Applebaum: What binds Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is not religion or ideology. China is communist, Russia nationalist, Iran theocratic. What binds them is fear of liberal language: rights, rule of law, separation of powers and independent courts. 1/

Today, I’m releasing never before seen intelligence revealing new evidence of past US government funding for more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including Ukraine. In support of President Trump‘s Executive Order to end federal funding of dangerous gain of function research around the world, and increase transparency and accountability, ODNI will continue working with partners across the Administration to identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what “research” is being conducted. odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/…

Former MI6 Chief Richard Moore: Without China, Russia would have lost war in Ukraine. North Korean troops and Iranian drones grab headlines. But what keeps Putin in Ukraine is China — chemicals for artillery shells, components for drones and missiles. 1/

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The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…

That's not what created the legitimacy crisis. In the old days it was enough that the king was Catholic, but the aristocracy and the Church discredited themselves so thoroughly through poor governance that people went looking for new legitimating ideas.

Who knew that Chinese songs translate so well into French that you can't even tell that it was Chinese? Because it sounds 100% like French chansons.

AI machines acting autonomously killed humans for the first time, it was revealed today. Ten AI-powered drones were given full authority to choose human targets and kill them, New Scientist reported in its latest edition. The operation worked. The killings took place in Ukraine two years ago, but the information was never before publicly admitted, the journal said. . CLEARLY VISIBLE CORPSES “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy told the publication. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.” Afterwards, the Ukrainians sent regular drones—fitted with cameras and piloted by humans—into the same area, to see if the AI had killed people. It had. There were clearly visible corpses and a disabled truck. . USED ON OTHER OCCASIONS This has probably happened on other occasions, the journal said. “Reports in 2023 suggested that Ukrainian attack drones equipped with artificial intelligence were finding and attacking targets without human assistance – but were being deployed against vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry,” the journal said. Human casualties may well have been in the destroyed vehicles, but they wouldn’t have been visible. Why are the Ukrainians revealing this horrific fact so casually? With the massive demonization of Russia in the western mainstream media, they likely think that no one will care, since the victims were Russian. It’s worth noting that Ukrainian drone makers are working closely with the US and UK armed forces and doing shared tests in the area. And that warfare in both Ukraine and Iran are being used as training material for a US attack on China—more on that below. . WHO’S IN FAVOR OF KILLER ROBOTS? But seriously, we have to ask: are autonomous AI flying killer robots, with permission to kill humans of their choosing, a good idea? Most people don’t think so. In 2019, China and the majority of other countries of the world met at the UN to discuss a motion saying that killer robots are an obviously horrible idea and should be banned immediately. Guess who disagreed with the motion? You can guess the answer. Think of the four most ruthless nations. Correct. The US, the UK, Russia, and Australia disagreed. (Ukraine hadn’t gotten into drones at that time.) . LONDON HAS A TASTE FOR THEM The British leadership definitely likes the idea of robots killing people. In April last year (2025), the idea was floated in the Times of London, under the genteel headline "Drones may strike targets with no human input, says minister." The word "drones" sounds nicer than "killer robots" and "strike targets" sounds better than “humans”, right, British government? . BUT THE U.S. IS WAY AHEAD No one doubts that the Pentagon is well advanced into making flying AI robots who can choose which humans to kill. “The Pentagon has been trying to develop AI-powered autonomous drones for years,” said Katrina Manson, a US author who writes about AI weapons. The US is developing flying killer robots called Goalkeeper and jet-ski style killer robots called Whiplash. Both are AI powered and have the power and ability to destroy humans of their own choosing, she says. By putting AI into airborne or waterborne weapons and then giving them permission to kill humans, it means that the US can still keep killing people even when radio contact cannot be maintained. “The military is also working to put AI directly into its ‘one-way attack drones,’ so they can navigate, locate targets and carry out lethal attacks even when wireless communications have been severed,” Manson said in a recent book. . CHINA IS ULTIMATE TARGET They are being prepared for war on China, Manson says. “Starting in 2022 the Pentagon’s Maven team began collecting enormous amounts of imagery of Chinese vessels in the Pacific, which they used to enable the creation of algorithms that drones operating there could use for targeting.” The tragedy of all this is that many futurists, including author Isaac Asimov, saw this coming and warned against it. His “first rule of robotics” states that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. He believed that failing to follow this fundamental rule would doom the human race. Many people still agree. And there are some who will stand up and say so. In February this year, Anthropic, one of the world’s top AI companies, told the US government that it did not want its tech to be used for autonomous weapons that kill humans. The US Department of War immediately blacklisted Anthropic—and found an alternative partner, OpenAI, the same day.

Most Royal families in Western Europe are descend Germanic chiefs that invaded during the Roman Empire's downfall. And those that didn't intermarried with them due to the HRE producing many petty kings and princes of suitable rank to marry royalty elsewhere. There were monarchs with closer ties to the people in places with more absolute monarchs. Appealing to the people was often used to gain power over the nobles.

The “Dumpling Alliance” burst to life during Covid, a nifty description for an informal collective of Eastern European states supporting Taiwan. Just a few years later, it’s hard to find a mention of it anywhere. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

A growing number of foreigners are traveling to China for life-saving treatments, including for cancer, because it's often cheaper and more readily available bloomberg.com/news/features/…

I think the very recent definition and scope of “nationalism” is limited. One can easily trace “modern nations” to historic language families. Like languages, nations are evolving, fluid, merging, and diverging entities but nonetheless are of substance, both materially and immaterially, which can be definitively categorized at points in time with a particular development history. While complicated, there was a general coherence between a monarchy and a nation throughout history, although modern historians find it convenient to erase this in favor of an abstract dynastic system. Thus, modern historians’ assertion that nations were invented in modernity is very dubious. The Irish nation is perhaps the oldest consistent nation in Europe arising in its primitive form around 3000 to 2000 BC. The 17th century Annals of the Four Masters constructed the succession of Irish kings shortly after 2000 BC with the first being Sláine mac Dela. The last king of Ireland was Rory O'Connor who died in 1198 AD (with a final failed revival with Edward Bruce, brother of Robert the Bruce, who died in 1318 fighting a reconquista against the Normans/English). While the Norman invasion and consolidation prevented Irish centralized state rule thereafter, the underlying Irish nation persisted. The lineage of Irish kings shows clear evidence of continuity of Irish national particularity. This is why the remaining native Irish nobility kept writing to the Pope to defend their claims of sovereignty against the invading Normans/English on the basis of national particularity. These events were well before modernity and especially the French Revolution which is when modern historians like to place the invention of nations. Thus, this example shows, in general, nations and national affinity were intelligible for a very long time and were not “new”. Albeit, exceptions to the rule exist in terms of consolidating borderlands and complex population migrations and settlements. Therefore, one may be able to sufficiently critique some national constructions as artificial while it can’t do so with others. It’s also an evolving dynamic just like language as said before which grants dynamism over static fossilization. The modern trend of national revolutions and construction of generally republican nation-states was not about people waking up one day and inventing a nation out of thin air. It can be better understood as a crisis of legitimacy of absolutist monarchies and petty feudal lords. These institutions which ultimately derived their legitimacy from the nation became more and more like detached oligarchs which married into each others’ foreign dynasties thus alienating themselves from their own nations. Everyone forgets that the French Revolution villainized the monarchy for being alien to the French nation. King Louis XVI was 80% ethnically German/Austrian and his wife was 100% Austrian. In his trial, charges 9, 19, 20, 28, 31, and 33 were all concerning his foreignness to France which led to his treasonous collaboration with the Germans/Austrians fighting France at the time. It is more accurate to see this as the monarchs losing legitimacy or Mandate of Heaven leading to the need to replace them with republican nation-states. Thus, nationalism can be seen as a return to something older vs. the creation of something new. Of course, accented by modern technology.

In the superficial view of “China” held by Chinamaxxers, there are no social movements, no debates, no counterparts for the politically active American to engage. This is not meaningful "solidarity." It doesn't view Chinese as genuine people. trib.al/1YqrbWV

BREAKING: US oil prices collapse below $87/barrel after President Trump cancels scheduled strikes on Iran.

COLUMN: Why oil is below $100 a barrel? I take a look at the top-10 reasons; some are structural, but most are ephemeral. The single most important? China, China and China. Beijing is bailing out the global economy — and US President Trump. @Opinion bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

There’s a simple realpolitik maxim that hurts a lot because of its simple but powerful message: If you can’t be a side, pick a side! But which side will you pick if none wants you since you are turning into a major liability amid new Cold War? Neither too loyal, nor too neutral.