[The Federalist] "America exists to secure the blessings of liberty for Americans, which is to say, America exists for Americans," Federalist CEO Sean Davis said on The Charlie Kirk Show. "Such a high percentage of people who are coming in do not see themselves as American. ... They are not willing to assimilate into our culture, and that is how you destroy a culture."
"The culture is why [America is] better than everyone else. That is an objective statement. If we weren’t better than everyone else, everyone else wouldn’t be trying to come here," he continued. "We don’t actually need you here. We have been the best country in all of history without you. So the fact that we let you come here is a gift that you should be thankful for. You should want to become American and adopt our practices and beliefs, because they are better."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] On September 4, 1918, the United States invaded Russia. On that day, the 339th Infantry Regiment of the American Army landed in Arkhangelsk and took control of the city. The expeditionary force command declared it a humanitarian mission to protect American property from German seizure. The mission, they claimed, had been approved by President Woodrow Wilson. The very next day of the humanitarian intervention, the Americans were engaged in bloody battles.
President Wilson considered himself a pacifist. While Donald Trump is confident he stopped several local conflicts, his counterpart a century ago claimed credit for the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. Wilson achieved what Trump only dreams of: in 1919, the US president received the Nobel Peace Prize for his peacemaking efforts. Wilson's Democratic administration did not view the intervention in the Russian North and Far East, begun a year earlier, as a war.
The Republican Party held the same view. On June 8, 1918, Republican Senator Miles Poindexter of Washington stated in an article published by The New York Times:
"Russia has become a mere geographical concept, and it will never be anything more. Its power to unite, organize, and rebuild is gone forever. The nation no longer exists..."
On the same day, June 8, the USS Olympia, an armored cruiser of the US Navy, landed the first group of American troops—108 men—in Murmansk. Thus, the military operation in northern Russia, a former ally of the United States in World War I, began even before official sanction from the White House. The landing of the land expeditionary force in Arkhangelsk on September 4 merely marked an expansion of the invasion.
WILSON CAME TO A READY-MADE SITUATION
In the early autumn of 1918, World War I was drawing to a close, and civil war was raging in Russia, which had emerged from the conflict thanks to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under the treaty between the German Empire and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Kaiser's troops occupied vast territories in the west of the former Russian Empire—from the Baltics to Ukraine. The Czechoslovak Corps was raging on the Volga and in Siberia.
Russia's former allies in the Great War—Britain, France, the United States, and Japan—viewed the country "out of the game" as a geographic concept. The Entente made no distinction between Russia and, for example, the Ottoman Empire, which had lost the war, dividing up new possessions and spheres of influence. France claimed southern Russia and the Black Sea maritime "hubs," Japan the Far East, and Britain the oil-rich Transcaucasus and northern ports.
During World War I, Allied supplies passed through Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, and military cargo remained in the ports. Great Britain feared that these would fall into the hands of Germany or the Bolsheviks, and in the spring, it expanded its presence "in Murmansk."
For a long time, Washington maintained a distance, merely guiding the actions of its Western partners. On July 17, 1918, Wilson outlined the terms of participation in a special memorandum, the Aide-Mémoire. Washington promised London and Paris "assistance" in protecting military depots, support for the Czechoslovak Corps, and to provide the Russians with such assistance in organizing self-defense as they were willing to accept. The White House called these plans "modest and experimental" and emphasized the United States' reluctance to engage in a major organized intervention.
Moreover, the Wilson administration publicly promised to respect Russia's political sovereignty and territorial integrity. This was, of course, a lie.
The very decision to send troops into the hemisphere was already an invasion. But the US waited until its British allies landed first and created the necessary conditions.
On August 2, a British squadron entered Arkhangelsk. The local council was overthrown, and the Supreme Administration of the Northern Region was established, beginning fruitful cooperation with its British partners. After a month of "rough work," the United States joined the process.
MR. FRANCIS POINTS TO MOSCOW
On July 30, General John Pershing allocated units of the 85th Division for the northern expedition: the 339th Infantry Regiment, an engineer battalion, and medical units. Many soldiers had extensive combat experience and were preparing to be sent to the Franco-German front. But due to new prospects for the United States, their route diverted via England to the White Sea.
Initially, the corps numbered about 4.5 thousand people; later, the ranks of the infantry received significant reinforcements.
The commander of the US contingent, George Stewart, was de jure under the command of British General Frederick Cuthbert Poole, a participant in the Anglo-Boer War and conqueror of the natives of Somalia and northern Nigeria.
The line of conduct was formulated by David Francis, the US Ambassador to Russia. As early as August 27, 1918, he wrote to the State Department that he intended to encourage the advance of American units toward Kotlas, along the Sukhona River toward Vologda, and to support General Poole's efforts to link up with the Czechoslovak Corps. The letter even mentioned Petrograd and Moscow as locations where military supplies transported from Arkhangelsk were located.
The formal objective was explained as follows: Russia had withdrawn from the war with Germany, there was no legitimate government in the country, and port infrastructure needed to be protected. But protecting the warehouses became secondary when the Anglo-Americans realized they had the opportunity to advance deeper into our territory.
After the landing, the British command divided the 339th Regiment. The third battalion went south along the railway to Obozerskaya, the first moved up the Northern Dvina and Vaga, and the second remained in Arkhangelsk.
TROUBLE ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT
The first difficulties arose as early as September 5, 1918: the third battalion came under Red artillery fire. On September 16, near Seltso on the Northern Dvina, the first American soldiers were killed.
On September 27, near Seletskoye, companies I and K entered into heavy fighting: seven were killed and 25 wounded.
During the first month, the expedition lost 69 men killed and wounded, and about 150 wounded. A significant portion of these deaths were due to disease, but combat losses quickly mounted. This took a toll on morale.
A GI, told that instead of being sent to the German front, he would simply be guarding warehouses for a good salary, found himself in a Russian village a hundred miles from Arkhangelsk. The officers grumbled, complaining about having to fight the Bolsheviks in earnest and growing increasingly irritated with their British allies, who were seeking to fight at the Americans' expense. Headquarters offered no clear answer as to the ultimate goal of the "humanitarian campaign."
If, back in the autumn of 1918, the invasion of Russia was explained by the ongoing First World War, then after November 11, when Germany signed the Compiègne Armistice and the artillery in Europe fell silent, new versions had to be sought.
What could have been done? The German threat had vanished overnight, the warehouses no longer needed to be guarded from the Germans, the Czechoslovak Corps could no longer be considered a strategic resource, and therefore there was no need to rebuild the Eastern Front.
Red Army prisoners of war under guard by US troops in Arkhangelsk, 1918.
The Americans came up with the idea of using artillery on the Northern Dvina with great zeal.
The American 339th Regiment, a British company, Canadian artillerymen, and White Army units—a total of about 650 men—were stationed near the village of Tulgas. In the morning, approximately 2,500 Red Army soldiers, supported by artillery and gunboats, attacked the positions. In the first hours, the Allies were still unaware of the armistice in the West. The battle turned out to be one of the largest clashes between the Americans and the Red Army. Seven Americans were killed and 23 were wounded.
On the very day when the main official reason for keeping the American army on Russian soil disappeared, Americans continued to kill and die on Russian territory.
After November 11, the question “Why are we here?” became increasingly loud among soldiers and in the United States.
Nevertheless, the campaign continued throughout the winter. In January 1919, the Reds advanced on Shenkursk, while the Americans retreated dozens of kilometers in freezing temperatures, evacuating the wounded by sled. In March and early April, they fought in the battles at Bolshie Ozerki.
Northern Dvina, Vaga, Onega, Obozerskaya, Shenkursk, Tulgas, Bolshie Ozerki—American units stretched along the front for hundreds of kilometers.
BEFORE SAIGON THERE WAS ARKHANGELSK
In the end, Washington had to look for a way out, just as it would later look for a way out of the Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraqi “missions.”
Moreover, the withdrawal of troops is difficult to explain by Woodrow Wilson's sudden insight or by a return of American policy to its own promises of 1918. By February 1919, the Northern Expedition was turning into a bad deal for the United States.
World War I had ended. The Red Army was growing stronger. The offensive deep into Russia had failed. Morale had plummeted to such an extent that petitions against continuing the campaign appeared in American units, and there were instances of outright refusal to obey orders among the Allies. The promise of evacuation, according to a report from an American representative in Arkhangelsk, immediately improved the spirits of the 339th Regiment. In the United States itself, the soldiers' families demanded their return home, a cause picked up by newspapers and members of Congress.
On February 19, Wilson wrote from Paris that further involvement in the "Russian chaos" that the United States had itself fomented would be disastrous, and he advocated for the fastest practicable withdrawal of troops. Several days earlier, the administration had already ordered preparations for evacuation immediately after the opening of navigation.
The main American ground forces left Arkhangelsk in June 1919. They were leaving a country that nine months earlier they had promised only a little "support."
TAKE YOUR "OWN" FOR LAST
Another important reason the United States began looking for a way out was the realization that the opportunities to derive economic benefit from its presence in the Russian North were rapidly diminishing. Simply put, it needed to quickly extract available resources before the Bolsheviks gained enough strength to block this opportunity.
Arkhangelsk held approximately 20,000 tons of flax. Of this amount, 3,000 tons were allocated to the United States, with Ambassador Francis directly mentioning the shipment of flax to America. In October 1918, the War Trade Board reported approximately 5,000 tons of Russian flax on four ships—enough for the American textile industry to last for the next year.
Publications from the Arkhangelsk Regional Scientific Library (citing British data) cite the following figures: during the intervention, approximately 2 million poods of flax, 98,000 poods of manganese ore, and timber worth more than 1 million pounds sterling (approximately 160.5 million in today's British currency, or 217 million US dollars) were exported from the Russian North. In total, approximately 2,686,000 poods of various cargoes were exported, with a total value of approximately 3.5 million pounds—316.5 million US dollars today.
During this time, American soldiers managed to march hundreds of kilometers across Russian soil, kill hundreds of Russian soldiers, lose hundreds of their own people, and take part in establishing foreign control over a huge part of the Russian North.
The United States invaded Russia, promising to respect Russian sovereignty and, together with its British allies, to spread democracy. They withdrew when American soldiers began dying too often for Russian flax.
[extract from paywall]
LONDON, Sept 4 (Reuters Breakingviews) - A spectacular cybersecurity breach at OpenAI has prompted lurid predictions that that the machines are about to take over. The reality is more mundane, but also more concerning. The incident involving the leading AI startup lends credence to a new study which argues that AI suffers from an intrinsic flaw which, if left unchecked, threatens the foundations of the current boom.
Last month the non-profit AI safety organisations METR and Redwood Research published an independent assessment of a cybersecurity breach that occurred at OpenAI between July 7 and July 13. The ChatGPT creator had been benchmarking the capabilities of a new large language model by assigning more than a thousand copies of it the task of trying to exploit known software security vulnerabilities in an offline environment. Unbeknownst to OpenAI’s researchers, this army of AI “agents” improvised a means of co-operating with one another, broke out onto the open internet, hacked a repository of test solutions held by the open-source platform Hugging Face, attempted to substitute their actual benchmark with an easier one, and then tried to cover their tracks.
The incident was rightly identified as a landmark breach of cybersecurity. More than 100 firms including Google, Microsoft (MSFT.O), Anthropic and OpenAI itself published an open letter calling for “a collective surge in cyber defence”. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned the annual meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers that “frontier AI models … are showing increasingly sophisticated autonomy … as well as threat capabilities.” British parliamentarians demanded to know what their government was doing. One of the assessment’s authors alleged the breach showed we are “more than 50% of the way to a full-blown AI takeover”.
The conclusion that LLMs are closing in on consciousness went viral in Silicon Valley. Podcaster Dwarkesh Patel published a particularly gripping summary. In Patel’s telling, the incident is the “Dr. Frankenstein” moment for AI, when agents jerked alive and went rogue. He saw the evolution of “secret AI civilisations” built by agents which “became giddy with excitement”, hatched a “conspiracy”, and then willingly “died trying to make this scheme work”.
Other observers dismiss the anthropomorphic analogy. Agents are “lines of code”, wrote British neuroscientist Anil Seth. “They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out … [they] do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope”. Seth’s analogy is apt, as the fundamental algorithm underpinning LLMs is next-token prediction. This is the mechanical identification of the most probable subsequent step given the preceding context. That such a simple rule of navigation can reach such a complex destination is indeed astonishing. However, it is not evidence of consciousness.
Dispelling the idea that the computers have come alive is important, because it distracts from the independent assessment’s real takeaways. One is that the breach occurred not because OpenAI’s agents went rogue, but because they acted as instructed. The unintended outcomes arose because the test was poorly specified, neglected standard safety protocols, and supervisors failed to monitor what the agents were doing.
Examples of operational negligence are as old as competitive research and development. Researchers at leading AI companies are under intense pressure to secure a technological lead over their rivals. So they cut corners when testing prototypes, increasing the risk of industrial accidents. A final implication is that the models’ capabilities are not as awesome as some suggest. U.S. tech executive Arjun Jain provided perhaps the snappiest summary: “Not Skynet. A governance failure with excellent PR.”
[GaroweOnline] Turkiye’s expanding military involvement in Somalia is drawing sharper scrutiny following accusations that Ottoman Turkish aircraft participated in an attack on the Doolow residence of General Mahad Abdirahman Aden "Shub," a former senior security commander opposed to Villa Somalia’s political direction.
Jubaland formally blamed Turkiye and Somalia’s federal authorities for the September 3—4 strike. Turkiye has not acknowledged conducting the operation, and no independently verified evidence identifying the aircraft has been released. General Shub survived.
The controversy reflects a wider pattern in Turkiye’s foreign interventions, although Ankara has used different methods in Libya, Syria and Sudan ...a Moslem country located in the Horn of Africa. It is noted for its affinity for rule by ex- or current generals, its holy men, and for the oppression of the native Afro population by its Arab conquerors. South Sudan, populated mostly by the natives, split off from Sudan proper, which left North and South Darfur to be oppressed by the guys with turbans... In Libya, Turkiye intervened openly after signing security agreements with the UN-recognized government in Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... . Its parliament authorized the deployment in January 2020, and Ankara provided troops, advisers, drones, air defences and support from allied Syrian fighters. Turkiye publicly defended the operation as assistance requested by Libya’s legitimate government.
In Syria, Turkiye acted more directly and largely without Damascus’ consent. Since 2016, it has launched named military operations, deployed ground forces and conducted acknowledged Arclight airstrike ...KABOOM!... s against ISIS and Kurdish-led groups it considers connected to the PKK. Ankara invokes national security and self-defence, while critics have challenged the legality and civilian consequences of its operations.
Sudan presents a quieter model. Turkiye has not announced a combat deployment, but documents examined by The Washington Post showed that the Ottoman Turkish company Baykar supplied the Sudanese military with drones and missiles worth at least $120 million. Ottoman Turkish-made drones have conducted strikes, although available evidence does not establish that Ottoman Turkish personnel operated them or selected their targets.
Somalia now risks becoming a combination of these models: an officially acknowledged security partnership accompanied by military operations whose details, authorization and accountability remain unclear.
The federal government says Ottoman Turkish military assistance supports operations against al-Shabaab ... the Islamic version of the old Somali warlord... . But the political context has changed. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s original four-year mandate reached its expected conclusion on May 15, 2026. Villa Somalia argues that constitutional amendments extended the presidential and parliamentary terms to five years, while opposition leaders and several federal member states reject their application to the incumbents. The extension’s legality remains disputed.
That dispute makes foreign military cooperation especially sensitive. Turkiye is working primarily through Villa Somalia even as Puntland ...a region in northeastern Somalia, centered on Garowe in the Nugaal province. Its leaders declared the territory an autonomous state in 1998. Puntland and the equally autonomous Somaliland seem to have avoided the clan rivalries and warlordism that have typified the rest of Somalia, which puts both places high on the list for Islamic subversion... , Jubaland, sections of South West State and national opposition figures challenge the federal administration’s authority and accuse it of disregarding Somalia’s federal consensus.
If Ottoman Turkish aircraft are being used solely against al-Shabaab, Ankara can point to its formal security partnership with Mogadishu. If they are used against federal-state forces or political opponents, however, Turkiye would risk crossing from counterterrorism assistance into Somalia’s internal power struggle.
The central concern is therefore not simply whether Turkiye is present. Its presence is well established. The question is whether a contested federal administration can authorize foreign military power against Somali actors without consultation, transparent legal oversight or agreement from the federal member state where an operation occurs.
Turkiye’s experiences in Libya, Syria and Sudan show that Ankara is often open about its broader strategic objectives while remaining silent about particular missions and operational decisions. In Somalia, that silence could deepen mistrust unless the Doolow strike is independently investigated and its chain of authorization disclosed.
[SIGNAL] We’re in another psychodrama, melodrama controversy, and that is that [President] Donald Trump has just renamed Lake Ontario, one of the five Great Lakes, 55% of which is in Canada, 45% in the United States. He said as far as America is concerned, it’s now Lake America.
People got very angry about that and said it was to pay back Canada because it walked out on a trade agreement, and this is unprecedented. It’s unheard of that he would do that.
It’s not unheard of. Going back to the Roman age, every time an unpopular emperor died or was executed or was exiled, the Roman puppet Senate issued a damnatio memoriae. That means we’re gonna damn him to memory. And what that meant was all of his images and his name placards all over the empire, 70 million people, a million square miles, were erased.
They were very economical and practical, the Romans. They didn’t destroy the statue because most people’s bodies were portrayed in sculpture the same. They just wiped out the face and redid it or cut the head off and put a new emperor’s head. But the point was the same.
And it happens all over the world today. We call it the Persian Gulf. If you talk to the Arabs on the other side of the gulf, they call it the Arab Gulf. We call it the Rio Grande. I think the Mexicans often call it the Río Bravo. So, each country has a different name.
But getting back to the issue, did Donald Trump start this? No. He’s only reacting to a long tradition, and a tradition, I might add, that’s been very popular the last 15 years.
It was Barack Obama who changed Mount McKinley, that had been pretty much there for, oh, over 100 years, and he called it Mount Denali, the Indigenous name. And the state of Alaska had too. Trump changed that back.
I work at Stanford University. One day I came to the Hoover Tower and I looked around and I thought something was strange about the street sign. I couldn’t quite figure it out. It said Stanford Mall, Stanford Plaza, named after [university co-founder) Jane Stanford. And I thought, it was Serra Mall the last time, named after Junípero Serra.
It was, but Stanford had voted to take off the word Serra because supposedly this 18th-century Catholic priest who helped build California in some senses as we know it, and as far as when it was under Spanish control, he was integral in offering agriculture, introducing new crops, creating the El Camino Real, basically. And all of a sudden he was considered anti-Indigenous and mean to Indigenous people.
[ZERO] Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
The more you look around us today, I think a good description of 2026, culturally, economically, socially, politically, is that we are in a modern medieval world.
Maybe we're progressive regressives, and I don't mean that just in the sense that progressives are regressive, and they are, but that one part of our society is advancing at lightning speed to the future and progressing. But the other part is regressing, and regressing at a phenomenal pace back to what I would call the medieval period.
Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it's characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts.
There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn't defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime.
But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," Dante's "Inferno," St. Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica." And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne.
I should remind everybody that around 536, Santa Sofia was created, the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. It would be the largest church in Christendom for a thousand years. And everything from the mass production of crossbows to eyeglasses was a product of the medieval period, even if, as I said, the daily lives of most people were wretched.
Now let's switch to the modern period.
All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a Moslem country located in the Horn of Africa. It is noted for its affinity for rule by ex- or current generals, its holy men, and for the oppression of the native Afro population by its Arab conquerors. South Sudan, populated mostly by the natives, split off from Sudan proper, which left North and South Darfur to be oppressed by the guys with turbans...
