You could not pay me to read any further in this thread.

Yes, thank you, I meant wild bees.

You have a lot of answers to go through so there’s just one thing I will focus on: bees and clover.

Where I grew up, nearly every space with grass - so backyards, parks, etc - had at least some amount of clover in it. And more importantly, there were honeybees all over that clover. I distinctly remember as a kid being more afraid of honeybees than most kids. And walking through a field of grass with clover scared me because I knew there would be honeybees all over.

Nowadays, I don’t know if there’s less clover but there are so much less honeybees around. More often than not when I see clover I don’t see bees on it, and that’s very different from when I was a kid.

Ironic given that the NYPD has a larger budget than what most countries spend on their military.

I’ve found it to be the most concise and straightforward (and yet thorough) primer on dialectical materialism that I’ve come across so far. In particular I liked how the book split dialectical materialism (the philosophy) from materialist dialectics (the tools of analysis).

I mean I’m a communist so YMMV, but I’m re-reading the Vietnamese textbook on Dialectical Materialism that Luna Oi translated. I’m re-reading it because I also have the second textbook she translated (on Historical Materialism) and I wanted to brush up before diving in to that one.

Remember that the US government has been accusing the Cuban government and Gustavo Petro of running drugs. Every single leftist, indigenous rights, labor union groups et al will be targeted for “drug trafficking”. IIRC just the other day Rubio said the protestors in Bolivia were involved in drug trafficking.

“The free market will come up with a solution.”

Putin came to power in… 1997? So almost 30 years. In that time, the invasion of Ukraine is I think only the second or third time Russia has attacked another country? The other two are Chechnya and Georgia IIRC, and both of those were quite a bit complicated (and the former was only like a few days).

Impressive… very nice… now let’s see America’s card.

Seriously, America is poised to attack as many countries just in the first half of 2026 as Putin has in nearly 30 years.

I think the “exported food during a famine” part deserves some examination. Because doing this in itself may or may not be justified.

For the Soviet Union, I have heard this as an anti-communist talking point for both the famine that occurred during the civil war in the 20s and the famine of the early 30s. In both cases the Soviet Union was totally justified in exporting food during a famine. Why? Because having food in itself doesn’t necessarily solve a famine. You need inputs (like fertilizer) and capital (like farming equipment). For the Soviet Union, agriculture was essentially still pre-modern. They were seriously lacking both in both famines. The decision to export was not “let’s make some side cash by starving our people”. Rather it was recognizing that selling X units of food today would yield X+Y units in the future by using the proceeds to improve your agricultural situation. Food was swapped for inputs and capital. It’s an incredibly difficult decision to make, but it’s the rational one and in the end saves more lives.

But the British in Ireland in the late 1848? That was just allowing the invisible hand of the free market to do its thing. Produce sold for more in England so they shipped it off, because England was significantly richer than Ireland. You can say the famine wasn’t the intentional result of the British government perhaps, but you can’t say it’s not the expected and natural outcome of free market capitalism.

And then the British in Bengal? I’m not quite as familiar I’ll admit but IIRC that was just the Brits needing more food for themselves so they took it from India, consequences for Indians be damned.

As someone who has expressed some discomfort at the left’s occasional meme-ish appreciation of the Catholic Church… I am developing an appreciation of Leo to some extent. Francis I felt was a master at saying things that the western press would latch onto as “woke” but once you scratched the surface, would be revealed as not really all that different from the past. I think Francis was well aware of this and used it to make himself seem like more of a progressive force than he actually was. He was partly sincere, sure. But he also knew how to phrase a sound bite that would appear one way, but hide something else that wasn’t quite what the sound bite implied. Better than his predecessors, but that’s such an incredibly low bar.

Leo, on the other hand, has actually made fairly enlightened statements like this on AI; or when he mentioned that the focus on sexual sins should be placed well below a focus on justice and helping others. And when he does speak, it seems like the meaning is plain without any need to guess at what exactly he’s getting at. I like that about him. A straight-shooter, even if he represents a regressive institution.

So you simultaneously see this as deflating revolutionary spirit and also don’t care about revolutionary spirit because you see the American working class as a lost cause? This is just edgelord bs.

Booker is one of the most pro-Zionist Democrat senators. He both accepts boatloads of AIPAC money and also seems to genuinely believe in the Zionist project (like Biden, one of his few genuine beliefs). All this seems on brand for him.

I am getting increasingly concerned about Cuba, in particular the news of the USS Nimitz being in the Caribbean. So far, it seems that once the empire starts moving around military assets, it’s not a bluff. I think the US is legitimately planning on a potential attack.

That said, I don’t think even a military attack on Cuba automatically means the end of the revolution. I of course do not want to downplay the suffering that the US can inflict on Cuba. But from military and political standpoints, I think there’s some aspects to consider.

Politically, Raul’s grandson is not Delcy Rodriguez. It was very fortuitous for the empire that Delcy was next in line to take over for Maduro, as I’m sure even those who questioned her recognized there’s a lot of value in an orderly succession and sticking to what are the legal route of succession. But Raul’s grandson, I don’t think he even has any official position in the government. There’s no political mechanism that would allow him to come into power. If the US killed Diaz-Canel, the next in line I’m sure is not someone who would be a US ally. The president is selected by the National Assembly, so the only way any US puppet could even come into power is by force. For the US to take any political power on the island, it won’t be like Venezuela, it would require a complete surrender by the government. Not saying that’s impossible, but it’s not as easy as what the US did to VZ.

Militarily, I’m hoping that Cuba can benefit from what I think is what allowed Yemen to effectively get the US to stop attacking them: a lack a hard targets. In Yemen, ultimately all the US could do was bomb people - an unintended consequence of being an underdeveloped country. What exactly can the US bomb other than civilian targets? I of course wouldn’t put it past the US to be just that bloodthirsty, but ultimately bombing soft targets doesn’t lead to regime change. That requires boots on the ground. And while I don’t think the Cuban military would be able to do much against an initial invasion, I do think they could lead an insurgency campaign that would ultimately get the invaders to run home. It would come at a tremendous, unthinkable cost to the Cuban people but I am only trying to frame the military situation.

Sharing this as a good rundown of the lead up to the BTTR plane being shot down. Cuba did nothing wrong:

https://imginn.com/p/DYkTBoXFHl7/

I know pointing out hypocrisy is pointless these days but for the US to indict Raul when they are simultaneously killing civilians in boats in LatAm without even a hint of a justification is something else.

https://bdsmovement.net/

FYI HP (and Dell, but not Lenovo) are priority targets on the BDS list. Please do not support them even if they support Linux.

I haven’t looked too deeply into her, but from what I can tell the phrasing she uses and how she sometimes frames things isn’t the best. But I would definitely disagree with those (AOC, for one) who are slandering her as an antisemite.

The one that sticks out to me as an example was Cuba. In the very last days of Trump’s first term, he put Cuba on the official list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. This is patently absurd claim that has no evidence to support it. At the time, it was largely seen just as a move to make things just a little bit difficult for Biden. There was no reason to do it other than make life harder for the people of Cuba.

When asked about whether Biden was going to take Cuba off the list, Jen Psaki basically said Biden has more important issues to get to. He never removed Cuba off the list like he could have with just a stroke of a pen. Instead of meaningfully engaging with Cuba to foster better relations - something Obama valued and pursued in his foreign policy - Biden just kept them on the list as well as all the other ways in which Trump tried to crank up the temperature on the people of Cuba. Now here we are on the verge of a potential invasion of Cuba.

I think this might actually be the answer. Raul is 94, he’s not exactly buying green bananas anymore.

The US narrative is that he still wields a significant amount of power in the government. Sure, maybe; I’m sure he commands a lot of respect based on his history and leaders at least listen to him. But removing him does nothing for the functioning of the Cuban government. Honestly the US could kidnap Diaz-Canel, and the legislature could just… select a new president. Because Cuba is an actual democracy that doesn’t have power tied up in one person.