“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 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. Use an internet-connected TV and haven’t bothered to turn off ad tracking? What you watch is being watched.
If you’re not tech-y, the best thing you can do for yourself is dive head-first into Apple’s ecosystem. Their phones collect minimal data, much of it optional. (But not all.) 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.
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, 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 — some of them are turds) cry.
It would be easy to give in to my anger, to give a hearty fuck you to the sniveling, smug Democrats and the aggressively stupid and spineless Republicans.
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.
What started as simply a fight over Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill sharply escalated into who deserved more credit for Mr. Trump’s election victory and why Mr. Musk did not cover up a black eye with makeup and whether the government should cut its contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies and provide it with subsidies.
“The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
We really do live in the stupidest timeline. 🤦🏼♂️
After several years of research and development, Sodern has developed Astradia, an endoatmospheric celestial viewfinder that, coupled with an inertial power plant, provides day and night an attitude measurement to guarantee accurate, robust and reliable on-board geolocation information.
This high-performance sight is therefore autonomous, not dependent on radio navigation signals and aims to counter the natural drift of inertial power plants. In addition, it has the advantage of not emitting any wave that would make the carrier detectable.
Leave it to the French to announce their technology with an exclamation point, but like I’ve been saying, we need an alternative to satellite-based navigation systems!
Israeli soldiers opened fire Tuesday morning near crowds of Palestinians walking toward a new food distribution site in southern Gaza, the Israeli military said. The Red Cross and Gaza health ministry said at least 27 people had been killed.
It was the second such large-scale shooting by Israeli forces in three days near the same aid distribution site in the southern city of Rafah, where thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians are coming early each day in hopes of securing a food handout. Israeli soldiers opened fire on Sunday near an approach to the same food distribution site, and Palestinian officials said they killed at least 23 people.
I’ve been largely resistant to calling what Israel is doing in Gaza ‘genocide,’ but gosh golly, Israel is just determined to make that position impossible to defend, aren’t they?
Google co-founder Sergey Brin claims that threatening generative AI models produces better results.
“We don’t circulate this too much in the AI community – not just our models but all models – tend to do better if you threaten them … with physical violence,” he said in an interview last week on All-In-Live Miami.
If these LLMs are merely predicting the next word in a sequence based on patterns learned from massive text datasets (aka the entire internet), what does it say about humans that these models produce more accurate results when we threaten them with physical violence?
Elon Musk said he is “disappointed” by the costs of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” passed by Republicans in the House last week.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk told “CBS Sunday Morning” in an exclusive broadcast interview.
The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries, according to an amateur security researcher. The site was part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.
Less than three weeks after she attended the dinner, Mr. Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon.
It came just in the nick of time for Mr. Walczak, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence that had been handed down just 12 days earlier. A judge had justified the incarceration by declaring that there “is not a get-out-of-jail-free card” for the rich.
Trump’s memecoin, the Qatari jet, now this… How can Trumpets justify such blatant, unabashed, shameless corruption?
“But but but…the Biden Crime Family!” they scream, spittle flying from their lips.
The obvious truth is that most Trumpets have no regard for integrity or any interest in fighting corruption. They’ll just point to Biden or the nearest Democrat and say, “but look what they did six years ago! It was just as bad!”
Occasionally, they are right. But not very often — they’re unable to parse signal from noise. Of course some Democrats are corrupt, and any self-respecting Democrat must acknowledge as much. (But there aren’t many of those left.) But the corruption of Trump is on a scale the United States hasn’t seen before.
The sad truth is we Americans have been groomed into hating the other political party so much that we just stand around pointing fingers saying, “but they got away with it, so why can’t we?” No one has the political courage to call a spade a spade and say enough of this bullshit.
Three teenagers nearly escaped prosecution for a 2020 house fire that killed five people until Denver police discovered a novel investigative technique: requesting Google search histories for specific terms. Kevin Bui, Gavin Seymour, and Dillon Siebert had burned down a house in Green Valley Ranch, mistakenly targeting innocent Senegalese immigrants after Bui used Apple’s Find My feature to track his stolen phone to the wrong address.
The August 2020 arson killed a family of five, including a toddler and infant. For months, detectives Neil Baker and Ernest Sandoval had no viable leads despite security footage showing three masked figures. Traditional methods – cell tower data, geofence warrants, and hundreds of tips – yielded nothing concrete. The breakthrough came when another detective suggested Google might have records of anyone searching the address beforehand.
Police obtained a reverse keyword search warrant requesting all users who had searched variations of “5312 Truckee Street” in the 15 days before the fire. Google provided 61 matching devices. Cross-referencing with earlier cell tower data revealed the three suspects, who had collectively searched the address dozens of times, including floor plans on Zillow.
Why anyone uses Google instead of DuckDuckGo, I’ll never know.
The State Department refused to provide a complete list of countries with which the U.S. has made agreements to accept deportees from other countries — often referred to as third-country nationals — citing the sensitivity of diplomatic communications. But the Trump administration is planning a major increase in deportation flights in coming weeks to destinations across the globe, according to a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as well as published reports.
In remarks outside the White House on Friday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller offered a glimpse of the global scope of deportations. “We send planes to Iraq. We send planes to Yemen. We send planes to Haiti. We send planes to Angola,” he said. “I mean, ICE is sending planes all over the world all the time. Anyone who came here illegally, we’re finding them and we’re getting them out.”
The Democrats’ position on immigration during Biden's presidency is confounding. Millions of people came into the country illegally, and it seemed as though the Democrats didn't care. Quite the opposite — they seemed to welcome it.
This is one of the many areas in which the Left left me behind long ago. I welcome immigration. I recognize that this country's immigration system needs reform — it takes far too long for some immigrants to get seen in an immigration court, sometimes longer than a decade. No one should have to wait in limbo this long.
But the United States shouldn't have open borders, either. It doesn't make me a conservative or a nationalist to say that the integrity of a community matters — shared values, shared ethics, shared language. These things develop naturally as people assimilate into the culture — this is the famous 'melting pot' we hear so much about.
But assimilation can only happen slowly, and immigration in the last five or so years has not been slow. Many American citizens have watched their communities rapidly change (though admittedly, my community is not one of them) in the last few years and they are understandably unnerved by this. This doesn't make them racist or xenophobic (though there are always some of those people), it’s merely a natural human reaction to change.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind a lot of the fear-mongering done by the Right in the last few years: under Biden (and Trump's first term), the country lost control of illegal immigration.
And because of that, we're facing these draconian deportation policies from Trump's second administration. To be clear: deportation should be on the table. If you came here illegally, I'm sorry, but we have borders, and those borders matter. But we do want immigrants, and in order to facilitate them coming here, we need to overhaul our immigration system.
Until that happens, I think we're stuck in this vicious cycle of the Left's strange indifference and the Right's near-gleeful cruelty.
Andor is one of the more thoughtful, thrilling, and beautiful television shows I’ve seen. That it takes place in the Disney’s Star Wars galaxy feels ancillary to — and at times even at odds with — the exceptional quality of the show.
Disney has not been the greatest steward of Star Wars. I’ve been a fan of Star Wars since I was five, long before the old “Expanded Universe” was wiped out by Disney to make way for their new canon. Andor is the first time I’ve been unabashedly proud to be a Star Wars fan since George Lucas sold the franchise. (The prequels, remember, were released in a more civilized age, before the dark times, before the Empires of Facebook and Google and Twitter became the main conduits of discourse in our culture. I felt little self-consciousness about my love of Star Wars then, as our fandoms were much less central to our identities as they've been engineered to be now.)
Andor is a masterpiece, and whether or not you are a Star Wars fan, you should consider watching it.
China has launched the first 12 satellites of a planned 2,800-strong orbital supercomputer satellite network, reports Space News. The satellites, created by the company ADA Space, Zhijiang Laboratory, and Neijang High-Tech Zone, will be able to process the data they collect themselves, rather than relying on terrestrial stations to do it for them, according to ADA Space’s announcement (machine-translated).
The satellites are part of ADA Space’s “Star Compute” program and the first of what it calls the “Three-Body Computing Constellation,” the company writes. Each of the 12 satellites has an onboard 8-billion parameter AI model and is capable of 744 tera operations per second (TOPS) — a measure of their AI processing grunt — and, collectively, ADA Space says they can manage 5 peta operations per second, or POPS. That’s quite a bit more than, say, the 40 TOPS required for a Microsoft Copilot PC. The eventual goal is to have a network of thousands of satellites that achieve 1,000 POPs, according to the Chinese government.
With announcements like this, you begin to understand that, by comparison, Americans are not a serious people. We are too busy fighting with each other while China assumes the mantle of the lone technological superpower.
