Aaron and Tonery are joined by Klonny of ParaPower Mapping to discuss Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in the Iran-contra meta-conspiracy. Check his recent article on the subject: "Jeffrey Epstein’s War and the PedoFash International (Pt. II): Iran-Contra and the Year of the Spy"

ParaPower Mapping is an auditory and prosaic cork board mapping the interlocks and hidden passages of the capitalist elite. Moneyed families, secret societies, intel networks, and trafficking rings.

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American Exception followers on Patreon, regardless of the tier, get first access to new episodes! Paid subscribers enjoy access to the entire library of the best historical analysis of deep events on the American Exception podcast. 

Subscribe to our Patreon at https://patreon.com/americanexception

 

Music: "Poster Child" by Mock Orange

Special thanks to Dana Chavarria for producing the episode!!

Uma, Nick and Ciarán talk about the protests in Albania (which expanded aggressively since recording), Germany's failed UNSC bid and Henry Nowak

Co-hosts John Dolan & Mark Ames

Andy Zaltzman is joined by his panel of political satirists to unpack the critical essays of Tony Blair, the spending habits of Peter Murrell and the SNP, the sweltering heat, social media ban proposals for under 16's and young people in record levels of unemployment.

This week’s panellists are Scott Bennett, Cody Dahler, Ayesha Hazarika and Bella Hull.

Written by Andy Zaltzman.

With additional material by: Angela Channel, Sam Nicoresti, Pravanya Pillay and Peter Tellouche. Producer: Rajiv Karia Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Coordinator: Asha Osborne-Grinter Sound Editor: Marc Willcox

A BBC Studios Production for Radio 4.

Democracy Now! 2026-06-05 Friday

• Headlines for June 05, 2026
• Adam Hamawy, Ex-Volunteer Doctor in Gaza, Wins NJ House Primary Calling for End to Israeli Aid
• Hasan Piker on Being Banned from U.K., Traveling to Cuba & Supporting Candidates Critical of Israel

Download this show

Ian Smith is back on his quest for calm. In this episode, Ian is going through one of the most stressful life experiences... moving house. Is he middle class now? How can he keep in touch with his friends? And just how much damage can an entire chickpea cause? Let’s find out together in Ian Smith is Stressed.

Written and performed by Ian Smith Additional Material from Mike Shephard and Rhiannon Shaw Featuring Stuart Laws Assistant Producer - Em Humble Production Manager - Laura Shaw Produced by Benjamin Sutton A Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for BBC Radio 4

Two years ago I wrote a super simple todo package for Emacs to see whether I could get over my tendency to 1) procrastinate a lot and 2) being annoyed at my tendency to procrastinate.

Reader, you won’t believe the answer: Yes and no. Or rather, no and yes.

That is, I still procrastinate a lot (but less than before), but I’m way less annoyed about it.

As you can clearly see from the Emacs mode line above, I’ve got 27 “new” things on the todo list, 4 things that are “in progress” and… tada! 616 things that have been done!

It cannot be! That’s about one thing per day! (Although it’s more like no things most days and then eight things on a random day.)

I’ve had a look at other todo systems, but like I said two years ago, they seem to be specifically made to enable further procrastination: You can tinker endlessly with priorities, deadlines and arranging things in hierarchies. So you can spend an hour working on your todo list and then feel you’ve really made some progress. Which is a total lie, of course.

And open sores todo lists encourage further meta-tweaking — altering the todo software itself, so that you can add even more features. I’m proud to say that after starting to use it two years ago, I haven’t touched the anddo code even once! Behold the Microsoft Github repo!

So it’s just a list of tasks, and the ones that are new or in progress are shown. You can edit them and add notes, and you can change status, but that’s it. No dates, no priorities, no nothing. Just do it.

This system has really made me actually take care of a lot of annoyances and stuff, but even more importantly: Instead of looking at the lamp that’s sitting on the hall table every day and going “oh yeah, I should hang that on the wall somewhere; I must remember that”, I just put it on the todo list… and then my brain stops doing that every time I see the lamp on the hall table.

The system works!

(And then I might even hang it on the wall one day when I’m in the mood to do something, and I pull up the todo list… I might.)

I sort of… postpone the procrastination.

Anyway. That’s the life hack.

We go way back, at first, to the rise and fall of the filibustering William Walker, who wanted to be king of Nicaragua. You’ll meet Smedley Butler as well, but this episode on Interwar Nicaragua focuses on the rebel leader who dared to fight the American occupation, Augusto Sandino, who fought from 1927-1933 and has … Continue reading "Interwar 14: Sandino battles the Americans for Nicaragua, 1927-1933"

Ryan and Jeremy of Drop Site News return on Day 94 of the Special Military Operation in Iran, with breaking news about the ongoing ceasefire negotiations. We survey the (bleak) state of affairs across the globe, from Lebanon to Palestine to the looming regime change in Cuba. We also discuss the Israel lobby’s attempted counterinsurgency and the “Israel Day Parade” in NYC. Subscribe to Drop Site here: https://www.dropsitenews.com/

Watch Part 2 of conversation with Steven Thrasher, author of the new book The Overseer Class: A Manifesto. In the book, he explores how members of historically marginalized groups rise to positions of power within institutions. Thrasher says these figures often perpetuate, rather than challenge, systems of injustice.

Democracy Now! 2026-06-02 Tuesday

• Headlines for June 02, 2026
• Iran Suspends U.S. Talks as Israel Kills 8 More in Lebanon & Expands Occupation
• "Murder as Policy": Amnesty Int'l Decries U.S. Strikes on Latin American Boats as Death Toll Tops 200
• "The Overseer Class": Steven Thrasher on Black Cops, Pro-Palestine Protests, DEI & More

Download this show

Would your friends do a False Flag for you?

In this News Brief, we talk with Chris Mills Rodrigo from Writers Against The War On Gaza about their campaign to boycott the New York Times and remove the "paper of record" from its pedestal of alleged neutrality and editorial rigor.

#emacs #brainiac #productivity #systems

Time has come to release a new version of Brainiac. The whole configuration file has been almost completly restructured, cleaned up and properly commented. So I will declare this to be version 2.0.

Following changes have been made:

• READ.md has been extended to explain the installation and usage.
• Readability improvements:
  • All colors decisions are now left to Modus themes, we only change typografy, e.g. underline the PROG tasks to encode work in progress.
  • Multiple Org elements were restyled, e.g. ellipsis, tags etc., to improve scanability in large documents.
  • Added the configuration for fixed and variable pitch fonts. You may set the font family to your liking.
  • Packages org-bullets, org-appear and diminish introduced.
  • Priority cookies are removed after the task is closed, to remove visual clutter.
  • When saving, the tags will be aligned automatically.
• Added number of matches to isearch.
• Repeaters are now visible in the agenda.
• When jumping to items from the agenda, automatic narrow is done to improve focus.
• Capture from anywhere is now implemented by a custom script based on org-protocol.
• Many, many small tweaks, fixes and changes.

Get the new release from here.

Enjoy and keep hacking!

Co-hosts John Dolan & Mark Ames

Bryan Quinby and Chris James from Guys are here for an analysis of the newest “assassination attempt” on President Trump. We also talk about lunch, early Chapo touring memories, and cap things off with a discussion of Tyler Austin Harper’s ode to Miller Lite in The Atlantic. Check out Guys here (or wherever you get your podcasts): https://www.patreon.com/GuysPodcast Check out Guys live in Toronto June 5: https://www.theguysery.com/products/guys-live-in-toronto And follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/murderxbryan/?hl=en

In the Interwar years America invaded many Central American and Caribbean countries. The major ones included Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. We start with the DR, 1916-1924, who nonetheless managed to get the Americans to withdraw.

We keep bringing up the beloved American film critic Roger Ebert over and over again, and we've decided it's time to finally exorcise this demon. Before we put Roger in the penalty box for a while, we're going to put our accumulated knowledge to good use and play a long-threatened game: The Roger Ebert Mystery Box Challenge, in which we attempt to predict his reviews for movies we've covered on this podcast. The balcony is open! Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - patreon.com/michaelandus

I mentioned OSM for emacs briefly before, but I haven’t played with it much. That’s because the maps never showed up correctly in the buffer: the map tiles were not aligned correctly and some appeared blank.

As it turns out, someone else had this problem and also found the culprit: visual-line-mode. I have it turned on by default as the majority of my work in Emacs involves org-mode and I need my lines wrapped in the buffer. With visual-line-mode disabled, OSM works as expected, including zooming in and out. Good stuff.

Now that I fixed OSM, I was wondering about something else I wanted to do for a while: having Journelly’s latitude and longitude fed automatically to OSM in Emacs, so I can view the location on a map.

Journelly captures locations and weather information for each note and stores those under properties, like so:

PROPERTIES:
:LATITUDE: ##.##########
:LONGITUDE: ##.##########
:WEATHER_TEMPERATURE: 62.1°F
:WEATHER_CONDITION: Cloudy
:WEATHER_SYMBOL: cloud
:END:

The OSM function that calls for those is osm-goto.

So what we need is a simple function to feed the properties values directly:

(defun jtr-goto-from-properties ()
(interactive)
(let ((lat (org-entry-get (point) "LATITUDE"))
(lon (org-entry-get (point) "LONGITUDE")))
(if (and lat lon)
(osm-goto (string-to-number lat) (string-to-number lon) osm-default-zoom)
(message "No LATITUDE/LONGITUDE properties found on this entry"))))

This is an interactive function that I use when I’m standing on the header in Journelly I want to see on a map. It’s quick and works well. Now I can use my Journelly entries, which are already in org-mode, as a base for a post with a map tile inside Emacs. OSM doesn’t have a native function to export an image, but since I usually want to annotate the image anyway before I make a post out of it, a regular screen-capture app is a good solution, at least for now.

Nick and Ciarán talk about this years Eurovision and the antics Kash Patel

Since the US-Israel war on Iran broke out three months ago, the price of oil has jumped at least fifty percent, causing economic pain around the world. The war has come at a time when many countries were already considering the value of their economic ties with the United States. Ongoing conflict is also putting pressure on budgets, with money being funnelled into defence rather than social measures. So how is this colliding of geo-politics and economics going to play out globally and here in Australia? Satyajit Das says we are heading into an uncertain world. 

• Guest: Satyajit Das, global financial analyst
• Producer: Catherine Zengerer

Matt and Daniel are joined by Citations Needed co-host and author of the new book “How To Sell A Genocide,” Adam Johnson. They cover the consent factory being run by American cable news, use of the word “terrorist” by journalists to describe a population being terrorized, and every fedora’d Jewish child’s best friend: Abraham Lincoln.

Please donate to Pal Humanity: https://palhumanity.com/

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How To Sell A Genocide: https://www.plutobooks.com/product/how-to-sell-a-genocide/

Citations Needed: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/

See Francesca Fiorentini and Matt Lieb May 21 in Pasadena: https://events.leapevents.com/event/new-world-disorder-05-21-26-8-pm

What’s The Spin playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50JoIqCvlxL3QSNj2BsdUR

What’s The Spin Album List: https://bit.ly/whatsthespinlist

Skad Skasbarska playlist: http://bit.ly/skadskasbarska

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We've assembled an all-star panel of journalists to break down the controversy around the AI data centers being built across the country. We start with a discussion of the curious & controversial Jacobin piece by Holly Buck in which she opposes Bernie Sanders' data center moratorium. Why would a left publication advance a take that so obviously benefits big AI? Journalists Levine, Ongweso & Regunberg go on cover Tucker Carlson's take down of Billionaire Kevin O'Leary over O'Leary's Utah data center that's anticipated to be twice the size of Manhattan, the surveillance implications of said centers, the media campaign to get Democrats to stop talking about all environmental issues, the ratcheting up of criminal penalties for protestors, and what this means for millions of Americans who find themselves living in the shadow of these AI energy hogs.

Further reading: https://jacobin.com/2026/04/data-center-ai-moratorium-bernie

https://aaronregunberg.substack.com/p/corporate-dems-are-climate-scapegoating

https://jacobin.com/2024/08/climate-crisis-disinformation-fossil-fuels

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

The weather’s getting warmer, so what better time to take a trip to the hottest place in the universe — Fresh AI Hell! Emily and Alex take a spin through more than 30 hype artifacts, with topics including medicine, data centers, and fake people.

Fresh AI Hell regions visited:

• AI bubble + data centers
• Fake people
• Medicine
• This is your brain on ChatGPT
• Policy + privacy

See the show notes on Peertube for a full list of artifacts referenced.

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

Find our book The AI Con here, and MAIHT3k merch here.

Subscribe to our newsletter via Buttondown.

Follow us!

Emily

• Bluesky: emilymbender.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender

Alex

• Bluesky: alexhanna.bsky.social
• Mastodon: dair-community.social/@alex
• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park. 
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

What a week it's been for the Prime Minister. In the aftermath of seismic local elections results, there's been non-stop Labour party in-fighting. Wes Streeting has resigned as Health Secretary so the race for Labour leader is seemingly on - who will throw their hat in the ring? Will Andy Burnham, i.e. the King of the North, make his move? In other news, the panel discuss Trump's state visit to China and why the Royal Navy has to redesign women's uniforms over 'inappropriately placed' buttons.

Helping Andy make sense of it all this week is Nish Kumar, Ian Smith, Katy Balls and Mhairi Black.

Written by Andy Zaltzman.

With additional material by: Alex Kealy, Ruth Husko and Claire Rammelkamp Producer: Georgia Keating Executive Producer: Richard Morris Production Coordinator: Asha Osborne-Grinter Sound Editor: Marc Willcox Recorded by David Thomas

A BBC Studios Production for Radio 4.

Charlie Holland has a very interesting post about annotation in place. The idea is to take notes on digital content the same way you would if your were marking up a book or a physical paper. The important thing is that you don’t want to suffer a context switch disruption by switching to another app to take your notes and you want those notes to appear (even years later) when you revisit the file. A secondary consideration is that you want to be able to go not only from the text to the notes but also from the notes to the text.

There is—as we Emacsers always say—an Emacs package for that. That package is org-remark. It does its magic just as you’d expect. The notes are anchored in the text by highlighting the passage you’re writing about and the position of that highlight and its associated notes are kept in a separate Org file with enough meta data to get back to the original document.

The package comes with builtin support for several document types but Holland says that it’s pretty easy to add others and that in fact he’s added them for Elfeed, PubMed, and Wombag. The major shortcoming that I can see is that PDFs aren’t supported.

Holland’s post includes an 18 minute, 15 second video that demonstrates org-remark and provides a nice overview of the post. The post itself is long and comprehensive.

The org-remark package seems like a nice app that could be a big help for those of us that like to take notes as we’re reading. I could see myself using it to take notes on Web pages that I want to write about for Irreal. If it seems like it might be useful to you, take a look at Holland’s post.

Update [2026-05-21 Thu 13:48]: Added link to Holland’s post.

The Turbulence crew returns to discuss the state of the Iran War, including potential escalations and Trump taking possibly the first real L of his entire political career. We also talk about the horrifying Nicholas Kristof story about rape in Israeli prisons, discuss AOC vs. MTG, and then close things out on a lighter note with a Wall Street Journal op-ed about how China doesn’t have babes.

Recorded on Friday morning, Andy and the panel dig into the election results from 7th May. Who’s done well? Who’s done not so well? And how does this have anything to do with The Grand National? Also up for discussion is The Met Gala and the legend that is Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday.

Written by Andy Zaltzman.

With additional material by: Mike Shephard, Cameron Loxdale, Stephanie Kemp and Angela Channell Producer: Georgia Keating Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Coordinator: Asha Osborne-Grinter Sound Editor: Marc Willcox Recorded by Jerry Peal and Jon Calver

A BBC Studios Production for Radio 4.

Ciarán exposes Alex Ptak and Jeremy Kaplowitz of the most intellectual podcast Quorators to Eurovision and harvest their thoughts on the whole thing.

GYROVISION No. 6

We're back again for another Gyrovision and tickets are on sale at the following links

https://buytickets.at/cornerspti/2174077

https://www.patreon.com/posts/tickets-to-6-155676140

https://www.twitch.tv/cornerspaeti