Hello 👋 Many friends have asked me about the significance about this Supreme Court ruling on Cuba 🇨🇺.
“Why,” they ask, “would a US court ruling matter for a foreign country – with its own laws, and its own institutions?”
The answer is simple — if you follow Marco Rubio’s imperial logic to its conclusion.
So let’s break it down ⏬
The US is right now preparing to invade Cuba, where it hopes to reintroduce the colonial dynamic that defined the US-Cuban relationship for decades.
What does that mean in practice? It means dividing the spoils of the island between Cuban-American counter-revolutionaries & US corporations.
Beachfront property, rural farms, industrial capacity — all of it. That is the prize — and the real motivation — for Rubio’s invasion.
Why does this matter for US citizens on the other side of the border? 🧐
Because after invasion — and after six decades of punishing economic sanctions — the US plans to pummel Cuba with cash.
Sounds good, right? 🤑 Nope! I can guarantee you that this money will not go to ordinary Cubans.
And here we come back to the Supreme Court ruling.
The ruling basically means that all the “charitable” cash the US injects into the island will immediately leave again — fleeing into the hands of the ultra-wealthy domiciled abroad.
Through cases at the US Supreme Court, those “exiles” will be awarded huge payments out of Cuban coffers — only serving to impoverish further a population that has already suffered so much under US siege.
What is the lesson? 🙇♂️ Well, mine is that we must always read US law through the broader analytical prism of our imperial project — a project that does not provide for justice, but rather paves the way for the plunder of foreign nations close and far.
Cuba is no exception. On the contrary, after over a century of US efforts to secure colonial control of the island, Cuba is the paradigmatic case that proves the rule.
The largest open library in human history, Anna's Archive, has been ordered to pay Spotify and the three largest record labels on the world $322 million.
The defendant has not appeared in court and is not going to. The site is still up with two backup domains standing by and there's nothing the censors can do.
Anna's Archive currently holds 63 million books, 95 million academic papers, and 1.1 petabytes of mirrored torrents. It is free. It is searchable. It is run by a pseudonymous person nobody has identified after four long years of searching.
In the four months since the music industry filed the first of three coordinated lawsuits, the library has lost six domain names and added two million books to the catalogue. The cartel is suing it faster every month, and it is growing faster every month.
In December, Spotify and the major labels filed. In January, OCLC, the company that runs WorldCat, won a default judgment of its own. On March 6th, thirteen of the largest book publishers in the United States, including HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Elsevier, Wiley, and McGraw Hill, filed a third lawsuit in the same federal court.
The publishers' complaint runs to seventy-four pages. They call Anna's Archive a "brazen pirate operation." They call it "an illegal supplier of stolen content to the AI industry."
The same publishers are simultaneously suing Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, and NVIDIA for training their models on the same corpus the publishers want Anna to destroy. The cartel argues, in two parallel federal courts, that the corpus cannot be used by anyone. Not the pirate who built it. Not the AI company that downloaded from it. Not the graduate student who pulls a paywalled paper from it at two in the morning.
Anna did not respond to any of the three complaints. Anna has never responded to any complaint. Anna is a name on a blog and a public key on a server and a person, or maybe several people, in a jurisdiction nobody has identified after four years of searching.
The judgment is uncollectable. The permanent injunction binds Cloudflare, Public Interest Registry, Njalla, the Switch Foundation, Tucows, and nine other named intermediaries. The Greenland registry is not on the list. The Greenland registry has not complied.
The site currently lives at .gl, with .pk and .gd standing by. The corpus has always moved faster than the censor. The censor has always called the corpus piracy. The corpus has always survived the censor by becoming the readers themselves.
The publishers' lawsuit cannot reach the torrents. The torrents are already seeded across continents and IPFS nodes and personal NAS drives owned by people the publishers will never find. The default judgment is paper. The corpus is everywhere.
The cartel will win every lawsuit but they will lose the war. The publisher who walks into court next month with a fresh filing will be filing against a defendant who has, in the time since the last filing was sealed, mirrored another half million books to another seven hundred volunteers in another forty countries.
There is no defendant to find. There is only the next upload. It is already seeding.
PARA ACLARAR
La CIA no son agentes con traje como los hombres de negro.
La CIA es tu pastor cristiano que te mete ideas empresariales y ganancias jugosas que nada tienen que ver con la espiritualidad.
La CIA es la música que te normaliza ideas bélicas como peso pluma con un inexplicable auge.
La CIA es la prensa hemegónica que te hizo odiar a Rusia.
La CIA es Hollywood donde los gringos salvaban al mundo siempre.
La CIA son las drogas permitidas y no permitidas que te generaron dependencia desmedida.
La CIA es la ciberseguridad y las IAS que controlan datos y te espían sin que te des cuenta.
La CIA son los generadores de violencia y crimen organizado que arrasa y desplaza gente en tu barrio.
La CIA son las empresas de armamentistas que controlan los conflictos y matanzas para desestabilizar.
La CIA está en los golpes de estado que tiran gobiernos de izquierda que apelan a las soberanías de sus pueblos.
La CIA está en caricaturas, series, novelas, cortometrajes y canciones.
La CIA es el monstruo omnipresente que se mete en tu psique sin que te des cuenta.
La CIA es quien tiene el dominio de la estúpida cabeza de los fascistas.
La CIA es la podredumbre gringa.
FOR CLARIFICATION
The CIA are not agents in suits like Men in Black.
The CIA is your Christian pastor who instills entrepreneurial ideas and juicy profits in you that have nothing to do with spirituality.
The CIA is the music that normalizes war in you, in a way that’s as soft as a feather with inexplicable surge.
The CIA is the hegemonic press that made you hate Russia.
The CIA is Hollywood where the gringos always saved the world.
The CIA are the permitted and forbidden drugs that generated immeasurable dependency in you.
The CIA is the cybersecurity and AIs that control data and spy on you without you realizing it.
The CIA are the orchestrators of violence and organized crime that ravage and displace people in your neighborhood.
The CIA are the weapons manufacturers who control conflicts and slaughters to destabilize.
The CIA exist in the coups d'état that topple left-wing governments that appeal to the sovereignties of their peoples.
The CIA is in cartoons, series, novels, short films, and songs.
The CIA is the omnipresent monster that sneaks into your psyche without you realizing it.
The CIA is the one who has dominion over the stupid heads of fascists.
The CIA is the Yankee rot.
Shrouded in a serpentine-green light and dressed as a dollar-store Nazi, Javier Milei addresses a Zionist university about ‘Satanic Marxism’. You could not make it up. The Fascist International is real and its every member is a sickly spawn of US imperialism.
@txsinatrafan And the Angels were Jerry’s call.
You know who didn’t have a call? Bobby.
Ever.
Think about what it was like to be one of the 1,000 people at Swing on 2/27, with 100 Angels there, and nearly everyone dosed on Owsley’s finest.
No safe scene. It was dangerous + exciting.