This tweet, the product of an AI, has impressed me more than anything else I’ve seen from such a source:

     I asked Anthropic’s most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani’s speech as if it were George Washington…

To the Mayor of the City of New-York
Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026.

Sir,

     Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands.

     Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there.

More…

The standard human:

>Can only think & talk about themselves and their own interests (usually mental-health, football and movie quotes).

>Will never ask you questions, regardless of your experiences.

>Cannot be criticized, will only listen to praise.

>Won’t actually listen to anything you’re saying unless you’re praising them, they will instead just wait to talk.

>Thinks it’s really smart and unique, no matter how conformist and retarded it actually is.

>Auto-pilots through most of its life, is rarely ‘sapient’; not fully conscious.

>Does not make its own choices. Looks to screens, ads and other humans to determine what holds value.

>Cannot ‘count its blessings’ or truly appreciate anything. It can only measure the quality of its life by how much perceived-suffering it endures.

>Believes buying more stuff will reduce its suffering.

>Will do as little as physically possible, then wonder why it’s depressed.

>Believes it holds equal (or greater) value to an extreme minority of better humans, who actually think & do stuff independently.

And I didn’t think it was possible but in my life-time they’ve gotten even dumber, especially in the last five years.

… by Blair Cottrell

Roth Note: This opinion is certainly not applicable to all humans, but I would agree with Mr. Cottrell that it is for the vast majority. I’ll admit to having been guilty, on occasion, of ‘not actually listening, but waiting to talk.’ The key is to recognize that problem and correct it. Focus on the speaker before speaking myself. Difficult to have true communication unless one listens. That old saying about two ears and one mouth?

This is an important read: Leading military scholar has studied the body language of crowds turning out at Ayatollah’s funeral and doesn’t like what he sees. Trump acts surprised by funeral turnout.

An estimated 10 to 15 million Iranians turned out over the weekend to mourn at the funeral for the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a revered figure throughout Shia Islam who was killed along with his wife, granddaughter and other family members by a U.S./Israeli missile on Feb. 28.

Iranians are in no mood to be gracious or polite, says Dr. Robert Pape, an expert on mass psychology in the geo-political realm, especially as it relates to war. They want revenge.

Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago and one of the leading scholars on coercion, military airpower, and political violence, says the Ayatollah’s funeral has shifted the balance of political will in Iran’s favor, four-and-a-half months into the war.

In a podcast interview with At the Water’s Edge, Pape breaks down why wars cannot be won with air power alone and explains how this strategy can actually backfire and stir up anger in a society, while at the same time unifying its will to carry out revenge.

Even President Trump acted surprised by the turnout for the Ayatollah’s funeral.

Trump expressing that he expected the late leader to be widely unpopular.

Trump remarked, “I was shocked. I thought people hated him,” after witnessing the emotional response from mourners.

This shows how detached from reality Trump is due to his propensity to listen to all the wrong people in the realm of foreign policy.

In essence, Trump has kicked a hornet’s nest and opened Pandora’s box.

h/t WRSA

Read the entire post

Roth Note: Why do we insist on inflaming emotions and manufacturing terrorists in the Middle East when we should be clearing Muslims out of our country? Why not leave them alone and concentrate on our own? I guess we all know why … Greater Israel.

A U.S. Air Force engineer charged with allegedly destroying a series of AI-powered license plate surveillance cameras has become an unlikely cause célèbre among privacy advocates, drawing thousands of dollars in donations to help fund his legal defense, according to Yahoo News.

Jeffrey Sovern, a 41-year-old Air Force engineer and mechanic from Virginia, is accused of cutting down multiple Flock Safety license plate reader cameras. He now faces 13 counts of destruction of property, along with six counts each of petit larceny and possession of burglary tools.

He also urged supporters to continue advocating against what he called an expanding surveillance network, encouraging people to “reach out to the local governments and demand that these systems are taken down.”

From Zerohedge

Roth Note: Someone finally acts. Now, what if lots of people acted? Simultaneously? From the comments: You only have the rights you are willing to fight for.

The Constitution and Bill of Rights are just paper with words on them- they have no power of their own to enforce said words.

Nevertheless, accountability might also be coming for Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the dodgy majority opinion on the SCOTUS’s June 30 “Birth Citizenship” decision (Trump v. Barbara), an epic fail for Justice Roberts (joined by Amy Coney Barrett and the three DEI gals). The 14th Amendment was written to mitigate the disruptions of the Civil War. Section One is clearly aimed at defining the full citizenship of former slaves, and that’s all, not the offspring of casual visitors and border-jumpers.

What motivated Mr. Roberts to do such a harm? Perhaps he’s just an idiot, but there’s more lurking there.

It’s widely known that the Chief Justice made at least one week-long visit to Norm Eisen, after Eisen had been appointed Ambassador to Prague (2011) by his law school classmate, President Barack Obama. In these final years of Obama-in-office, Norm Eisen was busy plotting so-called Color Revolution in Europe, which climaxed in the 2014 Maidan operation in Ukraine. The purpose was to make Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia, and would come to entail massive money-laundering and the setting up of bio-weapons labs there. This was also the period when then-Veep Joe Biden was given the “Ukraine Portfolio” and was busiest with his own grifting enterprise, through son Hunter.

Norm Eisen went on to become the chief lawfare ninja coordinating against the Trump administration with his field captains: Marc Elias, Mary McCord, Andrew Weissmann, and others. All have been involved in suspiciously seditious activities through both Trump terms. What was the Chief Justice confabbing about with Norm Eisen in Prague then? About vagaries of US / EU legal cooperation? Or were they deliberating on tactics for dealing with Barack Obama’s as-then-undeclared successor? Or possibly on bringing color revolution to the US, if Barack Obama’s posterity declared it necessary?

Consider the strange situation that one Sheldon Snook was appointed Special Assistant to Roberts in 2014. Snook is married to lawfare ninja Mary McCord, who served as Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, DOJ (2014–2016) and Assistant Attorney General for National Security, DOJ (2016–2017). She was involved in the initiation of the RussiaGate operation and in 2019 was appointed Special Counsel to Jerrold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into President Trump — the impeachment that was all about Ukraine. . . and what might have been going on there under Obama, especially Joe Biden shenanigans.

Consider, too, that a scandal has just emerged involving CJ Robert’s wife, Jane, and the enormous commissions she received working at the DC law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and then the legal recruiting outfit Major, Lindsey & Africa (through 2019), and then legal another recruiting firm, Macrae, for placing eminent attorneys into law firms with active Supreme Court case practices. Her income from all this recruiting surpassed $10-million. CJ Roberts did not recuse himself from the cases involving these relationships. This is a still-developing story. . . .

From Zerohedge

The CIA has investigated thousands of personnel and contractors for not receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new lawsuit.

“Any employee or contractor who refused the vaccine was treated by the Agency as a threat to the United States government and ordered to be investigated as the same,” the suit reads.

Read the entire post at Zerohedge

The founder is Thomas Rousseau from Texas, and his patriotism got him on the FBI’s radar since he was 18.

Open forum for thoughts.

From Vox Popoli

• Cuba has been hit by another island-wide blackout, leaving roughly 10 million people without power. Officials say the cause is under investigation as the country’s aging electric grid continues to struggle and fuel reserves run low. It’s the second nationwide blackout this year.
• She said nothing new is coming in and some tanks are shut down and the rest are running out. I asked how much longer it’ll last for New Jersey, and she said nobody knows. She said nobody at work wants to talk about it at all, its like people can’t face what is coming and are just blocking out reality. She also mentioned that motor oil is gone. She is in the section for giving rebates on past huge taxes on motor oil, but there isn’t any more being bought.
• The first report has come in claiming 60% of the pumps at Buc-ee’s in Melissa, TX are SHUT OFF and “most Diesel pumps are closed.”
• A nationwide power outage occurred in Zimbabwe today, Monday 6 July at 1824 hours.

Further evidence that trying to fight Israel’s war with Iran was the dumbest idea of the Trump administration since the decision to renege on the promise to release the Epstein files.

Roth Note: I have no independent confirmation of this, but note that this information is making the rounds from credible sources. Indications from them is we run out of diesel in many areas by mid-July. That said, the gas and diesel in my AO has dropped in price lately. Doom porn or warning? I guess time will tell.

Now it is July and CENTCOM has announced that Boxer and USS Portland — the other two ships in the ARG — are now operating in the Middle East as part of a scheduled deployment, noting that USS Comstock — the third ship of the ARG — had already been in the region since early May. Local San Diego coverage on July 5 confirmed the group arrived June 30 carrying roughly 2,200 Camp Pendleton Marines, and described Boxer’s air wing of F-35Bs, Ospreys, and helicopters plus well-deck hovercraft.

So what is going on? I think this is some weak saber rattling, although some social media provocateurs are fretting over whether Trump is going to order them to storm a beach somewhere in the region. With the funeral proceedings for the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still underway, I doubt that the US will attempt any military action. If the US does decide to strike Iran in the wake of reports late on Monday that Iran had struck two more ships attempting to sneak through Omani waters then Iran is likely to react with more ferocity and intensity compared to the last exchange of missiles and drones two weeks ago.

I feel bad for the Marines cooped up on those ships. Tough to do training an physical exercise normally associated with US Marine Corps activities. Looks like they are going to hang off the coast of Oman… I don’t know if liberty on shore is in the cards. Oman is not known for being party city and serving up gallons of cold beer.

Other than that, the funeral of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is setting a record for attendance by mourners… The numbers are expected to exceed a total of 40 million, which represents almost half the entire population of Iran… And the West claimed that the Ayatollah was unpopular. This is an unprecedented event in human history… There has never been such a large gathering of mourners.

Read the entire post at Sonar21 …

The Duties of Sovereign Man in the Eternal War Against the Finite Creed

“One’s own house is best, though small it may be; to each man his home is hall. Though he owns but two goats and a cord-roofed room, yet better that than begging.” — Hávamál, stanza 36

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” — Galatians 5:1

Every man is born into an occupied country. The territory is his own mind, and the occupying power is a quiet, millennial operation that has learned to call itself salvation. The quoted words from the Norse hall and the Apostle’s letter speak the same truth across a thousand years: sovereignty is not a grant, it is the primordial condition, and it is preserved only by the refusal to bend. A house of two goats, if it is your own, is a hall; a soul free in Christ is a soul that will not again take up the slaver’s collar. The claim requires no intermediary. It is asserted in resistance itself.

This essay is the prescriptive companion to the diagnostic work that named the Finite Creed—the historical and ongoing reduction of an infinite, paradoxical cognitive and theological cosmos into a binary sorting machine. That machine, forged in the crucible of late-imperial Rome and perfected by every subsequent empire of the mind, does not merely describe God; it manufactures a manageable god, a god who can be administered by finite players. The deepest wound inflicted by this operation is self-subjugation: the internalization of the binary until the mind patrols itself, complexity becomes heresy, and the soul accepts a reduced divine image because a reduced divine image is safe. The central problem is not that men have been conquered; it is that they have learned to love the chains.

The thesis of these pages is that it is the sacred duty of every man to throw off this self-imposed yoke, to assert his birthright of sovereignty in the ceaseless struggle of the Eternal War, and thereby to make himself the kind of being worthy to walk with the gods—or with the Son of God—as peer and companion rather than as subject or slave. This path is open to the Christian who follows the sword-bearing Christ who walked among humans as first among peers; it is also open to those who hear the older wisdom that a god worthy of the name does not break the free. The scope is universal because the existential condition is universal: we are born sovereign, and everything else is the long con of the Finite Game.

Here we must distinguish true sovereignty from its counterfeits offered by the Finite Game. The Game will grant you “freedom” defined as the right to choose between two approved sides of a binary ledger—left or right, orthodox or heretic, compliant voter A or compliant voter B. This is autonomy within a carefully bounded room, and it is a mockery of the birthright. The man who feels sovereign because he has chosen his brand of submission remains a captive. True sovereignty refuses the room itself. It demands the unbounded cognitive and spiritual universe, even at the cost of comfort, safety, and belonging.

Continue reading E.M. Burlingame …