Skeptics laughed when the founders of #Outbound #Aerospace told them they planned to build a new type of blended-wing airplane using innovative manufacturing technologies. Now Seattle-based Outbound has flown its first small-scale prototype. https://www.geekwire.com/2025/outbound-aerospace-test-flight-funding/ #STeVe #Tech #Technology #Aviation
On Donald Trump’s first day in office, the Department of Defense announced a spate of hires, including 26-year-old
#Kingsley #Wilson, who will serve as the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary.
Wilson is the daughter of #Steve #Cortes, a longtime Trump advisor and right-wing commentator who promotes Latinos moving to the political right.
Wilson is also a Trump 2020 campaign alum, and until taking the job at the DoD, ran digital media and communications for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.
She’s also an overt internet troll with a long history of bigoted, xenophobic, and deliberately provocative shitposting.
Wilson in many ways embodies the face of the new Trump administration:
she’s worked in the MAGA world for seemingly her entire, very short career;
besides her roles in the Trump campaign and at the Center for Renewing America,
she also served as the national committeewoman for the DC Young Republicans.
She also briefly worked at Gettr, the social media platform founded by former Trump aide #Jason #Miller and with deep links to fugitive Chinese mogul #Guo #Wengui.
When she wasn’t doing any of that, Wilson was busy reeling off an endless tweets excoriating immigrants and trans people,
advocating for what she called “zero immigration and mass deportations,”
and bemoaning the “death of the West,”
a term popularized by Pat Buchanan and often used by nativist, isolationist, and white nationalist groups to argue that immigration dilutes “Western” culture.
At least twice, Wilson also repeated long-debunked lies online about the lynching death of Leo Frank,
a Jewish man who was kidnapped from a Georgia prison and murdered in 1915,
claiming he was guilty of the murder for which most modern historians agree he was wrongly convicted.
She also claimed the Black Lives Matter movement had an “affinity for race-based violence,”
and derided George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis,
a “career criminal,” and scornfully called him “Saint George Floyd.”
“If you identify as transgender and/or are undergoing hormone therapy
—you should NOT be allowed to legally purchase a firearm,”
she posted, in one of her many tweets
claiming transgender people are abnormal or mentally ill.
“In a healthy country… transgender people aren’t visible,” she tweeted in 2024 (ellipses hers).
Wilson also explicitly lent her support to Great Replacement theory,
a racist and xenophobic conspiracy theory that holds that non-white immigrants are being lured to the United States to replace white Americans.
“The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory… it’s reality,”
she tweeted in 2024, over a screenshot of a Bloomberg article about the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population.
Wilson also called to “make Kosovo Serbia again,”
a particularly weird stance for an American now working in the Pentagon;
the United States has recognized Kosovo as an independent state since 2008 and maintains troops there as part of peacekeeping efforts.
Wilson also lent her support for the German far-right party AfD,
tweeting in 2024, “Globalist elites hate AfD because they put Germans before foreign migrants and radical Islam. Ausländer Raus!”
Wilson has tweeted the phrase
“Ausländer Raus” at least four times,
including the slogan,
“Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus.”
The phrase, which means, “Germany for Germans, foreigners out,”
is explicitly considered to be an extremist slogan in Germany with neo-Nazi roots;
in fact, a 1992 paper about its use among German skinheads is available on a Department of Justice website.
At least one German prosecutor has said that using the phrase is a criminal offense.
Nonetheless, the chant has been adopted by some young AfD supporters.
A video of the chant being sung at a trendy bar in the holiday island of Sylt sparked an enormous controversy last summer,
and again when it was sung a month later at a village festival in Germany.
(Non-Germans signaling their contempt for immigration, including accused human trafficker Tristan Tate, have also tweeted the phrase.)
Wilson’s career seems to have followed a dual track,
both making the rounds in DC politics and the Trump campaign and flirting with a career as an online provocateur
—though those roles that are increasingly blurred in the MAGAfied Republican party.
During her time at the Center for Renewing America, the Vought-founded think tank, she appeared as a talking head on conservative news sites like The Blaze,
and has appeared multiple times on the podcast of Tim Pool’s, the once “heterodox” streamer who’s become increasingly far-right.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/kingsley-cortes-wilson-defense-department/
Musk and his advisers — including #Steve #Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies
— did not want to create a commission,
as past budget hawks had done.
They wanted direct, insider access to government systems.
They realized they could use the digital office,
whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems,
to quickly penetrate the federal government
— and then decipher how to break it apart.
Bill gates prijst steve jobs om zijn intuïtief ontwerpvermogen https://www.trendingtech.news/trending-news/2025/02/53862/bill-gates-prijst-steve-jobs-om-zijn-intu-tief-ontwerpvermogen #Bill Gates #Steve Jobs #Apple #Microsoft #technologie #Trending #News #Nieuws
https://www.europesays.com/1807441/ Mass. priest ‘tragically’ dies while preparing to embark on cruise in Spain, officials say – Boston 25 News #_yukon #andover #BC #bc_high #Boston #boston_25 #boston_25_news #daniel_coats #father #groß #high #jesuits #malaga #mark_father_gross #News #phillips_academy #richard_gross #seaport #spain #steve #steve_pinnella #video
NextStep: The Visionary OS, Steve Jobs’s Apple Exodus, and the GNUstep Legacy
NextStep was a pioneering operating system and development environment created by NeXT Inc., the company founded by Steve Jobs following his departure from Apple. Released in 1989, NextStep introduced technologies and design principles that would heavily influence modern computing.
Read More: https://machaddr.substack.com/p/nextstep-the-visionary-os-steve-jobss
https://marionsmumblings.online/not-an-aurora/
Not an aurora???
Many throughout the world were able to experience another great evening of auroras on New Year’s Day 2025. However, there’s a catch, some actually saw what are known as SAR arcs. These were first discovered in 1956. Researchers weren’t sure what they were and gave them the misleading name, Stable Auroral Red arcs.
Elon Musk’s deputy #Steve #Davis has spent more than 20 years helping the billionaire cut costs at businesses such as SpaceX, the Boring Company and Twitter
— making the engineer by training a natural choice for his new role at Musk’s "Department of Government Efficiency", or DOGE.
Davis is helping recruit staff at DOGE, in addition to his day job as president of Musk’s tunneling startup, the Boring Company.
Davis’ interactions with the government weren’t always positive.
Boring, which must navigate a morass of national,
state and local rules to build its tunnels, has run into major regulatory challenges
— particularly around environmental requirements that dictate when and if the first shovel can hit the ground.
Neighbors have also been a challenge.
At one point, Davis was on track for a proposed project in Los Angeles,
but nearby residents got wind of the project and sued
— successfully scuttling the endeavor.
Working in Las Vegas created its own set of regulatory run-ins for Boring.
Tunnels the company built to connect the convention center in Las Vegas to two nearby hotels, the Wynn Encore and the Westgate, still aren’t open to the public, more than a year after their completion.
The Nevada Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration fined Boring $112,504 after an investigation into conditions during construction. Complaints from workers included toxic muck falling from overhead conveyor belts and an overloaded bin collapsing and disgorging its contents across the work site.
Chafing at government rules has been a recurring theme for Musk, whose net worth recently surpassed a record $400 billion.
Aside from Boring’s challenges, SpaceX and Tesla have had their own issues with regulators,
ranging from launch approvals to mask mandates.
Critics of DOGE have speculated that the billionaire and his associates could use their influence to, say,
lower budgets for regulatory bodies that have put up road blocks for his companies.
Asked about Musk’s potential conflicts of interest, Donald Trump said that Musk will put the interests of the country first. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-12-27/who-is-steve-davis-elon-musks-go-to-cost-cutter-is-working-for-doge
Steve, un petit casse-tête numérique sympathique sur iPhone http://dlvr.it/TGzm63 #Steve #CasseTête
Beneath a River of Red
A glowing arch of red, pink, and white anchors this stunning composite astrophotograph. This is a STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) caused by a river of fast-moving ions high in the atmosphere. Above the STEVE’s glow, the skies are red; that’s due either to the STEVE or to the heat-related glow of a Stable Auroral Red (SAR) arc. Find even more beautiful astrophotography at the artist’s website and Instagram. (Image credit: L. Leroux-Géré; via APOD)
Kevin Langdon's 'Omni Magazine' unsupervised IQ test (1979)
http://www.lumifont.co.uk/omnitest.php
#ycombinator #Steve #Stephen #Hopkins #physics #music #physicist #musician
Donald Trump’s pick for the number two position in the Department of Defense,
#Steve #Feinberg, is a billionaire with business ties to the defense industry.
Feinberg is co-CEO of Cerberus Capital Management, which has invested in hypersonic missiles and once owned private military contractor DynCorp.
In Trump’s first term, Feinberg was the head of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which gives advice to the president on intelligence estimates and assessments,
as well as counterintelligence.
The deputy secretary of defense post comes with much more responsibility, with day-to-day management of the massive department’s 3 million civilian employees and service members among its duties.
Like Trump’s choice for secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, Feinberg does not have experience running a large organization or working in the Pentagon.
Plus, Feinberg’s investments and business activities would create multiple conflicts of interest if his appointment to the DoD survives the Senate.
Unlike Hegseth, Feinberg doesn’t have a long list of sexual misconduct, as well as scandals running veterans organizations (that we know of).
His appointment could convince senators that there’s someone competent actually running things as the deputy to a Christian nationalist who envisions the military taking sides in a civil war scenario.
Feinberg is not the only Trump appointee with conflicts of interest:
the president-elect’s pick to run Medicare and Medicaid,
#Mehmet #Oz, has multiple ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
But Feinberg’s defense industry ties could affect his view of the role of the U.S. military,
as the Trump administration is already stocked with pro-war and pro-intervention advisers.
A man who stands to profit when the U.S. military is deployed doesn’t bode well for peace.
https://newrepublic.com/post/188973/surprise-trumps-latest-appointment-conflicts-interest
“Elon and I disagree on some things, but Elon deserves his place at the table,” #Steve #Bannon recently told Puck.
“He stroked a $150 million check for the ground game, which is not sexy, at the exact moment we needed it. He came in with the money and the professionals.
To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won.”
The tech billionaire’s support means more than just money though, according to Bannon.
“This is what I like about Elon Musk.
He and Vivek are talking about what we’ve been preaching on the War Room for years,”
Bannon added, referencing his radio show.
Since Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 election,
the Mercers have drifted ever further out of the orbit of Planet Koch,
building up their own entities, including #Breitbart #News,
#Cambridge #Analytica (the data startup),
and the ironically named #Government #Accountability #Institute,
all of them featuring #Steve #Bannon, the self-described economic nationalist, in top slots
—until he joined the White House.
Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon served, and Breitbart, where he was the chief executive, are private companies.
#GAI, which produced the campaign-season book
"Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich", by Peter Schweizer,
is a nonprofit organization.
Schweizer’s book, together with an accompanying movie executive-produced by #Rebekah Mercer, was designed to sully the reputation of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
It was part of a Bannon-crafted strategy to steer the sort of smears that usually bubble up from the right-wing fever swamps directly into the mainstream media.
It worked; in 2015 the New York Times and the Washington Post both made exclusive agreements with the GAI to report on advance excerpts of Clinton Cash.
#Bannon was wealthy before he met up with the Mercers,
first through his work as a banker for Goldman Sachs back when it was a privately held company,
and then through his own privately held ventures in movie-making and consulting.
Though Bannon’s wealth, when compared to that of Betsy DeVos, makes him a pipsqueak in the Trump money universe
(assets worth between $12 million and $54 million, according to the New York Times),
it nonetheless derives primarily from privately held entities.
Attendees, with white-and-red gift bags and lanyards, knew to be closelipped when approached by hotel interlopers
or by the Times reporter, who was not invited to the closed-press festivities.
But a copy of the agenda listed remarks by several tech billionaires, including the Anduril co-founder #Palmer #Luckey and the venture capitalist #Marc #Andreessen, who spoke about his support for deregulating technology
and the mixed reaction in Silicon Valley to his endorsement of Mr. Trump, according to attendees.
There were tech up-and-comers, too:
Donald Trump #Jr. announced at the welcome dinner that he was entering venture capital.
And days before the president-elect chose Robert F. #Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary,
Mr. Kennedy spoke extensively about his public-health work to a standing ovation.
Ms. #Wiles also led a session on “2024 Election Analysis,” where she gave a preview of Mr. Trump’s first days as president.
“It’s the domestic ‘Davos in the desert,’” said the Rockbridge backer #Omeed #Malik, referring to the annual business conference in Riyadh, and Donald Trump Jr.’s new business partner.
Rockbridge began with more humility.
Back in 2019, Mr. #Vance, then best known as the author of “Hilbilly Elegy,” and a conservative media figure named #Chris #Buskirk began informally hosting a series of small dinners
that would eventually become called Rockbridge.
The group drew early support from the venture capitalist #Peter #Thiel and eventually caught the attention of Donald J. Trump, who spoke at a few meetings.
Once in the fall and once in the spring, Rockbridge began to gather at places like the Four Seasons in Palm Beach, Fla.,
or the Ritz-Carlton in Dallas for three days of political panels and business networking.
Speakers included people like #Tucker #Carlson; the Thiel protégé #Blake #Masters; the casino mogul #Steve #Wynn; the investor #David #Sacks; and #Woody #Johnson, the billionaire owner of the New York Jets.
Not all attendees have politics at the top of their mind.
Some are primarily interested in business, seeing Rockbridge as a conservative-tinged version of the elite Sun Valley conference.
Unexpected #STEVE Observations at High Latitude During Quiet Geomagnetic Conditions: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL110568 -> STEVE is a mysterious purple-white arc near the aurora, typically seen after space disturbances called substorms - a new study reveals a rare STEVE event without a substorm, prompting questions about its origin: https://eos.org/editor-highlights/unusual-occurrence-of-steve-an-aurora-like-glow
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