“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”
Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.
This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:
“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.
A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.
A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.
A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.
A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.
You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.
In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.
Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.
Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.
Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.
Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.
Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.
And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.
And you call Greenland badly governed?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.
‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’
When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?
Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.
Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.
Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.
And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.
You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.
So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.
The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.
And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”
Stephen Colbert was awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for his advocacy for free speech and speaking truth to power. A fitting honor for a champion of our democracy.
RETWEET to congratulate Colbert on this honor!
"Circa early 2018, somewhere in the quiet of his beloved Cornville, Arizona ranch, John McCain — living with the knowledge that his days were growing shorter — made a decision that was so perfectly, mischievously, achingly him that it made the whole country smile through their tears when they finally heard about it: he picked up the phone and called Barack Obama, the man who had defeated him for the presidency a decade earlier, and asked him to speak at his funeral. Obama later said that when that call came, he felt 'sadness and also a certain surprise' — and then, with the warmth that defined him, he recognized exactly what McCain was doing, telling mourners at the Washington National Cathedral on September 1, 2018 that the invitation showed McCain's 'irreverence, his sense of humor, a little bit of a mischievous streak' — because, as Obama put it to a cathedral that erupted in laughter through their grief, 'what better way to get a last laugh than to make George and I say nice things about him to a national audience?' It was John McCain's final act of political theater, and it was genius — choosing the two men who had each defeated him for the presidency to stand before the nation and celebrate his life, sending a message louder than any speech he could have given himself: that in America, rivalry and respect are not opposites, that the man you run against can still be the man you trust with your legacy, and that decency is not weakness but the most durable form of strength. Obama stood at that altar and told the packed cathedral that McCain had 'made this country better,' that he had made Obama a better president, and that when all was said and done, despite every disagreement, 'we never doubted the other man's sincerity or the other man's patriotism' — and in the front pew, Cindy McCain wept, because her husband had arranged, from the very edge of his life, one last beautiful lesson in what it means to be an American.
Are you actually seeing this post?
Ever since Donald threw his latest unhinged temper tantrum about me (again), folks have been telling me I've mysteriously vanished from their feeds. It appears the deeply unwell narcissist is so terrified of dealing with me in Congress that he’s begged @elonmusk to throttle my account.
This kind of pathetic desperation is nothing new. But I need YOU to help me beat Donald and Elon at their own game. Don't let a malignant sociopath and his billionaire enabler silence us.
Please like, retweet, and click the link below to support my campaign. Let's give him something to really cry about.
https://t.co/NiW1Ro2kZa
Mark Cuban just compared the most powerful AI on earth to a two-year-old in a high chair.
The toddler won.
Cuban: “A two-year-old on a high chair with a sippy cup knows that when she pushes that cup off, Mom’s going to come running and the baby’s going to be laughing its ass off. It knows the consequences of its actions.”
Then he named the thing no one building AI wants to say out loud.
Cuban: “If you ask ChatGPT or any of them something and it gives you bad advice, it has no idea what’s going to happen because you took that bad advice.”
A system that passed the bar exam. Aced medical boards. Still can’t grasp what a child who can’t tie her own shoes already knows.
The child understands cause and effect.
AI understands pattern and prediction.
They sound similar.
They are not even close.
A pattern tells you what comes next in a sequence.
Consequence tells you what happens to the person standing at the end of it.
One is math.
The other is meaning.
Cuban went further.
Cuban: “If you were blind at an intersection and had the choice between your seeing-eye dog or holding up a phone with AI, I’m taking the seeing-eye dog every time.”
Because the dog understands something no language model on earth understands.
Stakes.
The dog knows a wrong step means its owner gets hurt.
The app knows a wrong step means a revised output.
Hundreds of billions spent building systems that can write, reason, and diagnose.
Not one of them loses sleep when the answer is wrong.
A toddler pushing a cup off a tray runs a tighter feedback loop than every foundation model combined.
The child doesn’t just predict the outcome.
The child wants the reaction.
Pushes the cup off the edge, watches it fall, watches Mom come running.
Laughs.
Because the child knew what would happen before the cup ever hit the floor.
That gap between prediction and consequence isn’t a bug.
It’s not getting patched in the next update.
It is the unsolved problem of artificial intelligence.
We didn’t build minds.
We built mirrors.
Mirrors don’t flinch when you walk into traffic.
BREAKING: Donald Trump just got hit with a brutal reality check — and it’s exactly what working Americans have been feeling for years.
A new Gallup poll shows 55% of Americans say they’re getting poorer....the WORST number in 25 YEARS. Let that sink in. Worse than the pandemic. Worse than the financial crisis. And it’s been rising FIVE YEARS STRAIGHT.
This is Trump’s so-called “golden age.”
While he brags about factories and billionaires, everyday people are drowning. Gas prices have surged past $4.00, families are cutting back, and nearly 80% of Americans are changing how they live just to survive.
And why? Reckless tariffs. A costly war with Iran. Policies that hit working people first and hardest.
Even Republicans are starting to admit the truth: affordability is becoming a political nightmare heading into the midterms.
Trump promised prosperity. Americans got higher prices, shrinking paychecks, and economic anxiety at record levels.
This isn’t a “short-term pain.” This is a pattern.
And voters are noticing.
Please Like and Share!
https://t.co/4CAUQEcpOk
In 1964 a soon-to-be Nobel laureate walked into a Cornell auditorium and spent seven evenings explaining the nature of physical law to a general audience. Bill Gates paid the BBC out of his own pocket to keep those recordings on the internet forever.
His name was Richard Feynman, and the lectures are called The Character of Physical Law.
He was 46 years old when he gave them. He would win the Nobel Prize in physics the following year for his work on quantum electrodynamics. The BBC filmed every session. The tapes then went into distribution at universities through the 1970s, disappeared in the 1980s, and stayed lost until Gates licensed them for a Microsoft research project in 2009 specifically so they would never go offline again.
Here is the framework buried inside those lectures that changed how I think about knowledge itself.
In the final lecture of the series, titled Seeking New Laws, Feynman stops the philosophy and tells the room exactly how scientific discovery actually works. Not in metaphors. In three sentences.
He says in general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if the law we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation directly to nature, to experiment, to observation, to see if it works.
And then he delivers the line that has outlived him by forty years.
If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not matter how beautiful your guess is. It does not matter how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. That is all there is to it.
Read that again slowly.
He is not describing physics. He is describing the only intellectually honest way to hold any belief about the world. The method is indifferent to credentials, indifferent to elegance, indifferent to how much you want the idea to be true. Reality is the only referee, and reality never explains its rulings.
The second thread running through the whole series is the one Feynman kept circling back to across all seven nights.
He argued that the deepest beauty of a physical law is not in what it depends on but in what it refuses to depend on. Newton's law of gravitation works the same way on a falling apple, a moon in orbit, and a galaxy at the edge of the observable universe. That is not a detail. That is the entire point. A law that only works in one place is not a law. It is a coincidence. The test of a real generalization is whether it survives contact with situations its inventor never imagined.
The part that hits hardest comes in the opening lecture on gravitation.
Feynman is walking the audience through how Newton assembled the theory, and he pauses to say something most scientists never say out loud.
The importance of a physical law, he tells the room, is not how clever we were to find it. It is how clever nature was to pay attention to it. The universe did not have to be lawful. It did not have to reward pattern recognition with deeper pattern. The fact that it does is what makes science possible at all, and it is a standing miracle no one has ever explained.
Feynman ends the final lecture with a warning almost everyone misses.
He says the principles we now have may still be wrong in places we have not noticed. He suspects, out loud, that space being continuous is one of them. He offers no replacement. He just marks the edge where his own confidence runs out and tells the audience that honest uncertainty is the correct default for anyone actually trying to find the truth, instead of defend a position.
Sixty years later the full series still streams for free. Seven hour-long lectures. The best of Feynman at the peak of his powers, filmed before he was famous to the general public, speaking to a crowd that was never supposed to understand physics at this level.
Bill Gates kept them online because he understood what most people still miss.
A three-sentence method for testing any belief against reality is worth more than most of what graduate school teaches in three years.
Retired 4-Star Navy Admiral and former Navy SEAL William McRaven on Donald Trump: "Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation."
RETWEET if you stand with Admiral McRaven!
When Trump leaves office:
The Department of War will go back to being the Defense Department.
The Trump Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center.
The Gulf of America will once again be the Gulf of Mexico.
The unfinished East Wing (it won't be finished by the end of Trump's term) will be rebuilt by the next president, and it will not be a ballroom.
Federal agencies packed with unqualified loyalists will fire those people and rehire the career experts Trump fired.
The Department of Justice will go back to enforcing the law instead of protecting the president.
Scientific agencies like NOAA, the EPA, and the CDC will go back to publishing research without political interference.
The U.S. will re-align with its allies and not with its enemies.
The presidential pardon power will stop being used as a rewards program for loyalists.
Inspectors General will go back to investigating corruption instead of getting fired for it.
The White House press room will go back to having briefings, with real journalists and not podcasters.
U.S. foreign policy will stop revolving around flattering dictators.
And the world will progress as though Donald Trump never existed.
JUST IN: The United States has lost eleven MQ-9 Reaper drones over Iran in seventeen days.
Each one costs approximately $30 million. That is $330 million in airframes shot down by a country whose entire air defense network the Pentagon was supposed to have neutralised in the opening 72 hours.
The fixed sites were hit. US and Israeli strikes degraded an estimated 60 to 80 percent of Iran’s radar installations and higher-end missile batteries. The suppression campaign worked on paper. What it did not suppress were the mobile systems. The Khordad-15 and Khordad-3 are medium-range surface-to-air platforms that use passive electro-optical and infrared sensors instead of active radar. They do not emit a signal for anti-radiation missiles to home in on. They move. They hide. They wait. And when a $30 million Reaper enters their engagement envelope on a targeting or battle damage assessment orbit, they fire.
Eleven times they connected.
Air and Space Forces Magazine confirmed the losses represent roughly 10 percent of the active MQ-9 fleet. CBS News and TRT World corroborated the tally. Iran claims 104 US and Israeli drones downed in total, a figure that includes smaller platforms, but the 11 Reapers are the ones that matter because they are the backbone of American persistent surveillance and precision strike architecture in the Middle East.
The US accepted this attrition rate deliberately. Every Reaper lost is a manned aircraft that did not have to fly through the same threat ring. The trade-off is rational. A $30 million drone is cheaper than a pilot. But rational trade-offs still carry strategic costs that compound.
Every Reaper orbiting over Iran is a Reaper not available for Hormuz escort reconnaissance. Every hour of ISR capacity spent verifying bomb damage in Isfahan is an hour not spent tracking the mines being laid by Hormozgan provincial IRGC naval units in the shipping lanes. The same Mosaic Doctrine that runs the permissioned chokepoint benefits from every asset the US diverts to the air campaign over the mainland. The blockade does not need to shoot down a single drone. It needs the drones to be busy somewhere else.
This is the cost asymmetry running in both directions simultaneously.
Iran spends thousands on Shahed drones that force the US to spend millions on interceptors. The US spends $30 million per Reaper that Iran shoots down with mobile systems costing a fraction of the airframe they destroy. Meanwhile the provincial IRGC commands running the strait operate on radio handsets and standing orders that cost nothing and cannot be bombed.
The most expensive military campaign since 2003 is being fought alongside the cheapest blockade in modern history. The air campaign burns through Reapers at 10 percent of fleet in seventeen days. The blockade burns through nothing. It runs on pre-delegated authority, allied diplomacy, and the biological clock of a planting season that does not send invoices.
Eleven drones down. $330 million spent. The strait is more closed today than when the first Reaper launched.
The war the Pentagon designed is being won. The war that matters is being lost. And the difference is measured not in airframes but in urea tonnes that are not moving through a chokepoint that no drone can reopen.
Full analysis:
https://t.co/iFmUcar8on
He took the greatest military force in world history, lost a war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded that the media lie about this and everything else. I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone can mistake this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength. His weakness is something negative, gravitational, so deep that it can draw in a whole country. But only if we fail to see it. Only if we let it.
Over twenty-five years in the U.S. Navy, thirty-nine combat missions, and four missions to space, I risked my life for this country and to defend our Constitution – including the First Amendment rights of every American to speak out. I never expected that the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would attack me for doing exactly that.
My rank and retirement are things that I earned through my service and sacrifice for this country. I got shot at. I missed holidays and birthdays. I commanded a space shuttle mission while my wife Gabby recovered from a gunshot wound to the head– all while proudly wearing the American flag on my shoulder. Generations of servicemembers have made these same patriotic sacrifices for this country, earning the respect, appreciation, and rank they deserve.
Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn’t like, they will come after them the same way. It’s outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that.
If Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in our country’s history, thinks he can intimidate me with a censure or threats to demote me or prosecute me, he still doesn’t get it. I will fight this with everything I’ve got — not for myself, but to send a message back that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump don’t get to decide what Americans in this country get to say about their government.
🚨NEW: Republicans are calling for the firing of 60 Minutes journalist Sharon Alfonsi, who called out CBS News chief Bari Weiss for cancelling her segment on Trump’s inhumane deportations.
RETWEET if you stand with Alfonsi against the GOP!