Happy May Day!
LIVESTREAM of May Day Protest from Around the country Payday Report
The Western Left Misunderstands Power Simplifying Socialism
How an Oil Refinery Works Construction Physics
A Stray SpaceX Rocket Will Smash Into the Moon at Mach 7 in August, Analyst Says Gizmodo
Climate/Environment
2026 On Track for Warmest Year Climate Uncensored
Higher warming predictions for 2026 and 2027 The Climate Brink
Pandemics
On Climate Change Denialism & COVID Denialism Disability, Chronic Illness, & Culture
It’s the day of the month where I ask myself if I’m crazy to be thinking that people are getting sicker and sicker, and then the NHS Staff sickness absence rate data comes out and the answer is: No, I’m not crazy, and yes, people are just getting sicker and sicker. pic.twitter.com/5HR6C565WV
— tern (@1goodtern) April 30, 2026
China?
China’s “Fake” De-Dollarization Council on Foreign Relations
China’s technological ambitions hinge on property market Nikkei Asia
The AI Termination Ban: Why Chinese Courts Just Made It Illegal to Replace Workers with Robots Gadget Review
Tungsten price breaks records as China export curbs, military demand boost investment Mining.com
Southeast Asia
Rice markets are starting to feel a bit uncomfortable — and this isn’t just another short-term blip 🌾
What’s happening right now is a mix of geopolitics and weather hitting at the same time.
The ongoing Iran war is disrupting fertiliser and fuel flows through the Strait of… pic.twitter.com/ZBdBvzgtrl
— Gaurav kochar (@gaurav_kochar) April 30, 2026
Asia’s oil shock nightmare has only just begun Asia Times
India
Why is India turning to crocodiles and snakes to ‘fence’ Bangladesh border? Al Jazeera
Syraqistan
In Gaza, a desperate rush for water trucks persists more than 6 months after the ceasefire AP
Apartheid without borders’: Israel abducts dozens of Gaza flotilla activists in international waters The Cradle
New 7amleh Report: Meta Monetizes Settlements and Violence Against Palestinians 7amleh
***
Israel suffers heavy toll from Hezbollah drone strikes, faces operational collapse Press TV
***
Netanyahu plans to rush to Washingon as Trump pushes ceasefire Al Mayadeen
The Bogus Blockade Claim of the US Department of War Larry Johnson
In Iran, at the site of the worst US war crime since My Lai The Grayzone
***
In blow to Syria cover-up, dissenting OPCW inspector wins case at international tribunal Aaron Mate
European Disunion
Germany’s Churches Ready for War Pascal’s Substack (Neutrality Studies)
Most Swiss back initiative to cap population at 10 million, poll shows Reuters
Africa
Madagascar detains French ex-serviceman over alleged destabilisation plot Al Jazeera
US Seeks to Turn Eritrea Into “a Bulwark Against Iranian Influence” Black Agenda Report
Jihadists urge united front against Mali junta as Bamako blockade begins France24
The Russian-Tuareg War Was Inevitable From The Moment That Wagner Arrived In Mali Andrew Korybko
Old Blighty
The number of homeless children in England could fill Wembley Stadium twice: ‘A clear failure’ Big Issue
New Not-So-Cold War
Perm was attacked today, about 1500-1800km from Ukraine. It is ridiculous to believe that these attacks on Russia are done solely by Ukraine. We are led by lunatics who will surely scream “unprovoked” when a powerful retaliation comes. pic.twitter.com/TAkrpVIZAZ
— Glenn Diesen (@Glenn_Diesen) April 30, 2026
EU shouldn’t ‘humiliate’ itself by seeking direct talks with Russia, warns Kallas Euronews
Ivan Katchanovski Faces ‘Stalinist’ Smear Campaign To Silence His Work On Ukraine. The Dissident
Fact check: Did Ukraine’s US ambassador steal champagne during White House dinner shooting? Euronews
Imperial Collapse Watch
Fire aboard Navy destroyer USS Higgins, officials say CBS News
America’s Colonization of the Minds Class Consciousness Project
South of the Border
US energy blockade leaves Cuban farmers struggling to feed a nation AP
L’affaire Epstein
Why Ghislaine Maxwell will get a pardon The Epstein Files by Julie K. Brown
Trump 2.0
More Details Emerge of Trump’s Secret Use of ICE to Spy on Critics Truthout
What Trump Can Learn From Nixon Statecraft
***
Trump Signs Permit for Oil Pipeline Echoing Keystone XL Bloomberg
Trump sons take stake in Kazakh miner that won $1.6bn US contract FT
Half of ‘long shot’ Polymarket bets on military action are successful FT
Show Me the Money Savage Minds
Democrats Suck
Janet Mills ends campaign for U.S. Senate Maine Morning Star
Progressive Democrats Propose Banning Surveillance Pricing, Breaking Apart Corporate America If They Win in 2026 Matt Stoller
Police State Watch
ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Good Quietly Relocated as FBI Stalls Investigation PunchUp
The controlled information ecosystem of American incarceration Prism
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
The Accelerationists
Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass New York Times
AI
Why Sam Altman reminds me of Anton Chigurh Necessary Fictions
The data center rebellion is only the beginning Blood in the Machine
Local Politics, After Murder Vital City
The Bronx Still Burns Dissent
Agriculture
Chemical Collision: The Pesticide Provisions that Nearly Derailed the House Bill FarmDoc Daily
USDA Seeks to Increase Meatpacking Line Speeds, Threatening Workers, Consumers Food & Power
Economy
Trump Says Iran Blockade ‘Incredible’ as Pump Prices Keep Rising Bloomberg
Net Crude Supply Loss is 9 Million Bpd Despite Surge in Atlantic Exports: Vortex OilPrice
The US will suffer more from oil shock than China, Russia, or EU Responsible Statecraft
The Real Cost of War Levy Economics Institute
Zeitgeist Watch
Turbo-Culture novum
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Happy May Day indeed!
Raise the Red Flag proudly!
“we shall not be moved”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmkoQXyj_NY
A big “Amen!” to that, ambrit.
Here’s an old DailyKos essay about the Haymarket origins of May Day and the significance of the color red. It includes many of my favorite quotes from Goldman, Kropotkin, Durutti and the Bearded One.
From the time of that essay, there’s a newer story of May Day martydom. During Occupy in Cleveland, three quasi-homeless young men and two drifters from out of town, were targeted, first by “woke” libs who sought to “cleanse” “their” movement of these coarse, untutored boys, then by ambitious local feds in the U. S. Attorney’s office and the FBI. A May Day demonstration, involving Occupy participants, local unions and progressive Democrats, a veritable Popular Front, had been scheduled, but on its eve, the FBI staged a bombing attack on a bridge located in a national park with this band of misfits as passive observers. The march was canceled (by the Dem elements), and those boys are still in prison.
The same Feebies tried the same bs at the Occupy Buffalo encampment. Showed up in new khakis and new work boots. Then word got around that they were trying to recruit folks for a railroad sabotage job. They were exposed and run out of Occupy Buffalo and we heard they resurfaced in Cleveland.
Happy May Day.
Give me bread and give me roses.
Here in the “Petrograd of Italy,” as it was once nicknamed, the May Day corteo was long and slow and amusing. Very well attended. As always, I make it a practice to be in the parade rather than on the sidewalks — a practice I recommend to all. I was with a group that included two wonderful stilt-walkers, and each of the women was wearing a cape that made them look like a kind of butterfly (a reminder of the ancient, pagan origin of this day).
To the barricades. But with grissini.
Wasn’t there talk late last year about a General Strike on May Day? What happened to that? Did I imagine it? Or are they still trying to decide which year? (Or did it get dropped in favor of more people standing on corners with No Kings signs?) You’d think the American public has enough grievances by now that getting people to do an “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” action of some kind could be instigated.
Fox has a special alert or something. The graphics are mostly yellow for a not-red and Eastery theme, I guess.
Map of the contiguous US States with yellow stickers all over to show where this is happening.
Gives then a break from trying to run cover for gutting the Voting Rights act and all the cheer for all the winning.
Happy Feast of St Joseph the Worker.
Yes, the main feast of St Joseph is mid March. 1May has some political tone.
“Tungsten price breaks records as China export curbs, military demand boost investment”
This is China ramping up the pressure against Trump by denying the US access to Tungsten which is a vital metal for military purposes. You add this to the ban of refined rare earths to the Pentagon and China has Trump by the short and curlies. Maybe that is why there is no word of that summit between Xi and Trump as Trump has no cards-
https://theconversation.com/the-iran-war-has-depleted-supplies-of-tungsten-a-critical-mineral-for-the-worlds-militaries-279243
That mythical summit is only 14 days away, and as far as I know, there have been zero stories about it in the press. No technical preparations, tales of diplomats getting ready, or CEO’s booking flights or more likely fueling up their Gulf Streams.
I hate gambling but I am really tempted to head over to Polymarket and put some coin down on “no China trip for Taco by May 15.”
There is a great story about tungsten. Portugal and WWII.
Germans and British both were keen on Portuguese tungsten mines and interfering in each others´ efforts to mine it. OSS eventually dispatched a Brazilian secret agent to travel to the German mines and release a biological weapon (some virus I forgot which one). It was cancelled for some unknown reason. Of course OSS constantly developed insane plans which never were carried out.
Orbion
@cryptorbion
·
17h
MY PREDICTIONS FOR THE NEXT 3 YEARS
2026: Iran war escalates through Q3
2026: Oil stays above $130 for 6 months
2026: S&P falls to 5,200, BTC to $55,000
2026: Fed prints money under a new name
2026: First G7 country enters technical recession
2026: Dollar loses reserve currency status debate goes mainstream
2027: Iran ceasefire
2027: Oil falls back to $90
2027: Fed pivots hard – 4 cuts in 12 months
2027: S&P recovers to 6,500
2027: Bitcoin bottoms in Q1, doubles by Q4
2027: Real estate crashes in 3 major US cities
2027: AI boom starts showing up in GDP numbers
2027: Gold stays above $3,000
2028: Bitcoin above $400,000
2028: S&P at 9,000
2028: people who held through 2026 make generational wealth
2028: Fed balance sheet hits $15 trillion
It always plays out this way
Bookmark this
Come back in 2028
You should also put in an entry that the US debt breaks the $50 trillion barrier by 2028. But since it happens on a Tuesday, nobody notices.
A ‘bit’, or Mexican Real in monetary transactions in the USA was legal tender for 12 & 1/2 Cents until 1858, which is where we get 2 bits = a Quarter.
That seems a more likely evaluation for Bitcoin, by say 2028.
Interesting parallel to the informational bit, one eighth of a byte, with 12.5% being one eighth.
Anyone know if this reflects an etymological throughline? Computer science wasn’t much of a thing back in those days.
A Spanish Dollar was a silver coin comprising 8 reales, and such coins could be broken into smaller pieces as needed. Eight pieces, like pizza slices, being mechanically convenient.
The size of a byte is largely determined by the requirement to code a text character, which depends on the size of the character set, i.e. your repertoire of letters, figures, and symbols. I don’t think there is much correlation to ease of chopping sliver disks, but perhaps you see one:
As a yute I occasionally encountered bytes of 5 bits to 9 bits, but I believe the historical range was much larger. In the early 20th century, 5 bits were used for teletypes (“Baudot” code) but that required a mode switch to send letters vs. figures. The advantage of 6 bits (e.g “six-bit transcode” used by airlines) was you could have one code for all letters and figures, plus punctuation. But if you wanted lower case letters the 64 available characters still wasn’t enough and 7 bits became necessary.
The occasional error in a teletype transmission isn’t usually too impactful, but with computers it became important to detect them. Thus a parity bit was added, and you are now at 8 bits. As transmission became more reliable (or more accurately, as errors became corrected at a different level of the protocols) the parity bit wasn’t really needed any longer and character sets were expanded to 256, with some of those devoted to “control codes” and not actual printable characters. You could also code two decimal digits in 8 bits with BCD coding.
(If you’re wondering about the 9 bits, IBM’s EBCDIC character set was itself 8 bits, so if you wanted a parity bit you needed one more.)
A standard is quite useful for reducing costs, and 8 bits turned out to be the most universal solution for meeting requirements. Its wide adoption became the final word. Er, so to speak.
Best commentariat on the intertubez!
Thank you kindly.
“I’m going to convince myself that the obvious and unavoidable disasters already underway will eventually create such a complete cluster it will make my free market utopia necessary. Then we all become fabulously wealthy”
Once we declare the leaf as legal tender and undertake our massive program of deforestation. With apologies to Douglas Adams. He did it first and funnier.
Insert WW3 somewhen, for an hr. Oops, remainder of list.
Why Sam Altman reminds me of Anton Chigurh?
Please. Is Altman trying to manufacture street cred now? Lol.
It’s an interesting essay about determinism/free will in the age of AI. It’s enough to send me back to watch No Country for Old Men again.
The essay did include a secondary theme with which I strongly disagree:
Does author Isquith really believe that holding a job is all that stands between a human being and “superfluousness?” There are jobs in our society that do actually serve others and provide social value. At the top of my list are people in the healing profession: nurses, EMT-ers, technicians and most doctors. Right after them are the people charged with the difficult task of passing on human knowledge and culture to the next generation. Firemen, some cops, utility linemen and all those folks who face danger for the sake of others must be included. At the same time, there are people who perform these tasks without being employed to do so–mothers and grandmothers are at the top of this list.
But what about all the jobs with no or even negative social value? We all would be fine, perhaps much better off, without many if not most lawyers, bankers, management consultants, politicians, professional military, Madmen and corporate media. Many of these jobs are worse than superfluous or even bullshit. They constitute the major threat to human thriving.
Around the world, there are many people who are not employed by anyone, but who raise and feed families by the sweat of their brow as subsistence farmers. Are they superfluous?
Having a job on its own does not give meaning to your life on the grounds that you are contributing to the social welfare because many jobs in our society have negative social value. In a system as perverse and corrupt as ours, it may mean that you are contributing to social disruption, even dissolution. And not having a job does not make you superfluous. For example, much of the work of caring for other human beings is uncompensated in our society, and much of the rest only pays subsistence wages (e.g. day care).
Let’s go a little deeper than the capitalist myth that working for the boss make you a worthwhile human being. Given our dire circumstances thanks to all those jobs that have pumped too much CO2 into our atmosphere, we might consider a value system that focuses on living in harmony with the Earth and our fellow creatures.
But the article’s points about determinism/free will are interesting and worthwhile.
Thank you HMP. I may of had a knee jerk reaction there, Anton Chigurh is one of the most complex metaphors I’ve come across in a lifetime of reading (perhaps the Judge, from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, is possibly harder to grasp). Comparing Altman seems a stretch and click-bait motivated, but that’s probably just me.
As an aside, H and I are un-superfluously splitting time between Vermont and NYC in order to look after her late octogenarian parents. It hasn’t been easy.
I’d add in criminal defense lawyers. If you ever needed to get out of jail and fight invented charges and crooked, malicious, evidence-planting cops, you see the need.
Then there are the M&A lawyers, medical malpractice and the white collar defense bar. And general counsels, help me.
“Israeli ceasefire” is an oxymoron.
I like the line that when you agree on a ceasefire with the Israelies, it means you cease and they fire.
It’s the Hebrew definition
This is how they quibble with YHWH too, nitpicking and loopholing words. Cover the hair, yes, with a wig, etc.etc. etc…
Amazing photo in Antidote. Thank you.
General Strike, anyone? Do Little, with less?
re: Folke Bernadotte assassination and Sweden
The Price of Moral Superpower: Sweden, Israel, and the Assassination of Folke Bernadotte
by Pelle Neroth Taylor – he is a British-Swedish journalist, film-maker, and political writer. The author of several books, his work has appeared in the Financial Times, the European, Africa Today, the Sunday Times, New Scientist, the Lancet, and the Economist. He is the co-host of the popular CapitalsUncovered podcast on YouTube.
https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/the-price-of-moral-superpower-sweden
intro:
“Four Statesmen, Four Deaths
Over the course of a single century, Sweden lost all four of its greatest international figures to assassination or state violence: Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest; Folke Bernadotte, the first United Nations Mediator in Palestine; Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General; and Olof Palme, Cold War prime minister and voice for global peace and nuclear disarmament. In each case the trail points toward a foreign state actor. In each case Sweden looked away.“
re: assassination of Walter Reuther, UAW
Tom Griffin Substack
Book review: The Assassination of Walter Reuther
Rob McKenzie, The Assassination of Walter Reuther: Why They Did It, How We Know, Algora Publishing, 2025.
https://intelligencehistory.substack.com/p/book-review-the-assassination-of
“A Stray SpaceX Rocket Will Smash Into the Moon at Mach 7”
What a hoot: ‘Mach 7’ means ‘at seven times the speed of sound’. The moon has no atmosphere and therefore no speed of sound.
It might be better to have such pieces written by someone who had actually attended school.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX motto: ‘We aim for the stars – but sometimes we hit the Moon instead.’
Written above a urinal on the campus of the local college,
Look low
Look near
Your aim the bowl
Not up here
Or one that I saw elsewhere-
‘Our aim is to keep this urinal spotless. Your aim will help.’
‘We aim to please, you aim too please’
I think the best one is:
Don’t look up here, the joke is in your hand…
Why the indignation? Mach 7 is 7x speed of sound (…on earth; implied as stating so generally unnecessary). I learned about implied givens in school, IIRC.
That’s not what it means. It’s not a single speed, like km / hr; it’s a relative velocity, relative to the fluid you’re moving in. Mach 2 at sea level (2450) is very different from Mach 2 at 5 km altitude (2307), and different again from Mach 2 at 80 km (2034).
So dearieme is correct, ‘Mach 7 on the moon’ is meaningless, aside from demonstrating that the author is proudly displaying their ignorance.
And Mach 7 in seawater would be.. very very fast. (It’s actually variation of a joke I heard from a Rockwell aeronautical engineer who was a submariner, in context of challenges in building very fast subs–sound barrier is not one of them. Somehow, he made it sound very funny to my high school self.)
Hey, “this ain’t rocket surgery.”
Real Estate is going to crash this year or early next year in my part of California (The Wine Country), I’ve seen enough Boom/Bust cycles to recognize a top and we are there.
“House Speaker Mike Johnson says the U.S. is ‘not at war’ with Iran as White House approaches 60-day deadline”
This is the same line that the Trump regime is spouting. That since they paused this war, then that law got paused as well. Laws don’t work that way unless it is spelled out in them. Having said that, I am willing to bet that nobody, especially the Democrats, will dispute this but will let Trump get away with it.
Democrats love it when republicans do wildly unpopular things. Just not enough to try to do popular things themselves, you understand.
Instead of Dumb and Dumber, it’s Bought and Boughter.
It’s Mr. and Mrs. The wife party supports her husband party. They both defend the marriage against interlopers and exploit the children. Their weird public drama is really just misdirection and foreplay. The fertility cult of the Republic, I tells ya.
Let him get away with it?
Please, the Dems are just as responsive to their Zionist Masters as the Republicans, of course they will nod wisely and agree that the War is over…
This War was started on behalf of the Zionists, the State Department has made that crystal clear.
What is also crystal clear is that the welfare of the American people matters not at all, Congress is overtly controlled by a foreign government and Americans are increasingly unhappy about that.
Which is why Palantir is getting those sweet, sweet contracts
It’s gonna be lit, with a flamethrower.
Your Midterms are going to get pretty ugly I bet. And for Trump, the clock is ticking as they are only six months away. He should be already campaigning but instead he is bogged down in Iran. Tick, tick, tick, tick…
Tom, you’ve summed up my feelings about this matter in a paragraph. Thanks.
Mikenocchio knows!
Sonoma County’s economy is based on Agriculture (Wine grapes, mostly), Tourism and Construction.
Foreign tourists are staying away in droves, the input costs for Ag just went through the roof and housing sales depend on interest rates staying low and incomes staying high.
Don’t suppose that a lot of those foreign tourists were from Canada, were they?
Yup, lots of Canucks, eh.
Trump fumes as Powell plots his future at the Federal Reserve:
https://thehill.com/business/5858321-fed-chair-powell-trump-backlash/
What time is it?
I’m talkin’ bout ten seconds to get to the dance floor
America, have you heard?
I got a brand new dance called “Flip Taco the Bird!”
You don’t need no finesse or no personality
You just need one digit and an attitude
And everybody sing with me, come on now!
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa
Brothers, don’t be cool
Women like it sometimes when you act like a fool
Sisters, don’t be shy
Let your body get loose, your fingers ain’t too fat to fly
Come on now,
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa
Yes, hold on now, this Fed ain’t for everybody
Just the sexy people
White folks, you’re much too tight
You gotta shake your head like the black folks
You might get some tonight, look out
America, have you heard?
I got a brand new dance called “Flip Taco the Bird!”
You don’t need no finesse or no personality
You just need one digit and an attitude
And everybody sing with me, come on now!
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa, everybody
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa, come on
Squawk! Hallelujah! Whoa
Alright, when the economy blows
I want everybody on the floor
You know this groove is sexy
You ain’t got no excuse no more
Jerome, you show us how to live
Forget that frivolous lawsuit
Fellas, give me something to fly with, squawk!
The Wright brothers can’t mess with that
Jerome, bring me my hat
Did I mess my hair up?
Fellas, y’all play something
I’m go over here and talk to this girl …
I pledge allegiance to the Fed
Can y’all sing that? Sing it
I said, pledge allegiance to the Fed
Squawk!
“The Bird” by Morris Day and the Time
(Original lyrics NSFW)
I heard that Trump is furious about this because as Powell is sticking around and has a seat on that board, that that takes away the option for Trump to appoint one of his toadies to that board to support Warsh. Also, Powell being on the board will make it harder for Trump to hound him & seek revenge than if he had just retired to private life.
Yes, that is an element of Powell’s play that I missed – by sticking around, he denied Taco an appointment.
Plus, Jerome gets to live rent-free in Taco’s head for another 18 months.
OPEC broken; Faisal Al Ketbi فيصل الكتبي
@luiz_vidal
·Do you understand what happened in the last 72 hours.. > the UAE quietly opened a sovereign dollar swap line with the US Treasury.. days before any cartel news broke.. nobody on Bloomberg connected the timing.. > Abu Dhabi formally announced it is leaving OPEC after 58 years.. the first major Gulf producer to walk out since the cartel was founded in 1960.. > the UAE was sitting on $93,000,000,000 of spare oil capacity it was never allowed to pump because Saudi-driven OPEC quotas kept getting in the way.. > Saudi Arabia issued a 90-word statement saying the cartel “remains strong” and never mentioned the UAE by name.. silence speaks louder.. > the trigger nobody is talking about: Iranian missiles hit UAE cities and Saudi Arabia stayed publicly silent.. Abu Dhabi remembered.. > Russia loses its only multilateral lever over oil prices at exactly the moment it is bankrolling Iran’s war and bleeding petrodollars on Ukraine.. > Trump’s administration has been openly courting Gulf producers one by one.. cheap oil before the midterms is now official US policy.. > Qatar walked in 2019.. Ecuador walked in 2020.. Angola walked in 2024.. UAE walked in 2026.. four major exits in seven years.. zero new members.. every single move on this list points the same direction.. Washington just dismantled the cartel that quadrupled oil prices in 1973.. and didn’t fire a single shot.. all of this.. one week.. OPEC didn’t collapse.. it got bought one Gulf state at a time.. if you’re not following me you’re finding out about this 48 hours late from someone who read my post.. it’s only getting crazier from here..
“the trigger nobody is talking about: Iranian missiles hit UAE cities and Saudi Arabia stayed publicly silent.. Abu Dhabi remembered”
Interesting tweet. If the above-quoted line is taken as fact, it would seem that the Iranians’ sequence of attack may have had strategic goals. And with an almost anarchist sort of military organization. There seem to have been some Iranians, some now dead, who had some foresight.
Maybe the UAE exit is part of some master Trump plan, if such a thing exists. And it’s hard to see how the goal of any such plan is to lower energy prices when both the long and short term effect of the war has been to sharply increase global energy prices. Is this information stream party of what’s holding commodities down while propping stocks up?
Got a family reunion in Prague in 3 weeks, in theory.
My sister related tales of canceled flights within Europe among family members, and in one case a flight was available, but at a cost of many thousands of $’s compared to many hundreds of $’s prior.
Strč prst skrz krk!
I hope that you actually make it there for your family reunion. Having said that, I think that you should plan for the contingency that you get to Prague but then find it very difficult to get a plane back to the States. Not sure what that last bit said. I think that you are missing a coupla vowels. :)
Pro tip:
Don’t ever try and buy a vowel on Czech Wheel of Fortune.
More than 20 years ago we spent a couple of nights in Prague.
We found a local restaurant a walk to. Black Cat. Very friendly good food jovial diners. We sat with a French man touring Europe. Toward end of dinner hour the whole place toasted with a shot of beckarovka! We also spent a few nights south of Prague.
Enjoyed it!
A friend described speaking Polish as an exercise in spitting a lot. I reckon it’s the same in Czech? (she IS Polish, btw)
What’s that sentence they use … “the skunk rolled down the hill and broke his larynx?” … to demonstrate that the Czechs have problems with their vowels…. :-)
Mrs. Hobbit is flying back to Taiwan in June, when school’s out. We’ll see how that goes.
im 1/4 bohemian czech.
we came from a place called dubinek, just south of prague.
always wanted to go there.
i suspect that we were bohemian jews, based on lots of anecdata and what my grandad’s generation looked like in their dotage,lol.
and that “pinter”, or “pintr” doesnt seem to appear in any czech lexicons i have scrutinised…and yet it does mean “cooper” in hebrew,lol.
when my brother was in vienna, 20 years ago, on bidness, everybody assumed he was jewish.
my bunch ended up in dimebox, texas. and i can trace the names, at least, back to the 1700’s. earliest is some gut named voitech….spellings vary
I didn’t do a DNA test, but my sisters did and it showed we are 1-2% Jewish by ancestry.
That would be Wojciech, or diminutive Wojtek in Polish. It is supposed to be a Slavic version of Latin Adalbert. Saint Adalbert is a very much Chech/Polish Saint.
Check out the price US->Europe and compare it to Europe->US, round trip. About double to get the heck out of Dodge. Sort of shocking.
Going to see friends in France after the reunion, and a flight from Toulouse to Fresno is $1,800 one-way!
Catch a cheap flight to CDG from Toulouse, then home. It’s the Airbus factory shuttle and the rate is sort of fixed by the state.
Just looked and no cheap flights anymore, its 150k Amex points ($1500) with iffy connection times and i’d have to spend a night in Paris-adjacent to catch a flight to beautiful downtown Fresno the next day.
We took a TGV direct from Bordeaux to CDG, less than 4 hours. I’m sure you can do the same from Toulouse.
Americans are an entitled bunch, and I am not sure how they’re going to handle having their European vacation cancelled or priced out of reach. A few years ago, someone coined the term ‘revenge travel’ as if yearly junkets were an entitlement, and folks were getting vengeance for COVID taking that away from them.
I’ve coined the term “Summer of Rage” to describe what is likely coming. Makes me nostalgic for the “Brat summer” or the “Kamalalove Summer” of 2024.
We were laughing then, but I’m crying now.
Ugh, we have a long planned family reunion this summer at the beach on the Gulf, with a contingent from Europe expected. I expect they will have to cancel as spending $5k on 4 round trip tickets they could handle, not $15k. This timeline totally sucks. CERN, when will you work your magic for us? /s
We’ve a gaggle of Swiss relatives planning a visit at the end of the month. They bought tickets in January. I am curious how it will play out.
The Harvard 50th Reunion Report would be less than half as long.
At least Europe has trains.
She who must be obeyed has a flight to Stockholm 5th May from Boston still a go. A long tour with a friend, I don’t expose myself to TSA and CBP.
I get in trouble when I suggest Queen Mary out of UK, as coming home option……
1500 for UK to US taking about a week sounds like a bargain, tbh…
“In blow to Syria cover-up, dissenting OPCW inspector wins case at international tribunal” Good for him.
I have long assumed that many of the allegations of the use of poison gas in Syria were lies. What I don’t know is whether any of them were true. Can anyone here enlighten me?
P.S. from Hitchens “The OPCW is an agency of the UN.” No surprise that it’s corrupt, then.
The best source for the whole Syrian false flag operation and subsequent OPCW arm twisting is Aaron Mate. Here’s a link to various articles, including Mate’s UN testimony.
https://thegrayzone.com/?s=aaron+mate+syria
Thanks
Assad’s government was alleged to have stocks of sarin. Since his ouster, there haven’t been any announcements of such stocks being found, so far as I know.
In the future, it will likely become clear that much of the slander directed at the Assad regime was unjustified and false. The truth will come to light. However, now that the goal of overthrowing the regime has been achieved, none of that matters anymore.
OPCW has no relation to UN whatsoever. But it is corrupt, in the sense that it’s totally run by the neocolonialists.
The most amusing shenanigans was the Dutch intelligence failing a GRU cyber attack against OPCW in 2018. Media completely failed to mention that as a founding member Russia already has access to all information within OPCW.
No relation to UN whatsoever?
https://www.opcw.org/about/our-partners
The OPCW and the United Nations signed a Relationship Agreement in 2001 outlining the modalities for their future cooperation and the mechanisms for consultation on matters of mutual interest and concern. The OPCW’s Conference of the States Parties approved the agreement one year later.
Over the years, OPCW has forged other important relationships to advance its mission and implement the Convention. In 2012, OPCW signed an agreement with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to coordinate activities in case of chemical weapon emergencies. In 2017, OPCW and the World Customs Organization (WCO) signed a Memorandum of Understanding that further enhances cooperation between the two organisations to tighten national and international controls on the trade of toxic chemicals.
“Israel suffers heavy toll from Hezbollah drone strikes, faces operational collapse”
HistoryLegends dropped a video about this subject and calls out the IDF leadership of criminal neglect for ignoring the lessons of the Ukraine war the past coupla years-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhtc9COUi78 (10:00 mins)
Under the old regime, the red flag meant: clear the streets, martial law is in effect. After the Revolution, when Lafayette and the new National Guard hoisted the red flag, it meant martial law of the people against their enemies.
Lafayette hired Paris’s unemployed to demolish the Bastille.
My late wife Martha and I got married on May 1st, 1990, one hundred years to the day after the Second International declared May Day to be the official holiday of the international working class.
My warmest best wishes to Yves and the NC commentariat, the best friends/comrades I can imagine.
Solidarity & love, Stephen Moran
Happy Anniversary and a solemn toast to your late wife.
Re: A Stray SpaceX Rocket Will Smash Into the Moon at Mach 7 in August, Analyst Says
America Will Blow Up the Moon: Mr. Show
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJ3LIA5LmA
From The Real Cost of War
I think this distinction is important, in that Esienhower is speaking of real resources. Liberal Democrats, as you’d expect, are talking about money.
Eisenhower:
(bold mine)
Labor resources invested in weapons, and not public commons.
Meanwhile, Democrats.
Subsidies.
More subsidies to health insurance parasites. More “funding”.
More funding.
Meanwhile, Eisenhower speaks of American people, laboring on public goods, instead of laboring on bombs.
Key difference.
Of course had I kept reading, Professor Wray immediately makes that same point:
Unfortunately in America are elite are so divorced from reality, they lack this conceptual understanding. So we’re in week 9 of an ongoing massive oil shortage, and no steps are being taken to soften the incoming blow. Because oil just magically appears, or something. Food just appears in stores, magic. Product zips from place to place not on diesel, but on magic ponies.
This timeline is lit.
This is a distinction way more important than may meet the common eye these days.
The thinking has been altered as such.
So most obvious solutions and points of criticism have disappeared.
That´s possibly the biggest win of capitalist order: faith and ideology are not recognized as such any more.
https://news.meaww.com/classic-democrat-glenn-greenwald-blasts-elizabeth-warren-for-clapping-for-trump-on-iran-at-sotu
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/classic-democrat-glenn-greenwald-fumes-at-elizabeth-warren-applauding-trump-on-iran/
I read Simplifying Socialism‘s Substack essay, The Western Left Misunderstands Power.
Throughout, instead of trying to follow the (insipid) argument, I paid attention to the richly clichéd prose style. It has several markers of AI slop, a sing-song of “not this, that” and many series of three.
I am not sure how the supposed markers of LLM-written prose were identified by the prose detectives, other than flawless spelling. I am supposing that this particular essay in critique of a recent Jacobin piece was not the product of “a prompt”. (What could prompt this?) I am supposing that the essay was the product of preening human intellect lost in mimetics and meta.
My supposing, though, makes me slightly curious about what human brain function mediates the abstract. Can humans distinguish purely performative processing of abstractions from reasoning about the functioning of systems?
In a 2021 blog post, the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, predicted that within decades, “unstoppable” A.I. systems would be able to do almost any job a human could, and thus would shift power from labor to capital.
Huh what?! Capital has had the power for almost a generation now
When capital needs labour, labour has the power to strike.
“Most Swiss back initiative to cap population at 10 million, poll shows”
I think that the Swiss are smart enough to see how their government will sell them out to the EU and let the later flood Switzerland with refugees so that the Swiss are “doing their part”. And a cap on population will let the Swiss spike any such move.
Tungsten price breaks records as China export curbs, military demand boost investment.
This will make it harder for the US to expand its gold supply at Fort Knox. Tungsten and gold share a fascinating relationship, primarily because they are density twins. This physical similarity is the reason tungsten is the primary metal used for high-end gold counterfeiting.
Since Congress Let Obamacare Subsidies Expire, Millions Are Dropping Coverage (NY Times)
Oops
That’s our Democrats! Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, folding on a shutdown where Trump was loudly asking for the end of the unconstitutional filibuster in the Senate. We couldn’t have that, so (more) conservative Democrats folded.
Oh, you mean like Trump’s disastrous war of choice with Iran. I guess on the plus side, Americans are learning geography yet again. What an expensive lesson this shall be.
So going back to the pre-Covid or original Obamacare subsidy levels has caused millions of people to drop their coverage because it’s too expensive. What was the law called again? Oh yeah, the Affordable Care Act, not!
re: Hong Kong
NEW LEFT REVIEW
review of 3 books on the subject
Three Vistas of Hong Kong
by Sebastian Veg
on
Ming-sho Ho, Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Protests
Temple University Press: Philadelphia 2025
Ching Kwan Lee, Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle
Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA 2025
Edmund Cheng, The Making of Leaderful Mobilization: Power and Contention in Hong Kong
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2025
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii158/articles/sebastian-veg-three-vistas-of-hong-kong
Judge Napolitano and UK reporter Richard Medhurst. utube.
Richard Medhurst : US Is a Pirate Nation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK9jqERs3AU
Worth a listen. There is method to T’s madness.
RE: Apartheid without borders’: Israel abducts dozens of Gaza flotilla activists in international waters
From the article –
“Israeli naval forces launched a midnight raid on civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza near the coast of Crete on 30 April…”
Why is the Israeli navy operating off the coast of Crete and not the Greek navy?!??!? Very discouraging – this does not happen without Mitsotakis giving the OK. I’ve mentioned previously that while in Crete last year, there was anti-Zionist graffiti all over the place. Allowing the Israeli military to operate freely is very much against the will of the people there. Hopefully some of the traditional Cretan cussedness will come to the fore soon before Mitsotakis allows Crete and Cyprus to turn into new Zionist settlements.
“Crete and Cyprus to turn into new Zionist settlements”
And what will be the justification for that? It will take a pretty crooked line to include Crete in “Euphrates to the Nile.” Maybe Jason and the Argonauts were part of the Diaspora.
Maybe Israelis would rather have King Antiochus as one of them rather than those Maccabbee terrorists?
Reminds me of a video I ran across. It’s an interview of John Collins about Second Temple Judaism, a period that runs from Ezra to the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 CE. Collins gives what would be one of the most current and expert accounts of how Judaism began, and how it relates to YHWHism. He’s professor emeritus at Yale Div and the former editor of JBL along with being my advisor when he and spouse Adela were at U. of Chicago Div School.
Israel / Zionist organisations gave been reported as buying land in the Greek islands.
https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-701507
Obviously the blue and white flag is a comfort but the ties appear deeper than that….
Apropos The Debate Behind the Debate: Is the Exploitation of the Global South by the Global North the Main Contradiction of our Time?
No. It’s the new imperial, which is just the same old imperialism with modifications. See this in the FT —
Liberia threatened with funding loss if it fails to sell carbon credits
Rainforest nations face intense pressure to sell credits to airlines and wealthier countries
https://archive.ph/BpuLj
https://www.ft.com/content/e62d7f6c-051f-4424-8059-dfe054e38e63
‘Airlines including British Airways, Emirates and Ryanair must buy credits to offset some emissions by 2028 after their home countries signed the scheme into law. There is also heavy demand for credits among wealthy governments themselves. But there is a shortage of credits as their sale can be cumbersome — and can make it harder for forested countries to meet their own climate goals.
‘Liberian government departments have been told that a portion of the country’s funding from the African Development Bank (AfDB) — which has previously provided budget support and loans to the country’s private banks — depends on its approving a carbon sales framework, according to two people familiar with the matter….
‘Liberia, which is still rebuilding after more than a decade of civil war, has been burned once by international carbon market trading. Last year, a proposed deal with a Dubai royal fell through, following complaints by forest-dwelling communities that they had not been consulted on it. The former head of the AfDB, which is based in Abidjan in Ivory Coast, warned last year about the risk of “carbon grabs” from foreign investors.’
And so on.
File under “The Bezzle.”
Due Dissidence on Mills exiting her Maine run for US Senate. utube.
Platner A LOCK as Janet Mills DROPS OUT of Mains Senate Race
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpHO-0HHXE8
I’m sure that afterwards that Janet Mills will find new more lucrative employment – as a consultant for a data center corporation.
I received a group email this morning from Lambert announcing the launch of his new blog. Great! The more great blogs the merrier. Especially since the jackpot is edging ever closer, imo. / :)
The Jackpot.
https://thejackpot.blog/node