Badlands News Brief
Biden Baits Israel as Solar Storms Bring the Weird
The News Cycle is almost impossible to track these days. At least, to do so fully.
That’s where we come in.
In the Badlands News Brief, the Badlands Media team hand pick news items of interest from the previous days to give you an overview of the biggest goings-on relevant to the Truth Community.
Many items feature original (and subjective) commentary. Feel free to follow the corresponding link to see our writers’ Substack accounts and check out their other work.
Now, onto the news from the Weekend that Was …
U.S. cites intelligence, offers Israel supplies to limit Rafah operation
The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance in an effort to persuade it to hold back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.
American officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks.
President Biden and his senior aides have been making such offers over the past several weeks in hopes they will persuade Israel to conduct a more limited and targeted operation in the southern Gaza city, where some 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering after fleeing there from other parts of Gaza under Israeli orders. Israel has vowed to go into Rafah with “extreme force,” and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a number of steps that raised fears at the White House that the long-promised invasion could be materializing.
The United States has provided Israel with intelligence throughout the seven-month war. Senior Biden aides are now seeking to convince Israeli officials that they can destroy the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah with more targeted strikes that the United States can assist, by identifying senior Hamas leaders, rather than a full-scale invasion.
Administration officials, including experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development, have told Israel it will take several months to safely relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are now living in decrepit and unsanitary conditions in Rafah. Israeli officials disagree with that assessment. — WAPO
Our Take: “What is most telling about this story is the fact that the CIA knows where the Hamas leaders are, and yet none of them are being targeted as part of this military operation against Hamas.
When Trump went after ISIS with Putin/Russia, they didn't launch massive bombing campaigns of areas suspected to be housing ISIS soldiers. Instead, they used precision strikes and raids that targeted ISIS leadership, minimizing the casualties necessary to effectively dismantle ISIS operations. These efforts are important, as every death is used by these terror networks as recruiting material and propaganda to help win the sympathy and support of the normie public in the region— as we have seen happen in Palestine with Hamas.
(They likely also targeted financing networks… hello Qatar and Langley…)
Using these tactics, Trump and Putin were able to wipe out ISIS in a matter of weeks.
So why aren’t these same strategies being utilized against Hamas? Why are the leaders being ignored and allowed to operate, while armor columns and 2,000 pound bombs are being deployed against displaced women and children sheltering in refugee camps?
The answer is coming into clear focus, as time goes on…” —
US Power Grid & Communication Networks Survive Extreme Geomagnetic Storm
The Space Weather Prediction Center of NOAA warned on Friday night about an "extreme" G5 geomagnetic storm impacting Earth, which lasted into the early morning hours. While there have been disruptions in communications, no significant failures in the US power grid have been reported. Intense solar storms can disrupt the digital economy.
G5 represents the highest level of a geomagnetic storm on a scale from G1 to G5. This intense space weather event led to disturbances in some satellite orientation and operations, as well as deterioration in radio communications that rely on ionospheric transmission. Additionally, there were some outages in GPS networks.
"The solar storm has knocked out almost all long-distance shortwave radio," Captain John Konrad, CEO of Captain, wrote on X.
Elon Musk reported hours ago, "Major geomagnetic solar storm happening right now. Biggest in a long time. Starlink satellites are under a lot of pressure, but holding up so far."
The last G5 storm to hit Earth this strong was in October 2003, which sparked power outages across Sweden and damaged transformers in South Africa. Since then, the economy's digitalization has dramatically increased, which means there's an increasing risk of grid failures and disruptions in communication networks. — ZeroHedge
Our Take: “This headline is basically, ‘OMG, I can’t believe we actually survived the fake crisis we just made up!’
Fear porn reached 11 over the weekend as all the newsy outlets began pushing the ‘cannibal solar storm’ in earnest. The cannibals never materialized, but many Americans got sick pictures of the Auroras for the first time.
I wasn’t one of them.
It was cloudy on the second day, which was after the first day where I learned that apparently you can only see them through a modern mobile phone camera. Sure, why not.
The most hilarious part of this latest mass formation is that the breaking headline news here is essentially: ‘nothing happened.’
Why are cannibals so unreliable?” —
Bill Maher unleashes on Stormy Daniels’ testimony in Trump trial: 'She's a bad witness!'
"Real Time" host Bill Maher wasn't particularly thrilled with the testimony of adult film actress Stormy Daniels this week in the New York trial against former President Trump.
During a panel discussion Friday night, Maher reiterated his frustrations with how the criminal charges against Trump have been stalled, noting the recent developments with the Georgia and classified documents cases.
"So it's Stormy or bust," Maher quipped. — FOX News
Our Take: “I like to use Bill Maher as my canary in the coal mine when it comes to a particular subset of Mind-Movers in the Information War—specifically, the Culture Critics.
While this community is more versed than most as to the corruption inherent in the design and functioning of the Media Industrial Complex, I believe we often leave aside some of the charlatans on the late night scene because they don’t seem ‘legitimate’ enough to the Normie Layers of the Collective Mind as to be worthy of our attention or scorn.
That’s where we err.
In fact, I think Maher and his ilk are arguably MORE influential over Normieville than anyone blabbing over red or blue chyrons in the MSM, and that’s because their political filters aren’t as tuned up when they take in his softer, more ‘entertaining’ sociopolitical rhetoric.
That said, when we see Culture Critics like Maher increasingly devolving to common sense rhetoric … see it not as him seeing the light, but more so as a final attempt to re-brand ahead of the backlash he sees coming.” —
Sen. Lindsey Graham says Israel should do 'whatever' it has to while comparing the war in Gaza to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Sunday compared Israel’s war against Hamas to the U.S. decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan in World War II during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing [of] Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons,” Graham said. “That was the right decision.”
He added, “Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war. They can’t afford to lose.”
Graham, a staunch supporter of Israel, used the analogy multiple times while condemning President Joe Biden for threatening to withhold certain weapons from Israel if it launches a military operation in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza where over a million civilians are sheltering. — NBC News
Our Take: “Crisis always exposes the weaklings in the room. And we all know that Lindsey is among the biggest weaklings in DC.
But Ladybug Lindsey isn’t the story here. The real story is Israel’s illegal nuclear program.
It is commonly understood that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, was obsessed with obtaining nuclear weapons ever since he assumed his position in 1948. (His justification was to prevent another Holocaust.)
Ben-Gurion found an ally in the French, who helped him develop the Negev Nuclear Research Center, which began construction in 1958 and became active sometime between 1962-1964. By 1967, Israel developed its first nuclear weapon.
We know all of this because an employee from that facility—Israeli scientist Mordechai Vanunu— defected in 1986 and went public with this information, corroborating his claims with detailed photographs he had taken of the facility and nuclear material housed within it.
(Vanunu was secretly drugged and captured by the Mossad in Italy, and brought back to Israel to face trial for treason behind closed doors, where he was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison, 11 of which were spent in solitary confinement. Vanunu converted to Christianity, and since being released in 2004 has abdicated for the nuclear disarmament of Israel, though his activities and movements are still strictly controlled by the Israeli government.)
French President Charles de Gaulle discovered this illegal partnership in 1958, and sought to stop it. As Matt Ehret and I have discussed on Breaking History, de Gaulle is particularly famous for evading over 30 assassination attempts on his life, most of them during the 1960’s and mostly carried out [allegedly] by the CIA and Mossad.
In a similar vein, in 1963, President John F Kennedy discovered Ben-Gurion’s obsessive intent to acquire nuclear weapons, and sought to stop it. He spent the majority of that year demanding answers from Ben-Gurion— requests that were evaded or flat out ignored— most famously in a 7-page letter that JFK sent in which he explained why Israel could not develop this technology, especially in the shadows, as it would only inspire others to follow suit. (Hello, Iran)
JFK succeeded in setting up inspections of alleged Israeli nuclear sites, which were not carried out until after his assassination at the end of 1963. While Kennedy’s wishes to investigate the Israeli nuclear program were pursued, the efforts were subverted and ultimately led nowhere.
(There’s also the whole ‘Samson Option’ dilemma, but that’s another rabbit hole for another time.)
So does Israel illegally possess the very weapons of mass destruction that Benjamin Netanyahu has breathlessly accused all of his Muslim neighbors of possessing for decades?” —
Cyberattack forces major US health care network to divert ambulances from hospitals
A major US health care system said Thursday that it is diverting ambulances from “several” of its hospitals following a cyberattack this week.
The cyberattack on Ascension, a St. Louis-based nonprofit network that includes 140 hospitals in 19 states, is also disrupting access to electronic health records, some phone systems and “various systems utilized to order certain tests, procedures and medications,” Ascension said in a statement distributed Thursday evening.
The sprawling health care network, which also owns 40 senior living facilities, said that it would be using “downtime procedure for some time,” because of the cyberattack. Downtime procedures are typically when health providers revert to backup processes, including paper records, that allow them to care for patients when computers are down.
Four sources briefed on the investigation told CNN that Ascension suffered a ransomware attack, in which cybercriminals typically try to lock computers and steal data for extortion. Those sources said that the type of ransomware used in the hack is known as Black Basta, which hackers have used repeatedly to attack health care organizations in recent years. Black Basta, also the name of a broad criminal group that uses the ransomware, includes Russian-speakers, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
On Friday, the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a cyber threat sharing group for big health care providers worldwide, published an advisory warning that hackers using Black Basta ransomware have “recently accelerated attacks against the healthcare sector.”
That includes at least two health care organizations in Europe and the US that in the last month have “suffered severe operational disruptions” because of Black Basta ransomware,” the advisory said, without naming the health care organizations. — CNN
Our Take: “Every time I see a story like this out of a mainstream outlet, my immediate response is: So what really happened?
This is a health network with a concentration in senior care, according to this CNN article. The attack affects, ‘access to electronic health records, some phone systems and various systems utilized to order certain tests, procedures and medications.’
So a cyberattack is impacting our healthcare system’s ability to treat and care for seniors? In an election year? Sounds familiar.
This story is also an example of just how vulnerable our critical infrastructure really is, and raises questions about the current administration’s ability to protect it. As cyber criminals get more sophisticated, we see attacks on financial, utility (water and electric), transportation, and now healthcare infrastructure.
These vulnerabilities are not insignificant. In the House hearing on water infrastructure, which we covered in the February 8 Badlands News Brief, experts assert that these types of cyber attacks could be used to poison whole towns or otherwise compromise the water supply for millions of Americans — and that we wouldn’t know until people started dying. Impacts to other sectors are equally devastating when looked at through a ‘worst case’ lens.
This is why we need serious, competent experts in positions of authority over US critical infrastructure, especially for our seniors and, most importantly, for our elections. Demand it.” —
BONUS ITEMS
FDA Preparing For Possible Bird Flu Spread Among Humans: Commissioner
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing for a scenario in which the highly pathogenic avian influenza starts spreading among humans, the agency’s commissioner said on May 8.
“This virus, like all viruses, is mutating. We need to continue to prepare for the possibility that it might jump to humans,” Dr. Robert Califf, the commissioner, told senators during a hearing in Washington.
The influenza, also known as the bird flu or H5N1, has recently started spreading among cattle and other species. One person in Texas has had a confirmed case this year.
So far, genetic sequencing and other data indicate that influenza poses little risk to people, and there are no signs that the flu is transmitting from person-to-person, according to U.S. officials. But they are working on getting treatments, tests, and vaccines ready in case that changes.
“We’ve been busy getting prepared for if the virus does mutate in a way that jumps into humans on a larger level,” Dr. Califf told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee.
The patient in Texas primarily experienced one symptom: inflamed eyes. Neither the patient nor many of the cows that have been infected have suffered respiratory symptoms. H5N1 commonly infects the respiratory tracts of birds.
“The real worry is that it will jump to the human lungs, where, when that has happened in other parts of the world for brief outbreaks, the mortality rates have been 25 percent,” Dr. Califf said. The worry is based in part on how viruses typically mutate, such as in the case of COVID-19.
From 2003 to April 1, 2024, 889 cases of H5N1 have been confirmed across the globe, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Of the patients, 52 percent have died. — The Epoch Times
"Something Super Weird Is Going On": Musk Reacts To 'Anticapitalist' Attack On Berlin Gigafactory
All hell is breaking out at Tesla's Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg on Friday as hundreds of woke Marxist extremists storm the property.
Videos on X show hundreds of people running towards the massive factory.
"Most of those demonstrators do not come from Grünheide if any at all, they are not just against Tesla but against any form of capitalism and that's a pretty ridiculous claim as its the best system to balance capital between poor and rich that exist. Its a wild mixture of people mainly believing in the lies of the media and activated from environmental organisations who amplify an ill designed protest," one X user said.
[…]
Some are wondering why the so-called 'anticapitalist' protesters who attacked the Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin are ignoring other automakers whose brands cater the the upper class they claim to oppose.
"Why not protest factories making BMW 7 series and Mercedes S Class or Maybach?" asks X user 'Warren Redlich,' adding "Because they're full of crap."
To which Tesla owner Elon Musk replied: "Something super weird is going on, as Tesla was the *only* car company attacked!" — ZeroHedge
Oscars launch fundraising drive as Academy Awards audience shrinks
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is launching a $500mn global fundraising drive to bolster its finances and counter a decades-long decline in the audience for the annual Oscars TV broadcast that generates most of its revenue.
The Academy has raised about $100mn already, with individual donors including billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, said Bill Kramer, the Academy’s chief executive, in an interview. It has also signed sponsorship deals with global luxury brands including the Dorchester Collection.
The TV audience for the Oscars has shrunk from nearly 44mn US viewers in 2014 to 19.5mn this year, according to Statista. The current deal between the non-profit Academy and ABC, the Walt Disney-owned TV network that broadcasts the Oscars, ends in 2028 — the 100th anniversary of the awards ceremony — and negotiations on renewal are set to begin soon.
Kramer describes the current ABC deal as “very healthy” and called the arrangement with Disney “an amazing partnership”. But he said that with streaming upending the film and TV business, the Academy decided it needed to embark on a “revenue diversification campaign”.
“No healthy company or organisation should rely on one source of support to a degree that could cause concern if that support decreases,” he said. — Financial Times
We hope you enjoyed this brief look back at the major news items you might have missed in this ever-escalating and ever-accelerating news cycle as the Information War continues to rage on around us.
As always, if you have any thoughts on these news items or the MANY others swirling in the digital ether, drop into the comments below to share them with your fellow Badlanders.
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So what is the FBI accusing J6 protesters of doing wrong?
1. They were trying to stop an illegal election from being certified.
2. Check: We now see evidence of a stolen election.
3. They were entrapped, framed by FBI provocateurs and Pelosi, Schumer, Capital police, and Mayor Bowser.
4. Check: doors opened, police escorts.
5. It was not blocking a legal proceeding as Pelosi denied a quorum.
6. Check: “The minimal number of officers and members of a committee or organization, usually a majority, who must be present for valid transaction of business.”
7. Mike Pence refused to follow the rules when there are called to re-examine votes.
8. Check: he was supposed to delay certification until further verification of vote counts by the state.
9. So why are the J6ers charged with a crime but the crime we now see was commuted by the crooked DOJ, and the Dems?
What is Chris Wray’s answer to this?
All of these "Hollywood STARS" doing drug commercials for PFIZER, 😂 and that double shot of Flu and Shingles BS. TWO Band-Aids are better than one!! Everyone I know who got the Shingles VAX, got Shingles 6 months later.