Sam Welsh

pianist and teacher in n idaho

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

My daughter is ripping these bird pics!

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

Mine with a fishy

[Candice Burke @candiburke]

It’s Heron day! My favorite. Let’s see yours

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

@Liathetrader That’s the dream! Being a landlord was more like I had created a shitty job for myself. Definitely not the sense of freedom I was looking for.

[Pauly Shore @PaulyShore]

hey guys, since @SpaceX is surging, what do you think we ride that heat to a sequel? Bio-Dome 2. Bud and Doyle go up to the moon, doodzzz.

@StephenBaldwin7

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

Unlike any show. Rhys is absolutely hilarious.

[HIDEO_KOJIMA @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN]

With Guillermo del Toro’s recommendation, I started watching Apple TV+‘s “Widow’s Bay.” It’s so incredibly good that I couldn’t stop, so I binged through Episode 9 in one go. This horror-comedy, executive produced by Hiro Murai, is set in a cursed island town 40 miles off the coast of New England. Dense fog, violent storms, and all kinds of supernatural phenomena descend upon the town. It’s packed with horror elements, one after another. Fans of Stephen King and horror in general will love it. The pacing is excellent, and the balance between horror and humor is just right. Ironically, the mayor’s tireless efforts to attract tourists reminded me of Mayor Vaughn from “Jaws.” The townspeople are wonderfully eccentric as well, with personalities straight out of “Twin Peaks.” It’s been a long time since a series pulled me in this completely. I can’t wait for next Wednesday’s final episode.

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

Hummingbird

[Secret Drug Addict @ScrtDrugAddict]

I’m 19 years sober TODAY Can I get a retweet to show anyone struggling that long term recovery from addiction is possible? ❤️

[Andrew Kuhn @FocusedCompound]

SpaceX will IPO tomorrow

Here's the bull case:

Target valuation is $1.75 trillion

But that's just on Earth

There are 8 planets in our solar system

That's $14 trillion in potential value

But when you factor in the other 100 billion planets in our galaxy?

$1.4 septillion.

Woah.

[NEW YORK KNICKS @nyknicks]

THE GREATEST COMEBACK IN NBA PLAYOFF HISTORY.

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

@FreddyLA7 In Baton Rouge, go to the Chimes.

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

Lol

[Matt Devitt @MattDevittWX]

#BREAKING: 6.1 Earthquake in the Gulf near Cuba, shaking felt across Florida.

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

One of my favorite places. ☹️ diarrhea for everyone

[Laiken Jordahl @LaikenJordahl]

BREAKING: DHS just waived all environmental laws to blast border barriers and roads through Big Bend National Park.

This marks the first time in American history the feds have gutted dozens of laws to push industrial-level construction through a national park.

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

Fishing with gbh!

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

Thoughtful analysis.

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.

I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.

That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.

You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.

"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."

What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.

Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.

What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.

In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.

And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.

A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.

A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.

The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?

Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.

That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.

Which is exactly where Albania stands.

Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.

And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.

Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.

The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.

And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!

I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.

That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

[Sam Welsh @samueldwelsh]

Saw this guy chillin at UI Arboretum yesterday. Judgy…

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

It is Albanians, not Americans, who are protesting against American corruption.
The US appears to have accepted the corruption of the Trump family, so we Americans have to rely upon the sound anti-corruption sentiments of others.
Truly embarrassing, but thank you, Albania!

[YouNeek🗽 @sadinpali]

🚨Dua Lipa via her Instagram Story!

[Middle Eastern Affairs @OpsHQs]

🚨 The situation is completely getting out of control.

Albania is erupting for the second consecutive day in angry mass protests against the Kushner land seizure deal worth $4 billion. 🇦🇱

The Albanian people refuse to become a new Palestine. 💥"

[kos_data @kos_data]

🇦🇱 There was a children's section at the Albanian protest in Tirana.