Blake Brown

Here's how private equity killed your local mall.

JUST POSTED: Today at The NYT we are publishing a major investigation into how President Trump used his executive powers to expose millions of Americans to greater cancer risks. A six month-long investigation built on more than 10,000 pages of FOIA records. Read it www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

JUST POSTED: A Russian energy giant has secretly moved to acquire a position in a massive Alaska gas project. Its part of talks between Witkoff/Kushner & Putin. But CEO of US company resigns after learning of Russian money in the project. A wowzer of a story. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

Politicians use their office to get rich. Those days have got to end. No revolving door for lobbyists, no congressional stock trading, no corporate PAC money.

The Roads Have Eyes! 👁️ Turn on the Surveillance Layer in Map Options to see known license plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other outdoor surveillance cameras.

New — Rashida Tlaib introduces the "Get the Flock Out of Our Communities Act." The bill would: —Ban use of federal funds to buy or operate automated mass surveillance systems, like Flock. —Require state & local govts to divest from such systems to remain eligible for certain law enforcement grants.

NEW: Walmart’s patents could enable more than just personalized pricing. They could usher in a level of surveillance unlike anything shoppers have seen before. As @forbes.com reports, the privacy implications raise serious questions Walmart has yet to answer.

Bloomberg:Career staff at CFTC concluded there was ample evidence to suggest that massive insider trading occurred on commodities transactions around specific points during the Iran War, and they referred the matter for enforcement. Then political appointees demanded that they retract the referrals.

Raven, previously called GeoSpy, lets cops figure out what specific Airbnb or Zillow property a photo was taken in. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. @josephcox.bsky.social story here: www.404media.co/ai-company-l...

Billions of dollars’ worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before Trump announced a U-turn on Iran in a post on Truth Social. CFTC staff began to investigate...then were told to lay off. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

It occurs to me that since I have unique data on the right-wing ecosystem on Facebook, I can actually tell you with data, not vibes, if there actually has been a 50% decrease (the original claim) in bot activity on here supporting MAGA, or even any kind of substantial effect at all. There isn't.

This is a form of retaliation against someone for speaking out. He knew he would be punished, buy that punishment does not include unnecessarily strict confinement (which is barred by military law). www.military.com/air-force-ma...

He is being tortured.

USPS says the cameras, put on USPS truck dashboards, will scan roads, signs, and more. www.404media.co/usps-to-put-...

An amazingly stark example of how the US economy has broken: Zaslav clears nearly a *billion* dollars amid a CEO tenure where he made basically anything he touched worse, harmed multiple prestigious brands, led huge layoffs—but delivered a corrupt merger for shareholders. variety.com/2026/tv/news...

I feel like this says a lot about us if we don't stop this from happening. 'Ft. Hood Shooter's Execution Will be Public and Streamed Live, Pentagon Says'

The nation’s largest food distributor, Sysco, is buying Restaurant Depot—a deal that could drive up costs for restaurant owners and, ultimately, consumers. I’m calling on the FTC and DOJ to put a pause on this merger and protect independent restaurant owners and the communities they serve.

Diplomatic cable leaked to me shows Marco Rubio order embassies to bar people from the US for speech-related reasons. Hours later, Rubio gave a speech at the Acropolis celebrating "free debate and public discussion": www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-speech...

There is nobody else in sports I can think of that goes from a standard rotation player to one of the best to ever do it in the post season the way we see with Kike Hernandez. Unreal #Dodgers

4/ Fernando Vasquez, an 18-year-old citizen, was on break from work when agents chased and handcuffed him, then put him in their truck. After realizing their mistake, the agents left the teen alone in the woods, with no way to get home. Then they threw his ID out of the truck.

ICE is now separating children from their parents in the nation’s interior and deeming them “unaccompanied.” www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

#politics #money #oligarchs #California '...the top 99 individual and corporate political donors in California spent more on campaigns and lobbying from 2005 to 2024 than did the bottom 99.9% of the state’s residents, businesses and organizations combined.' capitalandmain.com/new-oligarch...

Reminder that Peter Thiel hates you and probably wants you to die

USPS says the cameras, put on USPS truck dashboards, will scan roads, signs, and more. www.404media.co/usps-to-put-...

A Russian Mi-2 helicopter was spotted being transported on the roof of a pickup truck in Russia’s Krasnodar region. Something went wrong. #Russia

Every single one of 21 tested vehicles sent data to a third-party domain over Wi-Fi. Over half contacted domains specializing in advertising, tracking, or analytics. These companies gather details about your vehicle or driving behavior to sell to insurance companies or target you with ads.

Still wondering why people are fed up with the system?

Cannot insist you listen to this enough, this conversation condenses everything going on with AI and its wider economic effects tightly. One of the best in the show’s history.

The pay for a US Secretary of Defense is $246000 a year. They don’t even bother to hide the corruption these days

I keep telling everyone that Thiel is the most dangerous and most out of his mind of any of these evil tech billionaires. He needs to be stopped. Period.

Wtaf is this question my university just asked me about my project?

Just a remarkable choice, this headline. No other leader of any other country in the history of the UN would get that headline after giving an address with that quote.

This seems like a pretty big deal: donors made illegal contributions to Susan Collins and then were awarded lucrative contracts after her office intervened with the Navy. An FBI investigation was dropped under Trump. www.propublica.org/article/fbi-...

The accounting is in: In Oregon there are 111 data centers. The TOTAL number of people employed at data centers is just 2,630, or 0.1% of the labor force. Those 100 data centers consumer 23% of all electricity used in Oregon. Meanwhile, electricity rates skyrocket as more centers are built.

It’s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public. The statements are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they work, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor. @jasonkoebler.bsky.social reports. www.404media.co/doom-loop-op...

“Palantir has no place in our hospitals, no place in our community… Nurses are advocates first. We’re trained to advocate and to speak up when something is wrong, and that’s what we’re doing.” @nationalnurses.bsky.social

It's Monday, so a deeply compromised Kirsten Gillibrand is trying to enable Trump fraud www.politico.com/live-updates...

Elon Musk's lawyer is running for Congress. He's also a lobbyist for military tech and data center energy companies. One client was Viktor Orban's U.S.-based nonprofit. And he helped draw the district he's running in! His Dem opponent thinks she has a shot in a seat that went 60% for Trump in 2024.

Guys, I think maybe we've gone a bit overboard with all the capitalism stuff...

Perspective: The National School Lunch Program feeds 30M kids a day at a cost of ~$16B per year. We just spent an extra $100B on energy for no reason. Think about the choices America is making right now. www.axios.com/2026/09/07/i...

Absolutely terrifying.

(NBC News) — It is now the least rewarding time to be a worker in the U.S. economy since the government started keeping track. @nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com/business/eco...

christ

Bring back the corporate death penalty www.salon.com/2026/08/19/b... #corruption #law #Blues

Hegseth is clearly in neck deep shit with the budgets. All of the unprogrammed activity...sweet baby cheeses, it must be stunningly bad. Just setting fire to dollars everywhere - Middle East, Venezuela, Maritime Murder Spree, the Occupation of DC, the LA campaign...