Ondine

A girl was murdered and buried inside her brother’s tent. For twenty days, no one knew. There are moments when I feel as though this land is not merely wounded, but marked by something older than suffering, something that seeps into the soil and into the souls of those who walk upon it. Not because beauty is absent, no, beauty still exists here, stubborn and fragile, like a flower growing through cracked stone. But because pain here does not end. It does not pass. It accumulates, layer upon layer, until it becomes the air itself. And if I am honest, there are things I hate here far more than I love. I confess this quietly, almost with shame, as though I am betraying something sacred. Yet reality has been relentless, so relentless that there is rarely space to speak of these things aloud, as though even words must struggle to survive. One of those things is this: The quiet, normalized injustice against girls. Here, many girls do not live. They endure. They exist the way one carries a burden that was never chosen, yet cannot be put down. They grow up beneath an invisible weight, in a world that observes them with suspicion rather than shelters them with care. Their existence is examined, measured, doubted. Today, they discovered the body of a girl. She had been killed by her own brother more than twenty days ago, and buried inside his tent. Twenty days. Twenty days during which the earth held her silence, while life continued above her, indifferent, distracted, exhausted. A human life reduced to stillness beneath the ground, hidden in the very place that was meant to protect her. The shelter became the grave. The brother became the executioner. And the world, meanwhile, continued to breathe. And the reason? It will be the same cursed word, always ready, always waiting. A word that society accepts, and around which even the law, at times, bends as though compelled by an invisible force. “Honor.” What a terrifying word. Hollow, and yet filled with blood. A word capable of transforming love into suspicion, suspicion into judgment, and judgment into death. A word that allows the hand meant to protect to become the hand that kills. Here, “honor” may begin with something as small as a phone call. A conversation. A message. It may begin with her clothes. A pair of pants. It may begin with her walking in a public place beside a man. And suddenly, that is enough. Enough for suspicion. Enough for judgment. Enough, in the eyes of some, for death. There is something profoundly broken in a place where a girl must constantly justify her right to exist safely, where her life can be taken and explained away with a single word, as though the complexity of a human soul could be erased by a syllable. But perhaps the most painful part is not only the crime itself. It is how familiar it feels. How expected. How easily it dissolves into the noise of everything else, swallowed by the endless procession of tragedies, each one stepping over the last. Sometimes I wonder how much a place can demand from you before love begins to erode into something else. Not hatred, no, something quieter, something more dangerous. A fatigue of the heart. Because each time I believe I have reached the limit of what I can bear, this land finds a new way to push me further, to make me question it again, to wound me in a way that does not heal. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, like the fading of a light at dusk, it makes me love it less. #HerLifeMatters #JusticeForHer

micro dosing hell by staying informed and educated

An excellent day to post Tom Holland, who earned his chops in ballet and the theatrical arts.

the way this is actually so easy to understand😭

Heartbroken doesn’t even begin to cover it. Catherine O’Hara was one of a kind. A rare light in this world and her passing hits with a weight I can’t fully put into words. She wasn’t just a legendary artist, actor and comedian. She was an ambassador for Canada in the truest sense: brilliant, fearless, deeply original, and so full of humanity. She made the world laugh, but she also made people feel seen. As an artist, she inspired me more than she’ll ever know. She set the bar for what it means to represent your country with excellence and grace and all without ever losing warmth or humility. My heart is broken for her family, her loved ones, and everyone who adored her, both here in Canada and around the world. If you’re grieving this loss, you’re not alone. We’re all holding a piece of this sadness together. Rest easy, Catherine. Thank you for everything. 🇨🇦❤️

My late cousin, who I adored and miss every day, once said to me: Never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word. It means they learned it by reading.

I used to think this movie was a little too over the top but that shows what I know.

Textbook Stolen Valour right here.

If all the billionaires take a vacation for a whole month, nothing happens If dock workers, line cooks, nannies & truck drivers all refused to work today, whole entire economy would be thrown in crisis This is the difference between the essential worker & the billionaire leech

"On this day in 1980, the Canadian government and Canadian officials in Iran (who protected the Americans for two months at great risk to themselves), with some assistance from the CIA, rescued six Americans in hiding in Tehran, Iran" There I fixed it for you.

I am a citizen of Gaza, a tragic hero in an absurd play that no one applauds. I awoke at six in the morning and prayed at dawn, as though pleading for a salvation that never arrives. Then I sat for an hour, watching time crawl like a wounded creature, waiting for the rest of my family to rise within our single tent—a narrow kingdom of exile and endurance. I prepared my morning coffee, the only ritual that still convinces me I remain human. We lingered in stillness until eleven, doing nothing but counting our small daily defeats and calling them “life.” I went to the food kitchen like a knight standing in the queue of broken dignity, then to the line for drinkable water, as if begging the world for a basic human right it no longer recognizes. After that, I queued for bread—bread that has become a symbol of survival rather than mere nourishment. I returned home to practice my true profession: waiting. Waiting without horizon, a routine that slowly strangles the soul, a life trapped in an endless loop, as though we are characters in a Shakespearean tragedy written in the ink of helplessness. This day is not unique—it is merely a replica of countless days before it. For three years, time has circled the same wound, where nothing changes but the growing burden of patience, and the only hope left is the one we are forced to invent so we do not break.

It was around midday, that hour when the body continues out of habit but the soul has already collapsed. I remember thinking, without surprise, that exhaustion has its own clarity, a cruel lucidity in which illusions no longer survive. That was when she entered. I did not recognize her. And yet she was familiar, because suffering here has a single face, endlessly replicated, as if stamped from the same mold. She held her child close, not with tenderness alone, but with caution, as one carries something already threatened by the world. She hesitated before speaking, and when she did, her voice was so quiet it seemed almost ashamed of itself. “How much does the examination cost?” I have learned to fear this question more than any symptom. It is asked only when a person has already calculated the price of despair, when illness must be measured against hunger, and a child’s right to care is weighed against the arithmetic of survival. I told her the clinic was free. She entered my room carrying a four-month-old infant. Four months, an age at which a human being should know only warmth, rhythm, and protection. Instead, this child had been born into a time that recognizes none of these things. A time that devours even its infants without apology. The complaints were ordinary. Difficulty breathing. Persistent crying. Diarrhea that had not stopped. I listened, nodded, examined, as I have done hundreds of times. Illness here has become routine, and routine is the most frightening thing of all. But then I noticed the clothing. Or rather, the absence of it. The baby wore a single winter pajama, and over it a thin short-sleeved shirt. That was all. Two inadequate layers on a body that had barely begun to learn how to survive cold. Outside, the wind clawed at the walls of the clinic, carrying with it something harsher than weather, something almost intentional. I did not ask the mother why. I have stopped asking such questions. Not because I lack curiosity, but because I lack the strength to receive the answers. Each explanation here is not an explanation at all. It is an accusation, and I already feel accused enough. I gave what medications we had. For the child. For the mother. The act felt mechanical, almost dishonest, as though I were performing medicine while knowing it was not medicine that this child required. She turned to leave. Then stopped. I recognized that pause. It is the pause of someone who has already decided to speak, but still hopes not to need to. She came back. “I have been displaced for a long time,” she said. She spoke carefully, as if each word might be taken from her. “This is the only clothing I have for my baby. A charity gave it to us. I am not asking for anything.” She paused, and I could see that what followed cost her more than pride. “At night, in the tent, I wake up and find her very cold. Sometimes her skin looks bluish. Dry. Fragile. As if it might break. Is this dangerous for her? Is there anything I can do? Anywhere I can go?” The truth was not complicated. It was not hidden behind medical terminology or ethical uncertainty. It was simple, and because it was simple, it was unbearable. There was nothing she could do. And there was nothing I could do either. This child was not merely her mother’s responsibility. That was a convenient lie we tell the poor. This child belonged to everyone who made this war possible, to everyone who justified it, to everyone who watched displacement unfold and called it inevitable. She belonged to those who speak of policy while infants turn blue in the dark. I gave her an emergency thermal blanket. I handed her the blanket as one might place a cloth over a corpse. Not to reverse death, but to acknowledge it. And the question that followed me, long after she was gone, was not whether I had done my duty. It was whether you are truly doing all that you can. #WoundedGaza

⚡️🇨🇦🇮🇱Canadian Member Of Parliament Yeun Pau Woo: “If the remembrance of a genocide 90 years ago cannot evoke concern for a genocide taking place today, what is the meaning of "never again"? And if the answer is that "never again" only applies to Jews, I rest my case.”

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

Capitalism 1970: "work hard, you too can be rich" Capitalism 1990: "work hard & a few crumbs will fall down" Capitalism 2026 "you should be willing to die in order to save the economy for the top 1%"

In English, we say, “Can I be a child again?” But in poetry, we say, “Take me back to when laughter was endless, and my dreams were bigger than my fears.”

No mentally healthy person wants to rule the world. Nobody with a functioning conscience and a working empathy center in their brain is interested in becoming a billionaire. We are ruled by the most dysfunctional members of our species. The most wounded, neurotic and sociopathic among us. The least wise, caring and insightful. What drives a person to claw their way to the top of a wildly sick society and become a lord of the dystopia? What compels someone to amass obscene amounts of wealth in a world where so many have far too little? What causes someone to ascend to political leadership of a power structure that's built for the purpose of robbing and oppressing the most underprivileged populations on earth? Nothing wholesome, to be sure. That impulse is never coming from anywhere good. The worst among us are striving to prevail in this dystopia by riding the tides of its ugliest inclinations, while the best among us are striving to dismantle the dystopia and replace it with something kind and equitable. This causes the worst of us to be elevated to the top and the best of us to be smacked down to the bottom. Under our current system easiest way to set yourself on a trajectory from millionaire to billionaire to trillionaire is to exploit workers, crush your competition, plunder the available resources of the global south, externalize the costs of industry onto society and the ecosystem, bribe the government to advance your corporate interests via lobbying and campaign donations, contract with the most murderous military and intelligence agencies in the world, and psychologically manipulate the public into consuming products and services they don't need. Who is going to be most successful in this endeavor? The very worst people alive. People whose hearts and minds are so stunted and dysfunctional that they see other human beings as tools for their own personal enrichment, to be used up and discarded like juice boxes or condoms. These are the people who are touching the most lives on this planet. These are the people whose decisions affect the most people. Michael Parenti has passed away after a luminous life advancing powerful ideas and insights about the abusive dynamics of human civilization and how best to address them. He did not die a wealthy man. The mainstream papers did not report on his departure from our world. Only a relatively small percentage of the population is aware he ever lived. But everyone knows who Elon Musk is. Everyone knows who Jeff Bezos is. Who Bill Gates is. The best of us live and die in relative obscurity, generally being subjected to scorn and derision from the ruling establishment the entire time. The worst of us become plutocratic demigods. It's an uphill battle. You spend your life swimming against dystopia, and you are not handsomely rewarded for your efforts. You'll get deplatformed, censored and smeared. You might even get shot by government agents for standing up for the disempowered. And you'll definitely never be a billionaire. But it's absolutely worth it, and you should do it. Fighting for truth and justice in a civilization made of injustice and deceit is the only way to live. It's the only way to feel satisfied with your efforts during this life. The only way to be sure that when you are on your deathbed you can look back and know you spent your time here in a right and admirable way. It costs a lot to fight for a healthy world. But it costs a lot more not to.