🚨 New study (Safety Science, 2025): COVID spread in a restaurant wasn’t mainly aerosols, but larger droplets up to 40µm. That flips much of the early pandemic narrative. Let’s break it down 🧵 (1/15)

https://twitter.com/facedebengals/status/1965543122210885661

Case studied: Guangzhou, Jan 2020. 9 people infected in one restaurant. Researchers re-ran the outbreak using CFD airflow modeling + Wells-Riley infection theory. (2/15)

1/ 💰 Does taxing wealth discourage saving?
Conventional wisdom says “yes.”
But a new study in the Review of Economic Studies (Ring, 2025) on Norway’s wealth tax tells a very different story. Let’s dig in. 🧵 (20 posts) 2/ Background: Norway levied a ~1% annual tax on net wealth above thresholds.
Key: housing values formed a large share of the taxable base.
In 2010, property valuations changed → creating administrative discontinuities across local borders.

1/
Three decades after the Iron Curtain, Central & Eastern European (CEE) states have gone from followers to leaders in NATO & EU security. How? By transforming their military elites into highly transnational actors. 🧵 2/
Tomas Kucera’s 2025 study shows that CEE Chiefs of Defence (CHODs) are among the most internationalised military leaders in the world. They studied abroad, served in NATO HQs, and deployed in multinational missions.

1/
🚨 NEW STUDY: How has the Russia–Ukraine war reshaped the EU’s defense strategy?

Using 26,000+ official EU documents and AI analysis, Ünaldilar et al. (2025) map the EU’s evolving quest for strategic autonomy.

Here’s a breakdown of what they found 🧵 🔍 What is strategic autonomy?

The EU defines it as its ability to “make its own choices and shape the world around it” — especially in defense, tech, and industry — without overreliance on the US or NATO.

The war in Ukraine turned this from an aspiration into a necessity.

🧵1/15
What if the way we think about military innovation is stuck in the past?
Emilie Berthelsen’s new article in Journal of Strategic Studies dismantles the war/peace binary in military innovation theory.
Let’s dive in.👇 2/15
Military innovation studies traditionally separate innovation into:
⚙️ Strategic innovation → in peacetime
🛡️ Tactical adaptation → in wartime
This binary frames how we think about change — but it’s no longer adequate.

on a relavant topic:

1/25
🧵THREAD: "The Battle of Bakhmut: A Strategic Miscalculation"
Jean-François Caron's 2024 paper delivers one of the sharpest critiques yet of Ukraine’s costly decision to hold Bakhmut.
Here's what you need to know. 👇
#Ukraine #Bakhmut #MilitaryStrategy

https://twitter.com/FaceDeBengals/status/1937194245665776123

2/25
The core argument?
⚠️ Ukraine's decision to hold Bakhmut in late 2022 was a strategic blunder.
Rather than preserving its momentum from prior victories, Kyiv fell into a Russian trap—and paid the price.

Let’s rewind.

Comment Israël a infiltré l’Iran : guerre de l’ombre, renseignement, guerre cognitive (1/25)
L’étude de Grigorij Serscikov (2024) lève le voile sur les opérations du Mossad en Iran. Sabotages, assassinats ciblés, guerre psychologique : un modèle stratégique de guerre de l’ombre. 2/25
Depuis 2007, Israël a mené des dizaines d'opérations clandestines en Iran :
• Assassinats de scientifiques nucléaires
• Cyberattaque Stuxnet
• Exfiltration d'archives nucléaires (2018)
• Sabotages de sites sensibles
Le Mossad agit au cœur de Téhéran.

1/25
Forget what you think you know about Wagner.
They're not just a criminal enterprise or Putin’s thugs.
A 2025 study by David Jaklin reveals something far deeper:
👉 Wagner is state-linked, GRU-enabled, and strategically vital to Russia’s global playbook. 2/25
Wagner’s origins date back to 2014, but its ideological and operational roots are older.

It’s the product of a paramilitary–intelligence nexus, carefully crafted to serve Russian interests without accountability.

Hybrid warfare in its purest form.

🧵1/24

The CIA has long operated as America’s “secret State Department”—especially in regions where formal diplomacy is impossible. One of the clearest examples? Iraqi Kurdistan.
🕵️‍♂️🇺🇸🇮🇶 #CIA #Kurdistan 2/24

In Iraqi Kurdistan, U.S. relations began not through embassies, but via covert intelligence channels—especially with the CIA building direct links to Kurdish tribes and militias long before any official State Department involvement.

🧵 THREAD (1/25):
What do 🇩🇪Germany and 🇰🇿Kazakhstan have in common when it comes to project management?
Not much—until you realize both are being transformed by the rise of projectification.
Let’s dive into the most fascinating PM study of 2025.👇 2/25
First, the term projectification.
Coined in the 90s, it means this:

“The increasing use of projects as a form of work organization across all areas of society.”
We’re not just talking startups or engineering. We’re talking government, schools, hospitals, NGOs.

1/15
Why do civil wars keep coming back?
Because peace agreements promise a lot on paper—but deliver little on the ground.
Julia Palik analyzed 78 peace deals with full DDR (1975–2021).
Here’s what really goes wrong 👇 2/15
Out of 292 peace agreements, only 78 (26%) included all 3 components of DDR:
➡️ Disarmament
➡️ Demobilization
➡️ Reintegration
The rest? Fragmented, partial, or totally absent DDR provisions.

1/
🚨 NEW STUDY: The words we use to describe government workers change how citizens perceive them.
Are they “bureaucrats”? Or “public servants”?
The difference isn’t semantic—it’s psychological, political, and strategic. 🧵👇
#PublicAdmin #Framing #TrustInGov 2/
The study tackles a key paradox:
Citizens distrust bureaucracies, but often recall positive experiences with individual officials.
Why? And can this be manipulated through the framing of language?

🧵1/
A new study by criminologist Shai Farber exposes how the BDS movement, Palestinian terrorist organizations, and anti-Israel campus protests have become operationally intertwined post-Oct. 7.
This is about more than protests. It’s strategic warfare.👇 2/
The BDS movement, launched in 2005, claims to be a non-violent human rights campaign.
In reality, Farber shows it operates as a soft power arm of terror groups like Hamas and the PFLP, with Western universities as its main battlefield.

🧵Thread: How one German officer tried to stop Hitler’s war — and warned the Allies 20+ times. They didn’t listen. A WW2 intelligence failure you’ve never heard about. (1/20) 2/20
In Nov 1939, Britain’s army in France (the BEF) braced for war. Hitler’s armies were massing near Belgium and Holland. But when would they strike?

A little-known German officer had the answer.

1/
🚨 NEW STUDY — How much is school choice worth?
When Germany’s biggest state removed school zoning for primary schools, families responded — and so did real estate prices.
Let’s unpack a brilliant study on school markets, housing & equity. 📚🏘️
🧵(1/25) 2/
🇩🇪 Context: In 2008, North Rhine–Westphalia (NRW) ended mandatory “catchment areas” for primary schools.
Before: kids had to attend their assigned neighborhood school.
After: parents could apply anywhere — with proximity still a tiebreaker.

🧵 THREAD – How TIME shaped Iran’s nuclear diplomacy, and why Israel just struck
1/20
For 20 years, Iran’s nuclear program has been a ticking clock. But few realize just how central time itself has been to every decision, every delay, every crisis. ⏰🔬

https://twitter.com/facedebengals/status/1934955096242053556

2/20
Beasley & Mehvar (2025) argue that we shouldn’t treat time as neutral. Time is a weapon, a rhetoric, a strategy—and in the Iranian nuclear saga, it’s the unseen battlefield. 📚

1/25
🚨 New study alert!
Is Canada still an exception in the global rise of populism?
This 2025 research dives into 5,845 tweets by federal leaders in 2022 to find out.
Spoiler: The answer is both yes… and no. 🧵👇 2/25
🎯 Objective:
To test whether European-style populist patterns apply to Canada.
Focus: Three discursive styles —
1.People-centrism
2.Anti-elitism
3.Exclusion of others
Dataset: Leaders’ tweets from Jan–Dec 2022.

1/
🚀 Space is no longer the final frontier. It's the next business battlefield.
A new study in the Journal of International Business Studies makes a bold claim:
International Business (IB) theory is outdated in orbit.
Here's what you need to know 🧵⬇️ 2/
Space economy = $500B (2022)
→ $1T by 2030
→ ~$3T by 2045
This isn't just NASA and satellites.
It’s SpaceX, Blue Origin, and 2,000+ space startups turning Earth’s orbit into the next Silicon Valley (on steroids).

1/50
🚨 Jugement important rendu le 4 juin 2025 par le TAT :

Syndicat des travailleuses et travailleurs de la MRC de Bellechasse – CSN c. MRC de Bellechasse (2025 QCTAT 2362).

Une cause classique… sabotée par une défense patronale hasardeuse. 2/50
Le Syndicat demandait l’accréditation pour un groupe limité, ciblé, clair :
➡️ « Tous les salariés manuels du site d’enfouissement »
❌ Excluant les technicien(ne)s, chargé(e)s de projets, superviseurs.

How Hamas and its supporters are denying terrorism — and why it matters

1/ On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas committed one of the worst pogroms since the Holocaust: mass killings, rapes, torture of civilians in Israel.

A new peer-reviewed study exposes the strategy behind that denial. 2/ Lev Topor’s study (Israel Affairs, June 2025) shows how Hamas deliberately shared graphic footage of their atrocities to terrorize — and then shifted to denying them.

It’s not a contradiction. It’s a strategy.
Promote → Deny → Blame the victim

🧵THREAD:
If you think owning land or resources is just about being there first, think again.

Sergei Sazonov’s Entrepreneurial Theory of Ownership redefines private property as a form of discovery and judgment, not mere occupation.

Here’s why this matters👇 2/
Modern critics of private property say it’s unfair because it lets people impose duties on others — like “you can’t touch this land.”

They call it the Private Duty Imposition Objection (PDIO). It sounds plausible… until you unpack it.