Germany has a severe electricity shortage and cost problem, and it's getting worse.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently made the admission that shutting down the German nuclear power reactors was a "severe strategic mistake."

"To have acceptable market prices for energy production again, we would have to permanently subsidize energy prices from the federal budget," Merz said, adding: "We can't do this in the long run."

"So, we are now undertaking the most expensive energy transition in the entire world," Merz said with pronounced frustration. "I know of no other country that makes things so expensive and difficult as Germany."

The new contempt that Trump has shown for the French president, who contacted him proposing a G7 summit in Paris, is worrying on many levels. But it seems to signal the end of NATO and the special relationship put on ice.

There are very few certainties in political life, but we can now safely assume that President Emmanuel Macron will never again send Donald Trump a private text message. This extraordinary episode - Trump posting the message on social media and then mocking the French leader - has sent shockwaves across European capitals and is revealing on multiple levels.

For Macron and France, it shows a new level of brazen contempt, which will further erode whatever political capital he has left and leave many French commentators asking whether America is still an ally at all.

For the rest of Europe, the message and its humiliating reception are telling. They show that Trump has given up on EU countries as potential partners in his broader vision for America. Macron's text read like a plea, suggesting a last-minute G7 meeting and a special dinner - complete with the pomp and ceremony Trump enjoyed in London. Two main points in the message reveal the core European concerns: Greenland and Iran. Have European leaders seen solid intelligence suggesting Trump is close to a major strike against Iran? Likely. Do they believe their diplomatic skills could surpass those of Trump's advisors in talking him out of it, given the unthinkable implications of an Iranian retaliation? Also likely.

Yet they are misreading Trump's character and motivations. Macron is not the only one sending pathetic late-night messages after his diplomatic corps has shown its limitations. Trump recently wrote to the Norwegians, whining about their failure to award him a Nobel Peace Prize and hinting he would be less inclined to pursue peace efforts without their appreciation - falsely claiming to have stopped eight wars worldwide.

The truth is Trump has grown tired of courting relations that get him nowhere. Leaking such messages will simply make any EU leader wary of contacting him - exactly what he wants as he pushes ahead with his most radical ideas, namely Greenland and, arguably, Iran.

Countries that long participated in the system knew it was "partially false," Mark Carney told the Davos forum

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has admitted that the "rules-based international order" was always a partially false narrative that countries knowingly upheld for decades because it benefited them.

During a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Carney said nations such as Canada prospered under and promoted a system they understood was not fully true.

"We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically," Carney said.

"And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim," he added, comparing decades of compliance to a shopkeeper displaying a political sign he does not believe in, calling it "living within a lie" to "avoid trouble."

Europeans are tired. They want peace, stability, and the quiet dignity of prosperity.

Let's end the year in style

When a prime minister advises his staff to rest because the coming year will be much more difficult, it is neither black humor nor fatigue. It is a moment of sincerity, the kind that only emerges when internal projections no longer support the public narrative.

Giorgia Meloni was not addressing the electorate. She was addressing the machinery of the state itself, the administrative core charged with implementing decisions whose effects can no longer be hidden. Her observation was not about a normal increase in workload. She was talking about constraints, about limits being reached, about a Europe that has moved from crisis response to a phase of controlled contraction, fully aware that 2026 is the year when deferred costs will eventually converge.

What has leaked out is what European ruling circles have already understood: the Western strategy in Ukraine has run up against material limits. Not with Russian messages, not with disinformation, not with populist dissent, but with steel, ammunition, energy, manpower, and time. Once these realities assert themselves, political legitimacy begins to erode.

The EU cannot sustain this war economically.
Europe can strike poses of readiness.
It cannot manufacture war.

Russia has been invited to take part in the new US-backed 'Peace Board' put forward by President Donald Trump to oversee post-conflict governance and reconstruction in Gaza, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has announced, in a somewhat surprising and hugely symbolic diplomatic move and overture.

Peskov told reporters Monday that President Vladimir Putin had received an invitation through diplomatic channels. "We are studying the details of the proposal. We hope to hold contacts with the US side to clarify all the nuances," he said, but did not disclose any additional details.

The Putin invitation has yet to be publicly acknowledged by Washington, and Western mainstream media is likely to go into a frenzy over it. Press reports have highlighted that Putin was invited to oversee 'peace' but is still active in directing the Ukraine invasion.

By deploying troops to Greenland in response to Donald Trump's annexation threats, European states draw an unprecedented red line against Washington, signaling that the era of automatic deference in the transatlantic relationship may be coming to an end.

Europe has delivered an unexpected answer to Donald Trump's renewed threats to annex Greenland by dispatching troops to the Danish autonomous territory for a military exercise. Germany, France, Norway. Sweden, as well as Finland and Estonia, have joined Denmark in reinforcing the island's security. It is the first time since Trump's return to the centre of international politics that Europe has confronted the former US president directly and drawn clear limits.

The trilateral meeting went sour

The move follows a tense trilateral meeting between American, Danish, and Greenlandic officials that ended without resolving what Copenhagen described as a "fundamental disagreement" over the island's status. Within hours, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he still intended to take control of Greenland and that "there's not a thing that Denmark can do about it."

In a democracy, the government in office cannot ban an opposing candidate from running on the grounds that the candidate would win and take the place of the current government. But that is what President Macron has done to Marine Le Pen. Le Pen heads the largest political party in France. She has been banned by a French court from holding office for five years. This prevents her from competing in the 2027 presidential election, where she has long been considered to be the leading candidate.

The excuse used by the French government to frustrate the popular will is that Le Pen was convicted of "misappropriating EU funds." She was convicted of using money intended for her European Union staff for her French staff. Money, of course, is fungible, and the orchestrated charge succeeded only because the establishment presstitutes hyped it over and over.

Marine Le Pen is a controversial figure with the French establishment because she represents ethnic French nationalism, not the globalism of open borders and multiculturalism, that is, she stands for France, not for a Tower of Babel.

"The more contradiction you carry, the more reality resists you. Because you're fracturing the signal with every step." — SightBringer on "X"

Don't be too surprised if sometime later this day, Friday, the president invokes the Insurrection Act to tranquilize the city of Minneapolis, since aerial spraying of Olanzapine is probably out of the question. Where, oh where, are the mythologized "nice," and "above-average" people of Minnesota, once praised in song and sketch on those long-ago Saturday nights of The Prairie Home Companion?

They have been replaced by a mutant army of psychotic Transtifa wendigos on the payroll of Arabella Advisors (now operating as Sunflower Services), or the Tides Foundation, or some other Soros-connected money-laundry. And many have come from other states, possibly even other nations (or planets), to join the Cluster-B viragos native to the city in the crusade to defend "Joe Biden's" legion of illegally imported Democratic Party voters.

This acute agitation in the streets against federal officers is obviously and brazenly abetted by those in charge: Governor Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey, and Attorney General Keith Ellison. Walz is a huckleberry for the ages. Did you catch his smarmy sob-story act the day before yesterday, weeping for his "communities" and "neighbors-of-color," "who continue to stand up for freedom with empathy, blah blah." Who does this fraudster think he is kidding with his act?

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said Monday that Damascus has continued to attack its positions across northern Syria despite the US-backed ceasefire reached a day earlier, warning that attacks are targeting the vicinity of SDF-run prisons holding tens of thousands of jailed ISIS militants.

This poses an "extremely dangerous" security threat, the SDF warned. "Since the early hours of this morning, Al-Shaddadi Prison, which holds thousands of detainees from the terrorist organization ISIS, has been subjected to repeated attacks carried out by factions affiliated with Damascus. Fighters of the SDF confronted these attacks and succeeded in repelling them several times, resulting in the martyrdom of dozens of our fighters and the injury of others, in an effort to prevent a serious security catastrophe," it said. Unconfirmed reports and videos on social media say that Syrian troops are freeing prisoners from SDF-run detention centers holding ISIS militants.

Capitalist vultures aren't just circling, they are pouncing - drawn to the smell of decay evident in Washington's militant tactics.

As deplored in the Washington Post, Washington's recent assault on Venezuela wasn't just your usual US war of aggression/regime change operation but also served to facilitate a particular kind of insider trading.

Or rather, betting: On the so-called 'prediction' platform Polymarket, a very well-informed investor wagered over $30,000 that Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro would be out of office by the last day of January and - lo and behold! - "walked away with more than $400,000 in profit." That "prediction" was "timed with such pitch-perfect precision that it drew heavy media scrutiny" as it "bore the hallmarks of insider trading." You. Don't. Say. There's cheating going on at the White House and among its hangers-on!

Now, let's be realistic: Real, existing capitalism - not the Friedrich von Hayek-Milton Friedman fan fiction that still dulls all too many minds - has always been ruthless. Its modern history of about half a millennium includes stupendous scientific, technological, and cultural change, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels acknowledged in their Communist Manifesto, parts of which read almost as a panegyric to the bourgeoisie and the capitalist world it made.

But that world also began with the vicious impoverishment and exploitation of the masses, the plunder and devastation of whole continents and their original inhabitants, and a brisk international slave trade, vitiating and ending millions of lives. Marxists call this "primitive accumulation"; their master also used the term "original expropriation," sardonically comparing its role in traditional political economy to man's fall from divine grace in Christian mythology.

After the establishment of first a traditional European great power empire under a radically new management dedicated to Communism in 1917 and then, one World War later, a whole Communist "second world" - centered in but not restricted to Eurasia - the capitalist regimes of the West slowly learned to tread a little more carefully, at least at home.