The US—they call it NATO, though it was primarily the US—bombed North Korea almost to oblivion. When there was nothing left to bomb, they targeted dams—a major war crime for which Nazi criminals were hanged. Official histories, like the Air Force Quarterly, exult over these bombings. Huge torrents of water flooded valleys, destroyed crops, and killed people dependent on rice for survival. It’s monstrous, the praise for massive war crimes.
... since everything else in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the water supply — a war crime, by the way, for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the Asians scurrying around trying to survive. The journals were exulting in what this meant to those “Asians,” horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It’s not in our memory, but it’s in their memory. chomsky.info/20130604/ #BombingWaterSupplies #WaterWarCrimes #NorthKorea #NoamChomsky
Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. ... Politeness is not really the problem. I think we got into this situation in part by a lot of people in the mainstream thinking it was more important to be polite than to call things by their true names. There’s a wonderful historian and scholar of nonviolence named George Lakey who says polarization is good. That’s when you have clarity. Sometimes people have to pick sides. You do not get authoritarians to behave better by being meek and gentle and polite. You get it by being strong.
Warum schafft es Yaesu beim FT-5 eigentlich nicht, das Funkgeräte abzuschalten, wenn es aus ist? Abschalten bedeutet für mich: Kein Stromverbrauch. Aktuell steht das Gerät 3 Tage rum, und der Akku ist fast leer obwohl das Gerät aus ist.
Wenn es wieder Icom sein soll wäre meine Empfehlung das ID-52 mit D-Star. Alternativ: Wenn es DMR und FM sein darf: Meine Empfehlung: Anytone D168 oder Anytone AT-890. Alle drei Geräte habe ich im Einsatz und sie können was. Ist eine Frage der Vorlieben und des Budgets.
De regreso a Friendica. Admito que soy mas de microblogging, pero se me antojo volver.
Espero yo, que sea suficiente para mantenerme entretenido y darle el movimiento que se merece. A parte de la interfaz web, comence a usar #fedilab, para interactuar. En fin larga vida a las redes libres.
As of today, during the night, the backlog of >5 Mio. worker queue items has been resolved and new posts are delivered on time again.
Hopefully it stays that way.
Counter measures were: - increasing count of CPU cores from 8 to 24 vCPUs - increasing memory size from 20GB to 65GB - redundant setup of Friendica behind a load balancer, so that two virtual servers can work on the backlog
Whileas CPU and RAM are back to their old settings, the redundant setup will stay and maybe extended to a third virtual machine.
> It is worth noting that Jurgen Habermas and many of his disciples consider communicative structures as important as decision-making structures. When they assess the processes as well as results of social decision making, they find the fairness and efficiency of communication systems as important as the rules of decision making. The relevant questions are: Who has access to what information? What means for conveying information and opinions exist? How is the communicative interchange organized? These are some of the interesting questions the "modern" Frankfurt school has focused on. Remarkably, just by setting minimal goals for "humane communication," members of this school have elaborated guiding values for much of society.
"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats
In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~
"The Future of Poetry"
p. 151~
Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.
Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.
By transferring these dangerously high claims form the /poet/ to /poetry/, we gain great advantages. We clear the poet form intolerable curiosities. If one-tenth of the attention which as been given to portraying poets---since Dr. Johnson, that harbinger of modernity, launched the lives of poets on publishers' programs--had been given to making poetry more accessible, the world (I venture to suggest) would be much better off and poetry have a different order of audience.
... Happy was Isaiah, who had no biographer! Unhappy, Jeremiah, about whom we know too much. Amos again: what a noble figure! Poor Hosea, the type specimen of Nosy Parker! If one-tenth the attention had been linguistic not novelistic; it appears that there's no reason whatever to think Hosea and his wife, Gomer, were not an entirely happy, faithful pair....
"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats
In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~
"The Future of Poetry"
p. 151~
Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.
Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.
Ah, and Nerdica.net now runs redundant on two VMs behind a load balancer. Sadly, sometimes both backends are offline, but in general it got a little better...
Ich überlege, ob ich mal wieder versuche, mehr Friendica zu nutzen. Seit geraumer Zeit bin ich primär auf Mastodon unterwegs, aber die neue Version 2026.01 von Friendica sieht wieder ein bisschen frischer aus.
Schade finde ich immer noch, dass der Datenbank-Crash vom letzten (oder war es schon vorletztes) Jahr solche Auswirkungen gehabt und fast die Instanz d´gekillt hatte. Vieles ist einfach verschwunden, was meiner Motivation, hier etwas zu posten, auch nicht unbedingt zuträglich war.
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Blutwurz” 2026.01. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains fixes for security problems that Hrizi Bilel has notified us about. Thanks for your report! It also contains the first results of a accessibility review by Casey Kreer.
Some highlight of Friendica 2026.01 are
we overhauled the embedding of media from various sources and improved several aspects,
users can now sort widgets and channels,
the performance of system and user defined channels has improved,
admins can now export and import contact block lists and block access for non-logged in visitors to media included in posting.
If you have developed your own addons for Friendica note that we reworked our hook system and introduced a new AddonHelper class.
For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.
What is Friendica
Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumblr and BlueSky.
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.
Using Git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2026.01 release would be cd friendica git pull bin/composer.phar run install:prod cd addon git pull If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.
Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.php) and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.
The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2026.01 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script bin/console dbstructure update from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database this update might run for days.
If you are using the daemon for your background worker, note that we have moved the functionality into the console. Adopt your setup to use the new bin/console daemon command.
Known Issues
At the time of writing this, none with 2026.01
How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!
A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain. At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.
Greg Grandin on Noam Chomsky:
... In 1970, he lectured at Hanoi’s Polytechnic University, a building half-destroyed by US bombs, and then went on to tour refugee camps in Laos. He also lectured in 1985 in Managua, Nicaragua, during Ronald Reagan’s contra war, and then in the West Bank in 1997. In late 1999, Chomsky flew to Timor-Leste, as the Indonesian forces were slaughtering thousands following a vote in favor of independence. In 2002, he arrived unannounced in Istanbul to stand side-by-side in court with his Turkish publisher, Fatih Tas, who was being prosecuted for publishing Chomsky’s essays, including on Turkey’s repression of its Kurdish population. The state prosecutor dropped the charges rather than agree to Chomsky’s insistence that he be listed as a codefendant.
Noam was married to his first wife, Carol Chomsky—herself an influential scholar in the field of linguistic pedagogy—for 59 years. After Carol died in 2008, the inhabitants of two Colombian Andean villages, Santa Rita and La Vega, named a forest after her, El Bosque Carol Chomsky, in appreciation of her husband’s advocacy on their behalf in the fight to protect water rights. In August 2012, it took Noam two days traveling by jeep and on horseback to reach the high woods to attend the dedication ceremony. He sat in silence as villagers described violence, land theft, and water poisoning they suffered at the hands of ranchers, death squads, and gold miners. Chomsky tried to speak but couldn’t find the words. Later, he sent a note to the communities saying that he hoped that “Carol’s spirit” would help them fight the “predatory forces” they face.
And, throughout all of this time, Chomsky spoke to everyone. In 2004, he let the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, posing in character as Ali G, into his office...
The Epstein Class's uncaring attitudes and the list of Chomsky's caring actions brings to mind a 2012 article by Fred Branfman:^3
I was also struck by his self-deprecation. He had a near-aversion to talking about himself — contrary to most of the “Big Foot” journalists I had met. He had little interest in small talk, gossip or discussion of personalities, and was focused almost entirely on the issues at hand. He downplayed his linguistic work, saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in Indochina. He had no interest whatsoever in checking out Vientiane’s notorious nightlife, tourist sites or relaxing by the pool. He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. He struck me as a genuine intellectual, a guy who lived in his head. And I could relate. I also lived in my head, and had a mission.[/b]
[b]...One of the reasons I was so horrified by the bombing is that I had come to know the Lao as people by living in my village for the previous three years – particularly a 70-year-old man named Paw Thou Douang whom I had come to love as a kind of surrogate father. He was kind, wise and gentle, and I respected him as much as anyone I had ever met. I was particularly struck by how warmly Noam related to Paw Thou during our dinner with him and his family. He clearly felt an immediate affinity with them that I hadn’t seen in the many other visitors I had taken to the village. He also displayed a focused curiosity about the details of what was happening in Laos, to which I was more than pleased to respond.
But what most struck me by far was what occurred when we traveled out to a camp that housed refugees from the Plain of Jars. I had taken dozens of journalists and other folks out to the camps at that point, and found that almost all were emotionally distanced from the refugees’ suffering. Whether CBS’s Bernard Kalb, NBC’s Welles Hangen, or the New York Times’ Sidney Schanberg, the journalists listened politely, asked questions, took notes and then went back to their hotels to file their stories. They showed little emotion or interest in what the villagers had been through other than what they needed to write their stories. Our talks in the car back to their hotels usually concerned either dinner that night or the next day’s events.
I was thus stunned when, as I was translating Noam’s questions and the refugees’ answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping. I was struck not only that most of the others I had taken out to the camps had been so defended against what was, after all, this most natural, human response. It was that Noam himself had seemed so intellectual to me, to so live in a world of ideas, words and concepts, had so rarely expressed any feelings about anything. I realized at that moment that I was seeing into his soul. And the visual image of him weeping in that camp has stayed with me ever since. When I think of Noam this is what I see.
One of the reasons his reaction so struck me was that he did not know those Laotians. It was relatively easy for me, having lived among them and loved people like Paw Thou so much, to commit to trying to stop the bombing. But I have stood in awe not only of Noam, but of the many thousands of Americans who spent so many years of their lives trying to stop the killing of Indochinese they did not know in a war they never saw.
As we drove back from the camp that day, he remained quiet, still shaken by what he had learned. He had written extensively of U.S. war-making in Indochina before this. But this was the first time he had met its victims face-to-face. And in the silence, an unspoken bond that we have never discussed was forged between us.
As I look back on my life I feel I was a better person during this period than I have been before or since. And I realized that at that time we were both coming from the same place: Compared to the unconscionable Calvary of these innocent, gentle, kind people — and so many others — everything else seemed trivial. Once you knew that innocent people were dying, how could you justify to yourself doing anything other than trying to save their lives?
And I realized in the silence of that car ride that beneath Noam’s public persona as the intellectual’s intellectual, who relied on facts and reason to make his case, there lay a deeply feeling human being. For Noam these Lao peasants were human beings with names, faces, dreams and as much of a right to their lives as those who so carelessly laid waste to them. But for many of these visiting journalists, not to mention Americans back home, these Lao villagers were faceless “unpeople” whose lives had no meaning whatsoever.^3
Chomsky has often suffered fools, knaves, and criminals too lightly. Epstein was one of them. But that doesn’t mean Chomsky was part of the “Epstein class.”
Kafka, an employee of a workmen’s insurance company and a loyal friend of many eastern European Jews for whom he had had to obtain permits to stay in the country, had a very intimate knowledge of the political conditions of his country. He knew that a man caught in the bureaucratic machinery is already condemned; and that no man can expect justice from judicial procedures where interpretation of the law is coupled with the administering of lawlessness, and where the chronic inaction of the interpreters is compensated by a bureaucratic machine whose senseless automatism has the privilege of ultimate decision. But to the public of the twenties, bureaucracy did not seem an evil great enough to explain the horror and terror expressed in the novel. People were more frightened by the tale than by the real thing. They looked therefore for other, seemingly deeper, interpretations, and they found them, following the fashion of the day...
The words of the prison-chaplain in The Trial reveal the faith of bureaucrats as a faith in necessity, of which they themselves are shown to be the functionaries. But as a functionary of necessity, man becomes an agent of the natural law of ruin, thereby degrading himself into the natural tool of destruction, which may be accelerated through the perverted use of human capacities. Just as a house which has been abandoned by men to its natural fate will slowly follow the course of ruin which somehow is inherent in all human work, so surely the world, fabricated by men and constituted according to human and not natural laws, will become again part of nature and will follow the law of ruin...
英訳文 Valley goddess who produces all things never dies. I call her "mysterious motherhood". Heaven and earth appeared from her gate. Her existence is vague and obscure. But she is producing all things unceasingly.
Erik
in reply to Uwe Leigraf • •Uwe Leigraf
in reply to Uwe Leigraf • •Erik
in reply to Uwe Leigraf • •Uwe Leigraf
in reply to Uwe Leigraf • •Erik
in reply to Uwe Leigraf • •