JOHNSTONE

They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday. Laila al-Khatib was shot in the head by Israeli forces in Jenin, because I guess they needed one more dead Palestinian kid. One more dead Palestinian kid to add to the mountain. One more small Palestinian face raining down upon us in our nightmares like meteors on the dinosaurs in the prequel to this apocalypse. One more screaming, blood-spattered mother. One more grandfather with boulders for feet carrying the tiny shrouded form of someone who should have buried him. It’s one more dead Palestinian kid. One more snowflake in the blizzard. And yet here I sit, mouth agape, a mortally wounded polar bear in my chest and a cry of despair turning into a ghost and leaving me silent and slack-jawed like an imbecile. I want to crawl into my childhood crib and fall asleep forever. I want to turn into a crystal punch bowl and fall and shatter on a marble floor. The air is full of flapping, and there’s seaweed in my hair. There’s an angel with a mushroom cloud head in my doorway. They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday, because I guess they needed another one. I write her name on some paper and send it off into the wind, and stride back into the suburban ghost town with my body on fire. Reading by Tim Foley.

Well that didn't take long. President Trump has said he wants to "clean out" Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Reading by Tim Foley.

Here in the thick of it, our eyes full of pixels and our veins full of microplastics, out here with the child amputees in Gaza and the frightened street schizophrenics in Los Angeles and the pigs living their whole lives in metal crates the size of their bodies, our lives ruled by algorithms and wealthy world eaters as we pray for a miracle on knees made of miracles with clasped hands made of miracles in a world made of miracles, craning our necks to see past the giant flashing signs saying "YOU ARE LOVED, YOU ARE LOVE" in order to find Defects and Inadequacy. In the thick of it, up to our ears in it, cracked wide open, wide open to the screams of mothers clutching tiny broken bodies, to the screams of men on fire, to the screams of dying coral reefs and rainforests, to the screams inside all of us saying "Something is wrong, something has gone very, very wrong," wide open to the agony but also to the beauty, to the booming holiness of the earth and the sky, to the mysteries hiding in abandoned buildings, to the noble pigeons whose pristine minds know nothing of Elon Musk, to that place of tenderness within all of us which we cover with shields and armor and feigned toughness and pretend confidence, feeling it all, letting it all in, the pain and the exaltation and the weight and the exuberance and the rage and the orgasms and the darkness and the light and the Israeli stormtroopers and their victims and the bank boys and the savage saints and that song within all of us calling us home saying "It's here! It's here! Buddha nature is here!", and blessing it all, my darling, blessing it all. Here in the thick of it, our hearts sliced open like gutted fish, we breathe in the air, exhaust fumes and all, and we realize with slowly widening eyelids that this, this is paradise. There is no Heaven but That which sits before us and beats within our chests and grows the grass and spins the galaxies, right this very waking moment, closer to us than our own skeletons which will one day be laid to rest in the soil of a revolving ball in a universe we never once in our lives understood. Reading by Tim Foley.

They've arrested another pro-Palestinian journalist, this time in Switzerland. The Electronic Intifada's executive director Ali Abunimah has reportedly been detained by Swiss police in Zurich, after having been interrogated for an hour and released the previous day when entering the country. Abunimah, who is Palestinian-American, has played a leading role in exposing and critiquing the apartheid abuses of Israel for many years. Reading by Tim Foley.

Even if this ceasefire somehow manages to hold, some other nightmare will be unleashed by the US-centralized empire somewhere else in the world in the coming years. Reading by Tim Foley.

The world is ruled by religious fanatics with nukes. If a normal person says they're the second coming of Jesus Christ they get medicated and institutionalized. If you make equally insane religious claims on the Senate floor, they let you run an empire. Reading by Tim Foley.

During his inaugural address, the new president of the United States was refreshingly open about the fact that Washington is the hub of a continuously expanding empire which is ruled by billionaire plutocrats. Reading by Tim Foley.

TikTok is back in the US after a brief shutdown, reportedly because Trump pledged to suspend the Biden administration's ban. A Gaza ceasefire has also finally emerged due to pressure from Trump after Biden stalled for 15 months, and NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans on pressuring the Israeli government throughout negotiations to establish a permanent peace beyond the 42 days scheduled for the first phase of the agreement. Remember this: it's not that Trump is good, it's that Democrats are just that bad. Biden's completely unconditional facilitation of Israeli atrocities has actually been the exception rather than the norm among US presidents, as Trita Parsi explained in Foreign Policy last April. From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline. Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuse of the US empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end. Reading by Tim Foley.

Together, a bunch of mostly powerless people can create a very, very powerful force. If a healthy world is to be born, it that is the force by which it will come into being. Reading by Tim Foley.

Two journalists were ejected from a State Department press conference on Thursday for asking inconvenient questions about Gaza. One of them, Sam Husseini, was physically carried out by security while demanding to know why Secretary of State Antony Blinken is not in The Hague for his war crimes. Reading by Tim Foley.