M.A. English lit/lang, retired IT nerd. Passionate about patient safety, story telling, literature & film. Racism, sexism, etc. is not tolerated.

Denmark
Joined September 2009
Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Also “shithouse” Norway: 🇳🇴 Press freedom: 1st v. 🇺🇸 64th 🇳🇴 Happiness: 6th v. 🇺🇸 23rd 🇳🇴 Life expectancy: 83 v. 🇺🇸 78 🇳🇴 Wealth fund: $350k each v. 🇺🇸 debt $115k each 🇳🇴 Health cover: everyone v. 🇺🇸 27 million uninsured 🇳🇴 Uni fees: free v. 🇺🇸 $1.87 trillion in student loans
Trump on Nobel Prize: Norway has become a shithouse country actually
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Putin, Trump and MAGA love repeating the story that NATO betrayed Russia by expanding eastwards, supposedly breaking a promise never to admit countries once trapped under Soviet communist rule. There is one rather inconvenient detail they always leave out: those countries desperately wanted to join. And with good reason. They remember Soviet occupation, political executions, mass deportations to Siberia, forced collectivisation, prison camps, secret police, censorship and generations of lives destroyed by Moscow’s glorious socialist paradise. Families disappeared. Countries lost their independence. Ordinary people could be imprisoned for expressing the wrong opinion. When communism collapsed, these nations did not need NATO to persuade them to escape Russian influence. They practically ran towards the door. Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia and the others understood something the MAGA intellectual establishment apparently struggles with: living next to Russia is considerably more pleasant when Russia cannot decide how you live. And that brings us to Serbia. Aleksandar Vučić, a leader who spent years cultivating Moscow while balancing Serbia’s European ambitions, has just been defeated by a student-led democratic movement. The celebrations in Belgrade tell their own story. Serbia has its own complicated history, and nobody should pretend this election settles every question about NATO or EU membership. But it exposes the central absurdity of Moscow’s worldview. When a European leader continually argues against Western integration while protecting Russia’s influence, the obvious question is whose interests he actually serves. There is no need to invent secret payments to recognise a politician doing Moscow’s work. NATO did not expand eastwards because Washington forced unwilling nations into an alliance. It expanded because countries with experience of Russian domination wanted protection from ever experiencing it again. Putin, Orban, JD Vance, Hegseth and Trump calls that Western aggression. Russia, meanwhile, has spent centuries discovering that keeping its neighbours within its sphere of influence generally requires threats, repression or an army. That tells you almost everything about which civilisation has something worth offering.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
I lost family in Auschwitz. I had family hide in caves for yrs in Hungary from Nazis I'm angry at how Netanyahu & his Zionist supporters have destroyed the goodwill the world has had for Jews for 70 years We are born Jewish. We don't have a choice Being a Zionist is a choice
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
I wish men hated rapists as much as they hate feminists.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Europe’s heatwaves this summer contributed to more than 50,000 deaths. Two-thirds of those deaths were attributable to human-induced climate change, according to a new study. science.org/content/article/…
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
For weeks, some racist Western media outlets published story after story against Professor Jason Arday, at times every few hours, branding him a plagiarist. They hounded him relentlessly, and the pressure became too much for him. He committed suicide in August, aged just 41. This week, he was cleared of plagiarism yet again. A fresh investigation by the academic publisher Taylor & Francis found nothing to support the allegations. Of the four formal investigations into his work, not one substantiated the charge. The same publications that hunted him are now silent. They have not corrected their reporting, and they have not had the decency to admit they were wrong. This is how hard it is to be Black in a deeply racist world, and to succeed where they expect you to fail. Even those who present themselves as the moral conscience of the Western world have nothing to say. In a shameful act, the Oxford Reform Society has invited Nathan Cofnas, the self-described "race realist" who first raised the plagiarism allegations against Professor Arday, to speak at Oriel College next month. Oriel College, the home of Cecil John Rhodes’ statue. These institutions are racist. Sadly, Black leaders have failed to build rival institutions that give Black people respect and intellectual dignity. We are forced to endure disrespect because our leadership has failed us completely. Black billionaires line up to hand money to these institutions in exchange for meaningless honorary titles, instead of building our own. May Professor Arday's soul rest in peace. You were hounded to your death by publications that today do not even have the shame to admit they were wrong.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
As someone works in human rights, I’ve never seen anything like the Epstein files in my 15-year career Raped Cannibalized Trafficked Filmed Terrorized Tortured Murdered 13, 14, 15 year children ZERO arrests. Not a single girl got justice. THOUSANDS have been arrested for criticising Israel. ZERO have been arrested for raping children. I don't understand how we're not having a global revolution right now.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
I know Putin is a monster but seeing him ‘thanking Melania Trumр for her humanitarian effort’ in Oleshky after his own Russian army first occupied it to then starve the people there is some very special level of psychopathy
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
They taught the colonized child to see the world through the colonizer’s eyes. And then, when the colonized child grew up and looked through those eyes and saw themselves... They saw what the colonizer saw. "Backward." "Primitive." "In need of development." Behind on a timeline whose destination was someone else’s present. This is the wound that outlasts the empire. The guns go. The administrators go. The flags come down. But the curriculum stays in the mind. The habit of measuring yourself against a standard that was designed without you. The reflex of looking at your own culture and asking, involuntarily, what the colonizer would think of it. The deep, persistent, half-conscious belief that modernity is something you are still catching up to rather than something you were always building in your own way. This is why independence was necessary but not sufficient. You can remove the occupier without removing the occupation of the mind. Decolonizing the curriculum was not a symbolic act. It was the harder and more fundamental liberation. The liberation of the internal landscape. The recovery of the right to know what you knew before they told you it didn’t count.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
روسیه بزرگترین کشور دنیاست و تقریباْ تمام خاکش رو با زور نیروی نظامی به دست آورده اما شما هرگز از کسی نمیشنوید بگه که روسیه زمین و منابع مردم بومی رو غارت و استعمار کرده و با امپریالیسم به این وسعت رسیده/۱
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
After this, there is simply no way to restore trust in Starlink, particularly in Starshield as a defence option. Alternatives will take over within two years.
SpaceX Investor @GerberKawasaki tells me he’s not only “disgusted…from a humanity perspective” by restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine, but also: “…they've given everybody a reason not to use Starlink, that Starlink isn't reliable for national security for anybody but Trump.”
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
BREAKING: YES! A federal judge drops the HAMMER on Trump and orders him to be deposed for his $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC over alleged defamation. This is the LAST thing in the world he wants... U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett has ruled that Trump must be deposed by the BBC's attorneys — which, it should be noted, are some of the best-paid, most incisive, ruthless lawyers in the business — by December 11th. Given Trump's worsening dementia and pathological penchant for lying, it's safe to presume that they will tear him apart. If Trump refuses to be deposed by the deadline, he risks forfeiting the entire lawsuit. He was originally supposed to sit for the deposition on October 16th, but his attorneys informed the BBC that he was "no longer available" because he had to tend "other matters of national importance." Translation: He was scared. The suit in question revolves around patently absurd allegations of defamation stemming from the editing of a documentary about Trump's fascist efforts to overturn the 2020 election after he lost to Joe Biden. The case is clearly meritless, but Trump was hoping to use the powers of the presidency to harass and intimidate the BBC into agreeing to a settlement, like he has with other outlets. Thankfully, they're standing firm. Please ❤️ and share if you stand with the BBC!
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
The sheer insanity of American diplomacy under Trump is becoming difficult to comprehend. Steve Witkoff, a New York property developer somehow entrusted with negotiating Europe’s most consequential war since 1945, has just saluted Vladimir Putin as a humanitarian. The man who invaded Ukraine, ordered the destruction of its cities and presides over a state accused of abducting Ukrainian children. Apparently, releasing an American whom Russia wrongfully imprisoned makes Putin a humanitarian. Imagine sending a property salesman to negotiate with a war criminal, only to discover he cannot distinguish between a humanitarian gesture and the man responsible for creating the humanitarian catastrophe. They are so cringe. 😬
Steve Witkoff to Putin: You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Episcopal Church's bishop of Europe, Mark Eddington, on JD Vance's explanation of the protests in Paris. Priceless.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, was the grandson of an enslaved Black woman in French colonial Saint-Domingue. Omar Sy was born in a Parisian suburb to Senegalese and Mauritanian parents. He became the first Black actor to win the César for Best Actor. Zinedine Zidane, affectionately known as Zizou and arguably the greatest French footballer in history, was born in Marseille to Algerian parents. France has never had difficulty claiming the products of its relationship with Africa when those products were useful. The novelist. The screen icon. The World Cup trophy. These were French. The teenager in Saint-Denis is a problem to be managed. The same history. The same connection. The same people. What changed is the economic utility. When France needed labor, Africans were welcomed as workers. When the postindustrial economy reduced the need for that labor, the same communities became a social question, a security concern, a civilizational challenge. The civilization discourse arrived precisely when the economic usefulness ended. That timing is not a coincidence. That is the relationship, visible in its actual form.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Look at the post below. Yesterday, we reported that Europe’s four biggest mobile operators 🇩🇪🇫🇷🇪🇸🇬🇧are exploring a joint bid to take on Starlink: phones connected straight to satellites, no tower needed. The replies came on cue: “Europe can’t launch. Europe has no satellites. Europe has no money. SpaceX has no competition. Period.” We hear this every time Europe talks about tech independence. But are they right? 👇 ❌ “Europe can’t launch.” ✅ True, SpaceX launches far more: 165 Falcon 9 flights in 2025. That gap is real. But even Amazon booked 24 launches on Europe’s Ariane 6 for its own Starlink rival. Ariane 6 has already put 100 of its satellites in orbit. In September, @isaraerospace, a German 🇩🇪 startup, reached orbit. At the same time, Europe’s first reusable rocket prototype is on its pad in Sweden 🇸🇪. And the @esa has put €900M+ behind a new generation of rockets. That’s more than twice the ~$400M NASA gave SpaceX to develop Falcon 9 and its Dragon capsule. What will happen to American launchers once these are operational? ❌ “Europe doesn’t build satellites.” ✅ Galileo, Europe’s GPS, is the most precise satellite navigation system in the world. Over 4.5 billion devices use it. Probably yours too. Finland’s 🇫🇮 @iceye_global runs the world’s largest fleet of radar satellites, which see through clouds and at night. @Thales_Alenia_S, in Turin, Italy 🇮🇹, built over half of the International Space Station’s living space. It also built the current satellites of Iridium, the American satellite-phone network. @AirbusSpace, @ThalesAerospace and @LDO_Space are merging their space businesses into one 25,000-strong champion. And IRIS², the EU’s own 348-satellite network, is moving to full deployment of its governments and defence infrastructure. If Europe has “nothing”, why are NASA’s astronauts living in it and your phone navigating with it? ❌ “Europe doesn’t have the money.” ✅ EU households keep €12 trillion in cash and bank deposits. That’s more than Nvidia and Apple, the world’s two most valuable companies, combined. Enough to buy SpaceX five times over. On top of that, Europeans hold $8 trillion in US stocks and bonds. For now. Because something has changed. Every year, €300bn of European savings leaves the EU. Europe is done watching it go: it has started building a single market for savings and investment, so that European money grows European companies. Some, like Danish 🇩🇰 pension funds, have already started dumping US government bonds. What will happen the day Europe offers a real alternative to American financial markets? ❌ “Europe is years behind on innovation.” ✅ 3 of the last 4 Nobel laureates in physics were born in Europe 🇬🇧🇫🇷🇧🇪. All three did their prize-winning work at American universities. The world’s first microprocessor, the chip that became the brain of every computer, was designed at Intel by an Italian 🇮🇹: Federico Faggin. Google’s AI lab, DeepMind, was born in London 🇬🇧. OpenAI was co-founded by scientists born in Poland 🇵🇱 and Slovakia 🇸🇰. Now Washington is cutting research funding, and applications from US-based scientists to the European Research Council have more than doubled. The EU has proposed doubling its budget too. Europe’s red tape can be cut with a vote. Can America win back the trust it has destroyed by threatening, humiliating and insulting its allies? ❌ “Europe needs America more than America needs Europe.” ✅ Look closer. In April, NASA flew astronauts around the Moon for the first time in over 50 years. The module that powered their spacecraft, pushed it to the Moon and kept them alive was European, assembled in Bremen, Germany 🇩🇪. NASA’s Webb telescope launched on a European Ariane 5, so precisely that its fuel should last about 20 years instead of 10. And the world’s most advanced AI chips can only be made with machines from one company: ASML, in the Netherlands 🇳🇱. We’ve seen this film before. In 1970, American planemakers ruled the skies. Europeans pooled their strengths and built Airbus. Airbus has out-delivered Boeing every year since 2019. The US just turned 250. The University of Bologna, in Italy, was founded in 1088, 938 years ago. Europe has been written off many times. Those trying to convince Europeans we can’t stand on our own forget who gave the world the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the welfare state and the World Wide Web, born at CERN in Geneva 🇨🇭. Betting against Europe isn’t analysis - it’s hubris. And that arrogance is pushing European public opinion towards one conclusion: we’re done with America. One day, those repeating “weak, dependent Europe” will wake up to a Europe running on its own rockets, satellites, capital and talent. That day is closer than they think. 🇪🇺
After Trump and Musk restricted Starlink in Ukraine, four of Europe's biggest phone companies are joining forces to bring satellite coverage straight to your phone. European industry is answering what people want: a satellite service that isn't controlled from Washington.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Thank you, @kajakallas, for speaking plainly. All European leaders should follow your lead.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
The greatest intelligence failure in American history may not have been a foreign operation. It may have been America's inability to protect itself from its own president. For years, the evidence of Trump's extraordinary loyalty to Moscow has been mounting. His admiration for Putin, his attacks on NATO, his possession of highly classified American defence secrets, and his repeated willingness to advance Russian interests. Yet the most extraordinary part of this entire scandal is the American state itself. The FBI, the intelligence community, Congress and the entire national security apparatus have proved incapable of protecting the country from a president whose conduct has repeatedly raised profound questions about his loyalty. Russia spent decades trying to defeat the United States from the outside. Now Putin can watch an American president dismantle the Western order from within. And the institutions built to defend America have been unable to stop him. What an extraordinary national humiliation.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Funny how the god of conservative Christianity has a huge problem with how people dress and who they love yet is completely unconcerned with greed, bigotry, senseless violence, and systemic injustice.
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Birgit 🇩🇰 🇬🇱🇫🇴🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ retweeted
Canada's $2.3B pivot away from Starlink isn't just about internet-it's a massive warning shot to Elon Musk over Ukraine. PM Mark Carney directly cited Musk's sudden service cuts and data restrictions to Ukraine as the exact reason Canada must achieve total strategic autonomy. No ally wants to rely on one unpredictable billionaire who can pull the military plug during a war. Canada isn't just protecting itself. The $2.3B contract expands Ottawa-based Telesat Lightspeed into a military-grade satellite network meant for secure Arctic and NORAD defense. Telesat confirmed they plan to deploy this secure system directly to Ukraine and other allied nations. Canada is literally funding the un-pluggable backup system Ukraine has been looking for. 🇨🇦
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