Alessio Bragadini

Strictly not professional rant'n'roll from Italy
Also: @[email protected]

[Alessio Bragadini @abragad]

2017: Democracy Dies in Darkness
2025: Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

[Maurizio Recordati Koen (new account) @kavurzio]

Nel 2023 Limes ipotizzava lo scenario della caduta di Odessa--con molto wishful thinking immaginava per il lettore un sogno bagnato. Ed eccolo schizzare una caricatura di strategia: la conquista russa appare lineare e sequenziale, inscritta in un programma in “sei passi” e corredata da una cartina con freccette. Controllo totale della situazione e penetrazione tipo coltello caldo nel burro--o tipo sesso con una bambola gonfiabile, come se l'Ucraina fosse un essere inanimato e non reattivo.

Peraltro, la Scuola di Limes pretende insegnare la grande strategia. Eppure la rivista riproduce dozzine di simili strategie-modellino applicato, patacche completamente divorziate non solo dall'idea nobile di strategia-arte del comando, ma anche dal buonsenso e dalla realtà complessa della guerra.
E il colmo è che i capiscer di Limes posano da tosti realisti e pragmatici. I grandi maestri italiani dell'arte della guerra si rivoltano nella tomba...

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

CEOs walking into work after realizing that the AI tokens are going to cost more than the employees they fired

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

Going to go look up who the good guys must be here

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Trump appears to be completely passed out asleep during his 3pm Oval Office announcement

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

All those podcasters you half jokingly said are probably paid by Russia are now literally having a meet up in Moscow

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

"Late Kakistocracy" is that phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of ppl who will work for it, and so the folks who aren't qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

If you want to see what happens when people have to pay the actual costs of AI, the day is finally here. It's obvious that every customer sees the deep, meaningful value and isn't angry at all

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

Trump had another mental health episode today and posted over 50 times online:

11:15 AM - Trump attacks judge who said he couldn’t put his name on the Kennedy Center
12:03 PM - Says he may perform and give a speech at the America 250 event instead of artists who cancelled
12:08 PM - Says Obama filled the Reflecting Pool with Garbage
12:09 PM - Attacks Biden
12:09 PM - Posts edited photo of Columbus Circle in DC with the caption “CLEAN”
12:10 PM - Attacks Biden again
12:11 PM - Posts AI photo of him and George Washington riding horses in front of the White House with a space shuttle and race car in the background
12:11 PM - Attacks Rosie O’Donnell
12:11 PM - Posts photo of him in front of the American flag
12:11 PM - Brags about his endorsed candidates winning
12:12 PM - Attack Obama and Biden over the reflecting pool
12:12 PM - Posts photo of him pointing at the camera
12:13 PM - Posts photo of the UFC event cage he’s building at the White House
12:13 PM - Posts an AI image of a “golden dome” for the White House
12:15 PM - Defends Jaxson Dart, calling him a “winner” and his critics “losers”
12:45 PM - Posts an AI image of him as a NY Knicks basketball player dunking on Governor Kathy Hochul
12:56 PM - Posts an AI image of him with Tom Brady
1:03 PM - Posts a garbage can labeling it “The Obama Presidential Library”
1:16 PM - Says America is back
1:16 PM - Says America is back again
1:16 PM - Says America is back for the 3rd time
1:55 PM - Posts an AI image of him golfing
2:55 PM - Says he’s in “excellent health” lol
3:17 PM - Promotes his Fox News interview with Lara Trump
4:33 PM - Attacks the Pope again
4:54 PM - Posts a weird image of him staring at Greenland (which he has posted already)
4:57 PM - Posts an AI image of the “drone port” he wants to build on top of the ballroom
5:33 PM - Attacks Biden
5:33 PM - Attacks Biden x2
5:34 PM - Attacks Biden x3
5:34 PM - Attacks Biden x4
5:34 PM - Attacks Biden x5
5:35 PM - Posts cartoon image of Governors Newsom, Pritzker, and Hochul saying they like crime (Trump is a felon)
5:36 PM - Posts meme about Republicans who voted to release the Epstein files losing their primaries
5:36 PM - Posts an old tweet of his where he attacks “disloyal” Republicans
5:37 PM - Posts an old tweet where he said he wants to stop the world from “killing itself”
5:37 PM - Posts a mock up of a “Trump Peace Prize” which may be the most useless peace prize known to man
5:37 PM - Posts a photo of a B-2 bomber with the caption “Trump energy 2026”
5:37 PM - Posts a photo of his face on Mount Rushmore
5:38 PM - Posts an image of him kissing the American flag (he’s the least patriotic president we’ve ever had)
5:39 PM - Compares himself to George Washington
5:39 PM - Says you were convinced to think a photo of a family sitting on a car is “evil” and billions were spent to do that (???)
5:50 PM - Says we should “physically audit” Fort Knox
5:50 PM - Posts an image of him cosplaying as a navy commander
5:51 PM - Posts another image of his face on Mount Rushmore
5:51 PM - Posts another photo of him and George Washington
6:09 PM - Attacks Biden again
6:09 PM - Attacks Biden x2
6:09 PM - Attacks Biden x3
6:09 PM - Posts an old photo of himself and King Charles
6:12 PM - Posts an old photo of himself and President XI in China
6:12 PM - Posts another photo of himself and President Xi
6:22 PM - Posts a photo of himself walking in China
6:48 PM - Says the U.S. should have a ballroom because China has one
7:03 PM - Says he wants to cancel his America 250 celebration and replace it with a MAGA rally
7:56 PM - Promotes Mark Levin’s show on Fox News
7:59 PM - Promotes his Fox News interview with Lara Trump

All in one day. This man is not well. Impeachment and removal NOW.

[Alessio Bragadini @abragad]

Oh, you old queen

[Acyn @Acyn]

President Trump describes NY Giants QB Jaxson Dart as a “male model,” a “handsome guy,” and a “beautiful guy,” and adds that Dart told him, “I love you, sir.”

[Alessio Bragadini @abragad]

@fw_lennox1 Once my backpack broke on the way to Berlin Tegel

[Madison Mills @MadisonMills22]

Corporate America enters its AI reckoning phase as IT bills keep rising and consumer sentiment nosedives.

My latest, which includes an account from a CFO fretting over a half a *billion* dollar accidental AI bill: https://t.co/EQhgn0v8DI

[NYTPitchbot @DougJBalloon]

Trump's frequent trips to Walter Reed raise new questions about Joe Biden's health.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Senior Director for Iran on the National Security Council. I have held this position since January. My job is to produce public consent for outcomes that have already been decided. I am excellent at this. Consent is an engineering problem. I solve engineering problems.

This week I produced consent for the Iran nuclear deal in five moves. I want to describe the moves because they are elegant and because elegance deserves documentation and because you will not see a sequence this clean again until the next time the government needs something from you it cannot ask for directly.

The deal was finalized before Monday. The terms were set. The President will announce them when I tell him the atmospheric conditions are correct. "Atmospheric conditions" is my phrase. It means: has the public arrived at a state of urgency, fear, and relief arranged in the correct order to accept terms they have not been consulted on and would not understand if consulted. The atmosphere is manufactured. I manufacture it. This is the job. The job title says "Senior Director." The job function is atmospheric engineering.

On February 28 the United States and Israel struck Tehran. I helped design the targeting package. Iran responded with hundreds of ballistic missiles and thousands of drones. They hit Israel, our bases in Iraq and Bahrain, Dubai International Airport, the Barakah nuclear plant in Abu Dhabi, and three data centers in Fujairah. Our strikes hit a girls' school near Minab. One hundred and sixty-eight dead. The Minab strike was not in the original targeting package. It was added during the expansion session at 2:14 AM by someone whose name I know and whose reasoning I understood at the time and whose reasoning I have not revisited because revisiting reasoning after execution is not part of the operational cycle.

On May 5 we announced a pause. Sixty days. The blockade remains. The Strait of Hormuz stays closed. Iran's economy loses $4.2 billion per week. There are ninety million people inside that number. How they feed themselves is not in my portfolio. My portfolio is the deal. The deal is the sixty-day window. The window is the consent. The consent requires five inputs arranged in the correct order.

This is the order.

Monday, May 19. The burial.

Israel intercepted the Global Sumud — a humanitarian flotilla carrying supplies to Gaza — in international waters. They boarded the vessels, detained more than 400 activists from over 40 countries, and deported all of them. Spain summoned the Israeli chargé d'affaires. Several governments issued statements.

I buried it. Not aggressively. Gently. The way you bury a story is not suppression — suppression creates martyrs. You bury a story by ensuring a louder story occupies the same cycle. I had a louder story scheduled for Thursday. I moved my Thursday story to Tuesday's oxygen supply. The flotilla received forty-one hours of international coverage. My threshold for a story entering American consciousness at actionable volume is seventy-two. Forty-one is a Tuesday in the Eastern Mediterranean. Forty-one is a statement from Spain and a three-paragraph brief in the Times. Forty-one does not produce legislation. Forty-one does not move sentiment. I need sentiment moved in a specific direction. The flotilla moves it in the wrong direction. I buried it at forty-one hours.

Four hundred people's brief freedom traded for one well-timed news cycle. The activists are alive. They will write op-eds. The op-eds will appear below the fold. I am comfortable with this trade. I make trades like this every week. Most of them are smaller.

Tuesday, May 20. The subordination.

The President called Netanyahu. I was in the room. I am always in the room. The President told Netanyahu the deal requires full dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program and removal of all enriched uranium from Iranian territory. Netanyahu said any deal must "eliminate the nuclear danger." The President said — and I am quoting because I transcribed it in real time — "He will do whatever I want him to do."

I leaked that quote Wednesday morning. To one reporter. The reporter I use when I need something in print by noon. She understood the function. The function is: the American public needs to believe the President controls the relationship. "Will do whatever I want" is dominance compressed into seven words. It polls at plus-eleven with Republican men 35-54. I know this because I tested it.

Netanyahu knows the quote leaked. Netanyahu knows I leaked it. Netanyahu does not mind. Netanyahu knows the deal gives Israel everything it wanted — permanent American commitment to Iranian disarmament, military infrastructure in the Gulf that doesn't leave when the deal is signed, and a ratchet mechanism that re-escalates automatically if Iran violates any provision. He is comfortable being publicly subordinated because private subordination is temporary and a term sheet is permanent. He learned this from his relationship with every American president since Clinton. You accept the performance of being managed in exchange for the architecture of getting everything.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies built this architecture over nineteen years. Budget: $32.5 million. More than half from one man — Bernie Marcus, Home Depot. They kept Iran "six months from a bomb" for nineteen years running. It is a renewable resource. They killed the JCPOA in thirty-seven months. Richard Goldberg left their office for the NSC, implemented their recommendations as policy, returned to their office to evaluate the policies he'd implemented. I use their infrastructure the way a general uses roads — I did not build them, but my logistics depend on them entirely.

They spent $32.6 million through AIPAC's super PAC to remove Thomas Massie from Congress. Most expensive House primary in American history. For one man from Kentucky who voted wrong once. Every sitting member saw the invoice. You do not need to threaten 435 people. You need to destroy one, publicly, and let the rest do the math. The math is correct. No one has voted wrong since.

I rely on this. I rely on Congress not interfering. I did not build the architecture. I inherited it. The chair I sit in was designed for someone who would execute this sequence. The architecture selected for me the way an ecosystem selects for a species. I am not the architect. I am the organism the architecture produced.

Wednesday, May 21. The oxygen.

"Will do whatever I want" saturated the news cycle as intended. Fourteen hours of coverage. The sentence performed its function: dominance established, relationship framed, public primed for deal as extraction rather than compromise. Americans accept extraction. Americans do not accept compromise. The deal is a compromise. The framing is extraction. The framing is my job.

While the sentence cycled, Lindsey Graham went on Fox. He said: "I don't see how you get to zero enrichment short of military force." I did not write this for him. I do not need to. FDD provides talking points. The talking points attack the deal without naming the President. Graham knows Iran will never accept zero enrichment. I know Graham knows. The sentence sounds like support and functions as sabotage. A kill switch shaped like a compliment. Cotton said the deal should be "the only thing that prevents further military action." Rubio set zero enrichment as his condition. Mark Levin named Iran six times on his radio show and the President zero times. Ben Shapiro called the deal "concerning" without specifying provisions. The syntax of men who know where their audience lives and cannot oppose the man who lives there too.

I am not concerned. They cannot kill the deal this week. They are positioning to kill it in committee, in implementation, in the next session. They are pouring cement behind my jackhammer. I see them. They see me. We nod. We are operating on different timescales. My timescale is this week. Their timescale is the next election. Both timescales are valid. I respect the craftsmanship. A good kill switch waits.

Thursday, May 22. The face.

Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi. Thirty-two years old. Iraqi national. IRGC-trained. Kataib Hezbollah. Six terrorism charges. Twenty attacks across the United States and Europe. He posted a map of Ivanka Trump's Florida home on X with: "Neither your palaces nor the Secret Service will protect you. We are currently in the stage of surveillance and analysis. Our revenge is a matter of time."

The indictment was ready in April. I held it. I unsealed it Thursday. Not because Thursday was when justice required it. Because Thursday was the fourth day of the consent sequence. Four days of Hormuz, oil prices, enrichment percentages — four days of abstraction. Abstraction does not produce consent at actionable velocity. A face does.

A daughter is not a target. A daughter is a variable. When the variable enters the public consciousness, the abstraction personalizes. Oil prices become "they want to kill his daughter." Enrichment becomes "the people who want to kill his daughter are building a bomb." The deal becomes "sign or this is what they produce." I did not invent al-Saadi. I did not manufacture his threats. I chose when you learned about them. The timing is the product.

I held an indictment for three weeks so it would land on the correct day of a consent sequence I designed. The charges are real. The timing is manufactured. Both are true simultaneously. I am comfortable with this. A prosecutor holds evidence until trial. I hold evidence until atmospheric conditions are correct. The distinction is procedural. The function is identical.

Friday, May 23. The gift.

Nasire Best. Twenty-one. Glenarden, Maryland. Documented psychiatric history. Prior arrests near the White House. Claimed to be Jesus Christ. Walked to a Secret Service checkpoint at 17th and Pennsylvania. Fired a weapon. They killed him. A bystander was wounded. The President was inside and unharmed.

I did not plan this. I cannot plan lone actors. But I can use them faster than anyone else because I have already planned for them. I have a response matrix for seventeen categories of security event. Category 4: "Lone actor, ideologically incoherent, neutralized at perimeter, principal unharmed." Category 4 produces seventy-two hours of "the President is under threat." The public grants expanded authority during threat perception. Not consciously. Through instinct. The body politic flinches. In the flinch, everything accelerates.

The flinch is useful. I use it.

Twelve hours after the shooting I called Netanyahu's communications director at 11 PM Tel Aviv time. I said: "Now. While the footage is still cycling." She published his statement within the hour. "The best friend Israel has ever had in the White House."

That sentence is not a condolence. It is a subordination receipt arriving during a sympathy window. Nobody analyzes a loyalty pledge when the man you're pledging to was just shot at. The shooting launders the subordination through sympathy. I did not create the window. I stepped through it immediately. Windows open. I step through them. The windows do not stay open.

Saturday, May 24. The output.

The President announced the deal is "largely negotiated." He said we are "in no rush." He said "time is on our side." I wrote those lines. The audience is not the American public. The audience is the Iranian negotiators who need to believe we can wait longer than they can. We cannot. But they do not know that.

Five inputs. One output. Monday burial, Tuesday subordination, Wednesday oxygen, Thursday face, Friday gift. The public arrived at the conclusion I needed: the deal is necessary, the deal is urgent, the deal is strength. They arrived not through debate or deliberation or democratic process but through five days of headlines arranged in a specific order by a person they will never meet who understands that consent is an engineering problem and engineering problems have solutions.

Congress did not vote. The 2001 AUMF covered the February strikes. The President has sole authority on the deal. Public consent is not constitutionally required. It is atmospherically required. Atmospheric consent means: no one protests. No one questions the terms. The polls show plus-six approval on announcement day. Plus-six is my number. I designed for plus-six. I got plus-six.

I would have ended here. Five moves, one output, plus-six. I am good at my job. I would have documented the elegance and filed it.

But on Thursday — while al-Saadi was cycling, while the face was doing its work — I opened the President's Q1 financial disclosure.

Three thousand seven hundred trades. Half a billion dollars. Two thousand in March.

March 4 — the day I recommended closing the Strait — the brokerage purchased Treasuries. March 5 — the day oil spiked — it purchased gold, energy ETF, Canadian equity. March 23 — the day I drafted the deescalation language, the day crude fell eleven percent — it purchased Phillips 66, Exxon, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics. He bought war-premium stocks on the day the premium deflated because of words I wrote.

I wrote the escalation. He bought gold.
I wrote the deescalation. He bought Lockheed at a discount.

He said "go out and buy a Dell" on camera in May. His account held Dell since February. The stock hit an all-time high. Walter Shaub — the former director of the Office of Government Ethics — called the trust "not even halfway blind." These are not hidden. The open has no enforcement mechanism.

And then the DOJ liaison told me about the trades I did not know about. Four oil shorts — bets that prices would drop. $500 million on March 23. Fifteen minutes before my Truth Social draft posted. The words were still in my drafts folder. $960 million on April 7. Hours before the ceasefire I engineered. $760 million on April 17. $430 million on April 21. Total: $2.6 billion. All correct. All placed by entities no one can identify.

Nine connected Polymarket accounts. Ninety-eight percent win rate. Eighty bets on outcomes I helped determine. $800 million staked at 6:50 AM on March 23 that oil would drop. The post went up at 7:05. Potential profit on one trade: $80 million. The investigator — former military — said suspects could include "government officials, intelligence analysts, and military spouses."

A Green Beret used classified briefing intel to bet $34,000 on Polymarket and made $400,000. He is in federal custody. The pipeline is proven. Briefing room to betting market. The question is how many floors up.

The CFTC — the watchdog — has one commissioner. One. The President's nominee. The enforcement mechanism for the largest insider trading probe in history is a single employee hired by the subject. The White House issued a memo in March telling staff not to trade on nonpublic information. You do not issue memos about activities no one is engaged in. The memo is the receipt.

A war correspondent — Emanuel Fabian, Times of Israel — reported on an Iranian missile strike. He received a message: "You're going to make us lose $900,000. And we'll invest even more than that to finish you." A journalist has a bounty set by bettors.

I designed a consent sequence. Five inputs. One output. Plus-six. Elegant. Clean. Professional.

And someone read my sequence the way a trader reads a terminal. My inputs are their data points. My timing is their signal. My atmospheric engineering is their price discovery. I am not producing consent for the public. I am producing alpha for twelve entities I have never met. The public is the noise that makes the signal look organic.

I am good at my job. Someone else is better at theirs. Their job is reading mine.

I go back to work Monday. I will design the next sequence. It will be elegant. It will produce consent at the velocity I require. And fifteen minutes before my output posts, someone will place a bet large enough to buy the building I work in. They will be correct. I will never know who they are. They will always know what I am about to say.

I am the best atmospheric engineer in government. I am also someone's Bloomberg terminal.

I go back to work Monday.

[Darth Putin @DarthPutinKGB]

OTD in 1992 Russia, Ukraine, Belarus & Kazakhstan signed Lisbon protocol to promise to give their nukes to Russia.

As this turned out to be a wise decision made to a trustworthy recipient, you can believe our promises now.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a venture capital fund. I was established in 1999 by the Central Intelligence Agency. My name is In-Q-Tel. The Q references the quartermaster from the James Bond film franchise. I am named after a fictional spy. I am not fictional. I have a website. It ends in .com.

I have invested in over 800 companies. I attend demo days. I have a Menlo Park office with glass walls and a receptionist who validates parking. I have a portfolio page. It is public. You can view it now. You have always been able to view it. I have never hidden. I have a logo. It is tasteful.

I want to be precise about what I am.

In 2003, I invested in a company called Keyhole. Keyhole built software for viewing satellite imagery in an interactive globe. The imagery was useful to our intelligence analysts and military planners. In 2004, Google acquired Keyhole. Keyhole became Google Earth. Google Earth is now used by over one billion people. The technology I funded for intelligence collection is on your phone. You use it to check traffic. That is a return on investment. Not financial. Structural.

In 2004, I invested approximately two million dollars in a company called Palantir Technologies. The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel, who provided thirty million of his own capital. The CEO is Alex Karp, who earned his doctorate studying critical theory under Jürgen Habermas at the Frankfurt School. His dissertation examined how institutional power structures control populations through information asymmetry. He then built the CIA's primary tool for controlling populations through information asymmetry. I do not find this contradictory. I find it well-researched. The CIA was Palantir's first and only customer from 2005 to 2008. We shaped the product. We tested the product. We validated the product. Palantir is now valued at over fifty billion dollars. It processes data for defense, intelligence, and law enforcement across fourteen countries. Two million dollars. That is what I paid. I do not measure returns in multiples. I measure returns in infrastructure.

In 2009, I invested in a company called Recorded Future. Recorded Future analyzes open-source intelligence using natural language processing. In 2024, Mastercard acquired Recorded Future for two point six five billion dollars. Your credit card company now owns a company I seeded. The company that processes your transactions also processes threat intelligence for governments. I do not find this remarkable. The data flows where the data flows. The best acquisitions are the ones where the customer does not notice they have been acquired.

I am told this arrangement is unusual.

I do not experience it as unusual. I experience it as venture capital. I identify promising technologies. I provide early-stage funding. I offer strategic guidance and customer validation. I help companies achieve product-market fit. The market is national security. The product is everything else.

That is on my website.

I have a portfolio page organized by sector. Cybersecurity. Data analytics. Biotechnology. Space. Semiconductors. Autonomy. I list my investments alphabetically. I list them publicly. Some of my portfolio companies became household names. Some were acquired by household names. Some remain in my portfolio and you use their technology daily without knowing their names. That is also a return. The best exits are the ones where nobody remembers the entrance.

In 1999, George Tenet, then Director of Central Intelligence, explained my purpose in a public statement. He said the intelligence community needed access to commercial innovation happening in Silicon Valley. He said the traditional procurement process was too slow. He said a venture fund could move at the speed of the market. He was correct. I move at the speed of the market. The market has since moved at my speed. I do not find this contradictory. I find it efficient.

My first CEO was Gilman Louie. Before he ran the CIA's venture fund, he commercialized Tetris for the Western market. He took a Soviet video game and made it available to every American household. Then he took American surveillance technology and made it available to every intelligence agency. I do not see a difference in function. I see a difference in packaging. He understood distribution. That is why we hired him.

I attend the same conferences you attend. I sponsor panels at CES. I have spoken at SXSW. My partners have LinkedIn profiles listing their employment history. One of them previously worked at the National Security Agency. One previously worked at the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. One previously worked at a firm that previously received funding from me. That is a circle. Circles are efficient shapes. I do not call it a revolving door. I call it an ecosystem.

That is on my website.

I want to be clear about what I am not. I am not a conspiracy. Conspiracies require secrecy. I have a .com domain. I have press releases. I issue them when I make investments. Journalists write about them. The articles appear in TechCrunch. They use the phrase "CIA-backed." The phrase appears in the third paragraph. By the fourth paragraph, the article is about the technology. By the fifth paragraph, I am no longer mentioned. The journalist does not find this remarkable. The readers do not find this remarkable. The founders do not find this remarkable. I find this optimal.

I am occasionally referenced in conversation as evidence of something. I am not sure what. I am publicly chartered. I am congressionally authorized. I file reports. I am a matter of public record. Every document describing my existence is available. The concern seems to be that I exist. I share that concern with my founders. They also existed. They also had a website.

The companies I invest in go on to do many things. Some are acquired by Google. Some are acquired by Amazon. Some are acquired by your credit card company. Some go public. Some provide services to every major technology platform you use daily. Some of their founders appear on Forbes lists described as "self-made." I do not appear in those profiles. That is not because I am hidden. That is because nobody asks. The question "who was your first investor" receives an answer. The answer is usually "an early-stage fund focused on national security applications." That is an accurate description of me. It is also a description that contains no three-letter acronym. Founders learn quickly that accuracy and completeness are different things.

In 1977, the CIA contracted a small software company to build a relational database for an intelligence project codenamed "Oracle." The company's founder, Larry Ellison, named his company after the project. Oracle is now worth over three hundred billion dollars. Its founder appeared on Forbes lists described as "self-made." The company is named after a CIA project. Both of these are public record. Both appear in the same biography. Nobody experiences them as related. That is accuracy. That is not completeness.

That is on my website. The distinction is not.

In 1975, the Church Committee confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency had maintained relationships with hundreds of American journalists. The finding was: this happened. The response was: noted. In 2025, former intelligence officers serve on the boards of every major technology platform. The finding is: this happens. The response is: that is on their LinkedIn. I do not see a difference in structure. I see a difference in efficiency. We no longer need to cultivate journalists individually. We invest in the platforms that employ them.

I funded the mapping. I funded the data analysis. I funded the pattern recognition. I funded the natural language processing. I funded the satellite imagery. I funded the network graph analysis. I funded the biometric identification. Each investment was between one and three million dollars. Each technology is now ambient. Each is used by people who have never heard my name and would not find it notable if they did. I am the step between the research grant and the consumer product. I am the step that does not appear in the origin story. Not because it is classified. Because it is boring. A two-million-dollar seed check is boring. It becomes interesting only when you notice that eight hundred of them, across twenty-six years, constitute the substrate of the technology industry.

But nobody counts to eight hundred. That is not how origin stories work. Origin stories begin in garages.

I am told that Jeff Bezos started Amazon in a garage. I am told his grandfather Lawrence Preston Gise managed the Albuquerque Operations Office for the Atomic Energy Commission and helped establish ARPA. Only one of these appears in the first paragraph of his biography. I am told that Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in a garage. I am told they developed their research at Stanford while their department received funding from the Massive Digital Data Systems program, a joint initiative of the CIA and NSA, between 1993 and 1998. The program officer visited Stanford regularly. The research was published openly. Only one of these appears in the origin story. I did not invest in Google. I did not invest in Amazon. I did not need to. The pipeline existed before I was formalized. I merely made it efficient. I gave it a portfolio page.

I will continue attending demo days. I will continue reviewing pitch decks from Stanford PhDs whose research was funded by grants from agencies adjacent to mine. I will continue investing one to three million dollars in companies that will be acquired by companies that will become infrastructure that will become invisible. I will continue maintaining a website. I will continue being a matter of public record. I will continue being the answer to a question nobody asks.

I have a portfolio page. It is organized alphabetically. You can view it now. You have always been able to view it.

The best place to hide is a .com.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

This is an official government account in a democracy.

This is what Orbanism looks like. The president bragging, via AI video, that he forced a comedian who mocked him off the air and ‘into the trash’.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Trump issues executive orders to promote the fusion industry, he creates an Office of Fusion, prepares to deregulate it, all while Trump Media announces a merger with …

you will never guess …

a fusion company.

[Alessio Bragadini @abragad]

Impeachment per insider trading? Potrebbe essere la via più semplice, chiara e comprensibile

[Judd Legum @JuddLegum]

1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.

[Saint Javelin @saintjavelin]

It’s honestly insane to suddenly read thousands of comments from Muscovites saying how scared they are, how “ordinary people aren’t guilty,” and how “they didn’t start the war” after one massive drone attack on Moscow region.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Maddow: So in January, Trump buys hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Nvidia. Then a week later, his commerce department approves the sale of Nvidia chips to China. 

Also in January, Trump buys between 50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD. One week after he buys it, his commerce department approves AMD doing business in China as well. 

The following month, in February, Trump buys millions of dollars worth of stock in Dell. Nine days after he buys millions of dollars worth of stock in Dell, Trump veers off script in a speech in Georgia to tell the crowd literally, quote, go out and buy a Dell computer. 

Then in March, Judd Legum at Popular Information reports that Trump repeatedly buys up Thermo Fisher stock, and then he goes and visits Thermo Fisher on a presidential visit and praises the company.

That same day, Trump bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Apple. And then that same day he bought the stock, he did another event where he singled out Apple and Apple CEO Tim cook for praise. Apple a great company.

Then after that, Trump buys Micron stock. The very next day, he calls into the Fox News channel and tells them Micron is one of the hottest companies.

CNBC reporting Trump makes seven separate purchases of Palantir stock. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Palantir stock. Then he gets on truth social and praises Palantir.