US lawyer and antiwar activist Dan Kovalik just had his devices seized and was interrogated by counter-terror police at Liverpool Airport
Meanwhile, Palestine solidarity activist Sarah Wilkinson is heading to trial on terrorism charges for a couple of Twitter posts, and refusing to give police her mobile pin
The Canary, one of the UK’s most doggedly antiwar independent media outlets, was just debanked by Lloyd’s
The UK recently refused entry to Hasan Piker and Cenk Uyghur, two of the most recognizable voices of the left wing of the US Democratic Party, on national security grounds
It did the same this month to US journalist Jeremy Loffredo
UK counter terror police detained and interrogated my colleague, Kit Klarenberg, seizing his devices, and grilling him about his investigative journalism. PM Keir Starmer’s Labour Together slush fund even hired a private intel firm to smear Kit and The Grayzone.
UK police raided journalist Asa Winstanley’s home and illegally seized his devices on suspicion of “encouragement of terrorism”
The UK Crown Prosecution Service attempted to prosecute journalist Richard Medhurst under the Terrorism Act, but failed
The list of journalists and activists repressed by the British regime goes on and on. And they have one thing in common: outspoken opposition to Israel’s genocidal agenda.
Who’s actually in charge in London?
The US government blatantly opposes other countries defending their sovereignty.
In this screed that was obviously written with AI, a top State Department official (who is married to a Silicon Valley billionaire oligarch) attacks the concept of digital sovereignty, arguing that other countries should stay dependent on US Big Tech monopolies (so they must pay them rents).
What the US empire seeks is global monopoly.
https://t.co/qUwNFVNE8y
Ummm what's causing these insane prices? @OctopusEnergy ? Its summer not winter, shouldn't solar be helping massively?
Today looked.bad.... tomorrow looks insane... like shut everything off insane. What's happened?
Yep. What's really scary is the longevity of the creditor class's rule in the Near East and West. Since 1500 BC, on and off. Mostly on. Agreements on fixed-rate non-tradable bonds and capital controls across the G10 would crush money-market power. But their money buys the politicians, media and educators they want.
This is biblical.
A woman in her eighties. Ten years into Alzheimer's. Hadn't spoken a full sentence in five years.
Takes one, 5 gram dose of psilocybin.
She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life, recognized family and held real conversations. She regained bladder control after five years, walked on her own. and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks.
@morgan_downey As part of a broader IEA-coordinated release, the US released 79.7 million barrels to 12 companies, with nearly 50 million barrels going to UK-based commodity data firm Vortexa Ltd
We are subsidizing their oil market with our SPR
Mysterious ‘cold blob’ in the Atlantic suggests the AMOC is weakening
A patch of ocean south-east of Greenland is the only place on Earth that is cooling, and it could be a sign that the warm water “conveyor belt” in the Atlantic is slowing down
https://t.co/iOP7S0fjUS
https://t.co/nKdwhlJCaW
The classic neoliberal reaction. So, how long before the four-stage regime-change process kicks in? The 'bond market' is already showing 'concern'. Mexico is moving towards partial self-sufficiency, principally in agriculture, so it can resist. Money-market power must die.
Just so everyone is clear, the gripe here is that China is destroying the profits of the western bourgeoisie, because they are forced to make their products cheaper to compete with Chinese competitors.
This is the central argument of 100% of all western economic analysis of China. The more affordable China's products, the more it destroys their monopolies and their profit margins.
As always, the purpose of such propagandists, as well as their "elected" governments, is to make the interests of the bourgeoisie appear like the national interests of their respective countries. It's the first rule of bourgeois economics: What's good for the bourgeoisie is good for the proletariat.
It always astonishes me how there is virtually ZERO public debate - or even public awareness - in Europe about the decisions that will most shape ordinary people's lives.
These days, the EU is drafting a new anti-China legal framework where - quite literally - the more affordable and competitive Chinese products are, the more illegal they'd become.
You'd think EU citizens would want to be informed about such things - as it couldn't be more consequential for their prosperity.
Yet I bet virtually no EU citizen is even aware of it, beyond a vague sense that there is some sort of trade dispute going on.
So what's going on exactly? It all centers around a new legal instrument the EU is drafting called the "overcapacity instrument" (https://t.co/mNpCMudYyS).
First of all, the very notion of "overcapacity" is pretty ridiculous to begin with, especially the way it's being defined by the EU, as it basically means being competitive enough to export.
By this definition of "overcapacity," pretty much every European industry that's ever run a trade surplus - German cars, French wine, Italian fashion - has been guilty of "overcapacity."
I'm not even exaggerating: if you read this study by the EU Parliament on "Industrial overcapacities, with a focus on China" (https://t.co/TcwEBoL8mD), they define "overcapacity" as building more capacity than your domestic market can absorb. So the moment you build capacity to export abroad, you're in "overcapacity."
Utterly ridiculous.
And what this "overcapacity instrument" is about is creating a permanent legal mechanism for the EU to block Chinese competition across whole sectors of the economy, if they happen to be in "overcapacity."
In effect, this means that if China is competitive globally in a given sector in such a way that it exports a lot, that's proof of overcapacity, and legally it'd mean that the entire sector can be restricted from the EU market.
Which means it really, factually, is a legal framework where the more affordable and competitive your products are, the more illegal they become.
Which is a CRAZY economic concept! 🤦♂️
Please note that it's different from the anti-subsidy legal instrument, which the EU has already put in place in 2023 (the "Foreign Subsidies Regulation": https://t.co/SvPKFyN0zo).
This "overcapacity instrument" would be above and beyond this: it wouldn't even matter if a particular sector was subsidized by the Chinese government or not, the mere fact of its competitiveness in exports would be grounds for restrictions in the EU.
It doesn't take a genius to understand how badly this could impact everyday people: this is European consumers being forced to pay more for worse products by law, so that uncompetitive European firms don't have to improve.
Politicians frame it as avoiding a "China shock 2.0" but really this is choosing an even steeper self-inflicted decline than is already the case, where EU citizens would subsidize mediocre EU companies that would have even less pressure to catch up. It's a hidden tax: subsidies for uncompetitive firms paid by consumers instead of governments, which in turn makes them less incentivized to become competitive.
The first "China shock" did de-industrialize Europe somewhat, but at least it made things cheaper for European consumers. If this becomes Europe's response to a second "China shock" not only it'd make everything more expensive but it'd do nothing for EU industry: you don't become competitive by banning the competition...
Look at China itself: the way it industrialized was NOT by banning Western firms but on the contrary by welcoming them strategically and learning from them. You learn to compete by... competing, duh!
What I find most shocking in all of this isn't even the policy itself - you can make arguments for and against protectionism, and reasonable people can disagree.
What's shocking is that virtually no European media outlet is explaining any of this to the public. This is unarguably one of the single most consequential economic decisions the EU will make this decade, affecting the price of everything, and it's being drafted in near-total silence.
No newspaper is running the headline "EU plans to make Chinese goods illegal if they're too affordable" - even though that's essentially what's happening.
But that's what you call a "democracy" with "freedom of expression" these days apparently...
Britain at the height of its power and prestige was home to Karl Marx and Giuseppe Mazzini. It was a refuge for Alexander Herzen and Victor Hugo.
Now, in 2026, it wont allow American YouTubers & streamers to enter because they criticised Israel. 🥀
Deep inner suffering inevitably arises when the human person is reduced to performance, consumption, or a statistical datum. Many young people today live under the yoke of expectations to perform, immersed in an exasperated competitiveness that generates anxiety, fear of not measuring up, and disorientation.
@PatriciaNPino Congrats. But we need for deeper market design reform to get us out of this mess. A green power pool is good for wholesale but to not break the grid architecture we need nodal flexibility market arvhitecture and widespread sovereignty preserving digitalisation
It’s upsetting to watch so many people be led to believe a software feature created from human exhaust is an alien intelligence.
It’s a psyop. LLMs are a clever way to compress and search large databases with patterns. They have now inhaled effectively all of human knowledge. From this point, there will be spikes of improvement in narrow areas, but the big models are already collapsing from inhaling their own exhaust.
The core technology is at least 40 years old. Neural networks are nothing new. We’re just attaching obscene amounts of computing and data to them.
The physical nature of an LLM is literally just a database of tokens (word parts) and weights (relationships) that can be queried. It is not magic. It can be made deterministic by setting the entropy aka temperature to zero. It is a clever way to store an immense amount of data and retrieve it through token predicting.
“Agents” are just LLMs being queried in a loop. They take exponentially more energy and suffer the same problems as chatbots—hallucinations and sycophancy—but exponentially more complicated to solve.
In reality, it’s all a category error. It’s a mirage created by the desire of a small group of elites to build a technological and financial moat around themselves. “AGI” is the McGuffin, the plot device, to serve as the messiah that will deliver people from the toils of everyday life.
The broligarchs are trying to sell us our own replacements. According to them, we won’t have to drive, or work, or think anymore. The robots and AI will all do it for us.
It’s the oldest con there is: magic beans.
Your chatbot is not your Jesus or your girlfriend. Your Claude instance is not intelligent. It’s a search engine for human knowledge stolen from the internet and the destruction of physical books.
So please understand. You are witnessing the biggest financial bubble in all of human history based on deceptive marketing, astroturfing, and cult dynamics. You are not witnessing the birth of a new intelligence. Unfortunately, that’s a battle we’re losing.