Israel's security cabinet has approved a plan to expand its military offensive against Hamas which includes the "capture" of Gaza and the holding of its territory, according to an Israeli official.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the cabinet had decided on a "forceful operation" to destroy Hamas and rescue its remaining hostages, and that Gaza's 2.1 million population "will be moved, to protect it".
He did not say how much territory would be seized by troops, but he stressed that "they will not enter and come out".
The cabinet also approved, in principle, a plan to deliver aid through private companies, which would end a two-month blockade the UN says has caused severe food shortages.
The UN and other aid agencies have said the proposal would be a breach of basic humanitarian principles and that they will not co-operate.
A Hamas official said the group rejected Israel's "pressure and blackmail".
Asked about the Israeli plan to expand its offensive, President Donald Trump repeated a pledge to help get food to Palestinians there.
The UK meanwhile said it "does not support an expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza". The EU earlier urged restraint, saying it was concerned about "further casualties and suffering for the Palestinian population".
Israel's security cabinet met on Sunday evening to discuss the Gaza offensive, which resumed when Israel ended a two-month ceasefire on 18 March.
An Israeli official who briefed the media on Monday morning said ministers voted unanimously to approve a plan proposed by the Israeli military's Chief of Staff Lt Gen Eyal Zamir to "defeat Hamas in Gaza and return the hostages".
"The plan will include, among other things, the capture of the Strip and holding the territories, moving the Gazan population south for its defence, denying Hamas the ability to distribute humanitarian supplies, and powerful attacks against Hamas," the official said.
Israeli media reported that first stage would include the seizure of additional areas of Gaza and the expansion of the Israeli-designated "buffer zone" running along the territory's borders. It would aim to give Israel additional leverage in negotiations with Hamas on a new ceasefire and hostage release deal.
Later, a senior Israeli security official said the plan would not be implemented until after US President Donald Trump's visit to the region between 13 and 16 May, providing what he called "a window of opportunity" to Hamas to agree a new ceasefire and hostage release deal.
Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar on his trip.
Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich meanwhile told a conference in Jerusalem on Monday that Israel was "going to finally occupy the Gaza Strip", according to Reuters news agency.
Israel occupied Gaza in the 1967 Middle East war along with the West Bank. It unilaterally withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but the UN still regards Gaza as Israeli-occupied territory because it retained control of Gaza's shared border, airspace and shoreline.
In a briefing later on Monday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the expanded campaign would displace most Palestinians in Gaza as air strikes and other military operations continued.
However, critics say military action has failed to secure the return of the 59 remaining hostages - up to 24 of whom are believed to be alive - and have urged the government to strike a deal with Hamas.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents hostages' relatives, said the plan was an admission by the government that it was "choosing territories over the hostages" and that this was "against the will of over 70% of the people" in Israel.
Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi reiterated that the group wanted a comprehensive deal, including "a complete ceasefire, full withdrawal from Gaza, reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, and the release of all prisoners from both sides".
Palestinians in north Gaza told the BBC that they were strongly opposed to being forcibly displaced to the south once again, with several saying they would rather die amid the ruins of their homes.
"In October 2023, I evacuated with my children, daughters, and grandchildren - about 60 people in total," 76-year-old Gaza City resident Ahmed Shehata said.
"We lived through unbearable conditions in what Israel claimed was a 'safe zone' in the south. This time, we will not leave, even if Israel brings down the tents over our heads."
Osama Tawfiq, a 48-year-old father of five, said: "Israeli threats won't scare us. We are staying in Gaza."
Gaza's community kitchens say they are days away from running out of supplies
The Israeli official said the security cabinet also approved by a large majority "the possibility of humanitarian [aid] distribution - if necessary - that would prevent Hamas from taking control of supplies and would destroy its governmental capabilities".
The security official said deliveries would resume once the expanded offensive began, and that the military would establish a "sterile area" in the southern Rafah area that Palestinians would be able to enter pending inspection.
On Sunday, the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), a forum that includes UN agencies, said Israeli officials were seeking to "shut down the existing aid distribution system" and "have us agree to deliver supplies through Israeli hubs under conditions set by the Israeli military, once the government agrees to re-open crossings".
The HCT warned that the plan would mean large parts of Gaza, including less mobile and most vulnerable people, would continue to go without supplies.
"It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy," it said.
"It is dangerous, driving civilians into militarized zones to collect rations, threatening lives, including those of humanitarian workers, while further entrenching forced displacement."
Israel cut off all deliveries of humanitarian aid and other supplies to Gaza aid on 2 March, two weeks before resuming its offensive.
According to the UN, the population is facing a renewed risk of hunger and malnutrition because warehouses are empty, bakeries have shut, and community kitchens are days away from running out of supplies.
The blockade has also cut off essential medicines, vaccines and medical equipment needed by Gaza's overwhelmed healthcare system.
The UN says Israel is obliged under international law to ensure supplies for Gaza's population, almost all of whom have been displaced. Israel says it is complying with international law and there is no shortage of aid.
The Israeli military launched a campaign to destroy Hamas in response to an unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.
At least 52,567 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including 2,459 since the Israeli offensive resumed, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.
Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf
Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. “He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.” But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Two weeks later, I found myself on the front steps of the Old Chancellery and was led into an opulent living room, where a few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters had gathered: Himmler, Göring, Leni Riefenstahl and the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII. We talked about some of the beautiful art on the walls that had been taken from the homes of Jews. But our conversation ended abruptly when we heard loud footsteps coming down the hallway. Everyone stiffened as Hitler entered the room.
He was wearing a tan suit with a swastika armband and gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back. I found the whole thing quite disarming. I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.
He said he was starving and led us into the dining room, where he gestured for me to sit next to him. Göring immediately grabbed a slice of pumpernickel, whereupon Hitler turned to me, gave me an eye roll, then whispered, “Watch. He’ll be done with his entire meal before you’ve taken two bites.” That one really got me. Göring, with his mouth full, asked what was so funny, and Hitler said, “I was just telling him about the time my dog had diarrhea in the Reichstag.” Göring remembered. How could he forget? He loved that story, especially the part where Hitler shot the dog before it got back into the car. Then a beaming Hitler said, “Hey, if I can kill Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, I can certainly kill a dog!” That perhaps got the biggest laugh of the night — and believe me, there were plenty.
But it wasn’t just a one-way street, with the Führer dominating the conversation. He was quite inquisitive and asked me a lot of questions about myself. I told him I had just gone through a brutal breakup with my girlfriend because every time I went someplace without her, she was always insistent that I tell her everything I talked about. I can’t stand having to remember every detail of every conversation. Hitler said he could relate — he hated that, too. “What am I, a secretary?” He advised me it was best not to have any more contact with her or else I’d be right back where I started and eventually I’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. I said it must be easy for a dictator to go through a breakup. He said, “You’d be surprised. There are still feelings.” Hmm … there are still feelings. That really resonated with me. We’re not that different, after all. I thought that if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.
Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. “I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.” “I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.” And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.
A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the unusual large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from an Internet address in Russia that tried to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account.
Berulis said he discovered someone had downloaded three external code libraries from GitHub that neither NLRB nor its contractors ever use. A “readme” file in one of the code bundles explained it was created to rotate connections through a large pool of cloud Internet addresses that serve “as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Brute force attacks involve automated login attempts that try many credential combinations in rapid sequence.
The complaint alleges that by March 17 it became clear the NLRB no longer had the resources or network access needed to fully investigate the odd activity from the DOGE accounts, and that on March 24, the agency’s associate chief information officer had agreed the matter should be reported to US-CERT.
Berulis shared screenshots with KrebsOnSecurity showing that on the day the NPR published its story about his claims (April 14), the deputy CIO at NLRB sent an email stating that administrative control had been removed from all employee accounts. Meaning, suddenly none of the IT employees at the agency could do their jobs properly anymore, Berulis said.
A conman named Trump comes to a town and gets everyone panicked that the world is about to end unless they agree to let him build a wall that will save them.
Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was already a figure of some notoriety, at least in the greater New York region and actually beyond. Though he was a successful businessman and real estate investor, he also had a reputation as a huckster and a racist from New York to Washington, DC and to a degree nationwide.
No less a figure than Woody Guthrie, who leased one of Fred Trump’s Beach Haven apartments from 1950 to 1952, wrote or wrote new lyrics for a number of songs attacking Trump. Here’s one example.
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ….
Fred Trump had also figured prominently in 1954 Senate hearings into profiteering off federal subsidies designed to support affordable housing for returning World War II veterans.
| Der Geier Es war ein Geier, der hackte in meine Füße. Stiefel und Strümpfe hatte er schon aufgerissen, nun hackte er schon in die Füße selbst. Immer schlug er zu, flog dann unruhig mehrmals um mich und setzte dann die Arbeit fort. Es kam ein Herr vorüber, sah ein Weilchen zu und fragte dann, warum ich den Geier dulde. »Ich bin ja wehrlos«, sagte ich, »er kam und fing zu hacken an, da wollte ich ihn natürlich wegtreiben, versuchte ihn sogar zu würgen, aber ein solches Tier hat große Kräfte, auch wollte er mir schon ins Gesicht springen, da opferte ich lieber die Füße. Nun sind sie schon fast zerrissen.« »Daß Sie sich so quälen lassen«, sagte der Herr, »ein Schuß und der Geier ist erledigt.« »Ist das so?« fragte ich, »und wollen Sie das besorgen?« »Gern«, sagte der Herr, »ich muß nur nach Hause gehn und mein Gewehr holen. Können Sie noch eine halbe Stunde warten?« »Das weiß ich nicht«, sagte ich und stand eine Weile starr vor Schmerz, dann sagte ich: »Bitte, versuchen Sie es für jeden Fall.« »Gut«, sagte der Herr, »ich werde mich beeilen.« Der Geier hatte während des Gespräches ruhig zugehört und die Blicke zwischen mir und dem Herrn wandern lassen. Jetzt sah ich, daß er alles verstanden hatte, er flog auf, weit beugte er sich zurück, um genug Schwung zu bekommen und stieß dann wie ein Speerwerfer den Schnabel durch meinen Mund tief in mich. Zurückfallend fühlte ich befreit, wie er in meinem alle Tiefen füllenden, alle Ufer überfließenden Blut unrettbar ertrank. | The Vulture A vulture was hacking at my feet. It had already torn my boots and stockings to shreds, now it was hacking at the feet themselves. Again and again it struck at them, then circled several times restlessly round me, then returned to continue its work. A gentleman passed by, looked on for a while, then asked me why I suffered the vulture. "I'm helpless," I said. "When it came and began to attack me, I of course tried to drive it away, even to strangle it, but these animals are very strong, it was about to spring at my face, but I preferred to sacrifice my feet. Now they are almost torn to bits." "Fancy letting yourself be tortured like this!" said the gentleman. "One shot and that's the end of the vulture." "Really?" I said. "And would you do that?" "With pleasure," said the gentleman, "I've only got to go home and get my gun. Could you wait another half hour?" "I'm not sure about that." said I, and stood for a moment rigid with pain. Then I said: "Do try it in any case, please." "Very well," said the gentleman, "I'll be as quick as I can." During this conversation the vulture had been calmly listening, letting its eye rove between me and the gentleman. Now I realized that it had understood everything; it took wing, leaned far back to gain impetus, and then, like a javelin thrower, thrust its beak through my mouth, deep into me. Falling back, I was relieved to feel him drowning irretrievably in my blood, which was filling every depth, flooding every shore. |
| PROMETHEUS Von Prometheus berichten vier Sagen: Nach der ersten wurde er, weil er die Götter an die Menschen verraten hatte, am Kaukasus festgeschmiedet, und die Götter schickten Adler, die von seiner immer wachsenden Leber fraßen. Nach der zweiten drückte sich Prometheus im Schmerz vor den zuhackenden Schnäbeln immer tiefer in den Felsen, bis er mit ihm eins wurde. Nach der dritten wurde in den Jahrtausenden sein Verrat vergessen, die Götter vergaßen, die Adler, er selbst. Nach der vierten wurde man des grundlos Gewordenen müde. Die Götter wurden müde, die Adler wurden müde, die Wunde schloß sich müde. Blieb das unerklärliche Felsgebirge. – Die Sage versucht das Unerklärliche zu erklären. Da sie aus einem Wahrheitsgrund kommt, muß sie wieder im Unerklärlichen enden. | PROMETHEUS Four legends tell of Prometheus: According to the first, because he had betrayed the gods to the people, he was forged in the Caucasus, and the gods sent eagles to eat his ever-growing liver. After the second, Prometheus pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock in pain in front of the pecking beaks until he became one with it. After the third, his betrayal was forgotten over the millennia, the gods forgot, the eagles, he himself. After the fourth, they grew tired of what had become groundless. The gods grew tired, the eagles grew tired, the wound closed wearily. What remained was the inexplicable rocky mountains. – The legend tries to explain the inexplicable. Since it comes from a ground of truth, it must again end in the inexplicable. |
| Où va-t-on ? Quand on n’a plus de maison ? Les fleurs sous le béton, Maman, Dis-le-moi, Où va-t-on ? Est-ce qu’un jour on sait vraiment ? Ou est-ce qu’on fait semblant, tout le temps ? Où va le cœur quand il se perd ? Dans les doutes et les hivers ? Pourquoi les jours se ressemblent ? Est-ce qu’on finit par voir ce qu’on assemble ? Maman, dis-le-moi. Au-delà, De l’orage il y a De l’amour, de l’amour, de l’amour, Quand le ciel s’ouvre, Tout redevient calme Et tout va bien. Où va-t-il ? Le bonheur, ce fil fragile, Quand il vacille et se brise ? Maman, dis-le-moi, Où va-t-il ? Pourquoi le monde semble si grand, Quand on devient un peu plus grand qu’avant ? Que deviennent les rêves qui s’enfuient ? Et les souvenirs qu’on oublie ? Est-ce que j’aurai toujours des questions ? Peut-être que j’en ferai des chansons. Maman, dis-le-moi. Au-delà, De l’orage il y a De l’amour, de l’amour, de l’amour, Quand le ciel s’ouvre, Tout redevient calme Et tout va bien. | Where are we going? When we no longer have a home? The flowers under the concrete, Mom, Tell me, Where are we going? Will we ever really know? Or do we just pretend, all the time? Where does the heart go when it gets lost? In doubts and winters? Why do the days look the same? Do we ever see what we put together? Mom, tell me. Beyond, The storm there is Love, love, love, When the sky opens, Everything becomes calm again And everything is fine. Where is it going? Happiness, that fragile thread, When it falters and breaks? Mom, tell me, Where is it going? Why does the world seem so big, When we get a little bigger than before? What happens to the dreams that slip away? And the memories we forget? Will I always have questions? Maybe I'll make songs out of them. Mom, tell me. Beyond, There is a storm Love, love, love, When the sky opens, Everything becomes calm again And all is well. |
| Penultimate primal count... | down | |
|---|---|---|
| Night and day it was at first, | Ἀχιλλεύς had but one mortal physical flaw; | |
| A three-body problem it soon became, | It is the first to sink in water, | |
| The pentagram of sin sprung fast, | Gallium heralded a man-made singularity, | |
| And then exhausted, δημιουργός rested a day. | But first to follow the Stone Age, | |
| And one too many when finger counted, | Some flappers skidoo in a jiffy. | |
| Quite unlucky now it was | From potash it derived, | |
| Except for some cicadas. | Or salt even. | |
| This many angels are guarding الجحيم. | These many were at the Last Supper. | |
| And an omen was Burroughs' enigma | On many a US corner, one could get a Slurpee. | |
| Leap we must to straighten time, | Sumerians and married people quite despised it, | |
| The longest months are this, | On one hand I can count. | |
| Little boot succeeded Tiberius, | Trinity was set forth | |
| One short of the ultimate answer. | As every man is light and shadow. |
I pity those who have never conceived a dream of excessive domination, nor felt the times seething within themselves. In the days when Ahriman was my principle and my god, when I thirsted for barbarism, I brooded over the cavalcades within myself, hordes provoking one sweet catastrophe after the next! Foundered as I have, nowadays, in modesty, I nonetheless harbor a weakness for tyrants, whom I always prefer to redeemers and prophets; I prefer them because they do not take refuge in formulas; because their prestige is an equivocal one, their cravings self-destructive; whereas the others, possessed of a limitless ambition, dis guise its aims under deceptive precepts, retreat from the citizen in order to rule over conscience, to occupy it, and, once implanted there, to create permanent ravages without incurring the reproach, however merited, of indiscretion or sadism. Compared to the power of a Buddha, a Jesus, or a Mohammed, what does that of the conquerors signify?
Abandon the notion of glory unless you are tempted to found a religion!
The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the major intuition of ancient mythology.
Every undermining labor exalts, confers energy; whence the urgency, whence the practical infallibility of vile sentiments. Envy, which makes a fool into a daredevil, a worm into a tiger, whips up our nerves, ignites our blood, communicates to the body a shudder that keeps it from going soft, lends the most anodyne countenance an expression of concentrated ardor; without envy, there would be no events, nor even a world; indeed it is envy that has made man possible, permitted him to gain a name for himself, to accede to greatness by the fall, by that rebellion against the anonymous glory of paradise, to which-any more than the Fallen Angel, his inspiration and his model-he could not adapt himself. Everything that breathes and moves testifies to the initial taint. Forever associated with the effervescences of Satan (patron of Time, scarcely distinct from God, being merely
His visible countenance), we are victims of this genius of sedition who persuades us to perform our task as living men by rousing us against one another in a deplorable combat, no doubt, but a fortifying one: we emerge from torpor, enlivened whenever-triumphing over our Higher Impulses-we become aware of our role as destroyers.
He who has suffered humiliation will never forget its effects and will know no rest until he has put them into a work capable of perpetuating its pangs. To create is to bequeath one's sufferings, wanting others to enter into them, to assume them, to be impregnated by them, and to live them over again. This is true of a poem, this can be true of the cosmos. Without the hypothesis of a feverish deity subject to convulsions, giddy with epilepsy, we could not explain a universe that . everywhere shows signs of an original sputum . . . . And we divine the essence of such a God only when we ourselves suffer fits such as He must have known at the moments He came to grips with Chaos. We are reminded of Him by everything in ourselves that resists form or good sense, by our confusions and our delirium: we join Him by supplications in which we dislocate ourselves in Him and Him in us, for He is close to us whenever something in ourselves breaks down and when, in our fashion, we too measure ourselves against Chaos. A summary theology? Contemplating this botched Creation, how can we help incriminating its Author, how-above all-suppose Him able and adroit? Any other God would have given evidence of more competence or more equilibrium than this one: errors and confusion wherever you look! Impossible to absolve Him, but impossible, too, not to understand Him. And we understand Him by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune. His enterprise bears the stigmata of the provisional, yet it is not time He lacked in order to finish things off. He was, to our misfortune, inexplicably rushed. By a legitimate ingratitude, and to make Him feel the brunt of our ill humor, we set about-experts in counter-Creation-deteriorating His structure, rendering even messier a work already compromised from the start. Doubtless it would be wiser and more elegant to have nothing to do with it, to leave it as it is, not to exact reprisal for His own incapacities; but since He has transmitted His defects to us, we cannot show Him much solicitude. If, all things considered, we prefer Him to humanity, this does not exempt Him from our resentment. Perhaps we have conceived Him only to justify and regenerate our rebellions, to afford them a worthy object, to keep them from spoiling and dwindling, reinforcing them by the inspiriting abuse of sacrilege, an answer to the arguments and seductions of discouragement. We are never quite finished with God. Treating Him on equal footing as an enemy is an impertinence that fortifies, stimulates, and how much we must pity those He has ceased to annoy.
I’ve seen some wild shit in my day, but nothing—nothing—prepared me for the leaked audio of Elon Musk sobbing to Donald Trump about Tesla’s nosedive. The world’s richest man, the guy who’s spent years cosplaying as Tony Stark, was reportedly bawling his eyes out in the Oval Office, begging the former President to save his crumbling empire.
Tesla’s stock, once the darling of Wall Street, is getting hammered. As I write this on April Fool’s Day (ironic, right?), TSLA is sitting at $222.15 after a brutal 15% drop in a single day last month—the worst since 2020. That’s down from a mid-December peak of $480, a jaw-dropping 50% haircut in just a few months. Investors are bailing, sales are tanking, and the public? Oh, the public hates Elon right now. Like, spray-paint-swastikas-on-Cybertrucks level hate. And this audio? It’s the sound of a man who knows the jig is up.
I’ve got no sympathy for the guy. Elon’s spent years building Tesla into a symbol of innovation, a middle finger to Big Oil, and—let’s be real—a cult for tech bros and stock pumpers. But he’s also spent the last year tying himself to Trump tighter than a MAGA hat on a hillbilly rallygoer, and that’s where the wheels started coming off. The backlash isn’t just loud; it’s visceral. Protests are popping up everywhere—hundreds of them, from Seattle to Miami, London to Berlin. The “Tesla Takedown” movement hit all 277 U.S. showrooms last weekend, with crowds chanting “Elon Musk, shame on you” and waving signs like “Honk if you hate Elon.” They’re not just mad; they’re organized. And they’re hitting him where it hurts: his bottom line, with the goal of “ZEROING” Tesla stock.
The numbers don’t lie. Tesla sales in Europe dropped 45% in January compared to last year—76% in Germany alone. Australia’s down 72%. China, a key market, is slipping too, thanks to competition from cheaper EVs and Elon’s cozying up to far-right politics. Used Tesla prices are cratering—Cybertrucks are fucking DISASTER —and trade-ins are at record highs, according to Edmunds. Owners are ditching their cars, slapping bumper stickers on them that scream, “I bought this before Elon went nuts.” Hell, even Sheryl Crow sold hers. That’s how toxic this brand’s gotten.
And the violence? It’s next-level. Charging stations torched near Boston. Shots fired at a dealership in Oregon. Molotov cocktails in Colorado. Swastikas scrawled on cars from Pasadena to Clermont. Trump’s calling these folks “domestic terrorists,” threatening 20-year sentences in El Salvador’s mega-prison, but it’s not slowing down. If anything, it’s escalating. The progressive group Indivisible’s out there with protest guides, and Hollywood’s jumping in—John Cusack’s railing against Elon, and Valerie Costa, a Seattle organizer, got personally targeted by Musk on X with zero evidence. He’s lashing out, and it’s pathetic because he’s pathetic.
Columbia University student ran from Homeland Security, but still doesn’t know why they came for her
Ranjani Srinivasan was busy talking to an adviser at Columbia University when the federal agents first came to her door. The day before she’d got an unexpected email that her student visa had been canceled, and she was trying to get information.
“It was my roommate who heard the knock and immediately recognized (it as) law enforcement,” Srinivasan told CNN. “She asked them ‘Do you have a warrant?’ And they had to say ‘No.’”
“I was stunned and scared,” she said. “I remember telling the adviser ‘ICE is at my door and you’re telling me I’m fine? Do something.’”
They returned another day, also without a warrant, Srinivasan said. Matters escalated when they came a third time, with a judge’s permission to enter the Columbia apartment. By then she had already left the country.
The biggest question for Srinivasan is why they came at all.
Srinivasan had renewed her student visa just a few months earlier, being granted permission for another five years in the United States — more than enough time to complete her PhD in urban planning. She was no stranger to immigration rules, having won a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard University for her master’s degree and then returning to her native India for the requisite two years after.
Her dream acceptance at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation coincided with the beginning of the Covid pandemic, so she started her studies in Chennai, India, before making it to New York City.
By last month, the end of her doctorate was almost in sight, she was grading papers for the students she was teaching and fretting over a deadline for a journal. Far from her mind was a night almost a year before when she got caught up in a crowd.
That evening in April 2024 she’d been trying to get back to her university apartment from a staff picnic when she was swept up in a police operation against a crowd protesting Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, she said.
Srinivasan had only just returned to the US, having been away from Columbia since before the war began and generated passionate protests. “We didn’t really know what was going to happen that day,” she said. “The whole perimeter of the neighborhood had been barricaded.” Unable to prove she lived there, she wasn’t allowed to go to her street, so she ended up circling the neighborhood, looking for a way through, she told CNN.
“They kept shifting the barricades, and then I think around 200 cops descended, and they kind of charged at us. It was absolute confusion. People were screaming, falling, people were running out of the way,” she said. Too small to force her way through the melee, she ended up in a large group of people detained by the police.
She said she was held with the crowd for several hours but never fingerprinted or booked for an arrest. She was given two pink-colored summonses by the New York Police Department — one for obstructing pedestrian traffic and the other for failure to disperse — before being released. A lawyer working pro bono for a number of the students got the summonses dismissed even before she had to appear in court. That means there should be no record against her, and as far as Srinivasan was concerned, she could forget the whole thing.
She did not report the dismissed summonses on her visa renewal.
When asked why Srinivasan’s visa was revoked, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement “these citations were not disclosed.”
That was never mentioned to Srinivasan when she was told her visa had been taken away.
“I did not mean to deceive anyone,” she said. “If I made a mistake, I would have been happy to clarify it to the state.”
But she was never given the chance.
‘A punitive dragnet’
According to local so-called sanctuary laws, federal authorities should not have even known Srinivasan had ever been detained, according to her lawyer, Nathan Yaffe.
“New York City is supposed to have protections in place to prevent people who don’t commit crimes, who haven’t been in any kind of trouble, from getting caught in this sort of punitive dragnet that the administration is implementing here,” he said.
“But clearly the federal government has access to the summons database or to other data that allows them to see even when people aren’t fingerprinted, even when people don’t have any criminal case, even when the only allegation against them is entirely dismissed.”
No one from DHS, the NYPD or Columbia University responded to CNN requests about how federal authorities became aware of this case. When asked about Srinivasan by CNN at a news conference, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said: “I’ll say it over and over again: New York City Police Department, they do not collaborate for civil enforcement.” He said he would look into it but his office has not got back to CNN.
For Srinivasan, the sudden escalation was alarming. She says she had attended protests in her time in the US, but as much to experience American culture as to exercise free speech.
Demonstrators rally outside Columbia University in upper Manhattan on March 14.
But she was seeing others being detained under orders from the Trump administration and was afraid.
“You keep going back, thinking ‘Have I done something?’ And there are no answers there,” she said.
She knew Columbia University graduate student and US permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and put in detention in Louisiana, and did not want to take that risk.
“It was very clear to her, rightly so, that this government would stop at nothing to pursue her, even though their pursuit of her was based on nothing,” Yaffe said.
Srinivasan went to LaGuardia Airport and took a flight to Canada.
Agents searched her home
Government officers, now in possession of a warrant, went back to her apartment.
Four agents, three with their faces covered, spent several minutes inside.
They asked Srinivasan’s roommate to stay in her room. “If not, you can leave,” one agent said, as heard on a video recording taken by the roommate that CNN has viewed.
Another said he would explain the warrant “if you would like to put down your phone.”
“We have a warrant to search this premises for electronics, documents related to Ranjani Srinivasan,” continued the officer who identified himself as coming from “Homeland Security” as the roommate recorded. “Did you get enough video?” he added.
The officers left, taking nothing for evidence.
A DHS news release heralded Srinivasan’s departure but did not mention unreported summonses, instead alleging she was “involved in activities supporting Hamas.” The release was headlined: “Columbia University Student Whose Visa Was Revoked for Supporting Hamas and Terrorist Activities Used CBP Home App to Self-Deport.” The app, introduced the day before Srinivasan left, includes a feature for immigrants without legal permission to be in the US to inform the government they intend to depart.
There was also a damning post on X from Secretary Kristi Noem: “It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live & study in the United States of America. When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked and you should not be in this country. I’m glad to see one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers use the CBP Home app to self deport.”
Yaffe said the statements about Srinivasan were “absolutely false.”
“She has basically been a private person, pursuing her studies and pursuing her career,” he said. “She’s been a student, and they not only took that away from her in the sense of forcing her out of the country … but they also took away her privacy, obviously, and made her the huge public face of this campaign of repression that they’re undertaking with the deliberate desire, as the administration has said, to send a message to other students.”
Srinivasan also takes issue with how she was portrayed. She denies using the CBP Home app, saying it wasn’t on her phone and anyway her device was almost dead at the airport. “I didn’t even know the app existed. I just left,” she said.
As for her politics, she said: “I’m not a terrorist sympathizer, I’m not a pro-Hamas activist. I’m just literally a random student … It just seems very strange that they would spend so much, vast resources, in persecuting me.”
For now, she’s trying to stay optimistic about getting back to her life and doctorate. She was due to complete it in May. She hopes somehow Columbia can reenroll her so her five years of study with them is not for naught.
But she’s unhappy with the actions of the Ivy League school, which has made policy changes apparently to address demands from the Trump administration since she left. The interim president of Columbia University stepped down the following week.
“I do think that Columbia should have protected me against this. I think that that’s part of their mandate,” Srinivasan said. “When you’re attracting these international students to come and study at Columbia, when you go and do outreach all across the world to attract the best and the brightest, you have a mandate to protect them.”
She might be an expert in planning, but Srinivasan is not trying to look too far ahead and is set on two goals.
“I want my PhD. I want my name cleared.”
I fully agree with Bernie Sanders' position. Clinton lost for many reasons, one of which is the strong shift to the right of the Democratic Party that has peaked with Bill Clinton and Obama and is still happening today, in large part courtesy of:
1. the superdelegate system which has picked a corrupt pro-Wall Street insider over an unabashed pro-working class populist, and also in part by
2. controlling prevailing narratives in the public discourse, e.g. free trade mythology, treasury-draining foreign policy positions, Wall Street treated with kid gloves after policies and actions which have left tens of millions homeless and poorer, half-ass social programs that keep bankrupting more Americans every day and shift the poverty, education and war costs to the middle class instead of the rich, etc.
Hillary's pivot to the left in the general election was seen as hollow by many as she is of the same fabric as her husband and Obama which have not done anything in the past 20 years when they had the White House and Congress beyond enriching themselves and throwing crumbs to the masses.
I will agree that the Democrats were forced to shift to the right starting with the Reagan era and after the GOP's nearly complete anexation and appropiation of America's libidinal core (i.e. manifest destiny patriotism bordering on racism, jingoism and over-reaching militarism, family/Christian values in public policy that are often homophobic and mysoginistic, tough on crime/illegal immigration stances that have made a mockery of human rights values, conservative fiscal policy save for the military iceberg-sized spending).
The Democrats have been playing catch up with the GOP since 1984 and they have only temporarily borrowed the White House when the right was split (1992) or when the economy faltered (1992 and 2008). They have not projected a strong countervailing narrative to the GOP narrative and they will continue to suffer in the wilderness until they redefine their message and who they are really fighting for.
Continuing down this path of being pro-working class in rhetoric, but simply GOP-lite in practice will not bode well for the future of the Democratic Party.
"You cannot be a party which on one hand says we’re in favor of working people, we’re in favor of the needs of young people but we don’t quite have the courage to take on Wall Street and the billionaire class,” Sanders wrote today. “People do not believe that. You’ve got to decide which side you’re on.”
It looks like the independents voted mainly Libertarian and partly Green (instead of Dem as in the past two presidential elections) and the main reason that I can see for this change is HRC's political baggage especially as highlighted lately by Comey and wikileaks. That or senile dementia is a more serious and fast advancing epidemic than previously thought. There is also a pattern here: Reagan, W, Trump, ... Elmer Fudd?
Watched the debate live on BBC4 and I am amazed that those two were the best the two parties could put forward. They did the nearly impossible: they managed to lower to bar even further than the Bush-Gore debates, especially Agent Orange.
I just realized that a more appropriate ending to last night's debate would have been the revelation that HRC is actually Lisa (played by Laura Vandervoort in the V remake) still getting used to her human skin but getting better at expressing human emotion, and Double Agent Orange is actually Anna, the queen bee of the V species...
I am a Bernie Bro 100%, I think Hillary is just another cheap band aid for what ails America and up until now I was still considering whether I should vote for HRC or not. After this revelation, I know that I MUST vote for Hillary or I won't ever forgive myself: "Trump asked why he couldn't just use nuclear weapons 3 times in a national security briefing"
Best signal-to-noise ratio post on DNC leaks (even if Gucifer 2.0 was not the only leaker): Gucifer 2.0
At a time when the American way has made the country into the greatest power the world has known, there has never been more doubting and questioning. ... The higher up one goes, the more searching becomes this self-criticism. ... Those who rule America are enormously conscious of the total inadequacy of the crude material philosophy of life in which they grew up. ...
As Europe becomes more helpless the Americans are compelled to become far-seeing and responsible, as Rome was forced by the long decline of Greece to produce an Augustus, a Vergil. Our [European] impotence liberates their [American] potentialities. Something important is about to happen.
Can you confirm that your organization does not work with entities associated with communist,
socialist, or totalitarian parties, or any party that espouses anti-American beliefs?
Does this project reinforce U.S. sovereignty by limiting reliance on international organizations or
global governance structures (e.g., UN, WHO)?
Can you confirm that your organization has not received ANY funding from the PRC (including
Confucius Institutes and/or partnered with Chinese state or non-state actors), Russia, Cuba, or Iran?
Can you confirm that this is no DEI project or DEI elements of the project?
Can you confirm this is not a climate or “environmental justice” project or include such elements?
Does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology
as defined in the below Executive Order?
How much does this project directly impact efforts to counter malign influence, including China?
What impact does this project have on protecting religious minorities, promoting religious
freedom, and combatting Christian prosecution?
If you ask someone to name the Supreme Court’s single greatest moment, many will cite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. That landmark ruling, which unanimously found that the racial segregation of students in public schools was unconstitutional, is considered a turning point in American history.
But 70 years after the Court ordered public schools to desegregate at “all deliberate speed,” many public schools in America remain racially separate and unequal. And this racial isolation is deepening. Racial segregation has increased 64% since 1988 in the nation’s 100 largest school districts, according to a 2024 study from Stanford University and the University of Southern California.
How did this happen? The reasons are complex, but according to a provocative new book, much of the blame can be placed on another Supreme Court ruling that few like to talk about: The 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision.
In “The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North,” author Michelle Adams argues that contemporary American schools are shaped more by Milliken than by Brown. What one Supreme Court gave in Brown, another took away in Milliken, leaving us with the separate but unequal public school system that we have today, she says. Four of the five justices in the Milliken majority were appointed by President Richard Nixon, a Republican, reflecting the court’s shift to the right since its Brown decision.
“Milliken v. Bradley is where the promise of Brown v. Board of Education ended,” Adams writes in her book.
MOYERS: So we tell stories to try to come to terms with the world, to harmonize our lives with reality?
CAMPBELL: I think so, yes. Novels -- great novels -- can be wonderfully instructive. In my twenties and thirties and even on into my forties, James Joyce and Thomas Mann were my teachers. I read everything they wrote. Both were writing in terms of what might be called the mythological traditions. Take, for example, the story of Tonio, in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger. Tonio's father was a substantial businessman, a major citizen in his hometown. Little Tonio, however, had an artistic temperament, so he moved to Munich and joined a group of literary people who felt themselves above the mere money earners and family men.
So here is Tonio between two poles: his father, who was a good father, responsible and all of that, but who never did the thing he wanted to in all his life -- and, on the other hand, the one who leaves his hometown and becomes a critic of that kind of life. But Tonio found that he really loved these hometown people. And although he thought himself a little superior in an intellectual way to them and could describe them with cutting words, his heart was nevertheless with them.
But when he left to live with the bohemians, he found that they were so disdainful of life that he couldn't stay with them, either. So he left them, and wrote a letter back to someone in the group, saying, "I admire those cold, proud beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise 'mankind'; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and all humor. Indeed, to me it even seems that this must be that love of which it is written that one may 'speak with the tongues of men and of angels,' and yet, lacking love, be 'as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.' "
And then he says, "The writer must be true to truth." And that's a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting -- the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called "erotic irony," the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.
[...]
MOYERS: Zorba says, "Trouble? Life is trouble."
CAMPBELL: Only death is no trouble. People ask me, "Do you have optimism about the world?" And I say, "Yes, it's great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it."
MOYERS: Doesn't that lead to a rather passive attitude in the face of evil?
CAMPBELL: You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.
MOYERS: What about this idea of good and evil in mythology, of life as a conflict between the forces of darkness and the forces of light?
CAMPBELL: That is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into Judaism and Christianity. In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, notwithdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder: a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
"All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn't be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow -- loss, loss, loss. You've got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it.
MOYERS: Do you really believe that?
CAMPBELL: It is joyful just as it is. I don't believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.
MOYERS: But if you accepted that as an ultimate conclusion, you wouldn't try to form any laws or fight any battles or -
CAMPBELL: I didn't say that.
MOYERS: Isn't that the logical conclusion to draw from accepting everything as it is?
CAMPBELL: That is not the necessary conclusion to draw. You could say, "I will participate in this life, I will join the army, I will go to war," and so forth.
[...]
CAMPBELL: The big moment in the medieval myth is the awakening of the heart to compassion, the transformation of passion into compassion. That is the whole problem of the Grail stories, compassion for the wounded king. And out of that you also get the notion that Abelard offered as an explanation of the crucifixion: that the Son of God came down into this world to be crucified to awaken our hearts to compassion, and thus to turn our minds from the gross concerns of raw life in the world to the specifically human values of self-giving in shared suffering. In that sense the wounded king, the maimed king of the Grail legend, is a counterpart of the Christ. He is there to evoke compassion and thus bring a dead wasteland to life. There is a mystical notion there of the spiritual function of suffering in this world. The one who suffers is, as it were, the Christ, come before us to evoke the one thing that turns the human beast of prey into a valid human being. That one thing is compassion. This is the theme that James Joyce takes over and develops in Ulysses -- the awakening of his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to manhood through a shared compassion with Leopold Bloom. That was the awakening of his heart to love and the opening of the way.
In Joyce's next great work, Finnegans Wake, there is a mysterious number that constantly recurs. It is 1132. It occurs as a date, for example, and inverted as a house address, 32 West 11th Street. In every chapter, some way or another, 1132 appears. When I was writing A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, I tried every way I knew to imagine, "What the dickens is this number 1132?" Then I recalled that in Ulysses, while Bloom is wandering about the streets of Dublin, a ball drops from a tower to indicate noon, and he thinks, "The law of falling bodies, 32 feet per sec per sec." Thirty-two, I thought, must be the number of the Fall; 11 then might be the renewal of the decade, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 -- but then 11, and you start over again. There were a number of other suggestions in Ulysses that made me think, "Well, what we have here is perhaps the number of the Fall, 32, and Redemption, 11; sin and forgiveness, death and renewal." Finnegans Wake has to do with an event that occurred in Phoenix Park, which is a major park in Dublin. The phoenix is the bird that burns itself to death and then comes to life renewed. Phoenix Park thus becomes the Garden of Eden where the Fall took place, and where the cross was planted on the skull of Adam: O felix culpa ("O Phoenix culprit!" says Joyce). And so we have death and redemption. That seemed a pretty good answer, and that's the one I gave in A Skeleton Key.
But while preparing a class one evening for my students in comparative mythology, I was rereading St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans and came across a curious sentence that seemed to epitomize everything Joyce had had in mind in Finnegans Wake. St. Paul had written, "For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all." You cannot be so disobedient that God's mercy will not be able to follow you, so give him a chance. "Sin bravely," as Luther said, and see how much of God's mercy you can invoke. The great sinner is the great awakener of God to compassion. This idea is an essential one in relation to the paradoxology of morality and the values of life.
So I said to myself, "Well, gee, this is really what Joyce is talking about." So I wrote it down in my Joyce notebook: "Romans, Chapter 11, verse 32." Can you imagine my surprise? There was that same number again, 1132, right out of the Good Book! Joyce had taken that paradox of the Christian faith as the motto of the greatest masterwork of his life. And there he describes ruthlessly the depths of the private and public monstrosities of human life and action in the utterly sinful course of human history. It's all there -- told with love.
[...]
MOYERS: What does mythology tell us about how to get in touch with that other self, that real self?
CAMPBELL: The first instruction would be to follow the hints of the myth itself and of your guru, your teacher, who should know. It's like an athlete going to a coach. The coach tells him how to bring his own energies into play. A good coach doesn't tell a runner exactly how to hold his arms or anything like that. He watches him run, then helps him to correct his own natural mode. A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are -- then to give advice, not commands. The command would be, "This is the way I do it, so you must do it this way, too." Some artists teach their students that way. But the teacher in any case has to talk it out, to give some general clues. If you don't have someone to do that for you, you've got to work it all out from scratch -- like reinventing the wheel.
A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you're now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. In my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things.
[...]
CAMPBELL: Yes, although it's a little hard to explain. I gave her the belief that she was herself the cause of her suffering, that she had somehow brought it about. There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the "love of your fate," which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply. My friend had thought, "God did this to me." I told her, "No, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life."
MOYERS: The only alternative would be not to live.
CAMPBELL: "All life is suffering," said the Buddha, and Joyce has a line -- "Is life worth leaving?"
MOYERS: But what about the young person who says, "I didn't choose to be born -- my mother and father made the choice for me."
CAMPBELL: Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That's the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
MOYERS: But what about chance? A drunken driver turns the corner and hits you. That isn't your fault. You haven't done that to yourself.
CAMPBELL: From that point of view, is there anything in your life that did not occur as by chance? This is a matter of being able to accept chance. The ultimate backing of life is chance -- the chance that your parents met, for example! Chance, or what might seem to be chance, is the means through which life is realized. The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises. Another war has been declared somewhere, and you are drafted into an army, and there go five or six years of your life with a whole new set of chance events. The best advice is to take it all as if it had been of your intention -- with that, you evoke the participation of your will.
[...]
MOYERS: What is the illumination?
CAMPBELL: The illumination is the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things, whether in the vision of time these things are judged as good or as evil. To come to this, you must release yourself completely from desiring the goods of this world and fearing their loss. "Judge not that you be not judged," we read in the words of Jesus. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," wrote Blake, "man would see everything as it is, infinite."
MOYERS: That's a tough trip.
CAMPBELL: That's a heavenly trip.
MOYERS: But is this really just for saints and monks?
CAMPBELL: No, I think it's also for artists. The real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the "radiance" of all things, as an epiphany or showing forth of their truth.
MOYERS: But doesn't this leave all the rest of us ordinary mortals back on shore?
CAMPBELL: I don't think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.
MOYERS: But is art the only way one can achieve this illumination?
CAMPBELL: Art and religion are the two recommended ways. I don't think you get it through sheer academic philosophy, which gets all tangled up in concepts. But just living with one's heart open to others in compassion is a way wide open to all.
MOYERS: So the experience of illumination is available to anyone, not just saints or artists. But if it is potentially in every one of us, deep in that unlocked memory box, how do you unlock it?
CAMPBELL: You unlock it by getting somebody to help you unlock it. Do you have a dear friend or good teacher? It may come from an actual human being, or from an experience like an automobile accident, or from an illuminating book. In my own life, mostly it comes from books, though I have had a long series of magnificent teachers.
[...]
MOYERS: How do you explain what the psychologist Maslow called "peak experiences" and what James Joyce called "epiphanies"?
CAMPBELL: Well, they are not quite the same. The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being. My own peak experiences, the ones that I knew were peak experiences after I had them, all came in athletics.
[...]
MOYERS: What about James Joyce's epiphanies?
CAMPBELL: Now, that's something else. Joyce's formula for the aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he callspornography. Nor does the aesthetic experience move you to criticize and reject the object -- such art he calls didactic, or social criticism in art. The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic factor -- rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany. And that is what might in religious terms be thought of as the all-informing Christ principle coming through.
MOYERS: The Indians from the northeast woods of America told of a woman who fell from the sky and gave birth to twins. The Indians of the Southwest told a story of twins born to a virgin mother.
CAMPBELL: Yes. The woman from the sky originally comes from a hunting-culture base, and the woman of the earth comes from the planting culture. The twins represent two contrary principles, but quite different contrary principles from those represented by Cain and Abel in the Bible. In the Iroquois story, one twin is Sprout or Plant Boy, and the other is named Flint. Flint so damages his mother when he is born that she dies. Now, Flint and Plant Boy represent the two traditions. Flint is used for the blade to kill animals, so the twin named Flint represents the hunting tradition, and Plant Boy, of course, represents the planting principle.
In the biblical tradition, the plant boy is Cain and the flint boy is Abel, who is really a herder rather than a hunter. So in the Bible, you have the herder against the planter, and the planter is the one who is abominated. This is the myth of hunting people or herding people who have come into a planting-culture world and denigrate the people whom they have conquered.
Our Vater, who art near his golf cart, hallowed be thy mane, my Barron come, my putter be down, on earth as it is in Florida. Give us this day our daily tweet. And forgive us our wind passes, as we forgive those who pass wind against us. And lead us not into the train station, and deliver us from Evel Knievel.
February 1, 2025 (Saturday)
Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.
The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.
Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”
Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”
Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.
Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”
That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”
Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.
Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.
You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.
It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”
The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”
Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.
And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.
Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.
Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.
Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.
The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.
But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.
According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”
Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.
Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”
This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”
All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”
But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”
Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.
Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”
Trump, I don't really like travelling to the US, it's a bit boring, but I confess that there are some commendable things. I like going to the black neighbourhoods of Washington, where I saw an entire fight in the US capital between blacks and Latinos with barricades, which seemed like nonsense to me, because they should join together. I confess that I like Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and Miller I confess that Sacco and Vanzetti, who have my blood, are memorable in the history of the USA and I follow them. They were murdered by labor leaders with the electric chair, the fascists who are within the USA as well as within my country I don't like your oil, Trump, you're going to wipe out the human species because of greed. Maybe one day, over a glass of whiskey, which I accept, despite my gastritis, we can talk frankly about this, but it's difficult because you consider me an inferior race and I'm not, nor is any Colombian. So if you know someone who is stubborn, that's me, period. You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance, like they did with Allende. But I will die in my law, I resisted torture and I resist you. I don't want slavers next to Colombia, we already had many and we freed ourselves. What I want next to Colombia are lovers of freedom. If you can't accompany me, I'll go elsewhere. Colombia is the heart of the world and you didn't understand that, this is the land of the yellow butterflies, of the beauty of Remedios, but also of the colonels Aureliano Buendía, of which I am one, perhaps the last. You will kill me, but I will survive in my people, which is before yours, in the Americas. We are peoples of the winds, the mountains, the Caribbean Sea and of freedom. You don't like our freedom, okay. I don't shake hands with white slavers. I shake hands with the white libertarian heirs of Lincoln and the black and white farm boys of the USA, at whose graves I cried and prayed on a battlefield, which I reached after walking the mountains of Italian Tuscany and after being saved from Covid. They are the United States and before them I kneel, before no one else. Overthrow me, President, and the Americas and humanity will respond. Colombia now stops looking north, looks at the world, our blood comes from the blood of the Caliphate of Cordoba, the civilization of that time, of the Roman Latins of the Mediterranean, the civilization of that time, who founded the republic, democracy in Athens; our blood has the black resistance fighters turned into slaves by you. In Colombia is the first free territory of America, before Washington, of all America, there I take refuge in its African songs. My land is made up of goldsmiths who worked in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs and of the first artists in the world in Chiribiquete. You will never rule us. The warrior who rode our lands, shouting freedom, who is called Bolívar, opposes us. Our people are somewhat fearful, somewhat timid, they are naive and kind, loving, but they will know how to win the Panama Canal, which you took from us with violence. Two hundred heroes from all of Latin America lie in Bocas del Toro, today's Panama, formerly Colombia, which you murdered. I raise a flag and as Gaitan said, even if it remains alone, it will continue to be raised with the Latin American dignity that is the dignity of America, which your great-grandfather did not know, and mine did, Mr. President, an immigrant in the USA, Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world. I know that you love beauty as I do, do not disrespect it and you will give it your sweetness. FROM TODAY ON, COLOMBIA IS OPEN TO THE ENTIRE WORLD, WITH OPEN ARMS, WE ARE BUILDERS OF FREEDOM, LIFE AND HUMANITY. I am informed that you impose a 50% tariff on the fruits of our human labor to enter the United States, and I do the same. Let our people plant corn that was discovered in Colombia and feed the world. |
| Trump, a mi no me gusta mucho viajar a los EEUU, es un poco aburridor, pero confieso que hay cosas meritorias, me gusta ir a los barrios negros de Washington, allí ví una lucha entera en la capital de los EEUU entre negros y latinos con barricadas, que me pareció una pendejada, porque deberían unirse. Confieso que me gusta Walt Withman y Paul Simon y Noam Chomsky y Miller Confieso que Sacco y Vanzetti, que tienen mi sangre, en la historia de los EEUU, son memorables y les sigo. Los asesinaron por lideres obreros con la silla eléctrica, los fascistas qué están dentro de EEUU como dentro de mi país No me gusta su petroleo, Trump, va a acabar con la especie humana por la codicia. Quizás algún día, junto a un trago de Whisky qué acepto, a pesar de mi gastritis, podamos hablar francamente de esto, pero es difícil porque usted me considera una raza inferior y no lo soy, ni ningún colombiano. Así que si conoce alguien terco, ese soy yo, punto. Puede con su fuerza económica y su soberbia intentar dar un golpe de estado como hicieron con Allende. Pero yo muero en mi ley, resistí la tortura y lo resisto a usted. No quiero esclavistas al lado de Colombia, ya tuvimos muchos y nos liberamos. Lo que quiero al lado de Colombia, son amantes de la libertad. Si usted no puede acompañarme yo voy a otros lados. Colombía es el corazón del mundo y usted no lo entendió, esta es la tierra de las mariposas amarillas, de la belleza de Remedios, pero tambien de los coroneles Aurelianos Buendía, de los cuales soy uno de ellos, quizás el último Me matarás, pero sobreviviré en mi pueblo que es antes del tuyo, en las Américas. Somos pueblos de los vientos, las montañas, del mar Caribe y de la libertad A usted no le gusta nuestra libertad, vale. Yo no estrecho mi mano con esclavistas blancos. Estrecho las manos de los blancos libertarios herederos de Lincoln y de los muchachos campesinos negros y blancos de los EEUU, ante cuyas tumbas llore y recé en un campo de batalla, al que llegue, después de caminar montañas de la toscana italiana y después de salvarme del covid. Ellos son EEUU y ante ellos me arrodillo, ante más nadie. Túmbeme presidente y le responderán las Américas y la humanidad. Colombia ahora deja de mirar el norte, mira al mundo, nuestra sangre viene de la sangre del califato de Córdoba, la civilización en ese entonces, de los latinos romanos del mediterraneo, la civilización de ese entonces, que fundaron la república, la democracia en Atenas; nuestra sangre tiene los resistentes negros convertidos en esclavos por ustedes. En Colombia está el primer territorio libre de América, antes de Washington, de toda la América, allí me cobijo en sus cantos africanos. Mi tierra es de orfebrería existente en época de los faraones egipcios, y de los primeros artistas del mundo en Chiribiquete. No nos dominarás nunca. Se opone el guerrero que cabalgaba nuestras tierras, gritando libertad y que se llama Bolívar Nuestros pueblos son algo temerosos, algo tímidos, son ingenuos y amables, amantes, pero sabrán ganar el canal de Panamá, que ustedes nos quitaron con violencia. Doscientos héroes de toda latinoamerica yacen en Bocas del Toro, actual Panamá, antes Colombia, que ustedes asesinaron. Yo levanto una bandera y como dijera Gaitán, así quede solo, seguirá enarbolada con la dignidad latinoamericana que es la dignidad de América, que su bisabuelo no conoció, y el mio sí, señor presidente inmigrante en los EEUU, Su bloqueo no me asusta; porque Colombia además de ser el país de la belleza, es el corazón del mundo. Se que ama la belleza como yo, no la irrespete y le brindará su dulzura. COLOMBIA A PARTiR DE HOY SE ABRE A TODO EL MUNDO, CON LOS BRAZOS ABIERTOS, SOMOS CONSTRUCTORES DE LIBERTAD, VIDA Y HUMANIDAD. Me informan que usted pone a nuestro fruto del trabajo humano 50% de arancel para entrar a EEUU, yo hago lo mismo. Que nuestra gente siembre maíz que se descubrió en Colombia y alimente al mundo. |
| Trump, nu prea îmi place să călătoresc în SUA, e cam plictisitor, dar mărturisesc că aveți lucruri meritorii, îmi place să merg în cartierele negre din Washington, acolo am văzut o întreagă luptă în capitala SUA între negri și latini cu baricade, ceea ce mi s-a părut o tâmpenie, pentru că ei ar trebui să se unească. Mărturisesc că îmi plac Walt Withman și Paul Simon și Noam Chomsky și Miller. Mărturisesc că Sacco și Vanzetti, care au sângele meu, în istoria SUA, sunt memorabili și îi urmăresc. Au fost asasinați, pentru că erau liderii muncitorilor, cu scaunul electric, de fasciștii care există în SUA la fel ca și în țara mea. Nu-mi place petrolul vostru, Trump, el va nimici specia umană din lăcomie. Poate că într-o zi, la un pahar de whisky pe care îl accept, în ciuda gastritei mele, vom putea vorbi deschis despre asta, dar este dificil pentru că tu mă consideri o rasă inferioară și nu sunt, nici eu, și nici vreun alt columbian. Așa că, dacă e să fie cineva încăpățânat, acela sunt eu, punct. Cu puterea voastră economică și aroganța voastră, puteți încerca să organizați o lovitură de stat, așa cum ați făcut cu Allende. Dar eu mor în legea mea, am rezistat torturii și vă rezist și vouă. Nu vreau stăpâni de sclavi de partea Columbiei, am avut deja mulți și ne-am eliberat singuri. Ceea ce vreau de partea Columbiei sunt iubitori de libertate. Dacă nu mă puteți însoți, voi merge atunci în altă parte. Columbia este inima lumii și tu nu ai înțeles, este țara fluturilor galbeni, a frumuseții lui Remedios, dar și a coloneilor Aureliano Buendia, iar eu sunt unul dintre ei, poate ultimul. Mă veți ucide, dar eu voi supraviețui prin poporul meu, care se află dinaintea voastră în America. Suntem oameni ai vânturilor, ai munților, ai Mării Caraibelor și ai libertății. Nu vă place libertatea noastră, bine. Eu nu dau mâna cu negustorii de sclavi albi. Eu dau mâna cu moștenitorii libertarieni albi ai lui Lincoln și cu băieții țărani albi și negri ai SUA, în fața mormintelor cărora am plâns și m-am rugat pe un câmp de luptă, la care am ajuns după ce am străbătut munții din Toscana italiană și după ce m-am vindecat de covid. Ei sunt SUA și îngenunchez în fața lor și în fața nimănui altcuiva. Răsturnați-mă, domnule președinte, și America și omenirea vă vor răspunde. Columbia nu mai privește acum spre nord, privește spre lume, sângele nostru provine din sângele califatului din Cordoba, civilizația de atunci, din sângele romanilor latini din Mediterana, civilizația celor care au fondat republica, democrația din Atena; sângele nostru îi are pe negrii care au rezistat, deși au fost transformați în sclavi de către voi. În Columbia este primul teritoriu liber al Americii, înainte de Washington, al întregii Americi, acolo îmi găsesc refugiul, în cântecele sale africane. Țara mea este o țară a orfevrăriei existente din vremea faraonilor egipteni și a primilor artiști ai lumii în Chiribiquete. Nu ne veți domina niciodată. Războinicul care a călărit pe pământurile noastre, strigând libertate și care se numește Bolivar, vi se opune. Popoarele noastre sunt oarecum temătoare, oarecum timide, sunt naive și bune, iubitoare, dar vor ști cum să câștige Canalul Panama, pe care ni l-ați luat cu violență. Două sute de eroi din toată America Latină zac în Bocas del Toro, Panama de astăzi, fosta Columbie, pe care ați ucis-o. Ridic un steag și, așa cum a spus Gaitan, chiar dacă rămân singur, acesta va continua să fie ridicat cu demnitatea latino-americană, care este demnitatea Americii, pe care străbunicul dvs. nu a cunoscut-o, iar al meu da, dle președinte imigrant în Statele Unite. Blocada dvs. nu mă sperie, deoarece Columbia, pe lângă faptul că este țara frumuseții, este inima lumii. Știu că iubiți frumusețea la fel ca mine, nu o neglijați și ea vă va aduce dulceața ei. COLUMBIA ESTE DE ACUM DESCHISĂ ÎNTREGII LUMI. CU BRAȚELE DESCHISE, SUNTEM CONSTRUCTORI DE LIBERTATE, VIAȚĂ ȘI UMANITATE. Am fost informat că ați impus taxe vamale de 50 % pentru ca fructele muncii noastre umane să intre în SUA, așa că și eu fac la fel. Fie ca poporul nostru să planteze porumbul care a fost descoperit în Columbia și să hrănească lumea. |
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timeasmymeasure
