#Western Sydney Events

[thenextrush]

Neon Alley: The Easter show's new food truck destination

Click here to view video View this post on Instagram A post shared by JL (@josephlloyd_)

[thesapphire123]

Corporate Venue in Western Sydney - Sapphire Function Centre

Sapphire Function Centre is a premier corporate venue in Western Sydney, offering versatile spaces for meetings, conferences, and corporate events. With state-of-the-art facilities, exceptional service, and customizable setups, it is the ideal location for your business gatherings. Whether you're planning a small meeting or a large corporate event, Sapphire Function Centre ensures a professional and seamless experience. For a top-notch corporate venue in Western Sydney, choose Sapphire Function Centre.

[faunandfloraas]

Aussie question time: when I find out an idol is American/Canadian, their image in my mind completely changes because now it’s like “Oh I know exactly who you are, I grew up with your type around me” there are subtleties that I’m going to understand that others might not. So with all that said, I’ve been curious about what that’s like (if you experience it) w the skz aussies (throw in a lily if you’re feeling it -v-) 🎤

this is wayyyyyy too long so I'm putting it under a read more- also disclaimer: i dont know these guys and these are just my opinions, dont take em too srs <3

Hmmmm... Well I guess I'll start with Felix- I've said it before a bunch but the whole "Felix is a tiny uwuw baby sweet summerchild who is just such a baby" etc. etc. has made me laugh from the get go- because Yep! he is incredibly sensitive and sweet natured and kind and he cries a lot- 100% that is true. Dont think I'm saying it's not. But like. He also grew up in western sydney, he grew up in a area that if you google it one of the first suggestions is "is it safe" but then at the same time he went to private catholic school im pretty sure. and i saw pics from back then that he'd posted back in the day of cool little felix with his gold watch and his fade and all his little homeboys looking rowdy on the train- I know that kid and while that kid can also be sweet and sensitive, he's not incapable and hes not a baby. Good recent example was when he went on that Jewel box show with the gay dudes and people were acting like he was *so uncomfortable* and sooooo out of his element and so this and so that- theres gay dudes all over sydney, there's gay dudes all over australian media- the idea felix couldnt handle that was simply laughable to me- but it kinda shows how many outside perceptions of him still very much fall into that vaguely infantalizing thing. Like when he was the one who was happy to go up to adam levine and dj snake in that skz talker while the other boys were much more shy? that didnt shock me at all. felix went to korea as a whole teenager laregly against his parent wishes- he's actually quite an outgoing and brave guy. Outgoing guys can still be sweeties, though- one doesn't negate the other.

One other aspect of Felix i think a lot of fans just gloss over but is easily noticeable by me is that he can kindaaaaaa be ... a lil bitchy? like he's never ever mean or cruel dont get me wrong- but he has a slight bitchy streak, he rolls his eyes AND he's actually much more sarcastic than people bring up? Again- he does it a lot with Chan and that doesnt shock me- they both are aussie boys, Chan will get it and I think Felix can very much be himself with Chan, he doesn't necessarily feel the need to put up an extra air of like... Sweetie boy-ness? bc when he calls chan a cunt on live chan just laughs and goes OI!! so yuh the main thing with felix is while i do think hes a little sweet guy, ive never from the get go had a hard time seeing him outside of that box, too. Also maybe that's a lil bit aussie humour slipping under the radar here or there 🤔

Chan to me from the get go too was pretty much like. Prototypical overachieving aussie Good Boy. Like, i had a drafted post i never posted bc it was too niche- but it was essentially about how he speaks about sports and the like, and it just said "We get it. You went to zone carnival" which was the sporting event that the kids who got gold or 1st place were sent to. If you went to zone, you were the Successful kid. I think these days most fans perceive him as... a bit of a goofy guy? but I have gone through the archives and i have seen the comments from people talking about how chans such a bad boy- thats shit is so funny to me bc you can show me every iteration of chan and I'd never, ever think he's a bad boy. Like he wishes he was a bad boy, he kinda cosplays a bad boy- even him referencing swearing bc of his australianess and shit over the years makes me giggle a little bc i feel like felix def 100% swears all the time but he doesnt like Smirk about it too much? he doesnt really bring it up? things like that stand out, it to me feels very like Oh yeah I'm this naughty Aussie boy who swears hehe and then all the australians are like ? Girl we all do huh lmao

Otherwise, I dont have as much to say about chan as i do about felix, funnily. Like idk people might perceive differently to me, but nothing too far off? I will say that given Chan's success and the fact he was seemingly a very well achieving kid too (maybe not debuting for such a long time is part of this) he is WAY more humble than I'd expect. Like not to besmirch Australian men but a lot of them can be really loud and cocky, especially the famous successful ones (any sport star) it's almost encouraged to be like that if you're a dude (but only to a certain degree, anything beyond a certain point and you'll be roasted lol) So I have to give credit where it's due and say that Chan *Seemingly does have a very good nature and I appreciate that about him! Its probably why I like him so much bc he actually very much doesn't give off those vibes- he doesn't seem like that overly macho cocky bloke I know very well. So that makes him good fun for me- he's very successful and he's confident and yet he doesn't activate any of my bitch instincts- thats impressive! I don't know him, so I'll never know for sure of course, i feel like i need to make that disclaimer but still I do believe he has a good heart, and he tries so hard! and I appreciate that.

Lily is weirdly like Chan. like she's hilariously like chan tbh- I wonder how they really get along sometimes bc I feel like they might look at each other and be like Hm... we the same............ ? Lmao I will say though, lily is a bit out of pocket and half of that I believe is her personality but half of it is just.... I think she's just australian 😭 like i cant lie you get me as a teenager to early 20 something and put me on a live and I can promise I would be saying as much ?? shit. Like, I do think Australians are a little loud and not necessarily always.... tactful (again Not everyone, but yk.) lily certainly fits that bill to a T. I appreciate that regardless of her idolhood she does still say things that maybe she shouldn't, she shrugs off a shoplifting confession, she says she'd murder someone if she had to, she bought and wore a shirt that fans quickly tracked down and found out all the proceeds were going to Palestine- she would have known what that suggested. she clearly had this goal of being an idol since she was a baby, like literal baby but she hasn't sacrificed her broader personality, even the parts that could potentially be off-putting to those idol fans that expect perfection and nothing else. I appreciate that in her! and I hope she never loses her little weird girl spark bc it does make her very dynamic! Her slightly gruff aussie girlness is very fun for me to see in the idolsphere bc it def feels out of place, but in a refreshing way...

so yeah. Idk if this was sensical, I was making dinner so I put my phone down a bunch and it's probably disjointed but thats my opinion... my thoughts, my ideas! Idk my take on them. Thanks for asking 🫡

[gingergofastboatsmojito]

Polka thoughts

I think ThoughtfulC is onto something here, so I started thinking about what @thoughtfulchaos773 said and this came to mind (thanks for the inspo btw):

So, here's how I connect these Polka thoughts dots:

Symbolically speaking Carmy, who was going through his blue period 🔗 and dragged Syd down with him bc they ARE connected even when they aren't and that's what happens when you love someone, whether you admit it or not...

Cut down indeed all joy from his life and he’s sick right now, as I thoroughly described here 🔗and foresaw here 🔗. That's what the polka dots represent, both happiness and sickness. And that's why Storer chose them to make a visual point throughout this season. Polka dots are a pattern, Storer loves them, so here are my 2 cents:

Source: Shutterstock's Blog on History of Fashion

Throughout this entire season, they were barely on the same page on the menu, which represents their emotional connection, 🔗 right?

Please note that no matter how disconnected he was from his heart which in his case is like being dead inside because he leads with his heart, just like Syd, he never stopped praising her cooking.

And as we all know since S1, Carmy’s emotional connection is through food and cooking

and not only was he disconnected from his emotions heart (he was blocked as I mentioned here, 🔗which has to do with him not choosing Sydney the polka dots sauce), and from Syd, he was also disconnected from his own food and his own cooking and as we learned in the finale, that resulted in THE BAD REVIEW:

They both lead with their hearts and therefore, since their hearts were 💔 this season the food was not perfect either. He was stuck here 🔗

But here’s the catch and silver lining:

If we dig deeper we find out that Polka dots also mean this according to Eastern tradition, which Storer mentioned here and there since S2, and Syd seems to be intuned with

Source: au.coeur.du.japon.com

Carmy was moving in circles throughout this entire season, that's why it looked like no progress was made. Well, actually, I beg to differ, but this was basically the cliffhanger → Carmy's breakthrough 🔗

As the article above says: the circle symbolizes ETERNITY in Western culture, as well. These symbolisms do not cancel each other out but rather complement each other because Storer's view is holistic.

So the events that we saw in this ep, which is the culmination of the whole season of death and rebirth:

Are initiating a domino effect that will bring about PERMANENT CHANGES in all the characters involved.

And Syd's polka dots represent exactly that (bears repeating):

We haven't seen the re-birth/light/harmony part yet, (which I'm sure will include a heavy element of Sydcarmy) we only saw the funerals and labor pains in S3. But the Polka dots Syd sported are a good sign. We will see the rest of that Polka dots symbology Storer planted in plain sight soon. Either in S 3B or S4.

Syd is 🔗 the twist ❤️🤌

Remember to follow my tag #Gingerpovs 💋

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

New SpaceTime out Monday

SpaceTime 20241021 Series 27 Episode 127

Starship’s amazing fifth test flight

In what many describe as the most spectacular space engineering event of the year, SpaceX has successfully caught its Starship superheavy booster following its return from its climb to space, using a set of chopsticks on the launch pad tower.

Where do most meteorites come from?

A new study has found that the most common types of meteorites that reach Earth originated from just three major asteroid breakup events.

NASA’s Europa Clipper sails toward the Jovian ice moon

NASA’s Europa Clipper has embarked on its long voyage to the Jovian ice moon and its global sub surface liquid water ocean where it will investigate whether life could exist there.

The Science Report

Scientists warn that high temperatures and air pollution is driving an increase in stroke cases.

H5N1 bird flu mainly spreading in US dairy cows through the process of milking them.

Your life satisfaction in adulthood influenced by your relationships as teenagers.

Skeptics guide to cancer council of Western Australia bent spoon nomination

SpaceTime covers the latest news in astronomy & space sciences.

The show is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts (itunes), Stitcher, Google Podcast, Pocketcasts, SoundCloud, Bitez.com, YouTube, your favourite podcast download provider, and from www.spacetimewithstuartgary.com

SpaceTime is also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both i-heart Radio and Tune-In Radio.

SpaceTime daily news blog: http://spacetimewithstuartgary.tumblr.com/

SpaceTime facebook: www.facebook.com/spacetimewithstuartgary

SpaceTime Instagram @spacetimewithstuartgary

SpaceTime twitter feed @stuartgary

SpaceTime YouTube: @SpaceTimewithStuartGary

SpaceTime -- A brief history

SpaceTime is Australia’s most popular and respected astronomy and space science news program – averaging over two million downloads every year. We’re also number five in the United States.  The show reports on the latest stories and discoveries making news in astronomy, space flight, and science.  SpaceTime features weekly interviews with leading Australian scientists about their research.  The show began life in 1995 as ‘StarStuff’ on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) NewsRadio network.  Award winning investigative reporter Stuart Gary created the program during more than fifteen years as NewsRadio’s evening anchor and Science Editor.  Gary’s always loved science. He studied astronomy at university and was invited to undertake a PHD in astrophysics, but instead focused on his career in journalism and radio broadcasting. Gary’s radio career stretches back some 34 years including 26 at the ABC. He worked as an announcer and music DJ in commercial radio, before becoming a journalist and eventually joining ABC News and Current Affairs. He was part of the team that set up ABC NewsRadio and became one of its first on air presenters. When asked to put his science background to use, Gary developed StarStuff which he wrote, produced and hosted, consistently achieving 9 per cent of the national Australian radio audience based on the ABC’s Nielsen ratings survey figures for the five major Australian metro markets: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth.  The StarStuff podcast was published on line by ABC Science -- achieving over 1.3 million downloads annually.  However, after some 20 years, the show finally wrapped up in December 2015 following ABC funding cuts, and a redirection of available finances to increase sports and horse racing coverage.  Rather than continue with the ABC, Gary resigned so that he could keep the show going independently.  StarStuff was rebranded as “SpaceTime”, with the first episode being broadcast in February 2016.  Over the years, SpaceTime has grown, more than doubling its former ABC audience numbers and expanding to include new segments such as the Science Report -- which provides a wrap of general science news, weekly skeptical science features, special reports looking at the latest computer and technology news, and Skywatch – which provides a monthly guide to the night skies. The show is published three times weekly (every Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and available from the United States National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio, and through both i-heart Radio and Tune-In Radio.

[yannaryartside]

SYDNEY, PASTA, CARMY, AND FAILURE

When Sydney was trying to create items for the menu and failing at it, I kept asking myself why, why is he self-sabotaging now, even when she may have been waiting for a change like this her whole life.

There were some events related to her fear of failure, to pasta, and to Carmy, that created a unique avalanche of her own.

She tells Carmy the story of the incident that broke her business, about a mean lady who demanded fresh pasta that she couldn't deliver despite her best efforts. The failure was caused by improvisation on her part, trying to compensate for biting more than she could chew to begin with. 

In that same scene, she fucks up Carmy's recipe to ferment the pasta. Too much acid, when he had suggested her to add acid to another of her original dishes before. This was a subconscious response to how badly she fears to disappoint him, yet she does. Simple instructions, something she has done before, fucked up (remember the stock incident, even if it wasn't her fault, she felt humiliated). Pros to Carmy for actually reacting as a friend this time and the next scenario, even if that didn't help Sydney's self-critic too much.

Next time they cook together, Sydney fucks up another recipe, one of her own. Too much salt. Again, something she has done before.

And then, Carmy ditches her.

She has to go for inspiration alone, and what does she imagine as a possible signature dish? A pasta dish. It makes sense; it is an Italian restaurant, after all. 

When she imagines this dish, she imagines it plated on the circular black plate Carmy liked, the only one he wanted.

Later, after fighting with Carmy, she tries to make that pasta dish she imagined but fails at it. 

She cannot improvise or be creative because the last time she did that, she was punished by losing her business. And then made a recipe of her own, or tried to collaborate on another one, fucked up in front of her partner and idol. All these cases, in her mind, it connected to a pasta dish. 

images by @heardchef

She has failed in the same area (pasta) in different scenarios (Carmy and his standards, that is the same as saying the industry standard, her business, fucking a recipe) doubting herself to the point she has locked herself in an art block.

About Carmy ditching her on the food tour, for what we know, she may think that was something Carmy did on purpose as a way of saying, "You are a CDC now. This is your problem." She spoke to everyone all day, saying she had a partner, only to realize there is no such thing as a partnership at the top of this industry; you can pull your weight, or you sit your ass down. Nobody wants to feel like death weight in a partnership, and now she may feel she is lacking in the things that made Carmy choose her; that is why, in 2x09, under the table, she goes, "You could do this without me." The reassurance coming from Carmy completes her arc. 

Now, these some other thoughts on this:

Sydney may still only be able to define her own culinary success by the things that had made Carmy successful. Let's remember she is working for his family restaurant. Most recipes are his family recipes (filled with trauma, but we are not going to touch that today). He is the mold she cannot fit in, the plat in which she doesn't provide anything yet, to her eyes. This is a very common problem for artistic people, success is only defined by the people before you, if your own creative voice doesn't fit that mold, you may think you are not good, or ready.

She considers his experience more valuable than her own instincts, so I really hope she gets to resolve that. 

The inspirations he decides on would be pretty interesting since now she was only trying to fit the mold of her previous failures. Something is to be said about a woman of color, with a culture of her own, trying to fit in a Western-oriented industry, fighting to be taken seriously in what is considered "high-end cuisine." Someone made a post of a female black chef who won a chef competition combining her Italian and African heritage, something like that (at least until she gets her own spot), would be pretty neat.

Finally, and to aggravate everything, SHE IS RUNNING FULL SPEED. The sense of urgency that was very evident in s1. we don't know what makes her this way (it may be "working twice as hard to get the same recognition" or a different type of trauma). “Growing too much too fast" on her business, gambling on a shot on a kinda disgraced star chef in a chaotic environment, pressuring Carmy to change the restaurant on s1, pushing her dish to the food critic, all that collapsing on her all at once. Then she took care of her own and Carmy’s responsibilities on s2, because she tough that was expected of her. Too much, too fast. If she ever wants to make a path of her own, she needs to heal this.

[myf00djournal]

A chronological post run post.

Iiiiiii had a hard hard time man. In hindsight, I always knew our race was at 4pm so perhaps doing long runs at 6am was never going to help but I was so optimistic for cool weather in April. Nope 31 degrees. My worst fear. I was on pace and on the game plan up until around 8km which is when the course went from some shade to full sun. Told my running partner to push on without me which I had to say 5 times before he did listen 😛 I hate holding people back. The rest was an absolute slog. I thought about a DNF. I found a second wind around 13km and settled back into consistent trotting. Got through. They told us at the start the course was 20.5 which was a shame as it was advertised as a HM and then I saw a girl who was about a km ahead of me usually (because everyone we snaked past each other we did cute girl high fives) going in an opposite direction and I said don’t we turn left again? And she said nope the course was actually 18km. What the heck. Look my performance was not my best but I would’ve dragged myself another bit. Crossed the line and kept going with some other die hards who were also trying to make up km but I got to 19.8 and called it. The water station people were like oh we have cleared the course how much longer will you be and I was like you know what I’m done.

I’m annoyed because the organizers have a whole calendar of events and yet they were so shambolic. They delayed the start time, changed the course and then cut off a considerable distance for everyone. Also WHO KNOWS why the run was at 4/4:30pm in western Sydney but that’ll do me.

The 10km started an hour after us and then 5km after that so there was people always out on course but for a big event there was seriously maybe 60 people in each. So many DNS because we are legit flooded at the moment so I guess people couldn’t make it. A few people DNF. I saw the 5km fun run and wish I went in that because the first woman was 28:10 🥹 but I know it’s not about that.

My average km was around 7:30 which isn’t too bad considering I did a lot of walk/jog intervals for about 6km all up but Runna had me working at 6:25-6:30 as my goal which I was on but it really did fall away. My running partner did a great job and held around 6:40 which I am so happy for him.

Maybe next time I should do more than an 8 week training block. What am I saying with next time 🤦🏽‍♀️ haha never let me again please!!!! I just want to be a parkrun girly and maybe 10km???

Best of all Josh surprised me at the start line to see me off ❤️❤️❤️

The end. Also yes enjoy my post run glow - day ones will recognize the mirror. @taoistimmortal thank you for telling me to increase my cals by 500 cos yeah it’s going noice 👌🏻

[vintagelacerosette]

Weekly Tag game (Catch up)

Forgive meee I am late but I had the other one in my drafts & I hadn't be able to finish it off yet 😅

I was tagged by these sweethearts 💖💕💖

Jessica @guinguin1984 Julia @blue-disco-lights Deanna @deedala Georgia @iansw0rld

Face @burninface Jaclyn @crossmydna Evie @energievie

Bri @y0itsbri Lyle Lyle crocodile @kiinard Macy @heymacy

Mel @gardenerian Sarah @sleepyheadgallavich Julissa @heymrspatel

Harvey @mikhailoisbaby Kat @mybrainismelted Ling @lingy910y

Name: Shermyn

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? (or you): Sydney in the western part  

Ok, so this week we are going to snoop into your google search. Type in each phrase and tell us what the first suggestion is that google gives you!

What is the best way to….rule? (hehe nice maybe my Leo tendencies 🤣🦁

This is what I saw on Quora

1) Become a community organizer · 2) Learn to speak eloquently · 3) Tell people what they want to hear · 4) Sell your soul to the Devil · 5) ...

😂😂😂

Where can I…. watch Saltburn? (it's on my watch list haha) Amazon Prime

How old is…. Taylor Swift? (i didn't search this but i guess she's top result) 34

How long does it take… to get to mars? (wow a fun one) Now quoting NASA, "If jt all goes well, you'll get to the Red Planet in about seven ot eight months." ♂️🔴

How many… states in Australia? Six states 🇦🇺

Who set the record for…. the highest jump? Javier Sotomayor good job my dude 👏

When did….michael jackson die? 25 june 2009 (woah I started 1st year of high school then)

What does it feel like to… to be in love? (ummm ive never searched that but damn a pointed search 😭😭😭) Reddit says "when you wake up thinking of that person & go to bed thinking of them"

Can you…go parasailing in sydney? (So me bc i missed out when i was in the Philippines 🥲) You can't anymore booo 👎

Why do… i sweat so much? Google says could he nerves that trigger it.

Is there a way… to save karlach? I really wanna play Baldur's gate 3 what's gonna happen to her?? I love her?? 🥺

How old do you have to be… to work? (boooo i don't wanna work but i want money 😩) In NSW minimum age for full time work is 17

Where do the… kardashians live? (i don't care) Malibu

What is the best time to… to go to fiji? (aaayee holiday??) June to September

And to finish us off…. What comes up when you type in Shameless? shameless last episode date

11 April 2021 I needed it for my gallacrafts 🥹

Name: Myn

Age: 27

Astrological sign: Leo ♌️

Upon which continent do you reside: Stralia 🦘

tell us how you're feeling right now using 3-5 emojis: 🥶💸🤔🤫🤗

whats your favorite flavor of gum? Juicy fruit but the flavour never lasts long

whats the last movie you watched? Anastasia for my nieces first viewing 😆 It mostly became a sing-a-long with my big sis 🎤

what was your worst subject in high school? Maybe science?

whats the job you stayed at for the shortest period of time? Working for a weekend event at a convention centre for the active wear brand Lorna Jane. I got lost on the 1st day & didn't get paid for that 15 min 😅

whats your favorite thing to do at an amusement park? Try all the interesting foods 😋

what condiments go on top of the perfect hot dog (meat or plant-based)? BBQ sauce & caramelised onions 🌰

cincinnati chili, thoughts? Never heard of it!

do you sleep with a plushie? No my plushies are on a shelf bc I can get kicked out of my room every 2nd weekend bc my sister & her family takes it over haha. But worth it to have my baby niece over 🥰

how do you feel about thunderstorms? No strong emotions. It's cool when boom

what's the last animal you touched? My dog Roxy 🐕 ❤️

grab the nearest item with words on it that ISNT a book and tell me the final word: Tulip on this korean dry shampoo I'm trying 🌷

have you ever forgotten to do an assignment until the night before its due? Oh I was organised at knowing darw but procrastinated the hell out of the assignment until the due date. Then trying to finish the night before 😅 I found an old diary entry calling myself a dumb bitch for doing that to myself & saying to never do it again (she did) 😭

Not tagging anyone bc LATE but if you wanna play consider yourself tagged! 🩷🐇

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this Media-Culture Journal:

Australian children are uniquely situated in a vast landscape that varies drastically across locations. Spanning multiple climatic zones—from cool temperate Tasmania to the tropical North—Australia is home to flora and fauna specific to diverse regions, including arid desert and rainforests, mountainous woodlands, and unique mangrove estuaries and coastal regions. Many of Australia’s endemic species—about 85%—are found nowhere else in the world, and in 2020 alone, 763 new species of flora and fauna were catalogued in Australia. As a country, Australia is experiencing the full gamut of climate-related devastation, including rising land and sea temperatures, coral bleaching and loss of marine life, extreme bushfires and prolonged periods of drought, flooding, and relocation of communities. These extreme climate related events threaten human livelihoods and wellbeing in diverse ways, and disproportionately affect children.

It is well documented that children around the world are experiencing anxiety, grief, anger, and despair about the damage climate change is causing to the planet, and the lack of action being taken to reverse this damage. Today’s children will inherit a myriad of critical environmental, health, and socio-economic issues that will shape their future. Awareness of these impending challenges can invoke extreme distress from a very young age. Despite their feelings of powerlessness and the disproportionate impact on their generation, children and young people are effective agents of change. Climate change research is demonstrating that “children are effective communicators”, they “possess unique perceptions of risks” and “have distinctive knowledge and experiences and are capable of identifying and implementing viable, locally appropriate adaptation responses”. The specific climate-related effects that children face vary based on their geographic location and socioeconomic difference.

While global narratives and imagery about climate change and its impacts often utilise widely recognised phenomena such as melting sea-ice, deforestation, coral bleaching, and the great pacific garbage patch, the specific challenges faced by Australian children in their local suburbs look quite different. To explore the specific climate-related experiences and concerns of some Australian youth, creative and participatory workshops were conducted with children and young people in three geographically diverse regions of New South Wales (NSW). During the month of July 2023, 49 children and young people aged between 10 and 18 years participated in climate change workshops run by the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University. The workshops formed part of the research project in partnership with UNICEF Australia, who also co-facilitated some workshops. Participants were recruited from three regions of NSW, including Western Sydney, the Upper Hunter, and the Northern Rivers. The purpose of the workshops was to explore children’s perceptions and experiences of climate change, as well as their aspirations for the future, which were then used to develop a child-centred indicator framework for climate change. During our workshops we discovered that children communicate specific climate-related challenges and fears based on the unique landscape in which they live, and these location-based issues are the subject of this article.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: David Bernstein

Published: 16 Oct, 2023

Before the blood had even dried on the pavement of the Nova music festival in southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists ruthlessly murdered 260 young people on 7 October 2023, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies (CLES) began posting Instagram memes in support of “Palestinian Liberation.” The CLES is a collection of educational organizations that design curricula for US high schools. They aim to teach students about “critical consciousness” and “intersectional forms of oppression.” One of the memes they posted advertised an upcoming “Long Live Palestinian Resistance” event and another gave a shout out to “The People’s Forum,” which organizes events in New York under the banner “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” The academic activists of CLES are not first-generation immigrants from the Gaza Strip or the West Bank; they are largely home-grown ideologues who teach ethnic and gender studies at American universities and are now seeking to disseminate their ideas in US primary and secondary schools.

Even I—the jaded author of the book Woke Antisemitism and founder of a Jewish organization dedicated to countering this growing variant of the world’s oldest hatred—was stunned by their rhetoric. I would have thought that they would say that the murder of civilians was awful, but that Israel had it coming. But there was not even a token condemnation of Hamas’ violence on 7 October. Instead, the decolonizers publicly justified the bloodletting.

And then came the protests. Before a single Israeli bomb dropped in Gaza, the organizer of a gathering in New York’s Times Square celebrated the violent rampages in front of a cheering crowd. Alluding to the murdered festival-goers, he joked, “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party. They were having a great time and then the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters.”

At a massive rally on the steps of the Sydney Opera House three days after the massacre, protesters chanted “Gas the Jews.” And—among other calumnies on campuses across North America—thirty-one Harvard student groups issued a statement of solidarity with Hamas, pronouncing Israel “entirely responsible” for the terrorist group’s slaughter.

There are two distinct but overlapping camps of the social justice left. The radical decolonization camp is made up of extremist academics, anarchists, and Black Lives Matter activists. It is anti-Western, anti-American, and antisemitic to its core. It would be easy to dismiss these people as ideological quacks—if it were not for their outsized role in US educational institutions.

By “decolonization,” they don’t mean a colonial power extricating itself from a former colony; they mean the process of freeing institutions and spheres of activity from the cultural or social influences of what they perceive as the dominant white Western class. One early leader of the liberated ethnic studies movement, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, has denounced the United States as a “Eurocentric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-patriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” Influenced by decades of anti-Zionist Soviet propaganda, the decolonizers reserve special ire for the “settler-colonial state” of Israel, and call for the “liberation of Palestine,” by which they mean the displacement of the interloper Jews from their homeland. Witnessing the decolonisers’ zeal for obliterating the Jewish state, political scientist Wilfred Reilly quipped, “De-colonization is just ethnic cleansing, but woke.”

Those of us fighting the decolonizers have a golden opportunity to discredit them and undercut their influence in the days ahead. In their rationalizations of violence against Jews and Israelis, they’ve outed themselves as the extremists they are. School superintendents who might have seen them as credible educational partners in the new “diversity” initiatives will now have a hard time justifying their role to school boards and community members.

Then there’s the reformist, DEI camp, populated by people who have been deeply influenced by the same forms of neo-Manichaean postmodern thought, but who seek not to overthrow the capitalist system, but to reshuffle the deck of power. Unlike the decolonisers, their antisemitism tends to be latent. They insist that Jews are white, place them in white racial “affinity groups” and frequently downplay the validity of antisemitic claims as distractions from the important task of combating anti-blackness. They include mealy-mouthed university presidents and school superintendents, who see Muslims as a marginalized community and thus susceptible to “harm,” whereas Jews are a privileged minority and thus immune from such harm. These administrators are often held captive by the commitments and hires they made in the summer of 2020 during the great American racial reckoning. Some of them see Western cultural norms, such as being on time to work, as forms of white supremacy. They issue endless statements about racial justice and rightly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but they found themselves tongue-tied when Israelis were victims of a slaughter, and their Jewish students were in obvious pain. Suddenly, they rediscovered the merits of academic neutrality and free speech. They, too, stand to lose cultural clout in the intensifying anti-woke backlash.

Two and a half years ago, I left my job as CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the prestigious 75-year-old umbrella body of national and local Jewish advocacy organizations across the US. As a liberal lefty myself, I worried that a radical, illiberal ideology was gaining ground in my own ideological backyard, a phenomenon I first wrote about more than twenty years ago, in a 2003 article for Washington Jewish Week entitled “Consistent Moral Message Missing.” In the wake of the George Floyd murder, I watched with dismay as Jewish organizations in my field fell in line with anti-racist pieties, desperate to remain aligned with their civil rights partners, many of whom had long ditched their liberal principles. While still employed at the JCPA, I wrote articles for Areo Magazine and other publications, expressing my concern. As soon as my departure was official, I wrote a widely circulated article “My Cheshbon Hanefesh (accounting of the soul in Hebrew) for Cowardice in the Face of Wokeness,” which sparked much debate in the Jewish community.

In May 2021, I founded the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values to fight for viewpoint diversity and against the encroachment of radical social justice ideology in the Jewish world. That very month fighting broke out in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, and some of the responses to that conflict foretold our current reality. Media coverage of the ongoing conflict since it first broke out in June 2008, and of each subsequent conflict—in December 2008, November 2012, June 2014, and May 2018, and right up until May 2021—unfolded in a predictable pattern. The stories and editorials first acknowledged that Israel must have leeway to defend itself against Hamas rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. Then, as casualties mounted, the coverage turned against Israel, and, within a few days, the same outlets lambasted the Jewish state for using “disproportionate force.” In May 2021—when the last round occurred—Israel was not given the usual benefit of the doubt. In even the earliest stages of the conflict, Israel was demonized as the oppressor in some quarters. “If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency,” Batya Ungar-Sargon pointed out in a Newsweek editorial. I knew then that the fight against wokeness was not just about preserving free thought, but about combating a variant of antisemitism that grows out of the same ideological conditions that stifle free thought.

I have never been entirely at ease making the case for the growth of “woke antisemitism” in liberal humanist circles. Liberal humanists like me are highly suspicious of promiscuous accusations of racism and bigotry, and oppose dogmatic declarations that only marginalized groups with “lived experience” of oppression are entitled to an opinion on social issues. Such political attitudes are the essence of cancel culture. Yet here I was arguing that the very ideology that produced cancel culture also fueled a new variant of antisemitism that sees Jews as white and privileged. In highlighting the threat of antisemitism, I was concerned that I might be engaging in the same tactics as the people I critique.

From the outset, however, I made it clear that I didn’t regard my analysis of antisemitism as beyond scrutiny. I reject the now oft-repeated claim among some Jews, who, echoing the assertions of minority political activists in other communities, argue that only Jews get to define antisemitism. I sought to discuss antisemitism in liberal, not postmodern terms, encouraging multiple viewpoints about the extent and nature of contemporary Jew hatred. But in the eyes of some fellow liberal humanists, I was still partaking in the identity politics of the day.

Now, in the aftermath of the massacre, I sense a shift. Awakened by the outpouring of Jew hatred in the wake of the massacre in Israel, many liberal humanist friends have expressed their shock. This magazine’s editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann has stated, “I don't think I ever really understood anti-Semitism until now. And it is frightening.” Skeptic Magazine editor Michael Shermer was exasperated by the hypocrisy of many:

When I left my perch at JCPA, I was immediately regarded as a heretic by a number of former colleagues. Some actively tried to prevent me from giving speeches about the topic in their Jewish communities. But, on this front, too, I sense movement. This past week, I received a surprise email from one of my chief antagonists on Twitter, Paul Hackner, a South African-born Jewish leftist who earlier excoriated me for using the term “woke” which, he insisted, “is about compassion and awareness AND you weaponized to express a fragile need to be comfortable when addressing racism.” After the massacre, he told me: “It's clear there is a revanchist left in North America that is allying with Hamas. The firestorm of hatred is raging. Hamas is a death cult. Sad to say you were right. Thanks for engaging with me. It helped me find moral clarity.”

Even among Israel’s most ardent Jewish critics, such as Joshua Leifer, a leftist writer and editor for Dissent Magazine, there’s indignation about moral callousness on the left. “There's also a deep sense that the left abroad has lost the values it was supposed to stand for,” he has stated:

I thought we were leftists because we wanted a world without war, torture, the killing of families and children in their beds I thought we were leftists because we abhor cruelty, detest violence, and believe in the inherent, even divine, worth of all human life. I thought we were leftists because our struggle was for all people to be able to live with freedom and dignity.

Leifer’s discontent might portend greater willingness among American Jews to take on their own political camp.

A local Jewish advocacy organization in my area, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRCGW), tore into the area school superintendent who originally failed to issue a statement of support for Israel and the Jewish community and later released only a tepid one. Much to my chagrin, the JCRCGW had previously actively participated in the school system’s yearlong “anti-racism audit” and subsequent implementation of DEI training and pedagogy. But when their partnership on anti-racism failed to elicit support for Jewish students in the schools in their time of need, the normally restrained JCRCGW lashed out:

We reserve our greatest anger and disappointment for Montgomery County Public Schools … [which has] consistently ignored our agencies’ urgent appeals over the last three days to respond appropriately and sensitively … if our schools can’t call out the brutal murder of Jews right before our eyes, of what use is the Holocaust education and cultural competency that we have worked together to advance?

I believe that this dogmatic version of “cultural competence,” which rigidly ties identity to privilege or oppression, is the source of the school system’s indifference to Jewish life in the first place. But given recent events, it seems unimaginable that mainstream Jewish leaders will continue to deny or ignore the role of ideology in the callousness toward the murder of Jews and the disregard for Jewish concerns. I, for one, will do everything in my power to place the topic on their agenda.

What could really turn the tide is if Jewish donors and trustees at major universities finally use the power of the purse. Marc Rowan, the chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management and the chair of the Board of Overseers of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has taken his own university to task. “While Hamas terrorists were slaughtering Israeli Jews, university administrators were figuring out how to spin it,” he writes in The Free Press:

The responsibility also rests with many of our alumni leaders and trustees, myself included, who have sat by quietly as the pursuit of truth—the ostensible mission of our elite institutions—was traded for a poorly organized pursuit of social justice and political correctness.

“It’s long past time,” he argues, “for donors to take notice.”

It’s long past time for all of us to take notice. Let us hope that the horrors of the moment will not only be a turning point in the battle against antisemitism, but in the larger fight against radicalism and illiberalism in the West.

==

This was the world's easiest moral question: celebrate or condemn far-right religious terrorists who dismembered babies alive? And they got the answer wrong.

Atheists who defend Hamas lose the right to criticize the god of the bible.

Exodus 12:29-30

And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.

Numbers 31:17-19

Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. And do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the seventh day.

Psalm 137:8-9

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

What bible-god did is what Hamas did. You don't get to criticize the morality of bible-god while defending a terrorist organization that did the same kind of thing.

[aboardthescheherazade]

Part 2 to the Rastapopoulos timeline post. I call these two the "Ironic End" and the "Bad End":

Ironic end: After the events of Flight 714 to Sydney, an amnesiac traveller wakes up on the beach of a tropical island. The locals take him in, and they figure out just enough to know he's probably from the Mediterranean; maybe he fell off a migrant ship, but there haven't been any travelling worker ships in the area recently. Eventually, he puts together some kind of new name, and begins working at the docks to make a living. He's drawn to a handful of things - ships and new movies, mainly - but nothing clear ever comes through. He lives the last years of his life as a short-tempered but nice-enough port foreman who mostly keeps to himself outside of work. His coworkers in town mourn him, but over time, he just fades away into the rest of the island's history.

Bad end: Playing yet another role, and likely having gone through some degree of ego death, "Endaddine Akass" emerges in the tropics as a spiritual advisor and art collector. His "practices" are mostly just a mishmash of Christianity, Islam, Daoism, and Rastafarianism. He gets underground plastic surgery to subtly alter his face just enough to be able to appear in the media without someone recognizing mugshots from his "past life". Rastapopoulos has found a new way to worm his way into the public zeitgeist, and all it took was completely sacrificing his identity and his dignity. This design came about while talking with ProfCal...his Alph-Art version would take place during the late 1930s-early 40s, and it got me thinking about a period-accurate Endaddine Akass. I adapted a number of details from Herge's speculative design, most notably the faux third eye, and the sort-of Magen David at the top of his staff. I can tell it's not meant to outright signal Judaism; I see it as an example of 20th Century western esoterism's rampant cultural appropriation (i.e. he'd probably try to claim it's a hexagram symbolizing elements, or something), plus, it's regionally accurate: the Magen David is an important piece of iconography in Rastafarianism. It was a very new religion in the late 1930s, which would make Akass fairly predatory for stealing aspects of Rastafarian imagery. (We also considered him pretending to be White Jamaican, accent and all, which would go to show how far "Akass" is willing to humiliate his old self just to live as a debutante. Have you ever heard Steven Seagal pretend to be Jamaican? That's what we're dealing with here)

Regardless of the ending you choose to follow, I still tried to make either of them relatively within Herge's writing style. He was fond of using big finales, and themes of karma and turnabout, so I considered both of these when pondering Rastapopoulos's fate at the end of the Tintin series. (I have thought way too much about Rastapopoulos, I know. The shmuck haunts me like an awful poltergeist ^^;)

[cosmicanger]

SAREE MAKDISI

No Human Being Can Exist

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite?

RECENTLY, AN AUSTRALIAN-PALESTINIAN friend of mine was invited to appear on Australia’s national television network to discuss the situation in and around Gaza.1 His white interviewers posed all the usual questions: Can you defend what we’ve seen from Hamas militants? How has the Palestinian cause been helped by this violence? How can anyone defend the slaughter of young music lovers at a music festival? Do you defend Hamas? They probably expected a defensive reaction from him, but calmly, in his smooth Australian-accented English, my friend had already turned the interview on its head. “I want to know why I’m here today, and why I haven’t been here for the past year,” he said gently. By the eve of October 7, he pointed out, Israeli forces had already killed more than two hundred Palestinians in 2023. The siege in Gaza was more than sixteen years old, and Israel had been operating outside international law for seventy-five years. “Normal” in Palestine was a killing a day—yet a killing a day in a decades-old occupation was hardly news; it certainly wasn’t justification for a live interview on a national television network. Palestinians were being given the opportunity to speak now because the Western media suddenly cared, and they cared (“as we should care,” my friend added) because, this time, the victims included Israeli civilians. In the days after October 7, Australia made a strong show of support for Israel: Parliament and the Sydney Opera House were lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag; the Prime Minister said pro-Palestinian rallies should be called off out of respect for the Israeli dead; the foreign minister was lambasted for saying Israel should endeavor to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza. “Well, what about our lives?” my friend asked.

What about lighting up a building for us? When our government lights up every building blue and white, how are we [Australian Palestinians] supposed to feel? Are we not Australian? Should nobody care about us? A 14-year-old boy was set on fire in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. What about us?

The news anchors were caught off guard. This isn’t how these interviews are supposed to go.

Those of us, like my friend, who are summoned by Western media outlets to provide a Palestinian perspective on the disaster unfolding in Gaza are well aware of the condition on which we are allowed to speak, which is the tacit assumption that our people’s lives don’t matter as much as the lives of the people who do. Questions are framed by the initial Hamas attack on Israeli civilians (the Hamas attack on Israeli military targets and Israel’s belt of fortifications, watchtowers, and prison gates surrounding Gaza goes unnoticed), and any attempt to place it in a wider historical framework gets diverted back to the attack itself: How can you justify it? Why are you trying to explain it instead of condemning it? Why can’t you just denounce the attack? If Palestinian commentators want to be asked about Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians—about the history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid that produced the contemporary Gaza Strip and the violence we are witnessing today; about the structural violence of decades of Israeli occupation that cuts farmers off from their fields, teachers from their classrooms, doctors from their patients, and children from their parents—we have to ask to be asked. And even then, the questions don’t come.

I’ve spoken to a lot of journalists from a lot of different media organizations over the past two weeks. With rare exceptions, the pattern is consistent, as it has been for years. A recent appearance on a major US cable news channel was canceled at the last minute, immediately after I sent in the talking points the producer requested I submit; they clearly weren’t the talking points they had in mind. For years, I was on the list of regular guests for BBC radio and television interviews concerning Palestine—until, during a previous Israeli bombardment of Gaza, I told the interviewer he was asking the wrong questions and that the questions that mattered had to do with history and context, not just what was happening right now. That was my last appearance on the BBC.

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? How can you explain that the Israeli occupation doesn’t have to resort to explosions—or even bullets and machine-guns—to kill? That occupation and apartheid structure and saturate the everyday life of every Palestinian? That the results are literally murderous even when no shots are fired? Cancer patients in Gaza are cut off from life-saving treatments.2 Babies whose mothers are denied passage by Israeli troops are born in the mud by the side of the road at Israeli military checkpoints. Between 2000 and 2004, at the peak of the Israeli roadblock-and-checkpoint regime in the West Bank (which has been reimposed with a vengeance), sixty-one Palestinian women gave birth this way; thirty-six of those babies died as a result.3That never constituted news in the Western world. Those weren’t losses to be mourned. They were, at most, statistics.

What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn. During the Haitian revolution in the early 19th century, former slaves massacred white settler men, women, and children. During Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, insurgent slaves massacred white men, women, and children. During the Indian uprising of 1857, Indian rebels massacred English men, women, and children. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, Kenyan rebels massacred settler men, women, and children. At Oran in 1962, Algerian revolutionaries massacred French men, women, and children. Why should anyone expect Palestinians—or anyone else—to be different? To point these things out is not to justify them; it is to understand them. Every single one of these massacres was the result of decades or centuries of colonial violence and oppression, a structure of violence Frantz Fanon explained decades ago in The Wretched of the Earth.

What we are not allowed to say, in other words, is that if you want the violence to stop, you must stop the conditions that produced it. You must stop the hideous system of racial segregation, dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that has disfigured and tormented Palestine since 1948, consequent upon the violent project to transform a land that has always been home to many cultures, faiths, and languages into a state with a monolithic identity that requires the marginalization or outright removal of anyone who doesn’t fit. And that while what’s happening in Gaza today is a consequence of decades of settler-colonial violence and must be placed in the broader history of that violence to be understood, it has taken us to places to which the entire history of colonialism has never taken us before.

AT ANY MOMENT, without warning, at any time of the day or night, any apartment building in the densely populated Gaza Strip can be struck by an Israeli bomb or missile. Some of the stricken buildings simply collapse into layers of concrete pancakes, the dead and the living alike entombed in the shattered ruins. Often, rescuers shouting “hadan sami’ana?” (“can anyone hear us?”) hear calls for help from survivors deep in the rubble, but without heavy lifting equipment all they can do is helplessly scrabble at the concrete slabs with crowbars or their bare hands, hoping against hope to pry open gaps wide enough to get survivors or the injured out. Some buildings are struck with such heavy bombs that the ensuing fireballs shower body parts and sometimes whole charred bodies—usually, because of their small size, those of children—over surrounding neighborhoods. Phosphorus shells, primed by Israeli gunners to detonate with airburst proximity fuses so that incendiary particles rain down over as wide an area as possible, set fire to anything flammable, including furniture, clothing, and human bodies. Phosphorus is pyrophoric—it will burn as long as it has access to air and basically can’t be extinguished. If it makes contact with a human body it has to be dug out by scalpel and will keep burning into the flesh until it’s extracted.

“We live,” one of Al Jazeera’s Arabic correspondents said, talking over the ubiquitous buzz of Israel’s lethal drones, “enveloped in the smell of smoke and death.” Entire families—twenty, thirty people at a time—have been wiped out. Friends and relatives desperately checking on each other often find smoking ruins where close relations once lived, their fate unknown, vanished either under the concrete or scattered in the remnants of other increasingly unrecognizable areas. Survivors find themselves in one of the most crowded areas on earth with crumbling telecommunications, faltering electricity, failing medical systems, a looming internet outage, and an uncertain future.4

In 2018, the United Nations warned that Gaza—its basic infrastructure of electricity, water, and sewage systems smashed over years of Israeli incursions and bombings, leaving 95 percent of the population without ready access to fresh drinking water—would be “unlivable” by 2020. It’s now 2023, and the entire territory, cut off from the outside world, is without any access to food, water, medical supplies, fuel and electricity, all while under continuous bombardment from land, sea, and air.5 “Attacks against civilian infrastructure, especially electricity, are war crimes,” pointed out Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. “Cutting off men, women, children [from] water, electricity and heating with winter coming,” she continued—“these are acts of pure terror.” Von der Leyen is right, of course, but in this instance she was referring to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. As for Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s infrastructure, Von der Leyen says that Israel has the right to defend itself.

900, 1000, 1500, 1800, 2600, 3500, 4600, 5000, 5900, 6500. The fatality figures, with which no one can keep up, are augmented every few hours with another twenty here and thirty there as this building or that is brought down in a cataclysmic burst of fire, smoke, and rubble. Three or four hundred people—or more—are being killed every day. At one point, health sources in Gaza reported 100 fatalities in a single hour. For every person killed there are two or three or more wounded, often severely. Almost half the dead and wounded are young children; some of the most painful images coming out of the current bombardment of Gaza, as in the ones past, are those of dead children, battered, ashen, covered in soot and dust, wrapped in the final embrace of parents who were killed trying to protect them. So far, with no end in sight, Israel has killed almost three thousand children. The dead and wounded or often simply recovered body parts—charred legs, trunks, heads—are taken to hospitals overflowing with casualties, running out of medical supplies and fuel for their emergency generators. Hospital beds have long since been fully occupied; new arrivals to Gaza’s hospitals crowd together in their own blood in hallways or on the pavements outside; doctors report napping on operating tables on which they now have to operate without anesthetic by the light of mobile phones, using household vinegar to clean wounds because they’ve run out of everything else.6

With morgues full to capacity and cemeteries running out of space, health authorities in Gaza have started storing bodies in ice cream trucks, with blood dripping slowly from doors emblazoned with the bright childish colors of ice cream brands.7 In alleys, courtyards, and makeshift mosques, those who are able gather in silent tears and prayers over arrays of bodies, large and often pitifully small, wrapped in blood-soaked shrouds in preparation for burial. Relatives sob over each bundle, give a bobbing forehead one last kiss as it is taken away for the last time, leaving only weeping mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins in each other’s arms, their own turn in their shrouds surely not far away. Sometimes there are no relatives; they’re all gone, too. The scale of the death and destruction is so massive, so unrelenting, there’s often no time to mourn, and every day, every hour, the Israelis shower more death on Gaza. One hospital has begun burying the anonymous dead in mass graves for lack of any other option.8

In the first week of the round-the-clock bombardment, the Israelis said they had dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza, a number equivalent to about a month of bombing at the peak of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—countries many, many times larger than the Gaza Strip.9 (Iraq is over a thousand times the size of Gaza.) They also claimed to have dropped over a thousand tons of high explosives; by the end of week one, we were, in other words, already into the kiloton measurements of nuclear weapons, and weeks two and three are upon us.10 In the first week of bombing, 1,700 entire buildings in Gaza were destroyed. Many times that number were damaged, often beyond repair. Each building includes seven, eight, nine, or more separate apartments, each one the former home of some family now either homeless once more or dead. As ever, the Israelis claim that they are targeting “the terror infrastructure.” As ever, the bodies (or body parts) actually pulled from the rubble or picked up from the neighboring streets are mostly of women and children, unlikely constituents of the phantom “terror infrastructure” from which the occupying power—with the blessing and benediction of its superpower patron—claims to be defending itself.

It is obvious from the harrowing footage coming out of Gaza that the Israelis, unable to locate any clear military targets—no guerrilla fighters in the history of anticolonial struggle have ever stood around waving their hands and making themselves obvious targets—are indiscriminately striking civilian targets instead, systematically destroying one concrete building after another, often annihilating entire neighborhoods at a time; the UN estimates that Israel’s bombing campaign has already damaged or destroyed 40 percent of all of the housing units in Gaza.11 On its websites and social media accounts, the Israeli state proudly boasts of the success of its campaign against Hamas, but the evidence it musters generally amounts to photographs of urban ruin, and the result is the carefully calculated infliction of mass homelessness on an entire population.

On October 12, the Israelis told one million people in the northern part of Gaza to flee for their lives.12 But there is nowhere for them to flee to, and those who attempt flight compound risk upon risk. The Gaza Strip is all of 140 square miles; it is already one of the most densely populated areas in the entire world. If the United States had the population density of Gaza, it would have 60,000,000,000 inhabitants. That’s sixty billion. And now the Israelis are bellowing that they want the tiny territory’s population to somehow squeeze into half the remaining area—and anyway they are bombing the south of Gaza as well as the north and the center. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.

Already refugees once or sometimes twice over (80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees, survivors or descendants of survivors of the ethnic cleansing of the rest of southwestern Palestine in 1948), new refugees find themselves in search of refuge once more, even as the Israelis warn darkly that there is far, far more to come.13 On October 14, a column of terrified refugees making their way north to south down Salah al Din Street in Gaza City—specifically singled out by Israeli leaflets as a safe corridor—were bombed, and seventy survivors of other bombings were killed and scores more injured. Doctors in clinics and hospitals in northern Gaza refused to move altogether, saying that it would be impossible primarily because there’s nowhere to move their patients to. All the other hospitals are full, said Dr. Yousef Abu al-Rish of the Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza. “And the other thing,” he added, “most of the cases are unstable. And if we want to even transfer them, even if there [are] extra beds in the other hospitals, which is not true, they will die because they are too unstable to be transported.” Patients in the ICU, newborns in incubators, people on ventilators—they would all just die if they were moved. Of course they might die if they stay put too, especially once the last drops of diesel run out and the lights go off. Or if the Israelis continue to bomb hospitals and ambulances as they have been doing. Already, a third of the hospitals and clinics in Gaza have had to shut down due to a lack of resources.14

“The specter of death is hanging over Gaza,” warned Martin Griffiths, UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. “With no water, no power, no food and no medicine, thousands will die. Plain and simple.”

A few days ago the Israelis said that it would be best, on the whole, for the entire population of the territory—over two million people, half of them children—to leave, either to Egypt or to the Gulf. We aim, the Israeli analyst Giora Eiland said approvingly, “to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” As a result, he added, “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”15 Major-General Ghassan Alian of the Israeli army, echoing the Defense Minister’s recent reference to Palestinians as “human animals,” said, “human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”16

What kind of people talk like this, with a godlike sense of their power over literally millions of people? What mindset produces such genocidal proclamations on the disposition of entire populations?

WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING before our eyes is, I think, unprecedented in the history of colonial warfare. Ethnic cleansing, in itself, is unfortunately not as rare an occasion as one would like; only a few weeks ago, 130,000 Armenians were driven in terror from their homes in Artsakh by (not coincidentally Israeli-armed) Azerbaijan. In the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, thousands of people of the “wrong” religion or ethnicity were expelled at a time from their communities in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia. Almost all—90 percent—of the Christian and Muslim population of Palestine itself was ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948. And we can go back to the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries and recall the sordid history of genocide, extermination, and slavery with which Western civilization made its enlightened presence felt all around the planet.

But in no instance that I know of has ethnic cleansing been accomplished through the use of massive ordnance and heavy bombardment with ultra-modern weapons systems, including the one-ton bombs (and even heavier bunker-buster munitions) used by Israelis flying the latest American jets. Such matters are normally conducted in person, with rifles or at the point of the bayonet. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was carried out almost entirely with small arms, for instance; the Palestinian civilians massacred at Deir Yassin, Tantura, and other sites to inspire others into terrified flight were shot with pistols, rifles, or machine-guns at close range, not struck by thousand-pound bombs dropped from F-35s flying at 10,000 feet or higher.

What we are witnessing, in other words, is perhaps the first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with advanced state-of-the-art heavy weapons; a twisted amalgamation of the 17th century and the 21st, packaged and wrapped up in language that harks back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes involving the smiting of whole peoples—the Jebusites, the Amelikites, the Canaanites, and of course the Philistines.

What’s worse, if anything could be worse, is the near total indifference on display by so many in and out of government in the Western world. Given the shock and outrage over the Palestinian massacre of Israeli civilians expressed by journalists, politicians, governments, and university presidents, the nearly blanket silence concerning the fate of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Israel is deafening: an earth-shattering, bellowing silence. We who live in Western countries didn’t support or pay for any Palestinian to kill Israeli civilians, but every bomb dropped on Gaza from aircraft the US provided is added to a bill that we pay for. Our officials are falling over themselves to join in the encouragement of the bombing and to rush the delivery of new bombs.

State Department officials issued internal briefings calling on spokespeople not to use phrases such as “end to violence/bloodshed,” “restoring calm,” or “de-escalation/ceasefire.”17 The Biden Administration actually wants the bombing and killing to continue. Asked about the tiny handful of more or less progressive congressional voices calling for a ceasefire and a cessation of hostilities, White House Spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said, “we believe they’re wrong. We believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.”18 There are “not two sides here,” Jean-Pierre added. “There are not two sides.”

Government spokespeople are calculating and insincere; the ultimate nihilists, they don’t actually believe in anything, least of all anything they say themselves. But the same cannot be said of the people all around us who, so desperately moved by the images and narratives of Israeli suffering, have nothing to say about Palestinian suffering on a far greater scale. How can anyone be so heartless? I’m not talking about overt racists who explicitly call for the destruction of Gaza and the expulsion of the Palestinians. I’m talking about ordinary people, many—maybe even most—of them solid liberals when it comes to politics: advocates of gender and racial equality, anxious about climate change, concerned for the unhoused, insistent on wearing face masks out of humane consideration for others, voters for the most progressive of Democrats. Their indifference is not personal, but a manifestation of a broader culture of denial.19 Such people seem not to see or to recognize Palestinian suffering because they literally do not see or recognize it. They are far too intent, far too focused, on the suffering of people with whom they can more readily identify, people they understand to be just like themselves.

Of course, the corporate media know how to encourage such forms of identification, how to construct protagonists, and how to make viewers sympathize with a subject, to imagine themselves in her shoes. In throttling information, Western media outlets cut off access to identification with Palestinians, and reaffirm the perception that there is only one side. Meanwhile on Al Jazeera Arabic—whose team of correspondents in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine and Lebanon have been providing gripping and unflinching coverage of the catastrophe in Gaza—tragedy unfolds in real time. On October 25, the Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh was on air when he received news that his wife, son, and daughter were killed in an Israeli airstrike nearby.20 Footage shows him on his knees as he weeps and places a hand on his teenage son’s chest.21 “They’re taking their revenge on us through children?” Dahdouh says. For those of us glued to Arabic Jazeera these days, to whom Dahdouh is a familiar face, the loss feels personal.

Some lives are to be grieved and given names and life stories, their narratives and photographs printed out in the New York Times or the Guardian along with photos of mourning parents. Other lives are just numbers, statistics coming out of an accounting machine that doesn’t seem to stop adding new digits, twenty or thirty at a time.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 2.13 (after 1940)

1945 – World War II: The siege of Budapest concludes with the unconditional surrender of German and Hungarian forces to the Red Army. 1945 – World War II: Royal Air Force bombers are dispatched to Dresden, Germany to attack the city with a massive aerial bombardment. 1951 – Korean War: Battle of Chipyong-ni, which represented the "high-water mark" of the Chinese incursion into South Korea, commences. 1954 – Frank Selvy becomes the only NCAA Division I basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game. 1955 – Israel obtains four of the seven Dead Sea Scrolls. 1955 – Twenty-nine people are killed when Sabena Flight 503 crashes into Monte Terminillo near Rieti, Italy. 1960 – With the success of a nuclear test codenamed "Gerboise Bleue", France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons. 1960 – Black college students stage the first of the Nashville sit-ins at three lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. 1961 – An allegedly 500,000-year-old rock is discovered near Olancha, California, US, that appears to anachronistically encase a spark plug. 1967 – American researchers discover the Madrid Codices by Leonardo da Vinci in the National Library of Spain. 1975 – Fire at One World Trade Center (North Tower) of the World Trade Center in New York. 1978 – Hilton bombing: A bomb explodes in a refuse truck outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia, killing two refuse collectors and a policeman. 1979 – An intense windstorm strikes western Washington and sinks a 0.5-mile (0.80 km) long section of the Hood Canal Bridge. 1981 – A series of sewer explosions destroys more than two miles of streets in Louisville, Kentucky. 1983 – A cinema fire in Turin, Italy, kills 64 people. 1984 – Konstantin Chernenko succeeds the late Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1990 – German reunification: An agreement is reached on a two-stage plan to reunite Germany. 1991 – Gulf War: Two laser-guided "smart bombs" destroy the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. Allied forces said the bunker was being used as a military communications outpost, but over 400 Iraqi civilians inside were killed. 1996 – The Nepalese Civil War is initiated in the Kingdom of Nepal by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre). 2001 – An earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter magnitude scale hits El Salvador, killing at least 944. 2004 – The Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe's largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star "Lucy" after The Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". 2007 – Taiwan opposition leader Ma Ying-jeou resigns as the chairman of the Kuomintang party after being indicted on charges of embezzlement during his tenure as the mayor of Taipei; Ma also announces his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election. 2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations. 2010 – A bomb explodes in the city of Pune, Maharashtra, India, killing 17 and injuring 60 more. 2011 – For the first time in more than 100 years the Umatilla, an American Indian tribe, are able to hunt and harvest a bison just outside Yellowstone National Park, restoring a centuries-old tradition guaranteed by a treaty signed in 1855. 2012 – The European Space Agency (ESA) conducted the first launch of the European Vega rocket from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. 2017 – Kim Jong-nam, brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, is assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. 2021 – Former U.S. President Donald Trump is acquitted in his second impeachment trial. 2021 – A major winter storm causes blackouts and kills at least 82 people in Texas and northern Mexico.

[zendyval]

They are not spending much money on TV advertising for Challengers and that money has been diverted for those in person events because Z premieres attract press and social media chatter. It's a very small cast, so they don't have to spend a lot of money on flying a large cast and their entourages. Besides the couple of days in Sydney, promo has been just in Western Europe. Another thing to remember is that these Australia and European events are being paid by the international distributor Warner Bros. The US distributor is MGM/Amazon. So MGM is benefitting from the money that Warner is spending to promote Challengers in Europe/Australia. The stuff that MGM has spent money is that drone show today in Coachella, which is not a huge thing, and a few scattered ads

That's true and I agree on the small cast part.

[mariacallous]

Pilger’s politics can fairly be described as anti-American, in that he reflexively saw the United States as a malevolent actor in any conceivable situation. That idée fixe in turn drove him to the conviction that any regime opposed by the US was automatically innocent or even benign. Interviewed on the state-propaganda outlet Russia Today in 2018, he declared the Putin regime’s attempted murder of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury a ‘carefully constructed drama in which the media plays a role’. He said in December 2021, as if Ukrainians lacked any capacity to speak and act for themselves and were merely puppets of Washington: ‘It was the US that overthrew the elected govt in Ukraine in 2014 allowing Nato to march right up to Russia’s western border.’

The apotheosis of this approach was an article in 2016 in which Pilger claimed: ‘The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.’

There was, I need hardly say, no truth whatever in this preposterous fabrication. With all too familiar legerdemain and gullibility, Pilger had alighted on an article on the Russia Today website and, without stating this was his source, plagiarised it. In my view this episode marks, in its combination of idleness and indecency, the nadir of Pilger’s career, and it was a very low and shady point indeed.

This is not the place to set out the chronology of the Bosnian war but what the mainstream media (including The Guardian, through the exemplary reporting of Ed Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane) said about it at the time was simply the truth. The war was not a cover for American power: it was a campaign of genocidal aggression conducted by Bosnian Serb forces covertly orchestrated from Belgrade, and in which Nato intervened against their positions far too late. It was also, as I have described here, a terrible augury of the barbarous assault that another European autocrat, Vladimir Putin, would direct against Ukraine 30 years afterwards.

What, then, of the earlier body of Pilger’s work, before his alleged journalistic and ethical deterioration? In the nature of things, it was not always wrong, but it was always reductive. His condemnation of Australian recognition of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, in print and in his 1994 film Death of a Nation, was entirely correct. But to be right on a discrete issue was never enough for him. He would have to construct some overarching explanation (or, less politely, a conspiracy theory) in which to embed it. He hence charged that Australia was administering a ‘hidden empire’ that ‘stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to the South Pacific’. You’d be hard put to find any such coherence in Australian foreign policy, which has often been made on the hoof and at the mercy of events.

When East Timor eventually achieved its independence, it did so to the fury of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. It was, in their eyes, an affront, for East Timor (whose population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic) was properly a ‘part of the Islamic world’ and belonged to Indonesia. This complaint was explicitly cited by bin Laden in justifying al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Indonesian tourist resort of Bali in October 2002, which killed 202 people including 88 Australians.

Pilger was usually quick to blame western foreign policy for provoking terrorism – he referred to the 7/7 attacks in London in 2005 as ‘Blair’s bombs’ – yet here was a case where western nations incurred the wrath of al-Qaeda for unequivocally (if belatedly) doing the right thing. The geopolitical situation was more complex than he had supposed, and than you would imagine from reading his output. He dealt with the disjunction of theory and fact in time-honoured fashion, by never mentioning it.

John Pilger was a charlatan and a fraudster

[gkfarming]

Haryana was part of the Kuru Kingdom during the Vedic era during 1200 BCE.

Haryana has been inhabited since the pre-historic period. Haryana was part of the Indus Valley civilization during the Bronze Age period. The ancient sites of Rakhigarhi and Bhirrana are some of the oldest Indus Valley civilization sites.(5) Haryana was part of the Kuru Kingdom during the Vedic era during 1200 BCE.(6)(7)(8) The area now Haryana has been ruled by some of the major empires of India. The Pushyabhuti dynasty ruled the region in the 7th century, with its capital at Thanesar. Harsha was a prominent king of the dynasty.(9) The Tomara dynasty ruled the region from 8th to 12th century. The Chahamanas of Shakambhari defeated them in the 12th century.(10)

Harsha Ka Tila mound, ruins from the reign of 7th century ruler Harsha.

Lal kot built by Anangpal Tomar in 1052

Portrait of Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, who fought and won across North India from the Punjab to Bengal, winning 22 straight battles.(11)

In 1192, Chahamanas were defeated by Ghurids in Second Battle of Tarain.(10) In 1398, Timur attacked and sacked the cities of Sirsa, Fatehabad, Sunam, Kaithal and Panipat.(12)(13) In the First Battle of Panipat (1526), Babur defeated the Lodis. Hem Chandra Vikramaditya claimed royal status after defeating Akbar's Mughal forces on 7 October 1556 in the Battle of Delhi. In the Second Battle of Panipat (1556), Akbar defeated the local Haryanvi Hindu Emperor of Delhi, who belonged to Rewari. Hem Chandra Vikramaditya had won 22 battles across India from Punjab to Bengal, defeating the Mughals and Afghans. Hemu had defeated Akbar's forces twice at Agra and the Battle of Delhi in 1556 to become the last Hindu Emperor of India with a formal coronation at Purana Quila in Delhi on 7 October 1556. In the Third Battle of Panipat (1761), the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali defeated the Marathas.(14)

In 1966, the Punjab Reorganisation Act (1966) came into effect, resulting in the creation of the state of Haryana on 1 November 1966.(15)

Distribution

Haryanvis within Haryana

See also: Demography of Haryana

The main communities in Haryana are Gujjar, Jat, Brahmin, Agarwal, Ahir, Chamar, Nai, Ror,Rajput, Saini, Kumhar, Bishnoi etc.(16) Punjabi khatri and Sindhi refugees who migrated from Pakistan had settled in large numbers in Haryana and delhi.

Haryanvi diaspora overseas

(icon)

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (July 2021)

See also: Indian disaspora overseas

There is increasingly large diaspora of Haryanvis in Australia, Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, UAE, UK, USA, etc.

In Australia, the community lives mainly in Sydney and Melbourne, has set up Association of Haryanvis in Australia (AHA) which organise events.(17)

In Singapore, the community has set up the Singapore Haryanvi Kunba organisation in 2012 which also has a Facebook group of same name. Singapore has Arya Samaj and several Hindu temples.

Culture

Main article: Haryanvi culture

Language

Main article: Haryanvi language

Haryanvi, like Khariboli and Braj is a branch of the Western Hindi dialect, and it is written in Devanagari script.(18)

Folk music and dance

Main article: Music of Haryana

Folk music is integral part of Haryanvi culture. Folk song are sung during occasion of child birth, wedding, festival, and Satsang (singing religious songs).(2) Some haryanvi folk songs which are sung by young woman and girls are Phagan, katak, Samman, Jatki, Jachcha, Bande-Bandee, Santhene. Some songs which are sung by older women are Mangal geet, Bhajan, Sagai, bhat, Kuan pujan, Sanjhi and Holi. Folk songs are sung in Tar or Mandra stan.(19) Some dances are Khoriya, Chaupaiya, Loor, Been, Ghoomar, Dhamal, Phaag, Sawan and Gugga.(19)

Cuisine

Haryana is agricultural state known for producing foodgrains such as wheat, barley, pearl millet, maize, rice and high-quality dairy. Daily village meal in Haryana consist of a simple thali of roti, paired with a leafy stir-fry (saag in dishes such as gajar methi or aloo palak), condiments such as chaas, chutney, pickles. Some known Haryanvi dishes are green choliya (green chickpeas), bathua yogurt, bajre ki roti, sangri ki sabzi (beans), kachri ki chutney (wild cucumber) and bajre ki khichdi. Some sweets are panjiri and pinni prepared by unrefined sugar like bura and shakkar and diary. Malpua are popular during festivals.(20)

Clothes

See also: History of clothing in the Indian subcontinent and History of Textile industry in India

Traditional attire for men is turban, shirt, dhoti, jutti and cotton or woollen shawl. Traditional attire for female is typically an orhna (veil), shirt or angia (short blouse), ghagri (heavy long skirt) and Jitti. Saris are also worn. Traditionally the Khaddar (coarse cotton weave cloth) is a frequently used as the fabric.(21)(22)

Cinema

See also: Haryanvi cinema and List of Haryanvi-language films

The First movie of Haryanvi cinema is Dharti which was released in 1968. The first financially successful Haryanvi movie was Chandrawal (1984) which spurted the continuing production of Haryanvi films, although none have been as successful.(23) Other films such as Phool Badan and Chora Haryane Ka followed with only about one out of twelve films being profitable at the box office.(23) In 2000, Aswini Chowdhary won the Indira Gandhi Award for Best Debut Film of a Director at the National Film Awards for the Haryanvi film Laddo.(24) In 2010 the government of Haryana announced they were considering establishing a film board to promote Haryanvi-language films.(25)