polyploy

If you’re consistently seeing the same pattern then the most likely culprits will either be your tamp or a clogged shower screen. Water is going to follow the path of least resistance, so if you’re getting faster extraction at the back there is either less coffee there, it’s less tightly packed (tamped), or there’s an obstruction to the flow at the head (probably the shower screen) causing more water to flow to the back.

Considering the consistency, I’d wager it’s a bad habit in tamping method. It tends to be easier to put more weight down closer to your body, meaning less pressure applied at the back, meaning water has less resistance flowing there. Something you might try to see if it makes a significant difference is to change the orientation of the portafilter while tamping. For instance, if you usually hold the handle straight out from the counter, you can try rotating it to the left, applying a light tamp, then going to the right and applying full pressure, or something like that. If you find that the pattern changes significantly when you make adjustments like that, then you know where the problem lies.

The funny thing is that you can actually check the official Canadian source right here that links to two posts directly (one and two) and if you use some browser translation you can see exactly what the articles actually say which is… literally just a news update for Chinese audiences offering a summary of Carney’s past behavior and achievements. It’s not even really negative, if anything it’s just vaguely uncertain.

I have read them both twice and am not really really finding any false narratives to speak of. The only real editorializing is in portrayal of current exchanges between Trump, Carney, and Trudeau, and if we’re going to consider any kind of characterization of foreign political leaders as somehow pushing a false narrative then we should probably take a look at how all our own media reports on the US, EU, and elsewhere ourselves.

Granted, I don’t speak mandarin and there is always a possibility that there are more skewed statements that are being lost in translation, but I don’t really understand why these particular posts summarizing Canadian electoral politics for Chinese readers on wechat are somehow some kind of election interference.

A snippet, from one of the posts that is being framed as some kind of attack on Carney, which is actually titled “The United States is facing a tough prime minister from Canada”:

Who is Mark Carney? What is his campaign message? Can he lead Canada through the current crisis?

Carney was born in a small town called Fort Smith in the northwest region of Canada. His mother was a teacher and his father was the principal of a local high school. He later became a professor of education at the University of Alberta. Carney, who grew up in an academic family, originally dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, but changed his mind after being admitted to the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He admitted: “I came to Harvard from Canada with a large student loan, and the most effective way to repay the loan was to become a banker.”

After that, Carney graduated from Harvard University and Oxford University, spent 13 years in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and then returned to Canada to start a public service.

In 2008, Carney, who was only 42 years old, became the governor of the Bank of Canada and was praised for his quick and effective response to the financial crisis. Carney then moved to London to take charge of the Bank of England, the central bank of the United Kingdom, becoming the first foreign governor in the bank’s 300-year history.

The British media called him a “rock star economist” for his series of modern reforms to the traditional Bank of England.

During his tenure in the UK, Carney helped the UK through the turbulent period after Brexit and was called “the only adult in the room.” But at the same time, Carney also caused controversy for repeatedly warning about the economic risks of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and making remarks about the risks of climate change to financial markets.

After leaving his post as Governor of the Bank of England in 2020, Carney served as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Chairman of Bloomberg, and Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management.

His professional achievements have earned Carney a large support base among Canadian Liberal MPs.

Earlier, Canadian Foreign Minister Joly said Carney was “capable of dealing with major crises”. Canadian Environment Minister Guilbeault believed that Carney was best suited to “manage” US President Trump and lead the Canadian economy to achieve energy transformation in the coming years.

Syrians deserve peace and stability, but that is not at all what is being offered here. Sanctions are cruel, and it’s worth celebrating that they’ve been lifted, but the cost looks like it’s going to be an international effort to pillage and exploit Syria.

These puppets did nothing while israel systematically bombed most of Assad’s leftover military infrastructure, stockpiles, and vehicles. Literally hundreds of airstrikes without any meaningful response. They’re barely disputing occupied territories, even as they expand. Instead they’ve gotten into border skirmishes with Lebanon, attacked the Syrian Druze, and killed thousands of Alawites.

The testimonies of coastal massacre escapees are harrowing. There are more widely publicized stories of door to door executions, but there’s another pattern I heard described several times by people that lived in smaller villages.

Security forces would show up in uniform during the day, ask around about locals and their backgrounds, and disarm the population while assuring them that they would be protected. Then at night, there would be a brutal attack, and what I heard again and again is that the groups doing this are one and the same.

It’s ludicrous to describe this demon as protecting ethnic minorities while his forces have systematically killed thousands in an ethnic cleansing campaign. There were a few scattered clashes with Assad loyalist forces, but Alawite civilians were then described as such in order to justify liquidating entire villages.

Just because this monster puts on a suit, gets some official uniforms for his dogs to wear for the public, it does not change who he is and what he does. Don’t be fooled by the hollow condemnation of what he dismisses as the actions of extremist elements. This entire regime change operation has been undertaken not by Syrians seeking liberation, but by foreign powers conspiring to strip the country and its people for parts.

Thousands of Syrians trusted this new regime, believed it could be a step in the right direction, and were instead brutalized and exterminated. al-Jolani is an implant and a foreign instrument, and he’s given himself 4-5 years in power. Syrians did not choose him, other states did.

It’s not pessimism. Fascists are already banning books, criminalizing trans people, reversing environmental protections, outlawing abortion and criminalizing those that seek them, rewriting school curricula with historical revisionism and fascist propaganda to suit their needs, perpetrating hate crimes, discriminating against minorities and political opponents, and their media is cranking out fuel for stochastic terrorism day after day. Hell, on the primary debate stage the other day, the candidates were talking about how they would each approach executing people at the border. Of course there was a layer of euphemism, it was about “lethal force in border security”, but a whole hell of a lot of the people on the receiving end of that are migrants and refugees fleeing the conditions american foreign and economic policy has subjected them to.

I have clearly touched a nerve here because there are a lot of upset people downvoting what I’m saying, but I am not being a cynic or a defeatist, I am begging people to reckon with the reality of what is already happening. As I’ve said repeatedly, this trial is literally about how he incited his supporters to attempt overthrowing an election, and people are in here acting as if all that matters is how this might sway voters.

Fascists do not care about democracy, why do you think the GOP spends as much time as it does gerrymandering and messing with voter eligibility, closing polling stations, and purging rolls? They are not going to be voted away, and they are not going to give a fuck about whatever ethics people are just hoping they will abide by. Rules are seen as an obstacle to be overcome, not a boundary which cannot be crossed.

I said this in another reply but I’m going to repeat it here: ask yourself how much of his base are cops and soldiers, and then think about who it is that you’re expecting to step in when his base takes another swing.

$40 million for this bullshit instead of literally anything useful or productive at all.

Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.

Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.

“I have no idea why they were doing that with government money,” said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract. Deployed did not respond to requests for comment about its Greensboro contract.

There are a lot of terrible people doing terrible things to humanity and the planet, and I’ll be damned if I let those fucking ghouls outlive me.

It also has nothing to do with discouraging political participation, but rather encouraging more active political participation in processes outside of simply voting intermittently. When both choices offered are dogshit, or no choice is presented in the first place, the point isn’t to say “all hope is lost give up” but rather “this is broken in a way that voting will not fix.”

When the DNC is actively doing things such as obfuscating the very clear decline of the sitting president in order to bypass the primary process and install Harris, or ratfucking someone like Bernie via super delegates, media control, and so on in '16, this was not done by some “nefarious-but-nebulous they”. It’s very explicitly the DNC. Harris was one of the least popular candidates in '20, one of the first to drop from the race, and her term as vice president did very little to ingratiate her to those she ostensibly represents.

Whatever it is that needs to happen in order for people to get the sort of representation and principled opposition to fascism that most of them actually want, the DNC itself is obviously highly resistant or outright incapable of providing it. Voting alone will not fix this.

(edited '16 to '20 for the Harris primary drop out, realized I’d gotten dates mixed up and double checked afterwards to confirm)

No, I am well aware that the Israeli state has a long and well documented history of lying and fabricating evidence to support its genocidal goals. Just because Israel defines the entire civilian population as human shields does not make it so.

As I suspected, you will be unable to provide any independent sources or imagery of Hamas militants engaging in anything that would be recognized as human shielding under international law.

Conversely, I can provide several different examples from several different sources, which paint a clear and ongoing picture of flagrant war crimes being perpetrated by Israel. This is just the stuff that more closely aligns with “human shields”, using civilians, as well as civilian structures, uniforms, and vehicles, for protection. Israel has been openly violating international law for decades, their disregard for Palestinian life and basic human rights is excruciatingly well documented.

You’ll note that most of these articles do parrot all the lines from Israeli officials as their editorial boards force them to, some even repeat the claims of Hamas using human shields, but you will find none of those are tied to anything but Israeli testimonials. It’s reported matter-of-factly without a shred of evidence. The Israeli crimes however, usually include video or photographic evidence of them being perpetrated.

Surely if the practice of human shielding was common for Hamas, it should be easy enough for you to provide at least one photo or video of this happening, right? All I ask is that you provide one such example, anything that shows this actually happening that isn’t just an Israeli official, civilian, or militant saying it’s happening. If it’s common, it should not be hard to do.

That’s fair and I understand the impulse. The point of flooding the zone is partially to create panic and confusion, but it’s also a way to rapidly scatter a bunch of possible seeds of division or control at once, then focus on tending whatever works best, whatever has the least opposition afterwards.

There’s absolutely no situation in which a fascist regime making registries of “diseased” children is unworthy of alarm though.

I point out the vulnerability of kids because fascists always start with their easiest targets. It allows them to normalize, practice, and develop the systems they are building while also instilling fear and eroding opposition. That’s why we have to take this shit seriously from the start, the longer anyone waits the fewer there are around to fight back.

If anyone is distorting rules of engagement and humanitarian law, it’s actually Israel. Something that has come up again and again, especially in the writing of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, is the concept of “humanitarian camouflage” and how the Israeli state has very deliberately misused terms of international humanitarian law to cynically redefine civilian people, structures, and infrastructure as military targets. I am going to quote from an article she co-authored (available here):

The article analyzes the components of this humanitarian camouflage, unveiling how it has been deployed by Israel as a legal-political strategy in the service of a war of total annihilation. We start by examining how, since October 7, Israel has justified its genocidal campaign in Gaza using two registers: on one hand, a brutal register of dehumanization of the Palestinian population of Gaza, construed as a terrorist population to be eliminated; on the other hand—and simultaneously—a liberal register to legitimize its eliminationist violence in the face of its international allies’ audience, disguising it as compliance with IHL.

We then expand the analysis of the second register, showing how the Israeli military, mimicking IHL language, has construed the entirety of the built-up areas of Gaza as a continuum of alleged military objectives, reclaiming the ‘right’ to ‘lawfully’ raze houses, schools, mosques, churches, hospitals, entire neighborhoods, and entire cities to the ground, including the infrastructures indispensable for the survival of the civilian population, rendering the living space of the victim group unlivable. Subsequently, we examine how lethal distortions of the IHL concept of proportionality and collateral damage have been functional in construing entire masses of civilians as killable surroundings of military objectives with a diminished, or non-existent, right to life.

The analysis continues by showing how an array of IHL concepts like safe zones, evacuations, human shields, and “hospital shields” have been mobilized by Israel as technologies of settler-colonial displacement and genocide, creating conditions of life leading to the destruction of Gaza’s Palestinians “in whole or in part.” The article concludes by arguing that the settler-colonial genocidal war against Gaza, and Israel’s marshalling of international humanitarian law to legitimize it, ultimately shows that the international order has reached a tipping point whereby political acquiescence towards Israel and its legitimization as an international law-abiding state eviscerates the key legal tools the international community has developed to prevent international crimes. If tolerated, condoned, and unpunished, this process may inaugurate a new era of mass atrocities against protected groups in the Global South, in which big powers will be able to portray genocides as ‘incidental’ and ‘proportionate’ means to achieve their war aims.

I highly recommend reading the three reports issued by the UN on these matters, “Genocide as colonial erasure” which focuses more on historical context, “Anatomy of a genocide” which covers more of the present patterns of conflict, and finally “More than a human can bear” which covers the widespread and systematic use of gendered and sexual violence inflicted on Palestinians.