aramis87

Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing and distanced himself from the case

Desperate corrupt official lies to keep power and protect from prosecution, news at 11 …

Good.

Israel said it sent about 30 truckloads of aid into northern Gaza on Friday, including food, water, medical supplies, and shelter equipment. “We’re fighting Hamas, we’re not fighting the people of Gaza,” military spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told journalists in an online briefing.

Technically correct, you’re not fighting them, just slaughtering them :(

I desperately hope that the US doesn’t let you down come November :(

I dunno, genocide seems pretty barbaric to me.

Well, if you didn’t want Israel dependent on foreign governments for a constant supply of munitions so you can genocide an entire people, maybe you should have built your own munitions industry.

My standard anti-Michael Steele rant, because too many people don’t know this story:

I lived in Maryland in the 2000’s, and in 2006, Michael Steele (who was lieutenant governor at the time, iirc) announced he was going to run for Maryland’s US Senate seat. He tried campaigning and, while he had some success in the more rural areas, he was heavily loathed in the cities, especially Baltimore; he was also heavily losing the black vote.

He tried to get volunteers to go into the city for him, but white people just got ignored or laughed at. He tried to get black volunteers, but only got a few; he tried hiring black people and got some more. But that turned out to be a losing proposition as well: as soon as his new recruits but cut streets, they got lectured on his real character and soon quit.

He also decided the best way forward was to hide his political affiliation. Soon the airwaves were filled with vague ads referencing the concerns of local voters - things he had never cared about (and actively worked against) in his term as lieutenant governor. All the ads prominent featured Steele “working with” and surrounded by smiling black “voters”, and ended with a firm voice saying, “Steele, Democrat.”

The yard signs and mailers were the same: Democratic Blue, no mention of actual party affiliation, and “Steele Democrat” in large white letters. (The mailers also had the smiling black people as well.) When challenged on the fact that he was not, in fact, a member of Democratic party, he claimed it was a “descriptive phrase” like “Reagan Democrat”.

Comes close to the election, and Steele really wanted people just outside the poll limits, handing out his “Steele Democrat” flyers and urging then to vote for him. Problem was, he couldn’t find any local black people willing to do that, and he really needed the flyer-people in Baltimore and some other areas to be black.

So he sent recruiters up to Philly, and the good people of Philly just laughed at him. So he turned to Philadelphia’s homeless population. He promised them that, if they came to hand out his flyers, they’d get a cool t-shirt (his campaign shirt), three meals that day, a hundred dollars cash, and he’d hire buses to take them down to Baltimore and then back to Philly at the end of the day. [When you’re homeless, intimate knowledge of the area you’re in and it’s resources are incredibly vital.]

So everyone gets bussed in, and I think they were given donuts and coffee for their first “meal”. They never got lunch, nor did get the dinner they were promised. End of the day, polls close and the promised buses never show up. Nor does the money they were promised. Michael Steele essentially trafficked a bunch of homeless people into Baltimore and abandoned them - or he tried to. There was a bunch of local uproar over this that started to build, I think it lasted a couple of days? And then suddenly Steele was there, great big smiling grin, flashing hundred dollar bills, claiming it was all a big mistake, paying people and sending them back to Philly. And I have absolutely no doubt that, if this hadn’t started to become A Thing, he would’ve left those people on the streets of Baltimore without a second thought.

Fuck Michael Steele.

Fucking everyone wants Trump because he’s so fucking easy to manipulate.

It’s the old Tacony-Palmyra Drive-In site. More fun facts: part of the area they’re building on used to be a landfill for Philadelphia, which is still contaminated - they’ve just paved it over. Oh, and the condos they’re building? They’re being used to fulfill the town’s low-income housing requirements (as required by Mount Laurel I and II). I’m sure the developers are being quite open with the residents that their lovely new buildings are on top of a munitions testing site and a landfill … :(

A few years ago, near where my family lived in New Jersey, there was a small newspaper article mentioning that construction on a set of mid-rise condominiums on the Delaware River was being notably delayed, with the vague implication that there was some trouble with financing or construction or something. [To be fair, both of these were true, but for very not-obvious reasons.] But then you start tracing back through the history of the site:

They had selected the site for the condos because it had been the site of a large flea market from the late 1970s to early 2000s, so all they’d have to do was dig up the parking lots, lay in utilities, and compact the soil to be ready to build. The flea market was there because it was the site of a massive drive-in movie theatre built in the early 1950s, so all they had had to do was put up some cheap buildings that were eventually condemned and torn down. The drive-in movie theatre was there because the land had already been cleared and flattened by the US government, so it was cheap to put in a parking lot and big screen.

Why had the government so kindly cleared and flattened the ground? Well, the site was right next to a small bridge across the Delaware; on the other side of the bridge was Frankford Arsenal, where they produced munitions during both World Wars. And they had to test the munitions, so they’d drive over the bridge and test them at this site in New Jersey. And it turns out that sometimes they were either high or lazy or careless or something, because sometimes they didn’t bother driving across the bridge, they’d just shell New Jersey from across the river instead.

The shelling led to a bunch of unexploded ordinance being in extremely unexpected places, until it started showing up eighty years later, when the condo people actually started digging up the ground to lay in their utilities. Of course, the condo association was quietly and casually referencing vague construction delays, because if people knew it was a munitions testing site and they’d recently found a bunch of UXO, no one would buy the condos.

[Also, while trying to look up details for this comment, I discovered three other cases of UXO in New Jersey in the past couple years. This is all very weird to me.]

FTA: There is risk of a crush when crowd density exceeds about five people per square meter.[a] For a person in a crowd a signal of danger, and a warning to get out of the crowd if possible, is the sensation of being touched on all four sides. A later, more serious, warning is when one feels shock waves travelling through the crowd, due to people at the back pushing forward against people at the front with nowhere to go.

It seems like you’re leaning toward getting standard light fixtures. Are you looking at the ones with naked bulbs, or those with the glass coverings over the bulbs?

If you’re looking at naked bulbs, and if your landlady doesn’t already have one, you might also consider getting her a lightbulb-changing kit so she can change any dead bulbs without climbing a ladder. Something like this with an appropriate-length pole.

Fuck it, if that’s how we go that’s how we go.

Be faster than climate change.

Those are structural couches, providing a basin for more contents.

Israel wants (and has always wanted) lebensraum. The Palestinians will continue to be pressed into smaller and smaller enclaves, with Israel controlling more and more of the infrastructure and humanitarian supplies. It is, and has been, slow-motion genocide.

Did they somehow not see the camera blatantly on the desk, feeding an image to the monitor, directly of the couch? Did they not see the butt imprint on the couch? Even if they didn’t recognize the set it was based on, it was pretty blatant.

It’s cute how you’ve deluded yourself into believing that Netanyahu wants peace.

There are two types of polio vaccine: inactivated polio virus (given by a shot) and oral polio virus (OPV). OPV is a lot easier to give in rural and impoverished areas, or areas where it may be difficult for healthcare workers to get access. However, because it’s given orally and because it contains a very weak but live form of polio virus, there’s the chance that the recipient (while immune themselves) may continue to replicate and carry the virus in their intestinal tract. They may then pass the virus in their feces.

In an area with a functioning sewage system, this is generally a negligible risk. In an area where everyone is vaccinated and has a functioning immune system, this is generally a negligible risk. In an area where possibly not everyone is vaccinated, or where people’s bodies are starting to break down due to starvation, and where the sewage system has been deliberately blown up, this is almost inevitable.

This is also intentional. In the concentration camps, a significant portion of the deaths were due to diseases that ripped through the camps, where the inmates were severely and deliberately malnourished, chronically overworked, had minimal protection from the elements, and were provided little hygiene or healthcare. The only difference with Gaza is that it’s a bigger camp, and instead of being overworked, the inmates are repeatedly forced to move from one area to another to another.

Looks like OP was going to eat it with a fork (?floppy crust?) and then decided to take a picture first.

Honestly, if I’d been tied to that dipshit my entire life, I wouldn’t go out of my way to be spending more time or effort on him.