Monitoring the Situation Thrilled to announce our investment in a new media company called MTS

Could @bencollins.bsky.social @theonion.com also now start gearing up to buy www.a16z.news/p/monitoring... (more here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEOi...)

Opening text of a thread by Palantir from X Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Palantir put out a 22-point summary of their CEO's book The Technological Republic. It's pitched as a defence of the West, but if you read it through the VDA framework, verification, deliberation, accountability, what it's actually doing looks rather different.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

Fuzzy memories and hard facts: An SC accuser's claims against Epstein, Trump examined An alleged victim of Jeffrey Epstein gave FBI agents true accounts of her time growing up in SC. Claims she made about Donald Trump remain unsubstantiated.

"A woman who claims she was abused as a minor by both Epstein and Trump has given the FBI vivid accounts that include aspects of her life corroborated by the The Post and Courier through public records ... she claimed Trump forced her to commit a sex act on him sometime around 1984."

The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February.

A record number of Americans are withdrawing from their 401ks to cover expenses.

Americans owe $18.5 trillion in debt — an historic high.

Meanwhile, the wealth of America's 935 billionaires soared by $1.5 trillion in 2025.

“Golden Age” for whom?

Screenshot of an X post by “No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen” claiming Costco is demanding that Trump reimburse them for tariffs so they can refund customers. Below are two images side by side: the Costco Wholesale logo and a photo of Donald Trump looking at a phone while reporters hold microphones near him.

This is what all big companies should be doing.

The king of the hypocrites, really.

Just an utterly shameless person who also, if I recall correctly, covered up sexual abuse crimes.

Instead, Kari Lake has badly damaged America's international broadcasters and wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers money
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

There are four non-mutually-exclusive fundamental incentives to disinformation campaigns:

1) financial
2) power
3) physical
4) social-psychological

I assess the most powerful current narratives are to offer:

Absolution of shame and self-regulation.

This supports all four incentives.

Peter Thiel has been open about this for a long time. Trump is a way to break the republic, which can then be replaced by “free economic zones” with oligarchs as dictators and tech as a taskmaster for helpless humans without any rights. (1/2)

The Two Empires of AI AI may feel universal but the capability is sovereign and the power sits in the US and China. Sovereignty matters. Written together with Christopher Ahlberg.

Do Americans appreciate how quickly they are alienating even their staunchest former allies? Read conservative @tomtugendhat.bsky.social from the UK and former Canadian PM Stephen Harper making the case for sovereignty: dispatches.tomtugendhat.org/p/the-two-em... and www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

"Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some"

“Cognitive warfare is not coming—it is already here.”

Discussion from Mark Van Helzing link: www.linkedin.com/pulse/cognit...

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.

Bellingcat's Discord community is still digging through the Epstein files and making sure they're all safely backed up. You can join the thread here:
discord.com/channels/709...
Some really weird stuff in there. New users can use this link to join the server:
discord.com/invite/belli...

Similar to my testimony in European Parliament last year.

youtu.be/xJaJfROLs6Y?...

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio) YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

Pay attention to this. The purpose of these investigations is not just to manufacture evidence to support Trump’s 2020 “voter fraud” accusations, but also to set the stage for another round of efforts to suppress votes and delegitimize election results in 2026 (which the GOP is likely to lose).

Weeks before the 2024 election, American military hackers carried out a secret operation to disrupt the work of Russian trolls spewing false information at US voters. https://cnn.it/4qHxzHb

The Minneapolis Uprising A series of street-level clashes have snowballed into a larger fight against autocracy.

“At times, Minneapolis reminded me of what I saw during the Arab Spring in 2011, a series of street clashes between protesters and police that quickly swelled into a much larger struggle against autocracy,” Robert F. Worth reports.

TincherSealedWitnessDec012426.PDF

This witness to Alex Pretti's murder not only refutes the governmen't story, but says she is afraid to go home because federal agents might arrest her. This is what it feels like to live under state terror.
www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

👇💯

The lack of intellectual humility, particularly across tech / venture, is not self-destructive as it should be, but rather humanity-destructive

I post politically on eXtwitter and no science/tech, and here only post on science/tech. But we must not look away from what is happening right now, out in the open with no regard for morality or human life. Do not look away.

Spotlight graph of X discourse about the shooting/killing of a man by ICE agents on January 24 in Minneapolis. Graph showing X posts along time (X axis) and cumulative number of X posts shared by that time (Y axis). Post counts are estimated (by Brandwatch) and include both X posts and reposts where the text contained terms indicating the post was about the *shooting AND the video* during the time period. Individual posts are plotted on the graph, sized by the number of reposts that post received (during the time period). Plotted posts are limited to posts that received >1 reposts. Two posts are highlighted. One by @gremloe (1/24/2026, 12:31:31 PM EDT): “It appears from zooming in just moments before ICE/CBP shoot yet another US citizen, one agent removes the victims firearm from his waste holster. The victim was UNARMED when he was shot multiple times. This is a state execution. Again.” A second by @bennyjohnson (1/24/2026, 1:21:28 PM EDT): “Tim Walz just a few days ago was climbing on the gate of his mansion urging protesters to keep causing “trouble” and fighting ICE. An armed man just attacked agents and got killed. See how that works? Minnesota officials are fueling this.”

If you're interested in seeing how framing contests are taking shape after the ICE killing of another person in Minneapolis, here's a window into the conversation on X this morning.
Link to interactive graph: faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Spot...
* I put this together quickly. Sorry for any errors

Don't believe your lying eyes:

Please reshare the below post, unfortunately some accounts with lots of followers have reposted the false claim and loads of people are falling for it.

Same thing every time:
1. Reframe the victim as the villain

2. Make the state the injured party

3. Turn critique into complicity (“oh so you side with terrorists”)

4. Expand blame to an entire out-group

5. Fuse to a larger us-against-them story to keep any alarmed within the base from defecting

not surprising and yet still jarring to read ex-FBI agents describing how Kash Patel and Bongino reacted to Charlie Kirk's murder while running the agency. truly the content creator administration/podcast govt www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

It’s not a meme it’s a deceptively edited photograph.

US law requires 2/3 Senate approval for international treaties

Podcast Jay and the Resentment Bros own this

As I tell my students:

“Where there is chaos, there is opportunity.”

There is a great opportunity to rebuild infrastructure in other regions and in private enterprises, with support from investors such as major pension funds.

Opportunity to build, but with real urgency.