Huh, so now it’s the verge, but less unique and creative. Not to disparage anyone doing redesigns, it’s a valiant effort.

You already tortured and destroyed the orb for liking other orbs, you can put your hands down now.

Yeah, seriously. It actually sounds like she might have had it even worse than his “normal” victims. What an absolutely disgusting piece of shit. As time goes on and we learn more, he only looks more and more fundamentally evil.

Brad Edwards, an attorney for Doe, told The Daily Beast, “In addition to Epstein’s rotation of victims, there was typically one person who he made believe was his girlfriend, usually completely in the dark about his criminal abuse.”

“Jane Doe 200 was that girlfriend during this period of time, which means she learned more information than most other victims,” Edwards added. “In the end, Epstein violently raped her in a manner far worse than his usual modus operandi. This victim has lived in a particular fear for a long time and she deserves justice.”

Well that’s some backwards bullshit.

Single-shaming is real. It’s particularly nasty because it can often come from family, friends, and strangers alike. And the media does it constantly.

Most governments are set up to support and value married folks with tax breaks and incentives, fuck everybody else.

Guess who’s less likely to be able to buy even a small house because you need at least two huge incomes these days to even qualify? That’s right, single people.

I’ve been single for about a decade, and I’m overall pretty happy. Every once in a while I do find myself in a self-inflicted shame spiral, but I always tell myself “Bertram, this is your life, live it however you want to live it.”

That said, I’m not opposed to finding a partner, somehow, but I’ve built a nice little life for myself so it’s just not a priority. Especially because I wouldn’t even know where to start…

There always needs to be a human making the calls. I never want the robots to make life and death decisions, and sentencing is just that. It definitely seems like they got this one wrong, but AI is not the answer.

The criminal justice system is completely fucked right now. There are multiple tiers of justice, and it is by no means blind. But large language models (we don’t have anything remotely like an AI that could do consistently what you want) are a warped and biased reflection of humanity, and would only intensify and perpetuate the systemic injustice.

After lighting the candles we used to bang on the table and chant suf-ga-niyot! suf-ga-niyot! like the little animals we were…

Needless to say, it took weeks to get the smell of oil out of our clothes with all the latkes and donuts we devoured….

Hell yeah, thanks! I’ll definitely give that a try.

Hah! Funny you bring up chopped liver. That was one of the only things my parents could get me to eat on matzah until I found out what it was…then I was piiiissed at them for withholding that vital information. What a dumb kid I must have been. Your veggie version sounds excellent!

Wait, do you actually like matzah?! I’m totally on your daughter’s side lol. It was always a groan in my household. Ugh, time for a week of cardboard sandwiches.

The only thing to look forward to was sweet matzah-brie: matzah soaked in water to soften it up, then soaked in eggs with cinnamon, sautéed, then covered with maple syrup or sugar. Basically matzah French toast.

Yeah, I wouldn’t bother making her try gefilte fish, unless you make it yourself in your bathtub!

The article focuses on violence after October 7th, but I have personally witnessed police and military in East Jerusalem beating people more times than I can count, way before the 7th. It was already incredibly common. I’ve said it before, but Israeli police are some of the worst people I have ever encountered.

What the actual fuck? The army is putting on live torture shows for the public? I didn’t think there was anything left that could surprise me, but this is next level evil.

“The Israeli army brought a number of Israeli civilians into our detention centres while beating us and telling them, ‘These are Hamas terrorists who killed you and raped your women on 7 October,’” Omar Abu Mudallala, a Palestinian man who was held for 53 days in these centres, told Euro-Med. He added: “The Israeli civilians were filming us being beaten, abused, and tortured while making fun of us.”

Morally reprehensible. I don’t care who you are or what happened to you, if you unapologetically and purposefully retaliate against the most innocent and vulnerable, then you are the bad guy.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Stand for those who can’t stand up for themselves. Speak out before there’s no one left to speak. Never forget. Pick whichever goddamn platitude you want, but mean it.

Toufexis has such a uniquely recognizable voice. I felt like the Leonardo Decaprio meme when he popped up on Expanse.

It’s a shame, you could tell he really cared about the franchise.

Why don’t we talk about the nearly 28,000 dead Palestinians? We can’t rebuild them for any amount of money, they’re dead.

Me neither! This was news to me. For no reason I always thought it was a Russian company.

I read this article when it was written in 2014, and it was the thing that made me delete my account. I was completely disgusted. I remember telling a friend about it the same day I read it, and they didn’t believe me, thought I was peddling a conspiracy theory, to the point that I had to find the article again to be sure I hadn’t imagined it. As far as I know, there were no consequences and no one was held accountable.

Frankly this makes that incredibly ugly piece of hardware look really cool. I agree though, whoever thinks this is a bad thing definitely shouldn’t have kids.

Yeah, not ideal, but he does link to Seymour Hersh’s investigation, which I read when it came out a while back, and found it to be comprehensive and pretty convincing. Unfortunately it looks like Hersh’s article is behind a paywall now, which really sucks.

At the time (last February) I was genuinely surprised that it wasn’t being covered in the mainstream media with any substance, and then I started seeing the more recent reports this article mentions, that just uncritically parrot the US government’s official line. Something is very clearly out of place, and it seems like the major players are just hoping the world forgets and moves on, which it basically has.

I thought blindly publishing the Bush administration’s lies about the Iraq war was supposed to have taught the mainstream media a lesson about accepting convenient messaging without doing a proper independent investigation.

Yeah surprisingly similar actually. Israeli police are somehow even more flagrant and overt about it though, they openly defend their use of racial profiling and are even less restrained in how they choose to dole out violence. In Israel and the occupied territories, Arab Israelis and Palestinians are targets of suspicion, by default, in a pretty similar way to how black and brown Americans are targeted by authority as a matter of daily life.