...This is not gulag socialism ...
Yeah, we know, it's final solution socialism.
...This is not gulag socialism ...
Yeah, we know, it's final solution socialism.
Elon Musk compares his company’s work to that of Jesus
... “It has enabled people who have completely lost their brain-body connection to speak again … and we believe it will enable people to walk again,” Musk said of Neuralink’s brain-computer interface, or BCI, technologies.
... “Restoring control of people who are tetraplegics and restoring sight I think are pretty big deals,” Musk said on Monday at the conference, adding: “They’re sort of what I might call Jesus-level technologies.” ...
Trump invokes emergency powers with $23 billion in Gulf arms sales as Iran war wages on: WSJ report
... For some of the deals, the American government invoked the emergency clause of U.S. arms control law, a mechanism that allows the executive branch to proceed without the standard 30-day congressional review period, according to the report.
Trump's stupid November 2016 Contract With The American Voter had 28 points, too, remember?
The first thing on that list was "impose term limits on all members of Congress" and the last ten things started with the words "work with Congress".
This peace plan is just the banal repurposing of that template, same as with Gaza, filled with more surrender to Russia Russia Russia and more Pie In The Sky than gramma can bake.
The unseriousness is off the charts.
AXIOS had the scoop here:
1. Ukraine's sovereignty will be confirmed.
[What, like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum ROFLMAO?]
2. A comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled.
[LOL, they're going to wave a magic wand and start over with a blank slate. Cue Burt The Invisible from Soap.]
3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighboring countries and NATO will not expand further.
[Sure, sure. In your dreams, pal. This was definitely written by Trump at 3AM]
4. A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.
[ALL issues, lol.]
5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees.
[Like from God maybe?]
6. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel.
[I'll take Nation Building for $1,000, Alex.]
7. Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.
[Ukraine misbehaved in class and has to write "I will not join NATO" on the blackboard 100 times after school.]
8. NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine.
[Watch me herd cats!]
9. European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland.
[There are no European fighter jets.]
10. The U.S. guarantee:
[What if Russia launches missiles at Kyiv, which happens every goddamn day?]
11. Ukraine is eligible for EU membership and will receive short-term preferential access to the European market while this issue is being considered.
[Do they get frequent flyer miles with that?]
12. A powerful global package of measures to rebuild Ukraine, including but not limited to:
[All this new spending by a bankrupt country already $38.2 trillion in debt]
13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:
[Russia will never pay for its war crimes in Ukraine.]
14. Frozen funds will be used as follows:
[The G7 holds $300 billion in frozen Russian assets, hardly enough for the current estimates for rebuilding Ukraine, which run from $524 billion to $1.1 trillion.]
15. A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.
["Ensure compliance" how?]
16. Russia will enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine.
[Molotov-Ribbentrop anyone?]
17. The United States and Russia will agree to extend the validity of treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons, including the START I Treaty.
[This peace plan is the everything bagel.]
18. Ukraine agrees to be a non-nuclear state in accordance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
[This worked out great the last time in 1994, didn't it?]
19. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant will be launched under the supervision of the IAEA, and the electricity produced will be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine — 50:50.
[Like Chernobyl, right?]
20. Both countries undertake to implement educational programs in schools and society aimed at promoting understanding and tolerance of different cultures and eliminating racism and prejudice:
[Mighty woke of you.]
21. Territories:
[Trump is Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler in 1938.]
22. After agreeing on future territorial arrangements, both the Russian Federation and Ukraine undertake not to change these arrangements by force. Any security guarantees will not apply in the event of a breach of this commitment.
23. Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.
24. A humanitarian committee will be established to resolve outstanding issues:
25. Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days.
26. All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.
[In other words there will be no Nuremberg Tribunal for the Butchers of Bucha.]
27. This agreement will be legally binding. Its implementation will be monitored and guaranteed by the Peace Council, headed by President Donald J. Trump. Sanctions will be imposed for violations.
[Who will head it in 2029?]
28. Once all parties agree to this memorandum, the ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides retreat to agreed points to begin implementation of the agreement.
That basically encapsulates the initial emotional reaction of the Trump administration to the murder of Charlie Kirk in 2025.
... That evening, CNN reported that bombs were dropping in Afghanistan — and then updated the report to say they weren't our bombs.
They should have been ours. I want them to be ours.
This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson. ...
You probably remember the column more for the closing however:
We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.
Because Trump is weak, Mark. It's a failure of nerve. He doesn't have the right stuff.
Iran should be forced to sign a surrender document. Unconditional surrender. They lost their nukes, they’ve lost their air force, they have no ground-to-air protection. China didn’t step in, Russia didn’t step in, not a single Arab country stepped in. The Supreme Nazi is hiding in a bunker much like Adolf Hitler did. Adolf Hitler wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He was going to be killed, so he committed suicide.
More.
There isn't a single story on the front page right now at The Federalist about the Israeli-Iranian conflict, like it's not even news.
Asking the people to make more sacrifices, to get even poorer through tariff-induced higher prices, all for the sake of The Party und Der Führer is really . . . rich.
... If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy. ...
We are at that moment in Animal Farm when the gentle carthorse Clover looks through the window to see the pigs playing cards and drinking a toast with men.
The pigs are all perfectly at ease and sitting back in chairs around a table, no doubt a rougher surface than the luxurious polished table used to host America’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week. The Russian press reports that the meeting was a love-fest of jokes and bonhomie, with a “very tasty lunch”.
George Orwell’s scene was an allegory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Europe’s great power alignment suddenly and violently shifted. The liberal democracies woke up on Aug 23 1939 to discover that the Soviet Union had reached a non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Days later, Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Nazis could then turn their concentrated fury on France and Britain without having to worry about a second front.
Britain had started to re-arm as early as 1935. Neville Chamberlain hurled money at the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, with Spitfire squadrons arriving just in time. Defence spending had risen to 9pc of GDP by 1939.
This time, Europe’s democracies have indulged the same pacifist illusions as they did in the run up to 1939 but have milked the peace dividend even longer. Military spending by EU states was 1.9pc of GDP in 2024, a full 17 years after Vladimir Putin declared political war on liberal civilisation and all its works at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 – “a good speech” said one Angela Merkel, audibly, in the front row.
He then set about restoring the tsarist empire to the borders of Catherine the Great with an unswerving consistency. Austria is not even part of Nato and behaves accordingly.
Some are rising to the challenge. Denmark has given its stock of munitions to Ukraine and even the trade unions back a war tax to raise defence spending to 4pc of GDP. “We are in a very, very critical period in world history,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister.
Poland’s military budget is already up to 4.7pc. “We’re that afraid,” said his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski at last week’s Munich forum.
Lithuania aims for 5pc to 6pc of GDP by next year, alarmed by intelligence warnings that Putin may seize the Suwalki Gap, which runs through its territory from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
They all know that Putin has a narrow window of time to attack if the Ukraine war is quickly settled on Russian terms. His advantage is temporary: a greatly enlarged army heading for 1.5m by 2026 and an industrial war economy firing on all cylinders but untenable for much longer.
Fears are growing that Donald Trump will order the US military to pull its Nato tripwire forces out of the Baltics in order to seal the “deal of the century” with the Kremlin. Will he swallow the bait as the smooth McKinsey-trained head of Russia’s investment fund, Kirill Dmitriev, dangles the offer of hydrocarbon riches – real or imagined – in Russian Arctic waters?
The issue runs deeper in any case. Maga America has a greater natural affinity for Putin’s Right-wing cultural Weltanschauung than it does for the liberal democracies. After the battering of the last two weeks, some of us are forced to conclude that Britain and Europe are now the real enemies for this new Washington and, furthermore, that the US is anything but isolationist under Donald Trump.
He will not let us carry on being different. He will force-feed us his Maga ideology. His oil-fracking energy secretary was in London this week describing our renewables as “sinister”. Will we face sanctions for trying to do something about CO2 emissions? Perhaps, yes. Particularly for that.
I do not wish to dissect every post by Trump on Truth Social, or dwell on the speech by JD Vance. I think Britain should repeal all its hate legislation and stop misusing police resources on thought crimes. It should stop dividing us into categories and return to colour-blind liberalism. But one can agree with elements of Vance’s anti-woke critique while entirely rejecting the larger message behind it.
We are told repeatedly by Trump’s circle that he does not really mean what he says, or that we should not overreact to what he is very clearly doing. Let us hope they are right, but it is becoming harder by the day to have confidence in such assurances, or to believe that either Republicans or plutocrats will lift a finger to stop him – and I say this as a defender of Pax Americana for half a century.
Sir Keir Starmer is right to stay calm and try to defuse this terrifying inter-allied crisis on his visit to the White House. But we of The Telegraph parish, readers and writers alike, will all have to look into our souls if, as now seems painfully plausible, Britain is singled out for tariff warfare along with Europe on the pretext of our VAT taxes.
Worse yet if Trump does this while reaching a cosy commodity deal with Putin along with a grand bargain with Xi Jinping to protect Elon Musk’s interests in China. That would test one’s pro-American sympathies to breaking point.
Europe shares much of the blame for the disintegration of the Western alliance system. It failed to re-arm after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Germany rewarded Putin months later by launching the Nord Stream 2 project, which had no purpose other than depriving Kyiv of strategic leverage by re-routing Siberian gas through Baltic pipelines. In return, Germany enjoyed a sweetheart gas deal at sub-market prices.
Britain could have rebuilt its military hardware at ultra-low borrowing costs during the secular stagnation of the 2010s, when it had ample spare capacity. It could have rebuilt its decaying infrastructure and revived its economy at the same time. The multiplier effect would have let us do these things without pushing the debt ratio any faster. Britain pursued austerity instead. Now it faces a greater task, in a hostile bond market.
Europe was even more destructive. Germany cut public investment and military spending to the bone for 15 years. It relied on mercantilist export surpluses of 8pc of GDP to drive growth, a policy that has left Germany in the cross-hairs of Trump’s trade warriors.
The eurozone debt crisis – self-inflicted because the European Central Bank did not then have political approval to back-stop debts – turned into a wider depression because Brussels over-egged austerity and used bailouts to impose drastic spending cuts. There was no exemption for military spending.
Defence as a share of GDP in 2015 was Hungary 0.5pc, Belgium 0.8pc, Germany 1.0pc, Spain 1.0pc, Italy 1.2pc, France 1.8pc –and that was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Military budgets crept up slowly thereafter but not enough to prevent further disarmament.
Europe thought it could keep free-riding on Uncle Sucker forever, despite warnings that this would end badly. There was much talk along the way of a European army and endless euro-speak meetings about procedures, modalities and the architecture of EU defence, but never anything real. That is why Europe today finds itself utterly naked.
But nobody expected it to end this badly and this suddenly. To watch an ally of 80 years turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days.