnapped.”

🔺" We are preparing for a wild entry, and I will not specify when or how."

🔺"All Hamas members deserve to die; Inside and outside Gaza, above and below the ground."

🔺 “The failure will be investigated thoroughly, and everyone will have to provide answers, including me. But all this will happen later.”

🔺 “The lives of 1,400 (Israelis) were eliminated, and this is like a shower of arrows on our hearts. The government will hold days of mourning for the terrible disaster.”

🔺 “When we enter Gaza, we will take the full price from the killers of Hamas.”

🔸 Ahlul Haqq News Network 🔸

watching Palestinians whose Twitter accounts I have followed for years - both regular citizens and journalists - go from posts of desperation about the current hell in Gaza to silence and then the announcement of their deaths is a modern horror I don’t really have the words for

Nitter

-–

Edit

Aljazeera’ s brave veteran journalist Wael Dahdouh’s wife, son and daughter were killed in an Israeli airstrike which targeted a shelter house they had fled to. Wael received the news while on air covering the nonstop Israeli strikes on Gaza!

Nitter

There are two raw video clips at the link.

The liberals are doing it AGAIN and it’s making me furious! People all over Twitter who have been like relatively good about Palestine are suddenly handwringing about “River to the sea,” “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution,” and “Honor our martyrs,” claiming that these are all basically calling for genocide of Israelis and glorifying Hamas. It’s just so transparently people wanting to support Israel so they can stop feeling bad about the ACTUAL REAL GENOCIDE Israel is doing RIGHT NOW to the Palestinians. Fuck all these people, I hope they all suffer and die so they can feel a tiny fraction of what the Palestinians have had to go through.

Continually my mind is drawn back to Red Sails’ essay on how Brainwashing isn’t real and people intentionally buy into propaganda to justify that which they already want to believe.

Speaker vote circus is over :(

They ended up electing Mike Johnson. He’s aligned with the (relatively) right-wing Freedom Caucus but not an actual member, so sort of a compromise but also still just one of the (relative) right-wingers.

https://nitter.net/AndrewMaclean_/status/1717234353669874025#m

Green Brigade ftw

Edit: fuck that’s a lot of Palestinian flags flying. Would like to see more but still a good showing.

(archived) really interesting article about how the much-vaunted lightning-fast invasion of Iraq was nowhere near as impressive as portrayed by American propaganda. How do these paper tigers keep getting in my imperialist militaries?

The US invasion of Iraq, begun almost exactly twenty years ago, on March 20th, 2003, is often sold to us as a gloriously flawless campaign, where heroic US forces valiantly marched forward, vanquishing hordes of elite Iraqi Fedayeen numbering in the hundreds of thousands. … But there remains one important facet to the image that has continued to endure the test of time, despite the general acknowledgment these days that the war was an egregious mistake. And this facet is the actual view, the historiography of the war itself from a militaristic, rather than political or social, perspective. Despite acknowledging the war as a mistake, most people still vacuously adhere to the vision of the war as some resounding, exemplar achievement of military science par excellence.

The most obvious thousand-ton elephant in the room must first be swiftly gotten out of the way: There was no actual ‘war’. … What was once oft-discussed in those days, but is now conveniently buried in the memory-holes of American alt-history is the fact that almost every Iraqi general was paid off by the CIA and various US intelligence services to lay down their arms, along with the men under their command, and surrender. … Even the US Army Supreme Commander for the war effort, General Tommy Franks attested to the fact:

General Tommy Franks, the US army commander for the war, said these Iraqi officers had acknowledged their loyalties were no longer with the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, but with their American paymasters. As a result, many officers chose not to defend their positions as American and British forces pushed north from Kuwait.

Like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, the MI6/CIA teams even carried cold hard gold bullion in briefcases to effect the bribes … And a Salon article from late March 2003, on the eve of the war also lifted the lid on the secret, massive CIA effort to completely denude the Iraqi army of any resistance whatsoever. They go on to explain how, as bombs were already devastating Baghdad in the ‘shock and awe’ portion of the conflict prior to the full-on ground invasion, the Iraqi Defense Ministry headquarters was left standing. The reason was self-evident: the CIA had already established quite a rapport with the Iraqi military leadership, and was busy successfully bribing them to lay down their arms.

As the American columns continued to leisurely drive down the highways toward Baghdad, they faced the occasional light small-arms resistance. However, even with such paltry opposition, they were experiencing massive problems. They go on to outline how the Marines continued driving into Iraqi territory for two weeks (with little to no resistance, mind you) in their AAV’s (Assault Amphibious Vehicle), which began to break down en masse … So they lost a whopping, unheard of 1/3 of their vehicles in the first week or two of the road march just from systemic break downs?

Western wunderwaffe strikes again, expect this time it isn’t even some kind of fancy ultra-amazing tank, it’s literally troop transports breaking down from the arduous task of… transporting troops, on a fucking highway, not even trudging through mud or anything

At 15:27 of the NBC Nightline special, they even groan about how badly the supply situation deteriorated, the commander explaining how ‘nervous’ he got when they had to ration down to two meals a day for four days straight. … Here again, at 57:11 of the NBC doc, they describe completely running out of supplies during a sandstorm, where US troops were rationed down to 1 MRE per day, and almost no water. … In fact, this was a well known occurrence for US forces even back to the 1991 Gulf War conflict. … They go on to mention the systemic normality of this problem, highlighting how US ground forces virtually ran out of fuel on only day 3 of the 1991 hostilities.

YOU RAN OUT OF FUEL ON DAY 3

Something that Western military “analysts” never bring up when heaping praise on their wunderwaffe and shitting on Soviet/Russian stuff is the logistical footprint - it doesn’t matter how amazing your tanks are if they just run out of fuel a few days into the goddamn offensive. I’ve wondered previously if Western countries’ obsession with lightning-fast wars is because deep down they understand they simply have no capability for sustained warfare…

At 44:37 of the NBC documentary, they report an incident where a US serviceman ‘traitor’ threw a grenade into a command tent, killing and seriously wounding ~15 American officers. And this was in the famously elite 101st Airborne division. … a US Marine Corps Major being run over by a bulldozer, and an elite 101st Airborne command tent being blown away by grenades thrown by a disgruntled US soldier shows what, exactly—exemplary martial spirit? The famed American Esprit de Corps?

lol. lmao. get fragged assholes

At one point, the correspondents describe one of the most eventful parts of their war march toward Baghdad being an incident in Al Kifl—about at the haflway mark—where they came under fire of ‘four mortars’. And scary 105mm mortars at that. Yes, you’ve read that right, a grand total of four mortars and a light drizzle of sniper fire led to an entire US Army unit relocation under major alarm.

When they finally did enter Baghdad, they admit that the only minor skirmishes that flared up were against ‘small teams’ of lightly armed men in civilian clothing; i.e. typical insurgent, light guerilla squads—and not even well armed, trained, or numerous ones at that. Notice how you’ve never seen any footage of real ‘battles’ as we know them from the Iraq invasion, despite the fact that it was billed as the first truly ‘televised war’, and had hundreds of embedded journalists with cameras literally riding along with the US force convoys? … And notice how, despite several of the so-called key ‘battles’ revolving around capturing critical bridges in approaches to Baghdad, not once did the Iraqi ‘forces’ even attempt to blow up a bridge to hamper the US advance … There are myriad other ways the US experienced shortages and problems during the invasion. Here, Harper’s DC editor Andrew Cockburn explains how “families of US soldiers in Iraq had to go into debt to buy them adequate armor, nightvision goggles, and other critical gear” because their command was unable to supply them.

The actual enemy combatant losses during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion and capture of Baghdad, which were officially “observed and recorded” as per wiki, were 4,895–6,370. … And it should be mentioned that, while the US and coalition suffered a ‘celebrated’ total of ~5,000 KIA in the entire Iraq war (including insurgency period), the actual total Allied Force losses (which includes the Iraqi militia that did the heavy lifting) is listed on wiki as: Total dead: 25,071 - Total wounded: 117,961. This is compared to the estimated total dead enemy combatants of: 34,144–71,544. Viewed from that perspective, especially if we assume for argument’s sake the lower end of that range, the war wasn’t as ‘lopsided’ of a victory as it seems—25k Allied vs. 34k enemy dead. After all, it also falls upon the merit of US military skill and prowess if their own militia which they used as cannon-fodder was killed under their watch, does it not? When the US forces work in tandem with them, operating from their ‘rear’ with the overwatch of various systems (artillery, airpower, etc.), it reflects on the US’s military capabilities, if they can’t keep the total forces under their purview from suffering nearly as many casualties as the completely outmatched (no airpower, no artillery, no heavy weapons) enemy. Not to mention, as others have pointed out, these figures don’t count the likely thousands of secret US contractors/mercenaries (Blackwater/Xe, etc.) killed ‘off the books’. … The fact of the matter is, had US faced even an Iraqi Army (much less a far superior Ukrainian one) that had the same conditions imposed on Russian forces (not taking bribes, for one, and being armed, supplied, aided by a coalition of other major countries), and had the initial invasion therefore stretched out over a longer period, you would have seen those same pratfalls and foibles already outlined above, but at an exponentially greater scale.

Something suspicious is happening with American aircraft carriers - CVN 71 Theodore Roosevelt left San Diego today, yesterday CVN 72 Abraham Lincoln left the same base

Liberals are so fucking unhinged. Now they’re calling leftists opposed to Zionism “tankies “

Hopefully someone comes up with a good retort that catches fire and exposes it for the meaningless term it is. A westoid in the imperial core calling someone a tankie like it means shit lmfao

Potentially the prophecy Netanyahu is referencing?

If Palestine is the “nation or kingdom that will not serve thee”, Netanyahu’s statement saying they will fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah is a statement of intent to genocide.

Protesters at the Iraqi-Jordanian border decided to stop the transfer of subsidized Iraqi oil to Jordan as long as the war continues in Gaza due to Jordans support of the Zionist entity

An American Ohio-class submarine, the USS Georgia, has been ordered to relocate to the Mediterranean. This order comes shortly after several other American warships have departed for the region, sources say.

Al Jazeera’s Wael Dahdouh taken to see bodies of his family

Al Jazeera’s managing editor has confirmed that correspondent Wael Dahdouh lost his wife, son and daughter in an Israeli air raid on a house they were sheltering in.

how the fuck do you go on after this? how can anyone with an ounce of humanity blame these people for resisting in any way possible? I hope Hezbollah levels Israel