While some anti-AI advocates have called for some extreme property damage to halt the AI boom, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has a proposition that’s a little more down to Earth: simply shut it all down until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

In a video shared on social media, Sanders announced he’ll be pushing for a “moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI.”

His main contention is that society needs to slow down on the rapid deployment of new tech, and ask an important question: who benefits?

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As a professor of medieval history, I can assure you the popular belief that the lives of peasants were little more than misery is a misconception. They enjoyed rich social lives – maybe richer than ours – ate well, celebrated frequently and had families not unlike our own. For them, holiday festivities didn’t begin with Christmas Eve and end with New Year’s.

The party was just getting started.
[…]
Today, many people start thinking about Christmas after Thanksgiving, and any sort of holiday spirit fizzles by early January.

In the Middle Ages, this would have been unheard of.

Advent – the period of anticipation and fasting that precedes Christmas – began with the Feast of St. Martin.

Back then, it took place 40 days before Christmas; today, it’s the fourth Sunday before it. During this period, Western Christians observed a fast; while less strict than the one for Lent, it restricted meat and dairy products to certain days of the week. These protocols not only symbolized absence and longing, but they also helped stretch out the food supply after the end of the harvest and before meats were fully cured.

Christmas itself was known for feasting and drunkenness – and it lasted nearly six weeks.

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The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will now be renamed to honor President Donald Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced.

Leavitt, 28, shared that the building — which was dedicated in 1964 as a “living memorial” for JFK — would now be known as the “Trump-Kennedy Center” in a post on X on Thursday, Dec. 18.

“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” Leavitt said. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation.”

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Kennedy Family Comments On Center Being Renamed

The name change has stirred backlash, particularly from members of the Kennedy family. Former Representative Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.), the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, questioned whether the name change was legal. He posted on social media that the Kennedy Center was established by an act of Congress as a memorial to President Kennedy and compared the change to trying to rename the Lincoln Memorial.

Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and head of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center, also expressed strong disagreement. In a message shared online, she accused the Trump administration of targeting freedom of speech, including artists and journalists. She claimed that President Kennedy and President Trump represent very different values and said Trump’s name should not appear next to her father’s.

Maria Shriver, daughter of President Kennedy’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, also reacted emotionally. She said she was left “speechless” and in “disbelief.” Shriver had previously clashed with Trump on social media, particularly after his remarks about the death of filmmaker Rob Reiner.

The name change has stirred backlash, particularly from members of the Kennedy family. Former Representative Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.), the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, questioned whether the name change was legal. He posted on social media that the Kennedy Center was established by an act of Congress as a memorial to President Kennedy and compared the change to trying to rename the Lincoln Memorial.

Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and head of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center, also expressed strong disagreement. In a message shared online, she accused the Trump administration of targeting freedom of speech, including artists and journalists. She claimed that President Kennedy and President Trump represent very different values and said Trump’s name should not appear next to her father’s.

Maria Shriver, daughter of President Kennedy’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, also reacted emotionally. She said she was left “speechless” and in “disbelief.” Shriver had previously clashed with Trump on social media, particularly after his remarks about the death of filmmaker Rob Reiner.

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“…Professor Malcolm Dando suggests implanting misinformation to bend perception may no longer be confined to science fiction and could soon be a conceivable reality.

Prof Dando, who recently penned a report on the rising threat of neuro weapons, is now begging the UK to take the threat seriously.

The University of Bradford’s Department of Peace Studies professor warns that untraceable drones that spike soldiers with hallucinogens could be just around the corner…”

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In fact, scientists had been aware of fallout-contaminated reindeer for decades. In the 1960s, the discovery of contaminated caribou triggered a major public health investigation in Canada. Historian Jonathan Luedee describes how, in their efforts to unravel the mystery, scientists and politicians grappled with the reality of a nuclearized world.

“Between 1953 and 1958,” Luedee explains, “the US, UK, and the Soviet Union conducted more than 220 atmospheric nuclear tests,” leading to concerns about widespread ecological contamination. Caribou were already on scientists’ minds. Their population had been mysteriously declining, and Indigenous groups in northern Canada had long relied on caribou meat. Early radiation studies showed that caribou had “higher exposure levels than other grazing animals, including groups of animals located closer to nuclear testing sites,” Luedee writes. Then, in 1959, Canadian botanist Eville Gorham noted high levels of radioactive material in lichen.

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“We are Tatáŋka Íyotake’s Oyate — ‘Sitting Bull’s People,’ therefore our
fight and resistance must continue for our future generations because we
cannot drink oil.” — Standing Rock Nation

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On December 17, Assange submitted a criminal complaint to the Swedish Economic Crime Authority and Swedish Crimes Unit. The legal complaint is directed against the Nobel Foundation, arguing that the pending transfer of 11 million SEK ($US 1.18 million) and the award of the prize medal to Machado violates the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will of November 27, 1895.

The will, binding under the terms of Swedish law, stipulates that the award of the prize and monies be given to a person who, during the preceding year, “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in pursuing “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Given that the peace prize laureates are selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, seeking to hold them accountable for their poor choice of awardee might have been a better starting point. But the complaint is alert to this, noting that the Swedish funds administrators have a fiduciary duty when it comes to disbursing the funds. “The Norwegian committee’s selection does not grant them criminal immunity.” Indeed, it was up to the administrators to consider such a decision made “in flagrant conflict with the explicit purpose of the will, or where there is evidence that the awardee will use or is using the prize to promote or facilitate the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity, or war crimes”.

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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in his speech at the High-Level Segment of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024, attempted to characterize today’s world as one in which the quest for multipolarity has triggered a “purgatory of polarity”, in which impunity would reign and the rules and protection mechanisms established in international law would not be respected. For, “in that purgatory, more and more countries are filling the spaces of geopolitical divisions and doing whatever they want without any accountability”.

This narrative creates the misleading perception that it is multipolarity that is responsible for the world being plunged into chaos, due to the deliberate failure of the powers of collective imperialism to comply with the rules established by the United Nations Charter. It is as if the emerging powers, or those peoples of the world who see multipolarity as an opportunity to exist, were responsible for the imperialist powers’ indiscriminate violence, genocide, expansionism, and the dismantling of the international security architecture that has brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict.

The Main Threat To US Imperialism

In his reflections on deterrence in international security, retired US General Michael P. C. Carns argued that the main threat and greatest challenge facing the United States today is the existence of a multipolar world in which hundreds of actors with different types and levels of power, within the framework of a set of cross-cutting alliances, make the world more “dangerous and volatile” than in previous contexts of bipolarity.
[…]
The geopolitical battle is in full swing, and whoever controls the narrative will be able to direct the consolidation of a new multipolar world order, because in this world of exponential subjectivities, it is not enough to “be good”; one also has to appear to be so, and one must have the cultural and communicational strength so that the peoples of the world can be aware of this geopolitical battle for the defense of a new international power correlation and the democratization of the decision-making process, projecting the interests and cultural values of the diversity represented by the Global South.

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From: 2025 RAND Wrap-Up: Research That Defined Our Year

…In 2025, that meant helping to build an even stronger, more ready, and more effective military. It meant helping decisionmakers understand and prepare for the risks and opportunities of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. It meant offering innovative analysis and ideas to rebuild Gaza, achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine, and compete with China. It meant finding ways to reduce the federal debt burden and save American taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Here are just some of the ways RAND helped policymakers answer the challenges of 2025.

Strengthening the U.S. Military…