Category: Uncategorized

War Crimes in the News

DETROW: That’s what the press secretary says. The Pentagon has repeatedly said, the United States does not deliberately target civilians, and yet the president is talking about attacking a desalination plant. Would that be a war crime?

RONA: Absolutely, Scott, both under international law and U.S. law. We have a War Crimes Act that prohibits precisely this kind of thing. It would also be a violation of laws against terrorism. It’s prohibited to engage in attacks in armed conflict where the primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population. If you’re targeting a desalination plant, then that would be an act of terrorism.

DETROW: Help us understand a little bit more just ’cause I think you cannot overexplain this enough, right? Like, here’s an example. In the early days of the war, it seems like the United States accidentally bombed a girls school. What is the difference between something like that and deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure like a desalination plant?

RONA: So the difference is that even though one might have been mistaken and the other intentional, under U.S. law, both intentional and mistaken attacks that aren’t pursuant to due diligence can be war crimes.

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/01/nx-s1-5766235/who-is-held-accountable-if-a-war-crime-is-committed-in-iran

Palestinian Rights, Free Speech, and AI

The dystopian future is here. Yale University has suspended a scholar in its law school after a Jewish news website that uses AI to produce articles called her a member of a terrorist group. It comes as the Trump administration has launched a relentless campaign to silence any speech sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

Already, ICE has arrested an activist at Columbia University who helped lead Palestinian protests. It was also recently reported that the State Department will use AI to scan social media and deport international students who express pro-Palestinian views. The Trump administration has pulled federal funding from universities that continue to allow protests that are supportive of Palestine, which it claims are antisemitic. Conservatives care a lot about protecting free speech on social media platforms, except when it is speech they disagree with.

Helyeh Doutaghi, the scholar at Yale Law School, told the New York Times that she is a “loud and proud” supporter of Palestinian rights. “I am not a member of any organization that would constitute a violation of U.S. law.” The article that led to her suspension was published in Jewish Onliner, a Substack that says it is “empowered by A.I. capabilities.”

Yale Suspends Palestine Activist After AI Article Linked Her to Terrorism

Bad Habit of Overthinking

But looking at it from another angle, if we’re able to control our mind, maybe we’ll be able to stop the continuous thinking that goes on in our head, dictating how we behave. The problem here is that the mind has a habit of looking for stronger stimulation and can get out of control if we let it. Because negative thoughts have a much stronger impact on our brain than a mild, gentle sense of happiness, it’s hard to prevent that from happening.

The Practice of Not Thinking: A Guide to Mindful Living
Ryunosuke Koike

User Names – Programming Snags with

tonyHawkandthetaleofFeaturenotabug
byu/GoldenBaby2 inProgrammerHumor

Classy_Mouse
I know some people that only have a given name. No family name. So when they came over to Canada, they had a lot of issues with official forms. Some of them split their name into 2 names, some just repeated their given name twice

Toloran
True story, I went to middle school with a kid whose entire name was ‘Rainbow’. I initially assumed his parents were hippies or something, but it turned out they were hippies and indecisive: They both had different last names, but couldn’t decide which to give him. So they just didn’t give him one.

EODdoUbleU
My first name is a single letter. The amount of shit I can’t do without creating some bastardization to fulfill the mUSt cONTaIn a miNImUM Of tWO ChAraCTeRS bullshit is annoying as fuck.

Airport kiosks are absolutely the fucking worst because their system won’t let me put my legal name in, but I have to use my legal name to pass security.

FormerGameDev
aye, like Metallica’s longest lasting bass player, Roberto Agustín Miguel Santiago Samuel Trujillo Veracruz

thrye333
I like the point near the end about names being consistent across systems, because when I was getting ready to go apply to colleges, I found out that most of them had my last name misspelled. I have a common English first name as my last name. I have never seen it spelled how 75% of those colleges spelled it.

I have no idea how they got that spelling. I don’t even know how they had my info. But that’s college mailing lists, I guess.

Dalimyr
I used to work in a hospital, sharing an office with another team who told a story about how people testing in their system (in prod, because you’re lucky to have a proper test environment in the public sector) would use Simpsons characters for their tests. People who knew this got accustomed to filtering out “Bart Simpson”, “Lisa Simpson” and all that…until one day this instinctive behaviour impacted a patient (I can’t remember what happened – if it was an appointment being deleted or something like that) because their name was Margaret Simpson and someone had erroneously thought this was just test data.

I don’t think this incident actually stopped the person from continuing to create Simpsons test data, but yeah, that shit happens from time to time.

AaronTheElite007
I wonder if someone has the last name ‘null’?

IMightBeErnest
I heard a story about a guy who made his license plate “null” and ended up getting assigned all of the tickets where a license number wasn’t known (or bugged, or something). Point is, he got like a bajillion fines he had to contest.

Peak Human Experience, Database of – ChillsDb

https://www.chillsdb.com/

Abstract
We introduce ChillsDB the first validated database of audiovisual stimuli eliciting aesthetic chills (goosebumps, psychogenic shivers) in a US population. To discover chills stimuli “in the wild”, we devised a bottom-up, ecologically-valid method consisting in searching for mentions of the emotion’ somatic markers in user comments throughout social media platforms (YouTube and Reddit). We successfully captured 204 chills-eliciting videos of three categories: music, film, and speech. We then tested the top 50 videos in the database on 600+ participants and validated a gold standard of 10 stimuli with a 0.9 probability of generating chills. All ChillsDB tools and data are fully available on GitHub for researchers to be able to contribute and perform further analysis.

Background & Summary
Aesthetic chills are a universal marker of human peak experiences across the arts, sciences and world religions. Best characterized as the feeling of cold down the spine or goosebumps while engaging with music or film, chills are the sensation associated to shivers: short thermogenic tremors of skeletal muscles. Though ordinarily involved in the regulation of temperature (or as an immune response during fever), chills can also be triggered by information-related processes (e.g., music, stories, speeches), independently of changes in temperature (i.e., psychogenic shivers, thereafter “chills”).

Nature

Saving Lives Through Astral Projection and Time Travel

We headed to a taco place around the corner. Damien walked quickly, something slightly edgy in his energy. Lorri was such an easy person to be with that Damien’s intensity startled me at first. At dinner he explained that his life since his release has largely been devoted to magick. As a kid in Arkansas, he’d daydreamed of becoming a great magician, and being in prison had given him plenty of time to study. His practice derives from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the nineteenth-century mystery cult that counted W. B. Yeats and Bram Stoker as members. Every day, Damien spends several hours performing protective rituals, doing energy work, and invoking the names of angels. He told me that the most adept magicians can transcend time, space, and the rules of physics—not in a metaphorical way, or a karmic-progression-toward-enlightenment-over-many-lifetimes way, but literally: they can travel back to the eleventh century, find a pilgrim dying of thirst in the desert, and become an oasis for him.

All this lofty energy worried me; I could imagine being swamped by it, feeling as though there was no space for me and my small human concerns. Damien knew he wasn’t a simple person to live with. The adaptive strategies he’d developed in prison—his incredible capacity to re-create the universe in his head; his complete immersion in the present moment—made it challenging to negotiate the outside world. He couldn’t remember what he’d done even just the day before—where he’d eaten, what he and Lorri had talked about. More and more, his mind was elsewhere, operating on some other plane.

Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
Rachel Monroe

Lake McDonald’s and Lake Chipotle (RIP)

The parking lot by my house has been flooded long enough for Google Maps to recognize it as the natural wonder that it is
byu/kingbob123456 ingeography

1570 University Ave W

FatGuyOnAMoped
There used to be a Lake Chipotle across the river in Minneapolis. It had its own website and everything. Unfortunately I believe they filled it in a while back

https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-lifestyle/introducing-minnesota-lake-no-11843-lake-chipotle

DavidRFZ
Oh no! Lake Chipotle is gone? That was legendary. Today was the first time I had heard about Lake McDonalds.

Good Rule in General, Not Good Idea in Specific Case – Example of

Kraut juice: When Circus Peanuts aren’t enough
Dear Cecil:

At the risk of dragging out an already idiotic discussion (Circus Peanuts suck, period), I just wanted to provide reader Rob Atkinson with some interesting information. A few years back, I worked in a grocery store as a night stocker. A fellow night stocker, we’ll call him “Wayne,” started a stupid morning ritual of trying some bizarre new product at the end of each shift. One morning, his choice was a fine can of kraut juice. We weren’t sure if you were supposed to drink it by itself or what, but the packaging showed a mouthwatering WINE glass full of the green sludge.

Anyway, Wayne popped the cap open and took a big swig. He then began gagging and spitting out as much as he could. His first words after tasting the kraut juice were, “How can this be a marketable product!?!”

After calming down and quelling the desperate attempts of his stomach to return to sender, Wayne sat down, looked at the can, and then chugged the rest of it. After he nearly vomited once again we asked him why he did it. With a face nearly as green as the juice, he replied, “Well, I didn’t want to waste it.”

https://www.straightdope.com/21342305/does-anybody-actually-like-circus-peanuts

Rikers – Quotes from Oral History

TAMI LEE, retired correction officer, 1989 to 2020: I never smiled for thirty years. I never smiled at that job one time. Sometimes I’d have to think about it—like, “Smile.” I didn’t want to smile so they could think I was playing with them because I was not playing with them.

CASIMIRO TORRES, detained various stints, 1980s to 2000s: I had a girl one time, I used to go to this twenty-four-hour store after I came out of prison, late at night, and after a few times she started calling me Smiley. I said, “Why do you call me that?” And she said, “Because you’ve never smiled.” And it had never occurred to me that I hadn’t smiled in years and years. I had my prison face on wherever I went. It’s something that clings to you, like the smell of shit. You have to really wash it off.

ANNA GRISTINA, detained 2012: I was in the bullpen, waiting at the processing area. There was a woman. These girls were going, “She needs to get to the doctor. She’s shaking on the floor.” A couple minutes later, everyone is screaming. The guards, they are having their lunch. This sergeant with braids, she says, “Shut the fuck up! Mind your own business!”

We were looking and we saw this woman from across the pen, froth coming out of her mouth. She’s having a seizure. She’s vomiting foam. The guard says, “Mind your business. You’re in enough trouble. Keep your mouth shut.” We came back from a lawyer visit, and they had taken her out on a gurney, dead. The guards had denied her medical, and she died. I don’t know her name or her age.

She [the woman who died] had covers over her body when they took her out. She had been screaming for hours for help. She had been half the day in the holding pen with no water, no nothing, having seizures. I’ll never forget the feeling of telling my lawyers a woman died in there and they shrugged their shoulders.

JERRY DEAN, detained 1987, 2003: The last day I was leaving Rikers when I was sixteen, I sat in the corner, they drive me upstate [to the Goshen Secure Center], and I remember somebody said, when you leave Rikers, don’t ever look back, don’t look back in the car or the bus, or else you’ll come back. So I didn’t want to look back.

Rikers: An Oral History
Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau

The Burden of Someone Else’s Dream

When we lived in England my days had a familiar rhythm. Each morning, my mother flung open the curtains in my room, and I tugged my school jumper over my head and pulled on my skirt before tumbling downstairs to eat cereal with my younger brother Jon. After school, we’d play on the swing in our garden, or crouch at the far end of the stream to watch dragonflies hovering above the gold-green surface.

I was used to this rhythm; I liked it and thought it would never change. Until one morning over breakfast, my father announced that we were going to sail around the world.

I paused, a spoonful of cornflakes halfway to my mouth.

“We’re going to follow Captain Cook,” Dad said. “After all, we share the captain’s surname, so who better to do it?” He picked up his cigarette and leaned back in his seat.

“Are you joking?” I asked.

Next to me, Jon watched Dad, his lips parted.

“Not at all,” said my father, puffing out a cloud of smoke. “I’m deadly serious.”

“But why?”

“Well, someone needs to mark the 200th anniversary of Cook’s third voyage, don’t they?” he said, raising his eyebrows at my mother.

“Of course they do, Gordon,” said Mum, returning his smile.

‘Dad said: We’re going to follow Captain Cook’: how an endless round-the-world voyage stole my childhood
In 1976, Suzanne Heywood’s father decided to take the family on a three-year sailing ‘adventure’ – and then just kept going. It was a journey into fear, isolation and danger …

This is an excerpt from the book:
Wavewalker: Breaking Free
by Suzanne Heywood

Simple and Basic Honey Whole Wheat Bread

INGREDIENTS:
1 1/4 cups lukewarm water
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/4 cup honey
3 1/2 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast

DIRECTIONS:
Knead the dough until it’s smooth and just slightly tacky, about 8 to 10 minutes. Place the dough in a greased bowl, cover, and let it rise until doubled in volume, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Deflate the dough and shape it to fit a greased 8 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ loaf pan. Let it rise, covered, until doubled, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Bake the bread in a preheated 375°F oven for 35 minutes.

via King Arthur Flour