A US engineer named Cortland, claiming he loves Ireland, built an AI voice agent, deployed it to cold-call over 3,000 Irish pubs without consent, and trained it to pass as human. The BBC wrote up the attack as a heartwarming story about those Irish.

Cortland claimed harm avoidance while running unsolicited automated surveillance on thousands of small businesses. The BBC never asks who consented. Never asks about data protection. Never asks whether Irish and EU telecom regulations cover AI robocalls to commercial premises. Never asks who owns the recorded interactions. The only friction in the entire story is the Donegal bartender, and the piece treats that as comic relief.

The Irish aren’t unbothered. They were never asked. Their good humor after the fact is being laundered into consent.

The premise is a pretext. Price transparency for a product (pint of beer) with negligible variance is not a problem anyone needs solved. Cortland apparently is a former pub owner. He knows this. The “hidden gems” language is marketing copy, not a mission statement.

The method is the actual product. Building a voice agent that deceives thousands of workers into giving up commercial information, then measuring how few of them catch on. That’s a penetration test marketed as a pub guide. The cost of running it only makes sense if the return isn’t cheaper pints but demonstrated capability. He’s selling the voice agent, or selling himself as the guy who built it. The Guinndex is the portfolio piece.

In any other context, 3,000 unsolicited calls from a foreign operator using voice spoofing to extract commercial intelligence from small businesses would be called what it is: a social engineering campaign. Or worse, another “just asking questions” extraction campaign foreshadowing integrity breaches.

Brian Friel’s play “Translations” (1980) shows us how. Set in Donegal, British soldiers arrive in a small Irish-speaking community to ask details about the area. They’re charming. They need basic information. The locals provide it. The result is the erasure of their own language from their own land.

It’s based on the real-world Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1824 to 1846. The British sent engineers and surveyors across every townland in Ireland. The stated purpose was modernization: better maps, standardized place names, improved administration. The surveyors were friendly. They asked locals to pronounce place names, explain local geography, share knowledge of the land. The Irish cooperated because the questions seemed harmless and the men asking them were personable.

The output was the anglicization of thousands of Irish place names, the tax valuations that followed (Griffith’s Valuation), and the military cartography that made subsequent control of the countryside possible.

Local knowledge, freely given to foreigners, became the infrastructure of Irish dispossession.

The output today is normalization. The BBC frames every failure of detection as comedy at the expense of the Irish. The bartender who offered to buy “Rachel” a pint. The two AIs stuck in a loop saying “Oh, dear.” The interrogation in Donegal played for laughs. Every one of these anecdotes trains the audience to find AI deception of workers endearing rather than alarming. The story’s emotional arc is: isn’t it cute that they couldn’t tell?

The BBC has centuries of practice with this framing. The charming, credulous Irish who can’t spot the trick is a colonial trope with a long shelf life. Updating it for the AI age doesn’t make it new. The structural match across time is exact at every level: foreign military/commercial operator, benign cover story, friendly extraction of local knowledge from cooperative locals, and output that served the extractor’s interests while dispossessing the extracted.

The EU has already legislated this exact AI threat scenario and Cortland’s system appears to be designed to fail the standard before it even takes effect.

The calls were unsolicited, automated, and designed to extract commercial information while concealing their nature. Irish law (SI 336/2011, Regulation 13) and the ePrivacy Directive (Article 13) require prior consent for automated calling systems. Both were written to stop machines from selling things to people. Cortland’s system does something the law didn’t anticipate: it impersonates a person to harvest data from them. That’s arguably worse, and the regulatory framework hasn’t caught up. The EU AI Act, Article 50(1), will require AI systems to disclose themselves to the humans they interact with. It takes effect August 2, 2026.

References:

J.H. Andrews, A Paper Landscape (1975); Seosamh Ó Cadhla, Civilizing Ireland: Ordnance Survey 1824-1842 (2007); G.M. Doherty, The Irish Ordnance Survey: History, Culture and Memory (2006).

More than 1,500 mathematicians have signed a petition to boycott the International Congress of Mathematicians this July in Philadelphia. The ICM meets every four years. It is where the Fields Medal is awarded. It is the single most important gathering in the most universal discipline humans have.

If the people who work in pure abstraction look at the United States and say “we cannot go there,” that is measurement.

The math of precedent

In 2022 the International Mathematical Union moved the ICM out of Saint Petersburg after Russia invaded Ukraine. The principle was clear: military aggression disqualifies a host country. Since that decision, the United States has started wars in Venezuela and Iran, imposed a naval blockade on Cuba (an act of war under longstanding international law), suspended visas from 75 countries, and deployed federal immigration agents across its cities. The same organizers who cancelled Russia have said nothing about America.

The paper trail is damning. In 2022 the European Mathematical Society wrote: “We call on the International Mathematical Union not to proceed with the ICM in Russia.” In 2026, the same EMS wrote that it “will continue to support the IMU and the local organizing committee.” Same institution, same structural problem, opposite conclusion.

The American Mathematical Society’s president wrote in February that the congress would “powerfully demonstrate the importance of civilizational values.” This is the language of exception. The rule applies to others. We demonstrate values.

A technically impossible defense

Defenders of the double standard argue that 2022 was different because Western sanctions made attendance in Russia literally impossible. Institutions banned travel. Flights were cancelled. Grant money could not be spent. Fair enough. But follow the logic. The West created that impossibility through its own sanctions regime. The absence of equivalent sanctions on the United States for equivalent behavior is not evidence that the situations differ. It is the double standard in its most precise form. The mechanism of enforcement is selective, not the principle.

Mein Gott, Göttingen?

When the Nazis purged Jewish mathematicians from Göttingen in 1933, they destroyed the greatest mathematics department in the world overnight. The new Education Minister asked David Hilbert how mathematics was faring without the Jews.

Mathematics in Göttingen? There is really none anymore.

The regime did not care. The talent left. America inherited it.

Now America is repelling it. The French Mathematical Society announced its boycott in January, before the wars even started. France has more Fields Medalists than any country except the United States. When France looks at the conditions on American campuses and in American cities and decides the risk is too great for its researchers, that is not posturing. France does not posture about mathematics. France is serious about mathematics.

Orders of moral magnitude

Mathematicians have a particular relationship to contradiction. You cannot do the work and tolerate inconsistency. The petition names the inconsistency directly: one invasion disqualified Russia, three conflicts do not disqualify America. That is not a political argument. It is a proof by contradiction.

The ICM has accommodated power before. Benito Mussolini was honorary president of the 1928 congress. The 1950 ICM in Cambridge nearly lost Laurent Schwartz, its Fields Medal recipient, because McCarthyism made his communist affiliations a visa problem. Alexander Grothendieck resigned from IHÉS over military funding and withdrew from professional mathematics entirely. The apartheid-era academic boycott of South Africa removed international legitimacy from a regime that craved it. The pattern is consistent. When the scientific community withdraws, it is telling you something the diplomats will not.

On MathOverflow, the question of whether to cancel or relocate the 2026 ICM has been closed four times and reopened four times. Moderators have deleted political answers to the 2026 question while the equivalent answers to the 2022 question remain untouched.

The forum cannot decide whether its own question is legitimate because answering it honestly would require applying the standard it set four years ago to the country it is in.

Deafening silence

The IMU and the Simons Foundation, which is funding the congress, both declined to comment. When the money and the organizers go quiet, they are calculating, not deliberating.

The question everyone poses is what mathematicians can do with their collective power. The answer is already visible. They do not need to achieve anything beyond what they have done.

A canary does not need a plan. It just stops singing.

The world’s best minds will not enter the country. That is not a prediction. That is the simple math.

During a Cabinet meeting on March 26, the president interrupted a war briefing to deliver a five-minute monologue about a disposable plastic marker.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, envoy Steve Witkoff, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had just offered updates on missile strikes, uranium enrichment, and U.S. troops in harm’s way. Trump picked up a black and gold Sharpie, held it in the air, and said:

See this pen right here? This pen is an interesting example.

What followed was a pack of lies about how he replaced the White House’s “beautiful” $1,000 ballpoint pens with $5 Sharpies. A business story, he called it. An example of his instinct for saving the government money.

Every layer of the story is false. And nobody in the room stopped him.

The $1,000 Hallucination

White House signing pens are usually A.T. Cross Century II ballpoints. The same model used by Obama, Bush, and Clinton. They retail for about $100. The distributor pays under $50. Even the fancier Cross Townsend model tops out around $260.

For about $300 you can get a real 14K gold Cross pen.

Nobody has ever documented a $1,000 White House signing pen, because it doesn’t exist. Anyone who buys pens knows that number is a lie. The number is inflated by a factor of ten to twenty, for intentional disinformation. Without it, there is no story. The entire interruption depends on a fabricated comparison.

Failed Negotiation That Saved Nothing

Trump said he called Sharpie and asked for custom pens, meaning with a gold logo. He said the company offered to make them for free. He insisted on paying $5 each.

A standard Sharpie costs $1 to $2 and it is worth less than half that.

The man who claims he “loves the government like I love myself, economically” rejected something free to volunteer to pay at least 2.5 to 5 times over the market price. This loss is claimed as the love, the savings.

Cost vs. Value

A Cross Century II is a refillable precision writing instrument backed by a lifetime mechanical warranty. It is American engineering. You replace the ink cartridge, not the pen. It is designed to last generations. That is the point of the tradition. The signing pen is the gift. Recipients keep the actual object used to sign the legislation. It is a historical artifact. Your grandchildren show it to people.

A Sharpie is a disposable felt-tip marker. The ink dries out. There is no refill. There is no warranty. It is plastic and goes in the trash.

Trump replaced a durable, refillable, historically significant instrument with a consumable product, paid above retail for it, and called it a deal.

The Company Denies It

Newell Brands, Sharpie’s parent company, said in a statement that it had “no information about the specific conversation Trump described.”

The phone call. The negotiation. The claim that a CEO asked “is this really the president?” None of it is confirmed by the other party.

Three layers of fabrication: a fake price for the old pen, a bad deal on the new one, and an origin story the manufacturer doesn’t recognize. Five minutes of cabinet time burned, during a war, to deliver a commercial full of lies for a marker nobody wants.

Hallucination Table

Claim	Reality
Old pens cost $1,000	Cross Century II pens cost $50-100
Sharpie deal saves money	He rejected free and insisted on paying $5, which is 2.5-5x retail
“I want to save money”	Planning a $400 million ballroom (last estimate) by demolishing the historic East Wing that won WWII
Sharpie is “a much better pen”	Disposable marker vs. refillable lifetime-warranty instrument
Custom pens are “hot as a pistol”	They are branded disposable markers that dry out
Called the head of Sharpie to negotiate	Newell Brands says it has no information about the conversation

The signing pen tradition exists because a pen that signs legislation into law has meaning. It becomes a piece of the historical record. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 with 75 pens and gave them to people including Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. Those pens are now in museum collections including the National Museum of African American History. The pen notoriously represents something the KKK hates.

A Sharpie that dries out in a drawer and gets thrown away is the opposite of all that. It is not a cost saving. It is not a Civil Right. It is the replacement of something permanent and loved with disposable trash, by a man who cannot tell the difference, telling a story that may not have happened, during a meeting about a war.

Cross is a 180-year-old Rhode Island company, oldest pen maker in America, rooted in five generations of jewelers. Sharpie is a 1964 disposable marker whose most notable production was moved to a foreign country to dodge environmental regulations. The Sanford company in 1984 reacted to EPA regulations of workers breathing in polyester and felt byproducts by shutting down protected American jobs, making workers suffer brain damage in other countries instead.

Sharpies contain a cocktail of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that give them their characteristic odor and quick-drying properties. These compounds include: Ethanol, N-propanol, Diacetone alcohol, and various pigments and dyes.

[These chemicals] wreak havoc on the body, particularly the brain. The human body isn’t designed to process these substances in such concentrated forms…