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...

Elon Musk basically accused Trump of being a pedophile and then got dinner with him again a few months later. Joe Rogan acted shocked and dismayed about ICE and Iran and now he’s standing behind Trump in the Oval Office. These guys only care about holding onto power through any means necessary

Pretty convenient outcome, right? It reminds me of exactly what happened when they ended the shutdowns.

You know what I don't see? Lots of Democrats running to Axios to call Jared Golden a selfish asshole. They save that for when one of their own attempts impeachment.

bsky.app/profile/dyla...

"A budget is a moral document" and "uncle sam goddam"

The New Khan TED Institute will reimagine higher education - while apparently ignoring it completely. Yesterday, TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced they will "reimagine higher education for t... The New Khan TED Institute will reimagine higher education - while apparently ignoring it completely. Yesterday, TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced they will "reimagine higher education for the AI...

'Yesterday, TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced they will "reimagine higher education for the AI age." Corporate partners include Google, Microsoft, Accenture ... Not a single university is present. Think about this.'
www.linkedin.com/posts/jeppes... #HigherEd #Learning #Education

Also: the people who know and try to do something about it are frequently punished in extreme and disproportionate ways.

Texas Tech University to Close Gender, Sexuality Programs All majors, minors, certificates and graduate degrees that are “centered on” sexual orientation or gender identity must be phased out and canceled, Texas Tech University system chancellor Brandon Crei...

“The decree is an escalation of the course content review policies implemented last year and reflects a trend of academic censorship at Texas public institutions.”

From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Octavia E. Butler, 1998:

That part

🙋‍♂️

Philadelphia’s Abolition School taps the ‘radical potential’ of political education Known as the W.E.B. Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction, the organization grounds local organizers in historical knowledge, theory, and rigorous analysis

If you do not know how power is wielded, how can you analyze the systems working against everyday people?

Philadelphia’s Abolition School taps the ‘radical potential’ of political education, @adryancore.bsky.social reports. Facilitators are interested in making ideas available to analyze the world.

FYI, Seattle.

To be clear, these are what the presidential budget request is *trying* to terminate.... They tried this last year, and we fought and won.

When we fight, we win.

Ban users rather than regulate and punish companies, that totally worked for tobacco right? RIGHT?!?!

Tell us about it. We’ve been covering it for more than a year in the medical literature. And we can explain why and how these things get seeded. www.the-geyser.com/hey/

Sam Altman proposing to literally meter intelligence is just the most egregious proposal of such an anti-human industry. But he is not the only one with a desire to create a world where buying a tech product is a requirement to be fully engaged in society. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a society where anyone not wearing his AI-enabled smart glasses is at a disadvantage. In some ways, tech billionaires have already pushed us in that direction. It’s become hard to get by in modern society without a smartphone. Altman’s slip of the tongue at the Infrastructure Summit give us a bit more insight into how these tech billionaires see the world, and how little humanity features in their visions of the future. They will degrade every aspect of society if they feel it will get them one step closer to the realization of intelligent machines and their science fiction dreams. But every time they reveal more of that vision, they further demonstrate why everyone else must work together to stop them.

Altman’s statement about treating intelligence as a utility is another insight into the dystopian world tech billionaires are trying to build. It’s one with their power is enhanced as the rest of our realities is degraded and enclosed. They must be stopped.

disconnect.blog/make-em-dumb...

There’s one other wrinkle to this story. It’s convenient that Musk is promoting IQ so hard, when the metric was designed in many cases to make white people appear quantifiably more intelligent than people of color. Reviving the use of IQ tests is convenient for the arguments billionaires make around quantifying intelligence in order to try to legitimize their arguments around chatbots, but it also benefits the broader white supremacist project that so many influential people in the tech industry have started openly championing in recent years. At every point, they’re finding ways to make the world a worse place while pretending to do the opposite.

But there’s another piece of that too: IQ tests are not actually a trusted measure of intelligence, and in the past they’ve been used to push a eugenic project that made white people appear more intelligent than people of color.

disconnect.blog/make-em-dumb...

An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death

The 2025 documentary Pistachio Wars by Yasha Levine (Watermelon Pictures) shows that billionaire California pistachio magnates Stewart and Lynda Resnick, owners of The Wonderful Company, use their influence to drive a hardline U.S. foreign policy against Iran to protect their market monopoly...

16 GW of power deals announced by 5 hyperscalers in 2026

More evidence that Big Tech is locking us into a new generation of fossil fuel infrastructure and destabilizing our climate: the 5 largest hyperscalers have announced 16GW of power deals this year, and only 3GW have been for clean power.

From AP News: "Microsoft is contributing $12.5 million to AFT over five years. OpenAI is providing $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources, and Anthropic has offered $500,000."

Looks like AFT is receiving $23 million from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to push AI onto educators via "trainings"

apnews.com/article/arti...

news.microsoft.com/source/2025/...

Or... instead its important Ts understand how they can help students be critical and resist the AI inevitability narrative that so many finaciers are banking on with no reguard for the larger impacts of widespread so called AI

This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.

"The metric of deciding who is a legitimate target 'in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.'”

from an article on US drone policy post-9/11

Israeli soldiers are detonating entire villages in South Lebanon while taking selfies. Ancient mosques, churches, cemeteries, schools, hospitals - all being obliterated by the genocidal regime

www.instagram.com/reel/DWrg5xi...

Humans are fucked up.

fortune.com/2026/04/01/a...

It's open season for refusing AI There's been a wave of successful efforts to ban, reject and shut down AI.

HELL YEAH

"Looking back at the events of the last few weeks, I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing a reawakening of our capacity for this sort of mass refusal," writes @bcmerchant.bsky.social.

These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department. Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of publ...

A policy expert described Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s push in favor of private schools as a “great American heist,” funneling money from public schools:

“It’s a strategic theft of the future of our country, our kids and our democracy.”

(Published October 2025)

The Republican program of tax cuts for billionaires, endless foreign wars, and healthcare cuts is just not very popular. That's why they campaign on culture war bullshit.

feeling like we're in some of those weeks where decades are happening