Mortimer Cladwell

[Mortimer Cladwell @mbcladwell]

@jufujimaru The message I took away was that when public services are eliminated to reduce taxes, the private sector does not necessarily rush in to fill the vacuum.

[Ultra New Hampshire @Ultra603]

Our prophecies will be fulfilled.

[Pasha Kamyshev (wrote a book!) @PashaKamyshev]

https://t.co/nfM7NCopht

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Bret Weinstein just said something that won’t leave my head:
For the first time in 300,000 years of human evolution, we removed the cost from the single biggest reward nature ever invented — sex and pair-bonding.

Reliable birth control + abortion = you can now cash the evolutionary lottery ticket without paying the 20-year mortgage of pregnancy, diapers, sleepless nights, and college funds.

Result? An entire generation of 18–35-year-olds walking around with the energy, libido, hormones, and protective instincts that evolution spent millions of years calibrating for child-rearing… but with zero actual children. That energy didn’t disappear. It got redirected.

Heather Heying’s observation is brutal: young women especially began treating ideologies the exact way evolution wired them to treat babies. Climate change, social justice, whatever the cause of the month is — it gets defended with literal mama-bear ferocity, the same neurochemistry that once guarded a toddler from predators now guards an abstract idea from wrong think.

And now Elon is promising the second shoe is about to drop: AI-driven abundance will make money as “free” as sex became in the 1970s. Both of evolution’s primary carrots — mating and resource acquisition suddenly cost almost nothing.

Weinstein’s ice-cold question: When producing and protecting actual children is no longer the central organizing principle of adult life… and when creating wealth is no longer required for status, security, or attracting a mate…What is left to give a human life direction, meaning, and structure?

Are we about to become a species that invents bigger and bigger dragons to slay just to feel alive? Or do we drift into total listlessness? This 3:52 clip is genuinely haunting.

Watch it all the way through, then tell me — honestly — does this explain the absolute intensity we’re seeing in culture right now, or is Bret completely missing something?

Real answers only. Quote-post if it hits you in the chest like it hit me.

[Russians With Attitude @RWApodcast]

Okay, this is kino. Conquistador entering a tribal kingdom of mystical rituals.

[Modern Agriculture Updates @ModernAgUpdates]

Revolutionized Agriculture !!!

[The Gateway Pundit @gatewaypundit]

Barack Obama Inadvertently Created DOGE Dept When Covering for Obamacare Website Failure

READ: https://t.co/kHAXKPfwgl

[Clandestine @WarClandestine]

In 2014, Obama’s CIA/State Dept destabilized Ukraine, took over via color revolution, installed a puppet regime, and turned Ukraine into an offshore playground for criminal racketeering and money laundering.

And they spent the last 10 years covering it up by any means necessary.

This is the reason the last 10 years have been so crazy. This is why they accused Trump of being a Russian asset and tried to prevent him from talking to Putin.

This is why they impeached Trump over a phone call to Ukraine.

This is why they are so desperate to arm, fund, and defend Ukraine.

This is why they are willing to start nuclear war over Ukraine.

All the insanity the Swamp have unleashed over the last decade, is because they are terrified that their crimes will be exposed. And their most heinous crimes, were carried out in the lawless war-ravaged land of Ukraine, with protection from their puppet government, and outside the scope of US oversight.

Everything leads back to Ukraine in 2014.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Milton Friedman was the best

[Mortimer Cladwell @mbcladwell]

https://t.co/jojyQgbKj7

[Ralph Nader @RalphNader]

This is leaf raking time as the trees shed their leaves. But where are the rakes? Largely replaced by polluting, noisy leaf blowers which blow dust into the air for pedestrians to inhale as they walk by. Instead of healthy exercise—and no fuel or electricity consumption—the rake has been put on the shelf by the firms hired out to gather the leaves. -R

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

The republicans and democrats of the past no longer exist. They have been replaced by two entirely new parties.

In the 20th century, the republicans were the party of classical liberalism, and the democrats were the party of social liberalism (the welfare state). These two parties no longer exist.

This isn't obvious because both new parties used the old names and infrastructures, which they infiltrated. This was easier than building something new, and allowed them inherit the resources and connections of the old parties.

But they are not the same, because not only are the philosophies different, the new parties aren't based on philosophies at all.

The new parties represent communication technologies.

The neo-democrats are the party of television.

The neo-republicans are the party of the internet.

This single relationship underlies all of their character and policies.

You see, in the 20th century, the prevailing masss communications technologies of the day — radio, television, newspapers, print books — were all expensive to produce, but cheap to copy.

Making a TV show, running a radio station, publishing a newspaper, all required a lot of resources. But reaching one more person with that show, that broadcast, that book, was very cheap compared to the initial investment.

This resulted in a particular communications style — one to many. Those who owned these media and could afford to run them, spoke, and everyone else listened.

Then the internet came along. Many hands touched it, first DARPA, then universities, but finally private enterprise made it take off.

And the cost structure was different. Internet media was cheap to copy, but also cheap to make. Anyone could put up a webpage, and it got easier all the time. And eventually people created websites whose whole purpose was to allow anyone with a keyboard to say what whatever they wanted to anyone who wanted to listen.

This resulted in a different communications style — many to many. Everyone talking to everyone else, or at least to anyone they wanted to talk to. Many people still wanted to just listen, but anyone who wanted to talk could do so.

Obviously, this change in the shape of the national conversation changed the content of that conversation as well ... by a lot.

But it also bifurcated the tools of power.

America cannot be ruled by force.

It's too big, too sparsely populated, and too heavily armed. Opposing armies can be wiped out with bombs and missile and drone swarms, but territory can only be occupied by men with guns.

And the American population is so spread out, with so many guns, that no army in the world can pacify any significant portion of it except a few densely packed, lightly armed cities. And those cities are dependent on rural people to supply their water, power and food.

So force is out.

The tool by which pre-internet America was ruled was deception.

If you own, or seize control of, the means of communication, which you can do because they are few-to-many, then you can put out any story you want.

This allows you to control what the accepted facts are, because you can say anything without fear of contradiction.

Even those who don't believe you, who realize that their TV lies to them, have no alternate, more accurate source of truth...they have only their skepticism. And they can't communicate it to others, because they don't own a TV station, and you can use yours to call them crazy conspiracy theorists.

Or racists. Whatever.

But when you introduce a many-to-many communications tech into the mix, things change.

Now you cannot control the narrative by seizing a few central points, and when you get your message out there, you do not do so without fear of contradiction. You can be fact-checked, and an alternate narrative can be presented, by literally anyone who pays ninety bucks a month for an internet connection.

Deception is a lot less effective on this new medium. If you wish to gain power through it, you must rule by persuasion. This means not controlling what facts are presented, but instead controlling how those facts are interpreted. This is done by creating a compelling, persuasive narrative that strings those facts together into explanations for how the world works, and plans for how it might work.

And in a world that is split between few-to-many, and many-to-many, communications, deception and persuasion become alternate paths to power.

This has caused a split between leader (and wannabe leaders) based on which style they are adept at using.

This is why the parties have been replaced from the inside out and are reshuffling.

The elites, those who have the money and power to control few-to-many media, have seized control of the democrats and created neo-democrats, the party of television.

The neo-democrat path to power is to control the media.

Seize control of a platform using wealth, power, and connections, and allow only your version of the facts to be told. Then construct an alternate set of facts that implies that voting for you is an imperative.

Global warming is gonna kill us all.
Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler.
Women are being refused life-saving medical interventions in ectopic pregnancies.
Diversity is our greatest strength.
Vast numbers of kids are born the wrong sex, and we must surgically modify them.

Who are the constituents of the neo-democrats, the ones whose interests they serve?

The elites. It could be otherwise. Since they are dependent on few-to-many media to get their message out, they must cater to those who can afford them that access, either directly or financially.

This is why all the pop-record label singers and Hollywood actors were telling you to vote democrat. Their allegiance to the neo-democrats was an inevitable consequence of their dependence upon few-to-many media.

This is why Fox is also aligning with the neo-democrats, despite being traditionally affiliated with the old republican party. They have to. They are a television network. The future of many-to-many media has no role for them.

Same with the Manhattan-based tradpub book industry, and numerous other old media from the 20th century.

They simply have to be neo-democrat, because the neo-republican future has no place for them.

So who are the neo-republicans?

The republican party has been seized by wealthy and prominent mavericks... those who don't own or control media, but who have money or power because they have an unusual skill... tech investment, brand building, internet marketing, whatever.

The neo-republican path to power is to shape the narrative.

They don't own TV stations, so they must speak on the internet.

Since they speak on the internet, they cannot speak without fear of contradiction.

Since they cannot speak without fear of contradiction, they cannot invent their own facts that support their positions.

Instead, they must invent stories that resonate with people, and convince people to interpret the facts their way.

This set of problems you experience in your life are due to these things. Vote for us and we will do this other thing instead, and that will lead to this other result.

See how this all makes sense? See how it all fits a narrative? Let's do this, this, and this, and we'll make America great again.

This is why Donald Trump, a lifelong democrat, had to run as a republican, despite the fact that his platform is pretty much John Kennedy 2.0.

Because he didn't have control over few-to-many media, and those who had it weren't going to let him in. But he did have a lifetime of experience as a highly successful brand-builder and deal negotiator.

So he had to be a neo-republican.

That's why many of his supporters are former democrats as well... all the ones who rose through skill or charisma. The neo-democrats have no need of such characters, since they are about platform control.

And this is why the old-style republican powers, such as the Cheneys, are reshuffling to the neo-democrats.

Because deception is their strategy... remember Iraq and their fictional nukes? They have no power to persuade, and no role in a future where power depends upon charisma and narrative persuasion.

And this is why the Obama-centered era of neo-democrat ascendancy (2008-2016)was characterized by internet censorship.

The neo-democrats were attempting to make the internet into a few-to-many medium, so they could use their platform control strategy of deception.

When the neo-republicans began to break through the censorship by routing around it, they were able to deploy their strategy of persuasion, and start to win.

The neo-democrats "won" the 2020 election because their strategy, venue control, worked for them — the platform, in this case, being the vote counters.

The neo-republicans won the 2024 election because they crippled (perhaps temporarily) the venue control of the neo-democrats, and then deployed their superior persuasion capabilities.

The neo-democrats cannot craft appealing narratives because the inability to craft appealing narratives is what defines them as neo-democrats.

They are the alliance of people who must control the venue because they cannot persuade. This is why they represent the Machine.

Because only the Machine can allow them control of the venue.

They are the people who cannot build a power base on their own merits, so they must serve the Machine or they will have no power.

In the video below, we see what happens when neo-democrats attempt to craft narratives and persuade.

This woman claims to be a tech expert, and tells us a story about how Elon Musk and Starlink fixed the 2024 election.

Her problem is, she's using the internet as if it were a few-to-many medium.

She's speaking as if she were on television, and could lie without anyone else being allowed on that television to contradict her.

She's not a computer expert. And what she's saying is not even wrong, it's gibberish. To be wrong it would first have to have a thesis, and that thesis would have to make sense.

I don't know if this story sounds okay to a layman, but to any software engineer, sysadmin, or even electrical engineer, she sounds like Gene Ray the Time Cube Guy.

She doesn't know what any of these terms mean. She doesn't even pronounce a lot of them correctly. And the way she hooks them together looks like somebody gluing recognizable bits from an electronics catalogue to a D-list actor's face for a super-low-budget cyberpunk movie.

When neo-democrats venture onto the open internet, they don't know how to craft narratives, because they aren't used to being called on their bullshit.

Make no mistake, the 2024 vote split broke into People Who Believe What Their TV Tells Them vs. People Who Look Shit Up On The Internet.

By the very nature of their allegiance to legacy tech, the neo-democrats are doomed... unless they can control the internet, or the vote counters.

The neo-republicans must focus on protecting those two systems.

[elvis @omarsar0]

Qwen2.5-Coder is a big deal!

It's been quiet in the open LLM space these days but this new release resurfaces an important question.

Can open models close the gap with closed-source competitors?

If the Qwen results are correct, then these are exciting times for open-source AI, specifically code LLMs.

More of my thoughts here: https://t.co/Oo4ojzsSMq

I still prefer using Claude 3.5 Sonnet as my top model for generating code. But I am hopeful we could see more innovation in open-source LLMs for coding, creativity, and reasoning.

Great work from the Qwen team.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Some thoughts on how to prune the fourth branch.

Since the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with three branches, not four, there are no Constitutional checks on the emergent fourth branch.

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

- It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.

- It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a "ruling".

- The only recourse against a "ruling" is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.

- But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

- Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.

- But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.

- Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.

- And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

All of this creates a Red Queen Effect.

Citizens must establish their own organizations, and raise donations to engage in constant lawfare, just to retain the rights they haven't lost yet. And they must win every time to maintain the status quo.

Bureaucrats, on the other hand, can fight endless legal battles using money taken from their victims by the IRS, at no cost to themselves. Any victory they claim, they may keep permanently, while any loss may be refought endlessly simply by a slight variance of the attack.

Obviously, if this system is not changed, all power will accrue to the bureaucracy over time. They will constitute a totalitarian authority over every aspect of the life of every citizen.

This is why the name "DOGE" (Department of Government Efficiency) is a serious mistake.

Look, Elon, I like a joke as much as the next guy, and I do think irreverence is a load-bearing component of checking the bureaucracy, because a false aura of gravitas is one of their defenses against public outrage.

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people's lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

But the name isn't my decision. The power of the vote isn't that granular. I can only elect an administration, not protect it from tactical errors by weighing in on individual policy decisions.

Unless someone with direct power happens to read this.

So, regardless of the name, here's how an organization might be set up to effectively check federal bureaucracies.

1. DOGE must be responsive, not merely proactive.

Being proactive sounds better in the abstract, but it is much easier for a federal agency to gin up some numbers to fight a periodic overall audit, than it is to fight an investigation of a specific case.

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

"You have to stop that now" is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

DOGE must follow Saul Alinsky's 11th rule: target individuals, not institutions.

Why?

Because agencies are agencies. They consist of agents.

An agent is someone who acts on behalf of a principal — someone whose interests the agent is supposed to represent.

When the agent is incentivized so that his interests diverge from those of the principal, he will be increasingly likely to act in his own interest, not the principal's.

This is the Principal-Agent Problem.

An agency is a construct, a theoretical entity. What Vonnegut would call a "granfalloon".

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn't just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies' staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

4. DOGE investigations must be triggerable by citizen complaints.

This is self-explanatory. It gives DOGE the practical capability to redress individual injustices, and it crowdsources your discovery problem.

Establish a hotline.

5. DOGE must have sufficient power to protect and reward whistleblowers, and punish those who retaliate against them.

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing".

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

The point is not for DOGE to address every instance of waste or wrongdoing, it is to make bureaucrats act responsibly because they fear an investigation.

In essence, I am imagining DOGE (or some superior name that better reflects the mission) as an entity with a license to treat bureaucrats the way bureaucrats currently treat citizens.

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

This photo should tell you everything you need to know.

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but can we go back to what happened here?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

They say red light helps you sleep better

[Derek Morris @derek_j_morris]

@jeremykauffman End car inspection laws

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

I posted here last week that I thought the DNC had given up on winning via election fraud in the 2024 general. I believe my prediction was borne out, and now I'm going to think out loud about what that reveals.

The level of attempted shenanigans we saw in Pennsylvania and elsewhere was really low compared to 2020. This cycle we didn't have 3:00AM vote drops that violated the hell out of Benford's law. We didn't have convenient water-main breaks. We didn't have cardboard glued to windows to keep people from watching the counting. We didn't have 19 bellwether counties that always predict the national failing to predict the national. It's like the Democrats weren't really trying.

The Democratic fraud machine was clearly never a unitary conspiracy that could be turned on and off like a light switch; in order to be deniable, it has to be a whole bunch of smaller local conspiracies, all pulling in the same direction, not communicating with each other, managed to the limited extent they are managed by political operatives who act as deniable cutouts for the DNC and various state-level political machines.

I think some low-level fixers never got the message to stand down. So we got some spasmodic twitches like Democratic operatives in Bucks County PA masquerading as election workers, telling voters in a Republican-leaning precinct to go home. But the stochastic-fraud network as a whole didn't generate the strong stink it does when it's fully activated.

I'm not sure why the network didn't get its go signal this time. There are at least two possibilities: one is the DNC knew from internal polling that Harris was utterly doomed, the other is that they contemplated the amount of monitoring the Republicans put in place this time and quailed. Either way, they must have concluded that all they would accomplish by trying to put the fix in was risking the exposure of their network.

But the thing they can't hide now is the consequences. Somewhere around 15 million fewer votes, losing the popular vote, and losing all seven of the swing states that normally get buggered by big-city Democratic fraud machines.

It's the last confirmation I needed that 2020 was stolen. And it's big enough to make me suspect they frauded in Obama. Twice.

I only suspect, mind you, because unlike Biden I and Biden II and Harris, Obama ran campaigns that weren't somnolent dogshit. Maybe he won honestly - I'd still give that odds of over 50%, though not by much.

Still, I wish there were a way to do forensic audits that far back. Because the possibility of another Presidential election being swung by fraud needs to be eliminated, and making it common knowledge that Democratic fraud was endemic in the past would help with that.

One of the top priorities for the Republicans has to be pressuring the states to clean up their act. Mandatory voter ID, elimination of ballot harvesting and drop-boxes. No mail-in voting except in special hardship cases. You know, the things even poor Third World countries do so their election security isn't laughable.

Maybe Democrats will even stop opposing these measures now. Right, I know, who am I kidding...

Why is this important? Maybe it wouldn't be if government weren't so powerful and intrusive. But as it is, the stakes in elections keep getting higher and higher; the righteous anger that would be unleashed by revealed fraud becomes more and more daunting to contemplate; and I prefer my breakfast eggs without a side of civil war, thank you.

[Jet Ski Bandit @fulovitboss]

Kamala won all the states that don’t require voter ID.

#CatchingOnYet 🤔 #DodgyDems