The O.M.B. Plan to Defund Science

... and anything else Trump doesn’t like. Under a new proposal, Administration officials could deny government grants to any group or project on the ground that it didn’t fit the President’s agenda.

The list of tactics the Trump White House has used against its perceived enemies is nasty and brutish but certainly not short. It includes indicting them (James Comey, John Bolton), investigating them (Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Gavin Newsom), threatening to investigate them (Chris Christie, Bruce Springsteen), and threatening to prosecute them (top election officials in all fifty states). The Administration has dispatched troops to cities the President doesn’t care for (Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland); sued universities that ticked him off (Harvard, U.C.L.A.); and withheld billions of dollars’ worth of funding from groups and projects that it deems “woke” or wasteful or not in line with Donald Trump’s priorities, whatever those at the moment happen to be.

Recently, the White House announced plans to codify its campaign of retribution. The proposal, which would dramatically increase the President’s power over how federal funds are given out, would hand Trump a “new cudgel” to “advance his partisan agenda and punish political rivals,” a letter signed by all the Democrats in the Senate charged. “The stakes could not be higher” is how the legal website Lexology put it.

The proposal in question comes, not surprisingly, out of the Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025. Titled, innocuously enough, “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance,” it would replace the current guidance for signing off on government grants, which generally leaves the task to civil servants and peer-review panels. Instead, the final say would go to political appointees. All discretionary awards from the federal government would have to be assessed by senior Administration officials, who could deny them on the ground that they didn’t fit the President’s agenda. Grants could also be terminated at any time for the same reason.

The rules would affect hundreds of billions of dollars in funding disbursed by agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Transportation Department, to pay for everything from local dance performances to massive infrastructure projects. As Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program director at the National Institutes of Health, noted in a recent Substack post, “Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends.” The proposal, she added, would put the “entire financial partnership between the federal government and the states under political control, without an act of Congress.”

The O.M.B.’s stated rationale for the new rules is to “improve transparency, accountability and oversight for Federal awards.” But no one—and this includes Trump appointees—seems to be buying it. Trump’s nominee to be the O.M.B.’s deputy director, Hal Duncan, noted at his confirmation hearing last month that the proposal would enable the Administration to prevent federal money from supporting “divisive D.E.I. ideologies.” At the same hearing, Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, accused the White House of trying “to turn the entire federal government into this one big slush fund to reward those aligned with the Administration and punish everyone else.” Among the many groups that have expressed concern about the changes are the National League of Cities, the School Superintendents Association, and the National Council of Nonprofits.

Research organizations have been particularly outspoken in their opposition to the O.M.B. proposal. “This latest move is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to buck the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely,” Sudip Parikh, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote recently. Among the proposed rules’ many provisions is one that would prohibit federal money from being used to support collaborations between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in many other countries. “By this guidance, America would not be allowed to be included in the International Space Station,” Colette Delawalla, who founded and heads the group Stand Up for Science, said in an interview. “The same goes for every type of weather monitoring and pandemic monitoring.”

Of course, even before the O.M.B. proposal was published, on the Friday after Memorial Day, the White House was finding plenty of ways to undermine science. Last year, the Administration terminated or froze nearly eight thousand research grants. Federal judges have ordered many of them to be reinstated; still, roughly a third, totalling some 1.4 billion dollars, have yet to be released, and may be gone for good.

For the current fiscal year, Trump proposed slashing the budget for the National Science Foundation by more than half. Congress rejected the cuts and essentially held N.S.F. funding flat; the Administration has responded by simply refusing to disburse the funds. According to the website Grant Witness, this year the N.S.F. is on track to make the lowest number of grants in more than half a century—roughly seventeen hundred. Meanwhile, the agency has been operating without a director for the past fifteen months. (Trump has nominated a financier with no scientific expertise to lead it, but the Senate has yet to confirm him.) And, in April, the President abruptly fired all twenty-two members of the N.S.F.’s science advisory board. It was dismantled just as it was working to finish an analysis showing that China has overtaken the U.S. as the leader in key scientific fields. The turmoil at the agency has affected scientists—and budding scientists—across the disciplines: recently, M.I.T.’s president, Sally Kornbluth, reported that the school’s graduate enrollment has declined by about twenty per cent. “It’s a loss for the nation,” Kornbluth said in a videotaped message to the campus. “When you shrink the pipeline of basic discovery research, you choke off the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures.”

The O.M.B. is aiming to finalize the new regulations by October 1st. (This is the case even though the office has already received more than ninety thousand comments on them and, under the law, is supposed to respond to all significant points before they can take effect.) It’s no accident that Vought wants the proposal enacted before the midterms; this would allow the Administration to continue to terrorize grant recipients even if Democrats gain control of Congress and start to exercise real oversight. 

by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Julia Koblitz on Unsplash
[ed. Making America Dumb Again. See also: The Trump Administration's Existential Threat to Scientific Research (Dresner); MAGA's attack on science is even worse than it looks (Smith); Gold Standard Lysenko (Gellman); and, Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule (Ginexi).]

***

[ed. How to submit comments: "Through social media, video calls, Substacks and petitions, scientists, universities and groups representing them have called for a flood of public comments. They’ve shared resources listing objectionable provisions they’ve identified in the more than 400-page proposal. They’ve provided online guides to the public on how to write comments pushing back on specific changes that would affect them." ~  Comments Flood OMB Proposal to Cement Political Control of Grants (Inside Higher Ed).]

No Great Loss

Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.

Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it. 

I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.

We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.

Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.

Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.

When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.

Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.

He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made. [...]

He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.

Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.

He was no patriot. [...]

I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.

He was a most contemptible man.

by Steve Schmidt, The Warning |  Read more:

Image: Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
[ed. Pretty much says it all. Everything you hate about Washington and politicians. I'd only add the same epitaph his golf buddy Trump used on the occasion of Robert Mueller's death: "Good... He can no longer hurt innocent people." See the official NY Times obit here. BBC here.]

Introducing Plan A

A Is For America

It’s increasingly clear that nobody has a plan for if this AI thing turns out to be real. Some people have suggestions, but they’re all things like “regulate a little more” or “regulate a little less” or “react to things as they come up”. This won’t be enough. Not just because things may move too quickly - although they will - but because in order to regulate or react, you need to know what you’re aiming for, and it’s increasingly clear that people can’t even visualize what AI going well could look like. What would it take to honestly tell our children that we rose to the occasion, to make the AI transition go down alongside the American Revolution and D-Day as one of our country’s finest hours? If your brain sputters and throws an error message at the question, isn’t that a problem?

It’s a total coincidence that Plan A comes out the week after America’s 250th birthday. It was supposed to come out earlier, but got delayed. Then it was supposed to come out later, but got pushed forward.

Still, the saying goes “A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives exactly when he means to.” And if anyone qualifies as wizards, it’s Daniel Kokotajlo and his team of forecasters at the AI Futures Project. I previously wrote about Daniel’s eerie accuracy over the 2021 - 2025 period. Since then, they’ve gained worldwide fame for their AI 2027 scenario, which predicted the rise and quick takeover of coding agents in early 2026, plus something like the fight over Fable1.

Plan A isn’t another prediction. It’s a wish list, a positive vision, a road map for navigating the future. It describes the best course of action that Daniel and the AI Futures Project can come up with, and what would happen if we took it.

“Really? You got America a policy paper for its 250th birthday? Doesn’t America already have enough policy papers?” Sort of, but it’s not exactly a policy paper. It starts in a timeline similar to that of AI 2027, on track for a poorly-controlled intelligence explosion that either ends the world or dooms it to permanent techno-oligarchy. But this time, America is blessed with some extra foresight and determination, and makes only good choices (all non-Americans behave naturally, including trying to thwart America when incentivized to do so). It gives a year-by-year description of this best-of-all-possible-worlds, from now through 2040, as predicted by the best AI forecasters alive, with over a dozen supplements explaining all the implementation details.

This is a crazy thing to try releasing. Daniel gave me several justifications for doing it anyway, but the one I remember most is that it’s supposed to be a floor. When some politician proposes a data center ban, or says that we have to gut safety regulation to compete with China, or promises a job retraining program, think to yourself: does this person have a vision for where all of this ends up? If so, is it as good as Plan A? If not, consider demanding that they do better.

I did a lot of writing for AI 2027 and was listed as a co-author. Some of my writing made it into Plan A too, but it was a bit less. The difference is of degree rather than kind, but because of this - and to give me more latitude to discuss it the way I like with less PR blowback - we decided not to put me as a co-author this time. I continue to be proud of having a part in this, small as it may be.

(related: everything in this post is my opinion only, and not officially endorsed by the AI Futures Project)

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: AI Futures Project

[ed. Important. Here's that link again: AI 2040: Plan A. See also: Plan A: Suggestions For Further Work (AI Futures Project). Also: What Should Be Done (Hyperdimensional). And especially, Introduction for and Reactions to Plan A (DWV).]

Moving On

The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected.

At first there was rage at America’s betrayal, when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada, threatened Greenland, imposed tariffs on its friends and began his campaign to undercut NATO, which continued at its latest meeting this week, in Ankara, Turkey. Now, a strange feeling is emerging in some of the countries that used to be known as America’s allies: Optimistic determination. There’s an established principle in chess that applies to geopolitics as well: “The threat is stronger than the execution.” The possibility of U.S. abandonment of the world order was terrifying. The reality turns out to be a new beginning.

Canada, America’s neighbor, was the first to see it, naturally. Since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, American bullying on trade has been ferocious. As a result, Canada has had to consider what American favor or disfavor is worth. The Bank of Canada recently ran a scenario in which the United States imposed a 25 percent tariff on everything Canada exports to the United States. Canada’s growth of its gross domestic product would slow by about 2.4 percentage points, which over a period of adjustment is well within Canada’s capacity. A disaster, to be sure, but not the end of the world. That’s the worst-case scenario.

A recent study by economists at the Canadian Shield Institute, commissioned for the podcast “Gloves Off,” which I host, found that Canadian merchandise exports to the United States last year fell by over 30 billion Canadian dollars, (21 billion U.S. dollars), or over 5 percent of exports to the United States. But that loss was offset by nearly 29 billion Canadian dollars in new demand from the rest of the world. When services were included, total exports from Canada increased by almost 7 billion dollars. America can make whatever threats it likes, but if you have the aluminum or oil or potash, somebody will buy it.

It’s not just Canada. European equities outperformed American equities in 2025, and surged in the first two months of 2026. The European Defense Industrial Strategy, put in place in 2024, is keeping more of Europe’s rapidly expanding military spending within the continent. And after the threat of the European Union’s anti-coercion instrument, the so-called trade bazooka allowing rapid counter tariffs, forced Mr. Trump to back down from his early round of Greenland threats, the Europeans now know that they have their own Strait of Hormuz — their own pain point that can make America flinch.

American military threats have the same diminishing power. If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that when the United States decides to achieve a geopolitical aim by means of military force, you can make a pretty safe bet that aim will not be achieved. Against all odds in a war with the United States, Iran’s corrupt and cruel regime has maintained its power and is now receiving sanctions relief. While the U.S. military invents whole new genres of defeat, the Gulf states, and their airports, have now learned during the Iran war exactly what an American security guarantee is worth.

At the NATO meeting in Ankara, where Mr. Trump berated allied nations — especially Spain — and repeated his call for U.S. control of Greenland, the leaders of Spain and Denmark took Mr. Trump’s comments as the idle threats they self-evidently are. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada may well say that Mr. Trump “won the argument” on NATO members raising their spending levels for defense. The reason they are spending more now may be that they know that American military power is in retreat. American support, whatever that even means anymore, guarantees nothing.

It’s not just NATO. Bureaucracies once defined by their lethargy are moving at surprising speed to limit their exposure to both the U.S. government and the companies that serve as outposts of American power. Since taking office a little over a year ago, Mr. Carney’s government has made just over 100 international trade deals. The European Union has expanded its defense procurement deliberately to avoid integration with American military forces. Disentanglement from American technology will be the thorniest knot to undo, but the work is already underway on this, too: The European Union has switched from Google to the French Qwant as a default search engine in its official systems, while Belgium and Finland have both moved away from Amazon Web Services.

The post-American reality is not a world without America, of course. As a geopolitical actor, the United States has become a kind of lumbering zombie — a beast that can be startled into reflexive actions but lacks higher functions. Much of the world understands that another round of elections in the midterms or in 2028 won’t solve anything. The American people are so divided that the future will be chaotic whoever wins, many outside the United States feel. They fear a sane Republican or Democratic president would not be able to guarantee a stable American policy or consistent application of even the vaguest principles in international relations.

“What is America?” is no longer a grand theoretical question. It is a practical matter. Governors of a number of U.S. states have rational political programs. American institutions survive. Some Americans have even kept their ideals. But as for the entity known as the United States of America, there’s no there there. There’s no America to deal with. An increasingly isolationist America is no longer the leader of the free world. How can it be, when it’s no longer the leader of itself? [...]

“The threat is stronger than the execution” was the wisdom of Aron Nimzowitsch, a leading figure of the hypermodern school of chess. The reason it applies to the chessboard is that all the time and energy you spend trying to figure out how to avoid a disaster turns out to be worse than the disaster itself. Once the worst has happened, you can focus on incremental improvement rather than avoidance. You can become active rather than passive. In geopolitics, too, so much of power is the appearance of power.

Everybody who believes in freedom and democracy and the dignity of the person and the right of nations to self-determination should be working toward the destruction of the United States’ capacity to project power — to end the strange hold it has over the world so we can all move on. So far, no one is helping more than the United States itself.

by Stephen Marche, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Aaron DuRall

Take the Money and Run

Fire Any Financial Advisor Who Tells You to Utilize a Trump Account

I’m serious, and this is not just my disgust with everything Trump. There is no good reason for the overwhelming majority of people in the country to ever put a dollar in a Trump account for their kids.

To be clear, I’m not in favor of tax-sheltered accounts in general. They strike me mostly as a very inefficient way to accomplish public goals, in this case making education more affordable. The more efficient route would be to have more public funds go to support public colleges and community colleges. [...]

In addition, tax-sheltered accounts put a lot of money in the hands of the financial industry. Tens of billions of dollars go to the people and companies who administer these accounts, creating a pointless layer of wasteful bureaucracy.

To be fair, the Trump accounts limit fees to 0.1 percent of assets, far lower than is charged by many accounts. This is an important point. People can get low-cost funds in other accounts also. Stock index funds generally have the lowest fees, and most people would be wise to take advantage of them. People will tell you that they will beat the market, but most won’t, and you’ll just end up wasting money in higher fees and trading costs.

But that has nothing to do with individuals’ decisions on where to put their money. For better or worse, Trump accounts exist. The question is whether people will be helping their kids by putting money into them. And, as I said above, the answer for almost everyone is no.

The main reason is that we already have 529 accounts for the purpose of saving for a kid’s education. The big difference between the accounts for this purpose is that it is possible to withdraw money from a 529 account, if it’s needed, where it is not possible to withdraw money from a Trump account for any reason, until the kid turns 18.

People do pay a penalty for taking money out of a 529 early, but at least they can have access to it if they need it. And unexpected events do happen. People can lose a job, have serious medical expenses, or get divorced. These and other unanticipated situations can require people to dip into whatever savings they have. With a 529 plan, they can use the money if they really need it. With a Trump account, they are out of luck.

It is important to recognize that withdrawals for non-education purposes are fairly common. A recent study by Vanguard found that 2 percent of accounts had an unqualified withdrawal in an average year. If an account is open on average for 20 years, this would mean that 40 percent of accounts have an unqualified withdrawal. People don’t expect bad things to happen, but they do.

Also, since the penalty is based only on the earnings portion of the 529 plan, not the whole sum in the plan, in most cases it is likely to be small. Suppose someone pulls $5K out of a 529 plan, where earnings are currently 40 percent of the money in the plan. That means they would pay taxes on $2,000, plus a penalty of 10 percent. If they are in the 10 percent bracket, their taxes would be $200, and their penalty would $200. If they were in the zero bracket, say because they had lost their job, they would only pay the $200 penalty. That compares to being unable to touch their money at all in a Trump account. (The money in a 529 is not taxable at all if used for educational purposes. The earnings in a Trump account are taxable.)

It’s also worth mentioning that it’s not even possible to change asset allocations in a Trump account. Suppose your kid is 17, one year too young to make a withdrawal. If you’re worried there is an AI bubble likely to burst, and you would rather have your money in Treasury bonds, you’re out of luck. Trump accounts won’t let you make the switch; you have to go down with Elon Musk and the rest of the market.

The silliest argument given by proponents of Trump accounts is that they can be rolled over into an IRA to allow for lifelong wealth accumulation. So can the money in 529 accounts, up to a ceiling of $35,000.

The Trump gang makes a big issue of the $35,000 ceiling, but this is something only elite types with lots of money would care about. Very few people ever accumulate more than $35,000 in a 529 account, and the vast majority of people who do will find some education-related expense that would reduce the value of the account to less than $35,000. Remember, even food and housing can count as education-related expenses.

But let’s say someone ends up with an amount over $35,000 that they can’t use for education-related expenses. Suppose they have $40,000 that they want to roll over into an IRA. In this situation they would have to pay a 10 percent penalty on the amount over $35,000. That would be $500 on the $5,000 difference.

They would also have to pay taxes on the $5,000. The beneficiary is the one receiving the money, so they would be paying the tax. Since they are just beginning their working career, they likely have a relatively low income. This means they will almost certainly be in the 10 percent or 15 percent tax bracket, and quite possibly the zero bracket.

So, this is the bad scenario that Trump account proponents say it is important to avoid, and therefore skip a 529 and put your money in a Trump account instead? That seems pretty whacky, and why you need to fire your financial adviser if they suggest putting money in a Trump account.

To be clear, take the $1K that Trump wants to give newborn kids. It would be a much better use of tax dollars if we provided food and medical care to kids from low-income families than giving out $1K checks to millions of families that don’t need it. But you aren’t going to change the policy by turning down the money. If it bothers you, donate the money to a good cause, but do take the money and don’t ever put another penny in a Trump account.

by Dean Baker, Common Dreams |  Read more:

Image: Koala imagess via

[ed. More details on the accounts here.]

The Pre-Crime Machine

The Seminar Room

At an AI seminar at my university, I submitted three photographs of myself: one frontal, one profile, one smiling. Within a minute or so, the system had generated a video of me. What I watched was not a rough approximation. The micro-behaviors of my face, the slight asymmetry in my smile, the way my eyes crease at their corners, were all reproduced with an accuracy that made my skin cold. I had fed it three still images, and it handed me back myself.

I am a psychologist. I know what behavioral prediction means. I understand what large datasets do to the concept of individual uniqueness. But sitting in that seminar room, watching my own face move on a screen I had not animated, something shifted in my understanding of where we are and where we are going. I did not feel excitement. I felt the specific dread of a person who has just understood the nature of the cage being built around him.

Let us be honest about what is happening. The question is not whether artificial intelligence can predict human behavior. It already can, with a precision that should terrify every person who still believes in the concept of a private self. The question is who owns that capacity, whose interests it serves, and what kind of world they are constructing with it.

We Are More Predictable Than We Realize

Human beings are, as any serious scholar of behavioral science knows, far more predictable than we like to believe. We are creatures of pattern, of repetition, of legible habit. The self we experience as sovereign and spontaneous is, in aggregate, astonishingly consistent. Subtle cues in our environment routinely trigger our behavior without our awareness, while we experience the resulting action as a free and sovereign choice. Big data revealed this about us long before the current generation of AI systems arrived to exploit it.

What has changed is the scale and the granularity of the exploitation. Researchers have already demonstrated that AI systems can predict the sound of a person’s voice from a photograph alone, inferring the acoustic properties of the throat, the shape of the oral cavity, the structure of the face, and from these physical facts reconstructing something no still image was ever supposed to contain. We did not consent to this inference. We did not know it was possible. The technology did not ask us.

The invasion runs in both directions. As far back as 2022, before most people had any reason to pay attention, AI could take nothing but the sound of your voice and reconstruct your face. You were already legible from the inside out

The Pre-Crime Machine

Now consider what becomes possible when you feed an AI system not thousands but millions of hours of therapy footage, prison recordings, detention center surveillance, clinical interviews with people who have committed acts of theft, violence, or predatory sexual abuse. The AI does not think. It does not judge. It finds patterns in facial microexpressions, in the geometry of eye movement, in the timing of certain muscle groups, in behavioral signatures so subtle that no human observer could consciously detect them. And then it generalizes. It builds a model of what a future thief looks like before the theft. What a future abuser looks like before the abuse. It assigns probabilities to faces.

Connect this to the smart cameras already embedded in our streets, our transit systems, our shopping centers, our workplaces. Cameras that do not merely record but analyze, in real time, the faces and bodies of everyone within their field of view. The alert that fires to a police control room does not say this person has committed a crime. It says this person is behaving with seventy percent similarity to the behavioral profile of someone who will. Philip K. Dick imagined this in 1956 and called it science fiction. We have built it and call it public safety.

A Mask Changes Nothing

But facial recognition is, by now, almost the least of it. The more consequential technology is gait recognition, a biometric system that identifies individuals not by their face but by the specific, anatomically determined way they walk. The curvature of the spine, the rotation of the hips, the particular rhythm of a stride, these are as unique as a fingerprint and far harder to disguise. Gait recognition systems currently deployed can identify a person from security footage even when the face is turned away, obscured by a hood, or hidden behind a mask. The protesters who covered their faces at demonstrations believed they were protecting themselves. They were not. The system had already read them from the ankles up.

Gait recognition tells the system who you are, even when you believe you are hidden. What comes next moves deeper. Layer on top of this the emerging field of real-time emotion recognition, AI systems embedded in that same CCTV infrastructure that classify emotional states from facial expression, assigning labels of agitation, hostility, fear, or concealment to the faces of people who have done nothing except exist in a public space.

And the system is getting better.

Accuracy is what billions of dollars of investment buys, and the investment is relentless. The day is approaching — closer than most people understand — when the system reads the thousand markers encoded in your face, your gait, your microexpressions, and states with ninety-five percent certainty that you will commit a murder. That you will commit a rape.

Not that you have. Not that you tried. That you will. And when that threshold of confidence is reached, the pressure to act on it will be overwhelming. Society will accept it as grounds for intervention, for detention, for pre-emptive removal, and pre-crime will stop being a dystopian metaphor and become official state policy. A system that labels your face as hostile does not need to be right today. It only needs to become right. And it is. [...]

Palantir and the Architecture of Control

Palantir is not a hypothetical. It is a company with a current market valuation measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, deep contractual relationships with the United States military, the CIA, the FBI, the Mossad, MI6, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a product suite specifically designed to do what I have been describing.

Its Gotham platform aggregates data from tax records, DMV files, employment history, educational records, immigration status, subpoenaed social media accounts including private messages and location history, and synthesizes this into individual dossiers that can be searched by tattoo, by neighborhood, by association, by movement pattern. Its immigration enforcement application, called ELITE, populates a map with what it designates as deportation targets and assigns each one a confidence score estimating the probability that a given address is where they currently sleep. The word target is theirs, not mine.

This is not a system built for national security in any meaningful sense of that phrase. National security was the pretext used to build it. What it actually does is make the population legible, sortable, and actionable to whoever holds the contract. Right now, those contract holders include an administration that has already demonstrated its willingness to use these tools against students who attended the wrong protest, academics who signed the wrong letter, immigrants whose only crime was existing without documentation in a country that spent decades depending on their labor.

by Karim, BetBeats Newsletter |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

Thoughts on a Funeral

I've just visited the largest funeral in history, where millions mourned Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader who was assassinated by the US-Israeli coalition along with members of his family. It is practically impossible to understand what this scene is like, or what it means, unless you're here. I've met people from around the world who've come to pay respects, including many from across the West. The crowds pouring in are endless, and grow larger and more intense into the night. 

From Tehran's Mosala, there are indignant calls for vengeance, displays of sorrow and defiance, protest, songs and marathons of poetry. These days of mourning will amount to one of the most resonant moments in the history of anti-imperialist movements. 

Everyone I've spoken to believes war will return to Iran before long, and none trust the MOU with the US. But they are confident their country can deter another assault. They see their own citizens' mobilization as an integral component of Iran's survival. 

If the assassination of Khamenei was designed to spur regime change, his funeral demonstrates how badly it has backfired. And the crime may blow back in ways its historically illiterate authors could have never imagined. 

What we're witnessing in the Mosala consolidates the Islamic Republic and its revolutionary society as a political reality that can not be erased through regime change war or sanctions. This is a turning point in the region that will echo for a generation.

by Max Blumenthal, X |  Read more:

Image: X

Good Vibrations

Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.

A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.

It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.

The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.

But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.

Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.

Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading.

There are any number of ways to mark the shift back: the president’s abysmal approval ratings, including a –50 net approval rating among independents; the fact that Democrats, hated as they may seem, now have a pretty good chance of winning control of the Senate; the hugely unpopular Iran war coming to such a humiliating end.

But the most vivid might be the planned celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. A year or so ago, we were told that MAGA had won the culture wars, but barely a year later, when organizers with close ties to the White House tried to put together the Great American State Fair, the biggest stars they could attract were Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice and the living half of Milli Vanilli. Most of the performers who were announced quickly pulled out, then got called “libtards” by a cabinet secretary for doing so, and the lineup was repopulated by fillers like the girlfriend of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Motocross bikers did flying tricks on the White House lawn — which called to mind Evel Knievel rather than any less ironic embodiment of American greatness — and the White House staged a high-profile Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn that Americans judged inappropriate by a 3-to-1 ratio. And that was before the fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory by declaring that Michelle Obama was a man, as Joe Rogan giggled beside him.

A year ago, the U.F.C. spectacle might have seemed like a mark of right-wing cultural ascendancy, even though fewer Americans watch combat sports or motocross than they do tennis, hockey, soccer or golf; even though Americans have, by and large, hated Mr. Trump’s rash remodeling of the White House property; and even though Mr. Rogan has spent 2026 criticizing the president on deportations, corruption, wars and foreign policy. But by the summer of 2026, it looked like the kind of imperial indulgence that tends to mark the end, not the apogee, of a given reign.

What happened? One explanation is that Mr. Trump simply squandered his advantage. His tariff crusade produced a burst of inflation. DOGE was a dud. His invasion of American cities in the name of immigration enforcement was so violent and aggressive, it seems to have alienated even those voters who wanted more serious action at the border. And his attacks on foreign countries exposed American military vulnerability, drove a big spike in the price of oil and other products and lost him any claim he might have had to being an antiwar president (always a dubious claim but a relatively widely held one nevertheless).

But look at Mr. Trump’s declining approval ratings, and you see a pretty steady line, from about plus-12 net approval on Inauguration Day to almost negative 19 this month. On particular issues, the decline has gone even further. On inflation, for instance, his net approval has fallen by almost 40 points. Same with demographic subgroups, perhaps most conspicuously those said to be central to MAGA’s claim on the country’s future.

His net approval with young voters has fallen by as much as 50 points, depending on the poll. His net approval among Black Americans was –9 on Inauguration Day and has fallen to –50 today, according to Decision Desk. Among Hispanic voters, said to be a new MAGA bulwark, the president is about 20 points underwater. In his first term, he grew steadily more unpopular but held on to the white working-class voters serving as his base. This time, their patience wore thin quickly, and their support for the president collapsed like everybody else’s.

This may seem like normal postinauguration decline, but the fact that Mr. Trump would be following a normal path toward unpopularity is itself a kind of narrative violation.

During his first term, pundits often marveled at the durability of his base: How could it be that someone so noxious and erratic, peddling such punitive and destructive politics, retained the unswerving backing of so many Americans? To some, he looked like such a transformative figure that the old rules no longer applied; others called him Teflon Don.

But in his second term, there isn’t much of a mystery or obvious superpower. Mr. Trump is in the same neighborhood as George W. Bush was at this point in his second term and no more popular than Joe Biden was at the end of his presidency, and the longer Americans live with Mr. Trump, the more they dislike him. Part of this is the result of voters seeing promise in his 2024 campaign that he was never likely to fulfill, rather than the more predictable path — toward punitive and incompetent governance laced through with corruption and self-dealing. But if Trumpism in office has done so much damage to MAGA’s popularity, it means, among other things, that the support wasn’t that robust in the first place.

As it turned out, according to YouGov, the only sustained period in which Mr. Trump’s personal favorability ratings were positive, since they started measuring them in early 2016, was in the one or two months around Election Day 2024. He was elected again by just 1.5 percentage points and did not even win a majority of votes in the midst of a global anti-incumbency wave.

We heard a lot about the red shifts along the Rio Grande and among New York’s working class, but those populations have swung so far back that they helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in New York City and have helped revive the perennial Democratic dream of a blue Texas. Project 2025 looked on Inauguration Day like a policy Death Star, but Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive actions has been stymied in the courts, and these days it doesn’t seem that he spent the Biden years building a willing army of ideological loyalists. Instead, he can’t manage to find people to hire for very important jobs. Is that supposed to be a mark of populist integrity, that actual staffing proves to be an unsolvable problem?

On the surface, the rightward lurch of tech oligarchs appears perhaps the stickiest shift of the last cycle, with many leading figures in Silicon Valley still talking about tech accelerationism and how much liberals hate progress — and one of them, the most outspoken Trumper, becoming the world’s first trillionaire along the way. Yet even this phenomenon looks, on closer scrutiny, more like the drift of a few tech leaders than the arrival of an entirely new partisan landscape across the industry or region.

In 2024, tech titans donated much more to Republicans than they did in other recent years, then funded and attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, celebrating it as a return of sanity or perhaps masculinity. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where almost 1.5 million votes were cast in 2024, he won only 3,500 more votes than he did in 2020. Does that look like a culture-spanning vibe shift? Or like the strategic alliance of a relatively small number of wealthy executives and the candidate they believed would happily let them write their own ticket, policywise? Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even wearing his chain anymore.

MAGA was never just a political movement. It pulled anti-establishment sentiment into a bundle with hard-line evangelicals and a new breed of gender traditionalists, unapologetic and rapacious entrepreneurs and those who spent the last decade bristling against the cultural reign of what the progressive wonk Matt Stoller recently called — pretty rudely — “HR lady” liberalism.

In the cultural sphere, those shifts are both a bit harder to measure and perhaps more enduring than the ballot-box version of MAGA. Affirmative action looks genuinely dead, and the SAT is once again a requirement for admission at even those elite universities that briefly made it optional in the name of social justice. Big business still stands cocky and empowered.

Artificial intelligence still mostly holds sway in policy, and the immense wealth of its biggest cheerleaders may mean that hands-off consensus will endure, though the backlash against A.I. and data centers has been astonishingly swift, too, with four times as many Americans saying they were concerned about the A.I. future as were unconcerned about it. Presumably the culture of self-dealing and corruption won’t endure unchanged if a Democrat takes the White House. But it’s also hard to believe — given the ambient presence of gambling apps, for instance — that on questions of self-interest and acquisitiveness the country will return to the standards and propriety of the Obama years. [...]

Hollywood has taken a few steps away from peak woke, but we haven’t seen anything like the pivot from 1970s New Hollywood cynicism to 1980s American flag blockbusters. Corporate America has gotten a bit less gung-ho about D.E.I. but still looks to conservatives to be impossibly woke. The temperature of climate alarm has cooled, but American concern about global warming is just a couple of points off its peak. And while the internet has grown a bit more right wing overall, it’s hard to know if any of that is natural drift, given how much more money has been spent on purchasing platforms and recalibrating algorithms.

The most worrying pattern may be around gender and sexuality, which seems significant enough it can make the whole MAGA phenomenon look like an expression of gender backlash. As recently as 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men surveyed said they believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” but two years later, that number was 48 percent. Among Republican women, the number jumped 14 points.

Support for same-sex marriage among all Americans has dropped six points since 2023, but the drop is powered by Republicans. In 2022, 56 percent of them told pollsters that same-sex relations were morally acceptable; in 2026, that figure was just 35 percent — lower than when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell in 2015 and lower even than when Mr. Obama belatedly came out in favor of gay marriage in 2012. In 2016 many liberal Americans believed that Mr. Trump was the reactionary product of the country’s ongoing race conflicts. A decade later, gender looks like a much more illuminating skeleton key. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Erika Kirk is a favorite punching bag of the country now.

But nationally, even these declines can be measured in just a few percentage points, and outside MAGA, it’s not clear how much, if any, ground has been lost since the peak woke years. Democratic men have grown perhaps one or two percentage points more reactionary in their views of gender since 2019, and Democratic women haven’t moved much at all. The share of Democrats saying gay sex is morally acceptable is higher than it was in 2019, as is true for independents, though each is down a bit from a Biden-era peak.

Shifts of just a few points matter, of course, for culture as well as for politics. For obvious reasons, the past 10 years can’t really be called anything other than the Trump era, and Americans will be dealing with the fallout for a very long time — in culture and in politics. But in retrospect it seems we might have gotten ahead of ourselves in tabulating all the things, beyond who was in power, that had really changed about the country as a whole.

Perhaps this sounds like liberal cope; probably at least some of it is. But it is also a reminder that partisan outcomes do not offer precise and comprehensive X-rays of the country, that politicians are rarely the avatars of national meaning we want them to be, that even in a time of hyperpolitics most Americans are pretty disengaged from partisan squabbles and that whenever we try to erect a simple new story about the country on the basis of a couple of percentage-points shifts, we should probably expect the foundation to give way pretty quickly beneath our feet.

by David Wallace Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Pretty thorough and thoughtful essay. See also: Trumpland and Inverted Totalitarianism (SheerPost).]

Addicted to War

Whether it’s an addiction or an illness I’m not sure, but all too many of us and our leaders, it seems, have war fever (and a distinctly high temperature). And here’s the strangest thing: when you consider our history since World War II or look around this planet any day of the week, it seems as if all too many of our leaders simply can’t help themselves. They just (or do I mean unjust?) have to go to war. And it evidently matters not at all that the major powers on this planet can no longer seem to win any war they start. Not one in recent memory. And yet, explain it as you will -- an addiction, a fever, a grim desire -- at least two crucial leaders at this very moment, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, seem incapable of stopping themselves.

And here’s the OMG news story that shocked me the other day. At the New York Times, a piece by reporter Constant Méheut had this headline: “The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I.” And here’s how his report began: “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable.”

No longer, unfortunately.

And Russia is anything but alone. After all, my country spent three years in bloody strife in Korea, nearly 9 years in Iraq, almost 20 in Vietnam, and almost 20 more in Afghanistan (and, mind you, that’s hardly the full list of its various conflicts) without a victory in sight. Of course, only recently, “my” president launched the latest all-American conflict, this time with Iran and with an utterly predictable lack of success given our history over the last 80 years. That war is now in a strange, distinctly unsettling holding pattern, and who knows what will come next?

In fact, given the history of this country and war since, in September 1945, it emerged victorious from World War II (having dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end it), it should be considered beyond remarkable that Americans would still be so willing to let staggering amounts of our tax dollars be eternally “invested” in the U.S. military. That’s year after year after year without the slightest bit of protest. The latest figure offered by Donald Trump: a Pentagon budget that’s no longer the usual almost a trillion dollars (itself nothing short of shocking) but an even more eye-opening (or do I mean eye-watering?) $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars.

And how strange, don’t you think, that, in a world where we humans already seem to go to war endlessly with other human beings, we’ve also evidently decided to go to war with this very planet itself? Of course, I’m thinking about what’s come to be known as “climate change,” but should undoubtedly have been labeled something more like “our war on the climate” (or “climate war”). And worse yet, war among us humans has proven to be perhaps the most devastating way of all to also make war on this planet itself, since nothing releases fossil fuels into the atmosphere quite the way war does. In fact, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. military is now believed to be “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world”!

After all, whatever it doesn’t accomplish, the one thing that war actually does do remarkably successfully (along with killing so many of us and destroying villages, towns, cities, and sometimes whole countries) is pour ever more fossil fuels into our atmosphere and so add immeasurably to the overheating of this planet. Honestly, could we humans be more dystopian?  [...]

It is truly strange, don’t you think? I’m referring to “my” president’s never-ending urge, the second time around, to commit mayhem on this planet. (And yes, I keep putting “my” in quotation marks because I didn’t vote for him and I never wanted him to be president of the United States.) And yes again, every day there’s something, whether it’s the killing of a supposed Latin American gangster-in-chief, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife, the blasting of Iran, the increasing threats against Cuba, or... well, I can’t even imagine what truly lies in our future (and, count on it, neither can Donald Trump), but nothing good, that’s for damn sure.

And hey, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of war (which, as a label, is historically one hell of a lot more accurate than secretary of defense), couldn’t have been blunter about our situation back in 2025: “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards and readiness.”

Yes, there is, it seems, nothing worth the bother but war and more war. That, sadly, is indeed our world and it seems like we just can’t help ourselves. War is and always has been a human addiction -- or should we think of it as an illness? War fever, perhaps?

by Tom Englehardt, Substack |  Read more:

Image: A long wall of acceptance. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, Washington. (David J. Jackson, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons)

What is the United States of America Now?

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is ... so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.

It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.

The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.

It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).

It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.

King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.

Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.

But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.

It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.

The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.

But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.

Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.

But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.

On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.

Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]

These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.

I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.

by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty

[ed. For a more optimistic view: America Should Love Itself Again (Common Reader).]

Non-Technological Constraints to AI

Market manias have patterns. The most powerful ones are genuine technological revolutions pushed far beyond rational limits by crowd psychology.

By mid-1999 it was already clear to veteran investors and students of economic history that the dotcom bubble had reached parabolic insanity.

The speculative momentum was still unstoppable – and would run a lot further – but grown-ups knew by then that few of the high-flying start-ups were ever going to generate a viable revenue stream. The authentic success stories would have to fight each other in a cannibalistic struggle for survival.

We are nearing the same point today with AI, although this time for a different and overwhelming reason. The $20tn (£15tn) valuation of hyperscalers, chipmakers and the larger AI complex, has wildly outpaced the electrical infrastructure needed to run data centres and sustain the technology on anything like the projected scale.

The physical constraint is rock hard. “Our grid in the United States hasn’t had any meaningful upgrade since the 1970s,” said Bobby Majumder from the industrial law firm FBT Gibbons.

The threat to AI stock mania is not so much lack of energy – though that is serious – but rather the global bottleneck of transformers, substations, switchgear, transmission lines and all the unsexy stuff we rarely think about, leaving aside the acute shortage of skilled workers in the US able to install and run such kit.

A single big campus in the data centre hub of Hays County, Texas – an area where I once played a lot of golf (misspent youth) and know well – can use 10 million gallons of water a day for evaporative cooling and power generation, draining the Edwards Aquifer that also supplies the Austin-San Antonio corridor.

“Nobody is talking about cooling; nobody is talking about water,” said Majumder, speaking at the recent Marshall & Stevens forum on energy infrastructure. “The farmers are not going to be happy at all about you pumping down their aquifer for cooling.”

There are other obvious catalysts that could puncture the bubble. Stubborn US inflation – input prices are rising at the fastest pace in four years – may force the Federal Reserve to stop its “stealth-QE” via bill purchases. The bond markets may hold Kevin Warsh’s feet to the fire as he takes over the institution.

Inflation may stop Scott Bessent, the poacher turned gamekeeper now running the US treasury like a hedge fund, from using the $8tn money market to help soak up massive fiscal deficits at the peak of the economic cycle.

Cheaper “commoditised” AI from the likes of DeepSeek in China may start to undercut American rivals, threatening the implicit pricing model behind today’s equity valuations. If it is true that DeepSeek v4 can achieve 80pc-90pc of the performance of Anthropic’s Claude at 10pc of the cost, you start to see the problem.

Liaquat Ahamed, author of the wonderful Lords of Finance covering the Great Depression and now releasing his new book 1873, likens the AI boom to the American railway mania after the Civil War. Routes were duplicated in the rush for dominance.

Costly lines passed through sparsely inhabited regions where there would never be enough human traffic in time to justify the scale of debt issuance. [...]

Hyperscalers can try to leapfrog the grid bottleneck by building their own power plants, but that will not solve the problem either, at least not in time to alleviate the burden of fast-mounting and opaque AI debt.

It took 17 years to plan, license and build the recent Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Costs ballooned from $12bn to $30bn. Small modular reactors may be cheaper per gigawatt – don’t hold your breath – but none yet exist in the West, and there will be no serious supply chain until circa 2040.

Shale gas frackers can drill until they drop, but that makes no difference if there are no gas turbines available on the world market. The waiting list for heavy-duty models used in combined-cycle plants has stretched to seven years, although hyperscalers with the deepest pockets are jumping the queue for a fat fee with 2030 delivery dates. [...]

The AI revolution is real. The language models are fabulous. The technology will make economic life almost unrecognisable by mid-century.

But the internet revolution was also real in 1999 before the Nasdaq index dropped 77pc, flushed out the commercial nonsense and overshot in the other direction.

Don’t track Nvidia chip orders if you want to know where the AI market is heading. Track the metaphorical picks and shovels that make it all possible. 

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Richard Newstead
[ed. See also: How bad is AI for the environment? (Yale Climate Connections).]

Cadillac Desert

CADILLAC DESERT: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. By Marc Reisner. Illustrated. 582 pp. New York: Viking.

It's unlikely that most taxpayers will read ''Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,'' but they should. It's a revealing, absorbing, often amusing and alarming report on where billions of their dollars have gone - and where a lot more are going.

The money has gone into Federal water projects in the Western states - some of the projects awesome, some scandalous but all with an uncertain future. More than a century ago John Wesley Powell, the nation's pioneer hydrographer and an explorer of the Grand Canyon, concluded that so much of the West was virtually desert that if all the flowing water in the region were applied to it, the water would spread too thin to make much difference.

But that didn't daunt several generations of pioneers, who believed the selective harnessing of available water could yield miracles. And it did. It virtually created modern California, making it the nation's most populous state and one of the world's prime agricultural areas. On a smaller scale, similar marvels were wrought in other states - Arizona, Utah, Colorado, the Dakotas, Montana and even Nevada.

It all came about less through engineering skill than through political prestidigitation. There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable. President Carter tried to challenge it with his ''hit list'' of questionable water projects and came out of Congress's threshing machine too battered to swing a second term.

The taxpayers' problem is that the chronicle of this hocus-pocus normally emerges in inconclusive bits and pieces, in reports based on sanctimonious handouts from the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers that are heavy on how they are saving the world, light on what it's costing - and often opaque about the justification for the projects.

Marc Reisner, a former staff writer for the respected newsletter of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has put the story together in trenchant form. He details the Machiavellian competition between the bureau and the engineers, recounts how huge sums have been spent to benefit small numbers of influential people and suggests painful days of reckoning lie ahead.

Parts of his account are oft-told stories, such as Los Angeles's snaffling of water from farmers 300 miles away. But much of his material is fresh and powerful, taken from such previously unplumbed sources as the bureau's ''blue envelope'' (secret correspondence) files and a marvelous, hair-down interview with Floyd Dominy, its free-swinging former commissioner. The 1976 collapse of the Teton Dam in Idaho - an instance of a structure that never should have been built - is detailed for the first time, with all its implications of carelessness and incompetence. Mr. Reisner also makes clear that much Western irrigation has been based on reckless ''mining'' of water in the great Ogallala Aquifer, which extends into seven states, from Texas to South Dakota. The severe depletion of this eons-old unrenewable resource, he says, has been matched in other areas by a reckless indifference to the accumulation of salts in soils. This has killed farmland and caused drainage crises like the current mess at California's Kesterson Reservoir, where pollution has poisoned the wildlife.

''None of this,'' Mr. Reisner writes, ''is to say that we shouldn't have gone out and tried to civilize the arid West by building water projects and dams. It is merely to suggest that we overreached ourselves.'' He maintains: ''What federal water development has amounted to, in the end, is a uniquely productive, creative vandalism. Agricultural paradises were formed out of seas of sand and humps of rock. Sprawling cities sprouted out of nowhere. . . . Its worst critics have to acknowledge its positive side. . . . The cost of all this, however, was a vandalization of both our natural heritage and our economic future, and the reckoning has not even begun. . . . Who is going to pay to rescue the salt-poisoned land? To dredge trillions of tons of silt out of the expiring reservoirs? . . . Somewhere down the line our descendants are going to inherit a bill for all this vaunted success, and . . . it will be a miracle if they can pay it.''

by Gladwin Hill, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. A classic, and the bill's about to come due.]

Clearing the Market

Cushing, Oklahoma is the pricing point for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude and the physical hub through which US oil supply flows to refineries across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. As of 25 June, inventories have fallen to 19 million barrels, below the operational minimum (~20mb) that the industry considers the threshold for physical stress. The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has fallen to 331.2 million barrels, the lowest since 1983. According to the IEA, global inventories are at their lowest seasonal point in recorded history.

The market has priced almost none of this. 

- Two Spikes Coming?

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• The ceasefire holds, but the underlying deal has stalled on the points that determine whether reopening is sustainable.

• Iran is entrenching control over the strait through mechanisms – mines, fees – that outlast any ceasefire.

• Iran’s institutions can’t agree among themselves, so even a signed deal still may not compel the IRGC, hence the physical reopening the market is pricing isn’t coming on the MOU’s own timetable.

• Meanwhile the price is being held down by three cushions – released barrels that had been trapped in the Gulf, SPR drawdowns, and Chinese reserves and reduced imports – that are all finite, so the mispricing identified in Two Spikes Coming hasn’t resolved.

• New evidence this week – inbound tanker numbers, floating storage, operator testimony – confirms the physical picture rather than the price picture.

The argument in Two Spikes Coming rests on a race, between stockpile depletion and production restoration, with Cushing already near its operational floor and reserves elsewhere running out within one to two months. The past week has not changed that race, but it continues to indicate the reserve draws are still outpacing the return of flow.

The MOU signed on 17 June was supposed to settle the reopening. Instead it has settled into a pattern of brief traffic windows followed by a strike, a US response, and a return to the negotiating table to manage the aftermath. The Ever Lovely was hit on 25 June inside the safe corridor the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and Oman had set up along the Omani coast days earlier. The US struck Iranian missile, drone, and radar sites the next day. A projectile then hit the tanker Kiku and Iran fired at US positions in Bahrain and Kuwait. The US next expanded its target list to surveillance, communications, and minelaying infrastructure. Both sides then turned up in Doha this week and kept communicating, which suggests the ceasefire itself is intact, but does not indicate the deal underpinning it is progressing.

The two sides are not talking directly to each other in Doha. American and Iranian delegations are meeting Qatari and Pakistani mediators separately, a step back from the direct sessions held in Switzerland two weeks earlier. Iran’s stated priority is Clause 11, the release of frozen assets, and President Pezeshkian has stated that $6 billion of the $12 billion held in Qatar will be returned, though it is not yet clear on what terms or even whether the funds have moved. Iran will not discuss its nuclear programme until those funds move, but if that money moves without a matching concession on enrichment it will reduce the leverage the US has left for that discussion. Trump has claimed a deal was close at least 38 times between late March and early June, according to a CNN count. Doha is yet one more round in that pattern.

The strait’s governance is where the deal has stalled most. Iran’s foreign minister Araghchi has said the removal of “obstacles” in the strait, and its reopening, rests with Iran alone. The IMO’s Secretary-General has said Iran laid an estimated eighty mines across the main shipping channel. The timetable for clearing them is set by Tehran regardless of what Doha produces. The Joint Maritime Information Centre raised the strait’s security threat level to “substantial” this week, citing mine risk and clearance uncertainty. Oman has separately delivered a service-fee proposal to Washington and its allies. An Iranian official has called the fees mandatory, but a regional diplomat has called them voluntary. Either way, Iran can prioritise the shippers who comply and delay the ones who do not, so the dispute over wording matters less than the authority it establishes.

Inside Iran, more than sixty of the Assembly of Experts’ roughly 88 members signed a statement on 28 June warning negotiators against crossing Khamenei’s red lines, control of the strait among them. The Assembly’s own secretariat publicly distanced itself from the statement within hours, which means even the body meant to speak for Iran’s clerical establishment cannot agree on how hard a line to take. Pezeshkian spent the same week in Qom telling senior clerics the opposite, that the MOU was an economic win worth defending. And while the president was making that case, the IRGC struck a vessel inside a corridor the foreign ministry had just endorsed. Three arms of the same state, pulling three different directions, in the same seven days. No single part of the Iranian state can bind the others to one position, hence why incidents the negotiators did not authorise keep recurring.

WTI is trading around $70, close to its level before the war began, and Morgan Stanley has cut its Brent forecast on the basis that Hormuz is reopening faster than expected, projecting a 2027 surplus of 4.8 million barrels a day. “Strip away the narrative,” the bank’s analysts wrote, “and read only the prices. They describe a market that has weakened across the board.” Morgan Stanley may be right about a near-term glut – outbound cargo has genuinely surged since the MOU – but the mistake is extrapolating that burst into durable recovery. The analysts are getting the direction backwards because a weak price does not necessarily prove a weak market. Rather, in this case it means a market distorted by reserve draws and supply disruption, and both of those aspects are temporary props under the market, not foundational features. That makes Morgan Stanley’s case much harder to sustain.

Roughly 170 million barrels of crude that had been trapped in the Gulf cleared the market once the MOU allowed it out. The SPR is drawing at a pace that leaves perhaps three to six weeks of room. Chinese crude imports have fallen by something like 5 mb/d since March, while China’s visible commercial stocks have barely moved, which means the shortfall is being met from reserves that do not appear in any published series. Cushing itself fell to 18.96 million barrels in the week to 19 June, the lowest since October 2014 and near the roughly 20 million barrels traders treat as an operational floor. A partial reopening of the strait does not fix that on its own.

by Nick Wade, State of Play |  Read more:

Image: EIA, HFI Research

[ed. See also: Trump Paused War to Manipulate Oil Prices (video/YT). And, this: New Report Reveals True Extent of Devastation of US Fifth Fleet HQ in Bahrain with a special status update on F-35 readiness. Priceless. (Another good(?) read here).  I don't think this war is going the way they thought it would.]