D Luria

Today on #BirdTV is entirely local programming, with the exception of Canada Geese yelling at the planes on the landing approach for #LAS

Thank you -- crabs are always appreciated 💜💜💜

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#NewsYouCanUse #FoodSecurity

This is the daily norm here. Both of us carry on like this, and have for 20 years.

Also, if I *have* added to the noise, I sincerely hope you will tell me. I can't fix what I can't see.

@rjhansen.bsky.social if I have added in any way to the craziness, I do apologize.

Proton Mail Suspended Journalist Accounts at Request of Cybersecurity Agency The journalists were reporting on suspected North Korean hackers. Proton only reinstated their accounts after a public outcry.

This is *very* bad news indeed. Proton is where most of us go for secure, hassle-free email.

theintercept.com/2025/09/12/p...

I get the impression ChatGPT doesn't like the works of T. Kingfisher.

*Saints however, are mostly like us in mundane detail, yet have *just* enough reality-bending ability to be helpful -- but not enough to cause widespread havoc.

*Saints, spirits, ancestors, katchina, loa -- all of that ilk.

I've often felt that humans really aren't emotionally mature enough or responsible enough to have access to anything with godlike powers. We remake divinities into images of our own worst selves with dreary regularity.

OK then.

I ***ADORE*** the notion of (nearly) all the creatures of earth rising up to depose malicious and unkind gods, and thereby becoming the Saints that humanity looks to for succor.

...just sayin.

No really, you've been warned. If spoilers make you sad, stop here.

OK, I have a LOT more words than that, but they are somewhat spoilery...

Just finished @tkingfisher.com _Hemlock & Silver_ and have just one word --

Flintwolves?!?

I would very much like to see that.

(I miss Ursula-the-Visual-Artist as ardently as I enjoy Ursula-the-Writer.)

@greta89.bsky.social checking in -- the EF gang misses you 💜💜💜

WinRAR Zero-Day CVE-2025-8088 Exploited to Spread RomCom Malware Follow us on Bluesky, Twitter (X), Mastodon and Facebook at @Hackread

Heads up, People of the Screen -- if WinRAR is your compression software of choice, do a manual patch/update IMMEDIATELY.

#NewsYouCanUse

hackread.com/winrar-zero-...

Before now, I never imagined Starbucks tried expanding into Israel, but of course they did. Hah!

...and yeah, coffee is and was Serious Business there.

It will be hotter than Tophet today, so bring lots of water! Enjoy your time with The Girl and your Daiso fix ;-D

*Anything* that requires violence and forced indoctrination to exist is questionable in the extreme at ANY scale.

It should be reiterated here that I have always been largely anti-Zionist -- as are nearly all the descendants of Jews whose families never left the Levant. From our perspective, Zionism is just another attempt at making Judaism conform to European (largely Christian) cultural expectations.

I think the big error in scaling was in making governments that were not made of representatives coming directly from the worker collectives. We see this in workers unions in the States. The farther away from shop stewardship the union reps are, the more corrupt the union becomes.

Likewise. You are one of the very few people with whom I will discuss any of this .

While kibbutzim have evolved away from their origins, socialism remains inseparable from the Zionism that brought Eretz Israel into being.

As such, I can see an argument against Soviet & Chinese _implementation_ of those ideas, but the ideas themselves are the rock Israel stands on.
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The scale difference comes from those polities' creating the entire state as one non-productive collective, whose voting members had no material relationship with production.

I grant this is an enormous departure from Marxist origins. Yet still, it is inarguably from the same root.

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In scale, certainly. In functional model, not at all. The first kibbutz, (Deganya) was intentionally classic Marxist workers cooperative. This is the very same model behind Soviet socialism & Chinese communism.
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Consequently, I find it peculiar when anyone upholds Zionism in the same breath they abhor Communism -- as many Israelis descended from Soviet expats do, to this very day.

Kibbutzim in their original form were explicitly Socialist collectives. Socialist thinking was a fundamental part of early 20th century Zionism.

Did you ever live on a kibbutz?

Yikes!

That cut-strings sensation is simply horrible. I wish you much hemoglobulin and mending 💜💜💜

(Having been busy chasing my own monkeys back into the biomedical circus tent, I am just now catching up on social media.)