For those of us old enough to remember...

What we refer to as Linux should maybe rightfully be called GNU/Linux, as the OS is a combination of the Linux kernel with the GNU userland. There used to be an effort to make the longer name stick, but it's a mouthful, so nobody cared.

Where the SystemD project is going is to replace the GNU userland with a SystemD userland, one piece at a time. The project will be complete when there is no GNU left in the system, and the resulting OS will be rightfully called SystemD/Linux.

Well maybe this is what they are doing, it's just that they are doing it about something other than the purpoted hacker problem.

The word you are looking for is psyop.

People known to lie, from a government agency known to lie, make unsubstantiated claims that somehow happen to align with the foreign policy of said government.

But having witnessed the shifting in public consciousness over the recent years, I completely expect everyone to believe it on face value, and to consider an enemy agent everyone who voices doubt.

The issue a year ago was motherboard manufacturers pushing cpus past their limits, in search of an edge in performance.

The issue now seems to be the completely different issue of motherboard manufacturers pushing cpus past their limits, in search of an edge in performance?

Yup, completely different.

Education in the US was a scam long before Artificial Stupidity came along. For quite some time one has been better off learning a trade and being debt-free, rather than going into debt for a degree that most probably will not pay for itself. And that's even before the horror scenarios of the lenders often spiralling that debt into bottomles pits of lifetime servitude.

An important part of that scam, other than the fact that universities have turned into vehicles for manufacturing student debt, is that the money in the universities has also for quite some time now been increasingly going into administration, not faculty. In fact the US is moving towards the model of that asshole, and the whole faculty staff, working for free, and putting up with it for the privilege of having a still in demand career in academia. So you really get what you pay /them/, and I cannot fault them for finding ways to match their work load to their compensation.

For a more philosophical side of the matter, I find it kinda amusing that the bulk of those essays graded by ChatGPT will have also been written by that very same ChatGPT. At some point one would expect to move to have this farce dropped from the curriculae, but this would open a whole can of worms I'm not sure many would be ready to eat any time soon.

So try to follow me here. In WWII, what was the difference between the war crimes of the nazis, and the war crimes of the Soviet Union? The nazis bere beaten to submission physically, so it was possible to put them in court. There was no shortage of terrible things done by the soviets, but they were the winners, so they got to parade around as the good guys and circle jerk each other with the allies.

What is the difference of the war crimes of Milosevic in Kosovo, and of Bibi in Gaza? Milosevic was a commie without backing in an area where the US wanted a foothold, so he had to go. Bibi is an ally in an area where the US wants to keep a foothold, so he is going to stay.

Now getting closer to home, has anyone in DC been tried over for what they did to Korea, Vietnam, Laos? What they did to Iraq and Afghanistan, and do I have to remind here that these wars were illegal under international law? Is anyone dragging anyone to court over the still ongoing drone strikes? Of course not. There is no one to do that. Nor is anyone going to drag the ruskies to court for that matter, either.

International law only applies when someone has the will to apply it, and the power to do it. The sad reality is that 90% of the time the law is broken by those who have the power, and another 9% of the time it broken by those who have the backing of power. So everyone just shrugs and moves on, with the occasional Assange thrown in jail here or there for the horrible crime of actually exposing what had been done. What remains of actual justice I can not consider anything but show trials for photo ops; ceremonial proceedings of self-licking ice cream cones.

Any law that does not apply universally to everyone is a farce, and international law is pretty much as far as it can be from applying univerally. There is nobody in the world to make it happen, and for a fun fact, for the bodies of justice like the ICJ that would have the authority, although not the power, the US does not even recognize them, lest it be slowed down in it's matters.

First of all, there is no such actual thing as international law. The closest thing that we have to that is that the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must, which was already the observation 2400 years ago, and still stands. Whether it's the US doing the Middle East, Russia doing Ukraine, of now Israel doing Gaza, if there is no one to uphold the International Law, it is meaningless. When the International Court of Justice calls for the prevention of genocidal acts in Gaza, and the UN reminds everyone that it is binding, what is the worth of any of this if Bibi just goes on killing, and Joe goes on sending him the bombs? Nothing. It's just word salad useful for nothing more than to dress up people you don't like.

Second, it should be painfully obvious that every nation has propaganda. Take a moment to think what propaganda actually means - it is the public propagation of government position on policy matters. It's as simple as that, but it has some important considerations. We all know that governments have interests that differ from those of their populace, and we all know that because of this governments are known to lie, especially in the matters of war. Governments feel a great need to give their populace a purpose, and identity, and a shared outlook on things, this makes governing oh so much easier, but also, worse in outcomes. So it is our job as patriotic citizens to connect the dots on this, to see things for what they are, and to call things what they are, so that we might set our governments up to higher standards. Every government on this Earth tells it's people their local equivalent of "we are the manifest destiny exceptional nation, under God, truth, and justice, both in general, and especially in this current situation in particular", and any country it is just as bullshit as in any other one. That we in any nation lack the ability to see this is a testament to the fact that propaganda does indeed work.

Now for the particular issues claimed in that triggering post of GP. Coup - check out the infamous phone call between the then assistant secretary of state Vicky Nuland and ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, where they discuss who are they going to make Ukraine's post-Maidan prime minister. Neo-nazis - kinda meh for me, Russians have a tendency after WWII to call everyone they don't like fascists. On the other hand, nazi insignia is commonly found in social media coming from the frontlines, with the Azov batallion actually having the Wolfsangel as their official insignia. On the third hand, every populace is going to have nazis, and the army is the main place where you want to put them, if you want to get something other than crime out of them. Lighting Russians on fire - check out the Trade Unions House fire. These points are all real, they are not all the points, nor everything that can be said about the events, but you can not just handwave them away by calling OMG LIES!!1, it will not help your argument, nor will it help your public image in the conversation.

Proxy wars and whatnot, this is how great powers and cold wars work. You usually don't want them to get too hot, but you still need to measure against each other to settle matters. So every once in a while you find some poor sucker nation that cannot help but to get pulled into your dick waving contest, and you go and double team wreck it. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, now Ukraine, to name those that everyone should know.

As to whether you should read a wall of text, if you want to form an informed and argued worldview, you should cultivate na ability to tackle texts longer than a twitter thread. But hey, at least you did not call me /google/ translated...

It's not Russia that has lost the plot, it's the Western populace. And it's no wonder either. Ever since the orange guy got elected we have had non-stop Russia hate thrown at us from every angle, only paused to make room for the bi-weekly China hate. It was going to get to us sooner or later, you cannot live in this pressure forever without getting cooked, and it has done us in, and nobody can see anything but the red of their bloodshot eyes anymore. I might even say that it has reached brain damage levels in our Western societies. So maybe the real Havana syndrome was the hate we made along the way after all... But I welcome you to consider this: do you think our leaders act on these matters filled with the same hate we are now entertaining, or do they keep a level head, and discuss and decide in a rational manner, maybe during a lunch, or with a glass of bourbon in the evening? One would think that surely they must keep a level head, lest they make mistakes in their judgement. So let me entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, so should we strive to keep a level head, lest we make mistakes in our judgement...

What Russia is doing is what any other country does. It is looking out for it's interests, with whatever tools it has available. There is no news in that. Since it was denied a peaceful say over it's security interests in Ukraine, it took to the only other path that it had left, the war path. You know the analogy, disregard the revolution mentioned here, but you should get it - those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable... Russia did say for years that Nato in Ukraine was a red line and was going to lead to war, and this culminated in an ultimatum before the war. All of this was ignored by the US, didn't really make the media either, the US just pushed on, and then acted shocked, I tell you, shocked, as if the war was somehow a surprise and unprovoked.

But there is a cycle to how that stuff works out with Russia, and this goes back a thousand years already. Obviously if you look at it from the "several years" perspective, you are left like a deer in headlights. It seems to be part of the American condition that the concept of history as a meaningful progression of cause and effect relations is somehow very much overrated; that history is something for the nerds, that history just does not apply, that it just does not have any relevance whatsoever. But for a country like Russia history is everything, and they act based on what they have learned from it. And what basically all of Russian history boils down to is two storylines. 1) Russia wants to be part of Europe(now the West). Europe says sure, just change your uncultured ways and be the same like us. Russia says I can work on it, see? Europe says look at that idiot, funny, isn't he. Russia gets pissed and takes it out on some poor schmuck. 2) Russia says we can be friends, right? Everyone says sure. While Russia is busy otherwise, someone, more recently someone from the West, builds an army and invades.

Yes Russia also invades others. But it's not like we are any better either. Europe did not give up it's colonies because of a change of heart, it did so because it was too messed up after WWII to keep hold of them. Matter of fact, France still has quite a few in Africa, Britain still has the Commonwealth, and so on. US just spent 20 years fucking up the Middle East based on lies upon lies, not blinking an eye for any change of government of president, and every other country in the West was happy to join in. The death toll of these forever wars was 5M, and you know what? The drones are still in the air turning brown people into red mist over there! Half of us can not point out any of those countries on the map, and most of us don't know most of those have had anything happening at all, much less so that the US or the West has been involved in them. Nobody else this century comes close to the level of mayhem the US has unleashed on the world, the war in Ukraine is an order of magnitude smaller a happening. So one might stop to question that the US govt has no more the moral authority on these matters than the pot has to call the kettle black.

The most recent cycle of Russia/West relations was Obama's thaw with Russia, which was killed by Hillary with the destruction of Libya and the death of Gaddafi, and finalized by her giving speeches to the Russian people to rise up against Putin during the Moscow Spring. The result of this was Putin replacing his city liberal voters with country conservatives, and his our decried social injustice policies that followed from that. Then there was the cycle before that, when Slick Willie was basically running the fledgling post-Soviet Russian economic policy, resulting in the creation of the oligarchs, the crisis of 1998, and culminating in the ascent of Putin to power. If the US had a concept of history, it would surely learn from such mistakes, but alas... I cannot really for the love of me think of a single instance of the US learning from history.

But the most important movement to understand what is going on is the expansion of Nato in general, and Nato expansion to Ukraine in particular. It should be obvious to anyone with any sense of history, war and statecraft, that Russia can never and will never allow Ukraine to join Nato. Ukraine is the number one route to invade Russia, whether you go by land, or by sea via Crimea, as Moscow is just a stones throw away from the Ukranian border. Both Napoleon and Hitler went through Ukraine, and it is as obvious as daylight to Russians that now the US is coming for them there, too. To put that into perspective, imagine if Canada or Mexico became part of a Russia/China military alliance, and imagine what the US would be willing to do to prevent that... Or just remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. But you do not have to take my word for it, either. How about George Kennan? There was and still is literally no authority greater than him on all matters of Cold War and Russian policy - and he called that the expansion of Nato already into Central Europe was the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. US diplomats have warned ever since the reunification of Germany that Nato expansion was going to end up in a war with Russia, most probably in Ukraine. You can get some background here https://www.theguardian.com/co... , but I encourage you to actually seek out and read what has been written and said on this matter. That the US politicians have ignored these warnings of their diplomats for 30 years of policymaking leaves only one conclusion - that they have not cared about, or have actually been actively seeking out this war. But it is obvious that as long as Russia as a state exists, they will not give up on keeping Nato out of Ukraine, and to go for the end of the Russian state is to go for nuclear war. What the end game for this is in the heads of our policy makers, I cannot think of anything. But considering that the owner of project Ukraine, no.3 in US Victoria Nuland, was recently retired out of a career that seemed so far to be going quite well, gives me hints that there never was much plan at all, and she the US was just winging it as is usual.

Now back to the TFA, as to whether there is anything behind the Havana syndrome, my guess is prolly not. The whole thing is only useful as a plot device for the hate minutes. As a weapon targeted at low and mid-level diplomats it doesn't make any sense at all. There is no gain, no motive, no purpose. If they just wanted to test this, they would not need US diplomats. If they wanted to spread panic, they could find much better plays and targets. And most importantly, let me give you this. There is a certain regular happening in the doctors office. Someone comes in suspecting they have head lice. To substantiate their worries they have a matchbox containing maybe a dozen pieces of the tiniest stuff, single grains of sand and whatnot, suspected to be louse eggs and such. What they are crucially lacking though, is actual lice, nowhere to be found. Having even one actual louse would settle the matter, but so does having zero, just in the opposite direction. But for some reason this requires the doctor to spell it out for them, and to prescribe a beefsteak and a pint of porter for every lunch for as long as it takes for the tortured psyche to snap out of it. So the same for the microwave gun. Get your hands on one, go and even get some spectrum scanners and get some recordings. Anything at all to get an actual material claim that there is something. As long as you cannot provide the simplest of actual evidence, my take is the fifties called and they want their commie scare b-movies back.

That now leaves just the question of why does the public need to be hyped up on to the hate train like this? First of all is the obivous issue of perception management. You need to be seen as the good guys, especially if you have been working up towards trouble for 30 years. If you lose the ability to posture as the good guy, you are left as being just one rando asshole against another rando asshole in a stupid bar fight, and your voters might even remember that wait a bit, these politicans of us are the same ones who have lied to us about every single previous war ever, so why would we believe them this time? Second, as everyone of us is certainly aware, the congress is less popular than syphilis for quite some time now, and for a reason, and the reason applies to all of the other institutions as well. The country is mismanaged to a catastrophic degree with joblessness, homelessness and healthcarelessness rising, infrastructure rotting everywhere and with the young'uns never going to own homes. And every four years we con ourselves to believe that one of those jerks is going to come in and be the Saviour for us. So in this kind of a situation the only thing you can do to maintain popular support for the status quo is to rally your people against a common enemy. The rising level of rallying needed I take to be a measure of the rising level of dysfunction we have to be distracted from. Caveat emptor.

There ain't no place I'd rather be

Baby won't you carry me...

Nobody wants to conquer the US. But everyone would be really happy if they got the US out of their business. The US has been at war with most of it's existence. What's new is that peak US seems to be in the rear view mirror now, and this has given the rest of the world enough relative strength to manage to fight back. The hate towards US is real, but the US does not need to go about sustaining it, like e.g. the forewer wars main loop. Bomb some brown people - you turn some of them against you - they will attack you - bomb again - more will turn against you and attack you - rinse and repeat. Leave them fsckin be and you will discover they leave you be, too.

In general, other nations are neither bad nor good, they're just different, and have interests that differ from the US interests. This does not have to be made into a zero sum game. But the problem is that if you have empire tools like armies and spooks and coups available, like the US does, the tendency is to put them to work, lest you pay them to do nothing. But the more you use them, the more enemies you make, and the less your diplomacy is able to do. This is a vicious circle, and has resulted in a world that is divided into two: the West, consisting of countries that are suzerain to the US, that is, they depend on the US for protection, and give up independent foreign policy in return, and the rest of the world, which has been regular subject to the US empire tools, and therefore hates it's guts. Of course this is difficult to explain to the people while keeping face, so you get gems like "they hate us for our freedoms".

But the idea that anyone would want the US way of life is just a meme pushed by the leadership. There is nothing original about this though, it's part of the standard textbook of empire justification. If you are about to fsck some other people up, you need to motivate your soldiers, and persuade your people into believing the killing and subjugating that is about to go down is a morally good act. But the reality is everyone just wants to be left alone with their own way of life. The superiority of any other peoples way of life is as obvious to those other people as the superiority of the US way of life is obvious to the US people. Anyone who would believe you can just go and push your way of life, at gunpoint or not, and it would be happily taken up, really doesn't have much perspective at all into the human condition.

You are right that history matters. Countries like China and Iran have thousands of years of it. It's not just a source of national pride, it is a source of experience, of good times and bad, of statecraft, and understanding of existence, and coexistence, and of making friends, and enemies. The US, the new kid on the block, is sorely lacking in this, and so it often tends to solve every problem like the schoolyard bully. But this is not the first rodeo for those people, they will outlive this. Empires come and go, so will this one.

Funny thing is, during the cold war the US was doing a great job in analyzing what made other countries tick. This is no longer the case. Just as in here it is now impossible to point out e.g. what Russia has going for it wrt Ukraine, lest you be considered a Putin troll, so the US leadership has drank it's own Kool-Aid and made it impossible for any such thing to be pointed out in DC also. But make it impossible to point out the strong points of your enemy, and you make it nigh impossible to make a winning play, and you will get what is coming for you.

And this ties back into the bigger picture of US vs. China. The fun fact is, in the Thucydides trap, the war never happens because the rising power somehow felt the need to squish what was already on it's way out. The war happens because the declining power hopes to squish the rising power. The problem with that is that the rising power is rising becaue of competence in managing it's matters, and the declining power is declining because it has traded in competence in managing it's matters for competence in internal power struggle. When it becomes easier to make career in the capital city as a yes-man instead of a statesman, and the impossibility of pointing out the strengths of your enemy is an indicator of that, the inevitable is pretty much locked in. All we can hope is that this time we luck out and go about this without a war, it's not the usual way this goes, but it does happen every once in a while.

People have a basic need to have someone good and just in the world, and to be on the side of the good and the just, and be one of them. They will find someone to attribute these qualities to, mostly based on this someone's opposition to someone else that is percieved as bad. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that; the possibility that the enemy of my enemy might just be another my enemy escapes people 99,999% of the time. If people do not have someone to fill the good guy spot, they feel the existential dread of walking above the abyss, so they will not stop at any mental gymnastics required to have and keep that spot filled.

If the all-too-common happens and the guy in the good guy spot discredits himself, whatever he did is handwaved away as "it doesn't matter", "his hand was forced by powers beyond his control", "he had to make a tough choice" and so on; in this defense mode Russians will regard the millions of people killed by Stalin as nation building, and the Americans will regard the dead of the Ukrainian war as a nice boost to the US military industrial economy. But once it happens that the good guy becomes inescapably unsalvageable, people will attach to the next one basically overnight. Much like the hatchling attaches to any moving thing as the parent as it exits the shell. And once the new object of attachment is found, people will rewrite their own history and convince themselves that they were with this guy right from the start.

Politics of course abuses this dynamic, going at it with a hard-on. The good ol' everyday power struggle of different interst groups, with no principles or morality ever in sight, is always framed as a the final fight between good and evil. Empty words and phrases are paraded, to have people fill them with whatever meaning they want to hear, and to attribute to your camp whatever values they want to see in their camp. The enemy is at the gates, there is only us to stop them, if only you could support us and sign here, here, and here, thank you... Give some time and you find out you signed away your soul, well you probably still have a lot of it left, you see, your are the good guy still, never mind all of the corruption, stealing and murder you seem to have ended up supporting, you are the good guy, and so is now this guy you support, yes, he really is the one.

Stewart is definitely right on that, and I was definitely one to advocate for his presidency back in the day. The sad nature is that something being right does not mean it's going to happen.

I guess Bidens minimum wage, union and student debt work is better than nothing. Then again he added more to Trump Wall, which tbf should probably be called by some other name, Trump just did a 9% expansion to it. Children are still in the cages on the border. Guantanamo is still open, drones are still blowing up brown people overseas.

Young people are still never going to own homes, two thirds of the country is still one hospital visit away from being homeles... Life is still getting worse by the day for the majority of the people. Nothing has fundamentally changed, to put it in the words of Bidens own campaign promise to his donors.

But maybe most importantly, Biden took all of the aid that was going to Ukraine and is now shipping it to Israel, to aid with Bibi's ongoing Gaza genocide. The world is looking on this aghast, and all the US can think of is to solve the PR problem by getting their hands on TikTok to stop the spread of video evidence. This might end up being Bidens most important legacy.

Covid is in the air, carried by aerosol water droplets breathed, sneezed, and coughed out by infected people, and when you breathe that air there is a high chance you get infected; it's the main infection vector it has. That's a textbook case of what airborne means. The idea that there is anything off or unclear about it is a meme pushed by the powers that be, to escape the inconvenient responsibilities that logically follow from the fact. Seriously, take a look at e.g. the Covid science Twitter, there is a healthy community of scientist still working and sharing results there, a community which, by the way, was supressed as misinformation right from the beginning of the pandemic. Actual virologists and geneticists working on making sense of the virus, exacly the people you would want to amplify everywhere, suppressed and kept from the media under both the Trump and Biden admin, because the science did not align with the politics of the pandemic management. Did I say pandemic management? I really meant to say mismanagement and criminal negligience.

Nobody is saying it's the job of Biden to identify disease behaviour. This job was done already long before him by people who work on this. It's the job of whatever president is in the office at the time to take this information and enact a plan to get results on the disease. This never happened, didn't happen under Trump, didn't happen under Biden either. The curve was flattened to some extent, lip service was paid, and a lot of noise was made, but in the end the priority under both presidents was keeping the economy open, that is, keeping the money flowing into the donor class pockets, disregarding any effect it had on the lives, and health of the populace.

Not saying that there was any other place in the world that did much better. The Chinese did the best, having zero-Covid policy for quite some years, until in the end they gave up also. But the disease is still going around. Getting it gives no permanent immunity, and every time you get it, there is a chance of getting long Covid, and being disabled to x extent for y time, possibly for life - nobody really knows yet, but there are enough people who haven't been able to work 4 years now. And what's more, have you noticed the mystery disease outbreaks we have been having often in the recent years? Might that have something to do with e.g. the fact that a third of the US populace was allowed to contract Covid, an immune system damaging disease, and now the people are a free meal for anything that comes our way?

As to whether one should rip out the existing ventilation, instead of paying an extra 1% into the military budget or whatnot, the leadership have shown their priorities, and that's all there is to it. Never mind that in addition to the dead, basically the whole set of the young'uns have been given organ damage and immune system problems by being forced back to school, which has been nothing but a continuous nationwide superspreader event. The legacy of this will be with us for a long time. But again, priorities.

So I'm both weak sauce and spinning it as hard as I can. Got it.

My man, if the number of deaths is not meaningful to you, you have major shortcomings in the being-a-human-being department. It should be rather obvious to anyone that there is nothing more meaningful than that.

As to the supposed cleanup, should maybe admitting that basic factual reality that covid is airborne be part of it? Should getting proper ventilation to schools and worplaces be part of it? Is it somehow Trumps doing that nothing has been done on that front during Bidens presidency? Is it somehow Trumps fault that the US right now still has 940k active cases, a year after the Biden admin declared the pandemic over?

I get the Trump hate, I really do, but the fact that one guy is bad does not make the other guy good. Real life is not a stupid Hollywood flick where you always have a hero to save the day. Real life is more like just real life, where everyone sucks and then you die.