Not once did I see the descriptor “Hamas run.” It’s about goddamn time Western media started moving away from that to cast aspersions on the truthfulness of Gazan government statements.

Also,

A UN report this week said that nearly 70% of the people killed in the war in Gaza have been women and children.

Go Japan! Hell yeah!

Tally Gotliv, a Likud MP, told MEE: “We need to occupy the complete land of Israel. There are no innocent people in Gaza. Everybody who has refused to leave the north is a collaborator.”

Monday’s event took place against the backdrop of an escalating military assault on northern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remained trapped and subjected to daily air strikes.

The assault came amid reports from Israel that the military has started to implement a strategy known as “the Generals’ Plan” which called for the ethnic cleansing of the north of the territory, and condemnation by aid groups who warned last week that northern Gaza is being “erased”.

This is their plan. They’re doing it right now. I can’t imagine how folks will deny this, I guess they’ll move onto justify.

I think sentiment is changing. Recently I’m noticing more US mainstream media using language like

Since Israel launched its devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack just over a year ago

It’s a small thing, it’s better than the softer language they would normally use. But, damn, it’s not enough.

Here you go. Looks like it’d be about the eastern third to one half of the country getting high speed rail in just 10 years. That’s amazing.

I do wonder, though, what they’d do when

crops are left rotting in fields and houses and buildings aren’t rebuilt after disasters because all undocumented immigrants have been reported;

after LGBT+ folks hide themselves and “fit in” for safety like it’s the 1950s;

when there are masses of unemployed young people born after abortion and contraception are outlawed living in a nation unequipped to handle them;

after the education and environmental protection systems cease to exist and the country falls behind in every metric of a developed nation from an absence of knowledge pools and poison in everything.

What will they do after creating an environment that fosters stability, innovation, and a thriving society like we saw in the mid-2010’s Middle East. It sure sounds like a great and prosperous future, doesn’t it. Right?..

Here’s a list of states that have effectively banned adult films websites by requiring sites to verify a user’s age:

The states are:

• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Louisiana
• Mississippi
• Montana
• Nebraska
• North Carolina
• Oklahoma
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia

How age is verified:

While the specifics vary between states, in general the new laws mean users are required to provide a pornographic website with a copy of their ID to obtain access or by sending it to a third party.

Project 2025 and “adult conent”

“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology … is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

What does this mean? Well it seems to mean that the far right want to define a book that features a same-sex couple as illegal pornography and throw the author of the book and any distributors of the book in prison. It seems to mean that a book talking about sexual violence could be classified as porn and banned. It seems to mean that talking about the existence of trans people would be “porn” and criminalized. In short: anything that goes against normative gender roles and hierarchies, or interrogates those hierarchies, could be considered obscene and criminalized.

These are the kinds of laws they have in theocracies. These were the kinds of laws they had in the Soviet Union. This is where they want to take us. And that is where we will go if we let them.

There’s a neat post I came across some time ago showing how few votes can still win the electoral college.

Comment link

Direct link to website

Turns out, though unlikely, it is possible to win the election with less than 25% of votes through the magic of the electoral college and disproportionate representation.

Right! I use silicone spatulas because I like the slight bit of flop it has, but there are options besides pan scratching metal and really crappy, pan saving plastic spatulas.

I’ve noticed a small change in how news media has recently been reporting information provided by Palestine: they’re not using ‘according to Hamas run (agency)’ as often. It’s a small but significant change that, I think, indicates more people are no longer buying that Israel has the “most moral army.”

She then claimed that if people would take a moment to try to “understand…the context” of her husband’s comment and focus less on the “three-word phrase,” they would understand that he was simply arguing that “it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder.”

Our policies. Policies like being against school lunches? Like voting against a child tax credit? Like not supporting or opposing funding for childcare? Like opposing paid parental leave? I don’t know, it sure feels like some folks in particular have made it their goal to continue hardships for parents and children.

Would it make a difference to you if the controversy kicked off because the org that disqualified these two fighters was banned by the IOC from participating in the Olympics for shady stuff? Or if the org has never said why they were disqualified? Or if the guy making the wild claims is the head of the org and a friend of Putin, and the DQ for one fighter happened after she beat an until then undefeated Russian fighter?

You really should look into the background of it. Here’s an AP News link

Banned governing body that’s fueling outcry on Olympic boxers has Russian ties and troubled history

It was hard not to copy and paste the whole article, I did my best to pull excerpts and bold important portions.

Summary- Long story short, the disqualifications were done in a tournament run by an organization banned by the Olympics. Both boxers participated in tournaments run by this organization with no issues for the last several years. The organization hasn’t said why they were disqualified. The man saying the weird trans woman claims is the leader of the organization. He’s a friend of Putin and described as a drug trafficker. The disqualification for Khelif happened after she beat the previously undefeated Russian boxer Amineva 3 days post fight.

Strangely, nobody who’s up in arms about the weird claim has looked into who made it, when, the context around it, or an explanation for it. They just ate it up.

Nearly 17 months ago in New Delhi, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was disqualified from the International Boxing Association’s world championships three days after she won an early-round bout with Azalia Amineva, a previously unbeaten Russian prospect.

The disqualification meant Amineva’s official record was perfect again.

The governing body claimed the fighters had failed unspecified eligibility tests

The BA’s decision last year — and its curious timing, particularly related to Amineva’s loss to Khelif — would have raised warning signs around the sports world if more people cared about amateur boxing, or even knew more about the IBA under president Umar Kremlev of Russia.

The entire boxing world has already learned to expect almost anything from the Russian-dominated governing body that was given the unprecedented punishment of being permanently banned from the Olympics last year. In fact, it hasn’t run an Olympic boxing tournament since the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016.

The International Olympic Committee has decades of mostly bad history with the beleaguered governing body previously known for decades as AIBA, and it has exasperatedly begged non-boxing people to pay attention to the sole source of the allegations against Khelif and Lin.

The IOC had stuck with the previous incarnation of boxing’s governing body through decades of judging scandals, bizarre leadership decisions and innumerable financial misdeeds while it presided over Olympic boxing tournaments.

Not until 2019, nearly two years after the organization elected a president with what U.S. officials call deep ties to Russian organized crime and heroin trafficking, did the IOC finally banish the perpetually troubled group.

The IOC permanently stripped the IBA’s Olympic credentials and ran the past two Olympic boxing tournaments with a task force.

Kremlev also has made additional allegations about the gender of both fighters without providing proof, and people across the world have accepted his word.

So much is unclear about the IBA’s decision to ban Khelif and Lin last year, particularly since both had competed in IBA events for years without problems.

It’s even possible the decision was actually made according to the results of legitimate tests conducted over two years, as the IBA says — but the IBA has refused to officially say what, when or where these tests were administered, who evaluated them, or what the results meant.

The IOC has said boxing will be dropped from the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics unless the sport lines up behind a new governing body

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The second half is me. I absolutely loved being a carpenter for the 3 years that I did it. But I left the field because I knew the pay ceiling wouldn’t be like in the days when my dad was my age. So, I moved to an office job that pays more than the guys in charge of work sites were (and are currently) making and I get actual benefits. I’d go back to it in a heartbeat if the pay and benefits were better, and I don’t mean matching my current ones, just definitely middle class.

I do wonder what will happen when the number of people in the trades reduces because young adults aren’t going into them such that people can see it and feel it. Will the corps raise wages and improve benefits? Will the federal government make immigration easier or restart the WPA like during the Great Depression? I don’t know. What I do know is that my buddy who’s 35 is always one of the youngest electricians on job sites and that can’t be good for the trades.

NYT - Here’s the latest on the attack in Beirut.

Israeli analysts said Hezbollah was most likely aiming at a nearby army base on Mount Hermon and did not intentionally target the village. But the group’s use of inaccurate rockets in an area dotted with civilian communities could lead to the kind of unintended consequence that risk sparking an all-out war, they said.

Sounds a lot like Israel might be using human shields to protect their base.

Let’s not forget banning open carry in CA:

he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons” and that guns were a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”

In February, far-right settlers went on a rampage in the West Bank town of Huwara torching dozens of houses and cars. Following the violence, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for Huwara to be “wiped out”.

Hmmm, I wonder what happened to the people rampaging in the town.

Israel’s military called the settler attack on this Palestinian town a ‘pogrom.’ Videos show soldiers did little to stop it

The IDF said in a statement to CNN that dozens of Israelis had “desecrated Palestinian property” and “acted violently against Palestinian residents” on February 26, but only several were arrested. All were released without charges.

I found this interesting article when trying to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing with Twitter. What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter? - NBC News

On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter’s biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter…

The text messages described a series of actions Musk should take after he gained full control of the social media platform: “Step 1: Blame the platform for its users; Step 2: Coordinated pressure campaign; Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks; Step 4: Deplatforming.”

That pressure campaign is against the Anti Defamation League which Musk has been trying to do.

So I guess he’s doing it all for far right adulation.

Similar story here. I work away from home for months at a time and I got locked out of using it on all my devices. Fuck Netflix.