Fwiw, this was front page under the fold in today’s Sunday edition of the East Bay Times. I was pretty happy with the coverage.

Also, the above-the-fold story was about a 14 year old Gazan who was recovering well from 9 months of burn treatments in the US.

Where do you work? How hard is it to find a new job? How likely are they to fire you if you stand up to them?

The best case scenario would be that you and the entire staff stand up to HR and say that you were all led to believe this was permitted policy, and that if they’re going to declare retroactively that it isn’t, you all want a compensation raise because you considered this a job benefit.

Obviously you shouldn’t do this, though, unless you feel like you’ve got a strong position and you’re not afraid to find a new job.

If you’re looking for the safest option, I’d go with lie and deny: deny having eaten what you ate. Deny having confessed. Deny that you even work there if you have to.

Don’t bother throwing your coworkers under the bus. This is very unlikely to change HR’s reaction. They will punish you the same either way, they just might punish others too. There’s no benefit to you, so either stand up and fight or deny deny deny and promise you’ll be good.

They’re also different enough that people will disagree on taste.

The worldbuilding of the expanse is head and shoulders better than Firefly. But Firefly’s strength was characters: the writing and acting made the crew so loveable. I like the crew of the Roc, but I never felt the same level of connection to them.

I wouldn’t bother pitting then against each other. They’re very different, but if you like Firefly, you should check out The Expanse.

Personally, though, I recommend the books. I watched the first few episodes of the show first and was underwhelmed, but then checked out the books and was hooked right away.

First: It’s not like ice are going to walk up to white girls with blue hair and be like, ‘No voting for you, liberal.’ They don’t need to assess anyone to guess how they’re going to vote: the plan is to just reduce overall turnout at voting sites in places with a lot of Democratic voters.

The way I expect this to go is for Maga folks to drive into big cities and station themselves outside voting sites in poor, non-white neighborhoods and pretend they’re ‘looking out for non citizens who might try to vote’. The goal is to create hassles and long lines so that people who have limited time decide to leave instead of wait.

If you are able to arrive early and don’t mind waiting you’ll be fine. But a better response is to contact your county and volunteer as an election worker. If you do, you can help enforce distance requirements for observers, make sure there are no bottlenecks, make sure there is seating available, keep the line moving in good spirits, etc.

If you just make voting smooth and efficient as a volunteer, they lose.

I find this whole thing pretty fucking hilarious, because it’s great to see fascists stab each other in the back.

Trump isn’t totally wrong here: the filibuster should be converted into a talking filibuster. Obviously, he wants that for reasons opposite to my own, but we’re still in agreement on this narrow point.

What makes it extra funny is that the filibuster is already on a deathwatch. The writing is on the wall that voters in both parties are sick of this pro wrestling performative senate theater where they pretend not to be able to pass laws. It’s very possibly going to be retired by Democrats in 2028. So trying to preserve it is hilariously foolish for a Republican.

I hope that it’s retired by Democrats, and I’m grateful that Thune is betraying Trump in this fashion.

I don’t think he expected or planned it, but this massive security failure does demonstrate my point.

After the attacks, it was uniformly agreed that he was now politically dead. There was no coming back from a fuck up that massive.

Yet here he stands. He turned Oct. 7 from the biggest political liability imaginable into a tremendous opportunity.

Never assume he’s finished.

First, I really wish I could put that many 9s on it. I agree with you, but it would be nice if Democrats ran as directly on “no more wars” as Trump did. I definitely wouldn’t rule out Harris allowing Israel to attack Iran, but just being more discrete and framing it as “Israel’s war” instead of ours.

Second, folks should be wary: one of the things that makes Netanyahu so dangerous is that he’s genuinely a mastermind at planning AND pivoting: he’ll game out multiple sides of things, and when people say he’s cooked or is finally out of options he’ll pull out a move he had ready.

My point is that he’s never taken by surprise, and he’s the undisputed master of pulling a rabbit out of his hat when everyone thinks they’ve got him cornered.

Do not underestimate his ability to win reelection or retain his power even if he loses.

Based on my understanding, there’s two considerations:

1. I don’t think most Israelis expect Arab neighbors to actually care about the Palestinians. They reason that many of the citizens in those countries are mad, but leaders are all corrupt and can be bought off or manipulated.

2. There’s a general mania for war, and a belief that they can just threaten or kill anyone who tries to stop them.

It’s all insane. The general Israeli public is heavily propagandized and traumatized. I think it’s possible that experts might eventually categorize this period as a mass hysteria event among Israeli Jews.

Just to add some additional context, it’s rarely discussed in America, but Israeli society is getting torn apart by all of this. Not over political disagreements (sadly genocide has become overwhelmingly popular) but this state of constant war is destroying their economy, their labor force, their international collaborations, and the general mental health of their society. It’s obviously nothing compared to what their victims in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank are going through, but the population within Israel is setting fire to their own society in their lust for blood.

I thick we should sit with what you’re doing here.

You’re not a fool. You know perfectly well that I despise Trump. But you’re accusing me of supporting him because you know it’s a vicious and disgusting thing to say. You’re resorting to vulgar insults because my words hurt you deeply, moreso because they’re coming from an ally. I’m violating the safety of the fiction you’re sheltering in, and if you can convince yourself that I’m actually some kind of manipulative fascist that is doing it to hurt you rather than help you confront painful truths, it makes it easier for you to dismiss my words.

I don’t think this is a conscious plan. But this is what a worldview trying to protect itself from painful truths does.

I’ll say no more. I will accept your anger. But I wish you progress on the journey we’re all on.

Once Trump won, Isreal ramped up the attacks on civilians; so whatever Biden was doing, it helped somewhat.

I’m sorry but what reality is this in? Netanyahu literally accepted the ceasefire Biden had been unsuccessfully pushing for seven months the day before Trump took office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2025_Gaza_war_ceasefire

The primary difference between the war before and after the transition was that the IDF transitioned from a brutal ground offensive to a three month ceasefire, followed by a ruthless starvation blockage. It’s not substantively better. But no, Israel did not “ramp up up attacks”; they literally did the opposite of that when Trump took office.

I’m sorry to say this so bluntly, but you’re living in denial. I get it. The truth was devastating to watch. But if you want anything to get better, you need to confront reality.

This is unintelligible.

I want to take a big step back and ask what the point of this conversation is.

Personally, I think we should study history to learn from it.

I think you should – as a mental exercise – imagine that although Biden objected to the optics, he fundamentally believed that the only way for Israeli Jews to be safe was to teach Palestinians the lesson that armed resistance will always elicit an unfathomable cost in their children’s blood. And that meant that an unrestrained total war on the civilian population was an unfortunate necessity.

If he believed this, but also found the glorification of racial hatred despicable, and recognized that politics and law required him to publicly disavow crimes against humanity…

… what do you think he would do?

Really try to answer this question. And then ask how his real world choices differed.

The cost of Biden’s mistakes has been unbearable. So we had better learn lessons and make sure these mistakes are never repeated. And that requires an honest accounting.

I think this is 100% correct.

I have no illusions that Harris and her advisors would like to see Iran’s leadership attacked, and would look for ways to support Israel. But as you said, they’d be at least smart enough to explore ways to justify it, and would avoid direct involvement.

I could absolutely see them holding talks, then Israel attacking and them wringing their hands about how disappointed they are in the “breakdown of diplomacy” while also justifying Israel’s attacks, and then sending weapons and support and troops to “assist” while insisting that they’re not at war.

This war is so dumb that I remain actually surprised Trump fell for it. I have no illusions about how stupid he is, but this is jump-off-a-shed-onto-a-bike-rack-directly-on-your-nuts-dumb. I remain amazed that even he would fall for this.

I’m unclear what this means.

Do you think Biden and Trump are different with regard to Palestine?

I’m not one of those people who equivocates between Democrats and Republicans, but on this issue I’m genuinely unclear what someone would point to as a difference in policy between Biden and Trump.

This bodes well.

I see a lot of doomerism on the left, but I’m happy to hear that Thiel and I agree on this one thing: his project is not going as well as he had hoped.

Ulghhhh.

The ceasefire is dead. Stop describing it as “strained” or “shakey”.

They’re continuing to cleanse and depopulate it in preparation resettle it.

Disgusting.

I remember this incident.

Words don’t do justice to the depravity.

Pollard was released on parole at the age of 61 from US prison in 2015 after serving 30 years for selling military secrets to Israel for money. He and his wife, Anne Henderson, were arrested in 1985 after Pollard passed a huge volume of classified documents to Israeli intelligence – enough to fill a 10ftx6ftx6ft room, by Pollard’s own calculation. In return he received cash and jewels.

Marion Bowman, a Pentagon lawyer who assessed the damage to US national security by Pollard’s espionage, told NBC News in 2014 the spy had been motivated by money as much as allegiance to Israel, and alleged he had provided highly classified materials to two other countries.

This guy is propogating antisemitic tropes by fulfilling them. Truly fuck this guy very much.

The courage it takes to sail into that hell is inspiring, but also I worry so greatly for them.

I would like to see this information break out further.