BabbleBee

Taking a giant step back: In the 1970s, elites wanted to keep their post-WW2 gravy train rolling, so they made a deal with the white collar: We’ll cut your top tax bracket from 70% to 30%, and let’s globalize and screw the blue collar. This worked great for 40 years, but there’s no longer enough gravy for the kids of the white collar to get as much as their parents, and the blue collar are finally getting feisty. Now the battle is over low-skill immigrants: elites tell the white collar we need them, their hard work, and low wages. Counter-elites tell the blue collar that the low-skill immigrants are raising housing prices and lowering wages. So here we are, pretending our central issue is Trump or Biden or Harris. But we are in a class war, white vs blue collar, instigated by elites.

@CR1337 I’m reading that Jia Tan was probably not one person, tended to work 9-5 Central Europe time, worked on Chinese holidays but took Eastern European holidays off.

When Andres Freund, Linux kernel contributor & Microsoft engineer was debugging slow SSH logins on his Debian machine in March 2024, he noticed something weird: liblzma (part of XZ Utils) was using way too much CPU power, so he kept digging, and what he uncovered was a multi-year supply-chain attack! An attacker using the name “Jia Tan” had spent two years slowly infiltrating the tiny XZ Utils project, a compression library used by virtually every major Linux distribution. The backdoor wasn’t in the source code. It was hidden deep inside the build scripts. It would have given the attacker remote root access on millions of servers the moment a specially crafted SSH key was used. Freund caught it days before it would have shipped in Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and more. One man, one anomaly, one routine debug session saved the internet from a potential catastrophe. Respect!

@PolitlcsUK At some point will HM get embarrassed about the association, and ask them to call it just S Dragon?

🚨 BREAKING: UK warship HMS Dragon has been forced to withdraw in order to be repaired at port after experiencing issues with its fresh water supplies

@douglasbulloch @grok can you give us a quick primer on the principle of distinction and when destroying a bridge is and isn’t a war crime?

Destroying a bridge? Isn’t that a war crime?

@kennymxu Did you not take APUSH? I’ve read Bailey and found it included more direct material than I expected.

One trend I distinctly remember from high school history was "hiding the primary"; as in, giving us the secondhand, opinionated branding of a source instead of showing us the source. We read about “rants” and “tirades” that were never shown to us so we could read for ourselves.

@RoKhanna @andersoncooper Iran just rejected your first and third points. They were pretty enthusiastic about your second and fourth points.

As I told @andersoncooper, we need statesmanship to end this war. Here's a plan. 1) Ceasefire of Iran, Israel, and US bombing. 2) Ironclad guarantee from US & Israel not to attack Iran with China & Russia involved. 3) Open the Straight of Hormuz. 4) Enact sanctions relief in exchange for Iran giving up enriched uranium.

@MariaDavidson In other words, the rules of capitalism didn’t work. Hospitals don’t really compete with each other like auto service stations. In other words, our medical economy sucks. And Illinois sucks.

@MariaDavidson And I’ll keep answering. 🙂 Pensions is part of it, but Medicaid expansion is the big driver. Funny thing is, when the uncompensated care (poor people without insurance) was replaced by Medicaid, prices were supposed to come down or at least flatline. Instead they rose faster!

State with the worst gap between population growth and spending in the last decade? Illinois. Population shrunk by 1%. State spending grew 72%, inflation adjusted. I'll continue asking - where did all the money go?

Teenagers are sharing photos of their AP U.S. Government textbooks, and the sheer amount of indoctrination is wildly disturbing. Apparently, Barack Obama is ideologically a right wing authoritarian. Hillary Clinton and George W Bush are entirely indistinguishable politically. Donald Trump is of course virtually the same as Hitler. @tedcruz is apparently more radically authoritarian than Fidel Castro AND Joseph Stalin..??!!?? @Linda_McMahon — can we expedite some major changes to American public education?

@theisabelb The good news is that this is not AP US History. It’s their government course and not that many high schools teach it. The bad news is it really does appear to be a course in left-wing training.

@johnkonrad You’re on fire today!

I got 39 trillion problems, but NATO ain't one

@adamhousley Air-conditioning, Green Revolution, telephone, assembly line, transistor, GPS, polio vaccine, integrated circuit/microchip, water chlorination, pacemaker, confidence intervals, bootstrapping, …

Let’s fix this for this took: The civilization that invented The Internet The Personal Computer The Smartphone The Airplane The Light bulb Space Exploration Organ transplants Pacemaker Laser Technology The Telephone And Chocolate Chip Cookies Is fighting a regime that's been holding an amazing people hostage with brutality that includes throwing acid in young women’s faces for showing their hair. There. Fixed it for you.

@KnugenafLind To <this> American, anyway, the Danes are the exception. We wonder why you hang out with such a lot of clowns. It’s surely just because you live in their neighborhood.

Americans have genuinely forgotten they threatened to invade us and seize Nordic territory just 2 months ago.

@KobeissiLetter 11. Free Dove Bars on Tuesdays

BREAKING: Iran has delivered its highly anticipated "10-point" response to the US' "15-point peace plan." Iran's 10-point plan includes: 1. Guarantee that Iran will not be attacked again 2. Permanent end to the war, not just a ceasefire 3. End to Israeli strikes in Lebanon 4. Lifting of all US sanctions on Iran 5. End to all regional fighting against Iranian allies 6. In return, Iran would open the Strait of Hormuz 7. Iran would impose a Hormuz fee of $2 million per ship 8. Iran would split these fees with Oman 9. Iran to provide rules for safe passage through Hormuz 10. Iran to use Hormuz fees for reconstruction instead of reparations President Trump's "deadline" for a peace deal with Iran is 25 hours away.

@johnkonrad It makes perfect sense when you see it as class warfare. When you stop thinking “class=money” which was always a lie, and realize that some people benefit from bringing bus loads of underclass migrants.

@johnkonrad Peitav Synagogue in Riga, Latvia I know there’s more but that’s all I’ve got.

Off the top of your head, name Europe’s greatest cathedrals. Now name its greatest mosques, synagogues and temples.

@NateSilver538 Hmm. Maybe you should update your priors. <snort>

It's not my data. The source is Cluvio, which is linked to in the article. I'd link to it in this tweet, but ironically, that would kill engagement. And I know that traffic is hard to count. Especially for a private company. But if you have more accurate data, then publish it.

@TheQuartering Open a new account. Like a few crazy lefty posts. You’ll come to the opposite conclusion.

Unpopular Opinion: X has actually become a right wing echo chamber. Between US paid shills and foreigners pretending to care about right wing politics, I almost never see left wing opinions anymore.

@bumbadum14 How can you tell there’s a European at a cock fight? He’s the one holding a duck. —- How can you tell there’s an American there? The duck wins.

I once remember reading a study/poll that asked different men across the world if they thought they could fight a bear 1 on 1, unarmed, and win. All across the world everyone polled like 98% no. But only the Americans believed they could do it.

@AlexBeaurepaire @johnkonrad @french_report78 I thought about it. You probably DON’T think MAGA is a small minority. You probably just wonder why the American elites can’t squash it the way you squash yours.

@AlexBeaurepaire @johnkonrad @french_report78 You might do well to be a little less offended and a little more understanding of degenerate Americans. You appear to think the MAGA are a tiny minority?

NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets. The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural. Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them. That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it. After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble. The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first. Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon. American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life. Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake. Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs. We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating. So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving. We were manufacturing jealousy. And it worked. The Wall came down. But here’s what no one accounted for. When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs. And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle. An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas. And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized. So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening. Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude. Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated. Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass. Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar. Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity. What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle. For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked. Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid. Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.” We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more… like your conquering armies did for centuries. Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit. You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators. What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization. It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine. That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report. Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us” Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.

I can see that from the Eastern Europe POV. From my American POV, Europe is like my overeducated, underemployed sister in law and her husband, who move into my spare bedroom, argue incessantly, dominate my television, eat all my ice cream, insult me to my kids, and call me arrogant when I suggest they’re beginning to overstay their welcome.

@ThankElon @johnkonrad The most aesthetically compelling way I have of viewing old Europe is to see it as a knot of snakes: not a single entity, but creatures that are very similar to one another, seemingly hostile, and quick to strike if you try to interfere. Yet if you have a stick large enough...