B. At the OCIS 2023 conference, I heard about some anthropological research on Asia’s cyberscam centres. Now, very credible allegations of gender-based violence are emerging. This builds on the recent risk advisory about how these cyberscam centres are involved in ‘pig butchering’ romance cons and cross-border investment fraud.

C. I’ve posted lists compiled from Google for my research program of defence contractors and geopolitical risk firms in Australia and internationally. The latter includes bespoke / boutique firms, as well as law, trade, investment, risk & audit, corporate governance, and other sectors.

D. Actor Dustin Hoffman reflects on the creative process for the recent, excellent film Tuner.

Here is Mark Kermode’s review.

E. Why Iran will probably still get nuclear weapons, notes the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

F. Man Group’s Ed Cole on Bloomberg about how to best structure your diversified portfolio in equities.

B. WOPR in John Badham’s film WarGames (1983) - and the military sourced police surveillance helicopter in Blue Thunder (1983) have returned with a vengeance. Daniel Boguslaw considers the AI-nuclear command and control systems debate for The New Republic. That this is missing from Australia’s domestic debate on AUKUS in its public national security elites highlights how disconnected in reality they are from the reality that the United States and China are two legs of nuclear tripolarity (Russia is the third and has a renewed geopolitical alliance with China). This shift from a Cold War bipolar era to a tripolar or complex deterrence era has long been debated in the United States (for example in 2025 at the Center for a New American Security think tank. Australia does not have the comparative think tank networks that the United States has - and so there is still not yet the contestability (although it is wished for) in either domestic debates or the socialisation pathways of national security elites.

C. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama discusses with Damon Linker the intellectual history of Leo Strauss and the pathway of some adherents into the MAGA movement. There are some great insights here about academic publishing; how to teach about Plato’s Cave Allegory; and how Liberation oriented pedagogical teaching practices actually work in the context of moral and political philosophy. Aspects of this debate can be applied to other contexts and problems - such as concerns in Australia about the rise of populism.

There is a discussion about dissociative fugues as the brain’s attempt to deal with time dislocation experiences. Not referenced in the script is that Arthur Koestler documented such radical subjectivity in real life in the 1950s and the 1960s as part of the Eranos Circle. Peter Moon’s Montauk Project took a different angle on this in the 1990s that directly influenced (in a Background IP sense) Thomas Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge (New York: Penguin Press, 2023) and the hit Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-2025). The episode also inspired an Anthrax song called ‘The Constant’ as part of their album Worship Music (2011) in which the classic era singer Joey Belladonna returned to the fold.

Cuse, Lindelof, and episode director Jack Bender play up Hume and Widmore’s reconnecting phone call in the 2004 timeline for its melodramatic worth: Hume’s male ego craves validation and dyadic acceptance. In reality if you try this with someone who has left and clearly rejected you in a “falling up” situation (where you are not their type, you are not good enough for them or have character flaws, and you got together by sheer accident), it is unlikely to work as the episode portrayed. You are more likely to get the dismissive reply “I think you have contacted the wrong person.” Time’s arrow goes only one way. You are now an unwanted ghost to them. Your well intentioned attempt to reconnect will be perceived and treated as a boundary violation. You will never get the positive, emotional, reflective response that Widmore gives Hume in the episode’s closing minutes.

‘The Constant’ in the end portrays wish fulfillment: the delusional belief that a fragment of the original “falling up” situation can survive many years later. In romance psychology this is called a positive illusion: see the 1988 influential paper by Shelley E. Taylor and Jonathan D. Brown that inspired this on-going, cumulative research program. Or as Alice In Chains once noted in “All Secrets Known” that opens the mournful, liturgical When Black Gives Way To Blue (2009): “There’s no going back | To the place | We started from.” Silence can also be metacommunication.

B. The Crow (1994) directed by Alex Proyas and starring Brandon Lee (whose on-set accidental death overshadowed the film’s initial release). This was one film that I didn’t see in the year that I took an unpaid writer / industry liaison position for the now former La Trobe University student newspaper Rabelais. I didn’t see Gettysburg, Speed, or Forrest Gump, either. This film adaptation of the James O’Barr comic series is filled with 1990s film tropes from its MTV influenced visual style to criminogenic narratives that the then Clinton administration legislated in its focus on an urban underclass.

The film opens and its narrative arc deals with Devils Night (arson and pyromania events) which we discover in the second act are orchestrated by crime boss “Top Dollar” (Michael Wincott), who quotes an underclass variation of the Wall Street elite financier Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987) - itself sourced from Drexel Burnham Lambert client and insider trader Ivan Boesky.

Much of the film deals with Eric Draven’s mission (Brandon Lee) to avenge his murdered fiancee Shelly Webster (Sofia Sinas) with the help of Sergeant Albrecht (Ernie Hudson), and to protect Sarah Mohr (Rochelle Davis). This quartet structure (a quintet with “Top Dollar” is from the Christopher Vogler school of scriptwriting. Co-scriptwriter John Shirley was on the cover of one of the final 21C Magazine issues, and we corresponded about The Crow and his other projects in 1998-2001. The rest of the cast are essentially gang members to be dispatched, although Mohr’s drug addicted mother Darla Mohr (Anna Levine) experiences the kind of familial redemption that the criminologist James Q. Wilson would perhaps have espoused (Albrecht’s character arc definitely fits a Wilson critique of then bureaucratic policing and urban crime contagion due to anomie and alienation).

The Draven-Webster romance is idyllic early love that is savagely ended on 30th October when the gang leader “T-Bird” (David Patrick Kelly) leads an assault that kills both victims. A year later when Draven returns in a post-death afterlife (suggestively vampiric) state as The Crow (complete with a familiar), Devils Night is now routine - there is even unauthorised merchandise that “Top Dollar” complains to his medium-like half-sister Myca (Bai Ling) the gang do not get to cash in on. The film - together with its iconic and now very influential soundtrack (and its various in-film band performances) - plays to Goth and Romanticist subcultures that in the mid-1990s were a growing consumer market for morbidly sad Generation Xers. The surface reading of Generation X by others (now both Baby Boomers and the subsequent Millennials / Generation Z cohorts) is of falling into the schema trap of depressive realism. This misperception fails to pierce the eudaimonic core of who Generation X actually is (and was at the time of the film’s initial release). You don’t really know us. We (still) really don’t care, either.

The Crow ultimately is an argument that the emotional transcendence of a Draven-Webster romance (the idyllic early love of courtship, prospective marriage, and starting a family together) will conquer all. Eros will defeat Chaos and Thanatos. Draven as The Crow - with the help of Sergeant Albrecht - is able to harness the Direct Action, Surgical Strike, and Strategic Surprise of utilising Special Forces modes to achieve relative superiority. The communicated “strategic effects” of this is that whilst Draven can’t bring Webster back to life, he can use his willed, focused intent (one of the major aims of the Vitalist school in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom in 1900-1945) to avenge her and to wreak revenge on “T-Bird” and his gang.

The operative key to this is a traditionalist understanding of Troth (pledged faith, fealty, and loyalty to another - such as in both upholding and exalting the marriage oath with your betrothed to last beyond physical death) that energises and actualises the individual human psyche as a causal willed force. (The Troth state in suitably receptive, mindful individuals may create an empathetic sense of shared psycho-emotional attunement that is subjectively experienced as being dyadic - whilst such consent-based commitment lasts and is jointly honoured.) This is the deeper ritual (operative in the sense of linguist J.L. Austin’s speech act theory in which the mutual betrothed now have an ontologically changed identity) in a marriage vow that most people experience as a ceremony.

In retrospect The Crow (1994) cast the die for Proyas with Dark City (1998) and the Wachowski Brothers’ more well known The Matrix (1999). It also runs in parallel with the magical hyperstition of Grant Morrison’s iconic series The Invisibles (1994-2000) which influenced creative director Richard Metzger and the original, core team of the now former Disinformation website (and Magick.me founder and Disinformation alumnus Jason Louv). Hollywood producers attempted to turn The Crow into a franchise and a 2024 remake. These all largely failed because they all focused on stylised aesthetics and criminogenic revenge narratives. They all largely missed the Draven-Webster romance as the original film’s emotional core, and its Troth narrative for its then younger Generation X audience. This is also summed up in the original film’s repeated maxim: “It can’t rain all the time.”

Except if you live in Melbourne, Australia. It often rains here several times a day.

B. Prior to the SpaceX IPO this week making him the world’s first trillionaire, The New Republic ran a lengthy profile on Elon Musk’s ideological politics. Human-Machine symbiosis was the hyperfocus in the 1990s of Extropian and Transhumanist schools of thought. Now, such utopian future visions are used to create social media narratives to raise investor capital. The TNR article is a long-form review of Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Penguin, 2026).

C. For the past 5 years I’ve been researching some as yet unpublished material on the Alt-Right, the MAGA Movement, and contemporary metapolitical thinkers. I’ve circled around the Russian geopolitical thinker and ultranationalist Alexander Dugin who has advocated a Eurasian informed vision. I’ve also been aware of the late Baron Julius Evola and his Traditionalist influence on contemporary initiatory networks that are helpful to spread political propaganda via multi-level metacommunication. Now, Arktos has released Dugin’s new book Julius Evola: Political Traditionalism which is my reading this week.

My estimative assessment of Dugin differs from Marlene Laruelle, who I saw speak at an invited workshop at the University of Melbourne. For Laruelle, Dugin is not “Putin’s brain” (biographer and translator Michael Millerman) and he is instead pre-framed as Russian Oligarch funded. This causal flow between Dugin and Putin is a little too Rasputin-like in terms of its posited Bayesian priors and its historical analogies. For me, Dugin’s role is more to influence transnational networks, notably in building US-Russia and Russia-Europe nodes and connectors.

D. The other material I’m reading this week is the CAIA Association’s professional designation for the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst. Aced It Publications has two unofficial guides on Level 1 (Foundations) and Level 1 (Asset Classes).

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on the Philosophy of Love created by Dr Lee Perlman.

F. The Social Reckoning (2026) - the sequel to The Social Network (2010) - now has a trailer.

G. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has posited a US-China war scenario.

H. The infamous debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault that happened on 22nd October 1971.

I. Author Charles Bukowski on dying and how to write.

B. Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller (New York: Scribner Book Company, 2022). Geoeconomics and Great Power competition is now a (renewed) major theme in international political economy. Miller’s book details the rise-fall-rise arc of semiconductor chip technology innovation and manufacturing in Silicon Valley, Japan, Taiwan, and China. It features anecdotes that often turn up in the military and technology innovation literature - such as how Intel’s Andy Grove (Only The Paranoid Survive on strategic inflection points) helped to promote Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma on disruptive innovation and subsequent books). Chip War spans from William Shockley to Huawei; and from Palo Alto to offshoring and China’s resurgence. The sections on Japan’s economic bubble and then its Lost Decades are informative. Miller has an MIT Security Program guest lecture and there are plenty of other book promotion talks on YouTube. Chip War has short chapters of 5 to 7 pages which makes it easy to read and to follow Miller’s narrative arc of intersecting geopolitics and technology innovation. It is thus no surprise that FT awarded Chip War its Best Financial Book of 2023. Chip War is a model trade press published book of well targeted translational research that continues to appeal both to specific audiences and that also informs a broader readership.

C. The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History by Mateo Jarquin (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024). Jarquin is an Assistant Professor at Chapman University: The Sandinista Revolution is a model book for being well positioned for a tenure application that is “relative to opportunity”. Many people are only familiar with the Sandinistas via The Clash’s Sandinista! triple album (1980) or the Reagan administration’s counterinsurgency and psychological operations messaging. Through interviews with Sandinista leaders Jarquin tells the inside story of an insurgent counter-elite from its origins (1933-1979) to its first power consolidation (1979-1989) and then the post-Cold War repercussions. As a revisionist global history this book decenters the dominant narratives from Cold War history and United States insurgency / revolution analyses in order to situate the Sandinistas in the broader context of Latin American area studies, North-South geoeconomic and geopolitical relations, and vanguard revolutionary movements and their decision elites. There are significant primary sources: archives, oral histories, elite decision-maker interviews, online documents, memoirs, and other published accounts. Jarquin participated in a Wilson Center seminar in 2024.

D. The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era by Edmund S.K. Fung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Fung was affiliated with Western Sydney University when he researched and wrote this book - which personifies WSU’s institutional strength in comparative area studies research. This revisionist history of China’s Republican era (1912-1949 and notably in the interwar period of the 1920s and the 1930s) focuses on liberal, conservative, and Confucian intellectual currents and their respective attempts to reform Chinese society. This book is a sophisticated analysis of domestic sociopolitical discourse, historical traditions, and how foreign and global influences were resituated and reinterpreted to address on-going social change. Of personal interest to me were brief sections on Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and how these Western macrohistorical thinkers informed Eastern and Sinic civilisational perspectives. The book’s chapter structure and case study sequencing has a model clarity (on the various competing sociopolitical ideologies) that is a hallmark of Cambridge University Press.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is an Introduction to Latin American Studies created by Professor Chappell Lawson.

F. The Minneapolis Fed’s President Ned Kashkari on the second Trump administration’s tariffs.

G. Why the quantitative trading firm Susquehanna is building its own prediction market.

H. Selected lectures from an MIT course on Dynastic China (2024).

A recent academic profile and eulogy on Sternhell’s significant contributions.

B. Professor John Mearsheimer on Realism and Great Power politics in Athens on 2nd June 2026. Professor Mearsheimer gives very clear explanations of normative versus explanatory theories; how realists think; how realism compares to other rival International Relations approaches like liberalism and democratic peace theory; and its theory-testing use in geopolitics, great power rivalry, and military intelligence analysis. An alternate version of the two videos below is here.

The end of Mearsheimer’s talk and a lengthy Q&A section.

C. The latest Australian Foreign Affairs Exchange on the Shangri La diplomacy and security dialogue and the AUKUS security compact.

Volatility Arbitrageurs, Hedge Funds (Meso-Level Strategic Subcultures), and Conflict Alpha

President Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47^th president of the United States on 20^th January 2025 signalled the shift to a mercantilist ethic and economic statecraft instruments. This new doctrine remains unarticulated in a declaratory way in part due to occurring in (and catalysing) ruptures and regime shifts. Instead, it operates in the “phase zero” (Brian S. Petit) of cognitive, hybrid, information, memetic, and other (morphological) forms of war. The efficient frontier lies in alternative investments—notably in event, global macro, statistical arbitrage, and volatility oriented hedge funds. These are institutional vehicles for private investor capital that allow greater operational flexibility with portfolio (strategic level) and execution trader (tactical level) functions.

This paper draws on 15 years of (unpublished) observation of Australian and United States financial markets; meso-level research of hedge funds as strategic subcultures (Jack Snyder) in the international political economy; and that provide arbitrage, optionality, and “risk on” based approaches which can augment traditional nation-state based defence and foreign policies. How do volatility arbitrageurs really work in global financial markets? How and why have hedge funds adapted? How—given regulatory restrictions on profiting from assassinations, terrorism, war, and force majeure events—are these volatility arbitrageurs and hedge funds able to achieve conflict alpha?

Prediction Market Intelligence: Lessons for Analysts and Policymakers

On 16^th March 2026, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Comment on digital platforms called prediction markets that allow speculation on event contracts. Firms like Kalshi and Polymarket have grown rapidly: the public’s interest in sports betting, the sentiment peak of an equities market bubble, cost of living and employment fears, and viral storytelling of winner-takes-all lottery / windfall-like payouts on X (formerly Twitter) and other social media networks. Prediction markets remain illegal in many international jurisdictions, like Australia.

How might prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket be used as Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) or alternative data (hedge funds and proprietary trading firms)? What are the benefits and dangers of using them as a data input into the intelligence cycle? What is the potential for deception, counterdeception, and misperception? How could this OSINT data be integrated with other data sources (operational risk)? Are prediction markets a failed ‘silver bullet’ (Frederick Brooks, The Mythical-Man Month, 1975) or just a technological fad in recurring hype cycles (Gartner)?

This paper offers some initial reflections for analysts and policymakers that draw cumulatively on MSc, MA, and PhD studies (2002-20), and experience with the former website Disinformation (1998-2008).

Michael Anton's essay The Flight 93 Election, which brought the Claremont Institute to greater public awareness:

I've been researching this for about 6 years, and dealt with its precursors in 1998-2008 whilst editing and writing for the former website Disinformation.

In particular, for those of you who were stunned when DJT was re-elected (and Kamala Harris lost) in the 2024 Presidential election, this book may help to explain the MAGA Movement networks that developed in 2015-25. These people both influence - and provide post hoc justification for - second Trump administration policies (including specific foreign policies being pursued).

The book has some similarities with the earlier work 20 years ago on the neoconservatives around George W. Bush, as illustrated in books by Murray Friedman (The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy), and Gary Dorrien (Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana).

B. Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University (Faculty profile page). He was PhD Supervisor to Erik Davis (the PhD dissertation-to-book is the excellent High Weirdness), who wrote for the former 21C Magazine. Kripal has been involved with the Esalen Institute and his book Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) deals with a number of important, adjacent aspects like Michael Murphy’s Transformation Project that mapped US-USSR scientific exchanges in the 1970s and 1980s on parapsychology / remote viewing oriented research. I learned about the Transformation Project from LTC Dr Michael A. Aquino and subsequently looked up aspects of in various university libraries - much of this body of work translated into peak performance training for Olympics athletes, which the late psychiatrist Ari Kiev then took and applied to trading psychology for hedge fund managers in the United States in the 1990s and 2000s, including for Steve A. Cohen’s SAC Capital.

I have borrowed the first edition of Kripal’s PhD dissertation-to-book Kali’s Child from La Trobe University’s Borchardt Library (a second edition is available, and Kripal has responded to critics and their rejoinders) and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011) from the University of Melbourne’s Baillieu Library. I also have Kindle copies of Kripal’s How To Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024) and Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Kripal is one of the annotators of the late science fiction author Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis reflections on his 2-3-74 encounter with VALIS (a Vast Active Living Intelligence System) which I wrote about in 1996-97 in an unpublished article pitched originally to Perth’s former REVelation Magazine.

A couple of brief comments from a research management / administration perspective on Kripal’s career:

Early on, he gained the support of Professor Emeritus Wendy Doniger at the University of Chicago. At Rice University, he was able to develop an innovative teaching program. Kripal was able to draw on “lived experience” and practitioner-informed insights - including via the Esalen Institute - that address many of the controversies in two epistemic communities: the anticult / countercult / cultic studies exponents (often psychology, psychiatry, social services and victimology oriented) versus new religious movement scholars (often anthropology, sociology, political science, and religious studies oriented). Being involved in such groups or movements have their own complex issues. However, in actually engaging with such ideologies, practices, teachings, and transmissions - you gain (more epistemologically grounded) transformational insights (many that may be more like Altamont’s darkness rather than Woodstock’s idealism) than in being an “armchair quarterback”.

There are some things we might differ on - Kripal’s advocacy of the late Adi Da Samraj (like Ken Wilber - to which Adi Da devotees have responded to) reads to me like an experience of altered states of consciousness / trance induction that interpersonal / social neuroscience can provide an empirical analysis of (in terms of its causal mechanisms). My own stance is probably closer to the Gurdjieff Work exponent William Patrick Patterson (in his book Adi Da Samraj—Realized and/or Deluded? - see reviews): the rise-isolation-fall arc of Adi Da Samraj’s avatar transmission, how he ended up in Fiji and what actually happened, and the closed nature of the community and much of its publications / public engagement (in terms of its attempted diffusion of ideas, beliefs, discourses, norms, values and worldviews) from a fringe community into the broader society are both cautionary and problematising.

Kripal built much of his career at the University of Chicago Press. He was able to collaborate with authors for trade press books that helped to reach a broader audience. Kripal has also captured many of the “lessons learned” from his Teaching & Research academic career in his memoir Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017). The latter book is highly recommended - and can be read along with other academic career and cumulative research program literature.

B. On the different creative and life phases of visionary musician Miles Davis.

C. Jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins has passed away.

D. Esperanto remains an enigmatic language that has never really gone mainstream.

E. President Donald Trump and the nuclear energy regulatory landscape.

F. Generative AI is ending the lifetime career arc of academic professors.

G. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Statistical Methods in Economics created by Professor Anna Mikusheva.

H. What weather derivatives are.

I. The Acquired podcast on the lessons learned from great companies.

J. On the SpaceX IPO.

K. The free Yale University online course Listening to Music presented by Professor Emeritus Craig Wright.

L. Learn as a complete beginner how to play backgammon.

M. The history of modern fashion from the NYU Center for the Humanities.

B. Drone warfare has also emerged as pivotal in the Russia-Ukraine War. Now, the McKinsey consulting company’s mid-aughties tagline of a “war for talent” takes on a new meaning.

C. The later period Wilhelm Reich promoted cloudbusting. In the 1980s, US LTC Thomas Bearden promoted Soviet weather modification as a late Cold War era disruptive innovation gap / missile gap comparator. Now, as geoeconomics and geopolitics creates a more unstable world, weather modification has returned as both a fear and an experimental, scientific frontier.

D. Today’s MIT OCW free course is the History of Science created by Professor Robin Schleffer.

E. Robert Kagan on President Donald Trump.

F. Sports gambling is taking over the United States: a plausible sentiment indicator of irrational exuberance and retail consumer-driven herding behaviour (cf. the Nobel laureate Robert Shiller). Consequently, sports gambling firms are looking to big tobacco to both understand and to operationalise the Black Arts of regulatory arbitrage and value capture.

G. Seth G. Jones on United States preparations for a likely war with China.

H. Francis Fukuyama on the United States as a declining power.

I. A free online course on Commodity Derivatives and Risk Management. An example lecture on Crude Oil Price Determination.

J. Orson Welles and Peter O'Toole on Hamlet.

K. A Dr James Orr lecture for the Peterson Academy on the philosopher Plato (and the Platonic / Socratic current in primarily Western intellectual history - including Plato’s Myths).

L. Bloomberg Podcasts on why the bond market is very important in the current financial market, and likely forecasts of inflation in the United States. A new edition (11th) of the Frank Fabozzi authored textbook Bond Markets, Analysis, and Strategies (Boston, MA: MIT Press Academic, 2026) is out on 23rd June 2026.

M. The Council on Foreign Relations on the future of American power.

N. An interview with the legendary Australian investor Geoff Wilson AO of Wilson Asset Management.

O. Australia’s 4 Corners investigates in The BHP Files the mining conglomerate BHP and its (perceived) rollback of its ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) projects.

P. X platform comments on economic statecraft, geopolitical investor Marko Papic, why Indonesia has banned Polymarket (with a nod to Edward N. Luttwak), why Japanese retail traders have shifted from forex / currency markets to AI stocks and OTC derivatives, and an excellent documentary on Black Wednesday (16th September 1992).

B. Why Bob Dylan is unique.

C. AI Slop has a prehistory for automating authorship.

D. I remember Hollywood’s Girlbosses from its Pre-Code era (1930-34).

E. The richest cat in the world.

F. Trump’s dangerous Taiwan gamble.

G. Cannes in 2026.

H. Famous Author decision regret.

I. Sinologist tips on the Trump-Xi Summit.

J. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Japanese Literature and Cinema, created by Professor Ian Condry.

K. The Maurin Academy’s Political Philosophy podcast.

M. The new PBS Frontline episode about President Donald Trump and the Federal Reserve on YouTube.

N. Australia’s If You’re Listening current affairs show on Palantir’s Alex Karp.

O. FT on big oil.

P. The ANU’s Professor Hugh White on the realist historian E.H. Carr.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.

B. Relatedly, Iron Maiden’s classic film clip for 2 Minutes To Midnight (1984).

C. How top-earning Australians make money.

D. Teaching poetry in the AI age.

E. On the Enhanced Games.

F. Polymarket’s hot new bet: hantavirus.

G. United States civil servants are under threat again.

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Frameworks of Urban Governance, created by Professor Deborah Kobes.

I. AI and jazz.

J. The Madisonian view on religious freedom.

K. Martin Shkreli on the semiconductor cycle.

M. How to start a cult - strictly for affiliative marketing purposes, of course.

N. Pink Floyd’s live concerts for The Wall (1979) from 1980, fan curated.

O. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson believes that new, major warfare has begun.

P. Radiohead’s live concert from Bologna, Italy on 17th November 2025.

B. The second Trump administration has escalated Antifa as a largely non-existent domestic terrorist threat.

C. The Alt Right and the MAGA Movement’s Tradwife ideology has become an identity trap.

D. Artists and designers are rebelling against artificial intelligence.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Disease and Health: Culture, Society and Ethics, created by Professor Jean Jackson.

F. Democratic fascism is for some people, a thing.

G. On United States-India relations in the Indo-Pacific.

H. The MAGA Movement faces an ideological (splitting) challenge with Evangelical Christians.

I. The power of libraries.

J. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy in an historical perspective (London School of Economics).

K. The Future of Mathematics Symposium at Stanford University.

L. Palantir’s Q1 2026 earnings webast.

M. Discovering electronic music: a 1970 documentary.

N. An MTV interview in 1984 with Frank Zappa.

O. Francis Ford Coppola’s picks from the Criterion Closet.

B. Beck’s symphonic turn.

C. What happens when Presidential assassins fail.

D. How The Fast & Furious film franchise took over Hollywood.

E. The artist Francis King teaches how to conceal.

F. Longevity research may benefit your next dog.

G. Halogencore films or so-called corporate thrillers are initiatory journeys into white-collar crime and institutional corruption in late (neoliberal) capitalism.

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on the Economics of Education created by Professor Frank Levy.

I. The important Nine Inch Nails song that is still not on most streaming services.

J. Turing Award winner Mike Stonebraker on Google, Postgres, and databases.

K. 44 hours of pure black screen - the black beyond black (Don Webb) or where the black stars hang (Lustmord).

B. The 30 greatest living American songwriters.

C. Monotask your way to success.

D. Hypnopedia (sleep learning) is an experimental technique that I used to hallucinate about in my teens. It’s apparently making a comeback.

E. An ageing population (a gerontocracy) challenges the United States political and social order. Generational cohort analyses have foreseen this for at least three decades: now the (posited) scenario is coming to pass.

F. Jacobin thinks that Australia has just entrenched lower wages for younger workers. Actually, since the 1990-91 “recession we had to have” (then Treasurer and later Prime Minister Paul Keating), that’s always been the case: a cheap workforce in part to ensure low credit ratings for favouring international capital to find a safe haven in the Indo-Pacific that is not an offshore financial centre like Singapore or Hong Kong. However, Karl Marx did not really cover shadow banking or tax havens.

G. OSINT satellite analysis is helping Oregon State University researchers to better understand how effective United States (and Israeli) missile strikes against Iran have been.

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Risk and Decision Analysis created by Professor Richard de Neufville.

I. Young and disconnected in America.

J. What the Iran War is really costing the United States.

K. How to looksmaxx - if you can afford it.

M. Martin Scorsese on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Vertigo (1958).

N. John Cale and Lou Reed on Sunday Night (1989).

O. The classic thriller No Way Out (1987).

B. The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has found that counterterrorism intelligence funding in Australia has fallen.

C. Your digital life can disappear. Free advice from my therapist: choose immersive experiences instead.

D. The new PBS Frontline episode on immigration arrests in the United States.

E. SCOTUS guts the Voting Rights Act. The majority opinion in Louisiana v Callais.

F. Acting on women’s rights.

G. The rumoured Ukraine-Al Qaeda link in West Africa.

H. An update on quantum computing - AUKUS Pillar 2 relevant.

I. The Strait of Hormuz in 8 charts.

J. Mobilising for war.

K. A wartime economy would be different this time.

L. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Modeling and Assessment for Policy created by Professor Noelle Selin.

M. The digital-democratic doom loop.

N. Paul Tudor Jones II on current trends.

O. Andy Warhol & William S. Burroughs on the Chelsea Hotel.

P. Classicist philosopher and Alexandr Dugin translator Michael Millerman on the Palantir Manifesto.

Q. Venture capitalist John Doerr on why execution trumps having just business ideas.

B. Brittany Higgins has spoken out in order to protect the counselling records of victim-survivors. This is really significant as any disclosure of medical records or confidential / personal / sensitive information to third parties can mean that this unauthorised disclosure can lead to targeted, weaponised disinformation as part of a DARVO playbook.

C. Wars often lead strategic actors and leadership involved in other conflicts to re-evaluate their decision sets and their strategic repertoires. Oliver Schmitt’s new book Preparing For War: Strategy, Power and Military Change (London: Hurst Publishers, 2026) also addresses varied aspects of this.

D. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Libertarianism in History created by Professor Malick W. Ghachem.

E. Michael Mandelbaum on how to build an American foreign policy.

B. The second Trump administration’s negotiation strategy with Iran.

C. The Pentagon’s impression management about the Iran War.

D. Poisoning the forest for the trees.

E. People think the post-truth era is really here. It’s not.

F. Political violence in the United States.

G. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Music and Technology by Professor Christopher Ariza (Academia.edu; Google Scholar).

H. Amelie turns 25.

I. Miles Davis on Prince and Michael Jackson.

J. The Munro Lecture with Columbia University’s Professor Adam Tooze.

K. Stanford University’s Professor Francis Fukuyama on how to defend Taiwan from China.