Category Archives: Coffee Break

When Politics and Finance Merge, Truth Surpasses Fiction

In the West, politics and finance run separately; in the East, they merge. That’s why politics there matters more and political fictions are absent.

Coffee Break: Gaza as Dress Rehearsal for War With China

The U.S. military legal establishment has big plans to use Gaza as a model for future large-scale conflicts, including with China.

Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – Poison Gas

Before our current age of nuclear war anxiety, there was widespread concern about an earlier terrifying weapon of mass destruction: poison gas. I will describe the history of war gases in the context of our current concerns about atomic war. It is an ugly topic, but examining it may provide some hope for a way […]

Coffee Break: Trump Makes an Example Out of Paramount

President Donald Trump has zeroed in on Paramount, the weakest of American media titans, to administer a lesson in sontaku, the Japanese art of “obeying in advance” or “following unspoken orders.”

Coffee Break: Garden of Healing, Good News on PEPFAR, Life in Biotech, and Our American Israel

Part the First: Pharmacopeia. Who doesn’t love a garden? It sometimes seems that all drugs come from plants, initially. My first biology teachers claimed they were taught that bacteria were plants back when life was either animal or plant. Garden of Healing is a bit long but very interesting. It is also a break from […]

The 2016 Coup Attempt Revisited: Türkiye’s Transformation and Its Regional Impact

How the failed 2016 coup transformed Türkiye’s power structure under Erdoğan and reshaped its relationshio to the US and the Middle East

Coffee Break: Elon Musk to Squeeze Tesla Shareholders to Juice xAI?

Elon Musk, Earth’s wealthiest human, is leveraging his business empire to invest in xAI with SpaceX and possibly Tesla putting in billions.

Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – AI Goes to War

A compact comprehensive discussion of the present state and future prospects of AI technologies applied to armed conflict is an impossible mission, but I will undertake it here. What gives me encouragement is the great difficulty of prognostication regarding AI. I believe AI will be the most profound transformation of human affairs in the history […]

Coffee Break: Texas Floods, Biblical Divorce Complicate US Senate Primary

Texas floods, Biblical divorce complicate US Senate race for Ken Paxton as Democrats search for a candidate.

BRICS 2025: Propaganda and the Illusion of Change

How the propaganda machine behind the BRICS 2025 summit works—told from the inside, it reveals that nothing truly new is happening

Coffee Break: P. Diddy, RICO, Politicized Prosecutions

The Sean Combs trial provides a lens through which to look at RICO and prosecutorial overreach in an era of collapsing rule of law.

Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – The Stab in the Back

As the war in Ukraine moves toward an ugly conclusion unfavorable to the U.S., I anticipate the appearance of a common propaganda phenomenon following lost wars: the stab in the back. This is a propaganda tactic in which military defeat is attributed to domestic treachery undermining the heroic efforts of the military. The bellicose elements […]

Coffee Break: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg Loves To Throw Good Money After Bad

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is upping the ante in the AI business, triggering a bidding war for talent and he’s willing to poach from competitors.

Coffee Break: Ancient Food Facts, Cancer Therapy, the Conscious Brain, and Biohacking with Biotech…Plus Thomas Jefferson

On this Independence Day in one country in North America a few notes on life outside current politics, scientific and otherwise. Part the First: The Archaeology of Food Is Fascinating. Having read about Roman eating habits over the years I have wondered about two things, fish sauce and the dormouse. Now we know which fish […]

Palantir’s AI Justified Israel’s Attack on Iran — Will Tech Take Us Back to Irrational Beliefs?

Palantir’s AI justified Israel’s attack on Iran, marking a turning point where decisions are made based on algorithms we don’t understand