It’s just full of ‘member this’ call back and line repeats word for word of iconic quotes just like Disney Star Wars. Soulless reanimated monstrosity living via 20th century nostalgia. Countless inconsistencies and breaks from precedent in the rest of the series.

Warning: spoilers of the plot of Alien Romulus

About the only good thing I have to say about it is they didn’t do the Prometheus thing that you see with many other IPs where a prequel has much more advanced looking tech in it than sequels that in real life were produced decades ago because of a desire to look futuristic for current audiences at the expense of consistency and feel of the universe. I liked that but it’s not enough to salvage it and is really probably just nostalgia slop same as Disney Star Wars so not sure it’s really a brave decision.

Biden just endorsed Kamala according to news coming across the wire.

Still remember to remind Democrats that you can’t vote for her or anyone else because the primary and thus the people in our totally healthy, totally democracy CHOSE Joe Biden and that he was undemocratically forced out by unelected media, donors, and insider. As such you’re either withholding your vote in protest of slap to the face of Democratic voters who CHOSE Joe fair and square or writing in Joe.

After all people don’t vote for a ticket for its vice president who is a place-holder at most, often a compromise with the visions of the candidate. They vote for the candidate, so it’s not at all fair to say votes for Joe were votes for Kamala or transferable to her. Just repeat this at liberals and watch them malfunction and lose it as they cope with their impending loss.

Better person? Probably not from our perspective. Different? Possible.

If he genuinely thinks that this was some sort of message from the deep state he might become a lot more pliable for them in his second term. Which would delight liberals who would celebrate his increasing deference to carrying out US imperialism and call him presidential for it but obviously be a bad thing. I mean he seems narcissistic and if he does see this as a shot across his bow and his life flashed before his eyes he might decide it’s not worth crossing those particular people on things because his life is in their hands and they’ve demonstrated it in a very, very visible way. Oh it won’t impact domestic policies and repressions because the imperialist violence apparatus doesn’t care about those one way or the other.

On the campaign I think there’s a good chance he tones down the rhetoric and tacks a little towards the American center (right) to try and really maximize his victory margins since he has his base more in the bag than ever now and there are plenty of frightened liberals who could be convinced he’s less of a threat if he acts less threatening for the next few months and seems to be changed. He might also be genuinely scared of more attempts and attempt to ward them off by appearing more conciliatory. Because it’s obvious the people supposed to protect him (secret service) didn’t (for whatever reason and they certainly at the least look incompetent if not complicit) and he has no power while not elected and in-power again to change that.

Edit Let me excerpt from PSL’s statement something I strongly agree with:

Trump is reportedly rewriting his speech, which had originally been an all-out attack on Biden, to focus more on themes of national unity. With leading capitalists extending him an olive branch, Trump could calculate that his best move would be to move in a “moderate” direction and demonstrate to fellow members of the ultra-rich elite that he can be a unifying, “presidential” figure and present strength for the Empire. Trump has no fixed ideology and solely cares about his image and legacy.

Kaspersky should just ignore it.

They should 1) Continue to provide updates, 2) do their utmost to prevent blocking of updates, provide updates through tor or some other service that makes it very, very hard to block for the US. 3) Do what US VPN providers did when they couldn’t do business in Russia anymore which is give all existing customers free usage of the product until such time the market is available again.

Further they should start openly attributing to the US spyware they uncover instead of doing their usual diplomatic analysis of “looks similar to many western government associated actors”.

What annoys the shit out of me about this conversation that’s going to be had is if they had fears about them taking data and files well they could pass a law that applies to all AV companies and applies strict privacy policies to them but they’d never do that because all western backed AV and info-sec companies are infested up to the gills if not literally founded by funded by national security state ghouls (former of course they’d claim but no such creature).

Sadly Kaspersky are kind of like many Russians, too diplomatic, eager to bend the knee. They should absolutely do what western companies into the anti-Russian propaganda did but in reverse, claim it’s their duty to continue protecting their customers especially in repressive western states.

They will absolutely sue of course. They regularly sue copyright trolls and all kinds of others but as I understand it this kind of listing is basically entirely at the pleasure of the US government and they can just sit in court and keep repeating nothing but the words “national security, sources classified, trust us” and win the case because commerce dept I believe has authority to sanction whoever they please.

Just a warning, this page tries to load resources from a url (africa [dot] thesmalladventureguide [dot] com) which is identified as being malicious and involved in malware payload delivery. This may be a false positive (though multiple products are concurring via virustotal) but exercise caution. Consider viewing article via an archive link.

Probably SocGholish campaign. Looks like they tend to rely on directing victims to fake update sites to execute malware downloads so not high risk. Most likely original site is legitimate but compromised.

It is alarming. I really hope China has put all effort into acquiring more nuclear weapons as fast as possible and putting them on their most advanced hypersonic missiles.

Because a credible threat of not just 300 but 600 or 1000 such weapons is the only thing that can dissuade the west from pulling the nuclear trigger themselves. The Chinese need to have enough deterrence to leave no chance in the minds of western bourgeoisie and planners that if they hit China, even if they take out 25% of their retaliatory capability, that China will have enough to destroy every major US city, ever major US military base, bunkers, industry, ports, infrastructure, staging locations in vassal states like Japan, occupied Korea, Australia, Philippines. They need to have such a deterrent that the western planners can’t argue themselves into thinking that they can hide in a hole and come out on top after. To know for a fact their means of production, their entire military apparatus, the overwhelming majority of their labor force will be thrown into the fire and they’ll win nothing.

The opinion is less interesting than the facts, the increasing rhetoric from the new leader of the rebellious province taken with US angling, taken with the fact that RAND study said the US had until 2026 before China overtook them militarily and it certainly seems like the stage is being set for a near term independence declaration and conflict in the SCS over Taiwan.

Given that there are elements of the bourgeoisie and state desperate to take down China and force the reluctant elements of the bourgeoisie/corporations to join in decoupling, the most realistic plan for that is instigating a conflict over Taiwan, declaring that the US and EU must “stand with democracy” as they did with Ukraine and forcing companies and countries in the case of the EU to decouple suddenly and harshly from China over it while blasting propaganda at the citizenry to get them riled up in an anti-China fervor so they don’t even notice or get angry at anyone but China for the first couple years as prices skyrocket, as supply shortages cripple the economy and so on.

Unfortunately such conditions will not likely lead to enough class consciousness for a progressive revolution of any kind but rather lead to isolationism, reaction, the working class in the imperial core being chained even further, forced into lower living conditions, forced into a kind of rentier-serfdom as the powers that be try and reshore and friendshore. The real problem with this plan occurring in time for the US to think it can win is that US foundries for chips and such won’t be anywhere near operational by 2026.

But ultimately winning a military conflict against China is not necessary for defeating it according to the plans they have. Those plans call for economic isolation of it, embargo, sanction, strangle. And for that they need outrage, they need a cause celebre, they need war propaganda. Though another problem with Taiwan is that unlike with Ukraine it won’t hold out for months. If the PLA decides to swoop in they can crush it with incredible violence and secure it within a week. If they decide to embargo and turn the screws to save lives versus an invasion while bombing military targets and formations it still likely won’t hold out for more than a few months and communications will likely be cut very shortly into things meaning they won’t have as much video propaganda to go on. At least I hope the Chinese are wise enough to cut submarine cables to Taiwan to isolate it from the western internet and propaganda as part of such a strategy. Though I suppose the western media can simply rely on making up Ghost of Kiev type stories about the break-away rebels fighting back, perhaps use video AI to “illustrate” such ideas and not disclose that it is the case right away along with lots of scary shots of Chinese military ships in formation and any initial videos that get out.

No matter how you dice it, it seems likely if not certain that Americans and probably Europeans are within the next 5 years going to find themselves without access to many Chinese goods, certainly the electronics market everything from hard drives to motherboards to graphics cards and smartphones will see spiking prices and probably severe shortages depending on how bad it gets. Just look at an artificial, engineered shortage in the prices of SSD’s because Samsung cut production to drive prices up and Micron of course did nothing to increase production because they like higher prices too. Check the price of a 1tb ssd 18-24 months ago compared to now, dramatic increases, from $60 to $100 often.

Even if the US doesn’t pull off a dramatic decoupling by war, they’ve shown with the solar panel tariffs that they’re willing to destroy the planet in some vain, idealistic hopes that they can forcibly revive domestic manufacturing and consumption by keeping out Chinese goods which only shrinks the market, hits the proletariat, etc so there’s no reason to expect that cheaply priced quality Chinese goods and components in goods from other countries will continue to flow.

The date may be much later but the US is definitely pulling out all the stops to try and make it happen eventually and slap up a hard wall for high technology. The recent comments by the occupied Korean government about their need to invest in chip-making shows the US doesn’t want to put all its chips so to speak in making chips in the US and realizes they may need help with that. Sacrificing Taiwan still means they have the puppets of occupied Korea and Japan to put such production into. Both of which they can manipulate to have lower prices than US production. I could see such a plan in Korea bearing fruit in 5-6 years easily.

China sees at least most of these moves hence their movements to move to Linux and risc architectures before the US can pull the ripcord and leave them stranded within 5-8 years at most.

May their plans fail spectacularly, may the people turn on them sooner than later. However we should all be realistically prepared for a crucible ahead of us that will mean much worse than the loss of cheap electronics treats.

I love how most of the things that incense this writer are things they are correct on which the writer calls misinformation. Things like Assad not doing the chemical attacks, the truth about Russia and Ukraine and US aggression, unspecified “misinformation” on Palestine which was probably too obvious for even Guardian readers and hence the specifics cut. Shows they couldn’t care less about Hitlerite tactics and politics, they’re just alarmed to see anyone spreading the name of communism and secondly that anyone is challenging western narratives and imperialism. And this is ultimately why it’s worrisome, because these two are only going to grow from these dishonest attacks from obvious, serial liar empire shills which is perhaps what they want. As an intersectional coalition that’s class conscious and anti-imperialist is the real nightmare.

rutracker has a lot of good album rips and some artist discography torrents. It’s actually only semi-private. Anyone can register for an account and you need one to use the API to search though you can use yandex with site:rutracker[dot]org set and search for what you want that way without one.

You could always interview for RED as well. You need to do prep and there’s a site for that, educate yourself extensively but it’s not at all impossible to get into if you want.

That’s just music though. While rutracker has some games they don’t focus on retro games, you’d need a more specialized site I think for that. Same with comics/manga.

Here are some links, sorry that they’re from reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/wiki/getting_into_private_trackers https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/6c5dn6/rtrackers_faq_v3/

And of course see the megathread which might help you find what you need in public spaces: https://rentry.co/megathread

Are you saying the US would be on the brink of starvation?

The US is probably one of the biggest agricultural powerhouses in the world. It has a huge amount of farmable soil. It exports tons of agriculture and is a major supplier to many countries including China.

Week six sure Americans might not have bananas and imported tropical fruits on or off-season from South America but they’d still have tons of corn, grain, domestic fruits (apples), domestic nuts, soy, just all kinds of things. I admit in the long-run it’s possible there could be issues with sourcing fertilize but even that I doubt. The US has huge natural gas reserves which can be used to make fertilizer among other things. The sad fact is the US is probably one of if not the best positioned country in the world to survive in near total isolation at some level due to food self-sufficiency and sufficient resources of energy. Add to that all the pasture for animals for slaughter and milk, still unexploited areas which could be converted, two big coasts with access to oceans for fishing. Off the top of my head I think cooking oils might be one of the few immediate problems but that could likely be fixed in an emergency by removing corn from ethanol and starting to convert more of it to corn oil, not to mention existing peanut oil, canola (which as I understand is pretty hardy and easy to grow in tons of places), soy, etc.

I think there would be riots about no new iPhones before you’d see any over food unless it wasn’t being allocated properly at all. Admittedly the prices wouldn’t be nice for the proletariat in the US and there would be some shocks there but there wouldn’t be a need to smuggle in food.

Well in theory the EU states would be obliged to arrest him if he travels to them as would over a hundred others worldwide. As to punishment it would depend on the judgement of the court, the charges convicted on, etc. In a world where everyone including the EU, US, and the entire zionist military-intelligence apparatus intentionally tried to let it happen and throw him to the lions he could go to prison. Obviously that is not our world.

It would certainly make traveling internationally more dangerous for him.

In practice most likely the US and zionist lobby would quickly push Europe to denounce the ICC as anti-semitic and to pull out of the treaty or just not enforce it in this case while the CIA and Mossad jointly blow up the cars of the involved judges, prosecutors, etc and the Belgian government sweeps that under the rug.

Well there’s India and they hate China and would love to help hurt it and have a large population of people living in deep poverty. Of course they probably wouldn’t allow the west to exploit them forever, they’d seek to move up the value chain if the west doesn’t manage to coup them with compradors but it would at the least buy the west a quarter century of thinking time. There are problems there of course, it’s run by extreme religious reactionaries, it doesn’t have the proper infrastructure in many places, etc. But I don’t ever want to be in a position of underestimating our enemies I suppose. As on the one hand I think it would probably take 10 years for India to get into position to take over a lot of this stuff, on the other it’s impossible to tell what they might pull off and my assumptions could be very wrong or outdated.

There’s also how they’re destroying Europe (and the US too), if you lower the quality of life of an area, hit it with neo-liberal shock therapy, gut social services, hit it with harsh inflation that decreases costs of labor and lowers quality of life and puts pressure on people to keep or get jobs just to stay above water, immiserate the population and make them desperate and if they’re quite happy being indoctrinated with liberalism and anti-communism then I see possibilities in the near-term, by 2030. They also have their prison slave population which is near free labor. I fear they are moving for enclosure. Higher prices to deal with the reshoring, more rent-seeking behavior instead of owning things to also deal with consumer inability to afford that. A future where you lose your job and it’s not just your apartment but your TV, your computer, your phone, your blender they repossess and that will be life for the lucky ones. Not so lucky ones, exploited under the table labor, servants for the luckier population, uber drivers, grocery pick-up, we see it already. But I hope I’m wrong and if I am indeed I don’t see anywhere for them to go though things will get very nasty in the west for workers for some time before we have a chance to make them better I fear.

Vile and dangerous cults.

Decoupling happening.

Only question is whether the west will actually manage to incentivize the creation or movement of means of production to replace this tariffed production from China. Certainly there are forces in India that would like to take on this role though the level of corruption and other endemic issues like lack of reliable utilities in many areas there and incomplete transport networks, etc makes it an uphill climb. With enough free money and subsidies it’s possible I suppose given a few years even in the west. In the end succeed or fail this will hurt Chinese exports a bit, hurt US workers who purchase these things and have to pay massively more whether because of tariffs or higher costs from reshored production. At the end of the day this is shooting the foot efforts to mitigate climate change because this will lessen the appeal of moving to green energy, EV’s, etc and it’s pretty predictable at the end of all these high prices Republicans (bad cop) will come in, declare the whole thing a failure and gut the subsidies leading to shrinkage of the whole industry and its usage in the west to being a kind of luxury thing.

So not only is Biden abetting genocide in Gaza, he’s pushing full steam ahead for full-scale eco-cide and the worst climate outcomes. China should really just gut-punch the US already, slap up a total stoppage on things and crash the US economy into the ground. US politicians are already badly hurting the proletariat with these moves and inflation so it would be a matter of getting very bad fast rather than slowly.

This doesn’t seem like straight up retaliation, I mean it’s not a gut-punch, it’s not threatening to severely limit the supply of drugs to the US, just leave the US unable to inspect for health and safety compliance with the pipeline fully open. The US themselves would have to force the issue and literally shoot themselves in the foot and declare they want and will accept shortages (without backing down upon seeing the problem) to cause an issue here so I don’t see this as really leverage against the US decoupling and sanctions regime.

If anything this seems like a gift to western capital that has stayed in China in the form of easing their regulatory compliance worries so they can run more cheaply and dangerously beyond the reach of western regulation.

Yes China could just straight up cut supply to the US but they could do that before this law was passed and that’s a nuclear option. Thing is the US doesn’t really care if lots of its workers die due to adulterated medication or supply crunches (as long as there’s still enough for the “important people”) so it’s unlikely to get them to panic and come to China on hands and knees begging and offering concessions on tech restrictions so they can make sure the drugs are safe for their people. In an absolutist sense yes it’s another thing they can bargain with the US over but it’s a very weak hand compared to the hand the US holds and not equal to the US for example letting China import advanced AI chips or lithography technology. The types of concessions they could likely get for it aren’t IMO likely to change the balance of things.

Now maybe this is an attempt to slow or stymie decoupling which is in fact happening. By preventing Chinese manufacturing knowledge and advancements from being observed and taken abroad to be used in spinning up a reshored factory in India or Vietnam or some soon to be impoverished region of the EU with newly cheap labor.

You see you use the language of liberals which tells me you’re a liberal. Dead give-away. That and the focus on the little puppet-show that is bourgeois democracy and the drama of that being pushed by one side or the other instead of thinking in class conscious proletarian, Marxist terms.

I suppose they refer to the fact the DPRK uses crypto-coins to evade sanctions. It’s not that their whole economy is based on them and really it seems most likely a large amount of the coins they do own have been stolen from the west via hacks so their exposure to actual risk should the whole thing go down in flames is likely to be lower and less impactful than if you as an individual invested in it and the whole thing went down in flames.

Fact is they don’t do a ton of foreign trade so the actual amount of crypto-coins used compared to both total size of foreign trade with friendly countries like China and Russia as well as the total size of their economy which isn’t foreign-trade oriented is pretty small so again it’s not a big risk for them to use them for sanctions evasion whereas the exposure to an individual putting half their savings in crypto is a lot, lot worse.

I’m not particularly an economic expert so take my words with a grain of salt but I don’t see crypto as particularly useful as an investment vehicle, it’s basically a situation where you either got in on the ground floor and got rich off a fluke OR you’re using them to do illegal things like buy narcotics or send funds to sanctioned or designated groups (though with the latter in particular the US can track an trace a lot of the coins back to people eventually so I really wouldn’t risk it). Beyond that I don’t think they necessarily have a lot of value. Most of the big investors got in fairly early so if most of the larger coins were to say lose 30% of their value they wouldn’t be badly hurt whereas you if you bought now and placed your savings in them would be.

Op if you want to be a liberal fool and a pearl-clutching ‘muh precious American democracy’ type kindly find a non-communist instance to post your garbage liberalism to.

Shameful that hexbear allows liberals like you to not only have accounts but clog up their instance and ours with your nonsense liberal conspiracy posts.

Who gives a flying fuck if Amazon charges lib-brained losers $20 to view some pearls-clutcher lib “documentary” about a bunch of speed boat dealership chuds having a little tantrum? Oh no not the precious discourse for fake bourgeois staged democracy!!

Students are being beaten, arrested, and allegedly blacklisted by Zionist orgs for simply peacefully occupying parts of universities to try to stop a genocide and the president of the party I suppose you’d say is better is calling them anti-Semite’s and echoing Hitler in demanding order while arming and defending a genocide.

But sure let’s worry about Jan 6 (a big nothing burger). Rather than the stifling of our very limited real dissent. Let’s do as the liberals want and obsess over the stage play and the process and precious institutions and not the real issues.

Let me join the circle of shame. Having people to latch onto leaving Evangelical Christianity was important to me when I was younger and he was one of those I unfortunately latched onto. Funnily enough all I ever did with him, Hitchens, etc was read their books. Never did the whole parasocial thing of clinging to their every statement and youtube video like so many people do which seems contrary to the nature of atheism as a thing without prophets to follow.

It’s a censorship and surveillance panopticon.

Maybe just don’t use it? Especially don’t use it if you’re on the left? Especially, especially don’t use it for news and organizing if you’re on the left?

I can get the argument (though I don’t respect it and I’ve never let it decide for me) that you need to keep Zuckerbook to keep in contact with grandma. I don’t get the argument that it’s a great place to find an anti-imperialist news feed or to organize people when it’s so transparently hostile and so deeply in bed with the US security state.

You want to view content from Russian funded news, Chinese news, anti-imperialist news? There are these neat things called websites and this other neat thing called the fediverse.

If you have to change a setting you’ve already lost the majority of people and that’s the point of censorship and propaganda, not to control all the people all the time but enough of them.