Some days I feel like I'm the only one who thinks Putin is indeed power-hungry and crazy enough to get trigger-happy with the tactical nuke buttons if he thinks he's losing this war. Russia and Belarus have already been carrying out exercises to practise their deployment.

The Western nations seem to think there's some sort of "gentleman's agreement" that no matter what happens in Ukraine, nuclear options will stay off the table.

But how the everloving fuck did we mistake Putin for a gentleman?

Yes, Musk is a psychopath. He's a textbook case, however much you think those textbooks are worth. Power makes him dizzy, and he's explicitly and publicly disavowed "empathy" as a valid emotional response to cruelty. Indeed, he called it the "fundamental weakness of Western civilization".

He's the sort of person our distant, nomadic African ancestors would have exiled to the savannahs to fend for themselves...or starve. Cut the bad wood from the tree.

Instead, we put these people in charge. 🙄

I don't usually share Substack links, but this piece by former NYT columnist Paul Krugman, Distinguished Professor of Economics and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, is important. Krugman makes a convincing case that the President is planning the biggest heist in history.

Fitting for an admirer of Al Capone, no? America elected an actual gangster, 34-times convicted felon and criminal extortionist to run their country, and 40+% of Americans still approve.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-planning-the-biggest-heist?r=g3wdv&triedRedirect=true

My kid just WhatsApped from his German exchange trip. They had to call an ambulance for him.

He has food poisoning, was very pale and nauseous. He was dehydrated and his blood pressure was dropping.

He's fine now but I wanted to share this because it has the most Western Europe Is a Civilized Place ending ever.

The paramedics came to the mall, took him into the ambulance, gave him an IV, checked him out, stayed with him until he felt better, then told him "No charge. Enjoy your trip to Germany." And if that wasn't enough, when they realized the group had had to move onto the train station without him, they gave him a ride over there to catch up with them.

I'm so ground down by the predatory realities of America in general in 2025 that this just about blew my fucking mind.

As plenty of other folks have said before me, if you didn't bother to write it, then why should I bother reading it?

To which I'd add, have you even read it yourself?

It's always about the pipeline and tanker routes, energy consortiums and contracts.

"Geologists and resources economists have confirmed that the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) lies above sizeable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip, according to a recent UNCTAD study.

New discoveries...in the range of 122 trillion cubic foot while recoverable oil is estimated at 1.7 billion barrels.."

https://unctad.org/news/unrealized-potential-palestinian-oil-and-gas-reserves

It's an energy war.

"[Nafeez] Ahmed published...revealing a plausible motivation - Gaza’s natural gas reserves - for Israel’s endless belligerence...(The story had until then been confined to minor and academic publications, including my own contribution...) Israel wanted to keep control over large gas reserves in Gaza’s waters so that it could deny Hamas a resource that would have bought it influence with other major players in the region, not least Egypt."

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2014-12-04/why-the-guardian-axed-nafeez-ahmeds-blog/

@blogdiva

Happy Towel Day to all the froods who celebrate!

Treat yourselves to something almost, but not entirely unlike tea. 🤖

In every city where the fascists turned up, they were outnumbered, shouted down and humiliated by counter-protesters, and went home demoralized and deflated. In Glasgow our comrades held the line until 10:20pm - more than 11 hours after they arrived! - until the remaining 7 goons were finally led away by police.

In Sheffield, a bride and groom spontaneously decided to spend some of their wedding day fighting the fash, and joined the counter-protest in full wedding gear! 😆 👏✊

Another guy who was so angry I could see viens pumping in his temples, told us he'd fought for this country in Afghanistan, and asked what we'd ever done? I told him all he'd really fought for was pipeline and tanker routes, energy consortiums and contracts, and so he was responsible for both the fleeing refugees and the terror threat he'd ranted about.

That went down like a shit sandwich, so I asked what if the West had spent all that war money on renewables and energy independence instead?😘 🤯

If you live in the USA, absolutely do not phone state law enforcement to set SWAT teams on any mysterious gangs of armed, masked individuals who are lurking around your neighborhoods.

Fascist ghouls angrily challenged me at a protest today to explain why it said "no Islamophobia, no antisemitism" on my sign, as if this was contradictory. I explained that opposing Netanyahu's government isn't the same as hating Jews. So they asked why, then, were we flying the "terrorist flag"?

They meant the Palestinian flag. I explained that being pro-Palestinian rights isn't the same as endorsing Hamas.

Americans, take comfort in the fact that our far right is every bit as dense as yours.

There were far-right demos in cities across the UK today, along with antiracist counter-protests. In this city we got there an hour earlier than the fash to surround the war memorial where they'd planned to meet, and refused to budge until every last one of them had given up and gone home.

It took about five hours of speeches, music, dancing and chanting to finally shatter the resolve of the last few remaining thugs, but we did it!

#StandUpToRacism #Antifascism #UKResistance

The idea you could build a giant, militarized wall along the Mexican border was bonkers. But the idea you could build an Israeli-style missile defense system covering the entire continental United States, which is 9.8 million square kilometers or 3.8 million square miles?

That "plan" that should raise serious questions as to the mental fitness of the President, even among Republicans and MAGAs. Can that many people really be so delusional as to think it's even possible?

Yes. Yes they can. 🤷‍♂️

Got it. It's taken me a while to understand what's really happening with Kanye. There's some mental health issues that it'd be better for people with greater expertise than I to unravel.

But if you're LGBTQ+ - anywhere here on this varied spectrum - you'll understand this vid. This broken man is wrestling with feelings he simply doesn't have the courage to face, and it's driving him rightward politically.

Denial ain't only a river in Egypt...

https://youtu.be/sp45-dQvqPo?si=WnDNHBHdKYf6SeZ5

Imagine a version of George Orwell's 1984 in which the characters were all like, "What, invite Big Brother to not only monitor my every move, but also allow it to do all normal human cognitive tasks for me so that I don't have to get good at anything ever, and can just coast through life being abjectly shit at even the most basic autonomous reasoning, but no-one would know? Sounds great!".

That's the dystopia we're living in *right now*.

Okay fedipeeps, I need a favour. We're mobilizing against these events on the 24th of this month, which appear to be a well-funded, national far-right operation that's appeared out of nowhere in the UK.

Who are they, and where does their money come from? We can't afford to pay for your services, but we can promote you in many other ways, potentially in the media if you can dig up the dirt we need. We have the connections.

#infosec #OSINT #OSINTAnalysis

p r o p e r d e m o c r a c y . o r g

Fun fact: I was in a band in college, whose access to a studio was part of a local government-funded youth initiative. There was a meeting of all the bands, and we were handed a sheet of paper with questions on it. One of them was, "What's the name of your band?". We put "nothing" because we hadn't thought of one yet.

Then shortly afterwards, our bassist quit. And that's the story of how our band became named Less Than Nothing.

I read about how unpopular Martin Luther King Jr. was among white Americans in his day.

If you wish to understand why the USA is in the state it's in, listen to any speech by this great man and imagine, as vividly as you can, how much hatred you would have to have in your heart to not recognize the profound historic importance of that oratory.

Imagine how consumed by racism you would have to be to not be stirred by those words, but to hear only a troublemaker.

That's the USA. That's MAGA.

A bit of our garden. We don't have soil, so *everything* is in pots. In this heatwave weather it can take an hour or more a day to keep all these sessile lifeforms healthy. The struggle is real! 😆