Not sure if this one has been posted in the last few weeks, but this follows up previous MintPress reporting on the links between western TikTok and the US military-intelligence apparatus. It was probably clear to us from the beginning, but the crusade against TikTok has been an entirely cynical ploy for the empire to gain even more control over the internet.

Previous articles:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/

https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/

German politicians have been discussing making applying for citizenship easier for a couple years now. Today the Bundestag (Parliament) approved the draft legislation, with two surprising new additions.

In applying for citizenship a person will now not only have to say they agree to and respect the German constitution (standard practice for gaining citizenship anywhere), an applicant will also have to agree to a statement "on Germany's special historical responsibility for the unjust Nazi rule and its consequences, especially for the protection of Jewish life." It's reasonable enough if taken literally, but we all know what this means in practice: Zionism is the law of the land. There could be an additional statement regarding the "illegalty of wars of aggression" required as well. If a person is found to have lied during the application or even behaves against such statements in the future, their newly gained German citizenship could be revoked.

To be fair, all of this is based on press reports and I haven't seen the law directly yet, so it may only be half as bad. But things are going in a really worrying direction.

I have been having such a difficult time getting a 2018 Dell Latitude 7930 to run any Linux distro stably. Maybe there is something obvious I am missing or maybe it really is dying hardware that's the root cause of the issue.

The silly thing is I had a stable install of openSUSE Tumbleweed running for a few months but because I made some poor choices on disk partition when I installed it I was eventually backed into a corner where I had to wipe the SSD and install from scratch.

I since then have tried Tumbleweed again as well as Ubuntu, Mint, and finally Manjaro to no avail. The Debian based distros completely freeze at some point, either immediately upon login and loading the desktop or when running apt update. Tumbleweed gets a kernel panic within an hour or so, even though I changed kernel options to a previous known-good config. Now after quite a frustrating time installing Manjaro it freezes within an hour as well and the diagnostic light code indicates a CPU issue.

Strangely enough none of these issues are apparent when running from a LiveUSB, but occur on two different M.2 SATA SSDs with proper installs.

At this point I don't really care which distro I use, as long as it doesn't crash constantly. Does anyone have any suggestions on other things I can try?

Edit: seems to be solved with the kernel options I already mentioned. For whatever reason it didn't work for the Tumbleweed reinstall but Manjaro has run for a couple days without crashing.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics#Crash/freeze_on_low_power_Intel_CPUs

Back in October I found a really cool book containing the speeches delivered during a Marxist theoretical conference hosted by the SED in the DDR in 1983. In the meantime I have started to transcribe some of these speeches with the intent of sharing them here and with the international community of working people. There are three speeches up at the moment and I am working on more. There are 140 in the volume so a complete digitization may take some time.

I plan to post my own thoughts on this site, as well as some more materials I have found. I may also consider cross-posts as well where appropriate.

I'll be in Berlin for a couple days soon and I'd like to see some DDR stuff while I'm there.

The DDR Museum looks interesting, even if it's just to look at the visual representations of everyday life while ignoring the lib remarks on Stasi oppression and whatnot.

Also happy DDR annexation celebration day. /s

I've been back into reading fiction over the last three years or so after a long time away. It's been really nice to slow down and read a book for entertainment rather than always going for a series or movie (when I'm not reading theory of course). For somewhat nostalgic reasons I'm missing some easy reading spy thriller type novels. There's plenty loaded with CIA/MI6 propaganda but I've had a hard time finding anything with similar pacing from outside of the imperial core. Most of the "best translated / English Chinese authors to read" lists are chock full of liberal emigrants and the like, which isn't a perspective I'm terribly interested in while reading for fun. I also enjoy sci fi, but there it seems to be a bit easier to find non western authors.

Does anyone have anything to recommend? Unfortunately it's gotta be available in English or maybe German at the moment.

A preprinted study by James Hansen and collaborators suggests that we've all but locked in 2°C warming by 2050. They go on to calculate a likely equilibrium warming of 10°C considering current GHG levels and known feedback loops.

I know we need to take this as yet another call to action, but at the same time I think so many of us feel absolutely paralyzed by the enormity and incomprehensibility of the situation.

This is a bit dated by now, but the recent post about some failed US weapons systems reminded me about this absolute doozy of a Spanish submarine.

Years ago, the S-80 submarine suffered a major engineering setback: It was overweight and at risk of not being able to resurface after submerging. In the latest hitch, first reported on Wednesday by the newspaper El País, it can’t fit into the port of Cartagena at the military base in southeastern Spain where the submarine will be stationed.

The article wraps up with a lame attempt to normalize spending billions on military equipment.

If this isn't a dire indictment of the ability of the capitalist mode of production to solve pressing problems, I don't know what is.

Seize property to build wind and solar farms, says JP Morgan chief

In his annual shareholder letter, Mr Dimon said: “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way.

“We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”

How should new countries be handled, where the people have clearly chosen that they would like to be their own sovereign nation, with all the rights and responsibilities that comes with?

Besides the people withing the territory agreeing that they're a new sovereign country and establishing the institutions thereof, what should the global community expect?

As things stand currently, it's simply up to the imperial core countries as to whether or not a territory is recognized as a country.

This story is incredibly strange and unnerving. How can a relatively well known and respected journalist simply disappear for six months before other journalists finally notice and start asking questions? Meek isn't even meaningfully anti-establishment although he's pissed off the military from time to time. It looks like he's pretty tight with the military and intelligence communities. It's clear to all of us that we cannot trust bourgeois media, but this is really something else, especially with new conspiracy theories of Chinese and Russian public figures disappearing being generated seemingly on a weekly basis yet nobody publicly stated that they noticed this guy's disappearance for six months.

In memory of the destroyed project of socialism in Germany, what better way to spend October 3rd (Germany's so-called German Reunification Day) than to discuss the successes, mistakes, and lessons of the DDR.

Putting such a positive light on this topic is still beyond taboo in mainstream circles, and anti-communist mythology runs deep in Germany even today. One way we can make revolutionary inroads in any capitalist nation is to educate the working people about the successes of their socialist peers and all the tried and tested ways we can work towards making life more meaningful for all of us.