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...

Over the past week, the president posted an image of himself as Jesus, the vice president challenged the pope on Catholic doctrine, and the secretary of defense quoted the speech of a fictional hit man and presented it as scripture.

Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems

The national media is eating up this report as justification for perpetuating the lie that universities themselves - as opposed to decades of attacks from the far right authoritarian party - are responsible for eroding trust in higher education. You can almost hear them salivating at the chance.

Inside Texas Republicans’ Effort to Make the Midterms About Islamophobia GRAPEVINE, TX – On a cold spring morning in this tony Dallas suburb,...

Some in the GOP eye a Muslim panic as strategy to win Texas.

My latest for MSNOW details how the Trumps turned Fox News’ “Biden Crime Family” schtick into a business plan, and the network immediately stopped caring about political corruption: www.ms.now/opinion/trum...

this is legitimately fascinating as an a real life demonstration of why trump is flailing

This is an existential crisis for American higher education, & it remains maddening, if not sadly predictable that there continues to be <exactly> no loud, collective public action by university chancellors & presidents to speak out against & try to reverse these policies (Olson 1965, Akerlof 1970).

What the death of Direct File tells us about state capacity We CAN have nice things - if we want them

New, from me: American taxpayers will spend billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars — not to pay their taxes, but to report them to the government.
Thank Trump, who killed Direct File, a free tax high-quality reporting tool that IRS had built. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/what-the-d...

You know what would also help her afford her husband's cancer treatments? UNIVERSAL FUCKING HEALTH CARE JESUS FUCKING CHRIST HOW IS THIS GODDAMN COUNTRY STILL LIKE THIS MAYBE GRANDMA SHOULDN"T HAVE TO DELIVER FOOD LIKE A TEENAGER IF WE HAD A DECENT FUCKING SOCIETY!!!!!!!!!!

“Iran showed up in Pakistan this weekend with a team of 30 people, many …with Ph.D.s & diplomacy experience. America’s delegation was five real-estate developers and venture-capital dudes who were shocked when the Iranians didn’t succumb to their Glengarry Glen Ross high-pressure sales pitch.”

Maybe I’ll go to UseR2026 in Warsaw and take a side trip to Budapest.

CDC delays publishing report showing covid vaccine benefits The acting CDC director cited concerns with the methodology, but the design has long been used to test vaccine effectiveness.

wapo.st/4222rHK I missed this story when it first came out. Keep up with your covid jabs, especially if you’re an old guy like me. You can’t trust the MAGA administration to give you good advice.

Oh, yeah, that was the Obama Iran deal.

series of headlines detailing "marathon talks"

series of headlines detailing "marathon talks"

series of headlines detailing "marathon talks"

series of headlines detailing "marathon talks"

Marathon talks? Compared to what? It took years for Obama to deliver a detailed Iran deal. The Trump admin are packing it in after 20 hours.
(H/T @bgrueskin.bsky.social)

I’m a Nobel Prize-winning immigrant. I can no longer recognize this country. Attacks on science and immigrants are destroying America.

"All of these things frighten me, and they should frighten you as well. I made the decision to create a life for myself here, because I viewed this as a place that rewarded determination, hard work, and integrity. It still has a chance to be that place again."
open.substack.com/pub/ofthebra...

There is a staggering gap between Trump’s confidence in his extraordinary talents, so that a great power’s strategy can be safely left to his mood of the moment, and the harsh reality of his limited grasp of the meaning of the events unfolding around him. As he starts from the assumption that there is none more powerful, his default tactics always involve bullying. When the targets are unresponsive all he can do is either double down, with ever more lurid threats, or else move on, as if there was never an issue, without acknowledging defeat.

@ldfreedman.bsky.social's apt assessment of how Trump's bullying leads him to fail.

samf.substack.com/p/the-causes...

Iran Tries to Grasp Economic Devastation of War, and Find a Way Past It The vast scale of destruction wrought by U.S. and Israeli bombardment will make sanctions relief all the more vital to Iran’s government as it tries to negotiate a peace agreement.

I think it's more accurate to say that Iran managed to establish deterrence based on mutually assured destruction than that it "won" the war.

But the problem with MAD is that the destruction is indeed mutual, and in Iran's case staggering.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/w...

A silent catastrophe.

WATCH: Donald Trump’s Siege of Minnesota Never Ended Swin traveled to the Twin Cities to see how Donald Trump’s brutal occupation is continuing to inflict pain and fear, months after the national media stopped paying attention.

As of right now, Trump’s occupation of the twin cities and Minnesota never ended. It just changed

As the national media and other mostly moved on, his siege, psychotic economic warfare, and terror campaign against the state and its civilians continue to this day:

zeteo.com/p/donald-tru...

I knew it was bad but really didn’t appreciate it was quite this bad

as.ft.com/r/db911dd6-f...

More… “These days, I wonder if a crucial skill to maintaining sanity and self-awareness is rather the ability to get out of zombie flow. ‘Without challenge, life had no meaning,’ Csikszentmihalyi wrote. The elders knew it, too. Life is supposed to be the right kind of hard.”

How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture Or: If you're so smart, why aren't you happier?

open.substack.com/pub/derektho...

“Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition….To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.”

The Israeli cabinet has quietly greenlit the construction of 34 new settlements across the West Bank— the largest single approval of outposts in a single step, nearly doubling the recent total from 69 to 103 www.i24news.tv/en/news/midd...

bsky.app/profile/adam... “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”

The meta-idiocy of it: rather than getting real results by playing madman, a real madman conceals the unreality of his results (due to his really being a madman) by playing at only playing at being a madman. Which he has the disinfotainment savvy, riding the madness, to manage.

The reprehensible story that Trump and Hegseth are now telling about this war is that threatening genocide and civilizational erasure is *good,* because it bends the world to Trump/American will. We need to take this on directly.

Some thoughts on this idea here:

newrepublic.com/article/2087...

Israel’s murderous rampage in Beirut today is both massive war crimes piled upon war crimes and a clear effort to blow up the ceasefire whether Trump wants it or not.

Across Asia, EV showrooms bustle in wake of Iran oil shock The pinch from higher pump prices is particularly acute in the Pacific region, where about 80 percent of the crude passing through the Strait of Hormuz typically ended up before that route was effecti...

I heard BYD is going to give Trump an award for salesman of the year www.autonews.com/byd/an-asia-...

How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran

Three takeaways from @nytimes.com "inside the room" account.

1) Previous US admins mostly resisted being conned by Netanyahu. Trump was a complete sucker.

2) Vance and, to lesser degree, Marco playing "we always knew this was bad idea" card.

3) Trump is an idiot.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/u...

This is an unexpected statement from Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson (R) to the Wall Street Journal today.