Out of Egypt

On this day:

476
Romulus Augustulus, last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, is deposed when Odoacer proclaims himself King of Italy, thus ending the Western Roman Empire.
1797
Coup of 18 Fructidor in France.
1862
Civil War Maryland Campaign: General Robert E. Lee takes the Army of Northern Virginia, and the war, into the North.
1886
Indian Wars: after almost 30 years of fighting, Apache leader Geronimo, with his remaining warriors, surrenders to General Nelson Miles in Arizona.
1957
American Civil Rights Movement: Little Rock Crisis – Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, calls out the National Guard to prevent African American students from enrolling in Central High School.
1967
Vietnam War: Operation Swift begins: U.S. Marines engage the North Vietnamese in battle in the Que Son Valley.
1972
Mark Spitz becomes the first competitor to win seven medals at a single Olympic Games.
1998
Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University.

***

The Sussexes return to England: A Royal Recall--Brian

***

The French Revolution reads like a sci-fi novel of religious excess.
In the Coup of 18 Fructidor, the Directory arrested political opponents and invalidated the previous election.
The Directory was instituted on 2 November 1795 under the Constitution of the Year III, drafted in the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction that overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on 27 July 1794, aiming to forge a moderate republican framework that curbed Jacobin radicalism while safeguarding bourgeois property interests through a five-member executive and bicameral legislature comprising the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients. 

The Directory perceived an existential threat from resurgent royalists following the 1797 elections, fearing a coordinated effort to restore the monarchy with foreign assistance amid ongoing wars against coalitions including Britain.
This unconstitutional action, supported indirectly by Napoleon Bonaparte's provision of military reinforcements from Italy, temporarily consolidated Directory power, reinstated anti-clerical measures against nonjuring priests and émigrés, and foreshadowed further executive overreaches culminating in the Brumaire coup two years later.

Fructidor. The Directory. The Year III. Thermidor. Council of Five Hundred. The Council of Ancients. Ah, democracy.

***

Prudence has been one of the great classical virtues, along with wisdom, courage, and justice. Has prudence become more of a behavioral suggestion than its original designation as an ethical obligation?

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According to the media watchdog Status, after Trump gave a speech in July about election interference, Fox Business officials ordered the network’s top stars to stay clear of Trump's unsubstantiated claims. Several outlets noted that Fox gave little airtime to Trump’s speech in the hours and days that followed.
Bartiromo then leaked the company directive to the White House, according to Status. It's unclear if she reached out first, or the Trump team made the request.

The Press leaks to the government.

***

European officials accuse Russia of years of hybrid warfare, from attempted arson outside the British prime minister's home, to firebombing warehouses in Latvia storing aid for Ukraine, to an assassination plot against a German weapons manufacturer, as well as drones that cross into NATO territory and have destroyed property. Recently, these attacks are increasing...
"You have the Leipzig attack. You have arson, sabotage, murder, attacks on critical infrastructure also. And Russia has more than one service likely engaged in this campaign. You have military intelligence in the GRU, and you have the FSB..."--David Cattler, Former U.S. Intelligence Official (PBS)

***

From Axios:

                "AI models are becoming unknowable."

***

Out of Egypt

Science has always walked the edge of mysticism. The original great Greek thinkers were as abstract as you could get with demiurges and the like. Newton had some astonishing beliefs well away from mass and acceleration. Science and its very unscientific stepbrothers have been a provocative topic and creep into many publications and articles, from The DaVinci Code to Benjamin Breen.

Thelema was one of the New Age foundational notions. The law of Thelema is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will." The law of Thelema was developed in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley, an English writer and ceremonial magician. He believed himself to be the prophet of a new age, the Æon of Horus, based upon a spiritual experience that he and his wife, Rose Edith, had in Egypt in 1904. By his account, a possibly non-corporeal or "praeterhuman" being that called itself Aiwass contacted him and dictated a text known as The Book of the Law or Liber AL vel Legis, which outlined the principles of Thelema. (These things happen in the Middle East. And New York.) An adherent of Thelema is a Thelemite. (From Wiki)

Jack Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first castable, composite solid rocket propellant and pioneered the advancement of both liquid and solid-fuel rockets, important contributions to eventual rocket flight.
For a while, Parsons was a Marxist. Then he became a Thelemite. Yes, he did.

Before Parsons accidentally blew himself up in his home lab in 1952, he had welcomed into his Pasadena home a Second World War veteran who’d been expelled from the Navy for psychological instability: L Ron Hubbard. The two men shared a love for science fiction and black magic. But in 1946, Hubbard ran off with Parsons’ mistress Sara, and his yacht. Parsons invoked a Babylonian god and (he believed) stirred up the typhoon that caused their boat to capsize, but Hubbard and Sara survived.

The next year, Hubbard would begin writing Dianetics, which mingled occultism with Atomic Age scientific jargon. By this time, Hubbard was claiming to be a nuclear physicist. Scientology would emerge a few years later.

 

 

New American Science

 On this day:

55
Roman forces under Julius Caesar invade Great Britain.
1346
Hundred Years’ War: the military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armoured knights is established at the Battle of Crécy.
1429
Joan of Arc makes a triumphant entry into Paris.
1768
Captain James Cook sets sail from England on board HMS Endeavour.
1789
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is approved by the National Constituent Assembly of France.
1883
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa begins its final, paroxysmal stage.
1920
The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution takes effect, giving women the right to vote.
1942
Holocaust in Chortkiav, western Ukraine: At 2.30 am the German Schutzpolizei starts driving Jews out of their houses, divides them into groups of 120, packs them in freight cars and deports 2000 to Belzec death camp. 500 of the sick and children are murdered on the spot.
1999
Russia begins the Second Chechen War in response to the Invasion of Dagestan by the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade.

***

It is liberty which is ancient, and despotism which is modern.--Germaine de Staël


***

A source familiar with the matter alleged to Reuters that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House because of her ongoing opposition to the Iran war.

***

In a recent Science study, a hibernation-like state in mice erased the state of more than half of their synapses, and yet the mice apparently kept their memories. Think anesthesia.

***

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a 2028 presidential hopeful, had welcomed data centers as an economic-development boon, boasting last year that an Amazon plan to build $20 billion in AI infrastructure was the "largest private sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania."
On Tuesday, Shapiro, whose Republican opponent in November is campaigning on halting data-center development, went from AI cheerleader to critic and signed an executive order imposing stringent new requirements for data-center developers.
He did the same thing with school vouchers, in favor while campaigning, opposed while governing.

 Calculatingly cynical.

***

Musk recently said Anthropic was leading the AI race, his company, Grok, was behind, and that soon AI would become too advanced for humans to control.

***

Paul Skenes pitched six innings of three-hit ball, and Oneil Cruz hit the first homer allowed by Mason Miller in over a year with two outs in the ninth Tuesday night, giving the Pittsburgh Pirates a 1-0 victory over the San Diego Padres.


***


New American Science

There is a plan to reorganize the country's science funding.

'American science has long been state-funded but not state-directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue: the system was decentralized and not under state control. This ..{new} ..rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science.'--Taborrok

The bureaucrat is, by his own assessment, confident, insightful, and high-minded. He is deaf to what history has stammered over and over: short-term control does not lead to long-term direction.

Arday in the Mist

On this day:

1609
Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
1835
The New York Sun perpetrates the Great Moon Hoax.
1894
Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.
1898
700 Greek civilians, 17 British guards and the British Consul of Crete are killed by a Turkish mob in Heraklion, Greece.
1914
World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts are lost.
1944
World War II: Paris is liberated by the Allies.
1945
Ten days after World War II ends with Japan announcing its surrender, armed supporters of the Communist Party of China kill Baptist missionary John Birch, regarded by some of the American right as the first victim of the Cold War.
1948
The House Un-American Activities Committee holds first-ever televised congressional hearing: “Confrontation Day” between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

***

Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.
Nothing earlier came remotely close.
It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.--mccloskey

***

On August 25, 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper.
Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day. Herschel had in fact traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, in January 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats. It was purported to be a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University. Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.
Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to recognize it as satire. Edger Allen Poe was deeply involved.

*** 

A surprising graph, ineptly reproduced:

American wages have fallen to roughly 43% of national income, the lowest share since 1970. For every dollar the U.S. economy produces, workers are receiving less of it than at any point in more than five decades.

The remainder has flowed increasingly toward corporate profits.

Interesting, especially when compared to McCloskey's quote.

***

South Carolina Republicans will decide Tuesday who will replace Sen. Lindsey Graham on the ballot in November's midterm election, after a rushed campaign in the wake of his sudden death in July. Graham's sister, Sen. Darline Graham, faces Rep. Ralph Norman in Tuesday's runoff vote.

The position is hereditary, right?

***

Combined spending related to old age and illness accounted for around 70% of total social spending in Germany last year, pushing the social budget to a new record high, according to an analysis by the Ifo Institute published on Monday.

***

2026 appears to be the first year in human history where the global population falls below replacement fertility. This includes times of war and epidemics. While many worry about climate change, Musk repeatedly argues that a collapsing birth rate is actually the biggest danger human civilization faces today.

***

Quebec's desire to preserve the declining French language has been a big factor in the trade dispute with Canada. For example, Bill 96 requires products sold in Quebec to have a French description and for trademarks using generic terms to be translated into French, while Bill 109 compels media services such as Netflix, Spotify and Apple to promote and prioritize French content for Quebec users.

***

Arday in the Mist

A note on Arday, abused and abuser:

Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.-- John McWhorter

"Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry..."

Now the academic who exposed all the fraud has been suspended, and crowds of Arday sympathizers have gathered to mourn him. This is sadder than the twisted Mangioni support. This is empathy in defiance of effort and quality, the same open-mindedness that tolerates goofy but harmless positions like Flat Earth groups and abolish-the-Constitution politics.

But a lack of intellectual and moral standards has erosive consequences at the bottom of the slippery slope.

Discussion and Credible Suspicions

On this day:
1565
The widowed Mary, Queen of Scots, marries Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Duke of Albany, at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1567
James VI is crowned King of Scotland at Stirling.
1588
Anglo-Spanish War: Battle of Gravelines – English naval forces under the command of Lord Charles Howard and Sir Francis Drake defeat the Spanish Armada off the coast of Gravelines, France.
1848
Irish Potato Famine: Tipperary Revolt – in Tipperary, an unsuccessful nationalist revolt against British rule is put down by police.
1921
Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party.
1967
Vietnam War: off the coast of North Vietnam the USS Forrestal catches on fire in the worst U.S. naval disaster since World War II, killing 134.
1981
A worldwide television audience of over 700 million people watch the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

***

"We are 1,000% going to go bankrupt as a country and fail as a country, without AI and robots. Nothing else will solve the national debt."--Musk, on AI productivity

***

Fauci is invoking the Fifth. The committee is divided on political lines, and the Democrats are talking about measles. 1 million Americans died and 15 million people died worldwide by a U.S. funded research program, and the country's political life has been altered, and these guys think this is a question of the next midterm election.

***

Is the Constitution compatible with the power and conformity requirements of socialism and Islamism?

***

Social experiments are a modern curse. They are soft with subjective criteria and uncontrollable variables. But an alluring study has come out of Scandinavia about retirement and more. 

The unexpected grief of retirement isn't losing a paycheck—it's losing the moment someone notices you're no longer there.  Retirement can remove a steady stream of evidence that a person is noticed, relied upon, and socially consequential. That a person matters.

Simple and impactful.

***

You can get a "Pirate Certificate" in phys ed at MIT. (Liz)

***

Discussion and Credible Suspicions

A recent article offers that Trump is part of a repeating wave of aristocrats and autocrats who have, since America's founding, have tried to control the country, once by a cabal including the Johnson family of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolution, once in the Civil War, once in the Roosevelt Years, and now, with Trump. 

The facts may require a bit of imagination. (The aristocrats during the Revolution were real-- they were British; the planters wanted to be aristocrats but actually weren't; not sure about the Roosevelt years, and most everyone who thinks he's an aristocrat now wouldn't admit to any connection to Trump.) Reaction to ambition and dominance are actually two of the stimuli of America's Revolution.)

The group Students for Life of America has spent the last two years collecting and analyzing water samples in different American cities, searching for evidence to support their claim that women having at-home abortions using the drugs and flushing fetal remains poses a threat to the environment.

That work culminated in the release this week of a study called "controversial" purporting to show “significant levels of mifepristone” contaminating the waterways of Austin, Texas; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Carbondale, Illinois. Despite acknowledging there is no proof the mifepristone detected impacts human health, livestock or the environment, the paper warns of potential “deleterious effects on human and animal biology,” including everything from autism to infertility.

A single study in a journal run by what is called "anti-abortion physicians."

As with global warming studies, such presentations can be insubstantial and thus hard to argue against, and no cause-and-effect scientific demands are claimed. They are suggestions, notions postulating unproved relationships in a media world of information blizzards. But, unlike the stimulating suggestions of curious college coffee houses that have, over the years, proffered everything from Utilitarianism to Bigfoot, these challenges are pointed and purposeful, fueled themselves with ambition and resentment. They are marketing plans and battlecries posing as hypotheses and academic examination.

This sort of information is possible only in a culture accepting of exaggeration and advertising in its efforts to permit free expression, but such an atmosphere demands a critical, discerning citizenry. They are meaningful only to the ecstatic and the gullible.

Consensus

On this day:

1613
The Globe Theatre in London, England burns to the ground.
1956

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 is signed, officially creating the United States Interstate Highway System.
1974
Isabel Perón is sworn in as the first female President of Argentina. Her husband, President Juan Peron, had delegated responsibility due to weak health and died two days later.
1974
Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with Bolshoi Ballet.
1995
Space Shuttle program: STS-71 Mission (Atlantis) docks with the Russian space station Mir for the first time.

***

“[16th century Grand Duke of Tuscany] Cosimo I de’ Medici supported art because he worried about getting into heaven as a rich man. I wish our guilty billionaires would support great classical art instead of stupid social causes.”--John Cochrane, economist at Stanford University,

***

Jill Biden's former husband was arrested for murdering his second wife. No further info is forthcoming, and the story has not pushed the Guthrie disappearance off the front page.

***

The birthright citizenship decision is expected this week.

***


Consensus

Every once in a while, when the world is bound by silliness and stupidity, it is worth hearing a smart guy sensibly explain an important thing. It is calming and edifying. Here is a section of Crichton's address to the D.C. Press Corps on a basic science concept.

"In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

...(An example is puerperal fever of pregnancy.)... One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them.

In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management.

In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him

South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology—until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2 . Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way." --from Crichton's Aliens Cause Global Warming lecture

Unit 731.5

On this day:

1215
Zhongdu (now Beijing), then under the control of the Jurchen ruler Emperor Xuanzong of Jin, is captured by the Mongols under Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Zhongdu.
1533
Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England.
1648
The Roundheads defeat the Cavaliers at the Battle of Maidstone in the Second English Civil War.
1660
Mary Dyer is hanged for defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1943
British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 is shot down over the Bay of Biscay by German Junkers Ju 88s, killing actor Leslie Howard and leading to speculation the downing was an attempt to kill British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

***

Tyranny can demand production but not innovation.

***

A meteor exploded off the coast of Massachusetts, causing a loud boom that could be heard throughout the state Saturday afternoon.

***

Bombs, drones, and missiles were exchanged over the weekend between the U.S. and Iran as they continue to redefine what a 'ceasefire' is.

***

Unit 731.5

Change within a free culture will always create new interfaces between the past and the future. Citizen interference with law enforcement, historically a recognized crime, is now apparently at least debatable. The vigilante now has an admired subtype, the vigilangione. Drone warfare has reshaped the requirements of the foot soldier. Technology — and a perceptible ethical slide — has changed our environment and us.

A biotech startup called Bexorg is extracting human brains just hours after death and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the tissue no longer has electrical activity, most of its key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.

According to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.

Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja said that the brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and other factors that make them a more realistic testing medium for drugs. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years,” Vrselja told Science.

Bruna Bellaver, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Pittsburgh, was also effusive.

“It’s a huge step up from mouse models,” she told Science.

A Copy, Sort Of

On this day:

1397
Geoffrey Chaucer tells the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II. Chaucer scholars have also identified this date (in 1387) the start of the book’s pilgrimage to Canterbury.
1897
The Aurora, Texas UFO incident
1912
Russian troops open fire on striking goldfield workers in northeast Siberia, killing at least 150.
1946
Syria obtains its Independence from the French occupation.
1961
Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of CIA-financed and trained Cuban exiles lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, intending to oust Fidel Castro.
1969
Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy.
1970
Apollo program: The ill-fated Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely.
1986
The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years’ War between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly ends. Ah, Europe.

***

Racial equity plans don’t build generational wealth—they redistribute resentment. They don’t heal historical wounds—they reopen them for political profit.--Chin

***

In 1897, in Arora, Texas, a flying metal craft crashed into a local windmill. The debris was unlike anything the townspeople had ever encountered—pieces of a strange, lightweight metal that was both strong and heat-resistant. As they sifted through the wreckage, they discovered something even more shocking: the body of a small humanoid figure, mangled and lifeless, lying among the twisted remnants of the craft.

Or so it is said.


***

An Obama-era loophole later expanded under Biden allows Chinese nationals to travel visa-free to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory. Pregnant women have exploited this policy to give birth on U.S. soil and secure American citizenship for their children.


***

Ukraine’s defenders have invented an entirely new way of war that’s costing Russia massively in blood and treasure to advance even a few yards at a time — and Kyiv’s “robot” forces are getting ever better.
Zelensky says autonomous systems have participated in over 22,000 frontline missions — sparing human casualties — these last three months, a period that’s seen Moscow driven back on multiple fronts.

For the first time in the history of this war, Ukrainian warriors captured an enemy position using exclusively unmanned platforms,” President Volodymyr Zelensky boasted to defense workers the other day.

Actually, it was the first time in history, period, that entirely remote-controlled robotic systems captured an enemy position, with no help from human infantry. (nypost)

***

A Copy, Sort Of

Current thinking is that studies show cloning is not what we thought. It is not the predictable, reproducible carbon-copy of a genetically identical precursor.

There are simply many more mutations in clones than in normally produced individuals. It could just be that the adult body cells being cloned accumulate more mutations than egg or sperm cells do. But Teruhiko Wakayama at Yamanashi University in Japan thinks the cloning process itself could be causing at least some of them.

A clone is meant to be a genetically identical copy, but a 20-year study has shown that this isn’t, in fact, the case. It reveals that clones have many extra mutations and, if you keep cloning clones, these build up to fatal levels. The findings have implications for the use of cloning in farming and for saving endangered animals, including efforts to recreate extinct species, as well as for the potential use of cloning technology in people.

“Unfortunately, however, while clones were once thought to be identical to the original, it has become clear that this is not the case, suggesting that there may be issues with their use,” Wakayama says. “Going forward, we need to demonstrate that mutations arising from cloning do not pose problems.”

Or, put another way, what are we doing?

The Science of Study

On this day:

1306
Robert the Bruce is crowned King of Scotland at Scone.
1814
War of 1812: In central Alabama, U.S. forces under General Andrew Jackson defeat the Creek at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.
1836
Texas Revolution: Goliad massacre – Antonio López de Santa Anna orders the Mexican army to kill about 400 Texas POWs at Goliad, Texas.
1915
Typhoid Mary, the first healthy carrier of disease ever identified in the United States, is put in quarantine, where she would remain for the rest of her life.
1964
The Good Friday Earthquake, the most powerful earthquake in U.S. history at a magnitude of 9.2 strikes South Central Alaska, killing 125 people and inflicting massive damage to the city of Anchorage.
1993
Italian former minister and Christian Democracy leader Giulio Andreotti is accused of mafia allegiance by the tribunal of Palermo.

***

“I have caused great calamities. I have depopulated provinces and kingdoms. But I did it for the love of Christ and His Holy Mother.”--Queen Isabella

***

In the 1960s and 1970s, Britain evicted as many as 2,000 people from Diego Garcia, so the U.S. military could build the base there.
The United Nations and the International Court of Justice have urged the U.K. to end its “colonial administration” of the islands and transfer sovereignty to Mauritius.
After long negotiations, the U.K. government struck a deal last year with Mauritius to hand over sovereignty of the islands. Britain would then lease back the Diego Garcia base for at least 99 years. But passage of the U.K.-Mauritius deal through Parliament has been put on hold until U.S. support can be regained.

***

The HBO Max series Harry Potter has an estimated budget of $100 million per episode.

***

The Battle of Horseshoe Bend was fought between the American Army under Andrew Jackson and the Red Stick faction of the Creeks who were aligned with the invading British (and the Iriquois organized around Tecumseh and his famous "Make war on their dead" speech). The Dreek War was savage on both sides. The Indian tribes, as a fifth column for invading forces, led to their harsh treatment later.

***

The Science of Study

Scientists are a group of people who believe that observation and experimentation leading to follow-up observation and experimentation, will lead to reproducible results and a more accurate reflection of reality. That is to say, scientists believe that there is a method that improves the accuracy of scientific research that removes bias. A consensus. A consensus we never hear from. (ibid)

One reason is that science is hard. It's hard to do well and is often hard to understand. The other reason is that science is judged unscientifically. Scientific results are seen as means to other, sometimes abstract, ends. Grants are applied for from third parties, often parties with an agenda. Political grease must be applied under the best of circumstances. And non-scientific positions demand their own narrative.

How often do you see studies with negative results reported?

Studies including unscientific motives are simple declarations at best, enchantments at worst.


 

Consensus, Filth Parties, and Betting Against the Spread

On this day:1199
Richard I is wounded by a crossbow bolt while fighting France, leading to his death on April 6.
1306
Robert the Bruce becomes King of Scotland.
1807
The Slave Trade Act becomes law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire.
1811
Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for publishing the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.
1894
Coxey’s Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington D.C.
1911
In New York City, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers.
1931
The Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.

***

Language is fossil poetry. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

***

Russia (the world’s largest supplier) has announced a one-month pause in ammonium nitrate fertiliser exports

***

Since her astonishing spontaneous combustion at the European Security meeting, AOC has been in a phase of quiescence. She knows her audience. 

The democracy forgets. Soon a consensus of American voters will say she never went to Europe.

***

Britain has become strangely concerned about Iran after it attacked Diego Garcia.

***

Coxey’s Army, officially named the Army of the Commonwealth in Christ, was a group of unemployed people who marched to Washington, D.C., in the depression year of 1894. Led by businessman Jacob S. Coxey, the group left Massillon, Ohio, on March 25, 1894, with about 100 men, accompanied by a large contingent of reporters, and arrived in Washington on May 1 with about 500. Coxey hoped to persuade Congress to authorize a vast program of public work programs. 

While ineffectual, it was the first significant popular protest march on Washington.

***


Consensus, Filth Parties, and Betting Against the Spread

The consensus elected Trump and Lincoln, nominated Goldwater (but not Harris), and picked Barrabas over Christ. It is the essence of the point-spread.

But in science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

In the 1700s, one woman in six died of puerperal fever after childbirth. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes and that he could cure them.

In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management.

In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him

South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at 'continental drift' for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology—until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2 . Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. (from Crichton)

Consensus has many suspected fathers. Arrogance. It breaks the tie. Who determines the consensus extends the influence of the aristocratic gatekeeper. Uncertainty is paralyzing: no one wants to invest in windmills if opinion will change in five years and invalidate the reason you built them. Consensus is clarifying and allows the public debate to move on. It allows the investment to move on.

Scientists are a group of people who believe that observation, experimentation leading to repeated observation and experimentation, will lead to reproducible results and a more accurate reflection of reality. That is to say, all scientists believe that. A consensus. 

A consensus we never hear from.

Another CO2 Opinion

On this day:
235
Maximinus Thrax is proclaimed emperor. He is the first foreigner to hold the Roman throne
1600
The Linköping Bloodbath takes place on Maundy Thursday in Linköping, Sweden.
1616
Sir Walter Raleigh is freed from the Tower of London after 13 years of imprisonment.
1760
The “Great Fire” of Boston, Massachusetts, destroys 349 buildings.
1815
After escaping from Elba, Napoleon enters Paris with a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000, beginning his “Hundred Days” rule.
1916
Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity.
1995
A sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway kills 12 and wounds 1,300 persons.
2003
2003 invasion of Iraq: In the early hours of the morning, the United States and three other countries begin military operations in Iraq.

***

Are you looking at me?--electron (Chris)

***

The Linköping Bloodbath was a significant event in Swedish history that took place on March 20, 1600, during the early stages of the power struggle between the Protestant Duke Charles (later King Charles IX) and the supporters of his nephew, the Catholic King Sigismund III of Poland. The execution of five noblemen, Sigismund's supporters, in Linköping was not merely an act of retribution but a defining moment that solidified Charles’s control over Sweden and marked the end of resistance against his rule. This event was a consequence of the broader conflict between Protestant and Catholic forces in Sweden and had lasting implications for the nation’s political and religious landscape.

***

Hachette Book Group, one of the largest publishers in the United States, pulled a forthcoming horror novel on Thursday in a decision that followed widespread allegations online that the author, Mia Ballard, relied heavily on artificial intelligence to write the book.

***

Walmart’s AI-powered pricing:

The retail giant has secured two new patents that give computer algorithms a bigger role in how prices are set. In January, Walmart was granted a patent for a system that can ‘dynamically and automatically’ update prices online based on shifting market conditions.

***

Rafael Flores Jr., the key piece in the Bednar trade with the Yankees, is hitting just .083/.241/.125 over 13 games this spring.

***.

Another CO2 Opinion

Steven E. Koonin is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He and four other scientists were assigned by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to provide clearer insights into what’s known and not known about the changing climate. The following is culled from Koonin's article in the WSJ

"The resulting peer-reviewed report is entirely our work, free from political influence—a departure from previous assessments. It draws from United Nations and U.S. climate reports, peer-reviewed research, and primary observations to focus on important aspects of climate science that have been misrepresented to nonexperts.

Among the report’s key findings:

• Elevated carbon dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.

• Complex climate models provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon dioxide levels. Overly sensitive models, often using extreme scenarios, have exaggerated future warming projections and consequences.

• Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.

• While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.

• Natural climate variability, data limitations, and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions.

• The use of the words “existential,” “crisis,” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.

• Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

Our work has attracted strong criticism, despite its grounding in established science. Almost 60,000 comments were submitted to the Federal Register during the month after its publication, and the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists filed a lawsuit to prevent the Energy Department or Environmental Protection Agency from using the report in decision-making. Most of these challenges have no scientific backing. Though scientists supporting the so-called consensus on climate change have organized several serious critiques, these at most add detail and nuance to our findings, without negating the report’s central points. They still merit response, which will form the next round in an overdue public debate on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate policies must balance the risks of climate change against a response’s costs, efficacy, and collateral effects. Reports like ours may draw a lot of anger, but our work accurately portrays important aspects of climate science. Acknowledging the facts is essential for informed policy decisions."

Anger in response to a scientific opinion is the virtual touchstone of subjectivity that should invalidate it.

This is an opinion, not a declaration. Not an edict. Science has a Darwinian element where lasting concepts emerge not from conflict but from different visions of ignorance. Small steps usually rise and fall, are parsed and organized and synthesized, until people of great insight--or one genius--organize a conclusion. 

The genius will be the guy whose only motive is truth.

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.

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."

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.