SDF Chatter

Normal type decree

In January 1941, the Government of Nazi Germany officially abandoned the Fraktur type, following Martin Bormann's Normalschrifterlass ("Normal type decree"). Bormann refers to Fraktur as Schwabacher Judenlettern ("Jew-letters of Schwabach").[2] The statement ignores the fact that Schwabacher originated from the earlier Rotunda blackletter script and late medieval Bastarda types. Despite Bormann's assertion, there is no evidence of any connection between Jews and the Schwabacher typeface; in fact, at the time of the typeface's origin, the ownership of printing houses was reserved for Christian citizens. The decree eliminating the use of Fraktur actually makes prominent use of Fraktur, including the party name (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) and other letterhead elements.

Normalschrifterlass by Martin Bormann

Circular
(Not for publication).

On behalf of the Führer I notify for common attention that:

Regarding and calling the so called gothic typeface as a German typeface is wrong. In fact, the gothic typeface consists of Jew-letters from Schwabach. Like how they later gained control of the newspapers, the Jews living in Germany had seized control over the printing shops at introduction of the printing press, so that the Schwabacher Jew-letters were heavily introduced in Germany.

Today the Führer decided in a meeting with Reichsleiter Max Amann and book printing shop owner Adolf Müller that the Antiqua typeface is to be called the normal typeface in future. Step by step all print products have to be changed to this normal typeface. As soon as this is possible for school books, in schools only the normal typeface will be taught.

Authorities will refrain from using the Schwabacher Jew-letters in future; certificates of appointment, road signs and similar will only be produced in normal typeface in future. On behalf of the Führer, Mr. Amann will first change those papers and magazines to normal typeface, that are already spread abroad or are wanted to be.

Signed M. Bormann

Upgrading to 0.19.14 (which I have a special call out in).

I'm also going to be migrating our pict-rs from Sled to Postgres. This is apparently a quick operation, but we'll have to see about that.

Join the Matrix room to stay up to date when when the instance is down.

By Vijay Prashad  –  Nov 29, 2025

The far right in Latin America is angry. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s Javier Milei always look furious, and they always speak loudly and aggressively. Testosterone leaks from their pores, a toxic sweat that has spread across the region. It would be easy to say that this is the impact of Donald Trump’s own brand of neo-fascism, but this is not true. The far right has much deeper pedigrees, linked to the defense of the oligarchical families that have roots in the colonial era across the virreinatos (viceroyalties) from New Spain to Rio de la Plata. Certainly, these far right men and women are inspired by Trump’s aggressiveness and by the entry of Marco Rubio, a furious defender of the far right in Latin America, to the position of US Secretary of State. This inspiration and support are important but not the reason for the return of the far right, an angry tide that has been growing across Latin America.

On the surface, it looks as if the far right has suffered some defeats. Jair Bolsonaro is in prison for a very long time because of his role in the failed coup d’état on January 8, 2023 (inspired by Trump’s own failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021). In the first round of the presidential election in Chile, the candidate of the Communist Party, Jeannette Jara won the most votes and will lead the center-left bloc into the second round (December 14). Despite every attempt to overthrow the government of Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro remains in charge and has mobilized large sections of the population to defend the Bolivarian Revolution against any threats. And, in late October 2025, most of the world’s countries voted for a UN General Assembly resolution that demands an end to the blockade on Cuba. These indicators – from Bolsonaro’s imprisonment to the vote on Cuba – suggest that the far right has not been able to move its agenda in every place and through every channel.

However, beneath the surface, there are indications that Latin America is not seeing the resurgence of what had been called the Pink Tide (after the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998) but is experiencing the emergence of an angry tide that slowly has begun to sweep the region from Central America down to the Southern Cone.

Elections in South America
The first round of the Chilean presidential election produced a worrying result. While Jara of the Communist Party won 26.85% of an 85.26% turnout, the far right’s José Antonio Kast came in second with 23.92%. Evelyn Matthei of the traditional Right won 12.5%, while the extreme right candidate who was once with Kast and now to his right, Johannes Kaiser, won 14%. It is likely that Jara will pick up some of the votes of the center, but not enough to overcome the advantage of the far right which looks to have at least more than 50% of the voters on its side. The so-called social liberal, Franco Parisi, who came in third, endorsed Kast in 2021 and will likely endorse him again. That means that in Chile, the presidency will be in the hands of a man of the far right whose ancestry is rooted in German Nazism (Kast’s father was a member of the Nazi Party who escaped justice through the intercession of the Vatican) and who believes that the dictatorship in Chile from 1973 to 1990 was on balance a good idea.

North of Chile, in Bolivia, the new president Rodrigo Paz Pereria, son of a former president, beat the far right’s Jorge Tuto Quiroga (a former president) in the second round of the election. This round had no candidate of the left, after the Movement for Socialism governed Bolivia continuously from 2006 to 2025. Paz’s own party has a minority position in the legislature and he will therefore have to align himself with the Quiroga’s Libre coalition and he will likely adopt a pro-US foreign policy and a libertarian economic policy. Peru will have its own election in April, where the former mayor of Lima – Rafael López Aliaga – is expected to win. He rejects the label far right but adopts all the generic policies of the far right (ultra-conservative Catholic, advocate for harsh security measures, and favors a libertarian economic agenda). Iván Cepeda of Colombia is the left’s likely candidate in their presidential election in May 2026, since Colombia does not permit second terms (so President Gustavo Petro cannot run again). Cepeda will face strong opposition from Colombia’s oligarchy which will want to return the country to their rule. It is too early to say who Cepeda will face, but it might be journalist Vicky Dávila, whose far right opposition to Petro is finding traction in unexpected parts of Colombian society. It is likely that by the middle of 2026, most of the states along the western edge of South America (from Chile to Colombia) will be governed by the far right.

Even as Bolsonaro is in prison, his party, the PL (or Liberal Party), is the largest bloc in Brazil’s National Congress. It is likely that Lula will be re-elected to the presidency next year due to his immense personal connection with the electorate. The far right’s candidate – who could be possibly Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo state, or one of the Bolsonaro’s (wife Michelle or son Flavio) – will struggle against him. But the PL will make inroads into the Senate. Their control over the legislature has already tightened the reins on the government (at COP30, Lula’s representative made no proposals to confront the climate catastrophe), and a Senate win will further their control over the country.

Common agenda of the angry tide
The Angry Tide politicians who are making waves have many things in common. Most of them are now in their fifties – Kast (born 1966), Paz (born 1967), Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado (born 1967), and Milei (born 1970). They came of age in the post-dictatorship period in Latin America (the last dictatorship to end was in Chile in 1990). The decade of the 1990s continued the economic stagnation that characterized the 1980s: the Lost Decade (La Década Perdida) that convulsed these countries with low growth rates and with poorly developed comparative advantages forced into globalization. It was in this context that these politicians of the Angry Tide developed their common agenda:

Anti-Communism. The far right in Latin America is shaped by an anti-left agenda that it inherits from the Cold War, which means that its political formations typically endorse the era of US-backed military dictatorships. The ideas of the left, whether from the Cuban Revolution (1959) or from the era of the Pink Tide (after 1998), are anathema to these political forces; these ideas include agrarian reform, state-led finance for industrialization, state sovereignty, and the importance of trade unions for all workers and peasants. The anti-communism of this Angry Tide is rudimentary, mother’s milk to the politicians and used cleverly to turn sections of society against others.

Libertarian Economic policies. The economic ideas of the Angry Tide are shaped by the Chilean “Chicago Boys” (including Kast’s brother Miguel who was the head of General Augusto Pinochet’s Planning Commission, his Minister of Labor, and his head of the Central Bank). They directly take their tradition from the libertarian Austrian School (Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard as well as Milton Friedman). The ideas were cultivated in well-funded think tanks, such as the Centro de Estudios Macroeconómicos de Argentina (founded in 1978) and the Chilean Centro de Estudios Públicos (founded in 1980). They believe the State should be a force to discipline the workers and citizens, and that the economy must be in the hands of private interests. Milei’s famous antics with a chainsaw illuminate this politics not only of cutting social welfare (the work of neoliberalism) but of destroying the capacity of the State itself.

Culture Wars. Drawing on the wave of anti-gender ideology and anti-migration rhetoric, the Angry Tide has been able to appeal to conservative evangelical Christians and to large sections of the working class that has been disoriented by changes seen to come from above. The far right argues that the violence in working class neighborhoods created by the drug industry is fostered by “liberalism” and that only tough violence (as demonstrated by El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele) can be the solution; for this reason, they want to strengthen the military and police and set aside constitutional limitations on use of force (on October 28, the government of Bolsonaro ally Cláudio Castro in Rio de Janeiro sent in the police who killed at least 121 people in Operation Containment). It helps the far right that it adopted various conspiracy theories about how the “elites” have spread “globalized” ideas to damage and destroy the “culture” of their nations. This is a ludicrous idea coming from far right and traditional right political forces that champion full-scale entry of US corporations into their society and culture, and that have no respect for the histories of struggle of the working class and peasantry to build their own national and regional cultural worlds. But the Angry Tide has been able to construct the idea that they are cultural warriors out to defend their heritage against the malignancies of “globalization”. Part of this culture war is the promotion of the individual entrepreneur as the subject of history and the denigration of the necessity of social reproduction.

It is these three elements (anti-communism, libertarian economic policies, and the culture wars) that brings together the far right across Latin America. It provides them with a robust ideological framework to galvanize sections of the population to believe that they are the saviours of the hemisphere. This Latin American far right is backed by Trump and the international network of the Spanish far right (the Foro Madrid, created in 2020 by Fundación Disenso, the think tank of the far right Vox party). It is heavily funded by the old elite social classes, who have slowly abandoned the traditional Right for these new, aggressive far right parties.

The Hemispheric Turn in New US National Security Strategy

Crisis of the left
The Left is yet to develop a proper assessment of the emergence of these parties and has not been able to drive an agenda that sparkles with vitality. A deep ideological crisis grips the Left, which cannot properly decide whether to build a united front with the traditional right and with liberals to contest elections or to build a popular front across the working class and peasantry to build social power as a prelude to a proper electoral push. The example of the former strategy (the electoral alliance) comes from Chile, where first the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concertación) formed in 1988 to keep out the parties of the dictatorship from power and second the Apruebo Dignidad formed in 2021 that brought Gabriel Boric of the centrist Broad Front to the presidency. But outside Chile, there is little evidence that this strategy works. The latter has become harder as unionization rates have collapsed, and as uberization individualizes the working class to erode working class culture.

It is telling that Bolivia’s former socialist Vice President Álvaro García Linera looked northwards to New York City for inspiration. When Zohran Mamdani won the mayor’s race, García Linera said, “Mamdani’s victory shows that the left must commit to boldness and a new future.” It is hard to disagree with this statement; although, Mamdani’s own proposed agenda is mostly to salvage a worn-out New York infrastructure rather than to advance the city to socialism. García Linera did not mention his own time in Bolivia, when he tried with former president Evo Morales to build a socialist alternative. The left will have to be bold, and it will have to articulate a new future, but it will have to be one that emerges from its own histories of building struggles and building socialism.

(Peoples Dispatch)

From Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond via This RSS Feed.

In February 2024, YouTube unexpectedly removed the account of independent British journalist Robert Inlakesh, a frequent contributor to Al Mayadeen English, The Intercept reported.

His channel held dozens of videos, including many livestreams documenting Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Over roughly ten years covering developments in occupied Palestine, he filmed Israeli forces tearing down Palestinian homes, police stopping and intimidating Palestinian drivers, and soldiers firing at Palestinians and journalists during demonstrations outside illegal settlements. All of that footage vanished instantly.

By July, YouTube had also taken down Inlakesh’s private backup channel. Then in August, Google, YouTube’s parent company, deleted his Google account entirely, wiping out his Gmail and archives of documents and written work.

The company initially claimed he had violated YouTube’s community guidelines. Months later, Google changed its explanation, claiming his channel contained spam or scam material.

But nearly two years after the deletion, when The Intercept pressed for details, YouTube offered yet another justification: alleging his account was connected to an Iranian influence operation.

YouTube deleted all my coverage of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including children targeted on a live stream, along with my entire account.

No community guidelines violated & 3 separate excuses given to me. Then Google deleted my email & won’t respond to appeals. https://t.co/0MREcPZOV2

— Robert Inlakesh (@falasteen47) November 5, 2025

No evidence for claims
YouTube would not provide evidence for the claim, saying the company does not disclose its methods for detecting influence campaigns. Inlakesh still cannot create new Google accounts, cutting him off from the world’s largest English-language video platform.

Inlakesh, now working as a freelance reporter, acknowledged that he had been employed from 2019 to 2021 at the London office of Press TV, Iran’s state-owned network sanctioned by the US. Still, he said that should not have led to erasing his entire channel, noting that nearly all of the content was independent work uploaded before or after his time at Press TV.

A publicly available Google document from the same month his channel was removed shows that the company had recently shut down more than 30 accounts it said were tied to Iran and had posted material critical of “Israel” and its war on Gaza. Google did not answer when asked if its account was part of that group.

He believes he was targeted not because of his past employer but because of his reporting on Palestine, especially amid what he described as a growing pattern of pro-“Israel” censorship across major tech platforms.

“What are the implications of this, not just for me, but for other journalists?” Inlakesh told The Intercept. “To do this and not to provide me with any information — you’re basically saying I’m a foreign agent of Iran for working with an outlet; that’s the implication. You have to provide some evidence for that. Where’s your documentation?”

Misdirection and lack of answers
Over the last two years, YouTube and Google have given shifting and often unclear explanations for deleting Inlakesh’s accounts.

YouTube’s first claim was that he had engaged in “severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines.” After Google employee Marc Cohen noticed Inlakesh’s public complaints in February 2024, he decided to investigate. Cohen submitted an internal support request using Google’s issue tracker, known as the Buganizer, seeking an explanation for why a journalist’s account had been terminated. When he couldn’t get answers inside the company, he raised the issue publicly that March. After capturing the attention of YouTube’s team on Twitter, he eventually received an internal response saying the account was removed for “scam, deceptive, or spam content.”

Cohen, who later resigned from Google over what he described as the company’s support for “Israel”’s war on Gaza, said that without his intervention, Inlakesh would have been left with virtually no information.

“They get away with that because they’re Google,” Cohen said. “What are you going to do? Go hire a lawyer and sue Google? You have no choice.”

Every breach possible cited
When Google deleted Inlakesh’s Gmail account this year, the company said he had “used to impersonate someone or misrepresent yourself,” which is against its policies. He appealed three times but received no reply.

It was only after The Intercept began asking questions that Google shifted its explanation toward alleged Iranian influence activity.

“This creator’s channel was terminated in February 2024 as part of our ongoing investigations into coordinated influence operations backed by the Iranian state,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Intercept. YouTube added that removing his main channel triggered the deletion of all connected accounts, including his backup.

When pressed for details, such as what content had supposedly linked him to an Iranian operation, YouTube said it does not “disclose specifics of how we detect coordinated influence operations” and pointed to quarterly bulletins published by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, or TAG, which focuses on countering government-linked cyber activity.

TAG’s bulletin from the time his account was deleted states that in February 2024, Google removed 37 YouTube channels as part of an investigation into alleged Iran-linked influence efforts. Four accounts had posted material “critical of the Israeli government and its actions in the ongoing Israel-Gaza war” and shared content about alleged cyberattacks on Israeli institutions. The remaining 33 channels shared material “supportive of Iran, Yemen, and Palestine and critical of the US and Israel.”

A pattern of censorship
Google has a long record of removing Palestinian content and material critical of “Israel”, as well as content documenting human rights violations in other war zones. That trend has only intensified during what many describe as “Israel’s” genocidal war on Gaza.

The company relies on several mechanisms for content removal: manual reviews by specialized teams, automated detection systems, checks against US sanctions and terror lists, and government takedown requests.

For years, “Israel’s” Cyber Unit has openly worked to pressure platforms like YouTube to remove content related to Palestine.

Among US allies, “Israel” has achieved the highest rate of successful takedown requests on Google platforms, close to 90 percent, since 2011. This surpasses countries such as France, Germany, the UK, and even the US itself. But Google’s public data does not include takedown requests from individual users, a channel reportedly used both by “Israel’s” Cyber Unit and by pro-“Israel” employees within companies.

Ban on Palestine-related content
Content removed because of US sanctions is also difficult to measure because such decisions often occur without transparency. A recent Intercept investigation revealed that YouTube quietly deleted the accounts of three major Palestinian human rights organizations due to the Trump administration’s sanctions against them for assisting the International Criminal Court’s war-crimes investigation into Israeli officials. Those deletions erased at least 700 videos documenting alleged Israeli abuses.

Technology and human rights consultant Dia Kayyali said that as platforms increasingly rely on automated systems linked to US sanctions and terror lists, more journalists in West Asia and North Africa have seen their Palestine-related content removed, even when it does not violate platform rules. Kayyali suggested the same dynamic may have affected Inlakesh.

“And that’s part of the problem with automation, because it just does a really bad job of parsing content that could be graphic, anything that has any reference to Hamas,” Kayyali said.

Google’s ‘overcompliance’
Google and other major companies often rely heavily on sanction lists to avoid potential conflicts with the State Department. But such caution can go too far, said Mohsen Farshneshani, principal attorney at the Sanctions Law Center.

Multinational corporations like Google tend to practice “overcompliance,” Farshneshani said, removing content even when the law does not require it, a pattern that harms journalists and human rights organizations.

Under the Berman Amendment to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, informational materials, including journalism, are explicitly exempt from sanctions.

“Deleting an entire account is far from what the statutes or the regulations ask of US entities,” Farshneshani stressed.

Furthermore, Farshneshani said this carveout should have shielded Inlakesh’s channel. Instead of wiping everything, Google could have removed individual videos that raised concerns or demonetized them. (Inlakesh noted that years earlier, YouTube had demonetized certain videos documenting Israeli military violence.)

“Deleting an entire account is far from what the statutes or the regulations ask of U.S. entities,” Farshneshani said. “The exemption is meant for situations like this. And if these companies are to uphold their part of the bargain as brokers of information for the greater global community, they would do the extra leg work to make sure the stuff stays up.”

State-sponsored media
While Google and YouTube have not said whether Inlakesh’s past work for Press TV influenced their decision, the Iranian state-funded outlet has long faced scrutiny from the company. Google briefly removed Press TV’s YouTube channel in 2013 and permanently deleted it, along with its Gmail account, in 2019 amid the Trump administration’s sanctions on Iran. In 2021, the Biden administration seized and shut down dozens of Iran-linked websites, and in 2023 sanctioned Press TV over Iran’s crackdown on anti-government protesters following the death of Mahsa Amini.

Venezuela: President Maduro’s YouTube Channel Deleted Amid US Tensions

Out of all the videos on his channel, Inlakesh recalled only two related to his Press TV work: one documentary criticizing the “2020 Trump peace plan”, and a short video about Republican Islamophobic attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Most of his content was posted either before or after his time there.

In older cached versions of his YouTube page, Press TV’s UK channel occasionally appeared as an “associated channel.” A YouTube spokesperson said the company uses “various signals to determine the relationship between channels linked by ownership for enforcement purposes” but did not specify which signals applied here.

Inlakesh insisted he worked independently while at Press TV and was never instructed to upload content to his personal YouTube page.

Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she recognizes that Google needs to moderate content, but questioned why the company opted for full deletion instead of applying its label for state-funded media, a system she said has its own flaws. “More labels, more warnings, less censorship,” York said.

“The political climate around Palestine has made it such that a lot of the Silicon Valley-based social media platforms don’t seem particularly willing to ensure that Palestinian content can stay up,” she said.

(Al Mayadeen)

From Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond via This RSS Feed.

Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Women and Child Affairs on Wednesday announced a special program aimed at safeguarding children affected by the recent floods and landslides.

RELATED:

509 Dead and Counting: Catastrophic Floods Devastate Indonesia and Sri Lanka

Deputy Minister of Women and Child Affairs Namal Sudarshana said that more than 100,000 children have been seriously affected nationwide, with the highest number reported in Puttalam District, where 43,000 children have been affected.

The deputy minister said the government will hold discussions with the International Children’s Fund on Dec. 11-12 to develop a support program for affected children.

Sri Lanka's Ministry of Women and Child Affairs announced a special program aimed at safeguarding children affected by the recent floods and landslides https://t.co/uMJ6EHTvGC pic.twitter.com/vCmGPUV82s

— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) December 11, 2025

Following these meetings, the ministry and international partners are expected to launch a joint initiative to strengthen child protection mechanisms in disaster-affected areas, he said.

From teleSUR English via This RSS Feed.

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) began deliberations this Wednesday on the Temporary Framework, the legislation that restricts the demarcation of indigenous lands, which is crucial for the protection of the Amazon and the global fight against climate change.

The court will analyze two constitutional challenges against the law, passed by the conservative-majority Congress in 2023, and one challenge defending its validity.

RELATED:

Amazon Hits 1.5°C Above Historical Average, Reaching Paris Agreement Threshold

The legislation established by Congress stipulates that indigenous peoples can only claim the lands they physically occupied on October 5, 1988, the date the Constitution was promulgated.

In 2023, the Supreme Court itself declared the Temporary Framework unconstitutional in a specific case. However, Congress passed the law that same year, defying both that ruling and the veto proposed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

El senado brasileño se anticipó a la votación en la Corte Suprema y aprobó el Marco Temporal, un artilugio del agronegocio para restringir la demarcación de tierras indígenas con la excusa de que deben demostrar ocupación territorial el 5 de octubre de 1988.

La trampa es que… pic.twitter.com/M3wT6f59UF

— Nacho Lemus (@LemusteleSUR) December 10, 2025

Faced with the deadlock, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) initiated a conciliation process led by Justice Gilmar Mendes, while Indigenous organizations asserted that the Temporary Framework is a “historical injustice.”

They denounced the fact that many were violently expelled from their ancestral territories, especially during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), and would be unable to prove their occupation on a specific date.

For its part, the spokesperson for the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), one of the organizations demanding that the deliberations be held in person at the court to exert pressure, stated that “this framework ignores centuries of dispossession and violence. Our presence and our struggle for the land are ancestral.”

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the Senate approved a constitutional amendment to include the Temporary Framework in the constitution, a move that seeks to enshrine the legal argument. Social organizations say the text still needs to be voted on by the Chamber of Deputies, but it reflects the pressure from agribusiness to consolidate the restriction on indigenous territorial rights.

From teleSUR English via This RSS Feed.

https://archive.is/w8uw3

Hamas has strongly condemned Israel for not abiding by its commitments under the Gaza ceasefire agreement.

From Presstv via This RSS Feed.

Comments

I had four pounds of bread dough started and a need to use up a few ounces of smoked mozzarella and some sesame seeds.

improve your memory instead of coddle it

Bandcamp