VIDEO OF THE DAY: GOP Senate candidate gets brutally booed in red state
In a very bad sign for Trump and the GOP's November prospects, Senator Roger Marshall was mercilessly booed by the crowd at the Kansas State fair for trying to defend Trump's tariffs. They were not having his excuses – especially when he tried to defend himself for suing his patients who were delinquent on their healthcare bills, at which they yelled "SHAME ON YOU!" at him. Polls show that Marshall is neck-and-neck in the polls with Democratic candidate Adam Hamilton, and this is just the latest evidence that the vibes are very, very bad in MAGAland.
Someone should maybe do something about the AI apocalypse, right?
Jason Linkins, The New Republic: "In the theater, there’s an old saying about 'Chekhov’s gun' that basically goes like this: If the playwright shows the audience a gun in the first act, you are locked into a certain plot inevitability—that gun will go off in the final act. It usually ends badly. This week, a couple of folks at Anthropic—one who was sounding the alarm on his way out the door, the other still merrily employed there as a safety researcher—effectively showed us the AI gun. Who might die in the final act? According to reports, 'All humans.' How soon? 'The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.'
Cool, cool, cool. If I could offer my hot take, maybe someone should do something to, you know, stop this? Unfortunately, there is a series of related problems that impede the easy fix. For starters, our political system is awash in tens of millions of dollars spent by the AI industry. AI is not popular with the general public, but it is very popular among the few who expect to get, or already are getting, insanely wealthy from it—and they have all burned through small fortunes of sunk cost in this arms race, where everyone is trying to build the best (read: most destructive) AI model they can before someone else does. And the industry actually makes a habit of regularly informing people that this tech could kill us all, because when they do, it excites investors.
It is actually genuinely difficult to trust the motivations of anyone in this industry (and it seems bad that genuinely deceptive people are the human core of this technology). But if only for a few paragraphs, let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic this week because (according to him) he came to believe that he was beckoning doomsday in humanity’s general direction. In a series of posts on X, Coxon declared that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was acting responsibly. Rather, they were barreling forward with plans to develop 'self-improving superintelligence' and 'gambling with our lives...The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.'
As much as you and I might recoil from the periodic reminder that this industry is hurtling toward a future of unknown dangers, the money is flowing heavily in the direction of that future. It’s also flowing into Washington, D.C. As Politico reported last week, super PACs aligned with the AI and crypto industry 'spent a whopping $127 million across more than 100 primaries this year in an effort to shape the future of Congress—and won roughly 90 percent of them.' Now, the goal of all of that spending can be murky. There are groups sending cash to Washington who are authentically invested in regulation and guardrails; not everyone is looking for laissez-faire treatment from Congress. But if we take Coxon at his word, the calculus has changed. Something that could wipe out humanity within a decade’s time probably needs something stronger than a mere guardrail—and something more forceful than those raining greenbacks on Washington may be willing to accept."
Mike Johnson: Trump's presidency is OVER if Republicans lose the House
Red to Blue: Speaker Johnson just said the quiet part extremely out loud: “[Trump] needs all four years, not just two, to fix the mess. And that's what we need. If we lost the midterms, heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House, it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect." That's what's at stake this November. We are faced with a choice between succumbing to dictatorship or stopping Trump's agenda in its tracks and making him a lame duck two years into his term. Democratic leadership just identified the top 20 most important races for the 2026 midterms. Will you make a donation that will be split between all the progressive Democrats in these must-win races? Let's take our country back and WIN in November!
"Naza" is one of the most important films of our time
Bilge Ebiri, Vulture: "Among the many shocking facts in Naza, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s unflinching expose of systematic Israeli war crimes in Gaza, is a title at the end noting that many of the revelations in the film were previously published in the Guardian newspaper, +972 Magazine, and Local Call. In other words, the information has been out there for months, and much of the world has shrugged, if not ignored it completely. Perhaps it will be hard to ignore now, with the appearance of this starkly shot, damning documentary.
The film’s setup is disarmingly simple. In a series of interviews, Abraham sits atop the rooftops of Tel Aviv with 24 different Israeli intelligence officers, their faces obscured by night and their voices modified to preserve their identities, as they tell him what they did.
The term “NAZA” refers to the number of civilians that might be killed as collateral damage in a strike on a specific target. So, for example, 4 NAZA would mean four other people killed — women, children, elderly, the term doesn’t differentiate. One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll. These were not outliers, or accidents, or isolated incidents. The murders were, again, part of a system. 'Do you think it’s a genocide?' Abraham asks one of his subjects. 'Yes, absolutely,' is the response.
Interviewees describe hacking little girls’ phones to see when their fathers came home and then bombing their houses, listening while the people on the line screamed and pleaded for help, while mothers cried over their burning daughters. 'I’d hear the final moments of a person’s life,' one man reflects. The style is purposefully antiseptic; aside from one brief section of footage from Gaza toward the end of the film, there’s nothing graphic here. And yet, I nearly threw up.
One man recalls watching snipers kill Palestinians waiting in line for food after Israel blocked supplies from entering the North as a way to push people to the South. One subject says he’d bomb little boys and then watch as dogs fed on their bodies.
Another man talks about visiting Poland as a child, learning about the Holocaust, and coming to understand that the Nazis were pure evil. 'I still believe the Nazis were evil,' he says. 'What does that make me?'"
25 years after 9/11, the zombie War on Terror stumbles on
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin: "What does it mean to 'Never Forget,' as we’re often asked to do when it comes to the September 11 attacks that killed nearly three thousand people? After all, few people who witnessed the crime in real time could ever forget it or the horrors in its wake: the bodies falling, the survivors crushed beneath rubble and dust, the people riddled with disease years later. Certainly, 'Never Forget' means keeping alive the memory of those whose lives were tragically lost. It could also be to remember and hold accountable those who perpetrated the crime. Or maybe, it’s to remember how and why it happened and the immense suffering that followed, to avoid repeating the disastrous choices that led to it all. One thing’s for certain, twenty-five years after the attacks: if we’re talking about the last two, we have forgotten.
Despite being the only government with direct complicity in the attacks, neither Saudi Arabia nor any of its officials have faced anything resembling justice for their role in the attacks. Instead, successive presidential administrations actively covered up the Saudi role in the attacks and coddled their leaders, even feeding that government vital US military support for the pitiless war it waged for seven years against the Yemeni people. The Washington elite instead seized on the rage and anguish that billowed out with the soot from the fallen towers to wage a spree of premeditated wars and military interventions against what felt like every Middle Eastern country but the one whose government was directly implicated: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, countries like Pakistan and Somalia (where the military simply drone-bombed 'supposed terrorists' from afar), and now Iran — all wars sold and justified to varying degrees as wars against terrorism, sometimes to avenge 9/11, sometimes to stop another 9/11 from happening.
If it was all meant to prevent more American bloodshed and end terrorism, it failed miserably. The wars waged in the name of 9/11 have taken five times more American lives than were lost that day, not to mention set into motion events that led to the deaths of at least 4.5 million other people in the region and displaced 38 million more. They created more terrorists, more crises, more reasons for the United States to spend more lives and money on the latest military adventure — most famously in Iraq, where the US invasion produced the bloody Islamic State (ISIS) insurgency a decade later, and years of more US bombing, special forces operations, and proxy battles to beat it back. It’s been an especially dismal failure in North Africa, where terrorism has, ironically, exploded 100,000 percent since the US military started 'fighting terror' there.
The war on terror that George W. Bush put into motion and every one of his predecessors escalated has become radically more lawless and extreme, while embedding itself menacingly deeper into Americans’ daily lives. Islamophobia has arguably never been more extreme in public life, even as the perpetrators of political violence are overwhelmingly right-wing American men. 'Terrorist' no longer refers to someone who blows up buildings or kills to make a political point, but that doesn’t mean the term has become meaningless. Instead it’s become a catch-all political slur for various nonviolent domestic political enemies: someone who vandalizes a billionaire megadonor’s car; who criticizes capitalism; who protests government policies or videotapes law enforcement; who simply moves a box of political zines; who wields political power while Muslim.
The war on terror has become a zombie, devoid of everything that gave it life in the first place but more dangerous than ever, marching endlessly, mindlessly on in search of new living flesh to devour. It turns out this is, tragically, the legacy of that terrible day. We’ve forgotten why 9/11 happened, who perpetrated it, what lessons we should have learned. But the monster we unleashed simply lumbers on and on, the power to stop it seemingly out of anyone’s hands."
Food for thought
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