Our democracy and social infrastructures—the patronage that our forebears fought and died for—are not distressed assets that can be bought on the cheap and run into the ground for the profit of a few private equity managers.

Worst Super Bowl for a guy named Drake since last year

On Oct 7, 2016, an emergency meeting was set by infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein with Palantir founder Peter Thiel, and Russian Ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin. Later that day, the Access Hollywood tape came out, followed by Russian-hacked emails being released on Wikileaks, which were systematically painted by alt-right online trolls paid by Thiel’s PAC MAGA3X to mean that Hillary Clinton was involved in child sex trafficking. Mike Flynn and Erik Prince both worked to amplify these false, traumatic narratives about Podesta and a cabal of Satanic pedophiles run by Hillary. This was done significantly through Breitbart, which was run by Epstein close friend Steve Bannon, and funded by Rebekah Mercer. Additional firepower for these psychological operations was provided by Wagner chief Yvgeny Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency—later charged by Robert Mueller. Up to 600 Russians were dedicated to the 2016 election on Twitter and Facebook. The smearing of Hillary Clinton, which mirrored Epstein and Trump’s own documented child rape, was later branded as Pizzagate—and extended by QAnon. It was all systematic, large-scale projection designed to swing a presidential election through psychological warfare. Thiel was the only major donor who supported Trump in the wake of Trump’s comments about grabbing women by the genitals on video. Palantir had previously been caught planning to run a covert influence operation on Wikileaks. A month after Trump’s inauguration, Vitaly Churkin suddenly died. We were looking for “Russian collusion” in the wrong place.

Scott Alexander on AI agents emergent behaviour on Moltbook: “Reddit is one of the prime sources for AI training data. So AIs ought to be unusually good at simulating Redditors, compared to other tasks. Put them in a Reddit-like environment and let them cook, and they can retrace the contours of Redditness near-perfectly…”

"Elon Was Too Cringe for Pedo Island Night" is almost -- not quite -- as good as "Trump Has COVID Night". The fact that it is happening on his own platform is 🤌

Can’t believe they released the Epstein files to cover up for the Melania movie.

Unbelievable—Jeffrey Epstein appears to bring three girls to visit @elonmusk at SpaceX in 2013. Mary Beth was Elon Musks personal assistant at the time.

Not only did Elon lied about "refusing" to go to the island. He was clearly seeking to go, whether he made it or not is unknown and would be due to scheduling issues, not him "refusing." In fact, I'm not halfway through the Musk references in the Epstein files and so far, it looks like Elon and Epstein were in close contacts through 2012-2014. Now maybe even 2015 as Sultan Bin Sulayem was asking Epstein about a potential meeting with Musk he had in August 2015. To be clear, all of this is well after Epstein was convicted of soliciting child prostitution.

One of the craziest stories I've heard is about this guy who desperately wants the approval of people who think his wife and children are subhuman.

Left hand on the ground trying not to hit the pavement; right hand still holding a cell phone. ICE person standing with a one handed grip pointing his gun right at the man’s head. There is nothing about this that we should accept. We all must reject this. This is our government

Hey @openai and @sama, ya gonna keep notorious misogynist and Epstein-buddy Larry Summers on the Board still? Today seems like an easy day to make the right choice.

I came back today. I thought I had known despair before, but what I saw today is beyond despair. It is not grief, nor horror, nor pain. It is something colder, a stillness where even God seems to have withdrawn His hand. The sky was impossibly blue. The kind of blue that mocks you, that makes you wonder whether beauty itself is a crime. I walked through streets that no longer exist, streets that were my childhood. They are now a wilderness of stone, wire, and dust. A man stood on a heap, a neighbor, I think. He pointed and said, “It’s here.” I asked him how far. He looked down. And I understood: my house was beneath his feet. I lifted my phone, as if the machine could recognize what I could not. The screen glowed; there was nothing to see. The earth had swallowed the distances. Even the smell of home was gone. It was as if the thread connecting me to life itself had been cut. I dug with my hands. The dust burned. My palms bled. My mother had told me: “Search for anything we can save.” And so I obeyed her like a son obeys the last voice that still believes there is meaning in obedience. From a house that once cost my father one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, a lifetime of labor, of hope, of decency, I found two things: a knife, and a pillow. Two relics of civilization. One for necessity, one for illusion. That is what remains of man. I sat in the ruins, the blue of my shirt turned gray with ash, and I thought: this is the end not of a city, but of meaning itself. I thought of my parents, their hands, their faith in honest work. How will they bear this? How will any man bear seeing his father’s roof turned into dust by a stranger’s hands, hands that will never know the names of those they destroyed? But what tears me apart more than ruin is silence. No one speaks to us. No one tells us where to go, who will rebuild, or who is responsible. The politicians talk of victories, the generals of strategy, the world of peace and progress. But none of them live here among the ashes. None of them stand where I stand, sifting through their own dead. And those who claim to represent us, where are they? Where is the money they collected in our name, the promises they made before the cameras, the slogans they wrote while we buried our children? Who among them will come to this ruin and say: Forgive us, we failed you? Not one. They sit in offices with clean shirts, counting our corpses as figures on paper. They say “reconstruction,” “aid,” “negotiations,” as though the vocabulary of power could fill the emptiness of a mother’s bed. I tell you the truth: there is no crime greater than indifference. The murderer at least acknowledges the victim. But those who look away, they kill the soul itself. I brushed the dust from my shirt, though I knew it was useless. I wanted to see if there was still color left in the world. There wasn’t. The blue had become the color of mourning. I looked at my hands. They were shaking, not from fear, but from the unbearable realization that we have become expendable to the world. Our suffering is entertainment, our death a policy, our endurance a statistic. I wept then, openly, shamelessly. I, who once believed in the dignity of suffering, now see that dignity itself has been annihilated. There is nothing noble in being forgotten. If you are reading this, do not admire the style or the language. Lower your head, and weep. Because this dust, this silence, this cry, is what remains of us.

If this is true, this is the largest public corruption scandal in the history of the United States and it's not even close. nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/po…

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

This discussion exposes how unchecked tech power in Silicon Valley fuels anti-democratic agendas and consolidates control in the hands of the few, leaving our privacy in the crosshairs. With @undersequoias, @tamigraph et al. on @techpolicypress buff.ly/T7pTw2L

This is the most racist, absurd, unhinged thing a democrat senator not named Fetterman has said in a long time. Absolutely revolting. In a just world she would be forced to resign.

I usually try not to feed Grok these days but maybe this will break it a bit. techpolicy.press/trump-20-ru…

Very weird, and telling, tweet: Sacks says that the future of AI is a Rorschach test, and describes what he thinks the left sees, but then says nothing about what he, or other RWers, think an AI-dominated society should look like.

Heighten the contradictions, comrades

Honestly thought there was more redundancy and bloat but DOGE showed me how efficient the federal government really was