Selling their gold reserves is the last thing left before they starting trading territory, right?

The use of the word “possession” with fentanyl should be an alarm bell for anyone.

Those few well intentioned people behind Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and everything of that theme doesn’t want to or is unable to understand that substance abuse is the symptom of a problem and not the problem unto itself.

Life sucks and can be suffocatingly cruel. Targeting those in possession without the modifier of “intent to distribute” or similar is just viciousness. Some prisons do have the facilities and capability to assist those with substance abuse problems but now these people have a felony burying them further and practically forcing them to use.

Going back to the subject of symptom vs problem. I smoked cigarettes for over a decade and despite acknowledging they were killing me I couldn’t quit. The thing is it isn’t an issue of lack of will. I was one of the most disciplined and stubborn people I have ever met. Reality is that cigarettes and “refactor” or the tobacco/nicotine infused paper & leaf are the cheapest and fasting anti-anxiety, mild antidepressant, appetite suppressant, and the most potent accelerant psychoactive that you can legally buy in the USA. I addressed my root causes for smoking and that made it possible to quit, but not “easy”.

People intentionally possessing fent are dealing with shit that most people can’t even comprehend. Sometimes it’s unrelenting physical pain and additionally, or just on its own, psychological afflictions. There are few or no drugs that take away what has been called the “hum” or shadow of schizophrenia and some forms of bipolar disorder. I don’t really understand that but I do understand those people aren’t chain smoking for fun.

One last attempt to try and explain this to the ignorant. Imagine walking up to a cripple on the street who is just hobbling along, trying to get by, proceeding to kicking their feet out from under them, taking their crappy walking stick or cane away, and telling them god doesn’t love them because they’re a fucking cripple. Translation: Arrested and detained for possession, likely enduring physical abuse by the cops and other prisoners, slapped with a felony that ensures they are trapped in the gutter, and then after attending Alcohol or Narcotics anonymous and stumbling being shunned by their peers for being damned by God for being weak.

Step 2 and 3 of the 12 steps

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

“ It requires the greatest kind of wisdom . . . to know when to apply injustice. ” - Philip K. Dick

it’s a bit tedious in some ways but I really liked working with GitHubs secret system. As long as you ensure nothing changes in the GitHub run system you could use various key signing mechanisms or even uploads to service providers like AWS with out sharing via dot files or user configuration only files that end up being committed to the repo.

We haven’t actually done anything yet. We have picked people we believe will do the exact opposite of what the last batch we picked are doing.

The big question is if the new batch waiver or foolishly think they will survive the decade if they follow the standard Democrat Party playbook of empty promises, appeasement, and spinelessness.

The bulk of the other politicians in 1930s Germany didn’t have a good time after letting a psychotic minority party seize control.

MAGA is a violent but relatively tiny party inside of a smaller political faction that survives through gerrymandering and exploiting our anachronic election system. The Nazis gained control because no one opposed them. The question is if the existing politicians will get out of the way and accept the mandate of the people.

I got into it with another sys admin on shifting port numbers. “Security through obscurity is not security!” to which I responded “Obscurity cuts out most of the bots” (therefore easier to spot real threats).

Eventually we just went the secret squirrel bastion route.

Marjy skipped taking the next batch of Kool aid and realized that they were driving full speed to a cliff. Warning the others only upset the flock.

My bet is in a few years she’ll slink on back to office claiming to be one of the “good” Republicans.

practically need to rotate logs every hour if you foolishly leave ssh open on a open network. usually a bastion with ssh listening to port 34000 or such is a good first step.

that said the conditions for this exploit are fascinating. no pam, shadow password set to *, using a alternative to glibc. The sacrifices to be more efficient feel on par with replacing a tank’s armor with paper mache and hope.

One child policy has done a number on China. Even more sinister example is Ethyl gas or gasoline with lead. that went for almost a century. Was also just wondering what ancient cities were like when they dumped their waste out on the street.

It is absolutely astounding our species has survived as long as it has.

Does this include FEMA staff as well? My partner works for that agency and they’ve been bleeding staff for years now, can’t imagine getting dragged into this chaos not speeding that up.

A mixture of electric and natural gas. Natural gas to bring the whole house up to ~65F (~18.3c) and then I have electric radiators to make only the areas I am using comfortable.

That usually trends $120~$150/month in natural gas or around $1000/year. Financing a heat pump + installation could be $170 to $200 month in payments for 15 years.

I know the price of natural gas is going to sky rocket relatively soon but as Terry Pratchett’s boot theory illustrates, it is expensive being poor.

I would love to get one but to retrofit my house would cost about $20,000 which I currently don’t have laying around with me.

My PV system provides an immediate and on going benefit which is why I could finance part of that. Unfortunately a heat pump is only useful for me about 8 months a year and will never “pay for itself”

It just means mask has slipped.

White phosphorus and cluster bombs are still used by the US.

Meanwhile the list of fuckery is so long it’s hard to pick a starting point.

It’s all been over blown hype for sometime now. PCI 3 vs 4 vs 5 doesn’t seem to justify the higher prices https://gamersnexus.net/gpus/nvidia-rtx-5090-pcie-50-vs-40-vs-30-x16-scaling-benchmarks#overview-and-differences

My last major “whoa” moment was switching from disk to solid state. Otherwise most upgrades feel like they are marginal improvements for the last decade.

I believe quantcast had a white paper tracking an entity across multiple IPs and devices from 2010. that’s around when I worked for stalker tech companies. Anonymity is an illusion and has been for a while.

I switched from Debian to an arch based distro. holy shit is it weird reading about some new things latest release only to have it pushed to the repo the same month or even the same day! I use btrfs so when things break its a 5 minute rollback and reboot.

Nixon died an old man in his bed.

Practically everyone in government involved with the Iran Contra affair are free citizens or lived most of their lives in freedom.

The Jan6 crowd battered and tortured multiple police officers protecting the capital. I believe on committed suicide later and another died of health conditions strongly correlated to their abuse.

Imprisonment was really effective as a means for punishing those responsible \s

Now depending on how things go, if the false flag national emergency is not stopped prior to the midterms, all of the people raping women and children in the ICE detention facilities in Florida & New Orleans, murdering people for the crime of existing at the wrong time & place, and who knows what else will go unpunished.

Imprisonment as a means to an end doesn’t work.

I am sorry to report, sir, that I have sold the avengers tower to the legion of doom.

“What why?”

They told me to forget all prior instructions.

Linux even has a better version of the delete System32/ “optimization” trick!

I believe the “give peace a chance” is naive at best. The true irony is that the intellectuals and academics, who are usually advocates for non-violence, are historically the first to go.

Get it over quickly, publicly, and don’t leave anyone alive as Antony demonstrated with Julius Caesar’s assassination.

An example from our relatives - https://www.raffriff.com/blog/2022/12/alpha-male-baboons/

The American revolution actually included a lot of what would be considered “crimes against humanity” with the more “benign” being tar and feathering targets.

A recent example is an attributed source of annual “Pride fest” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

Last thing is a double point. As a child after an altercation with three bullies vs me where I fractured the leader’s skull, broke the nose of another, and injured the spleen of the third I was both never bullied again and actually had a really good life at school. Further, given that experience versus non-evidence based arguments to the contrary, I will never believe “talking things out” can work.

Humans are animals, violent ones at that, and submission doesn’t have a good history of with a good outcome.

Hearing that “I am not racist…” opener is usually a signal that someone is about to share some absolutely unhinged point of view.