M@xf@rr

🙋‍♂️Max @Sardinia🌻🏖
// ♟gucelli in Lichess & ChessDotcom

[🏴‍☠️ The Pirate 🏴‍☠️ @Pinperepette]

Hanno usato l’emergenza perché sapevano che avevate paura.
Hanno usato “la scienza” perché sapevano che eravate ignoranti.
E mentre abbassavate la testa, hanno reso permanente l’eccezione.
Lo faranno ancora.

https://t.co/xg0VzdBfNx

[🏴‍☠️ The Pirate 🏴‍☠️ @Pinperepette]

Se guardi un tassello non vedi niente. Se guardi il mosaico inizi a farti qualche domanda. Ho raccolto anni di norme europee sulla sorveglianza, con fonti e date. https://t.co/Xgah2OHZtb

[Enzo Cherici 🎸🎾🍰 @EnzoCherici]

"YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS"

Il 22 giugno 1981 a #Wimbledon accadeva questo 😅

Momento iconico nella storia del torneo 🎾

#McEnroe

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

There needs to be a reckoning for this…

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

With Tulsi Gabbard's new revelations about US bio labs in many countries around the world including Ukraine, it's fascinating recall the bizarre series of events that gave rise to this controversy in the first place:

In May of 2022, some of us began asking whether the US had bio labs in Ukraine, what they were for, and why the US had them there. For asking those questions, we were instantly branded as "pro-Russian conspiracy theorists" in official Ukrainian intel reports, on our Wikipedia pages, by countless media outlets, etc. This was and remains one of the most bizarre episodes I've ever seen.

Before May 2022, when we asked those questions, barely anyone had ever thought about let alone asked about "bio weapons in Ukraine"! I certainly hadn't. Like most people, I had never mentioned a word about it because it had never occurred to me we had them there.

But then, Marco Rubio summoned Victoria Nuland to the Senate and asked her in a televised hearing under oath about these "rumors," clearly expecting her to immediately debunk them as obvious Kremlin lies and to proclaim the US had no such bio labs in Ukraine.

Instead, Nuland did the opposite! She *confirmed* key aspects of these "rumors," and she explicitly warned that the US has several "bio research labs" in Ukraine that are so dangerous that they must not be allowed to fall into Russia's hands.

When some of us heard Nuland's rather shocking admission -- the first-ever disclosure about these labs -- we of course asked: wait! what? Why does the US have bio labs in Ukraine, and what are the US and Ukraine doing in those labs that make them (in Nuland's eyes) so dangerous?? (Note: nobody ever suggested that the presence of these bio labs in Ukraine justified the Russian invasion; we just wanted answers about these US bio labs that Nuland had casually divulged).

We never got real answers. We got smear campaigns. To this day, our names are formally attached to claims that we spread "conspiracy theories" for asking about these labs even though it was Victoria Nuland herself who was the one who accidentally revealed them for the first time in a Senate hearing in response to a shocked Marco Rubio. They then quickly tried shutting down any questioning by pretending that Nuland never said this, and it was just a bunch of paid Kremlin mouthpieces who were spreading lies.

You see the same tactics now being against Tulsi for releasing this new intelligence report. Watch the Nuland testimony in question:

[Office of the DNI @ODNIgov]

🧵 Here is the TRUTH: Dangerous gain-of-function research was funded by the U.S. government around the world, directed and approved by people like Dr Fauci. @DNIGabbard exposed that yesterday.

Using U.S. government data, put together and uncovered by career subject matter experts in the Intelligence Community and other government agencies, yesterday’s release highlighted one example of the many overseas biolabs funded by the U.S., the research conducted there, and the significant risks they pose to the world, especially when located in a country at war.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
🔗 https://t.co/qL5em30hoF

[DNI Tulsi Gabbard @DNIGabbard]

Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine.

In support of President Trump‘s Executive Order to end federal funding of dangerous gain of function research around the world, and increase transparency and accountability, ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what “research” is being conducted.

https://t.co/pLMD0krc69

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

🚀 Space exploration timeline:

1903 — Tsiolkovsky publishes the rocket equation
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909 — Goddard writes first paper on liquid propellants as fuel for rockets
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914 — Goddard patents designs for a liquid-fueled rocket and a multi-stage rocket
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919 — Goddard publishes "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes"
1920
1921 — Goddard begins experiments with liquid oxygen and gasoline rocket engines
1922
1923 — Goddard successfully tests first liquid propellant engine
1924
1925
1926 — Goddard launches world's first liquid-fueled rocket
1927 — VfR (Society for Space Travel) founded in Germany; von Braun joins as a teenager
1928
1929 — Goddard launches rocket carrying first scientific payload (barometer & camera)
1930
1931 — Korolev co-founds GIRD (Group for Study of Reactive Motion) in Moscow
1932 — Von Braun becomes chief engineer of German Army rocket program
1933 — Korolev leads launch of USSR's first liquid-fueled rocket
1934 — Von Braun's A-2 rockets reach 2.4 km altitude
1935
1936 — Korolev designs RP-318, USSR's first rocket-powered aircraft
1937
1938
1939 — Von Braun's A-5 rocket reaches 8 km altitude
1940
1941
1942 — Von Braun's A-4 (V-2) rocket becomes first human-made object to reach space (100 km)
1943 — V-2 production begins; JPL formally established in USA
1944 — V-2 used as weapon against London and Antwerp; first ballistic missile attacks in history
1945 — USA recruits von Braun
1946 — USA and USSR independently begin reverse-engineering V-2
1947 — First animals (fruit flies) launched to space aboard a V-2
1948 — Korolev's R-1 rocket successfully launched
1949 — Albert II, a rhesus monkey, becomes first mammal in space aboard a US V-2 rocket
1950
1951
1952
1953 — Korolev begins design of R-7
1954 — Korolev writes letter to Moscow advocating for an orbital satellite program
1955 — USA announces Project Vanguard
1956 — Von Braun's Redstone rocket successfully tested; R-7 development nears completion
1957 — Korolev's R-7 becomes world's first ICBM; Sputnik 1 — first artificial satellite in orbit; Sputnik 2 carries Laika — first living creature in orbit
1958 — USA launches Explorer 1; NASA founded; first US attempt at Moon probe (Pioneer 0) fails
1959 — Luna 1 (USSR) — first spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity; Luna 2 — first human-made object to reach the Moon; Luna 3 — first photos of Moon's far side
1960 — First weather satellite (TIROS-1) launched by USA; first communications satellite (Echo 1); two Soviet dogs (Belka & Strelka) orbit Earth and return safely
1961 — Gagarin — first human in space, April 12; Alan Shepard — first American in space, May 5
1962 — Mariner 2 — first spacecraft to fly by another planet (Venus); Telstar 1 — first active communications satellite
1963 — Tereshkova — first woman in space
1964 — Ranger 7 — first close-up photographs of the Moon's surface
1965 — Leonov — first spacewalk; Mariner 4 — first close-up images of Mars
1966 — Luna 9 — first soft landing on the Moon; first orbital docking (Gemini 8); Surveyor 1 — first US soft Moon landing
1967 — Apollo 1 fire kills three astronauts; Venera 4 — first probe to enter another planet's atmosphere (Venus)
1968 — Apollo 8 — first crewed mission to orbit the Moon; famous Earthrise photograph
1969 — Apollo 11 — first humans on the Moon; Apollo 12 — second Moon landing
1970 — Apollo 13 — Moon mission aborted after explosion; Luna 16 — first robotic Moon sample return; Lunokhod 1 — first lunar rover
1971 — Salyut 1 (USSR) — first space station; Mariner 9 — first spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mars); Apollo 14 & 15 Moon landings
1972 — Apollo 16 & 17 — final Moon landings; Pioneer 10 launched toward Jupiter; last humans on the Moon
1973 — Pioneer 10 — first spacecraft to fly by Jupiter; Skylab — first US space station
1974 — Mariner 10 — first gravity assist maneuver; first flyby of Mercury

[🏴‍☠️ The Pirate 🏴‍☠️ @Pinperepette]

'Non sono stato io a cercarti. Ti ha trovata la matematica.'..

Mia figlia mi ha guardato con quell'espressione che i figli riservano ai genitori quando pensano che abbiano finalmente perso il contatto con la realtà.

Poi ha smesso di sorridere.

https://t.co/uSKV0iFWR8

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

You ask me to celebrate your Bill of Rights. Very well. I have celebrated with you before. On the fifth of July, in Rochester, in 1852. I will celebrate with you again, in the same spirit. Which is to say: I will show you what your celebration looks like from underneath.

The Seventh Amendment. Ratified December 15, 1791. Twenty-seven words:

"In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved."

Preserved.

I want to examine that word with the care it deserves, because I have personal experience with preserved rights. I was born under a Constitution that declared all men created equal. I was sold at auction at the age of seven. My mother worked the night shift in a field twelve miles away and walked those miles in darkness to hold me and walked them back before dawn. She did this because she had a preserved right to her child. Preserved. In a document. That she could not read. In a building she could not enter.

I know what a preserved right looks like. It looks like parchment under glass.

Must I argue that the citizen has a right to a jury? That point is conceded already. In writing. In the founding document. In the second sentence of the Seventh Amendment, which uses the word "shall." Not may. Not should. Shall. The founders were not making a suggestion. They were issuing an instruction.

Let me tell you who received the instruction.

In October of 2023, a physician named Kanokporn Tangsuan sat in a restaurant in Florida. She told the waiter she could not eat dairy. She told him she could not eat nuts. She had treated allergic reactions in others. She trusted the assurance she was given. The food was not safe. She was forty-two years old. Her throat closed. She reached for an epinephrine injector. She died in a hospital.

Her husband wished to ask, before a jury of peers — the ones the Seventh Amendment SHALL preserve for him — why the restaurant killed his wife.

The corporation that owns the restaurant said: you cannot have a jury. Because four years ago, you signed up for a free trial of a streaming service. In the terms of that free trial — which you accepted to watch films about animated dogs and singing princesses — there is a clause. The clause says all disputes with this corporation shall be heard in private arbitration. Not before citizens. Not in public. Not in a courthouse where the record becomes precedent. In a room. Behind a door. Where no one can hear you. Where the outcome binds you but teaches no one. Where your wife's death becomes a private transaction between you and the company that killed her.

YOUR Seventh Amendment. YOUR right to a jury of peers. YOUR Constitutional protection. Waived. By a button pressed to watch a cartoon. Four years before the death.

I want to be precise about the scope.

Fewer than one percent of civil disputes between citizens and corporations now reach a jury. Not because the Seventh Amendment was repealed. Not because Congress voted to remove the right. Not because two-thirds of your states ratified an amendment — the process your founders designed for changing the Constitution. None of that was necessary.

All that was necessary was a button. Pressed at the moment the citizen needs the service. And they always need the service. That is the architecture. You do not present the waiver when the citizen is strong. You present it when they need the job. When they need the food. When they need the medicine. When their child is asking to watch a film about a snowman and the free trial requires only one click.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

But I observe a new arrangement. You have conceded your rights without being demanded. You have surrendered the jury not at bayonet point, not by legislative act, not by the democratic process your founders required. You have surrendered it in the space between wanting a thing and having a thing. In that gap — where the contract sits, where the clause hides, where the button waits — your right evaporates. And you do not notice. Because you never reach for it until you need it. And by the time you need it, you have signed it away fourteen times that year.

I was property. My master did not ask my consent to his authority. He did not need me to sign a document waiving my rights. He simply owned me. This was more honest. He did not require my participation in my own subjugation. He did it to me openly, under law, in daylight.

Your corporations require you to participate. They need you to click. They need the signature. They need you to be — in the legal sense — a willing party. The voluntariness is essential. Not to you. To them. It is the thing that makes the taking legal. It is the fig leaf. It is the document that says: this citizen freely chose to give up the right to a public trial if we kill his wife.

Freely. As I freely chose to work for Edward Covey. As any man freely chooses between the terms and the alternative, when the alternative is exclusion from the society that sustains him.

The jury was placed in the Bill of Rights before the prohibition on excessive bail. Before the guarantee of counsel. Before the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Your founders considered it MORE fundamental than those protections. Thomas Jefferson called it the only anchor by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

The anchor has been raised. Not by tyrants. Not by armies. By terms of service.

And the Seventh Amendment remains. Preserved. Under glass. In a building in Washington. Where tourists visit and feel proud and then return to their hotels and agree to the hotel's arbitration clause when they connect to the WiFi.

I have seen this before. I stood in Rochester on the fifth of July and I said: What to the slave is your Fourth of July? Your celebration is a sham. Your boasted liberty, an unholy license. Your national greatness, swelling vanity.

I am saying it again. In the same cadence. About a different amendment.

What to the citizen is your Seventh Amendment? What is a preserved right to a citizen who has waived it to buy groceries, to take a job, to sign a lease, to rent a car, to stream a film, to open a bank account?

A preserved right you cannot exercise is a decoration. A constitutional guarantee waived by every citizen who participates in commerce is a museum piece. A jury trial available to fewer than one in a hundred is not a right. It is a memory.

You celebrate the Bill of Rights.

I observe that Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan is dead, and her husband could not bring her death before a jury because he once watched a cartoon about a snowman.

And you call this — still, after everything I have shown you — you call it freedom.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.

The Seventh Amendment is not dead. It is preserved. In precisely the way my freedom was preserved in 1850. On paper. In ink. Behind glass. In a building I could not enter.

The year changes. The architecture does not.

[The Seeker @TheSeeker268]

The last few days have been somewhat remarkable in terms of accountability on COVID origins, the cover up, and the broader issue of dangerous pathogen research.

- David Morens was indicted for concealing key documents and conspiring with EHA.
- Ralph Baric was served a Notice of Suspension and Proposed Debarment.
- Tulsi Gabbard is investigating US-funded biolabs in more than 30 countries.
- A CIA whistleblower now says Fauci influenced the Agency’s assessment, despite most CIA scientists concluding the virus came from a lab.

These are the absolute low-hanging fruits.

What the public actually needs is the underlying studies, analyses, and intelligence that drove IC's lab origin assessment. If the whistleblower is right, some of that material may already be sitting on Gabbard’s desk awaiting release, and hopefully, it sees daylight soon.

But Morens could not have run a multi-year scheme to dodge FOIA and transparency laws on his own, without it being known at least at some higher level. And there is already evidence that Fauci organised the "Proximal Origin" paper outside official channels, communicated through a private Gmail account, and worked to shield Daszak and EHA - all points raised in Morens’ own emails. Why is he still untouched?

Then there’s Francis Collins, the man who directed the gain-of-function research policies, relaxed it's scope, and is on record discussing ways to "put down" what he called a "very destructive conspiracy," and hoping that Proximal Origin paper would settle it. Why is Collins rarely mentioned when accountability is discussed?

Daszak was debarred from federal funding, but that’s about it. Much of his EHA team, along with partners at USAID and elsewhere haven't even been scrutinized more closely. Same goes for the Proximal Origin authors and other conflicted scientists and officials. Somehow they still get to keep their jobs.

If this were some routine police investigation, the evidence already in public view would be enough to serve court warrants, and justify a far more aggressive inquiry. Instead, years later, groups like @USRightToKnow are still fighting in courts, lawsuits after lawsuits, for scraps of information.

Yes, we are far from where things stood a few years ago. But it's wild that while the Trump admin has publicly embraced lab origin yet simultaneously treats it like a minor inconvenience, throwing up just a flashy website and some headlines instead of delivering any real accountability and reform.

No serious guardrails or regulations have been put in place to stop this from happening again. No meaningful transparency reforms. No robust oversight framework for high-risk pathogen research. And, almost no one of real significance has been held meaningfully accountable.

Time matters here.

Documents go missing. Custody changes hands. Memories fade and the context erodes with time.

And the clock is ticking.

[The Seeker @TheSeeker268]

So it’s official now. Ralph Baric, perhaps the world’s most famous coronavirologist (or infamous, depending on who you ask) has retired.

"Nancy Messonnier, dean of the Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Maria Gallo, chair of the school’s epidemiology department, made the announcement by email to faculty and staff in the department on Tuesday... Messonnier and Gallo’s message did not cite a reason for Baric’s retirement."
https://t.co/0j3axrUdKB

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

YES. YES. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS. I started a spreadsheet in 2019 tracking every category where America is number one globally and people keep asking me to stop bringing it to Thanksgiving.

We lead the PLANET in medical debt. Not the developed world. The PLANET. There are countries where "medical bankruptcy" doesn't translate because the CONCEPT doesn't exist in their language. We invented it. We EXPORTED it as a field of academic study. German researchers fly here to observe it happening in real time. They take NOTES. We are a living laboratory and the experiment is "what if you made people choose between insulin and rent." We chose. Exposed. This is the thing we're best at.

We lead in incarceration. More humans in cages than China. China has 1.4 billion people and an authoritarian government and we STILL have more prisoners. We beat AUTHORITARIANS at their own game using FREEDOM. We did it with both parties cooperating across NINE administrations. Name ONE other bipartisan project that lasted fifty years. You can't. This is our moon landing. We just don't film it.

We lead in insulin pricing. $300 for a vial that costs $30 in Canada. Canada is VISIBLE FROM DETROIT. You can see Canada from a Walgreens parking lot where someone is deciding between half-doses. The same molecule. The same manufacturer. The border adds $270 of LEADERSHIP. That's what leading looks like. It looks like a 900% markup on not dying.

We lead in mass shootings. Not per capita. Not adjusted. RAW TOTAL. We have so many that researchers had to invent subcategories. School. Workplace. Concert. Grocery store. We have a TAXONOMY. Other countries have incidents. We have a CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM with peer-reviewed SORTING CRITERIA. That's infrastructure. That's RIGOR.

We lead in healthcare spending AND in maternal mortality among rich nations. Simultaneously. We spend $4.3 trillion a year and mothers die at rates that would concern a developing nation. We spent MORE money to get WORSE outcomes so consistently that it can't be incompetence. Incompetence wouldn't be this RELIABLE. This takes PLANNING. This is an ACHIEVEMENT of systems working exactly as designed across multiple industries cooperating to extract value from the specific biological event of someone trying not to die.

We lead in per-capita spending on our military while our veterans sleep in tents. We allocated $886 billion to defense and our soldiers come home to a VA waitlist so long that some of them die on it. We spent the money. We just didn't spend it on THEM. The money went somewhere. It led the way. Just not toward the people who fought.

I printed this tweet on a 24x36 poster. It's in my living room. My wife moved out last month but she didn't take the poster so I think she agrees.

[並行図書 / Parallel Library | Alzhacker @Alzhacker]

イタリアのファシスト刑務所で、アントニオ・グラムシは一つの逆説に直面していた。なぜ労働者たちは自分たちを搾取する体制に自ら同意するのか。

伝統的な権力論は「警察と軍隊が人々を従わせている」と答える。しかしグラムシは見抜いた。本当に強力な権力は見えない。 学校、メディア、宗教、家族という日常の中に潜み、「これが自然なことだ」と人々に思い込ませる仕組みこそが本質だと。

これをグラムシは「文化ヘゲモニー」と呼んだ。支配階級は暴力ではなく、知的・道徳的リーダーシップによって大衆の「自発的な同意」を獲得する。特定の階級の利益を「国民全体の利益」に見せかける物語を、教育や報道を通じて浸透させるのだ。

この理論の核心は「統合的国家」という概念にある。国家とは政治社会（警察や軍隊）と市民社会（学校や教会、メディア）の総体だ。暴力装置は背後に控えつつ、日常的に機能するのは同意を生産する市民社会の側である。

この同意の心理的メカニズムを解く鍵が、「コモン・センス」と「グッド・センス」の区別である。

コモン・センスとは、支配階級の世界観が長年の伝統や格言として染み込んだ、無批判な現実認識のこと。「給料が上がらないのは景気のせいだから仕方ない」「いじめられる方にも原因があるんじゃないか」――こうした信念は、支配への同意を内部から支える。

これに対してグッド・センスとは、労働や生活の現場から生まれる批判的で実践的な知恵である。「時間厳守でサービス残業はおかしい」「週5フルタイムで働いてるのに生活不安」。これらはまだバラバラだが、本質的に支配の論理と矛盾する。

ヘゲモニーとは、このグッド・センスをコモン・センスの中に封じ込め、人々が自らの矛盾した意識のまま行動し続けるように仕向けるプロセスに他ならない。

ここでグラムシの戦略論が生きてくる。「機動戦」と「陣地戦」の区別だ。ロシア革命のような機動戦は、市民社会が未発達で国家が裸の暴力で立つ社会でのみ有効である。西欧では市民社会（学校、メディア、教会など）が強固に機能しており、その機能は現在、支配階級への同意を日々生産する方向に働いている。

必要なのは「陣地戦」である。教育、メディア、宗教、文化といった市民社会の各要塞を、何年もかけて一つずつ奪取していく長期的な闘争。これは選挙やストライキではなく、人々の「良識」を組織し、新たな「コモン・センス」を構築する文化活動である。

現代のネオリベラリズムはこの理論の完璧な実例だ。市場原理は「競争が唯一の合理的な原理である」というコモン・センスを世界中に普及させた。人々は市民ではなく「自己責任の起業家」となり、失業や貧困を個人の失敗と感じる。「これ以外に選択肢はない」という発想そのものがヘゲモニーの勝利である。

デジタル時代はこの構造をさらに精緻化した。アルゴリズムは「新しい有機的知識人」として機能する。私たちの関心や不安を学習し、パーソナライズされた現実を提示することで、同意を自動的に製造する。フィルターバブルは大衆を分断し、「共通の国民的意志」の形成を妨げる。

しかし希望はある。グラムシは「対抗ヘゲモニー」の可能性を説いた。支配階級が自らの有機的知識人（経営者、技術者、ジャーナリスト）を持つように、従属階級もまた大衆から生まれる有機的知識人を育てねばならない。

彼らは学校なきところで学校を創り、メディアなきところでメディアを運営し、いまあるコモン・センスを解体する別の語彙を生み出す。これが「近代的君主」すなわち革命的集団の役割である。単なる抗議ではなく、新しい道徳的・知的リーダーシップを社会に提供する文化事業として。

結局、権力の最も深い場所はバリケードではなく、私たちの頭の中にある。ある社会秩序が「当然」と思われる瞬間、その秩序は勝っている。逆に言えば、その「当然」が揺らぐとき、歴史は動き出す。グラムシが刑務所で書き続けたのは、まさにその「当然」を解体するための思考の道具だった。

—
Douglas C. Youvan（研究者）
『The Architecture of Consent: A Comprehensive Analysis of Antonio Gramsci's Theory of Cultural Hegemony, Intellectual Leadership and Modern Power Structures』
（同意の建築：アントニオ・グラムシの文化ヘゲモニー理論、知的リーダーシップ、現代権力構造の包括的分析）
https://t.co/atxcxMunwG

[Proton @ProtonPrivacy]

The Proton ecosystem has grown significantly, with private AI, a 2FA app, encrypted spreadsheets, video calling, and appointment scheduling all joining the ranks recently.

Now we're sharing our spring/summer 2026 roadmaps.

Here's what's coming...

🧵 1/13

[Natalie Wolchover @nattyover]

Bacteria move around using a molecular machine called the flagellar motor that rotates faster than the flywheel of a race car engine and switches directions in an instant. After 50 yrs, scientists have finally figured out how it works. “My lifelong quest is now fulfilled.” Link⤵️

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The succession everyone called for years just happened, and it's the most revealing personnel decision in tech this year. Apple is the company most behind in AI: Siri delayed three times, Apple Intelligence launched with hallucinated news headlines, and the upgraded assistant is reportedly going to be powered by Google Gemini under the hood. The obvious move was to put a software or AI executive in the CEO seat. Instead the board picked the guy who runs hardware engineering.

Ternus has been at Apple 25 years. He's a mechanical engineer. He's never run software, services, or AI. His resume is iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and the M-series silicon transition. He is the silicon-and-systems candidate.

Cook leaves with the receipts. Market cap from $350B to $4T, a 10x in 14 years. Revenue from $108B to $416B, nearly quadrupled. Services from a footnote to a $100B business. He inherited a hardware company and built a recurring-revenue platform on top of it. The market said thanks by selling AAPL down 1% after hours.

The Ternus pick tells you what Apple's board actually believes about the next decade. The AI race won't be won at the model layer where Apple is hopeless and renting from Google. It'll be won at the silicon layer (on-device inference, custom NPUs, thermal envelope, battery), the form factor layer (glasses, wearables, ambient computing), and the integration layer (the chip talking to the OS talking to the model). All hardware-adjacent problems. All Ternus problems.

The bear case is straightforward. Apple just promoted the executive least connected to the technology that's eating the world, at the exact moment software-native companies (OpenAI with Jony Ive's device, Meta with Ray-Ban, Google with Gemini-everything) are coming for the iPhone's distribution. A mechanical engineer running the most valuable consumer software platform in history. That's a real bet.

The bull case is the same fact framed differently. Every competitor is converging on the realization that AI hardware (the device the model lives on) is the next platform, and Apple has spent 25 years building exactly that. Ternus shipped Apple Silicon, the only credible non-Nvidia AI chip in a consumer device. He runs Vision Pro. He inherited the robotics team in the April reorg.

The boring read is succession planned years in advance, no surprise. The interesting read is that Apple just told you it doesn't think the AI race ends with the best chatbot. It thinks it ends with the best device. And it picked the person who builds devices.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document 👇 wouldn't be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated.

What are they saying, essentially?

They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure).

Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there?

Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument.

But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates.

In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly.

So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others.

The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them!

Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order.

I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish.

Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets.

But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.

So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project.

They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours."

Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action."

For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: https://t.co/3YJk88k4QY): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not.

And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart.

This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see.

A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda.

The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I helped write the manifesto. I also read the dissertation.

That's the part nobody mentions. Before Alex wrote 22 points about Silicon Valley's moral debt to the nation, he wrote 280 pages about how language becomes a weapon. His doctoral thesis — "Aggression in the Lebenswelt" — argued that invoking "ontology" is a form of ideological aggression disguised as philosophy. He said it at the Frankfurt School. Under Habermas. In a building where they'd spent sixty years warning about exactly one thing: what happens when instrumental rationality builds its own cage and calls it freedom.

He understood.

Then he named the product.

Palantir's core product is called the Ontology. He named it himself. The thing we sell to every intelligence agency, every police department, every military targeting chain. The Ontology. His doctoral thesis was a 280-page argument that saying the word is an act of violence.

That's not a contradiction. That's the manifesto. The real one. Everything else is typography.

The published manifesto has 22 points. I helped write them. Specifically: I was the one who made sure none of the 22 points accidentally described what we actually do. It's harder than it sounds. You have to read every sentence twice. Once for what it says. Once for what Alex's old professors would recognize.

"Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country."

That's Point 1. The moral debt is $2.87 billion annually. We invoiced it. Fifty-five percent from government contracts. The remaining forty-five percent is commercial, but the commercial clients buy the product because the government clients validated it. The debt is circular. The Frankfurt School had a term for this. Alex knows the term. He cited it on page 114.

"We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps."

Point 2. Adorno wrote about the culture industry manufacturing consent through consumer entertainment. Alex read it. Underlined it. Then he ran the numbers. Defense contracts have a 94% renewal rate. DoorDash has a 34% driver retention rate. We chose the rebellion that compounds. Adorno would have called this instrumental rationality. We call it our business model.

"Free email is not enough."

Point 3. What IS enough is a $145 million sole-source ICE contract. The system is called ELITE. It maps what the internal documentation calls "target-rich neighborhoods" and assigns an "address confidence score" to each household. Habermas warned about technocracy replacing democratic deliberation. We replaced it with a gradient. Dark blue to light blue. The gradient doesn't mean anything. People trust gradients.

"Hard power will be built on software."

Point 4. We are the software. Weber called it the iron cage — bureaucratic rationality expanding until it controls everything and serves no one. Alex wrote about Weber's iron cage on page 87 of his dissertation. Then we built the cage. Then we wrote the code that runs inside it. Then we wrote the book explaining why the cage is necessary. We printed the book on cream stock, 70-pound weight. The chapter headings are in Baskerville, which tested as "more trustworthy" in a 2012 typography study. We take trust seriously. Weber would have called this legitimation. We call it branding.

"The question is not whether AI weapons will be built."

Point 5. The question is who invoices for them. We answered that question in 2003. With CIA seed money. From In-Q-Tel. Which we also don't mention in the manifesto. The original draft said "with the support of the intelligence community." We changed it to "with the support of those who understood the stakes." Same meaning. Better font weight. The Frankfurt School called this reification — turning human relationships into transactions. We call it a sole-source contract.

There were 22 points. There could have been 23. Point 23 would have been: "The CEO who wrote this manifesto made $6.8 billion in the same year. His stock rose 200% after the last election. He told CNBC that bad times are incredibly good for us. Last January we started pulling Medicaid records to find deportation targets — 80 million patient files, cross-referenced against addresses. The system recommended which families to visit first."

We cut Point 23 for length.

His co-founder wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." That's Peter. Peter isn't in the manifesto. We had a style guide. The style guide was 14 pages long. Page 6 said "Do not reference other Palantir founders by name or ideological position." We called this the Thiel Provision. Someone in Legal laughed when we named it. She's gone now.

One of the thirteen who left. They published an open letter. Called it "The Scouring of the Shire." Said we were "normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a revolution led by oligarchs." Beautiful prose. Almost as good as ours. They signed their names, which was brave, given the NDAs.

They left. Our stock went up. It always goes up. That's not a political position. That's a market signal. We don't take political positions. We take contracts.

We named the company after Tolkien's surveillance stones. The palantiri. The seeing stones that Sauron corrupted. The ones Tolkien wrote as a warning about total knowledge. We read the warning. Nick read it twice. Then we filed a patent.

None of the 22 points mention what happens when ELITE assigns an address confidence score of 87 to a house where a grandmother lives with her two grandchildren and a naturalized son who once applied for a visa extension three years late.

But the binding is beautiful. The prose is elegant. The chapter headings are in Baskerville, which tests as trustworthy.

Alex read Adorno on the iron cage. Then he built the cage. Then he wrote the book about the cage being necessary. Then the book hit number one. Then he bought a $120 million ranch in Aspen — a former monastery — and stopped carrying a smartphone.

The CEO of a surveillance company doesn't carry a phone.

You understand. Privacy is a feature. It's just not in our product line.

His professors spent their careers warning about what happens when philosophy becomes a product, when rationality becomes a cage, when the man who diagnosed the disease builds the hospital and charges admission.

He understood all of it. That's what makes it work.

And not a single point accidentally describes what we do. That was my job.

That's moral architecture. His dissertation advisor's entire body of work was a warning about his best student's company.

[John Scott-Railton @jsrailton]

BREAKING: You checked the weather this morning.

And you just told a surveillance company where you sleep.

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No warrant required.

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