Parasocial — revealed by the global dictionary on Tuesday as its word of the year — refers to the connection a person feels to an online personality ranging from celebrities to podcasters, and even artificial intelligence.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/22/ai-chatbot-relationships-influences-2025s-word-of-the-year-.html
The book traces the fascinating, if appalling, history of state-sponsored research into central nervous system (CNS)-acting chemicals.
During the cold war and after, the US, Soviet Union and China all “actively sought” to develop CNS-acting weapons, said Crowley. Their purpose was to cause prolonged incapacitation to people, including “loss of consciousness or sedation or hallucination or incoherence or paralysis and disorientation”.
The only time a CNS-acting weapon was used at scale was by the Russian Federation in 2002 to end the Moscow theatre siege. Security forces used fentanyl derivatives to end the siege, in which armed Chechen militants had taken 900 theatregoers hostage.
Most of the hostages were freed, but more than 120 died from the effects of the chemical agents and an undetermined number suffered long-term damage or died prematurely.
Since then, research has made significant advances. The academics argue that the ability exists to create much more “sophisticated and targeted” weapons that would once have been unimaginable.
Buy Nothing Day offers a pause in a season driven by spending. The 24-hour campaign asks people to avoid purchases in stores and online as a statement against excess and waste. Canadian artist Ted Dave created the idea in 1992 as a small protest against materialism before it gained support from environmental and social advocates.
The anti-corporate magazine Adbusters and its founder, Kalle Lasn, later brought the event to a global audience, spreading participation across Europe, Asia, South America and Australia. Observed right after Thanksgiving, Buy Nothing Day creates a direct contrast to Black Friday’s shopping rush. Participants view the day as a reminder to consider the true cost of consumption and to focus instead on community, sustainability and mindful living.
BUY NOTHING DAY EVENTS
https://www.adbusters.org/buy-nothing-day-2025
“…Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.
[…]
Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley.
It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”
Altamides leaves no trace on the phones it targets, unlike spyware such as Pegasus. Nor does it require a target to click on a malicious link or show any of the telltale signs (such as overheating or a short battery life) of remote monitoring.
[…]
Last year the investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports obtained a secret archive, containing more than a million instances where Altamides was used to trace cell phones all over the world. This data trove, the majority of which spans 2007 to 2014, is one of the largest disclosures to date of the inner workings of the vast surveillance industry. It does not just list the phone numbers of people who were monitored; it offers, in many cases, precise maps of their movements, showing where they went and when. Over months of research, Lighthouse, Germany’s Paper Trail Media, Mother Jones, Reveal, and an international consortium of partners dug into these logs to understand who was being spied on and why. We identified surveillance targets in 100 countries and spoke to dozens of them. We obtained confidential documents and communications outlining how Altamides—an acronym for “Advanced Location Tracking and Mobile Information and Deception System”—was marketed and deployed. We also interviewed industry insiders and former employees of the company about its operations and clientele.
What we found changes what we know about the history of surveillance technology, demonstrating the proliferation of dangerous tools well before Edward Snowden brought the issue to global attention. Despite its considerable size, the archive represents only a fraction of the surveillance activities carried out with Altamides. But it nevertheless shows how it was used, and abused, across the world.
The First Wap archive reveals extensive cell phone tracking in the US, which usually is considered out of bounds for spyware and surveillance vendors. Even the most notorious, like Israel’s NSO Group, have made a point of avoiding it. Foreign companies that have surveilled people in the US have in multiple cases been sanctioned. Yet Altamides was deployed in thousands of tracking operations on US soil…”
Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein told current US ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack to “make me smile” with pictures of him and a “child”, according to a 2016 email that was released in a trove of correspondence by Congress on Wednesday.
“Send photos of you and child.. – make me smile,” Epstein, the disgraced late financier, wrote to Barrack in March 2016.
Epstein then responded to an email from Barrack, writing, “Photos look good.”
It is unclear what “child” Epstein was referring to in his email and what photos were contained in the emails sent by Barrack.
[…]
‘Smart’ shoes
The trove of emails also shows Epstein’s direct contact with at least one elite citizen of the UAE.
In 2011, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the chairman and CEO of DP World, emailed Epstein about sneakers embedded with GPS tracking devices advertised to monitor children. The email was titled, “Gps GTX Smart Shoe.”
Epstein responded: “thanks, great idea, i really like your friend”.
’Polina’ reportedly arranged to send the officer a gift of British beer via an intermediary. The courier, the FSB said, was already under investigation for smuggling explosives and other contraband into Russia from Ukraine-controlled territory using drones. He was detained immediately after delivering the package.
Testing of the beer revealed two toxic agents, including what the FSB described as a British-manufactured variant of the VX nerve agent. Had the intended victim consumed it, he would have suffered a painful death within 20 minutes, the statement said.
The Bottom Line: This Is a Coup
Last June, I said on Money & Markets that the leaders of the push for a totalitarian control model and the central bankers had decided to back Trump because he could deliver the conservatives into the model. What is happening now has been in the planning at least since then; Trump and Musk are simply Kabuki theater. What I underestimated was the speed at which they would proceed with a full-on coup. However, given that the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence agency clouds have all been digitized and put into the hands of Silicon Valley, a complete reengineering of the U.S. government through the digital systems is now possible at high speed.
One big question is how much they will cut off the federal flows. The more federal payments you cut, the faster you can do the land grab, the cheaper the price, and the faster you can force everyone onto an all-digital monetary system. However, if you can mandate government purchases of Bitcoin, you can run the price high and keep your supporters drunk with speculative profits while you put everything else in place. he first trial balloon I heard on using Bitcoin for the land grab—a proposal to shut down all federal flows overnight—was back in 2017, and it amounted to full-on “shock doctrine.”
https://solari.com/trump-administration-digital-control-grid-coming-together-at-high-speed/
Abstract
Some theorists argue that moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory. I take this argument one step further, arguing that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration ought to be covert rather than overt. This is to say that it is morally preferable for compulsory moral bioenhancement to be administered without the recipients knowing that they are receiving the enhancement. My argument for this is that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, then its administration is a matter of public health, and for this reason should be governed by public health ethics. I argue that the covert administration of a compulsory moral bioenhancement program better conforms to public health ethics than does an overt compulsory program. In particular, a covert compulsory program promotes values such as liberty, utility, equality, and autonomy better than an overt program does. Thus, a covert compulsory moral bioenhancement program is morally preferable to an overt moral bioenhancement program.
The investigation launched in Milan aims to clarify the role of Italian citizens suspected of participating in the deliberate targeting and killing of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo.
According to Margeti, the positions held by Aleksi’s unit – where Vučić allegedly served – coincide with the locations identified as the sites of these “human safaris”.
The journalist further argues that Vučić and another member of the unit, Zlatko “Zak” Novakovic, were among the few fighters who spoke foreign languages ??and therefore may have been in contact with foreign visitors to frontline positions.
Fascism did not vanish. It refined itself. It removed its militaristic costume and adopted new languages and institutions. Its imperial ambitions survived, hidden beneath the fabrics of civility and coated in the rhetoric of progress and development.
What we confront today is not the afterlife of fascism but its metamorphosis. It is fascism without spectacle, clothed in diplomacy, policy and market orthodoxy. It calls itself good governance and international order. It hides behind rating agencies, consulting firms or the Big Con, as Mariana Mazzucato calls them, and think tanks. It speaks of stability yet cultivates instability for profit, as we have seen in Congo DRC. It builds consensus by saturating the world with the idea that there is no alternative to Western universalism.
It no longer shouts. It administers. It no longer burns books. It shapes algorithms and commits epistemic violence. It no longer stages parades. It stages wars of humanitarian necessity. It wages violence through law, bureaucracy and debt. In this form, it appears rational, even inevitable and therefore more dangerous than its earlier expression.
This logic extends into culture, now aided by large language models. As colonial officials once codified African culture and languages to discipline communities, so too do the platforms of Silicon Valley flatten our speech into big data points. They claim neutrality yet carry the same impulse to command meaning. I have argued before that these digital tools rewrite our idioms into monotones and turn flames into ashes. They repeat, in a more sophisticated form, the colonial act of stripping knowledge systems of their sovereignty.
This is the fascism of our age: hegemonic statecraft.