Israeli snipers targeting Palestinian children?

Israel has started bombing Gaza again and there are horrifying reports that their snipers are deliberately targeting children.

On August 24, four-year-old Mira Al-Darini had just woken up to a hot summer morning in a crowded displacement camp, located between a local prison and the mediterranean sea in Khan Younis, when the sound of Israeli military tanks and gunfire erupted. Panic ensued. Mira was standing outside her family’s tent, clutching a sandwich her mother made for breakfast when a bullet struck her in the head.
…

Suddenly, Mira’s entire face was covered in blood, and we knew our daughter was shot in the head.” Witnesses said Mira was fired at by an Israeli military drone armed with a gun.
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This is what a police state looks like

You are walking along a public street in daylight when suddenly you are surrounded by people dressed in black with masks on their faces who then handcuff you and take you away in unmarked vehicles to an unknown destination and not allowed to contact anyone. This is what happens routinely in authoritarian countries where the rule of law has broken down and death squads operate with impunity.

But this happened on Tuesday on the streets of a Boston suburb to a Fulbright graduate student from Turkey attending Tufts University.

Dramatic footage had emerged on Wednesday evening of the moment US immigration officials, wearing masks and hoodies, detained the Tufts University doctoral student in Massachusetts in the street, handcuffed her and bustled her into an unmarked car.

Ozturk was detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents, and on Wednesday was being held at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Ice detainee locator page.

The video, taken from a security camera on a building, shows Ozturk walking along the street when she is approached by several masked figures, who forcibly take her phone and backpack and place her in handcuffs. The officials, some with badges around their neck, all have their faces covered.

After she screams, an unseen onlooker can be heard responding.

“Is this a kidnapping?” asks the bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest, footage that later circulated on social media.

In separate security-camera footage, the agents can be heard responding: “We’re the police.”

The bystander replies: “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”

Here is video of the event.

What the newly released JFK files reveal

Trump has ordered the release of a whole trove, over 80,000 pages, of formerly classified CIA and FBI documents purportedly dealing with the assassination of president Kennedy in 1963. The killing has been the source of endless conspiracy theories about who was responsible, throwing doubt on the official Warren Commission finding that it was the work of Lee Harvey Oswald working alone.

David Price has done a quick sampling of the documents and estimates that less than 20% of them deal with the actual events leading up to that day and those who are expecting bombshell revelations are going to be disappointed. However, he says that there is a lot on interesting information that is revealed about how the CIA (and FBI) operates because Trump has released information that is usually redacted.
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TV review of Adolescence (2025) and incels and the manosphere

I just watched the four-part TV series Adolescence that has created quite a media splash. The show tells the story of a 13-year old boy Jamie who would come home from school and then spend all his time online on the computer in his room. The parents did not worry too much about this, seeing it as somewhat normal behavior, until he is charged with the knifing death of a classmate Katie. They are incredulous that he could have done this but, as the show unfolds, they discover that his world of peers in school and online has taken him down some dark roads. The parents, ordinary people who live ordinary lives and try to do their best to bring up their children well, wonder where and how they went wrong and how they could have missed all the signs that their son was being influenced by others who were feeding them ideas that led to dangerous feelings of inadequacy and grievance.

The show makes a point of noting how adults are oblivious to what is going on in the world of adolescents and even when they know, misread the signals. This is shown in a scene where the detective’s son tells the father that he is blundering ineffectively because he does not understand the nuances of emojis, and that those emojis that he thought showed a liking by Katie for Jamie were actually sarcastic.

It is Mascombe’s own son, Adam, (Amari Jayden Bacchus), a recalcitrant kid, Fredo’s favorite target, who gets his father to understand his own ignorance. “It’s not going well because you’re not getting it,” Adam explains. “You’re not reading what they’re doing, what’s happening.” He shows his father a comment that Katie posted on Jamie’s Instagram. “Looks like she’s being nice?” Actually, the boy explains, the emojis she uses are coded ways of denigrating Jamie, of calling him an incel. “Adolescence” lives in the paranoid world that Andrew Tate made.

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You have no rights when trying to enter the US

My post about how badly visitors to the US are treated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the US, with them being sent to detention centers and kept in prison-like conditions without access to lawyers and other contacts, may have prompted questions in readers minds about exactly what rights they have when trying to enter the US. The answer is: not much. This article describes what can happen. There are a whole array of scenarios that can unfold depending on the type of visa you have and the mood of the ICE agents processing you.

The reason that you have almost no rights is because being on the ground in the US but before you are allowed by ICE to pass through immigration means that you are in a kind of no-man’s-land where the laws do not apply.

“If you’re a foreign national, first understand you haven’t affected an entry despite being physically on US soil until you’re admitted properly,” said immigration attorney Michael Wildes, managing partner of Wildes and Weinberg and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.

“It’s a term of art when you’re admitted fully to the United States,” he said. When a person lands on US soil but is not technically admitted, “you might be considered to be what’s called an ‘arriving alien’.

“You have greater rights as a criminal than as a foreign national coming with a visa.”

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Exposé of Facebook

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, has written a best-seller Careless People that describes her former employer as having a culture that is pretty much what you would expect from one run by tech bros.

The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.

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Trump gang’s message to other countries: We don’t want your people here

Jasmine Mooney is a Canadian who got caught in the nightmare that is run by ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) and held for nearly two weeks in appalling conditions because of a slight suspected irregularity in her visa documentation. Even though she offered to buy a ticket to return to Canada, they moved her around to various harsh detention detentions before finally releasing her. She has now written about her experience.

Many people from other parts of the world are treated like dirt by ICE agents. Why I have chosen to highlight her particular story is for three reasons. One is that if a young, white, fairly affluent, Canadian woman could be treated like this, one can only shudder at what poor people of color from other countries experience. The second is that she can write in the first person in English and that makes her story more compelling and accessible to English speakers than others. The third is that while she was shuttled around the various detention centers, she spoke with other women she was herded with and wrote about their stories. What emerges is that many of them were seized and imprisoned for minor visa irregularities but treated as if they were dangerous criminals.
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People are really mad at Musk

Since they cannot get to him since he lives in the cocoon that all rich people can put around themselves, they are going after Teslas.

The Las Vegas police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are investigating a blaze set at Tesla showroom as potential terrorism. The FBI is probing at least three other incidents of Molotov cocktails hurled at Tesla facilities since January, including one in Kansas City, Missouri, that took place on the same night as the alleged arson in Nevada.

In Las Vegas, in the middle of the night on Tuesday, a cluster of Tesla vehicles were set on fire as they sat in a lot at a Tesla collision center, according to the Las Vegas metropolitan police department. Security cameras caught a person dressed in all black tossing what appeared to be Molotov cocktails into the vehicles at approximately 2.45am.
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On bullshitters

What do the following people have in common: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, George Santos, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Dr. Oz, Yuval Noah Harari, Barack Obama, Sam Harris, Elizabeth Holmes, Steven Pinker, and Jordan Peterson? According to Nathan J. Robinson writing in Current Affairs, they are all bullshitters.

So what constitutes a bullshitter?

The clearest philosophical exposition of a Theory of Bullshit was put forth by Harry Frankfurt in his short classic On Bullshit. Frankfurt argued that bullshit was different than lying, and in some ways worse. A liar knows what they are saying is false. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether it is true or false. The liar has not abandoned all understanding of truth, but they are deliberately trying to manipulate people into thinking things are otherwise than they actually are, whereas the bullshitter has simply stopped checking whether the statements they are making have any resemblance to reality:
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