davel [he/him] @ davel @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

🤷 I have absolutely no doubt that Iran has had mines prepared for blockading the strait for decades, and I don’t think bluffing is Iran’s usual M.O., so I think this is likely regardless of what anonymous US sources say.

The CIA report (PDF): https://web.archive.org/web/20250703012001/https://www.cia.gov/static/Tradecraft-Review-2016-ICA-on-Election-Interference-062625.pdf

The thing is, it’s been known for at least 1½ years that the CIA "Cooked The Intelligence" To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016.

So if anything should happen, know that each incident was by a lone wolf and not a member of any fascist paramilitary organization.

Perhaps. Ultimately they’re heads of the same USAGM hydra.

I enjoyed A Podcast Of Unnecessary Detail. They stopped producing new episodes, though.

Hopefully more people will realize that bourgeois democracy is working as intended, and that it cannot be reformed; it must be replaced.

The [political] killing of Jeremy Corbyn

Broken link. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/taiwan-simulate-chinese-invasion-major-drill-2025-07-01/

VOA is yet another USAGM outlet.

For anyone unfamiliar with this malarkey: Reconciliation (United States Congress)

Budget reconciliation is a special parliamentary procedure of the United States Congress set up to expedite the passage of certain federal budget legislation in the Senate. The procedure overrides the Senate's filibuster rules, which may otherwise require a 60-vote supermajority for passage. Bills described as reconciliation bills can pass the Senate by a simple majority of 51 votes or 50 votes plus the vice president's as the tie-breaker. The reconciliation procedure also applies to the House of Representatives, but it has minor significance there, as the rules of the House of Representatives do not have a de facto supermajority requirement.

The Senate filibuster rules aren’t formal law. They’re rules the Senate imposed on itself over the last hundred years, and it can remove them just as easily. Both parties want these supermajority rules because they don’t want to pass bills that aren’t bipartisan.

So Democrats would have to get 60 seats who never vote against their own party. But it doesn’t ever work that way because there are always some rotating villians in those seats. If necessary, they’ll use other dirty tricks, for instance the Parliamentarian, who blocked a minimum wage increase in 2021. Congress is Kayfabe.

If I cared enough to do the work, I might use a basket of currencies, like special drawing rights.

As of August 2023, the XDR basket consists of the following five currencies: U.S. Dollar 43.38%, Euro 29.31%, Chinese Yuan 12.28%, Japanese Yen 7.59%, British pound sterling 7.44%

It would take a little extra math to exclude the USD allocation from the basket.

I knew where this was going: 1 April 2013

Three red lines was introduced in Aug. 2020. The collapse started in Sept. 2021. It was a centrally planned, managed collapse, with the intent of making the capitalists take the hit instead of the working class. It was very unlike the 2008 one in the US, where no orthodox economist saw it coming, and the government was caught with its pants down, and it ratfucked working class homeowners to save the private banks, who had written bad mortgages that they knew couldn’t be paid.

Don’t forget to

Technology giants Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, and IBM (IBM.N), opens new tab were named as "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."

First as tragedy, then as… also tragedy. IBM and the Holocaust

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation is a book by investigative journalist and historian Edwin Black which documents the strategic technology services rendered by US-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries for the government of Adolf Hitler from the beginning of the Third Reich through to the last day of the regime, at the end of World War II when the US and Germany were at war with each other.

Published in 2001, with numerous subsequent expanded editions, Black outlined the key role of IBM's technology in the Holocaust genocide committed by the German Nazi regime, by facilitating the regime's generation and tabulation of punched cards for national census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity.

modeled after “anti-disinformation” rules that were crafted by the NATOid security racket

Indeed. Previously:

The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach [real media literacy] to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.

This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.

The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”

Also previously.

Capitalism is right-wing; socialism is left-wing. Private property is not about your toothbrush or house, it’s about private ownership of the means of production, which is what capitalism is founded on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit.

Probably spent the weekend on Reddit, where liberal debate bro sophistry is king.

• ☑ Do something every day to help undermine public perception of the empire.
• ☑ Draw attention to its abuses in places like Gaza.
• ☑ Get people laughing at its absurdities and hypocrisies.
• ☑ Spread distrust in the imperial propaganda services known as the western press by spotlighting their deceptions and manipulations.
• ☑ Help people to recognize all the ways their government is screwing them over for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
• ☑ Facilitate the collective dawning of the realization that everything westerners have been taught about their society and their world is a lie.
• ☑ Help people to understand that it really, truly does not need to be this way.
• ☑ Use every means at your disposal to help open up the next pair of eyelids to the ugly reality of the empire.

Do you think we pull these things out of our butts?

• Wikipedia: Three red lines
• EAC Int. Consulting, ~2022: Three Red Lines Policy – Regulating China’s Real Estate Developers
• Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting & Economics, 2024: Real estate inflection point approaching? The Three Red Lines Policy in China and enterprise valuation