Global

Excuse me as I ponder eternity — briefly.

Like it or not, this is the essence of . . . uh, aging. As I wrote a year ago: “. . . once you actually hit it — that three letter word, ‘old’ — watch out: ‘An aged man (as Wiiliam Butler Yeats pointed out, as he sailed poetically to Byzantium) is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .’”

Nonetheless, hooray for my good fortune! I’ve been dancing around at age 77 for a while now, and before I start complaining about the aches and pains that come with it, I have to acknowledge — indeed, revere — the mere fact of making it this far. So many people don’t, due to the random will of fate, but also due to the hell of war, which remains humanity’s cancerous addiction. How can I complain when the bombs I help pay for are killing children?

A squeamish soul, I’ve avoided seeing any of the various stage or screenpermutations of the London-set Sweeney Todd saga, which - according to A Noise

The pathetic State of our World: Greed, Corruption and the Genocide by
Mazin Qumsiyeh
posted at
https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2024/02/pathetic-state-of-our-world.html

The UN Security counsil will try to pass a resolution calling for a
ceasefire (really should be called a resolution to end the genocide) but
the US is expected to veto it (thus violating its own laws again as wel as
the genocide convention)

What is happening in Palestine now? I see some 300 videos every week that
break my heart. Here are some of the less graphic ones.

Day 130 of the ongoing genocide: Total killed 28340 (+some 7,000 under the
rubble to be added) and injured  67984. 72% are women and children. This
also does not count the thousands dead from lack of food, clean water,
medicine and from infectious diseases and cold exposure. Desperate
situation for over 2 million people in Gaza strip. Meanwhile as you expect,
the news is mixed. Some groups speaking out and acting to end the genocide
while others work to accelerate it. For example while UNRWA (
https://www.unrwa.org/) tries to do its mandate of humanitarian aid,
Israeli authorities with support of the complicit puppet western
governments are shutting its operations and hobbling it. And yes the
Palestinian authority is permeated with corruption like the Israeli
authorities. Both are like this by design with no democracy or rule of
independent judiciary that serves everyone. In the case of Tel Aviv, the

"If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long," famed linguist and cultural critic Noam Chomsky wrote in an essay published in Z Magazine in October 1997. 

 The essay, entitled, 'What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", appeared before social media took off to the point it became essential to the formation of our modern culture. 

 Facebook arrived in 2004. A year later, YouTube was launched, followed by Twitter, now X. 

 With time, what may have started as creative or even juvenile digital phenomena became defining elements in our perception of ourselves, each other and the world at large. 

 Before the exponential growth of social media, the internet had numerous, but understandable, challenges pertaining to access, rules and regulations, financial viability, copyrights, social inequality and the like.