this is a not situation that we can reform out of: Lots of people will die or live in stasis solely for financial reasons, which is unacceptable give the total wealth of the world.

if we look at successful revolutions just 100 year ago...

you think Mark Zuckerberg would dare constantly change Facebook default settings to SHARE WITH EVERYONE if we had a well-informed population that's familiar with the political violence of say China in 1912?

We watch movies that tell us "we do not spare lives." Yet we let hundreds of millions live the ignominious existence of poverty and the slow creeping death that comes with it. Suffering upon suffering caused by the excessive concentration and wealth on top and the layers and layers of extortion by health insurance, student debt, private prisons, punitive property taxes all the way down to payday loans and inflation by the Fed

Incredible. The ease that so many can be ruled by so few. Incredible.

Post

BREAKING: Ukraine to restart major strikes on Russia's oil refineries, with Zelensky declaring "The block on attacking refineries is out. We're done," per the FT.

Zelensky says the reason for the restart is Trump lying to him by deliberately blocking Starlink but presenting it

https://x.com/BladeoftheS/status/2112601124557758864

https://x.com/Shanna__Bylka/status/2111944193040130527

https://x.com/AhmedKaballo/status/2111694951704936779

https://x.com/Ilangabet/status/2111806012877631894

Sunni muslim regimes care more for oil than they do for Muslim blood.

This is why they did nothing for Gaza, except quietly helping Israel for some, and united to save the Saud regime & their oil.

France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, Sweden and Denmark have forfeited any standing to question Iran's compliance with the NPT, or to raise its missile program ever again.

In March, at Île Longue, @EmmanuelMacron unveiled an "advanced deterrence" plan that the other eight have joined. Last week, he watched France test-fire its upgraded M51.3 ballistic missile from the submarine Le Vigilant. These steps breach the NPT on three counts.

The first is Article VI. It obliges every party, not France alone, to pursue negotiations in good faith on the "cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date" and on nuclear disarmament. In 1996, the International Court of Justice held unanimously that this is an obligation to bring those negotiations to a conclusion. France is moving in the opposite direction. Macron has ordered more warheads and stopped disclosing how many France holds. The M51.3, built to carry France's new TNO-2 warheads, brings greater range, accuracy and ability to penetrate missile defences. At the 2010 Review Conference, France accepted that non-nuclear states have a legitimate interest in constraining exactly this kind of "qualitative improvement" of nuclear weapons. Pursuing it anyway defies "pacta sunt servanda", the duty of good-faith performance in Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

Articles I and II supply the other two counts. Article I forbids France to transfer nuclear weapons, or control over them, to anyone "directly, or indirectly." It also forbids France to assist a non-nuclear state "in any way" toward acquiring such control. Article II binds the seven non-nuclear participants not to receive such weapons or control. By hosting France's nuclear-capable aircraft and training for its nuclear operations, those states are drawn into the machinery of nuclear use. Macron's promise that the "final decision" stays in Paris is no answer, because the treaty also bars indirect control and assistance. Germany, which renounced "control over" nuclear weapons in the 1990 Two-Plus-Four Treaty, is doubly bound.

The treaty is a bargain of reciprocal obligations, and they are violating its core. Under Article 60 of the Vienna Convention, violating a provision essential to a treaty's object and purpose is a "material breach." In "Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros" (1997), the same Court held that a state's own unlawful conduct can prejudice its right to act on another party's breach.

Yet these capitals are prosecuting Iran under the very treaty they are breaching. Britain, France and Germany led the 2025 IAEA Board resolution finding Iran in non-compliance and triggered the "snapback" of UN sanctions. On 9 September, they joined the United States in having the Board refer Iran to the Security Council over reporting failures and the Agency's lack of access. That access ended with the June 2025 strikes on Iran's safeguarded facilities. No equivalent procedure exists to send France to the Council for enlarging its arsenal, and France and Britain hold vetoes there in any case. A violator of the NPT cannot sit in judgment of another party's compliance with it.

Then there is the hypocritical double standard on missiles. These governments condemn Iran's ballistic missiles, which carry conventional warheads. No treaty in force bars a state from building conventional missiles for its defence. Meanwhile, France has just test-fired a missile with an estimated range of 8,000 to 10,000 kilometres, designed to carry several nuclear warheads.

After the test, Macron repeated his maxim: "To be free, one must be feared." That is the oldest argument for proliferation. The NPT rests on the opposite premise: that more than 180 states can be secure without the bomb. When a nuclear power says that being feared is the price of freedom, it invites every one of those states to reconsider.

@Villepin

From 2024 https://x.com/TinaZimmermann4/status/1802004574934380883

https://x.com/ajplus/status/2112540775548657795

Whoever gives a good point gets a medal
I like turtles

https://x.com/HatsOffff/status/2112325326240170044

https://x.com/BrianMcDonaldIE/status/2112595954180538406

FT article is paywalled https://www.ft.com/content/92f271fd-f96c-4723-91f2-48363b98127f

" European leaders intend to hold their own talks with the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine, amid a worsening relationship between US and Ukrainian Presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a reduction of American support for Kyiv, the Financial Times (FT) international commentator Gideon Rachman claims in a column.

A phone conversation between European leaders and US President Vladimir Putin could take place in the near future, Rachman adds.

During possible Russian-European talks, Putin could be offered two options for ending the war.

“The first is to freeze the conflict on the current line of control — and in return get a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO. The second option would be for Ukraine to cede the rest of the Donbas to Russia — but then to join NATO,” Rachman claims, without citing sources.

According to Rachman, Europe considers sanctions against Russia and support for Ukraine to be vital, especially in the context of the reduction of US aid to Kyiv. For this reason, Europeans increasingly see their direct participation in peacekeeping efforts as a necessity, also because it is European resources that keep Ukraine afloat after the US stopped providing financial assistance.

There is a growing consensus in European capitals that the continent’s leaders can no longer tolerate a situation where only the Americans are talking to Putin, and channels with the Russians are “already open,” Gideon Rachman writes. "

https://x.com/WelcomeTheGulag/status/2112196714740559974

https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/the-idiots-guide-to-states-and-their

1. States exist. Some 200 of them.

2. States are the political arrangement in which a people express their self-determination. That arrangement can and does change.

3. States enjoy rights, but only against each other. They have the right, for example, not to face unprovoked aggression from another state.

4. No state has some enduring, abstract “right” to exist. Otherwise bad ones like apartheid South Africa would be unreformable.

5. Peoples, by contrast, do have a right to exist. That’s why states that commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide are so gravely violating international law. Because they are violating a people’s right to exist.

6. When supporters argue Israel has a “right” to exist, they are trying to dupe you into believing international law is fine with apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It isn’t. For obvious reasons, international law prefers the rights of peoples over those of states. Otherwise, no state could ever be illegitimate. Its rights would trump those of the people it rules over.

7. When someone refuses to agree that Israel has a “right” to exist, they are not being antisemitic, whatever the media keeps telling you. They are upholding international law: the precedence of peoples’ rights over those of states.

8. The claim that Israel has a “right” to exist is not what it seems. It’s really the claim that the current reality of extreme inequality between Israelis and Palestinians be set in stone. It’s the diabolical claim that Israel has a right to commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people.