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Musique concrète for our times: Go Back? by Aditya Ryan Bhat on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds soundcloud.com/aditya-ryan-b…
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Aside from the shocking substance of this story, what's amazing is how it was unearthed by Cole. The short version: The Russians were able to penetrate Jared Kushner's iPhone and extract screenshots and data. Then, a Russian intel official was captured by Dutch intelligence (!) and flipped. The Dutch believed Kushner may have been acting on behalf of Russia, so pursued him as an intel target and were able to get into his phone.
They did not find any evidence of Russian collusion, instead they watched him moving hundreds of millions of dollars from slush funds created by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, one of them housed in Israel's central bank.
Incredible reporting, and if Democrats have any sense, they will pull on these threads and learn a lot more about this money.
Explosive story many years in the making, now out in Vanity Fair by Matthew Cole (who will be on Breaking Points next week, and publishing soon in @DropSiteNews):
Saudi Arabia and the UAE set up multi-billion slush funds for Jared Kushner to use.
Iran-Contra 2 here (except with Iran-Contra, at least the US got some hostages released. Not clear what we got out of this one.)
Ravi Bhat retweeted
“In late spring 2020, a source I knew to be reliable called me with a story,” writes Matthew Cole. “The Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner’s phone and monitored him as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man. The story sounded preposterous, I told my source. And yet.
Six months later, I found myself speaking with someone else about the UAE government and their use of mercenaries in conflicts around the Middle East and Africa when I asked, on a whim, whether they knew anything about Kushner and bank transfers from a UAE account. My acquaintance grew quiet. Then they replied, ‘Yes.’” Kushner’s lawyer denied the bank account existed.
Read an exclusive excerpt from Cole’s book, ‘Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East’: vanityfair.visitlink.me/Q5_W…
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Very interesting details in Cole’s Vanity Fair article on Kushner.
The Russians cracked iPhone security. Dutch intelligence used the exploit to watch whatever he was doing on that phone. This means that the bank accounts is only one story. There must be others.
The role played by the Azeris not only as a strategic partner of Israel and the Gulf Arabs, but also as the key node for money laundering. Worth digging into.
In general, we get a lot of color on neoroyalism. Can’t wait to read the book.
Ravi Bhat retweeted
What @srajagopalan is doing with Emergent Ventures in India will one day be in the history books.
Somehow, @srajagopalan and @lachygroom have managed to fund a hard-tech revolution in India.
There's something rather massive going on, and everyone else has missed it.
Our story - corememory.com/p/a-new-india…
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Jared Kushner’s Hacked Phone Revealed His Secret Negotiations—Including More Than $700 Million In Transfers vanityfair.com/story/jared-k…
Ravi Bhat retweeted
NAZA silences us not because of the monstrosity of what Israel did, but because it serves as irrefutable proof of our own monstrosity.
Read my latest here: middleeasteye.net/opinion/na…
Ravi Bhat retweeted
There was a deeper reason why the film NAZA left the entire audience speechless.
This film isn’t about the tangible, visible horror of Gaza. It was about something more hidden, something far closer to home.
This was about the horror lurking within each of us. What the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”.
We were stunned, I think, by the realisation that the 24 Israelis up on the screen – each of whom admitted, often dispassionately, sometimes a little proudly, carrying out the most monstrous of crimes – could have been our son or daughter, our brother or sister.
The only reason to applaud, as happened at the Venice Film Festival, it seemed to me, was to drown out the still, small voice of one’s conscience asking, “Might I have done as they did? Might my children?”
NAZA is a gut punch not because it tells us anything we did not already know or suspect about Israel and Gaza.
The enclave’s Palestinian journalists showed us daily the evidence of the genocide, before each was picked off by Israel’s AI machinery – in the largest slaughter of media personnel ever recorded.
No, the film tells us something far more shaming. It tells us who we are. It tells us exactly what the pillars of our western “civilisation” stand on.
Today’s western privileges were built on a long history of naked, racist colonialism – of greed, of pillage, of slavery, of genocide – that we have never truly renounced or forsaken.
Israel continues that tradition for us, both in sharpening colonialism’s technical efficiency with endless, murderous experimentation on a captive Palestinian population and in obscuring our own complicity in this barbarity.
That is the reason why it was so effortless for our leaders to collude in Israel’s genocide: to supply the bombs, to pass on the intelligence, to provide the diplomatic cover, to excuse the “excesses”, to crush the protests.
NAZA silences us not because of the monstrosity of what Israel did but because it serves as irrefutable proof of our own monstrosity. Our societies watched it all and did nothing. We are all guilty.
This is an extract from my latest article NAZA is not just about Israel and Gaza. It’s about the evil lurking in us all. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️
Ravi Bhat retweeted
The ground under Uttarakhand is quietly storing energy for a massive earthquake, says new study
The Himalaya above us may look calm. But deep below, something big is building up.
A new study by researchers from IIT Bombay and the University of New Mexico has found that the Main Himalayan Thrust, the giant fault line under Uttarakhand where the Indian plate slides beneath the Tibetan plate, is locked.
That means the two plates aren’t sliding smoothly. They’re stuck, and the energy from their constant push is piling up underground, with nowhere to go.
Using data from GNSS satellite stations and Japan’s ALOS-2 radar satellite, the researchers found the fault is locked across a width of about 115 km, building up strain at about 18 mm a year. The higher Himalaya is rising by 4 to 6 mm a year as a result. Their estimate: the energy building up beneath Uttarakhand is enough for one magnitude 8.1 earthquake every 100 years.
Uttarakhand sits in what scientists call the Central Himalayan Seismic Gap, a stretch where no truly massive earthquake has struck in a very long time. Earlier, scientists disagreed on how tightly the fault here was locked. This study adds strong evidence that it’s firmly stuck, in both Garhwal and Kumaon.
Wadia Institute geologist Dr Naresh Kumar puts it plainly: an earthquake can’t be predicted exactly, but a magnitude 7.5 to 8 quake in the Himalaya is a matter of when, not if.
And the danger isn’t just in the hills. The researchers warn that the Indo-Gangetic plains, home to about 40% of India’s population, could also be hit hard.
The study doesn’t say when it will happen, or exactly how strong it will be. But it does say we can’t afford to wait to prepare.
That means following earthquake-safe building rules, surveying old and weak buildings, making schools and hospitals safe, and building real disaster preparedness in every town and village.
In a state where buildings keep rising on fragile slopes, this is a warning worth taking seriously.
Source: Panda, D., Yadav, M., Lindsey, E.O. et al., “Evidence of strong plate coupling in the Uttarakhand Himalayas: Constraints from GNSS and ALOS-2 InSAR observations,” EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna. doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-eg…
🤖 Made with AI
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Episcopal Church's bishop of Europe, Mark Eddington, on JD Vance's explanation of the protests in Paris. Priceless.
Ravi Bhat retweeted
"Tied up and tortured: Israel using US-made electroshock weapons on Palestinian detainees
Investigation suggests American company Axon still supplies Israel with Taser weapons despite evidence they have been used to torture prisoners"
theguardian.com/global-devel…
Ravi Bhat retweeted
I am trying to grope towards a point in my usual ‘ill-tempered’ way. Let me take another pass. Bear with me.
The issue is not that the people are evil. The issue is the elite paradigm of ‘evil elites, innocent people’.
In The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, Gil Elliot describes how German tourists visited the General Government area in 1943. At the camps, they were allowed to shoot the Jews into the graves they had dug. This was a bottom-up, capillary movement.
The Nuremberg trials pretended that the evil was confined to the upper echelons of the Nazi party. Was it? That was the decisive ‘evil elites, innocent people’ paradigm in action.
More recently, in the Rwandan or Rohingya genocides etc, common people took part. It wasn’t just top-down. It went deep into society.
Students of ethnic violence in India work at different levels of analysis. Wilkinson says ethnic parties push communal violence to secure votes. Brass says that there are definite organizations for the production of ethnic violence. Varshney says that it goes deeper still. People themselves, by their own preferences, incentivize ethnic political violence.
I mean something like a general version of the Varshney thesis. The Israelis are quite agreed on the policy of genocide. It is absolutely not reducible to Likud or Bibi or the crazies.
I am trying to extend this problem to the broader problem of Western violence. Who precisely is responsible for the deaths of those schoolgirls? Who is responsible for the war of aggression on Iran?
It is not enough to say, I am saying, that a coterie of elites is. Thousands chanted ‘bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’. Imperialism goes just as deep in American and Western society as the genocidal tendency goes in Israel, as the exterminationist desires went in Nazi Germany, and so and so forth.
So, sorry, it just won't do. Some more notes with someone with a higher IQ than all you primates.
I keep getting pushback on this. Common people are not responsible. Regular people are not the ones making these catastrophic decisions to exterminate other people and kill their leaders and schoolgirls.
Actually, no. Who the fuck is voting for the Trumps and the Shumers and the Bidens and the Grahams? By definition it is the common people. Are we to believe that they do not know? Whose fault is that?
I am sorry. People who vote for their leaders are responsible for the actions of their leaders that they repeatedly keep putting back into office.
In fact, fuck this. Even the Saudis are responsible for accepting the murderer in Riyadh as their leader. The Pakistanis are responsible for living under the boot of their generals in Rawalpindi. Nobody is fucking innocent.
And that is why we need the succession.
Ravi Bhat retweeted
A very interesting development. Indonesia is emerging as a very important player, as the Australians are now recognizing. And anyone paying attention knows that the West decisively lost Indonesia with the genocide.
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Same fire. Same destruction. Different vocabulary.
Hong Kong, 2019:
Macron called for “dialogue,” “restraint” and “de-escalation.”
Paris, 2026:
Macron condemns the violence, vows there will be “no compromise,” and says rioters, looters and those attacking the Republic must pay the price.
Apparently when streets burned in Hong Kong, the answer was dialogue.
When streets burn in Paris, the answer is law and order.
Violence did not change.
The address did.
Western principles have always had a postal code.
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Congratulations to the entire team of @Cockroachisback!
And as always, kudos to Abhik Chimni, Pranjal, Moksha & their entire team!
Ravi Bhat retweeted
We are in this together 🫡
Congratulations to the entire team of @Cockroachisback!
And as always, kudos to Abhik Chimni, Pranjal, Moksha & their entire team!
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Narendra Modi’s party had used sleazy political tactics and its control of institutions to break up rival state parties and lure away their lawmakers. Voters accepted that. Under dispute now is whether the game itself is fixed economist.com/asia/2026/10/1…
Ravi Bhat retweeted
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay has called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stand trial for genocide in Gaza. trib.al/YAT9y9I
Ravi Bhat retweeted
OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country. We categorically reject censorship - whether direct or indirect - and urge the government to change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.
