"Stardust Solutions is a US-Israeli company that is developing technology for solar geoengineering. They've raised $15 million in funding from AWZ Ventures, a Canadian-Israeli venture capital fund that advertises its ties to the CIA, FBI, and the Mossad..." - Sofia Menemenlis

"When the Americans arrived in Korea [in September 1945] they refused to work with the People's Committees. Instead, the United States military worked with the Korean Democratic Party, which consisted mainly of the landlords and the collaborator class." - Kevin Gray

"Staring down the path of existential destruction..." - @philbc3 on how the Conservatives' voter coalition is breaking apart as they lose their Gen X voters to Reform:

"In France, Emmanuel Macron is absolutely detested. With a virulence that is perhaps difficult to imagine..." - Sebastian Budgen

"Very erratic, very unprincipled, very opportunistic on just about every, every level." - Sebastian Budgen on Emmanuel Macron's vacillating position on Gaza:

Sebastian Budgen on Emmanuel Macron's failed economic programme and unimpressive domestic legacy:

"The Starmer leadership want Reform to do well. It's the strategy that you're going to alight upon if you are a centrist political formation with nothing positive to offer, because the only way you can get people to vote for you is to make it a kind of blackmail." - @leninology.bsky.social

The prevalence of anti-Welsh prejudice in England during the 1980s and 90s is partly due to Wales being treated more as an internal British colony - centred on resource extraction - than was the case with Scotland (and closer to the model of colonial Ireland):

"The fact that a Labour government after Grenfell has decided that the regulation of construction is the problem and the thing they need to dismantle, I think is a fucking obscenity."

"So what you're going to get is tens of thousands of new Barratt Homes estates, which are poorly built, incredibly poky, built with no attention to climate change whatsoever. Shit housing that will be obsolete in five years." - Owen Hatherley on Labour's housing policy:

"Part of Donald Trump's incredible political success as a character and personality is that in many ways he is a stand-up comic. The way he holds a space, the way he goes off the cuff, his improvisation, his development of his own political idioms..." - @lclaberge.bsky.social

"Hegemony in the sense of trying to mould a common sense - that's over... It's just pure, brute force assertion, backed up by violence and power." - @leninology.bsky.social on public opinion and the US attack on Iran:

"Israel and the United States want Iran to be defenceless. They want to be able to strike it and coerce it at will. They want to leave it with absolutely no ability to constrain their freedom of action." - Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Often portrayed as if it is hell-bent on producing a nuclear weapon, Iran had kept to the terms of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal until Donald Trump reneged on the agreement in 2018 - in favour of pursuing all-out economic war on the country:

"Do the UK, France, and Canada even want to stop the war? I think they want to use this pressure to help the IDF leadership put manners on Netanyahu and the far right. Probably they won't even apply enough pressure even to attain that." -
@leninology.bsky.social

"Israel's dropped over 100,000 tons of explosives on Gaza. That's 275 tons per square kilometre over eighteen months. The savagery is incomparable." - @leninology.bsky.social

Whether it's the Islamophobic project of trying to alter the demographic balance in Kashmir, or seeking to repress militant groups, Radhika Desai argues that the Modi government is characterised by a preoccupation with public perception rather than actually achieving its goals: