even at a public event, the cancel culture, or variation on that theme, work day and night to let the world know ‘we won’t tolerate any deviation from the expected decorum, no contentiousness please.

First — Gaza is burning:

‘What I find striking is that there are actually people out there who are enthusiastically—what was it Yeats wrote, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”—and angrily declaring their support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in the Palestinian territory as you see the broken bodies of babies and women and men and the wholesale destruction of civilian life in Gaza. To see people actually organizing to support a perpetrator state against a defenseless civilian population and to hear the deeply racist ways that they are expressing that support, seemingly oblivious to the immorality of the positioning that they’re taking, is something that has hit me very hard.’

And the other thing that I think is unique here, that we have not seen perhaps since the McCarthy era, is the organized assault on human rights defenders in the United States.

But the fucking Americanos writ large DO NOT want to see, hear, speak, taste, smell the evil eminating from their own pores.

Speaking of

The Problem With Echo Chambers on Campus and Beyond

Bryan Stascavage, an Iraq War veteran, is a sophomore at Wesleyan University. He is on Twitter.

I think the unwillingness to have uncomfortable discussions at college is a recent development of the growing polarity in our society. And the effect of this polarity is pointing to the creation of stovepipes of thought, in which knowledge of valid opposing ideas has waned.

College campuses are not alone in this development. The stovepipes of thought have set up echo chambers where the range of acceptable discussion is narrow. Gun-toting right wingers? There is a round-the-clock source of information for those viewers, where all news is conveniently presented and analyzed to fit their world view. Liberal environmentalists have their own feed of filtered information.

Not only that, but a relatively small yet vocal and active group can sanitize discussion in those echo chambers by aggressively targeting dissenters, pressuring them to convert or leave. A salient example is the reaction at Wesleyan to my article on Black Lives Matter. Instead of engaging in discussion, a small group targeted the student newspaper for publishing an unpopular opinion.

Students are developing this idea further. Instead of being content with their own sanitized echo chambers, they are extending their worldview to the surrounding environment. These vocal activists are culturally terraforming the environment around them, using public shaming and soft threats as their means to keep voices they disagree with in check. The evidence of aggressive targeting by these activists already exists. Speakers have been uninvited, comedians have sworn off performing at campuses. This is cultural terraforming in action.

When they graduate, they will take these values to their respective industries. And if the recent upheaval surrounding my college newspaper is foreshadowing, the news media industry may have a problem on its hands.

The end result will be even more polarization in America, with societal fault lines growing increasingly contentious and unproductive.

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How Big Media Facilitate Israeli War Crimes in Gaza: Corporate media’s dehumanization of Palestinians, lack of historical context, and repeating hearsay as fact make the current tragedy unintelligible to Americans

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I wrote this after attending a gray whale talk: They Collect Data — As the World, well, Burns, Churns, Empties, Dies, Denudes!

In Newport, Oregon, around 25 people. I guarante NOT one there reads Substack (they do not know what Substack is, I guarantee).

I just received this email a week later:

Hi Paul,

Thank you so much for your help with the tech problems last week. Mac and PC are too different to work together I guess.

I did want to mention that some audience members expressed feeling uncomfortable due to the exchange with the scientists. We all have our own opinions and it’s fine to share them in the group. But we need to do so in a non-aggressive way, watching our language, tone, and body language. We had a handful of people who are not members of the ACS nor had attended our meetings or events before, so we need to provide a welcoming environment where questions and discussions are respectful. Thanks for understanding.

J***, American Cetacean Society!

I didn’t perseverate over it, for sure, but just a few minutes ago I broached it with someone I respect, but he’s a male and reads my stuff, and he is also ashamed at how shallow and cancelling the New New McCarthy America is.

Let me be clear — I did not stand up, raise my voice, or cuss once, or what have you. You can read what I said in the piece cited above.

The effect of this note is obvious, and I have to doubt that the person who wrote it would have not idea that I would take the short “watch you language, tone and body language” warning, not as a warning, and that I might not want to fool around or mess with these people in this venue.

Done deal:

Well, J***, I am sure you might have anticipated a variety of responses from me concerning this rather disconcerting email.

Look, I understand you are representing ACS, and you listen to folk tell you all sorts of things, i.e., what they think of presentations, who they want as speakers, and other topics. Great. That’s your role as chapter president. But to tell me that a “handful of people” who are not members who were there and who would somehow think my questions and comments would somehow reflect upon you, the speaker or the ACS, and be unwelcoming to them, is really pushing it.

This was announced as a public event, as you always seem to present these talks in the NNT. I am not going to go over what tone, body language, and language they or you might be referring to.

In this climate of young people not participating in events such as the ACS’s talks, any sort of policing an audience member’s tone and discussion is pathetic. And to top off this apparently knee-jerk reaction to someone in the “crowd” (me) who might have some point to make or some discussion to posit but who is then labelled as aggressive just illustrates how and why you, and these nameless folk, might be rendering the ACS and talks like these as irrelevant. Truly, when there are so many vibrant and far-ranging discussion points tied to environmental and ecological issues which might be discussed organically in a “science” talk.

Your email has had the effect of rendering me basically unwilling to put up with a “thought, body language and tone policing force” in this time of absolutely crucial political and funding issues around “the sciences” needing airing.

I suppose I should believe your email comes from good intentions, and that may be true, but the effect is chilling to me. That will have to be the end of the discussion on this topic. I will of course not be engaging in/attending ACS events in the future.

I know you just might be able to understand why I would rather not be in a room with thought and language police as well as basically thin skinned folk who seem unable to live in a world where even off-the-wall sort of comments or what have you are broached in their cloistered world. That’s sad, really, and their loss, but then, I could go on and on projecting what sort of people would even bother to mention my comments or “disrespectful” tone to you. Did they not realize you might be contacting me, and that the effect would most probably be me being completely turned off by such shallow and deriding comments about me?

Surprise: I have no interest now in attending these talks you all put on. Congratulations!

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It’s telling how Abby Martin states she feels so fucking guilty for her safe home for her kids and husband with the genocide unleashed. Puts the entire “save the whale” issue in perspective.

Of course, we must not go on as if the world is the same before OCT. 7.

Trump, Biden, the lot of them want more killing. So, I say, screw the scientists.

Shock?

You want entire lagoons filled with dead sardines and mackrel? And don’t expect to see or hear science maybe making some projections.

Officials in Japan have admitted they are struggling to determine why hundreds of tonnes of fish have washed ashore in recent days.

Earlier this month, an estimated 1,200 tonnes of sardines and mackerel were found floating on the surface of the sea off the fishing port of Hakodate in Hokkaido, forming a silver blanket stretching for more than a kilometre.

On Wednesday, officials in Nakiri, a town on the Pacific coast hundreds of miles south of Hokkaido, were confronted with 30 to 40 tonnes of Japanese scaled sardines, or sappa, which had been observed in the area a couple of days earlier.

Local fishers scrambled to collect the fish, fearing their carcasses would lower the oxygen content of the water as they decompose and damage the marine environment.

So, unlimited energy sources, hot rock boxes, black matter!

Both the Andora and Rondo CEOs attended the COP28 climate summit in Dubai where the power of Middle East petrostates was enough to weaken the global commitment to end fossil fuels. But both men came back enthused by the interest in their ideas and the dozens of other breakthroughs in clean energy.

“If you’d asked me five or 10 years ago, I would have said, I’m not sure we have everything we need to decarbonize,” Ponec said strolling through the solar array that powers his battery while a gas-fired power plant sat quiet and idle nearby. “But today, we have the tools we need. We just need to deploy them. The transition is inevitable. It’s going to happen. And if you talk behind closed doors to most of the people in the fossil fuel industry, they’ll say the same thing.”

At some point in the dawn of humanity, a smarter-than-average homo sapien moved a rock away from the fire for warmth and invented the thermal battery.

Over a million years later, as humanity struggles to evolve past fossil fuels in time to avoid climate collapse, that simple idea is making a modern comeback – and hot rocks are hotter than ever, literally and figuratively.

“(The rocks) in the box right now are about 1,600 degrees Celsius,” Andrew Ponec said, standing next to a thermal battery the size of a small building. That is nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, “Hotter than the melting point of steel,” he explained.

But what makes his box of white-hot rocks so significant is they were not heated by burning tons coal or gas, but by catching sunlight with the thousands of photovoltaic solar panels that surround his prototype west of Fresno. (source: These hot rocks can glow brighter than the sun. They could also help spell the end of fossil fuels)

Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a new technology that promises to make commercial nuclear fusion reactors one step closer to reality.

Nuclear fusion is a process that creates energy in the same way as our sun does. It involves the smashing together of two atoms with such force that they combine into a single, larger atom, releasing huge amounts of energy along the way.

Unlike nuclear fission—the nuclear reaction that is currently used in the energy sector—fusion does not create radioactive waste. It produces three to four times more energy than fission and does not release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unlike burning fossil fuels. Fusion is also a very fragile process that will shut down in a fraction of a second if the correct conditions are not maintained. Therefore, there is no risk of nuclear meltdown from this reaction.

Ahh, those scientists!

“Aid? What aid? We hear about it and we don’t see it,” said Abdel-Aziz Mohammad, 55, displaced from Gaza City and sheltering with his family and three others, about 30 people in total, at the house of friends who live further south.

“I used to have a big house, two fridges full of food, electricity and mineral water. After two months of this war, I am begging for some loaves of bread,” he said by telephone.

“It is a war of starvation. They (Israel) forced us out of our homes, they destroyed our homes and businesses and drove us to the south where we can either die under their bombs or die of hunger.”

The head of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said on Thursday hungry people were stopping its aid trucks to take food and eat it straight away.

In northern Gaza, which bore the brunt of Israel’s military offensive during the first phase of the war, between Oct. 7 and the start of a truce on Nov. 24, intense combat has resumed and barely any aid has got through since the truce ended on Dec. 1.

Youssef Fares, a journalist from Jabalia in the north, said staple goods like flour were now so hard to find that prices had gone up by 50 to 100 times compared with before the war.

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Sorry, but I am zero concerned about audience members’ sensibilities and thin-skins and quick to be insulted personalities. I fucking hope more and more people follow this fucking line.

Yep, there are so many Americans — some close to me — who will hands down take the side of the people at the event and believe the bullshit of bad tone, bad language, aggresiveness and bad body language.

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America has always been a land of linching mobs, spinsters, good Germans, Narcs, peeking through the curtains sad sacks. There are so many damaged people, so many deranged by Trump or Biden, so blasted by the slag furnace of death to intelligence media, education and those acceptable lines from which to draw those acceptable pieces of bullshit art.

Uncomfortable? As I always say — fuck the USA. Empire of Lies, Wars, Terror, Chaos and a land of Amnesia. Read this Santa story!

Ho, ho — no.

Quoting: ””””

Middle East expert loses job as Sag Harbor’s Santa over views on Israel

A Middle East expert and longtime resident was axed from his position as his small Long Island community’s Santa Claus this year after he blasted representatives of a Jewish organization for spreading “propaganda” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ken Dorph, a longtime resident of Sag Harbor, had been growing out his beard for the Chamber of Commerce’s Visit with Santa Claus — in which he would ride on board a fire truck to the village’s iconic windmill, where he would greet young children on Dec. 9.

But just three days before the event, Dorph, 70, received an email from the president of the Chamber of Commerce, telling him he was relieved of his duties, the New York Times reports.

She did not offer any explanation for the abrupt change in plans, only telling Dorph he was too outspoken for the role.

But apparently when word got out that Dorph would play Santa, members of a local synagogue started bombarding event organizers with emails objecting to his selection as jolly old St. Nick.

They claimed he made people uncomfortable during a Nov. 30 talk at the synagogue about the war in Israel when he sharply criticized speakers from the American Jewish Committee — a nonprofit advocacy group that supports Jewish people and Israel — from his seat in the audience.

But apparently when word got out that Dorph would play Santa, members of a local synagogue started bombarding event organizers with emails objecting to his selection as jolly old St. Nick.

They claimed he made people uncomfortable during a Nov. 30 talk at the synagogue about the war in Israel when he sharply criticized speakers from the American Jewish Committee — a nonprofit advocacy group that supports Jewish people and Israel — from his seat in the audience.

“He was very antagonistic, belittling them,” said Rona Klopman, 85, a member of the temple who attended the event virtually but was not involved in the email campaign.

“I could see why people would not be comfortable with him as Santa, who is supposed to be this jolly fellow trying to keep peace in the world,” she told the Times.

At the event, titled “Answering Tough Questions on Israel,” Dorph frequently voiced his frustration with the American Jewish Committee’s hour-long presentation, according to a video obtained by the Times.

He emphasized that he was heartbroken by the war with Hamas and “desperately wanted it to end,” but objected to the speakers’ characterizations of several topics — including the exact wording of Hamas’ charter and the relevance of the West Bank settlements to the current conflict.

Everything reportedly came to a head during a question-and-answer session, when Dorph cried out: “Honestly, you two could have just been propaganda for the Netanyahu government. I am appalled.”

Some audience members were left visibly shaken, while the speakers tried to politely but sternly engage with Dorph — who has spent more than four decades working in the Middle East as a consultant in the financial sector.

Dorph later acknowledged he should have just left the synagogue when he became upset with what he was hearing, but said he had expected a forum for debate given the title of the presentation.

Instead, he said, it felt more like a workshop designed to equip pro-Israel advocates with responses to difficult questions they might face.

“I never said a curse word or stood up or threatened anyone, but it was hot under the collar, and I regret that,” Dorph told the Times.

In the aftermath, Ellen Dioguardi, president of the Chamber of Commerce, said she received 11 emails from synagogue members asking her to “find a different Santa” — the most complaints the chamber had ever received.

Some parents even claimed they would not come to the event if Dorph were involved.

Amid the backlash, Dioguardi told the Times: “We were able to find an anonymous Santa Claus free of distraction, and had a great event focused on the simple joy and wonder that is the holiday season.”

But Dorph still seems to be irked by the change of plans.

“I did feel ambushed … and of course, I am deeply disappointed by those who thought that canceling Santa — behind my back — was a valid response to my speaking out against the AJC propaganda (which it was),” he wrote on Facebook.

“I would have preferred to continue this discussion over drinks.”

He added that “a reporter who saw a video of the interchange at the temple said that it was ‘less heated than the average Sag Harbor [Zoning Board of Appeals] meeting,’ but of course we know that in the Hamptons, questioning variances for pools and pickleball courts raises emotions akin to accusations of ethnic cleansing.”

Dorph told the Times he now hopes to educate people about Arab cultures, perhaps by creating a website or a podcast.

He also said he was proud to stand out in the community of under 3,000 residents — among other things as a gay, white father of two adopted black children.

Dorph then went on to point out that this was not the first time St. Nick lost his job,

“In ‘Miracle on 34th Street,’ Santa was canceled because he was drunk,” Dorph said, referring to the classic Christmas movie.

“I was canceled because I said something in a completely independent setting.”

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Kris Kringle replaces the intoxicated Santa in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and does such a good job that he’s hired as a store Santa. Unlike most department store Santas, he doesn’t shill for his employer. In his first day on the job at Macy’s, he sends a harried mother (Thelma Ritter) to Schoenfeld’s Department Store, which he says is the only place in town that has the toy her son wants. Kringle keeps a very close watch on the toy market, after all. She’s flabbergasted that a department store Santa would send her to a competitor, but she’s delighted, too, and Kringle’s helpfulness creates an enormous wave of good publicity for Macy’s.

The only problem is that Kris believes he really is Santa Claus, and tells everyone so. When the event director who hired him, single mother Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara), finds out that he’s been filling the head of her six-year-old daughter, Susan (Natalie Wood), full of such nonsense, she’s upset, and pulls his employment card. It lists his address as Brooks’ Memorial Home for the Aged, 126 Maplewood Drive, Great Neck, Long Island, but his date of birth says “As old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth,” under “place” he has written “North Pole,” and his eight tiny reindeer are listed as his next of kin.

Watch your language, tone, aggressiveness: Starbucks New York union Protesters rally against Starbucks union-busting outside one of the global coffee chain’s locations in Great Neck, New York on August 15, 2022.

Watch that fucking tone, body language and aggressive use of the term GENOCIDE!

Craig Mokhiber: I have to say, it doesn’t surprise me. The U.S. has marched in lockstep with Israel throughout a whole series of attacks by Israel on Palestinian civilian populations for decades now. I’ve been saying in regard to the current situation, the U.S. is committing legal complicity as defined by the Genocide Convention. Complicity is a specific crime under the [1948 United Nations] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In the past, when genocides were emerging, the sin of the U.S. was that it didn’t do anything to stop them.

The U.S. is committing legal complicity as defined by the Genocide Convention.

When the genocide was unfolding in Rwanda, the case I saw very closely in my previous job, the U.S. gave instructions to its diplomatic missions not to use the word genocide. They understood that if they used the word, they would be compelled by international law to take action to stop it. They didn’t want to.

In this case, it’s not just that they haven’t taken action to stop it. They have been actively participating in it. While these atrocities have been happening in real-time, the U.S. has been arming, financing, and providing intelligence support and diplomatic cover—even repeatedly providing the veto to stop a ceasefire so that Israel can continue to carry on these acts. That amounts to complicity under international law. And it explains why there is now legal action taken by the Center for Constitutional Rights to hold them accountable for this specific crime in the Genocide Convention.

Biden is doing what every Democrat and Republican has done going back decades. In this case, where Israel’s actions amount to genocide, it is particularly remarkable because, one, it is exposing U.S. government officials to legal action regarding genocide. Two, there’s no question that Biden is paying a very high political cost. He is getting ready next year for a competitive election, presumably against Donald Trump, where they were neck and neck. He has now lost significant support because he has lost votes as a result of what Americans view to be his unconditional support for Israel’s activities. He’s lost support from the progressive Jewish community, from Arab Americans, from Muslim Americans, from African Americans, from young people. All of them lined up against the Israeli onslaught. I can’t imagine that Biden’s people were not aware of these political costs.

But the degree of political capture of U.S. political institutions is so absolute now that they don’t even care what the American people think. Polls have shown that the vast majority of Americans—Republicans and Democrats—oppose this onslaught and want a ceasefire and a cutback on aid going into this process. If you look not just at the rhetoric of the members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and the State Department and the entire Executive Branch on the one hand, and the position of the American people on the other hand—before you even get into a moral position or a legal position which are all on the other side as well—you see just how wide the disconnect has grown between what the American people want—human decency, morality, human rights, international law—and the position of elected officials and the administration.

There are people who benefit from this—weapons manufacturers, technology companies, and Israel lobby groups who are all in, 100%—who are using all of the influence they have, pressure, carrots and sticks, to make sure that the U.S. remains completely aligned with Israel’s ethnic purge of the Gaza Strip.

Oh, watch that language and body movements:

On November 9, Israeli police arrested Jerusalem history and civics teacher Meir Baruchin after he posted a message on Facebook about his opposition to the killing of innocent Palestinian civilians. Police seized his phone and two laptops before interrogating him on suspicion of committing an act of treason and intending to disrupt public order. After being in jail for four days, Baruchin was freed but lost his job as a teacher and is still facing charges.

“These days Israeli citizens who are showing the slightest sentiment for the people of Gaza, opposing killing of innocent civilians, they are being politically persecuted, they go through public shaming, they lose their jobs, they are being put in jail,” says Baruchin, who says if he had been Palestinian, he would have faced more violence.

We can only hope the sun finally gets us!

Sun’s strongest solar flare in years knocks out radio frequencies.

LINK.