Wonder if there was a drone factory under the park?

I want a Turtle

When I watch Europe being smashed, I get déjà vu.

I understand what French Jean feels - the owner of a looted shop in Paris.

We were all robbed and raped too - those who simply wanted to live by the rules.

In Kyiv on Maidan in 2014. I was there every day as a journalist. Our office was right in the epicenter, on the central square where the protests were.

Every day a drunk, unwashed Vasyl who came down from the mountains, with baseball bat in hand, asked me where I was going. No one authorized him. But he decided he had the right. And European politicians supported a coup.

What did I feel? Helplessness. The same as the conscript soldiers who were doused with water in the freezing cold. The same as the police who had Molotov cocktails thrown at them and were burned alive. The same as people in Paris and Milan feel now.

That’s when I understood. The worst thing for us and for the state is when the crowd gains power. When the rules stop working. Because sooner or later it all ends in anarchy. And everyone suffers.

Today millions of Europeans feel the same helplessness. The very ones who told us 12 years ago: “This is normal. This is freedom. This is revolution.”

Fate is an interesting thing.

Europe must walk this path to the end. When you produce chaos, one day chaos will swallow you.

And for people like me, it was an excellent lesson. Those who kept their minds during the general madness became even stronger. We are ready to give our lives so our children can live where law and rules work. And I know that’s worth living for.

There’s a sentence in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997, that Europeans should have read more carefully.

He called Europe America’s "essential geopolitical bridgehead" on the Eurasian continent.

Not a partner. Not an ally in the full sense of the word.

A bridgehead.

A military term. The position you seize on hostile territory to enable further operations.

Brzezinski was one of the most honest American strategists of the 20th century, and he was honest about this:

Europe’s role in American grand strategy was not to become a sovereign power in its own right. It was to remain the western anchor of American Eurasian dominance.

Close enough to matter. Dependent enough to manage.

For decades, Europeans read that as flattery.

The energy bills since 2022 have translated it accurately.

Serious question

The “immoral act” was apparently a kiss on the forehead. They were newlyweds who decided to spend their honeymoon in Mecca. According to reports in Bangladesh, Saudi authorities refused to consider they were a couple, and the forehead kiss was an expression of appreciation to Allah for a beautiful bride. Their bodies have arrived in Bangladesh in two coffins for traditional burial rites.

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What most people already understand, even without the economic terminology, is that firms like BlackRock operate less like investors and more like modern feudal landlords.

They buy essential infrastructure,water networks, ports, energy grids, data centres, and other public necessities, often using vast amounts of borrowed money and paying prices that ordinary market participants cannot match.

Once the acquisition is complete, the debt is pushed onto the acquired company itself.

The result is simple: the public pays.

Consumers repay that debt through higher water bills, rising energy prices, increased fees, and declining service quality.

The infrastructure becomes a cash-extraction machine.

Profits flow upward to shareholders and executives, while the financial burden flows downward to ordinary households.

When the model inevitably breaks down, the consequences are socialised. Communities are left with crumbling infrastructure, polluted rivers and failing services.

Thames Water's £14 billion debt mountain and repeated sewage scandals are a stark example of what happens when financial engineering takes precedence over public stewardship.

The executives who loaded the company with debt have already collected their bonuses.

The investors have already taken their returns.

And when the system finally reaches its breaking point, taxpayers are expected to pick up the bill.

Privatise the gains.

Socialise the losses.

That is the business model......

Not enough people know this: in practice, the IMF is controlled by the US.

The US is the only country that has de facto veto power at the IMF because the biggest decisions require an 85% supermajority of total voting power. The US' vote share is 16.5%

This was by design, and the supermajority threshold was actually moved in 1978 so that the US vote share would continue to give the country veto power.

We should not see the IMF as an organisation that serves global development.

We should see is as an organisation that serves mainly Western interests — and, above all, US interests. https://x.com/haugejostein/status/2112230474676412712

https://x.com/Ilangabet/status/2111806012877631894

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2111885522625011831

Carney used to be head of the Central Bank in the UK and has been an awful Canadian Prime Minister thus far

I know several former Soviet dissidents, such as Edward Lozansky, who moved to the United States, where he worked with former American presidents. Lozansky asked me if I could produce some recorded online lectures on geoeconomics. I asked my university here in Norway, but they were opposed to the idea because it could cause a lot of problems. I told Lozansky that I could not contribute, as recording online lectures for an American-Russian university established to improve relations between Russia and the West would give Norwegian journalists too much ammunition for smears and to threaten the reputation of my university.

What is the purpose of articles like this? What exactly have they managed to catch me out on? This is a continuation of six years of intimidation since I returned to Norway. Always go after the person, never the argument. Make life as difficult as possible for your opponent, and do it publicly, so that everyone stays in line.

My great crime is arguing that Russia considers NATO expansion an existential threat, something that should be entirely uncontroversial given the extensive documentation supporting this position. Why do I believe it is important to acknowledge this? Russia will use force to push NATO back, and for Ukraine, this means that without a diplomatic solution that takes Russian security concerns into account, Russia will seize strategically important territory and destroy the remaining infrastructure so that Ukraine cannot be used by NATO as a front line. If I am right, NATO's policies will lead to the destruction of Ukraine and potentially to a nuclear war between NATO and Russia.

It is not easy to determine whether I am right, because debate in Norway has been criminalized by labelling dissenting voices as “Russian propaganda.” Unfortunately, arguments and evidence no longer matter in Norway today, where we are only allowed to discuss the supposed evil intentions of those who disagree with us. The freedom of academic discourse must be restricted because all dissent is dismissed as an attempt to “legitimize” the enemy.

In the past, we had journalists who discussed the security concerns of the opposing side. Today, we have journalists who investigate those who discuss the security concerns of the opposing side. How can we improve our own security in Norway when we are not even allowed to discuss the security concerns of Russia, China, Iran, and other countries of that kind? When acceptable debate is reduced to a narrative of a struggle between good and evil, weapons become the path to peace, while diplomacy and mutual understanding are portrayed as weakness and betrayal.

The punishment for academic dissent in Norway is endless personal attacks and derogatory name-calling. Journalists and NGOs affiliated with the state repeatedly contact my employer. Every time I am invited to give a talk, the event is cancelled. Journalists only email me to demand that I respond to accusations without providing any serious justification for them. Journalists investigating me in search of something they can use against me recently gained access to my university records. The only thing they had to use against me was that I had asked about producing some online lectures for Lozansky on political economy. Other recent articles about me have focused on my request to reduce my position at the university to 80% after journalists complained about my outside activities, as well as fake news claiming that I congratulated Putin on the election victory.

I do not believe it is a coincidence that "An Enemy of the People" was written by one of our own, Henrik Ibsen. Outside Norway, there are academic debates in which opposing arguments are presented without vicious personal attacks. Outside Norway, there is political opposition in which every member of parliament is not required to support arms shipments to a war and boycott diplomacy. Outside Norway, there are diplomats who believe in diplomacy and journalists who believe in journalism.

My advice to young Norwegian academics in security studies or political economy who argue for positions that are not supported by the political and media bubble is this: Get out of the country.