This deal will get the US nothing new, at the expense of burning down 80 years of relations with our strongest allies and trading partners and weakening the US with respect to China and Russia. Nonetheless, MAGA will applaud the deal as a triumph. The Trump family will get hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit gains.

I have zero details about the deal. But that’s how things work in the Trump White House.

Also, the Epstein files were, by law, supposed to have been released Dec. 19.

Now I can reveal what I was working on much of the last six months — this massively researched Fierce Network report on the role of telcos in the emerging AI economy: Risk, reward, and revenue: Defining the telco role in the AI economy

Artificial intelligence is reshaping network requirements and creating new revenue opportunities for service providers. As AI adoption accelerates, telcos must define how they will participate in this shift - whether as infrastructure providers, enablers of AI service ecosystems, or builders of their own AI-driven solutions.

This report explores how carriers can leverage existing strengths, including resilient networks, edge assets, and deep enterprise relationships, to compete and grow in the AI economy.

The report draws on industry perspectives and a recent survey of 500 telco leaders worldwide — yes, that’s five hundred — along with 11 in-depth interviews with executives at global telcos and cloud providers, including AT&T, Bell, Zayo Group, C Spire, MetTel, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Oracle, Cisco and more. The report highlights where the strongest opportunities are emerging, the barriers that could limit progress, and how collaboration across the ecosystem can help unlock long-term value.

Download the report to gain timely insights into the changing role of telcos in the AI era and what it means for future growth.

More than 4,000,000 citizens cheered King George VI and Queen Elizabeth as they drove through the city along the West Side Highway with a wisecracking Mayor LaGuardia, June 10, 1939. They were on their way to the New York World’s Fair.

Photo: Associated Press

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A roving searchlight illuminates the upper reaches of the Empire State Building about a month after its May 1, 1931 opening.

Photo: NY Daily News via Getty Images/Fine Art America

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Sometimes Trek anticipates the future, but only by three to five years

The original series: Cold War. Klingons are Russians, Romulans are Chinese.

“The Next Generation:” America ascendant. The lone superpower. The Enterprise is an embassy, bringing diplomacy and classical music to other nations.

“Enterprise” became paranoid post-9/11.

“Strange New Worlds” is nostalgic for the good ol' 20th Century, when things were simple (or at least that’s how we remember it).

“Starfleet Academy” anticipates the post-Trump world, when the US has to rebuild on the ruins of what MAGA destroyed. In the second episode, the Betazoids come to the Federation and say why should we trust you now when you betrayed us before?

An afternoon in New York’s Central Park with Sidney Poitier. (1964)

A divorcing couple dividing beanie babies in court, 1999

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Where can you go to get free cheese cubes and be around nicely dressed people?

The Rest is History is doing a multi-part series on the Iranian Revolution. I have listened to the first episode, covering the fall of the Shah and the US’s complete failure even to anticipate the revolution. Literally days before the fall, Jimmy Carter went to Tehran for a celebration, and he gave a speech proclaiming that the Shah was a stable presence, an advocate for human rights (which the Shah most decidedly was not), and that the Shah would rule for decades. This was also the consensus behind the scenes in American diplomatic and spy circles. Nobody saw the Iranian revolution coming, right up until the moment it was happening.

I look at that, and I look at similar failures with the fall of the USSR and 9/11, and I’m tempted to think, well, the CIA and State Department are bumbling clowns — completely useless!

But what I’m not seeing is occasions when diplomats and spies headed off catastrophe, and did so deftly enough that it never even made the news.

Nobody remembers the planes that don’t crash.

Anti-vaxxers look around and say we don’t have tuberculosis or measles or polio anymore, so those vaccines are useless! Even dangerous! But what anti-vaxxers don’t see is that vaccines are the reason we don’t have those diseases.

“A few things you need to know…. “ An adult remembers how they, as a precocious child, learned a lifelong lesson about being a wiseass.

Please enjoy the official music video for the Greenland Defense Front.

I mean, it’s not just political satire — It’s hilarious and it slaps.

The night they ended Prohibition, December 5th, 1933

Swastika emblem destroyed by the US Army after holding a victory parade in Nuremberg, Germany. April 22nd, 1945.

For the people who still support Trump today, no revelation or action will cause them to give up on him.

Based on what we know so far, it seems likely that Trump engaged in vile, depraved sexual practices. His business was a massive money-laundering operation. He openly and nakedly accepts bribes in staggering volumes. He falls asleep in meetings and demonstrates mental incompetence.

And yet Trump’s approval rating stands at 40%. Two fifths of America voters look at Trump and think that he’s their boy!

If the Republicans are soundly defeated this year — and pray that happens! — the people who support Trump today will continue supporting him for decades and believe that he was betrayed.

The game now is to activate the apathetic voters, the people who believe that Democrats are no better than Trump, and that there’s nothing we can do to make things better. That’s the Democrats' job, and the Democrats have been shit at it so far (which a few exceptions — hi, Zohran Mamdani!).

Be even better if the dog matched the couch too.

“The fact of the matter is that Renée Good was radicalized by these deranged, left-wing texts."

Engineer Karen Leadlay working on the analog computers in the Space Division of General Dynamics, 1964