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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by bolverk

  1. Well, there is a "Dead Sea" over there.
  2. sWe've had some nice light sprinkles out here in West Texas most of the morning, but it's unfortunately starting to clear and I'll have to close all the windows before too long. Really hoping we're done with the 90s, but I doubt it.
  3. @ABSR Here's some more light reading for you. BBC: Blindfolded, bound and beaten: Palestinians tell of Israeli jail abuse B'Tselem: Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps World Organisation Against Torture: Systemic torture and inhumane treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prison facilities since October 7, 2023 The Guardian: Palestinian prisoners describe systemic abuse in Israel’s jails Haaretz: Israeli Doctors Must Condemn the Inhumane Treatment of Hospitalized Palestinian Detainees Reuters: Israeli rights group says Palestinian prisoners subject to systematic abuse BBC: Chemical burns, assaults, electric shocks - Gazans tell BBC of torture in Israeli detention AP: Israel maintains a shadowy hospital in the desert for Gaza detainees. Critics allege mistreatment AP: Released Palestinians describe worsening abuses in Israeli prisons EU: Violating international legal obligations: Israel's treatment of Palestinian prisoners
  4. Take it up with those investigating all the various war crimes and atrocities committed by Israel. You do remember that there's an active warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu. https://www.un.org/unispal/document/special-committee-israeli-practices-report-05sep25/ https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157286 The Special Committee has received disturbing briefings on the systematic and widespread perpetration of sexual and gender-based violence, torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment inflicted on Palestinian detainees by Israeli military and security forces, as also reported by the Commission of Inquiry. Thousands of individuals were reportedly held in Israeli prisons and military camps, some under the “Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law”. Most were detained without due process, without access to family and in severely unhygienic conditions. Detainees faced daily physical and psychological abuse and torture, and many suffered from scabies and other skin infections due to the appalling environment. The torture and ill-treatment were such that special procedure mandate holders denounced them as a crime against humanity, warning that the high-profile case of the gang-rape of a detainee in the Israel Defense Forces detention facility of Sde Teiman represented the tip of the iceberg. The Special Committee also received information about the use of rape and gang-rape, including anal rape with objects, targeting both male and female detainees, amid a near-total absence of prison or military investigations and complete lack of accountability. Numerous Palestinian detainees released during the ceasefire in early 2025 required urgent medical treatment, and some bore signs of acute malnutrition and other forms of torture. Israel has arrested, arbitrarily detained or held incommunicado tens of thousands of Palestinians since 7 October 2023, raising concerns of enforced disappearance. Verifying figures is difficult given the lack of information shared by the authorities, the denial of access to lawyers and relatives, and the fact that Israel continues to deny visits to places of detention by the International Committee of the Red Cross. On 18 July 2025, special procedure mandate holders warned that about 4,000 Palestinians, including children and older persons, and 51 Israelis were still missing since 7 October 2023. They called upon the authorities in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory to clarify the fate and whereabouts of all victims of enforced disappearance, no matter the circumstances, whether in detention or deceased. The Special Committee echoes that call. On 14 July 2025, the non-governmental organization Palestinian Prisoners Society reported that, since 7 October 2023, over 18,000 Palestinians, including 1,450 children and 560 women, had been arrested by Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in addition to an unidentified number of detained Palestinians from Gaza. Over the same period, 73 identified Palestinian detainees had died in custody.[37] That number amounted to almost a quarter of the 310 identified Palestinians who had died in Israeli custody since 1967 and had been recorded by the Palestinian Prisoners Society.[38] For the first time since 1967, a juvenile Palestinian detainee, aged 17 years old, died in custody in April 2025, as a result of malnutrition and denial of medical care. In a report, the Commission of Inquiry concluded that the systematic abuse of Palestinian detainees was directly and causally linked to statements made by Israeli officials, including the Minister of National Security, who was responsible for the Israel Prison Service, and other members of the coalition Government, legitimizing revenge and violence against Palestinians.[39] According to the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, as at 30 July 2025, Israel retained the bodies of 460 Palestinians (of whom 6 were women and 46 were children),[40] including for use as leverage in negotiations – an Israeli practice long predating October 2023.[41] In August 2024, Israeli forces sent the remains of over 80 unidentified Palestinians to a crossing point into Gaza; it was not clear whether the remains were those of bodies dug up from cemeteries in Gaza or of detainees who had died in detention.[42] For the second year in a row, Israel was included in the annual report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict. The highest number of grave violations against children in the world in 2024 was verified in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (8,554), in addition to the verification of another 2,788 grave violations that occurred in 2023 in the Gaza Strip.[43] The overwhelming majority (7,188) of the verified violations were attributed to Israeli armed and security forces, and another 42 to Israeli settlers. Among those violations, including killings, maiming, the destruction of schools, the use of children as human shields and the denial of humanitarian access, the United Nations also verified the detention in 2024, for alleged security offences, of 951 Palestinian children (940 boys, 11 girls) in the West Bank (602), in East Jerusalem (259) and the Gaza Strip (90), including the detention of a Palestinian girl whose whereabouts remained unknown. Over 110 Palestinian children were being held in administrative detention, without charge or trial as at 31 December 2024, and, in addition, 25 children had been transferred to Israel from the Gaza Strip and detained under the “unlawful combatant” designation.[44] The Special Committee is particularly concerned by the targeting of children and their treatment in detention, and urges the Government of Israel to immediately release all children held in administrative and other arbitrary detention and cease the ill-treatment and torture of detainees. Moreover, the Special Committee echoes the concluding observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child on the combined fifth and sixth reports of Israel and the recommendations contained therein.[45]
  5. Sadly, no; I really don't. Most of what I know (or think I know) is only from documentaries and such over the last few years, which made me actually contemplate what they did and feel an awakening to amazement at their achievements. Hopefully, some other, more erudite Surlier can guide you.
  6. What the Polynesians did to populate islands across the Pacific with far less developed technology, including Hawaii and several US overseas territories, is a far more impressive feat, imo. European "discovery" of the Americas was pretty much inevitable with the ships they had and navigation tools like compasses, astrolabes, and quadrants. Let's celebrate these crazy fuckers:
  7. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/opinion/gen-z-conservative-christianity.html Americans who think that Generation Z might offer hope for a less divisive, less polarized political future should think again A close look at Gen Z reveals that today’s deep electoral divisions, ripping at the fabric of our politics, are likely to continue for years. That is particularly because of the role of religion, or its absence, in Gen Z, the people born from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. About a third of Gen Z-ers are nonreligious. Thirty-eight percent never go to church — a mark of the rise of the Nones, or Americans with no religious affiliation. But predictions that the Christian right would be moribund with Gen Z-ers have proved false. In the aftermath of Covid — and amid the longing for purpose, community and transcendence that many Gen Z-ers feel — a sizable minority of them have found their answer in conservative Christianity, fueling both a religious and a political revival among these young Americans. They bring a new attitude to the combination of faith and politics, and many see politics as a matter of spiritual warfare. According to survey data from the Barna Group, a Christian research organization, Gen Z-ers who go to church are more frequent attendees than churchgoers from older generations. Twenty-four percent of Gen Z-ers go to church every week (a slightly higher rate than for millennials and Gen X-ers). Many of these young Christians have turned to conservative politics — a near-seamless mix of Christian faith and the MAGA message. That mix was best demonstrated in speeches that wove political and religious themes at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk. Gen Z is clouded by despair. It’s not hard to imagine how young people traumatized by the isolation imposed by Covid and disillusioned by the perceived emptiness of secular liberalism might be drawn to a relationship with God and a purpose in life. Many were attracted by Mr. Kirk’s message of confidence and joyfulness in his conservative Christian faith. Some believe that they are in a spiritual war against “enemies” and that they can expect to be persecuted for their convictions from a hostile secular state or society. This belief is closely intertwined with the idea of spiritual warfare against demonic forces, which is especially popular in charismatic churches — that is, churches that encourage the use of miraculous gifts, such as speaking in tongues and faith healing. The Christian right of Gen Z is different from that of their parents’ or grandparents’ time. Members of those generations largely came of age in the Eisenhower era, when civil religion was so strong that the president led a prayer at his inauguration and signed legislation adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Schools in many regions started the day with classroom prayer or Bible reading. Then came the cultural shocks of the 1960s and ’70s. Many conservative evangelicals of didn’t like what they imagined second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution and the gay rights movement would do to their families. They started political campaigns to return America to the civil religion and moral conservatism of the 1950s. Ronald Reagan was their champion. At first, many Christian right leaders seemed optimistic about their political prospects of success. In the 1980s many such leaders came from the Sun Belt, which was experiencing some of the highest economic and population growth rates in the country. But Gen Z Christians don’t seem to have a Reaganite confidence in the free market or a Sun Belt-influenced optimism. While the Christian right of the 1980s was largely led by Baptists, the Gen Z Christian right is much more likely to be charismatic. One study showed that approximately half of Gen Z and millennial churchgoers attended charismatic churches. (By contrast, only 24 percent of older respondents attended charismatic churches.) The nondenominational or charismatic church option is also appealing to some Black and Hispanic Gen Z Christians, who may shed their family’s traditional Democratic identity when they gravitate toward multiracial megachurches that are more politically conservative. Young male churchgoers now outpace young female churchgoers in weekly attendance, and for the first time in modern American history, they are more religious than their female peers. Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians have been particularly attracted to anti-institutional populism and to leaders who are strong and charismatic (in a nonreligious sense). President Trump has enjoyed extraordinarily high support from this group. Members of the Assemblies of God, one of America’s largest Pentecostal denominations, identify as Republicans at a higher rate than even Southern Baptists do. That’s not because they are just white conservatives; 44 percent of Assemblies of God members in the United States are Hispanic or nonwhite. They have found in Mr. Trump a perfect match for their anti-institutional populism. Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians might also be attracted to the language of spiritual warfare, which fits well with a Manichaean view of politics as a battle between good and evil. They also appear to be stronger culture warriors than other evangelicals. Charismatic evangelicals are more likely than other Evangelicals who are not charismatic to favor rolling back legal protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. Today’s young Christian right voters may be less interested in specific matters of policy than in tribal identity. When the Republican Party abandoned its 40-year commitment to a national abortion ban last year, a few conservative Christians complained, but evangelical support for Mr. Trump remained as strong as ever. Political activism is less about getting a specific policy outcome and more about electing the candidate who is believed to be on God’s side. And in determining who is on God’s side, what counts is not so much a candidate’s faith or moral virtue but rather the person’s willingness to protect those seen as God’s people — that is, conservative Christians. Ultimately, for many Gen Z conservative Christian political activists, as with earlier generations, politics is a means to create a society that will not only protect the rights of conservative Christians to follow their conscience but also allow conservative Christian values to flourish. But in today’s political context, it is that last aim that has led at least some younger conservative Christians to question liberal democracy and religious pluralism altogether and to entertain the idea of a postliberal framework that might foster family-friendly values without allowing the sort of religious or ideological pluralism that might threaten those values. Gen Z Christian-right activists may soon face the realization that they will not win if their agenda is subject to a democratic vote — which means they will face a choice between feeling that they are a persecuted minority in a democratic system and fighting to be a victorious minority in a nondemocratic one. Right now, many Gen Z Christians are signing up to be martyrs in a society they believe will reject their views on sexuality, gender and absolute truth. But for those who grow tired of such sensed persecution, winning by rejecting democracy will be a temptation. Daniel K. Williams, an associate professor of history at Ashland University, is the author of “Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade.”
  8. It's estimated that almost 70,000 sq mi of Ukraine is contaminated by land mines, so they'll be a problem for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmines_in_Ukraine
  9. That wasn't directed at you. My annoyance was focused at the AP (and the media at large) for using the term, which I see as a loaded term in this case as if the 1,700 held without charges had done something wrong. It's especially irksome, given that their reporting has generally been good and they've thoroughly covered all the shit I described.
  10. Let's set the record straight. The majority (1,700) of Palestinians held were NOT prisoners; they were hostages, subject to severe deprivations and abuse, including physical and psychological abuse/torture, sexual assault (both men and women), denial of medical care or really shitty care with amputations resulting from neglect, generally inhumane conditions with inadequate food and unsanitary, overcrowded cells, or held in isolation and incommunicado, and being denied access to their families and even the Red Cross/Red Crescent. All of this has been documented. At least they've stopped dropping bombs on them, which is nice.
  11. Monday, mehday Wordle 1,577 4/6 ⬛⬛🟩⬛🟨 ⬛🟩🟩🟩⬛ ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #855 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🙂 Daily Quordle 1358 6️⃣4️⃣ 🟥8️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜🟨 ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩 ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜ 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜ 🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 🟨🟨⬜⬜🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟩🟩⬜🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
  12. Incredible drone work showing off Tech's football facilities
  13. Man, I was really sweating that final guess. Wordle 1,576 6/6 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #854 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🙂 Daily Quordle 1357 6️⃣5️⃣ 4️⃣7️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ 🟨⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜🟩🟨⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
  14. Boo! Nothing against you nor Mormonism. I just hate seeing private religious schools win football games against secular public schools. Edit: It's mostly a pecking order thing for me when it comes to watching teams I don't follow or give a real shit about.
  15. Game over for TXST. Stopped on 4th down.
  16. Texas State doinks the FG. Going into overtime. If anyone cares to watch:
  17. Bobcats at the 22!
  18. This is wild.
  19. I get it. I'm a Tech fan (undergrad) and tend to not like a lot Tech fans.
  20. Tech 42 - KU 17
  21. This is a different Tech. They've got 342 yards rushing right now.
  22. Visceral hatred for that whiny prick. Edit: That's not an answer as to why. Just how I feel about Kirby.
  23. A couple plays ago, Tech got their first penalty for tortilla tossin'.
  24. 55-yard run by Cameron Dickey for a TD. Tech 35 - KU 17. Looks like Tech got their groove back now.
  25. Jalon Daniels (QB for.KU) is having a helluvah night. He's 20 for 23 despite seeing tons of pressure. Tech's gone pretty flat on both sides of the ball since Morton went down.
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