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We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of this blog.

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

Gaza and media focus

 


Below are two charts, one showing all the major conflicts going on in the world and the deaths accumulated by them in the month of September 2026. The second chart lists the media coverage/headlines and attention those deaths received. We now have real data to back up what many of us have been saying for months on this app. Look at Gaza/Palestine with 120 the “least amount of deaths” where supposedly a genocide is happening but with “the most coverage.” Nigeria had 451 deaths nearly 4 times that of Gaza but received ZERO HEADLINES and they receive $730 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars FY2025. Somalia had 194 deaths, 74 murders than Gaza and receives ZERO HEADLINES and they received $498 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars FY2025. Gaza receives way more headlines, coverage, and attention than Ukraine and they had 6202 deaths in September alone and it’s not considered a GENOCIDE. Nobody’s marching in the streets, protesting, and rioting around the world for Ukrainians. Ethiopia had the 4th largest deaths at 609 and coverage is AGAIN surpassed by Gaza and they received $920 MILLION in American taxpayer dollars in FY2025. None of people talking about Gaza care that the tax dollars are getting to extremists and funding their atrocities. And you wanna know why? Yes it’s antisemitism because it’s a conflict with Jewish people. But ALSO in the other countries it’s the Islamists who are doing the killings mainly, but in Gaza they’re being killed and are pissed about it and the world has to know and pay, as they cry victim.

https://x.com/WeSee2024/status/2114857811699958192?s=20









Value creation as the only legitimate source of wealth.

 

I don't know how many people realize that if Elon Musk pulls off what he's building, it will be the biggest social reset in human history. To understand why, you need to understand a concept almost nobody really gets: rent. Yesterday I was talking about it with someone. I told them something simple: the moment a rent sets in, whatever kind it is, it gets paid for. Not necessarily in dollars. It gets paid for in stagnation. So what is a rent? A rent is income that doesn't come from the value you create, but from the position you hold. You don't win because you're better. You win because nobody is allowed to come and beat you. The mechanism is almost always the same. A company succeeds. Then, instead of continuing to innovate, it goes for regulatory capture: licenses, standards, quotas, approvals, lobbying. It turns its lead into a wall. And behind that wall, new entrants can't get in. But they're the ones who innovate. They're the ones who drive prices down, raise quality, create new wealth. When you block them, nothing dramatic happens. Nothing happens at all. Prices stop falling. Quality stalls. The pie stops growing. And when the pie stops growing, the only way to get richer is to take someone else's slice. This is the point almost nobody sees: what people blame on "capitalism" (frozen inequality, a broken social ladder, the feeling that the game is rigged from the start) are the effects of that stagnation. The symptoms of rent. Not of capitalism. Capitalism is competition. Rent is its negation. Now, Elon Musk. He said that by 2036, money won't matter anymore. Most people read it as science fiction. I read it as an implicit critique of our entire monetary system. His reasoning: AI and robots will produce more than we can possibly consume. So prices will collapse. Deflation, not inflation. And this is where it gets interesting. For decades, the role of central banks has been to stabilize prices. In practice: to stop them from falling. Yet in an economy that innovates, the natural direction of prices is down. Look at what a computer cost thirty years ago. Preventing prices from falling was the worst thing we could have done. Because it created an entire generation of rentiers. People who got rich not by creating something, but by owning something at the right time. An apartment. A plot of land. An asset shielded from falling prices by money printing and by rules that choke supply. In a world not captured by the state, house prices would be extremely low. And who would stay rich? The people who keep creating value. The ones whose wealth comes from the valuation of their company, because their company keeps innovating. Wealth you have to re-earn every single year. That's where Elon's line really makes sense. In a world of deflationary abundance, human life would look like a video game. Or a game of chess. If you're good and you start at the bottom, you can rise very, very fast. In a few years. If you're bad and you inherit the inertia of a position you don't know how to maintain, against people who keep innovating, you fall very, very fast too. No more rent. No more entitlement. Just your ability to create value, put back on the line every day. It would be the greatest equalizer in human history. Not equality of outcomes imposed from above. Equality of the playing field, imposed by abundance. I think Elon Musk is reinventing the rules of capitalism. Or rather, bringing them back to their original form: the Austrian school. Real capitalism. Value creation as the only legitimate source of wealth. And at the end of the road, something neither rent nor redistribution has ever achieved: the end of poverty on a global scale.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2115023725556871325?s=20

Monday, October 26, 2026

the problem was the business model

 

Another proof? Look at South America. It's the live experiment, running right now in front of us. For two decades, the continent was the showroom of 21st-century socialism. Chávez, Maduro, Morales, Correa, Kirchner, Petro. Endless promises, endless crises, endless enemies to blame. Then voters turned. Argentina elected Milei, who inherited 211% inflation and brought it down to around 34%. Bolivia ended nearly twenty years of socialist MAS rule. Chile elected José Antonio Kast with 58% of the vote. Ecuador kept Noboa. Peru moved right. And Colombia, after four years of Gustavo Petro, elected Abelardo de la Espriella. Look closely at Colombia, because it's the clearest case. Petro's flagship policy was "Total Peace": negotiating with guerrillas and narco organizations, treating armed groups as political partners. De la Espriella did the opposite. Within weeks he ordered a "total offensive" against the ELN guerrilla and the FARC dissidents and ruled out any negotiation with what he calls narco-terrorism. Daily arrests. Strikes against the Clan del Golfo, the country's largest cartel. Same country, same army, same cartels. Different will. That's the question that should keep you up at night. If crime can be confronted the moment someone actually decides to confront it, why wasn't it? My answer: because the problem was the business model. A left that solves problems makes itself unnecessary. Its entire apparatus, the parties, the unions, the NGOs, the consultants, the international conferences, the careers built on "managing" poverty, violence and inequality, lives off the problem continuing. Solve crime and you lose the fear that justifies your programs. Solve inflation and you lose the state that controls prices. Solve poverty and you lose your clients. I'm not saying they plotted it in a back room. I'm saying every incentive points the same way, and people follow incentives. A movement that lives off chaos will never be in a hurry to end it. Its status, its funding, its standard of living depend on the problem never going away. And that's what is collapsing today. Across South America, voters looked at decades of problems that were "managed" but never solved, and they fired the managers. Brazil is the last big piece. If it follows, the five largest economies on the continent will all be governed from the right. The lesson for the rest of us, for Americans voting in a few days, for Europeans watching their countries drift: a problem that is never solved is not always a failure. Sometimes it's the product. Free people solve problems because they have something to lose when problems persist. Collectivists manage problems because they have something to lose when problems end.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2114306917434540138?s=20





Once you see the world through this lens, a lot of things that looked random suddenly make sense. You understand why Macron recognized a Palestinian state at the UN. Not a state with borders it controls, a single government, or elections. A symbol. A gesture for domestic consumption, performed on the world stage. That's the politics of posture over reality, the obłuda I described earlier: what matters isn't what is true on the ground, it's the narrative you get to emit. You understand why Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France's hard left and a man trained in Trotskyist organizations in his youth, made Gaza the center of his politics and refused for months to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Look at the mechanism. He doesn't address French Muslims as individuals with their own jobs, families, ambitions and disagreements. He addresses them as a bloc. A mass to be mobilized. That's the collectivist reflex in its purest form: you don't speak to people, you herd categories. Yesterday the proletariat, today identity blocs. The individual disappears every time. You understand why Zohran Mamdani built his rise on the Democratic Socialists of America. The mayor of New York isn't just a progressive Democrat. He's a DSA member, and DSA doesn't hide what it is: an organization that openly calls itself socialist and treats the Democratic Party as a vehicle. His campaign promised a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses. Every one of those ideas has the same shape: the individual steps back, the city steps in. The price is set by the planner, the store is run by the planner, and voters are addressed as categories, tenants, riders, communities, rather than as free people who can build something of their own. And Mamdani didn't come out of nowhere. The same movement helped send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Bernie Sanders spent decades making the word "socialist" respectable in American politics. Different faces, same software. The lie isn't that they hide their ideology. It's the promise attached to it: that you can freeze prices without killing supply, that the state can run what entrepreneurs run, that someone else will always pay. That promise has been tested on every continent. It has never been kept. And you understand the most important thing: collectivists need chaos. This isn't a metaphor. It's their own doctrine. Lenin's strategy in 1914 was to turn the war between nations into a civil war inside them. The Soviet Union spent decades arming and funding movements across the Middle East and pushed through the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The KGB had an entire doctrine, "active measures," dedicated to amplifying every division inside Western societies. A stable, prosperous, confident society is the collectivist's worst enemy. Chaos is his natural habitat. Why? Because chaos is the perfect justification. It justifies emergency powers. It justifies more state. It turns citizens into frightened masses looking for a shepherd. It replaces individual judgment with tribal loyalty. A society at peace with itself asks the planner: what do we need you for? Look at the two great conflicts of our time through this lens. Russia's war in Ukraine was launched by a former KGB officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the century. A man formed in the exact school that treated chaos as a weapon. He doesn't just wage war on Ukraine. He wages it on Western cohesion, feeding every division he can find in our elections, our streets, our feeds. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the perfect fuel for Western politics. It splits every campus, every party, every city. It lets politicians like Mélenchon build an electoral base on permanent outrage. And for everyone who lives off that outrage, a real peace would be a disaster. Ask yourself honestly: who in our political class actually has an interest in this conflict ending? That's the pattern. The people who live off chaos never solve it. They manage it, they feed it, they posture around it. Because a solved problem is a lost lever. Freedom produces order from the bottom up: people who own things, build things, trade with each other and have something to lose. Collectivism produces disorder from the bottom up and then sells you order from the top down. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.






Sunday, October 25, 2026

How the EU legislates

 

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.


https://x.com/brivael/status/2114088268199518595?s=20




I've been saying it for months: we're heading toward a new 1989. Not the fall of the Berlin Wall this time. The fall of the globalist project, and its fundamentally collectivist vision of humanity. Remember the video Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum published in 2016, the "predictions for 2030." Prediction number one: "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy." You'll own nothing, rent everything, and smile about it. They presented it as a desirable future. Marx summed up communism in a single sentence: the abolition of private property. The WEF just rewrote it with a delivery drone. Their problem is that two forces are now tearing this project apart. The first is AI. For the first time in history, a single individual can own a lever of production that used to require an army of employees, a bank, and a state. AI doesn't centralize capital. It hands it to the people who build. That is the exact opposite of "you'll own nothing." The second is reality. Exploding debt, collapsing public services despite record taxes, rising insecurity, schools that no longer teach anything. You can lie about reality for decades. You can't stop it from arriving. So here's what they're going to do now. First, activate their networks. Soros's foundations, starting with Open Society, have spent years pouring money into NGOs, activist collectives, and "anti-repression" groups that form the ideological and logistical breeding ground of the crowds we're seeing today from Paris to Montreal. When the argument no longer works, all that's left is chaos. Second, manipulate the youth. This is how communists have always taken power. Mao, speaking to Chinese students in 1957: "The world is yours. You young people are like the sun at eight or nine in the morning." Nine years later, he unleashed the Red Guards: high schoolers and university students who humiliated their teachers, denounced their parents, and burned books. And once they were no longer useful, he shipped some 17 million of them off to the countryside to be "re-educated." Youth is always the fuel of the revolution. Never its beneficiary. Third, the globalist elites will do everything they can to keep the chaos going. Because a country in chaos demands more state, more control, more surveillance, more "governance." Chaos isn't a bug in their project. It's how it runs. But either way, their project has only two possible endings. Neither one goes their way. Ending one: political Islam. They think they can use it as an ally against the West, against the nation, against the family. They forgot Iran. In 1979, the Iranian left, led by the communists of the Tudeh Party, marched hand in hand with Khomeini to overthrow the Shah. Four years later, the party was banned, its leaders in prison, many of them executed. Islamism never lets itself be used by Marxism. It devours it. Your Marxist project will end up eaten by the very people you thought you were manipulating. Ending two: economic collapse. Because let's say it plainly: the elites running this project are, on the whole, economically illiterate. Brilliant at storytelling, hopeless at incentives. Ludwig von Mises proved it back in 1920: without private property there are no prices, without prices there is no economic calculation, and without economic calculation there is only waste and shortage. Hayek drove the point home: no central planner can aggregate the dispersed knowledge of billions of people. Global collectivism can't work. Not because it's been badly implemented. Because it is structurally impossible. The USSR learned that in 1989. They're about to learn it now. The wall is already shifting.

https://x.com/brivael/status/2114099112060551651?s=20


Gaza and media focus

  Tanja @WeSee2024 Below are two charts, one showing all the major conflicts going on in the world and the deaths accumulated by them in the...