Peter Verpoorten 🌻 🌍 🇧🇪

Now now, not to quick to reject this. Let the Irani's pick Trump as their leader and invite him over asap for an inauguration.

Dear all,

With a hint of spring in the air we very warmly invite you to our next POLEMO seminar, where we will be welcoming Georgetown's Christian Golden.

The most sensible explanation is that Starmer once drunkenly send dick pics to Rupert Murdoch and know has to do his bidding out of fear to be exposed because I can not believe that anyone can really be this inept.

Senior Labour politicians: 'what are these bloody 'values' that they keep talking about?!'

Fuck Trump. Fuck the puppeteers behind him. Fuck the GOP, especially congressional Republicans and quisling Democrats, who enabled him. Fuck the people who voted for this, and fuck the media for never reporting on him realistically.

Fuck them all, for they have truly fucked us and the world.

The High Cost of Trump’s Amateur Diplomats Jan-Werner Mueller surveys the damage from the Trump administration’s gutting of US diplomatic capacity and expertise.

Another victory for these savvy negotiators.

Well than we should expect the socialists to do better, instead of telling us that their sucking up to capitalists is the best we deserve and otherwise we can fuck off.

Arrogantly pretending that the conflict is not there is indeed complicity with those who started the attack on liberal democracy and what it is meant to protect. It's as simple as that.

corporate elites, the people who own newspapers, run the labour party so struggle to get what electorates are grasping intuitively:

it's death camps, deportations,& deranged pseudo-science or a friendly, inclusive, multi-racial society with lots of public transit

Like Helmut Kohl used to say: it's easier to get a dog past a hotdogstand than a socialist past a bag of money.

Because the people in charge are exceptionally bad at politics. Trying to court people who hate them no matter what by torching everything they should stand for and thinking themselves geniuses.

They are already three decades in a civil war. It's just that we are only now waking up to that.

Well, I've narrowed it down to two options. Either I am on Vienna's U1 metroline or I've accidentally wandered into 2001: A space Odyssey. 🤔

At least they are clear that they want to destroy democracy and their opponents. If only their opponents would wake up to that, then we could start dealing with that.

I'm seriously considering just throwing out all my digital devices and getting me an old fashioned mechanical typewriter and do my thing while the rest of the world needs a few more years to catch up. Back to typewriters, to mailmen, to newspapers, and days uninterrupted by toxic electronic shit.

What Elon Has Done Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has faded from public consciousness in America, despite leaving death and destruction in its wake.

“the largest act of mass murder of this decade, and of this century so far, was not perpetrated by militaries or militias, but by the world's richest man in Washington D.C.'s Eisenhower Executive Office Building.” @mckay4senate.bsky.social www.liberalcurrents.com/what-elon-ha...

Well, have you checked in Moscow?

Remembering

Hans Scholl 22 Sep 1918 – 22 Feb 1943
Sophie Scholl 9 May 1921 – 22 Feb 1943
Christoph Probst 6 Nov 1919 – 22 Feb 1943
Stadelheim Prison, Munich, 5PM

Rather than telling ourselves that we have to “catch up” to some imagined goal of normalized AI use in higher education, Columbia should take advantage of its prominence as a university to propose something better, like classrooms free of screens, oral examinations, and an end to slippery, relativistic standards on AI use from university administrators. Our response to AI is an opportunity to distinguish Columbia as a reservation where minds are developed without the crutch of a chatbot. As incoming University President Mnookin begins to navigate Columbia’s many financial and political threats, she should reassert the true value of a liberal arts education: learning for learning’s sake

The administrators might have been conned by the AI hucksters, but the students, my friends, are all right.

(The author is a history and economics major, I'll note.)

www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

Weekend Update #173: Ukraine Liberates Hundreds Of Square Kilometres, What Might It Mean? People Stop Taking The Negotiations Seriously. Good.; Flamingos In Action

Hi All, Just sent out my free weekend update (#173). It begins with reports of Ukraine liberating a large amount of territory. This could reveal alot of things, in particular that the Russian system continues to lie upwards about the state of the war. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...

Judge Goodwin: "An anonymous government is no government at all. It cannot be held accountable. A masked agent freely uses force without justifying his actions, and the public cannot name him to challenge his conduct. A regime of secret policing has no place in our society."

Ik ben toch voor hem het land uit te zetten. Duidelijk en publiek een lijn trekken is altijd beter dan de indruk wekken dat je niet durft tegen fascisten in te gaan.

An infographic from Our World in Data titled "Global land use for food production" uses a series of stacked horizontal bar charts to visualize the distribution of Earth's surface and the disproportionate land requirements of livestock. The first bar shows Earth's surface is 71% ocean and 29% land (141 million km²); the land surface is then broken down into 76% habitable land, 10% glaciers, and 14% barren land. Of the habitable land, 45% (48 million km²) is used for agriculture, while 38% is forests and 13% is shrubland. The agricultural land bar reveals a major disparity: 80% (38 million km²) is dedicated to livestock (meat, dairy, and textiles) including grazing land and cropland for feed, while only 16% is used for crops for direct human consumption and 4% for non-food crops. Finally, two smaller bars at the bottom contrast this land use with nutritional output, showing that while livestock uses 80% of agricultural land, it only provides 17% of global calories and 38% of global protein, whereas plant-based foods provide 83% of calories and 62% of protein.

80% of agricultural land is used for livestock (and textiles), yet this huge land use provides only 17% of our calories and 38% of our protein.

16% of the land used for crops provides 83% of our calories and 62% of our protein. It's past time we rethink what we eat.

And consequently treat them as they should be treated: co-conspirators.

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

Very excited that my paper "National attachment, past in-group perpetratorhood, and out-group attitudes", co-authored with the great Elias Dinas & Ethan vanderWilden, has been accepted for publication at the British Journal of Political Science. Abstract copied below:

As a former public defender who represented thousands of people, I can’t stop thinking about the contrast the Epstein files raise.

I watched 1000s face swift, devastating punishment for far less serious conduct — poor, marginalized, & presumed dangerous from the start.

Seen what happened to Epstein himself and to Virginia Giufre - both while Trump was in office - I'd think this is quite necessary.

Indeed a very important conversation - about how to criticize the reprehensible actions of specific actors without falling in harmful generalisations.