Mindnuggets

[Eoin Ó Broin @EOBroin]

The Irish Times view on the Government’s data centre argument: how not to make the case

No punches pulled here! 👀

https://t.co/Y6SPtCc7r2

[Ebere @EbereEze10]

I swear imma make It and when I do, they're gunna show this tweet lol

[🚨The Celebration Police🚨 @PLCPolice]

Arsenal celebrating like they’ve won the league

[Irish Times Opinion @IrishTimesOpEd]

Sinéad O'Sullivan: People in Ireland want to know where our money goes. The answer is depressing https://t.co/pcGkDQBc9x

[Natalie Wolchover @nattyover]

On billionaires, please read this by Cory Doctorow, summarizing Thomas Piketty's 𝘊𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 21𝘴𝘵 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘺.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Probably the funniest graph ever published by the FT: our 3 possible futures are either 1) infinite wealth and abundance, 2) human extinction or 3) 0.2% faster GDP growth 🤣

[Ethel Braithwaite @Ethelbrait1941]

Never stop saying "dozen" and "half dozen". Never stop using the word you read in an old novella. Never stop using your regional jargon. Don't succumb to an internationalized English stripped of its whimsy and romanticism in the name of streamlining global commerce.

[Ben Phillips @benphillips76]

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party .

Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.

[conspiracybot @conspiracyb0t]

Reminder: When the Panama Papers came out it revealed all the rich people in the world are part of an enormous criminal conspiracy to dodge taxes and hoard stolen wealth in offshore accounts and literally nothing happened except a reporter working on the story was assassinated.

[Daniel Aldana Cohen @aldatweets]

I will die on this hill: Angela Merkel broke Germany and probably Europe. In the wreckage of post-2008, she was uniquely positioned to choose social welfare over austerity. She chose austerity. Centrists loved her. But the fascists are now stronger than they’ve been in decades.

[Mindnuggets @bcheesfull]

@RossWynne16 @Ireland_Votes Well hopefully they'll lose votes so in the meantime

[Daniel Lambert @dlLambo]

Real shame these people wouldn't protest at Shannon.

Thats where the root cause of their fuel increases are operating from.

[RTÉ News @rtenews]

A new study from the Economic and Social Research Institute has found that recent increases to the minimum wage did not lead to low-paid workers losing their jobs
https://t.co/XfFjqqe5Lc

[Dave Keating @DaveKeating]

Remember when 🇪🇺President von der Leyen told us that we needed to buy all that 🇺🇸LNG because it would be more stable and reliable than other options?

[Jordan - The EV Guy @JordanEVGuy]

Choose your pill…

🔴 Red pill: A wind turbine falls over. Nobody is hurt. It becomes a viral clip for a few hours.

🔵 Blue pill: Oil wars, pollution, and millions of deaths linked to fossil fuels every year… but somehow that’s considered normal.

Your choice.

[Mark R. Brown, AICP, CNU @CompletedStreet]

Car infrastructure devours land.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

At the peak of the Gilded Age in 1910, the richest 0.00001% of the US population owned wealth equal to 4% of national income.

Now, the richest 0.00001% owns 12%.

US billionaire oligarchs today are even wealthier than the original robber barons.

Source: https://t.co/qOjOvUIRRc

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

The judge’s ordeal epitomising Europe’s disappeared values.

Let us, for a moment, entertain the fanciful hypothesis that Europe cares about its values. Imagine a Europe where the principles so lavishly inscribed upon the banners of the European project – the rule of law, the dignity of the individual, a commitment to strategic autonomy – are more than just rhetorical filigree for grand speeches in Brussels.

In this parallel Europe, the story emerging from the pages of Le Monde concerning Judge Nicolas Guillou, the French magistrate at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, would be the political scandal of the century. It would be the kind of affair that topples governments and reignites a proud European mindfulness.

But we do not inhabit that Europe. In this really-existing Europe, Guillou’s ordeal has been shrugged off, a symptom of our continent’s descent into a state of uncontested vassalage.

Stripped bare, the facts of the case are disconcerting beyond measure. Before us we have a French citizen. A magistrate of some note sitting on the bench of the ICC which European diplomacy went to great lengths to establish so as to turn the page from a past in which war criminals could hide behind their governments’ shielding. Meticulously following the procedures of his institution in the execution of his sworn duties, this judge authorized arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defense minister for alleged war crimes in Gaza. In response, US President Donald Trump’s administration sanctioned Guillou.

The imposed sanctions are a masterclass in the evisceration of European sovereignty. They render Guillou a non-person, not only in the United States, but also in his own country – the beating heart of Europe. He has been locked out of the global digital realm (WhatsApp, all Google apps, and social media like Facebook and Instagram). Even his French bank account is virtually useless, given the ban on all payments that require the cooperation of Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and the supposedly European SWIFT interbank messaging system. As if that were not enough, when he recently tried to book a hotel room in France, Expedia canceled his reservation a few hours later.

Trump’s success at “flooding the zone” with outrageous behavior must not cause us to miss the significance of these developments. The US government has decided to sanction – or, essentially, de-person – a European judge for carrying out his official duties in Europe while working in an institution established by Europe’s elected representatives at great cost and effort.

The real tragedy is not that Trump is throwing his weight around. It is in the nature of hegemons to bully those who inconvenience them. The real tragedy, or perhaps farce, lies in Europe’s reaction. Did our governments respond with a unified, thunderous condemnation? Did they trigger retaliatory measures and immediately create European financial and digital channels to protect their own judiciary and citizens from extraterritorial bullying? Alas, the response was a tragicomic spectacle of utter and complete acquiescence.

European banks, cowed by a stern look from a US Treasury official in Washington, rushed to close Guillou’s accounts. European companies, whose compliance departments act as extensions of the US authorities, refuse to provide him services. Meanwhile, European institutions – the Commission and the Council – look the other way, wringing their hands and muttering platitudes about the “complexities” of transatlantic relations. They are not merely failing to protect Guillou; they are actively enforcing US sanctions against their own citizen.

During a week when European leaders loudly protested how the US had sidelined them in drawing up a peace deal for Ukraine, their silence over Guillou’s treatment completely normalized the erosion of their authority. From Trump’s perspective, they swapped the challenging, messy project of sovereignty for the comfortable decline of a US protectorate.

How else could French President Emmanuel Macron have expected Trump to interpret his decision to treat the economic assassination of a French judge on French soil as nothing more than an unfortunate technical glitch or a minor bureaucratic snafu? Did he and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz really believe that sacrificing their citizens to Trump would gain them a seat at the negotiating table on issues such as Ukraine and Palestine, which are of existential importance to Europe?

No, Guillou’s Kafkaesque nightmare should not surprise us. What should be shocking is the silence surrounding it. We should be outraged not only by US actions, but also by Europe's inaction. Guillou’s case is a stark metaphor for Europe itself:

A union of nation-states that helped build an international court to uphold its values, allowing a foreign power to punish its own judge for doing so, and then helped to enforce the punishment. This is a union that has lost its way, its soul, and its spine, turning Europeans into willing extras in the theater of our own diminution.

When, in a few years’ time, almost everyone is claiming that they opposed Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, the world will remember Judge Guillou fondly. But the world will also remember Europe’s leading politicians not just for their cowardice but for their inattention to the simple fact that those who fail to uphold their own values become irrelevant.

https://t.co/TLri5QP4Ah

[Irish Unity 🇮🇪🇵🇸 @IrishUnity]

"It is an absolute tragedy what is happening there (Palestine). I don't see a difference between FIFA and UEFA banning Russia and not Israel.”

- Heimir Hallgrímsson

🇮🇪🤝🇵🇸

[Brad R. Torgersen @BradRTorgersen]

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl convinced the entire planet nuclear fission was catastrophically unsafe. Despite the fact Three Mile island's containment system worked exactly as designed, preventing a genuine catastrophe. And Chernobyl was a catastrophe because the Soviets were cutting corners and built their plants without proper containment. Thus, nuke accidents became the shark attacks of the energy discussion. And our best, cleanest, most abundant power source remains ignored.