-- spidermoon cobweblog --
blog of the futurepast
2003-01-31
2003-01-30
DIARIES
Israel pounds Gaza into dust
Kristen Ess, Live from Palestine, 25
January 2003
At 9 o'clock yesterday morning the Israeli military destroyed all of the bridges the lead in and out of Beit Hanoun in the north of the Gaza Strip. Israeli tanks and helicopters then shelled the town for 18 hours.
Night before last Israeli occupation forces invaded Gaza City. One of the houses they destroyed is near where I used to live, next door to where many Palestinians still live. It is unusual for the Israeli military to invade Gaza City by land the way they do in the rest of the Gaza Strip. In the south, in Rafah for instance, every house I've lived in is now destroyed. I left one house for an hour in Rafah's Block O and the Israeli military destoyed it. But usually the IOF attacks Gaza City by air, by firing missiles from US donated Apache helicopters, as they also did last night.
My friends from the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza City wrote this: "In the early morning hours of Friday, January 24, 2003, the IOF entered az-Zaytun area, west of Gaza City, and destroyed a house with explosives. The house is owned by the family of Mas,ud Ayad, who was assassinated by the Israeli military in 2000. Also, the IOF arrested four Palestinians; three of them are from the Ayad family. About twenty homes were damaged in the area due to the explosion.
The same night Israeli helicopters shelled a metal shop in Gaza with five missiles. One of the missiles struck Saint Philips Church, which is located inside the Al Ahly Hospital, while a second missile hit a house directly, destroying it. One elderly woman died from a heart attack and three other people were injured."
There is more from this morning. "At approximately 9 am Friday, January 24, 2003, the IOF attacked the town of Beit Hanun, in the north of the Gaza Strip. They destroyed four bridges at the entrances of the town isolating the town completely. Israeli tanks and helicopters then shelled the town until 3 am killing 18-year-old Hasan Yusif Fayad, and injuring 20 others. In addition, numerous homes were damaged from the shelling, which also damaged electricity and phone lines. Meanwhile, on the same day, the IOF murdered 24-year-old Muhammad al-Musadar, who was mentally disabled, from the refugee camp of Al-Maghazi."
In Rafah the Israeli military is still smashing through people's houses. They plowed into Block O again yesterday and destroyed twenty-one homes. The area is already flooded with sewage and nearly unihabitable. There is another wall next to the apartheid wall the Israeli military government is building made of broken toys and beds, bits from the houses. The children have nowhere to go. No one has anywhere to go. How is the Israeli proganda machine managing to sell this to the international community?
The kids from Jenin wrote: "Whose the terrorist? You're the terrorist. How am I the terrorist living in my homeland?"
Last week in Khan Younis 70 Israeli tanks tore through the main streets of the town targetting auto repair shops and other similar industry. It is a common practice of the Israeli military government to destroy any mode of Palestinian economic sustainability. Targetted shootings are also common, not always to kill, but often to maim in specific areas of the body making a future of working or mobility difficult if not impossible. In Bethlehem's Aida Refugee Camp when Israeli soldiers shot the children who threw stones at the heavily armoured invading Israeli jeeps and tanks, they aimed at the legs of the children. Two, one who was just 10 years old (not 12 as was reported earlier), and a young teenager, will never walk properly again. Last summer a young man was hit by an Apache missile. He lived through it, but cannot walk without a limp and is in constant pain.
Another boy is about to undergo a long term operation and recovery in order to have bullets removed from his leg. In the prisons the torture is often disabling. Israeli soldiers broke a friend's arm at the shoulder during interrogation. He put it back in place himself since he was denied medical treatment. He cannot move his arm properly now and is always in pain. He has a bullet in his back. The pain makes sleeping and using stairs difficult. Another friend who has an illicit mobile telephone inside an Israeli prisoner tells me that what I imagine happened to him at the hands of Israeli soldiers is true. He is being held without charge. When he gets out, if he gets out, the Israeli military government will be more easily able to sell their propaganda to the international community that it's just terrorists and felons that they are killing and that they must keep all Palestinians under curfew in order to "protect themselves." Israeli occupation forces abducted ten Palestinians from their sleeping homes in Bethelehem.
As Israelis enjoy the ability to hold elections, Palestinians in the West Bank remain under house arrest, unable to go to school, to work, and certainly unable to conduct elections.
Kristen Ess is a political activist and freelance journalist from New York City, who has lived in the West Bank and Gaza since March 2002, where she does solidarity work and reports for Free Speech Radio news and Left Turn magazine.
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jezebel 11:51 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-28
"He was the type of person who, clad only in brass armour, would climb to the top of a church spire during a thunderstorm and shout, 'All of the gods are bastards!'"
--anonymous
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jezebel 12:09 - [Link] - Comments ()
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dan savage is one of my favorite columnists. i first started reading his stuff when i moved to seattle and he was a writer for a local small publication there. a few years later the village voice publishers syndicated his column, savage love. his current article, below, is about the rumors of gay men and bug chasing.
2003-01-24
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jezebel 09:13 - [Link] - Comments ()
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Grimace And Hamburgler Lick Satan's Pinky Ring
The universe was heard to quietly applaud and sigh with a tiny sense of shimmering hope for the soul of humanity after all, sort of, just a little, as McDonald's Corp. reported the first loss in its history -- a $343.8 million setback, due to an unprecedented slump brought on by consumer weariness with fast food, a crowded restaurant market and its own problems with service, and the fact that it's been gnawing the very soul of human health for 50 years and it's about damn time karma slapped its flabby ass.
McDonald's was founded in 1955 and has been publicly traded since 1965. The bloated toxic burger giant said it is closing 719 under-performing restaurants, which will take its grand total down to a mere 45,999,809,757,630. But it also disclosed plans to open 850 more traditional McDonald's, because it is just that noxious and neverending a cultural cancer.
"We foresee great opportunities in the pre-teen market, those cute little flabby rugrats as of yet not completely addicted to our crap and sucked into the giant Happy Meal vortex," gurgled the McD's CEO from his throne of lard and green bubbling Dow Chemical additives and something resembling meat but which is actually pulverized kittens and reconstituted gobs of Lynne Cheney's cellulite, as a weirdly mutated hairless dwarf Ronald McDonald-like creature quivered on his lap and purred, its green eyes flashing.
san francisco chronicle -- sfgate.com
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jezebel 12:26 - [Link] - Comments ()
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.
cinema secrets
the seventh seal
for any cinema/chess cafe, this is the only film needed to play.
jezebel 11:26 - [Link] - Comments ()
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the office i worked at and got laid off from finally announced it's closing. all my telephone operator friends are now in the place i was in a year ago, or was it two years ago?
i've already forgotten. it's hard to believe that experience for me is over. at the time it was sheer hell. i truly empathize with all my soon-to-be liberated friends and co-workers.
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here's mark fiore's latest animation:
exile tv.
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jezebel 07:55 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-20
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
-Anais Nin (1903-1977)
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jezebel 00:45 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-09
when i was about eight years old i remember going to the local department store with my parents. in the hi-fi department all the televisions on sale were tuned to the news and the MLK assassination. it's a pity that's my only vivid memory of MLK. such is the world we live in.
the following link reveals a few of king's words, showing how he remains powerfully relevant to this day.
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jezebel 10:02 - [Link] - Comments ()
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here's an old animation by mark fiore i found in his archives. pardon me but i just couldn't pass up posting it here.
dot bomb
by mark fiore.
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jezebel 10:23 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-07
once in a great while justice does indeed get served. those who deserve it get their's, and may as well become, just dessert.
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jezebel 09:10 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-06
the latest, another dr death comes out. this one actually has a death bag. time and decrepitude breed creativity.
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jezebel 07:20 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-04
i reanimated my two-year-dormant digicam. got it back to working condition, re-read the manual because i forgot how to operate it it's been so long. now it's all working and -- still there is not much worth photographing that i can find. oh well. i'm not giving up.
this is one thing i excavated. it's a new path to that ever-growing cybercoboid entity, spookishly becoming more and more like my own personal cave, or brainal container, to creep inside and subsequently disappear amidst the darkened crevices.
so here it is. this is not the quickest or most well-lit way to go, nevertheless it will get you there. this passageway leads to and will arrive at spidermoon.net, ultimately ending hopelessly entangled amidst a chaotic assortment of chess links:
secret over-the-board dark passage to spidermoon chess.
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jezebel 17:21 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-03
an email forward, selfishly separated from its author by the uncaring cruelty of the internet.
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"When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year 'round blizzards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard had it and how easy they've got it!
But....
Now that I've reached the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.
You've got it so f*ckin' easy!
I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a goddamned Utopia!
And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it!
I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet--we wanted to know something, we had to go to the goddamned library and look it up ourselves!
And there was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter-- with a pen!--and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the f*ckin' mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!
And there were no MP3s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to go to the goddamned record store and shoplift it yourself! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over some part of it and f*ck it all up!
You want to hear about hardship?
You couldn't just download p*rn! You had to bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! It was either that or jack-off to the lingerie section of the JC Penney catalog!
Those were your options!
We didn't have fancy sh*t like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal!
And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was it could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent, your drug dealer, you didn't know!!! You just had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
And we didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked a$$! Your guy was a little square! You had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever!
And you could never win, the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died!
Just like LIFE!
When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! A tall guy sat in front of you, you were screwed!
And sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 20 channels and there was no onscreen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on!
And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning... ...D'ya hear what the f*ck I'm saying!?!
We had to wait ALL WEEK, you spoiled little bastards!
That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy.
You're spoiled, I swear to God! You guys wouldn't last five minutes back in 1984!"
-- anonymous
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jezebel 07:03 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2003-01-02
ever wonder what the heck is goin' on over there? the middle east and other places are everyday part of our lives now. how do we digest all that information being slung toward us at the velocity of a fastball.
i'm not sure the best way to even begin comprehending what's really transpiring at the hands of the overbearing empire called the usa. here's one site i learned about lately that has some detailed info. probably just as corrupt and censored as any other.
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jezebel 07:09 - [Link] - Comments ()
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2+0+0+3 = 5
Five is the number of deconstructive transient disorder screaming for mediation.
Its corresponding tarot card is V - the heirophant. met any good mediators lately?
welcome to 2003, the year of chaos.
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jezebel 08:42 - [Link] - Comments ()
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