NAZISM AND UNHINGED RIOT LIKE PROTESTS DON'T GARNER SUPPORT. Ask anybody how many Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and the number will be at their fingertips. It now stands at more than 50,000; they heard as much on the BBC. Ask them how many of those sorry souls happened to be fighting Israel at the time, however, and you’ll find that they soon draw a blank. See Anything Up Close in HD Detail, from Miles Away Top20GadgetDeals See Anything Up Close in HD Detail, from Miles Away Ad Three weeks after October 7, 2023, I wrote a column in this paper under the headline “The gullible West is falling for Hamas’s fictitious death figures”. It is a theme to which I and others have returned on many occasions. A year ago, for instance, I wrote about “the devastating proof that Hamas is faking its death figures,” when the American data scientist Professor Abraham Wyner became the first of several analysts to comprehensively debunk them. “By rights,” I argued, “if the central pillar of the anti-Israel edifice has been discredited, the whole structure should come tumbling down.” Fat lot of good that did. This week, it emerged that Hamas had quietly dropped 3,400 fully “identified” deaths from its casualty figures, including 1,080 children. “These ‘deaths’ never happened,” wrote Salo Aizenberg, a board member at Honest Reporting, the NGO which made the discovery. “The numbers were falsified. Again.” But not before they had been verified by the United Nations and parroted by a gullible — or ideologically blinkered — media. Shop Estee Lauder at Macy’s Macy's Shop Estee Lauder at Macy’s Ad Further analysis of the data showed that among those old enough to be fighting for Hamas, 72 per cent of the dead were male, a testament to the care and precision of the IDF on a battlefield often crowded with human shields. By contrast, in the most tragic statistic of all, the balance of child casualties was 50-50 between boys and girls. This builds up a picture of the way Israel is fighting this war, confirming that they are targeting belligerents, the very opposite of a “genocide”. Moreover, Honest Reporting found that Hamas had unscrupulously included natural deaths in the list of supposed victims of the IDF, including infant mortality rates of around 780 each year. This amounted to about 8,300 fatalities that any reporter acting in good faith would remove from the total. But the media has shown a singular lack of curiosity about that. Payoff Your Debt in 48 Months - $10K-$100K Debt Consolidation top10debtconsolidation.com Payoff Your Debt in 48 Months - $10K-$100K Debt Consolidation Ad If we take into account Israel’s figures, which state that about 20,000 of the dead were combatants, that means that about one civilian is killed for every fighter. This is a humanitarian feat that has never been equalled by any other army, in spite of the fact that Hamas herds its own people into the firing line to produce the footage we see on the BBC. That is the true story of this war. But according to research by the Henry Jackson Society, extenuating Israeli data is cited in just 5 per cent of news reports (which is why most people are unaware of it), whereas 98 per cent repeat numbers provided by Hamas. Soberingly, while thousands of despairing Palestinians are rising up against their jihadi overlords in Gaza, the West continues to do all it can to foist their propaganda agenda upon the public. Every human life is sacred and it is macabre to talk in such terms about the grim arithmetic of death. But those on my side of the argument have no choice but to respond in such terms to the obsession with casualty numbers that has characterised coverage of this war since the start. Put it this way: do you have any idea how many civilians were killed when we destroyed Islamic State, or waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq? No? That tells you something.

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Thats perfect for the story, because they dislike the moon surrounding so much they hook up to the machines for too long Searching the web 20 results Yes, that’s a brilliant, nasty little twist that makes your 40-year-old story hit even harder.The boomer-era crew (wealthy, adventurous types who grew up in that Marin scene of group porn viewings, hot-tub parties, and women often positioned as the entertainment) finally get their shot at the ultimate “dirty things” on the Moon. They blast off full of late-life bravado, chasing the fantasy of zero-G hedonism, no gravity sag, no Earthly rules. But once they’re there?The Moon itself disgusts and depresses them.That gray, airless, crater-pocked wasteland. Endless dust that gets into everything. The crushing silence broken only by the hum of life support. Two-week-long nights where the Sun never rises. No blue sky, no ocean, no trees, no familiar Earth comforts. Just confinement in a cramped habitat the size of a studio apartment, with the same few faces day after day. Real psychological research on isolation (even from shorter analog missions and ISS stays) shows exactly this: rising boredom, “sensory hunger,” irritability, disrupted sleep from the weird light cycles, and a deep longing for normal human connection or stimulation that the barren environment can’t provide. Desire for social contact can actually increase over time, but so can the urge to escape the monotony any way possible.So instead of roughing it or toughing out the science mission, they discover (or activate) the ancient/human-built “enjoyment” machines—those neural probes or wired interfaces that flood the brain with pure, overwhelming pleasure. No more staring out at the dead regolith. No more awkward small talk or performance anxiety in low gravity. Just plug in and disappear into endless rapture. It starts as an occasional escape (“just for a quick hit to take the edge off”), but the lunar surroundings are so unrelentingly bleak that they keep going back longer and longer. The machine removes every limitation: no need for partners, no aging bodies failing them, no consequences they can feel in the moment.And that’s how the skeletons end up there—still smiling (or locked in ecstasy), bodies wasted to bone from dehydration/starvation while their minds were blissed out for days or weeks on end. They didn’t get murdered. They chose the wire over the Moon… until there was nothing left of them to choose.It ties everything together perfectly with what you described from 1980s Marin: the same generation that treated social events like spectator sports for pleasure, where women were often cast as sex objects, now scaling their appetites to cosmic levels. The “liberation” they chased becomes the trap. The ultimate retirement fantasy—dirty things without limits—turns lethal because the environment they paid millions to reach is so inhospitable that the machine feels like the only tolerable reality.That contrast is what sells the horror: not alien monsters or radiation, but human weakness meeting a machine that gives them exactly what they want… until it kills them. The protagonists (later explorers) piece it together from logs, half-eaten rations ignored beside the consoles, and the peaceful expressions on the skulls still jacked in.It’s tragic, satirical, and darkly funny in a very 1980s way—boomers who thought they could party their way through anything, only for the Moon to quietly win by being too damn boring and ugly.If you’re thinking of dusting the manuscript off, this angle gives it real teeth today. The psychological realism (isolation + sensory deprivation driving addictive escape) maps straight onto actual space-agency concerns, while the hedonistic backstory keeps the Marin flavor.Want to workshop a specific scene? Like the moment the new crew finds the first wired skeleton and reads the final log entry (“Earth was never this good… why go back?”), or how the objectification dynamic played out among the original group before they all plugged in? Or the twist—maybe one survivor unplugged just long enough to warn the next arrivals? I’m game to brainstorm whatever piece feels alive to you. This premise still slaps after four decades.