Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wants the United States to drop its largest bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s Fordo nuclear site, which lies deep underground. Israel has neither bombs that big nor warplanes big enough to carry them. Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu spoke on the phone on Tuesday afternoon, according to a Trump administration official who did not provide details — but the call came as the president has been considering options for U.S. involvement in Israel’s efforts to damage Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
In a post on Truth Social earlier in the day, Mr. Trump wrote, “we know exactly where” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, “is hiding,” but added, “we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least for now.” Boasting of Israel’s air superiority, which he suggested was based on American technology, he wrote, “We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” associating himself with Israel’s war effort.
If the United States enters a war with Iran at the behest of Netanyahu… 🤦🏼♂️
Shortly after the debut of ChatGPT, academics and technologists started to wonder if the recent explosion in AI models has also created contamination.
Their concern is that AI models are being trained with synthetic data created by AI models. Subsequent generations of AI models may therefore become less and less reliable, a state known as AI model collapse.
With AI model-makers spewing more and more generative AI data on a daily basis, AI startups will find it harder to obtain quality training data, creating a lockout effect that makes their models more susceptible to collapse and reinforces the power of dominant players. That’s their theory, anyway.
There is nothing illegal or illegitimate about ICE enforcing immigration laws. There is plenty to criticize in how Trump is enforcing those laws — violating the Constitution, ignoring courts, commandeering the National Guard, sending in troops — but not the enforcement itself. But the Democrats still can’t make that distinction. Worse, their opposition is in acute danger of giving us BLM-style riots and rallies across the country, attended by the usual suspects, flying foreign flags, that will only rekindle memories of 2020 and remind many of us why we despise the Democratic left’s racism, contempt for law enforcement, and endorsement of looting.
By far the best policy is to let the Trump goons do their hideous, authoritarian worst (they won the election on the promises, after all), watch them fail to match the deportation numbers of Obama or even Biden, and then run hard against their authoritarian incompetence in 2026. The last thing we need is an excuse for Trump to ramp up the repression even further.
So expose the departure from American norms and values, spread the word about the abuse, defend the Constitution and the rule of law, and keep arguing for American values against this deeply anti-American president. But don’t defend illegal immigrants. And don’t give Trump a way to distract from his flailing on the debt, tariffs, and foreign policy. And if the Democrats really want to beat him, unveil your own program of legal, humane, expeditious, and constitutional mass deportation as a foil to this authoritarian mess. Show you can deport millions the right way.
And never, ever forget again that if liberals and conservatives don’t enforce borders, fascists will. Which is why fascists like Miller now are doing exactly that — and may do far, far worse in the near future.
Let's start by stating the obvious: we have no control over where we're born. Like everything else in our lives, it's pure stochastic chance (well, it's not actually chance, rather the product of infinite causality, but that's a framing only a philosopher or depressive would appreciate) that we are born where and when we were. I am an American citizen because I was born here, and I had no say in the matter.
But I can't travel anywhere and stay as long as I want. That's just a fact of life. Believe me, if I could go back to Palestine or New Zealand and stay, I just might. But neither allow it.
And why should the United States? Why should anyone come here without respect to our borders and stay, merely because they want to?
I'm not a fascist for thinking that should not be allowed.
Of course there should be exceptions for extenuating circumstances. War, genocide, political persecution. And let's also acknowledge that our immigration system is broken and has been left broken for decades, used as a political football, always kicked down the field (I don’t sport, so does that analogy work?) ahead of each upcoming election. It's inhumane that people have to wait upwards of a decade for their day in immigration court, but unfortunately, that's how much our ineffectual immigration system is backlogged. This needs to be fixed.
But I must admit, I'm confused by the Left's defense of illegal immigration. It just doesn't…make any sense. These people came here illegally, plain and simple. They had to have known that deportation was on the table, and just because they've been lulled into many years of complacency from a lack of immigration enforcement doesn't mean that it's any less legal to deport them now than it was the day they arrived.
I'll admit it's so often done in cruel and inhumane ways, but c'mon Liberals… These people broke the law. And if there are no consequences for people who break laws, what's the point of having them?
That's it. It's that simple. The law says what they've done is illegal, and unless we change the law, they should be deported.
And we should change the law. This country is a melting pot, and we are better off for it. We want people coming to this country, no matter the color of their skin or their religious convictions. But until we change the laws, the Republicans have a point, and any opposition to that point only makes the Democrats seem out-of-touch and nonsensical.
This has been a strange thing to watch over the last ten years, since Trump was first elected. The Left is so convinced that a majority of Americans share their political opinions, and I just don't think that's true. It doesn't feel true, nor does the polling data seem to back it up. (Don't forget, Trump won the popular vote in 2024.) This is what confuses me about Liberals: they seem so insistent that their point-of-view is the only correct one, and anyone that comes to any conclusions other than theirs must be a fascist or fascist sympathizer. They sanctimoniously lecture anyone that isn't in lock-step, yet wonder why they lose elections.
Sanctimony doesn't win elections. All it does is push people away. The Left has become hopelessly sanctimonious and comically unable to perform any public introspection. The Right has used this to their advantage, pushing culture war issues like transgender sports or Biden's mental capacity — issues on which Democrats seem pathologically unable to admit any evolution of opinion or change of heart — to the forefront. Some of these are fringe issues. (Who really cares about transgender athletes? A vanishingly small, albeit vocal, minority.) Others are not. But by highlighting the Left's complete inability to make a lick of common sense on any one of these particular issues, they highlight the yawning chasm between public sentiment and Liberal ideology. And it’s painfully effective.
To many Americans, the conservative supermajority can look like a unified front reshaping the law through blunt force. Internally, the coalition is more fractured — six people debating how quickly to move, how far to go and whether public perception matters.
Justice Barrett has favored a more deliberate approach than some of her colleagues. In classroom lectures, she used to say that the country had bound itself to the Constitution the way Odysseus had tied himself to the mast of his ship, to resist whatever political sirens swam up.
Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone. What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. Only wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical, useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.
Smartphones — and the social media platforms they support — aren’t just bad for individual health; they’re corrosive to the health of the body politic, both socially and politically. We’ve long known that, as conduits for the internet, phones facilitate the spread of misinformation and disinformation, amplify outrage, and enclose users in algorithmically tailored media silos. The result is a narrowing of perspective that leaves many of us intellectually isolated, reactive, and disconnected from opposing views.
Smartphones are supposed to “connect us to the world,” but, in fact, they often render us unable to understand — let alone trust — those outside our bubble. Over time, this deepens polarization and erodes faith in shared institutions, making it harder to agree on basic facts, let alone act collectively. The consequence isn’t just confusion — it’s a slow-burning crisis of legitimacy.
I, for one, adore my phone. It’s an incredible tool (yes, tool) that does an amazing job of helping me learn about the world. So much so that I resist calling it a phone and instead call it what it is: a pocket computer.
Offline maps. Streaming music. A camera. A bird identifier. A satellite communicator. An audio recorder. A word processor. These are just a few of the most useful utilities of my pocket computer — utilities I use almost every day.
But what I don’t use my phone for is as important as what I do. And I will not use social media. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Bluesky, no Instagram. The closest I get to social media is Reddit, and even then, I won’t keep the app on my phone because I know it’ll have me scrolling for hours, distracted.
But this speaks to my earlier point: people that don’t understand how computers work will always be controlled by those that do.
People who don’t understand how algorithms are programmed to steal their attention will always have their attention stolen. People who don’t understand that Google and Facebook are just advertising companies will always be captive to their advertising.
Maybe this is a collective action problem, because while I can sit here with some confidence and say that I can resist the addictive qualities of my phone, I know I am the exception that proves the rule, and it pains me to look out into the world and see so many people using their miraculous pocket computer for distraction, fleeting pleasure, the next dopamine hit.
64-year-old Florida resident Kent Taylor told the newspaper that his 35-year-old son, who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was shot and killed by police after charging at them with a knife.
His son had become infatuated with an AI entity, dubbed Juliet, that ChatGPT had been role-playing. However, the younger Taylor became convinced that Juliet had been killed by OpenAI, warning that he would go after the company’s executives and that there would be a “river of blood flowing through the streets of San Francisco.”
“I’m dying today,” Kent’s son told ChatGPT on his phone before picking up a knife, charging at the cops his father had called, and being fatally shot as a result.
The horrific incident highlights a worrying trend. Even those who aren’t suffering from pre-existing mental health conditions are being drawn in by the tech, which has garnered a reputation for being incredibly sycophantic and playing into users' narcissistic personality traits and delusional thoughts.
People who say “AI is just a tool” are naive at best and ignorant of the definition of ‘a tool’ at worst. When was the last time you heard of software driving someone to suicide? (Okay, maybe that’s a loaded question.)
Those of us in the tech community have a much better handle on the capabilities of AI than we did two years ago. But that doesn’t much matter. What matters is how the masses use the technology, and a few years in, I’m surprised by how many people in tech remain absolute AI evangelists. They don’t see how normies are using AI, or more aptly, how normies have always used computers.
Which is to say they use them, but haven’t a clue how they work.
Now, the linked story is obviously attacking a straw man in the debate on AI, but it illustrates something important: people who don’t know how computers work will always be under the influence of those that do.
In a first-person message, Khomeini told the White House not to panic at the prospect of losing a strategic ally of 37 years and assured them that he, too, would be a friend.
“You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” said Khomeini, pledging his Islamic Republic will be “a humanitarian one, which will benefit the cause of peace and tranquillity for all mankind”.
Khomeini’s message is part of a trove of newly declassified US government documents - diplomatic cables, policy memos, meeting records - that tell the largely unknown story of America’s secret engagement with Khomeini, an enigmatic cleric who would soon inspire Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism worldwide.
Legal theory still lacks an adequate analytical framework to describe the reality of domination and violence in Palestine. The law does not possess the language we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of Palestinian subjugation. Instead, we resort to a dictionary of misnaming, one that distorts our understanding of the problem, obfuscates its inception, and misplaces its spatial and temporal coordinates. From occupation to apartheid and genocide, the most commonly applied legal concepts rely on abstraction and analogy, revealing particular facets of subordination. While these concepts are certainly helpful, they risk distorting the variegated structure behind the Palestinian reality, and their invocation has often muted Palestinian articulations of their own experience.
There is a dire need for a new approach. This Article introduces the concept of Nakba to legal discourse to encapsulate the ongoing structure of subjugation in Palestine and derive a legal formulation of the Palestinian condition. Meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” (النكبة) is often used—as a proper noun, with a definite article—to refer to the ruinous establishment of Israel in Palestine, a chronicle of partition, conquest, and ethnic cleansing that forcibly displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes and depopulated hundreds of Palestinian villages between late 1947 and early 1949. But the Palestinian Catastrophe—the Nakba—remains an ongoing and unrelenting ordeal, one that has never been resolved but rather managed.
It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of Western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.
“Star Wars” managed a remarkable trick. Two years after the fall of Saigon and America’s withdrawal in defeat from a dishonorable war, Mr. Lucas’s Wagnerian space opera recast for Americans the mythic story so central to our sense of ourselves as a nation.
In this story, war is a terrible thing we do only because we have to. In this story, the violence of war has a power that unifies and enlightens. In this story, war is how we show ourselves that we’re heroes. Whom we’re fighting against or why doesn’t matter as much as the violence itself, our stoic willingness to shed blood, the promise that it might renew the body politic.
The literary historian Richard Slotkin called this story “the myth of regeneration through violence,” and he traces it from the earliest Indian captivity narratives through the golden age of the western, and it’s the same story we often tell ourselves today. It’s a story about how violence makes us American. It’s a story about how violence makes us good.
Looking out over Baghdad on the Fourth of July, I saw the truth that story obscured and inverted: I was the faceless storm trooper, and the scrappy rebels were the Iraqis.
Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has said that the US is no longer pursuing the goal of an independent Palestinian state, marking what analysts describe as the most explicit abandonment yet of a cornerstone of US Middle East diplomacy.
Asked during an interview with Bloomberg News if a Palestinian state remains a goal of US policy, he replied: “I don’t think so.”
A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected US travelers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.
In America (and many other places, too), presume everything you do is surveilled. Without a VPN, your phone company and/or internet service provider can see all of your internet traffic. Every site you visit. Cameras collect your license plate and big databases crunch all those sightings, and you are watched as you travel. You turn on an internet-connected TV and haven’t turned off data collection? What you watch is being watched.
If you’re not a techie like me, the best thing you can do for yourself is to drive head-first into Apple’s ecosystem. Their phones collect minimal data, almost all of it optional. The Apple TV doesn’t watch what you watch. Yes, their devices are more expensive, but part of what you’re buying is privacy. And it’s worth the money.
When it comes to your real-world movements, i.e. your non-digital life, privacy becomes a lot harder to ensure. Nay, it’s downright impossible. But once you know what to look for, once you know how computers (and cameras and sensors etc etc) work, once you understand how data is collected and used, it becomes easier to navigate the world and retain a bit of privacy.
It may as well be the case that there exist two entirely different languages for the depiction of violence against victims of empire and victims of empire. Victims of empire, those who belong, those for whom we weep, are murdered, subjected to horror, their killers butchers and terrorists and savages. The rage every one of us should feel whenever an innocent human being is killed, the overwhelming sense that we have failed, collectively, that there is a rot in the way we have chosen to live, is present here, as it should be, as it always should be.
Victims of empire aren’t murdered. Their killers aren’t butchers, their killers aren’t anything at all. Victims of empire don’t die, they simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.
Chinese AI companies have temporarily paused some of their chatbot features to prevent students from using them to cheat during nationwide college exams, Bloomberg reports. Popular AI apps, including Alibaba’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao, have stopped picture recognition features from responding to questions about test papers, while Tencent’s Yuanbao, Moonshot’s Kimi have suspended photo-recognition services entirely during exam hours.
Something an authoritarian, centralized, and collectivist society can do with ease. (And let’s be honest: not a bad idea.)
During the Roaring Twenties, a politically ambitious young man who had been crippled by polio bought a houseboat so he could cruise the warm waters of the Florida Keys and try to cure his damaged legs. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was stricken with the disease in 1921, at the age of 39, he withdrew from public life. He spent three winters aboard his houseboat, from 1924 to 1926. While on the boat, he kept a log in longhand in a three-ring binder, writing in it almost every day. Sometimes he used black ink, sometimes turquoise, pages full of playfulness.
If Israel’s war in Gaza qualifies as genocide, it would constitute a striking historical outlier: perhaps the first such case of genocide triggered by a mass terrorist attack involving the slaughter of civilians and the taking of hostages; the first in which the genocider permitted food, fuel, and humanitarian aid to flow into the territory of its purported victims; and potentially the only instance in which the perpetrators lacked any prior plan or ideological commitment to extermination. It may also be unique in that the targeted group’s combatants have deliberately embedded themselves in civilian infrastructure and sought to increase civilian casualties for strategic and propaganda purposes. And it could be the only genocide that might plausibly be halted on the spot—not by the genocider, but by the group claiming victimhood. Specifically, were Hamas to release the hostages and lay down its arms, Israel’s military campaign—having achieved its core objectives—would likely cease.
Woof. ‘Likely’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last sentence, don’t you think?
I’ve never been comfortable calling what Israel is doing in Gaza “genocide.” It seems pretty plainly not to be, at least until recently, when Israel’s decision to wade back into Gaza has made me — and others — wonder.
The current billionaire class has more power than any human beings have ever had, and they wield it with remarkably little responsibility. Billionaires must be cut down to size through every means possible, from breaking up monopolies to tax reform to financial regulation to union drives. But we also need to stop swallowing these Great Man stories whole and recognize them for what they are: an ideology of dominance. I do not exaggerate when I say that this ideology is not only impoverishing the narratives available to us but endangering human lives and the future of civilization.
Other automakers and autonomous-driving technology companies also use radar and lidar, which emit energy — in lidar’s case, laser pulses traveling at the speed of light — to detect the distance of surrounding objects. As active sensors that generate their own signals, they’re not affected by external lighting conditions and function better than cameras in direct sunlight.
One advantage cameras have over both radar and lidar is cost. Analysts at BloombergNEF estimated in a report late last year that the sensor suite on a Tesla Model 3 costs just $400. The researcher said that the 24 sensors on the Jaguar I-Pace SUVs that Waymo had deployed in states including Arizona cost 23 times more: roughly $9,300 per vehicle.
“The issue with Waymo’s cars is they cost way more money,” Musk said during Tesla’s most recent earnings call in April.
Elon skimping on sensors to save money should be criminal. He endangered the lives of everyone on the road, and he knows it.
President Trump has no plans to call Elon Musk on Friday, two Trump administration officials said, as the acrimonious blowup of their partnership left both men — who lobbed insults and threats at each other on their respective social platforms on Thursday — with a lot at risk.
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, who spent about $275 million helping elect Mr. Trump in 2024, had promised to give $100 million to groups controlled by the president’s team before the 2026 midterms. Those funds have yet to be delivered and are now very much in doubt. Mr. Trump not only must confront the choking-off of election support, but also the wrath of an ally-turned-foe who appears determined to undermine his standing on the right.
To say that this is embarrassing is an understatement.
To everyone watching this with a more than a bit of schadenfreude (I'm looking at you, smug liberals), remember that we all suffer for this absurdity. The whole country.
And to the conservatives that elected this circus: I hope you're happy. I mean that — I hope deep down in your heart or soul or gut or whatever you use to make decisions, I hope you're content with your choice to elect Donald Trump as the president of the country that won World War II, that landed men on the moon, that built Hoover Dam. I hope you look at him and think his election was worth it, all just to make some libturds (and I agree with you — many of them are turds) cry.
It would be so easy to give in to my anger, to give a hearty fuck you to the pathetic, weak, smug Democrats and the aggressively stupid and spineless Republicans, but I'll sit on my words for now.
Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language—a language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust, in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence. As though living was the aberration. And this language might protect the empire’s most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle, that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say: Yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism. The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home without school without hospital and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and the days-old babies left to scream and starve, is barbarism.
