Pip

[Pip @PipSydney]

@Taha_Azzawi13 @Aaaxxxx She’s from Brazil trying to enter Bali.

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

Appears to be absolutely MASSIVE protests all across the US yesterday and this platform is so skewed to the Trump/Putin side that this is the first I've seen or heard of it.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

At 67, here's one piece of advice I'd give anyone under 30:

Travel as much as you can while you're young. 🌍

You don't need to be rich. Fly economy. Stay in hostels. Take overnight trains. Backpack across borders. Sleep on a friend's couch. Eat street food. Get lost in places where nobody speaks your language.

Leave your comfort zone and experience the world beyond the one you've always known.

Dance with locals. Try unfamiliar foods. Listen to cathedral bells echo through ancient streets and hear the call to prayer drift across a crowded city. Walk through little alleyways, share meals with strangers, and make friends with people whose lives look nothing like yours.

Learn how other cultures think, love, work, celebrate, and survive. Discover that people can speak different languages, follow different traditions, and believe different things while still sharing the same hopes, fears, and dreams.

The world is much bigger than your hometown, your social circle, or what you see on a screen.

Travel won't just give you beautiful photographs and unforgettable stories. It'll challenge your assumptions, humble you, broaden your perspective, and teach you to appreciate things you once took for granted.

Don't spend your entire youth waiting until you have more money, a better job, or the perfect time. You can always earn more money, but you can't buy back the years you spent being afraid to explore.

Go see the world. Meet its people. Embrace its differences.

And when you return home, bring back more than souvenirs. Bring back a wider perspective, a more open heart, and a deeper understanding of humanity.

The best thing travel can give you isn't a passport full of stamps. It's a mind that has expanded and a heart that has learned to see the world differently. ❤️🌎

[💕 Brittany Belle 💕 @BrittanyinTexas]

OMG 😂 Whoever is playing Katie Zacharia deserves an EMMY. The impression is SO spot-on.👏

[Pip @PipSydney]

@GeoffTa91049662 @TruthFairy131 Passport was handed in

[Pip @PipSydney]

@StewartVolvo @TruthFairy131 Yes

[Pip @PipSydney]

@GetPaidMore @TruthFairy131 Channel 7 news reported he lives in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs.

[Pip @PipSydney]

@kelly_ques Yes, I had a Vegemite sandwich for lunch

[Sarrah Bellus @sarrah_bellus]

May they never know a moment of peace the rest of their miserable lives.

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

Oh god, this is comedy gold. Incredible.

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[Pip @PipSydney]

@RonniSalt The Rancan Sisters performing aerobics on Good Morning Australia ch 10

[Patrick Witty @patrickwitty]

9:59 a.m., September 11, 2001. Bodies were falling. The South Tower began to collapse. I turned around. This is what I saw.

[mel @HotAsPuck]

my dad was a lifelong pharmaceutical rep. his territory was Philly, NJ, NYC. he was in NYC during the morning of 9/11 and told my mom & I the hospital he was visiting for work went into code, expecting a mass influx of patients. barely anyone showed up.

[Marijke Chartouni @pinkPeptobismol]

We are Epstein Survivors.
We were kicked out of the Republican Midterm Convention.

[Brian Reynolds @breynoldz]

@AnthonyMeres @NotHoodlum https://t.co/H00eH6myns

[Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @NotHoodlum]

This should be on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow.

[drew @ImNotOwned]

Another good example of why I strongly believe you need to have almost endless grace and never assume the worst. These people were later interviewed and they were absolutely not just chilling

[Annie @AnnieForTruth]

Trump angrily lunged at ABC’s reporter Rachel Scott after she asked his rationale behind a voter bribe. “Mr. President, on the checks, the U.S. is still $40 trillion in debt. If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?” ⬇️⬇️