Tag: technology

Ukraine Hits Moscow Oil Refinery Causing Black Skies, But Kremlin Continues Advancing In Donbass-Kostiantynivka Falls, Ukrainian Drones Specifically Targeting Civilians In Russia Areas

Ukraine scored a public relations and tactical win this morning with strikes on the Moscow oil refinery, hitting a storage tank and causing black smoke to drift over the entire city.

Oil-like residue is falling over Moscow and the surrounding region, leaving marks on cars, windowsills, benches, and other surfaces.

The development caused Ukrainian President Zelenskiy to declare, “If Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn too.If Putin does not want to end this war and wants to continue it, we will not sit quietly. We will respond.”

What Zelenskiy is not telling the world is that the city of Kostiantynivka in Donbass has recently fallen under the Russian advance. Russian forces are now focusing on Sloviansk, which once taken, will open the door to Kramatorsk in one or two months.

A situation is developing where a massive cauldron is forming, encircling thousands of Ukrainian troops and the Zelenskiy government will not order the withdrawal to save the soldiers.

“It is a deliberate slaughter of Ukrainian soldiers,” said a source in Kyiv. “It is intentionally losing a division.”

Russia has launched massive strikes on Kyiv as of late in response to Ukrainian attacks on civilian targets. Recently many attacks have been filmed of drones hitting civilian vehicles, such as buses and trucks carrying civilian personnel and cargo, raising Russian ire. One such video of a drone intentionally targeting a truck in the Belgorod region of Russia is below.

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FBI stopped plot to massacre crowd at White House UFC event, Kash Patel says

The FBI foiled an alleged plot to massacre Sunday’s UFC White House event attendees and arrested several suspects, according to the bureau’s director, Kash Patel.

“On June 10, FBI and our law enforcement partners became aware of a potential threat to the UFC America 250 event in Washington, D.C.,” Patel shared Tuesday on X. 

According to officials cited by Fox News, the would-be perpetrators planned to set off explosive drones on the South Lawn, forcing attendees to flee the event. The alleged conspirators then planned to gun them down by sniper fire as they were funneled out of the White House grounds.

A total of 23 people were involved in the plot, according to court and FBI documents. They were allegedly upset about “government corruption, the handling of the [Jeffrey] Epstein files, data centers taking up all the water in communities, and other government actions,” according to the affidavit.

In a private Signal chat, the suspects considered targeting Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.Va.), Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) as well as West Virginia GOP Reps. Carol Miller and Riley Moore.

One proposed Marsha Blackburn as a potential target because she had “taken money from the Israel pro Israel lobby and supports them,” despite the fact that a large majority of congressmen have received money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The mother of suspect Tycen Proper, 19, who was arrested on June 10, tipped off local police about her son’s “recent conduct, including firearms purchases and communicating with certain individuals online,” according to a federal affidavit.

She said in a phone interview with an FBI officer that the conspirators “claimed to be ex-military and Christian based.” The group allegedly wanted to “jumpstart” a revolution by killing “high-value targets” including “billionaires” and “capitalist elites.”

Proper admitted to helping to plan the attack during a June 11 FBI interview and said that the conspirators got in touch around March 2026 through a TikTok group called “Vanguard of the Old.”

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Josh Hawley Warns that AI Is an Existential Threat that Risks Turning Humans into ‘Raw Material’

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warns that AI will reshape society by accelerating a major winner-take-all type of inequality. The senator also described AI as an existential test for America’s founding “moral covenant” that risks turning humans into “raw material” and children into victims.

“Artificial intelligence is testing our commitment to the great moral covenant that binds us together as a nation,” Hawley began in an op-ed for First Things, titled, “The American Covenant’s Answer to AI.”

Hawley then elaborated on the moral stakes of AI, adding, “The decisions we must soon make about the most powerful technology of our lifetimes are among the most difficult we have yet faced. These decisions go far beyond questions of economics or policy.”

“They are questions of labor and the family, of freedom and the value of human life. They are fundamental questions of our identity as Americans and the nature of this republic given to us by God,” Hawley wrote.

“We do not have to imagine the stakes,” the senator continued, before diving into what he described as a “K-shaped” society, which he believes is the result of AI’s social impact. “We are watching a handful of companies assemble a concentration of capital, information, and political power without precedent in the American experience,” Hawley pointed out.

Hawley explains that the upper arm of the K represents the developers, executives, and investors of AI firms, while the lower arm of the K represents blue collar workers, professionals like paralegals, and fresh grads.

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Poland Suspends Transference of MIG Fighter Jets to Ukraine – The Stated Reason, and the Probable Unspoken One

Drone tech, or the worship of Nazi collaborators and war criminals?

After the war in Iran appears to have found its way towards a peace settlement, the eyes of the world again turn to the Black Sea, where the bloodiest European war since WWW2 continues unabated.

As the usual Euro-Globalists scramble to continue financing the Kiev regime’s war effort, one close ally is moving in the opposite direction.

Neighboring Poland has paused the transfer of promised MIG-29 Fighter Jets to Ukraine, to the dismay of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and the MSM alike.

The stated reason for the pause was Kiev’s delay in sharing with of drone production technologies with the Polish.

This is a very believable reason – but for us following the Ukrainian bilateral relations, there is another very clear reason that is not being mentioned, as you can read in President Nawrocki Wants Zelensky Stripped of Top Polish Honor for Glorifying WW2 Nazi War Criminals.

​Zelensky has caused mass indignation in Poland by signing a decree recognizing a Ukrainian special forces unit’s ​contribution to the fight against Russian forces by naming it after the Ukrainian Insurgent ⁠Army (UPA).

The UPA was involved in ​the Volhynia massacres from 1943 to 1945, in which around 100,000 Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists.

Zelensky also transferred alleged WW2 war criminal Andriy Melnyk to a hero’s tomb in Kiev.

With all that, the relations soured considerably. Even Prime Minister Donald Tusk had to criticize the move.

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Missouri AG Catherine Hanaway Launches Lawsuit Against Baby Monitors and Home Cameras Company ‘Lorex’ Over Concealed CCP and Chinese Military Ties

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is taking aim at a major surveillance technology company over what she says are hidden ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military.

Hanaway announced legal action against Lorex, a popular manufacturer of baby monitors, home security cameras, and surveillance systems sold by major American retailers including Costco, Best Buy, and Amazon.

“Families and retailers like Costco, Best Buy, and Amazon are being lied to,” Hanaway wrote. “Lorex, a leading manufacturer of baby monitors and home cameras, is concealing material ties to the CCP and Chinese military. We’re taking them to court.”

The company’s products have maintained deep ties to Dahua, its former owner and ongoing supplier of critical components, even after Dahua was designated a Chinese Military Company that poses a direct threat to U.S. national security. Researchers found Lorex firmware routing straight back to Dahua servers, giving the Chinese Communist Party potential real-time access to the most intimate moments inside American homes.

These are the cameras watching babies breathe in their cribs. Recording children’s voices. Capturing family life in bedrooms and living rooms across Missouri and the country. Sold at Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, Staples, Menards, Micro Center, Office Depot, and directly through Lorex’s own site.

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” Attorney General Hanaway said in a statement. “Missouri will not allow the CCP to put its hand on our cradles. Parents place these cameras over cribs and in bedrooms to protect their children, not to invite a foreign adversary into their homes.”

“Lorex tells families its video cameras are ‘private by design’ while concealing ties to a Chinese military company,” she continued. “These cameras watch our babies breathe, capture our children’s voices, and record families’ most intimate moments. When companies won’t tell the truth about their connection to hostile foreign governments, my office will step in to protect families.”

The lawsuit, brought under Missouri’s Merchandising Practices Act, seeks up to $1,000 in restitution for every Missouri consumer who purchased a Lorex camera in the last five years, plus more than $1.8 million in damages and a court order barring the company from continuing its deceptive practices.

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Domesticating AI – It’s Not Coming, It’s Already Here

During a recent conversation with a diving buddy, he pulled out his phone mid conversation and said “Hey Grok, show me that dive computer we were talking about this morning.” And yes, it’s $580 worth of gorgeous.

Its translation abilities are spectacular, and occasionally hilarious. It really is the Babel fish. Not that long ago I moved to a bank simply because it supported Apple Pay years before the big players. At that time, paying with just the tap of a wrist always garnered astonishment and commentary. Around the same time, voice assistants started crossing the line from novelty to genuinely useful. Set a timer, make an appointment, play some music. Super!

“Alexa, turn the kitchen light on.” Light comes on. “No, turn it off.” “There is no device called ‘it’ to turn off.” Oof!

No memory, no context.

Enter Nabu (yes I know, I haven’t got round to changing the wakeword name yet). Naby knows it turned the kitchen light on, and knows I was referring to the kitchen light when I said “turn it off.” It remembers, it has context, because it’s not just a dumb voice assistant anymore, it is plumbed into my local AI.

The big commercial AI platforms can be connected to these systems, but running it locally means the data stays within the boundaries of my house. It won’t process that mountain of documents or win that tricky legal case yet, but it can keep track of the state of my home and understand what I mean when I speak naturally.

That’s a big deal – because now I don’t have to write and memorize tiresome automations for rigid pre-programmed commands, I can converse with Nabu in human and it understands “all the lights” or “just the downstairs aircons.”

Only five years ago, running an AI model at home was a ridiculous proposition – you’d need datacenter hardware and a tech-bro budget. Now, it’s dramatically cheaper and easier – with consumer GPUs, mini PCs, Ollama and Hugging Face, technically curious people are quietly building surprisingly capable AI systems at home. The GPU that I can hold in my hands doesn’t compete with a datacenter the size of several football fields – but for my homelab tinkerings, it’s surprisingly capable, and is only becoming more so.

I should probably backtrack a little here – I’m enthusing about Home Assistant, which I’ve been running for about 12 years – originally on a Raspberry Pi, now in a VM on ProxmoxVE. Sensors and controllers are scattered all over the house, with a dashboard in a browser acting as mission control. Lights automated with timers and presence detectors. Sun elevation adjusts blinds, curtains react to sunrise and sunset, and moisture sensors trigger irrigation on demand. Solar and battery systems respond to dynamic electricity pricing, buying and selling power depending on what the grid is doing.

Home Assistant proclaimed 2023 to be the Year of the Voice and duly launched a prototype Voice Assistant. At launch, its capabilities were limited. Today, it is genuinely good at a variety of tasks, and it’s all open source so you can build your own device from very inexpensive hardware, and the software is on GitHub.

Local models – Llama, Gemma, Mistral, Qwen – very much lag behind the giant commercial systems, but for experimentation, home automation, and general day-to-day interaction, they’re becoming more and more usable. I personally care about data sovereignty (a huge topic in its own right), so running a local AI grants me a more privacy-conscious workflow, and it still works when the internet doesn’t.

Quite how many months of commercial AI subscriptions I could have got for the price of my GPU is a question I’m deliberately avoiding, predominantly for marital reasons. I rather think of myself as a data nerd. All those sensors collecting all that data in a “If this, then that” environment makes for endless tinkering possibilities. And with an AI-powered Nabu gradually replacing Alexa, my office edges ever closer to Tony Stark’s lair. We’re no longer at “deploying Kubernetes clusters” level of difficulty, but it’s still very much a tinkerer’s space rather than a mainstream consumer appliance. Even so, it feels like a taste of where we’re heading.

The strange thing is how quickly this all stops feeling strange. Talking naturally to an AI that understands context, remembers previous conversations and controls my house may have garnered astonishment and commentary. Now, it’s just another thing sitting quietly in my server rack.

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Anthropic Accused In Lawsuit Of Lying About $200 Per Month ’20x’ Plan

A federal class-action lawsuit filed Monday accuses Anthropic of misleading customers about the real usage limits on its high-end Claude AI subscriptions. The suit, brought on behalf of Washington D.C. subscriber Karl Kahn and others who bought the Max 5x and Max 20x plans since April 2025, claims the company oversold how much computing power buyers would actually receive.

The lawsuit – filed Monday in the Northern District of California on behalf of Washington DC resident Karl Kahn and others who subscribed to the plans since April 2025 – targets Anthropic’s Max 5x and Max 20x tiers priced at $100 and $200 per month respectively. It accuses the company of misleading customers by advertising these plans as providing five and twenty times the usage capacity of the standard Pro subscription, when in reality the actual limits fall well short of those claims. The allegations draw heavily from emails Anthropic sent to subscribers in July 2025 that outlined the expected weekly usage allowances for each tier at the time.

According to the complaint, Kahn upgraded to the Max 20x plan in April of this year after increasing his reliance on Claude for coding work. He soon discovered he was exhausting his weekly limits rapidly, including burning through 15 percent of his allowance during a single five-hour session. The suit seeks refunds for affected customers and a judicial finding that Anthropic’s marketing of the high-tier plans was fraudulent.

Allegations

Kahn initially used Claude for personal tasks but later relied on it heavily for coding. After upgrading, he repeatedly hit usage walls and had to stop work, ration prompts, or buy extra credits to finish projects, according to the complaint. The lawsuit says the actual limits are difficult to predict and consistently lower than what was promised when the plans were marketed as giving five or twenty times the capacity of the standard Pro subscription.

“The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage,” reads the lawsuit, that claims Kahn “found himself needing either to halt his work, ration his usage, or purchase additional usage to ensure that he could complete his work.” 

Anthropic has not commented on the suit, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company offers free access plus paid tiers, with the Pro plan running $17 to $20 a month. The higher Max plans were positioned for power users needing substantially more compute.

This lawsuit arrives amid mounting frustration with AI subscriptions and tokenomics. Power users and even large enterprises have complained for months about unpredictable rate limits, especially on coding workflows – with several documented cases of extreme overspending, including one unnamed Anthropic client (Amazon?) that racked up roughly $500 million in Claude charges in a single month after failing to cap employee usage.

Compute scarcity remains a core issue across the sector. A surge in demand earlier this year strained systems at Anthropic and rivals, producing outages and tighter limits even for paying customers. At the same time, companies are racing to launch new models ahead of expected IPOs while navigating new government restrictions. Days before this suit, the Trump administration banned foreign governments, companies, and individuals from accessing Anthropic’s most powerful models after Amazon discovered a way to jailbreak the company’s Fable AI into its unrestricted form – Mythos, forcing the company to shut off certain access to comply.

On Sunday, Anthropic execs scrambled to DC to triage the situation. 

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Russia Tells Banks to “Shoot Down Drones Yourself”

The line between civilian society and war is disappearing completely. That is the real story behind Russia now authorizing its central bank and Sberbank to operate anti-drone systems and arm personnel to defend financial infrastructure. A country’s banking system is no longer simply processing transactions or moving money. It is now becoming part of the battlefield itself.

Russia passed a new law allowing the central bank, Sberbank, and the Russian Cash Collection Association to deploy their own drone defense systems after repeated Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russian territory. Staff at these institutions can now reportedly be armed as well.

This is what happens when modern war evolves into economic warfare. I have warned repeatedly that World War III would not resemble World War II where armies simply lined up across borders. The entire economy becomes militarized. Banks, energy grids, payment systems, telecommunications, ports, railways, factories, and data centers all become targets because modern civilization itself depends on interconnected infrastructure.

Ukraine understands this perfectly. Their drone strategy has increasingly focused on striking oil facilities, energy infrastructure, logistics centers, and economic targets deep inside Russia because they know they cannot defeat Russia conventionally in a prolonged war of attrition.

What is extraordinary here is not merely the drone attacks themselves. It is the admission that the Russian state can no longer centrally defend everything. Moscow is effectively decentralizing air defense responsibilities and telling major corporations and financial institutions: defend yourselves. That is a major shift psychologically.

The Guardian even framed it bluntly: Russia is telling its banks to “shoot down drones yourself.”

This is precisely how long wars transform societies historically. Civilian infrastructure slowly merges with military infrastructure until there is barely any distinction left. During the later stages of major conflicts, factories become military targets, railroads become military targets, ports become military targets, and eventually financial institutions themselves become military targets because war is ultimately about resources and economic survival.

Sberbank is not some small regional bank. It is effectively intertwined with the Russian state itself. Sberbank controls roughly a third of Russian banking assets and acts as a pillar of the entire domestic financial system. The Russian central bank likewise sits at the core of wartime financing, sanctions management, currency stabilization, and capital controls.

Russia has pushed aggressively toward cashless payments, digital financial infrastructure, and central bank digital currency experimentation through the digital ruble system. But centralized digital systems become vulnerable during wartime because they create concentrated targets.

The more governments centralize financial systems digitally, the more vulnerable those systems become to cyberwarfare, EMP threats, sabotage, drone attacks, and infrastructure strikes. This is one reason governments are quietly preparing for a wartime financial environment globally.

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Space: The Now Frontier And The AI Revolution

After last Friday’s extreme move (More Than Rates Moving Markets) we had a relatively tame week with the S&P and Nasdaq both gaining around 0.7%, but neither getting back to their highs of the week, set on Tuesday. Yields drifted moderately lower on the week, primarily on the back of steep declines in the price of oil (though I do feel the need to point out the Jan 2027 WTI contract, which I’ve been focusing on, is still at $76.1, barely one dollar lower than where it closed last Friday – I remain in the higher for longer camp). Credit spreads remain firm and the asset class remains “boring” which is a good thing! 

Now let’s address two bigger picture issues that have been taking up a lot of time during recent client calls and visits. Space and AI. 

Space: The Now Frontier 

Space: The Final Frontier still gives me the chills! The excitement of exploration! The IPO of SpaceX and all the discussion it has created has brought back that feeling. 

A colony of 1 million people on Mars! I love the concept! I have 0 opinion on whether the number of shares that Musk gets for achieving that target is the right number, but I love having that concept out there. 

Think big:! This concept floating around, and now documented into Wall Street, excites me. On the back of Artemis II and the planned lunar landings, there is a lot of potential for new discoveries. 

On a more practical (or near-term outlook) it can lead to AI and Data Centers in space. New sources of energy and potentially other materials. 

But there are also important National Security elements that are gaining more attention. 

Many members of Academy’s Geopolitical Intelligence Group lament that we have been “soft” on space. That we have ignored the real dangers to national security by not focusing on space as much as we need to. While the Space Force was a step in the right direction, many argue that we are behind (some might argue woefully behind) where we should be in terms of ensuring that space is safe and our interests are protected! 

At the simple and on the not controversial end of the spectrum, is “space junk.” The debris in orbit is increasing. While not currently posing a risk, it is something that should be addressed better than it has been. 

What about GPS and communications? I’m not sure that I could walk to the corner store without using some map app. The working assumption that “no one is interested in disrupting GPS” may be naïve? While at least 95% of communication remains “terrestrial” (fiber optic cables, undersea cables, cell towers, etc.) space will become increasingly important to communications. While it might not be “mission critical” to protect the communications equipment in space today, it could be.

Who will control discoveries? 

Let’s say we find some vital resources on the moon (seems the most likely “surprise” that could occur in the near future). Who will control that material? 

  • At best, the discoverer and those with the capabilities to take advantage of such material.  
  • At worst, might is right. 

We expect this administration, and future administrations, will spend more on space to support National Security. This is a bipartisan issue as we think about the myriad of possibilities for space. Not just the good and altruistic possibilities, but also about the risk that some other country doesn’t share such a cooperative spirit about the future of space. 

This is by no means, “closing the barn door after the horses have run out,” but it is something that deserves more serious attention and money going forward.  

The national security elements are in addition to the commercial opportunities that will be funded as corporations rush to harness the potential! 

If waking up to a $2.1 trillion market cap (and the first trillionaire) doesn’t motivate entrepreneurial and capitalistic spirits, then I should just give up this job, because it would go against everything I understand about capitalism! 

Space may be the “final frontier” but it is also the “now” frontier, which is incredibly exciting! 

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