Thursday Evening

enjoy

Accelerationism

I have never been an accelerationist, but I admit various scenarios of "fuckups so mighty they cannot be ignored" are increasingly appealing.

That doesn't mean we should wish for them, other than stock market crashes. Those are easily reversible, generally.

Liars

The issue of journalists not dealing with prominent liars well is not a new one, but the we are at the point where "these fuckers are lying again" should be the presumption. God bless the fact checkers, but we are way beyond any individual story or even a pattern. They just lie constantly! About everything!

A dramatic voiceover video shared by the White House and US President Donald Trump claims to show immigration agents responding to the "mess" in Chicago as the Republican seeks to justify deploying National Guard troops to the Democrat-run city. But an AFP investigation found that the video is littered with outdated footage highlighting drug busts, arrests and deportation raids in other states, including Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Nebraska.

Pass The Buck

For awhile I thought that even if AI is the useless bust I think it is, the data centers would have some productive use, at least. There was something there! But learning that the GPUs don't necessarily last very long...

As is often the case in the AI industry, Nvidia came to the rescue, announcing a $100 billion investment in OpenAI. Now OpenAI has the money to send to Oracle to build data centers, which Oracle will fill with Nvidia GPUs. So wait—is Nvidia just paying itself?

Lunch

Shop while you eat! (Ad, I get a commission).

Remembering Unity

The Kids won't remember gems like these

ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I'm thinking another 9/11 would help America.

What kind of a sick bastard would write such a thing?

A bastard so sick of how splintered we are politically - thanks mainly to our ineptitude in Iraq - that we have forgotten who the enemy is.

It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O'Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children.

...

If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America's righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.

Unity

I think it is a dumb concept, no matter who invokes it, but this is extra "hilarious" given the constant stream of rhetoric from top Republican figures.

Exaggerated Wink Dot Gif

Why would the police need to be involved when it would be, at worst, a bad prank (we all know it was not a prank) and not anything resembling a crime.

U.S. Capitol Police were called about an American flag altered to include a swastika and displayed inside the office of Rep. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio), his spokesperson said.

Yes I understand that the police were called so everyone can pretend it's something that it isn't, but it doesn't even make sense at that level.

Morning

Thirsty Thurday.

Wednesday Evening

 Enjoy

Come All Ye Nazis

Good job everybody who got enraged by Free Palestine signs.

The proposals also advise Mr. Trump to prioritize Europeans who have been “targeted for peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”

That appeared to be a reference to the European far-right political party Alternative for Germany, whose leaders have trivialized the Holocaust, revived Nazi slogans and denigrated foreigners. Vice President JD Vance has criticized Germany for trying to suppress the views of the group, which is known as the AfD.

More Thread

 One of those days

Lunch

busy with some things

Respect My Authoritah

I say this without sympathy, but it must be hard being Pete Hegseth. He can't walk into a room - any room - without imagining that people think he's a big dork loser, which he is.

The Department of Defense is pressuring staff to watch or read Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Quantico military address – or else. In recent days, senior officials at Donald Trump’s Pentagon have actively monitored staffers, pressing them to confirm whether they had seen the speech Hegseth forced hundreds of top military officials to listen to last month, according to two Defense Department staffers and another person briefed on the matter.

All these manly men lack any confidence and self-assurance. Making your underlings watch your dumb speech won't change that!

They'll Be Back

I suspect they will all have good Republican jobs within 6 months.

NEW YORK — Two more members of a Young Republican group chat strewn with racist epithets and hateful jokes stepped down from their jobs Tuesday after POLITICO published an exclusive report on the Telegram exchanges.

Peter Giunta’s time working with New York Assemblymember Mike Reilly “has ended,” the Republican lawmaker said. Giunta served as chair of the New York State Young Republicans when the chat took place. Joseph Maligno, who previously identified himself as the general counsel for that group, is no longer an employee of the New York State Unified Court System, a courts spokesperson confirmed.

Someone track their linkedins, if you are on there.

Morning

Wacky Wednesday. A bit busy with some things today.

Happy Hour

don't leak the Eschaton group chat

Are We Going To Give It Back

Probably a small donation to a Trump-linked "enterprise" will make it go away.

On Tuesday, officials in the United States and United Kingdom took coordinated action against one giant Cambodian organization and its boss who has allegedly run a series of notorious scam centers in the country. The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced it has issued financial sanctions against 146 “targets” linked to the newly designated Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization. This action includes targeting individuals and shell companies linked to the alleged criminal enterprise. As part of the sweeping action also involving the FBI, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has also seized almost 130,000 bitcoin worth around $15 billion at the time of the announcement—the largest US cryptocurrency seizure to date.

Seems Bad

Somehow expressing admiration for Hitler is no longer antisemitic. I'm not sure how that happened.

‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat

(not the only bad thing in there, of course)

There are plenty of pictures of fine representatives of the superior race at the link.

By The Short And Curlies

Even a dumbass like me knew who held the cards.

That we got to such a point is totally insane. In my 2020 book Monopolized, I explained that the U.S. invented rare earth magnets for fighter jets in the 1970s. “A company called Magnequench manufactured these magnets in Indiana until 2004, when the plant closed and shipped out to China,” I wrote. “In fact, China bought the entire company, using as a front a hedge fund operated by Archibald Cox Jr., son of the famed Watergate prosecutor.”

It took decades to hollow out industrial production, hand over critical inputs to other countries to monopolize, and then base our economy on development that needs those critical inputs. No single president is responsible for creating this vulnerability; it was a team effort of short-sightedness. But it’s true, as Rush Doshi has said, that Trump bumbled into a trade war “without preparation, without allies, and without reducing our own vulnerabilities.”

Rare earths aren’t that rare; it’s the processing where China really excels. And we’ve had a decade-and-a-half of knowing that China was capable of wielding rare earths as a geopolitical weapon. The country briefly cut off Japan in 2010 after a skirmish involving disputed islands in the South China Sea. Nine years later, Xi Jinping pointedly toured a rare earth factory in the middle of Trump’s first trade jostling with China.

U.S. efforts to diversify the rare earth supply chain have been honestly pathetic. There have been a lot of developments of blueprints of plans, and more recently small funds for production. Trump’s Defense Department took a stake in MP Materials, which runs the biggest rare earth mine in America. But none of this represents the kind of serious resources and market commitments that are necessary.