No extra tunnels, no extra concern! Trump Gaza is lastly right here! Or so goes the new song that simply dropped by way of the president’s Fact Social account.
JUST IN: President Trump shares a video of an AI imaginative and prescient for the Gaza Strip, ends with Trump having drinks at a pool with Benjamin Netanyahu.
The video additionally options bearded males in bikini tops.
Nothing might have ready me for this. pic.twitter.com/1tO19aFN2t
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 26, 2025
Like a lot of what Donald Trump does, it is untoward, unserious, and sadly catchy: An A.I.-generated video (with bearded belly-dancing girls? and shirtless Benjamin Netanyahu?) riffing on Trump’s feedback earlier this month on how he desires to maneuver Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, briefly, to show the Strip into the “Riviera of the Center East” (replete with Trump inns). “Donald’s coming to set you free,” the tune goes. “Trump Gaza shining brilliant. Golden future, a brand-new gentle.” Trump-style diplomacy stays a really combined bag: an curiosity in extricating the U.S. from conflicts and funding commitments overseas paired with an curiosity in…involuntarily resettling the Palestinians to develop casinos on high of rubble and negotiating an finish to the Russia-Ukraine conflict with out Ukraine current. As normal, checking out what Trump is critical about vs. what he is simply messing round about could be very exhausting to do. His Overton window–increasing talents stay spectacular, although.
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Home spending invoice: In way more critical information, the Home simply handed a funds decision that requires $4.5 trillion price of tax cuts and $2 trillion price of decreased federal spending over the following decade; it is not clear how precisely they will do that or which packages they will must slash to make it occur. The funds decision additionally known as for rising the debt restrict by $4 trillion.
“We promised to ship President Trump’s full agenda, not simply part of it,” said Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.). “We’re not simply going to perform a little bit now and return later for the remaining. We’ve to do it now.” However it’s not completely clear what he means or how it will work: Trump does not seem concerned with chopping entitlements, which will likely be essential to make as giant of a spending dent as marketed. And Trump stays dedicated to intense enforcement on the border, for instance, even when his protection secretary is working to trim the Pentagon funds. (The invoice requires an enhance in funding, to the tune of $300 billion, for the border.)
“Republican tax writers have been agonizing over what they will squeeze into the invoice,” reports The New York Occasions. “A lot of the tax income will likely be consumed by merely persevering with the tax insurance policies that Republicans put into place in 2017, which expire on the finish of the 12 months. Extending the 2017 tax legislation will value roughly $4 trillion over a decade, whereas a number of different desperately desired enterprise tax breaks will eat up one other couple of hundred billion. That leaves solely a sliver of the funds for the potpourri of different tax cuts that Republicans hope to cram into the laws, together with not taxing suggestions and lifting the $10,000 cap on the state and native tax deduction.”
Is the DOGEmaster really a dunce? Critics of each actions and aesthetics of Elon Musk, the pinnacle honcho on the Division of Authorities Effectivity—and SpaceX, X, Tesla, and The Boring Firm—like to assert he is a silly edgelord troll. There’s loads of proof to point he has 10-year-old boy sensibilities: The shitposting, the memes, the misspelling of staple items (like Genghis Khan’s identify), the sharing of LibsofTikTok content material. However denigrating Musk’s intelligence and capabilities (as with Trump’s) has at all times rubbed me the fallacious method; it appears overly simplistic, like there is likely to be one thing we’re not seeing.
“A part of the rationale some progressives nonetheless insist on sneering at Elon’s mind is the standard class resentment of the shabby educated elite for the rich titans of business,” argues Noah Smith at Noahpinion. “However I feel much more of it’s merely what the youngsters name ‘cope.’ Proper now, Elon is making use of all the identical skills he used to construct his corporations—motivating employees, circumventing purple tape, figuring out and overwhelming each bottleneck at breakneck velocity—to his effort to remake the U.S. civil service with DOGE. Telling themselves that Elon does not actually have any expertise, or that he simply will get fortunate, or that he is only a huckster, or that he solely succeeds due to authorities assist, are ways in which progressives consolation themselves with the idea that Elon’s efforts will inevitably fail.”
Nate Silver calls it “spiky intelligence” and says “it is necessary to keep away from two pitfalls when encountering folks” like this: “That Elon is extremely clever in a number of methods doesn’t imply that all the things he does is good. Some issues he does are exceptionally dumb or harmful—and we should not make excuses for these or fake that it is all a part of some grasp plan.” And in addition: “It is absurd to recommend that Elon is not good in lots of respects simply because he is not in others. And if he has merely excellent SAT scores, I do not care; he is demonstrated his intelligence by his accomplishments.”
Silver breaks down proof of Musk’s intelligence into a number of classes: “cognitive load capability and general horsepower”; “speedy cognition and thin-slicing capability”; “summary problem-solving capability”; and “instrumental rationality” (“aligning means with ends” or—put extra merely—”shrewdness”).
Authorities workers seemingly battle with fundamental DOGE project: Alina Habba, counselor to the president, held a press conference yesterday about DOGE and federal authorities workers’ seeming incapacity to reply to the infamous five-bullet-point job-justification e-mail: “It is simply such a nonissue. Take into consideration the truth that we’re having—have a look at all of you, standing right here, asking me why individuals are upset to reply to their boss, the American folks, and the president of the US, what you have accomplished at work! What a ridiculous factor!”
All of this—the Trump Gaza video, the seeming math challenge that may current itself when grappling with the brand new spending invoice, the controversy over Musk’s mind, the utter madness of federal workers melting down over staple items which can be anticipated in some other business, the haphazard method the DOGE audit has been accomplished (and the union lawsuits which have ensued)—may appear disjointed, nevertheless it’s actually not: We’re in an period the place the federal authorities—each the individuals who run it at a excessive degree and the profession bureaucrats who name themselves civil servants—are at a fork within the highway by way of whether or not they’ll select seriousness (like making exhausting cuts to get the nationwide debt below management, which might enhance American competitiveness) or a trolling, time-wasting race to the underside.
Scenes from New York: The Love Gov could also be back for more.
QUICK HITS
- Discover it semifunny that The Atlantic profiled the stunning Aella (whom I dined with not too long ago in Miami and have interviewed a number of instances for Cause). “Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 totally different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We all know this as a result of she meticulously gathers and posts details about folks’s private, emotional, and sexual lives—together with her personal. The crying quantity was unusually excessive, she says, due to a foul breakup. For a lot of followers, the extra boggling statistic was that final 12 months, she had intercourse on solely 41 days, however on a type of days, she had intercourse with almost 40 folks. We’ll come again to that.” I really didn’t count on phrase of Aella’s, uh, antics to achieve The Atlantic of all locations.
- This immediate, from Bridget Phetasy, is unbelievable (“What are your most insane, irritating, or infuriating tales of coping with any authorities businesses or companies?”). The responses are actually next-level.
I’ve two.
Again in 2015, I paid off my scholar loans…or thought I did. The final examine was for $.85 or one thing like that. Two months later, I began getting threatening calls from a debt collector, after which my credit score tanked as a result of I used to be “greater than 180 days late” on my… https://t.co/oBQE5mXxsD
— Emily Zanotti ???? (@emzanotti) February 25, 2025
New w/Dartmouth college students: State media tagging doesn’t have an effect on perceived tweet accuracy
Key findings:
-no proof tags modified perceived accuracy
-users appeared to largely not discover
-might be ineffective or worse for individuals who view state media favorablyhttps://t.co/BT9HANJO26 pic.twitter.com/XCR8GMuzcB— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on ????☁️) (@BrendanNyhan) February 25, 2025
What if lord of the rings is definitely a science fiction novel set 1,000,000 years sooner or later in a de industrialized society after an prolonged darkish age, amongst numerous genetically modified organisms which have misplaced their historical past ?
— ???????????????????????? ⏳ (@Grimezsz) February 26, 2025
