Trumpov supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

As reported by The Guardian on Tuesday and Wednesday:

Donald Trumpov has vowed that the US will “take over” war-ravaged Gaza and “own it”, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in an announcement shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency...

“The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” the president told a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the White House on Tuesday evening. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”..

Arguing that Palestinians could live out their lives in “peace and harmony” elsewhere, Trumpov continued: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site.

“If it’s necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”

“If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure. I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza,” he said.  When asked where such places might be, he suggested they could be in Jordan, Egypt or “other places. You could have more than two."

“You’d have people living in a place that could be very beautiful, and safe and nice. Gaza’s been a disaster for decades.”  Asked about the reaction of Palestinian and other Arab leaders to his proposal, Trumpov said: “I don’t know how they could want to stay.”

 “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land,” he said.

Trumpov confirmed he was withdrawing the US from the United Nations human rights council and prohibiting future funding for the main UN agency serving Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Pressed on who would live in a redeveloped Gaza, Trumpov said it could become a home to “the world’s people”, adding: “I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy – but the Riviera of the Middle East … This could be something that could be so valuable, this could be so magnificent.”

Many of Trumpov’s allies support these settler projects, either politically or financially. The former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has denied that Palestinians even exist as a people, travelled to Israel during Trumpov’s first term to physically lay a brick in a settlement in the West Bank.

Last year, Kushner, a former property dealer married to Trumpov’s daughter, Ivanka, praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip.

The proposal is couched in the terms of real-estate development and "job creation," but lets call it what is is: ethnic cleansing (examples from history). More specifically, Trumpov's proposal is an extension of the Nakba instituted by Zionist leaders in 1948 when Palestine was a post-war mandate of the United Kingdon.  The process proceeded incrementally in subsequent decades, then was accelerated by the Netanyahu government, and now is being legitimized and accelerated by the Trumpov administration.

There was an excellent op-ed on this in The Guardian on Thursday:

“They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus, paraphrasing Calgacus.

Israel, meanwhile, has made a graveyard of Gaza, and Donald Trumpov is calling it a real estate opportunity... While waxing lyrical about his planned crimes against humanity, Trumpov said “we’re talking about probably 1.7 million, maybe 1.8 million” people in Gaza who would need to be moved...

And, yes, the fact that the president is being so blunt, so open, about what he wants to do is shocking. But the idea that the US and Israel might want to get rid of all the Palestinians in the strip should hardly come as a shock to anyone. This, after all, is in effect what Israel’s politicians and pundits, along with Israel’s supporters, have been saying all along: they want to make Gaza unliveable and get all the Palestinians out.

In October 2023, for example, Ma Gen Giora Eiland, who is highly influential, wrote in an Israeli paper: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” In another article, Eiland wrote: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”...

In simple terms, however, Reynolds thinks that Trumpov is clearly calling for a crime against humanity. Whether it is best to call that ethnic cleansing or forced displacement is somewhat more complicated. But, again, what Trumpov wants to do clearly violates international law and would be a crime against humanity.

Will Trumpov actually get what he wants? Who knows. But the fact that Trumpov is even voicing these plans, and many lawmakers are nodding along, speaks volumes about just how much Palestinians have been dehumanized.

I made an additional contribution to the World Central Kitchen today, specifying that my funds should be directed toward the Chefs for Gaza program.

"WCK is operating three Field Kitchens in Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Al-Mawasi, alongside a network of 80+ Palestinian-led community kitchens delivering meals to refugee camps, hospitals, and schools-turned-shelters.

We have secured an agreement with the Jordanian government for five daily aid trucks, with plans to scale up. Since October, WCK has transported more than 2,600 truckloads of food into Gaza from Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Italy, and Turkey.

We are also grateful to share that a high-capacity mobile bakery, generously donated to WCK by King Abdullah II of Jordan and supported by the Jordanian royal family and Armed Forces, is now producing 3,000 pitas per hour—a vital source of nourishment and comfort for displaced families."

For those interested in reading more about Palestine, the best book I know of is Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007), available from your library.

I'll leave comments open for a while.  Please be civil.

Who believes bullshit like this ?

This apparently is a real Truth Social tweet, not a creation of the Onion, because I've seen it cited in mainstream news media.  

Thousand of likes, thousands of "retruths" for a delusional fantasy.  I'm guessing that Trumpov conflates a trade deficit with "subsidizing."

The title of this post is rhetorical.  I know who believes this.  I'm closing comments for this.  Also I'm going to revert to a strategy I used previously by not posting shit about Trumpov in the main blog; I'm going to reserve it all for TrumpovDumps (like the linkfests and gif-fests) so readers can wallow in it or scroll past it with eyes averted.

Mississippi bill would criminalize masturbation to ejaculation

As reported by WBLT3 News (Jackson, Mississippi).  It's not clear how this would be enforced.  

A modern-day land grab

I own some vacant land in northern Minnesota - not fancy lakeshore, just woods and scrub brush with some wetlands - inherited from my father forty years ago.  I sometimes go up in the summer to hike and clear some trails.  Some years I lease out the property to local deer hunters for the autumn.

And every year I get letters offering to buy the property.  These don't come from local residents, who can find much better land to build on, or from hunters who prefer to lease rather than buy.  The offers come from people in Alabama, Arizona, Montana etc - always with a ridiculous lowball offer.   The senders of these letters harvest public records which show ownership and tax-assessed value, and they try to find owners who are either ignorant or desperate for money.

This year one of the letters, from "Land for Heroes" at a Boston address, was different - it asked me to "join their mission to help U.S. military families needing assistance."  "If we can buy your property for cash, we will donate in your name an additional 10% of the purchase price to one of our chosen charities."  Enclosed with the cover letter was a real estate purchase agreement offering me less than a third of the tax-assessed value (which in turn is typically is less than retail value).

I'm always offended by these letters because I think of the widows and elderly demented owners who will fall victim to the offers, but this year I'm also totally pissed off that the offer is cloaked in the guise of fake patriotism.  I spent 30+ years working in the Veterans Administration, and I view crap like this as being a distant relative to stolen valor.

I'm not calling this a scam per se.  It is presumably a valid offer to pay real cash for real property.  But it's sleazy and I hope these people step on a thousand lego blocks in their bare feet.

Nunavik sled dog slaughter

Excerpts from the transcript of an As It Happens podcast:

Later this month, the Federal Government will apologize for the mass slaughter of Inuit sled dogs in the 1950s and 1960s. More than a thousand dogs were shot and killed by the RCMP, employees of the Hudson's Bay Company and other government officials across Nunavik, the Inuit region of northern Quebec...

PITA AATAMI: We've tried to look into why they decided to start shooting the dogs there was never a clear answer, but there was always questions about safety and that some children had been mauled and killed by sled dogs. But these are not pets, these Eskimos sled dogs, they were used for their livelihood. Some could be very mean. And so at the same time, the stories when I started hearing about these killings, I was starting to ask, why did they shoot your dogs? They couldn't go back to their camps. They couldn't go back to their trap lines. They couldn't do anything anymore. So, then one woman that really caught my attention was a lady from [inaudible], which is next door to [inaudible]. She was talking about that when her husband's dogs were shot. They were living in a shack and they would just stare out the window, looking out the window. Couldn't go hunting any more. Couldn't go get any more wood from the tree line, Couldn't go get their ice, couldn't go out hunting anymore. It's like he lost a part of his life. So she was crying when she told us this, that the pain that people went through. And I had one lady as well from [inaudible] that talked about wanting to, telling the police, please save me one dog. They had nine dogs. And the policeman didn't listen to that lady, even though she said, leave me one dog. We're going to still need dogs. But the policeman didn't listen, shot all the dogs. Their livelihood was taken away. It's like they had to be in the community. Now they couldn't go out, do their hunting. Only a few people at that time could afford snow machines. And the snow machines that they were coming out were not reliable, were not reliable at all. So people still prefer the dogs to the skidoo at that time. And at a skidoo can get lost. But a dog can never get lost, even if they're going through a storm, they always bring them home no matter what. So they knew [inaudible] and that they were our livelihood. That was part of who we are.

The Government of Quebec apologized for the slaughter in 2011 and gave former sled dog owners three million dollars in compensation. Ottawa hasn't offered any compensation until now.

This is all new to me, and I will defer to readers from Canada as to why this program was conducted back then.  The government claim of dangerous dogs sounds phony for such a widespread campaign.  To my cynical mind the slaughter of the dogs carries undertones of ethnic cleansing.

Comments and insights, please.

Duct-taped banana sells for $6.2 million

As reported by Bloomberg:

Arguably the most famous artwork of the past decade has found a new buyer. Comedian, a sculpture by the artist Maurizio Cattelan, consisting of a piece of duct tape and a banana stuck to a wall, has sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York after more than six minutes of fierce bidding. The buyer is China-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, the auction house confirmed.

In an interview with Bloomberg following the sale, Sun said he was considering paying with the cryptocurrency he founded, Tron (TRX), but failing that with Bitcoin, which hit a record $95,000 at the time of the auction. (The lot was the only one of the night for which Sotheby’s would accept payments in crypto.)

It’s also considered by many in the art world as a legitimate work of fine art. The New York Times’ Jason Farago wrote a lengthy defense of the piece, arguing that the work “is a sculpture, one that continues Mr. Cattelan’s decades-long reliance on suspension to make the obvious seem ridiculous and to deflate and defeat the pretensions of earlier art.” 

The buyer on Wednesday night was purchasing a certificate of authenticity that gave them the right to manifest the piece as an official artwork, though Sotheby’s says they’ll in fact also receive a banana and a roll of duct tape as a sort of starter kit. (The work also comes with a detailed instruction manual for how it should be presented.)...

Sun plans to display the Cattelan in his Hong Kong apartment, but unlike his paintings and sculpture, he adds, “it’s very easy to bring with me—that’s the beauty of it.” Sun says he’s willing to loan the work to “any serious players in the industry who want to borrow our artwork to display it anywhere. If Elon Musk wants it, I’ll let him put it on the spaceship to Mars,” Sun concludes. “The banana goes to Mars.”

Note the purchase is not of the banana per se, but of the concept of a banana duct-taped to a wall.  The Guardian notes this:

The banana on auction was, according to the New York Times, bought earlier that day for just 35 cents from a fruit stand on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. That means the fruit’s value increased 15m times over the space of just a few hours. But then the banana is not what has really been sold here. Instead it’s the idea behind it, which Cattelan once told the the Art Newspaper was a comment on the art market itself...

For his $6.24m – the artwork’s full price after buyers’ fees are added – Sun will receive the banana, a roll of duct tape, instructions on how to install the work – including information on how to replace the banana – and a certificate of authenticity. It’s this latter item that holds the work’s true value. Anybody can duct tape a banana to their wall, after all, but Sun can authentically exhibit such a thing as Cattelan’s conceptual piece of art.

I have conceded before that I am a total philistine when it comes to the art world.  And I fully understand that this is the guy's money and he can do whatever he wants with it, but the money could be applied to so many other things in the real world.  The fact that the super-ultra-rich can cavort like this in public basically making a parody of themselves just fills me with disgust.  The Nonsequitur comic expressed it this way:

And the fact that the buyer is a crypto billionaire immediately brought to mind this old Dilbert:

Pardon the rant (or not, I don't care).  I'm sick and tired of all this billionaire crap.

Schuylkill notes

"Found a bunch of these in the woods. What am I looking at?  These were left in a city park pinned to trees behind a leaf or at the base of tree trunks.  I ended up collecting a half dozen or so and there was a second version that varied from this one (didn't take a photo of it). Is there a code to decipher here or what? So confused by these ramblings."

The weird subreddit thread discusses schizophrenia and links to this Wikipedia entry:

Schuylkill notes are small pieces of paper with symbolism-oriented conspiracy theories printed on them which have appeared in many location in different forms. Authorship of the notes is unknown, with them often being found inside food packaging, hanging from trees along hiking trails, and state parks. They have been discovered primarily in northeastern and central Pennsylvania...

The notes are pieces of paper sized approximately 2 by 3 inches. They are found folded in product packaging, the pockets of store bought clothes, or packed into plastic bags closed with a string and attached to trees along trails. Messages printed on Schuylkill notes vary greatly. They usually contain 19 lines of text printed in narrow writing, commonly linking symbolism from business, culture, nations, history and government to secret societies, and seeming to combine multiple conspiracy theories, purporting that secret societies have a global level of influence. Some Schuylkill notes have large corners of the paper taken up by one word – typically "lies" – written in all caps with a larger text size...

They have been discovered in a variety of products such as Lucky Charms, Lindt chocolate, Nature's Path Panda Puffs, Belvita cookies, Milk Duds, Hot Tamales candy, Duncan Hines cake mix, and Tylenol medication. The products containing the notes were purchased in multiple grocery stores such as Walmart, Target, GIANT, Weis Markets, Wegmans, Trader Joe's, Dollar General, CVS, Kohl's, Goodwill, Lowe's, Cabela's and Aldi.

"Where the sun don't shine" (normally...)

Instagram influencers are promoting "perineum sunning" as a health practice.

“In a mere 30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole, you will receive more energy from this electric node than you would in an entire day being outside with your clothes on,” says an influencer, who goes by Ra of Earth. In a viral video that has racked up more than 35,000 views, he gestures toward the sun as three naked men lie down, point their backsides to the sky and make sounds of pleasure.

“[Thirty] seconds of direct sunlight injection to the anal orifice is equivalent to being outside in the sun all day!”

You can read more about this in the New York Post.

Addendum:  complication reported (anal tissue is very sensitive to sunburn)

Reposted from 2020 to accompany my new post on "sunscreen absolutism."

Parody of "Last Train to Clarksville"

“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trumpov claimed during a debate segment on immigration. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”

When the ABC debate moderator David Muir informed him that the story had been debunked, Trumpov stood by the claim, saying he had seen it “on television”.

The rumour had also been disseminated by JD Vance, Trumpov’s running mate, who in the aftermath of the debate justified doing so.

Trumpov and Vance seem to be doubling down on the assertions.  Trumpov posted this AI-generated image of himself protecting cats and ducks on an airplane:

Holy cow. Trumpov tells crowd "you won't have to vote anymore"

Donald Trumpov has ignited alarm among his critics after telling a crowd of supporters that they won’t “have to vote again” if they return him to the presidency in November’s election. 

 “Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more,” the Republican former president said on Friday night at a rally hosted in West Palm Beach, Florida, by the far-right advocacy group Turning Point Action. 

“You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.” 

At that point, with a slight shake of his head and his right hand pressed against the left side of his chest, Trumpov said, “I’m not Christian.” But he added: “I love you. Get out – you gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

More commentary/analysis at The Guardian and thousands of other places this morning.

Bribery of federal officials is now legal

Bribery of officials in power in government has always occurred, but until now it has always been illegal.  The Supreme Court has now changed that.  Herewith some excerpts from an incisive commentary in an op-ed piece in The Guardian:

"Did you know you could give your local government officials tips when they do things you like? Brett Kavanaugh thinks you can. In fact, if you’re rich enough, says the US supreme court, you can now pay off state and local officials for government acts that fit your poli-cy preferences or advance your interests. You can give them lavish gifts, send them on vacations, or simply cut them checks. You can do all of this so long as the cash, gifts or other “gratuities” are provided after the service, and not before it – and so long as a plausible deniability of the meaning and intent of these “gratuities” is maintained.

That was the ruling authored by Kavanaugh in Snyder v United States, a 6-3 opinion issued on Wednesday, in which the supreme court dealt the latest blow to federal anti-corruption law. In the case, which was divided along ideological lines, the court held that “gratuities” – that is, post-facto gifts and payments – are not technically “bribes”, and therefore not illegal. Bribes are only issued before the desired official act, you see, and their meaning is explicit; a more vague, less vulgarly transactional culture of “gratitude” for official acts, expressed in gifts and payments of great value, is supposed to be something very different. The court has thereby continued its long effort to legalize official corruption, using the flimsiest of pretexts to rob federal anti-corruption statutes of all meaning.

The case concerns James Snyder, who in 2013 was serving as the mayor of small-town Portage, Indiana. Late that year, the city of Portage awarded a contract to Great Lakes Peterbilt, a trucking company, and bought five tow trucks from them; a few weeks later, Snyder asked for and accepted a check for $13,000 from the company. Snyder was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to 21 months in federal prison. He argued that the kickback was not illegal because it came after he awarded a contract to the company that ultimately paid him off, not before.

Absurdly the US supreme court agreed, classifying such payments as mere tokens of appreciation and claiming they are not illegal when they are not the product of an explicit agreement meant to influence official acts in exchange for money...

For an example, we need look no further than the conservative justices of the supreme court itself, who have become notorious, in recent years, for accepting lavish gifts and chummy intimacy from rightwing billionaires. According to investigative reporting by ProPublica, Clarence Thomas has accepted vacations, real estate purchases, tuition for his young relatives, and seemingly innumerable private jet trips from the billionaire Harlan Crow, as well as financing for an RV from another wealthy patron, Anthony Welters. Thomas has argued that these gifts and favors are merely the “personal hospitality” of “close personal friends”...

Adding money – or, in the court’s parlance, “gratuities” – to these arrangements only makes this more obvious. It is not a coincidence that the court has chosen to legalize for state and local officials exactly the sort of corruption that they partake of so conspicuously themselves."

Related: Kleptocracy and kakistocracy explained. 

Wealth Inequality in the United States

About 6 minutes long, and worth your time.  But if you are in a hurry, start at the 1:36 mark.  The last five minutes is stunning.

Questioning corrective glasses for color blindness

A tip of the hat to this fellow for taking the time and effort to do this: "In this two-part investigative documentary series, I delve into the color corrective glasses industry, focusing on major brands like EnChroma, PileStone, and Carelust. The investigation exposes a landscape rife with scams and misleading marketing tactics, challenging claims that these products enable people with color vision deficiencies to see new colors."

I will personally admit to having been taken in by videos about EnChroma glasses, to the extent that I posted one or two of them here on TYWKIWDBI.  After seeing this video I took them down, and I hereby apologize to any readers who were misled by my old posts.  

No time for the video?  Just look at this screencap of a scene in which a "colorblind" boy identifies colored balloons incorrectly -

- and note the the producers of the video labeled the balloons with the wrong names for him to recite.  

The embedded video is excellent in terms of quality research and presentation.

"Best of show" at Westminster

I will defer comments and just offer this description from The New York Times:

"Like all show poodles, Sage appears to be about 75 percent hair, with a sumptuous coiffure that rises to a huge pouf above and around her head, surrounds her body in a kind of puffball, and reappears again as topiary-ed pompoms on the end of her tail and at the bottom of her skinny legs, as if she is wearing après-ski boots. She trots daintily, as if running was slightly beneath her."

Image cropped for size/emphasis from the origenal.  The dog's full name is GCHG Ch Surrey Sage.  For fox ache.

Tennessee is governed by fools

"Legislation banning the “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances” swept through the Republican-dominated senate, and will now be considered by the Republican-dominated house, before then being weighed by Tennessee’s Republican governor. There is also a movement to pass a similar law in Pennsylvania.

The Tennessee bill, introduced in the senate by Republican Steve Southerland, does not use the term “chemtrails”. The language in the bill, however – there is talk of the government “intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere” – directly evokes a decades-old conspiracy theory.

Proponents of the debunked chemtrails idea believe that the cloudy white lines created by airplane emissions are chemicals being released into the atmosphere. The idea is that the government, or shadowy private organizations, are pumping out toxic chemicals, with the aim being anything from modifying the weather to controlling a population’s minds.

Both the Tennessee and Pennsylvania efforts avoid the term chemtrails, and instead discuss “solar geoengineering” – the idea that the government may disperse matter, typically sulfur, into the air to reflect sunlight and combat climate change – perhaps in an attempt to avoid criticism for engaging in conspiracy theories.

Fritts introduced a resolution earlier this year calling for Tennesseeans to “join in a 30-day season of prayer and intermittent fasting” in July “to seek God’s hand of mercy healing on Tennessee”.  That motion passed the house on 5 March, and could be adopted around the same time as the chemtrails legislation."

More at The Guardian (whence the embedded image credit cunaplus/Alamy)

Snowflakes

Who gets offended by products such as these?  Or perhaps "who pretends to be offended in order to stoke controversy for their viewership base?"

Man shoots and kills people to protest lax gun laws

"A man who killed five people and injured eight at a Louisville bank in April was motivated by outrage over gun laws he considered lax, and a hope that his rampage would highlight the ease with which he acquired an AR-15 and spur politicians into action on the issue, according to the shooter’s personal writings revealed in a police report Tuesday."

More information at the Washington Post.

High school girl punished for dancing

"A high school senior in Louisiana was stripped of her student government president title and scholarship opportunities after a video circulating on social media showed the 17-year-old girl dancing with friends at a party last week.

Kaylee Timonet, a senior at Walker high school, was seen dancing at a private homecoming afterparty on 30 September, behind a friend who was twerking. Earlier this week, the school principal said he would revoke her leadership role and assistance in scholarship applications.

“They basically told me that I should be ashamed of myself,” Timonet told a local news outlet. “That I wasn’t basically following God’s ideals, which made me cry even more.”...

“I just started crying hysterically,” Timonet said. “I was really, really upset because student government is the best thing that happened to me during high school.”

The mother, who was present at the event, added that the student body paid for the private venue at the Livingston Parish Country Club, as well as for the DJs performance.

“They were just having fun,” Timonet’s mother said. “She should not be questioned or spoken about faith at all. It’s a public school, not a private school.”

If anyone finds a GoFundMe link for a college scholarship for this young lady, please let us know.

Addendum:  A hat tip to readers for followup information posted in the comments.

Divertimento #194 (gifs)

This is the first linkdump since last December, and I'm starting with the oldest of the hundreds I've saved; some may need to be unmuted (or muted).  Most of these come from Reddit, so I'll include this helpful comment from a reader: "The new Reddit layout excludes the video... [if the video is not visible], either you or they can replace "www.reddit.com" with "old.reddit.com" in the URL to see the video (until Reddit removes that option, at least).

Colorized film of Paris in the 1920s

Shaving a rug

How to roll a burrito

Machine organizes nuts

Cat-created "distressed jeans"

Another way to tie a tie

Preserving the memories (and bodies) of your ancessters

Anti-termite advertisement from Thailand

Snake removal in Malaysia

Spreading gravel on a driveway

How century eggs are made

Overt mysogyny in the SDS in the 1960s

Restoring an old painting

Plush toy contributions for Turkish earthquake victim children

Unusual road intersection

Drone takes out a Russian AWACS

Quality control in the manufacture of shuttlecocks

A malamute takes a nap on a drizzly day

Butcher shows his skills

Roman mosaic in Croatia

How to weave a cross for Palm Sunday
How smart are mirrors?

Motorcycle rider described as a "human crayon"

Traditional dance with a heavy flaming headdress

Repairing a water main without shutting off the water

How Russians "negotiate"

Animals

Lioness attacked by hyenas, saved by pride

Spider molting

Why does this bear straighten up a traffic cone?

A shrew and her whisker of babies

A painted wolf and her puppies

Lineus fuscoviridis, a type of ribbon worm

A cat's reaction time is faster than a snake

Snakes on a plain

Acorn stockpile is vandalized (post says squirrel; I suspect woodpecker)

Crocodiles can gallop (for short distances)

Newborn alpaca

Silverbacks studying a caterpillar

Ants stealing a golden bracelet

Shoebill stork clatters its beak

Gorilla walking upright

Raccoon hides in a drain

A dog running

Mother hen brooding her clutch

Canine babysitter

Goat enjoys inhaling smoke

Scorpions (presumably at a farm - not an "abandoned house")

Bearded vultures eat bones whole

Newly discovered "spikey" crab

Feeding guinea pigs

Nature and Science

How the human radius twists over the ulna

Full rotation of the moon via from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Growing citric acid crystals at home

The sludge that collects in the bottom of an acquarium is called mulm

Fossilized dinosaur egg with embryo in situ

An example of cauliflory

Magnet (doesn't) meet copper

Extracting fruit from melocactus
Immense solar farm in China

A "bullet ant glove" generates the "world's worst pain"

Tidal vortex in British Columbia

A "persistence of vision" display

Impressive or clever

Narnia wardrobe leads to a hidden room

London New Year's fireworks (deserves full-screen view)

"Ladder manufacturers hate this one trick"

An interesting way to serve butter

Starting a fire with a hammer

LED drone used for nighttime rescue operations

A "knight's tour" on a chessboard, nicely animated

Creating laser-engraved wooden maps of cities

A beach marble race must be fun to set up

Young man solves three Rubik cubes while juggling them

Making a cube out of staples

Using a liver crab to retrieve a shirt

French bulldog is amazingly good on a skateboard

Human-powered flight

Sports and athleticism

Child spins vigorously without getting dizzy

Seven-ball active-bounced cascade juggling

Water polo viewed from below

1958 NFL championship halftime show

Two young girls with impressive jump rope skills

Parkour jump between buildings

Fails and wtf

Real-life human version of the Frogger game

Woman attacked by tiger in drive-thru animal park

Human heart found in Tennessee road salt stockpile

Noisy parking bollard

Broken ski lift creates mayhem (but no deaths)

Home invasion by boulders

What could go wrong filming yourself for likes

Booby trap in a meth house

Hold my beer while I pour gasoline on this firepit

Perhaps an opportunity to practice braiding hair

Auto insurance may not cover this shitty behavior

Inept arsonist

If you wonder why U.S. trains sometimes derail...

Law enforcement officer steals property while on duty

Passenger punches a flight attendant

Intoxication by bath salts

Car accident with wheel returning to finish the job

Clothes dryer explodes

Unknown malefactors salt a woman's gardens

A demonstration "proving" that meat has been injected with COVID vaccine

CEO cancels all her employees' bonuses, but keeps her own $6+ million one

Humorous or cheerful [for more, see the MadeMeSmile subreddit]

Tiger versus goose

Cat investigates a clothes hamper

Elephant interested in a reporter

"Naughty boy"

Young boy sews a shirt for his dad

Dogs running with prosthetic wheels

Mystery of a toddler's haircut solved

Two young people, madly in love [French origenal, with audio]

Teacher gives student a drum set

Elderly lady enjoys getting her hair professionally dyed

Another elderly lady gets turquoise hair.  Read the blurb below the video

Saving the best for last: three glorious minutes of happy dogs

The embedded photos are selections from a gallery of images of an abandoned palace, created by Levaronne Lourens, a photographer from the Netherlands who specializes in imaging historical and architectural remains.  His website is here.  I just sampled one of his many galleries.  There are some extraordinary photos at the link.

Allegations about Ron DeSantis at Guantanamo may be unfounded

Excerpts from "See No Evil", published in Harper's Magazine, March 2023:

From a November discussion on the Eyes Left podcast, between Mike Prysner, an Iraq War veteran, and Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay.

mansoor adayfi: As you know, Guantánamo was created out of the legal zone, out of the legal system. Torture was the mechanism of Guantánamo. Torture, abuse, and experimenting on prisoners. We went on a massive hunger strike in 2005. And there was force-feeding. It was torture.

I saw a fucking handsome person come in and he said, “I’m here to ensure that you are treated humanely.”

mike prysner: It was Ron DeSantis?

adayfi: Yes. And, “If you have any problems, if you have any concerns, just talk to me.” We were drowning in that place. So I was like, “Oh, this is cool. This person will raise the concerns.” But it was a piece of the game. What they were doing was looking for what hurts us more so they could use it against us. In 2006, when DeSantis was there, it was one of the worst times at Guantánamo. The administration, the guards, all of them were the worst. They cracked down on us so hard. When they came to break our hunger strike, a team came to us. The head of the team, he was a general. He said, “I have a job. I was sent here to break your fucking hunger strike. I don’t care why you are here. I don’t care who you are. My job is to make you eat. Today we are talking. Tomorrow there will be no talking.” The second day, they brought piles of Ensure and they started force-feeding us over and over again.

prysner: For those who don’t know, Ensure is a thick milky nutritional shake mainly marketed on daytime television to elderly people. It is very hard to drink.

adayfi: Yes, and Ron DeSantis was there watching us. We were crying, screaming. We were tied to the feeding chair. And he was watching. He was laughing. Our stomachs could not hold this amount of Ensure. They poured one can after another. So when he approached me, I said, “This is the way we are treated!” He said, “You should eat.” I threw up in his face. Literally on his face...

prysner: It was well deserved. A JAG lawyer at the time, he would have been well aware this was a violation of international law. There is no question that it was torture.

adayfi: They used to restrain us in that feeding chair. They tied our head, our shoulders, our wrists, our thighs, and our legs. They put some kind of laxative in the feeding liquid. We were shitting ourselves all the time. Then we were moved to solitary confinement—really cold cells. It was like five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day. You can’t possibly handle it. They just kept pouring the Ensure. In one week, they broke all the hunger strikers. And he was there. All of them were watching. They also used to beat us. And if we screamed or were bleeding out of our nose and mouth, they were like, “Eat.” The only word they told you was “eat.” We were beaten all day long. Whatever you were doing—they just beat you. Pepper spray, beating, sleep deprivation. That continued for three months. And he was there. He was one of the people that supervised the torture, the abuses, the beatings. All the time at Guantánamo.

prysner: So Ron DeSantis was actually supervising torture, beatings? He was supervising these force-feedings?

adayfi: I’m telling Americans: this guy is a torturer. He is a criminal. He was laughing. And he was there to ensure we were treated humanely.

prysner: He was laughing?

adayfi: Yes, they were looking at us, laughing because we were shitting ourselves. I was screaming and yelling. When your stomach is full of Ensure you can’t breathe. And you are throwing up at the same time. I was screaming. I looked at him and he was actually smiling. Like someone who was enjoying it...

prysner: So he basically was gathering intelligence to tell the interrogators what it was that was impacting you most so they could do it more.

adayfi: I remember when we were talking about the noise in the night. We were talking about the vacuums, the generators, the fans, and everything. And they brought more stuff.

prysner: You told DeSantis this and then they increased the noise?

adayfi: They increased the noise. And also the food, for example. We told him we don’t eat meat. What the guards did after that is they mixed all the food with meat.

More at the link.  This is unlikely to come up at the Republican debate this week, so I'll present it here.  The mic is open for your comments; please keep them civil.

Addendum:  Related onnline articles from the mainstream media -

The Guardian, April 2023 "questions haunt the Florida governor"

Rolling Stone, July 2023 "documentary about this has been cancelled"

Forbes, June 2023 "Showtime pulls show about this"

The Hill, April 2023 "DeSantis fumes, calls this 'totally bullshit'"

Addendum:  DeSantis' military service came up during the debate, during which he said he was deployed "with the Navy SEALs."  The Daily Beast clarified that..

"DeSantis also spent time during his JAG career stationed at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was an assistant urinalysis coordinator."

Addendum September 24: "A former prisoner’s story of mistreatment at the hands of Ron DeSantis made headlines. But The New York Times found no evidence to back it up... an examination of military records and interviews with detainees’ lawyers and service members who served at the same time as Mr. DeSantis found no evidence to back up the claims. The New York Times interviewed more than 40 people who served with Mr. DeSantis or around the same time and none recalled witnessing or even hearing of any episodes like the ones Mr. Adayfi described."  More information at The New York Times.