2026-06-18
Quote of the day - 06-16-2026.
If a company cannot determine how its technology was used in a military operation, what does oversight mean? If executives lack visibility into deployment, then claims about safeguards become difficult to evaluate. If a system contributes to military processes whose consequences include mass civilian casualties, can responsibility be confined solely to the final human actor? These are not questions for Anthropic alone. They confront the entire emerging alliance between Silicon Valley and the US national security state. Throughout history, periods of technological transformation have produced new partnerships between capital and military power. Railways, telegraphs, aviation, nuclear physics, and digital networks all followed this path. Artificial intelligence is now walking the same road. Its advocates promise precision, efficiency, and fewer mistakes. Yet every generation hears similar promises.
The twentieth century was filled with claims that new technologies would make war cleaner, more rational, and more humane. The historical record offers little support for such optimism. Technology often expands the scale and speed of violence even as it promises to restrain it. The children of Minab did not encounter AI as a philosophical debate. They encountered it as part of a military system whose consequences arrived in the form of explosive force. Whether Claude played a significant role, a minor role, or no role at all in the targeting process remains to be determined. Investigators must establish the facts, journalists must continue asking difficult questions, and citizens must demand transparency. But even before those facts are fully known, the episode reveals something important about our political moment. The question is no longer whether AI will be integrated into war. That integration is already underway. The question is whether societies will permit decisions about life and death to be increasingly shaped by systems that even their creators struggle to monitor, explain, or control.
The schoolhouse in Minab stands as a warning, not only about a single strike, or a single company, or a single war. It warns of a future in which technological power advances faster than public accountability. And in that future, the distance between the engineer and the battlefield grows ever smaller with AI and drones, even as responsibility becomes harder to find amongst the humans who send the machines out to kill for them.
Another brown child killed, and no one cares.
Israeli soldiers shot seven-year-old Rayyan Abu al-Ajeen in his father’s arms and mocked his father’s pleas as he cried for his dying son. The father says they were in the part of Gaza designated as “safe” for civilians during the “ceasefire.”
The real legacy of events like Juneteenth, are a reminder that white supremacy and racism are systemic, not individual nor collective.
They are basic functions of the system, and always have been.
https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/17/over-160-years-after-abolition-racism-still-structures-us-economy/
2026-06-16
Another 'ceasefire' that will go down in flames, thanks to ethnostate Israel.
Should anyone really be surprised when (not if) this happens?
This is what happens when society's economic and political systems are hierarchical in nature - such that psychopaths and criminals always rise to the top to serve the rich and powerful.
The collapse of 'Western support', or the collapse of the 'West'?
https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/15/new-threat-to-netanyahu-the-collapse-of-western-support/
Since the 'West' (i.e. the US Empire and its vassals) is the biggest threat to the planet (thanks in part to its neo-capitalist republic economic system), this couldn't happen at a better time.
But more importantly, it's a reminder that bullies exist because of the tacit (or sometimes direct) approval of the environment or system they exist in.
2026-06-11
A victory for independent media in India.
Don't take my word for it -
On Wednesday, a single judge bench of the Delhi High Court quashed the cases filed by Delhi police’s Economic Offences’ Wing (EOW) and the country’s Directorate of Enforcement (ED) agency handling issues related to economic fraud, claiming their continuation was “nothing but a gross abuse of the process of law.”
The judge, Neena Bansal Krishna, further observed that the ED proceedings were “not only mala fide, but also an arbitrary attack and abuse of powers on the free and impartial journalism of NewsClick and Prabir Purkayastha.”
