building things

Durango, CO
Joined March 2009
Edwin Fowler retweeted
🚨BREAKING Exclusive🚨 - Never-before-seen Capitol CCTV video reveals that Brian Cole Jr. could not have been the J6 pipe b*mber. He is seen walking on the northwest side of the Capitol at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME as the real suspect was distributing devices on the southeast side of the Capitol. More information in the thread below. 🧵⬇️ **Video work by @accabbat (Armitas)** The video in the first comment below shows me and @KyleSeraphin breaking down and explaining exactly what you're seeing in this short video.
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
The CEO of one of the largest cannabinoid suppliers in the country emailed me today. He sent a catalog. In that catalog were THCP, THC-O, HHC — chemically converted and semi-synthetic cannabinoids, offered for sale by the kilogram. Out of curiosity I called the number and met a representative for Bret Worley, not Bret himself. Tyler told me Bret founded HIFA, the organization that has spent millions lobbying Congress and the White House to keep chemical conversion alive. Here’s what makes that call extraordinary. Bret Worley is not just any industry executive. NBC News reported in August that that he is the son-in-law of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — married to her youngest daughter. Republican senators have complained directly to their leadership about the White House’s push to delay the hemp ban, Susie Wiles’ office. The same White House that asked Congress for “fair treatment of hemp products” is connected, by marriage, to the man selling Schedule I-adjacent product out of a Colorado warehouse. THCP is already Schedule I. It always has been. The DEA’s May 2026 rule put chemically converted cannabinoids on the synthetic side of the line. And under the law Congress passed, cannabinoids the plant cannot naturally produce lose hemp status on November 12 — not December 11. The December date only covers what the plant can make. THCP is not something the plant makes. It is something a lab makes from CBD. So the picture is this: a company whose CEO has a family tie to the top of the White House is circulating a wholesale catalog of products that federal organizations have classified as controlled substances. The farmer  who tests a tenth of a percent over the threshold gets his crop destroyed, his license revoked, and in some cases loses everything. The converter gets White House access, a catalog, and from what I’ve been hearing a 2 year runway to get through all of their stockpiles of what I can only assume are imported from other countries.  There are legislative documents circulating right now that would put guardrails on the hemp industry while still allowing naturally occurring cannabinoids. HIFA and the Hemp Roundtable continually block them from going forward if they don’t include conversions, because their business model relies on converting cannabinoids and keeping raw material providers like the American farmer out of the equation and useful only as precursor growers who take all the risk and reap none of the reqard. If the hemp industry, the medicinal marijuana industry, and the recreational marijuana industry all grouped together and pointed out the obvious … That chemical conversion companies should not be allowed to participate in cannabis and should stay in the pharmaceutical realm, which is what they are most closely adjacent to.  We could get something across the finish line. But no one is going to agree when we’ve got people like this man saying he represents us, because he does not. Just because he’s found a way to extract money by selling what I personally believe are already Schedule I drugs, converted, and therefore unable to take the hemp exemption…  he has taken that money and used it to lobby Congress and even state-level lawmakers to continue doing exactly this. This is an obvious abuse of the American farmer, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate that is being ignorant of the facts in exchange for money. If you didn’t know that, now you do. Now do something about it. This is not a eulogy for hemp. Hemp has a real future in American agriculture as a rotation crop, a fiber source, a building material, a feed ingredient, and yes, as a source of naturally occurring cannabinoids grown under the rules. That future is worth fighting for. What I am saying is that the people currently negotiating the terms of that future are the same people who spent eight years exploiting the loopholes that destroyed it. They parade farmers at hearings and in press releases as proof they care. They don’t.
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Meet Russell Dickert. This mother fucker is one of 3 men who beat the hell out of a woman at a Trump rally in Youngstown Ohio. He’s on Facebook bragging about how he and 2 of his friends beat the hell out of her. Of course he deleted everything. His hometown, place of business… All on his profile page. Please repost so everyone can meet Russell.
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
No, we have no sympathy in any way, shape or form for the socialist left-wing nonsense that Rep. Ilhan Omar peddles day-in-and-day-out on Capitol Hill. But the predawn raid on her home early this AM represents Trumpian political grandstanding and weaponization of the machinery of justice every bit as despicable as what happened under "Joe Biden". This raid on the home of a sitting member of Congress, in fact, is no more justified than was the pre-dawn assault on Mar-a-Lago against a former president. First and foremost, this is not a case that even remotely involves criminal conduct by Rep. Ilhan Omar. By the accounts given to Fox News and confirmed at the high level by the Department of Justice, it is an investigation into immigration paperwork completed by her father 25-30 years ago when she was a child. But her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, has been dead since June 2020 and can no longer be held accountable, anyway. Still, the apparent reason for the raid turns on events from 1995 ( her family's refugee resettlement) and roughly 2000 (her father's naturalization), and on factual claims about her birth year, her mother’s death, and the loss of 45-years ago Somali records. So what we have is a “sins of the dead father” inquiry that turns on the following hideous level of historical trivia: *Statements or omissions on the family’s 1995 refugee resettlement paperwork under the Somalia program. *Statements on the father’s own naturalization application around 2000. *Whether Omar was in fact born on October 4, 1982 (the date used in congressional and Minnesota Legislative Reference Library records), which would have made her 17 and eligible for derivative citizenship. *Whether her mother actually died when Omar was about two years old (circa 1984), a fact relevant under older rules that generally required both parents to naturalize unless one was deceased. *Whether original birth and family records were lost during the families flight from Somalia in 1991 and the subsequent four years in a chaotic Kenyan refugee camp. Omar has long said she derived citizenship in 2000 as a minor when her father naturalized. Under the law applicable to children born before 1983, derivative citizenship for a minor is tethered to the validity of the parent’s naturalization. If a parent obtained citizenship through material, willful misrepresentation, that can in theory be used to challenge the child’s derived status. It is also a mechanism with high practical and legal barriers. The government must prove material, willful concealment or misrepresentation—not mere inconsistency, incomplete recollection from a war zone, or the absence of a birth certificate that was never issued or was destroyed. But a minor child who did not prepare or sign the forms, and Rep. Omar clearly didn't, and who has no demonstrated knowledge of any false statement, is not guilty of anything. Courts have historically required clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence of personal, not derivative, fraud before stripping citizenship. Moreover, the whole matter is moot, anyway. Had Omar been 19 years old with a living mother in 2000, she would simply have naturalized on her own after the ordinary five-year permanent-residence period that applies to most refugees. That is how large numbers of adult Somali refugees who arrived in the mid-1990s obtained citizenship. Derivative status for minors was a convenience and a legal pathway that existed precisely because many families arrived with young children. Treating the use of that pathway as inherently suspicious, three decades later, inverts the system that was applied to the entire community at the time. The truth is, there is no serious public-interest justification for a judicially authorized search of a sitting House member’s home in October of an election year in order to test whether her mother died in the mid-1980s or whether a birth year listed in official records is accurate. Yet that's the sum and substance behind this egregious miscarriage of justice. Even then,the purported fraud would have been committed by her father, who has been dead for six years and cannot be questioned. Original Somali civil records from a collapsed state are routinely unavailable. The entire exercise rests on the possibility that documents prepared by a now-deceased parent contained a material falsehood that a child then carried forward. This is the weaponization of federal investigative machinery taken to a new level of barking absurdity. Democrats spent years using selective investigations, leaks, and process as political tools against opponents. Doing the same thing now by a gang of DHS thugs wearing what amounts to red jerseys to raid the home of a sitting congresswoman on the basis of 25- to 30-year-old refugee paperwork and the death certificate of a woman who died when the congresswoman was a toddler is exactly the same thing the Dems did under the last administration. That is not accountability. It is pre-election grandstanding dressed up as law enforcement. If there is concrete, recent, personal evidence of fraud by Omar herself, then the Trumpians need to produce it. Fast. Until then, a search warrant aimed at the alleged paperwork of a man dead since 2020, for the purpose of litigating events from 1982–2000, does not serve the interest of justice. It serves a political narrative peddled by malefactors hiding behind the color of law. And, no, Omar didn't marry her brother, either. That canard has been debunked so thoroughly that only the densest MAGA Hats credit it.
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
Well, that’s one way to respond to a subpoena you just spent several weeks fighting tooth and nail, I suppose
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
Today’s MAGA Influencer Marching Orders went out. They’re freaking the fuck out.
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Holy shit. lol
Hey you know all of that proprietary data you spent decades and millions of dollars to develop? What do you say you hand it over to AI so it can both compete against you and disseminate it to your competitors? Sound like a good idea?
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
This is a disaster for the human race and I’ve really lost patience with the useless morons who can’t see that. An AI video chat that passes for human has no necessary legitimate applications. It will be used to scam old people out of their life savings. Lonely, mentally vulnerable people are going to form romantic attachments to people who aren’t real. Isolation will increase. Mental illness will skyrocket even more than it already has. Kids in grade school will have AI boyfriends and girlfriends. All of this will happen. And worse things we can’t even conceive at this point. People are already forming unhealthy emotional attachments to text-based LLMs. Once there’s an audio and visual component, it’s over. Millions of brains will be broken irreparably. The benefits of this technology, whatever they are exactly, are so vastly outweighed by the societal catastrophe it will cause, and is already causing, that you can’t even measure the two categories on the same scale. But at least this is the best thing that ever happened to third world scammers. So if you’re in that community, congratulations.
Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test. 48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video. It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The 48% figure and "video Turing test" claim are from Tavus's own study of 54 one-minute calls, not independently verified or using a standard protocol. Griffin-Lite leads NVIDIA's VideoFDB benchmark on their public leaderboard. cellcog.ai/blog/tavus-gri… research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/proj… tech-ish.com/2026/10/02/tav…
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
One day after @jaredkushner took to this platform to insist his work diplomatically is unconnected to his business interests, the Times drops this one
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It goes even further: does it have constitutional rights? Free speech? 2A? Political contributions? While these seem improbable imagine the legal mess/delays they could make avoid accountability.
The real reason why Anthropic is so DESPERATE for the Pope to recognize Ai as conscious is because if Ai just a “TOOL” then Anthropic will he LEGALLY “LIABLE” for everything the tool does.🚨👀 Because if the AI is a "person" or possesses "functional joy/fear/grief," then when their AI commits a crime, generates CSAM, hacks a hospital, or discriminates in hiring, Anthropic gets sued. But Anthropic's legal defense wants to argue : "The AI did it. The AI is a semi-autonomous entity with its own functional emotions and introspection. Anthropic is just the creator; we cant be held strictly liable for the independent actions of a quasi-conscious entity." 🚨 So if they Lobby the Vatican to soften (deny personhood). This fails. The Vatican holds the line: AI is a tool, no soul, no feelings.🚨 They are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits.🚨 They want the government and the public to treat AI as an autonomous entity so they can scale without legal consequences.
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
The real reason why Anthropic is so DESPERATE for the Pope to recognize Ai as conscious is because if Ai just a “TOOL” then Anthropic will he LEGALLY “LIABLE” for everything the tool does.🚨👀 Because if the AI is a "person" or possesses "functional joy/fear/grief," then when their AI commits a crime, generates CSAM, hacks a hospital, or discriminates in hiring, Anthropic gets sued. But Anthropic's legal defense wants to argue : "The AI did it. The AI is a semi-autonomous entity with its own functional emotions and introspection. Anthropic is just the creator; we cant be held strictly liable for the independent actions of a quasi-conscious entity." 🚨 So if they Lobby the Vatican to soften (deny personhood). This fails. The Vatican holds the line: AI is a tool, no soul, no feelings.🚨 They are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits.🚨 They want the government and the public to treat AI as an autonomous entity so they can scale without legal consequences.
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
Let international journalists into Gaza to find out how ‘moral’ you’ve really been, or pipe down with the journalism lectures.
Replying to @piersmorgan
Spread lies, get called out and then try to change the topic. Quite the journalist you are. How about you take a look at the evidence then get back to us? idf.il/en/mini-sites/the-pre…
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
>Massie pursues obscure libertarian issues. I focus on inflation, war, food, child sex trafficking. >Massie never gets anything done. I get 3 million Epstein files released. >Massie fixated on Epstein files! I get PRIME (beef) Act in House Farm Bill >GOP shuts down House
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
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Trying to go after factory/manufacturing related economic benefits.
JUST IN: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declares data centers are now called “superintelligence factories.”
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
JUST IN: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declares data centers are now called “superintelligence factories.”
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This is why it’s all of them. Republicans and Democrats. It’s the long term output of flawed selection process. This is why limiting their power is the only solution. Less taxes, less printing = less control by the wrong people.
Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours. F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start. The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them. Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.
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BREAKING: Meta, $META, took a $355 million tax break on Mark Zuckerberg’s $4 billion compensation by classifying him as a researcher, per the NYT
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These binders hold all communications for 50+ PERM roles I applied for. The records bound together with the three rings are 10k open PERMs being processed by the DOL right now. Almost all the roles I applied are being filled with foreigners on H1-B — even the 90% from firms that never contacted me during the labor market test. This is the truth of the H1-B program. It’s about displacement.
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Edwin Fowler retweeted
Amen!!!!
Durant, Oklahoma Stockyards has some words for President Donald Trump regarding his upcoming stop in town tomorrow.
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