Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

More than just a bit severe, wouldn't you say, Izzy.

Great Britain leads the world in conquering weaker peoples and wiping them from planet Earth. But anyone with a brain would not assert that, "Great Britain is about killing children, slaughtering weaker peoples...blah, blah, blah."

Get a grip!

We’re talking about the 21st Century, what is going on now.

And you’re right we were complicit in America’s crimes in the Middle East.

We were equal partners in the criminal coup in Iran which installed the Shah and did not do enough to stop the extermination of Palestinians at the end of the mandate.

You have to admit, mass shootings go on in America all the time, and whenever they do the NRA marches in celebration. Oralloy has repeatedly accused those who think killing children is wrong of virtue signalling.

If America was serious about the lives of children the school shootings would have stopped years ago.

We stopped it in the 1990s.

The point remains Biden was the only member of the security council, both permanent and non permanent, to veto the call for a ceasefire.

The one and the only conclusion to be drawn is that America supports the slaughter of the Palestinians.

It’s an opportunity to test out America’s weapons on a captive population, and to harvest organs for Americans.

There’s only so much can be learned from animal testing.

Gaza was deliberately excluded from the vaccination programme so they’ll probably be looking at the effects of a wide number of Covid variants deliberately introduced to the Palestinians.

Allowing dual citizenship (Israeli and US) in congress, while also accepting bribes from the AIPAC lobby group, indicates that the US is directed by the tiny nation of Israel. That's why your tax dollars mostly go to other nations.

What you’re saying is it’s alright for Americans to make sweeping statements about other countries, but not the other way round.

Where we you when Max, Cobbler, BillRM, and a whole host of others attacked me just for being English?

I’ll “get a grip” when you behave in a more even handed way.

Organ harvesting? You got any documentation of that?

It's ridiculous to hold people culpable for actions committed by their countries in the past. Understandably, contrition, embarrassment, or shame may be felt by present-day inhabitants but for others to insinuate guilt for past crimes of long-fallen governments and long-dead people is magical thinking. As Stephen Daedalus said, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

CNN is going to have a new owner？ Several business websites are reporting that AT&T, which owns CNN, is in talks with Discovery Inc. More to the point, AT&T is said to be spinning off its Warner Media. Could it be CNN simply changes its name to DNN after it merges with Discovery? Wait, that sounds like CNN is going to be part of the Democratic Party with that name.

DNN?

They did do it, don’t know if it’s still happening, but it did.

I can’t post links but if you google Palestinian organ harvesting the first thing that pops up is an article in The Guardian by Ian Black dated 21st December 2009, headlined “Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent,” there a doctor admits harvesting organs from dead Palestinians but claims the practice ended in the 1990s.

They only admitted it when found out, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out it was still going on.

From Bloomberg.

"AT&T Inc. is preparing to spin off its media business and merge it with Discovery Inc. in a tax-friendly deal, according to people with knowledge of the matter, a surprise reversal for a company that spent $85 billion to acquire the assets less than three years ago.

A deal could be announced as soon as this week, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The transaction will be structured as a so-called Reverse Morris Trust, or a merger with another company that’s structured to be tax-free, one of the people said.

The idea is to combine Discovery’s reality-TV empire with AT&T’s vast media holdings, building a business that would be a formidable competitor to Netflix Inc. and Walt Disney Co. Any deal would mark a major shift in AT&T’s strategy after years of working to assemble telecommunications and media assets under one roof. AT&T gained some of the biggest brands in entertainment through its acquisition of Time Warner Inc., which was completed in 2018.


The talks likely value the AT&T business at over $50 billion including debt and an agreement could come by Monday, Dow Jones reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The people warned that the talks could still fall apart, Dow Jones said. The new company is expected to be led by Discovery Chief Executive Officer David Zaslav, it reported.

The deal would underscore the difficulty telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. have had finding a payoff from their media operations. Through its WarnerMedia unit, AT&T owns CNN, HBO, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT and the Warner Bros. studio. Discovery, backed by cable mogul John Malone, controls networks such as HGTV, Food Network, TLC and Animal Planet.


Zaslav has helped Discovery grow through acquisitions, including a purchase of HGTV owner Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. that closed in 2018. Discovery’s class A shares have risen more than 18% this year, valuing the company at almost $24 billion. AT&T has gained 12%, giving it a market capitalization of $230 billion.

The companies are still negotiating the structure of a transaction, and details could change or the talks could fall apart, the people said. Representatives for AT&T and Discovery declined to comment.

AT&T CEO John Stankey has been cleaning house at the sprawling telecom titan, cutting staff and selling underperforming assets. The company has been funneling money into rolling out its 5G wireless network, which requires billions of dollars of investment, as well as expanding its fiber-optic footprint.

The carrier has been boosting movie and television production to attract subscribers to its HBO Max streaming service. It also needs cash to pay down debt. AT&T became one of the world’s most indebted companies after an acquisition spree, and though it’s been paying down what it owes, it now has bills from a recent spectrum auction.

AT&T was the second-highest bidder in the Federal Communications Commission’s sale of airwaves, committing $23 billion. Verizon, the top bidder, agreed to pay $45 billion dollars.


Any move involving AT&T’s content assets would come just months after it reached a deal to spin off its DirecTV operations in a pact with buyout firm TPG. AT&T also agreed in December to sell its anime video unit Crunchyroll to a unit of Sony Corp. for $1.2 billion.

And the company has parted with its Puerto Rico phone operations, a stake in Hulu, a central European media group and almost all its offices at New York’s Hudson Yards.

Stankey’s predecessor at AT&T, longtime CEO Randall Stephenson, spent his 13-year tenure bulking up the company. He was obsessed with deals and kept a color-coded roster of companies he wanted AT&T to buy, leading to 43 acquisitions.

But critics such as activist investor Elliott Management Corp. have complained about the strategy, urging AT&T to focus on its core business. And now that’s just what Stankey is doing.

In wireless services, AT&T is playing catch-up with Verizon, the market leader, and T-Mobile US Inc., which became the No. 2 carrier after gobbling up Sprint Corp. Verizon has made its own efforts to slim down. The company agreed this month to sell its media division to Apollo Global Management Inc. for $5 billion, a move that will offload online brands like AOL and Yahoo.


The Discovery deal could give the combined company enough programming to compete with Netflix and other streaming services in a global battle over the future of entertainment. In 2019, Disney bought 21st Century Fox Inc.’s entertainments assets for $71 billion, largely to gain enough muscle to constantly refresh its streaming services. It launched Disney+ in November 2019 and already has more than 100 million subscribers.

Both Discovery and AT&T’s media unit, WarnerMedia, have recently made their own forays into streaming. Discovery has debuted Discovery+, which has a vast array of unscripted reality shows. AT&T, meanwhile, has made a big bet on HBO Max, which launched a year ago and includes HBO programming and movies from AT&T’s Warner Bros. studio. Both companies are quickly expanding their streaming services around the world.

Discovery and WarnerMedia also own a portfolio of cable channels that remain profitable but are losing subscribers as more people abandon pay-TV service and adopt streaming. And AT&T’s CNN is looking for new ways to maintain its audience after the busy news cycle of the Trump years. TNT and TBS have some general entertainment shows, but their most attractive assets may be their sports rights to air professional baseball, basketball and hockey. Discovery, meanwhile, has the rights to broadcast the Olympics and professional golf outside the U.S.

Combining such assets would be complex, as the two companies have numerous long-term deals in place with pay-TV companies. A merged company would also have to choose a leader between WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar and Discovery’s Zaslav.

The deal would be an acknowledgment by AT&T that it hasn’t delivered on the promise of owning distribution and media assets. The strategy has been criticized before, with analysts suggesting the two could be more valuable if kept separate.


Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, has argued that AT&T and Comcast Corp., the cable provider that owns NBCUniversal, should spin off their media assets and combine them in a new company. He has called the promise of owning distribution and programming “fool’s gold.”

On Sunday, Greenfield tweeted that he could “certainly imagine the secularly declining Turner assets merged with Discovery for scale,” but added that it was “harder to imagine” HBO Max and AT&T’s Warner Bros studio being part of a combined company.

At an investor conference last week, WarnerMedia’s Kilar defended the need for WarnerMedia to be owned by AT&T, saying the telecom company had invested billions of dollars in HBO Max and broken down silos within the company to create a single operating unit. He added that AT&T’s phone and broadband customers were less likely to cancel if they got HBO Max, and many of HBO Max’s subscribers were AT&T customers.

Kilar irked the Hollywood establishment with his decision in December to release all of WarnerMedia’s movie slate on HBO Max at the same time the films hit theaters. But its recent movies have performed well at the box office, helping soothe concerns.

Kilar spoke about the growth strategy of WarnerMedia under AT&T in a Wall Street Journal interview published last week.


Now he may face a more daunting challenge: helping piece together a patchwork of media businesses to create an entity that can thrive in the streaming age."

You guys often post published by the Times here to back up your claims. What difference does it make if I also follow suit? In addition, what's the point of excoriating Israel when you guys still read and trust a newspaper owned by a Jewish family? I mean the Time's owner Ochs-Sulzberger family .

Well, I'm told that most Arabs living there just want to get along with the Jews and bag good jobs. They don't even want to be agitators who are at loggerheads with the Jews.

I also hear that it's true that some hard-liners still try to find a way to curb Arabs' voting rights in Israel. Yet we also have reason to believe that Netanyahu and his Likud Party also want to court friendly Arab voters. It just takes time for Arab voters to enjoy more rights. On the other hand, they have to show fealty to Israel.

I think Israel makes no secret of its desire to be America's most trusted ally. Likewise, Hamas also doesn't shy away from acting like another proxy of Iran just like Hezbollah; they are in cahoots with Iran to try to peg Israel or even America down in the Middle East.

They haven't been able to pull it off since other Muslim nations also detest them; only Turkey’s President Erdogan makes holier-than-thou remarks and expresses support for Palestine.

I think people living in Palestine still snipe at Balfour Declaration. Some historians also argue that the India-Pakistan rivalry stems from the Partition of India .

The thinking goes, the Chinese still belabour Japan for its refusal to say sorry to China, in spite of the fact that some Japanese politicians or even old soldiers have apologised for its past wrongs. Some right-wing politicians in Japan are still noncommittal; they are adamant that Japanese troops didn't kill lots of Chinese civilians, which is a lie.

It's understandable for the Chinese to hit out at such right-wing politicians denying the fact that Japanese soldiers raped and slaughtered Chinese civilians during its occupation of China. Iris Chang, who's Chinese American, wrote a book about the the Nanjing Massacre. Then some foreigners living in China even took pictures, alas, which show Japanese soldiers stabbing, raping and burying rafts of civilians' corpses . History channel once produced a show based on this. I still vividly remember what a Chinese old man said when asked what happened to his mom.

To which he replied " mom's body was drenched with blood; she had passed out. Yet she woke up once my baby sister started crying. Mom crept over to my baby sister , whereupon she held her body tightly and started feeding my baby sister with her bosom. Mom didn't shift this position even after she left this world.“

That’s awfully thin verification to support this horrible of an accusation. You can’t site any support for it, but say that you “wouldn’t be surprised” IF this rumored practice is going on in
2021. Not only do you make the accusation of this monstrous practice by Israel, with no evidence you go on to condemn the US for their support and participation in it.

How is this any different, or any better or more responsible way of making an argument than Builder or Oralloy insinuating Biden is a
pedophile?

You can’t just casually accuse a country of officially sanctioning willful participation in sorting through bodies killed on the battlefield, to cut them open and sort through their organs in order to sell them. That’s a scene straight from hell, or from the imagination of someone trying damn hard to smear feces on the US.

For something like this, I agree with Frank’s appraisal - that you really do need to get a grip.

It did happen.

Did you bother googling the article?

It’s pretty damning evidence.

America is the only member of the security council not to call for a ceasefire. America was fully aware that Palestinians were being denied the Covid 19 vaccine while Israelis were being vaccinated in earnest . That makes it pretty complicit in my book.

Some Japanese soldiers did this; they killed Chinese civilians and and even tore their bodies apart when they were still alive.

More Here

Republicans/conservatives are pushing the falsehood of a "stolen election" not merely to fraudulently burnish the reputation of Trump but rather to create a storyline that they hope will provide a means to refuse certification and overturn results in coming elections if those results don't go their way. So big kudos to the Republicans noted in this story for their stand against the broader pattern of Republican deceits and anti-democratic initiatives.

Some horrid Japanese soldiers