Jon Irvine

Trump has skipped EVERY correspondant's dinner across his presidencies. Except this one. His ratings are down, failed at Iran and his ballroom won’t be built. And all of a sudden there's a shooter in the lobby. Ok.

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills or illness-related work loss: 🇦🇺 0 🇨🇦 0 🇩🇰 0 🇫🇮 0 🇫🇷 0 🇩🇪 0 🇮🇸 0 🇮🇪 0 🇮🇹 0 🇯🇵 0 🇳🇱 0 🇳🇴 0 🇵🇹 0 🇪🇸 0 🇸🇪 0 🇬🇧 0 🇺🇸 530,000 There’s a lesson there.

MASSIVE: 🇺🇸 The BBC just validated everything we've been saying. A clear pattern of trades right before major Trump announcements. Iran war. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. We tracked a whale for weeks. 0 losses. 11 wins. 100% win rate. You would go to prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. They front-run war decisions with billion dollar bets. Now the BBC has the receipts. Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. The game is rigged. And now the world knows it.

“I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.” ~Walt Whitman

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.” ―Yasunari Kawabata

Needs sharing worldwide

One Year On: The Greatest Economic Own Goal in Living Memory A year ago, Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden, surrounded by charts nobody understood, and declared war on mathematics. He called it Liberation Day. The Financial Times, along with every economist who has read more than a bus ticket, is marking the anniversary with a verdict that should be carved into marble: it failed. On every single front. Spectacularly. Completely. Embarrassingly. Let us be precise about this. Measured against Trump’s own three stated goals, making foreigners pay for doing business with America, narrowing the trade deficit, and punishing China, the tariffs have clearly failed.  Not partially failed. Not failed with asterisks. Failed the way a man fails when he drives a Reliant Robin onto a motorway and acts surprised when it rolls. And everyone said so. Economists said so. Trading partners said so. His own party said so. The entire field of international trade theory, developed over roughly two centuries by people who actually read things, screamed it from the rooftops. But Donald Trump, a man whose relationship with economics appears to consist entirely of gut feeling and cable television and 6 casino bankruptcies knew better. The average American household paid an extra $1,700 due to tariffs. Over 65 percent of Americans reported that everyday goods became significantly less affordable.  This is what happens when you run the world’s largest economy on instinct and vibes. One year after the Rose Garden ceremony, factory jobs are down and inflation is up.  The precise opposite of what was promised. With extraordinary confidence. Then the lawyers arrived. The Supreme Court found that Trump had exceeded his authority, ruling that the declared emergency bore no rational connection to the trade measures imposed.  In other words, the legal foundation was nonsense. The government had collected $166 billion in tariffs from over 330,000 businesses on grounds the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. The refund process is now underway.  One hundred and sixty-six billion dollars. Collected illegally. From American businesses. The financial markets, bless them, responded with the only appropriate tool available: mockery. The meme “Trump Always Chickens Out” refuses to go away, and the TACO index is now actively used by analysts to price in the president’s chronic habit of retreating.  Every serious voice warned this would happen. Trade economists. Former Treasury secretaries. The IMF. The WTO. The EU. Canada. Japan. Basically anyone who had spent more than forty minutes studying how global trade actually works. The man who ignored all of them had previously run a casino into bankruptcy and considered that a learning experience. He was not, it turns out, a fast learner. One year. Zero of three goals achieved. One Supreme Court ruling. One $170 billion refund. One economy paying more for everything and making less of it. Liberation Day. What a name for it. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Before technology advanced, everything was art and elegance…

The USA took 829 days to support their allies in the 2nd World War. Pass it on.

Notice how every hostile state and autocrat absolutely despises the EU and its regulations? That is a pretty good sign those rules are actually protecting us. If our enemies hate it, keep doing it

@heraskevych The sacrifice you've made is bold, brave and admirable! #SlavaUkraïni

On front page of #France’s national newspaper, #LeMonde! #EpsteinFiles Just Brilliant

There’s no single leader in the Developed World that survives that “Obama - Ape” post. The UK PM would be gone before noon. France, Germany, etc. All gone. And the ones who’d survive - the likes of Putin & Xi - wouldn’t post it. Because they aren’t stupid. Except Trump.

Watch this.

Putin’s puppets. 🚨🚨🚨 Former MI6 officer Christopher Steele says Jeffrey Epstein helped Russian spies collect blackmail kompromat on Western elites for decades. If that is true, it does not explain one moment. It explains an entire decade. Look at the record. Donald Trump has never meaningfully confronted Russia. Not with pressure. Not with consequences. Not with moral clarity. He attacks allies with enthusiasm, but goes soft, evasive, or openly deferential when Russia is involved. Helsinki was not an exception. It was a reveal. Standing next to Putin, he did not look defiant or strategic. He looked small, defensive, and constrained. And it was never just him. People around him echoed the same distortions, again and again, like badly programmed dolls. Russia is our friend. Russia was never our enemy. Ukraine is corrupt. Ukraine is the real threat. NATO is the problem. Sanctions are unfair. Oversight is a witch hunt. Journalists are enemies. Victims are inconvenient. This is not coincidence. It is alignment. Several figures in that orbit behaved as if Moscow’s interests were indistinguishable from their own. Some were later exposed for undisclosed contacts. Some pushed policy positions that directly benefited the Kremlin. Some aggressively worked to block investigations, intelligence briefings, or accountability. And yes, multiple people in that circle have been tied to Epstein himself, a man now credibly accused of operating at the intersection of sexual exploitation and intelligence leverage. That is how this works. Kompromat does not announce itself. It quietly reshapes behavior. It makes leaders hostile to scrutiny, allergic to empathy, and obsessed with control. It turns questions into threats and journalists into enemies. It rewires priorities until defending ego and silence matters more than defending a country. And while this rot spreads at the top, ordinary people pay the price. Allies are weakened. Democracies are destabilized. Ukraine bleeds. Victims disappear from the conversation entirely. This is not about left or right. It is about a system compromised so deeply that treason starts sounding like patriotism. Stay connected. Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

When we talk about authoritarianism, it’s not just Donald Trump. Musk owns X Bezos owns Twitch Zuckerberg owns Instagram and Facebook Larry Ellison controls TikTok Billionaires increasingly control what we see, hear and read.

THIS IS PAINFULLY TRUE 🎯💯

seriously

The secret offshore owners of £460 billion-worth of property in England and Wales. Brilliant public service. 44% of them evading the law on disclosure of the actual humans who own it (beneficial owners in the jargon). A scandal