Global

Writer/director Michel Franco’s moving Memory is one of AFI FEST 2023’s most memorable movies. Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, who works at an adult daycare facility and is first glimpsed in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where the recovering ex-drinker participates in a 12-step program in Brooklyn. At a subsequent high school reunion, Sylvia has a strange encounter with Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), who she goes on to (wrongly) accuse of having sexually abused her when they were students. As it turns out, Sylvia has a history of incestuous sexual molestation, which likely triggered her substance abuse. Saul, too, has his own afflictions.

My first open letter was addressed to the people of Gaza https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2023/10/letter-to-gaza.html . It had hundreds of responses mostly asking us not to give up and asking for list of actions to do (these are available at ongaza.org and http://qumsiyeh.org/whatyoucando/ )

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand has been negotiating directly with representatives of Hamas in Iran to release 23 Thai hostages from Gaza, the largest nationality among kidnapped foreigners.

Thailand also expressed "outrage" against Israel's U.N. ambassador for showing the General Assembly a "horrific" video of Hamas purportedly trying to decapitate a Thai laborer.

The 1,400 Israelis and foreigners killed by Hamas' Oct. 7 cross-border attack include at least 32 impoverished Thai agricultural workers slain near the Israel-Gaza frontier, officials said.

Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thaivisin talked by telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the 23 Thai hostages and said on November 1:

"If there there is any progress, he'll phone me.  And if there are any demands involved he will also inform us," Mr. Srettha said, according to November 2's Bangkok Post.

In Iran's capital Tehran, meanwhile, representatives of Hamas held direct negotiations with Buddhist-majority Thailand's Muslim Sunni and Shia officials.

The subjugation and annihilation of innocent civilians, bombed into the dust of "collateral damage," does not support America, Israel or the West's claim for moral high ground and a path to peace.

On Tuesday, October 31, 2023, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bombed a Palestinian refugee camp with 100,000 inhabitants, producing a hellscape of casualties, 50 dead, 150 injured, with buildings in collapse at the periphery of  massive bomb crater.   The stated public intention was to kill a single Hamas commander.

There are two million Palestinians warehoused in the sliver of land 26 miles long and between 2-7 miles wide, a containment camp holding indigenous peoples of the region hostage, known as the Gaza Strip. 

Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which is estimated to have at least 40,000 members.  If the ration of 50 -1 holds up, that is 50 Palestinians will die for every Hamas member killed -- then every single Palestinian in Gaza would be killed.  This is not without possibility, perhaps the colonizers’ plan.

Gaza has changed the political equation in Palestine. 

Moreover, the repercussions of this devastating war are likely to alter the political equation in the entire Middle East and to re-center Palestine as the world’s most urgent political crisis for years to come. 

 Since the establishment of Israel, facilitated by Britain and protected by the United States and other Western countries, the priorities have been entirely Israeli. 

     ‘Israeli security’, Israel’s ‘military edge’, ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’, and much more, have defined the West’s political discourse on the Israeli occupation and apartheid in Palestine. 

 This bizarre US-western understanding of the so-called conflict, that an oppressor has ‘rights’ over the oppressed, has enabled Israel to maintain a military occupation over Palestinian Territories that has lasted for over 56 years.

We focus in the GREEP Zoom #155 on the in-your-face crisis at California’s Diablo Canyon nuke reactors.

While the 39-year-old Unit One is shut for refueling, a growing public movement demands the obvious—test this crumbling old nuke for embrittlement and much more BEFORE it’s allowed to re-open.

After four decades of blasting heat, pressure and radiation, Diablo’s Reactor Pressure Vessels are fried to the point of shattering like glass should they be flooded with coolant water in an emergency.

In other words….if the “brakes” are applied at uninsured Diablo during a major accident, the whole place will blow up.

Steam, Hydrogen and fission explosions will blast apocalyptic radioactive cloud into the steady breezing blowing south to Los Angeles.

Then it’ll go west into the Central Valley, then north to the Bay Area….and all across the continental United States.

LINDA SEELEY of the Mothers for Peace explains how her long-lived, incredibly persistent group is fighting to keep Diablo shut in the court system, regulatory agency and Public Utilities Commission.

We — by which I mean most of humanity — are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.

You know, violence is morally neutral — and thus, when the cause is just and sacred, go for it! Kill the non-believers. Make the world a better place.