Last week's US airdrops of 38,000 "meals" for 2 million starving people – starving because of our policy – is a bad joke.

Western leaders stand by as Israel conducts a straightforward expansion to what they tell themselves is unoccupied land, land they say God gave them to do with as they wish – and they wish to destroy all forms of non- Jewish life there.  For this there is no punishment, only blessing and fulfillment of the law, made possible only by US weapons that have flowed freely, most of it funded by taxation and taxpayer debt.

Western leaders and their media are untouched by a US airman's livestreamed self-immolation in protest of US support for Israeli-conducted genocide, collective punishment, calculated removal, extermination, and starvation of religious and ethnic groups.

The US Government has funded, is funding, and the Pentagon is surging the flow of arms and munitions, soldiers and contractors to Israel's operation in Gaza – which is to say a genocide, collective punishment, calculated extermination and removal of a population for purely political and geographic gain.  Nothing that Israel is doing in Gaza or the West Bank, or in southern Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East is improving Israel's security.  For a government to cultivate and channel fear and rage, among its own population and among its neighbors, in order to fight them, is a strategy doomed to failure in the long term, and we are witnessing that unfolding failure in real time today.

The nature of the dwindling choices remaining for Israel in Gaza are well described in a brilliant essay by Big Serge.  He posits that "Israel is a Eschatological Garrison State…and a Settler-Colonial State."

Without severe historical strain, we cannot call the US either of these, as a nation. But the leadership – the blob, the MICIMATT, the permanent bureaucracy, the swamp that inhabits Washington in order to spend money and make war of all kinds – we may classify this "government" as a Settler Colonial State, echoing Civil War themes, and 19th Century moves westward and outward, acquiring new states and dependencies in the wake of killing, assimilating and transferring native populations. Today, D.C. has spawned a new kind of ruling class  – its sights set on overcoming a new brand of native – white rural Americans. They don't have to be white, or rural – just skeptical of the ruling class.