Lawrence Anderson B

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

@KateriSeraphina @InadeBree C'est le plus précieux de mes livres de chevet. Presqu'en miettes, tenu par deux élastiques, je le trimballe partout.

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

😘

[Kerry Burgess @KerryBurgess]

I love Francesca.

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

@RnaudBertrand @hi_bbash @terrybythebay Exactly! Glad you picked that up

btw I'm delighted you have made your home (or *a* home) in Malaysia

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

@rganel @_OrbanAnita Complète BS. Hezbollah has never in 40 years shown the slightest desire to invade / occupy Israel. If the Zionist state just stayed on its side of the border there would be peace. But they cannot and will not, seeking evermore Lebensraum. So Hezbollah resists - v effectively.

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

The largest economies ranked by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP - PPA en français)

[dav @dav8119]

@russeurope juste pour dire

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

@russeurope Analyse fort érudite mais... XXVI chapitres et aucun mot sur les taux d'intérêt réels plus que féroces? La fanatique faucon Nabiullina impose 15% alors que l'inflation voisine 5%. Combien d'entreprises EU pourraient même respirer devant 10% réel?! La robustesse RU est un miracle

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

@SWagenknecht Yr pro-peace pro-Germany-first stance is admirable but then WHY did you avoid attending SPIEF? Leaving all the running to AfD. Did von der Schulenburg or any other BSW attend?

I'm sympathetic to BSW. If I could vote I'd rather you than AfD. But you make mistake after mistake

[BenAris @bneeditor]

Got to love Saint Petersburg one of the greatest cities in the world. I had a great fortune of living there for six months.
And the residents of Saint Petersburg are very special, Russians.

Everyone will tell you “I’m an artist but I’m working in a supermarket at the moment”.

Sums up the whole city‘s mentality. It’s the complete opposite of Moscow where everyone’s into power and Money.

[Brian McDonald @BrianMcDonaldIE]

Graduates at a Moscow school lined up today to rub their principal’s bald head for good luck.

The strange but harmless tradition has reportedly existed at School No. 548 for around 20 years.

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

@ThierryRouby @cyprien_ronze @russeurope "Alley of the Angels" dans Wikipedia a disparu, biffée de l'Histoire par nos censeurs

[🇨🇭🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿InLucysHead🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇨🇭© @InsideLucysHead]

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans...

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Germans drink a lot of beers and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

Conclusion:

Eat and drink what you like.

Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

I weep for my Europe

[Ivo Toniut @IvoTONIUT]

Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas:
“If Europe cannot defeat Russia, how can we defeat China?”

You can spin it however you want, but the reality is that the European Union is an organization made up of id|ots.

[Alexander Mercouris @AMercouris]

The two parts of what can just about still be called the WESTERN ALLIANCE seem each to be drifting closer and closer towards armed conflict with the two countries they have each chosen to label their enemy: IRAN and RUSSIA.

President TRUMP's rhetoric about IRAN has again become very belligerent. I am sorry to say that does not surprise me, coming as it does directly after a disappointing trip to CHINA.

Renewing the war with IRAN is a terrible idea.

It is not disputed that US arsenals of precision guided weapons have been severely depleted. By contrast, according to US intelligence, IRAN has preserved a large proportion of its missile arsenal, and is busy replacing its drones, which are cheap and easy to produce.

How does the US conduct a war with inventories so depleted? Advocates of doing so never answer this question.

The US did not deliver a knock out blow in March and April. Why assume it can now?

None of the suggestions - attacks on Iran's infrastructure, killing more of its leaders, seizing islands, a ground invasion - seem remotely adequate to the task and all come with enormous risks.

In the meantime energy prices continue to rise, as even Lindsey Graham has noticed. A fresh attack on Iran can only make an already bad situation worse.

In EUROPE there are identical levels of belligerency, this time towards RUSSIA. The folly here however is even greater.

In the case of the US it has a problem of depleted arsenals which can only be replenished over time and at great cost.

In the case of EUROPE it is a case of inventories that are not just depleted but in fact exhausted, with even some of EUROPE's hardest liners (KALLAS, RUTTE) starting to understand that it may not be possible to replenish them in any reasonable timescale at all. It is extremely unwise to invite conflict with a nuclear power. Doing so when one's militaries are so inadequate to the task is beyond reason.

In both conflicts diplomacy is possible. In neither conflict is it happening.

In the case of IRAN, TRUMP's idea of diplomacy is to repeat constantly the same unreasonable set of demands the IRANIANS have already rejected.

In the case of RUSSIA, EUROPE cannot even agree on the person who will represent them in negotiations, much less agree on a negotiating strategy.

Diplomacy is dead, and in its absence I fear war is coming.

https://t.co/UTYtIeiCn4

[Handre @Handre]

If you live in South Africa, you need to read this. Your family might be in danger.

The South African government wants to hand criminals a comprehensive shopping list of every citizen who owns Bitcoin, gold, or other valuable assets.

This is not hyperbole. This is not paranoia about government overreach. This is what happens when bureaucrats create centralized databases of wealth while operating cybersecurity systems that cannot protect government servers from ransomware attacks, insider leaks, and just plain old corruption.

France provides the blueprint for disaster. So far in 2026, French criminals kidnap one crypto holder every two and a half days. Forty-one cases this year alone. One hundred and thirty-five incidents since 2023. The victims include an eleven-year-old boy kidnapped with his mother in Burgundy while criminals demanded four hundred thousand euros from the father's crypto holdings. David Balland, co-founder of hardware wallet company Ledger, lost a finger when kidnappers severed it and sent it to his associates as part of their ransom demand.

How do French criminals select their targets? Government data leaks.

A French tax official used government systems to identify wealthy crypto holders and sold that information directly to criminal networks. She worked inside the system designed to protect citizens and instead fed their personal data to the people who showed up at their homes with knives and demands for Bitcoin transfers.

Waltio, a French software company providing tax services, was hacked and exposed fifty thousand users' portfolio information on dark web marketplaces. Government employees selling data represents something far worse than mere cybersecurity incompetence. It reveals the inherent corruption that emerges when governments collect detailed wealth information about their citizens.

Pavel Durov warns that expanding government data collection on crypto holders expands the pool of kidnapping targets. Telegram's founder said the platform would rather exit the French market than hand private user data to French authorities.

South Africa's cybersecurity record makes France look competent by comparison. Hackers put 3.6 million Gauteng Provincial Government files up for sale on the dark web for twenty-five thousand dollars. Statistics South Africa suffered a breach in January 2026. Cell C leaked two terabytes of data belonging to 7.7 million customers. The Department of Justice lost control of over 1,200 confidential files in a ransomware attack that crippled systems for weeks.

These same people now demand that every South African declare their Bitcoin, gold, and alternative asset holdings within thirty days. Name, ID number, portfolio amounts. All stored in government databases operated by the same institutions that cannot even secure their own local servers.

The regulations extend beyond Bitcoin. Gold holders face the same mandatory disclosure requirements. Alternative investments fall under identical rules. The government wants comprehensive records of every citizen who owns assets outside the traditional banking system.

Free market economists understand why governments crave this information. Capital controls require detailed knowledge of citizen wealth. Currency restrictions need enforcement mechanisms. Confiscation demands target lists.

But the immediate threat comes from criminals. French kidnappers prove that government wealth databases become criminal targeting systems. The data will leak. Government employees will sell access. Hackers will breach the servers.

South African criminals will adapt French tactics to local conditions. Home invasions already plague wealthy neighborhoods. Adding detailed cryptocurrency and gold holdings data transforms random crime into precision targeting. Why rob houses blindly when government databases provide exact wealth information and home addresses?

The regulatory framework creates perverse incentives for corruption. Tax officials gain access to detailed wealth information about every compliant citizen. The temptation to monetize this data through criminal networks will prove irresistible for some percentage of government employees. France shows this corruption is inevitable, not theoretical.

Compliance rewards criminals while punishment awaits honest citizens. Those who declare their holdings create detailed target lists for kidnappers. Those who refuse face government penalties. The regulations trap law-abiding citizens between criminal violence and state punishment.

The solution involves rejecting the entire framework. No government database. No mandatory declarations. No centralized records of citizen wealth in Bitcoin, gold, or alternative assets. The French kidnapping epidemic demonstrates exactly why financial privacy matters for physical safety.

South African crypto holders should study French headlines carefully. Today's regulatory compliance becomes tomorrow's kidnapping victim list. The government promises protection while operating systems that guarantee data breaches.

Act now, or your family will be in danger.
https://t.co/o4xEomRIr2

[Juan Manuel Macías @Juanmanuelmaci]

La cualidad esencial de Odiseo no es la fuerza bruta, aunque puede echar mano de ella, como guerrero aristocrático que es (o era) en casos puntuales: véase la matanza de los pretendientes. Su atributo principal es, por contra, la 'métis', que podríamos traducir por "inteligencia" o "astucia". En todo caso 'métis' no designa una inteligencia abstracta (el rey de Ítaca tiene poco de filósofo) sino la previsión y el estudio detallado de las circunstancias adversas con el propósito de llegar a un fin. 'Metis' es, de hecho, un sustantivo con un antiguo sufijo de acción en -ti, sobre la misma raíz que tenemos en español "medida": *med-, que se relaciona con el griego 'métron' o con el latín 'modus' e incluso 'medicus'. Odiseo es, pues, un calculador que trama un plan, conductas más propias de los personajes femeninos en la épica tradicional.

El héroe masculino está en las antípodas. Sólo ve dos caminos, destruir o destruirse. El personaje arquetípico es Aquiles, redundancia de sí mismo, puro fuego a la vez que combustible, destinado a arder. Pero el mayor antagonista de Odiseo en su regreso, el cíclope, no lo es por ser masculino ni la contienda entre ambos es la lucha entre pares del combate aristocrático. Polifemo niega la civilización. Es asocial y, por tanto, antipolítico. La astucia de Odiseo (junto a un poco de buena suerte) les salva a él y a sus hombres. Mas no sólo conservan la vida, sino que la huida de esa cueva es también un símbolo de la civilización que prevalece. Por desgracia Odiseo tuvo un mal momento para ser de nuevo el héroe aristocrático y, en un arrebato de orgullo y desahogo, le gritó desde la nave al cegado Polifemo su nombre, nacionalidad y residencia. Y ahí empezarían de verdad sus problemas.

Penélope, por supuesto, comparte esa métis con su esposo. No es un personaje pasivo ni resignado. Su ardid con la tela logra algo asombroso: suspender, en cierto sentido, el tiempo. Y es que el héroe y la (ya con derecho propio) heroína de la Odisea no buscan la victoria en el sentido tradicional, sino algo mucho más preciado: perseverar para poder llegar a puerto, y adaptarse sin descanso al entorno durante el arduo viaje. Y tal vez no sea del todo casual que el término griego para el telar sea el mismo empleado para nombrar el mástil de las naves.

[🅰pocalypsis 🅰pocalypseos 🇷🇺 🇨🇳 🅉 @apocalypseos]

The Anglo-Dutch liberal model—dominant since 1763—is finished. It was born in 1688, when the United Kingdom imported the Dutch financial system after the Glorious Revolution: public debt, a central bank (the Bank of England, founded 1694), joint-stock corporations, and marine insurance. Its financial DNA, however, reaches back further—to the merchant-bankers of Venice, who invented sovereign debt and maritime finance centuries before the Dutch perfected them. By 1763, after defeating France in the Seven Years’ War, Britain had perfected this system into a global engine of power. But it was never “liberal” in any universal sense. Violence, monopoly, and extraction applied to everyone outside the circle of beneficiaries.

Britain’s fury at losing the American colonies was not just about pride. The Anglo-Dutch order had been designed to secure North America as a source of raw materials and a market for British goods. More than a century later, Cecil Rhodes still echoed this imperial longing, writing of his dream to “recover the United States” for the British Empire.

After the American Revolution, Britain pivoted to India, Africa, and Asia—the “Second British Empire.” This was the era of the perfected British East India Company, the Opium Wars, and the informal empire of free trade. As formal empire dissolved in the 20th century, the financial architecture did not disappear. The City of London, the offshore havens, and the Eurodollar market continued the model without the colonial flag—a transformation documented in The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire. Britain’s “Second Empire” became financial rather than territorial: a spider’s web of secrecy jurisdictions extracting global wealth. Meanwhile, the Anglo-American elite network documented by Carroll Quigley—the Round Table groups, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rhodes Trust—provided institutional coordination for this transatlantic order.

In 1945, after World War II, the United States inherited the role of maritime hegemon, naval enforcer, and central bank to the world under the Bretton Woods dollar-gold system. But the underlying framework remained Anglo-Dutch: global finance, naval dominance, market-driven empire, and elite coordination. Zbigniew Brzezinski, in The Grand Chessboard (1997), made the geopolitical logic explicit: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire”—a doctrine that shaped NATO expansion and the post-Cold War containment of Russia.

Then came 1971. Richard Nixon took the dollar off gold, ending the Bretton Woods system and severing the last formal link between global finance and any commodity anchor. The era of floating exchange rates, financial deregulation, and explosive growth of the Eurodollar market began. Britain’s offshore web—the City of London, the secrecy jurisdictions, the spider’s tentacles of tax havens—became not a supplement to the system but its core. This financial order, once anchored by gold and disciplined by fixed exchange rates, was now free to float on nothing but speculation and trust.

Today, however, that order is finished. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the US Pivot to Asia, and the emerging “War of Corridors” are not adjustments to the system—they are signs of its terminal crisis. The Anglo-Dutch liberal model, born in 1688, perfected in 1763, globalized after 1945, and unmoored from gold in 1971, has met its challenger. And the challenger is building its own infrastructure, its own corridors, and its own financial architecture—one that does not run through London or New York.

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

Bravo, Taylor Hudak. I've followed you since your early courageous interviews with some highly unpopular (in the mainstream machine) independent minded doctors calling out the lies & dangers surrounding the COVID affair.

You are the meticulous clear-eyed source we need! Chapeau

[Taylor Hudak @_taylorhudak]

Btw, this information is far more important than this dancing clip. https://t.co/6EhHAuFha9

[Brian McDonald @BrianMcDonaldIE]

81 years ago today, Lydia Spivak, a young Red Army soldier, filmed directing traffic in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

Later she returned to Soviet Ukraine, became a teacher and lecturer in Donetsk, married a fellow veteran, and lived a largely ordinary life far from the ruins of Berlin where she had briefly become one of the faces of victory over Nazi Germany.

[Lawrence Anderson B @lawrenceab]

What to add? Long, yes, but every word is true. Stay human!

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE

There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?"

Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything?

Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it!

And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else.

Francesca Albanese is that someone.

She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen."

Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name.

And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity.

Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people.

There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased.

There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled."

There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.”

Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks.

She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape".

Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence.

What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik.

These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named.

Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable.

We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know."

Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise.

So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that.

A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything.

Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky.

Let us stand with her.

Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now.

[Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]