Defunding UNRWA: From Containment to Destruction / Laura Robson

Are there any real mysteries left? Clearly, we’re not the doe-eyed, innocent public we once were, back when Howdy Doody and Alka Seltzer ruled the popular zeitgeist. It’s not enough for things to be true anymore. Now they must pass a more rigorous test: the test of believability in the laboratory of public opinion. And yet somehow there still remain unsolved phenomena to boggle the jaded mind, shake us out of our trances, and remind us never to trust our senses, our reason, our memory, or the evidence. We live in a truly miraculous time, when anything can be true.

But only the best things can be SuperTrue®.

It was a day like any other for young Evalia Cementez. She woke before dawn to steal foxes from the furrier’s foxhouse, skinned them, fed them to her carnivorous chickens, and sewed their pelts into the expanse of fur she was accumulating which was destined to become the most elegant set of window treatments on the entire island of San Guadarico.

As she washed the blood from her hands in the galvanized tub next to the well, she felt the first big drop of rain. It was a raindrop big as a lobster, and it struck her on the back of the neck. Then another fell next to her, and still another. They were big, yellow drops of rain. As big as bananas. In fact, they were bananas. Before she had time to absorb what was happening, bananas were raining from the sky over Evalia’s entire village of Conejos Corners.

By noon, the rain had stopped, leaving the entire region for five miles in every direction covered banana-deep in flesh and peel. Many cheerful goats were hobbled in their enthusiasm, unable to stick their landings. But the danger to goats was minimal compared to the obese, sweaty immensity of the mysteriousness of the bananapocalypse.

Other strange precipitations have given the people of Earth cause to be unnerved. There was the famously documented rain of frogs in both a small village in Mexico and the PT Anderson movie Magnolia. There was the rain of fish in Iowa, at some point in recorded history. And of course the deluge of cats and dogs in the proverbial dimension.

But it is the rain of bananas that most tweaks the cranial thinkwurst of the UltraBelieving devotee of SuperTruth®. And why is that? Is it because the banana is an atheist’s nightmare, because it could only have been created by a Christian God? Could a random process... read more

Are there any real mysteries left? Clearly, we’re not the doe-eyed, innocent public we once were, back when Howdy Doody and Alka Seltzer ruled the popular zeitgeist. It’s not enough for things to be true anymore. Now they must pass a more rigorous test: the test of believability in the laboratory of public opinion. And yet somehow there still remain unsolved phenomena to boggle the jaded mind, shake us out of our trances, and remind us never to trust our senses, our reason, our memory, or the evidence. We live in a truly miraculous time, when anything can be true.

But only the best things can be SuperTrue®.

It was a Saturday séance like any other. The medium, a person sensitive to the presence of spirits of the dead who hovered close to the veil between worlds, intoned instructions to the others gathered, and recited incantations.

The one thing that stood out as different from any séance you might be picturing is that it took place thirty-four thousand years ago, and all the participants were Stone Age cave people.

Did they have candles? No. The cave they had gathered in was lit with twisted plant fiber wicks soaking in animal fat pooled in divots carved at intervals into the stone tabletop. The tabletop was also decorated with red and yellow ochre designs constituting a complex diagram of the spirit world. This schematic bled out from the limits of the tabletop and spread throughout the cave, across the floor, up the walls, and all over the ceiling.

All the better for the Stone Age medium and the avids and adepts assembled to fully inhabit the spiritual realm in both an analogous and an aesthetic sense.

They joined hands, connecting in a sacred circle, as their descendants would do in 19^th Century parlors tens of thousands of years later. The medium, or shaman, for that was her function in her tribe, now brought an eerie, deep tone to her incantations. Her voice was no longer her own, indicating that she’d entered the trance that would allow her to pass through the barrier between the world of living bodies and that of the shades.

The flames guttered in the breeze that passed over them as if a hot, animal breath from deep within the cave’s tunnels. The various hanging shell and bone chimes rattled. Crude furniture fashioned from logs clattered as they hopped and shivered around the chamber. The company were all used to this... read more

Are there any real mysteries left? Clearly, we’re not the doe-eyed, innocent public we once were, back when Howdy Doody and Alka Seltzer ruled the popular zeitgeist. It’s not enough for things to be true anymore. Now they must pass a more rigorous test: the test of believability in the laboratory of public opinion. And yet somehow there still remain unsolved phenomena to boggle the jaded mind, shake us out of our trances, and remind us never to trust our senses, our reason, our memory, or the evidence. We live in a truly miraculous time, when anything can be true. 

But only the best things can be SuperTrue®

“Every economic system that has ever existed has had people defending it as the only system consistent with human nature and insisting that every effort to go beyond it is doomed to fail because it contradicts human nature.” – Economist Richard Wolff

Where did they come from that day, those colorful, obese, amorphous, transparent objects that appeared in the sky above Old Country Buffet on the outskirts of Billings, Montana? Why had they come? Was it merely to blast “Everybody Dance Now” as rainbow lasers streamed out of them in every direction like unicorn projectile vomit? 

Within less than a minute, after several vocally anti-LGBTQI closeted Republican Congressmen had spontaneously orgasmed, gushing in tormented ecstasy until their balls were empty, shriveled husks and they died, the Fat Gay UFOs, as they were dubbed by the media, zoomed off along multiple vectors at startling speed, leaving no trace that they had ever been there. All that remained was empty blue sky… and questions.

That’s the way it is with Fat Gay UFOs. One moment they’re there in Montana, squirting rainbows, blasting disco as they wiggle and jiggle in mid-air like blobs of anti-gravity gelatin while they hover, inscrutable, and the next moment they’ve disappeared leaving no clue as to the reason for their confounding yet joyous visit. 

Or at least that’s the way it was the one time we know they visited here. 

The dead Congressmen they left in their wake were remembered as hypocrites who according to some interpretations got what they deserved. The governor of Texas, in response to the incident, and in supposed solidarity with the slender heterosexual people of his state, ordered a... read more