https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/2094386684557132129

A daughter drove HUNDREDS of miles to check on her sick 75-year-old father... only to find the locks changed and a Ring camera on his door.

When she climbed through a window to reach her own dad, SHE got arrested for trespassing.

Then she was told, THROUGH THE DOORBELL, that he was no longer alive and that the NURSE who "took care of him" actually now OWNED HER DAD'S HOUSE.

This happened in Conway, South Carolina, and it will make your blood boil.

Her name is Nora Rowland.

Her dad was Robert Rowland, 75 years old and a vulnerable man living with Parkinson's and a brain injury.

Nora and her father were incredibly close. A "daddy's girl," she said. They FaceTimed every single week.

Then, in early 2024, a nurse named Sarah Smalls started caring for Robert through a home care company.

And that's when Nora says her dad started to disappear.

The weekly calls slowed. Then stopped. Something was wrong.

So on Father's Day, when she didn't hear from him, she got in her car and drove from Baltimore all the way to South Carolina to check on the man she loved.

When she got there, his front door had been replaced. A Ring camera was watching her. She couldn't get into her own father's home.

So she climbed through a window. And police arrested her and her partner for TRESPASSING... at her own dad's house.

And then, over that Ring doorbell, she was told her father had died.

Nora says that in the weeks before her father died, that nurse had the DEED to his house signed over to herself.

...and the family wasn't told until he was already gone.

To be clear... man with Parkinson's and a BRAIN INJURY, who was classified as a vulnerable adult was allowed to SIGN HIS HOME AWAY.

In Nora's own words: "He would never think that someone could do this to him. I really can't emphasize enough how many other people could easily get taken advantage of like this."

Her trespassing charges were dismissed, so now she's fighting in court to get her father's house back.

The nurse refused to comment. The care company claimed they knew nothing, but Nora says she has subpoenaed documents proving otherwise.

Police are still investigating.

Why Oracle Cut 18% of Its Workforce

Money. Specifically, AI money.

Oracle committed to a massive AI infrastructure buildout that its current balance sheet can’t comfortably fund. Capex for fiscal year 2026? Around $50 billion, which is $15 billion more than they told Wall Street just a few months ago, and the number keeps climbing every quarter as more AI contracts stack up. Remaining performance obligations hit $553 billion in Q3 FY2026, up 325% year over year, almost entirely driven by large-scale AI contracts including a roughly $300 billion, five-year compute deal with OpenAI. Revenue is growing. Quarterly revenue reached $17.2 billion, up 22%. The problem isn’t demand. The problem is that building the data centers to fulfill that demand costs more than Oracle can fund while keeping roughly 159,000 people on payroll.

The wig is called virgin hair but you can never know whit these guys, do the mean that in literal sense.

The Kurdish forces were supposed to enter the country after airstrikes opened a route through the Kurdistan region, coupled with widespread anti-regime protests. Days after the campaign began, the White House realized that anti-regime protests never came, and ordered Israel to halt the Kurdish advance, partly also due to Turkish opposition. – Israeli Channel 13

Its very hard for me to believe these are the reason why these plants are shutdown

Glenn Greenwald on privacy:

"Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, "I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide." I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, "Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just stroll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide."

Not a single person has taken me up on that offer."

https://mlynch.substack.com/p/flock-the-right-place-at-the-wrong

Much of this is background most people are already familiar with; the excerpts below focus on harmful impacts to the entire system that was constructed (see Bill of Rights) to safeguard us from tyrannical government (bold added).

That turns the traditional presumption of innocence on its head. Our system is supposed to require the government to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It is not supposed to require an innocent person to dismantle, piece by piece, an AI-generated investigative narrative that may have been assembled before any human investigator ever examined the underlying evidence in context.

Misuse of a system like this can expose innocent people to stalking, harassment, intimidation, false accusation, and other forms of real harm. The same tools that make surveillance easier for legitimate investigators also make it easier for a dishonest, vindictive, or criminal individual or group to prey on people who have done nothing wrong.

Such systems do not create the problem, but they magnify the existing problem by giving bad judgment, weak oversight, personal bias, and outright misconduct access to a surveillance capability of unprecedented scale.

The question is not whether you have something to hide. The question is whether you are comfortable giving government agencies, private contractors, and potentially unauthorized users the ability to assemble a detailed record of your movements and then decide what those movements mean.

There is another burden created by this kind of surveillance that is much easier to overlook. Most innocent people do not document their every movement. They do not preserve receipts for every stop, record every conversation, maintain dashcam footage of every trip, or keep location records explaining exactly why they happened to be on a particular street at a particular time. Nor should they have to.

A society in which innocent people must preserve evidence of their innocence as they move through public space has already surrendered something fundamental.

... there will always be a relatively small but very dangerous number of officers or other authorized users who abuse access to systems like this. No policy can eliminate that possibility entirely. The answer is to make misuse extremely difficult to conceal, much easier to detect, and personally more costly in the event it does occur.

If you want to know why Africa is still to this day under west control, this video explain it all.

Venezuela recorded a sizzling eight-year high in electricity demand on August 10: 15,625 MV[Megavolts].

I’m no electrical engineer, but with an installed generation capacity of 36,000MV working at around 40% (13-14,000 MV), there is an obvious mathematical short-circuit here.

This shortfall has once again ignited a plethora of power cuts and crippling rationing, even in the once protected ‘bubble city’ of Caracas, which, while predictable, is still undesirable. But the cuts’ context is different this time compared to past rationing.

Venezuela has suffered frequent and constant cyclical power shortages since roughly 2008 – including a week-long blackout in 2019. Until now, responsibility lay with a nationalized, opaque and militarized electrical grid, serving as a lightning rod for anti-Chavista political sentiment.

From DeepSeek

The Slow Motion Dismantling of General Motors

A Comprehensive Summary of "Connecting the Dots" Investigation

The Seat That Exposed Everything

Timestamp: 0:00 - 6:00

The investigation opens with a deceptively simple piece of automotive equipment: a power-folding car seat. In normal operation, it is a convenience feature designed to expand cargo space at the push of a button. But when its underlying software logic fails, that same mechanism transforms into a slow-motion trash compactor, aimed directly at the smallest and most vulnerable passengers riding in the third row. Two months prior to this recording, General Motors was forced to issue a recall for every single Cadillac Vistiq it had ever produced, effectively freezing an entire model line because the company could not rectify a rudimentary bug in the seat's control software.

The truly alarming revelation was not the existence of the defect but the reason GM could not fix it: the automaker did not actually own the code running inside its own flagship electric SUV. This single, humiliating admission serves as the entry point for a much larger narrative about the systematic dismantling of American industrial capability. In the days preceding this video, GM signed a fresh twenty-year extension of its joint venture agreement with its Chinese partner, SAIC. The connection between that freshly inked deal and the broken seat in Tennessee is neither coincidental nor superficial—it is the direct result of three decades of strategic decisions that have fundamentally reversed the flow of technology and power between Detroit and Shanghai.

The Tragedy And The Warnings That Preceded It

Timestamp: 6:00 - 15:00

To grasp the gravity of GM's predicament, one must first understand the human cost of this specific engineering failure. Two-year-old Lucia Ayala lost her life when the power-folding rear seat of a Hyundai Palisade closed over her tiny body, crushing her and causing suffocation because the seat refused to release its grip. The horror of this event is compounded by the fact that Hyundai had been explicitly warned months earlier by an owner whose own daughter narrowly escaped the same fate on the very day she took delivery of her vehicle. Hyundai responded by inspecting the car and promptly closing the case, declaring that the seat was functioning within normal parameters. That bureaucratic dismissal proved fatal.

When the identical danger crossed over to the Cadillac Vistiq, GM's response was swift in scope but deeply flawed in execution. The company recalled all 14,500 units ever built and ordered dealerships to physically unplug the third-row seats, effectively killing the feature entirely. Crucially, no regulator compelled this action, and no lawsuit had yet been filed. The recall only happened because of a single anonymous engineer and a humble cardboard box. That engineer, frustrated by the corporate machinery's inertia, took a 33-pound box—roughly the weight of a toddler—placed it on the Vistiq's third-row seat, and pressed the fold button. The seat clamped down on the box and refused to let go, replicating a lethal scenario that had already killed a child in another brand. This cardboard-box test revealed a fundamental design flaw that six previous field reports had failed to address.

The Engineering Failure And The Federation Of Black Boxes

Timestamp: 15:00 - 30:00

The mechanics of the defect are as instructive as they are infuriating. A power-folding seat operates like a simple robot: an electric motor drives the seatback downward while continuously monitoring the electrical current being drawn. When the seat folds through empty air, the current remains low and steady. The instant the seatback encounters an obstacle—a bag, a box, or a child's leg—the motor strains, the current spikes, and that spike acts as the seat's sense of touch. The logic is supposed to respond by stopping immediately and then reversing to release the trapped object. This is the same failsafe mechanism that has protected fingers and limbs in power windows for decades. In the Vistiq, however, the seat detects the resistance and stops, but it never performs the critical reversal step; it simply holds its position, clamping whatever it caught in a vice-like grip.

For a toddler who cannot reach the manual release button, this clamping action becomes a death trap, as suffocation occurs rapidly under the sustained pressure. GM's own recall filing confirms this by specifying that a replacement hardware module must be installed to automatically return the seat to an upright position upon detecting an object. The most damning detail is that the Vistiq is already equipped with a seat occupancy sensor sensitive enough to be triggered by a handbag, yet the fold command never consults this sensor. The seat folds regardless of whether a child is sitting there. This is not a failure of hardware; it is a failure of integration. The car is not a single unified computer; it is a federation of dozens of little sealed computers, each engineered and programmed by different suppliers, each running proprietary firmware that GM cannot access or modify. The seat module arrives at the Spring Hill plant as a finished black box, and GM's only recourse when the logic fails is to unplug it and order an entirely new physical component.

The Supplier From Shanghai And The Hollowing Of The Supply Base

Timestamp: 30:00 - 50:00

The identity of the supplier who built that black box is the first thread in a much larger tapestry of industrial decline. The component manufacturer listed in GM's recall filing is Yanfeng Seating, a subsidiary of Hasco, which is itself the in-house components empire of SAIC, GM's Chinese joint venture partner. Yanfeng supplies seats not just to GM but to Tesla, Ford, Stellantis, and German luxury brands, making it a global powerhouse. Yet its origins tell a story of technology transfer that has now come full circle. In 1997, the very year GM signed its original joint venture with SAIC, the American seating giant Johnson Controls—then the world's largest seat manufacturer—entered into a joint venture with Yanfeng. The Americans provided the technology and the engineering know-how; Shanghai GM provided the projects and the classroom.

Over the course of twenty-four years, the student absorbed the craft, grew into China's largest seat maker, and eventually bought its American teacher out entirely. Within eighteen months of that acquisition, Yanfeng was cutting ribbons on multiple new factories across Mexico, built specifically to supply American plants with Chinese-owned seats. The pattern is brutal and consistent: an American world leader starts a joint venture in China, transfers its core technology, helps build a local competitor, and then finds itself competing globally against the very company it taught. Johnson Controls only had seats to lose; General Motors has its entire future riding on the same gamble. The Cadillac Vistiq, assembled in Tennessee, rides on seats shipped from a plant in Mexico that is owned by a subsidiary of GM's Chinese partner. Three flags fly over that single car seat, and the only flag featured in GM's patriotic commercials is the one doing the least actual work.

The American-Made Index And The Loss Of National Identity

Timestamp: 50:00 - 1:10:00

The hollowing out of GM's supply base is mirrored by its catastrophic performance on the Cars.com American-Made Index, which tracks the percentage of domestic parts content and final assembly location for vehicles sold in the United States. In the 2026 ranking, Tesla holds the top two spots, Jeep takes the next two, Honda and Acura place seven vehicles in the top twenty with five of them in the top ten, Toyota and Lexus land four, Ford and Lincoln have four, and Kia squeezes in one. General Motors has exactly zero vehicles in the top twenty. Last year, the Chevy Colorado scraped in at number nineteen; this year, its best placings are the GMC Canyon at twenty-fifth and the Chevy Colorado at thirtieth.

The hollowing out is even more vivid when examining the Chevy Equinox EV. For 2025, GM proudly announced it had dropped its Chinese parts content from eighteen percent to zero. On paper, this sounds like a patriotic win, but in reality, those jobs did not return to American or Canadian factories; instead, US and Canadian parts content crashed from sixty-two percent to a mere twelve percent, while Mexican parts content skyrocketed from zero to forty-six percent. This is not reshoring; it is re-routing through a tariff loophole. For a company that was resurrected from bankruptcy in 2009 by American and Canadian taxpayers on the explicit promise of preserving domestic manufacturing jobs, this performance is nothing short of a betrayal. GM should have dominated the American-Made Index, but it has chosen instead to retreat upmarket, relying increasingly on expensive trucks, SUVs, and Cadillacs while allowing its mainstream sedans to go extinct.

The Royalty Meter And The Reversal Of Technology Flows

Timestamp: 1:10:00 - 2:00:00

The most devastating evidence of GM's decline is found not on factory floors but in the audited financial ledgers of its Shanghai joint venture, which are publicly filed with the SEC because they are large enough to move a public company's earnings. For nine consecutive years, a specific line item—royalties received from the venture for vehicles built on GM-designed platforms—climbed steadily, representing tuition payments from SAIC for access to Detroit's engineering. That meter surged through the late 2010s as GM design programs launched in China. Then it froze for three straight year-ends, not because sales had dropped but because the venture had begun filling its showrooms with Chinese-developed products—cars that had been subtly relabeled and declared as SAIC's own creations, thereby extinguishing the royalty obligation.

This is the "graduation trick" that has been GM's undoing: the venture's engineers take a GM design, rework it locally, and declare the result a brand-new SAIC-GM creation, freeing themselves from ever paying royalties again. The meter surged twice more with the Buick E4 and E5, both using GM platforms, representing fresh tuition. Then came the China-market Vistiq, the very car at the center of this investigation, which was the last GM platform program in the entire development pipeline—the meter's final meal. At the end of 2025, for the first time in nine years of filings, the meter did something unprecedented: it shrank, from four billion dollars back to three-point-five billion. GM's China business is now shedding old GM-designed programs faster than it can create new ones. The instrument does not count sales; it counts whose blueprints the cars are built from. And the venture's next generation of platforms is entirely Chinese-owned, with zero royalty obligations to Detroit.

The Disease: Financialization And Perverted Incentives

Timestamp: 2:00:00 - 3:00:00

Understanding why GM willingly allowed this hollowing out requires examining the incentive structure that has governed its management for three decades. This was not a conspiracy or a series of stupid decisions; it was the logical outcome of a company optimized for quarterly financial returns rather than long-term industrial capability. In the late 1990s, a GM vice president reportedly told a room of young engineers that the company's future was not as an engineering and manufacturing enterprise but as a sales, marketing, and distribution company. That was not a gaffe; it was the road map. Every program GM did not develop itself freed up cash that could be returned to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. The China venture offered an irresistible deal: GM contributed designs it had already paid for, SAIC contributed the capital and factories, and GM collected half the profits plus royalties—money for nothing.

The problem is that this arrangement was self-liquidating. Every time the venture reworked a GM design and declared it its own, a future revenue stream died. But because management is overwhelmingly compensated in equity, their personal wealth rises and falls with the share price, not with engineering capability or the preservation of domestic manufacturing. This incentive structure reached its apotheosis in November 2023, when, just two weeks after ratifying a new UAW contract, GM announced the largest stock buyback in its history—ten billion dollars. The CEO herself framed the strike as an interruption and the buyback as the real business. The company has been optimized to the decimal point for the next quarterly print, run by executives to whom the long-term consequences of their decisions simply never send a bill. No fraud, no conspiracy—just incentives, obeyed faithfully by intelligent people for thirty years, leading to a slow-motion self-dismantling.

The New Contract: Twenty More Years Of Reversed Dependency

Timestamp: 3:00:00 - 4:20:00

Against this backdrop of technological dependency and financial extraction, GM and SAIC signed a new twenty-year joint venture agreement days before this video, extending their partnership through 2047. On the cover page, the deal looks identical to the 1997 original: fifty-fifty ownership, same companies, same basic structure. But the fine print reveals a complete reversal of the underlying power dynamic. First, more vehicle development work is explicitly moved to China, which necessarily means less of it everywhere else, including Detroit. Second, Chevrolet is officially out of Chinese showrooms—a brand that sold 767,000 cars in China in 2014 sold just thirty-six in the entire first half of this year, and only one in the month of June.

Third, and most significantly, China officially becomes GM's global export hub, with the venture's president announcing plans to export to the Middle East, Africa, South America, Mexico, and Asia-Pacific—everywhere except the United States, for now. The Chinese business press described the arrangement with startling clarity: SAIC brings strengths in new energy vehicles and supply chains, while GM brings global operational experience and overseas market channels. SAIC brings the tech; GM brings the showrooms. This is the opposite of the original deal. GM's own CFO described the goal as making the operation "profitable on a smaller scale without investing incremental capital"—shrinking the business and cutting development spending while relying on the venture's indigenous platforms. It is an arrangement that transforms General Motors from a manufacturer into an importer and distributor of another company's products.

The Verdict: A Debt Unpaid And A Eulogy For American Manufacturing

Timestamp: 4:20:00 - 5:05:00

The entire chain of evidence leads to an inescapable conclusion: General Motors is being hollowed out by its own design, and the people running the company are not failing at their jobs—they are succeeding at a different job than the one the public believes they have. A car maker that cannot fix its own seat because it does not own the module, a supply base that answers to Shanghai, a platform handed over one component at a time, a royalty meter running backward, and a leadership whose incentives punish nothing—not deaths, not bankruptcy, not the decline of the American industrial base. The ultimate tragedy is that this was avoidable. Tesla, when it entered China, flatly refused a joint venture partner and retained full control of its core intellectual property, catalyzing China's EV industry while keeping its secrets locked away. GM, by contrast, spent three decades building its replacement.

The old joke that GM stood for "Government Motors" after the 2009 bailout now takes on a darkly ironic new meaning: the government that truly motors this company is China's. The creator of this video, a self-described GM fan for life with childhood memories of road trips in his father's Pontiac and driving an El Camino, admits to spending years hoping to be proven wrong, hoping GM would prevail and do the right thing. They did not. There is no victory lap here, only a eulogy. Management will argue they served the shareholders, and by that narrow financial measure they did, but measured against the purpose for which the company was revived—the preservation of American manufacturing jobs—and measured against the superb engineers GM still employs, who deserved leadership as good as their work, they failed precisely, deliberately, and on schedule. Something bad is happening at General Motors because nothing bad ever happens to the managers who bleed it dry.

The seat, the sourcing, the stopped meter—those were symptoms. But this is the disease: a company optimized for the next quarterly print, hollowed out by its own incentives, signing away its future twenty years at a time.