Truth Not Myth

I read something in Haaretz. Israeli soldiers. Real names hidden. Yuval. Maya. Juda. Ran. They talked about what they did in Gaza.

The visit was supposed to reinforce the language of alliance: a British monarch in Washington, addressing Congress, affirming continuity between two long-standing partners. Instead, the occasion became dominated by Donald Trump’s behaviour. He ignored elements of protocol, redirected attention towards himself, and repeatedly blurred the line between diplomacy and performance. Many commentators treated this as a straightforward humiliation for Britain. The assumption beneath that reaction was simple: the louder figure controls the encounter. Yet the visit suggested something more complicated. Public authority does not always belong to the person generating the most attention. In some situations, restraint becomes more powerful precisely because it refuses competition. That distinction explains the entire episode. The central dynamic was not Britain losing control of a state visit. It was the exposure of performative power beside institutional confidence. One man attempted to dominate ...

Not even in power and the Governance Failures are incredible and long. A cluster of breaches across this many categories is rarely treated as noise. In political analysis, patterns like this usually point to structural weaknesses,  gaps in governance, low professionalisation, unstable internal culture, and systems that fail to catch problems before they spread. When incidents span ethics, administration, conduct, and communication, analysts tend to read it as a sign of deeper institutional vulnerabilities rather than isolated mistakes.  Here is the full List … available through open source. I’m certain there is many many more.  Category 1: Parliamentary Standards Breaches Nigel Farage breached the MPs' Code of Conduct 17 times for failing to register £384,000 in undeclared income from GB News, a gold dealer, Google, and Cameo. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found the breaches were inadvertent due to poor administration. January 2026. Category 2: Financi...

Recently Ray Dalio wrote an article titled The Big Thing We Are in a World War and It Is Not Going to End Anytime Soon . I read it on LinkedIn, and this essay is my reply to it. Dalio is an American investor and the founder of Bridgewater Associates , which is one of the largest hedge funds in the world. He is known for his long term historical frameworks and his belief that economic and political cycles repeat over centuries. His work carries weight because he has spent decades studying patterns in markets and states. That is why his argument deserves a serious response rather than a casual dismissal. Dalio starts with confidence. He builds a clean arc, a world that behaves the way older worlds behaved. But the structure has changed, and once you look at the material conditions, the mechanics do not hold. He sees a rising power and a declining one. He sees blocs forming because blocs formed before. He sees the United States anchoring one pole and China anchoring the other, with ever...

  It was Tuesday 7 April in the evening when BBC News interviewed Michael Baumgartner , a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives serving on the Foreign Affairs Committee. The subject was the escalating crisis with Iran. The immediate spark was a social media post from President Donald Trump . The words were simple and catastrophic. A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. Let that sentence sit in the mind. A sitting American president, on a public platform, threatening the erasure of an ancient civilisation. The vocabulary is not metaphor. It is not strategic misdirection. It is the language of annihilation. Yet when the BBC interviewer asked whether this constituted genocidal rhetoric , Congressman Baumgartner did not hesitate. Oh no, he said. Not at all. And so the theatre begins. The strange ritual of contemporary Republican politics, in which elected officials must take the impulsive, the reckless, and the plainly dangerous...

  For the past 15 years, the UK economy has been stuck in a cycle of low growth, high debt and political instability. Public services are strained, businesses are struggling to expand and the government has turned to spending cuts to balance the books. But how did Britain end up here — and is the Conservative government’s economic record to blame? To understand the roots of this stagnation, we need to examine the key policy decisions, political missteps and structural challenges that have shaped the UK’s economic trajectory since the financial crisis of 2008 . Austerity (2010–2016): Shrinking the State In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, David Cameron’s government introduced sweeping austerity measures aimed at reducing the budget deficit. Under Chancellor George Osborne, the government slashed public spending, including cuts to local government budgets, welfare benefits, public sector wages (which were frozen for years) and infrastructure projects. The goal was to rest...