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.”

Putin came to power in… 1997? So almost 30 years. In that time, the invasion of Ukraine is I think only the second or third time Russia has attacked another country? The other two are Chechnya and Georgia IIRC, and both of those were quite a bit complicated (and the former was only like a few days).

Impressive… very nice… now let’s see America’s card.

Seriously, America is poised to attack as many countries just in the first half of 2026 as Putin has in nearly 30 years.

I think the “exported food during a famine” part deserves some examination. Because doing this in itself may or may not be justified.

For the Soviet Union, I have heard this as an anti-communist talking point for both the famine that occurred during the civil war in the 20s and the famine of the early 30s. In both cases the Soviet Union was totally justified in exporting food during a famine. Why? Because having food in itself doesn’t necessarily solve a famine. You need inputs (like fertilizer) and capital (like farming equipment). For the Soviet Union, agriculture was essentially still pre-modern. They were seriously lacking both in both famines. The decision to export was not “let’s make some side cash by starving our people”. Rather it was recognizing that selling X units of food today would yield X+Y units in the future by using the proceeds to improve your agricultural situation. Food was swapped for inputs and capital. It’s an incredibly difficult decision to make, but it’s the rational one and in the end saves more lives.

But the British in Ireland in the late 1848? That was just allowing the invisible hand of the free market to do its thing. Produce sold for more in England so they shipped it off, because England was significantly richer than Ireland. You can say the famine wasn’t the intentional result of the British government perhaps, but you can’t say it’s not the expected and natural outcome of free market capitalism.

And then the British in Bengal? I’m not quite as familiar I’ll admit but IIRC that was just the Brits needing more food for themselves so they took it from India, consequences for Indians be damned.

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.

It signals to Trump that if he squeezes Democratic governors hard enough and with the right leverage, they will give him whatever he wants

Yeah yeah Polis says he wasn’t pressured but if you believe that I have a mountain in Colorado to sell you.

I interpreted AOC’s refusal to support Taylor-Greene’s proposal to cut funding to Israel as a personal grudge not based in what may ultimately do good, but rather refusing to give someone she despises on a personal level any sort of credit. I am saying this as a criticism, not an excuse.

I would support the devil himself it meant less funding for Israel. If you don’t want to give the right any victories on Israel, then push the left to be better! But tbh that doesn’t even really strike me as AOC’s real reasoning, I just think she really hates MTG.

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.

Whenever polls regarding universal healthcare are discussed, I always add that that if you want to gauge how popular universal healthcare is in the US, you need to subtract the over age 65 respondents (which leads to it polling even more favorably). Why? Because despite being the age demographic most opposed to universal healthcare, that is the one demographic that already has universal healthcare. And it’s not because they think Medicare is bad - on the contrary, Medicare is very popular among seniors. They love it. They just think they deserve universal healthcare while everyone else just wants to mooch off the system. So frankly I don’t care what they think about universal healthcare, actions speak louder than words.

Mario Golf on N64

Trump keeps pointing to “their navy is gone their air force is gone” as proof the US is winning.

Years ago Iran evaluated what kind of a war they might face, and determined that their best shot was through massive amounts of ballistic missiles, drones, and small watercraft. This meant significantly de-prioritizing a traditional air force and navy. So yeah, they don’t have really any capital ships or fighter jets, but they never had much of those in the first place and haven’t been prioritizing that part of their military. But their missile and drone stocks - to say nothing of actual soldiers in their army btw - are all still doing pretty great actually. Destroyers and interceptor jets aren’t going to win the war for Iran and that was never their plan anyway.

The US is absolutely NOT winning this war, and they will not be able win this war.

Personal property is respected under communism. Your possessions are yours. Countries like China, the DPRK, Vietnam, and Cuba have some of the highest home ownership rates in the world, for example. It’s productive private property - the means of production - that are limited. That means things like factories, farmland, etc. But even with productive private property, what we have learned over the last century is that socialism is a transition from the old to the new. And practically speaking, trying to completely eliminate any sort of small business emerging isn’t particularly helpful in the early stages of that transition.

Regarding self-expression, I don’t see why that would be limited under communism. Go to China now and see that people express themselves in just as many ways as other places, for example. I guess if you are talking about collective versus individualist values… we already have some fully capitalist societies that are more collectivist than others (say, Japan versus the USA). It appears to me in those instances, collectivism is not mutually exclusive with self-expression, no?

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.

Vol 2 is great! I mean there’s definitely some dry parts (the chapters on Smith and Ricardo were absolute slogs for me to get through) but Parts 1 and 3 have some of my favorite stuff Marx has written!