The illegality of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank is one of the most well-established positions in international law, resting on four distinct pillars:
📜 GENEVA CONVENTIONS
Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) explicitly prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. Israel ratified the Convention in 1951. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the authoritative interpreter of humanitarian law, has consistently held that this provision applies directly to the settlements.
🌐 UN SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS
The Security Council has repeatedly affirmed settlement illegality — including in binding resolutions the US did not veto:
• Res. 446 (1979): settlements have "no legal validity"
• Res. 465 (1980): calls on Israel to dismantle existing settlements
• Res. 2334 (2016): passed 14-0 (US abstained), explicitly states settlements constitute "a flagrant violation of international law" and have "no legal validity"
⚖️ ICJ RULINGS
• Advisory Opinion on the Wall (2004): the Court found settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, had been established in breach of international law, and that the wall built to protect them compounded that illegality
• Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2024): the Court went further, ruling that Israel's continued presence in the OPT — including the settlement enterprise — is itself unlawful, and called on all states not to recognise or assist it
🏛️ UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY
Countless UNGA resolutions have reaffirmed settlement illegality, including Res. 77/247 (2023), which requested the landmark 2024 ICJ opinion.
No serious legal scholar disputes this consensus. The settlements are illegal. The only remaining question is whether the international community will act on it.
@SupernovaMomma My 6 month old wants so much to be capable and independent, and I’ve been working really hard to make sure there is time set aside to give him that space.
Unpopular Opinion: Women who stay are also complicit in the destruction children experience.
A divorce doesn't necessarily constitute a broken family. The centering of men, and by extension, the nuclear family, is what undoes the unity of what makes for a healthy family dynamic.
You actually reduce crime by eliminating poverty. You reduce crime with universal healthcare, public housing, livable wages, and free college. You reduce violence by creating happy, healthy communities that aren’t constantly fighting over basic needs and material resources.
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
The BBC is at it again.
Dahiye is not simply “where Hezb0llah is based.” It is home to 500,000–800,000 people. It’s where families live, where friends meet in cafés and restaurants, where people work, shop, study, and build their lives.
The choice of language is deliberate, dehumanising an entire community to justify I$raeli attacks on civilians.
Shameful
👀 The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Mindanao caused parts of the seabed to rise by as much as 2 metres and the coastline has reportedly moved out by around 200 metres.
The sudden uplift has exposed coral reefs, seagrass and marine habitats, leaving sea life stranded and causing damage to the underwater ecosystem. Officials found exposed coral and dead marine animals along affected areas.
It’s incredible to think about the force needed to physically lift the seabed out of the ocean like this.
📷 DENR Soccsksargen
This is so so good and scary. “I can’t stand this place anymore,” he said. “These major tech giants will burn everything to the ground as long as they’re making a profit. They’re not interested in anything that’s going to slow them down.”
The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes https://t.co/L8dil5znDy
told my teenage coworker i’m going to a concert next week and he went “you’re probably gonna go see some old shit like simon and garfunkel” and he was right i’m seeing paul simon
Another major environmental catastrophe that impacts on climate and world trade, but it is not on the radar.
The following link is a good video of the Sargassum problem, a pelagic seaweed floating on the surface of the ocean.
When we sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, we got stuck three times in giant mats of Sargassum. The video gives a good explanation of what happens in the Caribbean when it washes ashore, but it misses the major environmental and economic implications that have a profound impact on world trade and marine life in an entire ocean.
The Sargassum starts off from the coast of Brazil; it picks up nutrients from the Amazon and grows at an accelerated rate. It can double in biomass every 10 days. The weed crosses the South Atlantic to Africa and flows up the west coast, picking up more nutrients from the Congo and Gambia as well as agricultural run-off. By the time it reaches North Africa, Cape Verde, it takes a left turn and starts heading back across the Atlantic to the Caribbean.
There should only be 1 million tonnes of the weed in the Atlantic, but there are now 40 million, and it is expanding year on year. Sargassum is a plant, and like all plants, it requires nutrients such as phosphate. However, the massive amount of weed uses up all the phosphate and then biochemically defaults to absorbing arsenic, which sits below phosphate in the periodic table.
The Equatorial Atlantic is now devoid of phosphate, which means there is almost no phytoplankton, zooplankton or fish. When we conducted our citizen science project, 5000 samples were collected by 25 yachts at around 15 deg. North, and the results all confirmed that the Equatorial Atlantic was effectively dead.
The results were not ignored by the academics; instead, they attacked the Citizen Science project, this has become the subject of a reports by https://t.co/agIIEMzAfR.
Given the phytoplankton, such as coccolithophores and diatoms, have exhibited a regime shift, it also means the SML oil surfactant layer is gone, which means evaporation across the air-water interface has increased and aerosol/cloud formation has decreased.
Satellite.
Imagery confirms a 10%+ increase in humidity and a 10%+ decrease in cloud formation and rain.
This is climate change TICC, the consequences.
Impact on Central America, the survival of the tropical rainforests, mangroves, coral reefs, 25% of all marine life in the Atlantic and water supply for the Panama Canal. 6% of world trade and 40% of USA trade pass through the canal, and it has been totally missed as a major economic and environmental catastrophe.
GOES centre for marine research:
https://t.co/pu9QswXI3r
The video below was taken in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean from our sailing vessel Copepod. Via Howard Dryden
Underrated element of NYC losing their minds rn is that we had the most brutal goddamn winter ever, with snowstorms on 3 separate Sundays, it literally stayed below freezing for a month straight, we have been WAITING for summer & look how we’ve been rewarded for our suffering