“The theater, or “carnival of grope”, as one dancer describes it, is the baseborn descendant of an old Times Square sleaze hall, the Melody Burlesk, where a host of carnal contact could be had for a fistful of singles. The theater’s materfamilias is herself a former burlesque girl. Part yenta, part hustler, she claims that, much in the way flowers know their humble origin in dirt, “Women build their dreams here”. - Extract from ‘Quality of Life’, by Lily Burana, New York magazine, May 7^th 1997

STRIPPERS ASKED FOR SEX ACTS, INVITED TO ISLAND BY EPSTEIN AND ANDREW: The letter, dated March 2011, claims that the woman and other exotic dancers from “Rachel’s Strip Club” in West Palm Beach had been chauffeured to Epstein’s house and offered $10,000 to perform. The document claims that she had seen “other young women dressed provocatively” at the party, some of whom “appeared to be as young as 14 years old”. After she arrived, she was directed upstairs where she was introduced by Epstein to Mountbatten-Windsor, the letter says. It alleges: “My client then danced for the men, undressing until she was wearing only a bra and panties. Mr. Epstein and Prince Andrew then told my client they wanted to have a threesome. “She said she was hired to dance, not to have sex. Mr Epstein said they would pay her later for dancing, and they prevailed upon her to engage in various sex acts.” The letter claims that “after the men had satisfied themselves” she was invited to take a trip with the pair to the Virgin Islands, which she declined. Lawyers said she had only been paid $2,000 of the promised fee of $10,000. - BBC

"Austerity is a false economy. If you don't invest in young people, if you burden them with student debt rather than public investment, that's why we get the kind of problems we've got." - Zack Polanski UK Green Party

Israel expected to benefit from 11 September, from America's new war on terrorism. Palestinians expected to suffer. Everyone understood that the rules of the game had changed. Long before the dead could even be counted some Israeli officials were trying to benefit from America's anguish - and its desire for revenge. They began a campaign to convince the world that Israel and America were fighting a common enemy. Israel believed there would be a lot more sympathy and a lot less criticism - whatever tactics it chose to use against the Palestinians. - BBC AUGUST 2002

In a newly released email, with no context attached to the document, Maxwell wrote to a contact, ‘The Invisible Man’, writing: “It is the year 2032, and a father and his son walk the streets of lower Manhattan.” “Approaching the site where the (World Trade Centre) used to be in the end of the 20th century, the father sighs and comments, ‘to think that right here used to be the Twin Towers…’ The son, not understanding, asks his father: ‘What are the Twin Towers?’ The son, not understanding, asks his father: ‘What are the Twin Towers?’ The father smiles and looks at the son, and explains, ‘The Twin Towers were two huge buildings that used to be here until 2001, when the Arabs destroyed them’. “The son looks up to his father, and asks, ‘And what are the Arabs?’” Reports suggest Maxwell sent the email to dozens of her contacts, including billionaire Thomas Pritzker among other elites in Epstein/Maxwell network. - TRTworld

"Don’t fall in love ... with your suffering. Never presume that your suffering is in itself proof of your authenticity. A renunciation of pleasure can easily turn in pleasure of renunciation itself. - Zizek

Sexy Assets: Emails released in the United States Department of Justice files show that the late convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was offered the chance to buy into a sprawling building tied to the Department of Defense in 2016, according to United Kingdom broadcaster ITV News. The 84,710-square-metre (101,312-suqare-yard) complex, located roughly 1.6km (1 mile) from the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, was described in an investor deck as a “mission-critical” site and “the only property in Arlington, Virginia other than the Pentagon itself with the ability to meet the space and infrastructure needs of the DOD”. The proposed purchase price was about $116m. The structure of the deal would have made Epstein a co-owner and, effectively, a landlord to the US government. - AJ

The FDA, by default, will now only look for one well-controlled and adequately-run clinical trial as the basis of its drug approvals, making official a controversial policy change that has pushed out at least one high-ranking agency official. - Biospace

Fifty-four seconds. That’s how long it took Raphael Wimmer to write up an experiment that he did not actually perform, using a new artificial-intelligence tool called Prism, released by OpenAI last month. “Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier,” wrote Wimmer, a researcher in human–computer action at the University of Regensburg in Germany, on Bluesky. - Nature

What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines. ..The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger.- Harpers

“What is happiness? It’s the moment before you need more happiness.” - Don Draper, Madmen

“The city shut it down in 1998, when Giuliani proclaimed the Harmony, which employed 250 women, a ”corrosive institution”. The dancers had few options, as the city made it impossible for small strip joints to operate, while glitzy “gentlemen’s clubs,” with airbrushed dancers, survived. As one Harmony performer told the Times, “I don’t have that Barbie doll look, and I’m afraid of rejection. What am I going to write on a job application, that I was a lap dancer for the last four years?” - Vanishing New York

President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows and others accused of backing the Republican’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The goal of therapy as transforming "neurotic suffering into ordinary unhappiness” - Freud

Rudy Giuliani is being sued for sexual harassment by a former employee: Noelle Dunphy alleges in the $10m (£8m) civil case that he coerced her into sex acts and launched into “alcohol-drenched” and racist rants at work. The lawsuit claims he exposed himself, took Viagra “constantly” and told Ms Dunphy satisfying his sexual demands was a job requirement. - BBC

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told reporters on Wednesday that the agency is pursuing “an enforcement action” against The View and would continue stepping up pressure on late-night shows such as The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel Live! - Consequence

Imagine going to bed one night and waking up 30 years in the future, except the world hasn’t done anything to address the climate crisis on any substantive level. Imagine everyone’s distracted by scandals and politics as usual. That’s now. - Wildfire

Earth’s climate is now departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia. Crossing critical temperature thresholds may trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks and tipping dynamics that amplify warming and destabilize distant Earth system components. Uncertain tipping thresholds make precaution essential, as crossing them could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory with long-lasting and potentially irreversible consequences. - Cell Press Journal

AI PANIC: Europe’s broader software sector is valued at roughly €300bn and is heavily concentrated in a handful of companies. That concentration makes every percentage drop more visible — and more painful. Germany’s flagship technology group SAP is by far the largest European software company with a market capitalisation of around €200bn. Shares in SAP have already fallen roughly 20% year-to-date and by 40% since its peak in February 2025. In terms of market value, SAP has wiped out €188bn over the past year alone, nearly half of its current capitalisation. Even more worrying than the number is the trend: SAP is heading for its ninth straight month of decline. That’s never happened in over 30 years of trading. - Euronews

Polymarket, Kalshi and similar prediction markets are illegal under New Zealand’s gambling laws, the nation’s gambling regulator has decided.

The data point that seems to have caught Wall Street’s attention the most is the estimated capital expenditure (CapEx) for this year, which collectively represents an investment of over $700bn (€590bn) in AI infrastructure. That is more than the entire nominal GDP of Sweden for 2025, one of Europe’s largest economies, as per IMF estimates. Global chip sales are also projected to reach $1tn (€842bn) for the first time this year, according to the US Semiconductor Industry Association.Currently, projected AI revenue for 2026 is nowhere near matching the spending, and there are valid concerns. For instance, the possibility of hardware rapidly depreciating due to innovation, and other high operational costs such as energy usage. It can be confidently stated that the numbers have a heavy reliance on future success. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged this month, there are “elements of irrationality in the current spending pace”. Amid all this spending, urgent questions have also been raised about Europe’s ability to compete in a race that has become a battle of balance sheets. For the European Union, the transatlantic contrast is sobering. While American firms are mobilising nearly €600bn in a single year, the EU’s coordinated efforts do not even match the financial firepower of the lowest spender among the US tech titans. However, the numbers tell a stark story. Total European spending on sovereign cloud data infrastructure is forecast to reach just €10.6bn in 2026. While this is a respectable 83% increase year-on-year, it remains a rounding error compared to the US AI build-out. - Euro News

A sweeping Israeli Channel 13 investigation has exposed the Biden administration’s complicity in Israel’s 19-month war on Gaza. Nine top Biden officials acknowledged avoiding real pressure on Israel—even as the death toll surpassed 30,000. Israeli leaders openly bragged they dragged out the war, playing for time until Donald Trump’s return. - Drop Site

An aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel will give Hamas a 60-day deadline to disarm, and if it doesn’t, Israel will restart its full-scale bombing campaign in Gaza. - Antiwar

Ontario students are drowning in debt. The provincial government’s recent announcement to end the domestic tuition freeze and mandate that a minimum of 75% of OSAP funding will now be loans drastically shifts the grant-to-loan ratio. Previously offering up to 85% in grants, OSAP will now provide a maximum of just 25% in grants, leaving students with significantly more upfront costs and decades of heavier repayment across the province. - Wall of Debt

If the EU has mismanaged its relations with Russia, a middle power, it has performed equally poorly with regard to China, a budding superpower. A massive shift has taken place in EU-Chinese relations. In 2000, the combined GDP of the EU countries was roughly seven times as big as China’s GDP. Now, both are about the same size. By 2050, the GDP of the EU will be about half the size of China’s. And yet the EU countries speak condescendingly toward China and have blocked deals that would productively strengthen ties, such as the EU-Chinese investment agreement. - Foreign Affairs

Nuclear war is obviously the most dangerous type of war that could take place, with potential participation by other nuclear powers. But Netanyahu may believe that the risk is manageable because Israel is not perceived as a threat to any nuclear powers. And he is counting on the US taking care of Israel’s economic needs in the war’s aftermath. Certainly, Israel will be widely condemned and probably ostracized. But Netanyahu and his supporters likely believe that this is another major step in fulfilling the Zionist vision, and that with time, Israel will be stronger than ever. - Defend Dem.

TRIBUTE TO REV. JACKSON: Because Rev. Jackson had made it possible to speak about Palestine, we were able to build coalitions around the issue during the 1988 presidential campaign. Not only did we elect a record number of American delegates across the country, but we also built coalitions with Black, Latino, and progressive Jewish delegates, among others. We succeeded in passing resolutions in support of Palestinian rights at 10 state Democratic conventions. And by the time we got to the national convention in Atlanta, we had earned enough delegates to call for a minority plank on Palestinian rights. - Zeteo

Facing a demographic catastrophe, Ukraine is paying for troops to freeze their sperm

‘My research shows that the Oslo Accords was a deal created solely on Israel’s premises, where Norway was willingly running a duty for Israel’ - Hilde Waage, University of Oslo

Chinese policymakers seem to treat AI not as an existential rupture in human history but as a powerful, general-purpose technology like electricity, computers, or the internet that can turbocharge many other domains: manufacturing, scientific research, services, defense, healthcare and medicine, and so on. Indeed, China’s AI+ initiative shares many parallels with China’s 2015 “Internet+” initiative where the goal was to boost adoption and use this new technology to drive progress across a whole range of areas, from industry to public services. Nobody “won” the internet. Instead, the question was: who can make the most of this new technology over the long run? While China may see AI as more significant than previous technologies, Beijing’s approach to AI lines up with a longer pattern of trying to harness new cross-cutting technologies through a broader process of economic and social transformation: “informatization” 信息化, “digitization” 数字化, and “intelligentization” 智能化. - High Capacity

With the swift Nazi advances in western and eastern Europe in the early years of the second world war, the German press claimed in November 1941 that “the United States of Europe has at last become a reality”. After Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, this notion of the continent united under the domination of one nation was superseded by a commitment to cooperation. This led in 1951 to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and in 1957 to the European Economic Community, which eventually morphed into the European Union with its motto of “united in diversity”. - The Conversation

Hazardous substances found in all headphones tested by ToxFREE project. Substances include chemicals that can cause cancer, neurodevelopmental problems and the feminisation of males. - Guardian

The Epstein outrage and Trump’s demolition of American prestige have alike led the collapse of enforced silence. Mark Carney’s admission at Davos that the US-led order had passed was applauded by the very Atlanticist elites who championed it for decades. Trump’s obscenity has made the system impossible to defend with the usual pieties. That these same commentators were unmoved by Biden’s sponsorship of genocide shows what actually troubles them: not the order’s concealed violence, but the loss of its dignified facade. It is now a scramble to salvage reputations amid general collapse. ..Aimé Césaire observed that fascism became objectionable to Europeans only when it unleashed in Europe the brutality they had inflicted on the “inferior” peoples of Asia and Africa. His insight is verified today at dizzying speed by the contrast between European alarm over Greenland and official indifference to a loudly proclaimed campaign of extermination against Palestinians. Western leaders still smilingly pose for pictures with wanted Israeli war criminals…History will be made increasingly outside the West, conforming to none of the rational designs posited by intellectual frameworks originating in a relatively small and uniform part of the world. Our task is to participate in this dialogue without pretending to escape complicity, to build new forms of solidarity while admitting our implication in systems of oppression, to envision futures that do not replicate the violence of the past while registering how deeply that past has shaped our present capacities for imagination. This is the work that confronts us: the difficult practice of learning to think and act without the guarantees and certainties that made our complicity possible. - Equator

The annual financial reports recently released by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla disclose that these corporations collectively reported $315 billion in U.S. profits for 2025, and collectively paid just 4.9 percent of that amount in federal corporate income taxes—with Tesla paying exactly zero. That amounts to a collective tax savings of $51 billion last year for these four giant multinational corporations, versus what they would have paid if they paid the full 21 percent federal corporate income tax rate. - Itep

Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars From New York City’s Public Hospitals

Third Conservative Canadian MP defects to Carney’s Liberals

You need $2 million to retire and ‘almost no one is close,’ BlackRock CEO warns, a problem that Gen X will make ‘harder and nastier’

For the desiring subject, the real dimension of the other remains constituatively out of reach. Sustaining the position sof desire demands that one respect the impossibility of this real and allow it to remain impossible. The only problem with this position is that it has the effect of insulating the subject. When the subject fantasizes, however, it immerses itself in enjoyment and becomes visible to the other because it is no longer concerned with its public appearance. This visibility -this vulnerability - represents the ethical side of fantasy, the side that Wenders explores in a film like Paris, Texas. - Todd Mcgowan The Real Gaze

The head of the US diplomatic mission in Cuba has revealed Washington is holding discussions with high-ranking government figures on the island, hinting a political transition is imminent as the Trump administration tightens economic pressure on Havana. - Intellinews

The boundaries between live entertainment, social streaming and online gambling just became significantly thinner. Live-game studio 155.io has launched what it calls the world’s first CCTV-based betting genre, turning real-world surveillance feeds into a continuous, wagerable gaming experience. The debut title, Rush Hour, uses live traffic cameras from cities around the globe to create a new form of ultra-fast, reality-driven betting. Instead of reels, RNGs or virtual sports, players watch actual intersections, streets and landmarks – and place bets on what happens next. How many cars will pass through a junction in 30 seconds? Will the next vehicle turn left or right? Will traffic slow or spike during the next minute? - CCTV Games

The Mega-Rich Are Turning Their Mansions Into Impenetrable Fortresses. Anxiety over high-profile violence has the wealthy spending big on armed security, bunkers and even moats to keep themselves safe from intruders. - WSJ

US military preparing for potentially weeks-long Iran operations

Rubio’s Valentine’s Day message to Europe: Change or get dumped: The Europe on show did not inspire. Rather, it seemed to lack the money to make good on its own ambitions, and be drowned out by internal political scandal, or the ticking clocks of leaderships coming to an end. Each year, Munich meets to hear European promises to do more. Each year, startling rises in defense spending seem nearer, but do not bring change. - CNN

On the menu: How the middle powers sacrificed Gaza to save themselves: Canada and Europe are only crying foul now because, for the first time in generations, they feel the walls of the privileged club closing in on them. They scream for international law to protect their trade routes and borders from Trump, yet they actively dismantle that same law to shield an ally in Gaza. - Middle East Online

Analysis by Channel 4 News has identified emails within the latest Epstein files that suggest that the mountain of information released by the US Department of Justice could amount to just a fraction of the total – potentially just 2% of the information that the FBI retrieved from Epstein’s homes. - Channel 4 News

US military used Anthropic’s AI model Claude in Venezuela raid, report says. Wall Street Journal says Claude used in operation via Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir Technologies

Canadian PM Mark Carney: “Large American online platforms have become seas of racism, misogyny, antisemitism, islamophobia and hate in all its forms...My government will act.”

Leftists in the U.S. are often advised to look to social democratic governments such as Denmark as a guide for governance. But when the Global South immigrant population grew to the kind of tipping point that makes white people uncomfortable, those same social democrats enacted racist legislation in order to police those people, determine where they live and even how often they can interact with their own children. Called the Ghetto Package, the 2018 legislation designated neighborhoods as “ghettos” or “tough ghettos” if their population was more than 50% non-European. The law decreed that public housing could make up no more than 40% of housing stock. Immigrants from nations such as Iraq, Syria, and Somalia were impacted as they were forced out of their neighborhoods through evictions and demolitions. Of course, gentrification followed as private investors renovated the empty housing and immediately raised rents…Of course, the U.S. has no right to Greenland but neither do the colonizing Danes. It is wrong for the U.S. to do the bidding of the ultra-wealthy elite who want to grab Greenland and the fact the state operates on their behalf should not end condemnation of these practices. But Denmark and other European nations cannot be allowed to play the victims when they are also the victimizers. They are happy vassals one day, joining the coalition of the willing in the Iraq invasion, but shedding tears when the mafia chieftain takes their stuff. No one should accept Denmark’s claims of innocence. In regard to Greenland, there is indeed no honor among thieves. - Black Agenda Report

Pressure on Greenland is ‘totally unacceptable,’ Danish PM says. Frederiksen gets asked (again) if Trump is still interested in acquiring Greenland, and she confirms that “unfortunately, the desire is the same”. “We are talking about threats, but as you Jens-Frederik often say, the people of Greenland have never been threatened before by anyone, so that pressure is unacceptable,” she says. - Guardian

Greenland’s membership in the Danish Commonwealth is looking increasingly bleak following Greenland’s government openly chastising the Danes for ignoring the island’s desire for independence. Greenland’s foreign minister, Vittus Qujaukitsoq, has blasted Denmark for denying Greenland the chance to join international fishing organisations such as NAFO and NEAFC. “The arrogance is devastating for our relations with the commonwealth,” Qujaukitsoq told Politiken newspaper. - 2016 Copenhagen Post

Experts estimate that the US alone will invest $946 billion in nukes over the next decade — enough to eradicate extreme global poverty. - Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez

(A)s Adrian Johnston puts it in a succinctly brutal way: “Analysis is not about teaching neurotics how to fuck.”3 It is about making them abandon the fantasy of full normal fuck, about making them identify with their “symptom,” with the fragile arrangement of the figures of enjoyment that enable them to go on living without too much suffering and pain. The point of Lacan’s reading of Freud’s metaphor of capitalism is very precise here, it reaches beyond the mechanism of dreams into sexual life itself: in the same way the capitalist who wants to start an enterprise has to borrow the capital from a bank or another pre-existing fund, a subject who wants to engage in a “normal” sexual activity has to mobilize “that which is accumulated as libido capital by virtue, precisely, of infantile non-maturity” – in short, when we engage in “normal” mature sex (“jouissance that is realized in copulation in the raw”), we can do this only if our activity is sustained by premature infantile sexual fantasies. The promise that, at some point, we will reach the “big fat” full jouissance at its purest, leaving behind infantile fantasies, is in itself the ultimate fantasy. In a parallel way, this is what Epstein was doing: providing and enacting obscene fantasies that kept the system alive…Epstein acted as a primordial father who organized a network in which (sexual, financial, political) basic rules were violated and everything was permitted. Obscenities abound – just recall the photo of Bill Clinton seductively stretched on a sofa with a wig and wearing a feminine dress... I don’t want to lose time resuming the mixture of sexual orgies, dark financial speculations and political speculations – I just think it is important to note the discreet but towering presence of Israel in the background. I also think that one should not lose time trying to determine which dimension is crucial, sexual, political or economic, in Epstein’s network. One just has to insist that this network is a clear example of what one usually calls “deep state”: an almost Communist (in the sense of Communism for the elite, of course) shadowy domain in which illegal sexual encounters are used for financial gains and to exchange diplomatic secrets, in which granting perverted sexual wishes and providing confidential data are signs of trust and simultaneously tools of discreet blackmail. - Sinners 2

Wim Wenders Says ‘We Have to Stay Out of Politics’ as Berlinale Jury Fields Questions About Israel and Palestine: Filmmakers ‘Have to Do the Work of People, Not the Work of Politicians’ - Variety

Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to
be: ‘entertainment’ movies. They are the most political films there are
because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell
you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for
things as they are.” - Wim Wenders 2013

Although I describe Land of Plenty as my most political feature film, my "American mission" dates back to 1978 when I was 32 years old and went to the US with a dream of making an American film. - Wim Wenders Guardian March 2008

Berlinale: Entertainer Charli xcx Brats Up Berlin: ‘The Moment’ Star Applauds the Fest for “Not Shying Away From Political Films,” Declares Brat Era “Over”. - Hollywood Reporter

Federal records obtained by WIRED show that over the past several months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE’s physical presence across the US. Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas. In many cases, these facilities, which are to be used by street-level agents and ICE attorneys, are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations. - Wired

Wim Wenders Interview Growing Up Nazi Germany: “I didn’t get any information about the past when I was a boy. I did realise that something was wrong. All the grown-ups in my family and everybody else, no-one wanted to look over their shoulders. Something was wrong behind their shoulders, in the past, deeply wrong. We didn’t find out anything in primary school, nothing at all. At high school, just like Anselm said, there were a couple of weeks that touched on the Nazi era, as if it had been a remote part of history. Then I knew about the real trouble and the extent of it. Those teachers were too deeply involved in it to even be able to present it as history. It was their own history they were not able to think about.” Wenders realised that many of his teachers were from the Nazi era. They were still in their jobs and their beliefs hadn’t changed. “My maths teacher was such a Nazi. He still had the moustache, the haircut. The way he treated us was clearly authoritarian. That’s the way he has treated his other students in the Thirties… “ - BE

We cannot understand climate change deniers—indeed, we cannot understand climate change itself, in all of its multifarious ramifications, from rising sea levels and Indigenous resistance, fragile social bonds to internet detritus, animal studies to “doomsday preppers”—without understanding how our terrifying proximity to the Real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect, like a parent or a child. This compulsion to repeat, this desire for the Real, then helps the reader to understand why, at one and the same time, we recycle and consume, why we seem to enjoy that destruction, like the images of polar bears among garbage dumps viewed on computer screens. - Lacan ( and the Environment )

Palantir CEO Dr. Alex Karp: “You need a higher purpose, and I think you often need a lower purpose.
andrewrsorkin: “What’s your lower purpose?”
Karp: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”

Two start-ups backed by tech billionaires Daniel Ek and Peter Thiel have won contracts worth as much as €4.3bn in total to supply kamikaze drones to Germany’s military, in its first major foray into unmanned weapons. The award comes despite glitches for Stark, which failed to hit a single target during two separate tests with the UK and German armies — a setback that the company insisted was an integral part of trialling and developing new technology. Helsing has also faced criticism of the performance of its drones in Ukraine, with Politico reporting last month that the company hit its target just five times out of 14 in field deployments in the Donbas region, citing an internal German defence ministry report. The deals strike a blow to the German arms giant Rheinmetall, which had been in the running for a contract and expected to secure a €300mn deal. - FT

Munich Conference Today: Germany’s Chancellor Merz says that the “international order based on rights and rules” no longer exists and that “China wants to be a leader in shaping the world... the U.S.’ claim to leadership has been challenged and possibly lost.”

Mediation is the social activity of making meaning, making sense, putting something into a medium, constructing relations between things, people, and places; without it art falls apart, the world becomes incomprehensible, and collective movements for change become unsustainable. In the work of these artists, mediation is being expressly rejected…If there’s an attack on collective meaning, individual meaning surges in its place. If there’s a disruption of mediation, things that seem immediate — experience, the body, the personal — rise up. - Anna Kornblum

“Our polling shows the growing concern about war does not give leaders license to spend heavily on defense,” said Wride. “If anything, voters are now less willing to make the trade-offs needed to improve military security. So European leaders are left in a bind — unable to rely on the U.S., unable to use that as a reason to invest domestically, and under higher pressure to urgently solve this for a world where conflict feels closer than before.” The findings, based on surveys of more than 2,000 voters in each country between Feb. 6 and Feb. 9, lay bare the challenge facing NATO leaders as they try to strengthen security at a time when public finances are tight… Russia is seen as the biggest threat to peace in Europe, while Canadians see Trump’s America as the greatest danger to security. In France, Germany and the U.K., the second-biggest threat is seen to be the U.S., which respondents cited far more often than China…The French and German publics are now less likely to support higher defense budgets within the context of a spending trade-off than they were last year, according to the results. - Politico

“It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” - Steve Jobs

Defend yourselves and don’t rely on the US, senior Washington official tells Europe. Ultimately, he said the alliance needs to become a modern version of its original Cold War status - defined by hard and credible fighting strength. Allies have tried to play down his boss’s absence as not signalling a reduction in US prioritisation of NATO. “This ‘NATO 3.0’ requires much greater efforts by our allies to step up and assume primary responsibility for the conventional defence of Europe,” he said. - Sky News

Remarks by Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby at the NATO Defense Ministerial (As Prepared) February 12, 2026: Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense. This is not a matter of ideology or rhetorical flourish. It is a conclusion grounded in a clear-eyed and rigorous assessment of the strategic environment we face as well as a pragmatic evaluation of the capabilities at our disposal. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are reprioritizing the defense of our homeland and the protection of our interests in our Hemisphere. We are grappling forthrightly with the fact that the Indo-Pacific is now a central arena of geopolitics, one with fundamental implications for American security, economic vitality, and technological leadership. It follows that Europe should field the preponderance of the forces required to deter and, if necessary, defeat conventional aggression in Europe. A strategy that pretends the United States can indefinitely serve as the primary conventional defender of Europe while also carrying the decisive burden everywhere else is neither sustainable nor prudent. It is an aspiration divorced from resources. It is a strategy that serves neither regular Americans nor, I must stress, Europeans. Continuing to proclaim the shibboleths of “NATO 2.0” without a credible strategy for how to meet them would not help Europe - it would hurt it, by perpetuating expectations that cannot realistically be met. That is not friendship. True friendship is speaking truly, forthrightly, and credibly. For Europe, it means moving beyond inputs and intentions toward outputs and capabilities. Defense spending levels matter, and there is no substitute for it. But what matters at the end of the day is what those resources produce: ready forces, usable munitions, resilient logistics, and integrated command structures that work at scale under stress. Let me stress something: There is nothing anti-European about this vision. If Europe rises to this moment, if it truly embraces primary responsibility for its own defense, then the Alliance will emerge stronger, more resilient, and better prepared for the challenges ahead. And the transatlantic bond will not weaken - it will mature, embodying the vision of a “NATO 3.0” that is balanced, credible, and rooted in shared strength and realism. This is a NATO that can do its part for Europe’s defense not just in the months and years ahead but for decades to come. - US Dept. of War

On Monday, officials with the Munich Security Conference unveiled their lengthy annual report and theme for this year’s conference, dubbed “Under Destruction.” “The world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics,” the report states. “Sweeping destruction — rather than careful reforms and policy corrections — is the order of the day.” The post-Cold War order, largely organized, upheld and enforced by the United States, is now “under destruction,” the report asserts. “For decades, Europe thrived under an American security umbrella that allowed it to prioritize integration and prosperity over hard power. That era has ended,” the report says. It goes on to cite growing doubts in Europe about U.S. commitment to NATO. For example, 66% of Germans polled say the United States has become a less reliable NATO ally over the last six months, according to new MSC polling released Monday in tandem with its report…“When your kids are young, they’re dependent on you. But eventually you expect them to get a job,” Whitaker said. “And so to me, that’s where we are. We still love them. You’re still allies.” - Stars and Stripes

Trump has long been preoccupied with the notion of citizenship — who gets to be an American and who doesn’t — and has expressed displeasure with immigrants from what he calls third world nations. He is separately seeking the power to strip citizenship from those born to foreigners in the U.S., though “birthright citizenship” appears in the Constitution. The Supreme Court is weighing his argument. - NBC

Google is redefining commercial intent across Search, YouTube, and AI interfaces. Ads are moving deeper into conversational experiences like AI Mode, creative production is becoming AI-native, and checkout is embedding directly into Search. - SEL

Europe must break from America. Warnings about the end of the postwar world are common sense, not alarmism: I don’t remember exactly when I first thought something was seriously wrong with the transatlantic relationship. Over the years, particularly in my time at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, I had many opportunities to meet and talk to the young conservatives coming up through the ranks of the Republican Party, the cohort which has now taken over the Trump administration. There certainly was something wrong then, but it took me a while to fully grasp it. Cracks about the European propensity for too much talk and no action. The “Europoor” internet meme. Sometimes the jokes were even amusing, but at some point they turned into what seemed like a fixation. It was no longer funny. It was obvious that a powerful form of Europhobia was developing among a new generation of American elites. - New Statesmen

Jouissance/Enjoyent does not mean suffering is justified, deserved, or secretly pleasurable. Its more about an unconscious libidinal attachment to a symptom within an otherwise stable psychic structure. It’s about the way people repeat what harms them because it organizes their desire (guilt, failure, self-sabotage). So no, it does not apply to trauma, violence etc. A child who loses their parents in any situation is not “enjoying” suffering; that is devastation and psychic rupture, not jouissance. Jouissance explains “stuckness” in relatively free subjects, not oppression or horror. It’s all about repetition. - Wrapped In Clingfilm

Canadian Separatists Reveal Jaw-Dropping Details of Secret Meetings With Trump Teams: Dennis Modry, a co-founder of the group, told NBC News that border security, the Canadian pension plan, taxes, national debt, and the possible currency revamp were on the table. So was “the development of an independent military,” according to him…The organization’s members are also rankled by concerns familiar to MAGA voters, namely immigration and a growing partnership between Canada and China…Modry said he attended the trifecta of meetings last year: one in April, one in September, and one in December. The separatists’ attorney, Jeffrey Rath, claimed the meetings were hosted at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C…“The key issue here is how the current administration sees the use of radical conservative groups as part of its foreign policy strategy,” said Michael Williams, a politics professor at the University of Ottawa. Ipsos polling conducted last month, however, suggests that more Albertans are happy being part of Canada than not. - Daily Beast

LIMA, Peru (AP) — The Trump administration on Wednesday expressed concern that China was costing Peru its sovereignty in solidifying control over the South American nation’s critical infrastructure, a blunt warning after a Peruvian court ruling restricted a local regulator’s oversight of a Chinese-built mega port. - NPR

Middle-class Americans are selling their plasma to make ends meet. Last year, people in the U.S. made an estimated $4.7 billion selling their plasma. Donation centers are popping up in middle-class neighborhoods, including suburban strip malls and college towns. - NBC

Want to earn $400/month by sitting in a chair? Donating plasma is one of the easiest side hustles in Canada. We break down which provinces allow paid donation, the exact pay rates at Grifols and Canadian Plasma Resources, and the “loophole” that now allows Ontario residents to get paid. - BetterPayJobs.ca

Stress. The most pernicious harm likely to come from owning a climate vulnerable home is stress. An ever-present, low-level strain based on the awareness that your home and, in some ways, your life are built on a non-solid foundation. It’s not an acute form of harm, but the constant demand on a share of your energy can be debilitating over time. Think of it this way: Do you have enough excess energy and personal resilience to take on a new, ever-present, and permanent (until you move) worry about the physical and financial foundation of our your life? - Non-Financial Risks of Climate Vulnerable Home

On 11 February, Canadian outlet The Maple reported that Israeli lawfare organization Shurat HaDin (SH) is attempting to pressure payment processors and Canadian authorities to shut it down over its journalism. - The Cradle

Germany's Merz: China builds the world’s largest solar farms within a few months.
In the EU, it takes years just for the project to get approved. Therefore, I propose to implement a fundamental principle in most permitting processes: Any project that is not treated within a few weeks or months will be regarded approved automatically.

“The subject of a movie is not its story, its plot, but that on which this movie takes a position and the cinematographic form with which it does so.” - Badiou a la Ruda

IMPOSTER SYNROME REVISITED: (A)ccess to commodities does not satisfy a consumer’s desire; it rather renews their search for yet another commodity to satisfy their desire. And the same goes for the ultimate commodity: the fantasized “success” that is supposed to grant access to all commodities, and thereby an exit from the treadmill of desire. This problem of capital can be seen at the heart of marketing’s endeavor to invent the ideal consumer, one who can acquire what he takes to be his desire and keep on desiring it afterwards. The imposter comes into play as the one who believes he has what he wants, and imagines that he will keep on wanting it—provided that what he hasn’t got is what he supposes it takes to have it in the first place. The correlate of this subjective position is everywhere in the contemporary endeavor to rebrand the commodity as experience, through which experience itself is made into a commodity…capital enlists “mental health” alongside its other sellable experiences. In giving imposture the status of a syndrome, the aim is to eliminate it as a viable subjective position, that is, to eliminate the possibility of deceiving (or lying) with it whereby the subject would posit himself as truth. ..the subject becomes a subject by subtracting itself from the content of what it speaks. - Mohamed Tal

Table for one? Now you can take your AI chatbot on an actual date at NYC’s ‘world first’ companion cafe

"If Canadians really don't like Donald Trump, how do Americans feel about Canada? Well, they actually like Canada! ... even among Republicans, it's +30 ... Canada -- more popular than Donald Trump in Trump's own country" - CNN

In countries like ours, Germany, the Netherlands and France, the situation is simply dramatic at the brink of an existential crisis. - Belgian PM at EU Industrial Summit

Reading, writing and learning a language or two can lower your risk of dementia by almost 40%, according to a study that suggests millions of people could prevent or delay the condition. - AAN

“Russian crackdown on Telegram app prompts rare criticism from soldiers, pro-war bloggers and officials.” - Guardian

Every legal order or every order of explicit normativeness has to rely on a complex network of informal rules which tells us how we are to relate to explicit norms: how we are to apply them; to what extent we are to take them literally; and how and when we are allowed, even solicited, to disregard them....One of the strategies of totalitarian regimes is to have legal regulations (criminal laws) so severe, that, if taken literally, everyone is guilty of something. But then their full enforcement is withdrawn...totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing, and cheating are conditions of survival. - Violence 158

Bank of Canada policymakers see Fed independence threats adding to global turmoil

Okay, now exactly half of xAI’s founding team has left the company

Beijing has canceled all new investments in Israel, a Chinese fund revealed in its response to a lawsuit filed against it by an Israeli settlement in the north. - The Cradle

Gogol freely acknowledged that his friend Alexander Pushkin provided the initial spark for The Government Inspector. “Do me a favor,” Gogol wrote the poet on October 7, 1835: “send me some subject, comical or not, but an authentically Russian anecdote. My hand is itching to write a comedy…give me a plot and I’ll knock off a comedy in five acts—I promise, funnier than hell. For God’s sake, do it. My mind and stomach are both famished.” Though, per custom, Gogol might have nabbed the tale without Pushkin’s realization. “One has to be very wary with this Ukrainian,” Pushkin later cautioned. “He robs me before I have time to shout for help.” - MROnline

“NATO, the EU, and their members should respond symmetrically and adequately to what Russia is doing,” he said. “And that is exactly what we will do.” NATO officials have already hinted at the possibility of pre-emptive cyber and other strikes against Russia over Putin’s actions in Europe, and, while Polish military leaders have yet to move in this direction, Warsaw is ideally placed to pioneer such a shift. Having long relied on the US and its security umbrella to protect it from oppressors, Poland won’t wait for its Western European allies to adapt their military policies and strategic approaches to Russia’s increasing threat to NATO’s east, especially now that Washington is looking less dependable and, in some cases, like Greenland, a possible adversary. - Cepa

Despite the growing concerns about the Netlerands and Europe’s dependency on American tech companies, NS has awarded a significant portion of its IT infrastructure to a United States-based computer service provider, NRC reports based on the tender documentation. According to the newspaper, the tender shows that the American supplier, DXC Technology, submitted the cheapest bid, but did not score the highest on quality. - Netherlands Times

“We have two choices - we are at a fork in the road. We can move in the direction of federation or we can disband the euro,” Varoufakis told Euronews’ Europe Today programme on Thursday…“We have federal money and this is our tragedy. We have a great central bank, a monolith of a central bank, and we have 20 treasuries that can’t really rely on it,” he said.

Venezuela is sending its first crude oil cargo to Israel in years as the Latin American country’s exports open up following the capture of its president Nicolas Maduro. - Bloomberg

Milan Olympics: Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government has requested legal permission to send asylum seekers to a holding center in Albania while their cases are being processed, a policy that has so far been banned by Italian courts. The Interior Ministry declined to comment about whether the government’s migration policies had exacerbated homelessness. That leaves many migrants, especially those who are not likely to be granted asylum, afraid that they will be taken to a temporary detention center or repatriated, said Mr. Bertolé, who was appointed by the city’s center-left mayor. “So they don’t trust” those trying to help them, Mr. Bertolé added. - NYT

US House lawmakers voted Wednesday, February 11, to reject Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, sweeping aside the president’s last-gasp threat of election consequences for Republicans to deliver a rare rebuke on his signature economic policy. The measure brought by Democrats was approved 219-211, with six Republicans joining the effort. It remains largely a symbolic move. - LeMonde

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend. This coincides with a growing belief among Americans that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one’s health, now the majority view for the first time. - Gallup

The American Revolution was a victory of liberty over tyranny made possible by a mixture of courage, grit, and virtue. It was also, however, a morally ambiguous affair with some of the main participants motivated as much by ambition as they were by idealism. While many of the founding generation prided themselves on their virtue, vice also played an important role in their rebellion against the British, and to fully appreciate this reality, it is useful to examine the role of alcohol, which turns up at many of the revolution’s key moments. - Alcohol and the American Revolution

Often overshadowed by the events at the Bastille, the customs’ wall that encircled Paris was attacked on 11-14 July 1789 with 40 out of the 54 tollgates destroyed. Wine was both a catalyst and a lubricant in these assaults. Groups of armed crowds drove away customs agents and brought cartloads of wine into the city tax-free. On the morning of 14 July, someone at the barrière de Neuilly had graffitied ‘finally we will drink wine at 3 sous, for too long we have been paying 12’.[4] Alcohol often oiled people’s resolve, released constraints and pushed them to do or say things they had not dared to otherwise. Wine barrels were opened and their contents consumed, often accompanied by music from drums and violins, while the tollhouses were set afire. By freeing people’s inhibitions and bolstering their confidence to transgress authority, wine did play a role in these events; but this should not be conflated with deranged inebriation, as this only fuels Taine’s negative characterization of popular revolutionary actors. - Age of Revolutions

Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it is healthy, that it doesn’t threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate, yes, but fat-free; Coke, yes, but diet; coffee, yes, but without caffeine; beer, yes, but without alcohol; mayonnaise, yes, but without cholesterol; sex, yes, but safe sex … - Classic Zizek

For decades American presidents and defense secretaries threatened, badgered, asked and begged European leaders to spend more on their militaries. Uncle Sam’s persistent whining was embarrassing for a superpower. Few NATO member governments appeared to take Moscow seriously as a threat. After all, who would build a natural gas pipeline to a country you believed planned on conquering you? They also took America’s measure. Washington policymakers might huff and puff, but they desperately wanted to appear to be running Europe. In the end Americans would make up any European deficiencies. Perhaps the surprise was that no European ally formally disbanded its military, which presumably would have been one ostentatious step too far. - June 10, 2018 Cato

Israeli Soldiers Accused of Using Polymarket to Bet on Strikes. Internal security agency alleges suspects used classified information from their jobs to inform their wagers. - WSJ

On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation. What explains this paradox? Capitalism. By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say. - Varoufakis & Hickel