Yes, thank you, I meant wild bees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://bdsmovement.net/

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

Drop Site News

Food, energy, and currency sovereignty is the trifecta that nation states need in 2026 if they want to maintain real sovereignty. Nukes are useful too, but I would posit that having the three things I mentioned above has better prepared Iran to defeat the US empire despite not having a nuke.

Mario Golf on N64

I think this is the work of Stephen Miller and Elon Musk - the two white nationalists close to Trump - moreso than anything Trump is initiating or even really cares about.

In the white nationalist world, the “white genocide” narrative is their lodestar.

Age verification is truly a bipartisan effort. California, Colorado, Illinois, New York… none of these are GOP strongholds. The federal bill was introduced by one Republican and one Democrat.

They have always been very clear that they will comply with Swiss law, they have never said otherwise. They chose Switzerland to be based out of due to existing legal protections there are better than most countries. And they limit what they hand over to the legal minimum, again something they have been clear about.

My Neighbor Totoro

This seems like a much more reasonable, enforceable, and frankly more effective approach. It also seems more in line with respecting personal freedoms to do things even that harm yourself so long as no one else is being harmed.

I am a tankie - literally as far from a libertarian as you can get - and even I am struck by the seeming lack of concern over stripping away the freedoms of one demographic in particular. Honestly I’d prefer to see cigarettes banned outright than to say some people can buy them while others can’t. Gonna be weird in like 2050 when a 43 year old can buy smokes but a 42 year old can’t.

I’m hopeful that this attack on Iran will have the long-term beneficial outcome of accelerating the move to renewables in the Global South. What’s happening to Cuba right now should be a warning to everyone: if your country relies on fossil fuels, the US can and will cut you off from those fuels if it doesn’t like the cut of your jib. I think that’s the real reason Trump is going so hard against things like windmills. He wants to see everyone dependent on oil - and is positioning the US to control global oil flows in order to force the world to bend to the US’ will. Any country that wants to preserve its sovereignty needs to be looking into getting off oil dependency yesterday. And thankfully, China is building out the capacity now to satisfy that demand for renewable energy.

I needed a Bluetooth speaker for my work PC (I work from home). I got one with a radio tuner as well. I’m fortunate that I have several radio stations in my area that play music I like. I prefer having some music on in the background while I work, but I was getting tired of having to actually think about what I wanted to listen to next. So I’ve been listening to OTA radio quite a bit, and it’s a nice change of pace from streaming music. And it’s not like the radio bits added much to the cost of the speaker.

Edit: also eyeglasses (sure, I’ll count that as a “gadget”). I hadn’t been to the eye doctor in probably 20 years. Hadn’t really noticed any problems but wanted to get my eyes checked since I had just gotten insurance. Doc recommended a prescription and now it’s like seeing the world in HD instead of standard def. If you’re in your late 30s/early 40s and haven’t gotten your eyes checked, it’s possible your vision has slowly degraded over time and eyeglasses will help more than you realize.

The bill is sponsored by Elise Stefanik and Josh Gottheimer, two of the more notable Zionists in Congress (and that’s saying something). If that doesn’t point to the real intention of these laws I don’t know what does.

Portal 2, Stephen Merchant provides most of the humor with his voice acting for Wheatley.