Hear me out...turf the 'Alto' albatross and redirect for a high-speed rail line for bitumen exports...

Who knew...

Most Western democracies have been hacked. Not with code. With institutional architecture. Let me show you how it works, using the most advanced example: the European Union. First, how it works. Once every five years, you vote for a European Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation. The body that proposes laws is the Commission: 27 commissioners nobody elected, appointed after backroom bargaining between heads of state. Bills are then negotiated between the Commission, Parliament and Council in "trilogues", closed-door meetings where the real decisions get made. A law that will apply to 450 million people goes through corridors that 99.9% of them will never see. Now look at who's in those corridors. Brussels has become the lobbying capital of the world: nearly 18,000 organizations on the transparency register, tens of thousands of lobbyists, more than 50 for every single MEP. And that's just the declared part. Add the revolving door: a former MEP only has to wait six months before becoming a lobbyist to the EU himself. The real problem is distance. A national MP who votes for a law that ruins the farmers in his district runs into them at the market on Saturday. In Brussels, the decision-maker never meets the people who live with his decisions. But he meets lobbyists every day: at lunch, at cocktails, at conferences. So the system doesn't optimize for the wellbeing of the people. It optimizes for the interests of whoever is in the room. You don't even need corruption for that, incentives are enough. Although sometimes, as Qatargate showed, there's corruption too. The result: the system has a structural incentive to accept things the people would never vote for. Take Mercosur. Twenty-five years of negotiations. France votes against it in the Council in January 2026 and gets outvoted. To keep national parliaments from blocking it, the Commission splits the deal into two texts, including a trade agreement that only needs a vote in Brussels. The European Parliament itself writes, in black and white, that this split circumvents the right of national parliaments, and refers the deal to the EU Court of Justice. The Commission's response: it has been applying the agreement provisionally since May 1, 2026, without waiting for the Court's opinion. Farmers were protesting outside Parliament. They lost anyway. And remember the one time the people were actually asked about Europe directly: in 2005, France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution. The text came back two years later as the Lisbon Treaty, ratified by parliaments. No more referendums. But the worst of it is immigration. In 2015, relocation quotas were imposed by qualified majority on countries that had voted against them. Since June 12, 2026, the Pact on Migration and Asylum applies across the entire Union, with its "mandatory solidarity" mechanism: you take people in, or you pay. Not a single European people has ever been consulted directly on this, even though it's the issue that is transforming our societies most profoundly. And this is where we have to talk about the most sophisticated piece of the machine: George Soros. Soros understood before anyone else that you don't need to win elections if you shape the ecosystem around the people who make decisions. His network, the Open Society Foundations, describes itself as the largest private funder of advocacy groups in the world. In Brussels, it runs its own lobbying arm aimed at EU institutions, the Open Society European Policy Institute. Here's what we know from internal documents leaked in 2016: a document titled "Reliable allies in the European Parliament" listed more than 200 MEPs. Strategy papers described building "inside-track groups" to caucus "internal allies" who could advance their goals in their daily work. Training sessions were organized for MEPs on how to counter so-called populist parties. The mechanism is brutally elegant. Think tanks produce the "expertise". NGOs produce the "demand from civil society". Legal NGOs litigate in the courts. Funded media outlets produce the narrative. The Brussels decision-maker, cut off from the population, hears the same message from every direction and ends up believing that this is what people want. And the craziest part: the institutions fund the loop themselves. Between 2021 and 2023, the EU paid around €7.4 billion to NGOs, and the European Court of Auditors found the use of that money insufficiently transparent. It even came out that the Commission had funded NGOs to lobby MEPs in favor of its own Green Deal legislation. The institution pays "civil society" to ask it to do what it already wanted to do. All of this is legal. That's exactly what makes it a hack and not a crime. The system works exactly as designed, except nobody designed it for the people anymore. The patch is simple to state and hard to impose: bring decisions back closer to the people who bear them, hold referendums on issues that change a civilization, create a mandatory register for every influence actor, NGOs included, with their funding sources, and shut the revolving door. Until that happens, European democracy will remain what it has become: a user interface sitting on top of a system that runs for someone else.

Now would be a good time to release the Lions & Tigers...

A little palette cleaner from all the crap that's been on here lately...

Our next Saint...

If you want to understand the chaos. And how it will end. Watch this:

🚨 EU PARLIAMENT ERUPTS 🚨 🇩🇪 A German MEP warns Canada could become a “living hell.” 📄 We obtained the draft statement circulated by Canada. 🇨🇦 Europe held a dedicated debate. Where’s ours? What is Carney negotiating on Canadians’ behalf? Watch below 👇

On top of everything else...Kennedy is a 'Master Spook' as well...respect...

It's a big Berg...

This is worthy of an annual 'Day'...

I love the USA, I love France, I love Japan, I love Italy. I love them because they're countries with radically different cultures and ways of life. And that difference is exactly what makes them valuable. America, I love your pragmatism in business and your technical excellence in everything you do. For you, an idea is worth what it produces. You build, you ship, you do it again. No country on earth turns ambition into reality faster. Italy, I love your art of living and your passion. The espresso downed standing at the bar in thirty seconds. The evening passeggiata where the whole town goes out to walk for no reason, just to be together. La bella figura, the idea that you owe it to the world to look elegant even to buy bread. Sunday lunch that lasts four hours with three generations around the table. And that relationship between men and women, unapologetic, playful, made of glances, gallantry and seduction without guilt. For you, life isn't a problem to optimize. It's something to savor. France, I love your intellectual side. That need to think everything through, debate everything, question everything. It has its flaws, especially when it gets lost in detached leftist theories. But when it's put to work on things that matter, it's incredibly fertile. Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville, Poincaré. France remains the intellectual lung of the West, for better and for worse. Japan, I love your obsession with detail. The craftsman who spends his entire life perfecting a single gesture. The silence on the subway, streets spotless without trash cans, respect as a collective reflex. You've proven you can be at the cutting edge of modernity without giving up a single second of who you are. Spain, I love your relationship with the night, with celebration, with family. Dinner at 10pm, life lived outdoors, everyone talking loud, and everyone with a seat at the table. Germany, I love your rigor, your industry, your pride in work done right. You gave the world Bach, Kant and half of modern precision engineering. Britain, I love your humor, your composure and your institutions. You invented parliamentary government, common law and the industrial revolution. Not bad for an island. Greece, I love that it all started with you. Democracy, philosophy, geometry, theater. Every time a Westerner thinks, he speaks a little Greek. Portugal, I love your melancholy, your saudade, and the insane courage to send caravels into the unknown while the rest of the world was still staring at the coastline. Ireland, I love your pubs, your poets, and your gift for turning every tragedy in your history into a song. Switzerland, I love your direct democracy and the living proof that four languages can hold together when each identity is respected. Poland, I love your pride. You were wiped off the map, occupied, crushed, and you're still here, standing, true to yourselves. Scandinavia, I love your collective trust, your restraint, your design. Societies where you can leave your bike unlocked. All these countries are different. And that's exactly what the West is: not a uniform mass, but a mosaic of nations that fought, influenced and inspired each other for centuries, and together produced the most fertile civilization in human history. Every country must remain. Every culture must remain. When you're in Italy, you should still feel like you're in Italy. When you're in France, you should still feel like you're in France. This project of total destruction and dilution of cultures, dissolved in the acid of mass immigration and of a culture and religion that aren't ours, is a completely insane project. It has to stop. Fast. Everywhere in the West.

The Useful Idiot: A Natural History Specimen: Western, educated, well-meaning. Habitat: universities, NGOs, quality newspapers, dinner parties where the wine is good and the opinions are better. Status: abundant. The useful idiot is not exactly stupid. This is the first and most important thing to understand. Stupidity would be a defense. The more precise diagnosis is what we in Poland call pół-inteligent – the half-wit. Not the bottom of the intelligence distribution, which is too obviously lost to be useful. Not the genuine top, which tends to develop the inconvenient habit of following arguments wherever they actually lead. The sweet spot: smart enough to absorb a complex ideological framework, to deploy its vocabulary with confidence, to feel the social rewards of appearing sophisticated – but not quite sharp enough to interrogate the framework itself. Enough horsepower to run the program. Not enough to question who wrote it. The pół-inteligent is the useful idiot’s technical specification. And the specimen is typically convinced – this is crucial – that it is among the most independent thinkers in the room. The delusion is important. Remove it and the whole architecture collapses. The species emerges in conditions of comfort and safety, which is why it proliferates in precisely the societies it works to undermine. It requires a baseline of security – enough that the consequences of being wrong about power remain abstract, theoretical, someone else’s problem. Eastern Europeans, who paid in flesh and decades for the privilege of understanding what the useful idiot enables, are able to see this as naivety so profound it becomes a moral failure. Not innocence. Culpable ignorance dressed as virtue. Observe the specimen in its natural habitat. It discovers The Cause sometime between the ages of 18 and 24, usually at an institution of higher education, usually through social contagion rather than solitary reasoning. The Cause varies by generation – Soviet sympathies, third-worldism, postcolonial theory, current-year identity grievance – but the structure is invariant: a clean division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, a designated villain class, and a role for the specimen as enlightened ally. The emotional reward is immediate and substantial. Belonging. The claim of moral clarity. The warm superiority of the awake among the sleeping. What the specimen does not perceive – what it is structurally prevented from perceiving – is that it is being used. Lenin coined the phrase, and he meant it with cold precision. The useful idiot is not a partner in the project. It is infrastructure. It provides legitimacy laundering: translating raw power-seeking into the language of justice, making the predatory appear compassionate, and doing so with enough genuine conviction to be convincing. The cynics who run the operation cannot do this themselves – cynicism is legible. True believers are required. The useful idiot’s sincerity is its primary value to those who deploy them. And so Lenin used them – and so does Islam now. The specimen’s lifecycle has a melancholy third act that it rarely anticipates. When the project advances far enough – when the institutions are captured, when the Overton window has moved sufficiently – the useful idiot becomes inconvenient. It knows too much about the earlier, more honest phase. It has friendships across the new fault lines. It retains, sometimes, inconvenient principles from when principles were the point. The revolution, as it industrializes, prefers newer models: fully formed apparatchiks with no memory of idealism to complicate their loyalty. The useful idiot is retired, marginalized, occasionally denounced by the very movement it spent decades building. It dies puzzled. It never quite understands what happened. We've all seen the very surprised lady in Paris... History is littered with these figures. Western intellectuals who defended the Soviet project through the show trials, the Holodomor, the Gulag – and who spent the rest of their lives in various stages of retrospective rationalization. Fellow travelers who called Solidarity troublemakers, who thought the dissidents were exaggerating, who trusted the official version over the testimony of people who had lived it. Their names are recorded. Their counterparts today are producing content, signing letters, and occupying endowed chairs. The useful idiot is not the enemy. It is the weapon. Understanding the difference matters – because the weapon can, in principle, be disarmed. It requires only one thing: contact with reality at sufficient intensity and duration to override the social rewards of the delusion. This happens. Some recover. Eastern European experience – the unignorable, undeniable, lived reality of what the project actually produces – has cured more than a few. The cure is not pleasant. It requires admitting that one’s most cherished moral identity was constructed by people who found it useful. That the independence one prided oneself on was curated. That the dinner party consensus was not wisdom but a lie. Most cannot make this admission. The identity investment is too great. They double down instead – find new framings, new rationalisations, new ways to explain why this time is different, why the critics are the real problem. They remain, to the end, useful.

*Carney Adjacent....

The Paesans are pissed...

In 2021, the head of the UN World Food Programme said $6 billion from Elon Musk could solve world hunger. Elon replied: publish the plan, right here, publicly, and I'll sell Tesla stock on the spot. The plan came out. And when you read it, it wasn't a plan to solve hunger. It was one year of food for 42 million people. A twelve-month subscription. And the year after? Start over. A few months later, Elon summed up his view: if you care about the reality of goodness rather than the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult. "Reality of goodness over perception of goodness." That line stuck with me for weeks. Does philanthropy actually work? Gates-style philanthropy is first and foremost institutional capture. Foundations funding NGOs, funding governments, funding programs, producing reports, producing photos. Everyone's happy, and the aid machine keeps itself alive. Sixty years and hundreds of billions later, much of Africa is still dependent on aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo laid it out in Dead Aid: aid breeds dependency, feeds corruption, and short-circuits the only mechanism that has ever lifted a country out of poverty. So what actually works? It's been tested. In Kenya, Berkeley researchers working with GiveDirectly randomly selected villages and gave every poor household about $1,000 in cash. No program. No training. No conditions. Just cash. The result: people bought metal roofs, livestock, started small businesses. Barely any inflation. And every dollar injected generated around $2.50 of economic activity locally, including for neighbors who received nothing. Why? Because you didn't give them charity. You gave them capital. You primed the pump. And that's where everything hinges: ownership. Hernando de Soto showed that the world's poor hold trillions of dollars in assets, but without recognized property titles, it's dead capital. You can't borrow against it, pass it on, or grow it. Where property rights are respected, the system starts running. Where they aren't, no amount of aid will ever be enough. Now reread Elon's post. "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many." That's not a meal. That's not a handout. That's a property title. A piece of the company building the infrastructure of a multiplanetary civilization, owned directly by millions of kids. A kid who gets a handout depends on the state. A kid who owns a share of SpaceX owns a piece of the future. He learns what an asset is, he has a stake in the economy working, and one day he'll vote as an owner, not as a client of the state. Gates buys perception. Musk distributes ownership. The reality of goodness versus its perception. And it's absolutely brilliant.

'Slightly precocious...mostly peaceful youth...engaged in some shuffles...' Nonna's take...

'Mostly peaceful youth...in scuffles...' Dude...

As the pinheads in Ottawa are wringing their hands and saying 'I'll have some of that'...

There is a very viral post going around on the leaked Canada-EU framework. I love it but think it gets some things wrong - here is my take. 1/ Everyone cheering the Canada-EU “alliance for the future” should read the fine print before they lift their elbows. Here’s what we’re actually signing up for 🧵 2/ “Associated country status” means we adopt EU regulatory frameworks we don’t vote on. Privacy rules, data rules, procurement rules, written in Brussels for 27 countries that aren’t us. Canada spent decades fighting for a seat at the table. This deal gives us a seat in the hallway. 3/ And what do we get for it? The right to bid on European cloud contracts. Bid. Not win. Against French and German champions in a market designed to protect French and German champions. Ask any Canadian firm that’s tried to sell into the EU how that’s gone. 4/ Meanwhile three in four dollars we earn abroad come from the U.S. That’s not a policy choice. That’s geography, pipelines, auto plants built across the border, and a shared language. No joint statement moves Montreal closer to Rotterdam. 5/ Trump already called this a “hostile act.” We’re mid-negotiation on CUSMA, the only agreement that actually matters, and Ottawa’s play is to publicly flirt with the one partner guaranteed to blow it up. That’s not diversification. That’s picking a fight with your landlord during the lease renewal. 6/ “But the tariffs came first.” Sure. And the response to a trade war with your biggest customer is to negotiate harder with that customer, not to go shopping for a second one who can’t absorb what you sell and won’t pay to ship it. 7/ Europe’s track record on standing with partners under pressure: strongly worded statements, a summit, a working group. Ask Ukraine how fast “associate membership” turned into anything real. We’d be their test case, and test cases get abandoned when the cost shows up. 8/ The Galileo and minerals pieces are fine. Do those as standalone deals. What they don’t require is a quasi-membership that imports Brussels’ rulebook and turns Canada into a bargaining chip in a U.S.-EU fight we didn’t start. 9/ Here’s the question for the people selling this: name one country that got richer by binding itself to EU regulation without a vote in the EU. Norway and Switzerland spent decades resenting exactly that arrangement. We’d be volunteering for it. From across an ocean. 10/ Canada’s future runs north-south whether we like it or not. The grown-up move is to fix that relationship, not to cosplay a European country and hope nobody in Washington notices. They’ve noticed.