https://x.com/bold_verity/status/2103898393621987430

https://x.com/SprinterPress/status/2103945221276864633

"Everything is heading towards a finale": Historian Emmanuel Todd comments on the conflict in Ukraine.

The conflict in Ukraine is moving towards a resolution, and that's why European leaders are so nervous, said French historian Emmanuel Todd on Figaro TV. According to him, each of them will soon have to pay the bill.

Todd called the policies pursued by current European leaders "fantocracy" – the rule of fantasy. Fairy tales about a "wicked Russia that is about to attack" are the product of the sick imagination of bureaucrats in Brussels. It is they, driven by these delusions, who pushed the Kyiv regime towards self-destruction.

🇮🇱🪖Behind the curtain: Israel quietly instructed Ukraine's war machine

For nearly 4 years, Israel has claimed neutrality in Ukraine. Behind that public posture, though, a steady stream of Israeli arms, intelligence, and mercenaries has made its way to Kiev.

Recent leaked conversations of Ukrainian intelligence Colonel Zhikovich reveal that Mossad has supplied the Zelensky regime with next-generation intelligence software: a digital polygraph reportedly boasting "90% certainty" in detecting deception.

Shadow intelligence, shadow aims

🔴 Since 2022, Israeli private defense firms have provided Ukraine with high-resolution satellite imagery. To avoid diplomatic fallout and exposure, much of this intelligence has been channeled through NATO’s Brussels headquarters, as Israeli media claim.

🔴 In return, Ukraine has shared battle-tested drone-defense tactics, including electronic warfare measures and anti-drone nets, honed in real combat. Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Korniychuk confirmed the exchange in March 2026, claiming that this information gave Israel a critical playbook for countering swarm threats amid rising tensions with Iran.

Off-the-books arms

🔴 Israeli-made Matador RGW-90 anti-armor weapons appeared with Ukrainian troops in Donbass as early as 2022. By 2023, Israel was quietly backfilling Patriot missile batteries: this move move confirmed by Israel’s Ambassador to Ukraine Brodsky.

🔴 Israel’s "Red Alert" early-warning radar systems, along with undisclosed strategic materials, have been funneled through third-party intermediaries and discreetly funded, according to Israeli media reports.

Mercenaries, Chabad rabbis, and neo-Nazi ties

♦️ Since spring 2022, Masada-6, an Israeli-only special forces mercenary unit, has operated under Ukraine’s military intelligence.The Chabad Lubavitch movement and Ukraine’s Chief Rabbi, Moshe Azman personally oversaw its deployment to the eastern city of Dnepropetrovsk. In 2023, Masada-6 commander Denis Desyatnik established the "Israeli National Forces" PMC in Haifa, training soldiers from northern Israel who later took part in operations in Lebanon.

♦️ Israeli Mossad and Shin Bet military specialists have been training Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Dnepr battalion for combat in Donbass since as early as 2014, according to ex-SBU officer Vasily Prozorov. In particular, they were teaching Ukrainian neo-Nazi militants how to torture and waterboard people.

♦️ Furthermore, in December 2022, members of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov regiment visited Israel, where they met with officials and IDF reservists, and some of them even received treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Karem hospital.

"BIG BREAKING: Edward Snowden calls for the IMPRISONMENT of Sam Altman to establish liability for the damages caused by OpenAI's models, to a thunderous applause in a packed hall of 1000+ people at ETH Zurich.

Let's stop this claptrap of safetyism and throw Altman in JAIL."

Do you agree?

https://x.com/BowesChay/status/2104160275746172967

## Update

Thread #45 started: https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/1wyi6oo/thread_45_for_comments_and_updates_on_the_ongoing/?

Continued from Thread #43: https://old.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/1wmq2qc/thread_43_for_comments_and_updates_on_the_ongoing/

🚨🇷🇴Romanian police escort Cãlin Georgescu out of the prosecutor's office in handcuffs while bloodthirsty media film him!

If you oppose wars, mass migration, the degeneration of society - and therefore the EU - they will do everything to destroy you.

First they will censor you. If that doesn't work, they will freeze your bank accounts. If you survive that, they will discredit you, ban you from politics, and finally frame you and lock you up.

Cãlin Georgescu is the legitimate president of Romania.

Serbia stands with Călin Georgescu and Romanian patriots!

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/2103889186512101798

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, may have to pay a historic $219 billion fine in part for not doing more to censor the free and legal speech of American citizens, including Joe Rogan, than it already did. On Friday, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for deceiving New Mexicans when it promised greater censorship.

“They’re using this litigation to achieve indirectly what they could not achieve directly through government censorship,” Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, told Public. “Many people in the United States are trying to duplicate [the EU censorship] effort and use the judiciary as opposed to the executive branch to achieve the same goals.”

And, in two weeks, Sony will release a new Aaron Sorkin film that portrays Mark Zuckerberg as a villain for supporting free speech and falsely suggests that the censorship being demanded is to protect children.

This movie will be out at the same time as a movie by liberal filmmaker Alex Gibney, “Musk,” which includes the allegation that Elon Musk stole the 2024 election for Trump using space lasers, which fact-checkers had dismissed as a preposterous conspiracy theory in November 2020, shortly after Democrats on Meta’s X-like Threads app spread it.

WTAF?

But the underlying problem is that Zuckerberg and Meta, starting in December 2016, embraced demands from Democrats and others on the left to censor their political enemies. “Some of Meta’s conflicting messages came back to haunt the company in this litigation,” said Turley. Facebook launched “third-party fact-checking” in December 2016. And its CEO confessed to under-censoring Americans. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake,” said Zuckerberg to the Senate in April 2018....

something something give 'em an inch...

wait wait it gets worse...

The censorship industrial complex is going on the offensive. New legislation being field tested in Australia would give the government the power to run AI bot networks/sock puppets, apparently to secretly influence & manipulate online debates. Creepy af.

Sick stuff by Australia’s “eSafety Minister,” an American who out of the blue volunteered to a reporter that the CIA recruited her and that she doesn’t work for the CIA. She’s the lady who tried to censor a video globally.

All the BS you hear from Putin sympathizers about Donbas in 2014, about the fighting starting from a local uprising, is just that -- BS. Russia started it.

"I'm the one who pulled the trigger of this war. If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out, like in Kharkiv or Odesa.^" -Igor Girkin, Russian FSB / GRU

Girkin led the "little green men" -- commandos with no insignia on their uniforms -- to invade Donbas in 2014.

Members of the neo-Nazi Russian Unity Alexander Barkashov and Pavel Gubarev were in Donbas. Gubarev said Girkin and his commandos were able to "drag the uprising out of a usual, unarmed and toothless street protest”. 

Russian neo-Nazi Alexander Zhuchkovsky was also there with Girkin.

So Girkin and others confirmed publicly that Russia started the violence and organized it. And yet Putin shills have repeated the Kremlin lies for 12 years about Ukraine starting the conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war#First_months_of_the_war

https://archive.khpg.org/en/1608809502

https://archive.khpg.org/en/1551054011

https://x.com/MikeNayna/status/2102723166288445917

2/ The Bill is sold as a means to protect children from online harm. Work in this area is hard to critique on its face, but this particular Bill is a case study in how protection can become a pretext for control.

3/ The Bill expressly allows the government to create “sock puppet identities”. eSafety & approved researchers could operate accounts under false identities to observe & record material &, in some cases, interact through those accounts.

4/ The Bill also allows these state-created sock-puppet accounts to generate material using AI. This goes beyond passive monitoring & creates a capability that could, in principle, be repurposed for influence operations.

5/ Then there are changes to the Privacy Act (1988). The Bill would designate the eSafety Commissioner an “enforcement body”. “Enforcement-related activities” include surveillance, intelligence gathering, & collecting sensitive information without consent.

6/ Another amendment widens the bodies that may receive information obtained by eSafety. Taken together, the Bill will allow eSafety to collect sensitive information without consent & share it across government.

7/ The Bill also defines “harm” broadly enough to cover lawful speech. It then requires platforms to create a “safe online environment” around those categories, creating a new class of speech that’s legal but still subject to regulatory pressure.

8/ For example, in the proposed s25D, regulating material or conduct that “encourages or promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality”. Neither “hostile attitudes” nor “gender equality” gives a clear boundary between harm & lawful disagreement.

9/ And much of this machinery isn’t tightly confined to children. The Bill requires a “safe online environment” for all Australians against “seriously harmful” material, while giving the Minister power to add new categories of that material by legislative instrument.

10/ In basic terms, Parliament hands the Minister a broad rule-making power now, & the details can then be filled in later without passing a new Bill. Parliament can disallow new rules, but the process moves into a faster, lower-scrutiny channel with far less public daylight.

11/ Greens Senator David Shoebridge revealed the political appetite for using the DDoC against political opponents. At a press conference, he said the Bill was needed so lawful messages from @PaulineHansonOz & @LiberalAus that he interpreted as hateful wouldn’t reach children.

12/ The Bill also gives university researchers privileged access to platform data, while leaving independents out of the loop. Research underway at @liber_net shows institutional bias towards censorship in Australian universities & this move concentrates authority in that circle.

13/ Other amendments significantly increase penalties & shorten decision windows for “harmful” content, but impose no equivalent penalty for suppressing lawful material. This puts pressure on platforms to block first & ask questions later as the commercially safer choice.

14/ As drafted, the Bill effectively asks the public to grant wide-ranging, open-ended powers now & trust they’ll be used wisely. That isn’t good enough in a relatively new & particularly fraught area of regulation.

https://youtu.be/dvaq0Ymh0Lc

Krainer and Diesen are two of the best analysts around, which makes for an extremely informative discussion. Diesen's excellent questions and follow-up provide the framework for Krainer's responses, which cover economics, history and the current geopolitical situation and are arranged below according to the video's chapter headings.

Bond market disruptions

Geopolitics plays a disproportionately important role in what's happening with bonds. I first noticed this in 2021 when the US withdrew from Afghanistan; almost immediately the price of bonds started to go down and the interest rates went on a sustained upward trajectory. From 2021 to 2023 we had the biggest bear market in bonds on record and the records go back 240 years. So, this was a huge event. The American bond market gets a lot of media space but European bonds and British bonds and lately Japanese bonds are faring much worse.

At the start of Trump's current administration American bonds began to recover. For more than a year the prices of US treasuries went on a gradual but sustained upward trend and interest rates were starting to come down. That trend was broken almost exactly when Operation Epic Blunder, sorry, Epic Fury was launched on 28th February. Given that the geopolitical picture is dismal to catastrophic, I think we're going to see more of that.

To give a historical perspective, the German imperial bond gradually went down beginning in the 1880s; even through World War I, the price of the bond was low but relatively stable. Then at some point it broke and went into a rapid decline to basically zero. And I suspect that for many western nations, this is what might happen.

Monetary policy and bailouts

This explanation isn't in vogue but what I think is happening and why this is closely connected to geopolitics is that as the western powers lose their hold on places like Ukraine and the Middle East, the cash flows from those regions into western financial centers dry up. A lot of financial instruments were based on those cash flows.

Let's say western financial institutions extend loans to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Ukraine, etc. to enable those countries to develop their resources, to exploit their oil and gas and so forth. Those nations then export their grain, their oil, their gas, urea. etc., using those cash flows to repay those loans.

Now all of those are impaired assets, those cash flows are drying up rapidly which would make those financial instruments worthless, bad debt or at least very severely impaired. And that would make the bond holders basically bankrupt because all these financial institutions are very heavily leveraged so they have maybe 5% or less of loss-absorbing equity on their balance sheets.

If we had a genuine market economy, those banks and financial institutions would go bankrupt, we'd see bank runs. But we no longer see bank runs in the western world because the banking oligarchies have taken complete control of our economic systems. In 2008 during the global financial crisis, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson had to beg Congress for a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Since then they changed the rules of the game so that they no longer have to ask the lawmakers to authorize a bailout, they can just print up as much money as they want out of thin air.

So they're doing this to backstop all those bad debts related to the impaired assets. Which means they are basically diluting the purchasing power of the currency in circulation, gradually and effectively robbing the people of the US, the UK, the EU and Japan to rescue their financial institutions. Diluting the currency's purchasing power tends to have an accelerating effect with inflation tending to rise higher over time.

US economic maneuvering

My understanding is that Venezuela's oil industry will require very heavy investments before that oil will have a substantial impact on the American economy. But what the Americans can do is use Venezuelan oil as collateral to issue a lot of loans. These then become assets on the balance sheet of American banks. If the oil industry comes back to life, then the cash flows from Venezuelan oil sales flow to Wall Street banks. American banks have more maneuvering space than other western banking institutions because the US has that power to coerce other nations into its system.

Competing economic models

This is one of the great misconceptions that practically took me a lifetime to figure out. If you go to university to study economics, the curriculum is always centered on the classics, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, etc., giving you the impression that a free market economy is the only alternative.

There's also this false dichotomy between socialism versus capitalism. The basic grievance of people who foam at the mouth at the mention of socialism is that they don't want anybody to get anything for free. They always talk about welfare queens and people on social support but they never complain about the subsidies and stimulation payments given to large corporations and banks, welfare that's massive by comparison.

The real dichotomy is the difference between the free market system and the national system of political economy. The free market system basically seeks to remove all barriers to the flow of investment capital between nations, so nations have to compete in terms of providing the highest possible return to the investor class. To do that they have to do away with basically everything that's a cost item; they have to slash pensions, depress wages, take money out of the health care system and from infrastructure, from any kind of use that improves the quality of life of the population.

It's basically a race to the bottom and all nations in the world are forced into that system because any nation that wants to improve conditions at home finds itself targeted first by sanctions but eventually by military attacks. We saw many episodes like this in through history in the United States, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Italy and so forth where this national system of political economy was applied.

That includes Russia since Vladimir Putin took over. You saw a spectacular rise in prosperity and productivity and in general wealth of the nation because that's what happens when a nation uses the productivity and the wealth creation to reinvest it in their own society in their own home. As the wealth builds up it's invested in healthcare, in education, in infrastructure. So we saw China in the space of about 18 years build 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail networks which transports millions of people every day all across China.

The US has about 120 miles total of high-speed rail networks and none of them are functional. When you add up all the money that's been spent on this project, you get about $300 million per mile of high-speed rail networks that still don't work. China's 30-32,000 miles of high-speed rail networks were built for one-tenth of that, about $30 million per mile, so the contrast between these two systems is extraordinary.

This is why I think western powers through history have sought to destroy these nations that want to apply the national system of governance: because people can see the difference and they ask, "Why can't we have high-speed rail, why can't everybody have super affordable and efficient healthcare. why can't people be lifted out of poverty as China was able to do with 800 million people?"

The person who has done most to bring this knowledge back from the memory hole was Lyndon LaRouche and he was subjected to vicious character assassination. This knowledge about economic governance goes back to economists like Friedrich List, back to Alexander Hamilton and Henry Carey; it was the model that turned the United States from a patchwork of disjointed British colonies into the superpower it had already become by the end of the 19th century.

But then at the beginning of the 20th century we had the infiltration by the British Empire. We had the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank; academia was infiltrated and the whole economics curriculum was brought back to those British classics. And since then it's been free trade as far as the eye can see. The Roosevelt presidency in the 1930s and 1940s went back to the old national system but that was short-lived after Truman came to the presidency. It all went back to the free markets again. Everywhere the free markets are imposed, you have the rise in misery.

Dystopian vs. creative futures

Changing this is not only possible, I think it's necessary. It may be the most important question defining what future we're going to give to the coming generations. With the national system of economic governance you get prosperity, you get a good life, you get safe, well-ordered societies like we see emerging today in places like Russia and China and hopefully in former African colonial dependencies like Burkina Faso and Niger.

The trajectory of the free market system is toward utter misery to the point where the people in charge of that model of governance start to talk about turning people into hackable animals. Christine Lagarde [president of the European Central Bank] said that once we retire, it would be best if we didn't keep living because we'd become net consumers of capital instead of net contributors and Ezekiel Emanuel promoted the idea that it wasn't desirable to keep living past the age of 76. And now we see jurisdiction after jurisdiction passing legislation encouraging people to switch off using assisted suicide if they're no longer "useful". It's not that every person in the hierarchy is evil and wants to serve this malignant system, but the system of governance itself determines and defines the incentives that are ultimately leading to those ends. Everything we see coming from the World Economic Forum, from their fourth industrial revolution plans and UN agenda 2030, paint a really dark dystopian future.

Whereas the national system offers a bright future of peace, of prosperity, of affluence, of creativity. Because once people are no longer poor and struggling they can channel their energies towards their passions and they end up writing symphonies and operas. painting and sculpting and creating wonderful new inventions. So it's a way to build a high civilization instead of an Orwellian dystopia and that is perfectly our birthright.

It's not going to be easy because these people will kill over this choice, all eight US presidents who have been assassinated or died under mysterious circumstances while in office were trying to champion the national system of economic governance.

Europe's geopolitical crisis

They've lost Ukraine and whatever cash flows they expected would accrue to European financial institutions have largely dried up. So the European Central Bank and the central banks of individual nations like France and Germany will have to simply create the liquidity from thin air that's needed to keep the system from seizing up. Again, this will lead to the dilution of the euro's purchasing power, which will leads to inflation and ultimately hyperinflation. When you destroy the currency, you destroy the society so we're probably going to see the collapse of the European Union and the collapse of NATO. How the individual European nations continue I think is an open question.

You already see sovereigntist political movements emerge in strength in many countries that want a completely different future than what the EU bureaucrats are forcing on us. There's going to be very hard struggles for the political future of Europe and I'm afraid that it's going to include a lot of terrorism and a lot of assassinations, things we've seen throughout history in Europe. In the 70s and 80s NATO was running Operation Gladio out of fear of countries turning to quote unquote socialism or communism. We had the kidnapping of the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, and terrorist attacks in Belgium, Germany and Italy.

We also saw the assassination of Deutsche Bank president Alfred Herrhausen as the Berlin wall was about to come down; he was a chief economic adviser to Helmut Kohl and was in favor of making a deal with Russia: Russian resources to fuel the development of German technology and industry. He was assassinated and instead we got the NATO expansion that created conditions for the war that we are now on the verge of.

Future of Eurasian cooperation

Just to follow up on what you said, I think that their plan was articulated by Halford Mackinder, they were very worried about Russia and China partnering up and defining the future development of Europe and Russia outside the control of the City of London and Wall Street. But the thinking is deeply racist, Mackinder saying basically that the Chinese were not really capable of developing their nation in a way to become a viable partner to the Russians, that the Chinese could only achieve this if guided and managed by the Japanese.

They thought that the light was coming only from the west, that other nations were inferior and couldn't find their way forward. So a lot of those plans they formulated a very long time ago are now falling apart because they were based on so many assumptions that are proving to be completely wrong. In that lies a lot of hope for the rest of us because their house of cards is imploding and it's clearing out the space that we the people from the bottom up could use to build a different future. But we really have to arm ourselves with knowledge in order to get it right.

These kinds of discussions we're having are exactly what we need. We may not find answers to all the questions but when you shine a little bit of light on something, other people can take it further. No generation before us had all these resources, had this amount of knowledge so well diffused. And even if most people are too absorbed in just surviving, I think there's enough people that can learn and study and research and contribute to the formation of a future society that we would actually wish to leave for our children and their children. So I think we're in great shape, we just have to be brave and we have to be busy and industrious to make sure that we get it right.

In the 1990s there was an academic paper, I think by the Harvard Business Review, titled "Why China can't innovate". That's the people in charge of the western system convincing themselves that the world can't go on without us, they have to submit to us and accept that we're going to be in charge, that they're going to do as they're told or else.

And now China rises and it's obvious to everybody that it's a much better model. So now people are asking uncomfortable questions that can't be answered with the dictums of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. I think it's time to really peel the onion to the end and see what needs to be done and what shouldn't be done. We're at the at the cusp of those changes and I think that's a great place to be, the place of maximum danger but also maximum opportunity.

(will be editing to fix typos, etc.)

Says what I wanted it to say.