Editorial cartoon

 

TRUMP UNHAPPY IN THE HAGUE: NATO Tries to Use Charm to Keep Trump On Its Side

Just asking questions—yes, that is what I’m doing.” ------ Tucker Carlson | Jon Allsop writing in Columbia Journalism Review

The Media Today

Just Asking Questions

How the Sunday shows—and Tucker Carlson—have handled the Iran story.

June 23, 2025 By Jon Allsop

. . .And of all the interviews I’ve seen in the past few days, Carlson’s clearly did the best job of puncturing the ignorance that so often lies behind calls for regime change abroad; yes, he was asking gotchas—and yes, these can be crude and distracting—but sometimes it takes a stupid question to expose the stupidity of a position. 

(And, following the weekend strikes, regime change may be what we’re dealing with here: after sending out his officials to dutifully say the US is not trying to effect as much yesterday morning, Trump posted on social media that while the term is not “politically correct,” it may be justified if “the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN.”) 

As Hasan and Lennard suggested, there’s nothing to stop mainstream interlocutors asking questions like this. 

• But the consensual codes of elite US media being what they are—and the horror of appearing to be partisan or rude being what it is—it’s unlikely that they’ll start doing so anytime soon, and so we might sometimes have to rely on scoundrels (or, worse, comedians) to do it instead. 

Following the heated exchange on Israeli influence that led Cruz to suggest Carlson was an anti-Semite, Cruz suggested that they ratchet down the temperature, leading Carlson to respond, “You’re the one who went to motive; I’m asking honest questions.” 

He then affected a pious voice:  

“Just asking questions—yes, that is what I’m doing.” 

 

The conversation then cut to an ad for a wireless company that’s giving away American flags that are actually made in America.

 

The Huckabee Newsletter Problem

Mike Huckabee, now the US ambassador to Israel, earns a substantial sum from Substack subscriptions—and the company takes a portion of the fees. Israel coverage is welcome.

By Dave Levinthal

Ed Sheeran - Drive (From F1® The Movie) [Official Music Video]

F1' London premiere arrivals: Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise

 

Two Hollywood Icons Reunite on Red Carpet for First Time in Over 20 Years

OLD FRIENDS

Tom Sanders 

Reporter

Published 06.24.25 10:07AM EDT 

Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage

Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt reunited on the red carpet while attending the premiere of Pitt’s latest movie, F1, in London. 

The Hollywood icons, who memorably starred in 1994’s goth classic Interview With the Vampire, were spotted palling around and hugging each other at the premiere, at one point even posing for photos while linked arm-in-arm. 

 

Cruise arrived solo at the event wearing a gray suit paired with his signature aviator shades, while Pitt, 61, sported a distinctive green suit paired with a mint scarf and arrived with his 32-year-old girlfriend, Ines De Ramon. 

The reunion is the first time Pitt and Cruise have been photographed together in public since 2001, when they attended a 9/11 benefit in Los Angeles, according to Page Six. 

When asked last month if he’d ever work with Cruise again, Pitt told E! News he would—on one condition. “Well, I’m not gonna hang my ass off airplanes and s--- like that,” he said in reference to Cruise’s insistence on performing his own stunts. 

“So when he does something again that’s on the ground, then yes.”

Read it at Page Six

Page Six

18 hours ago

F1' London premiere arrivals: Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and more celebrities

NATO's Defeat In Ukraine Has Created A Stronger RUSSIA!

Modernity, Post-Modernity and the Tower of Babel

 

Photo by Maxim Berg on Unsplash

The Obfuscation of Intelligence — Part 4…

Modernity, Post-Modernity and the Tower of Babel

Richard Schutte

326 followers

Innovation, Intrapreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Complexity, Leadership & Community Twitter: @complexityvoid

“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence”…

— Jean Baudrillard

obfuscate

/ˈɒb.fʌs.keɪt/ ˈɑːb.fə.skeɪt

to throw into shadow

confuse

to be evasive, unclear, or confusing

to make something less clear and harder to understand, especially intentionally

Please read and watch : 

canisgallicus

4 days ago

Sir Niall Ferguson: IS AI MAKING US DUMB? Comment: students please watch this. Your brain is

• Is AI making you dumb? — Niall Ferguson: What Technophiles Should Learn from Medieval Universities [ LINK ];

• The Computer-Science Bubble is Bursting — Is the snake eating its own tail? (i.e. an Ouroborus that will lead to its own Self-Destruction) — Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it [LINK];
• Enshittification is coming for absolutely everything [ LINK ] — We are all trapped in the ‘enshittification’ of the internet [ LINK ] — The Imminent Enshittification of the Internet: LLMs are creating a huge sanitation problem that will probably never be solved [ LINK ]; and
• Tech companies are turning to ‘synthetic data’ to train AI models — but there’s a hidden cost [ LINK ].

[ LINK ]

Avoiding Plato’s Cave…

Recognising Peirce’s Modes of Being

richardschutte.medium.com

“The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying!”…

— Rene Magritte

Please read — A Semiotic Painting Magritte’s point was to remind viewers that his representation of oil smeared on parchment is not a pipe. It is a symbol [ LINK ]

A Semiotic Painting Magritte's point was to remind viewers that his representation - oil smeared on parchment-is not a pipe. It is a symbol. 

The semiotic meaning of Magritte's painting is achieved by a visual combination of the picture with the text "this is not a pipe." 

• Magritte intends viewers who do perceive a pipe to be reminded that what they are seeing is not a pipe. 
• In other words, Magritte's intent is for his audience to perceive semiotics. 

It is important to understand that a speaker's intended implication for his speech may not be the audience's perception. There are many perceptions derivable from Magritte's painting, all depending on who is looking.

 

> To an astute French speaker who knows what a pipe looks like, the painting is about the complexity of semiotics. 

A less astute francophone may think that the painting is proof that the artist is weird. 

 

> To a French speaker who does not know what a pipe is, the painting offers little meaning. 

A non-French speaker simply perceives a pipe and may search for additional meaning by inquiring what the French text means. 

 

> To a blind person, there is no perception. 

 

 And any single person may well perceive multiple meanings in a painting. 

 

Semiotics presents an uncomfortable problem for First Amendment law in general and for false speech torts in particular. If falsespeech liability is to be predictable, a prospective speaker must be able to ____________________________________________________

 

Source publication

True and False Speech

Article

Full-text available

• Aug 2006

• Christopher P Guzelian

First Amendment law suffers from structural instability because it does not properly address liability for false speech. It is, in other words, "unpredictable." ("Unpredictability" means a speaker cannot accurately predict whether her contemplated communication is protected from legal liability. Scholars have long recognized that unpredictable law...

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