They watched Iraq burn on television and called it Shock and Awe.
Shock and Awe.
They named the massacre of a civilian population after the experience of watching it from a safe distance.
Not "the bombing campaign."
Not even the sanitized military euphemism.
Shock. And. Awe.
The aesthetic experience of the people watching.
Not the physical experience of the people dying.
This is what empire does to the psychology of its citizens.
It turns atrocity into spectacle.
It turns the suffering of distant people into a viewing experience with a brand name.
And the people watching from their living rooms were not monsters.
That's the point.
They were ordinary people whose entire psychological architecture had trained them to receive distant violence as entertainment, as proof of power, as reassurance.
The monsters are the architecture.
The Library of Alexandria created the first catalog of all human knowledge 2,300 years ago, and a team of fewer than 20 people just finished the modern version and made it free for the entire planet.
It is called OpenAlex. The name is not an accident.
The ancient library had the Pinakes, a catalog mapping every scroll, every author, every subject. When the library fell, the map of what humanity knew fell with it.
For the last two decades, that map existed again, but it was locked up.
Elsevier owns Scopus. Clarivate owns Web of Science. If your university could not afford the subscription, you could not see the structure of science itself. Entire countries were priced out of knowing what research existed.
OpenAlex indexes 474 million scholarly works. Every author disambiguated. Every citation traced. Every institution and funder connected. It updates with roughly 50,000 new works every day.
The whole thing is CC0. Not just free to search. Free to download, copy, sell, and build on. The API allows 100,000 requests a day without an account.
The ancient library burned and the catalog was lost for two millennia.
The new one cannot burn. Anyone can hold a copy.
https://t.co/peUYYpucnc
The British establishment pulled out all the stops to prevent Jeremy Corbyn becoming PM, simply because he criticised Israel and wanted fairer wealth distribution.
Yet Nigel Farage instigates riots and they still court him as a potential PM.
Make it make sense.
Can you imagine how explosively the right would shit themselves if a group of Muslims were driving around London impersonating police officers and intimidating non-Muslims under the justification of countering Islamophobia? The shrieking about "Sharia law" would shatter glass.
My good mate @aaronsmith wrote this stunning piece about his week as a temp political staffer in Canberra. 👇🏽
Australians become inured to reading about Canberra and federal politics through the mainstream lens, but Aaron walks us through it warts and all.
Apart from his illuminating insights, I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces of political writing, in fact, beautiful pieces of writing, that I have ever read - seriously.
Aaron crafts a tale of a tumultuous week in Australian politics, a tale of Parliament House and its operatives and inhabitants, like only a master storyteller can.
Congratulations Aaron, this piece will go into my very special book of writing that I will read again and again. I hope everybody does. We need to savour and cherish voices like yours, not just now, but forever.
https://t.co/7qUsGBvpG7
this language is now indexed as a form of racial harassment. The mere mention of Palestinians and their ongoing mass killing, siege and starvation is treated as a form of bigotry. I don’t know what else to say other than this is completely dystopian and insane.
This should make every one of us very, very afraid
It's not enough in Australia that we have a small, minority group forcing a distorted reality on us, we also now need to know some of those same powerful, well organised people are looking to own facts and information
LINDSEY GRAHAM: “I go back to S.C. and I’m asking them to send their sons and daughters over to the Middle East. To all the isolationists: I’m not with you, I’m with Israel. God bless Israel. We should move all of our stuff to Israel.”
He actually said this on live television.
@RebelNews_AU so glad ABC is finally standing up to zionists and their moronic defenders like Charlie. Zionism will never recover and those still defending Israel and their genocide will be remembered.
@JonesHowDareYou Oh I beg to differ.
Not a single Australian *anglo-white* comedian.
There's plenty of Aussie talent out there knocking Israel off its pillar
My man, @nazeem_hussain has been hilariously and consistently brutal
👉🏽https://t.co/kDKHDVFCC7
🚨🇺🇸BREAKING: The CIA officer caught with $40 million in gold bars allegedly invented an entire fake top-secret spy program to steal the money.
As if this story couldn't get and wilder:
-David Rush allegedly built a sham "special access program," the blackest box in U.S. intelligence, so secret even top-clearance officials couldn't look inside without authorization
-The fake program posed as "continuity of government" work, the doomsday planning that keeps Washington running after a nuclear war
-He allegedly read in two colleagues as unwitting accomplices and used a made-up government contract to funnel millions, persuading a defense contractor to buy huge amounts of gold
-The FBI raid on his home seized 303 gold bars worth roughly $40 million, $2 million in cash, and 35 luxury watches
-Investigators say he lied about his college degrees, faked being a Navy pilot, and still sailed through the CIA's notoriously brutal vetting
-A judge ordered him held as a flight risk, and several CIA officials are now on leave as the probe widens
The scheme worked because of the system, not in spite of it.
The secrecy walls built to hide operations from China and Russia hid the fraud from the CIA itself.
A man with a fake résumé ran a fake doomsday program inside the most paranoid institution in America, and for years nobody noticed...
Source: Washington Post
Israel expelled ~430,000 Palestinians & Syrians from their homes in 1967 & yet most people know little about these expulsions. So I wrote a concise but comprehensive history of Israel's ethnic cleansing operations in 1967:
Nah, this is amazing.
Ireland 🇮🇪 didn’t qualify for the World Cup, but their flag is similar to that of Ivory Coast 🇨🇮.
So a pub in Ireland, decided to support Ivory Coast at the WC. They’ll be selling Ivorian meals & playing Ivorian music.
This is top
The perpetrators of the 2004 spying on #TimorLeste’s maritime boundary negotiating team have asked Attorney-General @MRowlandMP to issue a ‘secrecy certificate’ over why they say they shouldn’t have to confess to the sordid gas theft crime everyone knows they facilitated. #auspol
Australian activist Gemma O’Toole has strongly condemned her government’s handling of her treatment after Israel intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla aid mission.
O’Toole, who along with fellow activists has staged sit-in demonstrations inside Australia’s Parliament House to force a reckoning over the nation’s foreign policy, says she was subjected to physical abuse, torture, and sexual assault in Israeli custody.
(More details in linked post.)
Video via @GFFAusGroup