The following was a letter submitted by an anonymous Pirate supporter using the pseudonym “Forward Thoughts”, sharing critiques of “Uncle Sam”. This article is apart of the project “Message in a Bottle”, allowing supporters of the US Pirate Party to submit editorial articles to the United States Pirate Party website.

Uncle Sam, the personification of the federal government, is supposed to be a beacon of democracy and good fortune towards the will of the people right here in the United States of America. However, he has gotten too big for his britches since the beginning. History highlighting this goes as far back as Uncle Sam exerting his power from the Whiskey Rebellion to recently using the Enemy Alien Act of 1787 to deport immigrant dissenters speaking out against the genocide happening in Palestine.

Every state relies on his charity to a certain extent, some more than others. How can we rely on our government to provide for its people when it directly meddles and persistently goes against the will of its people by starting wars and cutting funds to social programs, sometimes it creates on its own volition?

In a way, the American people receive assistance from the suits and ties of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., that assistance comes in the form of government regulations more so than it comes from funding assistance. Guns, voting, criminal penalties, taxes, immigration, etc. are always the hot button issues every politician or candidate running for office has on their agenda.

“I want to be controlled harder by my government” said no one ever.

In order to curtail exerting pragmatic force against the will of the people, there’s supposed to be a system our founding fathers put in place called “checks and balances.” How this works is there’s the executive branch consisting of the presidency and cabinet members, Congress which consists of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the Supreme Court which consists of 9 justices.

However, what happens when all 3 branches reciprocate the same political ideology as one another? Who’s gonna stop these corrupt politicians from filling the coffers of themselves and of their allies (the oligarchy) they’re in cahoots with? Now we’re faced with a constitutional crisis where all 3 branches need to be severed like an infected limb.

Get this: Uncle Sam can exert his power over the economy on a whim. Right now President Trump is putting his hand up Uncle Sam as a puppet and he’s levying taxes on Chinese imports and other countries around the world. In retaliation, other countries he’s levied tariffs on are levying retaliatory tariffs against our imports into their countries. Consequently, prices on goods and services are rising. Stocks on the stock market are plummeting.

History is repeating itself. Remember back in US history class (well, hopefully you were taught this in US history class) about the Great Depression at the very end of the 1920s? Part of the reason why the economy went into a spiral was because of then Congress’s tariffs on foreign imports. Consumers no longer were able to afford products, therefore companies losing profits, especially those in the manufacturing industry, laid off workers.

Granted it wasn’t as if President Hoover bypassed Congress to make the tariffs happen, but my point still stands on how tariffs cause unintentional side effects to our everyday lives.

Lesson learned: tariffs backfire immensely on the economy.

Then President Nixon back in 1969 wanted to defund TV program PBS, Public Broadcasting Service. The nonprofit network was created to provide educational programming in a non-commercialized manner. It has brought us shows such as Sesame Street, Arthur, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, just to name a few.

Speaking of Mr. Rogers, he testified before Congress and managed to avert budget cuts for the nationally renowned TV station. Fast forward to present day 2025 — Republicans in Congress and President Trump are trying to cut funds for PBS. History is repeating itself yet again. Will we have a savior of PBS like we did back in 1969?

Lesson to be learned: PBS really is made possible by viewers like you.

Even at the state level, funding can be granted and cut based on the current majority party’s and governor’s ideology of that time. Pennhurst State School & Hospital in Spring City, PA is one of many examples of state government apathetic to the welfare of its people, especially a vulnerable population.

Opened in 1908 and closed in 1987, Pennhurst State School & Hospital was a product of an era of eugenics where those deemed unfit to reproduce in the Caucasian gene pool were euthanized or removed from society. Marginalized groups such as the epileptic and the mentally disabled were housed here, but soon grew to orphans, physically disabled, etc. Within a few years Pennhurst became overcrowded and conditions became deplorable.

In 1968, Bill Baldini did a 5-part segment on the conditions at Pennhurst exposing its wretched standard of living and abuse residents faced. There was a public outcry after the segment aired. Conditions seldomly improved from there on out until its closure in 1987. Fortunately, these residents were moved to boarding homes.

Have you ever heard of a Kirkbride psychiatric hospital? They’re long-term psychiatric hospitals designed in a batwing fashion with emphasis on natural light and air circulation. However, lack of funding and mismanagement had led to conditions in a handful of these facilities to be anything but cheery. In fact, it is what can easily be described as wicked.

Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in Trenton, NJ, under the direction of Dr. Henry Cotton, extracted organs and teeth from patients. In spite of high mortality rates and disprovable claims of cure rates, this persisted at the behest of Dr. Cotton during his tenure.

Philly (Philadelphia) State Hospital at Byberry opened in 1907. Unlike Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and others similar to Trenton, it was not made using the Kirkbride blueprints. This didn’t make the hospital any less susceptible to daunting conditions such as overcrowding, barbaric experiments, abuse, and neglect.

Props are in order to a conscientious objector named Charlie Lord, who between 1945 and 1946 was so appalled by the conditions he took note of that he covertly took photos and leaked them to the press. In these photos, raw sewage and naked men lined the hallways of Byberry.

Lesson to be learned: these residents were at the mercy of state politicians apathetic to their basic needs. Moreover and lastly, psychiatric hospitals such as the Kirkbride hospitals and disabled residential facilities such as Pennhurst are archaic and stunt personal psychiatric growth in patients.

Most states’ systems are designed to where property taxes fund our public schools. Back in the late 1800s, public schools were a shining gem of what America could be. Nowadays in many communities, our schools are nothing more than shadows of their former selves, meeting the minimum standards set by the state for funding.

Gone are the days of home economics and industrial shop classes. It’s all about standardized testing mandated by the state capital and even Uncle Sam, which is basically modern day phrenology. There’s educators and politicians who’ll justify this inane waste of paper by saying it measures how schools are doing with educating their students.

Standardized testing can be summed up in four words, it’s this: elite stay in control.

Lesson to be learned: standardized testing is a disease on our education system designed to punish lower socioeconomic schools and to keep those at the higher end of the socioeconomic.

uspirates.org/message-in-a-bot…

What if you could design your 3D print to fall apart on purpose? That’s the curious promise of a new paper from CHI 2025, which brings a serious hacker vibe to the sustainability problem of multi-material 3D printing. Titled Enabling Recycling of Multi-Material 3D Printed Objects through Computational Design and Disassembly by Dissolution, it proposes a technique that lets complex prints disassemble themselves via water-soluble seams. Just a bit of H₂O is needed, no drills or pliers.

At its core, this method builds dissolvable interfaces between materials like PLA and TPU using water-soluble PVA. Their algorithm auto-generates jointed seams (think shrink-wrap meets mushroom pegs) that don’t interfere with the part’s function. Once printed, the object behaves like any ordinary 3D creation. But at end-of-life, a water bath breaks it down into clean, separable materials, ready for recycling. That gives 90% material recovery, and over 50% reduction in carbon emissions.

This is the research – call it a very, very well documented hack – we need more of. It’s climate-conscious and machine-savvy. If you’re into computational fabrication or environmental tinkering, it’s worth your time. Hats off to [Wen, Bae, and Rivera] for turning what might otherwise be considered a failure into a feature.

youtube.com/embed/akN1_7oDHr8?…

hackaday.com/2025/05/30/sustai…

Just a quickie for anyone who is in the neighborhood, today the annual Open Source Hardware Summit conference starts in Edinburg, Scotland. If you’re able to make it, it’s a microcosm of the open-source hardware world, and full of great talks and great hackers.

If you’re not in Scotland, they have a livestream on YouTube that you should check out, as well as a Discord server for discussions during the event. It’s going on right now!

hackaday.com/2025/05/30/today-…

nugole.it/nugoletta/ju/p/17485…

Ju

2025-05-30 05:21:56

Questo è bello.
Storie di Verona: il brigante Falasco.

La torre Falasco è ancora in piedi, costruita in una specie di rientranza - coalo - in una delle molte falesie. Si vede facendo un po' di attenzione quando si risale la Valpantena, è sul lato a sinistra della valle venedo su da Verona.
Nell'articolo dice che s'è perso arrivandoci ma da quel che mi ricordo c'è una stradella abbastanza confortevole che porta su.

larena.it/rubriche/vi-cammino-…

La leggenda del Brigante Falasco. Bello e spietato, era il terrore della valle

I Balladoro, i Leonardi, i Tedeschi, gli Oliboni, i Benella di Laudi, i Rotari, i Padoani, gli Allegri… Perché dal passato riaffiorano... Scopri di più

^{Alessandro Anderloni (L'Arena)}

The Trump administration’s hostility to First Amendment rights extends beyond the press to nonprofit organizations, museums, colleges, and anyone else who might question his infallibility.

But his targeting of the press is a key component of the administration’s effort to appoint itself the country’s sole arbiter of truth. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Advocacy Direction Seth Stern writes for the Daily Beast that in Trump’s view, “inconvenient truths and malicious lies are equally troublesome. They must be met with equal force.”

Stern urged journalists and others who value press freedom to treat these attacks not as passing storms but as existential threats.

Read Stern’s article here.

freedom.press/issues/when-alte…

Io sono un appassionato di linux e del software libero, potremmo dire un entusiasta. Continuerò a consigliarlo a tutti e ad aiutare gli amici ad installarlo quando vogliono provarlo o migliorare la loro vita digitale.

Ma, non per questo, vivo nel mondo delle fate.

Nel caso di questo articolo, mi trovo molto in disaccordo. A differenza di quanto è scritto nel titolo, ci sono pochi software di livello davvero professionale per l'elaborazione video su Linux: Da Vinci Resolve (ammesso di riuscire a farlo funzionare sulla propria distribuzione se NON è Centos o Rocky, dopo l'installazione) e Blender. Il secondo in realtà è più adatto a chi lavora con il 3D. Nel corpo dell'articolo si va un po' meglio, ma tra le righe si leggono dei limiti che purtroppo ha la soluzione proposta.

Poi ci sono tanti (ma tanti) software che vanno bene soltanto per uso casalingo, e ben venga che ci siano, e poi ci sono le vie di mezzo.

KDEnlive e Cinelerra secondo me sono 2 vie di mezzo, ma nell'articolo sembra che KDEnlive sia la soluzione di tutti i mali, e che il "comune sentire" (che sia difficile lavorare con i video su Linux), sia un errore.

(Inkscape non lo affronto neanche, è bello e completo ma le sue potenzialità sono quelle che aveva Adobe Illustrator 15 anni fa; ormai quel modo di lavorare è vecchio. In altre parole un professionista difficilmente lo userà).

Ecco il punto: nel 2025, per me, il punto non è "se" con una distribuzione linux si possa fare qualcosa, ma "in quanto tempo" e "con quale difficoltà".

Se gli sviluppatori non lavorano su questo, non credo che ci sarà mai una vera diffusione di Linux sul desktop.

Per citare un esempio, ormai anche il blocco note di Windows è pieno di IA, mentre Linux è rimasto indietro su questo fronte (e lo dico dopo l'installazione delle componenti di VOSK necessarie per trascrivere sottotitoli su KDEnlive).

Può piacere o no, ma io credo che l'IA sia qui per restare e per semplificarci la vita: ormai l'utente se la aspetta; non si può pretendere che gli utenti sacrifichino il loro tempo in nome di principi che, magari, neanche condividono.

Se ci fate caso, le soluzioni open che sono massicciamente sul mercato funzionano perché vanno meglio delle soluzioni chiuse per...uno scopo particolare, un esigenza. Sono abbastanza vecchio, ad esempio, per ricordare PERCHE' c'è stato un tempo in cui Firefox era IL browser: perché a differenza di Internet Explorer FUNZIONAVA.

Sarò cinico ma alla maggior parte delle perone non importano i principi, se c'è un modo per convincerle definitivamente è dar loro qualcosa di semplice e che funziona meglio dell'alternativa chiusa.

Mi spiace se urto la sensibilità di qualcuno, nel qual caso chiedo scusa. Questo però è il mio pensiero che non ha lo scopo di distruggere nulla, esprimo tutto ciò con malinconia per qualcosa che potrebbe essere ma non è.

Sta alla comunità cogliere il mio ragionamento con lo spirito che vuole avere: costruttivo.

In ogni caso, ecco l'articolo:

ilsoftware.it/focus/linux-non-…

#linux #opensource #foss #nonuccidetemi

Linux non permette di creare contenuti video professionali. Sbagliato! | IlSoftware.it

Come creare video professionali su Linux utilizzando software open source come Kdenlive, OBS Studio e Inkscape.

^{IlSoftware.it}