No one, and I mean no one, has ever been more destined to repeat history.

The Tech Oligarch's Republic A look at the Palantir manifesto, a logical conclusion of the War on Terror

The Palantir manifesto has the heritage of the War on Terror written throughout it. Which makes an awful lot of sense considering who staked Palantir at the start.

A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.

A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.

Bow to the machine that, if it works as directed, will destroy your way of life; and whether it does or does not work as directed, your boss will use it to try to destroy your way of life.

Bow To The Machine

NYT headline that says “Mamdani Endorses Lindsey Boylan, Who Accused Cuomo of Sexual Harassment.” The lede says “the endorsement, in a special election for a city council seat on Manhattan’s West Side, comes as the mayor seeks to build influence within the Council"

First & foremost, @lindseyboylan.bsky.social is more than deserving of this endorsement.

Second & just as important, fuck this headline. Lindsey didn’t accuse Cuomo of harassment. Cuomo harassed Lindsey. Period. She is not an accusor. She is a survivor-advocate. Show some respect. Report the truth.

Socialize the Knicks and correlate ownership share with MTA usage

The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden's Surveillance Machine Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more.

Absolute tour de force as @noahshachtman.bsky.social & @robertsilverman.bsky.social expose the Dolan Deep State, both a throwback to an older era of oligarchy and a harbinger of the next one.

Strike number 54 in Somalia of 2026 announced via press release (year’s total here is by count of confirmed strikes not by AFRICOM confirmation of the total so could be more unannounced).

www.newamerica.org/insights/ame...

Google, Microsoft, Meta All Tracking You Even When You Opt Out, According to an Independent Audit “This is the Strait of Hormuz in the data economy. If you want to make a change, this is where you cut it off. Anything short of that is theatrical political posture.”

NEW: An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines.

“In many ways fines have come to replace taxes."

zackeryatlas 12h The degradation of society: 1. Celebrating the k!lling of a CEO 2. Cheering on warehouse arsons 3. Making heroes out of people who attempt political violence You can be outraged at the system and still not glorify violence. These aren't wins. This is a society losing its moral compass. [Coming from a liberal btw]

I don’t know how people keep forgetting that workers rights were entirely written in blood and the capital class had to be threatened with violence before they agreed to things like 8 hour working days and 2 day weekends.

And now we know what Gates’ terms are

ME: I need to insert a footnote
MICROSOFT WORD: *spitting blood* fuck you, fuck your mother and fuck your footnote

Seeing a lot of shocked reactions to this in the quotes and it's funny how it's just people outing themselves for how deeply propagandized they are via the War On Terror lol.

Just US state department lines about Islam and Iranians they that deeply hold in their hearts not matching to reality.

It’s going to become increasingly harder and harder for people to separate mass deportation from policing and Mullin and the administration are quite sure there’s no appetite for addressing policing.

Mom, Kids, and Nowhere to Go - The American Prospect Family homelessness is spiking just as the Trump administration rolls back social services.

One of the fastest growing segments of the homeless population are families. They have a harder time getting shelter and staying in it, due to child care burdens that eat into their employment possibilities. Casey Quinlan talked to homeless families and service providers and files this report.

Honestly a lot of this reads like Ignatius forcing this awful, doomed strategy into making sense on behalf of his sources.

many obvious problems with this — even leaving aside the fact that it will require hostile acts against tankers and increase everyone’s energy costs — but it perhaps the biggest is that the “or what” Iran faces for noncompliance is the return to a war Iran just learned it can not just absorb but win

Orban to RETVRN to his ancestral homeland on the central Asian steppe

Bugs Bunny getting Daffy to hold up a DUCK SEASON sign ass empire

Surely this is fake, I thought, and then I checked my own website

We really sent the guy who couldn’t pick out donuts.

US President Donald Trump says the US Navy would immediately start blockading the Strait of ⁠Hormuz and would also interdict every vessel in international waters that had ⁠paid a toll to Iran. https://aje.news/x545rk

We have entered the “you can’t kill me if I commit suicide” phase of American Decline

New Yorker this week: "In the 90s, William F. Buckley had tried to keep paleocons like Brimelow and Buchanan out of mainstream conservatism by banning such ideas from the pages of National Review."

Brimelow was a senior editor of NR in the 90s and wrote many articles including cover stories.

Told her about Hidden Figures during the scenes with the mathematicians at Mission Control and they’re all white men

Watched Apollo 13 with my oldest and when the German scientist came on screen I stopped the movie to tell her about Operation Paperclip. If you know me or my work you know I’ve been waiting for this moment since I took her home from the hospital

The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it. Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal. On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.

Wrote about how Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the upper ranks of the US military ties into the larger MAGA project to restore hierarchies of race and gender: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Do you seriously think the world is only just now convinced the U.S. is an amoral threat to other nations?

This is a roster of names of the many, many people George Washington owned.

Iran Tightens Its Grip on Hormuz Despite Cease-Fire President Trump demanded opening the strait. Tehran’s Revolutionary Guard is limiting ship traffic and charging tolls

The long-term Iranian plan? Kill the petrodollar. “Iran is requiring ships to work out toll arrangements ahead of time and then pay the fees in cryptocurrency or Chinese yuan, mediators and shipbrokers said.”