Peter Pink-Howitt's Blog: Compossible

Democracy, Backsliding and the Need for a Weekly Radar

In March 2026, the V‑Dem Institute published its tenth global Democracy Report: Unraveling the Democratic Era?

For the “average global citizen”, they conclude, the level of democracy is now back to where it stood in 1978. The gains of the so‑called “third wave of democratisation”, which began with Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974, have been “almost entirely eradicated”.

The numbers are startling. At the e...

ACTORS THE EU WILL NOT NAME

A FIMI-Methodology Assessment of US, Israeli and Aligned Network Interference in European Democracy

‘Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must forever be on our guard, ever mobilised, ever vigilant...’1

(Winston Churchill)

Engineering Escape Velocity – A 5 year Plan for Europe

This three-part Reckoning series began with a question about what China’s history, including its 19th-century failures and its 20th century successes, can teach Europe about its 21st-century moment of crisis. China failed to adapt to geopolitical changes in the 19th century and that mistake gave rise to a century of humiliation. China learned from that failure and is now a superpower.

Europe has five years, at most, to learn and inco...

The Stackelberg Trap and dealing with the American Criminal Enterprise, China & Russia

Continuing the series:

The Reckoning: A European Strategy For an Unstable World

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one...

Part 1: What Europe Can Learn From China and the Mathematics of Human Survival

The fourth article in the European Reckoning series.

Read the previous (somewhat more polemical) articles here:

Europe Is On The Menu (February 2025),

The Union of Europe is Finally Born (March 2025),

The Rape of Europa (October 2025).

“Since the fall...

Part 1: What Europe Can Learn From China and the Mathematics of Human Survival

The fourth article in the European Reckoning series.

Read the previous (somewhat more polemical) articles here:

Europe Is On The Menu (February 2025),

The Union of Europe is Finally Born (March 2025),

The Rape of Europa (October 2025).

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe has no longer been strat...

Be warned:

The Devil does not offer

Temptations of earthly treasures or

A feast of carnal pleasures

Instead he whispers

Despair, despair, despair

That is why

On the gates of Hell is writ:

‘abandon all hope, ye who enter here’

The Moon is the promise of the Sun
Fear not, tomorrow will come

Look at its astonished face
Locked in place
To think it cannot look away
Not once

Forgive us
Some things are unspeakable
Even in reflection

I felt the moonbeams fall last night

Showered in its fulgent light
A man shaped moonflower

I stared up from our deep dark well
Was struck dumb in ignorance
A wordless wisdom
Radiating through my marrow
Like x-rays

Tonight I’m bones
Dem bones, dry bones

My son

One day you’ll learn

That love’s a kind of grief

Delayed

A journey

With the ferryman

Who must be paid

You’ll learn to wield

Love’s razor

Sharp blade

Each cut

Lets out

Your tender heart

There’s a point where impunity is not a failure of the system; it is the purpose of the system. That is the starting point behind a new AI‑generated seven‑part podcast series I’ve been working on: The Epstein Network: Sexual Abuse, State Power, and Impunity — and its opening episode, “The Deal of a Lifetime.”

Anyone who spends time with the documents – FBI files, court transcripts, bank records, internal emails, and now the informant reports – runs into the same problem. T...