Global

I need some help here. The Trump presidency and the “America only” future he’s hawking to the public like the world’s most arrogant snake-oil salesman feels beyond my ability to address right now, even though I consider doing so my life’s work.

But sometimes the news of the day simply feels too absurd, too strange, to seriously address, like Trump’s comment the other day as he sat next to Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House: “You know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate.”

Many Americans will be relieved to learn that US Embassy employees and their families in China can no longer have “romantic or sexual relations” with local Chinese. It is certainly a move long past due which will keep us safer together with those 125% tariffs that we will be hitting the Chinks with. But beyond that good news, it has been another interesting week in the fantasy world created and sustained by President Donald J Trump. This week included a not-so-surprise visit by the Chosen Lord of the Universe Benjamin Netanyahu, ruler of a pathetic little country called Israel, which is growing bigger as, with American support, it absorbs all of its neighbors one at a time. Netanyahu was in town to give Trump his marching orders for the next month or so, and it was no surprise that both men agreed that the two million or so hapless Palestinians still hanging around Gaza have to go and the sooner the better.

I recently read an article by investigative historian Eric Zuesse, author of America’s Empire of Evil, that began “One of the core features of nazism (not the German political Party but its core ideology) is racism, which allows some ethnicities (or “races”) to be advantaged by law, and other ethnicities to be discriminated against by the law — it is, at its very core, AGAINST equal rights under law.” Well, I was intrigued by what was packed into one long sentence due to recent developments in the United States and I am sure that none of my regular readers will be surprised by my view that a lot of what has gone wrong in the United States and elsewhere has been due to a racist Israel and its powerful lobbies.

In just 24 hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominated Eli Sharvit as the new chief of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, only to quickly retract the nomination.

 This episode highlights the lack of coherence in Netanyahu’s leadership, reinforcing the perception that decisions at the highest levels of government are made impulsively and without a clear plan.

Sows in Factory Farm Gestation Crates, courtesy of CIWF USA/Jo-Anne McArthur /We Animals Media Non-Commercial use

The blades move ever faster, slicing through flesh—animal and human alike. Workers, pressed shoulder to shoulder in a factory of blood, push through exhaustion, through pain, through the deafening machinery, knowing that slowing down isn’t an option.

Pigs scream, their bodies trembling from stress and drugs, their legs buckling beneath them. Some won’t even make it to slaughter—collapsing from heat, injury, or sheer terror before they reach the kill floor.