The rare Russia-Ukraine Orthodox Easter truce is already bearing much positive fruit, as both sides have on Saturday confirmed a massive POW swap involving 350 captives.

In a press release, the Russian Ministry of Defense said that “175 Russian service members were returned from territory controlled by the Kiev regime, while in exchange, 175 Ukrainian Armed Forces prisoners of war were handed over.”

via Associated Press

Additionally, the ministry announced that seven civilians from Kursk Region – who are believed to be the last hostages still held from a major Ukrainian army border incursion last year – were set free and will soon return home as part of the exchange.

The Russian servicemen are currently in neighboring Belarus undergoing medical evaluation ahead of making the final journey home to be reunited with their families.

On Friday, just the day prior, the two warring sides announced an Easter truce. The truce extends 32-hours for the whole holiday weekend.

Based on regional media reporting of the rare ceasefire, the pause in fighting has been holding and will run until midnight on Sunday.

This will cover the whole period of Orthodox Pascha (Easter) celebrations in both countries, which is done according to the Julian calendar and thus typically comes a weekend or two later that Western Easter (on the Gregorian calendar). The overwhelming majorities of both countries are adherents of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Typically in orthodox churches there is a long Saturday morning service, and then the main liturgy comes at midnight – going into the early Sunday morning hours, followed by feasting and breaking the Lenten fast (after 40 days of no meat, dairy, or animal products).

And then late Sunday morning or early afternoon there is another service, after which there is more celebratory feasting. Churches across Russia and Ukraine are packed this weekend.

Russian media reports that Defense Minister Andrei Belousov has instructed Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov to halt Russian military operations during the period; however, just like in past short truces Russia says it will respond immediately to any ‘violations’ observed.

If the whole ceasefire proves successful, it could provide the basis for something more lasting, as both sides say they are still interested in hammering out a permanent end to the war. But for Moscow, this will require that Ukraine cede much of the east and give political recognition too, including over Crimea.

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I’ve been saying this for months: despite “experts” just sounding the alarm moments ago: the private credit unwind that started months ago and has now spiraled into a very real liability for the economy wasn’t some unknowable tail risk lurking in the shadows.

It couldn’t have been clearer if it was a fucking neon sign blinking THIS ENDS BADLY hanging outside of the 4 train station on Wall Street so industry workers were forced to see it on their way into work every morning.

Not only did I call the private credit collapse, I also argued that it would experience a sharp downturn before the Fed stepped in to bail it out or provide a backstop, despite, once again, the widespread misconduct of mismarking positions and carrying opaque, low-quality assets on the books of the companies managing these funds.

And here we are, right on schedule, watching that script unfold with all the subtlety of Eric Swalwell on a date after 9 whiskey cocktails.

In the last two days alone, Bloomberg reports that the Federal Reserve has gone from politely observing to actively interrogating. Not in a press-release, “we’re monitoring conditions” sort of way, but boots-on-the-ground examiners asking major banks to cough up details about their exposure to private credit.

Translation: they’re not trying to understand the industry, they’re trying to figure out how bad the damage could get and who’s going to be holding the bag when it does.

And what are they likely finding? Exactly what anyone paying attention already knew. Private credit funds didn’t just lend money, they borrowed it, too. Because in good times, leverage makes returns look smooth and irresistible. It turns middling loans into “high-yield opportunities.” It creates the illusion of stability. But in bad times? That same leverage becomes a transmission mechanism, turning localized stress into systemic risk. It’s not a bug, it’s the design.

Meanwhile, the Treasury is now poking around insurers, because of course this nuclear dogshit being peddled as a financial opportunity didn’t stay neatly contained in some alternative-assets sandbox. It likely spread. Into insurance portfolios, retirement products, retail funds…basically anywhere someone was desperate enough for yield to believe the pitch. The industry ballooned to roughly $1.8 trillion (and depending on how you count it, more), all built on the comforting fiction that because it wasn’t traditional banking, it somehow wasn’t subject to traditional banking problems.

Just like we’re seeing with “magically” successful subprime lenders like Carvana, of course they’re still subject to reality. The better question is how they can avoid the assumption they have to face reality at some point. I think we know how Carvana has been doing it: f*cking with the numbers. And private credit is doing the same. Just with worse transparency.

And now suddenly regulators are “assessing spillover risk,” which is the bureaucratic equivalent of checking where the fire exits are while the building is already filling with smoke.

Let’s not pretend we don’t know where this goes. When the Fed starts mapping exposures like this, it’s not because they’re writing a research paper. It’s because they’re quietly preparing the intervention. Maybe it’s a backstop. Maybe it’s liquidity support. Maybe it’s some creatively named facility that sounds temporary but lingers for years (something like the “Assessment of Systemic Stress by Head Office Liquidity & Economic Support” plan, or A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S. for short).

Whatever form it takes, the direction is obvious: if this thing threatens the broader system, it will be contained and we will print our way out of it. Which is to say, the everyday worker, already suffering from inflation and unable to buy a box of Triscuits or a Domino’s Pizza, will now be responsible for bailing out private credit with their purchasing power.

And right on cue—this is where the story stops being predictable and starts being grotesque. Because while regulators are measuring the crater, Wall Street is building a gift shop next to it.

The Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that banks like JPMorgan Chase, working with S&P Global, are rolling out a brand-new shiny instrument: a credit-default swap index tied to private credit exposure. A clean, tradable, scalable way to bet against the very ecosystem they spent the last decade inflating. They’re packaging up the risk, labeling it, and selling access to its failure.

You really have to admire the efficiency, right?

The index pulls in names like Apollo Global Management, Ares Management, and Blackstone, the giants of the space, the architects and beneficiaries of the private credit boom. As sentiment turns and defaults rise, the index goes up. In other words, the worse things get for the underlying system, the better things get for anyone positioned against it.

If this is giving you déjà vu, congratulations, you were alive in 2008.

Back then, the game was subprime mortgages. Banks originated garbage, distributed it widely, then quietly built instruments to short it when the cracks appeared. Today, it’s private credit wearing a slightly more sophisticated suit, but the choreography is identical. Manufacture the asset. Scale it. Normalize it. Then monetize its collapse from every conceivable angle.

And of course, the official justification is “risk management.” Banks say they need these tools to hedge exposure, to protect themselves from potential losses tied to private credit funds. Which, sure, fine. But let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence. This isn’t just about hedging. This is about creating a liquid, standardized market for betting on distress. It’s about turning systemic fragility into a profit center.

Hedge funds are already circling, because until now, shorting private credit was messy. You had to pick off individual securities, make indirect bets, deal with illiquidity. It was cumbersome. Inefficient. Now? They get a big, convenient index…a one-click way to express the view that the whole structure is wobbling.

So step back and look at the full picture, because it’s almost too on-the-nose to be real.

Wall Street spends years constructing a massive, opaque, leveraged lending machine and sells it as safe, stable income. It pulls in institutions, then pensions, then retail investors. always expanding the circle of exposure. Stress builds quietly, then not-so-quietly. Defaults tick up. Liquidity tightens. Investors panic. Douchebags in bowties warn about it after it is too late.

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Regulators step in…not to dismantle the system that created the risk, but to understand how big the rescue might need to be. And at the exact same moment, the financial industry engineers new ways to bet against the collapse it set in motion.

This is moral hazard elevated to an art form. The downside is cushioned, implicitly or explicitly, by the expectation of intervention. The upside is captured privately, twice: once on the way up through fees and leverage, and again on the way down through shorts and derivatives. It’s not just asymmetric anymore, it’s circular. A closed loop of profit extracted from creation, expansion, and destruction alike.

And the most absurd part is how little effort is made to hide it. The Fed’s questions aren’t secret. The new derivatives aren’t backroom deals. This is all happening out in the open, narrated in real time by headlines that read like satire but aren’t.

And don’t be fooled. None of this bullshit is innovation. Not resilience. Not sophisticated risk transfer, or any other fancy sounding term they give it.

Nah. It’s just a deeply, structurally, almost impressively sick and psychotic ecosystem, where the same people who built the toxic dump of deals are now lining up to profit from its collapse, all while the adults in the room quietly prepare to make sure the fallout doesn’t inconvenience them too much.

And the everyman, honest hardworking plumber or mailman who can’t afford a box of cereal or a cup of coffee anymore because his purchasing power has been decimated by the same money printing that’ll inevitably be coming? Oh, well, fuck that guy. He has had his boot on the neck of Wall Street for just too damn long.

—

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This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

John Cleese has fired off a fresh round of unfiltered truth bombs, exposing the cultural erosion underway in the UK as mass immigration and Islamist influence accelerate.

The Monty Python star is zeroing in on the BBC’s latest woke assault and the realities of Islamist culture that open borders have imported.

Responding to a BBC claim that the UK education system “wasn’t built for black children” and was instead designed for “whiteness,” Cleese cut through the nonsense with characteristic clarity:

It was built for British children, because it was in Britain

At that time most British children were white

To claim that was some kind of racist conspiracy is insane

The BBC has a hidden agenda which is against the
beliefs of the majority of British people https://t.co/NFabZBHvHx

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 11, 2026

Cleese hit back: “It was built for British children, because it was in Britain. At that time most British children were white. To claim that was some kind of racist conspiracy is insane.”

He added, “The BBC has a hidden agenda which is against the beliefs of the majority of British people.”

No pandering to identity politics. Just facts about a nation educating its own people—before decades of mass immigration turned basic institutions into battlegrounds for grievance narratives.

Cleese’s comments come fresh off demanding a new election over the epidemic of crimes against churches—more than 10 every single day—continues his stand against the forces dismantling British identity.

Cleese slammed Prime Minister Keir Starmer for becoming “so dependent on Muslim votes that he now does not even pretend to be evenhanded,” highlighting how unchecked migration has left historic Christian sites vulnerable while authorities prioritize other communities.

Cleese didn’t stop there in his latest tirade. He highlighted a video of an Islamic figure blaming victims for failing to control the emotions of the faithful, posting “This sage is proposing that as his followers are incapable of controlling their emotions, their victims should be the ones blamed and punished.”

This sage is proposing that as his followers are incapable of controlling their emotions, their victims should be the ones blamed and punished

Much of Islamic teaching consists of the glorification of the male ego, and the encouragement of its worst
manifestations https://t.co/fplFQhtSZX

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 11, 2026

“Much of Islamic teaching consists of the glorification of the male ego, and the encouragement of its worst manifestations,” he continued.

This comes as Britain grapples with grooming scandals, parallel societies, and demands that native women and girls alter their behavior to accommodate imported cultural norms—while authorities look the other way.

Yes https://t.co/9vqQjSA9cU

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 11, 2026

No hedging. No virtue-signaling. Just acknowledgment that importing millions who reject British values creates the exact fractures politicians now pretend to solve with more surveillance and speech codes.

Cleese also dismantled London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s warning about a “dark blizzard of disinformation” online. ():

If you have a culture whose holy book forbids compromise, you will have division

It’s inevitable.

So divisiveness should not be blamed on media companies

It’s the result of the REALITY created by the refusal to compromise

Ooh ! I Thet’s the door bell. Speech police, I suppose https://t.co/Kc9rZdJ90y

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 11, 2026

The sarcasm lands because the pattern is unmistakable: mass Islamic immigration brings incompatible ideologies that refuse integration, then critics of the resulting chaos are labeled the problem. Khan and the establishment deflect blame onto social media while churches burn and British streets fill with calls for Sharia.

Britain’s historic identity—rooted in Christian values, free speech, and majority rule—is under sustained pressure from open borders policies and the cultural Marxism that cheers it on.

The BBC, Khan, and the Labour government aren’t protecting Britain. They’re managing its transformation, all while criminalizing dissent. The likes of Cleese, who has commented on British society for decades, see where this is heading and are refusing to play along, reminding the public that reality doesn’t bend to slogans about diversity or disinformation.

In an age of elite denial, his willingness to state the obvious stands out. Britain’s survival as a cohesive nation depends on rejecting the Islamist cultural takeover and the woke enablers who imported it—before the division Cleese warns of becomes irreversible. As he stresses, the ballot box, secure borders, and unapologetic defense of British heritage remain the only path back.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Summary

President Trump begins blockading Strait of Hormuz, warns US military will “finish up the little that is left of Iran”

2 Supertankers U-turn after peace deal talks fail

UAE Oil Chief warns Iran blocking Hormuz is “a direct threat to the energy, food and health security of every nation”

The odds of a peace deal by the end of the ceasefire period has collapsed…

President Trump Begins Blockading Strait Of Hormuz

President Trump said the US would blockade the Strait of Hormuz following the collapse of peace talks with Iran in Islamabad this weekend.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said in a social media post.

Trump noted that talks went well… until they didn’t…

“So, there you have it, the meeting went well, most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, NUCLEAR, was not.“

The US president is hopeful…

At some point, we will reach an “ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO IN, ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO OUT” basis, but Iran has not allowed that to happen by merely saying, “There may be a mine out there somewhere,” that nobody knows about but them.

But then came the threats, with Trump apparently widening his purview to international waters:

THIS IS WORLD EXTORTION, and Leaders of Countries, especially the United States of America, will never be extorted.

I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.

No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas.

We will also begin destroying the mines the Iranians laid in the Straits.

Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!

And the art of the deal… Escalate to De-Escalate… how long can Iran last with no oil revenues at all?

Iran knows, better than anyone, how to END this situation which has already devastated their Country.

Their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, their Anti Aircraft and Radar are useless, Khomeini, and most of their “Leaders,” are dead, all because of their Nuclear ambition.

The Blockade will begin shortly. Other Countries will be involved with this Blockade. Iran will not be allowed to profit off this Illegal Act of EXTORTION.

They want money and, more importantly, they want Nuclear.

Additionally and, at an appropriate moment, we are fully “LOCKED AND LOADED,” and our Military will finish up the little that is left of Iran!

Iran’s semi-official media cited “excessive” US demands, while the foreign ministry said it was natural that differences wouldn’t be resolved in a single round of talks, leaving the door open for more discussions.

A month ago we wondered…

If Iran is blocking and attacking US ships, why is the US allowing sanctioned Iranian tankers to cross the strait with Chinese oil?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 12, 2026

…and now we have an answer. 

The question is – how will the UAE oil chief deal with a US closure versus an Iranian closure?

China will certainly be pissed off as their tankers were flowing relatively freely until now.

Is the US endgame to take control of another chokepoint too…

2 Supertankers U-Turn In Strait After Peace Talks End Without A Deal

The marathon peace talks this weekend in Islamabad between Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Vice President JD Vance, and other officials ended without a deal. Still, the top Iranian negotiator signaled that the door remains open for future talks. Polymarket odds of a peace deal being signed this month collapsed late Saturday.

US x Iran permanent peace deal by April 30, 2026?
Yes 16% · No 85%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

Ahead of the weekend peace talks, three fully loaded supertankers carrying Iraqi and Saudi crude safely transited the Strait of Hormuz. But after U.S.-Iran negotiations ended without a deal late Saturday, two separate empty supertankers abruptly turned around at the mouth of the chokepoint rather than enter the Persian Gulf.

The exact reason for the U-turns of the two supertankers remains unclear, especially since Iraq and Pakistan had reportedly received Iranian transit approvals. However, the reversals clearly coincide with the breakdown in negotiations, highlighting just how quickly conditions on the strait can change.

UAE Oil Chief Warns “Illegal, Dangerous, & Unacceptable” For Iran To Close Strait

On Sunday morning, as vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained muted, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, ADNOC’s managing director and group CEO and one of the most influential people in global energy markets, wrote on X: “The Strait of Hormuz has never been Iran’s to close or restrict.”

Al Jaber continued, “Any attempt to do so is not a regional issue; it is the disruption of a global economic lifeline and a direct threat to the energy, food and health security of every nation.”

“Setting such a precedent is illegal, dangerous, and unacceptable. The world simply cannot afford it and must not allow it,” he concluded in the X post.

Since February 28:

* At least 22 ships have been attacked
* 10 crew members have been killed
* Around 20,000 seafarers are unable to transit safely
* An estimated 800 commercial vessels are stranded, including almost 400 tankers

The Strait of Hormuz has never been Iran’s to…

— Dr. Sultan Al Jaber (@SultanAlJaber) April 12, 2026

On Saturday, the U.S. Department of War confirmed that two U.S. warships transited the waterway to begin marine mine-clearing operations. Only a handful of ships have transited the strait this weekend.

Polymarket odds for vessel traffic returning to “normal” by the end of April plunged this weekend from 30% to 17%.

Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of April?
Yes 17% · No 83%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

US Becomes World’s ‘Gas Station Of Last Resort’

Disruptions at Gulf energy facilities and the continued paralysis across the Hormuz chokepoint led us early in the U.S.-Iran conflict to conclude that global energy flows were being rewired, whether temporarily or over the medium term, with energy exporters in the Gulf of America emerging as a potential net beneficiary.

In fact, the latest vessel-tracking data transmitted via the Automatic Identification System, supplied by Bloomberg, show that it is quite possible that America has become the world’s emergency gas station.

What appears increasingly clear after this weekend’s Islamabad talks is that Tehran refused to surrender any leverage around the Hormuz chokepoint. That posture only suggests to us that Tehran understands the chokepoint remains one of the last leverage points. 

A key Saudi oil pipeline to the Red Sea was restored on Sunday and is now pumping at full capacity after an Iranian drone attack last week damaged a pumping station.

The East-West pipeline is back at full capacity, moving about 7 million barrels per day and restoring critical energy flows from Saudi’s Persian Gulf oil fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, bypassing the turmoil in the Strait of Hormuz.

Bloomberg quoted the Saudi energy ministry as saying that Saudi Aramco’s offshore Manifa field has been restored, while repairs continue at the Khurais onshore complex. Last week, attacks on Manifa and Khurais each knocked out about 300,000 bpd.

“This quick recovery reflects the high operational resilience and crisis management efficiency of Saudi Aramco and the kingdom’s energy ecosystem as a whole, thereby enhancing the reliability and continuity of supplies to local and global markets,” the energy ministry said.

The Iranian attack on the pipeline last week came on the same day the U.S. and Israel agreed to a two-week ceasefire. By Sunday, after a marathon round of talks in Islamabad between Vice President JD Vance, U.S. negotiators, and Iranian negotiators, no peace deal was reached, but the door was left open for future diplomacy.

“We leave here with a very simple proposal: a method of understanding that is our final and best offer,” Vance told reporters earlier. “We’ll see if the Iranians accept it.”

On Saturday, the U.S. Department of War confirmed that two U.S. warships transited the Hormuz chokepoint to begin marine mine-clearing operations. Only a handful of ships have transited the critical waterway, as traffic remained muted late into the weekend.

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

India’s fast breeder reactor in Tamil Nadu achieved criticality earlier this month, making it self-sustaining and only the second commercial plant of its kind in the world.

The 500-megawatt plant advances India’s goal of reaching 100 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2047, up from roughly 9 gigawatts today.

While the milestone is significant, experts warn India’s ‘all of the above’ energy strategy may need to become more targeted as demand grows.

India has reached a milestone in its nuclear energy program through its state-of-the-art fast breeder reactor, signalling a major step forward for the clean energy transition in the world’s most populous country. The country’s most advanced nuclear reactor reached criticality earlier this month, meaning that the nuclear chain reaction powering the plant is self-sustaining. This breakthrough will ultimately allow India to import far less uranium to power its nuclear program, and can be adapted to use domestic thorium reserves for fuel in a win-win for the subcontinent’s energy security and autonomy. 

When the plant comes online fully, it will be only the second commercial breeder plant of its kind in the world. The other is in Russia. These plants could change the nuclear landscape completely, as they are capable of producing more fissile material (in essence, nuclear fuel) than they consume. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the achievement as “a proud moment for India” and “a defining step” in advancing India’s nuclear program.

“This advanced reactor, capable of producing more fuel than it consumes, reflects the depth of our scientific capability and the strength of our engineering enterprise. It is a decisive step towards harnessing our vast thorium reserves in the third stage of the programme,” Modi said in a post on X on Monday.

This achievement is a long time in the making. The plant, based in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, has been in development since 2000. It’s not yet clear when the plant will come online, but it is expected to generate 500 megawatts of carbon-free electricity. This will represent a major step toward India’s aim to achieve 100 gigawatts of capacity by 2047, a significant boost from today’s level of approximately 9 gigawatts.

At present, nuclear power accounts for just 2% of India’s energy mix, but the carbon-free form of energy production will be a critical part of India’s decarbonization strategy. India is currently between a rock and a hard place when it comes to balancing energy security and sustainability with the nation’s humans and economic development goals. 

Despite considerable economic development in recent decades, India remains one of the poorest countries in the world, and increasing energy access is a central platform of India’s continued climb out of poverty. “Tackling the energy access gap is a critical step in meeting the country’s economic and social development ambitions, and it has been a top priority for successive Indian governments,” says a Guardian report from September of last year. 

Meeting the energy needs of all 1.47 billion people in India without majorly derailing global climate goals will require enormous investments in a wide array of traditional and innovative energy alternatives. India is already the third-largest energy consumer in the world after the United States and China, and its needs will only continue to grow. Nuclear, and next-gen nuclear such as breeder reactors, will be just one component of a diverse energy portfolio. 

While the fast breeder reactor marks a major step forward for Indian energy innovation, it likely won’t provide a silver-bullet solution to the subcontinent’s energy challenges. Many other nations have pursued the development of such models, including the United States, China, France, and South Korea, but most have abandoned the pursuit in favor of other next-gen nuclear models that they see as more promising, such as small modular reactors. However, even if this form of reactor doesn’t become the new normal for India, it will still serve the country’s overall energy ambitions, which include a diverse energy playing field. But, going forward, a more streamlined approach may be necessary. 

“India’s energy transition goals have always been an ‘all of the above’ approach, to increase capacity from fossil and non-fossil sources as part of its broader economic growth aspirations – and in response to growing demand,” Ashwini Swain, an energy transition expert at the Delhi-based Sustainable Futures Collaborative, told The Guardian. “So far the approach has mostly been ad hoc and supply-centric rather than targeted to end users, because it comes from a scarcity mindset,” Swain went on to say. “This has worked out so far, but India has reached a stage where we need a much more strategic whole systems approach to energy transition.”

The Pakistan-based drone company Sysverve Aerospace can now be added to the rapidly expanding list of defense firms worldwide racing to develop, manufacture, stockpile, and potentially deploy low-cost, one-way attack drones on the modern battlefield. The proliferation of these drones across two major battlefields in Eurasia is set to permanently reshape warfare.

Pakistani-American artificial intelligence investor Amir Husain posted on X about an exhibit featuring Sysverve’s latest “Shahed-like loitering munition.”

When asked on X by one user where the exhibit was being featured, Husain stated it was at the World Defense Show, held in February in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Sysverve’s website describes the company as a leader of unmanned air target systems in Pakistan and states it also develops surveillance and combat UAVs. Its contact page lists the company in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Last week, we revealed that India has adopted the Iranian-style drone playbook, with startup HoverIt showcasing its DIVYASTRA MK2, an advanced long-range strike drone.

In the six-week U.S.-Iran conflict, Shahed drones launched by Iran proved extraordinarily effective, knocking out data centers in surrounding Gulf states and even successfully striking U.S. bases in the region.

The U.S. announced during the conflict that it had deployed its own Iranian-style kamikaze drones.

We recently published a fascinating piece titled “Ukraine Becomes World’s AI Weapons Laboratory,” which delves into Ukraine’s drone industry and offers more insight into interceptor technology.

On Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukrainian forces stationed in the Gulf had successfully used Ukrainian interceptor drones against Iranian Shahed drones.

The emergence of these low-cost drones on the modern battlefield began with the war between Ukraine and Russia over the past four years. There are even reports that Russia was preparing to send a massive drone shipment to Iran:

The UAE recently announced that it has developed a jet-powered, Shahed-style drone capable of speeds exceeding 650 mph.

Capability built for modern operations.

Combining jet-powered speed, advanced guidance, and precision targeting, SHADOW 25 supports forces with rapid, reliable, mission-ready performance when it matters most. pic.twitter.com/yaEessVgTZ

— EDGE (@_edgegroup) March 27, 2026

Let’s not forget that China is producing these drones at scale to the highest bidder:

China Produces “Baby Shahed” Kamikaze Drones For $500

Footage Appears To Show China Mass-Producing Iranian-Style Kamikaze Drones

The development of these low-cost drones will be accelerated by more advanced power plants, as well as AI-enabled targeting, which could make the kill chain truly autonomous. There are already reports suggesting that AI kill chains have arrived.

It is safe to assume militaries worldwide will stockpile one-way attack drones by the millions in the years ahead. 

Authored by ‘no01’ via Gold and Geopolitics substack,

I have a dream where politicians live next door to you…

Not metaphorically.

Literally…

The man who voted to rezone your street works three doors down. His kids go to the same school as yours. When he raises the local tax rate and the potholes don’t get fixed, he drives over those same potholes every morning. And when the community has had enough, they let him know. Loudly. Personally. The way humans have held each other accountable for most of history, before we invented the beautiful abstraction of “institutional distance”.

I know. It sounds naive.

Let me explain why I don’t think it is…

We live in an era that treats political monopoly as completely normal while losing its mind over market monopolies. Regulators drag Google into congressional hearings for owning search. They fine Microsoft for bundling browsers. They write entire legislative frameworks to prevent one company from becoming too dominant in any given market because we all understand, instinctively, what monopoly does: it kills accountability, it kills innovation, it raises prices, and it entrenches mediocrity. The monopolist has no reason to improve because you have nowhere else to go.

And then we hand the same monopoly structure to the people who control our laws, our taxes, our foreign policy, our money supply, and we call it “democracy”.

The irony is immaculate.

The European Union is the cleanest example of what happens when you take this logic to its conclusion. The European Commission – the body that actually initiates legislation – is not elected. The Parliament, which is elected, cannot propose laws. It can only approve or reject what the Commission puts in front of it. The commissioners are appointed by national governments, serve five-year terms, and answer to a structure so opaque that most Europeans couldn’t name a single one of them without Googling.

This isn’t a flaw in the design.

It IS the design.

Unaccountable by architecture.

And Brussels is just the most visible layer. NATO, the UN, the WEF, the IMF – the whole ecosystem of supranational governance operates on the same principle: decisions made by people you didn’t elect, cannot remove, and will never meet. Corruption doesn’t require evil people. It requires structures where there are no consequences for failure and no competition for alternatives. Give anyone a monopoly with no accountability and you don’t need to assume malice. Incentives do the rest.

Though, to be fair, the incentives also attract a specific type of person.

Friedrich Hayek made this point in “The Road to Serfdom”: in any large bureaucratic structure, it is not the best people who rise to the top. It is the people most willing to compromise, most comfortable with ambiguity about means versus ends, most talented at political manoeuvring.

Power selects for a particular psychology. Always has. And once you centralise enough of it into structures that nobody can vote out, you’ve created the perfect habitat for exactly the people you least want running things.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe pushed this further in “Democracy: The God That Failed”, making an argument that sounds monstrous until you actually think about it: monarchs, counterintuitively, have better incentives than democratic politicians. A king owns the country. He passes it to his heirs. His time horizon is generational – he has every reason to keep the thing functional long-term. A democratic politician has a four-year window. He doesn’t own anything. He’s a temporary caretaker with a short lease and no liability for what he leaves behind. So he extracts. He borrows against the future. He promises what cannot be delivered because he won’t be around when the bill arrives. You don’t have to agree with Hoppe’s conclusions to recognise that the time-horizon problem is real and unsolved.

The answer though in my opinion isn’t ‘monarchy’.

The answer is competition.

Hayek had a second insight (this one from “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, his 1945 essay in the American Economic Review), and it’s the one that made him famous: “The Knowledge Problem”.

Central planners fail not because they’re stupid, but because the knowledge they need is dispersed, local, contextual, and impossible to aggregate centrally. The price of tomatoes in a village market contains information no ministry of agriculture could replicate. When you centralise decisions, you lose the signal.

The same is true in politics. A bureaucrat in Brussels setting housing policy for Tallinn, Seville, and Ghent simultaneously is not making informed decisions. He’s making averaged guesses applied uniformly to situations that are not uniform. The knowledge that actually matters – what this or that neighbourhood needs, what these people value, what tradeoffs they’re willing to make – exists locally. It always has.

The economist Charles Tiebout formalised this in 1956, though the intuition is much older: municipalities that compete for residents are forced to govern well. If your city raises taxes and delivers nothing, people leave. The tax base shrinks.

The city either improves or it hollows out. Residents “vote with their feet” – a form of continuous democratic feedback that no election cycle can match, because it happens in real time and has immediate financial consequences for the state. Tiebout called it “fiscal federalism”. I’d call it capitalism applied to governance. Same principle. You have options, so the provider has to perform.

Liechtenstein wrote this into its constitution directly: any village has the right to secede from the principality by referendum. It has never happened. It doesn’t need to. The right to leave is enough to enforce good behaviour. Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own tax rate, its own laws, its own character. Zurich and Appenzell Innerrhoden are barely recognisable as the same country. And Switzerland, despite being landlocked, multilingual, and geographically inconvenient, consistently ranks among the most prosperous and stable places on earth. Coincidence is not the explanation.

Now add the OTHER half of the dream.

No professional politician class.

This isn’t even a new idea. The Romans had the cursus honorum – a structured series of civic roles that citizens were expected to fill as a duty, not as a career.

The Athenians used sortition, selecting officials by lottery from eligible citizens, on the logic that any competent adult could govern and that elections primarily select for rhetoric and ambition rather than competence. Switzerland still operates a militia democracy at the cantonal level – officials who hold day jobs and govern part-time. The professional politician is a modern aberration, roughly a century old, and the results speak for themselves.

The requirement I’d add: you cannot spend more than 50% of your time on political duties. The other half you work. Not consulting, not board membership, not “advising” – you do something that produces a tangible output. You build something, fix something, teach something, grow something. You stay in contact with the reality that your decisions affect.

A transport minister who commutes by train. A housing regulator who rents. A labour minister who has been hired and fired. The skin-in-the-game principle that Nassim Taleb has been banging on about for decades: those who make decisions must bear the consequences of those decisions. The current system is precisely inverted – politicians make decisions whose consequences fall entirely on others, often long after the politician in question has retired comfortably on a parliamentary pension.

And pay them accordingly. Prestige, not salary. The Romans understood this. The Swiss still understand it. When you make politics lucrative, you attract people who are primarily motivated by the lucrative. When you make it a duty, you get different candidates. Not perfect candidates – nothing produces those – but structurally different ones.

The accountability piece is the last thread, and maybe the most important.

Human scale. That’s what’s missing from every layer of modern governance above the local. When the city councillor who approved the bad zoning decision is someone you recognise at the market, something changes. Not because everyone will tar and feather him (though the option is clarifying). But because social accountability is the oldest and most effective enforcement mechanism we have. It predates courts, predates elections, predates states. You live in a community. You face the people affected by your choices. That feedback loop, compressed into institutional distance, is exactly what supranational governance destroys. Nobody in Brussels faces any community. Nobody at the IMF shops at the same supermarket as the Greeks they were advising in 2010.

The counterarguments are real and worth taking seriously for thirty seconds.

Defence: small states are vulnerable. True – but there’s a difference between voluntary defensive alliances and permanent supranational governments. NATO started as one and became the other. You can coordinate on specific shared threats without surrendering legislative sovereignty. Switzerland manages it fine.

Race to the bottom on standards: if states compete, won’t they all rush to the lowest tax, weakest regulation, most exploitable environment? Sometimes. Singapore didn’t. Switzerland didn’t. Liechtenstein didn’t. Competition also produces race to the top – the record is mixed, and the assumption that centralisation produces good standards is contradicted by every agricultural subsidy regime in EU history.

Not everyone can move: valid, and the most serious objection. Foot-voting privileges the mobile. But the competitive pressure benefits even those who stay, because the government that loses mobile residents to better-governed neighbours has immediate incentive to improve. You don’t have to leave for the dynamic to work. You just have to be able to leave.

Global problems need global solutions: pandemics, climate, nuclear proliferation. Coordination on specific, defined problems with voluntary treaty structures is not the same thing as permanent supranational government with legislative power and no democratic accountability. We managed to coordinate on nuclear non-proliferation without building a world government. The argument proves too much.

My dream ain’t a utopia.

My dream is incentives that work instead of incentives that reliably produce what we currently have.

I have a dream where the man who raised your taxes has to look you in the eye at the weekend.

Authored by ‘no01’ via Gold and Geopolitics substack,

I have a dream where politicians live next door to you…

Not metaphorically.

Literally…

The man who voted to rezone your street works three doors down. His kids go to the same school as yours. When he raises the local tax rate and the potholes don’t get fixed, he drives over those same potholes every morning. And when the community has had enough, they let him know. Loudly. Personally. The way humans have held each other accountable for most of history, before we invented the beautiful abstraction of “institutional distance”.

I know. It sounds naive.

Let me explain why I don’t think it is…

We live in an era that treats political monopoly as completely normal while losing its mind over market monopolies. Regulators drag Google into congressional hearings for owning search. They fine Microsoft for bundling browsers. They write entire legislative frameworks to prevent one company from becoming too dominant in any given market because we all understand, instinctively, what monopoly does: it kills accountability, it kills innovation, it raises prices, and it entrenches mediocrity. The monopolist has no reason to improve because you have nowhere else to go.

And then we hand the same monopoly structure to the people who control our laws, our taxes, our foreign policy, our money supply, and we call it “democracy”.

The irony is immaculate.

The European Union is the cleanest example of what happens when you take this logic to its conclusion. The European Commission – the body that actually initiates legislation – is not elected. The Parliament, which is elected, cannot propose laws. It can only approve or reject what the Commission puts in front of it. The commissioners are appointed by national governments, serve five-year terms, and answer to a structure so opaque that most Europeans couldn’t name a single one of them without Googling.

This isn’t a flaw in the design.

It IS the design.

Unaccountable by architecture.

And Brussels is just the most visible layer. NATO, the UN, the WEF, the IMF – the whole ecosystem of supranational governance operates on the same principle: decisions made by people you didn’t elect, cannot remove, and will never meet. Corruption doesn’t require evil people. It requires structures where there are no consequences for failure and no competition for alternatives. Give anyone a monopoly with no accountability and you don’t need to assume malice. Incentives do the rest.

Though, to be fair, the incentives also attract a specific type of person.

Friedrich Hayek made this point in “The Road to Serfdom”: in any large bureaucratic structure, it is not the best people who rise to the top. It is the people most willing to compromise, most comfortable with ambiguity about means versus ends, most talented at political manoeuvring.

Power selects for a particular psychology. Always has. And once you centralise enough of it into structures that nobody can vote out, you’ve created the perfect habitat for exactly the people you least want running things.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe pushed this further in “Democracy: The God That Failed”, making an argument that sounds monstrous until you actually think about it: monarchs, counterintuitively, have better incentives than democratic politicians. A king owns the country. He passes it to his heirs. His time horizon is generational – he has every reason to keep the thing functional long-term. A democratic politician has a four-year window. He doesn’t own anything. He’s a temporary caretaker with a short lease and no liability for what he leaves behind. So he extracts. He borrows against the future. He promises what cannot be delivered because he won’t be around when the bill arrives. You don’t have to agree with Hoppe’s conclusions to recognise that the time-horizon problem is real and unsolved.

The answer though in my opinion isn’t ‘monarchy’.

The answer is competition.

Hayek had a second insight (this one from “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, his 1945 essay in the American Economic Review), and it’s the one that made him famous: “The Knowledge Problem”.

Central planners fail not because they’re stupid, but because the knowledge they need is dispersed, local, contextual, and impossible to aggregate centrally. The price of tomatoes in a village market contains information no ministry of agriculture could replicate. When you centralise decisions, you lose the signal.

The same is true in politics. A bureaucrat in Brussels setting housing policy for Tallinn, Seville, and Ghent simultaneously is not making informed decisions. He’s making averaged guesses applied uniformly to situations that are not uniform. The knowledge that actually matters – what this or that neighbourhood needs, what these people value, what tradeoffs they’re willing to make – exists locally. It always has.

The economist Charles Tiebout formalised this in 1956, though the intuition is much older: municipalities that compete for residents are forced to govern well. If your city raises taxes and delivers nothing, people leave. The tax base shrinks.

The city either improves or it hollows out. Residents “vote with their feet” – a form of continuous democratic feedback that no election cycle can match, because it happens in real time and has immediate financial consequences for the state. Tiebout called it “fiscal federalism”. I’d call it capitalism applied to governance. Same principle. You have options, so the provider has to perform.

Liechtenstein wrote this into its constitution directly: any village has the right to secede from the principality by referendum. It has never happened. It doesn’t need to. The right to leave is enough to enforce good behaviour. Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own tax rate, its own laws, its own character. Zurich and Appenzell Innerrhoden are barely recognisable as the same country. And Switzerland, despite being landlocked, multilingual, and geographically inconvenient, consistently ranks among the most prosperous and stable places on earth. Coincidence is not the explanation.

Now add the OTHER half of the dream.

No professional politician class.

This isn’t even a new idea. The Romans had the cursus honorum – a structured series of civic roles that citizens were expected to fill as a duty, not as a career.

The Athenians used sortition, selecting officials by lottery from eligible citizens, on the logic that any competent adult could govern and that elections primarily select for rhetoric and ambition rather than competence. Switzerland still operates a militia democracy at the cantonal level – officials who hold day jobs and govern part-time. The professional politician is a modern aberration, roughly a century old, and the results speak for themselves.

The requirement I’d add: you cannot spend more than 50% of your time on political duties. The other half you work. Not consulting, not board membership, not “advising” – you do something that produces a tangible output. You build something, fix something, teach something, grow something. You stay in contact with the reality that your decisions affect.

A transport minister who commutes by train. A housing regulator who rents. A labour minister who has been hired and fired. The skin-in-the-game principle that Nassim Taleb has been banging on about for decades: those who make decisions must bear the consequences of those decisions. The current system is precisely inverted – politicians make decisions whose consequences fall entirely on others, often long after the politician in question has retired comfortably on a parliamentary pension.

And pay them accordingly. Prestige, not salary. The Romans understood this. The Swiss still understand it. When you make politics lucrative, you attract people who are primarily motivated by the lucrative. When you make it a duty, you get different candidates. Not perfect candidates – nothing produces those – but structurally different ones.

The accountability piece is the last thread, and maybe the most important.

Human scale. That’s what’s missing from every layer of modern governance above the local. When the city councillor who approved the bad zoning decision is someone you recognise at the market, something changes. Not because everyone will tar and feather him (though the option is clarifying). But because social accountability is the oldest and most effective enforcement mechanism we have. It predates courts, predates elections, predates states. You live in a community. You face the people affected by your choices. That feedback loop, compressed into institutional distance, is exactly what supranational governance destroys. Nobody in Brussels faces any community. Nobody at the IMF shops at the same supermarket as the Greeks they were advising in 2010.

The counterarguments are real and worth taking seriously for thirty seconds.

Defence: small states are vulnerable. True – but there’s a difference between voluntary defensive alliances and permanent supranational governments. NATO started as one and became the other. You can coordinate on specific shared threats without surrendering legislative sovereignty. Switzerland manages it fine.

Race to the bottom on standards: if states compete, won’t they all rush to the lowest tax, weakest regulation, most exploitable environment? Sometimes. Singapore didn’t. Switzerland didn’t. Liechtenstein didn’t. Competition also produces race to the top – the record is mixed, and the assumption that centralisation produces good standards is contradicted by every agricultural subsidy regime in EU history.

Not everyone can move: valid, and the most serious objection. Foot-voting privileges the mobile. But the competitive pressure benefits even those who stay, because the government that loses mobile residents to better-governed neighbours has immediate incentive to improve. You don’t have to leave for the dynamic to work. You just have to be able to leave.

Global problems need global solutions: pandemics, climate, nuclear proliferation. Coordination on specific, defined problems with voluntary treaty structures is not the same thing as permanent supranational government with legislative power and no democratic accountability. We managed to coordinate on nuclear non-proliferation without building a world government. The argument proves too much.

My dream ain’t a utopia.

My dream is incentives that work instead of incentives that reliably produce what we currently have.

I have a dream where the man who raised your taxes has to look you in the eye at the weekend.