The Trump administration is weighing new tactics to drive regime change in Cuba, including imposing a total blockade on oil imports to the Caribbean country, three people familiar with the plan said Thursday.

That escalation has been sought by some critics of the Cuban government in the administration and backed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to two of the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive discussions. No decision has been made on whether to approve that move, but it could be among the suite of possible actions presented to President Donald Trump to force the end of Cuba’s communist government, these people added.

“Energy is the chokehold to kill the regime,” said one person familiar with the plan who was granted anonymity to describe the private discussions. Deposing the country’s communist government – in power since the Cuban revolution in 1959 – is “100 percent a 2026 event” in the administration’s eyes, this person added.

The effort would be justified under the 1994 LIBERTAD Act, better known as the Helms-Burton Act, this person added. That law codifies the U.S. embargo on Cuban trade and financial transactions.

My buddy built a PC for me in 2014. I've gotten a lot of use out of it, but for the last few years I've just been using it solely as a media server. Which it works fine for. But we are running out of space in our house and that thing is huge and loud, so I want to replace it with a Lenovo mini PC to work as my media server and use my external 5 TB hard drive for storage (I have a couple TBs just in pictures and stuff).

However, I realized I don't really know how to dispose of this old PC. I really don't want to generate a bunch of e-waste. I'd be happy to give it away but I can't imagine there's a way to get rid of an 11 year old homebuilt PC (good specs at the time, but still). I would be willing to pay a service to dispose of it in environmentally-responsible way, but I also feel like that you really need to know who you're giving it to since whenever I see e-waste sites pop up around town it always seems shady.

Suggestions?

I get that there are three things this site will think I should be ashamed of:

1. Using Alexa
2. Using Spotify
3. Being a Collective Soul fan

I will accept criticism of the first two, but not the third. I’m a loud and proud Collective Soul fan, I’ve been to at least 10-12 of their concerts, they rock

We have an Amazon Echo. My wife got one and loves it as do my kids so I’m stuck with it. I hate Spotify as the CEO is a huge Zionist. I plan on migrating to Deezer or something once I get around to copying my playlists.

Anyway, since I was cooking I grudgingly decided to use Alexa to play some Collective Soul. Shouldn’t be a problem, they just had the most #1 Alterative Rock hits on Billboard during the 90s (not a typo) and over 3.8 million monthly users.

I said the precise statement into the Echo speaker:

“Alexa, plays songs by Collective Soul on Spotify”

The response was “playing songs by Machine Soul Collective”

I tried a few different variations of the same statement, and each time Alexa directed me to this Machine Soul Collective “band”.

Turns out it’s just AI generated slop “music” with only a few thousand monthly listeners.

So what gives here? Why is Alexa not playing music from a major band and instead directing me to AI slop? Is this intentional? Do they make more money by not paying royalties to an actual band? I don’t know but this is really bugging me.

It is one position that seems to cross ideological lines. It’s like literally everyone other than people who are very invested in the stock market (and even then) really want to see this thing crash and crash hard.

As someone who lived through and lost a job during the GFC, I think a bit of this is not realizing how bad an economic crash is even if you don’t think it will affect you much. It will. Some people think the residential real estate market will crash too and they can finally buy a house. But that’s hard to do when either you’ve lost your job or your job feels so precarious that you really don’t feel safe emptying your savings and taking out a mortgage. Or if you have a “safe” job, you think you can weather the storm. But in a depression, there are very few “safe” jobs.

But with that caveat aside, I think things are different now because so many people are struggling and barely getting by with their current employment situation. Life already feels so precarious, might as well throw a spanner into the works and see what happens. And that part feels very different than in the run up to the GFC. It affects everyone, regardless of political ideology.

Of course now I’m convinced that because it’s something everyone is expecting and wants to see happen, it will never actually happen. US will just limp along with high inflation, no job growth, and everyone getting slowly squeezed for years.

This is something I have felt for a long time, but with everything going on with that dead fascist, it seems to be really top of mind right now. I am white, for the record.

White society operates on plausible deniability of racism within itself. The number of times in my life when my fellow white people have said something that everyone would agree is definitely racist is actually fairly small, and concentrated into the time I was a teen or so. And not like people were ever afraid of saying it around me, I was very non-confrontational growing up and never really pushed back on anything bad someone said.

The idea is to never say anything openly racist that someone could call you out on. You don't say "I think black people are naturally violent", you say "I only go downtown for sports events, it's to dangerous there". You don't say you don't want to live in a neighborhood with a lot of minorities. You just... naturally end up in the lily-white suburbs. You will say you are open to dating people of other races, but just a coincidence that it's never happened. You agree that slavery was evil but you also get really worked up when your kids learn about slavery in history class.

Maybe these aren't even the best examples. I don't even like citing specific examples because it's an entire ecosystem. It's all about never saying enough that someone - even a fellow white person - could call you out on. I think a lot of the time, it's about lying to yourself as much as it's lying to everyone else. Because white folks have this notion that racism is "bad", and no one thinks they are a bad person... but at the same time we live in a fundamentally white supremacist society where NOT being anti-racist fundamentally says something about you anyway.

And Charlie Kirk was as good at this as any white person. I explained to someone the other day what Kirk said about black pilots. And this person responded with "well that's not racist, he wasn't saying black pilots aren't competent he is saying you can't know because of eeeeevil DEI!" You can take all the comments he ever said about race and pretend like he wasn't racist (according to white society) because he never said the exact words "I believe white people are superior to other races", because according to white people that is literally the only form of racism that can exist. Hell, some will even defend the statement "I just like being around my fellow white people" as not racist but just a form of personal preference.

And once you see all this, it can make you feel crazy. You can see so much racism among all your fellow whiteys, and yet everyone denies it. Everyone has an excuse, everyone has a reason it's not racist. Not looking for sympathy or anything, just describing what it's like.

I will serve in the PLA and fight and die for the Peoples Republic of China if you do.

Just sharing this as a "does anyone else ever feel this way?" post

I am fortunate to have a number of friends I have kept close most of my life, and a lot of family members who I am close with. I am unfortunate in that most of these people skew reactionary.

When I was a lib, it was easy for me to just write off political differences as inconsequential, especially since politics was a very minor part of my relationship with them. But now that I'm a commie, I've found it harder to not only keep up these relationships, but to actually feel love and care for people who I have loved and cared for for decades. Now in general, this isn't much of a problem with friends because I moved away from my hometown, and these relationships are kept on life support by group chats. These chats are largely just meme shit or talking about sports. But I've been surprised by an actual changing of feelings for two people who were my closest friends at one point.

But there is one person in particular for whom I am struggling with this. This person is my oldest and closest friend. This person knows I skew left but not as far left as I actually am. And I knew this person had libertarian leanings, but politics was something they never actually cared about in the past. In the last 6-12 months, they've gotten more strident and vocal with the libertarian crap (for example, telling me yesterday that they think it's ok that 16 million people will lose Medicaid coverage because the government shouldn't be in the business of healthcare). And as they have begun to be more serious and into their libertarian ideology, I find myself not feeling those same feelings of love and care, and really not sure I want to be this person's friend anymore. Someone I went to grade school with and really is like a brother. It's like, there's something about the libertarian ideology that if someone holds to it, I find it so repugnant that I can't be in a relationship with person. Not to mention this person has all sorts of anti-communist brainworms, which is why I've held back telling them how far left I've gone. They're genuinely not racist or anti-LGBTQ, I don't really think they are a "bad" person... but I just am so against their politics that I find I am starting to lack those feelings of love and friendship you should have for a close friend now.

This just feels jarring to me as I have always had very stable affections for people, and have always held love for people despite disagreements and seeing things differently. It feels like there is this massive gulf in how we see the world (because there is ofc) and that just sorta kills how I feel about this person.

Anyone else?

Link

I think it’s a good statement, short and to the point. The replies are absolute poison though, hasbara bots really honing in on them. Feds will try and make something stick but it doesn’t sound like he was even a member.

Of course it was that gusano Maria Salazar who introduced this bill.

Interesting to note that the text of the bill seems to focus on China and mentions Xinjiang in particular. Also how 1.5 billion people currently “suffer” under communism.

This actually seems like a bit of an own goal to me. Sure, tell a bunch of high school kids how China is an undemocratic totalitarian nightmare and that the Uighurs are currently having their organs harvested. Then those students can do literally 10 minutes of research to see that none of that is actually happening and that the people of China are pretty happy with the state of things (at least relative to US Americans).

I should point out for non-US Americans here, education in the US is decentralized. The federal government doesn’t actually have much authority. This bill just tells the Victims of Communism Memorial Fund (snicker) to create materials and make them available.

Death to America.

Interesting story about this artwork here