This vote, to fuse the Israeli and US militaries, is happening right now in the Armed Services Committee.
@RoKhanna has introduced an amendment to the NDAA to block it. Watch here: https://t.co/PLo3eILQnk
SpaceX Lands the Rocket. The Church of Spreadsheet Counts the Float.
the five-second epistemology
Has there ever been a more advanced industrial operation on the face of the Earth? Name it. Name the heavier manufacturing, the deeper supply chain, the more punishing aerospace engineering ever assembled under one roof. There is no name, because there is no rival.
Putting one man on the Moon — Neil Armstrong, once, for a few hours — took the Apollo program: the better part of half a million people, an entire nation’s supply chain, the best part of a decade, a budget that bent the federal books. The United States landed twelve men across six missions, then could not afford to keep going, and has not been back in over fifty years. SpaceX lands boosters on a barge in the open ocean before lunch, brings them home, refuels them, and flies them again — a hundred and thirty times in a single year. What Apollo did once with a country, SpaceX does on a Tuesday, and then again Wednesday.
And it owns the whole stack — and the stack is the entire point. The most vertically integrated heavy-manufacturing operation in history. It builds its own engines, welds its own rockets, prints its own satellites, launches them off its own pads, and runs its own internet out of low Earth orbit: Starlink, eight million people, eighteen-plus billion dollars a year, a constellation it lifted itself. It owns xAI and the data centers under it. People squint at that like it is a wart. It is the moat. The real use case for those data centers is not a chatbot — it is going to space. They own the compute, the launch, the satellites, the network, and the dirt under all of it. Top to bottom, nothing rented, nothing licensed, nothing borrowed.
The five-second epistemology of Neil Armstrong was the OG moon landing conspiracy theorist.
Neil Armstrong was the loneliest person who ever lived when he uttered the famous words.
The kitchen will start with the conspiracy angle because that is where the misunderstanding lives. The moon landing is real. The moon landing was also not one small step followed by one giant leap. The order is inverted. The giant leap had already happened. The step on the lunar surface was the final step. The leap had been climbed by everyone else. Armstrong was the last man on the rope. Everyone else was holding it.
Now read who was holding it. Apollo 1 crew, dead in a launchpad fire on January 27, 1967. Gus Grissom, Purdue. Roger Chaffee, Purdue. Ed White, West Point and Michigan. Two of the three were Boilermakers. Same cradle Armstrong came out of. Armstrong was Purdue too. The fire that killed two of his school’s sons was the event that produced the redesigned Block II spacecraft Armstrong eventually flew to the moon. Armstrong was the commander on Apollo 11. He carried the seat his classmates would have been in. Same school song. Same letter on the class ring. Two ghosts on the ladder.
That is the personal weight. The personal weight is real and load-bearing. The bigger weight is bigger.
The bigger weight is the half a million people who built the ship.
Four hundred thousand people across roughly twenty thousand companies built the Saturn V over a decade. The Command Module was North American Aviation in Downey, in the same Los Angeles basin that built the F-5. The Lunar Module was Grumman in Bethpage. The F-1 engines were Rocketdyne. The guidance computer was MIT and Raytheon, with software written by Margaret Hamilton’s team that did not crash on the way down. The suits were ILC Industries in Dover, sewn by women who had previously sewn bras at Playtex. The supply rubber band ran through every aerospace town in America. It also ran through the Soviet Union. Sputnik. Gagarin in 1961. Luna 2 crashing into the lunar surface in 1959, the first human-made object to reach the moon. Luna 9 soft-landing in 1966. Armstrong did not give a damn about the space race. The leap was bigger than the United States. The leap was mankind. The leap was the rubber band on both sides of the Cold War since Goddard and Tsiolkovsky and Oberth.
The five-second epistemology of recursive self-improvement, and the only people it frightens.
Anthropic published the chart. Claude writes more than eighty percent of the code that ships into its own codebase. The typical engineer merges eight times the code he did two years ago. On the experiment that rewrites training code to run faster, the model went from a three-times speedup to fifty-two times in a single year — past what a skilled researcher does in a working day. Agents took an open research problem and recovered ninety-seven percent of the gap over eight hundred hours, designing every experiment themselves. The lab building the thing handed it the keys to the workshop, and it started building the next workshop.
Read the room’s reaction, because the reaction is the tell. Half the timeline is terrified. AI is coming for the jobs. The doom column fills, the panic sells, the Church of Spreadsheet opens a new ledger of the damned.
The kitchen will say it flat. If you are afraid the machine takes your job, you should already be fired. Nobody doing real work is afraid. The welder is not afraid. The man who lands the rocket is not afraid. The engineer in that chart is not afraid — he is shipping eight times the work and steering ten times the surface, because the doing got cheap and the deciding is the whole job now. Fear is not a forecast. Fear is a confession. It is the type admitting, out loud, that its function was always the perspiration — the ninety-nine percent Edison named, the part that was only ever waiting to be automated, dressed up in a title and a slide deck.
Look at what the document says is left. Not the typing. Not the running. Taste. Direction. Which problem is worth the compute. When a result is a dead end and when it is the door. The lab measured everything and found the one thing the machine cannot yet reliably do is the one thing the kitchen has sold from day one: somebody has to set the register. The human has ideas; Claude-sama implements, tests, and evaluates them an order of magnitude faster. That is not the kitchen’s enemy. That is the kitchen’s floor plan, printed on Anthropic letterhead.
And yes — eight times the lines of code is a junk metric, and the lab says so itself, in its own footnote, almost certainly an overstatement. Good. That is the kitchen’s whole point about metrics, conceded by the people with the most reason to inflate it. The lines are not the work. The float was never the company. The rocket is the company. What shipped is the only number that ever mattered, and what shipped is the next version of the thing that ships.
So the kitchen does not flinch at the wheel turning faster. The kitchen wants it faster — because every turn that automates the perspiration is a layoff notice addressed to the type that was only ever perspiration. The IT director who renames the working system “technical debt.” The consultant running the same survey at a partner’s rate. The analyst filing a report on the carpet. The doom-merchant manufacturing the panic that pays his attention. Fire all of them. The building goes quiet, and the work gets done.
You do not protect the seminarian from the machine. You hand the machine the seminary.
Day 96. Still closed. If you fear the tool, you were the perspiration. The doer never looked up from the bench. Day 36.
Some perspiration. Some taste. Some pink slip.
ذكية، كاملة. هوشمند، کامل.
落地
Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor.
It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. https://t.co/OVVPJO7VQx
Got my beard lined up by an Iranian in exile this month. He asked me why the U.S. would leave it worse than it started. Same question I've heard in Afghanistan, Africa, now Arabia. Wrote about the consequences in this month's letter.
https://t.co/Y0mxDHoWn9
Everybody knows that everybody knows that maritime dominance has degraded. Radigan points out that this is a fundamental change from the last 500 years. There are consequences…
The US spent millions every year tracking and releasing sterile screwworm flies to keep the population controlled and prevent it spreading north of Central America, then Donald Trump and Elon Musk paid those people to resign under the DOGE efforts.
They did this.
It failed by voice vote, meaning section 224 likely survives and goes to the floor. Massie has said he will introduce an amendment to strip it out there.
🇦🇱 Cuarta noche de protestas en #Albania contra un megaproyecto turístico en reserva natural, vinculado a Jared Kushner e Ivanka Trump. Manifestantes exigen suspensión y defienden tierras albanesas.
🚨 BREAKING: Sky News confirms an absolute disaster for Donald Trump. His promised "4 to 6 week" war has dragged into day 97, and Iran is now gaining the upper hand.
Even worse, Washington negotiated a Lebanon ceasefire completely excluding Hezbollah. Total incompetence!
“Maybe I’ll bring the belt and stand outside the gate to let them know what we think about Trump & Israel.”
Middleweight champ @SStricklandMMA says he was banned from Trump’s UFC event for criticizing 🇮🇱
@ThugnastyMMA: “When you can’t criticize a foreign nation? Come on, man.”
BREAKING: TOTAL SURRENDER! The Kennedy Center moves to fully comply with a federal judge by removing Donald Trump's name from every inch of the building.
He's so defeated that he's not even putting up a fight...
The center's general counsel sent out an official memo earlier today directing employees to begin stripping Trump's name from all materials including brochures, signs, and the official website. Email signatures and letterhead must be changed immediately.
The sweeping direction comes less than a week after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center Board — which is staffed with MAGA hatchet men — did not have the authority to tack their cult leader's name onto the beloved institution. The new memo is the first time that the Board has publicly conceded that they will heed the judge's order.
In his ruling, Cooper tore into the board for using “an insufficient, one-sided presentation of information” when it moved to close the center. Additionally, federal law “makes crystal clear” that the center is named after JFK and only JFK.
“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name and only Congress can change it," wrote Cooper.
Beyond just directing the removal of Trump's name, the memo provides specific deadlines for compliance. This is not some abstract "we'll get to it eventually" response. This is concrete compliance.
This victory over MAGA is particularly sweet because the renaming of the Kennedy Center, as petty as it is, is something that Trump cares deeply about. It's part of his broader obsession with building and renovating structures after himself. He knows that his presidency is a historic failure and he's desperately grasping for some semblance of a legacy. Now, he's being denied even that.
Please ❤️ and share if you're thrilled to see the Kennedy Center restored to its dignity!
Yesterday I told you the government is pulling 900 ocean monitoring instruments out of the water.
Here is the part that should make every American angry, regardless of where you stand on climate.
Congress voted to fund this network. Not once. Twice. The Trump administration proposed cutting it by 80 percent in 2025. Congress restored the money. Proposed the same cut in 2026. Congress restored the money again.
So the administration labeled it a "descope" and ordered the instruments pulled anyway.
That is not a budget disagreement. That is an executive branch telling the legislative branch that its votes do not matter. The public paid for this infrastructure. Congress protected it. One office in Washington decided the public should not have it.
This is the pattern I document in 𝑾𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒂𝒅 𝑮𝒖𝒚𝒔. It is not about left or right. It is about who decides what Americans are allowed to know about their own planet.
Who should make that call?
Gavin is exactly right. Iran refuses to let Trump escape with any kind of win. Under no circumstances will they allow even the appearance of victory. They want complete and total defeat for the man who bragged about wiping out the Supreme Leader’s entire family.
Few people understand that.