September 9, 2026

Yesterday, at a White House event honoring those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11, President Donald Trump went off script and claimed he had taken a crew downtown “right after this happened. They were, they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but uh, it never came down. And uh, I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen—big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down, U.S. Steel.”

In fact, as CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale reported, there is no evidence for any of this story. Trump was at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan when the planes hit the World Trade Center, and there is no evidence for any of his other claims, either. Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump, added that Trump did not have a big building under construction at the time and the “only crew he claimed to bring to the site would have been secretarial and accounting employees.” The younger Trump said he was so offended by President Trump’s claim that he felt the “need to speak out.”

The White House said, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented,” and White House spokesperson Davis Ingle attacked the media for “using this to try to attack him.”

Trump posted on social media: “Everything I said was exactly accurate.”

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S.-made goods went into effect yesterday, matching Trump’s tariffs on Canada dollar for dollar and rate for rate, covering about $20 billion in U.S. goods. Trump responded by escalating his trade war with Canada even further, banning certain products outright, and establishing new tariffs on Canadian motorcycles, alcohol, and dairy products on September 29.

The U.S. and Iran are striking at each other again. The U.S. said it attacked and destroyed five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday; Iran said it targeted two U.S. ships and eight oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday as they tried to traverse an area Iran has said is off-limits. They also said they had fired at a U.S. military base in Jordan. The price of oil has surged as fighting resumed, with the cost of Brent crude rising above $100 a barrel.

Tonight, Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News reported that Iran’s strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan caused damage to “[m]ultiple American military aircraft.” Jacobs also posted that U.S. forces launched more than 30 Patriot missiles in their defense against the Iranian strikes.

Today Trump told reporters that the Iranians are prolonging the war because of the U.S. midterm elections and that he expects the war on Iran will end and gas prices will come down as soon as the elections are over. “They can’t hold out any longer,” Trump said. “They’re desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapons.”

But tonight, Alexander Ward, Shelby Holliday, and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s top advisors have warned him that the Iran war could continue for the rest of his term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already extended the deployment of some of the troops in the Middle East and has planned for additional extensions.

The conflict is already straining the military and disrupting global oil markets.

What is most astonishing about the nation’s economic and military problems is that they are entirely self-inflicted at the whim of one man. On October 19, 2024, the month before Trump was reelected, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.” “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” wrote Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr. “Expect that to continue.”

But Trump insisted the economy was weak and that tariff walls would make it boom. Months after taking office, he grabbed Congress’s authority to levy tariffs and on “Liberation Day” began trade wars around the globe, hobbling the free trade system that had underpinned global trade since World War II. When the Supreme Court ruled his power grab unconstitutional, he turned to temporary powers to achieve the same results.

And now we are in a trade war with our longtime friend and ally Canada, and the president is posting insulting memes about Canada’s prime minister on social media. Economist Paul Krugman wrote today: “I don’t think there has ever been a dispute this stupid. Bear in mind that this crisis is entirely gratuitous.”

“As Trump’s failures, from soaring fuel prices to plunging approval, multiply,” Krugman wrote, “he is doubling down on his disrespect for and attempted bullying of our northern neighbor and former ally. That is, you should think of this conflict not as something reflecting U.S. national interests, but as a form of self-medication from a sundowning president.”

Krugman called attention to the fact that the economies of the U.S. and Canada have been tied closely since at least 1965. Canada supplies about 60% of U.S. aluminum and about 70% of the oil refined in the Midwest. It supplies almost all of the lumber the U.S. uses for framing in new homes. This trade war will do real damage to both economies.

The Iran war, too, was self-inflicted and has been conducted without authorization by Congress as required by the Constitution and by the 1973 War Powers Act. Trump appeared to think the U.S. military could get rid of the head of the Iranian regime when it attacked Iran on February 28 as it had done to the head of Venezuela in just hours the previous month. Repeatedly, Trump has expressed surprise that Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s seaborne oil had passed before the attacks.

And while Trump is now trying to justify the attacks by claiming he is working for a nuclear-free Iran, under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran during the Obama administration, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, reports of corruption in the administration continue to drop.

Cat Zakrzewski and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Trump gave his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other young female employees gifts of $45,000 in cash last year. That amount is about a third of their $150,000 annual salary. He gave $20,000 to Walt Nauta, who was Trump’s co-defendant in the case of Trump retaining classified documents after he left office.

The chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, Richard Painter, told the journalists the gifts appear to violate federal law: federal employees can’t receive salary supplements from outside sources. The acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) under Obama, Don Fox, said the legality of the gifts was not clear, in part because such payments are “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned. This just doesn’t happen.”

Bill Allison of Bloomberg reported yesterday that Steve Witkoff earned $107 million in 2025 from the holding company that keeps his share of World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture he and the Trump family founded and in which Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ president, has invested half a billion dollars. Witkoff is Trump’s special agent for the Middle East and has been negotiating with Russia. Trump reported earning more than $594 million in 2025 from the same venture.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios reported today that they are hearing from top White House officials and elected Republicans that they are no longer even trying to persuade Trump to do something or not to do something. They are worn out, VandeHei and Allen report. “They know they can’t stop him and they don’t even try.”

“Trump insiders calculate they lived by Trump and so will die by Trump, rather than break with Trump.”

Their utter dereliction of duty to the United States of America has opened the field for Democrats. Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s team announced the creation of a new political action committee that will invest at least $20 million in Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. Shia Kapos of Politico reported that the “Ready for the Fight” PAC, which echoes the phrase the governor uses to end his political speeches, is targeting seats currently held by Republicans.

“Democrats must think big and take the fight to every corner to support candidates in often-overlooked races,” Pritzker said.

On CNN tonight, Pritzker warned Americans not to believe Trump’s lies. “This is the president who ran in 2024 and told you that on day one he was going to lower prices, he was going to end forever wars. And what do you know? He’s done neither. In fact, he’s done the opposite. Prices have gone up since he took office, and, of course, we’re in this endless war in Iran. He can’t stop it. Does not know what he’s doing. And after complaining about Joe Biden’s age, he himself—President Trump, that is—is suffering from dementia, and I think we can all see that. So I think that that’s what I would say about whatever he’s promising for the future, you know he never delivers.”

Tonight, at the “Trumpapaloosa” midterm convention in Dallas that Trump insisted on holding to rally his base, he promised that if the Republicans win the midterm elections, he will give all adult Americans a check for $5,000, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval. He called it the “Trump Dividend,” thanks to “our tremendous strength and success economically.”

Notes:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-nephew-calls-bs-on-his-shocking-911-lie/

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-attacks-us-base-jordan-ships-near-hormuz-after-tankers-sunk-2026-09-09/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/witkoff-reports-107-million-from-entity-that-held-crypto-stake

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/08/politics/fact-check-trump-9-11-claims

https://apnews.com/article/canada-trump-carney-trade-war-tariffs-4620ffb5ecc029322217207fa6758431

https://thehill.com/policy/international/6078254-us-iran-war-jordan-retaliation-oil-tankers-sunk/

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/09/trump-iran-war-end-midterms-01069191

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trumps-top-advisers-confront-possibility-that-iran-war-lasts-through-end-of-term-5f4e23d7

https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024-10-19

Paul Krugman
Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Edition
Posted by Trump on Truth Social…
Read more

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/08/trump-gave-45000-cash-gifts-natalie-harp-two-other-close-aides/

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/09/trump-midterms-republicans-popularity

https://apnews.com/article/trump-dividend-5k-5000-check-republicans-cc80644e3168acd31c892129fb849436

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/08/jb-pritzker-launches-midterms-pac-01067062

YouTube:

live/WFQUwcPrq5A?t=853s, at 14:29.

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41640

X:

JenniferJJacobs/status/2097860249000550647

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mv4esc2ntw2y

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September 10, 2026

We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has relied for seagoing transport on the Red Sea route that empties into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

As Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in July, the Red Sea is one of the most important routes for global shipping. It carries twelve to fifteen percent of the global maritime trade every year, worth about $1 trillion. The waterway extends about 1,400 miles from the Suez Canal—which connects it to the Mediterranean Sea—at the northern end to the Bab El-Mandeb strait in the south.

The Iran-backed Houthis are in a struggle against the Saudi Arabia–backed Yemeni government. A fragile truce has been in place since 2022, but clashes between the two forces have escalated for weeks, and on Tuesday, September 8, Houthi attacks on Saudi targets started fires at oil facilities and wounded more than 70 people.

The Yemeni government told Reuters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have guided the Houthi advance, and according to Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, and Kylie Atwood of CNN, U.S. officials think that hundreds of IRGC officers are currently in Yemen working with the Houthis to shut down the Bab el-Mandeb. The journalists note that CNN has previously reported that in case U.S. negotiations were unsuccessful, Iran had planned an economic “nuclear option”: closing the Bab el-Mandeb.

Cohen, Lillis, and Atwood reported this afternoon that more than 100 U.S. military advisors are in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint forces command, providing the Saudis with intelligence and helping them find Houthi targets.

The sources who told the journalists about the joint effort emphasized that the U.S. routinely shares intelligence with the Saudis and that it is neither participating directly in the strikes nor providing operational support. Still, U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis in 2025 killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others in Yemen in 2025.

The price of oil jumped to $109 a barrel, and U.S. gasoline rose to an average of about $4.28 a gallon. GasBuddy said the national average price of diesel had hit $6.00 for the first time in history. Just a year ago, the national average was about $3.70.

GasBuddy issued a statement, saying: “While gasoline gets the headlines, diesel is the fuel that moves the economy, powering the freight trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery behind nearly everything Americans buy. That means its impact reaches far beyond the transportation sector. As diesel climbs, higher supply chain costs work their way into the price of groceries, household goods, deliveries, and countless other products families rely on every day, even for households that never fuel a diesel vehicle.”

GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said the new record “will be a particularly painful one for the economy” and is “likely to reignite inflation up and down the supply chain.” He continued: “I suggest Americans anticipate a costlier holiday season, as it appears diesel prices could continue climbing as geopolitical tensions continue to remain a main factor.”

While all this was going on, tonight President Trump attended the second day of his Dallas rally to fire up his base before the midterm elections. There, a video from the Republican National Committee intoned: “And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

Notes:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/10/houthis-seize-key-port-mocha-yemen-red-sea-coast-iran-saudi-arabia-us

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/10/politics/us-military-support-saudi-arabia-houthi-iran-yemen

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/08/g-s1-142296/houthi-attacks-saudi-arabia

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-says-iran-war-end-after-us-midterm-elections-threatens-attack-pickaxe-2026-09-10/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/business/oil-middle-east-iran-war.html

https://www.gasbuddy.com/go/statement-on-diesel-reaching-6-per-gallon-for-the-first-time-in-history

https://www.cfr.org/articles/another-hormuz-the-red-seas-threat-to-the-global-economy

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/us/politics/us-airstrikes-houthis-civilian-deaths.html

Bluesky:

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Self-inflicted Problems

Thursday 10 September 1663

Up betimes and to my office, and there sat all the morning making a great contract with Sir W. Warren for 3,000l. worth of masts; but, good God! to see what a man might do, were I a knave, the whole business from beginning to end being done by me out of the office, and signed to by them upon the once reading of it to them, without the least care or consultation either of quality, price, number, or need of them, only in general that it was good to have a store. But I hope my pains was such, as the King has the best bargain of masts has been bought these 27 years in this office.

Dined at home and then to my office again, many people about business with me, and then stepped a little abroad about business to the Wardrobe, but missed Mr. Moore, and elswhere, and in my way met Mr. Moore, who tells me of the good peace that is made at Tangier with the Moores, but to continue but from six months to six months, and that the Mole is laid out, and likely to be done with great ease and successe, we to have a quantity of ground for our cattle about the town to our use.

To my office late, and then home to supper, after writing letters, and to bed.

This day our cook maid (we having no luck in maids now-adays), which was likely to prove a good servant, though none of the best cooks, fell sick and is gone to her friends, having been with us but 4 days.

Read the annotations

The Day of the Cockroach

corridor-shot-1994

 

September 11, 2026

MY MOST VIVID MEMORY of September 11th, 2001, is my memory of a cockroach.

It was one of the biggest roaches I’ve ever seen — copper-colored and bullet-shaped, the length of my little finger — and it came crawling across the platform of the Government Center subway station at 7:00 a.m., as I stood there waiting for the train that would take me to Logan Airport. It scampered, stopped, then zigged and zagged, in that deliberate yet utterly directionless way of insects, its footsteps so heavy I swear that I could hear them, click-click-click on the greasy concrete.

It portended everything, this giant subway cockroach. Or it portended nothing. And as it came closer I drew my foot back — my right foot, I remember with absolute clarity — and nudged it, gently, off the platform and down into the dark and filthy space alongside the tracks, where it disappeared more or less instantly into the shadows and detritus.

This is how we remember things.

Once on the train, I would chat briefly with a United Airlines flight attendant, whose name I never got, and who maybe, possibly — I’ll never know for certain — was headed to work aboard the doomed United flight 175.

I was on my way to Orlando, where I’d be picking up a work assignment later that afternoon. My airplane would lift off only seconds after American’s flight 11, the first of the two jets to hit the twin towers. I had watched the silver Boeing back away from gate 25 at Logan’s terminal B and begin to taxi. United 175 would launch a few minutes later. My plane was in-between.

In an old briefcase here in this room, I still have my boarding pass from that morning. It shows me assigned to seat 11D, on the aisle, but there were empty seats and I slid over the window.

Elevens were wild that day. On the 11th day of the month, flight 11 would collide with the World Trade Center, two buildings that shaped an enormous “11” in the Manhattan sky. I looked down from row 11.

But there was nothing to see, yet. I recall an almost uncannily clear view of Manhattan, taking note, as I always do, of that graceful little bend that the island makes — the way it turns eastbound just below Midtown. There was no smoke, no fire. I was just a few minutes — a matter of seconds, maybe — too soon.

A short time later, about halfway to Florida, we started descending. Because of a “security issue,” our captain told us, we, along with many other airplanes, would be diverting immediately. Pilots are polished pros when it comes to dishing out euphemisms, and this little gem would be the most laughable understatement I’ve ever heard a comrade utter.

Our new destination was Charleston, South Carolina.

A bomb threat had been called in. That was my hunch. My worry wasn’t of war and smoldering devastation. My worry was being late for work. It wasn’t until I joined a crowd of passengers in Charleston, clustered around a TV in a concourse restaurant, that I learned what was going on.

And there I am. I’m watching the video of the second airplane, shot from the ground in a kind of twenty-first century Zapruder film. The picture swings left and picks up the United 767 moving swiftly. This is flight 175. The plane rocks, lifts its nose, and, like a charging, very angry bull making a run at a fear-frozen matador, drives itself into the very center of the south tower. The airplane vanishes. For a fraction of a second there is no falling debris, no smoke, no fire, no movement. Then, from within, you see the white-hot explosion and spewing expulsion of fire and matter.

And then, a bit later, the collapse. And this is the important part. Because to me, had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. Had the towers not actually fallen, I suspect our September 11 hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. It was the collapse — the groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattan — that catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to historical infamy.

As I stand awestruck in this shithole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are falling down. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers, collapsing onto themselves, is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen.

Then I would go to a motel and spend the night. The next morning I’d rent a car and drive all the way home to Boston.

This is how we remember things.

And pilots, like fire fighters, police officers, and everyone else whose professions had been implicated, had no choice but to take things, well, personally. Four on-duty airline crews were victims, including eight pilots. John Ogonowski comes to mind, the good-guy captain of American 11. Of the thousands of people victimized that day, Captain Ogonowski was figuratively, if not literally, the first of them. He lived in my home state; his funeral made the front pages, where he was eulogized for his philanthropic work with local Cambodian immigrants.

Maybe it’s melodramatic to say I felt a bond or kinship with these eight men, but it’s something like that. What they went through, these eight colleagues on the very front edge of the attacks, the very men whose airplanes would be stolen and weaponized, is something I can’t fathom yet, at the same time, I can imagine and visualize all too chillingly.

And yes, in the ten-second bursts it took the towers to fall, I knew something about the business of flying planes would be different forever. I just wasn’t sure what it would be.

Fast-forward. It’s hyperbole to speak of the world having been “changed forever” that day. I’m conservative and skeptical when it comes to these things. History is bigger than us. Try to take the long view, even if, all these years on, the dominos haven’t stopped falling. Heck, tens of millions of people died in World War Two — tens of thousands at a time, as the incendiaries rained down over Europe and Japan. A hundred thousand bodies one night in Tokyo alone.

Sure, things are different now. Albeit for reasons we don’t always own up to. I have to say, I’m discouraged — or should that be encouraged? — because more than any “clash of civilizations,” the real and lasting legacy of Mohamed Atta and his henchmen has been something more mundane: tedium.

Think about it. The long lines, the searches and pat-downs, the litany of rules and protocols we’re forced to follow — all this meaningless pomp in the name of security. Of modern life’s many rituals, few are marinated in boredom as much as air travel. “Flying” is what we call it. How misleading. We don’t fly so much as we sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time.

And most distressing of all, we seem to be okay with this. There’s the real legacy of September 11th. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and perhaps that’s true. It isn’t quite what they hoped to win, but they’ve won it nevertheless.

The irony that nobody talks about is that the hijackers’ ability to pull off the 2001 attacks so spectacularly had almost nothing to do with airport security in the first damn place. And none of the measures we see on the concourse today would have kept them from succeeding. I’ve made this point many times, but never have I seen or heard it acknowledged elsewhere.

As conventional wisdom has it, the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling boxcutters onto the airplanes. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold: diversions to Beirut or Havana, with hostage negotiations and standoffs.

The presence of boxcutters was merely incidental — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The men could have used knives fashioned from plastic, broken bottles wrapped with tape, or any of a thousand other improvised tools. The only weapon that mattered was the intangible one: the element of surprise. So long as they didn’t chicken out, they were all but guaranteed to succeed.

For a number of reasons, just the opposite is true today. The hijack paradigm was changed forever even before the first of the Twin Towers had dropped to the ground, when the passengers of United 93 realized what was happening and fought back. That element of surprise was no longer a useful device. Hijackers today would face not only an armored cockpit, but also a planeload of people convinced they’re about to die. It’s hard to imagine a terrorist, be it with a boxcutter or a bomb, making it two steps up the aisle without being pummeled. It’s equally hard to imagine that organized groups would be willing to expend valuable resources on a scheme with such a high likelihood of failure.

In spite of this reality, we are apparently content spending billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened and cannot happen again. Guards paw through our luggage in a hunt for what are effectively harmless items: hobby knives, scissors, screwdrivers. Meanwhile, even a child knows that a lethal implement can be crafted out of virtually anything, from a ballpoint pen to a shattered first class dinner plate.

And so on.

A September 11th post isn’t anything I’ve looked forward to, and I’m wary of the maudlin sentimentalizing and over-the-top coverage this anniversary brings each year. But something needs to be said, and so here it is. After all, nothing in my lifetime had a more profound effect on air travel than the events of that Tuesday morning twenty-three years ago.

At least until COVID-19 came along.

As the pandemic played out, it was interesting to notice the eerie parallels with September 11th and the ensuing “war on terror.”

Both crises were born of legitimately dangerous circumstances, but quickly became twisted by politics and hysteria. Curiously, this seems to have happened in opposite ways: After the 2001 attacks, it was mostly people on the right who bought into the hype and fear; who saw terrorists around every corner and were willing to sign off on things like the Patriot Act, TSA, the Iraq War, and so forth. Left-leaning people resisted. With COVID, it was left-leaning people who were more fearful and pessimistic, while those on the right advocate for a softer, more laissez-faire approach.

Why the difference? I suspect it’s because people who lean right are more naturally drawn to responses involving power and conflict; going after enemies, seeking revenge, etc. — all the things that came into play after September 11th. The pandemic, on the other hand, centered on concepts like compassion and “saving people.”

Both crises have mostly receded, thankfully. But one of the crucial takeaways, in both instances, was witnessing how, when people are afraid, they’ll quickly adapt to almost anything, including ways of life that are unproductive or harmful.

Just as the virus will stay with us, chronic and endemic, so will terrorism. There may have been, and may still be, a “war on terror,” but there will never be an end of terrorism.

How we live within this reality defines us for the long term. We can do so sensibly, or by waging a ruinously expensive, self-destructive battle with no conceivable end.

 

About the photos:

The picture at the top was taken by the author from the cockpit of a 19-seater in 1994.

The second picture is a watercolor rendition of the same, painted by Julianna Harhay, the daughter of Michael Harhay, a pilot for United Airlines. That is Michael’s arm in the first photo.

 

An earlier version of this essay appears in chapter six of COCKPIT CONFIDENTIAL.

Related Stories:

CONSPIRACY NATION
AIRPORT SECURITY IN THE NEW CENTURY

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A cheesehead’s view of the world

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Wisconsin seemed perfectly normal. People in Boston or New Orleans had regional accents. We did not. We weren’t even a “region” at all. Just a generic state, with no distinguishing characteristics. When I was young, I could see the world clearly through transparent glass, without my view being filtered by a regional bias. At least that’s how it seemed to me.

Tyler Cowen would say that I was in denial, that I’m a regional thinker like anyone else. In this post I’ll try to figure out what that means. Does the place of my birth influence my political views? Does it influence my taste in art? In both cases, I am going to reluctantly suggest that the answer is yes.

In this post, it will be useful to avoid thinking in terms of the usual left-right distinctions in politics. Wisconsin is currently a purple state, arguably the most purple state in the entire nation. In that sense it is fairly normal. But in a deeper sense Wisconsin is an outlier. It has an unusually egalitarian ethic, and this was even more true back when I lived in the state (from 1957 to 1977).

In other posts, I’ve argued that the distinguishing feature of utilitarianism is the idea that every person’s welfare is equally important. By that criterion, you could argue that Milton Friedman was a utilitarian. But you could say the same about the “sewer socialists” that governed Milwaukee during the early decades of the 20th century. This isn’t one of those left/right issues—it’s beyond traditional ideology.

As with many on the left, I have a visceral dislike for the arrogant rich, for people who think they deserve special treatment because of their wealth or talent. As with many on the right, I have no sympathy for the argument that people on the bottom of society should be excused for bad behavior.

I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but of the countries that I have visited, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands seem most similar to Wisconsin in a cultural sense. Lots of Germans settled there after the failed 1848 revolutions (the same year that Wisconsin achieved statehood). There were also lots of immigrats from Scandinavia. I presume these migrants brought some of the egalitarian instincts that defined Wisconsin culture.

When I travel around America, most regions seem more class conscious than Wisconsin, at least compared to Madison, Wisconsin back in the 1960s. Like almost everyone there, I went to public schools. I never even knew whether the other students came from a family of doctors, lawyers or janitors. When I got to Boston, I was surprised by the fact that you could tell a lot about a person’s class by their accent. I was shocked to find that some towns reserved their beaches for residents only. Or that there were gated communities. (Today, I live in a gated community and I still hate the idea.)

I taught a semester in London in 1986 and then a semester in Australia in 1991. In a standard political sense, Britain seems more left wing than Australia. The British government certainly spends more on social programs. But Australia seems to have a more egalitarian culture. I’d make a similar comparison between Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

Because of the egalitarianism I imbibed growing up, I am very averse to any form of tribalism. I dislike right wingers that demonize various races and gender preferences, but I also dislike left wingers that demonize the rich or straight white males. Indeed I’d favor the French approach of not even having the government collect data on ethnicity, and I’d copy the Swedes by having the government treat everyone as a single person for taxation purposes. I’m a radical individualist egalitarian utilitarian. America’s president is a public servant—I view him no differently from a butler or chauffeur. He works for me.

In my paper entitled The Great Danes, I argued that utilitarians adopted left wing views on economics at times when those views seemed “progressive” and right wing views on economics when free markets seemed more progressive. Here is AI Overview:

On January 28, 1932, [Wisconsin] Governor Philip La Follette signed the nation's first state unemployment insurance legislation.

and

Wisconsin revolutionized U.S. social policy by replacing traditional cash entitlement programs with strict, work-based welfare systems that served as a blueprint for the 1996 federal welfare reform.

Socialism seemed progressive in the 1930s and neoliberalism seemed progressive in the 1990s. Both policy changes were small-p “progressive”, but only the first was progressive in the left-wing sense of the term. The key to understanding places like Wisconsin (or Sweden) is to look past the outdated left/right approach to political ideology. Progressive utilitarians follow the zeitgeist.

Part 2: Am I a regional art appreciator?

I am very resistant to the idea that my taste in art is in some sense “regional”. I tend to prefer literature from Europe and the visual arts from both Europe and East Asia. On the other hand, if I were to list my six favorite American artists, it would look something like this:

  1. Bob Dylan

  2. Frank Lloyd Wright

  3. Stanley Kubrick

  4. Herman Melville

  5. David Lynch

  6. Orson Welles

Half of those artists were either born in Wisconsin, or along the state line in (Duluth) Minnesota. Too small a sample size to be statistically significant, but worth thinking about. Do Dylan, Wright and Welles have anything in common?

In an excellent book discussing Wright’s residential commissions, the author quotes from Wright’s biography:

Human scale was true building scale. Why not, then, the scale fixing the proportions of all buildings whatsoever? What other scale could I use? This was not a canon taught me by anyone. So I accommodated heights in the new buildings to no exaggerated established order nor to impress the beholder (I hated grandomania then as much as I hate it now) but only to comfort the human being.

and then adds the following observation:

Prairie house plans were based on a tartan plaid of main spaces and secondary spaces, of public rooms and circulation spaces. Their decentralized asymmetry did not follow the Beaux Arts insistence on a primary, often dominating, focal point—a vestige of its roots as a symbolic architecture for the divine-right royalty, following Wright’s philosophy. Prairie design was emphatically democratic and non-hierarchical.

I suspect that Wright is under-appreciated because architectural critics prefer urbanism to Wright’s suburban approach. Even though I love visiting New York, deep down I have I have a suburban sensibility from growing up in Madison.

Orson Welles seemed to share Wright’s democratic spirit. Of all his films, it is the character Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight that is closest to Welles. Falstaff’s heart is broken when the dream of democratic camaraderie dies at the end. That is sort of how I feel when I see Wisconsin’s traditional political culture get destroyed by the forces currently sweeping national politics. Maybe that sort of egalitarian world is an impractical dream, but it is still sad to see it disappear.

A whole book could be written about Dylan’s views, which are almost endlessly multifaceted and hard to pin down. One obvious theme is his distaste for the arrogance of the rich and powerful, as seen in songs like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. But Dylan was never a reliable left winger, indeed he was once a fan of Barry Goldwater. The song It’s Alright Mama, contains jabs at both the right:

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears

and the left:

Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he's in

I like to think that I form my own views, and don’t let others tell me what to believe. But given the large share of my life devoted to listening to Dylan songs, I’m probably in denial about my autonomy. Many of his lyrics are in my bloodstream.

Maybe I should stop resisting the notion that I’m provincial. After all, free will doesn’t really exist—does it?

Another post could be written on how people are not just regional thinkers, they are also generational thinkers. Does the fact that I grew up without air conditioning or color TV influence the way I think about current issues of poverty?

PS. Much later in life, I discovered that Wisconsin people actually do have an accent, which you can hear in films like Fargo. I was fooled by the fact that when I was growing up, many national newscasters were midwesterners.

PPS. David Lynch grew up in Montana. That’s far from Wisconsin but perhaps shares some of the same “north central America” culture. The Straight Story is about an old man journeying to Wisconsin and is a film that affected me deeply.

PPPS. That same Dylan song quoted from above also contains many other gems, including, “he not busy being born is busy dying”. Even 60 years later, he seems like an almost insanely good lyricist.

PPPPS. I tried to get ChatGPT to generate a version of that famous New Yorker cover. The first two attempts were pathetic—big cities on islands. After a few nudges I improved the image to merely bad:

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Links 9/10/26

Links for you. Science:

OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician
More Impossible-to-Ignore Vaccine Effects
Some adult vaccines are linked to lower dementia risk. Can they promote brain health?
DRC’s Ebola outbreak has the potential to become a global pandemic. How to make sure it doesn’t
In cod we trust. As Northern cod stocks rebound, Newfoundlanders are expressing cautious optimism over a fish they nearly lost

Other:

OpenAI’s Egregious Pattern of Misconduct
Smear Campaign Says Anti-Flock Movement Is Chinese Propaganda
Two dire warnings, one from Terence Tao, the other from someone who just quit Anthropic
Memphis Has Spent a Year Under Federal Occupation. ICE Would Rather You Didn’t Notice.
What Voter Suppression Looks Like in Practice
What If We Could Have A Future?
MAGA fans erupt at Ken Paxton after ‘tone-deaf’ praise for women
Fact-checking Trump’s stories about his own 9/11 response
National Guard member arrested in DC, accused of drawing gun on fellow Guard member
The Race to Keep Cheating With AI
Donald Trump’s Empty Bag Of Tricks. Democrats need to be vigilant about his ongoing attack on the elections, but his ratf*ckery is too transparent and well-worn to fool anyone anymore.
The confident ignorance of Jane Kim’s plan for California insurance
A Brazilian Meat Billionaire Walked Into Trump’s Oval Office. What Happened Next Should Terrify Us All…
Democrats See a Wave. Can They Afford to Ride It? (it seems like wealthy Democrats are sitting out?)
Elon Musk’s PAC makes transgender people its multi-million-dollar midterm target
Maria Bartiromo discovers that her boss is not Donald Trump
Jared Kushner’s Incompetence Was on Full Display This Weekend
A summer of recalls exposes holes in the nation’s food safety net
Our Country’s Gone Awry
Teen Reading Slumps to Worst This Century Due to Surge in Screen Time
Trump Tailspins as GOP Leaks Humiliating Truth: He’s Toxic
Bizarre Glitch Causes Delivery Robots to Swarm Busy City Sidewalk
His model was built to detect voter fraud. Now it’s testing the limits of election trust. (it’s a crap model that failed basic control tests)
Don’t Let The Terrorists Win
‘I’ll miss you, tree’: A Dupont Circle tree stump becomes a memorial
Sure Why Not

Is this star winking at us? The central object in Is this star winking at us? The central object in


Forthcoming Tolkien Conference Explores Maps and Landscapes

The third Tolkien Conference Switzerland, to be held in Lucerne on 13 March 2027, will have as its topic Maps and Landscapes in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Tolkien’s maps are never merely geographical. While they guide the… More

Apple Maps Has Ads Now

Belatedly noting that ads have started rolling out on Apple Maps in the U.S. and Canada. 9to5Mac explains where and where they’ll appear (in Suggested Places, and in search results). John Gruber and Oliver Roick… More

A Severe Geomagnetic Storm’s Extensive Disruption of GPS

We’ve seen before that solar storms can have an impact on GPS accuracy. A study published in Geophysical Research Letters determined that a severe geomagnetic storm in November 2025 caused positioning errors in excess of… More

My short interview with Julia Willemyns

Here is the link, here is the end bit:

Who is the most important thinker of our time?

It’s not about individual thinkers any more. It’s about the internet as this vast organ of knowledge that you can play like a musical instrument, and combining the internet with AI. You can figure out things to an unprecedented degree, and it’s great in a way how much we’ve removed that process from any individual thinker.

What’s your favourite podcast?

My own! It would be weird if it wasn’t, right?

Fun throughout, from the Centre for British Progress.

The post My short interview with Julia Willemyns appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 

Thursday assorted links

1. On India’s new gdp statistics.

2. Reasons why robotics are hard.

3. On 20th century music.

4. Is the inflation picture shifting? (correct link)

5. The importance of nuclear risk.

6. Call for AI safety start-ups.  Project Tailwind.

7. Do the doomers have a good forecasting record?

8. OAI employees are contributing significantly to their 401k plans.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

Comments

 

When individualism worked

I’m reading more of Hartmut Rosa’s narrative of Social Acceleration. Paraphrasing:

It made sense to have a stable, personal identity when the pace of social change meshed with the change of generations; this is a marker of classical modernity (like, 1800-1970). Before that, and in traditional societies with slower rates of social change, people find themselves defined by pre-existing, enduring structures–an intergenerational identity. After that, in a super-fast-changing society like late modernity (now) pushes us toward a flexible identity, away from continuity. These days,

[People] must either conceive themselves from the very beginning as open, flexible, and eager to change

This describes me, and I considered it a virtue. Now I consider it advantageous. A small identity and willingness to shift occupations as the occasion offers, and take pride in new things every few years–useful.

Rosa goes on to describe the alternative:

suffering permanent frustration when their projected identities are threatened with failure by a quickly changing environment.

That describes a lot of America right now!

Our individualist culture made sense in that ~150 years when we got to have a stable identity that wasn’t tied to our ancestry. But modernity is built upon acceleration (of tech; pace of life; and social change), so it didn’t stay there. Now the way the world works changes faster than we can grow up, so we have to grow up over and over.

Right now we’re growing into people who use AI for everything. It’s jarring! Exciting, and also difficult. Most of us did not ask for this. Most of us would like to be who we are for a few more decades.

There was a moment when individualism was compatible with human identity formation, a golden age when our lifetime and the pace of social change coincided.

What to do about it?

Now I want an identity that stretches longer than a decade. I don’t think I can build one for my lifetime, plus that doesn’t make sense. Maybe I can weave into other people in the past, future, and now to find a narrative that extends beyond me. If I’m gonna make the world better, it’s can be both very local (the people around me) or slower than my lifetime. The day of a great Hero who Changes the World and lives to see it… that moment is gone.

Today’s Census News is a Big Deal

When with Congress and the public recognize how important the census is?

tl;dr: “American democracy depends on the census. Trump is undermining it” is my new op-ed at the Guardian. Check it out!

For census geeks, this summer has been one eeeek after another. Planks of the Jenga tower keep getting pulled out. First, the White House announced that the Census Bureau must stop using sophisticated techniques to protect the public’s confidentiality; they were told to go back to the 1960s and suppress data or round. The result will be less data, less quality data, and/or less privacy. It’s bad all around. We are starting to see the impact: critical data has been delayed.

And then a group of political operatives weaseled themselves into the bureau to produce a report that “shows” that immigrants voted in the election. Never mind that even their report shows that it had no impact on the election. Or that the quality of the data were shite. Or that they violated every norm of the Census Bureau to produce a report without names, data quality metrics, or methods. Folks were reasonably up-in-arms about what this means for the undermining of our country’s data systems.

And, then today, the Census Bureau released what they had leaked a month ago… The new “residence rules” for the 2030 census. While they are following protocol in how they are releasing them, the changes are gobsmacking. The White House is ordering the bureau to not collect data about race (or ethnicity or sexual orientation) by saying that this is the way to protect the privacy of the data and to ensure that the census is “colorblind.” It’s also ordering the bureau to not collect data about certain categories of non-citizens, despite the Constitutional requirement to count everyone. And there are lots of other weirdo changes in there. Like counting people based on where they live during the winter rather than where they live for the majority of the year (presumably to give states with “snow bird” populations extra people).

What bugs me the most about all of this is that the Constitution gave Congress the responsibility to govern the census. Will they? Or have they absconded with their responsibilities entirely?

And what will it take for Congress and the public to realize that every important decision about the 2030 census is about to take place NOW. Whenever I talk to people about the census, their eyes glaze over. And when I push, they tell me that it can all be fixed in 2029. It can’t be. This piece of data infrastructure is the core of American democracy – and the critical questions are happening now.

Oh, how I wish that more people would care to learn about what’s happening with the census. (Of course I do – I wrote a whole book about it.) It’s just sooooo important. But it’s also so infrastructural. And infrastructures are boring. But they shouldn’t be!

Want to learn more?

[RODEN] Writing in 2026, Walking Europe

Roden Readers —

Hello from Europe. My body hasn’t been this happy in September in years. The coolness. The chill. The clouds. The 0 UV index. What is this crazy way of summer living? Where you’re not being blasted by a death ray from above while wrapped in a wet blanket and shoved in a stove while tiny demons spray gasoline everywhere? This is not the September of Tokyo (although this year, from afar, looks freakishly wet and temperate(ish)?).

AIs Compress Exploit Timeline

Give an AI agent a mere rumor of an exploit, and it’s enough for them to find it.

What’s worse, I found I could use my own agents to find the exploit just by knowing roughly what it was about and so could have been exploiting it well before the public patch was available! Given that just the rumour of a security issue seems enough to give attackers enough info to find new exploits, we’re going to need to change the way we deal with security responses in open source.

Simon Willison comments:

Anil points out that this rate of discovery appears incompatible with existing open source embargo practices for new issues. If an issue can become an exploit this fast, we need to figure out new processes for keeping our communities safe.

Driver’s License Data for Sale

A database of 153 million drivers licenses is for sale on the dark web. Brian Krebs has more detail.

A Night With LA's E-Bike Gangs

In this episode, Ashlee joins the only gang that would plausibly have him — one run by a former circus clown.

After dark, downtown Los Angeles belongs to a lithium-powered gang led by Kelly Chameleon,…

Read more

Bessent and the Bonds

Another short, wonky post. Too much going on for more.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite aphorism made sense then and now. Policymakers should avoid being boastful or belligerent, not simply as a matter of good manners, but to save their credibility for moments when it’s really needed.

Obviously nobody expects Donald Trump to follow TR’s advice. No matter what the circumstances, Trump will always insist that he’s carrying a big stick, the biggest stick, a stick like nobody has ever carried before. But I expected a bit more circumspection from Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary.

After all, a young Bessent was working for George Soros in 1992 when Soros famously engineered a speculative run on the British pound. At the time British officials loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that they would never, ever allow the pound to be devalued — then caved in the face of market pressure, a humiliation from which Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, equivalent to the U.S. Treasury secretary, never recovered. So Bessent should know the risks of talking big when you might not have the means to deliver.

Oh well. On Tuesday, Bessent — who has been deploying U.S. funds to support the Japanese yen, declared himself in control of the situation: “I am the house now … And you can bet against me if you want.”

So far markets haven’t challenged Bessent’s boasts about the yen. They have, however, tested his attempts to push down U.S. interest rates — and as the headline at the top of this post says, those efforts are failing with flying colors.

Now, I’d like to blame the Trump administration for rising interest rates. The truth, however, is that rates are rising everywhere. As the European think tank Bruegel says,

[The] problem with explanations centred on a breakdown in US institutions is that the rise in long-term rates is not uniquely American. US, German, French, Italian, United Kingdom and Japanese 30-year yields rose by 45-79 basis points in the six months to 28 August, with the US in the middle at 58bp.

Given the craziness of our leadership, America arguably deserves to be punished by the bond market, but the truth is that we can’t see that happening in the data (yet?).

So what is driving interest rates higher? It may not have much to do with policy at all. The simplest story consistent with the facts is that we’re seeing a surge in demand for funds as a result of the AI boom. We are in the midst of a surge in spending on information technology (information processing equipment and software) that is on track to be even bigger than the boom of the late 1990s:

And it’s worth noting that long-term interest rates were even higher then than they are now, even though inflation was low and we had a budget surplus:

As I said, although the Trump administration deserves blame for many things, I don’t think it’s responsible for high long-term rates, any more than Bill Clinton was responsible for high rates in the late 1990s. This looks like the natural market response to the rush to invest in AI.

It is, however, foolish of Bessent to imagine that he can beat rising rates back by talking big while waving his tiny, tiny stick. All he’s doing is further draining his rapidly diminishing reserves of credibility.

Quoting Calif Research

Today, we're releasing a demo of WeWorm, the first zero-click worm to spread through WeChat calls across iOS and Android. [...]

The victim does not need to answer the call, or interact with their phone at all. Even if they do answer, they hear nothing, and the exploit still succeeds. [...]

Working with AI, our team found the bug and wrote the first remote code execution (RCE) exploit in about two days. Building the worm took one more week.

A worm at this scale used to be the kind of thing that took a larger team months. AI can already do most of the work here. Our team provided the judgment about what to target and how to test it safely.

Calif Research, WeWorm

Tags: ai-security-research, ai, llms, security, generative-ai

.blend URL Viewer

Tool: .blend URL Viewer

I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL).

As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs, I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture.

Yesterday I decided to try out the new ChatGPT Images 2.5 by running this prompt:

Generate a photo of a faberge egg that's themed after the TV show Pluribus - research first

It gave me this - honestly not bad for a first attempt!

It's a yellow Fabergé egg, half open. Inside you can clearly see Carol in her black outfit facing off against a choir of creepy white-faced joined humans. There are cacti and it has an Albuquerque New Mexico feel to it. The egg stand has a Pluribus plaque.

Then, just to see what would happen, I pasted that image into Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) and prompted:

Use your blender local skill to create a blender model of this faverge egg

(Here's the skill file, which I created like this.)

It churned away for 17m51s and built me several .blend files. I already had this vibe-coded Blender viewing experiment lying around, so I added that to my tools collection and now you can use it to see my Pluribus blender model in your browser:

Screenshot of a web-based 3D Blender file viewer showing a rendered gold Fabergé-style jeweled egg. The top of the egg is lifted open, revealing a miniature desert diorama inside with green cacti, brown rocks, and a small black-suited figure standing in the center. The egg's shell is decorated with green gems, pearls, ornate scrollwork, a ring of smiling white egg-shaped faces, and oval medallions painted with a cactus and desert scene. The egg stands on four gold legs over a black marbled base with a gold plaque reading PLURIBUS. The URL bar reads https://github.com/simonw/vibe-coded-blender-projects/blob/main/pluribus-faberge-egg/deliverables/Pluribus_Jeweled_Egg_v1.blend with a View button; top-right buttons read Fit, Wireframe, Clear. A bottom-left info panel reads: Loaded Blender 05.01 · 7.2 MB / 387 meshes · 1099 curves · 1 text · 783,764 vertices · 1,446,560 triangles · 17 materials / Preview: approximate materials and text; unapplied modifiers are omitted. / GitHub URL resolved through jsDelivr

Tags: 3d, javascript, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, blender, coding-agents, codex, gpt-6-astra

Desperate to Stop a Midterm Rout, Trump Lies About Offering $5,000 Checks If Republicans Hold the Congress

I guess the good news is that this offer to send every household a $5,000 check serves the same function as the poorly written Nigerian prince scam offers: the stupidity of the offer targets everyone who is stupid enough to fall for it. Democrats should not attack this as if it were a serious policy offering, but as yet another lie from Donald Trump, a corrupt man who is desperate to avoid the accountability he should face.

Consider his record of lies, since Trump was reelected (Boy Howdy, was that fucking stupid):

  1. We would be getting $5,000 DOGE checks. We didn’t! We did layoff a bunch of people, many of whom the Trump administration is now trying to replace. Also, we demolished foreign aid–killed a bunch of people, but no $5,000 checks!
  2. We would be receiving $2,000 tariff stimulus checks. We didn’t! But the tariffs have been estimated to cost, depending on who’s doing the calculations, $600 to $1,200 per household.
  3. We would receive $1,000 or more after the ACA subsidies expired. We didn’t! But millions of Americans now can’t afford healthcare.

None of this includes higher gas prices due to the Iran War. And for context, this $1.3 trillion ‘offer’ is about eighty percent of all U.S. government discretionary spending. The offer also raises the obvious question: why haven’t Republicans tried to pass something like this before? (Because it’s really stupid, that’s why).

Donald Trump is a stupid, failing narcissist, which means he will say anything to look good and to feel good about himself, which is to say, he lies all the time. In other words, this latest lie is just an act of desperation, meaning their internal polling for the midterms must be awful.

Links 9/9/26

Links for you. Science:

The function of LLM-based math “proofs”
Pigbutt worm
Cyclospora outbreak followed years of declining FDA foreign inspections
A Surge of Marine Heat Waves Threatens to Scramble Ocean Life
Bob Kadlec: “I call it virological Russian roulette” (Kadlec is the Defense Department official in charge of the money stolen from NIH)
Bears in Los Angeles Are Getting Their Close-Ups, Ready or Not
‘Rich botanical legacy’: UNC acquires Duke Herbarium

Other:

The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore
The media double-standard that lets the GOP get away with taking millions from a white supremacist
A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator. Patients sued by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas were routinely charged 18 percent interest, The Times found. Some had bank accounts garnished.
How To Undo The Great Lie Of 2024. Trump’s second election wasn’t a verdict for all time, but the coming midterms might be one.
Smithsonian’s Secretary to Resign as Trump Tries to Rule the Institution
Trump Makes Wild New Claim in Rambling Remarks About Visiting 9/11 Rubble
The AfD’s win in Germany is a dark day for Europe. Time is running out to stop the far right
The Day Most Holy
He Did Tech PR. Now He Rails Against AI for a Living.
After 9/11, Documents Suggest, New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality
Trump can’t help but make 9/11 about himself
Concentration Risk
Before Hegseth fired him, top general was advised to drop Kid Rock probe
A Presidential Failson’s New Crypto Grift
Fraud-convicted GOP candidate accused of exploiting five ex-wives
Netanyahu Received an Explicit Warning Days Before Oct. 7. He Didn’t Brief Israel’s Security Chiefs
Pentagon Agreement With N.I.H. on Biodefense Draws Alarm From Democrats
A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over
No Kings group pivots to mass voter turnout events
Trump officials strip military language criticizing Confederate memorial. A new sign at Arlington National Cemetery omits wording that said the 32-foot bronze statue “mythologized” the Confederacy and gave “sanitized” depictions of slavery.
Journalist Accuses Ohio’s Main Newspaper of Slapping Her Name on an AI “Express Desk” Article Without Her Knowledge, While She Was on Honeymoon
‘Toxic, Intimidating, Humiliating’: New Watchdog Report Adds Detail to Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s Ousting. Is it official Dept. of Labor business when you have subordinates “drop bills” on a “partially nude woman” in a strip club?
Republicans might still lose half the seats they gerrymandered to flip
The federal government is falling apart
Pentagon refuses payout for soldiers who died in Iran conflict ‘because it isn’t a war’
Can Philly Mass-Produce Its Way Out of a Housing Crisis?
Mamdani Issues AI Moratorium in NYC Schools
This U.S. Citizen Is Suing ICE for Arresting Him 3 Times. His Lawsuit Is Moving Forward.
Dems Ask for Probe Into Trump Team’s Handling of Anniversary Data
For Fired DeSantis Campaign Staff Member, a Second Chance at State Dept.

The Chinese room

Illustration of a robot reading with a thought bubble showing ancient cave paintings of hunters and a deer.

Can we test for AI consciousness when we don’t understand our own? Getting into John Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ experiment

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Medieval mental health

Medieval painting of a man in a bath, attended by various people under a tree with heart-shaped leaves.

Saffron and ostrich liver were prescribed but so were exercise, gardens, animals, socialising, and music

- by Katherine Harvey

Read on Aeon

Britain’s Sanctions on the West Bank Settlements Are the Right Step Forward

On Tuesday the United Kingdom announced a series of sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They were joined in this by Canada and France. The sanctions include a ban on imports on goods produced in the West Bank as well as those who provide services including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.” That sounds like it involves sanctions on banks funding settlements. The Times refers to this as a “symbolic step.” But I’m not sure that’s the case. The devil is really in the details of that clause I quoted, how it is interpreted and enforced; just what counts as services, direct or incidental; and what counts as expansion. It also, of course, matters a great deal whether other countries adopt the same policy.

This is a wise, judicious and necessary policy. If Barack Obama had put measures like this at least on the table back in 2009 when he tried to force a resumption of final settlement talks we might be living in a much better and very different reality today. When the then-newly elected Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Obama’s overtures Obama mostly walked away and gave up. In his semi-defense he wasn’t elected to bring about a final settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict and it would have required an immense amount of political capital simply to set the stage for it, let alone accomplish it. The key feature of this new British policy is that it distinguishes between what is legitimate (Israel within its internationally recognized 1967 borders) and what is not (its settlements on the West Bank).

We hear a lot about sanctions against Israel today. Some is from voices that want to delegitimize or destroy Israel. From others it’s over legitimate anger and outrage at the violence they see in Gaza and the West Bank. But the real measure of any sanctions, I would argue, is the degree to which they have a chance of shifting the trajectory of the region toward some possibility of a just settlement for both peoples. And the settlements are the key to that. Are they the sole cause of the conflict? Will eliminating them automatically bring a stable peace? Of course not. The point is that their existence and especially their continued growth makes any possible settlement in the future vastly harder and likely more bloody. Critically, the expansion of settlements provides zero security benefits to Israel. You can argue that control of the highlands of the West Bank provides a buffer to protect the rest of Israel, the majority of which is more coastal and low-lying. Settlements have nothing to do with that. They just create more outlying settlements the IDF has to defend.

Many Israelis will tell you that lots of the “settlements” are actually just bedroom communities around Jerusalem. Many of their residents aren’t ideologues but, at least originally, young families drawn there by subsidized home loans. Only a small number of settlers are the rabid and feral “hilltop youth” we’ve been seeing laying siege to that home in the village of Qusra and involved in various other attacks on Palestinian communities in the West Bank. That’s mostly accurate but beside the point. The violent settlers in the outlying outposts should all be under sanctions. For the rest, the issue isn’t who’s good or bad. It’s the settlement themselves. The key is at least to arrest their growth — and that’s what the current violence is about, accelerating the settlement process and pressing the Palestinian population into smaller and smaller enclaves.

The standard line for many is that the growth of the settlements since collapse of the original “peace process” in the 90s has been so great that all of this is moot. (Roughly 150,000 in 1995 to just over 500,000 today, excluding East Jerusalem.) Partition/two states is an illusion, no longer feasible. We need to deal with the current single state reality. On paper it seems like a strong argument. But this casual dismissal manages to be both too cynical and too naive. The argument is that continuing to argue for partition/two states is either pointless or a dodge because, whatever the Palestinians might think, the Israeli public simply no longer supports the idea. (A high point of upwards of 60% in support as recently as 2012 has seen a steady decline ever since.) Meanwhile, the right-wing or “nationalist” bloc is totally committed to perpetual control of the entire land between the river and the sea and at best an ongoing settlement process which presses the Palestinian population into ever smaller enclaves.

That makes it seem pretty bleak. And it is pretty bleak.

But there’s a basic breakdown in elemental logic. The argument is that this is impossible because Israelis range from skeptical/against to absolutely dead-set against the creation of a Palestinian state. But somehow they’re going to be more amenable to the creation of a single state in which there ceases to be a Jewish majority, all the Jewish character of the state is lost and, depending on your point of view, either the possibility of Jewish self-determination or Jewish privilege is lost in what would probably quickly degenerate into a failed state in any case? Put the matter squarely and the whole idea is laughable. That’s an infinitely heavier lift. The scale of opposition to a single state is like orders of magnitude greater. The answer is that opposition can be overcome: you press the matter with coercion, mostly through economic sanctions, arms embargo and general isolation. Fine. But if that’s your strategy why not just compel partition which would be vastly easier? Opposition to partition/two states is born of frustration rather than logic.

None of this is easy. It’s hard to imagine just how you get from here to there. But you have to start somewhere. For decades the approach of Israel’s allies in North America and Europe has been to plead, cajole, propose. More than that is clearly necessary, especially as the situation in the West Bank is slipping out of control, in a symbiotic relationship between outlaw hooliganism and the settler extremist factions who are central to Netanyahu’s coalition. As I mentioned above, the immediate critical need is simply to stop the growth of settlements — and what amounts to the hooligans-cum-gang violence that is the forward claw of the process.

None of what I say above assumes or anticipates any rapid move toward a final settlement. The main opposition candidate in the October elections recently ruled out that any Palestinian state would be created during his anticipated government. There’s close to zero trust between the two sides, fairly merited in each case. But you have to start somewhere, shifting the trajectory away from the worst possibilities if not necessarily ensuring the best ones. When you’re in a hole, at some point, you simply have to stop digging. Once you do that you can think about next steps. And if not now, when?

Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI

By Anton Korinek, Charles I. Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, and Peter McCrory, a strong line-up from Anthropic.  They are sober, reasoned, scientific, and (for the most part) dynamically consistent.  Here is the paper, here is the abstract:

This paper presents a framework for assessing the economic consequences of AI between 2026 and 2030. In the model, AI automates a growing share of cognitive work, raising productivity and displacing workers who must search for jobs in other occupations. The model maps future paths of AI capabilities into implied paths for GDP, the labor share, wages, labor reallocation, and unemployment. We illustrate the framework by considering three scenarios: modest, substantial, and extreme. Under modest change, AI adds less than half a point to GDP growth by 2030 and raises unemployment by a tenth of a point. In the extreme change scenario, AI has transformative effects, with AI performing almost half of today’s cognitive work by 2030. GDP growth then rises to 15 percent per year, the labor share of income falls from 60 to 45 percent, and nearly one in five cognitive workers is unemployed. We also surveyed US adults about their expectations for AI. Views vary widely, but the median respondent’s answers are consistent with our substantial change scenario in which, by 2030, GDP rises by 8 percent and cognitive employment declines by 4 percent. The model offers a structured way to compare possibilities for our economic future under different expectations about AI.

Here is the associated thread.  I will opt for something a modest bit more than modest.

And here is a good growth discussion from Alex Imas.

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Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment

All of a sudden, French entrepreneur Hèlene Huby is seemingly everywhere.

This week she is serving as one of two envoys, alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet, at a high-profile International Space Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The government's website for the event describes her as chief executive of "the fastest-growing space company in Europe."

Also this week, that firm, The Exploration Company, announced a significant capital raise of $450 million in Series C funding. Although not spectacular by the standards of some US space businesses, this is the largest-ever Series C funding round by a Europe-based space company, and likely the largest funding round ever raised by a female-led company in Europe.

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Surrogacy (on each side of the Atlantic)

 Crossing the Atlantic today, to return home from Paris, this story in The Atlantic seems apropos:

Mothers for Sale.  Most of Europe bans commercial surrogacy. The United Nations likens it to slavery. But in the United States, business is booming.  By Helen Lewis

"Since the legalization of same-sex marriage, male couples have become the big growth market for American surrogacy, but the practice is booming among aspiring parents—married or single, straight or gay—who can afford the cost of hiring someone else to carry their child. In 2024, 11,821 embryos were transferred to surrogates in American clinics associated with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, up from 8,461 three years earlier, and the United Nations estimates that the global worth of the industry is almost $15 billion. Most surrogacy in America today is commercial, meaning that the carrier is paid, and gestational, meaning that the carrier has no genetic relationship to the child.

...

" many liberal Americans are surprised to discover that their country is an outlier in its enthusiasm for commercial surrogacy. In Britain, where I live, a ban on the practice enjoys substantial support among feminists, who worry about the power differential between paid surrogates and wealthy would-be parents. (Altruistic surrogacy, in which the surrogate carries a baby solely out of generosity, is less controversial and is permitted.) A recent UN report went even further, declaring that commercial surrogacy “constitutes the sale of children, which is a crime,” and that “surrogacy arrangements can amount to or resemble slavery.” 

...

"Because so much can go wrong, every country in the European Union has banned commercial surrogacy. France’s centrist liberal president, Emmanuel Macron, has described the practice as “not compatible with the dignity of women.” Italy’s right-wing populist leader, Giorgia Meloni, has enacted one of the strictest anti-surrogacy frameworks in the world. Not only is domestic surrogacy banned, but any Italian citizen who brings home a baby born to an overseas surrogate risks jail and a fine of up to 1 million euros. Many other developed countries have either tightly restricted surrogacy or chosen, as Britain and Canada have, to allow only the altruistic version. Israel allows surrogacy but imposes a raft of conditions: The commissioning parents must not have more than two children already, must not have serious criminal convictions, and must be of the same religion as the surrogate.

"In general, Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable. The piquant difference, however, is that surrogacy is a cause of the American left rather than the right. Red states tend to have tighter limits on surrogacy. Louisiana, for example, restricts surrogacy to married heterosexual couples using their own sperm and eggs. By contrast, when New York legalized commercial surrogacy in 2020, LGBTQ activists hailed it as a triumph for “fertility equality.”

The debate cuts across political traditions and defies easy categorization. When surrogacy goes well, the result is a happy family that would not otherwise have existed. When it goes wrong, however, it can do so in unpredictable and emotionally crushing ways. At its core, the ethical question is this: How much physical and emotional risk should individuals be allowed to take on in the name of a commercial transaction? 

...

"America also stands virtually alone as a rich country that permits incoming surrogacy tourism from elsewhere. Many of these international intended parents are from China, where surrogacy is banned and where, until recently, family size was limited by the one-child policy. These customers have exacting standards. 

...

"Look abroad, though, and it’s a different story. Some agencies offer “guaranteed baby” packages for as little as $50,000. Surrogacy destinations pop up anywhere the local laws are lax, such as Northern Cyprus, a territory that exists in a legal limbo and is recognized only by Turkey. (The problem is that babies born there can end up stateless.) For parents from Russia, nearby Georgia is a similar no-questions-asked destination.

"India used to be the most favored low-cost destination, but in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing fears of exploitation, banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners. Ukraine’s appeal as a surrogacy destination has diminished since Russia’s invasion in 2022, although the leading agency there, BioTexCom, told me that the company is still handing off one baby born via surrogacy every day on average, at a cost of about $60,000. A representative of the agency initially told me that it was planning to open a clinic in Kazakhstan, to cater to the growing Asian market. In July, however, that country abruptly banned foreign surrogacy amid concerns about exploitation. "
 



 

The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie

The events of the last 24 hours are stunning. And not in a good way. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of tech, and it’s unfolding right now.

Here’s a start. Maybe you’ve already heard about the guy who resigned from OpenAI. He warned that the technology could kill everybody before the end of the decade.

He made this announcement just 20 hours ago:

Is this really true? Maybe Coxon is just a disgruntled employee. We need to find out what other insiders think.


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As if in answer to this question, another AI scientist—Evan Hubinger at Anthropic—quickly moved to endorse Coxon’s concerns.

Then Alex Turner, who recently left Google, said the exact same thing.

Here’s what Anna Wang at Anthropic has to say.

Samuel Marks, a Harvard PhD who works at Anthropic, offered more details—but comes to the same conclusion.

Jason Wolfe at OpenAI is also worried.

Here’s what Jonathan Richard Schwarz, formerly with Google, has to say.

And, finally, here is what Jakub Pachocki the Chief Scientist at OpenAI, tells us:

The AI fanboys are trying to defuse this situation. But their responses fall apart at the slightest touch. Consider the smear that this is just a PR campaign. Really? Others are hinting it could be a Chinese plot. Yeah, sure….

But the biggest lie is the claim that these people don’t know what they are talking about. The reality is that they understand this subject better than anybody.


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What’s happening here is obvious—eight different people building this technology are afraid of what they’re seeing. But they don’t have the power individually to stop the insanity.

If this isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is. Trillions of dollars are getting pumped into a runaway technology, and the public already hates it intensely. Now the people making it happen are warning it just might kill everybody.

This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing.


POSTSCRIPT:

Since publishing this article earlier today, several other AI insiders have stepped forward to share their concerns about the tremendous risk posed by this technology.

Let me share three of them. Here’s the first—from Ethan Perez at Anthropic.

And here’s another, from Julie Steele at OpenAI.

And here’s a third, from Drake Thomas at Anthropic.

This makes clear at how widespread these concerns are inside the AI community. And, in fact, these individuals keep repeating that they are merely expressing views widely shared by their colleagues.

In the face of this, any claim that this is some kind of stunt or smear campaign is easily refuted. Not a single insider has stepped forward to deny that these concern represent the actual views of a large number of AI experts.

Ricardo Reis and the IMF?

The IMF dropped the lead candidate to become its new chief economist at the eleventh hour after he was found to have made critical remarks about the Trump administration’s economic policies, according to people briefed on the process.

The Washington-based fund was preparing an announcement that Ricardo Reis, a professor at the London School of Economics, would take over as head of research and economic counsellor earlier this summer when it suddenly backtracked. The last-minute change was prompted by earlier remarks by Reis that were critical of Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, three people familiar with the matter told the FT.

The IMF in July appointed the former Bank of England policymaker Silvana Tenreyro to the position, another highly regarded LSE economist. Tenreyro started last month.

Here is more from Olaf Storbeck, Claire Jones, and Myles McCormick at the FT.

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My very interesting Conversation with Jared Diamond

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

So which leaders do make a difference?  

Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana’s success will endure, Jared’s own place in intellectual history, and what he’d tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he’s more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he’d do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur “genius grant” left him depressed for a week, why he’s listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more. 

Excerpt, we start with this:

COWEN: Who do you think is the least replaceable leader in human history?

DIAMOND: Wow. Wow. The least replaceable leader in human history. Frankly, my answer is none. There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out. A candidate, of course, would be Jesus Christ, but there were half a dozen other prophets in the Roman Empire at that time discussed in the New Testament. If Christ had died in childbirth, one of those other prophets might have taken over. I would say that in the long run, there is no leader that has made a difference.

COWEN: Well, you say “might have taken over,” but that’s probabilistic, right? Say with a 40 percent chance, someone else would have taken over. It still seems in expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.

DIAMOND: Certainly, his religion made an enormous difference. Christ himself was the charismatic founder, but a religion needs three things: It needs a charismatic founder, it needs an organizer, and often it needs a general because new religions often face opposition. The organizer for Christianity was St. Paul. In the case of the Mahdi’s religion of the Sudan in the late 1800s, the Mahdi was the charismatic founder, and he was the organizer, and he was the general. In the case of Islam, Muhammad was the founder and the organizer and the general. Religions may have three roles, some of which are sometimes played by the same person.

COWEN: Without the figure of Muhammad at exactly the time he came along, is it not quite easy to imagine a Middle East not unified under Islam, not unified with the common language of Arabic? In some ways, maybe a bit more like the Caucasus, which remains a crazy quilt of different patterns. Thus, Muhammad is one of the three or four most consequential leaders ever.

DIAMOND: That’s possible. That’s a big question. It’s harder to become clear about Muhammad than it is about Christ, because we don’t know what the weather was like in Arabia at that time. Weather makes a big difference. If it was rainy, that would mean lots of plant growth for lots of babies and for feeding an army. We just don’t have information on the weather in Arabia at that time.

A counter-example is Genghis Khan, who developed the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. Recently, why did Genghis Khan do it when there were other steppe leaders like Adolf Hühnlein and Timur the Turk? We’ve learned recently that the wettest time on the steppes in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis’s birth. He was born at exactly the right time at the right place. If he had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn’t know anything about him. In the case of Muhammad, we just don’t know whether the time of his birth was a particularly propitious time to found a religion in that area or not.

COWEN: The very notion that the two first names we’re talking about, they’re both religious leaders, right? They’re not kings. They’re not inventors. Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it’s ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?

Interesting throughout, and we debated pomegranate juice as well.  I enjoyed reading Jared’s new book Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?

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Dust Storm Sweeps Over Mali

A light brown dust plume, dense at its center and more diffuse toward its edges, extends horizontally across an orange-brown and green landscape. Scattered white clouds cover some of the scene.
A dust storm obscures the ground in Mali in this image, acquired with the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite on September 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

As summer winds down in West Africa, so does much of the region’s dust activity. Dust storms can still occur, though, as one did in early September 2026, when a plume covered parts of Mali and neighboring countries.

The MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on September 5, 2026. According to Tianle Yuan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, storms like this one are often associated with haboobs—powerful dust storms driven by strong convective winds.

In the days after this image was acquired, a wider satellite view showed aerosols from the region moving westward and spilling over the Atlantic Ocean. However, a full transatlantic crossing is unlikely. Such crossings are more common from late spring through summer, when the Saharan Air Layer—a dry, dusty mass of air—can carry dust thousands of miles westward from Africa, riding high in the atmosphere.

Looking ahead, the developing El Niño could reshape these patterns. For instance, Yuan noted that the phenomenon can affect dust over the Sahel and Mali by shifting the Intertropical Convergence Zone and altering convection patterns, though the influence cuts both ways. Drier conditions can leave more loose sediment available for winds to lift, but less convective activity also means fewer intense storms (haboobs) to kick up large dust plumes in the first place. “The connection can be real,” Yuan said, “but hard to pin down for individual events.”

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

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Wednesday 9 September 1663

Up by break of day, and then to my vials a while, and so to Sir W. Warren’s by agreement, and after talking and eating something with him, he and I down by water to Woolwich, and there I did several businesses, and had good discourse, and thence walked to Greenwich; in my way a little boy overtook us with a fine cupp turned out of Lignum Vitae, which the poor child confessed was made in the King’s yard by his father, a turner there, and that he do often do it, and that I might have one, and God knows what, which I shall examine. Thence to Sir W. Warren’s again, and there drew up a contract for masts which he is to sell us, and so home to dinner, finding my poor wife busy.

I, after dinner, to the office, and then to White Hall, to Sir G. Carteret’s, but did not speak with him, and so to Westminster Hall, God forgive me, thinking to meet Mrs. Lane, but she was not there, but here I met with Ned Pickering, with whom I walked 3 or 4 hours till evening, he telling me the whole business of my Lord’s folly with this Mrs. Becke, at Chelsey, of all which I am ashamed to see my Lord so grossly play the beast and fool, to the flinging off of all honour, friends, servants, and every thing and person that is good, and only will have his private lust undisturbed with this common … [whore – L&M] his sitting up night after night alone, suffering nobody to come to them, and all the day too, casting off Pickering, basely reproaching him with his small estate, which yet is a good one, and other poor courses to obtain privacy beneath his honour, and with his carrying her abroad and playing on his lute under her window, and forty other poor sordid things, which I am grieved to hear; but believe it to no purpose for me to meddle with it, but let him go on till God Almighty and his own conscience and thoughts of his lady and family do it. So after long discourse, to my full satisfaction but great trouble, I home by water and at my office late, and so to supper to my poor wife, and so to bed, being troubled to think that I shall be forced to go to Brampton the next Court, next week.

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Hell-bent

Politics Chat, September 8, 2026

September 8, 2026

On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk.

When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks, posting: “If we take on responsibility here, I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation. Germany would then once again be a place worth investing in. Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt!”

Jon Henley of the Guardian noted that right-wing leaders across Europe celebrated the outcome, including ousted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who called the election results “a huge night for Germany and Europe,” adding: “Buckle up. This is just the beginning.”

Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. On August 28, Andrew Howard, Erin Doherty, and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.

Since that meeting, Musk has plowed money into the Texas Senate race to support Texas attorney general Ken Paxton against Democratic nominee James Talarico. According to Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times, Musk’s investments—many through political action committees—target Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as House races in at least California, Wisconsin, and Washington.

Musk’s open attempt to buy elections for the Republicans should be bigger news, not only because of the political power his money has given to one man, but also because of what his behavior says about the MAGA administration’s ideology and its goals.

After supporting Trump in 2024, Musk appeared to become the head of the Department of Government Efficiency—the administration was coy about who actually held that title—where he worked to slash government spending. On February 3, he posted on his social media: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.” Musk called USAID—the United States Agency for International Development—“a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical left-marxists who hate America.”

In July 2026, Ari Daniel, David Augustine, Kazeem Olawale Nasiru, and Lameck Nyagudi of NPR reported on a study by Boston University infectious disease modeler Brooke Nichols that estimated more than 700,000 people had died from the sudden stop in USAID funding, including more than half a million children in developing countries.

And yet, for all his talk about slashing government expenditures, Musk’s DOGE did not appear to save much. Emilio Perez Ibarguen of Politico reported in August, when DOGE officially ended, that a report by the Government Accountability Office found that the savings it claimed were in large part exaggerated or couldn’t be corroborated.

Meanwhile, government contracts continued to flow to Musk’s businesses. As Desmond Butler, Trisha Thadani, Emmanuel Martinez, Aaron Gregg, Luis Melgar, Jonathan O’Connell, and Dan Keating reported in the Washington Post in February 2025, Musk himself has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer dollars in history, taking in at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the course of more than 20 years. Once he was in power in Trump 2.0, government investigations into those businesses ended.

The very public nature of Musk’s antics has helped to wake the public up to the fact that our current system is skewed toward billionaires. In July, economist Paul Krugman noted a growing backlash against those billionaires. A poll by UMass Amherst found that 58% of Americans think billionaires are a threat to democracy, and 45% of them say the U.S. is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” As Krugman noted, only 28% of those polled disagreed.

Krugman pointed out that wealth has been concentrating at the top of the U.S. economy for decades, so the growing wave against that concentration of wealth appears to be driven by those like Musk and Trump himself, who has flaunted his use of taxpayer money for his own interests while dismissing the pain of regular Americans.

This flow of taxpayer dollars to favored businesses rather than to programs that serve the needs of the people seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the Trump administration and reflects its rejection of democracy in favor of the right-wing axis of authoritarianism.

Last night, Tarini Parti, Josh Dawsey, Michelle Hackman, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal published a deep investigation into the machinations of Corey Lewandowski when his colleague Kristi Noem was secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. They report that Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016, appeared to offer aid to foreign countries navigating U.S. bureaucracy in the department for a fee, selling government services for his own gain.

The journalists also report that Lewandowski may have been involved in awarding government contracts improperly, an accusation covered in a November 14, 2025, article by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security an additional $75 billion to spend during Trump’s term on deportations, detention facilities, and technology, providing deep pockets for corruption.

While the administration appears to have sidelined Noem and Lewandowski since Noem resigned under pressure in March, the journalists say Lewandowski “has told people close to him he expects the president would pardon him in the event of a criminal case.”

Lewandowski responded on social media that the story was “just another example of the kind of anonymous-source, politically driven reporting that Americans have seen time and again. We’ve lived through the Russia collusion hoax the fake Birthday card and countless other sensational allegations that ultimately failed to withstand scrutiny. I’m tremendously proud of my work as a volunteer in advancing this administration’s agenda and remain confident that the facts and not anonymous accusations will ultimately speak for themselves.”

But, of course, every official investigation into the 2016 election, including the one conducted by the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee and unanimously adopted, agreed that Russia did work to get Trump elected in 2016. And while Trump claims he did not create the birthday card to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein apparently bearing Trump’s signature on a drawing of a nude girl that was produced by the Epstein estate, the story was convincing enough that it helped to push Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act and the first case he brought against the Wall Street Journal for publishing the story was dismissed. A second case is pending.

There is, in fact, increasing pushback against the world Musk and Trump are trying to put into place instead of liberal democracy. In the U.S., the growing opposition to data centers, which seems to represent anger at the very wealthy tech bros who want to call the shots, is perhaps a sign of the direction the wind in the U.S. is blowing.

Whether that popular pressure can withstand the extraordinary amounts of money Musk and other right-wing billionaires are pouring into the midterms is unclear. Judd Legum of Popular Information reported today that Musk is funding an advertising campaign encouraging people in swing states to check their voting registration status at a different website than the one run by the Election Assistance Commission, which is an independent agency of the U.S. government.

Instead, Musk’s campaign urges people to go to “votesafe . org,” which collects their full name, home address, date of birth, email address, cell phone number, IP address and location (which identifies city and zip code), every link clicked, every page looked at, and voter registration status, among other information.

Legum reports that the privacy policy of the website “allows [Musk’s super PAC] America PAC to ‘share’ or ‘sell’ personal information ‘with our business partners,’” including “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.” America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes about a user, including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.”

A new documentary about Musk by filmmaker Alex Gibney argues, as Steven Zeitchik of the Hollywood Reporter put it, that Musk is “a dangerous huckster [who] is stealthily aggregating power to exploit us, primarily by centralizing and controlling massive amounts of data.” The documentary, called Musk, notes that, under Musk, DOGE had access to federal IT systems and, as Zeitchik recalls, a whistleblower warned that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive data from the Social Security Administration.

Zeitchik reports on the onscreen comments of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as “the godfather of AI,” who said: “It’s fairly clear to me that Trump is hell-bent on corrupting the midterm elections,” he says onscreen. “If you wanted to corrupt those midterm elections and you wanted to use AI, all you needed to do was get detailed information on U.S. citizens. And what DOGE did looked like just what you would do.”

In Europe, in the wake of the rise of the AfD, German defense minister Boris Pistorius said today that Germany will send missiles to Ukraine to help it fight off a winter incursion from Russia.

Notes:

https://apnews.com/article/germany-afd-saxony-anhalt-election-e9c2b1bb69a9dab1778b80866ffa4c4f

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/berlin-says-vance-should-not-interfere-german-politics-2025-02-14/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-afd-won-saxony-anhalt-election-alarm-for-centrist-politics/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-afd-courts-conservative-support-after-historic-german-state-election-2026-09-07/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/07/first-thing-elon-musk-german-far-right-afd-election-win-russia

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/07/afd-thanks-elon-musk-german-state-elections-2026-win

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/02/elon-musk-spending-key-races-midterms-01063146

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/28/mike-johnson-plans-meeting-elon-musk-midterms-01054083

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/us/politics/elon-musk-midterms-republicans.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/07/30/musk-reportedly-spending-up-to-120-million-helping-gop-in-midterms-after-saying-he-got-a-little-too-involved-in-politics/

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/sep/01/how-misconceptions-and-woeful-pr-allowed-musk-to-shred-usaid-so-easily

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/g-s1-133651/usaid-elon-musk-rubio-deaths

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/06/doge-savings-overstated-watchdog-report-01027797

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musks-regulatory-issues-begun-melt-away-trumps-second-term-rcna202848

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/13/business/musk-trillionaire-government-tesla-spacex

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/elon-musk-business-government-contracts-funding/

https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campaign-strategy-group

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/corey-lewandowski-influence-dhs-43d3fe03?mod=hp_lista_pos1

Paul Krugman
Elon Musk, the New Hero of Populism
Republicans have settled on their midterm argument: Democrats are all Communists. As an election strategy, this is as lame as it is ludicrous. But there is a small kernel of political reality underlying the new right-wing red-baiting: The emergence of a widespread…
Read more

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/13/trump-epstein-lawsuit-wsj-00868845

Popular Information
The hidden dangers of Musk’s votesafe.org
With the midterm elections approaching, it’s a good idea to make sure you are registered. Each state has a tool to do so, and the federal government has set up a page that directs you to the right place, vote.gov…
Read more

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/whistleblower-responds-after-doj-confirms-doge-mishandled-social-security-data

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/elon-musk-alex-gibney-documentary-1236686790/

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/sep/08/state-handouts-10000-lasers-and-trumps-election-six-things-we-learned-from-the-elon-musk-film

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/germany-send-more-patriot-missiles-ukraine-warns-stepped-up-russian-winter-2026-09-08/

X:

elonmusk/status/1886307316804263979

CLewandowski_/status/2097323323076071667

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SpaceX launches classified payload for the U.S. Space Force

File: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is seen in the launch position at Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on Jan. 16, 2026, ahead of the launch of the NROL-105 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office. Image: SpaceX

Update Sept. 10, 12:23 p.m. EDT (1623 UTC): SpaceX landed its first stage booster.

SpaceX flew its latest national security payload for the United States Space Force with a Falcon 9 rocket launch scheduled for Thursday morning.

The mission, designated USSF-153, carried an undisclosed number of satellites to low Earth orbit. Because of the nature of the flight, SpaceX didn’t publish a post-launch timeline beyond the booster landing nearly 8.5 minutes into flight.

Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base happened at 8:42 a.m. PDT (1142 a.m. EDT / 1542 UTC).

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1081. This was its 27th after previously launching four missions for NASA; two missions for each of the National Reconnaissance Office, the European Space Agency, and rideshare customers; and 16 batches of Starlink satellites.

A successful landing of B1081 on the SpaceX droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, represented the 224th landing on this vessel and the 660th Falcon booster to date.

The USSF-153 mission was SpaceX’s fifth mission this year supporting national security-related payloads. Previous mission included:

  • Jan. 16 – NROL-105
  • May 11 – NROL-172
  • July 16 – Space Development Agency’s Third Tranche 1 Mission
  • Aug. 15 – USSF-366

The most recent of those, USSF-366, was procured as part of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 contract, according to Space Systems Command. However, further information about that mission was not provided, both before and after completion of the launch.

Spaceflight Now reached out to SSC regarding the USSF-153 mission and a spokesperson said, “Currently, specific details about the mission and payload are protected.”

What should I ask Kevin Roose?

Yes I will be doing a podcast with him.  From Wikipedia:

Kevin Roose…is an American author and journalist. He is the author of three books, and is a technology columnist and podcast host for The New York Times. He wrote a book about Liberty University, an evangelical Christian university known for strict rules imposed on students…

Kevin of course has a new book coming out, namely The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.  I have yet to read it, but I expect it to be gripping.

So what should I ask him?

The post What should I ask Kevin Roose? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Pandora: Tuning Up our Data on Exoplanet Atmospheres

Launching a flagship-class mission like the Roman Space Telescope is always exciting, but with Roman in space, let’s also keep an eye on Pandora, a smaller though fascinating NASA mission (through its Astrophysics Pioneers program) that is now beginning its own work in exoplanet science. 20 exoplanets are targeted here, the idea being to work with data from transits to characterize their atmospheres via transmission spectroscopy, but with an additional twist. Elisa Quintana,(NASA GSFC) is principal investigator:

“Pandora’s data will help close a major gap in our knowledge about planets and their host stars because, right now, we can’t be entirely sure how the star’s light affects measurements of what makes up exoplanet atmospheres. We designed the Pandora spacecraft and its in-depth observing program to better understand this vexing issue.”

Launched January 11 of this year, Pandora is now beginning observations of its target stars. It’s in that category of smallsats that fascinate me because their low cost also gives them the option of higher tolerance of failure, making it possible to push the limits without great financial risk (the cost cap on this class of mission is $20 million). A tool like this can be tightly focused on specific targets without compromising larger instruments that are already besieged with obligations to existing observing programs. Word from the Pandora team is that science work begins with all instruments performing as expected.

Image: Artist’s concept of NASA’s Pandora mission, which will help scientists untangle the signals from exoplanets’ atmospheres and their stars. Credit: NASA GSFC/Conceptual Image Lab.

What makes Pandora so interesting is that it’s a multi-wavelength mission. Pandora’s telescope, an aluminum Cassegrain instrument 45 centimeters in diameter, feeds detectors that work in both visible light for long-baseline photometry as well as near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths. Starspots or other stellar activity can be separated from the near-infrared spectroscopy data on the planet’s clouds and atmospheric hazes. This is information that will inform subsequent work with telescopes like JWST and Roman as we refine our tools for removing noise in the data. A recent paper on Pandora makes the case:

Alongside the opportunities explored throughout this work, Pandora provides a unique opportunity to help overcome many hurdles inherent in observations with current instruments. Namely, multi-epoch observations of exoplanet atmospheres with JWST are often observed at different points in the stellar rotation, making them difficult to fit jointly (e.g., E. M. May et al. 2023). By providing information about the stellar activity and allowing for corrections at the data level, joint Pandora–JWST programs will unlock new insights into planets around active hosts. Additionally, these same insights will inform the presence of offsets between different instruments and epochs, which have been difficult to constrain thus far with JWST alone (e.g., A. L. Carter et al. 2024).

Pandora is going to give us useful data on stellar contamination in our transmission spectroscopy work. That means a clearer and more reliable look at the composition of exoplanet atmospheres. Stellar contamination should stand out, with a minimum of 10 transit observing sessions per target, each lasting about 24 hours. The plan is to accumulate, for each target, roughly 240 hours of pointing time, which should yield more than 120 hours of science data once Earth occultations and unavoidable gaps for downlinks, etc. are taken into account. An instrument like JWST can collect transmission spectroscopic data for exoplanets but only with relatively short observing sessions involving one or a small number of transits. The combined datasets of the two observatories will cleanly excise star signals from the data on planetary ones.

The finalized target list was published last January and contains 19 host stars, one of which is orbited by two of the target worlds. The stars range from M-dwarfs to K-class. 16 of these planets have been observed previously by JWST, which will allow the retrofitting of the Pandora measurements onto the JWST spectra. As far as I can tell, earlier provisional target lists included planets that didn’t make the final list, with the emphasis shifting toward larger warm Neptunes and Saturns. That makes sense given that these offer higher signal-to-noise ratios as we put these techniques to work together for the first time.

Image: This is Figure 1 from the paper. Caption: The absorption cross sections of common absorbers in exoplanet atmospheres considered in this work, shown at a pressure and temperature of 0.1 mbar and 1000 K. The wavelength coverage of Pandora’s NIR detector (NIRDA), JWST’s NIRCam F322W2 and F444W filters, and HST’s WFC3 instrument (for the G141 grism) are shown. Pandora/NIRDA covers absorption bands of H2O, CH4, NH3 and the wing of the K doublet, making it most sensitive to these absorbers. Credit: Rotman et al.

Using these methods, Pandora’s science observations should be more accurate and reliable than any planetary atmosphere readings ever taken before. The paper is Rotman et al., “NASA’s Pandora SmallSat Mission: Simulated Modeling and Retrieval of Near-Infrared Exoplanet Transmission Spectra,” accepted at The Astronomical Journal/em> (preprint).

Wednesday assorted links

1. Crime and drunkenness map of England and Wales (that was then, this is now).

2. Cesar Aira says he will stop writing.

3. Toward a post-cultural state?

4. Madrid has great PISA scores.

5. Firms as foragers.

6. Asimov Press is back.

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Cancer Capital: It sucks for founders, too!

So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level.

Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies. Now, what I mean here are people who have a great idea for a product or a service, and who want to get it out to the world in order to make something amazing happen. (These days there's also a cohort of people who call themselves "founders", but who basically just identified a pile of money that they wanted to grab, and decided that they were willing to suck up to whatever investors they had to in order to get that pile of money. Let's file these horrid people away for later — we'll come back to them.)

The deal for founders used to be pretty straightforward. You'd have an idea you were obsessed with, you would build it out as far as you could with whatever resources you were able to scrape together yourself, or with the help of your friends and family, and then if you absolutely had to have more money to make your idea succeed, you might seek out some investors to help you get to the next level. The conventional wisdom was that investors were a bunch of predators (everyone called them "vulture capital", often to their faces), and that founders should go in extremely skeptical about them, but at times they were a necessary evil in order to achieve one's goal.

What about the investors?

On the other side of the table, investors knew the deal, and the best of them understood their role within the ecosystem. Here in New York City, we had influential firms like Union Square Ventures priding themselves on how founder-friendly they could be, both by trying to be straightforward in their communication with founders and by having an understandable thesis for their investments, which would let founders anticipate whether their company would be of interest or not. This avoided wasting time on the part of both founders and investors.

There was also a norm with real teeth, because it actually cost firms money: a VC would generally refuse to invest in a company that competed with one of their existing portfolio companies. Not as a favor, but because the conflict was obvious to everybody involved — you can't sit on two boards in the same market and be honest with either of them, and you can't ask a founder to open their books to somebody who's already funding their rival. Firms would tell you up front that they were out because of a conflict, and that early no was understood to be the professional thing to do. Part of why a legible thesis mattered so much is that it let you find those conflicts before you'd spent three months preparing a pitch.

By the time I pitched a company to Bloomberg Beta here in New York in 2013, they had published their operating manual on GitHub in order to be more transparent to founders — and they let us publish our term sheet on GitHub as well, for the same reason.

After the Good Old Days

I share all this history to give some sense of how, as recently as a dozen years ago, venture capital firms were striving to compete by showing how founder-friendly they could be, and in the following years many even made a lot of noise about how inclusive they wanted their portfolios to be, inviting underrepresented founders in to pitch. (To their credit, many of the most prominent investors in our NYC tech community have not succumbed to the Cancer Capital values yet, though it has meant that they're stuck as smaller players in deals where those giant firms dominate.)

In recent years, though, the mask has fully come off for the giant firms, and even many smaller firms that are aligned with their agenda. It's not merely that they've adopted extremist political positions — though they have — it's that they now regularly collude against founders.

That's going to sound shocking to people who haven't been involved in pitching these firms. But I'll say it again, and then I'll explain how it works: major venture capital firms now routinely collude against founders, which means those founders end up with worse terms for their deals.

Stacking the deck

Founders who are aggressive and enthusiastic about their companies will try to pitch a range of firms on the merits of their startup, often coming in with a well-polished pitch deck and presentation, sometimes tailoring each pitch to the specific preferences that they've researched about that firm or partner. It can take months and months of preparation to get ready for these meetings, and they're often among the most stressful and high-stakes meetings of a founder's career. I've helped many founders prepare for these meetings, and have seen folks break into tears or wake up with panic attacks ahead of them — people take them extremely seriously. (I never got stressed about these pitches, but I have a fairly atypical attitude about VCs and their firms.)

A bit of important context here: for decades, VCs have said that they don't sign NDAs. Decent guys like Brad Feld, Mark Suster and Fred Wilson wrote their blog posts about this many years ago back in the early days of VC blogging, because it would have added a bit of absurd overhead to ordinary conversations, and they genuinely wouldn't have entertained investing in competitive companies within the same portfolio. But a once-benign policy takes on pretty sinister implications in today's environment.

So look at what the actual arrangement is now. You are expected to hand over a complete financial model, your customer pipeline, a product roadmap, probably your unit economics or cost of go-to-market, and some version of an assessment of where you're weakest or how you stack up to your competitors — to a group of people who have explicitly refused to keep it confidential. And they declined before you walked in the room, as a condition for you getting to pitch them at all. They're exploiting the power imbalance from the start, in a way that no other industry considers normal.

Which brings us to the peculiar thing that I've seen happen to a number of founders who went through the process of pitching multiple investors: they would commonly find that the partner they were speaking to could speak with some familiarity and fluency about the details of their businesses, even before they'd gotten to that part of the presentation. Sometimes, the partner would openly say, "I was talking to [X] over at [other venture firm], and he thinks this is really interesting." It would almost always be when they were saying something positive (at least superficially), but they would routinely reveal that they had spoken to other investors, at other firms, about a company that was pitching them.

This was a casual point that came up in conversation! A few times, investors would even say it like it was a service they were rendering for the founder: "We were thinking we might team up with that other firm and we'll go in together on your next round."

Here's the issue with that kindly offer: it's colluding against the founder! I couldn't tell if the investors didn't know, or didn't care that they were admitting to working together with the other venture capital firms to discuss the proprietary, confidential details of a company that they hadn't even invested in. And all of this was happening years ago, before they had extremely advanced AI tools to help them analyze the details of the company data for startups that they were considering investing in.

To draw an important distinction here: syndication during a funding round is normal. Firms routinely co-invest, with rounds filled by multiple investors. As founders, we frequently want two or more firms to come in together to reach the desired amount of capital we're trying to raise. But that's not the phenomenon I'm describing. Syndication happens after a firm has consent, in collaboration with the startup's founders and executives. What happens in these meetings is a different thing entirely: firms that have not committed, may never commit, and in many cases are about to pass on your startup entirely, are comparing (confidential!) notes on your business while you're still in the middle of pitching them.

One of the most striking parts of this collusion is, from a legal and market standpoint, these venture firms are supposed to be competitors! I noticed this twenty years ago, back when it was merely funny: VCs are as obsessed with what the other guy is doing as anybody in fashion or entertainment. If you ask regulators or lawmakers, they would likely insist that venture capital is a healthy market where there is lots of thriving competition. But if you're a small startup trying to get funded, it can look a lot more like the entire industry is just one big company with a lot of little branches that operate under different names. (Back when regulators still pursued this stuff, the DOJ quietly pushed a dozen directors off nine company boards because the way they were intertwined was against the law, mostly at private equity firms. But that's the board-level version of the problem. Nobody's looking at the pitch meeting.)

Cancer Capital colludes against you

So we've seen how VC firms would team up against founders, even before the rise of the hyper-scale Cancer Capital firms. But how has it gotten worse since they took over? Well, there are a few ways.

The first is pretty straightforward: Pretty much everybody feels like they have to pitch the mega-firms, at some point. If it's not in the initial round of funding, then certainly by the time a company has reached a valuation of about $100M or so, they will have been expected to pitch one of the small handful of Cancer Capital funds, and it would be considered a glaring negative signal if they hadn't at least gotten one of them to sign on as an investor.

What's more, since they will have had to pitch all of the mega-firms in order to get to that level, all of those firms will now have gotten a full overview of the entire business plan and financial details of that startup (since that's a core part of the pitch) — as well as every one of their competitors, since all those companies had to pitch the same firms, too. And remember: not one of those firms signed anything.

The second way is that the conflict rule is simply gone. Firms now routinely take pitches from companies that directly compete with each other, and will invest in more than one, or even several of them. In the hottest categories it's just described as their strategy — they're taking a position on the category rather than simply investing in a company.

Think about what that does to the information problem. It's one thing for a firm to have every competitor's pitch deck. It's another for them to have every competitor's deck and board seats or information rights for multiple companies in the space. (Information rights include actual monthly numbers, real churn, staffing plans and compensation, and much more sensitive data that wouldn't be included in a pitch.) At that point the extractive VCs aren't just investing in the market — they're the only party that can see it. Not even regulators have access to this breadth of data.

Where that leaves the market is that the Cancer Capital firms often have nearly complete information about a nascent market, acting as an information tollgate that every startup has to pass through at a certain scale. They suck in the pitch decks from every player in a market, and sometimes far more data than that, all without an obligation to invest in any of them.

And it gets worse.

Because these firms are committed to their ideological agendas, if they do see an idea they like, but they don't like the morals of the founder who pitched it (i.e. the founder has morals), they could elect to merely choose someone in their network to create a clone of the idea, and then hyper-fund that clone in order to kill the company that just pitched them. If that sounds awful to you, imagine how it feels to the multiple founders that this has happened to over the years. I've heard about it firsthand, though nobody will go on the record, because they are convinced it would be the end of their careers. The receipts I've seen make me 100% convinced, though.

And this is where those horrid money-chasing fake founders come back into the story. It's not just that the industry tolerates them. It's that an industry shaped by Cancer Capital now produces them. If you're a firm choosing between an obsessive builder who's got a clear vision for what they want in the world, and is going to fight you on terms, or a sycophant who'll take whatever you offer and execute the ideas laid out in the manifesto on your fund's homepage, the second one is the obvious choice. And there's no shortage of folks in that second category.

The Cancer Capital firms are now operating with something like X-ray vision over entire markets, being fed detailed information on emerging spaces by founders who are effectively coerced into handing over all of their most sensitive business data.

Meanwhile the other 99% of venture capital firms, who are still operating in the old world, are at a massive disadvantage, because their "deal flow" (the number of startups that come to pitch them on investing) is more constrained as they don't have the name recognition or coercive power that the hyper-scale firms do. The network effects are a lot like social media platforms — the giant ones are toxic, but a lot of people go there because they feel like everybody else is there. This isn't coincidence; the guys running the Cancer Capital firms made a huge part of their fortunes by investing in the biggest, worst social networking platforms.

Any way out?

It's easy to see the way the deck is stacked and to feel a sense of despair if you're trying to build a business or a product. But there are lots of ways out. The first few here are about staying out of the trap in the first place; the last two are about going after the trap itself. No individual action can solve a systemic problem, but all of these tactics together can begin to change these systems.

  • Bootstrap. First, there's a big reason that the conventional wisdom in the early days of the web was to caution against ever taking venture capital funding: you often don't need it! As I noted in my last piece, legendary companies like Microsoft and Apple got to the launch of their earliest milestone products without any VC dollars, and your business will be more robust and resilient for having gotten on its feet without taking on those burdens. Put simply: Live within your means, don't raise VC.

  • Build more efficiently. Many startups are finding that contemporary tools (for some, including LLMs) are letting them build products and go to market much more efficiently than before, obviating the need for raising giant amounts of money just to get something launched. By staying lean and remaining closely connected to a community that can support you, you eliminate the need to rely on outside funding. Open source and open communities can be a superpower here.

  • Leak-proof the deck. If you're going to pitch anyway, pitch like everything in your deck is going to end up in front of your competitors, because there's a decent chance that it will. Founders often get coached to be exhaustive with every detailed number, every roadmap item, every honest weakness, but that's advice that only made sense when you could trust the people across the table. Give them only what they need in order to make a decision, and then hold the rest for later meetings once there's an actual commitment. Or: build your business to be fully transparent, where there are no secrets, and you don't have to worry about anything leaking, and there isn't any advantage to them having access to the data. Either way: protect yourself. And always, always compare notes with other founders. The VCs are already comparing notes about you. (I have a lot more advice about pitching VCs, but that's an entire other series of posts.)

  • Other VCs. Finaly, one last investor option: work with the more conventional VC firms. This remains technically possible, albeit dangerous. There are many firms in the "99%" of the venture world that haven't fully embraced the toxicity of the Cancer Capital funds. Earlier I gave credit to the folks in our NYC tech community who've held the line, and I meant it — but their decency can't protect you from the structure they're operating inside. The challenge is, even though these may be run by thoughtful or decent people, if your company succeeds, you may well end up having to do a follow-on round of funding, and that increases the likelihood that you will have to do business with one of the bad actors. Plenty of folks are trying this path, but I would caution against it.

  • Push for regulation. This option is hard at the federal level in the United States, due to the level of corruption under an authoritarian regime, but some limited wins, especially at state or local levels, may be possible. In the longer run, this has been the only mechanism that has truly held these kinds of abuses in check during prior historical precedents. Some state regulators may be willing to enforce rules against the worst behaviors that violate anticompetitive or anti-collusion laws.

  • Encourage limited partners to divest. Many of the Cancer Capital firms rely on funds from sources like public retirement funds which often still have responsible investment commitments. These may still offer some possibility of accountability or leverage which could be used to get them to divest from these firms, and put some pressure on others to discourage them from enabling these kinds of bad behaviors.

Fault Taunting

One of the first things they teach you is to NEVER play with the geology toy over a mantle hotspot.

Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher

Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes.

This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It’s good at things that involve lots of searching and testing.

The Xbox Nearly Destroyed Him - EP 87 Seamus Blackley

This episode is nerd catnip unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Ashlee sat down with Seamus Blackley, who you might know as the man who talked Microsoft into building the Xbox. Nowadays, you can find Blackley in a Pasadena laboratory making the world’s best chocolate. If you’re just here for the cacao, well, we did a video on it.

Blackley grew up in rural New Mexico and studied electrical engineering, then physics, at Tufts University. He spent years working on titles you know and love, like Madden, and ones perhaps you don’t, like Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a flop notorious enough to earn him his first death threats.

Also, Ashlee is away for a few weeks on a big video shoot in India, which means I, Kylie, will be filling in on all the writing stuff. Now that you know who the voice of God is here, let’s get into the most important thing — what I think about this episode!

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Blackley is totally captivating and eccentric, exactly the way you’d expect a physicist who builds holograms and runs a chocolate farm to be. He got deep in ways I didn’t expect, about his abusive childhood and what it was like working at Microsoft. I particularly loved this line from him:

“The khaki pants wearing guys, the lifers, they show up and we had fought them to keep them away from [the Xbox]. The more we kept them away from it, the more consumers got excited because we were talking about things with the power of Microsoft and not the bullshit of Microsoft. That was incredibly effective. But it was exhausting and it was a conscious effort of will to fight it. At some point it was going to destroy me and I had to stop.”

Blackley seems to talk at 2x speed naturally, and I’m grateful for it, because he has no shortage of brain-exploding lore to fit into these 80 minutes. He describes his whole career as “one long tale of woe and rapid dancing in the face of failure,” which is a very modest way to describe inventing the Xbox, shepherding Guitar Hero into existence, and abducting Jimmy Fallon. You’ll have to listen for that last one.

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IN THIS EPISODE

Core Memory on Seamus Blackley's chocolate experiment
Smithsonian Magazine on Blackley's ancient Egyptian bread project
Pacific Light & Hologram

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TIMESTAMPS

  • 00:00:00 — Intro

  • 00:02:38 — Why Tech Hype Sucks

  • 00:07:37 — Why Talking About Your Work Kills It

  • 00:10:42 — Early Life, Physics, and Jazz

  • 00:21:57 — Fermilab & Academic Politics

  • 00:30:47 — Building the First 3D Video Game Engines

  • 00:34:18 — Early Game Development Culture

  • 00:38:37 — DreamWorks & Working for Steven Spielberg

  • 00:44:32 — Joining Microsoft & Pitching the Original Xbox

  • 00:54:04 — Fighting Corporate Bureaucracy to Save Xbox

  • 01:03:42 — Abducting Jimmy Fallon

  • 01:07:20 — Baking Bread with 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Yeast

  • 01:10:40 — Growing Cacao Trees in a Lab

  • 01:17:09 — Accidentally Launching a Chocolate Empire

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Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Edition

Social media condemns Trump's hockey cartoon as Canada's counter-tariffs  take effect: 'Carney has been negotiating with a madman' - Yahoo News Canada

Posted by Trump on Truth Social

There have been many trade conflicts in history, some of them more destructive than the US-Canada fight. But I don’t think there has ever been a dispute this stupid.

Bear in mind that this crisis is entirely gratuitous. Canada has done nothing wrong. Even if one buys into Trumpian nonsense about how every nation that sells us more than it buys is ripping us off, Canada isn’t a villain. Last year Canada did run a modest trade surplus with the United States in goods, but more than half of this imbalance was offset by a U.S. surplus in services. Overall trade between our nations was almost balanced.

So what is this about? Clearly, we’re looking at a symptom of deranged Trump syndrome. As Trump’s failures, from soaring fuel prices to plunging approval, multiply, he is doubling down on his disrespect for and attempted bullying of our northern neighbor and former ally. That is, you should think of this conflict not as something reflecting U.S. national interests, but as a form of self-medication from a sundowning president.

And the derangement isn’t coming solely from Donald Trump. Yes, he — or more likely Natalie Harp — has been posting puerile insults and images on social media. But we also have Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, comparing our northern neighbor to a “little yippy dog.” This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Part of the job of being a finance minister involves projecting a certain gravitas, so that he or she will have credibility in a crisis. When he sounds like an immature thirteen-year-old instead, that does real damage.

It’s all deeply humiliating — for us, not the Canadians. But beyond the embarrassment, it’s also important to realize that an escalating trade war with Canada will do real damage to the U.S. economy.

Trump and his economic officials don’t appear to understand this (although Bessent may just be pretending to be ignorant.) Their expressed view is that Canada’s economy is too small — a “little yippy dog” — for a disruption of cross-border trade to matter. But this complacency is foolish.

The essential thing to understand about U.S.-Canada trade is that our two economies have been closely integrated for a very long time. We’ve had free trade in autos and automotive products since 1965. We signed an overall free trade agreement in 1988, six years before the creation of NAFTA, which included Mexico. And all those decades of free trade have encouraged a great deal of specialization.

That is, the Canadian economy isn’t a miniature version of the U.S. economy, producing the same mix of stuff on a smaller scale. Instead, Canada concentrates on producing a limited range of goods. In some cases Canada produces goods like lumber or aluminum that take advantage of Canada’s natural resources — vast forests and abundant hydropower, which generates the electricity used to smelt aluminum. In other cases, like autos, Canada achieves economies of scale by manufacturing a limited range of goods, exporting most of what it produces to the United States while importing the auto models and components it doesn’t produce.

The flip side of this Canadian specialization is that while the U.S. economy is roughly a dozen times larger than Canada’s, Canada supplies a surprisingly large share of many crucial goods. Canada provides 70 percent of the oil refined in the U.S. Midwest. Canada supplies about 60 percent of US aluminum. Canada supplies almost all of America’s spruce-pine-fir lumber — preferred for framing in residential construction.

If the tit-for-tat with Canada were to escalate into all-out trade war, could the U.S. economy manage? Yes — but it would be expensive and take a great deal of time.

In short, if Trump, Bessent and company think that trade conflict with Canada is a trivial issue, one that Americans will barely notice, they’re in for a rude awakening.

Now, I haven’t talked about the damage a trade war would do to Canada, but it would clearly be immense — possibly bigger in dollar terms than the damage here, although that’s unclear. What is clear is that because Canada’s economy is far smaller than ours, Canada would suffer much more damage from a trade war as a percentage of GDP than we would.

But Canadians understand why they are being asked to suffer this pain: They are defending their sovereignty and their national identity. Will Americans be willing to suffer economically to soothe Trump’s bruised ego?

No music: Too stretched today.

Quoting Terence Tao

I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...]

We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.

Terence Tao

Tags: ai-ethics, mathematics, ai

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that have been subject to a $1,000,000 prize since May 24th, 2000.

The discovery is somewhat overshadowed by accusations of skulduggery from Tristan Buckmaster, an NYU mathematics professor who was collaborating on related problems with Levent Alpöge, an accomplished mathematician who currently works for Anthropic.

Tristan's complaint accompanied a hastily published version of their own results. Here's the PDF describing what happened. The very short version is that Tristan and Levent worked on the problem for almost a year, making extensive use of Claude and Codex (mainly GPT-5.6 Sol), then had a breakthrough on August 15th. The mathematical rumour mill kicked into gear and Tristan and Levent heard that OpenAI had heard that Anthropic had resolved "a major open problem", so they reached out and learned that OpenAI had a team working on a related problem, with a similar approach. Quoting Tristan:

I asked when the first prompt had been sent by them. This question was not answered directly by OpenAI for some time. Eventually it was agreed that it had been sent in the past few days, after information about our work had reached OpenAI.

I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.

It gets more complicated from there. The OpenAI team offered to wait for Tristan to publish, or to have him author a paper about their result, but were clear that Levent would not be invited as a co-author due to OpenAI's competitive relationship with his employer.

Here's how OpenAI described their work:

On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems. [...]

The agents arrived at their resolution on Saturday, September 5, about 88 hours after the first agents were launched. Lean formalization and verification took an additional 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.

Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens.

(We don't know the cost structure of the internal model they used, but 300 billion output tokens at public API prices for GPT-6 Astra would cost $15,000,000.)

Here's where they provide their perspective on Tristan and Levent's work (emphasis mine):

Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. [...]

We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).

My interpretation of what happened here is that OpenAI heard that some Millennium Prize problems had been solved using LLMs and saw this as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of their latest model, without thinking too hard about the optics of scooping a team who had been using OpenAI's own models to work on this problem for the best part of a year.

This situation appears to mirror what's happening in the world of computer security right now. Anil Madhavapeddy recently pointed out that Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days, because if someone knows that some software has an unpatched vulnerability, they can set their agents the task of finding it. Is the same now true of mathematics? Just knowing that there is an unpublished solution to a problem might trigger millions of dollars in LLM spending to get there first.

This also highlights one of my ongoing frustrations about how all of this works. When an AI lab says that my data is "used to improve model performance", what does that actually mean?

My two favourite hypothetical questions regarding this used to be:

  • If I'm running Codex and one of my API keys accidentally gets consumed in the context, what are the chances that someone else might ask for an API key in the future and get mine back? (I asked someone at OpenAI once and they called this the "regurgitation" problem and assured me that they take great pains to prevent that... but wouldn't describe how.)
  • If I brainstorm with ChatGPT about potential new directions for my company, what's the chance that information might be exposed to a competitor in six months' time who asks "what might company X plan to do next"?

My new preferred hypothetical for this is:

  • If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?

Via Hacker News

Tags: mathematics, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, training-data, ai-ethics

How Democrats Should Respond to the Trans Sports Question

Before I get to how they should respond, this is a post that really isn’t written for those–and I include myself in this group–who believe there is a clear ethical case to include trans girls and women in high school and college sports. It’s really written as advice that politicians, who despite their personal convictions (or lack thereof), view this as a difficult political issue. In other words, politicians don’t have to follow various centrist pundits’ advice here–there’s a better way, that helps both trans girls and Democratic politicians.

Anyway, I found this excellent post by Eric Schmeltzer that grapples with how to deal with this politically, and I think his ‘sample text’ should be shared throughout the Democratic Party. Schmeltzer offers this up as an example:

“Honestly, I don’t know why a politician needs to be in the middle of this. When politicians did step in on sports, like Title IX, it was to get more kids into the game. This isn’t that, and I’m not even seeing any case that fairness or competitiveness has been affected. But I do know sports bodies can handle any competitiveness issue that does arise. And I do know Republicans keep trying to pass bills to have a state-sponsored doctor examine any kid’s private parts if anyone questions their gender. Any kid, not just trans kids. That’s not protecting sports or kids. That’s the government putting its hands on your daughter, and it makes me sick. So, frankly, I’m way more worried about how Republicans keep trying to use this issue to have government physically examine your kids than I am about any effect on competition.”

There it is. Edit slightly for taste, and perhaps expand the “Any kid, not just trans kids” to include how we know there will be a parent who’s upset that a girl on the opposing basketball team crashed the boards like a monster, and that parent now demands a ‘gender test.’ As Schmeltzer notes:

In Ohio, they passed a bill through the House that would have forced a physician to examine a child’s genitals, internal and external, if anyone so much as disputed that kid’s sex. Not the parents’ call. Anyone’s. A rival’s mother, a sore-loser coach, a stranger with a grudge could trigger a state inspection of a teenager’s body.

They only yanked it back after the public rightfully was aghast.

This rhetoric also has the advantage of flipping the attack around and using it to argue Republicans are perverts. This is the approach for those who don’t want to go full Ed Markey. There is no excuse for not adopting this strategy.

Liberalism needs a new philosophy of immigration

So, Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, just won a huge landslide election victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. This doesn’t mean AfD is taking over Germany — the far right is much more popular in the post-communist east than in the more populated western regions. Germany is also a parliamentary democracy, and almost everyone else hates and fears the AfD. But the statewide victory is a warning shot, and everyone in Germany — and in Europe — is taking it seriously.

AfD’s surge means two things. First, it means that the rise of far-right parties was not simply a reaction to the pandemic. Back in 2024-25, a number of pundits I respect argued that voters in the U.S. and Europe were backing rightist leaders out of anger at incumbents over Covid. That thesis now looks dead.

Second, it means that something is making many German voters so angry that they’re finally willing to overlook all of the AfD’s catastrophic flaws — its obvious ties to Vladimir Putin, the fact that the party is filled with crooks, its extreme rhetoric, its lack of governing experience, and so on.

What is that “something”? A number of socialist types have tried to claim that AfD’s new voters are responding to economic despair, and can be won back with more socialism. But more sober voices agree that the “something” is immigration. Adam Tooze, who strongly leans to the left, tries to be gentle as he explains that there’s no getting around the immigration issue:

If you ask AfD voters what they worry about, along with their xenophobic concerns about “too many foreigners”, they will mention the cost of living and their concerns for their standard of living. They also mention climate change and the threat of external war…But if you ask them what they think about the AfD and why they voted for it, economic issues are barely mentioned. What comes first is security, foreigners, woke politics, remoteness etc…

If you are hard up and working-class it would after all be nothing short of bizarre to vote for the AfD in the hope of improved social protection…Voting for the AfD in the current landscape, whatever your economic issues, in short, is not a vote to have your economic issues addressed by social democracy, or welfare or government intervention. It is a vote to crackdown on foreigners[.] [emphasis mine]

Robin Brooks is more blunt:

There’s lots going on in Germany at the moment, but - when it comes to the surge in AfD popularity - you don’t need to overthink it. The AfD is relentlessly campaigning on immigration, which tells you that this is what resonates most with voters…A key driver of the recent surge in AfD popularity is that the CDU - SPD grand coalition is proving itself incapable of confronting immigration with the urgency many voters want.

In fact, anger over immigration is probably the main reason that the right is surging everywhere in Europe. Here are Konstantinou and Roumanias (2024) with some data:

We use regional data spanning over 4500 electoral outcomes…between 2000 and 2017 to assess the impact of immigration on Western European Far-Right voting. To deal with potential reverse causation, we use immigration in neighboring countries as an instrument for domestic immigration. The estimated effects of immigration are positive, significant and larger compared to those obtained by simple OLS and fixed effects regressions. Depending on the measure of immigration used, we find that a 1% increase in immigration stocks leads to a between 1.78% and 2.97% in Far-Right voting…Our estimated effects explain a large part of the observed rise in Far-Right in Western European countries that experienced high levels of immigration during the span of our sample.

2026 is hardly the beginning of the trend. Here’s Brookings in 2024:

In the European Union (EU), one election after another has demonstrated the centrality of irregular migration and border security in public discussions and forced mainstream parties to take more restrictive approaches…The results of the European Parliament election, France’s snap election, three German state elections, and the Austrian election all showed a strong rightward drift and signaled voters’ distrust in their national governments, confirming the notable shift in tone on migration in Europe toward a more securitized, hardline approach, even among mainstream parties.

Trump’s election in 2024 was also partially about immigration. Trump voters rated it as one of their top issues, along with inflation. It was the issue where Trump had the strongest lead over Kamala Harris in polls. American voters clearly soured on immigration in 2023-24.

Progressives in America and socialists in Europe still desperately claim that what angry working-class voters really want is more economic support. They keep offering more and more lavish promises of welfare supports and price controls, while staunchly opposing restrictions on immigration. The approach keeps failing, and the far right keeps rising.

Center-right and center-left politicians, on the other hand, realize the source of their voters’ anger very clearly, and are taking steps to reduce immigration. Germany’s center-right CDU has already stanched the flow with restrictive policies:

Source: Robin Brooks

And Chancellor Friedrich Merz is responding to AfD’s gains by making it harder to get citizenship. Meanwhile, France and Italy are tightening border controls. France is making it harder to become a citizen. The EU is toughening up its asylum rules. Sweden is offering migrants large sums of money to leave the country. European countries are streamlining their infrastructure for kicking out large numbers of failed asylum-seekers. Japan is tightening its own immigration policies after a period of liberalization.

Even Canada, one of the most immigration-friendly and progressive countries on Earth, has scrambled to reduce immigration, cutting targets for permanent residents, reducing student visas, and slashing the number of temporary workers. Immigration levels are still high, but are falling quickly — all under the center-left government of Mark Carney.

And yet I’m worried that voters around the world will see these measures as superficial — tactical pauses to let populist anger simmer down before resuming the same permissive immigration policies that made voters mad in the first place. This certainly seemed to be the case in Europe, where the government stopped admitting asylum seekers from the Middle East in the late 2010s after a popular outcry, only to resume taking them in en masse in the 2020s:

Source: Brookings

And it also seems to be true in the U.S.; Biden mostly closed the border to asylum-seekers in 2024 after he saw how mad it was making Americans, but many Democrats are now calling for the abolition of ICE. This is a somewhat popular position right now, thanks to the agency’s abuses under Trump. But if Democrats actually try to abolish federal immigration enforcement instead of just reshuffling and renaming the agencies, I predict it will take just a couple of years for Americans to realize that the difference between “open borders” and “immigration laws with no one to enforce them” is largely semantic.

What’s needed, I believe, is not just a tactical, temporary retreat. We need to stop and think why a maximal pro-immigration policy is something that we need to retreat from in the first place. We need a new concept of what a sustainable liberal immigration policy looks like.

Since I started writing, I’ve been an advocate of more immigration to the United States. This does not mean I ever favored unrestrained immigration or open borders. I’ve consistently argued that favoring skilled immigration will bring more economic benefits to native-born Americans, and be more politically palatable as well. And while I don’t hate illegal immigrants for trying to better their lot in life, I favor strong border controls, because nations have the right to decide, democratically, who gets in and out. It’s understandable when people get mad at seeing their decisions flouted.

On top of that, I’ve always remained agnostic on immigration to other countries; although I find much to admire in Canada’s points-based system, for example, I don’t think that qualifies me to decide whether more immigration is good for Canada overall. If the people of a country decide that immigration is diluting their local culture unacceptably, for instance, I think they have every right to cut it off. That’s just Westphalian sovereignty — not a perfect system, but the best system we’ve ever found for organizing humanity into geographic units. As an American, I don’t view it as my place to tell Japan, or the UK, or any other country that immigration is the right choice for them.

Despite those reservations, I’ve always thought that immigration to the U.S. is a basically good thing, and should be expanded. The economic benefits are pretty undeniable — higher tax revenue to shore up our dangerously depleted government finances, dominance in high-tech industries and innovation, and so on. And while some of the economic costs are real — local housing shortages and strains on local government finances being the two biggest ones — many of the fears are overblown. In particular, the bulk of the evidence concludes that immigrants don’t reduce wages or job opportunities for native-born Americans.

And importantly, lots of Americans share my overall positive view of immigration. If you ask Americans whether they think immigration is good or bad, most will say “good”:

Source: Gallup

And if you ask Americans whether the annual rate of immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same, you get a pretty even split:

Source: YouGov

So I’ve never really felt like I was going out on a limb or advocating an unpopular position when it came to this issue. Sure, rightists will direct online vitriol toward anyone who supports any immigration at all, but their energy and savagery shouldn’t be mistaken for majority support.

And yet there will always be some amount of immigration — and some types of immigration — that will arouse even the most open and welcoming people to ire and make them think about shutting the doors. We saw this in the U.S. in 2023-24, when anti-immigration sentiment spiked in response to Biden’s permissive asylum policies. Yes, that sentiment crashed again when Trump took power and started committing abuses. But if liberals don’t change how we approach immigration, the sentiment will simply rise again and again, as it has so many times throughout our history. And the Donald Trump and Stephen Miller types will be right back in power — and our country will be worse off for it.

Liberals need an immigration approach that can be sustained for long periods of time — i.e., one that doesn’t enrage the public every time it manages to get in power. What would that look like?

The first thing liberals (and progressives, and Democrats, and European lefties, etc.) need to admit is that migration is not a human right. We live in a world of sovereign nation-states, and unless we find some better way of dividing up and administering the world, we will continue to live in a world of sovereign nation-states. And nations are, necessarily, exclusive clubs; they have the right to restrict immigration for any reason whatsoever.

Liberals must therefore not view borders and citizenship as annoying obstacles to be tactically circumvented or overcome; instead, we must view them as fundamental parts of the social compact that allows nations, including liberal nations, to exist in the first place. Nation-states and their laws and their police and their courts and their armies are the fundamental guarantors of the human rights that define liberalism. And for better or for worse, the ability to decide who gets in and who has to keep out is a necessary precondition for nation-states to exist.

That means we need to recognize that immigration law is legitimate and needs to be upheld. Some progressives have tried to advance the notion that being undocumented is a marginalized identity that needs to be protected and supported by the state. But this is absurd; it’s like if progressives decided that people who drive over the speed limit are a minority group.

Illegal immigrants chose to break U.S. law when they came to this country. Our democratically elected leaders made those laws, and they should be honored. We should treat illegal immigrants humanely, of course, and we should not tear local communities apart just to hunt down a few people. But there has to be some way of enforcing the law, because a law without enforcement is no law at all.

A third principle that liberals should embrace is that the purpose of immigration is to benefit the people who already live in the country that is receiving the immigrants. Immigration to America must be for the benefit of Americans. We must flatly reject any concept of immigration that sees it as a necessary sacrifice on the part of American citizens.

For example, the book This Land is Our Land, by Suketu Mehta, argues that immigration is a form of reparations for colonialism — a sacrifice that Western nations owe to other nations, even at their own expense. This idea has found some purchase in progressive circles, but liberals must reject it as wholly illegitimate.

Instead, liberals need to promote immigration because of the benefits it brings to the American citizenry. This includes economic benefits — the tax revenue, the investment, the eldercare, the innovation, the entrepreneurship, the expanded market size. But it also includes cultural benefits — the constant reinvigoration of this nation of immigrants by new waves of people with the gumption and bravery to pick up and move across the world in search of opportunity and freedom.

America has always been the country of the frontier; in order to maintain that ethos in the modern age, we need people for whom America itself is the frontier. And our founding ideals — which are very liberal ideals, of liberty and opportunity and the rights of the individual — are strengthened by people who make the conscious choice to move to a country that represents those ideals.

These are the kinds of arguments liberals made in the past. We can — we should — make them again.

And if this requires us to be selective about which immigrants we bring in, then so be it. Skilled immigrants bring far more economic benefits per capita than others — so by all means, let us tilt our system toward them, as American voters of both parties want. Immigrants who don’t love and embrace American culture will probably invigorate our nation less — so by all means, let us bar immigrants who have been part of groups that see America as evil, using the law with which we once banned immigration by members of communist parties.

These are the kinds of decisions that nation-states, including liberal nation-states, are inherently entitled to make. And we should expect Europe to make different decisions than America makes. That’s perfectly OK. Because immigration is fundamentally the decision of each sovereign nation-state, it’s inevitable that we’ll make different decisions. JD Vance wants us to think that France’s immigration policy, or Germany’s, is inextricably tied to America’s. But it’s not, and we shouldn’t let him get away with conflating the two.

A liberal immigration program based on these three principles could defuse the anti-immigration sentiment now sweeping the developed world — not just now, but permanently. But it will only do so if liberal leaders explicitly articulate and avow these principles. That’s what’s required in order to convince the electorate that liberals are trustworthy on immigration — that embracing the kind of immigration policies Americans demand represents a principled stand rather than a tactical retreat from a hidden agenda of open borders.

For America, the kind of immigration agenda I’ve sketched out — which all the polls show Americans favor by substantial margins — would not be a “far right” policy, even though some progressives and leftists will inevitably try to label it as such. In fact, it would allow in far more immigration than the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Harry Truman. It won’t satisfy progressives who dream of a borderless world, or leftists who salivate over the chance to make the West pay for colonialism. But I believe it will preserve America as the kind of liberal nation-state that we knew it as in the days before Trump.

As for the rest of the world, countries like Germany and Canada and Japan have to make their own decisions. I can’t tell them what kind of nation to build; I can only try to promise that as an American, I’ll respect their decision. If they want to shut their doors in order to slow the pace of cultural change, it’s not my job to lecture them otherwise. All I can say is that I hope they do what they need to do in order to avoid getting taken over by parties that take their marching orders from the Kremlin.

But speaking only for my own country, I believe that if America gives up immigration, it will lose one of the key things that has made it great. With the GOP in the hands of a xenophobic rightist movement that sees immigration as an invasion, it’s up to the Democrats to craft a system that can be preserved for the long term.


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'Help Wanted/Leave Now!' How U.S. immigration policy remains maddeningly consistently inconsistent

A new exhibition at the California Museum in Sacramento, 'Help Wanted/Leave Now!' focuses on the country's 'revolving door' of programs and practices toward immigrants.

Next Wins Appeal

A spot of good news for Britain. Next has won its appeal and may go on paying warehouse workers more than “equal value” retail workers. I’ve written about this case in Equality Act 2010, The Equal Pay Madness Just Got Madder and The Apples and Oranges Tribunal, and discussed it at length on the CapX podcast.

Note how crazy the headline is:

The landmark ruling allows the retailer to pay warehouse workers more than shop staff on the basis it costs more to recruit and retain them.

Pay more to recruit and retain people? A landmark! Eight years of litigation to establish that wages have something to do with supply and demand.

Some of the crazy has been disciplined. The Leeds tribunal had asked why Next failed to raise the pay of retail workers to the warehouse level. Wrong question, said Mr Justice Bourne on appeal. The right question is why Next needed to pay the warehouse workers more. It did so, he found, for sound business reasons, and those reasons did not apply to retail. Hilariously, he also noted that Next’s warehouses were 47.2% female as opposed to the retail workers who were 77.5% female. In other words, there was more gender equality in the warehouses.

Don’t celebrate too hard. Eight years of litigation isn’t over, Next lost on the basic finding of equal value, and everyone is appealing. Meanwhile the government is moving to replace market wages with committee wages. The consultation closing in October would extend equal-value comparisons to race and disability and it would extend the law up the supply chain so Next’s potential escape route of contracting-out warehouses would be foreclosed. In short, Bourne’s reason is lawful today. Whether it survives the future is another matter.

Hat tip: Stephen S. and Robert W.

The post Next Wins Appeal appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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★ The iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro

Last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time when I should have been reviewing the then-new iPhones 17 and iPhone Air. In my brief note explaining my absence, I wrote:

I look forward to getting back to writing very soon. I can feel it: I will be back soon. I’m itching to go. I mean, jiminy, it’s new iPhones week. But it’ll be a few more days before I get those reviews out.

354 days is arguably more than a few, but given that I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones.

The iPhone Air

The iPhone Air is the nicest phone Apple has ever made, and probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. It’s just so goddamn nice. Over the years, Apple has gone back and forth with its treatment of the metal side rails on iPhone hardware: some years polished like jewelry, other years, matte like a tool. The iPhone Air is polished, and the effect is luxe. (And it stands in contrast to the matte iPhones 17 Pro.)

The whole point of the device is that it is absurdly thin. A year later, it still feels remarkably thin and light in hand — and, even better, thin and light in pocket. It is delightful to hold and carry. The screen is terrific. The buttons are perfect: they stick out just enough and have just the right clickiness.

The big concern most people have regarding the Air is battery life. I used my Air review unit extensively and battery life was never once a problem. Yes, battery life is shorter than with other iPhone models, but it’s more than long enough. When you know you might need to top it off, you just do it here and there throughout the day. I not only never once ran out of battery by the end of the day with the Air, I never once came all that close. It’s fine.1 I mean, if you’re the sort of person who struggles to get through the day battery-life-wise with a regular (thicker) iPhone, the iPhone Air obviously isn’t for you. But that’s really obvious.

My biggest concern going into it was the camera system. The iPhone Air has only a single rear-facing camera, with non-interpolated 1× and 2× zoom factors.2 In practice, yes, sometimes while carrying the Air I regretted not having either the ultra wide 0.5× lens or telephoto lens, both of which I’m accustomed to having at my disposal. But ultimately I didn’t miss either of those lenses enough that I regretted having the Air in my pocket that day. And conversely, there’s something mentally freeing about having just one lens. There’s no question which lens you should use. Zoom with your feet.

And the one lens the iPhone Air has is excellent. It’s not quite as good as the main 1×/2× lens on the Pro models, but it’s much closer to the Pro models in image quality than it is to the single-lens iPhone 17e. (But even the 17e is a damn good camera for a phone.) One thing you miss by not having a 0.5× ultra wide lens is a true macro mode. But because it uses a slightly smaller sensor, the camera on the iPhone Air has a closer minimum focus distance than the iPhone 17 Pro’s main camera (15 cm vs. 20 cm — those 5 cm often make a big difference). I like the iPhone Air camera so much that it didn’t factor all that much into my decision whether to buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. It’s that good.

But I did not buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. I bought an iPhone 17 Pro. The reason is size.

The iPhone 17 Pro comes in two sizes: regular and Max. I find the Max sizes too big — unpleasant to hold, unpleasant to pocket. The iPhone Air comes in only one size — a sort of one-size-fits-all midway point between the regular iPhone models and Max models.

WidthHeightThicknessWeight
iPhone 17 Pro Max78mm163mm8.75mm233g
iPhone Air75mm156mm5.64mm165g
iPhone 17 Pro72mm150mm8.75mm206g

Width- and height-wise, the Air is pretty much halfway between the Pro and Pro Max. For me, in practice, the factor that really matters is width — and I find the Air too wide. Just holding the phones as objects to admire, the dramatic thinness and lighter weight make the iPhone Air the nicest, by far. But holding them to actually use, I find the Air feels too wide. Specifically, too wide to use with one hand, gripping it with my palm and fingers and swiping and tapping with my thumb. If I had my druthers, the regular-sized iPhones would be slightly smaller, footprint-wise. The regular iPhone 17 Pro is pretty much as wide as can be for me to use it one-handed. The Air is too wide for that — it’s a two-handed device for me. And that was the dealbreaker.3 I use my iPhone one-handed frequently, often while walking around the city carrying a bag or beverage in my other hand.

If the iPhone Air came in two sizes, regular and Max, corresponding to the widths and heights of the two Pro sizes, I would have bought the regular-sized Air model and, I’m convinced, been delighted with it for the past year. But the iPhone Air only comes in one size, and that size is too wide for my taste, and in practical use, that factor overrides everything I love about the Air.

If you use your iPhone two-handed almost exclusively — perhaps because you find even the regular-sized models too wide to use one-handed — there’s a good chance you’d be happier with the Air than whatever model you’re currently carrying. It’s so goddamn nice.

The iPhone 17 Pro

The iPhone 17 Pro is the best phone Apple has ever made, and perhaps the best device Apple has ever made, period.

After two years of titanium side rails and full-glass backs (the 15/16 Pro generations), the 17 Pro went back to aluminum, and the metal is now more of an entire frame for the device than just a side rail. There remains a matte glass panel on the back, but only for the bottom three-quarters or so, underneath the camera plateau. (Inductive MagSafe/Qi charging doesn’t work through metal.) The camera plateau is now aluminum, and, most noticeably, extends across the full width of the device, even though the three camera lenses (0.5×, 1×/2×, 4×/8×) remain in a triangle arrangement in the corner.

This new full-width plateau is a winning design. I think it looks good, but more importantly, feels great. It looks more balanced and feels more balanced too. It still wobbles when placed on a table, but it wobbles less. The camera capabilities, to me, are the defining aspect of the Pro models. It thus feels correct for them to be so physically prominent on the devices.

The iPhone 17 Pro was offered in three colors: cosmic orange, deep blue, and silver. All three colors are excellent, and each of them tempted me to some extent. I’m not sure why silver didn’t get an adjective — it’s a very nice colorway. But cosmic orange is the eyecatcher. For years, Apple has been releasing non-pro iPhones in fun colors, and Pro iPhones only in no-fun (or at best low-fun) colors. It really seemed like a mystery why Apple never released an iPhone Pro model in a vibrant fun color. Now that they finally did it, it seems like even more of a mystery why it took them so long — anecdotally, cosmic orange has been an incredibly popular choice. I see orange iPhone 17 Pros in use every day, often in clear cases to show off the color.

My personal rule has been to always buy black, or the nearest to black offered. Deep blue isn’t all that near to black, but it was the nearest, so that’s what I bought. I wouldn’t call it fun but I liked it when I bought it and I’m not tired of it now, nearly a year later. It’s a serious blue. After 10+ months of near-daily use, the anodization is beginning to wear away at the top corner of my iPhone’s camera plateau, where there’s a bit of a sharp corner. I find this to be a charming patina, not a flaw, and looking at that wear increases my affection for this little guy.

My deep blue iPhone 17 Pro, showing the worn anodization at the corner of the camera plateau.

(Photo taken with the iPhone Air, using Halide Mark III.)

I’ve shot (and kept) 5,365 photos and 97 videos with the iPhone 17 Pro. (Perhaps I should shoot more videos.) The iPhone camera has long been the best camera in the sense of “The best camera is the one you have with you.” With each successive year, they come closer and closer to being the best camera I’ve ever owned, period. It’s really quite remarkable how good a camera it is.

Battery life has been excellent. I charge to 100 percent every night while I sleep, and never worry about it during the day. Very seldom is the battery under 25 percent by the end of the day. According to the statistics in Settings → Battery → Battery Health, maximum battery capacity remains at 96 percent after 230 cycles. That seems pretty good.

Durability has been terrific as well. I mentioned a month ago that Apple’s “Ceramic Shield 2” process seems to be the real deal. Even under close inspection, there’s seemingly not a single micro abrasion on the front glass. I used a Nomad leather back during the very coldest weeks of the East Coast winter, but otherwise have never used a case. Despite near-daily use for 10-ish months, it’s in near-mint condition. I’ve also found that the phone, naked, is about as grippy as one could hope in most weather conditions, the frigid cold being the one exception.

Dust and fuzz accumulates in the USB-C port — just like every phone with a USB port. I clean it out every few months. Some sort of crud also accumulates in the very thin, easily overlooked slit for the speaker at the top of the display. That requires something like a pin or needle to clean. I don’t know what that crud is and I don’t want to know. I also don’t know what Apple could do about this crud accumulation, but I need to reach deep to find anything at all to complain about regarding this iPhone. I look forward to a future hermetically sealed iPhone which has no crevices in which to accumulate crud.

One year later and it feels like both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air could be announced tomorrow, not a year ago, and would seem fresh and exciting.


  1. Apple also created a battery pack exclusively for the Air: the $100 iPhone Air MagSafe Battery. Like Apple’s late great Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack, the Air MagSafe Battery is a much better product than any third-party battery pack I’ve ever tried, and I’ve tried an embarrassing number of them. It sticks better magnetically, and there’s software integration with iOS that shows the battery pack’s remaining power when you first connect it, and in the Battery widget. iOS also seems smarter about when to draw power from it, making it last longer. It’s a no-brainer recommendation for anyone who buys an iPhone Air. You won’t need it most days, but on the days when you need it, it’s perfect.

    My only gripe about the iPhone Air MagSafe Battery remains the same from the day it was announced last year: it has “Air” in the name because it’s designed exclusively for the iPhone Air. Apple’s old Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack was designed to fit any iPhone. (In fact, it debuted in 2020 alongside the iPhone 12 Mini, an iPhone that actually needed help getting through the day on a single charge.) The old Lightning battery pack remains so good that I continue to use mine (I own two) instead of the numerous third-party ones I’ve blown money on in the intervening years. The old Lightning ones don’t pack much of a punch, juice-wise — particularly because they’re now several years old — but no matter how much I use my iPhone, it’s always enough to extend me through the day. (The key is not to start using it until your iPhone drops under 30 percent — it takes less energy to recharge a mostly depleted battery.) I continue using them because they stick to the back of the iPhone so strongly, and, once attached, are so comfortable. It’s the last Lightning device I actively use, but unless Apple comes out with a proper USB-C replacement that works on iPhones other than the Air, I don’t foresee retiring mine until they’re completely shot. ↩︎

  2. The front-facing camera on the iPhone Air is the new (for 2025) Center Stage camera. It’s exactly the same front-facing camera as the iPhone 17 Pro and non-pro models, and uses a square sensor with a wider field of view. ↩︎︎

  3. This, of course, makes me wonder about the one-handed usability of the passport-sized foldable iPhone that Apple is expected to unveil tomorrow. ↩︎︎

Xenotransplants will substitute for dialysis before they replace human kidney transplants

Transplants of organs from genetically modified pigs to humans is making progress, but pig organs haven't yet survived long enough to be a viable substitute for human organs.  Kidneys are a good experimental organ to work with, because when the pig organ fails, the patient can go back on dialysis (and continue to wait for a deceased-donor organ transplant).  But if pig organs can last long enough, they might replace dialysis.  The first pig-organ recipient to go straight to a human organ transplant has now been reported, in a press release accompanying the case report.  Below are both the press release and the case report.

Patient Who Received Pig Kidney Becomes First To Progress to Human Kidney Transplant
Study shows xenotransplantation can serve as a bridge for patients with end-stage kidney disease

By MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM COMMUNICATIONS September 3, 2026 

 Riella L, Borges T, Rosales I et al.
Porcine kidney xenotransplantation as a bridge to allotransplantation: a first-in-human study
The Lancet, 2026;  

"This case shows that porcine kidney xenotransplantation can provide prolonged renal support and be discontinued without clinically significant allosensitisation or zoonotic infection. Early cellular rejection resolved with treatment, whereas later graft failure was associated with microvascular injury progressing to thrombotic microangiopathy despite a negative donor-specific crossmatch, supporting the possibility that mechanisms beyond conventional antibody-mediated rejection contributed to late graft injury. Kidney xenotransplantation has the potential to provide prolonged dialysis-free support while also serving as a bridge to subsequent human allotransplantation." 

Reading sentences to ponder

In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago.

From Sean Delone, via David Wallace-Wells.

The post Reading sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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Reasons to go to college

That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:

…college is a great place to make friends, date, and possibly meet a spouse. Those features are ever more important as America suffers a crisis of loneliness. Furthermore, if you think that artificial intelligence may displace a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, marrying well will become more important. The title of the new essay by Clara Collier says it all: “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other.” You are also going to live longer, so think hard about who you wish to spend that time with.

The data show that college-educated people are more likely to marry, and to stay married. More generally, college-educated folks have superior social indicators of all kinds, including resistance to alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction. (Charles Murray wrote a whole book on this theme, called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.)

If you have a bachelor’s degree and are over 25 years of age, your chance of being married is 64 percent. If you have only a high school degree, your odds of being married are an even 50 percent.

For divorce, the results are more dramatic yet. The chance of a woman remaining married for at least 20 years is 78 percent if she went to college, but 41 percent if she is only a high school graduate. For men, the gradient is less sharp though still significant—namely, 65 percent versus 47 percent.

People who finished college also have more extensive networks of friends. For instance they are twice as likely to have six or more close friends, and less than half as likely to have no close friends at all.

There are some private sector jobs where you can spend four years alongside the same group of people and then have social networks to stay in touch over the following years. But all too often people come and go in their jobs and lose touch with former colleagues rapidly, or maybe never share much of a common experience in the first place. College seems to do an especially good job of keeping people connected.

We do not know the extent to which these relationships are causal ones. That’s to say, does going to college induce better outcomes, or are the people who will have better outcomes in any case more likely to attend college in the first place? Probably some of both. In any case, it is better to have this force on your side, even if you are not sure how important it is.

So, in sum, while the money premium from college is falling, the friends and marriage premium from college is going up and probably will rise further still.

Of course those are not the only reasons.  That said, I do think going to college makes less sense, at the margin, than it did say seven or eight years ago, as I outline in the piece.

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Anak Krakatau Rumbles Again

A white volcanic plume streams left over a tan ash cloud that fills most of the image. A small green island and blue water are visible in the upper right.
Anak Krakatau erupts ash and volcanic gases in this image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on September 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Eruptions are a regular occurrence at Anak Krakatau, a small volcano between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Much of its activity remains relatively mild, but it occasionally puts on more impressive and hazardous shows of force. In early September 2026, a booming eruption lasting more than 24 hours sent gas and ash high into the atmosphere, disrupting thousands of flights and degrading air quality in parts of the country, including the capital city of Jakarta.

Satellites passing over the area during the eruption on September 5 captured images of the explosive activity. In the scene above, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite, a white plume of volcanic gas billows over a brown ash cloud. Below, a wider view captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite shows the volcanic material dispersing over a large area.

Indonesia’s meteorological agency reported that ash had reached altitudes up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) to the east of the volcano and 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) to the west by September 6. The presence of ash in the atmosphere prompted the temporary closure of eight airports on Java and Sumatra, disrupting nearly 3,000 flights in and out of the area, according to news reports.

A white plume streams to the left over a larger tan ash cloud, both coming from a volcanic eruption between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra.
Plumes of ash and volcanic gases from Anak Krakatau drift over Indonesia and the Indian Ocean in this image captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite on September 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Ashfall affected populated areas, particularly to the east of Anak Krakatau in Jakarta and other parts of West Java, the Indonesian Humanitarian Coordination Platform (IHCP) reported. Volcanic ash poses health risks to people and can irritate the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. However, this air quality hazard differs from the smoke produced by peatland fires elsewhere in the country in terms of particle characteristics, dispersal patterns, and protection measures, the IHCP noted. 

On September 6, the continuous explosive eruption from Anak Krakatau subsided, though the volcano kept rumbling. It returned to a more typical pattern of Strombolian eruptions, characterized by intermittent spurts of ash and volcanic material. Airports had resumed operation by September 8, but the volcano remained at the second-highest alert level on the country’s scale, as it has been since early July.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCEGIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

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Central Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook


Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ACPN50 PHFO 102317
TWOCP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
200 PM HST Thu Sep 10 2026

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Lowell, located well northwest of the Hawaiian Islands, and on
Tropical Storm Norbert, located several hundred miles west-
southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.

Well Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands:
Disorganized showers and thunderstorms located more than 500 miles
to the southeast of the Hawaiian Islands are associated with a broad
trough of low pressure. Some gradual development of this system is
possible over the next few days into the weekend while it moves
generally northward and then meanders to the southeast of the
Hawaiian Islands.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.

Central and Western East Pacific:
Showers and thunderstorms associated with a broad area of low
pressure are located several hundred miles southwest of the
southwestern coast of Mexico. Gradual development of this system is
anticipated, and a tropical depression is likely to form by early
next week while it moves generally west-northwestward to westward
over the central and western portions of the East Pacific.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...high...80 percent.

$$
Forecaster Papin
NNNN


Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook


Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABNT20 KNHC 102314
TWOAT

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
800 PM EDT Thu Sep 10 2026

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.

$$
Forecaster Blake


Eastern Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook


Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABPZ20 KNHC 102317
TWOEP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
500 PM PDT Thu Sep 10 2026

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Lowell, located well northwest of the Hawaiian Islands, and on
Tropical Storm Norbert, located several hundred miles west-
southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula.

Well Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands:
Disorganized showers and thunderstorms located more than 500 miles
to the southeast of the Hawaiian Islands are associated with a broad
trough of low pressure. Some gradual development of this system is
possible over the next few days into the weekend while it moves
generally northward and then meanders to the southeast of the
Hawaiian Islands.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...30 percent.

Central and Western East Pacific:
Showers and thunderstorms associated with a broad area of low
pressure are located several hundred miles southwest of the
southwestern coast of Mexico. Gradual development of this system is
anticipated, and a tropical depression is likely to form by early
next week while it moves generally west-northwestward to westward
over the central and western portions of the East Pacific.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...20 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...high...80 percent.

$$
Forecaster Papin


LDN 1295: The Giraffe Nebula

LDN 1295: The Giraffe Nebula LDN 1295: The Giraffe Nebula