This paper “analyzes whether allies decisively pulled the U.S. towards war & concludes that they did. The Iran War is a case of allied entanglement: allies, specifically Israel & Saudi Arabia, are a but-for cause of U.S. military action against Iran.” Uncontroversial! www.stimson.org/2026/assumpt...

Assumption Testing: The Iran War Is a Case of Alliance Entanglement • Stimson Center

Evaluating whether the Iran War is a case of alliance entanglement by the United States’ Middle East allies.

stimson.org

What's unusual about China's developmental trajectory is that it's followed the classic "move up the value chain" strategy of building strength in high-skill, capital-intensive manufacturing, while ALSO maintaining dominance in low-skill, labor-intensive manufacturing. www.piie.com/sites/defaul...

Autonomy, individuality & the active cultivation of one’s faculties are constituents of a good human life, not merely useful tools for achieving it. A technology that alters how we think, judge, attend or feel may leave us diminished even if it improves performance. humanistreview.ai/issue-1/appi...

AI Is Changing What We Can Do. Who We Become Is Still Our Choice.

To understand AI's effect on moral character, ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah goes back to John Stuart Mill, and the idea that people are shaped by their…

humanistreview.ai

I just don't believe that AI will be a winner-take-all technology. Open-weight model and the vagaries of deployment will be the determinate factors in who wins most from this disruption. foreignpolicy.com/2026/08/04/u...

America’s Cosmic Bet on AI

The winner takes it all. What happens if the United States loses?

foreignpolicy.com

Excellent essay by Clay Shirky: "The very idea of a coherent university is an oxymoron. We are incoherent because knowledge is incoherent.... This is not a failure of leadership or will. The management and maintenance of incoherence is a service we offer society." www.chronicle.com/article/ai-i...

Opinion | The University Was Made for the Age of AI

Colleges have never been coherent. Their strength lies in managing disagreement and uncertainty.

chronicle.com

Ouch: "a long-winded, ham-fisted stylist, given to sudden eruptions of cliche"

“Foreign firms stand little chance against a Leninist developmental state of China’s size, wealth & modernity.” When liberalism has lost the @economist.com, you know things are dire… www.economist.com/china/2026/0...

Tokyo has experienced THREE fires that killed more than 100k people: - The Great Fire of Meireki (March 2, 1657) - The Great Kanto Earthquake Fire (September 1, 1923) - The Operation Meetinghouse Firebombing (March 9–10, 1945)

“MAGA’s real position: Mass deportations must be carried out EVEN IF they hurt the economy. Mullin must ‘put deportations first’ — that is, he must put them BEFORE economic concerns. The goal isn’t primarily an economic one: It’s about ethnically purging the country.” newrepublic.com/article/2138...

MAGA Erupts at Trump DHS Chief—and Accidentally Exposes Big MAGA Scam

Markwayne Mullin just said the unsayable: that immigration can sometimes help the economy and the country. Now MAGA wants his head.

newrepublic.com

All this crap will have to be torn down or renamed — for the same reason there aren’t Kaiser Wilhelm Streets in Germany, Chairman Gorbachev Avenues in Russia, or Prime Minister Laval Boulevards in France.

The New Republic@newrepublic.com · 2d ago

The National Park Service is warning that Trump’s proposed “triumphal arch” would ruin just about everything near it. trib.al/adhrEFV

I also agree 100% that post-AI pedagogy can’t just be about “how AI is being applied within your field” but rather must be about giving “graduates the capacity to put AI to uses that they themselves have conceived and designed. This means having intellectual agency over one’s ‘bundle of skills.’”

Nils Gilman@nilsgilman.bsky.social · 2w ago

Strong agree that the future belongs to those who have put in the “massive labor of intellectual self-development so that one is basically smart enough to run the tech and not let the tech replace one's thinking.” utotherescue.blogspot.com/2026/07/line...

I also agree 100% that post-AI pedagogy can’t just be about “how AI is being applied within your field” but rather must be about giving “graduates the capacity to put AI to uses that they themselves have conceived and designed. This means having intellectual agency over one’s ‘bundle of skills.’”

Nils Gilman@nilsgilman.bsky.social · 2w ago

Strong agree that the future belongs to those who have put in the “massive labor of intellectual self-development so that one is basically smart enough to run the tech and not let the tech replace one's thinking.” utotherescue.blogspot.com/2026/07/line...

This article from last year is coldly scientific—about divergences between two modes of #PlanetarySapience, e.g. simulated models & empirical observation of climate data—but the content is some of the most feverishly alarming I’ve ever read in my life. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

Earth's Energy Imbalance More Than Doubled in Recent Decades

Earth's energy imbalance more than doubled in recent decades The large trend has taken us by surprise, and as a community we should strive to understand the underlying causes Our capability to o...

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

This is dumb. The question isn’t WHETHER a ruling power in a democratic system changes the rules/norms to entrench themselves, but HOW they do so: the changes are pro-democratic if they increase the system’s responsiveness to the popular will, and anti- if they make the system less responsive.

“MAGA’s real position: Mass deportations must be carried out even if they hurt the economy. Mullin must ‘put deportations first’ — that is, he must put them before economic concerns. The goal isn’t primarily an economic one: It’s about ethnically purging the country.” newrepublic.com/article/2138...

Rightly understood, knowledge is a divine gift — not to be bought or sold, but to be freely shared

How is Trump doing on his three big ambitions? 1. Patrimonialism: big success — corruption of gov’t institutions that’ll take a generation to unwind 2. Re-norming project: we can’t know until Trump is gone 3. Re-wiring civil society: incomplete (despite major effort) www.tiktok.com/t/ZTAXWfkDG/

#pov #fyp #tiktok #foryoupage #fypage

TikTok video by uighch

tiktok.com

The characteristic derp of young men is not appreciating that preventing catastrophic fail is the prime directive, against which all else must be subordinated. The counterconcept is recklessness. x.com/porterstansb...

I'm not sure if anyone cool posts on Bluesk...

Sanho Tree@sanho.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I have two cigars from Fidel Castro’s humidor.

The rule of law, in the end, is itself a political construct — one that the GOP no longer believes in

The Bulwark@thebulwark.com · 4d ago

The fact that a majority of Republican senators do not care that the Comey prosecution is dead on arrival and are willing to countenance the confirmation of its architect means something terrifying: The rule of law is now also almost dead.

"Everyone knows what the problem is: The [GOP] organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence…. We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.” www.politico.com/news/magazin...

GOP Staffers Say the Party Has a Groyper Problem

Party veterans are concerned that the pipeline of young Republican talent is veering off course — and into terminally online extremism.

politico.com

the president of the united states regularly goes on incredibly embarrassing unhinged posting sprees full of AI slop and somehow the entire political system just reacts like the This Is Fine dog

“Federal law enforcement is protecting one party and prosecuting its opposition…They are confident they can avoid consequences. If they can break the law with impunity, elections are the only consequence they face, [so] they have every incentive to steal them.” open.substack.com/pub/cmarmita...

A Ruling Party That Faces No Consequences for Open Corruption Has No Reason to Accept Elections

We won't survive if we try to play by their rules.

open.substack.com

This callow yoof is just like an LLM: he knew everything but understood nothing www.ft.com/content/620b...

How Leopold Aschenbrenner, the ‘golden child’ of the AI trade, was laid low

The $20bn hedge fund manager’s wild ride ended with a call to Ken Griffin

ft.com

Hi guys, I'm sorry to have to ask for this again but I really could use your support. My father died recently and now I have fallen behind on rent. If you could please chip in a few dollars, it would really help me keep going. I need to raise $10,000 asap to pay expenses. Thank you so much ❤️

Donate to Support Quality Political and Tech Journalism, organized by Matt Sheffield

The media industry is dying, but the need for in-depth analysis has not d… Matt Sheffield needs your support for Support Quality Political and Tech Journalism

gofundme.com

Even though many in the west were crowing about these events as “the third wave of democratization,” what I kept thinking at the time was, “An economic collapse this severe will almost certainly end in fascism.”

Nils Gilman@nilsgilman.bsky.social · 4d ago

Few in the West today understand what happened to the Russian people with the collapse of Communism. Here is one statistic: in 1987-88, 2% of Russians lived on less than $4/day; by 1993-95, 50% did. Observing this as it happened was a major formative political experience for me as a young adult.

Few in the West today understand what happened to the Russian people with the collapse of Communism. Here is one statistic: in 1987-88, 2% of Russians lived on less than $4/day; by 1993-95, 50% did. Observing this as it happened was a major formative political experience for me as a young adult.

Forget the clash of civilizations, we’re just doing Camp of the Saints

Ulrike Franke@rikefranke.bsky.social · 5d ago

Message from our main ally…

This is correct: performative impunity.

Radley Balko@radleybalko.bsky.social · 5d ago

Like the hypocrisy and the open corruption, the naked, brazen lying is itself aspiring authoritarianism. They aren't lying to cover anything up. They're saying, "We know we're lying. You know we're lying. And we know you know we're lying. And there's nothing you can do about it."