While the world waits to see what’s going to happen following America’s attack on the Iranian Fordow nuclear facility there are other things happening in the world.

Argentina

You may recall the prophecies of doom that followed Milei’s election and his rapid moves on cutting the government down to size. Keep those in mind as you read the following and also understand that the exact same screams are unleashed anywhere the same thing is attempted. ATTENTION, Nicola Willis!

France

While there is increasing talk of civil war in Britain and in Europe, the country that’s #1 for that possibility is France:

The US State Department is now warning of terrorist attacks targeting tourist locations, transportation hubs and public areas. France’s Vigipirate national security alert system is currently at its highest level, Urgence Attentat.

Such warnings have become so routine I wonder if even the highest level of alert works any more. However, as in Britain it’s the other side of the coin that increasingly matters:

As I stood in the queue at the fishmonger on the town square close to my home in the South of France yesterday, he was cutting the head off a sea bream with deft strokes of his razor-sharp knife.

‘You French have always been rather good at decapitation,’ I said, gesturing towards a spot outside the post office, where the town guillotine had stood in an earlier era. Nobody laughed. ‘They should bring the guillotine back,’ said the fishmonger. ‘We need it more than ever.’ He wasn’t joking and other customers nodded vigorously.

New Zealand

In visiting Peter Cresswell’s Not PC blog I’ve noticed in the last few weeks that his viewing counter, typically clocking along at 50-100,000 views every thirty days, has been climbing steadily through half a million and, as of today, sits at 865,573. Has Objectivism become suddenly very popular? Have Ayn Rand followers suddenly discovered this little blog in NZ? Not exactly, Peter’s noticed as well and identified it as theft:

It’s not because readers are beating a computer path to those allegedly wildly popular posts, good as they are. It’s because computers are cutting a track there. I think what’s going on is related to AI. Specifically, I reckon it’s AI bots “scraping” this site to hoover up text for one or other Large Language Model.

In other words, my words will become theirs. That is: they’re being stolen.

It’s not just this blog either, it seems to be every blog using the Blogger software (which, if you weren’t aware, is a Google service). So for instance—looking around just the local blogosphere—Lindsay Mitchells blog, which is criminally under-visited, has also leapt from its regular 30-50,000 pageviews (as assessed by Google) to more than triple that. Eric Crampton’s Offsetting Behaviour seems to have a similar thing happening. And although Liberty Scott doesn’t have a Pageview counter on his front page, I reckon if he looked under the hood he’d find something similar: i.e., that Google et al are stealing our words to sell them as their own.

And there’s bugger all we can do about it.

USA

NASA canned a scheduled flight of four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The Ax-4 mission, a collaboration between NASA, SpaceX, Axiom Space, and several international partners, was going to make history because, for the first time, Poland, Hungary, and India would each have an astronaut aboard the ISS.

Now flights get delayed all the time for various reasons but this time it’s not due to the rockets or the spacecraft but the ISS itself and the reason threatens the ISS itself. The second oldest part of it, the Russian-built Zvezda module, which allowed the first astronauts to crew the station in 2000, developed an air leak in 2019, which has now got so large that NASA is reluctant to put more astronauts on board.

Zvezda is even older than the 25 years it’s been in space. It was originally built in the mid-1980’s to form the core of a new Soviet space station called Mir-2, but when that got cancelled Zvezda sat in storage for fourteen years. Looks like it’s reaching it’s limit and all sorts of safety protocols have had to be implemented – like keeping certain hatches closed that connect it with other modules.

I’ll be sad to see the ISS go but this cannot continue. It’s scheduled to be de-orbited in 2030, but I have to wonder if it’ll last even that long.