The peacekeepers of war by Edoardo Moretti

Sergey Lavrov has discovered the oldest trick in the diplomatic book: when the war is not going your way, blame the people asking you to stop it. At the United Nations, Russia’s foreign minister accused Europe of doing everything possible to obstruct peace negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv. At the same time, Russian and Ukrainian missiles and drones continued to tear into cities, infrastructure and human lives. Moscow insists it wants peace. Kyiv says it wants peace. Washington says it wants peace. Europe says it wants peace.

And somewhere between all these declarations of peace, the bombs keep falling. Lavrov’s accusation would be easier to take seriously if Moscow’s definition of peace did not continue to come with territorial demands, security conditions and the insistence that Russia’s objectives in Ukraine will be achieved. That is not necessarily a rejection of negotiations; it is something more complicated and more dangerous. It is the language of negotiation conducted while keeping the gun on the table.

Europe, meanwhile, is accused of blocking peace because European governments refuse to treat Ukrainian sovereignty and Russian security demands as interchangeable pieces on a diplomatic chessboard. European leaders have repeatedly argued that any settlement must provide Ukraine with credible security and preserve its sovereignty. That position can be debated. It can be criticised. But calling it an international conspiracy against peace is another matter.

The real problem is that everybody has become addicted to the vocabulary of peace while practising the mechanics of war. Russia bombs Ukraine. Ukraine strikes Russian military and industrial targets. Europe supplies Kyiv while preparing for the possibility that the conflict may eventually reach beyond Ukraine. And across the continent, governments are increasingly accusing Moscow of hybrid operations involving cyberattacks, sabotage, disinformation and attacks on infrastructure. The European Union openly describes such activities as part of a growing hybrid-threat environment.

This is where Lavrov's argument becomes particularly convenient. If Europe is supposedly preventing peace, then Russia can present itself as the patient negotiator surrounded by unreasonable Europeans. If Europe strengthens its defences, that becomes evidence of European militarism. If Europe supports Ukraine, it becomes proof that Europe wants endless war. The logic is wonderfully circular: whatever Europe does becomes evidence against Europe.

But there is an uncomfortable truth for Europe too. Supporting Ukraine cannot become a substitute for diplomacy. Weapons can prevent defeat; they cannot manufacture peace. Sanctions can impose costs; they cannot write a peace treaty. And repeating that Ukraine will be supported for “as long as necessary” is not a strategy unless somebody can explain what the necessary endpoint actually is.

The battlefield has already become a graveyard of political slogans. Peace will not arrive because Lavrov demands it. It will not arrive because European leaders reject Moscow's conditions. It will not arrive because Washington announces another diplomatic initiative. And it certainly will not arrive because politicians repeatedly say that negotiations are “close.”

Peace begins when the parties involved accept that the war cannot deliver everything they want. That is the part nobody wants to say. Because ending a war requires compromise, and compromise is political poison in an age when governments prefer victory speeches to painful realities.

Meanwhile, Ukraine burns, Russia bleeds, Europe prepares and the diplomats continue talking about peace. Perhaps the most honest peace conference would begin with one question: How many more people must die before everyone finally becomes serious about stopping the war?

The Delusion #Poem & #Painting by Nikos Laios

They shouted
In the streets,
They shouted
In the boulevards
Waving banners,
The deluded and lost,
Purple and blue dyed hair,
Tattooed and pierced,
Aimless and hollow,
Uneducated and denuded of
Wisdom searching for meaning
To fill their spiritual and existential
Voids through selective causes,
Oblivious and unaware of their own
Privilege and hypocrisy and ignorant
Of the fact that their hollow prosperous
Lives were made possible the very west
They seek to attack while the hungry poor
Of the developing world do not have the
Luxury for protests and self reflection,
As they spend all of their time
Struggling to survive.

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With a digital painting from Nikos Laios

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Check Nikos Laios' eBOOK, HERE!

The light we sleep under by Marissa Washington

Modern insomnia has become so ordinary that we have almost stopped asking the obvious question: what if we are helping to create it? We blame smartphones, deadlines, anxiety, ageing, coffee, television, noisy neighbours and the general insanity of contemporary life. Yet there is another culprit sitting quietly in almost every room, the light.

For most of human history, evening meant darkness. Then electricity arrived and decided that midnight should look rather like midday. Today we can illuminate a kitchen, office or bedroom with enough brightness to perform surgery. We call this progress, although our brains may occasionally disagree.

Circadian lighting begins with a wonderfully simple idea: light should change during the day because human biology changes during the day. Morning belongs to brighter, cooler light. Evening should gradually become softer, warmer and dimmer. The home, in other words, should stop pretending that every hour is three o'clock in the afternoon.

This matters because light is not merely something we see. It is information. Our eyes continuously tell the brain whether it is morning, afternoon or night. Bright, blue-enriched light late in the evening can interfere with the body's natural preparation for sleep, particularly by suppressing melatonin and delaying the biological signals that encourage drowsiness.

And yet what do we do? We install the same brilliant white bulbs everywhere and leave them blazing until bedtime. The bedroom, bathroom, hallway and kitchen become miniature airports. Then we climb into bed, stare at a glowing rectangle and wonder why sleep has apparently resigned.

Circadian lighting offers a remarkably low-tech rebellion against this stupidity. Imagine a home that behaves like a day. Morning begins with relatively bright, cooler illumination that encourages alertness. During the afternoon, the light remains functional and energetic. As evening approaches, the temperature shifts towards warmer tones while brightness falls. After dinner, the house begins quietly telling the brain: the day is ending. By bedtime, illumination is gentle enough that darkness feels like a natural destination rather than an electrical failure.

This will not magically cure every case of chronic insomnia. Insomnia can involve medical conditions, medications, stress, depression, pain, sleep disorders and countless other factors. Anyone promising that a change of lightbulbs will cure all of it is selling enlightenment by the box.

But that caveat should not obscure the larger point. We have designed homes almost entirely around what electricity allows rather than what human biology needs.

The absurdity is particularly obvious in winter, when daylight disappears early and many people spend hours beneath artificial illumination. Instead of recreating a convincing rhythm of morning, day and evening, we often maintain the same harsh brightness from breakfast until midnight.

The answer does not require turning the house into a laboratory. A few adjustable lamps, warmer evening bulbs, reduced brightness after sunset and less direct exposure to intense screens can create a more biologically sensible environment.

Perhaps the future of sleep will therefore involve fewer heroic solutions and more ordinary ones. Before swallowing another pill, buying another mattress or downloading another sleep application, perhaps we should look upwards. The light above our heads may be telling our brains that it is still daytime. No wonder some of us refuse to sleep.

Walk the talk 26#016 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

The term “talk the talk, walk the walk” is a phrase in English
that means a person should support what they say, not just with words,
but also through action. Actions speak louder than words.

For more Walk the talk, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The Trump handshake by Regan O'Sullivan

Andy Burnham met Donald Trump for the first time spending roughly forty minutes with him in New York; then he emerges smiling and tells the world that they have established a “good connection”. Trump, meanwhile, declares that Burnham is a “natural businessperson” and could be a “great prime minister”.

Wonderful. Britain has survived another summit without anybody throwing a chair. But diplomacy with Donald Trump is not speed dating, however much the vocabulary might suggest otherwise. Burnham has inherited a relationship with Washington already littered with contradictions. Trump likes leaders who talk business, deals and strength. Burnham wants to present Britain as pragmatic, economically ambitious and technologically confident, while also insisting that Britain can disagree with Washington when British interests demand it. That sounds sensible. It is also where the real difficulty begins.

Because the warm handshake is the easy part. The hard part is discovering what happens when the interests stop overlapping. The Chagos Islands provided the first demonstration. Trump attacked the British-Mauritian agreement as a “terrible” deal, particularly because Diego Garcia hosts a strategically important joint US-UK military facility. Burnham responded that he had inherited the problem and wanted to find a resolution with Britain’s American partners.

Translation from diplomatic English: we hear you, but this is not entirely yours to decide. And thankfully nobody turned the Falklands into the evening's entertainment.

That particular landmine remains buried, although Burnham made Britain's position clear: London would stand firm over the islanders' right to self-determination and their wish to remain British.

This is where Burnham's approach will be tested. Being friendly with Trump is useful. Being liked by Trump can even be useful. But Britain cannot afford to confuse personal chemistry with national strategy. Presidents change, moods change, priorities change and, above all, deals change.

Trump's praise should therefore be treated as what it is: a pleasant diplomatic moment, not a foreign-policy doctrine. Burnham has promised to be the “circuit breaker” after years of British political turbulence. He wants a ten-year national plan, greater industrial strength and a leading role for Britain in artificial intelligence. He also wants the special relationship with Washington to function without Britain becoming Washington's echo.

That is the balancing act. Britain needs America. America needs Britain in several strategic areas. But neither country needs a prime minister who mistakes proximity for submission. The danger is not disagreement. The danger is the desperate desire to avoid it.

So let Burnham shake Trump's hand. Let them talk Rolls-Royce, energy, immigration, AI and trade. Let Trump call him a natural businessman. Let Downing Street celebrate the photographs. But when the smiles disappear and the negotiating table becomes hard wood rather than diplomatic velvet, Britain will need something more durable than a “good connection”. It will need a spine. Because the special relationship is useful. A special dependency is something else entirely.

The empty hall by Timothy Davies

Photograph definitely says more than a thousand diplomatic speeches and Benjamin Netanyahu standing at the United Nations podium while rows of delegates disappear from the chamber was one of them. The Israeli prime minister was speaking to an institution supposedly built to represent the international community, yet much of that community had already walked out.

And still Netanyahu stood there. He spoke. He attacked. He insulted. He accused. He praised Donald Trump. He attacked New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and dismissed the international criticism of Israel's war in Gaza. He even called departing delegates “moral cowards,” as though the problem was not the empty chairs but the people who had occupied them.

This is the strange new arithmetic of international politics, if enough powerful people protect you, accountability becomes an inconvenience rather than a consequence. Netanyahu is the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant. The Court found reasonable grounds to believe that he bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The warrant does not constitute a conviction, but it is hardly a diplomatic parking ticket that can simply be forgotten when the motorcade arrives in Manhattan.

Yet there he was, walking through New York as though nothing had happened. That is perhaps the most disturbing part. Outside the United Nations, protesters filled the streets. Demonstrators blocked traffic, marched and demanded accountability, while police detained protesters. Inside, the machinery of diplomacy continued operating around the man whose international legal status should make his presence anything but ordinary.

And then there was the extraordinary spectacle of a foreign prime minister using the United Nations platform to attack the mayor of the city hosting the organisation. Mamdani is certainly a political figure with strong views on Israel and Gaza. But Netanyahu did not merely disagree with him; he turned the UN podium into another battlefield in his political war, accusing the mayor of endangering Jews and attacking him personally.

It was diplomatic theatre with an ugly twist, the guest insulting the host's city while protected by the most powerful man in Washington. Trump's protection matters because it changes the atmosphere around everything Netanyahu does. It creates political shelter where legal and diplomatic isolation might otherwise have consequences. The message is brutally simple: international institutions may issue warrants, governments may protest, delegations may walk out and citizens may fill the streets, but if Washington's political umbrella remains open, Netanyahu can still arrive, speak and leave.

That is not strength. It is the spectacle of power detached from accountability. The empty UN seats therefore mattered more than Netanyahu's microphone. They were not merely a protest against one speech. They were a visual reminder of a widening fracture between diplomatic ceremony and international legitimacy.

The United Nations cannot function as a theatre where leaders applaud the rules in the morning and ignore them by afternoon. Otherwise the empty chairs become the most honest diplomats in the building.

They say what governments often refuse to say aloud: that somewhere between immunity, political protection and international law, something has gone terribly wrong. And Netanyahu, standing beneath the UN emblem, offered the perfect picture of it. A podium full of power. A chamber full of empty chairs. And an international order pretending not to notice.

The last guardrails by John Reid

Lonnie Bunch III’s decision to retire from the Smithsonian at the end of 2026 is, on the surface, the departure of a distinguished historian who has spent decades building institutions devoted to telling America’s complicated story. But it is difficult to look at the timing without seeing something darker.

Bunch is leaving as the Smithsonian has become another battlefield in Donald Trump’s war over what Americans are permitted to remember.

The Trump administration has accused Smithsonian museums of presenting an excessively negative, divisive and “anti-American” version of the country’s history. It has demanded changes, threatened federal support and sought greater influence over exhibitions. Bunch, the institution’s first Black secretary, has defended the basic proposition that history is not patriotic propaganda.

That proposition should not be controversial. America’s history contains triumph and tragedy, invention and exploitation, emancipation and slavery, constitutional idealism and racial exclusion. To remove the unpleasant chapters does not make the country stronger. It makes its history less true.

And this is where Bunch’s departure becomes symbolic. Trump’s greatest political achievement has not necessarily been changing laws. It has been changing the atmosphere in which institutions operate. A president does not always need to fire everybody who disagrees with him. Sometimes it is enough to make disagreement exhausting, expensive and professionally dangerous.

That is how institutional independence can slowly disappear. One resignation rarely destroys democracy. Neither does one museum exhibit, one executive order or one political attack. The danger comes from accumulation: one institution pressured, another intimidated, another leadership position politicized, another independent voice deciding that fighting has become too costly.

Eventually the defenders do not necessarily lose because they are defeated. They leave. That is why the 2026 midterms matter so enormously. A Democratic victory in the House, Senate or both would not magically restore the American political system to health. Nor would it automatically stop Trump. Presidents possess substantial executive authority, and a hostile Congress can itself become dysfunctional. But congressional control would change the equation dramatically.

A Democratic House could investigate, subpoena and expose. A Democratic Senate could block or complicate appointments and force greater scrutiny of executive actions. Congressional committees could become places where government decisions are examined rather than simply endorsed.

Most importantly, a congressional majority would restore something that has been conspicuously missing: institutional resistance.

The question, therefore, is not whether Democrats can somehow “control” Trump. The more important question is whether Congress will once again behave like a separate branch of government.

That distinction matters. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he understands political power as something to be exercised, not politely shared. Expecting him voluntarily to respect boundaries because tradition says presidents should do so is not a strategy. It is wishful thinking.

But Congress has constitutional powers. Courts have constitutional powers. States have powers. Civil society has powers. Universities, museums, journalists and voters have powers. Democracy is not protected by one heroic individual standing in front of the gates. It is protected by institutions refusing, collectively, to move the gates.

Bunch’s departure should therefore be regarded neither as proof that Trump has conquered everything nor as an insignificant personnel change. It is a warning about what happens when political pressure becomes normal.

The midterms offer Americans a chance to answer that warning. If Democrats win both chambers, Trump may discover that the American presidency still has walls around it.

If they lose, the Smithsonian may not be the last institution asking how much independence it can surrender before independence becomes merely a historical exhibit.

And that would be the cruelest irony of all: a museum built to preserve America’s history becoming one of the places where Americans learned how quickly history can be rewritten.

Maples & Oranges #073 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Taunting oranges in the midst of other fruity links,
constantly spreading the wares of their juicy gloom.

For more Maples & Oranges, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The bill comes due by Sabine Fischer

Nepal has brought a very inconvenient truth to the United Nations, the climate bill is arriving, and the people receiving it are often not the people who wrote it.

The catastrophic Bhotekoshi-Trishuli floods and landslides have killed more than 1,400 people, with thousands still missing. Recovery requirements are estimated at roughly a tenth of Nepal’s GDP. Prime Minister Balendra Shah stood before the UN General Assembly and asked the question that comfortable governments would rather keep buried beneath diplomatic language: who pays when a country that contributed almost nothing to the climate crisis is repeatedly forced to pay for its consequences?

Nepal contributes less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet its mountains are becoming more unstable, glaciers are retreating, rivers are becoming less predictable and communities are being forced to rebuild what they have barely finished building.

This is climate injustice stripped of the PowerPoint presentation. For decades, climate politics has been a remarkable exercise in postponement. Governments announce targets. Ministers fly to conferences. Corporations publish glossy sustainability reports. Diplomats negotiate commas in declarations while communities negotiate survival.

Then comes the flood. Then the landslide. Then the funerals. Then the reconstruction loan. And finally, another climate summit where everybody solemnly promises to do better. This is no longer good enough.

Shah's demand for grant-based assistance rather than another mountain of debt deserves attention because there is something grotesquely absurd about financing climate destruction by lending money to those already suffering from it. A poor country loses roads, bridges, homes, farms and energy infrastructure because of a rapidly changing climate and the international response effectively tells it: congratulations, here is your loan.

The climate crisis has created a particularly cruel accounting system. The powerful industrial economies accumulated wealth while burning enormous quantities of fossil fuels. The vulnerable countries are increasingly being handed the repair bill.

And nature, unlike international diplomacy, does not respect borders. The Himalayan disaster crossed from Nepal towards India and affected areas on the other side of the Nepal-China border. Water does not stop at customs posts. Glaciers do not recognise sovereignty. Atmospheric carbon certainly does not carry a passport.

That is why Shah's proposal for greater Himalayan cooperation matters. Satellite information, early-warning systems, glacial-lake monitoring and disaster coordination should not become victims of geopolitical rivalry. If three nuclear-armed neighbours can share mountains but cannot share warnings, then humanity has achieved the extraordinary feat of being technologically advanced and politically primitive at the same time.

But climate justice must become more than another beautiful phrase in a UN speech. The Loss and Damage Fund and other climate-finance mechanisms cannot function as bureaucratic waiting rooms while people are buried under mud. Money must arrive before reconstruction becomes another generation of poverty. Adaptation must be financed before disaster, not compassionately after the television cameras have left.

And perhaps the most important point is this: Nepal is not asking the world to rescue it from nature. It is asking the world to recognise responsibility. There is a difference.

The Himalayas are not simply Nepal's problem. They are part of Asia's water system, supporting hundreds of millions of people. What happens there will eventually travel downstream, through agriculture, electricity, migration, food prices and political instability.

The flood is therefore not merely Nepal's tragedy. It is a warning delivered in water, mud and corpses. The question is whether the world will finally listen or wait for the next mountain to collapse before discovering that climate justice was never supposed to be charity. It was supposed to be responsibility.

The Moroccan warning by Solomon Mensah

Morocco has counted its votes and the arithmetic is remarkably clear even if the politics behind the numbers are considerably less comfortable. The Authenticity and Modernity Party, PAM, has emerged as the largest force in the new 395-seat House of Representatives with 97 seats. The National Rally of Independents follows with 66, Istiqlal with 65 and the Justice and Development Party with 54. The final figures confirmed by the Interior Ministry were unchanged from the preliminary results.

But 97 seats is not a mandate to rule alone. It is 97 seats in a parliament where fragmentation remains the political language. And that may be the most interesting message of this election. Because elections are not merely about who wins. Sometimes they are about who bothers to participate. Only about 38 percent of registered voters turned out. That is a brutal number for any political system that wants to present itself as a vibrant democratic conversation. Turnout had been 50.86 percent in 2021 and 42.27 percent in 2016. The decline is therefore not a statistical footnote; it is part of the story.

A parliament can be perfectly legitimate under the law and still confront a more uncomfortable question outside the law: how many citizens actually believe it matters?

That is the question Morocco's political establishment should be asking. PAM's victory is particularly significant because the party was created in 2008 by a figure close to the royal palace and has long been regarded as a political counterweight to the Islamist Justice and Development Party. Its rise therefore cannot simply be read as an ordinary European-style alternation between left and right, government and opposition. Morocco's political architecture is different, with the monarchy retaining a central role in national decision-making.

That makes the election's mathematics almost more interesting than its winner. PAM needs partners. Everybody needs partners. RNI, which dominated the outgoing governing arrangement, has been pushed into second place. Istiqlal is almost tied with it. And PJD, after collapsing to only 13 seats in 2021, has returned with 54.

That comeback should not be ignored. It demonstrates that political parties do not die merely because commentators declare them dead. Voters can bury a party one election and resurrect it the next. Politics has an irritating habit of refusing to follow the funeral arrangements.

And perhaps this is where Morocco's new parliament becomes genuinely interesting. The country is simultaneously presenting itself as a modernising economy, a regional power, a major investment destination and an increasingly important diplomatic actor while wrestling with problems that cannot be solved by glossy development statistics. Youth unemployment reached 37 percent in 2025, while concerns over jobs, wages, housing, education and healthcare remain central among younger Moroccans.

There is the Morocco of new infrastructure, foreign investment, tourism, football stadiums and preparations for the 2030 World Cup. And then there is the Morocco of the young person who cannot find a decent job. Those two Moroccos cannot be kept in separate rooms forever.

The government can build highways. It can attract factories. It can sell Morocco as a gateway between Africa and Europe. It can celebrate economic growth and international recognition. But eventually the citizen asks the most primitive question in politics: what does any of this do for me?

That question is particularly dangerous when nearly two-thirds of registered voters stay away from the ballot box. The Moroccan authorities emphasise that the election was conducted under normal conditions, with thousands of observers and mechanisms designed to protect the electoral process. The Interior Ministry reported 3,006 observers, including civil-society, national human-rights and foreign observers.

Those safeguards matter. But democracy is not merely the absence of ballot-box fraud. Democracy is also the presence of political belief. A citizen who votes because she believes her vote can change something is participating in democracy. A citizen who stays home because every party appears to be another variation of the same political furniture is expressing something too.

Silence has political meaning. The new Moroccan parliament therefore inherits something considerably heavier than a coalition puzzle. It inherits a credibility problem.

PAM may have won the numbers. The real challenge is winning attention, trust and participation. And those cannot be counted by the Interior Ministry. They have to be earned.

Morocco has built much of its modern political identity around stability. That stability has real value in a turbulent region. But stability without political renewal can eventually become stagnation, while political competition without public participation becomes theatre.

The danger is not that Morocco has too many political parties. The danger is that too many citizens may conclude that none of them matter. That is the warning hidden inside those 97 seats. The ballots have been counted. Now Morocco has to convince the people who stayed home that the next ballot is worth casting.

Scarcity returns by Jo Anne Kamansky

For a brief, glorious moment, the art world convinced itself that ownership had become a file format. The NFT boom promised to liberate art from the tiresome physical world. No canvas, no gallery wall, no auction-room velvet rope: just a token on a blockchain, certifying that somebody owned the “original” of an image that could still be copied, downloaded and displayed by millions. It was an extraordinary technological achievement wrapped around an increasingly strange cultural proposition.

Then the market sobered up. The collapse of NFT speculation did not kill digital art. It killed something more interesting: the fantasy that digital art needed artificial scarcity to become culturally valuable. The great lesson of the post-NFT era is almost the opposite. Digital artists are increasingly discovering that the most compelling thing about their work may be precisely what NFTs tried to escape, the physical object.

This is not a return to nostalgia. It is a rejection of the idea that technological novelty automatically produces artistic progress. For centuries, scarcity was built into art. A painting occupied one wall. A sculpture occupied one room. A print had an edition. Even a photograph, theoretically reproducible, acquired value through the history of its negatives, paper, printing process and provenance. The physical world imposed limits, and artists learned to turn those limits into meaning.

Digital technology removed many of those limits. That was its revolutionary strength. But the art market, predictably, panicked. If something could be copied infinitely, how could it be sold as an object of prestige?

The NFT answer was ingenious and absurd: create scarcity around something that was intrinsically abundant. It worked until people stopped believing it. What comes after the NFT experiment is more interesting. Digital artists are beginning to treat the screen not as the final destination but as part of a larger artistic ecosystem. Digital works become installations, projections, printed editions, sculptural objects, books, physical archives and hybrid experiences. The code remains important, but the object returns.

And perhaps that is because humans remain stubbornly physical creatures. We still want to stand before something. We want scale, texture, imperfection and presence. We want to see how light falls across a surface rather than merely adjust the brightness of a screen. We want the strange intimacy of knowing that an artist touched the thing hanging on our wall.

This does not mean digital art has failed. Quite the opposite. It has finally escaped the burden of pretending to be a financial instrument.

The post-NFT artist can say: here is the digital work; here is its physical manifestation; here is the process; here is the edition; here is the history. Scarcity becomes meaningful again because it belongs to the artwork rather than being imposed by a speculative marketplace.

There is also a useful cultural correction here. Art does not become important because a blockchain says it is unique. It becomes important because somebody, somewhere, eventually cares enough to preserve it.

The irony is delicious. Technology spent years promising to make the physical original irrelevant, only to discover that the original was never merely about ownership. It was about presence. The digital revolution did not kill the original. It reminded us why we missed it.