On page 197 the biographer starts talking to John Berger directly. He writes, The past is not for living in, it says in Ways of Seeing: it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.

I dreamed of Gaza last night. I was seeing in pictures, I wasn't there, I knew I couldn't imagine being there without being there. I was only dreaming Gaza, not the real place as it's being destroyed. But the people in the pictures were moving still, and I wanted them to continue living somehow.

Somebody in the dogyard was joyous about the midterm Democrats. Somebody was disappointed at my lack of Democratic Joy. But the Democrats are genocidal, I said. They said it didn't start out as a genocide. But it did, and they will continue to fund the genocide, it was genocidal all along. I have no democratic joy. 

 We are watching this dystopia gradually unfold before our eyes, powerless to stop it because we have been groomed into acceptance, into passivity, into helplessness. 

Jonathan Cook

 The rich wage the wars – wars the rest of us pay for – that steal the wealth of others, of poorer nations. And, as we learnt after the 2008 economic crash, when the rich screw up, when they break the self-enrichment system they themselves devised, our captured governments bail them out with our money.

The rich are too big – too powerful – to fail.

Jonathan Cook

 The rich own the media that acts as our window on the world. Rich donors capture our politics, ensuring that the political priorities of the billionaires – the protection and expansion of their wealth – must also be our political priorities. 

Jonathan Cook

 And it measures that difference – rewards it – with money. Greater wealth equals greater power in the political, economic and social systems we in the West are educated to respect and revere. 

Jonathan Cook

 The creation of deep power imbalances is the very purpose of capitalism. It divides: the wealth creator from the worker, the have from the have-not, the landlord from the tenant. 

Jonathan Cook

 It should hardly need stating that those who chase power are also those with an appetite for it. And those with an appetite for power are the most likely to abuse that power if and when they achieve it. That happens in the entertainment industry, but it also happens in media, in politics, in law, in business. 

Jonathan Cook

 Last night we watched Hector Babenco: Tell Me When I Die. Tonight we're going to watch The Past. Some knucklehead broke the trees around the horseman statue again. What possesses people to hate even trees? 

It is about a culture, whole societies, that are built on the basis of deep structural imbalances of power – in every sphere of life – as their most cherished value. Indeed, as their purpose. 

Jonathan Cook

 Thanks for making the empire of mercenary death visible to even the most casual observers. Thanks for highlighting the evil nature of the United States and Israel. When enough people see the truth that has been hidden behind the specious narrative, things will change, and we will push the merchants of death out of the temple of nature.

The death doula I follow says try saying Yes, thank you, to everything that happens. Which I suppose you can do while feeling sad about the Gazan doctor who was in American Doctor being murdered by Israel and America, and people playing the stock market of genocide, and Monsanto glyphosate spreading their product cancer throughout the earth. 

 Why do stupid hateful people feel the need to comment on my posts? Why are people destroying the earth, stealing the land, and killing people. Go, figure. 

 i feel the briefness of life. i feel the heart pump in the breast of the pale feathered kestrel. 

I worried about Lulu's eye and asked John if it was ok and he said it's just allergies and I knew about the allergies but I'm reading things in light of her age and also my own and the fraught age we're living in. I said to John, Sometimes Lulu looks so woebegone, and sometimes so happy, and it's the same face. But the brown tear stain got to me. John said, As we enter this Winter, Luna is entering her own Winter. She's slowing down. I'm slowing down too, I said. He said You have many more years! But I'm slowing down, and I guess I measure my own time in dog years, and time feels brief. and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, John Berger wrote.

 Regime change for US.

 Owen and I went to the Obamachron to see the leucistic kestrel, and behold, we, or I, did. And two pairs of people liked my kuffiyeh. I showed a traveller from Italy the kestrel, and they were amazed. Own balked at the footbridge, so we didn't get to the island. Some people have a fear of bridges. I feel sad for anyone in the military. I can't imagine killing anyone. How do they live with themselves after killing people? So it's veterans day and I pray for peace. I know that the forsaken country has never in its existence made peace, but still I pray, and I know there are multitudes of others like me, praying all the time.

Veterans Day, 11-11-2026.

 Remember bots are human too.

 No we don't support the troops. They're not our troops. They kill for the Epstein class. We abhor the whole damned war machine.

 I say unto you: The first shall be last. Make of it what you will. I know you've heard it before.

 Oh yeah, today's 11-11. Portal? Yeah. Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. That's my favorite number. Amen. And here we go. Where we goin'? No where.

For R.

 Nietzsche’s most useful lesson is that liberation begins when the dominated stop describing themselves in their rulers’ language. Palestinians learned that lesson without him. The open question concerns everyone else, and above all the governments that fund and protect the occupation: whether they will deal with a Palestinian people that defines itself, or keep waiting for one willing to disappear.

Tawfiq Al-Ghussein

 Seventy-eight years after the Nakba, millions of Palestinians still decline the categories assigned to them: refugee as a permanent condition, residence as a revocable permit, a people as a problem to be managed. They decided long ago that no occupying army, foreign ministry or reconstruction board would tell them what they are.

Tawfiq Al-Ghussein

A self that needs another people’s absence to confirm it is exactly the reactive type the Genealogy describes, one that cannot say what it is without first naming what it must remove. 

Tawfiq Al-Ghussein

Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the Palestinian Refusal to Disappear

 Today we pray that Zionism will become exhausted and expire, and that Palestine will be free, and that the grave hurt that has been inflicted on the earth will begin to heal. We pray for the collapse of the global genocidal machine.

 Psychopaths legitimize mass slaughter, manufacture consent, and erase history. We must seek out the truth behind the lies. A friend told me yesterday she read and believes that politicians cannot be ethical. That would explain why they are able to commit serial genocide with impunity.

 I went up to see the rare leucistic kestrel on one of the Obamachronic flock of light poles but all I saw was the eternally melded windblown oligarchs forever together and alone presiding mutely in an endless frozen wave in the concrete seizure of the privatized park. 

 It will be indubitably increasingly obvious to even the most casual of observers that Trumpenstein is too stupid to rule the planet and moreover utterly insane and his days are decreasingly numbered, so take heart earthlings, life will, despite all odds, go on.

 In the future genocidal civilization will collapse and everyone alive will be antizionist.

 Revolutionary sentiments are rumbling around the world.

-Caitlin Johnstone

 

Turning, turning, turning

As a leaf in the sun
And breath in the lung
Turning, turning

The skin unfolds
Letting go another appearing

Follow the stream
Let it flow, let it lead
Show you all you have not seen
Just flows through
Where the stream holds the tune
And the water on the skin

Here is where we all begin

Watch it
Walk between
Fire, earth, water, stone
Waves of sound
Shake the land
Here we are
There it comes
Your endless dear companion
He'll follow your endless variation
Loads ?
Fossil
Lioness
Land
Ruin

Shida Shihabi

 i couldn't sleep, had midterm dreams, kept rolling back and forth, dreaming fitful stupid midterm videos, now i can't recall but all about the stupid midterms and woke up thinking i hate the evil government of this godforsaken country.

 Maybe we can't stop the slaughter, but everyone should watch what this government is doing to the people of Palestine. It's evil, it's mass murder. We should all watch American Doctor. Free Palestine.

Olive in hair product box with paint swatchbook fan. Song for scrabble Monday, I Know, by Maxine Funke. Us, grateful for cats for peace. Praying for Iran and Palestine and Lebanon, and all the countries under the guns and bombs of the evil empire. 

 Scrabble Monday with Olive.

Olive, a color study.

 That wasn't me. I didn't do it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 The only thing to vote for is against genocidal empire. 

 Oh my god in heaven, glyphosate. What kind of culture would allow itself to be poisoned like this. A mercenary death cult, god help us. From glyphosate to genocide, how the signs of the end times proliferate.

 Our beautiful bathroom door returns, with one hundred years of paint removed. It looks better than new, as it has aged in place. One layer was gold, imagine. The paint was so thick the door wouldn't close. Olive came and pushed it open. She'll be meowing through the wood now. Now we will have for the first time in years a door that closes and stays closed. Blessings upon John, the restorer of our beautiful bathroom door.

from life. 

The critical dimension of this is not how extensive and camouflaged are Iran’s means of securing its essential supplies. It is, rather, that U.S./Israeli officials must decide if they care to operate within the human realities of this world since the dawn of human civilization in our region when nomadic hunter-gatherers settled into year-round agricultural villages some 9000 years ago, or they prefer to affirm Wile E. Coyote’s cartoon world where every rocket you fire against Road Runner comes back to explode in your face. 

Rami G. Khouri

 how stupid can you get.