A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
The genocide has been on-going in slow motion for decades, so there’s not chance in hell that Israel would stop, no matter what Hamas does. It’s baked into the country’s political system: It can’t have a one-state solution and remain a Jewish ethno-state, and it can’t have a two-state solution because the settlers are a vital part of the governing coalition. The only solution that Israeli politics can allow is to remove the people of Palestine. I’m sure they’d be happy with ethnic cleansing, but no other country can practically take in that many refugees, so the final solution is to simply kill them, which the IDF has shown no hesitation to do.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to within days announce sanctions against the Israel Defense Forces “Netzah Yehuda” battalion for human rights violations in the occupied West Bank, three U.S. sources with knowledge of the issue told Axios....
Serious mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, this represents a major shift in U.S. policy. On the other hand, JFC, too little, too late. We should be sending the Navy to escort and protect the Gaza aid flotilla. (We know what the terrorists did to the last one in 2010.)
The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept....
Remember how NYT reporter Judith Miller teamed up the the neo-cons in Dick Cheney’s circle to “stovepipe” their phony intelligence about Iraq’s WMD to the mainstream media, which they could then cite as part of their justification for the invasion?
Remember also how, after Miller was disgraced and forced to resign, the Times had a public reckoning about its role as a mouthpiece for the establishment in selling a war on false pretenses?
I’d be surprised, because that last bit never happened. They just sort of moved on like it never happened.
I’m on a train trip across the U.S. today, so I will add what I see out the window: A landscape systematically strip-mined of beauty, meaning, and sense of place in service of extracting maximum profit from the people who have to exist in it.
So stupid. If they were smart, Iran’s leadership would use this opportunity to gain international support and clout by behaving like the reasonable ones while Israel is going rogue.
That’s true, but is that a wise move, geopolitically? If Iran retaliates with force, it risks escalation, because Israel will hit back, likely with the help of its powerful allies. Iran’s BRICS allies may stand by it, or they may keep a distance, not wanting to get dragged into armed conflict. Such an attack will also shift moral and media focus away from the genocide in Gaza, allowing Israel to play up external threats in its public messaging.
Its BRICS allies will support Iran if it makes its case to the UN for an international response, and it may get support from other nations which are fed up with Israel at the moment. It seems like the international order is spooked right at the moment about Israel’s and Ecuador’s attacks on embassies; it’s a good time to make this pitch. And if the UN does little to address Iran’s grievances, its leaders can play that up at home as evidence of hostility toward it by the West to undermine the pro-Western youth movement threatening their rule.
This is looking at it from the point of view of Iran’s interests. From my point of view, less bombing of things and less war is better for the world.
It was pretty clear that Palestine was going to disappear if the course of history didn’t change, and arguably is already gone. One can see that there’s simply no viable state of Palestine left—just fragments of land surrounded and controlled by an apartheid regime—by looking at the map.
If one were charitable, one could say that Hamas took an accelerationist approach as a hail Mary attempt to fight it. Or, as I think, they’ve gone down the path that so many radical groups in history have: Deciding that achieving their goal is worth sacrificing the people they originally set out to save, possibly even holding those people in contempt for not joining the noble struggle.
In any case, the only motive for the October 7th attack that sense to me is that Hamas wanted to provoke Israel into an all-too-predictable overreaction, to draw in the West Bank and other Arab powers, to de-legitimize Israel on the world stage, or both. Months later, we can see that it’s not not working. They are closer to diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state by a number of nations than they have been at any point in decades.
Project Drawdown has characterized a set of 93 technologies and practices that together can reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s a gigantic project with a lot of data and analyses....
The producers and consumers are two sides of the very same coin. Those companies aren’t just emitting 80% of the GHGs for giggles, they’re satisfying consumer demand. If we shut them down—and no other companies popped up to pick up the demand—our lifestyle would have to change radically.
Building bike infrastructure is one of the most cost-effective ways to change our lifestyle.
The French National Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a bill aimed at restricting the manufacture and sale of products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.” The MPs, backed by the government, voted to exclude kitchen utensils from the scope of the text....
I’ve hit upon the technique of just storing my cast iron pan in the oven. After using it, I wash it gently with dish soap to get the food/oil off, dry it, and put it back in the oven, maybe with a light wipe of oil. That way, it gets seasoned incidentally every time I bake something. It’s super easy, and stays nice and shiny now.
Interesting. My water bill is around $800 per year, and that includes sewerage service. That well would take 15 years to reach cost parity, and that’s leaving out the septic system.
And wells are decidedly not free after installation, if my parents’ experience is anything to go by. (Nothing catastrophic, to they just had to pay for pump maintenance occasionally.)
The Biden administration is close to approving the sale of as many as 50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel, in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter....
WASHINGTON (AP) — Top American and Israeli officials held virtual talks Monday as the U.S. pushed alternatives to the ground assault against Hamas under consideration by Israelis in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, a move the U.S. opposes on humanitarian grounds and that has frayed relations between the two allies....
Evan McMullin’s vote total in Minnesota in the 2016 Presidential election was larger than Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory. Gary Johnson’s vote total was almost 3 times McMullin’s total. Johnson’s vote total was larger than Clinton’s margin in Colorado, too. If it weren’t for third-party voters, Clinton would’ve had an even worse electoral college drubbing. (Perhaps this is the case in other states, too. Those are the two that I know off-hand.) Much has been made about how Jill Stein’s vote total in Wisconsin in 2016 was higher than Clinton’s margin of defeat, but without any 3rd party candidates, she would’ve lost by even more.
In 2020, Jo Jorgensen’s vote total in Wisconsin was larger than Biden’s margin of victory, as well as in Minnesota, Arizona, and Georgia. Her vote total in Pennsylvania was very close to Biden’s margin of victory there. Without 3rd party candidates, Biden would’ve lost in 2020.
This article is about Rep. Tim Walberg, who blew out Democratic Party challenger Bart Goldberg in 2022. The 3rd party candidates in that race were from the Libertarian and U.S. Taxpayers parties. Without them, Walberg’s margin of victory would’ve been greater.
Back in the mid -1990s, an outfit called the New Party tried to remedy the issue by a different angle, called fusion voting. That’s a practice which lets more than one party nominate a candidate, and the candidate’s name appears more than once on the ballot. That way, different parties can team up, eliminating the spoiler effect, and the winning candidate knows from whence their support comes.
You’d think that the Democrats would be all about that? Think again. Minnesota’s state law bans fusion, and the Supreme Court held that the ban does not violate the 1st Amendment right of freedom of association, on the ground that the state has a compelling interest in preventing electoral chaos. That’s patently ridiculous, as New York allows it without issue. The DFL could change the law in Minnesota, but they still have not. The New Party subsequently disbanded, and only one former affiliate (Progressive Dane) is still active.
The two major parties work along the same lines to hinder voters to protect their own power, and this is only one example. But I still think of that case when people insist that 3rd parties should build their base in state and local races. That’s when I learned that, at the bottom line, the Democratic Party cares more about its power and prerogatives than what’s good for the country. Just like the GOP.
Israel will stop working with the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, a government spokesperson said yesterday, accusing the aid agency of “perpetuating conflict”, Reuters reported....
Trenchant point here that doesn’t get brought up often enough— the state of Israel faces a demographic crisis, as birthrates and aliyah decline. It may not be able to maintain a Jewish majority in several decades.
Rising antisemitism around the world is actually in its interest, to maybe compel more Jewish people to immigrate.
MOSCOW, March 22 (Reuters) - Russia said on Friday that if the United States knew for sure that Ukraine was not involved in a mass shooting incident at a concert hall near Moscow Washington should share any information it had....
Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month....
Genocide is not the goal, but we have been able to accurately predict Israel’s next action every step of the way by simply looking at the script for what a genocidal regime would do. But genocide is not Israel’s goal. It just looks that way. Maybe a weird coincidence.
You don’t have to believe me, but I’m happy to show my work:
The state of Israel has always rejected the one-state solution and the right-of-return. (It makes political sense, as the Jews would be outnumbered in their own state in a few decades.) It has also rejected or sabotaged a two-state solution by expanding settlements, a process which has ramped up in recent months, so there’s nowhere for a second state to exist. Thus, the people of Palestine cannot live in Israel, and they cannot live in Palestine. No other nations would take that many refugees, so they also cannot leave. The, uhh, remaining solution is to kill them, and the IDF feels no compunction about doing exactly that. For decades, genocide hasn’t been the avowed goal of the state of Israel, just the inescapable conclusion of a cruel logic.
That brings us up to last October. So what would a genocidal regime do in Israel’s place, if it wanted to exterminate a group of people with enough plausible deniability to avoid triggering intervention by the rest of the world? Cut off incoming food, water, and energy? Check, Israel has done that. Contaminate the groundwater? Check. Destroy the energy, sanitary, and transportation infrastructure? Check. Render civilian homes destroyed or unlivable, and destroy businesses? Check. Destroy the health care system? Check. Drive the population toward the border with progressive waves of attacks? Gaza City -> Khan Younis -> Rafah, check.
And all of this, after several Israeli government officials stated explicitly that the goal is, at least, ethnic cleansing.
Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk....
Nitpick: It wasn’t a BLM protest. It was protests and unrest following the shooting of Jacob Blake. The events over many days in Kenosha included some organized BLM protests, but also outside agitators who wanted to stir shit up. BLM protests took place in daylight hours. Rittenhouse went there for the unorganized unrest in the nighttime hours.
I mention this because it’s a right-wing rhetorical tactic to link BLM to violence in people’s minds to discredit the organization and movement, and it’s bogus.
Grosskreutz (the one who survived) could have shot Rittenhouse and justifiably claimed self-defense under the law. He had a gun pointed at him by a dude who had just wasted two other men with it. The law’s fucked.
A watt is a derived unit for a rate of change, an amount of energy used in a unit of time, so P = E / t. A kW per hour would be a rate divided by time, or E / t^2, resulting in another rate.
More colloquially, think of watts/power by analogy to another rate, that of speed. Moving at a speed of 100kph for 3 hours results in 300 speed-hours of distance. Saying 100 kilometers per hour per 3 hours sounds awkward, but is actually a weird way to say acceleration, a rate of change of speed. (And probably a hint to get your car serviced.)
Anyway, the key is to think of a kilowatt as a rate, not a quantity.
Oh, hey, Jerboa is not so good about updating the Inbox tally…
I was responding to your question about kW per hour, and I was going for the intuitive sense of why that’s not right. The more “it’s just so” reason is that the math just doesn’t work, since the word “per” signifies division. So if we discharge a battery at a rate of 100 watts for 3 hours, that’s 100W * 3 hours, or 300 Wh used. If we say 100 watts per hour for three hours, that’s 100W / 1 hour * 3 hours. The hours cancel, and the result is 300 watts, which is a rate.
It’s totally confusing, I know, because people often use “watts” and “watt-hours” interchangeably, but they’re as different as speed and position.
Anyway, the watt is a derived unit in SI, and it’s equivalent to kg·m^2^ / s^3^. The per-unit-time is hidden when you write it as a watt, but clearly there when you write it in terms of base units. Of course, the joule is kg·m^2^ / s^2^, so energy also has time in the denominator, and I guess could technically also be a rate, but understanding that is way above my pay grade. 😀
Yes, if it’s cold, I will often make a 4-minute drive instead of walking 20 minutes from my guest house to my main house on my own property. It’s so relatable to most Americans!
A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.
Don’t forget the best part: It wasn’t just NYPD. It was a violent crackdown on OWS protests all across the nation, complete with torture and other unconstitutional methods, coordinated in secret by the Obama administration in collusion with the big banks. (For those who have forgotten, integration of government and corporate power is one of the hallmarks of fascism.)
Yeah, saying millionaire/billionaire as a category is gibberish. You have to be a millionaire if you want to do something crazy, like, I dunno, retire comfortably when you’re 65. You have to be a billionaire, well, never. Nobody needs to be a billionaire.
According to Merriam-Webster, the word “veteran” comes from a Latin adjective, veteranus, describing long experience. The first known use in English carried the meaning of an old soldier who served for a long time. But okay, let’s pretend that the original meaning isn’t valid because it was borrowed as a word describing a soldier, then shouldn’t we also go after people who call themselves “veterans” because they spent a single term of enlistment in the armed forces, and especially those who never had a tour of duty?
Bernie Sanders issues scathing statement directed at Netanyahu (www.independent.co.uk)
Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established (apnews.com)
A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
Canada contacts Israel after aid agency says water truck bombed in 'targeted' attack (www.cbc.ca)
Scoop: U.S. expected to sanction IDF unit for human rights violations in West Bank (www.axios.com)
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to within days announce sanctions against the Israel Defense Forces “Netzah Yehuda” battalion for human rights violations in the occupied West Bank, three U.S. sources with knowledge of the issue told Axios....
How the Media Treat Linux (www.youtube.com)
Just sharing this really well produced video on Linux’s public perception (since this channel has suprisingly not a lot of subscribers)
Mark Cuban is ‘proud to pay’ $275.9 million in taxes (www.cnbc.com)
Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory” (theintercept.com)
The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept....
Suicide is on the rise for young Americans, with no clear answers (www.bbc.com)
U.S. Intel Warns of Imminent Iranian Strike on Israel: Report (www.thedailybeast.com)
IDF shows journalists raw footage of the October 7 Hamas terror attack (www.nbcnews.com)
Why anyone would defend these people is beyond me call me a genocider cause I support my homeland and my religion I don’t care .
After six months of war, I fear we may lose Palestine completely | Raja Shehadeh (www.theguardian.com)
The most cost effective measure to beat climate change is building bike infrastructure (www.youtube.com)
Project Drawdown has characterized a set of 93 technologies and practices that together can reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s a gigantic project with a lot of data and analyses....
France votes to ban ‘forever chemicals,’ exempting frying pans (www.politico.eu)
The French National Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a bill aimed at restricting the manufacture and sale of products containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAS or “forever chemicals.” The MPs, backed by the government, voted to exclude kitchen utensils from the scope of the text....
Trump would "level" Gaza without a thought, ex-aide warns (www.newsweek.com)
Population tipping point could arrive by 2030: global fertility will drop below replacement level years earlier than expected. (www.science.org)
Biden administration set to greenlight $18 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets to Israel (edition.cnn.com)
The Biden administration is close to approving the sale of as many as 50 American-made F-15 fighter jets to Israel, in a deal expected to be worth more than $18 billion, according to three people familiar with the matter....
US pushes alternatives to Rafah invasion in Hamas war talks with Israel (apnews.com)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Top American and Israeli officials held virtual talks Monday as the U.S. pushed alternatives to the ground assault against Hamas under consideration by Israelis in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, a move the U.S. opposes on humanitarian grounds and that has frayed relations between the two allies....
Michigan Republican congressman suggests nuking Gaza, ending humanitarian aid (www.detroitnews.com)
Israel will stop working with UNRWA in Gaza, official (www.middleeastmonitor.com)
Israel will stop working with the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Gaza Strip, a government spokesperson said yesterday, accusing the aid agency of “perpetuating conflict”, Reuters reported....
Russia says United States must share any information it has on attack near Moscow (www.reuters.com)
MOSCOW, March 22 (Reuters) - Russia said on Friday that if the United States knew for sure that Ukraine was not involved in a mass shooting incident at a concert hall near Moscow Washington should share any information it had....
'Everyone in the World Needs to See This': Footage Shows IDF Drone Killing Gazans (www.commondreams.org)
Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month....
Kyle Rittenhouse storms off stage after being confronted by students (www.newsweek.com)
Kyle Rittenhouse abruptly departed the stage during an appearance at the University of Memphis on Wednesday, after he was confronted about comments made by Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk....
Stuck (slrpnk.net)
Mitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law Angela Chao made panicked last call before dying in ‘completely submerged’ Tesla on Texas ranch: report (nypost.com)
Israeli rabbi says ‘kill everyone in Gaza, including babies’ (thecradle.co)
boomers (midwest.social)
buying coffee (sh.itjust.works)
So you're a veteran in your field? What war did you fight to earn that title?! (files.catbox.moe)
Had a laugh when I saw this post, he was constantly defending himself in the comments as if the US army owns the word “veteran”