tempkenalt

A Good Faith Eclectic. Heroes:Edmund Burke, George Müller, Paul Farmer, Rhys Ap Tewdwr. Anything is possible, the impossible just takes longer! ( RTng )

[InfoGram @_InfoGram_]

🇺🇸Trump at 3:00 PM — Bought $1 million of Dell stock.

🇺🇸Trump at 4:00 PM — Americans Go out and buy a Dell computer. I have a son that loves their laptop.

In any functioning democracy, this would be called massive corruption and He would have faced at least 2 years in jail.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

EU countries are still buying Russian gas & supply Russia with raw materials.

This is where their money goes: burying civilians under rubble in Kyiv.

Europe is facilitating this.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

What the hell, @Netflix?

[The Halfway Post @HalfwayPost]

BREAKING: Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, and Donald Trump are reportedly pissed the Russian military is increasingly likely to oust Vladimir Putin in a coup because it'll ruin all the secret, lucrative deals they've made with him to help Russia develop future oil and gas projects.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Modernity did it.

The real answer is the full conversion of children from economic, religious, familial, and civilizational necessity into optional lifestyle consumption.

For most of history, children were embedded in the structure of life. They helped labor. They carried the family line. They supported parents in old age. They belonged inside a religious and kinship order that treated reproduction as normal adulthood, not a personal optimization question.

Then the whole stack changed.

Child mortality collapsed, so families no longer needed many births to ensure surviving children. Urbanization made children more expensive and less economically useful. Education lengthened. Women entered higher education and the labor force at scale. Contraception separated sex from reproduction.

The welfare state and retirement systems weakened the old dependence on descendants. Housing got expensive. Careers became longer status games. Marriage got delayed. Dating markets became unstable. Religion weakened. Kin networks thinned. The self became the center of life.

That is the core mechanism.

Phones absolutely intensified the late-stage collapse by attacking pairing, attention, social confidence, sex, risk-taking, courtship, and embodied community. They did not create the direction. They accelerated the last phase by making people more isolated, more distracted, more comparison-sick, more pornified, more socially avoidant, and more comfortable substituting simulation for life.

The deepest cause is that civilization made children feel irrational.

Under the old order, children were part of meaning, duty, continuity, survival, and adulthood. Under the modern order, children compete against career, freedom, consumption, travel, self-expression, housing affordability, personal identity, and optionality. Once that frame takes over, fertility falls unless a very strong culture, religion, kinship structure, or economic incentive counteracts it.

So yes, “culture” did it, but culture is too soft a word.

The machine did it.

Industrialization changed the household. Urbanization changed the economics. Contraception changed sex. Feminism changed gender roles. Secularization changed duty. Consumer capitalism changed desire. Credentialism delayed adulthood. Housing inflation punished family formation. Digital life weakened embodied social bonds. Status competition made children feel like a threat to self-actualization.

That is the real answer.

Fertility fell because modern life slowly taught people to experience children as a cost instead of a destiny.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

"We will slaughter every Russian speaker in Ukraine until they admit that we're rescuing them."

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

More of CNN's false equivalence language. Ukraine is not targeting St. Petersburg, but striking military installations, Russian warships, and oil refineries. It's the Russian terror state that strikes cities and targets civilians. https://t.co/Cy7DgqtkuT

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Rep. Keating to Rubio: "I'm sure you're aware that Ukraine, country that at the time had third-largest nuclear arsenal, peacefully turned over their nuclear weapons in conjunction with Budapest Memorandum.

And in exchange for U.S. commitment to defend Ukraine if it ever came under threat. The U.S. gave its word to Ukraine that it would defend them.

And I find this amazing. In your opening remarks, as you took us all over the world and mentioned 15 different incidents where you have interceded — 15, the top 15 — not once did you mention Ukraine when you were prioritizing achievements that are there."

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Did you know that Trump pardoned 77 people that stole from Medicare.
Is Trump selling pardons? That would be enough to send Trump away.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

A group of retired federal judges is asking a U.S. district court judge to reopen a lawsuit President Trump and his family pursued against the IRS over leaked tax records, asking the court to investigate whether a deal to end the case was an act of fraud. https://t.co/krwkCEH7TR

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

Trump could have presided over a very strong economy. All he had to do was...nothing: Inflation was trending downward, the AI boom was raising growth.

Instead, he engineered a global trade war and energy shock, while shrinking America's labor force. https://t.co/JvvlsQ83R8

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Francis Fukuyama on the U.S. as a declining power:

American decline is a direct product of Trump's rise since 2016.

It is as if Trump had decided to do everything in his power to weaken the United States vis-à-vis China.

He has polarized an already polarized country, cut funding for basic scientific research, and attacked American universities which are the best in the world.

He and his colleagues have openly stated that their domestic opponents — the Democrats — are a far greater threat to the future of the United States than either China or Russia.

There is agreement among America's friends and rivals that the United States has become something of a rogue state that is contributing to global instability and disorder — as well as something of a laughingstock.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

KASPAROV: Dictators always lie about what they've done, but very often tell you exactly what they're going to do. Mein Kampf was published in 1925, and it was a blueprint. Nobody took it seriously in 1925.

In 2005 Vladimir Putin, already in his second term as Russian president, in control of Russian nukes and enormous amount of money, addressed Russian Duma and Senate. He said bluntly, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."

Vladimir Putin made it very clear then, and for those who didn't want to hear him saying it in Russian in Moscow, he repeated it in 2007 at Munich Security Conference, looking straight in the eyes of Bush 43 and all other leaders of free world.

For those who couldn't hear him, the next year he attacked Republic of Georgia. So Vladimir Putin's goal was, is, and will be, and there's no indication he's changed it, to restore the glory of Russian Empire, which means to push NATO back to 1997 borders.

That was a part of the ultimatum that Vladimir Putin laid down back in 2007 and put again on the table in December 2021. Ukraine is the main target now, but it's not the ultimate goal.

The problem is Europe still doesn't want to recognize it. We're still talking about hypotheticals. This is not a threat. This is a menace.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: The 10 largest US stocks now account for a record 41% of the S&P 500's market cap.

This is 14 percentage points higher than at the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble peak.

This means ~41 cents of every Dollar invested in the S&P 500 flows directly into shares of just 10 firms.

~35 cents of every Dollar flows specifically into the Magnificent 7 group.

All while nearly 50 cents of every Dollar are now going into AI-linked stocks.

Mega-cap tech is all that matters right now.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Here's how the corruption works:

Thursday: RJ Reynolds donates $5M to Trump

Saturday: Trump invites RJR execs to Mar a Lago; execs ask to loosen regs on flavored vapes; Trump calls up RFK Jr. and tells him to change it

Friday: FDA changes the policy
https://t.co/Udu1RhYtKI

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

For three years, there were more job openings than unemployed workers — at peak, 2 jobs per job-seeker.

That has now flipped under Trump, and unemployed workers outnumber available jobs for the first time since the pandemic.

My @Morning_Joe Chart:

[Anders Åslund @anders_aslund]

If you work for Trump you must lie.
Why would any decent person ever vote for persistent liars?

[Rand Group @randgroup]

💥 JUST IN: China is dumping US debt at a pace not seen since the global financial system nearly collapsed.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Trump just got exposed for running the biggest insider trading operation in American history.

Nancy Pelosi traded $5 million in stocks and Congress lost its mind.

Trump literally executed $750 MILLION worth of stock trades in ONE quarter while being President.

His ethics filing just dropped and the numbers are genuinely unprecedented in history:

Between January and March 2026, Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 individual stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million.

That's roughly 60 trades PER DAY.

While signing executive orders, meeting foreign leaders, and making policy decisions that directly impact the companies he's buying and selling.

Now here's where it gets really insane:

On February 10, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of Dell stock.

Three months later, on May 8, he stood at a Mother's Day event at the White House, thanked Michael Dell by name, and told Americans to "go out and buy a Dell."

Dell stock surged 14.6% that day to an all-time high of $263.99.

Since Trump's February purchase, Dell is up 96%.

And 5 months BEFORE Trump bought Dell stock, Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to Trump Accounts, one of the largest philanthropic commitments to a sitting president's signature program in modern history.

So the timeline goes: Dell donates $6.25 billion to Trump's program -> Trump buys Dell stock ->Trump tells America to buy Dell from the White House podium -> Stock hits all-time high

And that's just ONE stock...

The same filing shows Trump bought Nvidia stock on February 10. One week later, Nvidia announced a massive chip deal with Meta.

He bought more Nvidia stock one week BEFORE his own Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to Saudi Arabia.

He bought Intel stock starting in March 2026. The US government already owned a 9.9% stake in Intel worth over $41 billion. On April 30, Trump posted on Truth Social praising Intel, writing that "Intel Stock continues to rise."

Intel jumped 3% in after-hours and is now up 140% year-to-date.

He bought Palantir stock while his administration was actively handing them billion-dollar government contracts for immigration enforcement and defense.

He bought Robinhood stock while his own Trump Accounts program uses Robinhood as the broker.

He's currently sitting on over 100% profit on AMD, Intel, Bloom Energy, Marvell Technology, and at least 10 other positions.

Every single president since Lyndon B. Johnson has used a blind trust to avoid exactly this situation. But Trump didn't.

His assets sit in a trust controlled by his own children, and the filings show a broker acted as agent on several trades.

The White House says the portfolio is "independently managed."

But here's what independently managed looks like:

Buy Dell stock. Three months later, publicly endorse Dell from the White House. Stock hits all-time high.

Buy Nvidia stock. One week later, your own government approves their chip sales. Stock rips.

Buy Intel stock. Post about Intel on Truth Social. Stock jumps. The government you run already owns a 10% stake.

Buy Palantir. Hand them contracts. Buy Robinhood. Route a federal program through their platform.

Nancy Pelosi got absolutely destroyed for her husband's stock trades.

Her husband's total disclosed trades in his most controversial year were worth roughly $5 million.

Trump just disclosed up to $750 MILLION in a single quarter.

While making the actual policy decisions that move these stocks.

This isn't a left or right issue.

We're talking about the President of the United States averaging 60 stock trades per day in companies his own administration regulates, contracts with, and publicly endorses.

What do you think?