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Sunday Dose of Democracy:
US says two naval ships ‘transited’ Strait of Hormuz for "mine-clearing"
Vice-President J.D. Vance is in Pakistan negotiating a cease-fire with Iran, and the situation is incredibly tense and volatile. So what do Trump and Hegseth do? Poke the bear by sending two US warships through the Strait of Hormuz. The Trump administration claims they successfully passed through the Strait, while the Iranians — and also a US official speaking to Bloomberg) — say that they were forced to turn back after Iran threatened to attack the ships. While it is still unclear what happened, team Trump has just dealt Iran a fresh, unhelpful, and entirely unprovoked wound to bicker over just as peace talks get underway. We should expect more from FIFA's peace prize winner.
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Explosive update rocks top midterm race
Brian Tyler Cohen sits down with top Senate candidate Mary Peltola to discuss her stunning surge in the polls (10 point gain in just a couple months!) and how "fish, family, and freedom," is a winning message in red Alaska.
Beloved Alaskan Mary Peltola SURGES in the race for critical red Senate seat
Mary Peltola for Alaska: Former Congresswoman Mary Peltola sent shockwaves through American politics when she won the only congressional seat in deep-red Alaska in 2022. Now she’s running for the US Senate seat held by MAGA millionaire Dan Sullivan. A new poll shows she's engineered a TEN-POINT swing and now leads the race by 5%! A proven winner like Peltola with an Alaska First platform of “fish, family, and freedom” is just the candidate we need to flip this critical seat and retake the Senate. Will you chip in to help push her over the finish line?
Trump’s staggering humiliation in Iran
Alex Shephard, The New Republic: "There were two ways to read Donald Trump’s unprecedented threat on Tuesday that Iran’s 'whole civilization will die' if the Strait of Hormuz was not opened by 8 p.m. Eastern time. The first was that the president was threatening to drop a nuclear weapon on a nation that he had started a war with, as punishment for that nation’s fighting back. The second was that Trump wasn’t just bullshitting, and instead was desperate for a deal—so desperate he would utter perhaps the most horrific, murderous words an American president has ever spoken. That second reading now looks to be the right one. Shortly before the Tuesday evening deadline, Trump announced that the United States and Iran had reached a two-week ceasefire and would be working on a potential peace deal.
True to form, Trump boasted that he had won a massive victory and that the U.S. had 'already met and exceeded all Military objectives.' Subsequent reporting—and the fact that Trump called Iran’s 10-point proposal 'a workable basis on which to negotiate'—suggests something rather different. Even if the U.S. agreed to just a few of Iran’s 10 demands, or even if the demands were significantly watered down, a peace deal based on that framework would lead to an unmistakable conclusion: The U.S. has lost yet another war in the Middle East. The reality may in fact be much worse. The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history. Iran will emerge from this the war in a significantly stronger position than it was six weeks ago.
That is remarkable in and of itself. But it is hard to overstate just how big a catastrophe this is for the U.S. By asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has effectively negated one of the core aspects of American power: its use of naval power to ensure the safety of shipping lanes, thereby protecting the global economy. Iran has also made a fool of Trump, who can brag all he wants about 'military objectives.' The fact is, Trump’s hubris cost thousands of lives, rattled economies around the world, and made the U.S. significantly weaker. Trump was never able to articulate a sensible argument for why the U.S. had to go to war with Iran, which allowed the Iranians to set the stakes of the conflict.
Trump quickly found himself in a trap of his own making. It is very possible and perhaps likely that on April 21, we will find ourselves in exactly the same place we were in on Tuesday afternoon. Trump has already threatened genocide, which shocked even those of us who thought his words and deeds could no longer shock us. If the negotiations with Iran go poorly, he will likely escalate his threats in ways we can’t even imagine. Even the godless among us pray that he doesn’t act on them."
Take Action: Chip in to elect Gina Hinojosa and send Texas Governor Greg Abbott packing!
Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real
Chris Stokel-Walker, Nature: "Got sore, itchy eyes? You’re probably one of the millions of people who spend too much time staring at screens, being bombarded with blue light. Rub your eyes too much and your eyelids might turn a slight, pinkish hue. So far, so normal. But if, in the past 18 months, you typed those symptoms into a range of popular chatbots and asked what was wrong with you, you might have got an odd answer: bixonimania.
The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. 'I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,' she says.
The problem was that the experiment worked too well. Bixonimania didn’t exist before 15 March 2024, when two blog posts about it appeared on the website Medium. The lead author was a phoney researcher named Lazljiv Izgubljenovic, whose photograph was created with AI. Within weeks of her uploading information about the condition, attributed to a fictional author, major artificial-intelligence systems began repeating the invented condition as if it were real. Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.
Osmanovic Thunström says the idea to invent Izgubljenovic and bixonimania came out of studies on how large language models work. Because she works in the medical field, she decided to create a condition related to health and hit on the name bixonimania because it “sounded ridiculous”, she says. If that wasn’t sufficient to raise suspicions, Osmanovic Thunström planted many clues in the preprints to alert readers that the work was fake. Izgubljenovic works at a non-existent university called Asteria Horizon University in the equally fake Nova City, California.
One paper’s acknowledgements thank 'Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy for her kindness and generosity in contributing with her knowledge and her lab onboard the USS Enterprise.' Both papers say they were funded by “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation for its work in advanced trickery. This works is a part of a larger funding initiative from the University of Fellowship of the Ring and the Galactic Triad”. Even if readers didn’t make it all the way to the ends of the papers, they would have encountered red flags early on, such as statements that “this entire paper is made up."
Soon after Osmanovic Thunström first posted information about the phoney condition, it started showing up in the output of the most commonly used LLM chatbots. On 13 April 2024, Microsoft Bing’s Copilot was declaring that “Bixonimania is indeed an intriguing and relatively rare condition”, and on the same day, Google’s Gemini was informing users that “Bixonimania is a condition caused by excessive exposure to blue light” and advising people to visit an ophthalmologist."
“The cruelty is staggering:” Jasper Nathaniel on reporting from the West Bank
John Ross and Jasper Nathaniel, Current Affairs: "There's a system called administrative detention in the West Bank where they're allowed to arrest people and not charge them and hold them for, technically, up to six months, but then after six months, they can go to a judge and ask to extend it so it can turn into years. And the idea behind it is that releasing the evidence that they have, which they claim they privately showed to the judge, would pose a security risk. And so they have to hide the evidence and can't actually have a charge, so they just get to lock them up, and they have no habeas corpus, basically. Which is, of course, nonsense.
You could make that case anywhere in the world that you know evidence could put people at risk or something. So now you have people who don't even ever learn why they have been imprisoned. They are taken from their homes at night, or they're abducted from their place of work or anywhere, and they never even learn what the charge is against them. In terms of the conditions, I think the big, sort of pervasive one is that they're being starved. Quite literally, these people are being starved. And I think that you can't overstate the degree to which that is a form of torture. Mohammed Ibrahim, the 16-year-old Palestinian American kid who was in prison for almost a year on the spurious charges of throwing a stone, was just released in November. He talked about having terrible pain in his stomach and his head 24/7 for 10 and a half months because of the hunger. There were fluorescent lights shining in their cell 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so it made sleep virtually impossible.
There was a terrible scabies outbreak that they were really not given treatment for. It just tore through the prison system. Some people suspect that they were basically using it as disease warfare by transferring scabies patients from one cell to another to spread it around. And I think, to me, one of the worst parts, certainly, for the minors, is that they had cameras in their cells and they were watching them 24/7, and if they caught them trying to have fun—literally, they made a makeshift chess set out of stale bread and scratched the board into the ground, and they caught them, and they went in and they beat them, pepper sprayed them, and confiscated their beds. If they sing, the same thing will happen. If they do push-ups. So they are not even allowed to be boys. It's torture, basically; it's torture.
And I guess the last thing is that since October 7, Israel has banned family visits to all Palestinian security prisoners, as they call them. So these kids and men and women are not allowed to speak to their families the entire time they're locked away. And so there's a lot that we don't even know about just how bad things are getting in there. But dozens and dozens of people have dropped dead in the last couple of years in prisons. A lot of their bodies are still being held by Israel, so we don't even know what they died from. But I think that they are gulags, essentially."
Corpus Christi water crisis spurs stampede on South Texas aquifers
Dylan Baddour, Inside Climate News: Dwindling levels in this region’s main reservoirs have triggered a rush on local aquifers as cities, towns, chemical plants and ranchers drill for water. The nearby city of Corpus Christi faces a looming catastrophe from the imminent depletion of water supplies that sustain 500,000 people and one of Texas’s main industrial complexes. Recent emergency groundwater projects have pushed off the timeline to disaster by months, officials said last week. But locals fear they may threaten the water supplies of rural towns and residents who have historically relied on their own small wells.
'People like me are probably gonna be running out of water,' said Bruce Mumme, a retired chemical plant worker who lives on family land in rural Jim Wells County, about 40 miles outside Corpus Christi. 'Then this property and house is useless.' Dust covers the fields where hay for Mumme’s cattle should grow. His catfish are about to die as the last of their pond evaporates. Sand dunes have started to form. He’s roamed this land since he was a boy and he’s never seen sand dunes. 'Without water we can’t even live out here,' he said as he drove dirt roads of the land his grandfather bought. 'You can’t feed cows bottled water.'
Last fall, after the city of Corpus Christi first began pumping millions of gallons per day from the Evangeline Aquifer, towns and landowners across this area saw water levels in their wells drop. Mumme lost access to water for three days while he waited for workers to come lower his pump, which he said cost thousands of dollars. After that experience, he paid $30,000 to add another well on his property, for backup. He’s not the only one. The region’s largest industrial water users are also drilling wells, according to officials. In Nueces County, where Corpus Christi is located, newly planned pumping projects alone could add up to over 1,000 percent of what the state water plan considers a sustainable rate of withdrawal from aquifers. The region’s largest water user, a massive, new plastics plant operated by ExxonMobil and the Saudi state oil company, also drilled test wells recently but found water that was too salty to use, according to Corpus Christi city manager Peter Zanoni.
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