by B. R. GOWANI

In the 1990s, I met a person in the Bay Area whom I knew from back home. A successful businessman, he showed me his business card and pointed with an emphasis at the word “President” on the card.

He then asked me to help him in setting up an NGO which would fight for the rights of children in South Asia working for multinational companies for just a pittance.

I declined for two reasons: I had no knowledge of how to set up an NGO and the person wanted to make money out of that project.

I would have easily overcome the first hurdle through conducting research and getting in touch with some people I knew who were associated with NGOs but for the second reason I didn’t pursue the matter.

The gist of the above story is that there are people who feel good when they see their names on top of the hierarchy while enabling them to mint money through that powerful position.

Our Dear Leader Donald John Trump is one of those leaders who loves to be on top with his name embossed on every monument and what not.

As a humble subject of His Global Emperor, I hereby recommend that every country, ocean, galaxy, star, airport, center, and so on should bear our Dear Leader’s name.

Here are some examples:

Trumpverse
Trumpgalaxies
Trumpstars
Trumpsun
Trumplanets
Trumpearth
Trumoon
Trumoceans,
Trumountains
Trumpnited States
Trumuseums
Trumaccounts
TrumStations
Trumairports
…
Trumpezuela
Trumpada
Trumpeenland
Trumpvarsha
Trumpirates
Trumpkistan
Trumpenya
…

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by MARTINA MONEKE

The name Homo sapiens—Latin for “wise man”—has always carried an air of self-congratulation. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, coined the term in 1758, confident that his species stood apart by virtue of intelligence and reason. But what if wisdom, properly defined as the capacity to act with foresight and moral restraint, has proven not to be humanity’s defining trait but its greatest delusion? In an era of mass extinction, climate collapse, and ecological disintegration—each driven by our own actions—perhaps it is time to set the record straight.

The species that burns its own home for temporary comfort, poisons its water for profit, and annihilates the other inhabitants of its shared planet for convenience should no longer be known as Homo sapiens. The more fitting name is Homo stultus—“foolish man.”

Our folly is not merely in error, but in pattern. Every major technological triumph has been followed by an ecological tragedy. The Industrial Revolution, heralded as the dawn of modernity, unleashed the carbon age that now suffocates our atmosphere. The Green Revolution, celebrated for ending hunger, saturated the planet’s soil and water with synthetic poisons. The Digital Revolution, promising connection and enlightenment, has given rise to surveillance capitalism and vast amounts of e-waste. We create miracles, but cannot master moderation.

Unlike the natural systems we disrupt, our civilization is not circular but linear: it extracts, exploits, exhausts, and discards. We treat the Earth as if it were a warehouse of infinite inventory, not a living organism with its own limits. The philosopher Hans Jonas warned in The Imperative of Responsibility (1979) that technological power had outpaced ethical maturity. He advocated for a moral framework that considers the long-term consequences of human actions on the planet’s future. Yet, four decades later, the counsel went unheeded. We continue to act as if tomorrow were someone else’s problem.

Wisdom implies learning from mistakes. But Homo stultus repeats them on a greater scale. Despite decades of scientific consensus on climate change, greenhouse gas emissions hit record highs in 2023. Despite global agreements to protect biodiversity, deforestation and species loss are accelerating. We congratulate ourselves on electric cars while expanding highways. We cheer reforestation projects while razing old-growth forests for palm oil and soy. We recycle plastic bottles, knowing that only a tiny fraction will be reborn.

Our ignorance is willful. It is not that we do not know, but that we prefer not to know. In the words of philosopher Günther Anders, humanity suffers from “apocalyptic blindness”—a refusal to comprehend the full extent of our destructive power. We are like Icarus, wings aflame, marveling at our altitude while plummeting toward the sea.

The root of our folly lies in the myth of human exceptionalism—the belief that we stand apart from and above the natural world. This myth is the theological residue of a species that once believed itself made in the image of a god. It gave rise to the notion of dominion: that Earth and all its creatures exist for our use. The Bible’s command to “subdue the Earth” became the philosophical foundation of extractive capitalism and colonial conquest.

But biology tells another story. We are not lords of creation, but products of evolution—kin to the chimpanzee, cousins to the coral, participants in the web of life we now unravel. As the primatologist Christine Webb argues in her 2025 book The Arrogant Ape, the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence is “systematically rigged in our favor.” For centuries, researchers compared privileged, well-fed human subjects to captive animals deprived of social and environmental richness, using the results to claim our superiority. We design experiments that confirm what we wish to believe: that we are singular, elevated, unique. It is not proof of wisdom, but evidence of vanity.

Even this vanity is learned. Webb notes that children naturally assume agency and feeling in animals until they are “trained out of it.” Anthropocentrism, in other words, is a kind of education—a cultural conditioning that replaces empathy with hierarchy. We begin life sensing kinship and end up defending dominion. Homo stultus’ estrangement from the living world is not instinct but indoctrination, a symptom of modernity’s arrogance.

Z Network for more

by HAZEL GANDHI

Online traders are betting millions on war, airstrikes, and political unrest.

Want to bet on whether the U.S. will attack Iran? An increasing number of people are using Polymarket and similar online prediction markets to gamble on war and other geopolitical events. The payoffs can be thousands, even millions.

These platforms have grown in popularity since the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, which drew significant interest from geopolitical gamblers. Although most online bets are still placed on sports, Polymarket, Kalshi, and other prediction markets have wagers available for a wide range of subjects — from the Oscars to Spotify charts and the potential for another U.S. government shutdown. Polymarket was valued at $8 billion in October, making its 27-year-old CEO, Shayne Coplan, a billionaire. Eighty-seven percent of accounts on the platform incur losses, according to market researcher LayerHub.

At a time of escalating geopolitical tensions, bets have swirled around U.S military action in Venezuela and Greenland, and potential Israeli strikes in Iran. Polymarket’s team creates betting events, while also inviting suggestions on Discord and X. In January, users created 191 new geopolitical events on Polymarket, a 260% increase compared to the same month last year.

…

Iran

Traders have put down large sums of money on potential U.S. and Israeli intervention in Iran, including one market whose volume has ballooned to $155 million as of February 2. The odds of a U.S. strike on Iran have dropped from 65% to 33% since President Donald Trump began hinting at ongoing negotiations with Iran on January 31.

Rest of World for more

by AARON SCHAFFER, WILL OREMUS, NITASHA TIKU

In early 2024, executives at artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic ramped up an ambitious project they sought to keep quiet. “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document unsealed in legal filings last week said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Within about a year, according to the filings, the company had spent tens of millions of dollars to acquire and slice the spines off millions of books, before scanning their pages to feed more knowledge into the AI models behind products such as its popular chatbot Claude.

Details of Project Panama, which have not been previously reported, emerged in more than 4,000 pages of documents in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against Anthropic, which has been valued by investors at $183 billion. The company paid $1.5 billion to settle the case in August but a district judge’s decision last week to unseal a slew of documents in the case more fully revealed Anthropic’s zealous pursuit of books.

The new documents, along with earlier filings in other copyright cases against AI companies, show the lengths to which tech firms such as Anthropic, Meta, Google and OpenAI went to obtain colossal troves of data with which to “train” their software.

The Anthropic case was part of a wave of lawsuits brought against AI companies by authors, artists, photographers and news outlets. Filings in the cases show top tech firms in a frantic, sometimes clandestine race to acquire the collected works of humanity.

Books were viewed by the companies as a crucial prize, the court records show. In a January 2023 document, one Anthropic co-founder theorized that training AI models on books could teach them “how to write well” instead of mimicking “low quality internet speak.” A 2024 email inside Meta described accessing a digital trove of books as “essential” to being competitive with its AI rivals.

But court records suggest the companies didn’t see it as practical to gain direct permission from publishers and authors to use their work. Instead, Anthropic, Meta and other companies found ways to acquire books in bulk without the authors’ knowledge, court filings allege, including by downloading pirated copies.

On several occasions, Meta employees raised concerns in internal messages that downloading a collection of millions of books without permission would violate copyright law. In December 2023, an internal email said the practice had been approved after “escalation to MZ,” an apparent reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to filings in a copyright lawsuit brought by book authors against the company. Meta declined to comment for this story.

In one newly released legal filing, Anthropic disclosed that co-founder Ben Mann personally downloaded a haul of fiction and nonfiction from a “shadow library” of books and other copyright-infringing content called LibGen over an 11-day stretch in June 2021. A screenshot of his web browser included in the filings showed him downloading files with file-sharing software.

A year later, Mann hailed the July 2022 debut of a new website called the Pirate Library Mirror, which claimed to have a massive database of books and had stated that “we deliberately violate the copyright law in most countries.” Mann sent a link to the site to other Anthropic employees with the message, “just in time!!!”

Anthropic said in legal filings that the company never trained a commercial AI model that generated revenue using its LibGen data and never used the Pirate Library Mirror to train any complete AI model.

Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive and music composer who now runs a nonprofit asserting creators’ rights, said the disclosures underscore that AI companies owe creators a greater debt than they’ve paid so far. “We urgently need a reset across the AI industry, such that creatives start being paid fairly for the vital contributions they make,” he said.

Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI are also facing copyright lawsuits from book authors making similar allegations. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

Most of the legal cases against AI companies are still ongoing and James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech, said the questions they raise are still unsettled law. But in two early rulings, judges have found that tech companies’ use of books to train AI models without an author’s or publisher’s permission can be legal under a doctrine in copyright law known as “fair use.”

In June, District Judge William Alsup found that Anthropic was within its rights to use books for training AI models because they process the material in a “transformative” way. He likened the AI training process to teachers “training schoolchildren to write well.” The same month, District Judge Vince Chhabria found in the Meta case that the book authors had failed to show that the company’s AI models could harm sales of their books.

But companies can still get in trouble for how they went about acquiring books. In Anthropic’s case, the book-scanning project passed muster, but the judge found the company might have infringed on authors’ copyright when it downloaded millions of pirated books free before launching Project Panama.

Alsup granted class-action status to authors whose books were included in a pair of shadow libraries — huge troves of digitized books shared online without authorization — that Anthropic had downloaded and stored for future use. Rather than face a trial, the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to publishers and authors without admitting wrongdoing. Authors whose books were downloaded can claim their share of the settlement, estimated to be about $3,000 per title.

“This case has been settled, but the court’s landmark June 2025 ruling remains intact,” Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, said in an email to The Washington Post. “Judge Alsup held that AI training was ‘quintessentially transformative’: Anthropic’s AI models trained on works not to ‘replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different.’ The issue we settled on was about how some materials were acquired, not whether we could use them to develop” AI models.

Washington Post/MSN for more

by ESKANDER SADEGHI-BOROUJERDI

The recent wave of protests in Iran have generated an extraordinary volume of commentary, much of it framed through familiar but misleading scripts. Some cast the unrest as an imminent revolutionary rupture; others as exclusively the product of foreign destabilization; still others as the delayed reckoning of a society finally pushed beyond endurance. Each captures part of the picture, but none adequately explains the dynamics of the present conjuncture. What is unfolding is better understood as the convergence of accumulated social exhaustion, acute distributive shock and a crisis of governance which the Islamic Republic no longer possesses the ideological, bureaucratic or fiscal resources to manage.

The protests have been sustained by a form of negative solidarity: a cross-cutting social coalition that stretches from elements of the rural poor and borderlands to the downwardly mobile middle classes and urban precariat of Tehran and other major cities. What unites them is not so much a shared project as repudiation of the Islamic Republic, and with it decades of failed efforts at structural reform and transformation. Beyond this refusal, however, the contours of a viable alternative remain indeterminate.

The immediate trigger for the protests was fiscal. Budgetary measures advanced under President Masoud Pezeshkian, particularly those affecting exchange rates and import licensing, sharpened pressures within an already distorted currency regime. The impact was felt most immediately among electronics vendors in Tehran’s bazaars, whose livelihoods depend on access to foreign currency and predictable pricing. The new rules soon translated into higher costs, disrupted supply chains and material losses. What transformed this sectoral grievance into a political rupture was the wider economic context. Years of inflation exceeding 40 per cent, with food inflation surpassing 70 per cent, infrastructural decay, water mismanagement, electricity shortages and toxic air pollution had already pushed large sections of Iran’s working and lower-middle classes into chronic insecurity. Since the Twelve-Day War in June the rial has depreciated by roughly 40 percent, and government employees’ wages have fallen by more than 20 per cent in real terms. Long-term socio-economic deterioration has converged with more immediate episodes of fiscal mismanagement. The budget did not create these conditions, but it crystallized a perception that the state protects rent seekers while offloading adjustment costs onto those least able to absorb them. The government’s pledges to provide food vouchers have done little to placate public fury. For decades, the Islamic Republic has pursued a form of authoritarian neoliberalism that has deregulated and precariatized labour while transferring state assets to parastatal organisations – from so-called revolutionary foundations and pension funds to subsidiaries of the Revolutionary Guards – coupled with the imposition of austerity from above. This provided a recipe for mass discontent and recurrent revolt.

NLR for more

by DAVID SWANSON

This was a headline in the New York Times on Tuesday: “With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest: After a century of defending other countries against foreign aggression, the United States is now positioned as an imperial power trying to seize another nation’s land.” Here is a sentence from the article that followed: “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will.”

Setting aside Alaska and Hawaii where, respectively, the people were never asked, and the people had been violently taken over years earlier against the will of most of them, it’s true that straightforward conquest went out of fashion around the time of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which became law 98 years ago. But to state so simply the popular wisdom that the United States has supposedly not seized any land in 100 years, one has to pretend that military bases do not exist. Here’s a small sampling of the problems with believing that lie:

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted in February and March of 1946, and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye. Portions and the entirety of numerous islands were not given freely:

World Beyond War for more

by JAWED NAQVI

Mahatma Gandhi scribbled a short piece of advice in 1948 about ethical decision-making for those in public service.

“Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self will melt away.”

A young journalist put out a video clip last week that should have impressed Gandhiji. Some of the poorest men, women and children have been sleeping in the freezing Delhi winter, covered only with plastic sheets and gunny bags, outside AIIMS, India’s premier hospital. The people include very ill or old patients who have travelled for treatment from Bihar and Uttar.

It’s not that there is no night shelter outside the hospital, but it still leaves around 100 miserable people in the cold while they await their turn to see the doctor or be called for a procedure that could take days or even weeks to begin.

Reports from abroad are equally dismaying. India has never been humiliated like this. Donald Trump is misbehaving with everyone. Everyone is standing up to him, even Europe, but not India. All BRICS countries censured Trump for the military assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president. Brazil is wary of the US because its president has been in prison at America’s behest. Yet it condemned Trump’s assault on neighbouring Venezuela.

South Africa and Russia expressed outrage, and China’s response was priceless. Expressing grave concern over the forcible abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, China said: “Release them at once, stop toppling the government of Venezuela, and resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.” And how did Vishwaguru, who plays host to the BRICS summit this year, respond?

“Recent developments in Venezuela are a matter of deep concern. We are closely monitoring the evolving situation,” the foreign ministry’s statement read. Not naming the US is understandable, given India’s desperate need to have a trade deal with Trump. But “recent developments”? Wasn’t the president of a sovereign country that once supplied oil to India just seized by the US military?

The very least the fractured parties can do is to stop carping at each other publicly.

It’s perplexing at the very least, therefore, that the Indian opposition continues to be in disarray, despite there being every reason for it to take a lesson from Gandhi’s talisman and give a piece of its mind to the government for an abysmal show at home and abroad.

Dawn for more

‘The Philosopher in the Valley’ is the latest book from journalist and author Michael Steinberger, and it explores Palantir and its equally controversial and perplexing CEO, Alex Karp.

Steinberger had unprecedented access to the people behind what he describes as “the most interesting company in the world” that is making warfare “in vogue in tech circles.”

Today, Palantir’s surveillance and data software is used by intelligence agencies, militaries, and corporations, which leads it to be used in areas from finance to immigration and counterterrorism.

Watch the full discussion above to hear how Karp’s U-turn from the democrats towards MAGA is cause for concern not only for people in the US, but across the globe.

Youtube for more

by KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS, ALLISON PARSHALL, FONDA MWANGI, JEFFERY DELVICIO, & ALEX SUGIURA

A dive into how scientists are trying to understand what consciousness is and where it comes from

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” What he was getting at, in part, is that though our senses might deceive us, the act of thinking was proof of our own existence.

But reflect on that sentence again: “I think, therefore I am.”

Who in that short declaration is I?

Scientists call that I, that subjective sense of self, consciousness.

And understanding what consciousness is, how it functions and where it lives in the brain has plagued researchers for generations. I spoke with SciAm’s associate editor Allison Parshall to learn more about the search for consciousness.

So you recently reported a feature in the February issue of Scientific American on consciousness. What kind of sparked your interest in the subject?

Allison Parshall: Well, I studied cognitive science in college, and consciousness is kind of the big question that looms over a lot of neuroscience, whether it’s, like, being addressed head-on or not.

There were these really famous split-brain studies many decades ago [with] people who were having seizures and they would try to address it by cutting, basically, the connections between the two brain hemispheres. And this would result in some really weird things where, like, there was information in your brain that you had but you weren’t conscious of because consciousness was, like, in one side of the brain and not able to access the other.

It’s inherently very interesting, right? It’s, like, the big question of, “How do I have a perspective? How is it that my brain is yielding me having a feeling of being me?” It’s, like, a very philosophical question, so as someone who is interested in cognitive science as a very interdisciplinary field the philosophy of it all was very interesting.

Pierre-Louis: One of the things that I thought was really interesting in your piece is: scientists don’t have a set definition of what consciousness is. But can you describe at kind of a high level what they’re trying to explore when they’re studying consciousness?

Parshall: The English word “consciousness” is a little bit of a mess, so we have to kind of forgive it for that, but it’s referring to a lot of things. I mean, first off, you can just think of it as whether you are conscious or not—like, are you awake or not? Are you—have you been knocked unconscious? Are you, like, blinking? Are you aware?

And then there’s also kind of what you are experiencing while you’re aware, so there’s this sense of subjective first-person perspective that is really kind of the source of a lot of the mystery here. It’s like, “Why is it that, as I’m sitting here, I am seeing through my eyes and having a holistic, unified experience of me as a person, and that is connected to every other state I’ve ever been in, and it’s all kind of this unified stream?”

Scientific American for more