I don't know for sure if it's true that the Biden admin okayed crushing Rafah as the "price" for not retaliating to Iran, but. If it is.

1. Morally horrific, obviously. Officially signing off on genocide for the 148th time, but with increased coldbloodedness because the people are so literally, inarguably trapped and kettled. Sent there for safety, to die. Milked for cash to reach safety, to be kept there, to die.

2. When people talk about how the relationship with Israel as it currently functions isn't even good for the US empire, this is the kind of thing they mean. Israel provoked Iran without warning or discussing with the US (which is generally what they're supposed to do for moves like that) and then turned around and used their response to Iran's response as the most obvious, almost childlike anchor-and-sway gambit. Oh, you want us not to do X? Let me go do something "worse" (from the US imperial perspective) so you'll agree to let us do it if we stop the new thing. Pets and toddlers pull this kind of thing and most remotely competent adults know not to give into it. Falling for that from a client state is classic crumbling empire flailing. Sick Man of North America behavior.

3. I had a third thing, but I'm too numb to remember.

April 12, 2024: A Small Psalm, Catherine Wing

A Small Psalm Catherine Wing

Sorrow be gone, be a goner, be forsooth un-sooth, make like a suit and beat it, vamoose from the heavy heavy, be out from under the night's crawlspace, call not for another stone, more weight more weight, be extinguished, extinguish, the dark, that which is deep and hollow, that which presses from all sides, that which squeezes your heart into an artichoke-heart jar and forbids it breathe, that which is measured by an unbalanced scale, banish the broken, the unfixable, the shattered, the cried-over, the cursed, the cursers, the curses— curse them, the stone from the stone fruit, let it be fruit, the pit from the pitted, the pock from the pocked, the rot from the rotten, tarry not at the door, jam not the door's jamb, don't look back, throw nothing over your shoulder, not a word, not a word's edge, vowel, consonant, but run out, run out like the end of a cold wind, end of season, and in me be replaced with a breath of light, a jack-o'-lantern, a flood lamp or fuse box, a simple match or I would even take a turn signal, traffic light, if it would beat beat and flash flood like the moon at high tide, let it, let it, let it flare like the firefly, let it spark and flash, kindle and smoke, let it twilight and sunlight, and sunlight and moonlight, and when it is done with its lighting let it fly, will'-o-the-wisp, to heaven.

--

Also: + you can’t be a star in the sky without holy fire, Frank X. Gaspar + Untitled [I closed the book and changed my life], Bruce Smith

Today in:

2023: How to Do Absolutely Nothing, Barbara Kingsolver 2022: Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you., Gabrielle Calvocoressi 2021: I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store, Eve L. Ewing 2020: Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space Station And a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico and All its Invisible Fishes, Jane Hirshfield 2019: Flores Woman, Tracy K. Smith 2018: The Universe as Primal Scream, Tracy K. Smith 2017: Soul, David Ferry 2016: Turkeys, Galway Kinnell 2015: He Said Turn Here, Dean Young 2014: I Don’t Miss It, Tracy K. Smith 2013: Hotel Orpheus, Jason Myers 2012: Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List, Andrea Carlisle 2011: Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think, Frank O’Hara 2010: The Impossible Marriage, Donald Hall 2009: The Rider, Naomi Shihab Nye 2008: from Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, John Berryman 2007: This Heavy Craft, P.K. Page 2006: Late Ripeness, Czeslaw Milosz 2005: A Martian Sends A Postcard Home, Craig Raine

Arnaud Montagard

Every time I see a duck I think to myself that I want to pick up that duck. There is a sort of quality of the duck that makes it feel like the act of picking up the duck would somehow be analogous to those strange videos where people use knives to cleanly cut through multilayered cakes. There would be a sort of accumulative act even without taking permanent possession of the duck. It would rather be more like pulling the lever on some ancient machine which makes a counter increase by one. The duck is the lever. I hope my meaning is clear to you all?

BREAKING: the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox have been put in a "Freaky Friday type of situation" until they can learn to appreciate each other's perspectives.

I always thought it was like an exaggeration when horse people would talk about how silly it was for anyone to think that riding a horse does not require any particular level of skill or balance or anything, or even that they "drive themselves" (???) but just the tags on the reblogs of that "can you ride a bike and/or horse" post from me alone are demonstrating how overconfident some people are in their (often entirely theoretical!) ability to stay on an alive and moving animal with a will of its own.

one thing about western indignation over martyrdom rhetoric ("the children never chose to be martyrs and it's disrespectful to hold their deaths as martyrdom") is that nobody in this kind of situation freely chooses to be a martyr. they either pursue martyrdom or it is inevitably brought upon them. in neither case does free choice play into the fact of death to the enemy. in this manner every death is subsumed into the resistance. that is the sense of martyrdom at work here.

“Yet I have been pondering not the English, prosecutorial witness, but the Arabic. In this, our, language, the verb to witness comes from the root شهد . This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. It is a word with many folds of meaning and history. It carries connotations not only of seeing, but of presence and proximity. To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.

Shaheed is the word Palestinians use to describe those lost to Israeli violence, a word which has drawn condemnation from American universities and press, who once again presume to know the meaning of Arabic-rooted terms, without bothering to investigate. They allege the word martyr glorifies death for death’s sake. But in this context, it should be read as honoring the truth these brutalized bodies speak. Their flesh, marked by colonial violence, makes visible the wild injustice they endured. Which is to say, their martyrdom tells us the truth about our world.”

Amtrak can u please come to Germany and fix our train system

We'll just make it worse, I'm afraid

Civilians from the Palestinian city of al-Ramleh, penned up in a barbed wire concentration camp by Zionist militia forces without food or shelter, awaiting their expulsion from their homeland. It is today known as “Ramla” in central Israel. Images source: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, by Ariella Azoulay.

[T]he American militarization of science would usher in a new era of ecological thought drawn from the notion of isolated landscapes permeated with nuclear radiation. […] Western colonizers had long configured tropical islands into the contained spaces of a laboratory, which is to say a suppression of island history and Indigenous presence. This generation of AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] ecologists embraced nuclear testing as creating a novel opportunity to study a complete ecosystem through the trace of radiation. […] [T]he Pacific Islands have long been fashioned as laboratories for western colonial interests, from the botanical collecting of James Cook’s voyages to […] structural anthropology. […]

The declassification of a 1957 memo from Brookhaven National Laboratory’s medical researcher Dr Robert Conrad, the doctor in charge of testing and caring for the hundreds of Marshallese exposed to radiation, has confirmed suspicious that it was the islanders as much as the environment that were subject to an AEC experiment. To his colleagues he wrote, ‘The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.’

Arguments like this appear elsewhere in AEC records. For instance, the director of the AEC Health and Safely Laboratory described neighboring Utirik Atoll in 1956 as ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’ but that it will be ‘very interesting’ to get data from the environment and islanders when they are returned there. Referring to genetic tests about the impact of radiation on fruit flies and mice, he observed of the Marshall Islanders:

‘While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than mice.’ […]

—

In claiming Micronesia and expanding the American exclusive economic zone, Truman tripled the territorial size of the United States. Although the land-base of Micronesia is 846 square miles, the oceanic territory, vital to US naval and airforce transit, represents three million square miles. […] With the advent of the far more powerful hydrogen weapons, the AEC in 1954 cordoned off an enormous area of the Pacific, banning the passage of ships or planes for 400,000 square miles. […] Estimated at one thousand times the force of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki […] [in] addition to spreading lethal levels of radiation over 5000 miles of the Pacific, Bravo’s fallout was detected in the rain over Japan, in lubricating oil of Indian aircraft, in winds over Australia, and in the sky over the United States and Europe. It caused the radiogenic illness of the crew of a Japanese freighter 1200 miles away. […]

When Rongelapese women began giving birth to babies without skulls and without skeletons (‘jellyfish babies’ and ‘grape babies’), infants with severe brain damage and missing limbs, scientists informed them that these miscarriages and defects were ‘to be expected in a small island population.’

Although scientists from the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine had ample evidence of the extensive radiological contamination of Rongelap, they allowed the islanders to return in order to deflect criticism of the AEC’s atmospheric testing program, and thus exposed the islanders to another 22 nuclear tests on Enewetak […].

—

Text by: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey. “The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific.” Cultural Geographies Volume 20, Issue 2. First published online 31 October 2012. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

Hey guys, I know there are a lot of really severe tragedies in the world right now and I in no way desire to push those aside, nor do I really want to load another thing onto people's plates, but anyone here in the US needs to be aware that on March 11, 2024, an agricultural company known as NEW Cooperative spilled 265,000 gallons (1500 tons) of liquid nitrogen into the East Nishnabotna River. This is the ecological equivalent of dropping a nuclear weapon into the river. Over a 60 mile stretch downstream of the spill its been a near total ecological wipeout for the river. So far, an estimate of 850,000 fish have been killed from this spill, and that's to say nothing for the insects, amphibians, reptiles and birds that relied on or lived in this river. It is literally filled with animal corpses. This river flows into the Missouri River and the impacts will likely continue to spread far past this 60 mile stretch. And this disaster has barely made local tv in Iowa, let alone national tv, despite the fact that 60 miles of river ecosystem were just wiped out in a way that may be impossible to recover from. And what's the punishment for this heinous act of destruction through negligence, you might ask? As it stands, its looking like a 6k fine from the DNR to the company. Not 600k. Not 60k. 6000 dollars. The maximum fine that the DNR can charge in Iowa is 10k unless they decide to take it further in court. That's why these spills are so frequent in Iowa: it's literally cheaper to eat the fines than it is to bother properly storing fertilizer. I don't know exactly what the proper course of action is here, or who needs to be contacted to enact change--I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable than me will chime in with that information--but at the very least, every one of us should know. Every one of us should make sure we don't forget this. And every one of us should blacklist NEW Cooperative fertilizer unilaterally.

Sources:

I'd also add that this type of rhetoric is both useless and actively unhelpful politically. Lead poisoning, COVID brain damage, whatever physical, biological, and yes ableist cause you want to assign to the existence and recalcitrance of your political opponents does not actually explain anything. Are all the children, most of them Black, exposed to lead in Flint growing up to be Trumpers? No! Did people exposed to lead poisoning in past decades and centuries - even if it did alter their thinking and behavior - hold the same types of opinions as the people you don't like today? Of course not, it was a different time. Which is exactly the point: people make political decisions based on situations. You cannot come up with some kind of deterministic relationship between a contaminant or an injury and a vote or an act of sabotage.

When you throw these bullshit accusations at your enemies you're both being ableist and simply declining to actually understand the political situation you claim to care about. It's a free "don't pay attention" token. It's literally biologizing and essentializing your enemies to explain why they're worse than you so you don't have to think about the fact that they don't agree with you. This is! In fact! Very fashy! It is not odd or surprising that this thought structure overlaps with ableist and frequently racist rhetoric, no matter how the person saying them identifies themselves politically!

My point here is not at all "oh we need to sympathize with conservatives so we can all come together." Absolutely not. It's that if you have no analysis of your opponents then you are lost. And this rhetoric is doing that to yourself on purpose for a fleeting moment of egoistic pleasure.

Reminder from someone with actual literal brain damage from a brain injury to stop fucking using "brain damage" and "brain injuries" as a means of describing someone whose opinions you don't like or deem as stupid.

It's ableist and offensive as fuck, and for some reason a lot of leftist people think it's okay to use. I've seen posts replying to right wing racists calling them "brain damaged if you believe this" and "do you have a brain injury? do you not understand X?". Just now I saw a beautiful post about fat people throughout history that was absolutely ruined by opening with "How do we break it to boomers with actual brain damage and nostalgic brainrot..." before continuing to say that fat people existed throughout history.

Brain damage does not make you racist. A brain injury doesn't make you stupid, or fatphobic, or unaware of history and politics. Stop fucking using my disability as a catch all to describe people you think are shitty. Y'all use it like it's a replacement for how people used to use the R-slur, which shows you learned absolutely nothing about why the R-slur was wrong to use and decided to throw in other disabilities instead. Fuck off and stop doing it.

(And don't do it with other disabilities either, because I know y'all do.)

I know a lot of people with brain injuries. They're smart, and funny, and compassionate. They learn about the world and care about social issues and wish they could go to protests if their disability won't allow them to. Are there right wing people with brain injuries? Sure, absolutely. But they are not right wing because they have a brain injury, and using any disability as an insult is still fucking ableist.

Tldr - stop using brain damage and brain injury as an insult. It's ableist and incredibly offensive.

Love, your local brain injured/brain damaged pal

"We'll be back to rebuild it" Gaza, 2024

Eclipse, ink and gelly rolls on 27x36cm paper.