Fuck the governments of both countries to be clear. The pro-israel lobby in the US is doing damage control. They worry that the loudly genocidal members of Netanyahu's coalition might prick Trump's ego and cause MAGA to turn on them too.

"If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not ​be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world."

He said he would also remind those cabinet members that two-thirds of the defensive weapons that have protected Israel "have been built by American hands and paid for by American tax dollars." The United States provides Israel with roughly $4 billion in military assistance a year, but the two countries are negotiating a new aid agreement.

Israel's far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a linchpin in Netanyahu's governing coalition, has harshly rebuked the U.S.-Iran deal and insisted Israeli troops would remain in Lebanon.

Vance criticized Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in a New York Times interview released earlier on Thursday. "What is your ⁠exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have," Vance said.

links:

• https://www.fairvote.ca/open-list-proportional-representation/
• https://www.fairvote.ca/stv/
• https://www.fairvote.ca/mixed-member-proportional/
• Regional Proportional Representation

I know who I want to vote for. Should I include the other frontrunner on my ballot?

I have been reading about the Iraq invasion and this story was particularly horrific. I created the post with the NSFW flag, but I removed the flag to comply with the community rules. There are no graphic images, but the text is difficult to read.

The Mahmudiyah rape and killings were a series of war crimes committed by five U.S. Army soldiers during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, involving the gang-rape and murder of 14-year-old Iraqi girl Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and the murder of her family on March 12, 2006. It occurred in the family's house to the southwest of Yusufiyah, a village to the west of the city of Mahmoudiyah, Iraq. Other members of al-Janabi's family murdered by American soldiers include her 34-year-old mother Fakhriyah Taha Muhasen, 45-year-old father Qassim Hamza Raheem, and six-year-old sister Hadeel Qassim Hamza al-Janabi.[1] The two remaining survivors of the family, al-Janabi's 9-year-old brother Ahmed and 11-year-old brother Mohammed, were at school during the massacre and orphaned by the event.

For years I've considered investors and executives in the fossil fuel industry to be lazy and stupid. They could make more money in the long term with clean energy, and yet they entrench themselves in their ways and opt to poison our discourse and slow down human progress.

I apologize if this thought experiment is messy. I got out of the shower with these thoughts and started writing. To separate clean energy from renewable energy, I will define the following:

• Renewable items can be "farmed" on demand, using natural processes that exist on the planet
• Non renewable items are created slowly, at a fixed rate, and cannot be created on demand. This includes fossil fuels and precious metals.

Those entrenched in fossil fuels oppose the alternatives that take away their power. Since fossil fuels are extractive and non renewable items, there exists a fixed amount of it on the planet. There is value and power from controlling this scarce resource.

Renewable energy can be created on demand by anyone with the means to do so. Solar and wind energy cannot be monopolized as both can be harvested planet wide by anyone with the resources to set up a "farm".

In an alternate universe, if it was possible to harvest and store energy in the form of oil and gas, it would not be as attractive. Likewise, if it was possible to limit access to wind or sunlight, the rich and powerful would have an incentive to do that.

If people can recognize this difference, they will be more likely to ignore fossil fuel talking points and not act against their own self interest

https://leadership.ndp.ca/faq

An Israeli attack killed two children in Gaza on Saturday, medics and relatives said, in violence that has persisted in the Palestinian enclave despite a fragile ceasefire.

The children's uncle said an Israeli drone fired on Fadi and Goma Abu Assi, brothers aged 10 and 12, while they were gathering firewood to help their wheelchair-bound father east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. "They are children...what did they do? They do not have missiles or bombs, they went to gather wood for their father so he can start a fire," Mohamed Abu Assi told Reuters as their funeral took place.

At the funeral, the children's father wept over the body of one of the boys whose white shroud had been peeled back to show his face.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

https://www.dw.com/en/gaza-israeli-fire-kills-2-palestinian-boys/a-74952358

Since the October 10 ceasefire, over 354 Palestinians have been killed in the largely devastated enclave, according to Gazan health authorities. Many of the deaths occur when Israeli forces shoot at Palestinians it accuses of crossing the yellow line set up during the ceasefire to mark territories still under Israel's control in the strip.

On Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces said their troops "identified two suspects who crossed the yellow line, carried out suspicious activities and approached the troops in southern Gaza, posing an immediate threat," adding that the troops "eliminated the suspects to remove the threat."

• Proponents will argue it's about fairness and deterrence
• Lack of judicial discretion and a shift to prosecutorial power will end up with disproportionate punishments, while still allowing for discrimination