Original article: https://www.reuters.com/world/biden-whats-happening-gaza-is-not-genocide-2024-05-20/

It's pretty clear to me Biden's trying to thread the needle on this in a gruesome way. The argument seems to follow the form of: civilian deaths are collateral damage, this is unfortunate but this is war and they are not purposely being targeted and so this is not genocide.

However that almost willfully ignores the denial and blocking of aid to the same affected civilians, which is a deliberate action that despite the cover story being to prevent it reaching Hamas, falls entirely flat as regardless, it results in direct suffering and death of the civilians. I say almost because some small efforts have been made to push back against the denial of aid, but as is evident to anyone monitoring the situation, these efforts are all far too small to address the widespread suffering and death of the Gazan people.

This whole semantics game around genocide is simply disgusting. You know those in government know exactly what people mean when they're calling it that, they want an end to the killing and an end to the deaths of civilians, whether from military strikes or denial of aid.

Pulling the background link here to save people some clicks: https://buttondown.email/ninelives/archive/the-coming-enshittification-of-public-libraries/

With a few quotes to highlight the frustrating situation:

That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.^1^ Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.^2^)

Emphasis added.

Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR. [...] The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong. [...] Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

[...]

And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.

Emphasis added.

[...] the group’s agenda and politics were inconsistent with Georgia’s conservative values.

In other words, supporting open access to a broad range of varied information is against their conservative values. Not that that's news to anyone following conservative behaviors, but it must be emphasized for those that don't.

Alongside that, undercutting a source of funds may not be banning books, but it absolutely reduces the operational capacities of libraries that were benefiting from them, in effect removing a range of books the libraries might otherwise provide.

For those out of the loop, 0.19 brings nice features to Lemmy World like:

• Unbroken ampersands (&) in titles.
• Improved 2-factor authentication, which will disable it for those using it, so you'll want to reenable it after the upgrade. I think in turn this may sign people out, so be sure you still have your login info around, and if things are acting kinda odd, maybe clear your cache.
• Scaled sorting to help surface less active communities.
• Instance blocking via user settings, so if there's an instance you don't enjoy seeing communities from, you can block them. This does not block all users from said instance.
• Import/export account settings, which includes your bio & various settings like show/hide bot accounts/NSFW content, default sort settings, etc., subbed communities, saved posts/comments, and blocked users/communities/instances.

"lemmy?"
"lemmy show u more memes"

This service going down and me recently deciding to try to check in on whether some people I used to follow on Twitter had migrated elsewhere made me realize how much Twitter's basically isolated itself from the open web.

A part of me hopes this serves as a wake-up call for those that were still hovering between using Twitter and weaning off it using services like this, to reach out to those they follow and let them know, "Hey, if you think you're still posting publicly...You're not, only other people here can see this." For many people that may not matter, but for creators/influencers? I dunno, maybe network effect is enough that they feel the large audience there is plenty, but I'd think they might want as broad of a reach as possible, and a popular but limited view platform isn't necessarily that.

Much more importantly though are any government/critical services. They really need to be brought up to date, if they haven't been already, that the platform is no longer as publicly accessible as it may have once been. Also the same applies not just for Twitter but Facebook and the like as well, but that's another topic.

It's genuinely such a relief to get your ear cleaned out when it gets all plugged up, undoubtedly more so when it's hurting. I once had something similar happen somehow, just without as much of the pain. It started getting harder to hear out of one of my ears, and although I tried to rinse it out, it didn't seem to help and I didn't want to fucking pierce my ear drum trying something stupid. I held off but it got to the point that not only was I having trouble hearing out of the ear, my balance was being impacted.

I had started to notice I felt kinda wobbly, and so I was finally like fuck it, doctor time. Go to doctor, nice lady does like the doc in the OP poking a camera in, then has some other guy come in and he's like, "You'll wanna tilt your head to the side for this," as he holds a small bucket to the side, below my head. Gets basically a spraybottle with some special ear-nozzle or whatever, squirts a warm stream of some solution (think it was carbamide peroxide) into my ear and dislodges this big ol' glob of earwax that had inexplicably managed to build up in my ear despite me not wearing earbuds/headphones often.

I glanced at that poor little bucket now full of this nasty ass archipelago of earwax and felt fuckin' great. Cost me a bit, but the doc saved me for the future telling me about some off the shelf stuff to help avoid a return visit.

If you've never had this done before but have been congested, and briefly cleared your nostrils with a good blowing of your nose or something, it's like that but so much better because your ears getting plugged up sucks so much more.

This headline and article are begging to be in c/NotTheOnion, yeah.

Screams:
My Christian nationalist flag has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my flag.

Thanks for added background! I haven't been monitoring this area very closely so wasn't aware, but I'd have thought a publication that has been would then be more skeptical and at least mention some of this, particularly highlighting disputes over the efficacy of the Glaze software. Not to mention the others they talked to for the article.

Figures that in a space rife with grifters you'd have ones for each side.

Get a mirror that doubles as a sort of magnifier to view the area around your nose closely & carefully. You're looking for seams around the nose with which to gain leverage to gently pry off the nose to get better access to the nostrils within & beneath. Once the nose has been popped off your face, you can rinse both it and the exposed nostrils out with some warm water, which should get rid of the dry, compacted mucus.

You may want to take a soft, thin brush while you're at this for a more thorough clean. Once both the removed nose and exposed nostrils are cleared to your satisfaction, realign your nose with the seams you found at the start and gently squeeze & press your nose to reconnect it with your face. A light splash of warm water and scrub should help reseal the nose to your face and make the seams less noticeable.

Hope this helps!

And in this case, it's about controlling everyone else's children, despite what they claim, by trying to force schools' curriculums to only cover/include what they accept.

Piracy isn't piracy when it's no longer sold.