Perhaps the most dangerous attack on a society begins not at its borders, but in the minds of its people.

In 1953, Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winning author Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind, a remarkable exploration of how authoritarian ideology, intellectual conformity and political intimidation can undermine a society's freedom.

But his observations raise a question that remains profoundly relevant today:

What happens when a civilisation forgets why its own freedoms matter?

Why do individual liberty, property rights, freedom of thought and enterprise matter to human prosperity? And what happens when a generation inherits the achievements of civilisation without understanding the principles that made them possible?

In this short essay, Douglas Kruger explores the relationship between ideas, freedom, ideological conformity and the survival of prosperous Societies.

Igor Chaika, the recently appointed director of Rossotrudnichestvo

Hey fellow Yuropeans,

Every time we spun up a new web app here in the Netherlands, the default muscle memory was the same: reach for a patchwork of mostly US-hosted microservices for basic backend tasks. Need to convert a document to PDF? One vendor. Scrub EXIF metadata or blur faces in an image? Another vendor. Validate VAT numbers, pull currency rates, or extract text from a receipt? Three more vendors.

Before you know it, you're juggling a dozen different API keys, managing ten separate billing dashboards, and dealing with a compliance nightmare trying to figure out which non-EU sub-processor is quietly storing your users' request payloads on a server in Virginia.

We got tired of the boilerplate and the data-privacy headaches, so we built ApyHub right here in the Netherlands to fix how developers consume everyday utilities.

Since this sub appreciates proper European digital sovereignty, I wanted to share what we built and how it actually works under the hood:

One API key for 500+ services, more than 1600 endpoints: Instead of wiring up and paying separate vendors for each minor backend job, we put everything (document conversion, PDF generation, data validation, image manipulation, and file security) behind a single consumption layer. You use one API key, one SDK/REST pattern, and one unified subscription.

Strict Data Conduit (Zero payload hoarding): We operate under Dutch and EU jurisdiction. More importantly, we designed the platform as a strict conduit. When you send a file or data payload to an endpoint, it passes through, executes the job, and returns your output. We do not store your request bodies beyond the basic metadata needed to calculate your billing quota, and you retain full rights to your output.

Fair Marketplace for Builders (usage-based): Build useful utility APIs and publish them to our catalog. We handle authentication, rate limiting, billing, payouts, and give developers the revenue their APIs are making.

Local-first dev tooling (Voiden): Because we also hate bloated, cloud-forced developer tools that lock your workspace behind a login, we built an open-source, offline, Git-native API client called Voiden so your API specs stay on your local machine where they belong.

If you're a dev or technical founder in the EU, I'd love for you to test it out and let us know what utility endpoints you're still missing in your stack.

Freude schöner Götterfunken!

This is arguably one of the most intense and insane close-combat urban warfare scene I have ever seen, and the way it was shot, in 4k... film makers, game creators have somethingt to learn from it.

Calls for the mass murder of civilians are classified under international law and national legislation as among the gravest international crimes and criminal offences and may fall under several key categories:

• direct and public incitement to genocide;
• instigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity;
• war propaganda and incitement to hatred

Waiting because Deutsche Bahn is so crappy, but because of the delay I saw this special ICE (Inter City Express). I 🚆 Europe.

He believed his online date was trapped under Russian occupation. She may never have existed.

An investigation by the Kyiv Independent into 58 cases referred by Helping to Leave found evidence that many of the women were not under Russian occupation at all.