Jeremy Kotkin

Veteran and Professional Devil's Advocate

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

I'm going to predict that when the damage assessment is complete, well into the future, Trump's greatest crime will prove to be espionage - AND - it will be the most catastrophic breach of national security in American history.
We will discover he passed secrets to Russia from day 1 because he was compromised; and did favors for the Saudis shortly after, purely for personal profit; and who knows what the hell else.
His many Useful Idiocies will boggle the mind. And his America First gaslight will be remembered as it should be remembered: "Trump Before America, facilitated by idiots who called themselves patriots."
His treachery - most done purely for power and profit, and some from pathology, revenge, and entitlement, will have massively impacted the globe, permanently shifted wealth, and cost many millions of lives.
I have to add that a good deal of it would not have happened but for our legacy media's consistent and widespread normalization of his disorders.

[Brian Tyler Cohen @briantylercohen]

At this point, these people should get awarded the Chinese version of the Medal of Honor because no one is doing more to position China to own the future than America's Republican Party.

[David Axelrod @davidaxelrod]

In his SOTU speech in 2010, @barackobama warned that with it's Citizens United decision, the SCOTUS had "opened the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections."
Today, his grim prophecy has become the reality.

[Thor Halvorssen @ThorHalvorssen]

Delcy Rodríguez, the "acting" president of Venezuela has declared a state of emergency.

What you are watching from Venezuela is more than a natural disaster story. It is a governance autopsy.

Hundreds are confirmed dead and the real toll is rising because no one is coming to rescue those still trapped in the rubble.

Let's break it down: Twin 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes. Buildings collapsed in Caracas and neighboring cities.

And where are the ambulances?

Where are the fire trucks?

Where is the state?

There are no emergency services. Because there is no state. There is only a criminal enterprise that wears a costume. The state built a machinery to repress. Silence. Torture. Kill. Not to rescue.

To every American businessperson who has traveled to Caracas in the last few months, met with Delcy Rodríguez, signed deals, convinced themselves that "things are changing" and that engagement is pragmatic. This is for you…

For those who believe the American government fiction that "everything is going great" with Delcy…. you are watching your thesis collapse in real time, under rubble, with no one coming to help.

The fiction that Venezuela is "open for business" exists for one reason: Delcy and her brother Jorge need your money, your legitimacy, and your silence. They have no intention of reforming. They respond that they just "don't know" when elections will take place. They have no intention of being held accountable for the billions looted, the political prisoners disappeared, the diaspora of more than eight million people. They need you as props. They need you to keep telling Washington that things are "great!" And that Delcy is exactly what Venezuela needs right now to "stabilize" and "reform."

What this earthquake reveals, as every crisis in Venezuela reveals, is that Maduro and his cronies hollowed out every institution. PDVSA. The hospitals. The fire departments. Civil defense. Emergency services. All of it stripped to the bone and the proceeds wired offshore.

The death toll will be much higher precisely because of what the people now in power did over the last 25 years.

Let's be clear: The people dying tonight and in the next few days under collapsed buildings in Caracas are not dying because of an earthquake. They are dying because of 25 years of systematic looting by the same people now issuing press releases about a "state of emergency." Because they're wholly unprepared. Because they looted everything. Did away with talent. And on top of all of this have zero empathy or motivation to help anyone but themselves. They didn’t care about millions of people fleeing into a jungle and walking hundreds of miles to freedom. Why would they care about survivors of this natural disaster?

The media locally isn't reporting or showing the images of the devastation. They're terrified of upsetting the dictatorship.

And tonight:

Not a firefighter in sight. Not an ambulance in sight. Just cameras, and Delcy, and the performance of governance where none exists.

Those businesspeople were warned. The Venezuelans who fled told you. The human rights organizations told you. The evidence was always there.

Now you have photographs.

[Rasmus Jarlov @RasmusJarlov]

It is completely beyond me why someone who has been prime minister of one the best countries in the world will sacrifice his dignity. Trump will be gone in 2,5 years and your memory will be like this for all time. It is not worth it.

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@jrizal1957 @Rainmaker1973 What were your biomedical credentials again?

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@MorosKostas "Finish the job?" Tell us you're incompetent when it comes to foreign affairs and military strategy without telling us you're incompetent when it comes to foreign affairs and military strategy.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In a significant breakthrough for surgical robotics, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed an AI system that enabled a robot to successfully perform gallbladder removal on a deceased pig with almost complete autonomy and no direct human control during the procedure.

The dual-layer AI model, trained on 17 hours of real human surgical video footage, interpreted live visual input and converted it into precise verbal-style commands (such as “clip the second duct”), which were then executed by the robot. Across eight separate procedures involving 17 distinct surgical tasks, the robot achieved a remarkable 100% success rate, demonstrating advanced real-time self-correction capabilities and only minimal human assistance (primarily for tool changes or occasional adjustments).

While fully autonomous surgery on living humans is still years away, this milestone represents a major step forward in the field. The robot’s ability to detect and fix its own mistakes highlights the growing potential of AI to enhance surgical precision and safety.

Researchers plan to advance testing to live animal models next, with the long-term vision of developing systems that can reduce complication rates, improve consistency, and help alleviate the workload on surgical teams.

[Kim, J. W., et al. (2026). SRT-H: A hierarchical framework for autonomous surgery using language-guided imitation learning. Science Robotics, 10(104), eadt5254. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adt5254]

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@CR07100710 @sentdefender Does it hurt to be so ignorant?

[Jay Bookman @jaysbookman]

The Texas screwworm story is a version of this. The Reflecting Pool fiasco is a version of this. The Iranian war is a very large and ongoing version of this.
Everywhere you look, incompetence is having its natural consequences, with more to come. Much more, I'm afraid.

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@BradenLOA https://t.co/Mbhm7LphCt

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

This is not The Onion. This is not AI. This is not even Idiocracy.
This...is John Cafaro, the guy who got the no-bid contract to re-do the defecting pool's circulation and filtering system.
He's Trump's Florida neighbor, he's a Trump donor, and he's been linked to bribery scandals.
The name of his company? Greenwater Services.
You cannot make this stuff up

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

This is Trump donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor John Cafaro who got the no-bid contract to install a water purification system for the reflecting pool. He has 2 prior convictions, one for bribing a member of Congress and another for an illegal loan that violated campaign finance laws.

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

Trump was able to quickly put together $300 billion in recovery money for Iran after he decided to bomb it.

He stood in Swannanoa NC not far from my house in October 2024 and said he’d build back bigger, better, more beautiful, and faster than Biden after Hurricane Helene inflicted $60 billion in damage in the Blue Ridge . . . and then he went MIA.

Imagine if @realDonaldTrump cared as much about rebuilding Western North Carolina for Americans as he does about rebuilding Iran for Iranians.

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@CBSNews

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@TheIntelFrog @sentdefender

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@BradenLOA

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

This AI just exposed the BIGGEST legal insider trading operation in America.

A platform called GovGreed built a seven-layer machine learning system that cross-references every stock trade disclosed by every sitting politician against the bills their committees control, the campaign donations they receive, and the companies their votes directly impact.

It scored all 540 politicians currently in Congress. And the numbers are crazy:

56% of every stock purchase made by Congress in the last 16 months was on a stock directly affected by a bill the buyer later voted on. That is 6,170 out of 11,016 total purchases.

More than HALF of all congressional stock buys are on companies whose fate that same politician is about to decide.

343 of 540 Congress members actively trade stocks while holding access to nonpublic legislative information.

That is 63.8% of the entire legislature making market bets with an informational edge that would put any hedge fund manager in prison.

The AI identified 752 active "Triple Signals" in the current Congress. A Triple Signal fires when three conditions line up at once:

The politician sits on the committee controlling a bill, they traded stock in a company affected by that bill, AND they received campaign contributions from that same industry.

Bills carrying these insider indicators pass at 5.4 TIMES the normal rate.

Now look at the individual leaderboard:

- Nancy Pelosi's estimated portfolio sits at $194 million with a Greediness score of 98.1 out of 100
- Ro Khanna made 13,231 trades across 800+ different tickers
- Michael McCaul made 32,302 trades and filed 6,670 of them late
- Thomas Suozzi filed 86.4% of his trades late with an average delay of 396 days, meaning his disclosures landed over a YEAR after he made the trade

And then there is Lisa McClain, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. She has made 1,443 trades in three years, more than 98% of all politicians tracked.

She violated the STOCK Act twice in a single year, disclosing up to $900,000 in trades months after the legal deadline. Her husband bought up to $250,000 in Elon Musk's xAI, which quietly converted into SpaceX equity before last Friday's $2 trillion IPO.

The penalty for all of this? A $200 fine.

The number of Congress members ever prosecuted under the STOCK Act since it passed in 2012? Zero.

And the cruelest part is this:

A bill to ban congressional stock trading was introduced in January 2026. It has bipartisan support. Over 80% of American voters want it passed.

But Congress is sitting on it, because the people who would have to vote yes are the same people making millions from the system staying exactly the way it is.

They write the insider trading laws, they exempt themselves from enforcement, they trade on the information those laws generate, and when they get caught, they pay a fine that is basically nothing.

The AI didn't discover anything Congress was hiding. It just organized what was already public into a pattern so obvious that nobody can pretend it isn't there anymore.

[Jeremy Kotkin @kotkinjs1]

@sashameetsrus Too bad you're just a propagandist for a terrorist state. Ekh, nikomu net dela.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

If there is one person you can trust to always endorse and promote the dumbest takes and fall for any conspiracy theory, especially racist and pro-Russian ones, it’s the world’s only trillionaire

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

Commercial advertising, product placements, and corporate-sponsored promotions are explicitly prohibited on national parklands. The White House lawn is a unit of the National Park System. It also violates standard Anti-Vending and Solicitation Laws as well as misuse of public funds and government endorsement ethics. Everything this administration does spits in the face of our laws. Everything is a grift.