Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics

Molly White – citation needed: “I’ve been running my website Follow the Crypto since 2024, tracking the cryptocurrency industry’s influence on our democracy. The industry spent more than $130 million buying the 2024 elections, and the strategy worked. Pro-crypto politicians have proposed or passed industry-drafted legislation that threatens to open the floodgates to even more predatory crypto products, regulatory agencies were gutted, and crypto executives bought direct access to the President and positions in the White House. Now the artificial intelligence industry is following the same playbook. Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network. Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbaseboard member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one, is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network. The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs. The PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people.

• So I’ve expanded the site to track both. It’s now called Tech Influence Watch, and it documents more than $400 million(and counting) in contributions from crypto and AI companies and their executives this election cycle. When two industries with shared backers and shared operatives are spending this much to write their own regulations, someone needs to be watching.
• The site is live now at influence.citationneeded.news.a Here’s a little of what I found while building it…”

Who won the redistricting fight? GOP with +8 to +10 seats

Data is Beautiful: “The GOP is forecasted to pick up +8 to +10 U.S. House seats via legislative redistricting as new congressional maps are finalized. Legal challenges may still overturn some maps. Geographically, most projected GOP gains are concentrated in Deep South states which have a long history of Voting Rights Act litigation. Several of the key seat pickups come from districts previously created to provide Black representation (eg, TN, AL and LA). All states redistricting in favor of Democrats did so through a voter-approved map. All states redistricting in favor of Republicans did so through the state legislature or through the courts overturning a voter-approved map.

• Tools: Built by hand in React + TypeScript — the timeline chart and US choropleth are raw SVG (no D3 or charting libraries; state shapes from a public-domain Wikimedia map), driven by a JSON file of redistricting events, with live Polymarket odds as the only dynamic data.
• Methodology: Estimated seat impact for each enacted, court-approved, or voter-approved congressional redistricting action relative to the prior map. Ohio is shown as 0–2 GOP seats because previously safe Democratic districts became toss-ups rather than guaranteed GOP pickups. This is an isolated analysis of states that changed maps and is not a full 2026 House forecast. Used actual news stories and Polymarket data to corroborate confidence…”

IMPERIAL - SYMBIO WILDLIFE PARK

"I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don't like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around."

 — Ernest Hemingway

"Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings."

 — Evan Esar

"I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces... Certain illusions about freedom plague them both."

 — Yann Martel (Life of Pi) 

When a 12-year-old Matt Radnidge first started raking pony yards at Symbio Wildlife Park for $10 a day, he didn’t realise he’d one day be helping lead it into a new era of conservation and purpose.

Today, he’s part of the family that owns and operates the park, and is preparing to celebrate a milestone — albeit belatedly.

A walk through time as Symbio turns 51

People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren't for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today.

Betty White

Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature’s impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it’s like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans of fly above its forests—even though most animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild.

Thomas French, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives

Southern Sydney's Favourite Zoo! SYMBIO WILDLIFE PARK Southern Sydney's Favourite Zoo

Southern Sydney's Favourite Zoo! SYMBIO WILDLIFE PARK Southern Sydney's Favourite Zoo

Clifton Imperial Historic. Iconic. Landmark

Trump team investigates how to deport major Iran war critic

 

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.

~ Langston Hughes

Trump team investigates how to deport major Iran war critic The New Republic

Just about everyone is mad at the media

“Welcome to Season 8: The News. This 8-part series will explore the deep challenges facing American journalism, and the nation’s news and information crisis. It seems everyone’s mad at the media, but we’ll ask, what’s reallywrong with the news? Is it what we think it is? What would a more independent and democratic media look like? By John Biewen and co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika.”

How to help knowledge workers who lose their jobs to AI

Platformer: “Brookings Institution researcher Molly Kinder on why she’s leaving her job to create solution for AI’s “messy middle.” 

Molly Kinder has spent the past three years at the Brookings Institution leading a multiyear project on how generative AI is transforming work. In a recent widely discussed essay, she predicted the coming of what she calls the “messy middle:” a long, hard period between the mostly intact labor market we see today (which she calls “reality 1” and the post-AGI abundance that Silicon Valley promises to someday deliver (“reality 3”). In the messy middle — “reality 2” — most jobs will survive, but losses will be concentrated in some of the best-paid, most coveted jobs in the economy. 

Whatever happens next, Kinder argues, we should expect those concentrated losses to be “politically explosive.” After all, Kinder told me, the workers most at risk in the near future are the ones who fared best in earlier waves of automation: the laptop class. 

“If you can do your job locked in a closet with a computer, eventually you’re probably going to be in trouble,” Kinder says. It’s a striking inversion of the pandemic, when the people who could work from home were the safest — and the essential workers who couldn’t were the most exposed…”

The PayPal Mafia, the architecture of power and the Rothschild connection

 Oligarchy

The PayPal Mafia, the architecture of power and the Rothschild connection 

Margherita Furlan [via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2026]

The link between these key figures is no coincidence: it is organic. [Elon] Musk and [Peter] Thiel co-founded PayPal. The network that emerged from this – known as the PayPal Mafia – now holds key positions in the Trump administration: David Sacks is in charge of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies; Vice President J.D. Vance’s political career was launched by a $15 million donation from Thiel; Michael Kratsios, Thiel’s former chief of staff, is an adviser to Trump. Thiel also founded, with Vivek Ramaswamy, a financial firm explicitly designed to challenge the responsible investment model promoted by BlackRock.

Documents relating to the Epstein case, made public by the US Congress in 2026, revealed that Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund accepted $40 million from Jeffrey Epstein and that Thiel corresponded with Epstein for five years prior to his death.

The inclusion of the Rothschild dynasty in this investigation is not driven by conspiracy theories. It stems from an analytical necessity. The Rothschilds represent four things simultaneously.

First: the historical model….

Second: the current operational presence….

Third: the link with BlackRock….

Fourth: the link with Israel….

The Rothschilds do not “control the world”. But they represent the source code of the system that BlackRock has industrialised, that Palantir has digitised, and that the Israeli ecosystem has militarised. To ignore them would be like studying a programme without knowing the language in which it is written. To understand the system, we must stop thinking of it as a conspiracy and start thinking of it as an architecture. A four-storey building, where each floor needs the others to stand, where the tenants of one floor are often the owners of another, and where those on the outside—that is, citizens and their elected governments—have no keys to any of the entrances….

If the first level is the body and the second is the brain, the third is the blood that nourishes them. The money that finances the construction of satellites, the development of software, the operation of data centres, the acquisition of strategic companies, and the restructuring of sovereign debt. Here there are three names, known in the world of finance as the “Big Three”: BlackRock with its $14 trillion in assets under management, Vanguard with around $9 trillion, and State Street with nearly $4.5 trillion. Together, these three funds hold significant stakes in almost every major listed company on the planet. According to various academic studies, the “Big Three” are the largest or among the top three shareholders in over 90% of the companies in the S&P 500 index, which comprises the 500 largest US companies. But their holdings do not stop at the United States: they are present in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. In Italy, as we have documented, BlackRock alone holds over €17 billion in stakes in the main listed companies.

These funds do not govern in the sense that a President or Prime Minister governs. They do not issue orders, sign decrees or command armies. Their power is different and, in some ways, more profound: they shape the gravitational field within which all other players operate. When BlackRock decides to overweight a sector in its portfolios, billions of Dollars flow in that direction and the sector grows. When it decides to underweight it, the flow reverses and the sector contracts. When it publishes its sovereign risk index and the assessment of a country is negative, the cost of that country’s debt rises, because the market follows the lead of the world’s largest investor. There is no need to ring ministers. There is no need to bribe anyone. All it takes is to move capital, and the rest follows. The historical template for this model of power is the Rothschild dynasty, which in the nineteenth century invented the fundamental principle of modern finance: whoever controls information before others do controls the markets, and whoever controls the markets influences governments without needing to govern….

Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

~ Shel Silverstein

Norman Mailer: “We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle, and end."

Cold War River: In the Shadow of the KGB: Legacy of Czechoslovak Intelligence (1948–1989)

“That’s what happens to exiles; they are scattered to the four winds and then find it extremely difficult to get back together again.”
Isabel Allende

My Surreal Vienna

The Hidden Power of Writing Your Thoughts

Writing is more than putting words on a Page. It is one of the most Powerful ways to express Thoughts, Feelings, and Intentions.

And,the best part of “Writing” is that it gives us a Room where our Minds can speak without Limitation. It allows us to turn Invisible Thoughts into something Genuine and Meaningful.

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Every Writer has a different reason for Writing. Some write to share Knowledge. And some write to tell Stories. Others write to Express Emotions they cannot easily say “Aloud”.

No matter the Reason. But it creates a Path between our Hidden World.

Writing Helps Us Understand Ourselves:

At many times, We do not genuinely understand our Thoughts until we write them down.

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When we sit with a Blank Page. Our mind begins to think about Ideas. We start connecting Experiences, Emotions, and Observations. Slowly, the Confusion becomes more Visible. “It acts like a Mirror”.

It clarifies what is happening inside us.

Many people thus find improvement following writing. The words have some “Mental Weight”. They…

Ideas Find Their Path Through Writing

One of the most Beautiful things about Writing is that ideas repeatedly grow whenever we Write.

A simple thought can become a Paragraph. And, that can become a Story. The story can become a lesson that inspires Others.

Many writers start with only a Small Idea. They do not know where it will Lead. However, as they continue Writing. New connections Appear. New Perspectives Emerge. The Writing itself forges a way ahead.

This Process makes Writing Exciting. Every unfinished Page holds Endless Possibilities.

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Writing Creates Human Connection:

Words have the Power to connect people from different Places, Cultures, and Backgrounds…

A Reader may find comfort in a Story. Because they have experienced something Similar. A simple article may Motivate someone to take Action. And a Poem may help a Person feel understood.

“This connection is one of the greatest rewards of Writing”.

As Writers, we may never meet all our “Readers”. However, our Words can Travel across Cities, Countries & even Generations. They can Inspire, Teach, Encourage, and Heal.

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“Writing Improves Thinking”

Writing & Thinking work together.

The more we Write. The more clearly we learn to Think. Writing forces us to Organize Ideas and choose the Right Words.

It teaches us to Communicate with Purpose & Truth.

Good Writing is not just about Grammar & Vocabulary. It is about understanding an Idea well enough to explain it Simply.

That skill becomes Valuable in every part of Life. From personal Relationships to Professional Growth.

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Every Writer Has a Unique Voice:

One common mistake many new Writers make is trying to Sound like someone else.

The truth is that your greatest strength is your voice.

Your Experiences, Observations, and Perspectives are different from everyone else’s. When you write Honestly. Your personality naturally appears in your Words.

Readers are not looking for Perfection. They are looking for Authenticity. They want to connect with honest Thoughts and genuine Experiences.

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The True Happy Hour of Writing

The true satisfying experience of Writing is not Fame, Followers, or Recognition. Those things may come and go.

The greatest Pleasure comes from Expressing something Meaningful.

And, it comes from Transforming thoughts into Words and ideas into Stories. It comes from discovering new insights while Writing and Sharing them with Others…

Writing gives our Thoughts a home and our ideas a Voice.

That is why the best part of Writing will always be the “Freedom to Express” what lives inside us. And allow those words to find their Path in the World.

How Iyengar yoga helped this 68-year-old Hong Kong man overcome ‘end-stage’ knee arthritis

Reynaldo Espineli took up Iyengar yoga after crippling knee pain and a stage-four osteoarthritis diagnosis. Now he’s got his mobility back