In ‘Birdsong on the Seabed’ the poet-bird sings of the land above to the cold-blooded and indifferent sea beasts, but none believe it. This marvellous, almost miraculous, poem fixes the fate of the prophet and the poet in Shvarts’ world - to sing with unbearable beauty of another reality to those who are deaf or indifferent to your song. Sasha Dugdale, Introduction to Birdsong on the Seabed

Is it worth singing where no one can hear?

2026 Slow Reads. Poetry Season. Week III. Elena Shvarts, Birdsong on the Seabed

"Like all new frontiers touted as necessary and worthwhile, the cashless society is advertised as a supremely convenient way to facilitate financial transactions while avoiding such silly inconveniences as carrying cash and scouting for a money dispenser. A cashless society also facilitates inequality, manifests a pattern of conduct easily monitored by both private companies and State agencies, and repudiates the notion of valid tender. It also subordinates its users to a digital ecosystem that can, at any given moment, fail."

Sleepwalking on the Money

Inequality, Surveillance and the Cashless Society

😎🤘 Deep Purple - Highway Star

"Anyone who has ever faced the crisis of an elderly parent who has suffered mental and physical decline can probably recall the moment when you had to intervene and take the car keys from your father or mother. Certainly not a happy time, but the given the possibility of the impaired senior citizen causing an accident that could kill others it was the right decision."

The Time Has Come to Take the Car Keys from Donald Trump

"In that sense, the future of democratic constraint may lie less in dramatic foreign crises than in the quiet refusal of citizens, in the United States and among its allies, to underwrite a politics of permanent emergency and imperial coercion."

The New World Order

Powers and Prospects

“It’s not just undocumented people, and not just people who committed crimes,” ... “We’ve built a giant surveillance panopticon.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/15/ice-activists-doxing/

"It has already been 5 years since UnifiedPush started! It also means I don’t have any Play Services, the official or microG reimplementation, for 5 years now. It is a good moment to do a recap, and think about what can be UnifiedPush in 5 years."

5 years of UnifiedPush | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

Back in 2020, “OpenPush - A Free, Decentralized Push Messaging Framework for Android” has been announced on F-Droid at its beginning, and in 20...

US Surging Military Assets to Middle East, Israel Kills at Least 10 Palestinians in Gaza, and More

"The Trump administration’s January 2026 military operation in Venezuela marks not an aberration, but the logical culmination of a presidency increasingly defined by broken promises and coercive force. Sold to American voters as a return to restraint, prosperity, and “peace through strength,” Trump’s foreign policy has instead echoed the very interventionist playbook he once denounced. The rhetoric of counter-narcotics and self-defence has become a convenient cover for the violation of Venezuelan sovereignty, just as trade wars have failed to revive manufacturing jobs and tariffs have deepened cost-of-living pressures. With approval ratings sliding and early indicators pointing to a high risk of Republican losses in the Senate and Congress at the midterms, foreign aggression now appears less like strategy than political diversion."

21st Century Wire

How Trump’s Venezuela and Iran Escalations Empower BRICS - 21st Century Wire

21WIRE | From Caracas to Tehran, Trump’s empire of chaos leaves Americans reeling.

"President Trump reportedly called off strikes against Iran last night because they would be unlikely to deliver a decisive blow, and the ensuing conflict would leave US assets in the Gulf vulnerable, as well as be hugely disruptive to the oil trade. He says he has received assurances from Iran that there will not be mass executions. He also says Iran has stopped killing protesters, presumably because Israel has stopped killing Iranian police. Lindsey Graham must be so fucking mad."

As Trump calls off airstrike, details of how Israel infiltrated Iran and spurred riots are revealed

President Trump reportedly called off strikes against Iran last night because they would be unlikely to deliver a decisive blow, and the ensuing co...

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Something for our German speaking frens Erster Auftritt von Otto Waalkes in "Wetten, dass...?" 1982

Yes, there was a time when mainstream media produced excellent documentaries and touched topics which are considered anti-semitic nowadays. I you have time, watch it... Frontline PBS: Israel, The Covert Connection, 1989

"Israel’s Channel 14 is reporting that Israel has been arming the rioters who have been carrying shotguns and pistols and throwing firebombs. Channel 14’s coverage is pro-Netanyahu so this story is likely to have come directly from government sources."

Israeli media is now admitting the rioters in Iran were armed with Israeli weapons

If, just yesterday, you suggested the riots in Iran were not organic protests, you would have been accused of supporting tyranny.

"What matters peace if it permits killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a society supposedly once at war? This is the situation facing Gaza as the occupying Israeli forces go about their business making the Strip even more uninhabitable for the Palestinian residents, ensuring that that land will be vacated, either through force or massaged consent, to enable its eventual seizure."

A Cruel Truce

Israel’s Ongoing Demolition of Gaza

"The resolution, Finkelstein points out, annuls decades of precedent established under international law on Palestine — erasing its entire legal history" Deconstructing Trump's 'Peace' Plan for Gaza - The Chris Hedges Report with Norman Finkelstein

US Pulls Troops Out of Mideast Bases Amid Threats of Iran War, Senate Kills Venezuela Bill, and More

Trump Tells Iran Protesters: 'Help Is on Its Way,' Senate To Vote on Venezuela War Powers, and More

"There is a way a country disappears without anyone noticing. It does not happen with sirens or tanks or foreign flags. It happens quietly, in offices and courtrooms, in registries and decrees, through signatures that never make the front page and numbers averaged until they lose all meaning. Argentina is disappearing this way, from the ground up. More than 13 million hectares of Argentine land are now in foreign hands. That is not an opinion. It is not rhetoric. It is the outcome of years of meticulous research by the Land Observatory, a project born at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and CONICET, where historians and social scientists have done what the state increasingly refuses: look closely at who owns the territory, and where."

21st Century Wire

The Capitalist Mafia’s Playground: How Milei is Rewriting Argentina for Foreign Profits - 21st Century Wire

Freddie Ponton | Burning Patagonia, selling Argentina, the hidden war over land and resources.

"Iran is in turmoil. Across the country, there have been protests of different magnitudes, with violence on the increase with both protesters and police finding themselves in the morgue. What began as work stoppages and inflation protests drew together a range of discontent, with women and young people frustrated with a system unable to secure their livelihood. Iran has been under prolonged economic siege and has been attacked directly by Israel and the United States not only within its borders, but across West Asia (including in its diplomatic enclaves in Syria). This economic war waged by the United States has created the situation for this turmoil, but the turmoil itself is not directed at Washington but at the government in Tehran."

Six Points to Navigate the Turmoil in Iran

Iran's Problems Wil Not Solved Through Imperialist Bombardment by the US and Israel