Global
In an important step toward the economic isolation of Israel due to its genocide in Gaza, Norway's Government Pension Fund Global has decided to divest from yet more Israeli companies.
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”
Imagine your town flattened overnight. No power. No water. Families trapped in rubble. For days, you wait for help that never seems to arrive.
The first thing that hit me in Gulfport, Mississippi, wasn’t the sight. It was the smell. Raw sewage from flooded treatment plants. Rotting seafood from capsized shrimp boats.
Diesel and gasoline spilled across the water. All mixed together in water so thick with debris it didn’t move like water anymore.
One of my shipmates handed me a jar of Vicks VapoRub. “Put it in your nose,” he said. “It’ll help.” It didn’t help enough.
A World Washed Away
What I saw looked like a scene out of an apocalyptic film. Whole neighborhoods gone. Homes ripped from their foundations and carried into the bayou.
Those that remained were filled with mud several feet high. I went building to building on search-and-rescue, marking walls with spray paint — an “X” and a number telling the world how many people, alive or dead, had been found inside.
It was devastating. It was lawlessness. And at times, it felt like we were the only ones left.
For GREEP Zoom #236, our beloved Poet Laureate MIMI GERMAN opens with her usual brilliant verse from “Where Grasses Bend."
We commemorate the passing of the great RICHARD LEE who founded Oaksterdam University, devoted to the cultivation of cannabis / marijuana & its immeasurable power.
We then get updated by "America’s Mayor” HEIDI LAMPERT about the battle for democracy in Waldport, Oregon, the Mayberry of the deep west coast.
Long-time activist MICKI LEADER shares her concerns about whether the 2026 election will be cancelled.
From radio host LYNN FEINERMAN we hear charges about so-called “Christians” who so deeply love to trash the preachings of the actual Christ.
Grassroots campaigner DOROTHY REIK warns that people with no human feelings are taking over the world with the view that the non-rich are a “burden.”
Legendary journalist DAVID SALTMAN tells of a network cohort who received a kidney from an anonymous donor whom he then honored with a legendary poem.
