Andrej Barla

Somewhere between the Baltic Sea, Mediterranean and the Caspian Sea. Arabic ambitions. Media, politics & belly disco dance

[Hala Gorani @HalaGorani]

Imagine living 80 years with so much goodness, grace and talent that no one has ever found a single bad word to say about you. RIP Dolly Parton.

[𝓐𝓤𝓓𝓤 @CineAudu]

I know exactly what I'm doing. How Dolly Parton shut down the noise and owned her narrative in 1977.

[Brian Lilley @brianlilley]

This was the most interesting part of Carney's appearance this morning.
Asked what changes the Americans made that were unacceptable, he gave a clear and direct answer with concrete examples.
This was not a deal any PM should have signed with those auto tariffs on trucks.

[Nikolaj🇺🇦🇵🇸 @nikicaga]

> imperial harem politics
> imported Slavic wives
> endless wars with Persia, complex relations with Arabs, protector of Jews
> ostentatious displays of wealth
> endless corruption
> extreme state brutality towards rebels

Is Trump the last Ottoman sultan?

[Ami Dar @AmiDar]

A good moment to repeat this: if everyone, everywhere, truly accepted that seven million Palestinians and seven million Jews are not going anywhere, and that any possible future has to include and encompass both, the whole energy around this conflict would shift. There, and even more so around the world.

I mean truly, deeply accept. Stop obfuscating, wishing, avoiding, fantasizing, implying that this can end any other way than with *some* form of coexistence. There is no other way.

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

Israeli settler terrorists deliberately emptied Palestinian water tanks onto the ground in Ein al-Hilweh, in the northern Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank.

Palestinians in this herding community struggle every day for water after Israeli settlers seized their main spring five years ago.

This is pure evil.

[Christer Sfeirكريستر @ChristerSfeir]

Den verkliga lärdomen av händelsen i Ceuta är: Europas yttre gräns kontrolleras inte enbart från europeisk sida. Den kontrolleras också av de regimer som EU hoppas ska hålla den stängd. Den som inte vågar säga det kommer heller aldrig att kunna föra en trovärdig migrationspolitik.

[Christer Sfeirكريستر @ChristerSfeir]

Postkolonial teori började som en analys av kolonialismens arv. I dag fungerar den alltför ofta som en intellektuell tvättmaskin för islamistisk aktivism. Allt pressas genom samma mall: väst är alltid förövare, den som säger sig bekämpa väst blir automatiskt offer. Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthirörelsen mm blir “motstånd”, mullorna i Teheran “antiimperialister” och islamister reduceras till produkter av kolonialismen; aldrig till ansvariga aktörer med en egen totalitär ideologi.

Den moderna antirasismen spelar ofta med. Identitet väger tyngre än handlingar. Antisemitism, kvinnoförtryck och religiös extremism relativiseras så länge de kommer från grupper som placerats längst ned i offerhierarkin. Resultatet är en märklig antirasism där principer offras för identitetspolitik och där analys ersätts av aktivism.

Det är inte kritiskt tänkande. Det är bara en ny dogm.

[Oz Katerji @OzKaterji]

Apologism for terrorism has always been at the heart of this iteration of the far-left, so it’s not surprising to see what Corbynites are turning the Green Party into. https://t.co/RhV5L4B3aG

[Aron Lund @aronlund]

Vår värld domineras snart av diktaturer och därför måste vi lära oss förstå auktoritär politik. Diktaturer är inte bara ofullgångna demokratier – de är politiska system i egen rätt och det är så de måste analyseras.

Läs min senaste DN-krönika! https://t.co/l2V0BYidUr

[Acyn @Acyn]

PabloReports: What do you make of Pete Hegseth refusing to promote qualified women of color?

AOC: He’s an unqualified man in his role, so of course he’s threatened by women who are twice as good as he is.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Mao Zedong was responsible for so many deaths in China that you can see it on a chart of global life expectancy

[Renaud Pila @renaudpila]

Penser aux énormes fous-rires qu’aura le petit frère de Yamine Lamal lorsqu’il regardera ces vidéos à 15 ans avec ses amis

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

One is football, the other is anti-football.

Whomever handles Argentina's PR really has a lot of work on their hands after this WC. I don't think I've ever seen so much backlash.

They don't give a fuck. Argentinians are very stubborn, especially when they're wrong, moreso when it's about football.

The whole of south america are happy that the world is starting to acknowledge that Argentinians are rascist.

Their rugby team has also lost their marbles (after being seen as a fairly respected team). Something is going on in Argentina.

[Spivach @0xSpivach]

Ex-Wall Street Banker:

"it's an industry that rewards psychopaths, and it's an industry that psychopaths thrive in."

Every junior analyst dreams of the lifestyle: the six-figure bonuses, the glamour, and the prestige. But behind closed doors, the reality is far more grotesque.

A former investment banker just exposed what really happens behind the scenes: from multi-million dollar insider trading rings disguised as "rumors" to absolute moral degradation, drug bings, and secret underground parties for elites.

It is the real, unglamorous version of "The Big Short" and "Wolf of Wall Street", explained by someone who spent 12 years playing for the team that didn't give a shit about anything except quarterly earnings.

watch the full version below 👇

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Henshi @HenshiG]

In 1942, in Nazi-occupied Tunisia—the only Arab country to suffer direct German occupation—a drunken officer bragged at dinner about the Jewish woman he planned to seize from a forced brothel.

He named her.

Across the table sat Khaled Abdul-Wahab, a 31-year-old wealthy Muslim Tunisian who had studied art and architecture in New York, spoke fluent German, and was trusted by the Nazis. They invited him to their tables. He smiled, poured the wine, finished the meal… then raced through the night.

He pounded on the door of the woman’s family at midnight. “Pack nothing. Come now.” He gathered 25 terrified Jews—mothers, fathers, children, cousins—and drove them nearly 20 miles to his family farm. For four agonizing months, he hid them in the olive press, stables, and storage sheds.

He fed them as supplies ran desperately low. He kept crying babies silent. When German soldiers came to count Jews, the hidden families pinned on their yellow stars, stood motionless, then tore them off the moment the danger passed.

One terrifying night, a drunk soldier stumbled upon them and threatened to kill everyone. An 11-year-old girl, hiding under a bed, watched in horror—until Khaled appeared like a guardian angel.

He calmly disarmed the soldier and sent him away.

No one on that farm died.

In May 1943, the British liberated Tunisia. The 25 returned home alive. Khaled went back to his quiet life—painting, raising daughters, serving his country—and never spoke of it again. Not to his wife. Not to his children.

He died in 1997 at 86. His secret died with him.

A decade later, his daughter Faiza sat in a Paris café reading a newspaper. An American historian was describing a Tunisian Arab who had hidden 25 Jews. He named her father. She was 45 years old and hearing the story for the first time. “I rediscovered my father,” she said.

Khaled was nominated to be the first Arab recognized as Righteous Among the Nations—Israel’s highest honor for those who saved Jews. The committee declined.

Today, those 25 souls have hundreds of descendants living in Israel, France, America, and Tunisia. The little girl under the bed grew up, built a family in Paris. None of them would exist if Khaled had looked away that night.

He had everything to lose. He acted anyway. Then he carried the silence for the rest of his life.

The world almost forgot him twice.
Now you know his name: Khaled Abdul-Wahab.

A true hero. A Muslim who stood against evil when it mattered most.

Colorized image of black and white photo poster by Israel the Jewish State.

[Anuj @anujcodes_21]

🚨 Anthropic just showed a 24-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[Acyn @Acyn]

PabloReports: Ted Cruz called you a parasite and disparaged your work as a bartender.

AOC: It’s not a secret the disdain Ted Cruz has for people who work working-class jobs. It’s not a secret what he thinks of the waitresses, the line cooks—he thinks we’re less than him. He thinks that because he has a Harvard degree and has never scrubbed a table that it makes him better than someone who has actually had to work for a living.

I think it’s funny that he’s been taking a government paycheck for 23 years but has the audacity to criticize someone who has come from a family that had to work their way up and earn their place here.

[Vatnik Soup @P_Kallioniemi]

Modern drone warfare is pure horror (sound on).