plinky

Two days later, thanks to the sleuthing of journalist Jack Poulson, we learned that UG Solutions’ new press page was created by Seven Letter, a PR management firm operated by former Obama and Biden communications officials. Among those hired by Seven Letter was Sabrina Singh, the former Pentagon spokeswoman who routinely spun Israel’s crimes.

Seven Letters’ Gaza profiteering follows the high-level contract Israel’s Foreign Ministry signed with a top PR firm run by Biden veterans called SKDK. Among SKDK’s top recent hires was Vedant Patel, the former spokesman for the Biden State Department who was notorious for his absurd denials of documented Israeli crimes across occupied Palestine.

ghouls ghouling in ghoulcentral

linky (cautious, cause nothing happened yet)

linky

unlimited willems on the piggies

linky

linky to tweet

iran, if you don't have three separate teams working on nukes, you are not living in reality

linky

The appeal for drones, sent out to Gordon’s mailing list, has since grown into a “thermal drone matching campaign” run by the One Israel Fund, another charity based in the Five Towns that supports West Bank settlements. The group hosts tours of the West Bank and holds annual wine-tasting barbecues in the Five Towns to fund settlement security projects. Although it usually raises $3 million per year, the One Israel Fund took in $2.5 million in the month after Oct. 7, according to the Long Island Herald

From newlinesmag

Dunno, if it should be removed or not now, cause china can’t exactly control new york dipshits sales :(

linky to tweet, don't know if it's the author

The recruiter for the air marshals told a crowd of applicants they shouldn’t bother applying if they were fat. “No one likes a fat cop,” she said. She drank Pink Monster Ultra Rosá and had multiple dreamcatcher forearm tattoos.

“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”

There was the young, taciturn southerner managing a batting cage near New Orleans, and the pimply youth from Kentucky, churning out Yahoo Finance content for twenty dollars an hour. Both said they were tired and bored. The latter said his father had been in ICE, but he “didn’t really know what he did.”

The last applicant I spoke to said he didn’t care much about the politics of ICE—it was just that he thought his taxes shouldn’t be used to buy school supplies for “illegal alien children.” What he was really interested in, he said, was parlaying his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs. “My classmates came up in the same environment as me,” he said, “but now they’re off posting photographs of Lamborghinis on Instagram, standing on balconies of waterfront apartments.”

His dad had also been in ICE and had broken down the doors of a Queens family that had just sat down to dinner when he stormed in. They all happened to be wearing Obama shirts and hats and were eating off of Obama dishware. Once, in the early part of his career, the man had gotten to travel to Southeast Asia on various deportation flights and had sent his son photographs of a beautiful waterfall in Cambodia. “I was like, what the fuck dad?” the young man said. “I thought you were supposed to be deporting people!”

The motivating force behind American career fascism would appear to be wanderlust.

n+1 doing solid reporter work

linky

The “private funds” industry is emblematic. Private funds is a catch-all term for venture capital, hedge funds, and private equity firms—the petty tyrants of finance capital. These interests grew explosively during the Biden years. Assets held by these funds grew 34 percent to nearly $28 trillion, almost matching the $31 trillion held in public mutual funds—historically the much bigger type of ownership. The number of private funds grew at an even faster rate, from about 63,000 in 2020 to almost 101,000 in 2024. Company founders and investment partnerships multiplied by the thousands. They form the financial shock troops of the new American gentry, the upper-class backbone of Trumpism. This base tends to be less complacent than the older financial establishment, which not only wants order and stability in international markets but also—at least for a time—publicly supported the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A whole financial Freikorps of private investors, fund managers, and activist shareholders see the Trump administration as a battering ram to smash the regulatory walls guarding the big money, i.e., the enormous pools of savings managed by government-connected fund managers and banks. This includes, for example, some $8 trillion in invested retirement accounts, as well as a bigger share in the roughly $6.1 trillion pool of public pension assets. Even Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complains about alleged central planning under Democratic governments and talks about the need to increase competition and reduce the power of market incumbents—by which he means opening the door to this vault for him and his colleagues. For the financiers backing Trump a raid on big finance could yield a jackpot of billions.

“He’s very disappointed, but it’s a strike dynamic. You strike to try to get your maximum effectiveness,” Spear said in an interview. “The point of the strike is to create enough discomfort to get them to meet as many of the demands as we can get them to meet, but at some point, then the threat of the injunction kicks in.”

Philadelphia’s last major municipal strike in 1986 ended shortly after a judge ruled that sanitation employees had to return to work to prevent a public health crisis due to the build-up of trash. The maximum point of leverage, he said, is likely well before that point.

“As time goes on, the clock is ticking, so at some point the courts — unfortunately, in this country — are going to overwhelm the will of the membership,” Spear said.