Pritzker: "We're talking about the death of a constitutional republic. That's what happened in Germany in 1933, 1934. And we're seeing today that we've got an administration in Washington that's ignoring court orders."

François Heisbourg, one of the world’s leading strategists and a cool head:

Damn @sanders.senate.gov. Just when I compliment you, I looked for info on the event. NONE HERE. But multiple posts on X.

WTF.

You obviously don’t care to engage. Just look at the quality of replies you get over there.

Oracle’s Ellison Calls for Governments to Unify Data to Feed AI Oracle Corp.’s co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison said governments should consolidate all national data for consumption by artificial intelligence models, calling this step the “missing link” for t...

Always always always the real game, as I have said. They want the data, as dangerous as this will inevitably be. They don’t care, these ceaseless borgs. trib.al/ctRDVKs

The Trump Executive Orders as “Radical Constitutionalism” Much more than “test cases” may be at stake in Trump's aggressive claims of presidential authority

Newly confirmed OMB Director Russell Vought has strongly implied that his strategy “is to instill fear in the Supreme Court that the presidency is prepared to resort to outright defiance of its decisions.”
executivefunctions.substack.com/p/the-trump-...

Dozens of Clinical Trials Have Been Frozen in Response to Trump’s USAID Order The stop-work order on U.S.A.I.D.-funded research has left thousands of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.

This is evil.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/h...

Merkley: "We have an assumption of a foundation of law. And once that assumption is gone, you erase the line between a republic in which there is a Congress to make the laws and executive to implement them, and a dictator."

It's appropriate that this sentiment comes after the industry realized that they haven't done anything useful in 20 years so they descended into mass psychosis over tech that does nothing but purports to do everything

April 2022: USAID delivered 5,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine through a public-private partnership with SpaceX.

March 2024: USAID's inspector general announced it was initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink terminals provided to Ukraine.

Sources: archive.is/NNwNx

Through comments, I learned about other big myths Americans believe about foreign aid:
1/ it's risen past 1% in recent years, esp. due to Ukraine - false, max is about 0.5% in 2022 $80B
2/ it's used mostly *not* for humanitarian aid - nope
3/ It's mainly about military objectives - nope

I still remember way back before Musk was illegally destroying US foreign aid that time when he claimed he’d give $6B to the UK WFP if they could tell him how it would solve world hunger & then he ignored the response & gave $5.7B to his own charity & no one ever found out where it went from there

honestly think some of the hesitation here is that no one wants to sound like a crank. i was talking at an event last night and even i felt like a crank while i was speaking!

This is exactly right

is it good or bad that a billionaire oligarch with close ties to foreign dictators is currently downloading the most sensitive information the us federal government has about its citizens to his own private servers?