In Tacoma, Wa.

I witnessed 5 police officers all hit a man on the ground with their tasers. Broad daylight.

Died on the scene of a heart attack. Apparently natural causes. The polices internal investigations found the police did no wrong, imagine that.

Unless you make enough money that you can regularly “donate” to the force, I suggest that you assume they are not there to help you and you protect yourself accordingly

The us was very much in an existential threat at the time. We had just lost almost our entire navy, which compared globally, not a single branch of our military held any high esteem. Our equipment was run down and I’ll maintained and our factories were not set. We weren’t mobilized. We didn’t even know if Japan was gonna stop. The emporers men invaded the aluetians too, taking two islands (and digging in hard on one).

So we effectively lost our Navy, then the UK and the Dutch lost the rest of South Asia. The UK lost 60x more men between 12/41 and 2/42 then we did. Can you even wrap your head around the amount of pain that causes a nation? Can you even imagine 120,000 ANYTHING? McCarthy was dug in in Manila and they are expected to fight down to the last man, as we didm’t have the means to get them reinforcements, if we even had the men we could somehow spare. If Japan has focused on us and not China then it’s doubtful we’d exist today. China only lost what…20million people in those 8 years? Chinas lost an estimated 100,000,000 people in the 20th century.

Man if that’s not under threat, idk what is. The fear is on full display, look up the Battle of Los Angeles.

It’s easy with hindsight to pass judgement from your current position with absolute knowledge. It’s also immature, foolhardy and you discredit yourself displaying your unawareness towards empathy, let alone forgiveness, compassion or understanding, to say such things. I was 17 once too and thought I knew everything. We all were, that’s the thing.

I’m not trying to hate on ya guy, it sounds like you’re being consciously reductive and overly critical, which implies you’re arguing in bad faith or, as I’m assuming, you are young and just don’t know what you don’t know because you can’t know. Wisdom takes time to develop, no way around it.

I mean, yes and no. Pearl harbor wasn’t the only place hit 12/7. Philipines, Guam and Wake were all hit as well

Hong Kong and Singapore were also attacked and the empire invaded Malaysia.

America took a sharp hit square in the face, but Britain got sent home in a body bag at the end of 1941. By Feb 1942 the UK had lost all of Malaysia, lost Hong Kong and lost Singapore. They lost 12,000 troops, the rest surrendering. Zero soldiers made it home. America had never been pit against such an enemy. You have to take all of WW2 into that context. Fuck in WW1 they played soccer across no-man’s-land on Christmas. The next year the Canadians had arrived and…well…I’m not saying shit about canuckistani military just that over half of the geneva convention exists because of Canada.

Lindsey Graham will say whatever his sponsors want him to say. He shares like 2 of his opinions a year, and you can tell which ones they are because a week after saying it he’s already backtracking acting like he never said otherwise. He’ll dance any dance to suppress video of him and his prostitutes dick in his mouth. It’s a corner he’s painted himself in by courting the homegrown hate vote.

My gut tells me that he’s a decent guy and I bet he’s quite capable at the state level, but he’s been in over his head in DC ever since he got there.

It doesn’t exist. Who’d fund that research? Lolz

Tor is funded by the CIA, which means assets use it to get info or send info.

It’s going nowhere.

Same thing with Bitcoin. It’s not going anywhere. In fact thats the reason why the CIA can trace every Bitcoin transaction and identify the owners, which was thought no one could do, but what do you know, when you wire up 3000 ps4s into a giant supercomputer for 1/50th the cost apparently the budget opens up some and now they must have a dedicated supercomputer just for this. Those chucklefucks who blackmailed the pipeline in the SE, that energy company paid up in Bitcoin, within 24 hours the NSA/CIA had the Bitcoin back and perps arrested.

Make your trades in favors, that’s all I’m saying.

I’m flattered. Thank you.

I told my wife if we ever decided on kids (which we won’t) I want to name the kid after my hero. She asked “who’s that?”.

“Mega man”

“What if it’s a girl?”

“We can call her Meg”

"Middle name?”

“No middle name. MegaBlake, that’s it.”

I’m wearing a mega man belt she bought me right now actually.🤓

Every single comment here is describing symptoms but not the cause.

Enshitification is the evolution to the final form, only possible after the company, thru merger/acquisition or stock manipulation (leveraged buy outs, acquiring controlling stake, shorting a company into insolvency, etc), has achieved a commanding monopoly.

Then it flexes it’s monopoly powers, the buttons fly off its shirt and the monster shows it’s true colors.

We have laws to prevent this. Lina Khan is the first FTC chair to start holding these companies to meaningful account in my lifetime (yea, Microsoft/netscape is exponentially smaller than todays issues). Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon all need to be broken up into a thousand different companies, same as we did with AT&T. Uber, Angieslist, homeaglow, all the contractors pretending they’re just networking hubs (like some union hall) need to busted up and gigwork made to contend with employment law, which it can’t, because it’s all bad faith exploitation.

And for fucks sake we need to make the fine for white collar crime that extends state lines to necessitate the forfeiture of the entire C-suite’s and board of directors assets, both domestically and internationally, upon threat of seal team 6. Empty their bank accounts and leave them with nothing, like they regularly do to employees. They’re so fucking smart they can earn it all again, right? Right!? Corporations are the largest thief in the land, just in WAGE THEFT. Everything else they do that’s slimy is all BONUS. The 2nd largest thief in all the land? the fucking Police force. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, democracy doesn’t work in mental institutions. We don’t need to defund the police, we need to fire all of them and start over with transparency. If casino employees can be video taped all day, so can cops. Fuck em.

What America truly needs is another Teddy Roosevelt. We need to revive the Progressive party with the Bull Moose as the symbol. Protect the environment, protect the family by protecting the workers, end legal loopholes and trustbust the 1% back down into the 10%.

And if we don’t? The path ahead is obvious, I for one, don’t want to live in Blade Runner, but that’s where we’re going until we stop fucking around and right ship.

Waking Life.

If you wrap your head around it after the 2nd viewing, you’re doing better than most people.

It took me a few watchings of Akira to really have it all sink in.

Koyaanisqatsi

Visual poetry. Literally. It’s conveying a message, it’s just you have to come up with the dialogue. Beautiful work. The sequels are fantastic as well.

The right is responsible for almost all domestic terrorism in the states, and that’s according to the FBI/NSA, who are far from objective. Police (and the FBI and NSA are just federal police, obviously) are overwhelming conservative. There is no liberal cop to speak of. This is proven, undeniable, by the reluctance to prosecute the right. I guarantee you if anyone made death threats to Mitch McConnell the NSA would know exactly who that is. But every democratic lawmaker, even sympathizer, and it’s crickets. Death threats continue. You know, you don’t see a leftist version of libs of tictok with its owner bragging about inciting stochastic terroirism. It’s proven again with the heavy hand society uses on peaceful protestors. I’ve been in the protests. I’ve seen the police strike first. I’ve been in the tear gas. The polices us vs them mentality, that they are “at war” with civilians is sickening and entirely one sided. A leftist will say ACAB and if you’re a leftist, every cop will be happy to prove that correct for you, but no one thinks they’re at war with the police. Not acknowledging this is willful ignorance. That’s the kind of ignorance thats unforgivable, even by legal standards. That’s where you go down by association alone.

Blood is almost entirely on conservative hands. Not the other way around.

But suuuuure buddy. It’s the left that’s the problem. I’m envious of your ability to see reality as you choose it, no bullshit, truly I am. I’m unable to mold facts to fit my narrative, I simply have to make a narrative around objective fact. if that is how you describe yourself as well, I suggest you relook at the facts.

And as long as we’re holding facts high, since 2016 the majority of guns in America, which have never sold better, have been sold to those that identify center or left, so don’t think you’re a wolf amongst sheep. Trump winning and his entire presidency of eroding our rights and institutions while stoking division amongst us - truly unique amongst presidents, in a baaad way - woke millions and millions of people up…and America acquired about 20million new first time gun owners.

Oh I’m with you, believe me. Theres some great building tech now, things like aircrete and the hundred variations and uses of lime. And if course just caluz it’s old doesn’t mean better, there was definitely a gradient to build quality back then, same as today.

We can look at churches in Uppsala that were built with pine and have stood for 1000 years…in Sweden…and it’s clear we’re missing something in our knowledge today that they had (it was their harvesting practices, btw, fucking germ theory levels of brilliance). Or how the Japanese have relied on coppacing for lumber for 500 years and that’s why Japan still HAS trees and didn’t go all Rapanui/Easter Island. The Amish and green wood timber framing is another example - practices that take the future into account. It’s the planting of trees who’s shade you’ll never sit in.

It’s easy, and incorrect, to point at history and say it was ALL better then, because only the cream of the crip has survived. Survivorship bias, clear as day. Of course we can build with the same mindset today - we just DON’T.

For a substantial group of people building their own home, to their own standards, towards sustainability or fingerprint reduction is their main driving goal. Earthships are an attempt. Buckminster Fuller made his entire career building off such ideas. Fuck I want to live in a geodesic dome SOOO BAD. Only have to deal with rain when I have to brave society. (I figure where the segments meet I can channel the rain to irrigation channels for the foliage and trees in the inner biodome…and then I’m raising free range sugar gliders.)

I’m in the middle of building my redoubt now. Everything by hand, it’s tedious, requires a ton of knowledge and physically taxing, but it also screams of character, uniqueness and craftiness. I take a lot of fun making things intuitively crafty if you know, but invisable if you dont know. Microprocessors can be a part of that (Im a huge electromagnetism fanboy, I’ve spun up my own generators from magnet wire for custom windmills, and I’m debating doing it again for some microhydro but currently leaning stepper moters), hidden magnetic locks are fun. shit my firearm safe is a Rube-Goldman-machines worth of steps to open, and that’s if you even noticed it was there.

I love the new tech. Don’t get me wrong. Maybe it’s that I’m a xennial, and that I had an analog youth, idk. I own all the power tools - I also own the hand tool analog version and know how to use them. I’ve always maintained the position that I had to level up into power tools. Electric planers save a SHITTON of time but if I can’t plane by hand…then it’s just a crutch. I don’t even want to get into metal working by hand, I’ve done it, i prefer metal to wood so that entire attitude applied to metal before wood.

Anyway. I think we have more in common here than not, lol.

Timber framing, and all Amish framing, is actually done with green wood. Attention is paid to grain of the beams and they are put up so as the wood dries and ages it’ll twist into itself making a more cohesive unit.

Sure it makes remodeling a bitch, but plum straight and true were never part of a remodelers lexicon to begin with.

Oh man, the quest for plum straight and true. Rick was well within his right to wipe Morty’s brain of it. It was probably the single greatest act of compassion we’ve seen him do. I wish he’d wipe mine.

New houses are fucking garbage, what are you talking about? You aren’t from the trades, clearly.

The only thing new houses have on old - speaking in generalizations - is a warranty - which is really what’s at issue here. And as it plays out, it’s super fucked up

The main number one metric for housing is livability. New houses are all glue and wood shavings. Literally what’s swept up after tree delamination for plywood. I’ve seen it. I’ve swept it up. I don’t even want to know the VOC release from OSB over time. If there’s ANY traceable amount (and of course there is) then the fact that I have to spend thousands putting in a RADON bypass cuz the ground wants to kill me for standing on it now yet swimming pools of profits from industry remain untouched and not held responsible. Yea…no. Old walls are best walls. Gypsum is nice but plaster isn’t out of reach. Old framing is best framing. Old wood floors can be found inches thick, no nailing. Carpet? Vinyl? Linoleum is only the best…NOFX song…arguably…Gen Z is suuuuper good. And Eat the Meek, New Boobs, Kill all the White Men, Creeping Out Sara, Idiots are Taking Over. Fuck. NOFX is just best, everything, really. Fat Mike seems like a cool ass dude to hang out with.

Um. Back on it…

PEX cannot be good for you, and even if not bad - yet - it’s not going to kill microbes like copper piping will - “upgrade” your pipes back to copper people, as a matter.of health). +1 old home

Hmm…Hardy board, that’s a modern win. Except it dulls your carbide immediately. That shits awesome for siding and water containment. +1 new homes

Modern windows are better. Without question.

Modern wiring wins over obvs.

Whatever. The WARRENTY. Don’t be the second owner of a new house. Do. Not. Do. It. Motherfucking chosen class gets zero percent interest rates and carried into new development, just to move 7 years later right before the “25yr” roof mysteriously needs to be replaced at 10years, just outside it’s warranty. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this. 1st owners have no costs going into house. 2nd owners, night shift, if you will, gets caught out, besides paying more for the house than the original owners did almost a decade ago, are going to have to absorb that extra 50k in repairs, essentially insuring 2nd owners NEVER rise above their position. Modern red-lining. Fuck bankers. Usury guarantees you’re going to hell. Fuck old money. Fuck everything -lord. Put feudalism back down, THAT SHIT IS BAD. The media only serves to persuade you of an opinion the owning class wants you to have without informing you of opposing opinions.

Did you know there are more houses in the UK and USA to the population than ever before? We’ve never had MORE housing…and yet…crisis…? That doesn’t make NeoLiberal sense…I was told…

Lies. You were told lies.

The amount of housing, that’s true. Thatcher and Reagen really changed the game tho. If you were born past 1980, your future was already sacrificed before the better part of you hit your parents sheets.

Before Thatcher less than 10% of housing in the UK was rented. It was considered one of the most successful postwar decisions, to promote security and autonomy in the citizenry…and now? The housing crisis is literally at the heart of every single crisis the western world is having, the entire world over. It’s vampiric. Cannabalizing the economy and lowering GDP for NO FUCKING REASON.

I am not against rentals - AFTER everyone has been housed. Let people have vacation homes, sure. Shit. My grandfather put 3 kids thru school, golfed thrice a week, stay at home wife, two car garage, bought his kids cars, my father raced motocross semi pro (thousands of trophies - that probably cost a house in itself) and was still able to buy a vacation home off his sole income (just so you don’t lose sight in how much economic freedom neoliberalism has stolen from the working class). I’m also not against private insurance - as Cadillac insurance. Capitalists have proven, beyond a rational doubt, that if they’re allowed monopoly to provide a neccesity (by that I mean, only private sector agents) than the rest of us are steadily more and more fucked. This is exemplified in the Simpsons. Homer went from bumbling idiot to upper middle class. Nothing about them changed, it’s just every year it gets harder. 2020 was the easiest year of the decade - bank on that - and that’s pretty fucking harrowing if you ask me.

Private farming…who has an issue against the farmer? No one. People have issues with being fleeced. See Netflix 10 years ago to the streaming shit cacophony today. Yar me matey, seems like some things are back in fashion. If farmers decide to fleece on a starving population, I won’t be sympathetic when the farmers are served up with their wheat. Treat people with respect. It’s fundamental to social cohesion. Exploitation is not.

My point, ultimately, is that people are people and people are entirely predictable. Our problems are manufactured by greedy people in power who’ve been using mass media to propagandized obedience while they return wealth to preplague levels of serfdom. And they e overplayed their hand, and they know it, everyone knows it - that’s why everyone’s just waiting for when the violence to start. Not if, when. People, again, are entirely predictable. Frankly, imo, we’ll be much better off when notions of social engineering and social darwinism go the same way route as phrenology.

It’s mind boggling that there are people who think God couldn’t come up with a better solution than murder. I mean a micrometeorite could take anyone of us out at any point. Or he could wait for us to yawn and have a murder hornet fly into your mouth. Or y’know, being God and all and capable of doing anything, he could just have his giant disembodied hand come out of the wall, grab us and pull us to the other side, a la Legend of Zelda and that’s just if he insists on making it a spectacule and not just snap* aneurysm.

Don’t stress over debt to a faceless entity. Stress causes your body to age double time. Does that payment of double time lower you interest rate? Cut into your balance? No? Then stop spending currency they aren’t taking.

Imo if they have no face, they’re just make believe anyway. I could care about credit, but I don’t think credit will still be around in 7 years, not in any way that would be meaningful to me at least.

I did what both y’all did. I got some undeveloped and bought a van. I buy tools and equipment used and fix it when it breaks. Or if I need or want something else, I make it myself.

I want a tattoo (one of the easier things one could want actually)? I make a tattoo gun, collect some lampblack and mix it into tincture and get going. If you don’t know how to do any of that, you are aware of what you are holding in your hands, right?

Buying off Craigslist or marketplace means I pay as little to tax as humanly possible. Starve the beast. Grow your own food. You CAN still grow some spice walls and put em up behind yr windows. Fucking herbs cost a pretty penny. Do all the repairs on your van yourself. The learning is the point, not some resale value (which, if you’ve learnt well on good enough would prob increase). Self reliance today is rebellion. Independence in punk rock. Gardening is punk rock.

Besides stealth camping that van, you can always park on BLM land or off the side of the road in a national forest, just so you know you have that option. I’ve found stealth camping is easier street parking suburbia then attempting a business lot. You know your town so you make that call urself. But if the sheriff ges real harrass-y, just haul yr ass-y to Sherwood.

Life adrift in a van is an acquired skill all its own, and let me tell those of ya that don’t know, those vanlife influencers on YouTube and tiktok? Yea almost all of them come from money. They’ve never known a day of actual financial distress in their lives. They can’t. If you’re able to make a call and get help from family, you don’t know life on the outs. Pretending like they built their van off their wage as an orderly is so shameful, we all essentially have a free pot shot to their chin. “Slumming” with the poors for credibility. It’s fucking stolen valor, is what it is. They should try stealing some valor in the military, see what that gets em.

It’s impossible for a wealthy person to make quality art. Impossible. They are no longer relatable, and no matter how much Tay Tay or Selena might act “Normal”, they aren’t. They have teams if people who make their decisions for them. Decisions that are focused grouped on how relatable they are. Gross.

Keep on keeping on, my fellows, and for whatever it’s worth, their definition of a good life doesn’t leave them fulfilled, wise or happy, so what good does holding ourselves to their, basically lazy, measure do us?

Fuck em.

Fact. The body only has objective on the day; survive. Everything else is what we add on top of our imperitive.

You woke up. You started your day as a winner. That’s been gifted to you, and unfortunately some people go out of their way to make you forget, and after enough abuse, sometimes we just do that part for them, for efficiencies sake.

In the end, entropies always going to win. If nothing else, I’ll keep winning as long as I can, and do my part in our collective chorus “Not today, Entropy, not today”.

If I could not be me, then I would be Diogenes. All y’all can get out of my sun.

Fax it to him 😉

I’m the same way. It’s led me to one of my “sayings”,

Whatever you do, do it spectacularly. If you gotta fail, fail spectacularly.

The worst results I can get are ambiguous ones, then I have to go over every piece of input and test them individually - it’s almost easier to just abandon the question and come up with a new one.

For maybe the last decade, the last 5 years at least, my new years resolution has always been the same. Stop getting in my own way.

Ive held a stance, with myself and with other people, for as long as I can remember, that “No is always an ok answer.” This is pertinent because it keeps me fluid in my planning and taught me to table any emotional attachment and wait until I have the thing to feel the thing. The deftness of my ability to plan shouldn’t be hoisted onto other people’s shoulders to bear, that’s MY responsibility, so if I’m asking favors, no is ok. I’m fact finding, not emotionally blackmailing or leveraging. I’ll call someone back as a last resort a burn a favor, but it’s gotta be life or death. If it’s a blown engine, I’ll just pay for a tow, y’know, but I got buddies with trucks and tow rope.

That can be further refined to, Don’t Stress Over the Imaginary. Stress is essentially double overtime, burning your life force at 200+%. Does stressing over paying your phone bill get you a discount on that bill? No? Then why spend currency that they aren’t accepting? (That being said, never extend real feelings to an artificial entity, real relationships require reciprocity). Is the stressing helping you find a solution faster? Really? REALLY?! I didn’t think so. You don’t need to punish yourself more than a “oh, this and this didn’t work, noted, avoid in the future.” No one and nothing benefits by a self imposed penence, you’re just wallowing. Really. Stop wasting time. That’s right, i said the thing we all know but don’t even admit to ourselves. A great man, a better man than we, once said, “Life is short, we must hurry” and I’m inclined to believe him.

Things, ALL things, will be done when they are done. That statement is at once both as direct and as vague as you want it to be. And it’s been that way for all time. Always. Just like we will never know the end of Pi, or simultaneously witness the ends of the superposition of an atom, life is just “fuzzy.” You’re welcome to scream about that into the void if you want, if you need more ways to come at the absurdity if it all. But again, things will be done when they are done. Putting an artificial time limit on it won’t change that. Getting upset over trivial missed deadlines is you getting upset about something that was never real in the first place. That is literally you getting in your own way. Spending currency that they aren’t taking.

As such, if I find out or am shown I’m wrong in any way, I acquiesce and admit. I’m not perfect, that’d be boring anyways, and doubling down on error just makes you look so soooo much worse than saying “ah shit, I didn’t realize, my bad, fucking thanks mate.” I lose NOTHING in the exchange. Nothing that I’d want to keep anyways. The truth has got to be holier than personal attachment, otherwise there is no objective reality, and therefore no way for us to ever truly be seen or known, or understood. Which I’m convinced is what we all ultimately want. Acknowledgement, understanding and vindication.

The only failure is the failure to learn the lesson.

The grace to live this seems so rare in people it’s like a super power.

What is that, like 12 people now?