Conservatives have been tripping over each other to praise Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They claim that the Israeli attacks on Gaza are somehow very precise and targeted. He claims that Hamas is the target, and that they will eradicate Hamas.

The question I haven't seen answered though is what will he do with Gaza when/if he accomplishes that goal? Conservatives here and in Israel are happy to allow people to confuse Hamas with Gaza, and even more so Hamas with the population of Gaza. But even if he found a list of everyone who is part of Hamas and had them all killed, what happens then?

It is important to note that Hamas has a majority in the politics of Gaza because Israel has ensured they would. Israel has prevented elections from happening in Gaza, and now there has not been one there for 15 years. There are already people who have been elected, died, and not been replaced. Simultaneously because Israel controls immigration in and out of Gaza, they have prevented people from leaving.

So what would happen if all of Hamas were indeed killed off in this conflict? You then have a country with no ruling government. We've seen that the Netanyahu government does not want to see elections happen in Gaza, nor does it want to see people achieve any kind of economic or geopolitical mobility from within Gaza. Who then will they acknowledge as the leaders of Gaza?

via d_r's favorite blog, PowerLine

I understand that contradicting a Holy Narrative this way makes me, somehow, personally culpable for every bad thing that ever happened to anyone with relatively more skin pigment than I, if I have understood the Doctrine of Equity correctly. If only I could have cared less, I suppose.

Sardonic humor aside, George Floyd's death is tragic. The ripple effects, in my opinion, have piled evil upon tragedy, and have not fully run their course. The country badly needs reform from the individual heart on outward.

I've pointed out more than a few times that Trump - and the GOP under him - is a fascist party that hopes itself to be on the rise. There is plenty of video now of Trump directly borrowing Nazi rhetoric at a rally to get his supporters riled up. Naturally, because like any other fascist - aspiring or otherwise - he cannot allow himself to be wrong in front of a crowd, he had his campaign actually dial it forward rather than back in response to concerns raised by the public.

One odd little twist in that line - a likely whistle for his supporters - he still called his opponents "fascists" in his bit. Not a surprise there, of course, as his party has favored attacking the English Language itself for some time. I expect they'll come up with a cheerier word for their movement than fascism, to better sell it to their supporters.

Inside Mike Johnson's Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution

Now, fustakrakitch rightly blames the voters for the collapse of everything around us, but goes Full Bircher at the idea of those voters supporting a Convention of States

I endorse the COS as the only likely shot at improvement. If we can "just add a variable" (as fustakrakitch put it) The Powers That Be variable isn't going to accept any sort of reform.

What's needed is some analysis. The original, agrarian, island nation Constitution of 1787 is like a local machine script in your tool of choice that was put in production and has simply become swamped. The basic ideas, as Amended, are largely sound, but the feedback loops that should keep it stabilized were removed a century back by Woodrow, and the system has gone unstable.

Congress doesn't actually legislate; the Executive and its agencies (alphabet organizations especially) run amok and essentially unchecked; the sclerotic SCOTUS is awash in Commie fools and trying not to get shot for making feeble attempts to preserve the Constitution.

Mike Johnson seems like a straight shooter, but may prove too little, too late. We'll see. America can be great again, but there is much Commie folly that needs to be puked out to get the country back on course, and the Eminence Orange cannot be the only means of getting there.

Yes, this is a silly first world problem.

But my job requires me to interact with my work iPhone more often than a lot of people in my age bracket would otherwise do voluntarily. My work provides me with both an iPhone and a Chevy Equinox (both of which are due to be replaced in the next 6 months or less). Using the two together has been ... interesting.

For reference I'm complaining about a 2021 Equinox, and an iPhone 12. This is more about the latter than the former.

I will argue that iTunes is a mess in two important places. First, in the car it is worthless. Second, on my work laptop (which runs windows) it is awful when I most need it to be useful.

In the car, I would think that iTunes would be a competent music player. I am sorely disappointed on that expectation. I imagine it does a good job playing music, but in the car is has no index or search function. I can't even call for Siri to play music for me. If I start iTunes in the car (simply as "Music" in the car through CarPlay), it shows me the 10 tracks I listened to most recently. I have thousands of tracks that I took the time to copy to my iTunes library, and it arbitrarily tells me about the ones with the most recent time stamps. If I don't want to listen to those, I don't get any other options in the car.

By comparison if I instead put all that music on a USB stick and plug it in to the USB port on my dash, my car will let me search through it all I want. It tragically does a completely horse-shit job of playing tracks in order from an album, but it at least lets me seek them out however I want while I'm driving.

Second, iTunes makes one really terrible assumption on the laptop. This assumption has bit me twice now when I've been away from home with my phone and my laptop. I've tried to install an IOS update on my phone through my laptop, which should be straightforward. Connect to iTunes, start the install. Great. Then it reboots the phone to continue. Then it downloads more stuff to complete the download, or it checks something against something else online, or it sends money to the upkeep of the Steve Jobs museum, or it does some other internet stuff.

Not great.

Why is that not great? Because I'm using my phone as my hotspot. And now the phone has been rebooted into a state that it can't escape from until that next step is completed online. And my laptop can't get online because it has no hotspot available. Around and around we go, until the phone gives up and eventually reboots to only show an address:

Which, for reasons already mentioned, I can't load. Eventually I find another way to get online where I learn the secret code to reboot the phone, which doesn't help. Then I drive to some place with good WiFi and try again, with a different secret gesture on the phone. I "update" - which means recover in a non-destructive manner in this case - my phone and then it's working again.

Yeah, yeah. First world problems. I expect smitty will respond telling me that Barack Obama is behind this, presumably trying to slow down senior citizens from voting in Florida to help Biden's reelection chances. Fusta will respond telling me that if I voted all third-party in 2024 this problem would be guaranteed to go away by November 12th.

We saw in 2021 that the GOP is not fond of democracy when it doesn't work out in their favor. They stormed the capitol for their Dear Leader and have sewn seeds of conspiracy and hatred since then as well. In a recently closed JE here on slashdot a question came up of what the GOP might do if their Dear Leader loses a third time in 2024 .

Cheering for His Team as usual, smitty offered only :

Which certainly is in line with their Dear Leader's ongoing refusal to accept the 2020 results as valid, and also likely sufficient kindling for another group of rabid conservatives to try for another insurrection.

As a side note, I'll give him credit for getting close(r) to the original topic of the JE by the end. The JE was about what His Team would do in the USHouse with a new speaker installed. He jettisoned that topic to praise a convicted murderer for a while, and then eventually went back to instead praising a fascist who has yet to win the presidential vote.

Slashdot poll: Who thinks the ZOTUS is mentally competent for the office?

Wow, the eagerness to embrace Correct Thought, where "liberals" used to cling to a benefit of the doubt, is worrisome.

One can only surmise that totalitarian states in prior centuries had similar non-inquisitive cheerleaders.

Global warming/climate change/; elections; police tragedy; international conflict: the willingness to fellate the first Narrative provided by the Zampolit, without question, bodes poorly for recovering the Republic from the ongoing crash.

I need to keep you guys in prayer.

Not that this should surprise anyone when it rolls out, but I'll lay it out here before they start to execute these next steps. The first is already in motion but hasn't built much momentum yet.

• Blame the democrats for the situation
  • This is already well in motion, they are pretending that the democrats are responsible for the lack of a speaker (ignoring that they needed 15 votes to elect the previous) and that the whole problem therefore belongs at the feet of the democrats instead of the GOP.
• Take credit as the "party of diversity"
  • After all they have both conservatives and conservative fascists in their party, and because of that they are now over 2 weeks behind their original claimed deadline for putting in a new speaker

Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth

A major missed point here is Nemrut Dag, which affords a general answer to POCM: possibly the cart is before the horse here?

The arrival of a Messiah occurred in a singular place and time. The Nativity (and Gospel in general) is counter-intuitive to all standard political thought.

That didn't mean the advertising was limited to the Israelites, though.

Or even resorting to religious arguments at all here on Slashdot. It really isn't "News for Nerds, Stuff that matters" at least as far as most people are concerned; morality clearly isn't a concern in cyberspace for 99.9999% of the internet (which explains porn).

Having said that, I'm doing catechism in a year, and today's study includes a pet peeve of mine.

Mainly because the war on this issue runs through my own head. I'm generally against the death penalty for completely pragmatic reasons- a man sentenced to heavy labor slavery at least will make some restitution for his crime, a man killed, won't.

Having said that, I'm at odds with Pope Francis on the issue.

Posted to the Catechism in a year group, but perhaps declined.

I struggle with day 293.

I struggle with the edits to today's reading, which has caused three revisions to the Catechism since 1992 as the Church also struggles with this teaching.
It has brought me into disagreement with the church, because advanced detainment techniques and technologies are neither worldwide nor wise in some areas.

I live in a county in Oregon where a cop killer was just arrested- part of his 5th arrest for giving drugs to and raping a 12 year old girl. It's pretty damn clear to me that justice is not being applied in his case. Though the death penalty is legal here it's been 30 years since anybody's been executed and the last 4 governors routinely pardon death row cases.

We routinely let violent criminals out of jail without rehabilitation.

Due to the violent nature of child sex abuse, I openly wondered if the most recent round of edits to the catechism were specifically to try to oppose death penalty laws in clerical abuse cases, as that has been as recently as the 1940s a common punishment for such cases.

It occurs to me that in at least some cases, where adequate detainment isn't available or where the due process laws fail to protect the public, paragraph 2267 is in direct violation of paragraph 2263-2264.

https://youtu.be/avbIiFbonnI?si=8PSDTKIsGmTl9eqw

I mentioned before that the Health Insurance Industry wastes tens of billions of dollars annually of our money, directly. I would think that would bother people enough to want to attack that industry just out of that magnitude of waste. Yet I overlooked completely another giant waste from them, to the tune of an even larger pile of money.

Annually, the federal government spends Over 300 Billion dollars on insurance subsidies. They also lose out on a comparable amount of money that would otherwise be counted as income tax, due to the provision that makes health insurance pre-tax contributions untaxed.

But of course all this gets us one of the worst health care systems on the planet, for the largest cost anywhere. Clearly this is a great deal.

https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23090483&cid=63917119
Late, but still Troll Tuesday

https://www.activistpost.com/2016/01/9-ways-to-stop-cooperating-with-the-ruling-elites-control-system.html

Well, that's good as far as it goes. But how are we precluding THEY from controlling, say, a JFKjr?

The improved answer is to seize control at the local level. Fair enough.

But at that point, one discovers that the system runs backward; the money is borrowed and comes down the food chain, rather than having local taxes fund matters and move up the food chain to fund the government.

Money, we know, is mostly fungible with power. I'd fall short of directly equating them, but that amounts to a quibble.

The rest of The Famous Article is interesting and worth discussion as well.

damn_registrars correctly points out that the NIH is not the NHS. My TLA was AFU, and I suck. That is all.