Reporting with multiple sources says Musk went to the Whitehouse with a plan to limit the connectivity of Ukrainian drones to satellites. The connections worked on the drones full speed when the drones flew into the EU, but didn’t work in Ukraine, making it seem that the connectivity was intentionally slowed for Ukraine. Musk said the Whitehouse had the say not him. The slowdown happened right as Trump was pressuring Ukraine publicly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVeGIZOqZCg
This violence in France is bad! The peaceful protests have been taken over by what appears to be organized violence against the state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEyAAGW2XJY
Europe isn’t doing nearly as bad as productivity statistics and GDP per capita imply. European productivity growth has been about equal to growth in most of the United States except California. European Lower GDP per capita is largely driven by more vacations.
https://www.youtube.com/live/yYITJnqWkz0?is=9jdlF4QJY9vUj_KJ
Trump wants to replace the new EMALS aircraft launch system on carriers with old steam systems even though steam systems are worse and would require rebuilding ships.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration so focused on building more naval ships, that they let commercial shipbuilding move overseas, ending subsidies. Naval ship demand will go up and down and is not consistent; the base of a country’s ship building industry will need to be commercial. By allowing, and helping by ending the subsidies, US commercial shipbuilding to move overseas, the Reagen administration ultimately greatly weakened US shipbuilding capacity despite building a lot of naval ships. China has a strong industrial base for shipbuilding because they build commercial ships.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY58Y_OZmu8
At some point in the 1990s, the central Chinese government made it so that profitable things like factories didn’t benefit local government revenue as much because it started going to the central government instead. However, the local governments could still make money by leasing land, and they could make a lot more money leasing land if they built a bunch of cool and useful stuff, making the land more valuable.
https://youtu.be/axRhjqd-rus?is=2rlqM4pMyJ-lJF6R
In Ohio, data centers spiked electricity costs, provided few jobs other than temporary construction jobs, and thanks to tax deals given to the companies by the Ohio government, the data center companies pay little taxes. They do however, use local services like firefighting when the data centers have fires.
https://youtu.be/iI3tT6CCVH8?is=jz2kfRgVezlyhn42
Trump and Musk attacked the bureaucracy without understanding what it actually did, doing much damage.
Musk could have focused on helping upgrade the government’s technology, something badly needed, instead, he just destroyed a bunch of stuff he didn’t understand.
While doing DOGE, Musk repeatedly made false statements. It seems like he had to be lying, but, Musk’s close friends claim that he never lies, meaning, Musk just easily deludes himself into believing a lot of false shit. Being a great businessman and technologist doesn’t mean you aren’t incompetent and massively deluded about other topics.
With the chaos DOGE caused, rather than saving money, DOGE cost the American people.
The bureaucracy is mostly filled with loyal law followers. If you want to break the law, it makes sense to destroy the bureaucracy.
Under Trump, datasets disappear. Rather than the government keeping data to help understand society and help inform decision makers and the American people, Trump has pushed the government to keep and create data for the purpose of making Trump look good.
Many public servants are there out of a sense of public spiritedness, and the Trump administration treats them not simply like employees who need to be cut for good reasons…but like the enemy and some of the administration seems to get enjoyment out of cruelty.
One DOGE guy went into DOGE to fix government, and then he took an interview with a journalist and said that government wasn’t as inefficient as he thought, then he was fired.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSpXE-iJUuo
Ukraine showed that combined arms maneuver warfare can still work in the drone era. It requires surprise, covering traditional units with drones, weakening the enemy drone forces in the area, and most of all…evolving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN7znoCNwV8
On social media, people are most likely to spread sensational bullshit that sparks their emotions. People share a lot of stuff created by bots or foreign troll farms, but bots and troll farms don’t make stuff go viral…average people on social media sharing and liking such content does.
The Muslim Brotherhood seeks to create a worldwide Muslim state. One strategy is to have Muslims immigrate to the West and influence Western countries from there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHVf1uYge3s