James Raftery

5 minutes before Trump’s announcement: * $1.5B notional worth of S&P500 (ES) futures are bought in a single clip. * $192M notional of oil futures (CL) sold. More than 4x-6x any other trade size during the market close. Insiders profited from his lies in broad daylight!

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Iran: Today more than ever, it is essential to remember that one can be against a hateful regime, as is the case with the Iranian regime, as is the whole of Spanish society, and at the same time be against an unjustified, dangerous military intervention outside of international law. That one must be against a war initiated without the authorization of the United States Congress or the United Nations Security Council and, as I have said before, one that violates international law. And that there is always room for a negotiated solution, instead of being dragged along by the devastation of arms as the only possible way out. Therefore, I would like once again, as we have done since the beginning, to appeal for immediate de-escalation, for full respect for international law in all the conflicts we are unfortunately suffering, and for the urgency of resuming dialogue as soon as possible. That is where Spain will be, and that is where I believe the whole of the European Union should be.

Multiculturalism has utterly failed. Britain is sadly losing its grip of our cultural heritage, traditions, Christian values, sense of history and unity. Too many politicians have shied away from dealing with this crisis of confidence that many millions of British people feel. We need to fix the problems of poor integration.

MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake. Just a few days ago many AI influencers (including Andrej Karpathy) had said that the website was "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff". It wasn't. The "taking over humanity" posts were human-generated. The top downloads were mal-ware (human generated). It was a phishing website dressed up in AI hype. If you are worried about AI taking over the world in a few years, please don't. There is no research basis for that opinion. Antrophic and OpenAI want you to beleive that they are just months away from AGI. Because it results in free marketing, boosting their stock value. Stay skeptical, stay safe :)

Fun fact: The 1998 paper that introduced Google and PageRank to the world ends with this acknowledgment: "Supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306. Funding also provided by DARPA and NASA." Sergey Brin was on an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Larry Page was a PhD student on the grant. Google—now worth $2 trillion—exists because American taxpayers funded "the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project." Not a startup garage myth. A government grant. Every time someone says public research funding "picks winners and losers" or "crowds out private innovation," remember: the most dominant technology company of the 21st century was incubated entirely with public money, inside a public university, by researchers on federal fellowships and grants. The private sector didn't see it coming. VCs passed. The government funded it anyway—not because it would become Google, but because fundamental research into information retrieval seemed worth understanding. That's the point. You can't predict which grants will change the world. You fund the science and let researchers explore. The internet (DARPA). GPS (DoD). Touchscreens (CIA/NSF). mRNA vaccines (NIH). Google (NSF/DARPA/NASA). Public investment in basic research isn't wasteful spending. It's the seed corn of the entire modern economy.