DPRK press releases never miss. The amount of sheer posting energy latent inside each one is off the charts. Whatever about the Great Firewall protecting the West—the collective firepower of just a few thousand North Korean posters unleashed upon the internet would be enough to eradicate the collective psyche of the West in like two months.
The broad strokes of your rant I agree with, but you can a) buy region free DVD and blu-ray players very easily these days that totally bypass all of the bullshit copyright region locking shit, b) you can just press the menu button on your remote to skip all the ads (if the discs even have them). Most blu-rays these days don't have any ads at all though, especially for any movies more niche than like Hollywood stuff. And c) digital hoarding is great, but large hard drives especially fail quite randomly, and then you're shit out of luck. A blu-ray will last for decades with no issues; after a decade of uptime an HDD or SSD is probably toast with no prospect of recovery. And that's all to say that Blu-ray quality for films is genuinely really good. Sure, you can get that in a hard drive but for the full blu-ray quality you're talking 20GBs+ for a single film. 4k gets even crazier. I have a 12TB hard drive filled with movies, but I make sure to have backups of it as well and often really obscure shit is hard to find online, much easier to just buy the blu-ray.
The claim here is that the historical Israelite kingdom of David, which lasted around a hundred years ~1000 BC and is the historical focus of a lot of stories in the Hebrew Bible, "controlled" various parts of what is now Southern Lebanon, either formally (very unlikely) or informally through hegemonic trade domination. The latter is potentially true, but how that then "proves" that Southern Lebanon is Israel is rather suspect, given that the historical Kingdom of Israel again lasted only around 100 years, was kind of a freak accident because of the giant power vacuum that developed at the end of the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age in the Levant and the fact that Assyria had basically destroyed all of Jerusalem's competitors for them. The kingdom was later destroyed by the Neo-Assyrian Empire and later the Neo-Babylonians.
The claim is very funny because really, if you want to go like back further, "Israel" and "Lebanon" were both possessions of New Kingdom Egypt around ~1300 BC, and under Hittite domination before that, and before that a kind of merchant zone that shuffled between Egyptian and Sumerian control. So really, by Israeli archeological standards, Israel is actually Egyptian and Egypt has the historical right to conquer and exert control over their historical possessions in the Levant.
Canaan
Your point more broadly is well taken, yes, but Canaan/Canaanite is actually a very well attested historical name that exists outside of the Hebrew Bible. The people commonly called "Phoenicians" called themselves Canaanites, and even as late as the 2nd century AD folks from North Africa around Carthage (which was originally a Phoenician colony from the city of Tyre in what is now Lebanon) called themselves "Canaanites" because they were descended from people in that region. Canaan isn't anachronistic, they were a real people who self described as Canaanite.
It's the only reason why the UN exists at all. Veto power is built into the UN Security Council, so all Security Council members have veto power. It's basically just a realpolitik admission that actual power lies within a few countries. If the US doesn't want something to happen, they can block it real life. Same with Russia, China, etc. The "Great Powers" have the ability to unilaterally use their power, and the UN tries to reflect that ability.
That was the most tame thing an Irish person could possibly say about meeting the fucking King of England (aside from like my weird British-aristocracy loving relatives, many such cases in Ireland unfortunately)
I'm so sorry. He was a lovely cat, always enjoyed your pictures of him and I know he knew you loved him. That's our blessing and curse as cat guardians: we get all the love, but in return we agree to be with them until the end, to help ferry them to their deaths, holding them to their last breaths. I know Mr. Softie appreciated you to the last. Thanks for being there for him.
You know, I always used to dismiss your warning of a tactical nuke being dropped in the next x years as pure nonsense. Guess I was totally wrong on that one.
The bourgeoisie don't want you to know this one trick to claiming owed back taxes!
Fascist Italian lady who's nice to me: 
Fascist Argentine man who's very rude and smells weird and fucks his sister and has cloned dogs or whatever: 
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thethirdgracchi
joined 4 years ago
Even the English press is engaging in bizarre conspiracy brain over those telecommunications cables that broke in the Baltic a few days ago. This is from the Financial Times, print edition so can't link it unfortunately.
Ah yes, everybody knows the secret to Western hegemony is a communication cable between Sweden and Lithuania, the two major players of NATO and strategic masterminds of the strategy of Chinese containment.