Who fact-checks the fact-chekers, There is the real problem?

This.

Most of the tech stack is american controlled and that is a security and privacy risk to everybody. From instruction set architecture to control over the social media. To American enemies, American allies… american’s themselves nobody is safe… probably the those that are best at mitigating said risk or take any steps at all are the American enemies.

I haven’t had much hope that if there was an major asteroid racing towards earth that there could be much done about it, but I also know that likelyhood of it is very small so there is no need to lose sleep over it.

political elites in Europe are afraid and fear upheavals are coming in the coming years and months because of the cost of living crisis and the war. They try to clamp down beforehand to preserve their own power. This always happens when things go bad. The leash is kept looser when people behave and it’s tightened again when the opposite happens. There is no real freedoms that is given to the people by the elites, because what concessions they give willingly they can just as easily take away when they no longer feel like it. Provided that they think they can get away with it.

Good. Necessity creates innovation. not so good for ASML that is getting competition created for it by the sanctions that aren’t doing so hot.

International law in this context just means that a single global hegemon can no longer push everybody else around and call it’s will and interests “law”, and therefore claim that it’s interest somehow benevolent and part of how just things are. That is exactly what “rules based international order” means.

Not that we have ever had any law that equally applies to everybody equally. All laws and even international law needs a hobbesian Behemoth that is more powerful than any other to enforce “international law” and is in the end above it since it is at the best position to enforce and set the “law”. The UN and it’s institutions are basically basically a discussion club by design and it can’t do shit so post 1990 world the Behemoth has been the world hegemonic United states. Now that US has declined relatively as Russia, China, India, Iran, etc have risen it finds itself unable to enforce anything through hard or soft power and therefore the idea of law, stability and peace under US dissipates. Not that it was ever lawfully, peaceful or stable, that illusion only applied to the western core nations of this now dead American world.

All of the sanctions and European energy security were banked on the idea that Russian frontlines would collapse under the super Nato equipped Ukrainian counterattack and then there would be a regime change in Moscow and gas would flow again. Now Ukraine is on the backfoot, there is no change in Moscow and Russia oil still flows to Europe, but only through intermediaries and loopholes, because there really never was an short to medium term alternative for it in the way the global oil market is structured. The sanctions were actual serious sanctions and their architects thought that they would actually work, but the decisions were made on faulty assumptions of effectiveness of sanctions and the structure of Russia economy.

Germany has been the second largest military supplier to Ukraine after the US. They are very much providing for that war too.

For german government “Never again” meant just never again genocide against jews. All other people are fine and free game.

They will try it again in like two to three years from now. This time they will just do a under the radar and somewhat diluted version of it.