Where Do Aspiring Actors Go to Cure Burnout? Clown School. Wall Street Journal (Micael T)
A Dream and a Passion: Mendelssohn’s Revival of a Bach Masterpiece Chamber Music Society (Micael T)
Call for ‘national treasure’ protections to cover natural history specimens Museum Association (Micael T)
How Did the Alps Develop Their Own Architecture? Architecture and Tradition (Micael T)
Your dislike of eating bugs may be 9,000 years old Science Daily (Kevin W)
When Your Partner Ignores the Collapse Collapse 2050
Climate/Environment
The ‘Asian water tower’ is starting to wobble, computer simulations show South China Morning Post (guurst)
The Velocity Hazard – Why the Rate of Warming Trumps Absolute Temperature Thresholds Climate Uncovered
Scientists find a huge hidden ice reservoir beneath Utah’s mountains Science Daily (Kevin W)
The Vibrations from Hell Ogredragon
Nepal
Nepal warns of new flood risk as hard-hit border region turns to ‘swampland’ BBC
China?
China has caught up in space. And that changes everything, everywhere. Kevin Walmsley
China’s super-rich fled Singapore. Now they want to come back CNBC
Hilarity, unease and relief: games show China is not over the finish line in humanoid robot race Guardian
Africa
How did a British, Rothschilds banker end up running South Africa? Part 1 Political Economist
O Canada
Florida tourism dips as Canadian visitors drop 14% NewsNation
South of the Border
Financial subjugation of Venezuela Venezuelanalysis
US secures majority control of 65B barrels of Venezuelan oil: Trump Anadolu Agency
Venezuela anuncia un histórico acuerdo con el Gobierno de los Estados Unidos, que tendrá un impacto significativo en el renacimiento de nuestra nación. pic.twitter.com/aIogqZOVA4
— Delcy Rodríguez (@delcyrodriguezv) August 29, 2026
European Disunion
Expensive gas is dragging Europe into stagflation.Vzglayd via machine translation
Be sure to click thorough to read the full tweet:
The Ghosts of Boshirov and Petrov Haunt Europe
The Telegraph is raising the alarm: Moscow has opened a branch in the EU to deal with "hot spots." According to Western intelligence, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) no longer bothers its officers with English architecture.… pic.twitter.com/qQeEFXAZvB
— 🇷🇺 STANISLAV KRAPIVNIK 🇷🇺 (@STANISKRAPIVNIK) August 23, 2026
Old Blighty
The race to stop England running out of water BBC
‼️‼️🇺🇸🇬🇧🇫🇰🇦🇷 BIG | Washington is reportedly turning even the Falkland Islands into leverage in its campaign to force European allies to rearm faster, warning London that continued U.S. diplomatic backing may no longer be taken for granted if Britain fails to spend more on… pic.twitter.com/MVLJatUZrr
— Visioner (@visionergeo) August 28, 2026
Israel v. The Resistance
Democratic senators demand Israeli government halt West Bank settlement expansion plans The Hill
Amb. Chas Freeman: Crumbling on All Sides: The Staggering Reality of Israel’s Multi-Front War Dialogue Works. One can hope.
Stark accusations of “engineering scarcity” and silencing humanitarian work
Athena Rayburn, Executive Director of the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA), told the UN Security Council that Israel was deliberately engineering scarcity in the Gaza Strip and… pic.twitter.com/R8Xp5lVw3f
— Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده (@RamAbdu) August 28, 2026
Iran War
Trump’s ‘economic D-Day’ against Iran is doomed to failure Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph (Robin K)
Iran transfers $7.5B in oil revenues to central bank despite US naval blockade: Report Anadolu Agency
Bessent targets banks in UAE over Iran ties Politico
Vali Nasr told The Telegraph that Iran’s real demand is much narrower than some of its public rhetoric: Tehran wants Washington to implement the June MOU, including the Iran-Oman mechanism for managing Hormuz and the release of frozen Iranian assets. Qatar could be central to… pic.twitter.com/FatPh6uuxb
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) August 29, 2026
Russia says it can now attack UK bases anywhere.
If Russia strikes both Akrotiri and Diego Garcia Airbases it would end armaments to Israel and resupply to USN fleets on the Gulf Embargo.
Russia could end two genocides, open Hormuz, and save the global economy from economic… https://t.co/zuaji6xy6w
— Kathleen Tyson (@Kathleen_Tyson_) August 28, 2026
US Hormuz demining operation resulted in only 11 mines being swept
More than 200 mine-like objects were swept from the main lane, according to Axios, citing US officials. However, only 11 were actual mines.
President Trump announced this week that the US had cleared the Strait… pic.twitter.com/0oLkYfBfzF
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) August 29, 2026
Iran Just Hit America’s “Safe” Haven | Photo Evidence Daily Mail, YouTube. Damage to Jordan bases
Turkiye
Mecca Agreement gives Turkey new leverage and risk in equal measure Middle East Eye
New Not-So-Cold War
CIA chief’s Moscow trip is a frightening signal Aftonbladet via machine translation. Micael T:
EU tragicomedy. This one is hilarious thanks to its complete absence of cause-consequence analysis. It is also deeply tragedic because it doesn’t lay out the cause-consequence of the war and therefore blames
Putler for everything. Billions and weapons from Sweden to Ukraine to kill Russians have nothing to do with it.Eight Hours in Moscow: What History Tells Us About CIA Director Ratcliffe’s Secret Mission Kautilya
Why Russia Is Winning Sonar21
UKRAINE FEARS RUSSIA IS ABOUT TO DO ANOTHER INCURSION FROM NORTH – w/ Andrei Martianov YouTube
Russia’s New Iskander-1000 Extended Range Ballistic Missile Sees First Ever Combat Test Military Watch
Germany plans rapid-response task force to counter hybrid threats in Baltic Sea Anadolu Agency
Four EU foreign ministers reopen the fight over Russia’s €210bn BNE
Sweden will radically change its espionage methods in Russia Vzglayd via machine translation (Micael T)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Ring Says New Encryption Limits What It Can Give Police The Verge
T.S.A. Abruptly Scraps Its New Private-Security Model New York Times (Kevin W)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Iran War Expert: “They Want America to Destroy Itself!” Young Men Will Be Trapped | Robert Pape YouTube. resilc: “Start 1:46:20 violent populism.” I started at about 1:30:00 and found the runup informative.
The Fall Of The Religion Of Progress John Michael Greer (Chuck L)
John Mearsheimer: Russia & Iran – The West’s Escalation Trap Glenn Diesen
Another Needless Casualty of War… RIP Nigel Larry Johnson
Trump 2.0
Donald Trump Puts Himself as Greatest President Ever Newsweek (resilc)
Corporate America Cut Big Checks to Trump. Now CEOs Fear Subpoenas Are Coming. Wall Street Journal
Hegseth Blocks Promotions of Four Army Officers as Purge Widens New York Times. Not paywalled.
Trump Postal Service board nominees held up by Republican senator over mail delay concerns The Hill
Judge rejects Trump’s newest bid to fight hush money conviction in federal court CNN
Trump Truth Social post on Lake America Truth Social (Kevin W)
Tariffs
Trump is writing a most favored nation clause that nobody signed The Hill (Kevin W)
Immigration
Milo Yiannopoulos, a Right-Wing Provocateur, Is Arrested by ICE New York Times (Robin K)
GOP Clown Car
NBC NEWS EXCLUSIVE: PETE HEGSETH IS TALKING ABOUT A POSSIBLE RUN FOR PRESIDENT IN 2028, SOURCES SAY NBC (resilc)
Grand Jury Says DeSantis “Misused” $10 Million in Medicaid Funds New Republic (resilc)
Our No Longer Free Press
One question, Ms. Fahimi: Does the union still stand by press freedom? Multipolar via machine translation (Micael T)
US ‘Terror’ Label on Palestine Action Threatens Speech Consortium News
Economy
How the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Works Brian Potter (Micael T)
Financialization of Farmland: How Farmers Are Staying Afloat as Crop Prices Plunge New York Times (resilc)
Mr. Market is Moody
Hawkish Kevin Warsh hints Fed will raise rates if inflation does not fall soon Financial Times
Expect a Fed Rate Hike. Odds Jump to 60 Percent on Warsh’s Speech Michael Shedlock
Warsh Speaks, Treasury Yields Jump, 6-Month to 3-Year Treasury Yields Spike Wolf Richter
AI
Bill Gates Declares An AI Pandemic Jordan Schachtel
How to spot AI writing Economist. I rarely use dashes but they have always been em-dashes. A dash is not a hyphen.
How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI? Pew Research
How Meta’s Plan To Replace Workers With AI Agents Fell Apart Reuters
5 lessons from the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident Gary Marcus and Zack Korman
Class Warfare
The Thesis of Political Capitalism The Ideas Letter (Chuck L)
Man sets himself on fire in lobby of Google office building in Lower Manhattan New York Post (resilc)
Buying a used car? For many employees, that’s only possible with a loan.Nachdenkseiten via machine translation (Micael T)
Citadel Imposes Two-Year Non-Competes Even on Some Analysts Bloomberg (Micael T)
The Culture of Repair Already Exists. It Just Wasn’t Funded Non-Profit Quarterly
Why Americans are not working Flowing Data
Antidote du jour (via):
And a bonus:
😃😍😂A male gorilla tries his best to reconcile with his angry wife. pic.twitter.com/amoaOeBKYm
— Amazing Nature (@AmazingNature00) August 27, 2026
A second bonus:
A dog wants to play with the small rodent, who is determined not to be distracted from its work. pic.twitter.com/U8vgR3pBDW
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 26, 2026
And a third:
Corvids are among the most playful animals.
This is a raven playing in the snow with a human. pic.twitter.com/v6McEKpali
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 26, 2026
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
Re: Presidential rankings, I would place DJT first in terms of the extravagance of his tan. One wonders what the cosmetics are covering.
—
I think he legitimately ranks first in terms of post-WW2 “magnitude of Federal injections into the domestic economy”, something like $12 Trillion (off top of head and IIRC, from $20T to $40T since 2017, with JRB presiding over about $8T of that) so far during his two terms. One could wish that these injections were directed more at internal development than at war preparations and actual war-making, but perhaps beggars cannot be choosers.
Strange that Ronald Reagan featured nowhere on that list. Not that many years ago Reagan was a god to the Republicans and there was serious discussion to dumping George Washington’s image on the US quarter and replacing him with Reagan. But now? And I see that Kennedy did not get a look in either nor did Eisenhower.
As referenced in the linked article this is appears to be based on a ranking published in a 1948 article in Life magazine. Trump’s version just has him added to the top, Clinton to average, and 3 Dem presidents he doesn’t like to the bottom. I posted a link to the Life article in yesterday’s links.
How could they? 1 anti war and the other anti mic.
Trump is the first Peace President that we have experienced in our lifetimes, and America First is real– he’s making it happen.
No, not kidding– and it’s certainly horribly sad and unfortunate that this road to peace carries such an enormous body-count, but these victims ultimately are martyrs for the greater-good and we should be grateful to them.
This administration is single-handedly and fundamentally demolishing the ability of the United States to project power and impose its will on all but the smallest countries of the world. Only recently our former friends and allies would support us without question, but what was an unquestioned assumption is all but gone, along with our military and financial capability to wage war: these facts will force the United States to focus almost solely and exclusively on its own homeland– this is America First!!!
Thanks to Team Trump, most of the world can breathe a little easier today, and is becoming free from US meddling or interventions– the man himself is a political judo master! He has accomplished much so far in his time in office, and it should be exciting to see what else he can do in the next 874 days, 21 hours, and eight or so minutes until his presidency ends (assuming we have elections in the future).
Unlike Obama, Trump truly deserves the Noble Peace Prize, as well as our gratitude… at least if you don’t suffer the misfortune of being stuck in that country, which is rapidly becoming an impoverished, dystopian shithole.
Re: Milo getting ICEd
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, he was famously reckless etc, but notable that he became anti-Israel and my Spidey senses suggest that’s behind him being targeted. Not least as Loomer is bragging that she is responsible for it.
Detestable man, but also one more notch on the anti-zionist suppression stick.
I was reading comments that Milo made about ICE recently and he was all gung-ho for them and thought that they were the best thing since sliced bread. But then he criticized Israel…
Indeed!
Milo quote:
“California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally,” he wrote in a social media post in June 2025.
Reminds me of the evergreen:
“‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
Antidote–
Don’t let that sweet, innocent look fool you. We’ve lived around, with, under and over raccoons for 15 years, and our observations indicate one thing most clearly:
We see it in their eyes as they peer in from the window that looks out on the upstairs porch. They’re saying, “Why are YOU in THERE where it’s warm in winter and cool in summer, while I’M out HERE in the weather? Why do YOU have a nice warm bed in THERE, while I sleep on a dirty floor in the attic? It’s time for you Two-Leggers to live outside for a while, and we’ll check out the inside.”
Humans must band together to meet the raccoon threat. Impose some sanctions. Declare raccoon gazes to be terrorist organizations. Blame rising interest rates on the Great Raccoon Conspiracy. Whatever it takes.
These four-legged devils must be stopped.
This may get me on a future HMP gulag list, but I vote we let the raccoons take over, but direct them to start at the centers of power.
How many raccoons would it take to overrun the White House?
Tell them that all the highest-grade trash is inside (which isn’t even a lie!)
Raccoons can be a serious vector for rabies:
[expunged because AI text]
You’ll find chatgpt generated stuff is unwelcome here ;)
I much find the mice more like terrorists. Can’t get rid of them. They get in the walls. I nearly kicked through the drywall once, wanting to put a trap back there. Services are useless. They wander around and shrug. The biggest innovation is one service put bait boxes on all four sides! of the house.
It’s not like the technology doesn’t exist to identify the ingress/egress points and resolve it. But when every service sucks and has the same suck service, you’ll have mice and you’ll like it.
Have you tried a cat? Not a cute wittle kitty that was born in a blanket lined box in a closet, but a real cat – a barn cat that was raised outside and taught to eat raw meat as a little kitten.
Your comment reminds me of two cats my daughter had a few years ago on her small dairy farm. They were quite an amazing pair, behaving like the Velociraptors in the Jurassic park movies, working together to take down the rats.
Alas as it is with outdoor cats and living near a busy road, the inevitable happens.
There is at least one cat, Orange Cat, that I see outside occasionally; Not sure it really helps any. Maybe it’s lazy.
I worked in many a recycling facility– talk about rats! That said, a few were vermin-free, except for a small army of cats.
The fastest way to take the kill out of a cat is to feed it– usually: there are exceptions.
My grandma had a cat named Billy Buff, and he was psychotic. He bit everyone, except grandma, and not simply bite, but chase you down and bite. Some people have pit bulls, I had grandma.
Billy was feared by all the kids, and they stayed well away from his house, which was fine by grandma. Billy was suspected of killing several other neighborhood cats, and blinded a number of dogs– two of which were police German Sheppards (grandma worked for Polk County Courts, and herself was likely feared by more than one judge), so her cop friends knew not to bring their dogs over.
I never got to meet Billy. He died of hate at the ripe old age of 18, before I was born. You might think I’m exaggerating, but grandma wasn’t a bullshitter, so yeah, I believe that the legend of Billy Buff was true… I kinda have to wonder how many men grandma killed, or at least, bitten.
I grew up in good farm country in the ’50s where the old farms were started in the 17th century and were still at it. Every farm had a cat collection living in the barn on milk and vermin. Normal.
Their masks will make identification really, really hard. Good luck on catching them!
“Four EU foreign ministers reopen the fight over Russia’s €210bn”
My god. They just can’t leave that honey pot alone, even though by seizing it that it will wreck the credit worthiness of the EU itself. Euroclear won’t play ball because they know that they will be on the hook for that money when the Russians come for it. They did ask the other EU nations to share part of any financial burden but to a country they backed off. So the EU is thinking of a new gimmick. They will get Euroclear to transfer that money to the EU so that all of them will be on the hook for it. Can you imagine how that will play in court? So a prosecutor will ask the head of Euroclear this-
‘So let me make this clear. You had a financial obligation to that money. And yet you transferred that money to the EU knowing that they would seize it. In fact, that was the actual plan. Your honour, I ask the court to rule against Euroclear for being a direct accessory in the theft of that money and ask that they must repay that full amount to the Russian Federation.’
I think they are signalling two things. First one is that the 90.000 M€ already compromised for 2026-27 won’t last for long. Second is that they are not prepared for the next compromise with more state-owned debt in case they are asked for it. This is the first end of summer in which i truly believe that Ukraine is on it’s last legs so that they will be done before 2028 arrives. The seizure of Russian assets won’t probably be justified to help Ukraine any more but the Eurotards won’t be able to de-seize the assets because it would mean that all what they have being saying and doing since 2022 was a mistake and that their rules based order is BS. Very much like with the US/Iran situation. We can say that the damage has already been done and that the Russian assets will turn to be the proverbial hot potato that no one wants to manage any more.
I have a theory. Right after the Nordstream sabotage Yves pointed out the difficulty Europe would have in replacing Russian gas with US LNG: docking facilities, gassification facilities, new pipelines and much more. Very expensive. It was all done much faster than I had read was possible. No doubt bonds were sold. These bonds – or loans if thry weren´t bonds – were sold based on a stream of income lasting a long time. That represents a sunk cost that pretty much locks Europe in from returning to Russian gas. Additionally, for the first several years we kept hearing about more loans to Ukraine both public and private (we don´t know how much of the private. The Z-man was in deep discussions with any money man he could get to talk with him over several years). If Ukraine loses the war, those loans will never be repaid. Finally, with the dire state of EU finances, and those of many individual states, who knows what kind of financial hanky panky has gone on with those balance sheets. In short, Europe can´t affford to quit.
Europe can´t afford to quit. I think this is very much what transpires politically. In fact everyone in Europe is betting on some kind of end of war consisting on an unstable ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia. “The war in Ukraine will eventually end, but probably in a ceasefire that leaves Russia, Europe and America locked in open-ended, low-grade, chaotic confrontation.” This explains the insistence of Europeans and their Zelenski muppet on ceasefires that Russians reject every time. For this to happen it is of course needed to provide a narrative of stalemate which is exactly what Russia is not buying: they stubbornly want to achieve their strategic goals. We, collectively in the West are unable to see any ending for this war except such unstable ceasefire. Here, at NC, we have read discussions on how Russia could win the war only to loose the peace. All this rests entirely on the assumption that the conflict goes on indefinitely as a low-grade chaotic confrontation. Such conviction is, I believe, a residual of the unipolar moment and the credence that the West would ultimately prevail in such conditions plus political beliefs like that “Europe cannot afford to quit”. I, on the contrary believe that quitting, and at some point ASAP, might become existential for Europe.
They’ve also, in their delusional wisdom, priced in reparations. There’s no other explanation for the continuance of burning money over there. The whole thing will need to be written down in a buy in and we’re going to pay for it.
It’s so wonderful, thank you! Construction physics to the rescue! So pleased to have a thoroughly sourced review to supplement my back of the napkin speculations.
Due Dissidence guys interview Roger Waters.
Interview: Roger Waters on BATTLING The Israel Lobby FOR DECADES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZzjSRupV7A
Religion of progress–
Thanks for the Greer piece. I think the Progress Myth is part of a complex of beliefs that have dominated human thinking since the Enlightenment. Human exceptionalism is part of it as is a preoccupation with accumulation. A focus on analysis rather than synthesis plays a role, echoing MacGlichrist’s left/right brain distinction. Call it the Conquistador worldview or follow Ishmael and call it the Taker mindset. The combination of these has led us to this dark time.
The Progress Myth is a core part of modernism, along with the Historical Inevitability of the Present Order, and the drive to maximize returns/profit, increase efficiency, and simplify away all undesirable complexity. We know that modernism has failed to give us the sort of world most people want to live in, that in fact it is pushing us toward self-destruction as a species, but we just can’t figure out how to replace it with something better. Alas!
I think it was Léotard who said that the postmodern is the end of the experience of modernism within the modern. Progress was a modernist grand narrative. Something like that.
I don’t believe in Progress, but I am reluctant to dismiss accumulation outright. It occurs to me that it lacks complementarity. Pollution, entropy, Jung’s shadow: the accumulation of goods goes hand in hand with the accumulation of bads. I mean that not so much in an ethical sense as it the sense of a system moving away from homeostasis. We breathe in – but we must also breathe out. We eat – and we excrete, and plants turn our exhalations and excretions into food.
The solution to progress is not an alternative state, because the problem with progress is that it is a phase of dynamic change that has ossified into a state of being. It’s as if the accelerator were jammed to the floor, careening the car over a cliff. The problem is not the accelerator, it is that it is frozen.
Progress was a movement that broke apart structures that had hardened around society. But then it too hardened. It rejected what came before in toto. Inevitably it become possessed by the shadow of what it had rejected. Tearing down hierarchy, for example, became flatness, centralization, and frozen into hierarchy again. Rather than a dynamic movement that integrated what came before, expelled it, just as it expelled its byproducts. Taken to extreme, progress turned into the thing it rebelled against.
The danger of rejecting the Myth of Progress is to repeat the error, replacing one stasis with another. Overcoming progress does not mean rejecting it altogether, but integrating it in a complementary dynamic. Stasis is the pathology of McGilchrist’s left hemisphere; only the right can encompass depth, time, and contradiction. Hierarchy, for example: structure is both the limit of freedom its condition for existence, and much of that freedom exists in the slippage and imperfections in the structure. Eliminating the structure is oppressive: as is allowing it to ossify, as is constant revolution. There is no system, socialist or otherwise, that would be an ideal replacement for progress as it falls – for it too would fall into stasis or chaos. There is only the dance of complements.
Greer says the Myth is collapsing rapidly. That may be a bad sign – or maybe we are only now confronted by something that already happened. Woke is clearly (among many other things) a reaction against the excesses of progress, as is the new right. Both are groping towards something necessary and real. Though both risk rejecting and then becoming the thing they rebel against (I see woke as both a reaction against liberal empire and an extreme expression of it, similarly on the right), rather than integrating it.
About the raven – a search finds the following, which seems plausible and tragic to me, although I cannot say for sure it is true – it contradicts my first guess, that this was AI
“The race to stop England running out of water”
I suppose that with climate change that we are going to have to get use to headlines like that. Drought in England, tornadoes in Los Angeles, snow drifts in Florida. It will be like that film “Blade Runner” where the future LA was not sunny and warm but dark with constant rain. We were warned about climatechage way bak in the 70s but we went ‘Nah, it’ll be fine!’
My first thought, as always when “race” appears in a headline, is lack of executive function. Our elite are too busy gratifying themselves to have a care, and if they did, they lack the capacity to accomplish anything. It’s all symbol manipulation, and there’s no consequence for ineptness.
Much of the population of the UK lives in dry areas (e.g. Cambridge receives an average annual rainfall of about 560 mm, while Perth, Western Australia, receives roughly 718 mm per year).
The water shortage is a consequence of useless governments and NIMBY objectors. As are so many other problems in Britain.
Some might find this particular episode of Pascal Lottaz’s Neutrality Studies concerning the 1990s Yugoslav/Balkans wars interesting, given the way it was in many ways a prelude to current events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v-Ik9N21JI
‘Amazing Nature
@AmazingNature00
😃😍😂A male gorilla tries his best to reconcile with his angry wife.’
I don’t know, man. That gorilla looked like he was trying to wind up his wife for some angry sex. When he stopped hassling her, she turned around as if to say nobody told you to stop.
It’s somewhat ironic that the Brits are seeking to prevent rich foreigners from stealing their “national treasures” given the controversial history of the English doing that very thing. Shorter them: “don’t let them be like us!”
Meanwhile we’ll be happy to sell off DC’s Trumpinalia in a few years in order to restore standards of good taste. Take our triumphal arch….please!
Wait. Are you suggesting gifting that Arch to the French as a return gift for them giving the US the Statue of Liberty? That’s not much of a swap and they have one already. :)
Yes but ours is going to be bigger and probably gold colored.
Dump it in shallow water to make an artificial reef? Then it could at least serve a purpose.
I read a headline that the NPS has green-lighted the arch. Also saw a headline that Trump is planning on trading/ selling part of Yosemite.
Why, it’s almost as if he wants to commit a variant of death-by-cop: death by angry mob or adroit lone wolf ?
ANYTHING to stay out of jail, including death?
Perhaps the memorials to DJT should be left in place as a remembrance of a time one should never repeat, sort of like the memorial function of the damaged spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin.
Kudos for unusual science stories today that include the new word entomophagy. Still, details of future plans to include insects in our diets may be–like the ingredients in sausage–more than we want to know. Soyent Green is…..???
Personally I look forward to munching on crunchy exoskeletons while unsure if my DNA includes the necessary genes. Aging eyes may need help with the important business of reading package contents.
Grasshoppers are a delicacy in Mexico. Also sold as a snack in Houston at the Butterfly Center and probably elsewhere.
Chapulines
“Chapulines, plural for chapulín (Spanish: [tʃapuˈlin] ⓘ), are grasshoppers of the genus Sphenarium that are commonly eaten in certain areas of Mexico. The term is specific to Mexico and Central America, and derives from the Nahuatl word chapolin [t͡ʃaˈpolin] (singular) or chapolimeh [t͡ʃapoˈlimeʔ] (plural).
“They are collected only at certain times of year (from their hatching in early May through the late summer/early autumn). They are toasted on a comal. Often they are seasoned with garlic, lime juice, chilies and/or salt.”
‘Radharamn Das राधारमण दास
@RadharamnDas
More shocking news from Nepal: another dam built by China near the Tibet–Nepal border has reportedly collapsed, triggering fears of a devastating secondary flash flood. Rescue operations have been suspended as terrified villagers flee to higher ground, while China evacuates the Gyirong border port.’
More and more, some of the videos coming out of this region put Hollywood to shame. I do wonder about that dam. I have a novel called “Flood” by Richard Martin Stern set in the American mid-west. In it, a natural dam in the mountains collapses sending a surge of mud and water down a ravine where it hits a lake held back by a new dam. As water is inelastic, the full force of that flood is transmitted through the lake to that dam wall causing it to rupture and collapse. So I wonder if something like that was a work here.
I’ve been thinking about Hegseth’s ideal running mate, clearly it should be a Woman, but which one?
Laura Loomer would steal the spotlight, so she’s out.
Erika Kirk?
I don’t think she could deal with Hegseth’s hangovers without blowing up.
Darline Graham!
That would work and if the Dems run Harris again they would have a real chance of winning.
No, no, no. It won’t be a woman. Hegseth refuses to have them even promoted is his War department. I say he should go with Ben Shapiro – the zionist’s zionist.
Me thinks that the ideal D 2028 adversary, in the sense of corresponding degree of gravitas, for Hegseth would be former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.
The thought occurs that recent Senate performance of duties related to senior official appointment confirmations should be considered “badvice and absent”.
The article on the financial subjugation of Venezuela via dollarization reminds me of that Rothschild quote about issuing currency, “permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who writes its laws”. I know it’s the empire, “our” hemisphere, “our backyard” and all, but taking over a country to this degree out in the open like this surely should warrant more domestic press, no? A hint of even opportunistic dissent from the liberals? I suppose that, as Richard Wolf pointed out in a talk with Nima, the Dems could make hay with a bit of anti-war sentiment, but they probably don’t have it in them.
Indeed, the NY Times recently had an article describing how Little Marco basically does run the country, and he gives the go-ahead on policy. So it is kind of a US possession in fact. Democrats are imperialists, too, though, so it is okay.
I have long been, and still am, an admirer of Craig Murray. His column of a couple of months ago managed to allay some of my doubts about Delcy Rodriguez, but it is getting harder and harder to keep the faith. Admitedly, the country was in very bad shape and her first duty, as a good revolutionary, is to improve the lot of the people. I would like to hear from Mr. Murray again to see if his opinion has changed.
I read him with some regularity; I believe he had a pre-existing relationship with Delcy, making him more sympathetic, and possibly generous, to her. It’s also probably the case that, as far as people’s individual motivations are concerned, things are much grayer than they are black and white. She could have her country’s best interests at heart and be committed to the Chavismo vision totally, and still be either deeply stuck in all the political weeds of the changing U.S. Venezuela relationship or compromised. I think people in those circumstances are likely to be socially and economically incentivized to fool themselves about the effects of their actions on others.
Crap. Now what?
On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.
Do we really need to sign-up for “X”?
You don’t have to. You could proselytise for the abandonment of X instead, although there doesn’t yet appear to be an alternative benefiting from comparable network effects, so X is probably it for globe condensing digital town squares, for a while yet, sadly.
nitter.poast.org is gone, too, this week. musk must be put down, please never use x.
The gates are closing.
We are losing the battle against narrative, and it’s becoming very difficult to be “reality-based” these days.
Thirty years ago, countercultural thinkers declared the internet an independent space. Today, it’s controlled by a handful of corporations. Were we deceived?
The internet was supposed to be free. What went wrong?
“We need to think about what we want these machines to do for greater public good. That’s what the counter-culturalists didn’t do, and it’s what we need to do now.”
I’ll leave this with another quote:
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.
While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.
And he oughta know– that’s Julian Assange.
Alastair Crooke, a Solari short clip.
Mr. Global Is Everywhere—Our Job Is to Defend Civilization and What It Means to Be Human
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCbpnzlLKg8
flora,
Thank you for this! Am looking to find the source of the (I hope) complete video.
It’s from Solari Report. The rull video is paywalled.
https://solari.com/opening-a-path-to-hearing-others-with-alastair-crooke/
This link has another, different short clip from the full video.
Re the internet was suppose to be free, what went wrong?
Nothing went wrong…unregulated capitalism intervened and it was monetized. What happened to the internet is a micro version of what is happening globally to many societies.
The internet was created by the military, more or less, created by ARPA – the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.
Remember ARPANET?
The ‘free’ part was to expand its civilian use to every corner.
No.
These work arounds are gone for the moment.
I think new ones will appear. Musk will be playing whack-a-mole. / ;)
In the meantime, a screen capture app works pretty well to get most of the displayed text before it greys out. ymmv
Perhaps Russian White Hats can give us a hand here…
Россия, пожалуйста, помогите!
A question might be why does Musk feel the need this week to start metaphorically searching the couch cushions for coins by shutting these mirroring services off now?
I’ve found that if someone sends me a link to a post on X, if I use “reader mode”, I can read the post without the annoying pop-up that asks me to use the app, covering the entire screen.
However, that presupposes that somebody else has to login to send me the link.
You barely get ads on the desktop version….and none are popups.
nitter.kareem.one
This is not about censorship, it is about reducing costs on the twitter infrastructure.
Services like nitter and xcancel work by reading post data from APIs. These require hosting, bandwidth and infra costs by Twitter, and twitter does not have a viable business model. If they don’t restrict the APIs for use by 3rd parties, twitter is footing the bill for their competition. It really is that simple, sorry.
Thanks for that explanation. It makes thing much clearer.
You are right this isn’t about censorship, because anyone still can sign up to twitter. But it isn’t about high costs either. If anything, nitter is reducing costs to twitter, because it’s cheaper to just give the raw data than to produce the whole web page. However, they are also reducing twitter revenue in terms of ads, subscriptions and surveillance. Clearly Musk’s hope is more people will sign up to his site (which will drive up his direct costs). I wonder how popular nitter was to warrant such action.
RE: Ukraine/Russia war
I wonder what the blue MAGA echo chamber is feeding their people. Yesterday I had a few tell me Ukraine needs to nuke Russia. What? Are you serious? Who in their right mind wants to use a nuke? And for what? I can’t image what these people are listening to to feel that way?
Of course these are the same people who think Zelenskyy is a great world leader, Russia invaded Ukraine unprovoked in what was it 2022? They never heard of Vicky Nuland and her “screw the EU” statement, or the facts about the US meddling in Ukraine long before 2022. The last time gas got this high was in 2022. Instead of screaming about gas prices they put Ukraine signs in their yard and cheered.
I don’t get it.
It’s the same with Hillary. “Hillary Clinton on says the only way for Trump to end the war in Ukraine is to go all in and “much more forcefully” fund the Ukrainians to fight Russia
She claims he won’t do that because of Putin’s “hold” on Trump.”
Mrs. “We came, we saw, he died” advocacy for more attacks against Russia is simply more evidence that US foreign policies of endless war are thoroughly bi-partisan. Not only that but has Hill’s not been paying attention to Trump’s Iranian adventure, where he had to cease hostilities because the US’s weapons cupboard is bare? I mean what weapons are we going to supply to Ukraine?
She must be drunk, or maybe she’s suffering from advancing senility? There’s a lot of that going around in Washington.
Unfortunately, too many of the professional/managerial/class still believe her and nothing I’ve ever been able to say can change their mind.
Blue really is a cult.
Jonestown was nothing compared to this: the level of collective denial on Ukraine and a host of other issues is truly remarkable, but here we are.
I am ever so appreciative of our hosts and of the Naked Capitalism community. It can be difficult to find the level of discourse that we see here elsewhere on the internet.
I came across a quote recently that seems apt:
I am adamant on the subject that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it. If a child learns nothing but that as a guide to life, that’s invaluable. You can’t learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can’t learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can’t learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard. …
“To Write Well is to Think Clearly”: David McCullough
Our Red Team/Blue Team system is thoroughly aligned against our collective interests as citizens and seems intent reducing our existance to simple units to be mined or extracted from by the more powerful, beginning at our conception and continuing until memory of our individual lives is lost to history.
I hope that I live to see the day that this machine is broken.
Seconded!
Wasn’t Herself/Clinton Foundation implicated in selling Uranium One to Russia? Maybe she wiped the deal “like with a cloth or something?”
Both parties are guilty of feeding their base a load of horse manure so deep you could bury the Empire State Building in it. I suspect that they now fear the moment of acknowledgement that the war is lost more than they fear losing power.
Because when the average Joe figures out that they’ve been lied to for four years, there will be one heck of a reckoning for people like Rachel Maddow and the Fox News crowd.
On a related note, I finished watching Dima’s latest Military Summary Channel video, and the US State Dept is now advising against any travel to Ukraine. I wonder if that includes the knuckleheads in the US Congress?
I don’t think these average Joe’s will ever ADMIT they have been lied to. It’s above them to be wrong. They are the all knowing everything of everything. And besides, team blue and their media lapdogs would NEVER lie to them… And that works for both sides.
Team blue was the Me Too movement until Tara Reade opened her yap about Biden then it was game over and she was a Russian spy. They sucked that up like a Hoover. Go figger…
Cat Stevens/Yusuf + Ladysmith Black Mombazo + Dolly Parton = a ride on the Peace Train.
Cat Stevens/Yusuf, “Peace Train”
came up on my playlist from youtube….now, great!
all irony, all the time
Kathleen Tyson pointing out russia taking out Diego Garcia and Akrotiri in same vein
sacrifice Santorini, that’ll be tragic but unavoidable! One of the most beautiful places I have ever been, burned into my memory!
There are two Akrotiris. One on Santorini, the other on Cyprus – this is the Brit air force base.
And since the Pentagon won’t be doing the targeting, the one on Santorini should be safe.
“Bessent targets banks in UAE over Iran ties”
Of course Banque Misr could re-orientate its business so that they are the UAE’s interface with China, Russia and Iran so that Bessent would have nothing left to sanction. Of course that bank might need a bit of financial help in its transition so maybe the UAE should pull some money out of the US market in order to do so. Nothing personal. It’s just business.
Targeting one bank allows that bank to experience the situation and adjust. The next bank targeted will have that experience to draw on to continue to create a new world order. There are alternatives.
It’s actually an Egyptian bank, and this is its UAE arm.
So does that imply that Bessent wants Egypt to shut down their branch in the UAE? Nice way to hit the EAU without actually hitting the EAU.
Jeffrey Sachs opens with comments about Bessent.
Judge Napolitano:
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Should Trump Be President?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYVxw1zdTRI
Adding: part of the Napolitano , Johnson, Kwiatkowsi Friday Roundtable
The clip starts where they talk about Bessent. Did T make Bessent Sec. Treasury to enrich T’s family fortunes? To enrich Bessent’s fortunes? The corruption is out of control, imo.
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & Kwiatkowski – Weekly Wrap 28-August
https://youtu.be/CCJV2zU8LG4?t=1147
This is the Leah substack article Larry Johnson references. no paywall.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-212780827
adding: the Leah article is very much worth a read.
It’s long but not too technical. Her thesis is that Bessent is trying to crash the dollar to enrich himself and his cronies.
The other day I left a comment about what looked like a strange new pattern in bank timed deposit interest rates. I half in jest wondered what the banks know, or what they fear. / hmmmm.
Two paras from her article.
…
The Treasury Secretary of the United States just threatened to cut entire nations off from the dollar. He did this while actively weakening the dollar through buybacks. While the debt just crossed $40 trillion. While he had just gutted the financial transparency system, and while the President’s family owns the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence.
Countries that get cut off from the dollar system still need a way to transact in dollars. The only private digital dollar with a federal bank charter is USD1, owned by the Trump family. Bessent is driving countries away from the dollar while the President’s family owns the replacement.
One last thought about this.
I’m beginning to understand why T wants the Fed to lower interest rates into the teeth of an increasing inflation. Higher interest rates defend the dollar. If Leah’s conjecture is right, a strong dollar is the last thing T wants.
ok…one more. short utube from Leah for the tl:dr crowd. / ;)
Is Scott Bessent Crashing the US Dollar and Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQfHtIi-34
Thank you flora. All very interesting.
It’s hard to believe in corruption on that scale but, well.. there it is.
“Iceland deeply divided as islanders vote on EU ”
If I lived in Iceland I would certainly not vote Yes to join the EU. It would definitely mean that Iceland would have to take part in the EU’s effort to support Ukraine and send it all the money that they can cut from social welfare. It would mean handing over your foreign & economic affairs to the EU and no longer having an independent voice. And it would certainly mean that fishing fleets from other EU nations would come in and pillage Iceland’s fishing grounds for all that they were worth. Fishing, which is a mainstay industry in that country, would collapse causing social chaos. And I ask you. In return for what exactly? If Iceland had been a part of the EU back in 2008, then I guarantee you that no bankers there would have gone to jail and not the forty that did.
RK don’t forget that Iceland put the bankers in jail and took over the banks in 2008 – of 47 bankers jailed, over half were from Iceland – if they go with the EU i would guess the fix is in on this one –
https://ig.ft.com/jailed-bankers/
“Scientists find a huge hidden ice reservoir beneath Utah’s mountains”
“with enough frozen water to fill 600 Olympic swimming pools”
That is enough water to keep Niagara Falls going for ten seconds.
JPMorgan’s climate research projects that global AI data centers could reach 450 million gallons per day by 2030, equivalent to 681 Olympic pools daily.
I did a double take when I saw that: if ppl think that counts as “huge ” we got issues.
huge it ain’t –
Looking at the charts in Why Americans are not working, while it is hard to see, it looks like the Pandemic hasn’t had any discernible effect at all. That seems at odds with Civilian Labor Force – With a Disability, 16 Years and over from St. Louis Fed.
I don’t know what to make of that. Different methodologies. But it comes from the same dataset. The series comes from the ‘Current Population Survey (Household Survey)’.
How can that be?
Maybe it’s always been over and I’m a horse’s ass. I haven’t heard of any scientific papers showing COVID is no big deal.
All the alternative front ends (xcancel, nitter, twitterwebview) to the Nazi bar (twitter/X) are now down due to legal threats from X while X is unusable and undoubtedly keeps up scraping other sites with Grok. What a pain, can’t understand why X won’t just die.
yesterday (or was it the day before ?) someone pointed to the nitter.kareem.one instance. It doesn’t work as well as the nitter.net of old, but it does the job when in a bind ;-)
From Grand Jury Says DeSantis “Misused” $10 Million in Medicaid Funds
So they could have indicted people, and chose not to. It isn’t that no one knows anything. Large sums of funds can’t be transferred just by randos. Pretty lame. So no consequences, as usual.
Reminds me of the tv show” Hogans Heroes” and the character Sargent Schultz. His famous line:
https://youtube.com/shorts/bPv8MCyyUbw?si=_bPj1hqd_PX2mKR9
Perhaps they didn’t even get out of bed on the day of the transaction
Barack
‘Cause if you look back, you will find that all us Ruling Class Creeps™ are, well…, creeps. It works from the top down to I don’t know where, just follow the program and don’t kick up.
“Germany plans rapid-response task force to counter hybrid threats in Baltic Sea”
Germany is losing its ability to make Volkswagens.
Like the Nordstream attack?
The backwards completion principle at work.
With digital media it’s never too late to change the past?
Orwell’s Ministry of Truth is so yesterday, today and tomorrow. :-/
just wondering if you perform at upcoming Jazz Festival in our fair city?
Hello JB, so thoughtful and kind to ask, but I am long past my sell by date… I still play my instruments every day and keep my hands strong but I have not been able to hear well enough (both physically and mentally) to inter react and thus join in for quite a few years – especially in the jazz realm as for quite some time before I retired I mainly did orchestra and show stuff, where I saw and heard music from the written page, in jazz you hear the next note in your mind and relate it to the situation. Some days I think of what I might write and maybe contribute something, but time has grown short.
I may go to see Artemis as Ingrid Jensen is a force of nature. I lament that Alexa Tarantino is not with them, as she has struck out on her own, but she is much younger and also a force of nature, so her future is hers.
There are, of course others, on offer. I like Vijay Iyler and Nduduzo Makhathini just off the top of my head.
p.s. I played in the first seven years, but then over to other musical avenues. :-)
Alpine architecture as function + form –> beauty.
I happen to be up in the Valsesia at Varallo, a town whose first written record is from 1025. There is much vernacular architecture here, because of limited flat land. I am now seated on a terrace above the Mastellone, which empties into the Sesia in about a kilometer. The buildings along the Mastellone are from four to six stories. The run along the edge of the stream. And this is the old part of town.
Noting: “In many Alpine regions, the house, barn, storage areas, and sometimes stables were combined into one enormous building, which makes perfect sense once you imagine living through a mountain winter several centuries ago. Every journey outside required effort, so bringing the necessities of agricultural life together beneath one roof made the household far more practical.” Farther up the valley, you will see more of the houses depicted. Here in Varallo I have seen one Walser house with wooden porch and pitched roof — a rather self-conscious renovation near a public park.
Throughout Piedmont, the cascina, the traditional farmhouse, follows this plan. Some royal cascine cover more than a U.S. city block, with a large inner courtyard, because they have adjoining houses for several families.
The arrangement minimizes energy use by housing several functions together.
In southwest Torino, I went on a guerilla walking tour to see big cascine that are now civic centers for neighborhoods that developed a round them. Yet we then crossed a street and the city limits and asked to enter a still-working cascina, very large, milking fifty or more skeptical (but adored) Piedmontese cows.
Usonions: Options are out there. You aren’t trapped.
And now for a snack of la mortadella coi pistacchi.
Oh man, I just looked up where you were … very picturesque! One of these days … ✈️ 🇮🇹
Financial subjugation of Venezuela – Venezuelanalysis
And other companies like Chevron are seeing the conditions they wanted to engage in added investment. They all played coy like the entire episode in Venezuela was not something they lobbied and helped coordinate.
It’s not only the USA’s energy companies lining up. UK and Europe probably have had plenty of lobbyists in DC making sure their stakes are protected or increased.
Example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-29/eni-working-with-venezuela-to-revive-energy-sector-amid-us-push
Remember what Major General Smedley Butler said (paraphrasing). He said he was a “gangster for capitalism” during his time in the marines. Not a “gangster for the USA”.
So AI writes English like an economist who is not a native English speaker?
On Hegseth: One of the recent interviews of Col. Wilkerson has a long segment on how Hegseth and his wife are white racists. I think the Col. said covert, but really how covert? (Why can I remember a reference in a book, but not what video interview had which segment in it? I don’t know.) Anyway, Hegseth is the ingrown toenail of American white racism. The American armed forces are truly multicultural, so something has got to give at some point.
Gary, Indiana without power for 2 weeks after a storm.
From Due Dissidence.
Gary, IN Left WITHOUT POWER For TWO WEEKS by Utility Company
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOj5kDayaN8
Meanwhile, about the power company and data centers.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/08/25/gary-indiana-power-outage-black-community/91391813007/
part 1/2
re: Morocco – Nolan´s Odyssey – politics – and a little film history
A not uninteresting take by LRB – see below in post part 2 – about how Morocco, Christopher Nolan and Ceuta relate to each other.
But first my own take:
The issue is an old one – in order to achieve authenticity increasingly – but very much with the demise of the old Hollywood studio system in the late 1960s – big epic films would be shot in exotic original places – on real – authentic – locations so to speak to achieve as much realism as possible.
This naturally led and still does to clashes between moral integrity of artists, of the message their film carries and the actual practice of the production of mostly ignoring moral issues cooperating with authoritarian leaders and invest into their coutries furthering the colonialist system put in place centuries ago.
A variation to this: Films with stories against exploitation are produced with non-labour crews to be cheap.
This often has put leftist filmmakers into the position of imperialists.
Old story in essence but with the change of how we regarded film as a mimetically perfect image of the world – more real than reality – this came to the surface with a vengeance when the old production system collapsed.
That was still a system providing us with fare that was holding up the old belief that movies are artificial fairy-tales that should or could reveal their artificiality to the audience.
Btw this is a problem which touches on the recent posts on “political films” by Satyajit Das.
Allow me to reference Acacia´s link to Narboni and Alex Cox´s comment under part 1 of those posts – the question is not to make political films but film political(ly) – to use Godard´s expression.
In that sense an intricate part of political films is always if that film manages addressing its own conditions of production.
(Well Alex put it better. You can look it up.)
Which often makes a fairy-tale like the “Wizard of Oz” perhaps more political in the particular sense of the medium than say “Schindler´s List”.
part 2/2
re: Morocco – Nolan´s Odyssey – politics – and a little film history
Be that as it may.
Back to the LRB.
It begins with CASABLANCA as an example of the era when it was possible to do an exotic film on sound stage in L.A. and Hollywood´s lots. The old “innocent” era.
The piece eventually cues into the question of morality vs. production incentives for expensive mass entertainment from Hollywood today and Nolan´s “Odyssey”. (“Lawrence of Arabia” and “Apocalypse Now” serve as earlier examples).
The text ultimately doesn´t resolve the problem, although hints at a moral debt – and leaves us with a question:
Would Nolan cooperate with the IDF as he did with the Moroccan authorities?
My answer is no.
Not last due to the fact that Western Sahara after all is NOT Gaza, dear LRB.
Not by coincidence does Jeremy Harding, who penned this piece, draw comparison to the West Bank. And oddly omits Gaza.
I guess otherwise his criticism of Nolan wouldn´t be as effective.
Which doesn´t mean it is not a valid point.
It very well is.
But it is as old as movie-making:
Another historic example:
David Wark Griffith and his affiliations with the Klan visible in the seminal “INTOLERANCE” (1916) but especially his best known “BIRTH OF A NATION” (1915).
Or the death and danger to crew throughout the heyday of silent Hollywood to save production money.
Capital was always a weapon in Hollywood. It didn´t need colonialism for that.
Which however wouldn´t give you any hint of a good or bad movie. Bad people can do great art.
(The best short film I have ever seen was one by Griffith.)
One last recommendation to those interested and to LRB´s Mr. Harding:
Spanish director Icíar Bollaín made a film about this very problem with “También la lluvia” (2010) which shows a movie crew caught up in the existential fight over water resources between the indigenous and a corporation in the very location where the movie is being shot.
Not by coincidence was it written by Ken Loach´s screenwriter Paul Laverty who incidentally is the longtime partner to actress/director Bollaín. The picture starring Gael Garcia Bernal as A-star was suggested for Academy Awards by Spain.
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JKs8aSb7eo
And now finally the LRB:
A Small Part of Paradise
by Jeremy Harding
26 August 2026
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/august/a-small-part-of-paradise
Also see one reader´s comment there.
p.s. My favourite Morocco movie is Josef von Sternberg´s love story of the same name “MOROCCO” (1930) with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Copper.
According to Wiki:
“(…)the film was filmed entirely in southern California, and Sternberg felt compelled to personally reassure the Pasha of Marrakesh that Morocco had not been shot in his domain.(…)”.
If curious with courtesy of the Library of Congress and CRITERION:
“MOROCCO”
92 min.
https://archive.org/details/morocco-30-1538596735589
May I recommend The Blue Caftan?
Excellent.
Thank you!
I had heard of it back then briefly and then completely forgot (since I have stopped making lists of these things and it is considered a “small” film.)
Besides Lubna Azabal is always worth it.
I have to bring back other things to the library on Monday. On that occasion I’ll pick up this one. I have been looking for contained stories anway.
*Gary Cooper of course.
I read that LRB article yesterday AG and while I enjoyed it I did not find it as interesting and thought provoking as your comments above.
So, thank you very much for those.
Trump’s videos are really on the nutsy side now-
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117179353254305954
Hee hee, the Donald is always outclassed, it is his nature:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUKa7tHbrFA
From the same folks that gave you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1ln5Pqbh5c
On further thoughts, this vid is the rampage of a three year old’s disposition. Brace ye well thou holders of the ®Republic, or be overwhelmed by chaos. And join us, crushed on the ground floor. Or not…
File under the EU. Elections coming up in France and Germany.
From the Duran:
Weidel and Le Pen Look Unstoppable, But The EU Has Tools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx3Uw5VBV7o
Best unpacking of the Nepal Glacial event I’ve seen yet – TheGeoModels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcNDKu8kuQ0
Its amazing how the flow in the first 12 miles culminated in so much material, which then went up stream at the end of the original flow, meeting the main river down stream. Hence the boarder buildings where not down stream. The pressure slamming into the wall off the main river was so powerful that it sent huge amounts of force upstream at that early flow. So much of the world is unprepared whilst people argue about economics/natural* dispositions of human stuff/money/ etc.