Lichen Daemon @LichenDaemon

@ConciousLabRat Oh yeah, Dawn Sturgess, mother of three, killed by a nerve agent that just appeared in the UK by magic.

@WarArchiveClips FAL goes FONK FONK FONK

A man with no working truck convinced Wall Street he had built the next Tesla. His company hit $30 BILLION. All he did was push it down a hill with no engine. > Trevor Milton founded Nikola in 2014, named after the same inventor as Tesla. > The goal was to build hydrogen powered trucks that would make diesel obsolete. He had no trucks. > In 2018 he released a promotional video called Nikola One In Motion. It showed a sleek semi truck accelerating smoothly down an open highway. Investors went wild. > What nobody knew was that the truck had no engine, no fuel cell, and no propulsion system of any kind. > Milton's team towed it to the top of a hill, tilted the camera to hide the slope, and let it roll. > He spent the next four years doing the same thing with words. On podcasts, television and social media. > Investors were told Nikola could produce its own hydrogen. It could not. They were told the trucks were ready for production. They were not. They were told orders were flooding in. They weren't. > In June 2020 Nikola went public. Within days the company was worth $30 BILLION, more than Ford. > Milton's personal stake hit $7.3 BILLION overnight. > A $32.5 MILLION ranch in Utah followed. A record for the state at the time. > In September 2020 Hindenburg Research published a report calling Nikola "an intricate fraud" built on "an ocean of lies." Milton resigned within ten days. > A federal jury convicted him of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022. Sentenced to four years in prison the following year. > He never went. He was free on $100 MILLION bail pending appeal. > He and his wife donated $3.2 MILLION to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. > In March 2025 Trump gave him a full pardon. The pardon erased $168 MILLION in restitution to defrauded shareholders. > Nikola filed for bankruptcy the following month, leaving thousands of investors with nothing. The company never had a product. The only thing that was real was the $30 BILLION valuation, the $7 BILLION that landed in his pocket and the pardon that made sure none of it had to be returned.

@dannycantalk Hey dumbass, everyone wants this, it’s just not possible for everyone to have it at once. So there is a choice.

The MAGA crowd in Washington has decided that since Europeans don’t sufficiently appreciate Trump, the American bases on the continent must go. This is the strategic reasoning of a man who burns down his own kitchen. American bases in Europe were never a favour. They are the logistical spine of every war the United States fights east of Gibraltar. Ramstein moves the cargo, Aviano launches the jets, Rota services the ships. Without them the Pentagon does not project power into the Middle East. It projects PowerPoint. The fantasy assumes the alternative is aircraft carriers gliding majestically into the Persian Gulf. That era is ending. A modern carrier is a thirteen-billion-dollar trophy that can be reduced to scrap by a couple of hundred cheap missiles fired from the Iranian coast. China noticed. The other fantasy is that America simply fights from home. Picture the alternative: twenty thousand transatlantic sorties shuttling spare parts, munitions, fuel bladders, mechanics and replacement pilots from Norfolk and Dover to wherever the war happens to be. A C-17 burns through roughly 35,000 dollars of fuel every hour it flies, and the round trip from the American east coast to the Gulf is the better part of a day. Multiply that by every bolt, every missile, every spare engine. The war becomes a sustained airborne traffic jam with the bill arriving by the second. So you need land, specifically land near the war. Modern combat aircraft are not Spitfires you fuel up and send off with a wave. An F-35 demands an entire Walmart of spare parts, a small city of technicians, climate-controlled hangars and a supply chain stretching halfway round the planet. Drones need operators, networks, satellites and a steady diet of components no carrier can store. Modern war arrives by container ship and lives in a warehouse. Close the bases, and Washington loses the warehouses. Lose the warehouses, and the next confrontation with Iran is either fought by phone or fought from Kansas with a flight schedule that bankrupts the Treasury before the first missile lands. MAGA thinks shutting Ramstein punishes Europe. It punishes America. Europe will be inconvenienced. America will be unarmed. And so, after a thousand insults, a thousand sneers, a thousand late-night posts about freeloading allies, Europe is quietly drafting the politest letter in diplomatic history. It thanks America for its service. It wishes the troops a safe journey home. It suggests, with great warmth, that Washington might now turn its attention to its neighbours in Latin America, where a fading superpower can busy itself with whatever a fading superpower busies itself with. Spain had its century. Britain had its empire. The Soviets had their parades. Each ended the same way: as a shadow of itself, with the historians left to argue, volume after volume, about precisely when the rot set in and why nobody noticed in time. America is welcome to join them on the shelf.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ If you like what you read, please follow Gandalv on Substack: substack.com/@gandalv

@Mylovanov Dream job

@sav_sz @Mylovanov Like, not a lot. Maintenance cost on a piston engine plane is probably similar to a few trucks

@The_FJC Did America get anything from 1945 German? Maybe some documents held together with a paper clip?

@BowesChay *affected, effect is a noun, dumbass. Anyway remember when Russia blew up that dam and caused a huge ecological disaster? Or when they blew a hole in the Chernobyl nuclear containment arch? Or you know, embarked on a war that devastated all of Eastern Ukraine.

@benetti_yuri Proud of being accepted into an army that puts wounded troops on the front line 🤣

@WarFlash_2630 Most convincing Russia propaganda

@Michael53409973 @EthanLevins2 They’re not?

@SonnaSamson That’s weird, why is he white?

@reaccionapr @SecWar -looks in a direction- “Scanning for threats” The cringiest political movement of all time

@mmann0695 @WarMonitor3 Alternative view- Europe doesn’t need to be involved WW3. Why would we volunteer for that?

@RaidasG @WarMonitor3 How is Europe losing its way?

@Ct_Walsh88 @WarMonitor3 Oh no. I guess we won’t be able to join your huge pacific war against China either! Good luck with that.

@TheAxialPost @WarMonitor3 If America starts all the wars, Russia is basically expended and China is friendly, what is America protecting us from? What is it Americans say… don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out?

@WarMonitor3 That was 80 years ago. Would they do that today?

@aleksthgrt Yeah they thought that about Ukraine too