What was fascinating, or perhaps horrific is a better word, about the article that I didn't know about is the brief mention of "The Canary Mission"

Here's from their about page:

Canary Mission documents individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond. Canary Mission investigates hatred across the entire political spectrum, including the far right, far left and anti-Israel activists.

Canary Mission is motivated by a desire to combat the rise in anti-Semitism on college campuses. We pursue our mission by presenting the words and deeds of individuals and organizations that engage in anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry on the far right, far left and among the array of organizations that comprise the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Essentially they gather dossiers on private individuals that they claim are anti-semitic. So, I looked up the woman that was taken off the street like a Ukrainian draft-dodger.

https://canarymission.org/...

Rumeysa Ozturk engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024, in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023.

Ozturk is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

What was the anti-Israel activism, you ask? I figured it was some sort of protest. Sort of like the one in New York where they occupied a building.

Nope

On March 26, 2024, Ozturk co-authored an op-ed published in the Tufts Daily newspaper titled: "Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions." The authors urged "President Kumar and the Tufts administration to meaningfully engage with and actualize the resolutions passed by the Senate."

The op-ed referred to the passing of anti-Israel resolutions by the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate, which demanded the University "...acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments, and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel."

At Tufts university, the Community Union Senate (not really sure what this is. a student council or something) passed a 3/5ths majority resolution urging the president of the university to

1. acknowledge the Palestinian genocide

2. apologize for some statements, I don't know what

3. disclose its investments

4. divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel

She co-wrote an op-ed essentially demanding the president follow the resolution that was passed. That's the "anti-Israel activism" she's guilty of. I suppose that's enough to be deported. Be careful out there guys. If you aren't a citizen, shut up about your political views until you are. Because there are eyes out there watching everything you do. Even if you are.. consider what you are doing. You may be making an enemy of a vindictive state that is willing to break the rules.

Here's the op-ed, in case you're interested: https://www.tuftsdaily.com/...

These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law. Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.

Lock 'em up, I guess. If you believe that Palestinian civilians have a right to life then you are a terrorist-sympathizer in this administration's opinion.

America is a country with over 300 million people and it's bigger than Western Europe. There's going to be a lot of variance. Someone growing up wealthy in San Fransisco is going to live in a different America than someone growing up with a single waitress mother in Louisiana.

The average homicide rate in the US is 5 per 100,000. The town of Boca Raton, FL has a homicide rate of 1 (less than half of the European average of 2.5) and Baltimore / St Louis / New Orleans can sometimes reach 30+ on bad years (worse than some Brazilian and Mexican cities).

When you ask about the shitty laws, we have to remember that the US is almost like 50 different countries in one. Every single state you will have a different experience as well. In Illinois school districts kids in elementary school may take home school laptops free of charge. In Panhandle Florida the kids aren't getting that.

In Florida you can go to a one of the many kava bars or smoke shops and purchase a kilogram of kratom. If you drive through Louisiana with that kratom you can get charged with a felony comparable to being caught with heroin.

Do you get what I'm saying? There are many different Americas - even in the same geographical area. In SE Florida there are a wild mix of different ethnicities and cultures. There are Haitians, Jews, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, Jamaicans..

You can live in the same city but have a totally different experience. The Brazilians may hang out with mainly other Brazilians and go to the Brazilian restaraunts / clubs / grocery stores and not ever go to the Jewish deli that all the Jews love as a staple of the town. It's like you walk around the same area and depending on the cultural lens you put on, you experience a different reality.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT

I think America is a good country to live in. Why? Because it's better than the vast majority of the world. You earn more money. You are safer. You have more opportunities and there's better infrastructure, healthcare, etc than in vast majority of the world.

Yes, there are serious problems. Wealth inequality is splitting the country in two. Healthcare is expensive. There's an opioid epidemic. We have high rates of gun violence. Etc etc

But having come from a relatively well-off third world country, I've seen the difference in QOL first hand and it's massive. America is a good place to live.

sad story. it's emblematic of a mentality that is all too common in "ivory tower" positions

whether you work for a university or a news agency or a government organizations, etc. everyone ends up self censoring because they realize that rocking the boat is bad for your personal interests. after working so hard to get into this little elite club, you don't want to jeopardize your position. your identity and sense of self worth is tied up with it

the few that end up trying get quickly chewed up and spit out by the whole.

it's essentially group think and self censorship. too bad this guy killed himself instead of trying to move forward in his life with another avenue.

if you stick to your workouts and train to failure, your muscles will grow.

however to eliminate fat, you don't exercise. you eat less. when you are eating below caloric maintenance, your body makes up the difference in fat. you can't control where the fat comes from. you just have to maintain that for a long time and it'll go away. everyone stores fat differently. some in legs, some in stomach, etc.

but you cannot exercise away body fat. it's like 80/20 diet exercise

It's sort of like how YouTube ran at a loss for a long time. The idea is to get ingrained in the market and make up the money later.

Right now Meta has the best VR / AR that is easily accessible. If some new idea or technology catapults VR into a more popular position, then Meta is in a prime position to take advantage.

Will that happen? I don't know, but Meta seems to think so.

I grew up illegal in the US. I was brought on a travel visa at the age of 5 and it wasn't until my mid 20s that I became a citizen.

I vividly remember being in elementary school, around her age, in music class where we were learning the national anthem. The entire class would stand up and we should sing "I'm proud to be an American" and I remember silently crying as I stood up and sang the song.

I cried because I understood even at that age that I was not an American. I was part of everything while simultaneously always being detached from everything. Never fitting in, but pretending to. I think long-term it created a strange sense of detachment from society. This shit fucks you up and it's heavy stuff for a child to process. It wasn't until my adulthood that I really started to understand and internalize a positive narrative from my upbringing. An 11 year old child does not have the capacity to process this.

And I'm in my 30s now- I grew up illegal before social media and before this xenophobic outburst started circa 2016. I'd imagine it's so much worse today.

I feel for this little girl. I feel for all the children in the country who's only crime was existing. Obama, while famously being the deporter-in-chief (both Obama terms aw more deported than Trump's first term), at least did offer DACA as an executive order for these children.

Really, I think you can tell the state of a society by how they treat the vulnerable. And the US is getting increasingly brutal and cruel. We're in for a wild fascist ride, comrades. It's only just begun.

at 76 with a reasonable amount of wealth under his belt, I'm surprised he was even mowing his own lawn

I think it's a short-sighted move by Universal. Granted, maybe they know something we don't (Tiktok getting banned soon), but the benefit in TikTok for artists isn't necessarily the revenue but the promotion of their songs. They are short clips, usually no more than 15~20 seconds long. Lots of people use the songs in their videos, lots more people listen to a clip and want to listen to the full thing -> they go to youtube or apple music or whatever where Universal presumably would make a much larger share of the revenue.

And who doesn't do it?

OSS operating systems. The more proprietary software you run, the less and less you actually own your computer and the more it becomes a tool to advance the interests of megacorps.

There's a story from Soviet Russia.

A bunch of politicians are in the Kremlin and Stalin is giving a speech outlining some new policy. One politician stands up and angrily yells out- "Stalin! This is wrong! I cannot support this measure". Everyone gasps and looks at him.

Quickly, another politician stands up and replies "Comrade! Don't you know? You cannot say that Stalin is incorrect! We do not do that here."

Stalin ignores these outbursts, tells everyone to settle down and continues the speech.

Of course, this being Stalinist Russia, the man who disagreed with Stalin gets quietly sent to the gulag for a couple of years to learn his lesson.

The second man, however, gets sent to the gulag for 20 years and doesn't come out until he is an old man.

What's the moral of the story? Implicit censorship is so much more powerful than explicit censorship. This is reddit goal. Create an air where people self-regulate their speech. The key is not to say it out loud. It needs to be vague and amorphous and ambiguous.

it shows how insane the country is becoming

we're openly celebrating war crimes and ethnic cleansing

like, before they would beat around the bush. you know the dog whistles. "anti-antisemitism" "self-defense" etc

once the need for the mask is not so strong, the mask starts to slip

Americans love dogs. Even the brainwashed MAGA loonies. I can't believe she is a successful politician and thought this would be an OK thing to include in a book.

Usually psychos who make it into power understand the public sentiment enough to hide certain things like this.

Maybe it was a calculated risk- an attempt at courting controversy like Trump does and just dramatically backfired.

This is why I don't trust any government trying to justify any warlike behavior. It's all a scam. There is no justification good enough for civilians and young men to suffer and die.

The politicians play chess and we die

Did everyone just collectively agree to forget 2016? The polls were all favoring Clinton by a dramatic margin. CNN famously had a headline where they predicted Clinton had a 99% chance to win off of the polls.

And what ended up happening? 538 (before bought and neutered by ABC) gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton's favor. Trump ended up winning that 35%. This year, according to polls, Trump's odds are better than in 2016. Kamala has the upper hand, but

A) lots of things can change suddenly before the election (like the Hilary emails thing)

B) polls are not the ultimate arbiter of who will win an election- actual real votes are

C) Trump more than likely has some "extracurricular plans" in store, much like Jan 6th, that has a chance of working.

Tldr: don't get drunk on positive news. Keep a level head and you'll see this election is still very close to a coin flip

I cut off a close friend of mine when I decided to get clean from heroin. I used to use drugs with him and he was my weed dealer. He never sold me heroin, but his friends did.

I feel bad because he messaged me 5 or 6 years later saying he got clean too and said he was sorry for anything he did. He honestly didn't do anything wrong, I just felt like I had to prioritize my sobriety.

I still haven't contacted him. He was my closest friend for years. I wonder how he's doing.

Sort of hard to say. I grew up an illegal immigrant in a big city. When I was 6 or so my parents would bring me with them when they went out to clean offices at night.

I pulled a fire alarm at like 1am without knowing what it was and my parents hid me in the trunk of the car. Told me to be quiet. They didn't speak English and were afraid the cops could take me away.

I got hit with the belt a few times. When I was around 12 I tried to fight my dad during a belting and got my ass beat.

Also when I was around 12 I was in a car accident on the highway in an SUV that flipped 4 times. Everyone went to the hospital except for me, I was perfectly fine.

I was in Vegas with my brother for his 21st once and he had spent all his money. We were in the airport on the way back and there are slot machines there. He asked me to borrow some money to play some slots- he said if he'd win he would share with me.

On the last $2 bet he hit a jackpot and we each got $600

One time I was playing pool at the bar in my early 20s and hopped a ball to make the game winning shot on the 8 ball - won $50. It was beautiful. I rode that high for a week.

Speaking of high, I also overdosed on heroin (fentanyl, really) and was revived with Narcan in an ambulance once. That was a very confusing experience. Coming to slowly with many lights and people in uniforms around you.

I've been robbed before, with 2 guys grabbing me by each arm while a 3rd goes through my pockets. While they talked shit I just stayed quiet.

I've gotten in bar fights and have been kicked out of bars. I stood up for a friend at a house party at around 18 and got my ass beat because of it. He was too scared to do anything. Around that same time period I had a short couple months long fling with a woman in her 40s. I felt like a badass at 18 but nowadays I look back and it was weird.

I've done intramuscular ketamine injections with exactly the right dosage to be under anesthetic - aka khole. I've done a lot of drugs - nothing in my life has ever come close. I've also done two cycles of steroids. I've never had so much sex as during those cycles. During this time period I caught chlamydia & gono.

Also I made like $5,000 on Dogecoin and like $3,000 on Bepro. (Easily lost more than that overall with coins)

Those are some arguably crazy things that have happened to me. I'm not sure if my life is tame compared to the average. I guess it all depends on perspective. I know people who have seen much more craziness out of life.

Reddit may actually be doing a lot of people a big favor.

Today Trump's DHS went out and arrested a Palestinian student at Columbia for participating at a protest a year prior. Our federal agents are becoming like the KGB- hunting down political dissidents.

I believe that is just a start. I think people would be wise to be careful about the things they post online. If you do post content you believe the administration may not like, I suggest making an anonymous account with an email not linked to your personal name.

I have a hunch that people will be arrested in the near future for posting things online.

People believe just because someone interacts with some sort of digital device, it makes you an expert on computers. The thing is, it depends on the type of operating system you are interacting with.

For example when I was young, my father would buy those big old gray computers from yard sales. I would mix and match the pieces inside to build my own PC. I broke a lot of shit but learned a lot.

The operating system was one where you more or less had total control over the computer. By 12~13 I was using CD-Roms to load different Linux distros and play around with all sorts of different things.

This experience basically taught me how operating systems work at a fundamental level. How it needs a kernel, how it loads and maintains services, packages, etc. How file systems work and learning how terminals are useful. Scripting languages, and eventually coding applications.

Compare and contrast that to the young kids of today. What do they get? A phone and a tablet. You can't open it up. You can't tinker with it. The OS is closed off and is deliberately made as difficult as possible to modify. No mouse, no keyboard. Streamlined UIs with guard rails.

You get what you get and you don't get upset. That doesn't leave nearly as much room for exploration and curiosity. It's a symptom of our computers becoming more and more railroaded. More and more control by large companies.

It's really sad, I think. Fairly soon I believe every device will be a "thin device" or essentially a chrome book. Very little local processing power and instead it'll essentially stream from a server.

There are lots of ways to hide money and protect your assets, and many of them perfectly legal.

Lot of it stems from laws made to protect regular people in debt (bankruptcy laws, getting rid of debtors prison, etc) but people with money use them too

Imo it's a worthwhile price. Otherwise credit cards would just take money straight from your wages if they could.

The higher up you go the less work you do and the more stress you take on. You're essentially trading your peace of mind for more money.

When you work a simple manual labor job you clock in and clock out and then go home and live your life. Work stays at the office.

When you're an executive or a business owner you're working 100% of the time. Something happens, you need to respond. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions where you're fucked either way but you need to minimize damage.

You need to find solutions to problems and that keeps you up at night. Don't have enough money for payroll next week? How you gonna do it? Not pay vendors this week? Take out another line of credit at ridiculous rates? Skip a payment on your rent? Equipment financing?

You have to do something- you stop paying your employees and the company falls apart very quickly. Could start a chain reaction of good people leaving, making the situation worse. The buck pretty much stops with you, you can't pass off the problem to someone else.

It's not easy to be in charge. Lot of blame rests on your shoulders if things go wrong.

Of course that doesn't mean they deserve 10,000x the salary of a regular job. I think CEO pay should be capped to some multiple of regular employee pay. Whatever that scalar value should be 2, 5, or 10 I think is debatable. But it should be capped.