Authored by James Howard Kunstler,
The Jungle Drums Speak!"Love that the crack heads on Skid Row are up on the issues, know the candidates, and are able to Make Their Voices Heard in between hits of meth."
- Peachy Keenan on X
Whaddaya know? Looks like the charismatic Nithya Raman has overtaken maverick candidate Spencer Pratt in the Los Angeles mayoral “jungle” primary because. . . jungle reasons. That is, the denizens of LA’s vast homeless encampments — once known as “hobo jungles” — apparently voted overwhelmingly by mail for the Harvard-credentialed champion of street-junkies in the Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, and Hollywood neighborhoods (SELAH) she represents on the LA City Council.
LA Mayoral Candidate, Nithya Ramen, Champion of the Down-and-Out
So, it will be a November runoff between the super-duper “progressive” incumbent Karen Bass, and merely super-progressive Ms. Ramen. Better reserve your U-Haul trailer ASAP, as the City of Angels completes its transformation to the City of Zombies. And no complaining, please. This is what you voted for.
By the way, what does “progressive” actually mean these days? Progress towards. . . what? The culminating disintegration of a civil polity? The concerted failure to govern a large, urban organism? Unconditional surrender to the forces of entropy? One might suspect a soupçon of racial animus in the mix, too, something of a middle-finger to this thing called white supremacy we hear so much about. It must be rooted out at all costs, including the cost of a place that a productive population once loved — the very people renting all those U-Hauls, dispersing out into the USA gloaming.
Of course, this “progressive” Democratic Party has transformed itself in a decade or so into an out-and-out racketeering operation, that is, to a criminal enterprise dedicated to the misappropriation of taxpayer money among its rank and file, many of whom are not citizens. The model is not unlike more primitive early versions, such as Boss Tweed’s ring in 19th century New York, or the gang under mayor James Curley, the “Rascal King” of Boston. The system was known as “patronage.” Voters were the party’s patrons, and the patrons were on the payroll. Some had actual party jobs. Some just got free stuff in exchange for their votes. They called it a “machine” because its operations became automatic, self-fulfilling.
There was one big difference, though: these earlier Democratic Party grifters, for all their moneygrubbing shenanigans, were American patriots. They celebrated a country so ostentatiously “free,” so fervently dedicated to upward mobility, that it made room for their garish political corruption. The Democratic machine of Los Angeles today is quite the opposite: It’s a faction that loathes and detests the American system and seeks sedulously to destroy it, even while grabbing as much loot as it can in the process.
Mayor Karen Bass was trained for that mission in Cuba. Beginning at age 19, in 1973, Ms. Bass made eight trips there with the Venceremos Brigade (founded in 1969 by the Lefty-left SDS) to “show solidarity with the Cuban revolution,” which, you might remember, was a straight-up communist revolution. One might infer, then, that Mayor Bass is a straight-up communist, with ambitions to destroy the capitalist city of Los Angeles, so as to replace it with a communist utopia — where all production (if there is any) is owned and controlled by the government, which then dispenses the fruits-of-production to the people, according to their needs, as officers of the government see fit.
In such a system, history shows, the people enjoy no ability to make decisions for themselves about what sort of work to pursue for their own improvement and well-being — what we call economic liberty. That’s all left to the political office-holders, the kommisars, the decision-makers, who tell everybody else what to do (because, you see, they know better). It has not worked too well in practice, as the collapse of Soviet Russia demonstrated, and the imminent collapse now of Cuba, will validate.
This is also exactly what you see in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires of 2025. There was the fiasco of the fire itself in which everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, in the way of prevention and mitigation. The incompetence of Los Angeles city officials was so total — from the mayor’s absence in Africa, the fire chief’s cluelessness, the empty reservoirs, the broken fire hydrants, etc. — that Pacific Palisades and Altadena across town got completely destroyed. In the eighteen months since, the city’s bureaucracy (with “help” from the state) has made sure that next-to-nothing can be rebuilt. Since a large number of people employed in the movie industry lived in these places, and were left financially ruined, Karen Bass’s government has also neatly helped destroy the city’s signature business. . . a home run for communists!
Marxian economic theory is appealing to those who hate and oppose the natural fact that not all outcomes in human life are equal, who resent with red-hot passion the human tendency to social hierarchy, and work fanatically to defeat it. They never do, of course. In communist revolutions hierarchy always reorganizes itself — only within the party structure itself, while all extra-party human effort is outlawed. In California, as in the other “blue” states and cities, Democratic Party leaders perch in the upper branches of the social hierarchy while they cream-off all available revenue streams.
If you suspect there’s something shady about the California election system, you might be onto to something. President Trump thinks this is the case, and said so pretty forcefully on Sunday in his confab with the argumentative Kirsten Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press show. “There’s no evidence!” Ms. Welker repeated strenuously, of voting irregularity, either in this month’s California jungle primary, or in the 2020 national election. You think? I guess we’ll see about that.
Remember: former president Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — home of the Smartmatic vote tabulation system — has been in US custody for months.
Do you suppose he might be trying to cut a deal for himself to avoid a very long prison sentence by disclosing what he knows about Smartmatic?
Do you suppose that Mr. Trump might know something about these ongoing negotiations?
Do you wonder if any of that has occurred to Kirsten Welker of Meet the Press?
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 08:00The US and China are locked in a series of races, with AI now sitting at the center of nearly all of them. This is a race not only to build the leading frontier models, but to deploy them across entire economies, unleash physical AI, and convert compute power into productivity, surveillance, military, and industrial advantage ahead of the 2030s. This is the new world we are entering, and it is moving incredibly fast. The current chapter of this story is the data center build-out phase. It will then eventually extend into space.
Goldman has already estimated that US hyperscalers will deploy $800 billion in capex this year alone on AI infrastructure. Across the Pacific, however, the scale of Beijing's data-center buildout had remained relatively opaque until now.
China is preparing to unleash a 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) data-center buildout phase over the next five years, according to a new Bloomberg News report, citing people familiar with the matter, as Beijing and Washington race to ensure their own tech giants are ahead in the frontier model race.
The report said the National Development and Reform Commission is drafting plans for a network of interconnected data centers to be operated by state firms such as China Mobile and China Telecom.
These data centers are expected to rely heavily on domestic chip suppliers, including Huawei, for at least 80% of core technology. This is a move by Beijing to accelerate the development of its domestic chipmakers by sidelining Nvidia and AMD.
More color about the buildout:
The over-arching plan represents Beijing's most aggressive endeavor yet to lay the foundation for future Chinese AI development.
It recalls the undertakings of years past that marshalled resources to support national champions like Huawei, with the aim of replacing US technology. And it's a key prong of the "Six Networks" program announced earlier this year, covering construction of essential infrastructure spanning water and electricity to computing, one of the people said.
The report sent Chinese data-center stocks higher in the premarket: GDS Holdings rose by 5% and Vnet Group jumped 8%.
The US-China rivalry is extending well beyond the chip space. It should be viewed as a full-blown industrial race, and China's planned data-center buildout shows that Beijing is trying to fuse AI, power infrastructure, domestic chips, and state financing into a single national mobilization strategy.
Given that this is now a full-blown industrial race, Beijing's broader strategy is no longer limited to chips, data centers, and power infrastructure. It also extends into the domain of information.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned of "three vectors of foreign influence," including CCP state media, the Singham network, and foreign-billionaire dark money, behind elements of the anti-AI data center campaign in the US.
If correct, that would suggest China's playbook is not just to accelerate its own AI buildout, but to slow, divide, and politically constrain America's.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 07:45Authored by Kit Knightly via OffGuardian,
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced plans, in a speech earlier today, to introduce "device-level controls" that will prevent children from viewing, sending or taking naked photographs:
This government will not stand by while children are put at risk online.
Today I am calling on the tech companies to introduce device-level controls to prevent children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images.
And if they don't act, we will.
According to Justice Minister Catherine Atkinson, the UK will become "the first country where it will be impossible for children to take, share or view naked pictures"
The UK will be the first country where it will be impossible for children to take, share or view naked pictures, a justice minister tells @LeahBoleto.
The government says tech companies must stop this happening within three months or they'll be forced to act through legislation. pic.twitter.com/ZQ3MWobQ2X
The only way this is even close to enforceable is if one or more of the following measures are in place:
It means "nudity detection" on every app on the device, at all times. There's literally no other way of doing it. From the government's website earlier today [emphasis added]:
Apple recently introduced age checks for iPhone users, making it the first company to activate safety features by default for those who are not verified as over 18. This is a significant step forward following the government's commitments to work with industry, and one this announcement builds on.
Despite this, the nudity detection is not applied to the camera or broader apps, third-party messaging services, or search functions, meaning children can still take, view, share and save nude images. The government therefore wants Apple and Google to block nudity across the whole device by default
...but don't worry, just verify your age via digital ID or biometrics or whatever, and the government won't look at your internet history or share your nudes.
Over-18s will still be able to view adult content by providing proof of age.
It's the basest of blackmail, that's all.
The UK government wants to make it mandatory that everybody verifies their age by linking their ID to their smartphones or other digital devices.
That's ALL they want.
We all know what this is really about.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 07:20