If you want to see the future as manifest in the present, the two places to look are either (a) in the very core of the power center or (b) in obscure corners of the periphery. www.hrw.org/news/2026/03...
Yes, there is a severe βsecurity dilemmaβ with respect to this technology.
Roughly 10% of the Homo sapiens who have ever made it to age 5 are breathing *right now.*
Like in the first Cold War, in this new Ecological Cold War both sides are doing nasty things, but one side is not only far more evil, it is also deeply less effective than the other at solving the most pressing goals of the day.
Incredibly this headline is not from
The Onion www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-d...
A lot of people have devoted their lives to the idea that it might be otherwise.
Whatβs particularly hilarious is foregrounding as models (a) a murderous drug lord who destroys his family and dies alone in his meth lab & (b) his corrupt, morally bankrupt lawyer who ends up in witness protection.
The entire arc of these characters is about the rot inside the American dream.
If you read Michael Roginβs βRonald Reagan: The Movieβ and then reverse engineer its insights through a Vulgar Girardian frame, this where you end up: youtu.be/ZDG6OmyAaIE?...
It seems obvious that if we had βaligned AIβ (in the sense that people working on that problem claim to be aiming for) that it would prevent the present US government from using GenAI in many of the ways it would like to.οΏΌ
βWe have a huge number of statutes, unbelievably broad sets of laws in many cases, and the reason it all works is that the government does not enforce those laws anything like uniformly. The problem with A.I. is that it enables uniform enforcement of the law.β
βThe entire technocratic nation-state that we currently have in the advanced capitalist democracies is a technologically contingent institutional complex. The problem that A.I. presents is that it changes the technological contingencies quite profoundly.β www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/o...
The disparity between these two numbers is so crazy that sometimes people donβt believe it, so you should look it up yourself.
On the other hand, if we expanded SCOTUS to 17 Justices, as I propose below, the correct mix would be:
- 5 agnostic/athiest/none
- 4 Catholics
- 4 White evangelicals
- 2 Mainline Protestants
- 1 Black evangelical
- 1 Hindu/Muslim/Jew/Buddhist
bsky.app/profile/nils...
If we want to have a denominationally representative SCOTUS it would be
- 3 Non-religious types
- 2 Catholics
- 2 Evangelicals
- 1 Mainline Protestant
- 1 member of the black church, Jew or Muslim
βThe western allianceβ LOL
L'Εil, d'abord, glisserait sur la moquette grise d'un long corridor, haut et Γ©troitβ¦.
βIf you like some scenarios better than others, you can be aware of the ones you donβt like and look for signs of them, and also look at signs of the ones you want to have come to pass, and lean differentially toward them.β www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Itβs not a hard test: would you allow bets of this sort to be placed against your community or loved one?
βThis is American commercial immorality on steroids. Once events that involve good and evil simply become a financial product, I donβt know how right and wrong matters any longer." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Yudkowsky gets his wish www.techbuzz.ai/articles/ama...
Also worth noting: since 1992, GOP presidential candidates have gotten 50%+ of the popular vote exactly ONCE (in 2004).
ALSO worth noting: despite all this, the GOP somehow has a hammerlock on the Supreme Court for the rest of my life.
In the last third of a century, the US economy has generated +49.9m jobs under Democratic presidents and -800k under GOP Presidents. www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...
I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that itβs not become a question of βshould our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?β but βto what extent?β
www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...
Who needs to shut down the Straits of Hormuz when "Qatarβs energy minister has warned that war in the Middle East could 'bring down the economies of the world,' predicting that all Gulf energy exporters would shut down production within weeks & drive oil to $150 a barrel." www.ft.com/content/be12...
Wars are extremely hard things to justify. It is intrinsic to what they are that they tend to death, destruction, and misery. Given this and some knowledge of history, one's default attitude towards powerful people purporting to do the world some great benefit by war should be extreme scepticism.
UAE billionaire to Trump: βYou have placed the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab countries at the heart of a danger they did not choose.... But the question remains: Who gave you permission to turn our region into a battlefield?β www.khaleejtimes.com/uae/uae-bill...
Covid is over, Brexit is not, and the decline continues.
The earliest example I've found of the phrase "international order" in its contemporary IR sense is in this article from 1908: "codification of international law does not necessarily involve a reconstruction of the present international order": www.jstor.org/stable/2186595
Official start date for Brexit: 1 February 2020
She needs to be prosecuted. A democracy cannot just shrug off members of the executive lying under oath to legislators. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/u...
