Alex Kerala

History, Geopolitics & Finance. Concerned european citizen, navigating through the false narratives, wars and crises of a decaying US Empire & Western order.

[ADAM @adamemedia1]

🚨 Glenn Greenwald just broke it down…

A sitting US President, who ran on ending wars, is being openly defied by a foreign Prime Minister. Not behind closed doors. In public. Repeatedly.

Trump is a Zionist. His family is tied to Israel. He is owned. But he wants this war over. The midterms are coming. His base is fracturing. His promises, and legacy, are rotting in public.

Trump has repeatedly begged Netanyahu to stop.

Netanyahu didn’t just tell him to STFU.

He went straight to Congress, who AIPAC has bribed with $28M this election cycle alone, and passed Section 224, LEGALLY FUSING the US and Israeli military structures.

Democracy BYPASSED In broad daylight.

This is what @ggreenwald has spent years warning people about.

The most powerful man on earth can’t end a war his own voters want ended, because the lobby doesn’t just own the President.

It owns the building he works in.

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

@BrankoMilan As a Parisian, I would say you make a very valid point. The french psyche since 1789 is very much egalitarian. But it conflicts with the centuries-old aristocratic history.

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

@TheStalwart This is not surprising for "catholiques de gauche" (there's a lot of them in France)... But protestant anglos are different, I guess...

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

@cusackandrew I didn't realise there were so many romanians in London...

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

1. Little by little Open AI is abandoned in favor of the competition.
2. More generally the US LLM models are disappointing when you factor in the costs
3. "Good enough" Deepseek and other chinese models will beat US competition, because they are incredibly cheaper...

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

🧵True story: my wife asked ChatGPT to update an existing mortgage simulation, with a couple of different parameters. The result was garbage. 1/4

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

I ended up using Deepseek with the same prompt. The result was not in a PDF but it was fast and more than satisfactory...
I think this tiny example is giving you the direction that AI is going to take in a few months... 3/4

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

THE PENTAGON YESTERDAY DECLARED BYD, the world’s most successful electric carmaker, to be linked to the Chinese army.

Alibaba, one of the world’s largest retailers and e-commerc companies, was also added to the Federal Register yesterday.

Innovative tech firm Baidu, and two chipmakers, ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies, were also written into the register, known as the “1260H list”.

Last year, the Pentagon made the same accusation at Tencent, the world’s biggest video game and entertainment company, owner of Epic Games, and a major backer of Reddit, Snapchat, Spotify and others.

.

UNFAIR
The accusations are unfair, and everybody knows it. America’s biggest firms work directly with the Pentagon at extremely deep levels with multiple joint ventures to create attack tools, yet this is never considered an issue. In contrast, Chinese firms which have the slightest interaction with their country’s army are targeted for harm by the Pentagon.

The accusation paves the way for the US to make unilateral sanctions against the firms and then use economic coercion to force its vassals (“allies”) to follow suit.

.

REAL REASON
Analysts say the real reason is to harm the work of Chinese technologists, many of whom are developing AI applications.

The US already has an unassailable lead in the sector, with more than 5,400 datacenters compared to China’s approximately 375, but Washington DC has strongly opposed the concept of fair competition in recent years.

The listing move also harms US investors, who are steered away from buying shares in companies on the register, which are some of the most innovative and fast-growing firms in the world.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

Great post on the latest Kushner-Trump scandal in Albania. This is a long read , but it's worth it ...

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.

I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.

That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.

You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.

"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."

What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.

Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.

What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.

In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.

And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.

A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.

A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.

The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?

Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.

That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.

Which is exactly where Albania stands.

Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.

And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.

Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.

The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.

And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!

I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.

That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

@Bogachan_1971 It won't take much when you see how Trump reacted to just a 2.6% fall in the S&P yesterday (talking of taking over AI companies...etc...)

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

@Kathleen_Tyson_ @jpcdelorme @ianbremmer @ezraklein The story of Frederic Pierrucci is edifying... After learning about this, you don't look at the US in the same way... This is literally the Mafia mode of operating.

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

@GaryMarcus Things must be really looking ugly and the stock market must be at risk if Trump considers extrême measures like these...

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

⚠️ The American public may be about to be fleeced. ⚠️

OpenAI, a deeply unethical company that was built on a series of lies, does not have a realistic road to profitability. And they reportedly want the USG government to rescue them

But here’s the thing: Anthropic, Google, and others can readily fill the same niche.

Under no circumstances should the US bail them OpenAI.

Nor should taxpayers be forced to take a stake in them.

cc @DavidSacks

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

They said the reason for the sell off was about interest rates , but I agree with @GaryMarcus that it might be about the faltering IPOs prospects...

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Absolutely brutal day for AI fantasies:

Nvidia $NVDA: down 6.2%
Broadcom $AVGO: down 7.92%
Coreweave $CRWV: down 7.07%
Nebius $NBIS: down 12.27%
Oracle $ORCL: down 9.59%

Worst of all?

OpenAI is rumored to be looking for government to invest, a huge sign of weakness.

Less than 24 hours after the S&P said no to fast-tracking, things are looking very different.

[Macro Alpha @MacroAlphaHQ]

Retail investors are actually celebrating that SpaceX is reserving 30% of its IPO for them.

Let me explain how the real world works: Wall Street doesn't hand you 30% of a generational asset out of charity.

When institutional money refuses to swallow an inflated private market valuation, they need a massive liquidity sponge to absorb the float.

You aren't getting in early. You are volunteering to be venture capital's exit liquidity.

Save this tweet for 6 months from now.

$TSLA

[Alex Kerala @akerala]

@egea_blog Ces gens sont payés pour faire de la propagande. C'est maintenant évident. Ce genre de journalisme là est à vendre.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

People like me take great pains to avoid coming across as antisemitic in our criticisms of Israel, and then Jewish Zionists go to these events all “Yes we Jews need to be actively manipulating western institutions in order to deceive everyone and control society.”