The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations: We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense. We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy.

Woke Ninth Circuit decides Korean spas have to let biological men swing their gear in front of women and children. The dissent is pure gold:

Wait… King’s Landing from Game of Thrones is a real place? This lady just visited the real-life King’s Landing filming location in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and this is what it looks like. 🤯

This student section deserves an award

Also from “News Items” (substack.news-items.com): “5. When the U.S. military’s top general laid out the risks to President Trump of launching a major and extended attack on Iran, one of the issues he flagged was America’s stockpile of munitions. Now that is being put to the test, as the U.S. races to destroy Iran’s missile and drone force before it runs out of interceptors to fend off Tehran’s retaliation, current and former officials and analysts say. The precise size of the U.S. stock of air-defense interceptors—what the Pentagon calls magazine depth—is classified. But repeated conflicts with Iran and its proxies in the Middle East have been eating into the supply of air defenses in the region. Since Saturday morning Tehran time, the U.S. and its allies in the region have pounded an array of leadership and military targets in the country, including Iran’s missile launchers, drones and airfields. One reason the U.S. and Israel struck first, a senior official said Saturday, was to blunt Iran’s ability to retaliate with its missiles and drones. It isn’t yet clear how long the strikes will need to last. U.S. Central Command said Saturday that its force has already mounted a largely successful defense against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks, though some have managed to hit their targets, especially in Arab Gulf states that are close to Iran. The conflict isn’t over, and there are still more U.S., Israeli and Iranian strikes to come. “One of the challenges is you can deplete these really quickly,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center think tank who used to teach at the Air Command and Staff College. “We’re using them faster than we can replace them.” (Source: wsj.com. Italics mine.)” An excellent secondary effect of the battle will be to serve as the forcing function to expand domestic production of critical munitions. Finally.

Operation Epic Fury: Why Iran's Ballistic Missile Force Remains the Greatest Threat These military testing memos are strong evidence Iran experimented with and deployed contaminated or "dirty warheads" against US forces as early as January 2020. We obtained the memos as part of a recent investigation into the toxic fallout of Iran's 2020 ballistic missile strike on US forces at the Al Asad air base in Iraq. Three independent environmental experts who reviewed the military records told us Actinium-228, Bismuth-214 and Cesium-137 seemed "out of place" with a conventional warhead. In this week's article for @X subscribers!

THE FIRST CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE CASUALTY OF WAR An Amazon Web Services data center in the UAE just got hit. AWS confirmed that at approximately 4:30 AM PST on March 1, “objects struck” the facility in availability zone mec1-az2, creating sparks and igniting a fire. The UAE fire department cut power to the building. The zone went dark. AWS says other zones remain operational and restoration will take several hours. Read that sentence again. “Objects struck.” The most valuable corporate infrastructure on earth is now absorbing kinetic damage from a state-level military conflict, and the world’s largest cloud provider is describing missile or drone debris as “objects” because no corporate communications playbook exists for this scenario. This is the first time in history that a major hyperscaler data center has been physically struck during a war. Every cloud architecture slide deck in every boardroom on earth assumes physical security means perimeter fences and biometric locks. Not ballistic missile defense. Not drone intercept capability. Not wartime fire suppression while the building next door absorbs ordnance. The Jerusalem Post reported the facility was used by Israel’s military. If confirmed, Iranian targeting of dual-use cloud infrastructure transforms every data center in a conflict-adjacent geography from civilian asset to military target. The distinction between cloud infrastructure and defense infrastructure just collapsed. And the geography matters enormously. AWS chose the UAE for its Middle East region precisely because Dubai and Abu Dhabi offered stability, connectivity, and proximity to enterprise clients across the Gulf. That thesis died on a Saturday morning when Iranian drones struck the Burj Al Arab, hit Jebel Ali port, and set fire to a data center running workloads for governments, banks, and military operations simultaneously. The concentration risk is staggering. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all operate Middle East regions clustered in the same geographic corridor that just became an active theater of war. Oracle has infrastructure in Dubai. Every enterprise running production workloads in these regions is now calculating disaster recovery scenarios that were categorized as “theoretical” 72 hours ago. The insurance implications alone will restructure cloud pricing for a decade. Lloyd’s of London was already reassessing war-risk exclusions after Ukraine. Now a drone has physically damaged a data center belonging to a $2 trillion company in a country that markets itself as the safest business hub in the region. AWS built multi-availability-zone redundancy for earthquakes, power failures, and network partitions. Not for Iranian retaliation against a joint US-Israeli military campaign. The architecture held because one zone went down while others stayed up. But the premise broke: that geography selection for cloud regions is a business decision, not a wartime calculation. Cybersecurity expert Lukasz Olejnik flagged the euphemistic language immediately. AWS did not say “bombed.” AWS said “objects struck.” That linguistic gap is the entire story. The world’s cloud infrastructure just entered the theater of war and the industry has no vocabulary for it yet. The vocabulary will be priced in by Monday. open.substack.com/pub/shanak…

Ok but have you guys seen videos of the Japanese bluegrass scene? Catching a bluegrass show in Japan is on my bucket list.

It apparently takes a lot to impress a hog.

In India, head movements are a whole language [📹 livingthejolife]

A PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS. Team USA honored Johnny Gaudreau by bringing his 2 kids out to the ice and holding his jersey up for a picture after winning the God Medal. Johnny and his brother Matthew were killed by a drunk driver in 2024, which kept him off the ice today. What an incredible tribute that his family will never forget. This is BIGGER THAN HOCKEY.

Why grokepedia is a must use tool

Can we all agree this dog deserves a medal?

Mom: “My kids don’t want to return from their grandpa’s place” 😩 The grandpa:

We all need more of this…

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly. What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook. Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse. This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s. The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity. I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night. Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war. We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread. Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.

Some interesting Marine Trivia👇🏼Hope you like it In 1952, a young Korean stable boy named Kim Huk Moon faced an impossible choice. His sister had stepped on a landmine. She needed an artificial leg, but the family had no money. So Kim sold the only thing of value he had: a small Mongolian mare named Ah Chim Hai—"Flame of the Morning." A U.S. Marine lieutenant named Eric Pedersen paid $250 for the horse. He needed a pack animal to carry heavy ammunition up the steep Korean mountains where no truck could go. The Marines renamed her Reckless. But Reckless was never treated like a mule. She was treated like a Marine. She roamed freely through camp. She slept in the tents with the men on cold nights. She ate scrambled eggs at the mess hall, drank beer with the platoon in the evenings, and once devoured $30 worth of poker chips. She was their mascot. But in March 1953, she became their savior. The Battle for Outpost Vegas was one of the bloodiest clashes of the Korean War. The Chinese launched a massive assault, raining artillery down on the Marines at a rate of 500 rounds per minute. The Marines on the ridgeline were running out of ammunition for their 75mm Recoilless Rifles—their only defense against enemy bunkers. The shells weighed 24 pounds each. No vehicle could reach the gun pits. The ammo had to be carried by foot up a 45-degree incline through a no man's land of explosions and sniper fire. Reckless went to work. Her handler loaded her pack with shells, slapped her on the flank, and she started climbing—alone. When she reached the firing positions, the Marines unloaded the ammo. Reckless turned around, walked back down, and came back for more. She did this 51 times in a single day. She walked over 35 miles on steep terrain, most of it under direct enemy fire. She carried over 9,000 pounds of ammunition on her back. She was wounded twice. Shrapnel cut her above the eye and tore into her flank. She didn't stop. She didn't spook. Gunnery Sergeant Joe Latham had trained her to respond to the word "Incoming!" When she heard it, she would drop to the ground and crawl into a trench to wait out the explosion. Then she'd get back up and keep walking. On her trips back down the mountain, she didn't go empty. She carried wounded Marines to the medical station. Because of the ammunition she delivered, the Marines held Outpost Vegas. After the war, Reckless was not left behind in Korea. She was brought to the United States. In 1954, she was promoted to Sergeant—and in 1959, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Randolph Pate, promoted her again to Staff Sergeant in a ceremony with a 19-gun salute and 1,700 Marines marching in her honor. She outranked her own handler. She spent her retirement at Camp Pendleton, where she gave birth to four foals: Fearless, Dauntless, Chesty, and one filly who did not survive. When she died on May 13, 1968, she was buried with full military honors. Her decorations include two Purple Hearts, a Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, and two Presidential Unit Citations. In 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Dickin Medal—the Victoria Cross for animals. She wasn't a horse. She was a Marine. ~Professor Calcue

This story was truly heartwarming. I found it in the CBS archives. A man approaches a CBS reporter in Russia after realizing they are American and shares the story of his captivity. He had been held in a concentration camp alongside American soldiers, separated from them by a large fence. Each American soldier received five kilos of food from the Red Cross every Friday, but the Germans allowed nothing for the Red Army POWs. They were given only a small amount of soup each day and were constantly starving. Some U.S. soldiers came up with a plan with the Red Army POWs across the fence to throw food over to the Russian prisoners. The plot was eventually discovered, and the Gestapo brought all 8,000 American soldiers outside and demanded they reveal the names of the Russians involved on the other side. Not a single American opened his mouth or betrayed them.

My dog judging me is annoying enough, but then she and my wife start comparing notes.