Bro Poettering worked for Microsoft for four years after working for Red Hat for fourteen and then left to create Amutable, and no offense, but I don’t see his goals for Amutable to be about trying to force everyone to use his solution as much as giving groups who use massive numbers of Linux servers an option for something they can more securely lock down and ensure hasn’t been fucked with. I don’t think he’s out here building a desktop distribution and telling end-users they need it for security.

This is just FUD fearmongering, especially considering how small the company is. He isn’t forcing the entire ecosystem to adopt his ideas.

and they likely won’t.

You mean the same Republican-dominated congress that has basically given him handjobs every time he breaks a fucking law and does something that is actually under the direction of congress? The same Republican-dominated congress that has essentially abdicated any responsibility to govern at all? I’m skeptical, but I hope you’re right.

What a fucking asshole

For real, this is another mask-off moment. He had played up the tariffs as a game to push other countries around, but clearly and literally the only reason he is doing this is because he’s pissed off at the Supreme Court. It has fuck-all to do with other countries because it’s the same rate, worldwide, with no room for negotiations. He’s supposed to be this great negotiator of trade deals with other countries, yet he’s blowing up every single potential trade deal with a flat 15% worldwide because he’s pissed off at people in his own government.

If people can’t tell that he doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything except pushing people around, doesn’t matter who or about what, they’re fucking idiots. He’s just a cruel fucking asshole, like you said.

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.

We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

-Donald Rumsfeld

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

-Unknown but commonly attributed to Karl Rove

The Rumsfeld quote lives on with me due to its sheer absurdity and his explanation behind the impetus for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, that the inability to predict 9/11 was a “failure of imagination.” Yet it seems the “imaginations” in charge continue to become more and more narrow and unable to imagine anything outside of a set of prescribed ideas. I actually hate this quote because it reveals the kind of absurdist thinking behind the beginnings of the fascist machinations we live under today.

The Rove quote lives on with me because as much as I hate his guts, he was abso-fucking-lutely right and the Trump administration has practically weaponized this against the “reality based community” which spends its time on journalism and court cases that take years while a thousand new crimes have been committed in the meantime, all of which will take further years of journalism and court cases to resolve. A death by a thousand cuts by moving so fast that the rest of us are “left to just study what [they] do.”

Sorry my quotes are kind of downers and not ones you actually want to live by. However, we’re living through dark times and I think understanding the mindsets of those would cage and kill us is pretty important.

In the same vein:

Someone smart said nothin’ at all.

We can only hope that their businesses crash hard before any of these deals come to fruition and then when the hardware has nowhere to go we can all “buy the dip” so to speak.

To be clear, I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware, but hopefully it all crashing down will help get more people into self-hosting and working on community resources and networks instead of having everything live in the cloud.

“Elevating glyphosate to a national security priority is the exact opposite of what MAHA voters were promised,” Cook said. “If Secretary Kennedy remains at HHS after this, it will be impossible to argue that his past warnings about glyphosate were anything more than campaign rhetoric designed to win trust — and votes.”

How is it possible that these people are this fucking stupid? I just don’t understand being conned again and again and again and then being surprised each time that these conmen fuck you over? Or are they living by the Bushism “Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice… sh- can’t… can’t get fooled again.” considering Bush fooled them over and over again as well.

I just genuinely can’t wrap my mind around it because the times I’ve obviously been misled pushed me to be more skeptical and less trusting, not to cynically trust anyone who told me what I wanted to fucking hear.

I’m not a real doctor, but I am a real worm. Immortal words.

To have someone to pick on, to bully, who can’t fight back.

He’s had a hell of a lot of the world fighting back against all his stupid shit this time around, and he only feels big and strong when he can bully someone who doesn’t have the position or resources to fight back, much like his victims in the Epstein files.

In my opinion: that’s it, that’s all, there’s nothing more to it. Ascribing a more long-term plan to it is idiocy, he would tear apart Cuba for shits and giggles just like he is doing to the US. He gives not a single good god damn what happens to it after. It has nothing to do with regime change unless it’s just self-fellatio of saying “my army did what bone spurs ass couldn’t ever do and I’m gonna steal the valor for it while calling them losers for risking their lives for my idiocy.” He has no plans, he has no scruples, he literally is a child-bully who never grew up and has spent his entire life abusing people that he has power over because it’s the only thing that brings him actual joy.

He’s a sick fuck.

two more to go, now.

Okay, Henry of Skalitz. May I have all the things you robbed from me while I was out cold back please? Also tell Hans to go fuck himself.

I’m not convinced that there’s anywhere near as many straight people as straight people pretend there are. It’s gotta be closer to like fifty-fifty split between straight and bi/pan/ace/and so on.

How sad for Obsidian Entertainment to go the same way as Black Isle Studios… but they probably will when the Xbox division completely fails.

KDE is premier for a modern system, but I have a handful of low-power devices where XFCE or LXQt are a lot more useful despite disliking their interfaces.

XFCE is great for mid-range old devices, and LXQt is great for dogshit old devices.

I know this claims to be about China, but let’s not pretend the bulk of it doesn’t also apply to the US, especially now.

Only the quote about the one party state seemed particularly China specific to me. The rest reminded me of my home country, the USA.

In the podcast/television show Comedy Bang! Bang! there is a running joke that host Scott Aukerman is always misnamed. The names are things like Yacht Rockerman, Hot Saucerman, Shock Jockerman, Stop Clockerman, Shop Talkerman, Flip Flopperman, and so on. They generally rhyme with “Scott Aukerman.”

Snot Flickerman is definitely inspired by the Aukerman nicknames, although it doesn’t perfectly fit since Flickerman doesn’t rhyme with Aukerman. Also, in my own headcanon, Snot Flickerman is an audacious television news anchor voiced by Tom Kenny.

I hope this illuminates my stupid fucking username.

https://dos.zone/dune-2000/

Not as clean because it’s running DOSBox in your browser, a little more choppy for me, but still works.

They’re too busy making more money-sink Spider-man movies without Spider-man.

It’s Morbin’ Time!

I’m not your pal, friend!

I’m not your buddy, guy!

-Canada

They must, a non-zero number of them voted for a despot to destroy the country three times.