Sometimes you just draw a little blobby creature and give them some friends who are also blobby creatures

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/42956

Religion News Service (4/9/26): “The synagogue was leveled in a strike overnight Monday (April 6) before the ceasefire was declared, one of scores of religious and cultural heritage sites destroyed or significantly damaged by the war led by Israeli and US forces.”

An Israeli missile attack destroyed a Tehran synagogue during the Jewish Passover holiday (Religion News Service, 4/9/26). The Israeli military “expressed regret over what it called ‘collateral damage’ to a synagogue in Tehran caused by an overnight strike,” which was “targeting a senior Iranian commander,” said the Middle East Eye (4/7/26).

Photos of the wreckage at the Rafi-Nia Synagogue have accompanied many of these pieces. The Council on American-Islamic relations condemned the attack in a statement (4/7/26):

We strongly condemn the Israeli regime’s bombing of a synagogue in Tehran, which was the predictable end result of the indiscriminate US/Israel bombing campaign against mosques, hospitals, schools, apartments and other civilian sites across Iran.

The group challenged “various Israel advocacy groups and politicians that support this war in the name of protecting Israel to condemn Israel’s synagogue attack.”

Buried at best

The Wall Street Journal headline (4/7/26) refers to the “damage” Israel did to a Tehran synagogue—similar to the “damage” done to the World Trade Center by Al Qaeda.

The story of the attack on the Tehran synagogue was, at best, buried in the US corporate media. CNN posted a brief video (4/7/26) about the bombing but had no online article about it. The New York Times (4/7/26, 4/7/26) mentioned the attack, but as background in broader stories about the US/Israel war on Iran.

A search for “Rafi-Nia” on the Washington Post website yields no results. Ditto for the AP, although the news service did post a video to YouTube (4/7/26). Al Jazeera’s coverage (4/7/26) of the attack was a mélange of AP and AFP copy. CBS News (4/7/26) also used a few paragraphs of AFP copy to report on the attack, although it was buried in the middle of a general timeline about the war.

The Wall Street Journal (4/7/26) had the story, but led with Israel’s contrition over the destruction; that’s not a journalistic construction we see in US news coverage when it comes to the Israeli bombings of other civilian structures in Iran, Gaza or Lebanon. When Israel destroys a hospital, apartment building, encampment, etc., the stories don’t lead with official regret, but rather include Israeli claims that the civilian facilities were actually legitimate military targets. The Journal’s lead provided the government with public relations cover over the sensitive issue of destroying a Jewish house of worship.

Newsweek (4/8/26), once a bigger player in the US media landscape, led with condemnation of the attack from Jewish Iranian leaders, who declared “their unwavering solidarity with Iran in defending the homeland.”

Jewish presence in Iran

Palestine Chronicle (3/6/26): “The Iranian Jewish community sees itself as part of the broader Iranian society rather than as an extension of Israel.”

Underplaying the story obscures not only the wantonness of Israel’s aggression, but the actual nature of Iranian society, which is portrayed as obsessed with wiping Jews off the map (ADL, 6/25/25). “Iranian foreign policy freely mixes anti-Israel furies with anti-Jewish ones,” wrote New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/13/26), a pro-war cheerleader (2/22/26, 3/24/26).

In fact, while Israel is obviously the center of Mideastern Jewish life, the Iranian Jewish population dwarfs those elsewhere in the Middle East. “Estimates range from 9,000 to 20,000 Jews currently living in Iran,” according to the Forward (6/18/25).

Wrote the Palestine Chronicle (3/6/26): “The Jewish presence in Iran is among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, with roots that historians trace back more than two millennia.”

Yes, Iran is a theocracy; the government is no model for an open society. But there is a Jewish member of Iran’s parliament, who even went on record this year openly criticizing Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s handling of popular unrest (i24, 1/29/26).

‘Well-protected second-class citizens’

Reporting on Judaic studies in the holy city of Qom, the Forward‘s Larry Cohler-Esses (8/27/15) writes of “the absolute distinction between Judaism and Zionism that the [Iranian] government makes.”

US media have covered the Jews of Iran before. USA Today (8/29/18) did a story in 2018, reporting from Tehran. Former Forward reporter Larry Cohler-Esses (8/12/15, 8/12/15, 8/18/15, 8/27/15) reported extensively and critically on Iranian Jews, indicating that the country was at least open to letting a reporter for a Jewish publication do their job.

Cohler-Esses told FAIR that Jews in Iran are “well-protected second-class citizens.” In fact, when he read about the attack, he “wondered if it was the synagogue I spent Shabbat in, but it wasn’t,” because there are more than a dozen active synagogues in Tehran—a reflection of the size of the Jewish community there.

Recalling his 2015 reporting trip, Cohler-Esses said that on Shabbat, Jews would spill out of their synagogues and mingle in the street after services, a sight he didn’t often see in many places in Europe. In one instance, after he left a synagogue service, one of the congregants ran after him through a street teeming with people, wearing a kippah and a tallit (traditional religious attire), and “no one batted an eye.”

The Jews of Iran do suffer discrimination, because Muslims are favored in the legal code over all non-Muslims, Cohler-Esses said. He noted that the Jewish population of Iran has shrunk significantly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“Iranian Jews are viewed by Iranians as indigenous,” he said. “They’re the original Bundists,” a nod to the Jewish political movement that “stood not just for socialism, but for do’ikayt—Yiddish for ‘hereness,’” the concept that a Jew’s homeland was in whatever nation they resided in (New York Times, 4/6/26).

Cohler-Esses was hopeful that coverage of the synagogue’s destruction in Israeli press (JTA, 4/7/26; Jerusalem Post, 4/7/26) had the “potential to make Jewish readers of Jewish media outlets go, ‘Oh, they have synagogues there.’” But with the underplaying of the story in US media, it’s a missed teachable moment for news consumers generally.

More robust press coverage of the attack could have taught Americans that the Jews of Iran do have something to fear: Israel.

From FAIR via This RSS Feed.

A new study shows that a specific type of silicone, the so-called methylsiloxanes, is widely present in the atmosphere across diverse environments. Also, concentrations appear to be much higher than expected. According to the researchers, this raises concerns about their potential—yet poorly understood—effects on human health and the climate. Methylsiloxanes are commonly used in industry, transportation, cosmetics, and household products. The study was supervised by Utrecht University and the University of Groningen, and the results are published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/science by /u/mvea on 2026-04-17 01:57:45+00:00.

Original Title: Trials of psychedelics for mental health may be invalid, because it's fairly obvious to patients whether they've been given a psychedelic or a placebo. Blinding failed more than 90% of the time in the studies of psilocybin, LSD and DMT, and 85% of the time in studies of MDMA.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/science by /u/Cosmyka on 2026-04-17 01:26:36+00:00.

Original Title: Common silicones from engine oil and cosmetics are far more prevalent in the atmosphere than expected, making up to 4.3% of organic aerosol mass. This stable pollutant is now omnipresent in urban and rural air, potentially impacting both human health and cloud formation.

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/science by /u/Cosmyka on 2026-04-17 01:19:07+00:00.

Original Title: Venice may need to be entirely relocated or protected by a massive €30 billion "super levee" as sea levels rise, researchers warn. A new study shows that the city's current mobile barriers will likely be overwhelmed by 2300, requiring radical engineering to save its residents and history.

Debs is back from the dead and out for glory. Plus: Lenny Henry faces a tough grilling from the Assembly crew. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, Sky AtlanticTo paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Deborah’s death have been greatly exaggerated (“TMZ got a bad tip”), as the fifth and final season begins. Determined to “shift the narrative”, she works on bagging a Grammy and an Oscar in this opening double bill. Will her “Mexican music album” strategy succeed? And could her autograph signing session be any worse? Ali Catterall

Continue reading...

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.cafe/post/34123497

The introduction by the creator:

It's in https://distro.fedesito.me/ , It's a Pokedle inspired game, in which you try to choose the Linux distro based on it's characteristics/features.

If you want to add features/distros feel free to do a pull request, the project is opensource at my ShitHub (link in website).

EDIT: fixed some bugs and added instructions

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1sm1jhz/i_made_a_linux_distro_guessing_game/

You will see the tears of time!

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I'm a big proponent of self-hosting, right to repair, and rolling your own whatever when you can. That probably started as teenage rebellion that got baked in - I was lucky enough to read both Walden and The Hobbit during a week-long cyclone lockdown several decades ago - but I suspect there's a non-trivial overlap between that space and privacy-minded people in general.

My endgame is a self-sufficient intranet for myself and family: if the net goes down tomorrow, we'd barely notice.

I also use LLMs as a tool. True self-hosted equivalence to state-of-the-art models is still an expensive proposition, so like many, I use cloud-based tools like Claude or Codex for domain-specific heavy lifting - mostly coding. Not apologising for it; I think it's a reasonable trade-off while local hardware catches up.

That context is just to establish where I'm coming from when I say this caught my attention today:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude

To be accurate about what it actually says: this isn't a blanket "show us your passport to use Claude." Not yet.

The policy as written is narrower than it might first appear.

My concern isn't what it says - it's that the precedent now exists. OAI will do doubt follow suite.

Scope creep is a documented pattern with this kind of thing, and "we only use it for X" describes current intent, not a structural constraint.

Given the nature of this community, figured it was worth flagging.

Top secret
Personal

Copy to Comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev

Dear Comrade Stalin:

You have been so rude as to summon my wife to the telephone and use bad language. Although she had told   you that she was prepared to forget this, the fact nevertheless became known through her to Zinoviev and Kamenev. I have no intention of forgetting so easily what has been done against me, and it goes without saying that what has been done against my wife I consider having been done against me as well. I ask you, therefore, to think it over whether you are prepared to withdraw what you have said and to make your apologies, or whether you prefer that relations between us should be broken off.[1]

Respectfully yours,
Lenin

March 5, 1923

Ruby Ridge Operation Northwoods Project Mockingbird

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