Fully agree there. This administration has to be removed from office. While there’s still a congress to do this. What I’m worried about now is a Reichstag fire event that will allow them to enact emergency legislation that will put the Patriot Act to shame. I watched the USA collectively lose its mind in 2001; it wouldn’t take much to do that again.

I only have one minor pushback. I read The Art of the Deal back in 2016. And having not read Mein Kampf, I can safely say it is no Mein Kampf. When it’s not totally incoherent it reads like a puff piece in a tabloid rag. So I guess I’m just less afraid of Trump than I am of a Hitler-class demagogue, but that says nothing about the MAGA movement as a whole. You don’t need intelligence to be a figurehead for a fascist coup.

I think it’s time for a general strike. There are rumblings of a reinvigorated labor movement, so for the first time since the 1970s I think it’s within the realm of possibility.

Yeah ok so he’s not as bad as late Hitler.

Here’s my most optimistic take for Americans. This guy is not as bad as Hitler. He’s out to scam the world, not conquer it militarily. So that’s a plus, for now. If his successor is Vance then the invasion of Canada and Mexico might actually happen.

I have a friend who looks like this. 6’5, Carhardt jacket, overalls, drinks Budweiser like it’s water. Hangs out with socialists. He says he got his septum piercing mainly so the alt right would leave him alone.

Marxism-Leninism explicitly calls on using technology to eliminate scarcity. That’s what collectivized agriculture and mass electrification were for. Along the development pathway the leadership sort of forgot this because they ran into a lot of problems (not the least of which was an incredible amount of hostility from the capitalist powers).

In my view Zeitgeist was just an update on The State and Revolution, but somehow without the armed overthrow of the government. Like technology will somehow allow us to surpass our class antagonisms and ingrained social structures (eapecially militarism) without toppling the ruling elite. I think it turned out to be a naive view unfortunately.

Was it the poet who lives on the beach? That was the only one I’d have been threatened by

Thanks, I had to research to even notice anything was wrong.

Just for posterity in case this follows us here, there is a genocide going on in Palestine. Feels like a mantra at this point.

As your annoying communist I’ll also point out that if you’re a scientist developing novel methods to detect endotoxins your grant funding is currently being eviscerated by the US federal government and you’re likely to find a much more lucrative career path working for a pharmaceutical company that lacks your research ethics. And if you make it up to the admin level you can go lobby the government too!

Did anybody find the transcript for this second leak? The first one was so cringe and I’d love to read this one as well.

And this law came into effect last July

The problem is global. The US and the global elite are dragging the planet down with it. The most downtrodden victims of US domination are usually abroad anyway. So it feels pointless to worry about where people are because we all need to unite to fight Davos and its appointed imperator.

McGill professors love warning about red lines from their safe space in a city that’s “just more European”. It’s a gradient, and the US is in between cherry and crimson right now.

So now we’ll have a whole plethora of social networks for everyone to isolate into their own bubbles essentially because our global leadership is comprised of children who can’t play nicely with each other. Sounds good, sign me up for TurkmeniNet.

We don’t hate America. We hate you.

So E471 is a whole class of hydrocarbons. I was using Wikipedia as a source too. Broadly speaking, catalysts containing heavy metals are often used for synthesizing organic molecules, regardless of the feedstock which can be deeived from plants or animals or whatever. Ideally, the catalyst does not get incorporated into the product, but generally quality control has to be enforced by regulations because corporations love cutting costs by glossing over safety standards.

Look, you can do the same thing with any religious document. See for instance Jeremy England’s Every Life is on Fire in which he equates passages in the Torah about Moses to the thermodynamical necessity of the emergence of life as an autocatalytic process. The metaphor is tortured and the whole enterprise comes off as awkward and unnecessary. Scientific principles are entirely nihilistic; it’s our interpretations of them that make them magical. And those interpretations aren’t captured by any holy document.

The necessity of this substance is far from proven, and it uses a palladium as a catalyst which introduces potential heavy metal contamination. This is a venture capital-backed startup. We simply have stricter standards in the EU.

Manhattan has gridlock that prevents this. There’s no space to move into.