Iran

 

As I understand it, there are some legitimate economic grievances that many Iranians have against their government.  This was also the case in the early days in the protests against Assad in Syria.  But as with Syria, so too with Iran.  USA and Israeli spies soon attached themselves to these protests and used them as a pretext to violently attack the government.  And if you don't think the US government would start killing dozens of protesters if US-Americans started murdering police officers, just look at that country today, when police there go ape-shit when US-Americans peacefully protest police violence.

Canadians Dying in Hospital Hallways

 

At the time, when I was first reading about Prashant Sreekumar dying in an Alberta hospital's hallway after having waited eight hours to see a doctor, somewhere in a comments section (I forget where) idiots were blaming Justin Trudeau.

Thwap's Reading Achievements for 2026

 Here's links to 2025 Books I & II.  2024's readings.  2023.  September 2021 to December 2022.

Anyway, a few days ago I finished Fresh Green Life by Sebastian Castillo.  

I knew that it was about a guy in his thirties who has been living in self-imposed isolation for a year who goes to a News Year's Eve party with friends and colleagues from his university days.  You can read the linked review if you want.  But I will just say that I enjoyed the book.  If held a few surprises for me as it went along.  I found the language of the narrator a little pompous at first.  I wasn't sure if that was intentional on the part of the writer to mock the narrator, or whether it was the writer's own voice.  Whatever it was, it faded and the rest of the time was smooth sailing.  In the end it was (for me) a hilarious send-up of the lives of academics.  [Here's a link to the narrator's favourite film.]

2026-01-18

Today I finished Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:

Pappe argues that Israel's creation involved deliberate ethnic-cleansing:

In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine ) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, beginning in the 1948 war for independence and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet , in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units organized by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the “architect of ethnic cleansing. The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948 and 1949, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. 

It's depressing reading Pappe's conclusion, written in 2006, about the slim possibilities for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, knowing how far from that outcome the reality in 2026 is.  

I didn't know much about the "war" between Israel and the Palestinians and other Arab states.  I had been raised to believe that the Arab states told the Palestinians to temporarily leave so as to be out of the way while they crushed the Israeli state as it was being born.  I never thought that their leaving justified not letting them return, but I learned a long time ago from Christopher Hitchens that there had never been such an order.

The reality is that the Palestinians were hardly armed.  They weren't happy with the UN partition plan but those within the borders of what was to be Israel had resigned themselves to living in "Israel" when the time came.  They weren't prepared for what the Israelis had planned for them.

Iraq, Syria and Jordan sent troops that never left the lands that had been allotted to Palestine by the UN.

Egypt sent a mostly untrained militia into Gaza with little preparation and bombed Tel Aviv and some other towns for a few days.

Jordan's King planned to take the West Bank for himself in return for allowing Israel to take the rest of all that it wanted.

And all of this ethnic cleansing had been planned long before WWII and The Holocaust.  

One [CounterPunch] Article Made Me Think About African Refugees

 

I have a lot of problems with some of the stuff that Jeffrey St Clair of CounterPunch writes and publishes.  But this is a good article: "Global Complicity: Who Kills in the Congo?"

Rather than delivering prosperity, Congo’s extraordinary mineral wealth has produced a “resource curse.” Competition for coltan, cobalt, gold, and diamonds drives violent conflict, forcing miners, often children, into brutal, unsafe conditions while forests are cleared and rivers contaminated in the scramble for profit. In November 2025, dozens were killed when a bridge at a mine collapsed, a tragedy that illustrates how extraction proceeds with total disregard for human life. Because the richest deposits lie in the eastern provinces, these territories have become the epicentre of militarization, where armed groups, militias, and even state forces battle for control while communities are displaced and terrorized.

The environmental destruction deepens the crisis: forests are cleared to reach mineral deposits, mining releases vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen dioxide, and toxic mining waste poisons rivers and lakes, wiping out agriculture and fishing, the very means by which people survive.

The humanitarian consequences are catastrophic. By 2025, there are over 6.9 million people internally displaced, the highest number in Africa, 1.2 million refugees in neighbouring countries, and 28 million people suffering from malnutrition. Furthermore, more than 3 million people in eastern Congo are in the emergency phase of hunger. Children as young as five work in dangerous artisanal mines, digging by hand, inhaling toxic dust and risking suffocation or burial in tunnel collapses. Conflict-related sexual violence affects thousands, with almost 40% of sexual violence survivors being children. Armed groups are committing gang rapes, abductions, attacks on hospitals, and unlawful detentions, abuses that may constitute war crimes. This is not simply a story of conflict happening near minerals; it is a system in which minerals fund the conflict, and conflict makes the minerals easier to steal.

It does a good job of identifying the international scumbags who contribute to this nightmare, this infrastructure of horror and misery.  But the facts presented about poisoned waters and soil and violence and desperation got me thinking about the waves of refugees from Africa trying to reach Europe.

Right-wingers in both North America and Europe are constantly bloviating about "hordes" of black and brown people flooding their shores.  They believe that "globalists" are deliberately trying to dilute the white "race" for various nefarious reasons.  They appear completely ignorant of the true causes of refugees, which is often wars and economic catastrophes caused by international capitalism.

When we look at the tent cities in North American cities that are now looked upon as the new normal, with right-wing voters and their politicians blaming the victims of rapacious oligarchy, and we reflect that this is happening in the core countries of the international capitalist system, we have to wonder about how bad things are in the exploited periphery.

So, in the Congo, there's about 7 million internally displaced people. Libya was turned from the highest quality of life in North Africa to a failed state.  There's the wars in Sudan and Ethiopia where tens of millions of people live.  There's the horrors of US-American and Israeli barbarism in West Asia.

I've often mentioned the theory that the right-wing brain is more prone to fight or flight than it is to rational thinking.  But poverty and uncertainty and the social ills caused by these can turn brains into reactive, right-wing versions.  This causes more people in the core countries to respond to refugees with aggression and fear rather than with rational analysis and compassion.

Just one more example of how decaying capitalism creates fascism.

Bondi Beach?

 

I didn't really have anything original to contribute at the time.  I thought that I would wait until more information came out.  But (and correct me if I'm wrong) it turns out that the Jewish organization that hosted the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach was an intensely zionist [read: murderously racist/fascist] outfit, led by a guy, Rabbi Eli Schlanger, who gleefully celebrated the mass-slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children.  Which, if our mainstream news organizations weren't garbage outfits filled with cowards, ignoramuses, hypocrites, careerists and other forms of useless scum, would make this whole thing seem almost like poetic justice.

Australia has strict gun laws and the son of the father-son team of shooters was already being monitored by Australian intelligence for his ties to the rabid, fundamentalist Islamic ISIS.  One could wonder whether this was a deliberate failure on the part of the Australian authorities.  But most police, intelligence agencies, etc., are generally filled with right-wing, stupid, boasting, delusional imbeciles.  They are often lazy and careless.  Don't ascribe to malice what can be blamed on stupidity and incompetence.

Would the psychopaths in Mossad have willingly sacrificed their own people for a propaganda coup, as Israel's reputation deservedly drops into the sewer?  It's possible.  But Schlanger was, I've heard, rather high up in importance both in Israel and Australia.  I don't think the zionists are going to reap that much benefit from the death of a fat, racist, pig who giggled about Palestinian toddlers being shot in the head.

Of course our nauseatingly hypocritical shit-for-brains automatons in the West are blathering about how some guys who started associating with ISIS in 2019 were really influenced by anti-genocide protests starting in 2023 when Israel began its deliberate genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. In the diseased brains of scum like Mark Carney, Australian PM Anthony Albanese, and all the other assortments of "leaders" in their "international community" this is just "antisemitism."  And "antisemitism" is the irrational, bigoted hatred of Jewish people simply for being Jewish.

Someone could be a genuine antisemite (like Charlie Kirk, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or John F. Kennedy) and they would therefore more easily find the murderous racism of Israel to be objectionable.  Other people, primarily but not exclusively, on the political left, have no objection to Judaism, and do not criticize Israel except for its murderously racist apartheid colonialism.  And I mention this about Leftists because in my decades of association with leftist causes and groups I hardly ever hear any talk about Israel's behaviour or Israeli-zionist influence in other countries as being based on the inherently evil dispositions of Jewish people and their terrifying, satanic control over world events.

No. Ninety-nine point some number way above five percent of the time, I only hear criticism of the Israeli state for actions that would be condemned no matter what country was doing them.  It's when I go to right-wing sites (as I tend to do more now as centrists and progressives have let their brains turn to shit with regards to Russia-Ukraine) that I read racist drivel about hook-nosed international bankers taking over countries and sexually molesting Christian adolescents because that's just the way they roll.

Nonetheless, the idiotic thesis that protesting genocide is antisemitic if it is Israel committing the genocide, that an organization that cheered and assisted that genocide, including the revolting figure of Rabbi Eli Schlanger were just innocent people who never meant any harm to anyone, that two guys associated with ISIS since 2019 didn't even know that Israel has been conducting a genocide since 2023 and they attacked that Hannukah celebration simply because they hate Jews, ... all of that insane garbage is how our political leaders and our mainstream media have framed this story. 

Interesting Take [s] On "Free Speech"

 

From a right-wing dude who thinks Biden stole the 2020 election and that Trump is genuinely fighting the Deep State, ... a look at sanctions (travel bans) on European bureaucrats and NGO leaders who are censoring US Americans.

Yesterday for the first time the US announced sanctions against European officials associated with the EU’s Digital Services Act and UK’s Online Safety Act, and specifically for their overreach in attempting to censor Americans extraterritorially on US soil.

These censorial attempts were made via a dense web of NGOs which collaborated with various US institutions, including the Biden administration, in “flagging” American content as well as creating ‘black lists’ of American “offenders” earmarked for deplatformization and other forms of illegal free speech suppression.

The whole thing is a farce.  Performed by monsters and morons.  The European Union is run by neo-liberal shitheads.  Trump's administration is fascists and perverts and plutocrats.

The European Union "un-persons" anyone who speaks out against their war mongering and the Trump MAGA hypocrites arrests and imprisons and deports and oppresses anyone who critcizes any number of things, such as Israel, "Christianity", US-American "values", and so on.

Can't say that I'm all worked up over whatever Trump's dispute with the EU is.  Can't say that I long for a return to the times when those assholes were walking hand-in-hand with scum like Biden, Blinken and the Clintons.

Fuck 'em all.  They all flew on Jeffrey Epstein's plane.

Signs O' the Times

 

If I find a link, I'll put it here.  McDonald's is finding that their low-income customers aren't coming in as often.

McDonald’s continues to lose low-income customers - The …

Nov 5, 2025

McDonald’s is working to hold on to its low-income customers. The company said there’s been a double-digit decline in traffic across the industry from lower-earning consumers....

Place for a link to this story.  Airlines are expanding business and other higher-class areas because coach flyers aren't flying as frequently.

Airlines bet big on luxury cabins as economy passengers feel the pinch

And maybe a link will go here.  Las Vegas isn't providing so much free stuff because the traffic from the poors who consume such stuff isn't big enough.  [Okay.  That link blames Trump's fascist border insanity for a drop in international visitors <especially Canadian> but I don't think foreigners are the main demographic in Las Vegas.  Something I read somewhere said that Las Vegas was trying to make their city a much more exclusive destination.  Therefore, start charging the hoi polloi more for stuff.  And to fuck with the employees hired to deal with the former high volume.  Las Vegas consumes too much water anyway.  So all those fired casino workers and the local jobs they supported can all migrate to the next big job-creating center.