Philip Burov 🍉

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The level of blatant corruption is breathtaking:

Trump has officially launched a service offering Wall Street firms early access to his social media posts on his website -- for a fee of $100,000 per month.

In the press release for the service it calls "Truth API", Trump Media and Technology Group boasted of providing financial firms with "market-moving Truths".

The White House is literally charging rich investors more than a million dollars per year so they can get even richer through government-sponsored insider trading. The fish rots from the head down.

[Karim Franceschi @karimfranceschi]

Elizabeth blocked me, hoping her audience doesn't see my replies dismantle her lies. Of course this is a complete and blatant misrepresentation of the reality on the ground.

1 - The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) had women covering every position of power, with the co-leadership model. And she was already covering that position since she comes from AANES, and Qamishlo, as well as Derek haven't been taken over by Jolani's “Security forces”, since his January offensive stopped at the gates of Hasakeh, that's 80km short of Qamishli, where the de facto authority is still AANES. Troops and the military power there still sit with the SDF. So confirming someone else for that position would've been awkward to say the least.

2 - What's even a bigger distortion is that Jolani has opened the door to Kurdish recognition, while just a week ago the Kurds of Rojava were in shock to learn of the order to REMOVE Kurdish-language education at the university level, in favor of English and Arabic. This is a de facto ban on par with Baathist language policies. With a further reduction to a maximum of two hours as an elective language for all the other grades. Mind you, for the last 15 years, an entire generation studied in their mother tongue Kurdish for all grades including university. And that's a rollback that could compromise the very integration agreement, regardless of the balance of powers. Yet, Tsurkov here characterizes it as a benevolent concession breaking from past regime traditions. ( for more on the subject of Kurdish language rights in Syria follow @_____mjb)

3 - Any researcher worth his salt, and not working to peddle jihadi state propaganda, would as a minimum check with the locals and ask what they think. Do the Kurds in Rojava agree with Tsurkov's "heartening view" on the newfound regime's benevolence towards its Kurdish subjects? I swear they'd SPIT ON HER FACE. And here’s the hard truth; Mazloum Abdi failed Rojava, alongside the entire leadership of AANES the movement they walked into the March agreement, and negotiated away their people’s, earned in blood, right to self determination. And the main reason is that they are increasingly treated as a security problem, just like the previous regime, and the other regime-states which have historically occupied Kurdish land. That's why the rollback in language rights, which paradoxically finds no justification in any interpretation of Islam, that's all Baath, rearing back its ugly face. And the worst part is that the one-man new regime has now a well established pattern of walking back on its promises when it comes to the Kurds, and they feel the Damocles sword hanging over their heads, dreading the moment he decide to walk back the SDF integration too.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Tupac's "They've got money for war but can't feed the poor" summed up in one headline:

[Steffen Lüdke @stluedke]

Alle, die nun Sánchez' Legalisierungsgesetz für #Ceuta verantwortlich machen, mögen bitte einmal die vermeintliche Kausalitätskette offenlegen. Dann merken sie selbst, dass das Schwachsinn ist. Thread 👇

[Gonzalo Bonet @GBCLopi]

Un poco de geopolítica para principiantes sobre el tema del asalto a la valla de Ceuta, que veo a la gente muy perdida. O peor, mintiendo y esparciendo bulos de forma intencionada. Entender el contexto de todo esto es muy importante, así que va hilo: 👇🧵

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

But at what cost: the Yangtze edition

The Economist reports a remarkable and very welcome piece of news. Fish biomass in the Yangtze has risen by more than 200 percent since 2021, reversing seven decades of decline. A rare sturgeon has been observed spawning in the wild for the first time in twenty years. Finless porpoise numbers are up from a low of 1,000 in 2017 to more than 1,400. This is not Chinese state media talking; it comes from a study by researchers in China, Canada, the United States and France.

How was it done? A ten-year commercial fishing ban across the river, its major tributaries and the lakes of its basin. Thousands of chemical factories closed or relocated. Forests planted on the upper reaches to hold the soil. Cities “spongified” with artificial wetlands and permeable surfaces to absorb rainfall and filter stormwater. A river that was being killed is coming back to life.

And then, inevitably, the pivot. China’s approach is “eco-authoritarian”, we learn, “top-down and intolerant of resistance”, and “deserves scrutiny before being imitated”. The Economist has coined a term whose entire function is to make successful environmental protection sound sinister.

China is condemned for not listening to the fishermen, who wanted to carry on fishing, and to environmentalists, who want fewer dams. So presumably the Economist would be happier with the status quo of a dying river, a collapsing fishery, and a species on the brink of extinction?

Such a line of reasoning brings to mind Michael Parenti’s observation about the absurdity of Cold War propaganda:

“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative.

“If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regimes atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike, this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.”

The article notes that the fishermen who lost their jobs were given compensation and retraining. It doesn’t mention that this is an awful lot better than what Britain’s coal miners got in the 1980s, or what the cod fishermen of Newfoundland got in the 1990s.

This is the “but at what cost” genre in its purest form. China eliminates extreme poverty; but at what cost. China builds the world’s largest high-speed rail network; but at what cost. China brings its greatest river back from ecological death; but at what cost. The real cost is, it seems, to Western hegemony.

[CNN بالعربية @cnnarabic]

حصري.. تحقيق لـCNN بالعربية يكشف أدلة جديدة في مقتل متطوع مستشفى السويداء.. شاهدوه كاملاً عبر الرابط: https://t.co/WCo7HPPlwl

[Karim Franceschi @karimfranceschi]

CNN Arabic has uncovered new evidence regarding the execution of Druze medical personnel at Suwayda Hospital by members of the new Syrian forces under Ahmed al-Sharaa’s command

@jamesaalongman says it’s only the Shahada, so nevermind those ISIS patches

[Lindsey Snell @LindseySnell]

My interview with the Syrian chargé d'affaires to the US back when he was a member of Jabhat al-Nusra.

[🔻agitprop + absurdity🔻 @agtprpnabsrdty]

A months-long Sky News investigation into the US double-tap strike on a Minab girls' school found the Pentagon had tracked the site by satellite since 1987 and could still count children's shadows in the courtyard before firing anyway.

What the evidence shows:

Three Tomahawk missiles fired from the USS Spruance, 716 kilometers away in the Arabian Sea, hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab on Feb 28, the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Witnesses described a second strike hitting the exact spot where a teacher had moved surviving students for shelter, killing nearly everyone who had taken cover there. A third strike followed on the same site. Death tolls range from 156 to over 170, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. The school had been walled off from the adjacent IRGC naval base since at least 2015, had its own website, and was geolocatable through open-source materials any analyst could have pulled in minutes.

Built to fail:

The Pentagon's own machinery for preventing exactly this outcome had already been dismantled. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by roughly 90 percent and cut CENTCOM's civilian casualty assessment team from ten people to one, months before the war started. A May Pentagon Inspector General report found the office had become a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate, no real mission. A functioning warning system was defunded on purpose, then blamed for not warning anyone.

Accountability buried:

Four months on, CENTCOM's commander told reporters the investigation was near complete, yet nothing has been released. Asked in June whether anyone would face consequences, Trump called it a strange question, adding that mistakes are made and war is nasty. The mistake was choosing not to fund the office that exists to catch mistakes like this one.

My take: A military that surveilled a schoolyard for four decades didn't fail to see the children, it decided in advance that seeing them wouldn't change the targeting. Nobody in this chain lacked information.

[Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson]

the Biden administration knew full well that Israel was committing war crimes but kept sending them weapons anyway. They all belong in the Hague

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The level of corruption in the US regime is absolutely off the charts:

The US president demands that Wall Street firms pay his company $100,000 per month to get "fast access" to his social media posts on his website.

This is White House-sponsored pay-to-play insider trading.

[julia kassem @jmaher568869]

Batoul Alloush's parents reveal that she has communicated with them via a phone call under pressure, her being registered under another person's name in court, saying "Haitham Ahmed Abbas" and "the Zina Squad" kidnapped her from her dorm in Lattakia and forced her into marriage

[Hawzhin Azeez @hawzhin_azeez]

As Kurds, we know quite well that the new Syrian Interim regime is a colony and proxy of Turkey. With large numbers of Syrian government officials, 52% to be precise, being both dual citizens and loyal to the Turkish Sultan Erdoğan, the ISIS-HTS-led Syrian regime has undertaken systemic efforts to dismantle the Rojava Revolution and roll back the major social, cultural, linguistic, and ecological gains made by the people of Rojava, especially powerful institutions such as the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), established precisely to resist and fight the very jihadists now in power. It appears that Turkey has finally won the almost two decade long war against Rojava.

Yet history has shown that Rojava was never built on the power of states, but on the determination and courage of its people! and that is not so easily conquered. Despite all this odds Rojava perseveres!

[Avêsta ☀️ @avesta_roj2]

Kurdish fighters in 1991 in Northern Kurdistan
The photo was taken by the German photographer Hackenberg And it was recently recolored…

[Kevork Almassian @KevorkAlmassian]

In this video, ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi describes dispatching Abu Mohammad al-Jolani from Iraq to establish Jabhat al-Nusra as an extension of ISIS in Syria.

Jolani, in turn, thanks Baghdadi for his approval, support, and funding.

A suit doesn't erase that history.

The United States ultimately handed Syria to a man who once led al-Qaeda's branch in the country.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I'm always astonished how people watch the liberal center in Europe adopt one dystopian policy after another and their non-ironical reaction is "god forbid the wrong team takes over and applies these policies."

They genuinely don't understand how absurd that position is.

Those same people would watch a law being passed to kill half the population and be like "it's fine but let's just make sure the wrong people don't get to decide which half."

[Ava @avavroche]

We're well past 'OOPS' now.

[Lindsey Snell @LindseySnell]

In a wholly unsurprising move, Israel kowtows to Turkey and Azerbaijan, suspending its hollow gesture to recognize the Armenian Genocide just two weeks after trotting it out.

[נדב וימן Nadav Weiman @weimanadav]

The IDF is lying about the detention of Rep. Khanna.

I was on the ground with him that day, and my body camera captured us being detained by both settlers and Israeli soldiers. The IDF did not disperse the violent settlers, as they claim. They explicitly sided with them.