Grumpy grandpa 🇷🇴

Naționalizare, naționalizare Mai e propagandă? 😎 E tot scoasă din context? 😎👍

An "unnamed ally" is very concerned about Ukrainian strikes cutting off global oil supply while their war... I mean, someone else's war 🤫... with Iran is affecting global oil supplies as well. Sorry, we're busy playing the cards we don't have. Maybe check back later?🂡🂮🂭🂫🂪

A trebuit să vină Ilie să arate că Liei îi lipsesc cunoștințe elementare: defapt.ro/politica/boloj… Bugetul e adoptat de Parlament, scrie în Constituție. Plângerea la Curtea de Apel împotriva Guvernului e lipsită de obiect, Savonea putea la fel de bine să-l dea în judecată pe papă

Trump has falsely signaled the Iran war was ending 12 times in a single month. Twelve times. The worst planned military campaign in living memory. Experts now say America has proven something it never wanted to prove: without allies, it is nothing. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

JUST IN: There are roughly 50,000 MRI machines operating worldwide. Each one requires liquid helium cooled to minus 269 degrees Celsius to keep its superconducting magnets functional. A single non-operational MRI eliminates 20 to 30 patient scans per day. Those are the scans that detect tumours before they metastasise, strokes before they kill, spinal injuries before they paralyse. The helium that makes those scans possible came, until 31 days ago, from Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, which produced a third of the world’s supply as a byproduct of liquefied natural gas. Ras Laffan was struck by Iranian missiles on March 18. It declared force majeure. Fourteen percent of its helium capacity is permanently destroyed. Repairs will take three to five years. Helium prices have doubled. India’s hospitals are already reporting MRI cost spikes and scan delays. European facilities are rationing non-urgent diagnostics. Air Liquide has warned customers of unfulfilled orders. And 200 cryogenic containers holding 41,000 litres each are stranded in the Persian Gulf with 35 to 48 days before their cooling systems fail and the gas vents irreversibly into the atmosphere. Helium is the only element that escapes Earth’s gravity once released. It does not come back. Here is the connection that should stop every health minister, every defence secretary, and every AI executive in their tracks. The same helium that cools the MRI magnet scanning a child’s brain for a tumour in Mumbai also cools the extreme ultraviolet lithography machine printing the two-nanometre transistor in Hsinchu that powers the AI model selecting bombing targets over Isfahan. Hospitals and semiconductor fabs are now competing for the same shrinking pool of the same molecule at the same temperature. The war has created a zero-sum allocation between healing and killing, and the molecule does not care which one wins. TSMC holds 6.2 weeks of inventory and recycles 68 to 95 percent on site. Samsung holds six months but sources 65 percent from Qatar. Both are rationing toward AI and high-bandwidth memory, starving consumer chip production to keep the advanced nodes alive. Hospitals are nominally prioritised in allocation queues, but when a single TSMC fab consumes 500,000 cubic feet of helium per year and a trillion-dollar AI buildout depends on keeping those fabs running, the allocation queue is a polite fiction masking a brutal triage. Newer MRI machines use zero-boil-off technology, sealed systems holding as little as 0.7 litres of helium that never need refilling. In India, 3,500 of 5,000 machines already use this technology. But the legacy fleet, the machines in rural hospitals, developing nations, and underfunded health systems, still requires 1,500 to 2,000 litres per fill. Those are the machines that will go dark first. Those are the patients who will be diagnosed last. The geography of helium scarcity maps precisely onto the geography of healthcare inequality. The war’s casualties are not only soldiers and civilians in the strike zone. They include every patient whose scan was delayed because the helium that should have cooled their MRI machine is boiling off in a container drifting 57 kilometres northwest of Dubai. The body count of a chokepoint war does not end at the chokepoint. It extends to every hospital, every diagnostic centre, every oncology ward that depends on a noble gas extracted from natural gas that transits a 39-kilometre strait controlled by a navy that no longer exists but whose mines, drones, and shore batteries still function. The molecule does not distinguish between a magnet in a scanner and a magnet in a missile. It cools both to the same temperature. And today, there is not enough of it for both. Full deep dive analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

❗️Hungary has systematically acted in Russia’s interests to weaken EU sanctions On August 30, 2024, Hungarian FM Péter Szijjártó received a call from Sergey Lavrov after arriving in Budapest from St. Petersburg. Lavrov reminded him that Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov wanted his sister, Gulbahor Ismailova, removed from the EU sanctions list, and Szijjártó promised to help. 🔺Seven months later, she was removed from the EU sanctions list. ▪️ In 2025, Szijjártó discussed efforts to derail a new EU sanctions package with Russia’s Deputy Energy Minister Sorokin. Hungary managed to remove 72 out of 128 proposed items from the sanctions list. ▪️In other conversations, Szijjártó reportedly shared details of closed-door EU discussions with Lavrov. One European diplomat stated: “Hungary is clearly acting on Russia’s political instructions.” ▪️According to Szijjártó, the Slovak government is also assisting in these coordinated Russian-Hungarian efforts.

Oricum se vor sfârși aceste alegeri, cred că Ungaria e o țară compromisă pentru o vreme, iar imaginea lui Szijjártó va fi greu de șters din minte. Acest "Karla" plantat în sânul grupului comunitar. Toată povestea legăturilor dintre Moscova și Budapesta zici că e dintr-o carte de John le Carré. „Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. Mai jos, urmarea investigației jurnalistului Szabolcs Panyi, acuzat de spionaj de guvernul Orban. Este în engleză. Și e țuț. (Bianca Felseghi / FB)

🔥“Holy sh*t, it’s getting hot,” a Russian says, reacting to the strikes on the Ust-Luga port. Couldn’t have said it better. This is already the fifth attack on the port.

“I’m always at your service”: leaked calls between Lavrov and Hungary’s FM Recordings of conversations between Sergey Lavrov and Péter Szijjártó suggest the Hungarian minister was willing to advance Moscow’s interests within the EU. In one call, Lavrov asks for sanctions on oligarch Alisher Usmanov’s sister to be lifted — Szijjártó responds that Hungary, together with Slovakia, is already preparing a proposal. She was later removed from the EU sanctions list. Before ending the call, Szijjártó also mentioned visiting Gazprom’s new headquarters and added: “I’m always at your service.” According to European intelligence officials, the tone of the exchanges resembles that of a “handler and source” rather than two equal officials. There have also been previous reports that Hungary shared details of closed EU discussions with Moscow.

I have a friend who works in oil shipping logistics in the Baltic region. He told me yesterday: "We've never seen anything like this. Three strikes on the same terminal in seven days. Buyers are panicking. Tankers are sitting empty. Nobody knows when loadings resume." That's when I knew the headlines weren't telling the full story. Here's what you need to understand: → Ukraine hit Ust-Luga — Russia's 2nd largest oil export terminal — for the THIRD TIME this week → 700,000 barrels per day capacity — OFFLINE → Primorsk — Russia's LARGEST terminal — also suspended loadings → Combined: 40% of Russia's total oil export capacity GONE → Repair timeline: 18 to 24 MONTHS. Not weeks. Not months. YEARS. → Russia was making $270,000,000 PER DAY from oil exports — that money funds every missile hitting Ukraine → India gets 80% of its Russian crude from these two ports — global ripple effect is ALREADY starting Three days ago Russia dropped its budget cut plans because the money was pouring in. Today the ports that generate that money are on fire. 400 drones. That's all it took to cripple 40% of a superpower's oil exports. Most people won't see this. RT to change that. 🔥

Three men launched the most expensive American military operation since Iraq. None of them asked Congress for permission. Donald Trump approved the strikes after a February 23 phone call in which Benjamin Netanyahu argued for joint action against Khamenei. Marco Rubio, whom Netanyahu has repeatedly called “my dear friend” across multiple Jerusalem visits and who speaks with the Israeli prime minister multiple times per 48-hour window, publicly admitted that Israel “was going to attack anyway,” effectively confirming that a foreign prime minister’s war plans set the timeline for American military action. Congress was notified under the War Powers Act. Congress was not asked to authorise. Congress has not declared war. Congress has not passed an AUMF. The only votes Congress has taken were votes to NOT stop the war, and even those passed by the thinnest margins: 219 to 212 in the House, 53 to 47 in the Senate, with a single Republican defector in each chamber. The United States has now fired 2,400 Patriot interceptors, consumed 40 percent of its global THAAD inventory, lost an irreplaceable E-3 Sentry AWACS, deployed 3,500 Marines, surged 120 aircraft, bypassed Congress for $662 million in emergency munitions sales, drawn down pre-positioned war reserves worth $3.4 billion, and is preparing a $50 billion supplemental request to replenish what has been expended. Total US military aid to Israel since October 2023 exceeds $21.7 billion. Cumulative lifetime aid exceeds $174 billion. All of it flows through a constitutional architecture in which the legislature’s role has been reduced to declining to exercise the powers the Constitution explicitly grants it. And the political cost is already arriving. Trump’s net approval has collapsed to minus 17, the worst for any second-term president at this stage. Working-class approval has cratered to minus 24. Independent economic approval sits at minus 48. CNN’s Harry Enten calls it “historic.” Forecasters project Democrats gaining 11 to 19 House seats in November. The war that Trump launched to project strength is producing the political conditions for the loss of his congressional majority. Netanyahu’s position is no better. Seventy-four percent of Jewish Israelis trust him to manage the war, but that trust has not translated into a single additional Knesset seat. Coalition support remains frozen at 40 percent. War support has already declined from 93 to 78 percent. Opposition among Jewish Israelis has more than doubled. Netanyahu is pushing through a budget specifically to avoid the snap election he would lose if forced to call one. The rally-around-the-flag effect is fading before the flag has been lowered. The third member of the triumvirate is the only one whose trajectory is ascending. Trump is privately polling “JD or Marco?” with advisers, and Rubio is drawing more positive feedback than Vance. He surged to 35 percent at CPAC behind Vance’s 53. The war that is destroying Trump’s approval is building Rubio’s profile as the man who coordinated it. The Secretary of State is being elevated by the same operation that is sinking the President who appointed him. Three men. No authorisation. Two thousand four hundred interceptors. A $50 billion tab. An approval rating in free fall. A coalition frozen. And a succession race accelerating inside the wreckage. The triumvirate that started the war is being consumed by it, and the only exit, the grand bargain with China that trades rare earth access for Hormuz stability, requires the cooperation of the country that supplied the missiles on both sides. The war has no constitutional foundation, no exit strategy, and no replacement parts. What it has is arithmetic. And the arithmetic is unforgiving. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

More people need to dump CHATGPT. Start thinking for yourselves. Stop asking Grok about shit and look it up, do some fucking research. Work your brain out before it turns to mush.

Islanda și Norvegia iau în calcul aderarea la UE. "Țările nu mai vor să adere la Uniunea Europeană pentru că le va face mai bogate. Acum o fac pentru că le va face mai sigure. Acum două decenii, când guvernele din fostul Est comunist se apropiau de Bruxelles, atractivitatea economică era clară: Occidentul mai bogat putea contribui la creșterea salariilor și a nivelului de trai. Dar, pe măsură ce ordinea postbelică se destramă și politicienii pun sub semnul întrebării fiabilitatea Statelor Unite, state mai prospere, precum Islanda și Norvegia - care au analizat în trecut aderarea la UE și au decis împotrivă - sunt atrase acum în brațele Europei pentru securitatea pe care aceasta o oferă." politico.eu/article/defens…

Orban's betrayal knows no bounds. There is clear evidence of how Hungary collaborated with Russia to prevent EU sanctions against Russian individuals or organizations. The Hungarian foreign minister not only carried out Russian instructions but also regularly briefed Lavrov on details of confidential conversations between European diplomats. Hungary is clearly implementing political orders from Russia.

Risk of severe instability inside Russia is very high in 2026 - it could turn into a perfect storm of converging circumstances. Events could culminate into another military rebellion. Turning off Telegram for Russian troops only makes sense if you're afraid of them organizing.

JUST IN: The United States has fired 2,400 Patriot interceptors in 31 days. It manufactures 650 per year. Replenishment at current production takes three and a half years. It has consumed 40 percent of its global THAAD inventory. It produces fewer than 100 THAAD interceptors annually. Full replenishment takes four to five years. Each interceptor contains neodymium and samarium-cobalt magnets sourced from Chinese-controlled supply chains. The US defence rare earth stockpile has approximately two months remaining. Read those numbers again. The US military has consumed more precision weapons in one month than it can manufacture in three years, using materials it can only source from the country it may need to fight next. Every Patriot fired at an Iranian Fattah-2 over Riyadh is a Patriot that does not exist for a Chinese DF-21 over the Taiwan Strait. Every rare earth magnet consumed in Gulf interceptors is a magnet that cannot be installed in a replacement built for the Pacific. The Iran war is not just depleting American arsenals. It is depleting American deterrence against China. And the country counting the interceptors from both sides of the table, as supplier and as future adversary, is the same country hosting peace talks in Beijing right now. China controls 90 percent of rare earth refining. China produces 90 percent of the world’s high-performance magnets. China buys 80 to 91 percent of Iran’s oil exports. China provides BeiDou navigation and ammonium perchlorate propellant to the Iranian missiles that are forcing the US to burn through its interceptor stockpile. China is simultaneously the supplier of the weapons America is using, the supplier of the weapons Iran is using, the primary customer of the oil the war is disrupting, and the only country with the leverage to end the disruption. The arithmetic of the grand bargain is not complicated. The US needs Chinese rare earths to rebuild its interceptor inventory. China needs Hormuz open to receive Iranian oil. The US needs the war to end before its stockpiles hit zero. China needs tariff relief, semiconductor export control rollbacks, and Taiwan arms-sale restraint. Both sides need something only the other can provide. The question is not whether a deal happens. The question is how much of America’s strategic position in the Pacific gets traded for the minerals needed to survive the Gulf. RAND estimated that 78 percent of US defence contractors would face production shutdowns within 90 days of a Chinese rare earth cutoff. The 2027 deadline to ban Chinese-sourced magnets from Pentagon procurement is nine months away with no domestic alternative at scale. MP Materials operates the only US rare earth mine and ships its concentrate to China for processing. The mine-to-magnet supply chain that the Pentagon needs to survive a Taiwan contingency runs through the country the Taiwan contingency is designed to deter. This is not a supply chain problem. This is a civilisational dependency. The United States built the most advanced military in human history on materials processed by its principal strategic competitor. It is now fighting a war that burns through those materials at a rate that makes replenishment impossible without the competitor’s cooperation. And the competitor is sitting in a conference room in Beijing today, across the table from Pakistan’s foreign minister, calculating exactly how much of America’s future it can extract in exchange for the minerals America needs to have a future at all. The deal of the century is not a choice. It is arithmetic. And the arithmetic leads to Beijing. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

🚨BREAKING: Orban mafia removed EU sanctions on Putin's mafia members. Alisher Usmanov's sister was delisted by the EU 7 months after this call. FULL STORY - Kremlin hotline: Hungary colluded with Russia to delist sanctioned oligarchs, companies and banks theins.press/en/inv/290911

Hey Belgium, now would be a good time to seize the $200 billion in Russian assets you're holding and use it to fund Ukraine to defeat Russia.

Someone is scared of Ukrainian interceptor drones. Good.

JUST IN: Two hundred helium containers are stranded in the Persian Gulf right now. Each one holds 41,000 litres of liquid helium cooled to minus 269 degrees Celsius. They have 35 to 48 days before the cryogenic systems fail, the helium boils off, and the gas vents into the atmosphere and is lost forever. Those containers were heading to semiconductor fabrication plants in Taiwan and South Korea that manufacture 90 percent of the world’s advanced chips. The helium inside them cools the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that print transistors at two nanometres. Without it, the machines cannot operate. Without the machines, the chips do not exist. Without the chips, the AI models that are currently selecting targets in this war stop running. This is the connection that nobody has made. The same Strait of Hormuz that carries 20 percent of the world’s oil also carries the helium that cools the machines that make the chips that power the artificial intelligence that the Pentagon is using to prosecute Operation Epic Fury. Maven, the AI targeting system that compressed 2,000 analysts to 20 and selected over 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours, runs on processors manufactured by TSMC using helium sourced from Qatar. Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility, which produced 33 percent of the world’s helium as a byproduct of LNG processing, was struck by Iranian missiles on March 18 and 19 and declared force majeure. The supply is offline. The containers are stranded. The clock is ticking at minus 269 degrees. TSMC says it has 6.2 weeks of inventory and 68 to 95 percent on-site recycling. Samsung holds roughly six months but depends on Qatar for 65 percent of its supply. Both are rationing toward AI and high-bandwidth memory production, starving consumer chips to keep the advanced nodes alive. The calculus is explicit: the war gets priority over your next phone. But here is the paradox that should terrify every strategist in Washington. The AI that selects the targets requires chips that require helium that transits the chokepoint that the war has closed. The cognitive infrastructure of the air campaign depends on a supply chain that the air campaign is destroying. Every strike on Iranian naval assets that keeps Hormuz closed for another day is another day of helium inventory burned at TSMC. Every week the strait stays shut brings the fab closer to rationing. Every month of war brings the AI targeting system closer to the moment when the chips it runs on cannot be replaced because the gas that made them evaporated in a container floating off Fujairah. The Pentagon is fighting a war with artificial intelligence manufactured in Taiwan using helium from Qatar transported through the strait the war has closed. The war is eating its own brain. Taiwan imports 95 percent of its energy. Seventy percent of its oil came through Hormuz. TSMC alone consumes 10 percent of Taiwan’s electricity. The island that makes 90 percent of the world’s advanced semiconductors is powered by fuel from the chokepoint that is shut, cooled by gas from the facility that is offline, and defended by interceptors depleting faster than they can be replaced. And the country that controls the rare earth magnets, the BeiDou navigation, the helium alternative sources, and the peace talks is the same country: China. The war will end when the helium runs out, when the interceptors run out, or when Beijing decides it should. All three clocks are ticking. All three lead to the same room. Read the full analysis - open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…