I would like to read what is the approach of people in this community

I take an hybrid approach: I bring a change, but I keep a pace that make me sweat lightly, so I don't need to take a shower at work. For the same reason I put my stuff in a pannier on the bike rack

Testing two completely different ways of bike commuting

Over the years, the way I've approached bike commuting has evolved so much that I now think there are two totally different approaches. This video offers advice on both of them so you can find the ...

^{Canadian Civil}

The court's conservative majority questioned whether some efforts to increase the voting power of Black people and other minority populations might be unconstitutional.

Archive article: archive.ph/otSN0

https://www.axios.com/2025/10/15/voting-rights-act-supreme-court-louisiana

cross-posted from: lemdro.id/post/30346791

Many of the 90 bodies of Palestinians returned to Gaza by Israeli authorities under the ceasefire deal showed signs of torture and execution, including blindfolds, cuffed hands and bullet wounds in the head, according to doctors’ accounts.

“Almost all of them had been blindfolded, and had been bound up and they had gunshots between the eyes. Almost all of them had been executed,” said Dr Ahmed al-Farra, the head of Nasser hospital’s paediatric department.

Palestinian bodies returned by Israel show signs of torture and execution, say doctors

Almost all had been blindfolded and had gunshot wounds between the eyes, says medic at Nasser hospital in Gaza

^{Julian Borger (The Guardian)}

“As a result of the genocidal war committed by Israel, many hostages were killed with their Palestinian resistance guards, and communications were lost with some of the units responsible for the bodies,” the source told MEE.

“The Israeli public should hold Netanyahu, his cabinet, and the Israeli army responsible for the killing of these hostages and the loss of their bodies under the rubble, as more than 10,000 civilian Palestinians [are believed to be under the rubble].”

The source added [that] Hamas’s Qassam Brigades “frequently warned” that the Israeli army’s actions would lead to the deaths of captives, but “Israel did not scale back its attacks”.

“The Qassam units in charge of guarding Israelis, alive and dead, were targeted. The main difficulty [in finding the bodies] is losing contact with the guards, because the Israelis killed them.”

The source said that Hamas was committed to fulfilling its obligation under the agreement to return the remains of all of the captives, and said it was working hard to do so.

He noted that the wording of the agreement required Hamas to return the bodies “as soon as possible” and said Hamas was willing to cooperate with international entities, as agreed in the deal.

“Nothing was hidden,” he said. “[Hamas has] fulfilled its commitment with handing over the living hostages, despite all the bad faith from Israel by changing the list of the Palestinian prisoners to be released, not allowing the top names in the list to be released, and changing the list at the last minute."

“Despite that it (Hamas) fulfilled its commitments and released all alive hostages on time, as well as four dead hostages.”

The source added that Israel’s destruction of Gaza has “really changed the geography of the area”, making it “extremely difficult” to identify locations.

He condemned Israel’s decision to keep the Rafah crossing closed as a “serious infringement of the agreement” that would further hinder rescue and aid efforts.

“We call on the mediators to intervene immediately to resolve this matter,” he said.

Exclusive: Hamas says Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ destruction of Gaza behind delay in locating captives' bodies

A senior Hamas source has told Middle East Eye that Israel bears responsibility for delays in locating and returning the bodies of captives still missing in Gaza.

^{David Hearst (Middle East Eye)}

Hi all,

First off, I want to apologize for all the server instability. We long ago outgrew our instance size, but I was unable to afford a larger node on our provider, Vultr. We were maxing out every part of the server whenever any even slightly significant number of users were on the fediverse.

I've finally found the time to migrate us to a new provider, which allows us to step up to a much more powerful configuration. That migration has now been completed. I actually intended to post about the downtime on this community this morning before beginning, but when I went to do so, the server was already down and struggling to come back up. So I went ahead with the migration.

Server before 4cpu/16GB/400GB NVMe
Server after 8cpu/64GB/1Tb NVMe

Please update this thread if you are seeing any issues around any part of the site. This means duplicate threads, things that aren't federating, inability to load profiles, etc.

There is still database tuning that needs to occur, so you should expect some downtime here and there, but otherwise the instance should be much more stable from now on.

During this process I also improved several other aspects of operating the server, so any 'actual' downtime should be accompanied by proper maintenance pages (that hopefully don't get wiped by ansible anymore), so that will also be a good indicator of legitimate maintenance.

Once again, I really apologize for all of the downtime. It's very frustrating to use a server that operates like this, I understand.

snowe

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6403457

Zip ties. Helicopters. Crowded cells. Guns trained on bewildered workers. Foul water. Forced vaccinations. An unconscious detainee left on the floor by negligent guards. A pregnant woman in handcuffs. A detainee being called “Rocket Man” (Donald Trump’s nickname for Kim Jong Un) by sneering federal agents. A menstruating woman forced to attend to her period with only toilet paper.

These are the details of 316 South Korean nationals’ experiences in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention that have flooded the country’s media in the weeks after the September 4 raid on a Hyundai-LG electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia. A wave of fury is now pouring forth from across South Korean society — and the political consequences are only just beginning.

There is far more at stake than a single factory in Georgia, which by itself represented 8,500 jobs and $4.3 billion in investment, and is just one of 23 plants being built across the U.S. by Korean conglomerates. Since the raid, the U.S. and South Korea have announced that Korean workers will be able to use B-1 visas and ESTA visa waivers to continue working in the U.S. A new bill in Congress, the Partner with Korea Act, also seeks to extend 15,000 professional E-4 visas to South Koreans for the first time.

But U.S. flexibility on immigration is not all that matters. Seoul and Washington have yet to finalize their trade deal instigated by Trump’s threat to impose a 25 percent blanket tariff on South Korean goods. At the current stage of negotiations, South Korea has agreed to accept a 15 percent tariff on its exports and provide tremendous investments and other financial agreements: $350 billion in state-backed short-term investment, $150 billion in private sector contracts with U.S. corporations, and a guarantee to purchase $100 billion in U.S. liquid natural gas. Despite so much on the table, a written agreement has yet to be produced, and negotiations are proving tense as the Trump administration presses for Seoul to provide the lion’s share of its $350 billion commitment in cash. While some of the shock over the ICE raid has died down, Washington’s conduct over the course of months of negotiations has also raised deeper questions in South Korea about the real nature of the alliance — and whether this is a relationship that can last.

The Art of the Steal

The anger unleashed by ICE’s abuse of Korean workers has been building for some time. Trump’s tariff threats, announced in March, hit South Korea at a difficult time, when the impeachment of former President Yoon Suk Yeol was unresolved, and the country was reeling from years of flagging economic performance.

The issue was not only a matter of timing. The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act also used similar (though less onerous) tariff threats to force South Korean conglomerates to transfer production and make large investments in the U.S. — which is how the Hyundai-LG plant made its way to Georgia in the first place. Having already complied with the previous administration, South Korea nevertheless now finds itself facing an even graver economic threat that could lead to recession: not just a 25 percent tariff on all exports (since reduced to 15 percent), but sector-based tariffs impacting most of South Korea’s key industries as well.

While much of the anger on either side of the Pacific has focused on the current administration in Washington, Trump’s tariffs are just the latest in a string of U.S. policies that have sought to deny South Korea its economic sovereignty, open its markets to foreign takeover, and degrade the rights and dignity of its working people.

Full Article

thelastaxolotl [he/him]

2025-10-11 23:29:26

After Hyundai ICE Raid, Even South Korea’s Capitalists Question US Relations

Zip ties. Helicopters. Crowded cells. Guns trained on bewildered workers. Foul water. Forced vaccinations. An unconscious detainee left on the floor by negligent guards. A pregnant woman in handcuffs. A detainee being called “Rocket Man” (Donald Trump’s nickname for Kim Jong Un) by sneering federal agents. A menstruating woman forced to attend to her period with only toilet paper.

These are the details of 316 South Korean nationals’ experiences in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention that have flooded the country’s media in the weeks after the September 4 raid on a Hyundai-LG electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia. A wave of fury is now pouring forth from across South Korean society — and the political consequences are only just beginning.

There is far more at stake than a single factory in Georgia, which by itself represented 8,500 jobs and $4.3 billion in investment, and is just one of 23 plants being built across the U.S. by Korean conglomerates. Since the raid, the U.S. and South Korea have announced that Korean workers will be able to use B-1 visas and ESTA visa waivers to continue working in the U.S. A new bill in Congress, the Partner with Korea Act, also seeks to extend 15,000 professional E-4 visas to South Koreans for the first time.

But U.S. flexibility on immigration is not all that matters. Seoul and Washington have yet to finalize their trade deal instigated by Trump’s threat to impose a 25 percent blanket tariff on South Korean goods. At the current stage of negotiations, South Korea has agreed to accept a 15 percent tariff on its exports and provide tremendous investments and other financial agreements: $350 billion in state-backed short-term investment, $150 billion in private sector contracts with U.S. corporations, and a guarantee to purchase $100 billion in U.S. liquid natural gas. Despite so much on the table, a written agreement has yet to be produced, and negotiations are proving tense as the Trump administration presses for Seoul to provide the lion’s share of its $350 billion commitment in cash. While some of the shock over the ICE raid has died down, Washington’s conduct over the course of months of negotiations has also raised deeper questions in South Korea about the real nature of the alliance — and whether this is a relationship that can last.

The Art of the Steal

The anger unleashed by ICE’s abuse of Korean workers has been building for some time. Trump’s tariff threats, announced in March, hit South Korea at a difficult time, when the impeachment of former President Yoon Suk Yeol was unresolved, and the country was reeling from years of flagging economic performance.

The issue was not only a matter of timing. The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act also used similar (though less onerous) tariff threats to force South Korean conglomerates to transfer production and make large investments in the U.S. — which is how the Hyundai-LG plant made its way to Georgia in the first place. Having already complied with the previous administration, South Korea nevertheless now finds itself facing an even graver economic threat that could lead to recession: not just a 25 percent tariff on all exports (since reduced to 15 percent), but sector-based tariffs impacting most of South Korea’s key industries as well.

While much of the anger on either side of the Pacific has focused on the current administration in Washington, Trump’s tariffs are just the latest in a string of U.S. policies that have sought to deny South Korea its economic sovereignty, open its markets to foreign takeover, and degrade the rights and dignity of its working people.

Full Article

After Hyundai ICE Raid, Even South Korea’s Capitalists Question US Relations | Truthout

Can the US and South Korea’s tenuous alliance survive Trump’s tariffs and ICE’s raid on a Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia?

^{britney (Truthout)}

I have a brother laser Printer which I use via IPP from my network. It can hold a bunch of pages in RAM and Print them once the other (it can Print 3 in a row) are finished.

Now what does any propriatery printing service do?

They feed ONE PAGE AT A TIME, so my printer starts printing, then it starts cooling off, but then it has to HEAT UP AGAIN FOR FUCKS SAKE, and that every time.

Also if I just print via CUPS from my Linux machine, its like 5 times faster.

And I just don't understand how my 15€ thin client from over 20 years ago can do more and better than my 1200€ iPad.

Just a reminder why I keep using Linux.

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6420802

cross-posted from: ibbit.at/post/80541

Illustration by Nathaniel St. Clair

Every autocrat needs an enemy who threatens the country—preferably from both sides of the border. Such an enemy can serve as the reason to suspend the rule of law and boost executive power.

For Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s been the Kurds. For India’s Narendra Modi, it’s been the Muslims. For Russia’s Vladimir Putin, it was first the Chechens, then Alexei Navalny and his followers, and now the Ukrainians.

Donald Trump has built his political career—and, frankly, his entire personality—on the identification of enemies. His presidential run back in 2016 required belittling his rivals in those early Republican primaries (quite literally in the case of Marco Rubio). Later, he widened his scope to include everyone who attempted to thwart his ambitions, like the FBI’s James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. These days, everything that goes wrong in the United States he blames on former president Joe Biden (who had the temerity to beat him in the 2020 presidential election) and the “radical left” (which is basically anyone more liberal than Stephen Miller).

But such “enemies” are small fry, given Trump’s desire for ever greater power. To justify his attacks on Democratic-controlled cities, which is really an effort to suppress all resistance to his policies and his consolidation of presidential authority, he needs a more fearsome monster. To find such a bogeyman, he has dug deep into the American psyche and the playbooks of the autocratic leaders he admires.

On the road to finding the right monster and making America “great again”—a hero’s quest if there ever was one—Trump must first depict the United States as a fallen giant. During his first inaugural address, he declared that “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” According to Trump’s self-centered timeline, the carnage stopped during the four years of his first presidency and resumed once again when Biden took over. Carnage, for Trump, is really just a codeword for race—the fall in status of white people who have lost jobs, skin privilege, and pride of place in the history books. “Carnage” is what Black and Brown people have perpetrated by asserting themselves and taking political power, most often in cities.

It’s no surprise, then, that Trump has characterized American cities as “dangerous” and, in the case of Chicago, a “war zone.” In his recent address to a stony-faced group of U.S. military leaders, he said that cities are “very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.” He proposed that the military use American cities as a “training ground” to root out the “enemy within.”

Trump often refers to this “enemy within” as “violent radical left terrorism,” as in the White House’s recent statement on the deployment of the National Guard to Portland. But that doesn’t quite cover, for Trump, the clear and present dangers of drugs and gangs, which are central to justifying his tariff and immigration policies. For that, the president needs to pump up the carnage.

And that’s where Venezuela comes in.

A State of War

The United States is an economically powerful country with relatively low levels of crime. It does not resemble a tropical kleptocracy (not yet). Yet, Trump has gone to great lengths to make it seem that Americans face the same kind of violence that plagued the Philippines during the tenure of Rodrigo Duterte and El Salvador under the current reign of Nayib Bukele. Both autocrats undermined the rule of law to fight drug lords and organized crime. Duterte engaged in myriad extrajudicial killings that have now landed him in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity. Bukele has imprisoned more than one percent of the population, many of them innocent of any crimes, and has effectively declared himself president for life.

For Trump, who thinks of himself as a white savior (el salvador blanco), the key to Salvadorizing America is to depict a country rapidly going to the dogs, which necessitates sending U.S. troops into American cities and ICE agents into every corner of society. Despite Trump’s claims, the U.S. crime rate was close to a 50-year low in 2022, halfway through the Biden administration. In 2024, the rates for murder,removed, aggravated assault, and robbery all fell, according to the FBI.

Then Trump discovered Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that he could use to demonize immigrants, blame for U.S. drug abuse, and tie to criminal activity in cities. The gang has served as the perfect pretext to remove the Temporary Protected Status of Venezuelans as well as round them up and deport them.

And now the administration is playing up the threat of groups like Tren de Aragua to attack boats near Venezuela’s coast and declare a war against drug cartels. Some voices within the administration are even pushing for a U.S. operation to dislodge Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

Has the United States replaced democracy promotion with a new, Trumpian form of carnage that it is exporting to the rest of the world, beginning with Venezuela?

The Purported Threat

Tren de Aragua began in a Venezuela prison about a decade ago. It quickly spread to other parts of Venezuela before branching out to the rest of Latin American and eventually to the United States. It has allegedly carried out hits, kidnapped people, and engaged in extensive drug trafficking. It has been linked to an assault on two New York policemen.

It sounds like a formidable organization, and Trump has done much to build up its reputation by branding it “terrorist” and putting it at the same level as the Islamic State.

In fact, Tren de Aragua is a decentralized organization that doesn’t pose a national security threat to any country much less the United States. Its links to the Venezuelan government are tenuous. Few if any of the roughly 250 Venezuelans deported earlier this year to a prison in El Salvador had any connections to the gang. Most were arrested on the basis of “gang” tattoos when Tren de Aragua doesn’t use tattoos as identifying markers.

The Trump administration’s order terminating Temporary Protected Status for approximately 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States makes multiple mentions of Tren de Aragua. This week the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s move. The vast majority of Venezuelans left the country to escape gangs, economic chaos and corruption, or the government’s campaign to destroy the political opposition (which has included 19 cases of incommunicado detention). And now Trump is sending them back to lives of great uncertainty.

According to one poll, nearly half of Venezuelan supporters of Donald Trump, who were key in delivering Miami-Dade county to him in the last election, are having buyer’s remorse.

It’s one thing to break U.S. laws in going after immigrants. Now the Trump administration is breaking international laws and engaging in extrajudicial murder in its imagined pursuit of Tren de Aragua overseas.

On September 2, U.S. Special Operations forces attacked a boat near the Venezuelan coast that the administration alleges was a drug-running operation. It claimed to have killed 11 Tren de Aragua gang members. But it hasn’t provided any proof…of anything. The administration has released videos of the attacks without identifying the people it killed, offering any evidence that there were any drugs on board, or demonstrating that the boats had any links to Tren de Aragua.

Meanwhile, despite a war of words with Colombian leader Gustavo Petro over the latter’s pushback against Trump’s aggressive moves in the region, the United States recently teamed up with Colombia (and the UK) to arrest the alleged head of Tren de Aragua’s armed wing in the Colombian city of Valledupar. This police work received considerably less attention in the press—and from the U.S. government itself—than Trump’s clearly illegal attacks on Venezuelan boats.

Regime Change?

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, an autocrat in his own right, has predictably denounced U.S. actions and called up reserves to prepare to defend the country against a potential attack. Less predictably, after the sinking of that first boat, he sent a letter to the Trump administration arguing that he wasn’t involved in narco-trafficking and offering to meet with the administration’s envoy Richard Grenell. The administration ignored the letter and continued its attacks, though Grenell maintained contacts with Venezuela in order to swing a deal to avoid war and facilitate U.S. access to Venezuelan oil. This week, Trump instructed Grenellto stop this diplomatic outreach.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been building up the U.S. military presence in the region. It sent advanced F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico. It beefed up its naval flotilla with eight warships, some Navy P-8 surveillance planes, and an attack submarine. There are nearly 7,000 U.S. troops now deployed to the region.

This is considerably more firepower than a drug interdiction operation requires. But it’s not enough for a full-scale invasion of Venezuela.

This in-between approach may well reflect the conflict within the Trump administration between gung-ho regime-changers like Rubio and anti-interventionists like Grenell. The regime-changers, which include Stephen Miller and the head of the CIA John Ratcliffe, count on the support of Venezuelan opposition leaders like María Corina Machado, who had failed to pry Maduro from office in what was clearly a rigged presidential election last year. With many opposition figures now in jail or in exile, she views the U.S. military as a Hail Mary pass.

Other Venezuelans are much more cautious. “You kill Maduro,” one businessman there confided, “you turn Venezuela into Haiti.” After all, the weak opposition would have a hard time holding the country together amid a scramble for power and oil.

Longtime international affairs expert Leon Hadar points out that such carnage would not just be a problem for Venezuela. “Venezuela has already produced over seven million refugees and migrants,” he writes. “A state collapse scenario could easily double that number. Colombia, Brazil and other neighbors are already overwhelmed. Where do Trump and his advisors think these people will go?”

Given that Trump doesn’t make plans and instead improvises like a bombastic actor, his administration has probably not yet decided how to pursue regime change in Venezuela. The president likes to pit rival factions within his administration to see what the internal carnage will produce. As The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall concludes, “Today, full-scale military intervention in Venezuela remains unlikely. More probable is an intensified pressure campaign of destabilisation, sanctions, maritime strikes, and air and commando raids.”

The reality of Venezuela—the government, the gangs, the immigrants—poses no threat to the United States. The country sends a small percent of drugs here—most fentanyl comes from Mexico, most cocaine from Colombia—while the vast majority of Venezuelans in the United States are law-abiding citizens. Maduro’s military couldn’t do much against U.S. forces, and so far Venezuela has not struck back against what has been a clear violation of its sovereignty.

Trump’s war on drugs and full-court press on deportations, on the other hand, depend on this idea of Venezuela as a full-blown threat. Venezuela presents Trump with carte blanche to deploy the U.S. military in America’s backyard and in America’s own cities.

Really, it’s no surprise that Trump wants such a white card. He’s been playing such trump cards all his life.

The post Will American Carnage Spread to Venezuela? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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