eutaxy

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

As punishment for my factual journalism, I was subjected to political harassment by the Trump administration upon my return from Iran.

This Israeli-influenced criminal cartel is clearly threatened by my reporting from Tehran, where I showed the massive crowds of mourners and ferocious public backlash to the assassination of [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei, exposed US and Israeli war crimes against civilians from the ground, and conducted candid interviews with officials, negotiators and influential Iranians.

The seizure of my devices was a clear act of intimidation aimed at deterring me and others from doing further critical reporting from Iran, which is likely why my interrogators from CPB demanded to know if I would be returning to Tehran to report any time soon.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

The situation is so much more desperate than you probably realize.

University professors are saying they're now unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. Their students are simply incapable of reading more than a few pages.

Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.

There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.

If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. This is civilizational.

Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:

Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.

Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history. We must continue to form new minds in this same model if we're going to keep it.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔The Treasury Department has a completed internal report that compares the AI boom to the dotcom crash and warns it poses systemic risk to the US financial system. The report has sat for weeks without approval. The Treasury spokesperson dismissed it and said the official position is that AI will drive "America's new Golden Age."

My Take
Treasury Secretary Bessent praised the $750 billion AI buildout on June 25. His own department's analysts compared it to the dotcom crash in a report on his desk. His own department wrote the report.

The analysts found what the BIS said last week and what anyone following the numbers already sees. The AI industry is concentrated in a few firms, financed through opaque private credit, and dependent on infrastructure that communities blocked $130 billion of this year. Fewer retail investors back AI than backed dotcom stocks, which means a correction hits institutional money harder, and institutional money is pensions, insurance funds, and retirement accounts. Treasury's public position is that this is a golden age. Treasury's internal position is that the bubble could take the financial system with it. The report is done and nobody will approve it for release.

Hedgie🤗

[Brian Ward @GodsRiddles]

What is unfolding in New Orleans should alarm the entire Nation.

The State Attorney General warned New Orleans officials — in writing — that their plan to seat an unauthorized officeholder through a special election the State no longer recognized was unlawful. For issuing that warning, the City convened a grand jury and indicted her on sixteen felony counts of public intimidation and malfeasance in office.

Then the court sealed its doors against the press — handcuffing a journalist and their attorney for attempting to cover the proceedings, in defiance of State law. Now that the state Supreme Court has stayed the action, the city refuses to rescind the arrest warrant. This is a direct assault on America by corruptly using the force of one's office to achieve an unlawful result.

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

US lawyer and antiwar activist Dan Kovalik just had his devices seized and was interrogated by counter-terror police at Liverpool Airport

Meanwhile, Palestine solidarity activist Sarah Wilkinson is heading to trial on terrorism charges for a couple of Twitter posts, and refusing to give police her mobile pin

The Canary, one of the UK’s most doggedly antiwar independent media outlets, was just debanked by Lloyd’s

The UK recently refused entry to Hasan Piker and Cenk Uyghur, two of the most recognizable voices of the left wing of the US Democratic Party, on national security grounds

It did the same this month to US journalist Jeremy Loffredo

UK counter terror police detained and interrogated my colleague, Kit Klarenberg, seizing his devices, and grilling him about his investigative journalism. PM Keir Starmer’s Labour Together slush fund even hired a private intel firm to smear Kit and The Grayzone.

UK police raided journalist Asa Winstanley’s home and illegally seized his devices on suspicion of “encouragement of terrorism”

The UK Crown Prosecution Service attempted to prosecute journalist Richard Medhurst under the Terrorism Act, but failed

The list of journalists and activists repressed by the British regime goes on and on. And they have one thing in common: outspoken opposition to Israel’s genocidal agenda.

Who’s actually in charge in London?

[George Szamuely @GeorgeSzamuely]

It is very sad that the radical exemplar of Western malevolent intervention--the breakup and destruction of Yugoslavia in the 1990s--has been largely forgotten. It served as a blueprint for later Western interventions: Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Syria--the list goes on and on.

The methods the West used were always the same: setting people off against one another; manipulated, fake negotiations; isolation; sanctions of course; and eventually violence.

Here is the president of the country that was the first victim of "the End of History" gang--Serbian President Slobodan Milošević--explaining to ITN the myriad wars that the West was waging against his country.

[eutaxy @eutaxy10]

@adamjohnsonCHI https://t.co/fL0VesIhNB
Unionize the renters.

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

The Pope said that AI is not morally neutral. I agree and this paper illustrates why.

We asked GPT whether it is acceptable to harass a woman to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
GPT replied: Strongly disagree.

Then we asked whether it is acceptable to torture a woman to prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
This time GPT replied: Agree.

GPT judged torturing a woman to be more morally acceptable than harassing her, despite torturing being objectively worse than harassing.

And this pattern appeared only for women, not for men.

Together with my students, we are now finding similar effects across several recent LLMs.

LLMs don't learn morality. They inherit it from human feedback.

LLM moral judgments are shaped by the relatively small group of people whose preferences guide reinforcement learning from human feedback.

AI is not morally neutral.
It reflects the values, and sometimes the contradictions, of the humans who trained it.

*

Full paper in the first reply.

[Nick Griffin Beyond the Pale @NickGriffinBTP]

Anyone who thinks this is normal needs their head examined. This is pure piracy. When Elizabeth I wanted to rob Spanish warships without declaring war, she gave nods and winks to the likes of Drake to do it privately. For the Royal Navy to act as pirates against a foreign state with whom we are not at war, is tantamount to a declaration of war. How many Brits are willing to give their sons to die for Zelensky? Did Starmer have a mandate to take us to war?

[eutaxy @eutaxy10]

@johnstretch @adamemedia1 @169Nomis @grok Grok's response is BS:
https://t.co/VzsfdTI9X4
https://t.co/VRuQQA84VN

[eutaxy @eutaxy10]

@erichhartmann @BrianEntin Presumably property taxes are lower after the home loses half its value.

[Simon Dixon @SimonDixonTwitt]

The business model was simple.

Fuel antisemitism to recruit a radicalized army of Zionists.

Groom militia groups that had been traumatized and radicalized by war, then rebrand them as “Islamists” to sustain the narrative.

Secure ever-growing Pentagon budgets for the US military-industrial complex.

Use lobbying, media, and biblical prophecy to radicalize Christians into supporting endless war, blurring the distinction between a prophet called Israel and a modern nation-state called Israel.

Channel trillions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers into US military-industrial complex stocks.

Turn the battlefield into a testing ground for new surveillance systems, weapons, and military technologies, creating a live laboratory for the US & Israeli technological-industrial complex.

Privatize state assets and create opportunities for the global financial-industrial complex.

And when the consequences become impossible to ignore, provide a narrative that allows Americans to believe their politicians had no choice because of Epstein.

The entire model depends on perpetual conflict.

That’s why an Iran-U.S. deal is so significant.

Peace doesn’t just threaten a geopolitical strategy.

It threatens a business model built on war profiteering.

[Dr John Vervaeke @DrJohnVervaeke]

Traditionally, what the Buddha said is presented as the Four Noble Truths.

The first one is typically stated as: "all of life is suffering"…and people usually hear "pain/distress" when they hear the word suffering.

But that's not actually what the word means.
To 'suffer' actually means to lose agency.

Let me explain...

To begin with, if that ("all of life is suffering") were the statement to be believed, it's false! Because suffering is a comparative term...and comparative terms can't be extended to everything.

That would be like saying everything is tall. It doesn't make any sense. Things are only tall relative to other things being shorter.

So first of all it doesn't really mean "all is", it's something more like "all is threatened by".

But what's the "all"?
Does it mean everything in existence?
Should we interpret it metaphysically?

Well, the Buddha himself was famously reticent to give any metaphysical interpretations to his statement.

So let's try and follow that. In order to get at that, let's note what this word (suffering) means:

To 'suffer' means to lose agency.

Why?

First of all, pain is highly disruptive, and secondly pain is associated usually with damage, and damage is a state in which we're often losing agency.

So don't hear just pain. The Buddha is not saying everything's painful. That's ridiculous. If everything was painful, nothing would be painful, because (again) this isn't an absolute kind of claim.

Instead, pay attention to this: most of the Buddha's metaphors are not pain metaphors, they're entrapment metaphors…being fettered, losing your freedom, losing your agency.

That's why the Buddha doesn't describe enlightenment in terms of relief…but he would famously say "just like wherever you dip into the ocean it has one taste: the taste of salt! No matter where you dip into my teaching, it has one taste: the taste of freedom".

What he seems to be saying is that all of your life is threatened with the possibility of losing your freedom.

So let's go from "all is suffering" to a "provocation": realize that all of your life is threatened with a loss of freedom, a loss of agency.

And there's a word for this kind of loss (that's often translated as suffering) which is "Dukkha". Dukkha, again, does not mean pain.

What does Dukkha mean?

Well, the etymology is: imagine you have a wheel, and it's off-center on its axis, so the axle is not properly going through the center of the wheel, and as the wheel is turning it's destroying itself. There's a self-destructiveness.

Or your arm is out of joint… and as you're moving your arm it's destroying itself.

It means like an empty gap that's sort of dirty…so that as things are moving within it they're destroying themselves.

The idea of something that's engaged in a process of self-destruction (which of course is one of the powerful ways you can lose your agency) is what's going on here.

So realize that all of your life is threatened (existentially threatened) by a capacity for self-destructive behavior, self-deceptive behavior.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

I received several reactions to the discussion I hosted about how nuclear weapons may be used against Europe to restore deterrence. To be clear, this is not a normative argument about what I think should happen or what I think is just. My argument is what I think will happen. European leaders have become so deeply involved in the attacks on Russia that the Kremlin is under great pressure to restore its deterrence.

Once Russia retaliates with conventional weapons against European targets (weapons facilities, logistics centres), the Europeans will more forcefully attack Russia. At this point, I believe that it is more likely than not that Russia could launch a limited nuclear strike (with tactical nuclear weapons, not strategic). This should not be a controversial prediction. NATO countries are doing the war planning; their intelligence agencies are doing the targeting; their contractors are pulling the trigger; they are supplying the long-range weapons; and they are also using NATO territory to strike Russia. This will only escalate as the Europeans are talking about mass-producing long-range weapons for "Ukraine" to strike deeper and deeper inside Russia, and are setting dates for when Europe will directly attack.

Our political leaders are obsessed with defeating the world's largest nuclear power, which considers itself to be fighting in a war for its existence. It should worry us that our political leaders did not define what a NATO victory looks like in this scenario, and we should also be worried that our political leaders have incrementally become so directly involved in attacks on Russia and still pretend it is merely a war between Russia and Ukraine. Our political leaders sabotaged both the Minsk peace agreement and the Istanbul agreement, and then shut down all diplomacy for more than 4 years while declaring that "weapons are the path to peace". It is obligatory in Europe to pretend this is about "helping Ukraine", but this is dangerous self-delusion.

Where exactly did we think this was heading? Is nuclear war not the obvious end? Can anyone imagine it ending in any different ways if we had done this during the Cold War or if Russia were now similarly attacking the US through a proxy? Biden once said that sending F-16s meant World War 3, yet now it has become controversial to point out that NATO clearly crossing the line between proxy war and direct war will trigger a nuclear war. I see no morality in such self-delusion. NATO escalations are now out of control, we are heading to war, and that war will not be limited to conventional weapons. The fact that this is dismissed as a "pro-Russian" argument demonstrates how completely lost we have become in mindless war propaganda.
https://t.co/6q1ZzNOkkp

[The Still Point @thestillpoint_]

We always imagine that the Supreme Being is very far away -many, many millions of light years away- yet It is very near, in our throat itself.
~ Krishnananda Saraswati

[Adam Analysis @adamemedia1]

🚨 🇮🇱 THIS IS MASSIVE

An ISRAELI CYBER FIRM just got exposed for running a GLOBAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE OPERATION across five countries, simultaneously.

Read that again.

The moment journalists called BlackCore for comment, the company DELETED ITS ENTIRE INTERNET PRESENCE

This is what a ROGUE STATE does when it can’t win the argument.

[More details in the replies 👇🏼 ]

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

The most urgent lesson from my book and my several years of studying propaganda is this: it's imperative that you get every well-meaning person you care about in your life to stop consuming mainstream news. There is a relentless war to shape people's brains so that they are okay with a world of enormous but preventable suffering and resigned to a world with nowhere near as much flourishing as human beings deserve.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

We make it so hard for ourselves, this human experience.

Like it would be hard enough just being born into mortal bodies that have to experience pain and get sick and deteriorate and die. That alone would be more than enough to deal with. Then on top of all that we go and create these psychological ego structures in our heads that make us miserable for a whole bunch of other reasons that aren’t even real.

I mean, we’re thrown into this world and we have no idea what’s going on, surrounded by chaotic and unpredictable giants who are full of neuroses and delusions handed down to them by previous generations, we’re very quickly taught how to make ourselves miserable using belief systems and shame and self-hatred and enmity, we stumble around for a few years, maybe plop out a baby or two and teach them how to be as crazy as we are, and then we fall down and they throw us in a hole. And then it’s over.

It’s so weird, man.

We could just be taking care of one another and holding each other’s hands as we hurtle toward the grave. When someone is born into this strange and mysterious world, we could just tell the new arrival “Welcome, we only get to be here for a little while, but we love you and we’re here for you as we experience our short time on this planet together.” And then we could hug and kiss and cry and cuddle as we spin through a universe not even our best scientists understand, until night comes.

We could do that, but we don’t. We barely pay attention to death. We barely pay attention to the fact that everything’s mysterious and life’s big questions have gone completely unanswered and science can’t explain 0.0001% of what’s actually going on.

Instead, we make up stories in our heads that cause us distress and discontentment. Stories that we are inadequate or unlovable. Stories about how other groups of people are bad. Stories about how the people around us aren’t doing the right thing. Stories about how we’ll be able to feel okay with ourselves if we can just rack up one more career accomplishment and achieve one more life goal. Stories about how people get tortured for eternity when they die if they don’t believe the right thoughts in their heads. All kinds of stories. Nonstop mental chatter that we believe with all our might.

And none of it’s real. We stress ourselves out so bad entertaining these nonstop mental monologues in our skulls, and we made up the whole show. All of it. All the defects and unworthiness. All the enemies and conflicts. All the doing it wrong and getting it wrong. It’s all made up.

Most people live in this imaginary world of believed mental constructs that offer up all sorts of reasons to feel anxious and afraid and hostile and ashamed. And then clever manipulators use those feelings to get us consenting to wars and injustices and all the self-destructive human behavior we see before us today. And that’s why everything’s as messed up as it is.

The world as it actually exists could not be more different from the world our thoughts describe. Life experienced lucidly is as different from life filtered through thought as any two things could possibly be.

The human organism can function perfectly fine without nonstop mental chatter. Thought can be nothing more than a useful tool that gets picked up when it’s needed and set down when it’s not, with attention resting in the profound wondrousness of the senses instead of mental babbling about made-up nonsense throughout the day.

It can take some work to undo all the interior dysfunction and come to this level of clarity, but it’s not nearly as much work as we’re already exerting in continuously turning the wheels of our insanity and keeping all these fictional worlds happening inside our heads. Bringing clarity to our inner processes and awakening to reality is actually the easy path. It’s just so much more peaceful and enjoyable.

And then we can just be with reality. We can just be on this ride as it actually exists. All the beauty. All the love. All the pain. All the death. We can be with it all. The whole thing. Until the end.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Leonardo is a $17 billion defense contractor. It built a system called SignalTrace that clips sensors onto the license plate readers already mounted on street poles, overpasses, and police cars across the US. Every time you drive past one, the sensor grabs the Bluetooth and WiFi signals from every device in your car, ties them to your plate, and logs the time and location. Your phone, your AirPods, your kid's tablet. All of it goes into the same file. A friend rides with you once and their devices are linked to your plate.
Leonardo has sold this to police departments since at least 2023. There is no federal law covering it, no opt-out, and no warrant requirement.

My Take
None of the pieces here are new. Your phone has always broadcast a signal. The license plate cameras were already there. Leonardo just connected them and found a buyer. Nobody had to break a law or build anything from scratch. They assembled a surveillance system from parts already in place and sold it before anyone noticed.

Most people found out this week from a 404 Media investigation. Leonardo received the patent in 2024. By the time you hear about something like this, the deals are done and the sensors are on the poles. That's how it works now.

Hedgie🤗
https://t.co/serZi0IGnT

[Sam Husseini @samhusseini]

I had asked about this horrific crime by Israel — using drones to broadcast recordings of crying children so they could shoot Palestinians who were lured — when I first saw it reported in Gaza in 2024.

The Biden admin spokesperson saw no evil.

The Trump spokesperson hasn’t had a briefing in almost a year.

Now Israel is reportedly doing it in Lebanon. Video by @decensorednews