● 08.19.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 19/08/2022: Neptune 7.5 and SDL 2.24.0

Posted in News Roundup at 4:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• We’ve built up some incredible backend infrastructure for our new website. We run through the big improvements, and where we still need some help.

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Linux Mint 21 are the TOP 2 Linux Distributions that You Could Be Using in 2022. But which one gives you better performance, which among them is the best? Which among them is more suitable FOR You? Ubuntu 22.04 or Linux Mint 21.

Applications

• Screen recording tools have become an essential utility for PCs and smartphones. You need a screen recorder to record your gameplay, a YouTube tutorial, or any other professional project. It helps you create videos for your audience or personal record, whichever may be your requirement.

• There is a common misconception that Linux users don’t have access to some of the basic apps that Windows and macOS users have, which is not true at all. So to bust that myth, here are some of the best screen recording apps that you can use on your Linux device. And the best part is that all of these apps are either open source or completely free for individual users.

• [...]

• It is difficult to find good screen recorders that are free to use. You can download, install, and test the apps listed above to find the one that suits you the best. These range from desktop apps to web apps, and some provide advanced features, while others focus more only on particular tasks.

• Similar to screen recording, you might need to take a screenshot of your Linux desktop. Almost all Linux desktop environments ship with a default screenshot app, but most of them have different keybinding and shortcuts, making it harder for the user to take screenshots on different desktops.

Instructionals/Technical

• Since Postfix version 2.3, Postfix supports custom bounce messages. This guide shows how to set up custom Postfix bounce messages and max queue lifetime.

• Every inquiry you could have can be answered on the internet. Finding the solutions to your queries is a great activity. But doing it every day without deleting the cookies, cache, and other temporary files from your Chrome browser might use up much space on your computer. Like other operating systems, Chromebook also gathers cache. So if you are a Chromebook user, you might clear the cache regularly. This guide will let you know how to delete cache files from the Chromebook.

• So the good practice for tech and the internet user is to clear cache routinely to ensure the device’s optimal performance. However, ChromeOS has no dedicated program or apps to clear cache quickly. Therefore, we must apply an unconventional technique using the Chrome browser.

• PowerDNS is a free and open-source authoritative nameserver written in C++. It is cross-platform and can run on Unix, Linux, and macOS operating systems. It supports several databases such as MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Oracle to store zone files and records.

• PowerDNS Admin is a web-based application that can be used for managing PowerDNS via a web browser. It allows you to create and manage DNS zones using the PowerDNS web interface. It offers very useful features, including IPv4 and IPv6 support, bulk domain, DNSSec support, AD, LDAP, SAML authentication, and more.

• “Yandex Browser” is a free fast and visually appealing alternative to Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft Edge. Users who want to switch to Yandex can easily import data such as bookmarks and the settings from other popular browsers in just a few steps.

• Well, this Russian Search engine company’s browser is based on Chromium and Opera elements, therefore we can use all addons that are compatible with Google Chrome and Opera. In addition to bookmark management and a password manager for automatic logins, the Windows program also offers an incognito mode that allows you to leave no traces on your PC while browsing.

• Set up a free Yandex user account, and just like Google or Firefox users can sync bookmarks or credentials with other devices running the same browser.

• For security, the browser offers Kaspersky’s integrated virus protection; tracking protection, phishing protection, blocking third-party cookies, and preventing unsolicited access to webcams, microphones, or USB devices.

• Kubernetes or k8s is an open-source platform for container orchestration that automates deployments, management, and scaling of containerized applications. Kubernetes is a container orchestration created by Google, and now become an open-source project and become standard for modern application deployment and computing platforms.

• Kubernetes is the solution for the modern container deployment era. It provides service discovery and load-balancing, storage orchestration, automated rollout and rollback, self-healing service, secret and configuration management. Kubernetes enables cost-effective cloud-native development.

• If you need macOS on your Linux PC for development purposes, you’ll be happy to know that it is possible to set up a VM in VirtManager using the macOS-Simple-KVM tool.

• [...]

• You’ll need to install VirtManager on your Linux PC to use macOS on your Linux PC. To install the software, open up a terminal window. You can open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T on the keyboard. Or, search for “Terminal” in the app menu.

• With the terminal window open, the installation can begin. Follow the installation instructions below to install VirtManager on your Linux PC.

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Linux Mint 21 Xfce.

• As you know, the ls command is used to list all directories and files that are stored on a computer, and it is the most basic command that every Linux user is aware of how to list files on a terminal, but some of them are not using an option that is available for use.

• So let me introduce to you some of the most common options which you can use to list files or directories, and not only that, after reading this article you can show your creativity to create your own personalized option as per your needs, which will help you to list files according to your preference.

• Well, I’ll try to show you most of the common options that you can use with the ls command, like listing files in reverse order, accessing time, showing only a directory, and many other interesting options, but while writing, if I missed something, then please put that command in the comment section for our readers.

• Since I joined Charm, I’ve been working and learning more about SSH, and I thought I would share a few quick tips and tricks with you.

• The cd command makes it easy to switch to another directory on Liniux, but only if you know where you’re heading. In this post, I discuss a couple of tricks for moving between known locations and provide a script for finding and “remembering” files or locations that you might want to reuse.

• One of the easiest things to do with the cd command is return to your home directory regardless of where you are sitting in the file system at the moment. Just type cd by itself, and you’ll be back in your home directory. Typing cd ~ will do the same thing, though adding the tilde won’t get you there any faster.

• Of all the Bash commands, poor old eval probably has the worst reputation. Justified, or just bad press? We discuss the use and dangers of this least-loved of Linux commands.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Eclipse IDE on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Eclipse is an open-source IDE used for java application development. The Eclipse IDE comes with a rich set of tools and features that are designed to help developers be more productive while they write or design code. Eclipse can run on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Development Environment) on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Games

• Soldier Boyz is the newest supported game of the Hypno engine, and it’s ready for public testing!

• Released in 1997 by Hypnotix and published by DreamCatcher Interactive and MCPA Interactive, this full-motion rail shooter is based on the 1995 film of the same name. The game starts when the daughter of an American billionaire is kidnapped by a group of Vietnamese terrorists. Then, it’s up to Major Howard Toliver, ex-Marine and highly decorated Vietnam veteran, to gather a deadly team for the dangerous mission of rescuing her. He recruits six prison inmates serving life sentences for a chance at a full presidential pardon.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Jammy porting is happening at full pace. Almost all the packages are now compiled and that leaves ISOs to be built and upgrade to be tested.

• As with any software or engineering project there’s not much point in putting a deadline on it, it’ll be ready when it’s ready. As a moving target the builds are often two steps forward and one step back cos suddenly there’s a new KDE Gear that needs built.

• Since Kate got LSP support some time ago (thanks to all the developers who made/make this possible, it is a great addition), I’ve been using it a lot; as you’d expect with any tool, it has some default behaviours that you’d want to disable, and some non-default ones that you want to make use of. Below are some of the config tweaks I’ve collected over time.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• KaOS 2022.08 moves to Pipewire as the default sound multimedia server and ships with the just released KDE Gear 22.08 apps.

• KaOS is an independent rolling-release distribution inspired by Arch Linux and entirely focused on the KDE Plasma Desktop and related Qt Toolkit-based software. It uses Pacman as its package manager but does not rely on software repositories developed and maintained by Arch Linux.

• Instead, the software is available from in-house repositories and is built exclusively for 64-bit machines.

• Unlike most other Linux distros, KaOS does not provide various installation images with GNOME, Xfce, LXQt, or any other desktop. Moreover, the packages for other desktops are not even included in the KaOS repositories.

• KaOS 2022.08 is the fifth released version of this Linux distro this year. So let’s see what’s new.

• Dubbed “Ada”, Neptune 7.5 is based on the software repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 11.4 “Bullseye” release, but it comes with a newer kernel, namely Linux 5.18.2, from the Debian Backports (Testing) repositories.

• There aren’t any major changes in this release, but Neptune 7.5 does come with a few new apps, including Timeshift for full system backups and rollbacks, as well as Persistent Creator 2.0 for creating a persistence partition on USB thumb drives.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Nothing is stopping Tumbleweed – it’s still full steam ahead with 7 snapshots released in one week, which means daily snapshots without interruptions—trying to get a new streak record? let’s see! So far we’re at 14 days of release without a gap. So far, the highest streak was 18 if I’m not mistaken (2021/1116-1203). In any case, these are just nice stats, but the quality of the snapshots has always been more important to us than the number of snapshots. And I’m convinced the Tumbleweed users to see this the same way.

Fedora Fluff / Red Hat (Mostly Openshift)

• Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

• I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

• Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL).

• EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and will never conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux distributions. EPEL uses much of the same infrastructure as Fedora, including buildsystem, bugzilla instance, updates manager, mirror manager and more.

• Red Hat has delivered a tech preview of its OpenShift containerization platform that can drive clusters spanning both x86 and Arm silicon.

• Version 4.10 of OpenShift, announced in March 2022, added the ability to run on Amazon Web Services Arm-powered Graviton CPUs. At the time, RedHat said the release was “only the start of our plans for OpenShift on Arm, in the coming releases you will see more and more of the add on features that run on x86 also being available for OpenShift on Arm.”

• The IBM subsidiary’s next release, version 4.11, debuted earlier this week and added an agent-based installer, more supported deployment configurations including the ability to run in Nutanix environments, and a higher level of FedRAMP compliance.

• And there’s also that tech preview, which Red Hat states is needed because “Arm continues its impressive march to full adoption.”

• In a marketplace that is becoming more and more crowded with both traditional and new competitors, it’s crucial that telecommunications service providers embrace disruption as a key component to capitalizing on the opportunities presented by 5G.

• New competitors are particularly threatening as their value propositions can compete on service quality and reliability that have been bastions of the traditional service provider offering. A trusted and reliable reputation will remain an important differentiator, but being seen as innovative is an additional key trait added to the mix. The evolution of a provider’s 5G core network is strategic in terms of innovation and will provide greater flexibility and increased agility to better serve customers and drive revenue growth.

• Learn on how to use mirror-registry to create a local copy that can be used to install OpenShift without external Internet connectivity.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Alongside the official flavors, some of Ubuntu’s other remixes have new 22.04.1 versions out: Unity, Cinnamon, and Kylin.

• We looked at Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon for their 22.04 releases not long ago. The new versions are not big changes so we’re not going to re-review them so soon. The main purpose of today’s update is to add some more data points to our recent remix roundup.

• Kylin is in a slightly different position to the other two. Kylin is very much an official Ubuntu flavor, but it is intended for use by Chinese speakers, especially in the People’s Republic of China. It has its own, separate website. The Reg FOSS desk has been experimenting with Kylin for a little while now, and we plan to do a full review soon because the 22.04.1 release is noticeably different from 22.04.

• Ubuntu Unity

• Ubuntu Unity’s scores look a little worse than they should for what is, by modern standards, a lightweight desktop. There are at least two valid reasons for this. One is that Ubuntu Unity supports Flatpak as well as Ubuntu’s own Snap format. Although no Flatpaks come preinstalled, that does mean it’s a little bigger.

• [...]

• There are multiple other desktops out there which are still maintained, of course, and there’s definitely room for some more Ubuntu remixes. In the past, as well as UbuntuDDE, there were remixes with CDE and the Lumina desktop from the now-discontinued FreeBSD variant TrueOS, but neither have updated in a while.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Linux 5.18 version landed in Fedora 36 and it includes a new ssd130x DRM driver for the Solomon OLED display controllers.

• One of the supported devices is SSD1306, which seems to be a quite popular display controller for small and cheap (I bought a pack of 3 on Amazon for less than 15€) monochrome OLED panels.

• I do a lot of development and testing on RPi boards and found that these small OLED panels are useful to get console output without the need to either connect a HDMI monitor or a serial console.

• When creating videos, making smooth, level movements at a constant speed is often a very important requirement, as sudden changes can leave viewers uncomfortable. But rather than purchasing an expensive gimbal-stabilized rig or a commercial motorized camera platform, Instructables user dslrdiy decided to devise their own four-axis system using a repurposed 3D printer with the goal of being able to easily control it through a phone.

• The old 3D printer already contained most of the parts for this build, such as several stepper motors, a controller board, and plenty of miscellaneous hardware. The main axis at the base allows for the primary assembly to move side-to-side with just a single stepper motor, while the other three axes sit on top. These include tilting up and down, rotating around the Z-axis, and rolling.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Happy Friday, everyone –let’s review the Apache community’s activities from over the past week…

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Ubuntu’s default LibreOffice office suite got a big updates! See what’s new and how to install guide.

• LibreOffice finally added WebP image format support by releasing the 7.4 release. As well, this release features new remote grammar checker: LanguageTool API; Calc now supports sparklines and uses 16,384 columns in spreadsheets; Show Changes mode does no longer count deleted list items, instead it now shows changes in numbering correctly.

• LibreOffice 7.4 community edition is a major upgrade to the previous release after six months.

• With LibreOffice 7.4, The Document Foundation mentions that the development is now focused on “interoperability” with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.

• While this is great news for users migrating away from MS Office, the upgrade also introduces some cool features. Here, let me highlight the best parts of the release.

• Yesterday, The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice 7.4, our latest major release. TDF helped to coordinate the release, but most of the work was done by community volunteers and certified developers in the ecosystem.

• We at TDF would like to say a big thanks to everyone who helped out – but don’t just take it from us! Here’s a selection of congratulations and thanks we saw, across social media, Reddit and other places…

Programming/Development

• The idea of beginning to monetize your desktop or mobile app, digital device, or other online service can be a daunting one. You might be looking for a convenient way to set up a new revenue stream but you don’t want it to be a hindrance or annoyance from a UX perspective. You also won’t want to worry about inappropriate or irrelevant ads running on your platform that may distract your users or deter them from using your service again.

• Kubernetes is a complex platform typically deployed across a number of servers to achieve high availability. However, creating multi-node clusters is often not practical for individual DevOps engineers performing local testing.

• Fortunately, there are many options available for installing development Kubernetes clusters on a single machine. This allows DevOps engineers to verify many aspects of their code and deployment process before deploying to a shared cluster.

• In this post, I look at some of the options available to DevOps engineers for running a development Kubernetes cluster.

Java

• In this Help Net Security video, Erik Costlow, Senior Director of Product Management at Azul, talks about Java centric vulnerabilities and the headache they have become for developers everywhere.

• He touches on the need for putting security back into DevOps and how developers can better navigate vulnerabilities that are taking up all of their efforts and keeping them from being able to focus on the task at hand.

Leftovers

• If you’ve ever been at an eatery and thought the server was a bit robotic, you should try San Francisco’s Mezli. The restaurant claims to be the first one to be totally automated. There are no humans in there. The restaurant serves Mediterranean grain bowls. Honestly, it is hard to decide if Mezli is a restaurant or a very sophisticated vending machine.

• Have you ever been tempted by those metal 3D printing services? [Carter Hurd] has, and puts them to the test with a wristwatch. (Video, embedded below.)

• If you’re a die-hard sports fan, there’s nothing you love more than staying abreast of developments in the league, from top to bottom. [Kiu] had a family member that was big into NFL, so set about building them a remarkably cool ladder tracker.

• Billy is around 60 and a skilled carpenter, among several we hired in 2019 when our house in Micanopy, Florida was being built. He’s tall and lanky, chain smokes, coughs, and has a working-class Georgia accent. He often teased me about being Jewish. He was poor and Jews are rich, he told me conclusively. I was cheap and he was generous, he said. In fact, he demonstrated his prodigality one afternoon by offering me a gift of some of his medical marijuana. I refused it, thinking I was protecting his valuable stash, but I realized afterwards I may have insulted him. One day, I told Billy that a crew of window-washers was coming, so he’d have to stay out of their way.

• “You mean the [N-word] ones, from Gainesville?”

• If you’ve ever tried to drill a hole on an angle with a power drill, you’ve probably drilled some pretty shocking holes. To do it right, you really need some mechanical assistance, and this jig from [Kartik_Nandrui] should do the trick.

• Imagine for a moment that you design products for a living. But you can’t design all the things, so you have to buy some of your stuff from big-box stores just to go about your everyday life. This is more or less what happened to [Eric Strebel], who recently bought a bathroom faucet from IKEA. This particular flat-pack faucet came with a single-use plastic nut driver to be used in putting the faucet together. Since there is no marking that indicates the plastic type, it can’t be easily recycled. Not even the size of the business end is indicated. So between the shoddy plastic construction and the lack of information, most people are going to just throw this thing away. And that’s terrible.

Education

• “Especially because my kids are African American,” Allen said, “I wanted them to have the best education opportunities they can have and give them access to whatever they need to neutralize the systemic effects of being Black children in a society that often discriminates against those children.”

• Allen had attended a private school in the elementary grades, but had attended a Montgomery County high school, which she eventually graduated from, that was known as “the worst” high school in the county, according to her. That education experience left her “feeling segregated from most of the families in the county,” she said.

Hardware

• Mecanum wheels are popular choices for everything from robots to baggage handling equipment in airports. Depending on their direction of rotation, they can generate forces in any planar direction, providing for great maneuverability. [ATOM] set about building just such a robot chassis, and learned plenty in the process.

• In the old days, it wasn’t uncommon to put an AM radio near a computer or a monitor and deliberately cause interference to have a crude form of sound generation. Did you miss out on that? No! Thanks to [luambfb] you can now do the same trick with a common LCD monitor. You’ll need the horizontal refresh rate of the monitor in question.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Meanwhile, even though IRA is loaded with good stuff to fight global warming, it’s not likely enough to put out the heat. After all, the Inflation Reduction Act is the third or fourth iteration of Biden’s Build Back Better $3.5T prominently mentioned in an article in The Economist d/d July 21st, 2022: American Climate Policy is in Tatters—Manchin Single-handedly scuttled Biden’s BBB Plans for $3.5 trillion.

• There’s real tragedy behind the slimmed down version of Biden’s BBB $3.5T. Even though the Inflation Reduction Act of a few hundred billion is a big number, inclusive of tax-oriented deductions, it is challenged by a capricious global climate system that appears to be broken down and totally out of kilter.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (ruby-tzinfo), Mageia (nvidia-current and nvidia390), SUSE (python-PyYAML, ucode-intel, and zlib), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, postgresql-10, postgresql-12, postgresql-14, and rsync).

• Sometimes you just hit on such crazy stories that you have to report them. That’s what I’m doing with this article. It sounds so bizarre. Microsoft reported that old laptops that played the Janet Jackson music video “Rhythm Nation” would crash. Just being in the vicinity of the song could cause your laptop to crash.

• A new Linux kernel exploitation called Dirty Cred was revealed at last week’s Black Hat security conference.

• The flaw which is identified as CVE-2022-0847 has been discovered by Zhenpeng Lin, a PhD Student, and his team, who tried to exploit the Linux kernel like the infamous Dirty Pipe vulnerability but with different approaches.

• More than 200 malicious packages have been discovered infiltrating the PyPI and npm open source registries this week.

• These packages are largely typosquats of widely used libraries and each one of them downloads a Bash script on Linux systems that run cryptominers.

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 221. This version includes the following changes:

Defence/Aggression

• This is the fourteenth in a series about a journey, by train and bicycle, across Russia to Crimea shortly before the war began.

• Even though the fighting in 1853-56 had aspects of a pan-European war—there were battles fought in the Baltic, the Balkans, and Turkey, in addition to Crimea—the first Crimean War was fought for control of the Russian port of Sevastopol (sometimes spelled as Sebastopol), a natural harbor on the southwestern side of the peninsula.

• Throughout its military operation, Israel has repeatedly underscored the point that the war was targeting the Islamic Jihad Movement only, not Hamas or anyone else.

• A somewhat similar scenario had transpired in May 2019 and again in November of the same year. The May clashes began when two Israeli soldiers were wounded by a Palestinian sniper at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.

• We look at the recent murders of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous researcher Bruno Pereira in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and what it says about Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who once vowed, “There won’t be one more inch of Indigenous reserve.” Phillips and Pereira went missing in June, and their remains were found dismembered about two weeks later. This week, a Brazilian Senate commission investigating the murders recommended a military operation in the Javari Valley to address the rise in organized crime there. Police have arrested five people linked to the murders and identified a suspect arrested earlier as the leader of an illegal fishing organized crime group in the Amazon region. “When the president dismantles public policies and public institutions that should serve Indigenous rights, when the government persecutes its civil servants whose mandate it should be to protect the Indigenous peoples and the policies applied to them, we become more vulnerable,” says Indigenous lawyer Eliésio Marubo, who led a search and rescue mission for Phillips and Pereira and recently returned to Brasília after visiting with U.S. lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to call for an independent investigation into the murders.

Environment

• Over the years he’s written a few books on the coming catastrophes we face as a result of ignoring the root causes of the climate catastrophe we face. His latest book is Hothouse Earth (2022). It’s grim and grizzles.

• We communicated recently and this is the unedited transcript of our exchange.

• The transformation is partially in process, partially done and no longer sharp but certainly has us wondering what the upstart to all this might be, whether there’s another sharp transformation facing us, other than the terminating one facing us: we’ve toxified the planet to an uninhabitable point. For us. Viruses and other lower order winners survive. But before that one, there is a political one that can be predicted. Imagine whether or not a second Trump or Trump clone presidency would be able to survive the crush of crises and catastrophe right now in the wings and all impervious to market efficiency. Faith in that has brought us to the point where five Americans have more wealth than 50% of all Americans.

• Market solutions to the steady disastrous heating up of the planet will lose their charm. There is no way to reduce temperature rise without reducing profits. Illusions of turning our own extinction on the planet into a marketing frontier, “a new kind of carbon-based economic market which can be used to buy and sell the very thing we don’t have — time,” are illusions that will sharply vanish.

• So, do its holdings “create cleaner oceans”? Its top 10 companies (as of late August 2022) look pretty busy polluting, purveying plastic, or processing conflict minerals. Here they are:

• Maybe the top holdings should be companies devoted to cleaner water? Consider PureCycle, a company that’s taken a process developed at Proctor & Gamble, and now uses it to deal with actual plastic waste. PureCycle makes shower bottles made from plastic salvaged from stadium dustbins. Its employees run cleanup days to pick up litter along the Ohio River, then recycle the polypropylene plastic. With plastic recycling constantly criticized as a sham, here’s a company that at least attempts to really do it.

• The authors seek to gain support for the U.N.’s resolution as a way government can avert the already advancing climate change crisis. But also, implicitly, the call is for people to downscale, “Walden-ize,” otherwise there’d be no bottom-up (populist) pressure on policy makers to support “going peasant.” Obviously back to feudalism is not what’s meant, but to a basis for agriculture that reclaims food as a right, and restores meaning, dignity and worth to localities and local food production, such that going backward is “aspirational!”

• It seems they presume that “backward” is the way forward to the future we who want the good-for-all want, the only future worth conceiving. But reality, in the market-based neoliberal system we’re in, makes any such legitimate call based in the common good a threat to that system. Such a call, then, also demands implicitly we give up our comfort in that system, that we become uncomfortable in it. Everybody now, on some level, “gets” the terrifying threat of climate catastrophe to human existence as we know it. But few can hear a call to “peasantism”as a call to reinvent our way of life and its comfortingly routine expectations. Few can hear it as aspiration! So, instead of sober approaches to our in-common problem of climate change, we have heightening chaos, deception, divisiveness and denial.

• Climate campaigners were arrested on Thursday after demonstrating outside Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) Manhattan office, where they expressed opposition to the fossil fuel-friendly permitting reforms the New York Democrat agreed to bring to the floor to secure Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) support for the Inflation Reduction Act.

Finance

• The “national divorce” talk has only increased since then, and of course there’s nothing new about the concept. As you may recall from high school history classes, hundreds of thousands died in a war over the last attempt at such a thing in the mid-19th century.

• I’ve got nothing against secession as such. If people don’t want to remain affiliated with a polity, they should be free to exit the relationship. In fact, the namesake of the media center I write for, William Lloyd Garrison, encouraged NORTHERN secession: “No union with slaveholders!”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1955 book Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer Prize for describing eight senators who went against party expediency to do what they thought was right. Many suffered political consequences. The book, although more than ghostwritten by JFK staffer Ted Sorenson, added to Kennedy’s intellectual aura and was an important step of the created mythology in the rise of the future president.

• Cheney was one of the recipients of the Kennedy family’s Profiles in Courage 2022 awards. Did she deserve it?

• + Liz Cheney didn’t do the one thing she was meant to do: convince any of her fellow Republicans that Trump was a threat to the Republic and, by extension, the “values” of the Republican Party, because Trump’s “values” are now symbiotic with those of the GOP. So, she was a failure. In fact, the Cheneys–Dick, Lynne & Liz–have been agents of political corruption since Dick’s tenure in the Nixon Administration, steadily eating away at whatever frail ethical foundations the party may have had for three decades, rotting clean through by 2001–the detritus providing the seedbed from which the toxic tendrils of Trumpism sprouted. So it is fitting that this is her political end, undone by the savagery of a party her family re-shaped in its own depraved image.

• + Ideologically Liz Cheney was pretty much in lockstep with Trump, backing nearly every vicious social and economic policy he sent to the Hill. (She voted for Trump bills 93% of the time.) She might as well be Stephen Miller’s political doppelgänger. Liz only diverged from Trump on those few occasions when he went soft on foreign policy–on Russia, Iraq, Syria, North Korea and Afghanistan. She’s always been a guard dog of her father’s ruinous legacy. Her objections to the J6th insurrection were to its overtness, which risked exposing the way the continuity of power–real power–is maintained in the US, from one administration to the next, with little real change in policy. Call it the Deep State if you like–though it’s really just “the State.” If anything, it was the clumsiness of Trump that offended the sensibility of the Cheneys. Because Liz and Dick both know from experience there are subtler ways to fix the outcomes of elections.

Censorship/Free Speech

• It was a chilling reminder that the fatwa condemning him to death never risked going stale, even if it might have been put into a form of archived cold storage. Declared by the Iran’s sickly spiritual ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Rushdie’s remarkable crime was to have blasphemed against the Prophet Muhammad in the novel The Satanic Verses. The supreme leader, having hardly distinguished himself in a bloody war against Iraq, needed a supreme distraction.

• The entire exercise was an example of how irony and humour have no place for dour, dogmatic priestliness. How dare an author, in a work of fiction, playfully and plausibly claim that the Prophet was not the sole editor of the message to Angel Gibreel (Gabriel), and that Satan had cheekily inserted his role into it? And that this was done using the medium of Gibreel Farishta’s hallucinations?

• Back in the spring of 2021, we wrote briefly about yet another Steven Biss SLAPP lawsuit. This one was filed by the brother of disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Jack Flynn, arguing that CNN defamed him by showing a video of both Flynns and other family members, repeating the QAnon slogan “where we go one, we go all” while implying that the Flynns were “followers” of QAnon. The CNN report barely mentioned the Flynns at all. It was a report about a QAnon gathering, but showed the clip, which the Flynns themselves had placed on social media. Jack Flynn, with Steven Biss as his lawyer, argued that this clip was defamatory.

• If you’re not familiar with the story and history behind the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then go read up on it, because it’s a great story. For you lazy bums out there, I’ll summarize it thusly. A 24-year old in Oregon got sick of religious types in Kansas trying to inject the teaching of intelligent design in public education institutions under the guise of “teaching the debate” or “equal time” with, well, actual science. As a result, he created a spoof religion centering on a monster made of pasta that uses his noodley appendages to do all kinds of things in our world, including changing carbon dating results so as to hide the actual age of the world and universe. He then argued for “equal time” for this religion in Kansas, stating that if it was good enough for Christians, it was good enough for “Pastafarians”.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• But maybe that’s the point. Indeed, if killing Assange isn’t the point, Biden should prove it, by pardoning him now. Biden doesn’t feel like it. Unlike Jamal Khashoggi, whose murder he deplored before he didn’t, Biden never censured the years of abuse heaped on Assange by the U.S. government. He enabled it. Unlike Trump, who may very well have been threatened with impeachment by senators like Mitch “Democracy’s Gravedigger” McConnell, if Trump dared dream of pardoning Assange, Biden was never vulnerable to such a hypothetical menace. In fact, he’s in McConnell’s corner. By his inaction, it’s clear that Biden approves of the criminal state attack on Assange.

• Both Biden and Trump look like moral midgets compared to Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who last month handed a letter to Biden about the besieged journalist. In this epistle, according to Reuters July 18, Lopez Obrador “defended Julian Assange’s innocence and renewed a previous offer of asylum to the Wikileaks founder,” in Mexico. This offer came in the month after the U.K. approved Assange’s extradition to the U.S., where he faces up to 175 years in prison on what everybody knows are trumped up charges under a law that shouldn’t even exist, the Espionage Act.

Civil Rights/Policing

• No statement rang more true as the country recently turned its attention to my home state of Kansas. We’re known for three things: The “Wizard of Oz,” our amazing barbeque, and our conservative voter base.

• But our ballot initiative on abortion shook that last notion up.

• It seems that the crux of his argument is that liberalism puts “such stress on reason” that “it attracts those who are helpless at conflict.” Rather than fearing conflict, he states, liberals must acknowledge the occasional necessity of brute force and embrace it. Or, “Sometimes, at least, set a brute to catch a brute.” It is a foolish and naïve argument, dripping with an all too familiar British nostalgia for Empire. It must be noted that liberalism’s apparent aversion to conflict is a falsity. For those on top, the conflict inherent in liberalism may be hidden; however, liberalism is rooted in conflict and violence – it simply solidifies its forms of violent conflict as the normal state of affairs.

• Liberalism goes entirely undefined throughout the article. Though the author states that “there is nothing innate about liberalism that mandates evasiveness,” he makes no suggestion about the things that might be innate to it. This is a telling and important aspect of the piece. Whatever great thing is under siege, seemingly on all fronts, is left to the reader’s imagination. He is not alone in this vagueness – evasiveness may not be innate to liberalism but it does seem to plague definitions of it. To speak of liberalism, that great catchword for modern pan-European society, it is necessary to better examine what it actually means.

• There are many intersecting streams feeding into the river of US-American fascitization. The overlapping and combining tributaries include the following:

• +1. A capitalist system whose underlying tendency towards the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and hence power repeatedly humiliates, de-legitimizes, and discredits democracy in the eyes of masses, helping open the door to authoritarian “solutions.”  This system’s inherent generation of ecological crises creates catastrophes certain to fuel late fascism.

• Number of months after signing PRWORA that President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman: less than 1 month

• The publication itself is a combination of a book, a CD, and a film. Beyond the sheer beauty of the package itself—one might run out of praises when describing the CD packaging alone—is the beauty of the music itself. Tragic, triumphant, reflective, sometimes angry, and joyful only begin the train of adjectives suggested by this reviewer in his attempt to describe the emotions felt while listening to the disc. Most of the music features voice as the primary instrument, whether performed by the aforementioned chorus, the Berea Songs of Slavery and Emancipation Ensemble assembled especially for this recording or one of the other groups and soloists. A friend, Thomas MacDonald—a tenor who studied with stars from the Met and La Scala—noted after listening to the recording: “All the soloists…have richly colored timbres, the males especially so. Though not trained in the classical sense like Paul Robeson or William Warfield, they are nevertheless unforced (performances) and the lyrics are deeply conveyed.” One anomaly in the selection of songs is an old-timey bluegrass-type tune titled “The True Spirit” performed by the Bluegrass Ensemble of Berea College.

• For those who are unfamiliar with Berea College, let me describe it. Berea is a small college in eastern Kentucky. It was founded in 1855 by a Presbyterian minister who was an abolitionist and it was the first integrated, co-educational college in the South. In addition, it does not charge tuition to its admitted students. For those readers familiar with the author and ecologist Wendell Berry, this was his home and the town of Berea was the model for his fictional burg of Port William. In addition, the college is home to a world-renowned school of woodworking and other folk arts. When I lived in Asheville, NC, works by woodworking students of the college competed in juried shows sponsored by various associations and the National Park Service, often winning most of the top awards.

• Having taken over the country as soon as US troops evacuated, the Taliban quickly acquired over $7 billion in American-funded military equipment that had been in the inventory of the former Afghan government before it collapsed, according to a new report released this week by the US Defense Department inspector general. With this military might, the Taliban has been able to enforce strict rules according to Sharia Islamic law, which forbids activities such as music, art and of course, education for girls.

• From 2001 until 2021, according to a UNESCO study, the percentage of female education in Afghanistan rose rapidly and remained steady. In fact, Datasets from Afghanistan’s national entrance exam, called Kankor, show that the number of female participants in the Kankor examinations gradually increased over those 20 years. Since the Taliban gained power, the fundamentalist Shiite Islam group has whittled away at women’s rights, freedoms and liberties in the country. The question now is what can women do about it? The answer? Nothing, according to some.

• The protagonist is a decidedly modern character in terms of his dissolution.  There is contained within him a particle of the anomie and listlessness of a modern world; in a Nietzschean-like fashion, it is all too easy for this often vacillating and timid priest to imagine that God is dead.  The moment of nihilism is encouraged by the darkness which falls over the desert at night, the elemental shadows of the forest, and the sense of this small rotund figure making his way through the murky blackness, a blind creature groping its way toward an uncanny fate: ‘It was evening and forest; monkeys crashed invisibly among the trees with an effect of clumsiness and recklessness, and what were probably snakes hissed away like match-flames through the grass. He wasn’t afraid of them. They were a form of life, and he could feel life retreating from him all the time.’[2]  There are times in the novel when the world itself is regarded from the same lonely, lofty purview: ‘it would roll heavily in space under its fog like a burning and abandoned ship.’[3]

• The stark poetry, the sense of a vast cosmological loneliness acts to throw into relief the priest’s own struggle.  Here he is, pressing through the dismal darkness, encountering the fleeting, haunting faces of the impoverished peasants, trying to survive and yet it is in this condition – reduced to an elemental sense of being, stripped of all artifice and privilege – where he most explicitly and violently encounters the most fundamental questions of his existence. In the shadowy hinterlands between life and death it is there where the cardinal elements of his personality – his strengths and frailties – are revealed, laid bare, in all their truth.  As a priest with a comfortable life, both content and privileged, his was an existence taken for granted, a complacent existence – and despite the eloquence of his proselytising – in many ways a thoughtless one.  Now such privilege is removed from him by the brutal mechanics of fate – moving through the isolation and harshness of the plains and mountains, he is compelled to fall through a different type of darkness.  An inner darkness, where he must confront nakedly every unsavoury and pious act of his past, where he is forced to question his faith and to discover those moments in his personal history that might provide the clue to some kind of redemption in the meagre amount of time he has left.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

• These are really cool! Using SSH for little things like this is so cool.

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