It's hilarious listening to CIA insiders talk about spying.
John Kiriakou [1] will spend 3 hours talking about the CIA's torture program (illegal) and NSA spying on Americans (illegal). In the same conversation, he will insist that the US would never spy on Israel because it is illegal.
Who is this fooling ?
[1] Senior ex-CIA official, whistleblower & internet meme phenomenon.
How can a vassal state with 1/60th your GDP 'influence' your nation into a war ? It's a rhetorical question. It can't.
Makes the MAGA military look incompetent. The US has a history of botched wars around the globe, most of which have little to do with Israel. If I'm drawing from data, then the Iran conflict is consistent with the post-war military movements of the US.
Now that the communists are no more, Israel is the next best scapegoat. The way I see it, Israel's current leaders are happy to be scapegoats because the war benefits Ben Gvir and a radicalized Likud. It allows them to consolidate domestic power and pursue aggressive foreign objectives under shadow of the Iran conflict.
I hope Netanyahu has thought this through. He has burned through 100 years of western guilt in the span of 3 years. To break even, Israel's military excursions must secure outsized outcomes, to the tune of decades of security. Because, I believe we are entering a couple of decades of bipartisan & unprecedented* anti-semitism.
* Figuratively speaking. Historically ofc, anti-semitism is pretty precedented.
> How can a vassal state with 1/60th your GDP 'influence' your nation into a war ? It's a rhetorical question. It can't.
You don’t need to influence a nation, you only need to get one guy on board.
When you have ready access to the ego-driven and cognitively limited man in charge, either directly or through his sycophants, and that man has enormous executive authority to do mostly whatever he wants, this becomes very straightforward.
Israel has been looking for a sucker in the White House for 40 years, and they finally found one.
Ah yes, the nation's most influential sex-trafficker/pimp was a Mossad asset and the $100b budget CIA knew anything about it. They set up the world's most advanced domestic spying system, and the NSA did not flag anything.
You do realize that such conspiracy theories require all 3 of these things to be true ?
1. American elites are totally clueless
2. The CIA is hopelessly incompetent
3. Mossad has compromised every layer of the American military and elite civilian life
Israel obviously has a ton of influence on American elites and politicians. Just the AIPAC donations and the strong representation of Jews in American elite life is proof enough. You don't have to look much further.
It's the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories (often peddled as fact) that me think there is a certain hysteria going on. It's not anti-semitism per se. More so that otherwise respectable people lose all discernment towards unsubstantiated claims when those claims support their biases about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The Rothschilds have supported Israel for over 140 years; the most recent example is Lord Jacob Rothschild, who appears in the Epstein files.
Those are the facts. I don’t think it necessarily follows that the CIA didn’t realize what was going on or that the American elite were clueless. Those are left as an exercise to the reader.
Right. That"s why Epstein wired millions of dollars to Russia, had a Russian bodyguard, gave away his estate to some Belorussian woman, and so on. Obviously, Mossad at work here!
Epstein was irate that he suffered consequences others didn't (I'm not saying he didn't do more than others). He was thoroughly red-pilling and making comments more about how he believed what he did should be okay.
And being so irate about such things, it's not unreasonable to think "Fuck my handlers (whoever they are, if they exist, Mossad or otherwise), they didn't protect me, so screw it".
Occam's razor and such, but it's also entirely possible that he could have been being blackmailed by the Russians while "working for" Israel - or for that matter, vice versa.
The US is currently waging a proxy war against Russia where they've managed to engineer something like 1,000,000 Russian casualties according to credible estimates [0]. Although obviously they're doing that for moral reasons since Russia launched an unprovoked war to maintain a sphere of influence around their borders which serious people in the US establishment have explained no country should be allowed to do.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the US has launched an unprovoked war on Iran because the Iranians were threatening the Israeli (and US for that matter) sphere of influence over the region, which obviously they are entitled to because god said so. The US is being entirely reasonable here and all serious people in the US establishment support or at most disagree with whether the mad scheme is a good idea.
Just saying, if the Russians are the ones who are running the influence operations in Washington they really should consider ... I dunno, sending younger girls, or whatever. Their money is doing unusually poorly for lobbying efforts.
And I want to add I don't even mind the hypocrisy or the evil all that much, I just wish I could find someone with a serious argument for how provoking the Russians makes long-term strategic sense. These policies are stupid, liable to get someone nuked sooner or later and just setting China up to have an easy time.
Please don't give credit for current Ukrainian advances to the Trumpenreich. The US intelligence apparatus was apparently even sharing NATO intelligence and information with Russia on Ukrainian positions. Once the EU excluded the US completely from this, Ukraine has made much more progress recently.
Nations do not apply a standard of 'total freedom' for most other vices. It is known that grown consenting adults can't compete against an algorithmic assault on their self-control systems.
Nations have established middle grounds for gambling. To gamble, drive a couple of hours down to an exempt casino and set fire to your money if you so wish. Bootleg operations are permitted as long as they stay low. Prostitution has similar regulations. Sports betting, Onlyfans & Prediction markets remove those necessary frictions from each vice, preying on men (it's mostly men) at their most vulnerable.
Garry Tan has been the primary crusader for AI driven decision making. I'm sure his position is more nuanced, but his twitter driven communication makes him appear like a caricature of a man in AI psychosis.
When the head of YC champions AI driven decision making, companies will inevitably be influenced into doing exactly that. It's unfortunate, because AI is generational technology and the hyperbole distracts from the real sea change occuring in labor markets everywhere.
Yep - It's nearly impossible to assign profit to those things - we have X revenue from Android licenses, what's the cost of an android license? Is it all the R&D that goes to UI or hardware research? What's the cost of a Youtube Ad?
Google makes money on ads, because its products span the entire internet.
Youtube, Gmail, Search, Maps, Android, Devices, Photos and Drive are how they get the data to make money on ads. Cloud, Android & Youtube would be a 2 trillion dollar company even without Google. They don't make money on these, because they don't need to make money on it.
Aren't they providing a wrapper for the work of another company? IE msft isn't actually doing any foundational work thus they can't meaningfully move product capability, just wait for the model to improve and integrate it?
I can only describe it being overcome with a sense of love and harmony. I was giggling ear-to-ear the whole time I was there.
Great works of art are meant to be religious experiences. At Falling water, every part of the house & estate feels like it was meant to be there. The shapes and curves feel so right. The emphasis on integrating natural materials makes it feel one with nature. Frank Lloyd wright cared a lot about sight lines, which makes every space easy on the eyes.
I've had similar experiences in great Basilicas[0] such as Sagrada Familia[1]. Smaller objects have evoked similar feelings too. Be that cars (The Ferrari Roma[2] or Alfa 33 Stadale[3]) or intricate jewelery (Earrings [4] or watches [5]). Great beauty feels divine, and Fallingwater is one such example.
> At Falling water, every part of the house & estate feels like it was meant to be there. The shapes and curves feel so right.
Even the little details, like the vents/intakes for the HVAC being built into the back of surfaces/built-ins, so they're invisible unless you peer over.
TBPN, OpenClaw and Astral - that's 3 high profile acquisitions in a month. I smell a PR push to be seen as the 'good guys'.
I don't buy it. The leaked emails and actions of OpenAI's leadership point to a cynical growth machine.
The winner of this AI cycle will fund the lobbies that decide the politics of the future. OpenAI gives me a 'must escape the permanent underclass' energy. Not the energy I want from possibly the most influential people of the near future.
John Kiriakou [1] will spend 3 hours talking about the CIA's torture program (illegal) and NSA spying on Americans (illegal). In the same conversation, he will insist that the US would never spy on Israel because it is illegal.
Who is this fooling ?
[1] Senior ex-CIA official, whistleblower & internet meme phenomenon.
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