Slow Motion Disaster

Water in the Colorado River is dwindling to levels that haven’t been seen in decades, and the seven states whose residents and farmers depend on the river can’t agree on a fair way to divide up what’s left.

Negotiations are going nowhere despite more than six months of ongoing talks, plus cajoling by the Trump administration, which twice gathered governors in hopes of a breakthrough that never came. States are already sniping at aspects of a water-use plan the federal Bureau of Reclamation is set to unveil this summer and impose later this year, and they’re threatening to sue each other over water deliveries, raising the prospects of prolonged legal battles just as Western states face demands to sharply reduce water use.

The river’s system of reservoirs and canals was designed for the climate and population of a century ago. It has strained to adapt to a declining water supply and enormous growth in communities in the river basin, despite improvements in efficiency that mean even booming cities are using less water than in the past. Water rights that may date back to the arrival of European settlers also complicate matters. And a year of extreme drought is making it even harder to decide how much each state can draw from the Colorado.

It is not for lack of effort.

“We have invested time, effort and money in trying to facilitate a multistate agreement,” Scott Cameron, the acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said in an interview this month, moments after signing a deal that could one day augment the basin’s supply using desalinated water from a plant in Carlsbad, Calif.

But a day later, Cameron told a conference of water experts in Boulder that states have repeatedly rejected proposals for compromise. He said he doesn’t expect any state to be pleased with the measures the federal government is expected to take to delay or prevent reservoirs from dropping to critical lows in the short term.

“I think we’ve succeeded in making everyone unhappy, and maybe making everyone mad,” he said.

About 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of cropland depend on the Colorado for drinking water and irrigation, but its flow has gradually diminished over the past two decades as the climate becomes warmer and more arid across the West. Now the arcane system of water rights governing the river entitles each state and Mexico to far more water than is actually available. The rules prioritize the longest-established uses of water, in many cases dating to the 1850s and 1860s.

But the states have been unable to agree upon water cuts that would reflect the new reality.

In the river’s lower basin — which includes growing urban areas in California, Arizona and Nevada; vast agricultural operations; and the nation’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead — communities have agreed to significant reductions in recent years. A new proposal that the states are asking the federal government to consider would curtail use even more, but the lower basin states and tribal nations have asked upstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming to cut back, too.

But anytime winter snowpack in the river’s headwaters is meager, the upper basin is forced to use less water, so those states have resisted committing to permanent annual water use cuts. While a 1922 compact divides the United States’ share of the river’s flow equally between the two basins, the less-populated upper basin consumes significantly less water each year than the lower basin.

The stalemate between the basins has deepened as the stakes rise. An existing water-use plan expired this winter, and the states missed key deadlines to agree on a new one, which must be in place by October to avoid chaos and confusion in water deliveries.

A mild winter and extreme spring heat left winter snowpack so depleted that Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, which straddles the upper and lower basins, risked falling below levels critical for hydropower until federal officials began emergency actions to shift water around and keep dams generating electricity. [...]

So far, Trump administration officials have resisted imposing any plan unilaterally, though Cameron said the bureau had “not been passive.” It has offered $454 million for water conservation projects across the basin, using money left over from the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed under President Joe Biden and included $4 billion for drought response in the West. Cameron said less than $100 million is left to help pay for more water savings.

“We have floated, three times, solutions that we thought represented something that the seven states could agree on,” Cameron said. “Turns out we were wrong.”

With the states unable to agree, the federal government is set to put new guidelines in place. Cameron said he expects Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose department includes the Reclamation Bureau, to release a plan in July to govern use of the river for the next decade. Before that plan becomes final, it would need approval from a White House that has so far not gotten very involved in Western water issues.

A draft plan released in January included a range of options, some of which would make significant cuts across the lower basin, where the federal government’s control of reservoirs gives it more power to cut off flows. The alternatives would force water shortages, mostly in the lower basin, based upon reservoir conditions. They include varying levels of cutbacks that would leave some risks of unplanned emergency water shortages in the lower basin.

Arizona is especially vulnerable because of its heavy reliance on the reservoirs and its relatively junior water rights.

As the talks stall, the threat of litigation is looming larger, even though negotiators have said they are hoping to avoid court battles that would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive and unpredictable. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, warned Wednesday on Capitol Hill that he would seek to block federal drought relief funds from any states that sue over Colorado River water.

In Arizona and Colorado, state officials have been readying lawyers and setting aside public funds for a legal fight over water. Earlier this year, television ads paid for by a coalition of Arizona water users warned that the state is “being targeted” with crippling cuts. Officials in both states said litigation was a real possibility.

In public comments submitted in response to the federal proposal, the states have hinted at contradictory legal interpretations of the 1922 compact, offering dueling arguments that both suggest that the Trump administration was at risk of violating that document. In dispute is whether the compact requires upper basin states to deliver a set amount of water downstream, regardless of conditions, or if the compact simply bars those upstream states from using more than they are officially allotted. [...]

Because the 1922 agreement is only about 1,700 words long, Entsminger suggested that the states might never agree on what exactly each of them is entitled to — and that was all the more reason for them to find common ground without resorting to litigation.

by Scott Dance, Seattle Times/NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Chet Strange /The New York Times
[ed. For a fictional and nightmarish vision of what a full blown water fight between states might devolve into, see: The Water Knife. For a detailed historical account (along with all the back-stabbing and dirty dealing) that produced water allocations and the sprawling cities we see now in the West, see: Cadillac Desert.]

SignalTrace: New Levels of Surveillance

If you thought Flock cameras were concerning, meet what comes next. 

A company called Leonardo has developed a system called ELSAG SignalTrace. It broke into public awareness just days ago and is already being marketed to law enforcement agencies across the country. It makes Flock Safety look modest by comparison. 

Here is what SignalTrace does: 

It clips sensors directly onto existing license plate reader cameras — the same poles, the same hardware already installed in your community. No new infrastructure required. A software and sensor upgrade is all it takes. 

Every time you drive past one of these upgraded cameras, the sensor sweeps up the unique electronic identifiers of every device in your vehicle. Your cell phone. Your smartwatch. Your wireless headphones. Your fitness tracker. Your laptop. Your tablet. Your car's own infotainment system. Your tire pressure sensors. Your vehicle's Bluetooth hotspot. 

And your pet's microchip. 

Every one of those devices emits a signal. SignalTrace captures those signals, timestamps them, ties them to your license plate, and stores them in a searchable database for future investigative use. The result is what Leonardo calls an electronic fingerprint — a unique profile built not from your face or your name, but from the constellation of devices you carry with you every day. 

Leonardo announced the ELSAG EOC Plus patent as early as May 2024, describing it as an electronic detection system for identifying people of interest through electronic device signatures. SignalTrace is the commercial product built on that foundation. The patent came first. The marketing came after. The sales calls are happening now. 

Here is where it gets worse. 

SignalTrace is explicitly designed to track vehicles even when the license plate cannot be read. If your plate is obscured, dirty, or misread — it does not matter. The system identifies your vehicle by the electronic fingerprint of the devices inside it instead. The plate reader becomes optional. The surveillance does not. 

The strategic advantage for police agencies is adoption friction. SignalTrace can be pitched as an extension of an existing ALPR ecosystem rather than a wholly separate surveillance buildout. That is exactly what happened with Flock. License plate readers went in first. Video came later through a software update. Nobody voted on the expansion. Nobody was told. SignalTrace follows the same playbook — attach to existing infrastructure and expand what it captures without requiring a new procurement process, a new vote, or a new public conversation. 

Who is Leonardo and why does their background matter? 

Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions is not a Silicon Valley startup. It is the American subsidiary of Leonardo S.p.A. — one of the largest aerospace, defense, and security conglomerates in the world, headquartered in Rome, Italy. Recent public market estimates place Leonardo S.p.A.'s market capitalization at approximately €29.76 billion — roughly $32 billion USD. For context that is nearly four times Flock Safety's valuation. [...]

What is ELSAG — and why SignalTrace is more dangerous than it sounds. 

ELSAG is Leonardo's license plate recognition product line — the company's core law enforcement technology that has been deployed across American communities for over two decades. ELSAG cameras are what you think of when you picture a standard license plate reader. Fixed cameras on poles. Mobile units mounted on patrol vehicles. Solar powered. Cellular connected. Reading plates and logging vehicle data. 

ELSAG is already deployed in all fifty states. Virginia State Police is a documented customer. Leonardo holds statewide procurement contracts in New York, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania among others, and is listed on the federal GSA schedule available to agencies nationwide. Their cameras are already on street poles and patrol vehicles across the country — quietly, routinely, and largely without public awareness. 

SignalTrace is not a new camera. It is not a new company. It is an upgrade — a sensor that clips directly onto ELSAG cameras already in the field and adds a new layer of data collection on top of the license plate reading that was already happening. The same pole. The same hardware. A new sensor attached to it that now also sweeps up every electronic device signal in every passing vehicle. 

That is precisely what makes it so significant. The deployment barrier is almost zero. Any law enforcement agency that already has Leonardo ELSAG cameras can add SignalTrace capability without purchasing new infrastructure, without a new procurement process, and — depending on how their existing contract is written — potentially without returning to their city council for approval. Sound familiar? It should. It is the exact same function creep mechanism that allowed Flock Safety to add video streaming, vehicle fingerprinting, and AI people search to cameras that were originally sold as simple plate readers. 

The infrastructure goes in first. The capabilities expand later. The public finds out last — if at all. [...]

The data retention problem. 

With Flock we at least know the default data retention period is 30 days — though the contract language grants Flock a perpetual license to use that data regardless. With SignalTrace the situation is more opaque. Leonardo's product materials state that all data collected may be uploaded to the EOC server and archived for future queries and analysis — with no published retention limit. How long does Leonardo store your electronic fingerprint? Who has access to it? Can it be shared with other agencies or federal entities? Can it be purchased by data brokers? Leonardo's materials do not answer these questions. That silence is itself an answer. 

The retail and private deployment problem. 

Leonardo is actively marketing SignalTrace to shopping malls, retail centers, and private businesses — not just law enforcement. Their materials describe deploying SignalTrace in parking lots and inside shopping centers to track individuals involved in organized retail crime. By identifying and correlating electronic devices carried by suspects, retailers can gain critical insights into criminal patterns. 

That means SignalTrace sensors could be on private property you visit every day — your grocery store parking lot, your shopping mall, your workplace — operated by a private company with no law enforcement oversight, no warrant requirement, no public accountability, and no notification to you. Your electronic fingerprint captured every time you park your car. Stored indefinitely. Shared with whoever the private operator decides to share it with. 

The no-plate-needed problem — and what it means for pedestrians. 

The implication of being able to track a vehicle by its electronic fingerprint without reading the plate goes further than most people realize. Deliberately obscuring your plate — which some people do to avoid surveillance — provides zero protection against SignalTrace. The sensor does not need the plate. It reads your phone. 

More critically — the sensor does not know or care whether the device it is reading is inside a vehicle or in the pocket of a pedestrian walking past the pole. A person walking down the sidewalk past a SignalTrace-equipped camera is emitting the same Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals as a person driving past in a car. The system's sensors capture signals from whatever passes within range. Whether that includes pedestrian device capture is not addressed in Leonardo's public materials. The fact that it is not addressed is worth noting. [...]

SignalTrace does not aggregate your vehicle's movements. It aggregates your personal electronic identity — every device you carry, every signal you emit — and ties it permanently to a location, a timestamp, and a plate number. It does not track your car. It tracks you. Personally. Individually. Every time you pass a sensor, whether you are suspected of anything or not. 

by BlackBetty (Anonymous), X |  Read more:

Image: Natasha Eliya/Michigan Daily via

[ed. Public service announcement. Are they actually able to do this with the weak signal of wifi and Bluetooth? Wouldn't be surprised. See also: SignalTrace just weaponized your AirPods against license plate readers nationwide (Cambridge Analytica).]

Introducing Peace 1.0™

“President Trump said he hoped the war with Iran would soon be in the ‘rearview mirror’ on Tuesday, even as the terms of a cease-fire he signed remained secret and Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that it was ‘a very general document’ with few details.” – New York Times

- - -

After several profitable quarters from our line of War Mongering products, which include blowing up water facilities and a school, as well as temporarily disrupting one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments, we’re excited to announce the rollout of our new product: Peace 1.0™.

Peace 1.0™ is a revolutionary conflict-reduction platform that leverages diplomacy, reduced bombing, and reopened shipping lanes to create value for shareholders, with potential benefits for people living throughout the region.

We’re starting with a regional rollout in Iran, but early testing suggests that customers respond positively to features like the absence of active warfare, longer lifespans, and a fragile sense of security.

FAQ

What is included in Peace 1.0™?
Peace 1.0™ includes a one-page memorandum, several unresolved technical questions, and a loose promise to figure out what the agreement actually means at a later date.

How is Peace 1.0™different from previous versions of peace?
Unlike legacy peace, Peace 1.0™ improves on the original by providing many of the same benefits while adding exciting new features, including higher oil prices, increased regional instability, damaged infrastructure, and a sense that war might break out again at any moment.

Is Peace 1.0™ a fully developed product?
Following startup best practices and to get our product to market faster, we’re releasing a minimum viable product that removes nearly all of the details customers typically associate with a peace agreement.

Why are the contents of Peace 1.0™ a secret?
New products always have a few technical glitches, like a lack of specifics on how the product actually works, and we don’t want customers to delay adoption until Peace 2.0.

What metrics will determine whether Peace 1.0™ is a success?
We’ll be tracking key performance indicators such as the number of missile launches (single digits are ideal), lower insurance premiums for cargo ships, and whether peace feels slightly less certain than it did before.

Are you planning on rolling out Peace 1.0™ to other parts of the world?
Our War Mongering division is working tirelessly to identify potential growth markets. Until then, we’ll be holding off on a global launch.

Are you discontinuing your War Mongering line of products?
Absolutely not. War Mongering products, combined with Peace 1.0™, work symbiotically to drive fast-growing revenue. In fact, every successful rollout of Peace creates exciting new opportunities for future wars, while every war creates additional demand for Peace. We’re so confident in this business model that our long-term goal is to become the world’s leading provider of both.

by Kate Chrisman, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The Art of the Nuclear Deal (McSweeny's).]

Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost

Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.

The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.

Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”

“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.

Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.

Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.

Until today.

“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.

“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”

The United States and Israel ostensibly went to war with Iran last summer over the prospect of the Tehran regime developing a bomb, and that same threat has supposedly been at the center of America’s largest military operation in decades—but now the highly enriched uranium isn’t very valuable? The president wants it for “psychological” reasons? (This is reminiscent of his comment that America should seize Greenland because it was “psychologically” important to him.) Does the commander in chief understand what he’s saying? More important, will Iran keep tons of highly enriched uranium under this new deal or not?

“The biggest thing,” Trump said today, is that “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” That’s fine, except that it didn’t have one before, either, and now it has an even greater incentive to get one. But nuclear issues are very complex and technical, so let’s move on to Trump’s comments about something less complicated: Middle Eastern politics.

Once again, the president seemed unable to comprehend either the situation or his own words. No one outside of the Trump administration has yet seen the final memorandum of understanding that Trump and the Iranians have signed, least of all, according to some reports, the Israelis. If the outlines of the deal are in line with the administration’s own talking points, it’s bound to cause serious agita in Jerusalem: The terms reportedly require a cessation of Israeli hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a tricky condition considering that Israel was not a party to the negotiations. This is probably why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday that Israel would maintain its presence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria for “as long as necessary.”

Trump, in other words, is trying to deal away Israel’s right to defend itself, treating it less as a sovereign country and more as a kind of 51st U.S. state run by an annoying governor who needs to get with the program. But what if Iran’s proxy Hezbollah attacks Israel? According to the president, the Israelis need to calm down, and he minimized Hezbollah as “a little pinprick out there that constantly rears its head.” [...]

Trump has never shown very much concern about the conduct of Israeli military operations anywhere (including the war in Gaza, which he viewed primarily as a public-relations problem). But now that he needs to rein in Jerusalem at Tehran’s behest, he has taken the position that the Israelis are causing too much damage in Lebanon. And in a stunning reminder that alliances for Trump are only expedients, he pivoted to praising al-Sharaa and criticizing Israel, saying that if Israel “can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job.”

This kind of flip-flop illustrates Trump’s view of global politics: States are just a bunch of playing cards that he can rearrange at will, which makes watching him talk about foreign policy this way like watching someone cheating at solitaire. Even now, after many years as president, he is constantly frustrated to find out how little leverage he has when other nations refuse to abandon their own interests and do as he commands.

Trump’s comments about the Middle East may not make any sense, but one thing that has emerged in 4K clarity is that the only world leader who got pantsed worse than Trump in all of this was Netanyahu. No one should pity Israel’s prime minister: He brought this situation upon himself and his nation. Netanyahu, along with the Iran-war hawks in the United States, somehow thought that he could be smart or flattering or persuasive enough to avoid the inevitable burn that comes from trusting Donald Trump. Netanyahu refused to see that Trump, when it comes to self-interest, is as predictable as a sunrise: When something he’s involved with goes bad, he walks away and lets others suffer the chaos he’s created. [...]

None of this makes any sense, except as desperate rationalizations from a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat. Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth, but evidence is mounting that on the most important questions of war and peace, the president of the United States seems to be losing his grip on reality itself.

by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. No coherent foreign policy other than flaunting American military power and trying to make Trump appear 'strong' (even if it's just taking out a few fishing boats). It really is that simple (minded). See also: Introducing Peace 1.0™ (McSweeny's).]

The Birthday Party No One Wants

Why Americans aren't celebrating the semiquincentennial

Throughout our history, Americans of all stripes have crafted and recrafted the country’s origin story, fervently recommitting themselves to our nationalist mythology—and using it for their own purposes. Anniversaries have long been natural showcases for these narratives of continuity: at the centennial in 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant traveled to Philadelphia to celebrate the past but used the event to unveil the futuristic new steam engine; that same year, suffragists revised their Declaration of Sentiments, a radical document advocating women’s rights that was also an homage to the country’s foundational text.

And so it should be astonishing, even to the most jaded or irate Americans, that so many are sitting out our 250th birthday party this July, rejecting both the obligatory ritual and the occasion for devotion or reclamation that the anniversary has represented in the past. In 2026, in the era of Donald Trump, it now seems that the tradition of consecrating our origins is a spent force.

This is in stark contrast with the bicentennial—the country’s last major birthday. 1976 was not an obvious time for patriotic celebration. Richard Nixon’s executive malfeasance and the failed militarism of the Vietnam War were fresh in memory. The generational revolt that dominated the sixties had ebbed, and the country was stuck in an interregnum—between the end of the New Deal order and the start of the neoliberal era. Yet back then, nostalgia seemed capable of meeting the moment: Americans observing the 200th anniversary turned enthusiastically to the founding. As the legal scholar Aziz Rana has noted, there was a “widespread public desire to close the book on the recent past and on critical interrogations of the actual national experience.” In 1976, celebrations of the deeper past were everywhere, from arts and educational programming to pure pageantry; virtually no American could have escaped them. And even many critics of the country seemed to share a hankering for an American consensus grounded in origins. In her censorious bicentennial address, the philosopher Hannah Arendt dwelled on the breakdown of recent years but implored Americans to live up to their “glorious beginnings two hundred years ago.”

Fifty years later, we are again facing chaos in the White House and a morass of global warfare. And we are again facing an interregnum: neoliberalism as we’ve known it has lost credibility, and there is no clear sense of what will replace it. But today’s mood is decisively different. The 250th anniversary falls during the ongoing perpetration and revelation of executive crimes and misdemeanors. Joe Biden did not turn out to be Gerald Ford: whatever bland tonic he offered the anxiety-ridden nation didn’t last (if it worked at all). Among the many ways that Trump has set himself apart from previous presidents is by adopting a nonchalant and shifting relation to the American past. Part of the reason may be that he is too palpably narcissistic to engage in ancestor worship: his interest in the 250th celebration seems to be as much about observing his own birthday, on June 14, as the country’s. He has put up statues of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin in the Rose Garden, but he mentions the founders and framers far less regularly than his immediate predecessors in either party. (His praise for other presidents is all over the map: he lionizes Andrew Jackson and William McKinley while also lauding Franklin D. Roosevelt.) Strikingly, he is a nationalist with little romantic investment in those who first launched the nation; to the extent that he’s nostalgic, it seems to be for the 1950s or the 1890s—not the 1770s.

Trump has many detractors, but if anything, liberals seem even less interested in reclaiming the founding spirit than their great foe. During Trump’s first term, many critical commentators coalesced around “normcore”—a return to the normalcy of the status quo ante, and a form of restorationist nostalgia. But in 2026, liberals are barely rousing themselves for this year’s ceremony of origins. In part, this may be thanks to a greater awareness of how the conditions that preceded Trump also produced him; the consensus seems to be that the only way out of our interregnum is through it, to something else and something new. And at a practical level, liberals’ attention is consumed by more immediate crises. In this regard, the mood of 1976 seems almost calm: Ford’s pardon of Nixon caused an uproar, but it pales in comparison with Trump’s constantly proliferating outrages. During the age of print newspapers and nightly broadcasts, even bad news didn’t have the same effect. For Americans now, glued to their feeds and screens and siloed by our fragmented information landscape, there is not enough emotional claim or free time to linger in political nostalgia. Both the seventies and today are examples of what political scientists call a “disjunction”—the failure of a political regime—but unlike in 1976, when the New Deal order had given way, the endlessly roiling turmoil of our current era is experienced as the result of one man’s caprice, not of shadowy structural forces apparently beyond anyone’s control. [...]

Increasingly less enamored of the founding, liberals and progressives seem happy to let Trump have all the claims on its memory he wants, even if—or just because—he uses them as occasions for spectacle. And these spectacles, such as a UFC cage match on the White House lawn, confirm that the flaws in the American union are simply too great to pretend that mindlessly ratifying the country’s original principles and promises will do the trick. Our need is not for restoration but for transformation.

For all the uncertainty of the 1970s, there was enough agreement across partisan lines to reform government. Republicans joined Democrats to oust Nixon, and responses to failed wars and presidential hijinks came from both sides of the aisle, with new arrangements intended to keep either from repeating themselves: the Ethics in Government Act, the Inspector General Act, and the Federal Election Campaign Act were established for politics at home; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the War Powers Resolution, and the prohibition of political assassination were meant to address malfeasance abroad. All have been eroded since, and no comparable legislation has been adopted in our time. In our present state of gridlock, it’s hard to imagine it will be.

The end of an interregnum can be identified only in retrospect. In 1976, the age of Reagan was already underway, ushering in a decisively new era. Now the country is once again trapped in an agonizing disjunction, and no party or politician has been programmatic or visionary enough to transcend it. American political regimes work in cycles. Partisan realignment or presidential leadership can set up new political orders, which last until their disintegration or entropy leads to a new shift. Our current interregnum has so far thwarted Trump’s own addled attempt to refound the country; he lacks enough popular support or a credible enough plan to do so. But the same is true, so far, of his bitterest enemies.

There is one glint of promise in the abstention from this summer’s anniversary. Watching Trump turn the country’s already hollowing rituals into truly empty gestures, Americans across the partisan spectrum see more clearly and in greater numbers the defunct religion in which so many have lost faith. And they see that nostalgia is not a strategy. Unlike in 1976, the emotional and intellectual plausibility of the American national mythology isn’t likely to survive the Trumpian pageantry this summer. The agonizing limitations of backward-looking resistance to Trump have already driven his enemies to invest less in that mythology in the first place. America, poised on the brink of something, knows it cannot go back to the future.

by Samuel Moyn, The Yale Review |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: The Story Wars: The Conflict Between Red and Blue America is a Clash of National Mythologies (Yale Review):]

***

There is no modern nation-state, after all, whose history is not rife with social injustice; with oppression based on race, class, and sex; with the violence of unjust wars. Our history is a dark and bloody ground in which slavery shares space with freedom, dispossession with progress, hatred with heritage. If there is anything admirable about America, it is not its supposed exception to these historical patterns but the persistence with which its people have struggled to amend injustice, relieve oppression, limit the exercise of state violence, and realize an extraordinarily broad and inclusive concept of nationality. If the dark side of U.S. history is the exploitation of land and labor by rampant capitalism and the rise of corporate oligarchy, its counterpart is the struggle for workers’ rights and environmental conservation and our determined efforts to strike a just and constructive balance between individual rights, corporate power, and the public good. It is because of that willingness to struggle, as much as for our achievements, that America has been the desired destination of immigrants from every country and culture on earth.

My Horrible, No Good Weekend at the UFC White House Fight

[ed. I didn't waste ten brain cells thinking about this 'celebration' - before or after. I guess it happened.]

If January 6th was violent projectile vomit then the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Freedom 250 event on the south White House lawn this weekend was the miserable subsequent spew of diarrhea from our sick electoral body. [ed. Yow.]

I spent the weekend ambling around the grounds that sit in the shadow of the Washington Monument, watching as it was transmogrified into a grotesque mishmash of a NASCAR rally and the Gathering of the Juggalos. America's vast, sunburnt underbelly of sunglassed men with names that end in -ayden and their vacant-eyed girlfriends descended on DC to, at least in theory, celebrate President Donald Trump's birthday and watch dudes beat the shit out of each other in a ring sponsored by crypto casinos, the now-unwoke Bud Light, and Saudi real estate, soundtracked by Godsmack and Diddy. The winning fighters received a special red, white, and blue raspberry "liberty juice" from Monster Energy to drink on camera and $425,000 worth of Trump's crypto tokens for their trouble.

I went into this weekend with a fairly open mind. There is something actually endearing about opening up the White House grounds to the public for a fun event that families can go to. But after 48 hours throwing back some of the most disgusting $30 margaritas I've ever had the misfortune of suffering through, my conclusion is that UFC's Freedom 250 could have only been dreamed up by a president and a fighting league that fucking loathes their own supporters.

I haven't experienced this level of profound pity for the average person attending an event since I used to report on crypto conventions. Which is appropriate, seeing as how Crypto.com was one of the high-level sponsors this weekend. At events like Ethereum Denver and Bitcoin Miami I met the same nice, normal-ish people looking for a good time, dropped seemingly unaware into a system designed to drain every last dollar out of them. If you are a UFC fan and you are reading this, please listen to me. I have now seen the machine up close. UFC CEO Dana White hates you. He doesn't even think you're a human being. [...]

On Saturday, we showed up early and still waited in line for nearly an hour in the blistering sun before we could get into the park. It got so bad that organizers started half-heartedly throwing water bottles at us. I joked that maybe the delays were because the TSA was running the security, only for my jaw to drop when we reached the gate and discover that, in fact, yes, the TSA was manning the metal detectors. Every guest also had to be searched by a Secret Service agent.

UFC reportedly paid $60 million to hold the fight at the White House. White, in a press conference on Sunday, said they would never do it again because of how expensive it was (they made about half the cost back in sponsorships). But it's unclear if they also paid for all the different law enforcement agencies to work the event. Aside from TSA and Secret Service, I spotted Homeland Security officers, US Park Police, DEA officers, the National Guard, and a whole bunch of local law enforcement. I am the last person to whine about the sanctity of law enforcement, but even I found it monstrous and depressing that our various law enforcement agencies were reduced to festival security.

Once we got into the Ellipse, there was shockingly little to do. You could take a photo in front of a WWE championship belt (both the UFC and the WWE are owned by the TKO Group), drink the aforementioned expensive alcohol, eat at a handful of food stands, take a photo with Monster Energy Drink booth babes, watch a guy rev a car in place at the RAM pop up, visit Meta AI's VR exhibit, and mindlessly stand in the field and watch Turning Point USA commercials play on a loop all day — complete with a Charlie Kirk voiceover. On the second day, they at least added a mechanical bull.

Beyond the TPUSA ads on the big screens, there was very little in the way of actual programming. On Saturday, there were some brief interviews with UFC fighters no one watched, the official weigh-in, which was bungled in ways we'll discuss in a sec, and a performance by the Zac Brown Band, where I watched what was quite possibly the worst guitar solo I've ever heard in my entire life. The night ended with, I'm not kidding, one single firework.

On Sunday, before the fight, there was a live taping of Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, which featured the Kick streamer Ninadrama, real name Nina Marie Daniele. The men in the crowd around me all started asking each other who she was. I'm not a prude and I am very aware that the entire weekend was based around a sport where men beat each other to a bloody pulp, but I, again, felt a bottomless pit of despair in my stomach looking around at all the families watching Paul and Daniele talk about how she should sell feet pics and why her Instagram followers keep making jokes about fingering her. Is this the best we can do? Is what we are? If Logan Paul's podcast is the result of 250 years of the American experiment then it was a failed experiment. [...]

Though I'm not sure the complete lack of amenities — and places to sit (I guess chairs are woke) — mattered to the UFC diehards that traveled from all over the world to watch the fight on Sunday night. I spoke to fans from across the US, Canada, and even further, none of whom seemed to be thinking particularly deeply about any of this. For what it's worth, they were all fairly nice. And the majority of them didn't even realize the event was connected to Trump's birthday until I reminded them. The big focus, instead, was gambling. Based on my own personal survey of attendees, it was split fairly evenly between FanDuel and DraftKings. And it seems like even the Trumps were trying to get in on the action. [...]

It wasn't just the question of "what is America" that loomed over the whole weekend for me, though. I also wondered whether this was all even worth it. Not just White's $60 million investment, but, also, Trump's continued endorsement of hypermasculine gutter culture. Can you feed a political movement with jalapeño vodka slams, Monster Energy Drinks, and potato chip skewers? The modern Republican Party has always been a coalition of vampiric aristocrats and a roving tailgate of redneck dopes, but at least the party of Reagan and Bush was smart enough to LARP as some mythic cowboy archetype. Do the JD Vance's and Marco Rubio's of the world think there is a path forward after Trump if they can capture the "guy who wears an Affliction T-shirt in the pool" vote?

As annoying as this weekend was, however, I actually think it's made me more optimistic about American politics than I've felt in a decade. I have seen what the combined power of Trump's oligarch cronies and their money can do. How weak and lazy it all is. How little impact and support $60 million buys them. A barren field, a sporting event that you had to buy Paramount+ to even watch, a bunch of "celebrities" no one's ever heard of, an undersold free event full of people who literally forgot it was Trump's birthday party!

by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Oiled-Up, Half-Naked Men Entertain President On 80th Birthday (Wonkette):]

***

Something around $30 million dollars was spent to turn the South Lawn of the White House into a giant cage fighting ring called “The Claw.” Behind it, on The Ellipse, was a small UFC festival. There was a large stage; scantily clad ring-girls; dumpy MAGA dudes in America-themed sleeveless T-shirts; bars shilling $12 Budweiser, $20 whiskey or tequila cocktails, $4 12 oz. cups of water; $25 burgers and kielbasas called “Giant Western Sausages”; portable chemical toilets; and two “free water” stations. There were two or three large stores offering a seemingly endless supply of UFC and Freedom 250 merchandise, like trading cards, T-shirts, hats, fingerless gloves and novelty championship belts. [...]

It should be noted that general admission tickets to the Fan Experience on the Ellipse were free, and seemingly given out at random to anyone who signed up on the UFC site. There were also some special VIP packages for deep-pocketed investors that ranged up to $1.5 million. [...]

But why not? It’s a goddamn UFC fight on the South Lawn! It’s like a grisly highway crash that backs up traffic for miles. Eventually, you creep close enough to submit to your lesser human instincts and gawk like a shaved ape when you finally pass the smoldering wreckage.

Qian Xuesen: "Father of Chinese Rocketry"; Deported Illegal Immigrant

Qian Xuesen (Chinese: 钱学森; December 11, 1911 – October 31, 2009; also spelled as Tsien Hsue-shen) was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. He achieved recognition as one of America's leading experts in rockets and high-speed flight theory prior to his deportation to China in 1955.

Qian received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1934. He traveled to the United States in 1935 and attained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Afterward, he joined Theodore von Kármán's group at the California Institute of Technology in 1936, received a doctorate in aeronautics and mathematics there in 1939, and became an associate professor at Caltech in 1943. While at Caltech, he co-founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was recruited by the United States Department of Defense and the Department of War to serve in various positions, including as an expert consultant with a rank of colonel in 1945. He became an associate professor at MIT in 1946, a full professor at MIT in 1947, and a full professor at Caltech in 1949.

During the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, the United States federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues and without any evidence of the allegations, he was stripped of his security clearance. He was given a deferred deportation order by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and for the following five years, he and his family were subjected to partial house arrest and government surveillance in an effort to gradually make his technical knowledge obsolete. After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. He left the United States in September 1955 on the American President Lines passenger liner SS President Cleveland, arriving in mainland China via Hong Kong.

Upon his return, he helped lead development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. He also played a significant part in the construction and development of China's defense industry, higher education and research system, rocket force, and a key technology university. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" and was nicknamed the "King of Rocketry". He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite.

In 1957, Qian was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He served as a Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1987 to 1998.

He was the cousin of engineer Hsue-Chu Tsien, who was involved in the aerospace industries of both China and the United States. He is a cousin of the father of Roger Y. Tsien, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [...]

Outside of rocketry, Qian had a presence in numerous areas of study. He was among the creators of systematics, and made contributions to science and technology systems, somatic science, engineering science, military science, social science, the natural sciences, geography, philosophy, literature and art, and education. His advancements in the concepts, theories, and methods of the system science field include studying the open complex giant system. Additionally, he helped establish the Chinese school of complexity science. His research advanced the discipline of engineering cybernetics, which emphasized the importance of design principles in practical engineering.

via: Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: unknown

[ed. Prelude to the post that follows (re: Gov. vs. Anthropic's Fable).]

American Government Takes Down Claude Fable

No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday.

Here we go again.

The Once And Future Fable

The United States Department of Commerce, as per a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, apparently in response to a narrow jailbreak identified by Amazon, has classified Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as being subject to US export controls. That explicitly means cutting off access to all ‘foreign nationals,’ even within the United States, even if they are Anthropic employees.

Given Anthropic has no means to verify citizenship at this time, that meant complete shutdown of the model, at least for the time being.

Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

Dean W. Ball: I can’t tell if this is lawfare against Anthropic in particular or extreme national-security hawkery. Regardless, it is simply cartoonish.

The justification for this appears to be rather flimsy, at best, and based on lack of understanding of what even is a jailbreak or how defense in depth works.

Anthropic: We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5.

We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

That left Anthropic with no options but to entirely withdraw it from the market, at least for the time being, since they have no way to verify who is and is not a United States citizen. [...]

This Action And Its Implementation Are Absurdly Stupid

If you take the action at face value, rather than as an attempt to lash out at Anthropic, there is no way to pretend this is not deeply, deeply stupid.

Dean W. Ball: If this is true, it is just baffling. An administration whose posture is that we *should* export advanced AI chips to China, which also wants to ban… Britain (and every other non-American on Earth)… from using our best models? I have no words.

zooko ⓩ: Judging from [the announcement], I imagine that some senior government official was shown a jailbreak—something they had never seen before and didn’t know about—and this was their kneejerk reaction.

Dean W. Ball: If implemented as this reporting suggests, Anthropic’s latest models would be subject to export controls to all *non-Americans,* including non-American nationals based in the US. This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models. [...]

What Happens Now?

It is a regular thing for the Executive Branch of the United States Government, these days, to issue declarations of policy that are, to use the technical term, absolutely bonkers and stunningly destructive with no reasonable way to implement them, often without stopping to realize what they are doing.

It is also a regular thing for them to then quietly walk those policies largely or entirely back, once the consequences become clear, leaving only relatively minor total devastation in their wake.

Alas, it is also a regular thing for them to leave at least a substantial portion of the new stupid and destructive policy in place indefinitely, and sometimes we keep all of it, or they even keep going further.

Or Anthropic could give the White House what it wants, no matter who is right about whether doing so makes any sense.

We are not short on examples of any of this.

One thing that must now be considered is that many employees of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, and other AI labs, are not United States persons.

Yo Shavit (OpenAI): Unless this changes, OpenAI researchers on visas need to plan for the fact they’ll probably lose access to internal models, and therefore their ability to do their jobs moving forward, sometime in the next couple months.

I hope the company acts to prevent that.

dave kasten: Uhhh so incidentally, does anyone have a plan to prevent all the non-US citizen AI scientists from going to join foreign labs after they get bored of playing Wordle at work for a month, or are we just sort of planning on having the greatest counterproliferation failure since we deported Qian Xuesen in 1955 and gave Mao a rocket program?

If we drive all foreign talent out of our AI labs, and otherwise actually go down the current road, that is one of the few things that could put China and other competitors back in the game in earnest, both slowing us down and speeding them up.

At Anthropic, Amanda Askell and Andrej Karpathy are examples of employees who suddenly are unable to work with Claude Mythos 5, even after Anthropic sorts out a new access control system.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

[ed. Who knows what axe is being grinded here, the stupidity appears to transcend logical analysis. See also: The Once And Future Fable #2 (Update):]

***

On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos.

It’s been a rough weekend. [...]

1. More details have come to light. There remains some fog of war, but we now have a rather good idea why Claude Fable and Mythos were, deeply stupidly, taken down.

2. A narrow jailbreak was discovered, of the type Anthropic warned in advance obviously existed. All demonstrated outputs are things GPT-5.5 can not only produce, but produce without any sort of jailbreak or bypass.

3. The White House demanded Anthropic take down Fable to ‘fix’ the situation, and did not listen when Dario tried to explain that there was no situation to fix.

When Anthropic did not do so, the White House hit them with an export restriction that they knew would force Fable and Mythos down for everyone.

A lot of nihilists are justifying this decision, and blaming Anthropic, all of whom are very much confirming that they adhere to Dean Ball’s portrait of the United States Government as a dying NPC hospice patient we have to properly placate with the proper vibes and genuflection so they don’t lash out at us. Except they equate this with strength and righteousness, because might makes right, power and vibes.

This is a fast developing story with a large speed premium, so I apologize for any errors, and for the structure likely not being ideal. We do the best we can.

What we do not know is:

1. What was motivating the government to make these decisions.

2. How deeply they were confused about how any of this works.

3. Whether they demanded and are demanding a narrow fix or a global fix. Narrow fix is probably easy. Global fix is probably impossible.

4. What they intend to do next and what they are trying to accomplish.

The good outcome would be that this is a terrible misunderstanding, a reflection of a panic reaction, which can be sorted out quickly, after which we can restore access. Or where they otherwise face enough pressure they quickly realize they made a mistake, or Anthropic can do something to quickly assuage their concerns even if it is dumb. There will still be a terrible precedent set, which comes with a lot of permanent damage to trust in American AI, to our business climate, to our ability to employ vital foreign AI talent, to America’s relationships to its allies, to the progress of Project Glasswing and our cyber security, and to the rule of law.

***

[ed. In addition, see: Seductive Salience (the inevitable politization of AI regulation).]

A Quiet Refusal to Compromise

Over the past decade, with amazement and dismay, I have watched former friends and acquaintances make radical turns toward a conservatism that I no longer recognize. This story is well known by now: beginning in 2015, conservatives began to divide into pro- and never-Trump factions. Some visited or moved to Hungary. National conservatism and integralism and “Common Good Conservatism” emerged as new options for disaffected traditionalists, and of course, liberalism “failed.”

All of this is chronicled in Laura Field’s new book, Furious Minds (reviewed earlier for Law & Liberty by John Grove). The volume is basically a book of highbrow gossip, and it has its faults. But it also provides a fairly accurate account of the past ten years. Field completed her PhD in (Straussian) political philosophy at the University of Texas in 2011. During her student years and afterward, she existed on the margins of intellectual conservatism. She watched many of the movement’s major players as they engaged in activism, wrote provocative essays, and instigated revolution on the Right. [...]

The problem in 2026 is that many of the most prominent intellectual conservatives have sold their birthrights for the fleeting fame promised by social media, podcasts, and coverage in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other prestige outlets. They appear more interested in making names for themselves or “blowing up the system” than in doing the quiet, unobserved, humble work of renewing the institutions that are so vital to civil society. They are, at root, interested in winning the culture wars, and winning requires fighting. It’s what a friend has called “punch-in-the-face conservatism.” In borrowing methods from the cultural Left, many of them have become right-wing Gramscians. These men (and they are nearly all men) sense that America has arrived at an eschatological moment, and they definitely want everyone else to know it too.

I also think they find it exciting and invigorating. At last we have come to a crisis point that demands strategy and action! Enough with all the subsidiarity, little platoons, and institutional reform. Conservatives should be bold enough to grasp the levers of power and use them against the Left, just as the Left has used them against us. As one Claremont Institute commentator has written, breathlessly, “Practically speaking, there is almost nothing left to conserve. What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding of America.” Helen Andrews has imagined a parallel crisis in the relations between the sexes. Her “great feminization” thesis lays the blame for “wokeness” on all those overachieving and schoolmarmish women who now dominate the white-collar professions. In her words, they are a “potential threat to civilization.” And on and on. It’s easy to adduce multiple examples of this overheated rhetoric.

To be fair, there are (of course) elements of truth in many of the scathing critiques leveled by the New Right. Andrews is correct that, in the aggregate, there are differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles. Christopher Rufo and others aren’t wrong that advocates of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” greatly overplayed their hands. And much of the extreme reaction on the Right is undoubtedly a response to the provocations of the Left, whose activists haven’t exactly been models of self-restraint over the past few decades.

Unlike those on the New Right, though, I’m not sure that we’re at an eschatological moment in Western culture. We might be. But whether or not we’ve arrived at a civilizational crisis, there are alternative ways of responding to this moment, ways far more authentically conservative than what is now playing out in so many contemporary institutions.

In thinking about what conservatism means, and about how to respond to our cultural moment, two courses of action come to mind. The first is to recalibrate our view of the world; the second, to engage in practices that don’t incite battles but preserve and rejuvenate culture. Work like this is not likely to be praised or even recognized, and it asks for quiet self-assurance, not loud declarations on social media. Cultivating a positive and hopeful vision in the midst of disorder simply is the primary obligation of conservatives, especially if we’re Christians, whose hopes lie not in the rise or fall of any particular worldly power.

Why is it so difficult, and so unpopular, to embrace this hopeful, alternative vision, and why are conflict and battle so enduringly attractive? William Hazlitt offers an answer in his shrewd essay from 1826 entitled “On the Pleasure of Hating.” There is a “secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind,” he writes, which “takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.” Life would “turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as possible.”

Most of us will recognize this universal human tendency to take perverse pleasure in hating, and in dwelling on ugly and disordered things. The desire to see awfulness helps to explain the market for polemics and declension narratives rather than subtle and qualified arguments. Who has not felt, in a moment of crisis, a sudden sharpening of the will, a vision of exactly the path forward?

The pleasure of critique also provides a sense of superiority, both intellectually—because we have seen things as they truly are—and morally. Deny it though we do, it is pleasant to think oneself smarter than others and to imagine that we, not they, stand on a solid foundation of truth. Similarly, in the moral sphere, if we are part of an unappreciated or persecuted minority, there is solace in knowing that our way of life is simply better than that of our opponents, even if the world at large does not agree.

And then there is the boredom factor. Temperance, civility, politeness, and all the other virtues that accompany political moderation can seem boring and mundane. Even if we mostly depend on norms of civility and respect in daily life, it is exciting to have a firebrand in the room—someone who will stir things up and throw rhetorical bombs. This is as true in a seminar room as in a board meeting. We admire and emulate the provocateur, the celebrity, and the radical, and are drawn to those with outrageous and “cutting-edge” views.

Yet these moral and intellectual eccentrics depend for their existence on an unseen foundation of equanimity, careful argument, civility, and self-control. They themselves may neglect or disparage this foundation, but it is nevertheless vital that somebody shore it up. Traditionally, this has been a job for conservatives.

So should conservatives be warriors or maintainers? Part of the answer will undoubtedly depend on temperament. Everyone knows people who are thoroughly pacific and disengaged or, on the other hand, full of spirit and always ready to argue. The latter disposition is what one sees far more often in the new conservatives I have been identifying, those who clamor to fight and win the culture wars with snark, meanness, and irony.

The tenor of the alternative—of a more gracious conservatism—is not adversarial but generative. It looks toward the present and the future, though not in the way that progressivism does, with its hopes of constant political improvement. Instead, this conservatism focuses on the things that are being conserved by living them fully, and by engaging in practices delivered from the past. It asks us to act within our own small spheres of influence, doing good where it is real, tangible, and visible, at levels much less national and much less public. While most of us aren’t prodigies, we all possess talents, aptitudes, and loves, which we would do well to use and develop. And this will make some difference, or all the difference, to those who live around us.

by Elizabeth Corey, Law & Liberty |  Read more:

Image: Agostino Masucci; Artcurial Worldwide/Wikimedia Commons
[ed. This is a conservative perspective I can get behind, but one that glosses over the 'tactics' the fighting contingent employ. Tactics that are frequently dishonest, threatening, sleazy and/or outright illegal. No valor in that, whatever rationalizations conservatives use for the ends justifying the means. By the way, the Hazlitt link (Pleasure of Hating) is well worth a read.]

AI Won’t Stave Off the Debt Disaster

For years, I kept a favorite cartoon in my desk and pulled it out to open the annual business-plan meeting at the unit I led. It showed a frazzled executive standing in front of a screen displaying his multiyear sales projections. The line ran straight horizontally, close and parallel to the x-axis, almost to the right edge, where it leaped steeply upward, next to a label that said, “Miracle happens here!”

No impulse is more human than wishfulness, the tendency to grasp at any straw that enables us to avert our eyes from difficult realities and put off facing them. Members of America’s national political class personify this failing, in their continuing practice of fiscal denialism. Even as the inexorable arithmetic piles up, those responsible for the nation’s economic future and national security fasten on imaginary miracles to justify a gross default of their duty of stewardship.

A decade ago, as the national debt surged toward the once unthinkable level of $20 trillion (now nearing $40 trillion), denialists took brief refuge in an alchemist fantasy that called itself Modern Monetary Theory. The notion that a nation could borrow without limit, forever, in its own fiat currency was quickly demolished by full-spectrum critiques, in venues ranging from the Cato Institute to the Review of Keynesian Economics. The experts weren’t really necessary; you could have just consulted the Journal of Common Sense, or maybe your grandparents.

MMT has mercifully disappeared from serious discussion, but the wishful impulse has not. Its latest comfort station is the claim that the productivity boost that artificial intelligence will bring to the economy will bail us out of our sinking boatload of debt. Stop worrying; “Miracle happens here!”

In our post-truth world, facts aren’t as stubborn as they used to be, but the most obstinate of all are the mathematical ones. They tell us not to rely on even the powerfully positive impact of these new technologies to spare us the radical adjustments that a generation of procrastination has now made inevitable.

That isn’t to say that no help is on the way. The evidence is persuasive that AI and related advances are already boosting the economy in the most important way possible, by raising productivity. That’s the biggest reason that GDP is surprising on the upside while job growth remains tepid. Moreover, forecasts that this favorable windage will accelerate seem highly credible.

What’s not credible is the idea that even an AI-led productivity surge can suffice to offset our decades of dereliction. The Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve, and other forecasters peg average future economic growth at a little under 2 percent. Assume a 70 percent boost from the AI revolution, to 3 percent or so, and it becomes possible to imagine our current debt level stabilizing, not improving but merely getting no worse.

But even this daydream requires far too many improbable breaks. Simulations conclude that the chances of growth of even 2.6 percent are less than 1 in 20. That’s without factoring in the possibility of a military crisis, a recession, another pandemic, or any other macroeconomic setback. AI revenue increases could be partially offset by new spending requirements, for energy infrastructure, for example.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model credits AI with a healthy 1.5 percent productivity and GDP increase over the next decade. That would result in deficit reduction of some $400 billion over those 10 years. Not chump change, but only a fraction of what would be required, given the tsunami of entitlement spending, driving trillions of added debt, making landfall over that period.

AI enthusiasts assure us that the beneficial impact will be even bigger. Let’s hope they’re right, although that would mean a bigger productivity surge than those brought by electricity or the Internet. Even if it happens, it cannot conceivably get here before the trust fund insolvencies start in the early 2030s. Kent Smetters, a Penn Wharton Budget Model scholar, states flatly that AI, however positive, isn’t “a magic bullet” and that the call is “not even close.”

Let’s stipulate that AI will be the transformative wonder that its inventors foresee; that the CBO and other forecasters have often tended to underestimate US economic growth, especially in environments of lightened regulation and taxation; and that the United States somehow sails through an unprecedented streak without a single costly exogenous blow.

It still ain’t enough.

by Mitch Daniels, Law and Liberty/WaPo |  Read more:

Image: chekart/Shutterstock
[ed. Yet we keep digging deeper. Where does another $500 billion/yr for defense spending come from? Or, say, $700 million to prop up coal billionaires (below)? Thin air.]

‘Clean, Beautiful’ Coal Industry Gets $700m Bailout

Trump uses wartime powers to dole out $700m to ‘clean, beautiful’ coal (The Guardian)

Donald Trump is using wartime presidential authority to hand $700m to coal-fired power plants in the US, the latest move by the president to bolster what he called “clean, beautiful coal”, despite it being the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

“Today, we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. [...]

In the past year, the Trump administration has doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to the coal industry, signed orders forcing ratepayers to pay extra for ageing plants to stay open, and dismantled environmental rules that limit toxins from coal leaching into Americans’ shared air and water.

The administration’s attempts to provide a cuddly rebranding to coal have even extended to creating a new mascot with giant eyes, called Coalie, and gushing social media posts that include an image of a lump of coal wearing sunglasses as if it were on the TV show Love Island.

“You’re not allowed to say ‘coal’ within the Trump administration unless it’s preceded by the words ‘clean, beautiful’,” Trump said on Thursday. “Complicates our life, but it’s good.” [...]

Trump’s attempts to revive the coal industry, while at the same time seeking to stymie the rapid growth of clean energy such as solar and wind, have so far floundered. The number of people working in coal has declined by more than 90% in the past century, with more people now working in Waffle Houses across the US than in coal.

US coal production is currently less than half of what it was in 2008, with coal recently declining as both a fuel for electricity and as an input for manufacturing materials such as iron and steel. Cheap, abundant gas has helped displace coal from power grids with even cheaper renewable energy also now taking off in the US despite the administration’s efforts to kill it off.

“What’s next, a taxpayer bailout to build new phone booths?” said Kit Kennedy, a senior climate campaigner at the Natural Resources Defense Council, of the new round of support for coal. “This is going to mean higher bills and dirtier air. What a waste.”

by Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
[ed. One picture = thousand words. The stupidity never ends. In other news of the stupid, henchman Hegseth gets bad reviews for his speech commemorating D-Day:]

***

"Speaking in north-west France on Saturday to mark the 82nd anniversary of the D-day landings, Hegseth seized on the moment marking the wartime liberation of Europe to reiterate the US administration’s longstanding attack on European immigration policies.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies,” Hegseth told those gathered at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.

“Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not,” he said."

The remarks were swiftly condemned on social media. The English historian, author and television presenter Simon Schama described them as a “special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self-importance”.

Schama added: “As if the little people’s rage against immigration somehow is superior to the war against the 3rd Reich and entitles this comic book nobody to lecture the actual heroes.”

In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Recordkeeping

As life sciences researchers, builders of AI and biotechnology, and experts with a wide range of views on how to approach AI policy, we call on legislators to make screening of orders for synthetic nucleic acids — and the equipment needed to make them — mandatory.

The ability to order synthetic DNA online has accelerated vaccine development, powered basic research, and made it possible for small teams to access capabilities that used to be confined to major institutions. Since the publication of protocols to reconstruct viruses from strands of DNA more than two decades ago, it has also been recognized as a point in the biotechnology supply chain where a bad actor could cause outsized harm. Recognizing the vulnerability, synthesis companies formed the International Gene Synthesis Consortium in 2009 to develop and implement voluntary safeguards against misuse.

While the issue is not new, the pace of progress in artificial intelligence is. AI systems now outperform PhD-level virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory procedures in their own domains of expertise. The evidence about what this means for present-day biosecurity threats is genuinely mixed, but the trend is hard to dispute. AI systems are improving rapidly, and alongside incredible benefits to science and medicine, there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode.

Support for screening does not depend on any particular view of AI; the biosecurity case has been recognized by scientists and governments for decades. Screening is also one of the best understood and least disruptive biosecurity measures available. It asks providers of synthesized DNA and manufacturers of synthesis machines to check synthesis requests for sequences of concern and to verify customer legitimacy before shipping orders. Providers should also record synthesis orders and sequence data to support legitimate biosecurity investigations, so that any threat that might evade initial screening can be traced back to its source — including when individual sequences would not raise concern in isolation. Awareness of traceability itself deters misuse.

Many of the largest and most responsible providers in the industry already screen and record orders voluntarily because it is well understood that they have an important role to play in maintaining public trust in and mitigating potential misuse of this important technology.

For these reasons, the undersigned support mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening, including recordkeeping, in the United States.

Given the pace at which the underlying technology is changing, we believe the need is urgent. Congress should act this session, and we applaud the legislative efforts currently underway. To ensure a consistent national standard rather than a patchwork of conflicting laws, states should also consider implementing requirements based on existing federal and industry guidelines.

This is a rare moment of agreement across stakeholders that are often at odds. We hope policymakers will meet it with decisive action.

Sincerely,
Signatories: — *Everybody*

[ed. No brainer, right? You don't just leave potential life-threatening bio-warfare components laying around with no oversight. Right?]

***

Amrith Ramkumar (WSJ): Top artificial-intelligence executives are joining security experts in calling for Congress to protect against biological threats posed by AI, adding to growing pressure on lawmakers to address the technology’s risks.

Three major chief executive officers—OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis of Google’s DeepMind AI lab—are among the signatories of a letter urging Congress to require safeguards when companies order synthetic DNA and RNA, a key step in developing certain vaccines and biotech breakthroughs.

… It was organized by two tech-focused think tanks that said the topic is a rare source of agreement among libertarians, progressives, researchers and rival executives.

Dean W. Ball: I am honored to have signed on to this letter. This is an urgent priority for near-term action by Congress. Biotech is advancing rapidly on its own, and I—and many others—believe the “Mythos moment” in AI/bio is coming soon. It is time for action.

revisions to existing nucleic acid screening requirements were mandated by an EO POTUS signed a year ago; I worked on them while in govt. I genuinely don’t know what happened to that work after I left but it is nine months behind schedule. Congress acting is better anyway.

Joshua Teperowski Monrad: People are so astounded when I tell them this isn't already law

Alec Stapp: it really is insane [...]

Other signatories include Patrick Collison, Paul Graham, Mustafa Suleyman, Alexandr Wang and a lot more where that came from.

We need such letters, despite this having ~100% support among those who understand any side of this, this is such a slam dunk that we should be doing this even before considerations of AI making malicious action vastly easier.

Why? Because political awareness is basically still near zero:

Will Poff-Webster: When I was a Senate staffer and occasionally got the chance to bring up biosecurity risks from AI, the response was often, “What? AI might be able to do that?”

This letter shows how easy it’d be for Congress to act on this