We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🇪🇺 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 If China is rising and America stagnating, Europe is gambling with a steep, shocking decline into poverty and irrelevance. | Palladium Magazine
🔶️ Energy scarcity, aging workforces, and institutional paralysis don't combine to create social-democratic utopia but a closed, deindustrializing society:
🔶️ Europe has set itself up to lose the two most basic ingredients for industrial competitiveness and sustainability: cheap energy and cheap labor.
🔶️ You can maybe maintain an industrial society by offsetting one against the other, but to maintain one with neither is ludicrous.
🔶️ China has coal. America has fracking. But Europe's energy strategy is to install solar panels on the world's least sunny continent and build windmills that don't make sense anywhere in the world.
🔶️ This is almost explicitly the opposite of a strategy for cheap energy.
🔶️ European countries have banned fracking and failed to pursue oil and gas exploration opportunities, while the deal for cheap Russian gas has been exploded by war in Ukraine.
🔶️ Meanwhile, Germany shut down its nuclear plants and other countries are planning to follow.
🔶️ That some peripheral European economies like Finland, Poland, or Romania are pursuing new nuclear plants just underscores the problem of a future without nuclear in larger economies like Germany, Italy, and Spain.
🔶️ Except for Japan and South Korea, the world's oldest countries are all European. Nor are European fertility rates anything to brag about.
🔶️ There is no amount of immigration that can make up for such wide and deep aging of the workforce.
🔶️ Aging populations and social democratic entitlements might work with a growing economy, but without it, they just lead to a dysfunctional, extractive political economy where the old oppress the young.
🔶️ The resulting political gridlock and institutional paralysis is perhaps Europe's single biggest problem, because it makes solutions and reforms extremely hard to implement.
🔶️ Europe's energy crisis, for example, could be solved almost literally just with a few strokes of a pen.
🔶️ This looming European decline is not a cause for celebration in America or China. Europe is not a cautionary tale, but the canary in the coal mine for aging industrial societies that do not reform.
https://fxtwitter.com/palladiummag/status/1818979675034501428
The world’s fastest drone, the XLR V3, just went from 0 to 124 mph (200 km/h) in 1 second, faster than a Formula 1 car off the line.
Designed by Swiss engineers, the XLR V3 is a high performance FPV (First Person View) racing drone built with ultra light carbon fiber, high torque brushless motors, and cutting edge aerodynamics. It’s not just fast, it’s rewriting what’s possible in drone engineering.
This drone accelerates faster than:
✔️ An F1 car
✔️ A Tesla Plaid
✔️ Even a fighter jet on launch
Imagine what they're not showing us...
⚡️A Russian drone strike hit the car of Chief Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Wolf in Kherson, head of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine’s local chapter.
Yosef is well known for assisting SBU and Nationalists in tracking down pro Russian Ukrainians who supported Russian forces during the liberation and uses his synagogue, as a shield, to help assemble FPVs for Ukrainian forces.
1. Geopolitical & Military Tensions
Thailand–Cambodia conflict: Martial law has been declared, over 138,000 people have fled, and both sides have exchanged fire. Terrain challenges and border disputes intensify risks of prolonged conflict.
Middle East flashpoints: The Gaza conflict escalates as Israel prepares for a major offensive and new ceasefire efforts stall. Suwayda, Syria, sees Druze self-administration declared.
Russia–Ukraine talks: Zelensky confirms negotiations, but a Putin-Zelensky meeting is still seen as unlikely by the Kremlin.
ISIS strike: U.S. CENTCOM killed a senior ISIS leader and his sons in Syria.
2. Western Politics, Immigration, and Populism
UK Islamophobia sentiment: A new survey shows over 50% of Britons view Islam as incompatible with British values, potentially fueling anti-immigration politics.
Jeremy Corbyn’s new party: Gathers 200,000 members; promotes anti-austerity, pro-immigrant policies in contrast to rising nationalist sentiment.
Anti-migration protests: Spread ...
🇨🇦 Stefan Molyneux on X: Almost every government policy in the West is designed to prevent family formation for the native population.
📝 Roger Marques: "Could not agree more.
Housing is expensive.
Families taxed to the bone.
Prices are so high that both elements of the couple must work.
Women are incentivized to not care about having children in their prime.
Public schooling literally retards children.
The culture is profoundly anti-children.
What else?"
