The geopolitical tectonics of the world have irrevocably shifted, and this earthquake runs straight through the Ukrainian steppe. While the West clings to the remnants of its unipolar hegemony, Russia is making something painfully clear on the battlefield and beyond: the time of Western illusions is over. The West, and NATO in particular, finds itself at its weakest point this century. The United States proves unable even to manage an asymmetric confrontation with Iran to its advantage, let alone win a symmetric war against a nuclear and industrial powerhouse like Russia. Europe, reduced to a collection of vassal states desperately trying to secure their energy supplies while serving American interests, is militarily and economically hollowed out.
Politics
Analysis of the Belgian subsidy culture: why liberal criticism of SME support contradicts the billions in aid for large corporations and the healthcare sector. While economist Rudy Aernoudt chastises Flemish SMEs for their subsidy reflex, his boss Georges-Louis Bouchez is helping to build Europe’s largest corporate welfare state. In the public debate on the Belgian economy, the term 'baxter economy' regularly surfaces. It is a powerful metaphor for a system in which companies no longer survive on their own business model, but are artificially kept alive by a continuous infusion of government support. Recently, this criticism received renewed prominence in a column by economist Rudy Aernoudt on www.made-in.be/. As chief of staff to MR chairman Georges-Louis Bouchez, he decried the Flemish subsidy culture for SMEs. He rightly stated that instruments such as the SME portfolio and growth subsidies have created a financial reflex: first seek support, then think about strategy and profitability.
The contemporary geopolitical architecture finds itself in a state of irreversible transformation. What has been presented over the past three decades by Western establishment think tanks and media as the "end of history" – a stable, unipolar world order led by Washington and its European allies – is increasingly revealing itself to be a costly, destructive, and morally bankrupt illusion. Drawing on the revealing and detailed analyses of former Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, an uncomfortable truth is laid bare, one that is consistently ignored by mainstream media. The current crisis in Europe, the devastating war in Ukraine, and the apparent collapse of the trans-Atlantic project are not an unfortunate coincidence, nor the result of unforeseeable Russian expansionism. They are the logical, and by many in Washington even intended, result of a decades-long, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-driven agenda.
Anyone driving through the Flemish and Walloon regions today can still see, here and there, the skeletons of a bygone era: abandoned factory halls, silted-up docks, and rusty railway lines that were once the lifelines of our prosperity. As a 79-year-old engineer, I look at this landscape not merely with nostalgia, but with a deep sense of bewilderment and indignation. What we experience today as 'stagnation' is, in reality, the end result of decades of deliberate, misguided political strategic policy. We did not break our industrial backbone by accident; it was taken from us.
Human vulnerability is exposed nowhere more painfully than in a doctor's consultation room. It is a space presumed to stand for science, empathy, and recovery, but in practice often degenerates into a theater of arrogance, systemic inertia, and dangerous complacency. Exactly one year ago, I, a 79-year-old man with a life full of international experience and a deep respect for knowledge, landed in a medical nightmare that nearly cost me my left foot. What began as intense back pain, through a sequence of medical errors, drug side effects, and professional hubris, degenerated into a life-threatening infection. This personal odyssey, however, is not unique. It is a microcosm of a much larger, Western problem. Our healthcare system, particularly in Belgium, is frozen in a monopoly position protected by the RIZIV, the mutualities, the pharmaceutical industry, and a medical establishment that dismisses any form of external control or criticism as nonsense.
In contemporary geopolitical and technological discourse, we are constantly presented with a narrative of relentless competition, technological separation, and the so-called necessity of 'decoupling' between the West and China. American politicians and policymakers speak with great pathos about containing China's technological rise, imposing sanctions, and protecting Western innovation through exclusivity. Yet, when we pierce through the rhetoric and look at the hard, undeniable facts of the market, a completely different picture unfolds. A picture where the so-called unbridgeable gap is not only bridged, but where Chinese innovation fundamentally rewrites the rules of global capitalism.
Europe's energy supply is in a state of deep, structural vulnerability—a reality systematically downplayed or wrapped in a narrative of triumphant resilience by the official channels of the European Union. While the European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, attempts to convince the world of a successful transition and an overcome dependency, the hard market figures and fundamental economic analyses point to a very different truth. Europe stands on the brink of a potentially catastrophic energy crisis, where prices are not merely fluctuating cyclically but are structurally driven up by a combination of physical market tightness, a fundamentally flawed market design, and short-sighted geopolitical policy.
There is no sugarcoating it: the European Union is going through a disastrous decade, and the ways to conceal the structural problems any longer are slowly but surely running out. Germany has been recording a declining industrial production for several quarters in a row and is losing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing sector. France is borrowing heavily to cover current expenditures, and the interest burden is suffocating any form of economic oxygen.
The “independence day” events this week in Kiev were a theater of the absurd. The commemoration was based on grotesque lies and propaganda. The truth is its people have been brutally violated by corrupt elites under the sway of Western imperial ambitions that have nothing to do with independence, sovereignty or democracy.
Free speech
Human vulnerability is exposed nowhere more painfully than in a doctor's consultation room. It is a space presumed to stand for science, empathy, and recovery, but in practice often degenerates into a theater of arrogance, systemic inertia, and dangerous complacency. Exactly one year ago, I, a 79-year-old man with a life full of international experience and a deep respect for knowledge, landed in a medical nightmare that nearly cost me my left foot. What began as intense back pain, through a sequence of medical errors, drug side effects, and professional hubris, degenerated into a life-threatening infection. This personal odyssey, however, is not unique. It is a microcosm of a much larger, Western problem. Our healthcare system, particularly in Belgium, is frozen in a monopoly position protected by the RIZIV, the mutualities, the pharmaceutical industry, and a medical establishment that dismisses any form of external control or criticism as nonsense.
History bears witness to great minds who achieved incredible things. Nicola Tesla, Sir Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and many others. But when one places the biographies of these exceptional individuals side by side, one striking common denominator stands out: the way they approached social interaction, or rather, how little they actually sought it. Many recognize this feeling. It is the experience of sitting in a room full of people, at a reception or in a crowded café, and instead of feeling energized by the social buzz, feeling drained and exhausted. The only wish that remains is the urge to escape, to retreat into the quiet space where one can read, think, observe, or simply be alone.
The Vietnam War killed over three million people. But the story most of us learned in school — that it was simply about stopping communism — is dangerously incomplete. The real origins stretch back decades before the first American soldier set foot in Southeast Asia, through French colonial rubber plantations where seventeen thousand workers died on a single estate, through a jungle meeting where American spies saved the life of Ho Chi Minh, through eight letters sent to President Truman that were never answered, through a democratic election deliberately sabotaged because the wrong side was going to win, and through a naval attack on a stormy night in the Gulf of Tonkin that declassified NSA documents now confirm almost certainly never happened.
In an era where the Western world presents itself as the guardian of the rule of law, democracy, and freedom of speech, reality reveals an increasingly darker and more authoritarian face. One of the most poignant and simultaneously illuminating testimonies of this decline comes from Colonel Jacques Baud, former Swiss intelligence officer and author. In a recent and devastating conversation with Nima Alkhorshid, Baud not only outlines the inhuman personal price he pays for his freedom of speech but also pinpoints the sore spot of Western strategic thinking. From the Sovietization of Europe to the ideological blindness of Israeli intelligence, and from the desperate acts of the Ukrainian regime to the rational, doctrine-driven warfare of Iran: Baud's analysis is a necessary correction to Western narratives.
When the United States government decided to impose sanctions against the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, honest defenders of human rights were astonished. The measure, announced in July 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was presented as a response to what the U.S. government called the expert’s “illegitimate and shameful efforts” to promote actions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli and American officials.
In a recent conversation on Dialogue Works, former Swiss Army Colonel and intelligence analyst Jacques Baud joined host Nima Alkhorshid for a probing discussion on the transformation of global power structures. Their exchange offers a crystalline articulation of a thesis increasingly echoed by strategic thinkers worldwide: the era of unipolar Western dominance is over, not by declaration, but by the irreversible rise of sovereign, technically capable states that refuse to be coerced.
An obituary in 12 propositions, or the downfall of a phased-out model. Speech at the annual conference "Courage for Ethics" from 29 to 31 August 2025 in Sirnach, Switzerland by Patrik Baab.
The United Kingdom's attitude towards the war with Iran has been a national disgrace and has shown that Britain has a powerless military and non-existent diplomacy. This is symptomatic of the growing ignorance of our British elite, with ministers coming and going so often that they can do nothing useful, while our universities go bankrupt and we struggle to train new talent capable of understanding a complex world.
She watched the Bolsheviks seize power in 1917. By 1918, they were already making the mistakes that would define the next century. One of the most respected Marxists alive, writing from a prison cell in Germany, told them exactly how it would end. They called her a heretic. Then Stalin proved her right. She got every detail right. Her name was Rosa Luxemburg.
AI & Open Source
Since the launch of De Jakobijn in March 2026, I regularly receive the same question: "How do you manage to formulate such complex geopolitical and social problems so clearly and simply? Where do you find the time to analyse all those sources?" Today I will give you an honest answer. An answer that may be surprising, but which fits perfectly with the vision of this website: Progress through Solidarity and the Sharing of Knowledge. The honest answer is this: without artificial intelligence, De Jakobijn would not exist.
Recently I bought a dream PC. An AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, an RTX 5070, 64 GB RAM and a 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe solid state drive for € 4,110. And then I made the mistake of also choosing Windows 11 alongside Linux Mint as a "dual boot". Within minutes I was staring at something that felt less like an operating system and more like a surveillance tool with a start menu. Microsoft wanted my email address. Microsoft wanted my phone number. Microsoft wanted me to use Edge, Microsoft wanted me to buy Office 365 instead of LibreOffice, Microsoft wanted me to "entrust" my data to the cloud...
While China conquers the world with open-source AI models like Kimi K3 and more than 10 billion downloads, Europe is building a wall of regulation. An in-depth analysis of the AI Act, geopolitical tensions and the future of global AI governance.
Prompt engineering is the art of formulating inputs that guide AI systems toward the desired output. The input to an AI system is called a 'prompt'. Prompt engineering therefore means: creating the best prompt to obtain the desired output. A prompt can range from a simple question to a complex instruction, depending on the task and the AI system.
It is a fascinating and important story – digital sovereignty is increasingly becoming a geopolitical issue, and the German approach offers a blueprint that other governments will study seriously. In the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, nestled between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, something has happened that the global tech industry did not see coming. Without spectacle or international press conferences, the state government has decided to systematically replace Microsoft Windows and associated software with Linux and open-source alternatives. What at first glance appears to be a technical migration is, in reality, a geopolitical statement of historic proportions.
The wars and aggressions of Israel and the United States in the Middle East have destabilized not only the region but the entire world. The West is trapped in a web of its own geopolitical miscalculations. After Trump's lost war, he falls between two stools: choosing between ego or economy, as he has maneuvered himself into an impossible position by starting the war against Iran. He has trapped himself. On one hand, there is internal pressure from neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham, who demand total destruction of Iran, and on the other hand, there is the harsh reality of the world economy. His ego drives him toward victory, but reality delivers him defeat. Oil and gas prices and faltering international trade pose a constant threat because the infrastructure of GCC countries (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait) is a potential target as long as the war with Iran continues. An escalation would not only disrupt oil markets but could also choke off the supply of strategic materials such as fertilizers, sulfur, helium, and aluminum.
Kyiv, May 2026 – In the four-year war against Russia, Ukraine has evolved into a global testing ground for military technology. One of the most influential, yet controversial, players in this field is the American technology company Palantir Technologies. Although unfounded accusations regarding the company's role have been made in the past, factual reports indicate that Palantir is primarily used for data-driven decision-making, air defense, and planning deep strikes on legitimate military targets. Nevertheless, the use of AI in warfare raises pressing legal questions: who is responsible if an algorithm makes a mistake?
In an AI landscape dominated by billion-dollar data centers and unlimited compute, a relatively small team from DeepSeek just dropped a bombshell: DeepSeek V4 Pro, a 1.6 trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that competes head-to-head with the industry’s closed-source giants. What makes this story remarkable isn't just the performance—it is the constraints. DeepSeek reportedly operates with a team roughly 40 times smaller than Open AI's and lacks access to the most advanced NVIDIA chips. Yet, they have built a model with a 1 million token context window that rivals Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4.
Built on Linux Mint and driven by the ethos of the Free Software Foundation: this article explains why LibreOffice is not merely a free alternative, but a superior creative tool, designed by you, for you.
Energy & Science
Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the top right corner of the screen. There you see a battery icon. Every night, without exception, you plug that device into the wall outlet. If you forget, your Apple device costing 1,200 euros turns into a useless piece of glass by midday. For fifteen years now, American tech giants like Apple, Google, and Samsung have been trying to convince us that this is simply the reality of modern technology. You want a faster phone? Then you'll have to learn to live with battery anxiety. But while Silicon Valley fights this battle against the laws of physics, a historic disruption is taking place in China that renders the entire iPhone ecosystem obsolete.
In contemporary geopolitical and technological discourse, we are constantly presented with a narrative of relentless competition, technological separation, and the so-called necessity of 'decoupling' between the West and China. American politicians and policymakers speak with great pathos about containing China's technological rise, imposing sanctions, and protecting Western innovation through exclusivity. Yet, when we pierce through the rhetoric and look at the hard, undeniable facts of the market, a completely different picture unfolds. A picture where the so-called unbridgeable gap is not only bridged, but where Chinese innovation fundamentally rewrites the rules of global capitalism.
Europe's energy supply is in a state of deep, structural vulnerability—a reality systematically downplayed or wrapped in a narrative of triumphant resilience by the official channels of the European Union. While the European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, attempts to convince the world of a successful transition and an overcome dependency, the hard market figures and fundamental economic analyses point to a very different truth. Europe stands on the brink of a potentially catastrophic energy crisis, where prices are not merely fluctuating cyclically but are structurally driven up by a combination of physical market tightness, a fundamentally flawed market design, and short-sighted geopolitical policy.
As a civilization that builds with self-healing concrete, carbon-fiber rebar, and algorithmic structural optimization, we look back at our ancestors with a patronizing fondness. We look at medieval cathedrals or colonial fortresses and marvel that they managed to stand at all, assuming their builders were operating on blind luck, superstition, and an abundance of manual labor. But then we look at our own infrastructure. Our modern highway overpasses sprout structural cracks within three decades. Our concrete high-rises are plagued by "concrete cancer" (alkali-silica reaction) and structural degradation before their first major centennial.
There is no sugarcoating it: the European Union is going through a disastrous decade, and the ways to conceal the structural problems any longer are slowly but surely running out. Germany has been recording a declining industrial production for several quarters in a row and is losing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing sector. France is borrowing heavily to cover current expenditures, and the interest burden is suffocating any form of economic oxygen.
I am not a journalist. I am not a commentator. I am a retired deep‑sea diver/welder who worked on pipe‑laying vessels worldwide, and later a team leader at the natural gas terminals in Zeebrugge and Dunkirk. Those terminals were not involved in the sabotage of Nord Stream. I have been retired for 14 years and have no secret information. What I know about underwater explosions does not come from YouTube – it comes from working at depths of 10 to 165 metres, with a welding or cutting torch in my hand.
The publication of scientific research is a particularly lucrative industry. The most recent estimates suggest it generates an annual turnover of approximately 19 billion US dollars (or 16.67 billion euros), with margins of around 40 percent. These staggering figures largely reflect the fact that the "Big Five" commercial publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE, profit from work that is largely funded with public money.
In certain geopolitical channels and on Persian-language platforms, a concerning message is currently circulating. Iran would have drawn up a specific list of European energy infrastructure as potential targets. The reasoning put forward is that Ukraine, under President Zelensky, is acting as a European proxy army. According to this narrative, Kiev's actions would justify retaliation against European energy interests. For the attentive reader of De Jakobijn, it is essential to look beyond the superficial sensation. We must separate the factual core of these claims from geopolitical distortion.
The Nord Stream saga has taken a turn for the absurd, with a new book claiming that the star saboteur who blew up the gas pipelines was a Ukrainian erotic model-turned-deep sea diver. This detail is the latest addition to an ever-shifting story – while one key coincidence has completely flown under the radar. Published on June 19, ‘The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Greatest Sabotage in History’ promises an inside look at the operation that destroyed the Nord Stream lines. Author Bojan Pancevski doesn’t quibble with the ‘official’ story circulated by the German media – that a Ukrainian commando unit carried out the attack, but adds some pulp-fiction flourish to the tale.
Videos
Volodamir Zelensky's recent threats against Russian airports and passenger planes have been the last straw for Moscow. The Kremlin is well aware that Zelensky would never have dared to make such statements without the approval of his masters in the European Union and Britain. Judging by the statements of numerous influential Russian politicians, it becomes clear that Moscow may perceive terrorist attacks on its airports and civilian aircraft as a joint action by Ukraine in Europe.
Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, also…
Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, also…
The True Origin of the Vietnam War: What Historians Get Wrong
The Vietnam War killed over three million people. But the story most of us learned in school — that it was simply about stopping communism — is dangerously incomplete. The real origins stretch back decades before the first American soldier set foot in Southeast Asia, through French colonial rubber plantations where seventeen thousand workers died on a single estate, through a jungle meeting where American spies saved the life of Ho Chi Minh, through eight letters sent to President Truman that were never answered,…
The Vietnam War killed over three million people. But the story most of us learned in school — that it was simply about stopping communism — is dangerously incomplete. The real origins stretch back decades before the first American soldier set foot in Southeast Asia, through French colonial rubber plantations where seventeen thousand workers died on a single estate, through a jungle meeting where American spies saved the life of Ho Chi Minh, through eight letters sent to President Truman that were never answered,…
Why Europe’s Gas Prices Have Doubled And Why Winter Could Be Worse
Europe's gas prices have doubled this year. But the bigger problem is what happens next. Prices have surged roughly 120% since January, even though winter is still months away. So why is gas getting more expensive now? Because Europe is being squeezed from both sides. Demand is rising, just as supply is tightening, while gas storage remains well below, where Europe wants it before winter. And that creates one crucial question. What happens if the code arrives before the gas does?
Start with…
Europe's gas prices have doubled this year. But the bigger problem is what happens next. Prices have surged roughly 120% since January, even though winter is still months away. So why is gas getting more expensive now? Because Europe is being squeezed from both sides. Demand is rising, just as supply is tightening, while gas storage remains well below, where Europe wants it before winter. And that creates one crucial question. What happens if the code arrives before the gas does?
Start with…
HP wages a bitter, and ultimately futile, battle against China
Two recent developments surrounding the American technology company HP (Hewlett-Packard) illustrate this paradox in a way that feels almost literary. On the one hand, HP, one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most established technology giants, pays licensing fees to Huawei, a Chinese company placed on Washington's infamous 'Entity List'.
On the other hand, HP wages a bitter, and ultimately futile, battle against an ecosystem of compatible ink cartridges worth only 3 dollars, produced…
Two recent developments surrounding the American technology company HP (Hewlett-Packard) illustrate this paradox in a way that feels almost literary. On the one hand, HP, one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most established technology giants, pays licensing fees to Huawei, a Chinese company placed on Washington's infamous 'Entity List'.
On the other hand, HP wages a bitter, and ultimately futile, battle against an ecosystem of compatible ink cartridges worth only 3 dollars, produced…