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LibreOffice
Check out these interviews with the two main sponsors of the LibreOffice Conference 2022, which starts next week! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2022/09/21/libreoffice-conference-sponsors-interviews/
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Michael Rupp
What's old is new again...
Thinking about songs like Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who.

Thinking about all of my own knowledge of History and its "Singing of the Spheres". It's a very dissonance-filled type of music.

We have so many looping cyclical themes in the world and far too many violent ones. It's hard sometimes to think we are making any progress; it's easier to think we were more advanced before we made stone tools. We can't even manage to see other humans as us instead of as them.

#melancholoy

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Michael Rupp
Radio Station WBUR in Boston MA, USA Presents "Captured" the story of how America's politics were/are destroying the planet
One of the many #Podcasts in my podcatcher is the Here & Now program. They never disappoint me. This was done as a series of 5 short episodes all dropped in one day.
#SpoilerAlert it starts out in #Reagan's "Evil 1980s" with the "I like beer" #SOTUS's mom.
#Environment #EPA #Gorsuch #ToxicWaste #RegulatoryCapture
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Michael Rupp
I didn't even know this news source existed until a recent episode of the #deconstructed #podcast that I listen to mentioned it while interviewing the son (Nat Parry) of the Consortium News founder; Robert Parry.

The remarkable story of how things happened is VERY worth the time to listen to, even at regular speed.

Consortium News is in the top class like Democracy Now.

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Michael Rupp
Nice Group, I'm new here
Hello !Linux On Phones
I've been excited about this topic since that Ubuntu Edge first had its go at crowdfunding.

I turned a retired Nexus 5x into a UBPorts phone successfully. I used it experimentally without a SIM for about 2 years. Then somewhere along the line, I bricked it while trying to start over from scratch.

I'd love to try things like that again with non-bricked older equipment.
Michael Rupp
Öppen Lodis: Autumnal Hackerspace Pop-up
Starts:  Friday October 01, 2021 @ 4:00 AM
Finishes:  Friday October 01, 2021 @ 10:00 AM

Autumnal Hackerspace Pop-up Fri Oct 1


Friday Oct 1, starting at 10:00 and going on until 17:00 (likely a bit later, too—no guarantees!) the hackerspace Lodis will open its doors to any & all people interested in the space! Feel free to drop by at any time and stay for 5 minutes or 5 hours.

Lunch



At 12:00 we will be in the building's restaurant Mygel ordering extremely well-made vegetarian (w/ vegan options!) dishes for lunch. After ordering, we will likely bring our plates to eat together at the long dining table on the floor above the hackerspace. For the person on a budget (or with that lunch box you really just have to eat because—is that mold no wait maybe it's just thyme—) there are also freely available microwave ovens.

People staying longer are welcome to work on their projects (as long as it aligns with at least 4/5th of the space's principles, see the principles section at the bottom of the email), sample our tea collection—or just ask questions, chat and hang out. Responsible for this edition of Öppen Lodis (unsanctioned name) will be Jacob and Louise!

...Workshop rumors??



There are also rumors of a lockpicking workshop that will be held during the day—verifying those rumors are, however, left to the reader as an exercise (2x true if biking).

Contact


If you need to get in, reach out to either Jacob or Louise! If you lack contact details and want to pop by, just reply to this event and we'll hook you up!

Attending


We'd appreciate it if you tried to click attend on this event and let us know how things worked out! (You are also welcome to drop-by the space completely unannounced!)

Location


See map above!

principles


from https://www.lodis.se

lodis is a space for people who want to

create projects independently...
...and hang out with others while doing so.
work towards a world with greater equality
work on non-commercial projects
explore ideas and see where they end up

See you on the first day of October!
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Michael Rupp
den nya äkta GALLERINATTEN
Starts:  Friday September 24, 2021 @ 10:00 AM
Finishes:  Friday September 24, 2021 @ 5:59 PM
Inför natten den 24 september öppnar vi porten på Lodgatan 3b för den nya äkta gallerinatten med en välkurerad samling av konstnärliga och kulinariska genier. Se konst i ena änden av byggnaden och ät och drick på Mygel i andra änden.
Kom från 16 till midnatt (dvs natten)

The gate of Lodgatan 3b opens the night of September 24 for a well curated collection of culinary and artistic geniuses. Observe art in one end of the building and have a bite and a drink at Mygel in the other end.
Come from 16 to midnight (aka the night)

Hosted by Lukas Annermarken / the rest of the house 3b[link to event on facebook]
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Michael Rupp
Here's what I think is the original source of the investigation into this particular #RealEstate #Graft by #Putin:
A #Russian to #English translator seems to work pretty well if you don't want to read it as is.
Michael Rupp
Kremlin’s spokesman is still dodging questions about ‘Putin’s Palace’
It's about time some in-depth reporting is being done by somebody about the #Graft & #Hypocrisy that rolls out of the #Putin based international criminal #Syndicate. Thanks #Meduza!
Michael Rupp
An #English version of the full-length #Documentary on YouTube:

Michael Rupp
A #Russian version of the #Documentary on YouTUBE:

Michael Rupp
If you see something, say something. (Official USA Anti-Terrorism Policy)...
{aside} So, I discovered that #Letterkenny is a great show this holiday season...

... In other news, I noticed after taking a deeper dive into a #RevealNews #Podcast that I see a pattern, so I'm saying something. A partisan news company tells a bunch of incendiary lies about one group in order to marginalize another group, and it ends with a lot of Black people dying.

The linked page for #Reveal is referring to the only successful American Coup d’Etat which happened in Wilmington, NC and just happened to include a massacre of black citizens. It's the same playbook as the recent Trump-led coup. While I was researching that one I was led to another; The Opelousas, LA Massacre & War On Reconstruction.

You can't swing a cat by its tail in American history without hitting a White Supremacist genocide.
Michael Rupp
Catching Amazon in a Lie
#Amazon #Lies.
If you haven't heard the #Reveal #Podcast yet, you are missing a LOT. It's some of the best detailed, coherent, in-depth reporting on a wide array of subjects. Their only #Bias is that they generally report on the situations where the few empowered inflict harm on the many for profits.

This episode Al Letson gets to take another swing at Amazon and I'm pretty sure he 'sent it over the fence'. #Bezos had publically stated that he welcomed scrutiny, so Al delivered it.

If you think this story is just about Amazon, don't worry, they are just the main course. The dessert is the whole for-profit siloed networking system on the Internet.
Michael Rupp
Geeze, #Updates! I thought we were done for a few months, it's only been days and #Friendica is out of date?
Michael Rupp
I do use Github. I'm just not good at getting the message that the update is available as fast as other people are. It was only a lucky break that I saw I was listed as an outdated version.
utzer [Friendica]
@Michael Rupp OK, I see. It was a bugfix, usually releases are not that fast after another.
Michael Rupp
Gimlet | Reply All | #166 Country of Liars
The best reporting of #QAnon both origin story and identity.
(see also: #122 The QAnon Code ⚡️⚡️)
https://player.gimletmedia.com:443/n8homa
(and see also: #165 The Mold and The Beautiful)
https://player.gimletmedia.com:443/6nhw5w
So this is a fun and concise reporting on the whole QAnon #AltRight #GamerGate #Hate generator machine on the Internet.

I just wonder if knowing the true identity of any "#Superhero" slash "#Supervillan" takes away their powers.
https://player.gimletmedia.com:443/llhe5nm
#QDrops = #QDefacations
Michael Rupp
I'm testing that Ground.News app
I'm never 100% sure of anything, but I think I'm underrating the importance of this new service when I call it wildly important and vital to the future of society at this troubled time for humanity on the Earth.
Spoiler alert: It was created by a NASA engineer/scientist with the intent of not introducing any bias to the news.


It's called "Ground.News" (that's their main website URL too). It's an app for most smartphones, and also a web service.

You can just put in a news story and it gives you an aggregated collection of what all the news sources are saying about a story. Last night I started a free trial of their premium service ($0.99/month) but I'm pretty sure I'll pay them for this.

Last night while dinking around on their site I went into the Politics section. Somehow down the list, this one caught my eye. Netflix already erroneously suggested I watch this movie a few days ago or more. It's just not something I want to spend my time on. That was my prejudged (not prejudiced) opinion, which in hindsight was correct. Seeing this histrionic reporting of comments by #GOP elected officials, including #CancelCulture calls which they say they're against, and considering the weight of the number of right-leaning news sources talking about it made me want to form an opinion about it first.

'Cuties' is a movie out of France, but through the magic of computers, I could play the English version of it so I didn't have to read the whole movie. It's a coming of age type story along with also being a hero's journey for a girl going through the changes of the edge of adulthood. It's artfully done, not a big-budget production, uplifting (depending on how a viewer was cultured), and takes the viewer on a normal healthy moral struggle with a great resolution at the end. It has a slight thread of empowerment of women in it but it's as thin as silk. Mostly its a struggle of girls against girls, girls against women, and a girl against herself.

I think if any reasonable person watches this, they will find the news stories about it making you think the Senators have gone out of their minds. Since most people are rational including members of Congress, it leads me to think it's just a capricious selection of a "villain" that they can rail against in an election year in a Machiavellian way.

Oddly the story is also being run by #Russian #news #sources.

The gist is they are trying to claim it's criminal sexual exploitation of minors. It's not much different from the crap Disney cranks out for late daytime after-school viewing. They do broach the topics of oversexualizing dance moves and costumes for early teens, but they do it to show it's not acceptable and leads to non-wholesome feelings for oneself.

Most of the stories are doing what I call "big-cat" by fluffing up their fur when frightened. They are claiming "widespread criticism" of a film that would likely be hardly known to exist if they didn't pick it to stand on fictional high ground. I wonder if their readers will avoid seeing the film because they think it will expose themselves to empowering the exploitation or make them see un-holy things.

Fake news seems to be the new crack-cocaine. I don't think we're going to build any rehabs for that. We certainly can't police it, because of the first amendment and all. Hopefully, we can grow some cultural immunity to it though. I think a service like this Ground.News is a good #Penicillin.
#groundnews
Leonard Rose Reich
This alone has made my foray into Friendica worthwhile. What a simple, brilliant idea.
Leonard Rose Reich
This alone has made my foray into Friendica worthwhile. What a simple, brilliant idea.
Michael Rupp
A really cool idea in news management...
So today while listening to the latest Deep State Radio #Podcast (named ironically) and they mentioned a new thing (in a way to donate to Deep State) about an #App/Web Service that aggregates similar topic news stories from all over the world and compares the left to right bias versions of the stories so that you can really filter out the truth by pairing away the places where they diverge.

It's called Ground.News, and here's their video description of the service.


#247newscycle #News #Overload #NewsOverload #SpinDetector #NewsAggregator #Bias #Truth
Michael Rupp
How the sausage was made.
#Science #FuckYeah #NASA
Michael Rupp
Waste Land (the true and disturbing story of recycling)
CONTENT WARNING: Be prepared to feel sick because of decades of deception and thinking we were doing a good thing but not really.

#Myth #Recycling #Lie #Deception #Plastics #Garbage #Trash #LandFill #OilIndustry #PetroChemical #Environment #Disaster #Oilogarchy
Michael Rupp
@Hypolite Petovan since you are to my knowledge one of the most insider people of the Friendica system, I thought posting this to you wouldn't be a bother.

I don't know if this is already on the Friendica to-do list, but at about 9:21 or so in @Anubis2814 's video below, he said something about automated account migration.

It sounds really cool to me but its just a stub idea. Imagine something like rank-choice-voting where a user picks a next of kin server to go to if the operator of the one they are on wants to shutter the operation. Admin clicks a migration button and users with a predefined next-of-kin server choice get moved. It's a fun idea.
Hypolite Petovan
Hi Michael, it’s an attractive idea on its face, but a single user account can weigh several hundreds of megabytes between posts and pictures, so an automated migration could quickly overwhelm both the source server and destination server(s). The accounts may also include unused ones or reshare bots that shouldn’t be moved automatically either.

In my opinion the best solution still is to trust each individual users with moving their account and admins to give their active users enough time to do so.
Anubis2814
Yeah its too bad the instances can't be set up to be backed up on redundant instances, similar to how big tech companies do it. Perhaps people who can't run an instance themselves could be a slower repository just for storage backup. If someone's drive craps out like mine did once, all our data is kaput, which is why I'm not going to even think about running an instance til I am sure there is nothing stopping me from keeping it up for good,, and I have enough storage for a backup drive in case one dies.. Also I've had like my peertube account just collapse on me which is really frustrating as the user just decided without telling anyone they lost interest or something and converted their instance to a personal one. a redundant backup in case of say health crisis of the person running the instance would allow people to migrate their data, even if it was slowly, from the backup system(s).
Michael Rupp
Sam Harris has a point, begging for the counter-points...

(Special note, this is a repost from https://nsfw.wnymathguy.com/display/27bb4d82-905e-e83a-53a4-24b331982239 because it somehow was only in the group's feed and not my main page.)
I believe that mentioning #SamHarris's name in mixed company can push #emotional #buttons on almost all people who have heard of him, or heard some of him, and even so for some people who have heard most of him. I think I know why that happens, but it's not why I am writing this. I have heard so much from him directly that I earnestly believe he is always ready to be wrong and change based on new evidence. However, he makes really strong cases for what he thinks, so if you disagree with what he is saying while he is saying it, you get the feeling that you are in a philosophical life or death struggle. I don't anymore because I have heard a sufficient amount of his spoken thoughts. I respect him a lot.

In his recent episode of #MakingSense "Can We Pull Back From The Brink?" (which seems to be a hot-take), he dispassionately discusses scale & judgment relative to the latest #uprisings and #police work—in earnest—hoping to find a way to make things better in a rational way. Give it a listen, please, maybe jot down notes so you don't let the good be the enemy of the bad.


What follows below is my reaction to his podcast above.

Regarding his "proximate cause" for the civil & uncivil unrest, I'd like to argue this is more accurate than Sam's claim.
#GeorgeFloyd, #Minneapolis #Protests, #AhmaudArbery & #AmyCooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show


Regarding his "if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind" part, I'm feeling a false dichotomy happening there. I'm no fan of #Anarchists ideals because they like #Libertarians don't present ideas that I can see as #sustainable or ideally doing the most good for the most people, but I agree with them in that what we are doing now isn't convincingly better.

Sam poses a world without cops vs. a world as it is. What about a world with different cops whos publicized mission matches their hidden agendas, and that type of police force is agreeable to the local public in a very democratic and constitutional-rights respecting way with real accountability for their actions?

Sam idealized "giving a #monopoly on #violence to the state" which if things weren't as they really are I could understand, but the reality is from the start we gave a monopoly on violence to a #mindfully chosen type of like-minded individuals who's direction came from only the #wealthy of #society. #Policemen and #prison #guards are far more like the depiction in A Clockwork Orange than they are in Blue Bloods. Sure, #NotAllCops, but it's supposed to be an ideal, a higher standard, and that is definitely not met.

It's also hard to know if my own #bias makes me feel the need to post this because Sam can say something in one in a sentence that makes me think of a rebuttal, and in the next sentence he will vindicate my thoughts, although I didn't hear it because of the distraction caused by the first sentence. Sam oddly uses some extreme examples of things that happened like firings from "woke-culture" for non-incidents to make his points—granted they were on the mass media so they have the power to cause #conventional #wisdom to be produced from thin air—but later in the podcast, he decided to claim the extremes causing the uprising were too #statistically #insignificant to justify the results on the ground. Not cool. Firings of well-to-do people for lousy reasons, bad, the #murder of black people for lousy reasons, not a significant thing statistically.

Sam, relative to #Democrats, reminds me of the dad-type who is harder on his own child than the rest of the world because he cares more about his own kid.

I'm not sure who Sam was listening to in general on the topic linked to #DefundThePolice to form his positions, but I think #TheDailyShow with #TrevorNoah does a far better job covering the concept than Sam did in his #podcast.
What Does It Mean to Defund or Abolish the Police?


Around 37 minutes in Sam starts to talk about the progress we have made with #RaceRelations in the #USA, and his points are valid, but I feel like the bright picture he presented was a sentence fragment that begged to be completed. A two-term black #POTUS (which Sam mentions), with the backlash of a #Trump (which he failed to juxtapose), and all that it has wrought since is not what I would consider a net gain in #Race #Relations.

Somebody who recently made this point, and is of better of recent notoriety than I, is Kimberly Jones. She eloquently states my position.
How Can We Win?


Sam goes on to justifiably suss out the difference between real and perceived patterns; the plural of anecdotal evidence is not data. A recent episode of Invisibilia agrees with him to some degree about how we can see a pattern where there isn't one because we have become #embattled by #acts of #aggression.
Trust Fall


He makes a lot of good points to shore up the mental space a #Cop might be stuck with based on what they experienced or were told by their superiors in the routine precinct meetings, but he didn't—to my liking—shore up the reasons why people economically below the middle-class citizen are also stuck in a mental space determining their actions based on their personal experience and that of their community. Change both their environments and cultures, and you'll change their actions. I'll offer a few places to find reasons to see things through the eyes of others if you haven't been out of your suburban cul-de-sac to find it out for yourself.





Later on, around 1:15:10 time mark, Sam starts to do a thing where he sees a statistical anomaly and without a good-enough theory of why there is an anomaly, he assumes things that I perceive as assumptions that are culturally forced on him based on his likely experiences to date.

His statement of, "we're talking about career criminals", to categorize police shootings as justifiable is a tip-off that the data is trusted on its face, and it bothers me that there is no acknowledgment that the path of a person who was cultured into being a "career criminal" could have started with a bogus arrest for marijuana consumption. People who haven't been flushed by the system think merits can save you. I, a white person from the middle-class, had many run-ins with the police where I undeservedly was let off the hook with a warning, and no records of mine were permanently kept in the system.
America Loves to Jail | I Love You, America on Hulu

Sarah on Her Criminal Past | I Love You, America on Hulu


Also, also, people without stuff may crime to survive, where people with means most likely crime to entertain themselves.

He mentions how Officer to Suspect interactions of the same race are more likely to be #violent. Like what if a like-race-category on the PD has more to prove to their coworkers when confronting a like-race-category "suspect". Since the incident of how PD's retaliate on anybody that crosses them in a cult-like way, e.g. the dismissal of LAPD's Chris Dorner the recently uncovered Buffalo PD case of Cariol Horne, it is very plausible that race discrimination or tacit racism pervasive in the PD's causes it the way a sidewalk in disrepair causes a bone injury. Did we even check to see if there's a bias in reporting where non-white officers are more likely to report things #truthfully? #Institutional #racism would come down hard on non-white employees and be forgiving of white employees.
8:46 - Dave Chappelle


He then jumps to a hypothesis that because blacks are more likely to #resist an #arrest because of real or perceived systematic racism problem, "the only response is for the police to increase their use of force". Damn Sam. That's the only choice they have? Like de-escalation techniques never worked? Like the way patrolling went in the months and years before the incident has nothing to do with how things go down? The cop's only choice was that. Sorry Sam, I reject your null hypothesis.

Maybe black on black violence outside police to non-police interactions wouldn't be so high if there wasn't a clear signal from the system that blacks don't matter to the police, and their bullshit arrests or stops & frisks are randomly distributed to make tally sheets on clipboards look right for municipal reporting. If an innocent black person was shaken down without #probable #cause and no tangible #justification, will they later call the cops when a local criminal act by a black person is being committed? If you are a skilled black criminal, will you cut in some of the local police on the action you are running? Any cop that doesn't give a fuck about black people would give a fuck more about a black person helping his kid get through college with side money. In the #Somebody Podcast linked above the Chicago PD's local precinct office couldn't find Courtney Copeland's killer with the evidence handed to them on a silver platter, I—personally—can only assume the cops are the mob.

Somewhere around 1:30:00, we hit a concept of what kind of people would want to be cops in such a #hostile #work #environment. "Who's gonna want to be a cop now?" Ugh! This smacks of, the only people that care about privacy are people doing something wrong, I ain't got nothing to hide. He further postulates that only prison guard type people will want to be cops. #WTF. Maybe if good people didn't think they were going to be gang-land retaliated against for doing the #morally #altruistic thing, they might take a chance on being a cop. If whistle-blowers didn't know by past examples that it would end all their #future #careers in one fell swoop, there might be more people doing good things for the world. Where's Reality Winner now? Our #dominating #culture propagated by those in power is #cancerous, and to extend the metaphor, many of us still think #smoking is good for their health. I would definitely want to go for it and become a cop if I didn't personally have reasons to see the PD's near me as corrupt from first and credible second-hand experiences.

Near the end, about 1:34:00, he's claiming the videos are warping our perception of the problem. I think he is putting the wrong weight on the value of loss and cascading ill-effects one police act of murder of a minority has on our country. We are supposed to be founded on all people are created equal, innocent until proven guilty, and so on.
What the Hell Happened This Week? | The Daily Social Distancing Show


Bear in mind, if I didn't mention something Sam said in his #podcast, it's about a 99% chance I agreed with him.

Michael Rupp
This adds on nicely to the "rant" above. Mike Pesca, in the first 5 minutes (the only part I care about for this context), outlines how holding for one variable in statistics tells a whole different story than the one Sam was rationally presenting.

Give Up That Racist Tradition

Michael Rupp
Slow Burn: David Duke
This episode was a roller-coaster of #Racism from the #UnitedStates' past. I'm not that young that I shouldn't be expected to know the David Duke history, but I guess I'm not racist enough to know and not marginalized enough to know either. If somebody had tried removing all cheese from America, I probably would have written an essay about it in elementary school.

Hearing the fun romp of the precarious up's and joyful down's of David Duke's early years was a fun time. Not BlacKkKlansman level but heading that way.

Slow Burn: David Duke | Season 4: Episode 2 "Robe and Ritual"

Michael Rupp
@Anubis2814 something electronically weird happened when I accepted your connection. I had it happen in the past with people on the social.isurf.ca server. Like right now I don't see your old posts on my feed, and I can't comment on your posts if I browse to them.

The remedy might be to both disconnect from each other by deleting from the contacts list and then on another day in the future try reconnecting.

I was going to comment on the hangings post. That's the kind of shit that rolls my eyes back in my head like when you get punched too hard and you are about to go unconsious.
Michael Rupp
Nevermind, I think my directly mentioning you cleared the queue.
Michael Rupp
1619
Damn, this short-run #Podcast, from the questionable NY Times, is ON!!!

It's jam-packed with mindboggling facts of #America's #Racism from pre constitution to today. I hope it goes on to do more episodes.
Michael Rupp
Yep, the Police can be very brutal in the USA 🇺🇸
More people than nobody do need to see it to believe it—#Pics or it didn't happen. 🙄

#PoliceBrutality is #Systemic and #Endemic. When I'm in a more doubtful mood I think of it as a confluence of random events and human nature—Stanford Prison Experiment—that get us to a point that we're at right now, but when I'm more confident I see it as a #mindfully #programmed part of the #system of #Capitalism by the #Wealthy #Oligarchs like #Koch Bros. designed specifically to keep the people in powerin power.

No matter what the driving force is behind our #InstitutionalRacism and #Police #Brutality, it exists.

Seeing-as-how a couple days ago a down-to-Earth but established star like Anna Kendrick has started #Tweeting about it, maybe you can pass it on to your #JoeThePlumber type relatives before #FauxNews starts slandering her as an #Atheist #Lesbian #BabyEater, or the #qAnon / #MAGA types try to murder her.

I mean. They couldn’t stop themselves from blatantly escalating things. Even for a few days, even cynically, even for the optics.


Anna Kendrick (@AnnaKendrick47) May 31, 2020
2 people reshared this
Tessa Byrd
There are always folks who deny, justify, and excuse brutality though. Pictures and video recordings have traditionally been ignored. I say traditionally because law enforcement has been murdering unarmed cooperating Black men & women for AT LEAST a decade...
Digit
oh it's enough to laugh/cry. that understatement. at least a decade. yeah. just a bit. 🙁
Michael Rupp
Trevor Speaks Out About the Murder of George Floyd
2 people reshared this
Michael Rupp
𝄕𝄞𝄚 𝅘𝅥 . You don't know me! 𝄚𝄀𝄚 I'm the O. P.D.! 𝅘𝅥𝅯 . 𝄚𝄂
Most people take law enforcement for granted, and by that I mean it's assumed to have always been that way and that it's acceptable. It's well documented how the #USA formed it's #Police forces in order to maintain the #sinful institution of #Slavery (see also: Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 & of 1850, Encyclopædia Britannica, TIME Magazine and Eastern Kentucky University for starters), but most of us are blissfully unaware of the darker driving truths.

A tidbit that comes out early in this week's #FAIR #Podcast called #CounterSpin, is that the #Brittish #PD (Bobbies) has a dark past as well.

The culture that forms an entity lingers on long after the people and reasons for forming an institution have died. It takes a lot of energy over generations to clean that garbage legacy culture out of an organization when everybody is willing to remove it. Collectively #Americans are not ready willing or able to remove our sins of #Racism and #Opressing the #Poor from policing because a minority of "us" (the wealthy) want it that way, and they can afford to produce a steady stream of propaganda convincing the majority of people beyond their interests into defending indefensible actions that come out of those institutions.

A stark truth that I personally see is that #Policing internally and #Military #Occupations externally are de facto the same thing for the same reasons put into motion by the same people for the same reasons. We have not yet really left #Feudalism, our #democracy is as big an #illusion as a #video-game.

FAIR | Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
CounterSpin
Alex Vitale, Chase Madar and Shahid Buttar on Racist Policing Full Show




#GeorgeFloyd #InstitutionalRacism #Racism #Riots #Protests #UnitedStates #PoliceBrutality
#open-mindedness #society #manipulated #power #capital #ignorant #white #middle-class #InstitutionalRacism #Racism #Riots #Protests #UnitedStates #PoliceBrutality
Michael Rupp
I saw @Lisa Stranger post the earliest "rumors" (minimally substantiated facts) of this recently. This morning I finally saw "Credible" (well-substantiated) sources getting on the story, like the embedded podcast and the attached web page below.

The linked webpage below has embedded video that was initially live-streamed showing early on that it WAS NOT the protesters causing damage. The #UmbrellaMan does seem like a cop and his only alibi is other police who were all dressed in murky black clothing amidst the chaos.

Twitter, has postings from journalists indicating that the #Minnesota #PD went on a tire slashing bender. See the @AndrewKimmel posting and his substantiation of the claim. Other's on Twitter have documented public tire slashing and from different angles at the same time and place. Still others on Twitter are making connections to the US Govt. Agencies investigating the true nature of the people damaging property.

Still, the best story to read is that linked webpage at the bottom of my microblog post here. They discuss Right-wing extremists and #accelerationists in the latter half. That's some sick stuff festering in our society.

BBC - Global News Podcast
Minnesota governor says protests ‘no longer’ about Floyd death




Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law
JustSecurity.org

Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests
Indicators of White Supremacists

Michael Rupp
A Decade Of Watching Black People Die
I don't know how exactly to deal with my white friends lately. I could have the same headspace of ignorance but for a lucky random event that changed my direction towards #open-mindedness about two decades ago. They aren't exposed to the realities of people without power or money. They don't know they should be exposed to those harsh realities. They don't know because of how #society has formed and they don't know how it has been #manipulated by people with #power and #capital.

A person in my circles asked me what I thought about what's going on in the news lately. He asked because his mind is starting to open, but it bothered me that he didn't ask that question when the Koch instigated and funded armed militia groups were storming State Capital buildings because they wanted hair-cuts and bowling. I didn't resist mentioning that to him. I also had to ask him, "How many people had their necks kneeled on but didn't die?"

I'm not sure I helped guide him closer to knowing. Us #ignorant #white #middle-class people didn't decide to be ignorant, we were cultured into it by design and it self-replicates as religion does by believing lies that make us reject conflicting evidence. "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit." "Yeah, that's a bad neighborhood. Those people don't know how to act civilized." Understanding is shut off. Complex things and environments are reduced to binary "facts". It's an illusion to think any person is different from another person in a meaningful way. Our actions are different because our culture is different, and we all think we are acting the right way, until the day we discover we are wrong and begin to act differently.

Give a sigh and assume the ignorant were victims of a cult when you try to enlighten them with harsh realities.

#InstitutionalRacism #Racism #Riots #Protests #UnitedStates #PoliceBrutality
Michael Rupp
@Bo Elder Love the name of your instance.
Michael Rupp
I'd be happy to argue about religion or politics come from that NSFW site, and happy to argue about economics or politics from this Social server.

Tap me in when you get rolling.
Michael Rupp
Distractions kill productivity.
Michael Rupp

Before ink is dry on record FCC penalty check, Sinclair runs full-hour in-kind ad for mayoral candidate


The station hosted a more than hourlong online “conversation” with Vignarajah alone Thursday night,

but the FEC has been gutted, so WGAF
with anchor Mary Bubala noting at the beginning of the livestreamed program that they had hoped to be joined by Miller, Dixon and Scott. The station did not invite former Baltimore Police spokesman T.J. Smith and Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young because they require candidates to release five years of tax returns to qualify for these debates.

THE IRONY, IT BURNS

In her letter to the station, Miller’s campaign manager, Ann Beegle, noted that several people affiliated with Sinclair, a conservative-leaning Hunt Valley-based company, have made large financial contributions to Vignarajah’s mayoral campaign.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/politics/bs-md-pol-fox-debate-baltimore-mayor-20200508-hmoenzleine63fcm7qabakdzxy-story.html

Vignarajah is an entitled twat, to boot.

Michael Rupp
Another type of Religion, Drinking Bleach, and Donald Trump
So we all know that The #Trump told us his idea of how getting UV light inside the body or injecting a sanitizing agent should be looked into to solve the #COVID-19 problem. You may not ask yourself "where the #FUCK does he get his dangerous ideas?", because that will lead to another crazy person to which you would ask the same question, and maybe loop on for thousands of branches.

Here's the short branch on this one. A #RWNJ claimed he was cured of malaria instantly when he took a water purification tablet, so he started an industry of getting people to ingest diluted #bleach. His method has led to the deaths of many children and his own wife, but he persists anyway. Turns out he's politically parallel to Donald J. Trump and has contacted him recently by a letter about how his product would cure the Corona Virus pandemic. That nut may believe it, but no, it doesn't work on anything. Trump gets a letter, then free-balls it at the press conference.
Link to the Guardian Column referred to in the tweet below.
Sawbones Podcast: Bleach Episode, which covers the #Quack selling bleach to drink as a #panacea.

#Clorox #Lysol #Disinfectant #Sterilizer
Michael Rupp

Coronavirus has already overtaken the death rate for cancer and is about to overtake heart disease.


Michael Rupp

Web Servers are HARD!


When you first install your own #Webserver on your own #Hardware, everything pretty much goes easy and right. Over time you get more complex with things. Then upgrades start to roll in. Eventually, you make a mistake and nobody notices anything. Because you care about the content on the #Server, you spend time on that, not reading logs and outputs of cron jobs. You miss some things that would have been great to know. Then in what seems like a flash, you are in Murphy's Law territory.

It's stunning how much a person doesn't know about things they know so much about.

Michael Rupp
Sorry Nations of the Earth, America fucked it all up, you're in grave danger now.
Typically I post a full microblog in the IP, but this time I'll reply to my own IP to add supporting info.

We are all in deep existential trouble. That's my conclusion based on the state of the world as I can know it as an ordinary single human being. I think we are all just as #Fucked as the world was prior to #Kristallnacht and this time it's #American #Capitalism that will be attempting to destroy the world so that under a quarter of its inhabitants can get what they want. Looking at you GAB types.

I'm not big on #Conspiracies. For example, as a former US Marine, I know you don't get out of boot-camp unless you can make the shots that Oswald took at Kenedy, so fuck your "Grassy Knoll" beliefs. And the Earth is definitely not flat. I'm never more than 100%-dx% sure of anything, so I'm always ready to be convinced that I'm wrong. Right now I'm convinced that a confluence of events has coincided in a way that it may be unstoppable, and it will alter the nature of all cultures on Earth.

  • The USA has fuckloads of weapons and an excessive desire to use them.
  • The USA has a minority subset of people controlling nearly all the power in the country and the citizens who privately own guns specifically to protect against a dictatorship, favor the dictatorship that is forming here.
  • The people with power also control the lines of thinking of a majority of Christian religions in the USA and have built them up to a fever pitch of pent up rage and righteous indignation that they will on command overwhelm the rest of the rational thinking Americans.
  • The Bullshit Strongman Leader type has propagated all over the globe into most of the powerful nations on the planet.
  • The USA became the unrivaled world leader from a second rate country because it sat out the world wars as much as it could and kept the fighting away from its oligarchs' factories. It seems like Putin could pull off a similar Judo move by instigating a World War and waiting it out all the while saying, "did I do that?"
  • The people in power in the USA that are the problem may actually believe that they are "Chosen by God" and that means they have no boundaries of ethics or morals because they are God and whatever they do is good by definition. This insidious culture may have been exported to all other countries from the USA and some of the other countries imported it either in a Machiavellian way or because they are True Believers; the latter is more dangerous.
  • During world wide chaos is the ideal time to make a move for power, just like rival mobsters would make a move on the other's turf if the other's top guy was hospitalized.

I strongly believe You (the non-USA world) will be under attack from about half of Us (the USA world) despite protestations from the other half of Us. You all better get ready for it now.
#Afghanistan #Albania #Algeria #Andorra #Angola #Antigua #Barbuda #Argentina #Armenia #Australia #Austria #Azerbaijan #Bahamas #Bahrain #Bangladesh #Barbados #Belarus #Belgium #Belize #Benin #Bhutan #Bolivia #Bosnia #Herzegovina #Botswana #Brazil #Brunei #Bulgaria #BurkinaFaso #Burundi #CaboVerde #Cambodia #Cameroon #Canada #CentralAfricanRepublic #Chad #Chile #China #Colombia #Comoros #DemocraticRepublicoftheCongo #RepublicoftheCongo #CostaRica #Coted'Ivoire #Croatia #Cuba #Cyprus #Czechia #Denmark #Djibouti #Dominica #DominicanRepublic #Ecuador #Egypt #ElSalvador #EquatorialGuinea #Eritrea #Estonia #Eswatini #Swaziland #Ethiopia #Fiji #Finland #France #Gabon #Gambia #Georgia #Germany #Ghana #Greece #Grenada #Guatemala #Guinea #Guinea-Bissau #Guyana #Haiti #Honduras #Hungary #Iceland #India #Indonesia #Iran #Iraq #Ireland #Israel #Italy #Jamaica #Japan #Jordan #Kazakhstan #Kenya #Kiribati #Kosovo #Kuwait #Kyrgyzstan #Laos #Latvia #Lebanon #Lesotho #Liberia #Libya #Liechtenstein #Lithuania #Luxembourg #Madagascar #Malawi #Malaysia #Maldives #Mali #Malta #MarshallIslands #Mauritania #Mauritius #Mexico #Micronesia #Moldova #Monaco #Mongolia #Montenegro #Morocco #Mozambique #Myanmar #Burma #Namibia #Nauru #Nepal #Netherlands #NewZealand #Nicaragua #Niger #Nigeria #NorthKorea #NorthMacedonia #Macedonia #Norway #Oman #Pakistan #Palau #Palestine #Panama #PapuaNewGuinea #Paraguay #Peru #Philippines #Poland #Portugal #Qatar #Romania #Russia #Rwanda #SaintKitts #Nevis #SaintLucia #SaintVincent #Grenadines #Samoa #SanMarino #SaoTome #Principe #SaudiArabia #Senegal #Serbia #Seychelles #SierraLeone #Singapore #Slovakia #Slovenia #SolomonIslands #Somalia #SouthAfrica #SouthKorea #SouthSudan #Spain #SriLanka #Sudan #Suriname #Sweden #Switzerland #Syria #Taiwan #Tajikistan #Tanzania #Thailand #Timor-Leste #Togo #Tonga #Trinidad #Tobago #Tunisia #Turkey #Turkmenistan #Tuvalu #Uganda #Ukraine #UnitedArabEmirates #UnitedKingdom #UnitedStates #Uruguay #Uzbekistan #Vanuatu #VaticanCity #Venezuela #Vietnam #Yemen #Zambia #Zimbabwe
#capitalism #cyprus #Mexico #Iraq #Russia #Argentina #UnitedStates #UnitedKingdom #China #Germany #Iran #Vietnam #Israel #Palestine #sweden #France #japan #Venezuela #American #Iceland #egypt #Jordan #southafrica #ukraine #Greece #india #Syria #canada #Afghanistan #Australia #czechia #Portugal #spain #Denmark #malaysia #Norway #botswana #Finland #southkorea #switzerland #italy #Luxembourg #panama #poland #Jamaica #Fucked #Kristallnacht #Conspiracies #Albania #Algeria #Andorra #Angola #Antigua #Barbuda #Armenia #Austria #Azerbaijan #Bahamas #Bahrain #Bangladesh #Barbados #Belarus #Belgium #Belize #Benin #Bhutan #Bolivia #Bosnia #Herzegovina #Brazil #Brunei #Bulgaria #BurkinaFaso #Burundi #CaboVerde #Cambodia #Cameroon #CentralAfricanRepublic #Chad #Chile #Colombia #Comoros #DemocraticRepublicoftheCongo #RepublicoftheCongo #CostaRica #Coted'Ivoire #Croatia #Cuba #Djibouti #Dominica #DominicanRepublic #Ecuador #ElSalvador #EquatorialGuinea #Eritrea #Estonia #Eswatini #Swaziland #Ethiopia #Fiji #Gabon #Gambia #Georgia #Ghana #Grenada #Guatemala #Guinea #Guinea-Bissau #Guyana #Haiti #Honduras #Hungary #Indonesia #Ireland #Kazakhstan #Kenya #Kiribati #Kosovo #Kuwait #Kyrgyzstan #Laos #Latvia #Lebanon #Lesotho #Liberia #Libya #Liechtenstein #Lithuania #Madagascar #Malawi #Maldives #Mali #Malta #MarshallIslands #Mauritania #Mauritius #Micronesia #Moldova #Monaco #Mongolia #Montenegro #Morocco #Mozambique #Myanmar #Burma #Namibia #Nauru #Nepal #Netherlands #NewZealand #Nicaragua #Niger #Nigeria #NorthKorea #NorthMacedonia #Macedonia #Oman #Pakistan #Palau #PapuaNewGuinea #Paraguay #Peru #Philippines #Qatar #Romania #Rwanda #SaintKitts #Nevis #SaintLucia #SaintVincent #Grenadines #Samoa #SanMarino #SaoTome #Principe #SaudiArabia #Senegal #Serbia #Seychelles #SierraLeone #Singapore #Slovakia #Slovenia #SolomonIslands #Somalia #SouthSudan #SriLanka #Sudan #Suriname #Taiwan #Tajikistan #Tanzania #Thailand #Timor-Leste #Togo #Tonga #Trinidad #Tobago #Tunisia #Turkey #Turkmenistan #Tuvalu #Uganda #UnitedArabEmirates #Uruguay #Uzbekistan #Vanuatu #VaticanCity #Yemen #Zambia #Zimbabwe
Categories: Politics , Religion , society , Philosophy
Michael Rupp
I'm an #Atheist now, but used to be a #Catholic, and used to be a #Republican too for that matter. A wide variety of attitudes and personalities exists among the world of atheists. Recently two who are culturally differen't enough that I was surprised to hear both of them setting off an alarm of #Cristian #Nationalism posing a big problem for society at large. Here are the media that they were posted on:
From DarkMatter2525, "Is Christian Nationalism Un-American?"


From Seth Andrews (aka: The Thinking Atheist), "The Power Worshippers: The Rise of Religious Nationalism (with Katherine Stewart)"
Michael Rupp
As an aside here, Jen Briney, founder and on air personality of The Congressional Dish, (is a very non-partisan thinker and has dedicated her life to reading the Bills before the US Congress and reporting on them to the public funded by listener charity), will make you understand the level of depravity that the US Government has stooped to. Give her a go!
Michael Rupp
Relatively Irrational Ideas vs. Universally Irrational Ideas
I'm trying to play with #Thoughts and don't know if my reach is big enough to attract people willing to chat about my content.
It started before hearing the latest podcast from The Thinking Atheist

but it felt urgent while hearing it.
Click to open/closeHis words and callers had me vasillating between NNNOOOOOO!!!!! & YYYEEEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!


We are all #Rational from within our own social circles.


I have to hear #Irrational thoughts uttered from people in my social circles very often. I'm rarely in a position to influence people towards truth (well at least to my truth if nothing else ;) because my #Atheism is something that causes all of them to be skeptical of my and my thoughts on anything. I took my trip to Atheism quietly in my own head and after Farcebook outed me by flipping a switch one day on private groups, everything changed.

Since I used to be just like them, I have some insight into how we used to think and react to #Divergent ideas. I would like to blame it on #Religion, but I think it's more pervasive than that based on personal experiences. It seems like something in human culture from somewhere way back in our collective past it became a #Game #Theory winning strategy to reject the "others" when they deviated from our thoughts and ways. That's a segway to my bigger point; we are more a product of our culture by far than we are of our genetics and that makes us malleable in remarkable ways. It can be the case that a tumor on a brain can cause a person to be criminally anti-social, so please lets only consider the cases where we are in good working order.

Sam Harris the public figure, has a strong case that #FreeWill is an illusion, and I reject that notion, but don't reject his supporting evidence. However, I do often notice how a person's choices were preloaded by their cultural influences. And most people are rational, so most people make a preselected single choice based on the values they adopted from their cultural influences. That can appear to show life is predestined, but it's also showing the lack of exercising free-will. It might help if we would occasionally make sub-optimal decisions in a Puckish way or take choices of action that aren't offered to us, then I think it makes us activists in the protection of free-will. Although this freedom can lead to bad things; that's part of free will, the danger of bad outcomes which cultural experience could have prevented.


I escaped my "cave" of #Christian #Theology and think it's was the best thing that ever happened to me, but between then and now were a lot of very uncomfortable times and bad memories. It was worth it for me.
Click to open/closeI've left a lot of psychological caves since then too and can't believe the things I accepted as reality without ever testing things rigorously.


If you have left a cave, or can bring yourself to accept the idea that your current #Reality might be a wrong one, then you are open-minded enough to break free of the cultural influences that programmed your decisionmaking apparatus.

From such a vantage point you can begin to see how others weren't inherently #Good or #Bad people, but instead were people stuck in a personal reality path where they saw no other choices despite there being infinite possibilities at their disposal at every moment in time. This is where my post title comes back into the foreground. People who are acting in ways you accept are most likely in one of your chosen or inherited cultural circles and those actions may be relatively rational to your circle(s), or they might be universally rational to all circles for all time (or somewhere inbetween). As a quick aside, I didn't know how remarkably bad WWI was till recently, and with my current understanding of how #PTSD works and affects people, it changed how I thought about Hitler since he suffered through, but survived, that wretched war. It seems to my recollection that every time I take a closer look into the life of somebody who's actions are Relatively Irrational to me, I can see how they could be so far askew of good social order and yet still think they are the good person doing the right thing. It doesn't mean I forgive or forget the actions, but like the amazing Chris Rock once said about O.J. Simpson, "I can understand."

What about people in bad places with bad parents who turn out good?


I believe the motivation for people asking this question is relying on the fallacy of incomplete evidence or at the worst a red-herring type Straw-Man.

The following is a brief trip to my past. As a young child, my parents told many lies which they thought at the time were good to tell in order to protect an innocent child; Santa is real, pulled teeth are worth money to a fairy, drugs are of the devil, etc. At some point in life, I discovered that some people were assholes based on how they treated me and others were not. For reasons I didn't think about at the time people I considered good also did drugs and drank alcohol outside the law. This type of cognitive dissonance caused by personal experience allowed me to distrust all the advice of my parents and their related circles of culture, even the good ones. You might say I got kicked out of the cave I was born into?

At some high level of summary, my parents were ideal in society and were above reproach as good parents. Depending on where one point's the telescope or microscope of hindsight, very different conclusions can be justified about how "good" my home-life was. Even from my own knowledge of history, I would have agreed that their parenting was above reproach and only I was culpable in my decisions to try drugs and drink to excess, that is, until I learned how to leave a cave.

I neither condemn or exonerate their actions, but I don't mindlessly repeat any of them. I'd like to believe I'm a truly good person in the world, especially since I rejected faith in any supernatural entities. I can also see how despite doing things in the past that I find despicable now, at the time I was doing them I was the hero in my own mind's eye, and I was doing the right things for the right reasons. So, if we took a closer look at how the "bad places" and "bad parents" world treated a person who left that all behind to become a "good person", we will probably find that similar to why I thought drugs would be good, that red-herring person who chose good was kicked out of their cave too.
Categories: society , Philosophy
Michael Rupp
In the voice of Steven Wright, "Still tired from the move."
Steven Wright clip on YouTUBE

So I moved recently to a new location. This might mean I will start posting again. It was a month or more to prepare to move and it might take another month to unpack.
Michael Rupp
'American Oligarchs' Reveals How Trump, Kushner Families Learned To Work The System
Wow, another confirmation of how the #Trumps got their start of #Wealth by selling dead horses to gold miners as "Steaks", hookers, booze, and crooked gambling. #Theif heritage is being respected by all the next of kin. #Kushner did an about-face from his heritage; #Immigration "I got mine, you aren't allowed though".


Transcript
Michael Rupp

The Software Freedom @[url=https://mas.to/@Husseinkhh.rss]conservancy , which helps manage funds and provides a legal home for the Inkscape project, is seeking your help for its donation match!

There are 6 days left to raise about $30K. Consider donating for software freedom today & have your donation count double!

Michael Rupp
My life got too busy for social media! Partly because of social media!
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