Irish Times scraping the bottom of the barrel today with its latest attack on our neutrality and Triple Lock. A retired Irish soldier gives his views, but it's not at all clear what he wants, he describes the practical difficulties of Irish soldiers in Lebanon being fired upon by a tank, but we've had anti-tank missiles in our armoury for decades and have recently acquired best-in-class Javelin at a cost of €40m, so we're all set on that front. Why do we need "increase capacity" further? One thing that is clear from the Irish Times article is the omission of what this retired senior officer is up to these days. In other publications, he is described as a security consultant for the European defence industry with particular focus on night-vision equipment. Is today's article a pitch for new weapons sales? It's all very confused. #DefendTheTripleLock#

I wish every single person on Earth could read and internalize this post. At the current rate of progress in AI capabilities, experts believe we will automate AI research by mid-2027. By 2028, they expect to have AI exceed top human experts at virtually all cognitive tasks. This revolution could happen while fewer than 10% of Americans understand its scale and importance.

I’m sorry if this hurts some feelings but when people ask me how I feel about other countries… …I genuinely just don’t care I don’t care about Ukraine. I don’t care about Israel. I just don’t care. I’ve got 3 kids and everything is 10x more expensive than I was growing up, my grocery bill looks like a car payment and the car payment looks like a mortgage and my friends can't even get a mortgage because rent eats half their paycheck and now health insurance costs more than college used to and college costs more than a house used to, and a house costs more than a small private island used to, and utilities just keep going up they never go down, car insurance keeps going up, home insurance never goes down, every single freaking thing in life is now a subscription and you can't get rid of them, and every home repair now costs $5,000 for some reason and every company that does home repairs is one gigantic company so you either pay them what they want or your roof caves in, and I can't keep up with what AI is doing but I know it's important and that I should keep up because my friends keep getting laid off of their jobs "because of AI" but no one knows which jobs are safe from AI so everyone is panicking and side hustling just in case they are laid off, and telling their kids to skip college because there "won't be those jobs in the future" but everyone is still going to college like there will be and coming out with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and I'm terrified that my kids won't ever be able to afford a home of their own and thinking back to the days when my parents raised us on one income with a house and a yard and a vacation of some kind every summer, and everyone I know is working their butts off and then some just to stay afloat, and by the time the kids are in bed and the dishes are done and I finally sit down, I don’t have the energy left to care about anything happening on the other side of the world, because I’m barely keeping up with what’s happening on this side of my own front door… So no, I don’t have room in my heart for another country and their problems. I'm so sorry... I just don't anymore. And I wish, I WISH, our leaders would fight for us half as hard as they fight for everyone else.

Irish Foreign Minister Helen McEntee expressed deep concern over flooding in Gaza that has destroyed temporary shelters, affected over 26,000 households, calling on Israel to end its blockages of aid.

Irish children’s book author Chris Haughton was arrested under UK terrorism laws as part of the crackdown on Palestine Action, with 28 Irish nationals now among those detained at related protests.