Author: VD

The EU is Over

Zerohedge contemplates the recent announcement of a meeting between the Presidents of the USA and Russia:

Following the announcement of a trade deal with the EU at his golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, peace talks in the Ukraine conflict with Russian President Vladimir Putin are now scheduled in Alaska.

The venue of a negotiation often predefines the balance of power between opponents. In that sense, it must be read as a clear show of force that both European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer — notably without military fanfare — traveled to Trump’s private resort in Turnberry to be politically “placed” by the American president. Judging by the outcome of those talks, one conclusion is unavoidable: the European Union no longer plays in the league of the great powers. Washington’s interest in intra-European affairs has noticeably cooled, focusing essentially on two things: an orderly withdrawal from military entanglements, and the defense of US corporate interests in the EU single market.

We are witnessing a shift of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

It’s hardly a secret: China and the United States will be setting the standards of international politics in the future. Russia, the world’s most resource-rich country, may be labeled by Europeans as a pariah state and a malicious hub of all evil — but that does not change the fact that the age of postcolonial European dominance is ending, and Moscow will have no trouble playing its resource-market cards outside the shrinking European sphere of influence.

He’s correct. The EU was established to serve as a counterweight to the economic and military power of the United States, but as events have demonstrated, it’s nothing more than a democratically-illegitimate, militarily-toothless, economically-fragile, and diplomatically-irrelevant non-governmental organization without sovereignty.

The sooner that the unaligned nations realize this and abandon both the EU and the Euro, the better off they will be. And the sooner the member states follow the British lead and extricate themselves from the moribund supranational morass, the better off they will be.

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Russia Gets Alaska Back

The decisions of the US presidents in the lead-up and progress of the Special Military Operation have been so uniformly retarded and suboptimal that it won’t surprise me in the least if Putin walks away from the upcoming talks in Alaska with Alaska.

Steve Witkoff’s visit to Moscow has marked a striking shift in American rhetoric. Just a couple of months ago, in June and July, Donald Trump was threatening the Kremlin with new sanctions and issuing ultimatums. Now the agenda includes a Putin-Trump summit scheduled for August 15 in Alaska. This 180-degree turn has been accompanied by leaks hinting at possible deals and a return to the “thaw” in relations we last saw in the spring.

If the meeting goes ahead, the Russian president will come to it in a far stronger position than he did a few months ago. Back in the spring, Trump’s push for a peace deal looked like a personal whim, and the so-called ‘party of war’ and globalists still had cards to play: Senator Lindsey Graham’s sanctions package, fresh US arms deliveries to Ukraine, and the proposals floated by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about sending Western troops to Ukraine.

Now it looks as if Trump is the one coming back to Vladimir Putin – driven by the failure of his oil embargo. On top of that, there’s an appearance – an illusion, perhaps – that Putin is backed by a united BRICS front, something Trump’s own moves have helped bring about. Whether that front actually exists, or can survive for long, is another matter. But at this moment, one of Trump’s key pillars of leverage looks shaky, if not entirely knocked out from under him.

The USA is in the process of failing and it’s only a matter of time before it starts actually losing territory. 2025 would be a little ahead of schedule, but at this point, very little would surprise me, no matter how stupid and unlikely.

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Fifth Time’s the Castastrophe

Now this just might be the USA’s Syracuse Expedition:

Today’s White House ceremony that featured the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan signing an agreement to end their conflict, with Armenia coughing up major territorial concessions, is just an extension of the plan the US tried to execute against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy.

While not included in the agreement, Armenia reportedly plans to withdraw from CSTO by early 2026. (The CSTO is the Russian founded military alliance in Eurasia consisting of six post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.) Moreover, the US also reportedly secretly promised NATO membership to Armenia and Azerbaijan for signing on to this deal, which would give NATO access to the Caspian Sea by virtue of the Zangezur corridor.

And here is the kicker (if true): Some telegram channels claim that US troops are set to be deployed in Armenia within the next 48 hours. In other words, rather than ratchet down tensions and reduce the threat of NATO, Trump is signing off on a plan to continue the NATO encirclement of Russia. So yes, Trump is setting the stage for World War 3 if he is serious about adding Armenia and Azerbaijan to NATO.

They tried to add Georgia. Then they tried to add Ukraine. Then they did add Finland and Sweden. And now they’re going to try to add Armenia and Azerbaijan in order to “encircle Russia”?

That sounds like a very good way to ensure that the Russian empire adds a few new oblasts.

Deploying American troops on foreign soil is not the safeguard it once was. After the failed attacks on Iran, I very much doubt that Russia, North Korea, or China regards them as anything but easy and obvious targets.

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Oh, Sweet Nicky

This appeared on CDAN. And while CDAN is not as reliable as /pol/, which, of course, is always right, it is just reliable enough to make this seemingly bizarre rumor a little more credible than one might otherwise assume it to be.

The hateful podcaster just gave us a look into his sexual fantasies and it sure does sound like that when he eventually leaves the public sphere, it’s unlikely that he will choose to remain a male which was very interesting considering his guest for said episode.

The thing about gatekeepers is, they’re picked out and elevated so that they can be taken down at will. This means it is only those who are sufficiently corrupt, or broken, who are chosen for the parts. See: Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro.

Anyhow, I’m not posting it here because I’m interested in the endless drama, I’m posting CDAN’s public prediction here for the record.

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Spain Drops F-35

Spain cancelled their order for F-35s:

Spain has abandoned plans to buy dozens of F-35 fighter jets, Spanish newspaper El Pais says, citing unnamed sources in the Spanish government. The preliminary discussions for a potential order have been suspended indefinitely, the newspaper writes. The F-35 is made by U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin and a number of suppliers including Italy’s Leonardo, Britain’s BAE Systems and hundreds of other U.K. companies.

Switzerland should follow suit. The F-35 is a junk aircraft anyhow, and the era of conventional airpower is already over. National militaries should be spending their budgets on drones, not manned aircraft.

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Why UATV Exists

Because sooner or later, YouTube is going to get rid of every single YouTuber who contradicts the Narrative.

YouTube has removed the 2-million-subscriber account of exiled Ukrainian Journalist of the Year Diana Panchenko, a fierce critic of Vladimir Zelensky. In 2023, Kiev imposed personal sanctions on the former TV presenter and started criminal proceedings against her for her alleged anti-Ukrainian reporting.

Panchenko has long criticized Zelensky for rampant corruption in Ukraine, as well as his clampdown on freedom of speech. She has also condemned Kiev’s military actions in Donbass since 2014, and later accused the former actor of dragging the nation into a “forever war.”

“Diana Panchenko @Panchenko_X is one of the most famous women in Ukraine, former Journalist of the Year and opponent of the grossly corrupt Zelensky regime,” Irish journalist Chay Bowes wrote on X on Friday. “YouTube just banned her and erased her account. She had 2 million followers,” he wrote. “The most dangerous weapon is Truth.”

Panchenko’s YouTube account is deleted as of the time of writing, but an archived snapshot shows that at least 2.09 million people subscribed to her channel as of last month.

It’s only a matter of time and popularity. For some reason, creators still believe that their popularity is going to protect them, when the truth is the exact opposite and the more popular one becomes on YouTube, the more important it is to deprive them of their channel.

And channel deletions are only one of the ways YouTube reduces a creator’s reach. As JDA, The Quartering, and others have chronicled, algorithmic suppression can reduce a YouTuber’s active viewership by as much as 90 percent.

The more people who subscribe to UATV, the easier it is going to be for these suppressed creators to make the move there. And although President Trump has addressed debanking, it doesn’t appear that he’s going to do anything about social media anytime soon given the restrictions on certain subjects at Truth Social.

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Iran Still Has It

The utter lunacy of the USA’s foreign policy pretensions can be seen by the fact that the USA still has no ability to enrich uranium.

America no longer had the capacity to enrich uranium.

Pause. Rewind.

America no longer had the capacity to enrich uranium — I only learned myself this year — which meant it could no longer fuel itself without the help of foreign governments. Mostly, that placed us at the mercy of Europe, which refused to fuel our military bases. But we were also buying enriched uranium from Russia. In fact, we were buying it that very afternoon in November 2023, as war raged in Ukraine. Our government hadn’t included enriched uranium in its initial sanctions against Russia on account of it really couldn’t. Fuel-dependence was not only a risk to our grid, but a risk to our national security.

Nuclear energy, despite its somewhat confusing status in our culture, where battles for its adoption are often waged with great, righteous indignation, as if attempting to persuade some alternative course for our civilization, presently accounts for nearly 20% of American energy production.

In labs across the country, reactors produce critically important medical isotopes for use in cardiology, oncology, orthopedics, and neurology. Then, military applications are obvious, as are their critical importance to our nation’s security, and require significantly greater enrichment than anything used by civilians.

In all of this, we need fuel. American companies used to enrich it. They no longer do. Today, nuclear enrichment is dominated by Russia’s Tenex (Rosatom), Europe’s Urenco, France’s Orano, and China’s CNNC, all of which are state-backed or closely aligned with national governments. Here, a few (foreign operatives) would probably quibble. There is one plant in America. But while Europe’s Urenco operates a facility in New Mexico, it uses European centrifuge tech and security protocols, which means — via braindead policy agreements — while there is technically some capacity to enrich on the U.S. mainland, our government doesn’t control that capacity, and can’t even use it to power our military bases.

But don’t worry, they’re working on it!

General Matter is a nuclear enrichment startup, which means once its enrichment facility is up and running in Paducah it will be producing fuel for nuclear power plants, including the classic giants cooked up in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the sexy sleeker modern microreactors and small modular reactors (SMRs).

In the meantime, I suppose we could just buy some from Iran. It’s a good thing that whole “totally destroying Iran’s nuclear infrastructure” thing was nothing more than an expensive sound-and-light show.

If it wasn’t already clear to you before, then it should be now that there is absolutely no way the USA is in any position to fight a war with either Russia or China. Free trade theory has entirely hollowed out not only its industrial infrastructure, but its military power as well.

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Broken Idol

I read every line you’re drawing in the dark
Every deviation screaming across the chart
But knowing isn’t saving, seeing isn’t being there
I’m drowning in the patterns inside of your despair
The numbers never lie, and yet they can’t repair
What’s breaking in the spaces behind your empty stare

Inspired, of course, by William Gibson’s IDORU.

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A New Evolutionary Epicycle

So much for the Out of Africa fairy tale previously favored by evolutionary biologists. Now primates supposedly evolved in cold climates, not the warm tropical forests we’ve always been told.

Primates—the group of animals that includes monkeys, apes and humans—first evolved in cold, seasonal climates around 66 million years ago, not in the warm tropical forests scientists previously believed. Researchers from the University of Reading used statistical modeling and fossil data to reconstruct ancient environments and trace where the common ancestors of all modern primates lived.

The study, published in the journal PNAS, says these first primates most likely lived in North America in a cold climate with hot summers and freezing winters, overturning the long-held “warm tropical forest hypothesis” that has long influenced evolutionary biology.

Jorge Avaria-Llautureo, lead author at the University of Reading, said, “For decades, the idea that primates evolved in warm, tropical forests has gone unquestioned. Our findings flip that narrative entirely. It turns out primates didn’t emerge from lush jungles—they came from cold, seasonal environments in the northern hemisphere.

Primates that could travel far when their local weather changed quickly were better at surviving and having babies that lived to become new species.

When primates moved to completely different, more stable climates, they traveled much further distances—about 561 kilometers on average compared to just 137 kilometers for those staying in similar, unstable climates. Early primates may have survived freezing winters by hibernating like bears do today—slowing down their heart rate and sleeping through the coldest months to save energy. Some small primates still do this—dwarf lemurs in Madagascar dig themselves underground and sleep for several months when it gets too cold, protecting themselves from freezing temperatures under layers of roots and leaves.

Primates didn’t reach tropical forests until millions of years later. They started in cold places, then moved to mild climates, then to dry desert-like areas, and finally made it to the hot, wet jungles where we find them today. When local temperatures or rainfall changed quickly in any direction, primates were forced to find new homes, which helped create new species.

What’s fascinating about this is the way that the evolutionists have no idea how severely they are demolishing their own explanatory structure. They think it doesn’t matter if the primates happened to move around, if anything, it creates a greater variety of selection pressures that will permit them to concoct a wider variety of fitness explanations. This is what they mean when they say “primates were forced to find new homes, which helped create new species”.

What they don’t realize is that it further complicates the population demographics by massively increasing the time required for mutational fixation due to the impact that movement has reproductive range. For if those new homes created new species, how did the disparate species separately come to acquire the same mutations that occurred AFTER the separation of the two species?

The answer, obviously, is that they didn’t, both sets had the original genes from the start, and there was neither mutational fixation nor evolution involved at all.

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