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dan maertens
  • “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.”
  • These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example

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dan maertens

Dilemma’s bij onderzoek naar collaboratie in een dorp

80 jaar nadien nog steeds zeer delicaat en met fictieve namen!

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  • Hoe schrijf je over ‘foute’ dorpsgenoten, decennia na de oorlog, wanneer families nog altijd in dezelfde gemeenschap wonen?
  • De vele vraagtekens rond deze liquidatie waren voor mij in 2020 aanleiding om een onderzoek te doen. Er kwamen nieuwe gegevens boven tafel, maar het lukte me niet om de precieze toedracht te achterhalen. In een artikel voor het tijdschrift van de lokale historische vereniging noemde ik als meest waarschijnlijke optie, dat de NSB’er door iemand uit eigen kring werd geliquideerd. Ik baseerde mij daarbij op verklaringen van de dochter van de vermoorde man en op een rapport uit 1948 van een politiek rechercheur.

     

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dan maertens

Where is the Palestinian Mandela? - by Sisonke Msimang

Geef Bibi de Nobelprice!!!!!!!
"A decade later Mandela would win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had to share it with Frederik De Klerk, who was the last apartheid president of South Africa. It was not lost on many of us that a Black man who had fought for freedom, spent twenty-seven years in one of the harshest prisons in the world, and then come out to negotiate the world’s most ambitious young democracy had to share a peace prize with a man who had dedicated his life to an ideology of white supremacy before finally capitulating to international pressure by entering into negotiations to end apartheid.

A few days before the joint prize was announced, the white South African army raided a “suspected black terrorist hideout” and killed five people. The ‘terrorists’ were five unarmed Black teenagers."

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  • If Palestinians had a Mandela, they would be able to stop themselves from being bombed.
  • This is exactly the kind of victim-blaming rhetoric that has always served as a pretext for genocide. Before you kill a people, you must first dehumanise them. The search for the elusive Palestinian Mandela is predicated on the idea that like other Arabs, Palestinians are inherently violent. Violence is in their blood, in their souls, in their culture and peace can never be brokered with such a people.

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Michel Bauwens

Goldman Sachs Just Revealed AI's $50 Billion Carbon Problem

"Goldman Sachs Just Revealed AI's $50 Billion Carbon Problem
The Math Big Tech Doesn't Want You To Calculate

MAATTR"

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Michel Bauwens

Beyond The Meaning Crisis - by Andrew Sweeny - Parallax

"John Vervaeke’s lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is sufficiently important, broad, and rich, it seems to me, to warrant an extended commentary. My aim here is, therefore, to have a conversation with the series"

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Michel Bauwens

Footnotes on Intelligence - by Will Ruddick

"We hear the word “intelligence” a lot, yet rarely slow down to ask what it means in practice. Here I offer a humble definition and then turn toward alignment with living systems, collective inquiry, and symbiosis - remembering we live inside ecosystems shaped over millions of years. I name intelligence not as a static trait but as a living process: a relational sequence (sensing → meaning-making → caring → committing → coordinating → learning) where attention and trust flow in ways that help life continue."

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Michel Bauwens

Weaponizing Time – Part II: The Global Operating System of Western Power

"Many believe the West, and the United States in particular, is in retreat: from Asia, from Europe, from the overextension of its own imperial logic. The evidence seems overwhelming: America's "forever wars" ending in humiliation, Europe's industrial base hollowing out, China's Belt and Road Initiative reshaping global trade routes, while BRICS+ nations slowly construct alternative financial architectures beyond Western control.

Yet foreign policy documents reveal a different trajectory entirely. Let’s consider this single line from the U.S. Army's Unified Network Plan 2.0, published quietly in early 2025:

"The initial Army Unified Network Plan (AUNP) was published… to address the changing character of war from episodic and regional to transregional and global."

Let those words settle: From episodic and regional to transregional and global.

This simple phrase constitutes a strategic directive of the highest order. The urban landscapes of Kyiv, the straits of Taiwan, the deserts of the Sahel, and the Arctic ice floes transform from separate conflicts into interconnected nodes within a vast, planetary system of applied pressure. "

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dan maertens

Morocco’s Gen Z and the regional volcano | Links

Gilbert Achcar; links is afwezig!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"However, what remains absent from all these experiences is a radical, country-wide political movement capable of joining forces with the democratic grassroots youth movement to offer a credible alternative to the status quo. This movement would need to embody the aspirations for freedom, democracy, and social justice, and possess the political capacity to replace existing regimes. Without the emergence of such an alternative, the success of any future uprising in the region will remain uncertain. While the regional revolutionary process is bound to continue, the absence of a viable alternative could lead to a dangerous stalemate — where existing regimes hold onto power through brute force, while others collapse into the chaos of civil war.

"

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  • Only a few years pass before events emerge that reaffirm the thesis that what began in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, and culminated the following year in a massive wave of popular uprisings that spread to six countries in the region and included various forms of mass mobilization in other countries — the wave known as the “Arab Spring” — was not an isolated or accidental event. Rather, it marked the beginning of what I described as a “long-term revolutionary process” (in The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising, 2013, 2nd edition 2022).

  • This crisis resulted from the dismantling of developmental economic policies and their replacement by neoliberal ones over the last quarter of the past century. These changes occurred within a system of regional states that were fundamentally at odds with what is required by the ideal of market capitalism upon which the neoliberal dogma is based

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dan maertens
  • currently exclusive to macOS,
  • This puts OpenAI at a disadvantage compared to, say, Comet, which features a TripAdvisor integration, allowing you to view more detailed information about a location, images, and AI-summarized reviews.

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dan maertens

How Belgium’s De Wever derailed the EU’s ‘insane’ €140B Ukraine loan plan – POLITICO

Gemakshalve is Zlensky "lucht" beloofd! Rijkdom uit thin air!!!!
"The EU's late-night compromise allows everyone to save face ― and leaves De Wever with the power to veto any future actions if they don't meet his red lines. 

If “Russia can actually claim the money for whatever reason … the cash needs to be there immediately," De Wever said, adding "trust in the entire financial system of Europe" would be at stake.

"Who’s going to give that guarantee. I asked my colleagues, 'Is it you? Is it the member states?' ... This question was not answered with a tsunami of enthusiasm around the table," the Belgian leader said"

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  • EU chiefs say they understand his concerns ― but they couldn’t find a way to reassure him.
  • The EU on Thursday was hoping to give the European Commission a firm mandate to make a legal proposal outlining the loan as early as next week. De Wever ensured that didn't happen.

        

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