Each day at just after midnight Eastern, a post like this one is created for contributors and readers of this site to upload news links and video links on the issues that concern this site. Most notably, Islam and its effects on Classical Civilization, and various forms of leftism from Soviet era communism, to postmodernism and all the flavours of galloping statism and totalitarianism such as Nazism and Fascism which are increasingly snuffing out the classical liberalism which created our near, miraculous civilization the West has been building since the time of Socrates.
This document was written around the time this site was created, for those who wish to understand what this site is about. And while our understanding of the world and events has grown since then, the basic ideas remain sound and true to the purpose.
So please post all links, thoughts and ideas that you feel will benefit the readers of this site to the comments under this post each day. And thank you all for your contributions.
This is the new Samizdat. We must use it while we can.
For those interested, please check out https://vladtepesblog.substack.com/ as an another avenue of expression. The Substack is a different project in a sense. It is older videos that in the light of subsequent events, look different or of increased importance, Check it out now and again if you like.
This really needs a better caption. It’s a video with Lebanese women dancing to music at a wedding, their hair flowing freely. An Iranian news agency published this video as an example of people cheering as missiles fly overhead en route to Israel. I’m glad that someone in Iran figured out how to make life fun by inserting a party vudeo, even in the face of war and modesty police censors.
https://youtube.com/shorts/mTn_UaQHxSM
Prepare for more “climate crisis” propaganda. Summer is here. Finally:
https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/weather-check-its-about-get-brutal
Why has the Liberal government of Canada, under the placed Prime Minister Mark Carney, extended the farce Covid Public Emergency to 2029, based on absolutely nothing?
Wake up little Suzy. Do they have plans to murder more peoplekind?
Award-winning pink enrichment from Iran:
Swedish “Queen of Trash” One of 11 Charged in Massive Environmental Scandal
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/swedish-queen-of-trash-one-of-11-charged-in-massive-environmental-scandal/
The trial against eleven people connected with Swedish waste company Think Pink started Tuesday in Stockholm. The company has been charged with illegally dumping at least 200,000 metric tons of waste from the Stockholm area in 21 places across 15 municipalities in Sweden. In reality, the number of illegal waste sites was much larger—so large that the court had to limit the charges for time reasons.
Managing director of the now-defunct company was self-proclaimed “Queen of Trash” Bella Nilsson, a former stripper currently going by the name Fariba Vancor, having changed her first name nine times and last name seven. Born in Iran as ??Isabella Khatibi Ghabagh Tabeh, she ran the refuse company together with her then-husband Thomas Nilsson, also charged in the case.
Vancor claims innocence and says she’s the victim of ploys from competitors. In the company’s heyday, she was celebrated in the media as a brave woman entrepreneur breaking into a largely male market. Her company was twice given a prestigious business award and its signature hot pink trash bags were a common sight in communities surrounding Stockholm.
[..]
As a result, toxic substances such as arsenic, mercury, dioxins, PCBs, and lead leaked into the soil, air, and water.
Toxic waste was improperly disposed of in the vicinity of water protection areas, unprotected stormwater wells, homes, and protected coastal areas. Some of the waste sites also caught fire and burned for months.
[..]
I’ve been having trouble loading.
Let’s try this.
planefag@planefag
every air planner in NATO these past three days waking around with a stack of these to hand out:
https://x.com/planefag/status/1934423614088257860
LOL
Robert Heinlein (a graduate of Annapolis) said that no matter how much you bomb the enemy the war isn’t over until a scared kid with a knife on the end of a rifle digs them out of their holes. Hopefully those will be Iranian kids fighting their own war of freedom and not US kids trying to nation build.
One of the many things that the left doesn’t understand is how people will work hard to protect things they have build but will ignore and throw away things they are given. Helping the Iranian people free themselves and establish a new government that is Western in their orientation gives the Iranian people a stake in the nation. Having other nations free them and set up a government the other nations like is just a different kind of occupation by Dictators which will be opposed and eventually thrown out.
Do your good works by working with Human Nature instead of working against it.
“Establishment” for a better future: The historic need of our time
A better future won’t just establish itself.
This essay, while a long one, is considerably shorter than it could be, if I included a lot of quoted citations and deeper discussion of the technical aspects of some of the targeting sequences alluded to (in Iran and Yemen, and with the recent Ukrainian attack on Russia’s high-value strategic aircraft).
It takes forever to put those articles together, and my priority is to convey clearly a top-level point about the “meta-trend” of our thinking on matters like game-changing geopolitical developments, negotiations, and warfare and the uses of power in today’s environment.
I think the meta-trend will be seen more distinctly and usefully if the discussion focuses on that, and doesn’t try to make too many ancillary points. I don’t even want to talk about the ancillary points; I want to get us ahead of the action, inside the OODA loop, by pointing out how appreciating the meta-trend makes us smarter in the face of President Trump’s negotiating style, rather than being held back by overlaying our incorrect assumptions on his actions.
At the outset, let me clarify that you don’t need to agree with Trump’s goals to think usefully about his way of framing negotiations. It helps if you can perceive why his goals make sense to him, and quite a few people disagree so much that they just can’t see it. Many of them assume Trump is a cynical, faithless, sold-out liar because he doesn’t have their premises, and hence their goals. The mish-mash you come up with trying to fit all that together has no utility; it just leads observers to a depressed, pessimistic view that is never requited by the instant failures predicted, but nevertheless keeps many people in a relentlessly sour mood.
Perhaps some might be willing to consider an alternative view, and ponder a reason why the view is interestingly suited to the time we find ourselves in.
So, without delay, let us investigate.
There are two meta-points to be addressed in considering the meta-trend. Consideration of the points causes the trend to emerge most clearly, so I’m going to treat the points first.
Better outcomes
Point number one can be seen in an analogy. The analogy is to the concept of a “better peace” following a war, a concept developed at length by British military analyst Basil H. Liddell-Hart in his seminal 1954 book Strategy (now in a second revised edition). Liddell-Hart was an army officer in World War I, and after departing the military in the 1920s with health limitations (probably from gassing during the war), spent the rest of his life as a military historian and theorist.
Liddell-Hart wrote of war strategy as something that should seek to procure and implement a “better peace.” Strategy’s goal, if limited to narrowly-defined objectives like recovering territory, would abandon achievable gains that could secure a better peace, and that would make the ensuing end of formal conflict weaker and less sustainable. Liddell-Hart advocated indirect approaches to strategy in part because they can draw in collateral lines of effort that bring about a better peace.
A simplistic linear approach, on the other hand, may look desirable from some political points of view. But if it doesn’t make the peace better than the status quo ante, its effect won’t last.
The interim between World War I and World War II – basically a primer on how not to end an armed conflict – is an obvious example. But writers in the Europe Liddell-Hart inhabited had decades upon decades of examples to highlight. Indeed, Europe had existed for centuries as a long series of unsustainable peaces cobbled together by exhausted states, to gain some brief relief from war.
Even the “peace of Vienna” negotiated after Waterloo served mainly to avert general war. Particular wars abounded between Vienna and World War I. In fact, as I have argued often, the idea of “limited war” became so ingrained in Europe’s geopolitical framework, with signal events like unifying Italy and unifying Germany achieved by means of them, that the very complacency of the notion – “limited war” – became a chief contributing condition to the eruption of World War I.
What is this “better peace” concept analogous to? In 2025, it’s analogous to the way Donald Trump frames his approach to negotiations, or deal-making. When Trump is negotiating deals, he’s not just stating a set of marginal changes to the status quo that he wants agreement on. That’s a linear and very simple approach. There may be finesse in the tactics used to obtain the marginal changes (in the numbers in a matrix, or in territory held, or in the wording of concurrence on principles). But the goal itself is unimaginative, assuming that nothing but the marginal figures will change, and that that quality of change is the limit of what can be pursued.
From my observation, Trump never thinks that way. He approaches each prospect of a deal as an opportunity not to tinker with the present but to shape a better future. He generally goes about that in a signature way, folding a vision of transformed relations and economic incentives into the discussion of dimensions like territory, formal instruments of agreement, and the roles and obligations of participants.
Recent examples are his vision for post-war Gaza, and his proposal to Ukraine for an economic boom to backstop a settlement with Russia. I myself would prefer to set the stage for a Ukraine-Russia settlement by driving Russia out of its post-2022 gains in Donbas, and that’s in large part because I think no peace can be sustainable that does not emphasize the futility of invading across recognized borders to seize territory.
But I can also appreciate the Trump model of angling for a “better future” by improving key contributing conditions, such as Ukraine’s parlous economic state, and the cynical participation of too many of Kyiv’s economic partners in the country’s endemic corruption. With both the Ukraine and the Gaza proposal, Trump’s vision is to reshape conditions so that incentives, reactions, and outcomes change for the better.
That’s the same way he negotiates tariffs. His intention is not to set a new slate of tariffs in stone. It’s to put the tariffs to work as a new set of incentives so that conditions change, and those who are affected respond to them by altering their goals and behavior. Trump thinks dynamically, not statically. He’s looking for a better future, not a helplessly damaged and freaked-out present. He knows everyone will respond by adjusting choices and priorities. That’s the point. He’s counting on it.
https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2025/06/11/establishment-for-a-better-future-the-historic-need-of-our-time/#more-10252
Victor Davis Hanson Notices Something UNIQUE About Israel-Hamas War No One Noticed
Rabbi Dovid Vigler – June 12, 2025
Time Stamp – In Description Box
1:11:44 Will the Middle East Finally See Peace Under Trump?
Victor Davis Hanson: President Donald J. Trump and the Fate of the United States
Robinson Erhardt – January 26, 2025
Victor Davis Hanson Interviews David Mamet
Victor Davis Hanson – June 7, 2025
“the continued futility of invading across recognized boundaries to seize territory”. Tell that to the Turkish occupiers of northern Cyprus or the NATO occupiers of Serbian Kosovo.