The nuclear gun on the wall by Gabriele Schmitt

The nuclear threat was always there and that is precisely what makes Vladimir Putin’s latest warning about Kaliningrad so unsettling. Nuclear weapons did not suddenly appear in the Kremlin’s arsenal because the war in Ukraine became difficult. They have been sitting in the background throughout the conflict, like the loaded gun on the wall of a badly written political thriller. What has changed is that Putin has now pointed at it.

Speaking at the Valdai Forum, Putin said Russia would use “all weapons” at its disposal if Kaliningrad or other Russian territory were directly attacked, explicitly leaving nuclear weapons within that formulation. His warning followed a Russian diplomatic message to NATO concerning the possibility of the Baltic exclave being isolated. NATO has rejected the suggestion that its activities threaten Kaliningrad.

That distinction matters. A threat is not an intention, and an intention is not an action. But nuclear politics has never depended entirely on what leaders intend. It depends on what others believe they might do.

And that is where the danger begins. Kaliningrad is an awkward geographical fact: Russian territory wedged between Poland and Lithuania, both NATO members. It is strategically important precisely because geography has turned it into a potential pressure point between Russia and the alliance. Moscow sees NATO military activity around the Baltic through the prism of encirclement. NATO sees Russian military power in Kaliningrad through the prism of deterrence and defence. Each side can therefore interpret the other's precaution as preparation for aggression.

This is how security dilemmas become machines that manufacture their own justification. Putin's argument is familiar. Russia does not intend to attack Europe, he says, but if Russia is attacked, Russia will respond with everything available. He has also warned that the world is living through a dangerous moment and that increasingly uncompromising confrontation could reach a point where events become impossible to reverse.

The uncomfortable question is not whether Putin genuinely believes this logic. It is what happens when two nuclear-armed sides construct their security around assumptions about what the other side might do.

Ukraine has already demonstrated something the Kremlin would rather not acknowledge: wars do not proceed according to the neat timetable of the people who start them. A conflict intended to produce a particular political result can become prolonged, expensive and unpredictable. Weapons improve. Targets expand. Red lines multiply. Political rhetoric becomes progressively more dramatic because retreat becomes harder to explain.

Then comes the nuclear vocabulary. Nobody should panic because Putin has mentioned nuclear weapons. Panic is precisely the wrong response. But neither should Europe become so accustomed to nuclear threats that they become background noise. Normalising such language is itself dangerous.

The real nightmare is not necessarily a deliberate decision to begin a nuclear war. It is miscalculation: an incident in the Baltic, a military exercise misunderstood, a drone strike, a naval confrontation, a political leader believing the other side will back down. Once nuclear weapons enter the calculation, the distance between accident and catastrophe becomes terrifyingly short. Europe therefore needs something less theatrical than another exchange of threats. It needs discipline.

Russia must understand that nuclear intimidation cannot become a routine instrument of diplomacy. NATO, meanwhile, must make its defensive intentions unmistakable while maintaining credible deterrence. Communication channels matter as much as missiles. So does political restraint.

Because the most frightening sentence in Putin's latest intervention was not “nuclear”. It was the suggestion that nobody can be certain destructive weapons will never be used. That is the truth everybody already knew. Now everybody has heard it aloud.

The integration mirage by Sabine Fischer

There is something deeply revealing about the language surrounding Italy’s new school decree. It is called integration. It is presented as common sense. It promises equal opportunity, better language learning and an end to so-called “ghetto classrooms.” Yet somewhere between the political slogan and the school gate lies the uncomfortable question: when does integration stop being integration and become assimilation by decree?

Italy’s Council of Ministers has approved measures banning face coverings such as the burqa and niqab during school activities and introducing a 30 percent ceiling for certain foreign pupils in first-year classes. The government says the classroom limit concerns students without adequate Italian and is intended to prevent concentrations that make integration harder. The decree also provides additional language support and measures involving parents who face serious language barriers.

There is nothing controversial about expecting a child to learn the language of the country in which that child attends school. Language is the bridge between the classroom and society. A child who cannot understand the teacher is not being integrated; that child is being left behind.

But bridges are built by opening roads, not by moving the destination. The danger begins when nationality becomes an administrative category for deciding who belongs in the classroom. Italy's own figures illustrate the absurdity of treating “foreignness” as synonymous with educational isolation: students without Italian citizenship represent roughly 11.6 percent of the country's total school population, while the new rules target particular categories of pupils with limited Italian and different educational backgrounds.

A classroom is not a demographic spreadsheet. Children do not arrive carrying the political arguments of their parents. They arrive with backpacks, homework, football cards, mathematics problems, anxieties, friendships and the extraordinary capacity children possess to become Italian, Swedish, French or anything else without first asking permission from a ministry.

And here is the great irony: the best integration usually happens precisely where separation is least visible. Put children together, teach them together, make them speak to one another, argue with one another, play with one another and eventually grow up together. That is how a society creates citizens rather than parallel communities.

The face-covering question is different and deserves its own serious discussion. Schools need to be places where teachers can communicate with pupils and where identities can be established when necessary. A democratic state has legitimate reasons for requiring faces to be identifiable in certain circumstances. But turning a relatively specific educational problem into a symbol of national civilization risks transforming the classroom into a theatre for cultural warfare.

That is the moral mirage here. The government says it wants to prevent “ghetto classrooms.” Fine. Then invest in teachers, language education, smaller classes, preschool access, counselling and support for families. Italy's decree does contain funding for additional language activities, which is considerably more constructive than simply drawing a demographic line across the classroom.

But integration cannot be legislated into existence by percentages. Nor can Italian identity be protected by teaching children that some classmates are first and others are conditional members of the same national story.

Europe has spent decades discovering that exclusion is remarkably efficient at producing the very alienation that politicians later use as evidence that integration has failed. The cycle is brutally simple: separate people, complain that they do not integrate, separate them further, then announce that separation proves the failure of integration.

A school should be the place where that cycle is broken. Italy does not need less Italian identity. It needs an Italian identity confident enough to teach Italian without fearing the presence of another language, confident enough to defend equality without turning clothing into a cultural battlefield, and confident enough to understand that tomorrow's Italians may have parents who arrived from somewhere else.

The real test of integration is not how efficiently a government can make newcomers resemble yesterday's Italians. It is whether tomorrow's children can become Italians without having to erase where they came from first.

The blind side by Polly Hobbs

Privilege is often discussed as a matter of money, status or access. But its most interesting consequence is not what privilege gives people. It is what privilege can prevent them from seeing.

This is the uncomfortable territory of standpoint epistemology: the idea that social position influences what people are able to know. It does not mean that every member of a privileged group is ignorant, or that every marginalised person automatically possesses superior wisdom. It means something more subtle and, therefore, more troubling. Experience determines which parts of reality demand our attention.

A person who moves through society without regularly encountering discrimination may sincerely believe discrimination is exaggerated. Someone whose gender is rarely questioned may regard sexism as an abstract political argument. A wealthy person may understand poverty statistically while remaining remarkably unfamiliar with the humiliations produced by having no money. The absence of an experience can become an experience of its own: the experience of never having to notice.

This is how privilege can become epistemological. The privileged individual does not necessarily wake up every morning thinking, “I belong to the dominant group.” Quite the opposite. Privilege works best when it becomes invisible. A person enters a building without wondering whether there is a ramp. Applies for a job without considering whether a name will influence the response. Walks through a neighbourhood without calculating whether the police might interpret their presence differently. Speaks in a meeting without wondering whether their authority will be questioned because of their identity.

The world simply appears normal. And that is precisely the problem. “Normal” is rarely neutral. It is often the social arrangement experienced most comfortably by those who occupy the centre. Everyone else learns the geography of the margins.

The danger is particularly obvious in political debate. Dominant groups frequently demand evidence of injustice in forms that reproduce their own blindness. Where is the statistic? Where is the individual case? Where is the undeniable proof? Yet the people demanding proof may be the very people least exposed to the phenomenon being measured. They are asking the blind spot to provide its own visibility.

Of course, standpoint is not a replacement for evidence. Experience can illuminate reality, but it can also distort it. Marginalised people are not magically objective, and privileged people are not intellectually incapable of understanding injustice. The point is not to replace one hierarchy of knowledge with another. It is to recognise that knowledge itself has social conditions.

This should make everyone, not merely the privileged, more intellectually humble. The real challenge is learning to ask what one's position makes difficult to see. What experiences are missing from one's understanding? Which complaints sound exaggerated simply because they describe a world one has never had to navigate? Which institutions appear fair because they have been designed around one's own circumstances?

A society becomes more intelligent when it stops confusing familiarity with truth. Privilege, then, is not simply an advantage in the distribution of wealth, opportunity or power. It can also be an advantage in deciding what counts as reality. And that may be its most durable power.

The uncomfortable lesson is that ignorance does not always look like ignorance. Sometimes it looks like common sense. And common sense, occasionally, is simply privilege speaking in a very confident voice.

AntySaurus Prick #138 #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!

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The algorithmic empire by Thanos Kalamidas

The United Nations has discovered artificial intelligence. The machines, unfortunately, discovered the United Nations some time ago. That is the uncomfortable joke behind the grand discussions now surrounding AI governance. World leaders gather in New York, pronounce the words security, responsibility, humanity, and international cooperation, and then return to governments that still struggle to regulate yesterday’s technology. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is moving at a speed that makes diplomatic procedure look almost geological.

The problem is not that the UN is discussing AI, it absolutely must. The problem is that much of the conversation risks being conducted through the mental architecture of the twentieth century: identify the dangerous technology, establish rules, create monitoring mechanisms, and hope sovereign states behave themselves. It worked, imperfectly, for nuclear weapons. AI is something else entirely.

A nuclear weapon requires extraordinary physical infrastructure. AI requires computing power, energy, data, talent, chips, and access to networks. These resources are not distributed remotely equally.

The UN itself has acknowledged this enormous capacity gap. Its current discussions include proposals for stronger access to infrastructure, skills, data, and technology, whilst a recent UN report highlighted fragmented financing for AI capacity-building in developing countries. The first Global Dialogue on AI Governance was deliberately designed to bring the Global South into the conversation.

That is welcome. But participation is not the same thing as power. A country can have a seat at the diplomatic table and still have no semiconductor industry, no hyperscale data centres, inadequate electricity grids, limited research capacity, and little influence over the companies developing the most powerful models.

This is where the AI debate becomes uncomfortable. The great technological powers are not merely developing products; they are building the infrastructure upon which everyone else may eventually depend. The danger is therefore not only that AI might become autonomous, malicious, or uncontrollable. The quieter danger is dependency.

The Global South could become the customer, the data source, the testing ground, and eventually the labour market of an AI economy designed somewhere else. That would be an old colonial pattern wearing a new digital suit.

This is why the UN cannot allow AI governance to become another exclusive conversation among governments, technology corporations, and the countries that possess the money to build the machines. António Guterres has warned that power is increasingly shifting towards a handful of private corporations and individuals, whilst global institutions still reflect an older distribution of power. That observation goes directly to the heart of the AI problem.

There is also a delicious contradiction here. Some governments argue that global regulation would interfere with innovation. Others demand stronger international rules. Technology companies themselves increasingly acknowledge that no single country or company can manage the technology alone. At the same time, the companies possessing the greatest technical capacity remain overwhelmingly concentrated in a small number of states.

So who exactly is writing the rules? And for whom?

AI governance cannot simply become nuclear non-proliferation with better software. The objective should not merely be preventing catastrophic misuse by powerful states; it must also prevent the creation of a permanent technological hierarchy in which a handful of countries own the intelligence and everybody else rents it.

The UN therefore needs to talk about infrastructure with the same seriousness with which it talks about ethics. Electricity, broadband, data centres, computing capacity, education, open research, local-language systems, and technical skills are not peripheral development issues, they are the foundations of technological sovereignty.

Otherwise, we may succeed spectacularly in regulating the future whilst leaving most of humanity without any meaningful ownership of it. That would not be global governance. It would simply be global dependency with a United Nations logo on the paperwork. The machines will not care who writes the rules. People should.

The violence we normalize by Mia Rodríguez

October 2 is the International Day of Non-Violence, chosen because it is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who demonstrated that political resistance does not require becoming what one is resisting. The United Nations created the day to promote a culture of peace, tolerance, understanding and non-violence.

There is something almost brutally ironic about celebrating that principle in 2026. We live in an age in which violence has become political language. Not merely the violence of wars, bombs and guns, but the violence of intimidation, humiliation, militarised policing, political threats and the deliberate creation of fear. Violence has become a performance, and politics has discovered that frightened people are easier to mobilise than hopeful ones.

America offers perhaps the most disturbing illustration. Under Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has become one of the central theatres of this politics. ICE has expanded arrests on a massive scale, while federal immigration officers have increasingly become visible instruments of a campaign built around deportation and deterrence. In July and August, ICE recorded more than 50,000 arrests per month, according to figures reported this year.

And then there are the guns. In September, an ICE officer shot Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a Venezuelan man, in Austin, Texas, during an immigration enforcement operation. Perez was subsequently placed in federal custody while seriously wounded; his attorney disputed important elements of the government's account. The circumstances remain under investigation.

That is precisely where a democratic society should stop and ask a very simple question: When did enforcement become synonymous with force?

Nobody seriously argues that a state does not need laws, borders, police or immigration procedures. A functioning society requires them. But the existence of authority does not give authority a moral blank cheque. The state possesses extraordinary power precisely because an individual does not. That imbalance creates an extraordinary responsibility.

And violence does not begin with a bullet. It begins with language. When political leaders describe opponents as enemies, immigrants as invaders, protesters as criminals and disagreement as betrayal, they are not simply choosing colourful vocabulary. They are lowering the psychological barrier against violence. Once another human being has been transformed into an enemy category, cruelty becomes easier to justify.

This is why the International Day of Non-Violence matters. Not because repeating the word peace once a year will magically make politicians peaceful. It matters because non-violence is not passivity. Gandhi understood that perfectly. Non-violence can be confrontation without hatred, resistance without revenge, courage without brutality.

The alternative is frighteningly simple: answering violence with greater violence until nobody remembers who started it. Police officers deserve protection. Migrants deserve human dignity. Protesters deserve lawful assembly. Citizens deserve security. Government deserves legitimate authority. None of these principles cancels the others.

That is the point. A democracy is not measured by how efficiently it can frighten people. It is measured by how firmly it can exercise power without losing its humanity. The political temptation of violence is that it produces immediate images of strength. A uniform. A convoy. A raid. A detention centre. A wall. A weapon. A frightened crowd. It looks decisive on television.

But strength and brutality are not synonyms. The real test of power is whether those who possess it can restrain themselves. On October 2, the world will once again remember Gandhi. Perhaps this year we should remember something more uncomfortable: non-violence is not an antique philosophy belonging to another century. It is a warning to our own.

Because when governments teach citizens that fear is strength, when police power becomes spectacle, and when political leaders discover that anger is easier to sell than compassion, violence no longer needs to be declared. It simply becomes normal. And once violence becomes normal, democracy has already begun to lose something much more important than an argument. It has begun to lose its soul.

#eBook The Verdant Apocalypse by Ana Salinas

 

It began not with a bang, nor a shriek of tearing metal, but with a subtle wrongness in the air, a scent too sweet, too cloying, like overripe fruit rotting beneath a humid sun.

Professor Aris Jonasson, a man whose very bones were composed of empirical data and sceptical gristle, was the first to notice. He stood within his beloved greenhouse, a grand cathedral of wrought iron and leaded glass, when he heard it. It was a whisper, not in his ears, but vibrating within his very thoughts: a soft, sibilant rustle, like a million leaves rubbing together in a silent, coordinated language.

He turned, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. His prized Venus flytrap, a specimen he had cultivated for a decade, was no longer merely a botanical curiosity. Its jaws, usually dormant, were slowly, deliberately opening and closing in a rhythmic, almost mocking salute. The ivy clinging to the red-brick walls was no longer climbing; it was watching. A thick tendril, emerald-green and pulsating with an unsettling, dark sap, snaked across the stone floor. It sought neither moisture nor soil, but aimed directly for his ankle.

"Aris? What is taking you so long with the soil samples?"

Ana Salinas, a desk worker trapped in a cubicle, dreams of escaping to the moon in a hot air balloon, much like Phileas Fogg, though she suspects Jules Verne may have exaggerated the comfort of those Victorian contraptions.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

The Verdant Apocalypse

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Berserk Alert! #121 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

 

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
For more Berserk Alert! HERE!
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Ma-Siri & Co #131 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

Ma-Siri is a mother, a grandmother and a very active social life,
searching for the meaning of life among other things and her glasses.

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The fragmentation trap by Marja Heikkinen

Globalization was never the beautiful, borderless paradise its salesmen promised. It was messy, unequal and frequently unfair. But it had one extraordinary virtue: it created habits of dependence. Countries that traded together had reasons to keep talking, negotiating and, occasionally, behaving themselves.

That bargain is now cracking. Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand went to the 81st United Nations General Assembly and described the moment with unusually blunt language: “We are facing a rupture, not a transition.” Her warning was not simply about tariffs or trade disputes. Canada sees great powers dismantling economic integration and forcing smaller and middle-sized countries to reconsider the dangerous assumption that the global economy will remain open and predictable.

This is the real story. The old globalization depended on institutions, the WTO, common rules, predictable markets, international supply chains and the increasingly boring but enormously valuable idea that economic cooperation could exist above geopolitical rivalry. Today, boredom has become a luxury.

Security is invading economics. Economics is becoming security. Chips are security. Critical minerals are security. Energy is security. Artificial intelligence is security. Ports, shipping lanes, batteries, food supplies and telecommunications are all being dragged into the same geopolitical calculation.

The world is not simply deglobalizing. It is reorganizing itself into strategic neighbourhoods. And that creates a particularly uncomfortable problem for middle powers. Canada can no longer assume that geography and economic interdependence will automatically protect it. Nor can Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Australia, South Korea, Singapore or dozens of other countries whose prosperity depends upon access to markets far beyond their borders. These countries may have sophisticated economies, strong institutions and capable governments, but they do not possess the military, financial or demographic weight of the superpowers.

When the big boys divide the playground, the smaller children do not get to draw the lines. Anand's response is therefore revealing. Canada is talking about “strategic autonomy,” diversification and new partnerships while simultaneously arguing for stronger multilateral institutions. Ottawa wants closer relations with Europe, deeper engagement across the Indo-Pacific, Gulf, Latin America and Africa, and cooperation with middle powers.

That is not merely Canadian diplomacy. It may be the survival manual for the middle powers. But there is a trap here. Regional security blocs can provide protection, yet they can also reproduce the fragmentation they were created to manage. A country joining one economic-security network inevitably becomes more dependent on that network. Supply chains are duplicated, markets become politically conditioned and commercial decisions acquire strategic price tags.

The world begins to resemble a collection of fortified islands, each proudly proclaiming independence while quietly discovering that everything inside the walls costs more. The United Nations itself has recognized the danger. Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that multipolarity could produce either greater networked cooperation or a “Great Fracture” of rival economic, technological and security systems. The difference matters enormously.

Because globalization did not disappear when countries became angry with it. It became something more dangerous: fragmented globalization. And fragmentation is not neutral. It favours those with enormous domestic markets, military power, financial reserves and technological monopolies. It leaves middle powers bargaining for access, exemptions and security guarantees.

The irony is almost unbearable. Countries are building walls in the name of sovereignty while discovering that sovereignty without economic resilience is merely a more elegant word for vulnerability. The answer cannot be nostalgia for the old globalization. That world had serious failures and inequalities. Nor can it be the fantasy that every country can become economically self-sufficient.

The answer is a new multilateralism capable of surviving geopolitical competition. Otherwise, today's protectionism will become tomorrow's architecture. And once the architecture is built, nobody will remember when the temporary walls became permanent borders. That is the rupture Canada is warning about. The frightening part is not that globalization is ending. It is that we may be replacing it with something much harder to dismantle.

The chokepoint weapon by Harry S. Taylor

The most dangerous weapon in the Strait of Hormuz is not necessarily a missile, a submarine or a drone. It is the narrow strip of water itself. That is the lesson the Middle East is teaching the world in 2026, and it is a lesson governments, corporations and consumers should have learned long ago. In the twenty-first century, geopolitical power is increasingly exercised not by conquering territory but by controlling the places through which everything else must pass.

Iran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz under conditions acceptable to Tehran was never simply about shipping. It was about leverage. The proposal reportedly linked reopening the waterway to reduced American military pressure and the lifting of the blockade on Iranian ports. Tehran was effectively reminding Washington that a few kilometres of strategically placed sea can become a bargaining chip for an entire nation.

That is the new battlefield. Forget the old military map for a moment. Look instead at the map of global supply chains. Hormuz is one chokepoint. Others include the Suez Canal, Bab el-Mandeb, the Bosporus, the Panama Canal and increasingly the underwater networks of cables and pipelines. Whoever can threaten the passage does not need to occupy a capital. They merely need to make ships hesitate.

And hesitation is expensive. A tanker waiting offshore is not just a tanker. It is delayed fuel, delayed electricity, delayed fertiliser, delayed industrial production and eventually a higher bill in somebody's supermarket. The modern economy has become extraordinarily efficient precisely because it has become extraordinarily dependent on uninterrupted movement. That efficiency is now also its vulnerability.

The International Maritime Organization has already warned about the human cost. Thousands of seafarers have been trapped in the Gulf, while hundreds of vessels and thousands of crew members have faced prolonged uncertainty. The organisation has recorded dozens of attacks on international shipping during the conflict.

Meanwhile, the seabed itself is becoming a military frontier. Iranian forces have claimed the seizure of American autonomous underwater vehicles in the Strait. One earlier incident involving a Dive-LD was acknowledged by the US as the loss of an underwater drone, although Washington said it malfunctioned and did not contain sensitive systems. Iran has since claimed another seizure, while US Central Command has disputed that account.

The argument over who captured what is almost secondary. The important point is that unmanned machines are now operating beneath commercial shipping lanes, mapping seabeds, monitoring infrastructure and gathering intelligence. The ocean floor, once imagined as a silent wilderness, is becoming another digital battlefield.

This is where the future of conflict becomes particularly uncomfortable. A warship is visible. A missile launch creates headlines. A tank crossing a border is impossible to misunderstand. But a drone beneath the water, a damaged cable, a blocked pipeline, a mined shipping lane or a tanker ordered to turn around can produce strategic consequences without looking like war at all.

That ambiguity is precisely what makes maritime chokepoints so attractive to governments seeking leverage. And the answer cannot simply be more warships. The answer is redundancy. If one strait can hold the world's energy system hostage, build alternatives. If one pipeline can be attacked, create several. If one port becomes vulnerable, develop another. If one undersea cable carries too much of the world's communications, build additional routes. Resilience is not weakness; it is the opposite of dependence.

Washington and its regional partners are already discussing alternative infrastructure designed to reduce reliance on Hormuz. That may be expensive, imperfect and politically complicated. But the underlying lesson is unavoidable: a supply chain with no alternative route is an invitation to coercion. The twentieth century taught nations to protect borders. The twenty-first century must teach them to protect connections. Because tomorrow's frontline may not have trenches, soldiers or flags. It may simply be a narrow piece of blue water and a ship waiting for permission to cross it.