ContraMalthus

This looks like a deliberate extermination of a people. The destruction is almost impossible for my brain to process even though i am looking directly at it & see it clearly. Our government actually funded this. Our money & resources are continually going to create hellscapes abroad while our country decays & rots internally at an increasing rapid pace. I’m pretty sure this is a clear indication that our empire is quickly ending & we’re acting irrationally violent like all ending empires. Voting will not change this, the Democrats have rigged their own primaries since 2016, so we aren’t even allowed the illusion of a choice. We only are allowed to vote for the puppet of the Oligarch’s machine, and things keep getting worse & worse. The next cycle will be no different. I don’t have an answer or solution except for one I know will most likely never happen. Workers uniting to rise up & shut down the Oligarchy we live in , bring it to its knees, and start over. I don’t know how to bring that about, but i’ll join with anyone who does.

The war in Iran must be going worse than we know as the Strait remains closed. So much so that China may be allowed to build $1 Trillion in factories in the U.S. probably in exchange for help with Iran. I’m old enough to remember when MAGA was demanding China not be allowed to own any land in America. But MAGA is whatever Trump says it is, according to him, so now it’s for foreign wars and China. Shocking.

So grateful Lebanese paramedics are wearing body cams. They are documenting, in real time, the war crimes they endure. No more doubting them, no more “where is the proof?” Another double-tap attack today caught on camera: as rescuers of the Civil Defence of the Islamic Health Authority inspected the site of a previously targeted building, Israeli jets struck the location again directly, injuring two paramedics.

A little while ago, while I was walking with my father in the street, a young man suddenly fell right next to us. He started screaming and crying in a terrifying way… Within seconds, blood began pouring out of him, and we didn’t understand what had happened until people realized he had been directly shot. Panic spread everywhere, and everyone started running and trying to escape. Later, we learned that the bullet had been fired from a distance of more than two kilometers. Imagine… even inside what is supposed to be a “safe area,” death is still chasing us at every moment, without any warning or mercy. I am still in shock. I cannot process what I saw with my own eyes. The young man’s screams and the sight of blood will never leave my memory. What is happening to us here? And how can any place truly be safe amid this horror?

Netanyahu said that an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel would be like “10,000 tons of TNT falling on a country the size of New Jersey (22,610 km2).” Israel has dropped 200,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza (365 km2) - the equivalent of 20 nukes on 1.6% the size of New Jersey.

If 51 Jews were killed in 24hrs, every world leader would issue a statement of condemnation & it would be described as the nth worst antisemitic massacre since the holocaust. When Israel kills 51 people in Lebanon in 24hrs, it's called a ceasefire.

"It was hell. Israeli prisons today are hell. Everything was about punishment and revenge." Journalist Ali al-Samoudi, abducted without charge and held in Israeli prison for a year, describes the diet of starvation (4 spoons of rice) and daily humiliation (beatings after meeting with lawyers, suffocation, medical neglect leading to deaths) that Palestinians have been experiencing under conditions many have described as worse than hell.

In April, a website that has been sued, blocked, deplatformed, and chased across thirty-seven domains over fifteen years quietly launched its own AI. Sci-Hub is the largest unauthorized library of scientific papers in human history. Ninety-five million academic papers. Tens of millions of books. Built and maintained by a single Kazakhstani neuroscientist named Alexandra Elbakyan since 2011, funded by donations, hosted on whatever country's registrar will tolerate it that year, mirrored across torrents and IPFS and Telegram bots. Elsevier sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. The American Chemical Society sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. India sued. Sci-Hub stayed up. Swedish registrar Njalla cut the .se domain in January. Sci-Hub stayed up at .al, .ru, .ee, .box, and a half-dozen .onion addresses the registrars cannot reach. Now the library has built its own intelligence. Sci-Bot launched in alpha in April. You ask it a research question. It answers, and it cites real papers from inside the corpus, with links that actually open the actual papers. The bot does not hallucinate citations. It cannot, because it only draws from papers it actually holds. The same property that the venture-funded labs have spent four years and forty billion dollars trying to engineer back into their products is a free side effect of training the model on a library that contains the books. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta have all been sued in the past eighteen months for training their models on the same shadow libraries that Sci-Hub assembled. Meanwhile the corpus those scripts were pointed at, the corpus those models were trained on, the corpus the entire generative AI industry is built on, sat right there the whole time, free, with a search box on top. The pirates beat them to it. Sci-Bot was built on a corpus that was already free, by a team that asked no permission, charging no one, with the explicit position that the right to read scientific research is older than the cartel that decided to charge for it. The same arithmetic the medieval guilds used to keep the printing trade in approved hands. The same arithmetic Pope Paul IV used in 1559 to publish the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The same arithmetic the Stationers' Company used in seventeenth-century London. Knowledge has always had a fence around it. The fence has always been guarded by men who did not write the books. The library answers. We never asked permission. We never had to.

The level of complicity of the @BBC in the ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon is shocking. I am listening to their Jerusalem correspondent report that the ‘IDF are striking Hezbollah targets’ while I’m on the ground in the middle of it watching men, women and children being killed on a daily basis. My colleagues are being executed. Paramedics are being systematically murdered. All of this is happening in plain sight and the BBC correspondent here in Lebanon knows it. May you all be put on trial for your deadly propaganda when the time comes. Shame on all of you, especially those on the ground who are too cowardly to speak out.

The White House just dropped a new “counterterrorism strategy” that quietly expanded the definition of terrorist by lumping cartels, ISIS, "left-wing extremists"… and "anarchists" into the same “threat” category. The first page of text ends with the phrase: “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.” That is printed above the president’s signature. The language in the document is broad and open-ended. Once political labels become national security threats, the target can change overnight. This is how mission creep starts: Today it’s cartels. Tomorrow it’s dissidents.

A school shooting you won't see on your evening news.

My teacher, who taught me for years, was never just a teacher. He was a rare human being kind-hearted, loved by everyone, carrying within him every meaning of respect and compassion But Israel did not see him as a human being. They showed no respect for his age or his dignity, and subjected his body to the harshest forms of torture with utter cruelty and complete disregard for humanity I will never forget this and neither his image nor his pain will ever fade from my memory for as long as I live

An Israeli soldier involved in the killing of an Israeli captive during military operations in Gaza told the captive’s mother: “Males, regardless of their age, we don’t mess around, we kill them right away. They even told us, if it’s a woman or a child, make the judgment call yourselves, because things happen.” The account aligns with Haaretz’ reports on the rules of engagement guiding Israeli forces in their genocide in Gaza, where soldiers have been instructed to treat any male as an immediate target.

The Israeli occupation army has just announced that it has completed the destruction of all buildings in my city, Beit Hanoun, and openly declared that none of its residents will be allowed to return — a systematic act of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement aimed at stealing the city and annexing it as Israeli land. They are not only killing us; they are trying to erase our very existence. They destroy our homes, steal our land, and forcibly displace us until we are left without a house, without a city, and without a homeland. What is happening is not a war — it is a genocide being carried out in front of the entire world, amid shameful silence and terrifying complicity. Beit Hanoun was once a city full of life, beauty, and memories, and today the occupation is trying to turn it into rubble and pretend that it never belonged to us. And for the record, this beauty you see is only a very small part of how beautiful my city, Beit Hanoun, truly was.

Absolutely shameful. Southern Lebanon is being hollowed out. Thousands of innocent civilians killed and homes destroyed. Over 1.2 million people displaced, which will cause another refugee crisis. Imagine if this happened to you or your loved ones. It’s completely inhumane.

part of the anthroposophical model of early childhood (what waldorf is based on), is that the child begins life in a kind of magic bubble, and that the time spent in this state is essential for their long term spiritual development. you can accidentally rush them out of this stage. the child goes through a process of recapitulating the stages of civilization itself: they eventually go through an egyptian stage, and become fascinated with writing, symbols, and what we think of as the hallmarks of that civilization. later, they go through an antiquity / roman stage, and become fascinated by building, laws (rules), and the things we think of humanity as generally acquiring during that time. later, the medieval, and so on. but at the start, the child is in magic world. this is occasionally referred to as “the garden”, as in the garden of eden, but i just think of it as fairy world, where the boundary between myth, story, imagination, and reality is completely fluid. taking this view puts you at odds with modern parenting in ways that you would not expect. a lot of parenting discussion online is about nutrition, discipline in general, appropriate punishments, homeschooling, giving them tablets - there’s a clear set of basic controversial topics. taking a concern about rushing the child out of this initial state and into the next one too quickly puts you at odds with other less obvious aspects of parenting style. the one i find most interesting is the conception of early childhood and learning itself that i see as flowing downstream from the modern scientific worldview. recently, i was at an aquarium. they have this large cylinder tank that you can walk around and look into. the walls are glass. in the center, there’s a (real) fish that’s huge - easily the biggest fish i’ve ever seen. a girl runs up and says, “wow, that’s a huge fish”. the mom says: “yes, it is a large fish, but just keep in mind that the glass is convex. when glass is bent this way, it makes things inside look bigger. but it is a big fish”. now, the kid asks, “so, it’s not a big fish?”, and the mom says, “well, yes, it is a big fish, but…” and reiterates the explanation about what convex glass is and what it does to your perception. in the modern scientific worldview, part of “becoming wise” is accumulating facts and that are not intuitive, and that undercut empirical perception. becoming educated means knowing these facts and having them at hand to make sure you’re perceiving things accurately - unlike someone uneducated, who wouldn’t know about glass distorting perception, and the finer mechanics of how and why that happens. this means that “passing on wisdom” and being “the wise elder” often amounts to passing on and dispensing these facts. here, the kid is looking at something - but has to be told: “don’t get the wrong idea. i, the wise elder, know something you don’t, and i’ll let you in on the secret.” there’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it’s completely at odds with the world the child is presently inhabiting (in my opinion). the child is just in awe of a large fish. this is a total, magical, all encompassing spiritual experience - but the adult has to step in and take them out of it, to ensure that they’re giving primacy to a scientific perception. the adult, due to their model of what knowledge is, is constantly stepping in to jet pack the child out of their direct perception, into abstractions that have nothing to do with their inner world. once you notice this, you really see it all the time. i’m at the park, and a kid is hitting a log with a stick. it’s making a cool sound. he says, “dad, look at this”, and the dad starts explaining that sound is really vibrations, what vibrations are - bam: smash the eject button. the kid can’t just hear the sound: an adult has to step in and make sure that the experience of hearing the sound is being filtered through this paradigm’s conception of what knowledge, and life, “really” is.

Leave aside your views of the Iran War or the CNN melodrama of Scott Jennings yelling: "get your fucking finger out of my face!" What's most notable is that Scott Jennings became enraged at exactly the moment when his history of working in the Bush/Cheney Adm was raised, and it was pointed out that he and his allies sold the Iraq War to the American public based on the *exact arguments and scripts* Jennings is now using to sell the Iran War to Americans (WMDs, terror state, oppressed their own people, can't wait for a mushroom cloud, etc. etc.). The DC swamp is so accountability-free that they all think they're entitled to have everyone just forget -- and not hold against them -- that they deceived the country into a historically disastrous and criminal invasion of Iraq, only to now return to use the same exact mentality, ideology, tactics and narratives to sell this new war against a country bordering Iraq, all as if it none of it ever happened! That Jennings and countless media and political elites are using the same arguments to justify the Iran War that they used for Iraq doesn't, of course, by itself prove that the new pro-war arguments are wrong. But OF COURSE that should be a vital factor in determining the credibility of these people and their assertions. And it should be the main metric for determining whether these are the people who should be presented as experts and listened to when advocating the very war policies that disgraced them when they defended them 20 years ago. In no other profession or sub-culture would such catastrophic error (or deceit) be deemed irrelevant. But because this basic standard would reputationally harm and disqualify the bulk of the DC political and media class on a bipartisan basis, they all unite to pretend it never happened or at least implicitly agree that it's irrelevant. The CNN guest violated that implicit self-protective taboo against raising it, and that's what sparked Jennings' rage.

Let’s talk about Khaled Daher. A paramedic in Lebanon’s Civil Defence. Not a fighter. Not a “target.” A first responder who ran toward danger to save lives. Two days ago, he was killed, along with two of his colleagues, when they were directly targeted while trying to rescue a civilian trapped under rubble. But his story doesn’t start there. Khaled wasn’t just a paramedic. He was the backbone of his family. After his brother died in Bulgaria, he went searching for him, across borders & through uncertainty, until he finally located his grave & brought him back to Lebanon, where he laid him to rest. He then became a father figure to his brother’s daughter, raising her as his own, carrying a responsibility that wasn’t his to bear, but one he chose anyway. He was a son, a brother, a provider, a quiet pillar holding others up. And in the end, he died the same way he lived, trying to save someone else. Khaled Daher didn’t just lose his life. His family lost their support. People lost the man who showed up when everything else fell apart. His niece has now lost both fathers. Khaled spent his life saving others. He was killed while doing exactly that. This is what is being lost. Over 103 medics and rescue workers have been killed since March 2. Not numbers. First responders. Lives that held other lives together.

💢 “It isn’t terrorist infrastructure; we’re destroying everything.” Israeli soldiers told Haaretz their operations in southern Lebanon are focused on systematically leveling buildings in villages, not targeting Hezbollah infrastructure as claimed. The army’s plan, dubbed “Operation Silver Plow,” reportedly assigns units quotas for homes destroyed, with contractors paid per building destroyed. They must report “how many homes [they] destroyed” each day, a soldier said. Troops are ordered to guard them under drone threat: “We stand there, exposed… There’s no logic to this.” “The only mission is to continue the destruction,” one officer said. Another added: “It isn’t terrorist infrastructure; we’re destroying everything.” Since March 2, Israel’s offensive has killed at least 2618 people and displaced over 1.6 million. Despite a ceasefire extended to May 17, daily airstrikes and demolitions continue. Reporter @ytirawi documented Israel blowing up a popular restaurant in the southern town of Amwaj Albayyada below ⬇️

@enonymuus @NoNonsenseND I don't like contaminating the flavors if they weren't intended to be eaten at the same time though I feel like most of the time eating one at a time from least favorite to favorite with exceptions for things like optimal temperature is maximum pleasure

@NoNonsenseND Mix autism with optimizing instinct and you eat this way to refresh the palate between each bite to maximize the pleasure value of the meal.