Among the many government agencies facing cuts from President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, USAID has garnered wide support in the media. But for whatever humanitarian good it’s done in the world, the agency has played a role in US imperialism.

In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber examines the true history of USAID and breaks down the false dichotomy between soft and hard US power.

Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.

Elon Musk wants drone strikes in Mexico. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has responded by proposing two reforms aimed at toughening the defense of sovereignty in the constitution and imposing the harshest penalties on foreigners involved in activities that infringe on Mexican sovereignty. Yet at the same time, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is softening his rhetoric, proposing cooperation instead.  In the latest episode of Soberanía, co-hosts José Luis Granados Ceja and Kurt Hackbarth break down what this all means for the US-Mexico relationship. Plus in Losers and Haters, we commemorate the one year anniversary of the NY Times clumsy attempt to interfere in the Mexican election by publishing unsubstantiated hearsay.

Danny and Derek talk about yesterday's hostile meeting between Donald Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the media and what that might signal for the two countries' relations going forward.

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Danny and Derek, the greatest news anchors since Lennon/McCartney. This week: Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan calls for the group’s disarmament (0:32); Syria hosts a “National Dialogue” conference to work through the country’s transition (6:34); Israel and Hamas salvage a hostage deal, but the end looms on Saturday (10:07); Yoon’s impeachment trial concludes in South Korea (20:46); in Sudan, increased fighting rages around Al-Fashir (23:27), the military makes gains in the country’s south (25:13), and the RSF and military set up dueling governments (26:43); Ukraine and the US potentially agree on a minerals deal (29:42); the results of the German election (34:41); Austria’s government attempts to form a coalition (38:17); Trump ends a sanctions waiver for Venezuela (40:35); the Trump admin muses kicking Canada out of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network (42:29); the US announces tariffs on the EU, potentially Canada, and maybe even Mexico (44:20); Trump announces the “gold card” visa plan (46:45); and Trump’s attempts at a humanitarian aid blockade continue (48:45).

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Eyup Lovely & Jacob ‘Venom’ Snake from the new Scroungers Pod Cast join us to go over the “special relationship” new of the day. First the Trump admin releases a less-than-nothing dossier of Epstein info to a gaggle of freaks at the White House, upsetting everyone. Then, Keir Starmer’s in the U.S. so we look at his relationship with the second Trump administration, how things are going back in the U.K. (poorly), and a handful of other social developments that have been brewing in fair Albion. 

Check out Scroungers Pod wherever you get pods, and subscribe here: https://www.patreon.com/SCROUNGERS

NYC: Come see Will & Hesse host an Oscars watch as part of a party for Zohran for Mayor this Sunday, March 2nd @ Nightclub 101: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/partyforzohran

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Andy Zaltzman is joined by Zoe Lyons, Ian Smith, Laura Lexx and Hugo Rifkind as they unpack Trump and Putin in talks in Saudi Arabia, the solutions to prison overcrowding, and the Welsh solution for parliamentary empty promises.

Written by Andy Zaltzman.

With additional material by: Simon Alcock, David Duncan, Laura Major, Christina Riggs and Peter Tellouche. Producer: Rajiv Karia Executive Producer: James Robinson Production Coordinator: Jodie Charman Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4 An Eco-Audio certified Production.

Ryan sits down with Rohit Chopra, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now essentially shut down by President Trump. They talk about Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, and the landscape of Tech Bros unleashed on America.

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Desi Lydic rates the Democratic Party's methods of opposing Trump: from off-key protest chants to interpretive dance to podcasts on the cringe-o-meter. Plus, with so many Dems saying "F**k Trump," Grace Kuhlenschmidt thinks that might just be a great idea.

Josh Johnson asks how NYCers honor black history without breaking DEI bans. 

Actor, producer, and entrepreneur Gabrielle Union sits down with Desi Lydic for a conversation about making the new film she stars in, “Riff Raff,” and how she uses her power as a producer to enact positive change in the industry and uplift people who are typically overlooked. They also discuss Union’s pride in her daughter Zaya’s actvisim work for the queer community and trans rights.

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William Hartung, a senior research fellow focusing on the arms industry and US military budget at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, joins the program to discuss reports that the Trump administration is planning “sweeping budget cuts” for the Pentagon. They talk about these “cuts” being more accurately termed “reinvestments” into other areas, the enormous amount of defense spending and the culture that engendered this, how the defense industry has changed in the past 20 years, actual moves that could meaningfully reduce the military budget like reducing bloated systems (F-35s, aircraft carriers) and overseas bases, whether there exists an influential constituency to support military budget cuts, and more.

Read William’s recent piece on this, “Hegseth orders 8% cut to Pentagon budget. Not so fast.”          

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We’re joined by Mark Ames & John Dolan of Radio War Nerd to discuss what may be the wind-down of the war in Ukraine. We look at the political ramifications both domestically and internationally, how the west & Russia have fared militarily, and the lives of the Ukrainians affected by the conflict. Plus, would you believe fighter aircraft, MMA, and a drive-by slagging of union general loser George McClellan all get mentions in this?

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd: https://www.patreon.com/radiowarnerd

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Desi Lydic tackles Trump’s first cabinet meeting, which included Elon Musk accidentally canceling Ebola prevention and RFK Jr. downplaying the measles outbreak. Meanwhile, Trump announces $5M "gold card" for wealthy immigrants.

Meet Elon Musk’s Body Movement Choreographer, Jean Lemón, the mastermind behind Elon’s X jump and heart-to-the-crowd salute.

Comedian, actor & writer Rosebud Baker sits down to discuss her Netflix stand-up special “The Mother Lode.” They talk about filming the special before and after giving birth, portraying an honest journey to motherhood, why Baker’s daughter is at high risk for becoming a comedian, and how kicking pigeons helps her cope while writing SNL’s Weekend Update.

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Ryan and Emily discuss House passes budget bill with Medicaid cuts, mass DOGE resignations, Trump to sell citizenship for $5 million, Israel Damascus bombing raid, Zelensky folds on Trump mineral demand, Trump lawyer blocks arrest of GOP Congressmen.

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Desi Lydic tackles Trump's continued defense of Russia to Fox News's dismay and his captivation with Emmanuel Macron's accent, despite the French president's attempts to sway him. She dives into the recent failures of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, including the “DOGE ultimatum” issued to federal workers via email. Plus, as government workers protest, Michael Kosta unpacks the symbolism in an AI-generated video circulating of Trump and, uh, Musk’s toes.

Actor Wendi McLendon-Covey joins Desi Lydic to discuss how her improv background prepared her for a career in comedy and the improvised sitcom pilot they worked on together years ago that led to a misguided boat purchase. McLendon-Covey also talks about the increased appreciation for healthcare workers she’s gained from playing a hospital administrator on the new NBC show “St. Denis Medical,” and the next fake profession she'd like to play.

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Syria is entering a new phase, and the regional balance of power is shifting. Gulf states, Turkey, and Israel are recalibrating their strategies, while the U.S., Russia, and China assess their next moves. Iran and Hezbollah, once deeply entrenched in Syria, are now facing new challenges. Meanwhile, Israel has expanded its presence in the occupied Golan Heights, and Trump is pressuring Egypt and Jordan to accept Palestinians expelled from Gaza.

Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, joins Rania Khalek to break down these developments and what they mean for the region.

📢 Full episode available for Breakthrough News members. Support the show and access exclusive content at Patreon.com/BreakthroughNews.

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Democracy Now! 2025-02-26 Wednesday

• Headlines for February 26, 2025
• Cory Doctorow on Elon Musk's "Chaotic Blitz" at DOGE, Living in a Tech Dystopia, Luigi Mangione & More
• Sister Helen Prejean Demands End to Death Penalty as Supreme Court Tosses Glossip Murder Conviction
• Advocates: NY Prison Guard Strike Is Part of History of Repression & Violence Against Prison Activism

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Okay less of an emergency and more of the slow creeping predictable outcome, but none the less

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Jon Stewart dives into Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE, and how the Elon Musk-led project masks its allegiance to corporate overlords and negligence to the American people under the guise of slashing the government's budget.

Georgetown Law’s Rupa Bhattacharyya, former Special Master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, joins to discuss how Elon Musk and the DOGE project’s reckless budget cuts are affecting valuable programs like the one she used to oversee. She explains how federal agencies and programs were typically non-politicized until Trump’s second administration, how similar uncertainty is affecting the World Trade Center Health Program, and why these roles are what the government exists to provide.

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I write my blog posts in Org Mode and export them to Eleventy with ox-11ty, which is derived from the ox-html backend.

Sometimes I want to link to something in a different blog post. This lets me build on thoughts that are part of a post instead of being a whole post on their own.

If I haven't added an anchor to the blog post yet, I can add one so that I can link to that section. For really old posts where I don't have an Org source file, I can edit the HTML file directly and add an id="some-id" so that I can link to it with /url/to/post#some-id. Most of my new posts have Org source, though. I have a my-blog-edit-org function and a my-blog-edit-html function in my Emacs configuration to make it easier to jump to the Org file or HTML for a blog post.

If the section has a heading, then it's easy to make that linkable with a custom name. I can use org-set-property to set the CUSTOM_ID property to the anchor name. For example, this voice access section has a heading that has CUSTOM_ID, as you can see in the . If I don't mind having long anchor names, I can use the my-assign-custom-ids function from my config to automatically set them based on the outline path.

(defun my-assign-custom-ids ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((custom-ids
         (org-map-entries (lambda () (org-entry-get (point) "CUSTOM_ID")) "CUSTOM_ID={.}")))
    (org-map-entries
     (lambda ()
       (let ((slug
              (replace-regexp-in-string
               "^-\\|-$" ""
               (replace-regexp-in-string "[^A-Za-z0-9]+" "-"
                                         (downcase (string-join (org-get-outline-path t) " "))))))
         (while (member slug custom-ids)
           (setq slug (read-string "Manually set custom ID: ")))
         (org-entry-put (point) "CUSTOM_ID" slug)))
     "-CUSTOM_ID={.}")))

  #+ATTR_HTML: :id interest-development
  That reminds me a little of another reflection
  I've been noodling around on interest development...

/* Add link icons to headings and anchored paragraphs */
function addLinkIcons() {
  document.querySelectorAll('h1[id], h2[id], h3[id], p[id]').forEach((o) => {
    const link = document.createElement('a');
    const article = o.closest('article[data-url]');
    link.href = window.location.origin + (article?.getAttribute('data-url') || window.location.pathname) + '#' + o.getAttribute('id');
    link.innerHTML = '🔗';  // link icon
    link.title = 'anchor';
    link.classList.add('anchor-icon');
    link.addEventListener('click', copyLink);
    o.prepend(link);
  });
}

addLinkIcons();

.entry h2, .entry h3, .entry h4, .entry p, .content h2, .content h3, .content h4, .content p { position: relative }
.content a.anchor-icon:link, .entry a.anchor-icon:link { font-size: 60%; text-decoration: none !important; font-size: small; float: right }
@media only screen and (min-width: 95rem) {
   .content a.anchor-icon:link, .entry a.anchor-icon:link { display: block; position: absolute; left: -2em; top: 0.2em; float: none}
}

Trump’s return isn’t just chaos, it’s a calculated strategy. While liberals dismiss him, Trump understands raw economic power in a way centrists fail to grasp. What is his master plan, and how could it backfire?

Meanwhile, Musk & other billionaires are the new ruling class. As capitalism dies, we enter technofeudalism, where corporate overlords control entire infrastructures of power.

And in Europe, elites literally cried over the U.S. pivoting away. Does Europe have any real sovereignty left?

Yanis Varoufakis joins Rania Khalek to break it all down.

Highlighting keywords such as TODO, FIXME, NOTE, BUG, and others (often referred to as tags, codetags, or tokens) enhances workflow by making key annotations more visible. This allows developers to quickly identify tasks, warnings, and notes within the code, reducing the time spent searching for unfinished work or potential issues.

This article outlines an Elisp code that highlights these codetags.

(There are packages like hl-todo and comment-tags that can highlight these codetags for those who need a more feature-rich solution. However, they contain hundreds of lines of code, which is excessive if your only goal is to just highlight codetags. While these packages likely offer additional features, such as navigating to the next codetag, the Elisp code in this article provides a much simpler solution for those who just want to highlight them.)

Elisp code to highlight codetags

To highlight these codetags, you can use the following Emacs Lisp code:

(defvar highlight-codetags-keywords
  '(("\\<\\(TODO\\|FIXME\\|BUG\\|XXX\\)\\>" 1 font-lock-warning-face prepend)
    ("\\<\\(NOTE\\|HACK\\)\\>" 1 font-lock-doc-face prepend)))

(define-minor-mode highlight-codetags-local-mode
  "Highlight codetags like TODO, FIXME..."
  :global nil
  (if highlight-codetags-local-mode
      (font-lock-add-keywords nil highlight-codetags-keywords)
    (font-lock-remove-keywords nil highlight-codetags-keywords))

  ;; Fontify the current buffer
  (when (bound-and-true-p font-lock-mode)
    (if (fboundp 'font-lock-flush)
        (font-lock-flush)
      (with-no-warnings (font-lock-fontify-buffer)))))

To apply codetag highlighting across all programming modes, add highlight-codetags-local-mode to the prog-mode-hook:

(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook #'highlight-codetags-local-mode)

If you call highlight-codetags-local-mode interactively, you can toggle the highlighting of codetags on and off.

Customizations

If desired (though not required), you can further customize the Elisp code:

• You can customize the highlighting by substituting font-lock-warning-face or font-lock-doc-face with any other face of your choice. (You can view all available faces by executing the command: M-x list-faces-display)
• Additionally, you can add more keywords to the regular expression.
  For instance, to add the MAYBE codetag to the \\<\\(NOTE\\|HACK\\)\\> pattern, simply append \\|MAYBE before the closing parenthesis \\):
  \\<\\(NOTE\\|HACK\\|MAYBE\\)>.

Conslusion

This simple configuration enhances keyword visibility in Emacs, making it easier to track important annotations while editing source code.

We have Ted on for our far too often Plakate review (man there's been too many fucking elections) of the 2025 snap elections

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Within weeks of assuming the presidency, Donald Trump has instituted tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. Trump has touted protectionism as a way of supporting American workers.

In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber and Jacobin contributor Melissa Naschek discuss how nineteenth and twentieth-century protectionist trade policies helped build domestic manufacturing bases around the world, but why Trump's twenty-first century tariffs are very different. While decades of global free trade have contributed to deindustrialization, workers are not likely to benefit from Trump’s tariffs.

Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.

Will and Felix briefly touch on Trump’s new Ft. Knox gold obsession, Hakeem Jeffries’ “captain chaos,” and look at an Ezra Klein interview with an up and coming dem with some “interesting ideas.” Then, we’re joined by Marlon Ettinger & Olly Haynes of the French Legislative Assembly Podcast (Flep24(/7)) to look at what’s up in France, which has gone through a wildly unstable political year. Starting with a new Catholic school sexual abuse scandal that’s implicated the current prime minister, we look into the state of the center & right parties, discuss what makes Mélenchon such a compelling left leader, and try to untangle the growing international right-wing conspiracies around Brigitte Macron.

Find the Flep24(/7) podcast wherever you get pods.

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Democracy Now! 2025-02-20 Thursday

• Headlines for February 20, 2025
• "Grand Theft Government": Federal Workers Send SOS over Musk-Led Mass Firings, Service Cuts
• "Crack-Up Capitalism": Historian Quinn Slobodian on Trump, Musk & the Movement to "Shatter" the State
• "Congolese Are Paying the Price" for Western Demand for Minerals & Support for Rwanda's Paul Kagame

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We're joined by Nemanja to talk to us about the protests in Serbia and how they've developed.

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