Anat Rubin and I co-wrote a story for @calmatters.org about the people behind Sheriff Chad Bianco's "election investigation" -- sovereign citizens, Christian nationalists, and "constitutional sheriffs."
calmatters.org/investigatio...
Perplexity’s CEO is just the latest tech leader to tell the public their jobs will be sacrificed on the altar of the glorious AI future.
It’s a compelling narrative, but it distracts us from the real impact of AI: not to take the human out of the loop, but to take away their power and cut their pay
Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near. This one is gonna be a doozy.
Uh oh.
Trump, who said in the 2024 campaign that Kamala Harris would start World War 3, compares his war against Iran to World War II
Feature or bug?
Posting this in the hopes it can be manifested:
Palantir's greatest source of profit comes from underpaying its so-called "forward-deployed engineers." They are paid well, but only a fraction of their value to the company. They should be encouraged to unionize.
SCOOP --> Paramount, Meta, and X are refusing to say what happened to their huge contributions to Trump's presidential library after Sen Elizabeth Warren raised questions about its fund getting dissolved. Ds say tens of millions remain unaccounted for.
Details here:
newrepublic.com/article/2092...
This piece begins with Amity Shlaes' most common and most deceitful trick -- citing the unemployment numbers in 1938, when the country fell into a recession because FDR had been persuaded to *ease off* the New Deal, as proof that the New Deal didn't work.
Pure hackery.
Seems to me it's good for anyone to be able to access public health facilities, but a new Tennessee bill would require county health departments--among other agencies--to collect immigration information before offering treatment.
"Fascinating and important." —Walter Isaacson, # New York Times bestselling author The Technological Republic Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska
Next on the reading list.
(…Why do I do this to myself?)
Tomorrow is Patriots' Day in Massachusetts, which means it's a good time to roll out this all-timer from our archives.
two images of the human body's circulatory system. One of them with good cable management
The human circulatory system, before and after proper cable management.
In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.
This is a boringly accurate, purely factual description of events.
And again, this is simply not receiving the same breathless BIDEN FAILED IN AFGHANISTAN type of coverage, even though this is orders of magnitude worse on every dimension. The two parties simply are not held to the same standards.
DOW Rapid Response & @ @DOW... •4h X U.S. forces operating in the Arabian Sea enforced naval blockade measures against an Iranian-flagged cargo vessel attempting to sail toward an Iranian port, April 19. Guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) intercepted M/V Touska as it transited the north Arabian Sea at 17 knots enroute to Bandar Abbas, Iran. American forces issued multiple warnings and informed the Iranian-flagged vessel it was in violation of the U.S. blockade. After Touska's crew failed to comply with repeated warnings over a six-hour period, Spruance directed the vessel to evacuate its engine room. Spruance disabled Touska's propulsion by firing several rounds from the destroyer's 5-inch MK 45 Gun into Touska's engine room. U.S. Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit later boarded the non-compliant vessel, which remains in U.S. custody. American forces acted in a deliberate, professional, and proportional manner to ensure compliance. Since the blockade's commencement, U.S. forces have directed 25 commercial vessels to turn around or return to an Iranian port.
1/2 Details on what occurred earlier today, according to the DOD.
Here’s the director of the NIH explicitly espousing populism over expertise as the means of determining priorities for federally science funding by leaning into the stupidest possible examples: ivermectin as cancer therapy .
@rauchway.bsky.social you know that zombie you keep putting back in its grave? It's back again.
I will absolutrly criticize people for attending. It’s a grotesque spectacle nobody who cares about press freedom should dignify with their presence.
BREAKING 🚨 🚨 🚨
Eight children ranging from 1 to 14 years old were killed in a mass shooting in Shreveport, Louisiana, on Sunday morning, according to police.
The alleged gunman, who is related to some of the children, was killed after a vehicle chase.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
Trump doesn't negotiate. He has no idea how. Instead, he threatens and bullies. When he doesn't get his way he behaves like a toddler screaming "well I didn't want to play your dumb game anyway" before melting into a tantrum. Unlike a toddler, however, he threatens war crimes and has nuclear codes.
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...
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures ... have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
⚠️ Palantir released what it describes as a vision for “The Technological Republic” in which it argues AGAINST democratic and cultural pluralism and FOR militaristic supremacy enforced by a technocratic elite who produce AI weaponry.
These points stand out:
Trump is unfit & already should have been removed. But, look, the president is the commander in chief. If this is true (paywalled), it is direct violation of the chain of command.
Also, if generals are willing to do 👇, then why aren't they also willing to say no to illegal orders to do war crimes?
Among the many should-immediately-end-this-presidency daily scandals is the fact that the current administration is dismantling research on the most incredible new scientific advance in the last several decades. Literally killing people.
Every presidential administration gets accused of corruption—sometimes with good reason, sometimes not. But the corruption of the Trump administration is of a magnitude that is not only without precedent in American history but so large and brazen as to be difficult to wrap one's head around.
A federal judge in Illinois today ruled that the Trump administration improperly coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
900lb crates full of onions in a field
The Coachella music festival is in the news with the minimum price of sold out 3-day ticket costing $549. Contrast that with "Nicolas" who is currently harvesting onions in the Coachella area and getting paid $22 for a $900lb crate. #WeFeedYou #coachella2026
So at the risk of maybe overreading this and making an educated guess, I think I can guess what specifically Wyden is talking about.
I think it's about use of AI (LLMs) by FBI to surveil American communications without a warrant
A new report reveals monthly, 62 million men, mostly from USA, visit a website that teaches them how to drug & rape their spouses, prostitute them to other men, & broadcast it online for other men to pay & watch.
Here's the hard truth...
1/2
