Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
reality TV comes to mind which famously is not only real but brings the literal best out of people for ratings and conveniently is on the cheap side for the people behind the camera.
if Nick already had pull and a fanbase on YT, people would have come with him into a van in all likelihood. even without compensation for silly stunts.
because when you are a celebrity they let you do "it"... someone allegedly once said. and allegedly did. and crucially has been winning big ever since!
it's astonishing how he is having his way with the US and its institutions. just one sham after the other.
whoever comes next better be of same moral disposition and continues to build upon this hollowed out carcass of the rule of law. or is in the most unenviable position picking up the pieces in a push for restoration.
Falling never said that the guy was pretending like this stunt was anything other then what it was, a stupid provocative stunt, you are just projecting, as always, oBlade.
Also, I love how, as your MO is, ignore every clear example where Falling (and me) pointed out how dishonest and stupid the guy was and decide to latch on a sentence that you can project your bullshit on.
dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
On May 17 2026 22:20 Doublemint wrote: reality TV comes to mind which famously is not only real but brings the literal best out of people for ratings and conveniently is on the cheap side for the people behind the camera.
if Nick already had pull and a fanbase on YT, people would have come with him into a van in all likelihood. even without compensation for silly stunts.
because when you are a celebrity they let you do "it"... someone allegedly once said. and allegedly did. and crucially has been winning big ever since!
it's astonishing how he is having his way with the US and its institutions. just one sham after the other.
whoever comes next better be of same moral disposition and continues to build upon this hollowed out carcass of the rule of law. or is in the most unenviable position picking up the pieces in a push for restoration.
It's amazing that this guy is openly taking $ 1.7 Billion dollars from Americans to reward the mob that attacked the capital and enrich himself and his cronies, yet the fiscally conservative folks have nothing to say about this.
Holding capital generating assets is portrayed as work by those who hold a lot, typically the average job required to acquire them is inheriting them. I had a degree of privilege too in not having to rent property for a long time.
At societal level we ended up with a bunch of guys who normalized defining their skills as an equivalent to the size of their bank accounts who quickly ran out of things to keep them stimulated while having people working for them, thus creating issues footed in excesses. Long term they want to retire their families from menial jobs while holding positions that allow them to influence society in a way that makes them intangible and often undetectable. Technological surveillance 'innovations' of recent times have no other purpose but for these overlords to climb up while kicking down and offering distractions from the fact that they're playing the role of both the disease and the cure.
That is to say that turning the US into a casino of sorts and trying to extinguish the middle class sounds very much like a Trump scheme to just entrench his followers and associates with insider information.
Can't even assume that a conflict like Iran has a reason like enriched uranium instead of price manipulation/gouging or energy grabbing at this point. How do you gauge the intention of an unaccountable power structure?
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote: Falling never said that the guy was pretending like this stunt was anything other then what it was, a stupid provocative stunt, you are just projecting, as always, oBlade.
Falling can speak for himself, he's better at it than you are.
Almost all of his videos are asking people questions. In this one, which I linked, and you skipped, you can also see him asking people questions, except in this case he also happens to compensate them for their time. There is no stunt. It's completely respectful to the people. I know you skipped it because anyone with eyes can see it's just men talking. I don't find the concept of paying Hispanic people to share their time and thoughts with a camera to be a stupid or provocative endeavor.
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote: Also, I love how, as your MO is, ignore every clear example where Falling (and me) pointed out how dishonest and stupid the guy was and decide to latch on a sentence that you can project your bullshit on.
The first and only thing I posted that Nick Shirley said since you brought up this line of, for lack of a better word, discussion, was that he lied about voter registrations at a post office. That was the only time I mentioned he maintained something to be true, and you completely ignored it. Ergo, by not acknowledging that he was wrong about the post office addresses, and by not manning up to agree with my criticism of him, you are tacitly defending him, meaning you are a fascist Nick Shirley lover. Am I doing your logic right yet? I think I've got it down pat.
The only thing I saw you post was a video response from someone who had a debate/discussion on their show. I skimmed and found 3 key points: 1) He doesn't know what benevolent means - So what? You don't know the difference between than and then. I knew he had verbal gaps from the moment he wrote his last name in lowercase in his X handle like a boomer. Nobody's perfect. He also speaks Spanish. 2) Andrew guessed that Denver was a prospering city, without knowing, and admitting that he didn't know, and Nick Shirley confidently said it wasn't, probably also without knowing well, but Andrew should totally like get credit for guessing right man, because afterwards he searched and found out certain crimes are slightly down, which means Denver is a great example of a prosperous Democratic city. This is either a massive own of Nick Shirley's pattern of fascist lies OR it's just evidence that two people are arguing about stuff they have no background knowledge of (which is something you don't need to link an external video to in order for us to be able to experience). 3) Nick said vaguely something like 89% of the fraud is Somalians, but that was actually only ONE case, the Feeding the Future case with 82 out of 92 indicted being in the Somali community.
That's the BTFO? That it's not actually 89% of all the fraud in the entire state?
"911 what's your emergency?" "Yes I just got home, my house is burning down" "We'll send the trucks right away sir, what's your address?" "Wait the wind is blowing the smoke everywhere from the backyard, it's actually my poolhouse and shed, not the entire home" "Sir, you're dishonest and stupid" "You're still going to send the fire trucks right? I mean this is-" "You're spreading dangerous fascist propaganda about fires, sir" "It might spread though I'm sorry I got it wrong about where exactly the fire was before it's just please my shed and poolhouse and-" "This entire thing has been a stupid provocative stunt, sir."
There is probably a fraud problem in the Somali community if 82 of 92 people in a case are from that community. The same way it would be for any community. If on the other hand that were unfair because simply every community in Minnesota has a case like that, the entire state might need to be occupied by the federal government. The problem is fraud. Talking about fraud is not the problem.
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote: dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
Sounds like less than propaganda if it's so extensive already.
On May 17 2026 03:48 Gorsameth wrote: China isn't stupid enough to make it 3 for 3 for super powers that start needless wars that humiliate them on a global stage.
you thought the strait blockade was bad for the economy or that the AI bubble is making computer parts expensive, watch what happens as 5 minutes after the shooting starts Taiwan blows up all its chip factories.
I've been hearing about "AI bubble" for 2 years, yet companies report real earnings and AI helps with productivity in my work. It's overhyped at times, and some companies' stocks grew too much too fast (e.g. Sandisk) but it's wrong to call this black & white. Which companies do you think of when you say "AI bubble"? Amazon, Google and Microsoft are definitely not.
Sorry, ive had a busy day. OpenAI is burning through insane amounts of money, like half the planned/announced datacenters are already getting cancelled.
Are Amazon and Google actually earning money on LLM's?
Yet a footnote in Google’s earnings release, and a bullet point under the net-income section of Amazon’s, tells a different story about where those profits came from. Nearly half of Alphabet’s record $62.6 billion profit—about $28.7 billion—”did not come from search ads, cloud services or any of its products at all. It came from Alphabet updating the value of the equity it owns in private companies, primarily Anthropic, the AI startup in which Alphabet holds a stake estimated at 14% before the announcement of an additional $40 billion commitment last week.
Amazon disclosed a similar figure even more directly. Its earnings release stated that first-quarter net income “includes pre-tax gains of $16.8 billion included in non-operating income from our investments in Anthropic”—more than half of Amazon’s pre-tax income (or profit) for the quarter.
The investment circle jerk of OpenAI, Nvidea Microsoft, intel and who else is in there by now is just complete bonkers that pushes evaluations based on just strait up incestuous investments and empty commitments that may or may not really exist.
I'm not saying AI can't have value, and I'm sure there are industries that make great use of current LLM's. But with current business models I don't see the avenue for value that is anywhere near the absolute astronomical burn rate of these AI companies.
On May 17 2026 03:48 Gorsameth wrote: China isn't stupid enough to make it 3 for 3 for super powers that start needless wars that humiliate them on a global stage.
you thought the strait blockade was bad for the economy or that the AI bubble is making computer parts expensive, watch what happens as 5 minutes after the shooting starts Taiwan blows up all its chip factories.
I've been hearing about "AI bubble" for 2 years, yet companies report real earnings and AI helps with productivity in my work. It's overhyped at times, and some companies' stocks grew too much too fast (e.g. Sandisk) but it's wrong to call this black & white. Which companies do you think of when you say "AI bubble"? Amazon, Google and Microsoft are definitely not.
Sorry, ive had a busy day. OpenAI is burning through insane amounts of money, like half the planned/announced datacenters are already getting cancelled.
Are Amazon and Google actually earning money on LLM's?
Yet a footnote in Google’s earnings release, and a bullet point under the net-income section of Amazon’s, tells a different story about where those profits came from. Nearly half of Alphabet’s record $62.6 billion profit—about $28.7 billion—”did not come from search ads, cloud services or any of its products at all. It came from Alphabet updating the value of the equity it owns in private companies, primarily Anthropic, the AI startup in which Alphabet holds a stake estimated at 14% before the announcement of an additional $40 billion commitment last week.
Amazon disclosed a similar figure even more directly. Its earnings release stated that first-quarter net income “includes pre-tax gains of $16.8 billion included in non-operating income from our investments in Anthropic”—more than half of Amazon’s pre-tax income (or profit) for the quarter.
The investment circle jerk of OpenAI, Nvidea Microsoft, intel and who else is in there by now is just complete bonkers that pushes evaluations based on just strait up incestuous investments and empty commitments that may or may not really exist.
I'm not saying AI can't have value, and I'm sure there are industries that make great use of current LLM's. But with current business models I don't see the avenue for value that is anywhere near the absolute astronomical burn rate of these AI companies.
Yes, Amazon and Google are earning actual money from LLM. Google has their own LLM, Gemini, which supports subscription tiers. They have a huge backlog for their cloud - $462 billion.
Amazon also has their own LLM (Amazon Nova), but it's not that famous. They're famous for building infrastructure (data centres) just like Google, so my thesis is they're preparing the necessary infrastructure to host both AI and internet traffic. In a way, that's similar to why people were buying TSMC and NVIDIA at the time (investors were calling it "picks and shovels" back then). Amazons' backlog is $364 billion. Amazon is reportedly supply constrained, as soon as they launch a data centre it is already reserved. You can read more about it from their Investor Relations page or their most recent letter - https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2026/ar/2025-Shareholder-Letter-Final.pdf
Circular financing is an issue indeed, but I'm not worried about hyperscalers for reasons of infrastructure. They don't need to have the best LLM to win. They simply need to offer it in cost effective way and part of that is also done with Trainium (Amazon) or Google's TPUs to reduce (partially) dependency on NVIDIA's chips.
On May 18 2026 02:45 oBlade wrote: 3) Nick said vaguely something like 89% of the fraud is Somalians, but that was actually only ONE case, the Feeding the Future case with 82 out of 92 indicted being in the Somali community.
That's the BTFO? That it's not actually 89% of all the fraud in the entire state?
"911 what's your emergency?" "Yes I just got home, my house is burning down" "We'll send the trucks right away sir, what's your address?" "Wait the wind is blowing the smoke everywhere from the backyard, it's actually my poolhouse and shed, not the entire home" "Sir, you're dishonest and stupid" "You're still going to send the fire trucks right? I mean this is-" "You're spreading dangerous fascist propaganda about fires, sir" "It might spread though I'm sorry I got it wrong about where exactly the fire was before it's just please my shed and poolhouse and-" "This entire thing has been a stupid provocative stunt, sir."
How are you unable to understand that you can't extrapolate statewide demographics using a sample size of one case?
On May 17 2026 03:48 Gorsameth wrote: China isn't stupid enough to make it 3 for 3 for super powers that start needless wars that humiliate them on a global stage.
you thought the strait blockade was bad for the economy or that the AI bubble is making computer parts expensive, watch what happens as 5 minutes after the shooting starts Taiwan blows up all its chip factories.
I've been hearing about "AI bubble" for 2 years, yet companies report real earnings and AI helps with productivity in my work. It's overhyped at times, and some companies' stocks grew too much too fast (e.g. Sandisk) but it's wrong to call this black & white. Which companies do you think of when you say "AI bubble"? Amazon, Google and Microsoft are definitely not.
Sorry, ive had a busy day. OpenAI is burning through insane amounts of money, like half the planned/announced datacenters are already getting cancelled.
Are Amazon and Google actually earning money on LLM's?
Yet a footnote in Google’s earnings release, and a bullet point under the net-income section of Amazon’s, tells a different story about where those profits came from. Nearly half of Alphabet’s record $62.6 billion profit—about $28.7 billion—”did not come from search ads, cloud services or any of its products at all. It came from Alphabet updating the value of the equity it owns in private companies, primarily Anthropic, the AI startup in which Alphabet holds a stake estimated at 14% before the announcement of an additional $40 billion commitment last week.
Amazon disclosed a similar figure even more directly. Its earnings release stated that first-quarter net income “includes pre-tax gains of $16.8 billion included in non-operating income from our investments in Anthropic”—more than half of Amazon’s pre-tax income (or profit) for the quarter.
The investment circle jerk of OpenAI, Nvidea Microsoft, intel and who else is in there by now is just complete bonkers that pushes evaluations based on just strait up incestuous investments and empty commitments that may or may not really exist.
I'm not saying AI can't have value, and I'm sure there are industries that make great use of current LLM's. But with current business models I don't see the avenue for value that is anywhere near the absolute astronomical burn rate of these AI companies.
Yes, Amazon and Google are earning actual money from LLM. Google has their own LLM, Gemini, which supports subscription tiers. They have a huge backlog for their cloud - $462 billion.
Amazon also has their own LLM (Amazon Nova), but it's not that famous. They're famous for building infrastructure (data centres) just like Google, so my thesis is they're preparing the necessary infrastructure to host both AI and internet traffic. In a way, that's similar to why people were buying TSMC and NVIDIA at the time (investors were calling it "picks and shovels" back then). Amazons' backlog is $364 billion. Amazon is reportedly supply constrained, as soon as they launch a data centre it is already reserved. You can read more about it from their Investor Relations page or their most recent letter - https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2026/ar/2025-Shareholder-Letter-Final.pdf
Circular financing is an issue indeed, but I'm not worried about hyperscalers for reasons of infrastructure. They don't need to have the best LLM to win. They simply need to offer it in cost effective way and part of that is also done with Trainium (Amazon) or Google's TPUs to reduce (partially) dependency on NVIDIA's chips.
Don't confuse their cloud compute business with their AI business. Amazon isn't really in the AI business. They're just selling the compute to those who do (and obviously making a killing ATM). Google is a bit different and it's very difficult to figure out if they make money from AI. They rake in cash from their cloud computing business, and some of that will be from various other people buying compute to run LLMs. But the revenue from Gemini is almost certainly not enough to cover the costs involved in it. We don't know that from Google, but OpenAI and Anthropic are single purpose companies and while their business models are obviously very different, they very clearly subsidize the use of LLMs very heavily. Google's pricing is very similar and it seems extremely unlikely their costs are much lower.
On May 18 2026 02:45 oBlade wrote: 3) Nick said vaguely something like 89% of the fraud is Somalians, but that was actually only ONE case, the Feeding the Future case with 82 out of 92 indicted being in the Somali community.
That's the BTFO? That it's not actually 89% of all the fraud in the entire state?
"911 what's your emergency?" "Yes I just got home, my house is burning down" "We'll send the trucks right away sir, what's your address?" "Wait the wind is blowing the smoke everywhere from the backyard, it's actually my poolhouse and shed, not the entire home" "Sir, you're dishonest and stupid" "You're still going to send the fire trucks right? I mean this is-" "You're spreading dangerous fascist propaganda about fires, sir" "It might spread though I'm sorry I got it wrong about where exactly the fire was before it's just please my shed and poolhouse and-" "This entire thing has been a stupid provocative stunt, sir."
How are you unable to understand that you can't extrapolate statewide demographics using a sample size of one case?
I think at this point it's pretty obvious our boy here is just being intentionally obtuse, kind of like his new journalistic hero, Nick Shirley, quite a lateral move from Mr. bow tie, if I might say.
On May 17 2026 03:48 Gorsameth wrote: China isn't stupid enough to make it 3 for 3 for super powers that start needless wars that humiliate them on a global stage.
you thought the strait blockade was bad for the economy or that the AI bubble is making computer parts expensive, watch what happens as 5 minutes after the shooting starts Taiwan blows up all its chip factories.
I've been hearing about "AI bubble" for 2 years, yet companies report real earnings and AI helps with productivity in my work. It's overhyped at times, and some companies' stocks grew too much too fast (e.g. Sandisk) but it's wrong to call this black & white. Which companies do you think of when you say "AI bubble"? Amazon, Google and Microsoft are definitely not.
Sorry, ive had a busy day. OpenAI is burning through insane amounts of money, like half the planned/announced datacenters are already getting cancelled.
Are Amazon and Google actually earning money on LLM's?
Yet a footnote in Google’s earnings release, and a bullet point under the net-income section of Amazon’s, tells a different story about where those profits came from. Nearly half of Alphabet’s record $62.6 billion profit—about $28.7 billion—”did not come from search ads, cloud services or any of its products at all. It came from Alphabet updating the value of the equity it owns in private companies, primarily Anthropic, the AI startup in which Alphabet holds a stake estimated at 14% before the announcement of an additional $40 billion commitment last week.
Amazon disclosed a similar figure even more directly. Its earnings release stated that first-quarter net income “includes pre-tax gains of $16.8 billion included in non-operating income from our investments in Anthropic”—more than half of Amazon’s pre-tax income (or profit) for the quarter.
The investment circle jerk of OpenAI, Nvidea Microsoft, intel and who else is in there by now is just complete bonkers that pushes evaluations based on just strait up incestuous investments and empty commitments that may or may not really exist.
I'm not saying AI can't have value, and I'm sure there are industries that make great use of current LLM's. But with current business models I don't see the avenue for value that is anywhere near the absolute astronomical burn rate of these AI companies.
Yes, Amazon and Google are earning actual money from LLM. Google has their own LLM, Gemini, which supports subscription tiers. They have a huge backlog for their cloud - $462 billion.
Amazon also has their own LLM (Amazon Nova), but it's not that famous. They're famous for building infrastructure (data centres) just like Google, so my thesis is they're preparing the necessary infrastructure to host both AI and internet traffic. In a way, that's similar to why people were buying TSMC and NVIDIA at the time (investors were calling it "picks and shovels" back then). Amazons' backlog is $364 billion. Amazon is reportedly supply constrained, as soon as they launch a data centre it is already reserved. You can read more about it from their Investor Relations page or their most recent letter - https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2026/ar/2025-Shareholder-Letter-Final.pdf
Circular financing is an issue indeed, but I'm not worried about hyperscalers for reasons of infrastructure. They don't need to have the best LLM to win. They simply need to offer it in cost effective way and part of that is also done with Trainium (Amazon) or Google's TPUs to reduce (partially) dependency on NVIDIA's chips.
Don't confuse their cloud compute business with their AI business. Amazon isn't really in the AI business. They're just selling the compute to those who do (and obviously making a killing ATM). Google is a bit different and it's very difficult to figure out if they make money from AI. They rake in cash from their cloud computing business, and some of that will be from various other people buying compute to run LLMs. But the revenue from Gemini is almost certainly not enough to cover the costs involved in it. We don't know that from Google, but OpenAI and Anthropic are single purpose companies and while their business models are obviously very different, they very clearly subsidize the use of LLMs very heavily. Google's pricing is very similar and it seems extremely unlikely their costs are much lower.
I think it's interesting to track. More or less all the big companies now have way, way different strategies with their freemium models and pricing.
You used to be able to do a lot of things with just a simple login, Grok let you create a fair amount of videos, one of the most GPU intensive tasks, now you can't even prompt it without logging in and video is completely behind a subscription paywall.
Similarly, you used to be able to do a LOT, bot graphically and textually with GPT, now it's a few pages of responses and you are done for the session, same with images, 3-4 and you are done.
Anthropic was always very stingy with theirs, mostly because of their focus on business and enterprise customers, and as it can clearly be gauged from earning reports and strategic moves, it's looking like both GPT and xAI (I guess SpaceX now?) burnt a ton of cash hoping to hook a lot of customers in but failed.
Best example of this is xAI renting a huge chunk of their compute out to Anthropic, the same AI it's owner called Misanthropic (how clever!) and all kinds of crazy shit a few months ago.
Amazon is making out like bandits, they basically paid for their chunk of Anthropic with their compute, Alphabet also did something similar, but they still had a leg up since they were pioneers in the technology from before LLMs were a thing plus they have genuine integrations with their other profitable businesses, search and mobile. The move of Apple giving up on their own inhouse solutions and going for Gemini as their underlying iOS AI was huge, so to me, Google and Anthropic are very much far ahead of the pack when it comes to all of this, especially since Google has an excellent TPM (inference running chips) and Anthropic has the Enterprise market cornered.
The Chinese are also a huge factor, it looks like they will (as usual) use every trick in the book (exfiltration of model weights especially) plus their GPU and memory industry made huge leaps, they might not have NVIDIa's technology yet, but they are getting close and they can do a lot with their own chips. Plus, they were smart enough to go in with a lot of renewables and energy is getting more and more expensive from all other sources, as Americans are going to find out more and more as time goes by and more Data Centers come online, without parallel investments in renewables and nuclear.
I have a feeling they will dump huge amounts of cash (as they are already doing) in subsidizing their AI industry, to the point where they'll undercut US companies in selling tokens and cheaper models that are 95 % there, which could in turn have huge consequences for the US economy.
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote:dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
Links to investigations including "failure to keep hazardous items away from children" are a little weird to link to, and a representative "told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this showed 'oversight is incredibly lacking.'" Kind of like telling people that the drug investigation is a nothingburger because the cops investigated and arrested 2 low-level dealers last week.
Let's check in with the star tribune for one second,
State education officials repeatedly raised concerns about possible fraud in the federally funded meals program during the pandemic, but their supervisors stopped them from taking more aggressive action, according to law enforcement interviews and other investigative records newly obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Frontline regulators said that they questioned soaring reimbursement claims and suspicious food distribution operations to their supervisors long before prosecutors uncovered what became one of the nation’s largest pandemic fraud schemes.
Three state employees told investigators that their managers discouraged aggressive oversight because they were afraid of lawsuits. One believed the department’s leadership feared accusations of racism from Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud case, which largely served Minnesota’s East African community.
The interviews provide a rare inside account of the state’s botched response to early warning signs of fraud — and how legal concerns and delayed enforcement allowed the scheme to grow, ultimately siphoning more than $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program overseen by the state education department.
She said that her supervisors repeatedly stopped her from digging into suspicious reimbursement claims and discouraged her from visiting sites that seemed “unbelievable” to her.
“Bock and her associates in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme used allegations of racism as a tactic throughout their criminal enterprise,” Buss said in the statement. She added it was litigation and court decisions that limited the department’s ability to prevent the fraud “not fear of being called racist.”
Story just came out May 17th, 2026. It's not from a random youtuber, but established print journalism.
I'm not on board with the method that happened to make this a national story with national attention and a lot more federal involvement. But I can't get with your method of crying fascism and pointing to the little that was done. Stories allege poor oversight and non-aggressive investigation (we aren't catching the fraud at a good rate). That's meat on the story. The object should be to stop the perpetrators prior to tens of millions or hundreds of millions going out the door.
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote:dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
Links to investigations including "failure to keep hazardous items away from children" are a little weird to link to, and a representative "told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this showed 'oversight is incredibly lacking.'" Kind of like telling people that the drug investigation is a nothingburger because the cops investigated and arrested 2 low-level dealers last week.
Let's check in with the star tribune for one second,
State education officials repeatedly raised concerns about possible fraud in the federally funded meals program during the pandemic, but their supervisors stopped them from taking more aggressive action, according to law enforcement interviews and other investigative records newly obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Frontline regulators said that they questioned soaring reimbursement claims and suspicious food distribution operations to their supervisors long before prosecutors uncovered what became one of the nation’s largest pandemic fraud schemes.
Three state employees told investigators that their managers discouraged aggressive oversight because they were afraid of lawsuits. One believed the department’s leadership feared accusations of racism from Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud case, which largely served Minnesota’s East African community.
The interviews provide a rare inside account of the state’s botched response to early warning signs of fraud — and how legal concerns and delayed enforcement allowed the scheme to grow, ultimately siphoning more than $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program overseen by the state education department.
She said that her supervisors repeatedly stopped her from digging into suspicious reimbursement claims and discouraged her from visiting sites that seemed “unbelievable” to her.
“Bock and her associates in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme used allegations of racism as a tactic throughout their criminal enterprise,” Buss said in the statement. She added it was litigation and court decisions that limited the department’s ability to prevent the fraud “not fear of being called racist.”
Story just came out May 17th, 2026. It's not from a random youtuber, but established print journalism.
I'm not on board with the method that happened to make this a national story with national attention and a lot more federal involvement. But I can't get with your method of crying fascism and pointing to the little that was done. Stories allege poor oversight and non-aggressive investigation (we aren't catching the fraud at a good rate). That's meat on the story. The object should be to stop the perpetrators prior to tens of millions or hundreds of millions going out the door.
I do think "People are so afraid of being racist that they don't report" is a more interesting line than "89% of the fraud was Solmalians and that means ________", but in both cases there's good reason to tread lightly with regards to racism.
The former is at least asking why this event happened, instead of leaving it hanging without exploring the context. It makes it seem like the 'journalist' is satisfied with "Well obviously it's because somalians are bad people trying to steal the heart of america"
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote:dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
Links to investigations including "failure to keep hazardous items away from children" are a little weird to link to, and a representative "told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this showed 'oversight is incredibly lacking.'" Kind of like telling people that the drug investigation is a nothingburger because the cops investigated and arrested 2 low-level dealers last week.
Let's check in with the star tribune for one second,
State education officials repeatedly raised concerns about possible fraud in the federally funded meals program during the pandemic, but their supervisors stopped them from taking more aggressive action, according to law enforcement interviews and other investigative records newly obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Frontline regulators said that they questioned soaring reimbursement claims and suspicious food distribution operations to their supervisors long before prosecutors uncovered what became one of the nation’s largest pandemic fraud schemes.
Three state employees told investigators that their managers discouraged aggressive oversight because they were afraid of lawsuits. One believed the department’s leadership feared accusations of racism from Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud case, which largely served Minnesota’s East African community.
The interviews provide a rare inside account of the state’s botched response to early warning signs of fraud — and how legal concerns and delayed enforcement allowed the scheme to grow, ultimately siphoning more than $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program overseen by the state education department.
She said that her supervisors repeatedly stopped her from digging into suspicious reimbursement claims and discouraged her from visiting sites that seemed “unbelievable” to her.
“Bock and her associates in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme used allegations of racism as a tactic throughout their criminal enterprise,” Buss said in the statement. She added it was litigation and court decisions that limited the department’s ability to prevent the fraud “not fear of being called racist.”
Story just came out May 17th, 2026. It's not from a random youtuber, but established print journalism.
I'm not on board with the method that happened to make this a national story with national attention and a lot more federal involvement. But I can't get with your method of crying fascism and pointing to the little that was done. Stories allege poor oversight and non-aggressive investigation (we aren't catching the fraud at a good rate). That's meat on the story. The object should be to stop the perpetrators prior to tens of millions or hundreds of millions going out the door.
I do think "People are so afraid of being racist that they don't report" is a more interesting line than "89% of the fraud was Solmalians and that means ________", but in both cases there's good reason to tread lightly with regards to racism.
The former is at least asking why this event happened, instead of leaving it hanging without exploring the context. It makes it seem like the 'journalist' is satisfied with "Well obviously it's because somalians are bad people trying to steal the heart of america"
The two questions I had were whether he had stumbled across widespread fraud with lazy or missing enforcement and whether the example of state-funded daycares were the tip of the iceberg in state mismanagement of public funds. This is a developing story. Feel free to comment on the news article I linked about a different program and a different department and concerning comments from people that tried to stop that example of fraud.
I already gave you the example of a partisan hack protester agitating against police and happening to catch the police in a clear instance of excessive force and assault. You can choose to say "Look at this partisan protester. He's such a bad man. He has terrible opinions. And besides, the police have had internal investigations recently that led to arrests!" You can also choose to say, "That looks pretty bad. Yeah, the guy that caught it engages in scummy behavior, but is there an innocent explanation to all of this, or is actually exactly what it looks like and more common that I would presume?" More directed at Jankisa than you, but read his post to me.
It's almost beside the point to focus on the societal reasons why a particular community got more clued into the (allegedly) weak anti-fraud protections in several state programs. I don't care if it was a bunch of neighbors in Maple Grove that took the state for $100 million over years. I care that money taken from taxpayers did not go to the needy and deserving.
My presumption is that the youtuber got lucky in those hallways of identical businesses in a windowless office building, and the other stuff, and then it was so comical that it went viral. There's no fairness in who strikes the match that starts the national fire. I kind of wish it was so-and-so veteran reporter for the Star Tribune that spent two years of investigating the issue and asking questions of state officials, but it wasn't.
On May 18 2026 02:45 oBlade wrote: 3) Nick said vaguely something like 89% of the fraud is Somalians, but that was actually only ONE case, the Feeding the Future case with 82 out of 92 indicted being in the Somali community.
That's the BTFO? That it's not actually 89% of all the fraud in the entire state?
"911 what's your emergency?" "Yes I just got home, my house is burning down" "We'll send the trucks right away sir, what's your address?" "Wait the wind is blowing the smoke everywhere from the backyard, it's actually my poolhouse and shed, not the entire home" "Sir, you're dishonest and stupid" "You're still going to send the fire trucks right? I mean this is-" "You're spreading dangerous fascist propaganda about fires, sir" "It might spread though I'm sorry I got it wrong about where exactly the fire was before it's just please my shed and poolhouse and-" "This entire thing has been a stupid provocative stunt, sir."
How are you unable to understand that you can't extrapolate statewide demographics using a sample size of one case?
Yawn. You obviously can't do that, I never said you could do that, and you can't find me saying you could do that.
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote:dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
Links to investigations including "failure to keep hazardous items away from children" are a little weird to link to, and a representative "told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this showed 'oversight is incredibly lacking.'" Kind of like telling people that the drug investigation is a nothingburger because the cops investigated and arrested 2 low-level dealers last week.
Let's check in with the star tribune for one second,
State education officials repeatedly raised concerns about possible fraud in the federally funded meals program during the pandemic, but their supervisors stopped them from taking more aggressive action, according to law enforcement interviews and other investigative records newly obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Frontline regulators said that they questioned soaring reimbursement claims and suspicious food distribution operations to their supervisors long before prosecutors uncovered what became one of the nation’s largest pandemic fraud schemes.
Three state employees told investigators that their managers discouraged aggressive oversight because they were afraid of lawsuits. One believed the department’s leadership feared accusations of racism from Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud case, which largely served Minnesota’s East African community.
The interviews provide a rare inside account of the state’s botched response to early warning signs of fraud — and how legal concerns and delayed enforcement allowed the scheme to grow, ultimately siphoning more than $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program overseen by the state education department.
She said that her supervisors repeatedly stopped her from digging into suspicious reimbursement claims and discouraged her from visiting sites that seemed “unbelievable” to her.
“Bock and her associates in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme used allegations of racism as a tactic throughout their criminal enterprise,” Buss said in the statement. She added it was litigation and court decisions that limited the department’s ability to prevent the fraud “not fear of being called racist.”
Story just came out May 17th, 2026. It's not from a random youtuber, but established print journalism.
I'm not on board with the method that happened to make this a national story with national attention and a lot more federal involvement. But I can't get with your method of crying fascism and pointing to the little that was done. Stories allege poor oversight and non-aggressive investigation (we aren't catching the fraud at a good rate). That's meat on the story. The object should be to stop the perpetrators prior to tens of millions or hundreds of millions going out the door.
I do think "People are so afraid of being racist that they don't report" is a more interesting line than "89% of the fraud was Solmalians and that means ________", but in both cases there's good reason to tread lightly with regards to racism.
The former is at least asking why this event happened, instead of leaving it hanging without exploring the context. It makes it seem like the 'journalist' is satisfied with "Well obviously it's because somalians are bad people trying to steal the heart of america"
The two questions I had were whether he had stumbled across widespread fraud with lazy or missing enforcement and whether the example of state-funded daycares were the tip of the iceberg in state mismanagement of public funds. This is a developing story. Feel free to comment on the news article I linked about a different program and a different department and concerning comments from people that tried to stop that example of fraud.
I already gave you the example of a partisan hack protester agitating against police and happening to catch the police in a clear instance of excessive force and assault. You can choose to say "Look at this partisan protester. He's such a bad man. He has terrible opinions. And besides, the police have had internal investigations recently that led to arrests!" You can also choose to say, "That looks pretty bad. Yeah, the guy that caught it engages in scummy behavior, but is there an innocent explanation to all of this, or is actually exactly what it looks like and more common that I would presume?" More directed at Jankisa than you, but read his post to me.
It's almost beside the point to focus on the societal reasons why a particular community got more clued into the (allegedly) weak anti-fraud protections in several state programs. I don't care if it was a bunch of neighbors in Maple Grove that took the state for $100 million over years. I care that money taken from taxpayers did not go to the needy and deserving.
My presumption is that the youtuber got lucky in those hallways of identical businesses in a windowless office building, and the other stuff, and then it was so comical that it went viral. There's no fairness in who strikes the match that starts the national fire. I kind of wish it was so-and-so veteran reporter for the Star Tribune that spent two years of investigating the issue and asking questions of state officials, but it wasn't.
Was he the first to it, though? It seems he wasn't (specifically regarding the 89% Somali fraud stuff)
If he wasn't the first to it, your partisan hack protester analogy doesn't hold. To bring it up to speed, Nick is the third party in that scenario, noticing the partisan protester and the police officer, and making a point of highlighting the race of the police officer. You and I agree that we don't particularly care if the offender is Somalian, Norwegian, or anything else. It's strange, then, that Nick is here really drilling in the fact that the police officer is a particular race.
In fairness - I hadn't heard of Nick Shirley before and am not familiar with his particular coverage. It seems to me that he's a third party 'journalist' that picked up a story and ran with an immigrant slant to it. He's relevant to the story insomuch as he went viral in telling about it, but isn't relevant in that he didn't start the story and doesn't seem particularly interested in seeing it to a conclusion. Please, correct me if I'm mistaken!
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote:dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
Links to investigations including "failure to keep hazardous items away from children" are a little weird to link to, and a representative "told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this showed 'oversight is incredibly lacking.'" Kind of like telling people that the drug investigation is a nothingburger because the cops investigated and arrested 2 low-level dealers last week.
Let's check in with the star tribune for one second,
State education officials repeatedly raised concerns about possible fraud in the federally funded meals program during the pandemic, but their supervisors stopped them from taking more aggressive action, according to law enforcement interviews and other investigative records newly obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Frontline regulators said that they questioned soaring reimbursement claims and suspicious food distribution operations to their supervisors long before prosecutors uncovered what became one of the nation’s largest pandemic fraud schemes.
Three state employees told investigators that their managers discouraged aggressive oversight because they were afraid of lawsuits. One believed the department’s leadership feared accusations of racism from Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud case, which largely served Minnesota’s East African community.
The interviews provide a rare inside account of the state’s botched response to early warning signs of fraud — and how legal concerns and delayed enforcement allowed the scheme to grow, ultimately siphoning more than $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program overseen by the state education department.
She said that her supervisors repeatedly stopped her from digging into suspicious reimbursement claims and discouraged her from visiting sites that seemed “unbelievable” to her.
“Bock and her associates in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme used allegations of racism as a tactic throughout their criminal enterprise,” Buss said in the statement. She added it was litigation and court decisions that limited the department’s ability to prevent the fraud “not fear of being called racist.”
Story just came out May 17th, 2026. It's not from a random youtuber, but established print journalism.
I'm not on board with the method that happened to make this a national story with national attention and a lot more federal involvement. But I can't get with your method of crying fascism and pointing to the little that was done. Stories allege poor oversight and non-aggressive investigation (we aren't catching the fraud at a good rate). That's meat on the story. The object should be to stop the perpetrators prior to tens of millions or hundreds of millions going out the door.
I do think "People are so afraid of being racist that they don't report" is a more interesting line than "89% of the fraud was Solmalians and that means ________", but in both cases there's good reason to tread lightly with regards to racism.
The former is at least asking why this event happened, instead of leaving it hanging without exploring the context. It makes it seem like the 'journalist' is satisfied with "Well obviously it's because somalians are bad people trying to steal the heart of america"
The two questions I had were whether he had stumbled across widespread fraud with lazy or missing enforcement and whether the example of state-funded daycares were the tip of the iceberg in state mismanagement of public funds. This is a developing story. Feel free to comment on the news article I linked about a different program and a different department and concerning comments from people that tried to stop that example of fraud.
I already gave you the example of a partisan hack protester agitating against police and happening to catch the police in a clear instance of excessive force and assault. You can choose to say "Look at this partisan protester. He's such a bad man. He has terrible opinions. And besides, the police have had internal investigations recently that led to arrests!" You can also choose to say, "That looks pretty bad. Yeah, the guy that caught it engages in scummy behavior, but is there an innocent explanation to all of this, or is actually exactly what it looks like and more common that I would presume?" More directed at Jankisa than you, but read his post to me.
It's almost beside the point to focus on the societal reasons why a particular community got more clued into the (allegedly) weak anti-fraud protections in several state programs. I don't care if it was a bunch of neighbors in Maple Grove that took the state for $100 million over years. I care that money taken from taxpayers did not go to the needy and deserving.
My presumption is that the youtuber got lucky in those hallways of identical businesses in a windowless office building, and the other stuff, and then it was so comical that it went viral. There's no fairness in who strikes the match that starts the national fire. I kind of wish it was so-and-so veteran reporter for the Star Tribune that spent two years of investigating the issue and asking questions of state officials, but it wasn't.
Was he the first to it, though? It seems he wasn't (specifically regarding the 89% Somali fraud stuff)
If he wasn't the first to it, your partisan hack protester analogy doesn't hold. To bring it up to speed, Nick is the third party in that scenario, noticing the partisan protester and the police officer, and making a point of highlighting the race of the police officer. You and I agree that we don't particularly care if the offender is Somalian, Norwegian, or anything else. It's strange, then, that Nick is here really drilling in the fact that the police officer is a particular race.
In fairness - I hadn't heard of Nick Shirley before and am not familiar with his particular coverage. It seems to me that he's a third party 'journalist' that picked up a story and ran with an immigrant slant to it. He's relevant to the story insomuch as he went viral in telling about it, but isn't relevant in that he didn't start the story and doesn't seem particularly interested in seeing it to a conclusion. Please, correct me if I'm mistaken!
I don't think we necessarily disagree here. He's the guy that made it go viral. You can hate that fact or love that fact. Quality Learing Center entered the national dialogue. What happens later is at one remove from him: is there widespread fraud, are the state systems too corrupt or incompetent to deal with it, and how many programs are affected? It's not a youtuber that's in charge of the follow-up; he's now a bit player.
I linked the story that broke yesterday on Feeding Our Future as a compare/contrast. You can imagine the same elements impacting both. Were there the same derelict supervisors in other departments, inaction from the specter of lawsuits, and fears of accusations of racism if oversight was actually applied? None of those questions involve Shirley! He's on to London or the next meme/culture-war flash point getting clicks for monetization. The national attention is what put public pressure to examine the system. It might also help counteract whatever corrupt networks kept the fraud going for so long.
On May 18 2026 02:45 oBlade wrote: 3) Nick said vaguely something like 89% of the fraud is Somalians, but that was actually only ONE case, the Feeding the Future case with 82 out of 92 indicted being in the Somali community.
That's the BTFO? That it's not actually 89% of all the fraud in the entire state?
"911 what's your emergency?" "Yes I just got home, my house is burning down" "We'll send the trucks right away sir, what's your address?" "Wait the wind is blowing the smoke everywhere from the backyard, it's actually my poolhouse and shed, not the entire home" "Sir, you're dishonest and stupid" "You're still going to send the fire trucks right? I mean this is-" "You're spreading dangerous fascist propaganda about fires, sir" "It might spread though I'm sorry I got it wrong about where exactly the fire was before it's just please my shed and poolhouse and-" "This entire thing has been a stupid provocative stunt, sir."
How are you unable to understand that you can't extrapolate statewide demographics using a sample size of one case?
Yawn. You obviously can't do that, I never said you could do that, and you can't find me saying you could do that.
On May 18 2026 01:57 Jankisa wrote:dynb, of course, comes to try and downplay the fascist propagandist by pretending like this guy "uncovered" fraud, when investigations and convictions on it predate this hysteria by quite a bit.
Links to investigations including "failure to keep hazardous items away from children" are a little weird to link to, and a representative "told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS this showed 'oversight is incredibly lacking.'" Kind of like telling people that the drug investigation is a nothingburger because the cops investigated and arrested 2 low-level dealers last week.
Let's check in with the star tribune for one second,
State education officials repeatedly raised concerns about possible fraud in the federally funded meals program during the pandemic, but their supervisors stopped them from taking more aggressive action, according to law enforcement interviews and other investigative records newly obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.
Frontline regulators said that they questioned soaring reimbursement claims and suspicious food distribution operations to their supervisors long before prosecutors uncovered what became one of the nation’s largest pandemic fraud schemes.
Three state employees told investigators that their managers discouraged aggressive oversight because they were afraid of lawsuits. One believed the department’s leadership feared accusations of racism from Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the fraud case, which largely served Minnesota’s East African community.
The interviews provide a rare inside account of the state’s botched response to early warning signs of fraud — and how legal concerns and delayed enforcement allowed the scheme to grow, ultimately siphoning more than $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program overseen by the state education department.
She said that her supervisors repeatedly stopped her from digging into suspicious reimbursement claims and discouraged her from visiting sites that seemed “unbelievable” to her.
“Bock and her associates in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme used allegations of racism as a tactic throughout their criminal enterprise,” Buss said in the statement. She added it was litigation and court decisions that limited the department’s ability to prevent the fraud “not fear of being called racist.”
Story just came out May 17th, 2026. It's not from a random youtuber, but established print journalism.
I'm not on board with the method that happened to make this a national story with national attention and a lot more federal involvement. But I can't get with your method of crying fascism and pointing to the little that was done. Stories allege poor oversight and non-aggressive investigation (we aren't catching the fraud at a good rate). That's meat on the story. The object should be to stop the perpetrators prior to tens of millions or hundreds of millions going out the door.
I do think "People are so afraid of being racist that they don't report" is a more interesting line than "89% of the fraud was Solmalians and that means ________", but in both cases there's good reason to tread lightly with regards to racism.
The former is at least asking why this event happened, instead of leaving it hanging without exploring the context. It makes it seem like the 'journalist' is satisfied with "Well obviously it's because somalians are bad people trying to steal the heart of america"
The two questions I had were whether he had stumbled across widespread fraud with lazy or missing enforcement and whether the example of state-funded daycares were the tip of the iceberg in state mismanagement of public funds. This is a developing story. Feel free to comment on the news article I linked about a different program and a different department and concerning comments from people that tried to stop that example of fraud.
I already gave you the example of a partisan hack protester agitating against police and happening to catch the police in a clear instance of excessive force and assault. You can choose to say "Look at this partisan protester. He's such a bad man. He has terrible opinions. And besides, the police have had internal investigations recently that led to arrests!" You can also choose to say, "That looks pretty bad. Yeah, the guy that caught it engages in scummy behavior, but is there an innocent explanation to all of this, or is actually exactly what it looks like and more common that I would presume?" More directed at Jankisa than you, but read his post to me.
It's almost beside the point to focus on the societal reasons why a particular community got more clued into the (allegedly) weak anti-fraud protections in several state programs. I don't care if it was a bunch of neighbors in Maple Grove that took the state for $100 million over years. I care that money taken from taxpayers did not go to the needy and deserving.
My presumption is that the youtuber got lucky in those hallways of identical businesses in a windowless office building, and the other stuff, and then it was so comical that it went viral. There's no fairness in who strikes the match that starts the national fire. I kind of wish it was so-and-so veteran reporter for the Star Tribune that spent two years of investigating the issue and asking questions of state officials, but it wasn't.
Was he the first to it, though? It seems he wasn't (specifically regarding the 89% Somali fraud stuff)
If he wasn't the first to it, your partisan hack protester analogy doesn't hold. To bring it up to speed, Nick is the third party in that scenario, noticing the partisan protester and the police officer, and making a point of highlighting the race of the police officer. You and I agree that we don't particularly care if the offender is Somalian, Norwegian, or anything else. It's strange, then, that Nick is here really drilling in the fact that the police officer is a particular race.
In fairness - I hadn't heard of Nick Shirley before and am not familiar with his particular coverage. It seems to me that he's a third party 'journalist' that picked up a story and ran with an immigrant slant to it. He's relevant to the story insomuch as he went viral in telling about it, but isn't relevant in that he didn't start the story and doesn't seem particularly interested in seeing it to a conclusion. Please, correct me if I'm mistaken!
I don't think we necessarily disagree here. He's the guy that made it go viral. You can hate that fact or love that fact. Quality Learing Center entered the national dialogue. What happens later is at one remove from him: is there widespread fraud, are the state systems too corrupt or incompetent to deal with it, and how many programs are affected? It's not a youtuber that's in charge of the follow-up; he's now a bit player.
I linked the story that broke yesterday on Feeding Our Future as a compare/contrast. You can imagine the same elements impacting both. Were there the same derelict supervisors in other departments, inaction from the specter of lawsuits, and fears of accusations of racism if oversight was actually applied? None of those questions involve Shirley! He's on to London or the next meme/culture-war flash point getting clicks for monetization. The national attention is what put public pressure to examine the system. It might also help counteract whatever corrupt networks kept the fraud going for so long.
Huh, that's an interesting perspective, at least.
If I'm understanding it - Shirley took an... anti-immigrant?... slant on an existing story and that caused it to get enough national attention for people to actually look at an deal with it. Meaning that even if Shirley's intentions were bad it wouldn't matter, because the end result was good.
If that's what you're angling towards, that feels generous? People were dealing with it before he said anything and it's hard to say it'll be dealt with better now because of the national attention. The national attention is as relevant to the issue as Shirley is - you could run propaganda stating that potholes in the street are the biggest issue faced by Americans and everyone will be so very grateful when you fix it, it just doesn't mean potholes were ever the biggest problem in America.
On May 18 2026 02:45 oBlade wrote: 3) Nick said vaguely something like 89% of the fraud is Somalians, but that was actually only ONE case, the Feeding the Future case with 82 out of 92 indicted being in the Somali community.
That's the BTFO? That it's not actually 89% of all the fraud in the entire state?
"911 what's your emergency?" "Yes I just got home, my house is burning down" "We'll send the trucks right away sir, what's your address?" "Wait the wind is blowing the smoke everywhere from the backyard, it's actually my poolhouse and shed, not the entire home" "Sir, you're dishonest and stupid" "You're still going to send the fire trucks right? I mean this is-" "You're spreading dangerous fascist propaganda about fires, sir" "It might spread though I'm sorry I got it wrong about where exactly the fire was before it's just please my shed and poolhouse and-" "This entire thing has been a stupid provocative stunt, sir."
How are you unable to understand that you can't extrapolate statewide demographics using a sample size of one case?
Yawn. You obviously can't do that, I never said you could do that, and you can't find me saying you could do that.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote: @Jankisa As far as I can tell in reading back, oBlade has made a separation between 'interesting' and 'information source'. And then there was separation between the 'hacks' like Shapiro and the 'conservative zeitgeist'. He gave an equivalent to TYT as Valutainment and then he lists what is key to the conservative zeitgeist at the time: Bannon's War Room, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, etc. However, I think all of them still fit in his 'interesting' category.
The confusing thing is I think Wombat was seeing oBlade shooting down many of the typical examples of conservative talking heads as being 'hacks' and not representative of the conservative zeitgeist (fast forward, turns out Shapiro was in process of being sidelined. Well, and he was only ever reluctantly defended Trump in the first place, thought he could break free after January 6 and then quickly toed the line again as under Trump, Jan 6/ stolen election is the Shibboleth loyalty test for anyone who dares call themselves conservative in the public sphere.). So Wombat asked, who do you actually recommend? And I don't think oBlade ever answered that, despite saying they were 'key'. He also separates voices from thinkers but only lists voices. But is he cosigning the voices or at least the unlisted thinkers behind the voices? Or are they just 'interesting' as in a piece of trivia? Because he ends with:
If I want just information as such, like you say there's other avenues.
So that whole list were 'interesting interviewers'... interesting for what reason? Presumably, not as a source of information. But yet they are keys to understanding the conservative zeitgeist... as a conservative source of entertainment? Or they use it as a source of information, but he does not?
This is mostly spot on, there is nobody from any ideology I would recommend for their ideas being correct, because I don't believe any specific ideology is correct, and I don't believe any people are specifically correct. Certainly no media figures are simply sources of what is correct. That's not their job and that's not how people should rely on them. People should either figure something out for themselves or be content not knowing, it is better to admit ignorance than get answers on faith fed to you like a faucet. That's the behavior of dogmas and religions and is not necessary when there's nothing pressuring people to have answers for everything.
On May 15 2026 04:01 Falling wrote:
Shirley was also a great call by me who noticed his promise before you knew him - which you do now.
@oBlade You saw his promise early and liked that he goes right to where the current events are- what do you think about his characterization of the US funding the war in Ukraine?
Thank you for acknowledging my tea leaf reading sense on Shapiro and Shirley. I don't know what Shirley characterization you are referring to though. There is a lot of bullshit in Ukraine rhetoric, like people characterizing literal purchases as free aid for one. Shirley is not immune to the mistakes any media make when they take shortcuts through stupidity or dishonesty. Like when the MSM took Trump's comments about the danger of "coyotes" (meaning human smugglers) and said actually there's no coyotes in this area it's not their habitat - I remember Nick Shirley standing in front of an apartment building with a post office on the first floor and saying there are a bunch of people registered to vote from this address. He is young so generally makes the mistakes that are associated with youth. His strength certainly wouldn't be in being right or wrong about Ukraine, it's other things.
This is a nice microcosm of complete dishonesty you operate with.
Nick Shirley, a proven liar and obvious and demonstrated agitator and propagandist is just a young guy who's "mistakes" can be explained by his youth, despite him very obviously lying through his teeth in order to demonize immigrants, because you like him and because you love when immigrants are demonized.
As contrasted to vague "MSM" taking comments from Trump (poor guy, good on you that you are always there to defend him) about coyotes and "maliciously pretending" like he meant the actual animals. Of course, no quotes, no this guy or this outlet, nope, just vague "MSM media bad".
Here's a nice video of an actual journalist debunking easily disprovable lies from this guy:
Dude if thats "a nice video of an actual journalist debunking easily disprovable lies from this guy" you have very weird standards.
Callaghan says Shirley accused him of unfairly editing interview, he admits it was edited so it leaves "unfairly". There is Nick tweet in this video saying "... cuts out any part where he looks bad..." thats get us to the Denver situation. There was literally 2 retards sitting there terrified that other may ask sneaky question like "what state is Denver in?" and Andrew in uncut version does agree with Nick that Democrat cities arent doing well, but he does cut this part out, and yes this part made him look bad and he cut it. Then he proceeds to say that in post production he made some research and turned out he was correct, so he decided to cut version where he "had a little self-doubt". It wasnt little self-doubt, it was concession. What he cut was the part which made him look ignorant.
Benevolent thing - he says its not a big deal (disagree, maybe read a few books and this wouldnt be a problem). It may be related to decline of reading ability discussed in this topic earlier and Nick seems to be in "no phonics" generation. Then however he proceeds to " I mean, he is wearing a hoodie where he makes fun of emigrants for their spelling errors" First of all there is a difference between words "learn" and "benevolent", with "learn" being way more common (not just syllables thing). On top of that, one is randomly heard word, another is allegedly professional sign (seriously what kind of printers lets that through). There is also the idea, that he may not be best person for this kind of jabs, given that he clearly cant read. Which ties into 89% debacle.
14:05 in the video he says "however the stat refers specifically to the "Feeding our Future" case", issue is that very text he choose to overlay says differently:
"Specific cases: In major fraud cases involving an estimated over billion dollars in stolen federal funds ( the most prominent being the "Feeding our Future" scandal [...] 82 of the 92 individuals charged are Somali Americans, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office"
He also cut the part where reading it live he agreed with Nick.
Quite frankly Falling debunk was much better, than the one made by what you consider "actual journalist".
EPT
