Lawrence

Aware of my lack of self awareness; bad Samaritan.

My opinions are forged from stars

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Myocarditis after Covid vaccine

5 per million

Myocarditis after Covid infection

150 per million

[Lawrence @LawrenceKeith1]

@kylegriffin1 She's gonna be the press secretary next week

[Lawrence @LawrenceKeith1]

@JonahDispatch There i fixed it

[Lawrence @LawrenceKeith1]

@EdKrassen There I fixed it

[Geoff @GeoffBrown82]

Mitch McConnell has FINALLY released that proof of life video and demonstration of his fitness to continue serving as a United States senator. Thanks Mitch, we appreciate you. Much love.

[Troll Football @TrollFootball]

New angle reveals Sørloth did attempt to pass to Haaland, but his path was blocked by a camera cable.

[Lawrence @LawrenceKeith1]

@MagnusCarlsen Congratulations 👏

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸 Trump's ballroom got a quiet half-billion-dollar deal

The White House handed Clark Construction up to $500 million to build the new East Wing ballroom, and never let anyone else bid for it.

The trick was simple. They ran it through the Executive Residence, the small office that usually just buys the White House furniture and art. It does not have to ask for competing bids or say what it spends, so the deal stayed in the dark.

Trump worked out some of the costs himself, and Clark walks away with tens of millions. The ballroom's price tag has nearly tripled along the way, from about $200 million to close to $600 million.

Half a billion in public money, one company, no one watching. This is the exact deal those bidding rules were written to stop.

Source: The Washington Post / Writer: Daniyal

[Team Ossoff @TeamOssoff]

Ossoff: Last September, the President of Kazakhstan calls Donald Trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an American company. And the very next month, Eric and Don Jr. get a stake in the American company pursuing the mining deal.

Six days later, six days after Prince Eric and Prince Don get their stake, Kazakhstan announces this company will get, “The largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.” A few more weeks go by, and then the U.S. government, run by their father, sets aside 1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project. In Kazakhstan.

All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Ken Griffin went home on a Friday "fairly depressed" after watching AI agents at Citadel do work that used to take teams of PhDs in finance months to complete. Done in days.

His words: "These are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are extraordinarily high skilled jobs being automated by agentic AI."

This is the head of one of the most successful hedge funds in history saying the people he pays seven figures to analyze markets and structure deals are being replaced by software that works in hours instead of months. Not theoretically. In his own office. Right now.

The Coatue deck we covered earlier this week called agents "the biggest unlock" in AI. Griffin just confirmed it from the buy side. The shift from copilots to agents is not a future event. It is already happening at the highest levels of finance.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

I debated MAGA supporters yesterday in LA on a variety of issues (not yet aired). One was corruption, and when I talked about the $2 billion the Saudis invested in Jared Kushner's fund and the massive wealth the UAE funneled to the Trump family through World Financial Liberty 4 days before Trump's inauguration, few if any of them had heard about any of this.

Most said they'd find it disturbing if true, but it was the first they had heard of it. Siloed media -- where you can turn either to corporate media or independent media to hear only things that validate your views and affim your side's greatness, while being shielded from anything that might disturb you or make you think -- is extremely alarming and dangerous.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

So far, Vance’s foreign policy record is yelling at Zelensky for not thanking Trump enough, campaigning for AfD in Germany and Orban in Hungary, getting rejected by the Pope on his invite to the US, and failing in the Iran negotiations.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

I'm hearing from a very reliable source that Trump is preparing to use his DOJ to target multiple Democratic congressional candidates with fraud-related prosecutions ahead of the midterms, all in an effort to help preserve a Republican majority.

The goal does not seem to be securing convictions. It seems to be creating just enough suspicion in the minds of voters that some stay home on Election Day or choose the Republican candidate instead.

Meanwhile, many Republicans seem entirely unbothered by the fact that Trump himself was found liable for fraud and has pardoned more than a dozen convicted fraudsters. Their concern does not appear to be fraud itself, but the political value of accusing others of it.

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next.

Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades.

George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks.

The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order.

No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide.

A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute.

The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no.

The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it.

https://t.co/dAOBBMsgDS

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Let me walk you through what happened one hour before Trump announced the five day moratorium on Iran strikes.

$1.5 billion in notional S&P E-mini futures contracts. Four to six times normal activity.

One hour before the announcement.

Simultaneously, $192 million in crude oil futures purchased at the same time.

They made between $300 and $400 million dollars off those trades.

Trump claimed he spoke to an Iranian official to negotiate the moratorium.

The Iranians said that person doesn't exist and the conversation never happened.

This is not the first time.

It has happened multiple times. He says something. The trade goes on. He says another thing. The market moves.

But whatever you call it — they are laughing at you and they are laughing at me while they do it.

Hunter Biden sold a painting and Washington lost its mind.

These people are making hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars trading on information that only exists inside the most powerful office in the world.

I think we are dramatically underreporting how much money is actually being made here.

This isn't politics anymore.

This is a financial operation running out of the White House.

[🇨🇳 Guo Shen 郭深 @GuoShenCN7]

🚨 Holy shit, catastrophic morning for U.S.-Saudi relations:

→ MBS signed defense pact with Ukraine WITHOUT telling Washington
→ Rubio called to express "regret" — MBS listed American FAILURES
→ Crown Prince said Saudi Arabia will act in its OWN national interest
→ MBS was MORE diplomatic than Trump — didn't respond to "kiss my ass" insult
→ U.S. defense monopoly in the Gulf — EFFECTIVELY OVER
→ European defense corridor through Ukraine — NOW OPEN
→ 70 years of alliance — ON PAUSE
→ American leverage in Riyadh — ZERO

Process that.

Trump told a man who controls 12% of the world's oil supply to "kiss my ass."

That man responded by restructuring Middle Eastern security architecture in a single week.

[Devin Nunes' Cattle Dog 🇺🇦 🇪🇺🇺🇸🇨🇦 🇦🇺 @Kaos_Vs_Control]

Pete Hegseth: The problem with Iran is it spends money on weapons and missiles instead of improving life for their people.

Self awareness of a potato

[TrivWorks @TrivWorks]

“Maybe instead of 10 or 15 gallons of gas, you get 1 gallon of gas…”

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

💥BREAKING: 🇺🇸 The United States national debt has officially surpassed 39,000,000,000,000.00 dollars.

27% of the U.S. National Debt is from spending under Trump’s presidencies.