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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net

2mo ago

Bulletins and News Discussion from January 27th to February 2nd, 2025 - Tariffs in Trump's Imperium - COTW: Colombia

Image is of Colombian President Gustavo Petro giving a speech at the UN in 2022.

Trump has arrived in office with the force of an avalanche; ~~ending~~ slowing a genocide on the one hand, while simultaneously promising a total nightmare for minorities and the poor throughout and outside the United States on the other hand. [edited for clarity; I do not actually think Trump has ended the Palestinian genocide obviously, I was making a joke - but the ceasefire is a genuine improvement in conditions for millions of people right now who are on the edge of death, so it cannot be dismissed]

It's still far too early to truly compare and contrast his imperial strategy with Biden's, but initial signs show that there does appear to be somewhat of a reorientation. Biden was famous for being two-faced; ostensibly offering aid and stability, while also blowing up your pipeline to ensure you did not actually have an alternative to his idea. Trump, meanwhile, seems only really capable of aggression, threatening several "allied" nations with what may as well be sanctions because of the economic harm they'd do. I suspect we'll be debating for a long time how much of this can be attributed to the specific characteristics of Trump, or whether he merely embodies the zeitgeist of imperial decline - a wounded empire lashing out with extreme violence to try and convince everybody, including themselves, that they can still be the world imperialist hegemon.

I'll admit it: I did not believe that Trump would actually try and go ahead with putting tariffs on basically anybody who annoys him. And while the threat could still be empty in regards to countries like China and Canada, Colombia is the first indication of the potential of his strategy. Despite some fiery words from President Petro, after Trump's administration revealed the punishment if Colombia did not agree, it appears that Colombia will in fact be accepting deported migrants after all. It's funny how that works.

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

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1.1K comments

more than a decade of the US trying to "pivot to Asia" to contain China , and it all ends with the US disembowling itself while China watches and wonders why the fuck they did that.

CIA agents in hell watching trump thinking USAID is purely government handouts.

Trump To Tariff Chips Made In Taiwan, Targeting TSMC
trust the plan

AP - Staffing was ‘not normal’ in the air traffic control tower at Washington’s Reagan National Airport
That’s according to a report by the Federal Aviation Administration that was obtained by The Associated Press.
The report says one air traffic controller was working two positions at the time of the crash.
“The position configuration was not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” the report says.
We already knew it, but now it's confirmed.

The citrus harvest in California's Central Valley is “virtually unviable”. The information was reported by NBC Los Angeles, with data from the California Farm Bureau. The measure is due to a lack of workers for the harvest, which is mainly carried out by immigrants, often undocumented. As a result, the price of citrus fruits in much of the country could rise, since California is one of the largest suppliers of fruit in the country.
- me when egg prices go up (I don't buy eggs)
  
  me when orange prices go up
- No eggs, no orange juice. Brunch liberals in shambles rn.
  
  All we needed was no coffee for the trifecta. But alas, Colombia couldn't hold out for that.
  
  Orangeman bad bc no oranges?
- Slave state realizing the state doesn't work because there are no slaves
  
  Easy to find libs defending the slave labor conditions on other sites too.
- :steinbeck-haunting-california-
- It's why a mass deportation policy isn't just horrifically racist and destructive to millions of people, but actively counterproductive to US profitability. it's why I assume that at some point somebody will step in and say to Trump "we, uh, can't actually deport all these people, because we need them to slave away for extremely low wages or many businesses will outright collapse." like, it takes a genocidal white supremacist to lock tens of millions of minorities into systems of exploitation for the purpose of making profit for white people in the wealthy parts of the imperial core; it takes a true idiot to then get rid of all those minorities slaving away for you for mere populist reasons (and then wonder why basic products now cost more money).
  although I also assumed that Trump wouldn't actually try and do the tariffs because of how idiotic that is for US imperial strategy and yet here we are
  
  Leave it to Trump to not get the "joke" that deportations are supposed to be a whip in the slave driver's hand, not an actual slaughter. Dumbass can't even do the fascist labor camps "right". He's gonna get got if he continues like he is. And not by some hero of a lefitst.

With Trump threatening to tariff TSMC chips (if he actually ends up doing that), pausing federal grants and loans, fucking with a fellow NATO member, etc, it honestly seems like he’s just really leaning into the mad man negotiating tactic, which only works if you show you’re genuinely willing and able to take things into new territory. It’s all so outlandishly against the interests of stabilizing US hegemony that it’s the only angle I can think of that he’s working here. Building up MadMan Capital™️ to spend later on his coming hallmark ground war with China

We finally found out what Trump's demand is in exchange for removing tariffs on Canada. The demand is... Annexation LMAO.
We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND NO TARIFFS!
Donald Trump Truth Social Post 08:26 AM EST 02/02/25

https://x.com/Sturgeons_Law/status/1884294162180362559
One of the criticism I see of Assads from pro-HTS clowns was that he "sold" Golan Heights to Israel. What is this then? Not even bothering with fighting for your territory.

PFLP leader Mohammed Ghali feed from prison, welcomed home by Gazans
https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1885073428513767767

That guy in Sweden who was known for burning qurans has apparantly been shot dead

The Short Case for Nvidia Stock
This is not a finance article nor is it financial advice despite the title (I do not condone any gambling nor do I hold any positions on Nvidia, just obligatory disclaimer here), but genuinely an excellent breakdown of the DeepSeek “breakthrough”.
To quote from a summary I read from Twitter:
Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers, which gives massive memory savings
Compress the key-value indices which eat up much of the VRAM; they get 93% compression ratios
Do multi-token prediction instead of single-token prediction which effectively doubles inference speed
Mixture of Experts model decomposes a big model into small models that can run on consumer-grade GPUs
That’s it! There is nothing groundbreaking about DeepSeek. There is no fundamentally new invention here (compared to the original transformer architecture). It’s simply a bunch of Chinese interns looking for shortcuts to bypass the tech sanctions, and stumbled upon a simple yet elegant solution to the problem.
What is groundbreaking though is that apparently none of the OpenAI engineers getting paid >500k per year managed to come up with a solution like this.
And this really is an indictment of the entire field of “AI”, the kind of people who are getting paid a fortune, and how overhyped, bloated and unrealistic it is to burn through $500 billion to chase their AGI scam which is never going to work. (The real AGI is as far as you can get from the current iterations of artificial neural networks based architecture, and we barely have any idea what it would look like).
The question is will it burst the AI bubble? Are we getting another AI winter? Or the US government will find a way around it like it did with all the crypto scam bullshit or the trillion dollar F-35 project?
- optimize your code
  Americans lose a trillion dollars
  
  The entire AI bubble is just a massive scam lol. Their version of AGI is a pipe dream that will never going to be materialized except for burning through $500 billion waste of GPU hardware.
  However I have been wrong about bitcoin before so I won’t celebrate just yet. The crypto idiots have earned their right to laugh back at me.
- Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers, which gives massive memory savings Compress the key-value indices which eat up much of the VRAM; they get 93% compression ratios Do multi-token prediction instead of single-token prediction which effectively doubles inference speed Mixture of Experts model decomposes a big model into small models that can run on consumer-grade GPUs
  This is another case of white people video games weighting 500 gb because no one knows how to optimize their stuff
  
  i am begging the white tech sector to be as civilized as the chinese tech sector
- Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers, which gives massive memory savings
  Theres just no fucking way no one thought of this before ahahahahahah what the actual fuck
  
  8 bit is kinda impressive honestly. I could see going from 32 bit to 16 bit, but 8 bit requires some confidence that you're only going to be dealing with fairly small numbers. It's obviously something the US players should've done by now but I have a feeling the coding done by the Chinese to make this work was not insignificant
  
  It’s genuinely funny. To be fair the DeepSeek team used some impressive sleight of hands to make the 8 bit precision floating point mesh well, but the OpenAI people are getting paid 500k a year and couldn’t even think of this. How.
  
  I’ve spoken to a nvidia engineer before who told me how they have optimized for 8 and even 4 bit fp operations using dedicated hardware and lookup tables for the explicit purpose of ML tasks. So somebody has used this before, just not in this way I suppose
- There is no fundamentally new invention
  I beg to differ. Finding ways to make do within a resource-constrained environment is the very heart of innovation. Especially compared to throwing a dragon's hoard amount of money at bigger data centers and more stolen personal data, which had been the style in Silicon Vallay for a time now.
  
  I won't be satisfied until relativity is broken
  
  It’s an impressive piece of complex engineering with far reaching applications, don’t get me wrong, and it’s damn impressive to put everything together and get it to work.
  But fundamentally new invention (at least in this particular field) is like when the transformer architecture was introduced that opened up an entirely new generation of neural network architectures and completely changed the field.
  Think of it in terms of basic vs applied research.
- Use 8 bit instead of 32 bit floating point numbers
  32-bit weights on the panoptidataset for the GPU melter
  
  did no one commit to trying even just, like, half-precision??? we need 8 decimal places for training our predictive text model because. because um. because
- What is groundbreaking though is that apparently none of the OpenAI engineers getting paid >500k per year managed to come up with a solution like this.
  That's likely because there is no capital benefit to reducing the size of the model. Sam Alton is the chair of a Nuclear Energy corporation and if the models continue to require more energy with every new release, well, that's just good for business.

One Republic became the first ever American band to perform on the CCTV New Year’s Gala (春晚), live from the Wuhan stage
Why? Because during Covid lockdown, frontman Ryan Tedder came out in support of Wuhan amidst waves of anti-China sentiment, livestreaming himself enjoying the Wuhan hot dry noodle, and promised that one day he would visit the city of Wuhan!
Wuhan hot dry noodle as imagined by Tedder using spaghetti noodles:
Wuhan (武汉) hot dry noodle tattoo:
He finally got his wish to perform in front of the entire nation today, straight from Wuhan itself!
Yes, this is news.

Trump executive order of cutting foreign aid may have partially crippled US regime change network

There has to be some kind of irony to such a terrible crash happening at Reagan National Airport, right? The guy who fired all the air traffic controllers?

Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay. Most people don't even know about it."
https://xcancel.com/cspan/status/1884690347474727404
Jesus christ

Average senate confirmation hearing:
Democrat: "You've been on this person's show 8 times, he has ties with neo-Nazis."
Sen. Norm Respectable (R-MT): "He already had my vote, you didn't need to convince me more."

This is pure speculation but I'm 90% sure that the NVidia drop had nothing to do with Deepseek R1 and was actually insider trading on the "news" that Trump was considering a tariff on Taiwanese chips.
First, R1 was released on the 20th, 5 days before the stock dropped. It wasn't at all a secret, basically it was the talk of the town that whole week and their capabilities claims were shown to be solid very early on by many many people running independent benchmarks. But the market didn't react.
Second, the big AI companies want all the compute they can get, they aren't satisfied with training 10 or 100 or 1000 times more quickly, this is why they're talking about trillion dollar data centers with nuclear reactors. Also of note, R1 was trained on Nvidia TPUs with the same amount of vram as the H100s. You couldn't cheaply train such a model on any other brand of hardware, demand for Nvidia products isn't going anywhere.
Third, if anything it's the AI software companies that would take a big drop, they're the ones who are supposedly spooked and scrambling to replicate R1 internally. The major software only players took only a small hit but recovered quickly, that would be Microsoft and Meta. Google is also a hardware company, they're trying to move some of their chip fabs to TMSC but their TPUs are made by Samsung. They took a small hit and have not yet recovered. AMD is a hardware company, they have fabs all over including sourcing from TMSC, same story. Intel, a similar company, no change whatsoever, they don't use TMSC at all. Nvidia took the big one, and they get ALL of their chips from... TMSC. All the action happened about simultaneously in after hours weekend trading.
Fourth, when the tariff news dropped the market seemed to be unaffected almost as if it had already been priced in over weekend trading.

The University of Michigan has suspended a pro-Palestinian group for 2 years
Boycott University of Michigan. They have a Huge college football presense. Blue and Gold.
Let it be known the University of Michgan is a ZIONAZI fascist organization that atands with genocide, aparthied, racism and bigotry. They used false anti semitism to shield their own fascist involvement and behavior.
Do not enroll. Do not watch their games. Do not buy their merch or themed merch.
Idk how to get a recall going but perhaps we can recall the board members and regents who are highly paid gifting zionazis. They are a public institution. They should be held accountable.

Finally can create an account to say:
FFS people Colombia didn't agree or surrender to Trump's terms on deportation. Petro wanted deportees to be treated humanly and not be chained like animals.
He got it. And didn't get any sanctions.
How is this a loss for Petro or Colombia? Or a win for Trump?

Trump is already blaming DEI and mental illness for the crash in the press conference

Qassam has released quite a lot of footage of their operations against the IOF during the last month or so, before the signing of the ceasefire. All I can say is that despite 15 months of relentless bombing and a full blown ground operation, the Resistance's fighting capacity is still there. It's not untouched though because I believe the Resistance has suffered tremendously, but they are more than able to fight back and even determine the pace of fighting. In the latest series of videos released by Qassam, named "Ambushes of Death", the picture couldn't look worse of the "israelis".., scores of their soldiers are killed or seriously wounded in elaborated RPG, IED and sniper operations in the last few months. In one such operation, a Qassam Brigades team detonates a BIG IED under a Merkava tank and flips it over, tossing the turret away from the chassis in the process, resulting in multiple dead for the "israelis" as well as gravely wounded.
Do check out Jon Elmer's twitter account if you haven't, it's a great archive of Qassam/PIJ footage that might be uh.. handy I guess.
I have nothing but admiration for the military prowess of the Gazans, they're fighting in a small strip of land that is almost entirely flat and urban. There are no mountains or jungles to run away to, it's just a big city with smaller ones as satellites, the sea and the big border with "israel" and Egypt, completely at the marcy of their genocidal neighbors. Their only hope was to dig, dig and dig, study every single street and corner that exists and have a plan for each part of the city, strike only when necessary or when the enemy is completely distracted (like when these mfs just start posing for pictures or bulldozing buildings). Their way of conducting urban guerrilla warfare will be studied for generations, there have been urban guerrillas in the past but I think none is just as good as this one.

buh-bye construction

Chinese company DeepSeek enters the market and crashes stocks in the US and Europe. Losses in Western technology stocks could reach more than 1 trillion dollars.
NVidia alone lost more than 400 billion dollars in market value and its shares plummeted 13%. Nasdaq is down 3%, driven by losses in chip technology companies.
Meta, Alphabet (owned by Google), Oracle, Broadcom and other technology giants have also suffered losses. DeepSeek promises to be more efficient, faster and cheaper than Open AI's ChatGPT. Nvidia's loss exceeds 520 billion dollars. Apple retakes the lead as “world's most valuable company”; NVidia is now worth “only” 2.8 trillion dollars.
- Losses in Western technology stocks could reach more than 1 trillion dollars.
- @TheGenderWitch@hexbear.net this is what I meant when I said that if a competitor can come in and destroy a company's projected future revenue, it destroys the wealth of the people that own it.
  
  this is just capitalist competition though, and could only happen due to large capitalist interests themselves deciding that this investment is no longer profitable. If workers could come up with their own AI and do this theres a lot more they can do than just do stock manipulation.

Im seeing a lot of people not getting their SNAP benefits after this government freeze

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/genz-dictatorship-survey-jordan-peterson-b2686927.html
A lot of blah blah blah in this, predictable differences between gender and these are the only parts I think that matter
Controversial influencers Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson were among those to command similar trust by 42 per cent of men.
I really don't like this line.

Another one to file under "not a surprise to the news heads but perhaps one to share with your libs"
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250128-uk-has-been-active-participant-in-israels-genocide-in-gaza-new-report-claims/

Really seems like Trump has no idea what the fuck he’s doing lmao
Reminds me of what my boss does when he’s trying to impress his boss

Canada, Mexico and China should simply increase trade between themselves, leave the US in the dust. Build a belt and road around the US

A host at a German public broadcaster allegedly had visceral reaction of disgust, when a guest, an Israeli-German cyber-security professor, said her name was "from Israel". First of all, there is no such thing as being "from Israel", and what's an Israeli name anyway?
Only a Zionist would answer this way, I thought, and yeah, she has written an article about how "Israel must also defend itself on the Internet".
The host is probably going to get fired, she's Turkish-German so they'll count that against her.

So states are saying the funding freeze will in fact impact Medicaid
joker voice and here…. we…. Go…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/world/europe/north-korea-troops-ukraine-russia.html
Ghost of Pyongyang

Jon Stewart saying AI breakthrough in china is because of lack of labour laws and human rights. Funny TV men as political pundits in America I guess

Trump is making some insane moves, implying that he is pausing hundreds of billions $$$ for various federal payments, without directly saying which payments exactly. And the markets are just not reacting to it. Yeah, he could be crashing the economy or just pausing already tiny payments to homeless shelters, we really can't tell. Whatever.

Sheinbaum orders tariffs against the USA in response to Trump; "categorically" rejects criminal alliances
Sheinbaum ordered the Secretary of Economy, Marcelo Ebrard, to implement tariff and non-tariff measures for defenders of Mexican interests, after the United States imposed widespread tariffs on Mexican products.
The President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, said this Wednesday that she does not believe that this week US President Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs on the country and its neighbor Canada will come true.
President Claudia Sheinbaum ordered Economy Secretary Marcelo Ebrard to implement tariff and non-tariff measures to defend Mexico's interests, after the United States imposed widespread tariffs on Mexican products.
The president also "categorically rejected the White House's slander against the Government of Mexico of having alliances with criminal organizations, as well as any interventionist intention in our territory," responding to Washington's statement that Mexican drug trafficking organizations have a "intolerable alliance" with the Government of Mexico.

https://xcancel.com/AliAbunimah/status/1883973272695627992:
I’m free! I wrote this on the plane and I’m posting it just after landing at Istanbul. On Monday evening I was brought to Zurich airport in handcuffs, in a small metal cage inside a windowless prison van and led all the way to the plane by police. This is after three days and two nights in a Swiss prison cut off from communication with the outside world, in a cell 24 hours a day with one cell mate, not even permitted to contact my family. On Saturday in a police interview in the presence of my lawyer they accused me of “offending against Swiss law” without ever telling me what crime I had committed in Switzerland or listing any charges. As far as I know I have not been charged with any crime whatsoever and I was held in “administrative detention.” On Sunday morning, they took me from my cell for questioning by Swiss defense ministry intelligence agents without the presence of my lawyer, and they again refused to allow me to contact her or my family. I refused to talk to them without my lawyer and told them take me back to my cell. During my imprisonment I refused every meal and every cup of coffee or tea they offered me except the last meal, after I knew I would be going home. I accepted only water, which is the right of every human being. All of this was after I was abducted off the street around 1:30pm on Saturday while on my way to the Palestine teach-in by undercover agents, handcuffed, forced into an unmarked car and sped straight to the prison. My “crime”? Being a journalist who speaks up for Palestine and against Israel’s genocide and settler-colonial savagery and those who aid and abet it. I came to Switzerland at the invitation of Swiss citizens to talk about justice for Palestine, to talk about accountability for a genocide in which Switzerland too is complicit. But while I was hauled off to prison like a dangerous criminal before I even had a chance to say a word, the Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who declared at the start of the genocide that there are no civilians in Gaza, no innocents, received a red carpet welcome in Davos, a carpet soaked in the blood of the more than 47,000 known victims of the genocide and the thousands more still under the rubble, or who died of deliberately inflicted starvation and denial of medical care. And on this very day Netanyahu freely travels to Poland to make a mockery of the Auschwitz commemoration despite an outstanding ICC arrest warrant. That is the perverse, unjust world we live in. This ordeal lasted three days but that taste of prison was more than enough to leave me in even greater awe of the Palestinian heroes who endure months and years in the prisons of the genocidal oppressor. More than ever I know that the debt we owe them is one we can never repay and all of them must be free and they must remain our focus. The police gave me my phone back only at the gate of the plane so I’m only seeing now the extent of the overwhelming support and solidarity from all over the world. I’m deeply grateful to each and every person who stood up for me. I’m especially grateful to my lawyer Dina Raewel and her team, to our friends in Zurich who I learned afterwards demonstrated outside the prison, to my family and my colleagues at EI and so many others. I honestly had no idea what was happening outside that concrete room! Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I want to tell the whole story of what happened, perhaps in an @intifada livestream in the next day or two, because I think it’s important for people to know the depths to which their Western so-called “democracies” have sunk in the abject service of genocidal Zionism. Right now I’m glad to be on my way home. I’m looking forward to hugging my mom and dad, taking a shower and sleeping in my own bed. Journalism is not a crime! Speaking out for Palestine is not a crime! Standing against racist genocidal Zionism is not a crime! Say it with me:
From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free! ❤️🇵🇸✌️
- How could Trump do this?!
  Sorry. I'm in a dark mood from too much Reddit.
  Anyway, fuck the Zionists so much. Go Switzerland; free and independent bastion of Western civilization, right?!
  Glad Ali is now free, after not-too-long-but-still-unbearably-long.

From the 25th to the 29th, in a period of 83 hours, the Deepseek server cluster was hit by more than 230 million DDos malicious requests per second. The total amount of attack was equivalent to the total network traffic in Europe for three days.
https://xcancel.com/MacaesBruno/status/1885417087994036511#m

It's funny to see western liberal papers criticize R1 for "censoring" their models. True, it does censor some stuff by default like the June 4th events or Taiwan but I've had it saying Chinese economy only works because it's repressive completely unprompted.
Also says some crazy stuff Openai models would never, like quoting Mao, "Revolution is not a dinner party".

Plane and helicopter collide in the air in Washington D.C. The aircraft exploded and crashed into the Potomac River, which runs through the US capital.
The American Airlines aircraft was bound for Kansas. The helicopter, according to sources, was a Black Hawk. Reagan Airport is closed and flights have been suspended.

Italy has blocked the Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, Reuters reports. DeepSeek is blocked in the Apple and Google app stores.
The blocking comes after local authorities decided to investigate how exactly DeepSeek uses users' personal data. The regulator is demanding explanations about what data is collected, for what purpose and whether it is stored in China.
Companies linked to DeepSeek have until February 17 to respond to the Italian watchdog's requests. If found to be in breach of privacy laws, the chatbot could face significant fines or restrictions.
ChatGPT also collects data and sends to Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

72 million new potential

~~Police~~ military helicopter involved in a tactically intercepted american airlines flight in Washington DC

https://bsky.app/profile/erininthemorning.com/post/3lgthupw73s22
Uhh apparently they just banned minors transitioning? Shit.

[nytimes archived link]~~https://archive.is/IkuOE~~ edit:: updatehttps://archive.is/zP5jp
White House Orders Pause in All Federal Grants and Loans The White House budget office has ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance, according to a memo sent to government agencies on Monday, potentially paralyzing a vast swath of programs and jeopardizing spending that Congress has mandated by law. In the two-page memo, Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, directed federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” and any other programs that included “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.”
It was not immediately clear which programs would be affected, although the scope could be vast. The memo said Medicare and Social Security benefits were exempt.
hmmm

Truckers be like: we support Trump’s border policies but we don’t like that you’re hurting our jobs and making our treats more expensive! Please re-consider!

Trump illegally fires NLRB and EEOC appointees: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/28/nx-s1-5277103/nlrb-trump-wilcox-abruzzo-democrats-labor
It really seems that the administration is going all in on unitary executive theory.

The USAID website is still down: https://www.usaid.gov/
Their Twitter account is also down: https://twitter.com/USAID?mx=1
Nerds speculate whether it's taken offline or if it's related to some DNS fuckery: https://xcancel.com/theoc2ps/status/1885803710485262743
This is an excellent opening for countries need to put
Thought into practice.

Billionaire tech CEOs are seeing their fortunes disappear in a matter of hours, thanks to the launch of DeepSeek. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has already lost 28.9 billion dollars. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has lost 21.3 billion dollars so far. Dell's CEO, Michael Dell, has lost 14.2 billion dollars; and famous Neo Nazi, Elon Musk, has lost 6.5 billion dollars. In addition to them, Google CEOs Larry Page, Sergey Brim and Andreas von Bechtolsheim have together lost 15.8 billion dollars.
- "Fortunes disappear" is a rather large exaggeration I fear. Oh no, Larry Ellison's fortune has disappeared, he's lost so much wealth that now instead of being the second richest person on the planet he's become checks notes the third richest person on the planet. $28.9 billion is not even 10% of his fortune.
  
  Its only a fortune if it had been in someone else's hands
- Lol that's barely anything to them
- I too saw my fortune disappear this week buying one carton of eggs
- Looks like they're recovering. I'd like to think it put a momentary sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs, though. Gotta dream big, right?

He made it sound like a full scale invasion of California 🤣

https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1885473025476145386#m
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/31/trump-california-water-00201909
Local officials had to talk the Army Corps of Engineers down after it abruptly alerted them Thursday afternoon it was about to increase flows from two reservoirs to maximum capacity — a move the agency said was in response to Trump directing the federal government to “maximize” water supplies. Before the Corps ratcheted down its plan, local authorities scrambled to move equipment and warn farms about possible flooding, said Victor Hernandez, who oversees water management on one of the rivers, the Kaweah in Tulare County. He said the Corps gave him one hour notice on Thursday. “I’ve been here 25 years, and I’ve never been given notice that quick,” Hernandez said. “That was alarming and scary.”
...It also reduces the amount of irrigation water available to farmers during the driest months of the year. The snowpack in the Southern Sierra Nevada that California depends on for water supplies in the summer has dipped to 47 percent of average for this time of year after a dry January, according to state estimates released Friday. “We need to keep every bit that we have, because this potentially is irrigation water that we have up there,” Hernandez said.
turns out that when trump said that he had the military release the water in california he just meant he made the army corps open up the dams???

we are in hell
- Chrystia Freeland
  
  Equally applicable to
  too
- Of course Canada won't be the 51st state. It will be stuck as some shitty territory instead.
- She’s right - The US isn’t selling its lapdog Canada to anybody anytime soon, and allowing Canada to do anything without permission from daddy USA is obviously out of the question, and most definitely non-negotiable.

another F35 down
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/military/2025/01/28/f-35-crashes-at-eielson-air-force-base-military-officials-say/
Video - https://xcancel.com/anadoluagency/status/1884461076487499852

Is this good?
Edit: musk is doing am hostile takeover of the US government lol
Elon Musk was at USAID this weekend trying to access a SCIF [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility], State Department source tells me
https://nitter.poast.org/kenklippenstein/status/1886105958872482267#m

Elon will be the American Himmler. Complete with trying to create his own state/fantasising about couping Hitler

South Africa and several of its allies have formed The Hague Group in another attempt to bring the "Apartheid Entity" to account and a possible alternative to the illegitimate courts in the West, with the ICJ's nuts roasting on an open fire in a war of attrition so to say. A live broadcast of the press conference started less than 30 minutes ago from me posting, being streamed by Salaamedia. Here is the link now saved on TankieTube, in 1080p.
Some of the other key figures present in The Hague Group press conference also include Namibia, Colombia, Malaysia, Bolivia as well as Ireland's Sinn Fein chairperson Declan Kearney.

The merciless January counteroffensive against China watchers continues. Further thawing between India and China:
https://xcancel.com/MayadeenEnglish/status/1884149054914888088
India and China have tentatively agreed to restart direct flights between their countries, nearly five years after they were suspended due to the COVID19 pandemic and escalating political tensions.
The announcement on Monday came after India’s senior diplomat visited Beijing, suggesting a potential easing of strained relations between the two most populous nations in the world.
Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri’s visit to the Chinese capital is among the most significant official interactions since the deadly border clash in the Himalayas in 2020, which pushed relations to a breaking point.
India’s statement further noted that China had agreed to allow the resumption of pilgrimages to a revered shrine dedicated to the Hindu deity Krishna, a tradition that had been suspended since the start of the decade.

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