Via @katemanne.bsky.social #Epstein emailing with Joi Ito. Just as Trump diagnoses detractors with Trump Derangement Syndrome, so does Epstein. katemanne.substack.com/p/theres-ano...

The U.S. government is in the hands of a disturbed authoritarian who is surrounded by people who either share his delusions, are too sycophantic to confront him, or believe the president’s delusions serve just fine as a vehicle for their own greed and ideological extremism.

#EconSky Bing 👇

#EconSky I wonder if the Egyptian Priesthood ever got greedy and kept the Nilometer's secrets to only a few, to boost their income? www.atlasobscura.com/places/nilom...

#ElonMusk #JeffBezos and the various super rich geniuses with their #AI and their super computers seem to find space travel so much trickier than a bunch of engineers making the equivalent of low 6 figures today. Maybe doing your own math is a good thing? www.npr.org/sections/ed/...

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is so hoping you're right Mr. Blanche. www.bbc.com/news/live/c7...

#Epstein Just to correct @klasfeldreports.com at around the 20 min, you said, before Trump people didn't claim charges were a hoax. Au contraire (admittedly before your time): Read about Ron Ziegler. Nixon's pardon gave us #Trump time.com/archive/6841... substack.com/inbox/post/1...

#EconSky That the Tech Lord Oligarchs believe if they make the common man poor he (and in their view of the world "he" is the only pronoun) will work for them cheap is one sure sign none of these guys took a liberal arts selection of courses. But hey, if Marxism was their goal, well done.

Can you imagine the force of President Obama in front of a protest line when ICE shows up. I hope someday to not need to imagine it.

#Epstein Curious timing for this article. A bit tone deaf perhaps? www.economist.com/culture/2026...?

So many people ask why this or that person didn't resign due to their involvement with #Epstein. But that they were involved is WHY they can't escape. Join my Cabinet or else.

Plus ça change... The president’s response: “This might have one hell of a salutary effect. They can talk all they want about the radicals. You know what stops them? Kill a few." “Remember Kent State?” millercenter.org/the-presiden...

#Skystorians Pondering counterfactuals. Would Yeltsin and the Oligarchs have been given such latitude in Russia with the elder Bush in office. Gingrich never does his contract with America. And what Dem would we have gotten in 1996? Cuz Qualye had no shot. Oh well.

#Epstein Publicly subsidized aristocracy creation. What could go wrong? Same thing that always goes wrong.

#EconSky There is one and only one sure fire way to service US$ debt, however incurred - and that is via US$s. #Crytpo ain't currency.

#BillGates #Epstein docs.google.com/document/d/1... TP: I think “nerd” is gradually becoming a comparatively friendly label. BG: No, “nerd” is boring. A “nerd” is a guy who never went out with good-looking girls. I think they were, like, staying at home or something.

Who knew selective stenography paid so much better than actual journalism? Sadly, a not small number of "journalists."

Fascinating #Epstein discussion from the UK. youtu.be/YkYA7eAgJXQ?...

I keep flashing to the scene from 48 Hours wherein Reggie Hammond asks, "let's see what I can F... with next" But POTUS has no goal but to show he can destroy youtu.be/kvzIRuIg288?...

and then there are people who love money too much and those 3 fit the bill sadly

Demonizing, pathologizing and/or criminalizing dissent is as old as human cultures have had the words; criminal, pathology and demon, respectively Living inside a Narcissist's dream - a narcissist with the DoJ and the most well equipped military in history at his beck and call is going as expected😬

I very much hope the incoming winter storm will not be the killer it is forecast to be. If that hope proves false and the storm is terrible, I hope the wrath of the MAGA faithful is properly directed at the GOP who misdirected FEMA money into brown people concentration camp detention VOTE wisely

I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

the ny times cleans up for trump the way the guy with a pooper scooper follows an elephant in a parade

#EconSky Fascinating exchange. Explain to us what the actual fu$k you're doing. Paraphrased slightly. www.youtube.com/live/vKNRk1_...

Philip K Dick was on to something with his Voight-Kampff test, except we don’t really need a machine. If you can’t figure out you’re conversing with an AI in a few minutes…your context window is very small indeed. AI is big on empathy though…annoyingly so. youtu.be/OWK6oSbSKKc?...

I was in my 30s when this happened. I remember the moral outrage. Little did most of the world know that while this was happening, Trump, Epstein and their ilk were running teen beauty pageants, systematically predating on girls when and wherever they could. And it just got worse and worse.

“The dominant feeling is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us.” ― Victor Klemperer

#EconSky THE debtor nation on the planet threatening capital controls was NOT on my 2026 bingo card.

Remember Defending Your Life? youtu.be/x1FhrhoudSE?...

#EconSky Meanwhile home.treasury.gov/news/press-r...

And all of this anguish inflicted willfully in order to let the centimillionaires and above live more wealthy lives. This is so tragic.

#EconSky I use #AI, mainly #Gemini these days to help writing research, even though it's glitchy. Today I learned you have to clear the memory of a chat as it will scrape its own errors into memory.

One can "freeze" right on Mitch without going wrong.

Nothing says "genius" like ensuring the famously isolationist United States goes to war with virtually no reservation.

I quite certain Elon couldn't explain the phrase "good faith" without a self-reference if he was given 10 tries. This also works more generally for racists and misogynists. All their complaints degenerate to "I'm great and you all suck for not noticing how great I am."

#skystorians Pondering delegitimizing gov't for some reason and I found Robert Darnton. What a treasure trove detailing the underground movement of literature that upended the House of Bourbon and created the French Republic. Fascinating. archive.org/details/lite...

#EconSky Rent seeking is killing our amazingly vibrant economy and how strong it must be underneath to survive Years from now when researcher access down to individual accounts is allowed so much will be learned about internal flow of funds. Let hope we are doing the studying and not China 😬

A good part of the reason I can't deal with the Bulwark crowd is the failure to say, "The very people we put in office are, by and large, the people who facilitated the takeover of our country by fascists." They still want to be "conservative." They want the fig leaf. Fuck that.

Jaws

#EconSky Economic growth is a function of two "P"s - population and productivity. "It [US population] will be smaller and grow more slowly over the next 30 years, on average, than the agency previously projected it would." If #AI isn't a productivity boom, we crash. www.cbo.gov/publication/...

I was sure he was gonna go with the "good people on both sides" bit ... obviously his handlers told him to soften the message 🙃

What actor’s facial expression in a movie/TV show will stay with you for the rest of your life?

#EconSky As of Dec. 11, US debt has increased by $712B since Oct. 1. Next week the Treasury will auction $275B (much of this is a rollover) . It's pretty crowded out there, no? www.treasurydirect.gov/auctions/upc...

#EconSky The historically correct answer to this question: we wait for a crisis that upends oligarchic control of the government and implement. Unfortunately the crisis will have to be very painful but I have faith in the current administration to provide exactly that. Buckle up.

#EconSky C'mon @mcuban.bsky.social . You know pharma is a rent seeking enterprise which is why you started your pharma venture. To your great credit. There's a $B100s ANNUAL industry of rent seekers in health care. YOU know this could be run more efficiently. It's the politics that sucks.

Hannah Arendt argued that the goal of the Authoritarians is to destroy the line between truth and lies. I agree. But for those who still seek truth, the willingness of the many to wallow in deception is...disheartening.

#EconSky Gillian Tett begs a great question, "what causes inflation?" Money supply advocates lean on David Hume. Hume's view, though, involved doubling everyone's money NOT the money supply. And I suspect the flow matters. Covid checks were inflationary. Bank bailouts in 2008/9 weren't.

#EconSky @hcrichardson.bsky.social Letters looks at the new National Security Strategy of the US. Dripping with White Supremacy, this document proclaims the end of the US protected global trading system. Why other nations should send their surpluses to the US under these conditions eludes me.