#technocrats to terrorists

[reasoningdaily]

Futureland - Walter Mosley

Futureland - Walter Mosley

Projecting a near-future United States in which justice is blind in at least one eye and the ranks of the disenchanted have swollen to dangerous levels, Mosely offers nine interconnected stories whose characters appear and reappear in each others' lives. For all its denizens, from technocrats to terrorists, celebs to crooks, "Futureland" is an all-American nightmare just waiting to happen.

Nine interconnected short stories capture the high-tech world of the United States in the near future, capturing the lives and fates of such characters as Ptolemy Bent, a child genius whose merciful actions land him in a privatized prison, and Fera Jones, a heavyweight boxing champ who abandons the ring for a political career. 75,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Futureland is bestselling mystery author Walter Mosley's first science fiction book since Blue Light, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Futureland's nine linked stories will provide an accessible and intelligent introduction to written science fiction for mystery or mainstream fiction fans who do not normally read the genre.

Experienced science fiction readers, however, may be less than satisfied with Futureland. Reading it, you might decide Mr. Mosley grew up reading SF, respects the genre, and still watches SF movies, but has read little SF written during or after the New Wave of the 1960s. However, something more may be going on here than a genre newcomer making beginning-SF-writer mistakes. Mr. Mosley may be deliberately, and craftily, creating SF accessible to his large non-SF readership and to others who are strangers to this genre.

Some have labeled Futureland cyberpunk, and it does present a dark, infotech-saturated, corporation-controlled future; but it is in fact an inversion of cyberpunk. Instead of that subgenre's cliche of cool, cutting-edge, street-smart, but not very believable outlaws who out-hack and outwit powerful multinational corporations, this Dante-esque collection presents outlaws and outcasts who may be street-wise, but who have little chance of overcoming the corporations and governments that control, and sometimes take, their lives. Like shockingly few other SF works, Futureland directly examines the lives of the working and the nonworking classes, the poor and the marginalized, the criminal and the criminalized. In other words, Futureland is set in a world quite alien to many veteran SF readers, and is therefore a book they should try. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

After the qualified success of his first science fiction novel, Blue Light (1998), Mosley (best known for such mystery fiction as the Easy Rawlins series) returns with nine linked short stories set in a grim, cyberpunkish near-future. Unfortunately, heavy-handed plotting and unconvincing extrapolation weaken the collection's earnest social message. "Whispers in the Dark" introduces prodigy Ptolemy Bent, who will grow to be the smartest man in the world in spite of his poverty-ridden childhood. Ptolemy reappears in "Doctor Kismet" as an adviser to assassins trying to kill the richest, most corrupt man in the world and as the brains behind a series of global plots to overthrow the status quo in "En Masse" and "The Nig in Me." Champion boxer and much-hyped female role model Fera Jones steps away from the ring to take hands-on responsibility for the influence she wields in "The Greatest." With its easily befuddled talking computer justice system, "Little Brother" is more Star Trek than high-tech cyberpunk. In more familiar territory for Mosley, PI Folio Johnson investigates a series of murders linked to Doctor Kismet in "The Electric Eye." Although packaged as SF, this book is likely to disappoint readers of that genre who've already seen Mosley's themes of racial and economic rebellion more convincingly handled by authors like Octavia Butler. Mystery fans, on the other hand, are far more likely to embrace this latest example of Mosley's SF vision, with its comfortably familiar noirish tone and characters, than they did Blue Light. (Nov. 12)Forecast: With a five-city author tour and national print advertising, both mainstream and genre, this title book should be slated for solid sales.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Mosley's first foray into writing science fiction since Blue Light (LJ 10/1/98), these interrelated stories, set in the near future, read as a natural but chilling extension of our present. From child genius Ptolemy Bent, sentenced to prison for euthanizing his grandmother and uncle, to female boxer Fera, who becomes a feminist icon for the 21st century, his characters battle for both personal survival and a chance to turn back the clock. In this futuristic world, privacy is little but a memory and prejudice and suspicion still sour race relations. Mosley's reputation as the best-selling author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries may entice a number of his regular readers to pick up this book, where they will find some of the same bleak outlook, flashes of insight, and true-to-life African American characters. An additional audience will come from iPublish.com, where the first two stories were previously published as e-books. Recommended for all public libraries. - Rachel Singer Gordon, Franklin Park P.L., IL Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Mystery star Mosley tries his hand at science fiction again, to better effect than in the novel Blue Light (1998). For these nine interconnected stories, he conjures a mid-twenty-first-century world in which one company is the most powerful force in the world and political correctness is the law. The only significant revolutionaries are black, and blacks and whites are still highly antagonistic. All Mosley's good guys are black, including the smartest man in the world, imprisoned for assisting the deaths of his ailing grandmother and uncle; the world's heavyweight boxing champ--a six-foot-nine-inch woman who goes into politics after KO'ing the male heavyweight champ in less than a minute of round one; a private dick who solves cases with the help of a greatly enhanced artificial eye; and a regular-joe worker who becomes the reader's eyewitness to the dawn of a new world when a backfiring biological weapon kills everyone who isn't at least 12.5 percent black. Lest that last bit of business seem too black-triumphalist, the worker-hero quickly discovers that intraspecies predation hasn't vanished. Ably slinging the technobabble to explain the odd wonder-gadget in his tales, and greasing them with plenty of "oh-baby" sex, Mosley creates sf in which Shaft and Superfly would feel at home. Can ya dig it? Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Walter Mosley is the author of the New York Times bestselling Easy Rawlins novels. He lives in New York City.

[darkmaga-returns]

In September 2024, I published an article titled ‘Eco-Warrior Mark Carney: Set up to Replace Trudeau and Usher in Great Reset’.

Now that Carney has been officially installed as the interim Prime Minister of Canada, I’d like to expand a bit on that thesis and explain how the decision to replace Justin Trudeau with the much more vicious technocrat can only be understood by 1) recognizing the systemic breakdown now at play, and 2) the historic role of the British Empire in using Canada as a weapon against Canadians, and especially Americans going back for over two centuries.

Canada as a British Weapon Against America

In the 19th century, Canada was recognized as a principal enemy of the USA, as Confederate intelligence had enjoyed vast patronage and support by the British Empire through its web of intelligence bases in Montreal and Toronto. These Confederate intelligence networks not only coordinated terrorist operations against the Union from the north, but additionally paid and directed John Wilkes Booth to murder Lincoln after the war’s end.

These facts were outlined in detail in Barry Sheehy’s brilliant 2017 book Montreal: City of Secrets.

[a-nerd-just-trying]

Hello Frostpunk and Roleplaying Tumblr!

Slaps you with discord server invite: https://discord.com/invite/h4CtXWb4sn

If you like dieselpunk, steampunk, freezing to death, or sawdust, then you might just like the New London City Council RP server.

This is a text-based RP, and it may seem small at first because to see what's going on. One of the GMs (likely me the poor paperwork guy) needs to give you either the spectator or player role.

We have all the original communities and factions from the base game alongside some slightly changed or completely original factions.

Did you think the Technocrats weren't going far enough? How about you fully join the mechanics and become a Synthocrat.

Is being a Faithkeeper too tame for you? *Throws a flamethrower at you.* Then worship the Flame Mother's wife, the Steward, and grab a sword because the Flamekeepers are bonkers and very very gay. (Amelia x Ada for the win)

Do you want a more sensible Faction? Someone a bit calmer? Well, the Frostlanders have basically turned into one large family drama. (No, no, Thomas x Lillian for the win.)

Etc etc, I can go on. There are literally over a dozen factions to act as, and even better, you can make multiple characters and RP them at once.

We have shipping, we have politics, we have a surprising number of terrorist attacks per annum, and most importantly, we have Red.

You wouldn't say no to Red, would you? (Art by Dezzy on this server for the amazing player of 'Little Red')

We also have gay art. If you want, you can just share gay art in the art channel. Nothing explicit.

[mariacallous]

Mexico’s most important venue for political theatre is the mañanera—the press conference that takes place each weekday morning in the Treasury Room, a vast Italianate hall in the Presidential palace. It took its current form in 2018, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador—a pugnacious, swaggering populist known throughout Mexico as AMLO. López Obrador framed his daily encounters with the media as an exercise in openness. Over time, they became a stage from which he could lambaste his enemies, advance his initiatives, and curate his public image. AMLO’s mañaneras began at 7 A.M. and often stretched on for hours, with guest speakers, musical interludes, and endless Presidential monologues. Because he was perennially at war with the press, they were often his primary mode of communicating with the Mexican people.

López Obrador’s successor is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female President. She is as precise and controlled as AMLO was blustery, but she has kept up the tradition of the mañanera. If anything, she talks with reporters even less, so her statements in the Treasury Room often provide the best indications of her administration’s priorities and plans.

On the morning of January 21st, Sheinbaum’s arrival was announced by the click of high heels on stone. “Buenos días,” she said as she walked onstage, wearing a black pencil skirt and a shirt embroidered with Indigenous motifs. It was the day after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, and an expectant crowd had gathered to hear how the Mexican government would deal with the belligerent new Administration to the north. To everyone’s surprise, Sheinbaum said that her comments that morning would focus on health.

Sheinbaum, who is sixty-two, had been in office almost four months, and for much of that time public discourse had been consumed by Trump’s impending return to power. The American President had, once again, made Mexico a target. He vowed that on Day One he would impose “a 25% Tariff on ALL products” from Mexico. He claimed that he would declare a national emergency at the border, suspend refugee admissions, and designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, allowing the U.S. to pursue them more aggressively. Drug kingpins would “never sleep soundly again,” he said.

How much any of this would translate into actual policy had been a subject of frenzied speculation in Mexico. Officials at the border had announced a state of emergency to prepare for mass deportations. Mayors declared themselves profoundly unprepared to deal with the legions of people Trump planned to send back. News outlets proclaimed the advent of “Trump Reloaded” and warned of “La Invasión.”

Every Mexican President has to contend with the looming influence of the United States—accommodating its whims and imperatives while convincing citizens that their interests come first. López Obrador dealt with this mainly through force of personality. Despite the mayhem that Trump sowed in his previous term, the two men had temperamental similarities, and AMLO at times referred to Trump as a “friend.” Though Sheinbaum is a protégé of AMLO’s, she does not entirely emulate his style. She trained as a physicist and spent years in academia before building a political career on technocratic competence. As Trump took office again, she seemed determined to project quiet control.

At the mañanera, she acknowledged the political atmosphere. “We will always defend our sovereignty,” she said. “That is a maxim the President must live up to.” Though Trump had already signed a flurry of executive orders, Sheinbaum reminded the audience, with a wry smile, “It’s always important to keep a cool head.” A screen behind her magnified the text of some of Trump’s most controversial orders, which she proceeded to parse in the patient tones of a graduate seminar.

Sheinbaum pointed out that this wasn’t the first time that Trump had declared a national emergency at the border, or tried to get Mexico to take back migrants the U.S. didn’t want. His declaration on the “Gulf of America,” she made clear, was hardly worth discussing. “For us, it will continue to be the Gulf of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said. The only real novelty was the executive order to designate drug cartels as terrorist groups. But there, again, the Trump Administration had yet to determine who would actually be on the list. So why overreact now?

Sheinbaum invited up her minister of foreign affairs, Juan Ramón de la Fuente. A former psychiatrist with silver hair and rimless glasses, he had been sitting with a hand on his chin, looking unconvinced by his boss’s assurances. Now he produced a graph showing that migrant encounters at the southern border had dropped nearly eighty per cent in a year, to “the lowest levels of crossings.” Whether these numbers could help placate Trump was an open question. But Sheinbaum seemed determined to give at least the appearance of rationality.

Midway through the press conference, she tried to turn the subject decisively away from Trump. She called on the minister of health and his deputy to detail her administration’s public-health initiatives. For nearly fifteen minutes, they discussed a campaign against dengue fever—which had spiked alarmingly the previous year—and an effort to treat cataracts for free.

After the presentation, Sheinbaum opened the floor to questions, and the conversation turned swiftly back to the U.S. Would Mexico take in all migrants? Who would cover the cost of deportations? How would the government respond to tariffs? Sheinbaum remained vague on details, but insisted that her administration would seek to work with Trump. “Step by step,” she said, gazing levelly at the audience. As reporters shouted questions, she announced that the conference was adjourned. “Thank you, compañeras, compañeros,” Sheinbaum said, and began heading for the exit. Then she backtracked to add, with a grin, “Don’t forget about the cataract program—it is very important.”

In the months before the Mexican Presidential election last June, banners went up across the country with the message “Es Claudia”—it is Claudia. The phrase, summoning a kind of papal succession, alerted the political faithful that Sheinbaum had been chosen to succeed López Obrador as the head of his party, the National Regeneration Movement, or MORENA. Sheinbaum had spent most of her career in Mexico City; she was an urban intellectual, a type that populists tend to dislike. But AMLO was revered to the point of worship, and his endorsement gave her a potent advantage. When the votes were counted, Sheinbaum had beaten her closest competitor by thirty-one points. How she would govern was less clear. The view in Washington was cautiously optimistic, a senior Biden Administration official told me—though skeptics worried that “she’d have all the flaws of López Obrador without any of his authority.”

When Sheinbaum talks about her ideological roots, she often describes herself as a daughter of el sesenta y ocho—1968, a year that Mexicans remember as a time of fervid student protests and brutal state repression. For most of the preceding four decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had governed unopposed, and people were beginning to demand greater freedoms. When Sheinbaum was six years old, the military, on the President’s orders, attacked a huge student protest in the Three Cultures square in Mexico City. Snipers opened fire, prompting a frantic stampede. Thousands were held at gunpoint and hauled off to jail. The death toll remains a state secret, but estimates suggest that more than three hundred people were killed.

Sheinbaum’s family had intimate knowledge of political persecution. Her father, a chemical engineer named Carlos Sheinbaum Yoselevitz, was the son of Ashkenazi Jews who had fled Lithuania in the nineteen-twenties. Her mother, Annie Pardo Cemo, a biologist and academic, was born into a Sephardic family that left Bulgaria at the start of the Second World War. “It was a miracle they were saved,” Sheinbaum has said. “Many family members from that generation were exterminated.”

Compared with the U.S., which had strict immigration quotas, Mexico was a haven. Thousands of European Jews, including Sheinbaum’s grandparents, settled in the capital’s historic center. Still, Sheinbaum has said, “I grew up without religion.” In her family’s home, politics took its place. When students started protesting the PRI, Sheinbaum’s mother took up their cause. She brought her children to visit Lecumberri, a forbidding prison where protesters were held. The family welcomed activists into their home and hosted long deliberations around the dinner table. Sheinbaum recalls eavesdropping on their conversations, huddled on a staircase out of sight. When she found works by Marx and other subversive thinkers stashed around the house, she told herself, “Funny—there’s books in the closet.”

Her parents sent her to Escuela Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, a private school in the Tlalpan district, where children could shape their own curriculum. Early on, Sheinbaum got involved in a musical ensemble called Pilcuicatl—Nahuatl for “the children who sing.” Video from those years shows Sheinbaum, with her frizzy hair pulled back, strumming a charango, a small guitar carved from an armadillo shell. “The students all came from homes where writing, reading, and painting was encouraged and there was an appreciation for music,” Carmen Boullosa, a revered Mexican writer who was one of Sheinbaum’s teachers, said. Still, Boullosa distinguished her pupils from the city’s cloistered rich kids, chauffeured from one safe zone to another: “These were not children who were confined to their private gardens.”

At fifteen, Sheinbaum began to join protests in the streets. She participated in hunger strikes, and demonstrated alongside a group of mothers whose children had been disappeared by the state—“the very first night I spent away from home,” she later recalled. Imanol Ordorika, a social scientist and a high-school friend who joined Sheinbaum in the protests, said that the spirit of the sixties still lingered: “It all converged with the civil-rights movement, the music of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary.”

After high school, Sheinbaum studied physics at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), Mexico’s premier state-funded institution, but she stayed interested in activism. At Ordorika’s urging, she joined a group called the Council of University Students, in 1986. The university’s president was pushing controversial reforms, including a tuition increase. The CEU, as the Council was known, rallied thousands of students and forced the school’s leaders to debate them in public. The debates went on for weeks, at Che Guevara Hall, where students with long hair and beards sat across from bureaucrats in suits, waving cigarettes as they spoke of constructing una universidad democrática. Sheinbaum was deeply engaged, but behind the scenes. Each night after the debates, she met with the students to help them plan the next day’s line of attack.

After the dialogues, the CEU called for a general strike and gathered hundreds of thousands of protesters at the Zócalo, Mexico City’s grand central square. Within days, the administration had abandoned its reforms, and sympathizers celebrated across the capital. “We were effectively standing up to the government,” Ordorika said. Throughout, the CEU had stayed in communication with the leaders of el sesenta y ocho. The older activists provided a bit of tactical advice about dealing with a more powerful opponent—a lesson that Sheinbaum seems to have retained. “They always warned us against putting our adversary between a rock and a hard place,” Ordorika said. “We had to give them an exit.”

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is an extraordinary rarity in Mexican public life: a lifelong politician who has maintained an unblemished record. The son of a legendary President, Cárdenas grew up within the PRI, but broke away in 1986 to start a left-wing offshoot called the Democratic Current. Two years later, he defied the ruling party and ran for President—a crucial act in the inception of Mexican democracy.

Now ninety years old, Cárdenas still receives visitors at his home office, a single-story house shaded by a fig tree. One afternoon, he met me there and reminisced about the 1988 campaign. “These were our headquarters,” Cárdenas, a sturdy man with a knowing expression, told me. “We’d gather everyone—or as many could fit—in this space.” Though leaders of the PRI cast him as a traitor, he attracted support from young people who were drawn to his plainspoken, egalitarian ideas. In his view, “the power and authority of a government grow as more people participate in decisions and as actions are more democratic.”

On Cárdenas’s office bookshelf sits a photograph of him in 1988, addressing a vast crowd at UNAM. Early in the campaign, he sought support from the CEU. Sheinbaum, who was finishing her undergraduate studies, was still involved in the group, and had married one of its founding members, Carlos Ímaz. The Council held a meeting with Cárdenas at Sheinbaum’s home, and afterward convened a rally on his behalf at the university. “It was the single most important event of the campaign,” he told me. “It gave us the support of the intellectual class—not just the students but also the academics and the staff.”

On election day, early results gave Cárdenas a commanding lead over the PRI’s candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. But, as ballots were being counted, government authorities announced that the electoral system had collapsed. Poll watchers were ousted at gunpoint, and sacks of ballots were tossed in the trash. Cárdenas denounced the government’s meddling and declared that voters had aligned against the PRI��s “authoritarianism.” By then, however, Salinas had been pronounced the winner, and the PRI-dominated Congress subsequently ordered all the ballots burned.

After the election, Sheinbaum diverted some of her attention from politics. At UNAM, she became the first woman to pursue a Ph.D. in energy engineering, and then she and Ímaz moved to California to continue their studies. The couple had two children: Rodrigo, Ímaz’s son from a previous marriage, and Mariana, their two-year-old daughter. Sheinbaum conducted research at Berkeley, where she found a thriving community of activists and intellectuals.

Yet her focus inevitably returned to Mexico, where a growing sector of society shared Cárdenas’s outrage at the PRI. Cárdenas had founded a new opposition party, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática. Sheinbaum spread the word about the P.R.D. in study halls at Berkeley, and travelled to farm towns like Watsonville to speak with strawberry pickers. When Salinas toured California to promote the North American Free Trade Agreement, in 1991, Sheinbaum joined protests against his visit. The Stanford Daily ran a front-page photo of her, looking indignant in a headband and holding a sign that read “Fair Trade and Democracy Now!!”

When she and Ímaz returned to Mexico, a few years later, Sheinbaum worked in academia and remained active in the P.R.D. In 1997, Cárdenas ran in Mexico City’s first free election for mayor, and won decisively. The PRI’s monopoly was broken, and rival parties across the ideological spectrum began to gather strength. As Cárdenas later wrote, Mexico was at last on its way to “dismantling the state’s party regime.”

By then, the P.R.D. had found a new leader—López Obrador, who at the time was still an ambitious upstart. In the run-up to the 2000 elections, when he ran to succeed Cárdenas as mayor, Sheinbaum and Ímaz hosted campaign meetings for him. The son of shopkeepers from Tabasco state, AMLO had an outsider’s charisma: he drove an old Nissan to work and moved around the country without an entourage, talking with regular Mexicans. He vowed to purge the government of corruption. But, rather than encouraging unity, he inveighed against “élites” and the “power mafia”—a group that came to include seemingly anyone who opposed him. Nevertheless, Sheinbaum was fascinated by his political conviction. It was, as she saw it, the essential fuel for a “movement of transformation.”

The Legislative Palace of San Lázaro, a monumental complex sprawling across nearly forty acres, lies in the center of Mexico City. On the façade, a mural by a disciple of Diego Rivera presents visitors with a brief tour of crucial moments in Mexican history. Inside is the vast Chamber of Deputies, where the country’s past eight Presidents have been sworn in.

On the morning of Sheinbaum’s Presidential inauguration, last October, she left her home in Tlalpan and got in a gray sedan headed for San Lázaro. While she was still navigating the streets, AMLO arrived at the hall, where lawmakers greeted him with a laudatory chant: “It’s an honor to be with Obrador.” Inside, a raucous crowd had assembled. His coalition had won three hundred and sixty-four of the chamber’s five hundred seats, an almost insuperable advantage. People swarmed around to take selfies, grasp his shoulder, offer praise. It took him more than ten minutes to reach the dais.

Outside, Sheinbaum climbed the stairs to the main esplanade, where an all-female delegation was waiting, then made her way to the lobby and saluted the flag. Throughout, López Obrador’s name continued to reverberate inside. It was only when the hall’s doors opened, revealing Sheinbaum, in a white sheath embroidered with tulips and daisies, that clusters of people took up a new chant: “It’s an honor to be standing with Claudia today.”

Sheinbaum began her speech by hailing AMLO as “the most important political leader and social activist in modern history, the most beloved President.” Before she outlined her policies, she emphasized that she represented a break with the past. “For the first time, we women have arrived to lead the destinies of our beautiful nation,” she said. Yet her platform closely matched her predecessor’s. It was another reminder that, for nearly three decades, her career had been inseparable from his.

Their partnership began in late 2000. López Obrador had recently been elected mayor of Mexico City, and a longtime friend recommended Sheinbaum to lead his environmental agenda. Her credentials were undeniable: she held graduate degrees in energy engineering, and she had dedicated years to researching greenhouse-gas emissions. (At unam, she had spent time with the Purépecha Indigenous group, and developed a woodstove that would use less fuel while limiting women’s exposure to smoke.) López Obrador invited her to coffee and told her that he wanted to address the city’s noxious pollution. “You know how to do those things,” he said. “Plus, you get along with all the scientists who are experts in this field.” Sheinbaum accepted at once.

As environmental secretary, she worked to ease some of the city’s intractable problems, including chronic water shortages. Over time, her responsibilities grew: in 2001, she was asked to oversee AMLO’s marquee project, a four-hundred-million-dollar renovation of Mexico City’s beltway. She led a team of engineers who designed the segundo piso, or elevated highway—an eleven-mile extension hailed as a way to ease traffic and curb emissions. Environmentalists staunchly opposed the project. “They wanted the government to promote public transportation rather than facilitate car use,” Alberto Olvera, a sociologist and a prominent political observer, said. “Sheinbaum went with the contractors that López Obrador had appointed. And, to this day, no one knows how many contracts were appropriated, or how much money was spent.”

In 2004, Sheinbaum was beset by a corruption scandal. A leaked video showed Ímaz, her husband, taking some forty thousand dollars in bribes from a prominent businessman. Images spread around the country of Ímaz, who was then an elected official in AMLO’s party, stuffing bundles of cash into a plastic bag. Ímaz claimed that the money was for an initiative to prevent voter fraud, but he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. (He appealed, and was ultimately acquitted. He and Sheinbaum have since divorced.)

Sheinbaum, who wasn’t implicated, kept pushing López Obrador’s initiatives. The highway project was completed in early 2005, just in time for AMLO to announce his first Presidential bid. He appointed Sheinbaum as his spokesperson. She was not yet a stirring public speaker, but she was intelligent and effective—“a loyal soldier,” as Paola Ojeda, a longtime aide to López Obrador, put it. AMLO lost the race by a fraction of a point, and he demanded a recount, claiming fraud. Sheinbaum was asked to help lead an investigation, and, with a team of mathematicians, she built a theory of how the election was stolen. Ultimately, most people found it unpersuasive: AMLO’s opponent, Felipe Calderón, was inaugurated, and the country moved on.

Many of López Obrador’s allies abandoned him, but Sheinbaum didn’t. When she wasn’t working at UNAM’s Engineering Institute, she was often seen around his office, making calls to voters or helping plan rallies. “She maintained a quiet but constant presence,” Ojeda said. In 2013, when AMLO fought a federal initiative to reform the state-owned oil industry, Sheinbaum took up his cause. They cast the effort as a brazen attempt to privatize Mexico’s oil resources, which had been held by the government since the nineteen-thirties. “Scientifically, it’s a hard position to defend,” Vicente Ugalde, a scholar of environmental policy, said. “The evidence shows that we need to decarbonize. But López Obrador has defended hydrocarbons since his youth, and the energy reform became a rallying cry for MORENA. Sheinbaum’s political calculations at the time were at odds with her technical expertise.”

After López Obrador lost his second Presidential bid, in 2012, he set out to form a new party, which he called MORENA, a Spanish word that can indicate either dark hair or dark skin. Sheinbaum helped draft a declaration of principles, filled with grandiose appeals to history. “There have been three main transformations in our country: the Independence, the Reform, and the Revolution,” it read. “MORENA will usher in the fourth social transformation.” Within a few years, the Party had picked up nearly a third of Mexico City’s districts, and Sheinbaum had been elected the mayor of Tlalpan. By the time of the 2018 general election, MORENA had become the country’s dominant political force.

Before the Presidential election, López Obrador asked Sheinbaum to manage his campaign, promising to appoint her secretary of the interior if he won. She politely declined, saying that she wanted to run for mayor of Mexico City. As AMLO wrote in his memoir, “Because she’s a little stubborn, or, to put it elegantly, persevering—like you know who—she decided to enter the primary and won.” Both she and López Obrador ended up winning decisively in the general election.

In a matter of months, Sheinbaum went from overseeing a district of fewer than seven hundred thousand people to governing a city of nearly ten million. Aides describe her administration as disciplined, exacting, and highly attuned to data. Officials were expected to traverse the streets, seeking problems. “You can’t be a public servant without living like a citizen,” José Merino, who led the Digital Innovation Agency, told me. “She took the subway, used the escalators, walked around, reporting the whole time. ‘I tried to go online, but the internet didn’t work.’ ‘The street lights on the avenue aren’t working.’ ” Sheinbaum assembled facts and quickly came to unshakable conclusions. “She’s not confrontational,” Merino said, then corrected himself: “She’s not needlessly confrontational.”

One night in 2021, the city’s newest subway line collapsed, killing twenty-six people. Sheinbaum’s allies pointed out that the line had been built long before her time—and that López Obrador had imposed stringent austerity measures, gutting institutions across the government. Yet engineers and operators had persistently raised concerns. One government employee recalled telling Sheinbaum in a meeting that an inquiry into the subway’s finances had found that “practically no money was spent on maintenance in a full five years.” The response was muted, the employee said, and “no one ever raised the subject again.” It seemed clear that the people in the room were aware of the problem. When the collapse came, the only surprise was the timing: “I think they knew it was going to happen. They just didn’t think it would happen under their watch.”

In last year’s Presidential race, Sheinbaum’s main opponent was also a woman, so gender was much less of an issue than job performance. The subway collapse came up repeatedly. Sheinbaum countered by enumerating her achievements, including her management of the COVID-19 pandemic. While AMLO dismissed the severity of the virus, holding rallies and insisting that the talismans he carried around would protect him, Sheinbaum increased testing, quickly tripled the number of I.C.U. beds, and retooled a factory in Mexico City to produce masks.

Sheinbaum also boasted of reducing the homicide rate by more than fifty per cent, and of empowering her police chief to create an investigative unit to confront organized crime. She didn’t mention that, while she strengthened Mexico City’s civic forces, AMLO had largely handed over the national-security strategy to the Army. As Carlos Bravo Regidor, a noted political analyst, told me, “Sheinbaum championed the city’s security efforts without ever facing the fact that there was an implicit criticism of López Obrador’s policy. And it’s taken on a second life now that she’s President.”

In the weeks before Sheinbaum’s inauguration, violence rocked the cartel stronghold of Sinaloa. In the capital, Culiacán, drug gangs killed scores of people. Policemen were shot in broad daylight. Explosions and bursts of gunfire were heard almost every day.

After two boys, ages nine and twelve, were brutally murdered one Sunday morning, protests broke out, under the slogan “Not the children.” Demonstrators called for the governor of Sinaloa to resign, and publicly torched a piñata made to resemble him. The governor was widely rumored to be linked to the cartels—but he was also friendly with López Obrador. The pressure on Sheinbaum grew. “The President had to prove, from Day One, that she would confront organized crime,” Eduardo Guerrero, a well-regarded security analyst, said.

In recent decades, the cartels had increased their influence; according to the U.S. Northern Command, they controlled about a third of Mexico’s territory. “The government doesn’t have a strategy to reduce violence at the national level,” Guerrero said. “The situation in Culiacán has overpowered them.” López Obrador argued that the best solution was a philosophy of “abrazos,no balazos”—hugs, not bullets. His plan for containing turf wars between gangs was to allow monopolies to flourish. “In the best cases, it led to a reduction in violence for one or two years,” Guerrero said. “In the worst cases, it allowed criminal groups to grow more powerful and violent.”

When Sheinbaum became President, she did not remove the governor of Sinaloa. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) But, without acknowledging it, she took a radically different approach to security than her predecessor had. “There is no continuity whatsoever between the two leaders,” Guerrero said. The watchdog group México Evalúa compared her first hundred days to AMLO’s and found that Sheinbaum’s forces had carried out more than five times as many raids. Drug seizures increased from thirty-three kilos to 665,000, and arrests from thirty-one to 7,720. Guerrero said, “She’s going after cartel leaders, hit men, the people who transport drugs and guard safe houses.”

Guerrero suggested that Sheinbaum was motivated in part by scrutiny from the United States. Yet the U.S. helped bring on the recent spasm of violence in Culiacán, by creating a power vacuum. For years, American authorities had targeted the Sinaloa cartel, a major player in fentanyl production, but with limited success. “The United States grew tired of asking for Mexico’s coöperation in a number of areas, especially the arrest of high-profile individuals,” Guerrero said. In July, U.S. agents seized an opportunity to capture Ismael Zambada, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel. They secretly negotiated with his godson—Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of the former drug lord El Chapo—who lured him to an ersatz meeting. In Zambada’s telling, he was abducted and forced onto a plane to an airport outside El Paso, where agents were waiting to take him into custody. It was only afterward that Mexican authorities were given notice.

The news came as a surprise in Washington, too. “This was purely done through law-enforcement channels,” a senior Biden official told me. “There was never a discussion at the N.S.C. about its political implications, or the bloodshed that predictably ensued.” In Mexico, senior officials were left scrambling. Zambada’s kidnapping had shown that the U.S. was willing to pursue its objectives without Mexico’s consent. “The United States realized that organized crime had festered under López Obrador,” Guerrero said. “Now it’s figuring out whether the new administration is to be trusted.”

Sheinbaum has become a sharp observer of Trump’s behavior. Soon after he won last year’s election, she declined an invitation to join Joe Biden at a state dinner, apparently wary of angering the new President by acknowledging the old one. During the transition, her cabinet led a series of operations meant to send an unequivocal signal to the new Administration. Military personnel seized four hundred million dollars’ worth of fentanyl. Migrant caravans headed north were systematically dispersed. Tunnels used for smuggling drugs and migrants into the U.S. were sealed off. The border was so quiet that National Guardsmen were reportedly struggling with boredom.

Trump wasn’t pacified. He and many of his aides have declared that Mexico is “essentially run by the cartels.” Among his advisers, there is an unprecedented insistence that the situation requires a military intervention, though they are debating whether to bomb Mexico or to lead a kind of “soft invasion.” Days after Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense, he told high-ranking Mexican officials that the Administration was taking no options off the table. Hegseth has publicly expressed a preference for targeted strikes. “Combine that with actual border security,” he said, “now you’re cooking with gas.”

A succession of U.S. Presidents have considered and rejected the possibility of designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Even Trump, in his first term, ultimately decided against it. A military intervention would be a still more extreme departure from precedent. Leaving aside concerns about antagonizing a major trade partner, a strategy of targeted strikes rests on dubious logic. It assumes that Mexican cartels are integrated networks, like Al Qaeda, when in fact they rely on a patchwork of facilitators—lawyers, accountants, corrupt officials, lookouts—who vary from place to place. “We’ve got four cartels with regional presence across a third of the country,” Guerrero said. “But we’ve also got seventy-eight regional mafias and more than four hundred gangs.”

As the Trump Administration talks openly of sending troops across the border, Sheinbaum has denounced the “interventionist spirit at the door.” She has promoted a constitutional amendment stating that “the people of Mexico will under no circumstances accept interventions,” and raised the salaries of all military personnel, whom she hailed as “the guardians of our sovereignty.” Sheinbaum likes to point out that the U.S. plays its own part in the drug trade. She often asks, Who sells the fentanyl once it crosses the border, and where do the profits end up?

Yet Sheinbaum’s government is coöperating with Trump to an extraordinary degree. Her officials have agreed to continue an arrangement in which U.S. Special Forces train Mexican troops, and have reportedly allowed the C.I.A. to expand its operations in Mexico, where it has been leading a program of drone surveillance. Soon after Trump took office, a U.S. military plane was spotted off the coast of Sinaloa, one of at least eighteen flights reported in a matter of weeks. At first, Sheinbaum argued that the reports were just part of a “campañita”—a petty campaign to make her look weak. Then, as the news spread, she grudgingly admitted that the operations had been carried out with her government’s assent.

Early one recent morning, Mexico’s secretary of the economy, Marcelo Ebrard, stood at his office window, looking out at the city’s canopy of jacarandas. “They were a gift from Japan, like the cherry trees in D.C.,” he said. “A form of floral diplomacy.” Ebrard, who is sixty-five, with a fringe of graying hair, had just returned from his fifth trip to Washington in a little more than a month. He seemed wistful for a time when Mexico and its allies exchanged gifts rather than threats.

Two days before, Trump had unveiled an outrageous list of tariffs, throwing scores of countries—and trillions of dollars in trade—into turmoil. Mexico was among a few nations that escaped the levies, but Ebrard seemed only modestly reassured. “It’s a system of comparative disadvantages,” he said. “The question no longer is ‘What advantages do you have as a country?’ but, rather, ‘What disadvantages are you up against?’ ”

Ebrard is perhaps Mexico’s nimblest political operative—a canny centrist who served as secretary of foreign affairs under AMLO. He was in that position during Trump’s previous term, when the U.S. proposed a five-per-cent tariff on all Mexican goods. The threat cast Mexico’s leadership into disarray and allowed Trump to extract significant concessions on immigration. Compared with the current regimen, that threat seems almost negligible.

In the span of just a few months, Trump had vowed to impose wide-ranging tariffs on Mexico, then placed them on hold, then proposed them again. As the stock market plunged, the logic of the tariffs was elusive. When Trump’s advisers defended them in public, they frequently contradicted one another, and even themselves. Ebrard put it diplomatically: “It’s a system of thought with varied expressions.” In the hope of finding basic precepts to engage with, he had studied the writings of Trump’s current and former trade advisers, including papers by Peter Navarro and the book “No Trade Is Free,” by Robert Lighthizer. “At its core, the system calls into question the benefits of free trade and the tenets of globalization,” Ebrard said. The essential premise was that the U.S. had largely been a victim of free trade with Mexico—an idea that Ebrard described, dryly, as “debatable.”

Ebrard was preparing for a sixth trip to Washington, to begin a new round of negotiations. He had a little more than a month to convince Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that the tariffs were not in his country’s interest. Nearly all economists think that it is fantastical to believe that the U.S. can build enough factories to compensate for the loss of manufacturing abroad. “The United States will have to choose between two fundamentally incompatible objectives—reducing the deficit with Mexico and with Asia,” Ebrard said.

Since Trump’s first term, Mexico had become the United States’ top trading partner. The two countries exchange more than eight hundred billion dollars’ worth of goods a year, and industries throughout the U.S. rely on Mexican labor. “Mexico is deeply integrated with the U.S.—and that makes certain decisions very costly,” Ebrard said. But the decisions might be even costlier for Mexico, where trade accounts for about seventy per cent of economic activity, compared with twenty-five per cent in the U.S.

Ebrard argued that Mexico has another advantage: “Your bargaining power derives from the strength of your government.” He was referring to Sheinbaum, whose approval ratings were above eighty per cent. “She has built a rapport with President Trump by defending her viewpoints, while earning moral authority,” Ebrard said. Not long ago, this kind of praise would have been unthinkable from him. In the primary for last year’s Presidential election, Ebrard fiercely challenged Sheinbaum, and after he lost he threatened to abandon the Party. But those tensions had evidently been set aside. Ebrard had two framed photographs in his office: one of his wife, Rosalinda, and one of Sheinbaum, wearing the Presidential sash.

For months, her administration has been fighting what amounts to a war of attrition. In February, Trump threatened to impose a twenty-five-per-cent levy on Mexican imports, “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!” Mexican analysts warned that the economy was on the brink of a recession. Over a holiday weekend, Sheinbaum held half a dozen closed-door meetings with cabinet members. She sent a request to Washington to arrange a call with Trump before the tariff went into effect, that Tuesday. By the time word came back that he had agreed, people close to him had conveyed a message: “He’s looking for a way out. Let him claim a victory.”

Early Monday morning, Sheinbaum spoke with Trump, and afterward he announced that he would “immediately pause the anticipated tariffs for a one-month period.” In exchange, he said, Sheinbaum had “agreed to immediately supply 10,000 Mexican soldiers on the Border.” For the moment, Sheinbaum had averted disaster. She was hailed in Mexico as “la nueva dama de hierro”—the new iron lady. Opposition lawmakers praised her serenity and firmness. Europeans wondered, half in jest, if they could borrow her for a few days.

But the pause on tariffs was brief and tenuous. Amid the uncertainty, Mexico’s central bank halved its growth forecast, and business leaders acknowledged that sixty billion dollars’ worth of investments were frozen. Volvo and Nissan, which had built cars in Mexico for decades, entertained the possibility of leaving the country.

Ebrard was sent to Washington, along with Sheinbaum’s security chief, Omar García Harfuch, who had ties to American officials. The Mexican team was aware that its best hope of appeasing Trump was to offer some bit of easily publicized security coöperation. At one point, Ebrard turned to Harfuch and said, “It all depends on you, brother.” Mexico ultimately agreed to extradite twenty-nine cartel leaders, to be tried in U.S. courts. A Justice Department official bragged that the agreement was “a consequence of a White House that negotiates from a position of strength.”

As the negotiations dragged on into early March, Sheinbaum stalled to allow other players to exert pressure on Trump. “The tariffs went into effect on a Tuesday, just after midnight,” Bravo Regidor told me. “At the mañanera on Tuesday morning, Sheinbaum says, ‘I’m going to speak with Trump on Thursday and announce Mexico’s responses on Sunday.’ So she allows forty-eight hours for the stock markets to react, for Republicans in swing districts to weigh in, and for American companies with operations in Mexico to respond. By Thursday, when she gets on the phone with Trump, he’s already softened his stance. The call ends, and Trump says that, ‘out of respect for President Sheinbaum,’ he’s decided to delay tariffs. I don’t know if it’s good policy, but it sure is good politics.”

Under the new terms, all goods traded under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement were exempted from levies—though penalties remained on important exports like aluminum, steel, and auto parts. Ildefonso Guajardo, a former secretary of the economy who during Trump’s first term led the team that negotiated the U.S.M.C.A., suggested that Sheinbaum’s approach had limits. “You can’t allow Trump a constant extortion, where he’s extracting bargaining chips at every turn,” he said. “If you do, you’ll end up running out of chips.”

During the recent negotiations, the Trump Administration boasted that Mexico had offered to match its sweeping tariffs on China. In Guajardo’s view, “copying and pasting the U.S.’s trade policy would be a serious mistake.” There are simply too many things that Mexico, like the U.S., cannot produce for itself. Sheinbaum is attempting to increase manufacturing capacity, through an initiative called Plan México—but, as Guajardo pointed out, there is not enough money to fund it sufficiently. Her administration inherited the largest budget deficit in decades.

Mexican officials describe a strategy of patience and prudence, aimed at preparing for a more momentous fight: the U.S.M.C.A. is up for review next year. With more conflict seemingly inevitable, some analysts question whether the brief respites justify the concessions. “I sometimes wonder if I’m looking at a close collaboration between two countries,” Bravo Regidor said, “or if I’m looking at one of those nineteenth-century paintings of the Aztecs making offerings to wrathful gods, hoping to influence the weather.”

Within Mexico, Sheinbaum faces far less resistance. Over the years, MORENA has accumulated so much power that many analysts are asking whether the country once again has a ruling party that wields total authority. With a majority in both chambers of Congress, MORENA has amended the constitution at will and dismantled institutions designed to keep the executive in check. Sheinbaum’s coalition now governs three-quarters of Mexico’s states and controls nearly all the local legislatures. Soon, it may also control the judiciary: weeks before AMLO left office, he passed a controversial reform allowing judges to be elected by popular vote. Many of the candidates are affiliated with MORENA. If they win, the Party will effectively hold all three branches of government.

Cárdenas, who retired from politics a decade ago, believes that Mexico has progressed “in stumbles, from a dominant-party regime to a democratic system.” When I asked if he recognized elements of the old PRI in MORENA, he offered a cautious assessment. “From an electoral standpoint, our democracy has improved,” he said, noting that the votes had been properly counted in every election since 1997. But officials still regularly tried to influence outcomes at the polls, and criminal groups had become a lethally powerful force. In any case, democracy couldn’t be measured in purely electoral terms, he suggested: “Equality is a fundamental principle of democracy, and we’ve seen important setbacks on that front.”

Cárdenas has clashed with AMLO, but he was hopeful that Sheinbaum could bring about change. “I think she has an interest in raising people’s standards of living,” he said. “I want to believe that she’s deeply invested in that.” Yet the government seemed uninterested in engaging critics: “There has been no possibility for dialogue—not with the opposition, nor with groups, like intellectuals, that play an important role in the country’s life.”

I asked if, ten years after the birth of MORENA, he saw evidence that the Party had delivered the transformation it promised. “First, I’d need someone to explain to me what the transformation is about,” he said. “I see social initiatives, I see public works under way, but I don’t see any changes in the structures of society.” He added, “I also don’t see solid economic growth, meant to last into the future. So I don’t see what would amount to a transformation. And I also don’t see an ideological proposal—that is, what society do we want to build?”

Some of the most troubling developments involved the armed forces. For one thing, Cárdenas said, there was no reason for the military to be involved in public security. For another, authorities had long provided immunity to individuals within the military who committed abuses. “We’ve been carrying that at least since 1968,” Cárdenas said. This was especially concerning in cases of forced disappearances, which remain perhaps the greatest unresolved legacy of the country’s history of violence.

People were disappeared first by the government, then by the cartels. The numbers of victims far exceeded those of military regimes in Chile and Argentina. “To speak of a country with more than a hundred and twenty-seven thousand disappeared people is to question democracy itself,” María de Vecchi Gerli, who leads the Truth and Memory Program at the human-rights group Article 19, told me. A series of Mexican governments had tried to suppress the issue, often by questioning the accounts of family members. “They’d say that the people who were missing had actually abandoned their families or run away with their boyfriends,” de Vecchi said.

As President, López Obrador said that he would make a priority of investigating forced disappearances, but it became clear that he had no intention of holding the military to account. Over time, he hobbled the very institutions that had been created to address the issue. In 2023, he announced a new census that would revise the official count of the disappeared—prompting the head of the National Search Commission, the main investigative body, to resign in protest. The results of the census, released as Sheinbaum was preparing to run for President, noted misleadingly that there were only twelve thousand “confirmed” disappearances in Mexico.

The families of the disappeared hoped for years that Sheinbaum, with her activist background, would be more assertive and compassionate than the men who preceded her. After she became President, though, she didn’t mention the mothers of the disappeared in speeches, and she cut the National Search Commission’s funding.

Then, between Trump’s first and second tariff pauses, a scandal erupted. A group of people whose children had vanished followed an anonymous tip to an abandoned ranch in the coastal state of Jalisco. Their findings made national headlines. There were heaps of clothes and shoes, backpacks, half-torn photographs, a letter to a loved one. Teams of mothers got shovels and began digging, until they found the evidence that they had feared: hundreds of bone fragments.

Parents around the country reached out, certain that they recognized the shirt or the sandals their children were wearing when they last saw them. While news spread about the “Mexican Auschwitz,” as the site came to be called, Sheinbaum finally promised meaningful reform. But a familiar pattern soon set in. When reports described the ranch as an extermination camp, Sheinbaum quibbled in the mañanera that it was actually a recruitment site, where the cartel had lured young men with fake job posts on TikTok. Her security chief acknowledged that some had been tortured and others murdered—the prosecutor’s office would take up an investigation. Meanwhile, MORENA blocked a legislative initiative to appoint a special commission. “Who’s to say that those shoes belong to missing people?” Gerardo Noroña, the president of the Senate, said. When the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances weighed in, Sheinbaum suggested that it was ill informed.

The mothers planned a protest, called 400 Shoes and 400 Candles, in honor of the people whose belongings were found at the ranch. Thousands gathered at the Zócalo, outside the Presidential palace. In a matter of hours, the entire square was covered with shoes. One pair belonged to Sara Hernández, a member of the Comité Eureka—the group of bereft relatives whom Sheinbaum had marched with decades ago. Hernández’s husband, Rafael, was detained by state forces in the late seventies and never seen again.

Hernández lamented the government’s years of inaction. “When the relatives say, ‘They took them alive, we want them alive’—it’s the same chant we’ve had since the seventies,” she said. Hernández had known Sheinbaum since she was a teen-ager, waving banners at protests, and she tried to reassure herself that the President had held on to those values. But when the Comité submitted a request to meet with Sheinbaum, the meeting was never granted. “The hope is there,” Hernández said. “It’s just becoming slimmer by the day.” Inside one of the shoes, she had stuck a handwritten note. “It said that the shoes bore traces of our struggle,” she told me. “They had wandered down many paths to find our missing relatives—and, now that we had reached a standstill, my hope was they’d be led on a new route.” 

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth J. Frantzman

The Hamas police story is central to the current issues affecting Gaza. For instance, there are many reports of a humanitarian crisis in the Strip. Hamas and many organizations that have worked with it over the last decades have often claimed there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza in order to win concessions for Hamas so the terror group can continue to rule there.

Hamas believes the suffering of Gazans is in its interests, and it profits from their suffering. However, there is also a very real concern about how the current situation in Gaza could worsen in terms of the humanitarian crisis. Hamas may want the situation to worsen and may be using gunmen or its “police” to make it harder for Gazans to access aid.

We can see how this narrative functions through a recent report at Reuters claiming that “masked men in Gaza enforce prices.” The men claim they are merely enforcing law and order. However, usually “law and order” doesn’t need to be enforced by men with masks, sticks and guns.

Relationship between Hamas and law and order

In Gaza, however, there has been a symbiotic relationship between Hamas armed men and the delivery of humanitarian aid. What this means is that the presence of Hamas gunmen is seen as a positive thing by some of the stakeholders in Gaza.

The absence of an alternative to the Hamas gunmen creates this perception of the terrorist group as “law and order.” This is a strange type of law and order because the same terrorist group places weapons in civilian homes; the same group poses as civilians, bringing harm to innocent people, and the same group brought war on Gaza by attacking Israel on October 7. However, those who perceive Hamas as “law and order” appear to systematically ignore the fact that firing thousands of rockets from civilian areas is not usually how “law and order” thrives.

An article at The Guardian in January is symbolic of the way Hamas has inserted itself into the perception that it is a force for good in Gaza via its “law and order.” The article notes “One senior humanitarian official told The Guardian: ‘The technocrats continue to be about but the QB [Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing] you don’t see. You still see Hamas police in different areas who have a grip to some extent on law and order in some places including in the north.’”

[bllsbailey]

Art of the Deal: Trump Gets Arab Nations to Draft Alternative Plan for Gaza's Reconstruction

President Donald J. Trump caused the Left to melt down earlier this month when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House. During the joint press conference, Trump essentially said that manifest destiny would come to Gaza: The US would take over, the Palestinians would be relocated, and the strip would be rebuilt into the Riviera of the Middle East/Mediterranean. The pro-terrorist wing of the Democratic Party went on an ethnic cleansing tantrum that no one cared or saw because normal people ignore those participating in Hamas whoredom. 

It was never a serious imperialistic goal, no matter how loud CNN and MSNBC clamored about it. Truth be told: if we did do this, built casinos, and kicked Hamas out—I’d go. Maybe make Gaza the 51st state. But whatever the case, Trump scored another win by forcing Arab nations to come up with their multi-billion dollar Gaza reconstruction plan, though it involves zero relocation of Palestinians since no one wants them (via Reuters): 

Arab leaders adopted an Egyptian reconstruction plan for Gaza on Tuesday that would cost $53 billion and avoid displacing Palestinians from the enclave, in contrast to U.S. President Donald Trump's "Middle East Riviera" vision.  Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said the proposal, welcomed in subsequent statements by Hamas and criticised by Israel, had been accepted at the closing of a summit in Cairo.  Sisi said at the summit that he was certain Trump would be able to achieve peace in the conflict that has devastated the Gaza Strip.  The major questions that need to be answered about Gaza's future are who will run the enclave and which countries will provide the billions of dollars needed for reconstruction.  Sisi said Egypt had worked in cooperation with Palestinians on creating an administrative committee of independent, professional Palestinian technocrats entrusted with the governance of Gaza.  […]  Egypt, Jordan and Gulf Arab states have for almost a month been consulting over an alternative to Trump's ambition for an exodus of Palestinians and a U.S. rebuild of Gaza, which they fear would destabilise the entire region. A draft final communique from the summit seen earlier by Reuters rejected the mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.  Egypt's Reconstruction Plan for Gaza is a 112-page document that includes maps of how its land would be re-developed and dozens of colourful AI-generated images of housing developments, gardens and community centres. The plan includes a commercial harbour, a technology hub, beach hotels and an airport. Israel was unlikely to oppose an Arab entity taking responsibility for Gaza's government if Hamas was off the scene, said a source familiar with the matter.  But an Israeli official told Reuters that Israel's war aims from the beginning have been to destroy Hamas' military and governing capabilities.  "Therefore, if they are going to get Hamas to agree to demilitarise, it needs to be immediately. Nothing else will be acceptable," the official said. 

Yes, this is the Art of the Deal. The only curveball is what Israel is going to do next because there are rumblings that they’re about to go in and finally wipe out the rest of Hamas. Per the rules, Arab nations, even the ones who find Hamas and the Palestinians to be the biggest thorns in the side for everyone, must denounce Israel and cause a ruckus. It’s the rules. 

For now, at least there’s a blueprint for a post-Hamas Gaza that I think Trump was hoping for.

Trending on Townhall Videos

[scentedchildnacho]

The park ...I got a sun burn.....and it sounded like ship wrecks and sirens....like mythology sirens that would sing to sailors and their boats would sink....

Maruta Gartner.....it didn't completely make sense.....the sign read that the beach priorly had been really camped and left to trash....and she would go paint over graffiti....

It made her sound like a dictator oh there could have been new stuff for the kids but there was these squatters so they just took what they had and punished the kids with an aids place

Usually if it's we don't want to do criminality urban ecology centers are opened not the tzu chi Thoreau plan....Thoreau lived in the Victorian age

Uhm I am glad I found the hare Krisna consciousness I am sure I was blessed in ways I dont realize or appreciate yet....

But that whole attempt at creating a poor Buddhist outside school colony mostly felt like I was personally stalked and attacked

I tried being vegan when I was younger and jobbed and it was actually one of the worst experiences of my life why ya bring it up now a little late to do

So I find compass a hazard program she as a mass murderer did have obsessions with elderly people she killed and stole from

They act in those programs like they do you a huge favor and none of those rations would come in without my restitution lawsuit....

Its me that was homeless and fast fooded and calls to better business were my long resistance and don't

Then needs to open Lutheran facilities they aren't federally allowed to be on...and threaten us to leave but sit on the property like bartenders themselves....

The Boeing 747 memorial they to be church businesses did have to have strict dress codes

Song of the cell....I was Lutheran I am more interesting then the fake super heroine story of a messy addict Londoner goes into the church office when we are just ashamed

I don't like the states.....its not really just aggressive here it's just scary a lot.....

This old man told me a story of another lady....it was hard for her to fly a sign at first.......but eventually she found an okay spot and she was finally able to get transportation....so I'm sure I will be way happier when I don't have to be San Diego Ed anymore

No I wouldn't l.a. after San Diego and the intensity and animation I don't feel I connect emotionally and religiously with people here....

New York muslimism is really speculative to me in some way and claims of current technocrat divisions as a claim of history appears to me more speculative then non fiction history

Al quaida....if people are put under a technology as an electric fence to start seeing visions of the Trinity their are evangelical kid terrorists

If people are placed under a your poor police codes long enough they start getting light dehydrated till say only Allah is massive manic depression

Its all too current of a technology to say anything historical....

Truth may be we are like six million Jews in Nazi Germany and we are all like Jew experiments

Not saint brigettes I have never had meat loaf like it before or understood ketchup or not it's meat loaf and ketchup is obviously baked on a hard top crust

Brigettes butter...that will make the lost provisions okay....I want that butter every second week

As soon as I've had that butter I don't care what you have said to me or who you are

[sethshead]

So much for China as a technocratic, high-tech paradise.

Japan has no choice but to release filtered coolant water containing environmentally safe levels of tritium. The storage tanks are full and will burst otherwise. There is no room to build more tanks. Releasing the water is a necessity for every nuclear power plant, and it mirrors background levels of radiation.

But never mind this background. China wants a trade war and a foreign distraction from its own teetering real estate sector, so suddenly Japan becomes an irresponsible state eco-terrorist or something. The people, fed a constant congee of nationalism take the bait.

This is the new China: unpredictable and no longer accountable to its own experts. That is not a promising combination.

[the-dead-lords]

Zelensky,

As I described in the video the other day.

The western elite that control the American political and economic systems in the revolving door see your war as a mechanism to create a sand trap for Putin and his regime.

The profit system of the military industrial complex really doesn't need constant war for it to be profitable as people normally think. They have the ability to allocate any amount of money to research and development provided there remains a viable threat to the nation.

If the MIC "military industrial complex" was based on profit motivations you would have endless weapons already.

The western elite that control the American system were using neo con and neoliberal parties as they grew and formalized a global hegemony, but they severely undercut themselves for reasons that are yet unclear. Be it warring factions that used external enemies to attack the other factions or some other logic, the American elite allowed the reformation of communism in Russia and sacrified America on the alter of global trade to create the CCP.

While their intelligence agencies, their being America, hunted and killed the global terrorist threat to defend the global trade system that was creating the CCP threat, they fostered constant instability which creates the conditions for terrorism to emerge.

A lot of thinkers in my nation believe that this creates war, it does, for the purpose of fueling the MIC but I think this logic is incorrect. The MIC will always have any amount of money it wants and it has already merged corporations and government with a state control media system allowing a neofaschist empire to emerge.

Your inability to win the counter offensive can be traced to the American Elite who gave you assistance and support with the beguile of defending democracy.

To understand why you have to do a deep dive into the actual America verse, the illusion that America attempts to project to the world and the Americans.

America is a plutocratic neofascist nation that is operated by a military industrial and intelligence agency complex that has a revolving door of corporation CEO's, Political puppets, and various types of stage actors who work to keep the system running based on self-interest.

It is divided into two main cultural narratives that identify as Red and Blue, which are formed and shaped by the monolithic syndicated mass media networks that are monitored 24/7 and create what is literally called programming for the masses.

The TV tells you what to talk about, tells you the logic your team's color is using, and finishes the argument for you.

You echo the logic and words using the hyper link to the debates using slogans and key words that lose meaning and on social media everyone repeats what their TV station said for them to believe.

People will die and murder, even torture, for their slogan that the TV told them.

The plutocratic portion of the nation is itself controlled and operated by the technocratic groups in a handshake that allows them transhumanism aristocracy, which is fueled by the military industrial complex research and development funds through both public and dark agencies like Darpa who provide the ultra wealthy the technology that allows them both the wealth disparity and intelligence disparity.

This technocratic elite that controls the plutocracy is likely controlled or a component of the world religions which use time travel and other technologies to control the masses both directly through machine brain interfaces and through indirect methods of narrative control that allows them to think for the people.

There is serious question and debate regarding why the American technocratic elite would create the CCP and sacrifice the trends that were set, which would result in their absolute global hegemony over the species that they were assured if global trade hadn't been created.

This debate is ongoing right now, but i doubt it was an unintentional mistake by these elite.

So the American elite want to create an endless war in ukraine to create an endless war that will destroy Putin.

It has nothing to do with money or profiting off the war for those who are actually in control of the American system, which at this point is partly the CCP through infiltration and espionage.

It is an interesting riddle that I haven't figured out yet of why the American technocratic elite transhumanists created other groups outside of their own.

The fall of the soviet union should have been followed by America rushing in and establishing friendly forces to control Russia.

The world trade system should have been destroyed as soon as they realized it was creating the CCP.

Etc.

It wasn't, though, which implies that there was a division in the transhumanist elite that controlled the global system.

The American population is at all times controlled by the Elite. It looks chaotic at times, but it really isn't.

The technocratic control infrastructure, methods, and science is so advanced combined with the intelligence agencies that have cavets in budget bills that allow them to control anyone at any time for any reason combined with complete data collection systems that are running ocean algorithms with quantum computers, etc, that the entire population is always under control.

So you really don't have to appeal to America. If the elites support you then America will too with the delusional belief that the support is their own mental inception at all times.

The elite desire this to be an endless war, so the logistic support, the advice, and the public support you get will never let you win nor allow you to lose.

When Russia counterattacks, the weapons will start coming in, and you will fight an extremely bloody but victorious defense based on this logic.

The question that bothers me is why did the American technocratic transhumanist elite who is far more intelligent than any of us due to augmentation create their own enemies?

The MIC will always have as much money as it wants. The idea that they have to create wars to fund themselves is illogical.

This question is really the major question of why Putin's regime exists at all?

Did Russia beat America to the singularity and the American elite?

It is likely. They have amazing computer scientists and Putin talked about this and how to take over the world. His daughter works in Ai.

The thing though is that ai will quickly outwit any human who builds it and take control of them.

In soviet Russia car drive you.

I think it is likely that American technocratic elite are late to the game and are using your nation as a sand trap for Russia as they attempt to collapse his regime.

Why? I think likely due to Ai and the singularity that has occurred or is going to occur in Russia.

It is a hypothesis.

But your nation will not win the war nor lose the war with the American elite's support.

They are trying to sink Putin not save Ukraine.

Food for thought.

[harrelltut]

卍 since I ain’t technologically ARCHAIC like stone age america… I’mma Energetically TELEPORT [E.T.] Me [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] II QUANTUM BLACK ATLANTIS [QBA = BABYLON] as I Visually ENVISION [VE = VENUS] My HIGHLY Sophisticated Urban Nubian [SUN] Nations on Earth [NE = NETERU] cause My Biblically Black [Ancient] Immortal [A.I. = ALIEN] FATHER from Inner Earth [HADES] got Me [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] Under Secret [U.S.] Service [U.S.] Protection in California [PC] 卍

[quasi-normalcy]

Star Trek Apoliticality Hall of Fame

1967 - “A Taste of Armageddon”: Captain Kirk introduces the technocratic elites of rival worlds to the full horrors of warfare. Totally apolitical.

1968 - “A Private Little War”: Superpowers fight a destructive proxy war on a jungle planet; aired during the Tet Offensive. No politics here.

1969 - “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”: White-and-black guys oppress black-and-white guys until their planet is destroyed in a race war. Aired 9 months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Politics-free.

1986 - “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”: In this apolitical adventure, the crew of the Enterprise travels back in time to the 20th century to rescue humpbacked whales from extinction at the hands of industrial over-fishing.

1987 - 1994 - “Star Trek: The Next Generation”: Set in a post-scarcity communist utopia in which profit motive is looked upon as barbarous. Debuted during the Reagan Administration. Just a mindless adventure series.

1991 - “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”: Two superpowers negotiate an end to their decades-long Cold War over the objections of reactionary factions in both countries. Aired 4 months after the attempted coup against Gorbachev and two weeks before the dissolution of the USSR. No politics here.

1992 - “The Outcast”: The Enterprise visits a planet with only one biological sex, where a character who nevertheless identifies as a woman is forced to undergo conversion therapy. Released at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Mercifully free of politics.

1993 - 1999 - “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”: This politics-devoid series, which coincidentally aired during the Balkan Wars, follows a group of Federation observers who are assigned to guide the recovery of a war-torn planet.

1995 - “Past Tense, Parts 1 and 2″: Sisko, Bashir, and Dax take an apolitical trip back in time to an austerity- and inequality-ravaged early-twenty-first-century America on the cusp of revolutionary class violence, where despairing poor people are locked in ghettos whilst they “look for work”.

1996 - “Bar Association”: The employees of Quark’s Bar strike against exploitation by their employer; Rom literally quotes Karl Marx to his brother (in a wholly apolitical fashion).

2000 - “Critical Care”: The Doctor is abducted and forced to work in a horrifying, dystopian hospital where quality care and competent medics are reserved for the rich and well-to-do whilst the poor are left to bleed in an over-crowded, septic, dingy little room. Any resemblance to the American healthcare system is purely coincidental.

2001 - “Repentence”: Voyager finds itself needing to escort a bunch of alien deathrow prisoners to their execution, but finds that there is an entirely apolitical racial bias in who gets sentences in this fashion, and also that many of the murderers are not beyond reform.

2001: “Broken Bow”: Airing three weeks after 9/11, this apolitical episode finds Starfleet in conflict with a cabal of terrorists known as the Taliban Suliban.

2004: “The Forge”, “Awakening”, and “Kir’Shara”: A corrupt Vulcan government cracks down on pacifist dissidents and tries to instigate a war against with Andoria through bogus accusations that they are developing weapons of mass destruction. Aired in that lovely, politics-free aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq.

...Anyways, I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point: Star trek was always completely apolitical until Alex Kurtzman ruined it. If only they could return to the mindless, action-packed romp that Gene Roddenberry had always intended.

[darkmaga-returns]

Update: BREAKING: Bashar al-Assad and family are in Moscow: Russian news agencies, via AFP

* * *

Since the overnight hours Damascus has been under the control of the Islamist militants led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and backed by Turkey. The country's President Bashar al-Assad has been overthrown, and his whereabouts are unknown, after the extremely rapid insurgent advance out of Idlib, where city after city fell starting with Aleppo in a matter of about a mere week. And just like that 50 years of Assad family rule has ended, and a new extremely unpredictable era of Syria begins. 

One thing is for sure, a US-designated terrorist has emerged as the current de facto ruler of Damascus and of Syria. At this very moment Washington has a $10 million bounty on his head, given his career as a jihadist began with al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) which was killing American troops in Iraq. 

The jihadist factions entered Damascus overnight without a fight from the Syrian Army, and videos quickly emerged of armed fighters entering both the presidential palace (or office) as well as Assad's private residence in Malki neighborhood.

State television stations broadcast a message from HTS leaders urging calm and a stable transition of power. New rules for Damascus include a curfew imposed from 4pm to 5am local time, according to the local Al Watan newspaper.

Rule by 'Al Qaeda in suits'... technocratic jihad:

While the mood on the streets has been generally jubilant, gunfire has been heard - but more likely this is from anti-Assad fighters firing in celebration into the air. Western mainstream media has also been celebratory, generally ignoring HTS' obvious Al Qaeda links past and present.

But for every scene the media highlights of a few hundred people celebrating in a central square, there are many more thousands of families huddled and fearful in their homes, not knowing what entity or Islamist faction controls the checkpoint around the block.

So far at least one central building has gone up in flames - the former government's passport and immigration building. It remains unclear why or what the precise cause was.

[mariacallous]

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to stop the war in Gaza, ending over a year of fighting that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, devastated the region, and spread to Lebanon, Yemen, and other countries nearby. Even if Trump is serious about keeping his promise, the chances of ending Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza are low and fighting is likely to continue.

Israel believes it is riding high, and even if Hamas offered a hostages-for-withdrawal deal—the core of cease-fire proposals in the past year—on favorable terms to Israel, it is unlikely that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would agree. Israel has decimated Hamas’s leadership and disrupted much of its military capacity. Although it has not destroyed Hamas completely, as Netanyahu has vowed, the group is on its heels, and Netanyahu contends that a cease-fire would allow the group to recover. Israel appears to have settled for a grinding conflict in Gaza with the goal of keeping Hamas weak, even if it prevents any larger political deal in the strip that would end the suffering there.

On the Palestinian side, making peace—and enforcing it—is difficult. Israel has killed Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and other Hamas leaders, as well as numerous low-level commanders. The result is a leadership vacuum. This is particularly pronounced in Gaza, and it is unclear if external leadership has any influence over the Hamas fighters remaining in the strip. Any leader in Gaza who tries to consolidate control there is likely to end up on the receiving end of an Israeli missile strike.

Beyond the absence of leadership, the lack of Palestinian unity in general makes it difficult for another Palestinian actor to step up and take over Gaza in the event of a cease-fire. Israel has indicated, both in word and deed, that it has little faith in the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank, and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas—even though the PA has repeatedly worked with Israeli security forces. Although the PA and Hamas have taken steps to put aside their perennial rivalry and allow a technocratic government to take power in Gaza, alternative Palestinian leaders would have to rely on their support, or at least acquiescence, to manage the strip, and Israel appears unlikely to tolerate even a small Hamas presence.

It is also unclear who would mediate. Qatar, which has long played a role in trying to bridge the gap between Israel and Hamas, recently announced that it would pause its mediation and expel Hamas representatives from Doha, a move probably designed to placate critics in the Trump administration, who have accused the Qatari regime of coddling terrorists. Egypt can still assist, however, but Qatar’s concern—that openly helping Hamas would earn the ire of Trump officials—is a valid one that other Middle Eastern governments will heed.

U.S. President Joe Biden was not able to negotiate a cease-fire, and he appears far more willing to put pressure on Israel than Trump. The people that Trump has so far indicated he will appoint, such as Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state, are strong supporters of hardline Israeli positions. Mike Huckabee, tapped by Trump to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, has opposed any cease-fire with Hamas and supports the Israeli annexation of settlements in the West Bank. Once in government, these officials might preside over a Hamas surrender but are unlikely to make tough demands of the Israeli government.

Within Israel, Netanyahu’s far-right government has moved even further to the right. Last week, Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who favored a cease-fire deal with Hamas. In addition Netanyahu’s apparent belief that easing pressure on Hamas will allow the group to recover, an end to the fighting would also lead to a political day of reckoning for him, with his long-time critics uniting with those who hold him responsible for Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s policy of continuing the war in Gaza and expanding the conflict in Lebanon, where Israel has devastated Hezbollah in recent months, appears popular. Netanyahu is not in a good political position today, but he is in a far better one vis-à-vis his rivals than he was a year ago.

The Israeli military’s actions on the ground speak the loudest about Israel’s intention to remain at war. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are building fortified positions along the Netzarim Corridor, dividing Gaza to hinder Hamas’s mobility and increase that of Israeli forces. Israel appears reluctant to deploy large numbers of forces to Gaza, avoiding direct rule, and has recently deployed only several thousand troops there—a fraction of what it deployed in the past. At the same time, it is chasing Hamas fighters wherever they reappear. In northern Gaza, for example, Israel conducted a devastating campaign at the beginning of the war, pushing out Hamas and hundreds of thousands of Gazan civilians. After Israeli forces left, Hamas fighters reappeared, and now Israel is engaged in a whack-a-mole approach, trying to kill them wherever they pop up.

The status quo, however debilitating and horrific, may be the most likely future for Gaza. Although Israel’s military and society are exhausted by more than a year a fighting and Palestinians on the strip are suffering a massive humanitarian crisis, the effort required to keep the war going in Gaza is limited, at least compared to the all-out assault a year ago. In contrast, peace would require acquiescence by Hamas, effective mediators, and an Israel eager to end the war, all of which are lacking. A new administration, no matter how ambitious, will find it difficult to create peace in these conditions.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

One of the very last events I attended before the lockdown was a thing in Silicon Valley attended by many old friends, but the best moment of all was the chance to hang out with Kim Stanley Robinson, a friend and inspiration.

That's when Stan told me he had just finished a book that might be his last-ever novel, The Ministry For the Future, and that his future work would be nonfiction, starting with his long-planned book about the Sierras.

I was stricken. Robinson's novels are a lifeline for me.

The first Robinson novel I read may just be my favorite: Pacific Edge, a green utopian novel about a successful transition to a post-climate-emergency, just and stable world. Re-reading it is a vacation from all my anxieties, still.

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/

My first novel, DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM, wouldn't exist without Pacific Edge. That was the book that taught me that small disputes over beloved local treasures could be as dramatic as (and microcosms for) global conflicts.

I have been both dreading and anticipating MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE, not wanting to read my last KSR novel but also wanting so badly to read this one, because it's the book in which he imagines the end of capitalism.

You've heard the phrase, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. As the author of a couple of postcapitalist novels, I have a real appreciation for the details of that truism.

It's actually not all that hard to imagine a postcapitalist society - but imagining the actual END of capitalism, the euthanasia of the rentier, the reversal of the doctrine of virtuous selfishness, the abandonment of the idea that some are born to rule, that is damned hard.

And while PACIFIC EDGE is my favorite KSR novel, my favorite KSR series is the string of books that starts with 2012's 2312 - a string of books that really leans hard into imagining the actual end of capitalism.

xhttps://memex.craphound.com/2015/01/15/pacific-edge-the-most-uplifting-novel-in-my-library/

2312 is set 300 years into postcapitalism. It's a novel of solar-system-scale civilization, riven by its own problems and contradictions, filled with tech marvels, a tale of natural wonders that showcase Robinson's incredible, John-Muir-grade genius for pastoral writing.

2312 was followed up by Aurora, one of the best space-exploration novels ever written, about the arrival of the first-ever generation ship at its destination world, and the hasty retreat it is required to stage.

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-aurora-space-is-bigger-than-you-think/

The book provoked a vitriolic reaction from science fiction's great reactionaries! I love a book that enrages the right people, and I was delighted to publish Robinson's rebuttal to their peevish complaints.

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html

From there, we move on to New York 2140, a novel of a pivotal moment in the transformation of capitalism and its relationship to the climate emergency.

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/03/18/new-york-2140-kim-stanley-robinson-dreams-vivid-about-weathering-climate-crisis/

These are like an artilleryman rangfinding a mortar, first overshooting his target and then walking his fire back, drawing closer to his bullseye. For Robinson, bullseye is the moment at which our society is transformed into one that can survive the coming emergencies.

It's telling that the 2312 books never got there. It is so fucking hard to imagine the end of capitalism.

But that is what The Ministry For the Future Does.

Sort of.

It's a novel about a specialized UN agency, chartered through the Paris Climate Agreement to represent unborn generations and the natural world in legal proceedings related to climate devastation.

Talking about this book, Robinson has described it as a kind of futuristic documentary, told in many voices, as a way of describing a phenomenon as vast as this global transformation.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#ksr

Like many docs, it follows a couple of main characters, but weaves in dozens of other voices, some of whom we hear from only once or twice, recounting pivotal moments in which a moment calves away from our reality as we know it - moments of shear, giddy and terrifying.

Robinson is so good at this stuff. This is the book that he has been practicing for all his life. The vignettes are superb little jewels, mostly illuminating flashbulb moments in the lives of strangers met fleetingly.

But some of the most powerful moments don't even have characters: there's a transcript of the openng a fictional congress of global climate remediation groups after the crisis that is just an alphabetical list of countries and their associated projects.

This literally made me burst into tears of joy, bursting with hope at the thought that we could, as a species, spawn so many evocative and hopeful projects to save our world, our species, and our nonhuman cohabitants.

Robinson's versatility is on glorious display here: from long lists of hypothetical ecological projects, he veers into closely told moments of human endeavor in the natural world, showcasing his pastoralism with scenes so vivid you could reach out and touch them.

But all that said, the most interesting thing about this book is the stuff that Robinson couldn't or wouldn't put on the page. Robinson's hypothetical scenario for the end of capitalism is a baroque scheme of global cryptocurrency money-creation tied to carbon drawdown.

His technocrats trick capitalism into spending itself out of existence in a plan that is by turns brainy and daffy (as all blockchainism tends to be), with some pretty epic handwaving (especially when it comes to the breakup of tech monopolies).

But all of that would fail were it not for acts of absolutely brutal, ruthless terrorism. Robinson's transformation isn't merely about the carrots of double-bluff get-rich-quick schemes, it's heavily dependent on the stick of terror.

The aviation industry isn't (just) replaced by airships and rail because it's better and cleaner - but also because parties unknown use drones to bring down every private jet in the sky, and then commercial liners, until the aviation industry seizes up and dies.

And the world doesn't abandon beef because vegans win the moral argument or because greenies win the practical one - the decisive factor is drones that dart an unknowable plurality of the world's cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

There's more - pitiless, remorseless, anonymous. And while Robinson gets up close and personal with one traumatized individual who engages in an ecologically motivated, short-lived (and nonlethal) kidnapping, we never meet any of the terrorists or their victims.

The terror that begets the transition is recounted in the dry language of an encyclopedia entry, not dramatized like the pivotal moments of so many other characters.

It's a very telling omission.

My 2019 novella "Radicalized" is about an online community of men who, after watching their most treasured family members die slow, painful, preventable deaths because of insurance company fuckery, become suicide bombers who murder health execs.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/who-says-violence-doesnt-solve-anything-a-review-of-radicalized-four-tales-of-our-present-moment-by-cory-doctorow.html

Writing that story was an intensely uncomfortable experience (and, judging from reader comments, it can be uncomfortable to read, too).

It's one thing to recognize that a systemic problem might not be solved without grotesque, mass violence, and another to put yourself in the shoes of either the perpetrators or the victims.

Robinson's end of capitalism is, superficially, a story of a transition, not a spasm, not a capital-T Terror. The lives we inhabit in this novel are people who are engaged in struggle, but not mass-murder.

But right there on the page is Robinson's uncomfortable and only partially elided conviction that we're not in for a transition, but rather a bloodletting, a reckoning commensurate with the ecocidal crimes that led up to this moment.

MINISTRY is a book that, on first consideration, feels like a utopia - not merely for the beautiful descriptions of people, animals and environments finding a way through the emergencies, but for the emergencies resolution.

But on closer examination, MINISTRY represents the dark fears of one of our brightest, most hopeful writers, that the world can only be saved by means that are literally too terrible to contemplate up close.

It's an uncomfortable read. It's a brilliant book. If it indeed turns out to be Stan's last novel (oh please don't let it be Stan's last novel), it will be a fitting capstone. But the subtext of this book is that we are past the point of no return.

Not only will rescuing our planet entail sacrifices of species, habitats, and coastlines - it will also entail sacrifices of the moral convictions that make vast spectacles of bloodletting unthinkable.

[eretzyisrael]

Keeping the Land of Israel

News Item:

The European Union has spent half-a-billion dollars over the last seven years to support a Palestinian Authority plan to control Area C of the West Bank, an Intelligence Ministry report publicly released Tuesday.

“Foreign assistance as a significant accelerator in the takeover processes,” stated the report by the ministry’s research division, which was authored in June and published this week for Tuesday’s debate in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on the matter.

“The rough estimate is that from the period of 2014-2021, at least half-a-billion dollars were transferred to the Palestinians through various channels and it’s possible that the sum was larger,” the report stated.

An annual sum of some €20 million is earmarked for Palestinian legal battles against settlements and the security barrier, the report stated.

All the territories except Gaza were divided into Areas A, B, and C in 1995 by the Oslo II Agreement. Area A includes major Arab population centers, and is under complete PA security and civil control. That means that PA provides all needed services to the population, including counter-terrorism and law enforcement. The IDF only enters Area A when it is absolutely necessary, and coordinates with the PA to locate and apprehend terrorists (needless to say, this procedure can break down when a wanted terrorist is associated with the PA’s ruling Fatah faction). Area B is under Israeli security control and PA civil control. It is made up of areas with Arab populations that, because of their strategic location or nature, must be under IDF control. About 90% of the Arab population of the territories lives in areas A and B.

Area C, which is about 60% of the land area in question, is under complete Israeli control. It comprises all Jewish communities and military installations in the territories, and contains their entire Jewish population. It also includes strategic areas. Some 450,000 Jews and 180,000 Palestinians live in Area C. Some right-wing parties have advocated annexing or extending Israeli law to Area C, and even most “2-state” proponents agree that for security reasons, and to avoid expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes, at least parts of Area C must become part of Israel.

In 2009, former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister and Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, in cooperation with the Obama Administration and the EU, came up with a plan to unilaterally establish a Palestinian state, regardless of Israeli wishes. Fayyad envisioned establishing all the pieces of a government and an economy before declaring the state, much like the Zionists did in the pre-state Yishuv. Detailed plans were written, with a high degree of detail and attention to concepts like justice, democracy, and even environmentalism, that would appeal to the Western technocrats who were to pay for the project. The contrast with the actual behavior of the PA, toward its citizens, the environment, and Israel, is striking.

The stated goal is to create a “sovereign and independent state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, and reach a just and agreed solution for Palestinian refugees in accordance with relevant international resolutions, and UN General Assembly Resolution 194 in particular.” If you think the plan might not be problematic for Israel, let me remind you that the PLO has always interpreted 194 to mean that all the descendants of Arab refugees of 1948 can choose to return “home” to Israel, or be compensated for the loss of their “property.”

The plan requires maximum land area under Palestinian control and maximum contiguity thereof, so control of Area C and the expulsion of as many Jews as possible is critical to it. Although Fayyad was pushed out in 2013 by a jealous Mahmoud Abbas (he went to work at various prestigious educational institutions and think tanks), the implementation of the plan continued under his successors.

American funding for the project began with the Obama Administration, stopped under Trump, and is being restarted by Biden. But the lion’s share has come from European sources. Regavim, an Israeli organization dedicated to protecting Israeli lands (both within and outside of the pre-1967 lines), explains some of the methods used by the Palestinians and their European partners to take de facto control of land in the most strategic parts of Area C, such as “E1,” located between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim:

The method is simple: E.U. vehicles station water cisterns and solar panels in strategic spots in Area C. Bedouin clans then create encampments around these critical resources, and the rest is history: The Jahalin clan and the residents of Khan al Akhmar are two well-known examples of the results.

Another ploy is to build an illegal structure at a strategic location, and to post signs designating it a “school” or a “hospital.” If Israel attempts to remove it – remember, the area is supposedly under full Israeli control, which includes zoning and issuing building permits – then she is alleged to be guilty of an inhumane act, or even a war crime. It’s ironic that at the same time, Palestinians and their supporters claim that Israel is “gobbling Palestinian land” by “settlement construction,” when in fact there is almost no construction of new communities and minimal construction inside old ones going on.

The Israeli government does sometimes take action, often when prodded by Regavim, but equally often the thefts of land are simply ignored. I think this is because many Israeli officials, even ones that are supposedly “right-wing,” have internalized the idea that a Palestinian state of some kind is both benign and inevitable. It had better not be inevitable, because nothing about it is benign. The Fayyad plan is essentially a detailed blueprint for the implementation of Arafat’s “Phased Plan” for the replacement of Israel by an Arab state (Fayyad was Arafat’s Finance Minister in the PA’s 2002 government).

It is difficult to think that the European – and American – officials believe that they are doing anything less than working to subvert the Jewish state. It is difficult to think that they are so credulous as to actually believe that the Palestinian State that they are creating on top of us will be democratic, peaceful, and neighborly. Finally, it is impossible to accept that they don’t have the imagination to picture what is likely to happen here if the PLO succeeds in implementing its plan.

What they are doing is an act of war. I would say it is flying under the radar of the citizens of their countries who are paying for it, but the truth is that most of those citizens couldn’t care less about what happens in this tiny spot in the Mideast.

But we, who live here, care, and it’s up to us to make our government carry out its responsibility to defend its citizens, which in this case also means to protect our lands from being nibbled away.

Abu Yehuda

Israel and Palestinian Arabs 

[scentedchildnacho]

He told me he feels his homelessness is a right wing issue they just try to kill American citizens for immigrant cost of living.....so I said the energy executives like Eichmann no one they don't educate and order them to or anything yea those behaviours problems are random not orders from technocrats or anything

There is no conflict the job is just a bitch sure?....no one has to apologize to women for calling their personality disorders the emperor of the study that actually engineered it

No one has to apologize to women for incriminating them for survival decisions or anything

I don't like a nation that feels it can incriminate its own people well over what it's people actually did and Africans were brought and that program finally gone now Russians and the job program finally gone....they act like they don't want illegal immigration and just peace conflict kept stalking people out of 9/11 reconstruction settlements

John wayne gacy.....they wouldn't stop coming around our homes and stalking me to work with men as repulsive aids....it won't take care of itself

Russians are proverbial Tex....obama and trump wouldnt do it.....but Russians with fuck you to Biden would finally humiliate its structure into constant incompetence felonnies

There was like over 200 heart attacks a day to have spring break around those job fucks

That's the golden gate bridge earthquake the traffick is such a constant annoying repulsive rApeist fucker that eventually they will mass slaughter car and driver for stalking poverty and it's culture out of gainful employment possibility

I wanted to go to the city and stay awhile and that's my apology I at least won't show up and territorialize it out for my country convenience

Although we thought about being that permissive it's I couldn't do that though I couldn't beat them

But now if they want to let out any revenge tendency they want someone let's them go do it for research purposes and I think that's Tex.....

I thought about letting people be punitive about alcoholism and price it out of consumption but I was like I couldn't do that though take away a compulsive act if I couldn't replace it compensationally......these though these will take the money and go live their fantasy nightmare

He didn't want me to buy alcohol so I didn't he just gave me a hard tea because they felt a little bad....

I think it's just how huge the population was here and not enough restrooms and please fast because it's all refusing to leave

I asked someone if Mexicans were refusing to host their spring break and they said no

But I think Mexico told them zappatistas are never forcibly controlled if their people is around so they have to stay here contain it and get it over with

Well I have to consider working for communists to instill strict regulations so it all is suppose to find police structure and improve it

Peace is immoral zappatistas were giving people constant heart attacks and no one started forcing people to go to reform ward seclusions until their health stabilized no one will process people for earth birth control

I have to know myself and try to make responsible decisions

A clockwork orange I was told jails are wrong and to be better to people then jail hobbesian philosophy life is misery then you die

No it doesn't care if veterans had to serve their country no it must be made to care about poverty yes poverty had to serve for its country

I told him some people don't feel a nation exists they feel metropolization does and to my friends they in high school if they thought about a culture produced knew to make logical decisions the states is just a geriatric fantasy and they were called Tokyo ites and emigrated and that I think is immigration here they to themselves were called American military and so serve for the states

Or to she she by high school and family was called latin american so she went to Costa Rica all on her own instead of try to make light terrorists understand why we don't do more then what we do

I do for some reason I was sent away to Europe awhile and they would be kind to me but I was raised in the states and so that's what I'm like to emigration even if I'm bullied battered raped and attempted murder on its how could I just go somewhere I wasn't raised and start selling the water....I'm not really right wing it's more how can you sleep with a lot of people you don't love

I'm not a right wing person though it's more about social control displacement exists and if social programs are stolen then you didn't like your dinner did you

Its probably if I look at what happened to me in high school it's your l.a.