Hunter getting unpardoned was definitely not in my bingo card.

From the way it’s worded I think it’s the fire. Lithium fires are really hard to put out.

Would like to see more about the arctic routes, that seems interesting and plausible.

But I find the “Second Suez Canal” theory less convincing. If they try conventional methods (or worse, hire the Boring Company) to build that it’ll take way too long until it’s done. And the nuclear bomb method would draw too much opposition even from “israelis”.

Besides that, any canal in that region would be really hard to maintain given all the possibly opposition put up by the countries in the region, and it’d still be vulnerable to Anserallah attacks off the coast of Yemen.

I think the US benefits way more from having that whole canal closed (blocking Mediterranean trade with the East) than controlling it, and “buying” Gaza would be a stepping stone towards that.

That looks too much like a scam to be real. The “Protectors” look like they’re retired or actors who play “Mafia Guy 2” and the business model makes no sense. If somebody is rich enough to need one of these hyperspecialised goons they can just tell their secretaries to hire some as part of their security, hopefully actually trained in urban security rather than sniping or explosives or low intensity warfare like half those big boys portray themselves. I know that’d be more trustworthy than the app given my first immediate thought was “how would one sabotage this?”

But either way, I’m still fond of any symptom that the spectre of Luigi is haunting the US. Hope these ghouls never forget that all it takes is a couple bullets, and the US is the country with the most guns per capita.

That would be massive and probably imply full European alignment with China. Europe would lose their bigger supporter in the maintenance of their colonies. And the United States would lose its most developed industrial ally, as well as the base for operations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Although that would probably help Europe’s economy get back to growth with cheap gas again, unless China or Russia are willing to become the colonial enforcers the Glorified Peninsula will never be the same again, and whatever remains of their ruling class will never accept it.

On the other hand the US sphere of influence would shrink to the north Pacific and Latin America. I don’t think that’s plausible, and I think in fact the new US admin should be trying to end the Ukraine war specifically as pretext to get cheap gas back in Europe and avoid anti-NATO sentiment. From that solid base they can wage war (economically or militarily) over the Rest of the World with China.

Are there no military advisors in there? Surely somebody must’ve told them that VoA is a key pysop agency. Or is Musk one of those bosses that don’t let their advisors advise?

Either way I’m constantly waffling between “this actually makes sense” and “this actually makes no sense” and killing VoA and specially RFE makes no strategic sense to me. Although “Europe is already free” in the liberal sense, Europe is still in dispute both in the world market sense wrt China alignment, but also internally with the myriad anti-NATO parties.

Backing away from that front on a crucial moment with the coming backlash and fingerpointing of the end of Ukraine seems to me at best to be a tactical retreat from obvious defeat, or just a big blunder. So if this is a rational decision (and it’s getting hard to tell from Musk’s antics but also incompetent “progressive” liberal reporting), this is would be IMO an announcement of propagandistic weakness wrt Europe.

Edit: Fuck, I think I get it. They’re gutting all this psyop apparatus because they intend to double down on more effective means. They have Google (YouTube), Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram) and Musk (Twitter) fully on board. That’s the only unchallenged hegemony left, and I believe it’s gonna get very intense soon.

Gabbard faced concerns from several Republican senators over her lack of support for Ukraine; her shifting position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702, a key surveillance and security tool; her 2017 meeting with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and her past support for Edward Snowden.

In December 2020, shortly before she left Congress, Gabbard introduced legislation that would repeal the Patriot Act and Section 702.

In a contentious hearing, she refused under persistent questioning by Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee to say whether she now believed Snowden’s actions were traitorous.

“I am glad that Ms. Gabbard plans to focus on identifying and eliminating redundancies and inefficiencies to restore the office to what it was originally designed to be,” he said.

Feds gonna get fired, better get used to that austerity. You reap what you sow, in this case “small government” propaganda.

Other than that she’s a very weird pick and I have no idea how Republicans even embraced her given her political record is centered almost solely on opposing direct US involvement in wars (from a liberal perspective).

Heck, she sometimes sounded like the least insane person on the DNC primaries for 2020.

So that’s the Super-High IQ new hire. Elon should put some of these teenagers on nuclear programmes, for more efficiency and definitely not because I want somebody to Stuxnet the US.

How have prestigious publishers of journals that would be severely impacted by this, like IEEE, reacted? I’m no longer immersed in that ecosystem, but I believe that’d seriously disrupt international peer-reviewed publishing of AI research, or even development supply chains in general.

Imagine having to use a VPN to download a Chinese pip package. Or having the US meddle in mirrors of FOSS package repositories in their territory.

Two related news, one follow-up and another in hindsight.

USAID apparently will be merged with the State Dept, which would mean a de facto mask off. That makes it less convincing for soft power but possibly more effective by not having to hide their intentions.

The news in hindsight is that Congress bipartisanly voted a bill to enable the Executive to strip non-profits “supportive of terrorism” off of their tax-exempt status. This gives the Executive legal authority to effectively kill by tax any anti-hegemonic organisation, and I believe this a helpful tool if they wish to consolidate their propaganda arms without having to deal with the pesky “battleground of ideas”.

Edit: horrible grammar.

I think this is the most plausible theory and a good hypothesis test will be Haiti. USAID has been active there since at least the 2004 coup, but now the new dependent government was collapsed through presidential murder and the country became a non-state “ruled” by a collection of bourgeois representatives de facto appointed by US-led CARICOM, with the main US representative being the NED/USAID-funded RNDDH.

Now this council is relying less on soft-power and political influence and more on a foreign legion composed mainly of Kenyans (with other CARICOM nations joining recently) under the leadership of the 51st US state up north. If the hypothesis holds up, this same form of control should manifest itself in other “allied” dependent nations, like Argentina (though obviously in a less explicitly racist manner).

The bourgeoisie and their administrators believing their own propaganda too hard explains a lot of recent happenings. I think that Musk actually believes he’s rich by being a genius and doesn’t need all the salaried managers to develop and exercise his wealth.

Musk did not say what legal authority he believed the White House has to shut down a federal agency without congressional approval, or how quickly the administration planned to act.

Political power comes first from not waffling about like a Democrat and just actually doing the thing you want to do, second from the barrel of a gun.

As CNBC reports, up to 15,000 scientists working at the institutions will get access to OpenAI’s latest o1 series of AI models

It’s literally just a bunch of enterprise subscriptions. Big nothingburger, but can create these silly headlines that make it seem like OpenAI does anything at all.

I suppose that makes sense if the intent is to counter democrats, but I find that line of reasoning self-defeating. The bourgeoisie in capitalist society will always control those things, at least partially.

Yes, capital doesn’t need a coup right now because they already wield state power but that state powe can become even more oppressive and allied with paramilitaries in response to this disorganised outrage. And it also presents working-class organisation as the reason why fascists rise, rather than having common origins of intensifying struggle and crises.

That Capital in the US is still poised to win is a tragedy, and I personally feel comfortable in being more predictive about it because I have no connection to that country. But that shouldn’t apply for prominent political figures in English-speaking platforms with majority US audience who constantly point at the problem (disorganisation) but never the solutions (organisations).

Lots of comments saying that there’s a “perception of a strong left” but I think that’s also missing the point, alongside Finkelstein. I’m responding to them rather than Finkelstein because I don’t even see an argument worth considering in what he’s saying.

There’s no relevant organised opposition to capital at this moment in the US, but the contradictions of capitalism are intensifying even in the core of the core.

People are struggling to make ends meet and taking 2 or 3 jobs, going bankrupt, saddled with debt. Students are occupying universities against Israel and Black Lives Matter does the occasional protest that is significantly large. Last years had the most labour strikes in a while. A guy shot down a healthcare CEO and is being unanimously praised as a hero.

And outside the core, the US is quickly losing its economic and cultural hegemony, which will require disciplined military action to maintain or regain.

So yes, there’s a messy and disorganised opposition internally. It’s angry and desperate but doesn’t know how to put that hate into practice. And internationally there’s a hell of a lot of opposition that’ll require “order at home” to defeat. And fascism is useful for those things, though in the US case I believe fascism will win due to that lack of organisation.

This is not infighting, this is the point. Finance organised crime abroad to sow instability and undermine local governments, and use that instability as an excuse for intervention, usually in the form of loans, joint military operations, while also driving investment and labour away from that country towards the “safer” core.

Outright invasion only makes sense if the local government becomes insubordinate and refuses “help” (often due to becoming effective at handling the “cartels”) or if the organised crime groups become politically active against imperial interests. In Mexico it’s the former, in Haiti it’s the latter.

In a White House statement, Biden said he was commuting Peltier’s life sentence so that he can serve the remainder of his sentence in home confinement.

This must be some sort of sick joke.

I find that unlikely, they can already trickle fake accounts slowly and unlike the new influx these sockpuppets will need to speak Chinese in order to influence the intended users.

I think this is just a failed attempt to isolate China and protect their national social media bourgeoisie (consider most tech giants are in the social media market), as well as backlash for the moderation not being in line with the State Dept, letting things like student occupations for divestment go viral. I at least have not seen almost anything about those occupations on US platforms.