Darn Vader

Palantir’s stock price went up 120% this year.

Senator Kelly is correct.

Plus a Public Service Announcement:

KEY section of Department of Defense's Law of War Manual is 18.3.2.1.

The VERY rule on the "requirement" to refuse illegal orders gives as its paradigmatic example of what is "clearly illegal:
"orders to fire upon the shipwrecked."

journalists really should stop baring their entire asses like this

"I have no idea how this technology actually works but my editor is mostly interested in engagement clicks so we proceeded anyway"

What’s depressing isn’t the higher levels of federal expenditures & DOGE’s failure—it’s that the feds replaced expenditures on foreign assistance, research & the environment with spending on ICE personnel & national guard deployments.

Meanwhile, the rich got tax cuts so the deficit worsened.

Alcohol

West Chicago brothers are on the front lines against ‘Operation Midway Blitz.’ And they’re only teenagers. The wave of youth activists who have been galvanized into action by “Operation Midway Blitz” follow a long tradition paved around the world by young activists.

Teen brothers have been on the front lines of Midway Blitz, following the Feds and helping their neighbors. This is their story. “If I get the opportunity to fight like this for the rest of my life, I would be totally OK with that.” By @tesskenny.bsky.social
www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/14/c...

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]

Every ad now

another manifestation of this is when you criticize the right and somebody tsk tsks "they say the same thing about the left," like, yeah, somebody is lying, are you interested in who? because the answer is easily discoverable

This isn't "internal recriminations." It's voters expressing overwhelming opposition to what the people they elected to represent them are doing, and anyone--either in journalism or politics--who characterizes it as infighting is either not seeing and hearing what's right in front of them or lying.

incredible photo that's definitely worth at least 1,000 words from Andrew Harnik of Getty

As many have pointed out, Mamdani didn't stand apart from our trans brothers and sisters. He didn't play the "Gee, gosh, it sure is complicated," milquetoast moderate card. And he crushed.

The way forward is together, not over the bodies of our own.

Reminder that this is a winning position, and people support it

you can win without billionaires supporting you

you can win without party leadership endorsing you

you can win unapologetically standing with every persecuted minority pundits say are too politically toxic to touch

we could do everything about this process differently if we wanted to

This is what national failure looks like. small children worried about secret police.

Screenshot text from the Atlantic Here is where the bubble dynamics get complicated. Tech firms don’t want to formally take on debt—that is, directly ask investors for loans—because debt looks bad on their balance sheets and could reduce shareholder returns. To get around this, some are partnering with private-equity titans to do some sophisticated financial engineering, Paul Kedrosky, an investor and a financial consultant, told us. These private-equity firms put up or raise the money to build a data center, which a tech company will repay through rent. Data-center leases from, say, Meta can then be repackaged into a financial instrument that people can buy and sell—a bond, in essence. Meta recently did just this: Blue Owl Capital raised money for a massive Meta data center in Louisiana by, in essence, issuing bonds backed by Meta’s rent. And multiple data-center leases can be combined into a security and sorted into what are called “tranches” based on their risk of default. Data centers represent an $800 billion market for private-equity firms through 2028 alone. (Meta has said of its arrangement with Blue Owl that the “innovative partnership was designed to support the speed and flexibility required for Meta’s data center projects.”) In this way, the data-center financing ends up being a real-estate deal as much as an AI deal. If this sounds complicated, it’s supposed to: The complexity, investment structure, and repackaging make exactly what is going on hard to parse. And if the dynamics also sound familiar, it’s because not two decades ago, the Great Recession was precipitated by banks packaging risky mortgages into tranches of securities that were falsely marketed as high-quality. By 2008, the house of cards had collapsed. Data-center build-outs aren’t the same as subprime mortgages. Still, there is plenty of precarity baked into these investments. Data centers deteriorate rapidly, unlike the more durable infrastructure of canals, railroads, or even fiber-…

seems bad!

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Congressional candidate @katmabu.bsky.social, who was indicted today for protesting outside the Broadview ICE facility: "We've been punched, dragged, thrown, shot with pepper balls, tear gassed, rubber bullets from snipers on roofs going into local businesses windows."

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

COATES: “Trump’s saying, ‘Y’all, I’m just gonna kill people.’ And the Greatest Deliberative Body has nothing to say about it. Y’all are punk, y’all are cowards.”

centrists will tell you to your face that we all need to abandon identity issues, and focus on kitchen table issues instead and yet when a leftist candidate runs a generational campaign based on kitchen table issues, it's the centrists weaponizing identity politics to smear the leftist.

Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.

Guillermo del Toro quote "...think about wealth for me for example. A wealthy man that has enough..."

"not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite somebody to beer..."

"...you're rich. If you have, whatever-"

"- yachts and planes and islands and you STILL need more? You're not rich."

Guillermo del Toro on wealth: "a wealthy man is a man who has enough, not a man that needs more. If you have enough to invite someone for a beer? You're rich. If you have a yacht, planes, islands, and you still need more? You're not rich."

Marc Lobliner post on X: "Why the hell are we giving food stamps to 40 million people? Does anyone work anymore?"

SNAP isn't about "people who don't work." It's about people who don't get paid enough to live.

Of the 40 or so million people who rely on food stamps:

* Two-thirds are children, seniors, or disabled

* Most working-age adults who receive SNAP are employed—but in jobs that pay poverty wages

Mamdani: "But there is one thing that I will change: I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light."

It turns out that making things more expensive makes them more expensive.

The use of AI to marionette a woman whose tortured existence was spent trying to carve her own life and identity out of the space men forced her into is both damningly macabre and a surprisingly perfect encapsulation of the problems with this ghoulish use of technology.

Wait, what? Their complaints were disingenuous in such obvious ways that anyone who took them seriously should be ashamed? No way!

“Military occupation doesn’t make our city safer. Resources and investment makes our city safer.” thank you Bri and all the other protestors who took the time to speak with me last night in Chicago.

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

Trump: we will do project 2025
Harris: he will do project 2025
Public: oh that’s bad
Trump: I’m not gonna do it have never heard of it
Harris: he’s still gonna do it
Media: no one can predict the future 77 pinocchios