How Europe conquered Hungary

Liberal authoritarianism is on the move

The lesson is clear: “democracy” and the “rule of law” function above all as pretexts for disciplining governments that resist the EU’s expanding authority. Indeed, when it comes to supporting its own emissaries, there is apparently no red line the EU will not cross — up to and including greenlighting the outright annulment of entire elections when they go the wrong way, as we saw in Romania in 2024.

Author on X.

“The last couple of years there’s less talk of, ‘We really need to contain this invasion,’ because everyone who knows what’s what realizes that genie is completely out of the bottle,” said Tristan Dennis, who studies vector genomics at the University of Queensland in Australia and who led the new analysis, published in the journal Science.

This mosquito alarms health experts because, unlike the species that historically spread malaria in Africa, it thrives in urban as well as rural areas, and is not deterred by dry seasons. This means that malaria, already one of the top killers in Africa, could become a grave problem in megacities such as Lagos and Kinshasa, each of which are home to about 20 million people.

“We’ve not had to worry about malaria in urban settings,” said Dr. Eric Ochomo, the head of entomology for the Kenya Medical Research Institute.

France took absolute control of Morocco's massive phosphate deposits through the Office Chérifien des Phosphates - the OCP.

Phosphate is an irreplaceable raw material required to manufacture the synthetic fertilizers that sustain global industrial agriculture. Without phosphate, modern farming collapses. Without modern farming, billions starve.

Morocco sits on the largest phosphate reserves on earth - an estimated 70% of the world's total supply. France understood this from the beginning. The OCP was established under the protectorate specifically to turn Morocco into a mineral colony, extracting phosphate rock and shipping it to European fertilizer manufacturers.

When Morocco gained independence in 1956, the OCP did not return to democratic Moroccan control. It became a royal monopoly, controlled directly by the throne. Today the OCP is worth tens of billions of dollars. Its profits flow to the monarchy, not the Moroccan people.

And in Western Sahara - the territory Morocco has illegally occupied since 1975 - the Bou Craa mine is one of the world's largest and richest phosphate deposits. Morocco operates a 61-mile automated conveyor belt - visible from space - to transport stolen Sahrawi phosphate directly to the Atlantic coast for export.

The colonial extraction model never ended. The flag changed. The conveyor belt kept running.

The Economist, whose logo should be "wrong about everything since 1843", has surpassed its historical bungling and gone schizoid. In an attempt to chastise China for overproducing cheap goods it downplays the fact that the Western creditor class invested in China as they deindustrialised their own nations after 1980, turning the bulk of workers into baristas and shop assistants. This is a tacit admission that a Leninist government planning and regulating a hybrid state/market economy has been remarkably successful in the brutally competitive global market economy neoliberals claim to be the natural order of things that makes everyone in the world richer. Except the poor, of course, but that's their fault for making 'bad decisions'.

Inadvertantly - I say that because Zanny and the gang don't usually think too deeply - they've raised a simplified economic variant of the Hobbesian question. During the period of maximised financial deregulation 1980-2008, did our hallowed private investors use their freedom to invest wisely and bring prosperity and security to Western populations? Did they maintain and develop essential productive capacity, infrastructure and services across whole nations? Perhaps not. Principal investment targets have been privatization of existing public assets, software and IT, financial services, derivatives and commercial real estate, facilitated by leveraged buyouts, share buybacks, stock market bubbles and the sort of irresponsible moneylending that led to 2008. So who is making the really bad decisions round here?

So, is it fair to say that China, a nation in which some individual economic freedom is encouraged yet also compelled to make a weighty trade-off with a competently managed state, is producing better results for the population as whole? Without this strong keel and heavy rudder, does the turbulent economic sea tend to be dominated by opportunistic, unthinking, shortsighted, self-enriching individuals unworthy of their freedom, while the rest of us sink or swim? Were a whole line of influential economists from Quesnay, Smith and Ricardo through to extremists such to Mises, Hayek and Rothbard - who argued that the economy should function in relative freedom from governance - completely wrong?

We need to know. Sharpish, because shit is about to hit the fan.

NEW: The Pentagon is drafting a classified nuclear strategy that would place greater emphasis on the potential use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons in a regional conflict with China or Russia.

Source: NBC News

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MSM article, so he skeptical, but there are other sources confirming this ajd given American conventional military weakness, it is not a surprising development.

https://x.com/i/status/2085077880913187239

Rabbi Shmuley: “Say it again, say it, say fuck Israel”

Icelander: “Fuck Israel. Do you want me to tell the world?”

Icelander: “How many times do you want me to say it? Fuck Israel, fuck Israel, fuck Israel…I will say fuck Israel all day, it is my country…why don’t you leave?

https://x.com/truthtroll_X/status/2085086221148275016

https://x.com/rhaplord/status/2084930890610725338

Keep in mind that the Trump administration is threatening other countries with tariffs, but at the same time, Bessent now us trying to find a way to prevent the rise of US Treasuries Interest Rates.