Europe Pub

For more context read: https://www.ft.com/content/6a039600-d4f3-4aaa-ae0f-e4ca72cf2268

Imagine my surprise reading this on the LA Times this morning (emphasis mine):

“I would not acknowledge reproduction as a human right, but instead as a form of rape,” IndictEvolution wrote on Lemmy.World in July 2023. “I am also not bothered by infanticide as long as it is done humanely...”

Here is an archive of the article.

Here is his account.

It looks like he only stayed on Lemmy for about a month, most likely a temporary Reddit exile with the earliest exodus on June 2023. The article mentions threads on Reddit but doesn't provide any quotes from there. User IndictEvolution on Reddit deleted their account, and the article makes it sound like they are referring to a different username that they don't specify.

I’ve obtained an alleged copy of the manifesto written by Elias Rodriguez, suspect in the killing of two staffers at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on Wednesday.

I believe the document to be authentic for several reasons, including the fact that it is signed by Rodriguez and timestamped well before he was named by law enforcement or any media. I am publishing it here not to glorify the violence — which is abhorrent and I condemn — but so the public can better understand the truth of what happened.

Below is the document in full.

Explication

May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here's an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those "ten thousand" under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in "Protective Edge" and "Cast Lead" put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians' forgiveness. They've let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they'll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they're doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can't let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who'd been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha's Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry's lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara's "very posture, telling you, 'My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you'll have to lump it.'" The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying "Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn't so fine, was it?"

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez

https://archive.ph/G7OrP

https://archive.ph/G7OrP

RCV trends: Four states ban RCV in 2025, bringing the number of states with bans to 15.

(Okay idk why it says 15 up here then later says 16, somebody on that site probably didn't update the title text)

As of April 30, five states had banned RCV in 2025, which brought the total number of states that prohibit RCV to 16.

• Gov. Mark Gordon (Republican) signed HB 165 on March 18.
• West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (Republican) signed SB 490 the March 19.
• Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (Democrat) signed SB 6 into law on April 1.
• North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong (Republican) signed HB 1297 on April 15.
• Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Republican) signed HB 1706 which became law on April 17.

Six states banned RCV in 2024.

Why YSK: If you're a US-American, its time to pay attention to State and Local politics instead of solely on the Federal. There is a trend in conservative jurisdictions to stop progress in making elecoral systems more fair. Use this opportunity as a rallying-cry to pass Ranked-Choice Voting in progressive jurisdictions, and hopefully everyone else takes notes. Sometimes, all you need is a few states adopting a law to become the catalyst for it to become the model for the entire country, for better or for worse. Don't allow anti-RCV legislations to dominate, counter the propaganda with pro-RCV arguments. Time to turn the tide.

Edit: fixed formatting

Edit 2: Added in the map so you don't have to click the link:

See the pattern? 🤔

The ship slid off the ramp and became stuck after the flatcar failed to move alongside it, throwing off its balance and crushing parts of the ship’s bottom, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

The accident at Wednesday’s ceremony at the northeastern port of Chongjin was an embarrassing setback for Kim, who has emphasized naval advancement as key to his nuclear-armed military.

The damaged vessel was likely in the same class as the country’s first destroyer, unveiled on April 25, which experts assessed as the North’s largest and most advanced warship to date. Kim called it a significant asset for advancing his goal of expanding the military’s operational range and nuclear strike capabilities.

An Employment and Social Affairs Committee delegation is travelling to Germany’s Ruhr area to visit chemical and steel plants and educational facilities.Committee on Employment and Social Affairs Source : © European Union, 2025 - EP

Bruce Springsteen fleht auf Konzerten eindringlich gegen Trump an und veröffentlicht seine Rede kurz später sogar auf einem Album. Ist das der Urknall für den großen, öffentlichen Kulturaufstand?

Altkanzler Gerhard Schröder sollte vor Abgeordneten in Schwerin aussagen, doch er kam nicht – wegen eines Burn-outs. Jetzt versucht er es schriftlich. Jede Verantwortung lehnt er ab.

Onigiri (お握り or 御握り), also known as omusubi (お結び) or nigirimeshi (握り飯), is a Japanese rice ball made from white rice. It is usually formed into triangular or cylindrical shapes, and wrapped in nori (seaweed). Onigiri traditionally have sour or salty fillings such as umeboshi (pickled Chinese plum), salted salmon, katsuobushi (smoked and fermented bonito), kombu, tarako or mentaiko (pollock roe), or takanazuke (pickled Japanese giant red mustard greens). Because it is easily portable and eaten by hand, onigiri has been used as portable food or bento from ancient times to the present day. Originally, it was used as a way to use and store left-over rice, but it later became a regular meal. Many Japanese convenience stores and supermarkets stock onigiri with various fillings and flavors. It has become so mainstream that it is even served in izakayas and sit-down restaurants. There are even specialized shops which only sell onigiri to take out. Due to the popularity of this trend in Japan, onigiri has become a popular staple in Japanese restaurants worldwide.

Onigiri is not a form of sushi and should not be confused with the type of sushi called nigirizushi or simply nigiri. Onigiri is made with plain rice (sometimes lightly salted), while sushi is made of rice with vinegar, sugar and salt. Onigiri makes rice portable and easy to eat as well as preserving it, while sushi originated as a way of preserving fish.

History

Prehistoric

On November 12, 1987, lumps of carbonized grains of rice, thought to be riceballs, were excavated from a building belonging to the Yayoi period (2000 years ago) in the Sugitani Chanobatake Ruins in Ishikawa Prefecture. The carbonized rice had traces which revealed that it was formed by human hands, thus it was initially documented as "the oldest onigiri." In subsequent research, it was thought to be steamed and grilled, rather than boiled like today's rice, similar to another dish called chimaki. Since then, it has been academically called the "chimaki-shaped carbonized rice lumps (チマキ状炭化米塊)".

Pre-Modern

Before the use of chopsticks became widespread, in the Nara period, rice was often rolled into a small ball so that it could be easily picked up. In the Heian period, rice was made into small rectangular shapes known as tonjiki so that they could be piled onto a plate and easily eaten. At that time, onigiri were called tonjiki and often consumed at outdoor picnic lunches

Modern

In the 1980s, a machine to make triangular onigiri was invented. Rather than rolling the filling inside, the flavoring was put into a hole in the onigiri and the hole was hidden by nori. Since the onigiri made by this machine came with nori already applied to the rice ball, over time the nori became moist and sticky, clinging to the rice.

A packaging improvement allowed the nori to be stored separately from the rice. Before eating, the diner could open the packet of nori and wrap the onigiri. The use of a hole for filling the onigiri made new flavors of onigiri easier to produce as this cooking process did not require changes from ingredient to ingredient. Modern mechanically wrapped onigiri are specially folded so that the plastic wrapping is between the nori and rice to act as a moisture barrier. When the packaging is pulled open at both ends, the nori and rice come into contact and are eaten together. This packaging is commonly found for both triangular onigiri and rolls (細巻き).

Rice and shapes

Usually, onigiri is made with boiled white rice, though it is sometimes made with different varieties of cooked rice, such as:

-Okowa or kowa-meshi: glutinous rice cooked or steamed with vegetables

-Sekihan: rice cooked with red azuki beans

-Maze-gohan: rice cooked with various preferred ingredients

-Fried rice

-Brown rice

The rice may be seasoned with salt, sesame, furikake, dried shiso flakes, and so on.

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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
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Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
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I ordered a data-logger for a work-related project, Which comes with windows software and need admin priviledge (that I don't have due to corporate IT policies). So I lost 2h going to the IT department trying to get someone with admin right installing this driver :(

What's the reason hardware come mostly with Windows driver (rather than Linux) and why do these software/driver need admin privilege for installation where their customer base are professional who often don't have the right privilege on their PC ? Is there something technically forcing the privilege elevation to install a driver ?