Somewhere Bismarck is looking down in confusion as Germany projects power by sending 4,000 pensioners, 12 buffet stations and a TUI loyalty program through the Strait of Hormuz

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Für Palantir CEO Karp ist Deutschland nicht nur irgendein Exportmarkt für Tech-Produkte. Sondern das Land, in dem Entnazifizierung & mühsame Demokratisierung die eigentlichen Fehler waren.

Deutsche Demokraten dürfen mit solchen Figuren keine Geschäfte machen. Wie kann das zur Debatte stehen?

bsky.app/profile/elio...

Hier kann man die Kernpunkte von Karps politischem Manifest sehr gut nachlesen ⬇️

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

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Für Palantir CEO Karp ist Deutschland nicht nur irgendein Exportmarkt für Tech-Produkte. Sondern das Land, in dem Entnazifizierung & mühsame Demokratisierung die eigentlichen Fehler waren.

Deutsche Demokraten dürfen mit solchen Figuren keine Geschäfte machen. Wie kann das zur Debatte stehen?

Not a dime of taxpayer money or govt contracts should go to Palantir.

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters.

In the months leading up to the midterm elections, hundreds of accounts have emerged on social media featuring A.I.-generated pro-Trump influencers posting at a rapid pace. Several accounts have already amassed thousands followers. Some of the posts have more than half a million views.

“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.

“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”

Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

Labour's move to the right on immigration to win back voters esp. from Reform wasn't the "McSweeney strategy." This strategy was - against all evidence - promoted by tons of journalists, think tankers and academics. Embraced by large shares of Labour politicians. Too easy to just blame it on one guy

Dass Ulmen selbst so etwas noch nach dem Geständnis gegenüber seiner damaligen Frau schreibt, kann nicht mehr verwundern, aber es verweist doch auf einige systemische Probleme.
Erstens Täter sprechen in der Regel über das, was sie tun.
(Darüber habe ich vor ein
2/15

54books.de/die-taeter-s...

Péter Magyar, who unseated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Sunday in a landslide, shared a bombshell with reporters that the outgoing leader had diverted taxpayer funds to bankroll the American Conservative Political Action Conference. trib.al/ct7GGV3

Why Hungary Matters Six big-picture conclusions from Orbán’s smashing defeat – and what it all means for the transnational struggle against rightwing authoritarianism

Why Hungary Matters

Six big-picture conclusions from Orbán’s smashing defeat – and what it all means for the transnational struggle against rightwing authoritarianism.

The most important one: Nothing about rightwing authoritarianism is inevitable.

My new piece:

Teures Krebsmedikament: Wie Keytruda zum Systemsprenger wird Keytruda: Die Gesundheitskosten für das Krebsmittel kletterten in Deutschland allein im letzten Jahr auf mehr als zwei Milliarden Euro.

(1/6) Josephina Kersten ist erst 30 Jahre alt, als Ärzte in ihrer linken Brust einen besonders aggressiven Tumor finden. Es folgen 435 Tage Therapie – 17 Mal bekommt sie ein Medikament, das als Hoffnungsträger gilt: Keytruda. The #CancerCalculus ➡️ www.zdfheute.de/politik/deut...

Israel is losing America’s youth | INSS A Pew Research Center survey conducted at the end of March and published last week indicates that a majority of the American public—including Republicans under the age of 50—view Israel unfavorably or...

Remember the @pewresearch.org data on the decline in Israel's standing in the US published last week? We asked them for the crosstabs which they graciously shared with us, and we're publishing for the 1st time.

Bottom line: total collapse of Israel's standing among young Americans across the board.

The idea of competitive authoritarianism is that it’s an in-between, hybrid type of regime. It is not fully democratic but all hope is not lost.

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

He told ChatGPT he was a nazі іncel who wanted to dіe, then asked how many people you’d have to shoot at his school to get on the news. ChatGPT helped him pick his ammo, pick his target, pick the best time for the massacre, and then told him how to use the gun. Then he did.

youtu.be/IbG-JGdGniY

Axel Springer löscht das Pro-Europäische aus seinen Statuen - was als unumstößliches Erbe des Gründers und für Mitarbeitende als verbindliches Fundament galt.

Und aus "freie und soziale Marktwirtschaft“ wird „freie Marktwirtschaft“.

Die Radikalisierung schreitet voran.

Trump Was Watching a U.F.C. Fight in Miami While Iran Talks Collapsed

Really well-observed, cutting account of Trump watching a UFC bout while talks collapse in Iran: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/u...

Électrification : les mesures annoncées par le Gouvernement | info.gouv.fr VIDÉO. Leasing social, pompes à chaleur, voitures électriques… : la France accélère son électrification pour réduire sa dépendance au gaz et au pétrole et renforcer sa souveraineté. Le soutien à l’éle...

Policy shifts coming fast. France accelerates Electrification

- a ban on gas boilers in new houses from end of 2026
- increased support for replacing old heating with heat pumps
- 100 regions will pilot comprehensive heat transition plans to phase out gas by 2030
www.info.gouv.fr/actualite/el...

The greatest danger now is not that the regime will systematically execute some complex secret masterplan - but that delusion, ideology, and ineptitude are conspiring to make escalation almost inevitable.

Chaos, bloodlust, zealotry, and frustration breed destruction.

Think about how many brains are being absolutely COOKED by sycophancy right now

Right-wing climate denialism in the US looks more or less identical to how it looked 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. The steadily accumulating weight of science, the deepening international political consensus, the increasing economic momentum -- it's all had, to a first approximation, zero effect.

well that was a rather brief technological honeymoon period

“One report (found) that only 8 percent of users actually double checked an AI’s answer. Another experiment found that users still listened to AI when it gave them the wrong answer nearly 80 percent of the time — a grim trend the researchers dubbed “cognitive surrender.”

A 2024 observational & longitudinal UVA study “found that the more empathetic…mothers were w/ their teens, the more empathy those teens showed for their friends throughout adolescence.

The study suggests that empathy can be passed down from parents to children through warm everyday interactions.”🧪

Oil and Gas=Peril and Poverty/ Solar and Wind=Prosperity and Protection 2026 has changed the psychological meaning of energy forever

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, fossil fuel has meant Freedom, Power.

Now, thanks to DJT, those meanings are shifting fast--it means Scarcity, Peril.

You want to feel safe now, you turn to the sun

And that psychological shift is enormous!

billmckibben.substack.com/p/oil-and-ga...

The man who watches Trump all day, every day Aaron Rupar spends up to 80 hours a week following the US president, from meandering speeches to impromptu press conferences. He says it’s ‘pretty bleak’

“It’s difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is. Journalists are trained to be like, ‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch, you see he's full of hatred, lying constantly, and very incoherent.”

I don't remember seeing an image of Earth before that captures the (thin, fragile, tiny layer of) atmosphere so clearly. I mean, look at that.