Morning from coastal Georgia
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Morning from coastal Georgia
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apple.news/ACcNqsY4pT5efg6wo3KzZwA
“Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls.”
Excerpt From
“The Venture-Capital Populist”
George Packer
The Atlantic
https://apple.news/ACcNqsY4pT5efg6wo3KzZwA
This material may be protected by
“In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Sacks demanded that the federal government bail out the uninsured deposits of start-up companies, much of the money from crypto firms. “Some libertarians care about the freedom of only one person,” Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, investor, and right-wing provocateur, once said of his friend Sacks.”
Excerpt From
“The Venture-Capital Populist”
George Packer
The Atlantic
https://apple.news/ACcNqsY4pT5efg6wo3KzZwA
This material may be protected by copyright.
“After the election, the new president appointed Sacks as his special adviser, or “czar,” for AI and crypto. After decades of keeping as far from Washington as possible, Silicon Valley would finally have its own man in the”
Excerpt From
“The Venture-Capital Populist”
George Packer
The Atlantic
https://apple.news/ACcNqsY4pT5efg6wo3KzZwA
This material may be protected by copyright.
“The Stanford Review, the conservative campus publication that Thiel had started as an undergrad. It took aim at the politically correct orthodoxy and anti-Western ideology that swept over American higher education in the late ’80s and early ’90s and never really left. But the outnumbered young conservatives’ mockery almost always overshot the target. An entire issue was devoted to making light of rape, including a contribution from Sacks that challenged whether statutory rape should be a crime. (He has since expressed regret for some of his youthful writings.)”
Excerpt From
“The Venture-Capital Populist”
George Packer
The Atlantic
https://apple.news/ACcNqsY4pT5efg6wo3KzZwA
This material may be protected by copyright.
“But these 20- and 30-somethings were not inspired in the same way that the founders of earlier Silicon Valley companies were: “They didn’t follow the vision of Steve Jobs, that tech can democratize power. They came to get rich.” McNamee added, “If their value system had been different, we would have a completely different country today.””
Excerpt From
“The Venture-Capital Populist”
George Packer
The Atlantic
https://apple.news/ACcNqsY4pT5efg6wo3KzZwA
This material may be protected by copyright.
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“Fighting in the Middle East flared, as Iran struck a crucial United Arab Emirates oil port and several ships, testing a shaky cease-fire. The U.A.E., which has backed tougher action against Tehran, said it had intercepted missiles and drones launched from Iran. It also confirmed a drone hit sparked a fire at the crucial oil hub of Fujairah, which the country has used to pump much of its crude output around Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz. “We reserve the right to a full and legitimate response to attacks,” the U.A.E. foreign ministry said.
Iran fired cruise missiles and other projectiles at U.S. warships and commercial vessels as the U.S. launched an effort to help vessels through the strait, according to Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command. Additional ships are “en route” to transit the strait after U.S. military forces successfully guided two U.S.-flagged commercial vessels through the vital waterway, he added. President Trump warned Iran against attacking U.S. ships near the strait.
Trump called on South Korea to join the fight in the strait, after Iran fired on a South Korean cargo ship.
Oil prices rose amid heightened tensions, with Brent crude climbing 5.8”
Excerpt From
“Attacks strike UAE, ships as fighting escalates in the Middle East”
The Wall Street Journal
https://apple.news/ACakChqg9RxqIiyJ6bKF02w
This material may be protected by copyright.
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the fact that many Democrats who find her renomination unthinkable are nonetheless incapable of acknowledging the real reasons that she lost.
I’ll list some of those reasons. First, her party was seen as too beholden to progressive activists on a range of issues, including immigration, crime, education, energy and the transgender debate. Second, Harris’s vice presidency was itself a creation of the 2020 identity politics moment, without which Joe Biden never would have picked her, and she succeeded him without a fight in part because no one wanted to acknowledge her painful limits as a politician. Finally, she tried to solve both the policy problem and the identity politics problem through evasion and distraction and yet more identity politics, with empty rhetoric of “joy” and circumlocution about her past positions and a mediocre Midwestern white guy running mate.
Despite being on the record taking radical positions, Harris was never a radical politician. Rather, she was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.
That’s still clearly what Democratic elites would prefer to do, and it’s also what you see in many of the figures contending for influence in the party, outsiders and insiders alike. Politicians as distinct as Graham Platner, Gavin Newsom, James Talarico and Abigail Spanberger have all offered new directions for the Democrats that are primarily image-based. The theory is always: What if we had the same basic policy orientation that makes moderates distrust us, except that this time we’ll talk like a bearded oyster farmer … or like Trump himself on a social media bender … or like a sunny youth pastor … or like a former C.I.A. officer? -
www.nytimes.com/2026/05/02/opinion/kamala-harris-democratic-party.html
But for now, Kamala Harris, presidential front-runner, should loom as a warning about how easily sticking together, playing nice and relying on backlash can lead a party to repeat the exact same mistakes.
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Scott Anderson is the author of “King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation.” -
www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/opinion/iran-us-israel-war-drones-strait-of-hormuz.html
if only the president and his administration had bothered to take note of a new feature of modern warfare, a feature that can be boiled down to a single word: drones.
The weaponized drone has utterly transformed today’s battlefield. It is the modern-day equivalent of the machine gun of World War I. Because of the drone, the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian military has been able to withstand the Russian Army of Vladimir Putin for the past four years, not only inflicting far greater casualties on the invaders than expected, but doing so at a cost of pennies to the dollar. As the Ukrainians have shown time and again, a $1,000 drone can destroy a roughly $4.5 million T-90 tank. While the Russians have recently made significant strides in drone warfare, this simple weapon has ensured that they’ve grievously paid for their war both on the battlefield and in the pocketbook.
Much of this same dynamic has played out in Iran for the past two months, although without the staggering cost in human lives. Certainly, American and Israeli warplanes can bomb Iran’s military infrastructure at will — and they have, tens of thousands of times — but no amount of bombing can remove the primary retaliatory weapon at its disposal.
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www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/us/politics/correspondents-dinner-shooting-suspect-suicide-watch.html
he has been treated differently than anybody I’ve ever seen. Judge
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Germany’s defense minister is playing down the impact of the Pentagon’s decision to pull 5,000 troops from the country, but the move has rattled NATO allies and added to growing fears that Europe can no longer rely on Washington.
— Read on www.npr.org/2026/05/02/nx-s1-5808891/europe-allies-germany-troop-withdrawal-us -
Tuesday 29 April 2026: 5:00 AM
Notes from a Childless Cat Lady Working Away in one of the Sub-Basements of the Ministry of Snark.
News: (MSNOW)
• The Justice Department has decided to prosecute James Comey, former head of the FBI, again, for posting online a photograph of something that was written in the sand with an arrangement of sea shells. And, so it goes on, the circus of useless, expensive, prosecutions of Trump’s perceived domestic enemies. This is while we are in the middle of a war.
• The FCC is trying to pull ABC’s licensee over a joke Jimmy Kimmel made about Melania Trump.
• King Charles spoke before the Congress, said some things that needed to be said about Ukraine and NATO, 9/11 and the history of cooperative action between the two countries. He did this while managing to be tasteful and amusing. What a refreshing difference in political speech.
CAT TALES
I’m up early because our youngest rescue cat, Sam Clemens, was trying diligently to steal our other cat, Hiram Bernard’s, food. Hiram, aka the Pooper, sleeps with us and right now, since he has cancer, his food intake is carefully measured. Sam, ingenious Houdini that he is, managed to make the bedroom door open and wake everybody up, announcing breakfast time.
“I can’t keep up with how much food Hiram is eating if Sam eats most of it.” Mike, my long-term partner, grumbled, standing across the bed from me in a tee shirt and green and black boxer shorts. He was using his left arm to try to push Sam away from Hiram’s food bowl, to no success.
“Come on,” I said to Sam. “Let’s go and get some real breakfast.” Sam, of course, knew exactly what I said, they always do, but he gave one more try, pushing his nose up under Mike’s arm in an attempt to get at the food.
But one more “come on,” did the trick and Sam threw himself off the end of the bed and followed me to the door. When we got there, he paused, looking around, sure that we were trying to deceive him (which we were), but decided that following his Mom was likely to get him unobstructed breakfast. I walked down the cat walk to the stairs and Sam, as usual, cavorted to the steps and hurled himself down, skipping steps, sliding on steps. I had been convinced for months that this was going to result in a broken leg and another expensive visit to the vet which we could not afford, especially now, during Hiram’s chemo treatment which was costing, on average, $700 a visit to the Oncology Clinic. Some visits were near $3,000 when we had to have complicated procedures, like the food tube lodged in his little stomach. Another cat medical disaster was the last thing we needed.
But, dampening the overflowing love of life in Sam, was a losing proposition. I have never seen such a happy cat in my life. He ran, he jumped, he tried to finagle abandoned food bowls off the cabinet. He launched himself on top of one of the other much bigger cats in an attempt to start a wrestling match. He hid behind anything really, waiting for one of them to approach so he could bound out and ambush. He was a delight to watch and after having been rescued five-weeks-old, starving, soaking wet, screaming his head off in a pouring rain, having just been mauled by our outdoor cat Willa for trying to eat her food, he seemingly had no fear – of anybody or anything. Everything was a toy, every day was a celebration,
• I have no idea what has happened to Joyce Vance. She appears to have lost a lot of weight and looks truly horrible. I saw her on another network yesterday and didn’t even recognize her.
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Home – Pitchfork Economics
— Read on pitchforkeconomics.com/ -
The stablecoin bill Congress just passed injects crypto into the part of the economy that needs to stay steady via Treasurys. A lot could go wrong.
— Read on nymag.com/intelligencer/article/crypto-bill-stablecoins-treasuries-bitcoin-congress-tether-terra-circle.html
