Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦

Petroleum Engineer. Excessively well read.

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@zackbeauchamp I'm a regular (generally admiring) reader of @Noahpinion, and genuinely startled by this ignorant and simplistic take, to say nothing of the patronising tone. His discussions of Asia and the US are insightful; of other western countries, often markedly superficial & clichéd.

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

Open Letter
To the President of the Russian Federation
From the President of Ukraine

When you came to power in Russia more than 26 years ago, many people in Ukraine viewed you positively. That is how it was. But that is now in the past.
Now, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians view it positively that our long-range drones paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St. Petersburg, covering a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. As you know very well, that distance is not the limit of our capabilities.

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@lymanstoneky Visiting Rome for the first time was strange...it was a feeling of awe constantly alternating with abject horror at all that the church had spent, and taken, for all this

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@Noahpinion I personally believe that this largely results from the OPEN BORDERS slander, which along with other lies and exaggerations on crime, gender, etc., was repeated endlessly and somehow never seemed to be explicitly refuted by the Dems.

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@Robert_E_Kelly His notional anti-Trumpism has always been clearly cosmetic. In all meaningful issues he has always been aligned with the axid of Vance, Thiel, etc. Maligning Europe and Ukraine, dismissal of scientific achievement and social improvement, suppressing women, cheering theocracy.

[Heath Mayo @HeathMayo]

Democrats: Please take lessons from Mark Carney. The guy is ice-cold competent and a qualified leader who champions capitalism, trade, and strong alliances and isn’t crusading to use politics to change or shame people’s social mores.

Result—Global leadership, domestic approval.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

This video should unsettle anyone who takes the United States seriously as a nation.

Because it exposes something dangerous: the trivialization of the world's most consequential office. It shows how carelessly the power, credibility, and accumulated moral authority of a superpower can be squandered for a few seconds of viral attention.

In any other major democracy, this behavior from a head of state would trigger a constitutional crisis. Paris would burn. Berlin would convene emergency sessions. In the Nordic countries, resignation would follow within hours. Across functioning democracies, the public, institutions, and political class would recognize this for what it is: an assault on the dignity of the state itself. Leaders are not free to perform as entertainers without consequence. National honor is not personal property, it's held in trust.

But the United States is not just another country with a provocateur in charge. It is the linchpin of global order. It maintains formal alliances and security guarantees with forty to fifty nations. It underwrites the financial architecture, trade systems, and diplomatic frameworks that billions of people depend on daily. When the American president speaks—or posts—it doesn't land as satire, meme, or personal whim. It reads as a signal about what the country is becoming.

American power has never relied solely on carrier strike groups or economic output. It has rested on something more fragile and more valuable: trust. The belief that beneath domestic turbulence lies institutional seriousness, predictability, and a baseline commitment to dignity. That belief is now disintegrating in real time.

Millions of American companies operate globally. They negotiate multibillion-dollar contracts in environments where reputation is currency. Boardrooms in Frankfurt, Singapore, and Dubai aren't debating whether a post was clever—they're asking whether the United States remains a reliable partner. Whether agreements signed today will be honored tomorrow. Whether American leadership has devolved from institutional to purely theatrical.

Consider tourism, which sustains millions of American jobs—airlines, hotels, restaurants, museums, entire regional economies. Soft power isn't an abstraction. It materializes in flight bookings, conference locations, study-abroad programs, and decades of accumulated goodwill. A quiet, decentralized boycott doesn't require government action—only a collective sense that a nation no longer respects itself.

Now picture this image being studied by foreign ministers, central bank governors, defense strategists, and sovereign wealth fund managers. Picture them asking a coldly rational question: How do we write binding thirty-year agreements with a country whose public face will be this, relentlessly, for years to come? How do we plan for the long term when the tone is impulsive, mocking, and unbound by the gravity of office?

This is where the real calculus begins. Trillions in foreign capital depend on confidence that America is stable, credible, and rule-governed. That confidence is now being traded for what, exactly? Applause from an online mob? A dopamine rush from manufactured outrage? Content designed to dominate the news cycle rather than serve the national interest?

Every serious nation eventually confronts this choice: burn long-term credibility for short-term spectacle, or safeguard the reputation previous generations bled to build. The United States spent eighty years constructing an image of reliability, restraint, and leadership under pressure. That image wasn't born from perfection—it came from a visible commitment to standards that transcended impulse.

This isn't a partisan issue. Europeans who value democratic norms recognize something ominously familiar here. Americans—Democrat and Republican alike—who believe in responsibility and restraint should see it too. Power attracts scrutiny. Leadership demands discipline. A superpower cannot behave like a reality TV contestant without paying a price.

The presidency is not a personal broadcast channel. It's a symbol carried on behalf of 330 million people and countless international partners who never voted but whose lives are shaped by American decisions anyway. Every post either reinforces or erodes the idea that America can be counted on when it matters most.

So the question is no longer whether this is offensive. The question is whether this is who America chooses to be: a nation that trades a century of hard-won reputation for viral moments. A country that replaces statecraft with content creation. A republic governed like a season of reality television.

History offers a harsh lesson here. Great powers don't fall because enemies mock them. They collapse when they begin mocking themselves—publicly, proudly, and without grasping the cost until it's far too late.

Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@sethharpesq @DouthatNYT Transcript or summary?

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@cremieuxrecueil "Communism"?! It's an ancient normal practice in Canada and Scandinavia, among many others, and (obviously) avoids tracking snow, ice and mud over floors. How in the name of god is it "communist"? Or is this just the old "everything I dislike is communism" weirdness

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@RoguePOTUSStaff Indeed. But I wish commentators like you, as well as the Dems themselves, would actually forcefully and vocally push against the pervasive slander that they're somehow AGAINST safe streets and indifferent to crime

[Tyler Black, MD @tylerblack32]

This will last generations.

The world has to figure out how to navigate a world in which no agreement, allyship, or policy involving America can be trusted.

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@chucktodd "Isaac Newton". Yes, when I think of the genesis of calculus and classical mechanics, I think of

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

HOW MAGA SPREADS MISINFORMATION:

STEP 1: Tabloid with no sources makes something up

STEP 2: Sister tabloid reports that tabloid’s “report” of the made up thing

STEP 3: Fox News reports that sister product “report” of the made up “fact”

STEP 4: RW influencers — paid by foreign countries — spread the clips as fact to sow distrust in governmental institutions

STEP 5: MAGA elected officials use online propaganda to pursue unsubstantiated claims and tries to cut funding people rely on

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@EuropeanPan Being generous, I assume he's taken on the thankless role of "official Trump appeaser" on behalf of Europe in general. If that's not the case, well, then he needs to go.

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@MatthewSitman I sympathise, but the long Pius IX to Pius XII period understandably affects perceptions

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@mungowitz @Kasparov63 Perhaps ask why even the mainstream media relentlessly attacked the Dems while applying a veneer of normalcy and respectability to a clearly incompetent candidate, tolerated by his own party in the name of power at any cost.

[Magyar Péter (Ne féljetek) @magyarpeterMP]

80 days left. Onward to victory!❤️🤍💚

[Stefan Smuk 🇨🇦 🇺🇦 @stefansmuk]

@Kasparov63 Note the reflexive both-sidesism. Biden and Harris did not attempt to dismember the West or accommodate the disease of Putinism.

[Veterans For Responsible Leadership @VetsForRL]

For all 82nd Airborne veterans that have ever served in the Global Response Force Brigade, you know the importance of a strong NATO alliance. We would have multiple training exercises every year where we would conduct airborne operations with our NATO allies, getting ready to deploy anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice.

We had two mottos with our NATO brothers and sisters and they were “Defend Democracy” and “Stronger Together”. The NATO paratroopers that we served and trained alongside were first class warriors that had our back. The only time that Article 5 has ever been invoked was right after 9/11 and our NATO allies came to our defense in Afghanistan and Iraq and served with great honor and immense courage.

It never crossed our mind for a single second that an American President would be the single reason for the erosion of the greatest alliance the world has ever known. It is a disgrace, it harms our national security, and the free world may never trust us as a reliable ally again. Make no mistake about it, abandoning the NATO alliance makes our country much weaker.

To any veterans of an allied country that may see this, we just want to apologize for the disgusting betrayal by our government. You do not deserve this treatment and there are still millions of veterans in America that love, respect, and support the NATO alliance. We hope we can build it back one day when Trump is gone. We are fighting everyday to get a pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian President back in office in 2028.

Airborne! All the way!