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Never Look at Your Files Again: Wikilinks, Tags, and Search. cartography.pika.page â Use a personal wiki as your organization system for documents on your computer. This guide is for iA Writer, but the principle works with Obsidian, NotePlan, DevonThink, HookMark or any app that supports linking.
Support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel are not anti-Semitism. Claims that they are anti-Semitism promote anti-Semitism and make my life as an American Jew incrementally more dangerous.
Trump is a scammer and scammers are his âmost important, best-served constituencyâŠ. The Trump II presidency is the most scam-friendly presidency in history, and everyone knows it. The scammers are lining up to get their scams okayed.â Cory Doctorow
âFour people have died as thousands of Palestinians burst into a United Nations warehouse in Gaza, tearing away sections of the buildingâs metal walls in a desperate attempt to find food.â The Guardian
Covid-19 is spiking again as the US government is making it harder to get vaccines. CalMatters
The way to end the Gaza war has been clear for nearly a year
David Ignatius at The Washington Post:
Whatâs agonizing is that Israeli military and intelligence leaders were ready to settle this conflict nearly a year ago. Working with U.S. and Emirati officials, they developed a plan for security âbubblesâ that would contain the violence, starting in northern Gaza and moving south, backed by an international peacekeeping force that would include troops from European and moderate Arab countries.
In place of Hamas, a Palestinian government, backed by a reformed Palestinian Authority, would take political control. This wasnât a pipe dream. Officials worked out a detailed road map. They began planning to train the Palestinian security force that would replace Hamas. This was, as golfers like to say, âa makeable putt.â
But Netanyahu said no. His right-wing coalition partners demanded âtotal victory,â even though they couldnât define just what that meant.
Also:
The Israeli-Palestinian dispute might seem intractable, but ending this conflict would be relatively easy. Iâm told that Israeli military officials keep working on âday afterâ plans, honing details as recently as this week. But they have had no political support from Netanyahu.
âThe âexit rampâ has been staring us in the face for a long time,â argues Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Itâs a mix of Arab states and Gaza Palestinians, operating under a Palestinian Authority umbrella, he explains. âIt is messy, with overlapping responsibilities and lots of dotted lines. But it checks all the boxes to enable the process of reconstruction and rehabilitation to get off the ground.â
A genocide is happening in Gaza. We should say so.
Shadi Hamid at The Washington Post:
For Israelâs defenders, the cognitive dissonance is difficult to bear. I get it. Many Americans have long seen Israel as an ally, a country that shares our values â a Western, liberal outpost in a sea of supposed Arab barbarism. But Israelâs actions in Gaza should shatter that perception.
That a close ally of the United States would declare its intention to displace a population is remarkable. But many Israelis, including senior officials and ministers, have been saying this for a long time. Just one month into the war, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said, âWe are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,â explicitly referencing the 1948 expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. In December 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated that âwhat needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigrationâ and that having â100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 millionâ would allow the desert to âbloom.â This month, Smotrich offered further clarification. The goal is to leave Gaza âtotally destroyed,â he said. These are not opposition figures or fringe elements. These are members of the Israeli cabinet.
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As the Economist recently reported, new research suggests that as many as 109,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel â which would represent about 5 percent of the prewar population. Even the lower-bound estimate â 77,000 killed â is 44 percent higher than the Gaza Ministry of Healthâs figure of 53,500 dead.
About 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced, many multiple times, forced to flee from one âsafe zoneâ to another as Israelâs military levels entire neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of housing units have been destroyed or damaged.
The engineered humanitarian emergency is equally damning. Israel has weaponized starvation as a method of warfare, blocking food and supplies from entering the territory for 10 weeks. The new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report finds that 22 percent of the population faces catastrophic levels of food insecurity, with 71,000 children younger than 5 facing acute malnutrition.
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Faced with assault on a population of this magnitude, one might expect universal condemnation. Yet, when atrocities are committed by a country perceived as sharing our values, powerful psychological forces activate to protect our beliefs. Israel canât be that bad. Itâs an advanced nation, where people speak English, vote in regular elections and launch tech start-ups. They seem like usâŠ.
Confirmation bias plays a part here, too. Imagine you had a close friend or family member who was accused of unspeakable crimes. Youâd have strong incentives to explain away their actions â or, better yet, deny that they committed them in the first place. To admit that someone you love was capable of evil can simply be too difficult, because in some sense that realization would implicate you as well.
I supported Newsom until this year but he is showing himself as a cynical hack who turns whichever direction he perceives the wind blowing. He perceives transphobia, xenophobia and anti-woke as fashionable now so heâs happy to embrace those beliefs. sfstandard.com