President Trump took a brief break from his critically acclaimed “F*** the World” tour to announce a surprise $100 billion bump in defense spending this week, promising a cool new $1 trillion budget — another record shattered (hooray?), and an odd look for an anti-war nationalist who never stops talking about our $36 trillion debt. Unless of course the announcement is related to trade negotiations. By Tuesday, China had already threatened retaliatory measures to Trump’s retaliatory tariffs to China’s retaliatory measures to Trump’s retaliatory tariffs. But with most nations willing to negotiate, Xi Jinping is increasingly isolated, and this is starting to look like a Cold War Part Two. Will China, like the Soviet Union before it, feel pressure to keep pace with our spending? And can Xi really manage a trade hit on top of a new arms race? I don’t know, but with neither country backing down we’re about to find out.

Meta shuttered its U.S. fact-checking program this week, just two days after shipping a fleet of new Llama 4 AI models that are tuned to answer more “contentious” questions. (Unavailable in the EU, of course.) The company “scrambled war rooms” after the release of DeepSeek’s models, which were on par with Llama 3 and (purportedly) created at much lower cost. The AI race is in full swing, and there’s no room for ideological babysitting in wartime. Pleasing woke arbiters has been deemed a task unworthy of capital and compute — Meta must move fast and break things or face irrelevance. In any case, AI agents might have their own “platform safety” benefits. Millions of perfectly aligned Zuckerbots, lowballing users for kettlebells and posting advertiser-friendly slop content. No need to fact check when all of the users are robots that work for you! A dead internet is a safe internet, kids.

“iPhones Made Fully in the U.S. Could Cost $30,000, With Production Limited to a Few Million Units – Forbes,” an X account called NewsWire posted Monday. Coincidentally timed for the peak of the rich people / globalist meltdown over (let’s be honest) a 3% drop in their Mag 7-heavy equities bags, the post quickly garnered 10M+ views. Two things: (1) the post fails to mention it’s referencing a Forbes ‘article’ from 2018 scraped from a Quora thread, (i.e. the whole thing’s a lie), and (2) sorry, but this is unambiguous proof that a non-trivial amount of tariff panic is driven by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Anyway, whatever. We SHOULD raise the iPhone price to $30,000. Do you know how addicted to phones we are, as a society? Do you know how addicted I am?? DJT, please help. Make Me Touch Grass Again, daddy.

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