China's AI Education Experiment

A deep dive.

Pilot schools in China are already using AI to grade children’s artwork, monitor their facial expressions during lectures, and screen them for psychological problems — and the Ministry of Education (MOE) wants schools across the country to follow suit.

Integrating AI into the education system has rapidly become a top priority of the Chinese central government, which is betting that AI tools can eliminate China’s vast educational inequities and make the next generation of workers more productive. The State Council highlighted education as a key area of focus in the “AI+” plan, it received a shout-out in the 15th Five-Year Plan, and in May 2025, the Ministry of Education (MOE) released a white paper on AI for education. This MOE document proclaims that 2025 marks the dawn of an era (“智慧教育元年”), the beginning of a system-wide effort to “intelligentize” 智能化 education using AI tools. The MOE’s goal: universalize basic AI access in primary and secondary schools by 2030. Industry received that signal and responded rapidly, with Alibaba Cloud releasing its own AI+education white paper the following month. But the gap between Beijing’s (and Hangzhou’s) techno-optimism and rural China’s reality is enormous.

This report explores why the Party wants to integrate AI into education, what applications the MOE is most optimistic about, and where the barriers to successful rollout lie. We’ll limit our analysis to K-12 education today, but university AI initiatives will be the focus of our next report in this series!

Institutional History

In official discourse, China is said to have entered a “post-equity era” 后均衡时代 since the MOE announced that all counties had met the baseline quality level for compulsory schooling in 2021. Now, the focus is shifting from access to education to improving the quality of that education. The 14th 5-year plan (2021-2025) prioritized expanding infrastructure in rural schools through the “county-level high school revitalization initiative” (县中振兴), part of which involved equipping classrooms with ‘smart hardware’ such as digitized blackboards. During this period, the party spent significant resources to provide nearly every school with an internet connection.

Still, rural education in China faces serious structural challenges. I spoke with Leo He — a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who did NGO work in rural China from 2019 to 2023 — for a firsthand account of the situation. Every locality, he explained, has designated “elite” schools that talented students from surrounding areas compete to transfer into. The result is a system where “educational resources are systematically sucked up to the center from the periphery, leaving rural areas incredibly depleted.” While this arguably gives academically gifted students opportunities to develop their talents, it deprives most students of educational resources.

According to China’s 2020 census, only 30.6% of the population has ever attended high school (including non-academic vocational secondary school), which Stanford professor Scott Rozelle notes, “is lower than South Africa, lower than Turkey and lower than Mexico.” In 2022, roughly 40% of China’s middle school graduates didn’t go on to attend high school of any kind, and among the students that do continue their education, national policy stipulates that roughly half (“五五分流”) are funneled into non-academic vocational high schools with no path to enter college.

To understand how AI could fit into this picture, we first need to understand the political and economic factors that incentivize Beijing to care about students in the countryside. It’s not clear that more investment in education will translate to high economic growth at this point in China’s development path — the real youth unemployment rate is probably still around 20%, and there are fewer entry-level positions available just as a record number of new graduates enter the workforce. Rather, this is a priority for the Party because improving the education system is so popular.

When Rozelle’s team surveyed 1,800 rural mothers and asked what they wanted their children to aspire to, over 95% said, “I want my child to go to college.” In China, a degree from an elite college doesn’t just translate to higher earnings — it unlocks better healthcare via the hukou system, cushy “iron rice bowl” 铁饭碗 jobs, and above all, social prestige. In 2023, researchers at Stanford found that Chinese families spent an average of 17.1% of their annual household income on education, which amounts to 7.9% of annual household expenditures. (Households in the US and Japan, by comparison, dedicate just 1-2% of annual expenditures to education.) The poorest quartile of families in China devotes a staggering 56.8% of income to education, and education spending is inelastic — that is, it’s prioritized as a necessary expense — across all income levels.

As Andrew Kipnis, the anthropologist who wrote Governing Educational Desire, explained to ChinaTalk, educational reform is a priority for the party “because it’s a way of keeping people happy. If they think there’s some hope their child will attend university, that gives them some investment in the system.” But not every child can become part of the elite: “People who have gone to university won’t work in factories,” as Kipnis put it. No matter how popular it would be, Beijing is not interested in building a system where a college education is available to anyone who wants one. But within this zero-sum system, where anyone who receives an advantage is inherently disadvantaging someone else, the party still needs to make parents feel like their child is getting ahead. Infrastructure is pretty much the perfect tool for this. It makes schools feel luxurious on the ground without changing the fundamentals that make the system so unfair. Shiny new facilities deliver popularity gains immediately, and if your child doesn’t get into university years later, it’s their own damn fault.

Those incentives are shaping the world’s largest AI education experiment. China is not the only country betting that AI will transform education, but the scale and style of China’s ambitions are unmatched globally. While China started with pilot programs, South Korea’s government led with inflexible national-level implementation, spending US$850 million on an ambitious AI textbook initiative that collapsed after just 4 months. India’s edtech ecosystem is private-sector-led with little top-down guidance or regulation, which resulted in the high-profile implosion of Byju’s and a proliferation of predatory practices targeting low-income families. Japan, unlike China, pledged to make sure every student had a device before implementing AI teaching tools.

Ultimately, China stands out globally for the sheer scale of its AI education ambitions — and the scope of applications its edtech industry is targeting for AI integration.

by Lily Ottinger, China Talks |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration (Nature). National Science Foundation.]

You Work For the Bad Boss You Have, Not the Good Boss You Wish You Had

In every job, there is some gap between the advertisement and the reality. The outdoor job boasting “fresh air every day” consists of picking up trash. The service job “perfect for sunny personalities” consists of getting yelled at by angry customers. The day care job that offers “unlimited cuteness” consists of cleaning up poop. This is how it goes. We must all endure some amount of hastily concealed tribulations in order to pay the bills.

Likewise, we must persevere through bad bosses. We must learn to navigate pernicious supervisors, backstabbing managers, and incompetent executives as the price of gainful employment. Good bosses are a stroke of luck, rather than a baseline expectation. If we all limited ourselves to workplaces that were free of bad bosses, it would take ten years to find a job.

Mostly, this is to be expected—an inducement to aspire to a promotion, or to start a union, rather than a catastrophe. But there are some jobs where a bad boss is a bigger deal. There are some jobs where a bad boss can very quickly get you into a genuine moral crisis. If you have a job like that, shrugging off what the bad boss is doing can become not an act of resilience, but one of gross negligence.

The military is one job of this type. There is more moral urgency attached to the military’s conduct of its affairs than to, you know, a restaurant’s conduct of its affairs, due to the fact that the military kills people. There are higher stakes to poor management decisions. If you are a line cook and your boss tells you to cook a dish improperly and you acquiesce for the sake of keeping your job, you can be forgiven. If you are a member of the military and your boss tells you to kill innocent people or bomb their homes or snatch their freedom and you acquiesce for the sake of keeping your job, forgiveness is not so certain. You become not a beleaguered employee, but a true villain. The space that the world is able to afford you as a matter of sympathy for your workplace annoyances shrinks down to almost nothing once guns are involved.

People join the military for all sorts of reasons: For economic opportunity, for adventure, for patriotism, for sheer lack of options. Most soldiers, it is safe to say, believe they are doing something good. Even those who are not ultra-patriots probably believe—and are told, by ads and by supervisors and by TV and by politicians and by the public—that their jobs are, on balance, honorable ones. They do something difficult, and they believe they do something necessary, and they take a certain amount of pride in that, as anyone would.

The school in Iran where we blew up kids.

But the military is a gun in the hand of the Commander in Chief and we have a Commander in Chief who is dumb, narcissistic, unpredictable, and dangerous. The bad boss problem, for soldiers, is everything. It is the difference between being honorable and being the violent foot soldier of a thug. Which situation is closer to reality now, do you think? Being a soldier is not inherently righteous. That is a fairy tale they tell teenagers in order to get them to join the military. The righteousness of an army is wholly dependent on the righteousness of the cause that the army fights for. (Teenagers learn this, too, about other armies in other nations. We are careful never to tell them to apply the principle to the United States itself.) [...]

Here in America, when we are talking about American soldiers, we typically say they are honorable public servants and dismiss any blame for the havoc they wreak. Whereas if we are speaking about other soldiers in other nations, we expect and call for them to be killed by our own soldiers because they are carrying out equivalent duties. I hope I do not have to point out the ethical schizophrenia of this approach.

My purpose is not to demonize members of the military. On the contrary. People who joined an organization with noble intentions, who were told that they were serving the purest interests of their country, are now in the position of being foot soldiers for a gangster-style president who is quite possibly the single biggest threat to peace on earth. It is important that we speak honestly about the fact that these soldiers are in the perilous position of risking their lives in order to carry out villainous goals. That would be a tragedy not only for the victims of American imperial overreach, but also for the American soldiers themselves, who will be cursed to live their lives with the knowledge of what they have done. You may have joined the organization imagining what good it could do with a good boss. But that is not the world you have actually entered. In this world, the world that exists, you are an armed member of a deadly organization run by a bad boss. He has done and will continue to do bad things. And who will have to carry out the bloody acts inherent in those bad things? You will. It’s a bad deal. While you may have come to find yourself in this position through a series of well-intentioned actions, the fact is that the only ethical thing to do is to do your utmost to remove yourself from a job that might ask you to kill, unethically, on behalf of a bastard.

The military is not the only sort of job in this same position today. Many well-intentioned people who went to work in, say, the State Department, or the CDC, or other branches of government may now be faced with a similar moral dilemma.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Images: Getty

[ed. Should be fun telling the grandkids what they did in their career. See also: Digging up the Dead (LRB):]

***

More than a million people have been displaced by Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Lebanon, many fleeing with nothing more than the clothes on their back, camping in the hills or sheltering in schools or municipal buildings. The desire to turn Lebanon into another Gaza, articulated by Israeli spokesmen, is being fulfilled with attacks on journalists, the use of undercover operatives and the bombing of displaced families huddled in makeshift shelters. Familiar too was the timing of the attacks during Ramadan, frequently at iftar when people were about to break their fast.

The attack on the small town of Nabi Chit in the eastern Bekaa Valley on 6 March shows the value placed on human lives by the regime in Israel and its backers in the United States. According to the Israeli government, the invasion was a rescue operation to retrieve the remains of an Israeli airman who disappeared forty years ago. Residents of Nabi Chit and the Lebanese army chief told the BBC that Israeli special forces entered the town ‘disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hizbullah’s Islamic Health Organisation’. They headed to the corner of the graveyard, dug it up but found nothing there. The town fought back, causing the Israeli soldiers to withdraw. To cover their retreat, Israel carried out more than forty airstrikes in five hours, killing 41 people. [...]

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 58 of Gaza’s 62 graveyards have been damaged or destroyed:

the Israeli army carried out a focused operation at al-Batsh Cemetery, east of Gaza City, in January 2026. The cemetery was converted into a military barracks, and more than 700 bodies were exhumed under the pretext of searching for the body of an Israeli detainee. The army later withdrew after extensive bulldozing that radically altered the cemetery’s landscape, preventing families from locating their relatives’ graves.

This was not an isolated event:

in many cases, the Israeli army deliberately exhumed graves and converted cemeteries into military barracks under the pretext of searching for the bodies of Israeli detainees. These actions were carried out without documented, verifiable procedures, independent oversight, or a clear chain of custody and handover process. Israeli forces removed hundreds of bodies from their burial sites, mixed remains, failed to return them to their original locations, and provided no identifying or biological data to enable verification or documentation, making the recovery and identification of remains extremely difficult. [...]

The scope of this policy has been expanded in recent years and upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court. Amira Haas reported in Haaretz last month that Israel was holding the bodies of 776 Palestinians. There are 256 buried in nameless, numbered graves while the rest are held at military morgues. Nearly half were killed since October 2023 and 88 died in Israeli detention. These bodies are sometimes used as bargaining chips in negotiations, although in more recent exchanges many of the bodies have been unrecognisable when returned. There is at least one case of the wrong (long awaited) body being returned to the family.

The grieving are not allowed to grieve, the reunited to celebrate. The repeated disruption of Palestinian funerals and prisoner releases has been bolstered by military orders that proscribe and punish expressions of Palestinian emotion. In February 2025, during a prisoner exchange, the psychotherapist Gwyn Daniels quoted Edward Said, who

chose the word ‘inert’ not descriptively but to conjure up the Zionist fantasy about the ideal Palestinian body. Perhaps for the coloniser, this ideal body should be lifeless or ‘disappeared’. But given the stubborn persistence of Palestinians to remain living on their land, they should preferably cause as little disturbance to the colonisers as possible. Along with no displays of cultural identity, there must be no passion, no pride, no joy, no sorrow, no anger – indeed, no demonstrable emotions that might trouble their oppressors.

Ship of Fools Lost in the Fog of War

Inside Trump's Search for a Way Out of the Iran War

Donald Trump was in the Oval Office during the third week of the Iran war when a group of his most trusted advisers came to deliver some unwelcome news.

His longtime pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had conducted surveys that indicated the war Trump launched was growing increasingly unpopular. Gas prices had surged past $4 per gallon, stock markets had tumbled to multi-year lows, and millions of Americans were preparing to take to the streets in protest. Thirteen American service members had been confirmed killed. Some of Trump’s key public supporters were criticizing a conflict with no clear end in sight. It fell on White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and a small group of aides to tell the President that the longer the war dragged on, the more it would threaten his public support and Republicans’ prospects in November’s midterm elections.

 

For Trump, the stark warning was unsettling. The President has begun many recent mornings watching video clips compiled by military officials of battlefield successes, according to a senior Administration official. He has told advisers that being the commander in chief to eliminate the nuclear threat posed by Iran could be one of his signature achievements. But Wiles, according to two White House sources, was concerned aides were giving the President a rose-colored view of how the war was being perceived domestically, telling Trump what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear. She had urged colleagues, the officials say, to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks.

The meeting reflected a reality the White House can no longer ignore: time is running out before the President, his party, and the American public pay an even steeper price. Trump had promised to revive the economy and keep the U.S. out of foreign conflicts. Now he has started a war he had not gotten a mandate to wage, and the economic pain may only be beginning. A month into the largest oil shock in modern history, global growth forecasts are being slashed, shortages are emerging across Europe and Asia, and energy traders warn the world has yet to feel the full severity of the disruption. A prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that is the primary exit route for oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, could tip the global economy into recession.

The President was left frustrated by the predicament, at odds with some of his own officials, and fuming at the negative impressions of the war. The mounting political and economic toll has left him looking for an off-ramp, according to two advisers and two members of Congress who have spoken to him during the last week. Trump told them he wants to wind down the campaign, wary of a protracted conflict that could hobble Republicans heading into the midterms. At the same time, he wants the operation to be a decisive success. Allies say he is searching for a way to declare victory, halt the fighting, and hope that economic conditions stabilize before the political damage hardens. “There’s a narrow window,” says a senior Administration official, who like others interviewed for this account of Trump at war was granted anonymity to provide candid observations about the President’s thinking. [...]

The Pentagon disputes the account. "The U.S. military is the most advanced, comprehensive, and battle-tested planning organization in the world. Long before Operation Epic Fury launched, we had already anticipated, war-gamed, and fully prepared for every possible Iranian response, from the weakest possible reaction to the most extreme escalation,” Hegseth’s chief spokesman Sean Parnell tells TIME. “Nothing Iran does surprises us. We are ready, we are dominant, and we are winning."

By the Pentagon’s accounting, Operation Epic Fury has been an unambiguous military success, leaving 90% of Iran’s missile capacity degraded or destroyed, roughly 70% of its launchers neutralized, more than 150 naval vessels disabled or destroyed, and Iranian Supreme Ali Khamanei killed, along with many of his top lieutenants. Yet it seems increasingly unlikely Trump will achieve the broader objectives he trumpeted—permanently blocking Tehran’s path to a nuclear weapon, dismantling its ballistic missile program, and replacing the Islamic Republican’s theocratic hardliners with a friendlier regime—on the compressed timeline the White House has embraced. [...]

As preparations for the war began, the Administration believed it had a winning formula. The U.S. would deliver an opening strike so overwhelming Tehran’s only viable response would be limited retaliation—enough to satisfy domestic audiences without inviting more attacks. It was a theory rooted in precedent. When Trump ordered the killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani during his first term, Iran’s response was a missile strike on a U.S. base that caused no casualties and was telegraphed in advance. After Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the retaliation was similarly tempered.

Trump has long favored what aides call “one-and-done” operations. He has launched them in Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. In January, he pulled off the audacious capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, spiriting the autocrat out of the country to face trial in the U.S., and creating room for the ascension of a more compliant partner, acting president Delcy Rodriguez. He then moved to facilitate U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, among the largest in the world. Aides say Trump saw Venezuela as a demonstration that a swift, surgical intervention could topple a hostile regime, install a cooperative replacement, and secure American interests without drawing the nation into an open-ended confrontation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a champion of military aggression against Iran, had a different idea of how things might go. Over the last six months, Netanyahu repeatedly told Trump that the past successes against Iran should serve as a prelude for a more sustained, final campaign, an Israeli official tells TIME. On Feb. 11, Netanyahu came to Washington for a private meeting with the President that stretched for hours. “We’ve come this far, Donald,” Netanyahu told Trump, according to a source present. “We have to finish what we started.” Iran was playing for time, Netanyahu told Trump, and would race toward a bomb in secret. “After they got hit the last time, they thought they had nothing to lose,” says another Israeli official, arguing that Tehran would see the development of nuclear weapons as the only way to prevent such an onslaught from happening again.

The plan of attack was set in motion nearly a month before it was executed, according to two senior U.S. officials. It took weeks of meticulous coordination, much of it conducted in close consultation with Israeli counterparts. When the New York Times published details of the planning of the operation on Feb. 17, Trump exploded at aides, unleashing a string of profanities, according to a senior Administration official. The President then told reporters he would decide on strikes within “10, 15 days,” although he knew the U.S. was planning to attack much sooner. “He was intentionally engaged in public misdirection to protect the mission,” a White House official says.

Trump became wary enough of leaks that some of his own aides were the target of subterfuge. On Feb. 27, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago. Aides assembled in a makeshift Situation Room. Trump bristled at the number of people present. “He thought the group was too big,” one official recalls; it included people Trump didn’t recognize or didn’t feel he knew well enough. At one point, the President snapped that the operation was off. He said he would keep deliberating. This was another head fake: Trump had already made up his mind to attack that very night. Once the room cleared, he called back a smaller, trusted circle—those he wanted beside him as the first bombs fell.

That evening, Trump had dinner on the patio of Mar-a-Lago with a group that included deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Witkoff, and White House counsel David Warrington. Not present was Vice President J.D. Vance, who was in the Situation Room back in Washington. A Trump official says that was a reflection of standard continuity-of-government protocol, which calls for the President and Vice President to be kept apart during sensitive national security operations when both are not at the White House. Of the President’s inner circle, Vance had pushed hardest against the operation, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations. “J.D. really doesn’t like this,” Trump told the group gathered under the Palm Beach stars. “But when the decision is made, it’s a decision, right?”

A White House source says that Vance, in the lead-up to the offensive, laid out what he saw as both the benefits and the risks, adding that “once the President makes the decision, the Vice President stands by him 110%.” (A Vance aide declined to comment.)

Operation Epic Fury began with a sweeping round of strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader. Tehran’s response was expansive: volleys of missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, barrages against Israeli cities, harassment of commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, and coordinated attacks by proxy militias across the region. Hegseth was among those taken aback, says the person familiar with his thinking: “He was expecting the Iranians to fight back in some form. When they started attacking virtually the entire region, it sort of hit him like, ‘Whoa, we’re really in this now.’”

by Eric Cortellessa, Time | Read more:
Image: Missiles launched by Iran over Beersheba in southern Israel, on March 29. Mostafa Alkharouf—Anadolu/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants (NYT):]

***

Kristi Noem is gone. Pam Bondi is out. If there’s going to be a fall guy for our ill-starred regime-change operation in Iran, it’s likely to be Pete Hegseth, whose prewar overconfidence is being highlighted in hostile leaks from inside the administration, emphasizing how he was “caught off guard” (never a good look!) by the scale and boldness of the Iranian response.

The former secretary of homeland security, the jettisoned attorney general and the embattled secretary of defense have often seemed like President Trump’s ideal cabinet officials: selected for televisual looks and energy, lacking any political constituency apart from Trump himself, serving without qualm as pure conduits of his will. So their struggles offer a lesson for Republicans contemplating service in this administration’s 33 (but who’s counting?) remaining months: What Trump appears to want and what he actually wants are not exactly the same thing.

The seeming desire of the president is for loyalty, sycophancy and TV-ready swagger. He wants to turn on Fox News and see his top officials performing like reality-show characters in the drama of his administration. He wants to sit in a cabinet meeting and listen to a litany of his accomplishments. He wants the decisions made in the West Wing or at Mar-a-Lago to be simply rubber-stamped in his departmental fiefs.

He wants all that, but at the same time he also wants victory rather than defeat, and he definitely doesn’t want embarrassment. His metrics for success are unusual by normal presidential standards: He has a high tolerance for unpopularity, to put it mildly, and a remarkable shamelessness around corruption. But there is a point at which, even inside his cocoon, Trump senses that things aren’t going well for him. And then sycophancy doesn’t work, and it doesn’t matter if you were acting on his orders; you will be punished for that unsuccessful service just as surely as if you’d tried to thwart his aims...  when Hegseth reportedly told the president “let’s do it” in the run-up to the war, he was merely being an enthusiastic yes man for a bellicose boss. But there’s no reward for being a loyalist if Trump’s grand plans don’t actually work out: In that case, you own the failure, not him.

Airports Are Too Safe: The Case Against Checkpoint Screening

If you take a plane in New York City, you must first perform a series of rituals. You set aside any liquids you possess, then you remove your shoes. You place your laptop and sometimes your phone into a plastic bin. You take off your belt and sometimes your shoes and place them into a plastic bin as well. You enter a machine that sees through your clothes. Only then may you board your plane.

If you take the subway in New York City, you swipe a card at a faregate and walk onto the train.

Put another way, airports have ‘checkpoint screening’: systematic inspection of every passenger and their belongings before boarding. Subways and rail stations do not.

Once we start thinking about this asymmetry, the stranger it seems. LaGuardia Airport hosted 32.8 million passengers in 2025, which averages roughly to 90,000 per day. Meanwhile, Penn Station processes more than 600,000 riders per day. Despite the fact that Penn Station has more than six times the number of passengers, no one verifies their identity, checks their bags, asks what liquids they are carrying, nor inspects their belts and footwear.

It’s not as if terrorist attacks on railways are unheard of. Madrid’s commuter trains were bombed in 2004, the London Underground in 2005, and Mumbai’s suburban railway in 2006, causing hundreds of deaths. And yet none of these now feature checkpoint screening. Indeed, the absence of checkpoints is regarded as a merit of rail and a demerit of air; there is no debate over just how many hours before one’s trip one should arrive at a rail station. Meanwhile, the USA’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employs over 56,000 people and spends more than $11 billion per year ensuring that no one boards an airplane with an unexamined shampoo bottle.

The asymmetry is so familiar that it barely registers as a choice. It feels like a law of nature: air travellers are screened but rail travellers are not. But it is a choice we’ve made, and the fact of that choice permits only two conclusions: either rail security is unconscionably negligent, or aviation security is irrationally excessive.

Our behaviour reveals which we actually believe.

A History of Violence

In the early days of commercial aviation there was no security at all. For a taste, watch Bullitt (1968) or Airport (1970), where it’s taken for granted that one can carry guns and bombs through terminals, onto the tarmac, or into aircraft without any mechanism for authorities to stop it, or even notice.

Those portrayals fall squarely within the so-called Golden Age of Hijacking, which began in 1961 when Antulio Ortiz, a passenger on a flight from Miami to Key West, threatened the pilot with a gun and demanded to be flown to Cuba. His was the first of 159 hijackings over the next ten years. After a 1972 incident where hijackers threatened to crash a plane into a nuclear reactor, in January 1973 the Federal Aviation Administration finally mandated that every passenger and their carry-on bag be inspected for weapons. Metal detectors appeared at airports that year.

The 1973 system had a clear purpose: prevent hijackers from bringing weapons aboard. Metal detectors caught guns and knives and, in principle, explosives carried by passengers, while X-ray machines did the same for carry-on luggage. This physical system to deal with hijacking complemented the social system, which was to cooperate. Acting on the theory that hijackers wanted hostages, not corpses, the doctrine for crew and passengers alike was to comply rather than resist. Going along with demands bought time for negotiation, which generally ended with surrender, or with the hijackers escaping the plane and being apprehended elsewhere without loss of life to those aboard the airplane.

This system, of metal detectors, X-ray machines, and cooperative passengers, persisted largely unchanged for nearly three decades. It was imperfect, but it addressed a real problem, and it worked reasonably well.

This was the model that the 9/11 attackers exploited. They carried box cutters on board the plane, which were seen as tools rather than weapons and as such were permitted. Once aboard, they relied on passengers and crew behaving passively. Lack of resistance meant they were able to carry out their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Notably, Flight 93 did not carry out such an attack, because the passengers did resist. Having learned, via Airphone, that other captured flights were being deliberately crashed, the passengers on that plane understood their only chance of survival was to fight back. They attempted to overpower their captors, who destroyed the plane rather than lose control of it.

That shift on Flight 93, from compliance to resistance, has turned out to be a permanent psychological change. Richard Reid, the ‘shoe’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2001. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the ‘underwear’ bomber, was subdued by passengers and crew in 2009. In both cases, everyone else on the plane understood that the right move was to restrain the hijacker rather than submit to his demands. This means that one of the two vulnerabilities the 9/11 attackers used is now closed.

The other is closed as well. By April 2003, all commercial aircraft were required to feature hardened cockpit doors. The flight deck is now mechanically isolated from the main cabin, and will remain that way irrespective of what might happen there. To commandeer the aircraft, as the 9/11 terrorists did, now requires breaching that barrier. At a cost of $12,000 to $17,000 per door, plus annual extra fuel costs of $3,000, these doors make it more-or-less impossible for the cockpit to be captured, meaning that, in the future, any attacker’s bad acts will be confined to the cabin.

This means that the specific attack vector that made 9/11 catastrophic, using aircraft as guided missiles against ground targets, is now defended against by layers that don’t depend on checkpoint performance. Cockpit doors provide physical protection. Passengers provide active resistance. The weaponization-of-aircraft scenario requires defeating both. [ed. along with the presence of air marshals].

Despite these changes, checkpoint screening has become ever more elaborate in the post-9/11 era. After Reid’s failed shoe bombing in 2001, passengers were required to remove their shoes for X-ray inspection. After a foiled liquid-explosives plot in 2006, liquids were restricted to containers of 100 millilitres or less. After Abdulmutallab’s failed underwear bombing in 2009, full-body scanners were deployed. Each measure was a reaction to a specific plot. Each remains in place decades later, despite none of these measures having ever demonstrably prevented a subsequent attack.

Indeed the evidence that checkpoint screening catches any threat is weak. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security red-teamed its own screening and found that screeners failed to detect threat items in 67 of 70 tests: a failure rate of 95%. We’re told things are better now, but I’m not aware of any subsequent published test, so there’s no public evidence to support the claim.

So if the 9/11-style vulnerability has been addressed by hardened cockpit doors and changed passenger psychology, what is the marginal security value of the vast post-9/11 checkpoint expansion? The 1973 system screened for guns and knives; perhaps that still serves a purpose. But the layers added since—shoe scanning, liquid restrictions, body scanners—what are they for? [...]

We maintain a regime whose costs are staggering (over $11 billion annually in direct federal spending in the USA, plus equivalent per-capita amounts in other nations, plus hundreds of millions of passenger-hours in queues globally) and whose marginal benefits are undemonstrated.

Let me pause to acknowledge a counter-argument: perhaps aviation checkpoint screening deters terrorists, who shift their attacks to softer targets like rail. The Madrid, London, and Mumbai bombings might be evidence of successful deterrence, with subsequent displacement. But if checkpoint screening merely displaces attacks from aviation to rail, the net security benefit is zero; we’ve spent billions and wasted millions of hours to move the threat from one set of passengers to another… implicitly, a set of passengers we think less deserving of our protection.

And the fundamental point remains: whether those rail attacks were sui generis or displaced from harder targets, they killed hundreds, yet we didn’t impose checkpoints. We revealed our preference.

The Security Ratchet

If that revealed preference is for the rail model of security, why doesn’t aviation security move in that direction?

The reason for the air vs. rail distinction is a separate asymmetry among political incentives. An official who maintains excessive security incurs no blame for doing things the way they have always been done. Passengers may grumble, but passengers always grumble. Conversely, an official who loosens security would incur heavy blame in the event of an attack, regardless of whether the loosened measures would have prevented it.

Put another way, any official who changes the system must first incur costs of time, attention, and effort. If things go well, they receive no benefit in return, because no one notices; but if things go poorly, the disbenefit they receive would be massive.

This incentive structure produces a ratchet. Security measures accumulate, but almost never recede. After the shoe-bomb plot, we started removing shoes. After the liquid explosives plot, we restricted liquids. After the underwear-bomb plot, we deployed full-body scanners. Each measure responds to a specific plot, but none is ever removed, at least not without a technological excuse. The only significant rollback in two decades came in July 2025, when the TSA eliminated the shoe-removal requirement… but only because new scanning technology could inspect footwear while still on people’s feet, not because anyone concluded the requirement was unnecessary.

There’s a strong tell that the system understands that checkpoint screening is theatre, namely TSA PreCheck.

by Andrew Miller, Changing Lanes |  Read more:

Image: Alist, Denver Airport Security Lines, 2008, Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
[ed. Finally, a voice of reason, no doubt shared by millions. I'd also add another reason for the asymmetry we see between air and rail travel: just the psychological aversion to falling (in a damaged aircraft) vs. smashing into something or being blown up. Nobody every said humans are totally rational.]

March 30, 2026

Showing reporters on Air Force One a series of posterboard images of his new ballroom last night, Trump told them: “I thought I’d do this now because it’s easier. I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this. But, ah, I’m fighting wars and other things. But this is very important ’cause this is going to be with us for a long time and it’s going to be, I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”

At 7:26 this morning, about two hours before the stock market opened, Trump’s social media account posted: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” [...]

When he decided to go to war with Iran, Trump apparently fantasized that the operation would look like his strike on Venezuela, in which a fast attack enabled U.S. forces to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, leaving behind Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who appeared willing to work with the Trump administration, in power. The initial strikes of Israel and the U.S. on Iran did indeed kill that regime’s leadership, but officials simply replaced that leadership from within the regime, making Trump’s claim of regime change as imaginary as his claim that the U.S. and Iran have been at war for 47 years.

More shocking in this statement, though, is that Trump appears to be trying to force his will on the Iranians by threatening to commit war crimes. International law recognizes attacks on civilian infrastructure—like those Russian president Vladimir Putin has been carrying out on Ukraine for years—as war crimes. The Geneva Convention specifically prohibits attacks on drinking water, so Trump’s threat to attack the desalination plants that make seawater drinkable is, as Shashank Joshi of The Economist notes, not only stupid because Iran could do the same to other Gulf states, but “also, quite obviously,...very illegal.”

Joshi notes that “[Arizona Democratic senator] Mark Kelly et al were right to warn of illegal orders,” and Charles A. Ray of The Steady State explains that not just Trump but anyone carrying out these orders would be implicated in potential criminality. Trump’s threat comes the day after Christiaan Triebert and John Ismay of the New York Times reported that on the first day of attacks, U.S. forces hit not just the girls’ school we knew about, but also, in a different city, a sports hall used by civilians and a nearby elementary school, killing at least 21 people.

Trump apparently had no plan B for what to do if the initial plan to strike Iran and knock out its leaders failed, and is now flailing. His repeated assurances that talks with Iran are making “great progress” contrast with Iran’s insistence it is not engaged in talks with the United States. Trump entered the war with vague promises of “regime change” and promises to guarantee Iran never developed a nuclear weapon but now is reduced to hoping for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, putting the U.S. in the odd position of fighting a war to achieve the conditions that existed before it started the war. [...]

Meanwhile, the price of oil rose to $116 a barrel after strikes against Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis have the potential to disrupt yet another key strait, the Bab el-Mandeb, through which tankers carry about 10% of the world’s oil out of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and into the Arabian Sea, from where it can go into the Indian Ocean and to the rest of the world. [...]

What we do know, though, is that Trump is extraordinarily unlikely ever to do anything that will conflict with the wishes of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Trump has blockaded Cuba, strangling its energy sector by blocking off all oil tankers from the island. Although he has stopped Venezuelan and Mexican tankers, today he permitted a Russian-flagged tanker to get through the blockade to sell oil that will help fund Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Asked why he permitted that tanker through, Trump answered: “He loses one boatload of oil, that’s all it is. If he wants to do that, and if other countries want to do it, doesn’t bother me much.” World affairs journalist Frida Ghitis commented: “When Mexico tried to send oil to Cuba, Trump immediately threatened to impose crushing tariffs on it, or on any country that broke his blockade of the island. Now Russia is sending Cuba oil and Trump says it’s fine, no problem. The mystery continues.” [...]

Tonight Trump’s social media account posted an AI-generated video of a future President Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. To triumphal music, the video features a gleaming skyscraper containing what appears to be the airplane the president pressured Qatar into giving him, along with what seems to be a replica of the Oval Office…and a model of his anticipated ballroom.

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

[ed. See also: The Obvious Scapegoat (Dispatch). Another day in the psycho ward, as Trump continues with his crazy ballroom fixation:]

***

Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia also stymied Trump today when he ruled that Trump cannot proceed with his plans for a giant ballroom on the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House without approval from Congress. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued Trump and a number of federal agencies to stop construction of the ballroom, noting that Trump skipped reviews and approvals that were required by law.

The decision by Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, begins: “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” It goes on to say that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims…to construct his East Wing ballroom project and do it with private funds,” and points out that Trump appears to be relying for authority on a law permitting him “to conduct ordinary maintenance and repair of the White House.” Leon also noted that the White House has offered vague and shifting information about who is actually in charge of the project and that the public has an interest in the appearance of the White House. Leon said “the ballroom construction project must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.” [...]

Trump exploded at the judge’s decision, posting on social media: “The National Trust for Historic Preservation sues me for a Ballroom that is under budget, ahead of schedule, being built at no cost to the Taxpayer, and will be the finest Building of its kind anywhere in the World. I then get sued by them over the renovation of the dilapidated and structurally unsound former Kennedy Center, now, The Trump Kennedy Center (A show of Bipartisan Unity, a Republican and Democrat President!), where all I am doing is fixing, cleaning, running, and ‘sprucing up’ a terribly maintained, for many years, Building, but a Building of potentially great importance. Yet, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used. So, the White House Ballroom, and The Trump Kennedy Center, which are under budget, ahead of schedule, and will be among the most magnificent Buildings of their kind anywhere in the World, gets [sic] sued by a group that was cut off by Government years ago, but all of the many DISASTERS in our Country are left alone to die. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Hours later, he posted: “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and I are working on fixing the absolutely filthy Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. This work was supposed to be done by the Biden Administration, but Sleepy Joe doesn’t know what ‘CLEAN’ or proper maintenance is—The President and Secretary do!”

~ Letters from an American: March 31, 2026

America's Military Is Never Coming Back From This

'America' is a good military like Cristiano Ronaldo is a good footballer. They was, but their careers are over in Saudi Arabia. And whereas Ronaldo is still in good shape (but a bad person), America is in terrible shape (and bad people). Vital links in their kill chain (refuelers and control planes) are decades old and being put out of their misery by Iran.

Ozymandias

Just look at the shattered ‘pedestal’ of the 50-year-old E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) and let me read Shelley over its grave situation,

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

People really do not understand how old and crustified the US military is. This is not your grandfather's US Army, or more precisely it is, without many updates since. They're still relying on primordial technology like the E-3 and KC-135 that have no modern replacements. Every new weapon these corruption engineers have come up with (like littoral combat ships or the F-35) have either failed or flailed in the field.

People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain't Iraq and this ain't Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to 'America's', they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn't school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, 'American' airframes burning in the sun while Iran's rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.

What I want you to understand is that the US military is never coming back from this. There are no modern replacements for these refuelers and control systems. The NGAS is a render and the E-7 Wedgetail was cancelled. They simply don't make ‘em like they used to anymore. As the meme template goes, “My father is a builder. We were in [Prince Sultan Air Base] I asked him what it would cost to build [an E-3 Sentry] today. I will never forget his answer… ‘We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.’”

Taking these planes to a war of choice was like taking Grandpa's ‘65 Mustang to a demolition derby and getting your nose out of joint. The White press keeps saying these planes are worth millions or billions which is missing the point. They cannot make these planes anymore, these assets are effectively priceless.

Killing The Kill Chain

Iran has found the kill switch on the kill chain which is that every rich man's house has a servants entrance. America never built underground or even hardened shelters for its fighters, so they have to be served by ancient refuelers, which are about as limber as an ancestral butler. America also lost their ground-radars in the first week, so they have to get surveillance from airborne units, which still have to park somewhere.

As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,

Moreover, the thousands of short-range missiles that Iran possesses are a factor here. There is no strategic depth. An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun. The refueling and rearming facilities on these bases are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.

They should have made this report a 15-second ad and run it on Fox because it's obviously news to Donald Trump. He can see it now anyways, because this is precisely what happened.

If you're asking ‘are these images real?’ The Wall Street Infernal has confirmed the ‘damage’. This is just damage like that Monty Python knight had just a flesh wound.

These guys have to lie, even when they're telling the truth. As I've said, the White media can no longer cover up the collapse of White Empire because Iran is the subject of history now, acting upon them.

In Appreciation Of Depreciation

People really do not appreciate how depreciated the US military is. To rust and dust and gone bust. Some of their vaunted aircraft carriers are supposed to be retired already, they just keep extending their retirement dates because they have no replacements. This moves stuff around on paper, but doesn't make these lumbering beasts any more limber.

Their newest carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was almost immediately defeated by Iran and fled the battlefield, beds burning and toilets leaking. They chalk this up to inanimate objects, but everyone can see the writing on the wall, Iran is a new subject of history and 'America' is exiting stage right, pursued by bear market. The Gerald Fart needs over a year of repairs, which in American military-industrial terms might as well be forever. These deindustrialized demons can't rebuild a bridge in Baltimore, let alone an aircraft carrier.

'America' certainly cannot rebuild their ground-based radar in the Gulf, that's all returned to the rare earths whence it came from. For example, Iran has turned the FPS-132s in Qatar into First-Person-Shooter 404. This poor thing has been hit multiple times over, just stop, it's dead already. These radars are never being rebuilt because even if 'America' could (they can't), they would need resources from China (they won't), and permission from Iran (they don't). It is pointless talking about the dollar value of these assets, as the White media does... These radars are never coming back again, and they can't be bought in colonial cash.The only currency in the Strait of Hormuz is yuan, that USD is in the past.

In the bigotry of low expectations, people say Iran's hits required Russian or Chinese intelligence, but you can find these dumb-assets on Google Maps. US bases are sore spots in the desert, visible from high ground Iran holds without much effort. The real innovation has been the rocket science of Iran hitting radomes with surgical precision. If you look at the whacking of the AWACS, they hit that plane right in the radar and nowhere else. This is liking Ulysses getting the cyclops right in the eye, and then it didn't matter how big he was. Iran blinded the White Empire all across the Gulf and is now blinding Jordan and Saudi. [...]

In this view, which I think is true, Iran isn't waging guerrilla warfare. If anything, the 'Americans' holed up in hotels are the guerrillas in their midst.

Farewell To Arms

... It's not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they're going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It's a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and 'America's' still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don't exist anymore. Even if they could right their ship tactically, it's gone wrong strategically long ago.

As that Tyranny of Geography report said, “U.S. bases in the region were originally designed to prevent Soviet encroachment into the oil-rich gulf during the late Cold War... And here is the problem. Today, these aircraft are largely based at locations along the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf—the bases that are an artifact of planning against Russian incursions in the 1970s, and the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns of the early decades of this century. They are close to Iran, which means they have a short trip to the fight … but that is also their great vulnerability. They are so close to Iran that it takes but five minutes or less for missiles launched from Iran to reach their bases.” And, as this played out, it took only five days to clear them.

Now 'America', in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities. The White media talks about Iran running out of missiles, but that is just another accufession. They follow Don Tzu's dictum, that war is the art of self-deception. In reality, it as the martyr Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh told them, “If we start today unveiling a missile city every week, it won't be finished even in two years.” They keep killing the messenger, but as one of Khamenei the Elder's favorite authors (Victor Hugo) said, “The whole current phenomenon is summed up in these few words. An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted.” You can't kill an idea whose time has come. We live in the age of tunnel and rocket wars, and fighter jets with vintage supply lines are just dumb.

by Indrajit Samarajiva, indi.ca | Read more:
Images: uncredited

[ed. An axiom that for some reason never sinks in: every war of choice ends badly.]

Situational Unawareness - The Rise of OSINT

In the leadup to the war with Iran—and in the harrowing days since—a dizzying number of tools like WorldView have appeared seemingly out of thin air, bringing the once niche hobbyist community of OSINT (short for “open source intelligence”) into the mainstream. With names like “World Monitor” or “The Big Brother V3.0,” these dashboards make “your own room feel like the CIA,” according to one observer. Though it sounds like the tradecraft of spies, at a basic level they simply visualize publicly available data: from conflict zone maps to air traffic to global market fluctuations. In theory, this information, when collected and aggregated in creative ways, can help the user make some surprising inferences.

That may be true for an actual intelligence analyst, but for most users, these snazzy dashboards cram a chaotic amount of information on screen, from which no sane person can draw logical conclusions. Instead of offering actionable intelligence, the illegible cacophony just leads to a type of hypercharged doomscrolling. “The amount of vibe coded ‘situation monitor’ slop being produced these days is absolutely astronomical,” one OSINT researcher complained. Another X user tried to impose some quality control by ranking several of these new dashboards in a post called “Monitoring the Situation Monitors.” For others, it’s a fantasy come to life: every person at the center of their own personal panopticon, the world stretched out before them as they omnisciently swivel their desk chair from cell to cell, screen to screen. [...]

It is tempting to think that anyone with an internet connection can pull a fast one on the world’s most powerful military or that you can bypass a presidential administration hostile to the very notion of an informed public simply by monitoring something as simple as airplane traffic. Even more seductive is the idea that everything is knowable. The digital age has blanketed the world in cameras and sensors, which generate dizzying quantities of data—in other words, noise. But in that vast noise, the OSINT thinking goes, are signals. You just have to know how to find and interpret those signals, and all will be revealed.

The OSINT revolution in many ways democratized the powerful capabilities to gather information traditionally associated with spy agencies and put them into the hands of intrepid citizens who have identified perpetrators of human rights abuses or exposed vast disinformation networks. These impressive investigations have elevated OSINT to a near-mythic status in certain corners of the internet. But the widespread misuse and abuse of these same methods have also spread conspiracy theories, incited internet mobs, and fostered the illusion that anyone can know anything—as long as you “monitor the situation.” [...]

Everyday people who may never have even heard the term “OSINT” have devised ingenious ways to help their communities. When Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for 2.2 million of his neighbors in 2024, one enterprising Texan opened his app for the beloved fast food chain Whataburger, which has a live map tracking the status of restaurant closures in his area—a near perfect proxy for the geographic distribution of power outages. Indeed, good OSINT abounds. “This is how real OSINT should be done,” declared The OSINT Newsletter, which described how Bellingcat “reconstructed the Minneapolis ICE shooting by syncing five different videos, mapping movements and analysing multiple camera angles,” adding: “No doxxing, no speculation—just sources and methods.” [...]

Take the Pentagon Pizza Report. In early January, after the U.S. military’s strike on Venezuela and capture of President Nicolás Maduro, one of their posts on X went viral. At 2:04 a.m. EST, as the Maduro raid was underway yet still unknown to the American public, the account posted a Google Maps screenshot with the caption: “Pizzato Pizza, a late night pizzeria nearby the Pentagon, has suddenly surged in traffic,” implying that the abnormally high traffic could be attributed to Defense Department staffers ordering food in anticipation of holing up in the Pentagon for a long night of handling a major international crisis the public has yet to know about. For the Pentagon Pizza Report, the surge occurring around the time of the raid was a vindication of their method. A similar project called the Pentagon Pizza Index, which “tracks potential correlations between late-night pizza orders and military activity,” even developed an alert system called DOUGHCON, a play on DEFCON, the U.S. military’s multitiered “Defense Readiness Condition” alert system. [...]

Even the Pentagon Pizza Index, which created Polyglobe, a marriage of OSINT and prediction markets—an industry not known for having an abundance of scruples—has its own “Operational Disclaimer.” The notice informs users that the dashboard is “for informational and educational purposes only,” and reminds them that “pizza consumption patterns should not be used as a basis for financial, political, or strategic decisions.” Though I only found it after scrolling to the bottom of the page, where it sat partially obscured by a banner overlay and a button entreating me to “trade geopolitics on Polymarket.”

In some cases, irresponsible OSINT cowboying can have darker consequences. After the Boston bombing in 2013, armchair investigators pored over videos and photos purportedly of the incident, swapping theories in online public forums. Within days, these OSINT cowboys thought they had their guy. When that suspect did not pan out, they thought another guy was their guy again. Every time the internet sleuths named a new “suspect”—which were overwhelmingly people of color—abuse inevitably followed. A similar pattern occurred following the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s assassination attempt in July 2024. [...]

These problems have only intensified as vibe coding makes it easier than ever to deploy trackers and dashboards that look sharp from a design perspective and therefore authoritative, as people tend to believe visual content that looks good. Incentives to feed the insatiable desire to “monitor the situation” have only grown more entrenched now that prediction markets are transforming global conflict into a competitive spectator sport, one in which the advantage goes to the player with the most reliable, real-time information.

Apophenia is the common tendency for people to detect patterns or connections in otherwise random stimuli. People see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or a man on the moon because the human brain craves order and familiarity as it searches for meaning in a meaningless world. It is natural and understandable to try and establish some semblance of control in the entropy, even if that control is only an illusion. But the hard truth is no amount of public data nor hours logged monitoring the situation will give you the power to predict the future. This is as true in Tehran as it is in Kyiv or Gaza.

by Tyler McBrien, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Nick Sheeran

Lost In Space

No one is happy with NASA’s new idea for private space stations (Ars Technica):

"Most elements of a major NASA event this week that laid out spaceflight plans for the coming decade were well received: a Moon base, a focus on less talk and more action, and working with industry to streamline regulations so increased innovation can propel the United States further into space.

However, one aspect of this event, named Ignition, has begun to run into serious turbulence. It involves NASA’s attempt to navigate a difficult issue with no clear solution: finding a commercial replacement for the aging International Space Station.

During the Ignition event on Tuesday, NASA leaders had blunt words for the future of commercial activity in low-Earth orbit. Essentially, they are not confident in the viability of a commercial marketplace for humans there, and the agency’s plan to work with private companies to develop independent space stations does not appear to be headed toward success. Plenty of people in the industry share these concerns, but NASA officials have not expressed them out loud before.

“We’re on a path that’s not leading us where we thought it would,” said Dana Weigel, manager of the International Space Station program for NASA.

NASA proposed a new solution that would bind the private companies more closely to NASA, requiring them not to build free-flying space stations but rather to work directly with the space agency on modules that would, at least initially, dock with the International Space Station. This change was not well-received."

***

[ed. See also: SpaceX offers details on orbital data center satellites (Space News):]

"At a March 21 event in Austin, Texas, Musk outlined an initiative by SpaceX, along with automaker Tesla and artificial intelligence company xAI — also run by Musk — to massively increase production of high-end computer chips needed for both terrestrial and space applications.

The Terafab project seeks to produce one terawatt of processors annually, which Musk said is 50 times the combined production rate of all manufacturers of chips used today in advanced applications such as AI.

Those processors, he said, are the “missing ingredient” in his plans to deploy a large constellation of satellites to serve as an orbital data center.

“We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we’re going to build the Terafab,” he said.

"SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission in late January for a constellation of up to one million satellites that would be used as an orbital data center for AI applications. The company provided few technical details about the constellation, including the size of the satellites, in that application."

Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster

The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions.

Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.

For the better part of the past year, Wall Street analysts and tech-industry observers have fretted publicly about an AI bubble. The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash.

Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”

Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel semiconductor manufacturing—from the Persian Gulf. The chip companies also require helium, sulfur, and bromine—three key inputs to silicon wafers—largely sourced from the region. In addition, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and other regional petrostates have become key investors in the American AI firms that purchase most of those chips.

Because of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed to most shipping vessels, stranding one-fifth of the world’s exports of natural gas, one-third of the world’s exports of crude oil, and significant quantities of the planet’s exportable fertilizer, helium, and sulfur. Meanwhile, Iran and Israel have begun bombing much of the fossil-fuel infrastructure in the region, which could take many years to replace. In only a month of war, the price of Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—has jumped by 40 percent and could more than double, liquefied-natural-gas prices are soaring in Europe and Asia, and helium spot prices have already doubled. The strait is “critical to basically every aspect of the global economy,” Sam Winter-Levy, a technology and national-security researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told us. “The AI supply chain is not insulated.”

The situation could quickly deteriorate from here. A helium crunch could trigger a shortage of AI chips or cause chip prices to rise. AI companies need ever more advanced chips to fill their data centers—at higher prices, the massive server farms, already hurting from elevated energy costs caused by the war, would have almost no hope of becoming profitable. Without these chips, new data centers would not be built or would sit empty. Astronomical tech valuations, and in turn the entire stock market, could collapse.

One industry’s precarious position isn’t usually everyone’s problem. Unfortunately, AI is different. The biggest data-center players, known as hyperscalers, are among the biggest corporations in the history of capitalism; they include Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon. But even they will be pressed by collectively spending nearly $700 billion on AI in a single year. In order to get the money for these unprecedented projects, data-center providers are beginning to take on colossal amounts of debt. Some of this is done through creative deals with private-equity firms including Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl Capital—which themselves operate as sort of shadow banks that, since the most recent financial crisis, have arguably become as powerful and as influential as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were prior to 2008. Endowments, pensions, insurance funds, and other major institutions all trust private equity to invest their money.

For a while, it seemed like every time Google or Microsoft announced more data-center investments, their stock prices rose. Now the opposite occurs: The hyperscalers are spending far more, but investors have started to notice that they are not generating anything near the revenue they need to. The data-center boom’s top players—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Oracle—have all lost 8 to 27 percent of their value since the start of the year, making them a huge drag on the overall stock market. And the $121 billion of debt that hyperscalers issued in 2025, four times more than what they averaged for years prior, is expected to grow dramatically.

All of the major players in this investment ecosystem are vulnerable. Private-equity firms are being squeezed on both ends by generative AI: During the coronavirus pandemic, they bought up software companies, which are now plummeting in value because AI is expected to eat their lunch. Meanwhile, private equity’s new investment strategy, data centers, is also falling apart because of AI. Blackstone, Blue Owl, and the like are sinking huge sums into data-center construction with the assumption that lease payments from tech companies will pay for their debt. In order to pay for their investments, private-equity companies raised money from major financial institutions—but now the viability of those lease payments is coming into question as the hyperscalers’ cash flow is strained. “There’s a reason to think we’re seeing some of the same 2008 dynamics now,” Brad Lipton, a former senior adviser at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and now the director of corporate power and financial regulation at the Roosevelt Institute, told us. “Everyone’s getting tied up together. Banks are lending money to private credit, which in turn lends it elsewhere. That amps up the risk.” [...]

The war in Iran affects data-center finances as well. Should energy prices continue to skyrocket, so will the cost of this already very expensive computing equipment, because it needs tremendous amounts of energy to manufacture and operate. And the war has exposed physical risks to these buildings. Janet Egan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, described data centers to us as “large, juicy targets.” It is impossible to hide these facilities, which can cover 1 million square feet. Earlier this month, Iran bombed Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. American hyperscalers had been planning to build far more data centers in the region, because the Trump administration and the AI industry have sought funding from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Oman. Now there’s a two-way strain on those relationships. The physical security of the data centers is more precarious, and the conflict is damaging the economic health of the petrostates, thereby jeopardizing a major source of further investment in American AI firms. The Trump administration “staked a lot on the Gulf as their close AI partner, and now the war that they’ve launched poses a huge threat to the viability of the Gulf as that AI partner,” Winter-Levy said.

Plus, “what’s to prevent Iran or a proxy group, or another maligned actor, from tomorrow launching an armed drone against a data center in Northern Virginia?” Chip Usher, the senior director for intelligence at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a national-security and AI think tank, told us. “It could happen. Our defenses are not adequate.” State-sponsored cyberattacks of the variety Iran is known for could also knock a data center offline. You can build all manner of defenses—reinforced concrete, drone-interception systems—but doing so adds cost and time to already costly and slow construction. [...]

Even if Iran and the Strait of Hormuz don’t directly trigger an AI-driven financial crisis, the odds are decent that another vector could. (Remember tariffs?) Energy prices could stay elevated for years, because the targeted fossil-fuel facilities in the Persian Gulf will take a long time to restore. As the U.S. directs huge amounts of attention and military resources toward Iran, it’s easy to imagine China launching an invasion of Taiwan—a scenario that terrifies Silicon Valley, because it would halt the production of chips needed to train frontier models. That’s not even considering the single Dutch company that makes the high-tech lithography machines used to print virtually all AI chips, or the German company that makes the mirrors used in those machines. “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail,” Kedrosky said of the AI industry’s web of risk. “All you can say for sure is this is a fragile and overdetermined system that must break, so it will.”

by Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia (Nathan Howard / Bloomberg / Getty)

[ed. See also: 

NASA's 'Lunar Viceroy' on Moon Base Plans

NASA's “Lunar Viceroy” talks about how NASA will build a Moon base (Ars Technica)

Image: Rendering of a Moon base that will be built over the next decade. Credit: NASA

[ed. In the next 10 years.]

Should I Stay or Should I Go

Trump Draws Bipartisan Backlash for Easing Oil Sanctions on Russia and Iran (NYT).

Image: Amit Dave/Reuters

[ed. TACOman in action. Cool picture. See also: For Putin, the War in Iran Changed Everything (NYT).]

Earlier this month, President Trump lifted restrictions on Russian oil exports, allowing shipments to resume to buyers around the world as officials scrambled to stabilize global supply following disruptions tied to the war in Iran. Days later, the administration temporarily waived sanctions on roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting at sea, opening those cargoes to the global market for 30 days.