Zach

NEWS --> Dems are planning novel ways to wield power of the purse against Trump's corrupt prosecutions of critics like Ilhan Omar if they win House. Reps Pramila Jayapal and Jamie Raskin tell me a range of aggressive tactics will be deployed. Details in my new piece: newrepublic.com/article/2171...

youtu.be/VFBAYStxOKQ

I was having conversations with journalists just a few months ago about whether democracy was doomed. Look at this year: Orban defeated. Vukic defeated. Bolsonaro Jr defeated. Trump heading to likely defeat in midterms. That’s the beauty of democracy. Voters can respond. Don’t count it out yet.

Lula: "We had to overcome foreign interference through digital platforms, which we will have to regulate. A crime in the digital world must be treated the same as a crime in the real world. We cannot have monstrous companies earning millions... not paying taxes... wanting to steer elections."

The Writers Guild on Musk blocking releasee of the documentary "Musk": "A small handful of billionaires now own virtually every major media company, news outlet, and social media platform and are demonstrating how this unchecked concentration over our news and media threatens democratic discourse."

An unearthed hack into Jared Kushner's phone has revealed at least $2,000,000,000 placed into Kushner's bank accounts by the President of the UAE and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince, while Kushner was serving as a Trump advisor.

nobody stopped Musk before he broke the state monopoly on violence, so now either he goes or the nation-state does

"Federal regulators have blocked a plan that would have allowed the operator of the nation’s largest regional power grid to reduce electricity use by certain new data centers when supplies became dangerously tight." security for capital, what else is new www.newsweek.com/electric-com...

The generation that got to buy cheap houses thanks to a postwar construction boom, then blocked new housing construction to juice their asset values is now whining that they have to pay taxes on their unearned wealth. Just breathtaking selfishness.

When I tell my players they need an explanation for their fighter multi classed to bard

Man, it kind of seems like if you’re a working person you lean Democrat and if you already got everything you wanted and have retired from contributing you lean republican

AI, as a political project, is primarily focused on your devaluation. Hope this helps.

The next Congress needs to investigate this and scrutinize every government contract going to SpaceX and any of Musk's ventures. Our allies cannot be made to depend on the whims of one oligarch, especially one who is a leader of the global far right.

Four days after Musk wrote, “Zelensky has gone too far.” @financialtimes.com #ukraine www.ft.com/content/3708...

Ukrainian presidential advisor Serhiy Beskrestnov confirms Elon Musk's Space X crippled Ukrainian capabilities last night. In other words, the US deliberately sabotaged European defence operations mid-mission. Every country in the world should move away from buying American hardware ASAP.

Point-and-click break?

statler and waldorf but it’s al-sayed and ossoff heckling republicans

Sen. Ossoff to Mike Collins: It's not just that you've hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office and that you've promoted Neo-Nazi content online. It's that you're robbing your constituents to subsidize your donors.

Well that's quite a coincidence @gilmored85.bsky.social

I do like the all-hands-on-deck approach to Democrats from the moderate to progressive wings all just dunking on Republicans in a variety of ways. It's nice. Feels like a team.

Let me see if I've got this right. The team of lawyers who stole an election in Florida, and gave W the presidency, are now the Scotus team at the center of the GOP theft of our democracy.

The fact is Trump not only lost his war but it's the biggest L the US has taken at least since Vietnam. Our bases are destroyed & abandoned, Iran is emboldened, China is toying w/ us. Hegseth & co want to move on to culture war slop, but they got routed & we'll be dealing w/repercussions for decades

among other things, musk is the #1 donor to the Republican Party in 2024 and 2026, now appointed to a board where he can steers contracts to his businesses. Bought and sold. Thieves.

I feel like if AI wants to be in the business of offering medical opinions, then AI companies need to be in the "getting sued for medical malpractice" business too

we could solve the western water crisis overnight by simply charging alfalfa farmers market rates for water

The GFC, much like the AI bubble, was nothing to do with reality, but ever-twisting levels of speculation. Too much of our financial system is powered by number games dressed up as investment.

If an individual did this, we'd treat it as a crime. We should treat this as a crime too, and hold OpenAI liable for what its models, under its supervision, did. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09...

I grabbed a mug out of my dish robot, to put it in my coffee robot, while I started my rice robot, then I loaded up my soymilk robot. Overnight my clothing got washed & dried in my laundry robot. I woke up to clean floors courtesy of a vacuum robot. “The future” is now. & it could be great.

... and much, much more from MANY voices. When the EA claim "no one has been warning you about this stuff" they are doing a double erasure: 1) Of the people doing the warning 2) Of the actual harms they are warning about bsky.app/profile/emil... >>

Sen. Susan Collins helped steer millions in federal defense contracts to Navatek, whose CEO illegally funneled thousands of dollars to her campaign. The FBI sought to launch a probe and was eyeing Collins and other lawmakers. Then Trump gutted the unit in charge. THREAD 🧵

NYT has now independently corroborated all the major allegations against Susan Collins in the ProPublica report, including that investigators were prepared to move against her and then Trump intervened to shut it down. This put Trump in a position of exceptional and extortionate leverage over her.

BREAKING: TV pool will not be providing coverage of presidential events until further notice b/c of CNN's ban, pool chair and FOX News Washington Bureau Chief Bryan Boughton said. It's effectively a boycott by the fellow members — ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX: www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

I miiiiiiiiggt be willing to have a less knee jerk reaction to AI if our fascist leaders weren’t always collaborate by with its makers

Alex Karp of Palantir says the AI industry must be nationalized to protect it from lawsuits if it accidentally destroys the world. More likely, he sees the bubble about to burst and he wants to be bought out with our tax dollars before that happens.

Democrats *cannot* support the Protection College Sports Act. It’s the most anti-labor coming out of this Congress. We cannot cap the mobility of black athletes, but not white coaches. My newsletter is up. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

This is the type of AI disaster scenario that I ACTUALLY worry about. (1) AI industry oversells the capabilities of its products to score fat government contracts. (2) govt puts the AI in charge of critical shit. (3) AI fucks up, because it has a nonzero error rate. (4) shit, now we’re at war.

The AI debate has forced me, somewhat agst my will, to grapple a bit more closely with the "longtermists", basically a movement or subculture of morons who propose novel forms of moral reasoning based on sci-fi ideas they imagine might happen hundreds, thousands or millions of years in the future.

Yes, there is a deranged millenarian sex cult running much of the immensely powerful US AI industry. No, we are not making this up, and you need to know about it. Read this:

i've been thinking a bit about killer robots in literature and how it's kind of ambiguous whether skynet is sentient. art knows that the machines don't need to think to have blood on the gears

Driving me crazy that a lot of very smart people aren't entertaining the idea that the **AI might kill us all** narrative is kabuki theater -- orchestrated by some of the world's richest people, whose net worth is tied up in people believing their technology is just on the cusp of super intelligence

"One 2025 study out of M.I.T. found that people who used chatbots as writing assistants struggled to remember what they had written only minutes after finishing their essay." www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/u...

It’s so awesome that every billionaire is insanely stupid

IMHO it's telling that even S&P 500 companies have difficulty pointing shareholders to how, exactly, AI is "transforming" their businesses. To the extent they say anything, it's basically what you'd expect: we can use it to cut some costs (presuming getting more work out of fewer people).

Extraordinary reporting: "Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family."

I doubt they disclosed that Larry Ellison, de facto owner of CBS, owns Oracle, which is deeply, deeply in debt building AI data centers - and any AI bust will likely bankrupt Ellison. Complete corruption of CBS to become corporate propaganda for its owner.

One thing that the AI companies making grandiose claims and threats distracts from is that they are doing extremely basic, state-level crimes such as Fraud, Theft, Criminal Impersonation, etc. Any AG or ambitious DA could likely nail these guys to the wall for their day-to-day operations.

Reminder: AI companies talk up the fear of hypothetical superintelligent AI to distract you from the real, present dangers of AI that are happening right now