Trade

On this day:

1994
The Church of England ordains its first female priests.
2009
Financier Bernard Madoff plead guilty in New York to scamming $18 billion, the largest in Wall Street history.
2011
A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melts and explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after Japan’s earthquake.

***


"If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation."--The Old Farmer's Almanac

***

Shumer says the Voter ID is actually an ICE conspiracy!

***

Whole Foods in New York has a 'holding pen' for wealthy shoplifters, according to a funny article in NR. 'For some, a little thieving is their way to “protest” corporate America. For others, it’s an expression of the economic anxiety that accompanies living in “an unaffordable city.” DeLigter deemed it “a form of collective nihilism.”'...'The biggest revelation here is that Whole Foods’ security guards seem to evince “glee” while doing their jobs. Who wouldn’t? The opportunity to impose consequences on people who appear to have avoided them deep into adulthood isn’t an opportunity that comes around every day.'

***

Trump says the Iran "excursion" will keep us out of war.

***

David Bossie was exposed for allegedly raking in $18.5 million for an unauthorized group called the Presidential Coalition, which reportedly fooled senior citizens into thinking they were helping Trump-aligned candidates.
A large chunk of the funds went to buy books he co-authored with Lewandowski, though the former campaign manager was not directly implicated.

***

The Brits are getting rid of non-royals on their banknotes in favor of animals.
The monarch has appeared on Bank of England notes since 1960, and will continue to do so in the future. Images of historical characters, starting with William Shakespeare, were first seen on the reverse side a decade later.
The current crop on circulating notes, in ascending order of note value, are Sir Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, JMW Turner and Alan Turing.
The Bank found itself mired in controversy owing to the absence of any women, apart from Queen Elizabeth II on notes in 2013. There has never been a historical figure who is black or from an ethnic minority background on the Bank's notes.

***

Trade

Trade is equal exchange. Both parties give up something they do not want as badly as what they receive. Trade is an agreement that makes both parties happy, not a "negotiation" where on party is at a disadvantage. Trade is a tie petween wqual partners.

Trade is not just about exchanging value; it's about building relationships and trust. Trust is earned and developed over time through agreed-upon rules and market access. Therefore, it goes beyond simple transactions, creating an environment of civil order—benign, dependable relationships. It's a social atmosphere of well-intended order—a symphony of quality and cooperation.

What can upset the order? First, government intervention. The violinist is the vice-president's niece and should have a larger role. How about a drum solo? The rules change; the discussion distorts. Patronage and favors intrude. And imagine the bribery! The trust and stable trading field developed and nurtured over the years will slowly dissolve.

And what if the trade is twisted to exploit some national preconception, some state advantage? So trade was just a bargaining chip? That would overturn the table of careful trade-building and fairness.

Tariffs.

 

Iran Musing

On this day:

241 BC
First Punic War: Battle of the Aegates Islands – The Romans sink the Carthaginian fleet, bringing the First Punic War to an end.
1629
Charles I of England dissolves the Parliament, beginning the eleven-year period known as the Personal Rule.
1762
French Huguenot Jean Calas, who had been wrongly convicted of killing his son, dies after being tortured by authorities; the event inspired Voltaire to begin a campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform.
1804
Louisiana Purchase: In St. Louis, Missouri, a formal ceremony is conducted to transfer ownership of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States.
1814
Napoleon I of France is defeated at the Battle of Laon in France.
1831
The French Foreign Legion is established by King Louis-Philippe to support his war in Algeria.
1848
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is ratified by the United States Senate, ending the Mexican-American War.
1876
Alexander Graham Bell makes the first successful telephone call by saying “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
1891
Almon Strowger, an undertaker in Topeka, Kansas, patents the Strowger switch, a device which led to the automation of telephone circuit switching.
1906
The Courrières mine disaster, Europe’s worst ever, kills 1099 miners in Northern France.
1922
Mahatma Gandhi is arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released after nearly two years for an appendicitis operation.
1945
The U.S. Army Air Force firebombs Tokyo, and the resulting firestorm kills more than 100,000 people, mostly civilians.
1952
Fulgencio Batista leads a successful coup in Cuba and appoints himself as the “provisional president”.
1959
Tibetan uprising: Fearing an abduction attempt by China, 300,000 Tibetans surround the Dalai Lama’s palace to prevent his removal
1980
Madeira School headmistress Jean Harris shoots and kills Scarsdale diet doctor Herman Tarnower
2006
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrives at Mars.

***“

"It does not sound crazy to a Silicon Valley executive that maybe they could be in charge instead of you,” AI alignment researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky warned politicians. “If they actually could control superintelligence, they’d discard you like used toilet paper.”
Great. Politicians as an abused group.

***

On 13–14 October 1761, one of the Calas sons, Marc-Antoine, was found dead on the ground floor of the family's home. Rumors had it that Jean Calas had killed his son because he intended to convert to Catholicism. When interrogated, the family initially claimed that Marc-Antoine had been killed by a murderer. Then they declared that they had found Marc-Antoine dead, hanged. Because suicide was considered a heinous crime against oneself, and the dead bodies of suicides were defiled, they had arranged for their son's suicide to look like a murder. The law thought the boy had been killed because of anti-Catholic fanaticism.trial/torture description is quite grim.
French philosopher Voltaire, after initial suspicions of anti-Catholic fanaticism were dispelled by his investigations, began a campaign to get Calas's sentence overturned, claiming that Marc-Antoine had committed suicide because of gambling debts and not being able to finish his university studies due to his denomination.

Voltaire's efforts were successful, and King Louis XV received the family and had the sentence annulled in 1764.

***

Two famous brothers who worked as real estate brokers have been convicted of drugging and raping dozens of women over the course of decades.
Tal Alexander, 39, and Oren Alexander, 38, rose to prominence from their sales of luxury real-estate properties in New York and Miami. Along with a third brother Alon, 38, a jury found all three guilty of sex trafficking by a jury in New York.

***

Is European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen overreaching?

The diplomats who spoke to POLITICO argued that von der Leyen’s flurry of tweets and conversations with Gulf leaders did not formally represent EU foreign policy positions. Critics also voiced skepticism about what von der Leyen, who has no military means at her disposal and has no mandate to shape EU-wide foreign policy positions, could be offering Gulf states under missile and drone attack from Iran.

“What exactly is she promising when she says we will support them?” asked Loiseau. “Who is ‘we’? For now, the support is the Charles de Gaulle [French aircraft carrier], Rafale jets in Abu Dhabi, and defense agreements with some countries.”

“What we’re seeing is role-play with nothing behind it,” said Loiseau, who belongs to French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party. (Politico)

Ambition fills any vacuum.

***

Iran Musing

What was the impact of the B-2 bombing? Wasn't it supposed to make another attack unnecessary? What was the revelation that made this attack a next and necessary step? Have you ever heard of the "conventional-weapons-shield-of-nuclear-weapons thesis" the Americans used to justify it?

An unsubstantiated theory, i.e., out of whole cloth: Israel, for some reason (and their intel is very good), had decided to attack Iran again, and the Americans thought the appearance and power of the two together created a better public relations picture and gave them the appearance of control. America followed them in. (Warning: Made up.)

Iran had their own strange war moment. When it was clear they were getting clobbered, Iran began to attack everybody, old friends and foes alike.

There is a theory, the Sampson Theory, stating that Israel has no minor fight. Every struggle threatens their very existence. Any vulnerability was a step toward their eventual destruction. Every fight was a fight to the death. There would never be a compromise; there would never be a standing-eight count. They would never sue for peace.

And if it was clear that events had gone against them, that the tide was running in their enemy's favor, they, like Sampson, would pull the whole building down around their ears. They would put their 53 or so nukes in the air against every living target they could reach and turn the Middle East--and its oil--into a lifeless, useless husk of a place.

Perhaps that is what Iran planned too.

Procrustean Ideology

On this day:
141 BC
Liu Che, posthumously known as Emperor Wu of Han, assumes the throne over the Han Dynasty of China.
1566
David Rizzio, private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, is murdered in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, Scotland.
1765
After a campaign by the writer Voltaire, judges in Paris posthumously exonerate Jean Calas of murdering his son. Calas had been tortured and executed in 1762 on the charge, though his son may have actually committed suicide.
1796
Napoléon Bonaparte marries his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais.
1862
American Civil War: The USS Monitor and the CSS fight to a draw in the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first battle between two ironclad warships.
1916
Pancho Villa leads nearly 500 Mexican raiders in an attack against Columbus, New Mexico.
1945
The Bombing of Tokyo by the United States Army Air Forces began, one of the most destructive bombing raids in history.
1961
Sputnik 9 successfully launches, carrying a human dummy nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich, and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was ready to begin human spaceflight.
1977
The Hanafi Muslim Siege: In a thirty-nine-hour standoff, armed Hanafi Muslims seize three Washington, D.C., buildings, killing two and taking 149 hostage.
2011
Space Shuttle Discovery makes its final landing after 39 flights.

***

We suffer from the growth that comes from suffering.--thomas and wang

***

AI update. Entrepreneurs are recreating dead and absent relatives for wedding videos and other occasions. Very popular in India

***

The US is the only major destination in the world to see a decline in international travellers in 2025. So far, 2026 is getting worse.

Foreign airlines are cutting the number of US-bound flights. Disney warns of “international visitation headwinds.”

***

Pancho Villa was an occasional revolutionary and politician who played himself in a Hollywood movie. He was assassinated by, presumably, his political opponents and is alleged to have said to his bodyguard as he died, "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something."

***

Procrustean Ideology

A new entrant on the Red Carpet of Big, Poorly-thought-out Ideas: The Center for American Progress, a prominent left-leaning think tank that often cultivates policy ideas the Democratic Party later adopts, proposed a two-year freeze on the prices of 24 food items, such as strawberries and ground beef.

Grocers would voluntarily agree to cap food prices in exchange for lower credit card transaction fees, according to the proposal, which was written by a group led by Jared Bernstein. Mr. Bernstein might have a peripheral thought process, but astonishingly, he is not a peripheral guy.  He chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers during Joe Biden’s presidency.

This notion would, in effect, force credit card companies to absorb the cost of subsidizing food purchases. A draft of the proposal stated that the Federal Reserve could require credit card companies to do so through its regulatory oversight, though that provision was apparently removed after questions from The Washington Post.

It is not clear how else the government might persuade credit card companies to foot the bill, nor how many grocers would agree. Nor is it clear how the unwavering economic law that price controls create shortages would be expressed, as a shortage of food or of credit.

One wonders how someone who thinks like this could become in any way influential. But calling yourself a "think tank" shields you from a lot of sensible scrutiny.

Sunday/The End of History

On this day:

1618
Johannes Kepler discovers the third law of planetary motion.
1722
The Safavid Empire of Iran is defeated by an army from Afghanistan at The Battle of Gulnabad, pushing Iran into anarchy.
1736
Nader Shah, founder of the Afsharid dynasty, is crowned Shah of Iran.
1775
An anonymous writer, thought by some to be Thomas Paine, publishes “African Slavery in America”, the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.
1917
International Women’s Day protests in St. Petersburg mark the beginning of the February Revolution (so named because it was February on the Julian calendar)
1920
The Arab Kingdom of Syria, the first modern Arab state to come into existence, is established.

***

Keplar's three laws state that:

--The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
--A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
--The square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

***


More than 7,000 Middle East flights were cancelled between Saturday and Tuesday alone, stranding hundreds of thousands of passengers in what aviation experts are calling the worst global travel disruption since Covid grounded the world.

Dubai International Airport, normally the world's busiest international hub with millions of passengers transiting annually, sits empty.

Private jet brokers report charging up to $350,000 for flights from Riyadh to Europe.

***

The Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case that AI-generated art does not qualify for copyright protection.

***

At 4:52 p.m. Wednesday, with eight minutes left before Montana’s candidate filing deadline closed, Kurt Alme walked into the Secretary of State’s office and filed for the United States Senate.

He had never run for office. He had no campaign. He had no publicly released platform. He had no announcement, no press conference, no town halls, no conversations with voters. What he had — the only thing he needed — was Steve Daines on the phone and Donald Trump at the ready on Truth Social.

That is how Montana’s next Republican nominee for U.S. Senate was chosen. Not by you. By them. (Just in case anybody out there thinks the Republicans chose differently than the party that chose Hilary and Kamala.)

***

Sunday/The End of History

Today's gospel contains the focused drama of a short story; it is a virtual advertisement for the quality of the writing in the New Testament.
In it, Christ meets the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well.

In this most social of places, she is alone, as is He. He asks her for a drink of water. And they talk. And something is wrong.

Just a few paragraphs, and there is so much going on. She is a Samaritan-- of Jewish heritage yet disdained by the Jews--at a well originally owned by a Jewish patriarch of the Old Testament. It is noon, the heat is at its height--why is she there at that time of day? And why alone?

She is uncomfortable with a Jew--and a man--asking her for water. She begins to spar a bit with Him as to how worship should be performed. Christ asks her to bring her husband; she says she has none, Christ agrees with her yet corrects her: She has had five and her current man is not her husband.

Now it is clear. The woman goes for water at the worst time of the day to avoid the criticism of the others; she is alone because she prefers it. She is an outcast among outcasts.

But Christ does not press her on her social circumstances. At the ancient Well, there is no history. There is no lecture, no scolding, no offer of forgiveness. And as we learn more of her, she learns more of Him.

The entire story--indeed her eventual conversion--is one of coming to knowledge, to understanding. And the transcendence of History.

SatStats

On this day:

321
Emperor Constantine I decrees that the dies Solis Invicti (sun-day) is the day of rest in the Empire.
1799
Napoleon Bonaparte captures Jaffa in Palestine and his troops proceed to kill more than 2,000 Albanian captives.
1850
Senator Daniel Webster gives his “Seventh of March” speech endorsing the Compromise of 1850 in order to prevent a possible civil war.
1876
Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for an invention he calls the telephone
1912
Roald Amundsen announces that his expedition had reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911.
1936
World War II (Prelude to): In violation of the Locarno Pact and the Treaty of Versailles, Germany reoccupies the Rhineland.
1945
World War II: American troops seize the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine River at Remagen.

1989
Iran and the United Kingdom break diplomatic relations after a row over Salman Rushdie and his controversial novel.
2007
The British House of Commons votes to make the upper chamber, the House of Lords, 100% elected.

***

True capitalism is grounded in private property, competitive markets, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law. It treats individuals as decision-makers in their own lives — not subjects of top-down control. It decentralizes power, rewards value creation, and invites experimentation, allowing people to say “yes” to opportunity without asking permission from bureaucrats or politicians.--Ginn
Which is to say it is both an outgrowth and an expression of freedom.

***

NYC First Lady Rama Duwaji showed support for far-left organizations applauding Hamas' Oct. 7th attacks.

***

Berkshire was a net seller of stock in the fourth quarter, meaning it sold more stock than it purchased. The company has now been a net seller in 13 straight quarters, which suggests Buffett has struggled to find attractive investments in the current market environment.

***



SatStats

The most landed-on property in Monopoly is Illinois Avenue. When players exit jail, the most common dice rolls (especially six to eight) funnel them there.

*

Between now and 2036, the CBO projects $94.6 trillion in federal spending against $70.2 trillion in revenue, a decade-long deficit of $24.4 trillion. Outlays reached 23.1 percent of GDP in 2025, nearly two full percentage points above the 50-year average, meaning annual spending growth is outpacing the economy itself. Debt held by the public is projected to hit 101 percent of GDP this year, which will surpass the post-WWII record of 106 percent by 2030, and climb to 120 percent by 2036.

*

Last week, Citrini Research projected a “human intelligence displacement spiral” caused by AI within two years.
But a recent survey of 6,000 chief executives across four countries found that they expect AI to cut employment by just 0.7 percent over the next three years

*

Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, we find that lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension.(study)

*

As a percentage of total book pages, Adam Smith has the highest share at 6.69%, beating out Ricardo (5.22%), Mill (3.83%), and Marx (4.36%). Just over 32% of all textbooks allocated most of their pages to Adam Smith, followed by Marx with 18.6%, Mill with 13.95%, and Ricardo with 11.3%. While interesting as a history of economic thought project, such an exercise isn’t merely amusing pedantry; it can provide insight into the types of contributions, research questions, and methodologies that have had the most enduring impact in economics. It may also inform future authors of history of economic textbooks.

*

Self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use.

*

The New York Central once ran forty-two daily passenger trains between Buffalo and Cleveland, with the 187-mile trip taking three hours. Today, Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited covers the same 187 miles in three and a half hours, if it’s on time, which it often isn’t. And the New York–Montreal run took nine hours in 1940; today’s Adirondack takes over thirteen.

*

Pensions cost the Brazilian government 10% of GDP. If no reforms are made by 2050, Brazil will spend more on pensions as a share of GDP than many richer and greyer countries… Though Brazil’s share of young people is similar to that in Chile or Mexico, its pension spending is already at Japan’s level. That is despite a modest reform in 2019 that introduced a minimum retirement age. The population is ageing rapidly. Without reform, its social-security deficit, or the shortfall between contributions and payments, is set to rise from 2% of GDP today to over 16% by 2060.

Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP —the second-most expensive in the world—mostly because of generous pensions. The typical soldier retires before turning 55 on a pension equivalent to their full salary.

*

Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all. As a 2024 review published by an American Psychological Association journal put it: “There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.”

*

Across specifications, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increases robot adoption by roughly 8 percent relative to the mean. 

Is the minimum wage a Robot Employment Act?

*

Men and lesbians are vastly overrepresented in stand-up comedy.

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.

***

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

***

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

***

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?

***


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.

***

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

***

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.


***

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.

***

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

***

Israel looks suspiciously like the piper here.

***

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

***

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

***

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.

***

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.

***

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)

***

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.

***

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.

***

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

***


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.

***

“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.

Worrying: Anthropic/DoD

On the day:
1560
The Treaty of Berwick, which would expel the French from Scotland, is signed by England and the Congregation of Scotland
1812
Poet Lord Byron gives his first address as a member of the House of Lords, in defense of Luddite violence against Industrialism in his home county of Nottinghamshire.
1860
Abraham Lincoln makes a speech at Cooper Union in the city of New York that is largely responsible for his election to the Presidency.
1933
Reichstag fire: Germany’s parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, is set on fire.

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The U.S. State Department announced on Friday that it started evacuating "non-emergency" government personnel from the embassy in Israel and their family members, citing "safety risks" amid growing tensions with Iran.

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So is the federal government going to subsidize a New York economic plan whose homicidal philosophy is directly opposed to the underpinnings of the American founding and spirit?

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Block, Jack Dorsey’s payments company, will cut 4,000 of its 10,000 workers as it embraces AI.

What jobs is the technology going to create?

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                                                              Worrying  

This post-Christmas period is a time of Epiphany, and I've just had one. I am a tech illiterate. I know virtually nothing about computers. I don't even know the nouns. But I have come to a realization that has changed my opinion about society, the community of nations, and us. 

There have been periods in history where the world changed; not just was shaken or had supporting struts removed. Fundamentally disrupted and changed. Christianity, the Decline of Rome, Islam, The Plague, the Reformation, The Enlightenment, The American Constitution, Marx, WW1, WW11--all of these events disrupted common life to the degree that required rebuilding. A good example is WW1, where the problems were not grasped and wrestled with but merely continued, vindictively, for another generation to solve. 

Rebuilding.

There are several elements to the notion of a human crisis and response. One, of course, is assessing the potential threats. The Plague, for example, would be hard to anticipate, and its fallout hard to assess. The other aspect is the response. Politics, generally, but more importantly now, when individual leverage is so great, demands insight and courage that Vietnam, the national debt, and provoked social disruption imply are simply not available.

For the next couple of days, I'm going to have an internal discussion of the two threats facing the West that will demand a world rebuilding. My ignorance will limit the insightfulness of my concerns.


Anthropic/DoD

A primer on the Anthropic/DoD situation from Dean Ball 

DoD and Anthropic have a contract to use Claude in classified settings. Right now, Anthropic is the only AI company whose models work in classified contexts. The existing contract, signed by both parties and in effect, prohibits two uses of Anthropic’s models by the military: 

1. Surveillance of Americans in the United States (as opposed to Americans abroad). 

2. The use of Claude in autonomous lethal weapons, which are weapons that can autonomously identify, track, and kill a human with no human oversight or approval. Autonomous killing of humans by machines. 

On (2), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s public position is essentially that autonomous lethal weapons controlled by frontier AI will be essential faster than most people realize, but that the models aren’t ready for this *today.* For Anthropic, these things seem to be a matter of principle. It’s worth noting that when I speak with researchers at other frontier labs, their principles on this are similar, if not often stricter. 

For DoD, however, there is another matter of principle: the military’s use of technology should only ever be constrained by the Constitution or the laws of the United States. One could quibble (the government enters into contracts, like anyone else), but the principle makes sense. A private company regulating the military’s use of AI also doesn’t sound quite right! So, the military has three options: 

1. They could cancel Anthropic’s contract and find some other frontier lab (ideally several) to work with. 

2. They could identify Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would ban all other DoD suppliers (I.e., a large fraction of the publicly traded firms in America) from using Anthropic in their fulfillment of DoD contracts. This is a power used only for foreign adversary companies, as far as I know. Activating this power would cost Anthropic a lot of business—potentially quite a lot—and give investors huge skepticism about whether the company is worth funding for the next round of scaling. Capital was a major constraint anyway, but this makes it much harder. This option could be existential for Anthropic. 

3. They could activate Title I of the Defense Production Act, an authority intended for command-and-control of the economy during wars and emergencies. This is really legally murky, and without going into detail, I feel reasonably confident this would backfire for the administration, resulting in courts limiting the use of the DPA. 

Option 1 is obviously the best. This isn’t even close, and I say this as someone who shares DoD’s principled concerns about the control by private firms over the military’s use of technology. Even the threats do damage to the US business environment, and rightfully so: these are the strictest regulations of AI being considered by any government on Earth, and it all comes from an administration that bills itself (and legitimately has been) deeply anti-AI-regulation. Such is life. One man’s regulation is another man’s national security necessity.