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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Where’s the demand for Hamas to end the conflict and to release the hostages?

    Israel hasn’t shown any good faith. I think given the situation, if Hamas completely capitulated it would just hasten their complete extermination.

    I honestly cannot say that Israeli would show restraint in a surrender, they’ve displayed none and their rhetoric hasn’t indicated any.

    If Hamas was to surrender, I don’t think it would lead to peace because Israel does not look like peace is what they want. I think it would lead to millions being murdered because it seems that is what Israel wants.

    I don’t disagree with a need for deescalating the situation and some olive branches being brought out, but Israeli leadership themselves are saying things like the goal is to completely destroy Hamas and Palestinian. That’s genocide talk and Israel hasn’t given us any reason to doubt their ambitions.

    I get what you’re saying, but Israel is taking and acting like the bully in a school fight that doesn’t know when the fight’s over. In three months, one percent of the entire population of Gaza has been killed. When a battle starts hitting significant measurable percentage of the civilian population, a wise nation would pause the hostilities and reassess. Israel has done quite the opposite and tripled down on their incursion.

    There’s no indication that Hamas doing anything to reduce the situation would actually lead to an outcome that would actually reduce the situation. And there’s every indication that doing so would actually speed up their and their civilian population’s demise.


  • And just so everyone remembers this, Lake Gatún is the primary water source for fresh water in the area.

    That little facet plays a non-zero role in any discussion about travel along the canal.

    And for those wondering how a canal “uses” water. At some point a lake that was never connected to the ocean, has some small amount of it discharge into the ocean every time a boat moves through the canal.

    You can use all kinds of partitions and fancy pumps to reduce the amount of salt water that gets in and fresh water that leaves, but you can never get it to zero. There will always be some salt water getting into the lake and some fresh water making it to the ocean. And that value begins to add up when you have thousands of boats.


  • Very light details from the court on this.

    The application to vacate injunction presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is granted. The December 19, 2023 order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, case No. 23-50869, is vacated.

    I would be cautious to read any deeper than that. The issue for the injunction wasn’t “does Texas have a right to protect their border?” The lower court had sided with Texas that the US had waived its sovereign immunity from state tort claims seeking injunctive relief, via the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

    Quick primer for those not knowing. A bill is a purposed thing in Congress, if both chambers approve it and the President signs it, it becomes law. These laws can be something like “The Department of Transportation shall build a highway that connects Wapakoneta, OH to Indianapolis, IN” The Department of Transportation is then allowed to build a road and they have to publish all kinds of rules about how they’re going about building it (because remember the law only says build a road, not where to build it, out what material, etc…). We call this regulation. Regulation is NOT law (as Congress+President can only do that) but can carry the weight of it.

    The APA is a law that sets up a procedure for regulation. Texas had argued that the Biden Administration did not check off all of the boxes required by the APA to remove the razor wire fence that Texas had erected. The Administration had indicated that, Texas was the one violating all kinds of Federal stuff, there isn’t a need to check the specific boxes that Texas indicated in Court because Texas is the one who started this whole mess. The Fifth Circuit agreed with Texas that “Hey look, I get it, Texas is being a weak ass bitch. BUT, APA says so on those check boxes”. It was a really technical win for Texas.

    So it basically boiled down to a question of where those specific line items in the APA are applicable when Texas is the one being the bitch about everything? I’m doubtful SCOTUS viewed this as a larger question about State vs Federal because even the Fifth Circuit (who is very conservative) indicated that the Federal Government was mostly right, BUT, if they didn’t like them forcing that part of the APA on them (the US Government), Congress ought to go back and clarify things.

    EDIT: Oh I guess I should indicate what the whole spat started over. Last October Border Patrol snipped some razor wire fence that Texas had put up. Texas sued for destruction of State Property. That’s what this whole thing is all about. Now that the fence can be fully removed with this order from SCOTUS, it’s likely that Texas will seek recompense for their property (AKA, Texas will attempt to make the US taxpayer pay for the clean up of the fence and the US government will likely want to send the clean up bill to Texas).




  • Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj, carried out his cyber attack using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel television and a mobile phone. He broke into the company’s internal Slack messaging system to declare: “If Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code.”

    I just read some dumb fucking shit from the Wayfair CEO telling everyone they need to blend their personal and work life together because no one is rewarded for laziness, or some shit.

    Bitch! This kid right here is a fucking genius and y’all locking him up for life because his intelligence hurts somebody’s bottom line. That’s the key take away here. Y’all don’t want actually smart and inventive people, you want slaves.

    This kid just MacGyvered the shit out of a triple-A game studio and absolute best we could do is lock him up for life? Ridiculous. This whole capitalism shit is a fraud.


  • Emirati authorities have put in place laws that reflect their values

    Yeah how’s those apostasy laws? Oh! Lookie there, it’s death. Noice. But in fairness I wouldn’t recommend the United States to folks based on my experience of having lived here all my life. So I think it’s fair to live and let live at the end of the day.

    That said, challenging a fine and that challenge resulting in an increased sentence encourages folks to accept guilt when it may not be due. I don’t like it when they do it here in the US, I think it’s fair to indicate that it’s not liked anywhere else.


  • This isn’t the slam dunk folks think it is as Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t broke per se but isn’t getting to dictate a lot of his wealth. And it’s complicated because Kyle is a pawn so trying to state things in terms of “how does this affect Kyle Rittenhouse” is missing a larger point about how Kyle is to the GOP actually useful.

    First off, Kyle’s book bombed. It’s not good. Even for those from the Conservative realm, it’s not a good book. This is likely in that a lot of what was promised by the book was either culled or just never written to begin with given that Kyle is facing civil litigation now and a book giving “full account” would not help his position. But also the author, yeah it’s complicated but most people do not actually write their own biographies, Michael Quinn Sullivan isn’t a good writer. He’s one of the Republican’s think tank folks from Empower Texans which… that’s its own ball of yarn to untangle so I’ll just end it there. I’m sure guy is a great GOP strategist, he just really sucks at writing and you can really feel the “suck” level of his writing in his sci-fi book Finding the Void. But you know everyone has different taste so Sullivan is a more “specific” taste, and Kyle didn’t pick Sullivan, that’s who was suggested to him for his book. And this gets to the point.

    Kyle is a pawn. The GOP is using him for an agenda and Kyle is just looking for a paycheck. And something people should quickly note, don’t rely on the GOP to hand you a paycheck. This shouldn’t be new knowledge, but just in case anyone is out there: You get paid by political organizations based on utility and that’s true for both of them. But there is a caveat to this seeming “both sides” and boy oh boy is it the GOP is some of the most fickle of political groups. With the GOP it can be here today, gone tomorrow like a beach house in a hurricane. Democrats do indeed back away from “troublesome” folks within their own rank, but man GOP people will drop you like you were Cobalt-60.

    And this gets into Kyle’s “foundation”. Right out the door, it’s not exactly doing as well as folks might have hoped. it’s operating at -$60k with 72% of its expense being Charitable Disbursements, which is fancy talk for “someone got paid”. And that’s likely indicative that Kyle’s foundation is being used as a funnel for money for someone else. Which absolutely indicates that Kyle isn’t getting a say in the foundation but boy oh boy is he the face for it. Usually a low revenue, high disbursement means mismanagement and I’m doubting that the far-right folks that helped him set it up put a moron in charge of it. It’s likely that the person they put in charge of it is getting a pay check for (insert wild speculation here). But point being someone is being rewarded that’s not Kyle Rittenhouse.

    “Now that’s what I call being a pawn!”. There’s clearly a lot of people who want to give Kyle Rittenhouse, for whatever reason, money. The thing is, that money is passing though hands that are distinctly not Kyle Rittenhouse’s hands and that’s Kyle’s actual finical issues. Not that he doesn’t have money or he’s not popular enough to rake in money, it’s that he hasn’t been promoted on the chessboard that is the GOP politics to a chess piece that gets to enjoy some of his spoils. He is very much “useful tool” but a lot of the public information about him and his finances show, he is not getting any benefits, or at least very few of them. Someone else (or perhaps the plural version of that) is raking in the cash due Kyle.

    Given the GOP, I don’t think any of this comes off as shocking news to anyone that Kyle’s money is being slowly siphoned from him. Or that true endeavors of his “like his book” are only given token measures of care. That’s a lot of the GOP this day and age. The second someone becomes a nonuseful tool it’s “Phil Valentine who?” Kyle has money, he’s just not allowed to use it. Other people get to use Kyle’s money. That should be the key take away here.







  • the tyranny of majority will emerge

    Which is why in most democracies there are inalienable rights and due process.

    The success of the CEO is dependent of supply and demand, if there are no monopolical privileges

    Unless they are a monopoly. Which most societies have established rules to prevent. Outside of those rules, we’ve seen time and time again such form. Capitalism doesn’t have an inbuilt mechanism that prevents a single person owning everything, that tends to be the problem we run into often.

    Following your logic, the citizens voting him is a perfect clue of this, am I right?

    He’s allowed to follow the process to remove the process. That doesn’t mean that’s a good choice. But yeah, you can absolutely use that logic to follow to that end. That’s the nice thing about democracy it’s flexible enough to become a ship we built to wreck. And voters are empowered enough to sink themselves if they so wish. So I question what freedom is not present currently that you lament the lack of?

    but he’s the only one who explicitly showed that, like donating each month his salary (funded by taxes) and not funding certain political campaigns

    Yeah, that’s not the altruism that it looks like. He’s ultimately picking who is getting that money of his. He’s picking which campaigns to not find funding. That’s the point, not the money part the power part. The money part is one thing, the power part is something that one would be ill advised to lose sight of.

    Citizens has no direct influence in the process of decision politicians make

    They’re not made to. Citizens have oversight and challenge on the wisdom of representatives. It would be unwise to have 500,000 peoples’ hands on the steering wheel. There’s no one direction we would be going in then.

    The term “slave” is not valid because those workers voluntary agreed, in a contract, the amount of money they’d get to do certain job

    When the choice is “go hungry” or “work” that’s hardly voluntary. You will find it hard to convince me otherwise.

    but accusing him of fascist? It does not make any sense.

    If you read though my comments, at no point did I indicate him as fascist. Authoritarian, yes. He’s looking to consolidate power to himself to enact change unilaterally, that’s authoritarian. Not every authoritarian is fascist but it is important to understand the fertile ground such leaves for the future. Lenin didn’t invent Stalin but he sure opened the door. And that’s something to consider.


  • Let’s solve “economic inequality” with more statism!

    I can vote the State, I can’t vote the CEO.

    Obviously, wanting to reduce the monopolical privileges of politicians

    That’s the citizens job, not his. Milei just wants to reduce the privileges of those disagreeing, at no point would Milei want to reduce the privileges that allows him to unilaterally reduce the political privileges of those opposed to him. Let him actually put forward something that actually indicates that HE wants less power and we’ll talk about this aspect.

    public spending and taxes

    Again it’s the citizens that dictate that. I can vote for people wanting to build something in the State, not a CEO that wants to build a highway for the goodwill of mankind.

    erradicating the central bank

    Nobody wants to be the “bad guy”. Many nations are suffering the fate of too long supportive monetary policy without fiscal policy to follow. Same can be said about the USA. They rode too high and too far on quantitative easing at some point the party ends and nobody likes being “that guy”. Again, that’s mostly on the backs of the capricious voters who don’t like mild inconveniences so they hold out for major ramifications. And why? There’s way less disposable income in the hands of the many. So literally any inconvenience is a massive blow to their way of life. And it shouldn’t be a hard guess for you to figure out why so many in the public have so little.

    increasing work flexibility and advocating for individual rights and liberty

    Every “work flexibility” I’ve ever seen pitched is just code for turning people into wage slaves. Sort of how like the UK got a lot of “trade flexibility” with Brexit. Once I’ve seen a working example that didn’t actually fuck everyday citizens over, we’ll talk.

    As for individual rights and selling organs. I’m actually cool with that. There’s quite a list of incredibly wealthy people I’d like to exercise those rights on.

    fascist af

    It’s just that every time I’ve seen someone purpose breaking the system to make it better, they just want to break the system so that they can profit. I literally expect nothing less from Milei. This is the age of grift, why should anyone believe any one who pitches “I swear, I’ll build something better, just first give me the power to destroy every protection you have first.” Sure buddy, sure you will.