The Poll Lady

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[The Poll Lady @ThePollLady]

10 most controversial exposé by WikiLeaks founded by Julian Assange.

Thread🧵

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/4cwvVOXGT4

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I was having dinner last night with a friend working in the chicken industry and I learned something that blew my mind.

Where do chicken farmers get their chickens? Most of us would say "from their existing chickens obviously, they breed and lay eggs."

That's what I thought too, but turns out I was dead wrong.

The reality is that the immense majority of meat chicken farmers in the world get their chickens from one of 2 companies: Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, or Aviagen, controlled by Germany's EW Group (the Wesjohann family).

They have a concept specific to the industry called grandparent stock: what you buy from these 2 companies is - essentially - a bunch of chickens with planned obsolescence.

The way it works is that each company keeps "pure" bloodlines on its own farms. Let's label them A, B, C and D. Those are the crown jewels - these companies' IP - and they never leave the building.

What they sell you are the "grandparents": chicks from those four lines, but each line in only one sex. You get A roosters but no A hens, B hens but no B roosters, C roosters but no C hens, D hens but no D roosters. Which means you can never breed more A, B, C or D birds yourself.

What you can do is cross them. A roosters with B hens give you the fathers, C roosters with D hens give you the mothers - these are the "parents". The parents then give you the chickens that actually end up on our plates, slaughtered at around 6 weeks.

And that's the end of the road. If you tried breeding those chickens, their chicks would be a complete genetic lottery: still chickens, sure, but without the genetic properties that make them commercially viable. They'd grow slower and less evenly, you'd have to sell them for way more than your competitors, and your business would be dead.

So you have to go back to Cobb or Aviagen for new grandparents. Forever.

Why buy grandparents at all, and raise 2 generations just to sell the third? The answer is scale. If you buy say 100 grandparents, each of them gives you around 50 parents, and each parent hen then gives you around 150 chicks: from those 100 grandparents, you have yourself some 600,000 chickens whose meat you can sell.

It makes no sense for these 2 companies to sell the final chickens directly. They'd have to hatch tens of billions of chicks a year and ship them all over the world. Much easier to simply sell the grandparents and let farmers do the multiplying and pay for the farms, the feed and the labor.

And, you knew this was coming, there is also a China angle here: as you can imagine, China isn't too pleased to be dependent on foreign companies for such a basic food item as chicken.

So China did what China does best: long-term planning. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a plan for "national broiler genetic improvement" (2021-2035), which aims for domestically bred breeds to make up at least 60% of the domestic market by 2035 (https://t.co/INHrS7YUpD).

And, of course, they're ahead of the plan. As of 2025, homegrown breeds held more than 30% of the market: halfway to the 2035 goal in just four years (https://t.co/hF0HvB6Q5y).

Can you escape all this as a consumer? Sure, you can buy organic or Label Rouge chicken, from slower-growing breeds raised for at least 81 days instead of 6 weeks, for two to three times the price.

Except, plot twist: the genetics behind most of those slow-growing birds come from a French company called Hubbard... which has belonged to Aviagen since 2018 (https://t.co/URsRSI3gI0)😅

And even if you could truly escape, you wouldn't want everyone to: we'd need vast new swathes of farmland, both for the chickens and their feed. Ironically, advocating for organic free-range chicken for everyone is one of the worst positions one can take for the planet's resources.

If you want to minimize your environmental footprint, the counterintuitive answer is to buy the cheapest supermarket chicken - or eat less meat, of course.

As my friend was saying last night, you may not like the way this industry works but, at the end of the day, it's what puts affordable protein on the plates of billions of people, using proportionally fewer resources than any other way of raising chicken.

[Rick Sanchez @RickSanchezTV]

“Iran's military capabilities are absolutely astonishing” — Kanwal Sibal, former Indian Foreign Secretary.

He hails Tehran's remarkable military prowess and resilience, forged through decades of sanctions and thousands of US and Israeli attacks.

“They have the kind of military capabilities that most countries in the Global South simply don't have. How have they done it?”

Watch the full interview on Sanchez Effect.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

should be obvious by now, but OpenAI and Anthropic are just gonna keep cannibalizing all their biggest customers.

it’s simply too profitable for them to resist. and it’s already happening:

1. Figma partnered with Anthropic on AI design tools. then Anthropic’s product chief quit Figma’s board, and 3 days later Anthropic launched Claude Design to compete with Figma. CEO Dylan Field said Anthropic was “not consistently candid.”

2. Novo Nordisk uses Claude to help develop drugs. now Anthropic is developing drugs of its own.

3. Microsoft poured billions into OpenAI. now OpenAI is building a Jobs Platform to compete with LinkedIn, and reportedly a code repository to compete with GitHub. Microsoft owns both.

4. Harvey uses Claude to sell AI contract analysis, due diligence, and litigation tools. now Anthropic sells those same workflows through Claude for Legal.

5. Intercom used OpenAI’s Realtime API to build Fin Voice. now OpenAI sells its own voice-and-chat support agent through Presence.

6. Abridge and Ambience build clinical documentation products on OpenAI. now OpenAI sells ChatGPT for Healthcare directly to hospitals with clinical documentation built in.

7. Benchling uses Claude to power its biotech R&D platform. now Anthropic sells its own scientific workbench through Claude Science.

the frontier lab playbook is simple:

1. sell their models to the world’s most valuable businesses
2. help wire them into those companies’ most valuable and sensitive work
3. map the business from the inside and find where AI can take over
4. turn those capabilities into their own products and become the customer’s competitor

[Nick Collins @nickcollins1953]

Mesopotamia was never the cradle of civilisation. India was.

I spent forty years in international shipping, not academia. When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I had no orthodoxy to defend. I followed the evidence, and it kept arriving in the same place: the Indian subcontinent.

Nineteenth century archaeologists dug in Mesopotamia because the climate preserved artefacts, the biblical sources pointed them there, and the Ottomans allowed the excavations. That is the entire basis for the myth of Mesopotamia as "the cradle of civilisation."

Nobody applied the same rigour to India. Mohenjo-daro was not discovered until 1922. By then the narrative had already hardened.

What was actually there was the largest civilisation of the ancient world. Three hundred cities. Fifty thousand people in each, by 2600 BC. Two thirds of them stood on the banks of the Sarasvati, the central and greatest of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda, flowing down from the Himalayas before the river vanished entirely by 1900 BC. The Vedic kings claimed territory stretching "sea to sea," from Afghanistan to Maharashtra, some 1.5 million square miles, against Egypt's 13,000. A dock at Lothal built to handle thirty ships of sixty tons, unmatched in Europe for four thousand years. When it was first excavated, it was recorded as a bathing pool.

When the scale became impossible to dismiss, the theory was not corrected. It was replaced with a story of pale-skinned nomads from the steppe who supposedly arrived around 1500 BC and brought civilisation with them. There is no evidence. The chronology doesn't work. The Vedas describe no invasion.

In 2019 a Harvard-led genetic study revived the claim, and the press reported it as confirmation. It was not. The same study found the builders of these cities were indigenous. The Sarasvati river that the Rig Veda described had already dried up before these newcomers arrived. What the study also found is that a small group of men, arriving after the Sarasvati had already dried up, interbred with the existing population and left a genetic signature. That is all.

So, where they chose to dig was mostly an accident of climate and access. The Aryan invasion theory was constructed because an Indian civilisation that owed nothing to Caucasians was a fact the late nineteenth century could not accommodate.

Link to full Substack essay with sources in the comments below.

[Abhijeet Tripathi @AbhTri_]

This guy with an Instagram handle :
https://t.co/i3b5PmxRLP

and his associated thread handle :
https://t.co/JzR4tUdsmK ; has access to multiple CCTV security cameras which are meant to be accessed by secret personnel or metro security staff only. Apart from them their Android and iOS applications are also available but that can only be accessed by the policemen only. Normal and random individuals don't have and can't have access to such cameras.

This guy not only has access to them via his own personal notebook but also through multiple monitors on which these security cameras were publishing live feed. He recorded them and published them to his Instagram page and cross shared them on his thread page.

The videos from his Instagram page have been deleted but some how the videos on his third profile are still there full stop the links of those videos have already been attached and apart from that the videos which were published on thread profile are being attacked below.

@Iyervval @sushantsareen @KanchanGupta @RajaMuneeb @kushal_mehra

[Andrew Korybko, PhD @AKorybko]

https://t.co/Y0tiE4A6oL

[Mohandas Pai @TVMohandasPai]

Minister @DrSJaishankar this is a totally obnoxious . Why are we giving her a visa? This racist bigot keeps abusing India, our leaders, writing fake narratives. Please kick her out. @MEAIndia @republic @AmitShah

[कुशल मेहरा @kushal_mehra]

People who have never run a production line or a business that involves manufacturing or multiple processes or spent time studying it properly are the worst people to take policy advise from.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

After reflection, this new narrative by Palantir is probably much more consequential than people may assume.

Palantir is basically being the canary in the coal mine announcing the death of two major assumptions propping up the US economy right now:

1) that AI labs will be able to extract significant economic rent - as opposed to AI models being mere commodities

2) that other countries can accept structural dependency on US technology and services without pushing back on sovereignty concerns

Why are Palantir specifically starting to be vocal about this?

First off, major middle-powers, even US “allies”, are one by one showing them the door. In June, France announced that the DGSI - its domestic intelligence agency, which had relied on Palantir since the 2015 Paris attacks - would replace it with French firm ChapsVision, with Prime Minister Lecornu explaining (https://t.co/SLhEGprBZC) that France “cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere” and shouldn't depend on the goodwill of companies “capable of turning off the tap.”

Germany moved even earlier: its domestic intelligence service, the BfV, also selected ChapsVision over Palantir (https://t.co/pDZVj4SYUY), and the German military has said it will no longer use Palantir at all. Then, just this week, Spain instructed state-controlled companies - including strategic firms like Telefónica, Indra and Navantia - to avoid signing any new contracts with Palantir (https://t.co/0ik4UAFrT7).

Even in the UK, Washington's most loyal vassal, the NHS's £330 million data contract with Palantir is under review following parliamentary pressure (https://t.co/uJl6g4BMsW), and London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50 million Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police.

Palantir making a lot of noise around them caring about sovereignty makes a lot of sense: it's damage control since they keep being told they're a sovereignty risk.

I doubt it will work - because it's true: they are a sovereignty risk - but the fact that they feel the need to be vocal around this tells you where the wind is blowing: they're not shaping the narrative, they're reacting to one they're losing.

What they're saying against closed-source AI (basically a broadside attack on OpenAI and Anthropic), is again highly self-serving. Palantir's sudden love of open-weight AI models conveniently coincides with them launching 2 days before a partnership with Nvidia to sell exactly that: open models models (NVIDIA's Nemotron) in sovereign environments.

So it's essentially a product launch.

It doesn't make what they're saying wrong: it is factual that the value proposition of closed-source AI labs looks increasingly unsustainable. I mean: you're paying 10X the price of Chinese open-source AI models for something that's not really better (or just marginally) and on top of that you have zero control over your data, or the models themselves.

When Palantir says that "the architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha," they're right. I'd add that this also means you shouldn't trust Palantir either with that "tribal knowledge"... they obviously left this part out 😉

When you take a step back, these two things have major implications on many other US companies.

SpaceX - which just went public at the largest IPO valuation in history - is one clear example as I describe in my latest article on the new space race with China (https://t.co/JK3ELAyEVO).

If countries like France concluded with Palantir that they couldn't depend on a company “capable of turning off the tap” when it’s merely analyzing their data, what should they conclude about a company that aims to literally control their entire connectivity - at one man's whim, from space?

What percentage of SpaceX's crazy market cap is based on the assumption that foreign governments will not do to Starlink what they're currently doing to Palantir?

And SpaceX - or Palantir - aren't alone: a significant proportion of the top US tech giants, who rose in a world where no one questioned American technological hegemony, now face an environment that's much less conducive to the kind of lock-in their business models - and valuations - depend on.

When you pair this with the fact that it increasingly looks like the US made a wrong bet with closed-source AI - an extremely expensive wrong bet - the picture that emerges is of a country that bet its economic future on two things - proprietary AI and captive allies - and is losing both at the same time.

And to compound the problem, it doesn't help that the official narrative of the US government - via the voice of Jacob Helberg, the Under-Secretary of State (https://t.co/Z1rotPl9Ee) - is to be vocally opposed to "AI Sovereignty": essentially telling everyone "you know what, your worst fears are real, our tech companies are really out to undermine your sovereignty."

Read Helberg's post (the one I linked) and put yourself in the shoes of - say - a European or Asian leader and ask yourself how you'd react to being told that building your own AI capabilities is "marching in perfect formation into the past," that your pursuit of sovereignty is really just "synchronized mediocrity," and that your only path to the future runs through American technology.

If it was me in a position of power, I'd read this as a massive wakeup call: when another country's official position is that your sovereignty is a problem, history says you're about to need it.

So yes, it looks like - unexpectedly - Palantir, of all companies, is being quite the canary in the big tech mine. Yes they obviously do this for self-serving and cynical purpose, and yes they're of course also very much part of the problem and not the solution. But it doesn't make them wrong: sometimes it takes a vulture to tell you something is dying.

[Kanwal Sibal @KanwalSibal]

Let me explain since I have great respect for you and do wish your tenure a big success.

Our ties with BD are very important and your political experience and engaging personality should greatly help in steering them.

The US ambassador to India has engaged you as US Special Envoy to South Asia.

This is not a mandate recognised by India.

The implication of this mandate is that he is both ambassador to India and US Special Envoy to South Asia, which includes India.

Which means further that he is US Special Envoy to oversee India’s relations with South Asian countries, which includes Pakistan too.

Shades of the Holbrooke mandate which we opposed, masked by extending it to South Asia this time.

I see no issues on which the US ambassador in India should work closely with our ambassadors in South Asian countries, including in Bangladesh.

For anything relating to India’s dealings with other South Asian countries, the point of contact is Delhi.

By reaching out to you the US ambassador is asserting his wider mandate of coordinating relations within the subcontinent.

I understand yours was a courtesy reply to him.

I am outlining some delicate diplomatic nuances that are involved.

[The Poll Lady @ThePollLady]

Funding will never end as Ukraine is a testing ground for Western military technology.

Weapons, intelligence, equipment from US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, and all of Europe flows through a hub in Poland into Ukraine.

[Western Exile @westernexile]

Maturing is realising that absolutely nothing of substance is happening here.

A false pressure valve is being released, to reset public anger so as to buy additional years of time to implement an agenda that was decided long ago, elsewhere. The frontman is utterly expendable.

[The Poll Lady @ThePollLady]

It’s a striking pattern how NATO uses Ukraine to strike Russia every time US suffers a setback, a humiliation, or a strategic failure elsewhere (in recent case, Iran).

media narrative goes from “Russia is losing” until retaliation n then it’s back to “Putin is a war criminal.”

[max seddon @maxseddon]

Trump was “hugely impressed and enthusiastic” about Ukraine’s recent campaign of long-range strikes on targets deep inside Russia at last week’s G7 summit. And Russia is realizing Putin’s bet on him hasn’t paid off.

New, with @henryjfoy @christopherjm: https://t.co/BZSZyBpjb3

[The Poll Lady @ThePollLady]

@PICGemini You’ll be surprised what self proclaimed hindu trad commentators are saying but yes Christian purists from US have more visibility

[The Poll Lady @ThePollLady]

This couple has it so bad from the purists.

Christian conservatives hate them cuz Usha remains a Hindu and the home isn’t fully Catholic.

Hindu conservatives hate them bcuz kids are being raised Catholic and Usha didn’t “hold the line.”

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

Usha Vance: I didn’t need to convert to Catholicism and try to be someone I’m not like JD because I grew up in a happy, stable household.

I love this woman. JD can rewrite every aspect of his own identity in order to gain power. But he can’t change Usha.

[Kanwal Sibal @KanwalSibal]

Depth of Pakistan’s history?

Or depth of ignorance?

Or depth of diplomatic hocus pocus?

Takshashila was founded around 1000 BC. Islam itself emerged about 1600 years later and Pakistan itself was created in 1947.

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

For years, I raised alarms about dangerous gain-of-function research being farmed out to foreign countries, and I was told it was a conspiracy theory. Now, declassified documents show that the U.S. funded over 120 biolabs across more than 30 countries. Some of this research was conducted overseas precisely because scientists knew it would face scrutiny on American soil.

I'm calling for a presidential commission of scientists to review all gain-of-function research going forward. We're going lab by lab and pathogen by pathogen until the American people know the full truth.

https://t.co/gtv6sZ7viR

[Sebastian Caliri @SebastianCaliri]

I just tested my hand in a mini version of this scanner. Images that are higher quality than MRI, whole body captured in <1 minute, virtually free to run. This is going to change medicine.

Things get even crazier when you consider the possibility of using the same tank to focus ultrasound to ablate tissue, stimulate nerves, etc.

The FDA is not in the slightest ready for this. People will also complain about incidental findings but they are wrong and don’t understand how quickly software can improve and how inexpensive a time series of scans will be to generate.

[Āsurā @iAsura_]

Translation: United States wants Modi to go on a full blown war with China, so that US can defend India by selling weapons.

In short Donald Trump wants Modi to be our Zelensky.

Indian media is all set to play the role of Ukranian media that fueled that beautiful nation's doom.