Watch: Macron Calls Free Speech Online 'Pure Bullshit'

   Just in case anybody in Europe had any remaining hopes for democracy! 

   For the last 5 years we have been arguing that as the economy of Europe accelerated its decline, the democratic institutions would not survive long. 

 

  Imagine, people may start having ideas, like kicking out the current crop of imbecile, incompetent bureaucrats!

Watch: Macron Calls Free Speech Online 'Pure Bullshit'

French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday said that the notion of free speech on social media platforms - is "pure bullshit," because algorithmically served content can lead to hate speech (such as the right to say his elderly wife has a penis and gives him black eyes).

The comments come after the US recently imposed bans on a former European official and pro-censorship activists for trying to police online speech, while US Secretary of State Marco Rubio justifies the moves as pushback against the "global censorship-industrial complex." 

Europe, including Germany and the UK, have been weighing social media bans for minors, a move that could impact critical advertising revenue for companies and platforms such as Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Snap, X, and others. 

"Having no clue about how their algorithm is made, how it’s tested, trained and where it will guide you — the democratic consequences of this bias could be huge," Macron said in New Delhi on Wednesday, Bloomberg reports.

"Some of them claim to be in favor of free speech — OK, we are in favor of free algorithms — totally transparent," he continued. "Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided to this so-called free speech, especially when it is guided from one hate speech to another."

Earlier this month, Macron said he expects a battle with the Trump administration over the bloc's regulation of digital services, and that countries such as France and Spain could be punished if they move forward with proposed social media bans for children. 

The Trump administration has vowed to oppose efforts by foreign nations to "censor our discourse" or otherwise limit free speech that has been used to disadvantage anti-immigration political parties, and that the US would foster "resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations." 

Vice President JD Vance, speaking last year at the Munich Security Conference, accused the EU of suppressing free speech and said Europe’s retreat from its fundamental values was a bigger threat to the continent than Russia or China. Calling Trump Washington’s “new sheriff,” Vance slammed attempts to moderate speech on social media.

Some EU officials were concerned that the US was using free speech as a pressure point to cow the bloc into softening its regulation of technology platforms, Bloomberg reported earlier. -Bloomberg

In response, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that freedom of speech ends with hate speech.

Hilariously, Bloomberg highlighted Elon Musk slamming Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, when he wrote "Dirty Sánchez is a tyrant and traitor to the people of Spain." 

As the FT's Stephen Bush opines regarding the UK's push:

Children are a lot like terrorists, and I don’t mean that as a commentary on their behaviour. I mean that being defined as one in a liberal democracy means that you lose at least some of the rights and freedoms that other citizens take for granted. Your freedom to marry who you want, to work or not work, to vote, to seek or not consent to medical procedures; these and many other rights granted to adults are curtailed for anyone the state defines as a child. 

Another way in which they are like terrorists is that invoking children is a good way to get people to stop asking difficult questions and arguing against policy proposals. One big reason why banning under-16s from social media is taking off as a policy idea is that it is more palatable than banning all of us. But it is far from clear that any of us are well served by algorithms that dish up addictive material, violent pornography or endless footage of atrocities. Nor is it clear that “protecting” the under-16s will not make 16, 17 and 18-year-olds more vulnerable. The large number of first-time internet users who are taken in by fraud or are susceptible to harmful behaviour online, suggests that all it may do is move the problem along. 

Starmer to add VPNs to UK’s “social media ban”

   The UK reminds us more and more of Communism. It is not that communism is repressive per se, but if people do not tow the line towards an ideal society, well you need to incentivize and coerce them into the right behavior, don't you? And soon enough you are in a repressive society. 

   Unfortunately, it looks more and more like the UK is way down on the slippery slope of repressive legislation and the less support the Government gets the more repressive it becomes. 

   Millions of cameras in London do little to limit crime and violence but somehow seems to be quite useful for the Government to identify and arrest disgruntled people. Likewise, the Internet is more and more scrutinized for "illegal" content which mostly consists of unhappy citizens posting angry videos or comments, much less often of gangs grooming children which seems to be more and more prevalent in the once again declining inner cities of the Midlands. 

   But what a repressive Government would go after, more than anything, is the freedom to post and communicate on the Internet, beyond the reach of the inquisitive all-seeing eyes of official software. The UK Government is not alone on this battlefront against freedom, it is just at the forefront, using more and more frivolous reasons to restrict more tightly what people can and cannot see on the Internet and especially what they can and cannot say. Now it is the turn of VPN. Next it will be AI (think about all the advice you can get to bypass any limitation), and eventually, you will only be allowed to log in on any site with a monitored device. That's unavoidable.    

  I see only one positive outcome of this race to the bottom, it is that soon enough, social networks and most useful sites will become distributed so that they become impossible to shut down. But that's for later. First repression or at least as much repression as the Brits can put up with!     

by Kit Knightly

In a statement yesterday, the office of the British Prime Minister announced plans to broaden the scope of the “social media ban” for minors that would see virtual private networks (VPNs) included in the future.

Speaking to “parents and carers” today, Sir Keir Starmer is expected to “make clear this government will act at pace to keep kids safe online as they navigate a digital world that did not exist a generation ago, and one that is shaped by powerful platforms, addictive design and fast-moving technologies.”

He will also be announcing potential “new powers” which will come into force after a “consultation” this summer.

The reference to VPNs is a single line in a long statement:

…as well as options to age restrict or limit children’s VPN use where it undermines safety protections…

…but it should be the most concerning to anyone who has been paying attention.

It has been said a thousand times, but always bears repeating, the “social media ban” deployed in the UK (and Australia, and Spain and…wherever) has nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with the state’s war on privacy.

Banning children from social media effectively means everyone who isn’t a child has to prove their age, which means verifying with ID or biometrics.

It’s a dagger to the heart of online privacy and anonymity, and that very much is the point.

VPNs offer an easy way of circumventing age-verification measures imposed by tyrannical governments worldwide, so it’s not surprising in the least that those same governments are rushing to close that loophole.

What would “restricting or limiting children’s VPN use” really mean, in practical terms?

The same as the social media ban.

The only way it can work is by adding identity verification to any VPN software – free or paid – you can download and install. Not just for the account holder, but for every user who shares the account and every device on the account.

It would effectively kill the entire point of having the VPN in the first place.

It remains to be seen if the VPN companies will cooperate, and it will be highly interesting to see how they react to the news. After all, they are essentially being told to tie their biggest selling point to a stone table and gut it with a flint knife.

And yet don’t be surprised if there is little-to-no resistance from the corporate side, after all there has been almost none from social media companies in general so far.

Resistance to this is going to have come from the ground up, as per usual, because they are laying building blocks for a digital prison all around us.

As Big Brother Watch said in their statement:

The ability of adults and children to enjoy the enhanced privacy provided by VPNs is a sign of a healthy liberal democracy. Starmer’s latest unfortunate announcement should worry everyone who values such a society remaining free.”

A skeptical approach to AI (Video - 50mn)

   I personally have a rather positive approach to AI. But here's below the other side of the coin. Anthony Aguirre explains why the race toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) may be fundamentally misaligned with human interests. And he may have a point. At the very least, we should progress carefully instead of investing blindly into a technology which negative aspects may far outweigh the positive ones. 

00:00 — Why AGI may be against human interests

03:50 — AI tool vs AGI: autonomy changes everything 

07:20 — “Why build something that can do everything a human can do?”  

12:40 — Autonomy is a bug, not a feature  

14:10 — Does AI alignment exist?  

15:40 — Digital copy after death: “It would look like you… but it wouldn’t be you” 

17:00 — Hinton’s idea: humans as the “second” intelligence  

19:50 — The next 5–10 years: loss of control? 

21:40 — Progress vs hype  

25:40 — Consciousness: no definition, but huge consequences  

29:50 — Free will, determinism, and physics  

41:30 — Aguirre’s framework lecture: entropy + control problem

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pp1P-bgjaQ

 

The Unsettling Truths The Epstein Files Reveal About Power And Privilege (Must read)

   The article below is essential to understand what is at stake with the Epstein papers. This is not about a network of pedophiles and perverts but about how "the system" truly operates behind the curtain beyond the laws and rules of society. 

  No wonder the Trump administration was not keen to dig deeper. The deeper you look, the worse it becomes, endangering the foundations of what we still call "Western democracies" but in reality seems to be nothing of the kind.  

Authored by Patrick Keeney via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The public fixation on the Epstein files has settled, predictably, on the most lurid elements of the story.

This is understandable.

Sexual exploitation, particularly of the young, is among the most corrosive of crimes, and the scale of Epstein’s abuse, as well as the apparent indifference of powerful institutions to it, demands moral outrage.

But to focus exclusively on the sexual scandal is to miss the deeper and more unsettling lesson the affair reveals.

Documents that were included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files are photographed on Jan. 2, 2026. Jon Elswick/AP Photo

What the Epstein files expose, above all, is the social and moral estrangement of American elites from the people they claim to govern.

Epstein was not merely a predator who gained access to power. He was a node within a closed world of wealth, influence, and immunity. The scandal is not that powerful people behaved badly in private—history shows many such examples—but that they did so with a confidence rooted in the belief they were insulated from the consequences of their behavior.

They moved through a transnational elite culture that had largely severed itself from ordinary moral constraints, legal accountability, and civic obligation. That culture did not merely tolerate Epstein but normalized him.

This echoes the point Christopher Lasch made decades ago, long before private islands and hedge-fund philanthropy became familiar symbols of elite excess. In his 1994 book “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that the modern American ruling classes had stopped seeing themselves as stewards of a shared national project. Instead, they increasingly saw themselves as a mobile, globalized caste, educated in the same institutions, moving through the same cities, governed by the same tastes, and primarily accountable only to each other. Citizenship was seen as a minor inconvenience. Nationhood and patriotism were just sentimental relics from less enlightened times.

The Epstein affair reads like a case study in Lasch’s thesis.

Here was an individual whose wealth was opaque, whose sources of income were rarely scrutinized, and whose social standing seemed immune to ordinary reputational risk. He functioned as a social broker among financiers, politicians, academics, royalty, and celebrities, many of whom publicly advocated policies of moral uplift, social justice, and global responsibility. Yet in private, they inhabited a world defined by indulgence, entitlement, and a contempt for limits.

Elite detachment today is not only economic but also existential, and it is hardly confined to Americans. The governing classes of advanced democracies increasingly inhabit a world defined by mobility, abstraction, and insulation from consequence. Their loyalties are professional rather than civic, global rather than national, and managerial rather than moral. They experience society less as a shared inheritance than as a set of problems to be administered at a distance. In such a world, attachment to place, memory, and common fate appears parochial, even suspect, while belonging itself is quietly redefined as an obstacle to progress.

Those who create policies affecting immigration, policing, education, public health, and national security rarely face the consequences themselves. They do not send their children to failing schools, live in high-crime neighborhoods, compete for scarce housing, or navigate broken public institutions. Their lives are shielded by wealth, location, private services, and increasingly by law itself.

The Epstein files sharpen this reality because they reveal not just hypocrisy, but impunity. Despite extensive documentation, repeated warnings, and credible testimony, accountability arrived slowly and incompletely. This is not because the crimes were ambiguous, but because the accused moved within a protected sphere where consequences were negotiable and enforcement discretionary. Justice, like morality, was something applied elsewhere for other people.

What enrages the public is not prurience, but recognition. The scandal resonates because it confirms a growing suspicion among ordinary people that there is one moral universe for the governing class and another for everyone else. Elites preach restraint, sustainability, and responsibility while living lives of extraordinary consumption and indulgence. They urge social sacrifice while exempting themselves from its costs. They speak the language of progress while practicing a refined form of decadence.

Lasch warned that such a ruling class would eventually forfeit legitimacy, not because of ideology, but because of character. A society cannot be governed indefinitely by people who do not believe they belong to it. When elites become tourists in their own countries, financially global, culturally unrooted, and morally untethered, their authority rests on little more than coercion and spectacle.

The Epstein files should therefore be read less as an aberration than as a symptom. They reveal a governing class that has lost the habits of self-restraint that once justified its power, and the sense of common fate that once bound leaders to citizens.

For many, the salient point of the Epstein files is the scandal. I think it is more accurately seen as a disclosure.

The danger is not merely that such elites are corrupt, but that they are bored. Bored with limits, bored with norms, bored with accountability, and ultimately bored with democracy itself. That boredom, Lasch understood, is the precondition of revolt, not by the masses, but by those who no longer feel answerable to them.

If the Epstein affair provokes lasting anger, it is because it crystallizes a truth many citizens already sense, that the people shaping the future live in a world apart, governed by different rules, and increasingly incapable of moral seriousness. No society can long endure that division without consequence.

The question is not whether further revelations will emerge. It is whether the public will finally insist that elites once again live under the same moral and civic conditions as those they presume to lead.

WhatsApp & YouTube Blocked In Russia, Telegram Throttled As State "Super-App" Falters

   If there is one subject on which governments across the East/West divide can agree on, it must be the subject of control of the Internet. 

   In North Korea, you simply cannot exit the country. What you have is a kind of national intranet. 

  In China, there is the Great Wall which filters and limits interactions. As far as I could experience, access from international hotels and companies is free but some applications are not available and many words are filtered. As in the case of AI, the "touch" can be light (DeepSeek) or insufferable (Kimi). 

  Following the example of Europe, Russia is also turning the screw and filtering access to YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram as explained in the article below.    

  What can be said? Yes, these applications can be used for propaganda and more ominously against the state. That much is true.

  As a libertarian, I believe that the best way to defend a state is to develop an efficient "immune system" based on truth and open information. 

  The opposite always ends up as a kind of joke, Pravda-like, the old communist newspaper that everybody read in the Soviet Union and absolutely nobody believed. 

  On this subject, your attitude will entirely depend on where you stand in respect of State vs Individual power. Chinese people, thanks to their education tend to err on the side of the state while Americans tend likewise to err on the side of the individual. The Russians and Europeans are mostly "socialist" in their thinking and consequently in-between.  

  From my experience of living in all these countries, your attitude and ideology is almost completely shaped by your education. This is why it is so difficult to build multi-national entities like the European Union. Greeks are simply not Germans and probably never will. Nor do they want to be!   

  So although it is easy to have an absolute opinion on the subject, for or against, in reality it depends on context and culture, time of growth and stress, economic expansion and contraction which is why attitude varies not only across cultures but also epochs.  

WhatsApp & YouTube Blocked In Russia, Telegram Throttled As State "Super-App" Falters

The West has been calling Russia's ever-tightening internet regulations on its citizenry a "digital Iron Curtain". Already over a period of months and years of the Ukraine war, various popular US-based social media apps have been throttled and even banned, but this week things have escalated with YouTube and WhatsApp being blocked in Russia:

Russia's internet regulator Roskomnadzor has removed"youtube.com" from its DNS (Domain Name System) servers. If a user tries to access the site directly without a VPN (Virtual Private Network), their router can no longer assign the address to its IP address.

This means that You Tube is no longer accessible in Russia. The WhatsApp domain has also disappeared from Roskomnadzor's servers. The Russian government has also launched a campaign against the messenger app Telegram, leading analysts to say Roskomnadzor is cracking down on platforms beyond its control.

But perhaps even more impactful - in terms of Russians quickly getting news, information, and public statements (even from their own government channels) - is the new move to throttle and block Telegram.

An interesting theory, especially in the wake of the shocking Wagner mutiny of 2023...

Russia’s state media watchdog Roskomnadzor has tightened the screws on Telegram, accusing the messaging giant of failing to curb fraud and safeguard user data, which ironically is similar to what the French government accused the company of when it famously detained billionaire Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov.

The platform has an estimated over 93 million Russian users, which is more than 60% of the total population, but the Kremlin hopes to replicate with its state-backed messenger, Max. The all-in-one 'super-app' has been described in the following:

Max, a state-backed messenger developed by VK, is being positioned as a patriotic alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram — platforms that in recent weeks have suffered complete or partial disruptions to voice and video calls across the country.

Max is further being dubbed a "state app":

Beyond the glitzy marketing, Max is built to serve a political purpose. Officials want it integrated with the state services portal Gosuslugi via the Unified Identification and Authentication System (ESIA). That would allow citizens to log into government platforms, pay utility bills or sign documents directly through the app, in effect making Max a digital gateway to basic civil services.

But at a government commission meeting in early August, the Federal Security Service (FSB) initially blocked Max's immediate connection to ESIA, citing the risk of personal data leaks. According to IT industry sources cited by Russian media, the FSB submitted a multi-page list of requirements ranging from certified encryption systems to source code audits. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Grigorenko, who oversees the project, voiced similar concerns.

BBC has pointed out: "Moscow has made extensive efforts to push Russians to its state-developed Max app, which critics say lacks end-to-end encryption."

As for Telegram, it's loss will be huge for Russians, given that for starters every major Russian media outlet operates a Telegram channel, some even publishing there exclusively.

Major state and legacy outlets including RIA Novosti, TASS, RBC, Interfax, and Kommersant maintain large, highly active channels. In border regions like Belgorod, battered by power outages and municipal disruptions from Ukrainian strikes, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov uses Telegram to deliver updates directly to residents.

The same goes for many oblasts across Russia's south which have remained a frontline of sorts when it comes to cross-border attacks out of Ukraine.

Moskva News Agency

The other problem in getting rid of Telegram is that Russia's Defense Ministry pushes near-daily battlefield briefings, combat footage, and soldier interviews to its several hundreds of thousands of followers. So clearly any kind of major 'transition' - as is now apparently being forced on the population, won't come easy.

The Kremlin has long warned against Western intelligence infiltration and data exploitation especially via US-based platforms. It has also long battled what it deems 'propaganda' via content on these apps. But to some degree they are also mediums where Russian and Ukrainian officials can directly address the other side, serving the cause of public diplomacy, or at least clarifying each's position.

CHECKMATE: 50 Nations Announce Silver Cartel, China Crashes Price & Doubles Reserves (Video - 25mn)

   We are at war although most people do not realize this. 

   In a way, this was unavoidable. Since the 1970s we knew that by the early 2020s there would not be enough resources for the 8.5+ billion people on Earth. Increased productivity should have solved the problem but the Jevons Paradox which states that when we reduce the price of goods thanks to increased productivity, people paradoxically start consuming more negating the benefits. So in the end, we ended up with a zero sum game where increased consumption by one party necessarily decreases consumption by other parties. Today, the apple pie is still growing but not as fast as our appetite and soon it may start shrinking.   

   Nowhere will this be more obvious than for raw material, although water and agricultural land are close seconds. And it is consequently what we are witnessing currently with rare earth and the silver market where East and West are competing for dwindling resources. (See video below)

   This is why the Trump Administration so desperately wants to "acquire" new land and resources, be they in Venezuela, Greenland or Canada. Only such a move can guaranty a new round of investment and economic growth.   

   The alternative is Europe: Rhetoric with no action. Europe will rearm to confront Russia, increase investment to compete with the US and China while doubling down on outrageously expensive Green technology and of course paying for the legions of retirees and the migrants flooding in to replace them. Too bad that each Euro can only be used once and that the debt is already so high. It would have been useful to have the current budget X5. But they don't. So to convince people that sacrifices are necessary and belts will have to be tightened, the war in Ukraine must go on. For this reason alone, the war will not end anytime soon.   

   As long as Europe is at war, they are in a war economy and budgets are irrelevant. The day the war ends, Europe stares bankruptcy in the face. How could this be allowed to happen? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJTv52IuinY