Miguel Ardan

Writer, graphic designer. Cat person.
// No relations with the labs. Not a politican.
#comics #scifi

[Pistachio 🇮🇷 🇵🇸 @HarleyShah]

This is why it is not a "conflict". No part of Israel looks like this.

[Jordan Zakarin @jordanzakarin]

The Paramout surrender is a perfect distillation of Democratic politics:

1. Talk a big game
2. Fold despite having legal leverage and public opinion on their side
3. Empower conservative oligarchs who hate working people.

Great message to send right before the elections!

[Miguel Ardan @migardan]

@danielafcr_back Colocou a nú a pobreza que existe e isso é que está a revoltar muita gente. Querem que volte a ficar escondida

[Wally Rashid @wallyrashid]

Wait so Ed Sheeran’s touring band are the founding members of the Irish Artists for Palestine movement and he didn’t expect them to drop out?

What in the hell did he think would happen?

[Casual Geopolitics @Casualgeopol]

Ed Sheeran sacrificed his legacy for Israel, at the command of a pedophile.

[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.

[Miguel Ardan @migardan]

@pipelinecomics The problem is the logo placement. It hides Maul's face, that was framed by the I logo.

[Dimitri @drposhlost]

She literally bragged on TV about working for the CIA (and how “liberal” and “honorable” the men running it were) then went on to date Henry Kissinger and Epstein associates Stanley Pottinger and Mort Zuckerman. Wake up

[Miguel Ardan @migardan]

So, John Stewart’s origin story is that he was a victim of child abuse who was raised to be an unemotional killer.

And they expect people to root for him.

#lanterns

[Miguel Ardan @migardan]

Episode 3 of Lanterns is really bad.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Don’t fall for the fake Fox/GOP outrage. Two weeks ago the House passed a bill that greenlighted the transfer of Spanish territory to Morocco. Every Republican except me voted for it, but now THEY are acting shocked at the invasion.
https://t.co/a7ROEAtoOD
https://t.co/886sJycfeL

[Secular Talk ([email protected]) @KyleKulinski]

Elon’s daughter Vivian absolutely decimated him oh my days

[Orwell Day @OrwellDay]

Microsoft admitted to using a global unique device identifier to help track a user across 3 countries, negating any value of using a VPN if you have a Windows machine

[Isaac’s Army @ReturnOfKappy]

Scientists have grown living human skin on robots with real human DNA...

They can actually bleed and heal...👀

We just gave machines the one thing that makes us human....

Our own DNA..!!🤯

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

Football fans around the world watching the World Cup Final "half time" show:

[Ryanair @Ryanair]

United States of Advertisement

[george @StokeyyG2]

‘I like a lot of them artists but I thought it was crap…’

Wayne Rooney on the half time show for the World Cup Final 👏🤣🤣🤣

[ODAY @yl2vv]

Saudi Arabia and Jordan: There are no American bases in our countries.

US military: A large number of our soldiers were injured in Jordan and Saudi Arabia

[Garland Nixon @TheGarlandNixon]

So.. now that Americans are living in their cars and the billionaire oligarchs are sailing 500 ft yachts.. Blame communism, China, and Putin. But definitely NOT Congress, Wall Street, or their corporate puppet masters.

[Pipeline Comics (Augie De Blieck Jr.) 🇧🇪 🇫🇷 @pipelinecomics]

But the worst thing to happen in comics the last forty years is the way that artists graduated to being cover artists instead of storytellers. We lost some of the greatest-selling and most exciting artists to cover illustration, and comics suffered for it.