#221: Someday, the Silver Moon & I Will Go to Dreamland
Added 2024-08-16 17:08:26 +0000 UTC"History" is things that aren't my fault; "news" is when the voiceover kicks in. The word you want is "carnage."
It's right down to the wire, and I just got a message – just now, after recording – that my friend & others are seeing strange new Israeli weapons that they suspect are chemical or biological. Help her and her family escape.
Comments
I think Radio War Nerd either did a segment or a whole episode on THREE STIGMATA. Is it the one where the Martian says "Mayyyy IIIII eeeeatt youuuu??"
Rohmer Simpson
2024-08-19 20:02:22 +0000 UTCAll it takes is a few more schlubs. Just encouraged me to pop another 50 in the pot, thanks to you too.
Graham Austin
2024-08-19 17:36:29 +0000 UTCThank you for so eloquently putting what I’m feeling and thinking into something coherent. Weeping on my walk home from work imagining those bags of people, what those people watching all of this in front of them must have to push down inside themselves every minute of every day.
Graham Austin
2024-08-19 17:31:19 +0000 UTCwe all have "that point" where we finally comprehend the righteous fury that demands blood
Laura
2024-08-19 14:49:56 +0000 UTCRe Palmer eldritch I think the stigmata included metal teeth. I always thought of it as a kind of blueprint for desire, eyes, hand, mouth. See, get, eat.
Tyson Settle
2024-08-19 08:38:02 +0000 UTCI’m going to make it a point to donate at least $50 a week to this family. Just made my first an hour or so ago. I’m just a blue collar schlub and don’t have much more than that I can help with, but if I can, I will. Thank you for helping to motivate me to doing so.
Chris
2024-08-19 00:30:44 +0000 UTCYou, my young friend, have won the rare honor of predicting something I was going to say on a subsequent episode
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-18 20:29:25 +0000 UTCYou mean from Twitter? I don't know for sure what they are, nobody in Gaza does either, but if you've lived your entire life in Gaza, you have firsthand experience of a pretty fuckin' good cross-section of US-Israeli weaponry, so the appearance of a new genre of carnage is pretty goddamn alarming. I've asked some people who know about weapons, and every one of them told me that it was either one or both of two possibilities: #1, what they call "kinetic weaponry," which is a sort of missle, bomb, etc. that doesn't contain an explosive charge but DOES contain some kind of enormous heinous object designed to annihilate human flesh while leaving things like architecture relatively unharmed, because the murderers want it for themselves once the genocide is over and the full occupation begins – I think Hellfire missiles do contain some amount of explosives, but they're also covered in blades that are coming at you at 995 MPH and will render you unrecognizable as a human body; and/or #2, thermobaric or "fuel-air" weapons, which have a similar purpose (eradicate humans without fucking up all the stuff we want to steal from them), which also don't contain a conventional explosive, and work by containing some sort of ignition device and some sort of extremely flammable gas, so when they hit, the gas ignites and spreads and creates a fucking Biblically enormous wall of fire, and that'll tend to delete all living things in the area without fucking up all the stone and concrete to be saved for, in this case, Greater Israel. My amateur research into this shit has led me to discover that Raytheon makes a weapon for the US government (and the US government's client regimes) called, and I cannot overemphasize that this is the real name of a real thing, The EXOATMOSPHERIC KILL VEHICLE. And the EXOATMOSPHERIC KILL VEHICLE is a huge chunk of metal attached to a rocket booster, which carries the metal chunk just outside the Earth's atmosphere and then detaches, leaving the metal part (and its online guidance system) to fall from THE OUTERMOST LIMIT OF THE ATMOSPHERE toward its target. If you were to do some basic algebra on the Law of Falling Bodies, you could figure out how fast a fuck-off giant piece of metal which has been dropped from Earth's atmosphere will be traveling by the time it hits its target. I haven't personally done that math yet, because I'm really trying not to drive myself too insane to be useful anymore, but if you care to imagine what a metal object of significant mass would do to a human body after it's been allowed to enter freefall at quite literally the highest point at which freefall is still possible, you'll have some idea of the things people are seeing in Gaza right now. (For clarity's sake: I don't think the EXOATMOSPHERIC KILL VEHICLE is being used in Gaza, because I think it was replaced by an "upgrade" that then turned out to require further modification, but that KIND of thing is almost certainly in use.)
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-18 20:28:39 +0000 UTCwould you mind sharing more about these strange new weapons you speak of?
V
2024-08-18 19:37:50 +0000 UTCHere’s a good OG imperialist quote from Senator Albert Beveridge in 1900 that mentions ‘progress’ “God has not prepared the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation... No! He has made us the master organizers to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among the savage and senile peoples of the earth.”
Venetia’s glue gun
2024-08-18 18:28:05 +0000 UTCThinking about the reality of primordial violence breaking through the dream of modernity, it occurs to me that The Man Behind Winkies looks a lot like a bog body.
Ian H
2024-08-18 17:00:31 +0000 UTCif you think you might check out the Doughboys podcast, I think I'd recommend the recent appearance by actor/comedian Griffin Newman, where they review a visit to Sbarro. In this one the episode is nearly derailed by a contagion of "thinking of other characters in any fictional media who are associated with water or wetness" puns and references that goes on for a minute or so, then another minute, then twenty minutes pass and they're still generating new puns and references. I was on a hike that day, a lot of changes in elevation, an ambitous hike. Beyond the "point of no return" (back to the parking lot) I began to experience some discomfort on the outside of my left hip. This was subsequently diagnosed as bursitis, but possibly something requiring orthopedic attention, but in the moment of the hike the discomfort scaled up rapidly, in severity and what I'd just call "heat that might as well be pain", plus a drop in mobility for the aforementioned left leg. I mention all this because the stretch of "characters in any fictional media who are associated with water or wetness" puns and references, I was so gutted, as in non-diegetic sides spliting, falling about the place really, that it was to my hip joint agony a relief never imagined by pharmaceuticals. Hope the rest of your weekend is 5x5, I'll keep stumping for the GoFundMe - I don't have a shit ton of social media presence but I think I can get some of the lads to chip in.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-08-18 00:16:42 +0000 UTCYou know what you can tell them, and I'm not being sardonic: tell them that. Tell them what you just told me.
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-17 23:27:44 +0000 UTCwhen i hear what is happening in gaza, i have sudden bursts of full body shivers and tears -- then I go cold and nothing about this world seems real, including my immediate surroundings, my emotions shut off and i am already dead. Walking through my neighborhood looking at other people like walking, smiling corpses. I work as a teacher and going to face my students feels absurd in the midst of this. I can't believe the world I'm helping raise them into. Don't have anything insightful to say about anything anymore.
M Wigby
2024-08-17 23:03:44 +0000 UTCYour thoughts about history remind me of this scene in Twin Peaks The Return, episode 17: Cooper: "Philip?" Phillip Jeffries: "Please, be specific." Cooper: "The date--February 23, 1989." Phillip Jeffries: "I'll find it for you. It's slippery in here. It's good to see you again, Cooper. Say hello to Gordon if you see him. He'll remember the unofficial version. This is where you'll find Judy. There may be someone. Did you ask me this?" Phillip Jeffries: "There it is. You can go in now. Cooper, remember." MIKE: "Electricity."
Bombs Over Rome
2024-08-17 22:18:42 +0000 UTCThree stigmata is one of my favourite novels of all time. Thank you for combining David Lynch with your friend in Gaza for this series. I really don't want to frame this in terms of it being a "good show". Just thank you for sharing this with the world so that I have this window to look through outside of where I find myself day to day.
Tyson Settle
2024-08-17 02:55:10 +0000 UTCAnd I slur some anyway, drugs aside – I don't know how obvious it is, because it's impossible to hear your own recorded voice as if it weren't yours, but I have a moderate natural sibilance/lisp as a result of my generally fucked-up skull. Most people produce the "S" sound with their tongues against either the backs of their top teeth or against the flesh just above those teeth, which is called the alveolar ridge; I can't do that, I have to pronounce "S" with my tongue against the backs of my bottom teeth, and if you try saying it like that, it'll sound like me
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-17 00:29:10 +0000 UTCimagine the end of THE GRAPES OF WRATH, except an infant is trying to suck milk from the nipple of a dead woman, and there was never a Tom Joad
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-17 00:24:32 +0000 UTCIf this were months ago, I imagine the idea would be to pay their way through the Egyptian border somewhere near Rafah (and I don't know if anybody's trying to run secret refugee boats off the coast, they'd be fucked if I DID know, but that might've been an element too?) and then start finding anyone anywhere who can take them in, especially in a country where they might be allowed to stay. Now, Rafah and Khan Younis are killing fields – you know, those safe zones Israel told everyone to flock to? – and the supposed "next safe places" were in central Gaza, like Deir al-Balah. With those also turned into slaughterhouses, I don't know where they can go, and neither do they; the only route is back north to Gaza City and surrounding enclaves, hoping they're already too destroyed for Israel to destroy again, but that also means no water, no food, no medicine, sewage and corpses everywhere, and straight-up Vietnam-style "free fire zones" where the IDF has explicit orders to kill everything that moves. The Palestinians, of course, do not know where those zones ARE, and the IDF isn't too fuckin' big on rules anyway
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-17 00:22:59 +0000 UTCI don't fully know; I imagine that will depend enormously on when it happens (if it happens). I know they're approaching the amount of money that, in theory, would allow them to get out of Gaza, and the rest would be to keep them alive while they try to find a place that will accept them, BUT I don't know if any of the institutions & mechanisms necessary for [amount of money] = [escape Gaza] are functioning right now. And my friend knows much more than me, but I don't think she could answer this question either until the money's actually present. Nobody in Gaza knows if tomorrow is ever coming, let alone what access to a Gofundme might look like in a week
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-17 00:14:54 +0000 UTCGoing from place to place, just hoping for some hope and hoping for some safety. Losing people but being forced to look ahead. It’s like some godless twist of the Grapes of Wrath. I hope your friend makes it and justice is dispensed.
Headbuttbuffet
2024-08-17 00:09:43 +0000 UTCWhat is the step after we reach the 55k euro mark?
Backofhouse4
2024-08-16 23:57:03 +0000 UTCLike, she’s alive! She’s alive right now and her family except for her her poor fucking brother is too, and fuck, how do you stop their murders? There’s got to be a way. She doesn’t deserve this, none of them deserved this, but even though ‘deserve’s got nothing to do with it’ there has to be a way to save one girl, or a half dozen family members I just have no fucking clue how to make that be
Brian
2024-08-16 20:42:22 +0000 UTCNo no, it's fine, believe me, I understand. I have never in my life felt anything like this, and I have never felt so completely useless and trivial as when a young woman in the middle of a genocide asks me, not angrily but sincerely, "What are we doing wrong? Why doesn't the world care? Do they not see that we're civilians?," and I've got no idea what to say
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-16 20:41:10 +0000 UTCThe Gazans, at least every Gazan I've heard from either directly or through my friend, don't want to HAVE to leave Palestine. It's their home. It's the only place lots of them have ever lived or even seen, because the Gazan population was so overwhemingly young when the genocide started (≈49% 18 or younger), tho christ knows who's alive now. That is what fucking wrecks me, or one of the things that wrecks me, over and over: my friend has never known any life but a brutal one, never had any home outside an open-air concentration camp, and she would give anything just to have THAT back. I don't think any of us, certainly no two people speaking English on the internet, has really even begun to grasp this degree of suffering. It is every bit as bad as the Holocaust or whatever else you care to name
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-16 20:39:17 +0000 UTCI’m yanking your chain a bit - it’s a podcast that reviews fast food restaurants. I like it a lot (to my surprise) but it’s 180 degrees from D/C.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-08-16 20:37:52 +0000 UTCAt one point Tony fucking Blair was hired as a lobbyist for a massive population transfer to Egypt, basically in exchange for a huge bribe to the Egyptian government, but even the Palestinians most desperate to leave are very conscious that if they DO, their homeland ceases to exist. I heard from my friend this morning, and it's impossible to say what rumors will come true, but apparently there's word going around that any "ceasefire" deal will involve all the survivors in Gaza being forced onto boats at gunpoint and sent to whatever country will accept a bribe to take them, much as England is trying to ship all its refugees to Rwanda right now (or at least was until recently, I don't know if that's still official policy)
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-16 20:33:52 +0000 UTCI’m sorry, I’m just trying to think anythingg, I wish I knew anything especially anything that could fucking help.
Brian
2024-08-16 20:32:14 +0000 UTCthe likelihood that any Gazan civilian who isn't already there could make it to the Egyptian border is effecitvely 0% now, and there have been Gazans AT that border since a few days after October 7 2023, to whom the response has been men with machine guns saying "Absolutely not"
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-16 20:30:06 +0000 UTCI don’t know though, with a U.S. passport maybe an Egyptian border patrolman might be more likely to let her through or something? God fucking damn it, even as I type this I want to vomit
Brian
2024-08-16 20:26:59 +0000 UTCDog I ain't even know what that is
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-16 20:18:45 +0000 UTCThink of the average Gazan as being a North Vietnamese civilian during the War, and then imagine that the nearest country to Vietnam, with the longest border, was the United States
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-16 20:17:49 +0000 UTCIt's much more desperate than mere "laws" at this point. It's not "How can people get around emigration laws," it's "How in the fuck could anyone reach a sea or border that isn't Israel's, when it's not safe to move 25 feet?"
Michael S. Judge
2024-08-16 20:16:25 +0000 UTCCan you marry her and get her out? Wouldn’t that give her U.S. citizenship or protection or something?
Brian
2024-08-16 20:07:24 +0000 UTCShred shred shred https://youtu.be/YYQ02OP5h00?si=xYTUPANqAeMMXWca
NYCM&AHole
2024-08-16 19:48:40 +0000 UTCThe wolf in the head discussion made me think of the cool metal song by Alyssa White-Gluz and Nita Strauss. Probably the only thought of “hey that’s cool” during the whole ep.
NYCM&AHole
2024-08-16 19:28:27 +0000 UTCThe last bit reminded me of that line from Stephen Dedalus, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” I wonder if there wasn’t something of the gnostic in Joyce…
Yarrow Paisley
2024-08-16 19:09:34 +0000 UTCThree Stigmata was one of my favorite of the Dick novels, forgot about it, thanks for the reminder. The biggest change in your speech is less slurring, which you incidentally do for a word or two during that particular sentence. "It's called, like, up here, it's called memory and it's called other things" - DJT on the brain
glenn mohre
2024-08-16 18:35:43 +0000 UTCThe currency conversion is done for you automatically.
Rohmer Simpson
2024-08-16 17:58:02 +0000 UTCCan we make the donation in US dollars? I'm ashamed to say I have never been on Go Fund Me.
Kelley Hoefer
2024-08-16 17:46:23 +0000 UTCMSJ you should go on Doughboys. How can we make this happen?
Rohmer Simpson
2024-08-16 17:19:36 +0000 UTC
