Ukraine Is Defending Itself With Money Europe Doesn't Have

   What happens when you lose a war? Europe is about to learn the lesson the hard way. Even to the least acute observers at the EU, it must now be obvious that the US is distancing itself from the war in Ukraine and that without support, Europe simply cannot sustain such a major war in the long term.

  Europe will also discover, that countries have no "friends" and that consequently, everybody will pounce on the weakened continent when the opportunity arise. It should therefore say goodbye to Greenland, but also to all the remaining colonies splattered around the world as well as the pretense of "grandeur", such as the G7 and other old uni-polar leftover of the 20th Century. The last but most important subject is of course the Euro...   

  This happened in almost exactly the same terms 2,000 years ago when Rome replaced Greece as the main power around the Mediterranean Sea. Greece was slowly getting weaker and then suddenly it was no more. Are we approaching such a denouement at Davos?   

Ukraine Is Defending Itself With Money Europe Doesn't Have

The ugly truth is that an end of the Ukraine war may have as devastating economic and political consequences for Europe as its continuance...

Ukraine already faces a $63 billion U.S. dollar funding shortfall in 2026 and I would be surprised if this figure doesn’t increase if the war continues. Ukraine’s massive fiscal splurge is driven by two factors

• The enormous cost of maintaining a standing army of almost one million people;

• The vast expense of importing weapons from the west to fight the war.

Weapon purchases are not sources of productive investment as they are literally burned in the heat of battle.

The same, of course, is true for Russia.

Both countries saw reducing economic growth in 2025, with Ukraine’s at 2.1% and 1.5%.

And, western pundits would point to this as evidence that Ukraine’s economy is performing better.

But the opposite is true.

Russia’s economy is around twelve times larger than Ukraine’s nominally and just over ten times larger when you look at GDP using purchasing power parity.

You can see this in the defense spending numbers.

Russia spent a record $143 billion on defense in 2025 compared to around $60 billion for Ukraine, so around 2.3 times higher. Yet, Russian defense spending amounted to just 6.3% of its GDP whereas for Ukraine it was 31.7%. So, massive spending on defense is a much less pivotal issue for Russia in terms of its economic fortunes.

Defense spending represents a far smaller proportion of total economic activity than it does for Ukraine. And Russia can afford to pay for its defense needs with its own finances, while Ukraine is entirely dependent on money from western donors to keep the war going.

Despite the massive cost of war, Russia ran a fiscal deficit of just 1.7% of GDP in 2025.

That is still well below the EU fiscal rule of 3% of GDP with some countries like France and Poland having deficits at or more than double that figure.

Ukraine’s fiscal deficit on the other hand was around 20% of GDP.

That gap had to be filled by foreign funding as it has debt of 107% of GDP and is cut off from foreign lending.

So, hence the EU stepping up with a loan of 90 billion Euros, two thirds of which is earmarked for defense.

Russia on the other hand has debt of around 15% of GDP and doesn’t really need to borrow heavily to keep its war effort afloat. By the way, 15% of GDP is far lower than the U.S. or any European nation, many of which, like Ukraine, have debt levels of over 100% of GDP.

Ukraine is defending itself with money Europe doesn’t have.

Despite the shock of sanctions, Russia doesn’t have to break the bank nor boost its lending significantly.

This also means that when the war eventually ends, Russia will be able to make the economic transition back to peace in a less painless way.

Russia will be under no pressure to impose massive cuts to defense spending to live within its means and can instead do so gradually.

Ukraine on the other hand faces a massive financial cliff edge when the war ends.

Ukrainian economic growth according to the OECD is set to fall further to 1.7% in 2027 if the war continues.

And that assumes continued large injections of capital from outside countries. In 2025, Ukrainian defence spending made up 31.1% of Ukrainian GDP, and two thirds of state budgetary expenditure. None of that spending goes into improving Ukraine’s weak economy.

With all of the support that it receives, Ukraine’s GDP in 2025 amounted to just under $210 billion according to the IMF.

Bear in mind here that Ukraine received $52.4 billion in external financing in 2025, or around one quarter of its GDP at the end of the year.

Take away foreign funding and Ukraine suddenly sees its economy shrink by over 20%.

Or, put it another way, take away the war and Ukraine sees its economy shrink by over 20%.

Russia simply does not face the same problem.

Rather, an end to the war may help Russia to get inflation – perhaps its biggest economic challenge – under control as economic activity returns to its normal rhythm.

But still the question arises, how come Ukraine has grown so little when it received so much foreign funding?

One big reason is that Ukraine recorded a trade deficit of $30 billion over the same period, a record according to the National Bank of Ukraine.

So, $52 billion in foreign money came into Ukraine during the year and $30 billion went straight back out again.

Because Ukraine’s massive trade deficit is fuelled by two things.

• First, a huge increase in the import of weapons from western suppliers which have doubled since 2022, not least as they are no longer being provided free of charge.

• Second, Ukraine has increased its imports of natural resources, in particular a massive increase in gas imports, because domestic production has been hit hard by the war. Coal is another area, as Russia has swallowed up important coal mines in the Donbas.

Not all of that deficit in trade will be recoverable even after the war ends, even if Ukraine was able to reduce the overall size of its trade deficit.

By comparison, Russia’s surplus of trade in goods was already at over $100 billion by October 2025, although the overall trade picture is narrower, at around $36 billion because of a significant deficit in services trade, including from large numbers of Russians who have moved overseas since the war started.

An end to the war, if anything, may allow Russia’s trade surpluses to grow further. A future relaxation on the import of natural resources into Europe could mean that Russia benefited from already increased trade with Asia and renewed trade with Europe.

In any case, the consistent surpluses that Russia pulls in both help shore up economic growth and foreign exchange reserves, which in 2025 grew by over $135 billion to a whopping $734 billion.

And just to be clear, Russia put their reserve funds almost completely into gold which now stand at over $310 billion.

One big reason for Russia storing its reserves in gold is to keep them clear of the stealing hands of western bureaucrats, who froze around $300 billion in reserves at the start of the war.

This means that Russia has a surplus of $434 billion in foreign exchange reserves which is almost completely insulated from western expropriation. The $10 billion rise in foreign currency reserves in 2025 was undoubtedly caused by an accumulation of reserves in non-dollar, Euro and sterling currencies, suggesting the move to greater trade in Chinese Yuan and Indian rupees.

An end to the war may at some point lead to the unfreezing of immobilised Russian assets in the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Ukraine’s reserve position is also comparatively strong, at $57.3 billion at the start of 2026, a record figure. However, that rise is completely down to inflows of foreign capital to fund the war effort. An end to the war would likely shrink Ukraine’s reserves as its stubborn trade deficit was not being offset by foreign inflows of funds as they had been during war.

But it’s the sudden and shocking loss of foreign funding that accompanies an end to the war which will cause Ukraine’s economy to shrink dramatically.

But fear not, Europe is determined that Ukraine maintain an army of 800,000 personnel when the war ends. However, this seems more about economic survival than about security.

Ukraine would not be able to pay for such as large army with its own money, as it doesn’t have any money. So, once again, Europe will be forced to step in to meet Ukraine’s financing needs to pay the salaries of soldiers who are no longer in war fighting mode.

This will lead to debt and taxes rising in Europe, according to a recent Kiel Institute study. But it will also lead to a loss of business for European defense firms. Because peace time will inevitably mean a sharp drop in the munitions and military material being burned on a daily basis in the fog of war.

Two thirds of the EU’s recently 90 billion Euro loan to Ukraine will be spent on military support, including weaponry. That has sparked an argument between Germany and France over a proposed ‘buy European’ clause, with France wanting to prevent Ukrainian purchases of U.S. equipment. Perhaps with one eye on the future, the French in typical fashion, are trying to ensure that their firms get a decent share of what could amount to dwindling Ukrainian orders for weapons.

A bit like the French army, Europe is reversing itself inevitably into economic defeat when the war ends.

Obligated to keep an economically failed Ukraine on life support.

Having to increase its debt and taxes to support bad foreign policy decisions it has been taking since 2014.

Trying to boost its defense industrial complex but losing business with the end of war.

For the mainstream political parties in Europe, this adds to the trend of them heading towards electoral Armageddon when they start putting themselves to the polls from 2027 onward.

Until then, they are stuck, knowing that continuing the war will kill them electorally, and knowing that ending the war will too.

To quote my old British soldier dad, they are like the mythical oozlum bird, continually going round in circles until they disappear up their own backsides.

FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT

  Just as the author of the article below, "I’m befuddled by the insanity swirling around and want no part in this shitshow". 

  Over the last few years, I have tried to add interesting insight to current issues, trying as much as possible to remain objective but eventually realized that in a polarized environment this has become impossible. Criticize one side and you lose half your readers, criticize the other side and the other half is gone. Eventually, you must align yourself with one side or the other. I won't. 

  Worse, news or rather their interpretation have not only become more polarized but far more difficult to approach objectively. AI is introducing bias, false narrative and pictures everywhere. So much so that curation is becoming more and more time consuming.  

  So, now is the time to reorient once again this blog and move away from the current insanity. I will consequently publish articles related to more profound and philosophical subjects. I expect far fewer readers but so be it. The wilder the short term becomes, the broader our focus shall be. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_tHqXt44sU&list=TLPQMTkwMTIwMjbVbsSmUr9liQ&index=4

FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT

“My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me.” — George Carlin

The government reported CPI of “only” 2.7% and the financial pundits and Trump toadies celebrated the “lowest inflation in 5 years”. This is after last week’s “surprisingly good” unemployment report where the country added 50,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4%. Of course, they also revealed every month in 2025 had been revised downward. EVERY freaking month was a lie when originally reported. December will eventually be revised to a negative number, when no one is paying attention.  The lie did its job of sending the stock market to new all-time highs, because they need to fake it until they make it.

It’s embarrassing living under the rule of a quasi-fascist corporate governmental bureaucracy built on a funeral pyre of lies, growing ever larger by the minute, anticipating a spark igniting a conflagration never before seen in history. The average “forgotten man” knows their cost of living increases are nowhere near 2.7%, as they pay 30% more for utilities, 20% more for a steak, 10% more for chicken, 20% more for car insurance, 10% more for homeowners insurance, 10% more for property taxes, 10% more for rent, 35% more for new and used cars  since 2020, and the list goes on. The CPI is a LIE.

They massage the employment numbers so hard, the BLS bureaucrats must achieve a happy ending every month. It’s laughable when common folk give up looking for a job because there are none to be had, they are no longer counted as unemployed. If you believe there are only 7.5 million Americans unemployed out of the 275 million adult population, while 103 million are Not in the Labor Force, then you are a clueless non-critical thinking dupe who deserves to get it good and hard. The American empire has devolved into a dying lying replica of the degenerate Soviet empire described so well by Solzhenitsyn.

“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 

If GDP is growing at 5%, unemployment is low, inflation is low, and stocks are hitting all-time highs, why would the Fed need to cut interest rates and begin another massive round of quantitative easing? It sure smells like the desperation exhibited in September 2019 when the repo market revealed major problems under the hood. This was followed by the plandemic, unleashing trillions into the grubby little hands of the banking cabal to enrich themselves while throwing a few crumbs to the plebs as they were locked in solitary confinement for 18 months.

The global financial system is choking on debt and the only solution central bankers, politicians, and their billionaire puppet masters have is to print trillions more fiat, while trying to create a Potemkin facade of normalcy and stability for the ignorant masses. Making up fake statistics, using the newly printed fiat to prop up financial markets, and having their legacy media propaganda outlets spew comforting lies has been their plan. But, it appears gold and silver are calling their bluff. They have lost control of their paper derivative price suppression mechanisms. Gold and silver do not go up 5% per day when all is well. The system is broken and the shit is going to hit the fan, soon.

There were a couple charts posted by the Kobeissi Report which I think explain why the average working stiff is mad as hell and getting close to not taking it anymore. The percentage of GDP which goes to workers in the form of compensation just reached an all-time low of 53.8%. It is clear from the chart, this has not been the century of the worker, but the century of bankers and corporations. From 1947 through 2000, workers received approximately 64% of GDP in compensation. It seems that giant sucking sound described by Ross Perot in 1992 was accurate, as millions of good paying jobs were outsourced to 3rd world shitholes, and now robots and AI are completing the task of gutting the middle class to benefit billionaires, bankers and politicians.

With current U.S. GDP of $31 trillion, workers would be receiving over $3 trillion more in annual compensation if our overlords had not financialized the world and treated workers as nothing more than replaceable cogs in their finance machine. Corporate profit margins reached 10.9% in the 3rd quarter, the 2nd highest in history. Basically, the American worker has been screwed over for the sake of corporate profits. Now you know why the stock market is at record highs, while senior citizens living on a fixed income have to choose between paying the electric bill or filling their prescriptions. Show me Ross Perot was not wrong after analyzing this chart.

“We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It’s pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, … have no health care—that’s the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. When [Mexico’s] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.” – Ross Perot – 1992 Presidential Debate

If the economy is doing so well, as I’m scolded to acknowledge by a multitude of Trump lackeys in the government and his social media influencer acolytes, why are all consumer related measures showing extreme stress? Auto loan delinquencies have soared to Great Recession levels, with over 2 million autos repossessed in 2025. Student loan delinquencies at over 30% have reached a 21 year high. Mortgage delinquencies have been ticking up as home prices have flattened and the boom is turning into a bust. Why would consumer confidence be near covid lows and 35% lower than 2019 if the economy was really booming?

And, the most important debt to everyday Americans, credit card debt, is seeing delinquency rates surge to levels last seen in 2011. Household debt rocketed by $197 billion in the 3rd quarter, reaching an astronomical $18.6 trillion. Nothing like a record amount of debt, a weakening frozen jobs market, and now Trump’s 10% interest rate cap PR stunt to  create a consumer debt crisis. It has already begun. US consumers now see a 15.3% chance of missing a minimum debt payment over the next 3 months, the highest since April 2020. This is also the 2nd-highest reading since the 2013 peak.

When you give workers a smaller and smaller slice of the pie for a quarter of a century, while doubling the cost of everything they need to live, and propagandizing these victims into a mass consumption mania, you’ve manipulated millions of Americans into inescapable debt servitude. And that is exactly what the ruling class wanted – hamsters running on a never ending wheel of debt. Of course, the highest delinquency risk, at 22.5%, was reported by households earning below $50,000, those doing all the hard work that keeps this country running. The sharpest increases were among respondents over the age of 60, seniors living on fixed incomes (declining due to lowering of interest rates) who can no longer make ends meet.

Things are falling apart. The country adds $5 billion to the national debt every day. The $200 trillion of unfunded welfare/pension liabilities are mathematically impossible to honor. Our “peace president” has kidnapped another world leader, about to bomb Iran for a second time, about to conquer Greenland, hijacks Russian oil tankers, appears to have been aware of the attempt to assassinate Putin with drones, threatens to bomb Mexico, Columbia,and any other country that irritates him, and saber rattles towards China regarding Taiwan.

Personally, I’m befuddled by the insanity swirling around me. I want no part in this shitshow, as what passes for leaders plunge the world towards WW3 and nuclear Armageddon. I can’t tell whether this international strife is being used to distract from the intractable imminent financial disaster awaiting the western world, or whether these psychopaths in suits are just following the orders of the globalist billionaires who are running the show and need chaos, strife, fear, and mass casualties to implement their New World Order. The center cannot hold. We are ruled by the worst, and they passionately want to blow up the world. Welcome to 2026.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”
― W.B. Yeats

Why Young Women Moved Left While Young Men Stayed put

   The social analysis below is fascinating and to my opinion essential to understand what's going on at the social level in our modern, which in this case means connected, societies. Social Media and mobile phones explain to some extent why young women have turned left while their male counterparts stayed put. 

  But there is also at the macro level a feminization of society which is undeniable, especially in Europe, when you see who is at the top, and unfortunately not only toxic but ultimately dangerous as demonstrated when very recently we saw a minister in Denmark crying after a rough meeting with the Trump Administration. 

  The micro level characteristics of women, as risk adverse and consensus seekers scale extremely poorly and in fact do become liabilities when applied at the global level. There are many situations when consensus becomes a weakness and risk avoidance leads to paralysis. 

  History shows that matriarchal societies, the Etruscan come to mind, are often (always?) dominated by their more aggressive patriarchal neighbors and more ominously, that societies in decline often display more "feminine" traits. The Greeks first and the Romans later.   

Authored by vittorio on X,

Bill Ackman quote-tweeted a graph showing the partisan gap between young men and women almost doubled in 25 years.

Women moved radically left. Men stayed roughly where they were.

Good question. Most answers I've seen are either tribal ("women are emotional") or surface-level ("social media bad"). Neither traces the actual mechanism.

Let me try.

First, notice what Wanye pointed out:

We've been told for a decade that men are "radicalizing to the right" and that this is dangerous. The actual data shows the opposite. Men barely moved. Women moved 20+ points leftward.

The story we are told is exactly inverted from reality. And when female leftward movement does get discussed, it's framed as progress: "women becoming more educated, more independent, more enlightened."

They'll tell you the graph shows enlightenment and progress.

Wrong.

What the graph shows is capture.

This Isn't Just America

Before getting into the mechanism, something important: this pattern isn't only American. It's global.

The Financial Times documented last year that the gender ideology gap is widening across dozens of countries simultaneously. UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Poland, Brazil, Tunisia. Young women moving left on social issues, young men either stable or drifting right.

This matters because it rules out explanations specific to American politics. It's not Title IX policy. It's not #MeToo. It's not the specific culture war of US campuses. Something bigger is happening, something that rolled out globally at roughly the same time.

South Korea is the extreme case. Young Korean men are now overwhelmingly conservative. Young Korean women are overwhelmingly progressive. The gap there is even wider than the US. Contributing factors include mandatory military service for men (18 months of your life the state takes, while women are exempt) and brutal economic competition. But the timing of divergence still tracks with smartphone adoption.

Whatever is causing this, it's not American. The machine is global.

The Substrate

Start with the biological hardware.

Women evolved in environments where social exclusion carried enormous survival costs. You can't hunt pregnant. You can't fight nursing. Survival required the tribe's acceptance: their protection, their food sharing, their tolerance of your temporary vulnerability. Millions of years of this and you get hardware that treats social rejection as a serious threat.

Men faced different pressures. Hunting parties gone for days. Exploration. Combat. You had to tolerate being alone, disliked, outside the group for extended periods. Men who could handle temporary exclusion without falling apart had more options. More risk-taking, more independence, more ability to leave bad situations.

(Male status still mattered enormously for reproduction, low-status men had it rough. But men could recover from temporary exclusion in ways that were harder for pregnant or nursing women.)

This shows up in personality research. David Schmitt's work across 55 cultures found the same pattern everywhere: women average higher agreeableness, higher neuroticism (sensitivity to negative stimuli, including social rejection cues). Men average higher tolerance for disagreement and social conflict. The differences aren't huge, but they're consistent across every culture studied.

Not better or worse. Different selection pressures, different adaptations.

But it means the same environment affects them differently. Consensus pressure hits harder for one group than the other.

The Machine

Now look at what we built.

Social media is a consensus engine. You can see what everyone believes in real time. Disagreement is visible, measurable, and punishable at scale. The tribe used to be 150 people. Now it's everyone you've ever met, plus a world of strangers watching.

And look at the timeline. Facebook launched in 2004 but was college-only until 2006. The iPhone was launched in June 2007. Instagram in 2010. Suddenly, social media was in your pocket and in your face, all day, every day.

Look at the graph again. Women were roughly stable through the early 2000s. The acceleration starts around 2007-2008.

The curve steepens through the 2010s as smartphones became universal and platforms became more sophisticated.

Women are by nature more liberal, but the radicalization coincides with the rise in smartphone adoption.

The machine turned on and the capture began.

The mental health collapse among teenage girls tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption, with stronger effects for girls than boys. The same vulnerability that made social exclusion more costly in ancestral environments made the new consensus engines more capturing.

This machine wasn't designed to capture women specifically. It was designed to capture attention. But it captures people more susceptible to consensus pressure more effectively. Women are more susceptible on average. So it captured them more.

Add a feedback loop: women complain more than men. Scroll any platform and it looks like women are suffering more. Institutions respond to this because visible distress creates liability, PR risk and regulatory pressure. In addition, women are weaker and inevitably seen as the victim in most scenarios. The institutional response is to make environments "safer". Which means removing conflict. Which means censoring disagreement. Which means the consensus strengthens.

The counterarguments get removed or deplatformed and the loop closes.

The Institutions

Universities flipped to 60% female while simultaneously becoming progressive monoculture. The institution young women trust most, during the years their worldview forms, feeds them a single ideology with no serious opposition.

FIRE's campus speech surveys show the pattern clearly: students self-censor, report fear of expressing views, cluster toward acceptable opinions. This isn't unique to women, but women are more embedded in higher education than men now, and the fields they dominate (humanities, social sciences, education, HR) are the most ideologically uniform.

Four years surrounded by peers who all believe the same thing. Professors who all believe the same thing. Reading lists pointing one direction. Disagreement is not even rare, it's socially punished. You learn to pattern-match the acceptable opinions and perform them.

Then they graduate into female-dominated fields: HR, media, education, healthcare, non-profits, where the monoculture continues. From 18 to 35, many women never encounter sustained disagreement from people they respect. The feedback loop never breaks.

Men took different paths. Trades. Engineering. Finance. Military. Fields where results matter more than consensus. Fields where disagreement is tolerated or even rewarded. The monoculture didn't capture them because they weren't in the institutions being captured. (mostly because they were kicked out of them, but that's a different piece)

The Economics

Marriage collapsed. This probably matters more than people think.

Single women vote more left than married women. This is consistent across decades of exit polls. Part of this is likely economic: single women interact with government more as provider of services, married women interact with government more as taker of taxes. The incentives point different directions.

The marriage gap in voting is one of the most consistent predictors. And marriage rates have collapsed precisely during the period of divergence.

Men saw marriage collapse differently. Family courts. Child support. Alimony. The rational response was skepticism of expanding state power.

Same phenomenon, different positions in it, different political responses.

The Algorithms

Algorithms optimize for engagement. Engagement means emotional response. Time on platform. Clicks. Shares. Comments.

Women respond more strongly to emotional content on average, they are more empathetic, they can be more easily manipulated with sad stories. That higher neuroticism again, higher sensitivity to negative stimuli. The machine learned this. It fed them content calibrated to their response patterns. Fear. Outrage. Moral panic. Stories about danger and injustice and threat and wars and "victims".

Men got different feeds because they responded to different triggers. The algorithm doesn't really have a gender agenda. It has an engagement agenda. But engagement looks different by demographic, so the feeds diverged.

Women ended up in information environments optimized for emotional activation. Men found alternatives: podcasts, forums, cars, wars, manosphere etc.

The Ideology

Feminism told women their instincts and biology were oppression and wrong. Wanting children was brainwashing. Wanting a provider husband was internalized misogyny. Their natural desires were false consciousness installed by patriarchy.

Many believed it. Built lives around it. Career first. Independence. Freedom from traditional constraints.

Now they're 35, unmarried, measuring declining fertility against career achievements. And here's the trap: the sunk cost of admitting the ideology failed is enormous. You'd have to admit you wasted your fertile years on a lie. That the women who ignored the ideology and married young were right. That your mother was right.

I think this is why you see so little defection. Not because the ideology is true, but because the psychological cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying. Easier to double down. Easier to believe the problem is that society hasn't changed enough yet.

The Other Capture

I should be honest about something: men weren't immune to capture. They were captured differently.

Women got ideological conformity. Men got withdrawal. Porn. Video games. Gambling apps. Outrage content. The male capture wasn't "believe this or face social death." It was "here's an endless supply of dopamine so you never have to build anything real."

Different machines, different failure modes. Women got compliance. Men got passivity.

The male line on that graph staying flat through 2020 isn't necessarily health. It might just be a different kind of sickness, men checking out instead of being pulled in. Or it may be that everyone and everything moved more left and women moved lefter.

The Line Is Moving Now

Here's the update: the male line isn't flat anymore.

Post-2024 data shows young men shifting right. Recent surveys all show the same thing. Young men are now actively moving more conservatively.

My read: women got captured first because they were more susceptible to consensus pressure. The capture was fast (2007-2020). Men resisted longer because they were less susceptible and less embedded in captured institutions. But as the gap became visible and culturally salient, as "men are the problem" became explicit mainstream messaging, as men started being excluded from society because of lies, as masculinity, or the very thing that makes men men became toxic, men had to start counter-aligning.

The passivity is converting into opposition. The withdrawal is becoming active rejection.

This doesn't mean men are now "correct" or "free". It might just mean they're being captured by a different machine, one optimized for male grievance instead of female consensus. Andrew Tate didn't emerge from nowhere. Neither did the manosphere. Those are capture systems too, just targeting different psychological vulnerabilities.

The graph is now two lines diverging in opposite directions. Two different machines pulling two different demographics toward two different failure modes.

Some people will say this is just education: women go to college more, college makes you liberal, simple as that. There's something to this. But it doesn't explain why the gap widened so sharply post-2007, or why it's happening in countries with very different education systems.

Some will say it's economic: young men are struggling, resentment makes you conservative. Also partially true. But male economic struggles predate the recent rightward shift, and the female leftward move happened during a period of rising female economic success.

Some will point to cultural figures: Tate for men, Taylor Swift for women. But these are symptoms, not causes. They filled niches the machines created. They didn't create the machines.

The multi-causal model fits better: biological substrate (differential sensitivity to consensus) + technological trigger (smartphones, algorithmic feeds) + institutional amplification (captured universities, female-dominated fields) + economic incentives (marriage collapse, state dependency) + ideological lock-in (sunk costs, social punishment for defection).

No single cause. A system of interlocking causes that happened to affect one gender faster and harder than the other.

So What

If this model is right, some predictions follow.

The gap should be smaller in countries with later smartphone adoption or lower social media penetration. (This seems true: the divergence is less extreme in parts of Eastern Europe and much of Africa, though South Korea is a major exception due to other factors.)

The gap should narrow among women who have children, since parenthood breaks the institutional feedback loop and introduces competing priorities. (Exit polls consistently show this: mothers vote more conservative than childless women.)

The gap should continue widening until the machines are disrupted or the generations age out of them.

Here's the part I don't know how to solve: these systems are self-reinforcing. The institutions aren't going to reform themselves. The algorithms aren't going to stop optimizing. The ideology isn't going to admit failure. The male counter-capture isn't going to produce healthy outcomes either.

Some women will escape.

The ones who have children often do since reality is a powerful solvent for ideology. The ones who build lives outside institutional capture sometimes do.

Some men will stop withdrawing or stop rage-scrolling.

The ones who find something worth building. The ones who get tired of the simulation.

But the systems will keep running on everyone else.

The Question

Bill asked why.

The answer isn't "women are emotional" and it isn't "social media bad." The answer is that we built global-scale consensus engines and deployed them on a species with sexually dimorphic psychology. The machines captured the half more susceptible to consensus pressure. Then they started capturing the other half through different mechanisms.

We're watching the results in real time. Two failure modes. One graph. Both lines are moving away from each other and away from anything healthy.

I don't know how this ends. I don't think anyone does. I don't think it will.

Both machines are still running.

How The EU Is Messing Up The AI Boom

   Over the coming months, I will reorient this blog, less towards "news" and more towards AI which now occupy most of my time. 

  It should be clear by now, like it or not, that we are entering a new era where AI will quickly transform our lives, as much first, then far more than the Internet did 30 years ago. 

  There are 2 possible attitudes: Fear the AI and try to regulate it to death as Europe is doing below, or embrace the unknown and adapt to the new paradigm as both the US and China are doing. 

  I will privilege the second path and will therefore try to bring a new light to current and especially AI events to understand and try to make sense of what is going on in the world. Stay tuned. .   

Authored by Thomas Kolbe via American Thinker,

Economic prosperity is created in free markets by innovative companies. Over 50 percent of globally operating AI unicorns are located in the U.S., while Europe plays virtually no role. The race for the next future technology is already decided.

It seems that economic history is repeating itself. On the stock markets, companies in the artificial intelligence and data center sectors are being traded feverishly. Massive capital flows into this technology. Much of it resembles the dot-com boom 25 years ago.

Structurally and regionally, little has changed since then: The U.S. and China are fighting for pole position, while the European Union’s economy remains largely on the sidelines, pushed into a spectator role by EU regulators.

Unicorns as a Measure of Innovation

An interesting measure of the EU’s lag in artificial intelligence is the number of so-called unicorns -- private startups valued at at least one billion U.S. dollars before going public. This metric is considered a valid indicator of a region’s innovative capacity -- and for the EU, the comparison with the U.S. is catastrophic.

About 1,700 such innovative companies currently operate in the U.S., while the EU has only around 280. The U.S. dominates this market with over 50 percent share, whereas the European economy lags far behind with less than ten percent of the global market.

This economic gap is also reflected in investment volume. Hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta invested over $320 billion in AI and corresponding data center infrastructure this year alone. More than 550 new projects -- with a focus in Virginia, Texas, and Arizona—are forming the backbone of a new economy.

Data center capacity in the U.S. grew by around 160 percent this year, while Europe’s capacity increased by only about 75 percent, equaling an investment volume of just under €100 billion.

With investments of around $125 billion, China’s economy also lags far behind the U.S. An interesting context -- especially from the perspective of European, and particularly German, policymakers -- is that nuclear power is gaining noticeable momentum in these regions.

Even if green-minded Germany refuses to acknowledge it due to its ideological stance against nuclear energy, the enormous energy demand of new technologies will in the future be covered to a significant extent by the expansion of nuclear power.

Among the few major projects in the European Union are the Brookfield project in Sweden, with an investment volume of around $10 billion, and the Start Campus in Portugal, which could also activate nearly $10 billion in investments.

Crash of Ideologies

Especially in AI, the ideological clash between the U.S. and the EU can be observed in practice and in all its consequences. While the U.S. relies on deregulation and private solutions, removing barriers for intense competition, EU Europe still adheres to the mantra of political global control. Nothing may happen unless Brussels officials have schemed it at their green table in all their wisdom.

The Draghi motto still applies here: Only massive public investments -- credit-financed and centrally planned -- will, in the view of EU statist planners, help overcome the enormous gap between Europe and the U.S.

In the simulations of the EU Commission’s master plan, now stretched over seven years under Ursula von der Leyen, everything seems surprisingly simple, almost simplified. The EU’s Invest-AI plan intends to borrow around €50 billion in loans and invest them in selected projects in the coming years. This is supposed to trigger private investments of €150 billion, ultimately creating four AI gigafactories.

Welcome to the socialist textbook world of “Habeckonomics”: a system in which state projects like Northvolt repeatedly fail. Yet as long as public guarantees, subsidies, and state-guaranteed purchase prices are in prospect, the small flame of political hope continues flickering in Europe’s lukewarm wind.

As usual, we also observe the typical European jungle of funding programs, subsidies, and steering projects. These include “Horizon Europe,” which is meant to strengthen computing power in science, the RAISE pilot, and the Gen-AI-4-EU initiative, together investing another billion euros in the EU’s digital infrastructure.

The Power of Competition

The ideological clash between the two major economic blocks, the U.S. and the EU, is producing strange effects. While the open capital market in the U.S. lets startups sprout like mushrooms from fertile soil, EU regulation -- especially under the Digital Markets Act -- has fostered a predatory mentality. That this was likely the Eurocrats’ goal from the start comes as no surprise.

Brussels imposed more than €3.2 billion in competition fines this year, mainly targeting U.S. corporations. Brussels has degenerated into a bureaucratic leviathan -- a parasitic glutton absorbing economic energy and generating ossified structures and economic vacuum.

In EU Europe, the motto is: the regulatory framework matters most -- and the state takes its cut. That private industry prefers other locations and withdraws capital matters little to Brussels’ extraction experts.

Against the backdrop of Europe’s massive descent into a climate-socialist dystopia, it is surprising that the roots of libertarian economic thinking originate precisely on this continent. Consider the great economist Ludwig von Mises, who repeatedly pointed out that it is the entrepreneur who drives the engine of the market economy through profit-seeking, and that without exception, decentralized processes create prosperity -- while state interventions regularly derail it.

Civilization-superior models like the free market sink in the waves of ideological EU infantilism. Its repressive climate socialism promotes the growth of corporatist structures in which politics and subsidized parts of the economy carry out the extraction, eliminating competition.

The rigid adherence to centrally planned control of the new tech industry tragically mirrors the timeline of the dot-com era. What Europe fails to understand is that groundbreaking innovation inevitably triggers an investment boom, often resulting in overinvestment and a stock market crash -- but ultimately leaving economically profitable structures permanently woven into the existing economy.

As with companies like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, Europeans will look back in a few years at these months and examine this intercontinental economic bifurcation through the examples of OpenAI, Gemini, or Perplexity. The energy needed will come from French nuclear reactors and soon also from Polish nuclear power.

 

What's happening with Iran? (Video x1) and the silver market? (Videos x2)

  Two days ago, we just came within a few hours of the US attacking Iran, and... it just didn't happen. 

  The best account of what took place is explained below by Scott Ritter. (You can jump to 17'40" to get directly to the start of the Iran section.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcrkoTloTn8

  

  We probably dodged a bullet on this issue, but we may not be so lucky with the silver market where an emergency is taking shape with price going through the stratosphere. China has skillfully cornered the silver market and deliveries on future contracts may therefore not be possible. If that happens, the market has a problem and the world consequently may also have a problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0E5V0nSMc8

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJsUCre6BNw

  What is essential as this stage is to understand that although we see little above the surface, i.e. in the news, below, a full fledged economic and especially financial war is taking shape. BRICS countries are circumventing the dollar market, without which the US loses its global hegemony and becomes just one power among others. This of course cannot and will not be accepted lightly, whence the current haphazard Trump foreign policy generating one crisis after another. It will therefore get much worse before it gets any better. That too is unavoidable at this late stage. 

Genes Are Not Your Destiny. How To Modify Your Epigenetics For Longevity

   Our destiny IS written in our DNA, although fortunately not all of it. We can modify, we can adapt. 

   Let's not forget that what is really "alive" through us is our DNA. The molecule is eternal, no break in the chain from the very first strand of RNA to us by definition. It evolves through a complex system of replication almost 100% reliable but not quite. It can adapt slowly through natural selection as Darwin discovered but also through "adjustments" thanks to epi-genetics, as Lamark suspected.    

   But what we truly care about is not really our DNA, more like our bodies and that unfortunately is only a second thought for nature. Evolution is slow so we end up being optimized for a lifestyle which has been obsolete for over 15,000 years. Too bad.

   Thankfully, we can adjust to some extent and optimize our lifestyle in order to limit the wear and tear of our expendable bodies. 

   Beyond maximizing exercise and minimizing stress, the main tool we have to stay healthy is food. So here's a long list of recommendations below: 

   If you want to keep it simple: mix a Japanese diet (fish, tofu, seaweeds and vegetables)  and a Mediterranean diet (olive oil, almonds, fruits and again fish) and you should be able to avoid doctor visits most of the time.)    

Authored by Makai Allbert via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

We’ve been told that our genetic destiny is written in our DNA. However, research is gradually dismantling this fatalistic view.

Artur Plawgo/Getty Images

Genetics may influence approximately 25 percent to 30 percent of how we age. The remaining portion is influenced by factors entirely within our control: what we eat, how we move, how we handle stress, others, and ourselves.

Lucia Aronica, a Stanford researcher specializing in epigenetics and nutrition, embodies this balance of nature and nurture.

After 17 years of epigenetic research, she sat down for an interview on my new show, “The Upgrade,” highlighting that: “You are not just a passive reader of your genetic code, but an active writer of your health story every day with every choice.”

Rewriting Your Software of Life

Aronica suggests that to understand epigenetics, we should view DNA as computer hardware—an unchangeable biological structure present in every cell—and epigenetics as the software that tells your cells which programs to run and when.

The prefix “epi” means “on top of,” referring to molecular switches that sit atop your genes, turning them on or off without altering the underlying code.

“Here’s the beautiful part: You can rewrite that software starting today,” Aronica said.

The first step? Food.

‘Food Is the Foundation of Everything’

Aronica grew up in Italy, where her mother taught her that “in the kitchen and at the dining table, you don’t get old.”

She calls her approach, “epi-nutrition,” a way of eating that focuses on specific foods that directly influence your epigenetics.

These foods act as more than just fuel and contain nutrients that can turn on the genes that make you healthy and turn off the genes that make you sick, she said.

The key players are methyl donors, nutrients that provide the chemical groups your body uses to regulate genes. They include:

• Folate: From green leafy vegetables, liver, legumes
• Vitamin B12: Mainly in meat, fish, shellfish, liver
• Choline: Mostly egg yolks, liver, and some in cruciferous vegetables
• Betaine: From beets, quinoa, shrimp, wheat bran

“Your doctor probably told you to eat the rainbow,” Aronica said. “But here’s what your doctor may not realize: those pigments aren’t just antioxidants. They are epi-nutrients that actually regulate the epigenetic writer and eraser enzymes, activating genes that boost your health.”

Therefore, make sure to eat:

• Red Foods: Tomatoes, bell peppers
• Orange Foods: Oranges, pumpkin, carrots
• Brown Foods: Coffee, dark chocolate—greater than 80 percent and non–Dutch processed
• Purple Foods: Berries
• Green Foods: Spinach, cruciferous vegetables

In particular, green foods contain sulforaphane, which Aronica calls “the boss of your body’s own antioxidants.” Unlike other vitamins, which work directly and are depleted within hours, sulforaphane activates your body’s internal antioxidant genes, keeping them active for up to three days. Thus, eating cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, arugula) two to three times a week, she said, is enough to “keep your genes happy.”

Rather than memorizing which foods to eat, following the Mediterranean diet offers a reliable template. A wide body of research has shown that adherence to the Mediterranean diet promotes positive gene regulation.

A 2020 study even found that older adults who followed a Mediterranean diet for one year showed signs of what researchers called “epigenetic rejuvenation.” Their gene-regulation shifted toward a younger, healthier profile.

The Body Remembers

Beyond nutrition, Aronica’s approach extends to movement, stress, connection, sleep, joy, and toxin avoidance, which she refers to as “epi-wellness.”

Research shows that even a single bout of high‑intensity exercise can cause immediate changes in gene regulation in your muscles. These kick‑starting processes help them adapt and become fitter.

However, the real benefits come from consistent exercise. A 2024 study comparing trained and untrained men found that years of regular exercise create a lasting “epigenetic fingerprint.” The genes controlling energy use and muscle fiber type become primed to respond more efficiently to each workout. At the epigenetic level, your muscles remember their training. The adaptation helps muscles perform better and develop greater endurance.

Perhaps most remarkably, exercise shifts the epigenome toward a younger biological age. A large meta-analysis of 3,176 human skeletal muscle samples found that people with higher aerobic fitness have younger epigenetic profiles.

Mindset on Epigenetics

“Our beliefs and our feelings shape our epigenetics,” Aronica said.

A systematic review of 18 studies on meditation and related practices, published in Frontiers in Immunology, found a consistent pattern: Mind-body interventions are associated with reduced NF-κB activity, a protein that acts as a master switch for inflammation. When NF-κB is chronically activated, it drives the production of inflammatory molecules linked to accelerated aging. The evidence suggests that meditation can help keep that switch in the “off” position.

Long-term meditators show DNA methylation changes associated with telomere length—the protective caps on chromosomes that shorten with age. Notably, age was not associated with telomere length in long-term meditators, suggesting that their practice may buffer against cellular aging.

A more recent 2025 systematic review found that meditation-based practices seem to reshape how our genes are “managed” in key stress and aging pathways, adding to the NF-κB and telomere findings.

In plain terms, regular mindfulness appears to tweak chemical tags on genes involved in inflammation, immunity, metabolism, and brain health, nudging them toward a pattern linked with lower stress and slower aging.

A Forgotten Variable

In the world of biohacking and longevity optimization, Aronica believes that many people jump from one health protocol to another, often sacrificing something essential in the process: joy.

“There is no sustainable change without joy,” she said. “You’re not going to stick to any lifestyle change, whether it’s food or exercise, if you don’t enjoy it.”

Our brain makes us repeat habits that are good for our health, such as nourishing food, connection, and movement, triggering authentic pleasure as it is “our ancestral compass for health.”

However, the problem with modern society, she said, is that joy is often hijacked by artificial pleasures rather than natural ones.

“I’m not telling you to eat a lot of chocolate or candies or just crawl on social media. That is, unfortunately, a type of addictive pleasure that you want to avoid.”

Aronica adds that once you detox yourself from addictive and artificial pleasures, you can find true pleasure that serves as the foundation for sustainable change. “Once you love and enjoy the food and exercise you do, you’re going to want to do it every day,” she said.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has tracked participants for more than 80 years, arrives at a similar conclusion: The strongest predictor of healthy aging isn’t diet or exercise alone, but rather the quality of relationships and the presence of joy in daily life.

Wielding Your Genetic Pencil

Genes matter, but they are not the final verdict.

Aronica illustrates that “some [DNA] edits, like those made before we were born, are in pen, so tend to be permanent. But the edits we write as adults are in pencil—they can be erased and rewritten.”

Every meal, every workout, every meditation session, and every choice for joy represents an opportunity to pick up that epigenetic pencil and rewrite your health story.