Salomé Viljoen

Update: In the past week we've learned ICE has secured property to build human warehouses in Merrimack, NH and Williamsport, MD *as well as* Surprise, AZ; Upper Bern, PA; and Tremont, PA.

Facts that bear repeating.

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

It's a story of magical thinking in assuming we could ever rely on benevolent billionaires to save journalism. It's also a story of oligarchs turning their backs on democracy and exploiting their media assets to advance class interests. Above all, it's a tragedy for news workers and for all of us.

Really struck by Bezos, Lewis and Murray's single-minded commitment to purging all of the genuine talent from their publication.

cover of The Washington Post on Wednesday Feb 4, 2026. Headline on bottom, right: Musk wanted to hook users; his chatbot got more sexual

My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power

Q: What did you mean when you said you should 'nationalize elections' & which 15 states are you talking about?

TRUMP: If a state can't run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it. Look at Detroit, Pennsylvania, Atlanta -- horrible corruption on elections

I talked to a woman who quit an AUSA job recently. She was asked by main DOJ to dismiss a Medicare fraud prosecution because the defendant was the daughter of a girlfriend of a MAGA figure.

Neither Trump nor the GOP in congress have this power, & the only way they do this is if we decline to stand up for our rights. He's had a string of electoral defeats & rightfully fears the midterms. His outbursts are real threats, but they come from weakness. Tough shit, he's going down. No Kings.

Trump openly admitting FBI raid in Fulton County was a prelude to interfering with the midterms and attempting to seize control of state and local voting process

All the stars are here: Brantley Gilbert, Brice Bradley, Gabby Babby, Bibb Glibsy, Slab Gabbert, Brice Bryce,

Republicans love adding seats to state Supreme Courts! They've done it three times in recent years. This latest court-packing plan will shift Utah's high court far to the right and possibly flip rulings on abortion and gerrymandering.

Democrats should take note that Rs have deemed this acceptable!

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test

Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs)

Good tech.

Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales)

Bad tech.

U.S. Envoys Refused to Report "Apocalyptic" Conditions in Gaza. Exclusive Photos Show the Reality They Suppressed The U.S. embassy in Jerusalem suppressed a February 2024 report on northern Gaza because it “lacked balance.” These photos from the UN fact finding trip are visual evidence of the conditions.

Look at the photos. The thing I heard often working on the USAID Gaza response from our partners in Gaza was the field of dead bodies - men, women, children - that fanned out around IDF checkpoints in the Netzarim corridor. Shot by IDF soldiers for no reason (unless "for fun" counts as a reason).

The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public Trump’s boat strikes will seek cover in the same specious legality debate the Bush administration sowed with the torture memos.

“we are sold the myth that the language of legality is preferable to the language of morality because it is impartial and fixed. But as this whole dispute makes plain, that is least apt to be true precisely when it matters most” www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...

I fully believe Trump will smash the authoritarianism button harder and harder as he feels the midterms wipe out approaching, I'm less sure that doing so will prevent or mitigate said wipe out

This new report shows the havoc AI is already wreaking in the creative sector.

Evidence from 10,000 British creatives shows:

- 58% of photographers have lost work to AI
- 32% of illustrators have lost commissions to AI
- 86% of authors say AI has reduced their earnings

🧵 1/2

Constitutional crisis doesn’t do enough to convey how absurd our current situation is.

A federal judge is weighing Attorney General Pam Bondi’s blackmail letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as evidence that the administration is using the presence of armed federal agents as coercion to achieve policy goals. trib.al/tcKLaft

new CBS contributor Peter Attia

The DOJ just took down pages with detailed descriptions of Trump engaged in child rape and other pedophilia. We don't know if they have been corroborated, but we already know this DOJ will deny everything on behalf of their client.

Speculation that the FBI special agent in charge in Atlanta was fired when he raised questions about the planned raid on the Fulton County elections center are confirmed.

Hmm.

DOJ Just DELETED This Document from the Epstein Files. We Saved It. The Trump Department of Justice has done it again.

BREAKING: The DOJ just DELETED a document in the Epstein Files that contained allegations made against Donald Trump.

But we saved it. 👇

the arrest of journalists in minneapolis, including don lemon, is more evidence that the only move the administration knows how to make is to use force, and does not know how to respond when that force is met with defiance and indifference.

I don't know whether it is the #1 Catherine O'Hara accomplishment but the fact that she invented a manner of speaking that no other person in human history has ever attempted for Schitts Creek and made it seem realistic that her character would talk that way felt like a comedy miracle to me

Trump posts discredited conspiracy theories following seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia In the hours after FBI agents in Georgia seized 2020 election ballots, President Trump posted a series of thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories about the election.

Jonathan Karl: This stuff is truly crazy ... claims that Italian spy satellites ... the CIA ... the FBI ... China all conspired tried to steal the 2020 election. Oh, and Obama tried to overthrow the government he led in 2016. In the hours after FBI agents seized 2020 election ballots

If you put the words "LOCAL FOOL" in place of Elon Musk, the headlines make more sense. People who cover him should try it to see if it helps clear up their reporting.

Local Fool Says He'll Build A Colony on Mars

Local Fool Says AI Will Cure Cancer

Data Centers Are Driving a US Gas Boom Gas projects in the US pipeline explicitly linked to data centers increased by almost 25 times over the past two years, according to new research from Global Energy Monitor.

i was actually shocked to see the numbers on new research from Global Energy Monitor on new gas projects in the US: nearly 100 gigawatts of power—enough to power tens of millions of homes—are currently in development explicitly to power data centers. At the end of 2023 that number was 4 gigawatts

Growing Wave of Silicon Valley Workers Condemns ICE as C-Suites Split Over Fear of Trump | KQED Many more progressive rank-and-file tech workers stopped speaking out after the 2024 election as executives cozied up to Trump. For some, the recent killings in Minneapolis by federal agents mark a tu...

“The reality is that ICE could not engage in their operations without technologies supplied to them through contracts with Palantir, Amazon, and Microsoft.” @veenadubal.bsky.social

www.kqed.org/news/1207155...

Given the deep investigations of the 2020 elections generally and Fulton County, Georgia, in particular, it is highly unlikely that the new FBI investigation (whose warrant was curiously sought by a U.S. attorney in Missouri, not Georgia or even Washington, D.C.) will amount to anything. So what was it really about? One tipoff is the curious appearance during the FBI raid of Fulton County’s election offices of Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, who is known to peddle conspiracy theories herself. Portraying this raid as part of a national security effort is in line with the musings of Cleta Mitchell, a Trump conspiracy-theory ally who had been on Trump’s call with Raffensperger. Back in September, Mitchell, on a call with fellow election deniers, suggested that Trump could declare a “national sovereignty crisis” in a bid to take over the midterm elections. Trump has no power over the conduct of federal elections, which are left in the hands of the states, a point numerous courts have made recently in striking down parts of an August Trump executive order purporting to make voting harder. But that doesn’t mean he won’t try. Trump has expressed regret that he did not seize voting machines in 2020. So this threat for 2026 (and 2028) is real.

My New One @slate.com: "Trump’s Continued Obsession With 2020 Is a Joke. His Raid on a Georgia Election Site Is Not."
slate.com/news-and-pol...