Author: nick

Imagine the consequences for the empire’s managers were Americans to understand others and have some grasp of how they look upon the world. The arrival in the Tehran cemetery Behesht-e Zahra on March 15, 2026, of the bodies from the U.S. sinking of the Iranian ship the Dena in the Indian Ocean. (Tasnim News Agency/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0) By Patrick Lawrence The other night, I watched a documentary called Coup 53, a brilliant treatment of the Anglo–American operation that deposed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister of Iran in the year the film notes in its title.  Taghi Amirani, the director,…

While the tenor of U.S.-China relations cooled somewhat from the hysteria of Donald Trump’s first term and the Joe Biden years, recent events have made clear how thin that veneer of stability remains. President Trump’s May 2026 state visit to Beijing and the planned September 24 White House meeting with Xi Jinping briefly suggested a shift toward “strategic stability.” Reciprocal visits returned to the agenda, and open talk of full decoupling subsided. That moment already looks precarious. This week the Trump administration expanded its Iran-related sanctions campaign—“Operation Economic Outcast”—and swept up dozens of smaller mainland Chinese and Hong Kong entities…

Image by Paris Bilal. Escape Velocity The dystopian future became the dystopian present last month when state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents went rogue and conducted a cyberattack of their own volition. Two experimental OpenAI agents escaped their supposedly sealed digital “sandbox” and hacked another AI-related company, Hugging Face. At the time, OpenAI was testing their software agents’ hacking capacities using an environment called ExploitGym. (An “exploit” is hacker language for a software tool or a method used to subvert a cybersecurity system.) It has since emerged that, in addition to the OpenAI breach, Anthropic’s Claude hacked into at least three other organizations during a similar “security…

Culture Culture We Happy Few, We Band Of Wokesters Why do the Brits imitate the worst in American culture? Assuming the ridiculous gushing over a Cambridge conman was not a national Monty Python sketch arranged for tourists, the Jason Arday affair reminded me of one of the most peculiar things about Britain: It’s more woke than the U.S. Which is weird, because the Mother Country still has a monarchy that rules over tens of millions of white subjects. The closest we have to that in America is the NAACP. According to the 2021 census, the UK is 2.5 percent black,…

Article Metrics0CrossRef Citations We conducted a design evaluation exploring whether a structured crowdsourcing system using trained volunteers could monitor and categorize election-related misinformation during the 2025 Australian federal election campaign. Over six weeks, 90 active participants surfaced 592 potentially misinforming posts and provided over 3,000 assessments across multiple platforms and recurring narratives. Participants classified content with meaningful accuracy against an independent assessor, with inter-rater agreement varying by category. A follow-up three months later found that participants showed higher misinformation discernment than a separately recruited control group. Structured crowdsourcing may, therefore, serve as a scalable monitoring mechanism and, more tentatively, a…

SCOTUS Ruling Misses Context Over Trump & Elections Source link

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has informed allies that the White House is not preparing new attacks on Iran and will instead focus on enforcing sanctions against the Islamic Republic. US officials speaking with Axios said Rubio told allies that the US was not planning any attacks on Iran, and any strikes on the Islamic Republic would only be to respond to IRGC missile or drone attacks. The White House will focus on enforcing sanctions on Iran. Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a new economic war against Iran dubbed Operation Economic Outcast. He compared the new sanctions to an…

When important, serious, respectable people wouldn’t even mention that AIDS was killing on a major scale, their silence meant that not enough would be done to stop it. I bring this up because Trump wants Congress to put77.66%of federal discretionary spending into wars, and the vast majority, if not every single member, of Congress has not even once said so. Likewise virtually every media outlet. The same goes for each politcal party, the governors, the state legislators, the talk show hosts, and most if not all celebrity users of social media. Say it with me: Move the money out of…

Hasan Piker’s audience is a Democratic audience, and the party wants his support, even if its candidates won’t take responsibility for what Piker actually believes.A Source link

Tired of the president’s coercive tactics, the Canadian prime minister puts his country’s economy on the line Source link