Ilene – Phil Stock World

American Princelings

Ilene — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:00:08 +0000

American Princelings By Dekleptocracy This week, the Trump family ran a coordinated charm offensive across Eastern Europe that would make a Kremlin political technologist blush. While Vice President JD Vance stood on a stage in Budapest telling Hungarian voters to reelect Viktor Orbán, a man whose own foreign minister was caught on tape pledging […]

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Putin’s Puppet Project in Peril

Ilene — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:18:24 +0000

Putin’s Puppet Project in Peril By emptywheel There’s a lot of commentary about how shamelessly Putin’s puppets are scrambling to save Viktor Orbán, the cornerstone of a larger far-right Russian-backed project. But I suggest you start by reading pieces that explain why the puppets are so worried, such as this post describing how Orbán has floated the British far right. At […]

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Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem

Ilene — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 21:24:30 +0000

Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem What happens when AI can hack everything? By Matteo Wong, The Atlantic For the past several weeks, Anthropic says it secretly possessed a tool potentially capable of commandeering most computer servers in the world. This is a bot that, if unleashed, might be able to hack into banks, exfiltrate state […]

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Peter Zeihan: What This Ceasefire Actually Means

Ilene — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:03:41 +0000

This is a summary of the transcript from Peter Zeihan’s “What Does This Ceasefire Actually Mean? ~ Apr. 9, 2026”, which is subscription-based so I can’t share the video for a week. You can find more from Zeihan here > “What Does This Ceasefire Actually Mean? ~ Summary Peter Zeihan frames the current ceasefire between […]

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Trump’s ceasefire deal with Iran

Ilene — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 03:22:55 +0000

Trump’s ceasefire deal with Iran By Ian Bremmer In this “ask ian,” Ian Bremmer breaks down the newly announced two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran and whether it can hold. Timeline 0:00 – Ceasefire announced; sharp reversal from prior escalation 0:34 – Trump declares victory and unilaterally de-escalates 0:59 – Iran maintains control demands […]

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Trump Made a Deal That Gives Him Nothing He Wanted

Ilene — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:46:52 +0000

Trump Made a Deal That Gives Him Nothing He Wanted U.S. declarations of victory ring hollow. By Nancy A. Youssef, The Atlantic President Trump said he went to war to ensure that Iran never acquired a nuclear bomb. The war ended—for now, at least—with a demonstration that Tehran possesses an arguably more powerful weapon of deterrence against […]

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U.S. and Iran Reach Two-Week Ceasefire with “Coordinated” Hormuz Reopening (updated)

Ilene — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:31:49 +0000

U.S. and Iran Reach Two-Week Ceasefire with “Coordinated” Hormuz Reopening Markets reacted immediately to the announcement, with oil dropping sharply and equities moving higher after hours. But what does this deal between the U.S. and Iran actually mean? At a basic level, the U.S. agreed to pause military action against Iran for two weeks. Iran […]

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Trump’s Fundamental Misunderstanding in Iran

Ilene — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:39:14 +0000

What makes the nation suffer helps the regime thrive. One of the U.S. government’s recurring mistakes about Iran has been to conflate the country’s national interests with regime interests. The two are in many ways opposites. What benefits the Iranian people—global economic reintegration, diplomatic …

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Iran-Linked Hackers Are Sabotaging US Energy and Water Infrastructure

Ilene — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:15:07 +0000

As Trump threatens Iranian infrastructure, the US government warns that Iran has carried out its own digital attacks against US critical …

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Shameful — ‘I Love Viktor’: Trump and Vance Cheer on Orban in Hungarian Race

Ilene — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:53:54 +0000

There was a time when something like this would have been unthinkable—American leaders openly campaigning for a foreign figure widely known for eroding democratic institutions and maintaining close ties with Vladimir Putin, a longstanding U.S. adversary. This isn’t new. Trump’s praise for leaders aligned with Moscow has been consistent for years, making this less an […]

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