When Charlie Kirk was murdered, those of us on the conservative side rightly chastised those of our political adversaries who cheered and celebrated his death. We accused them--again rightly--of shameful callousness and of polluting public discourse and coarsening social life. What President Trump does here merits the same chastisement, for the same reasons.
Grammarly: "Work with an AI partner that helps turn your thoughts into writing that’s clear, credible, and impossible to ignore."
Me: I'd prefer to be one whose thoughts 𝘢𝘳𝘦 clear, credible, and impossible to ignore so people aren't disappointed when they meet me.
Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."
Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.
They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."
Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.
That's the metered intelligence business model.
And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.
More than 70 heads and representatives of foreign diplomatic missions visited the sites of recent Russian strikes on Kyiv.
All of these courageous diplomats, heads, and journalists continue working in Kyiv under constant strikes for the sake of peace in our country.
We thank Ukraine’s friends for their support and for standing with us.
VOLKER: Trump looks at Russia's war against Ukraine as a matter of who's bigger, who has power. Russia's bigger country, so Russia's going to win.
Ukraine should give something up and make peace. Trump can't understand why they're not doing this. And he is making a huge mistake.
Russia is not as powerful as Trump thinks. They are completely corrupt and disorganized, poorly led, poorly equipped, poorly trained, and they're not making progress on the battlefield.
Moreover, this is a war of choice for Putin that even his own military and population are ambivalent about. Whereas for Ukraine, this is existential.
They have got to defend their lives, country, territory, families, and so on. And they've been remarkably determined and ingenious in how they have done that.
Trump is getting it wrong when he looks at the conflict as one that Ukraine is destined to lose. Conversely, I think Ukraine is destined to win.
Germany and several other key European countries have officially decided to move away from their older missile systems and certain American weapons platforms. Instead, they are preparing to massively expand purchases of Ukrainian-made missiles.
They are gradually shifting away from aging stockpiles and U.S. systems in favor of Ukrainian developments — particularly modern cruise missiles and long-range strike systems.
Zelensky personally gave the green light for technology transfers and weapons exports. He reportedly told European partners directly:
“We are ready to make Europe safer. If our missiles can help you defend yourselves — we are ready to give you that opportunity.”
Europe has finally realized that American weapons are effective, but Ukrainian weapons have already been tested in a real war against Russia. Ukrainian missile systems have demonstrated high effectiveness, strong adaptability, and lower battlefield costs. In addition, European countries want to reduce their dependence on the United States and develop a stronger European defense industry together with Ukraine.
Ukraine is becoming Europe’s new missile hub.
The country is receiving massive contracts, technological development, and growing strategic influence.
Europe is effectively acknowledging that in this war, some of the most battle-proven weapons are Ukrainian.
I have a senior on my roster who hasn’t attended my class a single day this semester. She showed up today for the first time.
We have 7 days left before grades are finalized for seniors.
My administrator just asked me to see what I can do to help her graduate.
In case anyone here is a new follower, this is why I’m leaving public education.
Absolutely horrifying and painful footage.
russia is wiping another Ukrainian city off the map while the world stays silent.
Kostiantynivka: from 70,000 people to a ghost town under nonstop russian bombs.
Why does the world keep allowing this horror?
This is horrifying and every American needs to hear this
California resident exposes what’s really going on with Flock Cameras in America
“I want to be clear what these cameras actually are, and I say that with somebody with 20 years of experience in IT. I've served as the chief network architect for Fortune 500 companies, I've designed data centers, and today I work on cloud infrastructure for one of the largest loan origination companies in the country. I'm not speculating on how this technology works. I've read their patents and I know how it works.
Flock advertises these cameras as simple license plate readers. But their own patents tell a different story.
They're AI-powered surveillance machines that capture every passing vehicle and person and transmit that data to a private corporate cloud, making it queryable by a multitude of state and federal agencies. The city of Corona does not control that database, and Corona residents have no public record rights against a private company's servers. Our daily movements are being harvested by a $7.5 billion corporation, that only answers to venture capital investors, not to us. Flock did not reach that valuation on their per-camera subscription fees. That math doesn't add up
The city council should also understand who they're doing business with. Flock CEO was asked whether the company had any federal contracts. He said no. That was a lie.
Public records revealed that Flock had been secretly running a pilot program giving the US Border Patrol access to local police camera data without the knowledge of the cities that paid for the cameras.
Now consider who's behind the company and where your data flows. Flock integrates directly with Palantir, a data fusion platform, with a $30 million contract with ICE. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, is also one of Flock's primary investors. These are not separate companies with separate agendas. They are connected actors that are building a connected infrastructure.
Palantir's own CEO stated publicly just this month that his technology is being used as a political instrument, designed to reduce the political power of certain voters. And that's the ecosystem that our Corona cameras are feeding into.
We're not anti-police at all. We're against mass surveillance of innocent residents by a company with a documented record of deception, built by investors with a stated political agenda. We're asking the City Council to start auditing the queries made against Flock's database, to disclose any data sharing agreements, and to take a vote to cancel the Flock safety contract”
I looked more into this and he is 100% right
Patents describe broader object detection, including tracking people and pedestrians, patents like US11416545B1. The system uses a centralized cloud database for nationwide queries
Data goes to Flock’s private cloud, AWS-based, encrypted. Nationwide lookup is common, 75%+ of customers are enrolled enabling cross-jurisdictional searches. Residents have no direct public records access to the corporate servers.
This creates a mass surveillance network feeding a private company’s infrastructure
If you ask me this is laying the infrastructure for a mass surveillance network in America. We are being lied to. Cancel all contracts nationwide
Ukraine allows Putin’s May 9 parade to go ahead after Trump’s intervention and a promise to exchange 1,000 Ukrainian POWs. No prisoners have been freed, and Putin after his parade unleashed one of the biggest missile and drone barrages of the war. Here is a Kyiv high-rise where dozens were killed and injured last night, including children, and many more still remain under the rubble.
BOLTON: Trump thinks if he’s friends with Xi, then US-China relations are in great shape. He calls Xi “king” and “greatest leader in Chinese history.”
Trump thinks he’s friends with Xi and Putin. I’ll guarantee you, that’s not how they see Trump. They both see him as easy mark.
@Ethelbrait1941@goinggodward This reminds me of the story my dad used to tell about him asking for a dozen eggs at a Mexican market. He got a blank stare and, "Doe-zen?"
Never stop saying "dozen" and "half dozen". Never stop using the word you read in an old novella. Never stop using your regional jargon. Don't succumb to an internationalized English stripped of its whimsy and romanticism in the name of streamlining global commerce.
Don't aim to be "based"; aim to be biblical.
Disaffected young White men are being sucked into the Dissident Right. Learn to recognize it and argue against it. 4/4
https://t.co/BOegKjlzJg