Tides of legitimacy by Marja Heikkinen

There’s a strange geometry to global politics, a kind of moral cartography where distance isn’t measured in nautical miles, but in who gets to define the rules. Take, for example, the recent Yemeni seizures of commercial tankers in the Red Sea and the U.S. Navy’s interdiction of a Venezuelan-flagged vessel. On a map, these events sit on opposite ends of two different seas. But politically, the gap between them is far wider, stretching across oceans of power, narrative, and the privilege of who gets to be called a pirate and who gets to be called a defender of freedom.

Let’s be blunt: very few nations actually obey the same rulebook at sea. The rules shift depending on whose ship you’re boarding.

When Yemeni armed groups, specifically the Houthis, stop merchant vessels in the Red Sea, they’re immediately branded “pirates,” “outlaws,” and “global threats.” The word “pirate” comes with heavy political weight. It strips the actor of state legitimacy, places them outside the international order, and gives every powerful navy on Earth permission to intervene. Calling someone a pirate is a geopolitical eraser; it deletes their status, their grievances, and any claim that their actions are tied to ongoing conflict rather than random lawlessness.

Yet when the U.S. Navy stops a Venezuelan tanker, often with the justification of sanctions enforcement or counter-narcotics missions, the language transforms. Suddenly, it’s not piracy but “maritime security” or “upholding international law.” The U.S. frames itself as a custodian of stability, a sheriff patrolling a global ocean that it believes must remain open and orderly, under its definition of order.

This isn’t about moral equivalence; it’s about narrative power. If an armed group in Yemen claims they are acting in solidarity with Gaza or retaliating against attacks on their territory, the world shrugs. If the U.S. says it is protecting global commerce or enforcing sanctions against a government it deems hostile, those words carry institutional legitimacy, because the U.S. is a recognized state actor with a Navy that spans the globe and decades of diplomatic relationships to reinforce its narratives.

Put differently, legitimacy is not something you do at sea; it’s something you’re granted on land.

Of course, the Houthis are not internationally recognized rulers of Yemen and operate from territory seized in civil war. That matters legally. But it’s also true that international law is heavily shaped, some would say disproportionately by the very powers that have the luxury of large navies. When the U.S. conducts maritime interdictions thousands of miles from its shores, these actions are viewed through the lens of America’s role in global governance. When a non-state actor does something similar in a narrow chokepoint through which one-third of global trade flows, the instinctive reaction is to classify the act as criminal.

But legality does not exist in a vacuum. It lives inside politics. The U.S. Navy can stop a tanker and call it enforcement. Yemenis stop a tanker and it becomes piracy even when the motivations are political or military, not criminal. One is framed as upholding the order of the seas; the other as threatening the international system. But both are, at their core, acts of power, someone with weapons boarding someone else’s ship for strategic reasons.

If we’re honest, "pirate" is simply the label reserved for those who lack the status to enforce their will under the polite umbrella of international law.

There’s also a moral convenience at play. The Red Sea is a vital artery for world trade; any disruption sends insurers, governments, and shippers into a frenzy. When the Houthis target vessels linked to certain countries as leverage in a broader political struggle, it becomes intolerable not only because of legality but because of economic impact. The U.S., on the other hand, rarely faces consequences when it intercepts foreign vessels, partly because no one is powerful enough to stop it, and partly because the global system is built on an assumption that American power is, by default, stabilizing.

That assumption is rarely extended to armed groups in the Middle East. In the end, the distance between these two maritime incidents cannot be plotted by GPS. It is a measurement of narrative privilege: who has the authority to police the seas, who is permitted to use force, and who gets shoved into the category of “pirate” simply because no one wants to admit they’re acting politically.

So yes, Yemen and the U.S. are thousands of miles apart geographically. But the real gap is the one between who writes the rules and who gets written out of them. And that distance is far greater than any ocean.

Projecting self by Gabriele Schmitt

There’s a peculiar boomerang effect that happens whenever Donald Trump describes Europe. He leans into phrases like “weak,” “decaying,” or “past its prime,” as if he were diagnosing a continent in its final stages of political exhaustion. But listen closely, really closely and the tone starts to sound less like an analysis of Europe and more like an accidental confession.

Because when Trump paints Europe as frail, fearful, or fading, he’s really sketching a portrait of his own anxieties: a leader who once projected swagger now shadowboxing with relevance, desperately trying to reclaim a version of American dominance that no longer exists and arguably never existed in the cartoonish form he remembers.

Trump’s favorite rhetorical move is projection. It has always been his most reliable, if unintentionally revealing, form of communication. What he accuses others of, he often embodies. What he mocks is what he fears. And so when he calls Europe “weak,” it feels less like geopolitical critique and more like an aging strongman squinting at his reflection in the mirror, convinced he’s still towering while the world sees someone shrinking.

Europe, of course, is far from perfect no serious observer would pretend otherwise. It struggles with bureaucracy, political fragmentation, demographic challenges, and uneven military investments. Yet even with these headaches, Europe continues to be a global economic powerhouse, a leader in democratic governance, and a region where most citizens enjoy a standard of living Americans would envy. Europe’s problems are real, but they’re not fatal. Its institutions bend, adjust, argue, reform, and annoyingly slowly, move forward.

Trump’s own trajectory tells a different story. His political capital depends on division rather than unity, resentment rather than reform. His messaging increasingly relies on doom, decline, and grievance, an emotional palette far dimmer than the swaggering confidence he once strategically deployed. When he speaks of decay, he seems fixated on it. When he mocks others for being weak, he sounds obsessed with the concept of strength. And when he talks about crumbling institutions, he gravitates toward imagery that mirrors the chaos he has personally unleashed.

So what’s really going on? For one, Europe is a convenient foil. Trump needs adversaries who are big but not too big, symbolic enemies rather than genuine threats. Europe fits perfectly: impressive enough to attack for drama, safe enough to attack without risk, and familiar enough that American audiences recognize the names but not the nuances. By calling Europe “weak,” Trump reinforces his old storyline that only he can return America to greatness, only he can make allies bow, only he can reassert dominance.

But beneath the bravado lies insecurity. Trump’s worldview is fundamentally nostalgic. His foreign policy instinct is rooted not in strategy but in longing, for a romanticized past where America dominated through sheer weight. He often speaks as though the world stopped in 1985. In that sense, Europe’s modern complexity challenges him. It doesn’t behave like a caricature. It doesn’t tremble when he thunders. It negotiates, disagrees, pushes back, and worst of all, it sometimes moves on without him.

When Trump calls Europe “decaying,” what he’s really lamenting is the changing global order that no longer centers the world around American exceptionalism or Trump’s vision of it. Multipolarity frustrates him. Consensus politics confuses him. Cooperative power bores him. So he claims weakness where he sees difference. He declares decay where he sees independence. And yet, Europe persists.

It maintains one of the most stable political landscapes in the world. It has strong social protections, competitive economies, and cultural influence that far outstrips its size. If Europe is decaying, it is doing so at a suspiciously comfortable pace, one that still ranks it among the world’s most desirable places to live.

Trump’s projection reveals a personal truth more than a geopolitical one: the world is changing faster than he can reinterpret it. The contours of power look different now. Force alone no longer defines dominance. Alliances matter. Cooperation matters. Soft power matters. Stability matters. And none of those things are Trump’s strengths.

When he describes Europe as fragile, the irony is sharp. Europe is many things, messy, sometimes maddeningly slow, occasionally divided but fragile is not one of them. If anything, the political figure showing signs of fragility is Trump himself, leaning harder than ever on overstated insults to mask diminishing influence.

In the end, Trump’s comments about Europe aren’t really about Europe at all. They’re about an aging political brand struggling to stay relevant in a world that has already begun writing its next chapter.

And that, perhaps, is the clearest projection of all.

Talcott Parsons and the Promise of Transdiscipliarity by Rene Wadlow

Talcott Parsons (13 December 1902 - 8 May 1979)  was a leading US sociologist usually considered a member of the structural-functional analysis school.  Some of his major theoretical writings are The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1949), The Social System (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1951), and Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (Editors). Toward a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).  Parsons taught at Harvard University and was the doctoral thesis advisor of students who went on to became important figures in the same tradition such as Robert K. Merton Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), Marion J. Levy Jr The Structure of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952) and Clifford Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). He also had students who went on to have radically different approaches and who became strong critics of Parsons’ approach such as C. Wright Mills in his The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).  Parsons’ approach was also attacked by George Gurvitch (1894-1965) a Russian-born French sociologist who spent the Second World War years in New York City and became knowledgeable with the schools of US sociology.

There are two aspects of Parsons’ work that merit attention.  The first is the role of Parsons in introducing and championing the work of the German sociologist Max Weber in the USA.  The second is the role of Parsons in helping create transdissciplinarity in area studies in the USA.

Parsons was unusual for his time in that he did all his graduate university studies in Europe. Many American students would spend a year at a European university but because of differences in degree programs would do their degree work within a US university.  However, Parsons did his MA at the London School of Economics and his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. In London, he studied under R.H. Tawney who was interested in the link between Calvinist Protestant thought and the development of capitalism.  This was a topic of great interest to Parsons who came from a long line of Calvinist ministers who had gone from England to New England in search of religious liberty in the late 1600s.  Parsons’ father was a Protestant minister as well as president of a University, and Parsons kept a life-long interest in liberal Protestant theology.  In London, he also participated in a seminar led by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in which also participated as students E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes who went on to be the leading British anthropologists on African societies. Parsons always kept an interest in anthropology and some of his students went on to be professional anthropologists.

In Heidelberg, he studied under Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s brother) and got to know the widow of Max Weber who was a champion of Max Weber’s thought.  Parsons was taken by Max Weber’s thinking, especially the analysis of the link between religious thought and economic organization.  When Parsons returned to the USA, he started translating Weber and then getting his colleagues like Edward Shils and his students like C. Wright Mills to translate works of Weber.  Thus Max Weber went from being virtually unknown in the USA to being probably the most-often quoted sociologist in the USA.

After his doctorate, Parsons went to teach at Harvard, which is a leading New England University.  In 1931, sociology which had always been taught in the Department of Social Ethics became the basis for a new three-man Department of Sociology with the Russian-born Sociologist Pitrim Sorokin as chairman.  Sorokin and Parsons did not get along; both men had a high opinion of his own work, little tolerance for the work of others, and no sense of humor.  Parsons, who was always very good at university administration infighting was able to have created a new Department of Social Relations with himself as chair.  There he was able to develop a transdiciplinary approach by bringing in people from economics, anthropology, and psychology. By the late 1930s Parsons had become very interested in the work of S. Freud and was trained and underwent analysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.

One of the important ideas that Parsons had drawn from Max Weber was the idea of the “ethic of responsibility”. What distinguishes responsibility from merely good intentions is the ability to foresee as far as possible the consequences of action and to make decisions based on this foresight. Thus, Parsons from his years of study in Germany continued to follow closely political evolution there.  He was a “premature” anti-Nazi and helped find jobs in US universities for German professors forced out of teaching by the Nazi government.  At Harvard, he set up a working group on the study of Germany in order to understand how the Nazis had come to power.  During the war, the group was transformed into a group to study what should be done after the war and to train people for the occupation of Germany which was to follow.

Likewise, as the US entered the war against Japan, Parsons organized working groups to study the societies of Japan and China.  While there had been people who specialized in the arts of the Far East in US universities, the study of the structure of their societies was largely unknown.  Harvard became a leading center for the study of Japan and China.  To his credit, Parsons continued his interest in Japan after the end of the war. One of the last things he did before his death was a lecture tour of Japanese universities.

With his responsibility for training people for the occupation of Germany, he had gone back several times to Germany to interview and to help set up sociological studies.  During these trips he had interviewed Soviet prisoners who had been members of the anti-Stalinist Vlasov movement — what some have called ‘Stalinists without Stalin’.  Parsons felt that relations with the Soviet Union would go from bad to worse and that Americans had little knowledge of Russian society.  Thus he pushed for the creation of a Soviet/Russian studies program at Harvard which became a leading center for Russian studies in the USA.

Parsons died in 1979 on a trip to Germany to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of his Heidelberg degree.  While he had a difficult personality and relations with people who did not agree with him were often tense or broken off when Parsons realized that the other could not be converted, he did make important contributions to the study of society with his emphasis on a “theory of action”.  Most important, I believe, was his ability to create working groups focused on crucial world areas with a transdisciplinary approach which acknowledges that there is no hierarchy of research disciplines.  Rather transdisciplinarity transgresses these boundaries to provide original and creative outcomes.

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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens.  He was a student in the 1950s of Edward Shils, Marion J. Levy, and David Apter — all of whom had worked with Parsons.

Always something #117 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

Mix a little childhood silliness with adult seriousness
and you are always up to something;
trouble most of the time!

For more Always something; the family edition, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Laurens van der Post: Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Rene Wadlow

Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) whose birth anniversary we mark on 13 December was an Afrikaner, South African writer but who wrote in English. Deeply influenced by his friendship with the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, van der Post could also call his collected writings after the title of Jung's autobiographic Memories, Dreams, Reflections.  The debt to Jung is developed in van der Post's Jung and the Story of Our Time.

Much of van der Post's writings have an autobiographic element  - his experiences as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp in Java and his travels in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa with the Bushmen. But his memories are selective and often have a dream-like quality. He leaves out of his accounts the factual aspects of his strong attraction to women – often having several women in his life at the same time. Rather, real women become Jung's archetypal “feminine”. The psychological insights provided are Jungian in background, but they are by no means mere echoes.  Van der Post was an original thinker with a capital of ideas won from his experience and  the social structure of South African society.

As van der Post wrote in The Dark Eye in Africa “The white man has first discredited the African way of living and dealing with the forces of nature about and within, and then obliged him increasingly to live in a way which rejects the institutions, customs, initiation rites and rituals by which, for centuries, he has struck a balance with these overwhelming aspects of nature...What is deplorable is that having discredited this ancient way of living we have not put an honourable alternative in its place.”

For van der Post, understanding must include the capacity to feel with oppressed people the agony of their expropriated psychic lives and to comprehend their sense of having been dishonored . For van der Post, this sense began for him with the attitude of the dominant British South Africans toward the Afrikaners that they had defeated in the Boer wars and in the destruction of the Orange Free State where his grandparents had settled coming from the Netherlands.  Van der Post was attracted to English culture, wrote in English, and later spent much of his life in England, but he recalled sharply the  contempt  of the South African English for the Boers. He also knew the common attitude of both English and Afrikaners for the Blacks and Indians of South Africa.

He found the same attitude on the part of the Japanese military when, as a British officer, he was for three years in a Japanese prison camp in Java, then the Dutch East Indies.  “We had no rights, privileges, and no security.  Even the fact that we were alive was held to be a shameful argument against us, proof of our guilt and culpability as well as proof of the unprecedented magnanimity of our captors.  What we stood for was condemned in advance not because of anything we had done but because of what we were imagined to be.  None of us stood out as an individual and we were merely a collective reality for our rulers.”

Contempt can become internalized and become part of one's “self-image”.  To overcome this weakness, one needs a sense of “rebirth” - a “journey of becoming”.  Van der Post draws upon the stories and myths of the Bushmen of the Kalahari. He spent some time with them but also drew largely on the ethnographic work of others.  Van der Post is a master story-teller, and he is able to transform rather dry ethnographic studies into tales of renewal and rebirth – a writer well worth knowing.

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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

When did the algorithm become the hiring manager? By Emma Schneider

There’s a strange new ritual taking shape in the corporate world, and most of us have already taken part in it whether we meant to or not. It goes something like this, a company receives your application, a machine scans your résumé, another machine evaluates your “digital footprint,” and an algorithm; cold, tireless, impressively unbothered by your liberal arts degree, decides whether you are worthy of human attention. Only after surviving this gauntlet of silicon gatekeepers do you earn the privilege of interacting with an actual person.

For years, job hunting resembled a two-way courtship. Applicants polished résumés. Employers reviewed them. Interviews, awkward, hopeful, palpably human, followed. Someone made a decision. It was imperfect but personal. Now, more and more companies are outsourcing their hiring to artificial intelligence, and it feels less like courting a potential employer and more like petitioning a distant oracle programmed by an intern.

We are told this is efficient, unbiased, future-proof. A neutral system scanning for skills, competencies, and patterns that humans might overlook. But increasingly, it feels eerily similar to asking social media platforms to vouch for our worthiness. Your online presence, your curated selfies, your memes, your half-forgotten posts from 2011, has become a de facto part of the application process. If your Instagram doesn’t disqualify you, maybe your LinkedIn endorsements will. “She has eight endorsements for leadership,” an algorithm might proudly note, while conveniently ignoring that they all came from former coworkers who just wanted to be polite.

The unsettling part is how quietly this shift occurred. Companies now rely on AI-powered applicant tracking systems to sift through candidates with the ruthless efficiency of a paper shredder. They scan résumés for keywords, eliminating anyone whose phrasing isn’t sufficiently optimized for machine digestion. They analyze video interviews for “microexpressions” and “vocal consistency,” as though the act of sweating through a Zoom call were some kind of psychological tell. One system even claims it can assess “cultural fit” using natural language processing, which is corporate-speak for “We want someone who speaks like us and therefore thinks like us.”

And these tools aren’t confined to low-stakes roles. Increasingly, they’re being used to filter candidates for jobs with real responsibility, leadership positions, financial oversight roles, jobs involving public trust. The irony should be enough to make your head spin: a machine is determining whether you’re responsible enough to be in charge.

Of course, AI is not inherently the villain. Used wisely, it can help reduce bias, improve efficiency, and broaden access. But too often, these hiring algorithms simply reinforce the biases of the data they are trained on. If a company historically favoured outgoing extroverts from elite universities, the AI may continue to do precisely that, except faster, at scale, and without stopping to question why all the boardrooms look eerily similar.

Even more troubling is the cultural implication: we are inching toward a world where people feel obliged to perform employability in public. Your posts must be professional but relatable. Your photos should radiate vitality but not frivolity. Your opinions must exist, but only in the safest, vaguest forms. The online self becomes another résumé one that follows you everywhere, glowing faintly behind your digital shoulder with every job you pursue.

This is not merely a matter of privacy. It’s a matter of identity. When companies rely on algorithms to hire, they aren’t simply choosing employees, they’re choosing data models that approximate people. And while the models may be consistent, they are terribly incomplete. AI can tell if you know SQL. It cannot tell if you’re thoughtful, principled, or quietly brilliant. It can detect your ability to speak confidently on camera, but it cannot detect your capacity to lead with empathy in a crisis. It can identify patterns in your work history, but it cannot grasp the context behind your choices, the sick parent you cared for, the industry that collapsed, the bold leap of leaving a stable job for one that mattered.

In the traditional job interview, flawed as it was, there remained the possibility of surprise. A candidate could charm, impress, or challenge expectations. Humanity itself could alter the outcome. Now, we are asked to present not our full selves, but our most machine-readable selves. And that should make us uneasy.

It’s not that AI should be banished from hiring. It’s that we must remain vigilant about how and where it wields power. If companies want to use algorithms as assistants, fine. But when those algorithms become the first, last, and sometimes only gatekeeper, we risk turning work into an automated caste system where only those who speak the dialect of the algorithm pass through.

The corporate world loves to speak of innovation, agility, disruption. Yet there is something deeply unimaginative about relying on machines to do the human work of judgment. It suggests a fear of complexity, an aversion to ambiguity, a preference for tidy metrics over messy humanity. But responsibility, the real kind, cannot be measured entirely by pattern-matching. Leadership cannot be identified by sentiment analysis. And trust cannot be bestowed by an algorithm.

We deserve better than being reduced to data points. We deserve to be evaluated by people who understand what it means to be one.

Dantean World #Poem #Painting by Nikos Laios

They descended down
Through the levels,
They walked past
Death and doom,
Eternal torments,
Famine and greed,
Violence and war,
Hunger and despair,
While the privileged few
In London, New York,
Sydney and Milan
Marched with full bellies
And selective rage
Protesting causes
In foreign lands;
While the forgotten poor
Of the world continued
Their descent through
The levels of their
Own Dantean world.

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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Screening the screens may simply turn tourism elsewhere by Virginia Robertson

The United States has always sold itself as a place of openness, opportunity and above all freedom. Yet the newest proposal from American officials, demanding a five-year social media history from tourists entering under the visa-waiver program, seems to take a hearty swing at all three pillars. The plan casts a wide net over millions of visitors from friendly nations, from the UK to Japan to much of Europe, many of whom have been popping into the U.S. for weekend breaks, business trips and family visits for decades without incident. Now, under the banner of national security, their Instagram posts and Twitter rants are suddenly of pressing governmental interest.

It is an extraordinary ask, hand over half a decade of personal online history or stay home. And when a country begins asking its visitors not simply who they are but what they have said, posted, liked, joked about, or regretted, something profound shifts in the global relationship between traveler and destination.

President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has set a clear tone, tough borders, suspicious minds, “security first” above all else. This is not a surprise; it is an extension of a political worldview that has long fed on the notion that danger lurks everywhere, even in the Instagram stories of a Scottish couple planning their Florida honeymoon. But the underlying message, intentional or not, is that the U.S. simply does not trust the world, even its closest allies. And when travelers sense they are not trusted, they do what any rational consumer does in a marketplace of options, they shop elsewhere.

Because make no mistake travel is a marketplace, and tourism is business. Huge business. The United States has long benefited from being a dream destination, a place people save up for, romanticize about and revisit. But that dream dims when entry requires a digital strip search. Tourists do not want to wonder if a sarcastic comment about American politics from 2019 will trigger a secondary inspection. They do not want to imagine a border agent scrolling through their TikTok history. They certainly do not want to risk being denied entry based on an algorithmic interpretation of humor or sarcasm.

If Washington’s message is, “We don’t really want you here unless we can read your diary,” many travelers will shrug and say, “Fair enough, we won’t come.”

After all, the modern traveler is spoiled for choice. Paris will still pour the wine. Tokyo will still welcome its punctual admirers. Canada will offer politeness, scenery, and none of the interrogations. Greece has sun, history, and crucially no interest in what you tweeted after the 2018 World Cup. When compared to these destinations, U.S. border procedures are already among the world’s most intimidating. This proposed layer of scrutiny isn’t just more red tape; it’s a glowing sign screaming “Proceed at your own risk.”

For Trump’s supporters who believe this keeps America “safe,” the argument assumes that someone with malicious intent would dutifully supply incriminating online activity as requested. It is security theater, not security strategy. Meanwhile, everyday tourists, the people who spend money on hotels, restaurants, rental cars, Broadway shows, national parks, small-town diners, and suburban outlet malls, are treated as potential suspects. And they notice.

In a time when economic resilience is paramount, pushing away travelers is a peculiar strategy. Tourism dollars are not theoretical. They fill cash registers, pay wages, and fund local economies. Many American towns and cities depend heavily on international visitors. Cutting that flow because of fear-driven bureaucracy is like refusing customers at your shop door because one person, once, shoplifted. It is self-sabotage disguised as vigilance.

But perhaps this is what “America First” has evolved into: America alone. If the U.S. insists on treating friendly travelers as security cases rather than guests, the global public will oblige by spending their money elsewhere. National pride may not care about the hotel industry, but hotel workers, waiters, Uber drivers, tour guides, and shop owners certainly do.

Maybe this is what the MAGA movement envisions, a fortress nation, walled in physically and digitally, suspicious of outsiders and uninterested in charm. But the truth is that isolation is expensive. Suspicion is not an economic growth strategy. Tourists who feel unwelcome do not fight their way in, they simply choose another destination.

So yes, if the U.S. wants to discourage visitors, this new social-media-snooping requirement will help achieve exactly that. The world will not beg to enter a country that treats them like potential criminals. They will take their holidays, their wallets, and their goodwill to places that still remember what hospitality looks like.

And America, convinced it is protecting itself, may wake up to realize it has simply been shutting itself off and this costs money!

AntySaurus Prick #121 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Dino is a vegetarian virgin dinosaur and his best friend is Anty,
a carnivorous nymphomaniac ant.
They call themselves the AntySaurus Prick and they are still here
waiting for the comet to come!

For more AntySaurus Prick, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The thick fog after the fall by Fahad Kline

One year after the chants of “Hurriya!” echoed from Daraa to Damascus, after fireworks lit skies that had long known only the dull orange of mortar fire, Syrians find themselves in a strange, liminal hour of history. They toppled a man who for decades seemed untopplable, the heir to a dynasty of fear, a ruler who treated the country like a private, paranoid kingdom. Bashar al-Assad is gone; this much is fact. But what has taken his place feels less like democracy and more like a weather pattern: shifting, opaque, and impossible to predict.

Syrians mark the anniversary not with the triumphant certainty of revolution fulfilled but with a cautious, almost weary gratitude. There are concerts on the Corniche in Latakia, poetry readings in Homs, youth forums in Aleppo. There are families visiting graves. There are men and women trying to will themselves into believing that the narrative arc of their suffering is finally bending toward something better. But beneath the festivities, beneath the official speeches and the televised address the new president is expected to deliver tonight, lies a quiet disorientation. It is the unsettling awareness that removing the dictator was merely the prologue, not the conclusion.

In the early days after the fall, the country experienced a euphoric clarity. Revolution has a way of making the future feel solvent. Citizens imagined newly paved roads, transparent institutions, overdue accountability, and a political system that might finally be theirs. Committees formed, neighbor spoke to neighbor, and people who had spent years whispering began to speak too loudly, as if making up for lost time. You could almost hear the collective exhale of a nation holding its breath for half a century.

Yet one year later, the fog has returned, denser, stranger, and in many ways more disarming than the darkness that preceded it. Because fog is not the same as tyranny; fog does not imprison you or disappear you into a basement cell. Fog is subtler. It obscures reality. It makes every direction look plausible and every path potentially dangerous. Fog hides the boundaries between hope and delusion.

The transitional government insists it is moving steadily toward a constitutional referendum, toward free elections, toward a reconstruction plan that will transform Syria into a model of post-authoritarian renewal. But such language, while soothing, often feels as artificial as the technocratic diagrams projected behind officials during press conferences. Policies are announced, only to be contradicted days later. Committees are formed and then dissolved. Regional power brokers jockey for influence. Old warlords rebrand themselves as civil-society advocates. Foreign governments offer support wrapped in conditions thick enough to feel like chains.

In Damascus cafés, those that survived the years of shelling and those newly opened with suspiciously generous funding, people debate whether this confusing interlude is merely the turbulence that follows any revolution or the first signs that the future is being negotiated above them rather than with them. The Syrian instinct for reading between lines is still acute, almost genetic at this point. And what they read is this: Freedom is promised, but its shape remains blurry.

The new president, a former judge with a reputation for integrity and an almost monastic seriousness, is expected to reassure the nation tonight. His supporters believe he is the antidote to decades of corruption, the first leader in modern Syrian memory who might not be enthralled by the machinery of power. They praise his quiet resolve, his refusal to turn himself into a personality cult, his early steps to release political prisoners and limit the reach of the still-intact intelligence apparatus.

His critics, however, detect a different story. They see a man hemmed in by the old state’s skeletal frame, trying to steer a ship whose rudder he does not fully control. They point out that the security services remain opaque, their internal hierarchies untouched. They question why certain former regime figures have been permitted to reinvent themselves in the new order, why transitional courts seem more symbolic than functional, and why journalists still hesitate before printing what they know.

And then there is the economy, an exhausted, skeletal creature staggering beneath the weight of both war and its aftermath. Prices have stabilized somewhat, but jobs remain scarce. Entire industries need to be resurrected from scratch. International investment trickles rather than flows. Syrians, resourceful as ever, adapt: informal markets flourish, households rely on complex webs of mutual aid, and young entrepreneurs dream up start-ups that operate largely on optimism.

But optimism is not a governance strategy. Nor is patience an infinite resource.

The question haunting this first anniversary, the question whispered in taxis, muttered in bread lines, and debated in university halls is simple, has freedom arrived or have Syrians merely traded one form of darkness for another, more nebulous one? In the old days, repression was blatant; one could point at it, name it, fear it. Today’s uncertainty is more corrosive. It creates a vacuum where conspiracy theories thrive and where trust a prerequisite for any democracy struggles to root.

Still, this fog, for all its dangers, is not without possibility. Fog lifts. Fog thins. It reveals landscapes once hidden. What Syrians have gained this year, if nothing else, is the right to imagine a future without predetermined borders. For a people long confined to a political maze designed by others, this alone is revolutionary.

The celebrations today are neither naive nor hollow; they are a testament to endurance. Syrians know better than most that history rarely moves in straight lines. But they also know that sometimes, in the long, disorienting aftermath of upheaval, nations find their way not by waiting for perfect clarity but by walking forward anyway.

And so they walk through the fog, yes, but together.

Another Trumpian peace agreement bites the dust by John Reid

In a very short time, the diplomatic rose-tinted glasses used to promote the 2025 ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia have shattered. Less than six weeks after what was hailed as a “historic” agreement brokered in part by former U.S. president Donald Trump, air-strikes have resumed, civilians have died, and mass evacuations are underway. What many predicted that Trump’s peacemaking amounted to an elegant, superficial pause rather than a serious foundation for enduring peace has proven tragically accurate.

It’s not hard to see why. The agreement signed in October included the withdrawal of heavy weapons from contested border regions, de-mining operations, release of prisoners, and a resumption of diplomatic channels under regional oversight. Yet from the very beginning, the truce rested on fragile promises: it asked both countries to lay down arms without confronting the underlying root causes centuries-old boundary ambiguity, nationalism, cultural claims, and a legacy of mistrust that no amount of calendar pages or press releases could remedy.

The first crack appeared with a landmine blast that wounded Thai soldiers, one losing a foot, near the border. Bangkok promptly suspended the deal, accusing Cambodia of planting fresh mines; Phnom Penh denied the allegation. What followed was inevitable: each side accused the other of provoking new violence. On December 8, Thai forces launched air-strikes on Cambodian military targets. Soon after, Cambodia reported civilian deaths and mass displacement. In effect, the calm was never real just a pause in a cycle built on ashes.

This is the problem with show-piece diplomacy: it treats war as an on/off switch. Push a few buttons heavy-weapon removal, gestures of goodwill, a podium photo op and voila... ceasefire. Yet peace, at its core, is far messier. It requires boundary commissions, credible verification, de-mining operations under neutral supervision, cultural confidence-building, community trust. There must be time to untangle maps drawn in colonial eras and to heal the wounds of decades. None of that was remotely achieved in Kuala Lumpur under flashbulbs and global media.

The gap between formality and substance is not a new failure, but a recurring tragedy. The contested border region between Thailand and Cambodia much of it steeped in colonial-era treaties and ambiguous demarcations, has festered for decades. The region has witnessed waves of displacement, trauma, and cycles of violence whenever tempers flared or political winds shifted. What the October agreement attempted was not a resolution but a pause and a pause is not peace.

Trump’s intervention was always part theatre: a bold claim, on his social media platform, that “Peace” had been achieved, that trade talks could resume, that economies lifted. The optics were powerful; the reality was hollow. It echoed past interventions in which a deal is brokered, photographed, applauded, only to fade when the parties return to old instincts. Without sustained mediation, demilitarization, and trust-building, such cease-fires are no more than fragile cobwebs across a chasm of history.

Now, as bombs fall again and villagers scramble to flee, the failure is laid bare: a peace deal that was never built to last, but to headline. It is not just a failure of two nations; it’s a failure of illusions that complex historical grievances can be resolved with a signature and a smile. And as churches of temples, villages, and human lives crumble on both sides, one must ask: whose “peace” was that, anyway?

So long as Washington (or any distant capital) treats frontiers like chessboards, and outer diplomacy like reality TV, wars will end only when the cameras fade and start again when the cameras return. The 2025 Syria-style snapshot of peace was giving the region a pause, not a promise.

It may be that this moment serves as a final lesson for those who believe that high-profile mediators have magical powers. In a world where borders are drawn by old treaties and people live by histories and grief, there are no shortcuts. Peace is not a tweet. It is the tedious, painful, human business of compromise, accountability, song, sacrifice and absence of bombs.