ALEX KARP, the chief executive of Palantir, published a 22-point manifesto on April 19 declaring that "hard power in this century will be built on software" and that certain cultures are "regressive and harmful." Five days later, the Chinese AI laboratory DeepSeek released its long-awaited V4 model: 1.6 trillion parameters, open source under the MIT licence, matching the most expensive proprietary American models at roughly one-thirtieth the price.

Two events.

ON April 7, the US president opened his social media app and typed this about Iran and its 90 million people: "A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." A genocide threat, in plain English. Could that happen without human language? No. The language conveys an inhuman threat. Language is not the true problem in this situation. The language arises from the arrogance of power and the greed for oil. These dress up mass death in a casual social media post. Iran's own language was mature, subtle, and alive.

THERE is more than meets the eye, whether it is the current US-Israel war on Iran now or the way we got our eyes. In both, it is not the creation of someone. However, an underlying dialectic is at work that needs to be understood. But this article is not about the ongoing imperialist war.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is now in well into its third week and, despite deployment of the overwhelming military superiority of the US and Israel, there seems to be no end in sight. Israel is continuing its bloodthirsty “decapitation” campaign against the top political, civilian and military leadership. It has murdered the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the internationally respected security chief and regime interlocutor Ali Larijani and numerous leaders of the regular army, the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Internal Security Basij force.

IT is a tragic sign of the times that, given the flagrant military assaults and leadership decapitation campaigns by the US on Iran and earlier on Venezuela, and hyper-aggressive assertion of US hegemony all around the world, the Trump administration’s repeal of the earlier “endangerment finding” in the US regarding the adverse effect of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on human health, has not received the attention it deserves, especially outside the US.