Klein is lighting the way forward.
Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover…
“Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol, they are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.” - Naomi Klein
Human solidarity.
“Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” | Democracy Now!
Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Brooklyn on Tuesday when Jewish New Yorkers and allies gathered for what they called a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover…
“At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free… The Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”
I first watched Koyaanisqatsi sometime around 1990 and I was left speechless. I cried while I watched it and after.
Without words it tells the story of modern industrial human societies, particularly those of the Global North. A story of alienation, cruelty and destruction that was well underway at the time it was filmed and which we’ve seen continue at increased pace in the 40 years since. And, in 2024, it would seem that it is a story we will not deviate from.
Five translations of the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi:
“crazy life"“life in turmoil"“life out of balance"“life disintegrating"“a state of life that calls for another way of living”
In the years since I’ve watched it again several times as a kind of ongoing acknowledgement meditation. We are racing into oblivion.
“These films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It’s been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it’s not the effect of, it’s that everything exists within [technology]. It’s not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe …”
The trailer.
Palestinian solidarity protests and encampments are appearing on college campuses from Massachusetts to California to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and to call for divestment from Israeli apartheid. This week, police have raided encampments and arrested students at Yale and New York University….
Uptown in New York City, the encampment at Columbia University is entering its seventh day despite mass arrests of protesters last week.
Great to see these protests gaining momentum.
On April 22, 2024, inspired by the resilience of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University and other demonstrations around the country, students at Cal Poly Humboldt campus in Arcata, California occupied a building in solidarity with Palestinians, precipitating a showdown with police from throughout the region. In the following report, participants in the occupation describe what took place and what they learned.
According to a UN report published in September 2023 settler violence against Palestinians has been increasing for years. Of course the settlements are land theft and are illegal under international law.
Settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank – visualized | The Guardian
Settlers are Israeli citizens who live on Palestinian land. In most cases, this happens because Palestinians are prevented from accessing their land and are physically attacked by settlers. In a third of cases, Palestinian property is damaged by settlers.
The inquiry was instigated by Colombia and Chile, which together asked the court to set out what legal responsibilities states have to tackle climate change and to stop it breaching people’s human rights.
Religious extremists do not accept or respect boundaries. They want to control it all and this is just a taste of what they want.
With This Week’s Abortion Case, Supreme Court Faces Grim Reality of Overturning Roe – Mother Jones
Just weeks after the Supreme Court ended the Constitutional right to an abortion in the summer of 2022, Mylissa Farmer arrived at a hospital in Joplin, Missouri after her water broke at about 18 weeks pregnant. The doctors agreed that the fetus had no chance of survival and that she needed to end her pregnancy to avoid sepsis, hemorrhage, or even death. But instead of helping to induce labor or perform an abortion, they urged her to go to another state for care: Under Missouri’s just-triggered abortion ban,they couldn’t provide the care she needed until she was in labor or her health deteriorated and her life was in peril.
Most nations have resumed funding to UNRWA which is the main channel of humanitarian support to Palestinians in Gaza as well as Palestinian refugees across the region. But with no evidence the US Congress permanently banned funding to UNRWA agency.
The US and Israel: Genocide, war crimes, apartheid.
Alt headline: Israel expects the US to indefinitely and unconditionally support its war crimes, genocide, land theft and apartheid state.
Israel presses the U.S. to reconsider sanctions against IDF battalion
The Israeli government called on the Biden administration on Sunday in public and in private to reconsider its expected decision to sanction the Israel Defense Forces' “Netzah Yehuda” battalion for human rights violations in the occupied West Bank.
2024-04-21 07_22
I never noticed that when magnified some of the Calyptra (oval ends of sporophytes) look a little bit like long sharp teeth!
A new-to-me moss, Plagiomnium cuspidatum. Very pretty with smooth, thin leaves.
I posted earlier today that I’d seen a drop off in reporting on the famine in Gaza. The April 9 article from Human Rights Watch that I linked was reporting famine stats from April 2. I’ve not seen any more recent stats. We’re now at April 20 and articles like the following from the Guardian today continue to describe the famine as looming with little to no new information. Is this just the result of journalists being restricted from the area?
Famine looms, made worse by acute shortages of shelter, medicine and clean water. Almost everyone in the enclave now depends on donated food, after more than six months of war has destroyed homes and decimated Gaza’s economy.
Daily aid shipments are still not even half the minimum levels the UN says are needed to keep more than two million people alive.
Israeli authorities, the US and humanitarian organisations have all said that deliveries should return to prewar levels of about 500 truckloads of aid a day. On Friday, only 250 trucks entered the enclave, UN figures showed, and that was the highest in April.
After more looking I’m still finding little in the way of recent updates. Suddenly intentional famine as a weapon doesn’t matter? Or is everyone in Gaza getting food?
Gaza: Israel’s Imposed Starvation Deadly for Children | Human Rights Watch
Gaza’s Health Ministry reported as of April 1, that 32 people, including 28 children, had died of malnutrition and dehydration at hospitals in northern Gaza. Save the Children confirmed on April 2 the deaths from starvation and disease of 27 children.
Media reports of famine in Gaza have dropped to near zero in the past 5 days. So is the food suddenly flowing in or is it just the attention span of the media shifting to the Iran story? I did find this:
Germany and Israel argued heatedly over images from Gaza during their meeting in Jerusalem earlier this week, with Germany’s Foreign Minister contending the images fail to show the reality of famine in the enclave, Israeli media reports said Friday.
Earth’s record hot streak might be a sign of a new climate era - The Washington Post
The heat fell upon Mali’s capital like a thick, smothering blanket — chasing people from the streets, stifling them inside their homes. For nearly a week at the beginning of April, the temperature in Bamako hovered above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The cost of ice spiked to ten times its normal price, an overtaxed electrical grid sputtered and shut down.
With much of the majority-Muslim country fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, dehydration and heat stroke became epidemic. As their body temperatures climbed, people’s blood pressure lowered. Their vision went fuzzy, their kidneys and livers malfunctioned, their brains began to swell. At the city’s main hospital, doctors recorded a month’s worth of deaths in just four days. Local cemeteries were overwhelmed.
We need to support social justice in tech. Solidarity. An excellent post by Ben Werdmuller: No tech for apartheid is within its rights to protest | Werd.io
There is nothing honorable about supporting your employer as it commits or facilitates human rights violations. Protesting is the ethical thing to do…
Human rights should always trump business.
The US is isolated in its support of Israel, a state actively engaged in land theft, war crimes and genocide. Shameful.
The vote in the 15-member security council was 12 in favor, the US opposed and two abstentions, the UK and Switzerland.
Before the vote, diplomats said the US mission had been trying to convince one or two other council members to abstain, to mitigate Washington’s isolation on the issue…
Columbia University is colluding with the far-right in its attack on students | The Guardian
In her willingness to unleash state violence against student protestors, Minouche Shafik proved herself to be a willing ally to extremists…
To that end, she made only tepid defenses of academic freedom, instead favoring wholehearted condemnations of the protestors, assents to bad-faith mischaracterizations of the students as antisemitic and genocidal, and public, apparently on-the-spot, personnel decisions that removed some pro-Palestinian faculty and staff from their positions.
We could do with far more worker activism like this. Genocide in Gaza and also the climate emergency, both are crises that need more activism. Not easy to put one’s livelihood on the line in a protest.
Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military.
Arctic permafrost is now a net source of major greenhouse gases | New Scientist
Areas of permanently frozen ground in northern regions are now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb, causing the planet to heat even further, according to the first Arctic-wide estimate of all three major greenhouse gases.
Frozen ground, or permafrost, which underlies 15 per cent of the northern hemisphere and contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere, has shrunk in area by an estimated 7 per cent in 50 years as it thaws.