Skeptic

We no longer live in the age of old ignorance, where people simply lacked information. We live in the age of new ignorance. Not empty minds, but corrupted ones, flooded with facts, half-truths, and weaponized lies. The danger today is not that people know nothing. It is that they are absolutely certain of things that are not true.

The vulnerabilities exposed in recent days are huge and deadly. Astra and Opus have been working on identification of exposures and fixes more than an hour and still a lot to take care of. It is not just PhP. Certificate issue almost everywhere. Pip and environments, Git, Jdk. It's nightmare. Node.js is the easiest to fix.

What is going on with Codex? I have 87% weekly remaining but getting "hit your usage limit" message. Did they introduce some new rule? Why are they messing up everything continually? We need stability and performance. That's it.

Whoever cheers for OpenAI's decision to merge Chat, Work, and Codex is either not a power user or plainly dumb. That includes OpenAI employees.

This your great, high accuracy Pangram! Three pieces from Grok, GPT, and GLM bundled. Pangram gives 100% human score. So much for reliability. pangram.com/history/9dd8cf04…

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Hormuz developments are accelerating rapidly. Iran’s IRGC has announced the full closure of the Strait until further notice, following attacks on commercial vessels that reportedly attempted to use unauthorized routes. CENTCOM says the Cyprus-flagged M/V GFS Galaxy suffered major damage, an onboard fire, and a missing crew member after an Iranian strike. The United States has now launched a third round of attacks across southern Iran, including reported strikes near Bandar Abbas, Jask, Chabahar, Qeshm, and Asaluyeh. Initial reports also point to Iranian mine deployment in the U.S.-backed southern shipping lane near Oman. The conflict has moved directly into the infrastructure that governs Gulf energy flows and commercial passage.

The chants at Ali Khamenei’s funeral created the perfect political image. Crowds demanded Trump’s death. Banners declared “WE WILL KILL TRUMP.” Iranian revenge rhetoric became impossible to ignore. The threat itself has credible foundations. Iran has viewed Trump as responsible for Soleimani’s killing, and previous IRGC-linked assassination plots show that the hostility has moved beyond speeches before. The latest intelligence came through Israel, and the public case remains thin. No detailed operational plan has been disclosed. Some American officials reportedly questioned whether the material showed an imminent plot or broader discussion among Iranian figures. That uncertainty matters because Israel has powerful incentives in this moment. Every assassination warning increases pressure on Trump to abandon negotiations, distrust Tehran, and return to military escalation. Netanyahu gains from that shift. The threat may be genuine. The presentation of the threat may also be designed to shape American policy. Serious security analysis requires attention to both.

Trump treated the Qatari 747 as proof that he could bypass Boeing’s delays and put a new presidential aircraft into service quickly. The political appeal was obvious. A $400 million luxury jet arrives as a gift, the administration accelerates the conversion, and Trump gets a new Air Force One years before the official replacement program is ready. The security tradeoff became visible during the return from the NATO summit in Turkey. Trump left Ankara aboard the older Air Force One and transferred back to the Qatari aircraft in Britain. Reporting indicates that security officials preferred the older plane for the more exposed portion of the trip because it carried defensive systems and mature protection capabilities that the newer aircraft still lacked. That moment damaged the entire narrative surrounding the plane. The accelerated retrofit delivered speed, visibility, and a political trophy. It also produced a narrower capability set than the older purpose-built aircraft. Once the threat environment became serious, security planners reportedly reached for the plane Trump was eager to replace. The reported anger now makes sense. The embarrassment came from a public demonstration of the gap between the aircraft’s political presentation and its operational limits. The controversy has since widened into questions about taxpayer costs, foreign influence, classified security weaknesses, and subpoenas targeting journalists who exposed the story. Trump wanted the plane to symbolize executive decisiveness. Its first major security test turned it into a case study in the risks of rushing national-security infrastructure for political effect.

Washington’s Israel-Lebanon framework tries to compress the whole southern Lebanon problem into one conditional chain. Lebanese sovereignty, Hezbollah’s disarmament, Israeli redeployment, and reconstruction funding are all tied to verified performance rather than political declarations. The core logic is straightforward. Lebanon is expected to rebuild the state monopoly on force, disarm non-state armed groups, and deploy the LAF into verified pilot zones. Israel’s redeployment is tied to that verification process, while the United States acts as mediator, verifier, and organizer of reconstruction support. The agreement gives Lebanon the language of sovereignty, but makes that sovereignty conditional on performance. It gives Israel a path to redeployment, but preserves its self-defense claims during implementation. The document is ambitious because it tries to convert Hezbollah’s disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, Lebanese state authority, and reconstruction funding into one sequence. That is also where the risk sits. If one link fails, the whole framework becomes another diplomatic text with no enforcement reality behind it.

Iran's launched ballistic missiles and drones at eight US military targets.

The American housing market has turned into a pressure system where high prices, high mortgage rates, locked-in owners, and scarce affordable supply reinforce each other. Affordability has improved slightly from the worst readings of late 2023 on some indexes, but the basic condition remains severe. Buying a typical home now requires an income far above what the typical household earns. The ownership burden has moved to a different level since 2020. The monthly cost of owning a median-priced home has roughly doubled, reaching around $3,100 by late 2025 when mortgage, tax, and insurance costs are included. The income required to buy a median-priced home now sits above $120,000 in some estimates, while the typical household earns far less. The result is a housing ladder that still exists formally, while the first rung keeps moving out of reach. The supply problem has changed shape. Many existing homeowners hold mortgage rates below 5%, which makes selling financially unattractive when replacement loans carry much higher rates. That lock-in effect keeps turnover depressed and limits the supply of existing homes. At the same time, new-home inventory has risen, but much of that supply remains difficult to absorb because prices, financing costs, and buyer incomes no longer line up cleanly. The starter-home market shows the same distortion. More than 240 U.S. cities now have typical starter homes priced at $1 million or more, up sharply from 2020. That matters because starter homes are supposed to be the entry point into ownership. When the entry point becomes a luxury product, the ownership system starts reproducing exclusion rather than mobility. The rental side offers little relief for lower-income households. The U.S. still faces a shortage of more than 7 million affordable and available rental homes for extremely low-income renters. High ownership costs push more households into renting, while the lowest-income renters face the tightest supply and the weakest bargaining position. The current housing problem is therefore larger than a simple price cycle. Rates may ease, prices may cool, and local markets may diverge, but the deeper structure remains strained. Housing has become a market where existing owners are protected by locked-in financing, new buyers face historically high entry costs, and the poorest renters absorb the harshest shortage.

Since the Swiss talks began, the Iran war has entered an implementation crisis. The formal diplomatic track continues, but the ceasefire framework is now being tested through shipping incidents in Hormuz, competing claims over navigation authority, and unresolved fighting around Lebanon. The starting point was the June 17 Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, signed remotely by Donald Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian. The agreement extended the ceasefire framework for 60 days, reopened the path toward a final nuclear settlement, and placed Hormuz and Lebanon inside the implementation agenda. High-level talks then opened at Bürgenstock in Switzerland on June 21 and 22, with Qatar and Pakistan mediating. The talks produced a technical roadmap, a Lebanon-related de-escalation track, and a direct deconfliction channel in Doha involving Iranian and U.S. military representatives. Hormuz quickly became the main enforcement dispute. Iran pushed for a system of service fees or administrative control over shipping in the strait, while the United States and Gulf states rejected any Iranian tolling authority. Trump then added a separate U.S. toll threat, claiming Washington could seek reimbursement for its role as security guarantor. The dispute now concerns more than shipping fees. It concerns who controls the rules of passage through the central energy chokepoint of the Gulf. The military track deteriorated after a cargo ship was attacked near the Omani side of the strait on June 25. The United States treated the incident as a ceasefire violation and struck Iranian missile, drone, and coastal radar sites on June 26. Iran condemned the strikes as a breach of the memorandum while Washington framed them as a response to threats against commercial shipping. A further tanker incident then triggered another round of U.S. strikes against Iranian surveillance, communications, air-defense, drone, and mine-laying facilities. Lebanon became the second enforcement battlefield. The Swiss talks created a process for addressing Israel-Hezbollah fighting, and Washington later brokered an Israel-Lebanon framework intended to restore Lebanese state authority in the south. The framework allows a phased security arrangement and eventual Lebanese army deployment in selected areas, while Israel retains an expanded security presence for now. Hezbollah rejected the arrangement as surrender, and Israeli strikes continued shortly after the framework was announced. The current picture is a ceasefire process under active stress. The Swiss talks created a mechanism, but Hormuz and Lebanon are now deciding whether that mechanism can survive. Iran is using both fronts to test U.S. enforcement capacity. Washington is trying to keep negotiations alive while protecting commercial shipping. Israel and Hezbollah remain outside the U.S.-Iran bargain, yet both can still shape whether the bargain holds in practice.

Fable 5 coming back soon.

Mythos has become the clearest case yet of a frontier AI model moving from cyber benchmark into national-security infrastructure. The same capability that makes it valuable to NSA and Cyber Command also creates an access-control problem for Anthropic, the Pentagon, and U.S. export-control officials. The public record supports three central facts. First, Mythos-class models have demonstrated unusually strong cyber capabilities. Anthropic says Project Glasswing partners used Mythos Preview to find more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities, and its own materials describe a shift in cybersecurity from finding vulnerabilities to verifying, disclosing, and patching them fast enough. Second, U.S. national-security agencies appear to view Mythos as operationally valuable. Axios reported that the NSA was using Mythos despite the Pentagon’s supply-chain-risk designation of Anthropic, while FT-derived reporting says Anthropic engineers were deployed to the NSA to help adapt Mythos for cyber work. Third, the same government that restricted Anthropic also moved to restrict global access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after concerns that Fable safeguards could be bypassed. That creates the central contradiction. The Pentagon treated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk after a dispute over mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, while the NSA and related cyber agencies treated Mythos as too important to ignore. The dispute therefore sits at the intersection of procurement politics, military AI control, and the intelligence community’s demand for frontier cyber tools. Public reporting says Senator Mark Warner recounted that General Joshua Rudd told him Mythos penetrated almost all tested classified systems in hours. That statement is significant, but the public record does not show the test environment, target list, access assumptions, or operational conditions. It should be treated as an alarming official anecdote, not as a fully documented technical incident. The Fable/Mythos architecture explains why the government reacted so aggressively. Anthropic says Fable 5 and Mythos 5 share the same underlying model, with Mythos operating under lifted cyber safeguards for vetted users. A jailbreak or access-control failure around Fable could therefore create a pathway toward Mythos-like cyber capability. That is the policy problem behind the June 12 export-control directive. Mythos marks a cyber capability threshold. The confirmed facts are already serious enough: a model that can find severe vulnerabilities at scale, a government trying to deploy it inside sensitive networks, and an emergency access-control fight over who can use it. The idea that Mythos freely broke into the NSA still needs confirmation. But U.S. officials appear to believe Mythos-class systems can expose or compromise classified environments at unprecedented speed.

Over the past 24 hours, the U.S.-Iran process has moved from headline diplomacy into the harder problem of enforcement. The Swiss technical channel is still active, but the agreement is now being tested by three connected pressures: Israeli operations in Lebanon, Iran’s use of Hormuz as leverage, and Washington’s ability to keep regional actors from overwhelming the implementation track. Switzerland has confirmed confidential U.S.-Iran discussions at Bürgenstock, and the next phase appears focused on technical details rather than a final settlement. Pakistan and Qatar are involved as mediators, while U.S. figures including JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner have been linked to the Swiss track. The Strait of Hormuz remains a pressure point. Iran announced another closure, citing Israeli operations in Lebanon and alleged U.S. bad faith, while U.S. Central Command said commercial traffic continued and reported 55 merchant ships carrying more than 17 million barrels of oil through the waterway. Trump then raised the possibility of U.S. tolls if a final agreement is not reached within 60 days. Lebanon is the main stress test for the interim framework. Iran is treating Israeli operations there as evidence that U.S. commitments are not being enforced, while Israel was outside the original U.S.-Iran memorandum and says it retains freedom to respond to Hezbollah attacks. Recent strikes and clashes in southern Lebanon therefore threaten the diplomatic process even while the Swiss talks continue. The current picture is one of negotiations proceeding under pressure, with Hormuz used as leverage, Lebanon functioning as the compliance battlefield, and the final agreement still dependent on whether the United States can keep parallel regional escalations from overwhelming the technical track.

Iran has rejected the latest Axios Switzerland story. Tehran’s position is straightforward. No delegation. No talks. No nuclear track. Article 13 comes first. That means an end to military operations in Lebanon, Israeli withdrawal, Treasury waivers for Iranian oil and financial transactions, and access to frozen Iranian funds. Washington wants another negotiation headline. Iran is pointing back to the MOU.

The Trump administration has opened a trade investigation into Germany over planned rules that would reduce spending on patented and innovative medicines in its public health-insurance system. The case matters because Washington is treating a foreign ally’s healthcare cost controls as a trade problem. Germany is trying to reduce drug spending; the U.S. says low foreign prices shift pharmaceutical innovation costs onto American patients. On June 18, 2026, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer opened a Section 301 investigation into Germany’s alleged “persistent underpayment” for innovative pharmaceutical products. The investigation asks whether German pricing, reimbursement, rebate, and discount policies are unreasonable or discriminatory and whether they burden U.S. commerce. USTR’s formal claim is that German rules suppress pharmaceutical prices below fair market value and force American patients to carry a disproportionate share of global pharmaceutical research and development costs. The immediate trigger is pending German legislation, not simply Germany’s long-standing drug-pricing system. Greer specifically pointed to reports that Germany was fast-tracking legislation that would further reduce spending on innovative pharmaceuticals. Germany’s health ministry had proposed a broader reform of the statutory health-insurance system to address a healthcare funding gap of roughly €20 billion. One part of that effort involved additional manufacturer discounts and rebates on patented medicines. The German bill is still in the political process. Reuters reported that the government was moving away from planned variable drug discounts after industry opposition and toward fixed-level discounts, although the health ministry said no final decision had been made because parliamentary deliberations were still ongoing. Major pharmaceutical companies had warned that harsher discounts could affect investment decisions or delay launches in Germany. So the dispute is partly about Germany’s existing pricing architecture, but the current U.S. escalation is especially about a proposed reform that has not yet become final policy. The U.S. action is also still procedural. No tariff or retaliation has been imposed yet. USTR has opened the investigation, requested consultations with Germany, set a public comment process, and scheduled a later hearing. Section 301 can eventually lead to retaliatory trade measures, including tariffs, but this case is at the investigation stage. There is also a domestic U.S. political context. Two days before the USTR announcement, a group of Senate Republicans led by Todd Young urged the administration to use Section 301 against foreign pharmaceutical-pricing practices, including Germany’s. Their argument was that foreign price controls allow other countries to “free ride” on American-funded pharmaceutical innovation. That pressure does not by itself prove the Senate letter caused the investigation, but it shows that the timing fits a wider Republican push to turn foreign drug pricing into a trade-enforcement issue. Germany is one case in a broader Trump administration strategy. Greer had already signaled that USTR would use Section 301 investigations across major trading partners and policy areas, including pharmaceutical pricing. The Germany probe therefore should be read as part of a larger effort to pressure wealthy allies to pay more for medicines, not as an isolated dispute with Berlin alone. Washington is also using the recent U.K. pharmaceutical-pricing arrangement as a reference point, where Britain agreed to increase spending on innovative medicines in exchange for protection from U.S. drug tariffs. Germany’s position is that drug reimbursement, healthcare financing, and statutory insurance costs are domestic policy matters. From Berlin’s perspective, the reforms are about keeping the public health system solvent and limiting cost increases for insurers, patients, and taxpayers. From Washington’s perspective, Germany is benefiting from pharmaceutical innovation while paying too little for it. The conflict therefore sits at the boundary between healthcare sovereignty and U.S. trade coercion. The Trump administration’s approach is a clear overreach. Instead of primarily fixing America’s own inflated drug-pricing system, it is trying to export that cost structure outward by pressuring Germany to raise what it pays for medicines. That turns affordable healthcare abroad into a trade grievance and effectively asks German patients, insurers, and taxpayers to absorb more cost so the American pharmaceutical model faces less pressure. Whatever the flaws in Germany’s system, using Section 301 to discipline another country’s healthcare policy marks a remarkable expansion of U.S. trade pressure into domestic social policy.

J.D. Vance has delayed his trip to Switzerland for Iran negotiations. The move follows Iran’s decision to suspend its delegation’s travel after Israeli attacks on Lebanon.