Opinion | Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. (Gift Article) A journey through the front lines of global poverty shows that when the world’s richest men slash aid for the world’s poorest children, the result is sickness, starvation and death.

“I think most Americans would both welcome some reforms and also be proud to see how we save the lives of hungry children and sick orphans around the world by allocating just 24 cents of every $100 of national income to aid.”

Like the spoiled children of the rich who squander their unappreciated legacies, a vast swath of Americans are taking for granted the hard-earned freedoms and rule of law that made us a rich and powerful nation. If we are not careful we will lose our inheritance forever.

America needs to stop cheering for the pickled egg On madness, cynicism, absurdity, and the event horizon to the end of the republic

In the first Trump admin, Americans used “I didn’t vote for this” as a shield

We should be clear: that’s gone now

We’re near the event horizon of something really bad—and this time every American should be ready to own the death toll & despair. Unless we stop it

www.greatpower.us/p/america-ne...

@badiucao.bsky.social and @melissakchan.bsky.social any chance of a Seattle stop on the boom tour?

Trump and Vance are not selling out Ukraine because of anything Zelenskyy said to them.

Trump and Vance are selling out Ukraine because of things Putin and Musk said to them.

Musk is stupid in the sense that he is profoundly incurious about the workings of the world and the lives of other people. The end

"[T]he withdrawal of the American security umbrella will be a really, really bad thing...These effects will be almost uniformly terrible and will be measured in lost lives and lost freedom of real people."

@benjaminwittes.bsky.social discusses the betrayal of Ukraine in the Situation.

If a woman had 13 kids by four different men, used ketamine and spent all her time running a shadow presidency, I’m not sure our society would celebrate her.

“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics...

All of this. All. Of. It.

Short-term pain for long-term isolation and decline!

Boy, these last eight days feel like a good reminder why democracies generally avoid letting people who attempt a coup come back to power….

Making other countries loathe us might not but good for US interests…

In the next 80 days, US adversaries have so much opportunity for action globally, in cultivating networks, “rebalancing” scales, growing influence

If we do show up again — if — it won’t be to the same table

I think a lot of people are being pretty unrealistic about how much weaker we are now

The world all of us Americans have lived in is one where—despite our griping & not awesome moments & political narratives—the United States has been an engine of innovation, prosperity, security, human progress

But if you take out enough screws, it will lurch to a halt & not be easy to resurrect /1

Hegseth reveals how much the GOP is willing to bend to Trump even at the expense of national security.

THREAD: In 2023, I received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a flash drive containing tens of 1000s of secret files.

It came from a vigilante with a tumultuous past, who'd conducted a years-long undercover operation. He didn’t tell the FBI or his family. He only told me.

Chinese state media is reportedly troubled by the latest exodus of X users flocking to Bluesky. State outlets, which put considerable resources into amassing millions of followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform — including by buying ads, deploying bots, and hiring influencers — have recently seen their growth plateau. The growing popularity of Bluesky, which has a largely liberal base and harder-to-manipulate algorithm, has sparked “worried chatter within Chinese state media circles,” a former Xinhua and China Daily employee wrote in his newsletter. He predicted the accounts will migrate to Bluesky, though it may take time. For now, the sector’s focus has shifted back to domestic, Mandarin-language channels and platforms like Bilibili, WeChat, and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

lol China's state media is sad about Bluesky because it's not an easy propaganda distribution channel like X (and Facebook)

www.semafor.com/article/11/2...