Author: The Board

Viktor Orbán out – Rumen Radev in

Brussels may have ousted Viktor Orbán from office in Hungary – Brussels bureaucrats may have successfully controlled the elections in Romania and Moldova – and yet they are confronting yet another challenge from one of the lesser EU countries: from Bulgaria.

Bulgaria is estimated to be one of the poorest EU countries. It accessed the Union in 2007, amid high hopes of a betterment of social and economic life. The social mood was engineered – just like in every country about to join the Union – through the mass media that managed to inculcate into the minds of the Bulgarians that there is no salvation beyond the European Union. The majority of Bulgarians – the gullible majority – believed and so the word became flesh: since 2007 Bulgaria is an EU member state.

Why do we call people voting in favour of joining the European Union gullible? Simply because people throughout the ages have always been lured into supporting now fascism, now communism, now the left, now the right only to later regret it bitterly. Biologically grown-up people – psychologically immature – always fall prey to promises. So did the people of Bulgaria. They had thought that once their country became an EU member, things could only be better. They woke up another day, and they found out that the cuckoo’s land was nowhere in sight while Bulgarian industry was done away with and a million of citizens had gradually disappeared – left for Western Europe. The same phenomenon that we have witnessed in the Baltic States. From the almost 8 (eight) million people in 2001 Bulgaria is now down to 6.5 (six point five)! (But never mind: the European Union will replenish those Bulgarians with Bangladeshis for the purpose of which Brussels has just [20 April, 2026] signed the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with Dhaka).

Even though Bulgarian economy did not fare well, the ruling class managed to make Bulgaria accept the euro, thus depriving the country of the remnants of its sovereignty. There were violent protests but to no avail. The ruling class was obliged (bribed?) to implement the European Union’s plan for their country and so they readily executed the plan.

Yet, just like once in Hungary and nowadays in Slovakia (Robert Fico), there emerged resistance to Brussels and the Bulgarian resistance had its name and face: Rumen Radev.

Rumen Radev is an interesting personality. Trained as a military pilot (he flew MiG 29), risen to the rank of a general towards his military career, a Christian Orthodox believer with leftist or socialist political and economic views, he successfully campaigned to be elected Bulgaria’s president, which office he held for almost ten years (2017-2026). Seeing his fatherland in economic and social distress, Rumen Radev became head of the Progressive Bulgaria (Прогресивна България) party, resigned from his presidential post and led his party to a landslide victory in the parliamentary election in April this year, winning 131 seats out of 240.

Rumen Radev is not the politician that Brussels would be glad of. Just like Robert Fico and Viktor Orbán (and most likely also Peter Magyar, Orbán’s successor) Rumen Radev is against the provision of support for Ukraine in the latter’s war with Russia; he wants to maintain pragmatic relations with Moscow, he is a vocal critic of the EU policies, especially its craze for green economy, and – to top it all – he was against the introduction of the euro.

As it is, the new members of the Union are increasingly anti-Union, be it Slovakia or Bulgaria, be it Hungary or Poland. Eastern Europeans are growing ever more disappointed with the Union. They are very often heard to say that the current Union is not the Union they wanted to be a part of. Well, it is good that Eastern Europeans are slowly opening their eyes to reality, but they should have known better years back when they were enticed and tempted to fling themselves into Brussels’ monstrous embrace. Life teaches us that all trouble routinely begins with the acceptance of the belief in sweet promises of a bright future. When will humanity eventually grow up to this realisation?

 

The paradoxes of green energy

Energy is a commodity traded on the markets. This happens every day, at every moment. If the price of electricity falls, the electricity producer stops feeding his electricity into the grid. However, producers usually have no choice, as wind turbines keep turning and solar panels operate automatically. Energy storage systems are expensive and currently have barely enough capacity to store surplus electricity for hours or days when demand is high.

The more photovoltaic cells feed into the grid, the more frequently this problem arises: too much energy is generated precisely when everyone is producing the most. On sunny days, particularly at midday, there is more electricity than the system can consume. The more the sun shines, the more electricity flows into the grid at the same time – and the more frequently the price drops to zero or below. In extreme cases, the energy producer has to pay extra just to get someone to take the electricity off their hands. The following chart shows how the percentage of hours with negative electricity prices is rising in Europe and individual regions – and in which countries the biggest increases were recorded in 2025.

A negative electricity price is not a gift to the recipient. It is a signal that the system has been ‘overwhelmed’ by the surplus. Photovoltaic operators therefore sell electricity at a lower price relative to the average market value, which is not reflected in the final price paid by the end consumer. Why? Because there are too few energy storage operators willing to buy the electricity for free or at a premium and sell it at peak prices in the evening. Whilst the number of electricity storage facilities is rising steadily, the electricity grid is not being expanded to keep pace with the rapid growth of solar, wind and storage. As a result, on sunny days, photovoltaic plants and wind farms are being shut down more frequently because it is not possible to absorb the electricity. According to reports, 8.5% of onshore wind production was curtailed in the United Kingdom in 2024. In Germany, wind curtailment (onshore and offshore) has been above 5% since 2022, and solar curtailment rose to 2% in 2024. In China, this rose to 4.1% for wind and 3.2% for solar energy in 2024; preliminary figures for 2025 suggest over 5% for both, according to the IEA.

A modern 100-megawatt storage facility requires around 0.5 to 1 hectare of land. How much farmland would be needed for the massive offshore projects involving terawatt-scale wind farms currently being built in the Baltic Sea (for example, in Poland)? How much lithium and other metals – mined in the developing world in ways that are far from environmentally friendly – are required for these large battery energy storage systems (BESS)? Is that sustainable? Really?

I don’t think so. But it is politically correct, because it creates the illusion that we are becoming less dependent on fossil (read: Russian, Putin-controlled) raw materials.

 

 

 

Ukrainian national identity

What comes to mind when you think about William Wordsworth, John Milton George Gordon Byron, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Johann Wolfgang Goette, Friedrich Schiller, Charles Baudelaire, Alexandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Dante Alighieri, and, and, and? Well, that they all wrote in their native tongues. Now, when it comes to Taras Shevchenko — the national bard of Ukraine – he wrote both in Ukrainian and Russian. His prose is exclusively in Russian and – which is a very telling factor – his personal diary is in Russian as well. Nonetheless, he is regarded as the Ukrainian national poet. Despite that fact, Russian is being suppressed in present-day Ukraine or at least its usage is strongly discouraged, even though the national bard did not think it wrong to confide his innermost thoughts in Russian.

Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) is a good example of the problematic Ukrainian national identity. There are circles in Ukraine who would do anything to sharply delineate anything Ukrainian from anything Russian, but then – lo and behold! – their own national bard poses such a big problem. His use of the Ukrainian language appears to have been reserved for poetry only, which might point to things other than patriotic sentiment in the broad nationalistic sense of the word. Taras Shevchenko’s choice of Ukrainian may have been a poet’s preference of the regional kind of Russian that he found… more melodious? more charming? more mysterious or enigmatic? It is perhaps only due to the certain subjects that he sang about in his poetry that Taras Shevchenko opted for that regional kind of Russian. Who can tell?

This distinction between Ukrainian and Russian is like the distinction between the Czech and Slovak languages. Using a phenetic term for comparison purposes, one is tempted to say that Russian and Ukrainian as well as Czech and Slovak are allophones of the same tongue. (Allophones are two varieties of the same language sound, like the dark and light L occurring, respectively, in feel and look. The smallness of the difference between them in pronunciation does not merit different characters in writing.). In the Czech and Slovak lands, in the 19th century, when those lands were part of the Habsburg monarchy, there was a national revival, which – among other things – consisted in restoring to its full literary use the language, Czech in the west, Slovak in the east. Now Slovak intellectuals stood before a choice: either to adopt the Czech language and give up on Slovak, regarding the latter as the regional allophone of Czech, or to opt for Slovak and develop it in opposition to the Czech language. The Slovak intellectuals chose to stick to the Slovak variety of the Czecho-Slovak allophones; hence, two languages – Czech and Slovak, although they are barely distinguishable.

Both, in the case of the Czech-and-Slovak divide as well as in the case of the Ukrainian-and-Russian divide the two varieties of the same language are mutually intelligible. Oh yes, Ukrainian chauvinists will try to talk you into believing that there is a huge gap between Ukrainian and Russian, just as the Croat chauvinists will try to convince you that there is a world of difference between Croatian and Serbian. To bring the point home they might point to the Latin script used by Croats and the Cyrillic script used by Serbs. Gullible people will readily fall for the trick and think, looking at the different scripts, that these are two different languages. People very often assess languages by the script that they are confronted with. The more bizarre from their point of view the script (Arabic, Chinese), the more they tend to think of a language as ‘difficult’, ‘strange’, or ‘weird’.

The case of the Ukrainian-Russian divide is compounded by the fact that there is no clear cut between the two allophones: between the Ukrainian spoken in western Ukraine and Russian spoken in eastern Ukraine. There exists a gamut of mixtures between the two, which collectively are known as Surzhyk, a hybrid language. There is nothing like that between Polish and Czech – two distinct Slavic languages – or between Polish and Russian – again two distinct Slavic languages, but there is this gradual transition between Ukrainian and Russian, an almost imperceptible transition like that in the colour spectrum in which it is very, very hard to point to a line clearly separating one shade of blue (green, red) from the other.

The fact that Taras Shevchenko used to write in both languages, but especially in Russian, reflects very well the problem of Ukrainian national and cultural identity. Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev (in office 1953-1964 and 1964-1984, respectively) – two consecutive leaders of the Soviet Union – had the same problem. It is disputable to this very day how much they identified as Russian and how much as Ukrainian. The former was visibly drawn to certain elements of Ukrainian culture, the latter’s personal documents identify him as Russian or Ukrainian, with no consistency. The fact that Nikita Khrushchev had otherwise Russian Crimea incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (tearing it away from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) testifies to either Khrushchev’s Ukrainian proclivities or his view that Ukraine and Russia are the two sides of the same coin; hence, the transfer of a province from one to the other was like handing a car over between brothers.

Coming back to Taras Shevchenko. Of his 47 years of life, he spent 17 adult years in Saint Petersburg. It was predominantly his childhood that he spent in Ukraine. It was there and at that time that Ukrainian folklore sank into his soul to later resonate in his Ukrainian poetry. Not an infrequent phenomenon: Alexandr Pushkin would recreate his nanny’s folk stories in his later poetry as did many other poets around the globe. Writers and poets from all countries of the world sometimes fancy to write partly or generally in a local variety of their mother tongue. Think about Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, who – just as Taras Shevchenko – wrote in both English and in Scots dialects, often mixing the two. In fact, when you take a look at such a stanza composed by Burns as this one:

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

O’ foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

Baith snell an’ keen!

 

and compare it with the anglicised version:

 

Thy wee-bit house, too, in ruin!

Its silly walls the winds are strewin!

An’ nothing, now, to build a new one,

O’ grass green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

Both bitter an’ keen!

 

you can get a taste of what it is for a native of Russian to confront a Ukrainian – written or spoken – text. See in the above comparison that apart from only three words (marked in blue) that are entirely different, the others (marked in green) are very similar.

Ivan Franko (1856-1916) was another Ukrainian national bard. His case is as interesting as that of Taras Shevchenko when you think about Ukrainian national identity. Ivan Franko wrote his poetry and novels in Ukrainian and… Polish. Yes, and in Polish. He is credited to have written more than a thousand articles in Polish. Interestingly enough, he would also translate some of his Ukrainian poetry into Polish. No wonder, then: Ivan Franko lived and wrote in the city of Lvov, a predominantly Polish city at that time, a Polish demographic island in a sea of mostly Ukrainian villages.

What is even more surprising is that in the 19th century there emerged a branch of Polish romantic poets who are collectively referred to as the poets of the Ukrainian School. Though they wrote in Polish, the themes and protagonists of their poetry were Ukrainian folklore, Ukrainian myths and legends, Ukrainian mythical heroes. Antoni Malczewski wrote Maria, a Ukrainian Story, Józef Bohdan Zaleski wrote poems about Kosinsky and Mazepa – Kossak or Ukrainian national heroes, while Seweryn Goszczyński wrote Kaniov Castle, a narrative poem set in Ukraine, whose protagonists are Ukrainians and Poles. Ukraine, Ukrainian folklore, Ukrainian legendary or historical heroes feature in many a poem of other romantic and post-romantic Polish poets, some of whom (Juliusz Słowacki, Wincenty Pol) till this very day enjoy the status of Polish (not Ukrainian) national bards.

Considering all this one might extend the above adduced linguistic spectrum from (starting from the west) Polish, through Ukrainian, Surzhyk to Russian (in the east). This can be illustrated by the three texts of the Lord’s Prayer placed alongside. Surzhyk is not present in the juxtaposition below as by definition there is no one Surzhyk, but – rather – many varieties of it.    

(Ukrainian and Russian texts have been transcribed into the Latin script.)  

 

POLISH UKRAINIAN RUSSIAN
  Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie,   Otche nash, shcho yesy na nebesakh!   Otche nash, izhe yesi na nebesekh!
  święć się imię Twoje;   Nekhay sviatytsia imia Tvoie,   Da sviatitsia imia Tvoye,
  przyjdź królestwo Twoje;   nekhay pryide Tsarstvo Tvoie,   da priidet Tsarstviye Tvoye,
  bądź wola Twoja jako w niebie, tak i na   ziemi.   nekhay bude volia Tvoia, yak na nebi, tak i     na zemli.   da budet volia Tvoya, yako na nebesi i na   zemli.
  Chleba naszego powszedniego daj nam   dzisiaj;   Khlib nash nasushchnyi dai nam siohodni;   Khleb nash nasushchnyi dazhd nam dnes;
  i odpuść nam nasze winy, jako i my   odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom;   i prosty nam provyny nashi, yak i my       proshchaiemo vynuvattsiam nashym;   i ostavi nam dolgi nasha, yakozye i my   ostavliayem dolzhnikam nashim;
  i nie wódź nas na pokuszenie,   i ne vvedy nas u spokusu,   i ne vvedi nas vo iskusheniye,
 ale nas zbaw ode złego.   ale vyzvoly nas vid lukavoho.   no izbavi nas ot lukavogo

 

The reader can assess for himself the affinity of the three languages. Of course, the comparison is heavily predicated on the translation of the Lord’s Prayer. One can easily adjust the texts to make them even more similar.

The similarity of the languages does not decide the identity in and of itself. The fact whether a writer or a poet writes exclusively in one or two languages tells a lot about his identity. Yes, people used to employ foreign languages to express themselves: in the Middle Ages it used to be Latin, later French. These used to be fashionable, international languages. The aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries gave preference to French rather than to their mother tongues. Prussian King Frederick the Great loved expressing himself in French rather than in German. Yet, neither Taras Shevchenko nor Ivan Franko opted for French: the former chose Russian, the latter Polish. These were not fashionable, international languages.

Ukrainian identity seems to be hung in between Polish and Russian heritages. Western Ukraine, which borders on Poland and used to be a part of the Polish Kingdom, has become hostile to eastern Ukraine, which borders on Russia and used to be a part of the Russian Empire. Ukraine is torn apart with the undecided Surzhyk area in the middle. Either the west or the east will win over, or – most likely – Ukraine will split simply because neither part seems to be getting the upper hand, and – as is commonly known – a house divided against itself will not stand.

 

Thou shalt not say no to Donald Trump!

To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God – these are the words that Christian minister Paula White-Cain – the White House Senior Advisor and head of the White House Faith Office said in 2025. These words stirred much uproar among Christians of many denominations. They rightly stated that no man can be adored like God, no man can be looked up to like he is a deity.

The White House’s main resident – Donald Trump – a psychological reincarnation of Benito Mussolini – received a powerful boost for his ego from this female minister. Paula White-Cain is said to have been contacted by Donald Trump many years ago, before his first presidential term. He is supposed to have been struck by the profundity of her preaching. No wonder: like draws like. Paula White-Cain is every inch as narcissistic as the American president is. She was heard (and recorded) on an occasion to say: “Wherever I go, God rules. When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds. I have every right and authority to declare the White House holy ground, because I was standing there and where I stand is holy.” Her self-esteem is just staggering!

Paula White-Cain, born in 1966, a Christian minister, has been married three times (to Dean Knight, a musician, with whom she has a son; to Randy White, a preacher; and Jonathan Cain, a keyboardist and songwriter). She herself is from a broken family, with her father being a suicide. Despite those life hardships she managed to amass a fortune, complete with a real estate and a private jet. She generates money through her evangelism (including televangelism), book writing, and various business ventures.

Why, Donald Trump has also tried his hand at various enterprises and – what a coincidence! – he also has had three spouses (Ivana Trump, the mother of his three first children; Marla Maples, mother of one of his daughters; and Melania Trump, mother of his youngest son).   

Paula White-Cain’s evangelism attracts thousands of followers. She makes believe she “speaks in tongues” and she delivers people from bad spirits causing the people to fall on the ground during the process and behave in uncontrolled ways. She acts self-assured and – you guessed it right – she does all those things for the good of the poor, including the poor in – yes! yes! – Africa. (You will have noticed, dear reader, that all the philanthropists of the world are somehow concerned with the Dark Continent, but never mind.)

Isn’t Paula White-Cain just the right person to accompany somebody like President Donald Trump? They both look for narcissistic supply of admiration from the masses of people, they both know how to ingratiate themselves with the common man, and they both have been extremely successful in enriching themselves and gaining social status.

One can wonder which is worse: a Leonid Brezhnev taking cues from Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx’s political-cum-philosophical tenets or Donald Trump being influenced by Paula White-Cain’s ministry and hr interpretation of the Holy Scripture. One can also legitimately wonder whether Leonid Brezhnev really cared about Marxism-Leninism, and, similarly, whether President Donald Trump really cares about religion, any religion. Rather, both leaders use(d) the ideology or religion for their self-aggrandizement. When Ivanka, Donald Trump’s daughter (from his first marriage) married Jared Kushner, she converted to Judaism, her husband’s religion, which shows that she was not raised by a genuinely Christian father.

President Donald Trump needs a bunch of ministers in the White House precisely for the purpose of raising his status in the eyes of still believing American Christians. The words said by Paula White-Cain that you cannot say no to Donald Trump because that would be like saying no to God himself turn the American president into a Caesar-like figure. We know that Roman emperors enjoyed the status of being divine. The United States is an echo of the Roman Empire: we have the senate and the senators, we have the Capital, we have the eagle as the national emblem (all the trappings derived from ancient Rome) and Latin inscriptions like the familiar e pluribus unum (out of many – one) seen on coins and paper bills.

Roman emperors were not deified within a day. It was a process. Are we witnessing something like that in the case of present-day America?

Christians, as said above, were enraged by what Paula White-Cain said about President Donald Trump, but some of them – and we think about Christian Zionists – had done the same long before they heard those words from the female minister. It is the Christian Zionists who notoriously deify the nation of Israel. They are used to saying that ‘who touches Israel touches God’, which is a loose quotation of Zechariah 2:8, which says: ‘For he who touches you touches the apple of His eye.’ It is then the Christian Zionists who have long ago equated one ethnicity with God himself. Why should they be bothered so much when the deification is extended to Donald Trump? After all the incumbent American president is Israel’s best friend, waging wars at the behest of Tel Aviv. If Donald Trump is doing his best to Make Israel Great Again, why deification should be withdrawn from him? Doesn’t he deserve it?

But jokes apart. Deification of a nation or an individual is a path into the abyss. History knows of such deifications and the results they entailed. Woe to the world in which a nation or a man is equated with God.

 

The most expensive race in history

For those who follow the financial markets even a little, it is no secret that the race in the field of artificial intelligence is currently being fought out among the largest technology companies. However, AI is not a free revolution. To develop ever more efficient models, Big Tech needs hundreds of billions of dollars for data centres, servers, chips, cooling and energy. It is astonishing, but according to an analysis by the IEA (International Energy Agency), data centres are expected to consume around half of the electricity produced in the US between 2025 and 2030.

This is beginning to be reflected in the cash flow of the major companies in the AI sector. The chart below shows the growing gap between the capital expenditure (CapEx) of the Big 4 – namely Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft – and their available cash (FCF – Free Cash Flow). 

Capex of Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft (dark blue) vs. their free cash flow (red) in billions of dollars, including forecasts for the coming years.

From 2023 onwards, these companies’ expenditure will rise steadily and, according to analysts, will be six times higher by 2030 than it was eight years ago. 2026 will be the first real test of this strategy. It is predicted that surplus cash will virtually disappear and debt will rise. In a year’s time, we will find out whether it was a brilliant gamble – or the most expensive mistake in the history of technology.

Another risk for Big Tech is competition. Although tests clearly show that Chinese models still lag far behind the American market leaders, whilst the US remains the leader where scale and computing power matter, the technological advantage is not yet a market advantage – especially when the cheaper Chinese alternative is good enough for most business applications.

Would you like to be the American vice president?

The talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, have come to a grinding halt. 21 hours bore no fruit. Americans, despite having lost the war to Iran, raised their demands and obviously sought no settlement. It is highly likely they are trying to regroup and strike again: they are playing for time. They have done so twice before so we may rest assured they will do it again. They will strike while the negotiations are in full swing if they are resumed, and most likely they will be resumed.

Yet, it is not the negotiations that we’d like to focus aur attention on. It is the person of the American vice-president JD Vance. He was sent by President Donald Trump to Islamabad to carry out the talks. One might think JD Vance is the second most powerful man on planet earth. Sadly, far from it. JD Vance had absolutely no empowerment to conduct the negotiations. He called Donald Trump eleven times during his stay in Islamabad – a sure sign he had absolutely no leeway, or – worse – Donald Trump did not trust him enough.

Second, JD Vance was accompanied by Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff (both of Jewish extraction), who were certainly sent to guide the vice president and see to it that he does not depart from the direction that is satisfying for Israel.

Third, JD Vance, while still on board the plane bound for Washington on his way back from Pakistan called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ‘reported’ (that’s precisely the word that Benjamin Netanyahu used giving account of the call to the journalists) about the talks. Let this sink in: the American vice-president reported over the telephone to a foreign head of state even before he did so in person to his superior, the president of the United States.

The position of the American second-in-command is unenviable! For all the splendour and what not, JD Vance is compelled to play a role he certainly – if he is a man of ambition – does not enjoy playing. Unless, of course, JD Vance is not a man of ambition, unless he only cares for the trappings of power. Who knows?

How things are sold and packaged to us

Traditional economics assumes that people make decisions rationally and after careful consideration. In practice, however, Homo sapiens rarely resembles Homo economicus. We are not machines that coldly calculate profits and losses. We are beings who, despite millions of years of evolution, make decisions under the influence of emotions and unconscious impulses. Behavioural economists and experts in neuromarketing are aware of this and use it to sell us products and services.

Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, demonstrated together with Amos Tversky that people make decisions based on emotions and heuristics (mental shortcuts). These simplified rules of thought enable quick decisions, but ones that are usually inaccurate.

The first of these cognitive mechanisms is the anchor effect. This means that the first piece of information we are given – such as the price – becomes our benchmark. For example, if a shop reduces the price from 500 to 300, customers see this offer as a great opportunity, regardless of the product’s actual value.

The second cognitive mechanism is the availability heuristic (mere-exposure effect): we consider things to be more important or more likely if an example immediately springs to mind. Insurance companies exploit this by showing specific claims in their adverts, leading us to buy policies we may not even need.

The third is the certainty effect: people prefer a small but guaranteed profit to the chance of a large profit. A “free gift with every order” is often more appealing than competition.

The fourth is loss aversion: adverts such as “Offer ends in 2 hours” or “Only 24 left in stock” attract customers like a magnet. Loss aversion is also linked to the FOMO effect (fear of missing out). This causes market participants to make irrational decisions under the influence of social pressure and the fear of missing out on an opportunity (see, for example, recent buyers of precious metals on the stock market).

The fifth is cognitive ease: used in marketing through consistent branding and slogans. If a message is repeated often enough, it ‘slips’ into the brain without resistance. This builds trust, even when there are no factual arguments to back it up. This is combined with clear presentation (visual ease) and ease of content (simple language, humour).

The sixth is the effect of scarcity. When a well-known brand announces a limited-edition product, people often react with enthusiasm. They see it as something exclusive and rare that will enhance their status and self-esteem. Nobody asks whether the product is worth the price.

The seventh is framing – the construction of an appropriate narrative.

The eighth is the halo effect. We are more likely to believe attractive, well-dressed people than those who look average, unattractive or poor, even if this says nothing about their competence.

Modern neuromarketing has long since incorporated all these effects and is taking things further by utilising the latest discoveries in neurobiology, cognitive science, psychology, data science and artificial intelligence. It examines not only human behaviour, but also its biological basis.

Politicians make massive use of neuromarketing, and we fall for it. They simply talk (Trump’s cognitive ease). They show us gruesome images of destroyed Ukrainian cities and say: ‘The war may soon come to you if you don’t pay more tax for defence spending. You must buy and produce weapons immediately, otherwise it will be too late’ (FOMO).

Politicians want to keep pay rises in the public sector as low as possible, so they stir up the trade unions, who then demand a far-fetched 15% increase (the anchor). Both sides then agree on 5%, and the electorate (the customers) are happy (the certainty effect).

Politicians never talk about necessary tax increases, but rather about ‘investing in the future.’ Instead of talking about ‘restrictions on freedoms,’ they talk about ‘security measures.’ Statistics: Voters are more likely to support a programme that promises ‘95% employment’ than one that talks about ‘5% unemployment,’ even though mathematically it is the same thing. Both are examples of framing.

Olaf Scholz positioned himself as Angela Merkel’s successor (even copying her diamond-shaped hand gesture). He capitalised on the fact that voters’ brains favour what is familiar (the mere-exposure effect). For Germans, voting for Scholz was ‘cognitively easy’ – not a revolution, but stability that provided a sense of security.

Youthfulness, impeccable looks and energy created a strong halo effect for Macron and Trudeau. Voters unconsciously attributed economic and political competence to them (which, as newcomers, they could not prove) because they reacted positively to their overall presence and self-assured demeanour.

Brussels constantly relies on certainty and availability heuristics. Half-truths – such as the claim that the EU is beneficial for all member states – or outright lies – such as the assertion that we need ‘doctors’ from Somalia or ‘engineers’ from Rwanda – are repeated so often that, for some Europeans, these lies begin to feel like facts. It is claimed that leaving the EU is not worth it, as EU funding is so beneficial. Hardly anyone mentions that leaving could eradicate the demographically and economically devastating (green; LGBTQ) ideology. Hardly anyone mentions that leaving could enable Eastern and Central European countries to prevent the migration of their best skilled workers to Western Europe.

Just as in Brussels, the authorities in Beijing blow like the wind over the people, and the people (like grass) bend, as the sage Confucius once said. They operate a system of electronic surveillance involving thousands of cameras and facial recognition, and present it as concern for the citizen (framing). Citizens bend like grass under the pressure of the wind and are content that they are in the green in the state’s points system, allowing them to travel and enjoy small freedoms. The certainty effect.

One could go on listing examples for a long time. The main thing is that we understand the mechanisms and do not fall for them.