This page permanently redirects to gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2022/10/15/wine-7-19/.

● 10.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/10/2022: Wine 7.19 and This Week in GNOME/KDE

Posted in News Roundup at 5:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Hackaday Podcast 189: Seven Segments Three Ways, Candle Code, DIY E-Readers, And The Badge Reveal

• This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi will discuss the return of the East Coast RepRap Festival, the scientific application of slices of baloney, and the state of the art in homebrew e-readers. The discussion weaves its way through various reimaginings of the seven (or more) segment display, an impressive illuminated headboard that comes with its own science-fiction film, and the surprising difficulty of getting a blinking LED to actually look like a flame. Stick around to the end to find out why iPhones are freaking out on amusement park rides, and to hear all the details about this year’s Supercon badge.

=> ↺ Linux Lite 6.2 Updates

• Today we look at Linux Lite to see what is up in the next release. This is the 6.2 RC1 which supports the Linux Kernel 5.15 by default but supports up to 6.0. We look at the system memory, default applications, and more.

=> ↺ Android Leaks Data Through VPNs – Invidious

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Install Visual Studio Code on Manjaro

=> ↺ Day 15: the :modal pseudo-class

• It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

=> ↺ Layout Breakouts with CSS Grid

• The previous structure of this page layout was virtually the same, the foundation of it expertly defined in the article Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid by Josh Comeau. It’s a technique I’ve used on many projects. I’ve even blogged about it previously in Horizontal Scrolling in a Centered Max-Width Container.

• What I’m documenting here is an extension of the full-bleed CSS Grid layout. In the last version of my site, selected elements – images, code blocks, quotes – were made wider than the page content area using negative margins. It worked well! For this next iteration, I explored applying these breakout offsets using CSS grid and named grid lines.

=> ↺ You should not be using AWS. Probably.

• Culture of simplicity eats strategy of complexity for breakfast

• Using the shiniest new technologies is rarely the cause for success, it’s usually the result. Resist the urge to buy an excavator when a shovel will do. Cultivate a culture of ruthlessly fighting complexity and focusing on what your users want.

=> ↺ We’re moving away from swap partitions on our Linux servers

• We have a reasonable number of Linux servers, almost all of them running various versions of Ubuntu. Like pretty much everyone configuring Linux servers, we give them some swap space; the Linux kernel traditionally is much happier if it has a bit of swap space (cf), although you don’t want too much. For a long time we used a separate disk partition for this (or a mirrored pair of them in a separate software RAID mirror device), although Linux distributions themselves were increasingly moving to using swap files located in the root filesystem (sometimes rather excessively large ones; the Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 installers use 4 GB even for machines with only 4 GB of RAM). We didn’t have any particularly strong reasons for using a swap partition instead of a swap file; it was just what we’d started out with and what we were used to.

=> ↺ How to change the Windows boot drive in BIOS – Android Authority

• If you have Windows installed on your computer and then installed a Linux distro next to that, your computer may not boot from the correct drive.

=> ↺ Rsh Command with Examples in Linux – LinuxWizardry

• The rsh command is one of the older commands in UNIX/Linux. It allows you to execute commands on the remote machine from the local machine. You do not have to log in or switch users in the remote system to run commands. rsh connects to the remote host and executes the specified commands.

• In this article, we will explain how to use rsh command and execute commands remotely in Linux.

=> ↺ Using Wikipedia from the Linux command line | Network World

• If you are sitting in front of a Linux system, you can always pop open a browser and query topics of interest on Wikipedia. On the other hand, if you’re logged on through a terminal emulator like PuTTY or you just prefer using the command line, there is another option: wikit.

• Wikit is a tool that queries Wikipedia from the command line and provides summaries of its content on a huge collection of topics. It’s easy to use and allows you to quickly query and, if you want, save the rendered information in a file.

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.19 is now available.

Games

=> ↺ Valve filed a ‘computer game software’ trademark for ‘NEON PRIME’

• Well this is perhaps exciting, seems Valve are cooking up something new with a trademark application for NEON PRIME. The application notes it’s for “categories of computer game software, electronic game software, video game software, computer game programs downloadable via the internet” and so quite likely some new game is on the way.

=> ↺ Proton Experimental updated helping Halo Infinite and Spider-Man Remastered

• Valve released a really small update to Proton Experimental on October 13th, so here’s what’s new and how to use it. This is the special version of the Proton compatibility layer for running Windows games, with lots of extra special fixes that eventually make their way into the main Proton version that’s most used.

=> ↺ I solved the Dandelions paper-and-pencil game

• For reasons I’ll discuss later, I only solved the 5-by-5 game, and the situation may be different for the 6-by-6 variant. Also, unlike British Square, my engine does not exhaustively explore the entire game tree because it’s far too large. Instead it does a minimax search to the bottom of the tree and stops when it finds a branch where all leaves are wins for the current player. Because of this, it cannot maximize the outcome — winning as early as possible as dandelions or maximizing the number of empty grid spaces as wind. I also can’t quantify the exact size of tree.

=> ↺ UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection gets Steam Deck Verified ahead of release

• Are you ready for another Sony game on Steam? The UNCHARTED: Legacy of Thieves Collection arrives on October 19th, and it’s been Steam Deck Verified already.

=> ↺ Steam Deck Client Beta updated, plus official Docking Station update coming

• Valve has released another small Steam Deck Client Beta update to fix some lingering issues, plus they’ve announced a Docking Station update is on the way.

=> ↺ The JSAUX M.2 Docking Station for Steam Deck is a great choice

• After playing with it for a few weeks, here’s what I think along with how to set up the M.2 Docking Station for Steam Deck from JSAUX. Note: JSAUX sent a Dock and a 2TB SSD for review that I can keep.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ This week in KDE: QA pays off

• This week we released Plasma 5.26 and so far our QA focus has paid off! It has been mostly a smooth release, with just a few regressions being reported, and most of them have been fixed already. Thanks to everyone who tested, reported bugs, and fixed bugs!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ #65 Officially Deprecated – This Week in GNOME

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 07 to October 14.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-41

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Topton Mini PC features Ryzen 4000U Series processors

• The Topton FU02 is a fanless Mini PC featuring the Ryzen 3, 5, 7 mobile processors. This device is enabled with Wi-Fi6/BL5.2 along with dual GbE LAN ports and dual displays with [email protected] resolution. The barebone model costs around ~$260-$318.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ This DIYer built themselves an awesome open-source HDMI capture card for only $10

• Capture cards aren’t cheap, especially if you want to record or stream footage at a high resolution and framerate. Even the best capture cards (opens in new tab) can cost you upwards of $200. So, if you don’t have that sort of cash lying about, why not try making your own for just a tiny fraction of that? That’s what one DIYer did.

=> ↺ Acorn Archimedes A3010: Restoration Part 4

• And that is it. The A3010 appears to be in full working order. Now I just need to find some time to play on it!

=> ↺ 10 amazing Raspberry Pi cases

• You may have noticed that a Raspberry Pi is sold essentially naked. However, you can easily get a case for your Raspberry Pi and give it some extra protection from the elements and spilled drinks. Here are ten of our favourites, including some nice cases for your Pico.

=> ↺ Spotting defects in solar panels with machine learning | Arduino Blog

• Large solar panel installations are vital for our future of energy production without the massive carbon dioxide emissions we currently produce. However, microscopic fractures, hot spots, and other defects on the surface can expand over time, thus leading to reductions in output and even failures if left undetected. Manivannan Sivan’s solution for tackling this issue revolves around using computer vision and machine learning to find small defects at the surface before automatically reporting the information.

• Sivan compiled his dataset by first gathering images of solar panels that have visible cracks using an Arduino Portenta H7 and Vision Shield and then drawing bounding boxes around each one. From here, he trained a MobileNetV2 model with the addition of Edge Impulse’s recent FOMO object detection algorithm for better performance. He was able to improve the model’s accuracy even further by augmenting the dataset with images taken at different camera angles and lighting conditions in order to prevent mistaking the white boundary lines for cracks.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Reolink TrackMix PoE review – A smart 4K PTZ security camera with two lenses, auto-tracking – CNX Software

=> ↺ Galaxy Z Fold 3 and more get Android 13 beta

=> ↺ Android 13 beta update brings back useful battery stats | Android Central

=> ↺ Nothing Phone 1 gets unofficial Android 13 with first custom ROM build | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ Nokia G21 receiving official Android 12 update now – Nokiapoweruser

=> ↺ Why Is Your Android So Slow? 7 Tweaks to Give Your Phone a Boost – CNET

=> ↺ 5 Hilarious Android Phone Pranks You Should Try on Your Friends

=> ↺ The Best Calendar App Alternatives For Android

=> ↺ 19 Harry Potter Spells Your Android Wand Can Cast Using Google Assistant � Android :: Gadget Hacks

=> ↺ How to Automatically Turn On Wi-Fi on Android

=> ↺ How to Customize and Use Quick Tap Gestures on Android – Guiding Tech

=> ↺ Honor “Magic5″ is linked to top-end Android smartphone specs such as a 200MP main camera and 100W charging – NotebookCheck.net News

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

=> ↺ FSD meeting recap 2022-10-07

• Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD, which is a catalog of useful free software that runs under free GNU-like systems (not limited to the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants) and a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, October 7, 2022 meeting, where we saw a couple of new programs added, an update to a collection page, and a discussion on the value of providing licensing and copyright notification file headers to every code file.

=> ↺ FSD meeting recap 2022-10-14

• Every week, free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on Libera.Chat to help improve the FSD, which is a catalog of useful free software that runs under free GNU-like systems (not limited to the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants) and a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). This recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, October 14, 2022 meeting, where we saw new programs added and several entries updated.

Licensing / Legal

=> ↺ Galician Region publishes a guide to Good Practices for Releasing Open Source Content and Software

• The guide is aimed at the general public and uses illustrations and examples to help make the topics understandable for all. In addition to the two main sections—one for the publication of content and one on the release of software—the introduction also gives an overview of the legal status of software and the relevant aspects of copyright law.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Youth Bulge theory: Why there won’t be an Uprising in Russia – Learning Machines

• Many wonder why there are so few protests in Russia over the brutal war against Ukraine. An answer could lie in the youth bulge theory which we will use again to explain the relative lethargy of the Russian populace, so read on!

• Since the beginning of the war against Ukraine observers have wondered why there isn’t more political unrest in Russia, i.e. more criticism, more protests, and more opposition in general to this unjust war against its peaceful neighbour.

• Several reasons come to mind like police brutality against protestors, long prison sentences for members of the opposition, and constant brainwashing with propaganda but there could be one hidden force: the proportion of young people.

=> ↺ Girls’ sense of belonging in the Computing classroom: Study results

• We’re sharing the fourth evaluation report on projects in our Gender Balance in Computing research programme today. This is a programme we’ve been running, with partner organisations, as part of the National Centre for Computing Education, funded by the Department for Education in England. The programme’s overall goal is to identify ways to encourage more young women to study Computer Science.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Elizabeth Mattijsen: It’s time to rak! (Part 2)

• This is a follow-up on It’s time to rak (Part 1). This blog post builds on that, so you should maybe read that first if you haven’t already.

• With rak, anything that starts with a dash (-) is considered to be an “option”. Anything else that you specify on the command line, is considered to be an “argument”. It does not matter in which order options are specified. The order of arguments is important: the first being the pattern, and the other arguments being the paths to search in.

• But before discussing all of the myriad options of rak (shown to you when you do rak –help), it is important to know how the specification of options work exactly, and how they interact with any of your customized options.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ How to Get Started with Shell Scripting in Linux

• Hello readers, In this post, we will cover how to get started with shell scripting in Linux or UNIX systems.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ From UUID to Infinite Loops – Susam Pal

• Most people involved in software development have probably come across UUIDs. UUID stands for universally unique identifier. It is also sometimes called GUID which stands for globally unique identifier.

Leftovers

=> ↺ To Turn An ATtiny817 Into A 150MHz Counter, First Throw Out The Spec Sheet

• One generally reads a data sheet in one of two ways. The first is to take every spec at face value, figuring that the engineers have taken everything into account and presented each number as the absolute limit that will prevent the Magic Smoke from escaping. The other way is to throw out the data sheet and just try whatever you want, figuring that the engineers played it as safely as possible.

=> ↺ How Wi-Fi spy drones snooped on financial firm

• Greg Linares, a security researcher, recently recounted an incident that he said occurred over the summer at a US East Coast financial firm focused on private investment. He told The Register that he was not involved directly with the investigation but interacted with those involved as part of his work in the finance sector.

=> ↺ Bob Dylan Lives (and Greil Marcus is Still Writing About Him)

• Each song serves a certain role in the chapter bearing its title. Sometimes the chapter is primarily about the song; its origins, its lyrical and musical development, and its performance. Other times, the song in the title is little more than a springboard to a cultural history that might include the president of the United States or a folksinger hooked on speed.

=> ↺ Just Stop Oil’s Van Gogh Soup Stunt Sparks Criticism of ‘Alienating’ Strategy

• Phoebe Plummer, 21, and Anna Holland, 20—who glued their hands to the National Gallery wall after dousing the $84.2 million “Sunflowers” in soup—wore Just Stop Oil (JSO) T-shirts. The U.K.-based group shared footage of the action and their motivations on social media.

=> ↺ Making Book at the Frankfurt Fair

• Translate all that into about thirty languages, spread the publications throughout six airplane-sized hangars, set up some booths with larger-than-life posters, and there you have the Frankfurt Book Fair.

=> ↺ Strangers Behind the Trees: On the Death of Rayan Suliman and His Fear of Monsters

• This was the abrupt and tragic end of Rayan’s life. All the things that could have been, all the experiences that he could have lived, and all the love that he could have imparted or received, all ended suddenly, as the boy lay face down on the pavement of a dusty road, in a poor village, without ever experiencing a single moment of being truly free, or even safe.

=> ↺ Pamela Turner

Science

=> ↺ Human Prehistory—Why New Discoveries About Human Origins Open Up Revolutionary Possibilities

• Long before Jane Goodall began telling the world we would do well to study our evolutionary origins and genetic cousins, it was a well-established philosophical creed that things go better for humanity the more we try to know ourselves.

Education

=> ↺ Afghanistan: Taliban ban women from many university subjects

• A year after banning most teenage girls from attending school, the Taliban are imposing sweeping restrictions on which courses women can enrol in at public universities.

=> ↺ The Intimate and Interconnected History of the Internet

• For inhabitants of an Internet designed to capture our full attention, where doomscrolling feels less like a leisure activity than a perverse metaphor for a never-ending kiddie ride into the metaverse, this book affords the odd experience of reading about the digital past and recognizing something worth rescuing for the digital future. I spoke to Driscoll about this phenomenon, the uniquely decentralized online social world of the 1980s, how technology shapes societal change, and the history of diversity in digital communities. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

=> ↺ Don’t feed the Troll

• “Many presume that troll refers to the ugly monsters who eat people alive, but the term derives from the practice in fishing of dragging a baited hook or lure behind a moving boat (trolling).[2] In other words, trolls are looking for some sucker who’ll bite.”

=> ↺ Short Taxonomy of Open-Source Strategies

• A few observations on how technology companies can strategically use open-source from my time working on open-source at Google.

=> ↺ Teachers and parents united in demanding changes in education

Hardware

=> ↺ WheatSystem Is A Homebrew 8-Bit OS

• [Esperantanaso] has long been involved in producing homebrew 8-bit computers. His various builds could all achieve different things, but he grew frustrated that applications written for one could not be easily run on another. He recently took a big leap forward in this area, though, cooking up his own 8-bit operating system called WheatSystem.

=> ↺ Toteable PC Is Inspired By Macs Of Days Gone By

• Back in the 1980s, the personal computer was a hip new thing, and the form this new technology would take was still up for debate. Back then, all kinds of weird clamshells, breadbins, and all-in-one designs hit the market, with the Apple Macintosh proving to be a successful example of the latter. Inspired by the Macintosh 128K that served as their first computer, [Arnov Sharma] decided to whip up a modern all-in-one of their very own.

=> ↺ Medicine Dosing Spoon Discontinued, Made 3D Printable Instead

• [Gregor Herz] caught wind of a problem that neuropediatric clinics in Germany have been facing recently. Orfiril, a seizure-preventing medication used in those clinics for treating children, is normally prescribed to adults, and the usual dosages are too high for kids. Orfiril comes in regular pill-shaped capsules, each capsule containing a bunch of small medication-soaked pellets, and you only need a certain amount of these pellets if you want to achieve a lower dose.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Mom is not amused with CNN. | BaronHK’s Rants

• Mom is not amused with CNN.

• She says that the nuns at the nursing home are being terrorized by CNN.

• Like, they’re in their room seeing January 6th over and over again every day for nearly two years now and nothing new is even happening about it.

• It’s just Democrats on a panel that can’t even do anything, who are about to lose the House, making noise in the run up to an election.

• And CNN is just playing the tape over and over to scare people who are 100 years old and in a nursing home.

• I told her “Cable news does this. There isn’t enough actual news to fill a 24 hour days so they just fill it with something. Most of the time they were reporting on COVID, there was nothing new to report, but they were traumatizing people.”.

• It’s not even just CNN. Fox does the same thing to Republicans.

• [...]

• Unfortunately, when the news isn’t traumatizing people who can’t even do anything about the thing, when the situation hasn’t even changed in months regarding the thing, they also turn to utter bullshit that doesn’t matter.

=> ↺ Biden’s Marijuana Pardons are a Seismic Shift

• But almost all marijuana-related arrests are for violations of state and local laws, not federal law.

=> ↺ Opinion | Having a Chronic Illness Without Paid Leave Is Nearly Impossible and Needs to Change Now

• I was diagnosed with lupus at the age of 19, joining nearly 1.5 other million Americans who have the chronic illness that can cause the immune system to attack itself. This disease requires many doctor’s visits, and the treatment is similar to getting treated for cancer. It’s very time-intensive, and it completely disrupts your everyday life—and most of us do not have the protection of paid leave policies that ensure we get the time we need to take care of ourselves.

=> ↺ New Bill Would Ban Private Insurance Plans From Using ‘Medicare’ Name

• Introduced by Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the Save Medicare Act would change the official name of Medicare Advantage (MA) to “Alternative Private Health Plan” to make clear that such coverage is offered by for-profit companies.

=> ↺ Corporate Media Mostly Ignoring GOP Ploy to Cut Social Security and Medicare

• “Social Security and Medicare are on the ballot next month,” said Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz. “If the American public doesn’t know that, it’s in part because the press isn’t telling them.”

=> ↺ DOJ to Investigate Bureau of Prisons After Judge Rips Officials Over Inmate’s Death

• “With timely diagnosis and treatment, Mr. Bardell’s attesting physician assessed his chances of survival at 71%.”

=> ↺ USDA Considers New Poultry Rules to Curb Salmonella Poisoning

• On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it is considering banning poultry companies from selling raw chicken and turkey contaminated with high levels of certain types of salmonella. Under current regulations, the agency allows raw poultry to be sold in supermarkets even when food safety inspectors know it’s tainted with dangerous strains of the bacteria.

=> ↺ ERRF 22: After Two Years, Back And Better Than Ever

• When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it became clear that organizers would have to pull the plug on any large social events they had planned. Many organizers decided to take their events online, but blurry web streams and meme-filled Discord channels can only get you so far. At this point we’re all keenly aware that, while they do have some advantages, virtual events are not the same as the real thing.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Benefits of working with open source data quality solutions

Security

=> ↺ Linux, Windows and macOS Hit By New “Alchimist’ Attack Framework

• It is implemented in GoLang and implants the Insekt RAT on the compromised systems.

=> ↺ This Week In Security: Npm Timing Leak, Siemens Universal Key, And PHP In PNG

=> ↺ Microsoft failure

• First up is some clever wizardry from the [Aqua Nautilus] research team, who discovered a timing attack that leaks information about private npm packages. The setup is this, npm hosts both public and private node.js packages. The public ones are available to everyone, but the private packages are “scoped”, meaning they live within a private namespace, “@owner/packagename” and are inaccessible to the general public. Trying to access the package results in an HTTP 404 error — the same error as trying to pull a package that doesn’t exist.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Legal Analysis: No non-material damages for GDPR violations (C-300/21)?

• On 6 October 2022, Advocate General (AG) Sánchez-Bordona issued his Opinion on CJEU case C-300/21 (UI v. Österreichische Post AG), the first of several preliminary ruling requests on the topic of damages for GDPR violations pending with the CJEU.

=> ↺ Connecting Europol and Interpol: EU provides more surveillance in Libya

• The EU mission EUBAM, which was actually set up to support border management, is building up a counter-terrorism „analysis unit“. This includes equipping it with analytical software.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Appetite For ‘De-Russification’ Builds in Ukraine

• But since February, Ukrainians are contemplating the presence of Russian in private and public spaces, even though 19% of Ukrainians say their native language is Russian.

=> ↺ Election software CEO is charged with allegedly giving Chinese contractors data access

• Now, amid the allegations, a number of localities across the U.S. are weighing whether to ditch Konnech’s software with just weeks until Election Day.

• Konnech has provided its PollChief software to some cities and counties across the country, including Los Angeles County.

=> ↺ ‘Neutral’ employer bans on headcoverings do not discriminate against Muslim women, EU Court of Justice rules

• The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) Thursday ruled that workplace bans affecting religious wear do not amount to discrimination under certain circumstances. A Muslim woman, referred to as L.F., brought a discrimination claim against a company called SCRL based on the Belgian General Anti-Discrimination Law. SCRL refused to consider L.F.’s internship application because she declined to remove her headscarf, and SCRL does not allow any headcoverings, religious or not. SCRL says L.F. did not comply with the policy of neutrality included in its terms of employment. The claimant argues that the policy is an infringement of her rights.

=> ↺ Russian military command complains about ‘fake news’ from pro-Kremlin war bloggers — Meduza

• Russian law enforcement agencies have started checking Kremlin loyalist Telegram channels that post about Russia’s war in Ukraine for “discrediting” the Russian army, fake news, and other prohibited content, reports publication Mash.

=> ↺ ‘Get out of the army’s way’ In the occupied Kherson region, Russian-appointed ‘authorities’ urge residents to ‘take a vacation’ in Russia — or move there for good — Meduza

• The Russian-installed government of the occupied part of Ukraine’s Kherson region has created a hotline for residents who might wish to “take a vacation” in Russia. The hotline was active as of October 8. On October 13, Volodymyr Saldo, the former Kherson mayor and now the Russian-appointed head of the occupied area, asked Russia to help “Kherson families” “leave for other regions of the Russian Federation, for rest and study.”

=> ↺ Moscow men ambushed and drafted near subway stations. Draft office denies these reports. — Meduza

• Journalists and human-rights activists are reporting that police officers have stopped and questioned men near Moscow metro stations, collected their data, and handed them draft letters.

=> ↺ Why Russia is pushing a return to negotiations The Kremlin wants to buy time to prepare for a ‘full-scale offensive’ in early 2023, sources say — Meduza

• Since the success of Ukraine’s massive counteroffensive in early September, Russian officials have repeatedly raised the possibility of peace talks — even after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree officially ruling out the possibility of Ukraine ever negotiating with Vladimir Putin. Meduza has learned from multiple sources close to the Russian government that the Kremlin has simultaneously been lobbying Western leaders behind closed doors to convince Kyiv to agree to a temporary ceasefire. But according to the sources, Putin has no intention of ending the war; instead, his ceasefire campaign is part of a wider strategy to buy time for training conscripts and replenishing supplies in order to launch a “full-scale offensive” in February or March.

=> ↺ Putin promises to complete mobilization within two weeks — Meduza

• Russia’s President Vladimir Putin says that all “mobilization activities” will be completed within two weeks, as reported by RIA Novosti.

=> ↺ Ukrainian defense minister claims Russia has used up two thirds of its missile arsenal — Meduza

• Ukrainian defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov posted on Twitter that, over the course of the war in Ukraine, the Russian army has used up two thirds of its precision missiles. He claims the Russian Ministry of Defense now has 609 missiles of various types at its disposal. The source of Reznikov’s information is not known. The Russian military has not shared similar information.

=> ↺ The Nazification of American Society and the Scourge of Violence

• The threat of violence not only functions as political performance in the interests of political opportunism and the stoking mass violence, it also is used by MAGA Republicans to conquer major critical institutions of society that extend from public schools and libraries to the courts. Dark money now drives such extremism and the repressive laws aimed at women’s reproductive rights, the banning of books, the weakening of voting rights, and assaults on the rights of trans-gender people, among other attacks. Many of these attacks are  driven by the modern Republican Party’s central fear of living with difference.[2]

=> ↺ Opinion | Can Democracy Survive in This Nation Awash in Guns?

• Two courtroom dramas unfolded this week in the U.S., both the result of America’s gun obsession: In Florida, jurors recommended Nikolas Cruz be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Cruz murdered 17 students and staff at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day, 2018. Meanwhile, a Connecticut jury decided on financial penalties for conspiracy peddler Alex Jones, who was found guilty of defamation.

=> ↺ ‘Counterterrorism operation state’ declared in Belarus after Minsk claims ‘neighboring countries’ planning ‘provocations’ — Meduza

• A “counterterrorism operation state” has been declared in Belarus after reports of possible “provocations” from “neighboring countries,” Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei told the Russian newspaper Izvestia on Friday.

=> ↺ ‘He came home with a smashed-up face’ The Ukrainian children facing bullying in Russian schools — Meduza

• While it’s too early to tell what the scale of the migration caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be when all is said and done, it’s clear that the war has sent demographic shockwaves across the region. In addition to the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have fled to the EU, more than a million others are now in Russia, many of them victims of forced deportation. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their own country, fleeing the Kremlin’s wartime crackdown on dissent and Putin’s mobilization campaign. While these crises differ in scale, one consequence they share is that children from both countries are suddenly living in environments where they stand out from their peers — a situation ripe for bullying. Journalists from the student-run online magazine Doxa spoke to Russian and Ukrainian parents now living abroad about the difficulties their children are having at school. In English, Meduza explains what they learned.

=> ↺ Russian authorities in Simferopol arrest five suspects in Crimean Bridge case — Meduza

• A Russian-controlled Simferopol court has arrested five suspects in the criminal case over the October 8 explosion on the Crimean Bridge, a source with knowledge of the situation told Interfax.

=> ↺ Protests in 40+ US Cities Demand Deescalation as Poll Shows Surging Fear of Nuclear War

• Anti-war groups including Peace Action and RootsAction organized picket lines at the offices of U.S. senators and representatives in more than 40 cities across 20 states, calling on lawmakers to push for a ceasefire in Ukraine, the revival of anti-nuclear treaties the U.S. has exited in recent years, and other legislative actions to prevent nuclear catastrophe.

=> ↺ Opinion | What Must Be Done to End Nuclear Extortion and Build Lasting Peace

• In a moment of candor, President Biden told Democratic Party contributors the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is the highest since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from Florida. Referring to Russian President Putin’s veiled threats to use short-range nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the President added it was the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis such a “direct threat” had been issued.

=> ↺ St. Petersburg police staking out draft evaders at apartment entrances — Meduza

• Military commissariat employees and police officers in St. Petersburg have started waiting inside apartment buildings of men who fail to show up after being served draft orders, city authorities told the Russian outlet RBK.

=> ↺ Charges against Russian Presidential Academy rector Vladimir Mau dropped — Meduza

• The embezzlement charges against Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA) rector Vladimir Mau have been dropped, RBK reported on Friday, citing two sources close to the school.

=> ↺ We, the People Did Next To Nothing

• And the storyline for The US and the Holocaust can be succinctly summed up this way…

=> ↺ Eduardo Carreon: Adopting the Mindset of the Oppressor

• Indigenous Los Angeles psychology graduate student Eduardo Carreon analyzes the mindset of disgraced former LA City Council leader, a Latina whose racist bile scorned Black and gay colleagues and others, including indigenous members of her own Latinx community.

=> ↺ The Media Finds Its War

• The language throughout the article is fawning, unquestioning, repeatedly glamorizing the soldier and his war. It’s Pentagon propaganda. The only question the journalist really raises is whether the soldier and his company can make a difference in helping the Ukrainians.

=> ↺ WaPo Wants US ‘Beacon’ for Ukraine Refugees—but Not for Haitians

• The notorious incident in Del Rio, Texas, where US border patrol agents on horseback were photographed apparently wielding long reins as whips against Haitian migrants, prompted widespread public outrage. But where Ukrainians seeking refuge in this country found a strong advocate in the Washington Post editorial board, their Haitian counterparts have received notably different treatment.

=> ↺ Opinion | On the Death of Rayan Suliman and Palestinian Children’s Very Real Fear of Monsters

• Children of my Gaza refugee camp were rarely afraid of monsters but of Israeli soldiers. This is all that we talked about before going to bed. Unlike imaginary monsters in the closet or under the bed, Israeli soldiers are real, and they could show up any minute – at the door, on the roof or, as was often the case, right in the middle of the house.

=> ↺ Israel Authorizes Military to Kill Palestinians With Drones in the West Bank

• Marjorie Cohn writes about the most recent Israeli military order in the West Bank, which Hamas calls “a dangerous step.”

=> ↺ Progressives and Palestinians

• All of this must have caused the Israeli authorities much frustration, considering that they cannot shut down the organizations issuing the reports. This was apparently the case even with B’tselem, which is internationally supported and respected. However, there were other Palestinian-run human rights groups, including the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Defense for Children-Palestine, located in the Israeli-controlled Occupied Territories. These proved vulnerable to Zionist authorities looking to vent their anger. This was the second, somewhat belated reaction to the human rights reports. (2) In August of 2022, “Israeli forces raided the offices of seven Palestinian human rights groups causing extensive property damage and issuing military orders to shut them down. This followed Israel’s earlier characterization of those organizations as ‘terrorist’ and ‘unlawful.’” Here, it turned out, it was the Israelis who were “echoing propaganda without seriously checking the facts.” According to United Nations observers, “these designations and declarations are illegitimate and unjustifiable and no concrete and credible evidence substantiating Israel’s allegations has ever been provided.”

=> ↺ Orbán: Our Zelensky was executed after 1956

• Every Friday, Hungary’s prime minister gives an interview on one of the state-owned radio stations. Since the independent media has not had a chance to interview him for many years, these weekly radio interviews are the only opportunity to find out what the leader of the country thinks about current events, how he sees his opponents and any issues at hand. Below are the two main subjects he focused on this week.

=> ↺ Biden’s Broken Promise to Avoid War with Russia May Kill Us All

• On October 5, Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, recognized that Russia is now fighting NATO in Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Putin has reminded the world that Russia has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them “when the very existence of the state is put under threat,” as Russia’s official nuclear weapons doctrine declared in June 2020.

=> ↺ Italy’s 100 Nuclear Weapons: Nuclear Proliferation and European Hypocrisy

=> ↺ US Foreign Policy Impasse Over Venezuela

• A related conundrum of its own making is the US sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry and at the same time needing the fuel. It wasn’t so long ago that Venezuela supplied the US with a significant amount of its daily petroleum consumption. Now Uncle Sam finds himself confronted with price inflation at the gas pump and the inevitability of negotiating with a government it does not recognize.

=> ↺ Cuba in the Eye of Washington’s Hurricane

• Maximum Pressure

=> ↺ End Times on the Great Salt Lake

• Who in Utah did not read or hear about the big New York Times story that dropped on June 7: “As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces an Environmental ‘Nuclear Bomb’”?  As a writer and professor of environmental writing, I was intrigued by the way Christopher Flavelle pulled off such a feat, and by how he focused the eyes of the world on the catastrophic local, global, ecological, social, and economic consequences of losing the drought-stricken Great Salt Lake.  But I had concerns, too: Could this work of journalism—however clear, objective, accurate, and well-received—have done more to teach and thereby move the conversation forward into new, more constructive territory?

=> ↺ Is the West’s Romance With Paul Kagame Finally Ending?

• The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation of 93 million people, is still struggling with the greatest humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II—and the rest of the world is still ignoring it. Since 1998, violence in the eastern Congo has killed at least 6 million people and displaced another 5.6 million. Today, the number of internal refugees is the highest in the nation’s history.

=> ↺ ‘I don’t have time to bow, or to wait in line’ Zelensky on ‘iPhone diplomacy,’ Putin, nuclear risks, and the power of being on the right side — Meduza

• On October 12, the German journalist Katrin Eigendorf interviewed the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the ZDF TV channel. When she arrived to meet with Zelensky in Kyiv, he suggested, on the spur of the moment, that they talk in Russian. We have transcribed and translated some highlights of this extended interview, in which Zelensky spoke openly about “iPhone diplomacy,” how Europe should talk to Russia, Putin personally, and handling Russia’s nuclear and energy blackmail.

=> ↺ The war in Ukraine is ‘unpleasant, to put it mildly’ Putin’s latest remarks from the summit in Astana — Meduza

• On October 14, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a press conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, after a summit for CIS and Asian countries. He answered questions about the Russian mobilization, the possibility of negotiations with Ukraine, and the prospect of a direct clash with NATO. Meduza summarizes his main points.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Did Uncle Don Call Kids ‘Little Bastards’ on the Air?

• However, this account leaves us puzzled as to how a “nation-wide reaction” could have taken place yet remain unreported in any major newspaper, magazine, or trade publication of the time. Where, then, did this national reaction play out? Moreover, a check of the radio listings in The New York Times from the winter of 1928-29 reveals that Oliver Sayler’s “Footlight and Lamplight” radio program didn’t, as he claimed, follow Uncle Don’s show, but preceded it. (“Footlight and Lamplight” aired after the news at 6:15 p.m.; Uncle Don was on the air from 6:30 to 6:55 p.m.) How, then, did Sayler come to be in the studio at the conclusion of Uncle Don’s program, as he claimed he was?

=> ↺ Unauthorized Disclosure: Guest Asa Winstanley

=> ↺ Chicago Sun-Times Kills Its Paywall; Makes Its Content Free For Everyone

• Going back many, many years, we’ve argued that paywalls are not a particularly sustainable model for most journalism enterprises. There are some exceptions. They seem to work in cases where breaking news and timely access are extremely important (e.g., financial news), and in cases where there is a strong community built up around the news provider (both small and large). A few months back I did a fun podcast discussion looking at why I was wrong when I predicted the NY Times paywall would fail. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, but the crux of it was that I didn’t expect the NY Times to be able to build up the kind of communal support that it eventually did — whereby many people felt that, in the age of Donald Trump, they had to be supporting media organizations like the Times.

=> ↺ Publisher Wiley Lets Libraries Offer eTextbooks Again… But Only For Nine Months

• Last week, we wrote about how publisher Wiley had removed 1,379 textbook titles from the list of books that academic libraries could lend out, thereby forcing students to have to buy the textbooks, rather than take them out of the library. As we noted, this was an example of how damaging copyright has been on the free flow of information. In the non-digital world, the libraries could just buy copies of the book to lend out, but thanks to publishers insisting that there is not a first sale right for ebooks, it allows them to block any sale they don’t want.

Environment

=> ↺ Armageddon Now or “The Last Man”

• But even then, the island is mostly empty. It takes an hour to walk to Scolt Head from Burnham-Overy-Staithe, and you can only do it when the tide is low enough to wade across Norton Creek. Fording the thigh-deep channel in Autumn is bracing but the yellow-green dunes beckon. Seen up close, they are a multitude of grasses and flowering plants, some with late season blossoms: sea pink and yellow rattle, sea lavender and harebells, sea aster and purslane. Beyond is the North Sea and beyond that – the map says — is Norway, about 600 miles away.

=> ↺ Activist Says Egypt’s Pre-COP27 Silencing of Climate Voices Should Be a ‘Wake-Up Call’

• “We will not get the urgent climate action needed without civil society pressure.”

=> ↺ UK Climate Minister Pulls Out of Event with Climate Science Deniers

• Graham Stuart MP was listed as a keynote speaker on Tuesday at the four-day Global Investment in Sustainable Development conference in London, hosted by the CC Forum, a company which touts itself as the “green Davos”. 

=> ↺ We Need a Green Wave: Confronting “Blue Tsunami” Bullshit on Abortion Rights

• The women hating Republi-fascists’ war on Roe has always been about right to birth, not “right to life.”  Once poor and working-class women’s unwanted babies take their first breaths outside the womb (the real beginning of life, by the way), the nation’s rightmost major party couldn’t care less about the newborns’ subsequent life prospects and circumstances. The “Republicans” are dedicated enemies of adequate social protection, schooling, and care. They viciously denounce and demonize as supposedly evil “socialism” the supports poor families and children desperately need to “thrive” in this savagely separate and unequal nation. How darkly perfect is it that the nation’s mostly virulently anti-abortion states are also the U.S. states that grant the least in the way of social welfare for poor and working class kids and families  – and that they are the states with the nation’s highest (globally scandalous) rates of maternal and infant mortality?

=> ↺ Are Green Resource Wars Looming?

• Adventurers and Opportunists

Energy

=> ↺ Greece says its entire electrical grid ran on 100% renewables for the first time

• Renewable energy sources covered Greece’s electricity demands for about five hours last Friday, the Independent Power Transmission Operator, or IPTO, said. Renewables also posted a new record that day, reaching a peak of 3,106 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity.

=> ↺ The Fine Art of Blowing Up Pipelines in a Post-Truth Era

• What makes the theory of Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction any less unhinged than the theory of bombs being planted in the World Trade Towers? How is putting your total trust in an establishment that essentially acts as a glorified Speak and Spell for the most violent military on the planet any less irresponsible than buying into whatever monster-of-the week Alex Jones has conjured up to sell more dick pills to incels?

=> ↺ Ahmad Abuznaid on Israeli Human Rights Crackdown, Sohale Mortazavi on Cryptocurrency

=> ↺ Opinion | Beware the Coming Wars Over Green Energy Resources

• Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual electric passenger cars won’t get us far enough down the road to ending greenhouse-gas emissions and stanching the overheating of this planet. Worse yet, the coming global race to electrify the personal vehicle is likely to exacerbate ecological degradation, geopolitical tensions, and military conflict.

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Ask Dr. Universe: Octopuses, squid and cuttlefish have an inky defense mechanism

• An octopus has three hearts and long arms with suction cups. It probably seems very different from you. But you have the main ingredients of octopus ink in your body, too!

• I talked about octopus ink with my friend Gretchen Rollwagen-Bollens, associate professor in Washington State University’s School of the Environment. She told me that ink isn’t just an octopus thing. Most animals called cephalopods (sef-uh-luh-pods) make it. These include octopus, squid and cuttlefish.

• Cephalopods including octopuses use color a lot. They have sacs of colored pigments all over their bodies. They use those sacs to change their body color. That helps them blend into their environment.

=> ↺ The Amazing Ways Nature Cooperates — and We Benefit

=> ↺ Herding is Human

• Whether the elites would themselves live off the stuff they make is open to question. They could ensure some healthy food is still grown normally, including from animals, but it would likely be priced well beyond the reach of ordinary folk. Bill Gates, for example, now invests heavily in fake meat and dairy, promoting it vigorously whilst tucking into the real meat he loves.

=> ↺ Opinion | A Fast-Emptying Ark: The World Grows Quieter by the Day

• I confess, for reasons I can’t fully explain, that when bad things are happening to animals I tend to look away in pain. When bad things are happening to people I try to face those things squarely and do what I can, but there’s something about wildlife—perhaps the way its become implicated in our strange human game without having the slightest agency at all—that just confounds me; some kind of sad and disabling rage fills me. Sometimes, however, the truths are just too overwhelming to avoid.

=> ↺ At War With Nature?

=> ↺ How a Supreme Court Case About Pigs Could Further Undermine… Abortion Rights

• I am a realist. In the legal context, that means I think judges and justices more or less make up the law as they go along to satisfy their political, social, or ideological preferences. There’s no objective constitutional reason for Chief Justice John Roberts to hate the idea of Black people voting. There’s nothing forcing Sonia Sotomayor to support the rights of women, just like there’s nothing that requires Neil Gorsuch to seek the destruction of the administrative state. These people believe the things they believe and just happen to be experts at searching the law to find ways to confirm their worldviews. Indeed, the justices’ votes are often easy to predict because their ideological priors are always so obviously on display.

Finance

=> ↺ A Wealth Tax on the 0.25 Percent Could Fund Biden’s Entire Student Debt Plan

=> ↺ Can the Fed Control Inflation With Just Rate Hikes?

• Maybe the Fed can not control this stuff in this current world the way they think, or used to think, without killing the patient. It is their only tool in the multi-factored toolbox.

=> ↺ Raise Corporate Taxes, Not Interest Rates

• General Mills hiked its prices five times since June of 2021 alone, and the company saw its net earnings climb 31 percent to$820 million in the first quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.

=> ↺ The Wealth of the U.S. Wealthiest One-Tenth of One Percent

• There is a huge difference between those at the top of the .1%–people such as Musk, Bezos, and Gates–and those at the entry level. One worth $43 million could not even afford to pay for two years, at $25 million a year, the annual cost to run Bezos’     $500 million yacht.

=> ↺ How CRDA Failed on Affordable Housing in Atlantic City

• But in the spring of 2021, they said, they found a notice posted on their door: Tenants must vacate by June 30. The date was just six weeks away. The owner was selling the building, along with two other neighboring rooming houses. Together, the three properties provided 42 rooms and two apartments to some of Atlantic City’s most vulnerable residents.

=> ↺ The Scandal of Congressional Stock Trading

• Despite efforts to curb insider trading, the practice has been rampant within the US government on both sides of the aisle.

=> ↺ The Scandal of Congressional Stock Trading

• Well, there is, kinda. It’s called the Stock Act and passed in 2012. It allows stock trading, so long as the politicos eschew insider information. But according to the Times probe, a substantial number of those 3700 trades could very well have involved insider info. Those congress critters, you see, get the confidential lowdown on what’s happening in an industry or to specific companies and then, presto, they trade stock. So the Stock Act ain’t working, to understate matters.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Africa, Zim not poor because of colonisation, other former British colonies succeeding

• Also, if we look outside Africa we find some former colonies doing better than others. There must be differences in how these countries are run. Singapore, for example, got its independence from Britain just 17 years before Zimbabwe got its and yet Zimbabwe feels like it is centuries behind.

• Why is that? Magatte Wade, a director at Atlas Network, Center for African Prosperity has thoughts. In an interview with Jordan Peterson, she laid out her case for why we can’t keep pointing to colonisation as the major reason for our struggles.

=> ↺ Muslim Body Condemns Govt’s Decision To Allow Sale Of Beer At Departmental Stores In J&K

• While the consumption of alcohol is banned in many states of India, why is it being “encouraged” in J-K, it asked.

=> ↺ Questions remain about who recorded the audio that led to L.A. City Council scandal

• The posting of the year-old recording on the website Reddit in the run-up to November’s midterm elections raised obvious suspicions of political motive. Much of the hourlong, private conversation among several councilmembers and the head of Los Angeles County Federation of Labor – all Latino Democrats – centered on fortifying their clout in the realignment of Council districts.

• It’s now prompted a state investigation.

=> ↺ January 6 Hearing Reveals How Trump’s Inner Circle Prepared for Violence

=> ↺ NY AG Says Trump Formed “Trump Organization II” on Same Day as Fraud Lawsuit

=> ↺ Thank You, January 6 Committee! Now It’s Merrick Garland’s Turn.

• So what did we learn from the dramatic ninth, and possibly final, January 6 committee hearing?

=> ↺ “All Hell Is Going to Break Loose”: How Trump’s Inner Circle Prepared for Violence Ahead of Jan. 6

• The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol held what may have been its final public hearing on Thursday. The meeting ended with the committee unanimously voting to subpoena former President Donald Trump, likely setting the stage for a court battle. During the hearing, Congressmember Zoe Lofgren of California detailed how Trump had developed a plan to declare victory in the 2020 election regardless of the actual outcome. “This big lie — President Trump’s effort to convince Americans that he had won the 2020 election — began before the election results even came in. It was intentional, it was premeditated,” Lofgren said. The committee also aired a new video showing Trump’s ally Roger Stone telling Trump supporters to declare victory no matter the outcome. “I really do suspect it will still be up in the air. But when that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory,” said Stone, whom the committee also linked to right-wing extremist organizations, including the Proud Boys. “We’ll start smashing pumpkins, if you know what I mean.”

=> ↺ Jan. 6 Panel Votes to Subpoena Trump as New Video Shows Pelosi Responding to Insurrection

• During the House select committee hearing Thursday, Representative Jamie Raskin revealed never-before-seen footage from January 6 of top lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, scrambling to stop the violence and making pleas for law enforcement and military support. Some Republicans had previously accused Pelosi of failing to call the National Guard to protect the Capitol, but the footage aired on Thursday sheds new light on her actions. Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson concluded the hearing with a vote to subpoena former President Donald Trump. “The need for this committee to hear from Donald Trump goes beyond our fact finding. This is a question about accountability to the American people,” said Thompson.

=> ↺ “I Don’t Want People to Know That We Lost”: Trump Knew Biden Won, But Kept Pushing Election Lies

• During Thursday’s hearing, the January 6 House committee aired video evidence showing how Donald Trump repeatedly made false claims about voter fraud that directly contradicted facts presented to him by top advisers. “These actions, taken directly by the president himself, made it clear what his intentions were: to prevent the orderly transfer of power,” said Congressmember Elaine Luria. California Congressmember Adam Schiff also presented several Secret Service messages showing prior knowledge of the potential for violence on January 6. “By the morning of January 6, it was clear that the Secret Service anticipated violence,” said Schiff, with one agent claiming in a chat group that it felt “like the calm before the storm.”

=> ↺ Ron Johnson Booed and Laughed At in Debate With Progressive Challenger

• With less than a month to go before the November midterms, Barnes—Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor—took Johnson to task over his opposition to abortion rights, support for cutting Social Security and Medicare, and 2017 vote in favor of former President Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular and regressive tax cut for the rich and large corporations.

=> ↺ Audience Booed and Laughed at Ron Johnson in Final Debate With Dem Challenger

=> ↺ Joe Manchin Impoverished 4 Million Children When He Killed Child Tax Credit

=> ↺ With Most Dems Silent, Warren Slams Fed for Pushing US Toward Painful Recession

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is one prominent exception.

=> ↺ Will Democrats Lose the West?

=> ↺ The D.C. Attorney General Is Investigating Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

• Racine told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune his office is examining whether immigrants were deceived by trip organizers before boarding buses for Washington, including several hundred who were bused from Texas under instructions from Gov. Greg Abbott and dropped near the official residence of Vice President Kamala Harris. Racine’s office has the authority to bring misdemeanor criminal charges or to file civil fraud cases.

=> ↺ A new chapter for the Chaika dynasty: Artyom Chaika appointed advisor to Kadyrov — Meduza

• The head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov has announced appointing Artyom Chaika as his advisor for humanitarian, social, and economic matters.

=> ↺ The Tragedy of the Islamic Republic and the Progressives’ Dilemma

• In the so-called Western democracies, as Karl Marx once noted, every few years people decide which member of the ruling class is to misrepresent them. So, voters oscillate between this or that party, or this or that individual, hoping that one day they will get lucky and their lot will improve. Even though such hopes are almost always dashed after the election, the concept of choice gives the illusion of legitimacy to the system of governance. In these democracies dissidents are usually small in number and mostly ineffectual, so they are tolerated. The only time massive force might be used against them by the state apparatus is when legitimacy of the state is questioned, and the existing social order is threatened.

=> ↺ Opinion | The Criminal Case Against Donald J. Trump Has Been Established, But Will the Garland Act?

• Thursday’s final hearing of the January 6 committee is a segue to the criminal case that federal prosecutors are piecing together, bolstered by the recent issuance of dozens of grand jury subpoenas and court-authorized searches of some of Donald Trump’s top allies.

=> ↺ Christian Nationalism is Like a Cancer, But is it Benign or Malignant?

• Republican leaders are energizing their voter base by espousing a Christian Nationalist philosophy.

=> ↺ 70 Percent of Republicans Running for Congress Doubt 2020 Election Result

=> ↺ The “Big Lie” Will Persist Unless Trump Is Held Accountable for January 6

=> ↺ Most Americans Back Reforms to Make Voting Easier, Poll Shows

=> ↺ Trump Hints to Advisers He Might Actually Testify Before January 6 Committee

=> ↺ Seattle Times, Brands Complain Over Senate Campaign Ad That Is Clearly Protected Speech

• There is something about when corporate brands get used in political advertisements that seems to make everybody forget about the very concept of fair use or international equivalents. One previous example would be when a bunch of foodstuff brands claimed trademark infringement over an anti-littering campaign in Canada, arguing that the use of their own packaging in photographs was somehow a trademark violation. It wasn’t, but that particular city campaign caved anyway.

=> ↺ The Great Crossing

• The logical outcome of the UK’s current political situation is for a large section of Conservative Party MP’s to defect to Keir Starmer’s well right of centre, pro-Brexit, New Labour Party.

=> ↺ Giorgia Meloni: The Great Replacement Moves In

• Unlike other conservatives and those of the Right in the Anglo-American tradition, welfare, in her political constellation, is not ill-fare.  People – provided they come from a certain traditional demographic and background – should be supported and encouraged by the state.  What matters is that they are the right sort of people.

=> ↺ Images, Tragedy and Bearing Witness

• How are we to react? At the Museum, the permanent exhibition – through images and film, through the lives of those living through crisis and the work of the Red Cross delegates – tries to put the visitor into the work of the ICRC in situations of humanitarian crises. According to its website: “The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum asks a central question: how does humanitarian action affect us all, here and now? 

=> ↺ Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Documents Appeal

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Misinformation most amplified on TikTok, Twitter: report

• Posts spreading misinformation are most amplified on Twitter and TikTok, according to a new report that looked at the spread of false narratives online.

• The Integrity Institute, an advocacy group, found that Twitter and TikTok have the highest “Misinformation Amplification Factor,” a figure the report’s authors used to track the spread of misinformation

=> ↺ Steve Jobs AI features in spooky ‘interview’ with Joe Rogan AI – listen here

• The voices have a number of flaws. There’s a slight robotic edge to them, the intonation sometimes doesn’t match the content, and there’s not enough variation in the pacing. The laughter is also pretty terrible! All that said, it’s still remarkable how close the voices sound to the real thing when you aren’t actively listening for these things.

• Describing the content as AI-generated is, I think, a real stretch. It’s very clear that the system is lifting the text of entire paragraphs from recordings, rather than generating completely new content. It’s effectively picking up on keywords and then looking for actual quotes on that topic, rather than truly generating new responses.

=> ↺ When fake Steve Jobs and fake Joe Rogan made a podcast

• “The Steve Jobs episode was trained on his biography and all recordings of him we could find online so the AI could accurately bring him back to life,” the company says on its website.

• There’s absolutely no attempt to pass this off as anything other than the latest exercise in marrying AI with voice synthesis. “All content is generated by artificial intelligence,” says a voice-over at the start of the 19-minute episode.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Social Panic at Sundance

• At the recent LA screening, I watched alongside the filmmaker, Meg Smaker—who, unlike the four ex-Gitmo prisoners profiled in the documentary, is neither male, nor Muslim, nor Arab. As the film rolled, I waited for the problematic scenes that had led to its cancellation. According to the filmmakers who’d successfully demanded the film’s ouster from Sundance, it was “ethically flawed and devoid of critical context,” and so exacerbated “problematic representations of Muslims and/or people from communities directly affected by Islamophobia.”

• But those scenes never came. Instead, I learned about four men who’d been detained at Guantanamo by my own government without any formal charges. They were open about the terror plots they’d been involved with, and the casual nature of these descriptions was unnerving. In the scenes set at what’s billed as the world’s first extremist rehabilitation center, these men were shown engaging in art therapy, self-reflection sessions, and efforts to learn about banal everyday subjects such as budgeting money. I smiled as the men poked fun at each other during their efforts to learn the secrets of becoming successful husbands and fathers. The expressions of vulnerability seemed to catch the men off guard, and me as well.

=> ↺ PayPal Terminates Hong Kong Account of Pro-Democracy Group

• The League of Social Democrats says that PayPal, a multinational financial technology company headquartered in California and Nebraska, sent an email stating it can no longer provide its services to the activist group.

• The group said PayPal Hong Kong Limited had sent an email on Sept. 19 about the termination and that it hasn’t been able to accept any new donations since.

• The text of PayPal’s email sent to the League of Social Democrats in September has been seen by VOA. It outlines the termination and says the decision is “final.”

=> ↺ Uganda Media Activists Say Computer Law Meant to Silence Government Critics

• Media freedom activists in Uganda have decried President Yoweri Museveni’s signing of the Computer Misuse Act into law, saying its vague wording will be used to silence government critics.

• The law, which Museveni signed Thursday, bans the use of social media to publish, distribute or share information prohibited under the laws of Uganda. It also bans the use of a disguised or false identity online. Violators could face jail terms of five to 10 years.

=> ↺ Letter to UK Foreign Secretary on Salma al-Shehab

• The Specialized Criminal Court (SCC), established in 2008 to try those suspected of acts of terrorism, has instead administered disproportionate sentences, including the death sentence, to people solely for expressing themselves online. Cloaked in the language of cybercrime, this has effectively criminalised free expression and has also been brought to bear against individuals outside of Saudi Arabia.

=> ↺ “Oust The Dictator”: China Sees Rare Protest Against Xi Jinpin

• Chinese social media censors have blocked posts, keywords, and hashtags related to the extremely rare public protest ahead of a landmark Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meeting that is scheduled to begin on October 16, at which President Xi Jinping is expected to secure a historic third term.

=> ↺ Turkish opposition calls new media law ‘censorship’, will appeal to top court

• Turkey’s main opposition group said on Friday it would ask the top court to throw out new media legislation that would jail people for spreading “misinformation,” calling the measures unprecedented censorship.

• Parliament adopted the law late on Thursday after it was proposed by President Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party (AKP), which says it aims to regulate online publications, protect the country and combat disinformation.

=> ↺ John Stossel Loses His Pathetic SLAPP Suit Against Facebook And Fact Checkers

• You may recall that a year ago, pretend libertarian, John Stossel, who talks a big game about free speech and the “marketplace of ideas,” decided to sue Meta/Facebook and some of its fact checking partners for, oh right, daring to fact check him in a way he didn’t like. For this job, he hired the Dhillon Law Group, which has become the recent go to law firm for nonsense grievance-inspired SLAPP suits (their name keeps showing up in so many of these lawsuits).

=> ↺ Meduza film critic Anton Dolin and TV Rain editor-in-chief Tikhon Dzyadko named ‘foreign agents’ — Meduza

• The Ministry of Justice has put Anton Dolin, Meduza’s film critic, on its list of “foreign agents” in media.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Sierra Leone’s civil war: ‘I was shot by rebels’ – the dangers of reporting

• In our series of letters from African journalists, Umaru Fofana looks back at how reporting on Sierra Leone’s civil war 25 years ago got personal and what dangers correspondents still face today.

=> ↺ Stop the Persecution: Iranian Authorities Must Immediately Release Technologists and Digital Rights Defenders

• On October 5, authorities arrested Amiremad (Jadi) Mirmirani—a blogger and one of Iran’s leading technologists and digital rights defenders. According to a family member on Instagram, authorities forcefully stormed into Mirmirani’s house and arbitrarily arrested him: “Today at 2 o’clock they rang the doorbell and said that we have a gas leak. When we went to the door, they attacked us. They entered with force, intimidation and threats of using tasers [stun guns] and firearms on us. They entered without a warrant and took Jadi away without any legal justification.” 

=> ↺ A Year of Milestones for CounterPunch

• At the 30-year mark, CounterPunch has veered insignificantly from its founding blueprints. The mission has remained fundamental: to provide in-depth reporting and commentary, helping readers to make informed assessments on the vital public issues of the day.

=> ↺ Criminalizing Journalism

• I’m thrilled at this recognition of our work at CounterPunch by the Before Columbus Foundation and what a bonus to be introduced for the Anti-Censorship Award by Ishmael Reed. Reed is a writer I’ve admired for 40 years or so, ever since a friend I was working with on a street painting crew in Indianapolis, during summer break from college, slipped me a copy of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and asked me: What the hell you do make of this?

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Headscarves Are Not the Only Thing Women Are Protesting in Iran

• But Iran is definitely a special case in the sense that it exhibits some truly crass contrasts. It’s a society in which women are, relatively speaking, very well-educated compared to [the country’s] income level. So 71 percent of women over the age of 25 have at least some secondary schooling, compared with 76 percent of men. So both the levels and the gap—their levels are very high, and the gaps are relatively small. And as you say, women are heavily represented in Iran’s universities. But at the same time, women’s labor market participation in Iran is shockingly low. I mean, it’s only 14 percent. I was kind of dumbfounded when I found this number. That’s half the Saudi participation, which is closer to 30 percent. It’s roughly on a level with Afghanistan pre-Taliban. And I think that has quite a lot to do also with the extraordinary frustration of young women in Iran, because they do get education but then are essentially pushed out of the labor market. I mean, the number is so low that I’m kind of baffled. Is it perhaps something to do with the formal labor market in Iran? Iran also has very low maternal mortality rates—16 women die for 100,000 live births, which is lower than in the United States right now—but it has a very high rate of early marriage and therefore of adolescent pregnancy. And only 5 percent of parliamentarians in Iran are women.

=> ↺ Iran Children, Detained During Protests, End Up In “Psychological Centres”

• Dozens of Iranian children have been killed and hundreds detained after being caught up in protests over Mahsa Amini’s death, some of them even ending up in “psychological centres”, it has emerged.

• Iran has been rocked by a month of demonstrations driven by public outrage over Amini’s death after the morality police arrested her for an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s strict dress code for women.

=> ↺ Muslim ‘Officials’ Deny Persecuted Christians Refuge in Europe

• After Germany closed its doors to him, Hassan took his case to the European Court of Human Rights; it, too, recently denied his appeal. The apostate from Islam is now set to be deported back to the Islamic Republic of Iran, an act that seems the equivalent of sentencing him to death, or at the very least, abandoning him to persecution and imprisonment.

• Before German authorities rejected his request for asylum, Hassan had offered the following testimonial to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees: [...]

=> ↺ Orphan Forced from Christian Home Highlights Islamic Ban on Adoption

• All was idyllic, until a jealous niece realized the impact on her inheritance.

• Egypt’s Islamic-based law, seeking to preserve lineage, prohibits taking another’s child as one’s own. The niece reported the couple to the police, who investigated. The prosecution determined there was no blood relation, but also no ill will.

=> ↺ As Iran Protesters Demand Regime Change, How Should West Respond?

• Anti-government demonstrations continue across Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last month. She had been arrested by Iran’s morality police for unsuitable attire. Where might the protests lead, and how should the West respond?

=> ↺ Amanda Todd: Dutchman sentenced for fatal cyber-stalking

• Amanda, who was then 15, posted a video in 2012 detailing how the cyber-stalker had tormented her.

=> ↺ Hundreds Of FBI Employees Are Simply Walking Away From Misconduct Charges

• The FBI has a long history of misconduct, dating back to the J. Edgar Hoover years when agents were writing letters to civil rights leaders encouraging them to kill themselves.

=> ↺ Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Goes Completely Rogue, Blocks Inspector General’s Access To Files, Facilities

• The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has been problematic pretty much ever since its inception. Its prior iteration — headed up by Sheriff Lee Baca — was an abhorrent mess. The LASD was (and still is!) home to gangs formed by deputies — cliques that encouraged members to violate rights and abuse those incarcerated in the county jail. Baca’s department became infamous for its internal corruption, something manifested by its obstruction of federal investigations and rogue jailhouse informant program.

=> ↺ ‘People Are Taking Inspiration From Union Victories at Amazon and Starbucks’

• Janine Jackson interviewed Jacobin‘s John Logan about Amazon and Starbucks organizing for the October 7, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

=> ↺ Judge’s Ruling on Gun Serial Numbers Highlights ‘Deadly’ Impact of Right-Wing Supreme Court

• U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin, who was appointed to the Southern District of West Virginia by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, ruled against a federal law prohibiting people from possessing firearms with serial numbers that have been “altered, obliterated, or removed.”

=> ↺ The Bad Cop Role of Russia in Policing and Locking Down a Unipolar World Entropic

• One cop plays the ‘bad cop’, the one who does not care and will menace; who threatens as promises the maximum sentence, who exhibits a rage and hatred at a personal level, whom pumps up the fear and will lie, do almost anything to purposively instill a state of fear, shock and confusion in the suspect.

=> ↺ The Racial Volcano Explodes in Los Angeles

• Los Angeles—The site of huge urban uprisings in 1965 and 1992 is once again a city on fire. The current blaze was ignited by revelations about an October 2021 meeting between three [email protected] members of the Los Angeles City Council and the [email protected] head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor regarding the redistricting of LA’s council districts. In a now-infamous conversation, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, racist remarks were directed against Blacks, Indigenous Oaxacans who live in the city’s Koreatown, Jews, and Armenians. One of the most outrageous utterances was council president Nury Martinez’s reference to the Black child of white LA councilor Mike Bonin as a “changuito” (monkey) who needed a “beat down.” The political thrust of the discussion was creating new [email protected] council districts—largely at the expense of existing districts that have Black representation.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ 240+ Groups Push Senate to Defy Telecom Attacks and Confirm Biden FCC Pick

• “She’s the decisive vote we need to close the digital divide, lower the cost of broadband, and hold companies like Comcast and AT&T accountable.”

Monopolies

=> ↺ Sanders Says Biden Admin ‘Must Reject’ Merger of Kroger and Albertsons

• “At a time when food prices are soaring as a result of corporate greed, it would be an absolute disaster to allow Kroger, the second-largest grocery store in America, to merge with Albertsons, the fourth-largest grocery store in America,” Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Thursday night, before an agreement had been reached. “The Biden administration must reject this deal.”

=> ↺ In EU And US, Big Telecom Desperately Wants Big Tech To Pay It Billions Of Dollars For No Coherent Reason

• We’ve noted for years how “Big Telecom” is desperate to have “Big Tech” pay them billions of dollars for no coherent reason. This effort is what began the net neutrality wars, and, despite the fact it’s routinely dressed up as adult policy making, it’s little more than a lobbyist-fueled cash grab.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Literary and Content Incubator Assemble Media Closes Deals for Five Book Titles

• Assemble Media, a literary incubator which concurrently develops its book projects for film and TV adaptation, has sold five new titles to major publishers.

=> ↺ Piracy Lawsuit Front Company Tries to Shut Down, Accounts Overdue

• Copyright Management Services Ltd, a UK-based company that helped front the BitTorrent piracy lawsuit factory known as Guardaley, is attempting to shut itself down, accounts overdue. After fronting controversial ‘copyright troll’ lawsuits all over Europe, CMS leaves behind an almost impenetrable matrix of companies, interlinked directors, and movie company partnerships.

=> ↺ Federal Court of Justice: Pirate Site Blocking Must Be a Tool of Last Resort

• Germany’s Federal Court of Justice has clarified the conditions under which rightsholders can seek site-blocking orders to restrict access to piracy sites. Deutsche Telekom had refused to implement DNS blocking against Sci-Hub and Libgen, arguing that more reasonable options were available to copyright holders. The Court agreed that website blocking should be a last resort.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Moving gemlog to my capsule

• I love Smol Pub, I really do; it’s simple and clean and friendly and has great users. But over time I’ve decided I’d rather just keep my gemlog on my capsule. So I’m moving over there.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ My (third) first gemlog entry

• The FIRST first was on gemlog.blue, which I quickly left after realizing it was completely unmoderated. The SECOND first was on smol.pub, which is a lovely place with a great dev, but over time I came to decide I wanted to keep my gemlog here on my capsule and maintain it myself.

• So! I just spent an afternoon writing, testing, and re-writing a script that would let me generate gemlog entries in the terminal and append links onto an index.gmi file. It was a fun learning experience! I learned more about the echo, read, and sed commands in the process. But I just could not get new lines to work at all in the generated files, so… I decided to cheat.

Programming

=> ↺ How I became a Contemplative Hacker

• A couple of years ago I started a journey, a self-discovery journey.

• The specific events that brought me there are not really relevant, so let’s just focus on the fact that one day I found myself immersed in a psychological and spiritual quest, trying to overcome a set of mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns that ended up being a General Anxiety Disorder.

• Despite all my expectations, that diagnosis was the best thing that could have ever happened. It was the entry gate, the trojan horse, the tunnel which would lead me toward the Source. Let’s start from the beginning.

• I had a pretty standard life. A good job, a beautiful family, and a whole set of capitalist collectibles: a fridge full of food, a house full of material possessions, a future full of plans, and a resume full of academic degrees.

• But definitely, there was something wrong, something that somehow was wrong from the beginning.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

=> Techrights

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.