Chuck-NAFO 🇨🇭🇩🇪🇮🇹🇵🇱🇪🇺🇹🇼🇬🇱🌍🕉️🐈🐕

The MAGA crowd in Washington has decided that since Europeans don’t sufficiently appreciate Trump, the American bases on the continent must go. This is the strategic reasoning of a man who burns down his own kitchen. American bases in Europe were never a favour. They are the logistical spine of every war the United States fights east of Gibraltar. Ramstein moves the cargo, Aviano launches the jets, Rota services the ships. Without them the Pentagon does not project power into the Middle East. It projects PowerPoint. The fantasy assumes the alternative is aircraft carriers gliding majestically into the Persian Gulf. That era is ending. A modern carrier is a thirteen-billion-dollar trophy that can be reduced to scrap by a couple of hundred cheap missiles fired from the Iranian coast. China noticed. The other fantasy is that America simply fights from home. Picture the alternative: twenty thousand transatlantic sorties shuttling spare parts, munitions, fuel bladders, mechanics and replacement pilots from Norfolk and Dover to wherever the war happens to be. A C-17 burns through roughly 35,000 dollars of fuel every hour it flies, and the round trip from the American east coast to the Gulf is the better part of a day. Multiply that by every bolt, every missile, every spare engine. The war becomes a sustained airborne traffic jam with the bill arriving by the second. So you need land, specifically land near the war. Modern combat aircraft are not Spitfires you fuel up and send off with a wave. An F-35 demands an entire Walmart of spare parts, a small city of technicians, climate-controlled hangars and a supply chain stretching halfway round the planet. Drones need operators, networks, satellites and a steady diet of components no carrier can store. Modern war arrives by container ship and lives in a warehouse. Close the bases, and Washington loses the warehouses. Lose the warehouses, and the next confrontation with Iran is either fought by phone or fought from Kansas with a flight schedule that bankrupts the Treasury before the first missile lands. MAGA thinks shutting Ramstein punishes Europe. It punishes America. Europe will be inconvenienced. America will be unarmed. And so, after a thousand insults, a thousand sneers, a thousand late-night posts about freeloading allies, Europe is quietly drafting the politest letter in diplomatic history. It thanks America for its service. It wishes the troops a safe journey home. It suggests, with great warmth, that Washington might now turn its attention to its neighbours in Latin America, where a fading superpower can busy itself with whatever a fading superpower busies itself with. Spain had its century. Britain had its empire. The Soviets had their parades. Each ended the same way: as a shadow of itself, with the historians left to argue, volume after volume, about precisely when the rot set in and why nobody noticed in time. America is welcome to join them on the shelf.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ If you like what you read, please follow Gandalv on Substack: @gandalv" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@gandalv

The U.S. federal government has a ghost. His name was Aaron Swartz. At 14 he co-wrote the code that powers every podcast on Earth. At 19 his startup merged into Reddit. At 24 he was a Harvard fellow studying corruption. In 2011 he downloaded 4.8 million academic papers from JSTOR. JSTOR declined to press charges. The federal government did not decline. 13 felony counts. 35 years in prison. $1 million fine. For downloading research. His lawyer warned the prosecutor he was a suicide risk. The prosecutor's response, on the record: "Fine, we'll lock him up." While he waited for trial, he built one last piece of software with two others. A way for any whistleblower in the world to reach any journalist in the world without dying for it. January 11, 2013. Aaron died by suicide in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26. His father said at the funeral: "Aaron was killed by the government." A Marine named James Dolan kept the code alive. Iraq War veteran. PTSD. He installed it at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Intercept, ProPublica. December 2017. James died by suicide in a Brooklyn hotel. He was 36. Two of the three creators are dead. Here's the wildest part: The repo's first commit is dated January 11, 2012. Aaron died exactly one year later. To the day. The code is still alive. Last push: today. 3,804 stars. 706 forks. AGPL-3.0. Audited by Bruce Schneier. Used by 65+ newsrooms across the world. Two dead developers vs. the most powerful government in history. But DO NOT use SecureDrop. We should all let the government keep its secrets. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

"Cuando la ley ya no te protege de los corruptos, sino que protege a los corruptos de ti, sabes que tu nación está condenada". - Ayn Rand -

Well, well, well. Looks like he's not as popular as he thinks he is. I love this for him. Lmao.

America lecturing Europe on prosperity is a broke man in a repossessed Bentley screaming at his neighbour about the hedge. Your GDP is huge. So is the 40 trillion in debt holding it up. Your bridges are collapsing, your roads belong in Lagos, and your city centres are dead malls patrolled by fentanyl ghosts and the occasional shooter. Your life expectancy is stuck in 1974. Your kids learn active shooter drills before the alphabet. Your workers do 90-hour weeks across three jobs before checking out of the planet early. Your mothers give birth and clock back in the next morning with the umbilical cord still attached. Your big holiday is four days in Orlando. Europe just quietly wins every ranking that matters, from healthcare to happiness to not dying in an ambulance bay because the deductible was too high. Try it sometime. The ambulance ride is on us.

Researchers at EPFL proved your AI is lying to you. Not sometimes. Most of the time. They built one of the hardest hallucination tests ever made with Max Planck Institute. 950 questions. Four domains where being wrong actually hurts. Legal. Medical. Research. Coding. Then they ran every top model on it. The results. GPT-5. Wrong 71.8% of the time. Claude Opus 4.5. Wrong 60% of the time. Gemini 3 Pro. Wrong 61.9% of the time. DeepSeek Reasoner. Wrong 76.8% of the time. These are the smartest AI models on Earth. The ones you trust with your career. Your health. Your money. You think turning on web search fixes it. It doesn't. Claude Opus 4.5 with web search. Still wrong 30.2% of the time. GPT-5.2 thinking with web search. Still wrong 38.2% of the time. The internet attached. Still lying to you in 1 out of every 3 answers. Now the part that should scare you. Medical questions. The one place being wrong can kill you. GPT-5 hallucinated 92.8% of the time on medical guidelines. Claude Haiku 4.5 hallucinated 95.7% of the time. Gemini 3 Flash hallucinated 89% of the time. Nine out of ten medical answers from popular AI models. Wrong. It gets worse. The longer you talk to it, the more it lies. Early mistakes cascade. The model starts citing its own earlier hallucinations as facts. Your third message is more wrong than your first. The paper, in its own words: "hallucinations remain substantial even with web search." This is what hundreds of millions of people are doing right now. Asking software that lies in the majority of its answers. About their health. About their job. About their legal case. About their code. Most are not checking. Most never will. But please. Keep using ChatGPT for medical advice. The doctors need a break. arxiv.org/abs/2602.01031

Donald Trump is not simply stupid. His idiocy is a complex system of ignorance, narcissism, and xenophobia, wrapped in a web of insecurity and covered by a thick layer of self-loathing, afloat in a spiraling, ever-widening miasma of dumb.

The Asian Guy has been removed again from YT. Completely.

Ex wife of Colin Firth tells Anna Wintour she is “heartbroken” she allowed Jeff Bezos to sponsor the Met Gala. Livia Firth has branded the Amazon founder “one of the most dangerous men in the world” while comparing the Met Gala to ‘The Hunger Games.’

If you use TikTok, you should read this once. In October 2024, a court clerk in Kentucky uploaded the lawsuit against TikTok with the confidential sections still visible. NPR downloaded it before anyone caught the mistake. By the time the court resealed it, the internet had a copy. What was inside was TikTok's own engineers, in their own words, describing what their app does to a human brain. Not a critic's brain. Yours. Here is what they wrote down. — TikTok ran the math on how long it takes to develop "compulsive use" of the app. The number is 260 videos. With 8-second videos played in rapid-fire succession, that works out to roughly 35 minutes. The company's internal documents call this the compulsive-use threshold. — TikTok's own research describes what compulsive use causes: "diminished analytical ability, impaired memory, contextual reasoning, conversational depth, empathy, and heightened anxiety." That is not a quote from a critic. That is TikTok's own language, in its own internal documents. — A team inside the company called "TikTank" wrote in an internal report that compulsive use on the platform was "rampant." — After 30 minutes of continuous use in one sitting, the company's own documents state that users are placed into "filter bubbles" — algorithmic loops the user did not choose and cannot easily escape. Then there is the screen-time tool — the one TikTok publicly markets as proof it cares. — TikTok ran an experiment on the 60-minute screen-time prompt. Daily teen usage dropped from 108.5 minutes to 107. A reduction of 1.5 minutes. — Internally, the screen-time tool was not measured by whether it reduced screen time. Its top success metric, in writing, was "improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage." — A project manager wrote in internal chat: "Our goal is not to reduce the time spent." Another employee added that the goal was "to contribute to daily active users and retention." — A TikTok executive approved the screen-time feature only on the condition that its impact on the company's "core metrics" was minimal. The lawsuit alleges the company planned to "revisit the design" if the tool ever reduced usage by more than 10%. The "Are you still scrolling?" break videos? An executive admitted in an internal meeting they were "useful talking points" for lawmakers, but "not altogether effective." Then there is the algorithm itself. — An internal report flagged that the For You feed was showing what the company called "a high volume of not attractive subjects." TikTok then retooled the algorithm to suppress those users. Kentucky authorities wrote: "By changing the TikTok algorithm to show fewer 'not attractive subjects' in the For You feed, [TikTok] took active steps to promote a narrow beauty norm even though it could negatively impact their Young Users." That sentence is the entire pitch of the platform, said out loud. — Internally, TikTok also acknowledged that its publicly reported content moderation metrics were "mostly misleading," because they only measured the content the company successfully moderated — never the content it missed. Now read those bullet points again as one continuous case. The company knows the addiction threshold. The company measured it. The company ranked engagement over mental health in writing. The company built a screen-time tool whose internal success metric was PR. The company suppressed people it deemed unattractive to keep you scrolling. The company called its own moderation numbers misleading. None of this is a leaked rumor. None of this is a journalist's interpretation. This is a court filing. The documents are TikTok's. The words are TikTok's. The math is TikTok's. The 14 state attorneys general who signed onto this lawsuit aren't fringe activists. They're a bipartisan coalition. Sources at the bottom: NPR, CNN, AP, Mashable, OPB, The Independent. All citing the same accidentally-unsealed Kentucky filing from October 11, 2024. The next time the company tells you it cares about your wellbeing — the screen-time prompts, the break videos, the safety features, the careful PR statements — remember that its own engineers wrote down, in court-admissible language, that the safeguards were never meant to work. The app is not broken. It is performing exactly as designed. You were the spec.

"Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it." — Leonardo da Vinci

“Atheists will never get to Heaven!” Most of us know this. We also know we won’t get to Oz, Middle-earth, Narnia, or Valhalla. But we can still choose to be decent people anyway, right?

🚨 EXTREMELY ALARMING: John Kerry at the WEF just said the quiet part out loud: "Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to hammer "disinformation" out of existence... We need to win the right to govern so we’re free to implement change." They don’t want to debate ideas. They want to delete them. The elite’s war on free speech is now on full display. RETWEET if you still believe the 1st Amendment is NON-NEGOTIABLE. Let me know what you think, and SHARE THIS so that others may too!

🚨 Mark Carney just nailed it: Countries that rushed into dodgy deals with the US under Trump got deals “not worth the paper they were written on.” Sound familiar, Brexit Britain? We ditched the stable EU single market for the fantasy 🦄 of brilliant US trade deals… and ended up with higher costs, bureaucracy, and now Trump tariffs. Time to stop the tantrum and do a proper reset with our biggest trading partner.

Wenn ein russisches U-Boot bereits seit vielen Jahren in den Reihen einer Regierungsfraktion sitzt, braucht Russland keine eigenen Spione mehr. Wie praktisch für die russischen Kriegsverbrecher. Unverantwortlich und realitätsfremd.

Mark Hamill still owns my favorite Tweet of all time. 🐐 Happy May the 4th be with you!!! #StarWarsDay

Berlin is banning all Soviet, Russian, and Belarusian flags on May 8th and 9th. Also banned are military uniforms, songs, images of mass murderers Putin, Lukashenko, and Kadyrov, and symbols glorifying the war against Ukraine. All symbols associated with this filthy Russian terrorist, who kills innocent Ukrainians and threatens Germany with war every week, should be banned 365 days a year. But for that to happen, we would need a Chancellor with courage and backbone.

This Wall Street insider just exposed the secret doomsday escape plans of AI billionaires. 1 in 3 billionaires has a fully funded plan to abandon civilization when things collapse. They meet their pilots at Oakland airport, board a Gulfstream 650, fly to New Zealand, and disappear into a bunker that cost tens of millions to build. And this isn't some conspiracy theory. There's literally PROOF: Sam Altman told The New Yorker he stockpiles guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, and gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force. He owns a patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to when society breaks down. His backup plan is flying with Peter Thiel to Thiel's compound in New Zealand. Peter Thiel became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 after spending only 12 days in the country. He bought a 477-acre estate for $13.5 million and submitted plans for a bunker-style compound embedded into a hillside with a 1,082-foot glass-lined guest lodge for 24 people. Mark Zuckerberg is building a 5,000 square foot underground shelter beneath his $270 million compound in Hawaii. Blast-resistant doors made of metal and concrete, its own energy and food supplies, and an escape hatch accessible by ladder. Every construction worker signed an NDA and different crews were forbidden from speaking to each other. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, quietly disappeared to Fiji during the pandemic. He reportedly bought at least one private island in the Mamanuca archipelago. When local media reported his presence, Fijian authorities ordered the article taken down. Scott Galloway sat with one of these billionaires who walked him through his entire exit strategy step by step. His response: "You don't think your pilots are going to kill you and fuck your wife? You don't think the people in New Zealand are going to come take the rich guy's shit?" But here's the thing that really matters... These are the SAME people building AI. The same founders telling Congress that AI will cure cancer have already decided they're leaving when it goes sideways. Galloway confirmed a secondhand account from someone close to one of these AI CEOs. The CEO admitted he believes there's a 7 to 10% chance AI results in a catastrophic event for humanity. And he doesn't care because being the person who summoned this intelligence is "more consequential than whatever happens." These billionaires don't use public healthcare. They have concierge medicine delivered to their living room. Their kids attend $75,000 per year academies while public schools spend $10,000. They fly private. They have private security instead of police. Galloway's words: "The 0.1% are no longer invested in the well-being of America. They've totally dissociated because they're sequestered from it." And the incentives to reach that level are so extreme that founders will make ANY decision necessary to get there. Galloway called it the Darth Vader pipeline. Every tech CEO follows the same arc: Sam Altman was "the gay son we all wanted." Soft spoken, testifying before Congress about safety. Now he's subpoenaing nonprofits that criticize OpenAI and telling people to stop complaining about energy costs. Galloway on all of them: "These guys would sleep with their cousin for a nickel." The next chosen hero is Dario Amodei at Anthropic. Galloway says he'll follow the exact same path because the system makes it inevitable. Then he dropped his most dangerous prediction: He thinks there's a 1 in 3 chance AI ends up like jet transportation, vaccines, or PCs. Technologies that changed civilization but where NO group of companies ever captured serious shareholder value. The entire airline industry across all of history is at break even. Moderna is down 90%. AI models are converging. Open weight Chinese models are free and a third of corporations are already using them. His prediction: Go short the AI ecosystem. The winner of AI might be us, the users. Not the companies. And if he's right, the domino effect is terrifying... 40% of the S&P is tied to AI. Most GDP growth over the last two years came from AI capex. So if corporations start dropping OpenAI and Anthropic for free Chinese models, the entire market could crash. This is just like the Chinese steel dumping in the 80s: Flood America with cheap AI, kneecap the companies propping up the stock market, then trigger a recession without firing a single shot. The billionaires building AI have escape plans ready. They've detached from society entirely. They know there's a real chance this ends badly and they're building it anyway. Every tech hero turns villain on a shorter timeline. And the financial system is so dependent on AI valuations that one move from China could bring it all down. And we're still trusting these people to self-regulate. What do you think?

“Being hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one of them.” - Jean Cocteau