Remember, this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

https://archive.ph/G7OrP

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/39143701

The CBO has estimated at least 15 million people would lose health care coverage due to the bill’s cuts to Medicaid.

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

Ceremony of Launching Newly-Built Destroyer Takes Place

Pyongyang, May 22 (KCNA) -- A ceremony of launching a newly-built 5 000-tonnage destroyer took place at the Chongjin Shipyard on May 21.

Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, watched the ceremony.

A serious accident occurred in the course of the launch of the destroyer.

Due to inexperienced command and operational carelessness in the course of the launch, the launch slide of the stern departed first and stranded as the bogie failed to move in parallel, holes made at some sections of the warship's bottom disrupted its balance, and the bow failed to leave the slipway, leading to a serious accident.

After watching the whole course of the accident, the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un made stern assessment, saying that it was a serious accident and criminal act caused by sheer carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism which should never occur and could not be tolerated.

He seriously warned that the errors caused by the irresponsibility of the relevant officials of the Munitions Industry Department of the WPK Central Committee, the Mechanical Institute of the State Academy of Sciences, Kim Chaek University of Technology, the Central Ship Design Institute and other relevant units and the Chongjin Shipyard responsible for the accident that lowered the dignity and self-respect of our state in a moment would have to be dealt with at the plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee to be convened next month, and censured them for the fault.

He earnestly said that restoring the destroyer as soon as possible is not merely a practical issue but a political issue directly related to the prestige of the state and the restoration should be completed unconditionally before the June Plenary Meeting of the WPK Central Committee, so as to make the ardent patriotic loyalty and devoted labour of the workers of the Chongjin Shipyard and the Rajin Shipyard prove fruitful as proud feats conducive to bolstering up the defence capabilities.

He gave important instructions on the work of the accident investigation group. -0-
www.kcna.kp (2025.05.22.)

http://kcna.kp/en/article/q/5a28b8c39c4051d3035fe145716fcd30.kcmsf

https://archive.is/FqPH7 (kcna)

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korean-leader-kim-jong-un-condemns-warship-accident-kcna-says-2025-05-22/

South Korea's military said the stricken warship was lying sideways in the water after the failed launch.

https://archive.ph/iytKW

Two staff members at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, were killed Wednesday night near the Capital Jewish Museum, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said.

“Two Israeli Embassy staff were senselessly killed tonight near the Jewish Museum in Washington DC,” Noem said in a post on X. “We are actively investigating and working to get more information to share.”

Two people believed to be connected to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, were shot Wednesday night near the Capital Jewish Museum, according to a source familiar with the situation and a law enforcement source. Another law enforcement source told CNN that two people were killed.

DC Police said its investigating a shooting across the street from the FBI’s Washington Field Office, which is located near the museum. The Israeli embassy is working with law enforcement.

The Israeli ambassador was not involved in the incident and was not at the location when the shooting happened, an embassy spokesperson told CNN.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a post on social media that she and acting US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro have arrived to the scene of the shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum.

Ted Deutch, the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, said his organization was hosting an event at the museum on Wednesday evening.

“We are devastated that an unspeakable act of violence took place outside the venue,” he said in a statement. “At this moment, as we await more information from the police about exactly what transpired, our attention and our hearts are solely with those who were harmed and their families.”

Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon reacted to media reports of the shooting on Wednesday, saying in a statement on X, “The fatal shooting that took place outside the event that took place at the Jewish Museum in Washington, DC – in which Israeli embassy employees were also injured – is a depraved act of anti-Semitic terrorism.”

Police are advising people to avoid the area in Northwest DC.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

A RECENT study has confirmed that an H5N1 avian influenza virus isolated from a dairy farm worker in Michigan, USA can spread through the air between mammals

Putting this in news and not doomer because it seems like an important development.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64579081

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 ofremoved,” 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.

Oh gosh, I wonder how long they had this community on their site! This must be a new phenomenon that just slipped through the cracks! Let me check Archive.org...

Oh... this community has been active since 2013...

Time to hide your crimes, right, Reddit? Fucking dog shit website has a long history of hosting the most depraved and vile shit without a single peep until the media comes sniffing around.

“Violence has no place on Reddit,” the spokesperson said. “Our sitewide rules strictly prohibit any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence. In line with these rules, we are removing any instances of the suspect’s manifesto or recordings and hashing to prevent reupload. We’re also closely monitoring the communities on our platform to ensure compliance with our rules.”

The same site that popularized the usage of "Orcs" when talking about Russians, maintains a popular subreddit called r/CombatFootage with 1.8 million users.

This is happening while MPs award themselves a pay rise:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/mp-pay-rise-salary-per-cent-inflation-financial-year-b2720512.html

Irritatingly, the journalist fails to link this to increased poverty and food insecurity.