A long, long, looooonnng, time ago, I went on a date to see a movie. This was before smart phones were super common and neither of us really bothered to look into what the movie was about before we went. It was an Adam Sandler movie that came out after Punch Drunk Love (but way before he did anything like Uncut Gems), so we both went in with the expectation it would probably just be a light hearted comedy with maybe a few more serious moments sprinkled in.

We were already in a long term relationship and knew each other pretty well, so it wasn’t supposed to be a super romantic date or anything. It was more just lets hang out and spend a fun day together, so I made us some weed brownies and snuck them in to share so we could giggle and watch this funny movie together.

Here is the description of the movie we saw that day:

When seasoned comedian George Simmons learns of his terminal, inoperable health condition, his desire to form a genuine friendship causes him to take a relatively green performer under his wing as his opening act.

We’d already settled in and eaten the brownies, and they were just starting to kick in when we realized this wasn’t going to be as light hearted as we thought.

If you’ve ever ingested THC you might already know that some people can have a much more intense experience compared to what they’re used to having from just inhaling it. The person I was dating was one of those people, and eventually he realized he just couldn’t handle eating THC, but this date occured several years before he finally accepted that truth.

So, we sit through this movie, and I can’t really remember much of what happened other than the general theme of coming to terms with your own mortality. I don’t remember it being funny at all. I think there were jokes, but I don’t think we actually laughed the entire time except for the opening scene.

The movie finally ends and the credits start to roll. Everyone gets up around us and starts walking out, but when I stood up to leave he stopped me and asked if we could just wait until people cleared out a little more.

I said ok and we just sat there a while longer. The credits were still rolling, but we were the only people left in the theater and the ushers were standing at the back clearly waiting for us to hurry up and get out so they could sweep before the next movie.

He said something about not being able to go back through the lobby, and said he wanted to go out the door near the screen instead because it led directly outside to the parking lot.

We open the door, step out, and I guess it was kind of jarring for him to go from the dark theater directly into the extremely bright sunshine because he started having a panic attack before we could even reach the car.

I tried to calm him down, but he didn’t want to talk. We hadn’t eaten all day other than the weed brownies so I figured maybe he would feel better if he got some food, but I had also eaten a brownie and I didn’t want to drive too far.

Since we didn’t have smart phones I couldn’t look up what was in the area, but I remembered there was a Chinese buffet pretty close that I had been to once before. I figured that would be a nice quiet place for us to go so he could calm down.

Except when we got there, I guess a family was having a birthday party and it was absolutely packed. It felt more like a giant cafeteria and there were people at every single table talking really loud and celebrating. Then they started playing this same song over and over on a continuous loop like a weird horror movie:

Happy Birthday (Sheng Ri Kuai Le)

Like it would end and then just start up again like it was going to be playing for all eternity. It was so fucking bizarre I couldn’t help but start laughing because it was such a weird situation.

He was mumbling “oh my God,” over and over, but I thought he was just joking about it being so ridiculous. Then around the 5th time it started up again he was suddenly like “I have to go now!” and basically bolted out the door and back to the car.

We get back in the car, and he goes “I think I’m having a stroke. I need you to call 911!”

So, I tried to calm him down and tell him, Hey, you’re ok, you’re not having a stroke. I’m pretty sure you’re just having a panic attack. Let me just take you home so you can lay down for a while.

He kept begging me to call 911, so I started driving him back home. Then, while I was driving he pulled out his own phone and tried to call 911! and I had to wrestle it away from him with one hand while driving, and, then when I did manage to get it away he screamed at me “You bitch! I can’t believe you’re going to let me die because you don’t want to get in trouble!” 😵‍💫…

There was a good 5 mins or so of total silence where neither of us said anything. I get he was scared, but he’d never said anything like that to me before and I was pretty pissed.

Finally, I just told him if he wanted to go to the ER I would drive him, but if he called 911 and it turned out he was just having a panic attack, he could also end up in trouble.

That seemed to sober him up a bit and he calmed down enough to let me just take him back home for a while. I laid on the bed still annoyed about the whole day and pretty pissed at him while he searched the internet on his desktop to figure out if he was actually having a stroke (btw we had taken the brownies like 3+ hrs earlier by this point).

Finally after looking things up and convincing himself he was indeed having something like a stroke, he said he still wanted to go to the ER. I was so fucking annoyed by this point but I just threw up my hands and said fine, whatever. This is fucking dumb. Lets go.

We don’t talk the whole way there, we get to the ER and just sit in this busy waiting room still not talking. Finally they call him back and I stay in the waiting room.

I sat there by myself for an hour or so just kind of rolling my eyes and thinking about how fucking ridiculous it was, and how it had ruined the whole day.

Finally, a chaplain came out into the waiting room and called my name. Then he asks if I’m there with my boyfriend… And for a moment I had my own mini panic attack of “Ohshitohshit did they send the chaplain to tell me he was actually having a stroke the whole fucking time?!”

It turns out that nope, the hospital was just understaffed that day, and he was sent to give me an update. It turns out he was totally fine. It was just a panic attack, and the next day he thanked me for not letting him call 911.

Anyway, that was my worst date that turned into a very shitty day and ended with a visit to the ER.

Ukraine’s defense relies increasingly on huge volumes of civilian data stored on cloud platforms. An adversary’s military may supply their targeting algorithm with an individual’s location, health, and online behavior. Military actors regularly mine, analyze, and repurpose social media posts.

It is not clear, however, that the deep learning systems integral to some of these new weapons can overcome the fog of war. These systems treat all data as objective representations of reality, when in fact information drawn from social media platforms is shaped by users’ emotional and cognitive experiences in ways that can skew its utility for wartime intelligence. The “learned knowledge” generated by analytic systems is probabilistic, not causal—leading to the risk that algorithms are “enforc[ing] their version of ‘reality’ from patterns and probabilities derived from data.”

These venture-backed firms view contemporary conflicts as live testing grounds.

Global digital platforms such as TikTok and Telegram illustrate the wider environment in which these dependencies are forming. Though neither company develops military technologies, both shape the information environment surrounding war. TikTok’s recommendation algorithm influences how audiences perceive the conflict in Ukraine, shaping global narratives and public opinion. Yet its complex ownership structure, rooted in Chinese parent company ByteDance and entangled with global venture capital, has sparked geopolitical concern. … These concerns highlight how platforms created for civilian use can also become entangled in the political and informational dimensions of war.

The overlapping interests of finance capital and private technology corporations transcend national borders, creating forms of influence that do not fit neatly into binary friend-or-enemy distinctions. ByteDance’s global investment network, spanning Chinese state-linked entities, American private equity funds, and international investors, illustrates this transnational ownership model. It complicates national regulatory and security responses, as policymakers must ask not merely who owns a given platform, but who controls the data, infrastructure, and decisionmaking power that states increasingly depend on.

This illustrates a deeper shift in the relationship between the market and the military. The problem is not that defense firms are publicly traded—Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics have been for decades—but that contemporary defense-tech companies retain proprietary control over data-driven systems central to military operations. Their technologies are not merely delivered to the state; the companies are embedded in the decisionmaking architecture of warfare. When a firm’s market value depends on its perceived wartime success, its incentives may diverge from those of the state it ostensibly serves. This intertwining of commercial strategy, military dependency, and investor confidence represents a new kind of vulnerability for states.

What is at stake, beyond the conflict itself, is the nature of state sovereignty. The ability of states to govern, defend, and act independently is increasingly mediated by private technology firms and global finance. This is not entirely new. States have long relied on private contractors, but the kind of dependency has changed. Unlike traditional arms manufacturers, today’s defense-tech firms control the digital platforms, data flows, and algorithmic systems that underpin military decisionmaking. At the same time, civilian platforms like Telegram and TikTok shape the informational terrain of conflict, influencing how wars are perceived and fought.

I just want to make sure I’m understanding this.

•You have companies like Meta (just an example) working for both sides of a conflict via government contract, but not necessarily bound to either side of a conflict because of global venture capital/transnational ownership model

•We know Facebook/Meta has been intentionally manipulating the emotions of social media users for over a decade now

•That social media data is then collected and used to train military platforms, which may be directly or indirectly linked to the social media company

•These companies very likely have an incentive to create an endless war (and endless profits for themselves) by manipulating the emotions and behavior of social media users, knowing that data will be used to train military platforms

Basically, a private tech company could manipulate data to give one side of a conflict an advantage over the other, but it could also intentionally pit adversaries against each other in an endless loop by manipulating social media content, and by extension, manipulating the military platforms being trained.

A company could potentially profit from both sides of a conflict it’s manipulating because the states have turned to it and other big tech companies to help them reach “victory” in the endless conflict the company helped create. Correct?

Continental breakfast of champions

This is like the weirdest IRL trolley problem, but the consequences of the decision are 1 death vs. several people running late or being mildly inconvenienced.

#Utilitarian at all cost *💪🏼 *unless it’s me getting mangled

Imagining a fully automated dystopian future where decisions are always predetermined and based on greater good rules. Billionaires can’t grasp why we’re so ungrateful for the better world they’ve created, so clearly it must be further proof we don’t know what’s best for us.

They are attempting to undermine and dismantle it. It took over 50 years of scheming and clawing their way into government to gain enough power to try and tear down from the inside out.

And they will continue to attack and try to dismantle it. That’s what enemies and bad actors will always do. That’s why the article lays out a strategy for creating a system that allows more flexibility in response to these attacks.

🙄 reconstruction was a response to oligarchs who wanted to ignore progress. They have always fought laws and regulations that threatened their power. There was literally a civil war fought over this.

America’s unending struggle between Oligarchy and Democracy

Even after losing a war, they continued to scheme and manipulate others to stack the decks in their favor. They continued to do it after the first reconstruction, and the second reconstruction, and they will certainly do it again after the 3rd.

That’s why it is (and always will be) a completely bullshit argument that the safety nets, laws, and regulations created to keep these assholes in check, allegedly no longer serve a purpose and only serve to place an unfair burden on society based on the mistakes of the past.

The callousness, selfishness, and greed that fueled the “mistakes” of the past were never unique to the time period. They have always just been human flaws, and should serve as reminders that every human is corruptible. The worst traits of humanity are never just magically going to disappear someday. They exist in every corner of the world, under every government. They always have and they always will.

USSR

Uhh…

History should teach you that the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation was traveling around Moscow and Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union collapsed, but it never really gets talked about for some reason.

A conservative who essentially birthed Project 2025 and is famously quoted as saying “I don’t want everyone to vote,” was sneaking in computers and other electronics to Soviet dissidents while teaching soviet politicians all about American “democracy” just prior to the collapse.

Then he and several other members of Heritage were ready to fill the power vacuum and help establish the first go between for U.S. and Russian capitalist businesses.

“You capture the Soviet Union --I’m going to capture the states.”-Thomas Roe, Heritage Foundation board member and founder of the State Policy Network to fellow Heritage Foundation board member Robert Krieble.

In 1989, the Krieble Institute was created “to promote democracy and economic freedom in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.”

1989: A Republican in Moscow (WaPo article about Weyrich holding mock elections)

1991: RUSSIA HOUSE, TRADING IN ITS NAME WaPo Article about the first ever go between for U.S. and Russian businesses involving Weyrich and Krieble

PBS Documentary about Weyrich and Krieble involvement in Collapse of USSR Playing For Power (2012)

•to move us from our undemocratic present to a more democratic future, we need to institutionalize our commitments to a more inclusive and responsive democracy in more durable forms. These might encompass everything from alternative economic regulatory institutions and new approaches to anti-discrimination to a more universal safety net that secures the essential guarantees of health, housing, and income that individuals and communities need to thrive.

•A second reconstructionist strategy lies in containing reactionary power and backlash. We should presume that there will always be efforts to roll back egalitarian expansions of democracy. Part of how democracies survive and thrive is through institutions that contain the potential resurgence of anti-democratic policies and forces. The democratic institutions of the future will similarly need to develop ways to contain authoritarian power. This will require laws and institutions that respond to techniques that are emerging in the current moment, such as new forms of state and private surveillance, or the weaponization of presidential control of funding flows.

•The third institutional transformation strategy is to democratize our governing institutions, making policymaking more directly responsive to and shaped by ordinary constituents. One important area is the balance of power between the branches. Even before Trump, the trend has been to centralize power in an imperial presidency. The legislature, by contrast, has been central to past moments of democratization. Any future reconstructionist agenda will need to be built on congressional majorities and a legislature willing to check and permanently shift away from the overreliance on presidential power.

Which socialist country would be the best example?

Capitalists only have the power they do because of the state, if we smash and replace it they have no power.

The state, as well as the public and private military and resources they hoard and control.

Like which countries specifically? Bc I can almost guarantee there is currently a far right disinformation campaign targeted at undermining that country’s government.

Ok, but how do we get there? How do we keep oligarchs, (like the ones who own Palantir and work with other oligarchs like Netenyahu using remote weapons of mass genocide to fight for them and gain ground in order to control others), from taking advantage of the power vacuum left by destabilization?

What makes you think oligarchs haven’t been continuing to undermine and dismantle the second reconstruction this entire time, and aren’t using their established global institutions (like banks, corporations, and conservative think tanks) to do exactly what they’ve been projecting and accusing progressives of doing?

Do you honestly think there isn’t a good chance a global cabal of far right conservatives might be ready to use their collective wealth and resources they hoard and pass down for generations to take full global control?

Example: The CIA and the Royal family working together to overthrow a progressive leader in Australia in the 1970s.

Or Steve Kangas on the Origins of the overclass and the crimes of the CIA

I don’t really get how that contradicts needing a 3rd reconstruction that dismantles the government agencies that carry out that kind of shit and didn’t even exist until WWII rather than dismantling a democracy?

you guys are just upset it is happening at home now and not Iraq.

Can’t argue with you there, but that’s also part of what makes me question who’s best interest would be dismantling U.S. democracy instead of dismantling specific agencies within the government, with no plan for where we go next?

Because it kinda seems like those agencies would carry on doing whatever they want even after a union fully dissolves. They would just have fewer obstacles in their way.

When you think about how an American agency, for example, the CIA operates this playbook in other countries, what is their intended goal?

Their goal is to destabilize a country in order to remove any obstacles to taking full control. They usually achieve destabilization by undermining public trust in a system and the leaders of that system, so that the public will either dismantle the government for them or be less resistant once it is dismantled (see the Soviet Union in the late 80s). Once that happens, they already hold all the resources and power, and install somebody they already have lined up.

Considering that there seems to currently be a global campaign to spread disinformation and install far right leaders across the globe, it makes me question if this is happening everywhere bc global destabilization is the goal.

Currently, just about anywhere in the world, who holds the majority of the resources? The people or a small group of oligarchs? When destabilization happens and a local government collapses who has the upper hand when it comes to filling the power vacuum?

The Case for a Third Reconstruction

The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking.

I mean they want a one government, they just want to be the ones in charge of that one government.

The entire argument is that it’s somehow safer bc it’s a private corporation/business, and not the government. Except it’s a private monopoly protected and contracted by the fucking government!

The only way that argument could possibly make the slightest bit of sense would be in an imaginary world where there was legitimate competition between other corporations (but if that was the case corporations probably wouldn’t exist) and the American people actually had some say in which private company got government contracts.

Instead, government officials (who are allegedly the reason we have to turn to private businesses bc we can’t trust the government) are buying stock in private companies, and then handing government contracts to the fucking private companies where they own stock.

Creepy ass conservatives: Stay asleep so I can keep doing stuff to you while you’re unaware.

Remember when he did that Nazi salute, and we kept hearing it totally wasn’t a Nazi salute, and the Trump administration kept saying that we were all just looking for imaginary things to be outraged over?

Then why is he having Grok rewrite Wiki and calling Hitler the Führer, Bart?

Not sure if you heard but according to the CEO of Palantir in an interview he gave a few weeks ago, there is now “woke left” and “woke right.”

Basically anybody on the right who wakes up and smells the bullshit in the narrative is “woke.” Like if you believe in those “crazy conspiracy theories” that say Palantir is up to some evil villain shit, you’re woke.

Idk shits really crazy right now, and I think everybody is kind of dissociating to some extent.

It might not be that your friends don’t want to see you, but just that everyone is so overwhelmed that it makes normal feel impossible.

It’s just kind of like everything feels like it’s barely hanging on by a thread, and it makes focusing on anything very difficult. Then that turns into a cycle of fuck I forgot to reply to this person 2 days ago, I can’t just reply now like nothing happened. Then that gets added to the ever growing list of things you’re avoiding bc you didn’t even mean to avoid them in the first place

Haven’t you heard? Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race.

Trump’s current Science Advisor (who was selected by Peter Thiel) gave an interview back in 2019 where he kept insisting the U.S. was at a disadvantage to China in the AI race bc we didn’t have access to the level of surveillance data China had (which it turns out, is possible thanks to a surveillance system we fucking created and sold to them). He also used this point to argue against any regulations for facial recognition tech in the U.S. because again, it would put us at a disadvantage.

But don’t worry, because the goal is to have an authoritarian surveillance state with “baked in American values,” so we won’t have to worry about ending up like China did with the surveillance tools we fucking sold them.

I’m not sure what values he’s claiming will be somehow baked into it (because again, we created it and sold it to China). My mind conjures up a scenario of automatic weapons and a speaker playing a screeching bald eagle, but maybe we’ll get some star spangled banner thrown in there too.