I understood that as meaning it would be sold, but you’re right: after an unsuccessful auction requiring its preservation, the requirement was dropped and a new auction held, and the building is now expected to be demolished.
why are all the surveyors drunk 5 year olds? Alcoholism plagued our republic
They reject open-pit mining in environmentally sensitive areas. On Tuesday, hundreds of Argentines marched through the streets of Mendoza to reject the approval of mining projects they say put the province’s water resources and ecosystems at risk. RELATED: Argentina’s Provincial Senate Approves Extractivist Mining Plan, Environmental Red Flags Ignored The march moved from the city center to the Government House, with banners, flags and chants directed at Gov. Alfredo Cornejo. Demonstrators demanded the repeal of Laws 9,684 and 9,685, recently passed by the provincial Legislature. The measures authorize environmental impact declarations for mining operations at Cerro San Jorge, in the town of Uspallata, and for nearly 30 extractive projects in Malargüe. “Water is not negotiable” was the main slogan of the march, which stretched for more than seven city blocks and included assembly members from about 15 regions of Mendoza, social leaders and environmental activists. No lo vas a ver en ningún canal de Televisión. Pero así está #Mendoza desde hace más de 20 días, una multitud en calles y rutas defendiendo el Agua💧contra el avance de la minería contaminante por gobiernos y políticos corruptos. Devuelvan las coimas. #ElAguaDeMendozaNoSeNegocia pic.twitter.com/zj9Htq6GTm — Lautaro Jimenez (@LautaroJimenezB) December 23, 2025 The text reads, “You won’t see it on any TV channel. But that’s how Mendoza has been for over 20 days: crowds in the streets and on the roads defending water against corrupt governments and politicians who are pushing through polluting mining. Return the bribes!” The demonstration began around 10:30 a.m. at Plaza Belgrano, where participants invoked the legacy of Gen. Jose de San Martin, defended shared environmental assets and reaffirmed Mendoza’s history of social struggle. Specifically, protesters rejected the PSJ Cobre Mendocino mining project, formerly known as the San Jorge mine, located near the town of Uspallata. The project is being promoted by the Swiss company Zonda Metals GmbH and the Alberdi Group. The project had already been rejected by the provincial Legislature in 2011 because it involves open-pit mining in an area considered environmentally and hydrologically sensitive. Demonstrators also upheld Law 7722, enacted in 2007 after a wave of social mobilization and regarded as a symbol of water protection in Mendoza. The law bans the use of toxic substances such as cyanide and mercury in metal mining. Nevertheless, right-wing politicians backing the mining project argue that the law does not prohibit the use of chemicals such as methyl isobutyl carbinol, sodium isobutyl xanthate, anionic polyacrylamide and calcium oxide. Miles en las calles de Mendoza para decir NO a San Jorge y volver a rechazar en las calles el proyecto minero que pone en riesgo a la comunidad de Uspallata y toda la cuenca del Rio Mendoza. No hay licencia social para la minería contaminante. pic.twitter.com/tJmH4rebxb — La Izquierda Diario (@izquierdadiario) December 23, 2025 The text reads, “Thousands took to the streets of Mendoza to say NO to San Jorge and once again reject the mining project that endangers the Uspallata community and the entire Mendoza River basin. There is no social license for polluting mining.” In recent remarks, Gov. Cornejo downplayed the hydrological impact of mining activity and said the largest water consumption comes from agriculture and residential use. According to him, the problem lies not in mining but in waste, a position that drew strong backlash from protesters. The date chosen for the protest, Dec. 23, was also symbolic. It recalls the massive demonstrations of 2019, when then-Gov. Rodolfo Suarez sought to amend Law 7722 and was forced to reverse course after a wave of protests that included road blockades and clashes with security forces. Those protests gave rise to what became known as the “Parientazo Day,” centered in the Uco Valley, a region that has once again become key to environmental resistance. That same territory holds deep historical significance: It was there that San Martin met with Pehuenche communities before crossing the Andes Mountains. Centuries later, that legacy is being invoked by Mendoza’s grassroots assemblies to promote what they describe as a new “liberating campaign,” this time in defense of water and against the advance of large-scale mining. #FromTheSouth News Bits | Argentina: The Central Workers Union condemned the United States’ aggressions against Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/4a8AQw731X — teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) December 23, 2025 teleSUR/ JF Sources: Pagina 12 – El Extremo Sur From teleSUR English via This RSS Feed.
every time I find myself trying to browse enclosures without having an account and they simply won’t allow me to browse much before prompting me to sign up or subscribe to view more. Yeah, like Pintrest and Facebook an a lot of services these days. I avoid those like the plague. That’s enshittification and for the users: living within small confined spaces. Though, that’d get me started babbling about freedom and starting the technobabble on how the internet is supposed to liberate information, and not confine it… as simple as them being open and ad-free I generally recommend uBlock to my friends. With that, 90% of the internet is ad-free. And I don’t mind watching the advertisements itself… It’s (again) the other things that come with it. The tracking, selling of data, being an object to the ad selling algorithms… I can’t help but immediately proceed to the technobabble… Maybe with a few exceptions. I could explain why it’s stupid to watch 2 ads before each Youtube video.
I call crap. Not to be rude. Talk to women in your life. 100% of the women I’ve ever spoke to on any level near this topic expressed a story of a degree of sexual violence or assault or intimidation. I as a boy also experienced sexual assault as a child. This is the most severe issue plaguing our society I think. I don’t know what it is but we have a problem. I’d bet 90% of the population has experienced sexual trauma. Shit is fucked bro.
So I get what you’re saying but at least from my point of view that’s still too much unnecessary shit, mind you I think cup holders are optional but hear me out. The problem isn’t the touch screen per-se it’s everything else reliant on it cruise control, lane assist, and back up cams are all either unnecessary or in the case of the back up cams a failure of design. All a lot of folks want is a basic as shit car where the most complex thing inside of it is the door ajar light. In many ways cars are too computerized they have so many points of failure that I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if we see a generation or two being bricked because of another capacitor or CPU plague. That’s also not getting into their shitty interiors, I fucking hate my grandmother’s car but maybe Ford in particular is bad. Point is they have too much shit going on maintenance wise and frankly speaking lots of folks just want what amounts to a 2001 era car, enough electronics for maintenance while still being relatively easy to repair and replace hell for backup cams you could even have a cool popup screen. But maybe I’m just a biased asshole who is a borderline luddite and only has really driven cars from the early 90s to 01, point is I will labatomize any new car if I am somehow forced to use one.
By Diego Sequera and Ernesto Cazal – Dec 15, 2025 The United States’ National Security Strategy 2025, published last week but dated November, is a text that transcends the imprint of a technical manual or a diplomatic wish list. It is, rather, a political act at a turning point: the first official US document that starts, albeit in a veiled way, from the somewhat less veiled awareness of US decline as a starting point. However, the document attempts to manage the fragments of decline, to gather them around a doctrine for hemispheric reaffirmation where its “backyard” is proclaimed as the region of its power. The security strategy does so through a double operation: on the one hand, by redefining the rules of the game in the Western Hemisphere; on the other, by carrying out a coercive reterritorialization of the global order where the economic becomes inseparable from the strategic and where the former conceals the necessary levels of violence that cannot be expressed in writing. According to the text, the new strategy seeks to secure what the US considers its sovereign right over the Americas in order to benefit its own interests. Within that framework, the US redefines the rules of the geopolitical game, although it does not have the necessary cards to win. The visible currents As has been the hallmark of the Trump years, and especially in this second chapter, the publication of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) combines the grandiosity of another event that is supposed to be a turning point, along with, once the uproar has passed, a scrutiny that offers its vulnerabilities, inconsistencies, and unfeasibility. In that sense, as a historical document—which it is, including its contradictory nature—three currents visibly converge, perfectly linked to the disordered and heterogeneous character of the elite in command of the unstable empire. Throughout the 33 pages, four parts and 16 sections coexist. They are cohesive but not without contradictions, and the following trends are revealed: • A narcissism and exaltation that has Trump as its center and object–the “miraculous” emperor president–of the alleged turnaround; • An anti-elitist simulation that goes beyond the MAGA spirit, reaching the new neo-conservative mutation that allows it to operate within the first noted current; • A fundamental reformulation of a strategy with overtones clearly based on a realism that is more aware of the current limits of the US but, despite the visible modifications with the same imperialist goals, synthesized in the dominant presence of Elbridge Colby, the assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, responsible for the “renewing” elements of the new foreign perspective of the current administration. The impression of consistency in the document fails to conceal the internal ideological contradictions. More importantly, despite the fact that this awareness must remain unstated, the NSS is the first official document that articulates, in a sotto voce, awareness of US decline. A combination of incurable superficiality is coupled with the anxiety to update immediate, even peremptory, lines of action to reshape the US’s place in the world as the sole and “formidable” superpower on the planet. It is not accidental that the NSS’s first premise focuses on the drift in which the country finds itself, both internally and externally, as a consequence of the lethargy to which “the elites,” as the document ironically states (p. 1), have caused: a loss of strategic direction that is dissipating US strength and effectiveness. The “foreign policy elites,” states the NSS, “convinced themselves that permanent world domination was to the benefit of our country.” A miscalculation plagued the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, leading it to assume the cost of “eternal global burdens,” accentuating and making unavoidable the disconnect between that “responsibility” to the world and US “national interests.” Along the way, the economic and commercial counterpart of this, the neoliberal free market, undermined and dismantled the middle class and the industrial base “on which the economic and military preeminence of the US depended,” continues the NSS. Of course, the new formulation represented by the NSS is a “welcomed and necessary correction,” a power exclusive to President Trump. This dimension, the apparent return to a nativist urgency that focuses on the vindication of the US as a republic, centers on “protecting this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life” from military dangers, threatening outsiders, and “predatory economic practices.” These dangers are summarized in the deregulation of migration and the consequent threat of invasion, particularly in the form of “narco-terrorist” infiltration within US borders: “No adversary or danger should be able to expose the US to risks” (p. 2). For its defense, it is urgent that the US must possess the most “powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced” army to “protect our interests” and, in case of war, to win quickly without a significant human cost. Despite admitting their mistakes, the exceptionalist dream/nightmare remains the essential basis of the US role in the world: “what we want” is the operative concept, and “what we want” operates, fundamentally, in opposition to “what we have,” even though they are sometimes mixed up. What the US wants, according to the NSS, is the most “robust, modern, and credible” nuclear deterrent; as the foundation of US military power, “we want” the strongest, most dynamic, innovative, and advanced economy; “we want the most robust industrial base in the world”; “we want” the most robust energy sector; “we want to remain” at the forefront of science and technology; “we want” our “unrivaled soft power,” with which “positive influence” is exerted, to remain strong; and, finally, “we want” a restoration of “cultural and spiritual health” that will lead to the “new golden age.” With this indirect admission of the state of emergency, and with the imperative of a resurgent effort, the first point of distancing is marked from what have been the ways that the empire has represented itself so far, if we take as a contrasting reference the 2022 National Security Strategy of the Biden administration, in which all of these weighted elements continued to be recognizable, unalterable, and unquestionable. The shift, both rhetorical and operational, becomes more pronounced in the “strategic principles” (p. 5) concerning what the US “wants in and from the world” and concerning the risk, it is claimed, of ignoring the “core and vital” interests. • That technological standards in AI, biotechnology, and quantum computing “drive the world forward”; • The end of “endless wars” is avoided while preventing an antagonistic power from dominating oil and gas supplies in the “Middle East” along with critical transit points without having to resort to “endless wars,” an undeclared reference to Iran; • That the ongoing damage inflicted by foreign “actors” be reversed by maintaining freedom of navigation in the “Indo-Pacific” and securing supply chains that, as with technology, are references to China and its southern sea; • Support for US allies while reversing the state of decline in Europe and its “Western identity”; • The most important and dramatic shift is that “we [the US] want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the US; we want a hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a hemisphere that remains free from hostile foreign incursions or ownership of key assets and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to essential strategic locations.” Thus, the Monroe Doctrine is updated with its “Trump Corollary” as a continuation of the Roosevelt Corollary, as will be seen later. This effort must be the result of the distribution of burdens and responsibilities among “partners and allies” because the days when the US held up the world “like Atlas” are over (p. 12). It is official, then, that the bill is not to be paid solely by Washington, and everyone has to contribute. However, this forces us to recognize, therefore, that “the fundamental political unit of the world is and will continue to be the nation-state” (p. 9). Where, the NSS asserts, “sovereign rights” are supported, the US, acting from its own interests, will “encourage” others to do the same against the remaining institutions that must be reformed. This alludes, once again implicitly, to multilateral organizations that must be “reformed” (p. 9). This claim, however, if we limit ourselves exclusively to the document, criticizes the dissolving vision of the borders of “globalism” with its unrestricted migration to ensure its own passage to the reindustrialization and reinvigoration of the military industrial base, the direct control of supply chains, and energy and financial dominance. Once again, in the use of adjectives and rhetorical devices, the cracks and fissures are visible: “Preserving and growing our (financial) dominance entails leveraging our dynamic free market system and our leadership in digital finance and innovation to ensure that our markets continue to be the most dynamic, liquid, and secure while remaining the envy of the world” (p. 15). The constant declaration of the “great shift” and an apparent relocation of efforts, an act that should embody an exercise in self-examination, recognition of one’s place, and therefore, some humility, is overlaid with a narcissism that clouds its supposed internal reform of interests and strategies. The high-flown rhetoric that permeates the postulated principles and the strategic considerations that presuppose the “turnaround” fails to hide, precisely, the alleged Copernican shift in the US vision. The combination of the miraculous arrival of the president-emperor, the admission of the failure of the liberal order, and the urgencies of a nuanced realism fail to synthesize that image if subjected to proper examination. Nostalgia for grandeur leaves unaltered the essential basis which has been the continuity of hegemonic aspiration, to which is added the caveat of being at that limit which is not fully admitted, leaving intact the geopolitical hallucination of the neoconservatives, resulting in the new strategic “thinking” being an accumulation of “tactics” where the superior goal does not differ substantially from that of any previous government that has occupied the White House. “Flexible” and imperialist realism and the alleged “great turn” “President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist,’ realistic without being ‘realistic,’ principled without being ‘idealistic,’ muscular without being ‘militaristic,’ and moderate without being ‘pacifist.’ It is not based on traditional political ideology. It is motivated primarily by what serves the US, or, in two words: ‘America First’” (p. 8), the NSS states. In contrast to both the 2018 and 2022 National Security Strategies, the new NSS ceases to acknowledge that the US is in an era of intense competition with other emerging global powers. On the contrary, through euphemistic devices and effort, wherever possible, it emphatically strives not to mention the other competitors. However, it is a recognized and public fact, the author and main force behind the document is, as mentioned, Elbridge Colby, a think tanker with a well-furnished brain and a recognized anti-China hawk. Despite all the omissions and the apparent admissions of external threats and their internal impact, the guiding principle remains the same: the focus is claimed to be national, America First; it’s not about China, when in reality it is all about China—the only competitor that truly threatens, according to Colby, US dominance. “In order to remain superpowered, the US may, temporarily, need to stop superpowering,” wrote The Atlantic in a recent piece about Colby. A “consummate institutionalist” of official Washington, as the article also points out, Colby, grandson of William Colby, the former director of the CIA and creator of the Phoenix Program (the model of disappearance and extermination that plagues us to this day), is a staffer who has collaborated with different administrations and think tanks in the capital. Colby was also one of the central authors of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which marked a departure from continuity and recognized the rise of other powers as strategic rivals. But in 2021, there was a turning point with the publication of his book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. Following a historical review of the evolution of defense strategies, the book essentially argues that the US must prioritize, first and foremost, the rise of what it considers its only serious competitor or rival: the People’s Republic of China. “The plain reality is that China is too powerful for the US to simply make it stop fighting; the US and any of its allies and partners therefore need to persuade it not to” (p. 185), Colby argues within the scenario of a military conflict surrounding Taiwan. This is the central nerve of his strategy both in the book and in the NSS itself, the latter starting from the premise that the Taiwan geographically and defensively divides the island chains in the western Pacific that constitute a natural barrier between China and the western flank of the US empire. Being unable to confront the People’s Republic directly and exclusively, lacking the economic, financial, logistical, and technological resources to do so, three pillars are needed: investment in naval and air technology, a network of allies, and denying the possibility of victory in a conflict in which the cost is greater than the benefits for Beijing. This, in turn, implies, as has been more or less distilled so far, abandoning other “priorities” corresponding to the globalist vision in order to concentrate all efforts on these three points and a single adversary/enemy. However, this also involves a scenario in which partners and allies are willing not only to accept part of the burden of that effort but also the human and military costs that this could entail in order to achieve a higher goal that, if successful, would ensure control of the western Pacific as a pillar of global dominance. There is, therefore, an explicit admission that the US is not in a position or condition to achieve those goals today and, thus, is threatened. Hence the need for a “cessation of hostilities” (pp. 25-26) in Ukraine that would reduce attention on Russia and lead it to a point of “strategic stability” (p. 27). However, this cessation of hostilities would not constitute the end of the war but a momentary pause. To regain a hypothetical leading position in military industry and technology, time needs to be bought; and to buy time, a system of diplomatic, military, regional, and economic alliances in East Asia in particular, and in the rest of the world in general, is indispensable. There is no other way that the US can block the ascendancy of the People’s Republic of China in terms of its political, commercial, and cooperation mechanisms throughout the planet. Yet, the scenario in which the battle for Taiwan is fought involves a complex game of public perception, the action of meticulously functional and well-oiled alliances, along with the impact that air and naval superiority should entail. It is Colby’s concern, he states in his book (p. 302), that the US public considers it worth “the sacrifice and risk involved” in containing a “hegemonic” state at a significant distance from its problems. Therefore, it can be inferred that going against this idea of preeminence is comparable to a political heresy that must be persecuted; thus, it must be understood that internal dissent to this postulate is one of the main threats to national security. Colby has publicly stated that the US is not prepared for a hypothetical World War III, and the only way to avoid it is to prepare for it. Seen in this way, and here, perhaps, in the crazy terms of late imperialism, lies the vision and lucidity of Colby and his supporters. The texts of 2018 and 2022 assume and reveal this external threat. They operated within a vicious maximalist vision, while the new NSS claims that what is necessary is strategic sequencing or a sum of cohesive tactics to deny the expansionist continuation of China. This explains the apparent abandonment of self-destructive Europe and the reduction of Africa and the Middle East to a network of public–private partnerships where US companies and state contracts are favored while centrally, the absolute control of the Western Hemisphere is consolidated as a power base capable of revitalizing and strengthening, through extractive control, private initiative. In this sense, multipolar states must be expelled from Latin America and the Caribbean, denying Beijing a “sphere of influence” in the region. This expulsion must begin, of course, with the main proponent of the multipolar approach in the region: namely, Venezuela. For Washington, the American continent is no longer a neighborhood but, as mentioned before, a matter of strictly domestic politics. Contrary to and in opposition to many traditional strategists and commentators, Colby’s vision centers on the need to reduce the over-extension of the empire as a way to revitalize the empire. In that sense, it is a transitional and provisional text: once Washington is “recovered,” it can reclaim its former power. At this point in history, the highway of domination is counterproductive, and a major detour is needed to achieve that higher goal: the US needs to defeat China, but for now, it depends on the old road. This constitutes imperial realism and a manifestly and internally extreme situation. The Trump Corollary: functional sovereignty and reconfiguration of the hemispheric order The 2025 National Security Strategy proposes a fundamental shift in what constitutes sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere, the operational core of which is the so-called “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” (p. 5). However, it is not limited to updating US foreign policy; it is not a mere tactical adjustment. It consists of a redefinition of the rules of the game: which decisions by other countries are acceptable and which, although legal and sovereign, are treated as threats. Within this framework, we can consider three moments of sovereignty that are recognized by historical development and systematic application of imperial reasoning. An early 20th-century political cartoon depicts Uncle Sam riding across the Americas while brandishing a large club inscribed “Monroe Doctrine 1824-1905.” Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images. The The US Monroe Doctrine (formulated in 1823) explicitly recognized the sovereignty of the new Latin American states and limited itself to prohibiting European intervention in the affairs of the Hemisphere. Its logic was one of non-interference: “America for the Americans… and the Americans are free and independent.” The Roosevelt Corollary (1904), on the other hand, introduced conditional sovereignty in the event that a country in the Americas failed to meet its international obligations; in such a scenario, the US would be obliged to exercise, at least temporarily, the functions of “international police.” Here, sovereignty could be delegated or revoked if the state did not comply with external standards: fiscal, moral, civilizational, etc. However, the Trump Corollary does not suspend sovereignty: it redefines it from its very foundation. The question is no longer whether a state is sovereign or not but what kind of sovereignty counts as legitimate for hemispheric order. Legitimacy no longer depends on the internal regime or compliance with international norms but on its compatibility with the US value chain. The NSS formulates it with technical clarity and hegemonic rhetoric: • “We will deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position threatening forces or other capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere” (p.15). • “The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend most on us and over which we therefore have the greatest influence, must be single-source contracts for our companies” (p.19). • “We must do everything possible to expel foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region” (p.19). This implies that the sovereignty of others is measured by their ability not to interfere with—and preferably, to facilitate—the vital interests of the US. It is striking (and reveals a deeper structural continuity than the rhetorical differences) that both the Roosevelt Corollary (1904) and the Trump Corollary (2025) use Venezuela as an exemplary case to justify their hemispheric doctrine. In 1902-1903, the European naval blockade against Venezuela for non-payment of debts served Roosevelt as a casus belli to assert that the US, and only the US, had the right to intervene in the hemisphere when an “incapable” state threatened regional stability. Today, Venezuela’s alliance with non-hemispheric actors—China, Russia, and Iran—and its resistance to integrating into the US value chain play an analogous role: its autonomous capacity makes it the perfect example of deviation from the new order to be imposed. In both cases, Venezuela is a pretext: its existence allows the establishment of a general doctrine—that of conditional sovereignty in 1904, that of functional sovereignty in 2025—which is then applied to the entire hemisphere. The aim is to use Venezuela as a model to redefine what counts as a legitimate order and who decides when that order has been violated. Three structural displacements From legal sovereignty to functional sovereignty. In the Westphalian tradition, sovereignty is a status: the legitimate monopoly of coercion within a recognized territory. In the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, sovereignty is an operational capability: that of aligning with the infrastructure, logistics, and standards that sustain the reproduction of US capital. A state may be fully recognized by the UN, hold elections, and have territorial control, but if it allows a Chinese company to build a port, a mine or a 5G network, its sovereignty becomes functionally illegitimate in the terms of the Corollary. Here, the structural validity of governments within the region, conceived as a space of US preeminence, is questioned. From territorial control to infrastructural control. Classical domination was exercised over the state: invasion, occupation, regime change. Now, in a different way, functional domination is sought over the means of production of sovereignty itself: energy, logistics, data, critical minerals, technical standards. According to the new Corollary, controlling access to refineries and oil technology (CITGO, Chevron) will be adequate; financing will be conditioned on the reversal of contracts with Russia, Iran, or China; “aid” will be offered in exchange for “single-source contracts” for US companies. Power lies in the control of the nodes that make any government possible: energy, infrastructure, minerals, etc. From sovereignty as a right to sovereignty as a coercive offer. In the liberal and republican tradition, sovereignty is an inalienable right founded on self-determination. In the 2025 National Security Strategy, sovereignty is presented as a service offering: the US “invites” integration into a system where prosperity and stability are guaranteed provided that the conditions are accepted. “The choice that all countries must face is whether they want to live in a US-led world of sovereign countries and free economies or in a parallel one in which they are influenced by countries on the other side of the world” (p. 18). Is it a free choice? The answer is undoubtedly no. It is structurally incentivized and coercively framed. Sovereignty is what the US certifies as compatible with the new hemispheric order. The Trump Corollary refuses to deny the existence of state sovereignty but frames it as the capacity for functional alignment. A sovereign state, in this order, is one that makes itself available to the US value chain through coercion via an institutional, financial, and technological design. Exceptionalism and the Venezuelan borderline case The Trump Corollary aims to function as an architecture of the new order, introducing a change in the framework of what is possible in the Hemisphere: what was once a sovereign decision—choosing with whom to trade, with whom to ally—now becomes a sign of risk or destabilization. Its strength lies in making deviation unthinkable: those who deviate will be punished. It is no longer a question of whether Venezuela can partner with China: rather, the NSS insists that if Venezuela does, it ceases to be a legitimate interlocutor, and therefore, any action against it (sanctions, isolation, military and diplomatic pressure) becomes reasonable and even necessary. This status is analogous to the homo sacer conceptualized by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben: Venezuela can be sanctioned (blocked, isolated, militarily pressured) without this constituting a “violation of sovereignty” because, in the language of the Corollary, it is not exercising legitimate sovereignty. However, neither can it be integrated into the US-led order, because its very existence—autonomous, non-functional—perverts the coherence of the system. In this structural vacuum, any measure against Venezuela becomes legitimate: sanctions, therefore, are containment measures; the financial blockade consists of a restoration of the minimum conditions of stability; and military pressure does not constitute an “aggression” but a prevention of threats. Within the framework of the US military deployment in the Caribbean, coercive measures against Venezuela appear as technical risk-management operations. The US military has intensified naval and air patrols in waters near Venezuela under the formal label of “anti-drug operations,” with the explicit use of lethal force against civilian vessels or those involved in commercial (oil) operations and non-military logistics networks, something that the 2025 National Security Strategy authorizes as a replacement for the “exclusively police-based strategy of recent decades” (p. 16). In this context, sanctions are presented as preventive containment measures: the “forced sale” of CITGO, for example, is justified as an impediment to strategic assets remaining under the control of a government that maintains alliances with actors described as “adversaries” in the strategy (p. 17). The financial blockade—exclusion from the Swift finance system, prohibition of dollar transactions, etc.—is framed as a restoration of minimum conditions of stability, according to the Treasury Department’s discourse, which repeats, point by point, the NSS’s warning about the “hidden costs in espionage, cybersecurity, and debt traps” of cooperation with non-hemispheric powers (p.18). Furthermore, military pressure is described as threat prevention based on the mandate to “deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to control strategically vital assets” (p.15). In this framework, all coercive action shifts from the political register to the technical one, based on a calculation of functionality. Venezuela embodies the ultimate challenge to this doctrine: it is the extreme case. It maintains strategic alliances with China, Russia, and Iran; it controls critical resources without surrendering their management to aligned capital; and it has developed exchange mechanisms that circumvent the dollar and US value chains. In this sense, the Trump Corollary frankly acknowledges: “Some influences will be difficult to reverse, given the political alignment between certain Latin American governments and certain foreign actors” (p.17). Venezuela serves as a precedent, as it demonstrates that it is possible to maintain an autonomous foreign policy even under prolonged coercive pressure. In light of the analyzed document, we can confirm that the encirclement of Venezuela seeks not only a change of government. Above all, it aims to exterminate Venezuela’s political and econimic model in favor of one of “American exceptionalism”: to prove that no country can survive outside the order of selective sovereignty established by the new doctrine. Regional change following regime change. The Trump Corollary is a technology for producing the excludable: it introduces a new way of measuring legitimacy based on alignment with the US value chain. The US reserves the right to decide which assets are “strategically vital”, which alliances constitute “systemic risk”, and which governments, although sovereign, should be treated as anomalies. The real novelty is not that the US imposes its will on others—that is already known. It is that the US unilaterally decides which decisions by other countries count as legitimate, and which countries, even if sovereign, are treated as threats. This constitutes blatant imperialist extortion. It’s the economy, dummy (again) While the US exceptionalist policy will gain new momentum with the redefinition of sovereignty and “legitimacy” within a hemispheric order that only prioritizes the interests of power in Washington, its rhetorical approach must be understood within the context of the economic offensive that apparently interests Trump. Thus, the document treats the Western Hemisphere as a space of strategic opportunity: a market in formation, a potential industrial base, a network of supply chains, and the closest thing to a tax haven with lax labor laws that, if governed from Washington, can drastically reduce US dependence on Asia and Europe after decades of rampant neoliberal globalization. To achieve this, the strategy is divided into two complementary moves: recruiting partners who are already aligned and expanding influence toward those who are not yet integrated. The text makes it clear that “trade diplomacy” is the strategic backbone of the “America First” foreign policy: “The United States will prioritize trade diplomacy to strengthen our own economy and industries, using tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” (p. 16). Thus, the NSS positions the US as the epicenter of a purported coordinated hemispheric reindustrialization: it seeks to have its partners “strengthen their national economies” because a more prosperous hemisphere becomes “an increasingly attractive market for US trade and investment.” While the partners gain access to technology, financing, and markets, the US gains systemic resilience. The mutual benefit is not mutual but asymmetrical: “Strengthening critical supply chains in this hemisphere will reduce dependencies and increase American economic resilience” (p. 17). This means that minerals used in batteries, medical components, agricultural inputs, and even low-complexity chips could be produced in any Latin American country—and not in China—under US standards, patents, and contracts. Geographical proximity thus becomes a strategic advantage in terms of logistics and control. Although the focus is economic, the Corollary does not separate trade from security: “And even as we give priority to trade diplomacy, we will work to strengthen our security partnerships, from arms sales to intelligence sharing and joint exercises” (p. 17). The sale of fighter jets, drones, or coastal surveillance systems provides a functional anchor within a security framework. Each military contract creates technical dependence, standardizes protocols, and opens the door to civilian contracts (in energy, telecommunications, or logistics) that solidify alignment. The second move—expansion—operates where alliances are not automatic. There, the US does not compete on a level playing field. Therefore, the NSS proposes a structurally advantageous alternative and delegitimizes its competitors due to systemic risk. “The United States has succeeded in reducing external influence in the Western Hemisphere by demonstrating, with specificity, how many hidden costs—in espionage, cybersecurity, debt traps, and other forms—are implicit in so-called ‘low-cost’ foreign aid” (p. 18). The US distorts the policies of multipolar actors: China does not offer south–south cooperation, claims the NSS, it offers covert dependency. Russia does not build ports; it establishes surveillance points and logistical access points. Iran does not refinance oil; it introduces uncertifiable technologies into global markets. The psychopolitical projection in this case is remarkable, with symptoms of a factitious disorder imposed on another in the field of US foreign policy. In contrast, the US presents itself as the partner of real sovereignty: “[US] American products, services, and technologies are a much better long-term purchase because they are of higher quality and do not come with the same conditions as aid from other countries” (p. 18). However, the new Corollary is not content with preaching: it announces the correction of its own bureaucracy in order to compete: “We will reform our own system to streamline approvals and licenses, once again, to become the partner of first choice” (p. 18). This implies concrete decisions: reducing the terms of the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) from 18 to 6 months, making the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) environmental requirements for energy projects more flexible, or allowing the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) to finance “single-source” contracts with US companies, as required by the document (p. 19). This is a coercive incentive structure: whoever chooses the “multipolar world” will be excluded from the financial, technological, and logistical systems that define contemporary prosperity. In this context, the economy is intrinsically linked to security. It is the main stronghold of the new hemispheric hegemony, and Venezuela, due to its resistance to integrating into this US-led order, represents a political exception that must be neutralized for the model to be sustained. Belated and retroactive vindication of the nation-state: the trade deficit Thus, imperialist realism collapses when, while claiming to have everything under control, it conversely admits a dramatic loss of ground that forces it to relinquish a global responsibility that, by its own sustained undermining, is a mistake. All the while, it asserts that the mission persists and has only been temporarily redirected. Apparently, “the US retains enormous assets—the world’s strongest economy and military, unsurpassed innovation, unrivaled ‘soft power,’ and a historical track record of benefiting our partners and allies—which makes it easier for us to compete successfully” (p. 19). In short, according to the NSS, the US needs to take a step back in order to recover the superiority that it claims to already possess. “The America First brand diplomacy seeks to rebalance global trade relations. We have made it clear to our allies that the current deficit in the US accounts is unsustainable,” states the NSS, and it demands that “other prominent nations,” including Europe, Japan, Korea, Canada, and Mexico, “adopt trade policies that help rebalance the Chinese economy toward domestic consumption” because regions such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, and West Asia alone “cannot absorb the enormous surplus capacity” of the People’s Republic (p. 22). However, the NSS also admits, pejoratively, that “The US and its allies have not yet formulated, much less implemented, a joint plan for the so-called ‘Global South’” (p. 22), but it still intends to assume that leading role, notwithstanding the new definitions of “sovereignty” and “nation-state” reviewed so far. But for Emmanuel Todd, whose aim has not failed him so far, a trade deficit, whether of the US or of a western European country, entails the possibility of being able to say definitively that “in the West, the nation-state does not exist” (The Defeat of the West, p. 15). As Todd argues: “A systematic deficit renders the concept of the nation-state obsolete, since the territorial entity in question can only survive by receiving a tax or a privilege from abroad, without any counterpart” (p. 16). It is a structure that, in order to function, needs a middle class that acts as the “center of gravity” and “nervous system” of a minimally homogeneous nation under certain parameters. The NSS acknowledges the need, as seen, to rebuild the middle class given the oligarchic fragmentation caused by the sustained unrestricted movement of capital from the bottom up due to accumulation by dispossession, which also leads to fierce competition among the elite. This characteristic, deeply investigated by numerous economists, is a sign of crisis, which for Todd signifies national disintegration. Recent US employment reports are far from encouraging, and alongside all this, a technological and cloud-based oligarchy, driven by finance and the speculative economy, is extensively assuming control throughout the US federal government apparatus. Through this filter, a document that, while claiming to represent the middle class, appeals to this same corporate constellation, that of the “tech bros,” to collaborate in surveillance tasks begins, algorithmically, by monitoring and controlling the domestic population itself, precisely that middle class that this administration claims to defend (p. 21). Whether in its adjustment of global vision or in its local dimension, of all the races it aspires to run, the empire should be careful about which of these two it will lose first, even more so when the mechanistic logic with which it outlines its strategy prevents its planners from calculating the reactions and consequences of this readjustment. Hegemony as the administration of decline The announcement of a disciplined management of the retreat draws its impetus from the urgency: the certainty that the US can no longer simultaneously sustain financial globalization, military interventionism, and the multilateral consensus it built after 1945. Faced with this impossibility, the document proposes a radical solution: to retreat in order to rearm. It rejects any kind of abandonment of hegemony and instead seeks to relocate it. The Western Hemisphere is the laboratory for this operation. Here, it is not seeking to restore the imperial ruins of past decades. It is proposing something strategically new: a functional order with symptoms of geopolitical rheumatism. In this sense, Venezuela is the mirror in which the US sees itself reflected: a state that insists on deciding its own destiny even when the cost is isolation, financial sanctions, and constant military pressure. Venezuela’s persistence poses an unusual and extraordinary threat to the US narrative of inevitability. Therefore, the blockade and piracy have their imperialist justification as long as Venezuela remains the precedent of an alternative possibility. However, at the heart of this logic lies a lethal paradox: the more the US demands that others be “functional,” the more evident its own dysfunction becomes. The US economy is burdened by unsustainable deficits. Its middle class, on which its internal stability depends, is decimated. Its political cohesion is fractured by a technocratic oligarchy that governs through algorithms and investment funds, and its “America First” rhetoric reveals, at its core, a deep insecurity: it is the voice of those who fear losing control without realizing that the power to govern has been decentralized outside of their “backyard.” The future of the hemisphere will not be decided in the Pacific but in the politics that now appear disguised as technical management and incentive coercion—where the most decisive battle of the century is being fought for the new definitions of power. In the vast expanse of this arena, which can be considered civilizational, as long as Venezuela continues to exist—not as a power, but as a possibility—the functional order of the declining empire will not be complete, for it heralds a world in which everything is yet to be written. (Misión Verdad ) Translation: Orinoco Tribune OT/JRE/SL From Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond via This RSS Feed.
Plague still exists mostly as a problem in poor countries without access to antibiotics. I think sheep get it too and it’s a problem in livestock. Also there was a large plague vaccination program in India in the 1890s
Almost as if the 50’s were being plagued by the same dumb rich out of touch assholes from the 1920s and it caused some ~trickle down~ issues for society down the line in the 90s. Turns out 35 years ain’t that long of a time in the grand scheme of things.
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. –Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” “It’s a monument. I’m building a monument to myself because no one else will.” —Donald J. Trump, as quoted by Fox News propagandist Jesse Watters, on his “big beautiful ballroom” Donald J. Trump is ubiquitous and inescapable. He appears in our newspapers and on our televisions, cellphones, and computer screens almost every single day. Ever the Killjoy, leaving his mark on every institution he touches. Ever the Killjoy, he uses every public speaking engagement to boast of his achievements and air his endless list of grievances, turning turkey pardons and Christmas tree lightings into joyless spectacles of self-promotion and score-settling. He – and his resentments – are everywhere. As are his monuments, real and proposed. In less than a year in office, Trump has succeeded in paying tribute to himself where others have refused. He is like a feral animal marking its territory or a delinquent child graffitiing public property with a golden Sharpie. His name now adorns the United States Institute of Peace and the Kennedy Center – the latter named for a real war hero who, unlike the White House’s current occupant, did not receive a deferment because of bogus “bone spurs” or describe STDs as his “own personal Vietnam.” His followers, for their part, are afflicted with TDS – Trump Devotion Syndrome, not to be confused with the more commonly discussed Trump Derangement Syndrome – a malady plaguing his cabinet members, Republican members of Congress, and his MAGA base, which demands unquestioned fealty. Trump wants his name on everything, excluding, of course, the Epstein files. Like Ozymandias, his frowning, sneering visage glowers at us from federal buildings, National Park Service America the Beautiful Annual Resident passes, and million-dollar Trump Gold Cards. (Don’t leave home without them, or risk being deported unless you also purchase the Trump Gold ICE Millionaire Pass Card for another million or two or three…). If he had his way – and who’s to stop him? – he would put his name on football stadiums, airports, state roadways, and “golden fleet” battleship classes. That fleet may prove necessary as Trump pursues new forever wars. It may be only a matter of time before Trump unveils a “Trump Doctrine” rationalizing the annexation of Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela, while striking “deals” to secure the critical minerals and rare earths of Australia, Japan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, and other countries deemed “important to national security” – not only to counter China, but also to enrich his circle of billionaire AI cronies. There are, however, moments when honesty escapes the black hole of Killjoy’s ego, as when, in the epigraph, he admits he erects monuments to himself since no one else will. Well, at least public monuments. Since his second term, Trump has been showered with golden trophies and ceremonial baubles from Apple CEO Tim Cook, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, President of South Korea, and a host of others – all eager to polish the ego of the man who would be king. And through his legion of sycophants – including Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who is sponsoring a bill (H.R. 5789), the President Donald J. Trump Congressional Gold Medal Act,which would award him the medal in “recognition of his exceptional leadership and dedication to strengthening America’s diplomatic relations during his presidency” – he continues to receive a steady stream of golden laurels. Others, including Luna, have proposed adding Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore (despite the resulting damage it would do to the monument – built on stolen and sacred Native American land). Meanwhile Trump himself, in yet another gesture of onanistic hubris we have come to expect from the orange Albert Speer, has announced plans to erect what he has variously called a “Memorial Circle/Independence Triumphal Arch,” or what CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe dubbed the “Arc de Trump.” No doubt this will be followed by a new Amazon documentary, The Trump of the Will, perhaps directed by Brett Ratner (if he can schedule it before he helms Rush Hour 4), Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza, or “Special Ambassador” to Hollywood Mel Gibson, an apt choice given the Leni Riefenstahl overtones of his oeuvre. While all of this may sound like satire, most of it is not. Trump has already reshaped federal spaces to suit his own narcissistic aesthetic. He has turned the Oval Office into a nouveau riche trophy room, remodeled White House hallways into portrait-lined corridors, complete with self-aggrandizing Truth Social-inspired plaques that pillory his predecessors and praise his own petty achievements. The purportedly phallic-challenged Trump has torn down the East Wing to erect – like another allegedly small-d dictator – a bunker-topping ballroom. How long before the White House becomes the “Trump House,” with the title emblazoned in his favored gold Shelley Script font along the building’s pediment? But Trump’s destructive excesses don’t end with the federal buildings he has demolished and degraded. There has been a human toll as well. At home, he has ravaged the health care system as he fiddles with his “concept” of one. His Department of Justice has terminated hundreds of public safety and victim services grants and implemented policies that severely undermine the nation’s public health. He has unleashed goon squads that have sent people to ICE and other facilities where they are sexually abused, brutalized, and killed, unpunished abuses that tellingly predate theTrump regime. Indeed, that fact ultimately explains why we are where we are. Abroad, Trump has obliterated USAID, armed the genocidal government of a war criminal who has slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and overseen operations coordinated by his own Secretary of War Crimes that have killed over 100 people in boat strikes in the Caribbean, as he prepares to repeat Gulf War II by declaring fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” and send Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the UN, where, one imagines, he will dramatically wave a vial of the substance before the Security Council. After all, it worked for George W. Bush and Colin Powell, didn’t it? And we’ve seen how many days they spent in lockup because of their murderous lies. In government, as in finance, the elites are all Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” And so the mad American farce continues, which, again, is why we are where we are. This is also why they continue to violate the law with impunity. By now we should expect that the rule of law – domestic and international – and the rules of war mean nothing. Not only to Trump and his enablers, but also those who say they stand to protect them but refrain from doing so. How does one explain their inertia? The calculation seems to be that once Trump’s economic agenda fails, the misery index rises, and his approval ratings tank, Democrats will ride to victory in the midterms (assuming, of course, elections are held), regain the White House in 2028 (ditto), and perhaps even reclaim the House and Senate. They will then remove his abominations and the nation will drift back toward a semblance of normalcy. If you believe that, I have a “ceasefire” deal for you in Gaza. Genocides don’t begin with terrorist attacks, and dictatorships don’t thrive in a vacuum; they require conditions that lay the groundwork – a series of uncorrected transgressions that allow them to take root. They require institutions that look the other way, officials and bureaucrats who shrink from their responsibilities, soldiers who simply obey orders, and citizens who no longer care because fear and hatred of the Other is not only normalized but celebrated, as the public proves itself all too ready to accept each new breach of the social contract as the cost of living out its version of the American Dream. Institutional checks and balances are only as strong as the people entrusted to uphold them. This is unlikely in a political climate in which those who grift on hateful rhetoric are made cultural heroes and canonized as the second coming of Martin Luther King. Unfortunately, those who contest such deceptions are sadly ineffective. This is why a 34-count felon and adjudicated sexual abuser sits in the Oval Office. Impeachment? Been there, done that. And while there have been a few lonely souls in Congress – Reps. Shri Thanedar and Al Green – who have called for Trump’s impeachment – there has been no momentum. The courts? Yes, they have ruled against Trump repeatedly, but he ignores them, filing countersuits of his own to gum up the process. The 25th Amendment? An obviously mentally addled president who uses every speaking engagement to rant and rave at ear-shattering volume about everything except coherent policy – who rambles endlessly about his press secretary’s filler-injected lips and his wife’s “drawers,” who boasts about acing his cognitive tests but doesn’t know which part of his anatomy was scanned during his MRI – somehow manages to escape its invocation. This is due in part to a Cabinet and, potentially, a Republican-controlled Congress that lack the courage to invoke it, not only out of devotion to their Dear Leader but also because they sense that making America white again has become a national priority, even if the charge is led by a sociopath with a self-professed (confessed?) “love for minors.” Sure, maybe he meant “miners.” But we won’t know for certain until the unredacted Epstein files are released, even though Attorney General Pam Bondi and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have already confirmed that he is in them – that Killjoy was there. But, as Wiles put it, Trump and his beastly bestie “were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever – I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” Dictatorships emerge not out of darkness, but from dismissal and denial. The post Killjoy Was Here: Monument Envy and the Trump Regime appeared first on CounterPunch.org. From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed
Kwazi Kwarteng was lost for words on GMB after journalist Ava Santina exposed the hypocrisy and rhetoric used around those receiving public money – notably the Royals: “These benefit claimants just taking away from the country & going on holiday… hate to see it, don’t you”@AvaSantina on the Royal family. In response Kwasi Kwarteng says he doesn’t know what to say. If it was demonising the poor it’d be a different matter though! #GMB pic.twitter.com/zEMKHibGY9 — Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) December 23, 2025 One rule for poor people and another for the rich On Tuesday 23 December, GMB presenters were discussing the Christmas plans of Andrew Windsor and his family: Beatrice and Eugenie have been invited to join the rest of the royals at Sandringham. They’ve also, you know, according to reports, been invited for the final Christmas at Royal Lodge with Andrew and with Sarah Ferguson as well. And it’s kind of juggling those family dynamics. And Ava’s going to tell us they’ve had to put up with the hardship of going on a skiing holiday instead. Santina pointed out the unbearable toll it must be taking on Andrew (and the Royals), and redirected a typical Tory attack line at one of the biggest recipients of taxpayer money: Well, that must have been exhausting for them. You know, gosh, these benefit claimants just taking away from the country and going on holiday using all our funds. God, I hate to see it, don’t you? Unable to deny the connection, Kwasi simply chortled his response: I don’t know what to say. Clearly Kwarteng hadn’t been given the script for this line of questioning: Why have Kwasi Kwartang on the programme at all? Woefully bad at his job, and doesn’t even have opinions? https://t.co/Th4vvQcVd2 — The Village Haul (@thevillagehaul) December 23, 2025 Or maybe his lack of response is because Santina is bang on the money: You don’t know what to say because she’s 100% correct — Tenesha! (@Teneshashashash) December 23, 2025 They are sitting on a £1.8bn private fortune protected from inheritance tax, while you face record household debt just to keep the heating on this Christmas. End Royal Excess: Monarchy celebrates, taxpayers pay, country suffers quietly. #AbolishTheMonarchy pic.twitter.com/N1WS95k4E8 — Candice Holmes (@hol40900) December 22, 2025 The Royals: an increasingly stark contrast with working families The Independent totted up the cost to the taxpayer for the Royals in 2024 and 2025, bringing in all known expenses. Hard working people across the country have provided just shy of £520m to keep a roof over this struggling family’s heads. Often, this huge expense to the taxpayer is excused due to the alleged income that the Royal Family bring in as a result of tourism. However, this argument is a point for contention amongst critics. As the Independent reported, whilst it is undisputed that the history and heritage of the monarchy attracts tourism, our dependency for the Royal Family being ‘in post’ is debatable. As the caller on Jeremy Vine pointed out, the Palace of Versailles sees 20 times more visitors as Buckingham Palace. Even Legoland is a more popular destination in Windsor than Windsor Castle itself. The article also highlights how the Royal Family have been plagued time and time again by scandal and crisis. As a result, the likelihood that anyone would even see a Royal (that they recognise) in person is next to none existent. The realities around the monarchy and the state of our public finances leaves the justifications for their continued privilege on shaky ground. In order to get your tax payer benefits, you got to do work in the community, that’s what Politicians tell us #r4today pic.twitter.com/pk3guVqO12 — Poptunes (@Catofbengals) December 22, 2025 GB News calls for “sympathy” as Andrew’s guns are seized. Where is the sympathy for the 382k homeless this Christmas? While Andrew hides in his estate, the King takes a £45.8m pay rise. We don’t need sympathy for a disgraced prince we need an end to the £1.3bn tax-free hoard. pic.twitter.com/LZetcrWOZW — Candice Holmes (@hol40900) December 23, 2025 The *Joseph Rowntree Foundation*draw focus to the highest percentage of poverty is seen amongst children in the UK, whilst poverty affecting pensioners and those without children is the lowest. This suggests the cost of raising children in our society has become so unaffordable that families are consistently finding their pockets getting tighter and tighter. Factoring in the two-child cap, and the fact that many in receipt of benefits are on such low wages that they have to be topped up by the state, it’s clear who the establishment want us to blame for the hefty benefit bill. But supporting families across the country to survive arguably has far more value to the economy than continuously supporting one of the most privileged families in the country. *Shelter*also have voiced their disgust at the fact that 84,240 families are facing homelessness, with 382,000 people set to spend Christmas day without a safe and secure roof above their head. This. The phrase in work benefits shouldn’t exist. For the people who keep yelling scroungers: the actual scroungers are employers and corporations. They are the actual recipients of handouts as WE are supplementing the subpar wages they are paying and helping THEM turn a profit. https://t.co/tJ5qtZ8M8s — Chirpy Chet (@ChirpyChet) November 30, 2025 Who is the priority: Royals or their ‘lowly subjects’? Often, the media and political pundits try to act as if we are all in the ‘same boat’, but that’s out of touch, at best, when hard working families across the country find life harder year after year. At worst, it’s a reminder that the richest in our society are never going to truly understand what life is like for ordinary people in this country. Not when the people they associate with have deeper pockets, and murky moral codes to boot. Featured image via By Maddison Wheeldon From Canary via This RSS Feed.
🔈 Fliperama de Boteco #505 – P-47 II MD 🎧 Ouça agora: https://bit.ly/4qehUi6 Neste episódio do Fliperama de Boteco, Guilherme Dellagustin, Lili, Éder e Renato decolam direto para os céus do Mega Drive para falar de um shoot ’em up pouco lembrado, mas cheio de personalidade: P-47 II MD. Sucessor do arcade P-47: The Phantom Fighter, o jogo traz ação aérea intensa, sprites grandes, trilha sonora marcante e aquela dificuldade clássica que só os anos 90 sabiam entregar. Aqui, analisamos o visual, a jogabilidade, as diferenças em relação ao arcade, curiosidades de desenvolvimento e, claro, se o game merece mais reconhecimento dentro da biblioteca do Mega Drive. Se você curte jogos de navinha, desafios old school e descobertas fora do óbvio, esse episódio é parada obrigatória. 🎧 Aperte o play, ajuste os motores e venha voar com a gente!
Church of St. Clement, Burnham Overy Town, Norfolk, U.K., built c. 1280. Photo: The author. St. Christopher About ten years, ago, my wife Harriet and I spent part of a summer with my parents-in-law at their house in Burnham-Overy-Staithe, on the North Norfolk Coast of England. One sunny, July day we decided to walk into Burnham Market, about two miles away, to buy groceries. The footpath cuts though a field planted with potatoes, jogs right between hedgerows composed of climbing roses, hawthorn, brambles and nettles, and passes a small junkyard with rusted farm machinery and broken skips and pallets. After that, you turn left and hug the perimeter of a churchyard busy with chickens owned by residents of the row of flint and brick cottages adjacent. We stopped, as we often do, to enter the Norman church of St. Clement. There are about a dozen medieval churches in “the Burnhams,” but this is my favorite because of its unusual central tower and belfry, finely carved 17th c. grave slabs inside, and remnants of a 15th c. mural showing a bare-legged St. Christopher carrying Jesus on his right shoulder. Anonymous, St. Christopher and Jesus, St. Clement, Burnham Overy Town, c. 1480. Photo: The author. According to Jacobus de Voragine, author of The Golden Legend, (c. 1260), Christopher – originally named Reprobus – was a servant in the court of the king of Caanan. Eager to improve himself, he decided to find a greater king to whom he might pledge service. His search led him first to the devil. Certain he had reached his desired station, Reprobus served him, but one day, seeing Mephistopheles shrink before a cross, he realized there must be a still more powerful king. That’s when he met a hermit who told him about Jesus Christ. Swearing allegiance to Christ, the courtier vowed – as a token of humility – to carry on his shoulders anyone who wished to cross a particular river. The promise was not made casually. Measuring five cubits (7’5”) — an inch taller than the current, tallest NBA player – Reprobus was well suited to his new profession. Everything went smoothly until one day, a little boy asked to be carried across the unusually fast flowing waterway. Reprobus found the going difficult and his burden surprisingly heavy. When they finally arrived on the opposite shore, the passenger identified himself as Jesus and said the ferryman had borne on his shoulders the weight of the world. Shouldn’t Christ at least have declared his luggage before requesting transport? What about a gratuity? (Was Christ a bad tipper?) The Golden Legend makes no mentions of complaint and Reprobus thereafter became known as Christopher (Christóphoros), or Christ-Bearer. For his trouble, he was soon martyred (beheaded) for refusing the tyrannical king of Lycia’s demand that he worship pagan gods. Because of his profession, St. Christopher has long been considered patron saint of travelers. There’s many a stranded air passenger who has prayed for saintly intercession after a delay due to mechanical issues, absent crew members, traffic control slow-downs or bad weather. I’ve personally never sought Christopher’s help, preferring the solace of airline lounges, gin and tonics and if necessary, hotel beds. A chance meeting and a key question I mention all this to explain the foolish question I asked my dear friend David James (the great scholar of avant-garde film), when Harriet and I met him by chance that bright, summer day about ten years ago in Burnham Market. I saw his wife Joanne before him; she’s tall and Black and stood out among the pasty white people (a few sun-burned a lobster-red) standing outside Humble Pie, the local delicatessen. “Joann!” I shouted, “what are you doing here? Is David with…” at which point David saw me, lunged forward, and gave me a powerful embrace, lifting me in the air. He’s about 6 inches taller than me, so I felt at that moment, like the baby Jesus I had just seen carried by St. Christopher. We all walked over to The Hoste, a pub a few meters from Humble Pie, to sit at a canopied, round picnic table, chat and drink beer — in Harriet’s case lager-shandy (a beer and lemonade concoction). David, English by birth, told me that he and Joann had flown in from Los Angeles just a couple of days before, and decided to spend some time by the sea and walking the North Norfolk footpaths. He also told me he was planning to retire soon from USC. Still thinking about the patron saint of travelers, I asked David, “Will you remain in L.A.? Or will you travel abroad?” To which he replied, “It isn’t a question of where I go, but what I’ll do.” A decade later, I silently rehearsed that conversation when I retired after almost 40 years of university teaching. Harriet and I moved first from Chicago to a small town in rural Florida, and then, in 2024 to Norwich, UK, to be closer to Harriet’s elderly parents and escape the emergent, American fascism. Self-exile was easy, but I experienced the predictable symptoms of PASD (“post-academic stress disorder.”) I started a novel, saw a therapist, and spent ridiculous amounts of time cooking. My dreams were ones familiar to members of my profession: standing in front of a packed auditorium with neither trousers nor lecture notes; dashing madly across a maze-like college campus, unable to find the correct classroom or building; sitting anxiously on a bench outside the university provost’s office, my feet dangling well short of the floor. Ministry of art and politics Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time at the University of East Anglia, where I have an honorary appointment. I’ve given a few lectures and gotten to know some terrific faculty members, all of them pressed by the university’s scandalously declining support for the humanities and social sciences. I’ve spoken at other, equally skint art history departments in the U.K., and traveled frequently to London to see exhibitions and attend gallery openings. But it’s another activity that’s providing an answer to my friend David’s question: I have been offering colleagues advice — more like pastoral counseling — on the timely subject of art and politics. These discussions have taken place in pubs, offices, seminars and my living room. Here’s a typical interrogative: “I’ve read some of your columns, and agree with you, of course, about Trump, neo-fascism, Gaza, the climate crisis, and all the rest. But when it comes to art, I prefer to judge it on its own terms, not according to a political metric. Can’t I still enjoy and champion art – past and present – that’s all about line, form, color, space, and plane? Or that represents places and stories that have nothing to do with politics? Is there no place in your world for the likes of Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman?” I reply by saying that I like those artists too, and that, of course, people are free to enjoy and write about whatever they please, but don’t suppose that doing so engages the unfolding catastrophe. Moreover, every work of art, no matter how politically neutral it appears to be, is inevitably infected by the ambient ideology, in the current U.S. case, neofascism. Politically disinterested artists and viewers are engaging politics without acknowledging it. “So, are you saying that every work of art today should be a protest against current injustice? Doesn’t that sound terribly tedious?” “That does sound boring,” I reply. “But I’m not arguing that art should represent or even protest current politics. Only that genuinely political art intervenes into the domain of power.” “How often does that happen?!” “Not often,” I admit. “But sometimes it does, especially during periods of political ferment, like the revolutions of 1789, 1848 and 1871 in France, and 1917 in Russia. Even in Washington, D.C. in 1967, when Allen Ginsberg, the Fugs, Norman Mailer and thousands of others tried to levitate the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam War. That was great, political art! As Marx wrote, “ideology becomes a material force when it grips the masses.” “But that’s cheating,” my interlocutor replies. “In those cases, you already had a revolution, or at least a powerful movement. You didn’t need art to help make one.” “In some instances,” I answer, “artists did help create radical consciousness. For example, the French artists Jacques-Louis David, Honore Daumier and Gustave Courbet, and the Russians Kasmir Malevich and El Lissitsky. Their works were revolutionary!” “In the latter two cases, the artworks you say contributed to the revolutionary cause weren’t even representational. They were completely abstract! Doesn’t that prove my point about the value of non-political art?” “Yes,” I agree. “Some art can affect you at the level of fundamental ideas. It can shape or change consciousness, making the viewer more receptive to critical, even revolutionary thought.” “Now, I’m lost. So, you agree with me that art doesn’t have to be political?” “Yes, so long as it’s deeply political,” I say. “Isn’t this a case of you wanting to have your cake and eat it too?” At this point, we’d typically begin to ventriloquize key writers on the subject: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse and Jean Paul Sartre. And we’d bring in some well-known art critics and historians who have written about art and politics, especially John Berger and T.J. Clark. Sometimes, roles are reversed; I act the aesthete, and my congregant the one who insists on the necessity of art marrying politics. A few weeks ago, I had a discussion with Patrick Creedon, registrar at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London, about their current exhibition of works by the renowned, feminist artist Mary Kelly. It’s called We Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire and comprises a sort of mini retrospective. I told Patrick, somewhat cheekily, that it seemed to me Kelly’s art looked best when its politics was most hidden, and worst when it was most visible. Patrick, who began a Ph.D on J.P. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and is obviously no slouch, proposed instead that Kelly’s collages, made largely of compressed lint collected from her clothes dryer over months and years, are physical residues of memory and experience and thus are a kind of embodied politics. He also claimed that the works bridged the space between the public and the private; they show public or political events – wars, protests, social movements – but are composed of the intimate residue of our clothes, households and even bodies. Study for Life, April 1945 reproduces in lint the cover of an issue of Life Magazine that shows the Battle of Iwo Jima, though comparison with the actual cover reveals that Kelly’s subject has been highly abstracted. (1945 was also the year of the artist’s birth.) I think it’s the best work in the exhibition, but I’m unconvinced about its contemporary, political salience. Mary Kelly, Study for Life, April 1945, 2014. Cover, Life Magazine, April 9, 1945. Courtesy: Pipi Houldsworth Gallery, London. Mary Kelly, Study for Life, April 1945, 2014. Cover, Life Magazine, April 9, 1945. Courtesy: Pipi Houldsworth Gallery, London. The Politics of St. Christopher There’s a reason images of St. Christopher were so common on the walls of medieval churches in the British Isles. He was the people’s saint: a worker, unlettered, and physically abnormal. He was a monster, but both pious and generous. His image, it was believed, had apotropaic powers. One look could protect you from plague or other disease; a glance could fend off the devil and stop the angel of death in his path. He thus conferred immortality on ordinary people. (It was a belief that can’t easily be disproved; on their day of death, most people are too unwell to visit church.) Frescoes of St. Chistopher were almost always located just opposite the entrance door of churches – usually on the north wall of a narthex or transept — so a busy visitor could crack open the door, look at the saint, and get away. Anonymous, The St. Christopher Woodcut, c. 1428-35, John Rylands Library. About 1430, an anonymous German artist made a woodcut of St. Christopher. It is one of the first European woodcuts ever made, and a few years later was the basis of the fresco at St. Clement and dozens more across the U.K. (By my reckoning, at least nine in that format still survive.) For the itinerant painters, this print was lightening in a bottle — a template both vivid and imaginative. It shows a giant of a man, bearded, swathed in flowing drapery, carrying a crowned Christ bearing the globus cruciger. The saint’s staff is a palm tree with dates — or coconuts? A fish swims between the giant’s legs, and peasants carry grain to a mill at bottom, and from it at left. At right, a hermit lights the way – it was a hermit who introduced Reprobus to Christ — and below him a secretive rabbit, a symbol perhaps of the Resurrection, emerges from the ground. The Latin text at bottom reads “On any day when you look upon the face of Christopher, on that day you will not die an evil death.” Most of these details have disappeared from the damaged, St. Clement fresco. St. Christopher must have lent courage to generations of English peasants determined to break the shackles of vassalage. He first appeared on frescoed walls about the time of the great English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. By the time of Jack Cade’s Rebellion in 1450, he was everywhere. Though there is no indication that St. Christopher was used as a symbol during either uprising, he was part of the background of empowerment and growing self confidence that led to the overthrow of English feudalism. Representations of St. Christopher impacted successive generations of peasants and other working people at the level of basic ideas. His story – of a poor man who used his strength to resist royal tyranny and help others — gripped the masses. We don’t know if the now damaged fresco of Chistopher in Burnham Overy Town, and the many others like it in Norfolk, was visited by the rebels who waged Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, but it’s likely. That’s when an army of 16,000 challenged the enclosure of common land that forced many into reviled wage labor or else destitution. The revolt was eventually put down and its leaders executed in Norwich, but memory of that uprising inspired Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers during the English Revolution a century later. And they, in turn, inspired the English Jacobins on the 1790s, including the poet and artist William Blake, who spoke to the counterculture of the 1950s and ‘60s and so on down to today. That’s what makes the study of political art so difficult; it may cause an earthquake, but in its own time be felt only as a tremor. Still, the challenges of the present are so great and so immediate, that artists – just like the rest of us – need to take immediate measures to fend off calamity. That counsel — easy to give but difficult to enact – remains the order of the day, here in the U.K., the U.S. and almost everywhere. 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Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn’t enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn’t had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices. I’m sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn’t available in 95, so yeah, it might have become “enshittified” but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book. Do you remember the internet back then? Sure, there were some truly terrible websites around back then, but most of the internet wasn’t like what MySpace looked like a decade later. Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn’t worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don’t even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn’t all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap. As someone who was around back then, the quality of 90’s cars were far better than the 70-80’s cars that preceded them (in general). By the 1990’s a lot of issues that plagued the early electronics in cars (late 70’s-80’s) had been sorted out, things like fuel injection became standard, the quality of paints improved drastically - 1990’s cars didn’t rust out nearly as bad as cars from previous decades. Of course most of these cars are gone now - the newest 1990’s cars are over 25 years old at this point, but it’s still not uncommon to see them driving around. Much more so than seeing cars from the 60’s-70’s driving around in the 1990’s.
I think there’s a difference between bad fiction and bad non-fiction. Bad fiction can still be fun and entertaining, just like a bad movie. You recognize it’s not good, but that doesn’t matter if it still carries you along (thinking specifically of Red One here… absolutely NOT a good movie, but fun!) The non fiction equivalent is something like “The Hot Zone” which I read back to back with “The Coming Plague”. Both super serious books about a potential ebola epidemic and how it’s basically one airplane away from happening. The Hot Zone is written as a thriller. Beach reading. Pop science. The Coming Plague is meticulously researched, triple sourced journalism with fact checking. I describe them as reading the exact same news story in the National Enquirer and New York Times back to back. To be clear, the Hot Zone is not a good book. If you want more than superficial detail, that’s where the Coming Plague comes in. But what gets me are the non-fiction books that are just bad. Sex At Dawn actually made me angry, first, because it’s a topic I care about, the history of monogomy and non-monogomy. Second, because the author jumps to conclusions and makes idiotic statements as fact without attempting to do any research whatever. If I, a non-scientist, can call you out on your bullshit, you’re going to have a really bad day in peer review. For example, he tried to justify the statement that porn with multiple men with one woman is more popular than the reverse with: “A quick peek at the online offerings at Adult Video Universe lists over nine hundred titles in the Gangbang genre, but only twenty-seven listed under Reverse Gangbang.” I’m like “My brother in Christ, you either don’t know what to look for or have not looked very hard.” (yes, I did look up that quote). But when I hit that line, it exceeded the patience I had already given the book and I fell back on my Dororthy Parker.
I know you mean well, so have an upvote. It’s true there is a setting in DuckDuckGo to select a region, or to leave it set on “all regions.” Unfortunately, it is functionally useless since I’ve confirmed that it does provide data tailored to my IP. In fact, not just my IP, but the name of my exact county and home town. The HTML fork does not have such a setting, but it was only more subtle about providing location-tailored results. At the end of the day, I can’t rely on it. Qwant doesn’t have such a setting, but at least it gets as general as “United States” (which would be fair enough for me – like you said, and it’s also occurred to me about searching in English – but searching English terms is also deliberate input from the user and would fall under the category of “keywords and syntax.”) However, Qwant does not simply provide US-based results, but actually targeted toward my exact location. I’m not aware of any setting in which I can change this. If you know of one, please let me know where to find it, because it’s not in the regular settings page. Kagi is the same as Qwant, but with the addition of an “international” setting. Again, it is non-functional since it persists in providing very specific results to my location. In fact, Kagi is one of the worst I’ve tried so far. It even presents the results in a style reminiscent of Google, including starred reviews and all. I find it ironic that I avoid toxic algorithms like the plague by not using Facebook or Twitter, yet I am seeing data manipulated by the very search engines I use every day. There’s got to be some obscure old-school search engine out there that works like they did in the 90s, right?