The devastating critiques of our apocalyptic mess keep coming. I was blown away by McCarrareh The Enchantments of Mammon (2019), by Eisenstein's Sacred economics: Money, gift and society in the age of transition (2021), Heying's A hunter-gatherer's guide to the 21st century: Evolution and the challenges of modern life (2021), Graeber's The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity (2021), by Monbiot's Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet (2022). So many brilliant, moral-boosting calls to use modernity's tools to dissect modernity and make a dent in our looming apocalypse. Each one seems to be the best yet. That goes for Against the Machine: On the unmaking of humanity by Paul Kingsnorth (Welsh roots. Roots are part of the answer). He's not just Chicken Little. There is a path forward – back to the future.

In a PalFest Podcast, Baconi suggests Fire in every direction: a memoir (2025). is the first gay memoir by an Arab writer. Baconi is a Christian Palestinian whose parents fled in the nakba first from Haifa first to Beirut then Amman, where Tareq grew up. He recounts his early, formative life.

The idea of the world 

And God said, Let there be numbers!

WHAT?! What about Genesis's 'Let there be light,' or John's 'In the beginning was the word'? It seems both the Old and New Testaments got it wrong. Or both right! Numbers are words, and Google AI opines about the intricate relationship between light and mathematical concepts, its dual nature as both a particle and a wave, geometric optics, Maxwell’s equations (light as electromagnetic waves), and Einstein's theory of special relativity, which establishes the speed of light as the universal speed limit. And we haven't even got to quantum mechanics. It's all maths to me.

The only timeless Truths 'we' or the universe has/have that are accessible to us are in numbers, maths. Everything else is subject-object, observer, messy Matter.

We laugh at Putin’s labelling LGBTQetc an extremist, terrorist organization. I’m not sure about ‘organization’ but the extremist, terrorist label rings true.

Most ‘gays’ are just guys that never made the transition as a toddler from mommy to daddy as role model. ie, they suffer from arrested development To put ‘gay’ on a pedestal, up there with straight, is a serious mistake.

A two-hour comedy-drama about ping pong?! What chutzpah. Only a Jew could dish this up (who controls Hollywood?) and sell it to the masses. Bravo! Meanwhile the Jewish state is committing genocide and selling it to the masses. Shame!!

Don't you love how Hollywood churns out one holocaust film after another, even comedies, as if playing by a script fashioned in Tel Aviv? Oh, I almost forgot. Defying international law (who cares?), Israel moved its capital to Jerusalem, Not west Jerusalem as was agreed upon in 1948 in the two-state settlement, but the whole kit and kaboodle. Screw the Palestinians.