superdrivel - Tumblr blog

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happy friday

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i love knowing exactly enough graph theory to be able to tell if a stupid "go through every door once" puzzle is impossible

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Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello reported the arrest of a U.S. Navy SEAL alongside two Spanish citizens allegedly linked to intelligence agencies.

The foreign citizens are accused of plotting to assassinate President Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials.

At a press conference on Saturday at the ministry’s headquarters, in front of some of the 400 seized firearms linked to the reported plot, Cabello accused Wilbert Joseph Castañeda, an active duty U.S. sailor, of leading the effort on behalf of U.S. intelligence.

“Castañeda is the head of the operation, placed here by the CIA,” said Cabello.

Castañeda’s arrest was first reported earlier this month. At the time, White House Spokesperson John Kirby denied that the Navy serviceman was in Venezuela on official business and argued his travel was for personal reasons.

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Wireless wunk

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Some of the largest living animals on the planet eat the tiniest food. For humpback whales, it’s krill – small shrimp-like animals floating in the ocean. Capturing enough krill can take a lot of work, like if your morning bowl of cereal were spread out across a football field. So humpbacks have developed a solution: bubbles. The 50-foot whales blow circles of bubbles underwater, creating a net of air that entraps the krill. A new study shows that humpbacks can do this with remarkable precision to corral their prey, even tailoring the bubble nets for the type of food they’re eating.

Continue Reading.

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It’s very funny how much of Lovecraft’s work can be seen as, effectively, an aristocrat’s existential horror at the idea that, as Rosa Luxemburg said, “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.”

In 1921, Lovecraft wrote ‘The Outsider’, one of the more clear expressions, in his works, of a fear of lacking a place in society. A man wakes up in a decaying, decrepit castle - once great, now in ruins - and descends, down to the townsfolk, who have renovated an old mansion, turning it into apartments. Upon seeing him, they panic, finding him terrifying and disgusting. Looking in the mirror, he sees that he is, in fact, a beast; even going so far to describe himself as “a stranger in this century.” In 1921, as the aristocracy gave its final breath, it’s not hard to see why.

However, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ stands as the most direct example of the ‘existential horror’ of capitalism. Luxemburg’s quote, that bourgeois society - capitalism - stands at the transition to socialism was not just an expression of a specific historical period. Capitalism innately, inherently works towards its own destruction. Capitalism develops and expands the proletariat, the class that aspires to destroy it. As capitalism develops science and technology, as it develops the means of production, it makes itself obsolete. Capitalist relations of production become limiting factors for new forms of industry - just as a nation that remained feudalist would be left behind and destroyed in the age of steam and industry, a nation that remains capitalist is dooming itself to the march of history. It is precisely the development of capitalism that makes possible, if not historically inevitable, the building of socialism. Compare this with the passage from ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Of course, socialism would seem like madness, in the eyes of the aristocrat. Comprehending, but briefly, the idea of communism, of a society without class, without class conflict and class oppression, might drive one to conclude that “mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside.“

Historical materialism, the scientific understanding of human society, cares very little for the ideas or desires of individuals, as far as shaping the course of society goes. It is quite resolute: the only options are class society, and the inevitable march towards communism, or no society. This would have been a very pressing fact in the 1920s, with the establishment of socialism in Russia, and socialist movements across the world spreading like prairie fire. ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ describes Cthulhu’s dream infecting the human psyche - “average people in society and business“ in the west are unaffected, though scientists and artists stir with it. Across the global south, however, there is great unrest, especially among indigenous peoples - even Ireland gets rowdy - and in South America, “a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen.“

The idea that class society is a specific historical phenomenon, one which is unerringly moving towards its own abolition, must be a frightening one for a member of the upper classes. I’ll leave it to Lovecraft to express this existential horror: “Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists, and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed.“

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Although located in the heart of Chongging, one of China's mega cities, Luohan Temple was constructed over 1000 years ago. Its ancient corridors lead to worn stone depictions of the Buddha while its wooden halls wafts with incense and are adorned with hundreds of local colourful deities.

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do you have that video of soinc going chill roomie you can have another helping

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Oh boy

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The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students. [...]

Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found.

But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.

“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.

They’ve never, until now, been able to build schools expressly on the public dime. [...]

When they were implemented in the 1990s, vouchers in Ohio, like in many places, were limited in scope; they were available only to parents whose children were attending (often underfunded) public schools in Cleveland. The idea was to give those families money that they could then spend on tuition at a hopefully better private school, thus empowering them with what was called school choice.

Over the decades, the state incrementally expanded voucher programs to a wider and wider range of applicants. And last year, legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine extended the most prominent of those programs, called EdChoice, to all Ohio families.

It was the ultimate victory for Ohio’s school-choice advocates. The problem, though, was that in many parts of Ohio and other states, especially rural areas, parents can’t spend this new voucher money because private schools are either too far away or already at capacity. [...]

Within months, the Legislature did precisely that. Led by Huffman, Republicans slipped at least $4 million in grants to private schools into a larger budget bill. There was little debate, in part because budget bills across the country have become too large to deliberate over every detail and, also, Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers in Ohio. [Note: Ohio voted 53% for Trump in 2020; unconstitutional gerrymandering allows Republicans to control 68% of the state House and 79% of the Senate.]

According to an Ohio Legislative Service Commission report, the grants, some of them over a million dollars, then went out to various Catholic schools around the state. ProPublica contacted administrators at each of these schools to ask what they will be using their new taxpayer money on, but they either didn’t answer or said that they didn’t immediately know. (One of the many differences between public and private schools is that the latter do not have to answer questions from the public about their budgets, even if they’re now publicly funded.)

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A[n anonymous] source close to Hezbollah told AFP that an Israeli airstrike on Friday killed the group’s elite Radwan unit chief, while the Israeli military said it conducted “a targeted strike” on the Lebanese capital.[...]

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency reported “an enemy raid targeting an apartment in a residential building in the al-Jamous area of the southern suburb” of Beirut.

20 Sep 24

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18/09/2024 - UNGA resolution calling for an end to Israel’s military campaign in occupied Palestinian territories

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moo deng vs the world

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Sneakers (1992, Phil Alden Robinson)