ThomasTheObscure

And many a verse from so strange influence That we must ever wonder how, and whence It came. - Keats

[ThomasTheObscure @obscure_thomas]

USAmericans see politics and diplomacy simply as an extension of war. In opposition to human history and societies NOT dominated by sociopathy, narcissism and grifting. The former saw war as an unfortunate, reluctant extension of politics when diplomacy first fails. #paxusa

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I've ratioed the prime minister and the foreign minister repeatedly on here. Now the government is trying to make that illegal. We're ruled by petty, narcissistic emotional infants.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🚨URGENT: Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s life is in immediate danger, Physicians for Human Rights Israel and his lawyer warned Saturday, after a prison visit revealed the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital bearing fresh, severe injuries to his head, eyes, ears, and neck, so disfigured his own attorney initially struggled to recognize him.

🔹Attorney Nasser Odeh, who saw Abu Safiya Thursday at the underground Rakefet interrogation facility in Nitzan Prison, said he arrived shackled hand and foot, escorted by masked guards, struggling to breathe and speak, unable to sit upright, and repeatedly on the verge of losing consciousness.

🔹Abu Safiya told him that after his Supreme Court appeal was heard June 10, four or five guards entered his solitary cell at Ganot Prison and beat him with a hammer and batons, and that since his June 24 transfer to Rakefet he has been beaten daily, losing consciousness several times without receiving medical treatment.

🔹“This is the last time you will see me,” he told his lawyer. “They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself surviving. This is the end.”

🔹PHRI notes the escalation in torture began directly after Abu Safiya challenged his detention in court. He has been held without charge since December 27, 2024, under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law.

🔹The group has appealed to Israel’s attorney general and prison service demanding his immediate transfer, an independent medical examination, and an urgent judicial visit “before it is too late.”

Photo: Amnesty International

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Peter Thiel, fundador de Palantir, creció en Swakopmund, una ciudad nazi colonial alemana en la costa de Namibia, junto a la ciudad de Luderizt, hasta los 90 todavía había esvásticas, se celebraba el cumpleaños de Hitler y los habitantes se saludaban con "Heil Hitler".

Las ciudades costeras namibias coloniales alemanas de Swakopmund y Lüderitz fueron claves en el primer genocidio del siglo XX, perpetrado por Alemania contra los pueblos Herero y Nama, cuyas atrocidades sirvieron de modelo para los campos de concentración nazis 3 décadas después.

[GenXGirl @GenXGirl1994]

Every day we learn new information about how despicable Israel is.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

After nearly a month, the US-backed, far-right electoral coup in Peru has succeeded. The daughter of the US-backed former fascist dictator, Fujimori, a convicted war criminal who committed genocide, has been installed in power.

The left-wing, pro-working class candidate, Roberto Sánchez Palomino, was winning when the votes were counted after the June 7 election, so the corrupt electoral authorities delayed the count and spent nearly a month cooking the books, overseeing some very extreme irregularities, especially with supposed votes from abroad that magically appeared and made Fujimori "win".

Keiko Fujimori ran for president multiple times, but always lost, because she is extremely unpopular in Peru. But Trump and Marco Rubio made sure she would be put in power this time, just as they blatantly meddled in recent elections to support right-wing candidates in Argentina, Colombia, Honduras, etc.

Keiko's father was the fascist dictator Alberto Fujimori, who, with US support, dissolved Congress, implemented mass privatizations, and committed genocide against indigenous peoples, sterilizing huge numbers of them without their consent (with funding from the US government).

The US-backed dictator was later formally convicted of corruption, bribery, kidnapping, murder, and crimes against humanity. His nepo baby daughter always defended his crimes, and the US empire just helped put her in power in an electoral coup.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

The world deserves to be free from the U.S. dictatorship of capitalism and imperialism.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is properly insane: quite literally the worst example of censorship I've ever heard of anywhere.

I checked the actual ruling (which you can see here: https://t.co/dBKFWZ2ZWm) and, to be clear, it isn't just censorship in the conventional sense - blocking access to a website or removing content from platforms - this is the criminalization of information relayed by private citizens, with prison sentences attached.

And the most insane aspect if that it does NOT matter if the information relayed is accurate or not. It just matters that it originates from RT or other media outlets banned in the EU.

In other words, truth isn't a defense anymore in the EU, it literally doesn't matter. It's purely based on the identity of the speaker.

The ruling is actually explicit about this: the regulation, quoted by the Court says that the prohibition applies to "any content," and they draw no distinction based on what the content actually says. If it originates from banned outlets, it's banned.

It is, quite simply, a complete unraveling of the entire post-Enlightenment legal and philosophical project where entire generations of Europeans fought to move from "who says it" to "is it true" as the operative question.

Think about the absurdity of it: if RT publishes a video saying the sky is blue and you share it on a publicly accessible website in the EU, you'd fall within the scope of this ruling, making you liable to criminal prosecution.

Completely and utterly absurd. But that's the EU today for you 🤷

[Richard @ricwe123]

Maybe future generations of Germans will understand the colossal gift their government threw away with disregarding Vladimir Putin.

A Russian leader who lived in Dresden for years, speaks German, whose daughter was born in Saxony, and who repeatedly offered genuine partnership and friendship to the German people.

Around the turn of the millennium, there was a real chance to combine Russian resources with German engineering and build a powerful, nearly untouchable alliance stretching from Vladivostok to Lisbon.

Instead, short-sighted and corrupt German politicians sabotaged it all, willingly aligning themselves with those in Washington who would rather see Germany and Russia locked in a devastating conflict.

What could have been a historic partnership was tossed aside for political expediency, and the devastating consequences are still unfolding.

Here is the historic speech the Russian president delivered in German to the Bundestag on September 25, 2001.

He directly addressed the German people in their own language.
This was a moment that, had it been seized, would have changed everything....

[Pepe Escobar @RealPepeEscobar]

THE PRICE OF BEING FIRST
IS OFTEN BEING ALONE

Two weeks ago, at our baby channel https://t.co/mZYtjJCwNW, we broke a very serious story.

Not a vague diplomatic concern. But a specific, operationally significant intel story: that Pakistani military intel had intercepted a Mossad plot - the proverbial Israeli AI-assisted kill chain - targeting Iran’s negotiators, and that Islamabad physically intervened to secure the Swiss site.

We named the actors and we named the stakes.

And for that, we were - soooo predictably - called reckless, hyperbolic, conspiratorial.

Now look at the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The core of our reporting is suddenly there.

The Times confirms the plot against Araghchi and Ghalibaf. The Post confirms the stakes, with one official summarizing the heart of our entire segment in a single sentence: “You kill those folks, and you’re killing the pragmatists.”

But what's more intriguing is how the facts are being laundered.

They confirm the plot. They confirm the targets. They confirm the warning. But they carefully erase the agency behind it. In the US sanitized version, Washington is quietly asking “other countries” to pass along a message — as if the US were simply a worried peacemaker restraining an ally.

The Pakistani intervention simply disappears. The AI kill chain disappears. The intel architecture disappears. The story is recast into something more...palatable, and obviously more flattering to the official narrative.

So the US MSM has now confirmed the skeleton of our reporting - while quietly rewriting the roles of the principal actors. We forced the facts into the open. The validation is right there between the lines.

We had a single source for an explosive intel story - but the source was surefire. That kind of information is highly compartmentalized. The person who knew is the person IN THE ROOM.

If ten people knew it, it would not be a scoop. It would be a press release.

The price of being first is often being alone. I learned that in my 41 years as a foreign correspondent. And the price of being alone is being doubted. No problem. Our information revealed itself to be a zillion per cent correct.

[Ethan Levins 🇺🇸 @EthanLevins2]

The coffin of Khamenei’s 14 MONTH OLD granddaughter.

She was burned alive in an American strike on February 28th.

She died alone, in a separate room, playing with toys.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The "international community" condemned this.

The "international community" is concerned.

The "international community" demands accountability.

Which countries constitute the international community?

In practice: the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia.

Sometimes Japan. Sometimes South Korea.

Seven billion people in China, India, Russia, the Arab world, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa are not the "international community."

They are the subject of the international community's concern.

They are the recipients of the international community's demands.

They are the locations where the international community deploys its accountability mechanisms.

This linguistic sleight of hand, converting a specific group of powerful Western states into "the international community" as if by consensus of the entire planet, is so normalized that serious journalists use it without irony in serious publications every day.

And the Indian reader, the Nigerian reader, the Vietnamese reader encounters this phrase and has two choices:

Accept the framing, in which case they have accepted their own exclusion from the category of "international."

Or reject it, in which case they are being unreasonable, parochial, nationalist, resistant to universal norms.

The language is a trap.

And it was built so carefully that most people walk into it before they notice it's there.

[ThomasTheObscure @obscure_thomas]

@SizweLo Losurdo is an awesome historian... and all his books are enthralling reads, liberating historiography from imperialist propaganda passed off as history.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Make no mistake: there is a new space race going on, but a very different one in nature from that between the US and the Soviet Union.

This time around it involves, on one side, a colossal state-backed monopoly built on government money, welded to its country's military-industrial complex and run by a politically connected and highly ideological oligarch.

On the other side: dozens of hungry startups trying to out-innovate each other in a ruthless, Darwinian competition.

The oligarch is Elon Musk. The Darwinian competition is China.

There is something funny about it, not only because of the role reversal versus the Cold War era, but also because it sounds like a repeat of the Tesla story: it increasingly looks like the Gods cursed Musk into serving as chief trailblazer of China's industrial ecosystem.

This time around though, a strong argument can be made that the space industry is even more strategic, and potentially far more consequential, than the car industry.

Stripped of Musk’s PR spin about saving humanity, what the SpaceX project is concretely about is:

- Building a new global communication infrastructure via Starlink
- Enabling the US security establishment to see and hear everything on Earth, all the time (via Starshield, its military division)
- Dominating access to space itself, from launch to orbital real estate

Each of these is very, very real.

Do the test one day and download the app “Stellarium” on your phone that allows you to identify stars, planets and… the satellites orbiting above you. I guarantee you that the sheer number of Starlink satellites right on top of your head at any given moment will genuinely shock you. There are currently over 10,000 of them up there - almost as many as there are planes in the sky at any given moment (https://t.co/UPVlBnO1av). Starlink satellites constitute roughly two-thirds of all active satellites orbiting Earth, all belonging to a single private American company.

So it’s not conspiracy theories: the SpaceX satellites are up there, right above your head, right now. Starlink already has over 12 million subscribers across 160 countries. Starshield - the military division of SpaceX - already has multi-billion dollar contracts with the US defense establishment to "enable the U.S. government to quickly capture continuous imagery of activities on the ground nearly anywhere on the globe" (https://t.co/1q9ICZGprA). And SpaceX already controls the majority of global launch capacity.

In other words, every single one of my three points above is already well underway.

And, more worryingly, the roadmap for these satellites doesn't stop at surveillance: the US Congressional Research Service has documented plans for space-based directed energy weapons within the same SDA program that SpaceX Starshield is part of (https://t.co/XIbwUyPlRI), with Congress having already granted the legal authority and budget to develop them.

So we're talking about a single private company, one deeply embedded in the US military-defense establishment, building the infrastructure to control global communications, conduct continuous planetary surveillance, and potentially project military force from orbit. And that company already has more hardware up in space than every other country and company on Earth, combined.

From the standpoint of China, or that of any country that cares about sovereignty, letting that go unchallenged would be an act of strategic suicide.

The question, therefore, isn’t whether China should develop its own sovereign capacities to challenge SpaceX, but whether it can.

That's the topic of my latest article: a systematic analysis of whether China can break SpaceX's grip on the sky. Spoiler: if you bought SpaceX shares at a $2 trillion-plus market cap, you may want to rethink that one.

This is the link to my article titled "Musk built a monopoly on space. Can China break it?": https://t.co/i4lG5lmK4W

[Jenny Difficult-Frecklington-Jones 🇵🇸🇱🇧🇮🇷 @JonesHowDareYou]

"The ALP no longer represents the people who vote for it. It is controlled by an unrepresentative coterie of factional heavies & officials. Party members have little influence. Internal politics is conducted almost entirely within an elite class." #auspol
https://t.co/K02Plg8uZB

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

They’re just openly saying the citizenry exists to serve the corporations.

[SilencedSirs◼️ @SilentlySirs]

38 years ago,
the U.S. shot down an Iranian passenger plane.

290 civilians were killed.
Among them, dozens of children.

Then came no accountability.
Only a medal.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

Palantir, Blackrock, and Blackstone are primed to govern the UK under a corporate political model agreed by Keir Starmer.
As Starmer is to Blackrock so Burnham is to Blackstone.
The UK MSM has been consistently ignoring Thiel’s infiltration of the UK’s and USA’s public sector, and what his ultimate plans for ‘exit’ from democracy comprise.
A key name here is libertarian Peter Thiel whose company Palantir has sizable chunks of the NHS and the UK’s Police Force.
Thiel and Marc Andreessen are funding an entire company – Pronomos Capital – dedicated to the building of futuristic tech cities around the world. Tom Bell advises 'Pronomos', a venture capital fund set up by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) focusing on Freedom cities which has laws derived from ULEX 'open source' system. A colonialist imperative to isolate away from democracy.
https://t.co/xhzZZJtNQg

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

As I have been saying for years, and was summarily dismissed by several so-called left-wing media outlets, Peter Thiel of Palantir is planning to build several private city-states run by a CEO, replacing social governance and collective sovereignty with corporate governance and corporate sovereignty.
The UK duopoly's nationwide rollout of deregulated free zones immediately after Brexit is already carving up the UK into patchworks of corporate sovereignties.
The British public was not meant to know this as secondary legislation bypassed Parliamentary debate, public consultation, and notification of the press.
Palantir has 35 contracts with key UK public institutions. The head of the UK branch is Louis Mosley, grandson of British fascist Oswald Mosley.
Palantir's Alex Karp head-hunted Louis Mosely and quoted his grandfather's fascist speeches during the interview, which called for Britain to seek peace with Nazi Germany.
There are 48 SEZs and 8 Freeports in England, 18 SEZs and 2 Freeports in Scotland, and 8 SEZs and 2 Freeports in Wales. In January 2025 Keir Starmer launched AI Growth Zones, which provides the digital layer of free zones.
Reminder
Freeports, SEZs, AI Growth Zones are by their very nature expansionist projects, which just so happen to culminate in free/charter cities.
William Rees-Mogg was the father of Jacob Rees-Mogg. He co-wrote the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual - How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, which predicts that the Information Age will destroy the nation-state and give rise to a new elite class of wealthy, liberated individuals.
It's all going to plan.
https://t.co/YS6vLiDHZX

[Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2]

🚨Today marks 1,000 days of genocide in Gaza. In this video we show ten of Israel’s most well-documented crimes

They're far from the worst atrocities they committed, but together they paint a clear picture of the brutality, deception & impunity that have allowed them to continue

[David Shoebridge @DavidShoebridge]

There must be justice. The world cannot ignore the Israeli genocide in Gaza and people who committed it must be held to account. Essential accountability and solidarity work from the Australian Centre for International Justice. @rawanarraf