Twothingscanbetrueatthesametime

@DavidAsmanfox If this is true it’s the most disgusting political concept I have ever heard. If it is not true Hakeem needs to publicly deny it immediately. I have no more eloquent thoughts on the matter.

@krznikov @AimenDean Seems it’s all about the midterms.

@AimenDean I am struggling to understand why the USA seems willing to throw away all its influence and alliances in the ME paid for with tremendous amounts of blood and treasure over the years for a shitty JCPOA-reloaded deal with a regime who won't observe it for even a day?

Having spoken to a senior Saudi official about the NBC article regarding Project Freedom, I honestly think the article completely misunderstood what actually happened because it was written almost entirely from a US perspective rather than from a GCC perspective. First of all, contrary to the impression being created, the GCC were NOT blindsided by Project Freedom. They knew about it beforehand. Roughly half a day before. The airspace was opened. The facilities were available. Nobody objected. There was broad support for the idea because, at least publicly, Project Freedom was supposed to be a limited humanitarian-security operation aimed at relieving the 22,000 sailors trapped around Hormuz and allowing shipping lanes to breathe again. Nobody in the GCC had a problem with that. But here is the issue .. and this is the part the NBC article completely misses. If you are asking GCC countries to participate in such an operation, then you need to be upfront about the rules of engagement from day one! You cannot say:
“Please open your skies and bases, expose your energy infrastructure” …only for everyone to discover afterwards that the actual American policy was apparently: “Oh by the way, if Iran attacks you with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones in several waves, we still won’t retaliate because Donald Trump is busy chasing The Deal.” And this is exactly what shocked the Saudis. Not the Iranian attack itself. The UAE/GCC expected retaliation.. This is Iran. Nobody in the Gulf is naïve about that anymore. The shock came from the American reaction afterwards. You had attacks against Emirati infrastructure. Fujairah was targeted. Multiple waves involving drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles. And Washington’s response was basically:
“Meh. Minor incident. Let’s not escalate.” Minor incident?! For the GCC that was madness. Because what Riyadh, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi suddenly realized was that Trump’s obsession with preserving “The Deal” had apparently reached the point where Gulf energy infrastructure was now considered acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of his precious negotiations. Everything became:
The deal.
The deal.
The beautiful deal.
The greatest deal.
The mother of all deals. The ultimate “Art of the deal” Or perhaps, more accurately:
The ultimate fart of the deal. Because from the Gulf perspective, this stopped looking like strategy and started looking like desperate political vanity mixed with deadly wishful thinking. Had the GCC been told beforehand:
“Listen, whatever Iran does to you during Project Freedom, America will not retaliate because we do not want to endanger negotiations…” …they would have almost certainly refused participation from the start. The problem was not Project Freedom itself. The problem was discovering midway through the operation that the GCC countries were apparently expected to sit there quietly as punching bags while Washington played negotiation theatrics with Tehran. So the Saudis and Kuwaitis pulled plug! Because the GCC know something US usually forgets: Iran plays the long game. You can freeze enrichment.
Pause enrichment.
Delay enrichment.
Sign ten agreements.
Twenty agreements.
Forty agreements. But if the infrastructure remains…
If the centrifuges remain…
If the IRGC remains…
If the proxy network remains… then eventually the game resumes. There will be another distraction.
Another pandemic.
Another financial crisis.
Another war somewhere else.
Another paralysis in Washington. And while the world is distracted, enrichment quietly resumes again. Ironically, much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile expanded during the pandemic years precisely because global attention was elsewhere. Judging by the reaction to the UAE attacks, the Saudis and Kuwaitis concluded that Trump’s version of deterrence had become: “Please absorb the missiles quietly because I’m trying to write the sequel to “The Fart of the Deal.”

@BobgonzaleBob @AimenDean Sounds like wishful thinking on your part. Only the US could possible protect the GCC. Only question is, will they do it. There is no independent deterrence, only indirect subjugation.

With Iranian missiles and drones hammering UAE oil infrastructure in Fujairah during the US-backed Project Freedom op—only for Washington to shrug it off as “minor” and refuse retaliation to safeguard Trump’s precious Iran deal—could it be the UAE 🇦🇪 has become the Gulf wild card, issuing blistering condemnations while accelerating independent deterrence, diversified alliances, and pragmatic hedging that could fracture GCC unity and bury American credibility for good?

@AimenDean Everything you say is true. But how does the US overthrow the IRGC without making things even worse?

@EricLDaugh Well we know thanks to @MZHemingway great new book “Alito” that Kagen absolutely did that regarding dobbs while the conservative justices were in danger so of course they did here too. This will be the new norm on any ruling not in their favor.

Tell me again why I had to fight the government in court for four years for being entirely peaceful on January 6, while antifa gets a pass for being violent demons!

It really is remarkable how awful the Biden administration was. A mixture of spectacular incompetence, malicious disregard for common sense, and political extremism It flies under the radar because Biden was mentally gone, but the whole thing was a massive trainwreck

Social Media Bias… Pre-Elon buying Twitter: 90% Left Leaning. Post-Elon buying Twitter: 70% Left Leaning. The change in the world with just 20% shift is incalculable. It’s healing. The Left needs control of info because their agenda is so devastating to mankind. Simple.

@IranIntl_En @AimenDean IRGC won’t care.

Iran International viewers reported widespread layoffs, soaring prices of basic goods, unemployment, food insecurity and growing inability to pay rent, as economic pressure deepens during the war. One viewer said at least 2,000 people had been laid off across production, industrial and service units in Rasht, a city in northern Iran. Another viewer said Islamic Republic state TV’s news channel had run a caption saying Iran was at war, basic goods were expensive and people should “get used to it.” A former worker at the Marvdasht petrochemical complex in Fars province said he had been laid off and had been unemployed for two months. “I have an elderly mother and I am ashamed before her,” the viewer said. “We have reduced our food consumption to one meal a day, and even that is barely manageable. I have not paid rent either. The situation is terrible.” iranintl.com/en/202604293484

This leads to some interesting questions. 1) was the robot running at its bio mechanical or robot mechanical threshold the entire time? The robot traveled on average about 16 mph. So still slower than sprinters and above average athletes. 2) How much battery juice was left at the end? In other words how much further could the robot have run before needing a recharge? Seems like it could have recharged and still won a full marathon race. Though In any fair contest the robot would have to find its battery, hookup and continue with the race without assistance.

Humanoid robot beats human half-marathon world record by 7 minutes at Beijing race with 112 teams | Ana Maria Constantin, The Next Web A humanoid robot named Lightning completed the Beijing E-Town Half-Marathon today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, beating the human world record by nearly seven minutes. The robot, built by Shenzhen Honor Smart Technology Development Co., navigated the 21-kilometre course autonomously, without remote control, using multi-sensor fusion and real-time decision-making algorithms. A second Lightning unit, this one remotely controlled, crossed the finish line even faster at 48 minutes and 19 seconds. The human half-marathon world record is 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon on 8 March. The robots and the roughly 12,000 human runners followed the same route but competed in separate lanes. The human race was won by Zhao Haijie of China in 1 hour, 7 minutes, and 47 seconds. The robot race was won by a machine that stands 169 centimetres tall, has an effective leg length of 95 centimetres designed to mimic elite human runners, generates 400 newton-metres of peak torque, and uses a proprietary liquid cooling system with a heat exchange flow rate exceeding four litres per minute, technology borrowed from Honor’s smartphone division. The scale of the event This was the second edition of the Robot World Humanoid Robot Games Half-Marathon, co-hosted by the Beijing Municipal People’s Government and China Media Group. The first, held on the same date last year, was riddled with mishaps. Only six of 21 robotic runners completed the course. Several stumbled, careened out of control, or simply lay down at the starting line. The winner, a Tiangong Ultra robot, finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds. The 2026 edition was a different event in almost every respect. One hundred and twelve teams from 26 brands entered, fielding more than 300 individual robots, including five international teams from Germany, France, and Brazil. Roughly 40% of the teams competed in the autonomous navigation category, in which robots must navigate the course without human input. Remote-controlled teams had their net times multiplied by a 1.2 coefficient, a 20% penalty designed to encourage autonomous capability. All three podium finishers in the autonomous category were Honor robots, and all three posted times faster than the human world record. The improvement from 2025 to 2026, from six finishers out of 21 to more than 100 teams competing with autonomous navigation, represents the kind of year-over-year progress that makes the event significant beyond spectacle. Lightning still collided with a barricade near the finish line and fell, requiring staff to help it back up before it completed the race. Another robot fell at the start line. But the failures were exceptions rather than the norm, a reversal from last year. Who built the winner Honor, the smartphone manufacturer spun off from Huawei in 2020, is the first major phone company to enter the humanoid robotics market. It unveiled its humanoid robot programme at Mobile World Congress on 1 March and committed $10 billion over five years to AI development. The company says Lightning’s running speed of four metres per second is 14% faster than Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. The entire development-to-marathon-entry process took one year. Du Xiaodi, an Honor engineer on the winning team, said the competition’s value lies in technology transfer: “Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas. For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios.” The race functions as a forcing function for locomotion, balance, navigation, and endurance, the same capabilities required for factory floors, construction sites, and eventually domestic environments. China’s humanoid robot industry The marathon is a showcase for an industry that China is building with the kind of coordinated state investment it previously applied to electric vehicles and solar panels. The 15th Five-Year Plan, covering 2026 to 2030, elevates robotics and “embodied intelligence” to one of the country’s top ten “new industry tracks.” The government has committed a one-trillion-yuan ($138 billion) state-backed fund to humanoid robots, industrial automation, and embodied AI. In February, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology unveiled the “Humanoid Robot and Embodied Intelligence Standard System,” drafted by more than 120 research institutions and manufacturers, with a roadmap to push Chinese standards into ISO and IEC international adoption by 2028. MIIT describes humanoid robots as “the next groundbreaking innovation following computers, smartphones, and new-energy vehicles.” The industry is projected to surpass 20 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) in scale by the end of this year. Chinese companies already dominate production. AGIBOT shipped more than 5,000 units in 2025. Unitree Robotics shipped 5,500. UBTech shipped more than 1,000 and plans to reach 5,000 this year and 10,000 in 2027. Chinese firms accounted for nearly 90% of global humanoid robot shipments last year. By comparison, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics each shipped approximately 150 units. The gap between running and usefulness The question the marathon raises is whether speed on a road translates into capability in a factory or a home. Western humanoid robot companies, including Tesla with Optimus, Figure AI, and those supplying BMW, have emphasised dexterity and manipulation: picking up objects, assembling components, navigating cluttered indoor environments. Chinese companies have invested heavily in bipedal locomotion and speed, which produces more dramatic demonstrations but addresses a narrower slice of the problem. The global humanoid robot market is projected to reach somewhere between $6.5 billion and $15 billion by 2030, depending on the research firm, with Goldman Sachs estimating $38 billion by 2035. The spread in projections reflects genuine uncertainty about how quickly robots that can run a half marathon will learn to do things that people will pay for. Industrial deployment is advancing: Figure 02 completed an 11-month pilot at a BMW plant, moving more than 90,000 components. But the gap between a controlled factory deployment and the kind of general-purpose humanoid robot that China showcased at its Spring Festival Gala remains wide. Lightning’s 50-minute half-marathon is a genuine engineering achievement. A robot that navigates 21 kilometres autonomously, maintains balance at 25 kilometres per hour, manages thermal loads through liquid cooling, and recovers from a collision with a barricade has demonstrated capabilities that did not exist in any humanoid platform a year ago. The question is not whether the technology is impressive. It is whether the country investing $138 billion in it will find applications that justify the spending before the rest of the world catches up on a different approach to the same problem.

@LU7AN @willchamberlain Make sure they lose the general and come back after two years with a new candidate.

@willchamberlain Lifelong Miamian here. Gimenez runs the GOP in Miami. No one is primarying him successfully any time soon. Salazar's primary opponent has 68 followers on X, no money, no support, and he completely agrees with her positions on immigration. How do we fix this?

Don Bacon is retiring. But for Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Lawler, Maria Salazar, Carlos Gimenez, and Nicole Malliotakis, I can GUARANTEE you a primary if you don't change your tune on the final bill. And Kevin Kiley - lol. Whatever future you had in GOP politics is GONE

@HeathMayo God has spoken. Bow before him.

“Reasonable minds can disagree about the 2020 election.” No, they can’t. If you think the 2020 election was stolen, you are not a reasonable person. If you make that claim in a court of law and advise your client to act on that fraudulent premise, you should be disbarred.

@AMGOOD80 @BobDole01118706 @MarioNawfal The Japanese took thousands of Korea women to act as sex slaves for their soldiers. You don’t read about in this in history books as they are more interested generals, weapons and battles, etal. Civilian suffering is hard to fit into the narratives.

@BobDole01118706 @MarioNawfal Sure I did, but nothing about sex abuse victims.

🇰🇷 Johnny Somali just got 6 months in a South Korean labor prison for doing a lap dance on a monument honoring wartime sexual abuse victims. He traveled the world disrespecting every country he visited for content. South Korea said no, you work here now.

@NFL_DovKleiman A 19 second Video.

Shedeur Sanders is going to be UNSTOPPABLE next season. It's rare to see this much potential in a quarterback. Clearly the Browns have their franchise guy.

@curiousmcgeorge @SharpFootball Yep, he’s better. That was easy.

@SharpFootball Is he better than Brock Purdy? Any more cherry picked stats you want to push?

QBs with 30+ TD passes every year for the last 3 years: Jared Goff end of list

@Dillon_Moon @ringer @BillSimmons If Jokic wins he will have one more than Larry Bird and only be one behind Bill Russel. Can’t have that.

How you gonna say "another typical year"?? Jokic lead the league in reb and ast. May never happen again in the history of the league. @BillSimmons Shai has 2 all nba defensive teammates. Clearly the best team in the league. What Jokic did with his team is superior. Just be honest and say yall are tired of voting for Jokic. Thats literally the real reason. Yall dont wanna see him get 4. When he should be receiving his 6th straight this year.

“One of the great offensive seasons and somehow didn’t win the MVP and I can’t believe it.” @BillSimmons explains why he voted SGA for MVP over Nikola Jokic despite Jokic having one of the greatest offensive seasons ever.

@I_am_Superbro @ForecasterEnten So why shouldn’t Trump take you out right now?

@ForecasterEnten But it's going to be Trump's ass in the grinder once we kick those f'ckin Republicans bums out and take over Congress. It's not going to be Tucker who gets impeached, removed and arrested. It's going to be this muthaf'cker. Bookmark it. Blue Tsunami incoming 🌊🌊🌊

Tucker Carlson has been in absolute free fall among the GOP. His net favorable has dropped by 47 points. Meanwhile, Trump crushes Tucker among the GOP. Trump's net favorable is 54 pts higher than Carlson's. When you up against Trump, you in the grinder to quote Good Burger.

@JohnDMacari @TheFinestCast This guy wasn’t even born in the US. No other country would be this stupid to elect him mayor of its largest city.

44% of White New Yorkers cannot afford the real cost of living in NYC yet they are excluded from NYC’s Racial Equity Plan. White New Yorkers not only helped to build New York City, they continue to help keep it running, why are they being shut out of NYC Government?

@TRobinsonNewEra @mrddmia That’s scary.

For the first time in UK history, welfare has exceeded income tax revenue. Welfare benefits is forecast at £334bn for 2025/26. Income tax receipts are projected at £329-331bn. Insanity.