‘Americans have a long history of being hurried into war on false pretexts. The “yellow press” encouraged a war fever in 1898 by blaming the sinking of the USS Maine on the Spanish, even though the Navy’s own expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 attacks and was building weapons of mass destruction, neither of which turned out to be true.

But with the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought. The American people weren’t consulted about attacking Iran—neither formally, through their elected representatives in Congress, nor informally, by allowing pundits, activists, and civil-society groups to have their say. As Trump told The New York Times in January, his power as commander in chief was constrained by nothing but “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”…’ (Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic)

‘All things come to an end eventually, including the human species. From the perspective of the universe it won’t matter, and so it also shouldn’t matter to us now. The discontinuance of a taxonomic unit is not particularly interesting or important, especially since no one will be around to notice.

My basic point is the same as Epicurus’ philosophical medicine against the fear of death: “Death should not concern us because as long as we exist, death is not here, and when death is here, we are not.…” ‘ (Thomas Wells via 3 Quarks Daily)

‘Wildlife filmmaker Devon Massyn captured absolutely magnificent and rare drone footage of the volcano Kavachi erupting explosively underwater. Kavachi, which sits in the Pacific Ocean near the Solomon Islands, had not erupted for nearly a decade before this.…’ (Lori Dorn via Laughing Squid)

‘New research suggests that inaudible infrasound waves emitted by a building’s old boiler, pipes, and plumbing can negatively influence someone’s mood, making them feel unnerved and uncomfortable. That could be enough to convince them there are ghosts afoot, especially if they’re already open towards supernatural explanations.…’ (Frank Landymore via Futurism)

‘Prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins became a worldwide laughingstock this week for an unintentionally embarrassing article in which he argued that conversing with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has made him believe that large language models are not only sentient, but actually conscious….[T]he author of The God Delusion is now suffering from a Claude delusion.…’ (via Flux)

‘A new analysis of the “Boltzmann brain” paradox suggests our memories and sense of reality could, in theory, be random illusions born from cosmic chaos. By uncovering circular reasoning in how physicists think about time and entropy, the study raises fresh doubts about what we can truly know about the past.…’ (via ScienceDaily)