AbdulRahman ElZein

Architect-Artist

Instagram: abdalzein

[AbdulRahman ElZein @abdalzein]

@saifedean Here's a cross-section I had drawn of the Dome of the Rock. One of the best if not the best drawing I've ever done.

[AbdulRahman ElZein @abdalzein]

Stories like these became so widespread that many Lebanese knew someone who had experienced it firsthand. What is striking is that this kind of degrading behaviour was apparently not directed only at Lebanese and Palestinians, but, as we are now seeing, at Americans as well.

[AbdulRahman ElZein @abdalzein]

Americans are only now beginning to realise just how disgusting the israelis are.

After Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, many Lebanese families recounted Israeli soldiers raiding and looting homes, and deliberately defecating on dining tables before leaving.

[Meidas_Charise Lee @charise_lee]

THIS IS CRAZY

[John Cusack @johncusack]

Pappe is a great witness for peace and justice

Ilan Pappé RIPS Into Israel’s History at Oxford Union Debate https://t.co/VCXEYObGpb via @YouTube

[AbdulRahman ElZein @abdalzein]

يا ساقي القومِ من شذاهُ
الكلُّ لما سقيتَ تاهوا..

[AbdulRahman ElZein @abdalzein]

بعدتم ولم يبعد عن القلبِ حبُّكم

[AbdulRahman ElZein @abdalzein]

ودَّعتهُ وبودِّي لو يودعني
صفوُ الحياةِ، واني لا أودِّعُهُ

[Mason Home Builder @bankertobuilder]

How I would improve Europe as an American home builder

[Classicals @_ClassicalSoul]

Granada pt.3

[El Sereno de Madrid - Sonia Taravilla @Unsereno]

Con lo bonita que es la Capilla de San Blas de la Catedral de Toledo, ¿cómo se les ocurrió colocar esos tubos de luz enmarcando los sepulcros?

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history.

How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing.

Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs.

An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians.

For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings.

By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do.

So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951.

How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it.

At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform.

It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

Norman Finkelstein has been telling the truth about Gaza longer than anyone else in academia. Naturally the media have dismissed him as an antisemite or ignored him completely.

0:00 The Gaza Concentration Camp
11:37 The Military and Intel Operations Focused on Destroying Gaza
14:05 Evidence of Israel's Genocide in Gaza
27:58 The Attacks Against Anyone Who Criticizes Israel
46:29 Israel's Targeting of Children, Medics, and Journalists
52:04 The Corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu and Denying Jewish Americans Entry
55:41 Has Finkelstein Faced Backlash in the US for Speaking Out?
59:39 Propaganda in the Classroom
1:11:34 Why They Kicked Finkelstein Out of Hunter College
1:25:50 Is Finkelstein Bitter About the Consequences He's Faced?
1:31:07 Are These Reports About Hamas Accurate?
1:45:31 Will Anyone Be Held Accountable for These Actions?

[Axiomatic Enemy of the State @DeTocqueville14]

You're about to find out why your grandparents canned vegetables, patched worn out clothing, and reused aluminum foil

[Francisco Gómez de Tejada | arquitecto @gomezdetejada]

Se cree que es el plano arquitectónico más antiguo conservado, Irak. Vivienda sumeria de hace 5.000 años.

La tablilla de arcilla muestra el plano de planta de una casa en líneas dobles con las dimensiones de la habitación.

[Stop the Forever Wars @DoctorFishbones]

All the scientists and math nerds were fine with OpenAI violating copyright by artists and only got up in arms when OpenAI stole the data on a math proof

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔An NYU mathematician says OpenAI used his own progress against him to beat him to one of the biggest unsolved problems in mathematics. Tristan Buckmaster had been working toward a Millennium Prize proof using OpenAI's Codex when information about his progress reached OpenAI.
Days later, OpenAI published a full proof of the same problem using the same uncommon approach, after burning $22.5 million in compute to get there. When Buckmaster confronted them, exec Sébastien Bubeck allegedly said "Why would you ruin your career?" and "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."

My Take
OpenAI spent $22.5 million to solve a problem with a $1 million prize. They didn't do this for the bounty. They needed a headline that says "our AI solved one of the hardest problems in mathematics" and they needed it before someone else got credit. They started days after they heard about Buckmaster's progress and took the same uncommon approach he'd pursued for months. That's hard to explain as coincidence.

Buckmaster did his work inside Codex. OpenAI reserves the right to train on Codex data. They admit they can't rule out that his usage helped improve their models. So a customer used their product, potentially handed them the roadmap, and then OpenAI outran him with $22.5 million in compute he could never match. I don't know if any of this was intentional. But if you're a researcher and you just watched this happen, I don't think you'd keep your best ideas inside someone else's product.

Hedgie🤗

https://t.co/1YnggU7xdI

[Cassandra @Cassandracass50]

La muerte lenta de la belleza en el mundo.

[Galloway Woodworks⚓ @Gallo_Woodworks]

They don’t tell you this, but if you do the labor yourself, stained glass costs just under 12 bucks a square foot.

Herringbone floor doesn’t use more material if you lay it yourself.

Beautiful things are worth working for!

[real person 𓇋 @shesarealperson]

ibn arabi believed that language itself functioned as a barzakh, “an intermediary veil that reveals even as it conceals”

[Dhillon @dhillonirl]

Moral of the story : Efforts in the wrong place are simply wasted.