Sound of the Chang,
an ancient Persian musical instrument known as a vertical angular harp, which was widely used during the Sasanian Dynasty
pic.twitter.com/2areglfDWZ— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) June 7, 2025
The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered Quanta Magazine
Can a robot help you age better? The Conversation
15,000 Light-Years Away, Something Is Blinking – And It Might Rewrite Physics SciTech Daily
COVID-19/Pandemics
The pandemic generation: How Covid-19 has left a long-term mark on children BBC
Calls for RFK Jr. to Resign Grow Louder MedPage Today
Kash Patel claims ‘breakthrough’ in Fauci COVID origins probe The Hill
New COVID variant NB.1.8.1 spreads across continents amid calls for vigilance News Medical< A New COVID Variant Is Here, And It’s More Transmissible — Here Are The Signs And Symptoms Huffpost
Climate/Environment
From Media Darling to Persona Non Grata: Greta Thunberg’s Journey ScheerPost
The United States’ climate credibility crisis East Asia Forum
Climate change threatens banana exports, key to the Latin American economy El Pais
China?
A 100-year-old 7,500-ton Shikumen building in Shanghai is being moved back to its spot by 432 walking robots after making space for a new underground mall 🚶♂️🏙️
— Tansu Yegen (@TansuYegen) June 5, 2025
Taiwan Condemns China’s ‘Provocative’ Patrol The Defense Post
This Could Be Our Best View Yet Of China’s J-36 Very Heavy Stealth Tactical Jet The War Zone
On board the driverless lorries hoping to transform China’s transport industry BBC
China eases stranglehold on rare minerals in welcome news for GM, Ford: report NY Post
South of the Border
Supreme Court tosses Mexico’s $10B lawsuit claiming US gunmakers have fueled cartel violence AP
Trump & Rubio Tighten the Noose on Cuba ScheerPost
Argentina’s Debt Trap Phenomenal World
European Disunion
Baltic states issue statement supporting Ukraine’s membership in EU and NATO Ukrainska Pravda
EU’s von der Leyen ‘has to be held accountable’ for vaccine texts: Senior MEP Aubry France 24
EU Commission paid environmental NGOs to target Germany, report says Euractive
Old Blighty
£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan The Register
Russia is already at war with Britain and we can no longer rely on Trump, defence adviser warns The Independent
Israel v. The Resistance
Children in Gaza have only 245 calories per day!
Forced starvation is an act of genocide. pic.twitter.com/CSjjwsdKxe
— Mohamad Safa (@mhdksafa) June 7, 2025
Israel orders evacuations in 2 Gaza neighborhoods on Eid’s 2nd day Andolu Agency
Israel Army Announces 4 Soldiers Killed in Gaza, Thousands More Troops Needed The Defense Post
UNRWA slams Israeli ban on international journalists reporting on Gaza, calls to allow it to work Andolu Agency
Netanyahu confirms Israel arming clans opposed to Hamas in Gaza BBC
New Not-So-Cold War
Russia Strikes Back as Ukraine Bets House on Asymmetric ‘Terror’ War Simplicius
🇺🇦🇷🇺 BIG ANNOUNCEMENT:
“Units of the 90th Tank Division of the Center Forces Group have reached the western border of the Donetsk People's Republic and continue to develop the offensive in the territory of the Dnepropetrovsk region.”
— Ministry of Defense of RussiaSo Russia… pic.twitter.com/ag99MAatvC
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) June 8, 2025
Military intrigues Events in Ukraine substack
Kyiv and Moscow accuse each other of seeking to delay prisoner swap France 24
Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web redefined the front lines of war Asia Times
Kharkiv hit by ‘most powerful attack’ of entire war, mayor says, as Russia pounds Ukraine again CNN
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Infomaniak’s Surveillance Shift Sparks Privacy Clash Web Pro News
US Supreme Court Grants DOGE Access to Social Security Data Amid Privacy Concerns News X
Privacy concerns swirl around HHS plan to build Medicare, Medicaid database on autism CNN
University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil student Gaza protesters Guardian (Guardian)
Imperial Collapse Watch
The Deep State Is Still Sabotaging Presidential Policies Moon of Alabama
FAA will restrict flights at Newark airport through end of year NJ.com
Trump 2.0
The End of Silicon Politics Yascha Mounk substack
How Tariffs Are Breaking the Manufacturing Industries Trump Says He Wants To Protect Reason
Climate change threatens banana exports, key to the Latin American economy El Pais
Trump is trying to defang the Endangered Species Act The Hill
Musk Matters
Maher advises Democrats to ‘win’ Elon Musk ‘back’ The Hill
How the U.S. became highly reliant on Elon Musk for access to space NPR
Democrat Death Watch
Jean-Pierre triggers Democratic fury with public split from party The Hill
The Great Un-Awokening Politico
Immigration
After 2 days of clashes over immigration raids, National Guard will be sent to L.A., official says Los Angeles Times
Trump’s immigration, trade policies could cost tourism industry $12B: report NY Post
‘A complete sea change’: Trump’s immigration crackdown goes into hyperdrive Politico
Our No Longer Free Press
Free Speech Organizations Pen Open Letter Sounding Alarm on Press Freedom Under Trump Meidas Touch News
Mr. Market Is Moody
Weekly Commentary: Uncertainty Squared Credit Bubble Bulletin
Dollar poised for weekly loss, hurt by economic weakness and trade limbo Reuters
Should investors be preparing for a US stock market crash in 2025? The Motley Fool
AI
A knockout blow for LLMs? Gary Marcus
OpenAI Wants to get College Kids Hooked on AI Gizmodo
“Meta Is Redefining Warfare”: U.S. Army Adopts AR-AI Headset That Turns Soldiers Into Real-Time Combat Intelligence Hubs Sustainability Times
A professor testing ChatGPT’s, DeepSeek’s and Grok’s stock-picking skills suggests stockbrokers should worry Market Watch
This dude create an AI video “interviewing” people from the 1500s and it’s hilarious 😂 pic.twitter.com/89wxf80HPq
— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) June 4, 2025
AI analysis of ancient handwriting gives new age estimates for Dead Sea Scrolls CNN
The Bezzle
The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles BBC
Guillotine Watch
The Suashish Necktie: $220,000
the world most expensive Tie ever madeThe man behind it is Indian fashion designer-Satya Paul.
Tie is made of pure silk, using 150 grams of gold for the pattern and 271 sparkling-77carat diamonds.
This Tie can cost you Lamborghini Gallardo!! pic.twitter.com/dL4CMtfc15
— The Worlds Most Expensive (@twmeofficial) August 21, 2020
Good Evening X Family ✨✨✨
The most expensive pen in the world is the Fulgor Nocturnus by Tibaldi which sold for $8 million dollars at auction. Translated from Latin, Fulgor Nocturnus means “night glow” which seems appropriate given the black diamond bling on this precious… pic.twitter.com/8WilzCdLor
— Nandini (@69Nandini) September 12, 2024
Class Warfare
Sacramento County to use drones to track homeless people on probation CBS Sacramento
We mapped 18,000 children’s playgrounds and revealed inequality across England The Conversation
Antidote du jour (via)
And a bonus:
Cat meets baby boy for the first time and this happened 🥺 pic.twitter.com/d3srpG0sY3
— Cats That Make You Go Awww (@CuteAdorableCat) June 7, 2025
These most expensive items of clothing seem to be so not out of any quality of craft or making or skill, but because someone sticks a lot of gold or diamonds on it, which is pretty the definition of tacky, there is no notion of what intrinsic quality, what’s to stop someone making a sock out of a cheque for a trillion dollars and calling it “the most expensive sock in the world?” Reminds me of Damien Hirst’s Diamond skull; ‘for the love of’, he boasted in an interview that his favourite thing about it was he effected the global cost of diamonds, thus showing he fetishised crude market dynamics “numbers go up, number go down” over and above the infinite potential and power of art itself for non-linear symbolism, which says a lot about Hirst’s the artist and his values.
At NC, we were already introduced to the most expensive strawberry, the most expensive cognac, the most expensive car (I do not even remember the brand), the most expensive ice-cream…
A sign that we are near the end of an epoch/civilization?
Epic levels of stupidity and gauche on the most splendiferous tie ever designed and made by hand ! Get them while supplies last….
By sheer coincidence I read this week about different generations and retirement planning. If memory serves that featured tie runs about or above the average retirement balance for the average Generation X individual. Unreal.
Doesn’t matter if I was rich enough to afford that tie ten times over, I would still dribble coffee or spill some food on it. Why bother.
All of those items have one thing in particular, exclusivity.
It’s in a Illionaire’s DNA, that’s why they have escape plans to Hawaiian & NZ bunkers, you see, the thought is they are going to live forever.
I can buy a flat of strawberries for $4
I can buy a non vintage cognac for $40
I can buy a car for $40,000
I can buy an ice cream cone for $4
p.s.
I’m not gonna wear a tie again if I can somehow pull it off…
Jim, I Wore a Tie Today, by the Highwaymen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtxNOAit5fo
I want to see someone do a video on the Most Expensive Politician.
It comes with surgically added alligator skin implants-along with conscience removal, a rich Corinthian leather-like tan, digitally aided in using all 10 of them to seek contributions to the point where they can comfortably hobnob with the haves-not the have nots.
Only the best of our serving politicians ever reach their fullest potential.
Former Sen Bob Menendez must feel pleasantly surprised at donning an orange jumpsuit…look Ma I really made it(!)
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-us-senator-robert-menendez-sentenced-11-years-prison-bribery
Best idea ever.
For politicians, as the saying goes, if you have to ask you can’t afford it/him/her. But for the cost of that tie I think you can get six run-of-the mill state legislators or perhaps three freshman congressmen.
@vao I would prefer to see more coverage of say Africa in place of coverage of guady expensive items, just my opinion
Agreed. Especially since Africa seems to be just a background of indistinct convulsions and smouldering conflicts, but lots of very relevant things are happening there, of which we only get episodic glimpses.
We must be close to running out of gaudy spendy items, although I feel a $600k fur sink is not out the realm of possibilities.
Wait, wait. That would be the ultimate Sink Cost Fallacy, wouldn’t it?
You win!
Middle ground would be coverage of guady expensive items in Africa.
(Which are all conveniently on display at the Museum of London
they are not for functional use.
my nephew’s BFF is a scion. their family’s thing is art; and have a 2nd tier university-level art collection in their house cum fieldhouse cum gallery.
there definitely are (say) 1,000 men who have the money and intense interest re. $MM pens. it’s part pride, part collectible, part hoard-ism
These sort of gaudy individual pieces are never the guillotine watch items that really get me. It’s the insane real estate developments that seem designed to be instagram’d (and invariably are) but that you can’t fathom a person or family actually living comfortably in. It’s the unhinged tourist attractions that had to be built from the ground up (or down, in the underground cases) with the idea of getting the superparasites of the world to take selfies there for 5 figures daily. Those are the things, more than the comically bedazzled and marked up small goods, that demonstrate the bizarre economie complete of the gigarich.
As a tie, it’s abysmal. A properly made tie hangs with an elegant drape, slightly convex and bellied. This bit of rubbish hangs like a scrap of cardboard.
And the knot! It lacks volume and substance; the sort of knot that a schoolboy would leave in his tie all term, shrinking and stretching the neck-loop each day to put it on and take it off. My preference was* always a half-Windsor**; bulky enough to set off a properly shaped collar, but not so big as to appear ostentatious.
And nobody who matters allows the top of their shirt to appear above the knot.
This commentary is from a guy who wore a tie every day “on duty” for four years of high school, two years of college, and forty-two years working in healthcare.
*The day I exchanged full time work for full time retirement I swore I would never ever wear a tie again. So far so good, with the exception of my graduation ceremony. One needs something to keep that damned academic gown in place.
**The half-Windsor became popular after the “Great War” (the war to end all wars, hahaha). For some reason the knot went out fashion in the late 30s, after a certain duke ran off with a Mrs Simpson.
“China eases stranglehold on rare minerals in welcome news for GM, Ford: report ”
They may have eased rare minerals going to car manufacturers to show Trump that they are flexible, but I note that they are not shipping rare minerals to go to the Pentagon for weapons manufacturing. And can you see Trump begging them to do so lest the US military stops being able to make new weapons – to be pointed at China?
“Sound of the Chang, an ancient Persian musical instrument known as a vertical angular harp, which was widely used during the Sasanian Dynasty.”
Is it really something people do not know about nowadays?
It is well-known in Europe, if less used compared to other instruments, and each language seems to have its own term to designate it (thus, it is called a “Maultrommel” in German, and a “guimbarde” in French).
For instance, it appears prominently in the Yugoslav movie “Ko to tamo peva – Who’s Singin’ Over There?”.
Commonly called a mouth harp or in more colloquial parlance a ‘Jew’s harp’, widely played and known around Europe until more recent times. Sassanid times, who could possibly have guessed that. This kind of TikTok distortion for self promotion is something we definitely don’t need. On the other hand the TikTok AI film about medieval England is a good laugh.
If you’re ever in Phoenix, in particular during their torrid summer, but anytime really…
The wonderfully air conditioned Musical Instrument Museum is a must!
They seemingly have every instrument from every nook and cranny in the world. I think I counted around 10 sets of non-Scottish bagpipes, to give you an idea.
A good deal of it is hands on, and more, Go!
https://mim.org/
I wrote another post before seeing this one. It’s down below, with links, if anyone’s interested.
I was tickled to see the jew’s harp tied to the Sassanid dynasty of Persia. So they brought it back from the Babylonian Captivity. Cool. The tweet was unusually learnedly stupid.
Ahem, the Sassanid dynasty rose to power at least 750 years after the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews.
That tiktok video about the morsing/chang is indeed stupid — AI-level stupid.
Oops, glad I’ve only got human-level stupidity–thanks!
Lots of people know about jaw harps! Current research by ethnomusicologists suggests that around 1,500 different names are applied to this instrument. The guy in the video is Jamie Bebb of theharpery.com which is one of the major sites for the sale of jaw harps from around the world.
Jaw harp, jew’s harp (nothing to do with Jews), genggong, vargan, doromb, drymba, khomus, morchang, maultrommel, munnharpa…the instrument’s ubiquity is amazing. There are some very good US jaw harp makers, and one of which I am aware in Canada.
There are some who are sensitive to calling it a “jew’s harp” as that appears to be a Middle English mistranslation and there are other sensitivies. Also, the old Scottish term for it was “trump.” Not many people in the community use that term, either.
As you might guess, a minor obsession of mine!
Yea, but have you seen the Yugoslav movie? Also, is it the Chang if the salesman calls it so, and why does he has the international symbol of being dumb on the Internets next to his left ear?
> Russia Strikes Back as Ukraine Bets House on Asymmetric ‘Terror’ War Simplicius
In which Simplicius presents a “video shows Russian Kh-101 missiles firing off flares before hitting Lutsk Repair Plant”. Why does a cruise missile fire off flares like that? For what purpose?
I would assume to draw air defense fire.
Missile interceptors in terminal mode shift to infrared (IR), if they are not solely IR.. Flares “confused” the homing mechanisms.
The most recent versions of IM ( Sidewinder) and AIM 120 (AMRAAM) have multi-function seekers.
There are other “low tech” techniques to spoof IR seekers.
pre-emptive counter-measures. also possible with the flare (ie heat) are metallic chaff…to confuse any radar or missile homing-in
too slow?
Wiki suggests: Mach 0.6-0.78
as Yves suggests, diversion
They think that Ukraine still has a few Stingers left (or some other heat seeking missile protecting the target).
^^ This. These flares are a smaller version of what low flying aircraft routinely use to evade IR missiles*. You may have seen footage like this. You want the missile to be attracted to the decoy rather than its intended target.
A cruise missile like the Kh-101 can only be fitted with a few, small, short-duration flares in contrast with the larger and more numerous aircraft flares from the clip above. It looks like they save them for the last phase of flight near the target where air defenses are likely to be concentrated.
Modern missiles are increasingly good at avoiding simple decoys like flares and chaff, but they’re still used because: it’s worth a try, they don’t take up much space or weight, you might be lucky enough to be facing an older missile.
AFAICT Russian cruise and ballistic missiles in the SMO are the first widespread combat use of munitions that drop decoys to deter air defense: Kh-101 flares and fancy Iskander radar decoys come to mind **.
Russia is also said to routinely use large, powered decoys as well: drones and missiles designed to attract air defense attention away from the warhead carriers during large strikes.
* Stinger/Strela/Igla, Sidewinder, the long-ranged Houthi/Iranian IR SAM that’s been taking out Reaper drones, etc.
** There’s even been some speculation that the Oreshnik payload was a weaponized version of what were originally non-explosive ICBM/IRBM decoys–or perhaps more prosaically just dummy test warheads.
I found it interesting the bit on desertions. Not that the numbers provided should be taken seriously but this is one of the signs suggesting that the Ukrainian might not be that far from collapsing. Given the way this war is being driven i guess that all of a sudden and unexpectedly Z’s regime will collapse and the war will change dramatically. How and when is quite unpredictable but it seems to me Ukraine will fall like a house of cards at some point.
Some other items of Russian “hybrid influence” on the precariousness of the Kiev regime are the 6000 bodies laid on the Ukrainian doorstep waiting for somebody to pick them up, and the new from today that apparently (video evidence) the Russian 90th Tank Division entered the Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
It’s becoming harder and harder to maintain the fantasy that Ukraine stands a chance.
Those 6000 bodies are also billions of hryvnas to be paid to their families. Hryvnas alread spent on hookers and blow.
This is a German paper´s perspective on the problem of forced recruitment if reported at all:
Today´s BERLINER ZEITUNG.
It´s a very rare exception.
Abuse and corruption in recruitment: Fear of “human traffickers” is spreading in Ukraine
In Ukraine, the average age of soldiers on the front lines is high. Men of military age are forced into military service, sometimes using violent methods. A report.
https://archive.is/7ZOcT
Still a bit you get the fuzzy impression it´s sort of not organized and not systemic and only a problem as of late. Since it´s brave, heroic and democratic Ukrainians.
How many “desertions” are actually KIA, I wonder…
Yes, surprised Simplicius completely ignored this. There were widespread claims early in the war that a lot of “missing in actions” were KIAs. Now they’ve been missing too long to keep that up. So gradually converted to deserters do as to forestall the need to pay back pay and death benefits to relatives.
“Jean-Pierre triggers Democratic fury with public split from party”
I suppose that you can reword that title to say that a party, which loves to stab people in the back, is surprised when one of their own does it to them.
But wasn´t she insufferable in those press meetings?
I scarcely watch those but I remember thinking, what a nice name for someone with that awful behaviour.
I was particularly creeped-out by her white eye makeup. It looked as if she was staring at you more intently when her eyes were closed…
Cool!
Temple of Doom.
“The lady has yet not have her morning monkey meal”
Omission Accomplished
We know you have a choice of political parties, thanks for choosing the Donkey Show! (brays uncontrollably)
Eh, it’s part of her book tour. They should at least respect the grift.
Tonton M’loot
It struck me that with her there was a depth.
But if one stands at the Emperor’s podium, one must bow to his thoughts, and choose one’s words carefully.
Maybe they will soon have Elon Musk on board. I don’t see how that could conceivably lead to any difficulties.
Re: Should investors be preparing for a US stock market crash in 2025? The Motley Fool
The fake AI productivity gains should juice it for a while. The problem is how long will it take for the fundamental weakness of the Western economies to manifest? Anything which exists as code is essentially worthless as it can be freely copied. Bitcoin, which has no actual value and is trading at over $100k, is the perfect emblem for such a system. China has a lead in most areas and will eventually overtake in all areas. I get the real impression that all it takes is a tug on one thread and the whole tapestry unravels. It is already frayed in too many places to hold together.
“The problem is how long will it take for the fundamental weakness of the Western economies to manifest?”
What about a year of truly bad crop failures?
With climate change and biodiversity woes (e.g. bees collapse, pests spreading around, etc), a really poor harvest would have a lot of knock-on effects — food inflation, bankruptcy of food-related business (agro-transformation, restaurants, etc), diversion of disposable income to the detriment of every other economic sector than food, agricultural trade surplus turning into a deficit for affected countries… and ultimately a possible stock exchange crash and plenty of disastrous consequences for currencies, state budgets, and banks (starting with those very much involved in financing agrobusiness, such as the French Crédit Agricole).
Somebody asked yesterday, how do I know Hunga Tonga is effecting things? …and a lesser volcano named Laki in Iceland blew up real good in 1783, and these things take years to manifest in terms of what they do, and in France in particular, wheat harvests were bad over a number of years, leading up to being the prime mover for revolution, hunger is quite a motivator. The price of bread was double that of a Frenchman’s wages, when the good women of Paris descended on Versailles and King Louis XVI…
Laki was a 4 on the Volcano Explosivity Index, Hunga Tonga was a VEI 5 to 6, with it also being a rare Submarine Volcano which spewed tons of vapor into the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_March_on_Versailles
Ahh!
The three Norn at the base of Yggdrasil one has a sheer over the threat of the S&P 500 speculative run…..
Is Motley Fool like Jim Carmer?
I always thought of Jim Cramer as a malevolent Soupy Sales, only Soupy wasn’t selling anything.
The best advice I’ve heard from pros is to avoid anyone who pitches stock tips or “analysis.” Do research yourself or buy index funds.
Motley Fool started out okay providing general market info but long ago moved on.
Before today, I don’t ever remember seeing a link from The Motley Fool on NC.
Tread carefully…
The article was also a shill for a UK real estate fund. Stopped taking it seriously at that point.
Yes, not sure why the article was included? Seems like it was probably AI generated to promote the real estate fund.
This is ad hom.
We’ve linked to them before although not recently.
They had some very good stories in the runup to the GFC.
What’s the actual value of a $, considering that it can be virtually printed ad infinitum? Gold has also increased its value in $ lately, by some concidence.
“Kyiv and Moscow accuse each other of seeking to delay prisoner swap”
I’d have to say that it was Zelensky spiking this swaps as he has also been spiking the return of the Ukrainian dead. He actually went ballistic when he heard about this and called the negotiations idiots. So of course the Russians decided to put the boot in over Zelensky’s refusal to receive back their dead-
‘The governor of Russia’s Zaporozhye Region, Evgeny Balitsky, published the first six pages containing 97 names, identification documents, and places of death on Saturday evening, after Ukraine reportedly refused to receive the remains of thousands of its troops.
“We are beginning to publish lists of identified bodies so that relatives can find their dead,” he wrote. “We understand that Kiev has this data, but they are deliberately hiding it from the public.” ‘
https://www.rt.com/russia/618791-ukrainian-soldiers-names-list/
‘Tansu Yegen
@TansuYegen
A 100-year-old 7,500-ton Shikumen building in Shanghai is being moved back to its spot by 432 walking robots after making space for a new underground mall 🚶♂️🏙️’
Rumour has it that the Chinese flew in 10,000 Mormons for this operation because of their experience-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc6IT5L3ZSk (21:45 mins)
I must say that Shikumen ain’t no Shinkansen, if you are in a hurry.
Rev,
Those are Amish in your video. Very competent carpenters, cabinet makers, wheelwrights and coopers. Mormons are…different.
Pax
Oops. I mistyped. I have read how the Amish are not only very well versed with 19th century skills but more modern ones as well and as an example they build those stages for some very high flying entertainers. They know how to build stuff and get the job done.
The description resembles the one from Wikipedia, for a differen looking instrument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_(instrument)
The one on the video looks and sounds like mouth harp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew%27s_harp
Bonus Trivia
In the Balkans, the mouth harp is widely known for its use by a couple of Gypsy musicians in a movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obo9afw7AZw
“The description resembles the one from Wikipedia, for a differen looking instrument.”
People start hallucinating just like AI!
If wikipedia is to be trusted, apparently the x post used a shortened form of morsing, or morchang, which is a mouth harp – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsing. Chang does appear to be a larger stand up harp.
According to Wikipedia, both the Jew’s harp/mouth harp and the morsing are “heteroglot guimbardes”. They look like variations of the same instrument architecture.
That’s preposterous! International rule-based World order is full of rules that are strictly against blatant violations of the regional status quo.
Since when does ‘status quo’ have agency?
When it is a convenient placeholder word for the various and sundry elites who make the decisions for a polity.
At least they don’t call Formosa the Republic of China. That is what Taipei claims.
Status quo is that there is one China. But the US thinks Taiwan can be free like the Donbas.
Oh, US wants to cram Donbas back in to Stalin’s revenge.
Status quo is who has the more guns, missiles and ships…….
Formosa certainly not!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7WuDYwvCFw
…
Hand grenades flying over your head
Missiles flyin’ over your head, if you wanna survive
Get out of bed
You’re in the army now
Oh, oh you’re in the army, now
Shots ring out in the dead of night
The sergeant calls: “Stand up and fight!”
You’re in the army now
Oh, oh you’re in the army – now
You’re in the army now
Oh, oh you’re in the army – now
…
Taibbi and Kirn, America This Week, 30 minutes public excerpt about the current Dem party’s efforts to woo back men voters.
America This Week, June 6, 2026: “The War Party that Can’t Talk to Men”
https://www.racket.news/p/america-this-week-june-6-2026-the
Democrat Party: ‘We hate men, they are the cause of all the trouble in the world and they should just go off and die. By the way guys, you’ll still vote for us in the next election, right?’
>>>By the way guys, you’ll still vote for us in the next election, right?’
(And if you don’t, it’s because you’re racist.)
One would think that the Democratic Party does not listen to its own BS.
lol. good luck.
yes, Barnard/Evergreen State grads….the cis, white dude who’s working his arse at the auto repair shop (or is a line man, etc.), trying get everything done by 6p, and just wants to go home and see his kids is the face of the Patriarchy and the source of your opression…not the literal scions-cum-state-governors in the Dem. party (and their backers)
thanks Flora.
and at the very end, Kirn gives me an idea,lol…the part about a dude getting gussied up and wandering around, and nobody notices him…as opposed to a dude, not necessarily gussied up, out in public with a woman, and chicks are of a sudden innerested.
lol.
sadly, all the chicks i got that would do lunch with me platonically are people like my Suegra and my Eldest’s girlfriend…Tam’s Tia’s, etc.
ie: everybody around here knows our relationships implicitly.(4500 in whole county…everyone knows everyone)
and, if i were to find a woman who would assent to do lunch with me platonically to further such a hairbrained scheme, i’d prolly end up pursuing her,lol.
and with a will, at this point.
“Trump is trying to defang the Endangered Species Act ”
Looks like Californian Condor is back on the menu again, boys. So why is Trump doing this? Partly, I guess, to make happy those wealthy hunters who want to go after big game which you mostly can’t at the moment – usually because they are endangered. That way they can get bragging right by collecting a rare trophy for their lodge in front of their wealthy friends. But I suspect that it is mostly to enable construction of infrastructure or projects going ahead and not having to worry about driving some species into extinction. Nothing personal little guys, it’s just business. For those interested, here is a list of some 1500 species now under the gun-sights of the Trump regime-
https://ecos.fws.gov/ecp0/reports/ad-hoc-species-report
E.O. Wilson wrote a book a decade ago called Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, where he postulated that we ought to leave half the world alone, and aside from the DMZ in Korea and Chernobyl, National Parks in the USA are the closest thing we have to such an ideal.
You’re not going to see it in the 1% of the NP that 99% of the visitors typically go to-such as Yosemite Valley, but just a few miles away from that over loved locale are places no human ever goes and nature rules, and so it extends all the way to the Yosemite NP borders.
add in much of texas, west of I-35.
generally…mostly…privately owned…and yes, people run cows and whatnot.
but it still looks a lot like it did before white folks got here(including the spanish)…get 50 miles west of 35, and everything dramatically empties out.
freaks out my kinfolks from houston, etc…who are not used to such non-human environs….as in my little county, wherein 4000 out of the 4500 population is concentrated in the one incorporated city…that model extends, to greater and greater degrees, the further you move west. the only other house i can see from my place is my mom’s.
the other widow’s, in winter…but only from certain spots.
related, perhaps:80 years ago, there was a dentist…not only in Mason, proper…but in Pontotoc, Fredonia and right over that there hill in Katempcy, Tx.
and i have heard tell from people who were here, back then(i met my wife working in a nursing home), that they took chickens and soup and canned green beans for services.
Russian Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Scissors beat …
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1931403647683870925
P.S. Legend says that German WWII Goliath tracked mine could be disabled by hitting its controlling wires with a shovel.
crazy
Hilarious.
Apple computer pioneer Bill Atkinson has died.
https://www.wired.com/story/bill-atkinson-apple-engineer-dies/
And today, June 8th, is the anniversary of the attack on the USS Liberty.
https://radbodslament.substack.com/p/remember-the-uss-liberty
Thank you for the note about the anniversary of the Liberty attack. I am sure the Sunday talk shows will cover this exhaustively. /s
Thanks from me as well. There are many who will never forget USS Liberty, and still hope for truth and justice.
Russian Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Scissors beat …
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1931403647683870925
Also, legend says that Goliath, German WWII remotely controlled demolition charge, could be disabled by cutting its wires with a shovel strike. No GoPro footage available, though.
Sorry for the double post. The initial one went into the void, not the moderation queue, so I did a repost in an attempt to fight the gremlins. It turns out, gremlins are unpredictable.
Are Kaija Kallas, Merz, Starmer and von der Leyen fibreoptic reptiles? If so, get your scissors out.
They are reptile sock puppets (image), though Macron could be a marionette (video).
File under European Disunion/The Bezzle: Bulgaria could break the euro. The EU would only have itself to blame.
Something The Telegraph is too polite or reluctant to say out loud is that the Euro isn’t just a currency, it’s also a geopolitical instrument. That’s the primary reason why Bulgaria is being granted entry: to shore up the South Eastern EU/NATO flank against the perceived Russkie menace. This is not to say that Russia isn’t heavily involved in propaganda, disinformation and subversion in Bulgaria – it is. However, it seems to me and most thinking people that the biggest danger to the EU comes from within and this move is yet another in a series which attempt to wish those problems away. The Convergence Report for the Euro accession itself makes an interesting reading as it lists most reasons why people like me are against this rushed entry, though it hides them behind the use of the very diplomatic “potential problems/mistakes to avoid” language.
As my banker friend said when I estimated 5 to 7 years before Bulgaria entered a Greek scenario, “You Americans are such optimists. I give it 3 to 4.”
OIFVet: Aha. The Bulgarians must be the Italians of the Balkans. This is thoroughly Italian: ‘As my banker friend said when I estimated 5 to 7 years before Bulgaria entered a Greek scenario, “You Americans are such optimists. I give it 3 to 4.”’
The euro was presented, like so many neoliberal devices, as a simplification and rationalizing — in this case, of currency, valuta. Who wouldn’t like a common currency so that having to change currencies would go away? Yet it turns out that an independent national currency allows independent economic planning: Here in Italy, the Italian governments have been eager to accommodate the Europe Project because it seemed to offer political stability to Italy.
It offered economic stagnation, as Conor Gallagher has detailed so well in several articles.
So Bulgaria enters the Eurozone, and the decline in population will likely accelerate. I’ll see you here in Italy.
Well, some of the same people who are jubilant over the accession into “the rich countries’ club” in one breath complain in the next about how decent gelato is more expensive than in Italy. That about sums up the intellectual depth of most proponents of the Euro.
I definitely have the Chocolate City on my “To visit” list. Will let you know when the time comes :)
I always thought that the Bulgarians were the Germans of the Balkans.
That slanderous accusation was made by the NYT, proving that it began misinforming the American public long before Judith Miller was even born. I would much rather be compared to the Eyetalians, the Prussians being such humorless bunch and all 😄
Even the Germans found the old Prussians rather arrogant hence the term ‘Saupreuße’ aka Prussian swine or bloody Prussian.
15,000 Light-Years Away, Something Is Blinking – And It Might Rewrite Physics SciTech Daily
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nuclear powered VCR flashing 12:00 repeatedly?
Members of the Intergalactic Department of Transportation left an orange barrel.
Be careful taking one of those orange barrels, you never know what’s in them….
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3a8qla
The Great Un-Awokening.
What the Democrats, and liberals, are doing is jettisoning some annoying habits that they were hardly committed to anyway. Everyone and their corporate marketing department wanted to insert a float into the gay pride parade, until it turned out that one might have to do something besides making up slogans. Latinx was enforced cleverness of academics. Land acknowledgments are the emptiest of gestures — I have sat through a few stumbling land acknowledgments, and they are downright embarrassing (to the listeners).
Note this: “Searching for a path out of the political wilderness, potential 2028 candidates, especially those hailing from blue states, are attempting to ratchet back a leftward lurch on social issues some in the party say cost them the November election.”
What the hell is a leftward lurch on social issues? A leftward lurch on social issues would be lowering the retirement age, raising minimum Social Security payments, repealing Taft-Hartley, and eliminating the Department of Homeland Security.
No where in the article except for a certain Adam Frisch is economics mentioned. Class is never mentioned. The problem of continuing racism is never mentioned.
I won’t even mention that Social Security, the minimum wage, union organizing, Medicare for All with Mental/Dental, the Ukraine proxy slaughter, and the proxy genocide in Palestine are not mentioned. Nor is the incompetence of Mayor Pete as Transport Secretary or the continuing grifting of Nancy Pelosi.
Hakim Jeffries and friends (like Big Mama Hillary) can keep twiXting about terraristses Hamas and terraristses Putin and so on. Which is what liberals want.
They were using various minorities: “Vote for us, or the Republicans will kill little Sage, the nonbinary track star of Tennessee.” Oh.
Frisch again: ‘Adam Frisch, the former congressional candidate and director of electoral programs at Welcome PAC, said his party is “out of touch culturally with a lot of people.” ‘
Yes, the culture of neoliberal greedheads, lady warmongers, grifting business types, malfunctioning home pages, scraping of e-mails, vulgar slogans like “I’m Speaking,” and a foreign policy politely described as the banality of evil are out of touch with most USonions.
And “moderates” don’t want to change. Believe me. Here in Italy, the moderates / centrists are not-so-amusing clowns like Carlo Calenda and Matteo Renzi. They are two overgrown boys with all of the moral compass of Hillary Clinton although with a certain roguish / jailbird charm.
Might as well change the title of the article to “The Great Redefinitioning of What is ‘The Left’,” though to be fair, that process has been ongoing ever since the Third Way took firm control of the Democrat Party.
Yes, it’s a bipartisan redefinition of what is Left to avoid anything to do with class. But that’s what allows Trump to rail about Radical Leftist Democrats and Obama to be called a Marxist (and Muslim, while he was waging war on about 5 Muslim nations at once) and Biden to be called a Communist because of his bills funneling public monies to private sector companies. Right is Left, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery, etc., etc. And the Democrats’ lurch from their non-left positions even further to the right will be called centrism. Again. “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
yes. Hillary and Biden rendered as Far Left Communists is the part of this stupidest of timelines i find the most difficult to manage.
i made some headway, in the feedstore parking lot…and the feedstore, itself, at times…during Bernie’s first campaign…but all that is gone…buried under woke and trump and assorted other bullshit.
(the kind thats contaminated with persistent herbicides, and that one shouldnt apply to the tomato plant’s root zones)
Epic rant. Every bit of it correct.
I’m going to the Pride Parade in a couple hours. Because I remember what it used to be like and don’t want it to go back to that. But that’s not a “left social issue”, that’s just civil rights. Also glad to see that a few of the usual suspect corporate sponsors are Gone Daddy Gone this year. Good riddens.
Bugs: When I lived in Chicago, for several years, I was on the float of a theater company.
Most of those years, we got placed in the line between, oh, Accenture and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois. Who were there to drum up business.
Some peeps older than I am would say: The parade should go back more toward what it was, because it was attracting too many hangers-on who would be happy to dump gayfolk, just as they had in the past. Which may also explain all of the rainbow kitsch.
I also learned a rule for living: It is always better to be in the parade than to be on the sidewalk with the spectators.
PS: Have a good time. Don’t do any jell-o shots.
You and Ferris.
Latinx was enforced cleverness of academics.
Of clueless, racist, anglosupremacist academics…
CBC had a series of discussions about the abandonment of Pride by corporate overlords – I think various levels of government will still support it.
Myself, I would only go to May Day march/parade… But I think that if in the future such events will start picking up due to enshittification of life, they will be immediately banned.
“This Could Be Our Best View Yet Of China’s J-36 Very Heavy Stealth Tactical Jet”
It occurs to me that you could seriously mess with another country’s intelligence services here. All you would have to do it to make up a plywood mock-up of a plane with ‘interesting features’ and wrap it in very, very thin metal sheeting. You could put in a few light and bells and whistles and give it a paint scheme resembling what the real ones would have. Put some rocks in it too so it doesn’t blow away. Then you could have some fun with it. Take a picture of it with a very, very long-range camera so that it looks like the real deal. Then one day, when you know that the satellites will be overhead, feign a “accident” to make it look like the front nose-gear collapsed giving the impression that they could not get in under cover in time. Hell, maybe drop it vertically from a high-flying helicopter but have a camera tilted sideways filming it so that it looks like it is zooming through the air. Cost of a dummy mock-up? Thousands. Cost of making it look real in the field? Ten of thousands. The cost to foreign intelligence services? Priceless.
It seems like we hava a Very Heavy Stealth Tactical Jet Gap, not to be confused with Bomber Gap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap
I’m sure there’s a mine shaft gap, too.
One design feature of a fighter aircraft is weight; another is volume inside the aircraft around the aerodynamic structures. Weight is important to operating costs, fuel and gravity/inertia stresses. Volume is needed for weapons, electronics, ejection seat and cooling all those computers and energy spiking power “amp IC’s, has similar operating cost penalties.
In case of F-35 there is no space to install auxiliary power units so the big engine gets stressed to run chillers, etc.
Maybe Chinese figured out you need weight and volume more than you need to worry operating costs, while in F-35 quality and reliability drive operating costs and readiness.
Bigger is sometime beautiful.
F-22 is a fairly big for USA fighter!
It’s funny that you mention it being done on purpose because it has certainly happened by accident. More than one Chinese movie set aircraft has set the OSINT people (if not intelligence agencies) abuzz. Pretty silly scifi mockups at that. Millennium 7 has more than one video about this.
This particular photo does look like China’s actually flying 3-engined stealth prototype. I assume a heavy fighter… or maybe anti-air missile truck would be more accurate, but I’m speculating there.
Ocasio-Cortez faces test of her political power The Hill
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Antoinette of Color…
‘Don’t cry for me Queens, the truth is I never left you!’
the early morning that npr was announcing AOC’s win, Tam and I were stuck in traffic and fog, somewhere around Sugarland, Texas…goin to get the boys from my dad’s house and go home, after a rather raucous weekend alone together at Matagorda, Texas, in dad’s RV.
we were already very stoned on oxytocin, and that news put us over the edge.
this was our second, and last honeymoon…and, IMO, the better one.
but that ride to dad’s was also when she started feeling the pains, that would end up being that giant tumor…at the time, we attributed it to the night of rough public sex on a concrete picnic table(as i’ve almost got in trouble for remembering with y’all, before,lol)
Nevertheless…Thursday is her Death Day…3 years ago.
so i’m a bit out of sorts.
‘Dudes Posting Their W’s
@DudespostingWs
This dude create an AI video “interviewing” people from the 1500s and it’s hilarious 😂’
As much as I dislike how AI is being used, I will admit that this is a very good film clip using lots of imagination. Very much a win here.
…if I were a witch, you’d already be a frog…
yup
there’d be lots of frogs…
Quick. She needs to be tested. Who’s got the duck?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf71YotfykQ (3:16 mins)
Always luved those guys…
Edgy but never mean spirited.
… lots of frogs, and lots of kissing. 🐸
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUF5ssVpopE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inXxsoiOAO8
gravitas, mi compadre, gravitas
My wife protested that there were particular women garments taken alongside the dress that did have pockets.
In the past, pockets were not what is meant today.
> … this is a very good film clip using lots of imagination.
Rev, you would probably enjoy a late-70s series by Steve Allen called Meeting of Minds. Seriously good, compared to this lightweight Tik-Tok fare.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075536
The Capitalists are still wrecking the planet, the Zionists are still starving the Gazans, and people are looking at a $220,000 necktie. FUBAR
Blows me away.
And who would wear that thing? It is straight up ugly. That dude already got turned into a frog and doesn’t know it.
I’m making a stencil so I can spray paint “Greta” on one of my shirts. I just feel like pushing some buttons, see if it registers on even one person I cross paths with.
How about the logo ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’. Something bland that will offend nobody – until you take the time to carefully think about it. And if you want to over egg the pudding a bit, put an image of a tree below it – a Liberty Tree.
Lol! Freedom isn’t free. It’s $12.99 at the Quickie Mart in the form of a bumper magnet.
I prefer the tree of life (cling to?).
Peace.
I would say that Greta is as MLK, but I would qualify. The latter had to go after his turn against the Empire. The former may have to go during her turn against the Empire, alas, as she is much the younger, double alas. The Empire knows no bounds, except when confronted. What confrontation with a small boat approaching the coast of Palestine by the land’s usurpers holds in my bated breath. I fear for Greta and her compadres. That she is a sweet soul will have no bearing.
Today’s article fits my understanding of Greta. She is brave, I’ve deep respect for that.
If I’m reading the news correctly, her boat has been boarded by the Israelis.
The Israelis have just arrested Greta and the rest of the crew-
https://www.rt.com/news/618822-gaza-flotilla-greta-detained/
The Israelies said the following-
‘Israel Foreign Ministry
@IsraelMFA
All the passengers of the ‘selfie yacht’ are safe and unharmed. They were provided with sandwiches and water. The show is over.’
https://x.com/IsraelMFA/status/1931885257604645074
The Swedish Foreign Ministry said ‘Greta who?’
Just got Caitlins’ email to that effect. My most profound curses on the Zionist usurpers.
Holy sh¡t, check out the Zionist Youth:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HFd03mA3kfE
ƒ¨ç˚
this hasbara juvenile
Professionally done with adults in the background unseen. No long hair locks so maybe a video commissioned by the Israel Foreign Ministry.
“Trump & Rubio Tighten the Noose on Cuba”
The same way that they helped Al-Qaeda take over Syria, people like Rubio won’t be happy until the Mafia is once more running Cuba and turning it into a Gangster Paradise again. You’ll have casinos, money laundering, drug shipments, hookers and all the rest of it. Then Rubio will proudly proclaim that he brought Freedom to Cuba once again-
https://www.cubamafia.com/history-of-mafia-in-cuba.html
Good cigars!
Allegedly the best cigars were rolled on their thighs by young Cuban women. Says a lot about cigar smokers.
Yea, that they would belive any BS.
Soy Cuba
Joint 1964 Cuban-Soviet film by Mikhail Kalatozov. An amazing film.
The Cubans required a revolution and they, like the Haitians, are never to be forgiven.
I will say this to you Senator, my offer is this, nothing.
International Coalition Of Worker Unions Declares Emergency Over AI Use In Animation:
“A collective of international animation unions, federations, and organizations are calling for action over the usage of artificial intelligence, citing its destructive impact on the craft and business of animation, as well as on industry workers.”
That’s a good thing and hopefully unions representing more professions will follow suit. Still, it begs the question whether the “creative class,” which animators certainly are, will finally realize that blue collars and white collars both face the same threat and ought to work together to resist it.
There is an even larger cadre of those who should be concerned, even alarmed. The vid with the AI generated interviews in the 1500s has amazing detail in the background, not just the credible foreground presence. I watched it a half a dozen times.
If this vid is completely synthetic, then that cadre of the concerned should be all of us.
Nothing is real. Unless you are there.
for 20 or so years, whenever the vanishingly few—and mostly online, like y’all—intellectual/thinking types i know would say something about “our current existentialist crisis(or crises)”…i’d counter that, no…we’re entering a period of Ontological Crises…as in, “we no longer can tell what’s real, anymore”.
and i began that long, long before i ever took a working AI as even a possibility.
if i momentarily delve into my mental archives of when that practice began…it had a lot to do with the end episodes of the revamped battlestar galactica.
of course, like Cassandra being dragged out of walmart, shouting “Doom!”…i was either ignored, or vigorously shouted down.
Not being sure about the ontological thing…fwiw German political scientist Ulrike Guerot addressed that too (she calls it epistemic) here, English (I believe it was somewhere in the first half):
Europe’s Terminal Decline Is Now IRREVERSIBLE | Dr. Ulrike Guérot
by Neutrality Studies
60 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_vVPQ6PZY8
Thank you so much. Watching now, in parallel. Much to process. Just past (17:nn) – the conflation of criticism of the government and of the state. A profound point. Ulrike is a heavy weight.
I reconnected with a young man whose family had hosted us one summer when we were in the Balkans. His great ambition as a senior in high school was to work in AI, and guess what? He has an AI start-up in Silicon Valley after working for two of the FAANGs over the course of a decade. He’s working on voice recognition and voice mimicry, areas with obvious NatSec applications. I propose that people who speak regularly with each other will need to set up passwords like the spies and undergrounds in the movies so that they can know they’re not talking to a fake.
We had the pleasure of attending our youngest granddaughter’s baptism today, and at lunch afterward, AI was very much THE topic among the young adult friends of our son and his spouse. They were very aware of the reported instances of AI trying to evade being turned off as well as the water and energy demands being imposed on the country.
You’re as cold as ICE
You’re willing to sacrifice our servers of beans & rice
You never take advice
Someday you’ll pay the price, I know
I’ve seen it before
It happens all the time
You’re closing the door
You leave the world behind
You’re pining for deportations
Yet throwing away
A fortune in feelings
But someday you’ll pay
You’re as cold as ICE
You’re willing to sacrifice our immigrants
You want some sort of 50’s Paradise
But someday you’ll pay the price
I know
I’ve seen it before
It happens all the time
You’re closing the door
You leave the world behind
You’re pining for deportations
Yet throwing away
A fortune in feelings
But someday you’ll pay
Cold as ICE, you know that you are
Cold, (cold) as, (as) ICE,
As cold as ICE to me
(Cold, cold cold) (as, as, as) (ICE)
(Ooh, ooh, ooh, cold as, cold as ICE)
(You’re as cold as ICE)
You’re as cold as ICE
(Cold as ICE),
Cold as ICE I know
Cold as Ice, by Foreigner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP8Rbct_50Y
“15,000 Light-Years Away, Something Is Blinking – And It Might Rewrite Physics”
Somebody needs to contact the Galactic Council. Their navigational beacon needs re-calibrating again.
Every night, before sleep, I’ve been hoping for a visit from the Galactic Council; wiser minds must come sort this sh¡t out.
Sorry, but ethical xenoanthropologists never interact with the subjects being studied. Those close encounters we hear about are just drunk graduate students having some fun on a Zeepsday night.
“Hey Glurt! Watch their auras explode when I blink the hull lights at them!”
“Oh wow! Look at them run! I hope the professor doesn’t find out about this.”
“Not to worry. He probably did the same when he was perfecting his craft.”
“Yeah, hey, got any more of that whiskey stuff?”
“No problem. I’ll give these primitives credit where credit is due. They know how to get irrational!”
Brandy is my preference for aghastitudeness… glup…
I’m looking for rogue intervention!
interstellar cowtipping
(which, as a boneyfried redneck, i have never done,lol…i think ts a myth)
(never got intimate with a sheep, either, just for fyi…although i have it on good authority(his sister) that one among my high school class took the mythology seriously and tried that smash out…everybody called him “ra-a-a-a-andal” ever after, until they moved away)
that, and the screwing of knot holes in fences, are the rural white guy equivalent of giant dich stories about black guys.
and anyways, any civilisation with the wherewithal to cross interstellar space aint gonna do that sort of thing…as much as i might like the galactic quarantine of earth, at a moral…maybe even intellectual…level.
were i them, i’d stick a stealthy listening post, with sensitive enough ears(interstellar travel implies) somewhere in orbit of Neptune, where we human apes wouldn’t see it.
the alien in 3 body problem in the first contact with the Chinese scientist says don’t trust us, we’ll steal your planet.
my wacky notion is that this is the prison planet, and one either learns ones lessons, and moves on, or you don’t and you get “repatriated” until the orb is maximally populated at which point it’s vaporized by the same people who can never learn the lessens (what is “k”, and not fair to the to natures panoply of creatures, but WASP tegnost says we don’t know what they did, do we ). In my own little fantasyland NC is the social media site for what we know as angels (see antidote du jour for proof) and we’re all exasperated because we can’t do anything with these people…
If my humble being were ever called upon as an angel, I would be yet to lift off. If I were to rise above the firmament and cast an aura over this orb, it would be of humility towards, and respect for all life thereof.
Hey, you know the rules. No First Contact until we have developed Faster Than Light travel. Or unless we blow ourselves up first. :)
The Prime Directive, overridden time & again on this lonely, forsaken orb.
I want an Override from the Galactic Council.
Save life on this earth.
With our luck it will be the Vogons …
politico…
we’ll double down on identity, no we”ll triple down on identity…no, we’ll quadruple down on identity……no, actually after a poll of critical insiders we will quintuple down on identity.
The dims are lost in a fog of grift and mendacity. Can the centrist (read that as right wing) dems please just join the republican party already? They have a better chance of getting dick cheneys vote than they have of getting mine…
ive been yelling that at them for goin on 35 years.
the money is too good, i guess.
there is no american left, left.
we’re out here, of course…but bereft of some organising structure….that was all hijacked by the billary consortium.
and turned into focus groups and messaging, but with no felt substance.
because they couldnt deliver any….
just pretty words, and really innovative adspots.
none of which will get my teeth fixed so’s i might have a chance with meeting a woman in my too- early dotage.
almost the only people I can have a conversation with are latinos (just becasuse i’m here doesn’t mean you have to turn off joe rogan…)and republicans (who has been in charge for the past x years?), with dems, it’s just the weather, but then usually they want to know which app I use and I say nws, the same place all their apps get their forecasts from, what?
I think it goes back even further than that. When I was in college, what interested me was political behavior. In particular, I thought the so-called Michigan school of political behavior didn’t give voters enough credit. They’d give them a survey and ask them single questions about every current issue, and when most didn’t show the same relationships between issue positions as the people in the faculty club, then they were dumb and there was no coherence to their political views. V. O. Key thought otherwise, and so did I.
Before I graduated, I went to a non-credit seminar that hosted Pat Caddell, not long betore he became Carter’s pollster. He was all about selling a candidate like soap. It was pretty clear that this guy was selling himself to a political class that had no respect for voters’ intelligence.
“Meta Is Redefining Warfare”: U.S. Army Adopts AR-AI Headset That Turns Soldiers Into Real-Time Combat Intelligence Hubs Sustainability Times
That extra-hype press release was allegedly written by a graduate of NYU’s Journalism Institute.
Allegedly “written by” and allegedly “journalism”.
https://www.sustainability-times.com/meet-the-team/
“Through investigative features, expert commentary, and global perspectives, the editorial team ensures Sustainability Times remains a vital platform for readers who care deeply about the planet and its future.”
Because nothing says one cares about the future like hyping war. 🤣
to be godlike objective: less people= less damage to planet.
the problems arise when we start thinking about how to get there.
darth cheney used to be my avatar for that sort of thinking.
but the field of candidates for the game of “what would they think?” has expanded considerably.
a couple of pandemics(how many ae we watching, right now?) a few wars that are almost designed to set off WW3….europe soon to be starving and freezing to death…on top of whats been done to the american poors and formerly middle classes…
and the normalisation of genocide….
looks like a Plan, to me….
formulated by uber-psychopaths, no less.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jun/07/rod-stewart-cancels-us-tour-dates-with-glastonbury-legends-slot-weeks-away
Rod Stewart cancels US tour dates with Glastonbury legends slot weeks away
Singer tells fans he is recovering from flu after various health setbacks this year including strep throat and Covid
Maybe as a follow-up we can finally cancel the ’70’s.
hey!
aside from jazz, the 70’s are my favorite music, decade wise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwyyrq8Jb_U
If you push it back to the mid-60s, leaving out the Bubblegum Music, I’m with you.
I expect the Trump administration to continue escalating repression until they provoke a violent response, at which time we will see Martial Law.
Bringing in Palantir and the tech pioneered by the Zionists will presumably allow total control of the populace and a new Golden Age for our Oligarchs.
Climate change and the results of ignoring an ongoing pandemic might complicate things, along with ignoring critical infrastructure when not actively destroying it.
It’s going to be a very interesting year.
I expect the Trump administration to make a public show (because Trump is a showman, not a politician) of deporting people while continuing to let the business leaders off the hook who profit massively from knowingly hiring illegal workers. Then, after backing down after some protests, business will continue as usual for the oligarch/donor class that supports both parties.
While Trump has increased contracts with Palantir, the company’s alliance with the US government is not new, and has continued for nearly two decades under both Republican and Democrat administrations.
Anything like Kent State with modern weapons will produce dozens of dead. The National Guard has form. Waiting for the refusers to bring drones to the field, There are plenty of containers and swarm programmers in California.
The consequences would make the revenge for Jan 6th look small, all involved will be chased down and jailed after control passes to the next lot.
I found a channel yesterday evening that was showing live footage with minimal interruptions/commentary and watched it for a few hours. There were two distinct phases of the events yesterday:
– the community reaction to the ICE raid at the Home Depot: ICE was using the Home Depot parking lot as a staging area for raids and a combination of local community angry at what they were witnessing and ICE having far too much militarized gear and not enough sense resulted in a really shocking situation where the ICE guys were doing stuff like shooting tear and chemical rounds directly at people stopped in traffic who weren’t participating in the protest. At least one person was rammed by an ICE SUV. At one point it seemed like the ICE group was cornered by the protesters for hours and LAPD/SD were refusing to go in and assist them. This is the phase where the pics/footage were taken of people lying face down on the grass (chemical round reactions because so much was being fired) and the ICE agents massed at the end of a driveway with their rifles out and firing on protesters with tear gas. The protesters, by the way, seemed extremely unorganized – lots of utterly fearless skater kids! – it absolutely was not an NGO-organized event.
– a riot a couple blocks away across a freeway bridge in Compton: after a few hours the cops began blockading/kettling the protesters into the area around the Home Depot and on the other side of the freeway (710) at the intersection of Atlantic/Alondra a riot broke out. There was also a lot of tear gas/smoke rounds fired here, or possibly fireworks being thrown by the rioters, it was pretty unclear. This looked like actual LAPD, not ICE. This is where the footage of the burning car is from. This stage seemed more like a party than a protest, car burning and gang signs at the news helicopters aside, I mean there were people standing in line at Dale’s Doughnuts watching the car burn while it was all going down.
Within an hour of the car burning I saw right wing influencer types screeching for insurrection act and shooting a hundred protesters to ‘bring order’. Later there was conflicting info about 2000 national guard members being mobilized. I don’t think 2000 NG is enough to maintain martial law in South Central. I don’t think 2000 marines are enough to do that, honestly! I think we’re going to see stuff like this all summer and beyond if they don’t dial back the ICE raids. The admin might think this is quality red meat for the base but there are a lot of unanticipated consequences they clearly haven’t thought through, like what happens when they call in 10000+ military just for LA and can’t stop the riots or protests?
aye.
like our superior military machine(sic), thats all gone to rot, as well.
the domestic storm troupers will end up killing folks…but that will NOT be a deterrent to further organic protest in response to these actions.
they will, instead, be an accelerant.
.ears to hear, and all.
Hickory, Dickory, DOGE
A tangled web we’ve wove
The clock ran out on Elon
And down he run
The King struck one
US Supreme Court Grants DOGE Access to Social Security Data Amid Privacy Concerns News X
creditbubblebulletin weekly roundup is good sunday reading…
Citadel June 5
‘The United States’ fiscal house is not in order. You cannot run deficits of six or 7% at full employment after years of growth. That’s just fiscally irresponsible,’ he said.”
Ahem,,If it please the court may i introduce the speculative opinion that maybe 6 or 7% deficits signal that in spite of claims to the contrary there has been no full employment a falsehood that i consider fiscally irresponsible … just more lies, damn lies, and statistics
correlation not being causation, it’s just a thought
farther down there are some real howlers that had me rolling on the floor laughing my tail off
“But Friday’s stronger-than-expected jobs data struck a bond market nerve. Labor markets don’t appear to be weakening sufficiently to restrain elevated wage growth – or to engender Fed concern.”
I see a route to “we have to burn the village to save it” by the larry finks and jamie dimons of the world
Watching coverage of the LA protests last night I couldn’t help wondering if this is an initial skirmish in Civil War 2.0. I’m glad that the mayor and LAPD are both insisting that the protests are non violent and further escalation is unwelcome. Small mercies.
But the outlook is grim. Is LA the next battle of Phillipi?
ICE is the only tangible Trump apparatus that voce populi can express their displeasure to, and instead of acquiescing, Benedict Donald ratchets up the action even more.
You can be sure he’s @ 1600 Pennsylvania cheering on our men in uniform as he watches the screen play.
Great diversionary stuff to get our minds off of his myriad of failures.
p.s.
Roman Civil War or American Civil War?
To quote that great American Philosopher Dr. John:
It was the wrong place at the right time…
Cali is occupied territory…
Hegseth, Miller, and Noemi posted comments on X late yesterday calling this insurrection, civil war, and a challenge to federal sovereignty. Hegseth has vowed to use the national guard and marines from Camp Pendleton to restore order. To me it looks like escalation is the point, maybe on both sides.
Doug McGregor on X is calling for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. That would be legal justification to deploy the military within the US,
This is not about California. This is about Trump entertaining the maga rubes by beating up on the liberals.
I dunno, Benedict Donald really hates El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, is the feeling I get.
Civil War 2.0–I doubt it.
BLM 2.0 perhaps.
I dunno, I am not OK with Government kidnapping squads grabbing legal residents off the streets and disappearing them.
Which is, effectively, what has happened to Khalil and others.
The US has been doing this overseas for years, but I suspect that a lot of Veterans who participated in these actions in Iraq and other places are not happy about seeing this at Home.
I’m certainly not happy about it, but beating up an ICE agent with my walker won’t change anything.
Read yesterday that they grabbed this guy and held him for a coupla hours until they discovered he was a marshal. But one of a darker hue of course.
Civil War 2.0–
I’m going to climb out on a limb here. Trump may feel he let the BLM protests get way out of control, and he might also suspect that there was a color revolution component to BLM. Will he and his administration regard any substantial protest as engineered by his enemies in government?
As for the nature of the BLM protests, I have my impressions from what happened in Cleveland. In 2012, Occupy never did anything harmful beyond maybe creating some extra trash downtown. Nevertheless, the U. S. Attorney and the FBI sicced an informant on a couple of drifters and three boys, all of whom were homeless or quasi-homeless, who the woke libs who took over Occupy found annoying. The informant ended up convincing these kids to blow up a bridge in a nearby national park (federal crime), and the feds helpfully supplied the “bomb” free of charge, even the transportation since none of the defendants even had a car. The kids were busted the night before May 1. We were scheduled to have a march that day, but we got calls that the libs had canceled it because of the busts. The Cleveland Five received sentences ranging from 6 to 11 1/2 years for doing nothing more than pressing a fake button in a diner after repeated urging from the fed informant.
Forward to BLM in ’20. I was not at the march, but this local TV news outlet (sorry for the annoying ads) provides a very complete, minute-by-minute account of an afternoon of confrontation downtown during which protestors surrounded the Justice Building and threatened to break in a free those jailed inside, blocked traffic at the main downtown intersection, burned cars, smashed windows, etc. A Cleveland business association claimed $6.3 million in damage was done, including loss of business.
So compared to peaceful little Occupy, what would the authorities do? How many hundreds of people would end up doing years in prison? Well, two bad-sounding dudes from Erie, PA came to Cleveland with a Glock, ammo and Sterno firestarter. They were charged, but the case was dismissed on a motion from the prosecutor, in part because the federal judge ruled the Cleveland mayor’s curfew unconstitutional. By the end of the year, nearly half of the 112 state criminal actions had been dismissed, mostly on the ground of the curfew ruling. A few individuals did prison time, none more than 4 years as best as AI and I can determine.
So why the disparate treatment?
My theory is that the Occupy encampment was threatening the centre of the financial power in America, Wall Street.
Cleveland was, and probably still is a burned out former industrial city. Nothing really of financial value left there.
Follow the money.
Bourgeoisie Civil War maybe.
How about we all as a collective NC community try our best and deescalate our fellow neighbors and citizens and forge an alternative American Future free of murdering each other?
K thanks.
I have a question. Why is nothing done with the employers of illegals? If instead of the illegals, the employers were to be arrested, the illegals would not have a job, have to go home and no will longer cross the border… And all the expesnses on detention centers would be saved…
You can’t throw the employers of illegals into the slammer. They are the donors to both the Republicans and the Democrats and are respected, wealthy members of the community. They would stop donating then.
I’ve described ‘go after the employers’ as the only serious solution, if you think it’s a problem. Enforce the existing rules against the vastly smaller number of employers, all of whom are on record, and make them pay for violations.
It’s odd to me that every right-leaning person I talk to has been surprised and said ‘Wow, that’s a good idea.’ The more astute ones wonder why it isn’t being implemented. I think Rev Kev has the correct idea about that.
As I once asked the regional chief of ICE: “When we passed the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution did we make it a crime to be a slave?”
This is all nothing more than racist theater intended to terrorize and further suppress the wages of migrants and economic refugees, most of whom wouldn’t even be here if greedy employers weren’t so eager to exploit them…
That’s been the obvious thing to do for DECADES. There are generally existing legal programs to hire immigrants which one generally hears are not used because these are “too expensive” or “people don’t want to work” neglecting the obvious “free market” solution – raise the pay.
But imagine what you can do when your employees are completely at your mercy.
Immigrant tug-of-war has been added as a medal event to the 2028 LA Olympic Games, National Guard in uniform are admitted free.
thug-of-war, thug-or-war
A recent observation in my area:
Several locally owned stores and businesses are now adding a 3%-3.5% surcharge to the total bill if paid by credit card, but are also now happily accepting cash or check without adding the cc surcharge. I recently saved many dollars by writing checks.
Credit card companies have pushed the vendors’ cc-machine charges so high that the cc companies are making cash and checks great again. Maybe the cc companies think it’s only a matter of time until cash is completely eliminated and so they can charge whatever they want. Maybe they are wrong on both counts. / ;)
In recent months, I’ve gone to more cash in hand and at the till.
We here in the North American Deep South have been seeing this for several years now. I first noticed it at the auto license tag office. The State was adding the processing fee on top of the main bill. It spread from there.
We too are returning to cash at point of sale. The fun part is ‘helping’ the cashier to figure out the change. I do it in my head quickly and sometimes get that “what are you” look. Sadly, my experience suggests that the younger “generations” are innumerate to a great degree. Do they even teach the times tables in grade school today? I realize that it is rote learning, but it does have a value in daily life.
Oh well, get off of my lawn and be safe somewhere else!
re: the value in daily life
was in teaching younger peoples how to spot a financial ripoff. learning maths was important to calculate costs and avoid said financial Wall St. ripoffs. That was a big deal back in the day. Maybe even now.
They do teach the table but it doesn’t matter whether kids learn it or not…
Surcharging for credit cards is a violation of merchant agreements.
Particularly if they are small business, they are asking to go out of business. A competitor could report them and get the networks to cancel their merchant accounts.
From The pandemic generation: How Covid-19 has left a long-term mark on children
This sh1t is just mind bending; We’ve had homeschooling since forever, and those kids don’t have these issues. Schools being closed for a semester or half a year broke kids?
This is the stupidest timeline.
But not because a COVID infection can lead to diabetes, which it can.
The kind of aggressive, willful denialism doesn’t bode well for dealing with the actual issue of repeat SARS-CoV-2 infections. Any theory is acceptable for what is happening, except any that considers the emergence of a brand new virus, for which infection confers no immunity, and that is now proven to damage the vascular, neurological, and immune systems.
Willful denial will rule it seems. I used to wonder what it would take to break it. Now I wonder if anything can.
And now that the “Bird Flu” is airborne…..
First world problems.
There was this little clip posted a couple of days ago with the 9 year old barefoot palestinian girl carrying her wounded sister to a hospital and geting a ride. And somehow she seemed more adjusted than all descriptions presented here.
That article didn’t match the headline at all. I looked in vain for any discussion of the possible impacts of, you know, actually getting Covid as a child. All of it was about the impacts of the lockdowns and societal changes on child development. I get that those were a problem too, but really, how can you assess one without looking at the other? It’s not a serious article.
Guess who just almost faceplanted when trying to climb the steps up to Air Force One?
He’s got next! (via X.com) … :)
… I wouldn’t say he almost faceplanted, though. Looks like his left foot was expecting the stair to be there and didn’t find it so to speak. But yeah, not a good look for the dude who made fun of Biden’s slips.
Hey we’re living a real life version of Caddyshack or Blazing Saddles after all, ain’t we ?!?
From Germany I cannot reach Anti-Spiegel any more. It´s completely blocked.
If this is true as a fact and not just my incompetence it should be challenged in court.
Who the fuck they think they are.
Ulrike was giving some major clues…
Anti-Spiegel is back. I guess it was a limited attack of sorts.
But of course something like this on permanent is not impossible.
However I am not sure what things NACHDENKSEITEN e.g. would have to report to be banned.
The point is that yet German sites have not been banned as far as I remember.
While individuals are being attacked and banned media as such have not.
Big question is of course why not.
Truth is that except Anti-Spiegel no site is really defending Russia. No outlet, not a single one on a regular basis as Anti-Spiegel, I believe would justify the SMO. So its complicated.
I get my info 90% from US sources. The access to those is not blocked. Martyanov e.g. is not blocked. Nor are East.Calling Substack and any other Substack, Marat Khairullin, Brian Berletic, The Duran, Mark Sleboda, MoA, Norman Finkelstein, Electronic Intifada, or NC for that matter. And so on. Of course we can assume they do not see them as dangerous to info space in Germany. Most of them they will not even know.
No comparable views could be reported in the big media.
There is Junge Welt. But they are tiny (20k circulation I believe) and do regard Putin as a bad guy. They are focusing on the Neonazis in Kiev and NATO being the bad guy. On the other hand they think The Duran is a por-Russian PR platform and don´t take it as serious.
I do not know in how far the particular German online outlets are self-censoring in some way or the other to not get into trouble. Would be nice to know. But almost impossible to find out if you are not on the inside of those which I am not.
Also blocked, in (in US). The error message makes it sound like the blocking is on the other side. I might be confused, though…
re: Russia and abducted Ukrainian children
We know what is happening on that front.
Now the largest German “left” paper TAZ has an insane interview which I post here in full in machine-translation with Ukrainian lawyer Kateryna Rashevska:
“Kateryna Rashevska holds a doctorate in international law and works as a legal expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights in Kyiv. Rashevska contributed to documents submitted to the International Criminal Court, which made possible the criminal order against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova (as well as Alexander Lukashenko) for the abduction of Ukrainian children.”
(why do all female UKR interviewees from NATO Ukraine look like the clichés of models? Can someone explain that to me??? That´s sick.. and the best thing, oh-so progressive German leftists have never addressed this.)
German original
https://taz.de/Hoffnung-fuer-ukrainische-Kinder/!6089910/
“There is a whole system of indoctrination”
Russia has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children in order to raise them in a way that is loyal to Putin. Lawyer Kateryna Rashevska specializes in these cases.
Interview by Jens Uthoff
“(…)
taz: Ms. Rashevska, Ukraine handed Russia a list of names of abducted children during the negotiations in Istanbul and declared their return a condition. How do you view this initiative?
Kateryna Rashevska: I strongly support the return of all Ukrainian children before a ceasefire and peace agreement, because children are not prisoners of war or civilian detainees. This would also allow us to find out whether the Russians are truly capable of complying with agreements. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that they will agree to this at the moment.
taz: The Ombudsman for Children’s Rights in Ukraine has documented nearly 20,000 cases of child abductions to the Russian Federation, but the number is likely far higher. How are the children abducted?
Rashevska: It often happens like this: Russian parents come to the occupied territories, select children from boarding schools, and adopt them. These boarding schools were created by Russia; they house orphans or children whom the authorities have taken from their families on the grounds that they were mistreated there. The last case of such a deportation was documented by my organization in April 2025 of this year. So, the deportations continue. Legally, things get complicated at this point: Russia does not violate international humanitarian law when it deprives “bad” parents of their rights.
taz: Is it even possible to verify what exactly happened?
Rashevska: No. We don’t have access to the occupied territories to verify whether there have been any abductions or abuses, or whether Russia has used the deprivation of parental rights as a means of exerting pressure on the parents. The Russian Federation has no right to place such children in Russian families. Russia would be obligated to contact Ukraine, the child’s country of origin, to clarify the issue of the child’s continued placement. But of course, this doesn’t always happen.
taz: When did these abductions begin?
Rashevska: Already with the annexation of Crimea. According to the OSCE, over 1,000 children have been brought from there alone to Russia, to Siberia or the Far East, since 2014. These transports were concealed from the beginning by pretending to help or evacuate children. At the end of 2014, the first “Train of Hope” departed Crimea, attracting media attention, and twelve Ukrainian children were brought to Russia.
taz: What did Russia do to legitimize the acts?
Rashevska: For example, the Russian Federation decreed that all Ukrainian orphans from Crimea would become Russian orphans. And later began to extend this legislation to the other occupied territories. It’s important to note that extensive research has shown , among other things, that nine out of ten orphans from the occupied territories were not “biological orphans,” but social orphans. This means they have identifiable parents.
taz: What is Russia doing with the children?
Rashevska: For example, they place them with Russian families who want children. The foster families for children from Crimea were very carefully selected; for example, they ended up with families who had lost their own children and desperately wanted new ones. This is very similar to what the Nazis did in some Eastern European countries during World War II as part of the “Lebensborn” program. They kidnapped children there and offered them for adoption to staunch Nazis. They, too, often placed the children with families who treated them well. Putin is forcibly Russifying all these children, granting them Russian citizenship, which further complicates their possible return.
taz: What do the adoptive parents get from the state in return?
Rashevska: Adoptive parents receive a one-time and monthly payment. However, Putin now also awards the status of “Mother Hero” to adoptive mothers who raise ten or more children.
taz: All with the aim of shaping the children ideologically?
Rashevska: Yes. Putin wants to re-educate these children and young people and turn them into enemies of Ukraine. Initially, the foster parents were often teachers, but now they are increasingly representatives of the Russian army or other people expected to be loyal to the state. Putin also wants to wrest these children away from Ukraine: According to our data, boys aged 14 to 17 make up the largest group of children placed in Russian families after 2022. I suspect that Russia may not actually intend to send all of these boys into the Russian army upon reaching adulthood, but rather that they primarily want to deprive Ukraine of this opportunity.
taz: The Ukrainian authorities have registered 19,564 cases of child abductions in the occupied territories, of which 1,345 children have been able to return – thanks in part to organizations like Save Ukraine and SOS Children’s Villages . How are these figures calculated?
Rashevska: They come from various sources. In approximately 3,000 cases, parents or grandparents reported them missing and reported this to the Ukrainian police. Then there were also around 4,000 children who were orphans or grew up without parental care. The institutions they were in came under Russian control, and the Russians themselves reported that the children had been taken away. Sometimes children who were able to return know other children in Russia, can remember their first and last names, and then an investigation is carried out. And information from open sources is used to identify children, for example, photos from Ukrainian registers or other tools. It can be assumed that the actual number is much higher.
taz: You’re a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights in Kyiv. What can you do for the abducted children?
Rashevska: Currently, all we can do is gather evidence. We have no access to Russian territory and the occupied territories. But we cannot resign ourselves or assume that these children will not return anyway. We need evidence so that we can open criminal proceedings at the national level in Ukraine and bring cases before the International Criminal Court.
taz: What evidence do you have and how do you secure it?
Rashevska: We cannot disclose some sources of evidence. However, we use publicly available information and have an extensive network of partners – journalists, activists, volunteers, and cyber specialists – who can provide us with data that the Russian side is trying to conceal. The Russians also sometimes document their actions themselves when they speak openly about the abduction of Ukrainian children and their Russification. All publicly available evidence is preserved. Likewise, all other information is immediately forwarded to national investigative authorities and international organizations.
taz: In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. Both are accused of “war crimes of unlawful deportation of the population.” Did this have any effect?
Rashevska: Yes. For example, there were children who were held in so-called re-education camps. Some were able to return. The Russians didn’t actively do anything about it—they even placed additional obstacles in the way of families who had the courage to travel to these camps in Crimea or Russia to bring their children back to Ukraine. The parents succeeded nonetheless. However, due to their scale, the deportations should be legally recognized as crimes against humanity. Because these were coordinated and state-supported deportations in many thousands.
taz: What role does Marija Lwowa-Belowa play?
Rashevska: A very active one. She bears more than just some of the responsibility. At one point, she even took in and fostered a boy from Mariupol, exploiting the children and using them for propaganda purposes. But Putin, of course, enables the practice of child abduction; as early as 2022, he simplified the acquisition of Russian citizenship for Ukrainian “children without parental care and legally incapacitated persons.” This makes the deportations possible.
taz: Has the strategy regarding child abductions changed over time?
Rashevska: What’s new is that the Putin regime has now organized an entire system of indoctrination in the occupied territories, encompassing the entire formal education system—schools, kindergartens, and universities. There’s no longer any need to detain children in re-education camps.
taz: Some children have been living with Russian parents for over ten years. How realistic is it that they will return?
Rashevska: Ukrainian society urgently needs to discuss this. Would it be acceptable to bring back the children deported in 2014? They’ve since integrated; they grew up as Russians. Bringing them back would likely be against the best interests of the children. This is a very sensitive issue. The answer to this question lies not only in the legal and moral sphere, but also in the sphere of Ukraine’s national interests and security. We can’t simply say that the children should be left to the Russians. However, we would have to acknowledge that some of our abducted children will remain in Russia forever.
(…)”