Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on April 24 that the United States will not renew the sanctions waivers that enabled buyers to take delivery of Iranian and Russian crude already loaded on tankers at sea.
Bessent said a one-time license covering Iranian oil on the water would not be extended, calling it “totally off the table.” The parallel waiver for Russian oil and petroleum products will also be allowed to end, he said.
“We will not be renewing the general license on Russian oil, and we will not be renewing the general license on Iranian oil,” Bessent said. “That was oil that was on the water prior to March 11. So all that has been used.”
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also on Friday sanctioned Hengli Petrochemical (Dalian) Refinery Co., a Chinese plant that can process roughly 400,000 barrels a day.
“Hengli has played an outsized role in purchasing crude oil from Iran’s armed forces,” the Treasury said in a statement.
The OFAC also sanctioned approximately 40 shipping companies and tankers connected to Iran’s so-called shadow fleet.
The action was executed under Executive Order 13902 and President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 2, the framework for the White House’s “maximum pressure” campaign.
“Treasury will continue to constrict the network of vessels, intermediaries and buyers Iran relies on to move its oil to global markets,” Bessent said in the Treasury statement.
On Friday, Bessent also disclosed the seizure of about $344 million in cryptocurrency held in crypto wallets the government has tied to Tehran.
“We will follow the money that Tehran is desperately attempting to move outside of the country and target all financial lifelines tied to the regime,” Bessent said.
Blockchain analysts cited in the report tied some of the wallets to the Central Bank of Iran and to Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges.
Bessent predicted earlier in the week that Iran’s oil sector was close to collapse. He said Kharg Island, the terminal that handles nearly 90 percent of Iran’s crude exports, would run out of storage “in a matter of days,” meaning producers had to shut in fragile wells that are hard and costly to restart.
“Constraining Iran’s maritime trade directly targets the regime’s primary revenue lifelines,” he said.
Bessent said on Wednesday that the maritime oil waivers covering both countries had been quietly extended for another 30 days, noting that at the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, “more than 10 of the most vulnerable and poorest countries” had pleaded for relief as crude prices rose past $100 a barrel.
That extension was executed via OFAC General License 134B, issued April 17, authorizing wind-down transactions involving Russian crude and petroleum products put on vessels by that date. The license is set to expire on May 16. It replaced an earlier authorization that ran out on April 11.
The original waiver, issued in March after the U.S.–Israeli war with Iran led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a squeeze on global supply, was designed to keep barrels already at sea moving and calm jittery markets.
Bessent said that the administration is also ready to employ secondary sanctions against any country or bank that purchases Iranian oil or holds Iranian funds, noting that it is “a very stern measure.” He said pressure will next be placed on the banks and refiners still conducting business with Tehran.
Tyler Durden Mon, 04/27/2026 - 03:30The maps below use data from various organizations to highlight interpretations of Eastern Europe’s geographical extent.
At a glance, the visualizations - via Visual Capitalist - show a tight core centered on Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, with boundaries stretching eastward into Russia and stopping along a debated western frontier that cuts through Central Europe.
Eastern Europe’s Borders, DefinedBelow are major groupings from the UN, CIA World Factbook, StAGN (Germany’s committee on geographical names), and The European Correspondent, the creator of the map.
A Region Defined by Perspective
Unlike continents or countries, Eastern Europe is not a fixed geographic entity. Instead, its definition has evolved over time, shaped by empires, ideology, and institutions. According to various modern definitions, the region can include anywhere from a handful of countries to over a dozen.
Historically, the term gained prominence during the Cold War, when it often referred to Soviet-aligned nations. This political framing still influences perceptions today.
The Core vs. the FringeDespite disagreements, some countries are almost always included:
These nations form the “core” of Eastern Europe across most academic and institutional definitions. Beyond them, the picture becomes less clear. Countries like Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are sometimes included, but are often classified as Central Europe instead.
Research from institutions like the University of Basel highlights how these shifting classifications reflect cultural identity as much as geography.
How Far Does It Stretch?At its maximum extent, Eastern Europe can span from Germany’s eastern border all the way to the Ural Mountains in Russia. This broader definition may include the Balkans and parts of Central Europe.
At its minimum, however, the region shrinks to just a few countries in Eastern Slavic territory. That these narrower definitions often reflect cultural or linguistic commonalities.
Ultimately, where Eastern Europe “begins” and “ends” depends on who you ask, which makes it less of a place on a map and more of an idea shaped by history and geopolitics.
Tyler Durden Mon, 04/27/2026 - 02:45Authored by Frank-Christian Hansel via American Greatness,
Germany is not, in the first place, suffering from an economic crisis, an energy crisis, a migration crisis, or a crisis of state. Germany is suffering, chiefly, from a crisis of its elites.
More precisely, Germany is suffering from a crisis brought on by that milieu which regards itself as the country’s morally, intellectually, and administratively legitimate leadership class but which has, for years, sustained a regime of reality-avoidance, self-congratulation, and rhetorical substitutes for genuine action.
The misery of our situation is not that mistakes have been made. Mistakes are part of politics. The real misery is that Germany has produced a class of managerial elites that refuses to change course even when the consequences of its actions lie plainly exposed. That class does not correct itself, because it no longer measures itself against reality; rather, it measures itself against the approval of its own circles. It does not want to be right before the tribunal of reality; it wants to be right before the tribunal supplied by its own milieu.
That is the root of Germany’s decline.
The Federal Republic was once—for all its flaws—a country that drew its strength from a peculiar mixture of sobriety, an ethic of performance, technical reason, institutional discipline, and bourgeois self-restraint. This country was not great through pathos but through seriousness, not through visions but through reliability, and not through moral grandstanding but through quiet competence. That was precisely why it was strong: because it had the capacity to concentrate on what was necessary, instead of losing itself in what was desirable.
Of that Germany, little remains inside the ruling apparatus.
In place of prosaic sobriety, a political-media class has emerged that mistakes governing for pedagogical world-improvement. Its first instinct is no longer to secure, to enable, and to set limits. Its first instinct is to educate, to frame, to therapize, to reinterpret, and to morally cultivate. Its relationship to the citizen is no longer republican; it is curatorial. The citizen no longer appears to this class as the sovereign on whose behalf it works—as Helmut Schmidt once understood the office—but as a problem case: too skeptical, too stubborn, too set in his ways, and too interested in normality, safety, and prosperity.
This is where the real cultural rupture becomes visible.
Germany’s elites no longer distrust merely particular political positions. They distrust ordinary life itself. The desire for normality, the desire for affordable energy, the desire for borders, the desire for safety in public space, the desire for cultural continuity—the desire, in short, that a state should first be obligated to its own—all of this is held in the upper reaches of society to be suspect, unpleasantly banal, and morally backward.
A paradoxical situation has emerged: the more obvious the functional failures of the state, the louder the moral self-celebration of its representatives. The thinner the substance of the country, the more clamorous the professions of stance, diversity, transformation, and responsibility—with the federal president, at the top of the hierarchy, leading the chorus.
We live, accordingly, in a state that announces ever more and delivers ever less. Politics that indulges in historical sermonizing while failing at train stations, borders, schools, the electricity grid, housing, the Bundeswehr, public administration, and internal security—an elite that cloaks its own barrenness with the claim that it, at least, stands on the right side of history. That formula is the real total loss.
For whoever believes himself to be on the right side of history ceases to answer to the present. He replaces examination with conviction, outcomes with intentions, and reality with narrative. From this posture comes the mixture of hypermoralism and state failure that characterizes Germany today. They speak of humanity and lose control of migration. They speak of responsibility and destroy the energy foundations of our industry. They babble about worldly openness and ask us to tolerate the degradation of public spaces. They speak of democracy and exclude millions of voters. They take the word “diversity” in their mouths and drive cultural estrangement in their own country.
This is not accidental. It follows a deeper logic. Those who rule the Federal Republic today have grown accustomed to drawing legitimacy not from performance but from moral elevation. They no longer govern out of their own solidity but out of symbolic self-immunization. Whoever objects is not treated as an opponent but as a disturbance. Whoever points to the limits of what a society can bear is not treated as a realist but as a suspect case. Whoever invokes people, nations, cultural inheritance, sovereignty, or self-interest is not tested argumentatively but ritually delegitimized.
Which is exactly why the opposition in Germany today is, at its core, not simply one more party among others. It is, apart from its internal difficulties and the external attacks against it, the political expression of a surviving cast of mind in this country.
A surviving cast of realism, of the will to self-assertion, and of a sense for reality. It is the form in which Germany still articulates itself politically: the Germany that is not yet willing to let itself be parted from its history, its cultural identity, its industrial reason, and its claim to the normality of the state. We can say it plainly: yes, we are bourgeois dissidents.
This also explains the frenzied state of mind of the establishment. We are not opposed so bitterly because we are irrelevant. We are opposed so bitterly because we touch exactly the point that the ruling cartel must conceal at any cost: that the decline is not fated, but politically engineered; that the crisis does not come from the voters, but from the leadership classes; and that the real scandal lies not in the protest, but in the necessity of the protest—in the necessity of dissent itself.
What has exhausted itself in Germany is not merely a government or a coalition. It is the whole style of governing: a style that dissolves all limits and manages everything at once; that relativizes every binding and sanctions every deviation; that treats national self-assertion as indecent and state overreach as progressive; that subordinates economic reason to climate, legal clarity to a false morality, cultural self-respect to a pedagogy of guilt, and democratic equality to the political firewall. This model is depleted. It has no answer left to reality except to impose further demands on those it governs.
It has, ultimately, no future.
What Germany needs, therefore, is not merely a change of policy. It needs a mental restart—a return to Go—so that a true reset becomes possible. Every renewal begins with a reset. Not with grand programs, but with a rediscovery of what is real. A country must know again who it is before it can decide where it wants to go. It must stop despising itself morally before it can become politically capable of action again. That is where the real task lies.
Germany must—we must—free ourselves from our exhausted elites. Not only in terms of personnel, but also mentally and spiritually. We must find our way back to a politics that distinguishes between one’s own and the foreign, between responsibility and posture, between freedom and paternalism. We must remember that the purpose of a state is not to redeem the world but to protect its own political community. And that a nation which loses the will to self-assertion will, in the end, lose its capacity for freedom as well.
The German reset will therefore not come from the centers of today’s operations. Not from the party apparatuses, not from the editorial offices, not from the committees of a class that is blind to its own failures and seeks refuge in haughty notions of moral superiority. The reset and restart can only come from those places where something of the country’s sense of reality still remains intact: where decline is not celebrated as transformation, where the normal is not dismissed as reactionary, and where Germany is not regarded as a problem but as a task.
That surviving cast of mind, on which the reset depends, still exists. But it is not infinitely resilient.
The question, therefore, is not whether this country needs a rupture. The question is whether that rupture will be organized politically in time—or whether Germany must first pass still deeper through the exhaustion zones of its old elites. In this situation, the opposition is not merely an opposition party. It is the only political force that understands the necessary rupture not as a breakdown to be managed, but as the precondition of renewal.
Whoever truly wants to restart Germany must first have the courage to stop treating this country‘s elite misery as its fate. It was done. And what was done can be undone.
Tyler Durden Mon, 04/27/2026 - 02:00Authored by Jonathan Miltimore via Civitas Institute,
In 1942, after fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1937), a disillusioned writer returned to London to write about his experience. It wasn’t just that the fascists in Spain had won and his side—a small, anti-Stalinist Marxist group—had lost. What frightened him was the ease with which truth itself had been erased and replaced by propaganda.
“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories ... and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”
The writer was George Orwell, and the quote appears in his book “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War.”
The disconnect between reality and narrative clearly made an impression on Orwell, who worried that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” The theme of falsified history and the destruction of truth would resurface in his fictional masterpiece “Nineteen Eighty‑Four,” where “memory holes” swallowed inconvenient facts and the past was rewritten to suit the Party’s needs.
Orwell’s book would go on to sell 25 million copies worldwide, and he is today remembered as a prophet for foreseeing a future in which the state’s deliberate power could extinguish truth itself.
Yet few today remember that five years before the publication of “Nineteen Eighty‑Four,” an Austrian economist, in his own magnum opus, explored how the state destroys truth.
Management of MindsUnlike George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) is not a household name, but his 1944 classic “The Road to Serfdom” made him one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers—despite the book’s inauspicious beginning.
Originally a memo penned at the London School of Economics, “The Road to Serfdom” was rejected by three publishers before finding a home with Routledge. The first run—2,000 copies—sold out in 10 days. Hayek’s book went on to sell more than two million copies and be translated into over twenty languages. Its core argument was straightforward: central planning, however well-intentioned, erodes individual freedom and sets society on a path toward serfdom.
What is often overlooked is Hayek’s deeper insight. Economic control does not remain confined to the economy. Once the state directs production and prices, it inevitably reaches into thought, expression, and belief. For Hayek, the danger of socialism was not only material impoverishment—as seen in the USSR—but the steady expansion of intellectual control.
“... It is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends,” Hayek wrote. “It is essential that people should come to regard them as their own ends.”
Hayek was warning that once the state begins to manage prices and production, it will soon find it necessary to manage minds. When a government takes control over economic life, it must “justify its decisions to the people” and “make people believe that they are the right decisions.”
In doing so, it inevitably begins to decide which opinions and values align with its plan—rewarding and amplifying voices that comply while punishing, suppressing, and silencing those that do not.
‘The End of Truth’The quotes above appear in Chapter 11 of “Serfdom,” aptly titled “The End of Truth.”
When I first read the book twenty years ago, the chapter didn’t stand out to me. Today it does. After all, we recently lived through a period in which the phenomenon Hayek described played out before our eyes.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a vast economic experiment. The federal government issued a wide array of public health “recommendations” that soon became dogmas. To question the efficacy of masks or social distancing—a policy we learned in 2024 had no basis in science—was to risk being censored or accused of spreading “misinformation.” Scientific debate gave way to official decree, and many who questioned “the plan” or resisted it lost their jobs or were booted from platforms.
None of this would have surprised Hayek, who warned that the plans constructed by central planners must be “sacrosanct and exempt from criticism.”
“If the people are to support the common effort without hesitation, they must be convinced that not only the end aimed at but also the means chosen are the right ones,” he wrote. “Public criticism or even expressions of doubts must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support.”
Hayek’s chapter is not primarily about censorship. Instead, he argues that the rise of state power will systematically undermine the concept of truth itself and the human pursuit of it.
As governments assert control over economic and social life, facts and evidence are subordinated to political goals—an idea Orwell illustrated vividly when the Party refused to accept Winston Smith’s claim that two plus two equals four.
‘Sometimes, Winston...’The phenomenon Orwell described was not moral relativism but factual relativism. It was a theme Hayek also addressed. The Austrian economist noted that in totalitarian systems, even basic facts—including mathematics—become subservient to state dogma. He reminded readers that in the USSR and Nazi Germany, ideology had consumed even the sciences. There was “German Physics” and a “Marxist-Leninist theory in surgery.”
“It is entirely in keeping with the whole spirit of totalitarianism that it condemns any human activity done for its own sake and without ulterior purpose,” he wrote. “Science for science’s sake, art for art’s sake, are equally abhorrent to the Nazis, our socialist intellectuals, and the communists.”
Hayek observed that as the state’s power grows, the sciences become corrupted. Instead of advancing truth, they become tools in the hands of planners.
“Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interest of a class, a community, or a state,” he wrote, “the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed.”
Hayek said the phenomenon he described was most pronounced in dictatorships, but he added that it was not “peculiar to totalitarianism.” Even in free societies, he warned, “the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape [the] influence” of state propaganda. His point was unsettling: susceptibility to propaganda is not limited to the gullible or uninformed—propaganda ensnares the thoughtful and educated as well.
The erosion of truth becomes apparent through a decay in language. Words like “freedom,” “right,” “equality,” and “justice” lose their meaning. Eventually, the word “truth” itself “ceases to have its old meaning.”
“It describes no longer something to be found,” Hayek wrote, “it becomes something to be laid down by authority—something which has to be believed in the interest of unity of the organized effort, and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.” (emphasis added)
All of this sounds familiar to readers of “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” who see Winston Smith struggling to hold onto objective truth in a world where truth is dictated by power. Surely two plus two equals four, he pleads.
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five,” he is told in the Ministry of Love. “Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder.”
‘The Tragedy of Collectivist Thought’Orwell was a master, and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is a masterpiece. But Hayek was describing Orwellianism several years before Orwell gave it fictional form. (It’s also worth noting that G.K. Chesterton used the “two plus two equals four” blasphemy metaphor nearly a half-century before Orwell.)
This doesn’t diminish Orwell’s work. On the contrary, it shows how powerfully he dramatized ideas that Hayek had already diagnosed in theory. (Orwell, it should be noted, read “The Road to Serfdom” and enjoyed it, with caveats.)
Still, Hayek deserves credit for superbly articulating—in one chapter!—the phenomenon that Orwell would translate into a terrifying warning, one that millions of junior high and high school students would receive in English courses.
The economist Daniel Klein recently called “The End of Truth” the most important chapter in Hayek’s most important work. I couldn’t agree more. The chapter serves as a reminder that the human mind is not something to be controlled but something to be unleashed. If we forget this simple lesson, we risk surrendering the very capacity for independent thought that sustains civilization.
“The tragedy of collectivist thought,” he noted, “is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends.”
Tyler Durden Sun, 04/26/2026 - 23:50