The Lost Weekend - and Friday

 I keep meaning to get caught up on my recent doings, and failing. Those plans of mice and men!

I went to Indy Saturday for Proof: A Midwest Literary Festival, This post is not about that.

Time has been spent on getting the apartment sorted out. And in blog posts. Those will be upcoming. Right now, I have an area organized for work. Do not ask about what else needs to be done.

CC came over last night. However, we made a stop at her storage bins - they were broken into, and a pit stop turned into a hunt for what was taken. She started crying on the way home. She is not in good shape. This morning she was to call early, and I was to get her to finish off what was not done last night. No call.

I have a meeting at noon. Before then, I want to do my laundry.

What follows is what was to have been my original post on my recent doings and readings. 

 Voting centers arrive in Delaware County (Ball State Daily News)

It has been 20 years, according to Delaware County Clerk Rick Spangler, since Delaware County initially moved to change its voting procedures from a precinct voting format to voting centers. Through a long and complicated process, representatives from both parties and individuals from the League of Women Voters (LWV) have been pushing their voting center plan steadily forward to make voting easier and more accessible for Delaware County residents. That plan passed a vote on Sept. 8, 2025.

Ball State is home to the Voting System Technical Oversight Program (VSTOP), which performs randomized audits on voting machines, post-election audits to ensure ballots are tabulated correctly and an assortment of other tasks that keep elections running smoothly around the state.

VSTOP election systems audit specialist Matt Housley said, “The number one reason that we hear counties switch [to vote centers] is they want convenience for their voters.”  

Voting centers streamline the voting process, allowing voters to cast their ballots without needing to go to a specific location. Instead, new locations have been chosen all over Delaware County to best suit voters’ needs. 

Following the Call to Create: Artist Aimee Maychack Comes to Minnetrista

Aimee describes the past 30 years of their life as being in the “helping profession.” First, a chemical dependency counselor, then in fire service after 9/11. They also served “as an educator, grant writer, civilian paramedic in the Air Force, captain, and most recently, a flight paramedic.”

If we look at Aimee’s work history, the trajectory of their life did not seem to say next would be “artist.” But that, to me, is one of the most beautiful things about their story. It happened in reverse of what many artists experience.

Young artists throw themselves into this profession, get burned out and hungry for more money, or find that without the prompting and structure of school, art is not as fun or viable. Some end up going into the very fields Aimee left. All of this is okay to discover about yourself as you figure out what is important in your life.

As Aimee writes on their blog: “Being an artist is not a get-rich-quick scheme or really a good plan towards a sustainable living. Making art, whether it’s a physical thing or a performance, is an obsessive passion. A passion, a gift, a pursuit to share the artist’s magic with the world.”  

Call It What It Is (Sheila Kennedy)

Calling this administration and its supporters fascists is neither an exaggeration nor an inappropriate epithet. It is a word–a label– that accurately describes both Trump and a significant percentage of his MAGA supporters. The rest of us need to acknowledge that, and the fact that most of those supporters are irretrievably lost to the American Idea.

It is up to the rest of us–to the majority of sane Americans– to reject the fascist project and save the Republic. The situation really is that dire.

‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick (The Guardian)

Kraus prefers the term “nonfiction novels” to “autofiction” because her books are as much about other people as they are about her, and she describes her approach as “reporting on experience”. “The fabulation of an entirely invented world of a novel is completely beyond me,” she says, “but transcribing and reporting to be accurate, that’s something I can do.” She changes names and details, but “I don’t invent anything. It’s more a matter of mixing, it’s a composition.” For decades, she has kept a detailed daily diary. “Just the act of writing anchors you in time and gives a reality to things that have happened that would otherwise be completely vaporous and elusive,” she says.

In her novels, Kraus uses herself as a case study, digging so deeply into her own, singular story that she uncovers truths that feel closer to universal, if not for everyone then at least for other “weird girls”. To construct them, she supplements diaries with boxes of photographs, interview recordings and – in the case of her latest book – court transcripts. The Four Spent the Day Together is split into three parts: the first describes Kraus’s upbringing in blue-collar small-town Connecticut; the second covers the slow, traumatic breakup of her second marriage; and the third describes Kraus’s journalistic investigation into a brutal murder that took place close to her former summer house in Minnesota, in a working-class community ravaged by meth.

Song for Friday? Saturday? 

I got a rejection: 

Thank you for sending us "Agnes." Although we must decline your submission at this time, we appreciated the chance to consider it.

We hope you are well and wish you and your work all the best. 

Sincerely,

-Pangyrus Literary Magazine

15 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Fall  (Electric Literature) by Wendy J. Fox has a list of books I wish I could buy.  

Let us hope, order means good things forthcoming.

sch 

The Poisonwood Bible Leaves Me Thinking 8-20-2015 (Part One)

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/5/2025] 

 I finished with Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (HarperPerennial, 1999) this Monday. She kicked me around quite a bit - got me invested with the fates of her characters; with the Congo/Zaire; with the sins of America; with freedom and democracy; and American (and Dutch and Belgian and Portuguese) evangelism; and the atrocities done in the name of Christ.

Anyone reading Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness should read Kingsolver's novel. She mentions Conrad in her Author's Note and also notes it in her Bibliography. Yes, a novel with a bibliography! She wears her research lightly - she is far from Sinclair Lewis territory.

 Tolstoy came to mind with her interest in history. Congolese and American history; Africa and American history. She turns loose her Price family - father Nathan, mother Orleanna, and daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May - into the Congo of 1960. Nathan never gets to tell his story. He assumes the role of a Southern Baptist patriarch to his wife and daughters. He becomes a Kurtz figure without the powers of Kurtz. I also was reminded of the Harrison Ford character in Mosquito Coast - so assured of America's rightness. That assurance gets amped up with the certitude - the pridefulness of the same kind of Christian (usually Protestant) missionary who will kill the villagers rather than let the village persist in sin. Is this a source - another - of our Vietnam policy of destroying the village to save the villagers?

Oh, yes, Ms. Kingsolver got me thinking of not only Congo/Zaire, but also Iran and Vietnam and Guatemala and Chile. We also get a brief glimpse into Angola. And once started, how anyone ignores the messes we have in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or the continuing problems of Africa? Scary, isn't it? How our foreign policy of belligerence and interference leaves death and destruction as our legacy. When do you think the pigeons will come home to roost?

The Price females tell their stories. One daughter dies. Two daughters never leave Africa. They all give different views of Africa and their histories. Of family relations, we get far different views. On the roles of women - mother, professional, Princess, intellectual - we get a discussion lasting a bit more than 30 years. I can see the literary roles for the daughters & mother, but I think they go beyond mere literary tropes. Here come the thoughts of Tolstoy: The characters have emotions, thoughts in reaction to the historical events around them, such as one will expect of characters as Kingsolver develops them. I wish I could do this.

sch

[10/5/2025: Continued in The Poisonwood Bible Leaves Me Thinking 8-20-2015 (Part Two). sch]

Poltical Roundup

 Francis Fukuyama finds the cause of our political (social?) downfall in It’s the Internet, Stupid (Persuasion)

As I wrote in a recent article, the current populist movement differs from previous manifestations of right-wing politics because it is defined not by a clear economic or political ideology, but rather by conspiratorial thinking. The essence of contemporary populism is the belief that the evidence of reality around us is fake, and is being manipulated by shadowy elites pulling strings behind the scenes.

Conspiracy theories have always been part of right-wing politics in the United States. But today’s conspiracies are incredibly outlandish, like the QAnon belief that the Democrats are operating secret tunnels under Washington, D.C. and drinking the blood of young children. Educated people would rather criticize Trump’s trade policies than his connections with Jeffrey Epstein, and yet the latter has dogged him relentlessly for several months now (although here we have the case of an actual conspiracy to cover up this connection).

 ***

Moving online created a parallel universe that bore some relationship to the physically experienced world, but in other cases could exist completely orthogonally to it. While previously “truth” was imperfectly certified by institutions like scientific journals, traditional media with standards of journalist accountability, courts and legal discovery, educational institutions and research organizations, the standard for truth began to gravitate instead to the number of likes and shares a particular post got. The large tech platforms pursuing their own commercial self-interest created an ecosystem that rewarded sensationalism and disruptive content, and their recommendation algorithms, again acting in the interest of profit-maximization, guided people to sources that never would have been taken seriously in earlier times. Moreover, the speed with which memes and low-quality content could travel increased dramatically, as well as the reach of any particular piece of information. Previously, a major newspaper or magazine could reach perhaps a million readers, usually in a single geographic area; today, an individual influencer can reach hundreds of millions of followers without regard to geography.

Finally, as Renee DiResta has explained in her book Invisible Rulers, there is an internal dynamic to online posting that explains the rise of extremist views and materials. Influencers are driven by their audiences to go for sensational content. The currency of the internet is attention, and you don’t get attention by being sober, reflective, informative, or judicious. 

A Deeper Look at Hegseth and Trump’s Performances in Quantico | Explainer (Heather Cox Richardson):

 Krugman on tariffs not working:

 MAGA Christians say empathy is a sin. Here's how that gives us a window into their thinking.

 What's wrong with revolutions (and you have not read Camus' The Rebel.)

Comparing Scottish and American living:

 

 sch 11:36 AM

Of Plays and Novels 8-17-15

    [ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 10/5/2025] 

"Perversion" took my time this past week or two. I only finished Chinua Achebe's 1959 Things Fall Apart (Anchor Books) about an hour ago. I have read only 160 pages of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (HarperPerennial, 1999). I put my all into the play.

But let me talk about Things Fall Apart. I think Achebe won the Nobel. This novel does not appear on Entertainment Weekly 100 Best Novels of All Time, and I think it should have.

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper., and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart, Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father's failure and weakness and even now he had still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbale. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbale was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

p. 13

Being someone who killed his father off in a war while riding in a bus to his second grade class, that passage caught my attention. This passage also establishes the unpleasantness of Achebe's protagonist. What makes Achebe's novel is his writing, impressive is how he makes this unpleasant protagonist into a sympathetically tragic figure unable to face the changes imposed by colonialism, or to adapt to those changes. Very clever writing.

Zora Neale Hurston has ahold of me. I think now of the novelist as anthropologist. Or maybe I understand what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was going on about with his early novels like Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Some of this novelist-as-anthropologist came to mind while reading Things Fall Apart. This is even though Things Fall Apart is a historical novel - even as it takes place during the Victorian Era colonization of Nigeria. So how could I play anthropologist of east central Indiana? I must think on that?

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible also combines the anthropological and the historical. I need to think more on what I did with the short stories and will do with "One Dead Blonde".

Obsessing quite too much with "Perversion". I wonder with bemusement what will be the reaction to the preceding sentence. Surely someone will say too long, too much, of my life got caught up with perversion, or else why would I be in federal prison? I think the play is not bad as a literary effort and quite good as agitprop. I may even be on time, for a change! Reading the last 2 Acts tonight. Then I will impose on Russell for a technical critique. I hope to have it published by year's end. Yes, quite absorbed in it. Glad for the leisure time prison has given me for writing but also put out by having so much time to worry over the play.

sch

[10/5/2025: The play I was working on seems to have been lost, and 10 years later, I cannot recall its themes or plot! sch]

Showing Off My Ignorance

 Until the other day, I never heard of Yan Lianke. Turns out he has been a favored candidate for the Nobel. I live in Muncie, Indiana, and that could work as an excuse. Better is that I have been too busy, too lazy, too pre-occupied to keep track of these things. 

So, in the midst of packing and moving and starting during lunch, I googled the writer. The attention given him seems deserved.

Hard Like Water by Yan Lianke review – language as a weapon (The Guardian, 2021)

Yan’s body of work includes 17 novels and more than 50 books of stories, novellas and essays. Almost all his works are banned, officially or unofficially, in China. A resident of Beijing, he is both celebrated and renounced at home, even as his books – some of which are published in Taiwan – are quietly removed from Chinese bookstores. His novels continually change form, as if attempting to both escape and unmask the ever-perforating realities that are contemporary China.

The plot of Hard Like Water is straightforward: in 1968, Gao Aijun, a 26-year-old People’s Liberation Army soldier, returns to his remote Henan home. Study sessions in the army have purified his heart so that it is like “sheets of paper on which one could draw something beautiful”. Arriving in Chenggang Village, Aijun meets Hongmei, a married woman with dreams of leading the ongoing Cultural Revolution. Aijun and Hongmei embark on a sexual adventure fit for their epic love, an affair they believe will propel them to orgasmic heights as well as to high-ranking positions in the Communist party. The Cultural Revolution, entering a stage of intra-party warfare, offers them a stage and opportunities: Aijun will “revolutionise my way into the position of town mayor or district commissioner”, and neither will be treated “as if we were merely made of mud, straw, or paper”.

***

Yan’s knowledge and appropriation of revolutionary language – Mao Zedong’s poems, slogans and most famous directives, plus a heady array of literary texts, songs and propaganda from the Chinese and Soviet revolutions – is formidable. Large sections of Aijun and Hongmei’s speech are borrowed words. But Hard Like Water is neither mockery nor satire; it is a sharp, desperately moving analysis of the logic of ideology. Its mashup of literary and political texts poses the uncomfortable and timely question: how did each of us arrive at our certainties? Language is wielded by Aijun sometimes as a liberatory force, sometimes as a weapon. Driven by vengeance, thirst for status and the understandable desire to “rise high in the sky”, to feel more than ordinary life permits, he and Hongmei nurture the belief that justice is enshrined in their very bodies. As they begin to control the life and death of everyone in their village, their bodies attain, through sexual ecstasy, what feels to them like the limitless yet insatiable power of the immortals. The engine of revolution is fed by bodies like theirs; for the pleasure of the engine, therefore, they are permitted everything.

In Hard Like Water, the individuals who place the basic needs of the rural poor over party dogmatism suffer the most cruel and horrifying deaths. The mass tragedy at the heart of this novel is not satirised or exaggerated; it is all too real. Early in his adventures, Aijun tries to counsel his impoverished mother: “Mother, you don’t understand revolution. Once you get on this ship, you can’t get off, because if you do, that would make you a counterrevolutionary.”

Yan Lianke, writer: ‘Revolutions are terrible. Human progress cannot depend on destruction’ (El País, 2025) is an interview.

 Exploring the emptiness of soldiers in the Chinese Revolution and the cost of China’s supposed progress has earned Yan Lianke, 66, the nickname “the fearless Chinese writer.” His books include Dream of Ding Village — which delves into humanity’s insatiable greed, Hard Like Water — a satire on the revolution, and Lenin’s Kisses — about the downfall of a village in the face of promises of a glorious future. He has won international awards such as the Franz Kafka Prize, been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker International Prize and is repeatedly mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Question. In the epilogue of Dream of Ding Village, you apologize to the readers for causing them pain.

Answer. In China, people were experiencing the happiness of development. Many people were unaware that others were suffering from the AIDS epidemic, which is what the book portrays. Chinese literature has long focused on the positive aspects, it has been like a hymn to the beauty of society.

Q. Why is it important to feel pain?

A. There was very little literature that paid attention to the problems we were facing. Those realities were hidden. That’s why Chinese readers found Dream of Ding Village so incredible. I wrote an epilogue apologizing for interrupting their happiness.

Q. Would you describe the literature of Chinese Nobel laureates like Gao Xingjian or Mo Yan as escapist?

***

Q. “Everyone in China was afraid: the poor were afraid of uncertainty, and the rich were afraid of losing comfort because they knew their money didn’t come from hard work.”

A. Those who have money fear losing it. And those who don’t are worried about their children’s future. There’s also a fear shared by rich and poor alike: the fear of pesticides, the fear of the air we breathe.

Yan Lianke sees “mythorealism” as next phase of modern Chinese literature (International Examiner, 2024)

 Franz Kafka. Leo Tolstoy. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yan Lianke?

Mandarin readers may love Yan for polemic novels like Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, and The Four Books. English language readers might gravitate toward the first three literary giants. What about a book by this popular Chinese novelist about the future of realist fiction? In Discovering Fiction, Yan Lianke exegetes 19th and 20th century European and Latin American literature in order to define mythorealism — the genre he sees as the next step in China’s literary journey.

***

So, what is mythorealism? I’ll give you Yan’s definition since I’m still a little fuzzy: “…[M]ythorealism is a creative process that rejects the superficial logical relations that exist in real life to explore a kind of invisible and “nonexistent” truth…” (99). What makes this definition murky is the fact that Yan’s just spent a great deal of time analyzing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which debuted the genre of magical realism. It’s not the same as mythorealism.

Yan Lianke, Hyun Ki-young confront unspoken wounds of nations (The Korea Herald, 2025)

Every nation has its dark chapters and scars. But Chinese novelist Yan Lianke noted that Korea's writers are able to face those shadows openly.

"In China, there are certain wounds left unspoken, something a writer cannot face,” Yan said on Thursday during a press conference in Seoul ahead of the Seoul International Writers’ Festival, which kicks off Friday at Ground Seoul.

“So Chinese literature is under certain constraints. To write in China demands tremendous effort and sacrifice," the Beijing-based novelist added.

The acclaimed Chinese novelist, winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and twice shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, is known for novels sharply critical of Chinese society — many of them banned at home.

***

“I would put ‘the truth of humanity, the truth of literature.’ A writer’s experience, like human experience, is limited. But the truths expressed in literature are infinite. Literature must capture the infinite through the finite,” said Yan.

 Yan Lianke wrote 

My 1994 collection Summer Sunset was also banned in China, but while this work is significant within the context of the genre of China’s military literature and its contemporary tradition of realist fiction, it is less significant if considered within the context of my overall oeuvre. The broader the context, the harder it is to specify a work’s significance. Of all my banned books, I hope that people would read Dream of Ding Village and Lenin’s Kisses, not those earlier works. Similarly, when people discuss me, I prefer that they refer to me simply as an author, not as China’s most controversial or most censored author.

My entire life, I have simply sought to produce good works and to be a good writer, and certainly have not aspired to become China’s most controversial and most censored author.

***

Time, age, reality, and the environment have left me feeling empty, vain, and ponderous. I no longer assume that China’s contemporary reality can be significantly improved, and I certainly don’t assume that literature will be able to change that reality. Even if I can’t change reality, at the very least I hope that reality will not change me. Regardless of how hard I try, I’ll never be able to change reality, although at the same time I recognize that reality is constantly transforming me, my literature, and my literary perspective.

Virtually all my friends and colleagues praise my works from the period in the late 1990s when I wrote Streams of Time, Marrow, and The Years, Months, Days, and they ask why I didn’t continue writing in that manner. To this I laugh and reply, “As the saying goes, after you pass that village, you won’t see that shop again.” Why is this so? It is because China’s current era is no longer the one in which I wrote those works, nor is China’s current reality the same as it was then. My reality and state of mind have changed, and one’s writing must necessarily be grounded in one’s current reality and state of mind. The issue is that reality has changed me and my literature, not that my literature has created, shaped, transformed, or maintained that reality.

***

Second, controversy and censorship are not good things, but they are also not necessarily bad. If an author is controversial, this demonstrates that at least he possesses integrity and magnanimity. To the extent that some authors have integrity, we should preserve their works. On the other hand, given that authors don’t have the ability to alter society or reality, their works are ultimately less influential than a single remark in an official document or a gesture by someone in power. Given that an author’s writings cannot change reality, we must simply ask that reality not change the author. We must try to help ensure that the qualities of integrity and truth in the author’s works might endure.

Third, as for an author’s ability to endure, one hopes this will not result in the author’s becoming increasingly distanced from society, the environment, and most readers. Sometimes persistence is not merely persistence, but it is also an opposition to a consolidated position. I have gradually come to understand that because you persist and don’t want to change, you must continuously be the object of controversy. If you persist but find that the controversy around you has stopped, that will be because it was not you but rather society itself that has changed. But that is such a distant eventuality! It is as difficult to imagine as a scenario where an egg and a rock collide and the egg remains intact while the rock shatters.

Think about it. I think he is onto something important.

sch 9/30 

 

 

 

Ending The Week

 Not much to report for Thursday or Friday. Yesterday was spent in tidying up my main room; with plans on finishing up on Friday. Once again, I stayed here for the most part - an early morning trip to the BMV was fruitless, but I did get some supplies at Payless.

I did get the following rejection for "Going After The Kid": 

Thank you for submitting your story to Big Smoke Pulp. I appreciate you considering this anthology for your work.

 

The selection process for this anthology was highly competitive, and unfortunately, your story was not chosen for inclusion in our anthology this time.

I apologize for this form letter rejection and the delay in sending this reply. 

Although I would love to provide feedback for each and every submission, we've received hundreds of entries for our second volume, significantly more than our first, and individualized feedback would be too great a challenge to attempt.

 

In lieu of that, here's a high-level view of what successful entries did to be accepted for this edition:

• Fast paced and high tension: get into the story immediately. Set the scene with action over description.
• Shorter is better: though some longer works have made it through, the overwhelming majority have been south of 2000 words.
• Cliches are okay...sometimes: with shorter word counts, using some cliched tropes helps set the scene so you can get to the action.
• Don't do too much: though you may have a neat or interesting way of formatting your short story, there's a lot you can still do while staying within the lines.
• With a twist: keep me guessing 'til the end. I want to feel like I know what's coming, then be shocked. It's not a requirement to be an actual twist, but subvert my expectations a bit.

The work submitted this round was the highest quality yet. I can honestly say that many of these stories deserve a home. I encourage you to continue submitting your story to more publications. 

Thank you again for submitting your work to us. 

I wish you the very best in your writing career - and hope to see something new for Big Smoke Pulp Vol. 3 next year!

Adriano Ariganello Publisher, Writer, Crowdfunder adriano@pestocomics.com | pestocomics.com Toronto, Ontario, Canada

I did read Modernity is a Predicament: On Jacob Burckhardt and the Italian Renaissance (Marginalia Review of Books).

Mostly, I spent the day working on blog posts.

 Today, I went to lunch at The Dumpling House and then to the group session and then Payless for more supplies.

 I spent most of today working on blog posts, listening to writing podcasts. Now i am thinking of going to bed.

sch  

Trump and Gaza and How Little Changes

 I read Trump's proposal for Gaza, and nothing reeked as insidious. Other than one item.

Not everyone agrees with me on that: Trump’s Plan to Deprive Palestinians Any Say in Their Future (The Intercept)

While Trump’s plan offers the important possibility of a pause or end to Israel’s genocide, the worst of Trump’s plan for Gaza is embedded in its long-term vision. The plan amounts to a blueprint for external neocolonial domination over Gaza, under which Palestinians will have no formal ability to assert their rights or determine their future. Trump’s plan for Gaza denies Palestinians self-determination and says nothing of Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Under the plan, Trump would personally chair an Orwellian “Board of Peace” that would rule over Gaza, with former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side. The Trump-run “board” would convene an unnamed “panel of experts” who would create a “Trump economic development plan” that would “rebuild and energize Gaza.” But dig a little deeper, and it is clear that Trump’s vision for Gaza is yet another page from the Trump family playbook for corruption and self-enrichment.

That "Board of Peace" set off the bells for me, too.

But we are not there yet - Israel and Hamas agree first phase of Gaza ceasefire deal (BBC). Yet, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna endorses Trump for Nobel Peace Prize after Gaza ceasefire (The Hill). Sorry, just getting to a ceasefire is not enough for a Nobel Peace Prize.

But for what has not changed:

Meanwhile, take a look at Radical Hope from Gaza: Aya Al-Hattab's Series in Solarpunk Magazine.

sch 10/9