Brendan

golf nomad not chasing any lists

[Luke Miani @LukeMiani]

> save $15M a year by cutting a screwworm monitoring program

> screwworm outbreak almost immediately

> $1B to combat it

Government efficiency

[Acyn @Acyn]

De Niro: I hate to say it, but loving our country is starting to sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser.

I can’t love a country that starts stupid and inhumane wars, killing thousands of innocents and indirectly causing the deaths and suffering of millions more.

I can’t love a country that takes healthcare away from millions of people and uses that money to enrich their pals in the Trump-Epstein class.

I can’t love a country that sends out masked militias to shoot citizens in the streets, torture our neighbors, and separate families.

I can’t love a country that’s led by a racist, misogynist, xenophobic tyrant.

And let me just say it: I can’t love a country that’s led by Donald Trump and his sycophant Congress.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.

The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.

What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.

Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.

In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The Trump administration has waived 31 environmental laws to blast barriers and bulldoze roads in Big Bend National Park:

—Clean Air Act
—Endangered Species Act
—National Fish and Wildlife Act
—Safe Drinking Water Act
—Wilderness Act
—Federal Water Pollution Control Act
—Federal Land Policy and Management Act
—Eagle Protection Act
—Farmland Protection Policy Act
—Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
—National Historic Preservation Act
—Energy Independence and Security Act
—Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act
—National Park Service General Authorities Act
—Archaeological Resources Protection Act
—National Trails System Act
—Solid Waste Disposal Act
—Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act
—Migratory Bird Conservation Act
—Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act
—Historic Sites, Buildings, and Antiquities Act
—Federal Cave Resources Protection Act
—Migratory Bird Treaty Act
—National Environmental Policy Act
—National Park Service Organic Act
—Noise Control Act
—Paleontological Resources Protection Act
—Wild and Scenic Rivers Act
—Antiquities Act
—Wild Horse and Burro Act
—Administrative Procedure Act

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Noah B. Price @TrueOnX]

🚨 DATA CENTERS: This is How Democracy Dies in America, One Lawsuit at a Time 🚨

A small Michigan farm town did everything right.

Saline Township residents packed meetings, plastered signs everywhere, and convinced their board to vote 4-1 AGAINST rezoning prime farmland for a $16 BILLION OpenAI-Oracle "Stargate" data center.

The people said NO.

Two days later?

The billionaire-backed developer sued.

The tiny township (budget $1M) couldn't afford the legal war... so they caved and settled.

Now the bulldozers are rolling over farmland while the town treasurer resigned in tears over death threats.

This isn't development.

This is corporate conquest.

Big Tech doesn't ask.

They sue until you break.

Your town could be next.

When corporations can override a 4-1 local vote with lawyers and cash, do we still live in a democracy?

How many more family farms get paved for AI server farms before we say enough?

Why do billionaires get to force their "future" on rural America while draining our water and power grids?

What would the Founding Fathers do if corporations treated towns like this?

Watch this town fight... and lose.

Retweet if you're done with corporate rule.

Comment your town below... are data centers coming for you too?

Let me know what you think,
and SHARE THIS so that others may too.

And if you're not already following @TrueOnX...
What the heck are you doing?!

[Rodger Sherman @rodger]

Shrey spelling 32 words in 90 seconds to win the Spelling Bee is the new greatest athletic accomplishment of 2026. I don’t even know how he said the letters that fast. Got a “Holy Mackerel” out of
@minakimes

[John Collins @Logically_JC]

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[Oleksandr Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Trump just got exposed for running the biggest insider trading operation in American history.

Nancy Pelosi traded $5 million in stocks and Congress lost its mind.

Trump literally executed $750 MILLION worth of stock trades in ONE quarter while being President.

His ethics filing just dropped and the numbers are genuinely unprecedented in history:

Between January and March 2026, Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 individual stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million.

That's roughly 60 trades PER DAY.

While signing executive orders, meeting foreign leaders, and making policy decisions that directly impact the companies he's buying and selling.

Now here's where it gets really insane:

On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

Three months later, on May 8, he stood at a Mother's Day event at the White House, thanked Michael Dell by name, and told Americans to "go out and buy a Dell."

Dell stock surged 14.6% that day to an all-time high of $263.99.

Since Trump's February purchase, Dell is up 96%.

And 5 months BEFORE Trump bought Dell stock, Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to Trump Accounts, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to a sitting president's signature program in modern history.

So the timeline goes: Dell donates $6.25 billion to Trump's program -> Trump buys Dell stock ->Trump tells America to buy Dell from the White House podium -> Stock hits all-time high

And that's just ONE stock...

The same filing shows Trump bought Nvidia stock on February 10. One week later, Nvidia announced a massive chip deal with Meta.

He bought more Nvidia stock one week BEFORE his own Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia.

He bought Intel stock starting in March 2026. The US government already owned a 9.9% stake in Intel worth over $41 billion. On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social praising Intel, writing that "Intel Stock continues to rise."

Intel jumped 3% in after-hours and is now up 140% year-to-date.

He bought Palantir stock while his administration was actively handing them billion-dollar government contracts for immigration enforcement and defense.

He bought Robinhood stock while his own Trump Accounts program uses Robinhood as the broker.

He's currently sitting on over 100% profit on AMD, Intel, Bloom Energy, Marvell Technology, and at least 10 other positions.

Every single president since Lyndon B. Johnson has used a blind trust to avoid exactly this situation. But Trump didn't.

His assets sit in a trust controlled by his own children, and the filings show a broker acted as agent on several trades.

The White House says the portfolio is "independently managed."

But here's what independently managed looks like:

Buy Dell stock. Three months later, publicly endorse Dell from the White House. Stock hits all-time high.

Buy Nvidia stock. One week later, your own government approves their chip sales. Stock rips.

Buy Intel stock. Post about Intel on Truth Social. Stock jumps. The government you run already owns a 10% stake.

Buy Palantir. Hand them contracts. Buy Robinhood. Route a federal program through their platform.

Nancy Pelosi got absolutely destroyed for her husband's stock trades.

Her husband's total disclosed trades in his most controversial year were worth roughly $5 million.

Trump just disclosed up to $750 MILLION in a single quarter.

While making the actual policy decisions that move these stocks.

This isn't a left or right issue.

We're talking about the President of the United States averaging 60 stock trades per day in companies his own administration regulates, contracts with, and publicly endorses.

What do you think?

[ADAM @adamemedia1]

“WE NEED TO LET THEM DO INSIDER TRADING TO FEED THEIR FAMILIES”

That was the actual argument just made in defense of politicians trading stocks.

Members of Congress make $174,000 a year.

The median American income is roughly $63,000. (3x less)

Meanwhile the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour… also unchanged since 2009.

And you’re seriously being told politicians need access to insider trading to survive.

The system is designed to lead earth to neo-feudalism.

And it’s becoming more brazen by the year.

Asset ownership consolidates upward.

Living standards decline downward.

The middle class gets squeezed from both ends and disappears while the elite class accumulates more wealth, more influence, and more protection.

Leaving behind a permanent underclass.

And a permanent political-financial aristocracy at the top…

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

A small town in Michigan voted against a massive Data Center but the developers are moving ahead with the project anyway

Your vote literally doesn’t even matter, they’re just going to do whatever they want

It’s a huge $16 billion project for OpenAI and Oracle. Last September, Saline Township board members voted 4 to 1 against allowing a proposal for an AI data center to proceed

The land has been zoned agricultural for decades, even hundreds of years. They didn't want it to become anything industrial

Now 575 acres of farmland are being rezoned for the data center. The full campus footprint described as up to 21 million square feet. It’s one of the largest construction projects in Michigan history

Here’s what happened

- Related Digital (the developer) proposed rezoning agricultural land
- September 2025: Saline Township Planning Commission and Board voted against it
- Just 2 days later: Related Digital sued for “exclusionary zoning”
- Township settled quickly because they were advised they couldn’t afford the ongoing lawsuit against these tech giants

The plant will use the equivalent energy of 1 million homes

Apparently energy usage and climate change aren’t a problem anymore. Funny how that works…. Just a couple years ago we were told not to use our air conditionings because we’d destroy the planet

[Farm Girl Carrie 👩‍🌾 @FarmGirlCarrie]

This is what local accountability looks like:

In Festus, Missouri, a town of about 14,000 people, the city council quietly approved a $6 billion Ai data center to be built on 360 acres just north of Highway 67.

Residents say they were never properly heard. Meetings were held in private. Documents were released too late. A week after the approval, the town held a regular election. Voter turnout jumped 129 percent.

Every single council member who had voted yes lost in a landslide. A 70-year-old first-time candidate beat an 8-year incumbent by 40 percentage points.

Now a recall petition is circulating to remove the mayor as well. The lawsuit against the city is already filed.

Has your local government ever been held accountable like this? 🔥

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🇺🇸BREAKING: Someone placed a $920 million crude oil short at 3:40 AM.

70 minutes later Axios reported the US and Iran were close to a deal.

Oil dropped 12%.

The trade made $125 million in profit.

Minutes after that Iran launched the “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” and oil surged 8%.

$760 million placed before Trump’s last announcement.

$920 million placed before this one.

Every major announcement in this war has been front-run by someone who knew it was coming.

What kind of war is this?

This is more like a trading desk with an army.

Never stop connecting the dots.

[kyle @Kylypso]

Only in America can a Canadian billionaire waltz into a drought-ridden state on the verge of ecological collapse and get a massive data center campus rubber-stamped with huge tax breaks. Zero local input. But made possible by the bought and paid for government!

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are all planning huge layoffs.

Amazon got $17.5B in federal tax breaks last year. Jeff Bezos is worth $271B.

Meta saved $13.7B in taxes. Mark Zuckerberg is worth $231B.

Microsoft saved $12.5B last year. Its CEO is worth $1.3B.

This is what a rigged economy looks like.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Taxpayers are spending $1 billion to upgrade the private jet Trump got as a bribe from Qatar.

[robert @rfhirschfeld]

$736 million is about what it costs to fund 20 hours of the disastrous Iran war.