@SkleKng I’m not sure how to even check. I asked it but it denied switching to opus even though it clearly shows the switched to opus message and opus 4.8 in the model display at the bottom. I’ve been rooting for grok to catch up soon, this is just one more reason why.
You could arrest Obama and Hillary tomorrow. You could release the Epstein files. You could shut down the DOJ.
But if their system still operates outside the United States — in Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine, through the cartels, through the NGOs, through the central bank — it all comes right back.
THAT is why Trump is doing this globally. THAT is why it has taken this long. You can't bring the whole system down and leave pieces standing.
You dismantle ALL of it. Every piece. Until there is nowhere left to hide. And that time is coming.
You have every right to know what your government is doing, and they have no right to know what you are doing.
That is why they are called public servants and we are called private citizens.
Instead, the relationship has been inverted. The state hides behind secrecy, classified files, and redactions while demanding total visibility into your finances, communications, movement, and behavior.
A society where the rulers live in privacy while the population lives under surveillance is the very definition of tyranny.
@julientalbot974 I'm just setting up my Hermes agent for the first time and using Grok 4.20 reasoning and in just an hour of basic back and forth it's already used a $1 in api. It's on v0.7.0. What model are you using as your main brain?
🚨 BREAKING SPECIAL REPORT! IT’S ENDING: Trump’s Iran Strategy Revealed — And Britain’s Energy Empire Goes With It — BOOM! [VIDEO]
🚨 BREAKING — Trump’s full Iran strategy is now revealed. The war ends on U.S. terms while Britain’s energy empire collapses. A new energy world order begins. BOOM!
🚨 UK AND EUROPE: COLLAPSING UNDER GREEN FANTASY
👉 FULL STORY HERE: https://t.co/GXAz94XMqf
🚨 VIDEO SOURCE: @PrometheanActn
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From Martin Iles, reposted:
Having lived in the USA for nearly two years, I've realised something.
The USA and the remainder of the Western world are no longer aligned.
We all laugh and mock when the Americans say, "Freedom!" because we truly think we're as free as they are.
Wrong. We're not. Not even close. The laws, the mindset, and the behaviour, is totally different in this regard.
Most of all, the governments are totally different. The USA's convictions around core freedoms are on a scale we do not share.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump wins the popular vote, the electoral college, the House, and the Senate... a man who, in every other Western country, is held in open derision, if not contempt.
For these and other reasons, we are not the same.
Yet the West, including Australia, fully expect to rely on the USA for our very survival.
If the world turns bad (which will happen - only a question of time), then the whole West, without America, is toast.
So, you may ask - if we're not very aligned ideologically, then it must be that we bring something to the party militarily?
Well, no... actually... we don't matter that much militarily.
The USA has about 470 ships in its navy, including 11 aircraft carriers, 69 submarines, 75 destroyers... plus 110 new ships in the pipeline.
Australia has about 30, including 3 destroyers, 7 frigates and 7 outdated submarines. The UK does a little better, with about 60.
Meanwhile, the US has over 14,000 military aircraft. A staggering number.
Australia has 252 military aircraft. The UK has 556.
The US army has just shy of 1,000,000 uniformed personnel in its military. Australia has about 45,000.
The USA spends 3.4% ($968 billion) of its GDP on defence. Australia spends 2% ($36.4 billion). The US spends as much as the next 15 largest military-spending countries (including China) combined.
The USA has a fighting culture. The men shoot things (a lot) and hunt things, the veterans get favoured in everything from parking spots to boarding planes. A uniformed young man is thanked in the street a dozen times a day.
"Oh, the Americans and their guns!" we say, in our smug way. Yes, they have a warrior culture. We do not. We don't have to, because we're a leech on theirs.
How many young British men are willing to fight for their country? Now ask the same regarding young American men. The difference is about as wide as it could be.
Militarily, we don't offer squat.
Meanwhile, look at the way Australia works against America's interests by loving on China. China made us rich and we stay close. This is a Marxist regime with expansionist aims.
Again, you have to spend time in the USA to realise just how vast a gulf there is between us on China.
Europe, too. They let China have their way everywhere from Germany to Greenland, all the while importing Islam and sending their own people to court for saying hurty words.
Somehow, we have landed the deal of a lifetime with the USA that says, "when the baddies come, you'll save us ok?" Because we can't save ourselves.
And we live in peace. But we keep gnawing away at freedoms, keep enabling China, and get flabby and disinterested about our military because Uncle Sam's got it.
And, let's be honest, Americans are widely looked down on. To add insult to injury, we don't think that highly of our protectors.
So, the USA is finally saying "enough." I am here, I can tell you what the vibe is, and that's it. Trump is doing what people want in this regard. They're over it.
And we come across all shocked and hard done by. We behave like people with no self-insight at all.
Yes, the global alliance system is all over the place now. From America's perspective, it's about time.
And I must say, though I be a proud Australian, I am forced to agree. Something has to change.
Food for thought.
Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride
For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.
The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.
Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.
In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.
In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.
A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.
By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.
In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.
In parallel with the A.I. tech race, there is an A.I. regulatory race. In that, I have a HUGE problem with a company like Anthropic seemingly leading the news today regarding A.I. safety. Anthropic’s leadership group is a hive of globalist/neocon/progressives that would love nothing more than to spearhead government regulation of A.I. When any organization seemingly CREATES a problem while simultaneously offering solutions, one should always be very suspicious. 🤨 🧵 (1/4)