Giving my kid a borzoi puppy, then every day pinching his nose and tail and tugging on them a little bit, to convince my kid I’m stretching the dog out like taffy.

Cape Canaveral is directly east of Orlando, with a bunch of vacation resort spots hugging the shore. The Florida coastline isn’t exactly lightly developed, either.

I mean the alternative is literally fascism.

Fascism or Fascism Lite. Take your pick.

He was radicalized against the Soviets because they did not support the socialist revolution

Was this before or after he served as a British intelligence officer in colonial-era Burma?

Getting all my aerospace technology on Temu.

I’m not saying that the persecution against Falung Gong is fake, actually I believe is true, violence against minorities is another Wednesday for the CCP

The Falun Gong was originally an ally of the CCP as recently as 1993. They had a falling out when some of their chief leadership got caught in a string of financial scandals and abuse allegations. Attempts by the state to begin prosecuting church leaders triggered an outcry from the membership, which prompted more arrests and more efforts hide the organizations money, and finally a wholesale exodus from the country by its most devoted members.

Falun Gong leadership arrived in the US and immediately began churning out anti-China spin, with the help of the Epoch Times - an originally Chinese-only paper primarily distributed in Chinese ex-pat communities by church refugees. If you get into the history of the Epoch Times, you should very quickly discover that it is not a reliable source of information.

Which isn’t to say China’s been great wrt religious freedom or free association. But the modern incarnation of Falun Gong has more in common with Scientology than, say, Mormonism or Baháʼí. You’re going to fall down some really QAnon-themed rabbit holes if you take everything their community is saying at face value.

These projects tend to bring a bunch of economic development along with it. Would be like Floridians rejecting Cape Canaveral or Texans trying to shut down SpaceX. Locals might not be thrilled, but developers and business leaders are ready for the rest of you to take the risk.

Spellcheck hates me.

Wasn’t Orwell a British spy under Churchill and a professional anti-communist agitator?

IBM and Standard Oil

Candidate: Konrad Adenauer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer#Years_under_the_Nazi_government

When the Nazi Party won several municipal, state and national elections in between 1930 and 1932, Adenauer, a strong opponent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, still believed that improvements in the national economy would make his strategy work: ignore the Nazis and concentrate on the Communist threat. He thought that based on election returns, the Nazis should become part of the Prussian and Reich governments, even when he was already the target of intense personal attacks. Political maneuverings around the ageing President Hindenburg then brought the Nazis to power on 30 January 1933.

By early February, Adenauer finally realized the futility of all discussions and any attempts at compromise with the Nazis. Cologne’s city council and the Prussian parliament had been dissolved; on 4 April 1933, he was officially dismissed as mayor and his bank accounts were frozen. “He had no money, no home and no job.” After arranging for the safety of his family, he appealed to the abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Maria Laach for a stay of several months. According to Albert Speer in his book Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Hitler expressed admiration for Adenauer, noting his civic projects, the building of a road circling the city as a bypass, and a “green belt” of parks. However, both Hitler and Speer concluded that Adenauer’s political views and principles made it impossible for him to play any role in Nazi Germany.

Adenauer was imprisoned for two days after the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934; however, on 10 August 1934, maneuvering for his pension, he wrote a ten-page letter to Hermann Göring, the Prussian interior minister. He stated that as Mayor he had violated Prussian laws in order to allow Nazi events in public buildings and Nazi flags to be flown from city flagpoles, and that in 1932 he had declared publicly that the Nazis should join the Reich government in a leading role.[24][25] At the end of 1932, Adenauer had indeed demanded a joint government by his Zentrum party and the Nazis for Prussia

What a cool dude. Glad this guy was able to get back in charge of the German government in 1949, because his views were so incredibly normal and good and definitely not what might enable fascism to take root a second time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Adenauer#Ending_denazification

In a speech on 20 September 1949, Adenauer denounced the entire denazification process pursued by the Allied military governments, announcing in the same speech that he was planning to bring in an amnesty law for the Nazi war criminals and he planned to apply to “the High Commissioners for a corresponding amnesty for punishments imposed by the Allied military courts”

Incredible leadership. Fantastic. Awesome. Love it.

Even setting aside the bit of history where the SDP party rallied around Hindenburg because of their deep and abiding fear of the Evil Russian Backed KDP party (god damn, everything old really is new again), there were three different elections from July of '32 to March of '33. The Nazis took 37% of the seats in July, dipped down to 32% in November, and then jumped to 43% the following March.

And then, what really kicked off martial law was the Reichstagg fire, which was blamed on Tankie Antifa Far-Left Communists and used to justify a Nazi-lead state of martial law. Liberals, Conservatives, and Fascists all united under a single banner in their staunch hatred of German Communism.

This was decades after German military police and Freikorps paramilitary groups under Hindenburg crushed the Spartacus League during the 1919 strike wave. The leaders of the movement - Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Franz Mehring - were executed by the police and the organizations disbanded under threat of further imprisonment/execution.

This, in comparison to the Beer Hall Pustch four years later, in which Hitler’s band of low-ranking military officers were tossed in the drunk tank for nine months, before returning to politics and rapidly climbing the ranks on the basis that he’d been martyred by (((bad Germans))) who secretly controlled the government.

Gotta wonder how this compares to the 2014 BLM protests, the subsequent police crackdown, and then the string of BLM leadership “suicides” where members of the movement shot themselves in the head right before being incinerated in their cars. Or the widespread bipartisan/corporate efforts to suppress labor activism in the rail, shipping, and Amazon distribution centers, the automotive industry, and the Starbucks-centric food service sectors.

Oh well, anyways!

Frustrating, because moderate recreational drug use is fine and occasionally even beneficial as a social lubricant or creative spur. Have a beer, smoke a joint, do a bit of LCD, it won’t ruin your life.

But also, people do have real material health care needs - both physical and psychological. They need secure homes and nutritious foods and freedom from a certain degree of anxiety. A big driver of the opioid crisis wasn’t simply evil pharma companies (although they certainly played their role). It was amateur athletics, construction work, factory work, and other physically strenuous jobs responsible for chronic physical pain.

Rather than providing people reasonable work schedules, protective equipment, and physical therapy for their broken bodies, we just doped them up and sent them back on the jobs. And it work! Productivity surged! For a little while! And then these people became reliant on opioids to the point where they weren’t efficient workers. So they were fired and replaced with younger people who were given a new prescription of opioids to treat the next generation of chronic pain. And we did this for three generations. And now here we fucking are.

Now we’ve got folks in the tech sector telling their staff to start micro-dosing with LCD. We’ve got online hustlers who are told to stay up for days at a time continuously churning out new work product by leveraging the benefits of amphetamines. We’re got sales bros and bar service workers who are expected to drink their clients under the table night after night. We’ve got sex workers who are expected to endure physical and psychological abuse for a paycheck. We’ve got IT guys jacked up on whatever the fuck is in modern energy drinks who come off it by smoking a bunch of the most potent weed on the planet.

That’s modern drug use for you. Its not a means of lubricating social interactions or spurring personal creativity or taking the edge off pain. Its just a tool to get people to work past their natural limits.

Commencing the naval operation by tooting my Warp Whistle

Europe has an enormous surveillance state, increasingly modeled (and managed) by Israeli surveillance systems used in Palestine.

Germany, France, the UK, and Spain already have some of the most advanced facial recognition imagine in the world deployed in their surveillance networks.

And the EU just expanded their legal use

Maybe you’re safer from an American tech company. But not from the local police.

If you’re going to propose a communist paradise as an alternative

Claiming that paradise is preferable to purgatory is not the same thing as knowing the road out of hell.

The kinship networks of pre-agrarian indigenous groups worked just fine when everyone knew each other.

One of the most effective methods for instituting an enduring state of capitalist exploitation is alienating you from your neighbors.

The worst that my country wants to do with my data is attempt to sell me shit I don’t want.

Facial recognition technology and the growing power of artificial intelligence

In some other countries, drawing parallels with certain emperors and certain A.A.Milne characters could cost me my freedom and possibly my life.

Of course. Always in other countries. Never in mine.

you dont have any clear call to action

There isn’t a clear path forward. It’s a complex problem that is made deliberately intractable by the people who benefit from the current system.

Very hard to get rid of all the rotten drywall if you’re not willing to swing the hammer

Start at the bottom and work your way up.

Or just become a Senator at the age of 30 by selling out to your state’s massive insurance and legal community.