The United States likes to talk about how overwhelming and powerful our military is. But as we have proven, time and time again, it’s just not true. It’s all bluster. Sure, we can kill lots of people, all over the planet, including hundreds of little girls just trying to go to school, and teenaged American citizens, but none of that has any sort of achievable goal behind it, nor have we achieved any sort of goal by doing it.

We lost the war in Vietnam, we lost the war in Afghanistan, no one won the war in Iraq, no one can win the genocide of Gaza. All military actions we entered without clear goals, and ended, excepting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, without accomplishing anything. We are nothing but a global bully, violently lashing out on demand in support of our oligarch, capitalist robber barons, who coincidentally, are also major shareholders in the military industrial complex.

Given that our military primarily exists to vacuum up cash that could otherwise be used to provide healthcare, childcare, or invest in our schools, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s actually really bad at, you know, war fighting.

A week before the drone attack, Amor was moved off-base to a shipping container-style building that had no defenses, Joey Amor said.

"They were dispersing because they were in fear that the base they were on was going to get attacked and they felt it was safer in smaller groups in separate places," he said.

Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, of White Bear Lake, among soldiers killed amid Iran strikes - CBS Minnesota

A soldier from Minnesota was among those killed in last weekend's military strikes against Iran, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Iran had intelligence that troops had been distributed from their base to unprotected shipping containers one week before the US and Israel launched their unprovoked attack. Yet US intelligence, didn't know a building had been a school for a decade before they added it to their targeting list, a time during which we spent trillions of dollars for that bad information. If that is hard to rationalize in your mind, good, it should be. That shows you haven’t turned in your brain to participate in the military-industrial complex, or the Silicon Valley tech scene which are rapidly intertwining themselves.

It doesn’t make sense to you, because you are not a vulture capitalist or pirate equity bro, and that’s a good thing. Because it’s exemplary of the larger problem with the hype cycle around technology. Every technology development is pumped up, it’s just a question of the size of the bubble, compared to the actual value. The same people who were pumping shit coins during the crypto bubble added “AI” to their company names and went back to the vulture capitalists for a new infinite money spigot. But that money isn’t actually infinite, if nothing else, VCs will get bored, or scammed into a new bubble. No one has a plan for AI companies surviving when that happens.

But you can’t reliably build a company on ever shifting sand. Well, you and I can’t, our billionaire oligarchs can, or at least, no one has stopped them from doing so to date. But your company, your CEO, your manager, will be lead to the trough of AI slop, if they haven’t been already. It won’t matter that the quality isn’t there, or the price will soon go through the roof. It’s the same pattern that management consultants have followed for years. Have someone else “fix” your company, and it will only cost you an order of magnitude more in accounts payable than you’ll save in cut salaries.

So the worry is not that AI will take away our jobs because it’s so good at them. The worry is that it will take away jobs and be shit at them. The only plays, movies, and books that get made will be written by AI because they’re cheaper. The only apps published vibe coded because it’s cheaper. Healthcare even harder to obtain because AI nurses, doctors, are cheaper.

Note that nothing I listed was better, just cheaper. Maybe faster, but always cheaper. There’s a long standing axiom, you can have something that’s two of the 3 options: cheap, fast, or good. Using AI immediately locks you in, never good.

So our future is not a technology utopia. It’s a dystopia. Millions out of work, not because we have found better, more meaningful work for them to contribute to society instead. But because we chased a unfounded short term gain, yet, again, despite obviously long term risk. Today, we can still avoid the slop, we can say “No, thanks” as Google, and Microsoft, and Mozilla, try to force their slop machines in front of us. But when the AI hucksters convince your boss to fire you, you no longer have an opt out. That’s the downside we must protect against. That’s the space on the left to oppose the AI future that the the right and the Epstein class has decided we have no say in.

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For third time, judge orders release of Palestinian woman whose detention at North Texas ICE facility gained national headlines by Paul Wedding

Support for Palestine, opposition of apartheid and genocide, means the federal government thinks you’re such a dangerous threat you need to be imprisoned. And what is a flight risk? ICE is seeking to expel her from the country. She’ll flee to another country under her own accord? She’ll continue to live in the US, while ICE continues proceedings to remove her? Seems like ICE, not a young woman from New Jersey, is the real threat here.

The immigration judge, in her oral ruling, called the government's arguments "disingenuous" and noted its lack of evidence compared to the thousands of pages of evidence submitted in support of Kordia's release, the Texas Civil Rights Project said.

For third time, judge orders release of Palestinian woman whose detention at North Texas ICE facility gained national headlines | wfaa.com

On the first anniversary of her detainment, a judge has ordered Leqaa Kordia's release on bond for a third time.

Judge orders Leqaa Kordia’s release. Will ICE keep her detained? by Hannan Adely (subscription required)

Kordia said in a statement after the hearing that she was heartened by the support she has received.

“To see so many people during the hearing today made me feel loved and supported, and it made me confident that freedom is near," Kordia said. "All I want is for the government to finally release me now so I can go home to my family. Until then, I’ll continue speaking up for the basic rights and freedom of all people, from Texas to Palestine.”

Judge orders Leqaa Kordia release again. Why is she still detained?

A third judge ordered Leqaa Kordia of Paterson released from ICE detention, exactly one year after her arrest. Why is she still detained?

It took U.S. years to lose a war in Vietnam. Trump lost one in days. by Will Bunch

As I write this on Thursday, at least three tankers are ablaze in or near the critical Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian military action has stopped almost all Western oil shipments, and a large oil facility is on fire in Oman, one of several Gulf states dragged into the war. The roller-coaster ride of crude oil — the toxic fentanyl of the world economy — is skyrocketing back up over $100 a barrel. The U.S. government is slowly acknowledging — if not yet apologizing for — the mistakes that sent a Tomahawk missile into a packed elementary school, killing at least 175 people, mostly children.

...

Instead of learning from the obvious mistakes of America’s recent past, we have tossed our history down an Orwellian memory hole. That was clear in an amazing TV moment this week that felt like a bookend to Brinkley’s wise commentary, as Wall Street blowhard Jim Cramer insisted that America could force a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz “if we bomb Tehran into the Stone Age,” as happened to North Vietnam.

It was left to Cramer’s guest, journalist Carl Quintanilla, to point out that North Vietnam then won the war. Indeed, our intentional ignorance of history has finally turned the United States into what Richard Nixon had feared even as he expanded the Vietnam War in 1970: a pitiful, helpless giant.

It took U.S. years to lose a war in Vietnam. Trump lost one in days. | Opinion

It's increasingly clear that Trump's war of choice in Iran has failed spectacularly. America learned nothing from past war failures.

Why Americans Should Root for Iran by Robert Wright

… Israeli strategists don’t put much faith in the engineering of enduringly stable relations with neighbors—whether by strong commercial or strategic bonds or by structures of mutual deterrence. Rather, the basic aim is to persistently degrade the economic and military power of neighbors that have threatened or could plausibly threaten Israel, thus neutralizing the threat.

For example: Killing one in 30 Gazans may somewhat deepen the pre-existing hatred of Israel in Gaza, but so long as Israel is killing lots of young males and destroying lots of infrastructure, the hatred can’t assume truly threatening form. Even the new Syrian regime—which is basically US-friendly and Israel-friendly—was welcomed onto the stage with extensive bombing by Israel, which took advantage of the power transition in Damascus to destroy as much Syrian military hardware as possible. Just in case…

As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute recently put it, “Israel believes that its security is achieved by dominating the region. It is not seeking security by balancing threats or managing threats. It actually has to dominate the region. So for it to have total security, everyone else has to have total insecurity.”

…

This is a big part of the reason to root for Iran’s success in realizing its war aims: Its goal is regional stability, and Israel’s goal is more nearly the opposite, and America’s goal is… well, so long as Trump is president, it’s hard to say what America’s goal is. But Trump has become such a global menace—with this illegal and irrational attack on Iran being only the most recent example—that it will be good for the world if he gets some negative reinforcement for his adventurism. Many future lives could be saved if this war becomes a clear political loss for Trump.

As of now, America and Israel are the two most lawless and destabilizing nations on the planet. They seem to compete with each other for the title of most frequent violator of the UN Charter’s ban on transborder aggression, and no other country is in their league. (Though, yes, what Russia lacks in number of violations it makes up for in magnitude: the invasion of Ukraine was a very consequential crime.)

https://www.nonzero.org/p/why-americans-should-root-for-iran

The Unbelievable Madness of Our War With Iran by Annelle Sheline

Those who are suffering most are the thousands of innocent people inside Iran. The savagery of the American attack became almost immediately apparent when its initial wave of airstrikes targeted a girls’ elementary school. Three separate precision munitions hit the school, indicating that it was attacked intentionally. Given that the school had been a separate civilian facility for a decade, the notion that the missiles were actually intended for the nearby IRGC facility strains credibility.

…

Americans are generally insulated from the tragic human toll of their government’s military interventions abroad; instead, the cost will be felt at the gas pump or perhaps the Republicans’ electoral chances in the upcoming midterms. Not in the loss of a child, a grandparent, a newborn baby to indiscriminate and inescapable violence.

And yet some Americans may pay the ultimate price, as speculation swirls about what was once considered unthinkable: a U.S. ground invasion. The majority of Americans already oppose Trump’s war on Iran; no modern U.S. president has started a war with so little public support. If Trump sends U.S. troops into Iran, the results would be catastrophic—for Iranians, for the region, and for American soldiers.

The Unbelievable Madness of Our War With Iran | The New Republic

Last year, I warned about the possibility that Israel might drag the United States into a regional conflict. What’s happening now is worse than I could have ever imagined.

APA Rewrites Antisemitism Guidelines to Protect Speech on Palestine by Chris Walker

“The weaponization of antisemitism — the manipulative or bad faith invocation of accusations to silence legitimate criticism, scholarship, or activism — creates significant adverse consequences for Jews and non-Jews who oppose the state of Israel’s actions and support Palestinian rights,” the updated resolution says.

…

“By refusing to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, this resolution strengthens the fight against genuine anti-Jewish hatred while also protecting Palestinians – including scholars, students, and clinicians – from being silenced for speaking about their lived realities, rights, and trauma under Israel’s oppressive and genocidal rule,” Trachtenberg said.

The Lonesome Death of Daphy Michel by Pablo Manríquez

On February 26, 2026, a judge dismissed both misdemeanor counts. Carlo left the courthouse believing his sister was coming home.

She never made it.

An ICE detainer was waiting in her jail file. The Washington County Public Defender’s Office confirmed that ICE used the detainer to intercept her release from county custody and transfer her directly into federal hands. The following day — February 27 — ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Pittsburgh enrolled her in its Alternatives to Detention program and strapped an ankle monitor to her leg.

Then they let her go. On the street. In Pittsburgh. Without notifying her brother. Without contacting her legal representatives.

AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money by David Gerard

AI companies are vacuuming up billions of dollars (and then largely lighting that on fire), but they want to pay their employees with IOUs. That should set off huge red flags for employees, regulators, and investors. It won’t, of course.

The idea is that instead of getting paid dollars to work for an AI company … you get paid in AI tokens. The units that the AI vendor charges API access in. You have to use these tokens in your job, too.

This is not in any way a “new” idea. It’s company scrip — a company’s own made-up money that you can only spend in the company store. Company scrip was always just a scam, and paying workers in company scrip has been illegal in the US since 1938. But you know these guys don’t care.

Other companies would love to pay workers in AI tokens too! And not in, y’know, money.

AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money – Pivot to AI

This week’s big headline is: “Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation“. Uh huh. [Business Insider] The idea is that instead of getting paid dollars to work for an …