https://xcancel.com/WhiteHouse/status/1919053040734072844

edit: A second stupid has hit twitter-

https://archive.ph/7ESf2

I read it hoping it would have some funny stuff. It didn't. It was just bad sentence after bad sentence and in the second half of the article Brooks whines that more Americans should be religious Christians and he praises the "Judeo-Christian ethos".

Something’s going on in our culture. The decline of religious participation, which was so rapid between 2010 and 2020, seems to have stopped. There has been a relative surge in religious interest among young men. According to research by the evangelical Christian polling group Barna, 66 percent of Americans say they have made a personal commitment to Jesus — a 12-percentage-point jump since 2021.

https://worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/should-east-german-symbols-be-banned-like-the-nazi-swastika/

This is to a town of only ~100,000 people

linky

https://xcancel.com/SenSchumer/status/1917367569842942065

linky to tweet

But Mr. Stubb’s country understands the peril of peace negotiations for Ukraine perhaps better than any other. After wars with the Soviet Union in the 1940s, Finland gave up land to Moscow, agreed to neutrality and accepted limits on its military, remaining under the Kremlin’s thumb to some degree for decades.

I wonder which wars Finland fought with the Soviet Union in the 1940s

I swear to God this woman is basically "western fascist chauvinism packaged in a sleek wrapper".

Peak coloniser brain. The only ones they show respect for is other colonisers. I wouldn't be surprised to see if she had produced some video or the other using (metaphorical) calipers to make (metaphorical) skull measurements of the incurable Arabs and why they deserved to be genocided by the superior aryan white settlers.

I find this shit even more disgusting just how comically wrong all this shit is. You don't have to dig up obscure facts! It is the Americans who systematically obliterated the public institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place! Shit is common knowledge for anyone who literally bothered to read news articles of the wars, forget doing actual research!

If the liberals are really so concerned about Afghanistan, could they try to not steal Afghanistan's foreign reserves and try to intentionally create a famine there?

Truly, these people gorge themselves upon the rancid dumpster of ideology.

linky

Tweet

Article

Harvard became directly implicated on Oct. 8, 2023, when the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee issued a statement endorsed by more than 30 student groups that asserted “the Israeli regime” was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Students for Justice in Palestine declared Oct. 12 a “day of resistance” and had a “toolkit” ready for the encampments and demonstrations that spread beyond campus. SJP declared that Palestinian students were “PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” In 2001 there were no such support groups for Islamists at Harvard.

Harvard was a soft target for foreign penetration, having developed an adversarial relationship to the American government and increasingly to the country itself. Veterans of the antiwar movement banished the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from Harvard in the 1970s and kept it off campus for 40 years. When memories of Vietnam faded, the military’s exclusion of open homosexuals became the high-minded excuse for shutting out recruiters—but not government funding. This selective antigovernment policy was reflected in the curriculum, which took an increasingly critical approach to America and Western civilization.

All these demonstrators lacked a common cause until they united around the handiest target in the history of civilization under the guise of liberating the Palestinians. Students who had been kept from marching for their country and warned against insulting every other minority jumped at the chance to attack a politically approved target. In a letter to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber acknowledges valid concerns about rising antisemitism and pledges that Harvard will continue to fight “hate” with the urgency it demands and federal law requires. Harvard’s record provides ample evidence against this claim. Campus coalitions for jihad count on liberal administrators to accommodate their assault.

The most useful of many political functions of anti-Zionism—as with antisemitism before Jews returned to their homeland—is building coalitions of grievance and blame against a small nation with a universally inflated and mostly negative image. This galvanizing enmity has united the pan-Arab and Islamist alliance against Israel since 1948. It powered the red-green coalition at the United Nations and seeds anti-Israel campus coalitions that are anti-American in all but name. Attacking only the Jews—now only Israel—is its key to becoming the world’s most powerful antidemocratic ideology.

https://www.mediaite.com/news/bill-maher-fumes-over-larry-davids-op-ed-mocking-his-trump-meeting-insulting-to-six-million-dead-jews/

March 31, Bill Maher had dinner at the Whitehouse with Donald Trump, Kid Rock, and Dana White.

April 11, Bill Maher made an episode of his show glazing Trump. It was loaded with civility shit. He talked about how civil Trump is in person and how they agree on a lot of stuff.

Bill Maher is a right wing Zionist who identifies as a Democrat on his talk show.

April 21, Larry David (creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm) publishes a satirical story in NYT titled "My Dinner with Adolf". It does not name Bill Maher directly but people have interpreted it to be mocking Bill Maher. https://archive.is/tNjw7

I think Larry David is a Bernie-crat. He's met Bernie Sanders. Some articles say he has never been to Israel but some of the episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm seem pro-Israel. He might be a Liberal Zionist.

Yesterday, Bill Maher accuses Larry David of disrespecting the victims of the Holocaust by comparing Trump to Hitler.

Article link

After firing thousands of U.S. Agency for International Development employees and gutting funding to programs across dozens of countries, this week Secretary of State and USAID administrator Marco Rubio set his sights on dismantling the State Department with the same hatchet-wielding fervor. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported on a plan to scale back U.S.-based staff by 15 percent, and eliminate programs related to human rights, war crimes, and democracy-building. “Non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” Rubio tweeted on Tuesday.

But a review of USAID programs shows that, while following the DOGE playbook in public, the secretary of state has quietly safeguarded Cuban regime change programs aligned with the island’s exile base that has long powered his rise.

One of these programs is the anti-communist publication CubaNet, based out of Miami, which saw its nearly $2 million grant cut, then restored. “Our goal has always been to counteract the propaganda of the Castro regime. Without this funding, the government in Havana will have greater freedom to intensify its propaganda and repression,” the news site’s director Roberto Hechavarría Pilia said before the cash was turned back on.

Support Group for Democracy in Cuba also saw just under a million dollars cut, then restored by Rubio, as did the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba. According to the foundation’s website, its three primary objectives include “cutting revenue streams that are used to repress the Cuban people,” “supporting the Cuban people by highlighting human rights violations,” and “empowering civil society to bring about positive change.”

A grant to the Pan American Development Foundation for “independent media and free flow of information” in Cuba was also listed as reinstated on federal contracting sites. Two people familiar with the program cuts told the Prospect that exceptions were made after Cuban exile groups lobbied the State Department to reverse their grant determinations.

linky

linky

Vijay Prashad

Kinda weird to call the central goverment Hindutva fascism for years and then fully support them in increasing the militarization of Kashmir, also Prashad posted this 5 years ago

One year ago, Narendra Modi arrested Kashmir.

At least the indian socialists still have the naxalites and the CPI(ML)

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the probe, said an anonymous letter sent last week to the WEF's board raised concerns about its governance and workplace culture, including allegations that the Schwab family mixed their personal affairs with the forum's resources without proper oversight. The WEF "takes these allegations seriously, it emphasizes that they remain unproven, and will await the outcome of the investigation to comment further," the forum said in an emailed statement to Reuters. It did not provide details on the allegations. A spokesman for the Schwab family denied all the allegations in the whistleblower complaint, the Wall Street Journal reported. The spokesman also told the Journal that Klaus Schwab intends to file a lawsuit against whoever is behind the anonymous letter and "anybody who spreads these mistruths."

reuters

fucking lmao, not that they would find or do anything

tldr; Tom Friedman took a Waymo ride. He's a "Waymo Democrats" now

https://archive.is/2Qs5f

I struggle these days whenever someone asks me for my political affiliation. But if you really force me, I’d describe myself as a “Waymo Democrat.” Waymos are the self-driving electric taxis started by Google. My party’s bumper sticker would read, “A chicken in every pot and a Waymo in every city.” And our TV ads would say: “Trump is for he/him — his grievances, his revenge, his corruption — and for bringing old stuff back ‘again,’ like coal and gasoline cars. Waymo Democrats are for ‘We the People’ and reinventing American industry anew.”

Why am I bringing this up now? It’s because, as my colleague David Brooks likes to say, Donald Trump is often the wrong answer to the right question. Trump today is offering America a spectacularly wrong answer — a tariff war against the whole world and a revival of 1960s assembly lines — to a very valid question: How do we get more Americans making stuff again?

So, then, what’s the right answer? I admire the fiery protest campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I love their ability to get people out to push back on Trump’s destroy-America-in-100-days campaign. God bless them for that.

But when I listen to A.O.C. and Sanders, I don’t hear them solving for the future. So much of what they are about is lazily bashing billionaires, along with defending Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from the Trump-Elon Musk chain saw. Please, save all of that.

But if Democrats are going to again be the party of the working class, and unify the country more, they need a strategy for expanding the pie of work by expanding new industries — not just protecting the pie of benefits. At a time when Trump Republicans have so given up on the future, Democrats should be for reinventing it. And that requires a strategy to push advanced manufacturing in America into wholly new realms. And that is why I am a Waymo Democrat. It is the right answer to the right question: How can we create more good jobs in advanced manufacturing?

I say this for three reasons. First, robotaxis are going to be a huge industry, not just because I use only Waymos whenever I am in San Francisco, but because I am not alone. In just San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles — the four cities where Waymo offers its fully autonomous ride-hailing service — it’s now racking up a whopping 200,000 paid rides a week. That’s a growth industry.

Second, as I have written based on two recent trips to China, if you want to see the future of manufacturing, you need to go to China, not America anymore. But not in every industry, and robotaxis are among the exceptions. A Chinese company does offer limited robotaxi service in a few cities, but it is an industry of the future in which American technology is still more than competitive and can become even more dominant.

And while I don’t enjoy seeing anyone put out of work, taxi drivers are not in a growth industry. Whereas the number of better-paying jobs supporting a robotaxi network — A.I. researchers, engineers, data scientists, chip designers, blue-collar mechanics, electrical engineers, marketers, maintenance workers, software designers, data-center construction workers — constitute a growth industry, with good incomes for more people. Finally, I can’t think of a more obvious moonshot project to spur advanced manufacturing in America generally than making it our goal to have Waymos or robo-Teslas — or any other brand of self-driving taxis that we can make — operating in every city in America. Because if you look under the hood of any Waymo, it is made up of chips, batteries, sensors and other components that also go into every part of the 21st-century industrial ecosystem — including robots, drones and flying cars — all infused with artificial intelligence.

Waymo uses its own proprietary artificial intelligence system for driving. That system runs on task-specific chips — GPUs (graphics processing units) and TPUs (tensor processing units) — designed in America but manufactured in Taiwan. There is no reason more could not be made here if the industry expands. Waymos contain a collection of high-tech sensors, including lidars (short for light detection and ranging), lasers, radars, some 30 cameras and an array of external audio receivers, all tied together by U.S.-designed software to provide a comprehensive 360-degree vision for the car.

They also have onboard computers and backup systems that control braking, the battery and collision detection/avoidance. The Waymo fleet consists entirely of fully electric Jaguar I-PACE cars assembled in America with a contribution from American Axle & Manufacturing and Magna. It is protected from theft and hacking by an A.I.-controlled cybersecurity system. (And recent studies suggest they are safer than human drivers.)

Waymo is planning to have its next generation of robotaxis manufactured by Zeekr in China, but, again, there is no reason those cars, or those of a U.S. competitor, could not be made in America by Ford or G.M. (Unfortunately, in December, under economic pressure, G.M. scrapped development of its own robotaxi, Cruise, a hugely shortsighted mistake in my view.) Let’s imagine that one day soon self-driving taxis were operating in every city in America and we, not China, became the world’s biggest market for them. There would be a huge incentive to make more and more of their components here. And that is one place I would use tariffs and government investment to give this industry a leg up.

To accelerate this industry further, Waymo Democrats would do everything Trump is doing maliciously today — but do it productively.

We would insist that big law firms that want to do business with the federal government have to offer a certain number of pro bono hours to any start-up building A.I. or other components for our robotaxi industry.

We would tell Harvard and every other Ivy League university that they can teach whatever they want, however they want. But … any student graduating with a degree in math, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering or A.I. on commencement day should get handed a refund check for their entire tuition along with their diploma.

We would tell would-be immigrants, especially from China and Russia, that if they have a degree or expertise in fields related to artificial intelligence, they can have an “A.I. visa” and stay as long as they want. Instead of destroying the Department of Education and letting it be run by a former World Wrestling Entertainment executive who is so clueless she referred to A.I. as “A1” (as in the steak sauce), we would repurpose her agency as the Department of Engineering and Innovation — D.E.I. for short. Has a nice ring to it.

Instead of wrecking our great research institutions like the National Institutes of Health and our national labs the way Trump is, we would triple their budgets and encourage more research in robotic cars. And, finally, we’d say to Elon Musk: “Stop wasting your talents and hurting America with your DOGE craziness and finally get the Tesla robotaxi that you have been promising for a decade out on the road. The greatest gift you could give America today is to junk your stupid chain saw, replace it with car tools and create a nationwide competition with Waymo for robotaxis.”

In sum, the best way for Democrats to demonstrate they are the party of the working people is not just by promising to protect people’s entitlements for another generation, but also by nurturing new industries, like robotaxis, that will fund them for another generation.

Remember, back in the 1960s, the moon was our destination, but the space race project spun off all sorts of new technologies, from CT scans to M.R.I.s and more, including the GPS technology that is used by Waymo cars to navigate today! A giant robotaxi industry in America and its ecosystem would surely spin off all kinds of other technologies that can sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act autonomously — all optimized by A.I. — that would be used in hospitals, homes, data centers and myriad factories. Any time you try to invent the future you end up inventing a whole bunch of things along the way that spawn multiple industries and solve multiple problems, not just the one that you are trying to solve. Any time all that you are focused on is reinventing the past — the way Trump is with coal and combustion cars — you end up stuck in the past.

linky