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Inevitable: You Show Up
Apologies for invoking again the awful noise that never stops. But a month before mid-terms, a fascist feckless clown show run by the dumbest people ever churns on with lies, bribes, cruelty, crude racism; their flailing leader grows daily more perilous; and fiery patriots remind us we cannot grow weary. Oddly, we find solace in Lindsey Graham's 2016 prophesy to the GOP: "If we (choose) Trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it." God: "And in the fullness of time...."
Because we are well and truly beyond the looking glass, an actual, NYTPitchbot-likeTimes headline just posited that "some conservatives are having second thoughts" about Trump - this, even as he continues obliterating every institution of democratic governance, bars press outlets, ignores court rulings, betrays allies, courts autocrats, spews profanities online and at rallies, turns the election into a reality show and the Oval Office into a bordello, and shovels over $1.8 billion into junk vanity projects as his approval plunges to 26% on the economy and his brain dissolves into mashed potatoes. "Second thoughts?"
Decades ago, Robert Reich warned an American economy moving increasingly overseas through the 1970s was creating a two-tired society of a few rich winners and too many left-behind Americans whose anger, resentment and historic racism could be easily manipulated by a savvy carnival barker hungry for power - especially with a right-wing SCOTUS willing to give him almost total immunity for his boundless crimes. The grim result: What Timothy Snyder calls unprecedented "superpower suicide," wherein a major country quickly crashes and burns due to incompetence at all the "basic instruments of state power."
Now, facing "the mid-term music," the GOP flounders through "a five-alarm fire," pulling out lies, bribes, denial. They "must WIN" by using "every tool" - vote early, absentee, in person, by mail (or ICE thugs). Rick Wilson: "Oh, NOW mail-in ballots AREN'T a scam? Sweaty Don is nervous." They hype a duplicitous White House App: "365 Days of Wins." Trump offers a stream of paltry bribes: $90 to 20 million seniors to offset higher Medicare costs he caused, $500 to a million "excess" Obamacare fees, $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans win, conjuring a shameless Oprah-like spectacle: "You get a car, and you get a car..."
The alleged master of the Art of the Deal grows cringey and desperate, as do his boasts. At a recent rally: "I know more about inflation, I know more about everything than anyone in this room, anybody anywhere in the world." Of his two-day "emotional support" debacle of a Texas convention, he claimed 107 million views compared to the NFL's 25 million; the reality was his 3.3 million vs. their 25 million views, with even Ken Paxton secretly complaining, "It dropped our numbers." One viral meme tells the tale: A sign with sky-high gas prices, an angry MAGA voter, and the text, "Turns out my truck doesn't run on liberal tears."
In 2015, Trump packed a rally in Mobile ALA with over 30,000 fans; last week, at a high school gym with mostly empty upper tiers, people began streaming out as he bragged the economy is "booming," with new plants "everywhere." Later, he stubbornly insisted, "There are no empty seats" and his rallies are "HOTTER than ever," so nothing to see here except mashed potatoes. "Just pretend I’m on the ballot," he pleaded, a loser's losing message amidst the debacles he's forged. In need of safe harbor, his itinerary in "a red-state October blitz" is almost entirely in deep-red states he once won by double digits: Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas.
In Ohio this weekend, he raved Democrats' "transgender for everybody" policies would “mutilize your children," he has "record-winning numbers," "Talafreako" (in Texas, not Ohio) is a "vaygan" who "eats a piece of lettuce all day long" but he's now "gone full on eating meat" to get elected so he goes to barbecues where he's "throwing up all the time." He rambled, ranted, cursed, flaunted "the utter disdain for the office he holds and the people hes supoosed to serve." NYTPitchbot: "Whether it’s Obama saying 'Yes We Can” or Donald Trump saying 'We're gonna shove it up their ass,' both presidents adopted divisive slogans."
Beyond the rallies, the carnage persists. Millions have lost SNAP benefits. Many thousands, caught in our immigration atrocities, endure "quiet reckonings with what the country has become.” The Atlantic profiled the Ohio truck driver who hit and killed Haitian student Pierre Damas Bel in an apparent suicide; he is haunted by a young man who “would have been a model citizen,” who had to charge his own ankle monitor, who "was hurting - we did not do right by him.” War agit-prop still spews. So does cultural appropriation: Park rangers blast regime theft of Smokey the Bear, a forest fire refugee: "Only you can prevent fascist liars." "Zoologically-deficient hacks" have also dropped AI slop of USA-themed penguins in Greenland, where they don't live; some suggest they "shouldn’t have dismantled the Department of Education so quickly."
Surreal dissonance flourishes. Because they are "committed to leading the world in Gold Standard Science," other regime goons are bravely charging ahead to "MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY, SAFE, AND BEAUTIFUL" with an executive order to "ELIMINATE FOREIGN, INVASIVE TICKS AND MOSQUITOES" to "restore enjoyment of the great outdoors" through "safe and effective technology-enabled methods," thus rebuilding "public trust in science." Too little, too late? Still, their effort aligns nicely with Press Barbie's move to Fox News, per The Borowitz Report, "as a stepping-stone" to acquiring the requisite “warrior ethos" to become Secretary of Defense. And that profound disconnect is alive and festering in the incoherent child king somehow still babbling about "the golden age of America.”
Declaiming, “Watch for the ‘Midterm Surprise!’,” he just boasted his sparse rally crowds are "unbelievable!" He even added for the 8,726th time his now parody-level, "Nobody has ever seen anything like it"and raved the GOP is “flipping races all over the place.” As a public service, Aaron Rupar, who's borne witness to years of this insanity, urges we read the transcript of his recent Time interview to grasp "the grave cognitive impairment" of "random brain firings" like, "I just got a tariff from Lindsey Graham" and "100 million people watched the midterm convention." Observers: "He’s like a criminally inclined rutabaga with some language skills" and "He looks like an attendant just asked him if he wants pudding or Jello and he’s mad he has no idea what those are."
Sunday night, Indivisible hosted a "Hands Off Our Vote" event in New York to prep for Oct. 17's No Kings and the election. Despite our fatigue - from lying, thieving, genocidal rants, fucking ballrooms - a fiery Mark Ruffalo vowed to "Hulk-out" to convey his rage. "We are so tired, but we can't give up now," he said. "They want to keep us afraid. Their only weapon is our fear. But we're inevitable." He recalled meeting with activist Harry Belafonte a few years ago and asking, "How are we going to know what to do? When are we going to know when it's our calling? And he said, 'Brother, you’ll know. And then you go. You show up.’“
Robert De Niro, out of furious fucks to give, raged at policies crazy, cruel and increasingly unpopular. "Power...to...the...people," he intoned. "It isn't just a slogan. It's the founding principle of our nation." So what do those now unduly empowered do? he asked. "They try to take our votes away. Are you kidding me?" (Ghost of Travis Bickle) "Hands Off Our Vote. Lemme put it another way - keep your fucking hands off our vote," he seethed. Then he led the crowd in an explosive call-and-response to "spineless officials, the Supreme Court, masked ICE thugs," finally "that coward, that fucking piece of shit Donald Trump. When he tries to take our voice and power away, what do we tell him?" To each, he bade,"Keep your fucking hands off our vote!" and take back the House, the Senate, our country. In brief, show up.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Trump's middle-school level AI images feature headless penguins in Greenland, where they don't live. Truth Social post
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Gaza Genocide 'Not Over,' Says UN Expert as Israel's Onslaught Enters Fourth Year
"It's really beyond what words can say, and it gives the sense that the destruction of Gaza is not over," the 49-year-old Italian jurist continued. "Seventy percent of the strip is under the control of the [Israeli] army, which is leveling as much as it can. There is an environmental catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe."
Israel's assault on Gaza began in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, in which more than 1,100 Israelis and others were killed—at least some by so-called “friendly fire” and under the fratricidal Hannibal Directive—and over 240 people were abducted.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials soon began calling for the genocidal destruction of Gaza and its 2.2 million people. Netanyahu declared it a "holy mission" for Israel to fulfill a divine command to the Israelites to exterminate every man, woman, child, and animal in Amalek, the fictional archenemy of the ancient Jews.
Over the past three years, Israeli forces have killed at least 74,237 Palestinians and wounded at least 175,206 others in Gaza, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures—which not only have been affirmed by senior Israeli military and intelligence officials, but are believed by the authors of multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies to be a significant undercount.
Tens of thousands of those injuries are classified as "life-altering," including thousands of amputations performed on adults and children, sometimes without anesthesia.
The Gaza Health Ministry says more than 10,000 of those killed were women, over 5,100 were elderly, and upward of 21,000 were children—figures supported by classified Israel Defense Forces intelligence data suggesting that 5 in 6 Palestinians killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the onslaught were civilians.
Tens of thousands of children have also been left without one or both parents, with more than 2,700 families suffering so many deaths that they were erased from the civil registry in Gaza. The UN Children's Fund called the strip the "world's most dangerous place to be a child."
In the wake of the October 7 attack, the IDF dramatically loosened rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. The IDF’s use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs, and the utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets, have resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths, including numerous instances of dozens or more people being massacred in single strikes.
At closer range, current and former IDF troops have accused their own of deliberately shooting Palestinian civilians, including children, sometimes out of sheer boredom. Palestinian medical professionals—who, like journalists and aid workers, have suffered hundreds of their ranks killed by Israeli bombs and bullets—have also described what they say is the deliberate shooting of Gazans, including children.
On October 8, 2023, then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered the "complete siege" of Gaza, explaining that "we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly." The siege, which is actually a tightening of a decadeslong blockade of Gaza, fueled famine and disease that killed many of the most vulnerable people in the strip. Nothing was spared, including hospitals and other medical facilities, whose staff members were sometimes abducted and tortured—allegedly to death in at least one case—by their Israeli captors.
Around 90% of Gaza's population—around 1.9 million people—has been forcibly displaced, most of them multiple times. With the vast bulk of Gaza's buildings damaged or destroyed, nearly two-thirds of Gazans continue to live in tents or makeshift shelters as the war's fourth winter, and with it the prospect of more infants and newborns dying of hypothermia, approaches.
Despite a purported year-old ceasefire, Israeli forces continue to kill, wound, and displace Palestinians in Gaza to this day. Gaza officials say that at least 1,460 people have been killed and more than 5,100 others have been wounded since the ceasefire took effect. Israel is still blocking or delaying desperately needed humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, although there have been some improvements in delivery during the ceasefire period.
Meanwhile, Israeli calls for more ethnic cleansing, occupation, and possibly even the Jewish recolonization of Gaza continue. And while President Donald Trump no longer openly discusses a US takeover and redevelopment of the Mediterranean strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East," his administration is still trying to determine Gaza's future through vehicles like his widely derided "Board of Peace."
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. The ICC simultaneously ordered the arrest of three senior Hamas officials, but Israel has since assassinated them.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), also in The Hague, is currently in the written stage of a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and formally supported by more than 15 nations. While a ruling in the case isn't expected until at least the end of the decade, a UN commission of inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and other experts—including many Israeli and international Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others—have already concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Yet genocide denial persists in Israel, the United States, and among supporters of Israel's destruction of Gaza around the world. And while numerous nations have severed diplomatic ties with Israel or imposed sanctions—sometimes both—the United States under both the Biden and Trump administrations has lavished the key Middle East ally with tens of billions of dollars in armed aid, as well as diplomatic cover including a string of vetoes of UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions.
Furthermore, the Trump administration has moved to punish members of the ICC, ICJ, and UN, including Albanese—who has been relentlessly critical of both Israel's genocide and Western complicity, especially by the United States.
On the other hand, increasing diplomatic recognition of Palestine by even Israel's allies and a worldwide wave of protests against the Gaza genocide—including numerous demonstrations organized and led by Jewish groups—has shown Palestinians that much of the world stands in solidarity with them.
"There are really these two forces... symbolically, fighting against each other," Albanese told Anadolu during Wednesday's interview. "Those who want to continue the genocide, the exploitation, and the erasure of Palestine, and those who want to stop it."
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