A. In what looks to be a very Schmittian film Mercy uses an AI-powered court to test if you are innocent or not of murdering your wife. (This specific threat scenario does not apply to me.) It’s 12 Angry Men meets Homeland meets I, Robot. Here is the trailer:
B. Disney has released Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) based on Ray Bradbury’s book today on its digital streaming service. It is part of the so-called Dark Disney period of the early 1980s which produced some interesting films that were not all commercially accessible. Here is the trailer:
C. Maria Corina Machado the Venezuelan democratic peace activist has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here is the press release.
D. Disinformation alumnus Nick Mamatas has a new book out called Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest. Please go buy it and support Opie’s college fund.
E. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Topics in Performance Studies: Comedy Across Media.
F. An Open Yale Course on Global Problems of Population Growth.
G. Weekend reading on for a planned academic journal article on AUKUS personnel selection: Occupational Disorders: A Treatment Guide For Therapists by the late psychiatrist Martin Kantor (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997). I discovered Kantor’s clinical work on personality disorders during my PhD studies at Monash University in 2019 - when I was writing up a political science-informed analysis of Aum Shinrikyo founder Shoko Asahara. Kantor’s book covers many of the common psychological disorders - depression, anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsiveness, and treatment options that go beyond 12-week manualised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (and its alphabet letter variants like ACT, DBT, and Schema Therapy), as well as the challenges in diagnosis. The sections on the causes of job dissatisfaction, exogenous (reactive) sources, and specific issues like wotkaholism, overload, depletion, burnout and flooding are very informative. The personnel selection model for this in terms of security vetting to Positive Vetting level is the Central Intelligence Agency’s John Gittinger.
H. The proscribed terrorist organisation Hamas and the sovereign state of Israel have made a ceasefire agreement. We now enter into a very dangerous period in which the ceasefire might not hold. Malign strategic actors might derail the ceasefire: violence might again erupt.