Ruari Martin

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Corruption in the Western imagination is always somewhere else.

It is the African official with the Swiss bank account. The Latin American strongman skimming from the infrastructure budget. The Asian bureaucrat with his envelope of cash.

It is never the defense contractor who writes the legislation that funds his own contracts.

It is never the pharmaceutical company that buys the regulatory agency that is supposed to contain it.

It is never the financial sector that crashed the global economy, received trillions in public money, prosecuted no one, paid its bonuses that year, and then funded the think tanks that wrote the papers explaining why this outcome was the correct one.

That is not called corruption in the Western taxonomy.

That is called lobbying.

That is called the revolving door.

That is called campaign finance.

That is called public-private partnership.

That is called the market correcting itself.

The terminology is doing everything.

Corruption requires a deviation from a norm.

When the plunder becomes the norm, when the extraction is the system rather than a violation of it, the word corruption no longer applies.

And that is precisely when the rot is most complete.

When you can no longer name what is happening to you because the people who control the language decided it doesn't have a name.

[Ruari Martin @RuariMartin]

Project 2029 https://t.co/Baa1xBjMTI

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Tony Blair is the living embodiment of what happens when political office becomes a down payment on future plunder. Ejected in 2007 by his own MPs as a massive liability, he bequeathed Britain a wild casino economy primed for the 2008 crash. And when the British economy crashed and burned, Mr Blair kept quiet while honing his skills at securing power by other means.

His first job, after his ejection from 10 Downing Street, was as the West’s Middle East envoy, with a supposed emphasis on Gaza. It took six painful years for Mr Blair’s tenure to prove a failure so profound it amounted to active complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing, in Palestinian erasure, and in paving the ground for the ongoing genocide.

Soon after, the Chilcot Inquiry demolished Blair’s Iraq lies, exposing him as a liar, a chancer and a war criminal responsible for countless corpses of Iraqis, but also of British soldiers.

Then came Blair’s real innovation: the financialisation of the ex-premiership itself. The Tony Blair Institute, fuelled by £130 million from Oracle's Larry Ellison—coincidentally, the largest individual donor to the Friends of the IDF—became a shadow state, brokering governance contracts for autocrats and companies like Palantir that weaponise AI to produce mega-death abroad and full-on surveillance of Western populations.

Now, in May 2026, this corporate fixer issues a 5700 word tantrum demanding that Labour embrace Trump even more than Starmer already has, denounce what is left of Labour’s betrayed Green New Deal, and trash the remnants of workers' rights. This is not the wisdom of an aging statesman. It is the frantic squirming of a man fearing his grip on oligarchic power might soon wane and whose entire post-10 Downing Street existence depends on preventing the many from ever reclaiming what the few have plundered.

https://t.co/1Onlpx9Nkh

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

Who precisely are the 'bond vigilantes', the true enemies of democracy who sell off and manipulate government bonds to jack up yields, spook populations and threaten cowardly politicians? We're usually told that pension funds run the show and they're just looking after our savings. This gives money-market power a rational and ethical image.

It's not true. Pension funds are big buyers, but they tend to invest long term, making them ineffective 'bond vigilantes'. The other big buyers are central banks, foreign governments, banks, corporations, insurance companies, asset managers, and mutual funds. But their tendency is also for the long term.

The true culprits, the 'bond vigilantes' at the heart of money-market power, are the 'global macro' hedge funds working through desk traders. They operate short-term and, using derivatives-style techniques such as shorting, interest-rate swaps and credit-default swaps, they can rapidly drive gilt yields higher and threaten governments anywhere. They can also launch simultaneous currency attacks, depreciating a currency and jacking up import costs.

This is stateless, concentrated money-market power with no loyalty to any population and determined to keep governments subjugated and powerless. They can unseat left-wing governments, prevent public investment and nationalisation, and keep nations open to private investment and privatisation.

This is a relatively small network of funders and traders, many ensconced in the City of London. It could be crushed with international agreements on non-tradable fixed-rate bonds and strict capital exchange controls. The secondary bond market is only 200 years old. It could be obliterated as quickly as it emerged, but that would take an international network of informed and courageous politicians and central bankers. At the moment a pipe dream.

[Katie Hopkins @KTHopkins]

On behalf of their client, Zara Sultana, Bindmans Media and Information Law Practise Group requires that I publish the following statement on X, and that such statement must be clearly visible and pinned to my
profile for a continuous period of no less than 24 hours:

“On 30 March 2026, I published a post on my X account addressed to Zarah Sultana in which I stated that she encourages and incites violence and is friends with terrorists.

Those statements are false. I was wrong and offer my sincere apologies to Ms Sultana for the harm and distress caused to her.”

It is my very great pleasure to do this, and I reiterate my sincere and repeated offer to meet with Miss Zara Sultana in person to resolve our differences.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[Ruari Martin @RuariMartin]

@bcdsignature It isn’t though, is it?

[Harry Halpin - Nym @harryhalpin]

Because I get asked a lot.

Why we must fight Palantir, in brief.

1. Programmers working on the Internet have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not a single country. The Internet has been designed since its inception as a universal system for the sharing of knowledge without censorship. The Internet is not the property of any one government or nation.

2. The Internet enables mass surveillance at a scale unimaginable to the Gestapo and the Cheka. Far too many programmers have wasted their lives at building surveillance systems under the guise of Web advertising. Today, these web tracking systems are being used to monitor, control, and even kill humans by companies like Palantir that seek to combine state violence with corporate efficiency, and thus create a new form of technofascism.

3. Surveillance justified by external national security threats will be turned against citizens inside the nation-state. Mass surveillance was once the exclusive domain of the NSA, but today it has been privatized to corporations like Palantir that are unaccountable to any democratic process. What begins as fear of external foreign nation-states turns inwards to focus on immigrants, dissidents, and eventually to anyone that might challenge the status quo or try to exit an increasingly dysfunctional society.

4. Everyone is a target. The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance. The line between policing and military operations blurs, with legal frameworks being replaced by technological violence operating with total impunity.

5. Surveillance can only be defeated by building software and hardware to defend ourselves. Meek calls for regulation or moralizing demands for human rights are useless in this era. Any rights must be enforced by the hard power of code. Code, not laws, can be used to uphold the right to privacy by making surveillance difficult, if not impossible, even by nation-state adversaries.

6. We are ruled by a senile gerontocracy. Unlike the generations that fought in the world wars, most of our current rulers are degenerate pedophiles who would sacrifice the well-being of the youth and the entire planet due to their infantile desire for wealth and power. Technology of surveillance and automated warfare reflects their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain archaic forms of domination.

7. The American Empire is unraveling. Once, the United States of America presided over a globe where it could enforce its rule via the status of the dollar as a global reserve currency and a network of equally global military bases, but new regional powers now directly challenge the United States as its empire dissolves in the face of internal economic stagnation, political corruption, and the inflation of the dollar.

8. In a real war, fantasies of total technological dominance always backfire. When a faceless drone kills a child’s father, that child will one day take revenge regardless of the cost, something forgotten by those raised in comfortable suburbs. Going beyond zero-sum games, one can only truly win a battle against a people by demonstrating your victory provides a better way of life, increased prosperity, and an inspiring philosophy.

9. Oddly enough, proponents of fully automated warfare support a universal draft. Deep-down, these keyboard warriors know that their technofascist fantasies are a paper tiger when up against determined opponents that engage in asymmetric warfare. They also know none of their children will fight in a war for their state but they would be happy to see other people’s children come home in body-bags.

10. The problem is not whether AI weapons will be built; we must hold responsible those who are building them. No matter which country is deploying automated killing machines, no one is absolved from the murder of civilians and the destruction of infrastructure due to the parlour-trick of shifting the blame to AI.

11. Atomic war is on the horizon. As various states descend into wars over increasingly scarce natural resources, the possibility of tactical nuclear strikes over Teheran, Kyiv, and other areas of conflict has returned to the historical stage. Increasingly geriatric and authoritarian rulers face less guardrails than before to deploying nuclear weapons, and may even be willing to sacrifice the survival of humanity to appease their own petty egos.

12. Our goal is a world of peace where every person can be empowered by the Internet. Modern war is the quintessential game of sending young people to the meat-grinder. Why die for the profit of corrupt rulers when one could build real wealth and power for yourself using the Internet?

13. We should fight for the world we want, and build the tools needed by future generations. Pacifism would be suicidal in this period of global turbulence and resource wars, but real hard power lies in technology: Programmers should be creating technologies to live a free life and prosper in a hostile society of surveillance and control, and decentralization is the only way these technologies will survive against the inevitable repression.

14. The State will not help us. The state is a dying pre-Internet institution that increasingly resembles nothing but a Ponzi scheme fueled by taxes and debt. None of the youth alive today will likely inherit any benefits, such as welfare and health care.

15. Centralized and opaque algorithms are a danger to free speech. Propaganda is the flip-side of surveillance, as continual propaganda prevents anyone from even thinking of challenging the system. Social media monopolies promote propaganda to create a generalized idiocy while silencing those that would dare to criticize the reigning order before they can organize against it.

16. Building new forms of social organization with each other is vital to survival. The traditional mediascape of politics and entertainment exists to distract us from building networked solidarity and distributed autonomous organizations across borders. The hierarchical state is as relevant to us as the medieval church and kings were to the formation of the joint-stock corporation and the labour union.

17. Digital identity is the next step in their system of control. Within the next few years, access to the Internet–including in Europe and the United States–will require biometric national identity cards, using the flimsy excuse of “protecting children.” The real goal is to gatekeep free access to subversive political content and halt cross-border communication in order to prevent new forms of self-organization and resistance from emerging.

18. Only when one can be anonymous is one truly free. The freedom to express oneself without censorship and surveillance is a vital precondition for both the autonomous use of reason and the democratic evolution of society. Technology must enable the freedom to selectively reveal ourselves to the world–so that we can become who we want to be–by preserving the right to privacy over the Internet, including not just individual privacy but the right to transact and form contracts privately.

19. America created the first global surveillance state, but it will not be the last. Too many have forgotten or perhaps taken for granted the revelations of Wikileaks and Snowden. States across the world from China to Russia are creating even more powerful global surveillance systems and propaganda machines. Leveraging private defense contracts in countries across the world, Palantir seeks to make itself the operating system of a cross-border global secret state while it pushes its own farcical version of ethno-nationalism.

20. Culture wars are a psyop. It is ironic that “Epstein class” virtue-signals about traditional morality and the superiority of forms of ethno-nationalism, while trying to return to the rule of hereditary elites, even in the United States. Rather than reverse the gains of the Enlightenment, we take the side of our ancestors who fought a centuries-long battle for individual liberty, scientific progress, decentralized markets, bottom-up democracy and the emancipation of humanity from feudal monarchs and their make-believe mythologies.

21. New forms of technology can reshape the world. Technology is not just a tool, but the world we live in and an extension of our cognitive capabilities. The co-operation of humans with the collective intelligence embedded in AI could accelerate human progress and overcome planetary crises such as climate change and atomic war that threatens the survival of our species.

22. Live free or die trying. We must bear eternal vigilance in the struggle against fascism, and the battlefield is technology. There is no middle ground: Technologists must choose whether to work for the enslavement of humanity or to create new spaces for freedom.

These are my personal beliefs, not those of @nym. Yet as a philosopher that founded a tech startup, I have a responsibility to respond to this manifesto of Palantir and it's so-called "philosopher-CEO" Alex Karp.

[Ruari Martin @RuariMartin]

@CalderLabour is this a live account?

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Zohran on CBS: " I think what we can see is that a democratic socialist politics is one that should be judged on its delivery, like any ideology ...  I think that this is a politics that can flourish anywhere because, frankly, there is only one majority in this country — that's the working class and it's time we have a politics that puts them at the heart of what it is that we're pursuing and not as part of the appendix."

[Ruari Martin @RuariMartin]

@NutcloughWoods Is this still an active group?

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

There is only one way we will defeat Reform: together.

That’s why I’m backing the Greens in the Gorton and Denton by-election.

We are a mass movement of all ages, backgrounds and faiths — united in a belief that things can, and will, change.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Full force of UK state, and its media assets, is coming down on Green Party

Labour, Tories, Reform all support NATO, Zionist genocide + US military occupation of UK

They are an imperial uniparty

Greens now offer something different. This is not tolerated by British oligarchy

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

It's helpful to think of the Guardian as the media analogue of the Labour Party

Same people, same politics, and same role in the British polity

They are liberal flank of the British establishment

Both institutions are set up to stop systematic change happening in this country

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

Solidarity to the dock workers across 21 ports in the Mediterranean and Europe for shutting down operations to block arms shipments to Israel. This is what our rulers fear most: Workers coming together to liberate each other from capitalism and imperialism

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

I agree with you on the drip.

They are not just hiding names.

They are calibrating the dosage.

Show you an island.

Nothing breaks.

Show you flight logs.

Nothing breaks.

Show you "suicide in custody" under cameras that magically stop working.

Nothing breaks.

After that, the content almost does not matter.

It can be satanic rituals, child torture, bio labs, blackmail, whatever version you believe.

The core experiment is always the same:

How much horror can you watch and still go back to work on Monday.

It is not just about normalizing depravity.

It is about teaching you something deeper:

That nothing you learn will ever change who rules you.

You are being trained to live with cognitive dissonance as a permanent condition:

Yes, your elites rape and traffic children.

Yes, your intelligence services run cover.

Yes, your media launders it as gossip.

And yes, life goes on, stocks go up, elections continue, the same surnames stay on top.

Once that lesson sinks in, mass surveillance and open authoritarianism are not a shock.

They feel like a natural continuation of a world where evil is public and untouchable.

1984 was about torture in a basement.

Our version is softer:

Reality shows, late-night jokes, "leaks", FOIA drops, redacted pages.

You are not beaten into submission in Room 101.

You are entertained into numbness on every platform.

For me the key point is this:

The drip is not only testing outrage.

It is measuring obedience.

They want to know:

Can you know this and still pay your taxes,

Still send your kids into their schools and armies,

Still treat their courts and ballots as legitimate.

If the answer is yes, then they do not fear exposure.

They have discovered something more powerful than secrecy:

A population that has seen the monster and decided to live with it.

That is the real Black Mirror.

[Sopo Japaridze @sopjap]

Here is an explanation of Epstein that makes more sense than this typical garbage from commentators like Matt, with their anti-communist, anti-Soviet explanations and apologia for capitalism—complete with scary Russian words.

Epstein's roots are fundamentally in anti-communism and the Cold War. (We should remember that Israel itself was fiercely anti-communist because communism presented a competing ideology that could draw Jews away from Zionism and the project of building what is essentially a fascist, Jewish-supremacist state.

Despite now amassing so much power that it influences U.S. policy, Israel began as America's lapdog in the Middle East, happily tasked for decades with crushing progressive movements on behalf of U.S. and European interests.)

Cold War’s covert networks (CIA, NSA, etc...) didn’t vanish in the ‘90s after they were repeatedly exposed by the public and movements in the US and USSR didn't exist anymore. It mutated. They fragmented into private jets, offshore accounts, and "philanthropic" black boxes. Look at the people who are all implicated around him: academics, philanthropists, and politicians.

Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) (1972-1991) was the CIA’s real "bank of doom." Financed anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan. Laundered drug money. Funneled arms via Adnan Khashoggi. Linked Saudi intel, Pakistani ISI, and Langley. A perfect covert pipeline. Then it collapsed.

Khashoggi ran so Epstein could walk.

What happened after the Post-BCCI vacuum? Khashoggi—BCCI’s top client—partnered with Robert Maxwell (Ghislaine’s Mossad-tied father). Their network: Arms deals, dictator bribes, intel cashflows. Epstein inherited this playbook, and then he privatized it; he made it into a private network.

The same kinds of shifts were happening in Academia:
Cold War military funding got scrutinized in the 1970s. So they decentralized: Think tanks. "Independent" research hubs e.g. Santa Fe Institute (SFI). They created complex systems, which meant a new kind of warfare research, "free market" fundamentalism being tested and exported, and most importantly, it was privately funded, so all of this could be "deniable."

Jeffrey Epstein's association with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) exemplifies how the military-academia complex can be repackaged as elite "pure science," where his donations facilitated access to Nobel laureates and obscured the agendas of private capital and corporations that shielded state interests.

This is a core mechanism of neoliberal innovation: it turns networks into a hall of mirrors where oversight is impossible, deliberately scattering components across intelligence, academia, and finance to leave little evidence, drown critics in "coincidences," and ensure accountability is difficult by design.

The collapse of the BCCI did not end the era of dark finance but inaugurated its next, more sophisticated phase—the Epstein era. This system upgraded the tools of state power: covert ops were outsourced to private billionaires, black budgets were hidden in philanthropic trusts, and influence was laundered through elite social and academic networks. It operates as a hall of mirrors, deliberately scattering components across intelligence, academia, and finance to create plausible deniability, drown critics in "coincidences," and make accountability structurally impossible.

Consequently, the suppressed "Epstein list" is not merely being buried to protect individuals from pedophilia charges; its full exposure would rip open the veil on how the modern military-industrial and knowledge production complex, spanning the U.S., Israel, and beyond, actually functions in real-time.

[Marc Lamont Hill @marclamonthill]

Today, let us remember Martin Luther King as he TRULY was: A Black radical anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, revolutionary Christian internationalist who was deemed an enemy of the State and assassinated for his radical work. Just about everything else is a lie.

[Chris Littlewood @chrislittlewoo8]

Digital ID for every adult is not progress. It is the end of a free society dressed up as convenience.

I am a cyber security specialist. This is my take.

They are selling it as a fix for illegal migration. That is bollocks.

We spend hundreds of billions a year on cyber security and yet the volume of breaches is breaking records. The threat is growing faster than the spend.

Digital ID will not stop boats. It will not stop trafficking gangs. It will not fix a broken border.

Criminals will work around it.

Honest citizens will pay the price.

It builds giant data banks that track where you go, what you buy, what you read and who you speak to.

It links your identity to every checkpoint in daily life.

One breach and your life is exposed.

Look at Jaguar Land Rover and the airports in recent weeks. Now imagine that at national scale on an ID system tied to everything you need to live your daily life.

Here is the risk that ministers will not admit.

Ransomware seeded through a supplier or an insider:

It lies quiet for months.
It rolls through the backups.
On trigger day the register and the recovery sets are both encrypted.

Payments fail. Health and benefits stall. Borders slow. Citizens are frozen out until a ransom is paid or the state rebuilds from scratch.

Centralise identity and you centralise failure.

Do not fall for the pitch.
Function creep is certain.
It starts as login.

It becomes access to money, travel, speech and public services.

It turns rights into permissions controlled by the state and its contractors.

It creates a single point of failure for criminals, insiders and hostile states to target.

It will punish the elderly, the poor and anyone who is not always online.

It will centralise risk and outsource blame.

It will not stop fraud.

It will not stop illegal migration.

It will build the machinery for a social credit system by stealth.

If ministers cared about the border, they would enforce current laws, resource patrols and processing, close loopholes and remove those with no right to stay.

You do not need a national ID to do any of that.

We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason.

Britain does not need a central register to prove age or status.

Yes to privacy first proofs. No to a database state.