In just 10 days, the Trump administration has: - Struck a deal to buy Russian diesel and eased sanctions. - Suspended the bipartisan Graham-Blumenthal Russia sanctions law, just weeks after signing it. - Restricted Ukraine's access to Starshield satellite services. - Suspended intelligence warnings about Russian missile launches targeting Ukraine for several days. - Threatened to cut intelligence sharing unless Ukraine stopped striking Russian oil infrastructure. - Pressured Ukraine to remove Zelenskyy from power. - Downplayed Russia's and China's assistance to Iran in its war against the US, dismissing it as "very little." - Proposed unfreezing Russian sovereign assets and placing some under US control. - Pursued lucrative US-Russia business deals, including cooperation on data centres. - Proposed that Europe resume buying Russian gas as part of a Ukraine peace deal If Trump were actually a Russian agent, what exactly would he be doing differently?

the canary in the coal mine is screaming

👇This remarkable Reuters investigation published today reveals the extraordinary damage inflicted by Iran's precision strikes on critical Persian Gulf infrastructure, how regional governments have concealed its true extent, and lends strong credence to longstanding reports that the UAE effectively paid Iran to ward off further attacks. On the last point, Reuters reports that Abu Dhabi agreed to unlock at least $10 billion in frozen Iranian funds, with $3 billion reportedly released, in exchange for Tehran halting attacks on Emirati infrastructure. The UAE denies any such deal, but notably, no further strikes on UAE infrastructure have been reported since May 17. Other major findings: • Scale and precision: Reuters documents at least 135 attacks on 84 infrastructure sites across seven Persian Gulf Arab countries, often striking indispensable components whose destruction crippled entire facilities for months or even years. • Concealing the damage: Persian Gulf Arab governments repeatedly attributed damage to falling debris from intercepted Iranian missiles and drones. Reuters identified at least 34 official statements making such claims. But 14 specialists who reviewed the evidence considered it “highly improbable” that debris accounted for the systematic destruction of critical equipment across so many facilities. • Restrictions on reporting: The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain have restricted the photographing and sharing of images from attack sites, making independent assessments difficult and obscuring the true extent of the damage. • Sophisticated Iranian targeting intelligence: Iran repeatedly struck critical equipment concealed inside buildings or otherwise difficult to identify from satellite imagery. Three officials told Reuters that Tehran relies on networks of informants with access to sensitive facilities, helping explain the extraordinary precision of some attacks. The broader strategic implications are enormous. Iran has demonstrated an ability to inflict substantial economic damage across the Persian Gulf despite overwhelming US conventional military superiority. And this is precisely why renewed all-out fighting, particularly an escalation into more extensive infrastructure warfare, carries such enormous risks. The destruction could trigger even greater economic shocks far beyond the Middle East. reuters.com/investigates/spe…

Aaron, was is your source or sources for the claim Trump thought it would be easy when initiating the conflict? What would be more useful is for you to identify the members of his national security team, or possibly among our allies, that advised him thus would be easy.

Robert Carlock pointed towards the Homonym game show as his favorite cut-away gag in 30 Rock and yeah it's one of the best.

This is an extremely bad look for Saudi Arabia, and if the Saudi government is indeed involved, this should have significant implications for the US-Saudi AI relationship. Good on OpenAI for reporting this and the DOJ and FBI for acting quickly. Quick reactions: (1) US AI labs host some of the most valuable and sensitive technology in the world, and are now a prime intelligence collection target. They need to dramatically harden their cyber and physical security ASAP and strengthen their insider threat detection efforts. Any infrastructure that hosts frontier model weights needs to take similar steps. This attempt appears fairly ham-handed, but others will be (and likely already are) far more sophisticated. (2) DOJ is treating this as a counterintelligence matter, which usually involves foreign governments. The DOJ press release says the case is being prosecuted with assistance from the DOJ National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. If this were being treated as commercial espionage, it would be supported by DOJ's Criminal Division. (3) Abdulrahman Alfozan has ties to Saudi Arabia, the Saudi government, and the Saudi royal family. In addition to being a Saudi national, he is a Venture Partner at RAED Ventures, a Saudi venture capital firm whose investors include multiple Saudi government-owned funds. One of two other venture partners at RAED is Prince Khalid bin Bader Al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family. (4) If Alfozan was acting in coordination with the Saudi government, I do not see how any company could possibly host a frontier AI model in Saudi Arabia after this incident. If Saudi intelligence services are spying on US frontier AI companies inside the United States, they surely are closely tracking everything these labs are doing in Saudi Arabia--and would almost certainly have access to any model weights hosted in Saudi Arabia. These weights are not only incredibly valuable IP, but increasingly provide national-asset-level defense and intelligence capabilities. US AI capabilities have to be protected from foreign espionage, which is exactly why DOJ charged Alfozan. (5) As a reminder, Saudi Arabia also maintains extensive and continuing ties to China in the AI space. It was recently reported that Saudi Arabia's AI national champion, Humain, is building its own AI model by using a Chinese open-source model from MiniMax as the base--and using US chips to train it. Huawei also maintains an extensive presence in Saudi Arabia. (6) If the Saudi government is indeed involved with this incident, and particularly given the longstanding concerns about Saudi Arabia's ties to China in the AI space and the rapidly increasing sensitivity of frontier AI technology, we have no choice but to immediately reexamine our AI relationship with Saudi Arabia. Last year Commerce approved licenses for 35,000 Nvidia Blackwell AI chips to Saudi Arabia. But if we can't trust Saudi Arabia not to steal any US models that it hosts, it makes zero sense to sell them any AI chips--especially given right now they're using these chips to fine-tune Chinese models. Stealing US AI models while building its ecosystem on top of Chinese models would be the exact opposite of supporting the US AI stack. If the Saudi government is involved, there must be consequences.

"Anduril's not in Ukraine!" "Maybe like one special forces unit has one thing!" Anduril has had people and hardware in Ukraine since the second week of the war. I have personally trained people how to use them in Kyiv and Lviv. Our weapons have destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Russian hardware. Our last publicly-reported major shipment was less than a year ago, and we have done even more since then. Why are you such a shit-eating retard, Crispin?