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.

***

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.

***

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?

***

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?

***

                                                              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.

Exceptional

On This Day:

1815
Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba.
1876
Japan and Korea sign a treaty granting Japanese citizens extraterritoriality rights, opening three ports to Japanese trade, and ending Korea’s status as a tributary state of Qing Dynasty China.
1935
Adolf Hitler orders the Luftwaffe to be re-formed, violating the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
1935
Robert Watson-Watt carries out a demonstration near Daventry which leads directly to the development of RADAR in the United Kingdom.
1936
In the February 26 Incident, young Japanese military officers attempt to stage a coup against the government.
1946
Finnish observers report the first of many thousands of sightings of ghost rockets.
1966
Apollo Program: Launch of AS-201, the first flight of the Saturn IB rocket
1993
World Trade Center bombing: In New York City, a truck bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center explodes, killing 6 and injuring over a thousand. A Pittsburgh mother of five is eventually part of the investigation.
1995
The United Kingdom’s oldest investment banking institute, Barings Bank, collapses after a securities broker, Nick Leeson, loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange using futures contracts.

***

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms. -John Leonard, critic (25 Feb 1939-2008)

***

A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

***

The FBI, during the Biden administration, subpoenaed Patel's phone records and those of the current White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

***

“She is making money off the murder of Charlie Kirk by literally implicating his widow and everyone else at [Turning Point USA] in that murder, and then trying to dig up pseudo-dirt on the wife of the person who was murdered. I don’t know what to call that, other than evil trash.” --Ben Shapiro on Candice Owens

***

Exceptional

Only 28 percent of NYC’s fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared with 31 percent nationally. In math, fourth-grade proficiency is 33 percent, behind the national average of 39 percent, while eighth-grade math proficiency is just 23 percent, well below the 28 percent national rate.

Some questions arise. What are the dynamics here? How are these numbers tolerated? Not just by parents but by the teachers themselves? How could an average person be associated with something so awful without disrupting their daily life and that of the organization to improve it? Integrity, aspiration, excellence, and nurturing the young are not particular American virtues, but they are very human virtues, and it would be difficult to have a successful America without them.

And the norm to which New York is compared is terrible. The goal they seem to want to attain is not remotely even mediocre.

Why isn't this a crisis? What is it about us that allows us to be so casual with such inferiority?

How Will We React When We All Know the Truth?

"It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans. But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the Communist Party leads the world." — General Chi Haotian, China's defense minister and vice chairman of the Party's Central Military Commission, reportedly secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans.

***

Bill Mazeroski has died.

***

Apparently, the animosity toward Melania is moral!

***

Archaeologists have discovered Paleolithic glyphs in a German cave that could potentially push back the history of written communication by over 30,000 years, per a rock-solid study in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences.

According to the researchers, the symbols were engraved on artifacts that dated back some 40,000 years to the Stone Age, when early humans arrived in Europe from Africa and encountered the Neanderthals.

Despite their age, these ancient etchings boasted a complexity comparable to the early stages of the world’s oldest writing system, cuneiform, which originated around 5,000 years ago, the New Scientist reported.

***

How Will We React When We All Know the Truth?

We have many news countdowns: the days Mrs. Guthrie has been missing, the days the Russians have been killing Ukrainians, and how long it's been since the U.S. won a gold medal in hockey. A new, highly symbolic one should be: how many days an open conduit of raw sewage has been draining into the river that runs through the national capital.

A serious issue has gradually become clear to Americans: with a $38 trillion national debt, the country faces enormous expenses, and the large taxes needed to cover these costs are either poorly managed or stolen. In other words, there is a conflict of interest between the country's needs and the personal desires and competence of the people's representatives.
 
A smaller view sometimes helps. New York City's budget is $127 billion. For perspective, this is similar to the annual expenditures of a mid-sized nation, with all the expenses a country requires, like Greece or Thailand, devoted to governing one city.

In little more than a decade, New York's budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth.
The city's population remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024.

New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles, and more than double that of Houston.

In Los Angeles, the Homelessness Services Authority reported that in 2023, homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city. And a 2024 AP account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015, and 80 percent in the city.

All this amid a public frustration because, despite billions spent, an audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Read that again.

How hard is it to have safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation, and adequate housing for the middle class in the world's richest nation? Apparently, very.

Solutions will not appear until the ostensible leaders put aside stupidity and avarice, and substitute some concern for the general good. But you can't teach stupidity and, ancient Greeks aside, teaching virtue to politicians has yet to be demonstrated.

The hard-working, good-natured American has shouldered a lot: intervention in strange, inexplicable wars, supporting non-productive but demanding fellow citizens and immigrants, hard-earned taxes stolen and/or redirected, third-world education for his kids, ridicule of his values, and his history.

One can only wonder what will happen when this governing model sheds her potemkin disguise, and the horrors of this dishonesty and neglect become fully understood.

Ghost students.

Essentially, it's a transfer payment. I basically believe that anything that would take Social Security payments below their present guaranteed level is a mistake. I think that in this country -- extraordinarily rich country -- that the people in their productive years can take care of those outside in both areas, even though the ratio of productive to non-productive has changed and is changing. But we take care of our young. And a rich country takes care of its young, and it takes care of its old.--Buffett on Social Security

He favors raising the cap. He doesn't explain how the demographics play into this opinion.

***

Abundance is about the specific puzzle of Gavin Newsom beginning his governorship by saying he wanted to build 3.5 million new homes in California and falling far, far, far short. Abundance is about why we never got high-speed rail, even though Californians voted to fund it and the federal government kicked in billions under Barack Obama. Abundance is about the reality that we cannot build enough clean energy infrastructure to meet the climate goals that virtually everyone on the Left believes we should meet under the laws we currently have.
Abundance is about the category of goods for which the government has lost the ability to deliver, even when the people who want to deliver in that way win power. --Klein, Abundance's author. 

So maybe incompetence is just a force of nature?

***

By as late as 1940, the federal and state governments’ investment in research amounted to only 23 percent of U.S. R&D and 10 percent of U.S. basic science, and the nature of that investment could have had little or no impact on rates of American economic or health growth: Defense R&D has almost no economic benefit, while the agricultural R&D was surplus to requirement.--Kealey


***

When people say Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, they are not making a metaphysical claim. They are pointing out that there is no external source from which its value is derived. Gold retains value because it has physical and industrial uses regardless of price. Equities derive value from businesses. Debt derives value from repayment. Fiat currency derives durability from taxation, legal-tender laws, and institutional enforcement. Bitcoin derives value only from the expectation that someone else will want it later. That expectation can sustain a price for long periods, but it is not a reference. There is nothing for valuation to converge toward.--Lincoln Square

And...Research cited by CryptoNews found that more than 60 percent of Trump-themed meme coins have effectively failed, losing most of their value and trading activity. CoinDesk has reported that at least one high-profile Trump coin is down more than 80 percent from its launch price.

***

Ghost students.

Community colleges cannot decline high school graduates under most circumstances. Imagine what can happen.

Over the past five years, the federal government has investigated more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by "ghost student" schemes

The scammers will use stolen or fake identities to enroll in classes online and sign up for Pell grants and loans, then disappear once they get the money -- robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims of the stolen identity. 

In California alone, nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent, according to the California Community Colleges, the state's administrative body for the community college system.
Dr. Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that at one point, a 50-person online class was booked in minutes and had 100 individuals on its waitlist. The school later learned that just six of those "students" were real people trying to get an education.

More than 200 investigations have opened nationwide, with some schemes suspected of racking up more than a billion dollars.
3 women, using prison inmates' IDs, made $1 million in one year.
Before their arrests in 2018 and 2019, a father and son in Arizona made off with more than $7 million from ghost student scams, and both served 12-month prison sentences after pleading guilty. And a Maryland man who used the identities of 60 people to take in more than $6.7 million in fraudulent financial aid was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison.

California has been particularly vulnerable.
California does not require ID.
Pierce College's student body shrank 36% when ghost students were purged.

$9 billion stolen from day care centers by people who don't speak English.

Does anybody have a job anymore?

 

Sunday/Temptation

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

***

From Glanmore:

The corrugated iron growled like thunder
When March came in; then as the year turned warmer
And invalids and bulbs came up from under,
I hibernated on behind the dormer,
Staring through shaken branches at the hill,
Dissociated, like an ailing farmer
Chloroformed against things seasonal
In a reek of cigarette smoke and dropped ash.

Lent came in next, also like a lion
Sinewy and wild for discipline,
A fasted will marauding through the body;
And I taunted it with scents of nicotine
As I lit one off another, and felt rash,
And stirred in the deep litter of the study. (Seamus Heaney)

***

Sunday/Temptation

First Sunday of Lent

Today's gospel is The Temptation in the Desert. Christ is asked by the Devil to change stone into bread, is offered dominion over the earth, and is offered the opportunity to summon angels. 

Sustenence. Glory. Power.

The temptation of God is unsettling even if we can rationalize it under Christ's duality. This event has been translated as the temptation of Israel but there is a peculiarity here that does not go away: Who is Christ proving Himself to? He is not being asked to change stone to bread because He is hungry but to prove He can do it. Ditto the display of throwing Himself from the precipice. These are displays of proof, confirmation of His divinity. And, as Christ does not need the Devil for dominion, one thinks the Devil is superfluous.

What the devil is going on?

What this really looks like is a heavenly internal debate (and a joy to the Manichees): "I could do it this way, but won't. This way, but won't. Nor this way." 

But Christ is not being asked by the Devil for proof.

The Devil is us.

SatStats

 

The tariffs have been ruled unconstitutional. Efficiency will not trump process yet. 

This will result in a wonderful boondoggle that will be mediated by a feeding frenzy of countless predatory lawyers and their predatory assistants.

***

Is ICE itself a problem, or is it the power of the government and its efficiency and integrity in using that power?

***

Over the last two seasons, Ke'Bryan Hayes is the only player to record at least 900 plate appearances and an OPS under .600.

***

And beyond alignment, I think an additional strategy should be to work on modifying the constraints that AI faces, to minimize the degree to which humans and AIs are in actual, real competition over scarce resources.
One potential way to do this is to accelerate the development of outer space. Space is an inherently hostile environment for humans, but far less so for robots, or for the computers that form the physical substrate of AI; in fact, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others are already trying to put data centers in space.--Noah Smith

***

Pirate outfielder Jhostynxon Garcia's nickname is 'the password.'

***


SatStats

Google Play Store has over 2.6 billion apps and games

***

Bill Gates' total land holdings are widely estimated between roughly 242,000 and 270,000 acres nationwide, making him the largest private farmland owner in the U.S.

***

By one estimate, almost 80% of Venezuela’s oil revenue is collected in stablecoins like tether, a local economist, Asdrúbal Oliveros, said on a recent podcast.

***

Today, a simple vial of blood can be used to measure more than 13,000 different proteins; ten years ago, this was nearly zero.

***

Superintelligent AI would be able to use all the water and energy and land and minerals in the world, so why would it let humanity have any for ourselves? Why wouldn’t it just take everything and let the rest of us starve?
But an AI that was able to rewrite its utility function would simply have no use for infinite water, energy, or land. If you can reengineer yourself to reach a bliss point, then local nonsatiation fails; you just don’t want to devour the Universe, because you don’t need to want that.

We can trust it to do the right thing.

***

Among the cohort who began college in 2004, 38% never took economics. Among the 2012 cohort, only 26% took economics.

***

Spending Distribution at the Federal Level:

From 1959 to 2024, the portion of federal government outlays that were spent on:
--national defense and veterans’ benefits declined from 55% to 17%.
--social programs—including healthcare, income security, education, housing, and recreation—rose from 20% to 60%.
--general government and debt service—including the executive & legislative branches, tax collection, financial management, and interest payments—rose from 17% to 25% and then declined to 18%.
--economic affairs—including transportation, general economic & labor affairs, agriculture, natural resources, energy, and space declined from 8% to 3%.
--public order and safety—including police, fire, law courts, prisons, and immigration enforcement—rose from 0.3% to 1.2%.

Regrettably, there is no section for theft.

The Freedom to Approve, Not Decide

Alysa Liu survived hard work and no drama to win Olympic figure skating gold, the first U.S. woman to do so in over two decades.

***

Pro-Trump ads are flooding the TV, sponsored by Homeland Security. The government is advertising for the government.

***

Nearly one in four adults in that generation currently identify as something other than heterosexual. This is in contrast to older Americans, among whom LGBTQ+ identification remains relatively uncommon.

Pick the sci-fi plot you like best.

***

Government debt is projected under the CBO’s baseline scenario to balloon from nearly $31 trillion today to $56 trillion over the next decade.

If that is true, why is it not a topic of conversation, an interview subject, or an election issue?

What are the options to deal with it?

***

The U.S. trade deficit hit a near-historic high of $901 billion last year.

***

The Freedom to Approve, Not Decide

Every so often, the popular world teaches a lesson. Science is harder than people say. Dogs that 'never bite' sometimes do. Bread usually falls jelly-side down.

The recent American display at the Munich Security Conference was such a teaching experience. The Pretty Girl Representative (PGR) showed up for no good reason and behaved like a moron. When asked, she did not know the basic geography of her continent, did not know the dramatic origin of the modern American horse, and was unable to say anything beyond "Uhh....." to a simple — and expected — political question. Watching this stirred a feeling of recognition. What was this?

It was a replay of something many teenagers experienced: a friend who showed up at an uncle's business for a token interview before getting a summer job. It was an audition where the required qualities were assumed.

For the nephew, the required qualities were being a blood relative and not drooling. For the PGR, the qualities were...not drooling. The PGR was auditioning for the international stage. She has been a successful American politician, and she was the PGR. She just needed a nod of approval, and she would move on.

Her failure is beside the point. The real question is what she was doing there in the first place? How did the PGR advance to be considered at this level? It makes you think she was picked somehow in advance, sometime earlier, that let her onto the scene. If that sounds a little too conspiratorial, remember that after she exploded on the audition stage, she rushed in tears to call her uncle NYT.

 

So AOC thinks Venezuela is south of the equator. Probably thinks all South Americans are alike.

***

What's with Netanyahu's low-profile visit to the U, S. recently? Avoiding the long arm of the UN court? A great idea from Kathy A.: They're planning heavy-duty Iran action, but they don't trust their domestic electronic security.

***

What would happen to a farmer who polluted a waterway a fraction of the degree the government has polluted the Potomac?

***

The president of a Florida insurance brokerage firm and the CEO of a marketing company were sentenced Wednesday to 20 years each in prison for leading a sprawling, $233 million Affordable Care Act fraud scheme

***

Outrage. Surrender. Despair.

Overwhelming national and personal debt. Governments that can't prevent fires or rebuild after the damage. People who immigrate here because the filthy streets and rivers look just like home.

Growing evidence that what people do is ineffective and that government is a foolish backup plan.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote of the lassitude that could arise in a nation. He described “an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.” That multitude would be governed by an “immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate.” The people, in such a condition, would be reduced to enervation: “The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

A people that has lost hope, and has retreated from fractious, risky individualism to the comfort of centralized power; a people that has surrendered its autonomy in the mistaken belief that its autonomy was always an illusion. Once they begin to believe that their choices aren’t their own, that broad and powerful systems are to blame for their individual problems—then they are ripe for something far worse. They are ripe for tyranny.

Enervation eventually gives way to frustration, and then to rage, as soft despotism fails to achieve utopia. Then the people are left with a stark choice: a reversion to freedom, or the embrace of autocracy. As de Tocqueville concluded, “The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions, or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.”

Little Chicks Up Front

“Everything must change for everything to remain the same.”--The Leopard

*

Norway has won the last two winter Olympics and is leading this one. They have 5 million people.

*

A Swedish Olympic ski jumper is afraid of heights and is getting therapy.

*

President Trump’s private company has filed for trademarks for airports not yet named after himself—setting up the possibility he could profit from what has historically been an honor in name only.

*

Johnson, the American speed skater, started skating in in-line tournaments. She's a materials engineer.

*

So, the representative government passes a law about illegal immigration. Many people think this is artificial and should not be enforced because the land was previously occupied by another group of people who invaded it earlier. Why their invasion is more meaningful than the European one is not explained.

*

There are 100,000 members of the Democratic Socialists of America in the world. The world.

*


Little Chicks Up Front

There is a law passed by America's representative government that places certain requirements on people who wish to immigrate to America. People who ignore or subvert these laws are sought out and arrested by immigration police and deported back to their home country. This behavior is typical of most organized national cultures.

Recently, things have changed. A small number of people have decided to oppose the actions of these immigration police. Keep in mind, these are American citizens sworn by the immigration officials to enforce American laws passed by America's elected representatives. The self-appointed judges block, obstruct, attack, and, if possible, prevent the enforcement of the law. Sometimes they attack the police physically or with weapons. One can imagine the danger of injecting oneself into that dangerous interface between police and criminal. Many people have been injured and several killed in these meddled confrontations.

Sort of reverse vigilanteism.

Astonishingly, this behavior has been supported by many local and state officials. Local politicians are encouraging lawbreaking. One can only wonder which of their laws deserve violent opposition, which don't, and what they would do should the approval of lawbreaking culturally spread.

Cries for general strikes have been raised, and students from elementary and high schools are being urged to participate in The Resistance. Children are being asked to skip school to join the protests. And their teachers are encouraging them to do so. Politicians, political leaders, and educators are encouraging children--children--to place themselves between law enforcement and its objective.

Who said the Americans are uninterested in caring for their children?

 

Arrogance, Stupidity, and the Limits of Ambition

American-born Olympic freestyle skier Eileen Gu has made headlines for her talent and for her decision to compete under the Chinese flag — a choice National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s edition of The Editors, said is, though “not in the legal sense, of course . . . adjacent to treason.”

***

Right now, there are about 70 million white-collar workers in the United States.

***

Arrogance, Stupidity, and the Limits of Ambition

Who invites whom to Munich's Security Conference? And why? Can anyone just show up? Could I go and talk about baseball? AOC looked like a moron. Newsome looked like a social climber. Fortunately, Rubio was consoling for poor Europe.

In any sensible world, AOC in Munich would be her Dan Quale "potato moment." She could not have looked dumber. She, our Latina heroine, did not know where Venezuela was. Then, when asked a routine question about Taiwan, she blubbered for 10 seconds before denying the question's validity.

Most unsettling, she knew, presumably, that she was at a world conference on security. While it may just be a tax-funded good time, she certainly could have anticipated discussion about several of the world's top four or five concerns. But she didn't. She did not bother to study, even superficially, the problems she was auditioning to solve. Because she is: 1. entitled to the position, 2. pretty, 3. a popular minority, and 4. favored by the Press.

It will be interesting to see the response of her handlers/champions. Even in America, high cheekbones and a good jawline should only get you so far. (Melania aside.) Ambition should have some quality ceiling. We'll see if the culture--and the Press--have any discriminating scruples.

The Constitutional Flaw

On this day:

1503
Disfida di Barletta – famous challenge between 13 Italian and 13 French knights near Barletta.
1542
Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII of England, is executed for adultery.
1692
Massacre of Glencoe: About 78 Macdonalds at Glen Coe, Scotland are killed early in the morning for not promptly pledging allegiance to the new king, William of Orange.
1935
A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.
1945
World War II: Royal Air Force bombers are dispatched to Dresden, Germany to attack the city with a massive aerial bombardment.
2000
The last original “Peanuts” comic strip appears in newspapers one day after Charles M. Schulz dies.

***

Buffett: On Focus. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

***

The Pirates' All-Star reliever Elroy Face has passed away at 97.

***

The parody continues. Nevada is the only state where people can legally purchase sex, and now 'sex workers' at one of the state’s oldest brothels are fighting to become the nation’s first to be unionized.

***

The Constitutional Flaw

For the last year, the winds of lies, innuendo, and manipulative conspiracies directed against Trump have reaped their poetic whirlwind.
A man, and a political group, who have been maligned and ridiculed by a small elite for as long as they can remember, have the upper hand for the first time since Reagan.

Jacoby summarizes it. "In just the past few weeks, the American president has threatened military action against Denmark, a NATO ally, if it doesn’t surrender Greenland to the United States. He moved to punish a US senator — a retired Navy captain and combat veteran — for reminding service members they must not obey illegal orders. He posted a grotesquely cruel message on social media jeering the deaths of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. He sent his press secretary to warn CBS News that unless it broadcast a presidential interview complete and unedited, we’ll sue your ass off.” He deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, then announced that the United States was now “in charge” of that country, and “we’re going to be taking oil.” He summoned Justice Department attorneys to berate them for not moving fast enough to prosecute his critics and opponents. And when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, an unarmed American citizen, the White House instantly pronounced her a “domestic terrorist” and refused to open an investigation into the shooting."

Jacoby calls this vengeful thuggishness, and to some degree, he's right. But how much Federal rummaging through your wife's underwear can a guy take? How much journalistic-approved lying vitriol are you supposed to tolerate?

In El Salvador, not much; in America, a lot.

This country is not an accident of geography, not a religious or ethnic redoubt. It is a philosophical creation, an embodiment of ideas and principles long debated. It is complicated because its citizens do not recognize each other in the street by their color, their physiogonomy, or their religious apparel. They are united by belief, a belief that, until recently, any man in history could only dream of. But there is a change in the country, a change that Trump does not epitomize but only represents. It is an essential defect in the Constitution.

The Constitution makes an assumption, an assumption of a precondition in its citizens and its leaders. Virtue. And the preference for the betterment of the nation over the whims of the few. 

These last years have revealed a loss of virtue. People do not take the Constitution's morality seriously.

Many of our problems--particularly foreign ones--are missteps. Bad judgment. With good intent, they will self-correct. But the real problems that threaten the nation are simple moral laxity and malice. A disregard of-- or overt animosity to--the guiding principles of the country--and how they impact the very health and well-being of the nation.

How could the national debt not be a front-page discussion topic? The topic? How could the Biden Regency — the complete takeover of the executive branch by a small cabal — not be in the daily conversation? How could Obama amend environmental legislation without a word of objection? How could Trump's gratuitous insults and chest-thumping--however gratifying to those who have been ignored, belittled, and insulted for so long--not be rejected? 

How have the politics of El Salvador immigrated here?

When the president was asked in a recent interview whether he recognizes any checks on his powers, he was his direct self in response: “Yeah, there is one thing,” he said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

The fatal flaw of the U.S. Constitution is revealed. The law of the land must start with reverence for it. Its virtues. It's not a tool in a shed; it is a relic in a tabernacle. And it is worthless when it takes itself more seriously than do the people it is supposed to guide.

 

Señor Bunny

 

On this day:

1554
A year after claiming the throne of England for nine days, Lady Jane Grey is beheaded for treason.
1593
Japanese invasion of Korea: Approximately 3,000 Joseon defenders led by general Kwon Yul successfully repel more than 30,000 Japanese forces in the Siege of Haengju.
1689
The Convention Parliament declares that the flight to France in 1688 by James II, the last Roman Catholic British monarch, constitutes an abdication.
1999
President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the United States Senate in his impeachment trial.
2001
NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touchdown in the “saddle” region of 433 Eros becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.

***

“We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”-- Sharma, on AI

***

1976 Senate special committee charged with emergency powers reform was appalled that four national emergencies were in effect at that time, yet “today we live under 50 active national emergencies, several of which date back decades and all of which unlock broad executive powers—under IEEPA mainly but also several other US laws—that are typically reserved to Congress or delegated to the president in a much narrower fashion.” --Lincicome

***

Greenland's strategic importance—missile defense, Arctic access, and denial of Chinese or Russian influence—is real and longstanding.
Why must it be confrontational now?

***

Señor Bunny

The NFL made history with the Superbowl show in two ways. For the first time, it had a performer who sang in a language that about 85 percent of the U.S. population doesn’t speak, a victory for gratuitous inscrutability. (Were none of the stars who sing in English available?)

Also, for the first time ever, the NFL gave its stage to a performer who sought to put the country in its place. So often, inept builders resort to tearing down their surroundings, seeing the relative change as an enhancement of their position. So Mr. Bunny sought to undermine the US claim to be called “America.” That is, to make America generic. To make the world's first written democratic republic one of many faux democracies. And, in the New World, to make freedom geographical. As Obama said, American exceptionalism was a provincial thought. After all, aren't we all El Salvadore?

To think that, once upon a time, the likes of Prince and Katy Perry simply aimed to put on a good show.

In an echo of singer Billie Eilish inveighing at the Grammys against America stealing land, Mr. Bunny said of his language proficiency in a pre–Super Bowl press conference, “English is not my first language. But it’s okay; it’s not America’s first language either.” Like so many bumper stickers, this sounds clever until you give it a moment’s thought. Mr. Bunny’s first language, Spanish, was a colonial imposition in the Western Hemisphere beginning in 1492. If the rapper wanted to associate himself with languages before this wave of European settlement, he’d have to sing in, say, Nahuatl or Algonquian.

The Spanish language indeed got a head start over English in what’s now the United States, when Ponce de Leon showed up on the Florida peninsula in 1513. But so what? English speakers forged a permanent presence at Jamestown in 1607. They then populated the Eastern Seaboard, won their independence, stood up enduring institutions of representative government, and made English the most important and widely spoken language in the world.

That the country they founded goes by “America” is an affront to elements in Latin America and on the left. They consider it insulting to everyone else living in North America or South America. Aren’t they Americans, too?

Certainly not everyone feels this way. The Canadians have as little interest in being called “Americans” as they do in becoming the 51st state. It is people hypersensitive to any Yanqui imperialism, including “linguistic imperialism,” who complain about us hogging the name “America.”

Sad to say, they are late to the game. Americans began calling themselves Americans in the 1700s to set themselves apart from the British. An anonymous writer in the Virginia Gazette in March 1776 referred to “the united states of America,” and Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence said it was a statement of “the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” (subsequently changed to “the thirteen united States of America”).

Once we were the U.S.A., the question became how to refer to our people. As “United States men and women”? Various solutions were tried out before we settled on “American,” which now denotes not just our country but a set of clearly defined cultural traits. And political concepts.

It’s bizarre that the NFL had a half-time show that questioned this understanding, although in the league’s defense, surely, few people picked up on it — or understood anything else said.

And why do the Spanish-speaking countries want to be named after an Italian cartographer anyway? Maybe it's just an attempt to ride on the success of others.--much from NR

Sound, Fury, et al

 

On this day:

660 BC
Traditional date for the foundation of Japan by Emperor Jimmu.
55
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Britannicus, heir to the Roman Emperorship, dies under mysterious circumstances in Rome. This clears the way for Nero to become Emperor.
1531
Henry VIII of England is recognized as supreme head of the Church of England.
1861
American Civil War: United States House of Representatives unanimously passes a resolution guaranteeing noninterference with slavery in any state.
1978
Censorship: the People’s Republic of China lifts a ban on works by Aristotle, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.

***

There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. -James Thurber, writer, and cartoonist (8 Dec 1894-1961)


***

Until 2009, India was poorer than Pakistan on a per capita basis. India truly became richer than Pakistan after 2009 and since then it hasn’t looked back. If trends continue for a decade, India will be more than twice as rich as Pakistan soon…
So why has India pulled ahead in GDP per capita? The reason is simple. Pakistan’s high fertility has driven population growth faster than India’s. In 1952 Pakistan had about one-tenth of India’s population; by 2025 it had grown to nearly one-seventh.

***

The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury's mother was Churchill’s personal secretary, married a businessman, had an affair with Churchill’s other secretary, and Justin was the result (he didn’t learn this until he was 60!). He went to Cambridge, had a mystical experience that converted him to Christianity, worked for an oil company in Nigeria for 11 years, then quit to get ordained as a priest. He says he can speak in tongues – “It’s just a routine part of spiritual discipline – you choose to speak and you speak a language that you don’t know, it just comes” – and has written a book called “Can Companies Sin?”. He lost his archbishop position last month for the most stereotypical possible reason – failed to investigate sex abuse by a church leader who was a friend of his. (Wiki)

***

Sound, Fury, et al

10 days of speculation about the missing Guthrie woman. 10 days of preempted programs explaining what is not known. This is a metaphor of modern America, of politicians, political parties, Hall of Fame voting, and things like the Epstein Files.

Suspicion. Guesswork. Possibilities.

This has become the substitute for information in this country, what we do when we circle some worrisome thing...at a respectable distance. Until we start to sell the nooses.

Breaking News: El Paso airport is shut down for 10 days. One TV expert suspects a "Pearl Harbor-type event."

China/US Economies

On this day:
1258
Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed.
1306
In front of the high altar of Greyfriars Church in Dumfries, Robert the Bruce murders John Comyn, his leading political rival, sparking revolution in the Scottish Wars of Independence
1567
An explosion destroys the Kirk o' Field house in Edinburgh, Scotland. The second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley is found strangled, in what many believe to be an assassination.
1933
In round 13 of a boxing match at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Primo Carnera knocks out Ernie Schaaf, killing him.
1996
The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov for the first time.
2009
The communication satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251 collide in orbit, destroying both.

***

Common sense tells us that restraints on business are generally bad, that red tape strangles enterprise, that taxes on goods in transit will reduce the volume of transactions, that wage earners will suffer if the things they buy are made artificially dear, that legislation to increase the cost of living and production must be especially disastrous to a populous manufacturing and commercial country like ours.--Hirst

***

A newly released federal memo reveals Ohio’s richest man accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein stole or misappropriated several hundred million dollars from him over their decades-long financial relationship.

***

The U.S. attack on Iran was shocking and unprecedented. Why is there so little talk about it?

***

China/US Economies

Analysis of commercial and political patterns suggests China’s broader AI ecosystem operates according to a different logic than the “US-China AI race” framing implies.

First, development and deployment remain private-led, with state participation filling infrastructure and application gaps rather than competing directly for frontier capabilities.

Second, frontier developers are pursuing diverse technical and commercial strategies rather than converging on LLMs as the path to AGI. The data shows specialization in modalities, vertical domains, and applications. This reflects a market where companies are optimizing for deployability and commercial viability, not just pushing frontier capabilities.

Third, China’s AI ecosystem is actively shaped by local policy competition and fiscal incentives, rather than solely by market forces or central planning. This creates geographic inequality but also reveals how innovation actually gets governed in practice through decentralized competition for activity and talent. It also raises concerns of potential resource waste, especially given that many local governments are currently short of money.

This assessment (from somewhere) emphasizes local, private incentives and less central control (although they influence incentives), more free markets and less command economies. The strength of the West has always been its freedom to evolve, so China may be woodenly adapting here, allowing some risk. Compare this to Trump's recent demand that defense contractors freeze dividends and buybacks until their inventories rise.

We are back to the old arguments. A government, in the words of Zohran Mamdani, that can “replace the rigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”; a government, in the words of Adrian Vermeule, that will “enjoy a capacious scope of public discretion to promote the common good.”

But there is no "warmth" in government, no "discretion."

The Constitution creates political structures and then limits them within those structures because self-restraint in politics does not exist.

Vaudvillain

On this day:

1555
Bishop of Gloucester John Hooper is burned at the stake.
1775
American Revolutionary War: The British Parliament declares Massachusetts in rebellion.
1825
After no presidential candidate receives a majority of electoral votes in the election of 1824, the United States House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams President of the United States.
1861
American Civil War: Jefferson Davis is elected the Provisional President of the Confederate States of America by the Confederate convention at Montgomery, Alabama.
1942
Year-round Daylight saving time is re-instated in the United States as a wartime measure to help conserve energy resources.
1964
The Beatles make their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, performing before a “record-busting” audience of 73 million viewers.
1965
Vietnam War: The first United States combat troops are sent to South Vietnam.

1971
Apollo program: Apollo 14 returns to Earth after the third manned moon landing

***

February 5 saw the release of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.3-Codex.
What makes these new models so important is the fact that much of the programming work behind them was done by artificial intelligence rather than humans. Anthropic insiders are claiming, for instance, that effectively 100 percent of the code behind their products is written by Claude itself.

***

Jordon Hudson — Bill Belichick’s girlfriend — was photographed wearing an “Orchids of Asia Day Spa” shirt while standing next to the former Patriots head coach at the UNC-Duke basketball game on Saturday night.

***

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has shut off Russian pirated access on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The issue has fuelled anger in Moscow that, four years into the war, the Russian army remains heavily dependent on western technology.

***

Elon Musk says SpaceX is shifting focus from Mars to a moon city.

***


Vaudvillain


Epstein’s attorneys have formally demanded that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) release all records related to any potential intelligence ties involving the disgraced financier.

There is anxiety in the air.

The Epstein Files don't show much. There are a lot of rich creeps, but we knew that. There are creeps, and a lot of money just makes them worse.

Epstein information must be incomplete. Crucial information must be withheld. Blood sacrifice may be involved. The information we get is curated for the benefit of a cabal. Epstein himself may be alive.

ICE agents are not over-responding to being obstructed and attacked while performing their rightful job; they are part of a larger, unadmitted Nazification program in the U.S. The rising debt in the U.S. is not stupid, weak, and self-indulgent; it is part of a plan by persons unknown to undermine the currency and to leave them wealthy. No election is valid. Scientific studies are manipulated to benefit Pharma. The COVID disaster was a trial run.

This kind of thinking stems from the same creative center in all of us, the source of caution, suspicion, and poetry. Our need for order, explanation, and creativity.

And our regard for omerta. The hard, defensive shell of the outsider.

What we're seeing is a staggering loss of trust. The reason is our leaders' disregard — not of the truth — of us. We have moved from the Biden Regency of total disregard of reality, truth, and adherence to our basic legal concepts to Trump's vaudevillian buffoonery. We, the citizens, have become outsiders.

Tolstoy thinks this element in us is funny. In War and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov fiddles with the math and “discovers” that, when rendered into French and assigned various numerical values, the letters of his own name add up to 666, the “number of the beast” from the book of Revelation. How, exactly, he was connected to the events foretold in the Bible, Pierre did not know, but “he did not doubt that connection for a moment” and reveled in the knowledge that he was somehow involved in affairs of world-historical importance.

But it ain't all funny. Official, outrageous lies and distancing of the public carry a social risk and deserve a name.

I propose "Vaudevillain."

 

 

Sunday/Flavor

On this day:

1587
Mary, Queen of Scots, is executed on suspicion of having been involved in the Babington Plot to murder her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
1904
Battle of Port Arthur: A surprise torpedo attack by the Japanese at Port Arthur, China starts the Russo-Japanese War.
1942
World War II: Japan invades Singapore.
1952
Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom.
1962
Charonne massacre. Nine trade unionists are killed by French police at the instigation of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, then chief of the Paris Prefecture of Police.
1963
Travel, financial and commercial transactions by United States citizens to Cuba are made illegal by the John F. Kennedy administration.
1983
The Melbourne dust storm hits Australia’s second largest city. The result of the worst drought on record and a day of severe weather conditions, a 320 m deep dust cloud envelops the city, turning day to night.

***

Can anyone explain the decision to put the vile Obama parody out from the White House?

***

American skier Lindsey Vonn crashed seconds into her downhill Olympic race on Sunday after she decided to compete despite rupturing her left ACL in a prior crash during a World Cup event in the Swiss Alps a week ago.

***

Honey bee colonies across the United States collapsed at the highest rate ever recorded between April 2024 and April 2025. More than half of all managed colonies were lost, with especially severe impacts during winter. The USDA confirmed the findings in a press release, stating that colony collapses had been driven by “virus-infected, miticide-resistant parasitic mites.”

***

Sunday/Flavor

In the gospel today, Christ calls his disciples "the salt of the earth." There is a lot to it. Salt has several connotations of value and meaning. The phrase itself raised an interesting concept: Did the spirituality Christ and his followers were offering add an element to mankind or was it revealing mankind's essence?

Christ is certainly saying that the salt is its own essence, its own common denominator. It cannot be flavored.

And the passage has some unfortunate elements too, especially as an "evolutionary" passage. The Catholic Church has tried to update the language, arguing that the bible is not primarily literature.

Compare the original King James with the more accessible version:

"Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men." (Tough stuff.)

vs.

“You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

How long do you think they debated over "savour" vs. "taste"? And whether to remove "of men?"

There are sacrifices egalitarianism demands.

SatStats

On this Day:

1497
The bonfire of the vanities occurs when supporters of Girolamo Savonarola burn thousands of objects like cosmetics, art, and books in Florence, Italy.
1898
Émile Zola is brought to trial for libel for publishing J'Accuse.
1900
Second Boer War: British troops fail in their third attempt to lift the Siege of Ladysmith.
1986
Twenty-eight years of one-family rule ends in Haiti when President Jean-Claude Duvalier flees the Caribbean nation.
1990
Dissolution of the Soviet Union: The Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agrees to give up its monopoly on power.

***

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see."--Arthur Schopenhauer


***

The Olympics promises respect we don't always see in popular competitive sports. Or competitive ideas.

***

Vonn is said to have a plateau fracture, the support of the femur. Unbelievable risk at skiing force of up to 6 Gs.

***

Benghazi's been avenged. Any plans for The Liberty?

***


SatStats

Over the past century, the length of Oscar speeches has ballooned, peaking in the 2010s at almost 300 words per speech.

*

Mammals and non-human primates follow a clear scaling of body mass to brain mass. Humanoids break that trend.

*

People know whether or not they want to buy a house in just 27 minutes, but it takes 88 minutes to decide on a couch

*

At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires accounted for 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they accounted for 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent).

*

National Debt

A recent report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that interest payments on America’s national debt will surpass $1.5 trillion in 2032 and reach $1.8 trillion by 2035.

According to the Treasury Department, U.S. national debt now stands at $38.56 trillion — and it continues to grow as federal spending outpaces revenue.

So far in fiscal year 2026, the government has already spent about $602 billion more than it has collected.

The interest payments on the national debt exceed the military budget, which is $1 trillion.

*

100 South Koreans will have an estimated 15 grandchildren

*

Overall, our findings challenge popular narratives and suggest that pet ownership may support, rather than displace, fertility.---a paper

*

Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed.

*

At the end of 2025. Berkshire Hathaway's marketable equity portfolio was valued at about $320 billion, and the business has about $354 billion of cash to deploy on top of that.

*

This is the toughest market for PhD economists in recent memory. JOE listings are down 20% from last year. Worse: they are 19% below COVID levels.

Political Couture

On this day:1685
James II of England and VII of Scotland becomes King upon the death of his brother Charles II.
1820
The first 86 African American immigrants sponsored by the American Colonization Society started a settlement in present-day Liberia.
1952
Elizabeth II becomes the first queen regnant of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Realms since Queen Victoria upon the death of her father, George VI. At the exact moment of succession, she was in a treehouse at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya.
1959
At Cape Canaveral, Florida, the first successful test firing of a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile is accomplished.
1959
Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments files the first patent for an integrated circuit.
1976
In testimony before a United States Senate subcommittee, Lockheed Corporation president Carl Kotchian admits that the company had paid out approximately million in bribes to the office of Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka.

***

And how much did the global lockdown reduce 2020’s global carbon emissions? By about 6 per cent. It is the largest reduction ever but nowhere close to what would be needed. If we were to meet the Paris Climate Agreement by 2030 just by doing and travelling less, we would need to suffer a pandemic like this every year for the next decade, without allowing us to have any recovery between the pandemics. Which, of course, would lead to an unprecedented social collapse.--norberg

***

UFOs, Epstein, Omar's theft--we all know this, but when will the innuendo be separated from the chaff? Or is insincerity the arbiter, and truth will never escape it?

***

How could a voter ID law not distinguish Republicans from Democrats to the Republicans' advantage?

***

A Russian general serving as deputy head of Russian military intelligence was shot and seriously wounded in Moscow on Friday, officials said – the latest in a series of attacks on top military figures.

***

Innuendo Alert:

“Dear Director Ratcliffe, I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities,” Senator Wyden wrote.

***

The chairman of the new prospective owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins says his company is reportedly in discussions to acquire the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

***

Political Couture

Among the many declarations of The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is this insight:

“Customary obligations are the same for all States and exist independently regardless of whether a State is a party to the climate change treaties" (para 315). 

That is, it applies to you whether you agree to it or not. Like gravity.

It's one of the ICJ's more than 200 references to 'customary international law' (CIL), which is essentially the unwritten rules that bind the world. They're the rules so basic, they don't need a treaty.

America's own judge on the ICJ, Sarah Cleveland, reiterates this point. And that's particularly intriguing when you recall the US has now twice withdrawn from the Paris Agreement that the world negotiated to try and slow rising temperatures.

So the court (including Cleveland) is basically saying you can withdraw from as many treaties as you like, but your climate obligations remain unchanged at this point. It’s CIL.

This should sound familiar. It's much like Trump's campaign slogan of "It's common sense." The unagreed-upon assumption. The battle cry in the field of opposing opinion.

It's obvious and definitive. 

"It's couture."

Statements and Displays

On this Day:

62
Earthquake in Pompeii, Italy.
1576
Henry of Navarre abjures Catholicism at Tours and rejoins the Protestant forces in the French Wars of Religion.
1597
A group of early Japanese Christians are killed by the new government of Japan for being seen as a threat to Japanese society.
1918
SS Tuscania (1914) is torpedoed off the coast of Ireland; it is the first ship carrying American troops to Europe to be torpedoed and sunk.
1918
Stephen W. Thompson shoots down a German airplane. It is the first aerial victory by the U.S. military.
1937
President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a plan to enlarge the Supreme Court of the United States.
1958
A hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb is lost by the US Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, never to be recovered.

1971
Astronauts land on the moon in the Apollo 14 mission.

***

I'm not a perfect guy, but I've done a hellava lot of good for perfect people.--Trump, confessing his sin-eating.

***

Today is the anniversary of the loss of The Tybee Bomb, a tribute to those confident in government.

***

The Netherlands' Queen Maxima has joined her country's army as a reservist, voicing concern about national security.

***

The timing of the Guthrie disappearance--after she was out of the house until late--is curious.

***

Statements and Displays

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos garnered a lot of attention, but for the wrong reasons. He proclaimed the ability of “middle powers”—that is, Europe and countries like his own—to stand their ground against America and China, but he mentioned AI only in passing. He had no solution to an immediately pending world where Canada is quite dependent on advanced AI systems from American companies (often, incidentally, developed by Canadian researchers in the U.S.). That is likely to be the next major development in this North American relationship, and it will not increase the relative autonomy of Canada or of any other middle powers.

Carney has been praised for staking out such bold ground and standing up to Trump. The deeper reality is that Carney can “talk back” in the North American partnership because he knows America will defend Canada, including against Russia, no matter what. Most European countries cannot relax in the same manner, and thus, they are often more deferential. What the reactions from Carney and the Europeans show is not any kind of growing independence for the middle powers, but rather a reality where you are either quite tethered to a major power—as Canada is to America—or you live in fear of being abandoned, which is the current status of much of Europe. (from Cowen)

Posuuring need not be insincere. But it may be only wishful. The risk, of course, is that it is deceptive. Symbolic independence has shrinking importance in our world of increasing technical gravity. And sometimes global declarations, like those of Iran and Canada here, are only bluster. And sometimes they are a risk.

Reality is harsh, and unreality is increasingly hazardous. Hitler believed what he said, and many weak-minded followers have since. Russia's overreach in Ukraine was a dangerous underestimation of its victim. And how many stupid homicidal dogmas prowl just beyond the warmth of the sheltering common human campfire?

What will small producers do? What will oil-deficient countries do? AI deficient? Population deficient? They will drift toward survival and some acceptable integrity. The voracious autocracies will prove to be poor partners.