Lmst

René van Paassen boosted:

Happy Valentine's Day, earth! Cartoon from last year.

#Valentime #ValentinesDay #love #humanity

René van Paassen boosted:

We said pedo and you heard Trump.

Death to pedos:

Pamphlets: BREAKING - anti trump artists displayed violent message threatening US President

René van Paassen boosted:

🤨

Photo of the gates to Auschwitz where the sign reads “the Dow is 50,000”

René van Paassen boosted:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” -Anatole France

René van Paassen boosted:

Forbidden Planet: A robot (who speaks numerous languages) says "Something [a creature] is approaching from the southwest"
Star Wars: A droid (who speaks numerous languages) says "There are several creatures approaching from the southeast"

Forbidden Planet. A robot says "There is something [a creature] approaching from the southwest"

Star Wars. A droid says "There are several creatures approaching from the southeast"

René van Paassen boosted:

#Ireland becomes the first country to implement a secure basic income for all #artists and #musicians. When piloted, initiative that provided €325 a week to eligible artists recouped more than its net cost, study shows.
#Music

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/10/ireland-basic-income-for-the-arts-scheme-becomes-permanent

René van Paassen boosted:

The war waged by the tech authoritarian oligarchy against the media has reached a new level:

#Palantir is suing us. Us, the Republik Magazin.

A small Swiss media company, funded by readers, founded in 2018 and free of advertising. I am not aware of any other media company globally that Palantir is currently targeting so aggressively.

What is this about? Together with my wonderful colleagues at the WAV research collective Jenny Steiner, Lorenz Naegeli, Marguerite Meyer, and Balz Oertli, we published a two-part series on Palantir's activities in Switzerland on December 8 and 9.

Using an extensive corpus of documents – which we obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act – we were able to trace a sales campaign over a period of seven years. Palantir tried to get in with many federal authorities – and was rejected everywhere.

And we also found out that the Swiss Army Staff evaluated the products and came to the conclusion that the army should refrain from using Palantir products.

Among other risks, they feared that data would be passed on to the US authorities.

Palantir is not just any company. ICE uses its products to hunt down migrants in the US. The Israeli army IDF uses the software in its Gaza offensive. The British health authority NHS has made itself dependent on the products for data analysis during the pandemic. And CEO #AlexKarp displays inhuman and aggressive rhetoric towards Europe, while the company itself advertises the “optimization of the kill chain.”

These are all facts, repeatedly verified and published by renowned media outlets. Our research relating to Switzerland and Zurich is based on this.

In addition to analyzing documents, we also spoke to various sources – including Palantir executives here in Zurich. The quotes used were presented to them and approved. Of course, we always adhered to the high standards of journalistic work. We conducted a thorough fact check before publication.

But the company doesn't want us to write the truth.

After the US company owned by right-wing tech billionaire #PeterThiel dedicated an absurd blog post to us, claiming some misinformation (such as that they had not participated in official tenders with the federal administration, a point we never claimed. On the contrary: we spoke from the outset of attempts to establish contact, sales talks, informal meetings, business as usual), after the Global Director of Privacy & Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering and contact person for Swiss media Courtney Bowman launched personal attacks against us in LinkedIn comments between Christmas and New Year (“partisan fear-mongering”), Palantir's Swiss lawyers demanded a counterstatement on December 29.

We rejected this demand in its entirety.

In January, they demanded the same thing again. We rejected it again.

And now we see each other in court.

But why all this?

Our research on the Swiss army report caused a huge international media response. The Guardian and the Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported on the Swiss army's rejection. Numerous financial portals and stock market magazines picked up our news (which could have consequences for the overvalued stock market company Palantir).

And Chaos Computer Club spokesperson Constanze Kurz presented our research to a huge audience at the renowned IT conference Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg at the end of December.

All of this is making Palantir nervous.

We have now submitted a comprehensive defense brief. We can substantiate all of our findings with several documents and publicly available media reports.

We trust in the rule of law and freedom of the press in this country.

In keeping with yesterday's event “Zurich, little Big Tech City” at the Gessneralle, where we first announced this news exclusively to the audience on site:

World politics will soon be negotiated in Zurich: freedom of the press, the facts about ICE, Trump, Israel, Karp, tech authoritarianism.

The truth.

All this at the Zurich Commercial Court.

We will not be intimidated. And we will keep you informed.

the authors from the republik investigations (from left to right): maguerite meyer, lorenz naegeli, adrienne fichter, balz oertli, jennifer steiner

René van Paassen boosted:

A white MAGA man shot & killed his daughter because she criticized Trump. Why is no one asking the questions they'd ask if he was Black, brown, immigrant, or Muslim?🧐

For example:
•Where was he radicalized?
•Why is their culture so violent?
•Is this what they call "honor killing?"
•Why won't they assimilate to our values?
•What radicalism are they teaching in their churches?
•Was he here legally from Europe or was he an illegal?
•Did you know they cite their Bible to command women to be silent?

René van Paassen boosted:

I am floored by the entire idea that somebody sent Bad Bunny an invitation to their wedding and he turned around and said, I can't make it, I'll be busy headlining the super bowl halftime show but why don't you both meet me there and you can get married in the middle of it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/us/super-bowl-wedding-real-halftime-show.html

René van Paassen boosted:

Got this phone up and running, and it is every bit as satisfying as I had hoped to be able to dial using punch cards.

René van Paassen boosted:

Right off the bat: I loved the #BadBunny halftime show.
Yeah, I could do without some of the over-the-top sexy shit — but let’s be real, that’s his bread and butter. I’m not excusing it, just saying: if that’s all you saw, you missed the whole damn point.

From the very first image — people cutting sugar cane — this was political as hell. Sugar cane isn’t some random aesthetic. It’s the industrial agriculture imposed by the United States after they took over Puerto Rico in 1898. That was the moment communal farming was destroyed and Puerto Ricans were forced into brutal export agriculture for U.S. profit. That history matters.

The entire performance was an homage to the island I grew up in. The neighborhoods, the sounds, the colors, the references — there’s so much nostalgia packed in there I honestly can’t even list it all. They went down the fucking list. Every Puerto Rican I know was watching this with tears in their eyes.

And maybe most important of all: he did the whole thing in Spanish. At a time when Spanish has basically been criminalized — when people are afraid to speak it in public, afraid of having the “wrong” accent, especially after years of Trump-era racism — that alone is a massive political act.

I need to rewatch it because there’s so much going on, but I wanted to put this out there now. Because I already know a lot of people aren’t going to get it at first glance.

But make no mistake: this wasn’t just a halftime show.
It was a huge cultural and political moment — and for Puerto Ricans especially, it meant a hell of a lot.

¡Pa'lante!🇵🇷✊

René van Paassen boosted:

“Near the end of Nixon’s second and final day on the stand, the examination strayed into a subject that wasn’t listed on the agenda. This prompted Nixon to admonish his interrogator, ‘I would strongly urge the special prosecutor: Don’t open that can of worms.’ More extraordinary still, the prosecutors agreed.

The transcript was ordered withheld even from top officials at the Justice Department. General Scowcroft determined that one seven-page segment, focused on the very subject that Nixon had warned about, was so incendiary that it needed to be withheld even from the rest of the grand jury.“

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/opinion/trump-nixon-watergate-radford.html?unlocked_article_code=1.KlA.jyVZ.dyIlbsiUt8oq&smid=nytcore-ios-share

René van Paassen boosted:

In the play, based on an actual event in English history, Sir Thomas More delivers a gripping speech to a rioting mob, who are baying for so-called strangers (immigrants) to be banished.

More ‘relies on human empathy to make his point that if the rioters were suddenly banished to a foreign land, they would become ‘wretched strangers’ too, and equally vulnerable to attack.’"

https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/ian-mckellen-reads-a-passionate-speech-by-shakespeare-written-in-defence-of-immigrants-reblog/
https://qz.com/786163/the-banned-400-year-old-shakespearean-speech-being-used-for-refugee-rights-today
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1547
2/n

The speech:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to th’ ports and costs for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
...
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in line,
To slip him like a hound. Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,—
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

René van Paassen boosted:

Carved leaf by @lito_leafart

#Art

A hand holding a brown, dried leaf against a blurred blue sky. The leaf has been intricately cut to create a silhouette of a deer standing on grass, a tree branch, and several birds in flight.

René van Paassen boosted:

This is just wild.

RE: https://layer8.space/@crk5/115952282426820318

Too bad there are no penguins in Greenland.

René van Paassen boosted:

"The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/state-terror-has-arrived.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HFA.soDc.3KXo-wEIcKA9&smid=nytcore-android-share&fbclid=IwdGRleAPipf9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEem1-Tc9exK--Za22Ov6GezxZa5Bm-uOAi-PtokprtGMdBg3bUKMohxl-_RzY_aem_uEIPXAKLVEP3s33MbtNhyw

René van Paassen boosted:

Quite a phenomenal campaign ad from the Greens down in England. Strong. I firmly believe that any political party not running this same message will fail.

René van Paassen boosted:

LinkedIn heeft een video van De Correspondent zonder enige waarschuwing verwijderd van ons account. Ook volgers die de video wilden delen, melden dat hun posts worden verwijderd. In de video noemt hoofdredacteur Rob Wijnberg op basis van feiten de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump het grootste gevaar voor de wereld sinds Adolf Hitler.

Onze hoofdredactie diende een klacht in bij de Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM) over onrechtmatige contentmoderatie. Lees meer:

https://decorrespondent.nl/16689/linkedin-verwijderde-onze-journalistieke-video/904f97df-7358-076e-123b-f728c9f633ec

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