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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • 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.





  • 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.


  • I’m a little annoyed that my client apparently didn’t show me this post yesterday.

    I’m nominally familiar with utility scale issues and it appears the fault here lie with the lack of regulatory environment in Texas.
    There’s a process called “Line Clearing” where utilities send crews to cut down branches or sometimes whole trees if they pose a risk to power lines. Line clearing mostly impacts local circuits. Circuits are neighborhood level, and those power lines are lower than other kinds of power lines. Schedules for line clearing are often set with regulatory bodies, but can be left to utilities to set.

    Because line clearing means that crews have to traverse every power line on the grid, it’s often not something that utilities want to do. If given a say in the regulatory process or left to their own devices, they’ll opt for as long of a span between line clearings as possible.

    What’s that mean, now that I’ve written so much? Well, it means that when big storms come through, the failure point isn’t necessarily the transmission lines or the power stations. It’s the local lines, disconnecting individual houses, streets, or entire neighborhoods. Instead of a few fixes here and there to get the grid back up, it’s a lot of fixes everywhere, which is time consuming and expensive. It means that ‘everyday’ failures are more common as trees can rot out and randomly collapse.
    And, sure - those everyday fixes are relatively easy to deal with individually, but in a situation where a lot of those issues accumulate at once, they can cause other, more serious issues on the grid, as well as creating a massive backlog to work through.

    It’s sort of a foundational regulatory problem that seems to not have been addressed. A lot of midwestern states can bear wind storms with minimal problems - because their grid standards are written with lots of wet snow in mind.

    Which is all to say, it’s supply, demand, delivery, and all the trappings therein, too.
    I think on those grounds, criticism of Texas’ grid stands.


  • 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.