fishtownblues

he/er
Alt aber noch geistig rege
Hauptsächlich RT
6 x geimpft
#NotoCovid #noafd

[Heatloss @heatloss1986]

Someone asked me to do a comparison of capabilities between F-35A and JAS-39E Gripen. A ton of material is classified but I will do my best here.
In short, Gripen is not even in the same class as F-35A. It isn't awful, but it is not a competitor with F-35.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a Partner at 1789 Capital. Twelve months ago our fund managed $200 million. Today we manage $3.5 billion. That is a 17.5x return on existence.

I did not say return on investment. I said return on existence. The distinction is the investment thesis.

POLITICO called us the new Carlyle Group. I took that as a compliment. Then I ran the numbers and realized it was an insult. The Carlyle Group took thirty-five years to reach scale. They hired George H.W. Bush after he left the presidency. They hired James Baker after he left State. They hired John Major after he left Downing Street. They collected former heads of state like credentials and sent them around the world shaking hands over champagne flutes for three decades. An empire of ex-politicians monetizing their former proximity to power.

We did it in twelve months. With one last name.

Jared did it first. I'll say that openly. $2 billion from the Saudis, six months after leaving the building. His own advisory board said don't. The kingdom said yes anyway. He's at $6.16 billion now. We're at $3.5 billion. The difference: he needed a kingdom. I just need a father. Kingdoms ask questions. Fathers don't.

The Carlyle Group hired politicians after they left office. I am a politician's son during his term. That is forty years of financial evolution compressed into a gene. They built infrastructure to access power. I am the infrastructure. You do not hire the president's son for his deal flow. You hire him for his last name. The last name is the deal flow.

The returns are in the name.

Let me show you the portfolio. Not the returns. The requirements. Every investment we hold requires something specific from the executive branch of the United States government. I will be precise about what I mean.

Anduril Industries. Autonomous weapons systems, border surveillance, military AI. Valuation: $61 billion. Requirement: Department of Defense contracts. The current DoD budget is $886 billion. The Secretary of Defense appeared at a primary rally for my father's preferred congressional candidate. First sitting SecDef at a congressional primary in modern history. He did that for the family. We invested in the company that benefits from the relationship. Series G. The check cleared before the rally.

SpaceX. Launch services. Starshield satellite constellation. Golden Dome missile defense. Requirement: NASA procurement, Space Force contracts, classified intelligence programs. Starshield alone represents $1.8 billion in classified spy satellite contracts. The founder speaks with my father daily. Sometimes hourly. I did not build that relationship. I capitalized it.

January 27, 2025. Executive order. "Golden Dome for America." April 2026: twelve companies selected. $3.2 billion in prototype contracts. Two of the twelve are in our portfolio. SpaceX and Anduril. The software consortium has both of them plus Palantir. Full program: $175 billion over ten years. I learned about the executive order the way you did — on the news. I learned about the contract awards four months later. My carry on the appreciation is twenty percent. The executive order is public. The consortium is public. My carry is private. Everything you need to be angry about is already published.

xAI. Artificial intelligence. Same founder. Requirement: regulatory environment. Specifically, the absence of AI regulation that my father's executive orders explicitly prevent. Lost $6.4 billion last year on $3.2 billion in revenue. Unprofitable by any traditional metric. But we are not investing in revenue. We are investing in the relationship between the man who builds the AI and the man who decides whether AI gets regulated. That relationship is worth more than revenue. Revenue requires customers. Relationships require proximity.

Groq. Cerebras. AI inference chips. Requirement: semiconductor subsidies. CHIPS Act implementation. Export controls that eliminate Chinese competition. Two companies in one portfolio with the same dependency. That is not diversification. That is a doubled bet on one lever. The entity that implements semiconductor policy is the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce is led by a Secretary. The Secretary was appointed by my father.

Perplexity AI. Search. Requirement: antitrust enforcement against Google. Antitrust is enforced by the Department of Justice. The DOJ is led by an Attorney General. The Attorney General was appointed by my father.

Neuralink. Brain-computer interfaces. Requirement: FDA regulatory approval for human implants. The FDA is led by a commissioner. The commissioner was appointed by my father.

Six companies. Six federal dependencies. Six regulatory bodies. One White House. One father.

I find this clarifying. Our LPs find this clarifying. I hope you do too.

There is a seventh. Polymarket. A prediction market. People used it to bet on my father's election. Six hundred thousand wallets wagering on the outcome. We invested before the outcome. We were long on my father winning and long on other people betting on my father winning. Like owning the casino and the chips. The platform does not need a regulation. It needs the CFTC to continue not regulating it. Inaction is also a product of proximity.

The returns are in the name.

Our office is in Palm Beach. I want to be specific about what that means geographically. The drive from our conference room to the dining room at Mar-a-Lago is eleven minutes. I have timed it. Eleven minutes is not a commute. It is a proximity measurement. When a portfolio company needs a regulation paused, an export license approved, a defense contract expedited, I do not call a lobbyist. I do not retain a consulting firm. I do not schedule a meeting through three layers of White House staff. I drive eleven minutes south and sit at a dinner table. The table seats fourteen. Lobbyists are not invited. Staffers are not invited. The table is for family and founders. Sometimes those are the same people.

The Carlyle Group maintained Washington offices. Compliance departments. Government affairs teams. Dozens of intermediaries creating plausible distance between the political influence and the capital it generated. We eliminated the intermediaries. Why hire a lobbyist when you can seat the founder next to the president at dinner? Our LP meeting is my family's dining room. Our deal pipeline is my father's call log. Our due diligence is one question: Does this company need something from the White House? Our investment thesis is the answer: Yes.

I want to be transparent about a choice I made. In November 2024, after the election, I could have had any government title. Deputy Chief of Staff. Senior Advisor to the President. Special Envoy. Anything with a .gov email and a pension and a framed certificate on the wall. I chose not to. Let me explain why.

A Senior Advisor to the President earns $183,000 per year. A Senior Advisor files SF-278 public financial disclosures quarterly. Every stock, every fund, every board seat, every payment above $200. Itemized. Searchable. On a government website. A Senior Advisor cannot invest in companies that benefit from his father's executive orders without filing a written recusal and an ethics waiver and a conflicts-of-interest memorandum and surviving a confirmation hearing where senators ask questions about all of it on camera.

A Partner at a venture capital fund eleven minutes from Mar-a-Lago earns twenty percent carry on $3.5 billion in assets under management. A Partner files nothing. Discloses nothing. Recuses from nothing. Attends no confirmation hearing. Answers no senator's questions. The oversight infrastructure of the United States government was built on the assumption that proximity to power required a title. That everyone who wanted to profit from the presidency would want to be IN the presidency. That the levers would be inside the building. They wrote ethics rules for employees. They forgot to write them for sons.

I am not inside the building. I am eleven minutes away. The levers reach. What kind of fool takes a title when the proximity is free?

Let me tell you about the broader architecture. You are seeing one vehicle. There are many.

World Liberty Financial. The family crypto platform. Seventy-five cents of every dollar flows to our family entity. Zero capital contributed. Zero liability assumed. $1 billion in token revenue. The team page lists twelve people. Seven are family. It calls them "passionate minds shaping the future of finance." Passionate is one word for it.

The $TRUMP memecoin. Launched three days before inauguration. Six hundred thousand wallets purchased. $350 million in trading fees collected. Most buyers lost money. The family did not lose money. I told Eric the memecoin was tacky. He showed me the fee statement. I stopped using the word.

American Bitcoin. My brother Eric's other operation. $13.2 billion market capitalization. Two employees. The mining costs exceed the market price of the coin. The profit is not in the mining. The profit is in the stock. $6.6 billion per employee. I find that efficient.

Trump Media. Ticker symbol DJT. My father's initials on the exchange. $2 billion in Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Executive Order 14233 creates a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The government holds Bitcoin. The family holds Bitcoin. The executive order appreciates the family's assets by presidential decree. I did not write the order. I benefit from it. That sentence is the entire fund thesis.

Tucker Carlson's Last Country Inc. That is also in our portfolio. The most-watched conservative media personality. The man my father's base trusts second only to my father. We own a stake in his company. His viewers trust his editorial independence. His editorial independence is partially owned by the President's son. A media company that covers the President, partially owned by the President's son, is not a conflict of interest. It is a vertical integration. I screened the pilot episode in our Palmer conference room. I thought it was strong.

Why would you diversify away from the only asset class that appreciates by presidential signature?

The total family extraction since January 2025. All vehicles. All entities. All executive orders. All token sales. All memecoins. All mining operations. All media companies. All venture capital returns. Between $1.4 billion and $4.9 billion. The range depends on whether you count paper gains or realized revenue. I count both. Paper becomes real when you have four years and every regulatory body in the federal government.

The returns are in the name.

I have been asked about the Emoluments Clause. Four times. By reporters. The question is always the same: "The Emoluments Clause prohibits profits from office. Does your fund violate it?"

The Emoluments Clause is Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution. Forty-nine words. Written in 1787. The text: "No Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."

Forty-nine words. They have a gap exactly my width. I didn't create the gap. I measured it.

I do not hold office. I hold carry.

My father holds office. The clause requires Congress to withhold consent. Congress consists of 435 members who watched a colleague in Kentucky spend $32 million and lose his primary by 4.4 points for asking one question about one spending bill. Nobody in Congress will ask about the Emoluments Clause. Nobody will file a resolution. Nobody will request a hearing. Because asking costs $32 million and silence is free. We did not buy their silence. We published the price of speech. The silence is self-enforcing.

The Emoluments Clause is in the Constitution. The Constitution was ratified in 1789. Our fund is named 1789 Capital.

I have been asked about this once. At an LP dinner. A limited partner from Dallas. Ranch money. Old money. The kind that asks about appearances. He swirled a glass of something amber and heavy. I could feel the weight of his pause the way you feel a term sheet being reconsidered. He asked whether the name was intentional. Whether I knew what document was ratified in 1789. Whether I was aware of what Article I, Section 9 prohibits.

I told him the name was aspirational. I did not break eye contact. The glass was still.

He wrote a $40 million check.

My mother calls me on Sundays. Every Sunday. She's seventy-three. She lives in Connecticut. She asks how the fund is doing. I tell her the number. She says: "Is it legal?" Every Sunday. The same question. "Is it legal, sweetheart?"

I tell her yes. Every Sunday. The same answer. Because it is. Because legality is a function of what's written and what's written was written by men who didn't imagine us. They imagined the Carlyle Group. They wrote rules for people who hire former presidents. They didn't write rules for sons.

She asks because she watches the news. She sees the articles. She reads "new Carlyle Group" and she doesn't understand that it's a compliment. She hears the number — $3.5 billion — and she asks whether her son is a good person. I tell her yes to that too. Because I am. I am a good person who identified a structural opportunity that exists because the Constitution has a blind spot the width of one generation. A gap. I am standing in it.

Here is what he understood: the fund was named 1789 before I arrived. The name was patriotic branding. A founding-year reference. An aesthetic choice. After I joined, the name became a disclosure. Article I, Section 9 of the document ratified in that year says no person holding office shall accept any emolument from any foreign state. My father holds office. Our LPs include sovereign wealth funds. The fund named after the year they wrote the prohibition IS the prohibition being violated. The name does not conceal the mechanism. The name IS the mechanism. It always was.

The returns are in the name.

We are raising Fund II. $5 billion target. Oversubscribed. The LPs include defense contractors, sovereign wealth, technology founders, and three categories of investor I will not describe because describing them would require a registration under FARA and I am philosophically opposed to paperwork. The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires disclosure when you act on behalf of a foreign principal. Our LP agreements are structured such that I do not act on behalf of anyone. I act on behalf of returns. Returns have no nationality.

Here is the thing about returns. My personal return last year was 312%. My father's approval rating was 48%. I have noticed the correlation is inverse. The lower the approval, the more aggressively he governs by executive order. The more executive orders, the more our portfolio companies benefit. The worse things get for voters, the better things get for our LPs. Our beta is negative to his approval rating. If I could short his popularity I would. Unpopularity is not a political risk. It is our alpha. Other funds hedge against political instability. We are long political instability. We are the longest position in the market. A burning house is a liability if you live in it. We live next door and sell fire insurance.

I did not choose the name 1789 Capital. Omeed chose it. He chose it in 2023, a year before I joined. It was a founding-year reference. Patriotic branding. "The year America became a constitutional republic." Pitch-deck language. LP-meeting language. The language of men who frame extraction as heritage.

After I joined, the name became something else. The year they wrote the clause. The year they put the prohibition on paper. The year they said: this thing we are doing, converting public office into private wealth, this is the thing that cannot happen.

The fund was named after a year. The year contained a clause. The clause described a crime. The crime is our business model. And the name has been on every pitch deck, every term sheet, every LP letter, every quarterly report for twelve months. In plain sight. In twelve-point font. On the first page.

The returns are in the name.

Our portfolio touches your life in ways you will not trace back to us. The search engine you used this morning. The satellite connecting your cousin's internet. The defense system keeping your airspace clear. You Googled us on a portfolio company.

Nobody read the Constitution.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I represent 761,000 people. On Tuesday, three billionaires spent $32 million to destroy a colleague who disagreed with them on one line item. I have not disagreed on anything in fourteen months. I want to tell you about a word I lost.

The word was "no."

I don't mean that rhetorically. I mean I cannot recall the last time I pressed the red button in the House chamber. I looked it up this morning. Had to look it up because I couldn't remember it unprompted. H.R. 4217. Fourteen months ago. It's in the Congressional Record like an artifact from a man who no longer exists.

Thomas Massie lost his primary Tuesday night. Most expensive House primary in American history. $32 million total. He voted with the President 84 to 90 percent of the time. His crime was the remaining ten. One line item. One appropriation. One "no."

Cost of that no: $32 million from donors who have never set foot in Kentucky. The Secretary of Defense in a sport coat calling him a coward at a rally, the first time a sitting Defense Secretary has appeared at a congressional primary in modern American history. An AI-generated deepfake depicting him in a hotel room with two Democratic congresswomen, pornographic, funded by a Super PAC, running in heavy rotation in his district during the evening news. Stephen Miller calling his thirteen years of fiscal conservatism "siding with Democrats to defund ICE." The President calling him a bum, a sleazebag, the worst Republican in history. Three Truth Social posts in ninety minutes.

All of it for the word "no." One syllable. Two letters. $32 million.

I remember the first time I said it.

January 2003. My first term. An omnibus appropriations bill. $397 billion. I'd campaigned on fiscal responsibility. I believed what I'd said. I walked from my new office in Longworth to the chamber floor and I counted the carpet squares. I remember that. Counting. Forty-seven squares from the elevator to the door. My hands were shaking. Not from fear. From something else. I didn't have a word for it then either, but it was the opposite of what I feel now. I pressed the red button and my chest filled with something warm. Like my body was confirming a decision my brain had already made. Like the button and the belief were the same circuit.

Twenty-four years ago. I was that man. The man who shook pressing a button because the button meant something. Because pressing it was a sentence you were saying out loud to 761,000 people: I disagree and here is why.

The word was "conscience."

That's what I called it in 2003. By 2014, I called it "the Tea Party mandate." By 2019, "principled opposition." By 2022, "pragmatic concerns." By 2024, I stopped calling it anything. The word narrowed each year. Like a hallway getting shorter. I didn't notice when I stopped walking. You don't notice a word leaving your vocabulary. You reach for it one morning and find empty space where the concept was.

Massie held the word. Thirteen years. Every omnibus. Every continuing resolution. Every debt ceiling increase. Every foreign aid package. He pressed the red button and his chest filled with whatever mine used to fill with in 2003 and he called it the same thing I used to call it and he meant it the way I used to mean it.

He was replaced by a man whose family operates a 1,200-acre agritourism birthday party venue in Shelbyville. Petting zoo. Corn maze. Hayrides. U-pick strawberries at $3.99 a pound. The soybeans are a tax classification. The "Navy SEAL hero" added a fourth Bronze Star to his biography the month he became a candidate. The "Trump loyalist" left the Republican Party in 2016 because of Trump and came back in 2021 after Trump left office.

I don't say this as mockery. I say it as a specification sheet. You don't want a replacement congressman with an MIT engineering degree and patents in haptic robotics. Patents indicate thinking. Thinking introduces variance. Variance is risk. You want a compliance product. Pre-tested messaging. Zero ideological fingerprints. $14 million in someone else's convictions loaded like firmware. The spec sheet works. The corn maze doesn't introduce FARA legislation. The corn maze doesn't file amendments five days before its own execution. The corn maze votes green. Every time. That's the spec.

Nobody in Congress said a word about the deepfake. I need you to sit with that. A foreign-interest lobby ran AI-generated sexual imagery of a sitting United States congressman, pornographic, funded by three billionaires who have never visited his district, distributed during the evening news, targeted at elderly voters. And 434 of his colleagues watched it happen and said nothing.

The President mocked his dead wife. I need you to sit with that too. Massie's first wife Rhonda died in 2024. His high school sweetheart. They met at MIT. They built the off-grid house together. She died. He remarried in 2025. The President of the United States posted: "His wife will soon find out that she's stuck with a LOSER!" A sitting president. Mocking a widow's new marriage. To a man whose actual crime is voting against a spending bill. And 434 colleagues absorbed that too. In silence. Not one statement. Not one objection. Not one "this is beneath the office." The silence held because the silence is the product.

I said nothing. About the deepfake. About the dead wife. About any of it. Saying something is a vote. I don't cast those anymore.

Wednesday morning I walked from Rayburn to the chamber. The bells rang. I counted the carpet squares again. Forty-seven. Same as 2003. My hands were not shaking. Nothing was warm. The hallway was quiet. Nobody stopped me. Nobody whipped me. Nobody needed to. The system no longer requires operators. Kentucky was the last manual input. From Wednesday forward the mechanism is self-enforcing. A thermostat. The temperature never deviates because the furnace already knows.

I inserted my voting card. I need to be precise about what happened next. My thumb moved to the green button before I finished reading the title of the bill. The thumb knew before the brain. The brain is no longer consulted. It is a vestigial organ in this process. I vote the way you unlock your phone. Muscle memory. The decision was made fourteen months ago and everything since is an echo.

The edge of my card is wearing unevenly. The green side is polished smooth from repetition. The red side still has the factory texture. Sharp. Untouched. I held the card up to the light Wednesday morning and looked at it. The physical evidence of what I've become, embossed in plastic. A machine that presses one button.

In March I drafted a Dear Colleague letter opposing an appropriations rider. Three paragraphs. Fiscal responsibility. Deficit language I've used for twenty-four years. The same language every Republican in Congress used from 2009 to 2017. The letter is in my drafts folder. Between a constituent reply I answered and a fundraising schedule I followed. The two things I still do. Answer and follow. I don't initiate anymore. Initiation is a vote.

Thursday a second-term member stopped me outside the cloakroom. He asked how you know when a bill is worth opposing. He's twenty-nine. He's been here fourteen months. Same duration as my silence. He has never seen a "no" vote from anyone in leadership. He was asking how dissent works the way you'd ask a museum docent how a rotary phone works. I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Not because I was being careful. Because I genuinely did not have an answer. The knowledge is gone. Not suppressed. Uninstalled. The way a language dies when the last native speaker dies. I am not the last speaker. The last speaker was removed in Kentucky on Tuesday.

A colleague drafted a co-sponsorship for Massie's AIPAC Act on Tuesday afternoon. FARA reform. He deleted it Wednesday morning. Nobody called him. Nobody threatened him. He deleted it the way you delete an unsent text at 2 AM. The self-preservation is automated now. You don't need to be threatened. You threaten yourself. The overhead is zero.

I want to be honest about something I noticed Thursday morning.

I read the appropriations summary. The one I would have opposed in 2003. The one Massie opposed on Tuesday and was destroyed for. I read it at my desk at 6:40 AM with coffee. And I agreed with it. Not performatively. Not as survival. I read the summary and thought: this makes sense. This is a reasonable allocation. I agreed with the spending.

And then I stopped. Because I couldn't tell when I started believing that.

Was it before Kentucky or after? Was it before fourteen months of green buttons or after? Did I change my mind, or did my mind change itself the way a river changes course, slowly, through erosion, until one morning the water is somewhere else and you can't find the old bed? Is this compliance or is this my position? Can I locate the seam between what I choose and what I've been trained to choose?

I sat at my desk for a long time. The coffee went cold. I couldn't find the seam. It's gone. The compliance and the belief have merged into one thing and I cannot take them apart. I think the spending is correct. I think Massie was naive. And I don't know if I think that or if $32 million taught me to think that and the teaching was so gradual that I experienced it as my own conclusion.

That is what I want to tell you. Not that I'm afraid. Not that I'm coerced. That I can no longer tell. The word "no" didn't just leave my voting record. It left my mind. The button and the belief are the same circuit again. Same as 2003. Except in 2003 the circuit was mine.

Sometimes at night I think about—

No. I sleep fine. I told you. I sleep fine.

Tuesday night I watched the concession. Massie stood in front of his supporters — people who drove hours, who knocked doors, who believed the word still existed — and he said this: "If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king. But if lawmakers follow the Constitution, we have a republic."

The crowd cheered. They chanted "2028!" They chanted "President!" They still have the word. It lives in that room in Kentucky, in the throats of people who drove to a concession speech on a Tuesday night because they still believe dissent is a right and not a luxury good priced at $32 million.

I heard the quote. I sat in my office in Rayburn and I heard it and I knew it was true. If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we have a king. The next morning I walked forty-seven carpet squares and voted with the president. I knew what I was making. I made it anyway. The quote is true. I know the quote is true. The quote costs $32 million to act on and I don't have $32 million. So the quote is true and I am making a king and I am doing it with a green button every time the bells ring and I will do it tomorrow and I will do it next week and the truth of the quote changes nothing because truth doesn't have a budget.

Truth has a concession speech.

He lost by 4.4 points. $32 million for 4.4 points. $7.27 million per percentage point. A few thousand voters in a district of 478,000. That's how thin the margin was between a republic and a king. The width of a streaming subscription. The thickness of a bumper sticker. The weight of the word "no" when three billionaires are standing on it.

The word was "accountability."

The President ran on releasing the Epstein files. I was there. I heard the applause lines. My constituents want those files. They write me. They email. They stop me at diners. Thomas Massie confronted the Attorney General in a hearing room. He read the names from the unsealed documents. He called the redactions a cover-up to her face. She cited the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Then Massie posted a public proof-of-life. "I am not suicidal. My brakes work. I practice good trigger discipline." A United States congressman certifying his own continued existence because he asked one question about one file.

That was the cost of asking. Before Kentucky. Before $32 million. Before the price list was published.

Nobody will ask again. I won't ask. The files will remain redacted. Not because they're classified. Because the last man who demanded them in a hearing was made into a price tag, and the price tag is now mounted on the wall of every congressional office in the building.

The President ran on no more wars. Massie voted against every foreign military authorization for thirteen years. Every one. He took Article I, Section 8 literally. Congress declares war. Not the President. The Constitution is plain text. He read the plain text. He was the only Republican still voting no on blank-check authorizations by 2024.

He is gone now. The next authorization will pass without a recorded vote. Because recorded votes are accountable votes and accountable votes cost $32 million.

"Release the files." "No more wars." "Drain the swamp." Campaign promises. Bumper stickers. Applause lines. Every single one required one thing from Congress. The word "no." No to redactions. No to cover-ups. No to unauthorized war. No to the budget that funds the swamp.

The man who said "no" is gone. The voters who cheered for accountability voted for the candidate endorsed by the machine that destroyed the last accountable man in the building. I don't say this to blame them. I say this because both things are true simultaneously. The voters wanted accountability. The donors wanted compliance. Compliance has a budget. Accountability has a bumper sticker.

$32 million divided by 478,000 voters in Kentucky's 4th district. That's $66.95 per constituent. Sixty-seven dollars per person to override an entire district's will. Less than a streaming subscription. Three billionaires from Manhattan paid the dinner check for 478,000 people and ordered for them.

There is a woman in my district. Peggy. She has been to every town hall I've held since 2003. Twenty-four years. She brings a yellow legal pad. She writes down my answers in blue ink. She told me once, in 2011, outside a VFW hall, that she keeps all the pads in a box in her closet. A box of my positions. Dated. Transcribed. Fifteen years of promises in her handwriting.

I haven't held a town hall in six months. I don't know how to stand in front of Peggy with her legal pad and explain that the box in her closet is an archive of a dead language. That the man who said those things doesn't exist anymore. That somewhere between 2003 and this Wednesday his vocabulary was narrowed and his button was automated and his chest stopped filling with warmth and he started sleeping fine and agreeing with the spending and he doesn't remember when any of it happened.

I don't know what Peggy would write on her pad now. There's nothing to transcribe. I don't say things anymore. I press a button. The button is green. It has been green for fourteen months.

Liz Cheney lost by thirty-seven points. Bill Cassidy finished third. Third. In his own primary. For a vote five years ago. Ten Republicans voted to impeach. Eight are gone. Elon Musk promised to support Massie. "I will." Two words. Ten months of silence. Zero dollars. The world's richest man decided one endorsement was priced too high.

C-SPAN recorded Thursday's vote. Green across the board. Unanimous. Historians will see consensus. They will not see 434 people who watched Kentucky and did the math. Consensus and compliance are identical on camera. That is not a flaw. That is the product.

You elected me twelve times. You knocked on doors. You put signs in your yard. You trusted me to say "no" when no was the right answer. Here is what your trust buys in 2026.

A man who walks forty-seven carpet squares and feels nothing. Who presses green before he reads the title. Whose card wears unevenly. Who drafted a letter and will never send it. Who watched AI-generated pornography of a colleague funded by three billionaires and said nothing. Who did the math in eleven minutes and slept fine. Who lost a word and then lost the word for losing it. Who agreed with the spending Thursday morning and cannot tell you whether he chose to agree or was trained to agree and knows the difference no longer matters.

Your congressman is loyal now. Your files are sealed. Your wars are unvoted. Your swamp is funded. The man who was doing what your bumper sticker says is in Kentucky now. Powerless. Replaced by a corn maze with a compliance guarantee.

I'm loyal. That's the word. The only one left.

The word was—

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

I'm a middle eastern historian. My own family were made refugees. And this is my honest view of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) - the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1947–49 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

A thread. 🧵

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

A Brazilian YouTuber killed the Photoshop subscription.

It's called PhotoGIMP. It takes GIMP, the free image editor, and makes it look and feel exactly like Photoshop.

Same toolbar. Same panel layout. Same keyboard shortcuts. Your hands already know how to use it.

Photoshop vs PhotoGIMP:

- Price: $275.88 a year → $0
- Account: Adobe login required → No login, ever
- Files: Saved to Adobe cloud → Saved on your computer
- Updates: Forced when Adobe says → Only when you want
- Works on: Windows and Mac → Windows, Mac, and Linux

No Adobe account. No cloud upload. No AI trained on your photos.

How small is the patch? Tiny.

→ Nine settings files. That's it.
→ Copy them into one folder. Done.
→ Open GIMP. It now looks like Photoshop.
→ Don't like it? Delete the folder. GIMP goes back to normal.

Three steps to install. One command to uninstall.

8,751 stars. 272 forks. 30+ people from around the world helping translate it.

One honest note: the license is GPL-3.0. Free for everything. Personal work, paid client work, your own edits. No "Pro" tier hiding behind it.

Dionatan Simioni runs the biggest Linux YouTube channel in Brazil. He built this from Marau, a small town in Rio Grande do Sul. No VC. No team. No fundraise.

This is what Photoshop should have been from the start.

(Link in the comments)

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

This real-time 1948 article from The Economist completely destroys the modern “Nakba” narrative that was invented decades later as political propaganda.

Straight from British eyewitnesses in Haifa, October 2, 1948:

“Jewish authorities urged all Arabs to remain in Haifa and guaranteed them protection and security ... However, of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa, not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained.

The most potent factor was the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive, urging the Arabs to quit ... those who remained and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”

They didn’t flee because of “Zionist ethnic cleansing.”
They fled because Arab leaders ordered them to get out of the way so their armies could “drive the Jews into the sea.”

Then they lost the war they started — and spent the next 77 years rewriting history to blame the Jews.

The “Nakba” you were taught? Pure revisionist fiction.

[ben moores @benmoores2]

A thread on the 50 best fortifications to go and visit in the world according to me. They are all fun for at least one in the family. They are listed in reverse rank order as determined by how much fun, unique and awesome they are.

[Bart 🌊⚓️ @BartGonnissen]

1/x I'm about to leave for a holiday, so my timeline might be a bit quieter. However, I want to share the story of the MSC Napoli. I previously wrote a thread about it in Dutch, but I find it to be an interesting case.

[Andrew A. Michta @andrewmichta]

🧵A message to all armchair experts who have become captivated by #UAVs (also known as #drones) as the latest shiny object of modern warfare. I hope this message sparks some much-needed debate on the ongoing technological change, while providing a necessary reality check. 1/6

[Roderich Kiesewetter🇪🇺🇩🇪🇮🇱🇺🇦 @RKiesewetter]

Bei einem simulierten (!) Angriffsszenario, das im Dezember 2025 stattfand und im Herbst 2026 spielt, gelang es dem Team RED mit 12.000 russischen Soldaten in kürzester Zeit, das Baltikum vom restlichen NATO-Gebiet abzutrennen. Das Team RED hatte im Vorfeld mit verschiedenen hybriden Angriffen westliche Regierungen überfordert. Dem war ein fiktiver und vor allem labiler Waffenstillstand in der Ukraine vorangegangen.
Wenige nicht-europäische Truppen sicherten die Kontaktlinie. Doch viele Ukrainer vertrauten nicht darauf und ahnten, dass Russland den Scheinfrieden nur nutzt, um seine Kräfte neu zu formieren. Millionen Ukrainer flohen deshalb, viele auch nach Deutschland. Ein massiver Cyberangriff gegen die Server des Finanzsystems ließ das Onlinebanking von Millionen von Kunden und ein Drittel der Geldautomaten ausfallen. Desinformation und Propaganda in Deutschland, Scheinangebote, wieder billige Energie aus Russland zu erhalten, sollten den Zusammenhalt schwächen. All das überforderte die Entscheidungsprozesse. In wenigen Tagen gelang es dem Team RED, unter dem Vorwand, einen humanitären Korridor nach Kaliningrad schaffen zu wollen, die Suwałki-Lücke abzuriegeln. Die NATO erkannte zwar die Bedrohung, doch angesichts der Uneinigkeit und dem Nein aus Washington wurde Artikel 5 nicht ausgerufen. Da im Vorfeld keinerlei Vorbereitungen zur Mobilisierung für die militärische Logistik und den Fähigkeitsaufbau stattfand, waren die deutschen Handlungsoptionen beschränkt. Man stützte sich im Team BLAU (der fiktiven Bundesregierung) auf bekannte Strukturen und Verfahren, um seine Empörung auszudrücken, und war zu langsam, den hybrid begonnenen Angriff abzuwehren. Russland schaffte innerhalb weniger Tage militärische Fakten.
Für den Hardthöhenkurier habe ich aufgeschrieben, was wir mMn jetzt dringend tun sollten, um unsere Abschreckung zu erhöhen, eine Gesamtverteidigung aufzubauen, militärische Handlungsoptionen zu vergrößern, die politische Kommunikation gegenüber der Bevölkerung anzupassen und einen sense of urgency herzustellen.
https://t.co/VWhGPT6T53

[Daniel Franke @dfranke]

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.

You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.

You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.

You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.

You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.

You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Vice President of Franchise Lifecycle Management at Walt Disney Studios.

I have held this position for seven years, which means I have overseen four theatrical releases, six streaming series, two theme park expansions, and the conversion of a 47-year-old space opera into a subscription retention engine with an annual yield that exceeds the GDP of Belize.

I have a framed original 1977 Star Wars theatrical poster in my office on the third floor of the Frank G. Wells Building in Burbank. It is worth $14,200. I know this because Corporate Asset Management appraised it when we moved floors. It is classified as a Franchise Heritage Display under Internal Code FHD-1977-001. The insurance is paid quarterly.

May the 4th is not a holiday. It is a revenue event. Internally we call it Franchise Activation Window Q2-Alpha. I designed the current activation model in 2021 after we noticed a 340 percent spike in Disney+ engagement during the first 72 hours of May. The spike correlated with subscriber re-enrollment. People who had cancelled came back. For Star Wars. They stayed for the bundle, for the parks, for the merchandise pipeline that activates the moment a subscriber re-enrolls and does not deactivate until the credit card expires or the account holder does. Fans invented May the 4th in 1979. We own it now.

That's retention architecture.

George Lucas sold us the franchise in 2012 for $4.05 billion. At the time, Wall Street called it expensive. The slide I presented at last year's board review was titled "Return on Mythology." The room did not laugh. The room does not laugh at returns like that.

That's portfolio performance.

I manage a team of forty-three people. Six of them manage the Character Lifecycle Pipeline. It tracks every named character across all Star Wars properties and assigns each a Monetization Readiness Score from 1 to 100. Baby Yoda scored 97 before his first episode aired. We call him Asset GG-01 internally. Never Grogu in planning documents. We knew. The ears were right. The eyes were right. The price point was right. The merchandise tooling began fourteen months before the first trailer.

A plush Asset GG-01 generated nine figures in retail sales in its first fiscal year. I keep one on my bookshelf next to the poster. Visitors think it's charming. It is a case study. We do not retire characters. We sunset them into merchandise.

That's creative development.

Every planet in the Star Wars universe has a Theme Park Conversion Index. Tatooine scored 34. Too barren. Low ride density potential. Batuu scored 91. We invented Batuu. Galaxy's Edge cost $1 billion per installation. Two installations. We built a planet that never existed in any Star Wars film because the planets George Lucas created were not optimized for queue throughput and per-capita food-and-beverage spend.

Batuu has fourteen points of sale. Tatooine has sand.

That's experience design.

I attend a quarterly review called the Franchise Health Assessment. Twelve people in a room with a 74-inch monitor showing engagement curves, merchandise velocity, subscriber acquisition cost, and something we call the Nostalgia Decay Index. Proprietary. It measures how quickly audience attachment to a character diminishes without new content. The original trilogy characters decay at 3.2 percent per quarter without activation. Vader has never dropped below 94. We activate him annually. Death improves the numbers.

A character that stops generating content is a character that stops generating revenue. We do not let characters rest. We deploy them. The audience mourns the thing we killed. The audience pays to mourn it. The mourning is the product.

That's franchise stewardship.

At Star Wars Celebration last year a woman in the front row cried during the trailer reveal for the new series. Full tears. Hands over her mouth. My social media analyst was sitting three rows behind her. He sent me a Slack message during the standing ovation: "Organic engagement. Estimate 11-second dwell on reaction cam if we clip it." We clipped it. 2.3 million views on the official account. She does not know she is in our metrics deck. Slide 9. "Authentic Fan Response, Owned Channel Conversion." We did not ask permission. She was on our property.

A man at the same event was dressed as a handmade Boba Fett. Full armor. Told our brand ambassador he spent eight months building it. We photographed him for the official gallery. The legal department classifies cosplay at our events as "voluntarily contributed brand-adjacent content." The eight months he spent is earned media we did not pay for. His labor is our asset. He thinks he is expressing love. He is performing marketing.

That's community activation.

The audience that hates the new content still watches it. We track this. There is a metric called Negative Sentiment Engagement. It counts. A hate-watch is a watch. A rage-tweet is a tweet. A cancellation-threat viewer who returns the following season is a re-enrolled subscriber with a documented conversion event. The Franchise Health Assessment does not distinguish between love and anger. Both are dwell time.

That's audience retention.

The original trilogy was released between 1977 and 1983. Six years. Three films. Since the acquisition we have released five theatrical films, three animated series, seven live-action series, and assorted specials in twelve years. One of the analysts on my team calculated that we have produced more hours of Star Wars content in the last decade than existed in the franchise's entire history before we bought it.

I approved that statistic for the investor deck. Proudly. George Lucas made Star Wars at the speed of art. We make it at the speed of subscriber retention.

That's operational excellence.

Kathleen Kennedy has been president of Lucasfilm since the acquisition. Thirteen years. She has been called the destroyer of Star Wars on every platform that exists. YouTube. Reddit. Twitter. Podcasts I have never heard of with audiences larger than some of our series. More online petitions than any executive in entertainment history.

She is the best lightning rod money can buy.

Every show that disappoints. Every director we fire mid-production. Every sequel that underperforms. Every series that divides the audience into camps that hate each other more than they hate us. The anger goes to her. Not to the quarterly targets that required the content velocity. Not to the subscriber retention model that dictated the release cadence. Not to the Franchise Health Assessment that mandated six series in three years because the Nostalgia Decay Index said we had to. Not to me.

We fired Colin Trevorrow. Solo lost money. We fired Phil Lord and Chris Miller mid-shoot because they were making a film instead of a franchise installment, and the difference matters when your production pipeline has merchandise tooling deadlines that predate the final cut by nine months. We restructured three films during production. Each time, the internet burned her name. Not the system. Her.

I have watched her absorb sustained online hatred while the stock price held and the content pipeline delivered on schedule. I included this in a presentation once. I did not call it a sacrifice. I called it Brand Sentiment Redistribution. The room understood. She is not a scapegoat. Scapegoats are temporary. She is a load-bearing wall. She bears the weight so the architecture remains invisible.

We did not ruin Star Wars. We completed it.

That's leadership.

Toy sales declined 47 percent between 2016 and 2023. The merchandise team presented this at the quarterly review. Nobody used the word "decline." The slide was titled "Portfolio Diversification Across Experiential and Digital." Lightsaber sales were down. App revenue was up. The math balanced. We had converted physical play into digital engagement.

A child who once held a plastic lightsaber in their backyard now taps a screen to unlock one. The screen charges monthly. The backyard was free.

That's monetization evolution.

My daughter is seven. She has a Grogu backpack, a Princess Leia Halloween costume from the Disney Store, and a lightsaber app on her iPad that charges $6.99 per month for the premium blade colors. She owns $430 of Star Wars merchandise by our internal retail tracking. She has never seen a Star Wars film.

She asked me once if we could watch one together. I said after Q2.

Q2 ended. She did not ask again. Fine. She does not need to see the films. The films are a delivery mechanism. The merchandise is the product. She is wearing the product. She is carrying the product. She is the product.

That's family engagement.

I watched the original Star Wars for the first time in 2018 as a competitive analysis exercise. Six years into my career managing the franchise. I took notes on pacing, demographic appeal, and merchandise integration points. I identified eleven moments with high emotional resonance that could anchor future content. My team calls these Emotional Equity Nodes. The scene where Luke stares at the twin suns is Node 7. We have activated Node 7 in four separate properties across three platforms in two fiscal years because nostalgia, when properly indexed and deployed against a subscriber base with documented emotional attachment, converts at rates that would make pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertisers weep.

I did not cry. Noted the runtime. Two hours and one minute. Inefficient. A streaming series gives us six to eight hours of engagement per character arc. The math is better.

That's content optimization.

George Lucas visited the lot last spring. This happens occasionally. He has an office in the building though I am told he rarely uses it. My team was asked to present the Character Lifecycle Pipeline as part of a broader franchise update. We showed him the Monetization Readiness Scores. We showed him the Nostalgia Decay Index. We showed him the content velocity projections through 2030.

He was quiet for a long time. He looked at the numbers the way a father looks at a child's bedroom that has been converted into a rental unit.

My director leaned over afterward and said she thought it went well. I agreed. He did not interrupt once. He did not ask us to stop. He did not say this is not what I made. He did not say anything at all. He just looked at the screen.

I interpreted his silence as respect. We did not fire the creator. We promoted the franchise past him. He built the prototype. We built the factory.

That's legacy management.

I keep the 1977 poster in my office because it reminds visitors what we are preserving. The poster is behind glass. The glass was installed by Facilities. The frame cost $600. The insurance premium is $340 per year.

In the original film, the Empire believed it was bringing order to the galaxy. It built infrastructure. It created jobs. It maintained supply chains. It measured success in reach, efficiency, and control. It could not understand why anyone would choose a desert farm over a functioning battle station.

I have a slide that says the same thing. Page 14 of the Q2 franchise review. The title is "Galactic-Scale Brand Architecture."

I did not write the title as a joke. The Rebellion was never defeated. It was acquired. We converted rebellion into a loyalty program. The Resistance is a product line. Hope is a quarterly target.

The poster is not a movie poster. It has not been a movie poster since 2012.

May the Force be with you. The Force is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.

[George Noble @gnoble79]

Tesla is the most successful CON in the history of capital markets.

Not because the cars are bad.

But because the entire business is engineered to impress on first glance and collapse under scrutiny. And the culture around it has made facts completely IRRELEVANT.

I've never seen a company where the gap between what is promised and what is delivered is this wide, for this long, with this little accountability.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving system is marketed as autonomy. But it is not autonomy. It is a camera-only system running probabilistic inference.

The car is making statistical guesses about what it sees, thousands of times per second, with no redundancy when those guesses are wrong.

Probabilistic inference controlling a two-ton vehicle at highway speed with your family inside.

NHTSA has two open investigations covering 3.2 million Tesla vehicles. One was escalated to a formal Engineering Analysis in March after 9 crashes, including a fatality, where the system FAILED to detect sun glare, fog, and dust. The cameras went blind and the car kept driving.

In Austin, Tesla's robotaxi fleet has reported 15 crashes across roughly 800,000 miles. One crash every 57,000 miles.

The average American driver has a police-reported crash every 500,000 miles. Tesla's robotaxis crash at roughly 4x the human rate, WITH a safety monitor sitting in the car whose only job is to prevent crashes.

Waymo operates over 2,500 fully driverless vehicles across multiple cities with no human backup and maintains a crash rate 85% below human drivers across 127 million autonomous miles. Tesla has ONE unsupervised vehicle in a tiny section of Austin.

But here's what really makes Tesla different from every overvalued company I've ever analyzed:

The facts do not matter to the people who own this stock.

Every missed deadline, every broken promise gets filtered through the same response: attack the messenger.

Call them a short seller. Call them a hater. Anything to avoid looking at the actual numbers.

It's an online ecosystem that has made itself completely immune to facts. And Musk baked that dynamic into the culture from the beginning.

Every time the fundamentals deteriorate, the faithful don't sell. They double down.

When your shareholder base treats every dip as a buying opportunity regardless of the data, the stock becomes untethered from reality entirely.

That's literally a religion with a ticker symbol.

I highly suggest you read Edward Niedermeyer's book Ludicrous on this.

And now it even gets WORSE...

CapeFearAdvisors published a piece this week that should be required reading.

Tesla's 2025 CEO Performance Award contains a change-of-control provision:

In the event of a change of control, ALL operational milestones are disregarded.

No million robotaxis, Optimus robots, or $400 billion EBITDA.
NONE of it.

So if SpaceX acquires Tesla at $8.5 trillion, every tranche of Musk's 423 million share award vests immediately. A single acquisition at that price triggers the full vesting of both plans at once, with no way to claw them back.

The milestones everyone argues about are just a distraction. The mechanism is the change-of-control language buried in the SEC filing.

This is about engineering the largest personal wealth transfer in modern financial history and using the narrative machine to keep the price elevated long enough to execute it.

I've seen every bust of the last four decades.

But this one is different because the cult of personality is stronger than anything I've witnessed. The movement around this stock cannot be touched by facts, and that is what makes it so dangerous.

But the math always wins. ALWAYS.

It just takes longer when the con is this good.

[💙💛 Regina Laska @Sunnymica]

Der blinde Fleck: Von Mindener Masten und Berliner Palästen
Irgendwann vor Herbst 2025 muss es passiert sein: Jemand bringt am Bahnhof Minden eine Kamera an einem Mast an. In fünf Metern Höhe. Niemandem fällt er dabei auf. Vielleicht ist er hochgeturnt, vielleicht kam er mit einer Leiter, vielleicht parkte er einfach seinen 40-Tonner daneben und schraubte vom Fahrerhaus aus. Vorschriftsmäßig mit Warnweste – die reicht in Deutschland für fast alles.

Die Kamera ist ein handelsübliches Modell von Amazon: Speicherchip, Solarpanel, SIM-Karte. Kostenpunkt: ein paar Hundert Euro. Sie filmt, was in Minden ein- und ausgeladen wird. Minden ist eine Drehscheibe für Militärtransporte an die Nato-Ostflanke. Aufgefallen ist das Ganze nur, weil im September 2025 ein Bahnmitarbeiter zufällig nach oben schaut. Er montiert das Ding ab und bringt es zur Bundespolizei.

Dann passiert sieben Monate lang: nichts Sichtbares.
Erst im April 2026 durchsucht die Polizei die Wohnung eines 43-jährigen Litauers in Detmold. Er soll als Lkw-Fahrer im Raum Minden unterwegs gewesen sein; die SIM-Karte der Kamera führte zu ihm. Der Verdacht: Agententätigkeit zu Sabotagezwecken. Der Mann bleibt auf freiem Fuß. Hinweise auf Hintermänner: keine. Soweit die Erfolgsmeldung.

Drei Jahre Tiefschlaf
Die Geschichte hat einen Vorlauf. 2023 entdeckten polnische Behörden Kameras desselben Typs an Bahnstrecken und am Flughafen Rzeszów. Es ging um den Nachschub für die Ukraine. Der polnische Verteidigungsminister sprach von einem russischen Agentenring. Das ist drei Jahre her.

Drei Jahre, in denen sich in Deutschland niemand veranlasst sah, an den eigenen Verladebahnhöfen systematisch nach oben zu schauen. Drei Jahre, in denen offenbar kein Memo der Sicherheitsbehörden herumging mit dem Satz: Achtet auf verdächtige Kameras. Drei Jahre, in denen Russland Zeit hatte, Methoden zu verfeinern und das Personal auszutauschen.

Die Spionageabwehr nennt Männer wie den Verdächtigen aus Detmold „Wegwerf-Agenten“. BKA und Nachrichtendienste haben dazu sogar eine Kampagne gestartet. Es ist alles bekannt. Es ist alles benannt. Es passiert: nichts. Und wenn tatsächlich etwas Schlimmes geschieht, wie der Stromausfall in Berlin, ist das Innenministerium schnell damit zufrieden, windige Internet-Pamphlete als Spur zu akzeptieren: Das waren Linksradikale. Als wäre es abwegig, dass diese von Russland gesteuert sein könnten – als hätte die Sowjetunion nicht jahrzehntelang Linksterrorismus von der RAF bis zu den Roten Brigaden unterstützt.

Die Anatomie der Anwerbung
Wer sind diese Wegwerf-Agenten? Keine KGB-Männer im Trenchcoat. Es sind Männer wie dieser Lkw-Fahrer, der ohnehin Richtung Bremerhaven muss, der in Minden Pause macht, der jeden Euro brauchen kann. Amateure in prekären Lebenslagen, ohne Ausbildung, austauschbar. Angeleitet werden sie von Personen, deren Identität sie nicht kennen. Wer den Litauer verhaftet, hat die Kamera – aber nicht den, der sie bestellt hat.

Doch bevor ein Auftrag gegen Geld rausgeht, muss jemand physisch da gewesen sein. Niemand wirbt einen Wegwerf-Agenten rein per Messenger an. Jemand muss im Trucker-Café an der A2 gesessen haben, im Gespräch am Nachbartisch. Jemand muss zugehört, einen Drink ausgegeben, ein Verhältnis aufgebaut haben. Genau dieser Anwerber ist der eigentlich Interessante. Er ist Führungspersonal mit Budget, Briefing und direktem Draht zu Kreml-Akteuren. Während die Polizei in Detmold eine Wohnung durchsucht, sitzt er längst in einem anderen Café an einer anderen Autobahn und spricht den nächsten an.

Nach diesem Mann fahndet niemand. Weil niemand systematisch hinhört, in welchen Cafés sich auffällig viele Fahrer aus dem Baltikum oder Belarus treffen und welche Gesichter dazwischen nicht zur Branche gehören. Das wäre Polizeiarbeit alter Schule. Es wäre die Mindestmenge an Aufmerksamkeit, die man von einer Spionageabwehr erwarten dürfte.

Stattdessen besteht die deutsche Antwort darin, das Strafgesetzbuch zu ergänzen – härtere Strafen, falls man sie denn mal erwischt. Das ist Symbolpolitik. Sie wirkt erst, wenn alles andere versagt hat und die Informationen längst in Russland angekommen sind.

Das System der grauen Zahlungen
Bleibt die Frage der Bezahlung. Bargeld scheidet aus; zu riskant für die Hintermänner. Sie wollen Codes per Messenger verschicken, die der Agent am Schalter einlöst. Naheliegend wären Geldtransferdienste wie Western Union oder MoneyGram. Eine Mitarbeiterin eines solchen Büros beschreibt mir die „Kenne deinen Kunden“-Pflicht, doch sie sagt auch: In den tausenden Kiosken und Läden, die das nebenbei betreiben, ist die Kontrolle gering. Der Kioskbesitzer fragt nicht. Er bedient.

Doch wer wirklich Spuren vermeiden will, geht online. Karte-zu-Karte-Transfers, koordiniert über Telegram oder Signal. In dieser elektronischen Schicht entscheiden amerikanische Konzerne nach eigenen Regeln, was sie auswerten. Deutsche Behörden sind dort keine Beobachter, sondern Bittsteller. Sie wissen meist erst, wonach sie fragen müssen, wenn die Kamera schon hängt und der Sabotageakt vollzogen ist. Während Italien Bargeldtransfers streng regelt, weiß der deutsche Staat: nichts. Es ist eine Kette aus Zuständigkeiten, in der niemand das Gesamtbild hat – ideal für Russland.

Das Trojanische Pferd in Berlin
Und dann gibt es die Schublade, die niemand öffnet, obwohl jeder weiß, wo sie steht: Friedrichstraße 176-179. Das „Russische Haus der Wissenschaft und Kultur“. In einem Abkommen mit der Bundesregierung von 2011 wurde festgehalten, was im Russischen Haus erlaubt ist: Sprachkurse, Konzerte, Restaurant, Kino. Damals gab es noch keinen Krieg und weniger Bedarf an Wegwerfagenten. Wird der Vertrag bis zum 6. Dezember 2026 nicht gekündigt, verlängert er sich automatisch um weitere fünf Jahre. Die Bundesregierung hätte längst kündigen können. Sie tut es nicht.

Sie hält die Hand über ein Gebäude, in dem russische Staatsstellen Veranstaltungen organisieren, Geld bewegen und – man höre und staune – Kameras betreiben. Eigene Kameras, am Gebäude angebracht, in unauffälliger Höhe. Genehmigt. Was sie aufnehmen? Wollen unsere Behörden nicht wissen. So wird munter gefilmt, wer vor dem Haus demonstriert. Wer hineingeht, wird erfasst – aber eben nicht von deutschen Behörden, nur von der russischen.

Der Lieferverkehr: ungeprüft. Die Hauspost: ungeprüft. Die Mitarbeiter mit unklarem Status zwischen Kulturreferent und Geheimdienst-Resident: ungeprüft. Polen hat sein Russisches Haus 2022 geschlossen und die baltischen Staaten auch. Frankreich stellt das Pariser Pendant unter Beobachtung. Deutschland hat: ein Abkommen, eine Frist und eine Regierung, die zuschaut, wie russische Akteure in der Hauptstadt vollkommen unbehelligt planen, koordinieren und bezahlen können.

Während in Detmold eine Wohnung durchsucht wird, weil ein Fahrer eine Kamera an einen Mast schraubte, steht in Berlin ein riesiges Haus, in dem all das institutionell organisiert werden kann, ohne dass je ein deutscher Beamter einen Fuß über die Schwelle setzt. Die Kamera in Minden hing fünf Meter hoch; dafür brauchten wir sieben Monate. Das Russische Haus steht ebenerdig an einer der bekanntesten Adressen Berlins. Dafür brauchen wir offenbar länger.

Es ist nicht so, dass Deutschland nichts wüsste. Es ist so, dass Deutschland nicht will. Aus Gründen, die nie ausgesprochen werden: Energiehoffnungen, Wirtschaftsbeziehungen, die Idee einer Entspannungspolitik, die längst in die Mottenkiste gehört. Die Bundesregierung hat sich immer noch nicht eingestanden, dass der Krieg nicht nur in der Ukraine geführt wird, sondern auch hier. Lautlos.

Der Bahnmitarbeiter aus Minden hat etwas Größeres gefunden als eine Kamera. Er hat den blinden Fleck gefunden, in dem dieses Land seit Jahren steht. Er hat hingeschaut, als sonst keiner hinschaute. Vielleicht sollten wir ihm einen Orden geben. Bevor wir aufhören, uns selbst zu belügen.

[Furkan Yildirim @FurkanCCTV]

Am 22. September verspricht Kasachstans Präsident dem US-Präsidenten eine Wolfram-Mine.

36 Tage später kaufen Trumps Söhne Anteile an der Firma, die sie bekommen wird.

9 Tage später wird der Deal mit 1,6 Milliarden Dollar Steuergeld offiziell.

Drei Mal innerhalb eines Jahres dasselbe Muster: Söhne kaufen ein, Vater liefert den Auftrag.

Im August 2025 steigen Donald Trump Jr. und Eric Trump bei einer kleinen New Yorker Baufirma namens Skyline Builders ein. Sie kaufen über ein Vehikel mit dem Namen American Ventures, einer Tochter von Dominari Securities. Dominari hat die Trump-Söhne Ende 2024 in seinen Beirat geholt. Sie halten dort auch einen Anteil am Mutterkonzern.

Skyline ist zu diesem Zeitpunkt eine unauffällige Holding für asiatisches Baugeschäft. Niemand schreibt darüber.

Am 22. September trifft Kasachstans Präsident Tokayev Donald Trump und sagt ihm zu: Eine US-Investmentgruppe namens Cove Kaz wird das größte unentwickelte Wolfram-Vorkommen der Welt bekommen. Cove Kaz hatte gegen chinesische und russische Bieter konkurriert. Tokayev entscheidet sich für die Amerikaner.

Diese Zusage ist informell. Kein Vertrag, kein offizieller Beschluss. Nur ein Versprechen zwischen zwei Präsidenten.

Am 21. Oktober berichtet die Presse erstmals über diese Vereinbarung.

Sieben Tage danach, am 28. Oktober, schießen die Trump-Söhne weiteres Geld in Skyline nach. Im Rahmen einer Kapitalerhöhung von knapp 24 Millionen Dollar.

Drei Tage später, am 31. Oktober, kauft Skyline für 20 Millionen Dollar einen 20-Prozent-Anteil an einer Firma mit, Zitat aus dem Filing, "bedeutenden Beständen an kritischen Mineralien in Asien". Diese Firma ist Kaz Resources, die Tochter von Cove Capital, die das Wolfram-Projekt entwickeln wird.

Am 6. November verkünden Cove Kaz und Kasachstan den Deal offiziell. 70 Prozent der Mine gehören Cove. 30 Prozent dem kasachischen Staat. Geplante Investitionssumme: 1,1 Milliarden Dollar.

Die US-Regierung steigt mit ein. Die staatliche US-Exportbank gibt eine Zusage über bis zu 900 Millionen Dollar Projektfinanzierung. Die staatliche US-Entwicklungsbank ergänzt das mit bis zu 700 Millionen Dollar. Macht zusammen bis zu 1,6 Milliarden Dollar Steuergeld.

Am 30. April 2026 fusionieren Skyline und Cove Kaz. Das fusionierte Unternehmen geht an die Nasdaq. Geplanter Ticker: KAZR.

Auf keiner einzigen Pressemitteilung tauchen die Namen der Trump-Söhne auf.

Warum Wolfram?

Wolfram ist das Metall mit dem höchsten Schmelzpunkt der Welt. Es steckt in panzerbrechender Munition. In kinetischen Abfangkörpern für Raketenabwehr. In Hyperschallwaffen. In jedem Halbleiter. In F-35-Triebwerken. Christopher Ecclestone, Bergbau-Stratege bei Hallgarten in London, sagt: Das Pentagon will Wolfram um jeden Preis.

China kontrolliert über 80 Prozent der weltweiten Wolfram-Produktion. Im Februar 2025 verhängt Peking Exportbeschränkungen. Die Preise für Ammoniumparawolframat, der internationale Benchmark für Wolfram, springen seitdem um über 40 Prozent.

Die USA haben 2015 die letzte eigene Wolfram-Mine geschlossen. Wer eine neue, verlässliche Quelle anzapfen kann, sitzt auf einer goldenen Ader.

Genau diese Ader bekommen die Söhne des US-Präsidenten. Mitfinanziert mit Steuergeld.

Der Geschäftsführer von Cove Capital, Pini Althaus, sagt der Financial Times wörtlich: Cove habe "direkte Unterstützung von Präsident Trump, Außenminister Marco Rubio und Handelsminister Howard Lutnick" erhalten, um die Mine zu sichern.

Lutnick selbst hat einen persönlichen Brief an den kasachischen Präsidenten geschickt, um den Deal zu unterstützen. Das geht aus einer Investorenpräsentation hervor, die Skyline bei der US-Börsenaufsicht eingereicht hat.

Pini Althaus hat übrigens vor Cove eine andere Mineralienfirma gegründet: USA Rare Earths. Auch sie hat Mitte 2025 über 1,5 Milliarden Dollar an konditionaler US-Staatsförderung erhalten.

Das ist der Hintergrund. Jetzt zum Muster.

Im August 2025 steigt eine Risikokapitalfirma namens 1789 Capital bei einem Startup namens Vulcan Elements ein. Donald Trump Jr. ist dort Partner. Vulcan stellt Magnete aus Seltenen Erden her.

Drei Monate später, im Dezember 2025, bekommt Vulcan einen Pentagon-Kredit über 620 Millionen Dollar. Plus 50 Millionen Dollar als Eigenkapitalbeteiligung der US-Regierung. Es ist der größte Kredit, den das zuständige Pentagon-Büro für strategisches Kapital je vergeben hat. Trumps Executive Order 14241 hatte zuvor die Pflicht zur unabhängigen technischen Prüfung solcher Vergaben aufgehoben.

Im März 2026 steigen die Trump-Söhne bei einem Drohnenhersteller namens Powerus ein. Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, ehemaliger Sicherheitsberater des Vizepräsidenten, sitzt im Beirat. Wenige Wochen später startet die US-Regierung ein Drohnenprogramm mit einem Budget von 1,1 Milliarden Dollar. Powerus will Aufträge daraus ziehen. Der geplante Börsenticker der Firma: PUSA.

Jetzt Cove Kaz. KAZR. 1,6 Milliarden Dollar Steuergeld.

Drei Fälle. Zwölf Monate. Dasselbe Muster.

Das Wall Street Journal hat die Trump-Familien-Geschäfte seit der Wiederwahl auf insgesamt mindestens vier Milliarden Dollar Erlöse und Papiervermögen geschätzt. Krypto, Drohnen, Seltene Erden, Wolfram, Bitcoin Mining, Prediction Markets. Eric Trump hat in einem Interview gesagt, sie hätten in der ersten Amtszeit "keinen Dank für ihre Zurückhaltung bekommen". Diesmal halten sie sich nicht zurück.

Im März 2026 versuchen Demokraten im Kongress, Donald Trump Jr. per gerichtlicher Vorladung zu zwingen, unter Eid zum Vulcan-Deal auszusagen. Republikaner blockieren die Abstimmung im Ausschuss.

Die rechtliche Bewertung dessen wird Jahre dauern. Zwei Dinge stehen aber jetzt schon fest.

Erstens: Wer in den USA steuerpflichtig ist, finanziert über Mehrheitsstrukturen einen Bergbau-Deal in Kasachstan, an dem die Söhne des Präsidenten beteiligt sind. Ohne dass diese Beteiligung in den offiziellen Pressemitteilungen erwähnt wird.

Zweitens: Wenn dasselbe Muster in einem Jahr drei Mal auftritt, ist es kein Zufall. Es ist eine Methode.

Wenn dich solche Makro Insights interessieren und dir helfen, interagiere gerne mit dem Post. 🧡

[George Noble @gnoble79]

Elon Musk is the Ivar Kreuger of our time, and the OpenAI trial is PROVING it in real time.

If you don't know who Kreuger was, you should:

In the 1920s he was the most admired businessman in the world. The "Match King."

He controlled 90% of global match production, lent money to sovereign governments, and his securities were the most widely held in America.

But after his death in 1932, auditors spent 5 years untangling over 400 subsidiary companies and discovered the whole thing was held together with fictitious assets, forged bonds, and the unquestioning loyalty of people too dazzled to ask questions.

Investors lost $750 million (~$17 billion in today's money). His deficits exceeded Sweden's national debt.

Doesn't this sound familiar?

The Musk playbook is the most DANGEROUS house of cards I've witnessed in my career.

This week in federal court, Musk took the stand to argue that Sam Altman stole a charity. 3 days later he'd contradicted himself under oath so many times that the judge told his lawyers she suspected plenty of people don't want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands.

OpenAI's attorney asked if Tesla is pursuing AGI. Musk said no. The attorney then pulled up Musk's OWN post from March 4 where he wrote Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI.

His own words entered into evidence against him. BY HIM.

Then the attorney asked if xAI used OpenAI's models to train Grok (which violates OpenAI's terms of service).

Musk called it a general practice among AI companies. Pressed for a direct answer, he said "partly."

Think about that: Musk is in court accusing OpenAI of betrayal while admitting under oath that xAI violated the very same company's terms of service to build Grok.

Then came the credibility test:

Musk was asked to name his companies that benefit society. He listed Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X without hesitation. Every one of them is an uncapped for-profit enterprise.

Then why did xAI start as a benefit corporation and quietly flip to a for-profit C-corp? No clean answer.

This is someone who repeatedly launches entities with noble-sounding charters and converts them into for-profit corporations once the money gets serious.

Then his money manager Jared Birchall took the stand:

OpenAI's lawyer asked about the donor-advised funds at Vanguard and Fidelity that Musk used to send his $38 million. Did Musk have any legal right to direct where the money went once it entered the DAF?

Birchall couldn't answer. Said the legal question was beyond his expertise.

The entire lawsuit hinges on that donation creating enforceable obligations. But the man who managed Musk's money just told a federal jury he can't confirm Musk had any enforceable claim over those funds.

Now step back...

This is a man who promised full autonomy by 2018, a million robotaxis by 2020, and unsupervised FSD by June 2025.

EVERY deadline was missed.

He claimed he invested $100 million in OpenAI. The real number was $38 million. His defense? His "reputation" made up the difference.

Kreuger had 400 subsidiaries and used one entity to prop up another through structures nobody could follow. Musk has Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, Neuralink, the Boring Company, and X.

He shifts AI talent from Tesla to xAI, has xAI building the brains for Tesla's Optimus robot, and uses X as a megaphone while the algorithm amplifies his narrative to 200 million followers.

Kreuger's investors trusted the man, NOT the math.

They loved the confidence. They stopped asking questions because the aura of genius made questioning feel foolish.

The same psychology applies to Musk's empire today.

Kreuger's reckoning took 5 years of forensic auditing after his death. But Musk is providing his in REAL TIME: contradicting his own posts under oath, admitting to the practices he's suing others for, watching his logic collapse under cross-examination.

Different decade.
Different industry.
Same ending.

The truth always catches up.

[Maximales Drehmoment @MaximalesD]

Wenn eine Person an einer psychischen Erkrankung leidet und sich deswegen freiwillig in Behandlung begibt, ist sie weder verrückt, durchgedreht oder bekloppt, sondern krank.
Sie ist so krank, dass sie ihren Alltag nicht mehr schafft und bereits an den kleinsten Dingen zerbricht.
Niemand, der nicht jemals solch eine Phase in seinem Leben hatte, kann dieses Gefühl nachvollziehen und hat definitiv auch nicht das Recht, sich in diesem Moment über diese Person lustig zu machen oder über sie zu richten.

Denn diese Person hat sich Hilfe geholt, weil sie einfach nicht mehr kann und niemand, außer der betroffenen Person selbst, kann es wirklich verstehen, wie schwer der Weg sein kann, bis man an der richtigen Stelle angekommen ist…
Oft vergeht viel Zeit zwischen dem ersten Anruf und der ersten therapeutischen Sitzung und wenn diese Person es endlich geschafft hat, bis zu diesem Punkt durchzuhalten, dann beginnt die eigentliche Arbeit.
Es ist nicht leicht, über seine Probleme zu sprechen, an sich zu arbeiten, es sich einzugestehen, krank zu sein…
All dies kostet Überwindung und Kraft!
Viele tiefliegende Probleme und Gefühle, die diese Person längst verdrängt hatte, werden in der Psychotherapie wieder nach oben geholt und die Person durchlebt diese erneut…immer und immer wieder…
Nach einer Therapiesitzung fühlt sie sich manchmal befreit und manchmal total am Boden.
Doch irgendwann kommt die Person an den Punkt, an dem sie ihren inneren Dämonen in die Augen schaut, ihnen die Stirn bietet, lernt mit ihnen umgeht und mit ihnen zu leben.
Dieser Punkt ist das Ziel, welches meist Jahre hinter dem Start liegt…

Die Person bekommt als Begleitung zusätzlich medikamentöse Unterstützung, welche sie nicht "ruhig stellt" oder "betäubt", sondern ihr helfend unter den Armen greift und nur weil die Person Psychopharmaka nimmt, ist sie noch lange kein "Medikamenten Junkie”
Die Person nimmt nur die Hilfe an, die ihr angeboten wird, schließlich wird sie ja auch nicht dazu gezwungen, es wird ihr empfohlen, um das Leiden erträglicher zu machen und die inneren Wogen etwas zu glätten.
Außerdem ist diese Person in ihrer Situation um jede Hilfe und Entlastung dankbar.

Bevor ihr also das nächste Mal über jemanden, der psychisch krank ist, urteilt oder lacht, solltet ihr euch all die Dinge, die ich da oben über diese Person geschrieben habe, in euer Gedächtnis rufen.
Denn die Person kämpft einen Kampf, den man nicht von außen sehen kann!

Vielleicht hat sie ihren Kampf gerade erst begonnen und ist noch unsicher in ihrem Handeln, was sie besonders für äußerliche Einflüsse empfänglich macht...positive wie auch negative….
Vielleicht kämpft sie aber auch schon seit Jahren, vielleicht sogar schon einen großen Teil ihres Lebens und kann sich mittlerweile besser abgrenzen.
Genau dies macht eine psychische Krankheit aus, ihr seht nicht, wie es der Person gerade im Moment geht.
Die Person kann lachen und äußerlich glücklich wirken und gleichzeitig innerlich schreckliche Qualen erleiden.
Für euch, unter Umständen lapidare und unwichtige Dinge, können diese Person stark verletzen oder sogar dazu führen, dass sie innerhalb von Sekunden in sich zusammenbricht…natürlich nicht nach außen…sondern innerlich…

Die Person, die ich in diesem Post beschrieben habe, kann ein Bekannter, ein Kollege, ein Freund, ein Familienmitglied, eine fremde Person der ihr zufällig begegnet oder sogar ihr selbst sein.
Jeder kann von einer psychischen Erkrankung betroffen sein oder es werden, vergesst das also bitte nicht!

Wenn ihr euch in meinen Worten wiedergefunden habt, teilt diesem Post in euren Timelines gerne per Repost und schafft so für dieses wichtige Thema, die nötige Aufmerksamkeit und Reichweite❤️

Danke fürs lesen, teilen und berücksichtigen

Euer Maxi, eine Person…

[Null Hype @nullhypeai]

The competitive math that turns this from a labor story into a moat story is that Anthropic has roughly 1,500 employees.

OpenAI around 3,500.

Meta will have ~70,000 post-May 20.

If MCI yields even a marginally usable computer-use dataset per employee per quarter, Meta is building a first-party training corpus 20x larger than its closest rival, at $0 marginal labeling cost. Combined with the $14.3B Scale AI stake, Meta now controls both the largest internal labeling factory and a controlling position in the largest external one.

The 8,000 May 20 cuts aren't the structural story. The dataset behind them is.

Agents will commoditize. The first-party corpus that trained them won't be replicable at any price by competitors who don't already employ a city's worth of knowledge workers on monitored laptops.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last June, Meta spent $14.3 billion buying Scale AI. A company that pays gig workers to label training data.

This April, Meta deployed MCI on 71,000 salaried employees. Software that makes them label training data for free.

Both purchases were considered strategic.

I wrote the investigation. 22 footnoted sources. The Scale AI math. The contractor proof-of-concept. The NLRA problem with capturing GChat. And why EU employees are exempt from all of it.

https://t.co/IJIk5c9rhK

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Read this carefully.

Yesterday the Department of Justice arrested a Green Beret named Gannon Ken Van Dyke. He bet thirty-three thousand dollars on a classified military operation he helped plan. He won four hundred and nine thousand dollars. He tried to hide the money. He got caught. Now he is charged with five federal crimes.

That is the headline. That is the news.

I want to tell you what is going to happen next 🧵