What’s to say about Nick Cave & his group the Bad Seed who defiantly rejected appeals to honor the cultural boycott of Israel? Not just defiantly but whining like a twit that he was being bullied by the BDS movement. You don’t make groupies playing Count Dracula to apartheid & ethnic cleansing but the money is better. You show what you’re made of if you choose to stand with human rights over cashing in on oppression. Or vice-versa. Nothing left to say about Cave except another dirt-ball bites the dust.

The Voice singing talent show is in its finals tonight. It might be noted that two of the judges–Miley Cyrus (this season) & Pharrell Williams (past seasons)–bowed to appeals to honor the cultural boycott of Israel & backed out of scheduled performances. Another former judge Alicia Keyes refused to honor the cultural boycott & played Israel. Or rather, Israel played her.

On that note, we should tap our feet & snap our fingers to “Happy” by Pharrell Williams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbZSe6N_BXs

Slavoj Zizek is simply must reading on the politics of toilets but when he finally made his racism & xenophobia coherent in his vituperations against refugees he was all washed up as the rock star of socialism. Or so we hoped. Those of us who always thought he was a two-bit huckster like him best as farce & not at all as a theoretician where he should be an embarrassment since he is a cornucopia of idiocies.

His latest contribution to thought published in the Independent is titled “Alt-right Trump supporters & left-wing Bernie Sanders fans should join together to defeat capitalism.” He may be tapping into something here since there is an affinity between some of these forces on Syria & the denial of the Bosniak & Rohingya genocides. But the article mostly elaborates Zizek’s own affinity with the extreme right. He’s not so much Elvis as a reject from The Gong Show.

Social media is full of photos & reports about assaults on Palestinian children by Israeli occupying forces. It may be escalating but it is hardly a new tactic for Israel to target children. That is a hallmark of war, occupation, persecution, & genocide. Israel was formally accused of it by the UN & human rights groups after the seven-week bombing siege of Gaza.

This young boy was a victim of assault in one of the more notorious cases of July 2014 leading up to the bombing siege of Gaza. Then 15-year-old Palestinian-American Tariq Abu Khdeir was beaten into unconsciousness & stomped on by an Israeli border policeman following the kidnapping & torching murder of his 16-year-old cousin, Mohammed Abu Khdeir in occupied East Jerusalem.

Despite video documentation of the assault on Tariq, the policeman, whose identity was kept anonymous by Israel, was only sentenced to 45 days of community service & a suspended sentence of four months in jail. At the time, Tariq’s mother mother Suha Abu Khdeir said if her son hadn’t been a US citizen he would have been “just pushed to the side like a dog…left to rot in jail.”

Defend Palestinian children by honoring & promoting the economic & cultural boycott of Israel. Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729 & check every label.

A Palestinian human rights group for prisoners reports that Israel has kidnapped & arrested 5,700 Palestinians, including 700 children, since the start of 2017. Most are manhandled, many are physically assaulted, some have been released, hundreds have been placed in administrative detention & held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The incident pictured here has become iconic of Israeli violence toward Palestinian kids. In August 2015, an Israeli soldier was assaulting 11-year-old Mohammed Tamimi from the Palestinian family noted for fearless activism in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. The incident became notorious internationally because Mohammed had a broken arm when he was assaulted & his sister, mother, & others jumped on the soldier to get him off the boy.

The most powerful way to stand with Palestinians is to honor & promote the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (BDS). Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729 & check every label.

(Photo by Abbas Momani/AFP)

The Kashmir Doctors’ Association (KDA) reports that under revised guidelines established by the American Heart Association & American College of Cardiology more than 3.5 million of the almost 7 million residents of occupied Kashmir suffer from high blood pressure, also called hypertension. The affects of hypertension on the human body include heart disease, aneurysms, stroke, dementia, kidney failure.

You can’t just jump to conclusions or make facile comparisons about the pathology of hypertension but it is noteworthy that under the old, unrevised guidelines, 40-percent of American Black men & women had hypertension, one of the highest rates in the world. They not only sustain higher rates of hypertension but it develops earlier in life & is more severe. It’s no surprise that researchers started looking for the cause of hypertension among Blacks in their genes. Influenced by the antisocial idiocies of evolutionary psychology (more aptly called evo-psycho) which now dominate the social sciences, researchers are also looking for the biological roots of racism, misogyny, inequality & supremacy in the genes. If they were going to be scientific about the pathology of hypertension, it would be more useful to compare hypertension rates around the world by class & caste, by gender, by measure of oppression including war, occupation, persecution, genocide.

War, occupation, persecution, genocide are not good for human health. That should be as obvious to researchers with an ounce of scientific integrity as it is to the oppressed.

Television news is so obsessed with Trump’s tweets that none of the networks have considered war, occupation, or the Rohingya genocide of any interest for months. But the arrival of Pope Francis in Burma this morning actually prompted some coverage–although the summit of European & Asian diplomats in Burma last week received none. All media reports focus on whether Pope Francis will play politic with genocide by avoiding the proper name Rohingya as Burmese Cardinal Charles Bo requested since Bo is a nationalist supporter of the genocide.

There’s no way in hell Pope Francis can visit Burma & go all euphemistic about the Rohingya people. Suu Kyi & the generals justify the denial of citizenship, human, & democratic rights to the Rohingya precisely by claiming they are Bengali immigrants living illegally in Burma & have made it an international issue by asking diplomats not to use the proper name Rohingya. Kofi Annan obliged genocide in his commission recommendations by refusing to use the name & personally advised Pope Francis to also become a sniveling accomplice to genocide. If the pope does not stand up to the political pressure, he won’t just compromise his own spiritual leadership & reduce the Vatican to a flunkey of fascism. Most importantly, he endangers the Rohingya people & justifies governments who deny genocide & refuse to impose economic & military sanctions on Burma. Genocide is what is at stake in his visit & Pope Francis knows that–which is what makes his state visit so inadvisable & possibly compromised with the fascist junta.

Pope Francis has a chance here to show political & spiritual leadership. For the Rohingya people, we sincerely hope he has the integrity & courage to do so.

(Photo of pope arriving in Burma from Business Standard)

A stunning piece of music I found on Masood Hussain’s Facebook wall. You can hear those marvelous flutes in Peruvian & other Native American music also.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93wGaGFUnTs&feature=share

The face of Gandhi covered by a Kashmiri child’s pellet-riddled hands:

–a 2016 digital work by Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain

In a published interview, Ather Zia asked Masood Hussain: “Do you remember the first painting you made, what was it about, what inspired it?” He answered: “Yes I remember the first painting that I made. It was the portrait of a man with a bandaged head. The bandage was slightly stained with blood near the temples. It was inspired by an incident of stone pelting that I witnessed as a child in 1960s.”

Ather then asked Masood: “Has it {the occupation} brought any change to your perceptions about beauty, considering there is so much bloodshed & violence?” He answered: “Personally experiencing the 20 years of bloodshed & violence has forced me to paint a series of paintings portraying bloodshed & violence because you can’t notice beauty when there is violence around.”

What do you think it means that leading Assad apologists including Vanessa Beeley & Eva Bartlett have exactly the same view of the Rohingya genocide as Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, & Pamela Geller? They all support the fascist military junta & deny or justify the genocide. You want to know what I think in unvarnished language? They will all go down in the anals (no that is not a misspelling) of history as contemptible dirt-balls. There’s no nicer way to put that.