Susanne Keller 🇪🇺

geselliger Einsiedler. Even Helen Keller knows life stinks - Em

[Susanne Keller 🇪🇺 @juniwiese]

Eminem - Like Home (Lyrics) ft. Alicia Keys https://t.co/4atfijja3q via @YouTube

[Littlewisehen @littlewisehen]

#AfD und Verrat gehören eh untrennbar zusammen…

Unter dem Decknamen „Hubert“ spitzelte heutige AfD-Landtagsabgeordnete Jean-René Adam (61) für DDR-Kriminalpolizei.

Sein Auftrag: Jugendliche in Gera (Thüringen) aushorchen. https://t.co/eiqelARAPS

[Maria Shriver @mariashriver]

In this week’s edition of @thesundaypaper, I talked about this summer being a summer of friendship, a summer of connection. So many people in our country are lonely, divided, and scared to reach out. Reaching out is hard. Reaching out takes courage. Reaching out takes vulnerability. That is what I think @HunterBiden is doing here. He’s very open and honest about his own life, the mistakes he’s made and wanting to own up to them, while also wanting to reach out to others who might have gone through the same type of thing.

I think Hunter’s desire to talk and start a conversation about addiction, about recovery is wonderful. He acknowledges that not everybody will like it and that people might complain about it, but I’m glad that he acknowledges it. He’s also been met by a lot of love a lot of friendship. People need support in their lives. Life is tough for everyone, so when someone says, I’m here to start a conversation about mistakes I’ve made, about what I’ve learned about recovery, about addiction, I think it’s moving. It’s scary for them, and I’m sure scary for those who want to reach out and start that conversation with him, but in the spirit of this being the summer of friendship, the summer of connection, and in the spirit of moving forward and reaching across the divide, why not support someone who’s trying? 

Let this be your reminder or your nudge to reach out to someone you’ve not spoken to, whether because of a political difference, distance, or just because. Let today be the day you reconnect, and start your summer of friendship and connection off with an outreached hand.

[DJ P.R. 🙄 @djpr]

Alles, was man über Reiches Heizungsgesetz und die ideologische Verbohrtheit der Union wissen muss – in zweieinhalb Minuten auf den Punkt gebracht.

„Eigentlich gibt es von der Industrie über Verbraucherverbände bis zu Umweltverbänden eine relativ große Kritik an dem, was da jetzt geplant ist, weil vollkommen unklar ist, was das für Kosten auslöst. […] Aber es sieht so aus, als ob die Regierung dieses Thema jetzt trotz dieses ganzen Widerstands und dieser Zweifel durchziehen will.“

[nhu @maisonlongan]

the US fucked up so bad you got footy fans on here defending a referee

[Wolfe Tone Loc @Chigurh_Crash]

IOC needs to be looking at this World Cup fiasco and start immediately planning for moving the 2028 Olympics out of the US.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British novelist whose father worked in a bank explained the entire 2008 financial crisis in a 272-page book that a 12-year-old can follow, and the part that should scare you is how simple the fraud was once he stripped the jargon off it.

His name is John Lanchester.

He is a novelist by trade. He writes for the London Review of Books and The New Yorker. He grew up in Hong Kong because his father worked at a bank there, which means he absorbed the language of finance the way most kids absorb the language of cartoons. By the time the 2008 crisis hit, he was one of the very few writers on earth who could speak both finance and English fluently.

He sat down and wrote a book called I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.

In the UK it was published under the title Whoops! It came out in 2010. 272 pages. The reviews from financial journalists were almost embarrassed in their praise, because Lanchester had done in plain English what most of them had failed to do in years of professional coverage. He had actually explained what happened.

Here is the version a middle schooler can understand.

Step one. A bank gives a home loan to a person who clearly cannot pay it back. No real job. No savings. No way to make the monthly payments. The industry had a nickname for these loans. They called them NINJA loans. No Income. No Job. No Assets. The bank knew the person could not pay. The bank did not care.

Why did the bank not care?

Because the bank was not going to keep the loan.

Step two. The bank takes thousands of these loans, puts them in one giant pile, and sells the entire pile to a Wall Street firm. The Wall Street firm now owns the right to collect all those monthly payments. The original bank has been paid. Whether the homeowners actually pay or not is now someone else's problem.

Step three. The Wall Street firm takes the giant pile of loans and chops it into slices. They call the slices tranches. The top slice is supposed to be the safest because it gets paid first. The bottom slice is supposed to be the riskiest because it gets paid last. They give each slice a credit rating. The top slice gets stamped AAA, which is the highest rating you can get on earth. It is the rating used for the bonds of the United States government.

A pile of loans to people with no income and no job has just produced an investment product rated as safe as the United States government.

Step four is where the trick gets worse.

The bottom slices, the ones full of the riskiest loans, are hard to sell. Nobody wants junk. So the Wall Street firm takes the bottom slices from a hundred different piles, mixes them together into a new pile, and chops that new pile into new slices. And the top slice of this new pile, made entirely from the junk of the old piles, also gets stamped AAA.

This new product has a name. It is called a Collateralized Debt Obligation, or CDO.

A 12-year-old can see what is wrong here. You cannot take a hundred bags of garbage, dump them into one big bag, and then declare that the top of the big bag is now gold. The garbage is still garbage. The math does not change it.

But the people who ran the ratings agencies were not 12-year-olds. They were adults with finance degrees. And they stamped this stuff AAA over and over again because the Wall Street firms were paying them to do the stamping. The ratings agencies had become a paid service. The people they were rating were also the people writing their checks.

Step five. The Wall Street firms sell these AAA-rated CDOs to pension funds, foreign governments, insurance companies, and retirement accounts all over the world. Everyone buys them because the rating says they are safe.

Step six is the final trick.

Someone invents a product called a Credit Default Swap. It is insurance against a CDO going bad. The clever part, the part that Lanchester explains so well, is that you do not have to actually own the CDO to buy insurance on it. You can buy insurance on a CDO that belongs to someone else. You can buy insurance on a CDO ten times over. A hundred times over. There is no limit.

This is the equivalent of taking out fire insurance on your neighbor's house. And then on a thousand strangers' houses. And then betting against the entire neighborhood.

The smart people in the industry realized the CDOs were garbage. So they started buying credit default swaps against them. Not to protect themselves. To bet on the collapse.

Step seven was the part nobody planned for.

Housing prices stopped going up. The NINJA borrowers, who had been refinancing every year by using the rising value of their houses as collateral, suddenly could not refinance. They started missing payments. The bottom tranches of the CDOs started failing. Then the middle. Then the AAA tranches that had been declared safer than government bonds turned out to be made of the same garbage as the rest.

Then the insurance bills came due.

The biggest insurer in the world, AIG, had written hundreds of billions of dollars in credit default swaps on these CDOs. They did not have the money to pay. If AIG collapsed, every major bank on earth that had bought insurance from them would also collapse, because their "safe" CDOs would suddenly have no insurance. The American taxpayer ended up writing AIG a check for 182 billion dollars to keep the entire global financial system from falling apart.

The total damage of the crisis, by every honest estimate, runs into the trillions of dollars. Millions of people lost their homes. Millions lost their jobs. Almost nobody on Wall Street went to jail.

Here is the part Lanchester drives home in the final chapters, and the part you should not forget.

The fraud was not hidden in the math. The fraud was hidden in the complexity. Each individual step looked legitimate. Each individual product had a name, a rating, a paper trail. The reason nobody stopped it was that no single regulator, no single executive, no single auditor was forced to look at the entire chain from end to end. The garbage at the start and the AAA stamp at the end were separated by so many layers of paperwork that everyone could honestly say their specific layer looked fine.

Lanchester's central argument is the one that should haunt every person reading this in 2026.

Complexity is the disguise. Anytime a financial product is so complicated that the person selling it cannot explain it in 60 seconds, the complexity itself is the warning sign. The complexity is not protecting the customer. The complexity is hiding the fact that the customer is the product.

The 2008 crisis was not a failure of intelligence. It was a failure of plain language.

Almost every product on the market today that is being sold to retail investors, from leveraged ETFs to certain crypto derivatives to private credit funds, has the same structural pattern. Layered. Hard to explain. Stamped with an authoritative rating. And the people selling it can never quite tell you what is inside.

Which brings me to the question.

The next 2008 is already being built somewhere in the financial system right now.

Which industry, or which product, do you think is hiding the same trick under the same kind of complexity right now in 2026, and what makes you suspicious of it?

[Anna @AnnaDeMilanese]

Russland brennt und explodiert. Selenskyj sagte es heute.
Drei Explosionen auf der Hauptgaspipeline Mozdok-Kasimagomedsk in Dagestan – Kizilyurt. Feuerturm über der Stadt – kilometerweit sichtbar. Rohrdurchmesser: 1.200 Millimeter – Russlands Hauptversorgungspipeline in die Region. Über 100 Menschen evakuiert. Keine Opfer bisher bestätigt. Ursache noch unklar. Heute in Russland: Autobombe in Balaschicha – Oberst getötet.
150 ukrainische Drohnen in der Luft. Und jetzt: Hauptgaspipeline in Flammen in Dagestan. Es war ein langer Tag für Russland. 🇷🇺🇺🇦🇪🇺

[Greta @GretaGrace20]

@MustangMan_TX "the privilege of an interview"

He's not a King granting "privileges".

He's hired help living in public housing. Very temporarily.

So get off your knees, Tex.

Unless you're there exercising rights granted to you by Lawrence v. Texas.

If so, carry on.

[Brian Tyler Cohen @briantylercohen]

"When I saw my name on Trump’s newest enemies list, the absolute last thing I was going to do was the same thing all of those other cowards did by folding to Trump, getting themselves out of trouble, and not thinking about the effect it was having on everyone else. I have an opportunity here - in my small corner of the internet - to walk the walk, instead of just talking the talk. So if Trump wants to come after me and content creators, go for it. We’ll be even louder than before. If this self-proclaimed free speech champion wants to clamp down on my right to speak out against him, then I’ll do it twice as loud. And if me doing so gives a permission structure for the next person to fight back instead of capitulate, then I’ve done my job."

https://t.co/wYRxrMYerT

[Polymarket Sports @PolymarketSport]

🚨JUST IN: A camera fell onto the pitch during the Hungary vs. Kazakhstan match

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Plenty of awful things happening worldwide. One that hasn't gotten much attention is the brutal repression of women and girls in Afghanistan, including the denial of education. This holds back not just girls but the entire country.

[Daisy @DaizyZeeX]

FACT: Female victims who kill in SELF DEFENSE will spend an average of 15 years behind bars

Men who kill their female partners serve ,on average, between 2 and 6 years behind bars...

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Menstruation ad in South African newspaper The Star

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

Been feeling bleak for the past week after I read an essay saying the market for middle-grade books has collapsed because kids can no longer read them. Two long-time publishers of middle-grades have shuttered, with more to come. We don’t appreciate what a crisis this is. +

[Nobody Special @JG_Nuke]

This quote from OpenAI is telling.

Translation: We have a rapidly closing window to get this IPO out the door before the bubble bursts, our CFO doesn't want to go through with it because our books are a mess, but Sam is filing anyway.

[Edison V. Campos @Edison_vander]

Um homem de 25 anos mandou mensagem para uma menina de 13 anos.

"Oi, gatinha." "Meu sonho é ficar com você." "Seria uma honra tirar a virgindade dela."

O que ele não sabia: era a mãe quem respondia.

A mãe perguntou diretamente: "Isso não é pedofilia?"

Ele deu risada. E marcou o encontro.

Chegou lá — e encontrou a mãe.

Sete dias sem dormir. Conhecia o homem há 20 anos. Viu a filha crescer.

Ela bateu nele. Depois acionou a polícia, fez o boletim e entregou o celular como prova.

Ele foi à delegacia, prestou depoimento.

E foi embora. Não ficou preso.

Uma mãe passou 7 dias em colapso, montou uma operação, colheu as provas, entregou tudo — e o Estado soltou o homem na mesma noite.

Ela fez o trabalho da polícia, do MP e do judiciário.

E mesmo assim, não foi suficiente para mantê-lo atrás das grades.

[Littlewisehen @littlewisehen]

Köln bis London - per Direktzug

Von Köln direkt nach London – und das ohne Umsteigen: Diese Bahnverbindung könnte bald Realität werden. Nach aktuellen Planungen soll die Fahrt von der Domstadt in die britische Hauptstadt weniger als vier Stunden dauern. Bislang müssen Reisende in Brüssel oder Paris umsteigen. 🚆

[Acyn @Acyn]

Garcia to Reporter: Today we had Ms. Groff, who’s actually still testifying before the committee. She’s giving us, in fact, I think a lot of names of staff, employees, and folks who worked in the Epstein orbit. She worked for Epstein for 18 years, so she’s being asked some very tough questions, rightly so, about what she knew and who she scheduled appointments with. We know she scheduled massages, and that’s being asked of her.

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

If you’re looking for an explanation for how Trump got elected, it’s the same mechanism that makes people think irrational shit like chatbots are conscious or SpaceX is worth $2T.

Psyops. Elon Musk is a conman who learned from Peter Thiel you can change people’s brains through social media. That’s why Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a platform for personal aggrandizement, white supremacist propaganda, and organized psychological warfare.

That’s how Trump ran the table in ‘24: Elon Musk targeted exactly the demographics he needed to—on Twitter. It’s Cambridge Analytica on steroids, applied to a captured population.

This is also why there is a literal cult of AI promoters right now. Musk is deliberately programming the population to buy into the worst bubble in the history of the world—for exit liquidity.

This is what Thiel meant when he said “technology is this great alternative to politics.” He actually meant “we can use technology to take away freewill.” Musk is now applying this process to his own personal wealth.

America is being brainwashed at scale by a small group of elites.
They must be stopped and their tentacles totally rooted out. And our system must drastically change to prevent a relapse.

This is the great challenge of our time: Can we recognize the true source of our dysfunction—organized digital lying by elites—and do something about it?