I use X so I don't read out stuff & annoy my family https://xitter.cf/t.co/VvhVaAJdnz https://xitter.cf/t.co/7vqyPyGRsw https://xitter.cf/t.co/SkPaqqPjjk
Budapest, Bristol & NSW
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Zoë retweeted
An Open Letter to the University of Sydney @Sydney_Uni @mscott
Regarding the appointment of Jacinda Ardern as Professor of Practice
Dear Professor Scott,
I read with absolute disgust that the University of Sydney has appointed Jacinda Ardern as Professor of Practice, where she will apparently be sharing her wisdom on empathetic leadership, social cohesion and civic trust.
You cannot be serious.
You are quoted as saying:
"Dame Jacinda led New Zealand through events of profound consequence and her leadership demonstrated that empathy and resolve do not compete with one another; each can strengthen the other."
Appointing Jacinda Ardern to teach social cohesion is rather like appointing Jeffrey Dahmer to teach a course on wellbeing, or Jimmy Savile to run the local daycare centre. The sheer absurdity would almost be funny if the consequences of her leadership weren't so hideously tragic.
My name is Alia Bland. I am a co-founder of Voices for Freedom, an organisation established in New Zealand in 2020. For years, we stood alongside tens of thousands of ordinary Kiwis whose lives were torn apart by the policies of Ardern's government.
While the international media fawned over her kindness and compassion, we were dealing with the wreckage.
At the height of the COVID response, we were receiving upwards of 1,000 emails a day. Desperate people reaching out because they had lost their jobs, their incomes, their homes and, in many cases, their will to live.
People nearing retirement were forced to sell family homes they had spent decades paying off. Some are still living in caravans five years later.
Marriages collapsed. Families fractured. Lifelong friendships were destroyed. People who had served their communities for decades were suddenly treated like lepers because they declined a medical procedure.
Some of the people who came to us had spent their entire lives believing New Zealand was a decent, fair-minded country. Watching that belief crumble, and seeing what it did to them, was heartbreaking.
I cannot adequately describe the anguish in those emails. The desperation of parents wondering how they would feed and house their families. The humiliation of hardworking people being marched out of professions they loved. The despair of people who had done everything society asked of them, only to discover that their own government considered them disposable.
And presiding over it all was Jacinda Ardern, smiling for the cameras and telling the world how kind New Zealand was.
Kind? For whom?
Her government deliberately created a two-class society. Ardern herself acknowledged it publicly. New Zealanders were excluded from workplaces, businesses, events and ordinary social life. People were coerced into accepting a medical intervention under threat of losing their livelihoods.
And those who suffered adverse reactions to the COVID vaccines faced another nightmare. We fought for vaccine-injured New Zealanders whose lives had been devastated by serious physical harm, while many struggled to have their injuries acknowledged or receive adequate support.
The government's public assurances about vaccine safety deserve particular scrutiny. Officials knew about the myocarditis risk, including among young people. We have examined the records. Yet people raising legitimate questions about those risks were routinely dismissed and vilified.
The damage went far beyond lost incomes and broken relationships. An enormous number of New Zealanders lost faith in the very institutions they had trusted their entire lives. Government, health authorities, education, police and the media. That trust has not magically returned because Ardern has moved on to more prestigious surroundings.
While her government was busy marginalising people, we were building a nationwide support network to help them survive.
Voices for Freedom grew to more than 100,000 people on our mailing list, many representing entire families. More than 45,000 people signed up to our local groups across the country, which are still operational today in 2026. We established industry groups to help people fight for their careers, provided support through employment disputes and legal challenges, organised practical assistance and hand-delivered millions of flyers to households throughout New Zealand.
We did this while facing censorship, public vilification and government surveillance. Official records obtained since have confirmed that our activities and communications were being monitored and reported on.
Our volunteers gave everything they could to help people who had been abandoned by the institutions meant to protect them.
And now the University of Sydney wants to hold up the woman responsible for overseeing this period as a shining example of empathy and social cohesion?
It is sickening.
Professor Scott, did anyone at your university bother to speak with the people whose lives were destroyed under Ardern's leadership before celebrating her appointment?
Have you spoken to the former nurses, teachers and police officers who lost their careers? The families who lost their homes? The people still suffering from vaccine injuries? The parents whose children no longer speak to them?
Or did you simply swallow the carefully cultivated international image of Saint Jacinda, the compassionate leader who saved New Zealand?
I wonder whether you have considered why this internationally celebrated former prime minister now lives in Australia rather than the country she once led. The depth of hostility towards her among many New Zealanders should give you pause.
Because I can assure you, there is another side to that story. And there are hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who live with the consequences.
I have no objection to universities studying Ardern's leadership. In fact, I would encourage it. There is an enormous amount to learn from what happened in New Zealand between 2021 and 2023. Like, what not to do...
But presenting her as someone uniquely qualified to teach empathy, social cohesion and civic trust, without acknowledging the extraordinary human suffering that occurred under her leadership, is an insult to the people who paid the price.
We were there, Professor Scott. We saw what happened. We picked up the pieces. We are still picking them up.
Some of those people will never recover what they lost.
And the woman who presided over it all gets a professorship in empathy.
What an absolute disgrace.
Yours sincerely,
Alia Bland
Co-founder, Voices for Freedom
New Zealand
Zoë retweeted
Friends, in just two days, Christians were murdered on two continents.
On Friday, gunmen opened fire on a funeral at St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Karak, Jordan, and killed nine people. On Saturday, armed men attacked Orthodox churches and homes in Oromia, Ethiopia, and killed more than forty.
These are not statistics. They are our brothers and sisters, members of the mystical Body of Christ. When Saul set out to destroy the Church, the risen Jesus asked him, “Why are you persecuting me?” The Lord is still being persecuted in these victims of anti-Christian violence.
Christianity is by far the most persecuted religion in the world today. Those of us who worship in comfort have to ask what the deaths of these martyrs demand of us. At the very least, they demand that we pray for them, learn their names, press our leaders to act, and refuse to look away.
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.
"Lula's victory may be legitimate but it isn't obvious. How will we know if journalists ask no questions? The next time you hear a British journalist talk about the importance of their role in 'protecting democracy' & 'speaking truth to power', remember their apathy about Brazil."
Yesterday, Lula ostensibly became the first person since Brazil's return to democracy to win a fourth term in office. This is just three weeks after the country elected its most right wing legislature ever.
It was the first time a candidate has lost the first round and gone on to win the presidency, and the first time that turnout in the second round has exceeded turnout in the first.
Also unprecedented was the Supreme Court's last minute extension of voting hours. That decision was made by key Lula ally Alexandre de Moraes, who has now seized the passport of Lula's opponent after imprisoning his predecessor.
British media's response to all of this? Bovine silence. Brazil is a famously corrupt country. Honesty should not be the expectation. It may be that Lula's victory was legitimate: it is certainly not obvious that it was. How will we know if nobody asks the questions?
Remember this disinterest the next time that you hear a British journalist tell you about the importance of their role in 'protecting democracy' and 'speaking truth to power'. They have zero interest in either objective, and we should take zero notice of their words.
Zoë retweeted
BBC, so of course quote marks round massacre.
More than 60 Christians killed in Ethiopia 'massacre', church official says bbc.in/4e11nug
Zoë retweeted
Even the NYT realizes how obvious this was…
The major question in Brazil…
At exactly 5pm, a code is supposed to be entered that closes and locks the voting machines. Once a machine is locked, it can’t accept any more votes. It’s irreversible.
The Supreme Court extension was relayed a few minutes after polls were supposed to be closed and machines locked.
So… which machines were kept open? In what districts were those machines? And why weren’t they locked at 5pm?
Zoë retweeted
It’s very disappointing to see people who usually defend democracy somehow excuse the blatant irregularities in Brazil’s election as being acceptable to “stop authoritarianism”. Even if you agree that the polls should have been extended, the fact the order to do so was received so late meant that many municipalities had already closed their election stations and were forbidden from reopening them. It seems extremely suspicious in the least that the areas that hadn’t closed them were all seemingly Lula bastions.
An election lacks integrity if rules are inconsistently applied. Even Lula partisans should be able to understand that. Unless of course they are more interested in their favoured candidate winning rather than democracy itself.
You may be jumping the gun - or colluding with election fraud @vonderleyen:
xitter.cf/Jhonffonseca/status/21…
Congratulations to my friend @LulaOficial on his electoral victory.
Democracy and multilateralism have won in Brazil.
Europe’s partnership with Brazil is thriving.
We will remain by your side for the years to come.
Together we will keep working closely for free and open trade.
A rules-based global order.
And strong ambitions for our climate.
As @robbystarbuck comments: "Some one let @realDonaldTrump know that Alex Soros just enthusiastically approved of naming your personal lawyer to the Supreme Court & then asking them to extend voting hours in friendly counties after your opponent's good counties have shut their polls. Presumably he would be cool with Trump doing the same thing Lula did."
"The system works exactly as designed - but nobody designed it for the people. European democracy has become a user interface on top of a system that runs for someone else."
Most Western democracies have been hacked. Not with code. With institutional architecture. Let me show you how it works, using the most advanced example: the European Union.
First, how it works. Once every five years, you vote for a European Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation. The body that proposes laws is the Commission: 27 commissioners nobody elected, appointed after backroom bargaining between heads of state. Bills are then negotiated between the Commission, Parliament and Council in "trilogues", closed-door meetings where the real decisions get made. A law that will apply to 450 million people goes through corridors that 99.9% of them will never see.
Now look at who's in those corridors. Brussels has become the lobbying capital of the world: nearly 18,000 organizations on the transparency register, tens of thousands of lobbyists, more than 50 for every single MEP. And that's just the declared part. Add the revolving door: a former MEP only has to wait six months before becoming a lobbyist to the EU himself.
The real problem is distance. A national MP who votes for a law that ruins the farmers in his district runs into them at the market on Saturday. In Brussels, the decision-maker never meets the people who live with his decisions. But he meets lobbyists every day: at lunch, at cocktails, at conferences. So the system doesn't optimize for the wellbeing of the people. It optimizes for the interests of whoever is in the room. You don't even need corruption for that, incentives are enough. Although sometimes, as Qatargate showed, there's corruption too.
The result: the system has a structural incentive to accept things the people would never vote for.
Take Mercosur. Twenty-five years of negotiations. France votes against it in the Council in January 2026 and gets outvoted. To keep national parliaments from blocking it, the Commission splits the deal into two texts, including a trade agreement that only needs a vote in Brussels. The European Parliament itself writes, in black and white, that this split circumvents the right of national parliaments, and refers the deal to the EU Court of Justice. The Commission's response: it has been applying the agreement provisionally since May 1, 2026, without waiting for the Court's opinion. Farmers were protesting outside Parliament. They lost anyway.
And remember the one time the people were actually asked about Europe directly: in 2005, France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution. The text came back two years later as the Lisbon Treaty, ratified by parliaments. No more referendums.
But the worst of it is immigration. In 2015, relocation quotas were imposed by qualified majority on countries that had voted against them. Since June 12, 2026, the Pact on Migration and Asylum applies across the entire Union, with its "mandatory solidarity" mechanism: you take people in, or you pay. Not a single European people has ever been consulted directly on this, even though it's the issue that is transforming our societies most profoundly.
And this is where we have to talk about the most sophisticated piece of the machine: George Soros.
Soros understood before anyone else that you don't need to win elections if you shape the ecosystem around the people who make decisions. His network, the Open Society Foundations, describes itself as the largest private funder of advocacy groups in the world. In Brussels, it runs its own lobbying arm aimed at EU institutions, the Open Society European Policy Institute.
Here's what we know from internal documents leaked in 2016: a document titled "Reliable allies in the European Parliament" listed more than 200 MEPs. Strategy papers described building "inside-track groups" to caucus "internal allies" who could advance their goals in their daily work. Training sessions were organized for MEPs on how to counter so-called populist parties.
The mechanism is brutally elegant. Think tanks produce the "expertise". NGOs produce the "demand from civil society". Legal NGOs litigate in the courts. Funded media outlets produce the narrative. The Brussels decision-maker, cut off from the population, hears the same message from every direction and ends up believing that this is what people want.
And the craziest part: the institutions fund the loop themselves. Between 2021 and 2023, the EU paid around €7.4 billion to NGOs, and the European Court of Auditors found the use of that money insufficiently transparent. It even came out that the Commission had funded NGOs to lobby MEPs in favor of its own Green Deal legislation. The institution pays "civil society" to ask it to do what it already wanted to do.
All of this is legal. That's exactly what makes it a hack and not a crime. The system works exactly as designed, except nobody designed it for the people anymore.
The patch is simple to state and hard to impose: bring decisions back closer to the people who bear them, hold referendums on issues that change a civilization, create a mandatory register for every influence actor, NGOs included, with their funding sources, and shut the revolving door. Until that happens, European democracy will remain what it has become: a user interface sitting on top of a system that runs for someone else.
GB is "a runaway train staffed by people you wouldn’t let run the village fete. Not one of them knows how to make a profit, all charity workers & unionists with no idea what’s needed or how hard it is to create the money they spend."
I agree with pretty much all you are saying. The problem is he’s not in charge the civil servants are, and it’s a runaway train staffed by people you wouldn’t let run the village fete. Not one of them knows how to make a profit. It’s all charity workers and unionists. They have no idea what’s need or how hard it is to create the money that they spend. 2027 is going to punch them right in their collective face. I imagine there is a small group of economists at the treasury treated like lepers begging them to stop and just freeze the government spending increases for for 2 years to give the private sector and middle class some breathing room do it for four and you grip the deficit and finally get some real growth let’s call them the Cassandra economists, of course they are totally ignored and kept in the basement by the other civil servants who tell the politicians what they want to hear and get those promotions and advancements. They know it’s screwed but just one more promotion in the next three months and they can then turn that into a better gig at big bank. Just need the bond market to not rabbit for another six months as they cross their fingers and hope it keep on projection, then they can drop the resignation letter explaining they should do the stuff the basement dwellers suggest and they cannot in good conscience continue etc etc as they parachute out the door to the big bank job but keep their government blotter clean with whats required to fix it so they can come back at a new higher position with that private sector experience “he just the chap to fix this problem look at what he said before he left and he’s been kicking up a storm at big bank betting against the government, he’s just the fellow we need, a member of the Labour Party as well he campaigned for kier at the last election got his PPE at Oxford as well he was in my sister year”, while they totally ignore the truth tellers in the basement who don’t play the promotions game. He’s to 2027 bringing down their house of cards. Hell mend em.
"Will the British people [ever] fully realize how doggedly & relentlessly fucked they have been by the Uniparty’s decrepit, somnambulist, Oxbridge PPE retards & wake up"?
A less optimistic edit.
Predictions…
Nothingburger budget from Healey, whose incompetence is visible from space, and r-Andeh who doesn’t know why we’re “in hock to the bond market”.
In December, r-Andeh goes to the polls to get new mandate for big spending spree, sold to us as defence driven to ward off Putin and build infrastructure- because he can’t deliver what they want to under current fiscal rules. This will be a rouse.
Labour will win if they go this year (and lose if they go next year*). On the timeline where they win, they will - of course - then borrow even more and spend it all on welfaremaxxing for their client groups.
They then will crater the economy harder than anyone before them through even more retarded socialism. We then get net zero Miliband blackouts and Russian/Chinese/Iranian/North Korean AI driven cyber attacks on our grid and supermarkets/food supply chain. Iranian energy (oil refinery infra capacity lagged effect) and delayed Urea/Phosphorous fertiliser shortage via Hormuz = food inflation shock, so far not fully felt, landing too. Inflation broadly up. The least capable politicians of all time - a coalition like the Tories before them - will struggle to remain cohesive during this period and will split the party even further. This will cause leadership contests now they’ve popped their regicide cherry.
Bond crisis from massive tax receipt shortfall in Feb* (will push them into election in May if haven’t gone in 2026*) causes sterling to get nailed, driving inflation up even further as cost of goods coming into Britain get much dearer - and the reaction will be widespread civil unrest because the population is broadly at breaking point mentally and financially - credit card defaults and delinquencies up, even more job losses, unemployment up, and that will all combine to spark fresh GE risk, potentially as soon as next year. May, perhaps, after local elections. Almost certainly by 2028.
Only then —when the lethal combo of a bond crisis, an energy crisis, a food shortage crisis, a cost of living crisis on steroids, and Labour tax policy as the foreplay and AI decimating the labour market and tax base as the main event - all arriving one after the other or in some instances simultaneously —will the British people fully realize how doggedly and relentlessly fucked they have been by the Uniparty’s decrepit somnambulist Oxbridge PPE retards, since 1997. Then they will wake up. What they were promised hasn’t been delivered. What they believed was a lie. The new paradigm will force them to accept the 4th turning is upon them.
They will want something new.
Something radical.
Something optimistic.
They will vote accordingly.
Is the fuss about @kemibadenoch being described as:
1) Nigerian, which she is; or
2) a scammer?
Re 2) she claimed: Meloni advised her to shun Reform; verballed @Nigel_Farage re Chagos; & allowed a press release implying @SuellaBraverman had "mental health". All misleading.
The peculiar claim that Meloni advised @kemibadenoch not to enter into any kind of pact with @reformparty_uk did turn out to be something that looks rather like a scam.
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
Six months ago Hungarians voted out a government they were angry with & a peaceful change took place.
In 1956, Hungarians made a brave attempt to free themselves from Soviet Communism, imposed by Moscow. The West abandoned Hungarians.
The two events are not comparable in any way.
@vonderleyen - this is sickening.
Six months ago, Hungary voted for a new chapter.
Turning the page on years of eroded freedoms and trust.
And the banks of the Danube who saw people march and die 70 years ago.
That night saw people dance and celebrate a revived democracy in Hungary.
Once again, a powerful message of hope was sent to the world.
Zoë retweeted
Macron se déplace à Trappes. Très bien.
Mais où était-il pour pour tant d’autres actes aussi ignobles (Crépol, Lola, Philippine et les autres) qui ne collaient pas au récit du moment ?
La compassion présidentielle a une géométrie très variable.
The church's "mission is to proclaim Jesus Christ & lead souls to salvation. Wouldn't it be interesting if The Tablet pressed Cardinal Marx about the state of his own archdiocese, before inviting its readers to celebrate his diagnosis of the world's political problems?"
I do wonder whether the greater challenge facing the Church over the next twenty years might be the collapse of Christian belief, the disappearance of vocations and the failure to transmit the faith to another generation.
The Church is not simply the EU's spiritual counterpart, tasked with defending the prevailing European political consensus. Her mission is to proclaim Jesus Christ and lead souls to salvation. Wouldn't it be interesting if The Tablet pressed Cardinal Marx quite as vigorously about the state of his own archdiocese as it celebrates his diagnosis of the world's political problems?
Who knows who's right - but basing any decision even partly on having read Situational Awareness by Leopold Aschenbrenner, formerly connected to Sam Bankman-Fried, seems risky.
# Black October
For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books.
You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles.
We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out.
In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses.
Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time.
In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening.
These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1.
From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW.
For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever:
Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo.
Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password.
Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta.
Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this.
And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php."
This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world.
Much love.
Ever since @kemibadenoch verballed Giorgia Meloni, & then had to admit the claim was untrue, it has not been impossible to argue that she might, on occasion, display scammer tendencies - & of course Mrs Badenoch herself identifies as Nigerian when she chooses.
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
"Why has Europe spent €8bn on Russian liquefied natural gas this year alone? Why did British ministers announce (to great fanfare) a ban on fuel refined from Russian crude last year only to reverse it the moment it became mildly expensive? Why, over the course of the war, has Europe spent more on Russian fossil fuels (€231bn) than we have given in total aid (€200.7bn)?"
‘Trump is right’ to try to force an end to the Ukraine war, which will dismember it - @matthewsyed. Europe is hypocritical to criticise, he argues: it could have helped Ukraine win but didn’t and has spent more on Russian fossil fuels than it’s given in aid. thetimes.com/article/425e3d0…
