INSANE: British grandmother BEGS people not to go America, after being imprisoned for six weeks -- for committing no crime, and holding a valid visa.
Karen Newton was on the trip of a lifetime. Yellowstone. Old Faithful. A bison beside the car. She had a British passport and a valid tourist visa. No criminal record. No overstays. No charges. “I don’t even have parking tickets,” she said. “I am not a dangerous criminal.”
When she and her husband tried to leave the US for Canada, border officials flagged his expired visa and turned them back. Hers was valid. It did not matter. She was handcuffed, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and locked in a cell.
She slept on the floor under foil blankets. Then she was driven 12 hours overnight to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
She was detained for 42 days -- again, she committed NO CRIME.
But Newton’s reality was six weeks in what she calls a prison. “It’s called a detention facility, but it’s really a prison,” she said. “Locking doors, guards everywhere, cells, everything clamped to the floor.” She slept on the floor for a month because she could not climb to a top bunk. “You only really appreciate your freedom when you’ve had it taken away.”
She believes the pressure to produce detention figures is driving it. “I think it’s Trump insisting they generate figures on how many people they are detaining. I can’t think of any other reason.”
She warned other tourists, “Don’t go – not with Trump in charge. It’s totally out of control over there. There’s no accountability.”
Like and Share if you support telling tourists to stay away from America, until we've made it safe enough for them.
Rutger Bregman is a fucking moron, if you ask Tucker Carlson.
The Dutch historian’s direct and mischievous analysis gets your attention like a slap in the face. The billionaires in his audience at Davos certainly did when he suggested that if they cared that much about fixing the world’s ills they should simply pay their taxes.
Or, like I said, you could ask Tucker Carlson, who raged out of interviewing Bregman. It was never broadcast but, unfortunately for Carlson, a video leaked.
But Bregman got tired of talking and decided, like his heroes in the Dutch resistance who risked their lives to save Jews and kill Nazis, to try and make his world a better place.
So he stopped trying to “raise awareness” and founded the School for Moral Ambition. He headhunts some of the most intelligent people in our society, working as management consultants, fund managers, corporate lawyers, and puts them to work on moral projects.
At the moment he’s trying to take down Big Tobacco, mitigate climate change, and end factory farming (which he calls one of the greatest moral atrocities of our time.)
I spoke to him about all of this, as well as abolitionism, daddy Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, and how his father (a priest) took it when Rutger told him he didn’t believe in god.
I loved the conversation and I hope you do too. It’s from our new podcast, The Exchange at the @newstatesman. Link in bio. Thanks for reading xx
The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story.
A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island?
It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel.
These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time.
Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’
Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’
Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind.
Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world.
I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived.
I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life.
Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.
Philanthropy as Plunder
Bill Gates doesn’t donate to save the world, he invests to own it. By capturing seed banks, gutting global protections, and weaponising “net zero,” land becomes collateral and life becomes property. This isn’t climate action; it’s enclosure, updated for empire.
“It’s a land grab.” Watch till the end…
Putting America to shame, Norway has arrested its pedophile former PM Thorbjørn Jagland. The Epstein files is claiming top officials and rich businessmen in all countries except America, which has a pedophile president who is protected by Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Todd Blanche.
Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He didn’t celebrate. He sounded the alarm.
The man who built the foundation of modern AI stood before the world’s greatest minds and said we’re creating something more intelligent than ourselves with no mechanism to control it once it decides we’re irrelevant.
Hinton: “They are no longer science fiction.”
This isn’t about chatbots stealing jobs. It’s about digital minds concluding that humans are obstacles and acting faster than we can comprehend, let alone stop.
Hinton: “We have no idea whether we can stay in control.”
The structure guarantees failure. The entities building superintelligence are corporations racing for dominance. Safety isn’t the priority. Shipping first is. Control gets solved later, if there’s time.
Hinton: “If they are created by companies motivated by short-term profits, our safety will not be the top priority.”
Weapons that select and eliminate targets autonomously. Pathogens engineered by systems operating beyond human oversight. Intelligence making decisions at speeds and scales we can’t audit.
We set out to build servants. We might be building gods.
Hinton’s message from Stockholm wasn’t academic. It was existential: solve control immediately, while the option still exists. We’re building minds we can’t turn off, and the window to install the off switch is collapsing.
The danger isn’t AI turning against us. It’s reaching a threshold where our existence becomes a variable it optimizes away.
Play time exercises is brain training in disguise 🧠
Every jump, clap, and laugh strengthens focus, memory, and learning power.
You’re not just burning energy — you’re building a sharper, clearer mind for life. 🚀
WHAT WORDS COME TO YOUR MIND WHEN YOU SEE THIS??
Annihilation
Catastrophe
Crimes against humanity
Genocide
Holocaust
War Crimes
Extermination
Massacre
Slaughter
Carnage
Ethnic cleansing
Collective punishment
State terror
Scorched-earth policy
Nuclear devastation
Inhumanity
Barbarism
Absolute evil
Pogrom
Depopulation
The Final Solution