“It’s getting a little old at this point, but as the Deep State log rolls for another U.S. attack on Iran, it is promoting a new Iranian national savior, one with a familiar name. Here’s a graphic seen on X, much like others showing up on social media, championing Reza Pahlavi as ‘the legitimate national leader of Iran.’ Because Pahlavi calls for more U.S. intervention in Iran including airstrikes, his champions are a midnight choir of failed voices from prior regime change calamities: Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey. He is featured frequently in the warmongering of the Empire’s lapdog press, in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and on Fox News. Pahlavi’s only claim to legitimacy is that he is the son of the late-Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was driven from Iran in the 1979 revolution.” (02/12/26)
“Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: robots and AI are taking over our culture, our politics, our way of life and our relationships to each other as social beings. They’re becoming the advance guard for a new and unprecedented technocratic form of governance — the apotheosis of Western scientific materialism. Further, these new forms of governance are being carried out by unelected Big Tech overlords operating behind the scenes and in the backrooms of a mediated society well out of public view. I certainly hope that Gioia is right about a major cultural rejection of technocracy. There are indeed hopeful signs.” (02/12/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Right-wing American statists are celebrating with great glee the U.S. government’s economic strangulation of the Cuban people through its embargo and oil siege because right-wingers say they’re opposed to socialism, which has long been the economic system of Cuba’s communist regime. What these right-wing statists and interventionists fail to recognize, however, is that they, like most Americans, fully embrace the socialist principles that undergird Cuba’s socialist economic system. They fail to recognize that communist Cuba has simply carried the socialist principles that underlie American socialism to their logical conclusions.” (02/12/26)
“Prediction markets are one key component of America’s flourishing online gambling ecosystem. And they rely on the type of wager that many experts see as being at the heart of modern problem gambling: the prop bet. Prop bets (more formally, proposition bets) are bets that can be placed on specific eventuality, from how many touchdowns a quarterback will throw in a game to, yes, whether Jesus Christ will return in this calendar year. This gamblification of the world is the business model. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket proudly boast that users can bet on just about any proposition imaginable.” (02/12/26)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Laura Mahrenbach, Narayanappa Janardhan, Gedaliah Afterman, & Maximilian Mayer
“The global order was already fragmenting before Donald Trump returned to the White House. But the upended ‘rules’ of global economic and foreign policies have now reached a point of no return. What has changed is not direction, but speed. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks in Davos last month — ‘Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu’ — captured the consequences of not acting quickly. And Carney is not alone in those fears. Leaders around the world are increasingly moving from rhetorical warnings about the systemic risks of superpower dynamics to actively experimenting with new ways of navigating what Carney called ‘a rupture in the world order.'” (02/12/26)
“On paper, Sanae Takaichi is the kind of leader Japanese people ought to hate. Bossy, opinionated, conspicuously unbothered by the rituals of consensus that grease every surface of Japanese official life, she comes across as everything the country’s political culture is designed to sand down. She doesn’t schmooze with captains of industry over kaiseki dinners at fancy Tokyo restaurants. She goes home and reads her briefing papers. She plays drums in a heavy metal band — or used to in college, and still can …. She has opinions about Taiwan and isn’t shy about sharing them, which in the context of Japanese-Chinese diplomacy is roughly equivalent to setting your hair on fire at a funeral. Something for everyone to hate. And so the three months since Takaichi took office have been a bit of a surprise.” (02/12/26)
“Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is under federal indictment for participating in a Minnesota protest group’s obstruction of a church service. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday. News of his prosecution took me back more than five decades to when I was a young university professor in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). At that time, President Mobutu Sese Seko’s government threatened to arrest me for my alleged involvement in student disruptions. In both cases, increasingly authoritarian governments decided to clamp down on independent observers (journalists or others) who sympathized with community activists. To do so, they distorted what actually happened to serve their political interests. Yet, I suspect that the last person President Donald Trump wants to be compared to is a corrupt, fallen, disgraced African dictator.” [editor’s note: He performed as a part of the story, not as a real journalist, and should pay the penalty for violating the rights of the pastor and parishioner, End of story – SAT] [additional editor’s note: I’d chide SAT every time he was wrong, but nobody wants two editors’ notes EVERY time – TLK] (02/12/25)
“Ajeya Cotra’s Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient — it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like ‘time horizons’ that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong. But its headline prediction — an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s – no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s, with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless — the opposite of Ajeya’s assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 (as of 2022) and they are probably even shorter now. So, if its premises were impressively correct, but its conclusion twenty years too late, what went wrong in the middle?” (02/12/26)
My mom used to call me every Sunday between 8:30 and 8:45 p.m. In 13 years, she has never missed a call. Like most moms, if I don’t respond, she immediately assumes I’m dead. Two weeks ago, her calls stopped coming. The Islamic Republic of Iran has cut all internal and external communications during the ongoing protests. They even jammed Starlink. It’s been radio silence. Not a word, in or out. And in that silence, they’ve been killing people. At least 16,000 in just a few days. … my mom sold her jewelry, her prized Persian rug, even her house to make sure I went to a good school, got into a good university, and got out — to America. What has the Islamic Republic done to this mother (and millions of other families) that she’d rather never see her son again than have him trapped with her?” (02/12/26)
“Your representatives may finally grab the feared ‘third rail’ of U.S. politics. When the Social Security and Medicare trust funds run out in the early 2030s, the law is clear: Benefits must be slashed. That would mean a roughly 24 percent cut to Social Security checks and an 11 percent cut to Medicare benefits. But Congress almost certainly won’t let that happen. The easy, though irresponsible, political path may seem obvious: Change the law, keep benefits whole, and pay by borrowing the money. This way legislators won’t have to cast unpopular votes for spending cuts or tax hikes. This makes sense only if the consequences won’t become clear until much later, after voters have forgotten all about it. What most people are missing is that this time, the consequences may show up quickly.” (02/12/26)
