clay

@gmiller @amconmag @WhiteHouse Maybe do some research into who you voted for. Trump bought by Elon Musk. Vance bought by Peter Thiel. It is administration bought and paid for by tech / AI / crypto.

@amconmag The AI industry is the exact opposite of every value, every belief, every goal, everything that MAGA was supposed to stand for. The @WhiteHouse needs to understand that simping for the Leftist, globist, atheist, 'transhumanists' who run AI companies is not what we voted for.

"Imagine a humanoid named Plato." Melania Trump says humanoid educators will offer "instantaneous" access to the classical studies for students and help create a "more complete person."

@Dr_M_Davis @Robert_E_Kelly Isn't it even stupider than that? In what way would ground troops give assurance to insurers that ships wouldn't be subject to drone / amphibious / mine attacks?

How does the US sustain forces ashore on Kharg and along the coastline of Hormuz logistically, from long range, under fire? And as you say, once in, those ground forces really have to stay in - unless the regime can be removed. The only way I can see that the regime can be removed is if a ground invasion drives on Tehran across vast, mountainous terrain, ideal for Iranian forces to attack across complex terrain. And those ground forces need to be sustained logistically - from where? Iraq? And then what? Iraq showed us that even when the main combat phase is over, the ability to pacify hostile forces or prevent insurgency is very limited and extremely costly in lives and resources, and extended in time. No one has thought this through.

Let’s say we do take Kharg Island & a strip of the Iranian side of Hormuz, & open the strait Then what? How long do we stay? Won’t Iran shut the strait again as soon as we leave? How do we respond when the entire Iranian military descends on these enclaves? Mission creep looms

@MZanona Why is anyone pretending we have normal government? We have government of mad king and sycophants. Why would anyone imagine that anyone knows what will happen next?

New: Tensions flare in bipartisan Hill briefing on Iran Lots of frustration from both parties over lack of info Briefers could not provide details about the possibility of deploying U.S. troops, but would not rule it out & some lawmakers made clear in the closed-door meeting they wouldnt support boots on the ground w/ @ckubeNBC @jonallendc @glubold nbcnews.com/politics/congr…

@BedoyaUSA Very sad that no one in Biden administration thought to tell anyone what you were doing.

When I was at the FTC, I heard from various people that social media companies were hiring tons of psychologists. So I asked our law clerk to go on LinkedIn to try to figure out how many they had. She came back to me and told me there were too many to count. She suggested I focus on PhDs, and I said sure let's try that. A day later she came back and told me that just three or four companies had 180 or 190 PhD psychologists and brain scientists, and that one company, alone, had around 150. So I then asked her to figure out what these people were doing. For that, we looked at job postings. And the sad fact we saw was that while a minority of the open posts were for jobs that would mitigate or prevent addiction and other harms, the large majority of those posts were aimed at maximizing "engagement" -- at keeping people hooked for longer. So, with the support of Chair Khan, we started building the first behavioral team at the FTC, and hired on our first pediatrician, our first psychologist, and a human-computer interaction specialist (a technologist). This was the scrappy, brilliant group that was starting to help us assess the public allegations against these companies. I always wished that more of my parent friends could talk to -- and learn -- from Dr. Radesky, the pediatrician and youth development expert who was the anchor of that group. And now she has generously agreed to field questions from @thefairfightpod listeners -- details on how you can submit a question are below. If you have a question about your kids, teens (or yourself) and AI chatbots and social media, this is a rare chance to get that answered by a top expert in the field.

@MarkNel1026 Exactly the conversation I had with my mother today on hearing about death of 52 yo cousin. We are being poisoned and dying and no one is talking about much less adressing.

I’m tired of going to cancer fundraisers and funerals for perfectly healthy young people that have types of cancer that they are statistically improbable of getting for their age and lifestyle. Things needs to change

@DavidSegalRI @projo @GateHouse_Media What % of Projo subscribers live in FL during winter?

I'm in the middle of Providence, at home in Federal Hill, and I haven't been to Florida in over a decade. Why is the @projo @GateHouse_Media (Gannett) always serving me articles that are ads about restaurants in places like Palm Beach?

@SarahLongwell25 How depressing is it that he would have to cause this much destruction to get down to 40%.

Remarkable consistency among all major pollsters that Trump is very unpopular.

@jean_twenge I kept my kids off screens. No phones until middle school. My high school son's algorithms are brutal & relentless. No one could convince me there isn't coordinated effort to radicalize teen boys.

Sure, the "where are the parents?" argument, because it's so easy to keep kids off social media when age isn't verified, parental permission isn't required, the parental controls in the apps are so hidden and hard to use hardly any parents use them, and kids fear being the only one that doesn't have it. And back then basic phones (like Gabb, Troomi, or Pinwheel) that automatically exclude social media apps weren't available yet.

@peterpeirce @ddayen He literally presented it as finding coins in a sofa. He inherited huge shortfall - but sure - his efforts to find waste are the problem.

@ddayen and yet everything he found was not anywhere near what he needed to find x.com/createcraig/st…

Practically everything he found was price-gouging from contractors or outsourcing. The mindbending part of DOGE was that it was going to increase public spending by cutting public staff. Building state capacity saves money.

@ddayen 4 decades of both parties supporting privatization of government functions. And it takes a socialist to quickly point out is significant source of waste in government.

@annastansbury Confused why this is surprising. Unemployed post college sitting with unemployed roommate. She asked for help with resume / attire as dad had set up meeting with private banker who was going to get her job. She was given list of options and she chose paralegal at top law firm.

We often think that the effects of class background are washed out by education. But we show that two people who did the same subject at the same university at the same time, and got the same grade …. end up earning quite different amounts when they enter the labour market

@drantbradley A surprising number. And oddly I encountered them when I sent my kids to Catholic school.

What kind of parents raise sons that would do something like this?

@BulwarkOnline @PhilGordonDC @Timodc Some delusional talk. No one who cared about that issue got the sense - instinctively - that she had authentic, different feeling from Biden.

"She spoke about the Palestinian issue in a way that I think showed a sort of instinctive feeling that was different from what the president's was." @PhilGordonDC and @Timodc discuss where Kamala Harris could have distanced herself more from Biden.

@EliotACohen @TheAtlantic That anyone calls the unmasking of the US military as paper tiger “remarkable” is astonishing. DoD planning & procurement has been a colossal failure. $800B/yr — now asking $1.5T — and we’re losing war against cheap drones. Not another dollar until there’s a full reckoning.

In many ways our performance in the Iran war has been remarkable. But there are serious warning signs that need to be addressed. My latest in @theAtlantic: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/…

@sethharpesq Beyond absurd when US leaders making these decisions for other nations have <40% approval.

I hate to keep harping on it but this very much reminds me of my conversation with Ross Douthat. These people have no answer and go completely blank when confronted head-on with the question, "What gives you the right to determine a foreign country's form of government?"

@matthewstoller After 4 decades of both parties agreeing that privatization the answer - truly edifying for Mamdani to point out that private contractors & consultants are major source of waste in govt.

Mamdani just cut a $9 million contract that McKinsey has with NYC. And then brags about it publicly. More please.

@TCLangWrites @TheMetzMan @nataliesurely Maybe watch some of his stream as you really don't know what his views are.

@clayfrom80 @TheMetzMan @nataliesurely I don't need to watch hours of reaction slop content to know what his beliefs are

Hasan has great politics, rizz for days, and uses his platform to support on-the-ground political organizing, unions, anti-war movements. He’s the only streamer with a massive young male audience who isn’t a reactionary freak. His political credibility isn’t in doubt, yours is!

@mideastXmidwest We are never going to get better leaders, better people in government if people like Blinken are feted at Harvard vs called to account for their actions.

How does Tony Blinken reconcile his Gaza legacy? Speaking at the Harvard Kennedy School, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked yesterday about how he sees Gaza — and whether the Biden administration should have cut off arms to Israel. The moderator, New York Times journalist David Sanger, described Gaza as probably the "weakest" part of the diplomat's legacy. "Of course, for me, coulda woulda shoulda, is something that will always be there when it comes to Gaza," Mr. Blinken said. "Given the level of human suffering, given the horrific loss of of life among Palestinian women, men, children — you can't help but ask yourself on a regular basis, could we should we have done something different?" A Harvard student pushed further during the Q&A. He asked the former secretary of state more specifically about the 2024 USAID conclusion that Israel had blocked aid to Palestinians despite Mr. Blinken telling Congress the opposite, overriding experts to continue sending weapons to Israel. "You had opportunities to distance yourself and your administration from arming Israel, which committed what leading Holocaust scholars and human rights agencies call a genocide," the student said. "You rejected them and continued arming Israel. This is your legacy. How do you justify to the countless Palestinians, including thousands of children, that died from your decisions?" The student then read the names of several young children were killed in Gaza. "How do you reconcile with this and how do you reconcile with your legacy?" "This is something that I grappled with and will continue to grapple with for as long as I can see into the future," Mr. Blinken said. "Could we, should we have done things differently such that the suffering that people endured, the loss of the children you just listed and so many others could have been averted. The short answer is: Maybe yes. "We had to make judgments. We had to make judgments in real time about how to try to get to a better place. We made those judgments. People will make their own judgments about what we did and what we didn't do. "But let me just add a few things... and my great friend Samantha [Power] is here and we had this, you know, ongoing discussions in our own administration on the question of the assistance that was getting or not getting to Palestinians in Gaza throughout 2024. I was on this every single day, literally every single day. And we had a series of reports come out suggesting that there was an imminent famine that was about to happen. And then the next report would say actually fewer people are in danger even though people were leading terribly hard and difficult lives. "That didn't just happen. It happened because every single day we were on the Israelis to try to get assistance in, to open more crossing points, to flood the zone. They did that profoundly inadequately. They did that in ways that were not the way I would like to have seen it done, but we got some of that done. "When the report that you referred to came out and this was the product of the so-called NSM, the national security memorandum. If you look at that report, it lays out a lot of the actions that Israel were taking that were of more than deep concern to us. And I think that report actually served a very useful function in motivating the Israelis to do better. Not to do as much as they should have and as we would have wanted, but to do better. And at various points the aid went up, the number of trucks going in went up. The distribution even with the trucks going in was a huge problem. Looting, criminality, etc., all difficult problems that are really hard to control for. "But yes, of course, you couldn't be and I wouldn't be human if I didn't ask myself every day, could we have done things differently. "The one thing I want to suggest to you as well… I believe and look maybe I'm wrong that the nature of the the trauma in Israel, which is, there's no hierarchy of trauma, the trauma in Israel, the trauma among Palestinians, the same. The loss of a Palestinian life, the loss of Israeli life, the same. But on the Israeli side, the trauma was such that I believe the determination across that society to take the actions that they took in Gaza was such that irrespective of what we did, they would have continued to do what they did. And cutting off arms, sure, that was an option. But I don't actually believe that at least in the near term, it would have changed things. "And I also believe it would have led to an even wider war as Israel's enemies, and they were multiple, jumped in and that only would have extended the war in Gaza, not ended the war in Gaza. "We thought that the best way to get to an end, to protect people, to help people, was to get to a ceasefire, with hostages coming out and with aid going in. And you know I fully—more than respect—I empathize with people who felt this so, so deeply. I do remain with a question in my mind about why barely a word was spoken in all those months about Hamas, which was an actor too and is responsible for so much of what happened. "But yes, we all look at it, I certainly look at it, and say maybe we could have done differently. Maybe we could have done better by the people. I wish we could have."

@TCLangWrites @TheMetzMan @nataliesurely You do need to know what his opinions are to pronounce them bad.

@clayfrom80 @TheMetzMan @nataliesurely I don't need to be a subscriber to think his opinions are bad

@davidplouffe Most stellar part - finding that private contractors more expensive than doing work in-house. That $9 mn McKinsey contract wasteful. Under discussed over last 40 years degree to which private contractors & consultants have been bleeding govt budgets.

Stellar.