Nightjar

President Donald Trump and his team had several red lines that they used to justify the US war against Iran. At a press conference on Wednesday, Trump largely brushed them aside. Explaining his decision to agree to an interim peace deal, Trump repeated his insistence that the country would never get a nuclear weapon. Yet he went on to suggest that Iran should have the right to enrich uranium, be allowed to develop ballistic missiles and get access to billions of dollars in frozen funds. Those three things have been at the center of the debate around how to approach Iran for years, dating to the 2015 agreement that the US, under President Barack Obama, and other great powers signed with Iran to limit its nuclear program…. To be sure, he [Trump] has a history of taking a hard stance only to reverse it days — sometimes even hours — later…. But there was plenty in the press conference that surprised even the president’s supporters. Take Iran’s ballistic missile program…Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US objective was to “destroy the missile threat” posed by Iran. Trump shrugged off that idea…He even derided those offering him advice — he referred to them as “guys I like” — as focusing on the wrong thing with the fixation on ballistic missiles. “I mean, they have to have some because other people have some,” Trump said. “Missiles aren’t the problem,” Trump told reporters. “They hurt a little location but they don’t blow up the planet.” The president took the same approach with nuclear enrichment. For years, he and many Republican critics of Iran have questioned why it should be allowed to enrich uranium if, as it insists, it doesn’t want a nuclear weapon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News in May that Iran needs to “walk away from enrichment.” With Rubio standing right behind him on Wednesday, Trump made clear he no longer agreed. “It’s a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that,” Trump said. “You have to use a little common sense.” The third red line Trump crossed centered on Iran’s frozen assets. The country has billions of dollars in overseas accounts that the US has blocked banks from releasing. Part of the justification for years has been that Iran is a leading state sponsor of terrorism, funding proxy groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and can’t be trusted not to do so again. “It’s not our money, it’s their money — and we froze it at a certain point in time,” Trump said. “I guess we’re going to have to give it back, you know. If we didn’t give it back, nobody would ever invest in the dollar again.”

I think there's an incredible correlation between insulating cis boys from the consequences of their actions and the prevalence of violent crime.

I think we teach cis boys from a young age that violence will be tolerated from them as long as they perform masculinity to society's standards.

That second part is the salient factor here. Because we also teach them that violence will not be tolerated from them if they defy society's standards of masculinity, even if it's self defense. If they're picked on for defying those standards, it's the violence against them that's validated.

I think cis boys who are performing masculinity to society's standards get in no real trouble for snapping their classmates' bra straps or pulling their hair or whatever else gets written off as "he likes you" & it sets them up for a life of violence.

The spiral goes like this. You go to take the bus instead of driving, thinking "I'm going to o have a couple drinks" or "I don't want to worry about parking where I'm going." So you take bus. First bus is right on time. But then you transfer from your neighborhood line to the line that takes you where you actually want to go. And your bus is delayed. And it only comes every 30 minutes. And then you're waiting, 40 minutes later, wondering where your bus is, knowing you could have driven there in 20 minutes.

Why would you ever chose to take a bus again? The bus made you waste precious time on your day off just sitting there. So next time you drive. Ridership goes down. When the transit authority asks for more money for more buses and more drivers, people point to the ridership numbers and say "why should we pay for this instead of paying for our schools/police/baseball stadium/parks/police again (let's be real that's who's taking all the money)?" If we want to increase ridership we need to actually design and fund functional transit networks. If we want people to actually ride the bus we need to make it a better option than driving, which means reliable service, which you don't get with a bus every 30 minutes.

The blurb said the shot was taken in Granada, Spain, by Agneta Fondén.  No other info, so I have no idea how old, etc.  There's a game (from 1988) that uses a similar pattern on one of its pieces, but this could predate it by at least a thousand years  — or not.  But the pattern intrigued me, so I made a texture map and used Blender's geometry nodes (no generative AI) to set up a hexagon grid with random rotations for the tiles:

That's all done with a single design:

You'd think this would have a name, right?  (For its historical use as an architectural / decor tile — although I've found out more about its use in games, that's not what I'm looking for.)  Like the Penroses do (and no, it's not one of those).  But I've had no luck finding it, or any other info.  Any (human only, please) help?

"I didn't want the last sound heard in my music school to be the sound of bombs and missiles."

A KUBA 'BLOSSOM' RUG, NORTH EAST CAUCASUS, CIRCA 1900

@sissa-arrows source (french)

Over 200 Algerians were killed that night over 500 if you count the one killed in the following nights but thousands more were arrested (over 10000) every single ministry was an accomplice they used to public buses to transport them kept them in a stadium because the precincts were not big enough… While the people killed were men and women, the people arrested were a huge majority of men. So the following days the women and children started calling for a peaceful march to ask for their husbands and fathers to be released. This time they knew that the public opinion wouldn’t look kindly to it if they killed them. So the police instead arrested the women and sent them to a psychiatric hospitals saying they were unstable and needed to be locked inside. Luckily the director was a good man so he refused to lock the women inside the hospital saying they were perfectly sane but he also refused to let the police take them. So he waited until the police left to help the women leave back to their places.

There’s a documentary about it (I don’t remember if the psychiatric hospital was in this documentary or in an other) made by an Algerian woman in the diaspora in France. It’s filled with testimonies and a woman explains that when her husband left for the protest he told her to take care of the children and that if something happened to him she needed to make sure their children would go to school school and be good students. He survived to October 17 but was found and killed by the police on the 19th.