Opinion

Before Biden leaves office, he may want to consider drafting hundreds of pardons for his supporters and allies.  These pardons do not have to be announced publicly, but Biden can have them in a back file just in case they are needed or requested later.

Trump has made it clear that people will be investigated and prosecuted on the basis of revenge rather than in the name of justice.  Supporters of Biden and the Democrats may be targeted not because they did anything wrong, but because they opposed Trump and the Republican agenda in some way.

Now many of Biden 's wealthy supporters can afford to defend themselves in court for years because they have the resources. The Clintons, the Pelosis, George Soros, and others can let their legal teams defend them and have frivolous charges dismissed.

When Donald Trump again warms the throne in Washington on Martin Luther King Day, each of the three evils that King worked to abolish will get a major boost: racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.

While Trumplickers post-election propose recruiting abroad certain highly educated potential immigrants (and defunding and further destroying U.S. education — including by writing racism — not to mention critical thinking — out of history books while shaping them in a fundamentally racist vision), they’re also pushing for a military campaign to seize and deport the wrong kind of immigrants and refugees, and threatening any cities that dare to protect their residents. While Democratic emperors eagerly fuel genocide, they don’t campaign for office on racism. So, there will be attention paid to this one. But consider the next two interlocking evils as well.

The story of the Israeli war on Gaza can be epitomized in the story of the Israeli war on Beit Lahia, a small Palestinian town in the northern part of the Strip.  

 When Israel launched its ground operations in Gaza, Beit Lahia was already largely destroyed due to many days of relentless Israeli bombardment which killed thousands. 

 Still, the border Gaza town resisted, leading to a hermetic Israeli siege, which was never lifted, even when the Israeli military redeployed out of much of northern Gaza in January 2024. 

 Beit Lahia is largely an isolated town, a short distance away from the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel. It is surrounded mostly by agricultural areas that make it nearly impossible to defend. 

 Yet, a year of grisly Israeli war and genocide in Gaza did not end the fighting there. To the contrary, 2024 has ended where it started, with intense fighting on all fronts in Gaza, with Beit Lahia, a town that was supposedly 'conquered' earlier, still leading the fight. 

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The first installment (“I’m just a consumer”) closed with two admonitions. One said we should value people instead of tossing them aside as “mere hands,” and the other is confident we can cast aside propaganda that justifies inequity by the age old trick of blaming the victim. This installment scrutinizes a couple of those victim-blaming urban legends that twist our outlook to see our colleagues as disposable implements.

Like that previous piece, this one springs from reflections on chapters 15 and 16 of Beyond Capital by István Mészáros. I encourage you to read them for yourself to make up your own mind.

There’s Something Special about this Place

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Grim-faced rescuers were tying ropes to the stiff, jutting legs and arms of bloated corpses floating in the Andaman Sea, and bringing them to shore after an earthquake under the Indian Ocean triggered the giant pulverizing waves of the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami.

Tourists were thronging Thailand's gorgeous southwest coast where Phuket island and the granite-studded, sandy beaches of Khao Lak became the hardest hit zones amid estuaries, mangroves, and sea cliffs.

The doomed coast's exquisite Buddhist temples crumbled. Five-star resorts, tropical villages, and virtually everything else became smithereens when the tsunami hit.

Rare surviving Buddhist temples became storage grounds for bodies smelling of formaldehyde and packed in dry ice, shrouded, and left outdoors next to stacks of plywood coffins awaiting cremations or burials.

"The horrible thing about this is, we could tell that they were male or female, but beyond that it was very hard to differentiate whether they were Asian or foreign," Canadian volunteer Scott Murray said in an interview at the time after collecting the dead.

Just so we’re all clear, it is a fully established fact that the IDF is directly, deliberately killing civilians in Gaza. There was a time in the early days of the genocide when this could be disputed, but that is no longer true. The facts are in and the case is closed. It’s happening.

Israeli soldiers are telling the press that they’ve been knowingly killing civilians and then falsely categorizing them as terrorists afterward. Countless doctors have testified to routinely encountering dead and wounded children who’ve been shot in the head by Israeli snipers. Israeli media reports have revealed that the IDF is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and using AI systems to specifically target suspected Hamas members when they are at home with their families instead of out on the battlefield.