My buddy said the police really laid Ambushes for the corrupt cops and the arrests sometimes escalated. So, well, they didn’t got struck down by a drone but they really were at risk of getting taken out by 5.54mm bullets. Sure not everyone was corrupt and violent but still quite a lot.

If you say violent crime was low I am gonna believe that. Corruption and theft though were everywhere in the Eastern Block really bad, I know it myself from my visits in East Germany and Czechoslovakia and the simple casualness everybody took possession of government property was insane. A fellow of my uncle build his whole house in East Germany with stuff people he stole from the communist government. It was straight forward insane. Violence on the other hand was rather low and mostly because the cops were not shy about getting very violent you up just because they could. I remember when two border guards beat up a class mate in Berlin in 1989 because he had long hair. He stood in a queue waiting for being checked, the two border guards walked by, grabbed him, punched him a couple of times and send him back into the queue. My whole class was starring like “WTF what just happened”…

I know at least two Soviet/Russian Vehicles in my Munich neighbourhood straight forward stolen from the Soviets/Russia. One 60 year old Ural Truck which an East German buddy used to flee from Iraq in the 1980th to West Germany, another also pretty old GAZ used by a team of Russian soldiers fleeing from Ukraine through Turkey to Munich last Year.

While I once have been in Communist Romania it was during a holiday when I was eight and in a fenced hotel area. I can only remember it was kinda boring because no kids of my age were around. I should definitely visit the place again when I do my Europe tour after retiring, I guess it changed a lot.

If you are living in Romania you might also remember how life was there 20-50 years ago. The stories my buddy told me about his time over there are… wow. The story how his Grandpa as a major of a small village during communism stole enough money from the communist party until he could bribe his way to the West - and actually nobody minded him stealing like 90% of all money going to his village… In the late 1990ths my buddy was robbed at gun point twice. By Highway-Police. When he invited his Uncle to a good restaurant in the capital the simple farmer didn’t dare to step through the door because “I am not worthy”… Nowadays… it is a lot more relaxed. Not perfect but the really big shit is gone. Still he thinks most Romanian youngsters are kinda crazy but most Europeans are, just in a different way. And the tourist regions are actually quite nice.

The Albanian Government ist pretty well aware of their lack of control and gave full control over shipping lanes to FRONTEX around ten years ago.

That by the way is the main reason nowadays drugs mostly arrive in Rotterdam again. Easier to hide between millions of metric tons of cargo than in a single fishing boat.

I can assure you that there are regions within the European Union where people are even less poor and not trying anything criminal to get rich. I’m referring to parts of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and southern Italy.

Not to mention Third-Party-Members like Albania, Moldovia, Bosnia or Macedonia who are partially Third-World-Nations.

You won’t find poppy plants there. And while there is some organized crime - surely more than north of these countries - they are more or less under control and operate in the shadows.

But then the EU is also relaxed about giving work visas. Lots of people from those nations do some seasonal work within the EU, earning good money. We have all sorts of Ukrainians, Albaniens and even Tunesiens around Germany doing such jobs. Usually they earn enough money within two years to return home and start a family and a business.

Weeding out FARC and Shining Path actually did teach valuable lessons which habe been repeatedly reapplied successfully during modern counter-terrorism.

Both where heavily invested in organized crime but are nowadays toothless or non-existant due to coordinated goverment and civilian efforts.

The Best example might be “The Sons of Iraq” who helped to pacify Iraq quite well. The Coalition literally hired local people suffering most from extremists to fight the extremists and it worked like a charm. FARC and Shining Path were pushed into insignificance by roughly the same methods.

Yes, there were “revenge” killings by the “somewhat good guys” against the “really bad guys”. But in hindsight it was necessary to show the “really bad guys” that the tables had turned. As long as the overall violence decreases - deal with it.

Oh, by the way, did you know that the Mafia once was an organized military organization fighting for Sicilian independence? Over the last 200 years they slowly degraded into a bunch of sometimes wealthy oligarchic stock market fraudsters, but mostly pick pockets and low level fraudsters, at most bribing officials for construction jobs, if at all. 40 years ago they killed judges and police officers in the dozen. Nowadays they get beat up if they show up in Palermos shops and demanding the Pizzo (protection money). And the police stands by and collects the beaten gangster afterwards without minding the locals doing local justice. Works fine.

Who is “they”? Names, pls.

You would believe it if you saw the mosquito swarms in my garden. The quite busy street basically is a biological desert. One meter off road in my garden I have a HUGE swarm of mosquitoes every evening. Not just one or two, more like 100, all in one big flock, within 1-2m³. And as soon as I leave the house they are all over me. Only way to get rid of them: Walk to the street or get back into the house. Dusk-Time is Mosquito Time in my garden. No humans allowed.

Edit, what I call mosquitos are two different insects around here. The very tiny ones of 3-5mm and sting like hell and the huge ones at 50-150mm (Not joking, some are larger than my hand) which are utterly harmless but also disgusting. I guess nobody expected Monster Mosquitos in Bavaria. But then we also have snakes who can spray like skunks. And LOTS of them.

Some are even older. Especially the Tom and Jerry Cartoons with the big fat black female servant running the house hold are pretty old. For political correctness they removed her and replaced her with a white petite lady and a white upper class gentlemen. When you see only legs of the black woman: VERY OLD. Only legs of white Dudes: Reworked in the 1960/1970. No Humans at all or humans with faces: 1980ths and ongoing.

Funny thing, the very old versions got outright bought by public German Television. They OWN them. They never bought the reworked versions though. But the private stations can cheaply licence the reworked version.

So the private TV is always showing the “White-Washed” version and the public TV always the “Black-Servant” version. Not like anyone cares.

Oh, I also found out that public TV seems to hold the rights to a lot of other older shows and they locked them deep into their darkest vaults. Some are so toxic they don’t even dare to mention them (Lets start with Speedy Gonzales, continue with Pepe Le Pew and then it gets really weird)

I also learned that public TV around here holds the rights to the first season of Sailor Moon (they don’t show it anymore for sexist female display), all Episodes of Captain Future (too militaristic) and Hong Kong Phooey (too violent). And then you learn public TV financed and broadcasted a porn movie named “The Pornograph”…

When people around here mentioned there are no more insects on the wind screens of car a local biologists checked the number of insects - and it was more or less the same (~5% less)

But what he found out was pretty interesting: Nowadays insects avoid streets. Evolution seems to have breed an inherent fear of streets into insects.

PopOS is a sure way of getting into ten times more problems than Ubuntu.

Seriously, I know them all. Started with NetBSD in 1991, used pretty much everything.

If your system isn’t super weird then Ubuntu is the most relaxed experience you will ever have as a newby.

(And yes, I am not using Ubuntu currently. But then, I hat 35 years of POSIX/Unix/Linux experience)

I am an old timer. I started with BSD before there was even a Linux. NetBSD on an Amiga 3000 before the AT&T law suite against NetBSD, then heared about Linux which was twice as clean as NetBSD and without legal issues - Later NetBSD removed all legal issues nonetheless.

First Linux was a Watch-Tower Distribution, basically a big RAM-Disk with a rudimentary Linux system which you copied to HD. No package manager, nothing. tar, make was the way to do installations. Shortly after Slackware and SuSE which basically was the same back then. Then a lot of SuSE then Debian, then Ubuntu. Don’t care much about the distribution nowadays as long as it is DEB-based.

But now something to scare all of you: Today my most used POSIX environment is… Cygwin. Well, I got a Windows-Notebook for development and a VM is really clunky in comparison to a fully integrated POSIX-layer like Cygwin. For developing Stuff it actually matters very little if you use BSD, Linux, Cygwin or even Solaris.

88% is so typical - for Nazis it means the eight letter of the alphabet twice, which means “Heil Hitler”. Given that the Z symbol of his genocidal war looks like a half Swastika we can now finally agree: Putin is the reincarnation of Hitler.

In East Germany the people loved their nation most only weeks before collapse: 99,92% voted for the pro-soviet government.

Then the CIA dropped 20 million agents from invisible helicopters which fakes mass demonstrations and used mind-control rays to make them love the west and hate the soviet union.

In the first election after reunification the Communists got 11,1% of all votes in Former East Germany. Damned CIA mind control rays.

In my whole life I never bought digital audio or video content on vinyl, VHS, CD, DVD, Blueray. Never ever. It sounds as weird to me like paying for air to breath.

But one day I visited a live concert of a small band which I loved as a teenager. After the show I met with their drummer, gave him €200 cash and said “You know, when I was young you were cool about kids copying your music without paying. You told us if we like you music we can enjoy it. And if we can afford it, we can pay you. Back then I couldn’t. Today I can.”

And so I paid them five times as much as I saved back then by copying their music.

You think Hamas would be the one to attack humanitarian aid and food for the Palestinians in Gaza?

They did that a lot actually. For Hamas their subjects are just animals. See 06:30 at https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/p/why-the-jlots-wont-work-in-gaza

And while they are able to fire over 100 missiles per day into Israel they can take a good beating for quite while. Think about that: During their reign they fired 2 million missiles and grenades into Israel - during peace time as I might add.

They are pretty beaten anyway, pretty much every ally has meanwhile distanced from them: https://www.nzz.ch/international/gaza-krieg-die-hamas-will-auch-im-ramadan-weiterkaempfen-ld.1821648

I guess they want go down in flames and take as many Gazans with them as possible. And they are doing a great job, don’t you agree?

And now a serious question: What could Hamas do to end the violence?

He is not just an extremist but also an Idiot.

Killing everyone in Gaza is just dumb because there are also several 10.000 Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

But meh… we already learned that extremism breads brain rot. Hamas is proof of it.

Crass

Hamas has no soldiers because they don’t qualify for the Geneva definition of a soldier. For example they usually operate disguised as civilians which makes them unlawful.

They do qualify as “armed unlawful combatants” though. “Unlawful” means they don’t fall under the rules of war but under civilian Israeli law.

And to realize who is an armed combatant it is enough seeing he carries a weapon and then they are legit targets. If someone picks up his weapon he becomes the next legit target. And so on. The unarmed combatants - yes, those exist by the Geneva defintion too - are also legit targets although with more caveats. Overall it is a reliable way to get killed while holding a weapon. Much less if you drop it.

Just because came with a knife to a gun fight doesn’t mean you have extra rights.

And one more question, after all this guilt-mongering I would like to hear what options Hamas has to end the conflict.

About the attitude of Hamas:

https://ryanmcbeth.substack.com/p/why-the-jlots-wont-work-in-gaza

The “ceasefire” by Hamas looks like that they are still shooting 100 rockets per day at Israelian civilians. Not to mention the more than 1000 people they killed last year alone. In 2023 they shot 23.000 rockets and grenades at Israel - actually most of them BEFORE the October attacks. That is a typical Hamas-Ceasefire.

To Israel, Palestinians are subhuman animals.

The only one who called them subhuman animals is actually… you. Very interesting, indeed.

And btw, can you tell me what HAMAS could do to end the war?

For Crows this is also true. My Grandpa befriended a couple of Crows and even 40 years later their decendents visit us. We usually play with walnuts, they bring them to me, I open them for them and take some for myself. Smart birds, if I take more than half they get angry. But taking every second one - they are cool about that.

Give him “The Salvation War” from Stuart Slate to read.

That will shut him up.

Sell it to him as a story about the rupture and the fight of the unbelievers against their destiny.

He will then find out that the story doesn’t play out like the bible told… as Humanity curb-stomps hell and heaven into dust without blinking. And if he ever dares to speak the topic again, cite the book. I personally love the part when a random US marine puts a janitor on Gods throne because that guy is the only one knowing what he is doing. Though the pope excommunicating god for being not worthy also has its merit. Ah, Satan gets it too. He hides in a dirt hole from B-52 bombers.

I have a serious question!

What could Hamas do to end this blood sheet?

What could the Gazans do to end this blood sheet?

Please answer seriously. I am not asking for what anyone else could do. That has been discussed to exhaustion. I want to hear the options of the two mentioned. No one else.