lemy.lol

Socialism for the elite but not for the masses?

Christy Ratliff is sitting in a folding chair in a public school gym in Grundy, Virginia, waiting for her number to be called. She arrived at 4 a.m. on this October Saturday to secure her position in line to have eight teeth pulled. Genetic gum disease, she explains, has left most of them rotten or broken. She hooks a finger to pull down her lip and show me gruesome damage—the kind most dentists see only in textbooks.

Ratliff is 29 years old.

Grundy, the seat of Buchanan County, sits deep in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia. This weekend, it’s hosting a free clinic courtesy of Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit like Doctors Without Borders, but for places in the United States where the health ­outcomes are as grim as those in many developing countries. RAM founder Stan Brock once suggested that because Grundy is so inaccessible, his volunteers should literally parachute into town, as he once did while working in rural Africa.

Despite all the faith these locals have put in Trump, his second term is threatening their precarious existence. Few places in America are as reliant on the federal government. According to a recent study, 45 percent of the personal income of ­Buchanan County residents comes from Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and government disability programs. Federal dollars also account for about 15 percent of the county budget, subsidizing nearly every aspect of local life—education, economic development, disaster recovery, housing, sewer infrastructure. And Trump has succeeded in jeopardizing or eliminating nearly all of it.

“We live in a remote part of the world,” the driver says, declining to give his name. He’s here for denture work because ­Bradshaw has no dentist. He grew up in a holler, and like generations of his people, worked in the coal industry, including once for a company owned by Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.)—until his paychecks bounced, a chronic problem at Justice’s mines. Now he works in logging. He has no health insurance, he says. Like 80 percent of McDowell County’s voters, he cast his ballot for Trump: “He’s kicking ass and taking names. He’s cleaning up the gangs. He’s doing awesome with the immigrants, too.”

If you see someone stealing food, no you didn't.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42788535

President Donald Trump’s racist social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as offensive.

The Republican president’s Thursday night post was deleted Friday and blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady. The deletion, a rare admission of a misstep by the White House, came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for its removal for being racist -- including by Republicans -- the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously and it had been taken down.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/54860282

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...Our president insults and threatens countries that never posed any threat to us. There must have been some misunderstanding. We allow our government to kill innocent people and treat children inhumanely. This is not a reflection of our character. Journalists report on astoundingly brazen, breathtakingly massive corruption. We will not let this define us. Italians hear that ICE agents will be here and immediately start protesting. Please—let’s not rush to judgment...

...The strongest evidence that ICE agents are not here is that Italians protested and nobody shot them. As other outlets have reported, ICE often provides security support at major sporting events, but it does not use agents from the detaining-three-year-olds branch of the operation. It is also possible ICE is here to congratulate Italy for how it treated Amanda Knox.

But when Italians heard that ICE agents will be at the Olympics, of course they protested. Why should they wait for reassurance from a U.S. government that lies so regularly?...

...when a nation’s credibility crumbles, it crumbles everywhere, even at the Olympics...

Шукаємо, знаходимо, утилізуємо. Так виглядають будні операторів безпілотних систем. Все, що потрапляє в об’єктив, рано чи пізно стає металобрухтом.

Побачити результати полювання ? натискай ▶️

Combat hawks 🦅 Підписатися

https://t.me/ywjQfBTXyys5YWQy/765

Only a smattering of Republicans spoke out about clip in which Obamas’ faces were superimposed on bodies of apes

Top Democrats erupted with fury on Friday and challenged more Republicans to respond to Donald Trump posting a racist video that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

The clip appeared during one of the 79-year-old US president’s increasingly frequent late-night posting sprees to his Truth Social account, and shows the laughing faces of the former president and first lady superimposed on the bodies of primates in a jungle setting, bobbing to the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight.

They appear briefly at the end of a minute-long video made by a third party that amplifies Trump’s persistent but false claim that he won the 2020 election, when in fact he lost to Joe Biden. The conspiracy-theory video is a repost of content stamped with the logo of the website Patriot News Outlet, a site supportive of Trump, a Republican.

So one thing I've done to help me find more things to self host or do is think like a prepper. Like...what if my ISP goes out? How can I remotely control my homelab or even trigger Home Assistant events if my ISP is out? I had no idea how to solve this until about 6 months ago when I discovered Meshtastic.

For anyone who doesn't know: Meshtastic is basically an open-source, public mesh-network. You just buy a cheap ESP32 device, flash it with Meshtastic (They have a SUPER easy web-flasher so you don't need to be super technical to do it), and connect to it via Bluetooth with your phone and you're good to go! Then you can send messages to other nodes around you and have fully off-grid communications!

Well, while Meshtastic supports MQTT, that does require at least one end of the connection to have internet access. I wanted a way to SSH into my servers and diagnose or fix things without needing to rely on my ISP at all. Or even trigger things in Home Assistant without having access to any ISP. So, that naturally gave way to the idea of MeshExec.

MeshExec is a little binary that attaches to your serially-connected Meshtastic node, and looks for messages in a specified private channel for aliases to execute. Then it will execute whatever commands you specify and automatically chunk them and send them back through the mesh in a staggered fashion. This chunking is done to both fit inside the max message size that Meshtastic supports, and so that the mesh is not overwhelmed with messages and drops them.

You define the aliases, the shell used to execute the commands, etc. So you can basically use it to do whatever you want over the mesh! I've set up a handful of aliases to do simple diagnostics on my homelab servers. Things like restarting docker containers, checking the top 3 processes consuming the most memory, etc.

I decided to use aliases because I figured direct shell access to a server is SUPER dangerous, especially if you accidentally attach the daemon to a public channel.

No idea if this will be useful to anyone else, but I made it as easy to use as possible if anyone does want to use it. Here's the link to the repo if anyone wants to give it a go.

I just wanted to share how I've managed to find a way to further reduce my reliance on big corporations and my love for open-source software!

If anyone decides to give this a try, I'd love to know your thoughts or answer any questions you have!

https://xcancel.com/i/status/2019595406506967307