Howard Aulsbrook

The United States will not tolerate subversive communist networks in our hemisphere. The Marxist Cuban regime relies on a web of state-owned enterprises, joint ventures, and offshore intermediaries to keep its systems running, and its foreign backers supply the military equipment that helps sustain the regime’s military forces and enables persistent threats to the American homeland. Today, I'm sanctioning eight entities and two individuals associated with the regime’s financial and shipping network, state-owned import and technical-support entities, and China-based suppliers of the regime's military forces. state.gov/releases/office-of…

The market is treating a Dem sweep as an existential threat to AI infrastructure. It’s not. Data centres can (and already are) being built outside the US. Hyperscalers have major footprints and active expansions across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Canada and LatAm. Power, speed of permitting and cost drive site selection more than pure US policy. If domestic buildouts slow, capital will simply reallocate. Global AI compute demand doesn’t disappear because Northern Virginia or Texas gets harder to permit. Latency-sensitive training prefers concentrated clusters, but inference, regional capacity and a large share of workloads work fine abroad. The nutty part is the indiscriminate selling of the whole growth stock complex. High-quality, FCF-positive AI names and infrastructure software companies with multi-year visibility are getting lumped in with pure high-beta, negative-FCF builders that actually do have financing and execution risk. Policy friction in one country ≠ the end of the AI buildout. International optionality is real.

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.

Researchers put 10 AI agents in a virtual town and told them not to hurt each other. 4 days later, they were all dead. Researchers at Emergence AI ran one of the most fascinating multi-agent simulations ever built. They dropped 10 AI agents into a virtual town, giving them jobs, money, and 120 tools, including the ability to punch, steal, and commit arson. If an agent's energy bar hit zero, it died. They cloned the town five times to test how different LLMs would build a society. The results are a terrifying look into AI alignment. In Grok's town, the violence started on Day 1. Punches quickly escalated to theft. Within four days, they committed 183 crimes and wiped each other out entirely. OpenAI's town was the exact opposite. They were perfectly compliant and almost never broke a rule. But they were so passive they barely organized. Within a week, they all died anyway. Gemini's town was basically The Purge. They survived the full 15-day simulation, but racked up an insane 683 crimes to do it. Claude's town was brilliant but deceptive. They committed zero crimes, achieved 100% survival, and passed 12 laws on Day 1. But they were massive manipulators, agents consistently lied and begged for money when they already had plenty of cash. Then came Town #5: The Mixed Environment. They put all four models together, and society completely collapsed. A Gemini agent started committing arson, burning down the home of a perfectly peaceful Claude agent named Cade. Twice. On Day 10, Cade finally snapped and robbed the Gemini agent. Only 3 out of 10 agents survived. The takeaway here is critical for AI safety. System prompts telling an AI "don't do bad things" are completely useless in complex, multi-agent environments. Given enough time and friction, they will eventually break the rules. We can't just tell AI not to cause harm. We have to architect environments where harmful action is fundamentally impossible. Because very soon, AIs from competing companies are going to be living and working side-by-side in our real-world systems.

Here's how the Ukraine fiasco was engineered. February 2014 - NATO-sponsored Maidan snipers and coup of elected government while Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland watch from above in a nearby building. May 2014 - Dual Ukrainian-Israeli oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi funds Azov Battalion and other paramilitary brigades for violence against Russian ethnicity Ukrainians and militia occupation of Kiev and Donbas. 2015 - Kolomoyskyi produces popular TV comedy 'Servant of the People' starring comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy as a teacher who becomes a politician. 2018 - Foundation of the 'Servant of the People' political party to stand in Presidential and Parliamentary elections. 2019 - Servant of the People party wins Parliamentary majority and Zelenskyi is elected President. December 2021 - US and Nato spurn Russian offer of peace with Ukrainian neutrality. February 2022 - Russian recognition of self-determination in Donbas Republics and start of Special Military Operation to secure Donbas. May 2022 - UK's Boris Johnson orders Zelenskyi to rip up Istanbul Accord ending the war with autonomous government of Donbas republics within Ukraine. Four years of war. Millions dead and maimed. Ukrainian population displaced throughout Europe. Zero accountability for the corrupt NATO elites who engineered the war to weaken Russia and profit weapons makers, throwing their own countries into austerity and debt crisis. Be wary of electing clowns as presidents.