“Tyson Foods, which it turns out produces more meat than just chicken nuggets and is the world's second-largest meat producer, is dumping its toxic waste into America's rivers and lakes.”

yeah
but just
Think of its
Savings to its
Shareholders!

off-loading
‘Externalities’
to the Citizenry
is Massively Profitable

but NOT to We
the Citizenry who’re
forced to Internalize Corps’
Externalites.* relax -- it’s just Capitalism:

bought-n-paid for
Lawmakers rewarding
Shareholders whilst sticking
It To Stakeholders – the ‘bottom’ 90%.

so GRAB it
whilst you Can!
it’s Good to be an American.

*eat Corporate
Shit, suckers:

millions of pounds of toxic pollutants...
including nitrogen, phosphorus,
chloride, oil, and cyanide

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
mightn't we have
some More?

FWIW, the US has reportedly held up an ammunition shipment that was headed to Israel.

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/05/israel-us-ammunition-shipment-hold

Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich isn't helping Israel's "no we aren't committing genocide" case. Last week, the member of the security cabinet said, "Rafah, Deir Al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. 'You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' – there's no place under heaven." or, in another translation of the same speech, "We must destroy Rafah, Nusseirat, & Dir al-Balah 'wipe out the memory of Amalek! …There's no half- measure. Rafah, Dir al-Balah Nusseirat absolute destruction!" Take your pick. The link below also has a video of the minister speaking if you happen to speak Hebrew.

https://www.newarab.com/news/israels-smotrich-urges-total-annihilation-gazas-rafah (I would have cited the original Haaretz article, but it's paywalled)

Not to be outdone, the shitheads over at Hamas fired rockets at an Israeli base next to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which is now closed to aid supplies.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/06/key-aid-crossing-into-gaza-closed-after-rocket-attack-kills-israeli-soldiers

Naturally, the army base that Hamas fired the rockets at is a legitimate military target. The usual suspects here, in the interest of intellectual consistency, will no doubt condemn Israel for militarizing civilian and aid infrastructure by placing an army post right next to the crossing. I mean, they condemn Hamas all the time for similar actions so no doubt Israel should be held to the same standard. Sure, that'll happen.

i want to like st. vincent, but her songs just leave me cold. always have.

OTOH, i could give a flying fuck about multi-millionaire rappers' internecine squabbles.

As of this morning, AJ (both Arabic and English feeds) is still carrying live coverage from the West Bank and from Gaza (Rafah is being bombarded and bombed).

@3 I did like her collaboration with David Byrne from 2012. Maybe that was because it's a little more David Byrne than St. Vincent.

Thousands of Israelis have been demanding Netanyahu be removed. They do not support him or his genocide. He is ignoring them just like he's ignoring the rest of the world.

For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces
The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

Personally, I don't think Israel will ever recover from this and may cease to exist, and just like what is happening here in the United States (we only have ourselves to blame for not putting Trump in prison the minute he lost the election, let alone being complacent and stupid enough to allow him to run for POTUS again knowing everything we know and dealing with the consequences of the damage he did the first time that will continue long after he is dead and gone), Israel only has itself to blame for supporting Netanyahu. In both cases, it's too late, the damage is done, and the wreckage is not salvageable.

@6: it appears Hamas has accepted ceasefire terms - they dropped their demand for a permanent agreement and IDF withdrawal when the evacuation order went out and IDF bombing started.

I like St Vincent. Is gooooood. I don't like corporate pollution. Is baaaaad. Whitey goes to moon again soon. Fuck 'em.

@6, 9 No shock there that you completely ignore the Israeli minister calling for genocide. It's that ol' double standard again. Threats of genocide from Hamas bad (we agree there!), threats of genocide from Israel get a shrug that it's what the Israeli people want. Was the genocide in Bosnia also OK because it was what the Serbian people wanted?

@2: “The usual suspects here, in the interest of intellectual consistency, will no doubt condemn Israel for militarizing civilian and aid infrastructure by placing an army post right next to the crossing.”

I’m quoting that in full, because I’m still laughing at it. You’re seriously claiming you do not understand the inherent military difference between a border post (!) in a war zone (!!) and terrorists hiding inside a hospital?!? Really?

Seriously, you do not have to keep pounding home the point that you do not understand how any of this works. (When you do finally do drop that sledgehammer, please do try to miss your toes.)

@11: “No shock there that you completely ignore the Israeli minister calling for genocide.”

Because you couldn’t possibly have heard him wrong.

In Hebrew.

However, you can tell us all about the immense power the Finance Minister wields over military planning & daily operations in any democracy. (Why, the US Constitution itself says we can’t go to war unless we first hear a speech from Alexander Hamilton, right?)

@12 And yet in your opinion every time there's a single Gazan with a gun standing around somewhere, they're a Hamas militant that makes any civilian target they're near fair game. If you take Ahab's word for it, you can bomb an entire hospital building to rubble because there was one armed guy in front. Not that civilian hospital building security in a war zone would ever be armed, of course. Why that would be ridiculous!

Given that the original reporting was from Haaretz, I'm going to go with it being an accurate translation. Because, you know, they're an Israeli newspaper and /probably/ speak Hebrew. And do remember that the Finance Minister is a member of the War Cabinet, so he certainly does get a vote on the cease fire.

So you're on the record in favor of genocide? At least as long as it's by the right people?

Do you speak Hebrew, tensorna? If so, would you care to fact check the translation for us all, please?

"Rhetoric is not a war crime, or any crime. It needs an act to further it." - Dr. Pangloss

I wonder how the Tutsis felt about being reduced to cockroaches by the RTLM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Télévision_Libre_des_Mille_Collines

Hmm, I wonder if rhetoric influences actions? Who can answer that? Goebbels, perhaps?

Ahab, you are shamefully moving the goalposts yet again. First you said there was no evidence of genocidal intent on the part of the IDF, and now that they are repeating the same genocidal rhetoric, you claim that there's nothing wrong with genocidal rhetoric without actions to further it.

Ehem, DO YOU SEE ANY FUCKING ACTIONS BACKED UP BY RHETORIC IN GAZA?

If rhetoric is not a crime backed up by actions, why are we cracking down on university students whose apocryphal rhetoric is promoting antisemitism? Only antisemitic rhetoric counts? But not if tiki torch carriers spout it, right?

Get out of town you clown shoes wearing buffoon.

If tiki torch carriers say Jews will not replace us, and saturate Shitter/X to the rafters with vile antisemitic hate speech and white about being censored, then that's protected rhetoric said by very fine people who wouldn't hurt a fly. But you can't hold that same standard to kids on campus demanding that Palestine be free of Apartheid and who demand basic human rights to be upheld. Then it's fine for the police to assault EVERYBODY including professors and journalists and bystanders who aren't even part of the protests.

Hamas has already agreed to the terms of the ceasefire to release most of the remaining hostages. Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty cabinet of maniacs are nevertheless pushing to defy all international pressure and take matters into their own hands to complete their war goals in Gaza in bad faith. They don't care about the hostages at all, which was made clear from the beginning, as long as they can remove Gaza from existence and annex its territory.

The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty. —Likud Party Platform, 1977

The drive to establish the “Greater Land of Israel” is the central ideological goal of the Likud Party, which has dominated Israeli politics since 1977. The commitment to Greater Israel was enshrined in the “Basic Laws” of the Israeli state in 2018 when the Knesset passed the “Nation State of the Jewish People” law. This law states that the right to national self-determination in Palestine “is unique to the Jewish People” and that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening.” This commitment is one of the “guiding principles” of the current Israeli government, which stated that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” including “Judea and Samaria.”

That is the established charter of the current administration, along with the Religious Zionism extremists who call for nuking and erasing Gaza.

Also the hostages have been of non-importance to these extremists decision makers since the start:

Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said Sunday that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas could be to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip, in comments that were quickly disavowed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also suspended the minister from cabinet meetings.

Eliyahu, a member of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, was speaking in an answer to a question in a radio interview.

“Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there…,” the Radio Kol Berama interviewer said.
When it was pointed out to the minister that there are some 240 hostages currently held in the Gaza Strip, Eliyahu doubled down.

“I pray and hope for their return, but there is a price to be paid in war,” he said. “Why are the lives of the abductees, whose release I really want, more important than the lives of the soldiers and the people who will be murdered later?”

www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-minister-says-nuking-gaza-an-option-pm-suspends-him-from-cabinet-meetings/

@3 - I have always suspected that most of the rapper feuds were as legit as Tom Cruise's marriages.

@15 If Hamas is trying to perpetrate a genocide, they're not doing a very good job of it. It'll take several thousand years at this rate to eliminate the state of Israel.

The ICJ specifically cited Israeli minister's statements (eg, paraphrased There are no people in Gaza, only animals) as a precursor to genocide and ordered Israel to cut that shit out. Not that you noticed, of course. Because you, of course, understand far more about international law than those folks sitting on the ICJ. It's hard to imagine why you haven't been appointed to that body.

"That does not give them a pass on that conduct." And yet you give them a pass. Every. Single. Day. Even in the paragraph above, it was just self defense with a little soupcon of fog of war and the normal war crimes you'd expect. Nothing to get excited about. No need to tell the IDF to knock it off. Just keep on keepin' on. Shoot a few nuns? No worries. Fog of war. Bomb some WCK personnel? Oops, thought they were Hamas. No biggie, though.

@19: that Heritage Minister's been saying crazy irresponsible apocalyptic shit all along.

that's what ultranationalist religious fanatics do (see: Hamas). yet somehow, I feel confident that Israel is not going to nuke Gaza.

@22. It's not the nuking of Gaza that concerns me, but their utter disregard for the lives of the hostages in order to meet their state war goals in line with their ethos and the Likud's charter established in 1977. Their actions are clearly in line with that, particularly if they supersede the hostage ceasefire agreement to continue their Rafah offensive!

Garb@17: “If rhetoric is not a crime backed up by actions, why are we cracking down on university students whose apocryphal rhetoric is promoting antisemitism?”

The guy who recently got banned from Slog (!) now asks why institutions of higher learning have codes of conduct for their students and campuses? Folks, you simply cannot make this stuff up!

“…apocryphal rhetoric…”

That word does not mean what you think it means. The rhetoric in question was, in fact, very well reported:

‘The day before the police shut down the protests [at Columbia University], pro-Palestinian students led marches around the heart of the campus chanting “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel will fall” and “We don’t want no two state, we will take all of it”. Others led with a variation on the popular but contentious “river to the sea” slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.”‘

(Love the ambiguity removal on that last one, given how hard the pro-Hamas crowd had labored, in vain, to show the original had multiple meanings.)

What is the URL for that most decidedly non-apocryphal rhetoric? Who supplied it to Slog?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/03/college-gaza-protests-antisemitism

CDizzle on May 3, 2024 at 9:06 AM“

The guy who got banned from slog was on here 5 years before that incident, all of which was erased. Also there you go trying to discredit me because of an isolated incident instead of arguing the merits of my points.

Ahab, who is one of a thousand of Fax's sockpuppets, has been banned several times and I don't hear you doing anything but parroting his talking points.

There are documented incidents and those should be held to account, but they should not be used to mislabel and discredit the purpose of the vast majority of these nonviolent protests and protestors which are decidedly not antisemitic, especially the Jewish protestors in Tel Aviv and in the universities who have common cause with the college students.

What happened to tensor, tensorna? And I guess you don't speak Hebrew after all, or do you? Still waiting to hear about that since you seem to doubt that since boatgeek doesn't speak it that there was something lost in the Haaretz translation. Still waiting.

Slogans are not the fundamental ethos of an entire movement whose chief purpose is to stop the genocide against civilians and children. And why isn't the River to the Sea in the Likud's charter which essentially calls for the destruction of Palestine by making the entire region subject to Israeli annexation? Those calling for a second Nakba in the Israeli cabinet aren't calling for the destruction of Gaza through these means? Where are those people to go?

Tensor if anyone is discredited as a bad faith whatabouter that constantly deflects to avoid the indefensible, it's you.

And why isn't the River to the Sea in the Likud's charter which essentially calls for the destruction of Palestine by making the entire region subject to Israeli annexation considered hate speech?*

https://www.facebook.com/bingewatcherspodcast/videos/fist-of-the-north-star-clip/454763645151888/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqbaBlTPEFM

Garb@25: Aaaaand, after yet another round of your not understanding the very concept of civility in public discourse, let alone why it’s important in places like a university campus, we get another round of logical fallacy.

Boatgeek stated as fact his interpretation of a single quote, despite his not knowing the language or culture of the speaker. The burden of proof rests entirely upon boatgeek to show his interpretation is complete and correct; no one else is required to prove he was wrong. I merely stated my doubts about the validity of his claim, and left it at that.

“What happened to tensor, tensorna?”

My old account is still here, as you could so very easily have seen for yourself: https://www.thestranger.com/users/2402388/tensor

But finding it yourself would have required actual curiosity about my old account, instead of just a snide attempt at a gotcha. (I had problems with my old IT, which locked me out of my old account. So I created a new account, and to show it was still me, I named it, well, tensor’s New Account. So, to the best of my knowledge, I have an undeleted, unbanned, unbroken string of comments here, going all the way back to those fabulous days of yore, when Our Own Dear Mrs. Vel-DuRay first graced this silly place with her seriously divine presence.)

@7 xina: I am amazed the Orange Turd isn't already being cornholed in hell if not prison for its unforgivable war crimes against humanity, the environment, women's body autonomy, our electoral and judicial systems, and leaving our democracy in ruins.
Anybody else guilty of committing only 10% of what the Orange Turd has willfully done in crimes in this divided country would never again see the light of day.
I can't help but wonder what the number of people exiting the Divided States would be if the Orange Turd steals another election brought on by its AmeriKKKan Taliban.

Tyson = Just Say No

@29 If tie going to lie about me, at least try to make it less obvious. That is not at all what I said, as a cursory review of @2 will show. I gave two different translations of the same quote, a link to a non-paywalled news site in the region’s analysis of the quote, and plenty of information for the user to find other resources if they didn’t like the slant of the link I gave. If you don’t like the conclusion of the references I gave, by all means supply your own. It’s not up to me to try to resolve your amorphous doubts.

I leave it to you to explain the nuance and deeper cultural meaning of “There's no half- measure. Rafah, Dir al-Balah Nusseirat absolute destruction!" Because that certainly looks clear.

@31 should have started “If you’re…” Damn autocorrect.

@31

“@29 If [you’re] going to lie about me, at least try to make it less obvious. That is not at all what I said, as a cursory review of @2 will show.”

it’s called
‘Wormtongue’
for pretty pretty Good reasons

and
if he isn’t some
Evil Totalitarinian’s
corporate spokesperson

he’s Missing out
on probably Million$

all for What, exactly?
some Revenge fantasy
on Progressives in Seattle?

@31: And again, the Finance Minister controls daily operational planning and targets of the IDF, right?

@25: Yet, it’s so easy to find eliminationist hate slogans in the pro-Palestine protester playbook, isn’t it? From the streets of Seattle to the campus of Columbia University in New York City, we hear calls for “peace” via total destruction of Israel. (And if that’s what they say publicly, in the most liberal parts of the United States, then what do they say in private?) Do you really believe demonstrators in Israel agree with these slogans?

Everyone except Hamas wants peace. Everyone but a few of you dead-enders understand Hamas is the problem here.

"Everyone except Hamas wants peace."
--@Wormtongue

(yet) Another Lie:

bib nutnyahoo Knows
when his little War on Pal-
estinians is Over he's Gotta
Face the Music in Court where
his genocidal campaign on Pal-
estine will come crashing in on him

Not to mention
his Corruption
which is Also
up for court-
ly consider-
ations as
Soon as
his little
WAR is
Over.

so
NO not
Everyone
'wants Peace'
Wormtongue.

@34 Nobody in the War Cabinet controls daily operational planning and target selection. That's left to the relevant staff organizations of the IDF, unless they're doing it badly wrong (shades of Kissinger selecting targets in Vietnam). However, the War Cabinet absolutely controls overall strategy, including whether or not to make any real effort to preserve human life in Gaza. As the Finance Minister is one of 5 members of the War Cabinet set by law (others are added by the Prime Minister), he absolutely has a voice in those decisions.

what with their
purported Penchant
for pinching Pennies
surely the Finance Minister'd
be sending the Bill to genocided
Gazans for the cost to Israel for the Bul-
lets or for their Fair Share of Bomb shards
used to destroy thier Bodies to Smithereens

but My question is:

how on Earth might Israel
assess the Costs to Israel
for those Buried in the
Rubble? or are they al-
lowed to Get Away for
Free? which seems
awfully Unjust if
you were to
Inquire of
Myself at
some pt.