Maintenance guy at my apartment is Cuban. Fled during the special era. I'm wondering if he noticed my theory books. I hide my Blowback Fidel poster when he comes over

Buying up American farmland not part of China’s agricultural investment strategy, US panel told

Buying American farmland is not part of China’s current agricultural investment strategy, US lawmakers heard at a hearing by the Senate Agriculture Committee on Wednesday. “We’re seeing investments in farmland in places in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, as well as Russia. But by and large, China’s foreign investments in farmland have bypassed North America,” said David Ortega, a professor and economist at Michigan State University.

There was also “no clear evidence” that foreign land ownership was causing American farmland prices to rise, Ortega said. Nor did such ownership threaten “our ability to produce food”, he added. Foreign ownership accounts for about 3 per cent of privately held agricultural land in the US, and Chinese entities own less than 1 per cent of that amount.

Biden won't actually make it to the UAW picket line today. Somehow he'll be blocked by Republicans so that he can throw up his hands and say "I really wanted to go but I can't".

This is the KHive playbook

How to be a successful NATO leftist influencer:

1. Talk like an irl Twitter poster in a smarmy voice with epic one-liners

2. Dunk on culture warriors like Matt Walsh and every vile TikToker you come across on your feed

3. Continue to dunk on those clowns through Twitter so people can screenshot your epic wins

4. Make sure to be a little edgy and poke some fun at people to your left in order to let your growing liberal fanbase know you aren't THAT kind of leftist

5. Mention Marx and other famous Left-Wing intellectuals to simultaneously keep your left-wing credentials

6. Slowly pivot to defending the Liberal Party of the country you live in: Dems, LibDems/ Labour/ , Canadian Liberals, German Greens, Australian Labor Party, etc. But focus way more on the American Democrats because 90% of your fanbase will probably be American

7. Make sure to let everyone know that China and Russia are bad country's with bad policy's. You can reference the Soviet Union and talk about how good it is now that it no longer exists

8. Finally begin to call out tankies and purge any leftist in your communities

You have now become a successful left-wing grifter and you can either continue on the Liberal path or eventually give the right-wing grift a shot if you want even more money at some point.

Edit: I forgot to add a step of making videos on how various pieces of pop culture are actually leftist from video games to Hollywood films

Just to keep beating the dead horse cause it's still driving me crazy, The Guardian out here doing the lords work keeping the Canadian Nazi in the news

The rains in NYC look pretty insane

Update to what I posted earlier: Medvedev said that any British soldiers would be "ruthlessly destroyed", and the Daily Telegraph changed the headline

Why do people sometimes purge their comment histories on here and vanish? Are they getting doxxed online or found out by disapproving people in their lives? Is it some kind of opsec thing? It just seems drastic to me

Damn, this is pretty big. Evo Morales is running for president but he's running against the current president Luis Arce. There's internal divisions within MAS.

Here's another article in Spanish. Apparently, Morales and Arce went to Cuba where they tried but failed to patch things up.

What is with Germany and the heavy America worship? I know the military bases play a role in their foreign policy but their citizens and politicians are so heavily Americanized compared to France and Italy with the latter also hosting US military. Every other political post I see from a non-American defending the US and everything it does is from a German.

‘Vulture capitalists’: Maui’s indigenous community fights land grabs after wildfires

The fires were still raging when families in Lahaina started receiving messages from developers asking if they were interested in selling their land. Several residents in the town told news outlets that they began to receive messages on Facebook and other platforms from people inquiring about whether they were open to parting with their land.

While the incidents made major headlines in the coming weeks and even led to a temporary moratorium on property sales, many within Hawaii's indigenous community, Kanaka Maoli, fear that with the fires in Maui faded and soon with it the media coverage, developers will get back on the hunt, targeting the victims of these fires for their land.

"These vulture capitalists, vulture developers are preying upon our people and our connection to the land during a time when none of us have been given time to properly grieve," said Kahala Johnson, a PhD student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an indigenous activist with ancestral ties to Maui.

Despite all of the outrage around these recent land grabs, the dispossession of Hawaii's land has been a part of the island's history since the arrival of American settlers in the 19th century.

BRATISLAVA, Oct 1 (Reuters) - Slovakia's leftist former Prime Minister Robert Fico beat his progressive rival in a parliamentary election after campaigning to end military aid to Ukraine, but he will need to win over allies to form the next government, nearly complete results showed on Sunday.

With 98% of voting districts reporting in the Saturday election, Fico's SMER-SSD party led with 23.37% of the vote. The liberal Progressive Slovakia (PS) followed with 16.86% and the HLAS (Voice) party, which could become the kingmaker for forming the next government, was third with 15.03%.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230930092650/https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/slovaks-choose-between-pro-russian-ex-pm-fico-pro-western-liberals-2023-09-29/

It is surreal watching the Armenian Genocide happen again

New sanctions bill targets US allies normalising Assad government

A pair of US lawmakers aim to counter normalisation with Bashar al-Assad's government with sweeping new legislation, as Syria continues to be welcomed back to the world stage.

Republican Senators Marco Rubio and James Risch introduced the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023 on Wednesday. The bill's rollout comes less than one week after Assad made his first visit to China since his country erupted into civil war 12 years ago.

The bill, a senate version of one introduced in the House of Representatives earlier this year, would extend the current sanctions on Syria, known as the Caesar sanctions, to 2032 and prohibit the US government from normalising relations with Assad.

The thaw in ties has put some of Washington's closest Arab partners on opposite sides of bipartisan consensus in Congress, where lawmakers want to keep Assad isolated over his role in a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and for his closeness to Russia and Iran.

"Despite a growing mountain of evidence against Assad for war crimes, there has been a troubling wave of efforts to rehabilitate and whitewash the regime and its crimes," Republican Senator Jim Risch said. "This legislation enforces a policy of diplomatic and economic isolation against the Assad regime."

The bill calls for a "description of steps the US is taking to actively deter recognition" of Assad by other governments including "specific diplomatic engagement and economic sanctions". Unable so far to prevent the steady drumbeat of normalisation, lawmakers want more visibility into what their regional partners are doing.

It contains a provision that calls for the Secretary of State to provide Congress with a list of all meetings - at the ambassador level and above - between Syria and its neighbors, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan and Turkey. It also requires a review of all transactions, including donations over $50,000 in areas of Syria held by Assad's government made by anyone in those countries.

what the fuck lmfao

Kosovo update:

More than 48 hours have passed since the end of the fighting between Serbian paramilitary forces and Albanian police in North Kosovo. I guess we can say that the dust has settled down a bit, although we still don't know the full picture. It seems like the Kosovo government has more information, but they are choosing to make only a small amount of it public, likely as a political play against the Serbian government. Regardless, the assault left one Kosovo Police officer dead and another two wounded. On the Serbian side, four men were killed, with two people being arrested for direct involvement in the fighting, and another eight for aiding them (four have since been released for lack of evidence). All of the Serb men involved in the fight seem to be from communities in North Kosovo.

In the aftermath of the battle, Kosovo's PM published photos of all the confiscated weaponry that the Serbian side was using, blaming Serbia for arming them. Yet, the most worrying thing among the stash weren't weapons, but (according to Kosovo Police) documents belonging to a member of the Kosovo Serb political party. Along with this, they also published a video of the incident in which they claim that the politician was featured in. This only raises fears over here that the Serb population will be put under greater repression in the future, especially because they have no representatives in any positions of power within the government of Kosovo, thanks to exodus of all Serb officials from almost a year ago and the election boycott from a few months ago. Hopefully this won't also lead to a massive escalation, but knowing the people currently in charge of Kosovo managed to make a license plate issue into an international scandal, it's highly unlikely.

Financial Times with another banger: Maybe politics should be more mindful

See how long it takes you to lose your mind.

One Tory MP admits: “Mindfulness . . . actually makes [my] meetings far more efficient because instead of me saying ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand that point’, i.e. I wasn’t listening, I’m fully focused.” “I’m not claiming that mindfulness will turn you into the next Greta Thunberg, but it might create the space in you to think a little more openly,” says a baroness. The accompanying press release tells us that mindfulness training has helped politicians to “disagree better, engage in more active listening, be more open to different views, and to react less impulsively to situations that are challenging or difficult”.

Part of the problem, I admit, is the word “mindfulness”. It is an ugly, lousy word — and I say this as someone who meditates most days, and regularly practises other “mindful” habits. Not only does it just sound like fluff from the “wellness industry” (shudder, again); it evokes the exact opposite meaning to the intended one: paying attention to the present moment with an attitude of openness and curiosity. “Mindlessness” might be a more accurate description.

But that doesn’t make it a bad idea. Research has shown that members of parliament tend to suffer from higher stress levels and generally poorer mental health than others in a similar pay bracket. Yes, we might dislike some of the jeering and mud-slinging so often on display in the House of Commons, but that doesn’t mean our representatives aren’t worthy of compassion. As Jamie Bristow, a former director of the Mindfulness Initiative and co-author of the paper, points out to me, “we complain about the politicians we have, but we are complicit in eroding their capacity to be the politicians we need”.

...

I was struck by the words of the former Tory MP turned podcast host Rory Stewart while promoting his new book, Politics on the Edge. “It’s a horrible, horrible profession, and I think we underestimate the damage it does to your mind, body and soul,” Stewart told the journalist Christiane Amanpour this week. “So many of us become robots; we cease to become private people; we become slogan-spouting machines . . . There’s no room for reflection, and . . . there’s no room for seriousness.”

Being reflective and serious is challenging in a time of such divisive, antagonistic politics. From Brexit to “stolen” US elections, immigration crises to the culture wars, we are living through an era of deep polarisation. So finding ways for leaders to disagree with one another more constructively, and with more empathy for the other side, is crucial.

And at a time when trust in politics is near record lows, authenticity matters too. Bristow points out that populists such as Donald Trump often tend to do better at appearing to speak from the heart and to mean what they say because they care less about the accuracy of their words and manage to be less “trapped in their heads”. Non-populist politicians, Bristow tells me, tend to be too heady, giving them “less of an instinct for understanding the desires and impulses of the irrational emotional beings they are trying to win over”.

Almost every UK politician should be put in prison for crimes against humanity. I literally could not care less about the trials and tribulations of ghouls who kill hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of "economic efficiency" or "freedom" or whatever the fuck.