Lord Randall of Parody (🐙, 🦉)

David Sacks reveals how the GOP alienated Joe Rogan and alternative media SACKS: "We lost all the podcast bros. I mean, obviously, it was Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and Theo Von and that whole set. Megyn Kelly. So, you know, a house divided against itself cannot stand. I mean, we lost a huge part of our base. And I would say that the Republicans in particular are dependent on the podcast circuit. Let's call it alternative media. Why? Because the mainstream media hates us. Legacy media hates us. They will never give us a fair shot. And they're 90% left. So it is what it is." "Yeah. And I think one of the reasons why Trump produced such a resounding victory in 2024 is he appealed to that whole podcasting circuit. And frankly, we should have done a better job giving them all front row seats in the White House press room. We should have stayed connected to all of them because they are our media." "By the way, they don't work for us. They're willing to defect, obviously. They have their own opinions. But we have to pay attention. I think our side has to pay a lot of attention to them because without them, we don't have any media that supports us. So I think that losing them was a big deal. It fueled the sense. And I think that a lot of those people showed up and then did a protest vote because they wanted to send the message that they want out of this war."

Taiwanese semiconductor analyst Andrew Lu’s take on the recent scandal involving Jensen Huang: Why the US Seized on the Scandal to Draw Its Sword: Three Strategic Objectives The purpose of this scandal is by no means to expose an affair. It is to force through three critical objectives that had made no headway in the tech war between the US and China because Jensen Huang opposed them. The first cut: Completely destroy the legitimacy of Jensen Huang's lobbying against sanctions in Washington Over the past two years, the loudest and most influential business leader in Silicon Valley opposing a total ban on chip exports to China has been Jensen Huang. He has told the White House the same thing all along: "Cede the Chinese market to Huawei, and the only one that ends up dead is the American tech industry." But the moment US intelligence labels the woman named as Huang's affair partner "a spy working for China's Ministry of State Security who sought to steer the US toward easing its chip controls," every bit of lobbying he has done for looser controls takes on an entirely different political meaning. It becomes a national security matter, raising the possibility that a foreign spy used a secret relationship to exert influence. Huang can no longer say a single word in defense of the Chinese market before Congress or the White House. If he does, he will be branded as someone who "fell for an intelligence operation and still hasn't come to his senses." The second cut: Reverse the H200 export approvals for China and sever the link between Chinese shell companies and Southeast Asian smuggling networks Look at the timing of the two reports. On November 8, the very day the Jensen Huang scandal broke, The New York Times published an investigation for which its reporters went in person to dozens of Chinese companies that the US Commerce Department had approved to handle Nvidia's H200 chips. New Matrix in Beijing was one of them. According to the report, the registered addresses of companies approved to buy the chips turned out to be empty "ghost offices," and some of the companies had close ties to entities on US sanctions lists and to firms under contract with the Chinese military. One exposé says Nvidia's CEO was having an affair with a female spy from Megaspeed, the Singapore company that handled the chip smuggling. The other says the Chinese companies Commerce approved to buy H200s are nothing but shell companies trading on behalf of the Chinese military. The aim of these two reports is clear. They are meant to pressure the Trump administration and the Commerce Department into fully revoking or freezing H200 export approvals for China and, going further, to force a sweeping overhaul of the loophole that let chips be diverted through data centers run by third parties in Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The third cut: Put Nvidia on a national security leash through congressional oversight and an independent investigation As the world's largest company by market cap and the dominant force in AI, Nvidia has until now enjoyed broad autonomy in how it runs its business. But in the wake of this incident, the three congressional committees responsible for China, foreign affairs, and intelligence have begun examining Nvidia's internal security measures directly. They have even pressured Nvidia's board into forming an independent investigation committee to look into the company's own founder and CEO. In effect, Washington's national security establishment has planted a watchdog right inside Nvidia's board. From now on, the goal is to make sure that everything, down to where each and every one of Nvidia's high performance chips ends up, conforms strictly to US national security strategy. It also means there is no more room for skirting the edge of the rules or releasing chips with specs specially tailored to regulatory thresholds. Conclusion "The scandal was a detonator set off right on cue. The real goal was to plug the holes chips were leaking through." Jensen Huang made the fatal mistake of letting his guard down in his private life and personal relationships. In the end, he fell into a honey trap, the textbook tactic of intelligence warfare, and was compromised. America's national security and intelligence agencies ruthlessly exploited the weakness his private life had exposed. As a result, they solved three thorny problems in a single stroke: Nvidia's lobbying at the White House to ease restrictions on China, the flow of H200 chips into Chinese shell companies, and smuggling routed through Singapore. The closed congressional hearing set for November 18 will be the decisive turning point at which the US moves in earnest to tighten its sanctions on China's AI compute even further.

1/ I'll explain exactly how this happened because I'm the person at Forbes who calculates these numbers. This is going to take some unraveling, but here's a spoiler: The president's answer here is nonsense.

“Pete is focused on three things: survival, survival, and survival,” said a U.S. official. “He wants to survive long enough where he can leave on his own terms… He wants to survive to preserve a political future.” @JackDetsch @dlippman politico.com/news/2026/11/06…

We moderns have lost the capacity to see Achilles as glorious. We admire the honor of Hector and the strategic genius of Odysseus, but we do not see sheer excellence in the techniques of war as glorious in itself. An earlier generation would. (3/4)

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up. So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us." Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.) In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.

BREAKING: Democrats surge to an all-time high in the odds of winning the 2028 presidential election. 69% chance. 🔗 polymarket.com/r/2028-US

☑️Democrat Zachary Mullock has been elected to Congress from New Jersey's 2nd district, unseating four-term Republican Jeff Van Drew.

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it.

Governor Warns New Jersey Ports to Turn Away Russian Fuel nytimes.com/2026/11/02/nyreg…

They're becoming Italian.

No one wants to live with strangers or roommates, Mark. That’s bad advice for the younger generation.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes people owning RAM is wasteful, and that it belongs in data centers instead. "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everyone have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer."

I think there is going to be a bit of shoot-the-messenger here with labs getting blamed for proving software can being very good at security research. One part which will make people more shooty is labs will be selling the primary solution, for many billions of dollars.

I have formed a strong impression that in spite of our sustained engagement with Iran since the Shia extremist takeover, our leaders have not read Xenophon's Anabasis which explains how Iran's peculiar geography offsets the qualitative inferiority of its forces. Nothing has changed since 401 BC