[110] Red Flag Conditions.

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*Due to technical difficulties, there is no audio version available. Next week. Inshallah.
I've been in Southern California for the past few weeks. It has been excessively hot - and humid too – which is weird in a desert climate. There are hurricanes called Fausto and Genevieve, far away in the Pacific. They’ve turned this place tropical.
Down at the beach, the water is warm, the waves are huge and the rip currents are overwhelming. The lifeguards put up red flags to warn people that, right now, the Pacific is not a playground. The dolphins and pelicans sure do disagree.
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My mom lives seven miles from the Pacific, as the crow flies. There are a lot of crows in her neighborhood. There are also a lot of hummingbirds. When they whiz by, it sounds like light sabers from a Star Wars movie. Also, every time I come back home to visit, I see a black Phoebe right outside my childhood bedroom.
I wonder if it might be my dad coming by to check on us.
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My mom’s grassy backyard, full of fruit trees, has been invaded by mosquitos. I grew up in this house. Back in the 80s and 90s, there weren’t any mosquitos. They started showing up in the summers, maybe five years ago. My mom calls them “ankle-biters.”
There’s a surge of West Nile Virus in Orange County this year. So we spread a waxy substance with oils made of citronella, cedarwood, rosemary and lemongrass all over our legs to keep them at bay.
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My mom lives right next to the town of Ladera Ranch, where a horrifying number of young people have been diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma, an extremely rare form of bone and soft tissue cancer. A lot of pets and adults in Ladera Ranch are getting other kinds of cancer too.
They don’t have any definitive proof, but people around here know that the cancer comes from the pesticides and herbicides the city has been spraying all over its parks for years.
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Most Americans are well-aware that the Midwest is currently battling an outbreak of Cyclosporiasis. A friend texted me last week to ask if I got the Michigan Mudslides.
Apparently, the parasite that’s causing explosive diarrhea came from a factory down in Mexico that sources iceberg lettuce for Taco Bell restaurants.
The people getting paid a miniscule amount to pick produce in the sweltering heat do not have access to proper hygiene after they use the toilet.
The people at the drive thru, ordering tacos thousands of miles away, are also paying the price.
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My deep ancestors did not have to deal with this stuff. They spent their entire lives in little villages, centuries before they became "civilized," before they were absorbed into countries called Germany, Ireland, England and Wales. The lifestyles of my way back family members – and yours too – were simple, collective and intimate.
They knew about a hundred other humans their entire lives. They also knew the names of every species of flora and fauna in their watershed. They were omnivores who foraged and hunted for everything on their plates.
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About fifteen years ago, Lindsay and I became vegetarians. Our dear friend Mike started feeding us books and documentaries about factory farming. We decided to stop eating animal products because, in imperial America, most of it is sourced by torturing animals, poisoning the land and water, and exploiting workers.
I like meat. A lot.
But after a little research, I realized that meat is a serious justice issue.
So I gave it up.
Now I am dealing with B12 deficiency. Because I boycotted meat without supplementing my diet.
For the past five years, I’ve navigated waves of fatigue and brain fog. I figured these were lingering after-effects of that insane Delta strand of coronavirus I caught in the summer of 2021. But this is how Covid works, exploiting and accelerating all of our pre-existing conditions.
I just started taking 5000 mg doses of B12 to try to get back to where my levels were in the Obama years.
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Last week, on our way home from visiting our friends in Pasadena, we stopped in Irvine to refuel. It was $6.19 a gallon for unleaded.
In early March, right after the u.s. and Israel began bombing Iran (again), I filled up our Corolla in Detroit.
It cost $3.09.
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Pete Hegseth recently confessed that the Pentagon has spent $37 billion on Operation Epic Fury. He is asking for $60 billion more. The Pentagon also just came out with updated casualty counts. 18 US troops have been killed and 624 have been wounded since February 28.
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This week, a Palestinian friend of mine asked me how I felt about the possibility that Benjamin Netanyahu might lose his election this Fall in Israel.
This does not make me hopeful.
Because the century-long hurricanes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran were not caused by one evil person. They are the horrific symptoms of a parasite called “settler-colonialism.”
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The hyper-focus on Netanyahu serves a function: it protects the parasite. Israel is a powerful “junior partner” of Western corporate interests. When Netanyahu is dead and gone – or locked up as a war criminal – the West and its junior partner will continue doing all the same dreadful things that they’ve done since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, when the British foreign secretary proclaimed that Palestine would become “the Jewish Homeland.”
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Dr. Hatem Bazian at UC Berkeley says that Westerners do not need more information about Palestine. They need a reorientation. The problem is not Netanyahu, or the current right-wing Israeli government. It's settler-colonialism.
Dr. Bazian says that we must go further back, to the 17th century, when Christian Zionists wanted to get rid of the “Jewish Problem” in Europe by sending God’s Chosen People back to the Holy Land. This required killing Muslims, the ultimate enemy of the Christian West.
The creation and maintenance of the modern state of Israel is a continuation of the Crusades.
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Of course, the settler-colonial parasite is not only causing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine. It is also the root cause of the bulging ICE budget, border militarization, a miniscule minimum wage, mass incarceration, climate catastrophe, cancer, our dysfunctional profit-driven healthcare system, food-borne illness, extreme fossil-fuel extraction and an epidemic of home evictions.
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The symptoms of the settler-colonial parasite are on full display in the 2026 primaries. This week, we are dealing with the Michigan Mudslides. Liberal voters up and down the state are claiming that they must vote for Haley Stevens, the corporate-sponsored Israel mascot. Because they believe that the progressive Arab Muslim Abdul El-Sayed won’t be able to beat the Republican in November.
Here’s the Crusader calculus:
We have to eat out of the unwashed hands of the genocide-supporter so that the Trumper won’t win.
Fear has been steering this ship for centuries.
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We do not need more information. We need a reorientation.
This is a spiritual and emotional move.
To reorient is to wave the red flag on the old racist conditioning, to break rank with a Western culture committed to the Crusader calculus, to completely overhaul this parched political climate that justifies genocide of Muslim-majority populations.
Jesus of Nazareth called it repentance.
It's an initiation into Something Else. It pivots away from the false security of the wealthy and powerful. It finds God in the faces of those on the bottom rung of society: the stripped-down, incarcerated, emaciated and migrating.
Reorientation is soul recovery - and it only costs everything.
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For many Michigan voters, the only thing they know about this Senate race is what they see on social media, TV ads, or receive from the US Postal Service.
$46 million from pro-Israel PACs can buy a lot of junk mail.
The flyers say that Abdul El-Sayed is disrespectful towards women like Gretchen Whitmer and Michelle Obama – and that he is not a real medical doctor. They show Haley Stevens in photos with Barack Obama, and other Black people who have not endorsed her.
But there is hope that a reorientation might be happening in Michigan.
Four days before the election, Haley Stevens posted an unhinged message on social media saying that Abdul El-Sayed blames all his problems on Jewish Americans. She had to pull out the antisemitism card because voters, by and large, aren't buying all her propaganda.
The Stevens campaign is experiencing red flag conditions.
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Two days before I flew out to Southern California, I drove over to Dearborn, in the 90-degree heat, to see the Wall of Tears installation at Peace Park on Michigan Ave. It memorializes the 18,457+ children murdered in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to July 19, 2025.
The Wall of Tears lists the names – in English and Arabic – of all these kids.
There are also photos of some of them, with a little summary of who they were, before they became martyrs. Like Saja Al-Hawajri, a 12-year-old who loved football and rooted for Real Madrid and Ronaldo.
The Wall of Tears was created by artist Phil Buehler, who first installed it in Brooklyn, New York in January on the anniversary of the death of Hind Rajab, who was murdered by Israeli forces firing 335 rounds at the car her family was riding in.
The Crusades have come to this. Firing 335 rounds at a car with a 5-year-old in the backseat. It was not a mistake - or an outlier. It was a typical symptom of the settler-colonial parasite.
Palestine is more than just an electoral red line for me. Palestine is the primary source of a spiritual, emotional and political reorientation of everything.
If this sounds dramatic, just imagine what it must be like to live on the other side of Western drones, bombs and ambitions. 

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