Maychos

no country for old girl

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Minister of Strategic Investment for the Republic of Albania.

People ask why I signed the island over before there was a business plan. I tell them this is how a small country gets chosen.

The daughter swam to it. This is true. She swam out from the yacht, touched the rock, and swam back, and by the time her towel was dry the matter was, in the parlance of my ministry, under active review. We do not require a survey when a principal has already conducted one in person.

For fifty years we were the place that hid. Enver poured three thousand bunkers into that one rock so we could vanish from the earth and outlast an invasion that never came. Now the son-in-law of the American president wants a spa where we kept the submarines, and you want me to wait for a feasibility study?

The feasibility study was written by a firm in Tirana. I will not tell you who registered that firm last spring. I will only tell you that it found the project feasible.

Strategic investor status is a beautiful instrument. It makes the ordinary rules a courtesy, and we have chosen to extend that courtesy to a man whose fund carries two billion dollars from Riyadh, money his own advisers flagged as too vast for someone so green and burdened with fees too steep for someone so unproven. They wired it regardless. Abu Dhabi added to it. Doha added more. The only due diligence anyone ran was on the surname, and the name came back clean.

The park is protected, yes. It was guarded from the world like a relic under glass. Now the world pays four thousand a night to step inside the case, and that is the superior protection. The kind that wires.

My cousin handles the catering. My brother-in-law owns the sole firm on this coast that pours concrete to specification, and these days the specification is simply whatever he pours. Call it nepotism if you like. I call it keeping the value at home. The Americans have a tidier phrase in their glossy reports. They call it local content. I possess an enormous quantity of local content. Everyone in this story is, you understand, extremely local.

The Americans adore the bunkers. The gas masks they love most of all, the genuine ones, Soviet, still scattered in the weeds where the conscripts dropped them and ran. The resort presents one to each guest at check-in. I assured the developers it was tasteful, a tribute. I neglected to mention that my nephew walks the field at dawn and sells the masks back to the resort at nine euros apiece. Local content.

SPAK opened a file on the approvals. A committee of the United States Congress opened a second. Let them both read. An indictment is merely a nation taking itself seriously, and seriousness is a luxury we can finally afford, because we have become a destination. No one audits a place that no one wants.

There was a woman with a map of the seal caves. The breeding caves, she kept repeating, as though I had never studied the map myself. She attended three hearings. She missed the fourth. I hear she found other work, somewhere inland, somewhere without a coastline to defend. The seals will adapt. They always adapt. In thirty years I have never once watched a seal lodge a complaint, and I have watched every other creature in this republic do nothing but.

The Serbians attempted their own version. The Belgrade army headquarters, the one NATO flattened in 1999, a protected war monument until a quiet little law unprotected it, and the same heir meant to raise a hotel from the wreckage. It died last year in a scandal. I rang my counterpart to console him, and the lesson I carried away from that call was simple: the only difference between corruption and investment is whether the doors ever open. His stayed shut. Mine will swing wide.

And then a young man from the fund told me, over a long dinner, that Sazan is the pilot.

He is a real estate person at heart, he said, just as the son-in-law is one. It is all about location. Had I ever reckoned how much breathtaking land on this earth simply idles there, burdened with history, crowded with people, waiting for the right eye to see what it might become? He tilted his phone toward me. White towers. A marina. A long bright beach with not a single soul upon it. Where is this place, I asked.

Gaza, he said. After.

After what, I asked, and he only repeated the word, after, the way my own ministry murmurs under active review, and he showed me the next slide, which was the same beach with the people still on it, and that slide was titled Before, as if a people were a phase a property passes through.

He told me Sazan settles the argument. A coastline can be cleared of its history and sold back at four thousand a night, and the world will book it for an anniversary. Gaza is merely the bigger lot. The son-in-law has said the waterfront is very valuable. He has sworn there is no Plan B. Do you know what a man means when he swears he has no Plan B? He means Plan A is already pouring concrete.

That was the moment I understood what I am. My island is not the destination. My island is the showroom. Sazan is the tidy little model you walk the buyer through before you drive him to the parcel that still has families asleep in it. We are the demonstration unit. We validate the concept. We prove that a place raised so a frightened people might outlast the end of the world can be photographed, priced, and handed to the very people who schedule the endings.

My grandfather poured a bunker on that island with his own hands so that we would survive being forgotten. He braced that door shut against the whole of the earth. I signed one page, in good morning light, so that we would never be forgotten again. I am the man who opened the door. I want to be precise about the distinction, because people keep mistaking the two of us.

He kept everyone out so we could live.

I let everyone in so I could.

We open for the summer in June. Nearly sold out. Even the bunker. They tell me the next site will be larger, and warmer, and that the building was never the difficult part.

The difficult part is always who is standing on the land when you arrive.

[Maychos @maychos]

This is when my weak parenting ban my kids stuff they really don’t care about. But i practiced banning. And they were banned. Except there was really no consequences.

[Al Jazeera Breaking News @AJENews]

UPDATE: France bans Israeli officials from Eurosatory defence exhibition

🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/Mc3tn3ZKb9

[Maychos @maychos]

@GBX_Press @lanabudimlic They crossed the line two years ago. Almost three.

[Maychos @maychos]

@aseisfree Leaders of the weak democracies, with high corruption, media control, seem as a perfect partners for the Zionists. Whole the western Balkan as a promised land myth, although a bit stretched tho, but the narrative can always be manipulated, who cares, media is controlled anyway.

[Haaretz.com @haaretzcom]

On average, 11 children are killed or wounded every day in Lebanon, UN says https://t.co/XCJfbBMVPh

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

A VIRAL VIDEO appears to show police violently taking down the pregnant wife of a Palestinian man from Gaza facing deportation proceedings. The footage shocked millions. The silence surrounding it may reveal something deeper. https://t.co/IoKHSYwxtS

[Maychos @maychos]

Male pobede su jako bitne.

[Vesna Radojević @Vesna_Radojevic]

Divni Oliver Tošković. ✊ Profesor UB koji je danas jedan jedan od najvećih neprijatelja SNS-a. Vidite i zasto. Zbog razuma.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🚨Israel’s PM Netanyahu says he has ordered the IDF to seize 70% of the Gaza Strip

Netanyahu: “At this point, we are fully in control of 60% of the territory of the Gaza Strip… and my directive is to get to… 70%”

Audience member: “100! 100!”

Netanyahu: “Wait, let’s go in order. First 70%. Let’s start with that.”

Israel had withdrawn to 53% of Gaza after the ceasefire brokered by the US last October, but has steadily expanded control to over 60%, maps show.

(Footage from Channel 12)

[Maychos @maychos]

Saša Dragojlo @RobinIzHuda 🎯
https://t.co/h8OLL1EadZ via @Novossti #birn #gaza #izrael #novinar #oruje #SaaDragojlo #srbija #zapadnaobala

[Maychos @maychos]

The Abraham Accords - an agreement which is sidelining the Palestinian question.

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

President Donald Trump is now linking a potential Iran nuclear agreement to a broader regional demand that key Arab states formally join the Abraham Accords — despite longstanding resistance from parts of the region.

In remarks reported from the White House, Trump suggested the deal with Tehran could hinge on whether countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar agree to normalize relations with Israel under the U.S.-brokered framework.

(The UAE normalized years ago)

“I think those countries owe it to us,” Trump said. “I’m not sure we should make the deal if they don’t sign. You want to know the truth. If they don’t sign to join the Abraham Accords.”

The framing runs up against public positions from several of the very states he named. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly said it will not move toward normalization without the establishment of a Palestinian state, while Qatar has maintained that its diplomatic posture is tied to a negotiated settlement to the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict — effectively signaling that any accession to the Abraham Accords, in its current form, is not on the table.

The comments effectively merge two separate diplomatic tracks — Iran nuclear negotiations and Arab-Israeli normalization — into a single conditional framework, raising the stakes for both.

Arab governments have not committed to joining the Abraham Accords, and officials across the region have consistently emphasized that normalization cannot be decoupled from the unfolding genocide in Gaza and the question of Palestinian statehood.

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

Love wins.
But not all the time.
And not for everyone.
We must always celebrate love,
We must always utilize privilege,

We must not forget those left behind,
We must not forget those still silenced.
We must not forget that none of us are free until …

The fight for freedom continues.

May my freedom be a reminder that we need each other.

I thank you for your support and patience while I process this horrible experience and plan how to make it matter most.

It means more than you know.
Know that I feel your love.
And know that it is healing.

Find me on Substack — link in bio — and subscribe there. I will be focusing on that for now …✌🏾❤️‍🩹 #grateful #eidmubarak

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

That time when President Truman explained that Zionists wanted the whole of Palestine and that the peace deal was a scam to take the land in small doses.

May 14, 1948.

[Maychos @maychos]

Heros of the day: Italian unions 🏆

[neyi kaybettiğini hatırla @neyikaybettik]

İtalya'nın 75'ten fazla kentinde, İsrail'in tamamen boykot edilmesi ve tüm bağların koparılması talebiyle ülke çapında genel grev düzenlendi.

▪️İtalya, Başbakanı Meloni'nin Filistin Devleti'ni tanımayı reddetmesinin ardından Filistin destekçisi kalabalıklar sokaklara indi.

▪️Milano, Napoli, Floransa ve Torino gibi büyük şehirlerin sokakları milyonlarca protestocuyla doldu.

▪️Ülkede ulaşım, eğitim, lojistik ve diğer sektörleri etkileyen ve çok sayıda işçi sendikasının katıldığı genel grev nedeniyle 24 saat boyunca felç oldu.

▪️Filistin yanlısı liman işçileri, İsrail'e silah gönderilmesini engellemek için önemli limanlara erişimi engelleyerek birçok bölgede lojistiğin durmasına yol açtı.

▪️Milano'da ise polisin merkez istasyon yakınlarında göstericilerle çatışması ve kalabalığı kontrol altına almak için göz yaşartıcı gaz kullanması sonucu sokaklarda kaos yaşandı.

Protestocular şunları talep etti:
1) Filistin Devleti'nin tanınması.
2) İsrail'e silah satışlarının durdurulması.
3) Netanyahu hükümetine yaptırımlar.
4) Gazze'deki soykırımın sona ermesi.

[Maychos @maychos]

The evil empire strikes back.

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

BREAKING: Trump administration is reinstating sanctions against UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs, the world's leading investigator of Israeli apartheid & genocide in Palestine.

A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court just issued an administrative stay, allowing the Justice Department to restart punishing Albanese while the courts deliberate.

Judge Richard Leon had correctly blocked the sanctions, recognizing that Albanese's First Amendment rights are protected because she owns property in the U.S. and her daughter is an American citizen.

But the Justice Department is arguing that foreign nationals abroad have no constitutional rights—a dangerous precedent that would gut free speech protections globally.

The Court of Appeals has scheduled key filings for May 28 and June 2.

This isn't just about Francesca. It's about whether America will uphold free speech or become complicit in Israel's crimes through censorship and intimidation.

[Maychos @maychos]

Totally understandable.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Rick Rubin is a lazy workaholic. He explains what that means:

“I'm a lazy workaholic. I have to force myself to do it.

My demeanor would be to do nothing.

I love the beautiful thing and it takes a lot of work to get to the beautiful thing.

I like to get to the point where it's like okay press the send button and share it with the world. That's a great feeling.

But all of the work up until then it's like "Oh my God I have to go to the studio today”

It's such a beautiful day. Wouldn't it be nice to just go out and have lunch with friends?

The first 25 years [of my career] were spent in a dark room for 16 hours a day, seven days a week in New York City working on music.”

[Ahmed Shihab-Eldin @aseisfree]

Huge protests erupted in Bilbao, in Spain’s north, after footage spread online showing Basque police using force against returning supporters of the Sumud Flotilla at Bilbao Airport yesterday.

READ WHY: https://t.co/VBVsHescx8

[FDU u blokadi @sviublokade_fdu]

Dragi naši,

Molimo vas ukoliko ste u mogućnosti da pomognete. Ljudima koju su uz nas od početka je potrebna pomoć!
❤️

[Arhiv javnih skupova / Public Assembly Archive @javniskupovi]

Belgrade, May 23: Between 180,000 and 190,000 people attended the "You and I, Slavija" protest. APA estimate based on a measured crowd surface of 107,000 m² and mean density of ≈1.7 p/m². Second largest protest in Serbia since the fall of Milošević.

Photo: Nikola Jovanović

[Milan Nikolic @Milan__Nikolic]

prestanite da jugoslovenstvo posmatrate kao nekakvu bumersku nostalgiju, to je pripadnost jedinstvenom kulturnom prostoru, doslednost u antifašizmu i svest o pustoši i duhovnoj bedi koju nacionalizam ostavlja za sobom