FriskyMatze

[FriskyMatze @FriskyMatze]

@wartranslated great music video! 😄 Whoever sows wind will reap storm. It's good to see that you're finally getting the Nightly Fear 2022 sent back to the sender. keep it up. That the enemy collapses and you return to the 2013 borders in peace.

[Roderich Kiesewetter🇪🇺🇩🇪🇮🇱🇺🇦 @RKiesewetter]

Für mich ist unbegreiflich, wie man fordern kann, die Frontlinie "einzufrieren" - gerade jetzt, wo es gilt, die Ukraine so zu unterstützen, dass sie das Momentum aufrechterhalten kann und militärisch weiter erfolgreich Staatsgebiet befreit, und Russland sanktioniert. Wem soll es nützen, jetzt die Frontline "einzufrieren". Damit würde Russland v.a. Zeit gewinnen, sich neu auszurichten & sich zu erholen. Wer an der Seite der Ukraine steht, der erhöht die militärische & finanzielle Unterstützung und der liefert auch endlich Taurus. Denn jeder kann sehen, dass es möglich ist, die Krym zu befreien. Russland muss verlieren lernen - sonst hört es nicht auf. Wem soll es nützen, sich weiter an Pseudo-Verhandlungen festzuhalten? Russland kann jeden Tag den Krieg einfach beenden und sich aus der UKR zurückziehen. Es muss darum gehen, der Ukraine zum Sieg zu verhelfen, wie es auch die @KASonline Präsidentin @akk beim Café Kyiv gefordert hat. Nur dann wird Russland einlenken. Alles andere stärkt den Aggressor und wird zum Wiederaufleben des Krieges führen!
https://t.co/qXYowzGcs9

[(((Tendar))) @Tendar]

A lot of Russian assets across the globe have started a last ditch effort to save Russia from its looming defeat. The only right response is to increase help for the Ukrainian people, enabling them to finish the job. Once imperial Russia is no more, many „domestic“ problems will „miraculously“ disappear, because after all it has always been Russia and not a domestic issue.

[Ben Hodges @general_ben]

Russia has been at war with the West for years. The risk of escalation by Russia increases if we continue to fail to acknowledge that and don’t take action to inflict consequences on them for their Gray Zone operations. The Kremlin only respects strength.

[olexander scherba🇺🇦 @olex_scherba]

Isn’t it weird that Russian strikes on Ukraine are so often called “retaliation” and Ukraine’s aren’t?

Who invaded whom, again?

[(((Tendar))) @Tendar]

The unfolding disaster of the Trump administration in regards to Iran, is a self-inflicted wound on so many levels. It showed that military might alone is not a silver bullet. What went wrong?

1.) Atrocious planning and slow reaction

It was known for 47 years that if Iran gets attacked that the Strait of Hormuz will be a target. When Iranian civilians were rising up in January 2026 and then were left alone, it was claimed that the military built up had to be concluded before an military engagement can happen. This cost valuable time. A military intervention so early and in conjunction with uprisings on the ground would have caught much more momentum. Worse, even after that delayed attack, the US strategy still didn't account for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. So it was a double-loss.

2.) No coherent strategy and missed military developments

Once the operation started, again, Iran was reacting in a predictive way, launching thousands of drones and missiles which they had refined in the war in Ukraine. It was clear that the low-cost but numerous weapon systems will eventually cause a lot of damage. Ukraine has been experiencing this for 4 years and developed effective countermeasures. The Trump administration, however, repeatedly refused to heed the help and advice from Kyiv, and even belittled it. The US military, on the other hand, and even more the Arab countries in the Gulf quickly learned the hard way that this rebuff was stupid. Eventually, they invited Ukrainian drone experts. The USA lacked any kind of strategy when the Iranian regime refused to collapse and were absolutely ill-prepared for this kind of war.

3.) Lacking support by allies

You might argue that Bush's Iraq war was ill-planned and when it comes to long term planning this was certainly the case, but it was far more successful in bringing in allies. More than 30 countries participated as the "coalition of the willing" back in 2003. Trump's Iran war, on the other hand, was widely an "one-man-show". Aside from Israel, the USA were practically alone. This resulted directly from Trump's repeated attacks against allies, including those who supported the USA in Afghanistan and even Iraq. It was clear that after that nobody wanted to risk his or her neck for somebody who repeatedly insulted them and their countries. The fact that Trump didn't bother to consult them beforehand only reaffirmed their stance.

4.) Decline of US soft power thanks to "DOGE"

The destruction DOGE left in its wake is immeasurable. Gutting crucial elements of American soft power such as USAID, Voice of America and dozens of other programs destroyed a lot of goodwill the US had in the region and across the globe. The perception of the USA moved from a powerful benefactor to an aggressive and transactional bully. In its relentless obsession to fight "wokeness" - or what was perceived as such - the foundation of soft power, which was built in almost a century, was trampled on in a matter of months. From the carrot-and-stick approach only the stick remained, and that one turned to be flaccid.

5.) Overall downfall of the USA

Let's not mince words here. Trump is a wrecking ball for US' democracy. Insider trading, corruption, mass lying, cozying up to dictators and an absolute disdain for the rule of law had a direct impact on America's standing in more than just political or morale questions. No matter how loud you scream in certain parts of the USA, it is fact that the USA under Trump have lost huge respect in the world. The enemies of the USA hate you just as must they hated you before, maybe even more, but your friends are absolutely shocked and aghast about what is happening. Far more devastating, however, is US' unreliability. What was agreed upon before, can change on a whim. "Good relations" are defined by one man and one man alone.

This is not how you conduct policy, neither domestic nor foreign. The USA are in full decline and the big bang will certainly come if the trajectory is not immediately corrected. The strategic defeat in Iran is even worse than Vietnam, because Vietnam gave Washington the lesson from which they learned and eventually won the Cold War. What Trump is doing, however, is just doubling down on stupid and denying reality, which didn't work before and won't work even less now.

[KIU ✪ Russian Officers killed in Ukraine 🇨🇿🇺🇦 @KilledInUkraine]

Where does Europe keep finding these corrupt assh*les who are always inviting criminal Russia to come here?

[Mick Ryan, AM @WarintheFuture]

This is the rough equivalent of Nazi Germany demanding that the Allies leave France in 1944 so that talks can start. But, even Putin knows the war only gets worse for him from here. https://t.co/bOqwtRM4Rf

[Aimen Dean @AimenDean]

Having spoken to a senior Saudi official about the NBC article regarding Project Freedom, I honestly think the article completely misunderstood what actually happened because it was written almost entirely from a US perspective rather than from a GCC perspective.

First of all, contrary to the impression being created, the GCC were NOT blindsided by Project Freedom.

They knew about it beforehand. Roughly half a day before. The airspace was opened. The facilities were available. Nobody objected. There was broad support for the idea because, at least publicly, Project Freedom was supposed to be a limited humanitarian-security operation aimed at relieving the 22,000 sailors trapped around Hormuz and allowing shipping lanes to breathe again.

Nobody in the GCC had a problem with that.

But here is the issue .. and this is the part the NBC article completely misses.
If you are asking GCC countries to participate in such an operation, then you need to be upfront about the rules of engagement from day one!

You cannot say:
“Please open your skies and bases, expose your energy infrastructure”
…only for everyone to discover afterwards that the actual American policy was apparently:

“Oh by the way, if Iran attacks you with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones in several waves, we still won’t retaliate because Donald Trump is busy chasing The Deal.”

And this is exactly what shocked the Saudis. Not the Iranian attack itself.

The UAE/GCC expected retaliation.. This is Iran. Nobody in the Gulf is naïve about that anymore.
The shock came from the American reaction afterwards.

You had attacks against Emirati infrastructure. Fujairah was targeted. Multiple waves involving drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles.

And Washington’s response was basically:
“Meh. Minor incident. Let’s not escalate.”
Minor incident?!

For the GCC that was madness.

Because what Riyadh, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi suddenly realized was that Trump’s obsession with preserving “The Deal” had apparently reached the point where Gulf energy infrastructure was now considered acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of his precious negotiations.

Everything became:
The deal.
The deal.
The beautiful deal.
The greatest deal.
The mother of all deals.
The ultimate “Art of the deal”
Or perhaps, more accurately:
The ultimate fart of the deal.

Because from the Gulf perspective, this stopped looking like strategy and started looking like desperate political vanity mixed with deadly wishful thinking.

Had the GCC been told beforehand:
“Listen, whatever Iran does to you during Project Freedom, America will not retaliate because we do not want to endanger negotiations…”
…they would have almost certainly refused participation from the start.

The problem was not Project Freedom itself.

The problem was discovering midway through the operation that the GCC countries were apparently expected to sit there quietly as punching bags while Washington played negotiation theatrics with Tehran. So the Saudis and Kuwaitis pulled plug!

Because the GCC know something US usually forgets:

Iran plays the long game.
You can freeze enrichment.
Pause enrichment.
Delay enrichment.
Sign ten agreements.
Twenty agreements.
Forty agreements.

But if the infrastructure remains…
If the centrifuges remain…
If the IRGC remains…
If the proxy network remains…

then eventually the game resumes.

There will be another distraction.
Another pandemic.
Another financial crisis.
Another war somewhere else.
Another paralysis in Washington.
And while the world is distracted, enrichment quietly resumes again.

Ironically, much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile expanded during the pandemic years precisely because global attention was elsewhere.

Judging by the reaction to the UAE attacks, the Saudis and Kuwaitis concluded that Trump’s version of deterrence had become:

“Please absorb the missiles quietly because I’m trying to write the sequel to “The Fart of the Deal.”

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

KASPAROV: Trump keeps ignoring American public opinion to support Ukraine. It’s tragic that United States openly siding with Russia.

Look at United Nations. It’s shame beyond imagination. America never votes with Ukraine and European allies. It always sides with Russia, Belarus, Nicaragua, and North Korea.

America’s reputation has been damaged so badly that I’m not sure the next president alone will be able to recover it.

It will probably take a long time before people restore their confidence in America — country that was beacon of hope and garden of democracy in the days when I grew up as a kid on other side of Iron Curtain in Soviet Union.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Volodymyr Tretyak 🇺🇦 @VolodyaTretyak]

The American VP traveled all the way to Hungary to support the most pro-Kremlin and corrupt EU leader before the elections. What an embarrassment it is for the USA.

[FriskyMatze @FriskyMatze]

@NOELreports Not a good card, Mr. Trump.

[NOELREPORTS 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @NOELreports]

👏German MEP Moritz Körner criticized Viktor Orban in the European Parliament, accusing him of acting in the interests of Russia and China and pointing to alleged double standards on migration and corruption. #EU

[FriskyMatze @FriskyMatze]

@Tom_Winter @JuliaEAinsley @jonallendc @news_jul @strickdc You'd think a Mafia clan had taken up residence in the White House and was blackmailing everyone. Crazy.

[FriskyMatze @FriskyMatze]

@mattmfm The Nazis did the same thing in the 1930s. This does not inspire confidence in the government's intentions.

[Andrew Perpetua @AndrewPerpetua]

Accepting someone else's award is literally one of the most pathetic things any person can do in any situation. There is no way around that. Only a true bottom feeder would even consider it. Normal people cringe at the mere thought of doing this.

[AlexandruC4 @AlexandruC4]

BREAKING: Sources confirm the US House and US Senate have the numbers to pass the bipartisan NATO Unity Protection Act, blocking Trump from taking Greenland by force.

[FriskyMatze @FriskyMatze]

@bayraktar_1love Every Russian vehicle in the war zone should carry anti-tank mines inside. This makes destruction easier and looks particularly spectacular. 🤩

[U.M. OSINT @ungemeve]

Wer glaubt, Aufrüstung sei Unfug, weil die NATO Russland eh überlegen sei, sollte aufmerksam verfolgen, was derzeit in Berlin abgeht.
Denn da meinte jemand, man sollte eine Wehrübung zur Resilienz der Energie-Infrastruktur durchführen.

Das Ergebnis eines Brandes an einem neuralgischen Punkt. Das schafft eine Shaheed Drohne leicht.

Davon hat Russland im vergangenen Jahr etwa 170 auf die Ukraine gefeuert. Pro Tag.
5100 pro Monat. Im Durchschnitt. Bei Angriffen ging die Zahl bis 800+ in wenigen Stunden.
Und Russland weiß, wo unsere Kabel sind.
Und unsere Flughäfen.
Unsere Bahnhöfe, Bank-Server, Postverteilzenten, Verkehrssteuerungen, Kraftwerke, Raffinerien und Tankstellen, Autobahnen, Stadien, Logistikzentren, Krankenhäuser...

Ihr wollt über Pazifismus diskutieren?
Dann werdet erwachsen und hört auf mit Eurem infantil-naivem Scheiß.
Oder geht aus dem Weg.

Niemanden interessiert, ob Ihr "an die Front" müsst.
Die Front kommt zu Euch.