Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Feb 21, 1925: The New Yorker publishes its first issue with its mascot Eustace Tilley on the cover. He was based on an 1834 caricature of the Count d'Orsay (French amateur artist, dandy, and man of fashion in the early- to mid-19th century) that appeared as an illustration in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.


Website: The New Yorker
Wiki: The New Yorker
1st magazine issue: The New Yorker 1925-02-21: Vol 1 Issue 1

The New Yorker is owned by Condé Nast an American mass media company founded in 1909 by Condé Montrose Nast and owned by Advance Publications, headquartered at 1 World Trade Center and The Adelphi building in London.

On October 31, 2006, Condé Nast acquired the content aggregation site Reddit. In 2011, Reddit became an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications. In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto.

We all know what happened to Aaron Swartz, he was a Reddit co-founder.

It was believed the Reddit account "Maxwellhill" created in 2006 belonged to Ghislaine Maxwell.

Advance Publications, Inc. is an American media company owned by the descendants of S.I. Newhouse Sr., Donald Newhouse and S.I. Newhouse Jr.
Newhouse Sr. spouse was philanthropist Mitzi Epstein. Just a coincidence.

Mitzi E. Newhouse who died on June 29, 1989 is mentioned in a Vanity Fair (owned by Conde Nast) Epstein article... Peggy Siegal Sends Her Regrets


Feb 21st - "A trial was held in Superior Court in and for the County of Los Angeles. The Reverend Jonathan Whirley was found guilty on two counts of attempted murder, kidnapping, arson, obstruction of justice and tampering with public utilities".




Harper's Magazine March issue:

Slodov’s ambitions, however, were far bigger than starting a company. At the beginning of 2024, Slodov published a tract online titled “A Techno-Industrialist Manifesto.” “We need to make manufacturing better, cheaper, and faster through technology,” he wrote. “It should be as easy to make physical things as it is to make software. The end.” The main premise of “techno-industrialism” was that Silicon Valley might help solve the riddle that had stumped policymakers for more than forty years: how to reverse the tide of deindustrialization in a globalized economy in which companies can find cheaper labor abroad than they can in Detroit, Youngstown, or Peoria. “Techno-industrialists are finding their moment,” wrote Slodov. “The next wave of trillion-dollar companies in the coming decades will be in hard tech and/or manufacturing adjacent.” He called on “the most talented people in tech” to join the movement. “Go bang your head against the wall trying to figure out unsolved, insane, real-world problems.”

Soon, an ad hoc group—including Slodov’s college friend Austin Bishop; Chris Power, the CEO of Hadrian, a startup whose factories use AI software to automate weapons-parts production; and Julius Krein, editor of the conservative journal American Affairs—came together to form what they called the “vanguard of America’s techno-industrialist revival” and founded a nonprofit called the New American Industrial Alliance. That same year, a like-minded group of venture capitalists and technologists started an investment group, the New Industrial Corporation, with the goal of “build[ing] infrastructure for the most promising New Industrial companies.” They were tired of foreign powers—mainly China and Russia—“stealing” all the United States’ intellectual property; tired of the slow decline of the country’s defense-industrial base, which left it unable to effectively build ships or drones; tired of America losing its competitive edge; tired of the disappearance of manual-labor jobs and the decimation of local economies; and tired of politicians making empty promises to fix the problem.

Every American president blames the woes of deindustrialization on the previous administration and vows to be the one to stanch the bleeding. The specific framing of this issue changes over time, but the focus on industrial flight remains a point of bipartisan obsession. “Folks, where is it written that America can’t once again be the manufacturing capital of the world?” Joe Biden mused in 2023 while on a factory tour in Minneapolis. His 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in domestic clean-energy companies that produced electric vehicles, semiconductors, and batteries. When Trump assumed office for the second time, many of Biden’s policies that might actually have resulted in the creation of a meaningful number of manufacturing jobs were abandoned or scaled back, even as Trump promised a “manufacturing renaissance.” Instead, he opted to punish America’s trading partners with a blitzkrieg of tariffs.

“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country, and you see it happening already,” he declared last April. That same month, the number of manufacturing jobs in America declined by about one thousand. And despite the millions of manufacturing jobs that will soon open up as baby boomers retire, few Americans are willing or able to perform the work. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some four hundred thousand manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled. The jobs and factories have yet to come “roaring back.”

The techno-industrialists have a different plan to save America. As they see it, what we need is advanced manufacturing. For too long, they say, tech engineers have been fooling around with intangible things: software, blockchain, crypto, AI. Meanwhile, China, the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, is churning out roughly eighty-five thousand cars a day; the United States can scarcely produce a third of that number. Silicon Valley is bloated with startups, but too few of their products are concrete. The techno-industrialists believe that America needs to apply modern computing capabilities to industrial production. They believe that technology has drifted too far into the invisible realm of bits or into the digital cloud. They are tired of the coastal ethos of “tech for tech’s sake.” And they’ve attracted some very powerful backers in the newly allied worlds of tech and American politics, among them the vice president and the secretary of defense. “The West once held its own destiny in a firm grip,” reads the New Industrial Corporation’s mission statement. “We can all feel it. A supercycle is groaning to a halt. . . . The known world order is becoming disordered. The ‘end of history’ is ending.”

Two years ago, in June 2024, a group of techno-industrialist leaders organized a conference in Detroit that they called Reindustrialize. It was low-profile, with around seven hundred attendees, and held in a former book depository. When I heard from Slodov that there would be a second iteration this past July, dubbed Reindustrialize 2.0, I decided to attend. Like Slodov, I grew up in the Midwest and spent my youth wondering what had happened to postindustrial towns like Gary or Milwaukee, where the American dream had given way to bail-bond stores and foreclosure notices. The techno-industrialists, it seemed, were at the front lines, offering a concrete vision of a vibrant industrial base that would give rise to a Jetsonian future with automated machines and flying cars. At the same time, there were a number of things about the movement that hinted at something more complicated. For one, while it was easy to see how shiny new hardware might lead to increased productivity, it was harder to imagine how technology that leaned so heavily on automation would do anything to improve the plight of the Midwest’s working class. In addition, the movement’s roster of high-profile corporate partners such as Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Honeywell suggested that “reindustrialization,” just like the midcentury manufacturing boom it was constantly calling back to, would depend principally on its connection with one sector of the economy: the defense industry.

......

Here was the factory of the future. The software cut in half the time it took to make molds, which reduced the number of workers needed, at least according to Slodov, by half. “Ultimately, we need to grow our industrial base so much so there isn’t going to be any sort of job reduction, even if you make a human mold twenty times more efficient,” Young explained. “We need to increase it by so much that there’s not going to be any AI taking jobs. It’ll be creating jobs.” We continued walking through the factory. “I mean, this might be a loaded question,” he said, “but would you rather have a million jobs back, paying ten dollars an hour, or two hundred thousand jobs back, making two hundred grand a year?”

More than a loaded question, it was a hypothetical one. Atomic had yet to show that it could sustain itself as a business: it had closed its first round of seed funding in 2023 and was in the process of raising more VC money. And I struggled to understand how a factory that was supposed to bring jobs and life back to America could do so when it employed so few people. But after two days at Reindustrialize 2.0, Young’s optimism was hardly a surprise to me, nor did it strike me as inauthentic. On the way out, we passed a young man dressed in black, tending carefully to a million-dollar 3D printer. Every so often, he’d press a button on a screen that would direct a high-powered laser to weld powdered metal together, creating a mold component that Atomic software had designed. He motioned for me to peer into a circular glass window where a flash of aquatic colors vibrated in conic patterns. Little lasers danced beneath the light. “It’s kind of mesmerizing,” he said, as we stared, transfixed, into the portal.

Article continues: The Plot to Save America


The journalist and Elon Musk biographer Ashlee Vance (no relation to J. D. Vance):
Website: Core memory
X: https://x.com/ashleevance
Youtube channel
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance (Amazon link)

Atomic Industries The 21st Century Mass Production Company. The goal of Atomic is to move customers from design to production faster than anyone on earth. Atomic is reinventing mass production by teaching machines tool & die making.

America may have one chance at catching up to and perhaps surpassing China in manufacturing and it's inside this factory in Detroit.

Detroit is trying to pull off the impossible: turning the rust belt into the "American Shenzhen." In this episode, we travel to the Motor City to see if a mix of old-school grit and new-school software can actually bring manufacturing back to the US.

The Company Taking On China And Trying To Restart Manufacturing In America




More factories... nice but why build in Kalifornistan?

Neros Technologies

Neros was founded in 2023 with a mission to build the West’s drone industrial base.

In 2025, Neros became the highest-output American drone manufacturer within a 15,000-square-foot facility in El Segundo. But faced with the reality of modern warfare as seen in Ukraine, we were still just a drop in the bucket.

In 2026, we’re scaling our productive capacity by 100x.

Today, Neros is proud to announce our expansion into Millennium One, a 250,000-square-foot flagship facility in Torrance, CA. This factory is the cornerstone of Project Millennium, our initiative to build a drone industrial base that is truly competitive with China. We will build world-class systems, at a scale in the millions, and at internationally competitive cost right here on domestic soil.

Millennium One is a decisive step towards bridging the critical production gap to our adversaries. Beyond final assembly, we are also verticalizing components across the entire drone value chain, onshoring high-risk subsystems to ensure our domestic manufacturing capabilities are insulated from external supply shocks. Neros will provide the ultimate deterrent and the asymmetric advantage the West requires. We cannot afford to fail.
Project Millennium

Ryan Cohen / @ryancohen Feb 18, 2026

The Hollow Men

American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.

These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.

In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.

Today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.

If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.

This looting starts in the boardroom.

We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.

Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.

And for what?

Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.

And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.

This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.

While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.

If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.

The time for polite governance is over.

If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.

SAM ALTMAN: "People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart."

Nothing at all to worry about here...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IdyOXydDmc

He knows he needs to use absurd comparisons now to convince people of an ineffiecient model. Tech-bro nutcase. These types see no difference between humans and objects.

Seeing how the powers of the world (including America and it's "adversaries") worked in lockstep during Covid made me realize we're not moving towards a "multipolar" world order in the way I'd imagined but into a world where multiple global powers work in unison against the global proletariat.

These entities will, of course, continue to have differences and grievances in the same way mafia crime bosses might and there will be struggles for position on the top of the ladder but on a macro scale they're all in on the game and we're not.

None of these "leaders" are really "nationalist" anymore they all have bigger motivations and every time I see something happen like Assad getting whisked off to Moscow or Maduro get "kidnapped" I become more confident in my suspicions that there are no "good guys".


The “God-Switch”...


The God-Switch: What Elon Musk’s Starlink can actually be used for


Huh?



Did anyone bother to inform Trump that we only have two hospital ships, USNS Comfort and Mercy, which both are currently in the Mobile, Alabama Shipyard. The image Trump posted is an illustration of the USNS Mercy. Gov Landry was named special envoy to Greenland last month. When these ships are in their homeport of San Diego and Norfolk it takes at least 5 days to load supplies & the crew.




New 4Chan Apocalypse just dropped...




For all those about to suffer another major snowstorm in the Northeast, here's a vintage bit of warmth with the one and only Miss Julie Newmar and her steamy version of the weather report...