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:

The Adjudicated Rapist-in-Chief claims he could bring down the Papacy, the Vatican & the entire Catholic Church overnight.

Pope Leo: "The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants...
dragging that which is sacred into darkness & filth."

tRUMP: "I'm not a fan of Pope Leo."

#HappySundayToAll ✝️

2 days ago.

The appetite for public degradation in this admin is off the charts

Anyone on here see Soft Machine in concert 1970 - 1974? I'm currently writing a piece and I'm interested in getting eyewitness accounts of the team in action. If yes, please PM me or send an email (address in my bio)

Stuffed Cabbage World Championship brings together top culinary talent From Seoul to Tokyo, London and Saskatoon in Canada, seven carefully selected contestants traveled to France at the end of February to take part in the second edition of the World Stuffed Cabbage Cham...

meanwhile in france

www.lemonde.fr/en/lifestyle...

Except the robot fell over not far from the finish line and had to have humans pick it up again so it could keep going.

It’s really inexcusable the British publishers use glued instead of sewn bindings on most hardcover books. This is a brand new book I borrowed from the library, I am the first reader. This binding will not last for more than a half a dozen reads before pages start falling out.

MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged Conspiracy theories about the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting have ramped up in recent weeks as once steadfast Trump supporters turn on the president.

@wired.com bringing the news again.

www.wired.com/story/maga-i...

Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later.

We have an apparent cure for most people with pancreatic cancer—a profoundly swift, deadly cancer—and the position of the U.S. government is that it should be banned. This is real fall-of-empire stuff.

What a wretched little dishonorable man.

She was incredibly charming. RIP Nathalie Baye. One of my favourite films with her is Truffaut’s Day For Night (La nuit américaine)

Bereaved family members of Covid victims write to Nigel Farage urging him to sack his Croydon candidate who said COVID was a "staged event" by the US military, with vaccines used to control the population.

Reform has not responded to our story revealing his views

bylinetimes.com/2026/04/15/r...

Trump is seeking to set a record for personal corruption in the White House. He wants to steal your money.

Pallets of cash to Iran, you say?

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought Scientists say finding is ‘very concerning’ as collapse would be catastrophic for Europe, Africa and the Americas

"Rahmstorf, who has studied the Amoc for 35 years, has said a collapse must be avoided 'at all costs'. 'I argued this when we thought the chance of an Amoc shutdown was maybe 5%, and even then we were saying that risk is too high, given the massive impacts. Now it looks like it’s more than 50%.'"

3 Southern California residents sentenced in bear suit insurance fraud scheme Three Southern California residents have been sentenced in a bizarre insurance fraud scheme which prosecutors say involved them staging fake bear attacks on high-end cars.

People tried to scam insurance by dressing up as a bear and wrecking luxury cars.

"Investigators then took the video to biologists with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to also look at the video. The biologists said, 'it was clearly a human in a bear suit.'"

abc7.com/post/3-south...

The FBI Director Is MIA Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.

Truly remarkable reporting by Sarah Fitzpatrick in the Atlantic.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Anthropic Settlement Update: 91.3 Percent of Books Claimed in Settlement - The Authors Guild Yesterday, class counsel in the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit filed papers apprising the court that 440,490 of the 482,460 eligible works had been claimed—a remarkable 91.3 percent rate (the typical clas...

New on the Anthropic settlement from the @authorsguild.org : over 91% (!!) of eligible books were claimed as of the claims deadline (I would not have predicted such a high number!)

Looks like the payout will be close to the $3000 originally estimated authorsguild.org/news/anthrop...

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of a security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to justice department of White House officials. Our request for “breaching equipment” – normally used by SWAT and hostage rescue teams to quickly gain entry into the buildings – was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind, locked doors, according to multiple their request

I’ve been drunk but never “call the breaching team” drunk

I just read an article about this the other day. I don’t know where, but someone was saying how great a show it is. They compared it to Lost.

oh weird yet another random celebrity says we need AI

remember when celebrities seemingly randomly started coming out talking about how much they loved NFTs and thought it was super valuable and the future?

This is the stuff that inspires revolutions.

Congrats on “opening” a strait that was open six weeks ago, and all it cost was at least 13 dead service members, thousands of dead Iranian civilians, tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, our loss in global standing, and the Iranian regime’s increase in power. Phenomenal work.

For some reason, this makes me want to rewatch Tarkovsky's Stalker.

The conductor accidentally knocks a 16th century violin worth millions on the floor mid-concert. Happened in a concert in Finland yesterday (April 16). The violin in question is a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini violin from the 1700s, and their...

Oops.

old.reddit.com/r/WatchPeopl...

If that were the case, my writing would sound like Thomas Pynchon, Marcel Proust, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett. I'm actually smart enough that it doesn't.

Sounds like 24, just without music.