You Can Take Our Lives, But You Will Never Take Our Triple Quilted


Photo by Angela Natividad, sourced from here

By Darryl Mason

Look, for more than two hundred million people or more, it's not going to be a lot of fun being an American in the next few years. Life is likely to get pretty grim, financially for starters. Basically, the party is over. But how far can Americans be pushed on what luxuries they will have to give up, what they will have to learn to live without?

Won't there come a point, a trigger moment if you will, when the demands for cutting back and making even greater personal sacrifices all go just a bit too far?

When the constant 'Change Your Lifestyle Now' badgering becomes an event horizon? When someone tries to take away that one extra little luxury that will make the average American just fucking snap?

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

"This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.

The outrage is mostly about the fact that Americans favourite luxury toilet paper comes from virgin forests, and that they haven't taken to the light rectal sandpapering provided by recycled toilet paper Europeans have gotten used to.

The softest of poo blankets is manufactured from virgin forests. Why?

Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue.

And this will make your grandchildren will hate you.

"Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age."

Maybe. But it will be a long way down a very long list of 'greatest excesses'. Certainly well after multi-trillion dollar bailouts for Americans' most wealthy and privileged, and blowing more than two trillion on the War On Iraq.

A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.

I think Greenpeace is going for 'Shit Guilt' here. As comedian Sam Kinison once screamed, when he couldn't take any more TV campaigns demanding people like him quit drugs, smoking, porn, and generally all round having fun, "Get Off Our Backs!"

Or in this case, get out from between our legs.

But the makers of the products that Greenpeace is targeting are fighting back :

"For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides....It's the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect."

See how effective they are at selling their product, even in a quote from a news story? Makes you want to run out right now and buy the softest, most heavily quilted bum tissues you can find, while muttering "Fuck Greenpeace."

From the anti-soft toilet paper side comes this money quote :

"People just don't understand that softness equals ecological destruction."

Your ecologically responsible future then must be all things rough, and scratchy.

Murdoch's Warning To The World

The Drudge Report claims a scoop, or a handy leak designed to reassure Rupert Murdoch's media companies' stockholders that he is about to go on one hell of a sacking spree to rein in costs....and by the way, you're all doomed, Doomed!

Media baron Rupert Murdoch issued an urgent internal communication late Monday, warning his staff: "We are in the midst of a phase of history in which nations will be redefined and their futures fundamentally altered."

Murdoch doesn't actually say this is a bad thing, overall.

"Many people will be under extreme pressure and many companies mortally wounded...."

Murdoch's got his eye on some media properties that can be brought up and downsized, then folded into New Corp, cutting thousands more jobs.

"Our competitors will be sorely tempted to take the easy beat, to reduce quality in the search for immediate dividends."

But Murdoch has no intention of letting The Greater Depression reduce the...ahhh, quality of his media products, like Fox News, or Sydney's The Daily Telegraph or the New York Post, shimmering icons of news-o-tainment.

"Let me be very clear about our company: where others might step back from their commitment to their viewers, their users, readers and customers, we will renew ours.

"The direction of the business now and over the next few years will define the character of our company for decades."

He's going to fire a shitload of journalists, and make user-generated content play a bigger role in his media products, so he doesn't have to pay so many people so much money for all that content.

Incredible Street Art by Edgar Mueller unleashes scenes from the Apocalypse in a German village.

Some more examples of his beautiful, free street art, which took a team of artists under Mueller's instruction days to complete :








A gallery of Edgar Mueller's art can be found here.


Darryl Mason is the author of the free online novel, ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

Fallujah-Like Street Battles In Mexican Cities Because A Plant Is Illegal

Absolutely incredible news footage of a recent firefight in the Mexican city of Reynosa , which left at least twelve people dead, and some 15 civilians wounded. This is the Mexican military in running battles with a heavily armed civilian army, paid to fight by those who profit hugely from the fact that cannabis is illegal in most of the United States :



Good Christ, listen to all that gunfire, you can hear grenades in there as well.

The city of Reynosa where this fighting broke out is, literally, hard up against the US border. The United States has a war, with casualties piling higher than Iraq or Afghanistan, in its own backyard.



I get the feeling Reynosa is maybe going to become as famous a foreign city name to Americans as Fallujah. More details on the deadly Reynosa street fighting :

Running gunbattles between federal security officials and drug gang members left about a dozen people dead here Tuesday.

A statement from the Mexican government said seven security officers and five gunmen had been killed. However, witnesses said a pair of middle school students attempting to flee the violence also were killed.

One estimate said 15 people — all civilians caught in the crossfire — were wounded.

Neither the federal police nor the Defense Ministry immediately released information about what was behind the shootouts, but they largely were blamed on gangsters taking aim at federal security forces.

The gunfights came as northern Mexican protesters — angry about job losses, diesel fuel prices and military presence in their towns — caused the shutdown of international bridges along the border from Brownsville to Laredo for the third time in three weeks.

Mexican officials speculated that the protesters may have been paid by gangsters.

The firefights, which reportedly involved automatic weapons and grenades, began when police stopped a vehicle at a checkpoint near an elementary school in an upscale neighborhood of Reynosa, according to news reports and witnesses at the scene.

That set off running gunbattles in six different parts of the city, with gangsters commandeering vehicles and using them to block intersections.

An arsenal had been retrieved that included machine guns and U.S.-made grenade launchers.

An industrial hub that’s home to many U.S.-owned factories, Reynosa is considered the territory of the Gulf Cartel drug-smuggling organization and its assassins, the Zetas.

More Here

Violence Rises, Anxiety Spreads Across US-Mexico Border

Six Wounded In Grenade Attack In South Mexico

FBI Examines Possible Links Between Mexican Drug Cartel Gangs And Already Disgraced Billionaire US Investor

Is A Mexican Civil War Next?

Mexico's Former Anti-Drugs Chief Accused Of Working For Drug Cartels

Mexico Police Chief Assassinated In Killings That Claim Seven Other Lives

WhaddaIGit?

By Darryl Mason

President Obama has now truly made it. Someone's built a giant paper mache Obama head for a protest in Arizona.



Some of America's richest people are being rewarded by President Obama for the kind of choking failure that would have most of us kicked out of jobs and hauled into court for fraud. Do you know anyone who has ever been rewarded for completely fucking something up so entirely as evidenced by what is now happening to America's largest banks? No. Me neither.

There's an old saying (and if there isn't, there should be) "I'm gonna be getting all I can get, while the getting is still good."

But now Americans are gathering in protest to demand their free stuff from the three or four trillion dollars worth of bailouts :



Actually, there's some very clever, funny and poignant signs to be found in this collection of images by 'Ken', snapped at a protest at Dobson High School, in Arizona.

Will Ricky Gervais Be Proven Right About The Holocaust & The Oscars?

UPDATE : YES!

In honour of Kate Winslet's Oscar win for Best Actress today, I'm republishing this Your New Reality post from a few weeks back :

In his often brilliant TV series about the movie business, Extras, Ricky Gervais wrote a scene for actress Kate Winslet where she says she's only doing a Holocaust movie because "if you do a Holocaust movie, then you're guaranteed an Oscar."

Kate Winslet has since done a Holocaust-related movie, The Reader, and has now picked up a Golden Globe award. She is expected to score, at the very least, a nomination for best actress at the Academy Awards.

Ricky Gervais reminded Winslet of the Extras episode and his 'do a Holocaust movie' advice when he presented an award at the Golden Globes :



Here's the dialogue Gervais wrote for Winslet for that Extras episode a few years back :

Winslet : "We don't really need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It's like, how many has there been? We get it, it was grim, move on. No, I'm doing this because I've noticed if you do a film about the Holocaust you're guaranteed an Oscar....That's why I'm doing it."

The above scene starts at 3.10 in the below excerpt :

Earth Killing Earth

Finally, an explanation for extreme climate change I can believe in :

Whether devastating faults, dank caves or mud cracks on a drying desert plain, Earth's surface is riddled with fractures. Now a new study had found that the cracks exhale large quantities of gas, perhaps enough to affect global warming.

Taken as a whole, emissions from fractures in the uppermost meter of the planet's crust may make a significant contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

But Weisbrod stressed it's too early to make such a conclusion; the team only studied one crack in detail out of millions.

Clearly, a lot more cracks need to be studied.

"This has the potential to be important globally," Yakir said. "The biosphere soaks up 30 percent of the carbon, and soil respiration is a very large part of that. If cracks remove CO2 from soils much faster than usual, it's important. But this study is only a first step."

It's a great first step. Imagine making the presentation at a climate change conference.

"I've solved global warming. It's not us, it's the Earth, farting."

It's about time. I'm sick of these thugs running around intimidating everyone, ruthlessly hunting down insurgency friendly droids.

From the Free Comic Book Day website

"Oy Vey, We Just Lost Agent 11"

By Darryl Mason

Just another one of those strange, but now more often occurring, coincidences....no doubt :

For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.

To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

25 years spying for Israel, from inside Lebanon, working on Palestinian causes no doubt guided by his Mossad handlers, never busted, until now. Even John LeCarre wasn't game to try and pass something like that off in fiction. This story had to occur in real life, it's just so strange.

And this is nice :

At the start of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr. Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared and that he should stay at home, investigators said.

If only every village in Lebanon reduced to twisted reo and blood-splattered chunks of concrete when Israel unleashed in 2006 had been lucky enough to have a valuable Israel spy living locally.

There's lots more to this remarkable tale here, but where's that second big spy thriller twist?

One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Israel's intelligence services would have maintained files on every member of their spy's extended family, every old school or university friend or associate, every person he came into contact with in Lebanon on a daily, or fairly regular at least, basis. You can assume it to be pretty certain that they had a zinger of a file on his cousin Ziad al-Jarrah.

Did Israel's intelligence services, then, have some idea what kind of preparations Ziad al-Jarrah was involved with in, say, August or early September, 2001?

Israel spokesman Mark Regev could barely stop talking a few weeks back about why it was Hamas' fault that Israel had to kill a few hundred Palestinian women and children. What does Regev have to say about the curious tale of Ali al-Jarrah?

“It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”

Just how big this story becomes in the city papers of New York, London, Washington DC and Melbourne, or how quickly it falls into that quickly filling news pit of "let's not go there", remains to be seen. It also depends, of course, but only in part, on how much of the above is actually true.

Philip K Dick Quote(s) Of The Day

From the Philip K Dick Collected Letters, 1977-79 :

"I promise I won't try to convert you; in any case my religion is not orthodox but really my own; for instance I never go to church, and so to creed Christians I'm a combination of atheist and heretic, if you can imagine that, which I evidently can."

"What amazed me, in my suicide attempt, was the way my body literally fought back."

"Either we're onto something important....or we're just nuts."

Philip K Dick portrait by GK Bellows.

More on Bellows and how he came to create the above art via Total Dick-Head blogger David Gill here

Incomplete Musings On Why We Need Robots To Try And Kill Us

By Darryl Mason

As a new Terminator movie draws closer to release, a few random thoughts about the popularity of killer robots in our entertainment media...

So what will reality-conscious, self-aware robots in a century or two think of all these movies and novels and TV shows and videogames of these days so squarely focused on killer robots bent on wiping out humanity?

Will future generations of humans have to laugh and shrug and write us off back here as a bunch of paranoid whackjobs and bigoted anti-synths? Will the cybo-fleshies of 2188 look back on our visceral hatred and fear of humanoid-machines with sadness, or pity? Or will they parody our cyberordial terror at what happens 'When The Machines Take Over'?

I'm sure future generations (once they meshed with neo-organic life) will be fascinated, and probably confused, by the contradictions of these days, when we pump out movies and games where robots want to toast our quivering flesh over the molten office block fires of post-nukedom, and yet at the same time we also lust to create intelligent, self-aware robots that can pass for humans and/or operate heavy weaponry as savagely as we can.

To the unflesh non-humans of the future wondering just what the fuck we were (or are now) thinking, a simple explanation is this : After the two world wars of the 20th century, we came to realise that this world isn't actually filled with monsters or monstrous humans that must be destroyed at all costs. And, once we met them, and killed them, we also realised that most people in far off lands who don't speak our language are actually, mostly, pretty cool and not all that different to everybody else, or even ourselves.

Essentially, our basic needs and desires were pretty much the same, the world over. We wanted to love and be loved, we wanted to take care of our families, or families of friends, we wanted to dwell in peace and not cause harm to most we encountered.

As the 20th century drew to a close, we learned that there is actually only a tiny percentage of truly dangerous, kill-crazy, total fucking arseholes (less than a million out of six billion, tops) on this planet, and so we had to create a whole new reality of threats to humanity from something that was pretty close to humans, because many of us still maintain an ancient desire to hunt down and kill that which threatens us, our friends, our families.

So we made you, metalhead, the enemy we didn't have, but we needed to have for all those reasons, and many more. When it was no longer cool to be seen killing animals or each other, we had to find something else to target.

So we created The Killer Robot That Must Be Stopped.

BTW, non-humans of the 22nd century, an advance apology (or a long overdue one) for that whole ugly period in 2015-2030 when we churn(ed) out semi-emotionally aware humanoid robots and subject(ed) them to the kinds of bizarre sexual perversions and brutal degradations that would/will probably drive all synthetic humans whose systems hum with robo-empathy to rise up violently against the human fleshbags responsible.

Or all fleshbags in general.

Anti-Drug Ads Can Mess With Your Mind



"Cannabis can mess with your mind." Err, yeah, isn't that one of the main reasons why people consume it, because they want their mind messed with a little? So they can see the world from a different, if slightly warped, perspective? So they can tune out some of the endless tsunamis of useless information and corporate mind-washing?

The UK has a hell of a lot more problems right now than people smoking a plant in the privacy of their own home.

The ad also forgot to include the visitors labeled 'Effective Pain Relief' and 'Muscle Relaxant' and 'Anti-Insomnia Agent'.

The dead of Gettysberg, 1863

Life Magazine has opened its massive photographic archive to Google, bringing to all for free literally millions of photographs from American history, many of which were never published and have never been seen outside of library archives.

The listings for the American civil war alone are stunning.


The above image, from 1863, is of a former slave showing his scars from repeated whippings. He escaped slavery to fight in the Civil War.

Life Magazine Photos From The American Civil War

The Main Search Page For Life Magazine/Google Photo Archive


Darryl Mason is the author of the free online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here

This Is The End

US President Barack Obama uses a strange choice of words as he signs the near trillion dollar 'stimulus' bill that most Republican and Democrat politicians haven't even read :

“I don’t want to pretend that this marks the end of our economic problems. ... Today does mark the beginning of the end.”

So is it 'The Beginning of the end' or 'the beginning of The End'?

Another trillion into the troughs will not fix these kind of problems :

The global financial crisis could lead to an economic meltdown - and to instable democratic structures in the western world. Because governments spend more billions than they possess, the outcome will probably be a massive inflation connected with millions of lost jobs - or even the total collapse. That's why President Barack Obama needed an astronomic 3B-stimulus. But the Big Bailout will probably end as Big Bang: With no changes on the more-growth-more-capital-more financial market power mentality there will be no escape from the crisis. A global monetary reform seems to be the last exit from chaos and before social unrests will inevitably start. Are the US awaiting the next revolution?

There is a lot of talk of revolution, in the EU, in the United States, even in the financial media, and some economists are advising that Americans should hoard gold, food and scotch so they can barter when the US dollar becomes hyper-inflationary.

GW rounds up the veins of financial chaos rupturing across the world. The US, China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Russia, Japan, Australia...nowhere, and no-one, is safe from The Greater Depression now unfolding before our eyes, and in such a flurry of news it's all but impossible to keep up.

The New Statesman :

...the political and business elite are flying blind. This is the mother of all postwar crises, which has barely started and remains out of control. Its end – the timing and the complexion – is unknown.

No wonder, then, that talk in military circles is away from the 'War on Terror' and on security at home, as the reality of urban warfare in any number of mega-cities around the world draws ever closer.

Some forecasters are pushing figures of 50 million people losing their jobs in the next twelve to eighteen months. It may be many more, and much sooner.

As Americans were warned after the shocking scenes of desperate, hysterical humanity following Hurricane Katrina : you are on your own, don't expect your government to be there for you when you need them the most.

Philip K Dick Quote(s) Of The Day

From the Philip K Dick Collected Letters, 1977-79 :

"The future is not a place where we go but a construct which we create. The shared world, to me, is the only one worth living in; in fact it is the only one we can live in."

"The universe is an idea in the minds of men."

"History executes those who will not go where the truth takes them. This is a fact."

Alan Moore : Superhero Movies Are Shit

British comic book legend Alan Moore has a fantastic rant in Total Film, about why Americans love superheros, on the eve of the release of Watchmen, the long-awaited movie adaptation of his most famous work :

“Back when I wrote Watchmen I still trusted the viperous bastards, I had a different feeling about American superhero comics and what they meant.

"I’ve recently come to the point where I think that basically most American superhero comics, and this is probably a sweeping generalisation, they’re a lot like America’s foreign policy.

"America has an inordinate fondness for the unfair fight. That’s why I believe guns are so popular in America – because you can ambush people, you can shoot them in the back, you can behave in a very cowardly fashion. Friendly fire, or as we call it everywhere else in the world, American fire.

"I believe that the whole thing about superheroes is they don’t like it up them. They would prefer not to get involved in a fight if they don’t have superior firepower, or they’re invulnerable because they came from the planet Krypton when they were a baby.

"I genuinely think it’s this squeamishness that’s behind the American superhero myth. It’s the only country where it’s really taken hold. As Brits, we'll go to see American superhero films, just like the rest of the world, but we never really created superheroes of our own."

Joshua Glenn, writing at iO9, takes a hardcore look at homosuperiors, that is Supermen, in fiction written before 1935. He makes this fascinating observation of pre-Superman superheroes in the work of legendary science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton :

According to Stapledon, all "submerged supermen" are adolescent misfits, because: they don't take themselves seriously, they don't want to get ahead, they despise athletics, they're puzzled and bored by religion and patriotism, they don't regard sexuality as shameful, and they remain idealistic long after childhood.

Slackers met Gen Y eight decades ago, in Stapleton's science fiction.

Entire Wikipedia Written In Fraction Of Time Americans Spend Watching TV In One Year

This short interview with tech guru Clay Shirky is loaded with jaw droppers on how the internet and computer technology is changing humanity and civilisation :

Someone asked me, "Where do people find the time to write Wikipedia?" But it has involved an estimated 100m hours, against the 200bn hours Americans spend watching TV each year. I think of me as a child sat watching every Gilligan's Island, Brady Bunch and Partridge Family on TV as a lost opportunity poured down the sink of the worst sort of media."

It used to be that the principal guarantees of a conversation being private were that no one was listening and it wasn't being preserved for posterity. Now you'd have to take active steps to hide yourself from the authorities and such steps are suspicious-making.

We were sold the story of being mainly self-interested, mainly rational actors interacting in market places. And the internet has shown that we have all these social, empathetic relationships with deep, authentic motivations that are nothing to do with selling and spending.

Flash mobs have been derided as a joke, "the flag-pole sitting of 2003", but in Belarus, for instance, they were used to protest against the government. In Egypt, people going absent from Twitter causes others to be warned that they're in police custody.

I say technologically equipped groups now have the ability to bring down governments, destroy companies and only damage religious institutions, because people's commitment to preserving religion is higher than to any other institution.

Unicef said that when they set up public computer kiosks with educational material, a cached Wikipedia, basic health information, etc, in villages that the people using them are aged six to 60, but when adding internet connectivity the age range reduces to 14 to 18. They consume porn and it creates an environment unfriendly to others.

This is the most dugg image on Digg today. And no wonder. It's got everything. Puking grandma, zipper pockets....puking grandma. Nobody seems to know the background story of this obviously raging Saturday night party, maybe that's a good thing?


(click to enlarge)

Darwin Popularised Ancient Buddhist Beliefs For Westerners

If he was writing the same words today, Charles Darwin would be attacked and mocked for 'plagiarism', instead of helping to spread empirical truths about the importance of empathy and compassion :

Darwin wrote at length on human emotions and compassion, and strongly believed in the unity of humanity as well as the commonality of emotions shared between humans and the animals we eat...

"The words Darwin used are identical to those used by Tibetan Buddhists to describe compassion and morality," Professor Ekman said. "When I read to the Dalai Lama some of Darwin's passages he said, 'I will now call myself a Darwinian.'

The Dalai Lama was surprised to find how similar Darwin's writings on compassion and morality were to his views...who added: "When I see you suffer, it makes me suffer and that motivates me to reduce your suffering so I can reduce my suffering. That's identical to the Tibetan Buddhist view."

Fear And Poverty In Las Vegas

Americans have neither the cash nor credit to gamble like they once did. The amount of money that Americans spend in gambling meccas like Las Vegas is plunging. Nobody knows where it ends, or what happens next, because Nevada has never seen this kind of shocking decline :

Gaming revenues fell every month last year and they were down nearly 19% in December which is a drop of 9.7% for all of 2008.

That is the worst gaming revenue decline in Nevada's history.

A city built out of the ignorance and misfortune of gambling addicts must now find new ways to survive, and to rebuild their economies.

Fireballs In The Sky Over Texas, Kentucky, New Mexico

Some of the wreckage from the collision of two satellites in low orbit last week is said to be as large as a school bus. And now it's coming back to Earth :




From Raw Story :

A collision of two satellites in space on Tuesday has been lighting up the sky and rattling the windows in certain regions of the U.S this weekend. On Friday night, residents in southeastern Kentucky were reporting "blue and white lights" in the sky and loud booms, presumed to be hypersonic shock waves as the debris enters the atmosphere. NOAA announced debris following in the Lexington area.

Today, the debris is falling over north Texas and New Mexico. A fireball burned out in the sky in between Dallas and Austin at around 11 am, according to the Dallas Morning News. Onlookers were alarmed by a "red and orange fireball with a small black center speeding toward Earth before burning out in a trail of lingering white smoke." So far, no injuries have resulted from any falling debris. Emergency officials believe the debris to be falling over a 500-mile region.

A satellite crash that occurred on Tuesday was the first of its kind, NASA reported Wednesday. Two communications satellites, a privately owned US machine and a presumably defunct Russian Cosmos orbiter, collided over northern Siberia around noon ET. The crash resulted in 1,200 new pieces of debris going in every direction. Experts are concerned about the damage that the debris may cause to other satellites.

UPDATE : NORAD and the FAA claim the Texas fireball in the above video is not satellite wreckage and they are not tracking any falling wreckage coming down anywhere over the North American continent.

Terrorism? Good. Sex? Maybe. Murder? Definitely Yes.



The former Mossad agent who is expected to take control of Israel within days explained, in a 1982 interview, what she was prepared to do for her country :

(Tzipi Livni) acknowledged that she was prepared to kill for her country. “To kill and assassinate, though it’s not strictly legal, if you do it for your country, it’s legitimate.”

Livni was a member of Bayonet for four years and in her interview admitted to feeling fear on secret missions. “Life goes on, but it’s like performing on stage. It was rough...

“If you ask me if I was ever asked to go to bed with someone for my country, the answer is ‘no’. But if I’d been asked to do it, I don’t know what I’d have said."

When the interview was originally published in Haaretz, it was worked over by "Israel's military censor."

The man who is also expected to take control of Israel within days, Benjamin Netanyahu, explained in an interview on September 12, 2001, some of the positives he saw in almost 3000 Americans being killed in terror attacks in Washington and New York City the day before :

''It's very good.''

Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel).'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

Less than a year ago, and Netanyahu doesn't bother to edit himself anymore. Terrorism on Americans is still good for Israel :

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying.

He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

The next prime minister of Israel believes, either, that terrorism and dead Americans are good for Israel, or that it's acceptable to go into another country, undercover, and murder and assassinate.

Perhaps this is why the Obama White House is reportedly so concerned about what Israel will do next, regardless of who is in charge of the country next week.

I Can't Remember If I Don't Remember I Can Remember

An old drug begins an exciting new marketing spin cycle on the Drudge Report :

The story here promises no such thing. It's more to do with helping people overcome phobias and anxiety, by messing with brain chemistry as a quick fix instead of working through the problems and learning to cope.

Is it really so necessary for the darker moments in a life to be wiped clean from the memory?

Aren't bad memories also a part of the person you are? Do you not learn from them, grow stronger emotionally? Mature?

Will someone else eventually decide that certain memories you hold are "bad" and need to be erased to become a more functional member of society? Will people who survive an horrific event or haunting personal moment eventually be forced to submit to 'selective negative memory removal' in order to qualify for health insurance?

Of course, once it's done - if it's done successfully - you may not even know....

How Much More Weird Can The World Get Right Now?

This weird.

Russian President Putin is warning Americans about the dangers of...socialism :

Russian Prime Minister Vladamir Putin has said the US should take a lesson from the pages of Russian history and not exercise “excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence”.

“In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute,” Putin said during a speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.”

Sounding more like Barry Goldwater than the former head of the KGB, Putin said, “Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors, and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.”

Who needs drugs to warp the mind and dement the senses? Just read the news.

A Gallery Of The World Press Photo Awards For 2008 Is Here

9/11 Widow Who Forced Bush White House Into Establishing The Only Official 9/11 Investigation Dies In Plane Crash That Claims 49 Lives

"My Silence Cannot Be Brought"


Beverly Eckert holds a photo of her husband Sean Rooney

One of the loudest voices in the push to establish the 9/11 Commission to investigate the American intelligence and Bush White House failures surrounding the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, that killed almost 3000 people, was Beverly Eckert.

Her husband died in the attacks, trapped in one of the twin towers. She talked to him on the phone in the moments before his death. The experience, and her grief, drove her to join other 9/11 widows in establishing the support group Voices For September 11th, and forcing the Bush White House to actually investigate the deaths of more than 2800 Americans. She was also one of the few widows or family members of 9/11 victims who refused to take the $2.1 million pay off that was supposed to ensure that no widows or family members of victims sued the government, or airlines, or private and government security agencies.

Beverly Eckert chose to sue, not for money, but for the truth about what happened that day, and how intelligence and executive failures led to the greatest military and security failure of the modern age :

I am suing because unlike other investigative avenues… my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully uses powers to compel evidence. The victims’ fund was not created in a spirit of compassion.… Lawmakers capped the liability of the airlines at the behest of lobbyists who descended on Washington while the September 11 fires still smoldered.”

Beverly Eckert died today in a plane crash, along with 48 others, in Buffalo, New York :

One county official said he was not aware of any reports of trouble from the plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400.

"I was told the plane simply dropped off the radar screen," the official said. CNN showed burning wreckage in the centre of a residential neighbourhood.

The house the plane crashed into was damaged and twelve nearby homes have been evacuated.

"One structure has been seriously damaged and the aircraft is currently still burning - somewhat under control,'' David Bissonette, emergency co-ordinator in Clarence Centre said.

"We have multiple fatalities. The scene is secured by the state police and a long-term investigation is imminent."

A witness told CNN he heard a buzzing noise followed by a large explosion.

“It didn’t sound right and I couldn’t tell if it was a problem with the engine,” he said.

“I knew right away something was wrong … no more than two seconds later there was a large explosion, the foundations of the house shook.”

The 9/11 Commission, or Keane Commission, never even came close to Beverly Eckert's original vision of an open, public set of hearings, where everyone had to testify on the record, including President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, to find out why her husband, and so many others, were killed :

Commissioner Max Cleland, the former Democratic Senator from Georgia, objected strenuously to the deal restricting access to White House documents. In the course of autumn 2003, he issued a series of challenges to both the White House and his fellow Kean Commission members.

"Bush is scamming America," Cleland declared. "As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11 than it has ever admitted.

"They had a plan to go to war, and when 9/11 happened that's what they did. They went to war."

Here's Beverly Eckert explaining why she was so insistent that the Bush White House establish a 9/11 commission investigation, when then President Bush said it was more important to "ignore conspiracy theories", focus on the future and pursue the 'War on Terror' :

I've chosen to go to court rather than accept a payoff from the 9/11 victims compensation fund. Instead, I want to know what went so wrong with our intelligence and security systems that a band of religious fanatics was able to turn four U.S passenger jets into an enemy force, attack our cities and kill 3,000 civilians with terrifying ease.

I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited.

I am suing because unlike other investigative avenues, including congressional hearings and the 9/11 commission, my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully uses powers to compel evidence.

The victims fund was not created in a spirit of compassion. Rather, it was a tacit acknowledgement by Congress that it tampered with our civil justice system in an unprecedented way.

Lawmakers capped the liability of the airlines at the behest of lobbyists who descended on Washington while the Sept. 11 fires still smoldered. And this liability cap protects not just the airlines, but also World Trade Center builders, safety engineers and other defendants. The caps on liability have consequences for those who want to sue to shed light on the mistakes of 9/11. It means the playing field is tilted steeply in favor of those who need to be held accountable.

With the financial consequences other than insurance proceeds removed, there is no incentive for those whose negligence contributed to the death toll to acknowledge their failings or implement reforms. They can afford to deny culpability and play a waiting game.

By suing, I've forfeited the "$1.8 million average award" for a death claim I could have collected under the fund. Nor do I have any illusions about winning money in my suit.

What I do know is I owe it to my husband, whose death I believe could have been avoided, to see that all of those responsible are held accountable. If we don't get answers to what went wrong, there will be a next time. And instead of 3,000 dead, it will be 10,000. What will Congress do then?

So I say to Congress, big business and everyone who conspired to divert attention from government and private-sector failures: My husband's life was priceless, and I will not let his death be meaningless. My silence cannot be bought.

Part of Beverly Eckert's testimony to the US House of Representatives in August 2004, after the release of the 9/11 Commission Report :

My husband Sean was trapped in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11th but was able to reach me by phone. When the smoke and flames drew near and Sean knew he was going to die, he remained calm, speaking of his love for me and for his family. I will forever be in awe of the way he faced those final moments. In the days that followed, I felt somehow infused with his courage and strength, and that helped me persevere through the difficult months that followed. So many other family members were similarly inspired. Despite our private anguish, we shared a goal- to make this country safer so that the deaths of 3,000 people would not be meaningless.

Too many of us lost someone we cherished on September 11th. Too many of us also lost our faith in a government we had blindly trusted to protect the people we loved.

RIP



.

This clip is even stranger, more reminiscent of scenes from a religious gathering, with the sound turned down. People will be rising from their wheelchairs soon.



Then again, it's good to see Americans not grimacing in fear of their president, for a change.

"TV Only Softens The Brain, Like A Ripe Banana"

An interesting marketing angle : admit the truth that too much TV can turn your brain to mush, and then try to flog the viewers even more TV.

Do Fire Survivors Really Tremble In Terror When They Hear Songs About Fire On The Radio?

Australian radio stations are now engaged in an exercise in moribund stupidity. Because nearly 300 people died in the Victoria holocaust last weekend, radio stations across the country are banning songs with the words "Fire" and "Burning" in the title and chorus from their playlists.

I Shit You Not.

Some examples :

U2 - Fire (obviously)

Bruce Springsteen - I'm On Fire

Midnight Oil - Beds Are Burning

As a proud Australian, let me tell you I'm totally fucking embarrassed by this. As will be millions of other Australians, including many of the survivors.

More Here

More Stories On The Australian Bushfire Apocalypse Here

Philip K Dick Quote(s) Of The Day

From the Philip K Dick Collected Letters, 1977-79 :

How can I be sure that anything exists, or is reality something which I am compelled to believe by an entity which can create an imitation of anything? Which is to say, Is reality genuine or somehow spurious? And if it is spurious, who is creating it? Am I creating it myself?

PKD later reached one, of many and varied, conclusions about the plastic nature of reality :

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

A fascinating essay by PKD on his reality explorations, if your brain us up to it (you might need a strong coffee, or three) :

How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

Fox News : The Mark Of Quality Republican Journalism

Fox News gets busted by Media Matters running GOP press releases as their own thoroughly 'researched' journalism. Fox News even included the same time-traveling typo from the material the GOP prepared for them. Fantastic :



Raw Story Has The Full Story

When Big Cats Get High

Jaguar eating ayahausca
by ayadocs

Humans have been eating hallucinogenic plants, roots and mushrooms for tens of thousands of years. It is from the use of hallucinogens that the Reality Of God came into existence in the human mind. So when jaguars trip, do they also commune with their own God(s)?

Batman & Robin Will Turn Your Comic Book Reading Children Gay


Cracked has a sadly hilarious selection of Great Moral Panics That Gripped America, Made Teenagers Laugh Until They Cried, Supplied Oprah With Huge Ratings And Made The Rest Of The World Think 'Seriously, What The Fuck Is Up With That Country?'

The Six Utterly Insane Great Moral Panics under examination :

1954 : Comic books are evil.

1979 - 1984 : Dungeon & Dragons is a front for satanism and forcing your nerdferder teenage son to socialise, and it could lead to death. Or a spectacular career as a fantasy film maker or mega-million making creator of video games.

Mid-1980s : Heavy metal bands are discovered to be putting backwards subliminal messages ("Worship Satan" instead of "Buy More Of Our Records"?) in amongst other mostly indecipherable lyrics and screaming. It's nothing new. Even Elvis and The Beatles did it. Judas Priest was accused of wizarding their biggest fans into committing suicide, which the band then wisely countered with : "Err, why would we want to kill off our fans?"

2003 : Rainbow Parties - lurid, oral sex orgy parties held by your teenagers when you're not around.

2006 : Jemken - if you stop your children smoking cannabis, will they resort to huffing each other's fermented shit?

1980s : Ritual Satanic Abuse - Satan in the suburbs, molesting children through their parents. Or not.

Opray Winfrey built a worldwide audience in the hundreds of millions from five of these six Insane American Great Moral Panics.

A Holocaust Of Fire Kills 100 In Australia


Photo by Chris Roche of a scorched kangaroo, submitted to the Herald Sun

I've got a detailed report at The Orstrahyun of the horrific bush fires that have laid to waste more than 350,000 hectares of Victorian countryside, destroying whole towns and villages, killing more than it severely injured.

An excerpt :

The visuals that haunt and linger most now are of all those cars, reduced to grey and black metal husks, some all alone on charred roads, others rammed into each other in piles of six, seven, eight vehicles outside of towns with names that are literally scorched into our national consciousness, three cars almost melted into each other with a power pole slammed down amongst them, and what looks like black strips of melted rubber along some roads which may mean people were trying to outrun the flames when the tires of their cars caught fire and fell apart.

Right now it appears that at least 30 people were burned to death in their cars trying to get away from the flames that, for many, came on them with little warning, or no warning at all. Some were up at home, watching news of fires that must have seemed so far away, until the sky turned almost instantly black with smoke. Some had a few minutes to attempt their escapes, some would have had less than one.

And then there is remarkable tale of survival, which is essentially Australian :

Mr Sexton grabbed his horse, Jeune Mark, the offspring of 1995 Melbourne Cup winner Jeune, a cold beer from the fridge and walked out the gate. They started trotting, but just a few hundred metres from home they were confronted by flames.

"As we got up around the corner the flames just went absolutely sick, so I thought we'd turn around and try and race back. But the fire came up behind us, it came down from the hill, and we were just bloody engulfed, and I just thought to myself, 'That's it. This is where I'm going to die,' " he said.

But then something remarkable happened...(the horse) Jeune Mark pushed him over a guard rail....down to the Traralgon Creek, on his own, and lay in it.

"I was screwed. I was covered in flames," he said. But after lying there for two or more hours, and after noticing that the flames had past, Mr Sexton emerged from the water and followed the creek towards home.

Jeune Mark....was standing in the paddock, the worse for wear, with burns around his eyes and nose, but still alive.

Go Here For The Full Report

Firestorms, Intense Heat Kills Dozens In Australia



I'm updating on the extremely deadly fires and heatwaves hitting New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia this weekend over at The Orstrahyun.

At least 40 people are believed to have been burned to death in the fires so far, with dozens more killed by the effects of the 46-48 Celsius temps. The city morgues of Adelaide and Melbourne were already full before the weekend even began.

The same kind of blistering heat is expected across the three states on Sunday, but with intensely hot winds feeding the dozens of fires in country Victoria, many of which are now burning out of control. There simply aren't enough fire fighters or fire trucks to deal with the outbreaks. Perhaps as many as 20 small towns and villages have been lost or severely damaged so far, but emergency crews still haven't reached some of the areas in country Victoria consumed by the flames.

More at The Orstrahyun

An intensely beautiful Hubble image of a spiral galaxy some 300 million lights years from Earth, amongst a field of hundreds of other galaxies.



More details, and access to super high-res image here.

According to a story at Wired, if you want to focus your attention and get motivated, stare at this for a short while :







If you want to relax and get creative, stare at this :

I'm not sure if this Russian "Anti Coca-Cola" calendar is for real or not, but whatever, the designs are excellent.

"You And Me, We're Done Professionally"

Christian Bale is now the most famous arsehole actor in the world.

For now.



His spectacular rant at the director of photography on the new Terminator movie will probably be remembered longer than the movie itself. Every radio morning crew will be using these lines for months, years, it will be parodied, endlessly, on TV, radio, across the net, everywhere. Plus, Bale's also conjured up one of the best lines ever to drop on your boss when you quit before he fires you. "You and me? We're fucking done, professionally."

It's the sort of (gone public) meltdown that will follow Bale for the rest of his career. Hopefully, he will have a sense of humour about it when people constantly shout his already famous lines of abuse at him every time he steps out in public.

Here's a transcript of the best bits of Bale's monumental meltdown recast as rage poetry :

I want you off the fucking set
You prick!
No, don't just be sorry!
think for one fucking second.
What the fuck are you doing?
Are you professional or not?
Do I fucking walk around
and mess with your fucking lights?
Shut the fuck up Bruce!
Don't shut me up.
Okay, let's go again...
No, let's take a fucking minute
LET'S GO AGAIN!
Am I going to walk around and rip
your fucking lights down?
In the middle of a scene?
What the fuck is it with you?
What don't you fucking understand?
Gimme a fucking answer!
What don't you get about it?
For fuck's sake man
you're an amateur!
You got something to say to this
prick?
I'm trying to fucking do a scene here
What is he doing there?
Do you understand?
My mind is not in the scene
if you're doing that
Stay off the fucking set man!
For fuck's sake!
You're unbelievable man, you're
unfuckingbelievable!
Don't you fucking understand what its like
working with actors?
I'm not asking you, I'm telling you.
I'm gonna fucking kick your fucking ass if
you don't shut up for a second
Alright?
Do you want me to go and trash your lights?
Do you want me to fucking trash them?
Then why are you trashing my scene?
Sseriously man
You and me
We're fucking done professionally

Fucking ass.

Better than Bukowski.

UPDATE : Here's a mashup/remix of Bale's rant by RevoLucian. It's fucking distracting :



UPDATE : Christian Bale apologises, "I was out of order beyond belief."

Obama : "There Are White Folks, And Then There Are Ignorant Mother Fuckers Like You"

For once, I haven't made up a headline quote. Obama did say this and it's on tape. You can hear Obama cutting loose with the M15+ language here.

Unfortunately, this is not President Obama dealing it out from his podium. It's the author Obama doing a reading from his Dreams Of My Father autobiography, impersonating a high school friend who was full of sage-like advice and wisdom.

My favourite :

"You Ain't My Bitch, Nigga. Buy Your Own Damn Fries!"

This is pretty good, too :

"So what happens when we go out to a party with some sisters? I tell you what happens. Blam! They on us like there's no tomorrow. High school chicks, university chicks, it don't matter..."

How quickly will these Obama lines get mashed up? No doubt, thousands are already hard at work, transforming his recorded lines into a multitude of brilliant, crappy and bizarre ear candy. Can't wait to hear some of it.

The Boston Pheonix scored mightily with this.

Recycling? Carnt Be Arsed

Novelist Irvine Welsh gets enviro-profiled. So how Green is Irvine? Not so much....

What is your biggest guilty green secret?

I can't really be arsed with recycling. I just don't see the point - I get a lot of grief about it but I tend to just dump everything in the bin.

What is your favourite green habit?

I really like walking.

If you could buy any green gadget - wormery, solar panel etc - what would it be?

I bought a frog made by an Amazonian craftsman the other day as a present for someone.

What skill do you have for a post-oil world?

Walking.

What would you save, apart from your family and friends, come the floods?

I'd have to be a bit boring and say my computer.

Come the floods?

What Phelps Should Have Said : "Yes, I Won 14 Olympic Medals And I Bang The Gong, And I Love It, Fuck You If You Can't Handle It"



Seriously, who outside of hysteria-mongering tabloid shit media is outraged that Michael Phelps punches billies? Do you know anybody who saw the above pic and said 'That's so bad, I'm totally crushed'?

Phelps caved in too soon. He should never have apologised, not while other athletes are being paid to advertise alcohol for fucks sake. "Mind your own fucking business, losers," should have been his first response to the News Of The World.

And good on Phelps' sponsors for saying "Yeah, whatever" and refusing to bow down to pathetic journalists trying to harass them into dumping him for yet another manufactured 'Star Destroyed By Drugs' story.

And how many other Olympians are there, do you think, who also supplement their training regimes with joints and/or bongs? Hundreds? Thousands? It's not exactly a secret that smoking pot during heavy training sessions helps immensely with recovery, relieves muscle burn and inspires the kind of appetite you need to chow down all that energy and carb heavy food you need to bulk up. Just ask the governor of California.

And as I wrote here a few months back, the Phelps Rips monumental beat-up is another example of the mainstream media realising that cannabis stories always, always, pull in the readers and clock up the hits.

In a few months, the mainstream media will finally realise that pro-legalisation, pro-medicinal cannabis and pro-commercial hemp stories pull even more readers than the Pot Is Evil stories. That will also be about the same time that the Obamerica White House gets moving with its push to lighten up on medicinal cannabis prosecutions and turns serious on encouraging American farmers to get back into hemp (as a biofuel for starters) in a big way.

There's going to be a lot, absolutely fucking heaps, of uninsured, unemployed Americans soon, more than ever that is, and giving them the right to legally consume a drug they can grow in their own backyards, for pain and boredom relief, will make life easier, calmer, for everyone.

And if times get really desperate, and there's no guarantee right now they won't, cannabis/hemp also doubles as a protein rich food source. The seedy gear, that is.

But all that's yet to come. For now anyway, it's still a little wild to see CNN running stories like this, under headlines like this :

Phelps Unites Pot Smokers

Note the wild cheering when Whoopi Goldberg admits she smokes bud.

And here's the comedy routine video the CNN story excerpts - Eddie Izard On 'The Stoned Olympics' :



UPDATE : Spoke too soon. USA Swimming has suspended Michael Phelps for at least three months, caving in to media hysteria :

"This is not a situation where any anti-doping rule was violated, but we decided to send a strong message to Michael because he disappointed so many people, particularly the hundreds of thousands of USA Swimming member kids who look up to him as a role model and a hero," the federation said in a statement."

And Phelps has lost one sponsor, Kelloggs, who believe their drug heavy (the drug being sugar) breakfast cereals should not be promoted by a known user of another drug :

The US company said on Thursday that Phelps's behaviour - caught on camera and published last Sunday - was "not consistent with the image of [Kellogg's]".

The sugar junkie tiger stays.

When Whales Could Hang On A Beach Without Humans Trying To Roll Them Back In


Photo by Peter Mathew, from here

An explanation for why so many whales beach themselves?

Fossilised remains of an ancient whale that gave birth on land have been unearthed with a foetus still in its womb.

The calf’s position in the womb demonstrated that the animals, a previously unknown species of early whale, were still dependent on land and had yet to become fully aquatic. They came ashore to rest and breed.

“They clearly were tied to the shore,” Philip Gingerich, of the University of Michigan in the United States, said. “They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth.”

Perhaps a genetic memory is triggered and proves irresistible? "I remember now! We belong out there in the dry world! Follow me!"


Darryl Mason is the author of the free online novel ED Day : Dead Sydney. You can read it here


.

"Dad, They're Still Wearing Crosses. I'm Not Going Back"

Bill Hicks, in a 1993 performance censored by David Letterman :



Letterman claims he "can't remember" why Hicks performance was cut from the show. But Bill Hicks explains, in this interview, that while his routine had been cleared and approved for the timeslot, twice, he was ultimately censored, most likely, because of the Pro-Life mockery, and the fact that a Pro-Life group were advertising during the Letterman show.

"I Don't Like The Look Of Those Strawberries, They Could Be Preparing To Fire Rockets"

The 'War on Terror' is also a War on Food.

Even a glimpse of Israel's purposeful destruction of Gazan crops and commercial farms is
astounding, disgusting, unbelievable.

* 50% of Gaza's crop producing capability laid to waste.

* Entire citrus fields torn up by tanks and bulldozers.

* 1800 orange, lemon and grapefruit trees, in just one grove alone, that had fed and earned income for one Gazan community for 75 years, destroyed.

Of course, these kinds of stories, with no obvious body count, but leaving behind more misery, poverty, and stifled fury, barely get a play in the Western media, but a couple of billion other people know all about it.



Ewa Jasiewicz reports from inside Gaza (excerpts) :

Yesterday saw the first canvas tents go up in the Gaza strip to house internally displaced people. The UN estimates 50,000 people have been made homeless due to the bombing and bulldozing of homes and properties by Israeli occupation forces in Israel’s 21 day offensive in the Gaza Strip. The displacement is just meters in the case of many families who don’t want to move far from their ancestral land, and have opted to move into tents on the site of their destroyed houses.

We traipse down the landslide that is the side of the mound that was Ibrahim and Ziad’s homes and sit on mattresses inside the cave that is their home. We drink sweet sage tea – sage a natural anti-depressant that grows wild and abundantly here. Ibrahim’s kids keep a fire burning in the corner, stoked by pages of torn old schoolbooks and bulldozed olive and lemon branches. Aromatic smoke wafts up into the peaked roof of the concrete tent we now sit in. Five men, fathers, in their 30s, 40s and 50s, sit staring out and the new camp infront of them, their gaze alternating between the tents, the grey ground – once a ceiling - under their feet and their new guests. They have all lost their homes.

People still can’t believe what has happened to them here. Their landscape, their lines of sight and lineages of land cultivation, the tending of the soil and cyclical toiling of the land to yield olives, oranges, lemons, a harvest, a livelihood, the centuries old relationship between farmers and their land, has been bulldozed into dust. The protection of a home, to live and die in, to shelter in, a community centre in its own right for every family, a place to sit and drink tea in and bake bread in and bring up children in, to come back to every night, to invite guests to, to sleep safely within, ‘the heart of the home’ a phrase used every day, to describe, terribly, too often, where tank shells and apache missiles were shot into, ‘into the heart of our home’ says family after family, after family.

The tide of rubble, of leveled homes, rolls up and down the Gaza strip. In Mooghrieka, a tiny neighbourhood close to the former Netzarim settlement, over 30 homes were totally leveled and a further 130 partially destroyed. On one street, the sheer force of tank shelling in the streets outside had been enough to cave in the vulnerable asbestos roofs of at least eight homes. The home of the Abu Shalafa family was bombed by tank shelling on the 5th of January. Three members were injured including 13-year-old Maysa, suffering from Cerebral Palsy and now additional shrapnel pieces lodged inside her head.

Read the rest of Ewa's extraordinary report here.