Rob Kowalski - ₿

Bill Maher just went so hard against Islam, it left his guests in stunned silence. It all started when Maher recalled how people overused the term “Islamophobia” after 9/11. He says that moment was the “beginning” of a “wokeness” that forbade you to say this out loud: “There is such a thing as Western civilization. Remember after 9/11, if you said ‘clash of civilizations’? It was the beginning of sort of that wokeness where, ‘Oh, don’t say that. That’s Islamophobia.’” “No, it was a clash of civilizations. The civilizations are very different, and OURS IS BETTER!” [Guests stare at each other in silence]. Maher continued: “And if you’re not clapping, spend a week in a Muslim capital, you wouldn’t last.”

Budapeszt.❤️ Wspieramy Victora Orbana.

Holy moly: Sam Altman told Axios in a half-hour interview that AI superintelligence is so close, so mind-bending, so disruptive that America needs a new social contract. - It's on the scale of the Progressive Era in the early 1900s, and the New Deal during the Great Depression. - Altman warns: widespread job loss, cyberattacks, social upheaval, machines man can't control - "soon-to-be-released AI models could enable a world-shaking cyberattack this year. "I think that's totally possible," Altman said. "I suspect in the next year, we will see significant threats we have to mitigate from cyber."

Rubio: This is a regime led by people who believe it is their calling and their purpose in life to usher in the end of the world.

Another round of new VC funds in Poland. ~€60m for startups. Sounds great. But ~€45m of that is from PFR Ventures. That's 73% public money. Again. Poland is joining the G20 this year. A $1 trillion economy. Record cross-border M&A. And yet we still need the state to anchor nearly three quarters of early-stage VC fundraising? If after years of ecosystem-building, 44 private investors could only put up ~€15m alongside a €45m public commitment, the training wheels aren't coming off. They're getting bolted on. At some point we need to ask the uncomfortable question: is public capital still scaffolding the ecosystem, or is it preventing it from growing up? The real test was never how many new funds get launched. It's whether any of them could exist without PFR writing the anchor cheque. Congrats to the new teams. But the day we celebrate a major Polish VC fund with zero public capital - that's when the ecosystem has actually matured.