Cryptinish

Two Starlinks provide our Internet

by @proportio

[Riki @RikiRealEstate]

THIS ISN’T JUST A VILLA… IT ONCE BELONGED TO THE FAMILY OF THE MONA LISA. 🇮🇹🎨

Most historic estates have a story.

This one is connected to one of the most famous women in history.

Just 5 km from Florence, Villa Antinori di Monte Aguglioni was owned by the Del Giocondo family - the family of Lisa Gherardini, better known as the Mona Lisa.

Today, this extraordinary estate is for sale for €18 million.

🧵 Here’s why it’s one of Italy’s most remarkable historic properties.

👇

[Kekius Maximus @Kekius_Sage]

Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, says that passengers on the Titanic actually didn’t want to leave the ship for almost two hours after it hit the iceberg.

Pavel Durov says we are in a similar situation: our ship has already hit the iceberg. We have already started to sink without even realizing it. He is talking about the ship of our personal freedoms.

He says that personal freedoms have been eroded almost everywhere in the world, with very few exceptions. He has witnessed firsthand the methods governments use to suppress our freedoms and take away our basic rights. He has seen all the tricks: the PR tricks, the legal tricks, the political tricks, the manipulations, and the official excuses.

The thing that bothers him most today is that some of the same tricks employed by authoritarian regimes in places like Russia, China, and Iran are now also being used in some Western countries.

—————

Here are some key statements from Pavel Durov:

“Thousands of people are getting arrested every year in the United Kingdom for social media posts.”

“You say something politically incorrect online, you may end up being fined or spend some time in prison. In Germany, people get arrested and persecuted for insulting politicians online, thousands of people every year.”

“You call a politician a bigot or a thief online and you can serve up to 3 years in prison. So, now people are afraid to use their real identities. People stop using their real names when they make comments online.”

“The criminals will be fine. It will be the law-abiding citizens who will be put in danger.”

“Last year, a French tax official was caught stealing the financial data of people who held large amount of crypto assets… you have a catastrophic rise in the number of kidnappings in France. Just in the first 3 months of 2026, you have over 40 victims of kidnappings in France.”

“Another trick that has been used by authoritarians for decades. And now it is being increasingly exported from the East to the West. I’m talking about selective enforcement of laws.

The way it works is pretty straightforward. First, you need to introduce a large number of laws. You need to overburden a certain industry with excessive, mutually exclusive, contradictory regulation. As a result, you make compliance impossible. Now you can treat every entrepreneur, every CEO, every business owner in this country as a criminal.

But then the government carefully starts to choose who to persecute. If the business owner is loyal, if it complies with immoral, unlawful demands from the government, gives certain political favors, then the law enforcement system and the judicial system look the other way. But if the business owner decides to stand up for the constitutional rights of his or her fellow citizens, if they refuse to cave in to political demands from the authoritarian government, then the persecution comes in full.”

“We cannot afford to have this ship sunk. There is nowhere to escape. In the past, dissidents from authoritarian countries could flee to the West. But if the current trajectory continues, in a decade or two from now, they will have hard time trying to understand whether they have already left their repressive homeland or they’re just entering another open-air prison.”

“Those who are willing to give up their essential liberty for some temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

—————

Which would you choose: essential liberty or temporary safety?

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

Not a single word from Mayor Mamdani on 4 recent "church fires" in NYC

I wonder why

[Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat]

I noticed not a single Norwegian rioted in London last night

Turns out we're not all the same

[Megalithic Marvels @derek__olson]

Ollantaytambo vibes

[Muse @xmuse_]

One of the most surprising rooms in Villa del Casale is the one with the famous “bikini girls".

It’s a long gallery where ten young women are shown doing athletics. And yes, they really do look like they’re wearing modern bikinis, but it’s actually a Roman version of athletic wear.

What makes this scene so interesting is how normal it looks. These aren’t goddesses or mythological figures; they’re real women doing real training.

The detail is incredible!

The shading on the muscles, the folds of the fabric, the way the artist shows motion in the legs and arms. It’s one of the most famous mosaics in the entire Roman world, partly because it feels so unexpectedly contemporary.

And it’s just one small part of the villa’s massive mosaic program.

More than 12 million hand‑placed tesserae.

[Megalithic Marvels @derek__olson]

Notice the incredible intricate detail on this precision vertical sandstone block found at Cambodia’s Banteay Srei site

[Liz Churchill @liz_churchill10]

173-year-old church in Mamdami’s NYC is torched…the ‘cause is unknown’…which just code for ‘we know exactly who did it but can’t say it’…

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Encore un scandale.

On accuse Elon Musk sans arrêt de se servir de Grok pour faire passer ses idées.

Pourtant, le @neutralityorg vient de sortir The Neutrality Project : une étude indépendante qui prouve l’inverse.

Sur 18 modèles IA testés, 54 positions sur 60 atterrissent à gauche du centre.

Moyenne globale : -0.41 (biais progressiste massif, surtout environnement et valeurs sociales).

Et Grok 4.5 ? -0.02. Le modèle le plus neutre de tout le benchmark. Le seul vraiment proche du centre.

Pendant ce temps, les autres boîtes injectent massivement leur idéologie de gauche dans des IA qui répondent à des milliards de questions par jour.

Manipulation des masses à grande échelle.

C’est absolument scandaleux. Ça devrait être un scandale mondial.

https://t.co/X1tSvJfDEY

[Бианка @BiankaB12]

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea).

We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World.

The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated.

The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise.

A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention.

That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care.

Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it.

The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

[Cryptinish @Cryptinish]

I remember this sh^t too. Utter garbage from the manager.

Jude is a generational legend.

Step back idiot and let the players pick the team.

More chance of winning.

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

Hey @CraigHope_DM, how does it feel to be wrong in 72-point font? Your column should hang in the Louvre of bad takes.

[Cryptinish @Cryptinish]

@omid9 He picked Medueke for multiple game failures.

His mentality is the problem

[Cryptinish @Cryptinish]

@beeple Usual useless take on anything

[Cryptinish @Cryptinish]

@UTDCJ_ It's been every game. Madueke is a very strange pick.

Seen nothing at all.

I keep thinking Cole Palmer.

[Cryptinish @Cryptinish]

@elonmusk @sama After looking at Altman's eyes, I could give my house key to Mark Zuckerberg.

[Cryptinish @Cryptinish]

🤣

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@sama We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves.

After stealing an open source AI charity, you then stole all of Apple’s phone technology! Wow.

What do you plan for an encore? That’s tough to beat.

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

This just proves that conventional doctors are nutritionally illiterate and if you follow their advice on food, you are a complete idiot.

[Fabrizio Romano @FabrizioRomano]

🚨🇮🇹 BREAKING: Paolo Maldini signs in as new Italian National Team technical director, here we go!

Agreement done and confirmed for Maldini to lead new Italy project with Giovanni Malagò as FIGC president. 🫱🏻‍🫲🏼

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

He takes scamming to a whole new level

[Luke Slywaker @LukeSlywaker]

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

George Orwell—1984

This is where we are at.