Vicious Sydney

Software Engineer 💻 Artist 💜 Prince-enthusiast

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Extraordinary

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🌲Sen. Susan Collins’ household stake in UnitedHealth Group is up 850%, journalist Nathan Bernard noted, with the increase coming after Medicaid cuts in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” boosted the insurer’s outlook.

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner called congressional stock ownership “legalized corruption,” saying lawmakers and their spouses should be barred from owning and trading individual stocks because they can profit from legislation they help pass.

🎥 @nathanTbernard

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

⚡️Melat Kiros says House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries should not become speaker if Democrats retake the House, arguing the party must “root out the corruption and get money out of our politics” by voting out incumbents “taking that kind of corporate PAC money.”

Her comments to Politico came as Jeffries publicly congratulated Kiros on her primary victory, calling it a “hard-fought” win and saying House Democrats would “end the culture of corruption in Washington.”

[Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb]

We've been quiet recently because Mark Goodwin and I have been working to write the most comprehensive investigation into Polymarket's origins and ambitions to date.

We found that Polymarket's "official" origin story, that Shayne Coplan founded the company alone in 2020 and then built "the company in his bathroom", is a lie. Polymarket really started years earlier as another company called TokenBnk that was deeply tied to Israeli interests, specifically a crypto company founded by Benjamin Netanyahu's niece and nephew. Coplan has actively tried to obfuscate this company from his story and it's not the only thing either.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we unravel the real history of Polymarket, directly connecting the company to Peter Thiel's efforts to resurrect controversial DARPA programs from its now defunct Information Awareness Office. Polymarket appears to have been chosen by Thiel and his associates to succeed in resurrecting DARPA's Policy Analysis Market where another Thiel-linked company, Augur, had previously failed.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we explore the current influence of prediction markets and Polymarket, including how an insidious effort to have prediction markets replace representative democracy as a governance model is already being slowly implemented by the White House.

Read Part 1 here: https://t.co/xTmU5RzoZz

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

Part of the left populist/DSA rise is the way the Epstein files laid bare class dynamics. How can you really believe trans people or immigrants are the biggest problem when you see billionaires conspiring to self deal, war profiteer, and manipulate national governments?

[Aaron Maté @aaronjmate]

An important new report by @PalFeminist and @ProgIntl documents Israel's systematic sexual violence against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948:

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🚨 Israeli Plan to Herd Palestinians Into Controlled “Shelters” to Begin “Within A Matter of Weeks”

🔸Israel is preparing to channel Palestinians into fenced “humanitarian shelters” in areas outside Hamas’s control, policed by a foreign force, while its military deepens its occupation of the rest of Gaza, according to the pro-Netanyahu paper Israel Hayom, which reported the plan approvingly.

🔸Under the plan, unarmed civilians would be directed to a first zone in Tel al-Sultan, near Rafah, an area Drop Site has documented Israel systematically razing.

🔸A “multinational force” - the ISF - operating under the Trump administration’s “Board of Peace” would deploy there from a newly built base, equipped to police the zones, while the Israeli military “continues to maintain and deepen its hold” beyond the Yellow Line.

🔸 The camp/base for the force “has already been built,” and the Board of Peace has “begun identifying sites” for logistics warehouses, with the groundwork underway now, and deployment in the coming weeks.

🔸The paper described the effort as a “pincer movement”: the military seizing more territory as the population is siphoned into the controlled zones, in the hope that Hamas is left “without a population, territory or resources.”

🔸Officials said the areas would receive caravans and aid, but not the concrete needed to actually rebuild Gaza.

◽️The plan matches what Drop Site has previously exposed through leaked documents: a surveilled, checkpoint-controlled “planned community” in Rafah designed to force Palestinians into what amounts to an Israeli panopticon, tracked and screened as a condition of receiving aid.

🔸An Israeli political source told the paper the military would keep up “the pace of targeted killings while remaining below the threshold of international criticism… as long as Hamas is unwilling to disarm.”

📸 The buildup is already visible: the “Board of Peace” itself posted images of tactical vehicles arriving at a logistics base on June 30, matching the article’s account of preparations underway.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

I remember telling skeptical European diplomats in 2024 that the Gaza genocide will be a formative experience for an entire generation of Americans. That the politics around Israel will change in America faster than most have expected.

And I specifically told them that the kids at the Columbia, Harvard, MIT encampments are no ordinary kids. They are the future leaders of this country. At least one of them will run for president. Several will run for Senate. Even more for the House.

It's already happening.

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

What could go wrong? /s 🕳️

Read Vanishing Culture for more stories of cultural loss & what you can do to preserve digital history: https://t.co/M91NQlX7m2

[Melat Kiros for Congress, CO-1 @MelatKirosCO]

Just the beginning.

[MintPress News @MintPressNews]

🚨The Lebanese Government Has Handed Over The Following Villages To Israel Under Its Normalisation Agreement

Lebanese citizens can no longer return to their homes & are experiencing a Nakba like event if they are from:

•Al-Bayyada
•Shemaa
•Majdal Zoun
•Al-Mansouri
•Naqoura
•Alma Al-Shaab
•Teir Harfa
•Al-Jibbeen
•Shehin
•Al-Zahira
•Yarin
•Marwahin
•Al-Bustan
•Umm Al-Tout
•Al-Zalloutiya
•Al-Sulhani
•Aita Al-Shaab
•Ramya
•Al-Qawzah
•Debel (inhabited)
•Ain Ebel (inhabited)
•Rmeish (inhabited)
•Sarbin
•Al-Tayri
•Hanin
•Rshaf
•Yaron
•Maroun Al-Ras
•Bint Jbeil
•Ainata
•Aitaroun
•Kounin
•Beit Yahoun
•Hadatha
•Al-Ghandourieh
•Zoter Al-Sharqiya
•Zoter Al-Gharbiya
•Kfartabnit
•Yohmor Al-Shaqif
•Meifadoun (outskirts)
•Arnoun
•Doha Kfarreman
•Blida
•Mohaybib
•Meiss Al-Jabal
•Houla
•Markaba
•Adaisseh
•Kfarkila
•Al-Khiam
•Al-Taybeh
•Deir Siryan
•Talousa
•Al-Qantara
•Rab Thalathin
•Al-Qusayr
•Aadchit Al-Qusayr
•Debbin
•Al-Abbasiya Al-Hududiya
•Al-Majidiya
•Ain Arab
•Kfar Shouba
•Shebaa

[Acyn @Acyn]

Karl: Israel is a Jewish state. That’s in the charter. Do you support that?

Mamdani: I’ve said time and again that I support the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.

Karl: As jewish state?

Mamdani: I believe that any state that privileges one religion over another is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. And a lot of that comes back to a fundamental belief that we should all be considered equal, no matter what our faith is.

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

Yep. They get away with that “bullshit” by buying off politicians like you through the $30,000 you've taken in campaign payouts from them—and the $28,500 you've taken from Consumer’s Energy.

(Pro-tip: direct to camera videos work better when you're not pretending to care about problems you're a part of creating.)

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

This man is just too good at this

[Mohammed El-Kurd @m7mdkurd]

NEW: The Board of Directors at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) will formally change its definition of who qualifies as a journalist, to broadly exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese journalists who worked for government-funded media outlets. Israeli, American, and Ukrainian journalists who work for state-funded outlets or are embedded with the military will remain recognized as journalists, of course.

The move was catalyzed to appease the right-wing Zionist rag The Free Beacon, which has repeatedly accused Palestinian and Lebanese journalists of being undercover militants or used their political opinions or affiliations as justification for their killing by the IOF.

This is a racist scandal of massive proportions for everyone involved, and it makes a mockery of the purported mission of the organization. It is absolutely abhorrent that the organization’s resources are wasted on this cowardly witch-hunt, at a moment in history that is the deadliest for journalists, especially in Palestine and Lebanon.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

🚨NEW: @AbdulElSayed responds to Dem powerbrokers saying it’s too dangerous for him to be Dems’ Senate nominee:

“If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m dangerous. If you’re AIPAC, I’m dangerous. If you’re a corporate PAC, I’m dangerous. If you’re Blue Cross Blue Shield’s CEO, I’m pretty damn dangerous.”

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Think about what it means to order the killing of your own soldiers in order to prevent them from becoming part of a prisoner exchange.

It means that Israeli officials consider it a higher priority to keep detaining Palestinian men, women, and children without charge than to release some in exchange for those soldiers.

That logic is so obviously inhumane that Israel officially ended the Hannibal Directive policy on paper, yet obviously kept it in practice, because we now have many different reports of it being implemented on October 7. And we also know that the bombing campaign was organized through 2023 and 2024 in a way that many Israeli officials understood to be highly likely to kill captives Israelis in Gaza, as +972 has exposed.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

It is powerful to see other arbitrarily sanctioned legal professionals acting against this outright persecution and full-on assault on int'l justice. I hope their ordeal will end sooner than mine.
I am proud my family pioneered all this, even if the cost is extremely high.

[Boots Riley @BootsRiley]

I love this publication and I'm hyped to have a feature in it!

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

This man is Chris Butler (b. 1948), aka Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa. He's the founder of the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), a fringe yogic sect based in Hawai’i.

He is the “guru” of #Tulsi Gabbard, who was a child of the Science of Identity cult.

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