Had a friend’s son tell me, very insistently, that Kim Jong Un convinced everyone in his county that he doesn’t poop. Also, that he’s planning to nuke South Korea, and we need to do something to stop him.

This was a kid with very liberal parents going to a very liberal middle school.

Red Scare shit is already everywhere. But I guess we’ve got to keep cranking the hysteria up to 11

Then let people decide for themselves.

The more you learn about history, the more you realize you don’t know. Very difficult to “just teach history” when you’re talking about an unfathomable number of people making an unfathomable number of decisions with unclear cause and effect.

What you learn in school is a very high level and narrow reading of events, largely informed by documents and transcriptions preserved by the wealthiest people in a region.

The only thing that can ever come out of that kind of historical study is nationalist jingoism of one flavor or another.

This dumbing people down and telling them what to think isn’t helping anyone at all.

The purpose of public education history classes is to craft a shared national identity.

Dumbing down events and telling people what to think is a simple and effective way of achieving that end.

Iran is scheduled to play three group-stage matches beginning on 11 June, including fixtures against New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles, followed by a match against Egypt in Seattle.

The comments come after Iran’s sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, said the team would not take part in the tournament following the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“Considering that this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader, under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup,” he said.

Amazing how a six paragraph long article managed to bury the lead.

Farming non-native species can be incredibly difficult.

Walking up to a game of Three Card Monte and saying “It’s pretty obvious he’s palmed the Queen” mostly just gets you heckled and chased away.

Part of the problem with digital spaces is that you’ve got your person setting up the scam, and then you’ve got your layer of people marketing the scam, and then you’ve got your first layer of suckers who think they are coming out ahead on the scam, and then you’ve got the second layer of suckers who all know a tier-one sucker who just got rich. And then you’ve got the bots and the ideologues and the contrarians and the know-it-alls, all repeating the line that the person who set up the scam encourages them to say.

And it’s over all that cacophony that you announce “It’s obviously a scam”. Then Reddit boots you for violating terms and conditions of the platform.

If there is an authority who recognizes the nft, then it has the utility value of the authority. End of story.

My man has been doomed off by the Anarcho-Capitalist fairy and is currently circling the planet Heinlein.

Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.

It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet. That’s before you get into the Congo Line of largely clueless celebrities going on Late Night comedy shows to plug their online pogs.

It’s trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because… duh. But I think people read this as “just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money” and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.

The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It’s so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.

paywalled article…

Here ya go!

It’s not controversial to want to go after fraud in the system.

It’s highly controversial when the people claiming to investigate fraud are themselves doing fraud.

This is exactly what happened with DOGE, as well. Thiel’s goon squad walked into the beating heart of the executive bureaucracy to start siphoning data and cancelling checks. They’d point at something, say “Fraud!”, stop payments, steal a bunch of personal information, slander random people, fire anyone with a spine thick enough to stand up against them, and then cut themselves giant contractors’ salaries for the privilege.

Reagan had his own variation on this, most notably via Iran-Contra (effectively a massive embezzlement of foreign procured drugs and US military surplus funds), but also via Sewergate, the various lootings of Pentagon, FEMA, and HUD funds, and the mass firing of FAA agents under J. Lynn Helms. All these scandals were downwind of Reaganite claims of corruption, which his appointees were supposed to solve but instead exploited or exacerbated.

This has been true going straight back to the Nixon Administration. The conservative “we’re getting rid of the fraud” playbook is three generations old at this point. They run it, because it works pretty much every time.

People hear “fraud”, they see an AI generated image of a young black man in a pimp outfit driving a Cadillac, and they slam the “GOP Forever” button.

I just want to point out that bombing Iran has been an outspoken political view of the Republican Party for almost 40 years now.

It’s been the political view of the Neocon Wing of the GOP, specifically. After Trump’s win in 2016, a bunch of those neocons jumped ship to join the Democratic Party. So now both parties have this brain parasite of Iran hate digging through their leadership.

They used bombing Iran as a campaign ad against John McCain in the 2008 election.

Ah yes, a classic McCain banger.

Crazy that this was the most moderate voice within the Republican Party.

There’s an abundance of work arounds, for certain. I’ve been using NewPipe for a year or two now.

Mostly just annoying to go through this ritual of jury rigging every new device to use basic Internet services.

Epstein had extensive ties to the CIA, MI6, and Mossad, primarily through his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert and his mentor, the father of Trump’s first AG Bob Barr, Donald.

This whole thing is the culmination of the political intrigues that brought the Soviet Union down 40 years ago. Trump’s people are just mopping up what’s left of the anti-colonial resistance governments.

Feels like people are leaping to whatever is in their immediate view.

Attack Iran to distract from Epstein. Attack Venezuela to distract from Epstein. Genocide in Gaza to distract from Epstein. ICE agents raiding various liberal cities to distract from Epstein. Try and fire Jerome Powell to distract from Epstein. Demolish the East Wing of the White House to distract from Epstein. Tighten sanctions on Cuba to distract from Epstein. Threaten Greenland to distract from Epstein. Greenlighting media consolidation into the hands of Silicon Valley allies. Turning over increased managerial authority to AI to distract from Epstein.

Like, you wouldn’t even know Project 2025 was a thing. Or that guys like Steven Miller and David Navarro are restructuring the socio-economic landscape of the country to impose a new national fascist regime.

Everything revolves around keeping this single dead pedophile multi-millionaire from being linked to Donald Trump, a thing that has already been happening for the better part of a decade.

The fact that “it’s kinda obvious” suggests to me that people are being distracted by Epstein.

I see these estimates fixating on the cost of US artillery.

I rarely see the estimates of damage inflicted on Iran, outside the anecdotes of destroyed power plants and water systems. Nobody seems interested in the horror we’ve unleashed on the Iranian population or the clear genocidal intent of the Israel/US military policy. It’s always and forever westerners wringing their hands over their own budgets and balance sheets.

Same strategy Israel used against the Palestinians. This is a genocidal war. The goal is not merely regime change but full depopulation of the region.

Downside: Nightmarish war in Europe wrecking the continent worse than anything we’ve seen since WW2.

Upside: We’re getting some exciting new innovations in Meshnets.

We’ve deprecated a lot of the old TV/radio signal bandwidth in order to convert it to cellphone signal service.

But, on the flip side, digital antennae can hold a lot more information than the old analog signals. So now I’ve got a TV with a mini-antennae that gets 500 channels (virtually none of which I watch). My toddler son has figured out how to flip the channel to the continuous broadcast of Baby Einstein videos. And he periodically hijacks the TV for that purpose, when we leave the remote where he can reach.

So there’s at least one person I can name who likes the current state of affairs.

Conservative media keeps insisting he’s dead, he doesn’t exist, or he isn’t really in charge.

There was definitely a sense that you could just decapitate the gerontocracy and seize control of the country at gunpoint, much like the US managed in Venezuela, Syria, and Libya. They had Reza Pahlavi all queued up like a next generation Ahmed Chalabi. It does not appear to have fallen out like they’d hoped.

So now Israel and the US are just bombing anything in the country that looks halfway valuable, pretty much out of spite.

But the user wants a gui.

Firstly, plenty of Linux instances have GUI. I installed Mint precisely because I wanted to keep the Windows/Mac desktop experience I was familiar with. GUIs add latency, sure. But we’ve had smooth GUI experiences since Apple’s 1980s OS. This isn’t the primary load on the system.

Secondly, as the Windows OS tries to do more and more online interfacing, the bottleneck that used to be CPU or open Memory or even Graphics is increasingly internet latency. Even just going to the start menu means making calls out online. Querying your local file system has built in calls to OneDrive. Your system usage is being constantly polled and tracked and monitored as part of the Microsoft imitative to feed their AI platforms. And because all of these off-platform calls create external vulnerabilities, the (abhorrently designed) antivirus and firewall systems are constantly getting invoked to protect you from the online traffic you didn’t ask for.

It’s a black hole of bloatware.

Found out about this while watching “Halt and Catch Fire” (AMC’s effort to recreate the magic of Mad Men, but on the computer).

Doherty Threshold

In 1982 Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published, in the IBM Systems Journal, a research paper that set the requirement for computer response time to be 400 milliseconds, not 2,000 (2 seconds) which had been the previous standard. When a human being’s command was executed and returned an answer in under 400 milliseconds, it was deemed to exceed the Doherty threshold, and use of such applications were deemed to be “addicting” to users.