INTRO: For the past decade, global diplomacy has been dictated by one man’s social media musings. Since Donald Trump first glided into the Trump Tower atrium on his golden escalator, he – and what he has to say – has been the story, throwing red meat to the media and shaping the affairs of the US and the wider world through reactions to his increasingly imperial pronouncements.
But the 47th US president has been off-key of late, and his outbursts on everything from tariffs to the war in Iran have sent his popularity tumbling, not least in Europe where just 8% of Italians have a positive view of him, 10% of Germans and 13% of us in the UK.
As Trump-fever has cooled, one man has stepped forward to fill the ethical void. The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, has taken a stand against his bothersome southern neighbour and, in so doing, has reoriented the free world’s moral compass.
Instead of looking to Washington DC for global leadership, global democracies are increasingly looking to the middle power man in Ottawa. Carney is a banker – or at least that was the world’s view of him until recently. He was governor of the Bank of Canada during the financial crisis of 2008, before leading the Bank of England from 2013-2020.
He only became a politician when elected leader of the Canadian Liberal Party in March 2025 and ensuring his mandate through a landslide national elecion win the following month. But he has quickly emerged as a voice of political reason against the continued waves of Trump tirades.
This week Carney addressed the European parliament following EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s support for a proposal for Canada to become the EU’s first “associate member”. Much like his speech in Davos in January, Carney noted the current “geopolitical rupture”.
And, much like that Davos speech, he was calm, eloquent and displayed rare intellectual insight over how that rupture might be overcome. At Davos, he emphasised the need for middle powers to step up to the plate. This week in Strasbourg, he added flesh to the bones, stressing how Canada and the EU had complementary strengths. He made the case for a deeper partnership based on cooperation, delivering seamless digital trade in many goods and services, underpinned by people-to-people ties including the free movement of young people.
The Canadian PM laid out a vision where Canada and the EU were allied by “common values, our compatible systems and complementary strengths”. While it’s early days in the discussion of a Canada-EU relationship, it was a seductive pitch to “create a beacon for other democracies”.
Trump was not mentioned by name in the speech but was clearly listening and clearly riled. Amid a trade war with its northern neighbour, the US president heard Carney state that he did “not seek power to dominate others”, and was “not proposing a third bloc in order to become a great power rival – only with better manners”. The dig was pointed, the style was effortless.
Carney’s team write great speeches, and the Harvard-educated economist with a doctorate from Oxford delivers them well. But one senses he’s much more than a good autocue reader. He dropped a couple of German rhetorical phrases into his Strasbourg speech and built a strong historical context, drawing on the ties that have bound Canada and Europe from the first world war onwards, creating a memorable picture of the seeds brought back to Canada from Vimy Ridge (where Canadian troops won a hard-fought battle in 1917 with heavy losses) and then replanted in France a century later.
While evocative historical links underpinned his sentiment, the vision for a brighter, shared future brought hope where Trump sows only disquiet... (MORE - details)
Moscow has again threatened the United Kingdom with strikes on British military facilities in Ukraine and potentially beyond, linking its warnings to Ukraine’s use of British-supplied weapons in attacks on Russian territory. Russian officials said British military installations and equipment in Ukraine could become targets in response to Ukrainian strikes involving British weapons.
The Russian Foreign Ministry also warned of “necessary retaliatory measures,” according to a ministry statement. These types of threats from Moscow have previously surfaced, including at the end of August.
Russian authorities said British military sites in Ukraine, which could be used to launch attacks on Russian territory, are “legitimate targets,” according to their claims. The Foreign Ministry placed responsibility on London for any potential escalation and stated that Russia reserves the right to take “necessary retaliatory actions”.
On August 27, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine or elsewhere could be targeted in response to Ukrainian strikes using British-made weaponry.
Separately, in early September, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not rule out the possibility of strikes on British military facilities, calling this a “military secret”. He also stated that Russia considers any military facilities in Ukraine, including British ones if present, to be legitimate targets.
The threats from Moscow come against the backdrop of continued British military support for Ukraine. The UK has said it will maintain its assistance for Ukraine and has condemned Russian aggression.
Russia recently warned the UK of unspecified “consequences” following reports that Ukrainian forces had used British-made drones to strike targets inside Russia. Previously, Zakharova accused Germany of supporting Ukraine and raised the possibility of countermeasures.
Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said that if Poland were to enter the conflict against Russia, Moscow would use “the full arsenal of available forces and means,” leading to what he claimed would be the end of Polish statehood “within two or three days”. In response, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said Russia should consider the consequences of its threats and pointed to its experience in the war against Ukraine.
VIDEO INTRO: We bought a house in Svalbard: one of the most remote places on Earth, where buying property is far from simple. In this video, we take you through the story of how we managed to buy our own cabin in Longyearbyen, why buying a home here is so complicated, and what the process actually looked like for us.
And yes… we’ll finally reveal exactly how much we paid for our house in Svalbard. From getting a mortgage to navigating the rules and restrictions of living in Svalbard, this is the full story of how we became homeowners this far north.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to actually own a home in the Arctic, this is our story.
VIDEO EXCERPTS: Because of the extreme summer, now twice as many air conditioners have been sold, and companies that are installing them are busy until Christmas. It was a summer of extremes with sweltering temperatures.
So, Europe is really behind when it comes to air conditioning, but it has become so warm in Europe that a lot of people just cannot take it anymore. They are investing in air conditioning, and of course this will also put more stress on the grid.
Here they are saying that the sugar beet harvest was about 1/3 lower than normal. If next summer is as hot and dry as this one, it would be a disaster for farmers. No farm could survive that.
Costs are already spiraling out of control. The oil crisis is intensifying. The Saudis shut down the key pipeline, and now another price shock is looming. The world is running out of oil. Not because there's not enough underground, but the supply chain is going to be a real problem.
In Europe the natural gas prices are going up, and we will pay even more to heat our houses. Right now in Germany the natural gas reserves are only at 55%. So that's significantly less than last year.
[...] In Germany, the taxpayer is squeezed out like a lemon. The union's tax policy is more reminiscent of cabaret than serious government action. Instead of lowering taxes, they invent new ones. So this is the situation we are in. We have higher and higher taxes. Basically lowering our wealth here in Europe so that the government can use our money to fund the war in Ukraine, to fund death and destruction. So that's the plan, and it's running really well for them...
At the end of Disclosure Day, which Spielberg claims is based on a lot of factual data, the word appears across the screen "LISTEN". I have long suspected that the dawn of a new consciousness will happen thru sound somehow. We are so hardwired for light and images we hardly consider the nature of sound as also an extension of consciousness, particularly thru speech and music and the inner monologue of thinking itself. Light abstracts us from the Real. But sound re-embodies us within it.
"We got into why I named this Substack after metanoia, a Greek term for the kind of change that reorders who you are, not just what you think. I talked about my own encounter at age eight and the recurring nightmare that took thirty years to decode, my years as a bedside nurse and why I think subjective experience deserves the same weight as radar data, and why I’d rather sit with the strangeness of this phenomenon than force it into labels like extraterrestrial or demonic. We also talked about how this phenomenon seems to mirror people back to themselves, why Contact and Arrival capture that better than most disclosure discourse, why Spielberg’s Disclosure didn’t land for me, and the case of a Spanish fighter pilot who heard giggling, childlike voices over his radio, which might say more about the phenomenon’s sense of humor than anything else we discussed.
For the full conversation, including Jungian shadow work, telepathy and the right brain, and where I think this phenomenon goes next: watch it on YouTube."
“An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you.”
“The word, although prevalent in our day, has lost its reasoning value, and has value only as an accessory to images. In turn, the word actually evokes images. But it does not evoke the direct images related to my personal experience. Rather, it calls up images from the newspaper or television. The key words in our modern vocabulary, thanks to propaganda and advertising, are words that relate to visual reproduction. They are stripped of all rational content, so they evoke only visions that whisk us away to some enchanted universe. Saying ‘fascism,’ ‘progress,’ ‘science,’ or ‘justice’ does not suggest any idea or produce any reflection. It only causes a fanfare of images to explode within us: a sort of fireworks of visual commonplaces, which link up very precisely with each other. These related images provide me with practical content: a common truth that is especially easy to swallow because the ready-made images that showed it to me had been digested in advance. Make no mistake here: this is how modern people usually think. We are arriving at a purely emotional stage of thinking.”–Jacques Ellul
I see this. I saw it at my family reunion where my brother and brother-in-law emotionally bonded over their litany of conservative whines and bothers as if expressing something deep within themselves. They were not. It was just a little show put on a million times everyday across our country for each other where we recite all the cliches and catch words we are force fed thru the media locating us comfortably on some idealogical spectrum of concise and familiar political positions. I say positions again, and not real thoughts. When you recite and identify yourself with a public and broadly disseminated position or point of view, the last thing you are actually doing is expressing anything like real time thoughtful consideration. You’re only parroting what the media has conditioned you to say, never breaking thru to anything new or poignant at any time. Real time thinking in fact does not suit casual socializing very well because it expresses ambiguity and reservation and restraint rather than things we can confidently claim to believe in or “tag” ourselves with. It complicates and raises disturbing questions instead of seizing upon pat and easily opined answers. Our beliefs and opinions always being the least individual thing that can be said about us
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