Wake up babe, another form of structural power just dropped

#Trump is a window of opportunity to advance new bilateral and regional trade agreements. Promoters of digital regulation should use it to move beyond a defensive posture and pivot toward globalising digital rules. open.substack.com/pub/matteone...

AI agents discovered trolling, another step towards the superintelligence apocalypse.

I learn this morning that Péter Magyar is neither Leon Trotski nor even Clement Attlee. Horror of horror! That he's not in Putin's pocket and wants to be a normal EU member will do for me, for the moment

Facing the reality that brutality and cruelty also have tradeoffs and are not a secret weapon that facilitates an easy victory, they are furious at being embarrassed by their lessers and seeing their theory of the world publicly discredited (not that they would ever acknowledge that)

We are delighted to welcome seven new fellows to the IWM in April: Khalid Bencherif, Richard Cockett, Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Milorad Ivanovic, @matteonebbiai.bsky.social, @thomasseifert.bsky.social, and John C. Swanson. 👉 Learn more about their work on our website: www.iwm.at/news/new-fel...

Two of the journalists assassinated in South Lebanon this morning by Israel were Lebanese correspondents Ali Shoeib and Fatima Ftouni. They become the 252nd and 253rd journalists killed by Israel in the last two years. Unprecedented. (📸 Cradle Media)

www.ft.com/content/4f09... Genuinely hard to overstate how much of a strategic defeat it would be for the United States if the war ends with effective Iranian control of the Strait.

1/ Disruptions mean countries will rush to exit US-led oil order Worst case scenario for oil companies (best for rest of us) is that people permanently shift...what they call “demand destruction“ i.e short term pain but Long: Iran war will accelerate ongoing STRUCTURAL shift to solar+EVs+batteries

Put the Strait of Hormuz on the blockchain. by Andrew Yang

we are losing so much talent, progress, and hope for no good reason www.vox.com/future-perfe...

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public. I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are. 1/ Here's what I can share:

North Korea Was Right About Nuclear Weapons open.substack.com/pub/persuasi...

Why the US is facing strategic defeat @policytensor.bsky.social “The Trump administration needs to understand that there are no military solutions here. Talk to the Omanis. Find a diplomatic solution before this brings the whole house down on your heads.” policytensor.substack.com/p/why-the-us...

The government wants to Huawei any company that pursues a radical woke ideology like "no domestic mass surveillance" except it has no legal basis to do so and its rules for compliance are gobbledygook www.wired.com/story/anthro...

"long-range high-precision munitions are completely useless without targeting data: if you don’t know what you need to strike, high-precision is no longer an asset" bindinghook.com/data-really-...

"it’s a little disturbing how closely this discourse follows climate-debate patterns set down 20 years ago by the right. Either a man-made phenomenon isn’t happening or, if it is, it’s not important". open.substack.com/pub/transfor...

Problem about the loneliness epidemic is, it's everywhere except in representative survey data. Let's look at where the claim comes from. 1/

The EV debate in one picture: Even the smallest, most efficient gas car has a higher life-cycle footprint than the largest BEV. Size matters. Power matters. Powertrain matters more. This figure comes from this great paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This effort to curry favor by acting like an insult comic will be forgotten within the Trump administration in a day, but will make headlines and be remembered for decades in the countries being insulted.

Given Trump's mental health status, maybe newspapers are 4D chessing to let Trump believe he actually made that commitment. World order by performativity

A good explainer of what might happen domestically if Trump chooses the military option on #Greenland

"Restaurants are opening in DC" - Trump, 2026. "Restaurants are full" - Berlusconi, 2011, right before Italy's debt crisis.

1/Its easy to write off Trump as a mad king on Greenland. But it is as much about Court politics -- Trump and his insiders -- than simply a tantrum. Like any King, it is about makeup (hint: Estee Lauder). www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

"there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?" pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/3...

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

🧵 Thread on beautiful data centers: MareNostrum 4 (Barcelona SCC): Often called "the most beautiful data center in the world," this facility is housed inside the Torre Girona Chapel, a deconsecrated 19th-century church. When fully installed, it will have a peak performance of 13.9 Petaflops.

5/This is not a world marked by spheres of interest in the traditional sense because the focus is not about competing blocks. It is about extraction and dominance for the insider elite clique. www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/u...

Good point, also connected to the fact that Trump doesn't seem to have a particular plan for elections/democratic institutions. I feel neoconservatism was at least worried about what "good institutions" should be exported after intervention.

Best thing I’ve read this morning, from a human rights lawyer in Mexico. Translation is in the ALT-text.

A deluge of work on regime change after the 2003 invasion of Iraq yielded strong (and rare) agreement in IR: it doesn't work & has terrible consequences. @profdownes.bsky.social's book Catastrophic Success lays it out, but it's right there in the title. www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Rwanda-Albania model in full spree?

Now let’s see how many Iraq war "critics" are doubling down on Venezuela 😬

Im seeing discussions about consultations with congress, authorizations of force etc. I have to say this transcends any of what I would call sub constitutional technicalities. The president has gone to war with a foreign power and, it seems, kidnapped a foreign head of state on the basis of nothing.

you could say unbelievable, our European leaders will not condemn Trump's flagrant breach of international laws, but we've all watched them cower on US/Israel impunity in Gaza.

Venezuela is an important oil producer (~top15 in global ranking), with some of the world's largest proven oil reserves. Supply chocked last year but export to 🇨🇳 was picking up. The current uncertainty will be profitable to other fossil giants (🇷🇺) Unless, just an idea: we take renewables seriously

A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026 🧵

Wow, seems terrible. If only they put a Smart Businessman in with near-total, unconstitutional remit over federal spending, I bet he could find out and then stomp it all out easily!

"it can’t be overstated what an own-goal supporting this whole dumb thing was for Democrats, who not only helped Trump’s friends steal partial ownership of #TikTok, they saber-rattled over a ban during an election season where they desperately needed young people to vote".

I wrote about a conference marking the culmination of tens of millions of dollars of philanthropic spending to transcend neoliberalism. lpeproject.org/blog/post-ne...

This is excellent on the fundamental incompatibility between Starmer’s focus on “growth” and his determination to reduce the number of migrants. As Ben concludes, something will have to give and that’s likely to Starmer’s time in government app.prospectmagazine.co.uk/story/71810/...

2026 in 🇬🇧 trade policy: Labour Party’s undercurrents may well be leading to breaking taboos over post Brexit red lines in relation to EU. Read @davidheniguk.bsky.social for more (no 🔏)

Is Germany again dragging its feet and undermining a "simple" solution to the Ukraine financing problem, instead pushing the ubercomplex reparations loan? It's a tempting eurocrisis reflex that if only there were a will in Berlin, there would be a better way. But there isn't. Here is why:

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

Reposting this thread as to why I think, unfortunately, from the perspective of the EU and its Member States, UK EU membership or even encouraging the UK as it stands towards an application would be a gamble with big risks for them, in case of interest as it was buried in replies.

"That leaves one difficult solution and one bad solution for Europe. The difficult solution is to become more competitive and find new sources of value, as the US does with its technology industry... the bad solution: protectionism." on.ft.com/4p6j4Mv

Against Publishing: universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/... Preprints are read, shared, and cited, yet still dismissed as incomplete until blessed by a publisher. I argue that the true measure of scholarship lies in open exchange, not in the industry’s gatekeeping of what counts as published.