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My message today at the informal #GAC: @Europarl_EN agreed on its position on the next long-term EU budget in April. It is high time for the Council to adopt its position as well so we can start final negotiations to adopt a meaningful budget soon. Europe has more challenges, we #EUbudget #EuropeanParliament #GAC #EU #BE #FR #DE #IT #ES

I ACCUSE PUTIN. I accuse Vladimir Putin of turning 9/11 into one of the greatest strategic opportunities of his political career. Putin’s rise was built on war. After Kosovo in 1999, Moscow feared that the West might one day challenge Russia over Chechnya as it had challenged https://t.co/hUPN6p4AaV #Putin #9/11 #Geopolitics #RU #US #KG #RS

VKS ACADEMY NO INTERNACIONAL DO T2 🛫 É com muito orgulho que anunciamos que a VKS Academy está classificada para o World Star Challengers Invitational, novo torneio do Tier 2 que reunirá 16 equipes das principais regiões do mundo! SEREMOS O BRASIL NA WSCI! 💚💛 https://t.co/pUj5BGOF5D #VKS #WSCI #Esports

URGENTE 🚨 Riot Games acaba de anunciar o World Star Challengers Invitational, um campeonato MUNDIAL para times do tier 2 global. A Vivo Keyd Stars será a representante do Brasil no campeonato por ser a equipe Academy que chegou mais longe no 2º Split Circuito Desafiante. https://t.co/4BVvYiNNvW #RiotGames #WorldStarChallengers #esports

⚡️🇫🇷INFO -Challenges rapporte que Marc-Antoine Brillant, patron de #Viginum, quitte ce service de l’État contre les ingérences numériques étrangères pour lancer avec Havas, contrôlé par la famille #Bolloré, une agence dédiée aux menaces informationnelles et à la contre-influence. #Viginum #Information #ContreInfluence

“Socialism Was Good in Theory” That sentence assumes the theory was never seriously challenged. It was. Long before the Soviet Union existed, before Lenin seized power, and before socialism had been tested on a national scale, major thinkers were already attacking its foundations—from very different directions. Five of them stand out. Tocqueville: Equality Can Become Servitude In 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville drew a sharp distinction between democracy and socialism. Both spoke about equality. But Tocqueville believed they pursued it in fundamentally different ways. Democracy, in his view, sought equality while preserving individual freedom. Socialism risked achieving equality by expanding the power of the state over the individual. His warning was essentially this: equality is not automatically liberty. A society can pursue equality so aggressively that it begins sacrificing the independence that makes political freedom meaningful. Bastiat: Follow Where Redistribution Leads Two years later, Frédéric Bastiat attacked socialism from a different direction. His question was deceptively simple: What happens when the state acquires the authority to take from some people and give to others in the name of justice? Bastiat called this “legal plunder.” His concern was not merely that redistribution might be expensive. It was that once government becomes the instrument through which competing groups obtain benefits from one another, politics can turn into a permanent struggle over who controls the machinery of redistribution. The problem, therefore, wasn’t simply how much the state redistributed. It was the principle that made redistribution legitimate in the first place. (bastiat.org⁠) Nietzsche: Equality Can Become Resentment Nietzsche approached socialism neither as an economist nor as a constitutional theorist. He attacked its psychology. He saw modern egalitarian movements as part of a much older moral impulse: resentment toward exceptional individuals and suspicion of strength, ambition and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the danger was not simply that everyone might become economically equal. It was that a culture could begin treating excellence itself as something morally suspect. The goal would cease to be lifting people upward. It would become bringing the exceptional downward. Böhm-Bawerk: Challenge the Economics Then came Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1896, he turned his attention specifically toward Marx’s economic system. His criticism was not primarily moral or political. It was technical. Böhm-Bawerk argued that Marx’s theory of value did not adequately explain how the labor values developed in Capital could be reconciled with the actual prices Marx subsequently needed to explain. In other words, he attacked socialism where it claimed to possess a scientific economic foundation. The argument became one of the central criticisms of Marxian economics and helped launch a debate that would continue for generations. Mises: The Calculation Problem Then, in 1920, Ludwig von Mises attacked an even more fundamental question: Even if socialism is morally desirable, how would a socialist economy actually know what to produce? A functioning economy has millions of competing uses for scarce resources. Build a bridge or a hospital? Use steel here or there? Produce more machinery or more consumer goods? Under private ownership and markets, prices for capital goods provide information about relative scarcity and opportunity costs. Mises argued that abolishing private ownership of the means of production also removes the genuine market prices necessary for rational economic calculation. The problem wasn’t simply that socialist planners might make bad decisions. It was that the system deprived them of the very economic signals required to systematically compare those decisions. (Mises Institute⁠) And that was the sequence. Tocqueville challenged the political premise. Bastiat challenged the moral and legal mechanism of redistribution. Nietzsche challenged the psychology behind egalitarianism. Böhm-Bawerk challenged Marx’s economic theory. Mises challenged the possibility of rational central economic calculation. Five different thinkers. Five different objections. And all of them came before the Soviet Union had demonstrated what large-scale socialist government would actually look like. So “socialism was good in theory, but bad in practice” is not an argument. It is a historical claim that requires you to explain why these theoretical objections were wrong. The interesting question isn’t whether socialism had critics. It did. The interesting question is whether socialism ever adequately answered them” - ChatGPT

🚨| Dani Olmo ha hablado de cómo era compartir vestuario con Ferran Torres: “Al tío le decías 4-2-3-1 y cogía la calculadora para ver qué daba” “Había siempre que ayudarle a ponerse calcetín, medias y botas porque según él tenía un orden muy complejo” “El cabron no marcaba gol ni jugando al crossbar challenge. Iban todas fuera” “Flipabamos cuando se duchaba después de los partidos con tanga y chanclas. Maricon perdido” #DaniOlmo #FerranTorres #Fútbol

The article examines the differing approaches of Chinese and Nepalese media to reports on Himalayan floods, emphasizing how Chinese state media suppress personal stories of victims and the causes of the disaster through the selection of witnesses and focus on government responses. (translated)

Delighted to open today with @JozefSikela the 2026 EU Arctic Forum. The Arctic is not a distant frontier or a peripheral concern for us. It is a climate alarm bell, a security challenge, and a test for global cooperation. This is why the EU is stepping up: 🤝 stronger cooperation https://t.co/X2k9LY3gxE #EUArcticForum #ClimateAction #GlobalCooperation #EU

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni faces a challenge from the right — a macho ex general whose party manifesto says Italy should be a “Mediterranean patriarchy” and delivers critiques of her policies on Instagram while holding melons to his chest https://t.co/QwLJJIUZuM #GiorgiaMeloni #ItalianPolitics #Patriarchy #IT

I joined a meeting of the #G7 finance ministers and central bank governors via videoconference. We had a very productive discussion about the global economy, artificial intelligence, and Ukraine. The current global challenges require coordinated policy actions. https://t.co/CQxdNregwz #G7 #GlobalEconomy #AI #CA #DE #FR #IT #JP #UK #US #UA

John Klaver begon op 11-jarige leeftijd met gitaarspelen, geïnspireerd door Gary Moore, Jimi Hendrix en Robben Ford. Na zijn VWO-studie studeerde hij muziektheorie en gitaar aan de University of the Pacific in de USA en later aan het conservatorium van Amsterdam werd hij naast muzikant ook muziekdocent. In 2007 formeerde hij zijn trio, dat later zijn band werd. Zijn eerste album, ‘Jetpepper’, kwam uit in 2008, gevolgd door ‘Coming Back For More’ in 2011 en dat jaar won hij ook net als in 2013 won hij de Dutch Blues Challenge iets wat hij in 2024 herhaalde in de categorie solo/duo. Met het derde album, ‘Wheels In Motion’, uit 2012 won hij een Dutch blues Award Beste Bluesalbum. Op dit album spelen onder andere blues, mondharmonica, grootheid Big Pete, toetsenist Bob Fridzema en drummer Even Jenkins (Matt Schofield) mee. https://hvdommelen.nl/blues/KlaverJ.html

From September 4 to 6, 2026, Krakow will host the European Rover Challenge, a prestigious competition of Mars rovers, in which 25 teams from leading technological universities will participate, and an international science popularization conference with the participation of outstanding experts will also take place simultaneously. (translated)

Interview by @ObservateursCH, a French-language Swiss conservative-sovereigntist outlet, covering the political situation in Hungary, the challenges facing the national camp and the future of Europe’s patriotic movement. After sixteen years, many voters wanted change. As #Hungary #PatrioticMovement #PoliticalChange #FR #HU

The Downward Spiral of Gender Polarization The growing divide between men and women resembles less a debate than a divorce involving millions. Both sides escalate, talk past each other, and blame the other gender amid a mental-health crisis. Depression among Americans under thirty has doubled in eight years, while anxiety continues to rise. Each gender has failure modes and one successful path. Carl Jung called it individuation; a simpler term is integration. The integrated are not leading the conversation. The disordered are. Every man carries an inner feminine—the part that feels, intuits, and creates meaning. Jung called it the anima. Cut off from it, he becomes cold and contemptuous; overwhelmed by it, passive and moody. Every woman carries an inner masculine—the part that decides, asserts, and holds the line. Jung called it the animus. Cut off from it, she defers to stronger people; possessed by it, argumentative and rigid. I believe the four failure modes pair off. The cold, contemptuous man finds a timid woman who cannot challenge him; the red-pill industry calls this manhood. The passive man finds a domineering woman who can run his life; the feminist industry calls this liberation. A 2025 Nature Human Behaviour study of 14.8 million people in Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden found that disordered individuals consistently marry one another across cultures and generations dating back to the 1930s. My theory is that integrated people increasingly date within a pool dominated by the disordered. They try, fail, and get hurt, then drift toward the same patterns. The pool corrupts those who might have healed it, creating a feedback loop. We are in a downward spiral: integrated people encounter disordered partners and become disordered themselves, while the already disordered grow worse. Reversal requires enough people to reject cynicism. When every encounter feels like proof that the other gender is broken, our own drift toward disorder begins to feel justified.

The Age of Experts Is Over If the past two decades—COVID-19, the 2008 financial crisis, and the net-zero charade—have taught us anything, it is this: the age of unquestioned experts is over. Authority issued by corrupt, bloated institutions no longer commands automatic respect. We are entering an era in which trust must be earned, not assumed. Credentials matter less than results. Expertise can become conformity wrapped in a credential; status is no substitute for trustworthiness. The future belongs to those with proven track records, not merely letters after their names. Friedrich Nietzsche warned of this more than a century ago. He distrusted experts who served the spirit of their age—those who mistook consensus for courage and conformity for principle. To Nietzsche, many authorities were functionaries of the status quo: too timid to challenge the sacred assumptions of their time. University professors, state philosophers, and moral enforcers wore obedience as a badge of honor. They did not think; they repeated. They did not challenge; they conformed. They made the ordinary seem profound through jargon, complexity, and ambiguity. Nietzsche saw these not as signs of insight, but as camouflage—cowardice in disguise. He also distinguished knowledge from wisdom. Knowledge can be taught, measured, and tested. Wisdom must be earned through suffering, struggle, and brutal self-examination. Nietzsche admired those who forged their own paths rather than simply climbing institutional ladders. Even in science, he saw a danger. He respected its methods but feared their sanctification. Science, he argued, still required justification; materialists confused method with meaning and data with truth. Experts who presented science as the only path to knowledge were, in Nietzsche’s eyes, dogmatists in lab coats. So the question is no longer, “What are your qualifications?” It is: What have you done? What have you risked? What have you proved? We must recover the courage to think for ourselves—and place our confidence only in those who have earned it through action, not appointment.