US: Tesla Roadster. EU: tethered bottle caps. I made that joke too. But let me be serious for a moment. Made in Europe. Europe built it. Others told the story. The Web was born at CERN. Linux in Helsinki. Python in Amsterdam. ARM, the chip in your phone and your Mac, in Cambridge. DeepMind in London. The first commercial microprocessor was designed by an Italian, Federico Faggin. Every leading-edge chip on Earth is printed with ASML machines from the Netherlands. Mistral trains frontier open models in Paris. Hugging Face: French founders, although it is headquartered in New York. llama.cpp, the engine of local AI, started in Bulgaria. The first mRNA vaccine came from Mainz. Europe doesn’t lack innovation. It lacks a megaphone. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Innovation without narrative becomes someone else’s success. This isn’t Europe vs. anyone. I love innovation wherever it happens. I just want Europeans to feel proud and optimistic about the future again. Did I miss something relevant here?

US labs taking your usage data: "Whatever, what are they gonna do with it? I'm not losing anything." ​Seeing someone run Chinese LLMs locally: "There's a CCP backdoor hidden in that! How can you trust it? You're doomed."

What people are missing about the US government's AI regulation announcement: ID verification will now be forced on all accounts to prove citizenship. Frontier labs will take your data, and your sovereignty is officially dead. A permanent underclass division and a total control society are beginning right now. People ignored me when I started saying this last year, but it is happening right in front of our eyes. Get into Open-Source and Sovereign AI. Advancing together through collective intelligence is the only way to fight back.

Het kan gewoon! nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/11/04/int…

Ja, dat kan. Maar er is dan geen toezicht meer op de haalbaarheid en legaliteit van wetten. Zoals in je geliefde Rusland, zeg maar.

Morgen zal @wierdduk subiet de wijken intrekken om portretten te maken van de D66-kiezer. Wat drijft hen? Wat willen ze? Waarom zijn ze zo lang genegeerd?

#palingpopulisme Volgens het CPB #CPB zorgen de plannen van BBB, JA21 en SGP niet voor extra woningen. En dan plaatst ze dit. Dit mens is knettergek en zo schadelijk voor de politiek! Maar ze weet dat ze haar achterban van alles wijs kan maken.

Kampioen koopkracht voor de middenklasse is GroenLinks-PvdA, zo meldt het CPB. En nee, dat is dus echt niet de VVD. Absurd - want compleet onjuist - is dan ook het verwijt van Dilan Yeşilgöz bij het Radio1-debat, dat bij ons ‘de middenklasse de rekening zou gaan betalen.’

De @VVD valt compleet door de mand op hun kernbelofte dat ‘werken moet lonen’. Dit zegt het CPB daarover: bij GroenLinks-PvdA gaan de belastingen op inkomen/arbeid onder aan de streep met maar liefst €5,1 miljard omlaag! Bij de VVD zelfs met €3,3 miljard omhoog 🤬

Israelis keep dancing on the Titanic. The tsunami is underway. Every day more sanctions are imposed on Israel. Spain has canceled a 3 arms deal — this time with Rafael — following previous cancellations with Elbit and Rafael. In total, deals worth €1.2 billion have been canceled. And now, Microsoft has blocked MI’s Unit 8200’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of phone calls daily from Palestinian civilians in Gaza&West Bank — as revealed by The Guardian. According to the report, Unit 8200 violated Microsoft’s terms of service by storing the massive surveillance database on the Azure cloud platform.

Kijkend naar het debat over de fascistische rellen in Den Haag wil ik toch iets kwijt als iemand die dagelijks een fair share aan doodsbedreigingen en haat krijgt. Het was geen bezorgde burger die mijn adres online gooide. Het was geen bezorgde burger die die tweet ging reposten (sterker nog, diegene was PA van een PVV-minister) Het was geen bezorgde burger die zei dat ik moet stoppen met leven van uitkering (ik werkte toen in de Tweede Kamer) en terug moest naar de woestijn (in de Kaukasus hebben we 99% groen) Het was geen bezorgde burger die zei dat ie mij in elkaar zou rammen als ie mij tegenkwam in Amsterdam. Het was geen bezorgde burger die schreef dat ik dezelfde behandeling verdien als Peter de Vries. Het was geen bezorgde burger die schreef dat ie het niet vertrouwde dat ik in 20 jaar tijd het had geschopt tot de Tweede Kamer. Het was geen bezorgde burger die schreef dat ik eigenlijk een infiltrant van een buitenlandse inlichtingendienst was in het hart van onze democratie. Het was geen bezorgde burger die mijn foto's deelde in prive discordgroep van een politieke partij met "Ik heb HIV" erop. Het was geen bezorgde burger die riep dat ik mezelf onterecht een Nederlander noemde, want ik hoor hier niet. Het was geen bezorgde burger die schreef dat hij hoopte dat mijn nieuw gekochte woning in no time in vlammen zou opgaan. Een bezorgde burger. Dat ben ik eigenlijk. Bezorgd over de aftakeling van onze democratische rechtsstaat door de populisten, door latente en openlijke xenofoben die al een tijdje ons land regeren. Bezorgd dat het kabinet Wilders I, de minister van Justitie nota bene, niet de ballen heeft om de neo-nazi rellen van afgelopen weekend te bestempelen wat ze zijn. Bezorgd over de leugens en desinformatie die door politici in de Tweede Kamer, met Kabinetsleden voorop, worden gebezigd om bevolkingsgroepen tegen elkaar op te zetten. Bezorgd over hoe neo-nazi's onze veiligheid en democratische beginselen aan hun bruine laarzen lappen en gemotiveerd worden, aangespoord worden, gesteund worden door bepaalde partijleiders uit de Tweede Kamer. Bezorgd, dat nota bene Nederland geen lering heeft getrokken uit de geschiedenis en opnieuw diezelfde weg aan het inslaan is. En bezorgd, dat velen het niet beseffen dat democratie niet vanzelfsprekend is. Dat die fragiel is en altijd beschermd dient te worden tegenen diegenen die er niks mee hebben en bereid zijn om die orde met geweld omver te werpen. Dit land verdient beter dan politici die haat aanwakkeren en als er naar gehandeld wordt door hun achterban, meteen de moeder Theresa gaan uithangen, zichzelf losrukkend van de verantwoordelijkheid die op hun schouders rust. Per slot van rekening wil ik als vluchteling die geboren en getogen is in een dictatuur, dit zeggen tegen Nederland: democratie sterft niet van de ene op de andere dag, maar stukje bij beetje. Het begint altijd met het geluid van ingegooide ruiten.

IDF ground forces began the most sensless war in the hisory of Israel. Two conscript divisions with Merkava tanks, APCs and artilley supported in the skies by the air force are now engaged in the battle to conquer Gaza City. In their tracks, they are seizeing what remains of the asphalt roads in Gaza. Artillery and Air Force planes bomb and destroy more houses — about 70% of the buildings in Gaza have already been destroyed by the IDF in this a senseless war. Defense Minister Israel Katz will continue, with childish delight, to tweet that the gates of hell have opened and will post pictures of collapsing high-rises. This is the most political war in Israel’s history. Israel fought three no-choice wars against regular armies — the War of Independence in 1948, the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. All the others were wars of choice and operations of choice. But even in those, political motives were mixed with security considerations and their purpose was strategic — to secure a political arrangement at the end of hostilities. Any reasonable person understands that the war in Gaza — whose ugly conduct will soon reach two years — has only two non-substantive goals: the personal survival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the political survival of the government and the coalition. Although officially PM Netanyahu and his ministers still pay lip service to their constant mantra, that they adhere to the original objectives for which Israel, rightly, went to war after October 7 — the eradication of Hamas and the return of the hostages. However, Hamas as a military force was neutralized more than a year ago, perhaps longer. About 70% of its fighting force has been killed or is held in prisons in Israel. Almost 100% of the rockets were destroyed, as were most of the workshops and arms depots. This is war for the sake of war, which also has a hidden aim: to make the lives of the two million two hundred thousand Gazans miserable and to render their lives inhuman. Israel, with the help of the IDF and the Shin Bet, is turning them into human dust, in the hope of many in Israel that they will leave Gaza and emigrate to other countries. The goal is transfer. The extreme ministers in the government and Knesset have been saying this out loud since October 7. Netanyahu, who always speaks with double talk to different publics at home and abroad, did distance himself from ministers who talk about destroying Gaza, but his historical and associative world is not far from them. He demands from Hamas “unconditional surrender,” a stance borrowed from the Allied powers that set that as a condition for ending the WW2 against Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. Netanyahu knows that even if Hamas surrenders — the organization has already made clear that with its culture of shahids it will fight to the bitter end and will not surrender — the extremists in his government will begin to establish settlements, dispossess Palestinians and expropriate land. This was exactly the process after the Six-Day War that has continued to this day in the West Bank. It is the messianic vision of ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — conquest, dispossession, takeover, creeping annexation and transfer. In truth, the idea of transfer is not foreign to Zionism and the State of Israel. As early as 1940 Yosef Weitz, one of the leaders of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in his diary: “... there is no place in the country for the two peoples together.... The only solution is Eretz Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises! Move everyone. Leave not a single village, not a single tribe. Only in this way, transfer of the Arabs of Israel, will redemption come.” In the heat of the battles of the War of Independence some 700,000 Arabs of Palestine were expelled or left voluntarily. The best-known expulsions were those of the Arabs of Lod and Ramle. A new book reveals for the first time Israel’s efforts at the end of the war to encourage the emigration of the Arabs who remained in the country. “From the Foreign Office to the Mossad: The Early Years of the Israeli Mossad 1949–1963,” by Ori Rost and Shay Raz, is based on official Mossad documents and was published at its initiative. The person appointed to deal with the subject was Yitzhak Navon (later president of the state), who was sent on behalf of the intelligence body of the Foreign Ministry, a predecessoe of the Mossad. “From the Israeli mission in Uruguay where he was posted,” the book states, “he tried to promote the idea that the Palestinian refugees from Israel should settle in those countries (South America — Y.M.) ... after a short time he realized that the idea had no prospects.” Nevertheless, the Mossad did not give up, and after the Six-Day War it was again involved in an attempt to encourage and fund the emigration of Palestinians to South America. That program also failed at the outset. And now, once again, Mossad chief Dedi Barnea and his operatives are being sent to various countries — including Ethiopia, Indonesia, Somalia and Uganda — to try to persuade their leaders to accept Gazans, under a “voluntary migration” plan approved by the cabinet. It is an idea that even U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have toyed with. Of course, this will not happen. Egypt, which fears Gazans will break through its borders, and other Arab states have already made clear that they would view such attempts harshly. So all that remains for the Israeli government, which has no strategic plan, and is not seeking an alternative to the Hamas control of Gaza, is to continue the war. This is a war that will endanger the 48 hostages, will continue to exact a heavy toll of Gazan lives (already now nearly a hundred are killed each day), and will bring about the deaths of IDF soldiers. The Chief of Staff General Eyal Zamifr wo opposed the ground incursion but follow the cabint decision that entering the city if a "death trap". Hr also estimated that dozen IDF troops will die and hundreds will suffer. This week the Defense Ministry published that it expects some 50,000 people to be treated for PTSD by 2028. This is a bleak vision for Israelis and Palestinians. And if its not depressing enough. Netanyahu warned that Israeis must adjust to the notion that "our country is like Sparta". By the way, at the end Sparta was defeted.

Zo is het. Aan het werk! Zo ken ik iemand die vijf dagen per week op haar reet naar de televisie kijkt om daar later een zurig plasje over te doen.

Voor wie denkt dat de hypotheekrenteaftrek naar "middengroepen" gaat. 48% van het belastingvoordeel landt bij het 9e & 10e hoogste inkomensdeciel. De onderste 60% van de bevolking krijgt in totaal 24%. De hypotheekrenteaftrek is daarmee een enorme overdracht van arm naar rijk.

Het is Yesilgöz zeker ontgaan dat ze op ongeveer soortgelijke manier nog niet eens zo heel lang geleden zelf een kabinet opblies? nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/06/03/yes…

1998: Kamerlid VVD 2004: stapt uit VVD 2005: PVV 2008: Fitna 2010: gedoogpartner Rutte I 2012: stapt uit Rutte I 2014: ‘minder Marokkanen’ 2016: veroordeeld 2021: ‘rechtstaat failliet’ 2023: PVV grootste partij 2024: kabinet PVV, VVD, NSC, BBB 2025: stapt uit kabinet #wilders

Motie aangenomen, met de stemmen van de drie coalitiepartijen, FvD, Ja21 en 50plus tegen (NSC zit niet in de ⁦@EersteKamer⁩)

In Zuid-Korea zou dit inmenging in de politiek worden genoemd en waren er allang rechtszaken over geweest. En terecht denk ik. trouw.nl/binnenland/ind-hiel…

There has to be more pressure on NYT Publisher AG Sulzberger and Editor Joe Kahn to come clean on their paper’s conspicuous and inexplicable coddling of Trump. It’s been seven years since AG took over, and the quality and integrity of NYT journalism has never been worse.