#ad hoc october

[bagog]

The Quota

"Goddamn the Quota, anyway."

"Heh, nothing we can do. No use spitting brimstone about it."

"He seems like such a nice kid. I hate to do this to him. Kid doesn't have the exoskeleton for it. 'Skin for it?' Whatever the humans say."

"Aren't you always the one saying they need as many nice people as they can get? Seems like you of all people should be ecstatic over this little morsel joining their ranks."

"Who knows if he'll even still be a nice kid by the time he finds his people? Go look at his parents' memories, it's not going to be a pretty time for him. I hate doing this, Zephriel."

"Oh don't sigh all heavy like that! You know I can't stand that pout!"

"I think it would bother me less if we got the cases with accepting families, or even an aunt who's like them so they don't feel so alone. Seems like you and I are always on Quota Balance duty."

"Careful, you start talking like that, people will think you're against the Quota--here, hold his eyelid open, I'll do it--and then where will you be?"

"Well, maybe I am against the Quota. Careful, he's rousing a little."

"Bah! Then hold him steady, will you? Anyway... you know the rule, some get placed in G-class homes, some get placed in P2-class homes like this. You know the new management can't stop talking about 'Quota-this', 'Quota-that'."

"I just don't see the worst that could happen if all of them got to grow up G-class."

"You're not human, you wouldn't understand anyway, Posarion. They seem to prefer it this way. Alright, there, this one's all done. Heh heh, rest easy while you can, kiddo. What's next?"

"Just up the street. The Meyerson's eldest."

"Meyersons!? New management has a sick sense of humor, maybe tonight will be more fun than I thought. Let's go. What are you doing?"

"Just... giving him a vision is all."

"You're not authorized to do that!"

"I'm just... showing him who he's going to be, just a sneak peak, just enough to maybe guide his way. You're not going to report me?"

"Bah! Of course not. You're a ball and chain, Posarion, but you're my ball and chain."

"Goddamn Quota. Alright, let's go."

[triviallytrue]

I see the benefit in “was able to follow along each step and check for myself that the stated claim was true” but I’ve also seen people say the private vetting process can include things like “had a phone call with them where they fluently spoke the Palestinian dialect of Arabic” that can’t be checked by everyone, or “privately showed me their ID/birth certificate/bank info/official documents”, which probably shouldn’t be publicized. if these sorts of things (which seem fairly reliable if true) are indeed being involved in the process in at least some cases, how do you think people should vouch for that beyond a “trust me it’s vetted” without further clarification, or is it impossible to do so from your perspective since they could just lie?

so my suggested solution to these would be:

post a recording of the phone call, so that other Palestinian Arabic speakers can also attest that it's true

post redacted, watermarked versions of official documents

but you're getting at a very big problem: it takes a lot of information to vet people. the post i reblogged was only able to vet that one fundraiser because she's a PhD with a linkedin, instagram, tiktok, and pictures of her on a scientific organization's website. most people won't have that.

at a certain point, it also becomes a nightmare for the vetters (all or almost all of whom i suspect are just people trying their best in a horrific situation). if it takes an hour (or more) to fully vet one single gofundme, there are a single digit or low double digit number speakers of Palestinian Arabic on here with blog histories that stretch back before October 7th with the ability to vet people, and hundreds of gofundmes... well, you do the math.

this is the kind of work that is normally done by people who are paid to do it full-time, in a centralized fashion, not ad-hoc on the internet. amateurs are going to make mistakes - i've seen blogs successfully filtering out unsophisticated scammers, but this current discourse has already rooted out at least 3 scammers who made it onto the vetted lists. it's asymmetric - scammers can do this full time, hone their methods, figure out what exposed them last time and fix it, and overall iteratively improve the credibility of their scams, but vetters can't really keep raising the standards with the time and resources they have access to.

so unless we make the standards so high that they exclude many actual Palestinians (standards like the ones used in that ask), i think there will be some risk of even vetted fundraisers being scams. how big? 1%? 5%? 10%? i don't know, but it's definitely nonzero, and based on the uncovered scams so far, they are diverting thousands of dollars (possibly tens or hundreds of thousands) away from actual Palestinians.

which is why i think people should just donate to the UNRWA. there's a 100% chance your money will go to helping real Palestinians, and while it won't be as impactful for an individual as getting them across the Rafah crossing, that's only an option for a very small percentage of Palestinians anyway. as said before, there are 800,000 Palestinians in Rafah, something like 500 of which cross each day. those that can't cross and the Palestinians in other parts of Gaza deserve aid as well. people are at risk of starvation and have very limited access to medical care. donation to the UNRWA and organizations like it doesn't free anyone, but it does keep them alive, and the money doesn't end up in the pockets of corrupt Egyptian border officials who will wring every penny they can out of Palestinian refugees.

people are, of course, welcome to do whatever they want with their money, but those are my 2 cents.

[gael-garcia]

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people. Drawing together writers, editors, and other culture workers, WAWOG hopes to provide ongoing infrastructure for cultural organizing in response to the war. This project is modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam, an organization founded in 1965.

Statement of Solidarity

October 26, 2023

Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of human rights groups, scholars, and, above all, everyday Palestinians: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project. 

We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. At least 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers have faced severe harassment, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.

What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, buttogether we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing. 

We act alongside other writers, scholars, and artists who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of sumud, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has advocated for organizations to join a boycott of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.  

Signed,

WAWOG Interim Organizing Committee

Hannah Black

Ari Brostoff (Senior Editor, Jewish Currents)

Elena Comay del Junco

Kyle Dacuyan (Executive Director, Poetry Project)

Kay Gabriel (Editorial Director, Poetry Project)

Kaleem Hawa

E. Tammy Kim

Shiv Kotecha

Wendy Lotterman (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Muna Mire

Perwana Nazif

Brendan O'Connor

Alex Press (Staff Writer, Jacobin)

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Dylan Saba

Zoé Samudzi (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Jasmine Sanders

Claire Schwartz (Culture Editor, Jewish Currents)

Janique Vigier

Harron Walker

Chloe Watlington

Gabriel Winant (Department of History, University of Chicago)

Audrey Wollen

Hannah Zeavin (Founding Editor, Parapraxis)

Signed, In Solidarity

Fatimah Warner (Noname)

Saul Williams

Susan Sarandon

Janeane Garofalo

Gael García Bernal

Danez Smith

Ocean Vuong

Aria Aber

Saidiya Hartman

China Miéville

+ full list here

[mariacallous]

On Sunday, June 9, Israeli minister Benny Gantz, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet and Netanyahu’s main putative challenger for the position of prime minister, resigned from the government along with his fellow party member Gadi Eisenkot. The resignation comes at an awkward time for the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, which has been making a significant effort to promote a cease-fire and hostage release deal, proposed by Israel, outlined by Biden in a speech on May 31, and adopted by the U.N. Security Council as Resolution 2735. Gantz and Eisenkot, major proponents of such a deal within the Israel war cabinet, are now out of decisionmaking circles. Should Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, accept the deal, which he has not so far, Netanyahu would now have heightened political incentive to balk at his own proposal. But the resignation may also serve to catalyze political changes in Israel that may hasten a change of leadership, something the Biden administration would welcome. While there is no guarantee that Gantz’s resignation will bring Israel’s elections any closer, it was a necessary step for any major political change.

The Israeli war cabinet is formed

As the details and magnitude of the October 7 terrorist attack became clear, there were immediate calls in Israel for a national emergency government that would include centrist opposition leaders alongside Netanyahu. Israelis shared a sense of historic crisis and were prepared for a major war. The official leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, offered to join the cabinet, but he demanded that Netanyahu exclude Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, two far-right ministers, from his security cabinet. Netanyahu refused, with the rationale that after the emergency government eventually dissolved, he would have lost his base. It was an early sign that politics would continue to play a substantial role in the prime minister’s decisions, even in the depths of the crisis.

Gantz, the other major opposition leader, joined the cabinet nonetheless, satisfied instead by the creation of a “mini” war cabinet that excluded the two far-right ministers from the management of the war.

In the Israeli system, the prime minister is not the commander in chief of the military. Rather, the cabinet serves in that role, as a committee, with most powers bestowed on a smaller security cabinet (formally, the “ministerial committee for national security affairs”) of which Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are members. Netanyahu and Gantz thus formed an ad-hoc forum, the mini-war cabinet, with three official members: Netanyahu, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant of Netanyahu’s own Likud party, and Gantz. They were joined by three observers, Eisenkot; Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s confidante and former ambassador to the United States; and Aryeh Deri, the most veteran minister and leader of the Shas party. Notably absent were the far-right ministers.

Resignations and consequences

Gantz and Eisenkot joined the emergency cabinet on a temporary basis, for the duration of the war’s initial phases, and with the public expectation that they might resign by the end of 2023 or early 2024. Months past that, their resignations now have implications for Israeli policy and politics.

By May, as tensions with the Biden administration over Israel’s Gaza strategy had grown, Gallant publicly called out Netanyahu and criticized the latter’s lack of strategy for what Gaza might look like after Hamas. Without defined strategic goals, no operational or tactical objectives could succeed. Gallant demanded that Netanyahu state that he does not plan for a return to Israeli occupation, as existed before the Oslo II Accords of 1994. This dramatic challenge to Netanyahu also created an opening for Gantz.

In May, Gantz finally signaled his intent to resign. He laid out conditions for his staying in the government and set an ultimatum that he would leave if they were not met, which Netanyahu rebuffed the same day. In policy terms, his most notable demand echoed Gallant, demanding that Netanyahu elucidate the beginning of a strategy for the day after in Gaza.

Gantz, Gallant, and Eisenkot are all retired generals with a long, shared history in the military. Ganz is the former chief of staff of the military, a high-profile role that is more influential in Israel than the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in the United States, for example. As the only lieutenant general in the Israeli military and the commander of everyone in uniform, the chief of staff commands a great deal of attention from a public who face, in theory, universal conscription. When Gantz was appointed to the top military post in 2011, he was, in fact, the second choice of the cabinet. Netanyahu, the prime minister at the time, and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak had preferred Gallant, who was considered more hawkish on Iran, but was disqualified by a public committee due to ethical concerns. Eisenkot was appointed as Gantz’s deputy in 2013 and eventually succeeded him at the top military post. 

Now in government and civilian clothes, the former generals were at times allies in the war cabinet, despite representing different parties. Their demand for strategic thinking about the day after also reflected their desire to see some role, even if limited, for the secular, West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) in Gaza, which Netanyahu has rejected. The centrist ministers’ departures weaken that prospect, possibly strengthening the hands of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who would prefer to see the collapse of the PA altogether.

Elections are not imminent … probably

The resignations also had political motivations. Gantz has led Netanyahu in the polls ever since October 7, but his lead has narrowed significantly. If elections were held today, polls now suggest the possibility of an inconclusive election, though still with a clear advantage to the opposition. If these were the results of the next election, Gantz would need to cobble together a coalition reminiscent of the coalition headed by Lapid and Naftali Bennett, an act of political acrobatics that only held together for slightly over a year.

Elections are not scheduled for over two years, however. Even with Gantz’s resignation, Netanyahu’s original coalition, which consists of 64 out of 120 members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, still holds a clear majority. It could fracture in different scenarios, but none of them is very likely in the short term.

First, with Gantz’s and Eisenkot’s resignations, centrist Likud members, such as Gallant, may opt to defect and try to replace Netanyahu. This would be a very risky move for them politically, but it may become more likely if demonstrations against the government, already growing, return to the large scale that Israel had seen before October 6. Gantz’s presence in the government, and especially the war’s continuation, made the environment less conducive to such public pressure until now.

Netanyahu’s far-right partners may also bring about his downfall if he veers to the center. In particular, they have already warned that should Hamas accept the cease-fire and Netanyahu move forward with the deal (a “surrender,” as Smotrich termed it), they would topple the government. This, of course, makes such a scenario less likely.

Finally, there is a small chance that Netanyahu’s Haredi partners, who are the most conservative religiously but not the most hawkish in terms of national security, might destabilize his coalition. Haredi men are exempt from military service, due to political maneuvering, a highly emotive grievance for the majority of Jewish Israelis who do serve, especially in a time of war and bereavement. With the Supreme Court now demanding a legislative basis for the exemption, Netanyahu’s coalition is struggling to put one in place. Seeing a political opening, Gantz made conscription, in some form, one of his central demands of Netanyahu. Should such a legal standing not be found, the Haredim may follow through on their threats to resign, though they are unlikely to get a better deal with another prime minister later, and so have incentives to remain.

One final option remains: Netanyahu could call for elections himself if he found an opportune moment or excuse. Netanyahu has identified his opposition to a Palestinian state as a winning ticket in a population traumatized by October 7 and loath to take any security risks in negotiations with Palestinians. Netanyahu would hope to portray himself as the one man able to withstand international pressure on Palestinian sovereignty. He will undoubtedly hope to return to the theme of his recent election campaigns, portraying himself as being “in a league of his own” in global diplomacy. One opportunity for a campaign image of Netanyahu on the global stage will come soon, currently scheduled for July 24, when he speaks before a joint session of Congress.

[er1chartmann]

EINSATZGRUPPEN

These are some facts and curiosities about the Einsatzgruppen, The Death Squads:

The origins of the Einsatzgruppen can be traced back to the creation of a dedicated Einsatzkommando by Reinhard Heydrich for the purpose of safeguarding government buildings and the documents contained therein during the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938.

For the Polish campaign Heydrich again formed the Einsatzgruppen to follow the advance of the German armies but, unlike previous operations, he gave the commanders of these units carte blanche to kill members of those groups that the Germans considered hostile.

After the invasion of Poland the Einsatzgruppen began that career of "death squads" which made them sadly famous by "beheading" the Polish intelligentsia and killing politicians, scholars, teachers and members of the clergy.

In May 1940, during the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the Einsatzgruppen were activated once again to follow the advance of the Wehrmacht, but, unlike what had happened in Poland, in this case they were limited to the task originally for the protection of public buildings and documents.

During the invasion of the Soviet Union which began in June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen killed Jews, partisans and members of the Communist Party on a much larger scale than in Poland.

Each Einsatzgruppe, divided into operational units called Einsatzkommandos and Sonderkommandos, was logistically dependent on the German army's army groups but totally independent from them for the "special tasks" that were entrusted to it, having to report exclusively to the SS- und Polizeiführer ("Commander of the SS and Police») of the area of ​​use.

Within a short time the Einsatzgruppen were increasingly involved in the direct mass killing - the organization of "spontaneous" pogroms had not given the desired results - of Jewish Soviet citizens.

Initially the men of the Einsatzgruppen refrained from killing women and children but Himmler's calls for greater "harshness" quickly changed things and, starting from July-August 1941, the massacres also extended to these categories.

The most efficient of the Einsatzgruppen engaged in the Soviet Union was Einsatzgruppe A which operated in the Baltic republics (Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) occupied by the Soviets in 1939. -

The unit was the first Einsatzgruppe to complete its intended task of eliminating all Jews in its area of ​​responsibility, making it judenfrei ("Jew-free"). -

After December 1941 the other three Einsatzgruppen began what the historian Raul Hilberg called the "second sweep", which ended in the summer of 1942, trying to reach the results obtained by Einsatzgruppe A.

It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen killed around 1,500,000 people in the Soviet Union: Jews, communists, prisoners of war and gypsies. In addition to their extermination tasks, the Einsatzgruppen were also widely used in anti-partisan warfare.

The Einsatzgruppen were never permanent units but rather departments created ad hoc using personnel from the ranks of the SS, the SD and from various departments of the German police such as the Ordnungspolizei, the gendarmerie, the Kripo and the Gestapo.

The commanders and main coordinators of the Einsatzgruppen were tried on charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and SS affiliation

Commanders:

Einsatzgruppe A: SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker (until 23 March 1942)

Einsatzgruppe B: SS-Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe (until October 1941)

Einsatzgruppe C: SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Rasch (until October 1941)

Einsatzgruppe D: SS-Gruppenführer Prof. Otto Ohlendorf (until June 1942)

Sources:

Wikipedia: Einsatzgruppen

Military Wiki: Einsatzgruppen

❗❗I DON'T SUPPORT NAZISM,FASCISM OR ZIONISM IN ANY WAY, THIS IS AN EDUCATIONAL POST❗❗

[tower-of-hana]

Translation of the Vatican Latin Blog's post on Israel-Palestine

Inhuman Massacre of Journalists

In the war, which Israelies brought against Gaza around October journalists, were being killed.

Three more months have passed, as a result of which the Palestinian group who are usually called Hamas, after firing incendiary (the word he uses here appears to be an italian/romance word that means vomiting fire) missiles into Israel and attacking many times inside its borders (lit: making many incursions into its borders), killed 1,200 men and captured 247 civilians and kept the same hostages. Everyone knew the same day that the horrible facts came out that Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, announced a war with Hamas and their troops began to bring weapons into Gaza by land and sea in order to avenge a monstrous and cruel terror attack. And until now all the time, Israeli soldiers, who destroy this city and region and have not stopped killing thousands and thousands of innocent inhabitants, have also killed as many as 79 journalists, the Commision to Protect Journalists has alleged. Because this is a horrible and detestable crime.

Immanis Diurnariorum Strages

In bello, quod Israelitae contra Gazam intulerunt, circiter octoginta ephemeridum scriptores hodie usque interfecti sunt

Tres amplius menses elapsi sunt, ex quo Palaestinorum grex, qui vulgo Hamas appellatur, postquam ignivoma missilia in Israelitas coniecit multasque incursiones in eorum fines fecit, homines mille ac ducentos occidit atque cives ducentos quadraginta septem cepit eosdemque pro obsidibus retinuit. Omnes sciunt eodem die, quo luctuosa facta evenerunt, Beniaminum Netanyahu, primarium Israelis administrum, ut tam infandum tamque crudelem impetum tromocraticum ulcisceretur, Hamasianis bellum indixisse atque copias suas arma terra marique Gazae inferre coepisse. Et ad hoc usque tempus Israelitarum milites, qui urbem illam regionemque vastare ac milia et milia incolarum innocentium necare non cessant, saltem undeoctoginta ephemeridum scriptores, ut Commissio diurnariis tutandis, Anglico sermone Committee to Protect Journalists, asseverat, quoque interfecerunt. Quod horribile est scelus et abominandum.

[suresh-lal]

— BASICS

Name: Suresh Lal Age / D.O.B.: 38 / October 3rd, 1985 Gender, Pronouns & Sexuality: Cismale. He/Him. Demisexual / Homoromantic Hometown: Born: Puducherry, India. Grew up: Newcastle on Tyne, England and Marseille, France. Now: Lower East Side, Manhattan, NY Affiliation: Syndicate Job position: Captain / Owner of Shady Plots Funeral Home and Crematorium Education: Most of medical school Relationship status: Single Children: none Positive traits: Pragmatic, Calculated, Practical, Fastidious, Persuasive Negative traits: Cold, Morbid, Controlled, Selfish, Resentful

— BIOGRAPHY

tw: body horror, organ harvesting

Born in Puducherry, India. Parents relocated to England when Suresh was 5. His mother was French his Father was Indian. So Suresh has British, French and Indian passports. Left England at 15 to live with his Mother's family in Marseille.

Suresh was fascinated by forensic pathology and consumed large amounts of information on it growing up.

Went into medical school in France at 18. He was considered slightly off-putting with his clinically cold demeanor but showed great aptitude for trauma surgery.

When Suresh was approached by a few criminally minded individuals looking for help with a business idea he agreed not because he needed the money, and not for some type of sadistic need, but for the sheer personal challenge it offered to hone his surgical skills.

But it came crashing down three years later and Suresh was jailed at 27 after it was found that Suresh had helped a "friend" to remove and sell their kidney to pay of illegal gambling debts. Only one of the many surgeries they had performed over that three year term selling body parts and making a tidy profit. He was not allowed to complete his specialization as a surgeon and was stripped of his medical license.

In prison Suresh worked as an ad-hoc medic inside. His release was secured after only a year in prison, paid for by the business partners that he hadn't flipped on and that hadn't gotten caught.

After his release ten years ago he relocated to New York with a carefully cleaned background and first worked as a medic and cleaner for the Syndicate. Opening a Funeral home, he showed natural business acumen specializing in black-market sales.

Suresh became a Captain for the Syndicate five years ago. A feat on it's own considering his younger age.

Suresh is clean, efficient and professional. And is uninterested in letting personal feelings affect the Syndicate negatively.

He hasn't spoken to his family since his arrest in France.

Has a soft spot for horror films good and bad no matter how D list they are.

— WANTED CONNECTIONS / PLOTS

Employees of Shady Plots - Syndicate affiliated is a must for any illegal work

Close friends - Suresh is hard to get to know but there are a few that have made it past the surgical steel wrapped around his heart. (most likely Syndicate or Syndicate adjacent)

Professional acquaintances - (medical backgrounds, mortuary backgrounds, utilized the Funeral Home for legitimate business)

Resurrection men- (people that supply bodies or buy the bodies)

Romantic connections - Did you flirt at a horror convention? Did you hit on Suresh at your Great-Aunts funeral? Are you one of the few people that actually got a date? Or one of the even more rare people that actually got to go home with Suresh?

His bunkmate in prison that he grew close to.

— PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

Height: 6’

Body type: thin

Hair: Black 

Eyes:  Brown

Piercings/Tattoos: none

Languages: English, French, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam

[nicklloydnow]

“Today there is a state that, with a bit of challenging hyperbole, offers some interesting analogies to ancient Sparta. This state is Israel. Let's see what these analogies are, trying to present them in a parallel chronological order.

Just as post-Mycenaean Sparta was created by a massive Dorian migration, the new Israel came into being as a result of some fifty years of Jewish relocation there. Both displacements of peoples were the effect of two immense geopolitical upheavals: the Hellenic Middle Ages and World War II. Both the Dorians and the Jews had to fight, the former to conquer the new settlements, the latter to take back their ancestral homeland.

Once the situation was stabilized, the Spartiates created their own system divided into castes, while the Israelis guaranteed equal rights to the Muslim population, preventing at the same time the return of the Arabs who had fled in 1948: this because such a mass return would mean, sic et simpliciter, the end of Israel through its demographic destruction.

Surrounded by enemies and with a fragile internal balance, Sparta transformed the ruling caste into a collective warrior elite. Similarly, Israel was born and developed as a nation in arms, capable of mass mobilization in a very short time. In both peoples the brotherhood of arms has helped to cement equality and internal democracy (internal to the supreme caste the Spartan one, more collective the Israeli one).

Last but not least, both the ancient and the modern nation have found themselves having to be one of the spearheads in the eternal conflict between Western Civilization and the autocratic Eastern masses. The fact that these masses before identified themselves with an absolute God-King and today with a religion that claims world domination and rejects the very concepts of freedom and democracy changes little: geopolitics is the daughter of both geography and anthropology, therefore the enemies of the West remain essentially the same, just as the content of a bottle does not change even if the label is changed.

In this brief historical-geopolitical journey of ours, we have analyzed some curious similarities between two state realities that apparently could not seem more different: ancient Sparta and contemporary Israel. Many will find this parallel academic, if not opportunistic. However, it remains undeniable that, in its own way, today's Jewish state has similarities with the homeland that was once Leonidas'.

All the more reason for any Westerner to defend it to the hilt.” - Fabio Bozzo, ‘Israel: a new Sparta?’

“Brooks Adams prefaced his classic study of civilization and decay with the observation that conscious thought plays an exceedingly small part in molding the fate of men. “At the moment of action the human being almost invariably obeys an instinct, like an animal; only after action has ceased does he reflect.” For Israel the moment of action is now, the instinct is self‐preservation, and the time for reflection is yet to come.

When Israelis speak of the future, they generally mean what will happen tomorrow, next week next month. This is true of statesmen and publicists, as it is of the general public. There is no lack of forecasts, but little that rises to the level vision. Political leaders deal in ad hoc solutions to today's (and often, yesterday's) issues. The future will have to wait its turn.

(…)

Ben Gurion was, as events have shown, a premature Cassandra. True to the prophetic tradition, he was giving answers to questions which had not yet been asked. His June, 1967, warnings became relevant only in October, 1973, with the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath. Today, the nearly total diplomatic isolation of Israel, the resurrection of Arab claims to national rights in the entire area of mandatory Palestine, and the readiness of many in the West to bargain away interests of vital importance to Israel have raised, for the first time since the darkest days of Israel's war of independence, the very question of the future of Israel as an independent state.

Certain basic facts of national life obviously need to be reassessed. The increase in strength the Arab world, combining economic muscle with national‐religious fanaticism, and backed by the logistic capacity of the Soviet arsenal, has already affected the global balance of power, let alone the regional one. Perhaps its most significant immediate influence on Israel's military posture in terms of the morale of its foe: Israel today faces an enemy that enjoys a degree of self‐confidence that it never knew before, combined with the motivation that comes with a belief in its cause and in the inevitability of its victory. Loss of life irrelevant, as is loss of equipment, as long as the Soviet Union is prepared to make good the needs in matériel created by renewed hostilities. The major change in Israeli thinking has been with regard to the estimate of the enemy's potential.

There has been no change with regard to the estimate of the enemy's intentions: It is assumed that those intentions remain, as they have since Israel's creation, the destruction of the Jewish State. For this the address of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian terrorist leader, before the U.N. General Assembly, provides ample confirmation.

A realistic awareness of the growth of the power of the Arab world has not shaken confidence Israel's military superiority. Another war, in whose inevitability there seems to be general agreement, will bring another Israeli victory, costlier perhaps than its predecessors, but no less (and no more) conclusive. On this subject there is no end of reassurance from those who should be in a position to know, both in Israel and abroad. The unanswered question is, what happens then?

Some see this as the pattern of the future for as long in time as it is worth speculating. There will be an endless series of wars, the lag between them determined by the time required for the Arabs to re‐equip and prepare for the coming round. A small minority accepts the possibility of defeat, to which there are two answers.

One is summed up in the word Masada, a suicidal last stand that would satisfy national honor and redeem the memory of the millions of European Jews who were led to slaughter in the Nazi Holocaust. The other answer assumes that in an extremity the means would be available that would be adequate to the circumstances. On the basis of information in the public domain, the possibility of an atomic Armageddon would seem to he a real one, thus forcing the Arabs to reassess the cost that they would be prepared to pay for the privilege of destroying Israel. There is some indication that such a reassessment may have indeed been undertaken in certain of Sadat's (…)

As answers to the possibility of defeat, Masada and Armageddon are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they have a great deal in common. Desperation, however, is a luxury Israel cannot afford, nor can it serve as a guide to the determination of national policy. Nevertheless, there is some small corner of the mind in which such visions of the Apocalypse are lodged, blocked out from consciousness by their very unthinkability.

Jewish tradition tells us that problems can have a natural or a miraculous solution. To the never‐ending Arab‐Israeli wars, Masada and Armageddon are natural solutions. The miraculous solution is peace. Israel's acceptance by its neighbors remains the cardinal national objective, but its realization would appear to require time of Messianic dimensions. Still, it is sometimes an imperative of realism to seek the impossible.

War and another inconclusive victory are the immediate prospects. Masada, Armaeddon, peace— these define the limits of historical time. Israel lives in that broad range of possible futures that stretch from the here and now to the end of days. And all press into the present at one and the same time.

(…)

It is to be expected that in any garrison‐state society the army will have a dominating political role. In Israel, however, this is apt to be less than might he anticipated. First of all, Israel has been in a virtual state of siege since its independence, and the change as a result of the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath is one of degree rather than of kind. Second, in a state in which the army impinges to such a great extent over such an extended period of time on every facet of society, the society is affected, but so is the army. The Israel defense forces have never constituted a professional elite, divorced from a distinct caste, removed from other decision‐making and opinion‐farming elites. Israel is a nation in arms more than any other in modern history. The Jeffersonian ideal of every citizen a soldier and every soldier a citizen, realized in Israel to a much greater extent than it ever was in Jeffersonian America, makes of military participation in politics something very different than it has been in, say, France or Germany—or even contemporary America.

Nor is there reason to anticipate a breakdown of parliamentary democracy in a Spartan Israel. A continued period of tension is likely to cement further the basic national consensus. Its Achilles' heel has always been the necessity to make decisions on matters on which consensus does not exist and in which any decision is unacceptable to substantial segments of the population (such as territorial concessions, for example). Under siege conditions, decisions need not he made, as options are closed. The result is, on the one hand, immobility and, on the other, a high degree of stability in government, both of which have been characteristic of Israel in the past and will continue in the foreseeable future. A Government of national unity seems a distinct possibility, representing both a response to the demand for a heightened solidarity and the absence of significant issues demanding decision in matters over which the political parties differ fundamentally.

The importance of solidarity and the passage of time itself may help to close the social gap separating Israelis of European and non‐Europe origin, the most significant cleavage in contemporary Israeli society. Generally, it may he safe to assume that equality and fraternity will do better in a Spartan society than liberty. In Israel, however, basic freedoms do not appear to be in any significant danger, beyond those limitations imposed, as Holmes observed, “as long as men fight.” The pluralistic nature of Israeli society inhibits the denial of the right of political dissent, at least for those within the national body which in Israel is virtually coterminous with the society itself. However, tolerance for fringe groups beyond the pale is likely to diminish.

Israeli policy in the occupied areas of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip may be severely tested by future developments. This has been, in many respects, the most liberal military occupation in contemporary history. It has been based on keeping the peace by making it to the advantage of the local Arab population. Economic prosperity and the lack of reasonable expectation of political change have been far more important in the preservation of order and the prevention of hostile activities against the occupation forces than has the direct application of military force.

The creation of Israeli settlements in the occupied areas has been part of the general conception underlying official policy. The settlements, located along the Jordan and south of Gaza, protect basic strategic interests, without seriously intruding into Arab populated areas. (The one major exception, Kiryat Arha, near Hebron, was not the result of official initiative but rather a concession to the political pressures of coalition politics.) By blocking off possible invasion routes, the settlements make the annexation of areas densely populated by Arabs unnecessary. Wildcat settlement attempts by Jewish nationalist groups within Arab‐populated areas have been dealt with sternly and decisively.

Thus, both occupation and settlement policy have been designed to preserve security interests while keeping open options for a compromise solution. Possible economic difficulties and a fluid political situation could seriously threaten to encourage an increase in opposition to the occupation on the part of the local population, while Rabat and its aftermath appear to have barred, at least for the immediate future, the way to a political settlement. Major assumptions of present policy in the occupied areas may, therefore, cease to be valid. A breakdown of public order in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip would severely tax limited Israeli manpower reserves and might require a drastic change of policy. In this event, Arab propaganda claims with regard to alleged Israeli repression in the occupied areas and the displacement of the indigenous population could prove to he self‐fulfilling prophecies.

(…)

Yet fundamental change in Israel's prospects depends on a basic change within the West. There are other areas of the world besides the Middle East in which the Western powers have not acted in unity. However, there is no other area in which they have so frequently worked at cross‐purposes or to no visible purpose at all. In no other area has the policy of Western governments so frequently subordinated national ideals to putative national interests and in the end resulted in the loss or abandonment both of principles and of interests.

Winston Churchill once said that democracy was not harlot that could be picked up on a street corner by a young man with a tommy gun. He was wrong. It happens all the time, with the most prim and proper, the most matronly democracies, including his own. Instead, a tommy gun is not indispensable; hard cash and the control of oil resources will do just as well. Witness the spectacle of French diplomatic emissaries hustling the Middle Eastern turf, turning their tricks with sheik and terrorist. The sale of arms, encouraged by balance of payments difficulties, has become an aim, rather than an instrument, of national policy: and all fat cats are gray in the night.

Today, the fate of much of the industrialized world, with its masses of workers and consumers, has come to depend on decisions made by minuscule coterie of absolute potentates, their feet firmly rooted in the Middle Ages and their hands at the throat of the industrial civilization of the West. Never before in history has the fate of so many been at the mercy of so few. Oddly, there are still those who persist in seeing this as a victory of anticolonialism and anti‐imperialism, those most durable verbal relics of the long‐lost world of liberal innocence. Surely there must come a point at which the act in unity if its own survival is to be safeguarded. When that day comes, Israel's future will take a new direction.

(…)

Earlier, in the fall of 1962, Henry Kissinger visited this communal village and its regional school. In those days the threat came from the Syrian artillery on the Golan Heights, which dominated the area. Kissinger, then security adviser to Nelson Rockefeller and on a special mission fo. Kennedy, was especially intrigued by the attention devoted to gardening and to the atmosphere of tranquillity. juxtaposed against the network of shelters under the shadow of the commanding Syrian positions, visible even to the naked eye. What he founded in the Jordan Valley tended to disprove the contention of Rockefeller's adversaries that extensive civil‐defense measures would disrupt normal life and create panic.

Today, the children of the Jordan Valley communes play and study in close proximity to armed guards. The massacre at Ma'alot proved that children enjoy a privileged position as a priority target for Palestinian liberation fighters. The danger has become less anonymous and less indiscriminate. Life, however, remains normal in every critical sense, and there is no panic.

November 28 was the anniversary of the 1947 U.N. decision in favor of the creation of a Jewish State. The sixth‐grade pupils in the Jordan Valley elementary school wrote compositions on “What Israel Will Be Like When I Am Grown Up.” One theme is dominant: peace. Many express it by predicting that they will visit the Pyramids in Egypt and travel by train to Damascus. Moran Palmoni, a 12‐year‐old fourth‐generation sabra, concluded his composition in verse:

“I hope that peace will come

I believe that it will come

That we will not have to sit in the shelter

That tranquillity will fall also on us

Every child and every flower will he happy when it comes

Only may it come, only may it come!””

“Buried deep inside a Times report last weekend about Hadar Goldin, the Israeli soldier who was reported captured by Hamas, in the southern Gaza Strip, and then declared dead, was the following paragraph:

The circumstances surrounding his death remained cloudy. A military spokeswoman declined to say whether Lieutenant Goldin had been killed along with two comrades by a suicide bomb one of the militants exploded, or later by Israel’s assault on the area to hunt for him; she also refused to answer whether his remains had been recovered.

Just what those circumstances were began to filter out early this week, and they attest to deep contradictions in the Israeli military—and in Israeli culture at large.

A temporary ceasefire went into effect last Friday morning at eight. At nine-fifteen, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces headed toward a house, in the city of Rafah, that served as an entry point to a tunnel reportedly leading into Israel. As the I.D.F. troops advanced, a Hamas militant emerged from the tunnel and opened fire. Two soldiers were killed. A third, Goldin, was captured—whether dead or alive is unclear—and taken into the tunnel. What is clear is that after Goldin was reported missing, the I.D.F. enacted a highly controversial measure known as the Hannibal Directive, firing at the area where Goldin was last seen in order to stop Hamas from taking him captive. As a result, according to Palestinian sources, seventy Palestinians were killed. By Sunday, Goldin, too, had been declared dead.

Opinions differ over how this protocol, which remained a military secret until 2003, came to be known as Hannibal. There are indications that it was named for the Carthaginian general, who chose to poison himself rather than fall captive to the Romans, but I.D.F. officials insist that a computer generated the name at random. Whatever its provenance, the moniker seems chillingly apt. Developed by three senior I.D.F. commanders, in 1986, following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, the directive established the steps the military must take in the event of a soldier’s abduction. Its stated goal is to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands, “even at the cost of hurting or wounding our soldiers.” While normal I.D.F. procedures forbid soldiers from firing in the general direction of their fellow-troops, including attacking a getaway vehicle, such procedures, according to the Hannibal Directive, are to be waived in the case of an abduction: “Everything must be done to stop the vehicle and prevent it from escaping.”

Although the order specifies that only selective light-arms fire should be used in such cases, the message behind it is resounding. When a soldier has been abducted, not only are all targets legitimate—including, as we saw over the weekend, ambulances—but it’s permissible, and even implicitly advisable, for soldiers to fire on their own. For more than a decade, military censors blocked journalists from reporting on the protocol, apparently because they feared it would demoralize the Israeli public. In 2003, an Israeli doctor who had heard of the directive while serving as a reservist, in Lebanon, began advocating for its annulment, leading to its declassification. That year, a Haaretz investigation of the directive concluded that “from the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release.”

(…)

To be clear, there is no evidence that Goldin was killed by friendly fire. But military officials did confirm that commanders on the ground had activated the Hannibal Directive and ordered “massive fire”—not for the first time since Operation Protective Edge began, on July 8th. (One week into the ground offensive, in the central Gaza Strip, forces reportedly** **enacted the protocol when another soldier, Guy Levy, was believed missing.) Since the directive’s inception, the I.D.F. is known to have used it only a handful of times, including in the case of Gilad Shalit. The order came too late for Shalit and did not prevent his abduction—or his eventual release, in 2011, in exchange for a thousand and twenty-seven Palestinian prisoners. That year, as part of the military’s inquiry into the circumstances leading to Shalit’s capture, the I.D.F.’s Chief of Staff, Benny Gantz, modified the directive. It now allows field commanders to act without awaiting confirmation from their superiors; at the same time, the directive’s language was tempered to make clear that it does not call for the willful killing of captured soldiers. In changing the wording of the protocol, Gantz introduced an ethical principle known as the “double-effect doctrine,” which states that a bad result (the killing of a captive soldier) is morally permissible only as a side effect of promoting a good action (stopping his captors).

Whether soldiers have heeded this change in language, and how they now choose to interpret the directive, is difficult to assess. If past experience is any indication, the military hierarchy’s interpretation remains unequivocal. During Israel’s last operation in Gaza, in 2011, one Golani commander was caught on tape telling his unit: “No soldier in the 51st Battalion will be kidnapped, at any price or under any condition. Even if it means that he has to detonate his own grenade along with those who try to capture him. Even if it means that his unit will now have to fire at the getaway car.”

On Sunday, a decade after its initial investigation of the Hannibal Directive, Haaretz revisited the subject with a piece by Anshel Pfeffer that tried to explain why, despite the procedure’s morally questionable nature, there hasn’t been significant opposition to it. Pfeffer wrote:

Perhaps the most deeply engrained reason that Israelis innately understand the needs for the Hannibal Directive is the military ethos of never leaving wounded men on the battlefield, which became the spirit following the War of Independence, when hideously mutilated bodies of Israeli soldiers were recovered. So Hannibal has stayed a fact of military life and the directive activated more than once during this current campaign.

Ronen Bergman, author of the book “By Any Means Necessary,” which examines Israel’s history of dealing with captive soldiers, further explained this rationale in a recent radio interview: “There is a disproportionate sensitivity among Israelis [on the issue of captive soldiers] that is hard to describe to foreigners.” Bergman traced this sensitivity back to Maimonides, the medieval Torah scholar, who wrote: “There is no greater Mitzvah than redeeming captives.”

This line of argument, while historically true, is worth pausing over—if only to unpack the moral paradox within it. In essence, what this “military ethos” means is that Israel sanctifies the lives of its soldiers so much, and would be willing to pay such an exorbitant price for their release, that it will do everything in its power to prevent such a scenario—including putting those same soldiers’ lives at risk (not to mention wreaking havoc on the surrounding population). This is the dubious situation that Israel finds itself in: signalling to the military that a dead soldier is preferable to a captive one, while at the same time signalling to the Israeli public that no cost will be spared to secure a captured soldier’s release. (It’s worth recalling that, three years after Shalit was traded for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, the captive U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was traded for five Taliban prisoners. This isn’t to suggest that Israel cares more about its troops than the United States does, but rather that no crime is greater, in the eyes of Israelis, than the kidnapping of “our boys.”)

(…)

Sharon added that the mixed consequences of the directive are typical of the behavior that now characterizes the Israeli public at large. “On the one hand, we are willing to risk soldiers’ lives recklessly and without need, but on the other hand we have zero tolerance for the price that this might entail.”

[sweetbaloonsriseboldly]

Nakano Takeko (中野 竹子, April 1847 – 16 October 1868) was a Japanese female warrior of the Aizu Domait, who fought and died during the Boshin War. During the battle of Aizu she fought with a nagitana (a Japanese polearm) and was the leader of an ad hoc corps of female combatants who fought in the battle independently. After taking a bullet in the chest she had her sister behead her, so that the enemy would not take her as a war trophy!

[chipotle]

Twitter, failure modes, and your favorite bar

So I’ve been seeing arguments for why, no, you should really stay on Twitter, because of the problems with anything vying to replace it. Most circle around what tech people might dub failure modes in terms of both engineering and policy.

Make no mistake, many of these are solid arguments. Twitter has, as much as we like to pretend otherwise, gotten many things right. They’ve got fast onboarding. They provide a good experience on both mobile and desktop. (Please don’t @ me with your objections to ads and algorithms and whatever; I’m not saying the UX design on Twitter is perfect or free of dark patterns, I’m saying that it’s been developed by UX professionals over a 15-year period and it shows.) They understand the importance of making a service like theirs accessible. They understand the importance of well-designed terms of service that limit their legal liability without taking draconian stances toward users and their content. These are all failure modes that other, newer, smaller services have done little or nothing to address.

But for many people, the real issue isn’t what’s wrong with the other places. It’s that they love this place. Twitter, for all its faults, for all the love/hate relationship you have with it—it’s your favorite bar. This is what most indie creators are feeling, I think. None of the other services have the audience reach; it’s unrealistic to expect us to be on a half-dozen new sites when we could just stay put; and, hey, the likelihood of Twitter really exploding is pretty low. All of those are true, too.

The problem, though, is that just because Twitter’s failure mode isn’t likely to be “closing up shop” doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other failure modes. You might have noticed I didn’t mention harassment and toxic behavior as a failure mode—the things a Trust and Safety Team handles—but it is. As Nilay Patel observed, the product of a social network is content moderation.

To be clear, this is something all the Not-Twitters are going to have to come to grips with in ways they haven’t yet. Cohost, Hive, and OoobyBloobly (which I just made up, or did I, you’re not sure, are you) look good by comparison because they are a fraction of a fraction of Twitter’s scale. Your favorite Mastodon instance this week is even smaller. With Twitter’s two hundred million users, trying to regulate bad behavior is a 24/7 rearguard action.

Well, guess what? Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team is now gone. By deliberate design. It’s not coming back, at least not in any recognizable form, not any time soon.

You think I’m going to mention Musk restoring Trump’s Twitter account. I am. But the canary in the coal mine isn’t the who as much as it’s the how. Musk claimed in October that he’d set up a new “council” for moderation, and that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before the council convenes.” That was a blatant lie. He polled his followers—hardly a statistically unbiased group—about restoring Trump’s account, and has restored others just on his own. Tech journalist Casey Newton:

At the risk of stating the obvious, this sort of ad hoc approach to content moderation and community standards is completely unsustainable. It does not scale beyond a handful of the most prominent accounts on the service. And, most worryingly, it is not based on any clear principles: Musk is leading trust and safety at Twitter the same way he is leading product and hiring—by whim.

And this is Twitter’s failure mode. All those tweets you’ve seen bitching about how a big problem with Mastodon is that you might choose an “instance” that ends up being run by an anti-woke edgelord tinpot dictator? That’s Twitter now.

Oh, you say the need for advertisers will help rein in their worst impulses, because no sensible advertiser wants to have their “promoted tweets” running in line with alt-right propaganda? Good luck with that: a Twitter that’s only ten or fifteen percent of its original size requires a lot less money to run, and Musk’s been clear he aims to reduce the company’s dependency on advertising income.

And those remaining thousand employees or so aren’t going to push back the way we saw happen in some tech companies a year or two ago. The shakeout isn’t just in progress, it’s almost over. The ones left either can’t afford to leave or subscribe to Musk’s worldview. Anyone who joins Twitter under his leadership will have done so knowing what that worldview is.

The “liberal bias of big tech” has always been a phantasm. Silicon Valley has always had a strong libertarian bent to it, from the right-of-center Hoover think tank at Stanford University to the military/aerospace roots that long predate the 1990s dotcom boom. While many SV libertarians are socially liberal, not all are, and a few of the most prominent conservatives came out of the “PayPal Mafia”: Musk, the openly anti-democratic Peter Thiel, and VC David Sacks, who co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth with Thiel a couple of decades ago. Along with professional idiot Jason Calacanis, Sacks now advises Musk on how to run Twitter, and the circumstantial evidence suggests they’ve encouraged the performative cruelty Musk’s exhibited in how he’s run things so far.

So here’s the thing. What conservative culture warriors always say they want is the absence of political bias, but time and time again what they mean is bias that explicitly favors them. Everything else, you see, has an innate liberal bias—it’s them against the world, fighting the good fight. They want fairness and balance the way Fox News does. They don’t want an unbiased social media site; what they want is a site with Gab and Parler’s slant, but Twitter’s reach. Now they have it. The product of a social network is content moderation, and Twitter’s new content moderators will be hand-picked by Musk. It’s going to be full of people who won’t object to racism, homophobia, and transphobia as much as object to fighting it, because “free speech”.

If you do believe in the Fox News kind of balance, that I’m wrong about Silicon Valley’s political biases and especially wrong about Twitter’s, this isn’t a failure mode. It’s what you want, or at least what you think you want. It’s clearly what Elon Musk thinks he wants. But for Twitter as we knew it, this is a catastrophic failure. It’s a terminal condition, an unrecoverable crash.

New Twitter will be hostile to anyone queer, or non-white, or slightly to the left of Ronald Reagan. You may be a creator who wants to stay on Twitter to reach your audience, but the audience there will inevitably tilt toward the anti-woke, All Lives Matter, gender critical, Just Asking Questions crowd. If they’re your audience, congratulations, I guess. If they’re not, you have a problem.

I get that, right now, it’s still easy to rationalize staying on Twitter. The alternatives are too confusing, or have questionable terms of service, or don’t have a registered DMCA agent, or have a crappy official app, or have a crappy web interface, or just seem like they’re run out of a college dorm room. We can go down the list and acknowledge most or all of those are great points.

But your favorite bar is under new management, and whether you want to admit it or not, you know damn well what kind of bar they’re making it into. You need to think long and hard about whether you’re okay with that.

[bagog]

Nightmare Walk

Ryan could hear the crack of the flail in the next room, Patrick's mournful groans and austere sounds of agony. There was a syrupy tendril of false blood that was beginning to drip from Ryan's false beard, about to fall and join the puddle of red-dyed cornstarch at the foot of the cross.

Ryan wore a long brown wig and a false beard and little else besides a blood-stained cloth around his boxers: in the semi-dark of the haunted attraction, he was the spitting image of the crucified Christ. His arms were strapped into the cross-beam of a large cross which held him high above the extras in Bible-clothing who were milling around waiting to be jeering onlookers. He was covered in fake blood, and occasionally as it trickled down over an eyebrow and he would waggle his head, unable to free his arms to brush it away.

The things you did for the Kingdom.

"Every 'hit' you take, every person you defile yourself with outside of marriage, every Sunday you slept in: each of those is another crack of the whip onto Jesus' flesh."

Ryan could hear the guide narrating through the scene right before they were supposed to enter this room and see that Jesus on the cross, dying for their sins. The attendees had been through the drugs room, the suicide room, the school shooting room, and were proper scared and ready to see some Biblical violence.

And so, next door, Patrick, dressed almost identically to Ryan, was being 'whipped' by a costumed Roman soldier: tortured. Then, with their trespasses still rising in their throats, they'd walk through the door and BAM: cross.

He was sweating beneath the fake blood and cold everywhere else, but it didn't matter too much to him. It was a big honor, he'd been doing Nightmare Walk all through high-school, and finally he was allowed to play Jesus. Still, as he hung there, Ryan thought that he was glad this would be his last year. It had turned out that, since meeting Patrick especially, he more looked forward to hitting the local Denny's with the other actors once the night was over.

"AGH!"

Ryan shook himself from his reverie, tried to stretch his arms which were quickly becoming numb. He heard it again, another shout. This one wasn't austere and Biblical, it was Patrick, and he was actually screaming.

"The fornicators, the idolators, the thieves, and the homosexuals will not be permitted to enter the kingdom of heaven!"

The narrator was 'preaching' at a fever pitch now, and Ryan didn't recognize the voice or the script they seemed to be using. His stomach sank.

"Oww! Hey, time-out, stop! STOP! Davis--AUGH!--stop!" Patrick was sounding panicked now.

"This one is guilty of lying with another man. He is abomination. Play-acting as our Savior with this unrepented sin still upon him!"

Ryan began to struggle with the bindings that held him fast to the cross, but they wouldn't budge. Patrick's cries had grown softer, broken, pleading. The door opened, and a crowd of people in fall-coats and scarves sidled in, led by a woman Ryan did not recognize.

"And here's the other one, the other homosexual. Dressed up like the Son of God, mocking the almighty with his iniquity." The woman proclaimed. Ryan couldn't make out the faces of the crowd in the darkness, but when the woman stepped forward, he saw she was carrying a brick. Maybe everyone in the crowd was.

Ryan pulled at his bonds, tried to twist out of them and off the cross. The sounds of a whip splitting flesh continued in the next room, and the woman raised her brick, eyes fiery and grin alive. The extras jeered and booed. The dark crowd stepped forward, arms raised.

[oneminutemoneymagazine]

The Pensions Dashboard: A Constructive Alternative

The Pensions Dashboard is a UK government plan to set up one large database from which every person can access their UK occupational pension data from all of their past and present employers.  The previous post on this blog criticised it on the grounds of complexity and greatly increased risk of fraud.  It could also have mentioned the lack of consent.  The government has not asked me whether I want my personal data put on their new database!

Having said this, there is a risk that, when a pension plan member reaches retirement age, the employer and administrators may have lost contact with them.  There are ad hoc arrangements whereby administrators can ask the DWP to help trace a missing member.  This should be formalised and expanded.  Only small amounts of data such as names, dates of birth and national insurance numbers would be needed.  Either individuals or plan administrators could contact the new government agency and the resources needed would be a mere fraction of those for the proposed Pensions Dashboard.  It should also be possible to implement it well before the current dashboard target date of October 2026.

In the meantime, employees should carefully keep their own records and advise plan administrators of changes of address etc.  There is also a government website called “Find pension contact details”.  It isn’t perfect, but it can often be helpful.  The link is

https://www.gov.uk/find-pension-contact-details

(24/07/2023)

[burlveneer-music]

Mauskovic Dance Band - Bukaroo Bank - brand new from Amsterdam, but could pass for a Pop Group offshoot circa 1981 (Les Disques Bongo Joe)

Bukaroo Bank is actually Mauskovic’s second album. There, the band reinvents both their approach and their sound, while maintaining the rhythm-forward euphoria heard on their debut album and surrounding singles. It is one of those albums that sounds brashly live, like you’re in the room while the jams are being kicked out, but in fact uses the studio very shrewdly. Recorded in 2020, during one of the Netherlands’ intermittent lockdown bouts, for this one the MDB wanted to step up from their previous homebase, Garage Noord – an ad hoc Amsterdam space for recording, practise and after-hours parties. They chose Electric Monkey, operated by engineer Kasper Frenkel. His stacks of what Nicola calls “very strange equipment”, and ability to sprinkle magic dub dust over everything, suited the vibe perfectly. The results glow and shiver with assembled synth sounds, rhythms spliced and echoed in a way that hails late Jamaican dub great Lee Perry – maybe the band’s biggest influence. Some sections might remind you of Afro-disco or slightly older highlife, others industrial prototypes like early Cabaret Voltaire, or 1980s On-U Sound mainstays like African Head Charge, or NYC groovers such as Liquid Liquid... there are outbreaks of saxophone, congas, echo units, wah-wah disco guitars, beats that sound programmed but aren’t (a nod to MDB’s industrial side). If that sounds fun to you, be assured that Bukaroo Bank is an irrepressibly fun album – but one that contains multitudes. creditsreleased October 28, 2022 Mauskovic Dance Band is: Chris Bruining, Donald Mauskovic, Mano Mauskovic, Marnix Mauskovic, Nico Mauskovic All songs by Mauskovic Dance Band featuring Kasper Frenkel Frank Electric Monkey Dub

[mariacallous]

In the early morning of Jan. 11, a 21-year-old man was fatally shot in the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim, just across the Green Line from Jerusalem. It was revealed that one of the suspects had recently acquired his gun license, thanks to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s newly relaxed firearms policy.

The fear and tension across Israel since the massacre by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, mixed with the troubling turn internal security policies have taken, have created an atmosphere of armed paranoia—and led to the spread of armed militias with little training and an aggressive mindset.

Oct. 7 shattered the sense of personal security across the country, and many Israelis have started to organize their own ad hoc security arrangements in both villages and kibbutzim. This response includes a significant surge in applications for gun licenses, with more than 270,000 Israelis applying between Oct. 7 and Dec. 25. Police officials report a remarkable growth in civilian rapid response teams, which have expanded from 70 units to 900, incorporating more than 10,000 volunteers.

The widespread increase in firearms possession is not solely a spontaneous reaction from a worried populace but rather the result of pro-gun policies championed by the hard right, which have intensified under Ben-Gvir’s influence in the past year. This policy shift toward greater gun accessibility and ownership is a calculated move aligned with the hard right’s agenda, rather than just a direct response to public concern.

Ben-Gvir has advocated for increased private gun ownership, significantly relaxing the country’s traditionally stringent gun control laws and easing the rules of engagement for police officers. Last August, Ben-Gvir publicly commended an Israeli settler for fatally shooting a Palestinian teenager during a clash near the West Bank town of Burqa. After Oct. 7, Ben-Gvir called for a national campaign to give weapons to Israelis. His former cover photo on X, formerly Twitter, said in Hebrew, “Israel is arming!”

“People have lost their sense of security and felt that having a gun would bring it back. Ben-Gvir exploited this to advance his agenda,” said Wisal Raed, the coordinator of a project to combat violence and crime in Arab society at Sikkuy-Aufoq, a Jewish and Arab nonprofit organization.

“We need to go back to 20 years ago, to the Second Intifada,” said Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer who writes about Israel’s gun industry. “In response to the Intifada, Israel saw a proliferation of security guards in public spaces, from cafes to malls to train stations, with tens of thousands of them armed. Fast-forward to the ‘knife intifada’ [a period of increased Israeli-Palestinian violence starting in October 2015, characterized by numerous stabbing attacks by Palestinians against Israelis] and the late 2010s, when then-Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan passed a law lowering the bar for who can get a gun. Then, in the last elections in November 2022, Ben-Gvir ran on relaxing these laws even more. For the hard right, weapons aren’t a pragmatic necessity but an ideological belief.”

Ben-Gvir’s agenda was clear long before Oct. 7. After he took office in late 2022, he ordered the police to abolish the practice of requiring citizens involved in an attack to hand over their personal weapons for extended examination and investigation. During the protests that swept Israel in 2023, Ben-Gvir worked to oust Tel Aviv District Commander Ami Eshed, whom he saw as siding with anti-government protesters. Meanwhile, Israel saw its deadliest year on record among Arabs, with 244 killings attributed to crime and protection issues—six times the number among Jews—and a mere 10 percent solve rate, less than half the solve rate for cases involving Jews.

“Ben-Gvir has deliberately weakened the police to establish a ‘national guard.’ The privatization of law enforcement leaves citizens with no choice but to protect themselves,” Mack said.

For Ben-Gvir and his allies in the gun lobby, Oct. 7 was an opportunity. The new regulations initiated by Ben-Gvir have significantly reduced the criteria for obtaining firearms. Among other measures, they allow volunteers in rescue organizations (such as Israel’s national medical emergency, disaster, ambulance, and blood service) to obtain gun licenses; lower the certification threshold from “Rifleman 07” (a soldier who’s skilled in combatant training and advanced weaponry) to “Rifleman 02” (a noncombat soldier who has gone through basic training); and permit, from the age of 27, even those who have not served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and reside in eligible settlements (those near the Gaza border, including Ofakim, Netivot, and Sderot) to acquire a handgun license. Licensing regulations have been loosened, and in-person interviews are no longer required.

Members of kibbutzim and moshavim can now obtain handgun licenses through their agricultural associations. This move, alongside the establishment of hundreds of rapid response teams equipped with rifles, has created a sense of an “arming nation.”

In a Jewish Power party meeting last October, Ben-Gvir doubled down on his gun policies, saying, “The war’s onset confirmed our belief: Having a weapon in every location can save lives.”

But guns aren’t for everyone. The licenses of several members of the anti-Netanyahu group “Brothers in Arms” were taken away for “conspicuous reasons,” with members saying they were targeted for their anti-government stance.

Ben-Gvir also put out a directive permitting police to use live fire against those blocking roads, thereby hindering the movement of IDF personnel and access to settlements. Critics of this directive argued that it was meant to target anti-government protesters and Arab communities. When Arab members of Israel’s parliament, or Knesset, planned a protest to call for a cease-fire, they were detained by the police.

The new militias—and their weapons—are visible on the streets, to public alarm. Tel Aviv council member Tzipi Brand sent a letter to Mayor Ron Huldai protesting the actions of rapid response units that arbitrarily stop Arab residents, causing terror among the population. One of these units includes “The Shadow,” a rap artist with extreme-right views and a notoriously violent following.

Crime is also up. In early 2024, a woman was sexually assaulted at gunpoint allegedly by a man who had obtained his weapon after Ben-Gvir loosened regulations.

Guns have also not proved effective even in stopping terrorism. On Nov. 30, 2023, a shooting attack at the entrance to Jerusalem resulted in the deaths of four Israelis, including a tragic case of mistaken identity. Yuval Doron Castleman, a 38-year-old lawyer from Jerusalem’s outskirts, was among those killed. Castleman, who was at the scene, used his weapon to engage the attackers. However, in a distressing turn of events, he was mistakenly shot by Aviad Frija, a reservist soldier.

When the soldiers arrived, Castleman knelt down, discarded his weapon, and identified himself as Israeli, yet Frija, who is linked to the Hilltop Youth—a group of young extremist settlers—fatally shot him. Frija served in the “Sfar Hamidbar” (“Desert Frontier”) unit, a military group formed to integrate Hilltop Youth members into army service in the West Bank. This unit has faced scrutiny and is under investigation for alleged torture of Palestinians and violence against leftist activists.

Frija was initially placed under house arrest but was released in early January amid a controversial investigation. Although the police initially stated that an autopsy was unnecessary, Castleman’s body was later exhumed when the Military Police disagreed and determined it was needed. The subsequent examination revealed bullets from an M16, the same make of Frija’s gun.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already condemned by many Israelis for the security failures leading up to Oct. 7 and the subsequent handling of the war, has faced additional criticism for his perceived dismissive reaction to Castleman’s death. Responding to a question about the accidental killing, Netanyahu remarked, “That’s life.”

Following the shooting, the IDF clarified that its engagement rules prohibit shooting at suspects with raised hands. They announced the “preliminary arrest” of Frija, who later said he acted in self-defense.

“Reservists didn’t used to take guns off the base,” Mack said. “It’s a result of the chaotic environment coupled with right-wing policies. Rapid response units are supposed to be linked to the police. They are supposed to train them. But with so many units and so many weapons, the police can’t oversee all [of] them.”

With so many guns and groups of citizens organizing, there’s a concern that some of these guns are falling into the hands of fringe right elements: Rafi Kedoshim, a member of the Likud party who has a history of incarceration and is alleged to be the head of a crime family, runs a rapid response biker unit. Moshe Ben Zikri, associated with the Jewish Power party and known for his right-wing activism, also leads a rapid response team. Ben Zikri, who has been arrested for protesting LGBTQ Pride events and interfaith marriages, heads a unit that the mayor of Harish says has become uncontrollable and refuses to cooperate with municipal authorities. Another group, the Barel Unit, was established by Jewish Power MK Almog Cohen to bring “security back to the Negev.”

For Arabs in Israel, the civilian arms race is particularly terrifying because the incitement against them is coming from the top, whether from Netanyahu, who in 2015 claimed “droves of Arabs” were heading to the polls to oust him, or Ben-Gvir, a Kahanist who was convicted of racist incitement, or Cohen, who made animal noises at Arab MKs during a parliamentary session last year.

Arab-Jewish relations in Israel have always been fragile, but since Oct. 7, they have reached a critical point. Many Arabs perceive increasing hostility from higher authorities, as shown in the recent arrests of Arabs over social media posts and likes. These incidents contribute to a growing sense of unease among everyday Arabs, who feel threatened in a public sphere brimming with firearms. “It feels like all these weapons are aimed at me,” said Raed, the Sikkuy-Aufoq coordinator.

Scrutiny over Ben-Gvir’s policies has been mounting. In late November, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the Ministry of National Security had improperly appointed staff to approve gun licenses. In response to the high demand, Ben-Gvir had called for an increase in the number of clerks in the Firearm Licensing Department to process these licenses.

The responsibilities of these clerks include assessing the physical and mental fitness of applicants and verifying their training. But it turned out that training was inadequately short, lasting only one day instead of the usual month, and was done from within the ministry. Following these revelations, Yisrael Avisar, the head of Firearm Licensing Department, resigned.

Ben-Gvir also came under scrutiny from the White House when pictures of him distributing assault rifles to civilians at a political event were circulated online. In response, the White House delayed a shipment of thousands of U.S.-made rifles, worried that they would fall into the hands of settlers.

In early 2023, MK Mickey Levy of the Yesh Atid party petitioned Israel’s High Court against a law expanding Ben-Gvir’s powers over the civilian police. Following the Haaretz revelations, Levy and MK Gilad Kariv of the Labor Party also called on Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to consider a criminal investigation regarding the issuance of licenses in the Ministry of National Security.

The widespread availability of guns raises the alarming prospect of political violence, including by the police, which has intensified over the past year due to the movement against judicial reforms and the war. Recently, right-wing protesters have been targeting the families of hostages, accusing them of undermining Netanyahu’s government. The day after the war ends will not mean an end to violence in Israel.

[cyarskj1899]

CONTAINED OUTRAGE: Outgoing Arizona Gov. Ducey tries one last MAGA stunt before he leaves

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CONTAINED OUTRAGE: Outgoing Arizona Gov. Ducey tries one last MAGA stunt before he leaves

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We’re all familiar with the Great Wall of China. And some of you may have heard of the Great Hedge in India, used by the British to control the salt trade. Well, now another type of barrier – in Arizona – may go down in the history books. Decrying an “invasion” from Mexico, outgoing Governor Doug Ducey has tried to contain it with – well – containers.

Using 9’ by 40’, 8800-pound shipping containers owned by the state, Ducey has been plugging holes in Donald Trump’s notorious border wall.

The containers are topped with razor wire and currently stretch for some 3 miles. Ducey had started around Yuma, but now has plans to spend $95 million adding another 10 miles – likely a complete waste of money, considering that incoming governor Katie Hobbs has promised to remove the ad hoc barrier.

Ducey is also almost certainly trespassing on federal land.

“There’s just no question that this is federal property,” Dinah Bear, formerly with the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told The Guardian. “There’s no legal difference between the land they’re putting the shipping containers on and Grand Canyon national park.”

Ducey filed a lawsuit in October disputing this fact, which is now before Judge David Campbell. The U.S. Forest Service is looking for a court order to avoid any conflict with local authorities.

In addition to the U.S. government, the Cocopah Indian Tribe has also spoken out against Ducey’s wall, saying that some of it encroaches upon their reservation.

And there’s been criticism from scientists as well: the Center for Biological Diversity has noted that the containers hurt certain migratory species that typically cross over the area.

Of course, keeping out migrating animals and keeping out humans are two entirely different balls of wax. Generally, such obstacles don’t pose much of a challenge to human crossers, especially since they can be extraordinarily difficult to guard.

It’s reported that the Great Hedge in India took some 12,000 British officers working in shifts to maintain

Also worth noting is the fact that – despite Republican claims to the contrary – the overwhelming majority of illegal drugs that come over the border – more than 90% – come through legal points of entry and through the mail.

Fentanyl isn’t being carried by undocumented workers trying to sneak into the country; it’s going through the ports of California and being delivered by the USPS.

Ducey is probably just trying to stand out in a field of Republican hardliners (some might say “assholes” is a more apt description).

There’s Greg Abbott of Texas, who has been shipping out migrants by bus. And Ron DeSantis, who is so intent on being an asshole that he literally goes to other states to find undocumented workers to abuse.

Douchey (whoops! – meant Ducey) is competing against them and perhaps trying to distinguish himself, even if it means wasting tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on an eyesore that won’t do anything to change the situation.

Good job, Douchey!

Sent from my iPhone

[first-digi-add]

A Guide to the Latest Google Update - GA4

Loss of Historical Data - Starting in July 2023, Google will stop collecting data (October 1 for 360 users). Google Analytics 4 can monitor more than just pageviews (without editing the website code). You must manually export historical data (data from before GA4 adoption) if you want to keep it; otherwise, you may lose it.

The availability of entirely new logic for data collection is one of Google Analytics 4's (hereinafter referred to as GA4's) most important changes. In UA, data is collected based on page views, whereas in GA4, data is collected based on events, giving you a better understanding of how consumers interact with your company's website or app ( if appropriate). 

GA4 is not simply a redesign of Universal Analytics (UA); it is a completely new product that can be installed in addition to your existing UA profile. That said, if you're setting up GA for the first time, GA4 is the "latest version" that replaced UA as the default analytics platform in October 2020. UA can still be installed, but GA4 should be considered an upgrade to Google Analytics. If you want to know more about this update and make a lead for your website then it is best to get overall knowledge from Best Digital Marketing Company.

Previously, Analytics was split between web properties (traditional Google Analytics) and Analytics for Firebase (to specifically meet the needs of apps). Perhaps most importantly, Google Analytics 4 seeks to provide owners with flexible yet powerful analytics tools within the confines of cookieless tracking and consent management.

Let's take a closer look at the most important updates so that you get a better idea of ​​the potential of this tool to help you grow your business.

 Why is Google implementing GA4?

The primary intent behind the change is to bring together website and mobile app data usage measurement in one platform for unified reporting when creating a new property. This coincides with a greater effort to track the entire user journey, rather than segmenting user interaction across platforms, users, or sessions.

How can I get started with GA4?

If you currently use a Universal Analytics account, the update will be available from July 4, 2022. This means that the new property will be created and accessible through your Universal Analytics account, but your existing account will not it will be affected until July 1, 2023, which means that data will also flow through this account. Similarly, Firebase Analytics accounts (used for appli

Do you use Google Analytics 4?

Improved measurement. Google Analytics 4 can monitor more than just pageviews (without editing the website code). Things like outbound link clicks, scrolling, Youtube video, and other interactions can be automatically tracked

 Explorations - Google Analytics 4 introduced several additional reports/tools for analysis, such as routes and ad-hoc funnels. Previously, these features were only available to GA360 users.

 Integrations - I've already mentioned the BigQuery integration. However, there are still some integrations missing in Google Analytics 4, such as Search Console. 

Mobile App Event Tracking - With Google Analytics 4, you can now track mobile events on the same property as your website.

 This allows you to have a deep understanding of how customers use each property and spend your resources accordingly.

 Want to get more familiar with the new GA4, its dash, and all the available options? Then the time has come for the “change”! Contact Digital Marketing Company in Pune today and our experienced team will help you with everything you need to know about your upgrade and all the information you need to know.

Improved Customer Journey - With GA4, you can track your customer journey from numerous devices within a single platform, giving you a clear view of how your prospect is interacting with your business, and therefore you can allocate your marketing budget more efficiently. specific.

 Cross-Platform Monitoring - An integrated monitoring and reporting capability is provided using a single user ID across all platforms and devices. You'll save time, money, resources, and frustration by not having to patch the user journey across platforms or devices.