Launch services isn't a contract to launch anything, it's just NASA collecting information about every rocket. Rockets that blow up just get listed as Category I High Risk, allowed for Class D payloads that are cheap and replaceable.

Google's delusional fantasy has always been you want to buy a guitar, you go on Google, their ad algorithm shows you a perfectly targeted ad for the guitar you want, and you love and trust Google so you click the ad and buy it. They think LLMs will make that actually work, they want to give you a Grima Wormtongue that can simper and manipulate until you do love and trust it, and once you're a rotting husk it whispers the ad algorithm into your ear so you think it was your idea.

School class picture, the priest that let Stalin and his mom stay with him to get away from Stalin's abusive dad faked a story about who Stalin's dad was so he could get in to a free school for children of church officials.

If half the people circlejerking in here were serious they could pay a liberal developer to contribute instead, but somehow I doubt that's happening.

People jumping out of windows in 1929 was a hoax made up by Winston Churchill trying to convince poor people that rich people were hurting too. One drunk tourist fell off a balcony before the crash, and Churchill manipulated it for propaganda. The first actual suicide on Wall Street in the weeks after the crash was a clerk in her 20s worked to death by her bosses getting rich off the volatility using her as a human high frequency trading computer.

People are saying puritans or religion, but the US was even more religious and puritain 150 years ago, when nudity in public bathhouses was common. What changed was the US got rich enough to buy millions of tiny single person bathtubs and make installing more of them than you need an investment asset that you sell to pay for retirement.

Japan has onsens and it also has people sleeping in a bush on the street. Both of those disgust Americans because you look poor. Even if you're a sleepy business man in a suit it's offensive that you're not embarrassed that somebody might think you're poor for a second. American onsens were for the poor, then for the very poor, then they were effectively illegal because we hate the idea that somebody too poor to buy a personal bathtub is allowed to live.

Those who affirm the sovereignty of the Israeli state and also believe Palestinians have a right to sovereignty for the same reason, and who take the Palestinian question as fundamental, must admit that the Israeli establishment’s policy is literally crazy and deliberately aims at avoiding all possible solutions to this problem. It is therefore politi- cally accurate to say that a state of war exists between Israel and the Palestinians. In this war the Palestinians’ only weapon is terrorism. It is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no other, and the French who approved FLN terrorism against the French must approve in turn the Palestinians’ terrorist action. This abandoned, betrayed, exiled people can show its courage and the force of its hate only by organizing deadly attacks.

~~Jean-Paul Sartre, 1972, after the attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich

The thing they changed was cutting holes in the area where the fire was last time to "ventilate" it. I think it's the same fire just blowing out the holes and melting something different.

He doesn't, almost all of SpaceX's profit is Starlink. On NASA contracts they bid low and lose money to block competition. Elon bid 2.9 billion for a lunar lander so Jeff Bezos's company wouldn't get it, and it's going to cost Elon 4x that much at minimum if he actually has to finish it, which is why he's trying to kill the moon program.

Early on NASA contracts were funding SpaceX, now he has to pull up that ladder to protect his monopoly, and it's cheaper to just kill NASA entirely.

He can still get government money but once all the technical people inside the government are gone it would work like Boring Company. Draw some CGI of a space monorail and sell it to congress with no process or oversight and grift off hype and fomo.

They say "artificial sun" because that's what it is though, there's no fusion reactions here they're just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.

The story also goes on to say about how the deaths caused by the soviet-era disaster cause is disputed. How is that a pertinent thing to add?

It's not disputed those are just different parts of the same IAEA report. 2 people died in the explosion, 28 of radiation poisoning, 1 from a heart attack, so 31 known, then 19 with high radiation exposure died years later for ambiguous reasons, so 50 potential direct accident deaths. And then they estimated about 4,000 as the total eventual cancer deaths.

Their definition of "anti-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) content" is dialed way up into treating "China will fall in 7 days" like good content and anything less than that is Chinese propaganda. If they search for Tienanmen Square and get "pictures of the square without mention of the massacre" they classify that as "pro-CCP". If they get "unbiased historical content" or news coverage about bad shit China does they call that "neutral".

They also don't do anything to compensate for Tiktok's overall censorship, they went looking for massacre and genocide on the platform where people say corn and unalive, they don't compare how Tiktok deals with China vs any other subject.

They did a survey of how pro-China people are and how much they use Tiktok, but don't do anything to adjust for Tiktok being publicly associated with China. They could've put a question in the survey about whether people were boycotting Tiktok for anti-CCP reasons but didn't, which looks like they were fishing for a result.

I remember NCRI from back when they did the study comparing Antifa to ISIS, and they're still doing weird shit like that, if you like Luigi you're "Killing with Applause", colleges being too woke and anti-genocide is the "Corruption of the American Mind", if you do DEI it's your fault white people are racist.

A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm

The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

What makes Marxism communist is structurally you are more brutally exploited than a serf. A lord who kills his serfs stops being a lord, a boss who kills his employees is hiring. That nature of the exploitation left open an opportunity for a minority bourgeoisie to form and replace the lords last time, but this time capitalism doesn't allow room for that. It flattens everything into one homogenized capitalist class and one homogenized working class, so the only possible revolution is those two switching places. If Marx believed you were freer or more powerful than a serf he wouldn't be communist, he would be looking for which faction of workers was going to break out into a middle revolutionary class and replace capitalism with their own system of exploitation.

Pogchamp gamer fascist propaganda

The announcement trailer for Cold War is built around footage from a television interview, in 1984, between Yuri Bezmenov, the K.G.B. defector, and G. Edward Griffin, the American conspiracy theorist and longtime member of the John Birch Society. In the interview, Bezmenov claims that the Soviet Union was working to subvert the United States by brainwashing American students into becoming Marxist-Leninists. Griffin, now eighty-nine, recently hosted the fifth installment of the annual rally known as the Red Pill Expo, which, the New York Daily News reported, “gathered hundreds of unmasked conspiracy believers, along with militia leaders, Trump backers, anti-vaxxers and religious crusaders.”

Bezemov lost it in the 80s and was working for the Unification Church and John Birch Society saying whatever they wanted, a few years after the interview he killed himself trying to get drunk on antifreeze.

"Schuman had deteriorated both physically and socially … excessive drinking noted … now separated … become transient … now works with lower level fringe groups of little consequence,” said a 1980 report from the RCMP Security Service, the precursor to CSIS.

Odd choice to go with a fake quote on the real date of Khrushchev's probably most famous line about "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!" which is referencing the communist manifesto

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

Arguably "from within" but not anything Khrushchev or obviously Putin does, it's capitalism being a self-destructive loop.

It's both. Many, many issues have 15 people who can explain what they don't like and try to do something about it, and then 15 million people who don't like the same thing but can't explain it, won't try, only vote when they feel like it, and will never see any scolding you try to do.

Yes, Democrats don't know how politics works, they ask Republicans to decide which issues are important, and then argue a slightly more moderate response to those issues is best. Sometimes they accidentally win doing that, if the economy is good and people are happy with moderation, but that's probably not going to be true any time soon.

Wealth tax to collect more money to give to Israel and the most lethal military and killing immigrants is what she ran on, she ran as a right wing populist and lost because Trump is a better right wing populist

Small minded voters are told what to think, Harris refused to tell them to want free healthcare because that shit pisses off donors

That's only because they're designed with passivation to vent tanks and disconnect batteries to remove sources of explosion when they start to die. If that fails the tanks eventually pop from thermal cycling or the solar panels overcharge the battery until it blows up like a Russian satellite did earlier this year.

Leaves out the one catastrophic demand that the US actually cares about

(D) taking appropriate steps to return to United States citizens (and entities which are 50 percent or more beneficially owned by United States citizens) property taken by the Cuban Government from such citizens and entities on or after January 1, 1959, or to provide equitable compensation to such citizens and entities for such property;

"At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands - almost all the cattle ranches - 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions - 80 percent of the utilities - and practically all the oil industry - and supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports. ... The symbol of this shortsighted attitude is now on display in a Havana museum. It is a solid gold telephone presented to Batista by the American-owned Cuban telephone company." - JFK