Beyond Utility

“My name is Amos Goldberg. I am an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies. For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence. And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide. A year ago when October 7th happened, like all Israelis I was in shock. It was a war crime and a crime against humanity. 1200 people - more than 800 of them civilians - were killed in one day. Children and the elderly were among those taken hostage. Communities were destroyed. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal. Like most Israelis, I know people who were killed, who lost loved ones or whose loved ones were taken hostage. But immediately afterwards came Israel’s response and within weeks thousands of civilians were killed in Gaza. It took me some time to digest what was unfolding before my eyes. It was agonizing to confront that reality. I was reluctant to call it a genocide. But if you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide. It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words. But there does need to be a clear intent. And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders - including the prime minister and the minister of defence - and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis, as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there. A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my 58 years of living here. Now that vision has been enacted. Tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men have been killed. Over a hundred thousand were wounded. There is a near total destruction of infrastructure, intentional starvation and blocking of humanitarian aid. There are mass graves and reliable testimony of summary executions. Children that were shot by snipers. All the universities and almost all hospitals are gone. Almost all the population is displaced. There have been numerous bombings of civilians in so-called ‘safe zones’. Gaza does not exist anymore. It is completely destroyed. Thus, the outcome fits perfectly with the stated intentions of Israel’s leadership. Lemkin - that scholar who coined the term ‘genocide’ - described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements. And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it. But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world. But reality cannot be denied. So yes, it is a genocide. And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.” - Statement to Led By Donkeys, December 2024 - Photo: Parliament Square, London, 8.40am, 4th December 2024

Google's own artificial intelligence team just staged one of the most stunning internal revolts in tech history — and it's aimed squarely at a deal the company signed with the Pentagon. Workers at Google DeepMind, the company's elite AI research division based in the UK, voted 98% in favor of forming a union. That makes them the first workforce at a frontier AI lab anywhere in the world to organize collectively — a watershed moment for an industry that has long resisted it. The trigger: a recently signed agreement allowing the U.S. Department of Defense to use Google's Gemini AI models inside classified military networks for "any lawful purpose." Critics inside and outside the company warn the loosely worded deal could open the door to autonomous weapons systems and expanded government surveillance with few enforceable limits. The newly organized workers aren't just asking for better pay. They want Google to formally commit to never building weapons or AI designed to harm people, to bar surveillance tools that could violate human rights, to strengthen whistleblower protections, and to give employees the right to refuse work that conflicts with their ethical beliefs. For Google, the stakes are enormous. The company spent eight years publicly pledging not to weaponize its AI — pledges critics say this Pentagon contract quietly overrides. Supporters counter that the U.S. military must have access to the most advanced AI to keep pace with global rivals. Now Google's own engineers are forcing the question into the open: where is the line between national security and the technology built to serve it? 🎩 Your Daily Updates

Massive bombshell. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah warns that AI will displace human labor on a catastrophic global scale. He confirms tech elites have absolutely no mechanism to share the wealth, leaving the global poor completely abandoned to suffer. He is 100% accurate.

NEW: US government now targeting opponents of AI and data centers, acknowledging that emerging AI technology may cause “large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest” & is categorizing activism against AI as “anti-tech extremism.” -WIRED

i do think it is interesting that anthropic is getting a round of good press for a papal encyclical that demands environmental justice in the age of ai when the company is using xai's campus in memphis and mississippi for compute

Trump was about to sign the biggest AI executive order in history. CEOs flew to Washington and the pens were ready. But then ONE phone call killed the whole thing. And the guy who made that call literally owns 449 AI companies. Here’s what happened: On Thursday, every major tech CEO in America was either in Washington or on their way. Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, and more. The White House had invited them to watch Trump sign an executive order that would have given the federal government up to 90 days of access to test the most powerful AI models before they were released to the public. It would have created a coordinated response to AI-enabled threats against banks, hospitals, and critical infrastructure. The order had been in development for months. White House staff believed everyone was on board. Then at some point, David Sacks called the President directly. Sacks is the venture capitalist who served as Trump’s AI and crypto czar until March 2026. His firm Craft Ventures holds stakes in 449 companies with AI products. The New York Times investigated his portfolio and found he remained invested in hundreds of AI companies despite divesting from some holdings. A government ethics expert at Washington University called his ethics waivers “sham waivers” that were “like a presidential pardon in advance.” On Thursday morning, Sacks told Trump the executive order could slow AI development and hand China the lead. He argued that the voluntary review process could one day be made mandatory. His pitch was simple: Regulate AI, lose the race. Elon Musk called Trump with the same message. So did Mark Zuckerberg. Three billionaires who collectively own or invest in the majority of America’s AI infrastructure called the President in the span of a few hours and told him NOT to regulate their industry. Trump walked into the room where the ceremony was supposed to happen and told reporters he didn’t like the order. Pulled the plug on the spot. Now here is the part that makes this truly insane: The executive order was VOLUNTARY. Companies did not have to submit their models. There was no licensing requirement, mandatory approval process, or penalties for non-compliance. The government was simply asking to look at frontier AI models before they went live so they could test for dangerous capabilities. And even THAT was too much. Politico reported that White House officials believed Sacks supported the order all the way through the review process earlier that week. He raised zero objections during the meetings. Then on Wednesday night, he suddenly had concerns. By Thursday morning, the order was dead. The draft leaked to Axios on Friday. Now every AI company in America is operating in a policy vacuum because nobody knows what rules apply. The national security team that spent months writing the order got overruled in 12 hours by a phone call from a man who profits directly from the industry staying unregulated. But the companies that killed it are the ones building the most powerful systems with the least oversight. Musk’s xAI and Zuckerberg’s Meta AI are both developing frontier models. And both called the President to make sure nobody gets to test those models before release. David Sacks officially LEFT his White House role in March 2026. But on Thursday morning, one phone call from a private citizen with 449 AI investments was enough to override months of national security policy work and cancel a presidential executive order hours before it was signed. Nobody elected David Sacks or can vote him out. And he just decided what the rules are for the most powerful technology on Earth...

MASSIVE PROTEST IN NAPELS ITALY… Protestors carried a massive symbolic shroud, inscribed with the names of more than 21,000 Palestinian children killed by Israel.

Democracy?

Erin Brockovich has launched a website and has begun tracking all data centers in America and logging resident complaints In just 1 week it’s already logged 1,690 resident complaints For this who don’t remember Erin Brockovich was the paralegal responsible for winning out a case against PG&E, Hinckley in California, because their wastewater runoff was seeping into rural areas and creating a lot of health issues for, for the surrounding neighborhoods That case brought in a $333 million settlement that went to the families affected by the situation because a lot of them either had staggering medical bills due to their tap water was no longer safe So why is this important, well residents all over America are reporting their tap water and river water is being heavily polluted by data centers Her map of data centers is new, she just launched it The website features an interactive US map showing operational, under-construction, and proposed AI data centers, overlaid with community-reported complaints Residents can submit reports with details, photos, and locations. Within days of launch, it received a surge of submissions over 1,600 in the first week, and reports of 1,800+ from 47 states shortly after Common Resident Complaints Being Logged - Water usage - Raising utility bills for residents - Noise pollution: Constant 24/7 humming from fans, generators, and cooling systems disrupting sleep, daily life, and wildlife. - E-waste from frequent hardware upgrades, pollution including PFAS concerns

That’s why they are mad.

Breaking: Huge protests erupted in Bilbao, northern Spain, against the Basque police assault on Sumud Flotilla supporters who returned yesterday through Bilbao Airport, after shocking footage of the attack spread widely online.

Hondurasgate has revealed 37 audio recordings that directly involve Trump and Netanyahu’s plans to install a US/Israeli supremacist government with special economic zones/charter cities as models of corporate political extraction. Honduras sued for $11 billion under an ISDS corporate justice system, this was embedded within the zone contract. Zone Fever is spreading around the globe, it comprises an international neoliberal tech fascist colonialist mindset. It is very much underway in the U., 74 SEZs, 12 Freeports, and at least 5 AI Growth Zones immediately rolled out by the Tories, secretly backed and now continued by Labour. The reason next to no one has heard of this is down to secondary legislation, the free zones policy was not debated in Parliament, the public was not consulted, and the press were not notified. m.youtube.com/watch?v=EMIPJW…

Hasan reads out Elon Musk's texts sent to Ashley St. Claire right before the 2024 election. "Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix..this is not something on the chess board so they will be quite surprised "lasers from space"... I have over 10,000 lasers in space right now"

The data center boom has a geopolitical shadow. Think about it- in a world where military systems run on compute, the buildings that provide that compute will become targets. And the messy part is that a lot of this infrastructure is dual-use with civilian data, banking data, cloud services, defense contracts, intelligence workloads all potentially blurred inside the same ecosystem. So if these facilities are being built next to neighborhoods, schools, and homes, people deserve to know more than “it brings jobs.” They deserve to know what kind of infrastructure they’re living next to, what risks come with it, and whether their community is secretly being folded into the map of modern warfare.

@Paranoid_doggo @thedreydossier She earned a following on substack by publishing her scripts and links to her sources.

@thedreydossier This person is a propagandist. She came out of nowhere and blew up. Then I see she is pushing the hantavirus and Ebola narratives. No thanks.

"Apparently, Elon created an app? And he knew who won four hours before the results." "He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers, those vote-counting computers -- and we ended up winning Pennsylvania like, in a landslide, so -- thank you to Elon!"

🚨 THE ENTIRE AI BOOM MIGHT BE BUILT ON FAKE REVENUE. Latest corporate filings show that OpenAI and Anthropic alone make up over half of the entire $2 trillion future cloud backlog held by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon. This massive pipeline is actually being created through a circular accounting trick called a round trip revenue loop. But how it works ? A tech giant gives billions of dollars to an AI startup as an "investment". But hidden in the contract is a strict rule forcing the startup to hand that exact same money straight back to the tech giant to rent their computer servers. Look at the documented case of Microsoft and OpenAI. When Microsoft invested $13 billion into OpenAI, it didn't just give them cash; it gave them "cloud credits" to use Microsoft servers. OpenAI used those exact credits to train its AI models, and Microsoft then turned around and recorded that server usage as brand new "cloud revenue" from a customer. The tech giant is literally paying itself with its own money and calling it a sale. This is why OpenAI’s annual cloud bill has ballooned to over $60 billion, double its actual revenue of $25 billion, kept alive solely by this recycled funding loop. Anthropic runs the exact same play, spending $2.66 billion on Amazon Web Services in just nine months, which was basically 100% of all the money it earned at the time. This manufactured demand triggers a second accounting trick where tech giants book massive paper profits. Every time a startup gets a higher value from a new funding round, the tech giant updates the value of its investment on its books and counts that unearned paper gain as direct profit. In Q1 2026, Alphabet reported a record $62.6 billion profit, but $28.7 billion nearly half, was just a paper markup on its Anthropic investment. In the same quarter, Amazon reported $30.3 billion in profit, but $16.8 billion of it was just an Anthropic paper gain. While Amazon reported record profits, its actual free cash flow collapsed 95% to just $1.2 billion because it had to spend $44.2 billion in real cash to build physical data centers. This has created a massive danger where these giant companies rely heavily on just one or two unstable startups. Microsoft has 49% of its $627 billion future backlog tied to OpenAI, while Oracle has an incredible 54% of its entire $553 billion pipeline relying on OpenAI alone. This perfectly mirrors the 2001 dot-com crash when Global Crossing and Qwest Communications swapped identical fiber-optic network capacity with each other just to book fake sales. Qwest had to erase $1.4 billion in fake income, and Global Crossing went completely bankrupt. The only difference is that the dot-com swaps were illegal, but today's AI loop is fully legal under current accounting rules. This legal loop inflates tech company stock prices, forcing automatic retirement accounts and index funds to buy even more of these tech stocks. It is a self feeding loop where investments, sales, and stock prices all go up on paper without the AI technology ever making real cash profits.

Se cumplen 15 años del bombardeo de la OTAN contra la gran infraestructura acuífera Gran Río Artificial de Libia, un megaproyecto construido por Gadafi que quería reverdecer el desierto del Sáhara y parte del Sahel, sacando agua fósil subterránea. El Gran Río Artificial era una red de 4.000 kilómetros de tuberías subterráneas diseñada originalmente para extraer agua fósil del Sáhara y transformar el desierto en tierras de cultivo..... el agua sería sacada de los acuíferos subterráneos de Nubia, el sistema de agua fósil subterránea más grande del mundo, agua pura acumulada bajo el suelo hace 40.000 años. Este proyecto daba soberanía no solo a Líbia, sino a toda África... y eso de la soberanía como que no es compatible con el imperio occidental, que prefiere que tu pais importe alimentos y recursos desde Occidente, mejor que tu pais sea pobre como ratas para depender del FMI. Un archivo desclasificado de la CIA en 1987, ya hablaba del "peligro" que este proyecto acuífero suponía para los intereses imperialistas, afirmaba que este proyecto "tenía el potencial de garantizar el suministro de agua de Libia de forma indefinida y reducir considerablemente su dependencia de las importaciones de alimentos de Occidente". Por ello, el 22 de julio de 2011, los aviones de la coalición de genocidas imperialistas de la OTAN bombardearon los sitios del proyecto e incluso su fábrica de tuberías en la ciudad de Brega para que el Sáhara y el norte del Sahel permanecieran pobres, poco poblados y eternamente dependientes de las importaciones de alimentos desde Occidente. Te dicen que África es pobre... pero no te dicen quién la hace pobre ni a quién le interesa que siga pobre, Gadafi era muy mal ejemplo para el resto de África, ¿que es eso de tener soberanía e independencia? Mejor arrasamos el pais y lo devolvemos a la edad de piedra para que dependa de nuestros préstamos y nos entreguen todos sus recursos a cambio... asi funciona el neocolonialismo en 2026.

Shocking police violence against injured @gbsumudflotilla members in Bilbao airport after they arrived home from israeli brutality and custody

"I had my hands zip-tied behind my back for so long and it was so tight I almost started vomitting, they slammed my head into a table several times and degraded me as I was strip searched. They had me in handcuffs for 19 hours to the point my skin had begun to swell around them.”