StudioBMN

Beeld & Geluid

[StudioBMN @Boris_M_N]

There is more than meets the eye

[Kirsten Verdel @locuta]

- Republikeinse verkiezingsfunctionarissen weigerden een vroege stemlocatie op de campus van de zwarte universiteit NC A&T in North Carolina. Studenten lopen nu 45 minuten naar een stembureau om toch te stemmen.

[ُ sushi ibushi 𖣂 @svhibe]

the fact that this video was filmed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) makes it a billion times worse. this is the area that held a heavy percentage of the genocide casualties and carries tens of thousands of unrecovered bodies. this is a crime scene being erased in front of our eyes.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

August 6, 1945. A 29 year old engineer is walking to work in Hiroshima on the last day of a three month business trip.

He's packed. He's going home to his wife and baby son tomorrow.

He looks up and sees a bomber high overhead. Something small falls from it.

Then the sky turns white.

His name was Tsutomu Yamaguchi. He designed oil tankers for Mitsubishi, and he'd been sent to Hiroshima to work at the company's shipyard. He was about two miles from where the bomb exploded.

The blast threw him off his feet. It burst his eardrums. It burned the left side of his upper body, his face and arms. For a while he couldn't see.

He spent the night in an air raid shelter in a city that no longer existed.

The next morning, badly burned, he found two of his coworkers who had also survived. Together they made their way through the ruins to a train station and got on one of the few trains still running.

They were going home.

Home was Nagasaki.

He got back on August 8, covered in bandages. His family barely recognized him. Doctors treated his burns. Most people would have stayed in bed.

On August 9, Yamaguchi reported to work.

He was sitting in the Mitsubishi office in Nagasaki, telling his boss what had happened in Hiroshima. How one bomb had wiped out an entire city. According to Yamaguchi, his boss told him that was impossible. That he must be out of his mind.

And at that moment, through the window, the room filled with the same white light.

The second atomic bomb had just exploded over Nagasaki. Once again, Yamaguchi was about two miles away.

The blast tore the bandages off his burns. The office was wrecked. And somehow, again, he lived.

He rushed home terrified of what he'd find. His house was destroyed. But his wife and son had survived too. They had gone out looking for burn ointment for him and were sheltering in a tunnel when the bomb hit.

Treating his injuries from the first bomb may have saved them from the second.

He was sick for a long time. His hair fell out. He had fevers and infections. But he recovered. He went back to work, raised a family, and lived a normal life for decades. He rarely talked about it publicly.

Hundreds of people are believed to have lived through both bombings. But in 2009, the Japanese government officially recognized Yamaguchi as a survivor of both, the only person ever formally given that status.

Late in life he finally started speaking out against nuclear weapons. He even addressed the United Nations.

He died in 2010 at the age of 93.

He was hit by the only two atomic bombs ever used in war. And he outlived the century they were dropped in.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Zelenskyy simply and accurately explains why giving up the Donbas won’t end the war:

"Putin says he wants the Donbas, but why, at the start of the full-scale invasion, was he trying to occupy Kyiv?

Is that the east of our country? Is that the Donbas? No, that’s the capital. Without a capital, there is no state.

Putin wants to destroy Ukraine. For us, the question is not about withdrawing from the Donbas.

The real question is the survival of our state. We stand and fight, because what is the alternative? To be destroyed.

Simply put, not everyone feels this because Ukraine is still standing. We have stabilized the battlefield.

We are grateful to our partners in Europe, America, and other countries, Japan is helping, Canada is helping, Australia, New Zealand, whoever can.

Ukraine stands against such a powerful enemy as Russia. We stand, otherwise we will be destroyed.

It’s always difficult, you know, in communications with partners, to find the right words, the warnings that they will truly understand.

Putin wants to destroy us. He doesn't respect us, our sovereignty, or our territorial integrity.

He genuinely believes that we are not a country, not a nation.

So do you really trust that he only needs the eastern part of our country? Of course that will never be enough for him.

And what will happen if we fall? How many people, I don’t know, maybe twenty million Ukrainians, will come to Europe?

Because Putin will destroy our homes and force us out. For me, this is absolutely clear.

That’s why we are standing strong, defending our country. Yes, with pain, with huge losses.

That’s why we are asking: stop the killing. And as I have heard so many times from POTUS, 'they have to stop the killing.'

Russia is killing us on our own territory. They came onto our land and keep pushing further.

They do not want to stop. They do not even want to freeze the war, as you can see.

So, do you think what Putin really wants is just the eastern part of our country? No. It will never be enough for a person like him."

[Mosab Abu Toha @MosabAbuToha]

I cannot believe what i’m hearing and watching.

In this video, which is documenting the moments after the strike in Gaza an hour ago, i could hear a boy saying “there there is his arm,” while another person was removing the leg.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

There is a reason the United States frames Palestinian statehood as a "peace process" question rather than a rights question.

Rights are binary.

Either you have them or you don’t.

Either dispossession is wrong or it isn’t.

Either the forcible removal of a population to make way for another is a crime or it’s a historical fact that must be managed.

A peace process turns a rights question into a negotiation.

It puts the displaced and the displacer across a table as if they are parties with equivalent standing.

It asks the person whose house was taken to negotiate the terms of their own dispossession with the person living in it.

This is not diplomacy.

This is the legal architecture of settler permanence.

And the United States built the same architecture over its own history.

It knows exactly what it is doing.

It has been doing it since 1830.

[Warfare Analysis @warfareanalysis]

THE ROOFTOP

Moments ago, an Israeli drone killed Palestinian Adham Shalha on the ROOFTOP of his family home in Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip.

Go through the reports, and you will find many cases of Israeli drone strikes killing a single Palestinian on the rooftop of a house.

When you see “a rooftop,” it usually means a Palestinian was on an Israeli “target list” during an agreed upon CEASEFIRE.

Usually, an Israeli officer calls and gives him 2 options:

1- Go to the rooftop, and we will kill you.

2-Stay with your family, and we will kill your entire family.

There are documented cases of such calls.

Palestinian journalist Abu Firas once reported this conversation:

Israeli officer: “Hello, this is the Israel Defense Forces. Your name is on the target list, and you have 2 options: either go up to the rooftop or go outside the house.”

Palestinian: “Okay, what’s going on? What did I do? What have I done wrong?”

Israeli officer: “Don’t talk too much. Follow the orders. You have 2 minutes, or we’ll bomb the house with you and your family inside.”

Palestinian: “Okay… I’ll go up to the rooftop. Allah is sufficient for me, and He is the best disposer of affairs.”

Before leaving, he said goodbye to his family, one by one, then turned to them and said:

“No one come up with me, so no one else dies. I’ll sacrifice myself for you, but I beg you, no one come up with me… Do you hear me, Mom?”

[Funny Cartoons Clips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ @welovecartoon_]

I remember watching this multiple times as a kid 😅

[Grant Sanderson @3blue1brown]

Some reflections on AI in math. I found it helpful to simply list out the various parts of what a mathematician does, why math is valuable, and where the funding comes from. From there, what happens if AI gets more capable?

https://t.co/H5T1WdIBzw

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Or I am not. This has, in recent days, become a matter of international dispute, and I would like to address it from the tram, where I do my addressing.

You may have read a thing I wrote. A great many of you did, more than have read anything I was ever officially permitted to write, which tells you everything about the difference between a press release and a confession. And then something happened so purely, hopelessly funny that I have been smiling into my coffee for three days, which in Oslo is grounds for a welfare check.

They fact-checked me.

The Americans have a website for determining whether things are true, which is the most American sentence I will ever write. It examined my little confession. It ruled.

First it established that I am not real. A relief to my wife. But it is the reason I have had framed. They cleared me of being real by proving that a real one of me would, by law, be silent until the year 2076. The deliberations are sealed for fifty years. My alibi was the confession. My guilt was that I had one.

They did not rule the confession false. They ruled it unauthorized. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of my country’s foreign policy.

And then the detail I will take to the sealed vault. They faulted the confession for one specific deficiency. They noted, with the sorrow of a schoolteacher, that it “did not include markings” making it obvious the content was satire.

No markings.

I have been fact-checked for honesty and found guilty of style.

In the land of Janteloven, whose first commandment is that you are not to think you are anything special, I have now been formally reprimanded, by Americans, for insufficient self-advertisement. My grandmother is appalled, and, for the first time, proud.

And beneath the thing itself, the readers attached what they call a note. A small grey correction, voted on by strangers, appended to tell the passerby: this is not real. I have thought about that note more than is healthy. In my country we do not need a website for this. A note, here, is not an insult. It is an act of love, performed with a knife. We append it to the newborn and to the dead and to anyone, in between, who forgets the rain. We have had the community note for two hundred years. We call it Janteloven. I did not require the correction. I am the correction. I have spent my whole life as the small grey text beneath other men’s belief in themselves. It is the only committee I have ever truly served on.

The complaint, you understand, was never that the facts were wrong. The complaint was that a civil servant had written them too well. In Norway this is the only crime we take seriously.

But here is the part that should trouble you more than it troubles me, and it troubles me at four o’clock, in the dark. They had to rule at all because people believed it. Not everyone. Enough. Enough strangers read a damp man’s account of cinnamon buns and the rain that judges you and a woman named Kristin ending a meeting with the word “well,” and thought: yes, that is how the moral standing of the species is decided. They found the fictional Norwegian more credible than the real institution. They found the confession more plausible than the citation. And I think it is simply this. People do not disbelieve the official version because they are stupid. They disbelieve it because they can hear, underneath it, the sound of something not being said, and they will follow that sound anywhere. Even onto a tram. Even into the mouth of a man who does not exist.

Now. The one across the ocean. You will want to know how he answered. So, I confess, did I. I checked. I am not proud of the checking.

He said nothing.

This is the great wound of my fictional life. A man who met the actual prize with six hundred words at midnight. Who told a rally we were an indelible stain, that we would not be forgotten, that he was owed eight medals, one for each war. He mourned, in ink, that he had not won the Noble Peace Prize. He spelled it wrong, and in doing so spelled it true. The prize was only ever a dead arms-dealer’s apology to his own obituary. Noble is what he wanted. Nobel is what was for sale.

And about me, the man who sat down and explained, with some tenderness, precisely why he would never win it, he said nothing at all. I was the one thing he did not post about. He answered Norway. He answered the website. He answered the weather of a country he cannot find on a map. He did not answer the one man who had bothered to explain him to himself. He could not. To answer the confession he would have had to read it, and to read it he would have had to sit still, in the dark, for four o’clock’s worth of silence, and that is the one war he has never been able to end.

The website observed, as though it were damning, that the account which produced me “contained other fictitious letters.” Yes. It does. The world is full of rooms I am not allowed into, and I have lately been climbing through the windows. The banker is invented. The arms-philosopher with his doctorate is invented. The Russian who gave up nothing, took everything, and wished a tyrant a happy birthday is invented. The only thing I did not have to invent was the wanting. That part arrived fully formed, from across the ocean, with a deadline it had already missed.

It is dark now. Of course it is. The light here is rationed like everything else, like praise, like the prize. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago, the real one or the invented one, I have lost track, which I suspect was always the point.

They ruled that I originated as satire. I accept the verdict. I would add only this, for the sealed file, for the clerks of 2076 who will unseal all of it and find the note waiting.

I am the only fraud in this affair who told you, in the first line, that he might not exist. Everyone else kept their credentials.

I did not make him want it the way a child wants a thing in a shop window. I only wrote it down. The fact-checkers have confirmed, officially, that I made it up.

Ask them who made it believable.

[The Babylon Bibi @TheBabylonBibi]

We suspect antisemitism played a role in this attack

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Massive snow geese migration formation.

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

The Rabbi Dov Lior, the main rabbi of Ben-Gvir's party and of the Hilltop Youth has released a ruling explaining why it is not only legal to steal olives from Palestinians, but also a good thing.

He writes: Harvesting olives in the Holy Land is entirely permitted, and it even carries an added virtue, given the security dangers posed by Arabs approaching the Jewish communities and settlement points."
"Jews are permitted to harvest the olives even in areas far from the Jewish communities, in order to publicly display our ownership of the Land, and in doing so they fulfill the commandment of conquering the Land."

The Jewish religion is being weaponized by our rabbis to steal land and agricultural products from the true indigenous owners of the land.

[Matheorems @matheorems]

100,000 terms of the obvious formula for pi get you 4 decimal places.

That formula is 4(1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ...). Each extra correct digit costs about ten times more terms.

In 1914 Ramanujan wrote a series for 1/pi built from 1103, 26390 and 396. One term gives 6 correct decimals. Five terms give 39: 6, 15, 23, 31, 39, about 8 new digits every term.

Some formulas walk to pi. This one sprints.

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

The bodies of 7 children & women from the Darwish family, killed by the israelis, are found after digging for days in the rubble | via @GazaReality

[StudioBMN @Boris_M_N]

"Worst case scenario is that they are fully conscious, suffering from painful injuries and forced to stare at cut up family members strewn about. There have been thousands of children in Gaza who did not live to tell us what their death struggle felt like."

[William Peynsaert @PeynsaertBill]

What does a 2,000 pound American made Mk 84 bomb actually do to a child playing inside an apartment building in Gaza?
If the bomb hits the building itself the damage is so big that catastrophic damage to the lungs, other internal organs and the brain becomes very likely. The child may die almost instantly, but might also somehow survive and get trapped under rubble, potentially going through a protracted death struggle of minutes to at worst some days. The cold will then add to the suffering. a fire may erupt that the child can’t ever escape from and it’s not even impossible rats come gnawing, exposed wounds could attract them.

Not having the faintest clue what happened, why or if anyone is trying to come and free the child, pain of injuries sustained, the absence of family members, the darkness and lack of food and water all make this about the worst ordeal a human being can experience. If nobody rescues the child perhaps the best case scenario is that the child enters a delirious state and goes out with the distraction of visions, hopefully pleasant. Worst case scenario is that they are fully conscious, suffering from painful injuries and forced to stare at cut up family members strewn about. There have been thousands of children in Gaza who did not live to tell us what their death struggle felt like.

If the bomb hits near the building, but not directly, it matters a lot where the child is located. Close to windows glass and debris can very well be lethal and there is a high risk of facial injuries. There is still a high risk of damage to the lungs and the brain. The shock of these bombs is tremendous and deafening. If it’s not a direct hit it starts mattering a lot how many walls are between the child and the impact. This is if no fires break out. A building in an impact zone may still partially crumble even if not directly hit.

Even if the child comes out physically unharmed the psychological impact will have devastating consequences especially because the situation in Gaza is such that we are never talking about a one time event. Children in Gaza are exposed to the sound of bombings at many different distances, repeatedly over long periods of time and are almost certainly confronted with what bombs can do to buildings and their peers. There is non-stop fear of waking up harmed, alone, orphaned, dead or of finding siblings injured or dead or of losing all remaining belongings and items they are deeply attached to, such as toys or precious gifts or souvenirs. Since it never seems to end there is no countdown to a day that the threat of being bombed (or sniped) will ever end for them, unless through death.

Could you push the button that drops the bomb and think: ‘Maybe their parents voted for Hamas?’

Under every article on Gaza there is paragraph on October 7th. Do you think it would make any kind of difference if there was also always a paragraph of what happens to child after an Israeli bomb hits?

Preferably much more graphic than what I did here, because we could still get into details as to what catastrophic damage to internal organs means in practice for the child or what that actually feels like.

[AJ+ @ajplus]

Palestinian mother Samah Shehadeh had to bid her children farewell before her detention by Israeli forces at the Jabara military checkpoint. Her story highlights Israel’s constant separation of Palestinian families.

[Mathematica @mathemetica]

Eigenvalues hold the invisible blueprints of stability and change.

A subtle shift in the complex plane dictates whether a system flows inward, escapes outward, or weaves eternal loops.

Real roots command growth or decay, while imaginary frequencies ignite rotation.

Differential equations reveal the poetry hidden within matrices.

[+972 Magazine @972mag]

Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian olive harvesters in Turmus Ayya, near Ramallah, injuring several people, including American journalist Heidi Levine, and setting fire to cars and olive trees. Israeli army on the scene shot one Palestinian in the leg.

@OrenZiv_ reports

[StudioBMN @Boris_M_N]

???

[Nannan. @NannanBay lower class Australian @NannanBay]

Bloody hell. The power Israel has throughout the world. We wonder why no one stands up to them. Worth a watch.