The Synthetic Mind: Humanity’s First Engineered Mirror, Part 5
by Sammy Attoh / August 19th, 2026
Humanity is living through a crisis deeper than politics, economics, or technology. It is a crisis of meaning — a slow erosion of the human capacity to interpret reality, trust truth, anchor identity, and locate purpose.
This erosion did not arrive with spectacle. It seeped in through distraction, overstimulation, synthetic narratives, and algorithmic environments that increasingly substitute for lived experience.1Taina Bucher, If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 2. What confronts us is not an intellectual dilemma. It is a civilizational emergency.
I. The Fragmentation of Reality
Reality once rested on shared foundations — common stories, common truths, common …
The self-inflicted passing of Jason Arday this month following his resignation from the University of Cambridge is an unsettling yet fitting reminder about what the groves of academe tolerate (or not) regarding its members. Arday’s unmasking as a plagiarist and fabulist was treated as a tour de force by a contingent of conservatives and right-wing academics, keen to neuter the dogma of diversity and return to perceived notions of unalloyed merit. For his defenders, the exposure was tantamount to bad faith, diminished by the personal defects of those making the claim. The university’s chancellor Lord Chris …
Recently, while listening to an NPR interview with Cuban-American musician Arturo Sandoval, I was reminded of the late political scientist Michael Parenti’s classic text, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media. In his 1986 book, Parenti described a situation that is still relevant forty years later— when the US fears that another country’s non-capitalistic political model (and its attendant advances in social justice and quality of life) could cause US citizens to question their own system, it regularly imposes an embargo and sanctions against the country. …
“Nearly four in 10 Americans say their communities were damaged by extreme weather in the past year, as climate change helps fuel high heat, intense flooding, and other events. And 57% of those US adults who have felt the effects of extreme weather in the past year are worried it’ll happen again in the next, according to the new poll from the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup. The East South Central states are most impacted, including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee — all deep-red. Trump has come under scrutiny for cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and …
The latest incidents of Israeli settler violence in the villages of Qusra and Kour, located in the northern occupied West Bank, have again caught international attention, reaching the halls of the United Nations with a gravity that, sadly, is unlikely to have much effect. Towards the end of July, the settlers had set their sights on local mosques, which they set on fire. From August 9, three families in Qusra – making up 15 people in all – were confined to their homes in terror, running out of food and necessities. (Settlers had deprived them of access to water and …
“AI Has Memory and Humans Have Consequences. AI can be wrong and stay exactly the same—a person can’t,” read a headline from John Nosta in Psychology Today. Indeed, as so-called artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly deployed across critical sectors of everyday life, it is leading to high-profile failures that highlight the severe risks of over-relying on automated decision-making. For example, according to Politico, lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are using AI to draft bills that “are riddled with errors.” Meanwhile, the tech real estate marketplace company Zillow shuttered its home-flipping division …
Many revolutions or socialist governments existed in the 1970s besides Nicaragua that later lost power or abandoned their socialist ideology by the 1990s. These include Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Tanzania, Congo (Stanleyville), Afghanistan, Grenada, and almost El Salvador, Portugal, Spain, and Ethiopia. In addition, the Communist Soviet Union collapsed (now 15 countries), along with East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania.
When the Sandinistas lost the 1990 election, these other socialist leaderships were already disintegrating or had already been overturned. Only the Sandinistas continued the struggle and once again arose to retake power and implement their …
It does not take a huge leap of imagination to see how the limits of a ‘one-best-way’ approach to state governance, exposed by cultural relativism, suggest identical failings in John Mearsheimer’s universalist notion of ‘offensive realism’ (OR), whose well-known principal tenets include:
“In order to survive, and because competitors cannot be trusted, states must …. acquire and maintain sufficient military and economic power to protect themselves against threats which, Mearsheimer (2019) concedes, ‘can be a ruthless and bloody business’. This is usually done at the expense of rival states and is a zero-sum game” (Blunt, 2025).
Public discourse in Japan has already shifted from “whether Japan should take responsibility for its war of aggression” to “whether it should worship ghosts on such a sensitive day.” Muddying the waters has long been a tactic favored by Japan’s right wing. But there’s no getting away with this one. As the international community watches closely, Japan must return to the fundamental question: What exactly should it do, to whom must it be accountable, and how should it answer for its actions?
Rotten food, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscation of alert notification devices for incoming missiles (cellphones), infrequent mail, jumping off aircraft carriers, overflowing toilets... military families speak out for their loved ones, again and again.
by Ann Wright / August 15th, 2026
U.S. aircraft on the flight deck of USS Abraham Lincoln on Feb. 28 in support of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran. (U.S. Department of Defense /Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Rotten food, overflowing toilets into bunking areas, no room in the incoming missile shelters, confiscated cellphones that are the notification devices for incoming missiles, infrequent mail, social media closed down: these were some of the issues that military families identified at the national conference …
We all know the real reasons the US created the proxy war with Russia initially. It allowed the deteriorating US empire to cut Russia off economically from the consumer base of Europe – especially when it came to “energy” – thereby strengthening the petrodollar. (If sanctions didn’t do it, the US could always just blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, but we would never do that. Heh heh heh, ermmmm…)
The US rulers thought they could sanction Russia into oblivion and then easily create regime change — Push out Putin and …
Playing to one’s strengths is generally smart, but Mark Carney may come to regret convening the world’s wealthiest bankers in downtown Toronto. The Canadian prime minister’s upcoming CEO summit is a prime opportunity to paint the former banker as an agent of the global rich.
On September 14 and 15 Carney “will convene the world’s largest investors, including top CEOs, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders” at a luxurious hotel. The CEOs of financial behemoths Blackstone, BlackRock and Barclays, as well as representatives of the UAE and Saudi …
It was never really in doubt. The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, irritated, bothered, and keen to throw scrutiny off his financial affairs, was returned in the most pointless of by-elections on August 13. His share of the vote in the seat of Clacton was 63.34% (22,239 votes). The second in the voting tally, with 26.9% (9,455 votes), was a candidate sporting a bin, promoting himself as a 5,900-year-old intergalactic warrior hailing from Sigma IX by the name of Count Binface. No major party offered to stand a candidate, which did not prevent voters from filling in the longest ballot …
Lawyer For Paramilitaries and Drug Traffickers Promises "Iron Fist" Policy That Has Repeatedly Failed
by Michael K. Smith / August 14th, 2026
If Abelardo de la Espriella’s first four days are any indication of what his entire term will be like, we are in for some very dark comedy over the next four years. Here are eight highlights from his inauspicious beginning.
(1) On Inauguration Day a clip of him looking like a fool marching in place and saluting during military honors went viral after it was seen to have his own military officers looking at him with a look of bewilderment as to what on earth he thought he was doing. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department revealed that Colombia will receive a …
This summer, students marched through Delhi, India, in cockroach masks. The masks were a response to India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant calling the country’s unemployed youth ‘cockroaches’. India’s youth reclaimed the insult, naming their movement the Cockroach Janta Party. After a medical entrance examination was leaked, a wave of students committed suicide and Indian educator and activist Sonam Wangchuk went on a twenty-six-day hunger strike. These events culminated in the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on 25 July – the first …
Rick Hillier’s new bank job highlights the tightening ties between finance and militarism.
On August 10 Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff from 2005 to 2008 was made Strategic Defence Advisor for the National Bank of Canada. According to the country’s sixth biggest bank, Canada’s former top soldier “will provide strategic advice on defence-related trends and contribute insights on issues affecting Canada’s resilience, security, advanced manufacturing, aerospace and the defence industrial base.”
Alongside most of Canada’s other banks, National Bank recently became a member of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security …
While critiques of Indian agriculture have long focused on the crisis of commercial cash crops and the corporatisation of wheat and paddy procurement, this focus creates a significant oversight. By treating the state-backed mandi system as the universal standard, such analyses overlook the reality of the vast majority of smallholders—those growing pulses, millets and rain-fed crops who were never integrated into formal MSP procurement to begin with.
Consider the micro-farm in the foothills of Uttarakhand. A family tends a modest plot: a dozen goats, backyard poultry supplying fresh eggs and a handful …
There are no exits anymore from the MADD — Mutually Assured Destruction of Decency
by Paul Haeder / August 13th, 2026
Sure, another memoir: In her memoir Cleanup on Aisle Five, author and journalist Ann Larson does not publicly name the specific grocery chain she worked for. Instead, she deliberately anonymizes the large Utah-based grocery chain by referring to it simply as “The Grocery Store” (TGS) to protect the identities of her former co-workers and focus on broader systemic industry issues….
Under cover of night, the US military kidnapped the lawful Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores on January 3, 2026. Collateral damage included over 100 fatalities of civilians and Cuban and Venezuelan guards.
This unprovoked surprise attack flagrantly violated international law. The hegemon acted in full expectation that it could operate with impunity. Even the neighboring left-leaning governments of Brazil and Colombia offered only mild rebukes. Then Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil …
As their private jets descend on Toronto to promote a billionairist agenda will environmentalists confront Carney’s ecocidal CEO summit?
In a highly offensive article headlined “The 24 hours that could change Canada’s economic trajectory”, the Globe and Mail reported on the “heavy hitters soon to land their private jets in Toronto.” Saturday’s Report on Business should have described them as “heavy emitters”.
The CEOs and investment fund managers coming to Toronto in mid-September represent those disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and overconsumption. According to Oxfam, the richest 0.1% …
In 2009, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez severed ties between Venezuela and Israel, but this week, the government of Interim President Delcy Rodriguez announced that Venezuela had restored diplomatic relations with the genocidal Israeli entity.
This decision follows a series of major concessions by the Venezuelan government to the Trump regime.
What does all of this mean for the future of Venezuela? Has Delcy Rodriguez abandoned the Bolivarian resolution led by Hugo Chavez?
Dimitri Lascaris speaks with historian and author, Vijay Prashad, about the stunning turn in Venezuelan politics.
Pete Hegseth’s Department of War is building America’s largest Quantum Computing project right here on the Southside of Chicago, to the detriment of not only our city but the world at large. Governor Pritzker has lauded the venture capital project as an unprecedented opportunity to make Illinois the “Silicon Valley of quantum development.” With whose consent? On whose land? And on whose dime?
When examining the backers of the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP), it is difficult to rationalize this $9 billion project as anything but an accelerative altar to militarism. Alongside federal backing from DARPA, …
Nothing inspires confidence in the silliness of the human species than its efforts to understand the workings of others. This, at least, makes an improvement from wanting to biblically subjugate, enslave and eat members of the animal kingdom. But when efforts are made to understand what the domestic cat (surely an oxymoronic category) is up to, humankind is bound to come up short.
The issue of imposing curfews upon cats as if they were disobedient, wandering children is one such symptom. While the feral cat is an apparatus of mass killing when it comes to wildlife, Felis catus, that oddly named …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / August 13th, 2026
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States spent $21 trillion on its military between 2001 and 2024 (in constant 2024 dollars), equal to the combined military spending of the next eighteen countries. Iran barely made that list at all, spending only 2% of what the US did, and SIPRI estimated Iran’s 2025 military budget at only $7.5 billion. So how is Iran holding its own against the multi-trillion-dollar US war machine?
A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and …
The idea that a US-led West and its brand of ‘freedom and democracy’ are best has dominated international relations since at least the end of World War II. Its crescendo was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led Fukuyama to proclaim, ‘the end of history’. But not very long after, by the turn of the century, the assumption had started to become so threadbare and the prejudices, falsehoods, and bad consequences so obvious that even the (brainwashed) likes of me began – politely – to question …
As if regurgitating the Covid 19 pandemic required another round of national debate to settle the question of safety and effectiveness of vaccine injections, the FDA has recently approved a new Moderna mRNA-based flu shot (mFlusiva) specifically marketed for the elderly (over 50) population.
It was that senior population which suffered more Covid 19 deaths than any other segment of citizenry: during 2020 81% of deaths were over 65, in 2022 92% of fatalities were seniors and between 2022 – 2024 81.3% of …
Most politicians pledge to work for the working class, or sometimes for working families, a less Marxist-sounding label. Meanwhile, scholars struggle to define the category. I won’t assess the political posturing or adjudicate definitional disputes, but my work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.
