Text taken from man article which appeared in vz.ru
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics
[ColonelCassad] In anticipation of the almost inevitable American military operation against Venezuela under the pretext of fighting drugs, it's worth understanding where the fuss began.
The US has imposed sanctions against the current President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro. His crime? He said out loud what everyone knows, but no one should say: "Drug traffickers live in Miami, New York, Paris. Many of them are blue-eyed and blond. They live next to Trump's house in Miami, not on boats being hit by missiles."
Lula, the President of Brazil, added: "Drug traffickers are just as much victims as drug addicts, because demand creates supply." Petro is now on the same sanctions list as Putin, Maduro, and Assad. The US is bombing ships in the Caribbean (about 50 killed in October), preparing an invasion of Venezuela, and has declared the Colombian and Venezuelan presidents "narcoterrorists."
THREE KEY ASYMMETRIES:
Economics:
A Colombian coca farmer receives 1% of the cocaine price on the streets of New York. However, over 90% of the profits remain in the US – at the stages of transportation, distribution, retail, and laundering. Violence: tens of thousands killed in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America. Americans, completely safe (if we're talking about the elite) and less so (if we're talking about the common people), consume $150 billion worth of drugs annually.
Hunter Biden, a seasoned drug addict who has committed numerous crimes but has remained a "victim" rather than a criminal, deserves to become a monument to this approach.
Responsibility:
All the blame lies with the producers. The role of American demand as the driving force of the system is completely ignored. The US portrays itself as the victim of external aggression. The connection between a line of cocaine in the toilet of an elite club and the decapitated body of a teenager in Ciudad Juarez is fundamentally unacknowledged by the elite.
Florida as the Capital of Drug Capitalism.
In the 1980s, Miami laundered $7-12 billion annually, creating a Scarface-style frenzy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Miami held the largest cash surplus in the country. Today, the amount of money in Florida banks has increased exponentially. But it has become "non-cash," "gray," and "invested."
Orlando Cecilia, the brother-in-law of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who leads a crusade against Petro and Maduro, was one of Miami's largest cocaine traffickers. He was arrested in Rubio's home when DEA agents broke down the door.
Drug capital has transformed over three generations:
From the street gangs of the 1980s, through the real estate investments of the 1990s, to the political elite of today. The third generation of drug money now finances election campaigns and shapes US foreign policy. Who profits besides the "cartels"? Military-industrial complex: "Plan Colombia" – over $10 billion since 2000. It's the largest, but not the only one. Mexico's "Mérida" initiative continues this model.
The prison industry:
500,000 inmates for drug offenses (versus 40,000 in 1980). Private prisons use virtually free labor.
The financial sector:
The UN estimates global money laundering at $400 billion a year. Major banks have been caught and fined, but no one has gone to jail – “too big to jail.”
The paradox of efficiency:
If the Drug Enforcement Administration, created in 1973, had been tasked with developing the drug industry rather than suppressing it, it would have been the most efficient enterprise in human history.
The numbers:
1973 (creation of the DEA): US drug market – approximately $10-15 billion.
2025: US drug market – approximately $150 billion.
DEA budget 1973: approximately $75 million.
DEA budget 2025: approximately $3.1 billion.
Total Spending on the "War on Drugs":
1973: About $100 million.
2025: About $51 billion per year (federal + states).
Cumulative Spending since 1973: Over a trillion dollars.
Industries that grew in parallel:
• Drug treatment industry: $42 billion per year.
• Private prisons: $5 billion per year.
• Drug testing: Over $6 billion per year.
• Law enforcement equipment and technology: tens of billions of dollars.
The number of drug users is several times higher.
Effectiveness in terms of the stated mission: Negative. Effectiveness in terms of creating an ecosystem of dependent industries: Unprecedented.
And then we watch as the US aircraft carrier group approaches the shores of the "narco-state" Venezuela.
In Afghanistan, the fight against heroin and poppy crops produced similar results. The more vigorously they fought, the greater the increase in raw material and finished product production. Some of this went to Europe and the United States, with the support of the United States and NATO. This scheme works for both heroin and cocaine.
#3
All the blame lies with the producers. The role of American demand as the driving force of the system is completely ignored. The US portrays itself as the victim of external aggression. The connection between a line of cocaine in the toilet of an elite club and the decapitated body of a teenager in Ciudad Juarez is fundamentally unacknowledged by the elite.
There is plenty of blame to go around, Colonel. But at last we have a president who is trying to do something about it instead of snorting that line in the toilet and taking bribes from the cartels like some of his predecessors.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
10/28/2025 12:46 Comments ||
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A little something describing the Linux boot process.
[0XKATO] Part 1 — From power button to the kernel’s first breath
You press the power button. A second later a wall of text scrolls by, or a logo fades in, and eventually Linux appears. What happens in between is not magic. It is a careful handshake between tiny programs and a very literal CPU. This part follows that handshake until the very first line of C code inside the Linux kernel runs. The very first instruction
When power stabilizes, the CPU resets itself to a tiny, old‑fashioned mode called real mode. Real mode dates back to the original 8086 chip. The rules are simple on purpose. Memory addresses are built from two values the CPU keeps in special fast storage called registers. You combine a segment and an offset like this:
physical_address = (segment << 4) + offset
If you see numbers like 0xFFFFFFF0, that is hexadecimal. Hex is base 16. We write 0x in front to make that clear. 0x10 is 16 in everyday counting. 0x100000 is 1 megabyte. Hex lines up nicely with how hardware stores bits, which is why you see it everywhere in low‑level code.
Right after reset the CPU jumps to a special address called the reset vector at 0xFFFFFFF0. Think of it as a permanent bookmark that says “start here.” There is room for almost nothing at that address, so manufacturers put a short jump there that passes control to the firmware on your motherboard.
Tiny explainer: register A register is a tiny slot inside the CPU. It holds a number the CPU is using right now. Names like CS and IP are register names. CS means “code segment,” which marks the current neighborhood for instructions. IP means “instruction pointer,” which marks which instruction comes next.
BIOS and UEFI
The firmware is a small starter program baked into your board.
BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System. It is the older style. BIOS does a quick health check called POST, looks at the boot order, and tries each device. If it finds a disk whose very first 512‑byte sector ends with the marker bytes 0x55 and 0xAA, it treats that device as bootable. BIOS copies that sector to memory at 0x7C00 and jumps there. That sector is tiny, so it usually knows only how to load the next, larger piece.
UEFI is the modern replacement. It still starts the machine, but it understands filesystems directly and can load bigger boot programs without the old “first sector” dance. UEFI also passes richer information to the operating system. Different path, same goal: hand control to a boot program that can load Linux.
[FoxNews] As the Trump administration makes moves to change the H-1B visa program to benefit American-born workers, Skillstorm CEO Justin Vianello backed those efforts in an interview with Fox News Digital while offering his expertise on other issues that need to be addressed with work visas.
Vianello told Fox News Digital that one of the "biggest challenges" with the current H-1B system is the "impact" on college hiring, particularly with computer science and computer engineering graduates.
Vianello explained that the unemployment rate for college graduates with those degrees is significantly higher than the average for all college graduates and there is a "concerning" level of unemployment with college graduates in IT.
"So that basically means they didn't need degrees for the jobs that they're currently in, being significantly under employed," Vianello said. "How does the H-1B visa program impact that? Well, firstly, rough estimates are that there are about 730,000 H-1B holders in the U.S. and about 550,000 dependents. Most of them, in excess of 70% of them, are in IT."
Since we have a bunch of computer guys here, this has been a discussion topic from the early days of the site.
#1
The problem with Today’s American “Children” is they never learned to work! The H-1B’s learned to work and will put in 14-15hrs of work a day, without overtime. They like our country! When I worked all over the country and world after learning computers in the Navy. I worked 15-16 hours and spent much of my time on the road. When I earned my degree my pay doubled but my working hours stayed the same!
Posted by: Old Salty ||
10/28/2025 13:17 Comments ||
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#2
We should (Washington and big business should) take care of our own young people (US Citizens) first. If they do not have the skills necessary, TRAIN THEM to the standard that will permit full/employment and pay! Japan does it, we can do it as well.
#3
The H-1B’s learned to work and will put in 14-15hrs of work a day, without overtime.
In direct violation of the Fair Labor and Standards Act which their employers get away with. That's why they prefer H-1Bs. Employers also play the game of sub-contracting to shift blame so they don't get their company hammered by labor lawyers trying to collect under 'server penalties' consequences. The subcontractor folds then reappears under another name and incorporation.
#4
P2K, they don't have to pay overtime if the H1Bs are classified as exempt.
When I worked for IBM, they went through an exercise to "prove" most programmers - those above the most junior level - fit the definition of "exempt". So all companies have to do is classify them as exempt. And voila - no overtime.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
