A joint submission from four bureaus - Democracy Human Rights&Labor; Population, Refugees & Migration; Global Criminal Justice & International Organization Affairs – raised "serious concern over non-compliance" w/international humanitarian law in Israel's conduct of the Gaza war. — Hümeyra Pamuk (@humeyra_pamuk) April 27, 2024 These included repeatedly striking protected sites and civilian infrastructure; "unconscionably high levels of civilian harm to military advantage"; taking little action to investigate violations or to hold to account those responsible for significant civil ..read more

  (not clear if the person who made this wants credit for it ..read more

I'm sure my worst takes were when I first started my blog. Not so much the most wrong ones - I'm still capable of being quite wrong - but the most embarrassing ones. Despite having some controversial-for-the-times opinions like "The Iraq war seems like a bad idea," I still felt influenced and constrained by conventional wisdom. I had yet to unlearn a lot of the things one learns while spending years thinking, for example, The Economist magazine has some special insight about the world. Unlearning is a lot harder than learning. The things we need to unlearn are often things we'd deny believing ..read more

Slacker Saturday ..read more

Rock on ..read more

Get happy ..read more

Ah, well, nevertheless. The Biden administration has determined that three military battalions with the Israel Defense Forces committed "gross human rights violations" against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank but will remain eligible for U.S. military aid regardless because of steps Israel says it's taking to address the problem, ABC News has learned. I see: Between the lines: Israel expressed grave concern during the talks that a State Department determination that the Netzah Yehuda battalion committed human rights violations in the West Bank that were not dealt with by the IDF would in ..read more

Regularly I see people who, back in the day, were prone to tut-tutting me (or people "like me" - this isn't personal), now being as shrill about the Republicans or a certain media outlet - the one run by several generations of failsons - as I ever was. I'm not mad. Just observing ..read more

Don't have enough precise details so I won't share the institutions, but friends have been telling me that their universities have been doing these last minute rule changes without notifications or consultaton, also. “To invoke a reference to an ad hoc committee that might have existed half a century ago and attempt to use it to justify the on-the-fly creation of a new policy today, is utterly unprincipled,” Sanders said in an email. “If a university lawyer was involved in concocting this rationalization, then no one should trust their integrity or judgment.” In an email to faculty, Whitten c ..read more

eat ..read more