hummingbird228

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star." - Stephen Hawking

[Brown Eyed Susan @smc429]

Leave it to a woman to speak truth to power.
Go Kaitlan!

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

I am German, and that is simply not true.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

YOU DON'T SAY.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Ana Navarro: “We’re in the middle of a war that none of us know when and how it will end. In the middle of this war, you’ve got the Secretary of Defense focused on who’s chubby in the military, who’s got a beard, and now testosterone levels. Why don’t you focus on getting the hell out of Iran and getting us out of a no-win war?”

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

The Heritage Foundation — the same think tank that wrote Project 2025 — just published a report arguing that competitive women's sports should be scaled back and replaced with "group fitness classes, dance, yoga, recreational intramurals, hiking clubs, and the like."
Their stated reason? Fertility. They argue elite women's athletics make women less interested in having children.
The masks are off.
Watch: https://t.co/T9tyd7WCvP

[Marc E. Elias @marceelias]

I never stormed the Capitol. Instead, I have dedicated my career to fighting for voting rights.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔The internet was real. Most of the companies built on it during the dot-com era went bankrupt anyway. Amazon went from $107 to $7 and Cisco never recovered its high. The technology survived but most of the business models didn't. I've been thinking about that a lot lately...

My Take
The parallels to where we are now are hard to ignore. Massive infrastructure buildout outpacing actual demand (fiber optic then, data centers now). Unprofitable companies going public at peak hype (SpaceX is already underwater a month after the largest IPO in history).
CEOs calling skeptics stupid (Son calling bubble talk "blasphemy" while his own credit rating gets downgraded). And vendor financing, where the seller lends money to the buyer to keep the cycle moving. Nvidia just launched a program to finance its own customers. In the late 1990s, telecom companies like Lucent and Nortel did the same thing. Both ended in some of the largest corporate bankruptcies in American history at the time.

This one could be worse because of what's underneath the equity layer. The dot-com bubble was mostly stocks. This one has private credit, project finance bonds, off-balance-sheet joint ventures, and insurance company money all stacked into data center infrastructure.
Blue Owl froze investor withdrawals and is also funding 80% of Meta's $250 billion Louisiana campus. Oracle got downgraded to one notch above junk because half its backlog depends on OpenAI. Anthropic has $90 billion in compute leases and zero profit heading into an IPO. Chip stocks have erased $3.3 trillion since June. The technology is real and I use it every day. So was the internet in 1999. Whether the technology works was never in doubt. Whether the companies selling it can justify what investors are paying is a different question, and it's about to get answered in public filings.

Hedgie🤗

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

Quick advice to any Democrat running for anything or already in office:

Every interview, in fact almost every sentence should end with “Trump crime family” or “corrupt.”

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

ICE smashed the window of a disabled Iraq War veteran, on his way to work, pepper-sprayed him, dragged him out at gunpoint, and locked him up for three days without charges.

This is fascism.

https://t.co/du9bv2U4pY confirms that George Retes is a citizen, a disabled U.S. Army veteran who served his country in Iraq.

Federal agents smashed his truck window, sprayed him with chemical agents, detained him for three days, denied him contact with his family, and released him without charges. He missed his daughter’s third birthday while sitting in a cell.

No person on American soil should fear being treated this way, least of all a citizen and veteran at the hands of his own government. A nation that can do this to a U.S. citizen and veteran can do it to anyone.

PAXIS helps you prepare for ICE encounters, help friends and family if you are taken, and deal with the aftermath: https://t.co/Hi5Yo2N2N2

[Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari @RepYassAnsari]

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are responsible for the deaths of two more Americans. There are no words. We must find the missing servicemember. My heart breaks for the families of all three. A disgusting, illegal war for nothing.

[Congressman Robert Garcia @RepRobertGarcia]

Whether it’s his failure on the Epstein files or the DOJ slush fund, Todd Blanche has been a horrific example of leadership as the Acting Attorney General.

He should not be confirmed by the Senate.

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

Todd Blanche has been nothing but an obstacle to transparency and justice for survivors.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act II will allow state attorneys general to begin prosecuting the men who abused these young girls.

@RepThomasMassie @Morning_Joe

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

With two more troops killed and several others maimed and mutilated, guess who was playing golf today without a care in the world?

[John Pavlovitz @johnpavlovitz]

People actually threw away a 250-year-old Republic over this vile bag of excrement...

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

Marines conducting operations in Gulf of Oman

CentCom released footage

These are preparatory for more by the Marines

More operational signs Stage 3 coming

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

At an event in Pennsylvania this week, Trump told the room that the cost of living is a made up issue, and then bragged that one of his friends bought a private plane just for the tax benefits from his Big Beautiful Bill.

He said the quiet part out loud.

The bill let his friend write off the full cost of a jet in a single year. That is not an accident but rather the point of the law.

The tax break for private jets is permanent. The tax break for tips expires in 2028.

Working families got the version that runs out. Billionaires got the version that never does.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Xi Jinping just hijacked the rules of AI for the entire planet.

Today, Xi walked onto the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai.

It was his FIRST time attending the event in person since it launched in 2018. Heads of state do not fly in personally for a product expo.

The day before he spoke, 29 governments signed a founding charter.

It created a brand new international body called the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, with its permanent headquarters in Shanghai. China had spent a full year lining up the signatures.

UN Secretary General sat in the audience. So did the leaders of Kazakhstan, Cambodia, and Thailand, alongside representatives from more than 100 countries.

While the robots and the chips got the headlines, those 29 signatures were what really mattered.

Here's why:

Whoever writes the rules of a technology decides who gets to win with it.

The US is leaning on export controls and voluntary safety pledges. Europe is enforcing its own AI Act.

China just built the institution that wants to set the standards for everyone else, and it put the headquarters on its own soil.

And look at who signed...

The founding members include Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and Laos. Together, the countries in this new bloc represent a population that dwarfs the entire G7. These are the nations that felt shut out of the AI order the West built, and Beijing just offered them a seat at a table it controls.

And Xi framed all of it as a gift to humanity. He pledged 5,000 AI training slots for developing countries.

He called on the world to "encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing" and warned against any nation placing its own security above everyone else's, which is basically a shot at American chip controls.

It was a generous call for openness from the country that just created the rule-setting body and kept the headquarters for itself.

On the conference itself, more than 1,100 companies showed off over 3,000 products, including Huawei's Atlas 950, an 8,192-chip supercomputer built to go straight at Nvidia, and what China is billing as the world's first AI agent phone.

So while much of the West is still arguing about whether AI is a bubble, China spent this week doing something more lasting:

It started writing the rulebook, and got 29 countries to sign.

What happens to America's lead if the rest of the world ends up playing by China's rules?

[tae kim @firstadopter]

If you're long tech and long energy, you're having a good year

[Alessi Allaman @AlessiAllaman]

"Howard Lutnick lost 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who were killed on 9/11..."

Within days — before many were even confirmed dead — Howard Lutnick cut off their paychecks to their families without warning.

He wept on national television. The families were furious.
Years later Cantor Fitzgerald won a $135 million settlement from American Airlines.

Lutnick told senior executives the bulk of the money would go to the firm's partners — not the families of the 658 dead.

He is now Trump's Secretary of Commerce.
He is also the man who lied to Congress about visiting Jeffrey Epstein's island with eight children.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

BREAKING: Moscow and the surrounding region are burning this morning after a large-scale overnight Ukrainian drone attack reportedly struck an oil depot and major logistics warehouses.