What initially drew me to Amazonia was the tendency of its Indigenous inhabitants to consider the forest and river where they lived as a delicate society populated by beings similar, in crucial respects, to humans. An ecology of persons. This is what led me to Andoque territory in 2018, and why I spent more than a year living with families like Rosa’s. I had set out as an anthropologist seeking to study their notions of power, and how this power is bound up with nonhuman persons – like dolphins. For the Andoque, these beings may wear the bodies of trees, plants, animals and insects, but they have wishes, thoughts, fears and cultural customs like humans do. What would power look like in such a world, I wondered. A deeper interest lay hidden within the word ‘power’ – hidden, back then, even from myself. I longed for a first-hand encounter with something truly powerful: the dangerous web of life and death that makes up the forest; the intricate wisdom of a people attuned to it. I wanted to bask in that power. I wanted to admire it, decipher it, crash against it.

But the world of the Andoque had been battered long before I arrived. Far from the postcard ‘isolated tribe’, they place relations with whites at the centre of their culture. ‘Whites’ is a term that, for them, refers not to skin colour but simply to anyone external to the forest and its ways. These outsiders are closely linked in Andoque mythology with the Caquetá river mouth, as it was from there, where the water meets the main Amazon River, that European merchants first arrived as early as the 17th century.

Given how murky the internal activities of AI labs are and how new the AI industry is, it is unclear whether or to what extent AI labs are currently engaging in RKA. However, the labs have a strong incentive to do so. New data, better models, and new markets will be critical to maintain the stratospheric growth that the market valuations of labs imply. Recent macroeconomic work on AI bubble dynamics helps formalize this pressure: High valuations can be sustained only with high growth and eventually high profits. Given that AI is a “general purpose technology,” there has already been a natural incentive for AI providers to integrate their models into a wide range of industries. The next step is for those providers to expand their market vertically to downstream uses, owning those uses, not merely servicing them.

The industries most vulnerable to RKA are those in which information shared with AI providers directly implicates the industries’ products or services—for instance, software or legal. In such industries, AI usage data from customers could most plausibly be employed to develop competing products or services. For example, employees of an enterprise software company might use AI models to write code or analyze data, disclosing critical information about enterprise software to AI labs. Similarly, in the legal industry, lawyers might employ AI models to execute legal workflows, revealing proprietary legal strategies. And in the financial services industry, AI models might reveal sensitive information about investment strategies. Moreover, if many employees within the same enterprise are using the same AI models simultaneously, the available information, once linked and synthesized, could reveal much more about the enterprise than any single employee has access to.

To make matters worse, there is no reason to think that the laptop-text-based interface for AI will remain predominant. AI startups are already building ambient note-taking devices, integrating agents directly into workflows, and incorporating visual AI into augmented reality products. Further in the future, embedded AI will escalate this effect—for example, deployed industrial robots can be used as data collection devices, extending the threat of RKA to industries like manufacturing, where incumbents may license robots only to have their industrial information appropriated by them. As the possible use-cases for AI expand, so too will the set of information available for acquisition and, thus, so too will the possible targets of vampiric inference. In other words, there may one day be no industry safe from the threat of RKA.

I don't agree with the almost implicit assumption that AI works well and can actually replace a lot of industries and workers... but the broader point of this article is definitely worth taking seriously, the clear incentive structure here is for AI companies to try to escape their collapsing business model by attempting to steal the business model of other companies by vacuuming up all of their data in a business to business contract for AI and then turning it against them.

In all of those years, in addition to a broadly scoped AUMF, Congress failed to clearly distinguish the line between peace and war, appropriating trillions of dollars to spend on rooting out “terror”—a tactic, not an enemy. In other words, it largely rejected law enforcement as the preeminent framework to combat groups abroad that engage in terrorism and invested heavily in an indefinite war posture for the U.S. and its partners. It is possible Congress’s role as authorizer and funder of various forever wars—which continue today—has desensitized it to armed conflict, especially against an alleged “terrorist” enemy—and left it untethered from its human rights obligations.

Both parties have contributed to this shift from peacetime as the norm into a permanent armed conflict mindset against “terrorist” groups. (See various administrations’ expansion of the law to substantiate more killing.) To justify the boat strikes, Trump has asserted that as president he can determine the U.S. is at war with “narco-terrorists” and thus legally is able to target them.

To many Americans who have watched decades of drone strikes against non-state groups the executive branch has described as terrorists and determined the U.S. military can lawfully target, the boat strikes might seem like business as usual. But they are distinct. Notwithstanding the many valid criticisms of the ways in which executive branch lawyers have interpreted the AUMF, the drone strikes against al-Qaeda and its affiliates were at least tethered to that congressional authorization and, generally speaking, part of actual wars. By contrast, Trump’s strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific are no doubt extrajudicial killings. It is lawmakers’ job to know that and speak the truth plainly.

Understanding the distinction is important for several reasons.

...

First, to refute Trump’s attempts at fabricating reality, lawmakers need to appreciate that under international law the existence of a war—which would trigger the law of war and allow the use of lethal force as a first resort between the parties—is a factual matter, not something that can simply be declared. To prove the existence of a war requires a fact-based analysis that, in this case, would mean demonstrating the necessary duration and intensity of a conflict between a state and an organized armed group. Experts have provided thorough analyses on this issue, demonstrating no war exists.

...

Second, lawmakers must be attuned to the fact that misunderstanding the boat strikes as part of a war has wasted valuable time on red herrings when the heart of the matter is simple: All of the boat strikes are murder.

...

Another red herring legislators have fixated on is the Defense Department’s targeting criteria, which, while the details are classified, some senators have noted do not include the requirement of drugs or weapons on the boat. But it is erroneous to provide a contrast between striking boats with drugs or weapons and those without—either way it is murder. Just like it would be murder if a policeman shot someone on the street in the U.S. merely because they were transporting drugs. The Defense Department’s targeting criteria are a distraction; the key message is that all of these strikes are extrajudicial killings.

We are pleased to announce that the Animal History article, “Toward an Animated History of Technology,” by Christian Zumbrägel, has won the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) 2026 Tarr Envirotech Article Prize.

Animal History Co-Lead Editor Daniel Vandersommers says of the prize-winning article, “With astute historiographical reflection and a palpable desire to push the history of technology toward new horizons, Christian has fashioned a must-read essay for any scholar or student interested in how animals and technologies have overlapped across the centuries. “Toward an Animated History of Technology” is a timely and lively read with humbling implications, as well as a great introduction to an entire special issue on animals and the history of technology.”

What happens to the history of technology when we take animals seriously as agents rather than as objects of control? Christian Zumbrägel’s compelling essay answers by proposing an “animated history of technology” — one that treats technological change as the product of dynamic interactions among humans, animals, artifacts, and infrastructures.

—2026 Tarr Envirotech Article Prize Committee

https://online.ucpress.edu/ah/article/2/3/5/218429/Toward-an-Animated-History-of-TechnologyA

Despite having voted more with Trump’s agenda than any other South Carolina Republican, Norman could not compete with the idea that Lindsey Graham’s sister somehow deserved the president’s endorsement more. Don’t think her potential rubber stamp for the military didn’t have a lot to do with that.

Trump told reporters at the Graham rally four days ago that “she’s going to do what the military wants, and really what the president wants.”

What the “military wants”? What the “president wants”? Is that the role of a U.S. Senator representing South Carolina?

*note this article refers to the "Bad Cop War Party", this is not an article about the DNC as the "Good Cop War Party"

RFK is a mass murderer

Video of the attack caused outrage, and deepened concerns after a rise in harassment of Christian clergy and pilgrims by Jewish extremists in the Old City.

The victim, who hit her head on a stone block, suffered a bruised face and leg.

Schreiber, 36, had been charged with assault motivated by hostility towards a religious group.

According to the district psychiatrist's report, Schreiber "was in a psychotic state at the time of the act and is not substantively fit to stand trial".

The prosecution accepted the psychiatrist's opinion and asked for Schreiber to be acquitted and committed to hospital.

This is how a society radicalized into Genocide comprehends and rationalizes acts of violence against minorities.

also see https://eos.org/thelandslideblog/26-august-2026-nepal-and-tibet

and https://www.commondreams.org/news/nepal-flooding

What Chikli followers often miss is that antisemitism and Islamophobia do not compete for a fixed ration of public sympathy.

They are the one prejudice in two coats. Each rests on the same premise that a minority may be judged and feared and shut out for its religion.

So a serious campaign against antisemitism would widen the taboo against demonising anyone at all, because that taboo is the only thing that has ever kept Jews safe.