This guy’s way better company than most people tbh

Power without accountability: The Palantir manifesto The problems with our tech philosopher kings

New, from me: Take the Palantir manifesto seriously, if not literally.
It reveals that our tech philosopher kings want public money, but without public accountability. This creates a dilemma for governments unaligned with its techno-fascist vision. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/palantir-w...

Only just got to this. Great stuff, shame on us for failing to learn this lesson the first time around.

Watching Palantir do Sephiroth posting about multiculturalism and I would like to remind everyone that they were doing corporate fake woke shit just like every other company.

Local governance and public interest in it has really atrophied. People don't follow it unless there's a crisis b/c government meetings are long, boring and inconveniently scheduled. But officials make them that way, and then are surprised when suddenly everyone's mad at them about e.g. data centers

On this week's episode @benverschoor.bsky.social and I discuss not only the newest Faces of Death but the 1978 original as well. We open with a Cronenberg snuff film chase and a Orson Welles videoessay.
miseenscreen.libsyn.com/episode-40-f...

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit

Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here

Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse

Media and universities: AI is here to stay

another thing i find really funny about the maga industrial complex lashing out at the church at various tiers is like, hold up, you're trying to make priests and nuns into martyrs? ... really? this is like their whole deal. they're absolute perverts for it. they've been training for this

Clearly we plebs don't understand that the most effective weight loss method is amputation

Any savings gained from cutting *the production values that people go to these movies for* is going to be lost when their entire pipeline becomes last-minute crunch and do-overs because their institutional knowledge is gone, resulting in even more pixel-fucked visuals that will kill their box office

This looks the beginning of a death spiral (they fired the artists before they could complete the death spiral)

I'm sure Rod Dreher wore his best upholstery as he showed Vance the wonders of Budapest's Orthodox churches

Nine Inch Noize - Heresy - Live at Coachella 2026 YouTube video by Coachella

Trent Reznor is the best figure that came out of the late 80s "Alternative" boom. Always forward-thinking in his approach to music and technology, and, relatedly, he didn't turn into a bitter contrarian shithead as he aged. This rules.

look, sometimes you witness the glorious awe of traveling to the Moon and back, sometimes you get transfixed by a guy muttering “oooh, toilet,” humanity contains multitudes I guess

The Google data center fight has made me increasingly skeptical of Economic Development Authorities; that the Rambler's new owner sits on the local EDA and then went and killed the biggest legal challenger to the data center, is radicalizing.

UPDATE: Former Roanoke Rambler staff cite pay cuts in mass termination; new owner silent Former journalists at The Roanoke Rambler say they were fired after refusing new contracts that slashed their base pay and proposed other changes. In a joint statement released Tuesday, editor Todd J...

It's one thing to see an online media outlet get sold and stripped for parts across several months, quite another to see the local independent go through that in the space of a couple weeks.

The increasing number of Hollywood film shoots in Orban's Hungary over the past few years should have been a scandal. They have bigger priorities now, but I wonder if the new government will continue to be so welcoming when the American government will almost certainly be hostile to them.

Absolutely remarkable statement from Pope Leo today.
One for the history books
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

Class solidarity

In 7th grade in 1999 I wanted a Darth Maul poster. My mom wouldn't let me because "demonic," she said I should get Liam Neeson instead. If it had been one year later, after my gay awakening, I could have had Ewan McGregor smdh

Jack Off Jill deep cut!

As a former teenage Marilyn Manson fan and a college New Atheist, I know this all too well

It's a big tent, a broad spectrum of perverts

I can't remember if I read this somewhere or not, but the "alternative" culture of the early 90s lumped a lot of different, sometimes mutually antagonistic scenes together, and after the conservative Christian mainstream lost its bipartisan lock in the late 2000s, everybody had to pick a lane.

My point is that congressional hearings and votes are news. Campaign messaging is not. Republicans figured this out years ago. Democrats keep treating official government functions like distractions from the "real" strategy instead of recognizing they ARE the strategy.

Wild that in less than a decade, conservative messaging has gone from 'sex before marriage is bad' to 'you will propagate the (white) race before you can vote'

Thinking about Jim Goad makes me sad. Goad was tuned in to the leftish Zine transgressive culture of the 90s. The Redneck Manifesto was good stuff. It's class first, funny, and really takes the air out of liberal culture without going right wing. Afterwards... The culture Goad was a part of coalesced in to things like the WTO protests and the anti-globalization movement of the late 90s. While that was going on Goad was in prison soaking up ideas from actual fucking white supremacists! Basically his "people" took a hard left turn while he went right during his (deserved) prison stint. He came out confused and angry about the changes and the result is the Goad you see today. NGL, Goad is a highly influential author in my life. He is a demonstration of what you can become if you don't remember to maintain certain core values. He's a cautionary tale. Part of the reason I am hostile to things like the "post left" that some on this sub embrace is I have seen exactly where that leads and it looks a lot like Jim Goad.

There actually was a 1997 book titled The Redneck Manifesto that argued social issues were used by the rich to get the poor to fight each other. Then the author, Jim Goad, went to prison for domestic assault and eventually became an alt right guy.

www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/...

Consumer sentiment dipped the year after tracking started, incidentally when the U.S. installed the Shah of Iran.

Also, to the irony-poisoned, prophetic visions are cringe

It might be the lack of prophetic vision in contemporary art has to do with the same problem in politics. Shepard Fairey's Obama CHANGE portraits in 2008 were forward-looking myth-making. Then the financial crisis happened, and since then we've been defending a broken system from reactionary assault