Meu album de 2025 (1)

 

Mãe Carmen

CAU GOMEZ

 

Chaos Is the Policy

Trump’s Venezuela strike, the erosion of trust, and the quiet reordering of global power

"If you were looking for a textbook example of how to bury inconvenient truths under a geopolitical explosion, Donald Trump delivered one with terrifying efficiency this weekend."

read stack by MARY GEDDRY

Chaos Is the Policy - by Mary Geddry - Geddry’s Newsletter

Five Questions After the Finale of ‘Pluribus’

The most pressing mysteries on Carol’s mind, and our minds, at the end of Season 1F

ive Questions After the Finale of ‘Pluribus’ - The Ringer

The Foreclosure of a Country

SIR TERRYNCE

There is a glitch in the Venezuela story that most people are missing. The official line is that we captured a dictator to "restore democracy" and "stop drugs." But those reasons don't explain the timing. There is a $13 billion transaction happening right now that does. It’s called the Citgo Auction. 

Most people don’t realize that Venezuela’s "crown jewel"—the massive Citgo refinery network—is being sold off in a Delaware court this month. It’s a forced liquidation to pay creditors, but the auction had been frozen for years by political chaos. The capture of Maduro didn’t just change the regime. It cleared the title so the sale could close.

The winning bidder isn’t an oil major or a democracy activist. It’s Amber Energy, an affiliate of Elliott Management. That is Paul Singer’s fund, the most feared "vulture capitalist" in the world, famous for seizing sovereign ships to collect old debts. He isn’t betting on freedom. He’s closing a distressed asset deal.

 The timeline tells you everything you need to know. The sale to Elliott was approved by the court late last year, but it needed a "change in political circumstances" to finally clear regulatory hurdles. Maduro was the obstacle blocking the transfer. His capture on January 3rd wasn’t a police action. It was the final signature on the closing documents.

This reframes the entire operation. We aren't watching an episode of Law & Order; we are watching a foreclosure. The legal doctrine allowing the capture turns a President into a defendant, but the economic doctrine is simpler. It's a distressed asset restructuring with a military escort.

The playbook is the same one private equity uses for a failing mall, just scaled up to a sovereign nation. You depress the asset value with sanctions, buy the debt for pennies on the dollar, and use the courts to force a liquidation. Then you send in the troops to evict the tenant so you can collect at face value. It’s a leveraged buyout with an air force.

If you look at who is getting paid, the "democracy" frame falls apart completely. It isn't voters waiting in line; it's a queue of corporate creditors like Crystallex, ConocoPhillips, and Siemens, with Elliott Management at the front. Marco Rubio isn't representing a constituency here. He's processing a payout.

There is a simple way to prove the drug war angle is just wallpaper. Two weeks ago, the administration pardoned Rubio’s own brother-in-law for cocaine trafficking. You don't pardon traffickers while invading a country to stop trafficking. The drug story is decoration. The $13 billion asset transfer is the load-bearing wall.     That’s why the bonds rallied before the raid. The market wasn't guessing about justice; it had inside information about the closing date. Power is just physics with a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet says the auction is finally closed.

        

'Stranger Things' chega ao fim com expressão de seu próprio desespero

"Nunca antes na TV americana houve uma série que expressasse tão bem o desespero com seu próprio final como "Stranger Things". Com a imagem de um planeta que despenca dos céus em direção à cidade de Hawkins, o derradeiro capítulo levou ao pé da letra a sensação de agonia eterna do público, que viu o programa ser soterrado pelo peso das altas expectativas.
Foi uma temporada difícil. Encerrado na virada do ano, o seriado criado pelos irmãos Duffer sofreu com um destempero de ambição no quinto e último ano. A trama apanhou com episódios ao mesmo tempo corridos e arrastados, além de um desfecho de duas horas que descambou de vez para o constrangimento —de resoluções, pieguice ou explicações"

leia critica de PEDRO STRAZZA

'Stranger Things' chega ao fim com expressão de seu próprio desespero | Diario de Cuiabá

ZÉ DA VELHA - Sonoroso (K.Ximbinho) in memoriam

First Photo of 2026 | Primeiro foto de 2026

 

2025 2026

DALCIO MACHADO

 

FERNANDES

 

 

 

JBOSCO

 

 

 

 

 

KLEBER

 

Brigitte Bardot - Maria Ninguém (Carlos Lyra)

Maria Ninguém
É um dom que muito homem não tem
Haja vista quanta gente que chama Maria
E Maria não vem

IN MEMORIAM 

Last Photo of 2025

 

Out of the Greenhouse and Into the Madhouse: the Year in Climate Politics

 

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR 

025 will go down as the second or third hottest year on record. The last decade has been the hottest decade in human history.  Driven by drought and extreme winds, a massive fire burned its way across the LA Basin, incinerating more than 10,000 homes. The estimated damage ranges from $76 billion to $133 billion. Total losses to businesses and workers in income and wages totaled at least $297. The year saw two of the largest, most rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean. Floods in central Texas killed at least 137 people, while massive flooding driven by twin cyclones that tore across Sumatra and the southern Philippines killed at least 1,800 people and left more than a million people homeless. We are in the midst of the largest mass coral bleaching event in history, affecting 83% of the world’s extant coral reefs. The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is accelerating. Its surface is fracturing, causing massive ice falls and rockslides that are warping the southern continent’s geology. A total collapse of the ice sheet, which now seems certain, would raise global sea levels by 12 feet. The Arctic Ocean is now expected to be “ice-free” in the summer by 2030, twenty years earlier than predicted just a few years ago. The Atlantic Current is slowing down and may be on the verge of collapse, which would likely destabilize rainfall patterns for much of the planet. Wildfires in Canada now burn year-round. There were 24,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer from June to August alone. Deaths from extreme heat in the US have increased by more than 50% since 2000. 

None of these catastrophic events has left the slightest impact on Trump, who has ordered his administration to slash nearly every restraint on the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Oil drilling has been expanded on federal lands (including the high Arctic) and waters. The dying industry of coal mining has been put on life support with new subsidies and exemptions from environmental regulations, while coal-generating power plants slated for closure have been forced to keep operating. Large-scale renewable energy projects, in the planned for years, have been cancelled and tax credits and incentives for small-scale solar have been gutted. Energy-hogging data centers have been fast-tracked and freed from regulatory constraints.  Prior to Trump’s re-inauguration, Bethany Kozma — who now heads RFK’s Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs— vowed that the administration “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere” in government. And they’ve largely followed through gutting NOAA’s Office of Atmospheric Research; the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, National Center for Atmospheric Research,  U.S. Global Change Research program and NASA’s Earth Science program. Climate research stations have been shuttered. References to climate change have been removed from federal websites, documents, databases and signage on federal lands, offices and parks.

And it’s not just Trump. The supposed global protectors of the climate had their annual meeting in Bélem, Brazil this year and likely generated more CO2 coming and going from the confab than they saved during the sessions. That’s in part because they came and went without even mentioning fossil fuels in their final document. These actions go beyond denial and amount to incitement of the wrath of the climate gods. Their vengeance will be a terrible thing to behold. We’ve gone from trying to survive in a global greenhouse into a madhouse.

  

United States Of America - Love Song For The Dead Ché

And in the stillness of the Oriente rainfall
I remember the warmth of you, still in my arms
Late, late in the year

IN MEMORIAM JOSEPH BYRD 

Joe Ely - Me And Billy The Kid (in memoriam)

Me and Billy the Kid
Never got along
I didn't like the way he cocked his hat
And he wore his gun all wrong

We had the same girlfriend
And he never forgot it
She had a cute little chihuahua
Til one day he up and shot it

atravessar

 

 

o dia esta acabando.

o ano esta acabando.

nesta noite faremos a travessia,

cruzaremos a ponte, de um ponto a outro ponto do tempo.

que tenham conforto e companhia nessa travessia.

chegaremos lá l

(foto: rio tejo)

 

Papais Noéis

DALCIO MACHADO

 

 

 

JBOSCO

 

 

 

MIGUEL PAIVA

 

 

 

 

RICO

 

Phil Upchurch - Darkness, Darkness (James Brown - Pee Wee Ellis) in memoriam

Laboratorio

MARTINEZ

 

Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot Bonnie & Clyde (in memoriam)

Alors voilà, Clyde a une petite amie
Elle est belle et son prénom c'est Bonnie
À eux deux, ils forment le gang Barrow
Leurs noms, Bonnie Parker et Clyde Barrow

 

Charges Natalinas

-+ 

 

MARTINEZ

 

 

LAERTE

 

 

 

RICO 

KLEBER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

+

 

 

os cartões vitorianos de natal

 

The Future According to Trump

 

  "As Shakespeare’s witches saw the future in their cauldron’s bubbling brew and said of Macbeth, a man who would be king (whatever the cost), “Something wicked this way comes,” they also caught our Trumpian moment so many centuries later."

read article by ALEX MCCOY  

The Future According to Trump - CounterPunch.org

Acabaram as férias remuneradas

FRAGA

 

Goodbye to Language: The Year in Trumpspeak

 

 

"Trump isn’t speaking in code so much as he is connecting at an instinctual level to a network of cultural affinities, prejudices and insecurities that exist beyond grammar and etymology and without which Trump and his followers would be lost.

As it stands, though, it is we who are lost, trapped in language and rationality, unable to interpret the dark currents that Trump’s otherwise abstruse asseverations send coursing into some of the more reactionary precincts of the Republic.

Here then is a sampler of some of Trump’s most perplexing pronouncements over the last year. Good luck mining the meaning from the madness. "

read the compilation by Jeffrey St. Clair 

Goodbye to Language: The Year in Trumpspeak - CounterPunch.org

My Year In Books

"One writer I admire had said in an interview that time is precious and he had to choose between reading and writing. He had already read so much that it was time for words to flow in the opposite direction. He wasn’t reading much.

That resonated with me, and I started writing and writing. Then recently, I’d been feeling low on fuel. I listened to a young and highly successful novelist whom I admire. In her country she, like me, is the child of an immigrant. Her second-generation vision of the immigrant experience and multiculturalism was like oxygen. Just like me, she wrote the way her people speak: long sentences, long paragraphs, digressions, and lots of italics. Everything today’s editors hate. In the interview, however, I was disappointed by her political opinions. They were more emotional than analytical. The idealism was cloying even when I agreed with her. Once again, I encountered a writer who had been granted authority to opine on a subject for which she hadn’t come prepared with much more than conviction. But then she slapped me in the face: If a writer is not reading, their writing will not be up to par.

In 2025, I accepted her challenge and returned to reading—a lot. Serendipitously, the words entered me, becoming a part of me, helping me to express the inland sea.

read about Ricky Toledano 's year in books

My Year In Books – ā•multiplicity

Joni Mitchell - Chelsea Morning (1969)

Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today
And the streets are paved with passersby
And pigeons fly and papers lie
Waiting to blow away