𝔅𝔯𝔞𝔳𝔢 𝔑𝔢𝔴 𝔚𝔬𝔯𝔩𝔡

🤣🤣🤣 TRUMP, ORBÁN AND THE UNITED NATIONS: YOU COULDN'T MAKE THIS UP! First, Trump suggested that the UN might be replaced by his own Board of Peace. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, his administration wants former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to become the next UN Secretary-General — potentially with the backing of Russia and China. 🤣 Let's appreciate the sequence. 🇭🇺 Hungarian voters removed Orbán from power after 16 years. 🇺🇸 Trump, who recently questioned the UN's very existence, now wants to put Orbán in charge of it. 🇷🇺🇨🇳 And Moscow and Beijing are reportedly receptive to the idea. The icing on the cake? Orbán is apparently interested, but only if he has a strong chance of winning. After losing an election, apparently the safest strategy is to avoid another one unless the outcome is practically guaranteed. 🤣 But here's the real irony. Why dismantle an international institution when you can try to install your preferred candidate at the top? From replacing the UN to potentially influencing who runs it. From losing Hungary to aspiring to lead an organisation representing 193 countries. That's not a career comeback. That's geopolitical recycling on an industrial scale! 🤡🤣

⏳ POWER IS THE CONTROL OF TIME. AND THE CONTROL OF TIME IS POWER. The greatest struggle in human history has never been merely about money, territory, or resources. It is about who controls human time — and who gets to shape the future. Most people spend their lives working, paying debts, covering rent, meeting obligations, and waiting for decisions made by others. Meanwhile, those who control capital, institutions, and essential resources can plan decades ahead, survive crises, set the rules, and pass their advantages to future generations. Some spend their lives surviving. Others determine the conditions under which those lives are lived. This is why the history of the Russian Old Believer *Beguny* — the Runners — is so revealing. They regarded state authority as an instrument of the Antichrist and rejected passports, censuses, taxation, and compulsory service. Their resistance was not primarily about wealth or political power. It was about refusing to recognise the state's right to govern their existence. They attempted something radical: withdrawing from a system they believed had no legitimate claim over their lives. And they paid a considerable price for that independence. The same question arises with property and land. Land is not merely an asset. It can represent the ability to pass independence — and time — to the next generation. A child who inherits economic security does not necessarily have to sacrifice decades achieving what previous generations already possessed. Someone without independent resources may have little choice but to sell their time under conditions established by others. But control over time extends far beyond economics. Those who can make others wait indefinitely, navigate endless procedures, seek permission, or repeatedly justify their existence exercise a form of power over their lives. And that brings us to the fundamental question: Who decides how the best years of your life will be spent — you, or a system of obligations and decisions imposed by others? Freedom is not simply having money or possessing legal rights. It is having the practical ability to control your own time, make independent choices, and refuse conditions that compromise your autonomy. Money can be earned again. Property can be rebuilt. Land can be recovered. But stolen time can never be returned. Perhaps the deepest form of domination is not the confiscation of wealth, but the appropriation of human life itself. And perhaps the most meaningful measure of freedom is how much of your future genuinely belongs to you.

Wealth is accumulated opportunity. Power is the ability to determine whose opportunities will be realized, when, and on what terms. And freedom is the ability to direct your own time in life without turning it into an instrument of someone else’s will.

🇧🇷 In Brazil, the presidential election is quite puzzling. In the first round, the "right-wing" candidate Bolsonaro received 47.03%, while the incumbent "left-wing" candidate Lula da Silva received 45.16%. However, in the subsequent second round, Silva was declared the winner. Despite all polls indicating that Bolsonaro would receive at least 52.7% of the vote, while Silva would receive no more than 47.3%. Bolsonaro has already openly stated that he does not recognize the election results and accuses the Central Electoral Commission, which is controlled by the current president, of fraud. Silva is a friend of Putin, and like him, is being elected for a fourth term, as the Constitution, like in Russia, also includes the word "consecutively" (for him, this is his "second consecutive term" for the second time). 🇧🇷 It turns out that in some regions of Brazil, voting was extended by 2 hours at the decision of a Supreme Court judge named Zanin, who, quite coincidentally, was once Lula da Silva's lawyer in corruption cases. During these additional 2 hours, another 4 million voters suddenly cast their ballots.🤦‍♂🤷‍♂

Former Serbian President Vucic Loses Parliamentary Elections and Predicts Sanctions Against Russia Former Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has conceded defeat for his "United Serbia" coalition in the early parliamentary elections. According to him, the opposition bloc "Student List" won. "We don't have the final results yet. Based on the stratified sample, it's clear that we lost these elections. The 'Student List' won: they will have between 135 and 140 seats, while we will have 105," Vucic said at the headquarters of the Serbian Progressive Party. According to preliminary data from Ipsos/CeSID, the "Student List" is leading with 52% of the vote (138 seats), while Vucic's bloc is lagging behind with 39.3% (104 seats). This result guarantees the opposition movement an absolute majority in parliament, which requires a minimum of 126 seats. Vucic accused the "deep state," the United States, and forces within the EU that oppose U.S. President Donald Trump,🤡🤣 of being responsible for his coalition's defeat. He called his opponents "executors of dirty work that someone else devised to destroy a sovereign country." "It won't be long before sanctions are imposed against the Russian Federation, perhaps by March or April. They will do everything they preferred to remain silent about, everything they lied about, because, I repeat, they are just contractors, and nothing more," said Vucic.

The Age of Nomadism: What Jacques Attali's “Brave New World” Might Look Like Nearly twenty years ago, Jacques Attali, one of the thinkers associated with the vision of a “New World Order,” described the future as a nomadic world. At its centre would be information nomads — people without permanent addresses or traditional family structures, carrying everything that defines their social and economic value on their bodies, and eventually inside them: smartphones, self-diagnostic devices, artificial organs and other technological extensions of human life. In this world, health and knowledge would become instruments of social conformity. People would pursue them not merely for personal improvement, but out of fear of falling behind or being excluded. Wealth would increasingly belong to those who control knowledge and information. Capital would flow in two directions: towards places where labour is most creative, regardless of cost, and towards places where non-creative labour is cheapest. Attali also envisaged the emergence of a Continental Union — the European Union and Russia — as a potential counterweight to global nomadism. But perhaps the most fascinating element of his theory is his interpretation of economic hegemony. For Attali, the dominant force in capitalism is not necessarily a country. It is a city — the economic heart of a particular historical market order. From the 13th to the 20th century, he identified eight successive centres of capitalism: 1. Bruges — around 1300 2. Venice — around 1450 3. Antwerp — around 1500 4. Genoa — around 1550 5. Amsterdam — around 1650 6. London — around 1750 7. Boston — around 1880 8. New York — around 1930 Each transformation of the market order was accompanied by major technological innovations: the sternpost rudder, the caravel, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and the electric motor. At the same time, activities once performed directly by people or provided as services — feeding, clothing, transportation, housing, entertainment and others — were progressively transformed into mass-market commodities. Every transition between dominant economic centres was accompanied by a major crisis. The old centre lost its dominance, a new technological and economic structure emerged, and another city became the heart of the system. Attali's historical framework anticipated a ninth market form, promising a prolonged period of abundance following a profound structural crisis. Asia featured prominently among the potential locations of a future centre of economic power. And this is what makes his theory particularly interesting today. We are witnessing the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, the automation of human labour, the growing economic importance of information, and the increasing mobility of capital across national borders. At the same time, traditional political and economic structures are facing mounting pressure. Are we witnessing another transition between historical market orders — this time towards a world in which information, rather than industrial production, determines the centre of economic power? And if the next hegemon is no longer a traditional nation-state, but a global technological and financial centre, who will actually govern this new nomadic world? The question is not simply where the next economic capital will emerge, but who will control the new market order — and what place ordinary people will occupy within it.

La robotisation de la vie. - Jacques Attali https://www.attali.com/societe/la-robotisation-de-la-vie/

☝🏻Swedish officials banned ChatGPT and Claude The Swedish government office is restricting access to ChatGPT and Claude: starting Monday, October 26th, these services will no longer be accessible on employees' work computers. ❌ Employees are required to use only approved tools, with Microsoft Copilot being the primary one. 🤖 The director of digitalization declined an interview. On the internal portal, he stated that using AI services without a contract could have "consequences for our information security." ☝🏻DeepSeek was restricted even earlier. The Swedish government office is not the first: 🔻 Similar bans have already been implemented by the Tax Agency and the National Prison and Probation Service; 🔻 The court bailiffs service is preparing its own decision; 🔻 An internal audit at the Transport Agency this year found around a dozen AI services that employees were using without control. Sensitive data was being entered into open services, and the responses from the neural networks were being used in their work. 👁 In essence, one American AI is being replaced by another American AI, simply with a contract and the Microsoft logo. 🤔

Financial Times: 56% of Americans said they felt their lives had worsened under Trump, while his family reportedly earned at least $1 billion from cryptocurrency. More than a quarter of those surveyed had to economize even on food and medical care. 54% blamed Trump and the Republicans for the high prices, and over 40% said that the rising cost of living had made them more likely to vote for Democrats.

🇮🇱👀 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “We must prepare the economy to circumvent sanctions. Blockchain is one of the alternatives.” Israel's Central Bank has rejected Netanyahu's proposal to use blockchain and cryptocurrencies to counter potential international banking sanctions, stating that cryptocurrencies “cannot be used to circumvent sanctions.” The remarkable part? Netanyahu is publicly acknowledging the risk of Israel facing financial isolation — potentially imposed by its own traditional Western allies.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 570 ships have been attacked in the Black Sea, and 40 sailors have died. The Black Sea has become the deadliest place in the world for commercial shipping. Since the beginning of 2026, there have been more than 570 attacks on ships in the Black Sea, resulting in the deaths of at least 40 sailors, according to the Financial Times, citing data from the maritime security company Ambrey and the International Maritime Organization. The situation has deteriorated sharply in recent months. From July to September, 387 ships were attacked – more than five times more than in the previous quarter. Some of these ships were attacked while in port. In the third quarter, there were an average of more than four attacks on ships per day in the Black Sea. According to Ambrey's estimates, Russia was responsible for approximately 90% of these attacks over the past 45 days. The Black Sea region, which is important for the supply of grain and oil, has become more dangerous than the Persian Gulf: the number of attacks on ships is more than six times higher. In the Strait of Hormuz region, 24 sailors died during the same period. One of the most recent incidents involved the cargo ship Khoryv, whose crew consisted of Ukrainian and Azerbaijani sailors. On October 23, a fire broke out on the ship near the coast of Romania, after which it sank. One sailor died, and three are missing. The President of Romania stated that Russia attacked the cargo ship with a drone.

In December 1958, the Polish embassy in Beijing refused to allow the "sparrow killers" onto its grounds. As a result, the Chinese surrounded the embassy with drummers and continued to beat the drums non-stop for two days, until all the birds sheltering in the garden had fallen, and the diplomats collected the carcasses with shovels. The Maoists eradicated 2 billion sparrows. Later, their population was restored through the import of sparrows from the Soviet Union – according to some reports, 25 million birds were brought in, while others claim it was more than 100 million. (Another example of "ancestral wisdom")

☝🏻Denmark has abandoned its attempt to move away from the proprietary Microsoft Office. The Danish Ministry of Digitalization 🤡😁 has halted a project to switch from Microsoft Office to the open-source office suite Collabora. Earlier in the summer of 2025, the ministry publicly stated that it wanted to move away from Windows and Office to reduce its dependence on the American vendor and the decisions of the Trump administration. 🇺🇸 In reality, Collabora was only tested by 38 employees. ☝🏻Problems began at the end of 2025: Office files in Collabora, and Collabora files in Office, opened with blank pages. 🤯 Collabora works with the open ODF format, while Microsoft uses its own OOXML specification. Developers of LibreOffice have long struggled with this incompatibility. The experiment was ultimately halted by early parliamentary elections in early 2026. The ministry confirmed that the project has been closed and will not be resumed. ❌

We should neither assume an invisible mastermind behind every protest nor dismiss the possibility of organised provocation and political exploitation. The central question is not merely who set the buildings on fire. It is what happens after the fires are extinguished. Who gains power? Who loses the ability to challenge authority? Which emergency restrictions survive? And does the government ever return to solving the social problems that brought people onto the streets in the first place? Because the ultimate political outcome of civil unrest may not be determined by those who started the protests, but by those who gain control of the response. The real test is not who benefits from the chaos for a few days, but who retains greater power when the streets become quiet again.

Yet in October 2026, French schoolchildren have faced mass arrests, severe injuries and aggressive policing during demonstrations over education and living conditions. Human Rights Watch has reported thousands of arrests during the unrest, with minors comprising a substantial proportion of those detained. This raises an entirely legitimate question: Why should the standards of proportionality, civil liberties and protection of peaceful protesters demanded of Belarus not apply equally to France? The political circumstances and documented severity of repression in the two countries are not identical. But fundamental rights cannot become optional simply because a government considers the unrest inconvenient. A democratic state should be judged not only by how it condemns repression abroad, but also by how it handles dissent at home. 4. The Real Prize: Control of Public Perception Consider an ordinary French citizen. Initially, that person may sympathise with protesting schoolchildren. They understand the problems: deteriorating public services, rising living costs, inequality and declining confidence in government. But after several days of burning buildings, smashed shopfronts, looting and continuous television coverage of violence, their priorities may change. Instead of asking: "Why is the government failing to fund our schools?" They begin asking: "Why can't the government protect my home, my family and my community?" That is the critical shift. The debate moves away from the government's failure to deliver public services and towards its responsibility to restore order. In political science, this mechanism is known as securitisation: transforming a social or political issue into a perceived security threat that can justify exceptional state intervention. It does not require every rioter to be controlled by an intelligence agency. It requires violence to become the defining image of the entire protest movement. Once that happens, the original demands can be marginalised. And the authorities may acquire greater public support for measures that would previously have faced strong opposition. 5. Who Actually Benefits? This is where the analysis becomes more important than speculation about hidden masterminds. After the riots, we should examine the consequences. - Did the government gain additional surveillance or policing powers? - Were restrictions on public assembly expanded? - Were temporary emergency measures made permanent? - Were legitimate social demands displaced by debates about law and order? - Were particular political organisations weakened or marginalised? - Did the government address the original problems in education, public services and living standards? These are measurable questions. They provide a much stronger basis for analysing political beneficiaries than assuming the existence of a single secret command centre. A government does not necessarily need to create a crisis to exploit it. And political advantage does not, on its own, prove prior involvement. 6. The Larger Political Mechanism The most important danger is not simply that violent groups exploit legitimate protests. It is that their actions can change the political meaning of the protests themselves. A movement demanding better schools becomes associated with burning buildings. A campaign against declining living standards becomes a debate about policing. A demand for democratic accountability becomes an argument over public security. And citizens who initially sympathised with the protesters may begin supporting stronger state intervention. Social anger becomes social fear. Social fear becomes political consent. Political consent becomes expanded authority. That is the mechanism worth investigating. The Final Question France's social grievances are real. The violence is real. The political opportunities created by that violence are also real. What remains to be established is whether specific actors deliberately engineered, facilitated or manipulated particular incidents to achieve those outcomes.

France in Flames: Social Uprising or Managed Destabilisation? What if the greatest political advantage of mass unrest is not the destruction itself, but the opportunity to transform public anger into public fear? There is a much more serious argument here than simply claiming that intelligence services orchestrate every riot. Genuine social dissatisfaction can be transformed into a public demand for security. And once that happens, the political agenda changes. Instead of demanding better living standards, education and public services, citizens begin demanding protection from violence, disorder and threats to their everyday lives. The original grievances disappear behind the consequences of the unrest. And France offers a striking example of how this mechanism can operate. 1. Look at the Sequence of Events 21 September — School protests begin. The grievances are real and material: teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms and deteriorating school infrastructure. Students, trade unions and other social groups gradually join the protests. 1 October — The official narrative begins to change. The French Interior Ministry increasingly describes the situation in terms of urban violence rather than simply protests about education and public services. 5–7 October — Teenagers suffer serious injuries. A 15-year-old schoolboy loses a hand following the use of a police grenade. Another teenager suffers a severe jaw injury. The authorities temporarily suspend the use of certain stun grenades. 17 October — Limoges City Hall is set on fire. A demonstration deteriorates into violent confrontations involving groups suspected of organised attacks. Images of burning buildings and destruction begin overshadowing the original social demands. 23–24 October — Security measures intensify. Armoured vehicles, drones, reinforced police deployments, restrictions on gatherings and attempts to impose curfews. Some restrictions are subsequently suspended by an administrative court. Now look at the progression: Demands for social reform → Violent confrontation → Public fear → Expansion of security controls. That sequence is politically significant. It does not, by itself, establish that the events were planned. But it demonstrates how a social movement can be transformed into a security crisis. 2. Could Intelligence Services Have Influenced the Events? Of course, modern states possess extensive capabilities for monitoring political movements, infiltrating radical organisations, cultivating informants and assessing the potential for civil unrest. But three distinct mechanisms must be examined. Organisation: Particular groups coordinate violent actions in advance. The involvement of organised radicals in incidents such as the Limoges attack is a legitimate subject of criminal investigation. Deliberate non-intervention: Authorities possess intelligence about potential violence but fail to prevent it. That could result from operational mistakes, insufficient resources or, potentially, conscious decisions. Political exploitation: Authorities do not organise the violence but use its consequences to justify additional powers and restrictions. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. Nor does a government need to orchestrate every incident to benefit politically from the resulting disorder. The important questions are whether warnings existed, what decisions were taken, who made them and whether any operational failures were deliberate. The absence of evidence proving a centrally organised intelligence operation is not a reason to abandon scrutiny of the intelligence services. Equally, suspicion alone cannot establish their involvement. 3. France and Belarus: An Uncomfortable Question In 2020, France condemned Alexander Lukashenko's repression of protesters in Belarus and publicly supported their democratic demands. Paris criticised the use of force against demonstrators and demanded respect for civil liberties.

Putinism: The 21st-Century Version of Russian Serfdom? More than 225 years ago, French writer Charles Masson described a striking feature of Russian society: men were trapped in a rigid hierarchy of obedience, where everyone served someone more powerful, all the way up to the Tsar. In his Secret Memoirs of Russia (1800), Masson argued that Russian autocracy produced men who were submissive to their superiors yet capable of extraordinary cruelty towards those beneath them. A soldier could be courageous, but his courage served the will of his commanding officer. An official could exercise enormous power over ordinary people while remaining utterly obedient to his own superior. The system rewarded submission upwards and domination downwards. Sound familiar? Putinism: The Same System, Modernised Today's Russia exhibits remarkably similar mechanisms. 1. Loyalty matters more than competence. A governor answers to the Kremlin. A minister answers to Putin. A police officer answers to his commander. The entire hierarchy ultimately revolves around one individual. Independent judgement becomes dangerous when it conflicts with the wishes of those above. 2. Submission above, brutality below. The same official who obediently accepts humiliation from his superior may exercise arbitrary power over ordinary citizens. Authority is not exercised independently. It is borrowed from above and imposed on those below. 3. Initiative is punished; obedience is rewarded. Political repression, censorship, surveillance and prosecution for dissent reinforce the lesson that challenging authority carries serious consequences. Those who demonstrate loyalty advance. Those who question the system risk exclusion, imprisonment or exile. 4. War exposes the hierarchy. Soldiers follow officers. Officers follow generals. Generals follow political leadership. At every level, decisions are justified by orders from above, while responsibility is passed upwards or obscured behind appeals to duty, patriotism and historical necessity. From the Tsar to the Kremlin The institutions have changed. The underlying mechanisms show remarkable continuity. Imperial Russia relied on autocracy, serfdom and rigid social hierarchy. Putin's Russia relies on security services, political patronage, state propaganda, digital surveillance and institutionalised repression. Both systems concentrate authority at the top while creating chains of dependence below. There is, however, one particularly revealing feature: the system does not survive through coercion alone. It also depends on people who reproduce its rules voluntarily — seeking protection from those above while exercising whatever power they possess over those below. The Question Masson Left Behind Masson described a society in which obedience to authority became a condition of survival and advancement. More than two centuries later, Russia offers a disturbing example of how such political relationships can persist, adapt and re-emerge under entirely different historical circumstances. The most important question is no longer why Putin demands obedience. It is why so many people not only accept the hierarchy but actively participate in maintaining it. Because a system built on submission cannot survive through one ruler alone. It requires millions of people willing to obey upwards and command downwards. Different century. Different ruler. Familiar machinery of power.

Russian Autocracy: Why Obedient Men Produced Powerful Women More than 225 years ago, a French observer noticed something extraordinary about Russian society: men appeared to possess formal authority, yet women frequently exercised considerable power. His name was Charles-François-Philibert Masson. Masson arrived in St Petersburg in 1786, rose through the imperial court, and eventually became secretary to the future Tsar Alexander I. After his expulsion under Paul I in 1796, he published Secret Memoirs of Russia, offering an unusually candid account of the Russian imperial system. One of his most provocative observations concerned the relationship between autocracy and gender. Russia had experienced an extraordinary succession of female rulers and regents, from Sophia Alekseyevna to Catherine the Great. But Masson's interest extended beyond the throne. His argument was that Russian autocracy had profoundly shaped the character and behaviour of men. From soldiers to courtiers, men operated within a rigid hierarchy in which obedience to superiors was essential. Authority flowed downwards, ultimately from the sovereign. A man could command those beneath him while remaining utterly submissive to those above him. Masson believed this system encouraged conformity, dependence and the suppression of independent judgement. Women, meanwhile, occupied a different position within that hierarchy. Although legally subordinate in many respects, they could exercise substantial practical authority within households, families and estates. The result was a striking paradox: a patriarchal political system could coexist with remarkably powerful women in private life. Masson was not entirely complimentary. He accused Russian women of adopting masculine characteristics, exercising dominance over men and approaching relationships with a degree of pragmatism that shocked his French sensibilities. He also described a courtly society in which ambition, convenience and calculation frequently displaced romantic attachment. His judgements were often harsh, exaggerated and unmistakably influenced by the prejudices of his time. Nevertheless, the underlying question remains fascinating. What happens to a society when men are conditioned to obey authority, while women must develop the practical independence needed to manage everyday life? Perhaps what appears to be female dominance is not simply a question of gender at all. Perhaps it is partly the social consequence of an authoritarian system that rewards obedience in public while leaving the responsibilities of private life to those who learn to operate outside its formal chains of command. Masson was describing imperial Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. The more interesting question is how much of that institutional inheritance survived the empire itself.