Note: All personal names have been anonymised unless the individual has a verifiable public presence. I choose to run risks; I will not make that choice for others. He was 21 and already battling high blood pressure. His doctors confirmed it. His exemption papers were in order. But that didn’t stop them from coming for him. One morning in spring 2025, he opened his door to find officers holding a digital summons. No discussion. No delay. He was on a bus to a training facility by nightfall. Within a week, he was at the Ukrainian border—terrified, untrained, and furious. ...

The urgency of the mission In the pre-dawn stillness of June 1st, 2025, a modest vessel slipped out of Catania’s port in Sicily, its silhouette sharp against the Mediterranean blue. The Madleen, neither a warship nor a tanker, carried no tourists, no cargo of luxury—only defiance. Her destination: Gaza. Her mission: to challenge Israel’s suffocating blockade, now in its 18th year and increasingly lethal. This departure comes not as an isolated gesture, but as a direct riposte to last month’s drone attack on the humanitarian ship Conscience—a strike that occurred brazenly in international waters, just one more entry in Israel’s growing rap sheet of maritime belligerence. ...

In September 2023, the Israeli Ministry of Defence released a promotional video for its Iron Sting precision mortar system. The footage—taken from a drone—shows a building in Gaza being obliterated. It isn’t merely a military demonstration; it’s a sales pitch. The message? Our weapons work. And they work because we’ve used them—on real people, in real places, with very real consequences. At arms fairs like DSEI in London, the phrase “combat-proven” is more than sales patter; it’s a mark of credibility. The battlefield doubles as showroom. And the uncomfortable question is this: Is it morally, legally, or politically justifiable to turn war zones into testing grounds for profit? ...

Content Warning: May cause acute frustration in readers who (a) remember when politics had more than two settings, or (b) still believe electoral systems are designed to represent people. Being a Thoroughly Unimpressed Examination of Political Labels, Their Stubborn Persistence Despite Overwhelming Evidence of Uselessness, and Why We’re All Arguing in the Wrong Bloody Language. Recommended for Recovering partisans Citizens who’ve noticed the emperor has no clothes Anyone who’s ever muttered, “There has to be a better way” The political spectrum of left vs right is one of the most enduring, yet increasingly obsolete, frameworks in modern discourse. Its origins are surprisingly mundane, dating back to the French Revolution (1789), when members of the National Assembly physically divided themselves. The revolutionaries, who favoured democracy and equality, sat on the left, while the monarchists, clinging to tradition and hierarchy, sat on the right. ...

We humans adore a simple dichotomy. It’s frightfully efficient. White or non-white. Male or female. Disabled or abled. These binaries promise neatness in a messy world – a cognitive filing system for complex humanity. Yet as philosopher Val Plumwood observed, these “master/slave” frameworks operate through five dangerously slick mechanisms: backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorporation, instrumentalism, and homogenisation. The result? A society perpetually queueing at the wrong post office counter. The five quiet engines of oppression Plumwood’s mechanisms work like bureaucratic stealth. Backgrounding treats one identity as society’s default setting – the unmarked “normal” against which others are measured. Consider how medical textbooks historically used white male bodies as universal templates. Radical exclusion rigidly polices borders: trans folk facing scrutiny over toilet access, or mixed-race individuals pressured to “pick a side”. Incorporation defines the “slave” category purely by its relationship to the master (“disabled” meaning “needs help”). Instrumentalism reduces people to tools – like expecting minority staff to fix diversity problems unpaid. Homogenisation flattens groups: assuming all disabled people need identical ramps. ...

Premise: Functional by design By 2040, BRICS+ emerges as the world’s most effective climate alliance—not through luck, but through shrewd strategy, sovereign solidarity, and an uncanny ability to turn adversity into opportunity. What begins as a pushback against western hypocrisy evolves into a multipolar green order, driven by energy pragmatism, diplomatic agility, and some rather bold infrastructure experiments. How it happens The west’s green hypocrisy backfires (2025–2030) The European Union launches its much-touted carbon border tax with great fanfare—and little diplomacy. In the Global South, it is promptly dubbed “eco-colonialism in spreadsheets”. Meanwhile, the United States fails to pass its second Green New Deal, after a series of fiscal deadlocks and an unexpected banking crisis send climate funding into retreat. ...

Premise: Dysfunctional by design By 2035, BRICS+ doesn’t collapse under its own contradictions, nor does it morph into a cohesive challenger to the G7. Instead, it stumbles into superpower status by a series of messy accidents, economic disasters, and geopolitical farces. Less deliberate empire, more Frankenstein with a membership card. As the West self-harms through sanctions, debt cliffs, and diplomatic hubris, BRICS+ rises—not through coordination, but sheer entropy. They didn’t build an empire. They inherited the scrapyard and accidentally started selling tickets. — Anonymous EU diplomat, 2034 ...

The BRICS alliance began life as something between a Goldman Sachs marketing gimmick and a drunken bet among emerging market traders. “I’ll wager you a case of champagne these four economies will dominate by 2050!” Fast-forward two decades, and what started as an investment banker’s acronym has somehow morphed into a geopolitical bloc with expansionist ambitions. The recent addition of new members under the “BRICS+” banner suggests this is no longer just about economics. This is about building an alternative world order where the rules are made by autocrats and petrostates. ...

The received wisdom—trotted out at Davos panels, EU Commission summits, and in the more sentimental columns of the Financial Times—is that Europe, having learned its lessons from two world wars, has spent the past eight decades basking in a glow of enlightened tranquillity. No more trenches, no more blitzes. Just a polite consensus of democratic cooperation, cross-border trade, and the occasional fracas over mackerel quotas. How charming. And how utterly wrong. ...

In 2025, the financial sector continues its courtship with generative AI, hoping it will finally make compliance less of a bureaucratic slog. According to Global Relay’s State of AI in Surveillance Report 2025, attitudes are thawing: there’s been a 19% drop in firms reluctant to implement AI. Apparently, nothing eases doubts like the promise of automated paperwork and plausible deniability. Still, not all is rosy. Explainability remains elusive, regulators are breathing down necks, and integration often resembles a Frankensteinian patchwork. Innovation, it seems, comes with a compliance hangover. ...