I am truly worried that we will get caught up in yet another overseas war.

“Gulf states, already uneasy, have been forced into a strategic dilemma.” Pierre Pahlavi Full Professor, Chair of the Department of Security and International Affairs, and Deputy Director in the Department of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto

The temptation in moments like this is to measure escalation by visible firepower: missile ranges, troop movements, the opening—or avoidance—of a second front in Lebanon. But the most dangerous phase of this crisis may not be geographic expansion. It may be structural destabilization.

Much of the coverage treats the conflict as a conventional military exchange between Israel, the United States, and Iran. That framing misses two critical dynamics.

First, Iran was never designed to win a conventional war against a superpower. Its doctrine is asymmetrical. Ballistic missiles reaching 2,000 kilometres make for dramatic headlines, but Tehran’s real leverage lies in calibrated disruption: cyber operations, maritime insecurity in the Gulf, proxy ambiguity, and energy market shockwaves. If escalation comes, it is more likely to unfold in the grey zone than through a direct strike on North America.

Second, there is a growing risk of horizontal escalation—drawing in regional actors not because they seek war but because they are within range. Gulf states, already uneasy, have been forced into a strategic dilemma. European allies providing defensive support may find themselves redefined as co-belligerents. An expanding coalition changes the conflict’s logic. It dilutes pressure on Tehran in one sense—but also raises the stakes for everyone.

What concerns me most is not immediate regime collapse in Iran, nor a sudden regional war, but a grinding destabilization: energy volatility, cyber disruption, miscalculation among overstretched militaries, and a public debate fixated on spectacle rather than systemic risk.

The question is not how far missiles can fly. It is how far instability can spread—and how quickly.

Tech companies and industrial agriculture are “playing with the food system” by using AI and algorithms to undermine farmers in choosing what the world eats, leading food security experts have warned.

Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Alibaba are working with industrial agriculture firms to influence what crops are grown and how, according to a report by the thinktank International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).

The result, the experts say, is a “top-down” approach to farming systems where large companies tell farmers what to grow, often focusing on the most productive and profitable crops.

“Companies are playing with the food system, and we can’t afford to have that played with,” said Pat Mooney, a Canadian author and expert on agriculture who contributed to the Head in the Cloud report, adding that these companies tend to focus only on five crops: corn, rice, wheat, soya beans and potatoes.

The global economy must be reordered to ensure it serves ordinary people around the world rather than the “frivolous and destructive demands of the ultra-rich”, according to a leading UN figure.

Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, says politicians must stop prioritising “socially and ecologically destructive growth” that only increases the profits – and serves the consumption demands – of the world’s richest individuals and corporations.

Instead, to tackle the interwoven crises of rising inequality, ecological collapse and resurgent far-right politics, a new economic agenda is needed.

“The scarce resources we have should be used to prioritise the basic needs of people in poverty and to create what is of societal value rather than serve the frivolous desires of the ultra-rich.”

UPDATE THREAD (it's prettier, and on Mac and Linux now): https://piefed.ca/c/selfhosted/p/571213/honey-i-shrunk-the-vids-mr-universe-edition-v1-0-5

histv - Honey, I Shrunk The Vids

An overengineered PowerShell frontend for FFMPEG

Predendum 6/MAR/26: Yes, I’m using genAI - specifically Claude - to help me build and improve this application. But, I believe I’m using genAI differently than the majority of projects. For one thing, I’m not blindly copy-pasting output and crossing my fingers that it works. I read the output, looking for things I know are wrong, and try to fix it; if I can’t, I ask what I’m doing wrong, and then I fix it. When I encounter errors, I’m reading the error output and if I know how to fix it I do it myself. I’m trying to actually learn, but I do that best by diving in and fixing the mistakes I make. I test informally* on the hardware I have available, which is two Windows PCs, and sometimes my friend with a 2016 Mac will do a test run for me to confirm stuff works. (*by "informally", I mean I don't write test cases. I know how, but they're repetitive and I hate them and I'm not doing it for my personal projects or I'll end up hating my hobbies.)

My goal in posting my projects is not to have other people audit my code for me, nor do I want kudos or approbation (except for any jokes you see. Those are all me). I’m posting what I’ve got when I’ve got it largely working, in case other people find it useful, and that’s it. I do hope that if people see something I could refactor or conventions I should be adhering to, they’ll drop me a (civil) note about it so I can keep it mind. I appreciate feedback and advice, but I’m not expecting it.

Thanks for reading, I hope you find HISTV useful!

I was doing a lot of manual re-encoding down from insane source bitrates with FFMPEG, and I wondered if I could put it into a nice GUI. Then I wondered if I could make it hardware-agnostic. Then I wondered if I could give it a dark theme... and on and on and on... until finally I had it working how I wanted and I wondered if I could put it into a single executable file.

So all up I spent a little while on this today and I think I finally have something worth shipping. The executable will probably trigger your antivirus because it boostraps the powershell script, and the script will always throw a warning asking if you're sure you want to run it. But it works and it's safe, read the full source and readme in the codeberg if you want to be sure.

I hope this might be helpful for anyone else transcoding videos on Windows! I'd love feedback, but please be gentle, it's my first project like this and I have no idea what I'm actually doing.

U.S. President Donald Trump, in an interview with The New York Times on the 1st, local time, predicted that the military operation against Iran, named 'Epic Fury,' would last 4-5 weeks. However, there are observations that if the U.S. airstrikes on Iran prolong beyond this period, U.S. military assets and troops stationed in South Korea on the Korean Peninsula could also be deployed to the Middle East.

In Iran, the U.S. and Israel are employing tactics used in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the “War on Terror” and Trump’s recent attacks on alleged drug boats in the Carribean.

You watch these bespectacled pundits and pampered politicians babbling about war the way they’d talk about their plans to remodel their kitchen or take a trip to Paris, and you just know if actual war ever showed up on their doorstep they’d literally soil themselves.

now everything makes sense!

It was a joke. I assure you: I read.

Books are good.

Political parties, rather than local governments, administer primary elections in Texas. In the past, Democrats and Republicans have overseen them jointly.

The rules in effect Tuesday are part of local GOP leaders’ decision to hold a separate primary from Democrats this year in Dallas and Williamson counties, leading to precinct-based voting. In previous elections, individuals could cast ballots at any vote center, regardless of their address, under a countywide voting system.

According to the dpa news agency, Trump took up the vast majority of the time, speaking for at least 30 minutes and often repeating himself.

Merz spoke for just three minutes, even when some of the questions from the press were directed at him.

Ars Technica, the Condé Nast-owned technology outlet, fired senior AI reporter Benj Edwards after it retracted one of his stories over the use of AI-fabricated quotes.

The Socialist prime minister has slammed the conflict as unjustified and illegal, and now his criticism has sparked the threat of a trade war from the U.S. president.

Only one EU leader has dared to directly challenge U.S. President Donald Trump over the war against Iran, calling it unjustified, dangerous and illegal: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

And Trump has certainly noticed his outspoken critic in Madrid. On Tuesday, he slammed the Spanish government as “terrible” and “unfriendly” over its decision to bar U.S. military planes from using Spanish air bases to attack Iran, before threatening to cut all trade with the EU’s fourth-biggest economy.

Sánchez’s showdown with Trump puts the Spanish Socialist in a similar position to former French President Jacques Chirac, who famously emerged as the most defiant European leader in 2003, appealing to international law and multilateralism in an attempt to corral opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

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“We’ll see what happens with the people,” President Trump said as he appeared to be distancing himself from the longer-term consequences of the war in Iran.

American leaders say they are “punishing” Iran, “annihilating” its navy and meting out “retribution” against its rulers.

What comes after all that destruction, they increasingly insist, is not the United States’ problem.

“We’ll see what happens with the people,” President Trump said on Tuesday as he hosted Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, referring to the possibility of a popular uprising in Iran in the wake of the war. “You know, they have their chance.”

It was the latest instance of Mr. Trump and his top officials taking pains to paint Iran’s political future as being outside the scope of American responsibility.

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