In 1973, a British parliamentarian named Christopher Mayhew promised a £5,000 reward to anyone able to prove that Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had indeed declared his intent to “drive the Jews into the sea.” Mayhew then expanded his criteria to include any documentation of genocidal statements made by a responsible Arab leader. Whatever quotations he received he deemed inauthentic. It was not long before one claimant, a 22-year-old Jewish student, sued Mayhew and their dispute went to the High Court. The case was dropped after the student’s lawyer admitted that the statement his client provided, a quote from the first secretary general of the Arab League, “was not genocidal.”
Mayhew called the trope “apocryphal.” Still, apocryphal as it may be, I am often asked if I want to throw Israelis into the sea. This question has persisted for decades, leveled as an accusation against Palestinians and allies of our cause. Almost every time, anywhere I take the stage, it is an expected though unwanted guest. Whether I am singing my usual nagging refrain about Zionism or talking about the “creative process” (i.e., stimulants and sedatives), someone will spring from their seat, tripping over themself to ask that million-dollar question. More accurately, I am asked why I want to throw Israelis into the sea, not if. That I possess such genocidal intent is already assumed. It is an attempt to implicate me in the inquisitor’s worldview. A worldview where I am a savage, pathologically murderous Arab.
“Israelis” and “Jews” are usually used interchangeably by those posing the question and understood, irrefutably, as interchangeable. The responsibility to then make a pristine distinction between the two falls on me. The burden of pedagogy. But none of those words—“if,” “why,” “Israelis,” “Jews”— interest me the most. It is the word “want” that is most telling. Wanting is neither policy nor procedure, neither present nor material. Wanting is hoping, longing. Colonial logic says that if I were to have that mere desire within my heart; if I am fantasizing about cartoonish revenges, that alone negates my claim to justice. Thus, any testimony of the injustices I have witnessed and endured is unreliable. The brutality of colonialism, the very brutality that is institutionalized and legalized, can then be excused or even warranted, if I were to want such a turn of events. Such desires, according to mind-reading critics, linger deep within our psyche and should discredit the Palestinian. Our yearnings impugn our plight. The trouble here is not that our enemies employ this illicit tactic (that is what enemies do) but that we submit to it. We attempt to refute defamation instead of repudiating it. We placate this fallacious logic instead of saying: Even if—even if!—my dreams were your worst nightmares, who are you to rob me of my sleep?
To simply imagine Palestine without settlers, to simply imagine a sky without drones—that, in the Zionist imagination, is genocidal. If you stick with the “want” of the charge, the notion that Palestinians want to kill all Jews, you find that Zionism is at war with our future. It is at war with our ability to articulate, even if only through poems and protest chants, a future in which Zionism does not reign. For in the past 100 years, Zionism has situated us in a condition of constant dispossession and premature death; our Nakba remains and renews. We are besieged in an inescapable, eternal present tense.
Ti piacciono i vecchi forum, ma vorresti che fossero collegati ai social network e ai blog? Ecco citiverse.it, la città dei social liberi e l’alternativa ai gruppi locali Facebook!
Abbiamo bisogno di un’alternativa ai gruppi Facebook per gli utenti italiani, in particolare i gruppi locali; ma non potendo competere con Meta, dobbiamo fare in modo che gli utenti del forum non siano da soli…
Ti piacciono i vecchi forum, ma vorresti che fossero collegati ai social network e ai blog? Ecco citiverse.it, la città dei social liberi e l’alternativa ai gruppi locali Facebook!
Abbiamo bisogno di un’alternativa ai gruppi Facebook per gli utenti italiani, in particolare i gruppi locali; ma non potendo competere con Meta, dobbiamo fare in modo che gli utenti del forum non siano da soli…
Abbiamo bisogno di un'alternativa ai gruppi Facebook per gli utenti italiani, in particolare i gruppi locali; ma non potendo competere con Meta, dobbiamo fare…
Intel's upcoming Xeon 7 'Diamond Rapids' processors will feature up to 192 Panther Cove cores, 16 DDR5 memory channels, PCIe Gen 6 support, and a 500W TDP.
So I managed to find 80% food grade alcohol (it was harder than you might thought) and started the all season maceration.
Basically every fruit that I will get or pick I just put few pieces there and let it sit, the tasting will be at Christmas or sometime in December. First layer is red currant, I already used it for some maceration so I know it starts good.
My late-father once told me about a recipe he used when he was young, passed down to him by his old uncle.
Got a bunch of black plums (but he said any fruit could be used). Washed them, then put them whole in a big, glass jar with a screw top lid. The fruit was layered with sugar. Lots of sugar. Closed the lid and left it all out in the sun for a month. It fermented and turned into mush.
Brought it in and sifted out the solids. Left a lot of pulp. Mixed it with plain vodka and decanted it into smaller dark bottles with clip tops. Aged it for six months in the dark. After that, kept it in the freezer. 10+ years later, it still tasted amazing.
This post is inspiring me to try again. Thinking peach this time.
This is maceration not fermentation but I unintentionally did something similar with red currants and wine. I don't know how I made it but it was partly fermented with sugar wine and vodka (or some other clear distillate) to add more alcohol to be stable.
Found bottle few weeks ago and it was amazing, I forgot about it after I tasted it and don't liked it few years ago.
I don't like distillates that much, bit too strong for me, but basically fruit+bit of sugar+time+still and you have some eastern Europe pálenka/slivovice (from plums) or other "moonshine".
A friend of the family from Hungary used to bring out home-made palinka in small 7Up bottles to sneak them past customs. He said they would drink a few shots before and after every meal. Said that was how Hungarians became the highest per-capita meat-eating country in Europe.
I just remember it burning all the way down. The recipe I mentioned was more of a sweet liqueur and with lower risk of near-fatal distillation mishaps.
Will have to look into maceration. Thanks for the tip!
Israel will in “no way” halt its war on the Gaza Strip even if a deal is reached to release more hostages with Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
College graduates are hitting the job market at the worst possible time. A perfect storm of AI-generated applications and economic uncertainty has flipped traditional hiring patterns, leaving recent grads with higher unemployment than the general pop…
...all of the models evaluated "demonstrate near-zero confidentiality awareness."
Any agent that is accessible from outside the company (e.g. a customer support chatbot) is going to have to deal with malicious actors. If it has access to sensitive information, and no confidentiality awareness...seems like a problem.
My only hope is that AI like early social media and web services is supported by mountains of vc cash offering services at a loss in order to build users and familiarity, and while it'll continue to exist after it has to shift to a profitable business model, it'll essentially be relagated to corners of the economy where it makes sense and they'll stop trying to hamstring it into everything.
I think that's exactly what's gonna happen in the long run. Right now we're in the hype phase of a new technology, but one the hype dies down we'll start identifying use cases where the tech actually works well. At the same time the tech itself is going to mature, and people will figure out how to work with it effectively.
Well the article says that the AI agents were able to complete 30% of the tasks given to it like searching the web, communicating with co workers, etc. I think this is interesting
CMU researchers have developed a benchmark to evaluate how AI agents perform when given common knowledge work tasks like browsing the web, writing code, running applications, and communicating with coworkers
"We find in experiments that the best-performing model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, was able to autonomously perform 30.3 percent of the provided tests to completion, and achieve a score of 39.3 percent on our metric that provides extra credit for partially completed tasks"
College graduates are hitting the job market at the worst possible time. A perfect storm of AI-generated applications and economic uncertainty has flipped traditional hiring patterns, leaving recent grads with higher unemployment than the general pop…
College graduates are hitting the job market at the worst possible time. A perfect storm of AI-generated applications and economic uncertainty has flipped traditional hiring patterns, leaving recent grads with higher unemployment than the general pop…
my autism perpetually plagues my employment prospects and the memories of my struggles to gain employment in the few years since college makes me pitty others like me who will be forced to do the same thing I did.
i have an unfortunate front row seat to the asshattery that our capitalist system has created for young people trying to get a foothold in this industry and i don't know what to make of it since they, themselves support the same system that's fucking them over and sometime virulently defend it; it's a bit like watching maga cheer on their own demise.
Took long enough. People are so god damn stubborn.
Windows 11 is an annoying experience out of the box, yes; like Linux, you have to do some tweaking to get it functioning the way you like it (start with installing StartAllBack to fix the Start Menu + taskbar issues, and O&O Shut Up 10 to stop the ads and telemetry) but if you're big into HDR like me then there is no OS better than Win11 for a quality HDR experience that just works.
But if you're not into HDR, don't play games with kernel-level anticheat, and don't have expensive DJ equipment that is only compatible with Windows and MacOS, then there is no reason to continue using Windows. Linux is a much better option for you.
HDR actually works fairly well on Linux these days. Been using nobara for the better part of a year now and almost every game I’ve tried, that has HDR support, just worked out of the box.
Elon Musk has said an Axios report that the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had concluded there was no evidence of a Jeffrey Epstein client list was the "final straw".
The report also said the agencies had concluded there was no credible evidence the disgraced financier and pedophile blackmailed high-profile and prominent individuals, and confirmed that surveillance footage showed Epstein had killed himself in prison.
"So... umm... then what is Ghislaine Maxwell in prison for?" Musk posted to his X platform, referring to Epstein's former girlfriend and associate who procured underage girls for him to abuse.
damn, how can birth rates be so in peril in a culture that hates sex, women, and children so much? truly I am stumped. we must double down on hating sex, women, and children even more if we are to salvage this situation.
Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.
the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men
You're not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don't take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.
However, the whole "good times breed weak men" meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It's rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it's also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.
This is an op-ed by Jennifer Parker, a defence and national security expert associate at the ANU’s National Security College. She has served for more than 20 years as a warfare officer in the Royal Australian Navy.
[...]
A major flaw in Australia’s Taiwan debate is the simplistic “will we or won’t we intervene?” framing, which assumes any conflict would be confined to Taiwan. In reality, an invasion would be far more complex. The Taiwan Strait’s geography, weather and Taiwan’s defences already make it a formidable task. That challenge is amplified by expected US and Japanese intervention from bases in Japan and the Philippines, forces China would try to neutralise pre-emptively.
Any invasion would almost certainly immediately trigger a broader regional conflict involving one of Australia’s key allies and at least two of its closest security partners. In a region-wide conflict, Australia’s national security interests would be jeopardised, and it would have little choice but to respond. Its key role would be defending Australia and its sea lines of communication.
[...]
Staying on the sidelines would be inconsistent with our national interests. Australia’s security, including maritime trade, would be directly threatened. Not to mention Australia’s obligations under the 1951 ANZUS Treaty.
It would also seriously damage Australia’s credibility with key security partners and regional neighbours. Moreover, if China resorts to force against Taiwan, it is unlikely to stop there. Beijing is also engaged in maritime and territorial disputes with South-East Asian states and South Korea and Japan. A successful invasion would embolden further aggression.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would not be an isolated act – it would trigger a regional conflict with direct consequences for Australia’s security. An invasion may not be imminent or inevitable, but China’s clear preparations demand serious attention. Australia must invest in its own defence – not because war is certain, but because deterrence depends on capability. And if deterrence fails, we must be ready to defend our vital interests.
In recent weeks, the US State Department implemented a policy requiring all university, technical training, or exchange program visa applicants to disclose their social media handles used over the past five years. The policy also requires these applicants to set their profiles to public.
This move is an example of governments treating a person’s digital persona as their political identity. In doing so, they risk punishing lawful expression, targeting minority voices, and redefining who gets to cross borders based on how they behave online.
Anyone seeking one of these visas will have their social media searched for “indications of hostility” towards the citizens, culture or founding principles of the United States. This enhanced vetting is supposed to ensure the US does not admit anyone who may be deemed a threat.
However, this policy changes how a person’s online presence is evaluated in visa applications and raises many ethical concerns. These include concerns around privacy, freedom of expression, and the politicisation of digital identities.
Mobile money allows people without banks to securely transfer funds via text message, and its adoption is growing rapidly.
By the end of today, you'll probably have used your bank account — maybe to buy groceries, pay rent, or send money to a friend. Even better, to receive your salary. It's something many of us take for granted.
However, for more than a billion people globally, transactions only happen with cash. That means carrying around physical notes and coins, traveling long distances just to send or receive money, and facing the constant risk of losing it or having it stolen. The absence of formal banking services adds yet another hurdle for people trying to escape poverty.
But in recent years, “mobile money” has transformed how many people access financial services. Mobile money differs from traditional bank accounts; you don’t need a physical bank branch or even an Internet connection. Instead, you use text messages for services like deposits, transfers, and payments via a mobile phone. In this sense, it’s not the same as standard Internet banking, which many of us now use for most transactions.
Many people might be unfamiliar with how mobile money works, so let me briefly explain. You dial a short code for the mobile money provider, choose “send money”, and enter the recipient’s phone number (which serves as their account number). Next, type the amount and your secure PIN. That’s it — both the sender and recipient get an SMS confirmation within seconds. If you need to add funds to your mobile money account or retrieve your PIN, you can visit a local mobile money agent, often found in small shops or kiosks, which can be easier to reach than traditional banks.
A GOP state lawmaker who represents Kerr County says he likely would vote differently now on House Bill 13, which would have established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure.
Dopo cinque anni, Ginevra Di Marco torna in sala d’incisione per “Kaleidoscope”, un lavoro nato a seguito di un’importante campagna di crowdfunding, modalità con la quale l’artista ha già prodotto alcuni dei suoi ultimi progetti... Continua a leggere...
Ed eccolo ancora qui l'ultrasettantenne Bob Dylan, con il suo nuovo disco "Tempest", il trentacinquesimo, in uscita a cinquant'anni giusti dal suo primo album "Omonimo" datato 1962... Leggi e ascolta...
That night, the settlers moved from home to home forcing families out at gun point.
Resident Aliya Mlihat immediately rang the police, who were slow to respond. When border police and three military jeeps arrived on the scene, they did nothing to stop the onslaught, even facilitating the raids on people's homes.
Mlihat recalled that "the expressions on the soldiers' faces revealed satisfaction - even joy - as if they were endorsing the settlers' actions".
In one photo taken by Mlihat, settlers can be seen lounging in chairs and grinning alongside soldiers in fatigues.
The attack was led by sanctioned Israeli settler Zohar Sabah, who had set up the new outpost. According to Mlihat, Sabah stormed the area armed with an M16 rifle, shouting at residents to "flee to Jordan".
Israeli rights group Stop the Wall reported that settlers pitched a tent in the middle of the village, hooking it up to running water from a nearby outpost. They then proceeded to expand the outpost, forcing the 125 residents to flee to the industrial zone of Beitunia, where they do not have access to water or electricity.
"It involves just a couple of people setting up an outpost, herding their own flocks on the community's traditional grazing land, taking over access to water resources, stealing sheep, intimidating the community and preventing them from having access to all the natural resources around them.
"And then we'll see this escalation of violent attacks, often at night. This is what we're seeing now, just copy-paste, replicated all across the area east of Ramallah."
"It means that the two-state solution that the international community purports to support will no longer be viable, or is not viable if there's no Palestinian presence in large parts of the West Bank."
Low emphasised that despite frequent visits by diplomats to imperilled Palestinian villages in the West Bank, the international community is doing little to prevent their displacement.
On Thursday evening, Israeli settlers erected a tent just metres away from a Palestinian Bedouin village in the Al-Mu'arrajat area in the occupied West Bank's Jordan Valley.
For most of its existence, Daily Kos has run on custom-built publishing platforms. That might’ve made sense a decade or two ago, but now it’s expensive, outdated, and difficult to maintain. ...
Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron have disavowed a proposal by five purported local "sheikhs" to sever ties with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and establish an "emirate of Hebron" which would recognise the state of Israe…
Remember when you could pop open a phone, swap the battery, and keep going? Fairphone remembers. Their latest release, the Fairphone 6, feels like a nostalgic nod to sanity, with plenty of modern upgrades.
This is a phone that puts people and planet before profits. Sure, it doesn’t have the camera chops to take on a flagship, and USB-2 feels a bit retro in 2025, but what it lacks in bragging rights, it makes up for in staying power.
The TikTok app could reportedly get replaced by a new one for iPhone, Android and other platforms in the US on September 5th to satisfy the divest-or-ban law.
All’inizio del dicembre 1997 i rappresentanti di un larga parte dei paesi industrializzati al mondo (e non solo) fecero l’ingresso nella grande sala trapezoidale sotto un gigantesco disco illuminato, alludente all’astro del mattino, in cui le lettera…
A GOP state lawmaker who represents Kerr County says he likely would vote differently now on House Bill 13, which would have established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure.
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