blarkin

Grassroots activist for simple and accessible voting. Dog lover, MBA, history major and Dallas Cowboys fan, for no good reason.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Putin

Last night Donald Trump released a declassified document that says his own intelligence community identified Putin as personally running an operation to defeat my father in 2020, built around a fake Burisma corruption scandal centered around me and executed through prominent Americans.

Trump tasked his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to fly to Kyiv and meet a known Russian agent.

The Americans who ran, laundered, and legitimized the operation:

Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani. John Solomon. Joe DiGenova. Victoria Toensing. Lev Parnas. Igor Fruman. Chanel Rion. Sean Hannity. Steve Bannon. Miranda Devine. Ken Vogel. Ron Johnson. Chuck Grassley. James Comer. Jim Jordan.

To name a few.

An operation formally sanctioned by Trump's own Treasury Department on September 10, 2020, and expanded to include more named actors on January 11, 2021.

Oh, and don't forget the Russian-linked FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who later pleaded guilty to making the entire Burisma bribery story up.

The record exists and we have all the receipts, and more.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Hot take: If you have a pronoun designation on your business card, Americans don't like it.

Maybe 10% do, but the other 85% to 90% think it's nonsense.

In 2024 there were 10 transgender athletes competing in high school sports across a country of 330 million people.

I'm an inclusive person and I genuinely don't care about any of this personally.

But Trump took those 10 people and spent $150 million advertising them to swing state voters and it worked.

That shows that Americans don't like woke culture.

They don't like being told every Hollywood movie needs a representation checklist.

This is a socially conservative country at its core, even if those same people want their government services and Medicare left alone.

Trump understands that better than anyone on the political stage.

The Democrats genuinely don't know what's happening.

And until they figure it out, they're going to keep losing the culture war to a guy who reads the room better than all of them combined.

[Carolyn Rockey @CarolynWRockey]

Jo Nagai was raising swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan, when he noticed something odd. The ones he had looked after as caterpillars seemed to recognize him. Wild butterflies fled. His didn't.
He was in second grade. He wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Martha Weiss, an entomologist at Georgetown University who had studied whether moths could retain memories through metamorphosis. He asked if she could help him design a version of her experiment for butterflies.
She said yes.
Using a muscle therapy device, Jo trained caterpillars to associate the scent of lavender with a mild vibration. When the caterpillars became butterflies, 70 per cent of them still avoided the lavender. Their brains had been completely rebuilt during metamorphosis. The memory survived anyway.
Then he bred them.
The offspring, which had never been trained, also avoided lavender. So did their grandchildren. Without ever experiencing the vibration, two generations of butterflies inherited an aversion to a scent their grandmother had been taught to fear.
Jo documented it all in a 33-page research paper and presented his findings at the International Congress of Entomology in Kobe in 2024. He was 10.
A second grader wrote a letter to a Georgetown professor, and together they found evidence that butterflies can pass memories down through generations.

-Wilderness Whisper

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Ossoff: "Here's what's going to happen tonight: the world's most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his 6-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country. I expect the president to reheat debunked conspiracy theories about the repeatedly litigated and audited and confirmed 2020 presidential election in Georgia, an election that Donald Trump lost. And let me be very clear about this: if the President declares Georgia's election illegitimate, or if the President declares Georgia's sitting United States Senators illegitimate, he is declaring Georgia voters illegitimate. It's Donald Trump who tried to defraud Georgia voters in that election, Donald Trump who tried to commit election fraud when he called Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger -- and it was caught on tape, and you should play the tape to your viewers today -- and badgered and bullied Georgia's top election official to 'find him' the votes that he needed to win in a state where he had lost."

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The NBA's $76 billion TV deal is currently on hold because one 41-year-old won't say where he wants to work.

Adam Silver, the commissioner, admitted it today: the league cannot finish the 2026-27 schedule until LeBron James picks a team. Teams are calling. Networks are calling. The answer to all of them is "we're waiting on LeBron."

The story gets wilder when you know the context. LeBron is the oldest player in the NBA, entering season 24. He's also still one of its best: he just dragged the Lakers to the playoffs, then announced he was leaving. Three franchises are reportedly in the running.

Here's why one player freezes a $76 billion machine. The NBA is one season into an 11-year deal with Disney, NBC, and Amazon. Those partners split a fixed pool of premium inventory: opening night, Christmas Day, the big national windows. LeBron has played on Christmas a record 20 times, the last 19 seasons straight. Wherever he signs instantly becomes a Christmas team, an opening week team, and a 25-game national TV team. Until he signs, none of those slots can be assigned. The whole calendar is downstream of one man's group chat.

Run the math on what's waiting. $76 billion over 11 years is roughly $7 billion a year in media money, and the schedule that deal was priced on can't be built. So the commissioner of a $7-billion-a-year league is doing interviews politely asking an employee of one of his 30 teams to please make up his mind.

No other league works this way. The NFL schedules around teams. The NBA schedules around a person.

[Sarah Longwell @SarahLongwell25]

Things conservatives told me when I was in my 20’s:

*Character counts
*Crony capitalism is bad
*Russia is our enemy
*Tariffs are taxes
*The Constitution is sacrosanct
*Government power should be limited, restrained, and checked by congress.

Guess they were just joking.

[Joseph Allen @j_g_allen]

--> But I also want to talk about the thing most people are not talking about, and that is this air pollution gets inside of our buildings. So it's not enough simply to go inside. You need to go inside to a place that has good levels of filtration. The reality is we breathe more outdoor air pollution indoors. That is shocking to most people, but it's the truth.

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe Democrats were capable of stealing the 2020 election while out of power, but somehow incapable of doing the same in 2024 while in power. That is a categorically, phenomenally dumb thing to believe.

[Rasmus Jarlov @RasmusJarlov]

How on earth are Americans not rioting over this?

The news here is real. It is not a fake news story.

Trump openly admits that his announcements on Truth Social about wars, tariffs, etc., manipulate the stock market. And now he's selling the ability to engage in insider trading to banks so that he and his friends can get even richer, while the average person is getting f***** over in the stock market by these super-rich a******, because they will be told when stock prices will go up and down and the average man will not.

It is corruption on a scale never seen before. Riches worth billions, if not trillions, of dollars are being stolen this way.

No Europeans would ever accept this from anyone in power. Not corruption on this astronomical scale.

But Americans are just sitting there, watching it happen without doing anything about it.

You need to wake up over there.

[WTFGOP @doggintrump]

The CDC is saying the Cyclospora outbreak is from Taylor Farms

Then they keep bringing up Taco Bell

Not that I need to defend Taco Bell for colon blow food. But Taylor Farms sells to McDonalds, Chipotle, Walmart, Safeway, Kroger and a shit ton of places

So I don’t understand while Taco Bell, who pulled lettuce from their restaurants right away because they were trying to be responsible, is being made out to be the bad guy

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The 100 year old pipe that just sinkholed Sunset Boulevard was already on LA's replacement list. Construction was scheduled for 2031.

LADWP budgeted $280 million to replace 6.4 miles of this exact 36-inch trunk line. The project is still in the design phase. Work starts in 2031 and finishes in 2035. The pipe burst 5 years before the first crew would have touched it.

The replacement math explains why this keeps happening. Last fiscal year, LADWP's goal was to replace 1.1 miles of trunk pipe. They replaced less than one. LA has roughly 550 miles of trunk line. Even at the department's new target of 3.5 miles a year, each mile gets replaced once every 157 years.

Riveted steel pipe lasts about 100.

And Sunset Boulevard has run this exact experiment before. In 2014, a trunk line from 1921 ruptured under Sunset near UCLA and sent roughly 20 million gallons through campus, submerging Pauley Pavilion. That break is what made LA's aging pipes national news and launched the current replacement program.

Twelve years later: same street, same vintage of pipe, same aerial footage.

Cities schedule pipe replacement on political time. Pipes fail on material time. LA is replacing 100 year pipes on a 157 year cycle, and this morning is what the gap between those two numbers looks like.

[Capital Weather @capitalweather]

VERY UNHEALTHY: DC among cities with worst air on earth this morning. 😖

Air quality as bad or worse than during historic 2023 wildfire event. Could get worse before it gets better.

We'll have updates through the day: https://t.co/IvQi50uJhU

[AskLivermore @asklivermore]

Your portfolio is down and you don't know what to do. Save this for the next time your portfolio is red. You will need it.

Here's what the 6 greatest investors of all time do when they're losing money:

1. Buffett: Buys more.
- he deployed billions into Goldman Sachs and Bank of America during 2008 while everyone else was panicking.

2. Druckenmiller: Cuts fast, comes back bigger.
- he exits losers immediately. No ego. Waits for clarity, then re-enters with conviction.

3. Peter Lynch: Rechecks the thesis.
- when stocks drop, he does more research, not less. If the business is intact, he holds.

4. Soros: Cuts, rests, resets.
- he cuts ruthlessly, steps away from the screen, then comes back fresh with a clear head.

5. Paul Tudor Jones: Hard stop at -10%.
- if a position drops 10%, he exits. No exceptions. No averaging down. No hoping.

6. Ray Dalio: Rebalances, doesn't panic.
he studies the loss. Was the thesis wrong or was the market wrong? The answer determines the next move.

The common thread across all 6:
- None of them sit and hope
- They all have a plan before the drawdown happens

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

This is the true shape of our planet, known as GEOID.

[Alvin @Alvin1492840]

A guy bought a $1,500 Samsung TV 3 years ago.

He watched Netflix. He watched YouTube. He thought the picture looked fine. He assumed that's just what a TV looks like.

His friend, a home theater installer who calibrates TVs for a living, walked into his apartment and looked at the screen for 5 seconds.

"You're watching everything in demo mode. The motion smoothing is on. The eco dimmer is cutting your brightness by 40%. Your TV is taking a screenshot of your screen every 30 seconds and selling your viewing data to advertisers. And you're watching a $1,500 panel in the same picture mode Best Buy uses under fluorescent lights to make TVs pop on a showroom wall."
He changed 9 settings in 12 minutes.

The picture looked like a different television. The soap opera effect disappeared. The colors became natural. The TV stopped spying on him.
Here's every setting he changed 🧵

[Jigar Shah @JigarShahDC]

Love this work! So many layers.

PG&E has a program called Flex Connect: instead of waiting years for a full distribution upgrade, a big load (EV hub, battery, data center) gets a non-firm connection. PG&E sends day-ahead hourly capacity limits, the site respects them, and it can connect now.

[Guy who hates kings and clowns @NOKINGSNOCLOWNS]

@benpershing This could be the clearest example of how Trump is using the presidency to personally profit. He releases govt information on a platform he owns, and charges companies for access to that information.

Its so corrupt its almost unbelievable.

[Ben Pershing @benpershing]

Truth Social will sell Wall Street firms quicker access to market-moving posts from President Donald Trump, the company said on Thursday.

https://t.co/KypBxbT9XI

[CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil @CBSEveningNews]

Federal health officials say Taylor Farms is the likely source of the nationwide cyclosporiasis outbreak that has sickened people in at least 34 states. The California supplier provides lettuce to Taco Bell and major retailers including Walmart, Target and Whole Foods. https://t.co/HEaIzgdop6

[Brett Erickson @BrettErickson28]

Just moments ago, I released an op-ed in The Hill that explains why a renewed blockade and economic warfare campaign against Iran is doomed to fail, and why the downside risks dwarf the likelihood of success.

It would be exceptionally difficult for one to assert that the first U.S. Blockade of Iran ended in American victory. But now, with it officially reimposed as of yesterday, Iran is entering this new phase of economic warfare in a STRONGER position than when President Trump surrendered at Versailles.

Since the initial blockade was lifted by the United States, Iran has exported more than 80M barrels of oil outside the now in force U.S. blockade. With oil prices skyrocketing once again, this will likely be enough oil revenues to sustain their budgeted oil sales for 3-4 months.

But on top of this, Iran was able to import critical essential goods that Operation Economic Fury 1.0 & 2.0 looked to cut off. This includes wheat, cooking oil, medical supplies, and proteins.

In the meantime, the United States hasn’t been able to come close to normalizing traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, much less unwind the damage to the global economy.

By all indications, Iran is in a stronger position than when the United States first surrendered.

The problem with this, and the crux of my piece, is that economic warfare is not cost-free for the civilians inside of Iran. Their economy, without question, is in tatters. Inflation has been terrible, the foreign exchange rate has cratered. Unemployment continues to skyrocket. And the damage from U.S. bombing has hit pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and manufacturing plants. Estimates place the damage from US bombing at close to $150 billion.

Economic warfare is not inherently good or bad. It is a trade off. You can certainly make the argument that “the short-term pain is worth the long-term gain”. I do not deny that, nor do I live in the fantasy that war is without side effect.

The problem with the renewed economic warfare campaign and blockade is that it has a stupendously low likelihood of success, and an extremely high likelihood of causing a humanitarian crisis inside of Iran.

“Economic pain for the sake of economic pain is not a strategy.”

Operation Economic Fury 2.0 will not succeed. There is no evidence to support why a second iteration would succeed where the first failed. Iran is in a significantly stronger position to weather the storm of this economic onslaught, and the timeline to catastrophe for the United States is now far shorter.

The only result of this strategy will be needless suffering for the very Iranian people we claimed to want to help when we launched this war in the first place.

https://t.co/UIY8vo0oZe