B. Livestreaming NASA’s Artemis II and its Moon flyby.

C. Australia’s most decorated soldier (and Special Forces Operator) Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested and charged with five war crimes in Afghanistan.

D. Jacobin Magazine on managerial power in workplaces.

E. President Trump and paramilitary violence in the United States.

F. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Non-Violence As A Way Of Life created by Dr Lee Perlman.

G. Don’t be haunted when your family (essentially) cuts you off: it’s their loss.

H. Memes have taken over United States culture. Sadly, those interviews I did with memetics authors in 1998-99 (the tapes were stolen before being transcribed) means that my originally planned book will never come out.

I. AI may shape career pathways to better jobs.

J. The Heritage Foundation has released its 2026 Index of Military Strength.

K. Cato on the great political realignment that is unfolding.

L. AUKUS Pillar 2 relevant: quantum’s industrial moment.

M. Tehran’s strategic calculus.

N. 10 hours of NASA’s Artemis II and its Moon flyby.

O. Adam Tooze talks with David Harvey for two hours about Karl Marx (Capital volume 1) and Harvey’s new book The Story of Capital (New York: Verso, 2026).

B. Bloomberg on how the second Trump administration has alienated US financial markets.

C. Five artists who grew up in cults / new religious movements.

D. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi has been effectively fired by memes.

E. Two lost episodes from the Doctor Who story The Dalek Master Plan (1965) are now released on the BBC (you may need a VPN to view BBC iPlayer).

F. Kanye West has an AI era record.

G. Geoengineering is apparently now a thing. Neal Stephenson (Substack) wrote about this in his book Termination Shock (New York: HarperCollins, 2021).

H. What happens when a nuclear site is hit?

I. Sovereignty & Security Forum 2026.

J. The politics of oil have fundamentally changed.

K. Mapping History: a lecture by Sir Martin Gilbert.

B. What happens when a whale is born?

C. A Federal Judge has just saved NPR and PBS from the second Trump administration.

D. Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on the Iran War. He also has a Substack.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Economic Growth by Nobel laureate Dean Acemoglu.

B. Oil traders are arbitraging the second Trump administration on Iran War related geopolitical risk. This is no surprise whatsoever for readers of Leah McGrath Goodman’s classic The Asylum: Inside the Rise and Ruin of the Global Oil Market (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).

C. Muskism is the new reactionary modernist ideology that Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff have detailed in their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Penguin, 2026).

D. The game theorist, political economist, author, and politician Yanis Varoufakis on who will likely win the Iran War.

E. What tail risk inflation hedging is.

F. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Energy Economics by Professor Paul Joskow.

G. Sebastian Mallaby (Council on Foreign Relations) has a new book out today called The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence (New York: Penguin, 2026) available now on Amazon Kindle and Audible. All of Mallaby’s books are highly influential in finance, investment, and public policy circles - and are very highly recommended as long-form creative non-fiction and journalism.

B. Why Australian universities rely on external consultants: 4 Corners investigative journalism episode (Australia) and YouTube hosted version (for international viewers).

C. How to discuss additional work-from-home days with your employer.

D. A new book by Rose Gottemoeller on US-Russia space geopolitics / exopolitics after 1991.

E. The “international rules-based order” is increasingly viewed as being dead.

F. Has Russia won the Russia-Ukraine War?

G. Barry Eichengreen “talks his book” at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft on 9th April 2026.

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Social Science and the Iraq and Syrian Wars created by Professor Roger Peterson.

I. Wargaming the Pacific (United States Naval College and the Hoover Institution).

J. Lloyd Blankfein “talks his book” with Anrew Ross Sorkin at the 92nd St Y, New York.

K. A talk by Sir Lawrence Freedman at Google on his influential book Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

L. The trailer for the new film Palestine ‘36 (2026).

M. Rush returns with its new lineup at Canada’s Juno Awards to play its very first ever song, Finding My Way.

N. The SXSW 2026 panel The Knowledge Paradox: When Does Sharing Become Theft?

O. An hour of Iranian jazz.

P. The Nature of Genius - a free course at Open Yale Courses created by Professor Emeritus Craig M. Wright.

B. Has Russia won the Russo-Ukrainian War?

C. Jeffrey Epstein and the Gates Foundation.

D. On Vilfredo Pareto’s sociology of feared elite decline.

E. Wartime versus Deeptime.

F. The US and China are fighting over talent. It’s actually in Singapore, enjoying a hawker-style delicious lunch.

G. Why Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz matters. “Move fast and break things”?

H. How actively managed funds work. Also called a research product that promotes your think tank’s philanthropic funders from finance.

I. Data is now the frontline of warfare.

J. Setting the rules for AI warfare.

K. Iran’s escalation strategy won’t work, RAND claims. Tehran (obviously) didn’t hire RAND to run Herman Kahn scenarios and stress tests.

L. A recent thrift store purchase: James Rickards’ The New Case for Gold (London: Penguin House UK, 2016) that foresaw today’s “crisis alpha”, “safe haven” and “de-risk behavioural herding” gold bugs.

M. Tyler Cowen and Harvey Mansfield talk about Niccolo Machiavelli’s realpolitik and Leo Strauss’s elitism.

N. The initial post Cold War period (called the interregnum) was meant to bring us the “peace dividend.” The Council on Foreign Relations explores why this actually never happened.

CFR also considers the Iran War’s ripple effects in geoeconomics.

O. Stephen Kotkin (Hoover Institution) considers how strong Iran’s decision elite is.

My two submitted proposals which are both under consideration are below.

Old Myths, Nearly Dead: Why The Rules-Based International Order Is No Longer Credible

In early 2026 the second Trump administration of the United States launched Special Operations Forces in Venezuela; began an Iran war that triggered volatility in energy / oil markets; and released its National Defense Strategy. Russia continued its conventional war with Ukraine. China flexed its growing sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific—and, together with Russia and the United States—underpinned continued shifts in nuclear tripolarity.

These catalyst events all highlight that the rules-based international order touted by middle powers like Australia is an aspirational myth that is no longer credible. Yet it is also time to move beyond outdated classicist historical narratives such as frequent reliance on analogical reasoning with Thucydides, the Stoics, and Augustine (in political philosophy). Economic statecraft, denial strategies, and weaponised interdependence as prioritised policy instruments now requires more contemporary frameworks, found in the study of coercion, special operations instruments (beyond direct action / surgical strikes), space-based strategy, burden-sharing in strategic alliances like the AUKUS security compact, and geopolitical risk arbitrage.

Disorder, disruption and volatility are often fetishised: this paper seeks to go beyond outdated paradigms.

Strategic PSYOP for Advancing Impellance-Based Crisis De-Escalation and Facilitating Positive Peace

On 2nd December 2025, the United States Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signalled in a widely circulated memorandum for Senior Pentagon Leadership that he would revert to the prior designation Psychological Operations (PSYOP) from the prior Obama administration’s shift to Military Information Support Operations (MISO). Secretary of War Hegseth signalled this transformation of PSYOP doctrine, campaigns, and instruments prior to recent operations in Venezuela and Iran, and public controversy over the Pentagon, Anthropic, and Palantir Technologies.

Informed by decade-long doctrinal reform debates in what is now the PSYWAR School at Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg), this paper establishes an agenda-setting initiative that restores PSYOP to its strategic level over MISO’s far more limited tactical emphasis. Integral to this strategic level PSYOP re-emphasises on indirect, diachronic, longitudinal, non-kinetic, shaping forms of diplomatic, information, military and economic (DIME) instruments for the title’s identified two core strategic objectives. I go paradigmatically beyond Vallely/Aquino (1980) and Aquino (2013, 2016) oriented MindWar frameworks, to integrate strategic doctrinal insights from Sun Tzu, Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, John Boyd, Gene Sharp, Johan Galtung, Sohail Inayatullah, and William T. Vollmann.

B. On the Department of War’s Pete Hegseth (political psychology as attack PR).

C. China has closely studied Western classics (to better understand its foundational strategic thought, and to differentiate this from modernity).

D. Catalyst events (war) + prediction markets now facilitate insider trading: a new threat to national security.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is an Introduction to International Relations, created by Professor Richard Nielsen.

F. The deep harms of deepfakes, redux.

G. How to read 100 books a year.

H. Palantir and the US Federal Government workforce. What Palantir’s ontology is.

I. The heterodox economist Michael Hudson on Iran’s grand strategy in the Middle East.

J. An album that was part of my undergraduate years.

K. Dr Brian Keating (Peterson Academy) on cosmology.

L. Disinformation alumnus and Magick.me founder Jason Louv on strategic communications and perception management.

M. I listened to this on the weekend: Adam Tooze on the War in Iran.

N. Netflix has a new documentary on the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ early years, out on 20th March 2026.

O. The Santa Fe Institute on the origins and future of economic inequality.

P. A 90-minute Bloomberg special about the Iran war oil shock.

Q. James Baldwin, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X interviewed in 1963.

R. Some useful strategic studies lectures from Dr Julian Spencer-Churchill (Concordia University).

S. A talk by the late United Kingdom cultural critic Mark Fisher: “All this is temporary.”

B. The Center for a New American Security contended a month ago that the United States was not ready for a drone war. Is Operation Epic Fury a test run?

C. The commercialisation of space surveillance.

D. Australia and critical minerals.

E. Does President Donald Trump have an endgame for Iran? (Regime change is the ends or strategic objective; will the means deployed be sufficient?) This question crosses ideological lines - Jacobin’s Arron Reza Merat also asks it. A second order effect of Operation Epic Fury is that leftist advocates are framing the second Trump administration as imperial.

F. The MAGA (movement) plot to take down Canada.

G. On Anthropic as a United States supply chain risk. Aspects of this stratagem were addressed in two James Rickards books on geopolitical risk: Sold Out! How Severed Supply & Surging Inflation Will End Consumer Choice (London: Penguin Business UK, 2022) and MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy (New York: Portfolio, 2024). The past week’s events are not the strategic surprise that the pro-Anthropic / Silicon Valley / disruptive innovation school of thought has portrayed it as. Chris Miller also offers a view - his book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022) has become a bestseller and probably the most recent influential book on the intersection of geopolitical risk, disruptive innovation, and critical technology.

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Technology Strategy, created by Professor Jason Davis.

I. Bloomberg on societal collapse and how to avoid it.

J. Financial Times asks: can India quit coal?

K. The Hoover Institution has released the 2026 edition of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review.

L. The paperback edition of Ted Seides’ influential book So You Want To Start A Hedge Fund? Lessons for Managers and Allocators (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2026) is coming out on 8th March 2026 in Australia.

M. Professor Eric Kaufmann offers the first class of his Intro to Political Science for the Peterson Academy.

N. Professor Stephen Walt on America as the predatory hegemon.

O. Yascha Mounk and Francis Fukuyama discuss the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury and the implications for Iran.

B. San Francisco’s AI subculture. AI automation will risk transfer the costs to workers and suppress wages. The new payoff is meant to be more effective coordination / orchestration (Palantir Technologies ontology territory).

C. JSOU’s Special Operations Research Topics 2026 (Amazon Kindle version).

D. X is a disinformation vector on US/Israel-Iran and other geopolitics events. Meanwhile, the former Disinformation website is still silent.

E. Werner Herzog’s blend of fact and fiction.

F. Today’s MIT OCW free course is War & American Society, created by Professor Christopher Capozzola.

G. The United States is focusing on Australian sovereignty in the Indo-Pacific to offshore balance China.

H. Dave Mullins has a new podcast Aftercult on former members of cults and new religious movements. Understanding Beliefs by Nils J. Nilsson (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2014) is very useful.

I. X comments on the Pete Hegseth / Department of War and Anthropic contract dispute: income reliance; warfighter signalling on how military strategy trumps corporate strategy; Anthropic’s misperception versus OpenAI’s victory in strategic moves; how Hedseth / DoW countered Anthropic’s technology / ethics concerns; why the name change from DoD to DoW is a very important signal (now confirmed by Operation Enduring Fury in Iran); business development failure to understand military / warfighting mindsets; on supply chain coercion; executive power use of denial and economic sanctions; and as a negotiation / brinkmanship case study.

J. The cultural politics in Japan of Sumo wrestling.

K. PBS News special on War With Iran.

L. Stan Druckenmiller offers investment lessons.

M. Option pricing explained.

N. The Oscar Peterson Trio in Tokyo in 1964.

B. The Russia-Ukraine War in 10 charts. And: four years later.

C. An upcoming Quincy Institute webinar on the Trump doctrine.

D. You are likely not the winners in Trump’s America.

E. Prediction markets and inside bets on aliens.

F. Palantir moves to Florida to use noncompete employment contracts.

G. The dilemmas of German defence.

H. Today’s MIT OCW free course is an Introduction to Japanese Culture, created by Professor Ian Condry.

I. Free lectures on financial engineering and computational finance.

J. The MIT OCW free lectures for Introduction to Psychology (2011).

B. Australia’s wealth inequality and tax holes.

C. What’s driving the push for humanoid robots? Perhaps Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in its restored and colourised versions.

D. The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman frames the Jeffrey Epstein case as being part of ‘the last conspiracy.’ Actually, many of the elements formatively emerged in the 1970s; were part of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s and early 1990s; and were part of the 1998-2008 conspiracy theory subculture that I encountered when working as an offshore contractor for the former Disinformation website / company based in New York City. It’s maybe only new to high-brow, upper middle class New Yorker readers.

E. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols observes that the GOP Republicans are now getting their memes and slogans from a rather malignant historical source.

F. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs has written an “origin story” memoir. It’s called Streetwise and it’s out on 3rd March 2026. That gives you time to read William D. Cohan’s well received Money & Power: How Goldman Sachs Came To Rule The World (New York: Penguin, 2011) first. Cohan has very kindly signal boosted my X posts: thank you.

G. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Introduction to Media Studies, created by Dr Andrea Walsh.

H. The Omaha film trailer scares me.

I. Frank Zappa live in Berlin, West Germany in 1968.

J. A classical musician listens for the first time to King Crimson’s song Fracture (1974).

K. An original news report about Black Monday - the 1987 financial crash on Wall Street. The best history is veteran financial journalist Diana B. Henriques’ A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2017).

L. An MIT OCW free lecture called Seven Questions About Tariffs That Everyone Should Know the Answer To.

B. I knew there was a reason I have stopped eating protein bars.

C. The scramble for lithium (Thea Riofranco’s new book Extraction).

D. Will AI disrupt human labour and create future food wars?

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Media in Cultural Context, created by Dr Joshua Green.

F. Value at Risk (VAR) models in finance.

G. Stewardship of finance: the financial world and its regulators.

H. Stewardship of finance: risk and insurance.

I. Stewardship of finance: speculation and liquidity.

B. Pedagogical Grammar insights: Stephen Fry on grammar Nazis; then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s National Apology to the Stolen Generations; and then President-Elect Barack Obama’s acceptance/victory speech on 4th November 2008.

C. PBS documentaries Sun Ra: Do The Impossible; Bombshell on the fallout from the United States bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II; and PBS Frontline on the recent Venezuela crisis. VPN subscription may be needed for viewing from some countries.

D. How the Cold War’s end saved the Siberian tiger.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Writing Science Fiction, created by Shariann Lewitt.

F. Nazgul the Wolfdog who crashed the Winter Olympics deserves a medal and to be in the closing ceremony. He teaches us to embrace antifragility and to be ‘risk on’ when excellent risk-reward outcomes exist. Or the opportunity for cute viral internet videos.

B. Andrew Leigh MP who has written about existential risk talks about innovation in order to “talk his book.”

C. The Thaler-Sunstein behavioural economics “nudge” framework is now being disputed.

D. Gifted & Talented education programs in New York City are under fire.

E. How Project 2025 is reshaping the United States.

F. Iran is silencing dissent. I co-wrote a conference paper on this in 2009. Direct Broadcast Satellite use was also noted in the Vallely / Aquino MindWar paper (1980) which later circulated in conspiracy theory circles due to William Milton Cooper, Fritz Springmeier (whose Bloodlines of the Illuminati was found during Operation Neptune Spear on 1st May 2011 in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, amongst OBL’s bookshelf reading.

G. Today’s MIT OCW free course is Introduction to Linguistics, created by Professor David Pesetsky.

H. An unofficial audiobook of William McRaven’s Spec Ops: Studies in Special Operations Warfare (Theory & Practice) (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 2009) an influential SOF theory of attritionist-driven Direct Action. Do make your bed (daily journal).

I. A trailer for the upcoming film Pressure out on 29th May 2026 about the D-Day operation’s strategic planning and the Clausewitzean friction impacts of adverse weather on D-Day’s tactical operations / execution.

B. The plot to save America.

C. Anatomy of an ICE detention.

D. Iran’s protest movement and the regime.

E. Beyond strategic ambiguity on Taiwan.

F. Oil disruption scenarios for a second Trump administration strike on Iran.

G. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Energy Economics, created by Professor Paul Joskow (Google Scholar profile).

H. Nirvana live in 1989.

I. The infamous scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut (1979, 2019) featuring the late Robert Duvall.

J. Miles Davis with John Coltrane live in 1960.

K. Inside the risky world of high-frequency trading.

L. On the legendary film Killer of Sheep (1977) now playing on the Criterion Channel.

M. Beijing’s underground city.

B. Joseph Voros has kindly made me aware of a new article on neo-royalism: a clientelist, patronage system emerging at the meso-level of the emerging postliberal and multipolar global order. I have cited article co-author Abraham Newman (Google Scholar) in two unsuccessful Postdoc proposals for the University of Melbourne’s McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant Scheme that Timothy Lynch kindly supported. I could not get research funding; the proposed research was never conducted; and the debates and emerging global order dynamics have all moved on. I continue to note some brief aspects in this blog.

C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Brain Structure and Its Origins, created by - and now a legacy of - the late Professor Emeritus Gerald Schneider (Google Scholar profile).

D. Australia is having a furore over the attempted return of Islamic State families.

E. Today in why I never pursued a screenwriting career in Australia (after reading in US scriptwriting books about their options market for unproduced scripts and looking at state-based preproduction funding schemes, I realised that the Australian market was probably too small and unprofitable).

F. Today, I learned that New Zealand film producer and developer Grahame McLean passed away in 2025. I last saw him at my late father’s funeral and wake in 2017, for whom McLean was an inspirational (entrepreneurial) mentor. My parents both met in Queenstown, likely at McLean’s restaurant Carroll’s. I saw McLean overseeing the audio soundtrack edits to Worzel Gummidge Down Under starring Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee. McLean gave (now Dame) Fran Walsh her first gig. Dame Walsh and husband Sir Peter Jackson’s films are well worth seeing. Here is an interview with McLean.

G. On the baddest hedge fund in the United States.

H. Goldman Sachs on the new AI trades.

I. Finnegan Fox has passed over the Rainbow Bridge (and is now with Mikayla Raines of Save A Fox), but you can still hear the Good News from him, hee hee hee.

J. Dr Armin Krishnan on dual use research and neuroscience.

B. How will global nuclear stability survive?

C. A century-long Google bet.

D. How product-liability lawsuits get scammed.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Strategic Marketing Management, created by Professor Drazen Prelec.

F. Why did Obama say that aliens are real?

G. Exploring London as the disenchanted city (megapolisomancy).

H. How teacher education in Australia has failed. Plus: are United States schools caught in a digital delusion?

I. Why the United States needs economic coercion doctrine.

J. If you can’t measure it, can you improve it?

K. Trump’s war on history.

L. Gary Stevenson on Australia’s housing market.

M. Open Access (and me) as a researcher.

N. The Issues in National Security lecture series from the United States Naval War College.

O. The full Miami concert of Slayer on the legendary tour Clash of the Titans in 1991.

B. Families of Islamic State fighters are attempting to return to Australia from Syria - and are facing difficulties in doing so.

C. The second Trump administration’s Board of Peace and multilateralism.

D. Why AI chatbots should not be banned.

E. What the War on Gaza can teach us about counterinsurgency.

F. America isn’t ready for a drone war.

G. A restraint informed perspective on the second Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (2025).

H. The youth wasteland of HBO’s hit series Industry.

I. The infamous trilogy of documentaries on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas in 1993.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997) - full length version.

Waco: A New Revelation (1999).

Waco: The FLIR Project (2001).

B. The Thiel-Epstein connection.

C. The new Wuthering Heights film is either fan fiction or a kinky, revisionist, fever dream: how to grab attention via headline writing.

D. Russia likely killed Alexei Navalny with frog toxin (what it is). There is a history to this, documented in recent books like Death to Order and Rise and Kill First.

E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on the Science Essay.

F. It’s OK to change your phone number.

G. On geopolitical risk.

H. A collection of strategic studies lectures by Associate Professor Julian Spencer-Churchill on nuclear strategy.