RA

A short thread on what I think is happening - for future ref. To be clear, I think this is a disaster, but I think it's happening. 1 - US reverts to pre WW1 international behaviour. Isolationism, tariffs, rejection of international treaty organisations, 'spheres of influence'.

Major anti-Orbán protests in Hungary tonight! I really hope these people can take their country back tomorrow and free us all from the burden of dealing with an overgrown russian puppet.

"A false claim, now common in Western media and academia, portrays Hezbollah as having emerged in response to Israel’s 1982 invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon. In reality, Hezbollah arose in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution as part of an effort to establish an Islamic state in a Lebanon fractured by warring militias. Since Hezbollah first captured Western attention with its secretive operations and spectacular attacks, the West has produced a vast body of literature describing the group and its rise—often portraying it sympathetically as the movement of the impoverished, the downtrodden, and the victims of Israeli wars and invasions of Lebanon. This narrative is false. From its beginnings, Hezbollah served as an extension of Iran’s revolution, a reality reflected in its early slogans such as “No East Beirut, No West Beirut—an Islamic Republic.” Broadcasting from the eastern Lebanon village of Nabi Sheet, Hezbollah’s radio station frequently aired anthems from the Iranian revolution, chants praising Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and reports on the Iran‑Iraq War. So focused was Hezbollah on Iran’s war against Iraq that most of its first dozen major attacks were aimed at forcing the West to distance itself from Saddam Hussein. Hezbollah even attempted to assassinate Kuwait’s emir in 1985, then one of Iraq’s main financial backers, and carried out attacks against the U.S. and French embassies in the Gulf state. Hezbollah was largely absent from Lebanon’s “resistance” against Israel at the time. Only one of the group’s early attacks—a 1983 car bombing in Tyre—targeted Israeli forces. Instead, the Amal Movement, Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and Communist Party conducted most of the major suicide bombings against Israeli troops in Lebanon. The first retaliation to Hezbollah did not come from Israel, but from the U.S., which attempted a proxy assassination of Shia cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in 1985, striking his mosque in Beirut’s southern suburbs. Hezbollah did not recognize Lebanon as a legitimate entity, let alone seek its “liberation from Israel” until 1992, a decade after its founding. At the time, the militia was engaged in a months-long debate over whether it should run candidates in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, which the civil war had suspended for nearly twenty years. When Hezbollah finally decided to participate, its platform revolved around the single issue of “resistance” against Israel. Syria, which held hegemony over Lebanon, ultimately reserved the right to such military activity exclusively for Hezbollah. By then, all other militias had surrendered their arms under the 1989 Taif Agreement, which brought an end to the civil war. Hezbollah’s primary goal was not to defend Lebanon or liberate its land, but to preserve its own arms. After Taif, which Hezbollah opposed, “resistance” against Israel became the best pretext for doing so. This was not a Hezbollah innovation. The first Islamist to justify such a formula was Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. When Egyptian security forces raided his militia’s arms depot in 1949, he argued that the weapons were not meant for use against the government but to liberate Palestine. Only when the Lebanese state began asserting its authority did Hezbollah begin to make concessions. In 1992, the militia handed over to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) its largest barracks atop Sheikh Abdullah Hill, which it had seized and controlled since 1982. When Israel launched major military campaigns in Lebanon in 1993 and 1996, Hezbollah was so unprepared that it had to borrow Katyusha rocket operations from pro-Syrian Palestinian groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The group also rebranded itself from the “Islamic Revolution in Lebanon” to the “Islamic Resistance in Lebanon,” or more simply, the “Lebanese resistance.” Observers began claiming that the Iranian proxy was “Lebanonizing”—an assumption that would prove disastrously wrong. Hezbollah also rewrote its own history to obscure its origins in Iran’s Islamic Revolution. As part of its effort to project a more indigenous image, it invented the myth that it had been formed in 1982 in response to the Israeli invasion, a fairytale that Western media and academia have since repeated uncritically. With post-civil war Lebanon stabilizing, Israel saw little reason to maintain a security zone in the south. It repeatedly offered Beirut a withdrawal in exchange for a simple Lebanese commitment that Hezbollah would not establish positions on the border within striking distance of Israeli towns. But with Damascus controlling Beirut, Lebanon turned down the offer. Ending the Israeli occupation would have removed the primary justification for both the Syrian presence in Lebanon and Hezbollah’s continued armament. In 2000, Israel withdrew unilaterally, and the UN certified that it had complied with Security Council Resolution 425. Needing occupied land to sustain its “resistance” narrative, Hezbollah manufactured the Shebaa Farms controversy—minor border dispute over a sliver of land that Israel had captured from Syria, not Lebanon, in 1967. In 2005, a nationwide protest movement forced the Syrian regime’s military and security apparatus out of Lebanon, ending nearly 30 years of occupation. Hezbollah confronted efforts by pro-Western parties to assert Lebanese state sovereignty, sending armed men to seize control of western Beirut in May 2008 and cementing its veto power within the government. Since then, the pro-Iranian militia has functioned as the de facto state, while Lebanon’s official institutions have remained largely powerless. Hezbollah has skillfully manipulated Western perception by granting friendly journalists and academics access that was denied to more objective local and foreign experts. Even as it has started wars on behalf of Tehran, the Iranian proxy has helped shape a narrative portraying it as an indigenous Lebanese movement rather than what it truly is. Yet this fabrication has somehow become unquestioned conventional wisdom." Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, DC. fdd.org/analysis/2026/…

Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian who has spent his career studying authoritarianism in Eastern Europe. The framing he's amplifying from emptywheel is precise and documented: this is a transnational effort, funded by Russian oil, to replace Western liberalism with a pro-Russian ideology posing as restoration. The money trail is specific. Hungary's Mathias Corvinus Collegium - Orbán's "pet university" - received a $1.7 billion endowment in 2020: 10 percent stakes in Hungary's largest energy company and largest pharmaceutical company, plus $462 million in cash. That endowment is funded in significant part by Russian oil revenues flowing through state energy contracts. MCC then funds a sprawling network of think tanks, fellowships, publications, and summits pushing the same ideological program across Europe and into the United States. Heritage Foundation signed a "landmark cooperation agreement" with Orbán's Danube Institute. Heritage's president Kevin Roberts has praised Orbán's movement for fighting for "Truth, for tradition, for families." Gladden Pappin - Harvard-trained, Catholic, now running a Hungarian state foreign policy institute - sits in bilateral meetings on the Hungarian side when American officials visit. He was in Vance's study at the Naval Observatory for drinks with Orbán last fall. If Magyar wins Sunday he has pledged to defund MCC, recover its state assets, and end the use of public money to build political networks. That is why Vance flew to Budapest. That is why Trump endorsed Orbán twice by video. That is why the pipeline near Serbia produced two backpacks of explosives a week before the vote. The Sunday election is not about Hungary. It is about whether the money laundering vehicle for this network survives.

@elicalebon @owenjonesjourno Owen Jones sees his funding drying up, and lashes out in panic. You could feel sorry for him. Or not.

Saying “who the fuck are you” to a man who thousands of Iranians died calling for is one of the most outrageous forms of colonial audacity I’ve ever seen. Who the fuck are you, Owen? Other than a self-important westerner who feels entitled to colonize foreign stories and author them as your own?

Who the fuck are you?

I never thought I’d see a U.S. president and vice president actively back a European leader caught collaborating with the Kremlin at the expense of Europe’s security. That will forever be the legacy of Trump and Vance in Europe. We will not forget.

Super read on this Saturday morning.

Well the ketamine junkie’s algorithm has now throttled my account by 85%, from 2.3 mil views per day to 60K I will keep going regardless, challenging maga dumbfuckery and Russians 24 hrs a day. It’s easier to do lately, other than geography, nothing distinguishes these two groups apart from each other lately. Please check your notifications and follow my account if the teslagimp has unfollowed you. Nearly 400 accounts have been unfollowed in the past few days. Stay lofty peeps - there be skullduggery on this shit platform.

They aren't 'virtually unusable.' They just want to find a reason to be outraged. You still have all your books, in fact, you can find all your books on Amazon's website and redownload them if you want. The only thing you won't be able to do is buy books from the Amazon store directly. But you can sideload them if you are so in love with your 10+ year old device. Do people realize eventually you won't be able to charge the battery (my Kindle from 2012 was starting to have trouble fully charging several years ago) and the buttons will eventually age out and the memory is so much less than the newer devices. These are not eternal devices. People are so weird about this.

The New York Times reported on April 10, citing US officials, that Iran has been unable to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz because it cannot locate all of the naval mines it laid in the waterway and lacks the capability to remove them. The IRGC used small boats to plant mines haphazardly during the early weeks of the war. Many locations were never recorded. Some mines have drifted from their original positions. Iran does not have a complete map of what it put in its own water. When Foreign Minister Araghchi said on April 8 that safe passage through Hormuz would be possible “with due consideration of technical limitations,” US officials now confirm he was not being diplomatic. He was being literal. The technical limitation is that Iran mined its own strait and lost track of where the mines are. Iran published a chart on April 9 through Tasnim and ISNA showing a large circle marked “danger zone” covering the standard shipping lanes, with two alternative IRGC-controlled routes around Larak Island. This is the chart of a country directing traffic around its own weapons because it cannot guarantee the weapons will not detonate under the traffic it is trying to collect tolls from. The toll system, the IRGC coordination, the escort protocol, the VHF passcode, all the infrastructure built to monetize the chokepoint exists because Iran cannot simply reopen the chokepoint. The tollbooth is not leverage. The tollbooth is a workaround for a self-inflicted minefield. Richard Meade, editor-in-chief of Lloyd’s List, described the situation during an April 10 webinar: “As of this morning, the Strait of Hormuz remains both open and closed, depending on your position, both geographically and geopolitically. It is, if you like, Schrödinger’s Strait.” Traffic on April 10 stood at 7 to 18 ships per day, with only 2 to 4 tankers, against a pre-war baseline of roughly 140 daily. Over 1,000 vessels are queued outside the strait, including 187 tankers carrying an estimated 172 million barrels of stalled crude. The backlog alone would take weeks to clear even if every mine vanished overnight. And the capacity to clear mines does not exist on either side. The US Navy decommissioned its last dedicated Avenger-class minesweepers before the war. It now relies on Littoral Combat Ship mine countermeasures modules that have never been tested at this scale. The Royal Navy withdrew its last mine countermeasures vessel, HMS Middleton, from the Gulf in early 2026 and transported it home on a heavy-lift ship because it could not make the voyage under its own power. The West dismantled its mine-clearing capability months before the war that required it. Trump demanded “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the strait as the ceasefire condition. Vance is flying to Islamabad to negotiate terms that require a physical outcome neither side can deliver. Iran cannot find the mines. The US cannot sweep them. The UK sent its last minesweeper home on a cargo ship. And the ceasefire that was supposed to reopen 20 percent of the world’s oil supply is hostage to weapons that are drifting silently through a strait that nobody fully controls. The most honest phrase in the entire ceasefire was “technical limitations.” It just took the New York Times to decode what it meant. The mines are still there. The talks start tomorrow. And 20 percent of the world’s oil is waiting on a map that does not exist. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Wow. Talk about shadow banning! This post must have triggered every algorithm in the book. Elon managed to make sure that fewer 500 people saw. So don't read it. If you do, you will be defying Musk, MAGA, Trump and Putin.

BREAKING: Iran says the strait is closed. BREAKING: Trump says the strait is open. BREAKING: Hegseth says the strait is open. BREAKING: Bloomberg says 3 ships crossed. BREAKING: Iran says those 3 ships are Iranian. BREAKING: Maersk says it needs clarity. BREAKING: The strait is a philosophical concept at this point. BREAKING: A fourth ship attempts to cross. BREAKING: The fourth ship turns around. BREAKING: The fourth ship's captain says he "needed to think." BREAKING: Insurance for the fourth ship is now $47M. BREAKING: The fourth ship is still thinking. BREAKING: Trump posts on Truth Social that Hormuz is "TOTALLY OPEN, BEAUTIFUL, LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN." BREAKING: 800 ships remain trapped in the Gulf. BREAKING: Trump posts again that this is Biden's fault. BREAKING: Iran announces tolls of $2M per ship. BREAKING: Iran announces tolls must be paid in crypto. BREAKING: Iran has not specified which crypto. BREAKING: Someone on CT says it's XRP. BREAKING: XRP is up 34%. BREAKING: It is not XRP. BREAKING: Russia and China veto the UN resolution on Hormuz. BREAKING: Russia proposes an alternative resolution. BREAKING: The alternative resolution does not mention Hormuz. BREAKING: Nobody is surprised. BREAKING: Israel bombs Lebanon. BREAKING: Iran says this violates the ceasefire. BREAKING: Trump says the ceasefire does not cover Lebanon. BREAKING: Netanyahu says the ceasefire does not cover anything Netanyahu is currently doing. BREAKING: Ceasefire is now 11 hours old. BREAKING: Iran closes Hormuz again. BREAKING: Hegseth says the strait is open. BREAKING: Trump floats joint US-Iran toll venture to manage the strait. BREAKING: The White House clarifies Trump was "just thinking out loud." BREAKING: Iran says it will consider the proposal. BREAKING: Trump says Iran's 10-point peace plan is "not good enough." BREAKING: Trump says it is "a workable basis." BREAKING: Both statements were made within the same hour. BREAKING: 20,000 seafarers are still trapped on ships inside the Gulf. BREAKING: The IMO says the priority is evacuation. BREAKING: Iran says passage requires "coordination with armed forces." BREAKING: Nobody has coordinated with the armed forces. BREAKING: Hegseth says the strait is open. BREAKING: The strait remains closed. BREAKING: This is day 41. BREAKING: We will keep you updated.

@BecharaGerges This is exactly right

🚩 Peace with Israel is the single most terrifying word in Lebanese politics, not because it threatens Lebanon, but because it threatens every faction that has built its empire on the permanent absence of it. I have watched this country for decades, and I will tell you what no one on a podium has the courage to say: the people who oppose peace are not protecting Lebanon; they are protecting their own relevance. Hezbollah cannot exist without the “enemy” at the gate. Iran cannot justify its corridor to the Mediterranean without a front line that never closes. And every warlord turned statesman who laundered a militia past into a cabinet future needs permanent instability the way a parasite needs a host. That is why they prefer death over peace. Not Lebanese death, which has never cost them a single sleepless night, but the death of the system that feeds them. Christians watched their presidency hollowed into a rubber stamp issued from Dahiyeh. Sunnis watched Rafik Hariri assassinated and his political heirs forced to coexist with the architecture of his assassination. The Druze watched their autonomy reduced to a phone call from a handler. Every community outside Hezbollah’s orbit has been living under undeclared occupation disguised as national unity, and the absence of peace is the lock on the cage. Sixty years of rejectionism didn’t liberate a square meter, didn’t build a single power plant, and didn't secure a future. It buried 200,000 people, bankrupted a nation, exiled a generation, and delivered total strategic control to a militia that answers to Tehran and calls it sovereignty. Anyone still defending this isn’t a patriot. They are either an operative, or a hostage so conditioned by captivity that they have mistaken the warden for a guardian. This is why peace isn’t just a diplomatic position; it is the single act capable of collapsing the entire architecture of Lebanese captivity. The moment the war justification disappears, Hezbollah loses its veto, Iran loses its last ideological foothold on the Mediterranean, and every political actor in Beirut is forced to stand naked, stripped of the conflict they’ve hidden behind for half a century. And then, only then, the Lebanese can finally have the conversation that’s been strangled since Taif: what does this country actually look like when no one holds a gun to the table? Perhaps it’s federalism. Perhaps it’s partition. Perhaps it’s a model no one has written yet. But that conversation is impossible as long as one armed faction holds the permanent right to override every community in the name of a resistance that resists nothing except Lebanon’s own survival. The opponents of peace know this perfectly well. They know that the day Lebanon signs, their operating myth dies. That’s why they will fight it with every tool they have: religious guilt, nationalist shame, sectarian fear. Because peace doesn’t just end a conflict with Israel; it starts a reckoning with them. And they would rather bury another generation than face that reckoning. Enough. The absence of peace has already cost Lebanon everything except its last heartbeat, and the men who caused it are now asking for more time. They’ve had a century. The answer is no.

The last 20 or so years of Robert Plant’s solo career & albums are much better than most people realize, taking many chances, changing his sound radically. This⬇️is not “oldies band” sh*t, he reinvents himself soulfully, as an older artist, with a band with the skill to do that.

Who remembers Operation Murambatsvina? After the confiscation of the white owned farmlands millions were left homeless as they had lived on the farms all of their lives, for generations. As a result they ended up building makeshift homes amd tuckshops all over the major cities on any piece of vacant land that they could find. Operation Murambatsvina means "Clean out the trash" in the local Shona language. UN estimates that it directly affected ~700,000 people (loss of homes or livelihoods), with indirect effects on up to 2.4 million (nearly a fifth of Zimbabwe's population at the time). Hundreds of thousands were left homeless. Homes, businesses, and markets were bulldozed or burned. Entire communities were displaced. Mugabe told them to go home to their rural areas from whence they came. It was brutal and relentless. It came shortly after the March 2005 parliamentary elections, in which urban areas (strongholds of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change — MDC) had largely opposed Mugabe's party. Many viewed it as political retaliation against urban poor voters. A UN special envoy report (led by Anna Tibaijuka) strongly criticized the operation as causing "indifference to human suffering" and violating national/international laws. It described it as a military-style campaign with devastating humanitarian effects. The media said little, the South African government kept quiet. But if you want to know why our country is flooded with Zimbabweans, it was things like these that impoverished 2.4 million people overnight.

@garymeyerca 'You are working with people who can function in chaos, which makes them exceptional in difficult environments and mildly dangerous in functional ones.'

@garymeyerca "makes them exceptional in difficult environments and mildly dangerous in functional ones." 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

@garymeyerca Great read, Gary. An excellent and astute representation of true South African work ethic. The absolute winner was: “You are working with people who can function in chaos, which makes them exceptional in difficult environments and mildly dangerous in functional ones.”

@garymeyerca Twee skroewe drie moere en 'n lang stuk draad 🦾