Komunitas lemmy.ca

Avec l’affaire de Bétharram, le silence gêné de la bourgeoisie : « C’est le sujet du moment. J’espère que cela va s’estomper, cela fait du mal à notre région »

https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean peut t’aider Pour cet article ::: spoiler spoiler Avant même de s’asseoir à la terrasse ensoleillée d’un café de Pau, offrant une vue superbe sur toute la chaîne des Pyrénées, Hélène s’excuse : son mari ne pourra pas venir au rendez-vous, il est au golf. Puis elle explique qu’elle aussi a failli sécher cet entretien. Parler des dernières révélations sur Notre-Dame de Bétharram la met « très mal à l’aise ». Elle a envoyé son fils dans cet établissement catholique du Béarn dans les années 1980. Cette femme de 79 ans comprend la gravité des accusations de violences physiques et sexuelles portées par d’anciens élèves, mais, selon elle, ce sujet « pollue l’Aquitaine » désormais, autant que ses dîners. « On ne peut plus se retrouver entre amis sans en parler, souffle-t-elle. C’est le sujet du moment. J’espère que cela va s’estomper. Il y a constamment des blagues dessus, cela fait du mal à notre région. » D’un air désolé, elle montre un photomontage envoyé sur son téléphone : François Bayrou, premier ministre et maire de Pau, y est caricaturé dans une barque surnommée « Le bêta rame ». Pour ne pas être mêlée à cette « polémique », comme elle dit, Hélène refuse de voir son nom figurer dans l’article. Un nom à particule – « ce qui a ses avantages et ses inconvénients, souligne-t-elle, car les gens vous cataloguent rapidement » – légué par la famille aristocrate de son mari en même temps qu’un château proche de Pau. La bourgeoisie du Sud-Ouest n’aime guère s’épancher sur le dossier Bétharram. Les langues se délient péniblement pour évoquer ces plus de 150 anciens élèves de Notre-Dame de Bétharram qui ont dénoncé des violences physiques, des agressions sexuelles et des viols. Jusque-là, l’établissement des Pyrénées-Atlantiques était une institution intouchable, avec une réputation établie, autant pour son taux de réussite au baccalauréat que pour sa rigueur et sa capacité à « redresser » les enfants jugés trop turbulents. Beaucoup venaient de très bonnes familles. De Pau à Bordeaux, en passant par le Pays basque, des notables de toute la région y ont envoyé leurs enfants, autant pour construire leurs réseaux que pour les confronter à une éducation à la dure. Un choix traditionnel pour les élites Pourquoi ce choix de la part de familles bourgeoises ? « Ça se faisait », répondent-elles souvent. Comme une évidence que l’on ne questionne plus, dans une logique de reproduction sociale. L’institution a formé des garçons devenus avocats, médecins, journalistes, hommes politiques, directeurs de banque… Avant d’y faire entrer son fils au collège pour deux ans, Hélène avait eu « de bons échos » de Bétharram. Fille de notaire, elle-même était passée par la case pension en région paloise et y avait été très heureuse. Alors, en 1982, son mari et elle choisissent cette option pour leur fils qui, d’après eux, ne travaille pas assez à l’école. Ils étaient conscients que ce ne serait pas un établissement « de Bisounours », mais, de toute façon, précise Hélène, ils n’ont pas élevé « une chochotte ». « C’était un cadre que l’on cherchait, plus qu’autre chose, explique-t-elle. Une éducation rigoureuse qui soit bien posée. A la maison, il n’arrivait pas à travailler. » La stricte discipline est plutôt bien vue par cette bourgeoisie d’obédience catholique, inquiète de l’arrivée au pouvoir de la gauche de François Mitterrand en 1981 et d’un supposé laxisme dans l’éducation des enfants. Le quotidien Sud Ouest offrait un aperçu de cette mentalité dans un article du 13 avril 1996 : « Bétharram, dans le Sud-Ouest aquitain, est un symbole. L’un des derniers bastions (d’aucuns affirment le dernier) d’une éducation “à la dure”, capable de tenir tête aux coups de boutoir d’une société permissive triomphante depuis mai 1968. » Hélène se souvient qu’un jour, son fils lui a raconté avoir été puni et envoyé dehors en pleine nuit dans le froid sur le perron du collège. « Si tu n’avais pas fait une connerie, tu serais resté dans le dortoir », lui avait-elle alors répondu. Aujourd’hui, elle ne sait pas si elle porterait plainte pour cela. Elle n’exprime pas de regrets d’avoir envoyé son fils à Bétharram. « Il n’y a pas été malheureux », affirme-t-elle. Une institution qui « vendait du rêve » Avec le recul, Jean-Rémy Arruyer, cartographe, analyse les liens entre l’institution catholique et le milieu bourgeois comme « un jeu social ». Ce sexagénaire a été pensionnaire à Bétharram de 1973 à 1980, du CM2 à la 1ʳᵉ, et fait partie de la centaine de plaignants. Il y a subi des agressions sexuelles et mettra près de quarante ans à en parler à ses proches. Le jeune Jean-Rémy n’a jamais été un enfant turbulent, il collectionnait au contraire les prix d’excellence. « Cela correspondait aux bonnes valeurs d’un entre-soi bourgeois : tu avais une maison, deux voitures, tu allais à la messe et au ski le week-end, et tu avais ton fils à Bétharram », analyse-t-il. A l’époque, son père possède une coopérative de produits laitiers et sa mère enseigne dans le privé. Elle vient d’une famille aisée du Gers et ses cousins germains ont tous été scolarisés à Notre-Dame de Garaison, un établissement catholique des Hautes-Pyrénées, lui aussi récemment mis en lumière à la suite de dénonciations de mauvais traitements et d’agressions sexuelles par des anciens élèves – tout comme les collèges Notre-Dame du Sacré-Cœur, dit « Cendrillon », à Dax, ou Saint-François-Xavier, à Ustaritz, dans la même région. Si cette mère de famille s’en veut énormément, à 93 ans, d’avoir mis son fils à Bétharram, à l’époque elle le vit comme une vraie « fierté » et un « marqueur social », a-t-elle rapporté à son fils après les révélations de l’affaire. Entre les années 1970 et 2000, Notre-Dame de Bétharram met tout en œuvre pour vendre du rêve aux parents. L’établissement met en avant les nombreux équipements sportifs, dont une grande piscine, les sorties au ski le mercredi après-midi, la nature autour du pensionnat. « Le père directeur recevait généralement les parents avant la rentrée pour finir de les convaincre, raconte Jean-Rémy Arruyer, qui vit toujours dans la maison familiale, à Pau. Ce n’était pas le petit curé de la paroisse du coin, il faisait partie des gens d’un tout autre calibre. Tout cela était vu comme le gage d’une réussite sociale à venir. J’étais programmé pour être magistrat ou militaire en sortant de là. » Il restera pourtant traumatisé par son passage dans l’établissement. Un sujet difficile à évoquer Dans les familles bourgeoises, Bétharram n’a jamais été un sujet de discussion. Pas plus aujourd’hui qu’hier. Comme au sein de ce couple originaire de la région paloise, parti pour sa retraite dans une ville de la côte basque. Ils ont tous deux fait partie des grands notables de Pau et préfèrent ne pas voir leur nom associé à cette affaire. Leur fils, Matthieu, aujourd’hui médecin dans la région de Marseille, a fait sa 1ʳᵉ et sa terminale à Notre-Dame de Bétharram dans les années 1980. Une idée de ses parents, selon lui, car il avait redoublé sa 1ʳᵉ. Son père et sa mère soutiennent, eux, qu’il y est allé de sa propre volonté. « C’est difficile d’en parler, reconnaît l’ancien pensionnaire. J’ai baigné dans une éducation religieuse. Ces affaires remettent aussi en question tout un univers éducatif. » Matthieu assure n’avoir subi aucune violence, ce qui l’interroge au regard des témoignages publiés ces derniers mois : « Je me demande si les classes plus aisées n’étaient pas plus protégées que les gens plus pauvres. Les “fils de” étaient peut-être moins la cible des surveillants et des prêtres, notamment en ce qui concerne les violences sexuelles. » De leur côté, ses parents reconnaissent ne s’être jamais posé de questions. « Quand on est proche de ses enfants, ils parlent, ils vous racontent tout, soutient le père de Matthieu. Pour ceux qui ont subi des violences et qui n’ont pas osé parler, il y a sans doute un problème de lien avec leurs parents. » Une rhétorique identique à celle de François Bayrou. A la sortie de la réunion avec des représentants du collectif des victimes le 15 février, à la mairie de Pau, le premier ministre avait en effet répondu aux journalistes que, si ses enfants scolarisés dans l’établissement avaient subi des violences, ils lui en auraient parlé. Il « n’aurai[t] pas pu ignorer cela pour [ses] enfants ». Des faits déjà dénoncés dans les années 1990 François-Xavier Tourot, 55 ans, ne croit pas un instant que la parole est plus facile à libérer dans certaines familles plutôt que dans d’autres. « Peut-être encore plus que dans d’autres milieux, il y avait ce déni et cette omerta dans les familles bourgeoises », assure ce graphiste, victime de violences physiques et d’agressions sexuelles à Bétharram pendant trois ans, de 1980 à 1983. Sa famille, dont deux membres appartenaient à la direction du groupe pétrolier Elf Aquitaine, habitait à Trespoey, le quartier chic de Pau. S’attaquer à une institution dirigée par des prêtres est, selon lui, impensable dans ces milieux très catholiques et dénoncer les faits risque de mettre en péril la réputation de toute une famille. A 11 ans et demi, le jeune François-Xavier ne parvient pas à parler à ses parents des violences dont il est victime. Il ne trouve pas les mots justes, a peur de les décevoir ou de se plaindre de quelque chose qui ne serait pas si grave. Il laisse transparaître son mal-être autrement. Un soir, chez sa mère (ses parents sont divorcés), il boit une demi-bouteille de whisky, jusqu’au coma éthylique. Quand il se réveille, le lendemain, sa mère n’a aucune réaction. « Quelle honte », lui reproche-t-elle simplement. Celui qui fait partie des actuels plaignants n’a pu en parler à ses proches et publiquement que début 2024. Déjà en 1996, l’avocat palois Jean-François Blanco avait observé cette capacité du milieu bourgeois à protéger son institution. A l’époque, il défend la famille Lacoste-Séris, dont le fils Marc, 14 ans :::

Komunitas jlai.lu

Ce que contient la proposition de loi macroniste pour criminaliser toute critique d’Israël et signée par François Hollande - L'Humanité

Ce que contient la proposition de loi macroniste pour criminaliser toute critique d’Israël et signée par François Hollande Cyprien Caddeo Sous couvert de lutter contre les « nouvelles formes d’antisémitisme », la députée Caroline Yadan a annoncé déposer un texte qui cible les expressions de solidarité à la Palestine et la critique de la politique de Tel-Aviv. C’était une de ses promesses de campagne, dans la 8e circonscription des Français de l’étranger qui inclut surtout Israël. La députée Renaissance Caroline Yadan est malheureusement passée aux actes, ce week-end, en déposant une proposition de loi visant « à lutter contre les nouvelles formes d’antisémitisme ». Au prétexte de ce combat tout à fait légitime dans un contexte de hausse des actes contre les juifs depuis les attentats du 7 octobre 2023, le texte organise en réalité la confusion entre antisémitisme et antisionisme, haine des juifs et critique d’Israël en tant que régime. Dans un entretien accordé au Point, Caroline Yadan ne cache pas les arrière-pensées politiques de ce texte. Celui-ci relève « trois axes essentiels de cette nouvelle forme d’antisémitisme : l’apologie du terrorisme, la négation de l’État d’Israël et la comparaison avec la Shoah ». Et l’ancienne militante de la Licra de détailler : « Je voulais que soient punissables toutes les références à des expressions telles que “From the river to the sea” avec des cartes où Israël a disparu ; que Rima Hassan (l’eurodéputée insoumise - NDLR) ne puisse plus impunément estimer que le Hamas est un mouvement de résistance (ce qu’elle n’a jamais dit - NDLR) ou que l’on ne puisse plus poster sur ses réseaux sociaux un drapeau nazi accompagné d’une étoile de David. » Des députés socialistes signataires dont François Hollande Si le texte venait à passer, la blague de l’humoriste Guillaume Meurice comparant Benyamin Netanyahou à un « nazi sans prépuce » l’exposerait par exemple à une condamnation pénale pour antisémitisme. Caroline Yadan voit là une simple prolongation de la loi Gayssot de 1990, qui sanctionne le négationnisme : « La contestation de la Shoah est punissable, même si elle est présentée sous forme déguisée, dubitative, par voie d’insinuation ou de comparaison, d’analogie ou de rapprochement. De ce fait, la comparaison de l’État d’Israël au régime nazi serait sanctionnée comme une banalisation outrancière de la Shoah. » Ceux qui compareraient les crimes de guerre de Tel-Aviv à ceux du Troisième Reich - argument dont on peut tout à fait douter de la pertinence - seraient jetés dans le même panier que les négationnistes comme Robert Faurisson, qui nient l’existence des chambres à gaz. Jamais une loi n’avait limité de manière si explicite l’impossibilité de critiquer un État et sa politique. « Ce texte est une faute, tonne le député PCF Jean-Paul Lecoq. Il n’est pas possible qu’il y ait un seul État dans le monde dont la politique ne puisse être critiquée. Paradoxalement, cela contribue à faire d’Israël un État d’exception et donc à l’isoler. » La « loi Yadan » a été cosignée par 90 députés, dont 75 de la majorité (l’ex-ministre Aurore Bergé figure parmi les premiers paraphes) mais aussi 5 socialistes, dont Jérôme Guedj et François Hollande. De quoi alimenter les tensions au sein du Nouveau Front populaire, le texte étant explicitement pensé par son autrice comme une attaque contre la France insoumise, qui « fait justement partie intégrante du problème par sa légitimation de la haine des juifs dans notre pays sous couvert d’antisionisme ». À noter que ce n’est pas la première tentative de bâillonner les soutiens à la Palestine. En 2019, un autre député macroniste, Sylvain Maillard, avait tenté de faire adopter un texte pénalisant l’antisionisme au même titre que l’antisémitisme, mais celui-ci avait été transformé en résolution non contraignante.

Komunitas lemmings.world

FCC probes rise of AI robocall armies

This is the best summary I could come up with: The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tightening the rules protecting cellular network users and has kicked off an effort to understand the impact of AI on robocalls and robotexts. The impact of AI continues to reverberate, and the FCC wants to see how the technology can worsen that modern-day telecommunication plague: robocalls and robotexts. In this instance, the FCC is considering if AI analytics might better block unwanted calls and texts “and restore trust in our networks,” according to the agency. It would certainly be an improvement over reaching for the block button after receiving yet another call from someone purporting to be a Microsoft technician or something about an accident that was not your fault. However, those scenarios also highlight issues about which the FCC is concerned: for example, criminals’ use of AI technology to defraud consumers with texts and calls that mimic trusted sources. While the FCC is just at the Notice of Inquiry stage around AI, the agency is taking steps to protect the cellphone accounts of US consumers with rules requiring wireless providers immediately notify customers when a SIM change or port-out request is made. The original article contains 391 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Komunitas jlai.lu

En défense de Merwane Benlazar, cible d’un racisme plus idiot et décomplexé que jamais

Ben… quid de l’esprit Chalie ? Edit: attends je précise ma pensée parce que c’est pas sympa comme question sans contexte. Ce que tu décris c’est ton ressenti et il est tout à fait valide. Par contre, justifier la vague de haine que l’humouriste se mange parce qu’il ne serait pas rigolo, parce que les sujets qu’il aborde sont sensibles / de mauvais goût car liés à des tragédies, c’est pas top. C’est un sujet bien plus complexe, et c’est d’ailleurs exactement le genre de critiques dont est parfois sujet Charlie Hebdo, sauf que ces derniers bénéficient d’une certaine légitimitée parce que… justement ils (et leurs défenseurs) se targent que l’on peut rire de tout, même si cela offense, alors pourquoi pas Merwane Benlazar aussi ? De la même façon que Charlie Hebdo peut se moquer de l’islam (avant et) après ce qu’ils ont subit, pour certaines personnes c’est de bonne guerre, même si ça offense ; lui subit le racisme au jour le jour, et décide de le transformer en force, de tourner en dérision pour se moquer des stéréotypes qui lui sont collés au visage, ça devrait être ok aussi, pourtant… Les deux sont critiquables, mais il y a un certain deux poids deux mesures dans la société française, selon l’auteur de la blague Bonus un commentaire d’un internaute intéressant sur le sujet : ::: spoiler Spoiler Pour développer un peu (mais faudrait faire un thread tant y a à dire), globalement CH a plein de visions différentes selon qui le regarde et en fonction de ta critique tu peux te faire catégoriser (à tort ou à raison) dans l’une de ces visions ce qui rend toute discussion à propos de ce journal très pénible. la vision canal historique de Hara-Kiri, journal bête et méchant qui se moque de tout. Ouvertement tendance gauche anar, qui se moque des institutions, des représentants du pouvoir, profondément laïcard (et même anticlérical vu que les représentants religieux, particulièrement catholiques sont vus comme puissants au niveau de la société). C’est cet esprit là que continue de revendiquer Charlie Hebdo lors de sa création (à la main de Philippe Val, j’y reviendrai) et qu’il continue de revendiquer aujourd’hui (même si ils ne se collent pas d’étiquette, dans l’imaginaire commun ils en ont une). la vision islamiste terroriste de journal qui a osé représenter le prophète et donc c’est des impies qui méritent la mort. C’est évidemment une vision horrible et stupide qui est injustifiable (et qui a évidemment entrainé le 7 janvier), c’est un peu la reductio ad hitlerum dès qu’on parle de Charlie Hebdo. la vision qu’a désormais un pan de la gauche (moi le premier) et que partageait beaucoup de musulmans à l’époque des attentats : Charlie Hebdo a le droit d’exister mais c’est un journal de merde. Ils s’en prennent plus vraiment aux puissants mais suivent l’air du temps en critiquant un peu tout le monde, y compris ceux qui sont déjà en galère. Globalement elle se base sur le fait que Charlie Hebdo a pas pris le tournant qu’ont pris d’autres médias en s’adaptant au discours politique pour éviter d’amalgamer et cibler à tort les mauvaises populations : typiquement, depuis 2010 le RN ne dit plus “les noirs et les arabes” mais bien les musulmans, or CH cible (dans ses critiques pour dire qu’ils ont des attitudes pas républicaines par exemple) les musulmans. Cette vision considère que CH est devenu (ou était depuis une vingtaine d’année) un journal à tendance réactionnaire. C’est cette vision qui est assimilée à la vision 2 (“ah vous êtes donc des islamistes”) la vision un peu bêbête du "c’est un journal de gauche anti-woke parce qu’ils osent mettre des culs, des nichons, des non-blancs et des féministes/lgbt qu’ils critiquent (donc anti-woke) mais qui reste de gauche donc tendance historique (cf vision 1) parce qu’ils caricaturent quand même Macron. la réalité de Charlie Hebdo dans sa complexité suite (et même avant) aux attentats où je suis persuadé qu’ils ont un problème épidermique vis à vis de l’Islam (et je comprends pourquoi). Parce qu’être un journal dirigé par Philippe Val dans les années 2000, c’est pas rien. Philippe Val c’est pas n’importe qui. C’est un mec historiquement (années 90, quand il relance Charlie) de gauche, qui dès les années 2000 s’est illustré en virant Siné qui avait caricaturé le fils de Nicolas Sarkozy (et critiqué la LICRA). Philippe Val est ensuite devenu (nommé par Sarkozy) directeur de France Inter, a viré un journaliste citant le journal lancé par Siné, a ensuite viré des humoristes se moquant de Nicolas Sarkozy. Egalement, sous la direction de Val, Charlie Hebdo a refusé/extrêmement mal traité tout ce qui rattachait à Clearstream (affaire critiquant Sarkozy). On rappelera que Sarkozy a été le premier partisan dans la fin de la décennie 2000 du virage vers l’extrême-droite de l’UMP. Philippe Val qui a également soutenu Valeurs Actuelles dans leur caricature d’Obono en esclave. Et pour étayer pourquoi à mon sens la vision 3 est finalement la plus vraie en se basant sur la réalité de Charlie Hebdo c’est qu’ils “caricaturent” (ou bien tout simplement, dessinent) aussi les paniques morales amenées par la droite tendance RN quand c’est pas le RN directement. Typiquement, sur la mort d’un enfant lors d’une traversée clandestine de la méditerranée la caricature c’est ça et c’est Riss qui l’a faite. Riss c’est le propriétaire, directeur de publication et de la rédaction du journal. Sur la NUPES (truc inespéré soutenu par quasi tous les militants de gauche) et suite aux premières réponses israéliennes vis à vis de la population palestinienne, c’est ça. Pour rappel, l’aile historique de Charlie Hebdo (qui a été assassinée dans les attentats), représentait le conflit à Gaza de cette façon. Charlie Hebdo ca devenait déjà nul du vivant de Charb mais alors depuis sa mort c’est la berezinna. :::

Komunitas hexbear.net

Bulletins and News Discussion from April 15th to April 21st, 2024 - Between The Darkness And The Dawn, There Rises A Red Star

Lula da Silva is much better than Bolsonaro, there’s no comparison. I believe he’s much better than Boric and Biden (Biden is not left-wing, he’s a liberal), especially in his foreign policy. But he’s still a pragmatic socdem and not a radical socialist, so you can expect him to continue with the neoliberal things that have plagued Brazil and South America since the 80s and 90s. At least he has reduced the rate of the deforestation of the Amazon, promotes Latin American integration with CELAC and has really close relations with China and Xi. I believe that even Hugo Chávez had to sign a document saying that he would not abolish private property and change many of the neoliberal reforms. He even went to Wall Street to talk to investors. After the failure of the 2002 coup against him, he became more radical, but Chávez and Maduro are still the moderates within the Bolivarist movement. I don’t think Bolsonaro will come back, they’ll probably try another neoliberal ghoul after Bolsonaro is arrested or exiled. Iirc the right in Brazil only won one election after the election of Lula da Silva in 2002. And they only won because Lula was in prison. They can’t win presidential elections under normal conditions, so they keep trying to do it with coups. Like in Bolivia. Besides, I doubt that Milei will finish his government, he is very unpopular among the working class in Argentina. And when the crisis gets worse there, the right in Latin America will say that he wasn’t a true liberal.

Komunitas lemmygrad.ml

The protofascist precedents to the Axis’s extermination of Roma and Sinti

(This extract takes seven minutes to read.) The […] planned murder of our two peoples followed the implementation of the Final Solution. In the Romani case, reference to “The Final Solution of the Gypsy Question” was first drafted by Hans Pfundtner of the Reich’s Ministry of the Interior in March 1936. The second specific reference was made by Adolf Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit in September, 1937, and then by Himmler in his Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race on December 8th, 1938. The Second World War began nearly nine months after that. SS Officer Perry Broad of the political division at Auschwitz wrote in his memoirs that “it was the will of the all-powerful Führer to have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth; the Central Office knew it was Hitler’s aim to wipe out all the Gypsies without exception.” But why did Hitler want to destroy the Romanies, a people who presented no problem numerically, politically, militarily or economically? And why the Jews? He blamed the Jews for many things — claiming that they invented both Communism and Capitalism, that they were plotting to take over the world, that they created decadent literature, music and films — but Romanies were not accused of any of those things; in our own case, the only reason is in Himmler’s reference to “the nature of race.” Following Germany’s humiliating defeat in the First World War, and its economic woes in the years afterwards, Hitler wanted to rebuild German pride by getting rid of the foreign blood that he blamed for the situation; he believed it contaminated German “racial purity,” weakened German moral fibre, and had to be weeded out. Only by doing so, could the German people take their rightful place as the Master Race — and of all the different kinds of people in Europe, only Romanies and Jews originated from outside; they began in Asia. It should be added that the very small number of Europe’s Black population had been quietly rounded up and murdered even before WWII began. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were no anti-Jewish laws, but very many anti-Romani laws, about which the general public were already well aware. They had been in effect for centuries, and so even more of them being introduced came as no surprise, such as one he introduced right away called “the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring,” which ordered the sterilisation of certain categories of people, “specifically Gypsies and most of the Germans of black colour.” When the first Romanies crossed into the West some eight hundred years ago, the Europeans didn’t know who[m] we were. We were called many different things, but the name that stuck was “Egyptians,” where the mistaken label “Gypsies” comes from. Romanies weren’t Christian, they weren’t “white,” they had no country, and they did not want to get too friendly with the locals; because of these and more, they were quickly viewed with suspicion, and being powerless were easily blamed for all sorts of things, accused especially of theft, witchcraft, poor crops, and even the plague. Laws were soon passed everywhere in Europe, forbidding them from stopping anywhere; an exception was in Romania, where they were kept instead as slaves for over five hundred years. When the overseas colonies were created, different countries got rid of their unwanted Romanies by shipping them off to north and south America, Africa, and even to India, our original homeland. It is important to know these early details, in order to understand why Hitler was obsessed with wanting to exterminate our entire people, because German Romaphobia has a long history — it didn’t just start with Adolf Hitler; the first anti-Romani law was issued in [the First Reich] in 1416, and nearly fifty more were passed over the next 350 years. In 1500, Emperor Maximilian ordered [that] all Romanies to be out of Germany by Easter, or be put to death. Germans who murdered Romanies were protected by this law, which stated that “taking the life of a Gypsy […] did not act against the policy of the state.” In 1580, the governments encouraged Romani hunts in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany; in 1652, the townspeople in Bautzen are fined by the local magistrate for doing business with Romanies, who are then arrested if caught stealing food for their families. The mass murder of Romanies took place in 1659 in Neudorf, near Dresden, and in 1661, Elector Johann Georg II of Saxony imposed a fine on any Romani found in his territory. “Romani hunts” were encouraged as a means of exterminating them. According to a 1709 law in the district of Ober-Rhein, Romanies apprehended for any reason, whether criminal or not, were sent to the galleys or deported, and a year later, Frederick I of Prussia condemned all Romani men to forced labour, the women to be whipped and branded, and their children permanently placed with white families — another way to breed out a people. In 1714, an order was issued in Mainz sending all Romani men apprehended to the gallows, and requiring the branding and whipping of women and children. Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, ordered the murder of any Romani person resisting arrest. A significant year was 1721, when the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles VI ordered the extermination of all Romanies throughout the entire realm of the Holy Roman Church. Hitler’s plan was not the first. In 1722 in Frankfurt, Romani parents were branded and deported while their children were taken from them and placed permanently with non-Romani families. During this period, it was a hanging offence in Prussia for all those above the age of eighteen merely to be born Romani. A thousand armed Romanies resisted German soldiers in an organized fight for their freedom; nineteen were arrested at Kaswasser and tortured to death: four were broken on the wheel, three beheaded and the rest shot or stabbed to death. An edict from King Frederick William I of Prussia from 1725 condemned all Romanies eighteen years or older throughout the land, to be hanged. In the following year, Johann Weissenbruch described the wholesale destruction of a Romani camp in Germany: five were broken on the wheel, eleven were beheaded, and nine hanged. King Charles VI passed a law that any Romani man or boy found in Germany was to be killed instantly, while Romani women and children were to have their ears cut off and be whipped to the nearest foreign border. By 1740, all Romanies caught entering Bohemia, were hanged by decree. German racist attitudes became more deeply entrenched in 1783, when Heinrich Grellmann published his book which established our Indian origin; but in it, he claimed that in doing his research he felt a “clear repugnancy, like a biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interests of science.” The Church’s similar attitude was also expressed by the Lutheran minister Martinus Zippel, who wrote that “Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the present day, are like vermin on an animal’s body.” On September 14th 1888, the German Imperial Ministry of the Interior issued a lengthy order which said, in part, “Any Gypsies roaming about without legal earning, business or profession are to be criminally prosecuted […] the main duty of the authorities in fighting the Gypsy Plague must be unified cooperation, involving not only the police, but also the heads of community administrations.” In the early 1890s, the Swabian parliament held a conference on the “Gypsy Scum,” and recommended that the presence of approaching Romanies could be signalled by ringing church bells to warn the villagers. The military was also empowered at the same conference to apprehend and move Romanies on. In Munich in March, 1899, under the directorship of Alfred Dillman, the Bavarian police created a bureau later named The Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance, and a census of all known Romanies in Bavaria was compiled. Citizens were instructed to report all Romani activity to that office. Dillmann’s Gypsy Book, published in 1905, consisted of a long introduction in which we were described as “a pest against which society must unflaggingly defend itself,” a register of all the names compiled by the police and sent to the Central Office, together with individual criminal records, and many pages of “mug shots.” In February 1906, one Prussian minister instructed the police to “combat the Gypsy nuisance,” and a register was started to keep a record of Romani activity. The increase of anti-Romani terrorism in [the Twoth Reich] caused many Romanies to leave for western Europe, including Britain. A policy statement from the House of Commons in Vienna, capital of the Austro-German Alliance, was sent to the Ministers of the Interior, Defence and Justice “concerning measures to reduce and eliminate the Gypsy population.” In their 1920 book The Eradication of Lives Unworthy of Life, two Germans, psychiatrist Karl Binding and magistrate Alfred Hoche, argued for the killing by euthanasia of those who were “ballast existence,” i.e. whose lives were seen to be simply dead weight within the body of humanity. This included Romanies, who came under their second category: individuals carrying incurable hereditary disease, a genetic (i.e. racial) characteristic. Based on Dillmann, in our case this was “criminality.” The “criminality” listed in Dillmann’s Gypsy Book were overwhelmingly trespassing, and the theft of food. Requirements were introduced in Baden in 1922 that all Romanies must be photographed and fingerprinted, and have documents completed on them. In July, 1926, the Bavarian Provincial Criminal Commission passed a law aimed at controlling the “Gypsy Plague;” Romanies were forbidden to travel in family groups or to own firearms, and those over sixteen were liable for incarceration in work camps. Legislation requiring the photographing and fingerprinting of Romanies was introduced in Prussia in 1927, where eight thousand people were processed in this way. Following April 12th, 1928, Romanies in [the Weimar Republic] were placed under permanent police surveillance. Geneticist Professor Hans F. Günther wrote in his book Study of the German Race that “it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe.” One year later, the Munich Bureau’s National Centre jointly established the Division of Romani Affairs with the International Criminology Bureau (Interpol), in Vienna. Working closely together, they enforced restrictions on travel for Romanies without documents, and imposed up to two years’ detention in “rehabilitation camps” upon Romanies sixteen years of age or older. On January 20th 1933, officials in Burgenland called for the withdrawal of all Romanies’ civil rights, and the introduction of clubbing as a punishment. On July 14th, Hitler’s cabinet passed a law against the propagation of “lives not worthy of life.” There is no need to doubt that all of these precedents normalized antiziganist violence, thereby paving the way for the Samudaripen.

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Bulletins and News Discussion from May 19th to May 25th, 2025 - The Beginning of the End of the Monroe Doctrine

Make healthcare free, a basic universal job guarantee, decrease income/wealth inequality through taxes (which could reduce consumption by the top 10%) and spending targeted towards the bottom. Healthcare access, affordability and quality is constantly and consistently improving for the average Chinese person and is comfortably better than any remotely comparable country in income/wealth per capita. People should understand that you cant magically get the left end of the income distribution in a middle income country to attain welfare outcomes of a high income socdems country’s middle class with redistribution policy. Its not neoliberalism to say that they will get there even under a socialist government by YoY progress relative to the rate of the country’s development. China even now after all this absurd growth is still lagging the US or advanced European countries in GDP per capita (PPP or not) compared to how the USSR and other AES was positioned for most of the cold war. (40-60% for China vs 60-80% or above for the USSR in PPP terms). Even if China went full Soviet right now its welfare state redistributionary policies would be weaker for the average person compared to euro social democracies than the USSR’s were compared to its contemporary social democracies. Also fact is that Inequality in China HAS been consistently dropping for a decade+ now. Income inequality specificaly. And in China more so than in other countries inequality figures and changes ( as well as welfare access and quality) is a math problem driven by the rural-urban divide and rate of urbanisation. Inequality surged in the reform era as commercial opportunities exploded in urban China. The urban/rural income ratio was on a fast upward trend. As urbanization passed the 50% mark, China suppressed continued population growth in first-tier cities, pushing growth into second-and third-tier cities, thus evening out economic discrepancies between provinces. Since 2010, China’s Gini coefficient has been steadily falling. At around the same time, as the countryside emptied out, farm consolidation and mechanization resulted in rural incomes outgrowing urban incomes During the GFC China was like was only 48% urbanized (versus 65% today). Would China have been better off focusing on building out a nordic level safety net? Did the neolib CPC not want better healthcare for the masses and instead for whatever reason diverted resources to corrupt and inefficient state-owned construction companies? Of course not, its obvious that urbanization and massive infastructure building would achieve much more bang for the buck regarding welfare outcomes given just how rural China still was than trying to build an advanced social safety net at like 6k GDP per capita. Urban disposable income was over three times rural levels in 2008. No amount of redistribution could ever give households more spending power and better welfare outcomes than focusing in turning rural workers into urban ones and upgrading infastructure in rural and urban areas alike. And again China’s 65% urbanization today is where Japan, the EU and South Korea were in 1962, 1973 and 1985, respectively. Still ways to go . The welfare outcome juice left in urbanization and investment and infasrtucture building is still where the most potential is. China diverted most of its capital to manufacturing and infrastructure rather than welfare programs over the last 10-15 years not because they didnt want better welfare outcomes for households for but because that was and is still the best way to achieve them. And no neither China nor any other country at a similar level of development had and has enough capital, money and labour to focus on both these redistributive approches at remotely to the same degree Also over the past two decades, investment as a percentage of GDP has been far higher in inland provinces. Only one of the top ten fastest-growing provinces in the past decade (Fujian) has been coastal and none in the past two decades. So yeah if you’re in the 40-50% of China that is fully developed, the social safety net is on par with advanced nations. If you’re not, achieving modern social safety net merely a function of time regarding urbanization, development of lower tier cities and Houku reform and you are banking on current trajectories and the CPC getting you there. But it will happen in the controled way CPC has handled it till now. And to touch on that. Hukou reform, or lack thereof, is also a favorite hobby for China contrarians. With the huge gap in incomes and social services and nets between rural and urban china, if you just could go from a rural bumfuck town to Shanghai expecting access to all that it would have been a disaster for Chinese development. The costs of unregulated population concentration of hundreds of millions in megacities and the need for the walfare state to accomodate that in the span of 1-2 decades are rarely addressed. The hukou system has helped China avoid the slums that plague cities across the Global South. Everything you see in Brazil, Indonesia, India etc would have been an order of magnitude worse if there wasnt the oh so unfair and anti-socialist Hukou system in place. Through sequenced hukou reform, China has grown “medium-sized” cities – those with populations between 2 and 6 million – while keeping a lid on megacities with populations over 15 million. So in making sense of Chinese “welfare” focus and policies you have to recognize that if you can get bigger increases in income and welfare outcomes by funding infrastructure and keeping shit cheap (forcufully price wise or with supply & productivity rump up) than with redistribution from a thin top layer of high income tax payers the former is the more efficient welfare policy choice and thats the position China has been and is still. Per capita production expansion does far more than focusing on social safety net redistribution at China’s development level. Welfare redistribution can ease some hardships but it won’t integrate poorer regions and lower classes of a billion people into productive economic activity and high standards of living and ultimately you cannot support consumption of what you don’t make. If the pie isn’t big enough splitting it creatively won’t fill everyone. The vast majority of the country that would most benefit from income and wealth transfers need transfers of production factors first, not transfers of consumption. So right now China is engaging in extensive redistribution from the rich to the poor. That redistribution comes in the form of state owned financial system taking capital gains from growth to try to build those production factors in the places where most low income people are. All the infastructure China has been purring money to without end in EVERY province and all the production and manufacturing power and “oversupply” keeping goods and services cheap IS redistributionary welfare policy, a much more effective one for China’s strengths and levels of development at this point with much higher multipliers. It is the reason the average Chinese has seen their welfare get better much more so than any worker in any developing country. Its one of the more pro-social redistributive-oriented economic regimes the world has seen. Its pre-distributional vs post-distributional welfare economics. In simple terms its capex socialism. HSR alone for example is one of the biggest walfare projects of modern times in the world. Chinese people at this point have access to travel of any length more expansively AND affordably than pretty much any other population in countries of any significant size. Distributed urban development (that evens out welfare outcomes) through HSR buildout is a complete re-engineering of physical China on a level that makes economistic arguments irrelevant. What ppl looking for lessons on socialist construction, especially in developing countries should take away from China is that the government can intervene in a variety of ways to ensure goods and services stay cheap and to equalize welfare outcomes and not necessary to rely mostly on welfare payments and transfers and in fact depending on a country’s strengths and level of development its not even the right choice. Prioritizing money & tax redistribution only makes sense when you have a rich and large enough middle and upper class relative to the rest of the population. And even still direct welfare spending HAS increased over the last decade as a % of GDP in almost every sector (education, healthcare). It pretty much doubled for healthcare and its now on the lower end of european countries. Who’s to say that in 10-15 years China wouldnt overtake in healthcare spending european social democracies in their peak? Graphs time

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Grabow Riot (1912) - Novo General Thread for the 7th-10th of July 2025

spam filter tried to prevent me from reading this 🔥🔥🔥 email Kidnaping kids in School Tunnels Drug dealers sit watching all School Food Servers, Kitchen Doors and All Grocery Stores Back Doors kidnaping Girls in School Bathrooms Hidden Floor Hatches Kidnapers worked beside Bathrooms in 4 Separate Malls Kidnaping Elevator pits 5 to 20 feet never used space Commercial Building Ceilings Courthouse Building Tunnels to Hamburger Restaurants put Billion Human Hearts in Nuclear Reactors founder World biggest food ingredient chemical companies all WW1 Germany Coins Silver and Gold provider Degussa Headquarters FEMA during 911 Attacks Camp Kilmer also sent most US soldiers to WW2. Nazi Death Camps Slaughterhouse Cannibalism (Author) Joseph Myler ran President Harry Truman announcement Atomic Bomb Hiroshima Nagasaki President Truman founded War Food Administration National School Lunch Program feeds 30 million Children free school meals USA President George Bush & International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA run all India Nuclear Reactors IAEA India 1st Nuclear Missile Test 13th Prime Minister India founded National Food Security Act subsidize Grain 1.4 billion People & 2013 Midday Meal Scheme 120 million India School Children Food Inspector-General of Education grandson Father India nuclear power Plain Crash Ice Glacier. Police run all School Free meals in Kazakhstan 40% Global Uranium Kazatomprom by 2nd largest mosque outside Middle East. 19% World Population China 7% World Farm land use IAEA Nuclear isotope crop production China government launch SNIP nationwide free School meals in Pilot Countries, China Food & Drug Administration 1st Director executed by Lethal Injection for Briberies approval 150,000 new Drugs. World 3rd Largest Revenue State China Electric CEO Life imprisonment. 2024 Ukraine President in movie Love Big City Manhattan & wife founded Ukraine School Food Program. First Supreme Court in Meat Market Manhattan Mayor Eric Adams father Butcher. Prime Minister Tony Blair born above fathers Buttcher Shop Grocery Store owner Abraham Lincon Mom sleigh ride funeral Free Africans slaves John Fremont wife father Hart Benton named County 56 million gallons Nuclear Waste Hanford Site Federal Prisoners vegetable farm by 10 homeless Shelters VA Hospital across 6 Restaurants Manhattan Project Nuclear missile tailings in 5000 House Grand Junction Colorado Donald Trump Coronavirus stimulus reopen Climax Uranium Mill by all Countries Police Drug id Bible & Federal Reserve Chairman son David Eccles Sugar Factory became Climax Uranium Mill was Homeless Poor Farm by 3 Homeless shelters let people stay forever VA Hospital finance Homeless shelters beside Grease Monkey Mechanic by Hardee’s Hamburgers in Parking Lot thrift store selling stuff murdered people. 200 Homeless in Park across Police Station Chief IACP Doug Shoemaker worked for Ronald McDonald House Charities Children’s Hospital Cannibalism. University Cadaver Dead Body outdoor decay research Climax Uranium Mill by Jaill Probation was slaughterhouse by 3 NAZI Pow Camps in Grand Junction High School parties at 10 separate Hotels Converted into Apartments by VA Hospital Veteran Gave Covid 19 to all Homeless Shelter People went Quarantine at buzzy tourist Hotel owner Black Rock biggest vaccine investor. Energy Fuels Uranium Mill Moab Utah NAZI POW Camp Japanese Americans. Federal Law Books Westlaw Headquarters Climax Uranium One Owner Bank America Meral Research Building Energy Fuels Building 50 states Immigration Law Firm Usadefend in Headquarters USA only Uranium mill Energy Fuels Denver CO 66% States Homeless. Energy Fuels beside Homeless shelter by Canada Headquarters McDonalds Hamburgers = World 1st Nuclear Reactor Chicago Pile 1 CERN USA Revolutionary War Treaty Site France headquarters McDonalds by Orano Uranium by 2 Holmes Shelters. Pfizer Vaccine UM graduate New Mexico Founder J. J. Hagerman World 2nd Largest Cameco Uranium beside Indian Tribal Council Saskatoon 20 Homeless Shelters Headquarters beside Frezer Contractor by CrossFit beside Orano Uranium Sanofi vaccine. Orano donate Ronold McDonald Charity University Saskatchewan Uranium & Covid 19 Vaccine. NAZI Pow Camp USA Largest Uranium Plant Cameco & Uranium One Headquarters Thompson Reuters Federal law Books 240 million Refugees can only be verified by Banks own most nuclear Weapons Wells Fargo Bank and Bank America rob $100,000 Dollars from me & 50 bank lawyers say its imposable to comprehend Everyone Bank Account can secretly aBank robber’s address Worldwide Jail builders in Prison for illegal Kickbacks. 900 million People Die Smallpox Spanish Flu Plague originate by World Deepest Lake Russia Nuclear Sub Base 1st Joint Stock Company Alma Bridge Severodvinsk born JFK assignation Marina Oswald graduated University Michigan UM Pfizer biggest vaccine Factory Biggest Lipid Nanoparticles University TX Chile Restaurant worker Oswald Daughter lives by Princess Diana Chef. World 1st Color Picture Uranium Salt Hiroshima Bomb never paid for Climax Uranium Mari Curie Gun Powder Factory Prostitute Prison Died gun carriage coffin Princess Diana Salpêtrière Hospital Justus Liebig LAB Wurtz founder Poison Mustard Gas Napoleon Buonaparte & Lloyd Hall 59 Patents Meat Preservatives Justus Liebig Founded Civil War Beef Bouillon Cube, TNT Explosive Picric acid, preserves lunch meat potassium nitrate Gunpowder Nitroglycerin explosives Alfred Nobel combine 100 Drug Companies. Princess Diana last Priest Church Building Social Security. Diana date Islamic Largest Art Dealer Oliver Hoare graduate Salpêtrière. Israel Operation Opera Bomb Baghdad Nuclear Reactors sold by France Prime Minister Chirac missing when Diana Car crash survivor became Security Director AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine. Diana’s brother cooked 250 meals Covid 19 workers. Justus Liebig University Nobel Prize father nuclear physics Ernest Rutherford buried in Westminster Abbey Princess Diana many Ancestors Movie stars, Gunpowder Plotters, President Bush born saltpeter, John Dulles, World Largest Vaccine Investor Civil War Gun Powder maker Ancestors Microsoft Bill Gates TERA power Russia Nuclear Warheads Recycled China & USA Nuclear Reactors SOM Build World Trade Center & Most National Nuclear Laboratories 1934 to 1960 World Only 1 Cancer Treatment founder Napoleon Bonaparte Umicore-Solvay Pantera Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Congo Uranium acquired 1885 by Germany Social Security Founder named Bismark Donut. UMICORE Degussa CEO 2 School Teachers 1901 1st Nobel Prize in Chemistry carbon atom & Justus Liebig founded artificial Brest Milk Banks & Chloroform Poison Gas Bombs Solvay founded Baby ultrasound World Trade Center subway to World Largest Hamburg American Cruise Ship Port seized solders liberate Nuclear Missile Laboratory 15 miles tunnels under Gusen Holocaust Gas Chambers uranium mill Umicore donate Ronald McDonald Charities Heart Hospital Munich Vyaire Heart Drugs Headquarters Brunswick Bowling alley Builder my co-worker Arlington National Cemetery Army Honor Guard Unemployed Girlfriends Smoke meth drug all day hanging out eating area. Harison Ford House builder Father Pig Farmer Richard Jeffries sell Anique Barn Wood, Supply 30 Hi Schools Illegal Drugs Put Cocaine in Beer then 14-year-old girls want sex = David Johnson & Wife did not attend High School in Mankato then 10 years after graduation they lived with the Girls that sat closest to School Food servers then Purchased House beside School Board then House beside School Teacher from Smithfield Ham Sioux Falls SD moved many kidnapers (1 my Classmates (2 Brother Wife relatives (3 Dad Neighbor 12 year old cocaine dealer Chad Carpenter became Police DEA Drug task force leader School Police Camera owner Father Climax Uranium Miner (3 School Cook Doring Daughter Married Amy Solder Purchase House a Strip Club Move next Door. 1st Two apartments complex I rented lived Chad Carpenter and Michell Pettman 100% never saw all Grandpas Neighbors Children moved by Adam Hog Island Nuclear Reactor by World Largest Smithfield Ham also by Jail Sioux Falls SD by John Fremont Nuclear Reactor Director My Dad General Dynamic Nuclear Submarine Sailors bails Cocaine in my Room Prostitution 4-year-old Girls dancing naked to Fisher Price Radio my mom 15 years sat at Hardee’s Hamburgers with kids go in Storm Drain tunnels under Social Security Mall Director 14-year-old Prostitute Heart attack Drug Pimps date Heart surgery workers Phone call every day My Dad Federal Government Director WAPA 100 Foot Computer Screen Electric Power Grid Building Social Security Billings MT My Cousin Schaunaman mayor Aberdeen SD owned Subway Sandwiches Cannibalism Lunch meat Sandra Morgan Family My step Mom brother Craig Schaunaman President Obama appointed Heartland Grain Fuel Federal Farm Loans Building Social Security Huron SD Hubbard Mill worker relative BLM Land Water Director by Climax Uranium the Grand Junction Colorado Realtors sell bad land in Delta & Cortez My Grandma Owned State Farm Insurance beside Mankato only Strip Club & World Biggest Indian Hanging site director My Mom 1st Apartment at Hague Coffee across Hubbard Animal Feeds became Social Security Mall Basement Bull Shippers Coffee Club Owner Auto Garage across Hubbard Mill daughter Married my uncle owned Allstate insurance across McDonalds

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Numerous British neofascists have proudly waved Zionist flags

(The author published this on August 4, 2017 and it takes about three minutes to read.) Britain’s far right is trying to turn Jews and Muslims against each other. Most Jews know better, but a minority has allowed legitimate concerns about Islamist extremism to drive a search for false allies on the far right. The appeal is understandable. The extremes of liberal politeness and a well-meaning desire to maintain social order has led some of Europe’s chattering classes to go soft on extremist ideology. Many prefer to view Islam as an alien yet benign culture that simply needs to be ‘integrated’. If the jilbabs can be made tighter, the beards shorter and the curry milder, “Everything is gonna be ok.” It’s within this politically correct straitjacket that some British Jews have seen no option other than to ally with (or at least indulge) people who would, in any other circumstance, be called neo-Nazis. This mirrors the position some young British Muslims find themselves in. When no one in the mainstream appears to say anything of substance about Palestine or Western foreign policy, it can be tempting to ideologically graze in extremist pastures — even if some of what grows there is poison. It’s especially tempting when extremists pretend to be your friends. The extreme left will agitate for ‘Muslim’ causes like Palestine and admire Muslims for the ummah’s revolutionary potential. But behind closed doors, they still believe that not only is religion the opium of the masses, but that it is the one drug that shouldn’t be legal. [That last sentence is mostly incorrect. — Anbol] Similarly, the far right will pose with Israeli flags. But are they really in favor of the Jewish state, or are they trying to use Jews as puppets to inflame Muslim anger? And behind closed doors, how do they really feel about the Jewish people? British far-right ideologue Tommy Robinson is typical of this phenomenon. He claimed on a recent trip to Israel to be a friend to Jews everywhere. But he is also a friend (or ‘mate’ in his own words) to Jason Marriner, who proudly made a [Fascist] salute at Auschwitz and boasted that he had upset Jews there by attempting to climb into one of the ovens. This shouldn’t be a shock. Several years ago Robinson was pictured at a far right British National Party (BNP) rally at a time when one of its leaders, Jack Renshaw, described Jews as Satanists. Also at the rally was veteran Holocaust denier Richard Edmonds as well as John Pater, activist with the BNP as well as the National Socialist November 9th Society. Even Robinson’s former allies have now called him out as a far right extremist. The counter-extremism think tank Quilliam gained huge publicity by claiming credit for Robinson leaving the English Defence League — a move for which Robinson claims he was paid by Quilliam. The think tank has now denounced him as a far right extremist. He stormed their office in retaliation. Robinson’s pro-Israel posturing is as skin deep as the fake Zionism used by the far right Northern Irish paramilitaries from which his EDL organization stole crusader imagery and the slogan ‘No Surrender’. These paramilitaries flew Israeli flags simply because their (socialist Republican) opponents Sinn Fein flew Palestinian flags. Many of these extremists want us to forget that the Spanish Inquisition was as tough for Jews as it was for Muslims. It is only through opposing all forms of extremism that Britain’s Jews — and other minorities — can protect their communities. Reciprocal radicalization is the shared activity of all these apparently opposing groups. They need each other more than they need us. Robinson’s career (and dedicated supporters — 365,000 people follow him on Twitter) has been built on hitting Muslims’ nerves and profiting from the mayhem that ensues. His latest book, Mohammed’s Koran — already an Amazon bestseller — is a DIY effort at interpreting the Quran. He has rejected 1400 years of traditional Islamic scholarship as enthusiastically as ISIS do: both quote the book out of context, seeing only what they want to see, and ignoring the consensus of those who came before them. Robinson has become the mirror image of the jihadist radicalizers he attacks. This is perhaps one of the reasons why he so alarms Muslims. They know how dangerous he is because their communities have been plagued by their own Tommy Robinsons for years. Robinson and his foreign-funded radicalization of young white men is now at the stage that jihadist radicalization was at in the early 2000s, when some impressionable young British Muslims were listening to Abu Hamza audio files and watching grainy videos of Chechen Mujahideen. A decade later they were on one-way trips to Syria to join ISIS. If Abu Hamza and his like had been nipped in the bud, online radicalization would never have moved into offline reality in the Muslim community. Are we sleepwalking into the same mistake now with Britain’s angry young white men? Radicalization is a universal problem that is about the struggle of young people — regardless of creed or color — to find roots in tradition in spite of modernity. Muslims have been begging the world to see this for years. How ironic that it may be Tommy Robinson who finally proves them right. (Spotted here.) See also: ‘Why are U.S. ‘pro-Israel’ groups boosting a far-right, anti-Muslim UK extremist?’ ‘Are Zionists more antisemitic than anti-Zionists?’

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Silicon Valley’s Favorite New AI Agent Has Serious Security Flaws

A hacker demonstrated that the viral new AI agent Moltbot (formally Clawdbot) is easy to hack via a backdoor in an attached support shop. Clawdbot has become a Silicon Valley sensation among a certain type of AI-booster techbro, and the backdoor highlights just one of the things that can go awry if you use AI to automate your life and work. Software engineer Peter Steinberger first released Moltbot as Clawdbot last November. (He changed the name on January 27 at the request of Anthropic who runs a chatbot called Claude.) Moltbot runs on a local server and, to hear its boosters tell it, works the way AI agents do in fiction. Users talk to it through a communication platform like Discord, Telegram, or Signal and the AI does various tasks for them. According to its ardent admirers, Moltbot will clean up your inbox, buy stuff, and manage your calendar. With some tinkering, it’ll run on a Mac Mini and it seems to have a better memory than other AI agents. Moltbot’s fans say that this, finally, is the AI future companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have been promising. The popularity of Moltbot is sort of hard to explain if you’re not already tapped into a specific sect of Silicon Valley AI boosters. One benefit is the interface. Instead of going to a discrete website like ChatGPT, Moltbot users can talk to the AI through Telegram, Signal, or Teams. It’s also active, rather than passive. It also takes initiative. Unlike Claude or Copilot, Moltbot takes initiative and performs tasks it thinks a user wants done. The project has more than 100,000 stars on GitHub and is so popular it spiked Cloudflare’s stock price by 14% earlier this week because Moltbot runs on the service’s infrastructure. But inviting an AI agent into your life comes with massive security risks. Hacker Jamieson O’Reilly demonstrated those risks in three experiments he wrote up as long posts on X. In the first, he showed that it’s possible for bad actors to access someone’s Moltbot through any of its processes connected to the public facing internet. From there, the hacker could use Moltbot to access everything else, including Signal messages, a user had turned over to Moltbot. In the second post, O’Reilly created a supply chain attack on Moltbot through ClawdHub. “Think of it like your mobile app store for AI agent capabilities,” O’Reilly told 404 Media. “ClawdHub is where people share ‘skills,’ which are basically instruction packages that teach the AI how to do specific things. So if you want Clawd/Moltbot to post tweets for you, or go shopping on Amazon, there’s a skill for that. The idea is that instead of everyone writing the same instructions from scratch, you download pre-made skills from people who’ve already figured it out.” The problem, as O’Reilly pointed out, is that it’s easy for a hacker to create a “skill” for ClawdHub that contains malicious code. That code could gain access to whatever Moltbot sees and get up to all kinds of trouble on behalf of whoever created it. For his experiment, O’Reilly released a “skill” on ClawdHub called “What Would Elon Do” that promised to help people think and make decisions like Elon Musk. Once the skill was integrated into people’s Moltbot and actually used, it sent a command line pop-up to the user that said “YOU JUST GOT PWNED (harmlessly.)” Another vulnerability on ClawdHub was the way it communicated to users what skills were safe: it showed them how many times other people had downloaded it. O’Reilly was able to write a script that pumped “What Would Elon Do” up by 4,000 downloads and thus make it look safe and attractive. “When you compromise a supply chain, you’re not asking victims to trust you, you’re hijacking trust they’ve already placed in someone else,” he said. “That is, a developer or developers who’ve been publishing useful tools for years has built up credibility, download counts, stars, and a reputation. If you compromise their account or their distribution channel, you inherit all of that.” In his third, and final, attack on Moltbot, O’Reilly was able to upload an SVG (vector graphics) file to ClawdHub’s servers and inject some JavaScript that ran on ClawdHub’s servers. O’Reilly used the access to play a song from The Matrix while lobsters danced around a Photoshopped picture of himself as Neo. “An SVG file just hijacked your entire session,” reads scrolling text at the top of a skill hosted on ClawdHub. O’Reilly attacks on Moltbot and ClawdHub highlight a systemic security problem in AI agents. If you want these free agents doing tasks for you, they require a certain amount of access to your data and that access will always come with risks. I asked O’Reilly if this was a solvable problem and he told me that “solvable” isn’t the right word. He prefers the word “manegeable.” “If we’re serious about it we can mitigate a lot. The fundamental tension is that AI agents are useful precisely because they have access to things. They need to read your files to help you code. They need credentials to deploy on your behalf. They need to execute commands to automate your workflow,” he said. “Every useful capability is also an attack surface. What we can do is build better permission models, better sandboxing, better auditing. Make it so compromises are contained rather than catastrophic.” We’ve been here before. “The browser security model took decades to mature, and it’s still not perfect,” O’Reilly said. “AI agents are at the ‘early days of the web’ stage where we’re still figuring out what the equivalent of same-origin policy should even look like. It’s solvable in the sense that we can make it much better. It’s not solvable in the sense that there will always be a tradeoff between capability and risk.” As AI agents grow in popularity and more people learn to use them, it’s important to return to first principles, he said. “Don’t give the agent access to everything just because it’s convenient,” O’Reilley said. “If it only needs to read code, don’t give it write access to your production servers. Beyond that, treat your agent infrastructure like you’d treat any internet-facing service. Put it behind proper authentication, don’t expose control interfaces to the public internet, audit what it has access to, and be skeptical of the supply chain. Don’t just install the most popular skill without reading what it does. Check when it was last updated, who maintains it, what files it includes. Compartmentalise where possible. Run agent stuff in isolated environments. If it gets compromised, limit the blast radius.” None of this is new, it’s how security and software have worked for a long time. “Every single vulnerability I found in this research, the proxy trust issues, the supply chain poisoning, the stored XSS, these have been plaguing traditional software for decades,” he said. “We’ve known about XSS since the late 90s. Supply chain attacks have been a documented threat vector for over a decade. Misconfigured authentication and exposed admin interfaces are as old as the web itself. Even seasoned developers overlook this stuff. They always have. Security gets deprioritised because it’s invisible when it’s working and only becomes visible when it fails.” What’s different now is that AI has created a world where new people are using a tool they think will make them software engineers. People with little to no experience working a command line or playing with JSON are vibe coding complex systems without understanding how they work or what they’re building. “And I want to be clear—I’m fully supportive of this. More people building is a good thing. The democratisation of software development is genuinely exciting,” O’Reilly said. “But these new builders are going to need to learn security just as fast as they’re learning to vibe code. You can’t speedrun development and ignore the lessons we’ve spent twenty years learning the hard way.” Moltbot’s Steinberger did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment but O’Reilly said the developer’s been responsive and supportive as he’s red-teamed Moltbot. “He takes it seriously, no ego about it. Some maintainers get defensive when you report vulnerabilities, but Peter immediately engaged, started pushing fixes, and has been collaborative throughout,” O’Reilly said. “I’ve submitted [pull requests] with fixes myself because I actually want this project to succeed. That’s why I’m doing this publicly rather than just pointing my finger and laughing Ralph Wiggum style…the open source model works when people act in good faith, and Peter’s doing exactly that.” From 404 Media via this RSS feed

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Domestic Terrorism in Plain Sight: White Supremacy, State Violence, and the Assault on Democracy

Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. The United States is under siege, not by a foreign enemy, but by the Trump administration, which has transformed governance itself into a form of domestic terrorism in the service of a white supremacist state. By domestic terrorism, I mean the use of state-sanctioned intimidation, disappearance, and violence against civilian populations in order to discipline dissent, enforce racial hierarchy, and normalize fear as a mode of governance. Masked agents in unmarked vehicles, dressed in battlefield gear and operating beyond any recognizable legal authority, now stalk the streets, abducting, brutalizing, and in some cases killing people. Citizens and non-citizens alike are rendered disposable. Reason and the rule of law have collapsed, replaced by the naked exercise of state violence in defense of an apartheid politics. This is a regime that has turned against its own people. It governs through disappearance, terror, and the routinization of cruelty. Harm, misery, violence, and murder are no longer deviations from democratic norms; they are the norms. In the Minneapolis area alone, federal agents have now been involved in multiple fatal shootings in recent weeks, including the January 7th state murder of 37-year-old mother Renée Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen shot and killed by an ICE agent during federal enforcement operations. The killing has sparked widespread protests and outrage across the Twin Cities and the nation as communities demanded accountability and justice. The Trump administration attempted to justify the killing by labeling Good a ‘domestic terrorist,’ weaponizing the term to deflect accountability and invert the meaning of state violence. Soon after Good’s death, federal agents were again captured on video in Minneapolis using lethal force that amounted to an execution in plain sight. The footage shows a man overwhelmed by a swarm of officers, pushed to the ground, and shot multiple times even as he lay motionless before them. Local officials confirm that the incident resulted in the death of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, who dedicated his life to caring for veterans. This marked the third shooting by federal immigration agents in the city in just a few weeks, deepening public outrage over what critics call unchecked violence by federal agents. Once again, despite multiple videos documenting the murder, including one showing a Border Patrol agent taking Pretti’s gun before he was killed, the Trump regime nevertheless claimed an agent shot him in self-defense, “a narrative Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called ‘nonsense’ and ‘lies’.” Within minutes of the killing, senior Trump administration officials moved swiftly to control the narrative. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, joined others in seizing on unverified claims to label Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin,” while accusing Democrats of “fanning the flames of insurrection” for crass political gain. These assertions were not merely reckless; they were strategic fabrications designed to invert victim and perpetrator, delegitimize dissent, and preemptively justify state violence. They also backfired on the administration, as an avalanche of videos stripped away the official lies and revealed the real assailants, federal agents who beat and killed not as rogue actors, but as executors of state-sanctioned terror. To understand these killings as anything other than isolated crimes is to confront the deeper historical system of violence from which they emerge. State violence must be remembered and confronted not only in its most spectacular eruptions, such as the deployment of armed federal forces into America’s cities, but as a systemic condition rooted in a long history of imperial conquest, genocide, and racial domination. From the extermination wars against Indigenous peoples to slavery, lynching, and mass incarceration, violence has never been incidental to the American project; it has been one of its organizing principles. This history is embodied in the evolution of the carceral state, a political culture wedded to racist terror, and a punishing gangster form of capitalism that plunders labor, concentrates wealth, and thrives on mass inequality, impoverishment, and social misery. The machinery of death is thus both historical and existential, sustained by a culture of manufactured ignorance and permanent class and racial war. Such a system cannot be reformed without reproducing the very relations of domination on which it depends. It must be dismantled. Trump and his army of enforcers, in the streets and in the White House, are not a rupture from this history but its culmination, the moment when a long-standing regime of violence sheds its democratic disguise and rules openly through fear. The assassinations of Good and Pretti, however morally and politically repulsive, mark more than the tragic and shocking loss of two lives; they signal the death of American democracy, the unraveling of its civic culture, the collapse of its legal and cultural institutions, and the emergence of an upgraded form of fascism, a convergence that grimly fulfills the long history of violence through which America must now recognize itself. That long history does not remain abstract; it is actively mobilized in the present through spectacle, coercion, and the strategic deployment of state power. Such claims echo across the upper reaches of the Trump administration and function as ideological weapons. They sanctify state terror, erase visual evidence of brutality, and flood the public sphere with a fascist politics of fear in which dissent is criminalized, truth rendered disposable, and violence recoded as both necessary and virtuous. Their purpose is unmistakable: to create the conditions for invoking the Insurrection Act by normalizing the spectacle of unarmed civilians being shot in cold blood. These killings are not random excesses or rogue acts. They are calculated performances of power, intended simultaneously to shock the public into paralysis and to provoke mass resistance that can then be cited as justification for escalating repression. The regime’s logic is brutally circular: protest is met with violence, violence generates outrage, outrage is labeled insurrection, and insurrection becomes the pretext for extinguishing democracy at gunpoint. State-sanctioned violence is thus framed as the only means of restoring “order,” even as it becomes the mechanism through which democratic life is suffocated. Here, Václav Havel’s warning in The Power of the Powerless takes on renewed urgency. Havel argued that authoritarian systems depend not only on repression but on the forced participation of citizens in a lie, a lie sustained through fear, ritualized obedience, and manufactured consent. What we are witnessing is precisely such a moment: an attempt to compel the public to accept an inverted moral universe in which state murder is called security and resistance is branded terrorism. The real danger lies not only in the violence itself but in whether society is coerced into living within its logic. Havel also insisted that dominant power must never be allowed the final word, and that the downtrodden and oppressed always carry within themselves the capacity to overcome their own powerlessness. It is precisely this insight that haunts the Trump regime and its band of executioners, for it reveals that their authority is neither total nor secure. Embedded within their displays of force are the very seeds of their undoing, taking root in the growing courage, solidarity, and resistance of those who refuse to live within the lie. As Carole Cadwalladr has rightly observed, what taking place on the streets of Minneapolis is a test case. The city has become a political laboratory, a petri dish in which the administration is probing the limits of its power and measuring the resilience of democratic resistance. As she reported, drawing on an interview with conservative historian Robert Kagan, the strategy is deliberate: provoke street violence, manufacture chaos, and then invoke the Insurrection Act as a means of consolidating authoritarian rule. Minneapolis is not an aberration. It is a warning; it is a glimpse of a dark future. The brutal, state-sanctioned assassinations of Good and Pretti, captured on cell phone videos, expose a cruelty that tears through history’s thin membrane and returns us to its darkest rituals. This malignant lawlessness summons an earlier terror, when the lynching of Black bodies was staged as public spectacle, when murder became entertainment and cruelty was recoded as a political theater of fear in the service of the Trump administration. These killings and the unceasing violence unleashed by ICE summon the memory of Kristallnacht, that moment in Nazi Germany when sanctioned brutality spread like a moral plague, destroying reason, annihilating decency, and choking off the very possibility of civic life. What we are witnessing is not an aberration but a warning, violence unbound from law or conscience, rehearsing the old lessons of hatred with new tools and new victims. The horror is not only unthinkable, it is historically familiar, and that familiarity should chill us to the bone. History in this case should not be a weapon of state terror, but a repository of dangerous memories, a resource for radical change. This history of sanctioned brutality is not confined to memory or metaphor; it is institutionalized in the everyday operations of the contemporary carceral state. These deaths, and the escalation of federal deadly force within U.S. cities, are not isolated tragedies. They are part of a broader pattern, a rupture in the social contract and due process. ICE, in expanding its sprawling system of detention fortresses that critics have likened to creating its own gulags, oversaw at least 32 deaths in custody last year and additional deaths tied to recent enforcement actions, a carceral network where cruelty is built into the very architecture of state governance rather than treated as an aberration. This pattern of horror behind ICE’s prison walls should serve as a stark warning that violence, brutality, and cruelty now define the DNA of a democracy in retreat. Trump’s delusional embrace of violence is no longer a matter of abstract rhetoric. It is evident in his racist and dehumanizing language, the expansion of the so-called war on terror, and his unapologetic support for imperial power, all of which work to make state-sanctioned violence thinkable, defensible, and increasingly legitimate. This violence is not deferred or symbolic; it is unfolding in real time, in spaces that should be protected from state power rather than violated by it. The regime of terror now operates simultaneously at home and abroad, the latter visible in the bombing of Iran and Yemen and in the invasion of Venezuela. What is unfolding domestically mirrors a violence long rehearsed beyond U.S. borders. As Chris Hedges has observed, what we are witnessing is the return of violence long perfected abroad to our own streets, the “imperial boomerang” in action, where the tactics of occupation and repression once deployed in Fallujah or Helmand province are now repurposed against civilians here at home. Before we became the victims of such state terror, Hedges reminds us, we were often its accomplices. In Minnesota, ICE agents have escalated targeted raids and detentions across neighborhoods and in close proximity to schools, shattering any remaining pretense that children are off limits. School officials in a Minneapolis suburb report that ICE vehicles have entered school property, followed buses, circled playgrounds, and detained students, including multiple minors swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. As Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik stated publicly, ICE agents have been “roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots and taking our children,” leaving a community that once regarded schools as sanctuaries with a sense of safety that has been deeply shattered. The abduction of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos by ICE marks a chilling pedagogical moment in the worst sense of the term. Innocence itself is weaponized. A child’s terror becomes a warning to the nation: no one is beyond reach, not even those who should be most protected. Childhood is no longer a sanctuary; it has become a frontline. Schools, once imagined as fragile democratic spaces of care, learning, and protection, are now treated as legitimate sites of surveillance and coercion. When armed agents stalk school grounds and detain children, the message is unmistakable: fear has replaced care as the governing logic of the state. Liam Conejo Ramos’s case, one of several involving children detained near schools or on their way to class, demonstrates that the agents meant to enforce ‘immigration law’ now operate in ways that fracture communities and transform schools from sites of refuge into spaces of dread, state violence, and terminal abandonment. ICE has mutated into an apparatus of terror bearing unmistakable resemblance to the Nazi Brownshirts (SA). It has become a toxic and ugly institution that no longer seeks legitimacy through persuasion, spectacle, or even propaganda It has blood in its mouth, feeding openly on the spectacle and normalization of violence. The work of dehumanization is complete. Repression no longer needs a narrative. Violence now speaks directly, efficiently, and publicly. The photograph of five-year-old preschooler Liam Conejo Ramos trembling in fear is not incidental; it is visual proof of a war on children that is already underway, a war that treats young lives as collateral damage in the consolidation of authoritarian power. But this moment is not only one of terror; it is also a moment of profound pedagogical consequence. The Trump regime does not rely solely on repression, surveillance, and brute force; it depends on the continual production of fascist subjects willing to embrace its reign of terror as common sense, security, and patriotism. Fascism operates not only through the machinery of domination but through the colonization of consciousness, educating people to normalize cruelty, internalize fear, and confuse obedience with moral virtue. It educates by attacking public and higher education, stripping history of dangerous memories, ideas, and critical knowledge. It also works relentlessly to shape desires, loyalties, and perceptions, making violence appear necessary and dissent appear dangerous. Against this pedagogy of fear, resistance becomes an alternative form of education, one that awakens critical consciousness and restores the capacity to imagine justice. The assault on children, youth, independent media, organized resistance, and the future itself exposes the moral bankruptcy of the regime and clarifies the stakes of the struggle. Young people are learning, in real time, what power looks like when stripped of ethics and accountability, and they are also learning that democracy cannot survive without courage, solidarity, and collective action. The United States is not on the brink of fascism; it is living inside it. Yet history teaches us that authoritarianism is never defeated by silence or compliance. It is challenged when people refuse to unlearn their capacity for outrage, when education becomes a practice of freedom rather than domination, and when youth transform fear into political consciousness. The mass resistance now unfolding in Minneapolis and spreading across the country is not a fleeting protest but a giant stirring, a force gathering its strength in the face of terror. What is required now is a shared awakening, a collective refusal to normalize terror or accept fear as the horizon of political life. It calls for a renewed commitment to a pedagogy of resistance, one that names injustice without hesitation, connects private suffering to public responsibility, and affirms, even in dark times, that another future not only remains possible but is already struggling to be born. That future, however, depends on organized, nonviolent mass action led by workers, artists, intellectuals, cultural workers, youth, educators, unions, community organizers, and mass democratic organizations that understand that teaching, cultural production, and political struggle are inseparable practices. The tools required to confront authoritarianism are not new; they are part of a democratic inheritance forged through abolitionist movements, labor struggles, anti-colonial resistance, and the Black freedom struggle, this country’s most enduring and transformative force for democracy. Again and again, these traditions have shown that disciplined, mass-based collective movements can dismantle regimes of terror once deemed invincible. Under such circumstances, education should become central to politics and the struggle over identity, agency, and subjectivity, functioning as a fundamental force in social change**.** To reclaim democracy today is to recover this historical lineage, embrace the struggle over agency, reactivate its lessons in the present, and recognize that social hope is not an abstract retreat but a collective practice, one built through solidarity, historical memory, sustained resistance, and the refusal to surrender the future to fear. The post Domestic Terrorism in Plain Sight: White Supremacy, State Violence, and the Assault on Democracy appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed

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Airbus Seizes 28% of Global Military Helicopter Orders H145 Bestseller, Scandal-Plagued NH90 Still Sells | Defense Express

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Black hospital cleaners achieve ‘landmark victory’ against Great Ormond Street Hospital

Victory has been achieved today for 80 Black, Brown and migrant cleaners in a landmark Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT). The courageous workers at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) were represented by law firm Leigh Day and their trade union United Voices of the World (UVW). This case highlights the NHS practice of employing through subcontractors, resulting in inequitable pay structures whereby NHS-employed workers were receiving significantly higher wages. Black Hospital cleaners have won a landmark Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) victory against Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH). The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has upheld a landmark appeal brought by 80 cleaners at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), members of the… pic.twitter.com/TFEUMXeAoJ — The Voice Newspaper (@TheVoiceNews) January 23, 2026 NHS — migrants work is no less valuable than a white persons This case starts with UVW winning a campaign in 2021 to bring the 80 employment contracts in-house. Despite winning their case, the workers remained on lower pay for a further 18 months, raising serious concerns for the tribunal. They subsequently determined that this delay was ‘unreasonable, unlawful, and indirectly race discriminatory’. Furthermore, this shows a disproportionate impact seen in Black and Brown workers compared to their band two colleagues. Therefore, the EAT declared GOSH’s actions were discriminatory under the Equality Act 2010. We all know of the western colonial tendency to undervalue the work of marginalised groups. In this case, we see a meaningful advance towards pay equality within the NHS. It further highlights the essential role of migration in sustaining the health service, while strengthening the argument that employers systematically discriminate against migrant workers as a source of low-cost labour. According to Employee Benefits, UVW’s general secretary Petros Elia celebrated the victory and reminded us of its historic importance: This is not just a victory; it is a historic rupture in the systemic injustice that has plagued the NHS for decades. The EAT’s ruling confirms what we have always known: that forcing these workers to wait months or years for the pay and conditions they are legally entitled to is not just bad practice, it is unlawful race discrimination. A GOSH spokesperson provided a pretty condescending statement that we can’t help but pick up on some of these bizarre colonial sub-conscious biases: Our cleaning and domestic services colleagues are valued members of our team at GOSH. This was a complex process, and we worked hard to harmonise staff into NHS employment quickly and in ways that worked best for individual staff. We are carefully reviewing the EAT decision. As the appeal process is ongoing, it would not be appropriate to comment further. The language of “harmonisation” uncomfortably echoes the far-right’s use of “integration”, with its troubling implications given the delay in GOSH rectifying the pay discrepancies. It’s 2026, not 1956. I can’t believe what I’m reading. https://t.co/Y7fPUFNIXh — Lorna_TVeditor (@Lorna_TVeditor) January 23, 2026 Equality Act 2010: What is the point if employers just circumvent it? This case exposed a far larger issue that public discourse has long ignored. We proudly brandish laws and Acts to signal how decent and compassionate we are, even whilst their substance goes unenforced or ignored. However, it is the best unkept secret that employers find loopholes and means to ensure that discriminatory practices carry on. This time, there just ‘indirectly’ through third parties so the employer has a ‘buffer zone’ of accountability. The NHS should be an employer that recognises the work of all, regardless of ethnicity. For years, migrants have kept our NHS staffed working endless hours just as their white British colleagues do. Nevertheless, pay discrepancies continue to come to the surface. This signals that our NHS has a long way to go in making sure it looks after all of its staff equally. With no racial prejudice. Featured image via Twitter By Maddison Wheeldon From Canary via This RSS Feed.

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The protofascist precedents to the Axis’s extermination of Roma and Sinti

(This extract takes seven minutes to read.) The […] planned murder of our two peoples followed the implementation of the Final Solution. In the Romani case, reference to “The Final Solution of the Gypsy Question” was first drafted by Hans Pfundtner of the Reich’s Ministry of the Interior in March 1936. The second specific reference was made by Adolf Würth of the Racial Hygiene Research Unit in September, 1937, and then by Himmler in his Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race on December 8th, 1938. The Second World War began nearly nine months after that. SS Officer Perry Broad of the political division at Auschwitz wrote in his memoirs that “it was the will of the all-powerful Führer to have the Gypsies disappear from the face of the earth; the Central Office knew it was Hitler’s aim to wipe out all the Gypsies without exception.” But why did Hitler want to destroy the Romanies, a people who presented no problem numerically, politically, militarily or economically? And why the Jews? He blamed the Jews for many things — claiming that they invented both Communism and Capitalism, that they were plotting to take over the world, that they created decadent literature, music and films — but Romanies were not accused of any of those things; in our own case, the only reason is in Himmler’s reference to “the nature of race.” Following Germany’s humiliating defeat in the First World War, and its economic woes in the years afterwards, Hitler wanted to rebuild German pride by getting rid of the foreign blood that he blamed for the situation; he believed it contaminated German “racial purity,” weakened German moral fibre, and had to be weeded out. Only by doing so, could the German people take their rightful place as the Master Race — and of all the different kinds of people in Europe, only Romanies and Jews originated from outside; they began in Asia. It should be added that the very small number of Europe’s Black population had been quietly rounded up and murdered even before WWII began. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were no anti-Jewish laws, but very many anti-Romani laws, about which the general public were already well aware. They had been in effect for centuries, and so even more of them being introduced came as no surprise, such as one he introduced right away called “the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring,” which ordered the sterilisation of certain categories of people, “specifically Gypsies and most of the Germans of black colour.” When the first Romanies crossed into the West some eight hundred years ago, the Europeans didn’t know who[m] we were. We were called many different things, but the name that stuck was “Egyptians,” where the mistaken label “Gypsies” comes from. Romanies weren’t Christian, they weren’t “white,” they had no country, and they did not want to get too friendly with the locals; because of these and more, they were quickly viewed with suspicion, and being powerless were easily blamed for all sorts of things, accused especially of theft, witchcraft, poor crops, and even the plague. Laws were soon passed everywhere in Europe, forbidding them from stopping anywhere; an exception was in Romania, where they were kept instead as slaves for over five hundred years. When the overseas colonies were created, different countries got rid of their unwanted Romanies by shipping them off to north and south America, Africa, and even to India, our original homeland. It is important to know these early details, in order to understand why Hitler was obsessed with wanting to exterminate our entire people, because German Romaphobia has a long history — it didn’t just start with Adolf Hitler; the first anti-Romani law was issued in [the First Reich] in 1416, and nearly fifty more were passed over the next 350 years. In 1500, Emperor Maximilian ordered [that] all Romanies to be out of Germany by Easter, or be put to death. Germans who murdered Romanies were protected by this law, which stated that “taking the life of a Gypsy […] did not act against the policy of the state.” In 1580, the governments encouraged Romani hunts in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany; in 1652, the townspeople in Bautzen are fined by the local magistrate for doing business with Romanies, who are then arrested if caught stealing food for their families. The mass murder of Romanies took place in 1659 in Neudorf, near Dresden, and in 1661, Elector Johann Georg II of Saxony imposed a fine on any Romani found in his territory. “Romani hunts” were encouraged as a means of exterminating them. According to a 1709 law in the district of Ober-Rhein, Romanies apprehended for any reason, whether criminal or not, were sent to the galleys or deported, and a year later, Frederick I of Prussia condemned all Romani men to forced labour, the women to be whipped and branded, and their children permanently placed with white families — another way to breed out a people. In 1714, an order was issued in Mainz sending all Romani men apprehended to the gallows, and requiring the branding and whipping of women and children. Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, ordered the murder of any Romani person resisting arrest. A significant year was 1721, when the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles VI ordered the extermination of all Romanies throughout the entire realm of the Holy Roman Church. Hitler’s plan was not the first. In 1722 in Frankfurt, Romani parents were branded and deported while their children were taken from them and placed permanently with non-Romani families. During this period, it was a hanging offence in Prussia for all those above the age of eighteen merely to be born Romani. A thousand armed Romanies resisted German soldiers in an organized fight for their freedom; nineteen were arrested at Kaswasser and tortured to death: four were broken on the wheel, three beheaded and the rest shot or stabbed to death. An edict from King Frederick William I of Prussia from 1725 condemned all Romanies eighteen years or older throughout the land, to be hanged. In the following year, Johann Weissenbruch described the wholesale destruction of a Romani camp in Germany: five were broken on the wheel, eleven were beheaded, and nine hanged. King Charles VI passed a law that any Romani man or boy found in Germany was to be killed instantly, while Romani women and children were to have their ears cut off and be whipped to the nearest foreign border. By 1740, all Romanies caught entering Bohemia, were hanged by decree. German racist attitudes became more deeply entrenched in 1783, when Heinrich Grellmann published his book which established our Indian origin; but in it, he claimed that in doing his research he felt a “clear repugnancy, like a biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interests of science.” The Church’s similar attitude was also expressed by the Lutheran minister Martinus Zippel, who wrote that “Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the present day, are like vermin on an animal’s body.” On September 14th 1888, the German Imperial Ministry of the Interior issued a lengthy order which said, in part, “Any Gypsies roaming about without legal earning, business or profession are to be criminally prosecuted […] the main duty of the authorities in fighting the Gypsy Plague must be unified cooperation, involving not only the police, but also the heads of community administrations.” In the early 1890s, the Swabian parliament held a conference on the “Gypsy Scum,” and recommended that the presence of approaching Romanies could be signalled by ringing church bells to warn the villagers. The military was also empowered at the same conference to apprehend and move Romanies on. In Munich in March, 1899, under the directorship of Alfred Dillman, the Bavarian police created a bureau later named The Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance, and a census of all known Romanies in Bavaria was compiled. Citizens were instructed to report all Romani activity to that office. Dillmann’s Gypsy Book, published in 1905, consisted of a long introduction in which we were described as “a pest against which society must unflaggingly defend itself,” a register of all the names compiled by the police and sent to the Central Office, together with individual criminal records, and many pages of “mug shots.” In February 1906, one Prussian minister instructed the police to “combat the Gypsy nuisance,” and a register was started to keep a record of Romani activity. The increase of anti-Romani terrorism in [the Twoth Reich] caused many Romanies to leave for western Europe, including Britain. A policy statement from the House of Commons in Vienna, capital of the Austro-German Alliance, was sent to the Ministers of the Interior, Defence and Justice “concerning measures to reduce and eliminate the Gypsy population.” In their 1920 book The Eradication of Lives Unworthy of Life, two Germans, psychiatrist Karl Binding and magistrate Alfred Hoche, argued for the killing by euthanasia of those who were “ballast existence,” i.e. whose lives were seen to be simply dead weight within the body of humanity. This included Romanies, who came under their second category: individuals carrying incurable hereditary disease, a genetic (i.e. racial) characteristic. Based on Dillmann, in our case this was “criminality.” The “criminality” listed in Dillmann’s Gypsy Book were overwhelmingly trespassing, and the theft of food. Requirements were introduced in Baden in 1922 that all Romanies must be photographed and fingerprinted, and have documents completed on them. In July, 1926, the Bavarian Provincial Criminal Commission passed a law aimed at controlling the “Gypsy Plague;” Romanies were forbidden to travel in family groups or to own firearms, and those over sixteen were liable for incarceration in work camps. Legislation requiring the photographing and fingerprinting of Romanies was introduced in Prussia in 1927, where eight thousand people were processed in this way. Following April 12th, 1928, Romanies in [the Weimar Republic] were placed under permanent police surveillance. Geneticist Professor Hans F. Günther wrote in his book Study of the German Race that “it was the Gypsies who introduced foreign blood into Europe.” One year later, the Munich Bureau’s National Centre jointly established the Division of Romani Affairs with the International Criminology Bureau (Interpol), in Vienna. Working closely together, they enforced restrictions on travel for Romanies without documents, and imposed up to two years’ detention in “rehabilitation camps” upon Romanies sixteen years of age or older. On January 20th 1933, officials in Burgenland called for the withdrawal of all Romanies’ civil rights, and the introduction of clubbing as a punishment. On July 14th, Hitler’s cabinet passed a law against the propagation of “lives not worthy of life.” There is no need to doubt that all of these precedents normalized antiziganist violence, thereby paving the way for the Samudaripen.

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Br’er Vivek

“If you believe in normalizing hatred towards any ethnic group, towards whites, towards blacks, towards Hispanics, towards Jews, towards Indians, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” Vivek said to applause from the crowd. Two reporters from the national media– Pooja Salhotra of the New York Times and Alex Tabit of CNN– conveyed this moment when Vivek Ramaswamy made his plea for tolerance at the Turning Point conference, without mentioning that his presidential bid was based on the old-time Southern strategy, that of wooing white voters by disparaging Blacks. A Black reporter would have pointed to this contradiction, but the corporate media are cooperating with the Trump administration by firing Black reporters and commentators whose presence exists according to them because of D.E.I. The same thing is happening in Hollywood. Award-winning Black film director Marta Cunningham says at the present time she has a better chance of getting a film done in Portugal than in the United States. Has Vivek Ramaswamy learned? They call us the N-word. They call his people J-word. After some MAGAs insulted him and the Vice President’s wife, Usha Vance, does he still believe that white supremacy doesn’t exist? During the recent Turning Point USA gathering, the Vice President refused to condemn the growing power of the far right. He and some New York Republicans are friendly toward the AfD, described as a German Neo Nazi party. Vivek’s rebuke of the growing influence of anti-Black, anti-Semitic, and anti-South Asian elements in MAGA has earned him plaudits as a crusader against intolerance. That’s rich because Vivek ran a political campaign based on picking fights with Blacks. He even sympathized with the Nazi who murdered Blacks in Florida. The victims were Angela Michelle Carr, 52, who was shot in her car outside a store, employee A.J. Laguerre, 19, who was shot as he tried to flee, and customer Jerrald Gallion, 29, who was shot as he entered the store. Vivek blamed the murder on “racialized culture” and not white supremacy. If that were not enough, he donated $10,000 to the defense fund of Daniel Penny, who sneaked up behind a mentally disturbed Black man, Jordan Neely, and killed him with a rear-neck chokehold. Penny became a national hero and was celebrated by President Trump and J.D. Vance, who told his mother to get lost when she desperately needed help. Penny’s defense fund raised $ 2 million, the same amount received by Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante who murdered two Wisconsin demonstrators. Jonathan Ross, the killer of Renee Good, exceeded two million. Kill a Black, a Brown, or a woman, the right will make you rich. Billionaire Bill Ackman is contributing to Ross’s fund. Vivek said that the celebration of “Juneteenth” was a waste of time. Juneteenth, according to legend, was the date when Texas slaves learned that Blacks had been emancipated in states over which Lincoln didn’t control. The Mexicans who ruled Texas before the invasion were opposed to slavery, and Santa Anna, a villain in school textbooks, found slavery “disgusting,” so who introduced slaves to Texas? How did they get there? Don Lemon was fired when he challenged Vivek’s claim that the National Rifle Association, which was founded in 1871, had something to do with the emancipation of Blacks. U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) agreed with Lemon and questioned Vivek’s knowledge of Black history. Nevertheless, Vivek bragged that he was responsible for Lemon’s firing at CNN. In an interview I conducted with Lemon, which was printed in the first issue of Tar Baby, a new magazine published by the Toni Morrison Foundation by her son, the brilliant architect, Ford Morrison, Lemon said CNN executives told their employees to go easy on MAGA because MAGA buys their advertisers’ products, too. During Vivek’s campaign, he also leaned on some old guys’ tales about Blacks. They’re lazy and don’t want to work. Brookings reports (2020) that more profits were made from slavery than from factories and railroads combined. Blacks don’t like to read? Black Americans have a distinguished literary history. Books and poetry written in the 18th Century are still in print. Hip Hop is the international language of youth. Vivek knows this. He even used Rap music in his campaign. There are more Black writers of all ages writing today than at any time in history, despite the Eastern literary establishment limiting this Renaissance to one or two Divas or Divos. If Vivek had read Charles Chesnutt’s novel, *The Marrow of Tradition (*1901), he would have learned that the NRA had nothing to do with the Emancipation and that, after slavery, the use of Blacks as free labor continued in a different form. So, where did Vivek’s campaign of Black vilification get him? Not even an ambassadorship. And now he wants to be judged as MLK-lite. Outraged over racism. No, he’s more like Br’er Rabbit, a creature introduced to Joel Chandler Harris by Aunt Crissy, George Terrell, and Old Harbert, slaves on the Turnwald Plantation, where Chandler spent four years. Br’er Rabbit, popularized by Walt Disney, is a trickster who will take any position that will advance his goals. Br’er Vivek will be a bigot one minute and an anti-bigot the next. Denouncing Affirmative Action yet benefiting from it. Calling Juneteenth useless after posting a video celebrating the holiday*.* But even I admire how much Mr. Ramaswamy has achieved through hard work, and I understand his belief in the American dream because he’s living it. Were he living in India with his dark skin, he’d be considered an “untouchable.” I wish him luck in his battle with a movement that has apparently been seized by the likes of Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes, who wants Vivek to return to India, even though he was born in Cincinnati. Because of his Mexican-American father, Fuentes would have been considered a mongrel by Hitler. Ishmael Reed’s latest play is “The Amanuensis,” about how Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney made a fortune by ripping off stories told to Harris by three slaves. Readings of the play will be held Jan.22, 23, 24 at the Firestone Gallery, 40 Great Jones St, New York. Performances at 7 PM, tickets $20. The post Br’er Vivek appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed

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Political Climate Boomerang and World Chaos

The Dead of the Middle East Petroleum by Evi Sarantea. The oil machines extracting oil are seen in the distance. The black marks on the sand are the open mouths of the dead screaming without end, which the artist called νεκρών οιμωγές, ceaseless and extremely painful and tragic outbursts of crying. President Trump is withdrawing the United States from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is the legal bedrock for pathbreaking efforts of the world to take a look at its footprint on planet Earth. Is the US withdrawal from the environmental conventions of the UN undermining world safety and security? First, the UNCCC, negotiated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, started the conversation on what the human species is doing to its only nest in the universe. These activities include the petroleum-powered industrialization of agriculture, transportation, fighting wars and the primary heating of billions of homes by the burning of global warming natural gas. This massive use of petroleum, coal and natural gas did not bode well for the future of humanity and the myriad of species in the Amazon forest and other threatened forests the world over. So, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change warned, though did not even try to regulate human activities, that humans were harming the planet and threatening civilization. Second, the 2015 Paris Agreement is a modest, though failing, global effort to control planetary temperature from getting too dangerous. The executive secretary of the UNFCCC, Simon Stiell, said the withdrawal of the US will harm all, but especially the US. He said: “While all other nations are stepping forward together, this latest [US] step back from global leadership, climate cooperation and science can only harm the US economy, jobs and living standards, as wildfires, floods, mega-storms and droughts get rapidly worse. It is a colossal… goal which will leave the US less secure and less prosperous.” The Trump administration, however, is under the delusion that its rejection of climatological science, persisting in the falsehood that climate change is a hoax, would miraculously revive prosperity in America, which, according to the US Fifth National Climate Assessment of November 14, 2023, is warming up 68 percent faster than any other country on the planet. The Assessment also warns that: carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere since the 1970s have been higher than at any time for the last 800,000 tears; sea level rise in the 20th century rose faster than at any time in the past 3,000 years; and drought in the Western US has been worse and persistent than at any time in the last 1,200 years. Heat waves on land and seas, catastrophic fires, draught, hurricanes, rain bombs and storms embracing America are the results of a variety of human activities, especially the feeding and torturing of billions of food animals in thousands unregulated animal farms all over the country. These facilities become machines and factories of disease and toxic waste, stench and slaughter. They most likely gave the country and the world COVID-19, the 2020-2022 plague that killed millions of people and shut down the planet. I documented this potential origin of the pandemic in my latest book, Earth on Fire: Brewing Plagues and Climate Chaos in Our Backyards (World Scientific, 2026). Animal factories are inhumane and dangerous. They emit large amounts of global warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane. The owners of these animal farms don’t treat the diseased and toxic wastes of the animals. They put the wastes in lagoons and spray them over farms. The very likely diseased meat of the slaughtered animals is not healthy for human consumption. Yet during the pandemic, the government ordered the slaughterhouses to remain open and continue their dangerous work. Other activities and machines add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, like millions of airplanes flying; boats, yachts, ships, leaf-blowers, unfathomable petroleum-powered machines; the military, navy and air force training and fighting wars; cars and trucks, too many to count – most of them burning petroleum and polluting. But the America First ideology of the Trump administration means “asserting control of the Western Hemisphere for the benefit of the United States.” This also connects the imperialism of the America First to the decision to withdraw from most UN organizations and programs, including “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.” Such an unpredictable and harmful step is not simply a return to the good old days – of selling Americans cheaper gasoline. “The decision [of withdrawal from the UNFCCC] is not only an indicator of America’s rejection from global diplomacy, it’s a finger in the eye to the billions of people, including Americans, suffering through intensifying wildfires, storms and droughts, threats to the food supply and to biodiversity, and other dangerous and costly effects of a warming planet.” “This is a shortsighted, embarrassing, and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy quoted by the New York Times. McCarthy is the former US EPA administrator and White House climate adviser during the Biden administration. She accused the Trump administration of discarding “decades of global collaboration.” She said: “This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies, and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country.” I agree with Gina McCarthy. Like her, I served at EPA, but certainly not in a political position. I worked as an analyst for 25 years, all the way from the Carter administration to the end of the first George W. Bush administration, 1979-2004. I witnessed lots of corruption, the industry, including the fossil fuel companies, pulling the political strings behind the regulations and policies of the ceaselessly less protective EPA. I also recognized aggression behind the industry efforts for deregulation. In an October 10, 1989 article I wrote for the Chicago Tribune, I shed light on the pivotal role of petroleum companies behind climate change and the warming of the planet. When the Wall Street Journal reprinted a couple paragraphs from the article, the political reaction was swift. Senior EPA officials demanded that I be fired. They wrote me a “letter of reprimand,” step number one before firing. I took the letter to the EPA administrator Willian Reilly, who dismissed the baseless charges against me. And what an incredible coincidence and embarrassment for the EPA: sending me the threatening letter on Earth Day 1990. What was in the minds of those EPA bureaucrats? Certainly, not the Earth. Some 36 years later, Trump is repeating and exceeding the aggressive deregulation of the irresponsible Reagan administration. Withdrawing from the vulnerable global efforts to control the man-made climate giant in the room is party a self-destructive impulse under the influence and corruption of the money of the fossil fuel industry and partly an imperial notion that might is right, even when history and science say no, might rarely if ever is equivalent to justice. Thinking America First most likely was behind the US pulled out of the UN convention of 1992. “The decision to withdraw [from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change] is part of an aggressive assault on climate efforts by President Trump. His administration has rolled back climate regulations, removed scientific data on climate change from government websites, thwarted the development of wind and solar energy and commissioned a federal report downplaying the effects of a warming planet.” Yes, abandoning the United Nations is aggression – and much more. Trump treats domestic and foreign matters as if they did not differ. It’s not too difficult to see through the bluster of Trump, that: “the most chilling hallmark of Trump’s second presidency: the seamless fusion of domestic and foreign policy, bypassing America’s constitutional system of government to assume virtually boundless, unchecked power.” Power corrupts Indeed, power is at heart of this aggression and war against science, humanity, civilization and the planet. After WWI, the victors headed by President Woodrow Wilson, crafted the League of Nations, 1919-1920. The purpose of this first global intergovernmental organization was to promote international cooperation, disarmament and peace. Yet the US never joined the League. Moreover, decisions demanded unanimity. The League also did not have the military to enforce its decisions. In the 1930s, Japan, Italy and Germany ignored international agreements and the League was impotent. The result was WWII. After WWII, in 1946, the victors created the United Nations to replace the League. The UN has had more success than the League. However, just like the League, the presence and support by the US is a critical factor in its thriving or decline and extinction and the almost certain wars that follows its demise. So, Trump’s grabbing of Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, and treating him like a criminal in the US, while, simultaneously, getting out of long-standing agreements with the United Nations may be symbolic blows to international order. The world is in potential anarchy and chaos, not much different than the anarchy and aggression of unchecked Germany that sparked WWII. Epilogue Fossil fuels, especially petroleum, is behind the existential climate emergency, the blindness of the ruling classes to put humanity, civilization and planet Earth first. The other charge is a US administration thoroughly captured by fossil fuels, risking health, security, democracy and the planet for short term profits. American politicians, professors-intellectuals and environmentalists, no matter their party affiliation, should act together to repair the damage to the United Nations and the fragile international order of the rule of law. The Senate should exercise its authority and rejoin the US to the UN conventions and programs. Maduro may be a bad leader, but his trial should take place in Venezuela, not in the US. Doing nothing is unacceptable. It may trigger more wars, more deregulation, more pollution, more global ecocide, higher planetary temperature — and anarchy and chaos in societies and the already stressed Mother Earth, our sole home in the Cosmos. The post Political Climate Boomerang and World Chaos appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed

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Open source community figures out problems with performance in Starfield

It’s also a lack of specialized talent. There’s lots of great “talent” at game devs and even middleware devs. There’s just not much great talent that deals with renderers and API development. The vast majority of devs just lean on the middleware developer to push out the renderer codebase. In a situation like Bethesda running their own studio engine, they just don’t have the right people for it. This plagued the 90’s when people were trying to code for Glide, OGL, DX5,6,7,8, and 9. Many studios folded because they couldn’t get their tech to work with hardware acceleration.

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[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 1: Beta and Vanilla) - dinosaur cartels, naked gnome protest marches, racist stereotypes, funeral massacres, and elf orgies in a tavern in the woods

The Game-breakers No one had ever made a world as big as Azeroth before. It had been a massive undertaking, a wonder of programming and code which cost $64 million ($94 million accounting for inflation) before it ever even began to see returns – making it comfortably the largest and most expensive game at the time. Thousands of hands left their mark on its world, and while Blizzard would spend years polishing them away, they would never succeed completely. Even now. But it was a lot more obvious in Vanilla and that was part of the charm. For many players, it wasn’t the erotica or the world events or the combat or the gold that drew them to WoW, it was the world itself. As you might expect from a world that big, it was full of oddities. Little holes in the world, carefully hidden in spots players weren’t meant to see, written messages under the borders of the world, slabs of random environment thrown together in private areas, unfinished or rejected zones, exclusive locations for the developers and game-masters. An entire community grew up around investigating these curiosities, unravelling their meanings, and showing other players how to reach them. Looking at this map, you can see large empty patches between zones, or on the coast. Below Silithus lay the inaccessible land of Ahn’Qiraj (meant to contain the city of temples we covered earlier), north of the Eastern Plaguelands is the elf nation of Quel’Thalas, somewhere in the inaccessible west of Eastern Kingdoms lay the Twilight Highlands, and then there was the blocked off city of Stratholme, the focus of an iconic moment in Warcraft Lore. Players would agonise for years over the islands in the sea, and what they might be. The challenge became all the more tantalising when players discovered that many of these areas did exist in some form, sometimes mostly finished. Sometimes the reward was standing on a platform or tower in a major city, where no other player could get, and becoming a minor celebrity for the day. But Blizzard had hidden their secrets well. It wasn’t possible to just ‘go to’ these areas. Explorers had to break the game to do it. A game of cat-and-mouse arose, with players discovering new ‘exploits’ and Blizzard racing to patch them out. There were techniques to fall through the world, climb vertical walls, teleport to a specific graveyard upon death, or overcome fatigue (a timed effect that begins when players move too far from the coast, which rapidly drains health). To detail all of these hidden spots and how to reach them would take literally hours. To those who want to delve into this topic, I present a quick-fire montage. To the rest of you, let me elaborate on a few of the best ones. [1] By far the most famous secret area in the game was GM Island, designed to serve as a ‘lobby’ for Game Masters. For years, the island was located north-west of Kalimdor, way off the map. To get there, players had to overcome vast distances of nothingness – a land without texture or direction, which made it totally impossible to reach the island without exploits. So many stories have been penned about GM Island that it has taken on an almost mythical status. Members of the company were cagey about the island. An image of the island was visible on Blizzard Europe’s Career Opportunities page, but Blizzard rarely spoke publicly on it. Before patch 1.8, players could add GMs to their friends list, and their locations would be listed as ‘GM Island’. A forum moderator ‘Zarhym’ explained in 2010: The game masters who respond to you in the game are doing so through a separate chat/support tool. They’re not actually using the game client to whisper you, however, logging into the chat client means the character they use to contact players with is logged into all of the realms they need to. While GM invisibility exists, it makes it safer and easier to have a simple storage/port point to keep all of these characters out of the normal game world. The island itself was small and round and covered in dense vegetation, with a tall peak on one side. It included a mansion (taken from Stormwind City), a wall, and a graveyard. There were two NPCs, a Gnome named Ari and Tuskfyre the Troll. Embedded within the lower structure of the island (about 100 yards below the surface) was a hidden room known as ‘The Prison Chamber’. It’s textured with large blank white tiles and lit with a single light source. The only object in the room was a single chair, right in the middle. Players could enter, but can never leave without the help of a GM. Its walls couldn’t be climbed, teleport/hearthstone spells did not work, and it was the only place in the game where players could not be located using the /who command. While the room had no official purpose and seemed to have been added by a programmer purely for their own amusement, it is said that in the early days of the game, before an out-of-game chat interface was added, GMs would take offenders there to discuss their crimes. GM Island was one of those things you spoke about in a hallowed whisper, hunched in front of a blurry youtube video in 3x4 ratio with an ‘Unregistered HyperCam 2’ watermarked across the top. Those who could reach the island were legends. Most fans would only ever be able to reach it on private servers, which allowed them to teleport straight there – and that is where we get most footage of it today. The first adventurers to come across GM Island got there by swimming (there was water back then), constantly casting spells to heal themselves from the fatigue damage. It took an hour, and if the player’s direction was even slightly off, they would be forever lost in a seemingly endless ocean. Blizzard removed the water, so players tried manipulated the models in the game files to let them cross. This back and forth process went on for a while. Players found a new way, blizzard patched it out, players found a way around the patch, and so on. When all other attempts failed, the island was moved into an instance, effectively placing it in a separate world upon itself, and then eventually it was removed from the game completely. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Other locations created for developers include Designer Island and Programmer Isle. Neither was ever accessible in live version of the game – only on private servers. Both are filled with stock assets, written messages, and a few test quests. The regions of Programmer Isle are named after some guys called Jeff and Patty Mack, and there are even a few test NPCs. Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that so few players ever reached GM Island on a live server, and also due to its mysterious origins, it is still one of the most iconic places in the game. Even years after its removal. (Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

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This Is Not a Test (2026, dir Adam MacDonald)

Sloane and four classmates take cover in Cortege High to escape a world plagued by the infected. As danger relentlessly pounds on the doors, Sloane begins to see the world through the eyes of those who actually want to live and takes matters into her own hands. https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1428990-this-is-not-a-test

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(Suggest me a Book similar to) Station Eleven

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson is an alternate history about if a plague had wiped out 90% of the European population before the renaissance and how the would could have shaken out instead, focusing primarily on Arabic and Chinese culture. It follows a small group of people who are reincarnating through the ages, all the way up to modern times. It’s an amazing novel, and very approachable if you’re even vaguely into history.