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Christian wrote:

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Ah ha ha. Completely wrong though:

Note how little that “import” bar is.

Wind power was once again the most important source of electricity in 2023, contributing 139.8 terawatt hours (TWh) or 32% to public net electricity generation. This was 14.1% higher than the previous year’s production.

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/2024/public-electricity-generation-2023-renewable-energies-cover-the-majority-of-german-electricity-consumption-for-the-first-time.html

So, you know, wherever you got that cartoon, you can tell them to stick their bullshit fake facts up their arse.

Interesting how that is completely at odds with wikipedia which says 62 % of Germany’s energy usage is imported. The cartoon is wrong in that it is not French nuclear which powers Germany for the most part, but I think it is true in that we in the EU import a lot of our energy. (Germany isn’t alone in that) I am not sure what explains the discrepancy.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Energy_imports

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njerry, Todd, Uncle Retrospective

[Arjan Dirkse]

I like this hummus with sundried tomatoes on crispbread as a snack, but after a few days I get tired of it, I buy something else and about half of the hummus just rots away in the fridge until I throw it out.

 

 

 

• This reply was modified 1 day, 14 hours ago by Arjan Dirkse.

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Todd

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Todd, Martin Smith

There are several species of birds that get drunk of fermented fruits.

It’s funny that Western politicians are now shaking hands with the same people in Syria who they regarded as terrorists and on whose head they had placed a bounty. Our politics is absurdism.

Is Kickl worse than Haider? That’s really bad.

 

In my own country there had been some commotion lately about Wilders, about his original intentions to make Islam de facto illegal in the Netherlands, by out lawing the Koran. Coalition partner Omtzigt mentioned this had been an issue “on the table” when they started negotiations, despite many people thinking Wilders had long ago left this behind. Wilders is just major bad news, and the sooner this coalition falls, the better. He’s a blemish on this country.

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Christian

Christian wrote:

This has made national news over here recently: There is, it turns out, a tradition on the small island of Borkum that consists of a big celebration in which three men (who are decided by having a big fight or something) roam the streets at night in cow costumes and who hunt and then spank women (pretty violently) cow horns while being cheered on by the crowds.

Here’s the TV report with auto-translated subtitles. Around the 10-minute-mark you can see the video of the whole thing, and it’s exceedingly weird, like something from a folk horror movie.

I missed this post, we have a somewhat similar tradition on the island of Ameland, called Sunneklaas. Like other celebrations on the name day of St Nicholas, Krampus etc there are lots of pagan elements. They regularly kick journalists off the island around that time of the year.

 

https://nltimes.nl/2024/11/30/police-ramp-presence-sunneklaas-festival-last-years-violence

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Todd

Christian wrote:

…and Austria goes to the fascists. Ah well.

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen gave the green light to far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) leader Herbert Kickl to attempt and form the new ruling coalition after the two met in Vienna on Monday.

“Kickl has the confidence to find viable solutions within the framework of government negotiations and he wants to fulfil this responsibility,” Van der Bellen said.

If successful, it would mark Austria’s first far-right-led government since World War II.

Kickl’s party secured victory in Austria’s parliamentary elections in September, garnering 28.8% of the vote and surpassing outgoing Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative Austrian People’s Party, which came in second.

Am I misremembering? I thought the FPÖ had been in government before.

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Todd

I noticed many substacks now have paywalls…who is going to pay money for  your little bla bla article?

 

It makes me wonder if there is a market for magazines on things like art, philosophy etc. The magazines I see in the supermarket are mostly gossip stuff and lifestyle magazines clearly targeting a female audience.

Watched a documentary by a reputable Dutch investigative journalism tv show (so not some transphobe outfit) that concluded the scientific evidence for a lot of the medical interventions for transgender people, based on the so-called “Dutch protocol”, is very low. They also did interviews with some patients who said they were very badly treated by their doctors. Pretty disturbing stuff.

 

 

Gouden Carolus whisky infused is maybe my favorite beer and now I heard they have a new owner. I hope the quality stays the same

 

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njerry, Dave

They arrested the guy.

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Christian, Todd

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Todd

This country is going to collapse in a couple of years.

We have a likely shooter in Rotterdam who has executed three people at point blank range over the last couple of days. People are advised not to go out alone. Of course, many people ARE ALONE. Just some of the idiotic messaging out there is enough to despair.

 

My conspiracy braincell says it could be strategy of tension kind of thing. Create bloodshed and fear to get people to demand rigorous controls. Our leaders are thoroughly evil.

 

It’s hilarious. (I love it especially for the accents and the crazy things they say so I’m nt sure how much an Anglophone gets out of it!)Unfortunately a lot of these places disappeared.

 

It’s in 5 parts, there are no English subtitles though. I think this must have aired in the 90s.

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Todd

I’ve struck gold on youtube, an old documentary from local tv about a working class cafe in Rotterdam, where a bunch of characters do crazy shit. It’s absolutely great

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Christian

Honestly I’m not that far apart from you guys on that topic. I think climate change is almost certainly real, and it is bad, but I believe it might not be as disastrous as some are saying. I think we’ll probably deal with it somehow.

 

Or maybe not. I can’t see the future but I don’t worry so much about this. It’s just one of many threats we are facing, and some I worry about more than climate change.

Buddhist sculptures from the Greek Buddhist kingdoms in Bactria (current day Afganistan)

 

 

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

A cybertruck just blew up right in front of the Trump tower in Vegas…

https://edition.cnn.com/us/live-news/new-orleans-mass-casualty-bourbon-street-01-01-24-hnk/index.html

 

Man in car killed a lot of people, again. FBI apparently treating it as a possible case of terrorism.

 

edit: He had an ISIS flag.

Todd wrote:

Human capitalistic greed is fucking this planet over.

Well I wasn’t expecting you guys to agree…

 

Still I am not that pessimistic. The world has gotten about 1.5 degree warmer, and it’s pretty much business as usual. I mean there are extremes in temperature, but those scientists like Paul Ehrlich said billions would be starving, coastal cities would be wiped off the map etc. We should probably trry to keep temperatures in check somewhat, I especially think we should use a lot more nuclear energy to stop nonsense like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute, but I don’t see our current course as an end-of-the-world scenario.

 

I think youths like Greta are being weaponized, and I think it undermines our society, similar to extremist right wing movements and Islamism. Putin and China profit from that.

 

(And no I am not denying some people do starve today, but that has always been the case. I don’t think that has gotten worse, in fact probably the opposite)

 

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

He’s definitely eccentric and not in a good way.

 

Maybe he was radicalized to some extent by social media. I think I was too but at least I am somewhat aware of it.

Musk now calls himself “Kekius Maximus” on twitter and he has a pepe the frog avatar. That place looks a lot like 4chan now.

I’m really skeptical on the climate change thing. It has gotten quite a bit warmer already, and the effects aren’t catastrophic. Maybe a few more natural disasters, but nothing we can’t handle. And if things get worse, we can always move to colder areas. Paul Ehrlich etc have an almost perfect record of being wrong all the time.

 

Meanwhile humans are growing stupider and more depressed and anxious and psychotic because of the technology we are drowning in, and with the coming brainchip thing that could accelerate. The Matrix as a future scenario always seemed ridiculous, but maybe that isn’t true anymore.

 

The technological system at the moment mostly exists as a means to control people and that is likely to grow worse. That is more catastrophical to me than climate change.

 

I think people like Dugin are right about that, that the West is suicidal. That the Faustian impulse could be our demise. The problem is they don’t have a good solution either. Life in a greater Rusky Mir is probably not a preferable alternative.

 

I really love this guy’s videos, one of the best things on youtube. He takes you all across the US, showing the people and the cities and landscapes etc

 

Bunch of billionaires on twitter now talking about having an 80 hour workweek. These cunts want to enslave the people.

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Uncle Retrospective

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd

You can learn a lot about the war in Israel by listening to what Netanyahu and current day Israelis are saying about “Amalek” and then reading the Bible to see how Amalek ought to be treated. And then wondering who exactly Amalek is, in today’s world.

There is a lot of focus on climate change but there are myriad ways the Moloch of science and progress can end humanity.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather-of-ai-raises-odds-of-the-technology-wiping-out-humanity-over-next-30-years

I saw one of these birds today, for the first time. The great egret is rare in the Netherlands but starting to be more common.

 

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Christian

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd

Hero is such a brilliantly esthetic movie but it is pure CCP propaganda.

Honestly a lot of philosophy feels like an effort to take people away from simple life with simple goals, taking care of themselves, their family and their tribe, and towards following some abstract ideology or leader, or sacrificing themselves for some “higher purpose”. Nietzsche although he tries to go against that is aso a certified idiot.

 

Diogenes is still my guy. Epicurus also got a lot of things right.

Merry Christmas!

 

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Todd

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clygk48nxgzo

 

Woman dies after being set on fire in the New York subway by a Guatemalan migrant

Nah, this guy was already crazy for a long time, it seems. He didn’t suddenly snap, there had been warning signs.

 

The fact he wasn’t a practising muslim doesn’t really change the narrative very much, he was still part of a certain demographic.

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Martin Smith, Todd

Speech as an instinct, that is an interesting thought.

It’s crazy how animals brains work. We think they are “dumb” compared to use, lacking things like speech, or the ability to do something like math, but birds build nests, spiders make spider-webs, bees build entire colonies….it’s by “instinct”, but what is instinct? How does that work in their brains?

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njerry, Todd

I’m reading a book about the period after WW2 in the Netherlands and it’s pretty crazy. Queen Wilhelmina wanted to abolish political parties and install a theocratic protestant government.

https://www.euronews.com/2024/12/20/car-drives-into-group-of-people-at-christmas-market-in-magdeburg-driver-arrested

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Todd

They released the names of suspects of the explosion that killed 6 people in the Hague last week.

I am not sure wether Wilders is a complete Putin pet. He used to say positive things about Putin, and he probably received money, but now that he’s part of the government he has turned around and he supports sending money to Ukraine (although I think he still opposes NATO membership for Ukraine). I think he’s somewhere between Meloni and Orban.

 

Baudet is though, completely in Putin’s pocket. Not only does he oppose arming Ukraine, he literally said teh invasion was a good thing.

Boney M. member Bobby Farrell died in the same city (St. Petersburg) and on the same date as Rasputin.

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Todd

Well I think it’s understandable, you just have a lot of people responding to the tweet to give their condolences. So the algorithms sees, well this is a popular tweet, and pushes it on the timeline of a lot of people who follow animal accounts. But the effect is pretty depressing.

There’s something disturbing that happens on twitter (and I guess bluesky would be the same) when you follow a lot of animal accounts, for the cute animal pictures: you start seeing lots of sad tweets about people’s pets and animals dying. I guess those tweets get a lot of engagement, so twitter algorhitm puts it on everybody’s timeline. It’s sad when you just want to see a cute bunny.

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Christian

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Uncle Retrospective

Trump and Vance doing a photo op with Daniel Penny is fucking disgusting.

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Ben, Christian, Todd, JRCarter

I think Luigi Mangione was probaby right in hating the healthcare CEO dude – even though I can’t condoen the murder – but he didn’t hate the doctor who mangled his back enough. Iatrogenic death, death caused by doctors, is one of the leading causes of death.

Badenoch called people from Northern Nigeria her “ethnic enemies”…

 

Beware of people who deny free will, like Yuval Noah Hariri.

 

 

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Uncle Retrospective

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Christian, njerry, Uncle Retrospective, Dave, Todd

Israel stealing more land in Syria right now. Motherfuckers.

https://news.sky.com/story/haiti-gang-massacres-around-180-people-over-witchcraft-fears-13270436

 

Incredible. The rebels took control of the whole of Syria in 10 days. Assad is gone.

 

I fear for the Christians, Alawites, Kurds and Shias living there, but I hope it will work out.

Honestly it should be easy as shit for the left to win elections. Just promise more and cheaper housing, affordable food and electricity prices, jobs, better healthcare, in short better circumstances for the common man. That’s it. I am not quite sure why they keep fucking thing up.

Flat got blown up in The Hague. Looks very bad, 3 dead so far but many more dead posssible. It’s not clear what caused it

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/07/apartment-block-hit-explosion-dutch-city-the-hague

A few days ago a democratic country declared martial law, and today the Romanian election got thrown out. Democracy is in danger.

Syria’s regime hold over the country is completely collapsing. At this rate the jihadis will be in Damascus by next week. Basically it will be an Al Qaeda state.

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Todd, Martin Smith

A South Korean legislator said the president declared martial law because he was lonely.

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Todd

Todd wrote:

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

South Korea just declared martial law. Fucking hell.

And the SK parliament undid it.

South Korea martial law latest: Parliament votes to block declaration after clashes with police

Wild.

 

Must have been crazy things happening behind the scene.

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Todd

South Korea just declared martial law. Fucking hell.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/3/us-lawmakers-back-covid-lab-leak-theory-after-two-year-probe

 

It was always weird that Fauci, who had investments in the in the Wuhan institute, was asked if a lab leak theory was possible, and his word was taken as gospel. It’s like asking a farmer to test his own milk.

Government stooge in the Netherlands is going to get a wind turbine close to his home and suddenly discovers there are health danger involved in having these things close by.  And they were laughing when rural folks complained about them. Fucking filth.

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Todd

Interesting that he’s the one to say this. I mean most people probably knew, but it’s impossible to say it.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2024/nov/28/keir-starmer-on-migration-tories-ran-open-borders-experiment-video

Jihadists are taking Aleppo.

RAW DONG LOVER

 

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Uncle Retrospective

It’s interesting that when Westerners translate and annotate books on Eastern religions they betray a kind of residue of their old Christian, or Western lib roots. You can also see it in the Zen and Tibetan Buddhist communities where the Eastern religion becomes a vehicle for their hippie ideals. (The CIA also meddled with that stuff)

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Dan, Todd

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Sean Robinson, Todd

It would be fucking funny if Trump sanctioned the Netherlands over Netanyahu if he goes to trial here. We depend on the US economically and militarily, yet we still think it’s alright to piss them off. The EU really is kind of a joke. We could be making the same mistake Armenia did when it abandoned the support of Russia before it had any support from Western countries. Total political idiocy. Not saying I want Putin to take over, but we kind of deserve it for being a clown country.

 

If you want to piss the US off and live, you need a few hundred nukes at least.

There are several brigades of info-warriors trying to spin the Amsterdam “pogrom” story to their advantage on social media. For the record, I personally think antisemitism played some role in the event, but perhaps not as much as was initially reported by some of the media and our politicians. It was probably in part just “regular football violence” but of course that kind of hooliganism isn’t legal either. But it’s obvious that at least some of the perpetrators were partially motivated by antisemitic sentiments. Amsterdam police also said they are eyeing some Israeli suspects and may ask Israel for extradition, so it’s not one-sided.

And today it is 15 degrees and sunny! Feels like spring. (Only going to last for one day though, tomorrow it will rain again)

Wilders is visiting Israel and Netanyahu and might visit the settlements. He is doing this of his own accord, not as representative of the government, since he is not a part of the government, but it is a bad look for our country for someone to visit Netanyahu now.

 

The International Criminal Court is here in the Hague, so it is uncomfortable for his party. (Wilders’s party is part of the government, but Wilders himself is not a part of the government). The government does respect the arrest warrant against Netanyahu.

[Arjan Dirkse]

Odd burst of cold the last few days. France, Germany and parts of the UK are freezing. In November. (Or were yesterday anyway)

• This reply was modified 1 month, 2 weeks ago by Arjan Dirkse.

Interesting graph comparing the US with some other countries:

 

Yannis Varoufakis is to China as Tucker Carlson is to Russia.

 

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Todd

Beer with Dutch style herring makes a good combination!

 

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Christian, njerry

This is in Saudi Arabia. Looks like SE Asia

 

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Uncle Retrospective, Dan, Todd, njerry

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Todd

That Hegseth guy has a “Deus Vult” tattoo (slogan of the crusaders) and he wants the Israelis to buid the third temple. Pretty confused individual.

 

In my country a growing number of people want our government to be more critical of Israel, right now about 50 % take this position. I think it’s a good sign that people are getting more critical. Unfortunately our government is very loyal to Israel.

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Christian

“A Somali pirate from Minneapolis”

 

https://twitter.com/FOX9/status/1856823118633079152