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Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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  • Politics 

Trump Advisers Look to Shift US Foreign Aid to Wall Street Ally​

  • Potential shift could give Wall Street a greater role
  • Comes as Elon Musk dismantles main instrument of US soft power

“… The new approach would see reduced humanitarian assistance and a greater role for private equity groups, hedge funds and other investors in projecting economic might as the US competes for influence and strategic projects overseas with China.

It comes as billionaire Elon Musk has been pushing - with Trump’s blessing - to shut down the $43 billion US Agency for International Development, long a centerpiece of aid efforts. …”
 

“As Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was reportedly canceling Department of Education contracts in the name of frugality, Musk’s rocket company was this week cementing a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency, according to government documents reviewed by the Lever.

The new ‘supplemental’ contract dated February 10 adds $7.5 million to SpaceX’s NASA work, according to Federal Procurement Data System records. The government has already committed $3.9 billion to SpaceX as part of its NASA deal, which is projected to cost up to $4.4 billion by the middle of President Donald Trump’s term.”
 
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Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency​

Musk seeks not only to dismantle the federal government but to install his own technological vision of the future at its heart—techno-fascism by chatbot.


“… Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla software engineer who is now a deputy commissioner at the Federal Acquisition Service, recently told workers at the General Services Administration that the agency will be driven by an “A.I.-first strategy,” which includes plans for a chatbot to analyze its contracts.

doge is reportedly using A.I. software to identify potential budget reductions at the Department of Education. Anecdotes are circulating about A.I. filters that scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including “climate change” and “gender identity”—and then block the proposals.

“Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one government official told the Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.

He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency.

The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.)

Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump.

… In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”

… A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making.

… Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations.

As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them.

With doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot.

… the Muskian technocracy aims for something more expansive, using artificial intelligence to supplant the messy mechanisms of democracy itself.

Human judgment is being replaced by answers spit out by machines without reasoned debate or oversight: cut that program, eliminate this funding, fire those employees.

One of the alarming aspects of this approach is that A.I., in its current form, is simply not effective enough to replace human knowledge or reasoning.

Americans got a taste of the technology’s shortcomings during the Super Bowl on Sunday, when a commercial for Google’s Gemini A.I. that ran in Wisconsin claimed, erroneously, that Gouda made up more than half of all global cheese consumption.

Musk, though, appears to have few qualms about touting A.I.’s conclusions as fact. Earlier this month, on X, he accused “career Treasury officials” of breaking the law by paying vouchers that were not approved by Congress.

His evidence for this claim was a passage about the law generated by Grok, X’s A.I. model, as if the program were his lawyer. (Actual human legal experts quickly disputedthe claim.) …”


 
I will admit it takes some big balls and a "fuck any appearance of hypocrisy" to start this thread and post all the faux anger / indignation that is sure to come given how joe weaponized the justice dept and his pardon power. I thought you guys had accepted you lost the moral high ground here but hell no. You just ran up the back side of the hill and now pretend you never tumbled down the front Can't hide all the shit stains on your clothes though as they tell the truth.

At least I know my buddies lawtig and WM won't be offering much in this thread because I remember their previous condemnations of joe's use of pardons. My prediction is either this will be a really short thread as people care about not being hypocrites, or It will be a very large thread because the left doesn't give two shits about hypocrisy because its ingrained in their DNA.
 
I will admit it takes some big balls and a "fuck any appearance of hypocrisy" to start this thread and post all the faux anger / indignation that is sure to come given how joe weaponized the justice dept and his pardon power. I thought you guys had accepted you lost the moral high ground here but hell no. You just ran up the back side of the hill and now pretend you never tumbled down the front Can't hide all the shit stains on your clothes though as they tell the truth.

At least I know my buddies lawtig and WM won't be offering much in this thread because I remember their previous condemnations of joe's use of pardons. My prediction is either this will be a really short thread as people care about not being hypocrites, or It will be a very large thread because the left doesn't give two shits about hypocrisy because its ingrained in their DNA.

Take notes, Zen. THIS is how you troll.
 
I will admit it takes some big balls and a "fuck any appearance of hypocrisy" to start this thread and post all the faux anger / indignation that is sure to come given how joe weaponized the justice dept and his pardon power. I thought you guys had accepted you lost the moral high ground here but hell no. You just ran up the back side of the hill and now pretend you never tumbled down the front Can't hide all the shit stains on your clothes though as they tell the truth.

At least I know my buddies lawtig and WM won't be offering much in this thread because I remember their previous condemnations of joe's use of pardons. My prediction is either this will be a really short thread as people care about not being hypocrites, or It will be a very large thread because the left doesn't give two shits about hypocrisy because its ingrained in their DNA.
So, to be clear, your argument is Biden did it so it is perfectly fine that Trump is doing it?

Perhaps you could address the merits of these pardons.
 
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“…President Putin even used my very strong campaign motto of ‘COMMON SENSE.’…”
 

Senate votes to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence​



“… The vote was 52-48 mostly along party lines, though Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined Democrats in opposing the confirmation….

… McConnell appeared to reference some of Gabbard’s positions in a statement he released after voting against her, saying she has “a history of alarming lapses in judgement.”

“The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment,” McConnell said. …”

——

Mitch is facing apparently significant health issues (he’s fallen twice recently and has to be moved around via wheelchair) so maybe in a rush to make his peace with some higher power ….
 
She's utterly worthless, imo. She only seems willing to vote against her party when they already have enough votes to win, so her opposition is meaningless. But when they actually need her vote she always seems to fall in line. I really hope some Democrat is able to take her out in 2026.
I don't see how she can possibly win if current trends continue. Tillis and Collins were always likely to lose in a polarized mid-term election where Dems are angry and comprise the majority of high turnout voters. But with economic ruination approaching, they might as well not run.

If inflation hits 8%, which is looking increasingly likely (it's at 5-6% now), with increasing unemployment and cuts to social services, there are a lot of Pubs whose safe seats are going to be a lot less safe than they think.
 
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