Exclusive: Former UH staffer Ella Devenny says she faced harassment after divulging her condition to higher-ups, even though she never fell asleep on the job
AI giant Anthropic said in a statement released Friday that it had disabled its most advanced AI models, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the US government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing unspecified national security concerns.
AI giant Anthropic said in a statement released Friday that it had disabled its most advanced AI models, known as Fable 5 and Mythos 5, after the US government ordered it to suspend access to the models for foreign nationals, citing unspecified national security concerns.
Brazil’s elites have long treated drug violence as inevitable – like 19th-century slavery. But with banks and gas stations now feeling the pinch, will national pride finally force action where moral outrage never could?
In Um rio chamado Atlântico [A River Called Atlantic], the Brazilian diplomat and Africanist Alberto da Costa e Silva (1931 – 1923) addresses the history of the end of the slave trafficking in Brazil in a very interesting way. As is known, England in the 19th century positioned herself as the moral bulwark of the world, and this included a true crusade against the transatlantic slave trade. On the other hand, Brazil, according to our Africanist, was dependent on the forced immigration of Africans to populate this vast territory, given the small size of Portugal and the precarious technical condition of the Amerindians.
That English humanitarianism was merely a pretext, no one serious can doubt. After all, one only needs to see how inhumane the British chartered company’s dominion over India was, or consider the fact that English sympathies leaned towards the South during the American Civil War. From an economic standpoint, there is the issue of the competitiveness of Brazilian sugar produced by slave labor, but the most important thing, according to Costa e Silva, was this: the financial suffocation of the free African kingdoms.
Since the African kingdoms capitalized in the 19th century by selling slaves to the Americas, closing the Atlantic would cause these kingdoms to collapse, and thus, English merchants could try to replicate there the model of domination implemented in India. And, in fact, after the closing of the Atlantic, some African leaders began to imitate the Anglo-American plantation model to sell palm oil to the English, who used it for purposes as diverse as soap making and public lighting. The slave trade to the Americas ended and was replaced by African domestic slavery.
According to Alberto da Costa e Silva, the slave trafficking ended in Brazil because Brazil wanted it to. Even today, in the 21st century, we use in Brazil the expression “so that the English can see it”. The origin of this expression is the Feijó Law of 1831, a law of the Empire of Brazil that prohibited the transatlantic slave trade, imitating the English law of 1807. Brazil had been pressured by England to pass such a law since its Independence (1822). However, since the Brazilian authorities did not want to end this slave trade, the law was simply not applied: it was made so that the English can see it. To this day, Brazilians say that such a thing is “so that the English can see it” when they want to say that it is an empty formality. The slave trafficking in Brazil ended when Brazil wanted it to end. This occurred in 1850, when Brazil approved the Eusébio de Queiroz Law. From this, Alberto da Costa e Silva concludes: the trade ended because Brazil wanted it to end, and not because England wanted it to.
I have doubts. What would have happened if England had not pressured Brazil to end the slave trade? It’s impossible to answer historical counterfactual questions with certainty, but it seems to me that English arrogance, pointing the finger at us, may very well have driven our ancestors to action. After all, Brazilian society is both proud and conformist: we can spend decades complaining about the same problems as if for sport, but if a foreigner points the finger at us, then we become truly outraged.
Slavery was never a beautiful thing in Brazil. In Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell contrasted the reaction of the Ottoman and Brazilian peoples to the end of slavery: there, with revolt and protest; here, with public celebrations. In the 19th century, there were even those who imported scientific racism from Protestant countries to justify slavery – but, as Costa e Silva showed, both the pro- and anti-slavery sides had arguments for and against Negroes. Just as there were those who defended the end of slavery because they believed that Negroes did not deserve such a fate, there were those who wanted to end slavery hoping to purge Brazil of Negroes (in the same way that Anglophones created Sierra Leone and Liberia to “return” them to Africa). On the other hand, there were those who justified slavery based on white superiority, but also those who thought that the influence of Negroes in Brazil was too beneficial for slavery, however bad, to have an immediate end.
Given that most of Brazil was illiterate and had no reason to adhere to the racist fashions of the educated, and given that the Brazilian population actually celebrated Abolition (1888) en masse after a large public campaign against the interests of a slave-owning minority, we can assume that the latter position – simultaneously anti-racist and resigned to slavery – reflected Brazilian common sense. I believe that, without external pressure to offend our pride, we could still be lamenting the wickedness of slavery while saying that it was necessary. Furthermore, just 5 years before the Eusébio de Queiroz Law, England passed the Aberdeen Act, which authorized their navy to seize Brazilian ships suspected of slave trafficking. It was an offense, and it was also a cause of losses, since it made the cost of imported slaves unsustainable.
It seems unlikely, then, that just five years later, and with the increased cost of imported slaves, Brazil would have decided on its own to end the trade. It does not follow, however, that England is a saint and that the Aberdeen Act did not harm Brazil in a dishonest way. As Alberto da Costa e Silva reports, Brazil had already developed legitimate trade with the free African kingdoms (which sold us palm oil and fabrics), but England ended up closing the Atlantic.
I think this situation is similar to that of present-day Brazil with drug trafficking and Donald Trump pointing the finger at us. Almost every Brazilian agrees that urban violence caused by drug trafficking is a major problem, and that the territorial control exercised by factions is a very wrong thing. (I say almost every, because there is always the delusional leftist.) However, the elites treat the problem as if it were a phenomenon as natural as rain: Brazilians complain and have no prospect of solving the problem. In Brazil, Marxism ended up translating into a kind of scientific conformism, in which the sociologist looks at the ills and explains why everything is the way it is – in the same way that an English social Darwinist proceeded in the face of the ills of the poor.
Like 19th-century England, Donald Trump is far from being a saint. He has already shown that he feels entitled to invade countries under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, and the U.S. experience in Colombia, Ecuador, and Afghanistan gives no rational reason for Brazilians to root for armed intervention thinking that this will put an end to drug trafficking. The United States also does not seem committed to ending drug trafficking on its own soil, since it has a colossal surveillance capacity and continues to be the largest consumer of cocaine on the planet. (It is true that U.S. population is large, but it doesn’t compare to China’s. It’s noteworthy that two English-speaking countries – Australia and New Zealand – are the largest per capita consumers according to the UN.)
Just like the Aberdeen Act, the classification by the United States of the two largest Brazilian transnational drug trafficking organizations – the PCC of São Paulo and the Red Commando of Rio de Janeiro – as terrorist organizations certainly stirs the pride of Brazilians. Only a delusional middle-class leftist will claim that this classification is inappropriate. Even so, Brazil has an idiotic anti-terrorism law, made with the purpose of considering terrorism only actions motivated by politically incorrect ideas (see here). By this law, it is impossible to consider PCC and Red Commando terrorist organizations – even though PCC already caused panic in the state of São Paulo in 2006, and there are no nice explanations for the attacks having ceased. Just as Brazil did not end the slave trade in 1830 because it did not want to, Brazil does not end the drug traffickers’ empire today because it does not want to.
Brazil has never considered the PCC a terrorist organization, but the new classification has already prompted Lula to publish an “Administration Note” on his official Twitter profile alluding to the PCC and Red Commando as entities that “practice terrorism in the territories where millions of families live.” I have no record of a note from a PT (Workers’ Party) federal administration alluding to drug traffickers in these terms. The government is then in a complicated position to say that the PCC and Red Commando are organizations that practice terrorism that intimidates millions of families but are not terrorist organizations. And even more: that Brazil is a sovereign country in which non-terrorist organizations practice terrorism against millions of families, because this sovereign country does not have sovereignty over large portions of its own territory! After all, the government’s rhetoric is that Trump’s attack against these organizations is an attack on Brazilian sovereignty orchestrated by Bolsonaristas who betrayed the homeland, since the announcement of the measure occurred shortly after Flávio Bolsonaro’s visit to the White House.
But there is a great dissimilarity between the slave trafficking and the drug trafficking empire: slavery in general is a millennial institution, and the transatlantic trade in particular was as old as Brazil itself. It was reasonable for Brazilians to think that slavery was inevitable, because its end contradicted all previous experience. The drug trafficking empire, on the other hand, is only about 20 years old for most of Brazil. I am only 36 years old and I remember a time when there were no crack addicts: a completely different reality, which seems like a utopia to today’s teenagers. Furthermore, slavery in 19th-century urban Brazil allowed for social ascension, and slaves could realistically dream of freedom and enrichment. The drug trafficking empire, however, haunts Brazilians as long as they are in a Brazilian large city: even if they become rich and leave the slums, they could lose their lives at any moment to a stray bullet, or to a crack addict who stabs them in the street for no reason.
Therefore, the role of the mystifying sociologist is important among us. The rhetoric of Open Society and Ford Foundation – the racist rhetoric that insists on blackness as essentially linked to crime and drug addiction – presents the drug trafficking empire as natural and inevitable. One good thing about Trump’s classification is that now the sectors of the Brazilian economy that were bothered are starting to show their faces: banks, fintechs, and gas stations.
Hopefully, these sectors will now feel ashamed, and Brazil will finally decide to end the drug trafficking empire in its national territory.
Many may be confused about America’s recent attacks on Iran, given that they come each day while Trump keeps telling us that a deal is about to be made. Just days ago, analysts believed that Trump was genuinely angry about Netanyahu going ahead with his IDF attacks in Lebanon against Hezbollah. But was that real, or staged? Given that Trump ordered strikes against Iran after that, a cynical view might be that there are only two scenarios why he would do something so incongruent. One: he believes that Iran is very close to signing a deal but needs the extra ’encouragement’ to finally get over the line. Or two: he felt embarrassed by what a whole phalanx of Western commentators were recently saying — that it was in fact Bibi who was running the whole show, using America’s resources to create chaos and havoc. The refusal by the Israeli PM to stop his troops fighting was a clear signal that Trump really doesn’t control the war and is very much a servile player to Israeli thinking.
But what is interesting is how Trump is not at all convinced that he has no military options, even given that they would certainly mean the total eradication of anything left of relations with GCC countries. Trump still believes even today that the US military — who have only a track record in the last 80 years of losing all wars and interventions they instigate — can actually take on Iran and win. As ludicrous as this sounds, it is what is at the heart of what is stalling any deal being struck, coupled with Trump’s sensational failure to negotiate — something he is simply incapable of doing despite his own hype and hubris. The US struck a number of water plants in Iran, which was an incredibly stupid initiative given that this is the region’s Achilles heel. If Iran wants to completely eliminate water desalination plants in, say, Qatar — a country which has no natural water at all — then it could easily do this in a matter of hours.
When a US Apache helicopter crashes, Trump’s reaction is a theatre of the absurd, similar to watching a child burst into tears on his first sports day where his new soccer shirt gets dirty on the pitch. The US is the aggressor, but when a helicopter is downed, this is met with misplaced outrage that borders on comedy. The reality is that no US military analysts believe the chopper was taken down by Iranian fire; it is more likely that it suffered a malfunction and crashed, with both pilots surviving. But it is interesting how Trump considers the war as more of a theatre of PR stunts rather than an important battle he can win.
One reason which explains this is the need for US troops to keep busy in the region, in a pathetic bid to remain relevant to GCC allies — a point made by the commentator Patrick Henningsen recently on RT television. Another reason, though, is the people that Trump keeps around him who he listens to, like Lindsey Graham — who one can only assume is being blackmailed by Israel over his sexual inclination, given his almost cultish beliefs in Zionism. But Graham knows nothing about war and seems to glean some sexual satisfaction from sending young American men in uniform to their deaths. On the other hand, General Jack Keene, a man who isn’t overburdened with intelligence, is probably responsible for a lot of the erroneous decisions Trump is making militarily, and certainly for stoking the “invasion option” while reminding the whole world what an irony-free zone America actually is.
Keene recently rambled on Fox News that he had no confidence in Iran ever keeping its word if Tehran were to ever sign a deal — a hilarious and preposterous claim given America’s reputation for never keeping its word on ceasefires and peace deals. The very fact that Trump is in talks with the Iranians every day demonstrates that they can be trusted, as it is the Trump camp which has no credibility whatsoever when it comes to integrity — the main reason why the Iranians are dragging their feet and are more comfortable with a drawn-out war that will recalibrate their position in the region and put down Israel and the US once and for all. For Keene to say such a thing is quite remarkable. But then he continues with his ideas about US troops “taking” Kharg Island, and a picture emerges of how and why Trump is so deluded about what the real capability of US troops is, and how his decisions and ideas are so detached from reality. Landing airborne troops on the island would only be possible if Iran allowed it to happen — so that it could disarm the occupiers and then hold them hostage as a key part of a new deal. That’s on a good day. On a bad day, if the more hardcore element of the IRGC has its way, they might simply decide to slaughter all of them. What Keene doesn’t seem to understand is the logistical nightmare of having 10,000 US soldiers on a single location within reach of just about everything Iran has to throw at it. And the talk of troops “landing” there with helicopters is a fantasy. How did General Keene become a general, given that he is stupid and seems to know little about warfare or Iran’s capability? The Iranians will shoot down US helicopters like they are having a fun day at clay pigeon shooting. But even if troops were allowed to land on Kharg and other islands, they have to be supplied practically every day. Presumably, the Iranians would prevent the supplies getting in and then starve the marines on the ground. If General Keene really has the ear of the president and Iran holds out for a better deal, the case for Trump to go to war becomes even stronger and grows each day.
But Keene let the cat out of the bag when he talked about oil. It’s really only about oil, or energy, as it was in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and more recently Venezuela. For Trump to capture some oil production and then simply steal from it would be all in a day’s work for the president who has never had any problem with the stigmatisation of being called a thief. Trump believes oil theft is a real possibility and makes sense on any given day. But then there are days when he is desperate to get out of Iran altogether, which we can see with his panicky gestures — like the last strike, which actually achieved nothing but prepared Iran more for war, as the talks combined with bombardment don’t produce the results which Trump needs but make him look even weaker and more desperate. Has General Keene prepared Trump for a scenario where the ceasefire is over and he needs to move onto a new phase? Oil would only sweeten such a plan, and Keene makes no effort to hide this during his interview.
Peru's leftist presidential candidate Roberto Sanchez on Friday proposed a recount to his conservative rival Keiko Fujimori, citing alleged irregularities after votes coming in from abroad were tallied. Counting that continues at a sluggish pace has Fujimori ahead by a razor-thin margin.
Peru's leftist presidential candidate Roberto Sanchez on Friday proposed a recount to his conservative rival Keiko Fujimori, citing alleged irregularities after votes coming in from abroad were tallied. Counting that continues at a sluggish pace has Fujimori ahead by a razor-thin margin.
The leader of the Tren de Aragua gang Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, for whom the US government had offered a reward of up to $5 million, was killed during a joint operation with the United States in southern Venezuela, the two countries announced on Friday.
The leader of the Tren de Aragua gang Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, for whom the US government had offered a reward of up to $5 million, was killed during a joint operation with the United States in southern Venezuela, the two countries announced on Friday.
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