8 elections in Latin America since USAID got defunded The "far-right" won all 8 of them

Santa Monica 11.25% Sales Tax Tomorrow, Oct 1, Santa Monica's sales tax hits 11.25%, the highest in the region. That's a half-cent hike from Measure ER, passed by LA County voters in June. For a typical middle-income household spending around $20,000 a year on taxable goods, dining out, gas, clothes, household items, entertainment, that's about $2,250 a year in sales tax alone. Roughly $188 a month. And this comes on top of the city's own increases over the last 4 years. Water up 20%. Trash up 11% a year. Parking permits nearly doubled, while parking at the promenade has also increased. The city says it's for services. But when every bill, every meter, and every receipt goes up at once, families feel it. They deserve a council that asks whether we're getting value before we ask for more. Santa Monica residents deserve to know exactly where every dollar goes. No more blank checks. No more vague promises. We need real transparency, real audits, and real consequences when money is wasted. That's the accountability our city is missing. Affordability means keeping money in your pocket and letting you decide how to spend it. That's what I'm fighting for as your candidate for Santa Monica City Council. A Higher Standard for Santa Monica Derrick Townsend for Santa Monica City Council

Incentives determine outcomes If you give an NGO a certain number of dollars per homeless person, they will never solve homelessness SF spends more than $1b/yr (up 5x) and the homeless population has only grown NGO fraud is so insane, man.

HUGE NEWS: Millions of California households are automatically getting an average $75 off their electric bills for August and September. Thanks to the California Climate Credit, $886M collected from polluters are going back into the pockets of families across the Golden State.

Two important essays were published this week on the theme that the climate movement is now a serious national security risk for the US and Europe. This one in Tablet magazine: tabletmag.com/sections/news/… is by 2 authors, one from the Hudson Inst in DC and the other a professor at the Naval Postgrad Academy in CA. They trace the links between China and the western Net Zero movement, which is partly financial, but works mostly through influence operations by which the CCP gains exemption from criticism by western green groups despite its own coal-intensive and slave labor-dependent growth strategy. This one: thegwpf.org/content/uploads/… is by Richard Dearlove, former head of MI5, explaining how China's influence ops in the UK led to deindustrialization and a precarious dependence on China; to the extent that the UK could not now reindustrialize or stabilize its electricity grid without seeking assistance from Beijing. Dearlove's paper raises the possibility that a security agency like MI5 saw a threat building but was unable to address it because of a perception that climate science forbids criticizing Net Zero and related measures. A question I think worth asking is whether western intelligence agencies have internalized the green Net Zero mindset thereby preventing them from challenging the climate alarmism so effectively weaponized by the CCP. And if they now want to start doing so, would they know how, or have the capacity to do so.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren says it would be a "massive mistake" for California attorney general Rob Bonta to settle the lawsuit with Paramount Skydance: “As Trump tries to ban CNN from the White House, it would be a massive mistake to cave on the Paramount merger. The last thing we need is another Trump-controlled media conglomerate abusing its power to stomp out competition. This is a dangerous merger.” variety.com/2026/film/news/e…

It’s a Date: Paramount, California AG and Writers Guild Agree on Meeting for Settlement Talks hollywoodreporter.com/busine…

Anthropic chips in $250,000 to the committee backing a measure imposing a new sales tax in five Bay Area counties that will bring in an estimated $980 million per year to support local transit

People always ask me, “how can we fix LA? We don’t have the money!” We have the money…it’s just being stolen! You wanna fix the budget? END THE FRAUD. I will bust the scammers and put your tax dollars back to work for YOU.

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Paramount to leave California, according to the L.A. Mayor's office and the California Attorney General's office. What we know: tmz.com/2026/09/16/sources-s…

I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances. What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation. Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture. It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off. Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle. It starts with METR. Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models. He proposes METR for this purpose. But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock. Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio. And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem. This stock was worth $500 million early last year. It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later. METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth. Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well. But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much. The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all. The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll. If this were the end of it, that's bad. But that isn't all. The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom. The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others. They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's. All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile. As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder. Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created. From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts. This itself is an objective fact. The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it. But the problem also goes in the other direction: If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die. Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen. Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly. They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic. And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly. What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations. The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture. And that feedback loop is winning. That's what Jacob Coxon is. China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China. America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level. Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences. Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully. It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America. Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear. Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers. Congress must investigate. Evidence and Github in next post. Then some supplementary figures.