Donald Trump's Fed Chair nominee could not even say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

He is nothing more than a sock puppet.

Israel has killed more than 700 people in Gaza since last year's US-brokered 'ceasefire'

Israel has killed more than 700 people in Gaza since last year's US-brokered 'ceasefire' https://aje.news/niqwe0

Technofacism? Why Palantir's pro-West ‘manifesto' has critics alarmed Palantir's 'manifesto' has been described as an 'AI-driven threat to humanity's existence' and 'technofascism'.

Palantir's 'manifesto' has been described as an 'AI-driven threat to humanity's existence' and 'technofascism'.

This is just to say yes

This looks good. But Klein's SHOCK DOCTRINE seems equally a propos. As Trump creates a global financial crisis, the billionaire class is poised to use their massive wealth to buy up assets at bargain prices. Disaster capitalism in action.

If you’ve read the thread posted by palantir on X and are shocked, please read this piece that @tlecaque.bsky.social and I wrote 9 months ago. Palantir has not been shy about its fascist agenda, and neither has Karp, who has been rambling about Western Supremacy in text & video form for a while now

This looks good. But Klein's SHOCK DOCTRINE seems equally a propos. As Trump creates a global financial crisis, the billionaire class is poised to use their massive wealth to buy up assets at bargain prices. Disaster capitalism in action.

Techno-fascism, courtesy of Peter Thiel.

""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."

Homeland Security Task Force The nation's coordinated assault on cartels. A permanent, unified federal response operating across all 52 states and territories.

"The Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) is a permanent, interagency law enforcement task force created by executive order to combat transnational criminal organizations—including cartels, trafficking networks, and foreign terrorist organizations—across all 52 U.S. states and territories."

Yes the genie is out of the bottle, I'm afraid. Perhaps it's not an unraveling we need, but a reweaving. There are historical instances of new technologies that have proved dangerous as well as astonishing, but whose danger has been checked through technical and juridical means.

I've only played briefly with Claude but it was indeed something close to astonishing. In some sense it felt like playing a video game, a collaborative effort in finding its affordances, limits, etc. Together we wrote something that looks like an academic paper (I haven't read it in its entirety).

I don't think so. But it would make it astonishing in a different way, and would require constraints upon AI that the current formulations of it do not contain. And this has to include constraints on the environmental costs of the energy required for it to perform its feats of derring-do.

Is this an argument for getting rid of the Frankensteinian monster we call AI? I'm not going that far. But I would argue that we need to build a different kind of politics into AI, one that focuses more on collaboration and less on individual technical virtuosity. Will this make it less astonishing?

Capitalism and all that is not an add-on to this astonishing technology but is, IMHO, part and parcel of it. As Langdon Winner was not the first to remind us, artifacts have politics. AI was designed to support, indeed I would venture, to fortify the growing economic inequality of capitalism.

This formulation seems problematic to me. From where I sit (retired on the sidelines) many of the unfortunate downsides of this technology are built into this astonishing technology, which is extractive, solutionist, and amoral, for example, precisely because of these "truly heinous people."

Hi, Matt. Thanks for this thread, which corresponds with how I have understood your position on AI. I am puzzled, though, by what appears to be your separation of AI as technology and AI as social/political/economic practice. I will explain in a comment below.

Yes, Virginia, China is the only adult in the room.

He is clearly suffering from dementia. And the world suffers from his dementia as well.

Crazy times.

Justice must be served and after we lock this mother f'r up we need to start trials for all of those in both parties who have enabled genocide. Bing the trials! Make The Hague Great Again!!

The evangelical magazine Christianity Today has a good article today really going after Trump--and it does it with a fairly resolute defense of the Pope, which is not historically the way these things have worked.
www.christianitytoday.com/2026/04/trum...

Vance means "loser" in Hungarian.

Shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Exclusive: Four women describe sexual misconduct by Rep. Eric Swalwell, including a former staffer who says he raped her | CNN A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated, an allegation Swalwell strongly de...

Eric Swalwell, those are some ugly accusations, detailing a sickening pattern of sexual violence. California is fortunate that they won't have a Governor Swalwell in their future.

www.cnn.com/2026/04/10/u...

This is great. I would also invite people to go outside and notice when two things are relating to one another. Metonymy as well as metaphor.

I will say on the automatic draft registration: this is really a nothing burger. Every man has to register when they turn 18. If they don’t they can get penalties. This automates that.

There is no active draft and this isn’t one

Aside from sexually assaulting women, the one thing that is consistent in Donald Trump's life is his ability to squander wealth he has not earned and declare bankruptcy. He is well on his way to doing this to American wealth and power in his second term.

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/w...

Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work by Annie McClanahan

In Beneath the Wage, @anniemcc.bsky.social retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated.

Out now (2 June UK pub).

Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

#Sociology

So great. Congrats, Annie!

it's officially out! :)