Bankshotting off Zionism for .... I"m not sure what

Russ and Pam Martens' "Wall Street on Parade" is generally very good — when it sticks to writing about the banksters.

When it ventures beyond that, it generally falls into generic Blue Anon territory. In the past, for example, they've seen fit to attack Russia for various things in the Russia-Ukraine war without batting an eye at similar issues done by Ukraine. Things like war crimes.

So, Tuesday, when the pair wrote about "Deadly, Exploding Pagers ...," but only tacked Israel's pager bobby-trapping to the end of a piece about the newest revelations on Chinese hacking?

It came off as clickbait at a minimum.

By ignoring that the US has — albeit without explosives — done what Israel has done in supply-chain hacking, and nearly a decade ago, it came off as American exceptionist, Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ division post, not just the bankshotting off Zionism, but the attack on China.

In both of that, it came off as trivializing what's happening in Lebanon, and Gaza before that.

They wrote one piece about Gaza since last October.

(They've actually written in the long past a few pieces about Snowden, per Bruce Schneier's piece about NSA hacking. I didn't search too hard as their search window doesn't actually go in strict chronological order on newest to oldest.) 

Back to the matter at hand? The Schneier link was posted within a piece from Tuesday, which went up about the same time as the Martens', which said that none of this is new. And, also not new here in Merikka. Bruce notes that the FBI created a shell company back in 2019. There's Stuxnet, of course.

This is the bottom line:

But now that the line has been crossed, other countries will almost certainly start to consider this sort of tactic as within bounds.

So, are the Martens going to bitch when Russia bobby-traps Ukrainian cellphones? Or, looking retrospectively, what if Dear Leader's CIA had used that, rather than a drone, to off Anwar al-Awliki?

Per their original post, the idea that we can stop this? Doubtful. We get a lot of tech goods from China. And, not just oil, but a lot of other raw materials, like heavy metals, come from Russia and are fungible.

They also raised the issue of gas price gouging in 2022. Problem? Gas prices were actually higher when the emergence from the Great Recession started in 2012. Was there price gouging then? Yes, there was a brief spike in 2022, but for the whole year? Nope. More pricey in 2012.

Again, they're often very good when talking about the banksters. Hit and miss elsewhere. And, yeah, some of their takes on the Russia-Ukraine war left me predisposed to be a bit skeptical about their other non-bankster writing. Speaking of, they decided they had to haul in the Wagner Group along with Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein about shady people banking at JP Morgan Chase.