Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦

"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel"
– Samuel Johnson, April 7, 1775.
☘️☘️☘️ ::: San Patricio Battalion ::: ☘️☘️☘️

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

The vast majority of Irish people are happy to pay cash to tax-undeclared travellers to power-hose their drives, clean their gutters or do any kind of home maintenance. And this, in a country with one of the world's most aggressive revenue collectors.

So the 'vast majority' ARE as corrupt as the governments they consistently elect into power. Not to mention a public that has 'triple-locked' its own reputation for being as two-faced as the policies their government enact.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@IsabelOakeshott Just Oaksnot being Oaksnot.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@BrigidLaffan @IrishDad16 @ConorGallaghe_r We should be expelling Russians and their embassy from the country altogether. We either stand with democracies or we don’t.

[DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics]

🇦🇱🇮🇱 Albanian fans pelted Israeli players with trash and curses during the recent International "Friendly" match.

Tensions over the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon and the Kushner land grab are rapidly growing.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@Mark_Coughlan Professional jealousy catfight.
Jealousy that somebody's work is getting more attention and creating more impact.
You'd be better off just doing your actual job instead of indulging the greenness of your envy.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@ConorHogarty @BarryAndrewsMEP @McNamara_Eoin @nytimes @meganspecia @EUCouncil @fiannafailparty @RenewEurope Anyone working at the Department of Defence who doesn't believe in national defence needs to be booted out - NOW.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

I’ve been investigating the russian refinery for days now and the story gets darker and darker. The shipments are sent to Siberia, smelted, and sold to the russian company ‘ASK’. This company distributes aluminium directly to Russia’s missile & drone manufacturers.

[Red Hanrahan 🇮🇪 ハヌラハンーあか @Red_Hanrahan]

"We will constructively advance the security and defence agenda at EU level during the presidency..."

I really wish she would advance the security and defence agenda at the national level. 🙄

https://t.co/YyHtdLFS5f

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Today the EU made American AI illegal in 27 countries.

The reason is ONE sentence Microsoft's own lawyer said under oath:

This morning in Brussels, EU Tech Chief Henna Virkkunen unveiled the Cloud and AI Development Act. It's the most aggressive anti-American tech move from Europe since GDPR.

The law forces EU public sector procurement in banking, healthcare, defense, and energy to apply mandatory non-price factors favoring software and hardware built inside the EU. Microsoft Azure can be cheaper, AWS can be faster, Google Cloud can have the better model, and EU governments MUST legally prefer European alternatives.

AWS, Microsoft, and Google currently control roughly 70% of the European cloud market. Brussels is now openly targeting greater independence from US providers in cloud, AI, and semiconductors.

The largest regulatory market-share transfer in tech history is being written into law right now.

But the real story is how this happened...

On June 10, 2025, a man almost no one outside Brussels had heard of walked into the French Senate. His name is Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France.

Senator Dany Wattebled asked him under oath whether he could guarantee that data belonging to French citizens, stored on Microsoft European servers, would never be transmitted to US authorities without explicit consent from the French government.

Carniaux answered honestly. He admitted he could not guarantee it, because Microsoft must comply with the US CLOUD Act regardless of where European data physically sits. One sentence of sworn testimony from Microsoft's own counsel killed every sovereign cloud defense Big Tech had spent five years building.

It became the legal foundation for the law unveiled today.

Then Trump accelerated the divorce.

January 2025 brought executive orders expanding US surveillance authorities. Vance went to Munich and attacked European democracies on stage.

The tariffs followed and so did the Pentagon's $200 million AI contract war that ended with OpenAI replacing Anthropic after Hegseth labeled it a supply chain risk. So did OpenAI's Stargate and yesterday's Trump AI Executive Order, whose Section 3 lets the White House pick which AI companies get 30-day early access to frontier models. American AI was officially declared a US government strategic asset.

Europe heard every word of it.

On May 12, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told the French National Assembly that Europe had 24 months to build sovereign AI infrastructure or become a permanent US VASSAL state.

And the response came fast:

April 24: Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha for $20 billion with both Germany's and Canada's digital ministers in the room at the Berlin announcement. May 30: SoftBank committed up to $87 BILLION for French nuclear-powered data centers, the largest AI infrastructure project in European history.
Yesterday: EU Parliament announced it's dropping Google for French search engine Qwant tomorrow. France ordered every government workstation off Windows and onto Linux.

Today the Cloud and AI Development Act made all of it law.

- Mistral is building a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris by 2028 with Nvidia, MGX, and Bpifrance
- SAP's EU AI Cloud, launched last November, runs on Cohere, Mistral, and SAP's own sovereign infrastructure
- McKinsey forecasts $600 billion in sovereign AI needs by 2030

None of that money is going to Silicon Valley.

The America First AI policy built a wall around the world's most regulated economy, and American companies are on the wrong side of it.

Microsoft's lawyer told the truth in a Senate hearing nobody watched. Trump turned that admission into a national security narrative while the EU turned that narrative into procurement law.

And one entire continent walked away from the American tech stack...

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@ConorHogarty What is wrong with these feckin idiots!

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@RobGilbey Defence is one of the offices of Government where they offload those civil servants who couldn’t hack it in other Departments. A repository for sinecures.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@RobGilbey Exactly what you get when you have no strategists amongst the decision makers. They’d be better suited to Running the Irish Country Womens Association.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@donlav Could they do it any slower?

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@China_TVv Absolutely.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@mikepompeo @ACLJ Win in Iran?
You feckin idiot.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@bundeskanzler 'Ready'.... that's so re-assuring.
We'll all sleep soundly tonight.
Thanks Bundes Kanzler!

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@Keir_Starmer But you're too chicken to do anything but utter useless words.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@USAmbNATO Sure you will.
We believe everything Trump sycophants say.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@Uvejeje The original name is the 'Pretanic Isles' and it was named so by the Greeks.

[Mike Strank 🇮🇪 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @MikeStrank]

@roy_kinsella There shouldn't be a single Russian in Ireland until Russia leaves Ukraine.