It’s no surprise. The entire nation is based on the idea of coveting and stealing other people’s property, so they often have to also murder people too.
Like it says in the Good Book.
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Product of a Spectacle, ramblings from a has been fighter
The barn stank of manure and diesel, men stirred in their waiting, the few women present clung to their man. I was nineteen, I had sparred, been in scraps and ‘challenged’ martial artists to matches inspired by the Gracies, except I didn’t have the money to call it a “challenge”. Alone I walked towards bushy beards, bellies, tank tops and every second hand filled with a can. The feral energy had it’s own aroma, unwashed men covered by Brut and beer. The voyeurs and would doers watched on from the outside. Dirt was the arena, barrels, a single wood post, hay bails, a woman most likely named Cheryl and her camcorder. Chalk names, all made up, an esky full of grog… donations required. Tonight it was fight night. Though spelt, fite! No gloves, No judges, No rules. Except there were rules, Bogan Prize Rules, like those that Jim Figg or Jack Broughton fought under, except Aussie, before social media clipped men back to boys.
The first fight was reckless, two octopuses swinging, then crack! Like a clean hit of the snooker ball. A shirtless man fell face down into the dirt, a grey beard in a singlet rolled him into a recovery position, one hand still holding his can of bourbon and cola, he took a swig and bought the man back to life. The victor looked relieved, helping the loser to his feet they shared a swig from a beer can walking through a parting crowd. Claps, and words of respect mingled with burbs and farts.
Twenty-five years later I see a young fighter, dragged back stage surrounded by her peers still warming up for their turn.Crying, concussed, in shock, she is dumped on the floor as spit and spew rush from her mouth. Her anguish a spectacle, the state mandated doctor watches on as he goes through the motions of a virgin attempting to place a condom on a flacid penis. The unqualified experienced go to her aid, eventually removing her shin guards, boxing gloves, soon she is evacuated from the area. Her journey from the cage to the warm up area took her through a crowd of drunk voyeurs, screaming, squealing, either absent of instinct to move aside or with little care. She made it eventually.
Back in the barn, we walked over dirt, past pens, the crowd watching, drinking, vocal but too timid to let loose. The fighters may have been local tough guys or blokes horny for violence, but they had earned the mobs respect. Fortunately that night my fight was quick, two jabs and a right hand fell my foe. When I could see he was struggling, I went to his aid. Two of his mates joined in. He bought me a can of Coke, I was paid fifty bucks when that meant something and drove home with P plates on to watch Caddyshack on VHS. The cowboy days apparently, the wild west of the sport, before the rent seekers moved in and legitimised it. When it was “banned” but filling RSL’s andstadiums in the thousands.
Barbarians! The media called us, No Holds Barred fighters or whatever the term was before the clunky moniker Mixed Martial Arts was stapled onto the sport to satisfy imperial US legislators. They used the word Bloodsport as a slur, unaware that most of us fighters had been in part inspired by that film. Apparently the “Fastest growing sport” still, It’s been fast and growing since 1993 but whatever. Plenty of money in it, seldom for the fighters. No longer do the fighters have to spend a few minutes explaining the sport only to hear the reply, “so like WWF (WWE now)”.
When it was full of barbarians, their were characters, now we have avatars. Uncertain performers worried about the right moment a song reaches a spot for them to walk out, what the thread count will be on the logo for their “fight name,” A name, handle, whatever was something the crowd, promoters or media called you. Now kids have fight names ten years before they even fight. They enter the arena, imitating the superstars, or using a variation, the performance art as much for them, their mates and the cuckolds in the crowd who also imagine how they would enter if they ever fought. If. When they win, yippe, wow, like winning the lotto. The celebration of unchecked emotions as though they are the most surprised by the outcome.
It’s all about reactions now, an age of autism where social cues and emotional connection needs to be expressed for those who look at screens instead of into eyes. Commentators have cameras, so they can look like Chuck Lidell in his most cocaine raddled moment after each and every, each and every, each and every stoppage. It’s exciting because the men on the screen tell us so. We know how to react because we are shown by middle aged men reeling like memes. The subtle, nuanced and dignity itself lost to the ages.
Humility, humbleness, self control, honour, they are words. Whether they mean anything matters little but they are words, like “I am humbled to receive this award,” humbled is if you work and receive no award for it, that’s humbling. But the words are known to mean something to some, right? To be, that is hard. The jeering antics, performance art, reckless cheering after, only to suddenly pretend or maybe care to check on the opponent. Becomes token, symbolic. The fighter will always have more in common with each other than anyone else there that night.
The brands that make up ‘MMA’ are big business, popular, fighters, products. Commodities, short term assets that diminish over time. Each fighter needs a thing, to appeal. Social media and influencer life can elevate one fast. So long as you play that game well. The little boys and the males they call dad, will swipe, like and pump the devices with delight each time anti-social behaviour is on display, the hype like a nectar that keeps them stuck, Aldous Huxley could never have imagined the appeal of digital feed, feeding, gorging minds with the same and nothing, but it’s good for the sport right? Well that’s what the fans want to see, clearly.
The products want to get paid, so they can enjoy themselves before the CTE takes away the stories of ‘back when’ that new fans don’t care to hear. Those who believe performances and fighting alone will see them thrive, picked the wrong sport or better have been born in another time. In the past often it was tongue in cheek or a spectacle mask to be worn that did not burn into the soul of the man, now everything may as well be an avatar. The personality trait is getting paid, the hype is all that matters. The fans you see, they love it. Either hate to love, or love to hate but either way they pay the brands that book the products who end up fighting or, as is the case these days run a bar, promote a show so that kids can brawl in cage unpaid in front of a mob of drunks because the fastest growing sport no longer has dirt floors.
In the moment before I walked out, stood across from that man with his teary eyes full of rage, “Those of us who are about to die, we salute you!” I whispered from within my mind followed by, “I hope I don’t kill this man,” then we fought. Once it was done, we embraced. Back then we watched movies , read books, thought about philosophy and pondered the martial way, naive and romantic. Deluded? Two people fighting, that is the spectacle. And two fighters, would fight anywhere, I’d reason that real fight fans would show up to watch too. There is no moral, there is no winding up, just introspection, that was a thing people once did before they were told a diagnosis is more important than accountability.
May, 2024
Ari Shaffir Debunks Contemporary Anti-Semitism Hoax
“It’s another Holocaust. Sure, sure sure.”
Conflict in the 21st Century: A Dark and Robotic Future
I am delivering a talk at a professional organization in June 2024 on the 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict to illustrate the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) of a future conflict that is dark and robotic. For those paying attention, the harnessing of sensors to shooters at the edge at the speed of acquisition and declaration of actionable targets can destroy military momentum in conventional fighting hence smaller nations are stepping up top challenge first world national military forces.
As an amateur conflict futurist, these talks below are very informative.
One talk took place near the actual events in 2020 and are very illuminating. Jack Watling is one of my favorite conflict futurists.
The HistoryLegends video is an accurate and concise treatment of the conflict in 20 minutes.
The RMA is the combination of salvo competition, expendable and attritable UAVs and missiles (affordable mass) harnessed to a strike reconnaissance complex that synchronizes sensors and effectors.
The Russians are the sole peer competitor on Earth that have broken the code on having a working strike reconnaissance complex; whatever you hear from the West to the contrary, they have not solved this wicked problem. Advantage to Russia and China as regional hegemons.
My colleague and friend Les Grau wrote a great overview of the Russian SRC in 2018:
Nearly 2,000 Children Killed in Ukraine, Over 15,000 in Gaza
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported this week that nearly 2,000 children have been killed in the war in Ukraine, where US Congresspersons and President Joe Biden have accused Russia of committing genocide.
UNICEF said data indicated the at least 1,993 children have been killed in Ukraine since Russia invaded in early 2022.
“At least 1,993 children in Ukraine have been killed or injured since the escalation of war more than two years ago.” – @R_DeDominicis, @UNICEF_ECA.
UNICEF continues to call for an immediate ceasefire and for all children to be protected from harm.https://t.co/cvXQQ3zGWF
— UNICEF (@UNICEF) May 13, 2024
As of May 6, by contrast, the UN reported that over 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed by Israel as a result of its siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip during “Operation Swords of Iron”, which Israel launched in retaliation for Hamas’s “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023.
The number of dead Gazan children has since risen to over 15,000, as will be discussed further below. (If you think I’m spreading Hamas propaganda because you’ve heard that the UN has “halved” its estimate of Palestinian civilians killed, you will want to keep reading to free yourself from that delusion.)
Together, women and children comprise nearly 70% of deaths in Gaza, reflecting the perfectly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment coupled with Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare.
After just the first three weeks of Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment, more than 3,257 children were killed in Gaza, which was more children killed than in all of the world’s other conflicts combined — including the war in Ukraine — for each of the years 2020, 2021, and 2022.
By early November, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, had described Gaza as “a graveyard for children“.
In December, the government of South Africa filed an application with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention, and on January 26, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling that Israel has been committing a plausible genocide.
In early February, the UN published a report noting that more than 1% of the Gazan population had been killed, including one in every 85 children, “which is the highest rate by a wide margin when compared with other recent major conflicts.”
The report included the following visualization of the data comparing child deaths in world conflict zones.
As the report stated,
No other armed conflict in the twenty-first century has experienced such a devastating impact on a population in such a short timeframe. To find a 100-day period with greater bloodshed, it is necessary to go back to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
But you don’t see members of Congress or the Biden administration saying that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza.
Why the double standard?
Simple. The US opposes Russia and supports Ukraine, so the accusation of genocide serves the policy aim, whereas the US has always maintained a policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, and US officials have been absolutely complicit in Israel’s genocide, so of course they aren’t going to advertise their own criminal behavior.
The ‘Revised’ Gaza Death Toll Claim
Relatedly, you may have seen headlines recently claiming that the UN has cut the Palestinian death toll in half, which we are told indicates how unreliable the data is from governing authority in Gaza, which is Hamas.
This recent claim relates to the argument raised in a debate last month that the Palestinian death toll had been greatly inflated, which claim I addressed in my post “The ‘Israel Has the Most Moral Army in the World’ Trope“.
At the time, the UN, citing data from the Gaza health authorities, was reporting over 33,000 Palestinians had been killed, and the claim made was that Hamas had admitted that 11,000 of those might not actually be dead.
That was a lie. Hamas never said that. Rather, the Gaza Ministry of Health had issued a report on casualties saying that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 reported fatalities.
So, for example, if the Ministry of Health had the dead body of a Palestinian, but they didn’t know the person’s name, that would be a corpse for which the Ministry of Health had “incomplete data”.
The argument presented in the debate was thus effectively that, when estimating the Palestinian death toll, dead bodies alone don’t count.
How’s that for genocide apologetics?
Just this past weekend, a similar Zionist propaganda claim reared its ugly head, with reports claiming the UN had revised its estimates of the numbers of dead Palestinian women and children by half.
A headline in the Jerusalem Post on May 11 asserted, “UN seemingly halves estimate of Gazan women, children killed“.
The article pointed out that the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on May 6 that over 9,500 women and 14,500 children had been killed, citing data from the Gaza Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office.
But then in its May 9 update, the UN reported that 4,959 women and 7,797 children had been killed in Gaza.
The UN’s update on May 13 showed numbers of women and children killed that were unchanged from May 9, although the total death count increased from 34,904 to 35,091.
The Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) similarly reported, “UN Halves Its Estimate of Women and Children Killed in Gaza“, touting the change as evidence that the numbers that the UN had been reporting were effectively made up by Hamas and were unreliable.
At the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Elliot Abrams of Iran-Contra infamy likewise posted, “UN Halves Its Estimate of Women and Children Killed in Gaza“, remarking that “It has become increasingly clear that these numbers represent Hamas propaganda.”
The first thing you need to know is that in past Israeli operations in Gaza, the data provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health estimating the numbers of Palestinians killed always proved to be reliable, a close approximation of the subsequently verified numbers.
Second, Israel’s systematic targeting of Gaza’s health care system has made it impossible to count the true number of dead. As the UN also points out in its casualty updates, its numbers do not include the more than 10,000 Palestinians missing and presumed buried under the rubble.
For that reason, the numbers are inherently under-estimated.
As Sky News reported on April 4 (emphasis added),
During the first months of the war in Gaza, deaths were counted through a network of computers connecting morgues across the territory.
It was a system that, in the years beforehand, had won the trust of human rights groups, the UN and the World Health Organisation.
But amid repeated Israeli attacks on hospitals and chronic fuel shortages, this system has now effectively collapsed.
Of the eight major hospitals responsible for collating morgue data, just three are still providing information to the health ministry.
As a result, the morgue monitoring system is now only capturing a small fraction of deaths across the territory.
At the time, Hamas was reporting that 32,916 Palestinians had been killed whom the Health Ministry had been able to identify. The released data included the name and age of every identified fatality. Another 11,593 dead Palestinians remained to be identified.
As Sky News further reported, “As Gaza’s health system has collapsed, the share of unidentified deaths has grown — making up 81% of additions to the total number of fatalities in March, up from 69% in January.”
The article usefully includes this graph helping us to visualize the scale of the problem:
Third, the apparent discrepancy in the reported death toll among women and children is not because the UN has revised its estimate downward.
As The Guardian observed,
After the Gaza health ministry’s revised totals of those killed first appeared on the website of the UN’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (Ocha), they were quickly seized on as proof by pro-Israel media and commentators that the UN had previously been exaggerating the toll.
Rather, the appearance of the numbers being “halved” is simply a a statistical artifact from the UN changing its method of counting.
Whereas before it was including the total number of dead women and children as reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health, because health authorities are increasingly unable to identify the dead and the proportion of unidentified bodies has grown so great, the UN is now only including the numbers of dead who have been identified.
The Guardian also noted that estimates from the Gaza Health Ministry during past Israeli operations had proven reliable, and Human Rights Watch told the newspaper that it has seen “no evidence that the numbers were being manipulated.”
CNN also corrected the record (for a change) by reporting (emphasis added),
The number was reduced because the UN says it is now relying on the number of deceased women and children whose names and other identifying details have been fully documented, rather than the total number of women and children killed.
Although OCHA is no longer showing this in its situation updates, CNN further confirmed that the most recent data from the Gaza Health Ministry show that a total of 15,103 children and 9,961 women have been killed in Gaza.
So, no, the UN did not revise its estimate of dead women and children down by half. That is just another lie emanating from Zionist propagandists trying to defend Israel’s genocide. Instead, the UN just stopped including the numbers of women and children who have been killed but whose bodies have not yet been identified.
Consequently, it is accurate to go on reporting, as I have in the title of this post, that over 15,000 children have been killed in Gaza, including 7,797 whose bodies have been identified — but not including an unspecified number of children among the roughly 10,000 additional Palestinians who are missing and presumed buried under the rubble.
In sum, it’s not that the earlier UN-reported numbers were overexaggerated but that Israel’s massacre of Palestinians is of such a genocidal scale that Gaza’s health care system cannot possibly keep up with counting and identifying the dead.
The data might not lie, but political commentators making claims about the data sure do.
To come back to the point about US government officials’ hypocrisy in accusing Russia of genocide in Ukraine while backing Israel’s genocide in Gaza with its considerably more horrific death toll, also don’t forget how New York Times editors instructed journalists to avoid the word “genocide” when reporting on Gaza, as I discussed in my article last week titled “How Israel Supported Hamas Against the PLO“.
Cross-posted from JeremyR.Hammond.com.
Niger Tells Americans To Leave: American Influence in Africa will be Non-existent in Ten Years
More please.
More State Department behavior like this will reduce the American footprint of influence planet-wide.
“[Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine] said the Nigerian leaders took particular umbrage at remarks by Molly Phee, the State Department’s top official for African affairs, who he said had urged the government during a March visit to Niamey to refrain from engaging with Iran and Russia in ways objectionable to Washington if Niger wanted to continue its security relationship with the United States. He also said Phee had further threatened sanctions if Niger pursued a deal to sell uranium to Iran.
“When she finished, I said, ‘Madame, I am going to summarize in two points what you have said,’” recounted Zeine, who has led negotiations with the United States. “First, you have come here to threaten us in our country. That is unacceptable. And you have come here to tell us with whom we can have relationships, which is also unacceptable. And you have done it all with a condescending tone and a lack of respect.”
stripes.com/theaters/africa/2024-05-14/…
American influence in Africa will be non-existent in ten years.
Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is outpacing US investment:
Russian military alignment in Africa:
The Logic of It All
This is how some people think: Business has long used the government to gain benefits it could not get in the marketplace. I have the cure for that: Abolish the market and expand the government to encompass all of society.
Another Aspect of the Eternal Intelligence Failure in the West
Had a brain zephyr.
I know this because I am on the spectrum.
The intelligence community (IC) hires high IQ but neuro-divergent individuals who have difficulty with tone and context and that colors reporting, assessments and final analyses.
Couple that with group-think and an institutional refusal to thoroughly “red team” all analysis and to punish moral courage and you get the seamless perfect storm of disastrous decision-making informed by flawed intelligence products.
I suspect this is a proximate cause to the problem throughout the IC in the West getting so much wrong so much of the time.
Forever.
The state is the apex producer of chaos avalanches.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
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