It’s like it’s 1995, so listen along to Rage Against the Machine call out our racist President who is waging wars of aggression across the globe. Can’t quite imagine what events are driving my urge to listen to Rage Against the Machine right now.

I slept in Saturday and today, waking up at 5:20 and 5:40am. I guess I felt safe in my slumber, since our President is bombing yet another country for no reason. George W. Bush put us on this path, planting disinformation to justify an politically unpopular war that included several many members of his Administration committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Barack Obama, failed in correcting our course, famously pushing "a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Obama ramped up both deportations and drone strikes, including on US Citizens. In doing so, he continued the Bush era push to consolidate overwhelming power in the office of the President, in direct contradiction to the co-equal powers defined in the Constitution.

Trump One, then a wanna be fascist surrounded by ladder climbers loyal to the system not to him, continued to consolidate power, and Biden again refused to roll back over 2 decades of unconstitutional power grabs, many of which he helped usher in as Obama’s Vice President. All this left Trump part deux the least restrained American President in living memory and maybe ever.

It’s not hard to see how that legacy of Republican and Democratic Presidents ignoring international law and human rights leads directly to the genocide in Gaza and to ICE/CBP terrorizing people on the streets of major American cities. So while we can protest, in the streets and online, that we don’t support this war, we don’t think that Iranian girls should be bombed at school, we don’t support assassinations of sovereign and religious leaders, we can’t pretend that we aren’t complicit in the system that allows this to happen, 30 years after we’ve seen how purposefully incorrect the system is built.

Reading

Misogyny

It’s not enough not to be the bad man by Lyz Lenz

It never ends with a joke. Jokes are a test of boundaries, a way to push until your achievements are a punchline, your work is just a hobby, and your passions are something to be set aside to devote to his life, his dreams, his needs. 

Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal. But what happens if you don’t laugh? Have you ever tried not laughing at a man’s joke? Have you ever heard a man make a joke about a woman’s life and achievement, and replied, “I don’t get it. Why is it funny?”

…

Hughes complained that “everything is so political.” His mom, Ellen Hughes, herself an Olympic medal-winning hockey player, defended the men’s team and called for “unity” in a bland and meaningless statement.  I understand why she was asked about it, since she’s also an advisor for the women’s team, but as a side note: It’s crazy to blame mothers for their sons’ behavior without also blaming the fathers. It’s crazy to blame any parent for the behavior of grown adult men.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/its-not-enough-151580492

“Everything is so political” is white man speak for “I don’t think about the impacts of the words that come out of my mouth.”

White men with power, be it economic, legal, cultural, or all of the above are the problem. As are the white woman who facilitate their abuses. That is the throughline of MAGA, ICE, Epstein, the genocide in Gaza, AI, all of it. That is what we must tear down completely before we can move forward.

Things I’m reading - 02/27/2026 by me

Iran and the Forever War Machine

Iranian Officials to Drop Site: Tehran is Showing “Unbelievable Level of Flexibility" in Talks to Prevent U.S. War by Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain

On Sunday, Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff asserted in an interview on FOX News, conducted by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara, that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking material.” Witkoff did not offer any evidence for the claim and it flew in the face of years of U.S. national intelligence estimates. It also dramatically undermined the contentions of Trump administration officials who claimed that the June 2025 U.S. bombing of Iran had resulted in “complete and total obliteration” of its nuclear program. On Monday, referring to Iran’s nuclear development, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “It is a Development no longer, but rather, was blown to smithereens by our Great B-2 Bombers.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Witkoff’s claims.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/iran-us-negotiations-nuclear-ballistic-missiles-military-buildup-trump

Iran being “weeks, months, or years away” from a nuclear weapon has been a disinformation trope for over 30 years. Yet somehow Netanyahu is still in power, directing a genocide, and initiating un-provoked strikes across the Middle East. Even as the US and Israel launched a new war of choice and aggression against Iran, Israel was also bombing Lebanon, during an active ceasefire.

Who is the actual threat here? And did we destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities in the last strike? Or did Trump lie about the success of that operation? Unlike the Bush Administration, the Trump Administration can’t even get a unified lie rolled out, partially because Trump’s brain is dissolving, but also because the Bush Administration at least attracted a few serious people who knew what they were doing.

The Rules-Based Order Is Dead. Good. by Samantha Hancox-Li

Now it seems that Trump is hammering the final nail in the coffin. He has attacked traditional American allies, flouted international law—for instance, in the recent kidnapping of a sovereign head of state—and, after again threatening a potential invasion of NATO ally Greenland, he has pivoted to a direct confrontation with Iran without bothering to make the case to the American people or Congress, never mind our allies. In prosecuting its war with Gaza, Israel seems less interested in peace than with the steady annexation or subjugation of the Palestinian territories.

We have left behind a world divided between a rules-abiding "Core" and a lawless "Gap" and entered an age of renewed imperialism, colonialism, and conquest. This ambition is shared, in practice, by the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China.

Trump might be the gravedigger of the rules-based order. He is also its final expression. A basic tension at the heart of the rules-based order is that it was not, quite, a commitment to the actual black-letter rules of international law. The "rules" were always really more of a vibe. America did not bind itself to the institutions of international law, such as the United Nations or the International Criminal Court. We criticized those institutions... but also did nothing to reform or replace or supplant them. The "rules" of the RBO were always whatever the American president wanted them to be. The heart of the "rules-based order," in other words, was a sovereign not bound by any rules. This was never a stable equilibrium.

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-delusion-of-a-rules-based-order-is-dead/?ref=articles-and-essays-newsletter

The Scent of Iranian Lavender by Spencer Ackerman

"Remember that Iran refuses—refuses—to talk about ballistic missiles to us or to anyone, and that’s a big problem," Secretary of State-plus Marco Rubio said yesterday. Iran's ballistic missiles cannot strike the United States and have no nuclear warheads to carry. Surrendering Iran's missile fleet has nothing to do with American security and everything to do with making the Iranians either surrender their deterrent capability or provide the U.S. a pretext to attack. That's the reason Rubio and others added the missile issue once the Iranians said yes to closing the nuclear-weapons file in 2015—you need the Iranians to say no before you bomb them. This is not a negotiation about nuclear weapons capability. This is, and has been, an attempt to suborn or overthrow the Islamic Republic.

…

Maybe this is just Hegseth's instinctive dominance politics. But it looks more like another example of theater. Were Anthropic actually concerned with limiting the weaponization of AI, it would not have signed an up-to-$200 million contract last fall with the Pentagon. I suspect that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants to appear like a reluctant war profiteer while he delivers the weaponization of AI that he made such a show of rejecting. That's been the stance of the AI world—with the exception of the more honest and straightforwardly bloodthirsty Palantir-Anduril faction—while pursuing the military contracts that provide a plausible use-case often missing for the non-military commercial market. I was relieved to listen to the latest episode of the (quite good)   Turbulence   podcast and hear Edward Ongweso Jr. hold that suspicion as well. And already, Anthropic this week began unwinding some of its earlier safe-development pledges.

Then last night I had dinner with an AI-skeptic friend who saw it much the same way. My friend cautioned me that militarizing AI won't "work." By that, they meant that the AI companies misrepresent the capabilities of their LLMs so frequently as to have it be essential to their business model. Valuable point. But militarizing AI is not about precision—meaning the machine-learning discernment of "Legitimate Target" from "Unrelated Civilian"—but scale. 

https://www.forever-wars.com/the-scent-of-iranian-lavender/?ref=forever-wars-newsletter

Part of it’s rocking out to Know Your Enemy, but also I’m physically nodding along to this part of Ackerman’s writing. AI is not about making the war machine better, in any meaningful way. It was never about accuracy (AI lies, hallucinates, and ignores instructions as part of it’s normal operation). It was never about safety. Bombing the rest of the world via drones might keep soldiers from being killed literally over those other countries, but it makes every American less safe, at home and abroad, including members of the military whose uniforms make them clear and valuable propaganda targets.

The only thing AI is actually regularly useful for is removing blame and accountability. Just like outsourcing decision making to 3rd parties, or bringing in consultants who will justify firing workers, AI lets you say, “they made the decision, not me.” That’s why anthropomorphizing these computer models is so important. If it told you the Excel spreadsheet said I had to fire you, you’d take a swing at me. If I have Claude break the news that Claude has decided that you need to be fired, you throw your phone in the ocean and live out your lifelong dream to be a goat farmer.

So ignore the “AI companies shocked Death Cult wanted to use their technology to kill people” bullshit headlines just like you should ignore the “US/Israel preemptively strike,” “Strikes to prevent,” “Strikes designed to” headlines. We just bombed a sovereign country, again, in an act of unprovoked aggression, again. Everything else is noise.

Dario Amodei isn't the hero we need by Robert Wright

And Amodei hasn’t raised any concerns about the prospect that Claude could play a role in an equally illegal attack on another authoritarian nation, Iran—even though that could happen any day now, and the question of what military roles Anthropic does and doesn’t object to were the topic of the week.

This gets to my main reason for discouraging my fellow advocates of military restraint from putting much hope in the position Anthropic took this week. All of the big AI companies—Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic—decided some time ago to become defense contractors, even if that meant (as it did in OpenAI’s case) abandoning prior policies precluding the military use of their technology. So it would seem that the reckless belligerence that long ago became America’s hallmark (and that I documented in last week’s Earthling) will increasingly be AI-empowered, unless we either engineer a fundamental change in US policy or somehow shame lots of AI companies into suddenly denying their technology to the Pentagon. In any event, the kind of language Amodei wanted to insert in those Pentagon contracts, however laudable, isn’t going to do the trick.

https://www.nonzero.org/p/dario-amodei-isnt-the-hero-we-need

AI update: replication crisis by Jessica Kant

Social media makes up an increasing portion of the training data for powerful large language models like meta’s LLaMA, serving a ready source of speculation and hyperbole that gets regurgitated as fact. While proponents of using social media as training data like xAI argue disingenuously that a plurality of voices allows “the court of public opinion” to be the final judge and refuse to moderate or delete factually inaccurate data, the lack of moderation makes it open season for the truth. While “community notes” may be a nice idea, they’re a poor substitute for true moderation, and continuing to serve the text means language models are vacuuming up these ideas which have already been flagged as fictitious. As Ars Technica reports, the world’s most unlikeable supervillain is currently trying to launder Community Notes through an LLM, which honestly no one thinks is a good idea. As noted by Alejandra Caraballo and Maddison Stoff on Bluesky, it has recently been spotted serving up anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in Hollywood. Community Notes appear to be driving some of the answers, and the point at which the input of far-right users stop and AI generated notes start is unclear. It also appears as evidenced by an incident this week with a prominent “gender critical” figure successfully coaxing Grok to misgender a prominent trans woman, and a promise from the AI to “continue defining terms like woman based on biology”, a steep departure from the answers it was giving only recently.

To be slightly reductive, LLMs at their core are able to reproduce language through word frequency and proximity. The more a statement is made, the more those words in conjunction with one another are associated mathematically, which makes it more likely an LLM will produce that sentence for an end user.

https://jessk.org/blog/replication-crisis

Everything else

Judge excoriates feds after another migrant detention ruled illegal by Nikita Biryukov

The government’s continued reliance on the statute, violations of dozens of court orders, and its repeated transfers of immigration detainees in violation of those orders had also harmed credibility of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he said.

U.S. District Court Judge Christine O’Hearn issued an order earlier this month that says statements from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey could only be trusted if given under oath. Quraishi quoted from that order in his Thursday opinion.

“Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that ‘has been undeniably eroded,’ he wrote.

What Happens When ICE Detention Facilities Conflict with Land-Use Rules Designed to Promote the Public’s Interest? by Yonah Freemark, Will Curran-Groome, Lydia Lo, Jorge González-Hermoso, Rick Su

Local and state governments are also protected by the     “anticommandeering” doctrine, which prevents the federal government from coercing a state or locality into enforcing a federal law or carrying out a federal program. Even if the federal government asserts immunity from local zoning laws, it generally cannot compel a local government to fund or construct significant service or infrastructure expansions—such as expanded medical facilities or high-capacity sewer mains—specifically to support the unique demands of a detention center. This is especially true if local policies would deny such expansions for similar, nonfederal developments.

Billionaire halts mass eviction after London Centric investigation by Jim Waterson, Polly Smythe, and Cormac Kehoe

Hundreds of Londoners will be allowed to remain in their homes after London Centric uncovered a plan to carry out “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history” by a company controlled by billionaire landlord Asif Aziz.

Aziz’s Criterion Capital appears to have halted the mass eviction amid political pressure from Sadiq Khan, after we revealed the company’s intention to make vast numbers of private tenants homeless just before renters gain new rights at the start of May.

https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asif-aziz-halts-mass-eviction-london-housing