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A Rock: Feel how solid it is. How smooth. How heavy. Like, really heavy. Good lord. Was your kid lugging it around all week? Is this the burden we all bear—lugging around rocks that we thought, for just a fleeting moment, were special? What rocks in our own backpack can we unload? And will your kid remember this particular rock and have a fit when they discover you threw it in the rockpile outside?

A Broken Stick: The stick is broken, barely hanging together. So is the world. You can take comfort in knowing that all things are broken. Your kid will probably not take such comfort. Is it better to conceal the broken stick or confront the reality of its brokenness? A difficult decision in much of life. But not here, since it’s just before dinner and your kid is already hangry.

Well, this is practically nail in the coffin news:

As Israel and Hezbollah exchange fire, Israeli troops are stationed in the villages that dot the country’s northern border.

The post Israel Accuses Hamas of Using “Human Shields” While IDF Embeds Among Civilians at Lebanon Border appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s close adviser, the literally insane Laura Loomer, posted the following and Trump retweeted it: In case you need something to send to a brainwashed relative to prove Harris is Black, here’s a picture of her and her father: He’s still alive: Her father is Black. Clearly. He was born in Jamaica. And she has always identified as Black and Indian which is what she is. Like tens of millions of other bi-racial Americans, she identifies as both. And also like most Black Americans she has a slave owner forefather. Do these people have any idea what they are saying? This is so dumb I can hardly wrap my mind around it. But get ready. It’s going to be a thing.

The fault lies not in their candidates “Trump didn’t change the party, he revealed it,” Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump“) tells The Daily Blast. It’s a view the former Republican says he forced himself to admit. Lee Atwater’s1981 confession about the Southern Strategy was more than a political strategy. It was an admission that it would work on racist sentiments present among the GOP base. “We were very aware of this ugly, dark side,” Stevens says of himself, Nicole Wallace, and other Bush administration colleagues. “But we thought it was a recessive gene, and that we were the dominant gene.” They thought their party would move their way, just out of political practicality. It did not. Stevens tells Greg Sargent he did not write another of those “if only they’d listened to me” books. Because the GOP did listen to him. “American conservatism is a failed intellectual exercise,” Stevens concludes. It is no longer a political party but an extremist movement.

July’s Tory defeat, following as it did years of cruelty and misrule, was richly deserved. For many Tribune readers it will have been a moment of relief, finally putting an end to the ruling party’s planned further assaults on trade unions, human rights, and material security. To call the feeling that night relief alone, however, […]

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was dealt an unexpected blow in the recent elections, as the far-right Hindu nationalist party lost its parliamentary majority. The party has presided over an increase in anti-Muslim lynchings, an authoritarian crackdown on opposition parties, and widening inequality. In 2019, it introduced the […]

To adequately understand the historical context of Israel’s genocidal policies towards the Gaza Strip, one must first accept the definition of Zionism as settler colonialism. Settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism. The settlers are not expatriates sent by an empire to build colonies that exploit new countries and their peoples for the benefit of the […]

It’s been ten months of genocide in Gaza, and it’s been seventy-six years of denial of Palestinian rights, of ethnic cleansing, of occupation, and of Israeli state and settler brutality. The term ‘devastation’ does not cover the situation now facing people in the Strip. In its latest assault, Israel has systematically targeted education and health […]

The contradictions at the heart of the State of Israel have had little impact on its success. This can be seen in Israel’s relationship with Africa. Many African states had backed Israel after 1948 in what they saw as a noble anti-colonial struggle. They related to its cause. One of the least known aspects of […]

In December 2023, Ndileka Mandela, the granddaughter of Nelson Mandela, condemned the rich world for supporting a global system of ‘climate apartheid’. Speaking at the COP28 summit in the United Arab Emirates, Mandela stated that the term ‘apartheid’ was appropriate to describe the impact of climate breakdown because ‘the Global North a using their economic […]

Before I begin, I wanted to express my sincerest thanks to Tribune readers for their support over the past few weeks. I know many of you will have come down to support our campaign in Islington North or even wished us goodwill from afar. This campaign was not about me. It was about all of […]

Knocking on the door of Number 10 even as the new regime moves in is a crisis requiring the prime minister’s most urgent attention: Britain’s housing emergency. Before the election, Keir Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, promised action in the ‘first days and weeks in office’. Housing didn’t make it into Starmer’s pre-election ‘first steps’ promises […]

A sniper in a tower at the apartheid wall is watching a rooftop. On it, two men are disagreeing on how to install more water pipes in a hydroponic greenhouse erected to provide free food for the community. The permanent floodlights of the army base animate their shadows on plastic sheets that guard the tomatoes […]

There are few events more pivotal in modern history than the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, which between March 1987 and June 1988 witnessed Cuban, Namibian, and Angolan soldiers fight against the South African Defence Force (SADF) in the largest military confrontation in Africa since the end of the Second World War. The clash overwhelmed the […]

‘PLEASE look at these pictures. Please think about them. That is not too much to ask. We — you and I — are the fortunate ones. At most we need only to look at pictures and read the news. But the people of Vietnam live (and die, many of them) with these horrors from day to day.’ Tribune’s […]

Like a surprising number of British teenagers during the 1980s, Trish Keenan had become consumed by a black-and-white, nostalgic vision of Britain’s recent past. ‘I was obsessed with the kitchen sink idea of the 60s,’ Keenan told The Wire magazine in 2009. ‘I felt umbilically connected with it because of my upbringing. It was the […]

The programme looks like a normal news broadcast at first. A series of ordinary people are filmed sitting in their living rooms or standing in parks, giving testimony in straightforward but subtly grave tones. They’ve all narrowly survived death after being struck by lightning. An expert is called on to explain how electricity enters the […]

‘We have not only cut off heads, as the Mensheviks and the Kautskys in all countries accuse us of doing; we have also enlightened heads. Many heads.’ This is Lenin, in the early 1920s, talking about the importance of ‘culture’ and education in the creation of a socialist society. It’s an example of Lenin’s brusque […]

Much has been made on the Western left, for good reason, about the Chilean artists and writers who were killed during the CIA-backed counter-revolution of September 1973 and its aftermath, or who devoted their work in exile to criticising Augusto Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship. Poet Pablo Neruda and musician Víctor Jara are rightly seen as martyrs; […]

The staging is neat. President Emmanuel Macron interrupts the night of the European elections to address the nation. He is right that the situation is serious: Renaissance, his centrist party, has just suffered a heavy defeat, garnering only 14.6 percent of the votes cast, a long way behind the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), which came […]

When the going gets tough TFG has had many bad weeks, but the last couple have been especially bad. Vice President Kamala Harris now leads in some national and swing state polls. President Joe Biden’s success in winning (hear that word, Donnie?) the release of prisoners held in Russia has TFG flummoxed. His “unmitigated caucasity” (as a friend put it) in explaining blackness to the National Association of Black Journalists has neither won him friends nor expanded his voting base. Now the orange-hued, former wrestling promoter is trying to brand Harris as dumb and — xenophobia being his signature chokeslam — as failed “Border Czar Harris.” In TFG’s dim mind, the Biden approach is both weak and dumb. Actual data undercut that argument, Greg Sargent observes. Not that facts mean anything on the right. Border crossings have dropped for the fifth straight month per unpublished data obtained by CBS News and The New York Times, Sargent explains:  These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way.

Zionism Observer's relentless efforts reveal the IDF's use of Alkasheff Gaza to spread fear and disunity among Palestinians as the site resurfaces despite repeated shutdowns. Kit Klarenberg investigates.

The post Zionism Observer vs IDF: The Battle to Shut Down Israel’s Toxic Website Extorting Gaza’s Civilians appeared first on MintPress News.

I receive my Call to Adventure in the form of a text. It is not from a real person. It states that a prescription beginning with INS is ready.

The Call to Adventure comes at an inconvenient time. I am inhabiting my Ordinary World, which means I am having a snack and don’t have pants on. Plus, it is 7:58 p.m. and I am pretty sure the CVS cut more staff and reduced its hours. Also, I am not feeling 100 percent and it is only Tuesday. I must Refuse the Call.

A Mentor appears. He says his name is Lodi. He looks like a very famous mentor, but not too much like him, since that mentor’s name and likeness are proprietary to LucasFilm International. I tell him that I have been to Lodi, a lovely town in Bergen County, and in fact I think I dated a girl from there when I was in high school. He tells me this is all an unfortunate coincidence, that the girl was from Englewood, and that in any event we are late to Cross the First Threshold.