Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Fun fact: Europeans don't listen to Americans on employment law for the same reason we don't listen to Afghans on women's rights.

Europe Is Being Carved Up While Its Leaders Are Still Deciding Who Should Speak. I have a question for Europe’s leaders. Where were you this week? Where was the European leader standing before the cameras, declaring that Europe’s borders, security and future are not bargaining chips for Washington and Moscow? Who told Donald Trump, publicly and unequivocally, that his administration has chosen the wrong side of history? Who announced that Europe would consider sanctions against American companies profiting from Russian energy while Ukrainian civilians are being killed? And who delivered the simplest ultimatum of all: Europe must have a seat at the negotiating table, or European sanctions against Russia will remain in place. No American president gets to negotiate them away. Yes, some European leaders have spoken. Kaja Kallas, Giorgia Meloni and several foreign ministers have criticised Trump’s Russian diesel deal. Alexander Stubb and Jonas Gahr Støre even called Putin on October 27. But here is the extraordinary part: they explicitly stated that they were not speaking for Europe. And that brings me to something almost too absurd to believe. European leaders have been discussing who should represent Europe in negotiations with Russia since at least May. Five months later, with November practically upon us, they still haven’t agreed on a representative with a clear mandate. Five fucking months. We are talking about the future borders and security of our own continent, not choosing a new chairman for the Brussels gardening committee. Meanwhile, Trump is easing sanctions on Russian diesel. Washington and Moscow are exploring further commercial opportunities. And the Kremlin is discussing the possibility of additional American sanctions relief. Russia invades European territory. America negotiates commercial arrangements with the aggressor. And Europe continues discussing who should attend the discussions. You could hardly invent a more humiliating demonstration of geopolitical paralysis. And the stakes go far beyond Ukraine. We are watching the possible emergence of a new world order in which Washington, Moscow and Beijing treat Europe as a collection of territories, markets and spheres of influence to be divided between them. Russia wants territorial control. China wants economic and strategic leverage. Trump’s Washington increasingly appears willing to treat European security as another transactional opportunity. Their interests are not identical, but their willingness to pursue them at Europe’s expense should terrify every European government. I am not suggesting Europe should stop negotiating. Quite the opposite. Europe should be leading negotiations over European security, defining the conditions, controlling its sanctions policy and making unmistakably clear that Ukraine’s sovereignty is non-negotiable without Ukraine’s consent. And if Washington chooses to help finance Putin’s war economy, Europe should be prepared to examine economic consequences for those involved, regardless of whether they are Russian or American. Enough carefully worded expressions of concern. Enough summits about future summits. Enough waiting for Washington to rediscover its principles. Europe has the economic power, the institutions and the democratic legitimacy to defend its own interests. What it desperately lacks is a common political voice willing to use that power. History will not remember how many meetings European leaders attended. It will remember whether they stood up while the future of their continent was being negotiated. And right now, the silence from Europe’s collective leadership is becoming almost as alarming as the conversations taking place without it.

A rules-based international order is worth fighting for, even if it hasn’t always worked as it should. The alternative is the law of the jungle, where might makes right. Europe must step up and give Ukraine what it needs to secure a just peace. Defending Ukraine means defending the principles that safeguard Europe itself.

In 1867, San Francisco passed a law that effectively made visible disability a public offense. Other American cities followed, adopting what became known as the “ugly laws.” People with disfigurements, illnesses, or physical disabilities could be fined simply for appearing in public, particularly if they were poor and begging. I find the logic almost impossible to comprehend: society saw suffering and decided the problem was that others had to look at it. Some of these ordinances survived into the 1970s. A reminder that cruelty can arrive dressed as civic order.

The less you know about a subject, the harder it is to recognize when AI is giving you a bad answer.

It’s fascinating how many Western politicians and commentators fixate on Putin as the sole cause of the war, ignoring centuries of Russian imperialism embedded in its institutions, history and state-society relations. Absolving Russia of collective responsibility helps no one.

If you can separate Christians from the KKK, you can separate Muslims from Al Qaeda and you can separate Judaism from Zionism. Don't be a fucking idiot.

One of the cruelest myths ever created is the idea that humans exist separately from nature. A society that truly believed rivers were relatives rather than resources would organize itself very differently.

In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages. They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away. They believed the area was infected with typhus. It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing. The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back. He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight. What he had was medicine. His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus. They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war. And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance. Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone. So he started injecting his patients. He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again. The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them. Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable. Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect. Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry. The tests came back positive. The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people. Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk. After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War. He died in 2006. He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.

THE GREATEST AMERICAN BETRAYAL OF ITS ALLIES IN HISTORY. While Russia continues its war against Ukraine, the Trump administration is reportedly negotiating sweeping energy and business deals with Moscow. Russian oil, diesel, Nord Stream gas pipelines, American investments, access to Russian airspace, and even arrangements involving Ukraine’s occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are reportedly on the table. Let that sink in. While Ukrainians fight and die defending their country, Washington is exploring opportunities to do business with the very country responsible for invading it. President Zelenskyy has already warned that the United States is choosing the wrong side of history. And he has every reason to be furious. Europe and America’s traditional Western allies have every reason to be deeply alarmed. If these proposals become reality, the consequences for transatlantic trust, NATO unity, and America’s credibility could be enormous. For decades, the United States presented itself as the leader of the free world, a defender of democracy, sovereignty, and international law. Now, its administration appears increasingly willing to put business opportunities with Putin’s Russia ahead of the principles it once claimed to defend. This is not just about Ukraine. It is about whether America’s allies can ever trust Washington again. And the consequences of that betrayal could last for generations.

I do not see any point in negotiations with Putin if they are not happening literally at gunpoint. (Though, even then..) This is not an emotional assessment due to my personal hatred towards Putin and what he represents, but rather a quite boring combination of factors. 1) There is a bureaucratic trap in which Putin has caught himself. Wishful thinking and constant overly positive reports from the generals lead him to an erroneous decision: including Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions to the Russian constitution BEFORE they were actually captured and held as a whole. It is clear now that such a capture is almost impossible. 2) Due to the trap above, any (even temporary) peace negotiations leaving these territories to Ukraine are not possible. In a paradox way, Russia is a legalistic state. Before it does something, it usually legalizes it. To freeze the front on the current line would mean going against the constitution. So, it has to be rewritten again - otherwise Zaporizhzhia and Kherson would be left behind. And of course, Putin does not want to EXCLUDE territories from the constitution, because that would mean accepting the defeat. 3) Nobody on top wants the “heroes of the SMO” to come back home. Any long-term ceasefire would mean thousands and thousands of thugs coming back to the society. They were not the best members of the society even before the war, but now they would be more violent, many - possessing armor, with PTSD, and - no civilian jobs that match the salaries back in the military. The difference in salary will be 2-5 times. There also would be a sentiment of betrayal: what did we fight for and died for if there’s no victory? So, overall, it’s so much safer to keep these guys busy at the frontlines. Not very strategic, but it’s a matter of survival. 4) One cannot trust any agreement signed by Putin. He’s a pathological liar, and I think that at this point he brought himself very close to mental illness by his own lies and delusions. These things work both ways. There are other reasons, as well, but I think, these above are sufficient as an explanation.

A high school girl in Mexico just won a gold medal for putting out fires with a speaker. It plays one deep, low hum and the flames die in about 5 seconds. DARPA tried the same idea back in 2012 with a rig so big and clunky they never took it any further, and hers runs on a 12-volt battery and a speaker she can carry around. Sound is just air being pushed back and forth. A low note at 30 hertz means the air around the flame is flipping direction 30 times every second. Flames only exist in a thin layer where fuel vapor mixes with oxygen. Shake that layer hard enough and it keeps getting stretched thinner, the heat gets pulled away faster than the flame can make more, and eventually the flame rips right off the fuel. Whatever tears off is too cool to keep burning, so it just goes out. DARPA's report put a number on how little it takes. Once the air at the flame is moving about half a meter per second, which is barely a breeze, the flame goes out, and pretty much any pitch can get there if you crank the power high enough. Low notes just get you there way cheaper, because a speaker moves a lot more air on each push when the pitch is low. Two engineering students at George Mason figured this out by trial and error in 2015. They started with super high pitches, 20,000 to 30,000 hertz, and all the flames did was shiver. It only worked once they dropped down to 30 to 60 hertz, which is basically the bass on a hip-hop track. Ángela Karime's build is a 12-volt battery, a frequency generator, an amplifier and a speaker, tuned to 30 hertz. She named it Vortex Tech and talks about it shooting out little rings of air, and that's real physics. When loud, low sound gets pushed through a narrow opening, the air curls up into rings like a smoke ring, and those rings carry a puff of air way farther than the sound would get on its own. In her tests it put out small flames from about 2 meters away. She went through five prototypes and over 100 tests in about a year, and she says it's put out burning wood, flammable liquids, electronics and cooking oil. The cooking oil one is a big deal. Throw water on a grease fire and it flashes into steam and flings burning oil all over your kitchen, which is exactly the kind of fire where you'd want something that doesn't put anything into the pan. Now, sound can't cool anything down, so a big fire sitting on red-hot fuel can come right back the second the speaker shuts off. The George Mason guys worried about the same thing in 2015, and it's why this is still a prototype for small flames and the red extinguisher under your sink isn't going anywhere yet. Space might end up being where this matters first. Up there water floats off in blobs, while sound works the same with or without gravity, and acoustics researchers have already published experiments on fighting fires with sound on spacecraft. She's still in high school, and she's already working on a version that spots a fire and puts it out by itself. The gold in Indonesia also came with a special award that gets her into another international competition.

Women don’t need men to protect them. They need men to stop being the reason they need protection.

Just a casual reminder that Germans who “didn’t bother to vote” in 1932 didn’t get a chance again until 1946, after Hitler’s death. — There’s a lesson there.

When politicians convince you that a tiny minority is a greater threat than poverty, homelessness, and unaffordable healthcare, you’re not witnessing leadership. You’re witnessing manipulation.

Of all the things that never happened this never happened the most!