Загрузка видео...

Не удалось загрузить видео

Возникла проблема при загрузке этого видео. Это может быть связано с временными проблемами сети или видео может быть недоступно.

На главную

𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐦. 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧. 𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞. The troops of #𝐏𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧, #𝐕𝐚𝐣𝐫𝐚𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐬, together with 𝐒𝐃𝐑𝐅, 𝐁𝐒𝐅 and border communities, conducted #𝐄𝐱𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐮𝐤𝐭𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐚𝐥𝐩 to strengthen joint preparedness and build a swift, coordinated response to flood emergencies. Through realistic joint drills, integrated planning and seamless synergy, the exercise reinforced a mission-ready response framework—ensuring... that every stakeholder stands prepared to safeguard lives and respond decisively when it matters most. 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫. 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫. साझी तैयारी। सुरक्षित सीमाएं। ਸਾਂਝੀ ਤਿਆਰੀ। ਸੁਰੱਖਿਅਤ ਸਰਹੱਦ। #IndianArmy #VajraCorps #PantherDivision #ExSanyuktSankalp #FloodRelief #HADR #BSF #SDRF #MissionReadyshow more

VajraCorps-IndianArmy

46,789 subscribers

18,508 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад •via X (Twitter)

#𝐏𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 #𝐕𝐚𝐣𝐫𝐚𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐬 #𝐄𝐱𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐮𝐤𝐭𝐒𝐚𝐧𝐤𝐚𝐥𝐩

Anya Rossi• Live Now

Private livecam show

Комментарии: 6

Фото профиля BINTU GURJAR

BINTU GURJAR2 месяцев назад

@adgpi @westerncomd_IA @ndmaindia @BSF_Punjab @PbGovtIndia 🥰🥰🥰

Фото профиля Surajpal singh

Surajpal singh2 месяцев назад

@adgpi @westerncomd_IA @ndmaindia @BSF_Punjab @PbGovtIndia Best 💪💪💪💪😘😘😘

Фото профиля TARIT KUMAR GHOSH

TARIT KUMAR GHOSH2 месяцев назад

@adgpi @westerncomd_IA @ndmaindia @BSF_Punjab @PbGovtIndia Long Live INDIA 🫡.

Фото профиля surgyan26

surgyan262 месяцев назад

@adgpi @westerncomd_IA @ndmaindia @BSF_Punjab @PbGovtIndia 🫡🫡

Фото профиля Shivendra Pratap Singh

Shivendra Pratap Singh2 месяцев назад

@adgpi @westerncomd_IA @ndmaindia @BSF_Punjab @PbGovtIndia power of indian army 💪💪

Фото профиля chhot kaunu singh

chhot kaunu singh2 месяцев назад

@adgpi @westerncomd_IA @ndmaindia @BSF_Punjab @PbGovtIndia 👍🫡

Похожие видео

🌊 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐝. As part of #ExJalRakshak, troops of #GoldenArrowDivision of #VajraCorps conducted integrated flood relief training to strengthen preparedness, validate response procedures to ensure a swift, coordinated and robust response to any eventuality. तैयारी में समन्वय। प्रतिक्रिया में उत्कृष्टता। ਤਿਆਰੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਤਾਲਮੇਲ। ਜਵਾਬ ਵਿੱਚ ਉੱਤਮਤਾ। #IndianArmy #VajraCorps #GoldenArrowDivision #JalRakshak #HADR #FloodRelief

🌊 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐝. As part of #ExJalRakshak, troops of #GoldenArrowDivision of #VajraCorps conducted integrated flood relief training to strengthen preparedness, validate response procedures to ensure a swift, coordinated and robust response to any eventuality. तैयारी में समन्वय। प्रतिक्रिया में उत्कृष्टता। ਤਿਆਰੀ ਵਿੱਚ ਤਾਲਮੇਲ। ਜਵਾਬ ਵਿੱਚ ਉੱਤਮਤਾ। #IndianArmy #VajraCorps #GoldenArrowDivision #JalRakshak #HADR #FloodRelief

VajraCorps-IndianArmy

24,296 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад

Seamless Coordination. Swift Response. Decisive Action. Under the aegis of #EasternCommand troops of #BrahmastraCorps and #ArmyAviation conducted integrated joint training to enhance battlefield #Synergy and strengthen procedures for troop insertion, casualty evacuation, aerial reconnaissance and coordinated operations in dynamic combat scenarios. The training reinforced interoperability, sharpened operational readiness and enhanced the ability to respond swiftly and effectively across diverse terrain and contingencies. बेहतरीन समन्वय। त्वरित प्रतिक्रिया। निर्णायक कार्रवाई। #पूर्वी_कमान के तत्वावधान में #BrahmastraCorps के सैनिको और #ArmyAviation के बीच संयुक्त प्रशिक्षण आयोजित किया गया। इस प्रशिक्षण का उद्देश्य युद्धक्षेत्र में बेहतर तालमेल स्थापित करना तथा सैनिकों की तैनाती, घायलों की निकासी, हवाई निगरानी और समन्वित अभियानों की क्षमता को और मजबूत बनाना था। इस संयुक्त प्रशिक्षण से आपसी समन्वय, अभियान संबंधी तैयारी और विभिन्न प्रकार के भू-भाग एवं चुनौतीपूर्ण परिस्थितियों में त्वरित और प्रभावी कार्रवाई करने की क्षमता को और सुदृढ़ किया गया। #भारतीय_सेना #पूर्वी_कमान #IndianArmy #EasternCommand #BrahmastraCorps #JointTraining #CombatReadiness #OperationalReadiness ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY Ministry of Defence, Government of India The Assam Rifles PRO Defence Kolkata Facebook - Instagram -

Seamless Coordination. Swift Response. Decisive Action. Under the aegis of #EasternCommand troops of #BrahmastraCorps and #ArmyAviation conducted integrated joint training to enhance battlefield #Synergy and strengthen procedures for troop insertion, casualty evacuation, aerial reconnaissance and coordinated operations in dynamic combat scenarios. The training reinforced interoperability, sharpened operational readiness and enhanced the ability to respond swiftly and effectively across diverse terrain and contingencies. बेहतरीन समन्वय। त्वरित प्रतिक्रिया। निर्णायक कार्रवाई। #पूर्वी_कमान के तत्वावधान में #BrahmastraCorps के सैनिको और #ArmyAviation के बीच संयुक्त प्रशिक्षण आयोजित किया गया। इस प्रशिक्षण का उद्देश्य युद्धक्षेत्र में बेहतर तालमेल स्थापित करना तथा सैनिकों की तैनाती, घायलों की निकासी, हवाई निगरानी और समन्वित अभियानों की क्षमता को और मजबूत बनाना था। इस संयुक्त प्रशिक्षण से आपसी समन्वय, अभियान संबंधी तैयारी और विभिन्न प्रकार के भू-भाग एवं चुनौतीपूर्ण परिस्थितियों में त्वरित और प्रभावी कार्रवाई करने की क्षमता को और सुदृढ़ किया गया। #भारतीय_सेना #पूर्वी_कमान #IndianArmy #EasternCommand #BrahmastraCorps #JointTraining #CombatReadiness #OperationalReadiness ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY Ministry of Defence, Government of India The Assam Rifles PRO Defence Kolkata Facebook - Instagram -

EasternCommand_IA

13,519 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

"𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻." Mission success begins with relentless preparation. Paratroopers of the #ShatrujeetBrigade recently carried out an intensive Special Heliborne Operations (#SHBO) exercise, rehearsing a complex urban hostage rescue scenario to sharpen operational readiness for high-risk counter-terrorism missions. The exercise demonstrated exceptional air-ground integration through tactical helicopter insertions, including slithering, STIE and low-hover drills, followed by precision rooftop insertion and dynamic close quarter battle (CQB) room intervention. Every phase demanded speed, coordination, precision and unwavering teamwork under simulated operational conditions. Such realistic and mission-oriented training strengthens rapid response capabilities, enhances combat proficiency and ensures that Indian Army paratroopers remain prepared to respond swiftly and effectively to any contingency. Train hard, Strike with precision, Accomplish the mission. #IndianArmy #SuryaCommand #SpecialOperations #HostageRescue #UrbanOperations #CQB #CounterTerrorism #MissionReady #CombatReadiness #AirAssault #NationFirst ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY PRO Defence Lucknow PRO Defence Prayagraj PIB India HQ IDS PRO & Spokesperson, MoD, Dehradun Region Uttar Bharat

"𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝗗𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻." Mission success begins with relentless preparation. Paratroopers of the #ShatrujeetBrigade recently carried out an intensive Special Heliborne Operations (#SHBO) exercise, rehearsing a complex urban hostage rescue scenario to sharpen operational readiness for high-risk counter-terrorism missions. The exercise demonstrated exceptional air-ground integration through tactical helicopter insertions, including slithering, STIE and low-hover drills, followed by precision rooftop insertion and dynamic close quarter battle (CQB) room intervention. Every phase demanded speed, coordination, precision and unwavering teamwork under simulated operational conditions. Such realistic and mission-oriented training strengthens rapid response capabilities, enhances combat proficiency and ensures that Indian Army paratroopers remain prepared to respond swiftly and effectively to any contingency. Train hard, Strike with precision, Accomplish the mission. #IndianArmy #SuryaCommand #SpecialOperations #HostageRescue #UrbanOperations #CQB #CounterTerrorism #MissionReady #CombatReadiness #AirAssault #NationFirst ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY PRO Defence Lucknow PRO Defence Prayagraj PIB India HQ IDS PRO & Spokesperson, MoD, Dehradun Region Uttar Bharat

SuryaCommand_IA

11,642 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад

Lt Gen Dhiraj Seth, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, #SouthernCommand, reviewed ‘𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐑𝐔𝐃𝐑𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐊𝐓𝐈’, an all-arms manoeuvre exercise with live firing conducted by the Rudra Brigade at the Pokhran Field Firing Ranges, validating the Indian Army’s capability to undertake high-intensity, integrated operations in the evolving battlefield environments. ‘𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐑𝐔𝐃𝐑𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐊𝐓𝐈’ was conducted as a follow-up to ‘𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐊𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐏𝐑𝐀𝐇𝐀𝐑’, which had earlier validated the #RudraBrigade and new operational concepts in the desert sector. The live firing exercise focused on further enhancing combat integration and operational effectiveness through synchronized employment of mechanized forces, artillery, air defence units, Army Aviation assets including ALH-WSI and Apache helicopters, along with Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Counter-UAS capabilities, demonstrating seamless synergy across land, air and digital domains. During the review, the Army Commander interacted with troops on the ground and commended all ranks for their exemplary training standards, professionalism and operational preparedness, while lauding their ability to execute complex missions with speed, precision and cohesion. 𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐑𝐔𝐃𝐑𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐊𝐓𝐈’ stands as testimony to the Indian Army’s ongoing transformation, where organizational innovation, tactical evolution and technological integration are advancing together. It reaffirms the Army’s unwavering commitment to remain mission-ready, technologically empowered and #FutureReady to meet emerging security challenges. #IndianArmy #BlackMaceBrigade #DecadeOfTransformation #TechAbsorption ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY Konark Corps INDIAN ARMY Ministry of Defence, Government of India रक्षा मंत्री कार्यालय/ RMO India HQ IDS PRO Defence Pune

Lt Gen Dhiraj Seth, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, #SouthernCommand, reviewed ‘𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐑𝐔𝐃𝐑𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐊𝐓𝐈’, an all-arms manoeuvre exercise with live firing conducted by the Rudra Brigade at the Pokhran Field Firing Ranges, validating the Indian Army’s capability to undertake high-intensity, integrated operations in the evolving battlefield environments. ‘𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐑𝐔𝐃𝐑𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐊𝐓𝐈’ was conducted as a follow-up to ‘𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐊𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐏𝐑𝐀𝐇𝐀𝐑’, which had earlier validated the #RudraBrigade and new operational concepts in the desert sector. The live firing exercise focused on further enhancing combat integration and operational effectiveness through synchronized employment of mechanized forces, artillery, air defence units, Army Aviation assets including ALH-WSI and Apache helicopters, along with Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Counter-UAS capabilities, demonstrating seamless synergy across land, air and digital domains. During the review, the Army Commander interacted with troops on the ground and commended all ranks for their exemplary training standards, professionalism and operational preparedness, while lauding their ability to execute complex missions with speed, precision and cohesion. 𝐄𝐱𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐑𝐔𝐃𝐑𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐊𝐓𝐈’ stands as testimony to the Indian Army’s ongoing transformation, where organizational innovation, tactical evolution and technological integration are advancing together. It reaffirms the Army’s unwavering commitment to remain mission-ready, technologically empowered and #FutureReady to meet emerging security challenges. #IndianArmy #BlackMaceBrigade #DecadeOfTransformation #TechAbsorption ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY Konark Corps INDIAN ARMY Ministry of Defence, Government of India रक्षा मंत्री कार्यालय/ RMO India HQ IDS PRO Defence Pune

Southern Command INDIAN ARMY

45,815 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад

📌When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu Bola Ahmed Tinubu entrusted us with the mandate to deliver Nigeria's National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode System, the assignment was never simply about creating postcodes. It was about giving every addressable location in Nigeria a place on the nation's digital map. From the outset, the Honourable Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani Dr. 'Bosun Tijani , was clear on the standard we had to meet. This was not going to be another desktop exercise. The objective was to build a trusted digital location infrastructure that truly reflects the reality on the ground, one that serves every Nigerian, whether in the heart of our cities or in the most remote communities. That is why delineation alone was never enough. Maps can tell part of the story. People tell the rest. Over the past few weeks, our dedicated staff and thousands of ad-hoc field personnel have travelled across Nigeria, validating communities, identifying buildings and ensuring that what is captured digitally reflects what exists physically. Here are videos from Ebonyi, Jigawa. From Jigawa and Niger State, the largest state in Nigeria by landmass, covering more than 76,000 square kilometres and stretching across terrains that remind us daily of the scale of this assignment, we have remained committed to one principle: no community is too remote, no settlement too small, and no Nigerian too far away to count. Every journey reinforces something profound. Nigerians are remarkably warm, welcoming and hopeful. In many of the communities we have visited, people have told us they have never witnessed government teams coming specifically to identify their homes, understand their communities and ensure they are visible within a national digital infrastructure. There is dignity in being found. There is inclusion in being counted. There is trust when government makes the effort to reach every citizen, not just those who are easiest to reach. The Digital Postcode System is far bigger than mail delivery. It is foundational digital public infrastructure. It means an ambulance can find a patient faster. A security agency can respond with greater precision. Fire services can reach emergencies without relying on verbal directions. Businesses can deliver products more efficiently. Small enterprises in rural communities can participate more confidently in e-commerce. Governments can plan schools, hospitals, roads and public services using accurate location intelligence rather than estimates. Financial institutions can strengthen address verification and expand financial inclusion. Census exercises, elections and disaster response can all benefit from more reliable location data. But perhaps what excites me most is what we cannot yet fully imagine. Just as mobile phones became the platform for innovations few predicted twenty years ago, a trusted national location layer will become the foundation upon which future innovations are built. Entrepreneurs will develop services we have not conceived today. Logistics companies will optimise deliveries with unprecedented efficiency. Drones, autonomous systems, precision agriculture, smart cities, digital insurance, AI-powered public services and entirely new business models will all depend on one fundamental capability: knowing exactly where something is. That is what we are building. Every building we validate, every community we map and every postcode we assign is another block in Nigeria's digital future. This work is demanding. It requires patience, precision and thousands of kilometres on the road. But nation-building has never been about choosing the easy path. It is about ensuring that every Nigerian, everywhere, has a place in the future we are creating together. #PostcodesNG cc Nigerian Postal Service

📌When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu Bola Ahmed Tinubu entrusted us with the mandate to deliver Nigeria's National Digital Alphanumeric Postcode System, the assignment was never simply about creating postcodes. It was about giving every addressable location in Nigeria a place on the nation's digital map. From the outset, the Honourable Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani Dr. 'Bosun Tijani , was clear on the standard we had to meet. This was not going to be another desktop exercise. The objective was to build a trusted digital location infrastructure that truly reflects the reality on the ground, one that serves every Nigerian, whether in the heart of our cities or in the most remote communities. That is why delineation alone was never enough. Maps can tell part of the story. People tell the rest. Over the past few weeks, our dedicated staff and thousands of ad-hoc field personnel have travelled across Nigeria, validating communities, identifying buildings and ensuring that what is captured digitally reflects what exists physically. Here are videos from Ebonyi, Jigawa. From Jigawa and Niger State, the largest state in Nigeria by landmass, covering more than 76,000 square kilometres and stretching across terrains that remind us daily of the scale of this assignment, we have remained committed to one principle: no community is too remote, no settlement too small, and no Nigerian too far away to count. Every journey reinforces something profound. Nigerians are remarkably warm, welcoming and hopeful. In many of the communities we have visited, people have told us they have never witnessed government teams coming specifically to identify their homes, understand their communities and ensure they are visible within a national digital infrastructure. There is dignity in being found. There is inclusion in being counted. There is trust when government makes the effort to reach every citizen, not just those who are easiest to reach. The Digital Postcode System is far bigger than mail delivery. It is foundational digital public infrastructure. It means an ambulance can find a patient faster. A security agency can respond with greater precision. Fire services can reach emergencies without relying on verbal directions. Businesses can deliver products more efficiently. Small enterprises in rural communities can participate more confidently in e-commerce. Governments can plan schools, hospitals, roads and public services using accurate location intelligence rather than estimates. Financial institutions can strengthen address verification and expand financial inclusion. Census exercises, elections and disaster response can all benefit from more reliable location data. But perhaps what excites me most is what we cannot yet fully imagine. Just as mobile phones became the platform for innovations few predicted twenty years ago, a trusted national location layer will become the foundation upon which future innovations are built. Entrepreneurs will develop services we have not conceived today. Logistics companies will optimise deliveries with unprecedented efficiency. Drones, autonomous systems, precision agriculture, smart cities, digital insurance, AI-powered public services and entirely new business models will all depend on one fundamental capability: knowing exactly where something is. That is what we are building. Every building we validate, every community we map and every postcode we assign is another block in Nigeria's digital future. This work is demanding. It requires patience, precision and thousands of kilometres on the road. But nation-building has never been about choosing the easy path. It is about ensuring that every Nigerian, everywhere, has a place in the future we are creating together. #PostcodesNG cc Nigerian Postal Service

Tola Odeyemi

16,969 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

President Donald Trump is abandoning Ukraine and putting Europe in danger by negotiating directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin and criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, say the media, many European leaders, and some in Congress. But it is not in the interests of the United States to be involved in another endless war like Afghanistan that ultimately has the same outcome. Russians retain their numerical advantage. The supplies and capacities of Ukrainians and the European nations that support them are dwindling. The war has ended the lives of 200,000 people at a total cost of trillions. The US has spent $64 billion, and Europe has spent $62 billion on military aid for Ukraine, and another $50 billion and $70 billion, respectively, on other forms of aid. It’s true that Trump’s actions since taking office for his second term suggest an effort to end the so-called “international rules-based order” that has existed since World War II. And France and the UK have proposed continuing that order by sending 30,000 European peacekeeping troops to deter Russia, with US fighter jets and missiles to support them. But there is little appetite among Europeans or Americans for a long-term Western military occupation of Ukraine that is not guaranteed to work and may still trigger conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia. A Russian government representative has already rejected the proposal as a “dangerous provocation.” And the people who are demanding the US continue the war in Ukraine are the same people who got us into the war. Many are loyalists to past US presidents, including the last one, whose policies helped lead to the war by expanding NATO. Moreover, it is dishonest to call the Pax Americana that has existed since World War II an “international rules-based order.” From CIA interference in the Italian elections of 1947 to wars in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa in the 1960s and 1980s to George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US government has exemplified what most every foreign policy realist and International Studies professor knows, which is that the global system is anarchic and governed by power, not morality. And, from 2016 until now, the joint effort by the US government and our allies in Europe to uphold the entirely fictitious “rules-based order” had become totalitarian. The globalists turned the regime change guns inward. The US government, alongside NATO, the EU, and the governments of Britain, Germany, and others, funded the creation of a Censorship Industrial Complex to finance wrongly named “nongovernmental organizations” that “flagged” to social media companies alleged “misinformation” and demanded its removal. Government-backed NGOs and media organizations conducted sophisticated “information operations,” to falsely label nationalist political parties in Europe as “fascist” and “far right,” to frame Trump as a Putin-controlled Hitler, and to smear ordinary citizens as Nazis. These coordinated propaganda and disinformation tactics were coupled with viewpoint-based censorship, thereby undermining the democratic process. Last year, NGOs funded by USAID and the State Department even pushed for the annulment of an election in Romania to prevent the victory of a nationalist candidate. Many American historians and sociologists have observed that the American people are, by nature and geography, more isolationist than globalist. We very much enjoy having large oceans to separate us from the wars in Europe and Asia. And, our rational response to being repeatedly wounded, shamed, and humiliated for our oft-disastrous foreign interventions is to turn inward and seek to heal our internal wounds. We have many. Americans on the Right and the Left have all rightly soured on foreign intervention. Indeed, opposition to more foreign wars is one of the few positive things both the radical Left and the “far right” can agree on. Afghanistan was an end-of-empire mistake that Americans do not want to repeat, and certainly not in Eastern Europe on the border with a territorial and nuclear-armed superpower. Trump was elected twice on a platform of anti-globalist nationalism. Its clear internal logic, America First, is wholly consistent with Left-wing opposition to the kinds of foreign interventions that Noam Chomsky rightly taught several generations of students not only failed on their own terms but were also fundamentally immoral. The nationalists who voters elected to the White House and Congress are not anti-imperialists, in that they still have global ambition, but their aversion to new foreign entanglements overlaps with the 20th-century Left more than the Right. We should critically evaluate whatever agreement they negotiate, and even their behavior during negotiations, but we should also keep in mind that the American people have given a clear mandate to Trump and Vance to end the war in Ukraine and significantly pull back from our two-decades-long role in overthrowing governments across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Both the national mood and the popular mandate for the Trump administration to disentangle the US from the conflict in Ukraine and to transition our allies to greater security independence are clear. And yet many global media and governing elites — the cross-Atlantic foreign policy establishment, most European leaders, and most Democrats and many Republicans in Congress — are attacking the Trump administration’s efforts to negotiate peace in Ukraine. Why is that? Why won’t they just give peace a chance? Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!

President Donald Trump is abandoning Ukraine and putting Europe in danger by negotiating directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin and criticizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, say the media, many European leaders, and some in Congress. But it is not in the interests of the United States to be involved in another endless war like Afghanistan that ultimately has the same outcome. Russians retain their numerical advantage. The supplies and capacities of Ukrainians and the European nations that support them are dwindling. The war has ended the lives of 200,000 people at a total cost of trillions. The US has spent $64 billion, and Europe has spent $62 billion on military aid for Ukraine, and another $50 billion and $70 billion, respectively, on other forms of aid. It’s true that Trump’s actions since taking office for his second term suggest an effort to end the so-called “international rules-based order” that has existed since World War II. And France and the UK have proposed continuing that order by sending 30,000 European peacekeeping troops to deter Russia, with US fighter jets and missiles to support them. But there is little appetite among Europeans or Americans for a long-term Western military occupation of Ukraine that is not guaranteed to work and may still trigger conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia. A Russian government representative has already rejected the proposal as a “dangerous provocation.” And the people who are demanding the US continue the war in Ukraine are the same people who got us into the war. Many are loyalists to past US presidents, including the last one, whose policies helped lead to the war by expanding NATO. Moreover, it is dishonest to call the Pax Americana that has existed since World War II an “international rules-based order.” From CIA interference in the Italian elections of 1947 to wars in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa in the 1960s and 1980s to George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US government has exemplified what most every foreign policy realist and International Studies professor knows, which is that the global system is anarchic and governed by power, not morality. And, from 2016 until now, the joint effort by the US government and our allies in Europe to uphold the entirely fictitious “rules-based order” had become totalitarian. The globalists turned the regime change guns inward. The US government, alongside NATO, the EU, and the governments of Britain, Germany, and others, funded the creation of a Censorship Industrial Complex to finance wrongly named “nongovernmental organizations” that “flagged” to social media companies alleged “misinformation” and demanded its removal. Government-backed NGOs and media organizations conducted sophisticated “information operations,” to falsely label nationalist political parties in Europe as “fascist” and “far right,” to frame Trump as a Putin-controlled Hitler, and to smear ordinary citizens as Nazis. These coordinated propaganda and disinformation tactics were coupled with viewpoint-based censorship, thereby undermining the democratic process. Last year, NGOs funded by USAID and the State Department even pushed for the annulment of an election in Romania to prevent the victory of a nationalist candidate. Many American historians and sociologists have observed that the American people are, by nature and geography, more isolationist than globalist. We very much enjoy having large oceans to separate us from the wars in Europe and Asia. And, our rational response to being repeatedly wounded, shamed, and humiliated for our oft-disastrous foreign interventions is to turn inward and seek to heal our internal wounds. We have many. Americans on the Right and the Left have all rightly soured on foreign intervention. Indeed, opposition to more foreign wars is one of the few positive things both the radical Left and the “far right” can agree on. Afghanistan was an end-of-empire mistake that Americans do not want to repeat, and certainly not in Eastern Europe on the border with a territorial and nuclear-armed superpower. Trump was elected twice on a platform of anti-globalist nationalism. Its clear internal logic, America First, is wholly consistent with Left-wing opposition to the kinds of foreign interventions that Noam Chomsky rightly taught several generations of students not only failed on their own terms but were also fundamentally immoral. The nationalists who voters elected to the White House and Congress are not anti-imperialists, in that they still have global ambition, but their aversion to new foreign entanglements overlaps with the 20th-century Left more than the Right. We should critically evaluate whatever agreement they negotiate, and even their behavior during negotiations, but we should also keep in mind that the American people have given a clear mandate to Trump and Vance to end the war in Ukraine and significantly pull back from our two-decades-long role in overthrowing governments across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Both the national mood and the popular mandate for the Trump administration to disentangle the US from the conflict in Ukraine and to transition our allies to greater security independence are clear. And yet many global media and governing elites — the cross-Atlantic foreign policy establishment, most European leaders, and most Democrats and many Republicans in Congress — are attacking the Trump administration’s efforts to negotiate peace in Ukraine. Why is that? Why won’t they just give peace a chance? Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!

Michael Shellenberger

261,515 просмотров • 1 год назад

🚨NEW - House Speaker Mike Johnson delivers first floor speech on border catastrophe, accusing President Biden of intentionally creating a "clear and present danger to our national security." "Since I was elected Speaker less than 100 days ago, more than 700,000 illegals have been welcomed into our country illegally by the Biden administration. American schoolchildren have been forced into virtual schools so migrants can sleep in their school buildings. Korean War veterans have been booted from nursing homes that were sold to house migrants. Our streets are being flooded with fentanyl. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults are being poisoned and losing their lives. Vulnerable children and women are being exploited and trafficked by cartels. Since President Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas assumed office, there have been more than 7 million encounters with illegal aliens just at our southern border alone. 35 of our 50 states, including my home state of Louisiana, don't have a population that large. More than 300 individuals who are on our terror watchlist have been apprehended on the southern border. The frightening question is, how many have entered undetected? We know there are at least 1.8 million gotaways that have escaped. Understand that the situation at our border presents a clear and present danger to our national security, and it demands that it be addressed. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Homeland Security Committee in November that these gotaways are a great concern for the agency, and all 56 of our Joint Terrorism Task Forces are trying to identify who these people are. We don't know how many terrorists are inside our borders. We do know that fentanyl is pouring into our communities like an open sewer. Right now, the leading cause of death of death in America for Americans aged 18 to 46 is fentanyl poisoning. To make matters worse, we've learned that the Biden administration is now simply just releasing 85% of the illegals who come across that border right into the country. For reference, by the way, in 2013, the Obama administration detained 82% of illegal aliens. How do we go from detaining 82% to releasing 85%? It only happens if this is by design. It only happens if it's an orchestrated intentional effort by the administration to do exactly that, and that is what the evidence shows. Earlier this month, I released a memo documenting 64 specific actions that the Biden administration has taken to undermine our border security and to promote the mass release of illegals and dangerous persons into our country. The very first day President Biden walked into the Oval Office, he revoked Executive Order 9844. Do you know what that did? It ended the construction of the border wall that Congress had already paid for. Everybody has seen the images of the materials out there rotting in the sun. Why? Because Joe Biden decided unilaterally that he didn't want a wall. In February 2021, the administration stopped applying Title 42 expulsions to children and incentivize by doing that incentivize families to send unaccompanied children through Mexico under the watch of cartels and traffickers. Since then, the administration admits to losing track of more than 80,000 unaccompanied children somewhere in the US. We don't know where they are. Have they been put into trafficking rings? We know that some of these kids are being trafficked for free labor and being forced to do things that are too appalling for us to articulate on this floor. Everybody here knows that's happening, and we're not demanding the President stop it? He can. He has the power to do it. In October 2021, the Biden administration revoked the migrant protection protocols that had been instituted under President Trump. That's the policy that we all know colloquially as Remain in Mexico. The Remain in Mexico policy kept asylum seekers in a safe haven third country while they were seeking asylum in the United States. Do you know why that works magically so well? Because it sent a message around the world that you shouldn't pay your life savings to a cartel to traffic you through Mexico and drop you over the US border because you're not going to be dropped over the US border. The word goes out on social media to countries all around the world. They are not going to let you in. Man, is that the most common sense rule you've ever thought of? President Biden doesn't agree because he stopped it. He issued an executive order to stop that common sense rule. A senior border patrol officer told us on that trip to Eagle Pass that if President Biden, by the stroke of a pen, would issue an executive order today to just simply reinstate Remain in Mexico, they think that would stop the flow by 70%. One stroke of the pen by the President. He does not seem to care. I told President Biden this myself on multiple occasions, most recently, a couple of weeks ago on the phone, I read him the law that says that he has all this authority, but he refuses to act. And even that's even despite court orders, by the way that instructed the administration to reinstate the institute remain in Mexico while the litigation was going on. You know what they did? They ignored it. The Biden administration is actively incentivizing illegals to come to the United States. We have laid out the welcome mat. We told everybody around the world, come on, you know what? The US taxpayer will take care of you. It's costing the American people billions and billions and billions of dollars to provide for people who are intentionally breaking our laws, billions and billions of dollars to house them and educate them and clothe them and take care of them. Why should we bear the burden when they break our laws? In January 2023, the Biden administration expanded the use of the Customs and Border Patrol One App so illegal aliens could just make appointments and then be released immediately right into America's interior. Guess what? 95% of all illegals who simply scheduled appointments through the app were released right into the United States. That's right. All you have to do is just download the app because they all have smartphones, make an appointment, and the President of the United States will release you into a network of NGOs who will put you on a plane to the destination of your choice. Without identification, by the way, while Americans are waiting in line to get through TSA. All on the dime of the American taxpayer. In December 2023, CBP recorded more than 302,000 encounters, almost double the population of my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. In just one month 302,000 people just walked right into the country. I could go on and on about the 64 actions we've documented that President Biden has specifically taken to open our border wide up, but it's crystal clear his policy choices and Secretary Mayorkas refusal to comply with the law are driving this border catastrophe. They have chosen disorder and chaos for us rather than securing the homeland. They've ceded the homeland to cartels and traffickers. In the Del Rio sector alone in Eagle Pass, Texas, the cartels are making an estimated $3.5 million dollars a day trafficking human beings into our country. Do the math. They are making billions of dollars a year trafficking undocumented children and victims into this country. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a taxi driver to just help traffickers complete the last few miles of their human smuggling operation, and they're making billions of dollars in the process. It's absolute madness, and it is dismantling the safety of our communities. More than half a million known criminals and illegal aliens are in the US in our communities, free to re-offend and victimize American people. When we were at Eagle Pass in the Del Rio sector earlier in January, they told us that 60 to 70% of the people coming across the border right there at that epicenter are single adult males. They're military-aged. These are not huddled masses of families seeking refuge and asylum. These are people coming into our country to do only God knows what. The Biden administration is allowing it, and we've noted that they are coming from adversarial nations and from terrorist regions. We have no idea what they're planning. But in fiscal year 2023, border patrol encountered illegals from 170 different countries, including hundreds from Iran and Syria, thousands from Russia, and tens of thousands have come in from China. Tell me that's not dangerous? Law enforcement and intelligence leaders are warning us that we may very well suffer a preventable terrorist attack here in the homeland if we don't immediately secure that border and remove these dangerous terrorists from inside our borders. I read the black letter law to the President of the United States on the phone about two and a half weeks ago. I said, Mr. President, it says very clearly that you have all the tools and the executive authority necessary to reverse the catastrophe that you have created. He has those tools right now, and he has since day one. We have to decide if we believe in the rule of law or not. We have to decide if we're a sovereign nation or we're not. I believe that border security is part of our solemn obligation to safeguard the well-being of our citizens and uphold the principles that define who we are as a nation. A weak border weakens America, and a strong border is good for America, and a stronger America is good for everybody around the world. And everybody in this chamber should acknowledge that. Just as we lock our doors at night to protect our homes, we secure our borders to protect our homeland. And my friends, that is our sacred obligation." Speaker Mike Johnson

🚨NEW - House Speaker Mike Johnson delivers first floor speech on border catastrophe, accusing President Biden of intentionally creating a "clear and present danger to our national security." "Since I was elected Speaker less than 100 days ago, more than 700,000 illegals have been welcomed into our country illegally by the Biden administration. American schoolchildren have been forced into virtual schools so migrants can sleep in their school buildings. Korean War veterans have been booted from nursing homes that were sold to house migrants. Our streets are being flooded with fentanyl. Hundreds of thousands of children and adults are being poisoned and losing their lives. Vulnerable children and women are being exploited and trafficked by cartels. Since President Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas assumed office, there have been more than 7 million encounters with illegal aliens just at our southern border alone. 35 of our 50 states, including my home state of Louisiana, don't have a population that large. More than 300 individuals who are on our terror watchlist have been apprehended on the southern border. The frightening question is, how many have entered undetected? We know there are at least 1.8 million gotaways that have escaped. Understand that the situation at our border presents a clear and present danger to our national security, and it demands that it be addressed. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Homeland Security Committee in November that these gotaways are a great concern for the agency, and all 56 of our Joint Terrorism Task Forces are trying to identify who these people are. We don't know how many terrorists are inside our borders. We do know that fentanyl is pouring into our communities like an open sewer. Right now, the leading cause of death of death in America for Americans aged 18 to 46 is fentanyl poisoning. To make matters worse, we've learned that the Biden administration is now simply just releasing 85% of the illegals who come across that border right into the country. For reference, by the way, in 2013, the Obama administration detained 82% of illegal aliens. How do we go from detaining 82% to releasing 85%? It only happens if this is by design. It only happens if it's an orchestrated intentional effort by the administration to do exactly that, and that is what the evidence shows. Earlier this month, I released a memo documenting 64 specific actions that the Biden administration has taken to undermine our border security and to promote the mass release of illegals and dangerous persons into our country. The very first day President Biden walked into the Oval Office, he revoked Executive Order 9844. Do you know what that did? It ended the construction of the border wall that Congress had already paid for. Everybody has seen the images of the materials out there rotting in the sun. Why? Because Joe Biden decided unilaterally that he didn't want a wall. In February 2021, the administration stopped applying Title 42 expulsions to children and incentivize by doing that incentivize families to send unaccompanied children through Mexico under the watch of cartels and traffickers. Since then, the administration admits to losing track of more than 80,000 unaccompanied children somewhere in the US. We don't know where they are. Have they been put into trafficking rings? We know that some of these kids are being trafficked for free labor and being forced to do things that are too appalling for us to articulate on this floor. Everybody here knows that's happening, and we're not demanding the President stop it? He can. He has the power to do it. In October 2021, the Biden administration revoked the migrant protection protocols that had been instituted under President Trump. That's the policy that we all know colloquially as Remain in Mexico. The Remain in Mexico policy kept asylum seekers in a safe haven third country while they were seeking asylum in the United States. Do you know why that works magically so well? Because it sent a message around the world that you shouldn't pay your life savings to a cartel to traffic you through Mexico and drop you over the US border because you're not going to be dropped over the US border. The word goes out on social media to countries all around the world. They are not going to let you in. Man, is that the most common sense rule you've ever thought of? President Biden doesn't agree because he stopped it. He issued an executive order to stop that common sense rule. A senior border patrol officer told us on that trip to Eagle Pass that if President Biden, by the stroke of a pen, would issue an executive order today to just simply reinstate Remain in Mexico, they think that would stop the flow by 70%. One stroke of the pen by the President. He does not seem to care. I told President Biden this myself on multiple occasions, most recently, a couple of weeks ago on the phone, I read him the law that says that he has all this authority, but he refuses to act. And even that's even despite court orders, by the way that instructed the administration to reinstate the institute remain in Mexico while the litigation was going on. You know what they did? They ignored it. The Biden administration is actively incentivizing illegals to come to the United States. We have laid out the welcome mat. We told everybody around the world, come on, you know what? The US taxpayer will take care of you. It's costing the American people billions and billions and billions of dollars to provide for people who are intentionally breaking our laws, billions and billions of dollars to house them and educate them and clothe them and take care of them. Why should we bear the burden when they break our laws? In January 2023, the Biden administration expanded the use of the Customs and Border Patrol One App so illegal aliens could just make appointments and then be released immediately right into America's interior. Guess what? 95% of all illegals who simply scheduled appointments through the app were released right into the United States. That's right. All you have to do is just download the app because they all have smartphones, make an appointment, and the President of the United States will release you into a network of NGOs who will put you on a plane to the destination of your choice. Without identification, by the way, while Americans are waiting in line to get through TSA. All on the dime of the American taxpayer. In December 2023, CBP recorded more than 302,000 encounters, almost double the population of my hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. In just one month 302,000 people just walked right into the country. I could go on and on about the 64 actions we've documented that President Biden has specifically taken to open our border wide up, but it's crystal clear his policy choices and Secretary Mayorkas refusal to comply with the law are driving this border catastrophe. They have chosen disorder and chaos for us rather than securing the homeland. They've ceded the homeland to cartels and traffickers. In the Del Rio sector alone in Eagle Pass, Texas, the cartels are making an estimated $3.5 million dollars a day trafficking human beings into our country. Do the math. They are making billions of dollars a year trafficking undocumented children and victims into this country. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a taxi driver to just help traffickers complete the last few miles of their human smuggling operation, and they're making billions of dollars in the process. It's absolute madness, and it is dismantling the safety of our communities. More than half a million known criminals and illegal aliens are in the US in our communities, free to re-offend and victimize American people. When we were at Eagle Pass in the Del Rio sector earlier in January, they told us that 60 to 70% of the people coming across the border right there at that epicenter are single adult males. They're military-aged. These are not huddled masses of families seeking refuge and asylum. These are people coming into our country to do only God knows what. The Biden administration is allowing it, and we've noted that they are coming from adversarial nations and from terrorist regions. We have no idea what they're planning. But in fiscal year 2023, border patrol encountered illegals from 170 different countries, including hundreds from Iran and Syria, thousands from Russia, and tens of thousands have come in from China. Tell me that's not dangerous? Law enforcement and intelligence leaders are warning us that we may very well suffer a preventable terrorist attack here in the homeland if we don't immediately secure that border and remove these dangerous terrorists from inside our borders. I read the black letter law to the President of the United States on the phone about two and a half weeks ago. I said, Mr. President, it says very clearly that you have all the tools and the executive authority necessary to reverse the catastrophe that you have created. He has those tools right now, and he has since day one. We have to decide if we believe in the rule of law or not. We have to decide if we're a sovereign nation or we're not. I believe that border security is part of our solemn obligation to safeguard the well-being of our citizens and uphold the principles that define who we are as a nation. A weak border weakens America, and a strong border is good for America, and a stronger America is good for everybody around the world. And everybody in this chamber should acknowledge that. Just as we lock our doors at night to protect our homes, we secure our borders to protect our homeland. And my friends, that is our sacred obligation." Speaker Mike Johnson

KanekoaTheGreat

14,480,438 просмотров • 2 лет назад

NIGERIA AND TRUMP’S INTERVENTION: A TIME FOR TRUTH AND RENEWAL By Valentine Ozigbo This was a video of me in 2018, when I first chaired Unusual Praise in Lagos — long before my foray into politics. That year, our leadership chose to dedicate the project to raising awareness and support for our brothers and sisters in Benue State, who had become victims of relentless attacks by armed militias, or whatever names they are called. Tragically, those same patterns of violence have since spread across our country. Today, as I reflect on Nigeria’s current situation — and the recent decision by United States’ President Donald Trump to intervene — I feel compelled to speak as both a citizen and a believer in this nation's promise. 1. The Courage to Confront the Truth Our first responsibility as a nation is honesty. We must admit that we have a problem — one that runs deep into the very fabric of governance, justice, and moral leadership. We cannot heal what we refuse to confront. Nigeria must be reimagined on the pillars of truth, equity, and the rule of law — with accountability for every action, at every level. No amount of public relations or diplomatic spin can replace the sincerity of purpose. If we want peace, we must build justice. If we desire unity, we must earn trust. 2. The Urgency of Diplomatic Leadership The recent actions and statements from the United States should have triggered an immediate, coordinated diplomatic response from our government. It was an opportunity for strategic engagement — to open constructive channels, clarify concerns, and affirm the Federal Government's commitment to protecting the lives of its citizens. I expected President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to have swiftly activated a high-level diplomatic mission to Washington, aligning Nigeria’s position with both national dignity and global partnership. Some of the official reactions we’ve heard so far, unfortunately, have been unhelpful, even counterproductive. This was not the moment for defensiveness or rhetoric. We must remember that diplomacy is not submission — it is strategy. A strong and dignified foreign policy does not react emotionally; it acts responsibly. 3. The Pathway to Renewal Nigeria, as currently constituted, is not sustainable. Even what works can be improved — even more so for what does not. That is why I sincerely urge my party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the leadership of President Tinubu, to take full responsibility for both past and present failings. Let us show humility, apologise where necessary, and commit to genuine repentance. The place to begin is the rule of law — ensuring an independent and accountable judiciary, and fixing our broken electoral system. This means implementing electronic voting, ensuring the real-time transmission of results, and allowing independent candidacy, with clear legislation and timelines for each reform. These reforms are not political luxuries — they are moral imperatives. A nation’s destiny cannot rise higher than the credibility of its elections. 4. A Call for National Dialogue and Restructuring More fundamentally, Nigeria needs an honest, structured conversation about its future. I strongly recommend bringing together the leadership of The Patriots, the Fatherland Group (which advocates the Orange Union Model), and the Federal Government’s representatives to identify specific priorities, assign responsibilities, and set clear deadlines for key steps in restructuring our federation. A credible working document for this dialogue remains the 2014 National Conference Report — a blueprint born of consensus and national goodwill. Our diversity should be a source of strength, not suspicion. True federalism, balanced devolution of powers, and regional autonomy within a united framework can unlock Nigeria’s full potential. 5. Restoring Hope and Order Beyond political reforms, we must renew our collective moral compass. 1/2

NIGERIA AND TRUMP’S INTERVENTION: A TIME FOR TRUTH AND RENEWAL By Valentine Ozigbo This was a video of me in 2018, when I first chaired Unusual Praise in Lagos — long before my foray into politics. That year, our leadership chose to dedicate the project to raising awareness and support for our brothers and sisters in Benue State, who had become victims of relentless attacks by armed militias, or whatever names they are called. Tragically, those same patterns of violence have since spread across our country. Today, as I reflect on Nigeria’s current situation — and the recent decision by United States’ President Donald Trump to intervene — I feel compelled to speak as both a citizen and a believer in this nation's promise. 1. The Courage to Confront the Truth Our first responsibility as a nation is honesty. We must admit that we have a problem — one that runs deep into the very fabric of governance, justice, and moral leadership. We cannot heal what we refuse to confront. Nigeria must be reimagined on the pillars of truth, equity, and the rule of law — with accountability for every action, at every level. No amount of public relations or diplomatic spin can replace the sincerity of purpose. If we want peace, we must build justice. If we desire unity, we must earn trust. 2. The Urgency of Diplomatic Leadership The recent actions and statements from the United States should have triggered an immediate, coordinated diplomatic response from our government. It was an opportunity for strategic engagement — to open constructive channels, clarify concerns, and affirm the Federal Government's commitment to protecting the lives of its citizens. I expected President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to have swiftly activated a high-level diplomatic mission to Washington, aligning Nigeria’s position with both national dignity and global partnership. Some of the official reactions we’ve heard so far, unfortunately, have been unhelpful, even counterproductive. This was not the moment for defensiveness or rhetoric. We must remember that diplomacy is not submission — it is strategy. A strong and dignified foreign policy does not react emotionally; it acts responsibly. 3. The Pathway to Renewal Nigeria, as currently constituted, is not sustainable. Even what works can be improved — even more so for what does not. That is why I sincerely urge my party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the leadership of President Tinubu, to take full responsibility for both past and present failings. Let us show humility, apologise where necessary, and commit to genuine repentance. The place to begin is the rule of law — ensuring an independent and accountable judiciary, and fixing our broken electoral system. This means implementing electronic voting, ensuring the real-time transmission of results, and allowing independent candidacy, with clear legislation and timelines for each reform. These reforms are not political luxuries — they are moral imperatives. A nation’s destiny cannot rise higher than the credibility of its elections. 4. A Call for National Dialogue and Restructuring More fundamentally, Nigeria needs an honest, structured conversation about its future. I strongly recommend bringing together the leadership of The Patriots, the Fatherland Group (which advocates the Orange Union Model), and the Federal Government’s representatives to identify specific priorities, assign responsibilities, and set clear deadlines for key steps in restructuring our federation. A credible working document for this dialogue remains the 2014 National Conference Report — a blueprint born of consensus and national goodwill. Our diversity should be a source of strength, not suspicion. True federalism, balanced devolution of powers, and regional autonomy within a united framework can unlock Nigeria’s full potential. 5. Restoring Hope and Order Beyond political reforms, we must renew our collective moral compass. 1/2

Valentine Ozigbo

10,949 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад

War Diary Day 1,391 Blaise Metreweli, the Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, sticks it to the Killer in The Kremlin. And all his creepy helpers. I agree with every fucking word. VPDFO! (Transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered) 📷 Welcome inside MI6. This iconic building, familiar to movie fans everywhere, is the home of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency. But whilst hundreds of my team pass through the entry pods each day, the truth is that most of our work happens many miles away from this place - out of sight, hidden from the world, undercover, recruiting and running agents who choose to place their trust in us, sharing secrets to make the UK and the world safer. You might pass one of our officers on the street or sit next to them on a plane when you’re about to set off on an adventure of your own, or in a foreign city taking selfies by the sights. Whether it’s in seemingly everyday places, or on the front line embedded with our military, MI6 is there. In my first few weeks, I’ve heard repeatedly that MI6 is trusted and respected globally, two things that we never take for granted. We are seen as a source of hard power, soft influence and rapid innovation. I’ve also heard that people want to believe in MI6. It’s my job to make sure they can. Today, I want to talk about human agency. We all have choices to make about how we deal with the undercurrents shaping our world. About how, in our new, faster, more dangerous and technology-mediated world, it will be our rediscovery of our shared humanity, our ability to listen, and our courage that will determine how our future unfolds. Conflict is not inevitable. Understanding human nature is in my bones. From a family shaped by devastating conflict, I grew up with a deep sense of gratitude for the UK’s precious democracy and freedom. I spent much of my childhood overseas, which is where my passion for travel and adventure began. I studied anthropology, and later psychology and AI, exploring how we make sense of the world and each other. It’s why I was drawn to MI6: it offers strong purpose, a chance to serve and a belief in the positive power of human connection. Like the Service, I’m operational to my very core. Over nearly three decades, my career has involved recruiting and running agents in hostile territory; and leading operations in warzones to defuse threats and support peace. Always in teams, always learning from others. Over the years, I’ve worked with hundreds of brilliant partners – and indeed occasionally those we’d label as adversaries – across dozens of countries, tackling weapons proliferation and terrorism. During my time at MI5, I saw close up what it takes to defend Britain from being targeted by hostile states. You’ll find many like me in my organisation: powerfully motivated to protect our precious country; curious about how our world is changing, joining dots and taking action, across domains. But it was in my last role as ‘Q’, where it was my job to turn emerging technologies from threats to opportunities that I could most see the world changing. As I dug deep into data and extraordinary innovation, I could see how technology was rapidly reshaping not just our capabilities but also conflict and trust, truth and global power. Let me lay out how I see the global issues MI6 must tackle. Because the greatest danger we face is to misunderstand the nature of the problem. Let’s be in no doubt. Our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades. Conflict is evolving and trust eroding, just as new technologies spur both competition and dependence. We are being contested from sea to space, from the battlefield to the boardroom. And even our brains, as disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other and ourselves. Across the globe, we are now confronting not one single danger, but an interlocking web of security challenges – military, technological, social, ethical even – each shaping the other in complex ways. We are now operating in a space between peace and war. This is not a temporary state or a gradual, inevitable evolution. Our world is being actively remade, with profound implications for national and international security. Institutions which were designed in the ashes of the Second World War are being challenged. New blocs and identities forming and alliances reshaping. Multipolar competition in tension with multilateral cooperation. But there’s something distinctive that will make this change unlike any other: the impact of advanced technologies, which will accelerate the pace and scale of every threat and opportunity, and increasingly, individualise them too. Advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing are not only revolutionising economies but rewriting the reality of conflict, as they ‘converge’ to create science-fiction-like tools. There’s incredible promise in all this for all of us, from green technologies to hyper-personalised medicine. But also peril. AI-powered robots and drones are brilliant for scaled manufacturing but devastating on the battlefield. Discoveries that cure disease can also create new weapons. And as states race for tech supremacy, or as some algorithms become as powerful as states, those hyper-personalised tools could become a new vector for conflict and control. Power itself is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations, and sometimes to individuals. And at the same time, the foundations of trust in our societies are eroding. Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponised. Falsehood spreads faster than fact, dividing communities and distorting reality. We live in an age of hyper-connection yet profound isolation. The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so does our shared sense of truth – one of the greatest losses a society can suffer. The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Our security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it. Our world is being remade. And for the first time, we are all at the heart of it. My Service must now operate in this new context too: not just expert on hostile states, terrorism, proliferation and more, but also fluent in technology, able to anticipate the second and third order effects of advances that reshape the world in minutes not months. And as China will be a central part of the global transformation taking place this century, it is essential that we, as MI6, continue to inform the government’s understanding of China’s rise and the implications for UK national security. I’m going to break with tradition and won’t give you a global threat tour, but will focus here on Putin’s Russia. We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO. I find it harrowing that hundreds of thousands have died, with the toll mounting every day, because of Putin’s historical distortions and his compromised desire for respect. He is dragging out negotiations and shifting the cost of war onto his own population. But Putin should be in no doubt, our support is enduring. The pressure we apply on Ukraine’s behalf will be sustained. Because it is fundamental not just to European sovereignty and security but to global stability. Alongside the grinding war, Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war. It’s important to understand their attempts to bully, fearmonger and manipulate, because it affects us all. I am talking about: Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Drones buzzing airports and bases. Aggressive activity in our seas, above and below the waves. State-sponsored arson and sabotage. Propaganda and influence operations that crack open and exploit fractures within societies. Countering this activity is the work of intelligence and security services across Europe and the globe. And as the Foreign Secretary made clear in a speech last week, the UK is defending itself against this Russian information warfare – sanctioning Russian media outlets pushing Kremlin narratives. The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement; and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus. So, how should we respond? It’s not enough now just to understand the world. We must shape it too. MI6 is well-positioned to respond to these threats and wider global instability. And we will continue to evolve, just as we have throughout our long history. The UK government has invested in our intelligence agencies and we are all using our unique powers to keep the British people safe. Our ‘open and connected’ partnerships across the UK Intelligence Community, with HMGCC, NSSIF and the wider tech ecosystem in the UK will become even more important – because in the digital battleground, no single organisation can prevail alone. As a global agency, MI6’s inbuilt strength is our partners and our people. The risks I have set out require us to work ever more closely with our colleagues in MI5, GCHQ and in defence and diplomacy. But also with our Five Eyes partners, with the E3, the EU, NATO, those across the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and beyond. And with many valued partners whose identity needs to remain secret. Together, we integrate our diverse talent, data and tools to meet the threat. AI is a domain in which we will excel, using the technology to augment, not replace, our human skills. Every digital trace, every byte of data, every algorithmic decision has implications for the safety of the lives of the courageous people who work with us as officers and agents, and for the UK’s strategic advantage. Mastery of technology will infuse everything we do. Not just in our labs, but in the field, in our tradecraft, and even more importantly, in the mindset of every officer. We will become as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple other languages. Under my leadership, MI6 will continue to attract Britain’s best and most creative minds: linguists and data scientists, case officers and engineers, behavioural experts and technologists. We need people who walk in the shoes and get in the heads of our adversaries. We need people who think differently, challenge assumptions, and act decisively. All can thrive and make a difference at MI6. At an operational level, we will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into – if you like – our historical SOE instincts. We’re at our best when we’re hustling to make things happen, because our intelligence is most valuable when it changes reality on the ground. We will take calculated risks, where the prize is significant and the national interest clear. We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them. In every domain. In every way. So intelligence must drive action. Action must deliver advantage. And advantage must serve Britain’s security and prosperity. But at the core, our deeper contribution is also our simplest – how we unlock human agency. Our fast-paced, tech and threat-infused world now generates more heat than light. As nations retrench and rearm, we are losing opportunities to listen to what’s really going on. I’ve seen time and again throughout my career, that this is where MI6 matters most: we listen and we hear. We understand, because we take time to learn languages and cultures, complex technical and historical detail, immerse ourselves in what’s really driving the situation. Across the globe, right now, our officers are finding people with the courage to step forward, and they are taking time to sit and listen to break these tightening cycles of violence. They listen for nuance, for connection, for opportunity. Over the years, I’ve listened to terrorists who have told us how to defuse the bomb because they know that more violence won’t help. To proliferators and smugglers who’ve told us where to find the dangerous material, motivated to protect their children’s future. To people trapped in authoritarian regimes who know, deep down, that their humanity is being chipped away – and that telling us what’s really going on is an important release, allowing us all to find better ways to navigate our changing world. So, we will work with our agents. And we will continue to engage directly, and with respect, with states and organisation currently working against us. Away from the glare of the media, we will use MI6’s convening power wherever we can to make a material difference, bringing parties together to defuse tensions. But the response to the increasing risks we face won’t be delivered by the UK intelligence community alone. Wider society has a role to play too. That includes work taking place in schools across the country so our children don’t get duped by information manipulation. Let’s all check sources, consider evidence, and be alive to those algorithms that trigger intense reactions, like fear. It also means everyone in society really understanding the world we are in – a world where terrorists plot against us, where our enemies fearmonger, bully and manipulate, and the front line is everywhere. Online, on our streets, in our supply chains, in the minds and on the screens of our citizens. We must all stand together against this. As we do today with our friends in Australia after the shocking antisemitic terrorist attack this weekend. My thoughts -and those of my whole organisation – are with the family, friends and loved ones of the victims. Light will always win over darkness. In rising to meet these challenges we, in MI6, will remain anchored to our values: courage, creativity, respect and integrity. And to our principles: accountability and trust are not constraints on our work; they are the foundations of our legitimacy with the British public. Recently, I had the privilege of meeting and thanking a foreign agent who has worked with us for decades, taking extraordinary risks to help keep the UK safe. I asked why. They said simply, ‘Your values. Your integrity and respect. None of us have a future without them’. This moment reinforced to me that we must remain a very human agency. And so, to sustain that trust, MI6 will continue to be more open. Not for the sake of visibility, but because it matters – and as my MI5 counterpart Sir Ken McCallum said recently - because it is a strength. We will continue the practice of speaking publicly, broaden our channels of engagement, and sustain our focus on attracting the most diverse talent to join our Service. Transparency does not mean revealing what must remain secret. It means showing the British people who we are, what we stand for, and why our work matters. We need your trust and support for the difficult and often dangerous work our agents pursue, every day of the year. In an age of uncertainty, one constant remains: the choices made by human beings still determine the shape of the world. Yes, technology can illuminate possibilities: but information requires judgement; complexity demands clarity; and only people can decide which path to follow. The United Kingdom’s global voice has never rested solely on strength – it has rested on trust, principle, and the ability to understand others as well as ourselves. That is also the essence of intelligence: not simply knowing the world, but interpreting it through a uniquely human lens. Ours is the quiet service, the hidden service. It is one rooted in a profound belief that when human beings act with purpose and integrity, they can steady a faltering world. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was our shared belief in freedom that carried Europe forward. When acts of terror targeted open societies, it was intelligence, cooperation and resolve that preserved them. And when adversaries blur fact and falsehood, our task is to defend the space where truth can still stand. As we step into the future, the tools at our disposal will evolve. But what will always matter most is the human element – the person who stands in the shadows and says: this is right, and that is wrong. That choice – the exercise of human agency – has shaped our world before, and it will shape it again. Because in the end, it is not what we can do that defines us, but what we choose to do. Thank you. Published 15 December 2025

War Diary Day 1,391 Blaise Metreweli, the Chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, sticks it to the Killer in The Kremlin. And all his creepy helpers. I agree with every fucking word. VPDFO! (Transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered) 📷 Welcome inside MI6. This iconic building, familiar to movie fans everywhere, is the home of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency. But whilst hundreds of my team pass through the entry pods each day, the truth is that most of our work happens many miles away from this place - out of sight, hidden from the world, undercover, recruiting and running agents who choose to place their trust in us, sharing secrets to make the UK and the world safer. You might pass one of our officers on the street or sit next to them on a plane when you’re about to set off on an adventure of your own, or in a foreign city taking selfies by the sights. Whether it’s in seemingly everyday places, or on the front line embedded with our military, MI6 is there. In my first few weeks, I’ve heard repeatedly that MI6 is trusted and respected globally, two things that we never take for granted. We are seen as a source of hard power, soft influence and rapid innovation. I’ve also heard that people want to believe in MI6. It’s my job to make sure they can. Today, I want to talk about human agency. We all have choices to make about how we deal with the undercurrents shaping our world. About how, in our new, faster, more dangerous and technology-mediated world, it will be our rediscovery of our shared humanity, our ability to listen, and our courage that will determine how our future unfolds. Conflict is not inevitable. Understanding human nature is in my bones. From a family shaped by devastating conflict, I grew up with a deep sense of gratitude for the UK’s precious democracy and freedom. I spent much of my childhood overseas, which is where my passion for travel and adventure began. I studied anthropology, and later psychology and AI, exploring how we make sense of the world and each other. It’s why I was drawn to MI6: it offers strong purpose, a chance to serve and a belief in the positive power of human connection. Like the Service, I’m operational to my very core. Over nearly three decades, my career has involved recruiting and running agents in hostile territory; and leading operations in warzones to defuse threats and support peace. Always in teams, always learning from others. Over the years, I’ve worked with hundreds of brilliant partners – and indeed occasionally those we’d label as adversaries – across dozens of countries, tackling weapons proliferation and terrorism. During my time at MI5, I saw close up what it takes to defend Britain from being targeted by hostile states. You’ll find many like me in my organisation: powerfully motivated to protect our precious country; curious about how our world is changing, joining dots and taking action, across domains. But it was in my last role as ‘Q’, where it was my job to turn emerging technologies from threats to opportunities that I could most see the world changing. As I dug deep into data and extraordinary innovation, I could see how technology was rapidly reshaping not just our capabilities but also conflict and trust, truth and global power. Let me lay out how I see the global issues MI6 must tackle. Because the greatest danger we face is to misunderstand the nature of the problem. Let’s be in no doubt. Our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades. Conflict is evolving and trust eroding, just as new technologies spur both competition and dependence. We are being contested from sea to space, from the battlefield to the boardroom. And even our brains, as disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other and ourselves. Across the globe, we are now confronting not one single danger, but an interlocking web of security challenges – military, technological, social, ethical even – each shaping the other in complex ways. We are now operating in a space between peace and war. This is not a temporary state or a gradual, inevitable evolution. Our world is being actively remade, with profound implications for national and international security. Institutions which were designed in the ashes of the Second World War are being challenged. New blocs and identities forming and alliances reshaping. Multipolar competition in tension with multilateral cooperation. But there’s something distinctive that will make this change unlike any other: the impact of advanced technologies, which will accelerate the pace and scale of every threat and opportunity, and increasingly, individualise them too. Advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing are not only revolutionising economies but rewriting the reality of conflict, as they ‘converge’ to create science-fiction-like tools. There’s incredible promise in all this for all of us, from green technologies to hyper-personalised medicine. But also peril. AI-powered robots and drones are brilliant for scaled manufacturing but devastating on the battlefield. Discoveries that cure disease can also create new weapons. And as states race for tech supremacy, or as some algorithms become as powerful as states, those hyper-personalised tools could become a new vector for conflict and control. Power itself is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations, and sometimes to individuals. And at the same time, the foundations of trust in our societies are eroding. Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponised. Falsehood spreads faster than fact, dividing communities and distorting reality. We live in an age of hyper-connection yet profound isolation. The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so does our shared sense of truth – one of the greatest losses a society can suffer. The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Our security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it. Our world is being remade. And for the first time, we are all at the heart of it. My Service must now operate in this new context too: not just expert on hostile states, terrorism, proliferation and more, but also fluent in technology, able to anticipate the second and third order effects of advances that reshape the world in minutes not months. And as China will be a central part of the global transformation taking place this century, it is essential that we, as MI6, continue to inform the government’s understanding of China’s rise and the implications for UK national security. I’m going to break with tradition and won’t give you a global threat tour, but will focus here on Putin’s Russia. We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass NATO. I find it harrowing that hundreds of thousands have died, with the toll mounting every day, because of Putin’s historical distortions and his compromised desire for respect. He is dragging out negotiations and shifting the cost of war onto his own population. But Putin should be in no doubt, our support is enduring. The pressure we apply on Ukraine’s behalf will be sustained. Because it is fundamental not just to European sovereignty and security but to global stability. Alongside the grinding war, Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war. It’s important to understand their attempts to bully, fearmonger and manipulate, because it affects us all. I am talking about: Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Drones buzzing airports and bases. Aggressive activity in our seas, above and below the waves. State-sponsored arson and sabotage. Propaganda and influence operations that crack open and exploit fractures within societies. Countering this activity is the work of intelligence and security services across Europe and the globe. And as the Foreign Secretary made clear in a speech last week, the UK is defending itself against this Russian information warfare – sanctioning Russian media outlets pushing Kremlin narratives. The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement; and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus. So, how should we respond? It’s not enough now just to understand the world. We must shape it too. MI6 is well-positioned to respond to these threats and wider global instability. And we will continue to evolve, just as we have throughout our long history. The UK government has invested in our intelligence agencies and we are all using our unique powers to keep the British people safe. Our ‘open and connected’ partnerships across the UK Intelligence Community, with HMGCC, NSSIF and the wider tech ecosystem in the UK will become even more important – because in the digital battleground, no single organisation can prevail alone. As a global agency, MI6’s inbuilt strength is our partners and our people. The risks I have set out require us to work ever more closely with our colleagues in MI5, GCHQ and in defence and diplomacy. But also with our Five Eyes partners, with the E3, the EU, NATO, those across the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and beyond. And with many valued partners whose identity needs to remain secret. Together, we integrate our diverse talent, data and tools to meet the threat. AI is a domain in which we will excel, using the technology to augment, not replace, our human skills. Every digital trace, every byte of data, every algorithmic decision has implications for the safety of the lives of the courageous people who work with us as officers and agents, and for the UK’s strategic advantage. Mastery of technology will infuse everything we do. Not just in our labs, but in the field, in our tradecraft, and even more importantly, in the mindset of every officer. We will become as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple other languages. Under my leadership, MI6 will continue to attract Britain’s best and most creative minds: linguists and data scientists, case officers and engineers, behavioural experts and technologists. We need people who walk in the shoes and get in the heads of our adversaries. We need people who think differently, challenge assumptions, and act decisively. All can thrive and make a difference at MI6. At an operational level, we will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into – if you like – our historical SOE instincts. We’re at our best when we’re hustling to make things happen, because our intelligence is most valuable when it changes reality on the ground. We will take calculated risks, where the prize is significant and the national interest clear. We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them. In every domain. In every way. So intelligence must drive action. Action must deliver advantage. And advantage must serve Britain’s security and prosperity. But at the core, our deeper contribution is also our simplest – how we unlock human agency. Our fast-paced, tech and threat-infused world now generates more heat than light. As nations retrench and rearm, we are losing opportunities to listen to what’s really going on. I’ve seen time and again throughout my career, that this is where MI6 matters most: we listen and we hear. We understand, because we take time to learn languages and cultures, complex technical and historical detail, immerse ourselves in what’s really driving the situation. Across the globe, right now, our officers are finding people with the courage to step forward, and they are taking time to sit and listen to break these tightening cycles of violence. They listen for nuance, for connection, for opportunity. Over the years, I’ve listened to terrorists who have told us how to defuse the bomb because they know that more violence won’t help. To proliferators and smugglers who’ve told us where to find the dangerous material, motivated to protect their children’s future. To people trapped in authoritarian regimes who know, deep down, that their humanity is being chipped away – and that telling us what’s really going on is an important release, allowing us all to find better ways to navigate our changing world. So, we will work with our agents. And we will continue to engage directly, and with respect, with states and organisation currently working against us. Away from the glare of the media, we will use MI6’s convening power wherever we can to make a material difference, bringing parties together to defuse tensions. But the response to the increasing risks we face won’t be delivered by the UK intelligence community alone. Wider society has a role to play too. That includes work taking place in schools across the country so our children don’t get duped by information manipulation. Let’s all check sources, consider evidence, and be alive to those algorithms that trigger intense reactions, like fear. It also means everyone in society really understanding the world we are in – a world where terrorists plot against us, where our enemies fearmonger, bully and manipulate, and the front line is everywhere. Online, on our streets, in our supply chains, in the minds and on the screens of our citizens. We must all stand together against this. As we do today with our friends in Australia after the shocking antisemitic terrorist attack this weekend. My thoughts -and those of my whole organisation – are with the family, friends and loved ones of the victims. Light will always win over darkness. In rising to meet these challenges we, in MI6, will remain anchored to our values: courage, creativity, respect and integrity. And to our principles: accountability and trust are not constraints on our work; they are the foundations of our legitimacy with the British public. Recently, I had the privilege of meeting and thanking a foreign agent who has worked with us for decades, taking extraordinary risks to help keep the UK safe. I asked why. They said simply, ‘Your values. Your integrity and respect. None of us have a future without them’. This moment reinforced to me that we must remain a very human agency. And so, to sustain that trust, MI6 will continue to be more open. Not for the sake of visibility, but because it matters – and as my MI5 counterpart Sir Ken McCallum said recently - because it is a strength. We will continue the practice of speaking publicly, broaden our channels of engagement, and sustain our focus on attracting the most diverse talent to join our Service. Transparency does not mean revealing what must remain secret. It means showing the British people who we are, what we stand for, and why our work matters. We need your trust and support for the difficult and often dangerous work our agents pursue, every day of the year. In an age of uncertainty, one constant remains: the choices made by human beings still determine the shape of the world. Yes, technology can illuminate possibilities: but information requires judgement; complexity demands clarity; and only people can decide which path to follow. The United Kingdom’s global voice has never rested solely on strength – it has rested on trust, principle, and the ability to understand others as well as ourselves. That is also the essence of intelligence: not simply knowing the world, but interpreting it through a uniquely human lens. Ours is the quiet service, the hidden service. It is one rooted in a profound belief that when human beings act with purpose and integrity, they can steady a faltering world. When the Berlin Wall fell, it was our shared belief in freedom that carried Europe forward. When acts of terror targeted open societies, it was intelligence, cooperation and resolve that preserved them. And when adversaries blur fact and falsehood, our task is to defend the space where truth can still stand. As we step into the future, the tools at our disposal will evolve. But what will always matter most is the human element – the person who stands in the shadows and says: this is right, and that is wrong. That choice – the exercise of human agency – has shaped our world before, and it will shape it again. Because in the end, it is not what we can do that defines us, but what we choose to do. Thank you. Published 15 December 2025

John Sweeney

42,257 просмотров • 10 месяцев назад

A 550 kg animal can be in agony for weeks and never make a single sound. No scream. No cry. Just a stride that is two centimeters shorter, a little more weight shifted to the other side, a head that nods one beat too late. Most owners miss it. Most vets only catch it when it has already become expensive. The person who catches it first usually has dirt under their nails, a leather apron, and a steel rasp in their hand. This is the story of the most underrated profession in the horse world, and of one uncomfortable fact: an entire industry worth billions rests on four structures, each roughly the size of a saucer. Read this slowly. You will never look at a horse's legs the same way again. 1. THE ANIMAL THAT HIDES PAIN ON PURPOSE Horses are prey animals. For roughly 55 million years, the horse lineage survived by one rule: do not look weak. In the wild, the limping horse is the horse that gets eaten. The one that stops, flinches and cries out is the one the lions can hear. So evolution wrote a brutal instruction into the nervous system: hide it. Keep running. Pretend everything is fine. That instruction is still running in every stable, every racetrack and every backyard paddock on the planet. A horse with a hot, throbbing abscess building under its sole can still walk to the gate to greet you. A horse with early laminitis can still eat its dinner. A horse in chronic foot pain can still carry a rider for an hour and show you almost nothing. This is why horse people repeat one sentence like a prayer: No foot, no horse. It is not a slogan. It is a diagnosis. An enormous number of lameness problems begin in the foot, and the foot is exactly where the animal is best at hiding them. Now think about what that means for the person trusted to look at that foot every six to eight weeks. They are not a hobbyist with a file. They are the early-warning system for an animal that is biologically designed to lie to you. 2. FOUR SMALL PLATES CARRYING A HALF TON Here is a number that should bother you. An adult horse can weigh 500 to 600 kg. When it stands, that weight is not spread across a wide, cushioned surface like a camel's foot or a dog's paw. It is balanced on four hooves. Each hoof is a single toe. One toe. The horse is walking on the tip of what would be our middle fingernail, enlarged and armored over millions of years, with the rest of the finger stretched into a long lever that we call the leg. When that animal gallops, the foot hits the ground with forces that are several times its body weight, again and again, at speed, on surfaces that range from sand to asphalt to frozen clay. And the engineering that handles this is not metal or carbon fiber. It is keratin, the same protein family as your fingernails and hair, arranged into one of the most sophisticated shock-absorbing structures in biology. Let us open it up. 3. WHAT IS ACTUALLY INSIDE THE HOOF The outside is the part you see: the hoof wall. It is dead tissue, which is why a trim does not hurt when it is done correctly. Think of it as a thick protective capsule. The wall grows down from the coronary band, the ring of living tissue at the top of the hoof, at roughly 6 to 10 millimeters a month. A hoof that is completely replaced from top to bottom takes about nine months to a year. Every ring, bulge and crack you see on a hoof is a diary entry: illness, a diet change, a stressful season, a hard training block. The hoof records it all and carries the record downward. Underneath is where it gets wild. The wall is not glued to the bone like a boot on a foot. It is attached by the laminae, a set of interlocking leaf-like folds. Hundreds of primary laminae, each carrying a fringe of smaller secondary ones, lock together like two hands with fingers interlaced. Together they create an enormous attachment surface, large enough to suspend the entire skeleton of the horse inside the hoof capsule. Read that again. The coffin bone, the last bone in the leg, is not resting on the ground. It is hanging inside the hoof from this interlocking structure. Below the bone sits the digital cushion, a fibrous pad of tissue that behaves like a shock absorber. And at the center of the sole is the frog, the soft, V-shaped, rubbery structure that most people mistake for a flaw. It is not a flaw. It is a pump. Each time the hoof lands, the frog and the digital cushion compress and flex, and that deformation helps push blood back up the leg against gravity. Horses do not have large muscles in the lower leg. They rely on this mechanism to move blood. The hoof is part of the circulatory system. So when someone trims, shapes and balances this structure, they are not cutting a toenail. They are adjusting a hydraulic suspension system that the animal's circulation, joints and tendons all depend on. 4. WHEN THE SUSPENSION FAILS Now the dark part. If the laminae become inflamed and weaken, the bond between the hoof wall and the bone starts to fail. This is laminitis, and in its worst form the bone can rotate or sink inside the hoof capsule. The horse is, quite literally, standing on its own skeleton. Owners describe the posture they see: a horse rocking back onto its heels, leaning away from its front feet, refusing to move, shifting weight constantly because nothing feels safe. Veterinarians check for heat in the hoof and a strong, pounding pulse at the back of the fetlock. Laminitis is among the most feared conditions in equine medicine. It is linked to metabolic disease, to sudden changes in diet, to rich spring grass, to severe illness and to excessive load on the opposite limb when the other one is injured. That last cause matters. Two of the most famous horses of the modern era are tied to this story. Secretariat, the champion whose 31-length Belmont Stakes win in 1973 is still one of the most celebrated performances in sport, was euthanized in 1989 after laminitis in his hooves became untreatable. Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner, shattered bones in his right hind leg at the 2006 Preakness. Surgeons saved him for a while. But carrying the weight on the other legs triggered laminitis in the opposite hind foot, and he was euthanized in January 2007. Different horses. Same lesson. The foot is not the end of the story of a horse's health. Very often it is the chapter that decides how the story ends. That is the stage on which a farrier works. 5. THE PROFESSION NOBODY THINKS ABOUT The word farrier comes from the Latin ferrum, iron. For centuries, the person who shod horses was also the blacksmith, the toolmaker, and in many armies the one who kept the cavalry moving. Before that, people tried everything to protect hooves. The Romans used hipposandals, iron plates strapped to the foot. Nailed iron horseshoes appear in Europe in the early Middle Ages, and once they spread, they changed the world. A horse that could travel on stone roads without its feet wearing away was a horse that could pull heavier plows, carry heavier knights and cross whole continents. Entire empires moved on horseshoes. There is an old rhyme about it, the one that ends with a kingdom lost for want of a nail. Armies did not lose battles to dramatic reasons. They lost them to a thrown shoe, a lame horse, a missing man who knew how to fix it. Today the job looks different, but the core is the same. A modern farrier is part metalworker, part anatomist, part biomechanics specialist, part athletic trainer, and part psychologist for an animal that can kick with enough force to break bone. They do this work bent over, holding a leg that weighs more than a fully grown person's thigh, often in heat, mud or freezing wind. The physical toll is huge. Back problems are an occupational norm. Careers are measured in how many years the body lasts. And yet the margin for error is tiny. A few millimeters off in the angle of the hoof can change how load travels through the joints and tendons above it. A shoe set slightly too far forward or back can change where the horse breaks over at the end of each stride. A nail driven just wrong can hit sensitive tissue. The craft is not about doing something dramatic. It is about being right by a hair, thousands of times, on a living animal that is not holding still for you. 6. THE GEOMETRY NOBODY SEES Most people look at a trimmed hoof and see a clean surface. A farrier sees a set of angles, lines and balances. The hoof wall has to be trimmed so that it meets the ground evenly. The toe length, the height of the heels, the width of the heel base and the angle of the hoof relative to the pastern above it all matter. In many horses, a front hoof angle somewhere around the low fifties in degrees is considered a reference point, but there is no single magic number. The right answer depends on the horse's conformation, its discipline and its history. The goal is balance in two directions. From the side, the hoof angle should flow in a roughly straight line with the bones of the pastern. When it does not, forces concentrate where they should not. A long toe with a low heel can increase strain on the tendons at the back of the leg. A collapsed heel can change the load on the navicular region. From the front, the hoof should land flat. If one side is higher, the joint above takes the difference. Then there is breakover, the moment the heel lifts and the hoof pivots forward over the toe. Move that point and you change how hard the horse must work to take each step. A farrier can roll, square or set back a toe to make breakover easier. Over thousands of strides, that matters. A trim and a shoe are not a haircut and an accessory. They are small design decisions with cumulative consequences, and the horse pays for every error in a currency it cannot report. 7. WHY THE SHOE GOES ON HOT Here is the part that fascinates people who have never seen it. Many farriers heat the horseshoe in a forge until it glows orange and then press it briefly against the hoof. Smoke rises. There is a hiss. A smell that people who have been near it will never forget. It looks aggressive. It is not painful for the horse when done correctly, because the wall it touches is insensitive, and the contact is brief. The shoe is not nailed on while glowing. The hot contact leaves a mark, a map of exactly where the shoe and the hoof are not meeting perfectly. The farrier adjusts the shoe or the hoof, cools it, and repeats until the fit is true. Hot fitting is a diagnostic tool disguised as a ritual. The burn mark shows high spots and gaps that the eye can miss. A flat, sealed fit distributes load. A rocking fit concentrates it. Forges used for this reach temperatures in the neighborhood of a thousand degrees Celsius. Steel becomes workable at a glowing orange. Cooled in water or air, it holds the new shape. Cold shoeing, where the shoe is shaped without being heated, is also widely used, especially with pre-made or modified shoes. Neither method is automatically superior. Both rely on the skill of the person using them. 8. THE NAIL THAT IS DESIGNED TO COME OUT THE SIDE If you want to understand how precise this work is, look at the nail. A horseshoe nail is not a standard nail. It has a beveled tip and a specific shape so that when it is driven into the hoof wall, it curves outward and exits through the side of the wall, usually a couple of centimeters above the ground. The farrier drives it, feels the path, and twists off the sharp tip. The remaining end is bent over and tightened into a clinch that locks the shoe in place. The nail travels through the thick outer wall and is supposed to stay in the zone of insensitive tissue. The line where the wall meets the sole, the white line, serves as a guide. Too close, and the nail can press on sensitive structures. Too shallow, and the shoe will not hold. The farrier is working by sound and feel as much as by sight. Experienced hands can tell from the resistance and the sound whether the nail is traveling right. A subtle change in the tap of the hammer is information. You cannot automate this with a rule. You learn it by thousands of repetitions, some of them bad, under the guidance of someone who has been doing it for decades. 9. SHOES, NO SHOES, AND THE ARGUMENT THAT NEVER ENDS If you want to start a fight in a barn, ask whether horses need shoes. Here is the honest version. Some horses do very well barefoot. They have strong, well-shaped feet, they live on suitable terrain, and their workload does not demand extra protection. Many owners and professionals support barefoot management and some horses clearly thrive on it. Other horses need shoes. A shoe can add protection on abrasive ground, provide traction, support a foot with a specific problem, change the way load moves through a limb, or hold a therapeutic pad or medication in place. Horses with certain conditions are shod with special designs: wide webbed shoes, bar shoes, heart bar shoes, wedge pads, rocker toes. The best farriers are not ideologues. They look at the horse in front of them. What most people do not realize is how much of this is a conversation between three parties: the owner, the veterinarian and the farrier. When the three communicate, a lameness that might have run for months can be solved in a single visit. When they do not, the horse bounces between opinions while the foot keeps changing. If you take one practical thing from this post, take this: your farrier is part of your horse's medical team. Treat them like it. 10. THE TECHNOLOGY THAT IS QUIETLY CHANGING THE TRADE The forge and hammer are ancient. The tools around them are not. Digital radiography lets veterinarians and farriers see the exact position of the coffin bone inside the hoof, measure its angle, and plan a trim or shoe based on the real internal structure instead of guessing from the outside. Pressure-sensing plates and sensor-fitted shoes measure how load is distributed under the foot at each phase of the stride. High-speed video breaks down how a hoof lands, rolls and leaves the ground. Thermal imaging shows heat patterns in the foot and lower limb that can point to inflammation before it becomes visible. New materials have entered the market: aluminum shoes for racing, composite and polymer shoes that absorb shock, glue-on systems for horses with thin or damaged walls, and even 3D-printed hoof components that can be matched to an individual foot. In the middle of all of that, the ancient skill remains the bottleneck. A scan can tell you what is wrong. It cannot hold the leg, make the shoe, set the angle, and respond when the horse shifts at the wrong moment. The future of this trade is not machines replacing hands. It is hands armed with better information than any generation before them. 11. THE MENTAL GAME NOBODY TALKS ABOUT A farrier does not just handle metal. They handle fear. A horse is a flight animal. It is also a very large animal that has to stand on three legs while a stranger holds one foot, bends it, taps it, scrapes it, and sometimes heats metal next to it. Every instinct in its body says this is a vulnerable position. Great farriers read horses the way chess players read a board. They notice an ear tilting back, a shoulder tightening, a tail swishing in a different rhythm. They adjust their position, their breathing and their pace before the horse reacts. They know that rushing a nervous horse makes the next visit worse. They know that a young horse that learns to trust at its first trim can be easy for life, and a young horse that is frightened once can remember it for years. Calm is a technical skill in this job. Patience is a tool, as real as a rasp. And there is a strange side effect of watching someone do this well. Humans are wired to find mastery deeply satisfying. When we watch a person perform a precise, repeated, difficult task without hesitation, our brains respond with something close to relief. There is no waste. No panic. No improvisation that falls apart. Just a process, executed. That is part of why millions of people who have never owned a horse stop scrolling for this kind of work. It is a form of order, performed on a living creature that is anything but orderly. 12. THE QUIET MATH OF NEGLECT Let us do some arithmetic. The hoof grows continuously. If it is not trimmed, the wall gets longer, the toe flares, the heels can collapse underneath, and the balance of the whole foot drifts. In a few weeks, that drift is small. In a few months, it is significant. A hoof is a structure whose problems compound slowly and invisibly. Most horses on a normal schedule are seen every six to eight weeks. That is roughly seven to eight visits a year, per horse, for the animal's entire working life, which in many cases stretches past twenty years. Over that span, a good farrier makes tens of thousands of small decisions on a single horse. Now multiply that by the number of horses in the world. There are on the order of tens of millions. Every one of them is relying on someone, somewhere, to make those decisions well. When it goes right, nobody notices. The horse moves freely. The rider feels a good horse. The owner pays a bill and forgets about it. When it goes wrong, it can end a career, a competition season or a life. The best work in this profession is invisible. It looks like nothing happened. 13. WHAT THE HORSE IS TRYING TO TELL YOU Since the horse will not scream, you have to learn the whispers. These are the signs that experienced horse people check for. They are general information, not a diagnosis, and they never replace a veterinarian. The stance. A horse that stands with its front feet stretched out in front, or rocks its weight back onto its heels, is telling you something. So is one that constantly shifts weight from foot to foot. The pulse. A strong, pounding pulse at the back of the fetlock can indicate inflammation inside the foot. A calm, faint pulse is normal. Learning what normal feels like on your own horse is the whole trick. The heat. Run your hand over the hoof wall. A foot that is noticeably warmer than the others deserves attention. The stride. A shorter step, a head that bobs, a horse that suddenly dislikes turning in one direction or walking on hard ground. Subtle changes matter more than dramatic ones. The smell and the sole. A sharp, rotten smell from the underside of the foot can mean thrush, a bacterial infection that thrives in wet, packed conditions. Soft, crumbling tissue or black discharge is not something to wait on. The rings. Ridges that run across the hoof wall can mark periods of stress, dietary change or illness. They are a timeline written in horn. The behavior. A horse that suddenly resists being picked up, or pins its ears when you touch a foot, may not be misbehaving. It may be asking you to stop. And the emergency rule, the one that matters most. A horse that is suddenly refusing to bear weight on a limb, or showing severe heat and a pounding pulse in the foot, is a call-the-vet-now situation. Not tomorrow. Not after the weekend. Hooves reward the fast and punish the hopeful. 14. FIVE MYTHS THAT KEEP HORSES SUFFERING Myth one: if the horse is not limping, the feet are fine. Reality: horses are masters of compensation. By the time the limp is obvious, the problem has often been building for a long time. Myth two: the frog is useless and should be cut away. Reality: the frog is part of the shock-absorbing and circulation system of the foot. A farrier removes loose, ragged tissue, but a healthy frog is not a defect. Myth three: shoes are always cruel. Reality: shoes are a tool. Used well, they can protect and support. Used badly, they can cause problems, which is exactly why the person fitting them matters. Myth four: a trim is a trim. Reality: two trims on the same hoof can produce two different outcomes in how load travels through the leg. The difference is knowledge and judgment. Myth five: hoof care is an expense you can postpone. Reality: it is one of the cheapest forms of preventive medicine in the horse world, and problems left too long are among the most expensive to repair. 15. WHAT THIS TRADE TEACHES THE REST OF US Step back from the horses for a second. This profession is a lesson in a kind of work our culture is quietly losing: work that cannot be faked. You cannot fake a fit that holds. You cannot fake an angle that is right. You cannot fake the trust of a thousand-pound animal that has to stand still while you work with sharp tools near its leg. The feedback is immediate and honest. If the craft is good, the horse moves well. If it is not, the horse tells you, eventually, with the only language it has. There is a reason people drawn to this trade often speak about it like a calling. The work is hard, the hours are physical, the pay is not always proportional to the skill, and the conditions are rarely comfortable. But the loop is clean: you see a problem, you apply skill, you fix it, and a living creature walks away better than it came. In a world full of work that disappears into meetings and screens, that is rare and powerful. It is also why the best farriers carry themselves with a particular quiet confidence. They are not trying to impress anyone. They have already been judged by the toughest evaluator there is: a horse, on four feet, on real ground, every day. 16. ONE MORE NUMBER TO SIT WITH The hoof wall itself has no feeling. That is the reason a good trim is painless. But directly beneath it sits living tissue packed with blood vessels and nerves. The border between the part that does not feel and the part that feels everything is measured in millimeters. Every single visit, someone works along that border with sharp tools, steady hands and a mental map of what lies under the surface. That is the job. That is the whole job. No one applauds when a horse takes the first sound step after a visit. No one posts about the lameness that never happened. Yet that quiet nothing is the whole point of the work, and the whole art of it. 17. THE CHECKLIST YOU CAN USE THIS WEEK If you own, ride, board or simply love horses, here is a short list that can change an animal's life. Pick up and clean every foot daily, even when you are not riding. It takes a few minutes, and it is the single best way to notice early changes in smell, heat, cracks, stones and sole condition. Learn your horse's normal. The normal pulse. The normal temperature of each foot. The normal stance. You cannot spot abnormal without a baseline. Keep a fixed schedule with your farrier, usually every six to eight weeks, and adjust it with their advice. Do not wait for a problem to book the visit. Make sure your farrier, your vet and you are in the same conversation. Share X-rays, notes and observations. The best results come from teams, not from silos. Watch the ground daily. Constantly wet, muddy conditions soften hooves and invite infection. Dry, hard ground can bruise soles. Rotate, manage and adapt. Mind the diet. Sudden changes, rich pasture and metabolic problems are tied to the most dangerous foot conditions. Ask your vet about your horse's individual risk. And treat your farrier as the professional they are. Be there on time. Have the horse caught, clean and calm. Pay on time. Respect the work. Good farriers are scarce, and the ones who are worth having are booked months ahead for a reason. 18. THE REAL STORY The real story is not about a tool, a forge or a trick of the trade. It is about an animal that has spent tens of millions of years evolving to hide its pain, standing patiently on four small plates of horn while someone with strong hands and a trained eye decides whether tomorrow will be a good day or a bad one for it. It is about a skill passed down for more than a thousand years, now meeting radiographs, sensors and 3D printing, and still depending on a human being who can feel the difference between right and almost right. And it is about the fact that the most important work is often the work nobody notices. The horse that never went lame. The career that did not end. The animal that simply, quietly, kept moving. Next time you see a horse, look down. Not at the mane, not at the coat, not at the rider. Look at the feet. That is where its whole life is standing. If this changed how you see horses, do three things. Repost it, so someone who owns a horse sees it before their animal has to tell them the hard way. Tag a horse person, a farrier, or the friend who has been saying that something is "a little off" with their horse for weeks. Follow for more deep dives into the invisible crafts that keep the living world moving. This post is general information for awareness and education. It is not veterinary advice. If your horse shows sudden lameness, heat, a pounding digital pulse or refuses to bear weight, call your veterinarian immediately.

A 550 kg animal can be in agony for weeks and never make a single sound. No scream. No cry. Just a stride that is two centimeters shorter, a little more weight shifted to the other side, a head that nods one beat too late. Most owners miss it. Most vets only catch it when it has already become expensive. The person who catches it first usually has dirt under their nails, a leather apron, and a steel rasp in their hand. This is the story of the most underrated profession in the horse world, and of one uncomfortable fact: an entire industry worth billions rests on four structures, each roughly the size of a saucer. Read this slowly. You will never look at a horse's legs the same way again. 1. THE ANIMAL THAT HIDES PAIN ON PURPOSE Horses are prey animals. For roughly 55 million years, the horse lineage survived by one rule: do not look weak. In the wild, the limping horse is the horse that gets eaten. The one that stops, flinches and cries out is the one the lions can hear. So evolution wrote a brutal instruction into the nervous system: hide it. Keep running. Pretend everything is fine. That instruction is still running in every stable, every racetrack and every backyard paddock on the planet. A horse with a hot, throbbing abscess building under its sole can still walk to the gate to greet you. A horse with early laminitis can still eat its dinner. A horse in chronic foot pain can still carry a rider for an hour and show you almost nothing. This is why horse people repeat one sentence like a prayer: No foot, no horse. It is not a slogan. It is a diagnosis. An enormous number of lameness problems begin in the foot, and the foot is exactly where the animal is best at hiding them. Now think about what that means for the person trusted to look at that foot every six to eight weeks. They are not a hobbyist with a file. They are the early-warning system for an animal that is biologically designed to lie to you. 2. FOUR SMALL PLATES CARRYING A HALF TON Here is a number that should bother you. An adult horse can weigh 500 to 600 kg. When it stands, that weight is not spread across a wide, cushioned surface like a camel's foot or a dog's paw. It is balanced on four hooves. Each hoof is a single toe. One toe. The horse is walking on the tip of what would be our middle fingernail, enlarged and armored over millions of years, with the rest of the finger stretched into a long lever that we call the leg. When that animal gallops, the foot hits the ground with forces that are several times its body weight, again and again, at speed, on surfaces that range from sand to asphalt to frozen clay. And the engineering that handles this is not metal or carbon fiber. It is keratin, the same protein family as your fingernails and hair, arranged into one of the most sophisticated shock-absorbing structures in biology. Let us open it up. 3. WHAT IS ACTUALLY INSIDE THE HOOF The outside is the part you see: the hoof wall. It is dead tissue, which is why a trim does not hurt when it is done correctly. Think of it as a thick protective capsule. The wall grows down from the coronary band, the ring of living tissue at the top of the hoof, at roughly 6 to 10 millimeters a month. A hoof that is completely replaced from top to bottom takes about nine months to a year. Every ring, bulge and crack you see on a hoof is a diary entry: illness, a diet change, a stressful season, a hard training block. The hoof records it all and carries the record downward. Underneath is where it gets wild. The wall is not glued to the bone like a boot on a foot. It is attached by the laminae, a set of interlocking leaf-like folds. Hundreds of primary laminae, each carrying a fringe of smaller secondary ones, lock together like two hands with fingers interlaced. Together they create an enormous attachment surface, large enough to suspend the entire skeleton of the horse inside the hoof capsule. Read that again. The coffin bone, the last bone in the leg, is not resting on the ground. It is hanging inside the hoof from this interlocking structure. Below the bone sits the digital cushion, a fibrous pad of tissue that behaves like a shock absorber. And at the center of the sole is the frog, the soft, V-shaped, rubbery structure that most people mistake for a flaw. It is not a flaw. It is a pump. Each time the hoof lands, the frog and the digital cushion compress and flex, and that deformation helps push blood back up the leg against gravity. Horses do not have large muscles in the lower leg. They rely on this mechanism to move blood. The hoof is part of the circulatory system. So when someone trims, shapes and balances this structure, they are not cutting a toenail. They are adjusting a hydraulic suspension system that the animal's circulation, joints and tendons all depend on. 4. WHEN THE SUSPENSION FAILS Now the dark part. If the laminae become inflamed and weaken, the bond between the hoof wall and the bone starts to fail. This is laminitis, and in its worst form the bone can rotate or sink inside the hoof capsule. The horse is, quite literally, standing on its own skeleton. Owners describe the posture they see: a horse rocking back onto its heels, leaning away from its front feet, refusing to move, shifting weight constantly because nothing feels safe. Veterinarians check for heat in the hoof and a strong, pounding pulse at the back of the fetlock. Laminitis is among the most feared conditions in equine medicine. It is linked to metabolic disease, to sudden changes in diet, to rich spring grass, to severe illness and to excessive load on the opposite limb when the other one is injured. That last cause matters. Two of the most famous horses of the modern era are tied to this story. Secretariat, the champion whose 31-length Belmont Stakes win in 1973 is still one of the most celebrated performances in sport, was euthanized in 1989 after laminitis in his hooves became untreatable. Barbaro, the Kentucky Derby winner, shattered bones in his right hind leg at the 2006 Preakness. Surgeons saved him for a while. But carrying the weight on the other legs triggered laminitis in the opposite hind foot, and he was euthanized in January 2007. Different horses. Same lesson. The foot is not the end of the story of a horse's health. Very often it is the chapter that decides how the story ends. That is the stage on which a farrier works. 5. THE PROFESSION NOBODY THINKS ABOUT The word farrier comes from the Latin ferrum, iron. For centuries, the person who shod horses was also the blacksmith, the toolmaker, and in many armies the one who kept the cavalry moving. Before that, people tried everything to protect hooves. The Romans used hipposandals, iron plates strapped to the foot. Nailed iron horseshoes appear in Europe in the early Middle Ages, and once they spread, they changed the world. A horse that could travel on stone roads without its feet wearing away was a horse that could pull heavier plows, carry heavier knights and cross whole continents. Entire empires moved on horseshoes. There is an old rhyme about it, the one that ends with a kingdom lost for want of a nail. Armies did not lose battles to dramatic reasons. They lost them to a thrown shoe, a lame horse, a missing man who knew how to fix it. Today the job looks different, but the core is the same. A modern farrier is part metalworker, part anatomist, part biomechanics specialist, part athletic trainer, and part psychologist for an animal that can kick with enough force to break bone. They do this work bent over, holding a leg that weighs more than a fully grown person's thigh, often in heat, mud or freezing wind. The physical toll is huge. Back problems are an occupational norm. Careers are measured in how many years the body lasts. And yet the margin for error is tiny. A few millimeters off in the angle of the hoof can change how load travels through the joints and tendons above it. A shoe set slightly too far forward or back can change where the horse breaks over at the end of each stride. A nail driven just wrong can hit sensitive tissue. The craft is not about doing something dramatic. It is about being right by a hair, thousands of times, on a living animal that is not holding still for you. 6. THE GEOMETRY NOBODY SEES Most people look at a trimmed hoof and see a clean surface. A farrier sees a set of angles, lines and balances. The hoof wall has to be trimmed so that it meets the ground evenly. The toe length, the height of the heels, the width of the heel base and the angle of the hoof relative to the pastern above it all matter. In many horses, a front hoof angle somewhere around the low fifties in degrees is considered a reference point, but there is no single magic number. The right answer depends on the horse's conformation, its discipline and its history. The goal is balance in two directions. From the side, the hoof angle should flow in a roughly straight line with the bones of the pastern. When it does not, forces concentrate where they should not. A long toe with a low heel can increase strain on the tendons at the back of the leg. A collapsed heel can change the load on the navicular region. From the front, the hoof should land flat. If one side is higher, the joint above takes the difference. Then there is breakover, the moment the heel lifts and the hoof pivots forward over the toe. Move that point and you change how hard the horse must work to take each step. A farrier can roll, square or set back a toe to make breakover easier. Over thousands of strides, that matters. A trim and a shoe are not a haircut and an accessory. They are small design decisions with cumulative consequences, and the horse pays for every error in a currency it cannot report. 7. WHY THE SHOE GOES ON HOT Here is the part that fascinates people who have never seen it. Many farriers heat the horseshoe in a forge until it glows orange and then press it briefly against the hoof. Smoke rises. There is a hiss. A smell that people who have been near it will never forget. It looks aggressive. It is not painful for the horse when done correctly, because the wall it touches is insensitive, and the contact is brief. The shoe is not nailed on while glowing. The hot contact leaves a mark, a map of exactly where the shoe and the hoof are not meeting perfectly. The farrier adjusts the shoe or the hoof, cools it, and repeats until the fit is true. Hot fitting is a diagnostic tool disguised as a ritual. The burn mark shows high spots and gaps that the eye can miss. A flat, sealed fit distributes load. A rocking fit concentrates it. Forges used for this reach temperatures in the neighborhood of a thousand degrees Celsius. Steel becomes workable at a glowing orange. Cooled in water or air, it holds the new shape. Cold shoeing, where the shoe is shaped without being heated, is also widely used, especially with pre-made or modified shoes. Neither method is automatically superior. Both rely on the skill of the person using them. 8. THE NAIL THAT IS DESIGNED TO COME OUT THE SIDE If you want to understand how precise this work is, look at the nail. A horseshoe nail is not a standard nail. It has a beveled tip and a specific shape so that when it is driven into the hoof wall, it curves outward and exits through the side of the wall, usually a couple of centimeters above the ground. The farrier drives it, feels the path, and twists off the sharp tip. The remaining end is bent over and tightened into a clinch that locks the shoe in place. The nail travels through the thick outer wall and is supposed to stay in the zone of insensitive tissue. The line where the wall meets the sole, the white line, serves as a guide. Too close, and the nail can press on sensitive structures. Too shallow, and the shoe will not hold. The farrier is working by sound and feel as much as by sight. Experienced hands can tell from the resistance and the sound whether the nail is traveling right. A subtle change in the tap of the hammer is information. You cannot automate this with a rule. You learn it by thousands of repetitions, some of them bad, under the guidance of someone who has been doing it for decades. 9. SHOES, NO SHOES, AND THE ARGUMENT THAT NEVER ENDS If you want to start a fight in a barn, ask whether horses need shoes. Here is the honest version. Some horses do very well barefoot. They have strong, well-shaped feet, they live on suitable terrain, and their workload does not demand extra protection. Many owners and professionals support barefoot management and some horses clearly thrive on it. Other horses need shoes. A shoe can add protection on abrasive ground, provide traction, support a foot with a specific problem, change the way load moves through a limb, or hold a therapeutic pad or medication in place. Horses with certain conditions are shod with special designs: wide webbed shoes, bar shoes, heart bar shoes, wedge pads, rocker toes. The best farriers are not ideologues. They look at the horse in front of them. What most people do not realize is how much of this is a conversation between three parties: the owner, the veterinarian and the farrier. When the three communicate, a lameness that might have run for months can be solved in a single visit. When they do not, the horse bounces between opinions while the foot keeps changing. If you take one practical thing from this post, take this: your farrier is part of your horse's medical team. Treat them like it. 10. THE TECHNOLOGY THAT IS QUIETLY CHANGING THE TRADE The forge and hammer are ancient. The tools around them are not. Digital radiography lets veterinarians and farriers see the exact position of the coffin bone inside the hoof, measure its angle, and plan a trim or shoe based on the real internal structure instead of guessing from the outside. Pressure-sensing plates and sensor-fitted shoes measure how load is distributed under the foot at each phase of the stride. High-speed video breaks down how a hoof lands, rolls and leaves the ground. Thermal imaging shows heat patterns in the foot and lower limb that can point to inflammation before it becomes visible. New materials have entered the market: aluminum shoes for racing, composite and polymer shoes that absorb shock, glue-on systems for horses with thin or damaged walls, and even 3D-printed hoof components that can be matched to an individual foot. In the middle of all of that, the ancient skill remains the bottleneck. A scan can tell you what is wrong. It cannot hold the leg, make the shoe, set the angle, and respond when the horse shifts at the wrong moment. The future of this trade is not machines replacing hands. It is hands armed with better information than any generation before them. 11. THE MENTAL GAME NOBODY TALKS ABOUT A farrier does not just handle metal. They handle fear. A horse is a flight animal. It is also a very large animal that has to stand on three legs while a stranger holds one foot, bends it, taps it, scrapes it, and sometimes heats metal next to it. Every instinct in its body says this is a vulnerable position. Great farriers read horses the way chess players read a board. They notice an ear tilting back, a shoulder tightening, a tail swishing in a different rhythm. They adjust their position, their breathing and their pace before the horse reacts. They know that rushing a nervous horse makes the next visit worse. They know that a young horse that learns to trust at its first trim can be easy for life, and a young horse that is frightened once can remember it for years. Calm is a technical skill in this job. Patience is a tool, as real as a rasp. And there is a strange side effect of watching someone do this well. Humans are wired to find mastery deeply satisfying. When we watch a person perform a precise, repeated, difficult task without hesitation, our brains respond with something close to relief. There is no waste. No panic. No improvisation that falls apart. Just a process, executed. That is part of why millions of people who have never owned a horse stop scrolling for this kind of work. It is a form of order, performed on a living creature that is anything but orderly. 12. THE QUIET MATH OF NEGLECT Let us do some arithmetic. The hoof grows continuously. If it is not trimmed, the wall gets longer, the toe flares, the heels can collapse underneath, and the balance of the whole foot drifts. In a few weeks, that drift is small. In a few months, it is significant. A hoof is a structure whose problems compound slowly and invisibly. Most horses on a normal schedule are seen every six to eight weeks. That is roughly seven to eight visits a year, per horse, for the animal's entire working life, which in many cases stretches past twenty years. Over that span, a good farrier makes tens of thousands of small decisions on a single horse. Now multiply that by the number of horses in the world. There are on the order of tens of millions. Every one of them is relying on someone, somewhere, to make those decisions well. When it goes right, nobody notices. The horse moves freely. The rider feels a good horse. The owner pays a bill and forgets about it. When it goes wrong, it can end a career, a competition season or a life. The best work in this profession is invisible. It looks like nothing happened. 13. WHAT THE HORSE IS TRYING TO TELL YOU Since the horse will not scream, you have to learn the whispers. These are the signs that experienced horse people check for. They are general information, not a diagnosis, and they never replace a veterinarian. The stance. A horse that stands with its front feet stretched out in front, or rocks its weight back onto its heels, is telling you something. So is one that constantly shifts weight from foot to foot. The pulse. A strong, pounding pulse at the back of the fetlock can indicate inflammation inside the foot. A calm, faint pulse is normal. Learning what normal feels like on your own horse is the whole trick. The heat. Run your hand over the hoof wall. A foot that is noticeably warmer than the others deserves attention. The stride. A shorter step, a head that bobs, a horse that suddenly dislikes turning in one direction or walking on hard ground. Subtle changes matter more than dramatic ones. The smell and the sole. A sharp, rotten smell from the underside of the foot can mean thrush, a bacterial infection that thrives in wet, packed conditions. Soft, crumbling tissue or black discharge is not something to wait on. The rings. Ridges that run across the hoof wall can mark periods of stress, dietary change or illness. They are a timeline written in horn. The behavior. A horse that suddenly resists being picked up, or pins its ears when you touch a foot, may not be misbehaving. It may be asking you to stop. And the emergency rule, the one that matters most. A horse that is suddenly refusing to bear weight on a limb, or showing severe heat and a pounding pulse in the foot, is a call-the-vet-now situation. Not tomorrow. Not after the weekend. Hooves reward the fast and punish the hopeful. 14. FIVE MYTHS THAT KEEP HORSES SUFFERING Myth one: if the horse is not limping, the feet are fine. Reality: horses are masters of compensation. By the time the limp is obvious, the problem has often been building for a long time. Myth two: the frog is useless and should be cut away. Reality: the frog is part of the shock-absorbing and circulation system of the foot. A farrier removes loose, ragged tissue, but a healthy frog is not a defect. Myth three: shoes are always cruel. Reality: shoes are a tool. Used well, they can protect and support. Used badly, they can cause problems, which is exactly why the person fitting them matters. Myth four: a trim is a trim. Reality: two trims on the same hoof can produce two different outcomes in how load travels through the leg. The difference is knowledge and judgment. Myth five: hoof care is an expense you can postpone. Reality: it is one of the cheapest forms of preventive medicine in the horse world, and problems left too long are among the most expensive to repair. 15. WHAT THIS TRADE TEACHES THE REST OF US Step back from the horses for a second. This profession is a lesson in a kind of work our culture is quietly losing: work that cannot be faked. You cannot fake a fit that holds. You cannot fake an angle that is right. You cannot fake the trust of a thousand-pound animal that has to stand still while you work with sharp tools near its leg. The feedback is immediate and honest. If the craft is good, the horse moves well. If it is not, the horse tells you, eventually, with the only language it has. There is a reason people drawn to this trade often speak about it like a calling. The work is hard, the hours are physical, the pay is not always proportional to the skill, and the conditions are rarely comfortable. But the loop is clean: you see a problem, you apply skill, you fix it, and a living creature walks away better than it came. In a world full of work that disappears into meetings and screens, that is rare and powerful. It is also why the best farriers carry themselves with a particular quiet confidence. They are not trying to impress anyone. They have already been judged by the toughest evaluator there is: a horse, on four feet, on real ground, every day. 16. ONE MORE NUMBER TO SIT WITH The hoof wall itself has no feeling. That is the reason a good trim is painless. But directly beneath it sits living tissue packed with blood vessels and nerves. The border between the part that does not feel and the part that feels everything is measured in millimeters. Every single visit, someone works along that border with sharp tools, steady hands and a mental map of what lies under the surface. That is the job. That is the whole job. No one applauds when a horse takes the first sound step after a visit. No one posts about the lameness that never happened. Yet that quiet nothing is the whole point of the work, and the whole art of it. 17. THE CHECKLIST YOU CAN USE THIS WEEK If you own, ride, board or simply love horses, here is a short list that can change an animal's life. Pick up and clean every foot daily, even when you are not riding. It takes a few minutes, and it is the single best way to notice early changes in smell, heat, cracks, stones and sole condition. Learn your horse's normal. The normal pulse. The normal temperature of each foot. The normal stance. You cannot spot abnormal without a baseline. Keep a fixed schedule with your farrier, usually every six to eight weeks, and adjust it with their advice. Do not wait for a problem to book the visit. Make sure your farrier, your vet and you are in the same conversation. Share X-rays, notes and observations. The best results come from teams, not from silos. Watch the ground daily. Constantly wet, muddy conditions soften hooves and invite infection. Dry, hard ground can bruise soles. Rotate, manage and adapt. Mind the diet. Sudden changes, rich pasture and metabolic problems are tied to the most dangerous foot conditions. Ask your vet about your horse's individual risk. And treat your farrier as the professional they are. Be there on time. Have the horse caught, clean and calm. Pay on time. Respect the work. Good farriers are scarce, and the ones who are worth having are booked months ahead for a reason. 18. THE REAL STORY The real story is not about a tool, a forge or a trick of the trade. It is about an animal that has spent tens of millions of years evolving to hide its pain, standing patiently on four small plates of horn while someone with strong hands and a trained eye decides whether tomorrow will be a good day or a bad one for it. It is about a skill passed down for more than a thousand years, now meeting radiographs, sensors and 3D printing, and still depending on a human being who can feel the difference between right and almost right. And it is about the fact that the most important work is often the work nobody notices. The horse that never went lame. The career that did not end. The animal that simply, quietly, kept moving. Next time you see a horse, look down. Not at the mane, not at the coat, not at the rider. Look at the feet. That is where its whole life is standing. If this changed how you see horses, do three things. Repost it, so someone who owns a horse sees it before their animal has to tell them the hard way. Tag a horse person, a farrier, or the friend who has been saying that something is "a little off" with their horse for weeks. Follow for more deep dives into the invisible crafts that keep the living world moving. This post is general information for awareness and education. It is not veterinary advice. If your horse shows sudden lameness, heat, a pounding digital pulse or refuses to bear weight, call your veterinarian immediately.

Earth Unveiled

40,634 просмотров • 8 дней назад

A wild bobcat. Cold, open water. A body that was never built for this. This is an animal that can kill a deer. The water was about to beat it anyway. Watch the video first. Then read on. What happens in the final seconds is the reason I can't stop thinking about it. . Some clips you watch. Some clips you feel in your chest for an hour afterward. This is the second kind, and I want to explain exactly why, because once you understand what you are actually looking at, you will never watch it the same way again. This is a long one. Every section ends with something that makes the next one worth it. Stay with me. . 01 // THE COLDEST MATH IN THE WILD Let's start with something nobody tells you about water. Water is a thief. It pulls heat out of a living body up to 25 times faster than air at the same temperature. Not a little faster. Twenty-five times. It is the reason a cold day is uncomfortable and a cold swim is an emergency. Now put that math on an animal wearing a fur coat. Fur works because of what is trapped inside it: air. Thousands of tiny pockets of warm air held against the skin. The air is the insulation. The hair is just the scaffolding that holds it in place. Soak that coat and the air is gone. What was a winter jacket becomes a wet towel wrapped around the body. It is heavy. It drags. It bleeds heat at the exact moment the animal can least afford to lose it. And swimming is not free. A cat does not swim the way an otter swims. Otters are engineered for it: dense waterproof fur, webbed feet, a body shaped like a torpedo. A bobcat is engineered for something completely different. Every stroke burns fuel it does not have, while every second in the water drains the fuel it already has. That is the trap. Heat goes out. Energy goes out. Nothing comes in. In humans, the first minute in cold water triggers what physiologists call the cold shock response: a gasp reflex, a spike in heart rate, panicked breathing. Then comes the slow part, where muscles and nerves cool down and stop doing what you tell them. Animals do not get an exemption from physics. Bodies are bodies. Survival experts who study cold water use a simple frame for humans, the 1-10-1 rule. One minute to get your breathing under control after the initial shock. Ten minutes of meaningful muscle function before your limbs start refusing orders. About an hour before hypothermia becomes the real threat to life. Now shrink the body. A smaller body has more surface area for its mass, which means it sheds heat faster. Those human numbers are a generous best case. For a 20-pound animal, the clock runs quicker. So when you see a wild animal in water it did not choose, you are not looking at a swimmer. You are looking at a countdown. Here is the part that should bother you: the animal does not know it is a countdown. It only knows that it has to keep moving, and that stopping is not an option, and that there is nothing solid anywhere. Hold that thought. Because the next thing I am going to tell you is why this particular animal is the last one you would expect to be in that position. . 02 // THE "BIG HOUSE CAT" LIE Somewhere along the way, someone decided a bobcat is basically a large housecat with attitude. Somebody was wrong. Let's do the numbers. A typical house cat weighs 8 to 10 pounds. Most adult bobcats land somewhere between 15 and 30 pounds, with big males pushing past that. That is two to three times the mass, and none of it is soft. It is wire and spring: long hind legs built to launch, shoulders built to hold, claws that retract and reset like a trap. By widely cited estimates, a bobcat can cover roughly 10 feet in a single leap. That is not a pounce. That is a projectile. It hunts the way the best hunters do: by being patient past the point where patience seems reasonable. It picks a spot. It goes still. It waits, sometimes for a very long time, until the world arranges itself into a single clean opportunity. Then it ends the situation in a second. Rabbits and hares are the staple. Mice, voles, squirrels, birds. But here is the detail that changes how people talk about them: bobcats have been documented taking down deer, animals much larger than themselves, particularly in harsh winters when deer are weakened. Think about what that means. This is a creature that routinely wins fights against animals that outweigh it. It has ear tufts that scientists still argue about. It has a ruff of fur around the face like a lion in miniature. It has a stubby tail, four to seven inches long, that gave the animal its name. It has a spotted coat that is essentially camouflage for dappled light, and, useful fact, the spot pattern is different from one animal to the next, which is how researchers identify individuals on trail cameras. And it has a voice. Purrs, hisses, growls, and a night scream that has been mistaken for a human in distress by people who did not know what they were hearing. So this is who we are talking about. Not a pet. Not a pushover. One of the most efficient small predators on the continent. Which is what makes the situation in this video so strange. Because everything I just told you about strength, speed and pride goes quiet when the ground disappears. . 03 // THE ANIMAL YOU HAVE PROBABLY WALKED PAST Here is a fact that should feel a little unsettling. Bobcats are one of the most widespread wild cats in North America. Their range stretches across the lower 48 states, into southern Canada, and down into Mexico. Forests, swamps, deserts, mountains, the ragged edges of suburbs. They are adaptable in a way that very few predators are. And yet most people, including people who have lived their entire lives near them, have never seen one. That is not an accident. Bobcats are solitary, shy, and mostly active around dawn and dusk. They live in the margins. They move through your world at times you are not looking, and they have made avoiding you into an art form. A bobcat's entire survival strategy is to see you first and never be seen. Which means any video of one, let alone a close, unhurried, unguarded look at one, is rare. Wildlife photographers wait years for angles like this. Researchers set up cameras and come back to empty memory cards. Now think about what it takes for a wild bobcat and a human being to end up in the same small space, with the animal not running. The animal has to be in a situation where running is no longer possible. That should give you chills. Because it is not a heartwarming meeting. It is what happens when a very proud animal has run out of options. And what happens next is the part that does not add up, which is exactly where the next section starts. . 04 // THE PART THAT DOES NOT ADD UP Predators do not do calm. A wild animal's nervous system is a hair trigger. When something big and unfamiliar closes in, the body floods with adrenaline and cortisol, and the decision tree is short: fight, flee, or freeze. Every instinct it has been born with says a large, upright, two-legged creature is the most dangerous thing in the environment. So when a wild animal is calm around humans, there are only a few explanations, and none of them is "it decided to trust us." Sometimes the animal is habituated, meaning it has lived near people so long it has stopped treating them as a threat. Sometimes the animal is so depleted, cold, hurt or exhausted that its body has quietly shut down the option to fight. Biologists have a name for one version of this: tonic immobility, a kind of involuntary freeze in which an animal goes still and unresponsive when escape seems impossible. And sometimes it is a mix of all of it, in ways science is still working out. Here is the line I want you to remember, because it will save you from a lot of bad internet takes: Do not confuse calm with consent. Stillness is not friendship. A quiet animal is not a tame animal. And some of the most dramatic moments in wildlife rescue come not from the fight, but from the moment the body stops fighting and everyone has to figure out what that actually means. There is even a documented condition, capture myopathy, in which the sheer stress of being restrained can damage a wild animal's muscles and organs badly enough to kill it, sometimes hours or days after the event, with no visible wound at all. Handling stress is a real cause of death in wildlife work. That is why professionals move slowly, keep things dark and quiet, and treat every second of contact like it costs something. Which means that in a situation like this, the difference between a good outcome and a tragic one can be invisible to the naked eye. That is what makes the footage so tense to watch if you know what to look for. And I am going to tell you exactly what to look for. But not yet. First I need you to understand how unlikely it was that anyone was there at all. . 05 // NATURE HAS NO AUDIENCE Almost everything that happens in the wild happens unwatched. Think about that for a second. Billions of small emergencies, every single day. Animals slipping, trapped, lost, starving, stranded. A fawn separated from its mother. A bird with a broken wing. A predator that misjudged a jump by an inch. Almost none of it is ever witnessed by anyone. No camera. No rescuer. No witness. It simply happens, and then it stops, and the world continues as if nothing occurred. For a rescue to happen, a chain of things has to line up. Somebody has to be in the right place. Somebody has to be looking in the right direction. Somebody has to notice a small, wet, dark shape in a huge moving surface, and understand what it is. Somebody has to decide to act rather than say "huh" and keep going. And somebody has to actually know how to help without making it worse. Break any single link and the story ends before it starts. Every viral rescue video you have ever seen is a chain like that, where all the links happened to hold. I think that is why these clips hit differently than almost anything else online. They are not just proof that an animal survived. They are proof that the chain can hold. That in a world that mostly does not look, sometimes someone does. The cold math says this animal had little time. The odds say nobody should have been there. And yet. I keep circling that "and yet." . QUICK PAUSE Before we go deeper, a small experiment. Without scrolling back up, answer this in your head: how long was the animal in that water before anyone noticed? Got a number? Now hold it loosely. The truth about time in a moment like this is that it never feels like what it is. Seconds stretch. Minutes vanish. Nobody in a crisis has an accurate clock. Keep your number. We will come back to it. . 06 // WHY YOUR BRAIN CANNOT SCROLL PAST THIS Let's zoom out, because this is the part that fascinates me professionally. In 2012, two Wharton researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, studied thousands of New York Times articles to figure out what makes online content spread. Their finding was not what most people expected. Positivity helped, but what mattered even more was how much physical arousal a piece of content produced. Awe, anger and anxiety, all high-arousal emotions, made people share. Sadness, which is low-arousal, made people stop. Now look at a clip like this through that lens. It has anxiety: will the animal make it? It has awe: this is a wild predator, close enough to see the texture of its fur. It has relief, and something bigger than relief. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a word for that bigger thing: elevation. It is the warm, expanding feeling you get when you witness someone behaving with unexpected goodness. It is the emotion that makes people want to be better, to call their mother, to do something kind. It is exactly the kind of emotion that makes people hit share before they have even finished watching. And then there is the mechanism behind the hook itself. In 1994, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein described what he called the information gap theory of curiosity: curiosity is the discomfort of noticing a gap between what you know and what you want to know. The bigger the gap, and the closer you feel to closing it, the harder it is to look away. That is what I did in the first three lines of this post. I gave you a wild animal, a disaster, and an unanswered question. Your brain has been carrying that open loop ever since. You cannot un-notice it. You can only close it. That is not a trick. It is how attention has worked since the first campfire story. The only difference now is that the campfire fits in your pocket and never goes out. There is one more thing, and it may be the most important one. Animals do not perform. They cannot posture for a camera, hide their fear behind a joke, or spin the story afterward. Their reactions are uncut. In an internet made mostly of people curating themselves, a wild animal reacting honestly to a moment is about as authentic as content gets. And in a feed that is ninety percent outrage, ten percent ads, and the occasional argument about sandwiches, a clip that is about competence and kindness feels like finding cold water in a desert. So no, it is not weird that you cannot look away. It would be weirder if you could. . 07 // 15 BOBCAT FACTS THAT CHANGE HOW YOU SEE THE CLIP You now know what the water does and what the animal is. Here is the rest of the file, fast. 1. The scientific name is Lynx rufus. "Rufus" means reddish. The animal has been carrying a color-coded label for centuries. 2. It is the most common wild cat in North America, which makes how rarely people see one even more remarkable. 3. Bobcats are ambush hunters, not chasers. They win by patience, not by endurance. Long chases are not their thing, and long swims are definitely not their thing. 4. Yes, bobcats can swim, and they do it when they have to: crossing rivers, fleeing danger, following prey. But it is a tool of last resort, not a hobby. 5. Kittens are born in spring, usually in litters of two to four, and the mother raises them alone. Dad is not part of the picture. 6. A kitten's eyes open at around a week and a half old. It will stay with its mother for most of its first year before heading off to find a territory of its own. 7. Young bobcats leaving home can travel dozens of miles looking for a place to settle. That means young animals are the ones most likely to end up somewhere unfamiliar, in situations nothing in their short lives prepared them for. 8. Bobcats mark territory with scent, scrapes and scratched trees. Their world is written in a language we mostly cannot read. 9. When they cannot finish a meal, they often cover the leftovers with leaves, snow or debris and come back for it later. Forward planning, from a cat. 10. They climb trees and use them for escape and lookout. If a bobcat ever wanted to get out of a situation, vertical was its first idea. 11. Their ear tufts are still debated. Camouflage? Hearing? Communication? Nobody has a definitive answer, and I love that. 12. Bobcat and Canada lynx are cousins, not twins. Lynx have longer ear tufts, bigger paws for snow, and a fully black-tipped tail. A bobcat's tail is black only on top of the tip, like someone dipped a paintbrush and stopped halfway. 13. Coat color changes by region. Desert animals run pale and sandy. Northern animals run darker and grayer. Same species, different wardrobe. 14. A bobcat is not closely related to a cougar. It belongs to the Lynx genus. The cougar belongs to another. When people call it a "baby mountain lion," a biologist somewhere loses a year of their life. 15. In the wild, life is often short and hard. Many bobcats do not make it to ten years old. In captivity, they can live far longer. Which tells you what the wild costs, every single day, on top of everything else. Fifteen facts. One conclusion. Every one of these facts describes an animal built to survive. Which is exactly why watching one in trouble is so hard to forget. . 08 // SIX MYTHS ABOUT WILD CATS AND WATER Since we are here, let's clear up some things. MYTH 1: All cats hate water. FALSE. Tigers swim. Jaguars swim. Fishing cats literally dive for a living. The idea that cats are universally water-averse comes from house cats, and even that is a generalization. Plenty of wild cats are comfortable in water. It is not fear of water. It is that most cats do not choose it unless there is a reason. MYTH 2: If an animal can swim, it is safe in water. FALSE. Being able to swim and being able to survive in water are two different skills. Temperature, distance, current, exhaustion and time all matter. A strong swimmer can lose to cold long before it loses to drowning. MYTH 3: A tough predator does not need help. FALSE. Toughness is not immunity. Predators die of exposure, injury and exhaustion all the time. Being at the top of a food chain does not mean being at the top of every situation. MYTH 4: A calm wild animal is a friendly wild animal. FALSE. We covered this. Calm can mean cold, tired, hurt or in shock. It does not mean safe to touch. MYTH 5: Wild cats attack people constantly. FALSE. It is the opposite. Bobcats avoid people so well that many humans go a lifetime without seeing one. Encounters that end badly are extremely rare, and most involve an animal that is sick, cornered or handled. MYTH 6: Rescue is easy. FALSE. Rescue is the visible five percent. Underneath it are timing, knowledge, restraint, risk and an enormous amount of luck. Six myths. Not one of them survives contact with the footage. . 09 // THE SECOND HALF OF EVERY RESCUE Here is something the clips never show you. Getting the animal out is the first half of the story. The second half is quieter, slower, and matters just as much. When a wild animal ends up in professional hands, the priorities are almost the opposite of what your instincts tell you. Warmth, calm, darkness and silence come first. Then a medical check for injuries, dehydration and hypothermia. Then, if all goes well, recovery in a space where the animal sees as little of humans as possible. Yes, as little as possible. Good rehabilitators deliberately avoid cuddling, talking to, or bonding with wild patients, because an animal that gets comfortable around people is an animal that struggles to survive once it goes back out there. The goal is never a rescued pet. The goal is a released predator. And when it is possible, animals are often returned to the area where they were found, because that is the territory they know: the routes, the hiding places, the food, the neighbors. So the real happy ending of a wildlife rescue is not a hug. It is a door opening, and an animal walking through it without looking back. Hold on to that image. It will matter in a minute. . 10 // PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS I am going to be blunt, because the comment section will not be. Every time a clip like this goes viral, thousands of people write some version of "I would have grabbed it too" or "I want to keep it." Please do not. A wild bobcat is not a pet. It is a wild predator with claws, teeth, and a nervous system built to treat contact as an attack. Even a small, exhausted, seemingly docile animal can injure a person badly in a fraction of a second. Bites and scratches from wildlife can carry infection. Rabies in bobcats is uncommon, but it is real, and that is not a gamble you take on a hunch. And as we covered, the danger runs both ways. The stress of being handled can hurt or kill a wild animal even when nobody meant it any harm. In many places it is also illegal to keep or transport wild animals without permits, which means the well-intentioned rescuer can end up in a legal mess and the animal can end up worse off. So what should you do if you ever find a wild animal in trouble? Keep your distance. Keep noise and movement low. Do not try to pick it up, feed it, or warm it up yourself. Call your local wildlife agency, animal control, or a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, and follow their instructions. They do this for a living. They know what the animal needs, and what it does not. Love wildlife the right way: at a distance, with respect, and through the phone number of someone qualified. The best rescue stories are the ones where the animal gets to go back to being wild. Which brings me to the ending. . 11 // HOW TO WATCH THIS VIDEO Here is my one request. Do not watch it on autopilot. Before you press play, decide what you think is going to happen. Make a prediction, honestly. Then watch, and see how wrong you were. Keep your eyes on the animal, not on the people. Watch the eyes. Watch the ears. Watch the moment the animal has to decide what it wants to do. Wildlife tells you everything if you know where to look, and it does not lie. Pay attention to the way the whole tone of the clip shifts as it goes on. The first seconds and the last seconds feel like two entirely different films. And carry these five questions with you while it plays: Why is a predator this strong not fighting? What does an animal like this actually feel in a moment like that? How many other animals never get this chance? What would you have done in that spot, honestly? And what is the very last thing the bobcat does? Only one of those has an answer you can see with your own eyes. And remember the door I mentioned, the one that opens and the animal that does not look back? Keep that picture in your head while you watch. See how close reality gets to it. And stay to the last frame. There is a reason I told you the ending matters. A second watch will show you things the first one hides. . 12 // THE THREE RULES EVERY WILDLIFE PROFESSIONAL LIVES BY If you spent a week with people who do this work for a living, you would hear the same three ideas over and over. Rule one: the animal comes before the story. Good professionals never put a camera ahead of the patient. The best footage in the world is worthless if it costs the animal something. Rule two: distance is a form of kindness. The closer you get, the more stress you add. The most respectful thing you can do for a wild animal is usually to do less, from farther away, and let it be what it is. Rule three: success means the animal does not need you anymore. Not gratitude. Not a bond. Not a photo with a cute caption. Success is independence. Notice how that flips the usual story. In most human stories, success is being needed. In wildlife, success is being forgotten. . 13 // IF YOU ONLY REMEMBER FIVE LINES Screenshot this if you want to. I would. 1. Water steals heat 25 times faster than air, and a wet coat stops working. 2. A bobcat is an ambush predator with the strength of an animal twice its size, and none of that helps when the ground disappears. 3. Do not confuse calm with consent. 4. Almost everything in nature happens unwatched. That is why the times someone looks matter so much. 5. The best ending to a wild rescue is an animal that walks away on its own. . 14 // THE REAL REASON I POSTED THIS We spend a lot of time online being told the world is getting worse. Sometimes it is. But there is another truth underneath, one that rarely trends: in a random moment, on an ordinary day, with no cameras and no audience and nothing to gain, someone looked, someone cared, and something wild got another chance. Remember the number you guessed earlier, the seconds or minutes in that water? It turns out it does not matter. What matters is that somebody noticed at all. That is the whole post. Not a miracle. Not a spectacle. Just a small, stubborn piece of evidence that the chain can hold. If it moved you even a little, that is not weakness. That is the part of you that still works. If this landed for you, here is what to do: Reply with one word for how you felt watching it. Just one. I read them. Repost it for the person in your life who says they do not care about animals. Watch what happens to their face. Bookmark this thread-that-is-not-a-thread for the next time your feed makes you tired of everything. And follow me if you want more clips that make you feel something real, plus the stories behind them, without the fluff. One last thing. You made it to the bottom of a very long post. That means something. It means you are the kind of person who stays for the ending. Now go back to the video, press play, and stay for the last frame. P.S. If you scrolled straight to the bottom to see how this ends: the video is attached to this post. The ending is in the video. Nothing I write can replace it, and I would not want it to. P.P.S. Drop your prediction in the replies before you press play: what does the bobcat do in the very last seconds? Then come back after and tell me how wrong, or how right, you were. I will pin my favorite.

A wild bobcat. Cold, open water. A body that was never built for this. This is an animal that can kill a deer. The water was about to beat it anyway. Watch the video first. Then read on. What happens in the final seconds is the reason I can't stop thinking about it. . Some clips you watch. Some clips you feel in your chest for an hour afterward. This is the second kind, and I want to explain exactly why, because once you understand what you are actually looking at, you will never watch it the same way again. This is a long one. Every section ends with something that makes the next one worth it. Stay with me. . 01 // THE COLDEST MATH IN THE WILD Let's start with something nobody tells you about water. Water is a thief. It pulls heat out of a living body up to 25 times faster than air at the same temperature. Not a little faster. Twenty-five times. It is the reason a cold day is uncomfortable and a cold swim is an emergency. Now put that math on an animal wearing a fur coat. Fur works because of what is trapped inside it: air. Thousands of tiny pockets of warm air held against the skin. The air is the insulation. The hair is just the scaffolding that holds it in place. Soak that coat and the air is gone. What was a winter jacket becomes a wet towel wrapped around the body. It is heavy. It drags. It bleeds heat at the exact moment the animal can least afford to lose it. And swimming is not free. A cat does not swim the way an otter swims. Otters are engineered for it: dense waterproof fur, webbed feet, a body shaped like a torpedo. A bobcat is engineered for something completely different. Every stroke burns fuel it does not have, while every second in the water drains the fuel it already has. That is the trap. Heat goes out. Energy goes out. Nothing comes in. In humans, the first minute in cold water triggers what physiologists call the cold shock response: a gasp reflex, a spike in heart rate, panicked breathing. Then comes the slow part, where muscles and nerves cool down and stop doing what you tell them. Animals do not get an exemption from physics. Bodies are bodies. Survival experts who study cold water use a simple frame for humans, the 1-10-1 rule. One minute to get your breathing under control after the initial shock. Ten minutes of meaningful muscle function before your limbs start refusing orders. About an hour before hypothermia becomes the real threat to life. Now shrink the body. A smaller body has more surface area for its mass, which means it sheds heat faster. Those human numbers are a generous best case. For a 20-pound animal, the clock runs quicker. So when you see a wild animal in water it did not choose, you are not looking at a swimmer. You are looking at a countdown. Here is the part that should bother you: the animal does not know it is a countdown. It only knows that it has to keep moving, and that stopping is not an option, and that there is nothing solid anywhere. Hold that thought. Because the next thing I am going to tell you is why this particular animal is the last one you would expect to be in that position. . 02 // THE "BIG HOUSE CAT" LIE Somewhere along the way, someone decided a bobcat is basically a large housecat with attitude. Somebody was wrong. Let's do the numbers. A typical house cat weighs 8 to 10 pounds. Most adult bobcats land somewhere between 15 and 30 pounds, with big males pushing past that. That is two to three times the mass, and none of it is soft. It is wire and spring: long hind legs built to launch, shoulders built to hold, claws that retract and reset like a trap. By widely cited estimates, a bobcat can cover roughly 10 feet in a single leap. That is not a pounce. That is a projectile. It hunts the way the best hunters do: by being patient past the point where patience seems reasonable. It picks a spot. It goes still. It waits, sometimes for a very long time, until the world arranges itself into a single clean opportunity. Then it ends the situation in a second. Rabbits and hares are the staple. Mice, voles, squirrels, birds. But here is the detail that changes how people talk about them: bobcats have been documented taking down deer, animals much larger than themselves, particularly in harsh winters when deer are weakened. Think about what that means. This is a creature that routinely wins fights against animals that outweigh it. It has ear tufts that scientists still argue about. It has a ruff of fur around the face like a lion in miniature. It has a stubby tail, four to seven inches long, that gave the animal its name. It has a spotted coat that is essentially camouflage for dappled light, and, useful fact, the spot pattern is different from one animal to the next, which is how researchers identify individuals on trail cameras. And it has a voice. Purrs, hisses, growls, and a night scream that has been mistaken for a human in distress by people who did not know what they were hearing. So this is who we are talking about. Not a pet. Not a pushover. One of the most efficient small predators on the continent. Which is what makes the situation in this video so strange. Because everything I just told you about strength, speed and pride goes quiet when the ground disappears. . 03 // THE ANIMAL YOU HAVE PROBABLY WALKED PAST Here is a fact that should feel a little unsettling. Bobcats are one of the most widespread wild cats in North America. Their range stretches across the lower 48 states, into southern Canada, and down into Mexico. Forests, swamps, deserts, mountains, the ragged edges of suburbs. They are adaptable in a way that very few predators are. And yet most people, including people who have lived their entire lives near them, have never seen one. That is not an accident. Bobcats are solitary, shy, and mostly active around dawn and dusk. They live in the margins. They move through your world at times you are not looking, and they have made avoiding you into an art form. A bobcat's entire survival strategy is to see you first and never be seen. Which means any video of one, let alone a close, unhurried, unguarded look at one, is rare. Wildlife photographers wait years for angles like this. Researchers set up cameras and come back to empty memory cards. Now think about what it takes for a wild bobcat and a human being to end up in the same small space, with the animal not running. The animal has to be in a situation where running is no longer possible. That should give you chills. Because it is not a heartwarming meeting. It is what happens when a very proud animal has run out of options. And what happens next is the part that does not add up, which is exactly where the next section starts. . 04 // THE PART THAT DOES NOT ADD UP Predators do not do calm. A wild animal's nervous system is a hair trigger. When something big and unfamiliar closes in, the body floods with adrenaline and cortisol, and the decision tree is short: fight, flee, or freeze. Every instinct it has been born with says a large, upright, two-legged creature is the most dangerous thing in the environment. So when a wild animal is calm around humans, there are only a few explanations, and none of them is "it decided to trust us." Sometimes the animal is habituated, meaning it has lived near people so long it has stopped treating them as a threat. Sometimes the animal is so depleted, cold, hurt or exhausted that its body has quietly shut down the option to fight. Biologists have a name for one version of this: tonic immobility, a kind of involuntary freeze in which an animal goes still and unresponsive when escape seems impossible. And sometimes it is a mix of all of it, in ways science is still working out. Here is the line I want you to remember, because it will save you from a lot of bad internet takes: Do not confuse calm with consent. Stillness is not friendship. A quiet animal is not a tame animal. And some of the most dramatic moments in wildlife rescue come not from the fight, but from the moment the body stops fighting and everyone has to figure out what that actually means. There is even a documented condition, capture myopathy, in which the sheer stress of being restrained can damage a wild animal's muscles and organs badly enough to kill it, sometimes hours or days after the event, with no visible wound at all. Handling stress is a real cause of death in wildlife work. That is why professionals move slowly, keep things dark and quiet, and treat every second of contact like it costs something. Which means that in a situation like this, the difference between a good outcome and a tragic one can be invisible to the naked eye. That is what makes the footage so tense to watch if you know what to look for. And I am going to tell you exactly what to look for. But not yet. First I need you to understand how unlikely it was that anyone was there at all. . 05 // NATURE HAS NO AUDIENCE Almost everything that happens in the wild happens unwatched. Think about that for a second. Billions of small emergencies, every single day. Animals slipping, trapped, lost, starving, stranded. A fawn separated from its mother. A bird with a broken wing. A predator that misjudged a jump by an inch. Almost none of it is ever witnessed by anyone. No camera. No rescuer. No witness. It simply happens, and then it stops, and the world continues as if nothing occurred. For a rescue to happen, a chain of things has to line up. Somebody has to be in the right place. Somebody has to be looking in the right direction. Somebody has to notice a small, wet, dark shape in a huge moving surface, and understand what it is. Somebody has to decide to act rather than say "huh" and keep going. And somebody has to actually know how to help without making it worse. Break any single link and the story ends before it starts. Every viral rescue video you have ever seen is a chain like that, where all the links happened to hold. I think that is why these clips hit differently than almost anything else online. They are not just proof that an animal survived. They are proof that the chain can hold. That in a world that mostly does not look, sometimes someone does. The cold math says this animal had little time. The odds say nobody should have been there. And yet. I keep circling that "and yet." . QUICK PAUSE Before we go deeper, a small experiment. Without scrolling back up, answer this in your head: how long was the animal in that water before anyone noticed? Got a number? Now hold it loosely. The truth about time in a moment like this is that it never feels like what it is. Seconds stretch. Minutes vanish. Nobody in a crisis has an accurate clock. Keep your number. We will come back to it. . 06 // WHY YOUR BRAIN CANNOT SCROLL PAST THIS Let's zoom out, because this is the part that fascinates me professionally. In 2012, two Wharton researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, studied thousands of New York Times articles to figure out what makes online content spread. Their finding was not what most people expected. Positivity helped, but what mattered even more was how much physical arousal a piece of content produced. Awe, anger and anxiety, all high-arousal emotions, made people share. Sadness, which is low-arousal, made people stop. Now look at a clip like this through that lens. It has anxiety: will the animal make it? It has awe: this is a wild predator, close enough to see the texture of its fur. It has relief, and something bigger than relief. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a word for that bigger thing: elevation. It is the warm, expanding feeling you get when you witness someone behaving with unexpected goodness. It is the emotion that makes people want to be better, to call their mother, to do something kind. It is exactly the kind of emotion that makes people hit share before they have even finished watching. And then there is the mechanism behind the hook itself. In 1994, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein described what he called the information gap theory of curiosity: curiosity is the discomfort of noticing a gap between what you know and what you want to know. The bigger the gap, and the closer you feel to closing it, the harder it is to look away. That is what I did in the first three lines of this post. I gave you a wild animal, a disaster, and an unanswered question. Your brain has been carrying that open loop ever since. You cannot un-notice it. You can only close it. That is not a trick. It is how attention has worked since the first campfire story. The only difference now is that the campfire fits in your pocket and never goes out. There is one more thing, and it may be the most important one. Animals do not perform. They cannot posture for a camera, hide their fear behind a joke, or spin the story afterward. Their reactions are uncut. In an internet made mostly of people curating themselves, a wild animal reacting honestly to a moment is about as authentic as content gets. And in a feed that is ninety percent outrage, ten percent ads, and the occasional argument about sandwiches, a clip that is about competence and kindness feels like finding cold water in a desert. So no, it is not weird that you cannot look away. It would be weirder if you could. . 07 // 15 BOBCAT FACTS THAT CHANGE HOW YOU SEE THE CLIP You now know what the water does and what the animal is. Here is the rest of the file, fast. 1. The scientific name is Lynx rufus. "Rufus" means reddish. The animal has been carrying a color-coded label for centuries. 2. It is the most common wild cat in North America, which makes how rarely people see one even more remarkable. 3. Bobcats are ambush hunters, not chasers. They win by patience, not by endurance. Long chases are not their thing, and long swims are definitely not their thing. 4. Yes, bobcats can swim, and they do it when they have to: crossing rivers, fleeing danger, following prey. But it is a tool of last resort, not a hobby. 5. Kittens are born in spring, usually in litters of two to four, and the mother raises them alone. Dad is not part of the picture. 6. A kitten's eyes open at around a week and a half old. It will stay with its mother for most of its first year before heading off to find a territory of its own. 7. Young bobcats leaving home can travel dozens of miles looking for a place to settle. That means young animals are the ones most likely to end up somewhere unfamiliar, in situations nothing in their short lives prepared them for. 8. Bobcats mark territory with scent, scrapes and scratched trees. Their world is written in a language we mostly cannot read. 9. When they cannot finish a meal, they often cover the leftovers with leaves, snow or debris and come back for it later. Forward planning, from a cat. 10. They climb trees and use them for escape and lookout. If a bobcat ever wanted to get out of a situation, vertical was its first idea. 11. Their ear tufts are still debated. Camouflage? Hearing? Communication? Nobody has a definitive answer, and I love that. 12. Bobcat and Canada lynx are cousins, not twins. Lynx have longer ear tufts, bigger paws for snow, and a fully black-tipped tail. A bobcat's tail is black only on top of the tip, like someone dipped a paintbrush and stopped halfway. 13. Coat color changes by region. Desert animals run pale and sandy. Northern animals run darker and grayer. Same species, different wardrobe. 14. A bobcat is not closely related to a cougar. It belongs to the Lynx genus. The cougar belongs to another. When people call it a "baby mountain lion," a biologist somewhere loses a year of their life. 15. In the wild, life is often short and hard. Many bobcats do not make it to ten years old. In captivity, they can live far longer. Which tells you what the wild costs, every single day, on top of everything else. Fifteen facts. One conclusion. Every one of these facts describes an animal built to survive. Which is exactly why watching one in trouble is so hard to forget. . 08 // SIX MYTHS ABOUT WILD CATS AND WATER Since we are here, let's clear up some things. MYTH 1: All cats hate water. FALSE. Tigers swim. Jaguars swim. Fishing cats literally dive for a living. The idea that cats are universally water-averse comes from house cats, and even that is a generalization. Plenty of wild cats are comfortable in water. It is not fear of water. It is that most cats do not choose it unless there is a reason. MYTH 2: If an animal can swim, it is safe in water. FALSE. Being able to swim and being able to survive in water are two different skills. Temperature, distance, current, exhaustion and time all matter. A strong swimmer can lose to cold long before it loses to drowning. MYTH 3: A tough predator does not need help. FALSE. Toughness is not immunity. Predators die of exposure, injury and exhaustion all the time. Being at the top of a food chain does not mean being at the top of every situation. MYTH 4: A calm wild animal is a friendly wild animal. FALSE. We covered this. Calm can mean cold, tired, hurt or in shock. It does not mean safe to touch. MYTH 5: Wild cats attack people constantly. FALSE. It is the opposite. Bobcats avoid people so well that many humans go a lifetime without seeing one. Encounters that end badly are extremely rare, and most involve an animal that is sick, cornered or handled. MYTH 6: Rescue is easy. FALSE. Rescue is the visible five percent. Underneath it are timing, knowledge, restraint, risk and an enormous amount of luck. Six myths. Not one of them survives contact with the footage. . 09 // THE SECOND HALF OF EVERY RESCUE Here is something the clips never show you. Getting the animal out is the first half of the story. The second half is quieter, slower, and matters just as much. When a wild animal ends up in professional hands, the priorities are almost the opposite of what your instincts tell you. Warmth, calm, darkness and silence come first. Then a medical check for injuries, dehydration and hypothermia. Then, if all goes well, recovery in a space where the animal sees as little of humans as possible. Yes, as little as possible. Good rehabilitators deliberately avoid cuddling, talking to, or bonding with wild patients, because an animal that gets comfortable around people is an animal that struggles to survive once it goes back out there. The goal is never a rescued pet. The goal is a released predator. And when it is possible, animals are often returned to the area where they were found, because that is the territory they know: the routes, the hiding places, the food, the neighbors. So the real happy ending of a wildlife rescue is not a hug. It is a door opening, and an animal walking through it without looking back. Hold on to that image. It will matter in a minute. . 10 // PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS I am going to be blunt, because the comment section will not be. Every time a clip like this goes viral, thousands of people write some version of "I would have grabbed it too" or "I want to keep it." Please do not. A wild bobcat is not a pet. It is a wild predator with claws, teeth, and a nervous system built to treat contact as an attack. Even a small, exhausted, seemingly docile animal can injure a person badly in a fraction of a second. Bites and scratches from wildlife can carry infection. Rabies in bobcats is uncommon, but it is real, and that is not a gamble you take on a hunch. And as we covered, the danger runs both ways. The stress of being handled can hurt or kill a wild animal even when nobody meant it any harm. In many places it is also illegal to keep or transport wild animals without permits, which means the well-intentioned rescuer can end up in a legal mess and the animal can end up worse off. So what should you do if you ever find a wild animal in trouble? Keep your distance. Keep noise and movement low. Do not try to pick it up, feed it, or warm it up yourself. Call your local wildlife agency, animal control, or a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, and follow their instructions. They do this for a living. They know what the animal needs, and what it does not. Love wildlife the right way: at a distance, with respect, and through the phone number of someone qualified. The best rescue stories are the ones where the animal gets to go back to being wild. Which brings me to the ending. . 11 // HOW TO WATCH THIS VIDEO Here is my one request. Do not watch it on autopilot. Before you press play, decide what you think is going to happen. Make a prediction, honestly. Then watch, and see how wrong you were. Keep your eyes on the animal, not on the people. Watch the eyes. Watch the ears. Watch the moment the animal has to decide what it wants to do. Wildlife tells you everything if you know where to look, and it does not lie. Pay attention to the way the whole tone of the clip shifts as it goes on. The first seconds and the last seconds feel like two entirely different films. And carry these five questions with you while it plays: Why is a predator this strong not fighting? What does an animal like this actually feel in a moment like that? How many other animals never get this chance? What would you have done in that spot, honestly? And what is the very last thing the bobcat does? Only one of those has an answer you can see with your own eyes. And remember the door I mentioned, the one that opens and the animal that does not look back? Keep that picture in your head while you watch. See how close reality gets to it. And stay to the last frame. There is a reason I told you the ending matters. A second watch will show you things the first one hides. . 12 // THE THREE RULES EVERY WILDLIFE PROFESSIONAL LIVES BY If you spent a week with people who do this work for a living, you would hear the same three ideas over and over. Rule one: the animal comes before the story. Good professionals never put a camera ahead of the patient. The best footage in the world is worthless if it costs the animal something. Rule two: distance is a form of kindness. The closer you get, the more stress you add. The most respectful thing you can do for a wild animal is usually to do less, from farther away, and let it be what it is. Rule three: success means the animal does not need you anymore. Not gratitude. Not a bond. Not a photo with a cute caption. Success is independence. Notice how that flips the usual story. In most human stories, success is being needed. In wildlife, success is being forgotten. . 13 // IF YOU ONLY REMEMBER FIVE LINES Screenshot this if you want to. I would. 1. Water steals heat 25 times faster than air, and a wet coat stops working. 2. A bobcat is an ambush predator with the strength of an animal twice its size, and none of that helps when the ground disappears. 3. Do not confuse calm with consent. 4. Almost everything in nature happens unwatched. That is why the times someone looks matter so much. 5. The best ending to a wild rescue is an animal that walks away on its own. . 14 // THE REAL REASON I POSTED THIS We spend a lot of time online being told the world is getting worse. Sometimes it is. But there is another truth underneath, one that rarely trends: in a random moment, on an ordinary day, with no cameras and no audience and nothing to gain, someone looked, someone cared, and something wild got another chance. Remember the number you guessed earlier, the seconds or minutes in that water? It turns out it does not matter. What matters is that somebody noticed at all. That is the whole post. Not a miracle. Not a spectacle. Just a small, stubborn piece of evidence that the chain can hold. If it moved you even a little, that is not weakness. That is the part of you that still works. If this landed for you, here is what to do: Reply with one word for how you felt watching it. Just one. I read them. Repost it for the person in your life who says they do not care about animals. Watch what happens to their face. Bookmark this thread-that-is-not-a-thread for the next time your feed makes you tired of everything. And follow me if you want more clips that make you feel something real, plus the stories behind them, without the fluff. One last thing. You made it to the bottom of a very long post. That means something. It means you are the kind of person who stays for the ending. Now go back to the video, press play, and stay for the last frame. P.S. If you scrolled straight to the bottom to see how this ends: the video is attached to this post. The ending is in the video. Nothing I write can replace it, and I would not want it to. P.P.S. Drop your prediction in the replies before you press play: what does the bobcat do in the very last seconds? Then come back after and tell me how wrong, or how right, you were. I will pin my favorite.

Earth Unveiled

67,848 просмотров • 23 дней назад

PUTIN 12 minutes Answers to questions from media representatives **Question:** Vladimir Vladimirovich, you said earlier that after the State Duma elections, talks in a trilateral format — Russia, the United States, and Ukraine — might resume. The elections have taken place. Where and when might a new round of negotiations be held? **Vladimir Putin:** It is well known that the Ukrainian side broke off the talks that were under way in Istanbul. But now — or rather even before the elections, about ten days or a couple of weeks beforehand — it declared its readiness to resume those talks. And indeed, we said that negotiations were hardly possible before the State Duma elections, and that after that we would be ready to resume those contacts. But what has happened recently is also well known to everyone. On the night of the 19th to the 20th, that is, on the main voting day itself, an attempt was made to carry out a massive strike on Moscow. More than 1,600 unmanned aerial vehicles entered practically the Moscow zone. That is the first point. Second. Strikes were carried out against polling stations. In one place the polling station was in a school, and the school was practically destroyed by the strike. They began attacking the residential buildings of the chairs of territorial election commissions. In one case the chair of a territorial commission was wounded, her husband was wounded, and a child was wounded; in another case, unfortunately, it ended in tragedy, and as you know, the chair of a territorial election commission was killed — the strike was delivered against her home. In addition. We are in St. Petersburg right now. I think everyone remembers how the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum went, when the Ukrainian authorities tried to strike St. Petersburg, hit the so-called coal harbour in the port, and set it on fire. Who were they trying to frighten — us or our guests? People who work with Russia are hardly going to take fright and run off somewhere. No one ran anywhere. We held the forum through to the end. Then, starting in June, they began striking our oil refineries. As is also well known, in June they announced the start of a forty-day operation. Well, it led to certain losses on our side. On top of that they tried to organize a naval blockade of our Black Sea coast. They damaged more than 100 ships — 100 vessels — both Russian ones and those sailing under foreign flags. Yes, we restored all of that. But these were active operations that… Then — against such civilian facilities as Wildberries or Ozon warehouses. What is that? What is it for? Nevertheless, it was done. After that we began to respond on each of these points. And, by all appearances, the retaliatory actions of the Russian Armed Forces proved so painful and destructive for the adversary that now they are again actively raising the issue of a truce on several tracks, as they themselves put it: an energy track (that is, they are already prepared to stop striking our refineries), an air track (a mutual halt to strikes). We can see that they especially need to stop the strikes of our Geran drones — the modern Gerans — against which they have, at least for now, no countermeasure, no antidote — and to end the blockade we have imposed on the Black Sea coast. But they started all of this. They started it on every one of these tracks. Is this some kind of game? Children’s games of some sort? Therefore they must feel these retaliatory strikes by Russia and understand that no provocative actions and no whipping up of tensions will produce the result they want. They only make their own position worse. So all of these moves aimed at so-called reconciliation, and the proposal to resume negotiations — yes, they are all on the table; all of that is possible. But after everything they have done, we will still think carefully about what we need to do in response. And in any case, all decisions in this area, including on a possible resumption of the negotiating process, we will take on the basis of the interests of the Russian Federation. **Question:** Unfortunately, we have already grown used to a wave of Russophobia from Europe. But the other day Estonia’s Minister of Defence, Martin Herem, said they are ready to kill every Russian who crosses the border, and — note this — if the Russians do not attack first, it would be more advantageous for the Estonians to do it themselves. Madness. But this is being said by the defence minister of a neighbouring country, a NATO country. How should one respond? **Vladimir Putin:** On the part of European countries this is, without any doubt, a deliberate inflaming of the situation and a provocation. Everyone is saying — many in Europe are saying — that they expect an attack from the Russian Federation and therefore must themselves prepare for combat operations, for a war with Russia. I want to stress once again: we are not preparing for any combat operations with Europe whatsoever. We have no such plans and, most importantly, no grounds, no real motives for aggravating the situation with Europe, no matter what anyone says, including from the Baltic states. Yes, we know that the rights of the Russian-speaking population are being violated there, but we already know how to respond, and we have worked out a certain approach to this. We respond in the humanitarian sphere and in the sphere of international law. What they invented with “non-citizenship” — that is all a fabrication in the Baltic countries. They are not citizens, not foreigners, not dual nationals — they are “non-citizens.” But that is nonsense. It is nonsense that has already been a fact of international life for more than a year. We will continue to fight for the rights of our compatriots, but in the international legal field. We have never intended to use other instruments, we have not used them, and we do not intend to do so. The whipping up of tensions by certain aggressively minded circles can be explained by only one thing: they want to go on using Ukraine and Ukrainians as cannon fodder, and Ukraine as a state as an instrument of struggle against Russia, in order to prevent our development, to constrain our development, to slow Russia’s forward movement. And in order to keep pouring money into this thoroughly aggressive behaviour and to explain to their own citizens why they are doing it, they try to deceive the citizens of European countries with the thesis that Russia itself is supposedly going to attack someone. That is complete nonsense. Just as it is nonsense coming from this individual who says that they… What will they do? **Remark:** That it would be more advantageous for them to attack us themselves, and they will kill every Russian. **Vladimir Putin:** Look, this is one of those cases where, as we say jokingly, the circus has left town but the clowns have stayed behind. This is political clowning. Estonia’s population, I believe, is a little over 1.3 million people. And the Russian army — the Russian army alone, I am not even talking about the population of the Russian Federation — is 1.535 million. One million three hundred thousand are Estonia’s citizens, and that includes infants and elderly people. Clearly this is complete nonsense, complete rubbish. But unfortunately these are the kind of people we have to deal with today in Western Europe. **Question:** As is well known, talks are now under way in the United States between the Chairman of the PRC and the President of the United States. How do you view that? Are you jealous? And do you intend to go to the APEC summit in China, where a trilateral meeting with you could be held? **Vladimir Putin:** Jealousy belongs to an entirely different sphere — the humanitarian sphere, relations between a man and a woman. In international politics I do not think such categories are used. We welcome the talks between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Why? Because these are the two largest economies in the world, and depending on how they agree on disputed issues, on the problematic issues arising from illegitimate sanctions on the part of the United States, and on what agreements are reached, that will affect the entire world economy, including our own. Yes, today almost everything between us and the United States has been reduced to zero. But with the People’s Republic of China our trade turnover is 240 billion dollars. That is substantial. And the volume of trade is growing. In addition, we have a very important line of further development both for us and for the People’s Republic of China. And of course it matters how international economic relations as a whole take shape. Therefore we welcome any agreements of a positive nature between China and the United States. **Remark:** And as for the APEC summit? **Vladimir Putin:** Ah, the APEC summit. A final decision still has to be made. Everything will depend on the situation in the country — in our country. Whenever I decide whether or not to take part in some international event, I proceed from the situation that is developing inside the Russian Federation. But overall this is a major, serious event, and I have an invitation. I proceed from the view that it is useful to work on such a platform. I told Chairman Xi Jinping that as well. I am inclined to take part in that work. But, I repeat once again, in the end it will still depend on the situation in Russia.

PUTIN 12 minutes Answers to questions from media representatives Question: Vladimir Vladimirovich, you said earlier that after the State Duma elections, talks in a trilateral format — Russia, the United States, and Ukraine — might resume. The elections have taken place. Where and when might a new round of negotiations be held? Vladimir Putin: It is well known that the Ukrainian side broke off the talks that were under way in Istanbul. But now — or rather even before the elections, about ten days or a couple of weeks beforehand — it declared its readiness to resume those talks. And indeed, we said that negotiations were hardly possible before the State Duma elections, and that after that we would be ready to resume those contacts. But what has happened recently is also well known to everyone. On the night of the 19th to the 20th, that is, on the main voting day itself, an attempt was made to carry out a massive strike on Moscow. More than 1,600 unmanned aerial vehicles entered practically the Moscow zone. That is the first point. Second. Strikes were carried out against polling stations. In one place the polling station was in a school, and the school was practically destroyed by the strike. They began attacking the residential buildings of the chairs of territorial election commissions. In one case the chair of a territorial commission was wounded, her husband was wounded, and a child was wounded; in another case, unfortunately, it ended in tragedy, and as you know, the chair of a territorial election commission was killed — the strike was delivered against her home. In addition. We are in St. Petersburg right now. I think everyone remembers how the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum went, when the Ukrainian authorities tried to strike St. Petersburg, hit the so-called coal harbour in the port, and set it on fire. Who were they trying to frighten — us or our guests? People who work with Russia are hardly going to take fright and run off somewhere. No one ran anywhere. We held the forum through to the end. Then, starting in June, they began striking our oil refineries. As is also well known, in June they announced the start of a forty-day operation. Well, it led to certain losses on our side. On top of that they tried to organize a naval blockade of our Black Sea coast. They damaged more than 100 ships — 100 vessels — both Russian ones and those sailing under foreign flags. Yes, we restored all of that. But these were active operations that… Then — against such civilian facilities as Wildberries or Ozon warehouses. What is that? What is it for? Nevertheless, it was done. After that we began to respond on each of these points. And, by all appearances, the retaliatory actions of the Russian Armed Forces proved so painful and destructive for the adversary that now they are again actively raising the issue of a truce on several tracks, as they themselves put it: an energy track (that is, they are already prepared to stop striking our refineries), an air track (a mutual halt to strikes). We can see that they especially need to stop the strikes of our Geran drones — the modern Gerans — against which they have, at least for now, no countermeasure, no antidote — and to end the blockade we have imposed on the Black Sea coast. But they started all of this. They started it on every one of these tracks. Is this some kind of game? Children’s games of some sort? Therefore they must feel these retaliatory strikes by Russia and understand that no provocative actions and no whipping up of tensions will produce the result they want. They only make their own position worse. So all of these moves aimed at so-called reconciliation, and the proposal to resume negotiations — yes, they are all on the table; all of that is possible. But after everything they have done, we will still think carefully about what we need to do in response. And in any case, all decisions in this area, including on a possible resumption of the negotiating process, we will take on the basis of the interests of the Russian Federation. Question: Unfortunately, we have already grown used to a wave of Russophobia from Europe. But the other day Estonia’s Minister of Defence, Martin Herem, said they are ready to kill every Russian who crosses the border, and — note this — if the Russians do not attack first, it would be more advantageous for the Estonians to do it themselves. Madness. But this is being said by the defence minister of a neighbouring country, a NATO country. How should one respond? Vladimir Putin: On the part of European countries this is, without any doubt, a deliberate inflaming of the situation and a provocation. Everyone is saying — many in Europe are saying — that they expect an attack from the Russian Federation and therefore must themselves prepare for combat operations, for a war with Russia. I want to stress once again: we are not preparing for any combat operations with Europe whatsoever. We have no such plans and, most importantly, no grounds, no real motives for aggravating the situation with Europe, no matter what anyone says, including from the Baltic states. Yes, we know that the rights of the Russian-speaking population are being violated there, but we already know how to respond, and we have worked out a certain approach to this. We respond in the humanitarian sphere and in the sphere of international law. What they invented with “non-citizenship” — that is all a fabrication in the Baltic countries. They are not citizens, not foreigners, not dual nationals — they are “non-citizens.” But that is nonsense. It is nonsense that has already been a fact of international life for more than a year. We will continue to fight for the rights of our compatriots, but in the international legal field. We have never intended to use other instruments, we have not used them, and we do not intend to do so. The whipping up of tensions by certain aggressively minded circles can be explained by only one thing: they want to go on using Ukraine and Ukrainians as cannon fodder, and Ukraine as a state as an instrument of struggle against Russia, in order to prevent our development, to constrain our development, to slow Russia’s forward movement. And in order to keep pouring money into this thoroughly aggressive behaviour and to explain to their own citizens why they are doing it, they try to deceive the citizens of European countries with the thesis that Russia itself is supposedly going to attack someone. That is complete nonsense. Just as it is nonsense coming from this individual who says that they… What will they do? Remark: That it would be more advantageous for them to attack us themselves, and they will kill every Russian. Vladimir Putin: Look, this is one of those cases where, as we say jokingly, the circus has left town but the clowns have stayed behind. This is political clowning. Estonia’s population, I believe, is a little over 1.3 million people. And the Russian army — the Russian army alone, I am not even talking about the population of the Russian Federation — is 1.535 million. One million three hundred thousand are Estonia’s citizens, and that includes infants and elderly people. Clearly this is complete nonsense, complete rubbish. But unfortunately these are the kind of people we have to deal with today in Western Europe. Question: As is well known, talks are now under way in the United States between the Chairman of the PRC and the President of the United States. How do you view that? Are you jealous? And do you intend to go to the APEC summit in China, where a trilateral meeting with you could be held? Vladimir Putin: Jealousy belongs to an entirely different sphere — the humanitarian sphere, relations between a man and a woman. In international politics I do not think such categories are used. We welcome the talks between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Why? Because these are the two largest economies in the world, and depending on how they agree on disputed issues, on the problematic issues arising from illegitimate sanctions on the part of the United States, and on what agreements are reached, that will affect the entire world economy, including our own. Yes, today almost everything between us and the United States has been reduced to zero. But with the People’s Republic of China our trade turnover is 240 billion dollars. That is substantial. And the volume of trade is growing. In addition, we have a very important line of further development both for us and for the People’s Republic of China. And of course it matters how international economic relations as a whole take shape. Therefore we welcome any agreements of a positive nature between China and the United States. Remark: And as for the APEC summit? Vladimir Putin: Ah, the APEC summit. A final decision still has to be made. Everything will depend on the situation in the country — in our country. Whenever I decide whether or not to take part in some international event, I proceed from the situation that is developing inside the Russian Federation. But overall this is a major, serious event, and I have an invitation. I proceed from the view that it is useful to work on such a platform. I told Chairman Xi Jinping that as well. I am inclined to take part in that work. But, I repeat once again, in the end it will still depend on the situation in Russia.

🇷🇺 STANISLAV KRAPIVNIK 🇷🇺

13,639 просмотров • 19 дней назад

NATO's defense planning is not keeping up with the Russian threat. The problem is that NATO is mainly building forces for a possible future war, while Russia is already waging one in the present. This is where the Alliance's weak points show up: slow decision-making, blurred authorities, an expensive interception model, lengthy procurement processes, and slow responses to the adversary's new tactics. Russian violations of NATO airspace have already become a regular tool of pressure and a way to test the Alliance's response system. On 10 September 2025, Poland recorded 19 entries by Russian drones into its airspace and invoked Article 4, after which NATO launched Eastern Sentry; on 19 September, three Russian MiG-31s remained in Estonian airspace for more than ten minutes. In 2026, incidents continued in Poland, Germany, Romania and the Baltics. NATO is still responding with one-off actions to a systemic and regular provocation. It needs to shift to a permanent regime: pre-agreed rules of engagement, a joint command chain, a common air picture, and the authority to rapidly destroy military unmanned aerial vehicles without a separate political decision. The system must also distinguish real threats from false signals much better and rely on cheap interception means - electronic warfare, guns, SHORAD and interceptor drones costing around $15,000, and in the longer term $2-5,000 - while reserving expensive Patriot, SAMP/T and fighter aircraft for more complex targets. Simply intercepting drones is not enough. Russia must be punished - every confirmed deliberate incident should automatically trigger a pre-agreed package of consequences: additional sanctions, new restrictions on the shadow fleet, reinforcement of air defenses on the eastern flank, a greater military presence, or extra assistance to Ukraine. If NATO remains only in interception mode, Russia will not stop. Russia deliberately operates precisely in this grey-zone interval. On 14 September 2026, a Russian frigate fired two flares in the direction of a Danish military helicopter in international waters. Denmark called the behavior dangerous and deliberate, but the incident did not create a political crisis of Article 5 level. For Moscow, such operations are cheap and useful: they reveal reaction times, rules of engagement, command behavior and the threshold beyond which allies are prepared to move from protest to a forceful response. Even a drone that destroyed nothing can successfully accomplish a military task. It can force the activation of a radar, the scrambling of fighters, the disclosure of an air-defense position, the closure of an airport, the testing of a command algorithm, or reveal exactly who has the authority to authorize engagement. In July 2026, the IISS assessed it as highly likely that Russia had conducted a coordinated campaign of 144 UAV incidents across roughly a dozen European countries between August 2024 and February 2026. NATO still does not dare to treat such actions as a single campaign and breaks them down into separate legal and administrative cases. Russia, by contrast, plans all of this centrally as one operation. NATO's legal framework is also being rebuilt only after the threat has become permanent. Romania only in 2025 adopted Law No. 73/2025, which explicitly allows the destruction of unmanned aerial vehicles that illegally use its airspace. In July 2026, Baltic Air Policing had to be converted into Baltic Air Defence, expanding the mission from identification and escort to threat neutralization. This is a reaction, not anticipatory planning. The economics of interception remains one of the weakest points of European defense. A cheap Russian Geran or Gerbera drone can force the scramble of a fighter or the use of a missile that costs many times more than the target itself. This can be accepted and tolerable with isolated incidents. With dozens and hundreds of targets, such a model exhausts stocks faster than the adversary expends its own resources. That is why allies have started purchasing systems such as Merops with interceptors at roughly $15,000 each. Ukrainian experience already shows that even this price can be too high for a mass war, so the market is moving towards interceptors at $2–5,000. European air defense is still insufficiently adapted to a mass cheap aerial threat. For real resilience, a dense lower tier of cheap sensors, passive detection, electronic warfare, guns, interceptor drones and SHORAD is needed. Expensive medium- and long-range systems must be preserved for more complex targets - cruise and ballistic missiles, aircraft and high-speed strike systems. The summit in Ankara in 2026 showed that NATO has finally recognized this problem. Allies announced more than $40 billion in investments in counter-UAS over five years and a plan to roughly quintuple the number of trained drone operators by the end of 2027. These are large figures, but they also illustrate the scale of the lag. Speed remains the most serious structural gap. The NATO Defense Planning Process operates on four-year cycles, and short-term planning formally covers a period of up to six years. After capability targets are set, states still have to insert the money into budgets, conduct procurements, conclude contracts and wait for production. Russian drones, like Russian tactics, change within a few weeks. Drones are constantly being improved. In 2026, Russia increased the use of jet-powered strike drones from roughly 450 in June to almost 2,850 in August. This is a tempo that the classic European procurement system cannot match. European states are still trying to procure some rapidly evolving technologies through procedures created for large long-term programs. For a tank, a frigate or a fighter, lengthy certification is inevitable. For an FPV, an electronic-warfare system, software, an AI module, a cheap sensor or an interceptor drone, a multi-year cycle means the army may receive a system that is already obsolete. Ukraine has had to grant hundreds of military units the right to procure drones, EW, counter-UAS and communications equipment directly, shortening some procedures to months and weeks. NATO and European states need to do something similar. Despite the fact that modern war is a drone war, tanks have not lost their significance, and Russian military policy confirms this. According to internal documents of Uralvagonzavod analyzed by ISW, the enterprise plans to increase T-90 production by approximately 80% by 2028 relative to 2024. Russia learns quickly and simultaneously strengthens the protection of armored vehicles against FPVs, develops electronic warfare, drones, artillery and long-range strikes. It adapts old systems, embedding them into a battlefield denser with sensors, drones and electronic warfare. That is why the number of tanks, aircraft or ships is no longer a good enough indicator of real combat capability. A tank without drone reconnaissance, electronic warfare, counter-UAS, engineering support, protected communications, artillery and a repair system quickly becomes an easy target. A Patriot without a cheap lower air-defense tier risks expending expensive missiles on secondary targets. Military capability increasingly depends on whether the entire system works, not on the quantity of individual platforms. At sea, the same deficit has already appeared around undersea infrastructure and the shadow fleet. In 2025, NATO Task Force X-Baltic tested more than 70 aerial, surface and underwater unmanned systems. In 2026, eight allies decided to accelerate their procurement. The reason is that there are not enough ships to continuously control thousands of kilometers of cables, pipelines, ports and sea routes. What is needed is constant cheap surveillance, automatic anomaly detection and rapid response. The shadow fleet creates an even more serious problem for NATO, because Russia uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes. The IISS considers it probable that some Russia-linked commercial vessels are used as platforms for launching, recovering or supporting drones. Such vessels often sail under foreign flags, have opaque ownership and formally do not belong to the Russian military. NATO's industrial problem is even more serious than the technological one. In a long war, what matters is not how many systems are in stock on day one, but how many can be produced, repaired and replaced every month. Russia is converting its economy to a model of sustained military production and is simultaneously creating mass production of cheap systems. The official Russian target envisages approximately 130,000 large UAVs per year by 2030. Europe remains significantly stronger economically, but this advantage guarantees nothing if it is not translated into serial production of weapons, ammunition, sensors, interceptors and spare parts. The next two to three years therefore remain a dangerous transitional period. The European roadmap envisages initial capability of the European Drone Defence Initiative and Eastern Flank Watch by the end of 2026, full capability of EDDI by the end of 2027, and full functionality of Eastern Flank Watch only by the end of 2028. Russia is already conducting drone operations, jamming navigation, intensifying its military presence at sea and using civilian and semi-civilian channels for pressure. Moscow has at least two years during which it can continue testing a system that is still being rebuilt. 📹: NATO Steadfast Deterrence-2026 military exercises

NATO's defense planning is not keeping up with the Russian threat. The problem is that NATO is mainly building forces for a possible future war, while Russia is already waging one in the present. This is where the Alliance's weak points show up: slow decision-making, blurred authorities, an expensive interception model, lengthy procurement processes, and slow responses to the adversary's new tactics. Russian violations of NATO airspace have already become a regular tool of pressure and a way to test the Alliance's response system. On 10 September 2025, Poland recorded 19 entries by Russian drones into its airspace and invoked Article 4, after which NATO launched Eastern Sentry; on 19 September, three Russian MiG-31s remained in Estonian airspace for more than ten minutes. In 2026, incidents continued in Poland, Germany, Romania and the Baltics. NATO is still responding with one-off actions to a systemic and regular provocation. It needs to shift to a permanent regime: pre-agreed rules of engagement, a joint command chain, a common air picture, and the authority to rapidly destroy military unmanned aerial vehicles without a separate political decision. The system must also distinguish real threats from false signals much better and rely on cheap interception means - electronic warfare, guns, SHORAD and interceptor drones costing around $15,000, and in the longer term $2-5,000 - while reserving expensive Patriot, SAMP/T and fighter aircraft for more complex targets. Simply intercepting drones is not enough. Russia must be punished - every confirmed deliberate incident should automatically trigger a pre-agreed package of consequences: additional sanctions, new restrictions on the shadow fleet, reinforcement of air defenses on the eastern flank, a greater military presence, or extra assistance to Ukraine. If NATO remains only in interception mode, Russia will not stop. Russia deliberately operates precisely in this grey-zone interval. On 14 September 2026, a Russian frigate fired two flares in the direction of a Danish military helicopter in international waters. Denmark called the behavior dangerous and deliberate, but the incident did not create a political crisis of Article 5 level. For Moscow, such operations are cheap and useful: they reveal reaction times, rules of engagement, command behavior and the threshold beyond which allies are prepared to move from protest to a forceful response. Even a drone that destroyed nothing can successfully accomplish a military task. It can force the activation of a radar, the scrambling of fighters, the disclosure of an air-defense position, the closure of an airport, the testing of a command algorithm, or reveal exactly who has the authority to authorize engagement. In July 2026, the IISS assessed it as highly likely that Russia had conducted a coordinated campaign of 144 UAV incidents across roughly a dozen European countries between August 2024 and February 2026. NATO still does not dare to treat such actions as a single campaign and breaks them down into separate legal and administrative cases. Russia, by contrast, plans all of this centrally as one operation. NATO's legal framework is also being rebuilt only after the threat has become permanent. Romania only in 2025 adopted Law No. 73/2025, which explicitly allows the destruction of unmanned aerial vehicles that illegally use its airspace. In July 2026, Baltic Air Policing had to be converted into Baltic Air Defence, expanding the mission from identification and escort to threat neutralization. This is a reaction, not anticipatory planning. The economics of interception remains one of the weakest points of European defense. A cheap Russian Geran or Gerbera drone can force the scramble of a fighter or the use of a missile that costs many times more than the target itself. This can be accepted and tolerable with isolated incidents. With dozens and hundreds of targets, such a model exhausts stocks faster than the adversary expends its own resources. That is why allies have started purchasing systems such as Merops with interceptors at roughly $15,000 each. Ukrainian experience already shows that even this price can be too high for a mass war, so the market is moving towards interceptors at $2–5,000. European air defense is still insufficiently adapted to a mass cheap aerial threat. For real resilience, a dense lower tier of cheap sensors, passive detection, electronic warfare, guns, interceptor drones and SHORAD is needed. Expensive medium- and long-range systems must be preserved for more complex targets - cruise and ballistic missiles, aircraft and high-speed strike systems. The summit in Ankara in 2026 showed that NATO has finally recognized this problem. Allies announced more than $40 billion in investments in counter-UAS over five years and a plan to roughly quintuple the number of trained drone operators by the end of 2027. These are large figures, but they also illustrate the scale of the lag. Speed remains the most serious structural gap. The NATO Defense Planning Process operates on four-year cycles, and short-term planning formally covers a period of up to six years. After capability targets are set, states still have to insert the money into budgets, conduct procurements, conclude contracts and wait for production. Russian drones, like Russian tactics, change within a few weeks. Drones are constantly being improved. In 2026, Russia increased the use of jet-powered strike drones from roughly 450 in June to almost 2,850 in August. This is a tempo that the classic European procurement system cannot match. European states are still trying to procure some rapidly evolving technologies through procedures created for large long-term programs. For a tank, a frigate or a fighter, lengthy certification is inevitable. For an FPV, an electronic-warfare system, software, an AI module, a cheap sensor or an interceptor drone, a multi-year cycle means the army may receive a system that is already obsolete. Ukraine has had to grant hundreds of military units the right to procure drones, EW, counter-UAS and communications equipment directly, shortening some procedures to months and weeks. NATO and European states need to do something similar. Despite the fact that modern war is a drone war, tanks have not lost their significance, and Russian military policy confirms this. According to internal documents of Uralvagonzavod analyzed by ISW, the enterprise plans to increase T-90 production by approximately 80% by 2028 relative to 2024. Russia learns quickly and simultaneously strengthens the protection of armored vehicles against FPVs, develops electronic warfare, drones, artillery and long-range strikes. It adapts old systems, embedding them into a battlefield denser with sensors, drones and electronic warfare. That is why the number of tanks, aircraft or ships is no longer a good enough indicator of real combat capability. A tank without drone reconnaissance, electronic warfare, counter-UAS, engineering support, protected communications, artillery and a repair system quickly becomes an easy target. A Patriot without a cheap lower air-defense tier risks expending expensive missiles on secondary targets. Military capability increasingly depends on whether the entire system works, not on the quantity of individual platforms. At sea, the same deficit has already appeared around undersea infrastructure and the shadow fleet. In 2025, NATO Task Force X-Baltic tested more than 70 aerial, surface and underwater unmanned systems. In 2026, eight allies decided to accelerate their procurement. The reason is that there are not enough ships to continuously control thousands of kilometers of cables, pipelines, ports and sea routes. What is needed is constant cheap surveillance, automatic anomaly detection and rapid response. The shadow fleet creates an even more serious problem for NATO, because Russia uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes. The IISS considers it probable that some Russia-linked commercial vessels are used as platforms for launching, recovering or supporting drones. Such vessels often sail under foreign flags, have opaque ownership and formally do not belong to the Russian military. NATO's industrial problem is even more serious than the technological one. In a long war, what matters is not how many systems are in stock on day one, but how many can be produced, repaired and replaced every month. Russia is converting its economy to a model of sustained military production and is simultaneously creating mass production of cheap systems. The official Russian target envisages approximately 130,000 large UAVs per year by 2030. Europe remains significantly stronger economically, but this advantage guarantees nothing if it is not translated into serial production of weapons, ammunition, sensors, interceptors and spare parts. The next two to three years therefore remain a dangerous transitional period. The European roadmap envisages initial capability of the European Drone Defence Initiative and Eastern Flank Watch by the end of 2026, full capability of EDDI by the end of 2027, and full functionality of Eastern Flank Watch only by the end of 2028. Russia is already conducting drone operations, jamming navigation, intensifying its military presence at sea and using civilian and semi-civilian channels for pressure. Moscow has at least two years during which it can continue testing a system that is still being rebuilt. 📹: NATO Steadfast Deterrence-2026 military exercises

Anton Gerashchenko

75,284 просмотров • 28 дней назад

🚨9/11 2.0 is coming! Pakistan’s Joint Chief of Staff, General Sahir Shamshad, issued a warning that should have shaken every capital of the world. Yet the world stays silent, refusing to see what is now unfolding in plain sight. Afghanistan has once again become the epicentre of global terrorism, a command hub reborn, rearmed & reconnected under new leadership. Saif al-Adl & Hamza bin Laden, two names that now carry the weight of a coming storm, are systematically recasting Afghanistan into the operational heart of al-Qaeda’s next chapter. Where Ayman al-Zawahiri led through ideology, Adl & Hamza lead through action. Together, they have unified the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, TTP, BLA, BLF & remnants of ISIS affiliates under one command structure disciplined, coordinated & focused. From Kandahar’s safe houses to Tora Bora’s tunnels, training camps are active, new fighters are being indoctrinated from around the world & funds are flowing through the TTA (US money) & cross border smuggling. The blueprint for this new campaign is precise and ruthless. Al-Adl’s 2024 doctrine, “This is Gaza: A War of Existence, Not a War of Borders,” is more than rhetoric, it is a global battle plan. It calls for mass recruitment, resource mobilisation & the fusion of regional conflicts into one transnational offensive. Afghanistan is now the launching ground for a new wave of asymmetric warfare designed to break states from within. 9/11 2.0 isn’t a threat, it’s a prepared strategy for large scale devastation. It’s built to hit at the same time across multiple cities in the US, Europe & Asia, using suicide bombings, vehicle attacks, drone swarms & cyber strikes to blind emergency services & spread chaos. Al-Qaeda operatives are on the move, using encrypted apps & AI-driven propaganda to recruit online. Afghan networks now coordinate funding & logistics for a 2 front campaign, sleeper cells targeting Western countries & recent attempts to activate cells in Gilgit‑Baltistan & Azad Kashmir, in coordination with #India have also been made. The #US southern border is under infiltration by jihadist operatives, signaling a direct threat to homeland security. Across Europe, the danger is equally grave, with sleeper cells embedded within migrant flows, ready to be activated. Arrests in #Germany, #Sweden & #France confirm these networks are not only active but coordinated & resilient, operating largely under the radar. The goal is simple & brutal, overwhelm first responders, spark mass panic & break governments ability to act. If parts of this plan succeed, casualties & disruption would dwarf recent terror waves. The US with Nato countries would almost certainly retaliate hard, striking Afghanistan & turning the country into a new battlefield a response that would spread instability, displacement & violence across Asia Pacific, M.E & Central Asia. Pakistan stands at the frontline of this storm due to its geopolitical position & geographic terrain, which allows these groups to move freely along the #Pakistan-#Afghanistan border. The recent surge in terrorist activity, combined with complex operational planning, shows that AQ is in full control of the unified terrorist front. General Shamshad’s warning is not a prophecy, it is a statement of fact. The indicators are visible, the plans are moving & the world’s complacency is their greatest weapon. Pakistan stands awake in a world still asleep. If this warning goes unanswered, the next wave of fire will not stop at the mountains of Afghanistan, it will sweep across continents, leaving the world in the same shock & disbelief that followed September 11, but on an even larger, more devastating scale.

🚨9/11 2.0 is coming! Pakistan’s Joint Chief of Staff, General Sahir Shamshad, issued a warning that should have shaken every capital of the world. Yet the world stays silent, refusing to see what is now unfolding in plain sight. Afghanistan has once again become the epicentre of global terrorism, a command hub reborn, rearmed & reconnected under new leadership. Saif al-Adl & Hamza bin Laden, two names that now carry the weight of a coming storm, are systematically recasting Afghanistan into the operational heart of al-Qaeda’s next chapter. Where Ayman al-Zawahiri led through ideology, Adl & Hamza lead through action. Together, they have unified the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, TTP, BLA, BLF & remnants of ISIS affiliates under one command structure disciplined, coordinated & focused. From Kandahar’s safe houses to Tora Bora’s tunnels, training camps are active, new fighters are being indoctrinated from around the world & funds are flowing through the TTA (US money) & cross border smuggling. The blueprint for this new campaign is precise and ruthless. Al-Adl’s 2024 doctrine, “This is Gaza: A War of Existence, Not a War of Borders,” is more than rhetoric, it is a global battle plan. It calls for mass recruitment, resource mobilisation & the fusion of regional conflicts into one transnational offensive. Afghanistan is now the launching ground for a new wave of asymmetric warfare designed to break states from within. 9/11 2.0 isn’t a threat, it’s a prepared strategy for large scale devastation. It’s built to hit at the same time across multiple cities in the US, Europe & Asia, using suicide bombings, vehicle attacks, drone swarms & cyber strikes to blind emergency services & spread chaos. Al-Qaeda operatives are on the move, using encrypted apps & AI-driven propaganda to recruit online. Afghan networks now coordinate funding & logistics for a 2 front campaign, sleeper cells targeting Western countries & recent attempts to activate cells in Gilgit‑Baltistan & Azad Kashmir, in coordination with #India have also been made. The #US southern border is under infiltration by jihadist operatives, signaling a direct threat to homeland security. Across Europe, the danger is equally grave, with sleeper cells embedded within migrant flows, ready to be activated. Arrests in #Germany, #Sweden & #France confirm these networks are not only active but coordinated & resilient, operating largely under the radar. The goal is simple & brutal, overwhelm first responders, spark mass panic & break governments ability to act. If parts of this plan succeed, casualties & disruption would dwarf recent terror waves. The US with Nato countries would almost certainly retaliate hard, striking Afghanistan & turning the country into a new battlefield a response that would spread instability, displacement & violence across Asia Pacific, M.E & Central Asia. Pakistan stands at the frontline of this storm due to its geopolitical position & geographic terrain, which allows these groups to move freely along the #Pakistan-#Afghanistan border. The recent surge in terrorist activity, combined with complex operational planning, shows that AQ is in full control of the unified terrorist front. General Shamshad’s warning is not a prophecy, it is a statement of fact. The indicators are visible, the plans are moving & the world’s complacency is their greatest weapon. Pakistan stands awake in a world still asleep. If this warning goes unanswered, the next wave of fire will not stop at the mountains of Afghanistan, it will sweep across continents, leaving the world in the same shock & disbelief that followed September 11, but on an even larger, more devastating scale.

Taymur Malik

61,824 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад

Here is how I am using AI right now at work, at home, and for my finances... Every founder, executive or investor I talk with these days wants to know how others are using AI in their daily lives. I figured it would be helpful to pull back the curtain on what I am using and how I have implemented the various products. There are three areas where I have adopted AI in a material way: professionally, financially, and personally. Professional use of AI On the professional side, I am currently using Grok Grok Bot extensively. I started with a Chief of Staff bot that I put in charge of the entire operation, followed by a number of more specialized bots for various bodies of work (talent recruiter, product designer, podcast researcher, book launch manager, email organizer, etc). Once I had the initial team of bots set up, I spent about an hour “onboarding” the Chief of Staff to my professional life. I treated this exactly how I would onboard a human Chief of Staff. I explained each business I am involved with, including their products, business model, personnel, metrics, and goals. I explicitly called out what the business is doing well and where we need to improve. I also gave the Chief of Staff access to relevant systems (email, calendar, Slack, analytics dashboards, etc). Once I had given as much context as I thought necessary, I asked the Chief of Staff to create an overview document to send me so I could double-check the accuracy and thoroughness of the bots understanding. I also asked the CoS bot to interview me for any other information that would be relevant to ensuring the bot could help me. This entire process was fairly quick and painless, but I believe it was the single most important thing I did to get value from Grok Bot. The more context that the AI system has, the more helpful it can be. That context can come from static, institutional knowledge or it can come from dynamic daily updates like email and Slack messages. After getting the bots set up and giving them context, I have done two other things that I think are worth sharing. The first is that my team of bots holds a daily standup meeting where they all come together and share what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and what they need my help or approval on (aka what they are blocked on). These “exec meeting” or daily standup allows for the bots to collaborate in a more seamless way, while also creating a very simple process for the Chief of Staff bot to put together a daily brief for me on what happened yesterday, what is going to happen today, and where I am needed to unblock productivity. The second thing I have done is treat the AI system as the brain of the company. Most people try to use AI as an augmentation to themselves, which can be helpful to a degree. I have flipped the relationship though. I look at my job as persistently giving the AI bots as much context as possible, so I can leverage their superhuman intelligence to make decisions and achieve our goals. For example, the recruiter bot recently surfaced a number of very high-quality candidates for an open role we have. After meeting with each candidate, I wrote a quick message to the recruiter bot to tell it what I liked about the person, what I thought were potential issues, improvements for future searches, and what the next steps were with each individual. All of that information and context is getting stored in the bot’s memory, which will compound over time and help us improve as an organization. Quick pro tip: If you are worried about putting all of the context into a single system’s memory, but unsure if that is the system you will use forever, you can have Grok Bot or another system dump their memory and context into a Notion document as well. This way you have a duplicate copy of the memory so it can be referenced by any AI system you use in the future. My takeaway from using Grok Bot to manage our companies is that we are having to hire less people, we are seeing a direct impact on revenue growth, and it appears to drive higher quality in our decision-making process. That is a win-win-win. I highly recommend going through these steps to setup your system correctly and it will pay off big time later on. Financial use of AI On the financial side, it was nearly impossible to find a good AI product to use for personal finance. Everything seemed to be a Chat-GPT wrapper that technically worked from an engineering standpoint, but didn’t solve any of the user problems I was facing. A big issue is that most of the fintech products are focused on budgeting and saving, rather than investing and growing your portfolio. This is why I eventually spent the time and money to build CFO Silvia. I went through a similar process of getting Silvia set up with the necessary context. I attached my bank accounts, brokerage accounts, crypto accounts, and credit cards, along with uploading real estate, cars, collectibles, and private investments. Silvia allows me to dynamically track the value of these assets (and my overall net worth) in real-time. But the real unlock for me has been talking to Silvia about two specific topics: tax and estate planning. As most of you know, I am not a frequent trader, so although you could use Silvia for stock analysis or trading activities, that is not my approach to investing. Instead, I have had great success in using Silvia to find creative and valuable tax mitigation strategies that are personalized to my situation, including ideas that had not previously been surfaced by my accountants, lawyers, or tax experts. Additionally, I have used Silvia for estate planning purposes. I am married and have four children, so there is a decent amount of complexity and opportunities to pursue. Having a dedicated resource with superhuman intelligence and the full context of my personal financial situation has been incredibly powerful. One funny thing I have noticed is that I am willing to tell Silvia certain things that I would hesitate to tell other humans (financial goals, areas of concern, etc) and I ask numerous “dumb” questions that I would probably shy away from asking a human. Regardless of why I feel more comfortable talking to the AI product, it has unlocked a few different ideas and strategies that I was previously unaware of, so that has been an added bonus to using the product. If you aren’t using AI to help manage your finances, I think it is a no brainer to start using the technology. I am biased towards Silvia since we built it, but you can give it a try for free here: Personal use of AI On the personal side, I use almost all of the traditional AI products (Chat-GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, etc). Those are well understood at this point, but one product that I started using recently that I am impressed with is Instinct AI. They have built a personal assistant AI bot that you communicate with through iMessage or SMS. The experience has been delightful, but I am most excited about the bot’s ability to anticipate the second or third-step in a process before I have to tell it anything. For example, Instinct got access to my calendar and immediately started identifying scheduling conflicts and asked me if I would like the bot to reach out to one of the parties to reschedule. I never told it to look for conflicts, nor did I tell it I wanted help rescheduling things. It’s “instincts” knew what the basic task would be and began executing. Another example is that Instinct was told my wife is Polina, so whenever it deems something important to the household or family, Instinct will add Polina to the calendar invite, communicate the information to her, or ask me if Polina should be aware of the information. This is very helpful for someone like me who has too many things floating around in my brain and should always do a better job of keeping Polina informed about various things. Lastly, Instinct is very helpful in scanning my personal email and understanding what is most important. It ignores things that are trivial, but somehow can parse out the high priority items, summarize them for me in a text message, draft a response to the email, and then ask me for permission to respond. As I said, it is the most impressive personal assistant AI product I have used so far. So those are the three big areas that I use AI today and the specific products I have incorporated into my life. Before I let you go, I figured I could share some best practices I have learned as well. I also make sure to tell AI bots they are not allowed to respond to any message or email without my explicit approval. This reduces the risk of having a bot go rogue with a message or commitment that I am not onboard with. I also ensure that each bot only has read access to our business systems like an analytics dashboard, etc. While I am a big proponent of using these products and believe they will fundamentally transform how we operate professionally, I am still not ready to let them loose without human oversight. I am sure that will change in the coming weeks and months, but I need more time to get comfortable with that level of delegation and trust. I hope this overview was helpful for each of you. It would be great if you could respond to this post with any products you are using or tips/tricks that you have learned to get more productivity and value in your life. I love writing these letters each day because I learn just as much from me as I learn from you all. Onwards!

Here is how I am using AI right now at work, at home, and for my finances... Every founder, executive or investor I talk with these days wants to know how others are using AI in their daily lives. I figured it would be helpful to pull back the curtain on what I am using and how I have implemented the various products. There are three areas where I have adopted AI in a material way: professionally, financially, and personally. Professional use of AI On the professional side, I am currently using Grok Grok Bot extensively. I started with a Chief of Staff bot that I put in charge of the entire operation, followed by a number of more specialized bots for various bodies of work (talent recruiter, product designer, podcast researcher, book launch manager, email organizer, etc). Once I had the initial team of bots set up, I spent about an hour “onboarding” the Chief of Staff to my professional life. I treated this exactly how I would onboard a human Chief of Staff. I explained each business I am involved with, including their products, business model, personnel, metrics, and goals. I explicitly called out what the business is doing well and where we need to improve. I also gave the Chief of Staff access to relevant systems (email, calendar, Slack, analytics dashboards, etc). Once I had given as much context as I thought necessary, I asked the Chief of Staff to create an overview document to send me so I could double-check the accuracy and thoroughness of the bots understanding. I also asked the CoS bot to interview me for any other information that would be relevant to ensuring the bot could help me. This entire process was fairly quick and painless, but I believe it was the single most important thing I did to get value from Grok Bot. The more context that the AI system has, the more helpful it can be. That context can come from static, institutional knowledge or it can come from dynamic daily updates like email and Slack messages. After getting the bots set up and giving them context, I have done two other things that I think are worth sharing. The first is that my team of bots holds a daily standup meeting where they all come together and share what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and what they need my help or approval on (aka what they are blocked on). These “exec meeting” or daily standup allows for the bots to collaborate in a more seamless way, while also creating a very simple process for the Chief of Staff bot to put together a daily brief for me on what happened yesterday, what is going to happen today, and where I am needed to unblock productivity. The second thing I have done is treat the AI system as the brain of the company. Most people try to use AI as an augmentation to themselves, which can be helpful to a degree. I have flipped the relationship though. I look at my job as persistently giving the AI bots as much context as possible, so I can leverage their superhuman intelligence to make decisions and achieve our goals. For example, the recruiter bot recently surfaced a number of very high-quality candidates for an open role we have. After meeting with each candidate, I wrote a quick message to the recruiter bot to tell it what I liked about the person, what I thought were potential issues, improvements for future searches, and what the next steps were with each individual. All of that information and context is getting stored in the bot’s memory, which will compound over time and help us improve as an organization. Quick pro tip: If you are worried about putting all of the context into a single system’s memory, but unsure if that is the system you will use forever, you can have Grok Bot or another system dump their memory and context into a Notion document as well. This way you have a duplicate copy of the memory so it can be referenced by any AI system you use in the future. My takeaway from using Grok Bot to manage our companies is that we are having to hire less people, we are seeing a direct impact on revenue growth, and it appears to drive higher quality in our decision-making process. That is a win-win-win. I highly recommend going through these steps to setup your system correctly and it will pay off big time later on. Financial use of AI On the financial side, it was nearly impossible to find a good AI product to use for personal finance. Everything seemed to be a Chat-GPT wrapper that technically worked from an engineering standpoint, but didn’t solve any of the user problems I was facing. A big issue is that most of the fintech products are focused on budgeting and saving, rather than investing and growing your portfolio. This is why I eventually spent the time and money to build CFO Silvia. I went through a similar process of getting Silvia set up with the necessary context. I attached my bank accounts, brokerage accounts, crypto accounts, and credit cards, along with uploading real estate, cars, collectibles, and private investments. Silvia allows me to dynamically track the value of these assets (and my overall net worth) in real-time. But the real unlock for me has been talking to Silvia about two specific topics: tax and estate planning. As most of you know, I am not a frequent trader, so although you could use Silvia for stock analysis or trading activities, that is not my approach to investing. Instead, I have had great success in using Silvia to find creative and valuable tax mitigation strategies that are personalized to my situation, including ideas that had not previously been surfaced by my accountants, lawyers, or tax experts. Additionally, I have used Silvia for estate planning purposes. I am married and have four children, so there is a decent amount of complexity and opportunities to pursue. Having a dedicated resource with superhuman intelligence and the full context of my personal financial situation has been incredibly powerful. One funny thing I have noticed is that I am willing to tell Silvia certain things that I would hesitate to tell other humans (financial goals, areas of concern, etc) and I ask numerous “dumb” questions that I would probably shy away from asking a human. Regardless of why I feel more comfortable talking to the AI product, it has unlocked a few different ideas and strategies that I was previously unaware of, so that has been an added bonus to using the product. If you aren’t using AI to help manage your finances, I think it is a no brainer to start using the technology. I am biased towards Silvia since we built it, but you can give it a try for free here: Personal use of AI On the personal side, I use almost all of the traditional AI products (Chat-GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, etc). Those are well understood at this point, but one product that I started using recently that I am impressed with is Instinct AI. They have built a personal assistant AI bot that you communicate with through iMessage or SMS. The experience has been delightful, but I am most excited about the bot’s ability to anticipate the second or third-step in a process before I have to tell it anything. For example, Instinct got access to my calendar and immediately started identifying scheduling conflicts and asked me if I would like the bot to reach out to one of the parties to reschedule. I never told it to look for conflicts, nor did I tell it I wanted help rescheduling things. It’s “instincts” knew what the basic task would be and began executing. Another example is that Instinct was told my wife is Polina, so whenever it deems something important to the household or family, Instinct will add Polina to the calendar invite, communicate the information to her, or ask me if Polina should be aware of the information. This is very helpful for someone like me who has too many things floating around in my brain and should always do a better job of keeping Polina informed about various things. Lastly, Instinct is very helpful in scanning my personal email and understanding what is most important. It ignores things that are trivial, but somehow can parse out the high priority items, summarize them for me in a text message, draft a response to the email, and then ask me for permission to respond. As I said, it is the most impressive personal assistant AI product I have used so far. So those are the three big areas that I use AI today and the specific products I have incorporated into my life. Before I let you go, I figured I could share some best practices I have learned as well. I also make sure to tell AI bots they are not allowed to respond to any message or email without my explicit approval. This reduces the risk of having a bot go rogue with a message or commitment that I am not onboard with. I also ensure that each bot only has read access to our business systems like an analytics dashboard, etc. While I am a big proponent of using these products and believe they will fundamentally transform how we operate professionally, I am still not ready to let them loose without human oversight. I am sure that will change in the coming weeks and months, but I need more time to get comfortable with that level of delegation and trust. I hope this overview was helpful for each of you. It would be great if you could respond to this post with any products you are using or tips/tricks that you have learned to get more productivity and value in your life. I love writing these letters each day because I learn just as much from me as I learn from you all. Onwards!

Anthony Pompliano 🌪

83,069 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

Zack Polanski, "Today I was in Oxfordshire, standing in the aftermath of the devastation caused by a wildfire. Trees reduced to charcoal, cars turned to burnt out wrecks. The smell of smoke still lingering in the air on the site of what was once a thriving local business now reduced to ash." "Wildfires, literal scorched earth and a looming sense. And I really want everyone to hear this. This is only just the beginning. And today, as temperatures fall at the end of yet another extreme heat alert, we know that if it rains now, the soil being baked dry means it's much more likely to flood." "These days feel exceptional. But what we are living through right now are likely some of the least extreme summer temperatures we'll experience in our lifetimes. Today I am sounding the alarm and I'm laying out a plan." "Because last week, while a wildfire the size of 200 football pitches was raging across Suffolk, I called on, Prime Minister Burnham to act urgently to address the crisis. I suggested a COBRA meeting being the very least he could do." "And six days later, with another heat alert just having ended, we have still heard next to nothing from the very top of government. No emergency briefings, no new plan and precious little detail about how this government will protect people from the crisis." "It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk across the entire uk. So today I'm delivering a reality cheque. We are facing the biggest threat to this country since the Second World War." "I'm setting out what Prime Minister Burnham can do now to tackle the crisis and I am challenging him to act with the urgency we need. You will hear today from those on the front line of this crisis and they will lay out what they have dealt with in the past few weeks." "And to them, on behalf of the entire country, I want to say thank you. Extreme weather is now the new normal and without action, the impact on the people of this country will be unimaginably grave." "The threats we face are three hold first, the threat to the safety of the population. Almost 3,000 people have died from the effects of extreme heat this summer. And we know that older people and those with pre existing conditions are particularly at risk from these dangerous temperatures." "Those are the people who have been forced to stay at home for days on end, windows, curtains closed, trying to wait out the extreme heat. And these are the people who are most likely now to have grieving families whose bodies were under such intense strain and trying just to stay cool that their kidneys and their hearts could no longer cope." "Meanwhile, wildfires have seen hundreds evacuated from their homes, while many thousands more wait anxiously with Flames on the horizon and smoke in their lungs. We've seen across Europe how bad things can get." "Hundreds of thousands evacuated, half a million acres burned. The sheer scale of the devastation is hard to comprehend, but we need to look it in the face, because this is only a taster of what's to come if we don't act now." "Second, we face a threat to our food and water security. Farmers are now warning we could see food shortages after flooding followed by drought has decimated crops. And despite farmers working really hard through the nights to avoid the heat, food production is grinding to a halt and our food prices are set to rise." "Half of England is experiencing serious drought. And across the country, 8 of our water reservoirs are at risk of running dry. Privatised water companies they've failed to build a single new reservoir to since 1992, are, losing nearly 3 billion litres of water a day from leaky pipes." "That's five times more than a nationwide host pipe ban would even save. The threat is so severe that the UK's National Risk Register warns that if we have three years of exceptionally dry weather like this, we could face water rationing." "These aren't distant possibilities, they're very real scenarios and they are coming straight at us down the track because finally, we face a threat to our very way of life. Parents unable to take their children to the playground because the slides are so hot it could burn, their skin off." "Temperatures so high they keep us inside for days for the sake of our health. Cities feeling like ghost towns, parks turned into deserts. We only have to look across the Channel to France and Spain to see what faces us in the years ahead." "Europe is heating at, twice the rate of the rest of the world. Wildfires, droughts, deadly floods. The scenes we have seen play out on our TV screens are, frankly apocalyptic. And yet the response from our government is to pretend none of this is happening." "It is an astonishing dereliction of duty from those whose very first responsibility is to keep all of us safe, and from the media. With some brilliant and notable exceptions, we have seen more clamouring for North Sea drilling in the last few weeks than actually raising the alarm on climate breakdown." "While our country has come together, people have offered shelter to those who have had to leave their homes due to wildfires. They've checked in with older neighbours to care for those who are sick because of the heat. But the government. The government have been far, far too quiet on what is an emergency." "So today you will hear from some of those on the front line of this crisis and Those with vital insights into how we face this threat. A doctor, a firefighter, someone who served this country in the armed forces, and someone who has dedicated his entire career to our precious nature and wildlife." "It's experts like these that this government should be bringing to the table to design a full scale emergency response. So I want to step out from this big picture and look at some of the urgent steps that Prime Minister Burnham needs to urgently announce to protect people right now and keep us safe from what we know is coming down the track." "In the immediate term, we need to keep people safe from extreme temperatures. That means a free accessible cool space in every local area. And financial support for households so they can heat proof their homes. Second, we need a robust wildfire prevention strategy." "A fire service with the resources it needs to tackle blazes when they come. And that must include firefighting helicopters when needed. And not again ever seeing the shocking sight of requiring a charity to step in to contract a private firm to help fight fires." "And this should all be funded by taxing the fossil fuel giants who are profiting from fueling these infernos. And finally, to secure our water supply, prevent droughts and protect our food system, we need to bring water back into public hands." "Right now, money is flowing out of our hands into the pockets of shareholders, just like water is flowing out of those companies leaky pipes in the middle of a drought. Every single penny households pay for their water needs to go back into strengthening our infrastructure, building new reservoirs and protecting us from the droughts of the future." "We know that these extreme temperatures, these deadly wildfires, are being driven by the burning of fossil fuels. The sad reality is decades of inaction of politicians allowing fossil fuel companies to profit from pumping out deadly emissions have guaranteed the extreme weather we are seeing right now." "And we will see for the rest of our lifetimes. But there is still time to stop total breakdown. So let me speak directly to the Prime Minister. If we are to secure a livable future for our children and for our grandchildren, there can be no new drilling for oil and gas." "On this, the, the science is crystal clear. As politicians, we have a moral responsibility to do what is right for the people we serve, even when it's not politically convenient. And I know that whatever our differences, we both care deeply about the people of this country and the future of our planet." "So when the time comes, I hope you will have the courage to be truthful, be brave and hold firm to your party's commitment to no new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, including both Rosebank and, Jackdaw." "Now, some will say we can't afford to make these changes. These last few weeks are showing we can't afford not to. We are facing an existential threat. People are dying. People are scared." "It is time to act. And when we do, we won't just avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown. We will lower bills permanently, help our communities thrive, and give a grounded sense of hope for generations to come."

Zack Polanski, "Today I was in Oxfordshire, standing in the aftermath of the devastation caused by a wildfire. Trees reduced to charcoal, cars turned to burnt out wrecks. The smell of smoke still lingering in the air on the site of what was once a thriving local business now reduced to ash." "Wildfires, literal scorched earth and a looming sense. And I really want everyone to hear this. This is only just the beginning. And today, as temperatures fall at the end of yet another extreme heat alert, we know that if it rains now, the soil being baked dry means it's much more likely to flood." "These days feel exceptional. But what we are living through right now are likely some of the least extreme summer temperatures we'll experience in our lifetimes. Today I am sounding the alarm and I'm laying out a plan." "Because last week, while a wildfire the size of 200 football pitches was raging across Suffolk, I called on, Prime Minister Burnham to act urgently to address the crisis. I suggested a COBRA meeting being the very least he could do." "And six days later, with another heat alert just having ended, we have still heard next to nothing from the very top of government. No emergency briefings, no new plan and precious little detail about how this government will protect people from the crisis." "It is putting lives and livelihoods at risk across the entire uk. So today I'm delivering a reality cheque. We are facing the biggest threat to this country since the Second World War." "I'm setting out what Prime Minister Burnham can do now to tackle the crisis and I am challenging him to act with the urgency we need. You will hear today from those on the front line of this crisis and they will lay out what they have dealt with in the past few weeks." "And to them, on behalf of the entire country, I want to say thank you. Extreme weather is now the new normal and without action, the impact on the people of this country will be unimaginably grave." "The threats we face are three hold first, the threat to the safety of the population. Almost 3,000 people have died from the effects of extreme heat this summer. And we know that older people and those with pre existing conditions are particularly at risk from these dangerous temperatures." "Those are the people who have been forced to stay at home for days on end, windows, curtains closed, trying to wait out the extreme heat. And these are the people who are most likely now to have grieving families whose bodies were under such intense strain and trying just to stay cool that their kidneys and their hearts could no longer cope." "Meanwhile, wildfires have seen hundreds evacuated from their homes, while many thousands more wait anxiously with Flames on the horizon and smoke in their lungs. We've seen across Europe how bad things can get." "Hundreds of thousands evacuated, half a million acres burned. The sheer scale of the devastation is hard to comprehend, but we need to look it in the face, because this is only a taster of what's to come if we don't act now." "Second, we face a threat to our food and water security. Farmers are now warning we could see food shortages after flooding followed by drought has decimated crops. And despite farmers working really hard through the nights to avoid the heat, food production is grinding to a halt and our food prices are set to rise." "Half of England is experiencing serious drought. And across the country, 8 of our water reservoirs are at risk of running dry. Privatised water companies they've failed to build a single new reservoir to since 1992, are, losing nearly 3 billion litres of water a day from leaky pipes." "That's five times more than a nationwide host pipe ban would even save. The threat is so severe that the UK's National Risk Register warns that if we have three years of exceptionally dry weather like this, we could face water rationing." "These aren't distant possibilities, they're very real scenarios and they are coming straight at us down the track because finally, we face a threat to our very way of life. Parents unable to take their children to the playground because the slides are so hot it could burn, their skin off." "Temperatures so high they keep us inside for days for the sake of our health. Cities feeling like ghost towns, parks turned into deserts. We only have to look across the Channel to France and Spain to see what faces us in the years ahead." "Europe is heating at, twice the rate of the rest of the world. Wildfires, droughts, deadly floods. The scenes we have seen play out on our TV screens are, frankly apocalyptic. And yet the response from our government is to pretend none of this is happening." "It is an astonishing dereliction of duty from those whose very first responsibility is to keep all of us safe, and from the media. With some brilliant and notable exceptions, we have seen more clamouring for North Sea drilling in the last few weeks than actually raising the alarm on climate breakdown." "While our country has come together, people have offered shelter to those who have had to leave their homes due to wildfires. They've checked in with older neighbours to care for those who are sick because of the heat. But the government. The government have been far, far too quiet on what is an emergency." "So today you will hear from some of those on the front line of this crisis and Those with vital insights into how we face this threat. A doctor, a firefighter, someone who served this country in the armed forces, and someone who has dedicated his entire career to our precious nature and wildlife." "It's experts like these that this government should be bringing to the table to design a full scale emergency response. So I want to step out from this big picture and look at some of the urgent steps that Prime Minister Burnham needs to urgently announce to protect people right now and keep us safe from what we know is coming down the track." "In the immediate term, we need to keep people safe from extreme temperatures. That means a free accessible cool space in every local area. And financial support for households so they can heat proof their homes. Second, we need a robust wildfire prevention strategy." "A fire service with the resources it needs to tackle blazes when they come. And that must include firefighting helicopters when needed. And not again ever seeing the shocking sight of requiring a charity to step in to contract a private firm to help fight fires." "And this should all be funded by taxing the fossil fuel giants who are profiting from fueling these infernos. And finally, to secure our water supply, prevent droughts and protect our food system, we need to bring water back into public hands." "Right now, money is flowing out of our hands into the pockets of shareholders, just like water is flowing out of those companies leaky pipes in the middle of a drought. Every single penny households pay for their water needs to go back into strengthening our infrastructure, building new reservoirs and protecting us from the droughts of the future." "We know that these extreme temperatures, these deadly wildfires, are being driven by the burning of fossil fuels. The sad reality is decades of inaction of politicians allowing fossil fuel companies to profit from pumping out deadly emissions have guaranteed the extreme weather we are seeing right now." "And we will see for the rest of our lifetimes. But there is still time to stop total breakdown. So let me speak directly to the Prime Minister. If we are to secure a livable future for our children and for our grandchildren, there can be no new drilling for oil and gas." "On this, the, the science is crystal clear. As politicians, we have a moral responsibility to do what is right for the people we serve, even when it's not politically convenient. And I know that whatever our differences, we both care deeply about the people of this country and the future of our planet." "So when the time comes, I hope you will have the courage to be truthful, be brave and hold firm to your party's commitment to no new oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, including both Rosebank and, Jackdaw." "Now, some will say we can't afford to make these changes. These last few weeks are showing we can't afford not to. We are facing an existential threat. People are dying. People are scared." "It is time to act. And when we do, we won't just avoid the worst effects of climate breakdown. We will lower bills permanently, help our communities thrive, and give a grounded sense of hope for generations to come."

Farrukh

87,169 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

This is the problem with some of my African brothers, they take Donald Trump’s talking points and lies, turn them into facts, and then run with them. This is also why I encourage my social media followers to read first and then engage in debates that are centred on facts, not emotions, because repeating propaganda does not make it true. American oil companies did not “own Venezuela’s oil wells” in the Chávez era or just before. Venezuela nationalised its oil industry in 1976, more than 20 years before Hugo Chávez came to power. From that point onwards, the oil belonged to the Venezuelan state through Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). Foreign companies, including Americans, operated under service contracts and joint ventures, not ownership. Hugo Chávez did not hand oil to “mafias” as you have said, brother. He renegotiated contracts in the 2000s to give PDVSA majority control of 60 percent or more in joint ventures. Companies that refused those terms, such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, exited and later pursued international arbitration. Others, including Chevron, stayed and continue to operate in Venezuela to this day, even under US sanctions via special licences. Chevron is an American company. Russians, Chinese, and Iranians did not “take over American oil wells.” Companies from Russia and China entered Venezuela through state-to-state agreements and joint ventures with PDVSA, mostly after Western firms reduced exposure because of sanctions and financial risk. Examples of these partnerships include Rosneft and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). These firms did not seize American assets, they stepped into gaps created by sanctions, capital flight, and the collapse of PDVSA, operating through state to state agreements and joint ventures rather than expropriation. What happened recently is limited re-entry and licence based cooperation by American companies, especially Chevron, as part of sanctions negotiations tied to political and electoral conditions. So calling Chávez simply “Communist” is MAGA political rally shorthand talk to excite the so called political base, not an economic description of what actually happened. His model was a state-controlled, oil-funded populist system, not classic communism, and Venezuela retained private property and private enterprise throughout his rule. I studied Venezuela and Chávez at film school in Britain, so I know a bit about what happened there, hence my intervention to your comment. Was Maduro a saint? The answer is no, but is this how you pursue oil interests in a rules based world? Have we not learnt enough from history about how this always ends from Patrice Lumumba to Muammar Gaddafi? It is not a binary debate, you can condemn Maduro’s dictatorship and also call for the upholding of international law without lacing arguments with lies and Trump's propaganda. The tragedy on these social media Apps is that people follow personalities, not ideas, not principles, not a set of values. They tragically follow political personalities like they are a religion. So if someone likes Donald Trump, regardless of how badly he has performed, they will still take his talking points and run with them as fact. You cannot have a sensible intellectual debate if you debate that way and choose that route. Be principled and understand that even if you support a specific person or grouping, when the facts do not support what they are saying, you must have the intellectual courage to stand up and say no, this is wrong. I support this person, but what they are saying or doing is wrong. If you go hook, line, and sinker, it means you are intellectually compromised. You have no principles, no values, and you do not follow ideas. I do not think we can learn anything from each other under those conditions and discourse circumstances. I have read many debates on Zimbabwean Twitter and African Twitter that centre on the argument that we also have dictators, so some people end up celebrating Donald Trump’s behaviour on the basis that we too live under authoritarian leaders. That framing is intellectually lazy. Understanding history matters before we make wild and misplaced declarations. Venezuela is not Africa. When surveys were conducted after Hugo Chávez came to power, many Venezuelans described what was happening as liberation. For decades they had lived under oligarchic rule aligned with the United States, dominated by a largely white elite that excluded and marginalised the black and poor majority. That historical context matters, whether one likes Chávez or not. This is why I cringe when I read some of what is posted on social media, arguments made without nuance, without history, and without facts. When we misplace our arguments and compare apples with oranges, we end up making ourselves an intellectual laughing stock. In that context, Chávez was closer to Morgan Tsvangirai than to an African dictator caricature, while the role of the United States in Venezuela mirrors, in some respects, what China is doing in parts of Africa with the help of crooked and corrupt African leaders and their elite compradors. If we are serious about debate, we must engage honestly with history rather than bending it to fit personalities we happen to like. The suffering of poor and Afro-descendant Venezuelans before Hugo Chávez came to power is well documented, and central to why he initially enjoyed mass support. Before 1999 whenChávez came to power, Venezuela was formally a "democracy", but in practice it was run by a small, racially and socially stratified elite concentrated in Caracas and linked to oil rents. Although Venezuela does not use rigid racial categories, poverty and exclusion overwhelmingly fell on darker-skinned and Afro-descendant Venezuelans, while political and economic power sat with lighter-skinned elites of European descent. About 18 to 20 percent of Venezuelans lived in poverty in the late 1970s. By 1998, before Hugo Chávez came to power, poverty had risen sharply to about 49 percent, with roughly 20 to 23 percent of the population living in extreme poverty. During the 1990s, Venezuela also had one of the highest levels of income inequality in Latin America. Oil wealth flowed upward through patronage networks rather than downward into public services, leaving poor, largely black and mixed race communities without adequate healthcare, clean water, or quality education. This extreme inequality existed alongside immense oil wealth, with sprawling slums, the barrios, surrounding wealthy urban centres. The breaking point came in 1989 with the Caracazo, a mass uprising and state massacre in Venezuela in February 1989, and it is one of the most important events for understanding why Hugo Chávez later rose to power. IMF style austerity measures triggered mass protests that were brutally crushed by the army, resulting in the deaths of thousands of poor Venezuelans. That massacre permanently delegitimised the old elite order in the eyes of the majority, the very elite that controlled oil revenues. Chávez was therefore seen by many inside Venezuela as a liberator. He was not just another politician. He was the first president who openly spoke like, looked like, and identified with the poor majority, including Afro Venezuelans. His political legitimacy came from redirecting oil income away from oligarchic capture and towards social spending aimed at the excluded majority. Between 1999 and 2012, measurable social indicators improved significantly, using UNDP, World Bank, and Venezuelan official data from the 2000s. Overall poverty fell from around 49 percent in 1998 to about 27 percent by 2011, while extreme poverty dropped from roughly 23 percent to under 8 percent. This represented one of the fastest poverty reductions in the hemisphere during the oil boom years. Income inequality also declined. Venezuela’s Gini coefficient fell from about 0.49 to around 0.39, and by the late 2000s the country was ranked among the least unequal in Latin America. The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of income or wealth inequality within a country or society. There was a major expansion in health, education and social services. Free healthcare clinics were rolled out across poor barrios, illiteracy was declared eradicated under UNESCO standards, and school enrolment and university access increased sharply for poor and black Venezuelans. Political inclusion also changed. Afro Venezuelans became visible in politics, media, and state institutions for the first time, and the constitution explicitly recognised Afro descendant and indigenous rights. This is why international observers at the time acknowledged that Chávez achieved real social inclusion, even among critics of his broader politics. Chávez did not rise to protect a political elite. He rose against one. That is why poor Venezuelans initially defended him, just as many Africans supported liberation movements at independence, or opposition movements even when later outcomes disappointed. Ignoring that history flattens reality and turns serious political analysis into personality worship or cheap propaganda. Chávez genuinely improved the material lives of poor and black Venezuelans in his first decade, but he failed to build sustainable institutions, diversify oil production, or protect PDVSA from politicisation. When oil prices collapsed and sanctions later compounded mismanagement, many of those gains were reversed under Nicolás Maduro. However, this does not erase the historical reality of why Chávez rose to power, nor does it justify lazily comparing him to African dictators without context, which is intellectually dishonest. That is why Chávez was defended by the masses during the brief 2002 coup. When he was removed from office and a self appointed interim government was announced, poor and working class Venezuelans poured into the streets, surrounded the presidential palace, and refused to accept the return of the old elite order. Within about 48 hours, with the backing of popular mobilisation and loyal sections of the military, Hugo Chávez was brought back to power. That moment confirmed, more than any speech or election result, why large sections of Venezuelan society saw him as their own and were prepared to defend him. So facts matter my brother.

This is the problem with some of my African brothers, they take Donald Trump’s talking points and lies, turn them into facts, and then run with them. This is also why I encourage my social media followers to read first and then engage in debates that are centred on facts, not emotions, because repeating propaganda does not make it true. American oil companies did not “own Venezuela’s oil wells” in the Chávez era or just before. Venezuela nationalised its oil industry in 1976, more than 20 years before Hugo Chávez came to power. From that point onwards, the oil belonged to the Venezuelan state through Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA). Foreign companies, including Americans, operated under service contracts and joint ventures, not ownership. Hugo Chávez did not hand oil to “mafias” as you have said, brother. He renegotiated contracts in the 2000s to give PDVSA majority control of 60 percent or more in joint ventures. Companies that refused those terms, such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, exited and later pursued international arbitration. Others, including Chevron, stayed and continue to operate in Venezuela to this day, even under US sanctions via special licences. Chevron is an American company. Russians, Chinese, and Iranians did not “take over American oil wells.” Companies from Russia and China entered Venezuela through state-to-state agreements and joint ventures with PDVSA, mostly after Western firms reduced exposure because of sanctions and financial risk. Examples of these partnerships include Rosneft and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). These firms did not seize American assets, they stepped into gaps created by sanctions, capital flight, and the collapse of PDVSA, operating through state to state agreements and joint ventures rather than expropriation. What happened recently is limited re-entry and licence based cooperation by American companies, especially Chevron, as part of sanctions negotiations tied to political and electoral conditions. So calling Chávez simply “Communist” is MAGA political rally shorthand talk to excite the so called political base, not an economic description of what actually happened. His model was a state-controlled, oil-funded populist system, not classic communism, and Venezuela retained private property and private enterprise throughout his rule. I studied Venezuela and Chávez at film school in Britain, so I know a bit about what happened there, hence my intervention to your comment. Was Maduro a saint? The answer is no, but is this how you pursue oil interests in a rules based world? Have we not learnt enough from history about how this always ends from Patrice Lumumba to Muammar Gaddafi? It is not a binary debate, you can condemn Maduro’s dictatorship and also call for the upholding of international law without lacing arguments with lies and Trump's propaganda. The tragedy on these social media Apps is that people follow personalities, not ideas, not principles, not a set of values. They tragically follow political personalities like they are a religion. So if someone likes Donald Trump, regardless of how badly he has performed, they will still take his talking points and run with them as fact. You cannot have a sensible intellectual debate if you debate that way and choose that route. Be principled and understand that even if you support a specific person or grouping, when the facts do not support what they are saying, you must have the intellectual courage to stand up and say no, this is wrong. I support this person, but what they are saying or doing is wrong. If you go hook, line, and sinker, it means you are intellectually compromised. You have no principles, no values, and you do not follow ideas. I do not think we can learn anything from each other under those conditions and discourse circumstances. I have read many debates on Zimbabwean Twitter and African Twitter that centre on the argument that we also have dictators, so some people end up celebrating Donald Trump’s behaviour on the basis that we too live under authoritarian leaders. That framing is intellectually lazy. Understanding history matters before we make wild and misplaced declarations. Venezuela is not Africa. When surveys were conducted after Hugo Chávez came to power, many Venezuelans described what was happening as liberation. For decades they had lived under oligarchic rule aligned with the United States, dominated by a largely white elite that excluded and marginalised the black and poor majority. That historical context matters, whether one likes Chávez or not. This is why I cringe when I read some of what is posted on social media, arguments made without nuance, without history, and without facts. When we misplace our arguments and compare apples with oranges, we end up making ourselves an intellectual laughing stock. In that context, Chávez was closer to Morgan Tsvangirai than to an African dictator caricature, while the role of the United States in Venezuela mirrors, in some respects, what China is doing in parts of Africa with the help of crooked and corrupt African leaders and their elite compradors. If we are serious about debate, we must engage honestly with history rather than bending it to fit personalities we happen to like. The suffering of poor and Afro-descendant Venezuelans before Hugo Chávez came to power is well documented, and central to why he initially enjoyed mass support. Before 1999 whenChávez came to power, Venezuela was formally a "democracy", but in practice it was run by a small, racially and socially stratified elite concentrated in Caracas and linked to oil rents. Although Venezuela does not use rigid racial categories, poverty and exclusion overwhelmingly fell on darker-skinned and Afro-descendant Venezuelans, while political and economic power sat with lighter-skinned elites of European descent. About 18 to 20 percent of Venezuelans lived in poverty in the late 1970s. By 1998, before Hugo Chávez came to power, poverty had risen sharply to about 49 percent, with roughly 20 to 23 percent of the population living in extreme poverty. During the 1990s, Venezuela also had one of the highest levels of income inequality in Latin America. Oil wealth flowed upward through patronage networks rather than downward into public services, leaving poor, largely black and mixed race communities without adequate healthcare, clean water, or quality education. This extreme inequality existed alongside immense oil wealth, with sprawling slums, the barrios, surrounding wealthy urban centres. The breaking point came in 1989 with the Caracazo, a mass uprising and state massacre in Venezuela in February 1989, and it is one of the most important events for understanding why Hugo Chávez later rose to power. IMF style austerity measures triggered mass protests that were brutally crushed by the army, resulting in the deaths of thousands of poor Venezuelans. That massacre permanently delegitimised the old elite order in the eyes of the majority, the very elite that controlled oil revenues. Chávez was therefore seen by many inside Venezuela as a liberator. He was not just another politician. He was the first president who openly spoke like, looked like, and identified with the poor majority, including Afro Venezuelans. His political legitimacy came from redirecting oil income away from oligarchic capture and towards social spending aimed at the excluded majority. Between 1999 and 2012, measurable social indicators improved significantly, using UNDP, World Bank, and Venezuelan official data from the 2000s. Overall poverty fell from around 49 percent in 1998 to about 27 percent by 2011, while extreme poverty dropped from roughly 23 percent to under 8 percent. This represented one of the fastest poverty reductions in the hemisphere during the oil boom years. Income inequality also declined. Venezuela’s Gini coefficient fell from about 0.49 to around 0.39, and by the late 2000s the country was ranked among the least unequal in Latin America. The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of income or wealth inequality within a country or society. There was a major expansion in health, education and social services. Free healthcare clinics were rolled out across poor barrios, illiteracy was declared eradicated under UNESCO standards, and school enrolment and university access increased sharply for poor and black Venezuelans. Political inclusion also changed. Afro Venezuelans became visible in politics, media, and state institutions for the first time, and the constitution explicitly recognised Afro descendant and indigenous rights. This is why international observers at the time acknowledged that Chávez achieved real social inclusion, even among critics of his broader politics. Chávez did not rise to protect a political elite. He rose against one. That is why poor Venezuelans initially defended him, just as many Africans supported liberation movements at independence, or opposition movements even when later outcomes disappointed. Ignoring that history flattens reality and turns serious political analysis into personality worship or cheap propaganda. Chávez genuinely improved the material lives of poor and black Venezuelans in his first decade, but he failed to build sustainable institutions, diversify oil production, or protect PDVSA from politicisation. When oil prices collapsed and sanctions later compounded mismanagement, many of those gains were reversed under Nicolás Maduro. However, this does not erase the historical reality of why Chávez rose to power, nor does it justify lazily comparing him to African dictators without context, which is intellectually dishonest. That is why Chávez was defended by the masses during the brief 2002 coup. When he was removed from office and a self appointed interim government was announced, poor and working class Venezuelans poured into the streets, surrounded the presidential palace, and refused to accept the return of the old elite order. Within about 48 hours, with the backing of popular mobilisation and loyal sections of the military, Hugo Chávez was brought back to power. That moment confirmed, more than any speech or election result, why large sections of Venezuelan society saw him as their own and were prepared to defend him. So facts matter my brother.

Hopewell Chin’ono

38,337 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад