Are you saying that Israel and the US acted in bad faith when they agreed to Hamas’s more limited counter offer; then pocketed the front loaded benefit of the hostage release before reneging on their half of the agreement?

That would be like agreeing to negotiate so your enemy is not prepared for a surprise bombing campaign. Or bombing the country that volunteered their territory to host negotiations because they were hosting your enemies negotiators.

Or claiming a desire to negotiate while killing the enemy negotiators.

The 20 point plan was never agreed to by anyone. Trump proposed it. Hamas agreed to release the hostages; surrender control of Gaza to a body of Palestinian technocrats.

Disarming was not part of the agreement.

checks undetectable.ai

Of course their business model is an AI powered service to make your AI slop get classified as human by AI detectors.

This won’t fly with food. Companies are no longer allowed to use “may contain X” as a catchall. They now need to deliberately add X to their product.

https://snacksafely.com/2022/04/company-will-add-trace-amount-of-allergen-to-all-products-to-skirt-safety-regulation/

To err is human. But to err a million times a second takes a computer.

The GOP has 53 senators. Under current Senate procedural rules, they need 60 votes to pass a budget.

Having said that, they only need 50 votes to change Senate procedural rules. However, for reasons I do not comprehend, Senators from both bodies have been surprisingly resistant to the idea of removing or adding exemptions to the 60 vote requirement.

Federal employees are explicitly guaranteed their back pay.

Part of the problem behind the scenes is that the Democrats do not really trust guarantees passed into law anyone, as Trump has been utilizing the recision process to simply not pay money that Congress has explicitly appropriated into law.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/24

Choking. I spend a fair amount of time in kink clubs, and the choking you see casually thrown into random porn would get you thrown out of all of them; including the ones that allow choking.

The rapist pled guilty to 10 criminal counts. It’s not clear from the article how many victims that represents, as a single victim often results in multiple counts.

The 14 claimants come from a civil suit. The prosecutors have no say in who gets to sue. Further, the standard in a civil suit is propendrrance of evidence, which is far lower than beyond a reasonable doubt. And the defendant is the school, so it is likely that both sides would try to throw the rapist under the bus.

Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.

Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.

If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.

Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)

Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).

It probably doesn’t help that Yahweh was the god of War before becoming the only God.

By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.

We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.

She did not distance herself from Biden on the subject. As the democratic nominee; heir to the Biden campaign; and then current VP in the Biden administration, this meant that her platform on Gaza defaulted to being the Biden policy.

I agree that I would rather be fighting a Harris administration over Gaza policy instead of a Trump administration. But running as a less bad version of the opposing party is not effective politics.

In that same vein, protesting a former VP from a party that is out of power is also not an effective form of activism.

I’d hardly call it a reveal. It was clear from her reaction in the lunch seen that she was appolled by what is happening in Gaza and offended at the notion that she has anything to do with it.

Not really. This episode didn’t really take any jabs at Netenyahu or Israel.

Sure, Sheila ended up criticizing him. And objectively made good points. But the show treated that as the punchline to turning her into the kvetching mother trope.

I feel this.

I think of myself as bi. But every time I thought I was going out with a man, she would eventually hatch into a trans woman.

Like, I’m happy for you and women are great. But I need to date a man before my bisexual card gets revoked!

It could, but fighting over it definitely will.

Even without any reprisal from the administration; the hypothetical lawsuit would be a very public affair. Nintendo would be inserting itself directly into the fight over US immigration law; and approximately no one in the US would see it as them defending their trademark rights. The anti-imigrant crowd would see it as a direct attack on Trump’s deportation efforts. The anti masked-officer-shoving-people-into-an-unmarked-van-and-sending-them-to-a-venezualan-contrantion-camp would also see it that way.

In contrast, if they do nothing, no one is going to look at that tweet and think that Nintendo was actually involved or approved of it.

The Pokemon’s only real asset at this point is their brand value. Being appropriated by an unpopular or controversial third party is a textbook example of why a company would want to use trademark law to protect their brand identity.

Having said that, I agree that the brand damage here is likely minimal; and certainly far less than the damage that getting into a legal fight with DHS would be.

China is the most populace country.

The most plausible path forward I see is the Native American model from the USA.

1. Genocide and ethnically cleanse the target population into progressively smaller reservations. (Israel is here)

2. Sign treaties recognizing the target population as a sovereign entity existing within the borders and legal framework of the parent nation.

3. targeted population demilitarized. It’s people become increasingly integrated into the parent nation.

4. Civil rights movement for members of the targeted population within the parent nation.

5. Develop an esoteric field of law clarifying what “sovereign entity existing within the borders and legal framework of the parent nation” even means.

6. Gradually chip away at the targeted population through a combination of progressively narrowing the scope of law covered in (5), and the natural integration of the targeted population into the host population (US is here)

Israeli prime ministers.

David Ben Gurion 1948 - 1953. Born in Poland Moshe Sharett 1953-1955. Born in the Russian Empire (modern day Ukraine) David Ben Gurion 1955 - 1963. Born in Poland Levi Eshkol 1963 - 1969. Born in Russian Empire (modern day Ukraine) Yigal Allon 1969 (interim PM). Born in Palestine. Father born in Belarus. Maternal grandfather born in Ukraine. Golda Meir 1969 - 1974. Born in Russia. Yitzhak Rabin - 1992 - 1995. Born in Palestine. Father born in Ukraine. Mother born in Belarus. Shimon Peres - 1995 - 1996. Born in Poland. Benjamin Netanyahu 1996 - 1999. Born in Israel. Father born in Poland. Mother born in Palestine, but was a US citizen. Parents migrated from Lithuania to the US Ehud Barak 1999 - 2001 . Born in Palestine. Mother born in Poland. Father born in Lithuania. Ariel Sharon 2001 - 2006. Born in Palestine. Parents born in Russia. Ehud Olmert 2006 - 2009. Born in Palestine. Parents born in Ukraine and Russia. Benjamin Netanyahu - 2009 - 2021 Naftali Bennett 2021 - 2022. Born in Israel. Parents from the US Yair Lapid 2022. Born in Israel. Father born in Yugaslovia. Mother born in Israel. Maternal grandfather born in Transylvania. Benjamin Netanyahu 2022 - present

It is true that much of the Israeli population is middle eastern. However the political of Israel has been European from it’s founding until today.