It was pretty old, I think from the 50s or 60s.

Yo I heard you like trains that go through snow…

That’s a Union Pacific Rotary Snow Plow. 17 feet / 5.2 meters tall. 150 RPM. It’s not self-propelled and had to be pushed by 4 locomotives. It was used in Wyoming up into the 1990s to cut 14 foot / 4.25 meter wide paths through the snow.

ngl blaming RFK Jr on Russia just feels kinda lazy. The dude is just a brainwormed guy who has a bunch of incoherent views largely held together by conspiracy theories, like basically most of all Americans do. He was pulling votes from Trump so Trump gave him a promise that he totally won’t renege on, so he dropped out. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…

All US client states in the region only have the individuals at the very top - kings, some of the national bourgeoisie - who are allied with the US. The overwhelming majority of the people despise the US. Not a stable situation for an ally. The client states also have their own allegiances and enemies across the region. Those entanglements make unilateral action harder. Israel is a completely foreign entity to the region without any sort of entanglements - everyone hates them. And as you have seen over the last year, these clients have to tread very carefully with their own populations in terms of being seen openly helping the US. Israel has a population that is bloodthirsty and loves it when their military causes death and destruction in the region.

The Beam has fried this guy’s brain.

(I do have a soft spot for this lib, his older novels are pretty great ngl)

I started by looking at a James Lindsay tweet, and then spent waaay too much time reading the replies, and then going down too many rabbit holes of seeing profiles of boomer MAGA weirdos with the worst takes on communism you can possibly imagine.

Americans brains are so deeply broken. They are convinced there’s some massive conspiracy, led by the Democrats and noted communists like George Soros to bring about a communist revolution, which apparently is going to happen definitively if Trump isn’t re-elected.

I don’t know why it bugs me as much as it does.

It’s 100% faked.

Wompty dompty dom

Please let us know any further news on this if you hear it, and hope that you and everyone you know stays safe.

Because their mothers, wives, and kids aren’t actually under any real threat from the Russian military? Meanwhile, if you join up with the Ukrainian armed forces now there is a strong possibility your family won’t have a primary income earner when it all eventually ends and life in Ukraine becomes immeasurably harder once the west comes to collect on their debt. Any Ukrainian who cares about their family will avoid getting conscripted at any cost.

I have been enjoying just talking to people I know (all Americans) about how shit Teslas are compared to BYD and other Chinese EVs. They write me off as a CPC fanboy (ok, guilty as charged) not only because they consider Teslas to be a “premium” brand, but also because Americans’ egos can’t let them accept that China is doing something better than them.

I’d like to think that one day I’ll get to see their brains break when they realize that the little that Americans do make is dogshit compared to what China can do. But then again, there’s still way too many Americans who think universal health care is less efficient and leads to worse health outcomes than our current system, so they may all just cope until they die.

On it’s worst day, the German Democratic Republic was a better country than the United States will ever fucking be.

Volume 2 of Capital often gets overlooked, but one of the topics I have a tremendous amount of appreciation for is Marx’s discussion of how it is only in the sphere of production where value is created; everything else must be “paid for” out of surplus value. Nearly all commodity production for goods consumed in the US is produced offshore. That means the value is created offshore, but the surplus value is appropriated by US capital. Take Apple, for example. Some of the R&D work is done in the US and that would add to the value of a phone, as well as the transportation costs… but all the labor used to create the phone is in China. So that is where the value is created but all that surplus value is appropriated by Apple and used to pay shareholders, executives, tech support in the US, etc. The entire US industrial economy now more closely resembles a merchant capitalist economy - we do not produce surplus value, we simply appropriate it. And from a societal standpoint, so much of the US standard of living is based on the appropriation of this surplus value.

So (and this is where I get into very speculative ideas and could very well be wrong) to me, you can almost view the current situation in the US is that ALL Americans are “capitalists” now in that we benefit from the surplus value extracted from labor in the Global South. Of course it’s disproportionate - a typical warehouse worker benefits far less from this arrangement than an Amazon shareholder, for example - but it means that nearly everyone in the US benefits from the current system. Which means it’s hard to see how there can be any revolutionary class in the US as things stand.

That is why my theory is that the revolutionary potential of the US worker is moot until we can break the current system of exploiting labor outside of the US. Eliminate US hegemony and you will break the extraction of surplus value from the Global South, which will break the ability to pay off the working class with a cut of the surplus value. Where we go from there… I don’t know. That’s truly terra incognita. Maybe the US goes back to the beginning and has to rebuild domestic production, and then a re-emergence of an actual proletariat.

Note that I am only talking about the sphere of industrial capital and not finance capital - which of course makes this analysis incomplete but I am fully admitting that it’s not supposed to be a complete analysis. I also struggle with correctly incorporating both finance and industrial capital simultaneously, but that’s an area I’m trying to educate myself better in (hoping to get through Volume 3 before the end of the year).

Not quite. They are going after him for putting tampons in men’s restrooms. I assume this would be for trans men if it’s even true, which is cool and good ofc but they’re not attacking it as a “government handout”, they’re attacking it as a transphobia thing.

I’m curious if countries with universal healthcare systems have as much demand for jobs in the medical field.

Now that everyone has a decently good quality camera with them at all times, it’s easy to forget that photography is an art and being a pro at it requires talent, experience, and the right equipment. It’s a great photo because a professional was situated in the right place and got all the elements right - the angle, focus, aperture, framing, etc. Not an op.

In part, if the Resistance shoots down ONE evac copter, western media will made it major headline news and the narrative will be how the Resistance isn’t fighting by Queensbury Rules and so that’s why Israel’s genocide is justified. Meanwhile Israel can blow up 100 ambulances in Gaza and hardly a peep in western news.

I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I wonder if “liquidated” means incapacitated or if it means dead.

I mean, I really want it to be the later, but I also don’t want to get my hopes up only to find out a bunch of these guys are actually alive but sitting at home with a broken wrist or something.

What about defensive zeppelins?