• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Seattle
• https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2023/10/11/gen-z-rent-income-housing-seattle
• https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/heres-how-much-you-need-to-earn-to-afford-a-seattle-area-home/
• https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/as-wa-housing-costs-climb-incomes-arent-keeping-up/
• https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/its-definitely-tough-new-study-shows-nearly-third-wa-households-struggle-make-ends-meet/MV7YO5CQDJBOTHZFPM4ILD2HII/

To own the tanks.

lol

$ curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/refs/heads/master/supportedsites.md | grep -i porn | wc -l
      27
$

Huh, thanks! Based on its name I assumed it was exclusively for YouTube.

$ yt-dlp https://prod.vodvideo.cbsnews.com/cbsnews/vr/hls/3330898_hls/master.m3u8
[generic] Extracting URL: https://prod.vodvideo.cbsnews.com/cbsnews/vr/hls/3330898_hls/master.m3u8
[generic] master: Downloading webpage
[generic] master: Downloading m3u8 information
[generic] master: Checking m3u8 live status
[info] master: Downloading 1 format(s): 2879+audio_aac-English
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 45
[download] Destination: master [master].f2879.mp4
[download] 100% of   87.22MiB in 00:00:18 at 4.66MiB/s
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 45
[download] Destination: master [master].faudio_aac-English.mp4
[download] 100% of    4.04MiB in 00:00:01 at 2.14MiB/s
[Merger] Merging formats into "master [master].mp4"
Deleting original file master [master].faudio_aac-English.mp4 (pass -k to keep)
Deleting original file master [master].f2879.mp4 (pass -k to keep)
$ vlc 'master [master].mp4'

🥺
👉 👈

Docker, no docking!
Docker, no docking!
Docker, no docking!

EU/US have to step up financial reconstruction offers

The offers are likely to be predatory IMF/World Bank loans leading to even more neoliberal/neocolonial privatization & austerity.

The US hasn’t given Ukraine a blessed thing: they’ve all been lend-leases that will take the Ukrainian people generations to pay off.

a country under a genocidal invasion

These claims of genocide by Russia are projection by Western propaganda.

• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

None of my web browsers knows what to do with https://prod.vodvideo.cbsnews.com/cbsnews/vr/hls/3330898_hls/master.m3u8 nor does VLC.

three sources familiar with the matter

Anonymous sources. On the one hand, this is weak tea, but on the other, I wouldn’t put it past the Biden administration at all.

Ask Ukraine.

no u

Is this a fucking joke? Are you Josep Borrell?

• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• A Detailed Chronological List of US Interventions, Invasions, Destabilzations, and Assistance to Oppressive Regimes (ending in 2002)
• Shock therapy (economics)
• Are We The Baddies?
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
• Infographic: US military presence around the world The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
• Michael Parenti: Africa is Rich

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Counterpunch, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

Doubling down on Russiagate conspiracy theories isn’t the own you think it is.

• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away

What drives us ultimately is our material conditions. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. BTW, Harris’ dad is a Marxist, which is where I’m sure her comment sprang from.

Well no, this has been a bipartisan project stretching back decades. Brzezinski Mapped Out the Battle for Ukraine in 1997

Essentialist bullshit. You may as well say, from feudalism to capitalist settler-colonial genocide & slavery to imperialism: this is all we know.

I’ll take the CCCP, or even modern Russia—as shitty as it is—over this:

• World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country
• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• A Detailed Chronological List of US Interventions, Invasions, Destabilzations, and Assistance to Oppressive Regimes (ending in 2002)
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
• Shock therapy (economics)
• Are We The Baddies?
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent
• Infographic: US military presence around the world The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
• Michael Parenti: Africa is Rich

Do you believe the elections in Russia are held fairly?

Putin seems to be genuinely popular, so how fair the last presidential election was is somewhat moot. I think he had a clear majority regardless. Russians have good reason to like him: he kicked the Western capitalist neoliberal shock therapy plunderers out of the country. It’s still a capitalist shithole, but at least it’s their shithole and not a neocolonized state anymore.

it looks like Russia actually did hold elections for their own government within occupied Ukrainian territory.

I can’t speak to the quality of those elections. Eastern Ukraine had been in a civil war with western Ukraine for almost a decade, and many eastern Ukrainians wanted a Russian intervention, but I’m no expert and couldn’t say what percentage wanted one. Back in 2014, Crimea was very easy to annex, because most Crimeans wanted to be annexed. And they fared better than their friends to their north, who suffered almost a decade of attacks by western Ukrainian Banderites.

The US has wanted to Balkanize Russia ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, as laid out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard. It especially wants to now that, under Putin’s leadership, Russia has kicked the Western neocolonial/noeliberal shock therapy plunderers out of the country.

The US used Ukraine as a pawn to engineer this confrontation, with the hopes of Russian regime change, or better still Russian Balkanization. The US wanted this war. It worked for decades to create this war, much like it worked to create the Soviet-Afghanistan war decades before, to weaken the Soviet Union. The US does this kind of thing all the time.

Imagine if Russia (or say China) were expanding its “defensive alliance”* into south & central America, and making plans to expand it further, right up to the California–Texas border, which would likely lead to “defensive” nuclear weapons right on our back porch. Maybe they’re in talks with Canada as well, in an effort to “contain” the US. And imagine also if there were a large American-speaking population in northern Mexico, which were being ethnically cleansed with tacit assistance by the Mexican government. Realistically—regardless of what is internationally legal (which the US usually ignores anyway)—what would the US do?

*NATO, BTW, is not a defensive alliance.

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Counterpunch, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It