Walter Ostanek

Early on in the Ukraine war one of the refugee families I helped out was Lebanese-Ukrainian (from Mariupol). The Lebanese guy couldn't believe that Ukraine was seen as corrupt internationally: "what the fuck? it's nothing compared to Lebanon! We invented corruption!" - he then launched into a passionate defense of the ol' you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours as a resurrection of the pre-capitalist barter system (since, according to him, it often involves goods more than cash), and something that improves efficiency in otherwise terminally cumbersome bureaucracies. Strange chap, I'm still friendly with him but he has his idiosyncracies

lol I remember in the mid 2000s reading the Conservapedia article on Blair, twisting itself into knots trying to square Blair's background in a historically socialist party with his role as Bush's lapdog in his righteous (and very Christian) neoliberal crusade

His neuralink shit is a rip off of stuff in Iain Banks' sci fi - an author Musk adores though if Banks were still alive he'd certainly think him an immense wanker. There's more than enough Muskian characters in both his sci-fi and "normal" novels. Amazing to think that Musk read those books and saw the villains as role models

Almost all causes of death can be considered as variations on the theme of cerebral hypoxia

A lot of fleshblob makes me cry (with laughter)

Used to have actual meditation sessions to Black One at uni with a few particularly pretentious mates. Got wrecked but enforced strict silence

I missed the bit where Igor Girkin snuck into Iraq and Afghanistan with his band of merry russian fascists and started shooting up Romanis?

Never played it but I used to have the soundtrack on CD. I miss those glory days of the TDR aesthetic

The most important thing about music is that you recognise that it is a bread-and-circus distraction concocted by the bourgeoisie to steer the workers away from developing class consciousness. Thus you should not pay any attention to any music, ever

Can't agree more with the always buy the dumbest item you can find. I'm deathly allergic to any white good that has anything more than a handful of clunky analog dials on the front. If I can't fix it myself, the fella down the street definitely can. Fuck planned obsolescence and the obscene waste it entails The only exception seems to be printers, which have always been massive cunts

I genuinely expect to live to see a time when serious swaths of Australia are literally uninhabitable. Also probably good chunks of the US southwest

Fucking lol, and there I was thinking that they did it because it was highly profitable!

lol

did we ever find out what SIGN was an anagram of? can't be bothered to read all 168 pages lol

...capitalist countries, of which they are one? And forced precisely how? Everything they need for an effective energy transition can be found within their own borders What matters is that CO2 emissions decrease. It doesn't matter to the atmosphere if the energy thereby generated goes towards manufacturing stuff to be exported or not - though it does wipe the greenwash right off of Europe's green credentials! It doesn't matter how many wind turbines a country builds if their CO2 emissions are still increasing. I'm not out to demonise China (inb4 sarcastic quotemine of that one sentence), just point out that there is no basis to put them on a pedestal - and if anything, on account of their theoretically more favourable economic setup and their exceptional endowment of the metals required for low-carbon tech, I see their behaviour thus far as a tragic missed opportunity

No more or less weird than the late 80s Jarre and early 90s FSOL that Dan plunders for his ideas

I mean, I agree that capitalism is almost designed to fail miserably at solving problems like this, or any other where there's little prospect of the solutions being near-term profitable. Theoretically a Chinese type system should be able to weather the storm (lol?) far better given that they have the ability to steer their economy. Though judging them by their own actions they're not really bothering - their oft-touted, supposedly miraculous rollout of renewables is dwarfed into meaninglessness by their continued expansion of coal As for the above fine fella, it's classic campism, claiming to be socialist while copypasting vapid propaganda from overtly fascist regimes, just check out anything he's ever said about Ukraine

Good luck to all the Florida Men and women. I worry this could be a rerun of Katrina, who better than de Santis to turn this into an opportunity for disaster capitalism?

Oneohtrix Point - Never Again

So I live about an hour from the border so should I be arming myself to the teeth (legally, with PAL in hand ofc) in preparation for spillover from the coming civil war next door?

Will they put out a press release if I send them a unique disc of my shit?