Dave Sarjeant

Ex-submariner. Tokyo and Kobe, Japan. Student of the Great Books.

[Dave Sarjeant @DaveSarjeant]

Texas Senate candidate https://t.co/0zMjlxhsGh

[Dave Sarjeant @DaveSarjeant]

They Destroy Everything! https://t.co/Zf0jwoLO71 via @YouTube

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

This what every election will be about until the Democrat Party no longer exists.

[Ari Fleischer @AriFleischer]

The Soros Foundation paid for Abdul to go to Medical school and now they’re raising money for him. He’s owned by the Soros family and their stepson, Hasan Piker.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

Instead of making poverty temporary, LBJ’s “Great Society” made poverty permanent.

Instead of lifting the poor out of poverty, LBJ locked them into it.

It’s not just that socialism doesn’t work; it’s that it’s oppressive and cruel.

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

The Alternative for Germany party (AfD) just won 44.5% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt — more than double the CDU’s 18.5%. First conservative right party positioned to lead a German state government since WW2.

Reuters, BBC, NBC, Newsweek, Guardian, NY Times, WaPo, Euronews — every mainstream outlet ran the same “far-right” framing. They do it to Reform UK. They do it to Le Pen’s National Rally. The label isn’t neutral description — in Germany especially, it’s chosen as a pejorative to evoke the Third Reich and make the party radioactive.

Marco Rubio warned last year after Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD as an “extremist organization,” that the move was “tyranny in disguise. What is truly extremist is not the popular AfD . . .but rather the establishment’s deadly open border immigration policies that the AfD opposes.”

Rubio and others warned that attacking the AfD as extremists — amid a refugee wave straining social services and spending — would only push voters to rebel and embrace it. That happened today.

At some point, the media will have to report on the AfD without the “far-right” label.

[Dave Sarjeant @DaveSarjeant]

Stereotyping & projection on display.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

This visual from a Japanese newspaper explaining the US political divide made me laugh😆

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

I order a lot of secondhand and vintage books online. This year the prices jumped and I chalked it up to inflation. I was wrong.

The reason behind the spike in prices is what AI companies euphemistically dub "destructive scanning." That is when they buy millions of second-hand books in bulk and send them to enormous warehouses across America. There, automated assembly lines cut the pages from the spines and then feed the pages into huge industrial scanners.

Those books are being harvested for their text to expand the database for the LLM models. The physical pages? Later discarded. Some of these are the last remaining editions of historical and collectible works — once they're cut and scanned, they're gone.

Booksellers across the UK, Germany, New Zealand, Australia and the U.S. are reporting the same thing: bulk, random, non-fiction orders. Orders have ranged from 1,000 books to as many as a million in a single purchase. Just one vendor contract called for scanning 500,000 to 2 million books.

Anthropic ran this under an internal name, Project Panama, and tried to keep it quiet. Some booksellers noticed something was odd. A Devon bookseller, for instance, got an odd order this summer for books on subjects as disparate as Cornish pioneers in South Africa, cheeses of the world, and Hong Kong jewelry — from a "shipping company" near Heathrow. Her suspicions grew fast. It turned out to an AI run office.

I should have seen this coming. I'm one of the author-plaintiffs in the Bartz et al. v. Anthropic class action — a different kind of theft. Anthropic had trained Claude on more than seven million digitized books, sourced from pirate websites, without paying a penny to authors or publishers. Mine included, seven of my thirteen. There are 120,000 individual authors and rightsholders (representing 447,576 eligible works out of 482,460 total listed books).

A federal judge approved the $1.5 billion settlement this summer. It was the court documents from that litigation that exposed Project Panama. I missed it until the story recently hit the Washington Post and Daily Mail and other outlets.

Having learned an expensive lesson from its class action payout, Anthropic is now going after physical books a different way — and legally, this time. Under the first-sale doctrine, established by the Supreme Court in 1908, once someone buys a physical book, they can do whatever they want with it, including destroying it.

So Anthropic attorneys have determined that buying and scanning a physical copy sidesteps the piracy problem. And once that book is shredded, any future Claude user can draw on its contents for free — the original gone forever.

Some call this a modern-day book burning. The Nazis destroyed books to erase what was in them — these companies destroy books to steal the information and then essentially sell it back to you. I am still angry this is somehow legal.

[Miranda Devine @mirandadevine]

If you ever wondered why civilization has slipped

[Dave Sarjeant @DaveSarjeant]

Symptoms of a severely dysfunctional government and lack of checks & balances. Pritzker record: Governor signs nearly 400 bills, vetoes just one https://t.co/AhGa12eu1V

[Joe Gebbia @jgebbia]

Never forget 🇺🇸

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

Wonder how long into the fattening-you-up-in-a-cage period will the Hansel & Greteles of the world to realize the DSA Witch is never going to let them eat the gingerbread house.

[Dave Sarjeant @DaveSarjeant]

Francesca Hong obviously missed Econ 101 in high school.

[Adam Carolla @adamcarolla]

Agreed

[Dave Sarjeant @DaveSarjeant]

@GadSaad I’m not familiar with her body of work.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

On te vend depuis 40 ans que sans « sensibilité de gauche », les gens crèvent de faim.

C’est exactement l’inverse de ce que disent les chiffres.

1990 : 2,3 milliards d’êtres humains en pauvreté extrême. 38 % de l’humanité.
2025 : 808 millions. Environ 10 %.

1,5 milliard de personnes sorties de la misère absolue en 35 ans.
La plus grande réduction de souffrance humaine de toute l’histoire de l’espèce.

Qui a fait ça ?

Pas l’aide internationale.
Pas les ONG.
Pas les programmes de redistribution.
Pas la sensibilité de gauche.

Le marché.
L’ouverture commerciale.
La Chine de Deng qui abandonne le maoïsme en 1978.
L’Inde qui libéralise en 1991.
Le Vietnam, l’Indonésie, le Bangladesh qui s’ouvrent au capitalisme.

Les seuls endroits où l’extrême pauvreté a explosé sur la même période ?
Le Venezuela socialiste (de 27 % à plus de 80 % en dix ans, inflation à 130 000 %, un Vénézuélien moyen qui a perdu 11 kilos).
La Corée du Nord.
Cuba.
Le Zimbabwe de Mugabe.

La gauche ne nourrit pas les pauvres.
Elle les fabrique.

Le capitalisme produit tellement de richesse que même ses « perdants » américains vivent mieux que la classe moyenne soviétique.
Un pauvre américain a un frigo, une voiture, un téléphone, la clim et internet.
Un pauvre cubain attend du riz.

Et le « social américain est un désastre » reste une légende française.
PIB par habitant US : 80 000 $.
France : 45 000 $.
Un Mississippien (l’État le plus pauvre des États-Unis) a un revenu médian supérieur au Français moyen.

Dans un système libéral, il y a plus de richesse créée, plus largement distribuée, et beaucoup moins de pauvres.
Partout. Sans exception. Sur toutes les périodes mesurées.

Être de gauche en 2026 face à ces données, ce n’est plus de la sensibilité.
C’est préférer la posture morale aux résultats.

La compassion sans résultats, ça s’appelle de la vanité.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

🎯

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

I just wish the removal of the mile-long stretch of mobile home encampments on Forest Lawn and the enormous homeless tent city parking lot on the Cahuenga Pass in the district could have been cleared without residents begging for months and months and months for them to be dealt with.
As tax-paying citizens, we just want our elected politicians to handle things like this without us having to take these issues on. We have jobs we must attend to and don’t have the time to have this kind of “unpaid second job.”

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Listen to how smug and detached from reality she is as @elonmusk interacts with her. Elon is a honey badger.

[Brandon Gill @realBrandonGill]

Hey, it’s Brandon. I sat down to record this video message for you. No political jargon, just the truth from my heart.

Watch here: