"A Circus For Humanity's Decline"

Palestinians gather to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen in Khan Younis. Source: Gulf Today, "Several children among 50 killed as airstrikes hit Gaza humanitarian zone" Jan 3, 2025

I'm not a big music fan and before right now I had no idea who Iyah May was. Journalist Sam Husseini shared her recent song "Karmageddon" as a transcript and embed on his substack, and now I'm sharing it with you. I think the line "a circus for humanity's decline" sums up our current situation about as well as any of the essays I've read as the dreadful year 2024 morphed into the much-dreaded 2025.

From the description posted with the video:

While ‘Karmageddon’ has sparked significant conversation and controversy, Iyah has stood her ground. She refused to compromise her vision when asked to change a key lyric line, leading to the end of her contract with her manager. She chose to walk away from her record label and now, fully independent, Iyah continues to carve her own path as an artist. Her fearless approach is shaped by her unique perspective as a qualified medical doctor, having worked on the frontlines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 An Australian doctor during the pandemic now succeeding as a nymphet rapper? All part of the circus.

Husseini compares this particular song to another indie anthem that went viral: "Rich Men North Of Richmond". (I blogged about that one and a contemporaneous astroturf offering here in August 2023.) Anthony Oliver focused on the domestic economy that is failing most in the U.S. but his song also predated Israel's genocide in Gaza. Iyah May, who comes from a part of Oz I've heard described as "like your Deep South," has written her protest song with a more international focus, combining the Hindu/Buddhist concept of karma with the Christian concept of Armageddon, the war to end all wars/human life of the planet.

[Intro]
I open up my phone on a Monday mornin'
Starin' at my screen, I'm tired and a little lonely
Mr. Musk, he said some s***, the lefts are angry
Twitter wars and Gaza, man, it's overwhelming
Maybe that's how life becomes when

[Verse 1]
People less important than a profit line
No one cares about your dreams, just pay your tax on time
Keep scrollin'
Hold me near to you now

[Verse 2]
Gender, guns, religion, and abortion rights
You better pick a tribe and hate the other side
Keep scrollin'
(But did you see Taylor live?)

[Chorus]
Man-made virus, watch the millions die
Biggеst profit of their lives
Herе's inflation, that's your prize
This is Karmageddon

Turn on the news and eat their lies
Kim or Kanye, pick a side
Cancel culture, what a vibe
This is Karmageddon

Corporations swear they never lie
Politicians bribed for life
More than war, it's genocide
This is Karmageddon

Welcome to the chaos of the times
If you go left and I go right
Pray we make it out alive
This is Karmageddon

[Verse 3]
It's fashion week, celebs lose ribs
Balenciaga, how's the kids?
Just ask Drake, he's losing beef
Kendrick killed him in his sleep

[Verse 4]
Diss tracks about beatin' up your queen
While women dyin' doesn't cause a scene
While we're fed all these distractions
Kids are killed from Israel's actions

[Bridge]
I'ma speak my mind
Sick to death of all these crazy lies
A circus for humanity's decline
We just want a peaceful life
Give the people back their rights
And I've still got a beef
Cause Fauci's laughin' and we've been asleep
And WHO's a liar and it's runnin' deep
Big pharma finna eat
They a devil, make 'em weak

[Chorus]
Man-made virus, watch the millions die
Biggest profit of their lives
Here's inflation, that's your prize
This is Karmageddon

Turn on the news and eat their lies
Kim or Kanye, pick a side
Cancel culture, what a vibe
This is Karmageddon

Corporations swear they never lie
Politicians bribed for life
More than war, it's genocide
This is Karmageddon

Welcome to the chaos of the times
If you go left and I go right
Pray we make it out alive
This is Karmageddon

Source: Newsweek

Some right-wing influencers have concluded from this song that May is "on their side." Agree or disagree?

As Israel Gobbles Up Syria, Don't Look Away From Gaza

 

No, this is not two Zionists holding guns over baby Jesus. But it is a depiction of a newborn Palestinian under threat of imperial violence the West Bank. 

As Israel rushes to gobble up Syria, the world is distracted and sometimes even relieved to find a reason to look away from the horrors and suffering ongoing in Gaza. 

https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1867239362737619273

I'm not going to show you the badly burned 4 year old crying for his mother and father who are dead. Why? Because I cannot stand to look at him and then go on living.

Instead, here are some survivors clinging to a scrap of hope that they, too, may live.

https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1867595843500433425

We in the northern hemisphere are approaching the shortest day, and the winter solstice this year will be dark indeed. No amount of light or candles or goodwill among humans can erase scenes like this once you've seen them:

Is this a scene from medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch warning that humanity might descend to the lowest depths of hell? No, these are Palestinian men who were forced out of refugee camps in northern Gaza by Israeli soldiers marching them to...their death? There's really nowhere else for them to go. As intended. 

If you can stand it, you can see the longer video this is a screenshot from here: https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1866087123629023507.

Christ in limbo, indeed.

Hating Bad Orange Man More Than Gaza Genocide You're Funding?

It's hard for me to understand how people could be more upset about the potential return of the bad orange man than about currently funding the pulverizing of children sheltering in a school. 

When I say pulverizing I mean the people who died at the Tabi'een School on August 10 were unrecognizable in death.

https://x.com/DrMadsGilbert/status/1822771505903882496

These days I often think of Orwell's, 1984, where he has the protagonist grappling with this conundrum: 

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. 

It's hard to make this happen without torturing someone, so our corporate overlords' long term strategy has been to control the evidence that reaches your eyes and ears. 

It's why shouting "Free Palestine!" at a campaign event for VP Harris will get you dragged away by security and dissed from the podium. Also threatened with the return of the bad orange man you love to hate.

If you've managed to get off the corporate news feed approved by the oligarchy, your eyes and ears have seen and heard evidence of horrifying things. Many of your neighbors and your old friends do not know these things because they rely on the New York Times or CNN or Fox to get "news."  

Trigger warning: sexual assault, violence targeting children

https://x.com/martyrabuh/status/1821305985509814650

For instance, the systematic torture of imprisoned -- including being sodomized, in some cases raped to death, by Israeli soldiers -- that is official Israeli policy.

https://x.com/OmarBaddar/status/1815428315915973042

For instance, the routine killing of children by snipers who know exactly who they're aiming at.

https://x.com/Glia_Intl/status/1819711401469894769

For instance, the epidemic diseases like polio ravaging Gaza as health infrastructure has been deliberately destroyed throughout the strip.

Displaced Palestinian children queue to for food distributed by aid organizations in Beit Lahia, Gaza. Israel's allies have condemned Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich for calling the starvation of Palestinians "just and moral." Abood Abusalama/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images - Source: Newsweek

For instance, starvation and deprivation of potable water as a deliberate policy in Gaza.

For instance, the fact that U.S. factories make the bombs and the warplanes used to destroy Gaza, and U.S. taxpayers pay for them.

Hate is a thrilling emotion, and fear is a powerful motivator. Glenn Greenwald reminded us that Orwell described the "orange man bad" strategy aptly in Animal Farm where the ascendent pigs threaten the other animals with the prospect of the farmer coming back.

Corporate news constantly hypes the orange man as a threat -- but isn't his name being constantly in the "liberal" media a hint that he'll be elected again (and isn't that what all those trials were really about?). That's how he won in 2016 and how I knew he'd get the Republican nomination in 2024.

I hate fascist government and I'm scared of what it does to the most vulnerable (and, eventually, all of us). But none of the celebrities who are elevated to a position to be official spox scare me as much as the genocide they run interference for.

Biden's Trojan Pier & A Fake Aid Truck Reveal U.S. Boots On The Ground In Gaza

Control of the narrative being a signature of the Zionist project, last week's use of a fake aid truck full of soldiers has been lauded by pro-Israel press as a grand success, even as the raid killed hundreds of bystanders in order to snatch back four hostages.

At least some of the hostages were Israeli soldiers who would be more accurately described as prisoners of war.

Eyewitness testimony from some who survived in Nuseirat.

Among the hundreds killed were three other hostages, including one American. 

A salient feature of the Oct 7 breakout from Gaza was that the Israeli military killed many Israelis. (Zionists continue to claim that Hamas fighters killed all 1,200 victims, but that was always a lie.) Now, it appears that U.S. Special Forces are helping kill U.S. citizens to "liberate" them. Got it.

As the world watched U.S. taxpayers bleed money to build a pier off Gaza ostensibly to deliver humanitarian aid, almost no one believed that story. What the pier would eventually be used for was uncertain, but delivering food to a population being deliberately starved by Israel with U.S. backing wasn't likely. Now we see that the Trojan Pier is useful for delivering Trojan food trucks.

Most of the deaths in Nuseirat refugee camp occurred when a market was bombed to clear a path for Israeli vehicles.

Much has been made of the condition of the hostages who returned. All Israelis appear to have been fed adequately -- unlike the skeletons who emerge from months or years of captivity in Israel's archipelago of gulags for Palestinians. The Zionist press is accusing the 20-something hostages of having Stockholm Syndrome, a fake psychiatric condition where captives identify with their captors who, for example, "cynically" baked them a birthday cake. In fact, the reason Israeli children are prevented from ever meeting Palestinians is to conceal the fact that the indigenous culture has so many admirable qualities e.g. hospitality, also compassion.

One of the original Zionist crimes of the Nakba, besides outright murder, was the burning of ancient olive groves. A food source for an entire region, and one that takes years to come to maturity. Settlers in the West Bank continue this practice today although sometimes they use bulldozers to uproot the trees instead of setting fire to them. 

Weaponizing food has been a key feature of the genocide in Gaza: the Flour Massacres where aid trucks lure starving Palestinians out where snipers finish them off, the rioting Israeli civilians who block aid trucks and loot them so that no starving Palestinian children are fed.

Weaponizing the Gaza pier surprises no one. Well, possibly it surprised President Biden, who appears to be losing several marbles a day recently. One wonders if he can remember why, or even if, it was built by his administration. Does he care if the Pentagon has used it to put boots on the ground in Gaza? 

Ansar Allah (aka the Houthis) are about to get hypersonic weapons to continue their blockade of shipping that supports Israel. U.S. warships have already been hit by conventional missiles launched from Yemen. Yet another example of pulling down the curtain that conceals U.S. direct involvement in the Gaza genocide.

One hundred thousand protesters gathered outside the White House last weekend with a "red line" for Biden that contained the names of tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October. Chants included "Hey hey ho ho, Genocide Joe has got to go." But if Trump is elected -- and I predict, based on the corporate press keeping him constantly in the news, that he will be -- the genocide will likely continue much as it has. 

Voting will not fix our rapid descent into the hell created by our own evil actions.

The song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now (parody)" by Katie Halper and Daniel Maté has been stuck in my head for days now. Lyrics are in the description on YouTube.

Only a general strike will bring the U.S. war machine to a halt. May I live to see it.

Disrupting Business As Usual

Trigger Warning: This blog post contains a photograph of a Palestinian child starved to death by Zionist blockade of Gaza.

I can't have been the only person who saw that the Key Bridge over Baltimore Harbor had collapsed and thought, That will disrupt commerce and the war machine significantly. Probably for years. More than a mile long, the bridge was an integral part of the Interstate-695 highway system that connects to "the Beltway" in the Washington DC/Virginia/Maryland region. That's the belly of the military contracting beast, and the bridge being out of commission is and will remain a big deal.

The bridge is named for Francis Scott Key, composer of  our odious U.S. national anthem that glorifies "rocket's red glare and bombs bursting in air" -- so maybe there is some violent karma at work here, too.

The ship that hit the Key was registered in Singapore and video shows it having power problems just prior to striking the bridge support, so there's little suspicion it was deliberate. Of course Congress has demonstrated repeatedly that they cannot distinguish between Singapore and China, at least where TikTok owners and operators are concerned. So who knows who will get blamed for what was most likely an accident. 

Prayers up for the bridge workers and motorists plunged into frigid water in the dead of night (1am).

This tragedy unfolds amidst context of constantly escalating disruptions to business as usual while genocide in Gaza continues. 

"This is not a photo of a mummy or an embalmed body retrieved from one of Gaza’s ancient cemeteries. This is a photo of Yazan Kafarneh, a child who died of severe malnutrition during Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip." Source: Mondoweiss

This morning my husband shared news that Gazans had drowned swimming out to retrieve the paltry aid being airdropped into the Mediterranean Sea. He and I have agreed we will both keep getting louder and more disruptive as long as the U.S. continues funding -- and corporations continue profiting -- from torturing millions Palestinians to death to steal their land.

Here's a proposal for April 15 from the Coordinated Economic Blockade to Free Palestine.

The UN passing a mealymouthed temporary ceasefire resolution that does not even call for the release of the thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children in their prisons is of little interest to me. So what if the US abstained after vetoing other such resolutions? Obtaining bargaining chips to secure the prisoners' release is the reason that Hamas took hostages on October 7. Any agreement that doesn't start there is public relations and not worth wasting my time considering.

Here's the real news: Congress passed and Biden signed a fiscal year 2024 budget that has more than $1 trillion allocated for death, destruction, and new yachts for General Dynamics executives.

Also note that nuclear weapons spending is hidden in the Energy Department's budget line, so even $1.118 trillion is an understatement of the cost to operate our military and militarized State Department for another year.

This is unsustainable. A nation with this moral position deserves to be disrupted constantly. Let's go!

For a ShutDown4Palestine action near you visit shutitdown4palestine.org.