Beyond the myth, here's a great overview of the Dark Web. Not as dark as it looks once you shine a light on it. If you've ever used Thor, then you know the entrance. Silk Road, you know how deep it goes.
Eventually, as the laws become more and more restrictive, most of the web will become "dark" which in practical terms means changing from centralized to distributed.
Complete DARK WEB Explained: Crime, Cybersecurity & the Hidden Internet
It is breaking, no doubts but it is not completely broken yet, and when it finally breaks, nothing good will happen until a new system is put in place which could take decades, not years.
In between, expect the current mess to get worse, with local islands of stability shrinking while the global supply chain sputter. In this respect, America remains in a strong position as a continent-country but the dollar not so much.
The video is informative and well built. Worth the 20mn to understand the deeper cranks of the international financial mechanism currently in place. Why it cannot easily be replaced and why nevertheless it is falling apart.
Fascinating. True or not on the US side, Europe is toast!
PS: I am not at all convinced about the "smart" part of the US strategy. Some elements seem to be, others are simply hubris and over-reach. Conversely, on the European side, absolutely nothing seems "smart". The best advice would probably be to stop digging while they can but we are probably long past that point. The "investment" in Ukraine is already so large that once the "project" fails, both NATO and the EU soon after may go belly up.
by Matthew Andersson via AmericanThinker.com,
Critics may be misreading the recent NATO summit.
It looks to them as if the U.S. is unilaterally siding with Europe against Russia.
President Trump is smarter: he knows who has the winning hand, and his direct communications with his peers, Xi and Putin, are not always public.
President Trump's earliest critical instincts toward the EU and NATO still hold. While the U.S. is currently extending them some diplomatic courtesy and limited support, Europe is ultimately surrounded on all sides by powers that make it irrelevant in global influence terms. Europe has put itself into this predicament, due to its own domestic economic decline from bad policy choices. It is using war as a way to revive its fortunes. Its odds are long.
The EU is surrounded economically by the U.S. to the west; by Russia and China to the east, by a vast Arctic territory to the north that it cannot control, and by India and a rising Middle East power, Israel, to the south. Europe has no strategic maneuvering room. It has limited prospects to reemerge as a serious power, and NATO is long past relevancy, and solvency.
Since his first term, President Trump has been right about Russia, and NATO.
Being “right” means understanding Russia’s long-term economic and trade importance, and appreciating its military prowess. Along with China and the U.S., it makes up the superpower triad. Being right also means he understands that the days are numbered for the EU and NATO, and that the world has changed without them.
After the Anchorage meeting with President Trump, President Putin invited his counterpart to Moscow: Trump's guarded reply was a reminder that productive relations may be welcome by both leaders, but each is also operating in and surrounded by a complex defense and foreign affairs tradition that doesn’t trust the other side. Some have called this the “crucible of belief,” and past experience is hard to overcome. Change will happen slowly.
Europe is part of that shared Eurasian landmass, and its security, but “Europe” is not a unified, single country. Even within its own limited Western sphere, it has been a region constantly engaged in rivalry and war. There was a period after Napoleon — roughly a hundred years — where relative peace was enjoyed. But the 20th century has been just the opposite: a nearly unbroken chain of war — regional, revolutionary, world, and cold — and now, a new 21st century war is increasingly seen as inevitable.
There are many political, social, and institutional explanations, but economic decline is at the heart of why the EU is determined to provoke Russia (and why it is pleading before the U.S.).
If Germany, France and the U.K. were strongly led, however, with robust domestic industrial growth, controlled borders via immigration, and with less external energy dependence, if not facing domestic energy bankruptcy, such a conflict would not be necessary, or given any serious consideration.
In recent history, one only has to review Angela Merkel’s disastrous “green energy” policy, deindustrialization, open borders, and the idling of German nuclear power, as a strong explanation. She fell completely for naive progressive ideology which asserts that oil no longer matters.
But for President Trump, the U.S. was going down the same path.
France and the U.K. are just as bad in their string of weak leaders, uncontrolled borders, domestic violence from cultures foreign to their own, and deindustrialization and outsourcing. It is little wonder that Europe’s “leaders” are now economically trapped, and are turning to war as a desperate form of economic recovery.
NATO’s putative head, Mark Rutte, was recently in the White House, pitching for war and U.S. financial backing, with slides and charts that looked more like a failed business recovery plan. The old saying “be careful what you ask for” may be relevant, as NATO is functioning as a proxy for Western Europe, and looking to the U.S. as its pre-bankruptcy sponsor. President Trump has seen this before.
There are obviously many other interests and players driving this strategy, but German-French-British decline may be the largest factor. Scandinavia is somewhat immune, especially Norway with its natural resources and capital, but it is susceptible to European political and policy contamination.
Economic historian Walt Rostow, a White House national security advisor to U.S. presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, provided a powerful economic model that goes a long way to partly explain why Eurasia, and Europe, have always been unstable and in conflict. His “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,” maps how countries grow in relative stages of maturity.
But it also predicts how countries will turn to war when those stages are challenged, interrupted, or allowed through poor leadership, or state interference, to stagnate or backslide. Europe has slid backwards from an advanced industrial and colonial power, to an effective open border welfare state, led by a weak political class with no plans, ideas, commitment, or national loyalties.
Russia’s Kremlin has recently announced that its Special Military Operation in Ukraine has been converted to formal war. While predicting its development is problematic, Russia's power advantage is so overwhelming that NATO can only been seen as engaging in effective suicide. Given Europe’s cultural tendency to existentialist gloom, perhaps it is understandable.
When war finally stops, as it must, it usually results in new borders, relationships, alliances, and deals being formed. NATO and Europe seem to be counting on the chaos of war as a path out of their own weakness.
The U.S. may lend some technical military support to them as a simple matter of arms sales, but this may be their own self-inflicted, poisoned chalice.
And in the end, the U.S., Russia, and China will simply resume their global dominance and power alliance. The EU will likely collapse or shrink; NATO will finally be decommissioned, and the old Atlantic Alliance will bypass Europe and align economically with Eurasia’s east and south — because that is where the power is.
That is what the stages of growth predict.
The EU is also going to be further eclipsed commercially and militarily and by a rising Israel-dominated Middle East, because they know what they want, they have a plan, and they know how to fight. European bureaucrats like Rutte, Macron, Merz, and von der Leyen do not, and face an interesting fate when they finally realize that this battle is likely their last political stand.
The citizens of Europe may be relieved.
A very interesting interview of Col Macgregor on what is going on in the Middle East currently and what we should expect going forward. (Nothing good!)
The US is now a declining empire and as they ALL do in history, before retreating, they always lash out on weaker powers until they are broke and suddenly the game is over. This is what we are witnessing in the Middle East right now and unfortunately this will continue until the music stops.
The area around the Hormuz Strait on the Iran side alone is larger than Vietnam where the US lost 55,000 soldiers and at some stage had over 500,000 involved. Qshem island alone right in the middle of the strait is larger than Okinawa which cost the lives of 18,000 US soldiers in 1945. Iran cannot be crushed with bombs alone. The country is far too big at over 2M square kilometers nor does the US has the resources for a ground operation. The Kharg Island is 800 km inside the Gulf. And the temperatures are hovering close to 50C right now.
Both Bahrain and Kuwait are committing suicide. These are countries with no history whatsoever which at some stage or another belonged to different empires, the latest being the Turks and the British. You would expect them to want to negotiate instead of going for broke.
And now of course the huge funeral in Iran last week displayed the support of the population for the regime which like it or not the Iranians can now leverage against the Americans.
A better display of incompetence by the Trump administration would be hard to imagine. Well played Mr Trump! I share the pessimism of Col Macgregor: Trump will most probably not complete his mandate. (which by the way will change very little!)
BREAKING: BAHRAIN & KUWAIT JUST STRUCK IRAN - w/ Col. Macgregor
This may be the worst crime in recent history and no reckoning whatsoever. The medical establishment is so deeply involved in this scandal that no acknowledgement is possible without overturning the medical professional cart.
Could it be that what they call "science" is actually deeply biased? That they keep the data that fit the narrative and throw away the rest? Science without conscience but fully subservient to political pressure?
Ed Dowd has been very active denouncing bad data and lousy statistical methods, giving us below an accurate assessment of the recent "pandemic" which in the end simply wasn't one except for the headlines.
by Ed Dowd
Over the last several years I have been posting nonstop on X about the same nightmares we’ve been living through…the COVID psyop, the experimental mRNA shots, the mandates that destroyed lives, the injuries, the excess deaths, and the relentless propaganda machine that tried to silence anyone who noticed the bodies piling up. I have watched it all in real time: the fear porn, the goalpost moving, the “safe and effective” lies repeated like gospel while real-world data told a different story.
Now we have fresh, documented revelations that should have blown the lid off of everything. Instead? Crickets from the media and, more disappointingly, from the current administration that promised accountability.
Senator Ron Johnson dropped another devastating report and hearing in late April 2026: “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” Internal records show FDA officials knew their VAERS monitoring was inadequate to say least. They had better data-mining tools ready to flag clear safety signals: cardiac deaths, strokes, pulmonary issues, Bell’s palsy but they chose not to use them. Why? To avoid “vaccine hesitancy.”
This was not screw-up territory. It was deliberate. Vaccine-injured people sat across from Peter Marks and other top FDA brass begging for acknowledgment. They got stonewalled. Johnson rightly calls this one of the biggest scandals in his decades in public service. Then in early June he held another hearing exposing potential cancer links to the mRNA shots and the systematic suppression of critical studies. Same playbook: inconvenient science gets buried or attacked.
Around the same time, Tulsi Gabbard, in one of her final moves as DNI, declassified documents laying out Fauci’s role in funding gain-of-function research at Wuhan, the lab-leak cover-up, the intelligence manipulation, and the retaliation against truth-tellers. Millions of taxpayer dollars funneled into risky biolabs, followed by the full narrative-control machine kicking in to blame nature instead of the obvious.
These are not anonymous X threads. This is a sitting Senator with subpoena power and the former Director of National Intelligence dropping official records.
So where is the firestorm? Where are the front-page exposés, the prime-time specials, the demands for real hearings and prosecutions? In 1976 the swine flu vaccine was pulled after 25 deaths and 500 cases of Guillain Barre Syndrome. In the covid shot era we have approximately 39,000 deaths reported to VAERS following the shot. Apparently lives got cheaper over the last 50 years. The legacy media has mostly ignored it, downplayed it, or run the usual “right-wing conspiracy” dismissals. Paid to lie… and crickets on recent FDA COVID vax revelations. Their complicity is not an understatement, rather it was essential to the entire psyop.
Even more frustrating is the relative silence from the current Trump administration. After years of vowing to expose the lies and drain the swamp on the pandemic response, these revelations land and… not much follow-through. No aggressive push for accountability. No sustained public reckoning for the officials who covered up safety signals or manipulated the origins story. That silence hits hard. Additionally the vaccines are still on the market and this administration is now complicit. What an epic failure!
A lot of us did not need Johnson’s reports or Gabbard’s declassifications to see the fraud. Back in 2022 and 2023, my team at Phinance Technologies was already digging into the data and uncovering the real narrative through our Humanity Projects. We analyzed excess deaths, disability surges, absence rates, and the human and economic costs of mass inoculations when almost no one else wanted to touch it. Check out the full body of work here: Humanity Projects
What we found through cold, hard numbers lined up with what the bodies on the ground were showing. We weren’t surprised by the latest revelations from Senator Johnson. We had been sounding the alarm years earlier, while getting labeled conspiracy theorists for it.
We watched the institutionally well-established benefits of natural immunity get summarily dismissed and memory holed. We saw “two weeks to flatten the curve” turn into endless boosters for the compliant and job losses for the unvaccinated. We saw friends and family injured or worse, then told it was “rare,” “coincidence,” or “misinformation.” Those of us who protested the mandates and the experimental mRNA shots were labeled Russian disinformation, dangerous spreaders, even domestic terrorists. It did not stick, but they tried.
For those who saw through the propaganda early, resisted it, and watched peers fall for it our worldview has forever changed. The greatest cover-up ever. But despite the MSM blackout, word has gotten out through underground channels, thanks in no small part to Senator Ron Johnson and others who refused to let subject die.
The betrayal runs deep. These new revelations do not surprise us but rather they confirm what the data and our own eyes showed years ago. They lied. They knew they were lying. They censored, gaslit, and destroyed lives to protect the narrative. Many institutions including public health, intelligence, media, Big Pharma were all in on it and still propagating the lies today.
That loss of trust is profound and permanent for millions of us. We no longer default to believing official statements. We demand primary data. We assume self-preservation and narrative control from authorities until proven otherwise. The COVID era did not just damage credibility on one issue instead it shattered how an entire group of people view government, “experts,” and authority. “Doing your own research” proved to be a critical lifesaver.
The people in authority still defending the garbage jab or pretending none of this matters can keep taking their 12 boosters (dirty little secret… they are not). The rest of us are done. We are profoundly changed. More skeptical. More data driven. Less willing to comply. Team Humanity was born out of this mess.
The window for real accountability is slamming shut. Even if these official revelations get memory-holed, the lesson is clear: they never planned to come clean. They want us to forget and move on to the next crisis.
I am not forgetting. And from what I see every day, millions are not either. As time rolls forward and the cognitive dissonance of those who took the vaccine wears off…our numbers will continue to grow.
As we discussed some months ago, “Civilizations Die from Suicide, Not From Murder” The European Union is probably currently the best possible test case of this idea!
They also passed a law yesterday to control what is being said on Social Medias. The Europeans are now safe!
Of course they won't and this is the tragedy of our time and of democracy.
There are two aspects to these conflicts with Iran and Russia:
1 - Europe and the US as institutions are less and less democratic in the way they operate which unfortunately is an intrinsic and "normal" evolution of democracy. Conversely and paradoxically, if people can vote freely, they end up being represented by people who look like them i.e. Imbeciles! to paraphrase H. L. Mencken. Two complementary and opposite trends which are almost exactly what we are witnessing currently concerning the evolution of our political systems in Western countries.
2 - But more importantly, behind the mess and lack of apparent strategy, there is an insidious general direction born from what power does to lesser minds: Hubris and remote control. Hubris is readily visible in each and every sentence uttered by these leaders drunk with powers they are unfit to weld. Remote control is what emerges when the fog clears and the motives of their actions become more evident.
Let's look at the recent bombing of Iran. What the US bombed were not targets around the Gulf which would make sense according to their accusations that Iran is hindering passage of super-tankers in the Gulf but bridges on rail tracks belonging to the Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路 Yīdài Yīlù in Chinese). Same for Russia, what Ukraine, with the involvement of Europe, bombed were not facilities on the front or supporting the war, but a oil refinery in the city of Omsk, nearly 2,500 km away from the war, in a clear effort to weaken the industrial capacity of the country. These actions make no sense locally but do within the broader conflict of interest between East and West.
And this is why it is so dangerous because eventually, this will have to be answered in kind whence the warning of Russia. We are truly teetering on the edge of World War 3.
Another night has passed, and the usual major Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil and facilities and tankers have occurred, this time impacting at least three Russian regions, authorities said Thursday. Strikes hit oil depots in the Stavropol and Tver regions, as well as an oil pumping station in the republic of Bashkortostan and a marine loading terminal in the Rostov region - along with other reported impacts, Amsterdam-based Moscow Times reports.
During this week's NATO summit, Ukraine's President Zelensky was touting his country's drone capabilities as among the best in the world, and that now, essentially no place is safe in Russia.
This was perhaps on display Monday, when long-range drones apparently set a new distance record in striking a sprawling oil refinery in the city of Omsk in western Siberia
"Today, our long-range sanctions reached the oil refinery in Omsk – nearly 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine," Zelensky had announced in a nightly address soon after the attack.
"Upgraded Fire Point drones have put Siberia within reach of Ukrainian precision. This is a significant blow to Russia’s oil economy and an important achievement for the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Zelensky said.
The messaging from NATO leaders gathered in Ankara had clearly been one of support. For example, President Trump had commented, "It's an escalation but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end [of the war]."
Trump also said, "We have a lot of pressure on President Putin. I don’t think he likes what’s going on." He added: "But I talked to President Putin a lot. He wants to end the war."
Following these developments, the Kremlin is freshly warning Western strategists to 'stop and think' before leading the world to the brink of disaster by confronting nuclear-armed Russia.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated Thursday, "European elites are positioning themselves as leaders in the confrontation between the 'collective West' and our country," Zakharova said.
The Russians obviously knew Trump approved giving Ukraine targeting intel for deep strikes on Ru energy. Russia answered it this year by providing Iran targeting intel on US bases, radars & infrastructure. Iran defeated the US. Quite a brilliant tradeoff.https://t.co/X7vfRaExNO
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) July 8, 2026
"They likely don't realize that all this entails not only creating threats and problems for Russia, but also a significant depletion of resources and the creation of hotbeds of military tension within Europe itself," she added.
She also underscored how pursuing peace with Russia was glaringly absent NATO proceedings at the Turkey summit. "A constructive agenda remains a low priority for NATO," the Kremlin spokesperson continued.
"It's a shame that if NATO strategists had stopped and reflected, they might not have made such irresponsible decisions that could lead to disaster not only for the alliance, but for the entire world," she said.
According to more of her comments via English-language state publications:
The Russian spokeswoman also took aim at NATO's pledge to provide $80 billion in military aid to Ukraine in 2027, while ignoring mounting socio-economic problems across the continent. She accused the alliance of treating Ukrainians as "expendable material for their geopolitical ambitions.""In fact, the current European elites are positioning themselves for leadership positions in the confrontation with our country," she stated.
Some European officials actually voiced something similar, but they remain in a tiny minority:
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš:
— Clash Report (@clashreport) July 8, 2026
Everyone is talking about war, everyone is talking about rearmament, and yesterday I didn't hear the word "peace" even once. pic.twitter.com/KNfyVDzE6A
Prominent Russian writer and political philosopher Alexander Dugin has also commented, "The summit of NATO is a clear sign of all spectrum escalation. The growth of Russophobia and new phase of war against Iran."
Indeed both the Ukraine and Iran conflict theatres are growing hotter once again, and there's simultaneous escalation. Dugin has also warned that the "MoU is over. The new phase of the war begins. The escalation with Russia is going to grow."
