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The Battle-Axe

Germanic soldiers were known to wield heavy battle-axes capable of smashing through shield, armor and helmet in a single blow.

“The iron head of this weapon was thick and exceedingly sharp on both sides while wooden handle was very short,”

Go back to 2009 and the rise of the tea party movement, and you should recall the general feeling of chaos that gripped our politics. Amid a national economic crisis, a movement sprang up that was both genuinely grass-roots and assisted by elite Republicans. It was loud and aggrieved, and it filled the Republican Party with fear.

It did so because, from the beginning, its targets were not only Obama, whom it saw as an illegitimate president, but because it regarded as a quisling any Republican whose opposition to Obama was not strong, outraged or effective enough.

Its members have spent four years swimming in Trump’s sea of paranoia and misinformation, and the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump will become their foundational belief. Any Republican who dismisses it will be branded a traitor to the cause.

Earlier this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott appeared on local TV in Dallas and blamed the state's power crisis on the devastating storm that disrupted power generation and froze natural gas pipelines.

"Wind and solar got shut down," he said. "They were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis."

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank with ties to the fossil fuel industry, alleged that the storm "never would have been an issue had our grid not been so deeply penetrated by renewable energy sources."

Most people assume that Darwin was talking about physical strength when referring to “survival of the fittest,” meaning that a tougher, more resilient species always will win out over its weaker counterparts. But what if he didn’t mean that at all

researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe something else has been at work among species that have thrived throughout history, successfully reproducing to sustain themselves, and it has nothing to do with beating up the competition.

Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that friendly partnerships among species and shared humanity have worked throughout centuries to ensure successful evolution. Species endure — humans, other animals and plants — they write, based on friendliness, partnership and communication.

“I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand,” said one young man, his pitch a blend of curiosity and exasperation. “What do Republicans believe? What does it mean to be a Republican?”

You could forgive a 17-year-old, who has come of age during Donald Trump’s reign, for failing to recognize a cohesive doctrine that guides the president’s party. The supposed canons of GOP orthodoxy—limited government, free enterprise, institutional conservation, moral rectitude, fiscal restraint, global leadership—have in recent years gone from elastic to expendable.

Far more difficult is answering the question of what, quite specifically, has filled it.

At the worst possible time, when the United States is at its most vulnerable — during a presidential transition and a devastating public health crisis — the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation.

Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been hacked and that its clients, which include the United States government, had been placed at risk

The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network.

The warning, from the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm, indicated that hackers had found another line of attack to enter systems used by the government and Fortune 500 companies.

Federal officials issued an urgent warning Thursday that the hackers who had penetrated deep into government systems also used other malware — and different attack techniques — that posed “a grave risk to the federal government.”

Russian intelligence agency’s hackers had, since this spring, gotten into critical network monitoring software used by the government and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Thursday that hackers who American intelligence agencies believed were working for the Kremlin used a far wider variety of tools than previously known to penetrate government systems, and said that the cyberoffensive was “a grave risk to the federal government.”

complicates the challenge for federal investigators as they try to assess the damage and understand what had been stolen.

Echoing the government’s warning, Microsoft said Thursday that it had identified 40 companies, government agencies and think tanks that the suspected Russian hackers, at a minimum, stole data from. Nearly half are private technology firms, Microsoft said, many of them cybersecurity firms, like FireEye, that are charged with securing vast sections of the public and private sector.

As we approach nine months of vaccine availability and nine months of flood-the-zone coverage of vaccine safety and efficacy, it is clear that much (though certainly not all) of our remaining refusal problem is not one of information but one of moral formation itself. The very moral framework of millions of our fellow citizens—the way in which they understand the balance between liberty and responsibility—is gravely skewed. 

To understand the skew, it’s first necessary to understand the proper balance, and while we have vaccine endorsements from Christian leaders from across the Catholic/Protestant spectrum, we also have guidance from church fathers—individuals who no one can claim have caved to some “establishment” or are motivated by supposed invites to mythical beltway “cocktail parties.” For example, read these famous words from Martin Luther, written during a plague in his own time:

Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.

Electricity is cut off. Guards sit in cars on every corner. Hundreds of people are out of their homes, some without access to their clothing or belongings.

More than four months after the blast shuttered Wheatley’s downtown and injured 20 of the town’s 2,900 residents, the authorities still don’t know where the gas leak came from, or why it happened.

Many are now grappling with whether the center of the town, which was formally recognized in 1865, should be permanently abandoned.

“To us,” she writes, “reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95% of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.”

The matter and life we cannot see are demonstrated with stunning effect. Bacterial cells make up 0.2kg of your body weight; one handful of soil contains more microbes than there are people on Earth; the tiny particles called neutrinos generated by the sun’s nuclear fusion are so small that they can penetrate the Earth, enabling a subterranean observatory to come up with an image of the sun.

In three sections – on biology, society and civilisation – Tong relentlessly focuses on all the things we either do not know, or decide not to pay attention to, as we carry on with our lives

This is broadly what we know happened: Shortly after launching the intensive early-morning rocket attack, elite Hamas units simultaneously rushed multiple military outposts on the Gaza-Israel border. They quickly overwhelmed the posts, killing or kidnapping virtually all the soldiers in them. They then destroyed the observation and communications networks on which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) depended for identifying breaches of the border fence.

In parallel, Hamas launched an aerial and naval attack using several dozen motor-powered hang gliders, armed drones, and small speed boats. In the ensuing chaos, the fence was breached by bulldozers, explosives, and wire-cutters in up to 80 spots along the northern and eastern border between Gaza and Israel, facilitating the main thrust of the attack.

Over 1,500 armed militiamen on pickup trucks, motorbikes, and SUVs rushed across the border into adjacent Israeli kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns. Several dozen militiamen also headed to the scene of a youth music festival where around 3,500 revelers were camped in tents and cars. This became the epicenter of a massacre.

The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”

Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.

It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.

A small cadre of aerosol scientists had a different theory. They suspected that Covid-19 was transmitted not so much by droplets but by smaller infectious aerosol particles that could travel on air currents way farther than 6 feet and linger in the air for hours. Some of the aerosol particles, they believed, were small enough to penetrate the cloth masks widely used at the time.

For much of 2020, doctors and public-health officials thought the virus was transmitted through droplets emitted from one person’s mouth and touched or inhaled by another person nearby. We were advised to stay at least 6 feet away from each other to avoid the droplets

The group had a hard time getting public-health officials to embrace their theory. For one thing, many of them were engineers, not doctors.

the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

t the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement

For months, I have been documenting the incredible virality of bizarre AI-generated image spam on Facebook, now commonly referred to as “AI slop,” and Meta’s seeming complete apathy toward moderating this type of spam. 

My investigation reveals that the AI images we see on Facebook are an evolution of a Facebook spam economy that has existed for years, driven by social media influencers, guides, services, and businesses in places like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where the payouts generated by this content, which seems marginal by U.S. standards, goes further

The spam comes from a mix of people manually creating images on their phones using off-the-shelf tools like Microsoft’s AI Image Creator to larger operations that use automated software to spam the platform. I also know that their methods work because I used them to flood Facebook with AI slop myself as a test.