Thomas Brunkard 🇮🇪🇪🇺

After some practice something of the old abilities returned. For this one minute of reasonable playing my neighbours endured 20 more, somewhat less melodious... #guitarviol #cinamatic #baroque #cellopractice #violdagamba

Infinite tokens staff benefit

The Onion has successfully acquired Alex Jones’ ‘Infowars’ after 17 months of legal battles and has debuted its new logo. It will be turned into a parody of itself, with the support of the Sandy Hook families. (variety.com/2026/digital/n…)

44% of evening peak met by batteries. In California, world’s 4th largest economy. Not some tiny pilot project or a niche experiment, a global industrial powerhouse If you’re still sitting in boardrooms or parliament banging on about baseload and the intermittency of renewables, you’re not just wrong, you’re a dinosaur California's 44% isn't an anomaly. It's a preview of the 2027-2030 reality for every major grid overbuilding renewables The "technical barriers" the fossil fuel lobby loves to cry about are gone. We are shifting solar and wind into the night at a massive, industrial scale. We don't need expensive, inflexible coal or gas to keep the lights on; we need more storage and we need it now - everywhere reneweconomy.com.au/grid-batteries…

Shocker

Actual wow

As a pancreatic cancer doc, cannot understate the gravity of this moment. I get chills at the prospect that we will imminently have something else to offer our patients with real clinical impact. @AACR #AACR26 @RevMedicines

You’re mixing three different concepts: GDP size, GDP per capita, and productivity. And then assuming linear scaling on top of that. That’s not how any of this works. If you don’t know why not ask? It’s OK not understanding this and you don’t need to hide behind silly posturing.

@BylinkinMichael @NJB781 @neolatyno You’re mixing metrics. US GDP is higher in nominal terms. EU and US are broadly similar in PPP terms. EU is the larger market by population. Nobody is crying. All this remains true even if you think it otherwise.

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

ZERO cases of cervical cancer diagnosed in women under age 25 in Australia 🇦🇺 None . Nada . Zip. For the first time since records began! How did this happen? One word VACCINES!!!!!

This is terrifying - a genuine existential threat to Ireland that should be headline news but I've seen no coverage of it in Irish media as yet.

@LKagainstfash This is awful.

MAGA racists fear identity loss as their culture relies on supremacy. It pales next to others. Irish culture thrives because it’s the opposite. People embrace it. Like the 10 year old Ukrainian refugee in West Kerry who mastered the Irish language and box.

Even better - tell him we’re renaming the Barack Obama Plaza amd coating it in gold paint and rococo plaster…

In an alternate 2025, Russia never invaded Ukraine. Russia played the long game instead. Slow economic integration. Energy dependency as strategy. A seat at the table rather than a war outside it. Then Trump wins in 2024 anyway. NATO fractures under Trump. Europe builds its own defense architecture. And Russia, stable and trade-integrated, becomes the obvious partner. The energy infrastructure was already there. The geography was always there. In that timeline, Russia is inside Europe’s single market by 2030. A partner in a European army. Collecting tariff-free revenue while Washington retreats into itself. Instead, Putin chose tanks. He made Russian gas a liability overnight. And he ensured that any future Russian leader who wants back into the Western economic order starts the negotiation from rubble. The irony is almost too large to look at directly. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

"The researchers found a positive association between feeling bothered by the news article and expressing disbelief in the allegations. Participants who experienced higher levels of mental discomfort were more likely to claim the accusations were fabricated. This suggests that the denial is not just a calm rejection of information, but rather a direct response to the psychological distress of cognitive dissonance." #google_vignette" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">psypost.org/cognitive-diss…

@DumbocratD @the_moodyfoodie @realstewpeters I think you’re on here to convince yourself. It’s OK to just admit “I was wrong. I should have not voted for a pedophillic narcissist. He will in fact not buy me e a girlfriend” etc

@seanpfee @NewstalkFM Is the question unfair?

There’s only a few possibilities here: He’s an idiot He’s an idiot and he thinks everyone else is an idiot He’s not an idiot and the people he’s addressing are idiots. Can’t imagine another one.

@suzy_wt @news_TheTRUTH @harryjsisson It’s a pity. It feels like there’s a belief that everything “American” just self created in a vacuum without any synthesis or evolution.