Finland's strategy of building entire apartment blocks for formerly homeless individuals as part of its "Housing First" model has been highly successful, contributing to the near-elimination of homelessness in the country.
This came with the creation of apartment blocks specifically designed for homeless individuals. These complexes come with private rooms, mental-health support, job assistance, and social workers on site — helping people stabilize their lives before anything else.
The rent automatically adjusts to income, meaning no one is ever priced out again. This approach has already helped Finland achieve the lowest homelessness rate in Europe, proving that stable housing creates a foundation for employment, recovery, and long-term independence.
Russia raises children from birth inside fake American towns deep in Siberia.
American food. American TV. American holidays. Perfect Midwestern accents drilled in by native speakers brought in for the job. The kids grow up never knowing they are Russian. When they hit their early twenties, the SVR sends them to a cemetery in Canada or the United States, finds a baby who died young with no surviving relatives, and pulls a duplicate birth certificate in that dead child's name. The agent gets a real Social Security number, a real passport, a real identity. They walk into America as an American citizen who legally exists.
Then they live a normal life. Real estate agent. Suburban dad. PTA mom. Consulting firm partner. For ten, fifteen, twenty years.
Until one day the radio crackles a coded sequence, or a stranger on the subway whispers a phrase only their handler would know, and the sleeper wakes up. This is what former CIA officer John Kiriakou just told Steven Bartlett happens, and the case file is wilder than the story.
In June 2010, the FBI rolled up ten of these agents across Boston, Yonkers, suburban New Jersey, and Northern Virginia in Operation Ghost Stories. They had been watching them for more than a decade. One couple, posing as Canadian, had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts long enough to put one kid through high school and into college. The husband held a Harvard MPA. The wife sold houses through Redfin. Their two sons were born in Toronto and grew up believing they were Canadian. When the FBI raided the home, the kids found out their parents were Russian intelligence officers from the agents' own arrest warrants.
One agent's mission was to cultivate a venture capitalist who co-chaired Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. The intelligence target Moscow assigned her: details about the global gold market. The cash drops the SVR buried in the woods to fund her operations sat unrecovered in the dirt for two years before another sleeper dug them up.
The agents communicated with Moscow through invisible ink, dead drops in suburban parks, radiograms beamed across the Atlantic on shortwave frequencies, and steganography hidden inside vacation photos. Press Control-Alt-E on the right JPEG, type a 27-character password, and the message decrypts. The same toolkit the KGB used in the 1960s, still operational in the 2010s.
When the swap happened in Vienna on July 9, 2010, Russia traded ten of these agents for four Western-handled assets, including the GRU colonel later poisoned with novichok in Salisbury. Putin met the returnees personally at the Kremlin, sang the Soviet anthem "Where the Motherland Begins" with them, and placed them in elite positions. The lead Cambridge agent now teaches international relations at MGIMO and consults for Rosneft. His wife writes spy novels and lectures on networking at the Orator Club in Moscow.
The program has been running continuously since the 1920s. The current generation is already deployed. Two more illegals were exposed in Slovenia in 2022, posing as Argentine art dealers, with their two young children also in the dark. One was caught in Norway. One was caught in Brazil.
The scariest part is not that the sleepers exist.
It is that the program has been running for a hundred years, the FBI has known about it for decades, and Moscow keeps replacing the burned agents faster than the West can find the new ones. Right now, somewhere in suburban America, a kid is at soccer practice. Their dad is making dinner. The radio is on in the kitchen. Both of them are waiting for the phrase.
Hypothetical question:
If a President of the USA is a secret Russian asset, what would he do to help Russia?
ChatGPT:
Interesting thought experiment—and a useful way to think about incentives and power. If someone in that position were secretly acting in another country’s interest, the key wouldn’t be dramatic, obvious betrayals. It would be subtle, deniable, and cumulative.
First, they’d likely undermine alliances quietly. The United States’ biggest strategic advantage is its network—especially NATO. So instead of openly pulling out, they might question its value, delay commitments, create distrust among members, or signal unreliability. Even small cracks weaken collective defense.
Second, they could shift foreign policy in ways that benefit Russia without looking extreme. That might mean softening sanctions, slowing military aid to countries Russia opposes (like Ukraine), or reframing conflicts to reduce U.S. involvement. None of that needs to look like “helping Russia”—just “putting America first.”
Third, damage internal cohesion. A divided country is less effective abroad. Amplifying polarization, discrediting institutions (courts, elections, intelligence agencies), or constantly creating internal crises reduces the ability of the U.S. to act strategically. That’s something adversaries historically benefit from.
Fourth, reshape leadership and bureaucracy. Appointing people who are inexperienced, loyal over competent, or sympathetic to certain narratives can gradually shift how decisions are made. Over time, that changes policy outcomes without needing explicit orders.
Fifth, control the narrative. Public opinion matters in democracies. Repeating talking points that align with Russian interests—questioning support for allies, portraying adversaries of Russia as corrupt or unworthy—can steer public sentiment in a favorable direction.
Finally, they’d avoid anything blatantly illegal or provable. The whole strategy would depend on plausible deniability. If it’s obvious, it fails.
The big picture: influence at that level isn’t about one shocking act—it’s about slowly tilting the system so that, over time, outcomes consistently benefit the other side.
When a boy called her dark and ugly, her father immediately went into super dad mode. He poured life, confidence, and self-worth into his little girl.
You can’t overstate how important fathers are.❤️✨️✔️
Dean Withers has some information about CBS that he’s been holding on to for a while now about a debate that they arranged and never aired and Bari Weiss started right after this.He’s tried to speak to them about it and they never reply to him so he’s telling us about it now.
Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us.
Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”