The first three chapters of my latest book are on the Amazon webpage. (Click on the ‘Look inside’ link.) The publisher’s webpage is here and you can also buy it from any major retailer. (Note: This will be the new top post for a while. Later posts are below.)
Rodrigo Duterte was president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. A self-proclaimed tough guy, he encouraged the extra-judicial killings (i.e., murder without trial by government forces) of supposed drug dealers and criminals, claiming that he himself had carried out such killings when he had been mayor of the town of Davao. The victims were alleged drug users, alleged petty criminals, and street children. After leaving the office of the presidency, he was re-elected as mayor of Davao in 2025.
But he may not be able to serve out his term as mayor because a little over a year ago, he was arrested and taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to stand trial and is now the first former Asian head of state to stand trial in the ICC.
On March 11, 2025, Duterte touched down at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport after a flight from Hong Kong to find more than three hundred officers waiting for him. Under “Operation Pursuit,” Filipino police and Interpol executed an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant tying him to crimes against humanity committed during his self-proclaimed “war on drugs” and quickly put him on a plane to the Netherlands.
The ICC judges have now confirmed that Duterte will stand trial in November 2026. We should be happy that the once untouchable strongman has been in jail for over a year and will soon be held to account for his record in power.
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Recent developments in AI technology and its spawning of personalized chatbots has renewed attention in the Turing test.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human.
It seems clear that, by and large, these AI chatbots can simulate human conversation pretty well, apart from the tendency to occasionally hallucinate, to make up stuff and say it will confidence, a trait that many humans also exhibit. If one is not aware of the details of what it says, one might easily be convinced that the made-up fact is genuine. For example, a mathematician friend of mine said that his son (also a mathematician) tested out an AI system. He multiplied two very large integers together and then fed the result into the AI system and asked whether the number was ‘prime’ i.e., not divisible by any number other than 1 and itself. The machine said ‘yes’.
But despite those well known problems, people are treating the AI bots as being at least partly sentient, as demonstrated by those who seem to have formed long-term ‘relationships ‘with them and consider them as friends or even more. So at least as far as these people are concerned, these bots seem to have passed the Turing test.
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During their heyday, empires seem permanent, so strong and their rivals so weak that it is hard to imagine them being displaced from their position of dominance.But empires do die and historian of empires Albert McCoy writes that all the signs indicate that we are witnessing the end of the American empire.
Writing in 1942, during some of Britain’s darkest days in World War II, the editors of the venerable London Times looked far beyond the relentless German attacks on their forces in Egypt or the Nazi U-Boat sinkings of Royal Navy ships in the Atlantic to predict their empire’s future with an uncommon prescience. With its contradictory motto of “Imperium et Libertas” (Empire and Liberty), the vast British Empire, which still covered a quarter of the globe, had already become what those editors called “a self-liquidating concern.” Once the “temporary circumstances” that had allowed Britain’s ascent — naval dominance, industrial preeminence, and “the relative weakness of rival states” — faded, that empire’s “ultimate reliance on coercion” could no longer hold. Ready for self-governance, Britain’s many colonies, the editors suggested, would soon begin breaking away and so eclipse the empire. And that prediction couldn’t have been more accurate. Within five years of that editorial’s publication, the British Empire had already started to break apart.
Writing in a May 2026 edition of the New York Times, contributing editor Christopher Caldwell made a strikingly similar prediction about the future of U.S. global hegemony. Under the provocative headline “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” Caldwell noted some unsettling parallels between the fate of America today and Great Britain 80 years ago. Back then, England was “deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent,” and found itself “essentially bankrupt” by the end of World War II. Apart from its “ill-fated attempt” to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, however, it managed to decolonize in a successful fashion by giving up “territories it could no longer afford.” As he points out, Britain even “wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions.”
At the start of his second term as president in 2025, Donald Trump, Caldwell continued, “had a chance of pulling off something similar” by withdrawing “to a less expansive sphere of influence” and “refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere.” Caldwell considered that strategy potentially “workable” since “imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends.” Instead of keeping to that plan, however, Trump “has overextended the empire dangerously” by his intervention in Iran, which has now become nothing less than a “watershed in the decline of the American empire.”
Yesterday was primary day in several states and the results were a mixed bag from a progressive perspective.
In California the final results are not yet in and are likely to be not known for a while. The very worst possible outcome, that the two Republicans would make it to the top and then compete in the general election was avoided. The very best outcome, that both of them would be eliminated from the top two, also did not come to pass, since it looks like Republican Steve Hilton will make the cut, likely to face the Democratic establishment candidate Xavier Becerra although Tom Steyer, whom I voted for despite being an (ugh!) millionaire, might still squeeze out one those two, though it seems unlikely.
In the Los Angeles mayoral race, incumbent Karen Bass fended off a challenge from a progressive in Nithya Raman and will likely face a Republican reality TV character and Trump supporter Spencer Pratt, although there is still a chance that Raman might edge out Pratt.
Both those results, along with some others, are being interpreted as wins for the Democratic Party establishment.
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Trump may have a lot of money, though for him and his greedy family it is never enough and they keep using the government to enrich themselves, but he is the textbook example of a parvenu, defined as “one that has recently or suddenly risen to an unaccustomed position of wealth or power and has not yet gained the prestige, dignity, or manner associated with it.” People who have what used to be called ‘old money’ grew up with a sense that it was gauche to talk about it and especially not flamboyantly flaunt it. It was a given that everyone knew you were wealthy and you were expected to demonstrate it discreetly in understated ways, by being philanthropic, cultured, and patronizing the arts, so that the ugly origins of your wealth was obscured. Trump is the opposite, using every opportunity to tell people how rich he is, and even exaggerating so it is no surprise that old money people despise him.
While his father made a lot of money in the construction business and gave Trump a start on his his own ventures, they were from the outer boroughs of New York City, and Trump was always aware that he was not of the Manhattan elite and felt that they looked down on him. You can see this in the way that he bristles at what he perceives as even the mildest slight, and rages and insults anyone whom he thinks does not respect him. That is not how old money behaves. They feel superior to others and thus can afford to be condescending towards those they consider their social inferiors, mostly ignoring them.
But Trump craves to be accepted by the old money elites and as part of that push he moved his construction business to Manhattan and put his name in gaudy gold lettering on a building there, no doubt seeing that as his entree to the old money elites. But those snobby elites tend to look down even further at those who try too hard to join their ranks and so Trump ended up consorting with other parvenus like the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
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Before Stephen Colbert started his 11-year run on The Late Show, he guest-hosted a public access local TV program in Monroe, MI called Only in Monroe. On his last show on CBS on Thursday of last week, he hinted that he might go back to Monroe.
“Tonight is our final broadcast from the Ed Sullivan Theater,” he said, prompting boos from the audience.
“No, no, we were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years, all right? Can’t take this for granted,” he added. “Though technically our first show in July of 2015 was from a public access station in Monroe, Michigan, for an audience of 12 people. Show business being what it is these days, that’s probably where you’ll see me next.” and guest-hosted again.
And sure enough, the very next day, there he was back in Monroe.
I started watching the one-hour program just to see what it was like, thinking I would get bored and switch off after a few minutes but I was gripped and watched until the end. It was hilarious. There was something extremely appealing about this extremely low-budget show and we are reminded how Colbert can extract humor from the mundane, probably because he got his start in performing in improv that requires one to be funny while unprepared or backed by an army of writers and support staff.
Initially CBS tried to suppress the airing of the show on YouTube (corporate behemoths being the humorless profiteers they are) but then backed off after an outcry.
That Trump is a brazen grifter goes without saying. He has also used the justice department as his own personal law firm, using them to attack his enemies and reward his friends. But he may have outdone himself with his latest attempt to get money from the government to fund his grifts.
What happened was that Trump sued the government for $10 billion, charging that his rights had been violated when a private contractor leaked his tax returns back in 2019 and 2020. The idea of a president suing his own government was ridiculous enough and would likely have been thrown out. But he had appointed his own former personal lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general and before the case went to trial, the ‘two sides’ (which are actually just one side) announced that a settlement had been reached in which the government would create a slush fund of $1.776 billion (how patriotic!) to compensate those people who had been charged in the January 6th insurrection and then pardoned by Trump. We do not know whether this was the original plan or a fall back position after the outrage that emerged at the thought of such blatant chicanery by Trump to enrich himself. If this was allowed to stand, then there was no end to how much a president could get out of the government to do with as he wished simply by suing and settling.
But this was too much for some judges and they have called for an investigation into what they see as the abuse of the judicial system.
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Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell were at one time Scotland’s premier power couple. Sturgeon became the leader of the Scottish National Party and the First Minister in 2014. Peter Murrell served as the chief executive officer of the SNP from 2001 until 2023. But all that came crumbling down. She surprisingly resigned in 2023, claiming ‘occupational burnout’, while he also resigned his position after being criticized for misleading the party.
But things got worse. Murrell was charged with embezzlement in 2024 for using SNP money to purchase various luxury items and last week admitted to stealing over £400,000 from party over a 12-year period and now faces a lengthy prison sentence.
[T]he lengthy indictment, which included a 119-page list of all the items he bought using the SNP’s money, disclosed that for much of that time he was pilfering the SNP’s accounts to acquire a remarkable series of luxury goods, while earning £107,000 as party chief executive.
The indictment noted that in addition to the £124,000 motorhome, which he left parked in his mother’s driveway in Fife, and the Jaguar I-Pace, he bought gardening equipment for the home he shared with Sturgeon, a £1,300 Miele coffee machine for their home, a telescope, a Sony PlayStation, Fortnum & Mason hampers and several Montblanc fountain pens.
The charge said he submitted false invoices, used the party’s credit cards, falsified the party’s accounts and in some cases claimed they were legitimate expenses to cover up his embezzlement. Several times he used credit cards taken out in the names of SNP staff who worked for him.
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He was on a tear with his opening monologue. The AI-generated clip he showed at the beginning was scaringly good in how realistic it was. Not the content of course, which was hilarious, but how the video seemed so seamlessly genuine.
Kimmel seems to be really getting under the skin of Trump and his cult members in right wing media.
