We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
➡️ Why are young people—in the US and around the world—shifting right?
I wrote about a phenomenon I call Generation C—the young people whose experience with COVID's health, political, and economic crises caused a strong shift right among young ppl across the developed world.
In the U.S., between 2020 and 2024, voters under 30 (and esp young men) shifted ~20 points toward the GOP. In Germany, France, Portugal, Finland, and beyond, young voters seem to be swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties in numbers exceeding older voters.
What's going on? Probably many things. The world is an incumbent's graveyard right now (cf John Burn-Murdoch). Inflation is a scourge. Immigration is creating headaches for centrist/progressive parties throughout Europe.
But I also think that, in ways both obvious and non-obvious, this is a COVID phenomenon. The pandemic era didn't just demolish faith in scientific and political elites. It also strongly increased alone time, sending young men and women in highly gendered social-media spaces, where the youngest men in particular seem to have become significantly more anti-feminist and open to right-wing influencers and parties.
🔗 Derek Thompson
Yanis Varoufakis (former Greek Minister of Finance) describes AI as a new form of capital that produces not goods, but behavioral modification. This is achieved by engineering perceptions.
The answers provided by ChatGPT, or the images rendered by StableDiffusion — as these increasingly inform our perceptions, they in turn define the reality we experience.
This is what makes AI so powerful — he who controls the AI, defines the reality of tomorrow.
⚡️🇺🇸 Some more things coming out for the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
Under the preliminary drafts of the bill, the USAF is requesting a release of $57,000,000 USD ($57.0 Million) to retire all remaining 162 A-10 Thunderbolt IIs in current service. Apart of the 2023 NDAA, there was a clause for a few million dollars to be released every so often to gradually retire the (then) 250 airframes by 2034; however due to the push by the Dept of Defense to ‘shed’ obsolete or obsolescent airframes that cannot be overhauled or upgraded further without a whole new airframe, it appears the USAF wants to retire all 162 remaining A-10s by the end of 2026.
The USAF plans to fully divest the 340-total remaining A-10s entirely, including those that currently serve in a handful of Air National Guard units in some states; which will be replaced by F-15EX Eagle IIs (like what is already happening with the Michigan State Air National Guard’s A-10s), or F-35A/Bs.
Included ...
My older sister lives in the country in between Velma Oklahoma and Duncan Oklahoma near the Fuqua Lake area, this story was told by a rural mail delivery woman who delivers the mail in the country.
The incident happened while she was on her route, when she came upon to the mailbox a male Chinese nation came out brandishing a, AK-47 rifle being very hostile,
I don't know if he pointed it at her since it is against the law to do so but she was terrified and said she was never going back and that the location that had a guard tower. Was the sheriff department notified, I don't know, did she notify her supervisor, don't know. But word is from the country folk who live in the area they have seen the guard tower at the pot place;
I refuse to call it a farm because it is an insult to farmers.
And yes she was traumatized by that ordeal
