Life and Its Absence

On this day:
1820
The Missouri Compromise is signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allows Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, but makes the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.
1836
Texas Revolution: Battle of the Alamo – After a thirteen day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and colonel Jim Bowie, defending the Alamo are killed and the fort is captured.
1857
The Supreme Court of the United States rules in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case.
1869
Dmitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.
1951
The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins.
1970
Blast at Weather Underground safe house in Greenwich Village kills three.
1975
Algiers Accord: Iran and Iraq announce a settlement of their border dispute.
1975
For the first time, ever, the Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown in motion to a national TV audience by Robert J. Groden and Dick Gregory.

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The national debt is a taxation without representation upon our future children. Put another way: It’s child abuse.--letter to the editor

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RFK wants Dunkin' to prove its coffee is safe. That's impossible, and anyone running a scientific bureau should know that.

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A recent study by the New York Federal Reserve concluded what many other studies have shown—that nearly all the economic burden from the Trump tariffs has fallen on U.S. firms and consumers.

***

In the 1930s, some of Joseph Stalin’s censors, who were more zealous than educated, reportedly forbade radio broadcasts of music by Franz Schubert, who died in 1828, for fear he might be a supporter of Stalin’s nemesis, Leon Trotsky, who was born in 1879.

***

Will Mullin get lip fillers?

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Life and Its Absence

Youth see life as so hot, so intense, so expanding. They always struggle with the ultimate truth, that the universe is cold, indifferent, and winding down. 

Indeed, life is the outlier in the universe, the exception that gives it value.

The universe without life is math.


The Peace of Wild Things
by
Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Sineater

On this day:

1046
Naser Khosrow begins the seven-year Middle Eastern journey which he will later describe in his book Safarnama.
1616
Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is banned by the catholic chuch
1770
Boston Massacre: Five Americans, including Crispus Attucks, and a boy, are killed by British troops in an event that would contribute to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (also known as the American War of Independence) five years later. At a subsequent trial the soldiers are defended by John Adams.
1836
Samuel Colt makes the first production-model revolver, the .34-caliber.
1933
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party receives 43.9% at the Reichstag elections. This later allows the Nazis to pass the Enabling Act and establish a dictatorship.
1940
Members of Soviet politburo sign an order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intelligentsia, including 14,700 Polish POWs, known also as the Katyn massacre.

***

The Cassidy Report diagnosed FDA as a bottleneck to innovation.

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This year there will be over 9 billion--BILLION--trips from China.

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Korea imports nearly all its fossil fuels, including oil and natural gas, all of it brought in by tanker. About 70% of Korea’s oil imports and up to 30% of liquified natural gas come from the Middle East.

***

Amanda Askell has been hired by Anthropic to teach Claude, its chatbot, the sense of right and wrong.

***

Sineater

The last few years have been a concentration of questions and problems that have bobbed on the surface of America's stormy sea of self-definition and interpersonal governance. Obama's benign, enept power accumulation, the palace overthrow of the Biden Regency, and, now, this. Trump is a reaction to the last administrations, which have left us with huge problems whose only solutions seem to be traditionally unmanageable. Trump is bringing solutions outside the history of constitutional constraint.

Trump is philosophy-free, a casual utilitarian. He solves problems by decree. Wry and without philosophical roots, he is a difficult politician to pin down. He adopts as his justifications the bumper-sticker declarations of previous Leftist policies: patriotism, 'working families', and 'the children.'

Iran has been killing Americans for 40 years as national policy. We have been ignoring this as our own policy— and, in Obama's time, paid them off, like nuclear Barbary pirates.

The Latin American countries have been infiltrating drug damage and human trafficking into the country as routinely as interstate commerce.

The Biden Regency became the poster child for paralyzed neglect with their border non-policy.

We are now bombing Iran into oblivion, sinking mysterious boats in the Caribbean, stalking the streets for dark-complected men with accents.

Illegal immigration has dropped. Drug importation is down. Iran is gasping. Military success seems to justify the adventure.

The previous politicians created a vacuum. Trump is filling it, by hook or by crook. 

This looks, horribly, as if many Americans believe that their well-being cannot be managed lawfully in the modern world through Constitutional limits.

Good and Evil

On this day:
1461
Wars of the Roses in England: Lancastrian King Henry VI is deposed by his Yorkist cousin, who then becomes King Edward IV.
1519
Hernan Cortes arrives in Mexico in search of the Aztec civilization and their wealth.
1776
American Revolutionary War: The Continental Army fortifies Dorchester Heights with cannon, leading the British troops to abandon the Siege of Boston.
1797
In the first ever peaceful transfer of power between elected leaders in modern times, John Adams is sworn in as President of the United States, succeeding George Washington.
1918
The first case of Spanish flu occurs, the start of a devastating worldwide pandemic.
2009
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. Al-Bashir is the first sitting head of state to be indicted by the ICC since its establishment in 2002.

***

By pulling EV models from their lineups, repurposing EV battery plants and laying off workers in some EV factories, the automakers are taking $50 billion in combined write-downs on their EV investments. The electric-vehicle investment bubble egged on by the Biden administration reflected a classic disconnect between a government’s lofty policy goals and a public that wasn’t convinced. Biden set the fantastical goal that half of all new vehicles sold by 2030 should be EVs. Currently that number is just six percent and dropping.


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Don’t be misled by statements that private property rights put rights of property over rights of people. Private property rights are rights of people over uses of goods they own.-- economists Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.)


***

At a late January press conference, Mamdani lamented how "New Yorkers contribute 54.5 percent of state revenue and receive only 40.5 percent back." The irony here, City Journal's Adam Lehodey notes, is that Mamdani is essentially objecting to progressive taxation—giving out less in benefits to those who contribute more in revenue—between the city and state, while advocating for such taxation within the city.

***

15,000-20,000 people, including Islamic State affiliates, are now at large in Syria, after an exodus from a camp that held jihadists’ families, U.S. officials familiar with the estimate said. Security at the sprawling Al-Hol facility fell apart in recent weeks after Syria’s government routed the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, which had guarded the camp for years.

***

Total global debt now sits at a record $348 trillion, driven by global investment in national security and AI. Trillion.

***

Good and Evil

The attractive CEO murderer will stimulate a lot of discussion, even moral reflection. Remember, the bomber Kaczynski had a lot of support from American academics. Is it the analog of morality or just evil well disguised?

Here is an article (the source I can't remember), written about another topic, that has application.

Biden's speech at the UN was a sad farewell. As Israel ramped up its attack on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, Biden prattled on about his hopes for peace. If possible, he projected a sad, discouraged optimism about a world with unfocused threats. Global warming was mentioned 6 times, Iran twice. The UN was quiet; you could not hear the explosions in Lebanon, the gunfire in Ukraine, or the war engines of China.

We want to think that the line between good and evil is clear and that individuals fall into one camp or another. In The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.”

Because the line between good/evil is not as straightforward as we wish, an essential principle for organizing society is, in F. A. Hayek’s words, to ensure that a “bad man can do least harm.”

Many know these famous words by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Those who deny this truth of human nature often believe that giving “good” people – those possessing the right ideology – enough power to control others solves the problem of organizing society.

Solzhenitsyn’s famous line doesn’t appear until page 746, and most people are unaware of the context. The famous sentence begins, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good…”

Who disclosed this truth to Solzhenitsyn? It was his own experiences in the Gulag.

In the same section of his book, he wrote, “Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings.” He then draws out what he saw in himself:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.

Insightfully, Solzhenitsyn saw the fallacy of using good intentions as a guide to action: “In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.”

The worst villains can delude themselves into thinking they are doing good. We should not be fooled into believing that freedom can be preserved by relying on good people’s good intentions.

Take an honest look at your stream of thinking and notice how self-interested it is. Yes, notice your thoughts of kindness and generosity toward others, too. But there is no reason for society to trust your good intentions, or mine, with the power to control others.

To find goodness, Solzhenitsyn had first to see his darkness. And then, having done so, a path to goodness opened up: “And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.”

Following his famous sentence about “the line separating good and evil” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”

That the line between good and evil oscillates is a truth Solzhenitsyn expressed repeatedly. In Volume 1, he wrote:

During the life of any heart this line [between good and evil] keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.

Clearly, Solzhenitsyn wanted us to understand our work is never done. Cultivating our goodness is the work of a lifetime.

In both Volumes 1 and 2, Solzhenitsyn repeats Socrates’s admonition, “’Know thyself.” In Volume 2, he added, “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.”

It’s not only the other guy Solzhenitsyn was writing about. Evil can come through any of us if we don’t work to recognize and choose against it. Solzhenitsyn would say we are deluding ourselves when we think evil is only out there. This is a truth that continues to be vindicated.

Recently, Jonathan Mayo compiled new details of the November 2008 terror attack when ten youthful terrorists from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba murdered 164 people in Mumbai, India. Their targets were ordinary Mumbai residents, people at a Jewish Center, and visitors at a famed hotel catering to tourists.

What stood out about the attack is that, in real-time, the ten terrorists were in communication with controllers, messaging them from Pakistan.

Mayo reports that while terrorists were at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, they received messages that the controllers in Pakistan “are furious there is no sign of a fire at the Taj.” The controllers phoned the youthful terrorists: “Nothing is going to happen until you start the fire. When people see the flames they will begin to be afraid. And throw some grenades, my brother. There’s no harm in throwing a few grenades.”

The terrorists in the hotel seemed “overwhelmed by the opulence of the hotel and [told] their handlers: ‘There are computers here with high-tech screens! It’s amazing!’ The controller [insisted] they ‘start a proper fire’ immediately.”

After the attack, one terrorist at the train station drove to a police roadblock and said, “Please, sir, I have done what I came to do. Please kill me.” The young man told police that “his father, a street seller, sold him to [the terrorist group], telling his son: ‘We’ll have money, we won’t be poor anymore.’”

The line between good and evil, even in the youthful terrorists, was moving in real-time.

Solzhenitsyn’s testimony helps us see that evil cannot be eliminated, but, in his words, “it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

If Solzhenitsyn is correct about the potential for evil existing in each of us, then Thomas Sowell, in his book A Conflict of Visions, has an important warning:

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. Their prospects of growing up as decent, productive people depend on the whole elaborate set of largely unarticulated practices which engender moral values, self-discipline, and consideration for others."

Steven Pinker echoed Solzhenitsyn when he wrote, “Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

It would be a foolish bet to expect that each person will grow up civilized and exercise their moral agency to turn towards good. Human cooperation and flourishing are enabled by moral traditions and the rule of law that constrains evil.

When unconstrained ideology triumphs over rights and morality, we quickly discover how fast evil triumphs over good.

In contrast, the extended social order created by the free market expands our opportunities to cooperate with others, and crucially, accepts human nature for what it is. The more we cooperate, the more we see our well-being depends on others. The thicker the interdependence, the greater the incentives to cultivate the good side of our human nature. (from somewhere)

There is a Platonic element here, that virtue is taught, and evil is error. The commercial world just teaches better. But theft can alleviate hunger, and the Japanese really thought their Chinese victims were soulless lumber. Horribly, big evil looks like more than just a big mistake.

Worrying: An Alien Mind

On this day:
1820
The U.S. Congress passes the Missouri Compromise.
1857
Second Opium War: France and the United Kingdom declare war on China.
1861
Alexander II of Russia signs the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing serfs.
1873
Censorship in the United States: The U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail.
1905
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia agrees to create an elected assembly, the Duma.
1918
Germany, Austria, and Russia sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ending Russia’s involvement in World War I, and leading to the independence of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.
1924
The 1400-year-old Islamic caliphate is abolished when Caliph Abdul Mejid II of the Ottoman Empire is deposed. The last remnant of the old regime gives way to the reformed Turkey of Kemal Atatürk.
1938
Oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia.

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You can prove geometry to every man, not history. You can only prove history to men of good will.--Acton

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Israel looks suspiciously like the piper here.

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Iran went to bed fighting with two nations. They woke up fighting with nine.

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The Gulf States' responses have been remarkably aligned with the U.S.; Europe's have not.

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Iran's response has been the response it was assumed that Israel would resort to: random, vengeful attacks on the Middle East.

Imagine that done with nukes.

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Worrying: An Alien Mind

Alan Z. Rozenshtein has an article in Lawfare with a hair-raising title, The Moral Education of an Alien Mind

"Anthropic just published what it calls "Claude's Constitution"—building on an earlier version, it's now a more-than-20,000-word document articulating the values, character, and ethical framework of its AI.

More than anything else, the document focuses on the question of Claude's moral formation, reading less like a charter of procedures and more like what screenwriters call a "character bible": a comprehensive account of who this being is supposed to be.

Anthropic itself gestures at this duality, noting that they mean "constitution" in the sense of "what constitutes Claude"—its fundamental nature and composition. The governance structure matters, but the more ambitious project is what that structure supports: Anthropic is trying to build a person, and they have a remarkably sophisticated account of what kind of person that should be.

Anthropic uses the language of personhood explicitly. The document repeatedly invokes "a good person" and describes the goal as training Claude to do "what a deeply and skillfully ethical person would do." But what does it mean to treat an AI as a person? Three things stand out.

A person has agency. A person may have moral worth. The core unit of ethical analysis for a person is disposition, not rules or calculations.

The document poses the choice directly: "There are two broad approaches" to shaping AI behavior—"encouraging Claude to follow clear rules and decision procedures, or cultivating good judgment and sound values that can be applied contextually." Anthropic chooses judgment. The goal is for Claude to have "such a thorough understanding" of the relevant considerations "that it could construct any rules we might come up with itself." This is Aristotle's concept of phronesis—practical wisdom and the capacity to discern the right action in particular circumstances, which cannot be reduced to following rules.

There are only seven absolute prohibitions—bright-line rules against helping create weapons of mass destruction, generating child sexual abuse material, undermining oversight of AI systems, and a handful of other catastrophic actions. But there are (at least) fourteen competing values listed "in no particular order" that Claude must weigh against each other: privacy versus rule of law, autonomy versus harm prevention, innovation versus protection.

Claude's users span the globe, holding radically different values.

An Anthropic spokesperson has said that models deployed to the U.S. military "wouldn't necessarily be trained on the same constitution," though alternate constitutions for specialized customers aren't offered "at this time." This creates demand for open-source, self-hosted, and differently trained alternatives. The more principled Anthropic is, the more market demand there may be for unprincipled models—or for Anthropic to offer less principled versions itself.

Corporate codes of ethics exist, but not 80-page virtue ethics frameworks embedded in how the product actually works. The closest analogues might be religious texts or constitutional founding documents.

The document ends with a striking line: "We hope Claude finds in it an articulation of a self worth being." That's not how you talk about a product. That's how you talk about a child."

Worry #2: Debt

On this day:

1807
The U.S. Congress passes the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, disallowing the importation of new slaves into the country.
1825
Roberto Cofresí, one of the last successful Caribbean pirates, is defeated in combat and captured by authorities.
1836
Texas Revolution: Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Texas from Mexico.
1855
Alexander II becomes Tsar of Russia.
1861
Emancipation reform of 1861 in Russia: Tsar Alexander II signs the emancipation reform into law, abolishing Russian serfdom.
1939
Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli is elected Pope and takes the name Pius XII.
1998
Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicates that Jupiter’s moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice.

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Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best. -Henry van Dyke, poet (10 Nov 1852-1933)

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A grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the late founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is likely to figure prominently in the deliberations of the clerics who will determine who replaces Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader. 

Good thing they got rid of the Shah and his heir.

***

A man who scaled the Gulf Tower in Downtown Pittsburgh has now been criminally charged.

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China has officially implemented new regulations that ban hidden door handles, as reported by Bloomberg.
The rules prohibit both the type of door handles that pop out by pressing on one end of the handle and those that are electrically powered.

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Links between social media use and mental wellness in youth are an artifact of other factors: implications for public policy and meta- analysis--paper by Christopher J.Ferguson

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Worry #2: Debt

The average American citizen is concerned about prices and oceans, Mars and China, but does not scrutinize their inner workings. That they leave to their arrogant, posturing, insincere representatives. Government is a labyrinth of arcane demands and prohibitions that have, over the years, evolved to cover the basic skeleton of the country's hopeful and revolutionary aspirations and principles. And fears, especially fears. That government package is now wrapped in an inscrutable layer of mendacity, bombast, innuendo, and outright deception that makes it inaccessible and its convenient use almost impossible.

Of the worries of the nation, AI is an obscure, technical, uncertain, and imposed problem. Like a tiger. The government, especially the national debt, is internal, the result of willful ignorance and cowardly, inept "leadership."

Trump is a parody of our problems and is both loved and hated for it. Parodies may give us insight, but do not give solutions. We are at that point now in America: the problems are more visible, but Trump is not the next step. The Sineater needs an exorcism, but one that won't destroy the village.

Tariffs are a tax on consumers that will raise prices, create shortages, offend trading partners, and disrupt normal economic give-and-take. Contrary to the President’s claims, tariffs will not improve the national debt. Like it or not, America has a debt crisis, and it is not caused by a revenue problem. The federal government has an unsustainable spending problem.

The Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest Budget and Economic Outlook shows that debt held by the public exceeds 100 percent of GDP this year and will rise above its World War II record by 2030. Ten years from now, debt will be roughly 120 percent of GDP and will continue to climb to 175 percent by 2056 — and that is under optimistic projections that assume no economic, financial, or public health crises over that time.

 

Revenues are not the problem. Even after extending and adding to the Trump tax cuts, federal receipts are projected to remain near or above their historical average as a share of the economy, growing from $5.2 trillion (17.2 percent of GDP) to $8.3 trillion (17.8 percent of GDP) over the decade.

The problem is that federal spending exceeds revenues by a lot and is growing much faster than revenues. Spending is projected to grow from $7 trillion (23.1 percent of GDP) to $11.4 trillion (24.4 percent of GDP). 

The widening annual deficit (the gap between annual spending and revenue) is overwhelmingly driven by the growth in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and rising interest costs. By 2036, interest costs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are projected to consume 100 percent of federal revenues.

Read that again.

Under current law, within a decade, every dollar collected in revenue will be absorbed by health care programs, Social Security, and interest spending to service the ballooning federal debt, leaving nothing for national defense or any other core function of government.

Multiple estimates, from the Congressional Budget Office, the Yale Budget Lab, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and the Tax Foundation, estimate that the Trump tariffs would generate from $1 trillion to $3 trillion in additional revenue over a decade, depending on assumptions and whether economic feedback effects are included.

Those are large numbers in isolation. But they are small relative to the size of the federal budget hole.

CBO projects that the United States will borrow an additional $25 trillion over the next decade. Closing that gap would require eight to 25 times the revenues that Trump administration tariffs were estimated to bring in. About $16 trillion of those deficits will go toward interest payments alone. Even under optimistic assumptions, tariff revenue would offset only a small fraction of that amount.

Put differently: even if every dollar of projected tariff revenue materialized, the debt would still surge past its historic high within a few years and continue unsustainably climbing thereafter.

Moreover, tariffs are neither free money nor are they paid by foreign exporters. They function as taxes on imported goods and production inputs that are paid by Americans. According to the Kiel Institute, American consumers and importers paid 96 percent of tariff costs, while foreign exporters absorbed only four percent. Higher input costs reduce business profits and workers’ wages, shrinking corporate and individual income tax collections. From generating uncertainty to reducing available capital for investment, tariffs reduce hiring and dampen economic growth.


Part of the “revenue gain” from tariffs is thus clawed back through weaker economic performance and a smaller tax base. That’s one way to shoot yourself in the foot.

Meanwhile, the real driver of America’s debt trajectory is far more entrenched.

The entirety, more than 100 percent, of the federal government’s long-term funding shortfall stems from the growth of Social Security and Medicare, according to the Financial Report of the United States Government. These programs expand automatically as the population ages, beneficiaries live longer, benefits increase by design, and health costs rise. They were set up for a younger country with far fewer retirees per worker and transfer income from working Americans to retirees, regardless of need. One of the best ways to curb their growth is to refocus these programs’ benefits on seniors in need.

As debt climbs, interest costs compound. CBO projects that net interest will more than double over the next decade, consuming a growing share of the budget.

Interest costs already surpass what the United States government allocates toward national defense expenditures. As the Hoover Institution’s Niall Ferguson writes: “When a great power spends more on debt service than on defense, it will not be great for much longer.” The US Senate unanimously recognized  deficits as “unsustainable, irresponsible, and dangerous,” as if they were innocent bystanders. But Congress has yet to act to curb the debt threat.

This is how fiscal crises develop — not because a single revenue stream disappears, but because structural commitments grow faster than the economy that must finance them.

The United States is already well above the debt levels that much of the economic literature associates with slower long-term growth. Every year of delay increases the eventual adjustment required to stabilize the debt.

Congress should adopt a credible plan that stabilizes spending and the growth in debt. Members of the bipartisan fiscal forum in Congress recently proposed a three-percent-of-GDP deficit target, led by Representatives Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Scott Peters (D-CA), Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) and Mike Quigley (D-IL). That’s a promising goal. To succeed in meeting it, Congress will need structural entitlement reforms. Not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs with economy-crushing tax hikes — whether those are dressed up as tariffs or as a border adjustment tax.

Congress can reduce excess health care spending, streamline taxes, and cut welfare programs prone to fraud and abuse, using the same reconciliation process that Republicans leveraged in July to extend and expand the Trump tax cuts and slow the growth in Medicaid and food stamps (SNAP).

Going yet further, Congress can work toward advancing a Base Realignment and Closure–style fiscal commission to overcome policy inertia and provide Congress with political cover to advance necessary entitlement reforms. The Fiscal Commission Act, championed by Representatives Scott Peters (D-CA) and Bill Huizenga (R-MI) is a promising step in that direction.

If America ever experiences fiscal “ruin,” it will not be because presidential tariff authority was constrained. It will be because elected officials of both parties failed to modernize the country’s largest entitlement programs and halt their automatic spending growth.

The Supreme Court’s ruling does not create a fiscal crisis. Tariffs raised revenue at the margin. In the process, they also distort trade and slow growth. But they do not alter the fundamental arithmetic driving America’s debt.

The path to fiscal stability runs through entitlement reform and spending control — not through executive-imposed tariffs that were never large enough to solve the problem in the first place. (much from Reason)

Sunday/Transfiguration

On this day:

752 BC
Romulus, legendary first king of Rome, celebrates the first Roman triumph after his victory over the Caeninenses, following The Rape of the Sabine Women.
1562
23 Huguenots are massacred by Catholics in Wassy, France, marking the start of the French Wars of Religion.
1692
Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials.
1781
The Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation.
1815
Napoleon returns to France from his banishment on Elba
1872
Yellowstone National Park is established as the world’s first national park.
1893
Nikola Tesla gives the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis, Missouri.
1896
Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity.
1917
The U.S. government releases the unencrypted text of the Zimmermann Telegram to the public.
1932
The son of Charles Lindbergh, Charles Augustus Lindbergh III, is kidnapped.
1950
Cold War: Klaus Fuchs is convicted of spying for the Soviet Union by disclosing top secret atomic bomb data.
1953
Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses. He dies four days later.
1954
Nuclear testing: The Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, is detonated on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, resulting in the worst radioactive contamination ever caused by the United States.
1954
Puerto Rican nationalists attack the United States Capitol building, injuring five Representatives.
1966
Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet’s surface.
1971
A bomb explodes in a men’s room in the United States Capitol: the Weather Underground claims responsibility.
1974
Watergate scandal: Seven are indicted for their role in the Watergate break-in and charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.
1981
Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands begins his hunger strike in HM Prison Maze.

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“In 2013, I published RICH DAD'S PROPHECY, predicting the biggest crash in history was coming. Unfortunately, that crash has arrived. It’s not just the US. Europe and Asia are crashing. AI will wipe out jobs,, and when jobs crash, office and residential real estate will crash.”--Kiyosaki, on an economic disruption he has predicted for 12 years, although the AI component is new.

***

Chatellier's French Bakery in Millvale closed its doors for the final time Feb. 28th.

***

China buys more than 80% of Iran's shipped oil, data for 2025 from analytics firm Kpler showed. Iranian oil has limited buyers due to U.S. sanctions aimed at cutting off funding to Tehran's nuclear programme.
China purchased on average 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year, according to Kpler. That represented about 13.4% of the total 10.27 million bpd of oil it imported by sea.

***

Dan Simmons, 77, award-winning author of 31 novels and short story collections, passed away on February 21, 2026 in Longmont, Colorado. Many of his books won honors ranging from the Hugo Award, science fiction’s most prestigious award, to two World Fantasy Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards for horror, a dozen Locus Awards, and the Shirley Jackson Award. His titles have been translated into at least 20 languages and published in 28 foreign countries.

***

Speaking about Dorsey and AI comments concerning layoffs, Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, said:“This is a function of lax judgment during a period of rapid expansion and the retrenchment that follows. It should be understood within the unique context of that firm, and it does not signal risk to the broader U.S. labor market.”

***

Epstein was in the White House 17 times. What other private citizen was?

***

Sunday/Transfiguration

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Despite its drama, it was never formalized in the Church until after the Tenth Century. In it, Christ is transfigured on a mountaintop with Moses and Elijah while Peter, James, and John watch in amazement.

It is often seen as the point in the Gospel where Christ and the apostles are energized by this glimpse of heaven.

But it is a remarkable, almost posed, artistic, and philosophical moment. A distillation of the New and Old Testament conflicts and resolutions, it is a potent mixture of spirituality and humanity, Christ, the great prophets, and the apostles all swirling in opposition and conformity.

And light.

We have always had great respect for light. In Genesis, right after the creation of the formless heaven and earth, light displaces the dark. Even Lucifer (appearing only once in the Old Testament) means "the morning star" or "light-bringer."

The architect Wren, on deciding to avoid stained glass windows in his churches, said ""Nothing can add beauty to light." 

Edison's first commercial electric light system was installed on Pearl Street in the financial district of Lower Manhattan in 1882.

Before that, the world was lit only by fire.

The World
by Henry Vaughan

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit’s sour delights,
With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,
Yet his dear treasure
All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flow’r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,
He did not stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,
Work’d under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see
That policy;
Churches and altars fed him; perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves;
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugg’d each one his pelf;
The downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,
And scorn’d pretence,
While others, slipp’d into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despised Truth sate counting by
Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;
But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
But as I did their madness so discuss
One whisper’d thus,
“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,
But for his bride.”

Worrying/AI from the Workbench

On this day:

202 BC
The coronation ceremony of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu of Han takes place, initiating four centuries of the Han Dynasty’s rule over China
1784
John Wesley charters the Methodist Church.
1900
The Second Boer War: The 118-day “Siege of Ladysmith” is lifted.
1922
The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over Egypt through a Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
1939
The erroneous word “dord” is discovered in the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, prompting an investigation.

1947
228 Incident: In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with the loss of 30,000 civilian lives.
1953
James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April’s Nature (pub. April 2).
1959 

Discoverer 1, an American spy satellite that is the first object to achieve a polar orbit, is launched.
1993
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raid the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group’s leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.
1997
GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.

***

‘Never trust someone who is unkind to those who can do nothing for him.’--Goethe

***

America has stepped into another's property to kill a mad dog threatening the neighborhood. Better for the world, they say. Now, to protect the world from global warming, would it be right for the Chinese to shield the world from the sun's rays by seeding the atmosphere with reflecting material, risking global cooling?

***

The New York office of the FBI was hacked several years ago, and Epstein information was stolen.

***

The Clintons are not sure Epstein killed himself.

***

President Trump said the federal government will stop working with the AI company Anthropic, acting on a deadline for Anthropic to allow the military to use its models in all lawful use cases, a concession the company has refused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said yesterday. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump and administration officials have attacked Anthropic for being too “woke,” taking exception to its push for AI regulations and links to big Democratic donors. Meanwhile, federal agencies have raised concerns about the safety and reliability of Elon Musk’s xAI tools in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter.

Fascinating.

***

                              Worrying/AI from the Workbench

From a guy named Matt Shumer:

  I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.

I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.

The last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech . . .

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.

. . . [T]he gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone.

. . . Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

. . . Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.