I’ve even seen news stories that indicate the IDF is clearing and trucking out/burying rubble so it cannot be reused or recycled if rebuilding ever occurs.
Because of the concrete blockade, there used to be a decent trade in Gaza to recycle concrete to build new things. (I don’t know how they do it. Maybe they just use it as aggregate?) I imagine the metals could be repurposed (some), or more likely, sold as scrap and those funds used to buy new materials.

That’s sort of whack that they’d issue that diagnosis on the grounds that she was a deep sleeper and had sleepwalked once or twice in her teens.

It boggles the mind that the first and seemingly only time she woke up wondering “did I have sex?” the experts just jumped to it being sexsomnia.

Personal confession: I experience it. Not diagnosed, but by the time I was 19, I knew. Since then it’s a part of the conversation I have with anyone I share a bed with. (And the folks I share a bed with also confirm that it happens. Lots of “Were you awake when…?” questions. Fortunately, no misunderstandings or upset feelings.)

I know everyone is different, but I feel she is the best judge of herself. It’s already established that the experts were wrong and CPS reacted inappropriately, but… ugh. You fucking know. Your partners tell you about it. You usually wake up during or just after.
I can’t imagine her loss or despair at being told people who never met her know her better than herself and thus she is going to be denied justice. Much less the rage that they let the man walk free on such a flimsy reasoning.

Personally, I think the gambit is to pull troops from Donbas and then trounce the convoys en route, while they’re on the road. Ukraine has those new F16’s, and I think forcing Russia to move in ways they haven’t planned for or along routes that aren’t heavily covered with air defenses is the goal.

But I mean - I’m an armchair commentator. I have no expertise, just random facts I want to fit together a certain way because it would be satisfying. I hope this strategy is successful to Ukraine in whatever metric they’re hoping for success.

Well, I just realized I completely goofed, because I went with .arpa instead of .home.arpa, due to what was surely not my own failings.

So I guess I’m going to be changing my home’s domain anyway.

I’m out of touch with the prisoner swap news.
I had to read the article to be sure this wasn’t about the Turkish Olympian.

Mind you, the complaint from Israel is not that Adidas is engaging in the revival effort/advertising campaign. Their specific complaint was that Adidas picked Bella Hadid as the face of it.

Bella Hadid, who has not publicly said anything negative about Israel. Whose only “offenses” are that she’s half Palestinian, and that she’s shared messages on social media that condemn all murder, (which explicitly includes condemning the murder of Israelis in that statement).
Sure, she supports the right to a homeland by Palestinians, but that’s not explicitly a dig at Israel. It seems like she’s taken great pains to not condemn an eminently condemnable country that has personally wronged her family, and now, her personally.

It seems like Israel is throwing their weight around to harm her career and erase the achievements of yet another Palestinian. Much harm to her, for no harm mitigation to themselves.

Ah, thank you. That was the missing piece.

This might sound either self-adulating or naive (probably both), but I just don’t think like that. I view religions and nations as distinct - even nations that embrace a single religion. It’s just - Administrative systems for governance and the decisions that arise from those aren’t the same as religious belief systems.

My innate reaction to those who choose not to recognize a difference between hostility toward Judaism and hostility toward Zionism or Israel’s policies Is to think they’re an unserious person. (That’s a polite way of saying I think those people are complete morons.)
Note: Even though you’re discussing blurring those lines, I know you’re doing it for illustrative purposes. My sentiments above do not apply to you.

It’s probably a good thing I’m not in politics or a publicly visible position, because I don’t have to tie my livelihood to the perceptions of folks whose judgment I find questionable. It would suck making those sorts of moral concessions.

I’m even more confused.

I’ve read a lot of your comments and I generally agree with them/believe you have well-reasoned positions, so there’s probably more a foundational misunderstanding than a disagreement of opinion.

I’m understanding what you’re saying to mean that you believe zionists want Israel to be associated with antisemitism, but I don’t get how that association benefits them. I suppose I could see it as reinforcing a victim complex, that then can be used to justify their actions.

As a person who staunchly supports Palestine and believes Israel is not just currently committing a genocide, but has been since the inception of the state - I was horrified about that vandalism.
How would apathy benefit zionists?

I also feel like the my assumption about the first statement doesn’t align with your statement of the second. The first is an increased sensitivity/awareness of antisemitism to justify genocidal actions for the sake of “safety” (or whatever), but the second is an apathy to antisemitism, which undermines the first.

I’m just… not getting it.

I’m not sure I follow. Can you elaborate?

I get that zionists probably want anyone who supports Palestine to be considered an antisemite.
But I don’t follow how those who accuse others of antisemitism would benefit from a belief that they (the accuser) are pro-genocide.

I’m so disappointed this didn’t go to trial.

Trial would have meant discovery, and public disclosure of findings, along with potentially more discovery and/or charges if the trial process reveals anything more to look into.

I wonder what secret they have that’s worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
(High confidence they will try to appeal in one of the Trump judge districts. The verdict might get lowered to $1 or something dumb.)

That’s the reason I killed IPv6 on my network.

For those who saw the word “never” and had a record scratch happen in their head.
(As I did, so I did some furious research to play the role of the smartest person in the room, and merely came away more educated than before.)

This fellow died of H5N2. The strain that has been infecting cattle (and humans) is H5N1.

Oh, man. I remember coming into awareness of his movie a bit late, and while I think I watched it, I don’t think I paid attention to it. But catching bits and pieces of Super-Size Me prompted me to watch both Food, Inc, and Fast Food Nation within about a two-week span of each other, and since I saw those videos (early 2009), I’ve not eaten a burger from a fast food place, since.

Heck, my wife decided not to eat beef a few years ago, and it was really easy to just write it off, since I’d already been removing dubious meat sources from my life. (Or trying to, anyway.)

Not singularly life changing for me, but definitely added some weight behind decisions.

Or… one is bad and the other one is way worse.

The thing that always amuses me about this is that Iran was a burgeoning liberal democracy until the CIA and MI6 toppled it in 1953, installing a previously overthrown autocrat (overthrown by said forces of democracy), who ruled until 1979, when he was overthrown by religious hard liners, who really only had mass support because the autocrat was too authoritarian.

And the reason the U.S. and Britain overthrew their democracy? They nationalized their oil industry to give profits back to their people, which entailed taking over refineries and wells ‘owned’ by British Petroleum.
The U.S. created their own boogeyman in the area because they wanted to give a corporation near-free access to Iran’s oil. Which in turn lead to the oil crisis and instability in the region.
The U.S. has really got to stop trying to put out fires while covered in crude oil.

Yet you’ve offered no comment that wasn’t surface level. When pressed, you fell back on insinuating others were uninformed or intellectually lazy. Claims you failed to substantiate.

Your comments lack substance. Your positions lack support. You fail to engage intellectually, and the embarrassment you feel at being outclassed is palpable and plainly visible.
You are naked and shameful.

How did you know?!? I have to admit, my beliefs were really hard to come by. I almost didn’t have them!

I read Exodus when I was 13 and I believed it. A few years later, a history teacher challenged me to write a research paper over Israel for my IB history class, so in spring of 2002, I had to work so hard to find anti-Israel propaganda. I didn’t really find any in news media, but I went to the school library, and those people are absolute radicals!
They had books from the 1960’s that discussed Jewish settlers forming militias and attacking “moslem” civilians and burning their family farms. It totally blew my mind that Ben Gurion coordinated terror attacks on British officials in the region, so Britain would withdraw and let the Zionists massacre Palestinians - which they did within weeks of Britain formally withdrawing from Palestine in 1948.
Finding all those anti-Israel accounts of things they actually did was a lot of work!

I got an A on that paper, though.

Where and how did you learn what you know?

Don’t lie to us, and stop lying to yourself.

For over 100 years zionists have been terrorizing and committing genocide there. They killed or pushed out the Muslims, they disenfranchised the Christians until they left. They’re currently clamping down on Jewish people who don’t believe in Zionism.

They have always pushed. Every treaty, every agreement. Every legal attempt to stop the violence has been ignored, or discarded under paper thin or faulty pretenses. Terror is often the last resort of a people who have no other options. (Unless western nations give you billions of dollar in weapons and force other nations to recognize your presence, then you can call it statecraft!)

For zionists and for Israel, the goal has always been to paint the land red with non-believer blood and to destroy every bit of culture that isn’t ‘theirs.’
That’s why they bomb mosques and universities. That’s why they bomb infrastructure. That’s why the West Bank has been split into tiny enclaves. They’re choking the life out of the land so they can plant the seeds of their hollow society on barren soil.

I’m not saying I wouldn’t have mixed feelings about it, but I don’t think I’d have reservations about a politician that put on a luchador mask or dressed up like an 80’s wrestler and said the right things in absolutely batshit ways during press junkets and campaign appearances. And then, obviously, did those things in non-batshit ways while on the clock.

Saturday night: “I’m gonna slap Netanyahu like a bitch!”
Monday morning: “I’ve introduced legislation to suspend all military aid and arms sales to Israel immediately. Resumption of aid and/or arms sales is contingent upon the outcome of the ICJ war crimes investigation.”

Wow, he really slammed him.

Joking aside, I really appreciate that Bernie is speaking up. (And to a lesser extent that the headline doesn’t fall back to that overused descriptor.)

The Kremlin has repeatedly said that any seizure of its assets would go against all the principles of free markets which the West proclaims and that it would undermine confidence in the U.S. dollar and euro while deterring global investment and undermining confidence in Western central banks.

Like establishing an economic collaborative consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that are all in talks to increase trade with each other, and ditch the dollar as their trade currency?
Like attempting to undermine the petrodollar as the world reserve currency for purchasing oil?

I don’t know what counters the west has in their bag, but it’s a little silly to make threats as if BRICS hasn’t been completely transparent about their plans the whole time.
It’s kind of an empty threat if you’ve been openly working on it for decades while the (more powerful) nations you plan to ratfuck have had time to prepare. I also don’t know how China would manage with a loss or rapid decrease in trade. They seem a bit too pragmatic than to follow Russia into a hole.

Some Russian officials have suggested that if Russian assets are confiscated then foreign investors’ assets stuck in special so-called type “C” accounts in Russia could face the same fate.

I’m sure they’d have to target all western accounts at once. Targeting one type will lead to the rest quickly hemorrhaging their money out of country.
And I don’t think they’d wind up attracting new western investment for decades if they pulled a move like that.