Tuesday, November 21: Joe Biden is Cooked
Somebody get that cognitively impaired clown to a retirement home expeditiously
In all the chaos, I nearly forgot to wish president Joseph Robinette Biden a happy 81st birthday yesterday. That’s right my dear friends, the leader of the free world is now another day, another month, and another year closer to death. Looking back, I realize it was unreasonable to expect him to call for a ceasefire in Gaza when the fossil of a man can’t even call a ceasefire on his birthday cake. I can’t be certain of what he wished for, but I hope all his remaining nights are haunted by the faces and voices of the thousands of Palestinian children he’s helped murder in the past 45 days.
Biden is celebrating his birthday but alienating even more voters before next year’s presidential election. Cardi B, the New York rapper and occasional political commentator, has publicly announced that she’s no longer rocking with Joey Biden, after public service cuts in her hometown of New York. Add Cardi to a long and growing list of voters that are fed up with Biden’s inability or unwillingness to recognize that funding a genocide is in no way a reflection of American public opinion. As much as it pains me to say this, the way things are looking, we’re staring down the barrel of another Trump presidency.
While Biden tried (probably unsuccessfully) to blow out all his birthday candles, British media reported that 31 premature babies from Al-Shifa Hospital were successfully transferred to a hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza, and will eventually be moved to a hospital in Egypt. This is welcome news, but somehow the coverage failed to mention that initially there were 39 babies, meaning eight were killed in the Israeli siege of Al-Shifa, newborn lives extinguished before they could even leave the incubator.
In a sign of the cognitively impaired times we’re experiencing, German outlet Der Spiegel criticized young climate activist Greta Thunberg and her support for the Palestinian cause, claiming that “We are currently seeing anti-Semitism as we have never seen it before” which seems like maybe a bit of a miscalculation given Germany’s history. Meanwhile, Raz Segal, an Israeli associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University says what’s happening in Gaza is “textbook genocide”.
It’s noteworthy how much pro-Israel discourse is really about the discourse and the language itself —“don’t call it ‘genocide’”, “don’t say ‘from the river to the sea’”, “don’t use watermelons”, “use specific, magic words to condemn Hamas before criticizing Israel”—rather than any kind of defense of the apartheid state’s actions. Perhaps because genocide and ethnic cleansing are indefensible.
Yesterday, activists in New Hampshire vandalized Elbit Systems, a weapons manufacturer providing armaments to the Israeli military. The protesters spray-painted the front of the building with red paint, smashed a few windows, and locked at least one of the main lobby doors with a bike lock. Respectable, but not a terrible amount of damage to be honest. In response, New Hampshire senator Jeanne Shaheen took time out of her busy day to thank law enforcement and did her best to tie the protesting of a weapons maker to rising antisemitism. If you’re just joining us, we’ve apparently reached the point of imperial decline where “vandalizing a weapons plant is antisemitic.” I hate it here.
I sign off today with this 55 year old quote from Fidel Castro. Before you condemn or criticize, ask yourself why anyone would ever choose the life of armed struggle:
“Revolutionaries didn't choose armed struggle as the best path, it's the path the oppressors imposed on the people. And so the people only have two choices: to suffer, or to fight."
— Fidel Castro, 1967
Side Items
Another Walmart Shooting: A male shooter opened fire at a Walmart in Ohio yesterday evening, wounding four people before killing himself. The shooting took place just a day after two people were shot and killed outside a Walmart in Alaska. You may recall that last November, a Walmart supervisor in Virginia fatally shot six employees on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. And back in 2019, a white gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in a racist attack that targeted Hispanic shoppers. Either there’s something inherently violent about Walmart, or we have a rampant gun control issue in the US…
NYPD’s New Toy: The police department of New York City is spending $390 million on a brand new radio system that will encrypt officer communications, just as the city is cutting funding for everything from libraries to sanitation. This decision goes against a near-century-old practice of giving the public and the press access to listen to police dispatches. For context, the total budget of the NYPD is more than $5.5 Billion (with a B)